KENOSHA  Three southeastern Wisconsin musical acts will gather for a night of folk, pop, funk and hip-hop music from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday, May 20, at Kenosha Fusion, 5014 Seventh Ave.

They are Dayna Renee, The Eddie Muniz Project and Nick Ramsey & The Family.

Dayna Renee, will be releasing her debut acoustic four-track EP, "American Dream." Her music features a folk pop sound with rhythmic guitar and vocals. Dayna Renee is also in the process of recording her full album, "Because of You," which will be released later this year. Her biggest musical influences are the likes of Rilo Kiley, Florence and the Machine and Alanis Morrissette.

Newly formed through the spirit of genuine musicianship, The Eddie Muniz project is comprised of Milwaukee bassist Dwayne Williams, Racine keyboardist Eddie Muniz, traveling drummer Dennis Marshall and Racine guitarist Aaron Sullivan.

Nick Ramsey & The Family, a funked out, hip-hop and rock four-piece, finds its roots in crispy guitar licks, timely bass riffs, the cardiac thump of a kick drum, and layers of colorfully relatable poetics. Members are music director, guitarist and songwriter Christian Dreyer, drummer and sound engineer David Krautkramer, bassist Joseph Westenhagen and band leader, songwriter and vocalist Nick Ramsey.

Admission is $5.
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.




EMMITSBURG, Md.  What happened in Maryland wont necessarily stay in Maryland.

A Racine County delegation of more than 70 people attended a four-day disaster training last week at the Federal Emergency Management Agencys training institute in Emmitsburg, Md.

Many of those who attended said they want to build on what they learned from disaster simulations to make sure the county is adequately prepared for a large-scale emergency.

In Emmitsburg, the group spent several hours responding to a pretend scenario that entailed two tornadoes touching down on opposite ends of the county. In another exercise, a plane crashed near the intersection of Highways 20 and 31.

FEMA officials lauded the countys response, saying it didnt look like a group going through training for the first time. But they, as well as participants, also noted areas for improvement.

Communication was mostly good but could have been better in some instances; some response plans need to be developed or changed; and so on.

More training planned

David Maack, coordinator of the countys Office of Emergency Management, said he hopes to hold more discussions on response plans and another mock disaster before the end of the year so its still fresh in everyones mind and we actually practice in our own environment.

Those involved in the exercises saw ways to tweak response plans for real emergencies. More people should staff a public information center, for example, and the makeup of the emergency operations center could be altered to improve communication.

Dominic Cariello, Badger Meters director of manufacturing-flow instrumentation, said he plans to take information from the training to the business community to see how the private sector can help in a disaster.

On Tuesday, for instance, a request came in for a list of businesses within a two-mile radius with warehousing space and refrigeration capability.

What we need to do is go to the businesses and say, what are you willing to support? Cariello said.

Participants widely praised the four-day training and vowed to continue to talk afterward and iron out any issues.

Its important that our community, when there is a crisis situation, knows that they can count on us, County Executive Jonathan Delagrave said. We need to instill confidence in them that we are doing a great job, that we are going to be prepared.
There is currently 32.7 billion (27.7 billion) worth of equity targeting the UK Build to Rent (BTR) sector over the next five years, according to CBREs Build to Rent Equity Barometer and the property consultants believe that there is potential for some of this capital to be attracted to invest

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Satellite operator Arabsat and Algeria Telecom Satellite (ATS) are holding a workshop in Algiers covering the communications services now provided by the space-based technology.





The workshop, running from 15-16 May 2017, comprises a range of forums and seminars, and will include international experts in the field of satellite communications and Internet delivery. It is aimed at those working in the satellite telecommunications sector in Algeria, from both the public and private sector.Arabsat will also showcase its satellite Badr7 and the capabilities of its new 6th generation satellite. The first three of these are under construction and the 4th is at the research and design stage . The first of Arabsats 6th generation satellites is set for launch by the end of 2017, with the next two to be launched in 2018.The latest technology in the field of mobile telecommunications will also be discussed, in addition to Ka-band huge capacities coverage that meets the future demand of the market, the Saudi-based regional satellite organisation said in a statement.Arabsat, which was founded in 1976 by the 21 member states of the Arab League, now carries over 500 TV channels, and 200 radio stations, as well as pay-TV networks to viewers in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Its video hotspot at 26 degrees East now claims an audience of over 170 million viewers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
YuppTV has added a new platform called Mini Theatre to its South Asian video streaming service, featuring movies currently on theatrical release.





The Mini Theatre platform will offer subscribers films that have just been released in India, either on the day of release or the week following their arrival in cinemas. The platform is compatible with users of Samsung and Apple devices, as well as Roku, LG, and Sony TV interfaces.At YuppTV, we have a great opportunity of bringing best quality South-Asian content to our users across the Globe. Launching Mini Theatre is another step in the same direction. The release of various Indian movies is often limited only to very few selected geographies across the world and sometimes limited only to the Indian subcontinent. Hence, users end up missing out on these high quality and entertaining movies missing a worldwide release, said Uday Reddy, founder and CEO, Yupp TV Following the launch of Mini Theatre, our users outside of India will have the opportunity to access new Indian movie releases, just like they used to, back at home in India. Furthermore, filmmakers may now showcase their movies to a global audience, notwithstanding exorbitant investment for an overseas release. Since the launch is slated to benefit every stakeholder in the ecosystem, we look forward to receiving a huge response from both, expat audiences and filmmakers.In order to combat content pirates, YuppTV ensures users accept the piracy agreement conditions prior to accessing a movie. The title will then be made available on a pay-per-view basis with a six hour viewing window.The films are secured with DRM, invisible user based or forensic watermarking and encryption, and users are authenticated by mobile and location verification. Under the invisible or forensic watermarking technology, each viewer will have unique identification.It is an imperceptible and non-removable unique identifier that is embedded in the video, enabling YuppTV to trace any content breach. The pirate, if in case found guilty of breaching the privacy guidelines, will be charged with a heavy penalty, the over-the-top ( OTT ) video company said in a statement.
The Global Pay-TV Subscriber Forecasts report, based on forecasts for 138 countries, concludes that excluding analogue cable TV, the growth for digital pay-TV is really impressive  rocketing from 380 million subscribers in 2010 onto 852 million at the end of 2016 and 1.088 billion by 2022.Doom-mongers in the US have been predicting the demise of pay-TV for some time. Although the US is losing pay-TV subs, there is still a lot of life left in the sector, commented Simon Murray, principal analyst at Digital TV Research. We believe that the worst of the losses in now over for North America, with only five million fewer subscribers forecast between 2016 and 2022. Furthermore, they are ignoring the rest of the world.Indeed, looking at the regions, the report calculated that the Asia Pacific area will add 92 million subs between 2016 and 2022  and Sub-Saharan Africa will double its total. China is set to continue to supply about a third of the worlds pay-TV subscribers. India will bring in another 16% of the total by 2022. Therefore, China and India together will provide nearly half the worlds pay-TV subscribers.Overall, Digital TV Research believes that pay-TV subscriber counts will double in 26 countries between 2016 and 2022, but that the numbers will fall a further 18 countries.
Leading satellite operator SES has announced that the first craft to be launched using a SpaceX flight-proven rocket, SES-10, is now fully operational at 67 degrees West, serving the Latin America region.





Launched on 30 March 2017 from NASAs Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on board a flight-proven SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, SES-10 is the companys first satellite wholly dedicated to providing service to Latin America. SES-10's beams are designed to augment SESs capabilities across the region providing direct-to-home broadcasting, enterprise and mobility services to Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean.SES-10 was built by Airbus Defence and Space and is based on the Eurostar E3000 platform, the multi-mission spacecraft is the first SES satellite dedicated to providing service to Latin America and has a Ku-band payload of 55 36MHz transponder equivalents, of which 27 are incremental.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani says women are the biggest victims of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which he says has prevented millions of girls and women from getting an education.

"The number of women deprived of literacy in Afghanistan is three times more than men and the reason behind this is the imposed war that we are facing," Ghani said on May 15 at a symposium called Afghan Women: Messengers of Peace.

The three-day gathering is being hosted by Afghan first lady Rula Ghani.

In a statement, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) expressed hope that the government will achieve its goal of increasing the proportion of women in government institutions to 30 percent by 2020.

According to the Education Ministry, most of the estimated 3.5 million children who do not attend school are girls.

Afghanistans female literacy rate is among the lowest in the word at around 17 percent, according to a 2015 UNESCO report.

With reporting by Tolo News
The Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan says it has destroyed an Armenian air defense missile system in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Nagorno-Karabakh is officially part of Azerbaijan, but Armenia-backed separatists seized control of the mainly ethnic-Armenian populated region during the early 1990s in a war that killed some 30,000 people.

Diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict during the last 25 years have brought little progress.

According to the AP news agency, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said its forces on May 15 "destroyed an Osa air defense system along with its crew." The ministry added that the system's deployment near the line of control was a "provocation" and a threat to Azerbaijani aircraft.

The Nagorno-Karabakh separatist authorities confirmed that an Azerbaijani attack damaged its equipment, but denied that there had been casualties.

It warned in a statement that the Azerbaijani "provocation won't be left unanswered."

With additional reporting by AP
Russia has launched multiple suicide drones on Ukraine's southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, wounding people and damaging civilian facilities, the head of the regional military administration said, as fierce battles are under way in the eastern Donetsk region and in the south.

"The occupiers attacked the area massively with kamikaze drones, said Governor Valentyn Reznichenko. Ukrainian air defense destroyed some of the drones, but others hit targets. The Russian forces also used drones in an attack on the city of Dnipro, targeting a logistics enterprise. Reznichenko said four employees were wounded, and three of them are in serious condition in hospital.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's ongoing invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.

Russian forces also bombarded the Nikopol district in the region with Grad missiles and heavy artillery. Reznichenko said the shelling damaged private houses, a factory, and a power line, but no one was injured.



A fire spread over more than 3,000 square meters but was extinguished, Reznichenko said.



Russian troops regularly shell the Dnipropetrovsk region with various types of weapons, in particular the Nikopol, Kryvorizky, and Synelnyk districts.

In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy vowed Ukraine will not "surrender a single centimeter of our land" in Donetsk, and he thanked Ukrainian troops who are holding positions in the Donbas region.



The epicenter of the battle for the industrial region of Donetsk is around the towns of Bakhmut, Soledar, and Avdiyivka.



"The activity of the occupiers remains at an extremely high level -- dozens of attacks every day," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address late on November 8.



"They are suffering extraordinarily high losses. But the order remains the same: to advance on the administrative boundary of Donetsk region. We will not yield a single centimeter of our land," he said.



Donetsk is one of four Ukrainian regions Russia said it annexed in September following referendums considered a sham by Kyiv and its Western allies.



Fighting has taken place there between Ukrainian military and Kremlin-backed separatist forces since 2014, the same year Russia illegally annexed Crimea in the south.

Zelenskiy said the goal of the Russian troops is to push to the administrative border of the Donetsk region.



"We clearly understand the enemy's plans, so we act accordingly: carefully, thoughtfully, and in the interests of the liberation of our entire territory. We are strengthening our positions, breaking Russian logistics, and consistently destroying the potential of the occupiers to keep the south of our country under occupation," Zelenskiy added.



Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said the most intense battles were taking place in Bakhmut and Soledar where the Ukrainian military repels dozens of Russian attacks per day.



Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the region's military administration, said the city of Bakhmut was badly damaged, and there is not a single surviving house in Avdiyivka, Maryinka, or Krasnohorivka. Russian troops are trying to wipe the cities "off the face of the Earth," he said.



Fierce fighting was also going on on the edge of the town of Snihurivka, in the southern Mykolayiv region, according to Yury Barabashov, the town's Russian-appointed mayor, as cited by Russia's RIA Novosti news agency.



Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Russian-installed administration in the southern Kherson region, said on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had tried to advance on three fronts, including Snihurivka.



Vitaly Kim, the Ukrainian governor of the Mykolayiv region, apparently quoting an intercepted dialogue between Russian troops, suggested Ukrainian forces had already pushed the Russians out of the area.



"Russian troops are complaining that they have already been thrown out of there," Kim said in a statement on his Telegram channel.



The information could not be independently verified.



The Ukrainian military said it destroyed two Russian ammunition depots in southern Ukraine on November 8, one in Snihurivka, and one in Kostromka, in the neighboring Kherson region.

WATCH: Paratroopers with Ukraine's 79th Air Assault Brigade say they're holding positions around the small city of Maryinka in eastern Ukraine despite daily Russian attacks.

Russia has mobilized hundreds of thousands of reservists in recent months seeking to stave off an offensive launched by Ukraine to regain Russian-occupied territories.



Kyiv-based military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said on November 8 that 21 Russian conscripts had surrendered to Ukrainian forces around Svatove in the eastern Luhansk region.



"These poor mobilized men -- really poor, they had had nothing to eat or drink in three days -- of course they decided to surrender," Zhdanov said on his YouTube channel.



In the southern Kherson region, a battle between advancing Ukrainian forces and the Russian occupiers has been looming for weeks in the city by the same name, the only regional capital Russia has captured intact since its unprovoked invasion in February.



Kherson is arguably the most important of the four partially occupied Ukrainian regions that Russia says it annexed. It controls both the only land route to the Crimean Peninsula and the mouth of the Dnieper River that bisects Ukraine.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, also commented on the fighting in eastern Ukraine on November 8. He was quoted by TASS as saying that information released about casualties among Chechen fighters near Lysychansk, a city in the eastern Luhansk region, was false.



"Not a single fighter of ours was killed in the aforementioned area," Kadyrov wrote on his Telegram channel, adding that he didn't want to comment on "such falsehoods" but found it necessary "to reassure all sane and concerned people."



Russia's Defense Ministry, meanwhile, released video footage that it said showed a drone strike obliterating a Ukrainian tank that was hiding in an urban area and shelling Russian troops.



"A Russian squad of unmanned aerial vehicles spotted the Ukrainian tank and destroyed it using a precision strike," the ministry said on November 8, according to TASS.



The Ukrainian military's General Staff said Russian troops used drones and artillery on November 8 to shell communities along the Sumy region's border with Russia in northeastern Ukraine. The only damage reported was to utility poles.



Sumy borders three regions of Russia: Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod. The border regions of Ukraine are regularly shelled by Russia.



Neither side's battlefield claims could be independently verified.



The Ukrainian military has accused Russian troops of more looting and destroying infrastructure in Kherson.



"A convoy of trucks passed over the dam of the Kakhova hydroelectric station loaded with home appliances and building materials," the military said.



Russians were dismantling mobile phone towers and taking equipment, it said, adding that near the city of Beryslav, Russian forces "blew up a power line and took equipment from a solar power station."

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and CNN
TBILISI -- Hundreds of young activists have disrupted public discussions of Georgia's constitutional amendments proposed by the ruling Georgian Dream party.

The discussions of the amendments were held on May 15 in the State Philharmonics concert hall in Tbilisi.

Parliament speaker Irakli Kobakhidze had to stop the discussions after hundreds of activists whistled and shouted, expressing their protest against the amendments.

The activists said they were concerned about some proposed amendments such as switching from direct presidential elections to the election of the president by parliament, allowing the winning party to acquire more mandates through redistribution after parliamentary polls, and legalizing land purchases by foreigners.

The activists also questioned the public discussions of the amendments organized by the government in other towns and cities, saying only officials had taken part in them.


India has appealed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to order Pakistan to suspend the execution of a retired Indian naval officer convicted of espionage.

Deepak Mittal, joint secretary of India's Foreign Ministry, told the court in The Hague on May 15 that the death sentence handed down to Kulbhushan Jadhav last month followed an "unjust" trial in a Pakistani military court.

He said that Pakistan failed to respond to Indian demands for information about the case.

But Pakistan's representative Muhammad Faisal told the tribunal that Jadhav had "confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan."

Faisal, from the Pakistani Foreign Affairs Ministry, said the court had been shown a video of the confession which was available online "for viewers to decide for themselves whether Commander Jadhav is confessing voluntarily."

Faisal showed the court a photograph of a passport which he said was found in Jadhav's possession bearing a completely different "and Muslim" name.



"India has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to provide an explanation for this passport which is the most obvious indication of covert and illegal activity," Faisal said.

Jadhav's arrest and trial has further strained tense relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

Pakistani officials say Jadhav was arrested in the southwestern province of Balochistan in 2016.

India denies Jadhav was a spy and claims he was kidnapped from Iran. It lodged a protest at the ICJ last week, accusing Islamabad of "egregious violations" of the Vienna Convention On Consular Relations.

With the case expected to take months or years to resolve, New Delhi is calling on the international court to order Islamabad to prevent Jadhav's execution pending the final outcome.

The court's president has already written to Pakistan urging it to refrain from steps that could affect the hearings, effectively a request to prevent the execution from taking place.

With reporting by AP, AFP, and dpa
China this week showcased its ambitious plan to revive the Silk Road trade route before more than two dozen world leaders at a Beijing forum dedicated to President Xi Jinping's One Belt, One Road initiative.

Launched in 2013, the project is widely seen as Beijing's bid to expand its global economic and political influence with highway and maritime trade links to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

China is touting the massive project, which involves more than 60 countries and could cover nearly two-thirds of the world's population and one-third of global gross domestic product, as a catalyst for peace and trade liberalization.

But the feasibility of the initiative remains unclear, says Theresa Fallon, a China expert at the Center for Russia, Europe, Asia Studies, a Brussels-based research group. She spoke to RFE/RL's Carl Schreck about the potential geopolitical and economic impact of the trade initiative, and the prospects that China can pull it off.

RFE/RL: Given the massive planned investments and the sprawling geography involved, how viable is the One Belt, One Road initiative?

Theresa Fallon: That's a really good question, because even the Chinese declare that it's ambiguous as well as ambitious...The One Belt One Road project, or the Belt And Road Initiative, as it's been rebranded, is kind of an all-encompassing project. So old projects that were successful are folded into the narrative. That way it guarantees that they're a success.

For example, what happened in Kazakhstan with the building of the first oil pipeline away from the Russian monopoly Transneft. [It] took place -- it was agreed to do it -- in 1997. It was built in three stages, and it went from Kazakhstan to China. And that's considered part of the Belt And Road initiative. So it almost predates [the initiative] by over a decade. So old projects [and] new projects are all kind of wrapped into the Belt And Road initiative, and it gives a very positive narrative.

RFE/RL: What impact could it have on Central Asia?

Fallon: In Central Asia, there are concerns that it's kind of peaked -- the issues that China was interested in, for example: investment in uranium and gas in Uzbekistan. The Turkmen [natural-gas] pipeline has already been built. So these big megaprojects have happened.

Privately, Russians will tell you they are very concerned about [the Silk Road initiative], but publicly they put on a very brave face.

Although improving rail links and connectivity could be very beneficial for the region because the average speed of rail is extremely low,... China's investment in that area could be beneficial for connecting these various economies. But some are concerned that the trains will just go through Central Asia and bring these goods to Europe and not really help Central Asian economies as much.

But there are projects happening on the ground -- some beneficial, some economic investment failures. But the big megaprojects seem to be tapering off a bit.

RFE/RL: What problems has China faced so far with the initiative?

Fallon: The Chinese have a very bad record on their investments. There are many, many failures along the way. In the early days of the Belt And Road Initiative, it was easy to get Chinese bank loans if you said: "This is a Belt And Road project."

So it seemed to have the imprimatur of the Xi Jinping administration, and it was very easy to get a loan if you were going to do some sort of project along the Silk Road. They didn't have a lot of risk analysis, or cost-benefit analysis, so these projects failed.

So there's a lot of what we call "white elephants." or the local people call "red elephants," along the Silk Road: projects that never took off, or were just abandoned or useless.

RFE/RL: What role could the United States have?

Fallon: U.S. companies want to get in on this. It sounds great; the Chinese narrative is very powerful; it looks like all these building projects are going to take place. U.S. companies want to get a piece of the pie.

Well, it's questionable, because it's designed actually to help the Chinese domestic economy. So some companies -- for example, General Electric has gotten some contracts and is focusing to get more contracts out of this.

Europe has not been as successful, but it remains to be seen how much the tenders will be wide open, and if it's really packaged to help China instead.

The [U.S. President Donald] Trump administration is interested in infrastructure building, but it will remain to be seen how much they can actually compete with Chinese prices.

When the Chinese come in, they send in their workforce, everything. It's all one big package. So it's very difficult to compete with the Chinese on these projects.

RFE/RL: Only a handful of European leaders attended the Beijing summit. What's the view from Brussels on One Belt, One Road?

Fallon: The leaders that did attend [are from] Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary. And those have all received investments from China. So that's quite interesting.

Hungary is landlocked, but they are on the receiving end of the disputed Budapest-Belgrade rail that would be built from Piraeus port in Greece. So China has a huge investment there, and if you look at it from a geostrategic point of view, China has a lot of interest now in the eastern Mediterranean, moving on up through Central and Eastern Europe.

"It's kind of a coming-out party for Beijing, and also for Xi Jinping as his signature policy.

So even before this Belt And Road Initiative was enunciated, China had already created a subregional grouping within Europe called the 16+1. It's made up predominately of Eastern European states but also five possible member states, including Serbia.

This is a growing concern in Brussels, because as we've seen with the arbitral tribunal decision that was announced last July, Europe was expected to support the arbitral tribunal decision on Philippines versus China, but instead, because of Chinese investments -- and therefore leverage and influence in the region, and especially in Eastern and Central Europe -- the Europeans had a very watered-down statement. And the key holdouts were Greece and especially Hungary.

So they used their leverage to water down the statement, and the [European Union] came up with a statement that just said that they merely acknowledged the statement of the arbitral tribunal's decision.

So this was also a wake-up call in Brussels, and they understood that now Europe could be successfully divided and that China could, in fact, buy a statement from the EU.

RFE/RL: What was China's primary goal with the Beijing summit on One Belt, One Road?

Fallon: The idea was to give it a lot of world attention, saying that China is a huge economic player on the world stage; all economic roads go back to Beijing.

So it's kind of a coming-out party for Beijing, and also for Xi Jinping as his signature policy.

This has a lot to do with domestic politics as well, saying: "Look, all these people have come, all these world leaders have come to Beijing and theyre interested in China as a new leader in globalization."

RFE/RL: Russian President Vladimir Putin made a high-profile appearance. How does Russia fit into the initiative?

Fallon: It's a very interesting relationship between Russia and China. Some have described it as an axis of convenience, others have called it frenemies.

Putin had a very important speaking role at this event, but the Russians remain skeptical, in my view.

Privately, Russians will tell you they are very concerned about it, but publicly they put on a very brave face. The Chinese are the same way; in public they applaud this type of cooperation, but privately they just wonder when its going to run out.

And the Russians have enunciated the Eurasian Economic Union. In one sense, it was kind of a way to compete with China's Silk Road. But they are unable to do that because the Chinese have very deep pockets, and the Russians don't.

So some in Russia understand this and are willing to embrace it. Others are playing for time to see how this project will actually work out.

CORRECTION: This article has been amended to clarify that Theresa Fallon now works at the Center for Russia, Europe, Asia Studies in Brussels.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.


While elections in Iran look like slug-it-out campaigns, with many of the trappings of competition -- government critics, disagreement on high-profile issues, and televised public debates -- they are kept tightly in check by unelected officials under the country's clerically dominated system.

There is careful vetting by the Guardians Council, which routinely disqualifies all but a small fraction of reform-minded candidates. Entrenched hard-liners within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its volunteer-based paramilitary, the Basij, and Friday Prayer leaders in pulpits throughout the country also combine to stake out no-go zones. Nevermind the supreme leader, who has the final say on political, military, and religious affairs, and his network of representatives at all levels of government.

But in addition to these hallmarks of political power struggles in postrevolutionary Iran, there is also a state-dominated media environment with a history of subtle attacks on candidates and sitting officials, including incumbent President Hassan Rohani.

Attacks and smears targeting elected officials -- in the past and so far in the run-up to this election-- have included crackdowns on supporters, intrigue around family members, and appeals to national security.

Rohani, who is allied with Iran's reformers and centrists, faces a potentially strong challenge in the May 19 election from hard-line cleric Ebrahim Raisi. But another conservative, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, also waged harsh attacks on the incumbent before dropping out of the presidential race on May 15.

Here's a look at some of the issues that have emerged as hard-liners try to unseat a man they've criticized as being too friendly toward the West.

Targeting Close Aides, Associates, And Relatives



This tactic has been used by hard-line officials against politicians who oppose them, but also against perceived enemies from other walks of life.

Iranians whose close associates or family have been targeted in the past include Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi. She recounted in her 2016 autobiography from exile, Until We Are Free: My Fight For Human Rights In Iran, how Iranian security agents hauled her sister off to jail in the middle of the night or tricked her husband into cheating on and denouncing her in order to exert pressure on her.



Presidents whose allies have come under attack have been largely helpless to protect them.

This year, in the first of three televised presidential debates, Qalibaf accused Rohani of relying in part during his victorious 2013 campaign on an individual who has since been sentenced to death for economic corruption. Qalibaf did not name any names, but he appeared to be referring to Iranian billionaire and business magnate Babak Zanjani. His accusation echoed a statement in January by the head of the powerful judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, who said Zanjani had claimed that he had contributed to Rohani's election campaign.

Rohani denied the accusation as a "sheer lie."

"A corrupt individual who is sentenced to death has made a claim. One doesn't quote a corrupt individual," Rohani said in the April 28 debate.

Hard-line news sites published a photo of Rohani giving what appears to be an award to Zanjani. Rohani has countered that the image is from an event held several years ago to highlight Iran's top exporters. He said he was asked to present the awards, saying that he didn't know the recipients.

During the second presidential debate, on May 7, Qalibaf accused the daughter of Rohani's education minister of the "smuggling of imported goods." The allegations were also leveled by a spokesman of the judiciary, who said in late April that a large shipment of clothing had been discovered in a minister's home.

Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri, who is one of the five men running against Rohani but who is seen as in the race to run cover for the president, dismissed the charges, saying that the minister's daughter had paid all custom duties.

Months before the presidential campaign, Rohani came under pressure over his brother, Hossein Feridun, who is a member of the presidents inner circle. Feridun has been accused of criminal wrongdoing. In January, 46 lawmakers called on Rohani to present his brother, a former ambassador to Malaysia, to the powerful judiciary to face "financial corruption charges." Reports had swirled that Rohani might be getting "pressured to part ways with his younger brother," who was said to be a key contributor to Rohani's 2013 campaign and has been dubbed the president's "eyes and ears."



"Feridun's fate -- whatever it is -- will also affect the political fate of Rohani," the daily Arman predicted in April. 

The opposition website Sahamnews.org in May quoted unnamed sources as saying that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had warned Rohani about Feridun and the president's chief of staff, Mohammad Nahavandian, and called for their dismissals.

During the third presidential debate, on May 12, Raisi and Qalibaf each tried to paint Rohani with the corruption brush.

"The head of the government is being told that the closest person to him is engaged in corruption," Raisi said, adding that Rohani has been resisting calls for action.



It's not just Rohani. Two of his presidential predecessors, hard-liner Mahmud Ahmadinejad and reformist Mohammad Khatami, experienced similar broadsides-by-association.

Ahmadinejad, a divisive hard-liner who served two terms as president from 2005 to 2013, was targeted over his inner circle. Close Ahmadinejad aide Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei was once accused of being part of a "deviant current" straying from the principles of the Islamic establishment. Several individuals close to Mashaei were even arrested and charged with sorcery in 2011, at a time when the president was reportedly coming under increasing criticism from Khamenei. Mashaei also came under pressure when a $2.6 billion embezzlement scandal rocked the country, accused of ties to the mastermind of the massive fraud case.

Khatami, who campaigned on reform and held the presidency from 1997-2005, also witnessed attacks on his supporters and allies, including civil-society activists and journalists who were harassed, summoned, detained, or imprisoned. Two of Khatami's key associates -- former Tehran Mayor Gholam Hossein Karbaschi and leading reform voice and onetime Interior Minister Abdollah Nuri -- were eventually tried and jailed for corruption and political and religious dissent, respectively. Khatami political strategist and consultant Said Hajarian became the victim of an assassination attempt in 2000 that left him partially paralyzed and in need of constant medical care.



'Threat To The Islamic Republic'

Hard-liners often accuse their rivals of undermining the Islamic establishment and the values of the 1979 revolution, seemingly highlighting their concern that their dominance over the country's political landscape could diminish. Scores of intellectuals, journalists, activists, and human rights defenders have been harassed and jailed on vague charges that include "acting against national security" or "harming Iran's national interests."



Presidents have been also accused of undermining the clerical establishment.

Khatami -- who endorsed Rohani in a video released on May 14 -- was accused during his own presidency of being Westernized and of damaging the Islamic republic over his attempts at reform, although he served two terms.



Well to his right on the political spectrum, Ahmadinejad was made out by some to be a potential threat for repeatedly defying the aging supreme leader, Khamenei.

And Rohani has repeatedly been targeted over his attempts at engagement with the West, prompting warnings of alleged Western "infiltration" efforts aimed at undermining the Iranian establishment.

In the second presidential debate, Raisi accused Rohani's government of weakness during negotiations with world powers ahead of the landmark deal exchanging curbs on Tehran's nuclear program for relief from sanctions.

At a rally for Raisi in the capital, an organizer referred to Rohani's government as "the government of humiliation." "Mr. Rohani, how quickly you shook hands with the enemy," the organizer said, according to a report by the Financial Times.

Pictures posted by the Tasnim news agency showed some of Raisis supporters holding handwritten signs that said: "We've come here to put an end to the green light to the enemy."

Rohani aides have also been accused of improper affiliations with Western countries, a claim the Iranian president has dismissed as a misuse of the term "infiltration" for their political goals.

The harassment and arrests of dual nationals -- including Iranian-Americans accused of espionage -- are seen as further evidence of efforts to bring Rohani's outreach efforts to heel.

Speaking on March 15, the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned against pro-Western and liberal tendencies among state officials.



"Today, many of the officials running the country have liberal, Western, and counterrevolutionary views," he said.



Jafari did not single out by name Rohani, who has a doctorate in constitutional law from Glasgow Caledonian University, or any of the members of his cabinet, some of whom are graduates of American universities. But he complained that some officials appeared proud of having obtained their degrees or doctorates from Western universities.

The Economy And The Nuclear Deal

Rohani came to power in 2013 promising Iranians a better economy, among other things. Many Iranians were hoping that ending their dispute with the international community over Tehran's nuclear program -- in the end, the deal with the United States and other major powers in 2015 to trade curbs for an end to sanctions -- would bring them significant economic benefits. Yet among other sticking points, including a new U.S. president who has vowed to renegotiate the nuclear deal, many firms still appear reluctant to do business with Iran. Supreme Leader Khamenei and hard-liners have complained publicly that Iranians have not seen tangible improvements in their daily lives.

Rohani confronted increased pressure during the current campaign to demonstrate any windfall from the nuclear agreement, primarily from Raisi and Qalibaf.

"Today, 30 percent of our young people are out of jobs and unemployment is over 12 percent," Raisi said during a recent rally in Tehran. "Does this situation have to continue? Do we have to wait for foreigners to fix our problems?"

WATCH: Is Iran's Presidential Election Free And Fair?

Speaking on state television on May 1, Qalibaf played down Rohani's role in achieving the deal. He said that any other administration would have signed the nuclear accord because the green light for the nuclear talks came from "the entire establishment." But he also said Rohani's government has failed to translate the deal into benefits for Iranians.

"Have people benefited from the accord?" he asked, adding that "this is a serious weakness" of Rohani's government.

On a related note, Rohani has also come under pressure for allegedly doing too little to implement Khamenei's call for a "resistance economy" to make Iran more self-sufficient. His rivals have suggested that the president has been relying heavily on foreign investment while ignoring national resources and capabilities.

In fact, Khamenei personally called out Rohani on that subject in early March.

"Of course, the government has taken remarkable steps," Khamenei was quoted by state TV as saying, "but if the resistance economy had been implemented fully and widely, we could witness a tangible difference in people's lives."

The same week, Guardians Council head Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati called on Rohani to present evidence of the degree to which such a resistance economy has been put in place. "If some work has been done, let people know so that they can rejoice," Jannati said. "If not, apologize to the people and explain why nothing has been done."

Khamenei later criticized the government's economic policies in his Norouz message, when he repeated his call for more jobs and greater self-sufficiency.

Official Graft

Rohani has also come under pressure over leaked pay slips that suggested senior government employees received salaries that were as much as 200 times what more modestly paid government employees make. Several officials were reportedly dismissed over the scandal and the government said it is taking steps to regulate the salaries. Yet the president's rivals have used the issue repeatedly to pressure him.



Speaking on March 6, former Iranian nuclear negotiator and onetime presidential candidate Said Jalili blasted the government over what he described as "astronomical salaries." Jalili said that employees outside those privileged, highly paid few are being told to be patient in the face of economic problems.



Rohani's associates had said ahead of the presidential campaign that the leaks were aimed at diminishing his chances of reelection.

In another context, Ahmadinejad was criticized for reportedly taking large delegations, including family members, with him during his annual trips to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly. His 2012 delegation reportedly included over 100 people.

In Iran, where officials and politicians frequently go to great lengths to demonstrate piety and modesty, signs of conspicuous consumption can do considerable damage.

In 2013, Guardians Council head Jannati said that the country's next president should lead a simple life and not drive around in a Mercedes. Jannati did not name names, but he appeared to be referring to former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had arrived to register for the presidential vote in a Mercedes. Rafsanjani, who died earlier this year, was banned from running.

Preelection Crackdown

Ahead of voting, hard-liners frequently resort to crackdowns to tighten their grip on power and undermine a sitting president by demoralizing his supporters.



In recent months, at least three journalists, a well-known editor, and several administrators of pro-government and reformist Telegram channels have been arrested, prompting warnings over a crackdown.

On March 15, lawmaker Ali Motahari disclosed that 12 administrators of Telegram channels had been arrested by a "military intelligence body." He said the arrest created "doubts" about the upcoming vote.

Another outspoken lawmaker, Mahmud Sadeghi, also expressed concern in a letter to IRGC commander Jafari. He said that the arrests, which he said appeared to have been carried out by the IRGC's intelligence unit, had created worries in the Iranian society.

Iran's judiciary also blocked correspondence on the highly popular Telegram messaging app. Instagram Live was reportedly also blocked following an order from authorities within the judiciary.

Iranian authorities have stepped up their repressive measures in the run-up to past elections. In 2013, for instance, a number of activists were either arrested or summoned for questioning. Some journalists previously released on furlough were also recalled to prison in the month leading up to the voting.
Over the past five years, Iranian officials and state media have touted the "indigenous" ingenuity in the Islamic republic's mass-produced Mohajer-6 combat drone, which Russia has deployed in its war against Ukraine.

But a new investigation by Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, has found that electronic components underpinning Tehran's production of the Mohajer-6 are far from homegrown.



The Mohajer-6 drones contain components produced by companies from the United States and the European Union, both of which have sanctions restricting the export to Iran of such technology that can be used for both civilian and military purposes  dual-use technology.

The presence of these components in the Mohajer-6 does not mean their producers are in violation of U.S. or EU sanctions, and RFE/RL does not have evidence that this is the case.

The investigation also found Mohajer-6 components produced in China, including a real-time mini-camera made by a Hong Kong firm that said it was "very sorry" that its products were being used in war.

At least one major foreign-produced component of the Mohajer-6 has previously been identified by reporters in a Mohajer-6 recovered from the battlefield by the Ukrainian military: an engine made by the Austrian manufacturer BRP-Rotax GmbH & Co KG, a subsidiary of the Canadian company Bombardier Recreational Products.

But Ukrainian intelligence assesses that the Iranian combat drone contains components from nearly three dozen different technology companies based in North America, the EU, Japan, and Taiwan, the Schemes investigation has found. A majority of these companies are based in the United States.



A Schemes reporter who personally inspected the foreign-made drone parts identified components produced by at least 15 of these manufacturers.

These include parts made by the U.S. technology firm Texas Instruments, which said in a statement that it does not sell into Russia or Iran and complies with applicable laws and regulations.

To identify these components, Schemes reporters examined parts of the Mohajer-6 drone that the Ukrainian military shot down over the Black Sea near the Mykolayiv region coastal town of Ochakiv. They also reviewed Ukrainian intelligence records on the sources of these components.

The drone also contains a microchip bearing the logo of a California technology company and a thermal-imaging camera that Ukrainian intelligence says may have been produced by a firm based in Oregon or China.

Both Western officials and experts on illicit technology transfers say Iran has built a broad, global procurement network using front companies and other proxies in third countries to obtain dual-use technology from the United States and the EU.

"Exporters will look at the request coming from the [United Arab Emirates] or another third country, and they'll think that they're selling to an end user based there, when really the end user is in Iran," Daniel Salisbury, a senior research fellow with the Department of War Studies at King's College London, told RFE/RL.

In September, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions specifically targeting Iranian companies that Washington links to the production and transfer of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to Russia for deployment in its war on Ukraine. Fighting rages with no sign of an end more than eight months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked invasion on February 24.

"Non-Iranian, non-Russian entities should also exercise great caution to avoid supporting either the development of Iranian UAVs or their transfer, or sale of any military equipment to Russia for use against Ukraine," U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson said in a statement announcing the sanctions.

Chinese Cameras, California Chips

Development of the Mohajer-6, the latest model in a series of drones Tehran has used since the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, began in 2017, while mass production began the following year. During a ceremony commemorating the Islamic Revolution, then-Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami said that the new tactical drone could perform surveillance, reconnaissance, as well as help destroy targets.

Hatami extolled what he described as the drones domestic design, a portrayal echoed in later reports by Iranian media.

"The homegrown drone was made through cooperation among the army, Defense Ministry, and Quds Aviation Industries," the English-language Tehran Times quoted an Iranian military official as saying in July 2019.

The dismantling of the Mohajer-6 drone recovered by the Ukrainian military shows that the UAV is packed with foreign components.

One of these parts is a bright-orange real-time mini-camera produced by the Hong Kong-based company RunCam Technology. Documents seen by Schemes show that Ukrainian intelligence has also identified RunCam as the producer of the camera, which likely assists in remote guidance of the drone.

Founded in 2013, RunCam is involved in the development and production of so-called "first-person-view" real-time cameras. "Our users are our friends," the company's website states. The site says that RunCam has two authorized Iranian dealers.

Reached by Schemes for comment about the use of its camera in the Iranian drone deployed by Russia in its war on Ukraine, RunCam said in an e-mailed response: "We are very sorry to know that RunCam's products were used in warfare. RunCam is specialized in producing products for model aircraft hobby. We never contact any customer related to military."

The provenance of the Mohajer-6 drone-s thermal-imaging camera is more difficult to determine. A Ukrainian intelligence assessment reviewed by Schemes indicates it could be the Ventus Hot model produced by Sierra-Olympic Technologies, based in the U.S. state of Oregon, but that it also resembles a cheaper analog available for sale by the Chinese company Qingdao Thundsea Marine Technology.

Qingdao Thundsea Marine Technology said in an e-mailed statement that the company did not "have any business with Iran," because "it will affect our business." The company said it specializes in marine services and is not involved in manufacturing. It also said that it did not have a single successful order for its online advertisement of the thermal-imaging camera resembling the one recovered from the Iranian drone.

Sierra-Olympic Technologies did not respond to a request for comment on the possible use of its thermal-imaging cameras in Iranian combat drones in time for publication.

Microchips recovered from the drone also featured the logos of the California-based company Linear Technology Corporation and its parent company, the Massachusetts-based semiconductor company Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI). ADI did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment on the possible use of its technology in the Iranian combat drone.

Schemes reporters also observed among the components of the Iranian drone a voltage step-down converter produced by Texas Instruments. The company said in an e-mailed statement that it "does not sell into Russia, Belarus, or Iran."

"TI complies with applicable laws and regulations in the countries where we operate, and does not support or condone the use of our products in applications they weren't designed for," Texas Instruments said.

Schemes reporters also saw several components produced by the California-based technology manufacturer Xilinx, whose parent company is the multinational semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), also based in California.

According to Ukrainian intelligence, one of these Xilinx components was integrated into a video data-link module located in the wing of the Mohajer-6 that helped carry out attack missions.

"This module transmits information from the board to the missile head. That is, guidance for the missile. With the help of this module, it was possible to guide the missile to the target," a Ukrainian military intelligence representative told Schemes.

AMD did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

'No Authorization'

Previous media reports about the components of the Mohajer-6 drone, including by CNN, have shown evidence that its engine was produced by the Austrian manufacturer BRP-Rotax GmbH & Co KG, whose parent company is the Quebec-based Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP).

The Canadian company responded to the reports on October 21, saying in a statement that it "has not authorized and has not given any authorization to its distributors to supply military UAV manufacturers in Iran or Russia."

"As soon as we were made aware of this situation, we started an investigation to determine the source of the engines," BRP said. .

But Schemes reporters found that the authorized Rotax distributor listed on the Austrian manufacturer's website advertised itself as a Rotax aircraft engines distributor for Iran as recently as December 2020.

The distributor, the Italian company Luciano Sorlini S.p.a., has posted multiple magazine advertisements on its websites in which it describes itself as a Rotax distributor for numerous countries. Prior to January 2021, Iran was listed among these countries.

The Rotax website also lists a Tehran-based company -- MahtaWing -- as an official service center for its engines. The company, known in Persian as Mahtabal, conducts repairs of Rotax engines, including the Rotax 912 iS, the engine that was found in the Mohajer-6 combat drone recovered in Ukraine.

BRP said in an e-mailed statement on November 4 that while Luciano Sorlini S.p.a. is the appointed distributor of Rotax aircraft engines in Iran, "since 2019, no Rotax engines have been sold in Iran, and we will not sell any engines to Iran moving forward."

The Canadian company said it had "internal controls" that "significantly" restrict the sale of its products for military purposes.

"For example, the sale of any BRP product to operators with any military activity in Iran, Turkey, and Russia is strictly prohibited," BRP said. "We conduct our business in compliance with all EU, Canadian, and U.S. applicable regulations."

BRP described the Iranian company MahtaWing as a "local service center" that "offers maintenance services for previously sold aircraft engines."

Shahriar Siami of RFE/RL's Radio Farda contributed to this report.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has ordered Russian troops to withdraw from the west bank of the Dnieper River in the partially occupied Kherson region of Ukraine, another retreat amid a number of setbacks for Moscow on battlefields in Ukraine's east and southeast.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's ongoing invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.

"Begin to pull out troops," Shoigu said at a televised meeting with the commander of Russian troops in Ukraine, Army General Sergei Surovikin, on November 9, adding that the withdrawal must be implemented in "the nearest future."



"The lives of the Russian military personnel are always a priority for us. We must also take into account threats imposed on the civilian population and make sure that all civilians who chose to leave can do so," Shoigu said. "We also need to start withdrawing the troops and undertake all necessary measures to secure the move of military personnel, arms, and equipment to the other side of the Dnieper."



Kherson was the first city fully captured by Russia during what Moscow calls a "special military operation" and the only regional capital controlled by the Russians since the offensive began on February 24.



Ukraine's forces for weeks have been capturing villages as they advance toward the city, and Kremlin-installed leaders in Kherson have been evacuating civilians.

Earlier on November 9, the Moscow-installed deputy head of the Kherson region, Kirill Stremousov, died in a car crash.



Shoigu's order came after Surovikin said it was impossible to deliver supplies to the city of Kherson and other areas on the western bank of the Dnieper River.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces were strengthening their positions "step by step" in the south.



"There is a lot of joy in the information space today, and it is clear why, but...the enemy will make no gifts to us," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.



Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Zelenskiy, said earlier on Twitter that the Ukrainian side sees "no signs that Russia is leaving Kherson without a fight."



Part of the Russian group remains in Kherson city, he said, adding that additional reserves are being sent to the region. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, are "liberating territories based on intelligence data, not staged TV statements," he said.



Zelenskiy has suggested that the Russians could fake a retreat in order to lure the Ukrainian Army into an entrenched battle in Kherson city.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden said Moscow's order to withdraw from Kherson was "evidence of the fact that they have some real problems with the Russian military."

Moscow and Russian-installed officials in Kherson have said for weeks that they are evacuating residents of Kherson -- both the city and the region -- to "other parts of the Russian Federation" for their safety. Ukraine has said the Russian move amounted to their forced deportation.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the withdrawal announced by Shoigu is "part of an overall pattern or picture we have seen over the last month that Russia has absolutely lost the momentum."



But Stoltenberg also cautioned against underestimating Russia.



"They still have capabilities," he said in an interview with Sky News during a visit to London. "We have seen the drones. We have seen the missile attacks. It shows that Russia can still inflict a lot of damage."

Kherson is considered by many military analysts as the most important of the four partially occupied Ukrainian regions that Russia announced as annexed in September.



It controls both the only land route to Ukraine's Russia-annexed Crimean Peninsula and the mouth of the Dnieper River that bisects Ukraine.



Earlier on November 9, Russia launched multiple suicide drones on Ukraine's southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, wounding people and damaging civilian facilities, the head of the regional military administration said, as fierce battles were under way in the eastern Donetsk region and in the south.



"The occupiers attacked the area massively with kamikaze drones, said Governor Valentyn Reznichenko. Ukrainian air defense destroyed some of the drones, but others hit targets. The Russian forces also used drones in an attack on the city of Dnipro, targeting a logistics enterprise. Reznichenko said four employees were wounded, and three of them are in serious condition in hospital.



Russian forces also bombarded the Nikopol district in the region with Grad missiles and heavy artillery. Reznichenko said the shelling damaged private houses, a factory, and a power line, but people were not injured.



Zelenskiy vowed Ukraine will not surrender a single centimeter of our land in Donetsk, where heavy fighting has been under way, and he thanked Ukrainian troops who are holding positions in the Donbas region.



The epicenter of the battle for the industrial region of Donetsk is around the towns of Bakhmut, Soledar, and Avdiyivka.



"The activity of the occupiers remains at an extremely high level -- dozens of attacks every day," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address late on November 8.



"They are suffering extraordinarily high losses. But the order remains the same -- to advance on the administrative boundary of the Donetsk region. We will not yield a single centimeter of our land," he said.

Donetsk is one of four Ukrainian regions Russia said it annexed in September following referendums deemed as sham by Kyiv and its Western allies.



Fighting had been going on there between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatist forces since 2014, the same year Russia illegally annexed Crimea.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and CNN
North Korea claimed that it has successfully tested a new type of mid-range to long-range missile, and warned the United States that it is in its "sighting range" for a strike.

The official KCNA news agency said on May 15 that it was a test of the abilities of a "newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead."

It said the May 14 launch was supervised by leader Kim Jong Un, who warned the United States not to misjudge the country's military capabilities.

North Korea's latest ballistic missile test triggered an international outcry, with the European Union and NATO describing it as a "threat to international peace and security," and China voicing concern about mounting tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was opposed to any new countries acquiring nuclear weapons, but that the world should talk to North Korea rather than "intimidating" it.

The missile flew more than 787 kilometers and reached an altitude of 2,112 kilometers, KCNA said, basically matching what officials in South Korea and Japan had determined earlier.

The missile landed in the Sea of Japan surrounded by the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and the Russian Far East.

"The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead," KCNA said.

Experts said the distance flown by the missile would suggest a range of 4,500 kilometers if flown for maximum distance, putting a U.S. base in Guam within its capabilities.

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, told ABC TV that Kim was "in a state of paranoia."

"Hes incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him, Haley said.

In a tweet, she added, "There are no excuses that justify N. Korea's actions. This was close to home for Russia. China can't expect dialogue. This threat is real."

Speaking during his visit to China, Putin said Russia considers North Korea's missile launches and nuclear tests to be "counterproductive, harmful, and dangerous."

"We need to return to a dialogue with North Korea, stop intimidating it, and find peaceful solutions," he also said.

Russia's Defense Ministry said the North Korean missile crashed some 500 kilometers away from the city of Vladivostok in Russia's Far East, but Putin said the missile "presented no threat to us.

In Washington, the White House called North Korea a "flagrant menace" and said "the United States maintains our ironclad commitment to stand with our allies in the face of the serious threat posed by North Korea."

The White House statement called for stronger sanctions against the North, but did not directly threaten U.S. military action.

It also seemed to suggest that Russia should be concerned enough to do more to rein in North Korea.



"With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil -- in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan  the president cannot imagine that Russia is pleased," the statement said.

North Korea is widely believed to be developing an intercontinental missile tipped with a nuclear weapon that is capable of reaching the United States. President Donald Trump has vowed not to let that happen.

The U.S. military said the type of missile fired on May 14 was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile."

North Koreas missile program has been banned by United Nations resolutions, but it has continued to test ballistic missiles and to develop its nuclear program.

The launch is the first since South Korea's new president, Moon Jae-in, took office this week. He has said he favors engagement with Pyongyang to bring it to the negotiating table, in contrast to a tougher stand by his predecessor.

Nevertheless, Moon on May 14 condemned the missile launch as a "reckless provocation."

The UN Security Council is scheduled to meet on May 16 to discuss the missile launch at the request of the United States, South Korea, and Japan, diplomats said.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP
Nicole Kushner Meyer  sister of Jared Kushner, who is President Donald Trumps son-in-law and one of his senior advisers  was in Beijing earlier this month, urging Chinese citizens to invest in a New Jersey project being managed by the Kushner familys real estate company. She implied that to make such an investment was a path to immigration to the United States; we were reminded of a distasteful government program that critics call green cards for cash.

The EB-5 investor program allows foreigners to win fast-track immigration in return for investing $500,000 in U.S. properties. The program has offered wealthy foreigners a way around complicated U.S. immigration rules, allowing them to live in the United States and seek permanent residency in return for substantial investments, the Washington Post reported May 7.

EB-5 was extended in a bill signed by President Trump just one day before Kushner Meyer pitched the program to Chinese investors. Trump, who advocates for restrictive immigration policies, extended EB-5 without long-promised changes as part of a massive federal spending bill.

In Meyers Beijing presentation, she and her associates urged the Chinese to invest in the luxury apartment building, One Journal Square, which is slated to be built next year in Jersey City, N.J. Invest early, and you will invest under the old rules, one speaker said. A brochure put it even more plainly: Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said in a May 7 email that it was pretty sketchy for Meyer to make her sales pitch given that the programs continued existence is in doubt, and the backlog of applications from Chinese investors may add five years to the process. In 2014, 85 percent of investor visas were issued to Chinese applicants. The fact that she is the sister to the top adviser to the president makes it even worse, Lofgren said.

Yes it does, Congresswoman.

The Kushner Companies, of which Meyer is a principal, said in a May 7 email to the Post that it apologizes if that mention of her brother was in any way interpreted as an attempt to lure investors. That was not Ms. Meyers intention.

The Trump administration did not create the EB-5 program. Numerous reports from federal agencies have shown it is a bureaucratic nightmare, prone to abuse and difficult to justify in terms of economic return, the Post reported. Members of both parties have said it should be killed or overhauled. Two of the leaders of the EB-5 reform effort, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote in a March 14 letter that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a real estate group were undercutting their efforts  which included making it more costly to participate and more difficult to defraud the government  through secretive, back-room deal-making.

The Obama administration proposed that the price of the least-expensive investor visas go from $500,000 to $1.3 million, and it left it to the Trump administration to decide whether to implement the change.

We dont find the Obama administration proposal, or the bipartisan legislators group proposal, to raise the minimum price for an investor visa any better. That would only serve to limit those cutting in line from the rich to the even richer.

We know that any good sales pitch should include all the benefits of making such a purchase. But its different and wrong when your family business is as intertwined with the federal government as the Trump and Kushner family businesses are with the Trump administration. There should be no possibility, and no suggestion of the possibility, of greater access to a government program if an investment is made in a Trump company or a Kushner company.

But more importantly, the line to immigrate to the United States exists for a reason. No one should be able to cut in line because they have a half-million dollars to spare.

The EB-5 program should be killed. We welcome those from abroad who want to invest in our companies. But when it comes to immigration, those investors should be invited to find their way to the back of the line.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has declined to state publicly whether he plans to seek a new six-year term in a March 2018 election.

Asked by a journalist in Beijing on May 15 if it was time to announce whether or not he will run, Putin replied: "No."

Putin, 64, has been in power as president or prime minister since 1999.

He is widely expected to run in the election, and his popularity, dominance of the political arena, and control over the media and levers of power in Russia mean he would be heavily favored to win.

Lawmakers in parliament, which is dominated by the loyal United Russia party, are in the process of moving the date of the election back by one week to March 18 -- the day Russia celebrates its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Anticorruption activist and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny announced in December that he plans to run, but officials may bar him from the ballot based on a criminal conviction he says was the result of a politically motivated prosecution ordered by the Kremlin.

Based on reporting by Dozhd, TASS, and Reuters
Major oil exporters Saudi Arabia and Russia say that an agreement to cut output should be extended through March 2018.

The statements on May 15 caused oil prices to rise on world markets.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Russia, and other producers initially agreed to reduce output by 1.8 million barrels per day in the first half of 2017, with a possible six-month extension.

"We've come to the conclusion that the agreement needs to be extended," Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih told a briefing in Beijing alongside his Russian counterpart, Aleksandr Novak.

The two ministers said the supply cuts should be extended for nine months, through March 2018, instead of just six.

Russian President Vladimir Putin later reiterated that Moscow backs a nine-month extension, saying it would increase stability in oil prices.

"I have met with the heads of the companies...and we support the proposal," Putin said in Beijing.

Leaders and senior officials were in the Chinese capital for a May 14-15 meeting on China's One Belt, One Road trade initiative.

The supply-cut deal has increased prices, but they remain below the $60 per barrel that Saudi Arabia would like to see.

Inventories remain high and countries not involved in the agreement, such as they United States, have not limited their output.

The Saudi and Russian statements prompted oil prices to rise by about 2.5 percent.

At one point after the announcement, global benchmark Brent crude oil was trading at $52.26, the highest since April 26.

Russia's struggling economy relies heavily on income from oil and gas exports.

With reporting by Reuters and AP
The U.S. State Department has accused the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the dead bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital.

The accusations come a day before the start of a new round of UN-sponsored Syria peace talks in Geneva.

Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, said Washington's information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US "intelligence community" and it is thought that as many as 50 people per day are being hanged at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes from Damascus.

The department released newly declassified photographs depicting what it says is a building in the prison complex that has been adapted to support the crematorium.

"We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison," said Jones, who presented the photographs.

He did not give an official estimate for the total number killed, but cited an Amnesty International report from February, which said that between 5,000 and 11,000 had died between 2011 and 2015 in the prison.

Jones said on May 15 that Assad's government had "sunk to a new level of depravity" with the support of Russia and Iran and called on both countries to use its influence with Syria to establish a credible cease-fire and begin political talks.

"The United States is on record, has stated many times, that we are appalled by the atrocities that have been carried out by the Syrian regime," said Jones.

"And these atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran."

Jones told reporters that U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had raised concerns about Assad's brutality with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during his visit to Washington last week.

The declassified satellite pictures taken over several years, beginning in 2013, do not definitely prove the prison building is a crematorium, but they show construction consistent with such use.

As many as 70 prisoners are being held by the Syrian government in cells designed to hold just five, Jones said.

He also voiced reservations about a deal to set up four "de-escalation zones" inside Syria in an attempt to reduce violence and save lives. The deal was brokered by Russia with support from Iran and Turkey during talks in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, last week.

"In light of the failures of the past cease-fire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical," Jones said.

"The [Assad) regime must stop all attacks on civilian and opposition forces. And Russia must bear responsibility to ensure regime compliance."

Geneva Talks

On May 15, ahead of the Geneva peace talks aimed at trying to find a solution to the Syria conflict which has killed more than 320,000 people since it broke out more than six years ago, UN mediator Staffan de Mistura said that the discussions in Switzerland should benefit from a tighter format -- and the recent Astana agreement to create the de-escalation zone.



However, observers say the UN appears to be scrambling to match Astana's momentum after the deal.

Since the deal came into effect a week ago, fighting appeared to have slowed in parts of the country.

Previous rounds of talks in Geneva have resulted in agreement that the warring sides will discuss a four-part agenda -- a new constitution, reformed governance, new elections and the fight against terrorism. However, there has been no progress yet on any topic, as the two sides have sharp disagreements over the meaning of the four points on the agenda.

Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, is keen on discussing "terrorism," a term he uses broadly to describe all adversaries.

Opposition representatives have demanded Assad's removal.

Last week Assad told the Belarusian TV channel ONT that the Geneva talks were "merely a meeting for the media" and there had been "nothing substantial in all the Geneva meetings."

With reporting by AP, Reuters, AFP, and dpa






Relatives say the 18-year-old son of a former police colonel who joined the extremist group Islamic State (IS) has been arrested.

Behruz Gulmorodov's relatives told RFE/RL on April 17 that he was detained three weeks ago and is being held incommunicado.

They said they have received no explanation of the arrest, which could not be independently verified.

Behruz Gulmorodov's father, Colonel Gulmurod Halimov, was commander of the Tajik Interior Ministry's special forces, known as OMON.

He went missing in April 2015 and later appeared on the Internet, saying he had joined IS.

Last August, the U.S. State Department called Halimov a key member of IS and offered a $3 million reward for information on his whereabouts.

Western media reports quoted Iraqi officials on April 14 as saying that Halimov was killed in an air strike in Mosul.
Tajikistan's foreign minister has defended his country's Roghun hydroelectric station project, which has been questioned by neighboring Uzbekistan for years.

Foreign Minister Sirojidin Aslov told reporters in Brussels on May 15 that Dushanbe has always taken into account the "interests of our neighboring downstream countries."

Tajik authorities hope that, if completed, the Roghun dam project will give the Central Asian nation a stable energy supply.

Its construction officially started in late October, less than two months after the death of Islam Karimov, the long-term president of Uzbekistan, was announced.

Karimov opposed Tajikistan's project for years, saying the dam would reduce water flows to Uzbekistan's cotton fields.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has also criticized the project's implementation, saying that many families residing in the Roghun dam area will suffer disruptions in access to housing, food, water, and education after the government resettles them to other areas.

Aslov said that Dushanbe had painstakingly prepared the project's implementation with the help of the World Bank, UN, and European countries.

Italian construction conglomerate Salini Impregilo won a $3.9 billion contract to build the dam, which is expected to start generating power by the end of 2018.

Aslov said that there is enough water in Central Asia for all five countries -- Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan -- and that "the problem is irrational use."

"We have to do our best together to implement measures for saving the water resources in each country of the region, and I hope that each country of our region recognizes this important issue," he said.


Managers and employees at government offices, organizations, and businesses returned to work warily on May 15 amid fears that a massive cyberattack could worsen after the weekend, but computer infections appear to have slowed.

The WannaCry "ransomware" attack, which began on May 12, disrupted hospitals, banks, shops, schools, and government agencies in more than 150 countries, attacking through vulnerabilities in older versions of Microsoft computer operating systems.

Among the big victims were the U.S. package delivery company FedEx, car production facilities in Europe, the Spanish telecom firm Telefonica, Britain's National Health Service, and Germany's rail network.

"The number of victims appears not to have gone up and so far the situation seems stable in Europe, which is a success," Jan Op Gen Oorth, senior spokesman for Europe's police agency Europol told the AFP news agency.

"It seems that a lot of Internet security guys over the weekend did their homework and ran the security software updates," he added.

"We haven't seen a second spike in #WannaCry #ransomware attacks, but that doesn't mean there won't be one," Britain's National Crime Agency said on Twitter.

Inbox 'Landmines'

Companies have been warning employees to be careful when clicking on attachments and links in their e-mails.

But Michael Gazeley of the Hong Kong-based cybersecurity firm Network Box told the Reuters news agency that there are still "many 'landmines' waiting in people's in-boxes" in Asia, with most of the attacks having arrived via e-mail.

Tom Bossert, the Homeland Security Adviser under U.S. President Donald Trump, told ABC television that the cyberattack was for now "under control" in the United States.

The attackers told computer users to pay $300 to $600 in the anonymous bitcoin currency to retrieve files that the virus had decrypted, blocking owners from getting access.

The ransomware warning said the cost would double after three days, and threatened to delete files within seven days if no payment was made.

Experts said account addresses linked to the WannaCry software code appear to show the attackers received about $32,500 in bitcoin as of 11 a.m. GMT on May 14. That figure is expected to rise, although many experts and government agencies urge victims not to give into the demands.

Putin's Warning

During a visit to China, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted that his country was not behind the attack, and pointed the finger at the United States.

"Russia has absolutely nothing to do with it," Putin said.



"As for the source of these threats, Microsoft's leadership stated this directly: they said the source of the virus was the special services of the United States."

He was referring to a weekend blog post by Microsoft president, Brad Smith, stating that the U.S. National Security Agency had developed the code being used in the attack.

It was leaked as part of a document dump, according to researchers.

"Once they're let out of the bottle, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators," Putin said.

Putin insisted that his country was not behind the attack.

The United States has accused Russia in the past of mounting several cyberattacks.

Russia's Interior Ministry earlier said some of its computers had been hit, and authorities said the country's banking system and railway system were also attacked but that no major problems were detected.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, AFP, and the BBC


The 2020MY Honda Grom 125 remains mechanically unchanged from its previous version

Honda Motorcycle has unveiled the 2020 Grom 125 for international markets. Also known as the Honda MSX125 in certain regions, the modern-day minibike (with naked street motorcycle traits) receives minimal changes for the 2020 model year.

The mechanical department remains untouched while Honda has added new colour choices depending on the market. In the US, the 2020MY Honda Grom 125 is available in four colours: Cherry Red, Blue Raspberry, Halloween Orange and Incredible Green. The ABS version comes only in Cherry Red. US prices stand at $3,399 (Rs 2.57 lakh) and $3,599 (Rs 2.73 lakh), respectively.

For the niche minibike market, Honda has got another fun product under its miniMOTO category: Monkey. Available from $3,999 (Rs 3.02 lakh) in the US, the Honda Monkey is so popular that it coined the term monkey bikes to minibikes  as Xerox did to photocopy or fridge (from Frigidaire) to the refrigerator.

Coming back to the 2020 Honda Grom 125, its 124.9cc air-cooled FI single-cylinder motor makes a humble 9.57bhp and 10.9Nm of torque. Even though these figures look low on paper, the Grom weighs just about 103kg to make the best out of the least. The engine is mated to a 4-speed gearbox.

Despite being smaller than the usuals, the Grom 125s seat height is decently high at 762mm. Braking duties are carried out by 220mm and 190mm disc brakes at the front and rear, respectively. The minibike rides on 12-inch wheels supported by 31mm USD forks and a rear monoshock. Fuel economy figures are claimed to cross well over 50km/l no matter how much you abuse the engine. The Honda Grom 125 gets a 5.5-litre fuel tank.

Other notable features include full-LED lighting, digital instrument console, ABS (optional), etc. The Grom 125s construction is as simple as it can get and this is the most fun part of owning a minibike. In a safe and legal environment, minibikes are excellent starter motorcycles for kids and lady riders. Its compact dimensions make it a joy to ride in tight traffic conditions.

For our market, Honda Motorcycle India had tried something similar with the NAVI. However, it ended up being an odd-looking CVT scooter that could not garner enough sales or interest. At one point, it was even offered for free while buying the BS3 Honda CBR250R. The outdated CBR250R was discontinued well ahead of BS6 emission norms as sales fell drastically due to tough competition.
A UCLA study has found that a common strain of Caenorhabditis elegans -- a type of roundworm frequently used in laboratory research on neural development -- has a pair of genes that encode both a poison and its antidote. The new research also revealed that if worms with the two genes mate with wild strains of C. elegans that don't have both genes, their offspring who don't inherit the antidote can't protect themselves from the toxin -- which is produced by mother worms -- and die while they are still embryos.

The pair of genes represents one of the clearest examples to date of a "selfish genetic element" at the molecular level.

Selfish genetic elements are stretches of DNA that exist for no reason other than promoting their own inheritance; they do not contribute any benefits to the organism. Scientists have known about selfish genetic elements for decades, and their importance became especially clear after the publication of Richard Dawkins' 1976 book "The Selfish Gene."

The mechanisms by which selfish elements promote themselves can be subtle. For example, they might alter an animal's behavior so that it favors mates that have the same genetic makeup. In extreme cases, a selfish gene can require organisms to inherit it for the organisms to survive at all.

The researchers were studying an unusual strain of C. elegans, called DL238, that was isolated from a reserve in Hawaii. When they crossed those worms with the standard worms, called N2, that are used in most labs, the scientists noticed a long stretch of DNA where offspring always inherited the N2 copy.

Their experiments showed that this was because worms inheriting DNA from the DL238 worm were dying during their development as embryos. When the researchers studied the genes within that stretch of DNA, they were surprised to find that DL238 was missing a gene called pha-1, which was thought to be required for the development of the worm's feeding organ. However, the researchers showed that pha-1 was actually an antidote to a toxin, sup-35, that was also missing in DL238. Together, these genes make up a selfish element, rather than being important components of worm development.

Scientists have long been interested in using selfish genes to stop the spread of pathogens, such as the malaria parasite. The pha-1/sup-35 system offers a starting place to explore how selfish genes propagate.

The researchers write that the finding also suggests that selfish genetic elements may be hiding in plain sight under scientists' noses, and might be more common than previously thought. The pha-1 gene had been well-studied but there were no previous hints that it was merely an antidote to a toxin, which raises the possibility that other developmental genes could turn out to be antidotes to as yet undiscovered toxins.
When a group of researchers in the Undiagnosed Disease Network at Baylor College of Medicine realized they were spending days combing through databases searching for information regarding gene variants, they decided to do something about it. By creating MARRVEL (Model organism Aggregated Resources for Rare Variant ExpLoration) they are now able to help not only their own lab but also researchers everywhere search databases all at once and in a matter of minutes.

This collaborative effort among Baylor, the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School is described in the latest online edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Big data search engine

"One big problem we have is that tens of thousands of human genome variants and phenotypes are spread throughout a number of databases, each one with their own organization and nomenclature that aren't easily accessible," said Julia Wang, an M.D./Ph.D. candidate in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Baylor and a McNair Student Scholar in the Bellen lab, as well as first author on the publication. "MARRVEL is a way to assess the large volume of data, providing a concise summary of the most relevant information in a rapid user-friendly format."

MARRVEL displays information from OMIM, ExAC, ClinVar, Geno2MP, DGV, and DECIPHER, all separate databases to which researchers across the globe have contributed, sharing tens of thousands of human genome variants and phenotypes. Since there is not a set standard for recording this type of information, each one has a different approach and searching each database can yield results organized in different ways. Similarly, decades of research in various model organisms, from mouse to yeast, are also stored in their own individual databases with different sets of standards.

Dr. Zhandong Liu, assistant professor in pediatrics -- neurology at Baylor, a member of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's and co-corresponding author on the publication, explains that MARRVEL acts similar to an internet search engine.

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"This program helps to collate the information in a common language, drawing parallels and putting it together on one single page. Our program curates model organism specific databases to concurrently display a concise summary of the data," Liu said.

Supporting researchers

A user can first search for a gene or variant, Wang explains. Results may include what is known about this gene overall, whether or not that gene is associated with a disease, whether it is highly occurring in the general population and how it is affected by certain mutations.

"MARRVEL helps to facilitate analysis of human genes and variants by cross-disciplinary integration of 18 million records so we can speed up the discovery process through computation," Liu said. "All this information is basically inaccessible unless researchers can access it efficiently and apply it to their own work to find causes, treatments and hopefully identify new diseases."

Collaboration

This project started as a necessity for the Model Organism Screening Center for the Undiagnosed Disease Network at Baylor, but as it grew, the group began reaching out to researchers in different disciplines for feedback on how MARRVEL might benefit them.

"This program is just the start. I think our tool is going to be a model for us to help clinicians and basic scientists more efficiently use the information already publicly available," Wang said. "It will help us understand and process all of the different mutations that researchers are discovering."

"The most exciting part is how this project is bringing so many different researchers together," Liu said. "We are working with labs we might not have normally collaborated with, trying to put together a puzzle of all this data."

Both Wang and Liu are thankful to the contributions from the genetics communities allowing them access to the databases as they developed MARRVEL.
New diagnoses for two types of skin cancer increased in recent years, according to a Mayo Clinic-led team of researchers.

Their paper, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, uses medical records from the Rochester Epidemiology Project to compare diagnoses of basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma  both nonmelanoma skin cancers  between 2000 and 2010 to diagnoses in prior years. The Rochester Epidemiology project is a medical records linkage system and research collaborative in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Age, sex lead to different diagnoses

The researchers report that, between 2000 and 2010, squamous cell carcinoma (also called cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma) diagnoses increased 263 percent, and basal cell carcinomas increased 145 percent. They compared the 2000-2010 period to two other segments of time: 1976-1984 and 1985-1992.

Women 30-49 experienced the greatest increase in basal cell carcinoma diagnoses; whereas, women 40-59 and 70-79 experienced the greatest increase in squamous cell carcinomas.

Men had an increase in squamous cell carcinomas between the first and second time period studied (1976-1984 and 1985-1992), but experienced a slight decline in the 2000-2010 period. However, for basal cell carcinomas, men over 29 showed similar increases in diagnoses in the 2000-2010 period then the two earlier periods.

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Tanning: Beautifying or death-defying?

"We know that the sun and some artificial sunlight sources give off skin-damaging ultraviolet, or UV, rays," says Christian Baum, M.D., a Mayo Clinic dermatologist and the study's senior author. "This skin damage accumulates over time and can often lead to skin cancer."

"Despite the fact that sunscreens and cautionary information have been widely available for more than 50 years, we saw the emergence of tanning beds in the 1980s, and tanning -- indoors or out -- was a common activity for many years."

Although Dr. Baum notes that tanning has slowed, tanning beds still exist, and beaches will never be empty. But what people should remember is that the damage accumulates, he says, and "eventually those blistering sunburns of your youth and hot, reddened skin, and peeling shoulders of your adulthood can add up to one or more skin cancers."

The authors also reported that shifts in exposure to UV light may be the reason for a location shift in where the cancer tumors are found. In the earlier time periods, both basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas were diagnosed more often on the head and neck. But, in the most recent time period, the records showed that basal cell tumors on the torso increased, as did squamous cell carcinomas on the arms and legs.

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Dr. Baum says that the risk of cancer should provide the ultimate argument for using sunscreen -- every day, year-round on all exposed skin.

"Use sunscreen," says Dr. Baum. "This includes on your left arm for those who do a lot of driving. UV rays can penetrate car windows and exposed skin  even when the sun isn't shining. UV rays bounce around under the clouds, off the snow, buildings, and more, causing damage  even on gray days.

More on the data

Using the Rochester Epidemiology Project medical records linkage system, the research team was able to identify nearly all of the Olmsted County, Minnesota, adult residents who received an initial diagnosis of the most common nonmelanoma skin cancers -- basal or squamous cell carcinoma (or both), during the 2000-2010 period and the comparison years.

"There is no tumor registry for these types of cancer," says Dr. Baum, "So it is difficult to have accurate estimates of the national or worldwide impact of these cancers. However, because the Rochester Epidemiology Project contains health care information for virtually all residents of Olmsted County since 1966, it provides a good proxy for information on many global population health concerns."
A diverse group of the world's leading experts in marine conservation is calling for a Hippocratic Oath for ocean conservation ? not unlike the pledge physicians take to uphold specific ethical standards when practicing medicine.

A code of conduct for marine conservation would help prevent human rights violations that might occur during conservation and promote fair, socially responsible decision-making when planning and carrying out actions to protect the ocean. The recommendations were published May 15 in the journal Marine Policy.

"The benefit of developing a code of conduct is that we are taking past mistakes and learning from them," said lead author Nathan Bennett, a researcher at the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University. "We are trying to suggest a way forward and ultimately to increase the success of conservation."

An international group of academics and practitioners from universities, government agencies and nonprofit organizations convened at the International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Conservation Congress ? the world's largest recurring conservation event ? in Honolulu last year to discuss the need for a marine code of conduct and put together a framework for what such a document would include. This discussion, along with a review of existing conservation policies, is summarized in the new paper.

"Bringing together this broad group of experts is really the first step in a longer process," Bennett explained. "What we are calling for here is for the development and application of a code of conduct by the entire marine conservation community. This will require some of the key players in marine conservation to step up and support this initiative."

A number of human rights violations have occurred as byproducts of conservation activities in various parts of the world. In Tanzania, for example, coastal indigenous people have been forced off their land in the government's attempt to protect the area. In South Africa, areas that were designated for marine protection without consulting local communities are cited as examples of "ocean grabbing" ? policies or actions that take away resources and rights of small-scale fishing communities.

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Part of the problem, the authors say, is that marine conservation is relatively new and it is ramping up quickly to meet global targets to protect 10 percent of the oceans by 2020. Mistakes or negligence can happen under tight deadlines. Additionally, oceans have several unique qualities that make it difficult to navigate conservation work: property rights are not as clearly defined in the sea as on land; jurisdictions are hard to define and rules are hard to enforce; and there are stark differences in opinion over whether to further exploit the ocean's natural resources or protect them.

It is perhaps the world's newest "Wild West" scenario.

"The oceans are a busy place these days, with everyone trying to stake their claim with different end goals in mind," Bennett said. "Dealing with issues around how decisions are made, who is involved and being clear about the rationales for decisions ? and putting that information on the table in a transparent way ? are some fundamental challenges to making marine conservation happen in a good way."

The paper's authors lay out a number of social justice, accountability and decision-making principles that could be used for a marine conservation code of conduct. These include topics such as indigenous rights, food and livelihood security, inclusivity and transparency. They also list draft objectives for further development, and they cite examples of good and bad outcomes from conservation activities.

In British Columbia, for example, the marine planning process has been inclusive of all affected parties. In Hawaii, a marine national monument integrates native culture while protecting the ecosystem's health and diversity. Lessons learned from these positive examples, and others, can also be used to guide development of an international code of conduct, Bennett said.

The authors plan to discuss their recommendations at several upcoming international ocean meetings, including the United Nations Ocean Conference in June, the International Marine Protected Areas Congress in September and the Our Ocean conference in October. They hope other scientists, policymakers and funders will weigh in on what should be included in such a document, then get to work on drafting a code of conduct.

They expect the final document will be used as a tool to educate and guide the actions of the next generation of conservation practitioners and advocates and, when necessary, as a means to hold groups accountable for their actions.

"The practice of marine conservation always involves trade-offs. This analysis makes it clear that society's most vulnerable cannot be expected to carry the main burdens of conservation," said co-lead author Patrick Christie, a UW professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs and the Jackson School of International Studies. "Without taking into careful consideration the principles of this analysis, conservation will likely fail in the long term and have unintended negative impacts on society and environments."
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Genesee & Wyoming Inc. owns and leases freight railroads. It operates through three segments: North American Operations, Australian Operations, and U.K./European Operations. The company transports various commodities, including agricultural products, autos and auto parts, chemicals and plastics, coal and coke, food and kindred products, lumber and forest products, metallic ores, metals, minerals and stone, petroleum products, pulp and paper, waste, and other commodities. It owns or leases 122 freight railroads, including 105 short line railroads and 2 regional freight railroads located in the United States, 8 short line railroads located in Canada, 3 railroads located in Australia, 1 railroad located in the United Kingdom, 1 railroad in Poland and Germany, and 2 railroads in the Netherlands with a total of approximately 16,200 miles of track. The company also operates 6,200 additional miles of track that is owned or leased by others. In addition, it operates deep sea maritime containers and provides bulk haulage, including coal, aggregates, cement, and infrastructure services. Further, the company provides rail service at approximately 40 ports; rail-ferry service in North America, Australia, and Europe; and contract coal loading and railcar switching for industrial customers. Genesee & Wyoming Inc. was founded in 1899 and is headquartered in Darien, Connecticut.
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.
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Draft bills on public finance mgmt soon: MoF

The Ministry of Finance (MoF) is forwarding drafts of two crucial bills required to manage public finance in a federal structure to the Cabinet as early as next week, albeit the government will not be able to refer to these documents to frame the budget of the next fiscal year as chances of them being signed into law anytime soon are very slim.
Election cancelled in three centres; one killed

The historic local level elections took place in 34 districts in the first phase in a largely peaceful manner, barring a few incidents of violence.
India could cite its security concerns to derail OBOR projects

Last week, Nepal inked a deal on the One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative. This makes Nepal an official partner to Beijings ambitious plans to revive the ancient Silk Road trade routes.
Home >The Revolt > Camera Destruction > Italy, Saudi Arabia: Speed Cams Taken Out By Gunfire, Accidents
SAN FRANCISCOSilicon Valley startup Desmos Inc. is going after one of the oldest names in technology, Texas Instruments Inc., in an area not normally associated with cutting-edge innovation: hand-held calculators.

Founded in 2011, Desmos has developed a free graphing calculator program that runs on smartphones and computers, eliminating the need for a separate device.

The downloadable app has won users and the endorsement of the same testing organizations and textbook publishers that approved Texas Instruments products for tests such as the SAT college entrance exam.

Last week, a group called the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium gave Desmos its blessing. The organization oversees some standardized testing for middle- and high school students in 15 states, including California, Connecticut and Michigan.

We think students shouldnt have to purchase this old technology that predates the Internet, said Eli Luberoff, the company founder. This market is shifting. A monopoly is crumbling.

Calculators, such as the TI-84, are a staple for most college-bound students in the U.S. They retail for about $100 (U.S.), with fancier models going for more than twice that. According to Desmos, theyre made with old, underpowered technology thats no match for the capabilities of even a mid-range smartphone or low-end laptop.

Their limitations are a good thing, according to Dallas-based Texas Instruments, which debuted its first pocket calculator in 1967.

Our products include only the features that students need in the classroom, without the many distractions or test security concerns that come with smartphones, tablets and Internet access, said Peter Balyta, president of education technology at Texas Instruments.

While online apps can be free, they require a connection and devices to access them, he said. Thats an expense that can add up for schools or individuals.

Desmos counters that, as tests move online themselves, its calculator can be integrated into the exam. Such software locks down computers, not allowing anything other than the test.

Because its software is free to students, it also removes the financial burden on cash-strapped households.

Texas Instruments, which started life as Geophysical Service Inc. in 1930, doesnt break out calculator revenue. Sales of the devices are included in a category that includes licensing income and some other chips. That group accounted for 4 per cent of the companys $13.4 billion in 2016 sales.

Desmoss software racks up 300,000 hours of use by students in 146 countries every month, the startup said.

While it offers the software free to individuals, it charges organizations, such as publishers that use it, providing the San Francisco-based company with its revenue.

Luberoff founded the company after working as a math tutor, where he saw a market for math education as curriculum and students moved online.

The company secured about $1 million in seed funding in 2011 from investors, including Learn Capital, Kindler Capital and Mitchell Kapor, as it built the product and a revenue model. The startup also received an investment from GV, formerly Google Ventures, in 2012. Desmos has the backing of Pearson Plc, the worlds largest education company. Pearson is using it as a partner for its high school math program, enVision.

The College Board, which administers the SAT and Advance Placement tests, has endorsed the use of Desmos for its SpringBoard platform, which provides study drills, practice exams and curriculum assessments for students and teachers.

Such tie-ups are the key to breaking into the market, according to Luberoff.

One company has enjoyed a near market monopoly on the sale of graphing calculators for more than 27 years, thanks to strategic relationships with textbook publishers, statewide testing companies, college entrance exam makers and little outside competition, he said.

Calculator functionality hasnt significantly increased nor has its price decreased in decades, he said.

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Its the death hoax that refuses to die.

Poor Avril Lavigne. For about a third of her life, shes been dealing with rumours of her demise. And so it was this weekend when an old conspiracy theory was dusted off and repackaged for the most gullible elements on Twitter.

avril lavigne is dead & was replaced by a look alike, stated user @givenchyass, who then posted a video comparing an avril song from 2002 to an avril song from 2014.

I know what youre thinking: what do millennials have against capitalization? Must we really inhabit a world without punctuation and grammar, a world in which emoji replace persuasive arguments and acronyms ride roughshod over language?

So the spliced video, which has Zapruder aspirations but the gravitas of an MTV interstitial, is supposed to stimulate the part of your brain that can kind of, sort of, maybe see how the moon landing was faked or 9/11 was an inside job: Wait a minute. Avril looked different when she was a teenager. Now she also bops differently, almost like shes possessed by a Pogo champ. This can only mean ... WE ARE DEALING WITH AN IMPOSTOR.

But why would someone pretend to be Ms. Lavigne?

Im glad you asked. Avril, as the conspiracy theorist explains in lowercase exposition, used to lead a normal life. Then she got famous. She couldnt handle the paparazzi. So she hired a doppelganger, someone who could secretly share the burden of public strutting and posing.

Its actually not a bad idea, especially in Hollywood where there is no shortage of body doubles. Man, I wish I had a body double, a fake-me who could attend the occasional school concert or go antiquing with my wife. I would pay my body double top dollar to wait in line at the passport office or pick up embarrassing prescriptions.

So now its 2003 and Avrils grandfather has died, leaving her severely distraught. She cant go on. What does she do? She hangs herself (WTF?) and the look-alike assumes her identity (OMG) under the guidance of treacherous studio execs (SMH).

Enter the second visual exhibit: side-by-side photos of the real Avril before her alleged suicide and fake Avril, who is identified as one Melissa Vandella.

By Monday, as the original tweet was retweeted more than 100,000 times, others dove face-first into this pop conspiracy, sharing suspicious photos, analyzing handwriting samples, pointing to voice anomalies, scrutinizing birthmarks and, generally speaking, adding to the overwhelming evidence the world is bonkers.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar  and if it does, you may be spending too much time on the Internet  thats because BuzzFeed covered the Avril Lavigne is dead hoax two years ago when reporter Ryan Broderick wrote about a visit to Brazil where he discovered a local blog that was comparing old photos of Avril Lavigne with new photos of Avril Lavigne.

That blog theorized that at some point between 2002 and now, Avril Lavigne killed herself and was replaced by an actress. The new Avril might even be tipping off fans with not-so-subtle clues in her lyrics: The day you slipped away/ Was the day I found it wont be the same.

Heres the rub: that Brazilian blog was an inside joke. It was a deliberate hoax, one that was created to show how conspiracy theories can look true.

But instead of serving as a cautionary tale, BuzzFeeds story generated new stories and investigations as people searched for proof Avril was dead. The conspiracy theory never really went away and now, two years later, its back with a vengeance.

None of this makes sense. I mean, if a doppelganger really was pretending to be Avril for the last 14 years  and this person could blow the whistle if she didnt get exactly what she wanted  would she really marry Chad Kroeger after the charade begins and subject herself to endless Nickelback?

I doubt it. But what this old-new conspiracy does prove is that people are finding it easier to believe just about anything. Within the taxonomy of fake news, the celebrity death hoax is not new (see Charlie Chaplin or Paul McCartney). But it has become a psychological lubricant that has primed and helped more serious hoaxes glide toward intended targets.

The fake news line between, say, Adam Sandler killed himself and this pizzeria is ground zero for a child sex ring run by the Democratic Party is not as blurry as it may seem at first. Put it this way: the president of the United States is now a leading consumer and spreader of conspiracies.

The real conspiracy is that this death hoax holds Avril in incredibly high regard, implying as it does that a career on life support a few years ago is still somehow crucial to the health of the music business. Why her? Why not hire doppelgangers for Prince, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, or any bona fide superstar who is gone. We can live without them but not without the kid from Napanee?

Life has turned into a Nickelback song.

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The most famous astrologer in the world is used to being badgered everywhere she goes  by friends and strangers alike.

In fact, Susan Miller is more than resigned to her destiny, except when getting her teeth cleaned. Its a little hard when youre at the dentist with a mouth full of cotton, she hoots.

The voice coming in on the other end of my phone is fun, flutey, not to mention reminiscent of the same come-sit-next-to-me BFF-ness she telegraphs on her AstrologyZone.com, a website that attracts some 6.5 million visitors per month. Calling up the New Yorker in advance of two separate events in Toronto next month  a rare Canadian appearance  I hadnt quite known what to expect, but I certainly didnt expect her to tell my Aries self that I should be wary of water problems in my house.

But I live in a highrise! I was quick to exclaim.

Well then, thats good, she replied.

Could it be an allegory? A metaphor? I wanted to query more, but we got sidetracked, Miller having already moved on to something about my shoulders. (I need to watch them.) And then an anecdote about late-night host James Corden, who shes hung with. Then an anecdote about a Chinese woman whom she met that day who reiterated how much all of China loves her and how they call her Mom Susan in the Middle Kingdom. And then a drive-by reference to David Beckham and a sideways tale  I think  about the invasion at Normandy Beach. And throwaways like this: I see all these Sagittariuses breaking up . . . its because they travel.

For a woman whos an industry unto herself  shes a bug-in-the-ear to everyone from Pharrell to Gloria Vanderbilt, boasts a following that includes the fashion elite and Wall Street types, comes with her own app (of course) and columnizes for scores of magazines like InStyle and Vogue Japan  she takes on skeptics with a fact strewn from the natural world.

Even the oysters of the sea open their shells according to the rhythm of the moon, she reminds.

Its all math! she says, adamant to make the point shes not a psychic, per se, but rather someone whos about percentages and cycles and planetary positions.

The daughter of a grocer, Miller learned at the knee of her mother, who was also schooled in the zodiac arts. A sickly child  she had a congenital disease in her leg that almost killed her  she went through a phase of home-schooling. Oh, and a lot of daydreaming. Some time later, a brilliant surgeon helped her adapt to a normal life, and Miller went on to study business at NYU, have two daughters and work at one point as a photo agent. (To this day, Miller sees parallels between working in photography and astrology: Im still looking at Polaroids, but Polaroids in the sky, she coos.)

Doing readings for friends and family, and the occasional acquaintance, the Big Break, as it were, came when she accurately read the chart of an exec at Time Warner. One thing led to another and she was soon doing monthly horoscopes for an early incarnation of Time Warners website. Boom: the Internet had met the zodiac and Miller, branching out on her own, would soon be its virtuoso.

Whats long struck me about Miller is the extent to which she is not only a Jane Goodall of the zodiac but also one of our cultures highest-producing writers. Known for her War and Peace-length capsules on each sign and the sheer breadth of her activities, she probably puts out about 50,000 words each month. How does she do it?

From the 20th on (every month) I become a hermit, she explains. I dont see anyone.

While I have Miller on the line, I get her insights into the media-hot liaison between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. What say she?

Because Markle is a Leo, the first thing that strikes the zodiac-tracker is that shes the only fire in the mix with lots of water and earth (which puts out fire) in the context of the British royal family. Not only is Harry a Virgo (earth), but Queen Elizabeth is a Taurus (earth), Prince Philip is a Gemini (air), Prince William is a Cancer (water), Kate Middleton is a Capricorn (earth), Camilla Parker Bowles is a Cancer (water) . . . and so on.

And while Miller is adamantly against the idea of nixing one sign for another  she calls it racial profiling and thinks that any sign can fall for another bad-on-paper sign  in general, a Virgo-Leo pairing can be tricky. According to AstrologyZone.com, a Virgo and Leo couldnt be more different, and such a love affair is going to take some time to develop into a long-term success.

When she looks closer at Markles zodiac (complete with time of birth), she is vexed, in particular, about Saturn conjuncting her Moon . . . shes very careful about her emotions. Theres a sadness, maybe, about her childhood.

But who can say? If theres going to be a royal engagement, she points to August  the 21st, specifically  when a major eclipse is due. She wants everyone to take heed.

Eclipses are the big instigators of change in the zodiac.

Meanwhile, what of a certain president of the United States? I couldnt not ask about him.

One of the hardest years of his life, Miller says about Donald Trump, particularly where Saturn sits in his zodiac. In terms of predictions, she tells me that the end of August, the beginning of September . . . thats going to be hardest of the hardest of the hardest for him.

Wrapping up our call  my phone battery dunked at 5 per cent  Miller leaves me with this thought: No ones chart is identical to someone else. Its statistically impossible.

Susan Miller is coming to Torontos Verity Club on June 3. See astrologyzone.com/event/toronto-canada for more information.

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Royal Myanmar

Address: 438 Horner Ave. (near Browns Line), 647-891-7819, royalmyanmar.ca

Chef: Ommar Maung

Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 7 p.m.

Reservations: Yes

Wheelchair access: Step at front

Price: Dinner for two with tea, tax and tip: $25

The lunch box

A tall, curving piece of lacquer ware sits on the counter of Royal Myanmar, Torontos only Burmese restaurant.

It is a traditional Burmese lunch box, a metre high and built to hold curries and salads inside what looks like a miniature pagoda.

My grandmother carried it on her hip, chef/co-owner Ommar Maung says.

Since opening the modest family restaurant two years ago, Maung has become an unofficial ambassador for her countrys rich culture and subtle food. If you want to know what Burmese cuisine is like  and you should  Royal Myanmar is the place to eat it.

The background

Myanmar (formerly Burma) shares a border with Thailand, India, China and Bangladesh. Its cuisine, at least the version at Maungs Etobicoke restaurant, is muted compared to its neighbours.

Many dishes feature coconut milk or noodles. Garlic is a frequent contributor, as are cilantro and caramelized onions. Fish sauce sometimes replaces salt. Curries of pork ($11.50) and chicken ($10.50) are straightforward affairs stained by turmeric and paprika.

Like Uzbek restaurant Taj, Royal Myanmar attracts both the culinarily curious and those connected to the newly democratic country. I learn about it from colleague Leslie Scrivener, who twice went to Burma to cover the political upheaval.

The vibe

The room is plain but clean. A TV plays the YouTube series Burma Bites.

A smiling server (all staff are related to Maung) brings out green tea and glasses. She hands over an index card and a pen to write our order.

Speed is not Royal Myanmars strong suit. Every dish is cooked to order, one at a time; it can take hours to get through a meal. Staff advise diners to phone their choices ahead of time.

Me, Id request fritters ($8.95), a haystack of battered bean sprouts that recall latkes. Spicy dipping sauce disguises the slight oiliness.

Not for brewing

The dish on every table is tea leaf salad ($9.95), unique to Burma.

Fermented chopped leaves  not leftovers from the tea pot  weave their welcome tartness through shredded cabbage, pulpy tomato and crunchy roast chickpeas, peanuts and pounded sesame seeds. Each forkful lingers in a good way. And, my goodness, the heat! Not only does this salad wake up the taste buds, it slaps them around.

Compared to that, Burmese mixed salad ($8.95) suffers only in comparison. The starchy tangle of noodles, potatoes and cucumbers comes across as bland. Even blander is another noodle salad, khauk swe thoke ($8.95).

Soup and such

Burmas national dish, mohinga, is here: Rice noodles and hard-boiled eggs in fish broth made gummy by chickpea flour ($9.95).

The homey meal ends with either subtle coconut jelly ($2.50) or fudgy coconut-semolina cake dusted in white poppy seeds ($2.50).

While paying at the counter, I point out the intricately painted lunch box to my children. Yellow deer cavort on a red-and-black floral background; like all Burmese lacquer, the work is done by women.

Impressive. Its so beautiful, my 12-year-old daughter says.

How do they fit that in their backpacks? her 8-year-old sister wonders.

Indeed.

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OTTAWACanadians will have to wait until next month to see Canadas new defence policy  after federal politicians have first met with allies in Washington and Europe.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced Monday that the long-awaited defence policy  which had been expected this week  would instead be delivered June 7.

Thats after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends a meeting of other NATO leaders at a summit in Brussels on May 25.

And it comes after Sajjan himself and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland hold scheduled talks in Washington this week with the Trump administration, including James Mattis, the U.S. Secretary of Defence.

In the Commons Monday, interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose charged that Canadians were being left in the dark while allies were getting a preview of Canadas new defence plans  and the spending to back it up.

I know the chamber has not seen it, members of Parliament have not seen it, and the military has not seen it, Ambrose said.

Why do Washington insiders get privileged access to Canadian defence policies before the Canadian public does and before the Canadian military does? she said in question period.

The coming policy review is expected to detail the countrys defence priorities over the next two decades, the kinds of equipment  and funding  needed to fulfil those missions.

The Liberals have hinted that it will outline a significant boost to military spending, which now stands at about $19 billion a year, or about one per cent of GDP.

NATO nations, including Canada, have pledged to meet a target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence. Since coming to power, U.S. President Donald Trump has been pressuring NATO allies to live up to those spending commitments.

It was expected that the federal Liberals would release the new defence plan prior to the May 25 meeting of NATO leaders. But that plan is now off the table and Canadians will have to wait a few weeks more.

Sajjan said Monday that the defence plan will be released on June 7, after Freeland gives a speech on Canadas foreign policy foundation.

Speaking later to reporters, Sajjan did not rule out that the defence policy will be part of the discussions with the American administration during his visit on Monday and Tuesday. But he denied they were getting a sneak peek, saying that Washington has been involved from the start.

When it comes to our discussions and working with our allies, multilateralism is very important to have input into our defence policy review as we did the consultation, and thats what good allies do, and thats exactly what weve done, he said.

Our coalition partners have been part of our defence policy review from the beginning, Sajjan said, adding that he reached out to Canadas closest defence allies for advice.

We took their recommendations, many of them, and incorporating that into ours where we actually added the industry consultation as well, and thats what good partners do, he said.

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Anup Ojha is a reporter for The Kathmandu Post primarily covering social issues and human interest stories. Before moving to the social beat, Ojha covered arts and culture for the Post for four years.
OTTAWAThe Liberal government will support a proposed Conservative bill that would require anyone hoping to be considered for the bench to undergo comprehensive training in sexual assault law.

David Taylor, a spokesman for Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, says the government is satisfied with minor changes the Commons status of women committee made to the legislation, introduced by Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose.

Ambroses bill would also change the Criminal Code to require either recorded or written decisions in sexual assault cases, and would require the Canadian Judicial Council to report on continuing education courses on sexual assault law.

The proposed legislation also has the support of one of the women at the centre of last years high-profile trial of Jian Ghomeshi.

Linda Redgrave says judges need to better understand the effect that trauma can have on the memory and behaviour of someone who has experienced sexual assault.

Redgrave, whose identity was protected by a publication ban before she asked for it to be lifted, was among those who accused the former CBC personality of sexual assault before his dramatic and controversial acquittal in March 2016.

Unless there is some kind of judicial training in place, then we dont have fair access to justice, said Redgrave, who founded a non-profit organization called Coming Forward to help support victims of sexual assault navigate the justice system.

Were getting what were getting. ... Its luck of the draw.

In acquitting Ghomeshi, Ontario Court Justice William Horkins said he was unable to rely on Redgraves testimony, describing her version of events as shifting and her behaviour as odd.

The expectation of how a victim of abuse will, or should, be expected to behave must not be assessed on the basis of stereotypical models, Horkins wrote in his ruling.

Having said that, I have no hesitation in saying that the behaviour of this complainant is, at the very least, odd. The factual inconsistencies in her evidence cause me to approach her evidence with great skepticism.

Horkins also noted all he had to go on was the credibility of the complainants, which is not unusual in matters involving sexual assault.

Horkins declined to comment, but a spokeswoman for the Ontario Court of Justice said all its judges are given education in social awareness, including on issues related to gender-based violence and sexual assault.

Redgrave said better and more consistent training could change the way judges determine the credibility of a sexual assault complainant.

She said it could also help encourage more victims to turn to the courts.

The Ghomeshi trial and ruling, both of which prompted an emotional debate about how abuse complainants are treated by the justice system, probably did the opposite, she added.

I think it sent a message loud and clear to tell people that if you try to come forward, your credibility is going to be taken down.

In a written brief to the House of Commons committee that studied the proposed legislation, also known as Bill C-337, Redgrave and Toronto lawyer Helgi Maki argued the training for judges should include learning about the neurobiological impact of trauma, as well as how to conduct a trial in a way that understands this effect.

Drawing on the work of Lori Haskell, a Toronto clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, Redgrave and Maki wrote that victims of sexual assault can find themselves feeling frozen and unable to fight back, have trouble making decisions, show no emotional expression after an assault takes place and experience memory loss.

New Democrats want the Liberals and Conservatives to agree to fast-track the bill so that it comes back up for third reading this week.

Last month, Ambrose told the status of women committee that her idea for the bill stems all the way back to when she was in university, when she took part in a project looking into how sexual assault complainants were treated in the courtroom.

She told the committee she remembered a prosecutor asking a young girl why she had been sitting in the lap of the defendant, who she said was a man in his 50s.

These kinds of stereotypes still exist, these kinds of mythologies continue, and we see them in our courtrooms, Ambrose said April 4.

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HAMILTONIn a darkened, quiet room off the third-floor neonatal intensive care unit at St. Josephs Hospital, Christie cradles her baby Sam. He is swaddled tightly in a white hospital blanket, with a matching white cap on his chubby bald head. Nurses shuffle back and forth outside the door as muffled cries echo through the hallway.

Christie is nervous. In just a few hours, she will meet Sams future foster mother  the woman who will take her baby home from the hospital in just a few days. Sam was born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS), meaning that he came into the world in opioid withdrawal.

For this first 31 days of his life, he has lived at the hospital, as his tiny body is slowly weaned off the morphine he is given to combat the shaking and shivering and fever and near constant crying that can come with NAS.

Baby Sam is one of an increasing number of babies in Canada born with an opioid addiction. In the St. Joes NICU on this day, there are five babies being treated for opioid withdrawal.

When I started (20 years ago), wed maybe have one every six months, says registered nurse Ann Patton.

NAS rates are up nationally, provincially, and even locally in Hamilton  a byproduct of a deadly opioid crisis that is killing thousands of people across the country each year.

For every 1,000 babies born in the province between April 2015 and March 2016, 5.9 were diagnosed with NAS. The national rate was 4.2 births per 1,000. Those figures are a stark increase from a decade earlier, when the provincial and national NAS birth rates were both 1.8 per 1,000.

In Hamilton, there were roughly 45 NAS births in 2015  a number that shot up to roughly 62 last year.

For those struggling with addictions, pregnancy can be a difficult experience; one wrought with shame and fear and guilt. These women know drugs are bad for their unborn children. But quitting is easier said than done  and in many cases, going cold turkey during a pregnancy can be much more dangerous. But doctors say that a pregnancy can also offer a unique and unprecedented chance to engage.

In the face of this epidemic, the Spectator explored the local programs that support moms with addictions and babies with NAS. This three-part series shares stories of heartbreak and perseverance from those at the very heart of this fight.

Christie and her boyfriend, Sam Sr., both 27, have long struggled with opioid addiction.

These are not their real names. Because their baby is going into foster care, legislation protects the family from being identified in any way.

For Christie, it was during her pregnancy  which she discovered only between the fifth and sixth months  that she felt ready to get help. Shes now on methadone and in a residential treatment program, which linked her up with the Maternity Centre before baby Sam arrived  a program she is grateful for.

The Centre, which runs out of the David Braley Health Sciences Centre in the downtown, has a specific Program for Substance Use in Pregnancy (PROSPR).

We had started to see (moms with these issues) at the Maternity Centre . . . and we really didnt have a co-ordinated approach to their care, said Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the programs founding physician. Inspired by the work that was being done at Torontos TCUP (Toronto Centre for Substance Abuse in Pregnancy) program, Shaw knew there was a similar need here.

PROSPR provides one-stop shopping for expectant mothers with substance use issues, offering both neonatal (or antenatal) care and methadone out of one clinic. By combining medical and addiction treatment into a single appointment, Shaw and Dr. Jill Wiwcharuk say they increase the likelihood of their patients actually making them.

As soon as you put those together, youve decreased the amount of appointments in their life by a ton, says Wiwcharuk, who is also the executive director of the Shelter Health Network.

Our womens lives are so chaotic with so many competing priorities that they find it difficult to show up to all the appointments necessary for prenatal care. But they rarely miss an appointment for methadone. So it can really help get patients the prenatal care they need.

In the three years since it has launched, roughly 60 women have gone through the PROSPR program. The three-person team  Shaw and Wiwcharuk, along with nurse practitioner Claudia Steffler  also works closely with the NAS clinic at St. Josephs, where that support is carried through delivery and into infancy.

Their program is not restricted to women using opioids. Some of their patients also struggle with alcohol use or other drugs such as cocaine.

Signs of withdrawal in babies can occur within hours of birth, or can take days to appear.

For Christie and Sam, having been through withdrawal themselves made it harder to watch their little boy go through it.

We both know what its like to go through withdrawal, it was hard to see a newborn going through that, dad says.

A scoring system called the Finnegan Score is used to monitor the babys symptoms  things like tremors, broken or red skin, excessive crying, sweating, sneezing, vomiting  and determine whether medication (like morphine) is needed. If it is, the babys hospital stay can be extended from five days to several weeks.

During that time, parents can stay in bunk rooms (called care by parent rooms) outside the NICU, which allows them to be nearby for feeding or holding duties. While babies in withdrawal do not necessarily need high-tech care, they require lots of hands-on care  literally near constant holding.

Moms who are on methadone can also breastfeed. Its encouraged. Such little amounts of drugs pass through breast milk that the benefits generally outweigh any worries about continued drug use, the doctors say.

Though she was able to, Christie opted not to breastfeed baby Sam. Knowing hed be going into foster care, she didnt want to forge a bond that would be broken so quickly.

The hardest part for her, she says, was the uncertainty during her pregnancy  not knowing what to expect, or whether her baby would come out OK.

I was worried, dad says, nodding. I didnt want him coming out with two heads.

In reality, NAS is not a life sentence. With the right care, many babies born in opioid withdrawal go on to have perfectly healthy childhoods and perfectly normal lives.

But it is this fear, and the stigma around drug use, that keeps so many expectant women with addictions from getting the prenatal care they need. A hospital can be an intimidating and scary place for these women. They feel judged by the staff, and even the other patients  and so, often times, they stay away.

Its always sad when somebody comes in and weve never met them before and theyve had no care. It happens not infrequently, says St. Josephs Healthcare pediatrician Dr. Sandi Seigel, another member of the support network.

It is heart-wrenching, Seigel acknowledges. But the reality is its not going away.

If youre on a stable methadone dose, then thats the best scenario if you have an addiction. The best thing would be if you can fight your addiction before you get pregnant, but we dont see a lot of it . . . and its true that a lot of these are unplanned pregnancies, Seigel says.

Getting onto methadone is a major step in a moms recovery  one to be celebrated, not criticized, they say  and one that could mean the difference between her ability to parent her baby and the baby being taken from her.

According to a 2014 audit by St. Josephs Hospital, Seigel says close to 60 per cent of their NAS babies went home with their mother upon discharge. Another 10 per cent went into kinship care (with a relative or friend), and roughly 30 per cent went into foster care.

More than half do go home with their biological parent, even if CAS is involved, Seigel says.

Most of these moms do want to parent, they say  whatever that arrangement looks like. It is rare that they have a patient who wants to put their baby up for adoption.

Abortion, of course, is the third option. But the reality is that many of these women, particularly those who come through the shelter health network and whose lives are more chaotic, are coming in for care too far into the pregnancy for abortion to be an option.

Opioid use can affect a womans menstrual cycle to the point that she may rarely have her period, and therefore may not realize she is pregnant.

Dr. Suzanne Turner, a family physician at St. Michaels Hospital in Toronto who has studied NAS, says that it is important to connect with women with addictions to discuss the possibility of pregnancy with them.

We can do a better job of saying to them: if you dont want to get pregnant during this time, you should be on birth control  and if you do want to be (pregnant), there are some things we can offer you to make this pregnancy as safe as possible, Turner says.

Often these women have had a lifetime of trauma  another reason for the fear of authorities and institutions including hospitals. Maybe they grew up in care themselves, or have dealt with the justice system, they say.

For Christie and Sam, it was indeed their baby that sparked the desire to finally get clean. Christie is now in a residential treatment facility. Sam has been on methadone for a full month, off street drugs since the day his son was born.

I can celebrate my recovery anniversary every year on his birthday, he says, grinning.

For today, Christie is ready to meet the foster mom, but she is not ready to see her interact with her baby. She doesnt want to be there for that.

Sarah Simpson, her social worker, encourages her that theyll work on that. She wants Christie to feel like she taught the foster mother how to care for her baby, because she knows him best.

You can think of her as a babysitter if you like, Simpson tells her.

Christie nods, still staring down at Sam, now quiet and sleeping in her lap.

Thanks for that, she says quietly.

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Even bandwagons need brakes and airbags.

Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown says he hired private-sector auditors PwC to oversee his partys candidate nominating elections because so many people are vying to run for him in the June 7, 2018 election.

As first disclosed by the Star, party activists in Newmarket-Aurora and Ottawa West-Nepean are formally challenging the results of their nominations after irregularities such as ballot stuffing.

With public-opinion polls suggesting the Conservatives could unseat Premier Kathleen Wynnes Liberals next year, newly minted Tories have been climbing aboard the Brown bandwagon.

Weve never seen so many memberships being sold. There is this massive appetite for change in Ontario and because of that weve never had so many candidates, so many contested nominations, the PC leader said in an interview Monday.

For me, given the fact that were seeing nominations that are more energized than ever before I thought engaging PwC would help let anyone know that theres a neutral arbiter there, he said.

Auditors from the firm that is also known as PricewaterhouseCoopers began monitoring Tory nominations this past weekend.

We had three nominations, heard no complaints, said Brown.

Ultimately I have to sign the nominations and Ive told the party that I want PwC to sign off on the best practices, he said.

The Tory leader said the juggernaut began picking up steam after PC MPP Raymond Cho won the Liberal stronghold of Scarborough-Rouge River in the Sept. 1 byelection.

When we saw Scarborough-Rouge River  a seat that had been Liberal for 50 years  go, that meant a safe Liberal seat can change. That means right now there are contested elections in every single riding, said Brown.

Frankly, its a good problem to have. Where other parties have to appoint candidates or struggle to find people, we have more people than weve ever been accustomed to.

The Tories have nominated 34 candidates  including the two being challenged in Newmarket-Aurora and Ottawa West-Nepean  beyond the partys sitting 29 MPPs.

Ottawa West-Nepean riding association president Emma McLennan alerted Brown to alleged ballot box stuffing at the nomination there on May 6 after there were 28 more ballots in the boxes than had registered to vote.

The declared winner was Karma Macgregor, who bested runner-up Jeremy Roberts by 15 votes. Roberts is officially appealing the outcome.

If there is a do-over in the suburban Ottawa riding, PwC would oversee it.

In Newmarket-Aurora, Tory riding association officials complained of a blatant breach of the nomination rules.

They are challenging the April 8 nomination of candidate Charity McGrath Di Paolo, who beat Tom Vegh and Bill Hogg.

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Ontario students will get up to speed with a $50 million provincial investment in broadband access  and it may even help them get Snapchat back.

Education Minister Mitzie Hunter announced the funding on Monday, saying it is about ensuring that as they are learning in the classroom, they have the technical support in place to support that learning.

The money will bring schools up to an industry standard of one megabit per second, per student, she said in an interview.

Students will notice the difference in speed, Hunter also said. The reality is that the world is complex, its changing and there are so many different demands on students in the very different ways in which they are working ... we want to make sure Ontario students are equipped.

Some 182 schools are first in line for funding, with a focus on better serving those in rural and remote areas, starting this fall.

A week ago, the Toronto District School Board announced it was blocking all Wi-Fi and network access to Snapchat, Netflix and Instagram in schools until the end of June saying those sites alone accounted for one-fifth of daily network use.

It was overloading an already slower network, meaning even inputting daily attendance or working on report cards have become almost impossible to complete, the board said.

While students found ways around the ban, schools have said the new measure has had an impact and the system is working faster.

The board plans to update its network over the summer for all schools.

The Avon Maitland District School Board also recently ended access to Snapchat because it too was taking up too much bandwidth.

University of Toronto professor Alberto Leon-Garcia said if a school has 1,000 students, one megabit per second per student equals one Gigabit per second and for an entire school, that is pretty good today. Now the speeds that are available commercially for an entire school can be much higher.so it comes down to how that megabit per second per student is calculated.

He said it will help, but the history of usage is users just increase their appetite according to whats available, added Leon-Garcia, who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

At a speech last week to the Canadian Club, Hunter said the one megabit industry standard was important because I know in the world of tomorrow, computing power will be the technological equivalent of fresh water  and with this commitment, we are signalling that we appreciate how important it is that this resource be made available widely and fairly.

The Toronto public board says it provides varying Internet speeds because different networks are used.

The Peel District School Board has plans to double its bandwidth this summer, said spokesperson Carla Pereira.

As for once again getting access Snapchat and Instagram, Hunter said that certainly the Toronto District School Board had to prioritize and noted the ban is expected to be lifted in the fall.

Im sure students have been very clear that they would like to have that type of access.

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WASHINGTONWhile Democrats may trot out any number of demands or manoeuvres to influence the selection of the next director of the FBI, heres a reality check: Republican U.S. President Donald Trump fired James Comey, and he and his party will decide whos next.

And theyre not wasting time. Trump said Monday the selection process for a nominee for FBI director was moving rapidly.

Democrats irate over Comeys abrupt ouster, and concerned by the inclusion of politicians on the list of possible replacements, are demanding Trump not select a partisan leader. Although theyre likely to mount considerable pressure before and during the confirmation process, they dont control enough votes to influence the outcome since Republicans hold a 52-seat majority in the Senate.

Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald Trump

If they can keep all 52 together, then it wont matter, said Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. If Republicans start to lose a couple, or two or three look like theyre not on board, that could create more pressure on the majority leader and the president to perhaps do something other than what they were planning on doing.

The next director will immediately be confronted with oversight of an FBI investigation into possible co-ordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, an inquiry the bureaus acting head, Andrew McCabe, has called highly significant.

The person also will have to win the support of rank-and-file agents angered by the ouster of Comey, who was broadly supported within the FBI. And the new director will almost certainly have to work to maintain the bureaus credibility by asserting political independence in the face of a president known for demanding loyalty from the people he appoints.

Read more:

Trump says he could make a fast decision on new FBI director  possibly by next week

U.S. democracy under assault from Trump and Russia, former intelligence director says

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein interviewed eight candidates Saturday, including some who were not among the names distributed a day earlier by the White House. The list includes current and former FBI and Justice Department leaders, federal judges and Republicans who have served in Congress.

Among those interviewed was McCabe, though its not clear how seriously hes being considered.

Itd be unusual for the White House to elevate an FBI agent to the role of director, and McCabe during a Senate hearing last week broke with the White Houses explanations for Comeys firing and its dismissive characterization of the Russia investigation.

FBI directors have predominantly been drawn from the ranks of prosecutors and judges. Comey, for instance, was a former United States Attorney in Manhattan before being appointed deputy attorney general by George W. Bush. His predecessor, Robert Mueller, was a U.S. attorney in San Francisco.

One contender who could prove politically palatable is Michael Garcia, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan with significant experience in terrorism and public corruption investigations. He was appointed by FIFA in 2012 to investigate World Cup bidding contests. He later resigned after he said the global soccer organization had mischaracterized a lengthy investigative report he had produced.

The FBI Agents Association has endorsed former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, an ex-FBI agent and former chair of the House intelligence committee who had collegial relationships with his Democratic counterparts.

Senate Democrats have insisted that Trump should not pick a politician as the next FBI director. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said on NBCs Meet the Press on Sunday that the choice should be certainly somebody not of a partisan background, certainly somebody of great experience and certainly somebody of courage.

Piece by piece, the FBI'S Acting Director Andrew McCabe, during Senate testimony Thursday, undermined the White House's explanations about Director James Comey's firing.

One Republican whose name had been mentioned as a possible candidate, Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, said Monday that he had taken himself out of the running.

Given the partisan uproar over Comeys firing, Democrats seem unlikely to support any FBI candidate put forward by Trump. But the nominee will require only a simple majority vote in the 100-member Senate, meaning Republicans can use their 52-48 majority to confirm the next director without needing Democratic votes.

Democrats are demanding appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Russias involvement in the 2016 election and ties to Trumps campaign, and have discussed trying to slow down the confirmation process or other business of the Senate as a way of drawing attention to the demand.

Senate rules requiring unanimous consent or 60-vote thresholds on various procedural or legislative steps give Democrats the ability to slow the Senate to a crawl and delay committee hearings.

Given the Republicans narrow Senate majority, the larger consideration for the White House is that some GOP senators also insist on a non-partisan choice as the next FBI director.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on Meet the Press that Trump has is obligated to pick somebody beyond reproach outside the political lane. Graham said under the circumstances he wouldnt be able to support his colleague Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, who is under consideration.

Some House Republicans, who technically have no role in the pick, have spoken out about the need for non-partisanship and independence.

The FBI is Americas pre-eminent law enforcement agency. As such, it needs to be led by a person of unquestioned character and completely divorced from partisan politics, GOP Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma wrote in an opinion column circulated Monday.

House Democrats are weighing their own steps related to the firing. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is asking House Speaker Paul Ryan to join in a call for Rosenstein to brief House members, as he will do for senators Thursday. Democrats will also try to use a procedural manoeuvr to force a vote on legislation calling for an independent commission to investigate Russian election interference, although theyre unlikely to prevail.

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WASHINGTONThe United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Daesh militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to U.S. interests in the volatile Middle East.

The Turks are fiercely opposed to the U.S. plans, seeing the Kurdish fighters as terrorists. And when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visits the White House on Tuesday, the most he and President Donald Trump may be able to do is agree to disagree, and move on.

The Turks see this as a crisis in the relationship, said Jonathan Schanzer at the Washington-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

Read more:

Kurdish-led forces in Syria plan to advance on Daesh capital

Turkey threatens more strikes on U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria, Iraq

The challenge is hardly new. Long before Trump took office, U.S. presidents have grappled with the fragility of partnering with Turkeys government and the Kurds to carry out a Middle East agenda.

Past administrations have sought a delicate balance. Too exuberant in its support for the Kurds, and the U.S. risks pushing ally Turkey toward U.S. geopolitical rivals such as Russia or emboldening the Kurds to try to create an independent state  a scenario that would destabilize multiple countries in the region. Too little co-operation with the Kurds risks squandering a battlefield ally with proven effectiveness against extremist threats and which has staunchly supported Washington.

Trump has made his priorities clear.

His administration is arming Syrian Kurdish fighters as part of an effort to recapture the Syrian city of Raqqa, Daeshs self-declared capital. Coupled with the U.S.-backed fight in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Raqqa is seen as a key step toward liberating the remaining territory the militants hold.

Turkey has been pressuring the U.S. to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesnt want them spearheading the Raqqa effort. Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish group, known as the YPG, a terrorist group because of its ties to the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party inside Turkey. The United States, the European Union and Turkey all agree the PKK is a terrorist organization.

The Turks fear any weapons the U.S. provides the Syrian Kurds could well end up with their ethnic brethren in Turkey, whove fought violently as part of a separatist insurgency for more than three decades. As a nod to Turkeys concerns, the Pentagon has promised tight monitoring of all weapons and greater intelligence sharing to help the Turks better watch over their frontiers. Kurds are an ethnic group predominantly concentrated along the borders of four countries  Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

But a face-to-face confrontation on the matter between Trump and Erdogan seems inevitable.

Erdogan and other top Turkish officials have pressed for the U.S. to reverse its strategy, however low the prospects of Trump changing his mind. As a result, experts see Erdogan using the meeting to confront Trump on a host of other Turkish grievances. Those include extraditing the Pennsylvania-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blames for fomenting a failed coup last summer, and dropping U.S. charges against Reza Zarrab, a Turkish businessman accused of money-laundering and violating U.S. sanctions in Iran.

I see this trip as a new milestone in Turkey-U.S. relations, Erdogan said, as he prepared to fly to Washington.

The U.S., too, has a wish list for Turkey. Washington is concerned by rising anti-Americanism in Turkey that Erdogans government has tolerated since the July coup attempt. The U.S. also has pressed unsuccessfully for the release of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor, and other detained U.S. citizens.

Trump also has much at stake. His willingness to partner with authoritarian rulers and overlook their shortcomings on democracy and human rights have alarmed U.S. lawmakers of both parties. Trumps premise has been that he is focusing on deal-making. That puts added pressure on him to get results.

Trump has gone out of his way to foster a good relationship with Erdogan. After a national referendum last month that strengthened Erdogans presidential powers, European leaders and rights advocates criticized Turkey for moving closer toward autocratic rule. Trump congratulated Erdogan.

Now, the American leader may try to cash in.

Trump has prioritized protecting U.S. national security interests over lecturing allies on democratic values or human rights, said James Phillips, a senior research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Heritage Foundation. I dont think the president will lose any sleep if he is criticized for meeting with President Erdogan, as long as it pays dividends for advancing his foreign policy agenda.

But Erdogan may not be amenable to accepting the U.S. military support for the Kurds in a quid pro quo. Last month, the Turkish military bombed Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, in one case with American forces only about six miles (10 kilometres) away. His government has insisted it may attack Syrian Kurdish fighters again. The U.S., whose forces are sometimes embedded with the Kurds, has much to fear.

Barack Aydin of the Washington-based Kurdish Policy Research Center, said the key ought to be a broader peace process between Erdogans government and Kurdish opponents in Turkey, which would eliminate these problems.

That would be a very good start, Aydin said.

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MONTREALThe families who sheltered U.S. fugitive Edward Snowden in Hong Kong need to be brought to Canada immediately while the country processes their asylum claims, their lawyers said Monday.

Hong Kong-based attorney Robert Tibbo said Canada needs to take this exceptional step and allow the seven people to enter the country after the Hong Kong government rejected their asylum applications last Friday.

The seven people  four adults and their three children  allegedly helped hide Snowden when the fugitive was in the region in 2013 after he leaked documents revealing extensive U.S. government surveillance.

They were put in contact with Snowden because they share Tibbo as a lawyer.

Read more:

Trumps firing of FBI boss Comey is alarming, Snowden says

Families who sheltered Edward Snowden in Hong Kong seek refuge in Canada

Russia extends residence permit for Edward Snowden

Speaking from Hong Kong through a video conference, surrounded by the seven refugee applicants, Tibbo told reporters they have two weeks to appeal the decision or risk deportation to their countries of origin, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, where they fear for their safety.

A non-profit group is attempting to raise the estimated $15,000 to cover the appeals.

There is little chance their appeals will be successful, however, Tibbo said.

The solution is Canada, he said, adding the country is one of a handful of jurisdictions that permit a review of refugee applications from people who havent been screened by the United Nations.

Tibbo said the Hong Kong government doesnt allow the UN to screen refugee applicants into the country.

Michael Simkin, part of the families legal team, said in Montreal his clients file could be handled within days in Canada if the government wanted to.

More importantly, if they were willing they could bring the families to Canada as an exceptional measure while their claims are processed, he said. It has been done before and can be done again.

The families lawyers say the Hong Kong government rejected their applications because it believes the Philippines and Sri Lanka are able to protect them.

One of the refugee applicants, Ajith, said he is convinced he will be killed if he returns to Sri Lanka.

Tibbo said he has no regrets about his decision to introduce the families to Snowden.

They made fully informed decisions but at the same time I feel a moral responsibility, he said. With Mr. Snowden moving on from Hong Kong it is my view my clients shouldnt be left behind.

All four adults told reporters via video conference that they had no regrets sheltering Snowden.

Snowden remains in exile in Russia. He has been charged with espionage in the United States and could face up to 30 years in prison.

Correction  May 17, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Hong Kong-based attorney Robert Tibbo asked for donations to help cover the $15,000 cost to file appeals.

With files from The Associated Press

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PARISOn his first full day in office, French President Emmanuel Macron moved quickly Monday on fronts both foreign and domestic, naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister before flying off to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Appointing Philippe to the top job in his government ticked several boxes for 39-year-old Macron, Frances youngest president, who took power on Sunday.

Philippes age reinforced the generational shift in Frances corridors of power and the image of youthful vigour that Macron is cultivating. Philippe is also relatively unknown to voters, fulfilling Macrons campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces.

Philippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers. Hes also a member of the mainstream-right party Les Republicains that was badly battered by Macrons victory in the presidential campaign.

As such, Philippe could possibly attract other Republicains to Macrons cause, as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass his promised economic reforms.

Macron and Merkel pledged Monday to work closely together to draw up a road map of reforms for the European Union, saying that theyre both prepared even to implement treaty changes if needed.

We each represent the interests of our own countries, but the interests of Germany are naturally closely tied to the interests of France, Merkel said.

She added that she hoped for a new dynamism in German-French relations, saying that Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that.

Both leaders suggested they were prepared to change European treaties if needed, but Merkel stressed that such measures were not immediately on the table.

First we need to work on what we want to change, and then if it turns out it needs a treaty change, then were prepared to do that.

The visit to Berlin continued a tradition of French presidents making their first foreign trip to Germany.

A large group of onlookers, some carrying European flags, stood outside the chancellery as Macron arrived.

Germany and France have traditionally been the motor of European integration, but the relationship has become increasingly lopsided over recent years as France struggled economically.

Germany is looking to Macron to revitalize France as an economic power and political heavyweight in the EU, which is facing complex divorce proceedings with its current No. 2 economy, Britain.

When Britain leaves the bloc in 2019, France will be the EUs only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

As a candidate, Macron called for a new Franco-German deal that would involve much more structured co-operation on investment, on European border security, and on defence.

Macron is the conservative Merkels fourth French president in nearly 12 years as chancellor. She built a solid relationship with Macrons predecessor, Socialist Francois Hollande, despite their political differences  notably with their joint effort to secure an accord to calm the fighting in eastern Ukraine in tense talks in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015.

Germany is keen to continue the Franco-German diplomatic drive to keep a lid on the situation in Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists are battling the government.

Merkel has praised Macrons embrace of European unity but has offered few concrete details about the way forward for German-French relations.

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NEW YORKA fraternity pledge who was ordered to guzzle alcohol during a hazing ritual and twice fell down a flight of stairs before his death was treated like roadkill, his father said Monday, days after criminal charges were filed against 18 of his Penn State fraternity brothers.

Jim Piazza, the father of 19-year-old engineering student Timothy Piazza, said the Beta Theta Pi fraternity members were to blame for his sons February death.

They planned this night out, Piazza said. They had all the intent to feed these young men lethal doses of alcohol  to bring them to alcohol poisoning levels. This was premeditated. They killed our son.

Read more:18 fraternity members charged in Penn State students death

The family of the college sophomore from Lebanon, New Jersey, told The Associated Press its considering a lawsuit but is focused now on the criminal case against his fraternity brothers, eight of whom face the most serious charge of aggravated assault, a felony that carries a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

Timothy Piazza consumed what prosecutors said was a life-threatening amount of alcohol during a hazing ritual on Feb. 2 in State College, Pennsylvania, and he died two days later.

Piazzas parents said they would likely attend the court proceedings. A preliminary hearing that had been scheduled for this week has been pushed back to June.

Piazzas mother, Evelyn Piazza, said her grief has worsened the more shes learned about what happened to him.

My mind used to go to dark places before. Now Im imagining more horrors so its really hard to fall asleep, she said.

Jim Piazza said the fraternity brothers tortured their son.

They held him captive and tortured him. They treated him like roadkill, he said. Knowing that your son suffered the way he did over such a long period of time and died a very slow and very painful death, frankly, its haunting.

A grand jury report said security camera footage captured events inside the house that night, including pledges being ordered to guzzle alcohol after the ceremony. Piazza appeared to become inebriated and fell face-first down a flight of basement steps.

Fraternity brothers made half-hearted and even counterproductive efforts to help him, and when one member strongly advocated for summoning help he was shoved into a wall and told to leave, the report said.

Piazza apparently fell down the steps again early the next morning but was not discovered until about 10 a.m. Someone called 911 some 40 minutes later. Piazza later died as a result of severe head injuries.

The Piazzas said no one representing the university or the fraternity attended their sons wake or funeral services.

Penn State said the administrator assigned to student funeral services had a personal emergency but notified the Piazza family he wouldnt be there. It said it deeply regretted no one was sent in the administrators place.

Jim Piazza also noted none of the students involved has been expelled.

Penn State said disciplinary proceedings have started. It said it placed a graduation hold on an unspecified number of students named in the May 5 grand jury report.

The Piazzas said they hope to push Penn State and universities across the nation to adopt changes and improve enforcement of existing policies to prevent deaths. They suggested a ban on alcohol at fraternity events and a strict ban on hazing.

This cant happen to anyone else, Jim Pizza said. Tim Piazza is our son, but he represents so much more than that now. He represents everybodys son and daughter that is thinking about going to college, thinking about participating in Greek life.

Neither parent would say whether the fraternity members involved should have to serve jail time.

Thats for a jury to decide, Jim Piazza said.

He added, What is a life worth? Our son lost the rest of his life. He lost the ability to graduate, to get married, to have kids, to be his brothers best man.

Evelyn Piazza said: He gets to sit in a mausoleum. Everybody else gets to continue living their lives. The world goes on for everybody else.

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MANILA, PHILIPPINESPhilippine lawmakers on Monday killed an impeachment complaint accusing President Rodrigo Duterte of crimes against humanity for the thousands of people who have died in his anti-drug crackdown.

The Justice Committee of the House of Representatives, which is dominated by Duterte allies, declared during the first hearing on the matter that while the complaint was sufficient in form, there was insufficient substance to proceed.

The decision to stop the impeachment complaint, which also accused Duterte of murder, corruption and unexplained wealth, was expected. But the presidents critics hope the procedure could bolster a lawsuit against him before the International Criminal Court for alleged extrajudicial killings by showing that domestic efforts to stop Duterte have failed.

Read more:

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The dismissal of the complaint, filed in March, bars any new impeachment case against Duterte until next March.

Since taking office in June, Dutertes war on drugs has killed 7,000-9,000 suspected drug dealers and addicts, according to human rights groups. The government refutes that, releasing data on May 2 showing nearly 4,600 people have been killed in police anti-drug operations and homicides found to be drug-related.

During Mondays hearing, Rep. Rodolfo Farinas, the majority floor leader, questioned Rep. Gary Alejano on whether he had personal knowledge of allegations he made in his complaint, including the more than 8,000 people killed in the anti-drug war and the billions of pesos supposedly in Dutertes bank accounts.

Alejano said he had no personal knowledge as a witness, but that he had personal knowledge as a complainant based on official records, affidavits of witnesses and Dutertes public pronouncements. His appeals to be allowed to explain were rejected.

Opposition Rep. Edcel Lagman urged the committee to allow Alejano to be heard, saying to determine substance, there only needs to be a recital of facts on offences charged and determination that they are under the committees jurisdiction.

While it is true that an impeachment proceeding is a political exercise, it is not a partisan enterprise, Lagman said.

After an executive session, several lawmakers pointed to Alejanos lack of personal knowledge about the alleged crimes, calling his allegations hearsay. Forty-two of 49 committee members then voted to declare the complaint sufficient in form but insufficient in substance.

A frustrated Alejano told reporters that hell discuss with his colleagues from the Magdalo party whether they should file their own complaint before the ICC.

He said it was clear that the procedure was railroaded and that the House is not independent.

Now that they have killed the impeachment, which is the only way for the people to hold the president accountable, where will we exact justice from him, he is immune to suits, Alejano said.

Presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella said that Alejanos complaint was from rehashed, trumped-up charges aimed at undermining the duly constituted government.

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MC wins 3 wards in Rukum, NC claims victory in 1 so far

Ruling CPN Maoist Centre wins three wards of Rukum district while Nepali Congress has won one ward so far after counting of different local levels begins in Rukum.
WASHINGTONThe Trump administration accused the Syrian government Monday of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital. It also stepped up criticism of Iran and Russia for supporting the Syrian government.

The allegation came as U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing options in Syria, where the U.S. attacked a government airbase last month in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians.

But Trump hasnt outlined a larger strategy for ending the Arab countrys civil war or ushering Syrian President Bashar Assad out of power. These questions were sure to arise in his meeting at the White House with the United Arab Emirates crown prince Monday, a day before Turkeys president arrives.

Read more:

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The State Department said it believed that about 50 detainees a day are being hanged at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes north of Damascus. Many of the bodies, it said, are then burned in the crematorium.

We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place, said Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, in accusing the Syrian government of sinking to a new level of depravity.

The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not definitely prove the building is a crematorium, but they show construction consistent with such use.

In presenting the photographs, Jones called on Russia and Iran to press Assads government to establish a credible ceasefire with Syrian rebel groups and begin negotiations on a political settlement.

We are appalled by the atrocities that have been carried out by the Syrian regime and these atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran, Jones said.

State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had been firm and clear in a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last week that Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad.

A main point of that meeting was telling Russia to use its power to rein in the regime, she said. Simply put, the killing, the devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria.

The war has killed as many as 400,000 people since 2011. It has contributed to Europes worst refugee crisis since World War II and enabled the Islamic State group to emerge as a global terrorism threat.

Trump travels to the Middle East later this week on his first official foreign trip.

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NATO is scrambling to tailor its upcoming meeting to avoid taxing U.S. President Donald Trumps notoriously short attention span. The alliance is telling heads of state to limit talks to two to four minutes at a time during the discussion, several sources inside NATO and former senior U.S. officials said. And the alliance scrapped plans to publish the traditional full post-meeting statement meant to crystallize NATOs latest strategic stance.

On May 25, NATO will host the heads of state of all 28 member countries in what will be Trumps first face-to-face summit with an alliance he has bashed repeatedly. NATO traditionally organizes a meeting within the first few months of a new U.S. presidents term, but Trump has the alliance more on edge than any previous newcomer, forcing organizers to look for ways to make the staid affair more engaging.

Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald Trump

Its kind of ridiculous how they are preparing to deal with Trump, said one source briefed extensively on the meetings preparations. Its like theyre preparing deal with a child  someone with a short attention span and mood who has no knowledge of NATO, no interest in in-depth policy issues, nothing, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Theyre freaking out.

Still, despite these changes, experts are wary of how Trump will react to NATO meetings and their long-winded, diplomatic back-and-forth among dozens of heads of state, which can quickly balloon into hours of meandering discussions. One former senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described these meetings as important but painfully dull.

Rank-and-file diplomats always try to push for shorter, more efficient meetings at NATO. Its not so unusual that they strain to try to keep it interesting and short and not dragged down into details, said Jim Townsend, who served as the Pentagons top NATO envoy until January. But what is unusual is the president.

Even a brief NATO summit is way too stiff, too formal, and too policy heavy for Trump. Trump is not going to like that, said Jorge Benitez, a NATO expert with Washington-based think tank the Atlantic Council.

Another change: NATO traditionally publishes a formal readout, known as a declaration, after each major meeting or summit. While theyre often lathered in diplomatic drivel, declarations signal new strategies and key policy shifts that come out of closed-door meetings, giving direction to allies and the NATO bureaucracy  and showcasing alliance unity toward rivals like Russia, a former senior NATO official said.

This year, NATO has scrapped plans to publish a full formal meeting declaration. One NATO official said thats simply because its not a full summit, like past major NATO gatherings in Warsaw in 2016 or Wales in 2014. Its not necessary to have another full declaration as its not a full summit, the official said. This meeting is just much more focused.

But behind closed doors, other officials are giving a different reason. NATO isnt publishing a full declaration because theyre worried Trump wont like it, another source said.

Experts say a declaration could be invaluable to European allies still struggling to get a read on Trumps stance on Europe. Four months into office, Trump hasnt clarified U.S. policy toward Europe  he cheered Brexit and endorsed anti-Europe candidate Marine Le Pen in the recent French elections  let alone toward NATO.

Trump rattled NATO allies during the campaign by slamming the alliance as obsolete and openly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since he became president, top administration officials including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Vice-President Mike Pence travelled to Brussels to soothe Europeans nerves and reiterate customary U.S. commitments to the 68-year old alliance. Meanwhile, Trump declared in April during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg the alliance is no longer obsolete.

But the presidents erratic policy shifts and surprise Twitter storms on other international issues have NATO jittery, a former senior NATO official said. (Trump offered a taste of this during his awkward meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in March, where he refused to shake her hand; German officials also said he handed her a fake bill for overdue NATO payments  though the White House swiftly denied those claims.)

People are scared of his unpredictability, intimidated by how he might react knowing the president might speak his mind  or tweet his mind, the former official said.

Or, as another current senior NATO official put it ahead of the meeting: Were bracing for impact.

Beyond nerves over Trump, the May 25 meeting is important in another way. It will be the first visit for newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron. And NATO leaders will use the meeting to unveil their new headquarters building  a sleek, modern edifice meant to symbolize a new and modern alliance. But it also embodies the alliances shortfalls. The building is way behind schedule and over budget.

The senior NATO official who spoke on condition of anonymity expressed concern this could be a sore spot with Trump as he pushes European countries to spend more on defence. And while Trump may know little about the military alliance, he does profess to know something about getting buildings done on time and budget.

If they can keep Trumps attention, NATO heads of state are expected to discuss two main issues at the May 25 meeting, both catering to the presidents priorities: Counterterrorism and burden sharing.

On the counterterrorism front, the United States is pushing NATO to formally join the coalition against Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, at the May 25 meeting, but Germany is pushing back against the idea, multiple sources said. All NATO members are involved at a national level, and while the alliance supports the mission, its not yet a formal member of the coalition.

Some members say its not necessarily the right format, a NATO official said. Since all NATO allies are already members ... the question is what could we do as an alliance we are not already doing.

But beyond that, and potentially sending more troops to Afghanistan, where it has been fighting the Taliban and other terrorists for about fifteen years, officials concede NATO hasnt thought up much more to do.

Part of the issue is staffing: After months of Trump threatening a radically new approach to global alliances the United States helped create, theres nobody even charting a new course. Trump hasnt appointed any key high-level posts for Europe, including key Pentagon postings, undersecretaries of state, an assistant secretary of state for Europe, or a new ambassador to NATO. With no middle-management to give direction on a day-to-day basis, Europeans are struggling to decipher exactly what the new administration wants from them.

Thats where theres a ton of panic in NATO, a source said. The United States put that issue forward, but it has nobody on tap whos doing any sort of fresh thinking on that front.

Trump is also expected to push his Canadian and European allies to pony up more for defense. Burden sharing has always been a sore spot in U.S.-NATO relations. The United States is by far the largest defence spender in the alliance  its share of NATO spending has skyrocketed in recent decades  and its long warned other allies to bulk up their military budgets, to little avail in the past.

His views of burden sharing seem to be more ambitious than past presidents, and that could become a source of tension at the big NATO confab, said Alexander Vershbow, former deputy secretary general of NATO. The burden sharing conversation may not go entirely smoothly, he said.

Only five of the 28 members  the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Estonia, and Greece  met the NATO guidelines of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence, despite a more aggressive Russia and an unravelling security situation in the Middle East.

Ultimately, to keep Trump on board, NATO will probably set out to sell those recent changes as a concession to Washington, even though ninety-eight per cent of the changes NATO undertook are because of Russia, not because of Trump, said Benitez.

That might secure Trump a happy ending to this first meeting, but could spell more trouble down the road.

They may give Trump credit, but privately many allies feel theyre being bullied into it, Benitez said. Trumps approach to NATO is poisoning the relationship, he said.

One former NATO official said the agenda meant to mollify Trump appeared to amount to repackaging what NATO was already doing  increasing its defence spending and continuing to support U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and the counter-Daesh campaign  in a new wrapper for the president. They think theyre fine because theyre going to put old wine in new bottles, one former senior U.S. official said. Whether Trump buys it remains to be seen.

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WASHINGTONU.S. President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trumps disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on Daesh.

The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald Trump

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trumps decision to do so risks co-operation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL. After Trumps meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.

This is code-word information, said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.

The revelation comes as Trump faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI director James Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trumps subsequent admission that his decision was driven by this Russia thing was seen by critics as attempted obstruction of justice.

Read more:

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Trump, GOP control FBI chief pick despite Democrats partisan uproar over Comeys firing

U.S. democracy under assault from Trump and Russia, former intelligence director says

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a key figure in earlier Russia controversies, into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details about a Daesh terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

For almost anyone in government discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.

White House officials involved in the meeting said Trump discussed only shared concerns about terrorism.

The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation, said H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, who participated in the meeting. At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.

McMaster reiterated his statement in a subsequent appearance at the White House on Monday and described the Washington Post story as false, but did not take any questions.

In their statements, White House officials emphasized that Trump had not discussed specific intelligence sources and methods, rather than addressing whether he had disclosed information drawn from sensitive sources.

The CIA declined to comment and the National Security Agency did not respond to requests for comment.

But officials expressed concern with Trumps handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into Daesh, they said, could hinder the United States and its allies ability to detect future threats.

It is all kind of shocking, said a former senior U.S. official close to current administration officials. Trump seems to be very reckless, and doesnt grasp the gravity of the things hes dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And its all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day, Trump said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States only learned through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence gathering method, but described how Daesh was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in Daeshs territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling, said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said that the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russias presence in Syria. Moscow and would be keenly interested in identifying that source and possibly disrupting it.

Russia and the United States both regard Daesh as an enemy and share limited information about terrorist threats. But the two countries have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russia could identify our sources or techniques, the senior U.S. official said.

A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, I dont think that it would be that hard (for Russian spy services) to figure this out.

At a more fundamental level, the information wasnt the United States to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments  and even individual agencies  are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.

The officials declined to identify the ally, but said it is one that has previously voiced frustration with Washingtons inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.

If that partner learned wed given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first that is a blow to that relationship, the U.S. official said.

Trump also described measures that the United States has taken or is contemplating to counter the threat, including military operations in Iraq and Syria as well as other steps to tighten security, officials said.

The officials would not discuss details of those measures, but the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed that it is considering banning laptops and other large electronic devices from carry-on bags on flights between Europe and the United States. The United States and Britain imposed a similar ban in March affecting travellers passing through airports in 10 Muslim-majority countries.

Trump cast the countermeasures in wistful terms. Can you believe the world we live in today? he said, according to one official. Isnt it crazy.

Lavrov and Kislyak were also accompanied by aides.

A Russian photographer took photos of part of the session that were released by the Russian state-owned Tass news agency. No U.S. news organization was allowed to attend any part of the meeting.

Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout.

Thomas Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.

One of Bosserts subordinates also called for the problematic portion of Trumps discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients, efforts to prevent sensitive details from being disseminated further or leaked.

Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian prime minister this year. He has also faced criticism for lax attention to security at his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points, and often ignores those.

He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it  and that has big downsides, the second former official said. Does he understand whats classified and whats not? Thats what worries me.

Lavrovs reaction to the Trump disclosures was muted, officials said, calling for the United States to work more closely with Moscow on fighting terrorism.

Kislyak has figured prominently in damaging stories about the Trump administrations ties to Russia. Trumps initial national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign just 24 days into the job over his contacts with Kislyak and misleading statements about them. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from matters related to the FBIs Russia investigation after it was revealed that he had met and spoke with Kislyak despite denying any contact with Russian officials during his confirmation hearing.

Im sure Kislyak was able to fire off a good cable back to the Kremlin with all the details he gleaned from Trump, said the former U.S. official who handled intelligence on Russia.

The White House readout of the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak made no mention of the discussion of a terrorist threat.

Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria, the summary said. Trump also raised Ukraine and emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.

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WASHINGTONFirst lady Melania Trump announced Monday that her son, Barron, will attend a private Episcopal school in Maryland, beginning this fall.

The announcement answered one of the lingering questions surrounding the first familys unusual living arrangement. Mrs. Trump and 11-year-old Barron have been living at Trump Tower in New York since Donald Trump took office in January, while the president has lived at the White House.

Trump has said his wife and youngest child will relocate to the White House after the current school year ends, which meant finding a local school for Barron.

Mrs. Trump said Monday that they have chosen St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, for their son.

It is known for its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence, she said in a statement. The mission of St. Andrews is to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning and service, all of which appealed to our family.

Annual tuition ranges from more than $23,000 for pre-K to more than $40,000 for students in grades 9-12.

We look forward to the coming school years at St. Andrews, Mrs. Trump said.

Founded in 1978, St. Andrews, a day school, has a total enrolment of 580 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade, according to its website. Class sizes are small, with anywhere from 11 to 13 students, and all of its graduates go on to college, the school said.

Barron currently attends Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The Trumps decision to send Barron to St. Andrews marks the first time in decades that the school-aged child of a president will attend a school other than at Sidwell Friends, an elite Quaker school with campuses in Washington and Bethesda, Maryland.

President Bill Clintons daughter, Chelsea, attended Sidwell. So did President Barack Obamas daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Malia Obama, 18, graduated from Sidwell in June 2016. She is taking the year off, what is known as a gap year, before her expected enrolment at Harvard this fall. Sasha Obama, 15, is a sophomore at Sidwell Friends. Her parents decided to live in Washington after leaving the White House so she can finish her studies there.

President George W. Bushs daughters had graduated high school and were headed to college when he was elected.

President Jimmy Carter is the only recent president to send his child, daughter Amy, to a District of Columbia public school.

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SEATTLEFederal judges on Monday peppered a lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump with questions about whether the administrations travel ban discriminates against Muslims and zeroed in on the presidents campaign statements, the second time in a week the rhetoric has faced judicial scrutiny.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, defending the travel ban, told the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the executive order should be reinstated because it falls well within the presidents authority.

No one has ever attempted to set aside a law that is neutral on its face and neutral in its operation on the basis of largely campaign trail comments made by a private citizen running for office, he said.

Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald Trump

Further, Wall said the president had backed off the comments he made during the campaign, clarifying that what he was talking about was Islamic terrorist groups and the countries that sponsor or shelter them.

Neal Katyal, who represented Hawaii, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, expressed disbelief at that argument and said Trump had repeatedly spoken of a Muslim ban during the presidential campaign and after.

This is a repeated pattern of the president, Katyal said.

Read more:

Trumps travel ban heads to federal appeals court

New Trump travel ban removes Iraq from list, officials say

Why does Trump keep running into legal trouble with his travel ban?

The 9th Circuit panel was hearing arguments over Hawaiis lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nations refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The judges will decide whether to uphold a Hawaii judges decision in March that blocked the ban.

Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judges decision putting the ban on ice. They also questioned whether they could consider Trumps campaign statements, with one judge asking if there was anything other than wilful blindness that would prevent them from doing so.

Dozens of advocates for refugees and immigrants rallied outside the federal courthouse in Seattle, some carrying No Ban, No Wall signs.

Walls insistence that the travel ban should be upheld because it is neutral, without reference to Islam, drew pointed questions from Judge Richard Paez. An executive order issued by President Franklin Roosevelt that led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II similarly was couched as a necessity for national security and made no reference to residents of Japanese heritage, Paez noted.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that executive order in a challenge brought by California resident Fred Korematsu. The ruling is now widely considered regrettable.

Would the Korematsu executive order pass muster under your test today? Paez grilled Wall.

No, Judge Paez, he answered

Why not? Facially legitimate  thats all you say! Paez said. You emphasize facially legitimate.

I want to be very clear about this, Wall said solemnly. This case is not Korematsu, and if it were I wouldnt be standing here and the United States would not be defending it.

There were chants of 'no ban' outside a federal court in Seattle Monday, as a three-judge panel heard arguments on the Trump administration's revised travel ban, as the president seeks to block a lower court ruling that put it on hold.

Wall went on to argue that unlike the Korematsu case, Trumps executive order probably wouldnt be questioned but for the statements he made as a candidate.

Paez also questioned Katyal about Trumps statements, calling them profound. But the judge wondered whether Trump is forever forbidden from adopting an executive order along the lines of his travel ban.

Katyal said no, and suggested the president could begin by repudiating his earlier statements or by working with Congress.

If you rule for him, you defer to the president in a way that history teaches us is very dangerous, Katyal said.

Mondays arguments marked the second time Trumps efforts to restrict immigration from certain Muslim-majority nations have reached the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.

After Trump issued his initial travel ban on a Friday in late January, bringing chaos and protests to airports around the country, a Seattle judge blocked its enforcement nationwide  a decision that was unanimously upheld by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel.

The president then rewrote his executive order, rather than appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in March, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu blocked the new version from taking effect, citing what he called significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus in Trumps campaign statements.

Again, in this court, the President claims a nearly limitless power to make immigration policy that is all but immune from judicial review, Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin wrote to the 9th Circuit. Again, he must be checked.

At his daily briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer expressed confidence that the executive order will be upheld by the appeals court.

The executive order is fully lawful and will be upheld. We fully believe that, Spicer said.

The travel ban cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court, but that would likely be cemented if the 4th and 9th Circuits reach differing conclusions about its legality. Because of how the courts chose to proceed, a full slate of 13 judges heard the 4th Circuit arguments last week, while just three, all appointees of President Bill Clinton, will consider the case in Seattle.

With the possibility for myriad concurring or dissenting opinions, it could take the 4th Circuit longer to rule, noted Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond law school in Virginia.

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There are more reasons than ever to understand how to protect your personal information.

Major website hackings seem ever more frequent. Investigators believe that a set of top-secret National Security Agency hacking tools were offered to online bidders last summer.

And many of those worried about expanded government surveillance by the N.S.A. and other agencies have taken steps to secure their communications.

In a post to the website Medium, Quincy Larson, the founder of Free Code Camp, an open-source community for learning to code, detailed the reasons it might be useful for people to make their personal data more difficult for attackers to obtain.

When I use the term attacker I mean anyone trying to access your data whom you havent given express permission to, he wrote, whether its a hacker, a corporation or even a government.

In an interview, Larson walked us through some of the basic steps he recommended. We added a few of our own, based on additional interviews.

Now, lets encrypt.

1. Download Signal, or Start Using WhatsApp to send text messages.

Encryption is a fancy computer-person word for scrambling your data so no one can understand what it says without a key. But encrypting is more complex than just switching a couple of letters around.

Larson said that by some estimates, with the default encryption scheme that Apple uses, youd have to have a supercomputer crunching day and night for years to be able to unlock a single computer.

He said the best way to destroy data was not to delete it, because it could potentially be resurrected from a hard drive, but to encode it in a secure form of cryptography.

Signal is one of the most popular apps for those who want to protect their text messages. It is free and extremely easy to use. And unlike Apples iMessage, which is also encrypted, the code it uses to operate is open source.

You can be sure by looking at the code that theyre not doing anything weird with your data, Larson said.

In general, the idea behind the app is to make privacy and communication as simple as possible, said Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Open Whisper Systems, the organization that developed Signal.

That means that the app allows you to use emojis, send pictures and enter group texts.

One bit of friction: You do have to persuade your friends to join the service, too, if you want to text them. The app makes that easy to do.

WhatsApp, the popular free chat tool, uses Signals software to encrypt its messaging. And in Facebook Messenger and Googles texting app Allo, you can turn on an option that encrypts your messages.

Marlinspike said the presidential election had spurred a lot of interest in Signal, leading to a substantial increase in users.

When asked, shortly after last Novembers presidential election, to speculate why that was, Marlinspike simply said, Donald Trump is about to be in control of the most powerful, invasive and least accountable surveillance apparatus in the world.

Signal is available for both Android and iOS.

2. Protect your computers hard drive with FileVault or BitLocker.

Your phone may be the device that lives in your pocket, but Larson described the computer as the real gold mine for personal information.

Even if your data were password protected, someone who gained access to your computer would have access to all your files if they were unencrypted.

Luckily, both Apple and Windows offer means of automatic encryption that simply need to be turned on.

3. The way you handle your passwords is probably wrong and bad.

You know this by now. Changing your passwords frequently is one of the simplest things you can do to protect yourself from digital invasion.

But making up new combinations all the time is irritating and inconvenient.

Larson recommends password managers, which help store many passwords, with one master password. He said he uses LastPass but knows plenty of people who use 1Password and KeePass, and he doesnt have a strong reason to recommend one over another.

Not every security expert trusts password managers. Some noted that LastPass itself was hacked in 2015.

So that means you may want to write them down in one secure location, perhaps a Post-it note at home. It seems more far-fetched that a hacker would bother to break into your home for a Post-it note than find a way into your computer.

If you take that route, we suggest setting a weekly or biweekly calendar reminder to change your passwords.

As far as making passwords up goes: Dont be precious about it. Use a random word (an object near you while you are hunched over your Post-it), scramble the letters and sprinkle in numbers and punctuation marks. If youre writing passwords down, you dont have to worry about making them memorable.

4. Protect your email and other accounts with two-factor authentication.

When you turn this step on, anyone trying to sign in to your email from new devices will have to go through a secondary layer of security: a code to enter the inbox that is sent to your phone via text message. (Though sadly, not through Signal.)

You can also set two-factor authentication for social media accounts and other sites. But email is the most important account, since many sites use email for password recovery, a fact that hackers have exploited. Once they have access to your email, they can get access to banking, social media, data backups and work accounts.

5. Use a browser plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere.

Marlinspike recommended this free plug-in, developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital security organization. It ensures that you are using the secure form of websites, meaning that your connection to the site will be encrypted and that you will be protected from various forms of surveillance and hacking.

And this is a good time to note that you should always find out whether the Wi-Fi network you are using is secure. Public networks  and even private networks without security keys  often are not.

6. Invest in a Virtual Private Network, or VPN.

The New York Times personal tech expert, Brian X. Chen, recommends using a VPN to shield browsing information and hide your location. He highlights three providers: Freedome by F-Secure, TunnelBear and a service called Private Internet Access, each offering options that cost in the range of $5 a month.

7. Remember that incognito mode isnt always private.

You may be in such a hurry to use this feature, available on Chrome, Safari and Firefox, among other browsers, that you do not heed its clear warning.

On Chrome, the second paragraph of the incognito home screen spells it out for you.

You arent invisible, it says. Going incognito doesnt hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider or the websites you visit.

Larson recommended Tor in his article, a browser that allows for private web activity. But were not going to recommend that here, mostly because Tor is relatively slow and clunky at the moment.

Ill be honest, I dont use it very often, Larson said.

He said he suspected that other browsers would start adding ways to browse more securely.

Apple is very security conscious, he said. I wouldnt be surprised if they started to incorporate Tor-like features into Safari.

8. Do sensitive searches in DuckDuckGo.

Larson said that if people were paranoid about Google, he would strongly encourage them to use DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine.

He said, however, that he was not paranoid.

Google is built on the hacker ethic, and they have put principle above profits in some aspects, he said.

But he also acknowledged that he meets people all the time who are extremely skeptical of any large software organization, and I think thats reasonable. There are trade-offs. Googles search results are more useful and accurate than competitors precisely because of the ways it collects and analyzes information about its customers searches.

A Bonus: Cover your webcam with tape.

That way, if someone has found a way to compromise your computer, they cannot spy on you through its camera.

And yes, this happens.

Happy encryption.

Editors note: This article was originally published by the New York Times on Nov. 16, 2016. It has been updated.

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Many Canadians had a good laugh over the recently released book The Wise Owls, written to explain the role of the Senate to young children. The majority of senators, who first learned of the book from the media, found it less funny.

At a time when they have been working hard to restore the image of this unpopular institution, they have been tripped up again. And, as is often the case, the injury was self-inflicted.

Im not kidding when I say working hard. If theres one thing that has astonished me since taking my seat in the Senate a little over a year ago, its the amount of work to be tackled.

Weve got nothing to complain about, mind you. It is a great privilege to be a senator. But it is far from the cushy job often described by the media and imagined by the public: the days are long and extremely full, and the weekends are consumed by work as well.

What do senators do, besides settle arguments among squirrels, beavers, foxes and other MPs?

Last week, for example, they passed Bill C-6, which repeals the changes to the Citizenship Act introduced by Stephen Harpers Conservatives. Before passing it, however, senators made an important amendment so people who are threatened with revocation of their citizenship can access an appeal process.

This amendment is the result of a tremendous effort by the bills sponsor, independent senator and immigration expert Ratna Omidvar.

The Senate also amended and passed Bill C-37, which will make it easier to open supervised drug consumption sites. The Senates main amendment will require staff at these sites to offer clients alternative pharmaceutical therapy before they inject the illegal (and often deadly) substance they brought with them.

This amendment was proposed by Conservative senator Vernon White, a former senior officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The amendment was supported by Liberal and independent senators, and is a fine example of the non-partisan work that the Senate can accomplish.

With the support of a number of Liberals and Conservatives, the independent senators are working on reforms to make the institution less partisan and more effective.

The initiative is still in its early stages and is meeting with definite resistance. It requires a careful hand. In the face of public disillusionment with the Senate, we need to act boldly and decisively, but we must not make changes without thinking them through.

The media are naturally more interested  and I, as a former journalist, certainly will not blame them  in the fate of Senator Don Meredith than in the daily workings of the upper house.

What will people remember from this whole issue  that a senator behaved disgracefully or that at least this time the Senate acted decisively?

Expelling a parliamentarian who has not been convicted of a crime is unprecedented in the Senates 150-year history. Yet that was precisely what senators were preparing to do when Meredith announced his resignation last week.

At a time when all of our institutions are facing criticism, Canadas Senate has a particularly tough hill to climb. Regardless of the impression left by the owl story, I can attest that the members of this house are doing everything they can to regain Canadians trust.

Andre Pratte an independent senator.

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There was good news and bad news this past week about Bombardier Inc., the troubled transportation company that has left Torontonians waiting endlessly for new streetcars.

The good news is that the Toronto region and the province are finally taking concrete steps to end our destructive dependence on a company that has failed spectacularly to live up to its promises.

That came on Friday when Metrolinx confirmed it has turned to the French company Alstom to build 61 light-rail vehicles for transit projects in the Toronto area. Its a deal worth $528 million.

This is a creative move that amounts to a completely justified vote of non-confidence in Bombardier.

Metrolinx and the province simply cant be certain that the company will deliver vehicles in time for the scheduled opening of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, given delays already plaguing the project. So the Alstom vehicles will be available to be deployed there if necessary, allowing the Eglinton line to open and potentially saving Metrolinx millions in penalties.

Bombardiers repeated failure to deliver the new Flexity streetcars to Toronto on time, chronicled in detail in a recent Star series, means no one should trust its promises in other areas. Metrolinx has done the right thing by effectively buying an insurance policy for Toronto transit users and starting to get out from under the dominance of Bombardier.

The bad news about the company came out of Montreal, where the family that controls Bombardier made some reluctant concessions under heavy pressure from investors.

Pierre Beaudoin, grandson of the man who founded Bombardier, stepped down as executive chairman to become simply chairman of the board.

In fact, he should have resigned completely given the shambles he has presided over in the past several years.

Aside from falling on its face in delivering streetcars to Toronto, Bombardier has stumbled badly in developing its C-series aircraft. It has asked for and received enormous subsidies from the Quebec and federal governments, adding to the billions of public money ($4.1 billion, according to one study) it has taken over the years.

To add insult to injury, Beaudoin proposed giving senior executives raises of 50 per cent while cutting rank-and-file staff. Finally, the Quebec government, major institutional investors and the public cried foul, forcing Bombardier to postpone the raises.

Those same investors, including the countrys biggest pension funds, refused to support Beaudoins selection as chairman last week. That was a clear message to him to step down and let an independent, non-family-member serve as chairman. Instead, he took a tiny step back.

Bombardier needs a thorough shake-up at the top, not reluctant half-measures. Taxpayers have propped it up for long enough, and they deserve better.

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A night of Netflix (NFLX) - Get Free Report and chill could become more expensive, if one is to read into what the digital video beast is doing in Australia.

Netflix has been quietly testing out users' reactions to higher subscription fees ahead of the introduction of a so-called "Netflix tax" in the country, which arrives on from July 1, according toBuzzfeed. The story says users laid eyes on a basic service increase of AUD $1 to AUD $9.99 a month, the standard service went up $2 to$13.99 a month and the premium service rose from $14.99 to $17.99.

Depending on the reactions, Netflix could very well do something like this in the U.S. The reason for doing so would be simple: it has to.

For one, Wall Street has valued Netflix as having a good deal of pricing power. The Street has seemingly forgotten the harsh reaction to Netflix raising prices back in 2011 and how the streaming giant had to backtrack. To keep Netflix shares hovering at insane levels, CEO Reed Hastings will have to push some form of serious price hikes through -- and not five years from now.

Secondarily, Netflix has to raise prices to support rising sums to develop content and lay the foundation for its streaming service across the world. Keep in mind Netflix continues to burn through an absurd amount of cash. At some point Wall Street will demand cash generation, consistent if possible.

Start saving those pennies, Netflix users.

This article originally appeared at 08:30 ET on Real Money, our premium site for active traders. Click here to get great columns like this from Jim Cramer and other writers even earlier in the trading day.

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Tesla gets whacked: With a stock that has surged 52% this year despite shaky corporate fundamentals, here come the intra-quarter downgrades and concerning notes on Tesla (TSLA) - Get Free Report from Wall Street analysts. Shares of the electric car maker fell 2.7% on Monday as a notable Tesla bull at Morgan Stanley slashed his rating and raised worries about Tesla's cash usage.

And hey, not for nothing; Elon Musk's last earnings call really stunk. One couldn't possibly have come away confident in the company from that call.

General Motors' Uber rival arrives in NYC: Ever so quietly, General Motors' (GM) - Get Free Report relatively new ride-sharing service Maven is expanding. On Monday, GM announced that Maven is live in New York City. About 80 cars will be parked in Manhattan for usage.

The Street just sat down with the head of Maven. Learn something by watching the video below.

About that Lamborghini: If you own a Lamborghini, please do send me in a picture and any fun stories you have. Two weeks ago, I got to have a Lambo for a few days to review and, well, how people reacted was quite interesting. It's almost as if folks forgot about moving traffic -- they wanted to take selfies with this $313,000 piece of fine Italian art.

Here is our full review, video below.

Damn right: The U.S. still boasts the most powerful military in the world, easily topping both Russia and China, according to military analytics website Global Firepower. The U.S. spends almost $600 billion a year on its defense budget and has an "available manpower" of 145,215,000.

Where you at, North Korea.

Sorry Apple, it will be tough to crack this market: Ahead of Apple (AAPL) - Get Free Report potentially launching an Amazon (AMZN) - Get Free Report Echo like speaker, some new data hint doing so may be a challenge. The Amazon Echo holds a dominant 70.6% market share of the voice-enabled speaker market, according to new data from eMarketer. Alphabet's (GOOGL) - Get Free Report Google Home clocks in with a solid 23.8% share of the market, while smaller players such as Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon, and Mattel (MAT) - Get Free Report hold down the remaining spots.

The Chinese embark on cruise vacations: The number of people taking a cruise in China has risen tenfold in five years, to about two million in 2016, Bloombergpoints out . The Chinese government expects 4.5 million passengers by the end of the decade.

While Royal Caribbean (RCL) - Get Free Report and Carnival Cruise Line (CCL) - Get Free Report have begun to cash in on China, it should be noted the Chinese have started to build their own cruise ships. A battle is brewing.

Apple and Alphabet are holdings in Jim Cramer'sAction Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer buys or sells AAPL or GOOGL? Learn more now.

Click here for the latest business headlines.

Read More Trending Articles:

Editor's Pick: Originally published May 15.
On Monday Wells Fargo (WFC) - Get Free Report was sued by the city of Philadelphia, which accused the banking giant of intentionally pushing minority borrowers into higher cost home loans than those being offered to white borrowers, Reuters reports.

The complaint was filed in Philadelphia federal court and alleges Wells Fargo's "long history" of "redlining" in the Pennsylvania city.

The lawsuit says Wells Fargo violated the federal Fair Housing Act and is seeking damages. The suit says Wells Fargo's alleged actions represent a "total breakdown of appropriate internal controls," Reuters noted.

Retail's downturn giving you the blues? Jim Cramer has a list of retailers that are currently oversold, giving investors a leg up one of the market's most volatile sectors.
More parties turning to social media to swing opinions

Social media, which has emerged as a powerful tool in recent days for reaching out to large audience, has made a major impact on the first round of local elections that took place after two decades.
Now more than ever, there is serious doubt that Sears Holdings Corp. (SHLD) will still be operating in 2018.

After Sears CEO Eddie Lampert went on yet another blog-post rant on Monday, this time aimed at one of the dying retailer's vendors, the company's shares plunged as much as 14%. And on Sunday, Morgan Stanley wrote casually about the possibility of a Sears bankruptcy in 2017.

"[Sears] one- and two-year credit default swaps imply the market is pricing a high profitability of default over the next 12 to 24 months," Morgan Stanley said in a note. "If Sears files for bankruptcy this year and subsequently liquidates, JCP could be a major beneficiary."

That's right, Morgan Stanley is already predicting who will come out the big winner from a likely Sears Chapter 11 filing and possible liquidation, and it's J.C. Penney (JCP) - Get Free Report . That surely comes as a slight relief to J.C. Penney, whose stock has also been declining after posting a disastrous first quarter. Last year, after a 33-year hiatus, J.C Penney started selling home appliances again, making its business prepared to benefit should Sears die.

READ MORE: J.C. Penney May Have No Other Choice but to Aggressively Close More than 300 Stores by 2020

"While JCP comps would likely be negatively impacted for one quarter in a liquidation scenario, they would then likely see four quarters of flat to [positive] low-single-digit comps which would lead to greater free cash flow and allow JCP to pay down more debt than anticipated," Morgan Stanley wrote.

On a company earnings call last week, J.C. Penney CEO Marvin Ellison touted appliances as one of the retailer's strongest-performing categories, delivering positive comparable store sales despite the retailer's overall same-store sales decline of 3.5% for the quarter.

"We remain very excited about appliances," Ellison said, noting that J.C. Penney is focused on becoming "a dominant home retailer."

Still, Morgan Stanley said in its note that J.C. Penney's problems are "unlikely to improve or go away," leading its analysts to predict further store closures beyond the 138 planned for this year. The firm also said it doubts that "EBITDA ever grows again," estimating that it will come in at $838 million for the full 2018 year, compared to its previous expectations for $938 million.

Meanwhile, Sears shares have been under attack ever since Lampert began his Trump-like rants against the media last week, showing only that the CEO of the Sears and Kmart stores could be coming unhinged as the retailer clearly struggles to stay afloat.

In a rare and borderline completely out-of-touch interview with the Chicago Tribune last Wednesday, Lampert blamed media reports for his inability to get the retailer out of its certain decline and suggested that Sears is "ahead" of rivals J.C. Penney , Macy's (M) - Get Free Report and Target (TGT) - Get Free Report . On Monday, he aimed his anger at One World Technologies, which he publicly berated for taking a "very aggressive step of filing a lawsuit against us as they seek to embarrass us in the media to force us to let them out of their contract."

Sears said recently that same-store sales since the start of the year plunged 11.9% between both its Sears and Kmart brands. Excluding one-time gains related to the sale of the Craftsman tool business and certain real estate, Sears lost between $190 million to $230 million, worse than a year ago when it lost $181 million.

The retailer, in announcing the recent departure of CFO Jason Hollar after only six months, also hinted that it will move to shutter more stores beyond the round of 150 closures it just completed.

To try and keep the lights on a little while longer, Sears has outlined more than $1 billion in cost savings this year through layoffs, store closures and other restructuring efforts.

More of TheStreet's top stories:
General Motors launched its car sharing service known as Maven on Monday in New York. The new service allows members to rent several different GM vehicles for any reason they need from an errand of 30 minutes to a road trip of multiple days.

Maven will have 80 vehicles parked in Manhattan. Membership is free and members can choose SUVs such as the Chevrolet Equinox or Cadillac Escalade or smaller vehicles such as the Chevrolet Cruze.

Get

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alerts:

Using the smartphone Maven app, members are able to see locations of the vehicles, reserve a pickup time and unlock then start the vehicle upon arrival.

Prices will vary according to the vehicle chosen but will cost approximately $100 for a Chevy Cruz for a full day. Maven will take care of insurance and leaves a card for gas inside the vehicle.

For now, members of Maven in New York cannot use the vehicles for side gigs like with Uber or Grubhub deliveries of food, since that needs a different type of insurance, said a GM representative.

However, that capability is likely to be available down the road. Maven launched a new and separate service recently known as Maven Gig. Located in San Diego, it allows drivers to rent vehicles to use for side jobs.

It also uses rental agreements in a number of cities for Uber and Lyft drivers.

GM is not alone in experimenting with these types of services. Daimler AG, the Mercedes Benz parent company, in 2008 founded car2go. It is currently operating in 27 cities across China, Europe and North America.

BMW has ReachNow a service of car-sharing that operates in New York, Seattle and Portland, Oregon. DriveNow, its larger service, is in Europe.

Toyota Motor announced a new partnership with Getaround based in San Francisco for car-sharing late in 2016.

Automakers must keep up with the changing needs and desires of consumer especially when it comes to mobility. It has been estimated that one of ten new vehicles sold by 2030 will likely be a sharing vehicle, which could lower sales of vehicles for private use.

By 2050, it is expected that one of three new vehicles would be for shared vehicles use.

For now, carmakers have said that car-sharing services continue to help them learn how and for what cars are being used.

For example, Maven was surprised that people rented the Chevrolet Bolt, an electric car, and drove it to Los Angeles from San Francisco, since it assumed electric vehicles would be used only for trips that were short because of charging concerns.
PM holds talks with RJP Nepal leaders

A discussion has been held between Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Rastriya Janata Party Nepal leaders at former's official residence at Baluwatar on Monday.
First Bahrain Real Estate Development has posted a net profit of $2.7 million during 2016, representing annual growth of 148 per cent over the $1.1 million reported in the year prior, the company said at its Annual General Meeting (AGM).



On the strength of this performance, I am pleased to confirm that the board is recommending a dividend of 5 fils per share this year, said Waleed Alkhaja, chairman of First Bahrain.



First Bahrain is building momentum as it implements its plans, activating dormant land holdings and diversifying its sectoral holdings. The commercial success of the El Mercado Janabiya retail centre, completed and fully leased during the year, led directly to a growth in total income of 60 per cent. Construction has also begun on El Mercado Village, our first residential development, a complementary project of villas for sale on land adjacent to the mall, Alkhaja explained.



On assuming our duties in 2014, First Bahrain had operating income from just 28 per cent of its holdings, being the Majaal industrial facilities. Under our mandate and approval, we grew and diversified our revenue such that 49 per cent of the investment property is now generating rental income and a further nine per cent is under construction .Across the whole of our term, rental income has grown a combined total of 353 per cent from KD279,851 to KD1.26 million, while the value of the assets has grown a combined total of 22 per cent from KD29.35 million to KD35.93 million.



Alkhaja advised that First Bahrain had successfully managed its banking relationships to fund the construction of new projects and the creation of new streams of revenue with the debt to equity ratio increasing in measured fashion from 12 per cent in2013 to 20 per cent in 2016, leaving, as he stated, ample room for further increases in leverage. He also affirmed that First Bahrain had sufficient liquidity to meet all expected obligations.



Alkhaja stated that First Bahrain will look to extend its success in the retail sector to a new development in Seef, commencing the first phase of a mixed-use project which will realise the founding vision of the company. He added that First Bahrain would continue to explore ways to realise cash exits from existing income generating properties to create liquidity for further expansion and dividends.



Noting that the first successful listing of a Real Estate Industrial Trust (REIT) on the Bahrain Bourse occurred at the end of the year, he suggested that this structure could offer a means of generating exits while maintaining a stake in its existing brands.



During the meeting, the shareholders held elections, selecting new directors to join the board for the coming three-year term.



Operating out of Bahrain and Kuwait, First Bahrain is strategically positioned to execute projects across the GCC, in accordance with the principles of Sharia.  TradeArabia News Service
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- Mexico has denied selling maize to the Kenyan government amidst claims that there is a scandal behind the importation

- Kenyans were reading foul play in the process after the maize arrived in just three days

- It was understood that the government had imported maize from Mexico to help ease the high cost of basic comodities

- The Kenyan embassy has now revealed the importation took place between private businessmen and not the government

Mexico has denied selling maize to the Kenyan government saying it has been selling high quality non GMO white maize to private businessmen.

READ ALSO: Blow to Muthama as Jubilee hands his WIFE nomination certficate for Machakos race

READ ALSO: Kenyans suspect foul play after maize arrived from Mexico within THREE DAYS

The Kenyan embassy indicated that the process was not a government to a government deal but was instead initiated by private businessmen.

On Monday, May 15, Transport Principal Secretary Paul Mwangi clarified on the importation saying the maize had been imported to South Africa in 2106 from Mexico making it possible for it to be delivered within 5 days.

"This is to dissuade Kenyans from insinuating that the government is doing business within itself," he said.

READ ALSO: Ruto takes a swipe at NASA over the Maize import shenanigans

Statement on the importation

Install TUKO App To Read News For FREE

Mwangi said the maize was imported by three private firms including Kitui flour mills and Pempe flour mills.

Kenyans were reading foul play in the process after the maize arrived in just three days of ordering believing there is scandal behind it.

Subscribe to Tuko youtube channel to watch more interesting videos!

The NASA leaders had pointed out that it was not possible to import maize from Mexico in just 3 days.

Have something to add to this article or suggestions? Send to news@tuko.co.ke

Meet the youngest presidential aspirant;

Source: TUKO.co.ke
Ukraine and Israel are interested in deepening bilateral economic cooperation and are working on signing the Free Trade Area (FTA) agreement by the end of this year.

Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu discussed this during a meeting, the Governmental portal reported.

"I am glad that the general trade in commodities has been growing over the past few months, we are working together to create a free trade area between the countries," the Head of the Ukrainian Government said, expressing hope that the relevant negotiations will be completed by the end of 2017.

Groysman also urged the Israeli side to consider the possibility of liberalization of access to the Israeli market of agricultural products, primarily grain, dairy products, fish, meat, honey, oil, vegetables and industrial products.

In turn, Benjamin Netanyahu noted that Israel was interested in the acceleration of negotiations to establish the FTA agreement with Ukraine. "We want to speed up the negotiations on the establishment of the Free Trade Area agreement, to develop commerce, trade, tourism, economic exchanges between our countries," he said.

ish
UML for re-polling over code violation

The main opposition CPN-UML has demanded re-polling at the election centres where basic norms of polls and the code of conduct were violated.
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has met with organizers and hosts of the Eurovision Song Contest 2017 and congratulated them on successful completion of the contest.

This is reported by the press service of the Head of State.

My sincere congratulations to you all. The Eurovision 2017 was organized at a very high level. This is the result of a very efficient coordination and interaction of your and our team, Petro Poroshenko said.

The President noted a huge work on preparation, organization and hosting the song contest at a proper level. This is not only the issue of design and creative solutions, but also the issue of ensuring security of the participants and guests. I am very glad that we managed to organize everything at a high level. This allowed our guests to feel comfortable. Thousands of people worked to create a positive image of Ukraine. And it seems to me that we succeeded, Petro Poroshenko stressed.

It is a great pleasure that my team and my wife were involved in the contest. Maryna took part in the opening of the Eurovision, a great number of Ukrainian volunteers assisted in organization and holding of this wonderful competition, the President noted. He also expressed hope that thousands of foreign guests who visited Kyiv enjoyed the level of organization of the contest and hospitality of our capital.

Despite Russian aggression and Russian occupation, Ukrainians and the Ukrainian authorities showed their hospitality and made everything they could to organize a truly wonderful event, the Head of State said and expressed gratitude to Jamala for having brought the Eurovision to Ukraine.

Executive Supervisor of the Eurovision Song Contest Jon Ola Sand also noted an extremely high level of organization of the contest in Kyiv: Each year we have certain remarks or complaints: either transport or logistics, security or other aspects. But the Eurovision in Kyiv was held flawlessly. We didnt have any problems. Everything was organized at the top level by the Ukrainian party, he said.

On behalf of the European Broadcasting Union, member of the EBU Administrative Board Pavlo Hrytsak thanked and congratulated the President on a wonderful organization of the contest. This is a great international event with thousands of foreigners who visited Ukraine. Its one of the most popular shows with many challenges and risks, particularly in the security field. And the fact is that a wonderful job was done for all journalists, contestants and fans to feel hospitality of Kyiv and stay in comfortable conditions. I am grateful to the Ukrainian government and to you, Mr. President, for a significant support, he emphasized.

Despite concerns of skeptics about possible threats, I am proud that we have made this wonderful event. Nobody could stop us, the President noted and invited everyone to visit the UEFA Champions League Final that will take place in Kyiv in May 2018.

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On Monday, May 15, a regular meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group on the settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine will be held in the capital of Belarus.

According to Iryna Gerashchenko, the representative of Ukraine in the humanitarian subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group, a consideration of the verification results of the lists to unblock the process of releasing hostages will be one of the main issues, Ukrinform reports.

"On May 15, a meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group will be held in Minsk, and it will be very important for us as Ukraine insists that information on the verification procedure should be heard first of all in both the humanitarian subgroup and the Trilateral Contact Group," Gerashchenko told reporters on May 11.

She said that 128 citizens of Ukraine were still held hostages in the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

However, the other party submitted lists of more than 600 people demanding their release to unblock the process of releasing hostages.

ish
Today, May 15, Ukrainian Defense Minister Army General Stepan Poltorak starts an official visit to the Federal Republic of Germany.

This has been reported by the press service of the Defense Ministry.

"This is the first visit for the past ten years of the head of the national defense department to the Federal Republic of Germany," the report said.

The agenda of the visit includes meetings with representatives of the committees on foreign affairs and defense issues of the Bundestag, Commander of the Bundeswehr Joint Forces Operations Command Lieutenant General Erich Pfeffer, and official talks of Ukrainian Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak with German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen.

During the visit, there will be also meetings with representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora and volunteers.

ish
All foreign ministers of the European Union member states have called for the need to step up pressure on Russia in response to its aggression against Ukraine.

Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin said this after the meeting with the foreign ministers of the EU member states in the "friends of Ukraine" format on Monday in Brussels, an Ukrinform own correspondent reports.

"All the ministers, who attended the meeting, clearly supported the need for consistent pressure on Russia and, of course, the continuation of sanctions," the Ukrainian Foreign Minister said.

Pavlo Klimkin also emphasized that the meeting with his EU colleagues was very informative and confirmed the unconditional support for Ukraine in the European community and the continued pressure on Russia.

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Ukraine will be useful for implementing the cybersecurity strategy of the European Union.

Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin said this after the meeting with the foreign ministers of the EU member states on Monday in Brussels, an Ukrinform own correspondent reports.

"I suggested that Ukraine should become the part of the future cybersecurity strategy of the European Union," the Minister said.

Klimkin stressed that Ukraine has something to offer Europe.

"Our experience is much appreciated. The Estonian presidency [in the Council of the EU in the second half of the year] will make efforts to coordinate such a strategy in the next six months," the Ukrainian Foreign Minister said.

ol
On the occasion of the World Vyshyvanka (Ukrainian embroidered shirt) Day, the Ukrainian women held a creative event in the historic part of the Italian capital.

Oles Horodetsky posted this on his Facebook page.

Twelve Ukrainian beauties in national costumes walked in an improvised fashion parade from the Colosseum to the Piazza di Spagna, showing the Ukrainian traditions to the residents and guests of Rome.

The main goal of the parade was to popularize the embroidered costumes and remind the world that people are still dying in such a beautiful European country  Ukraine  as a result of the Russian aggression.

According to the initiator of the event, chairwoman of the Congress of Ukrainians of Italy Mariana Tril, the action was a success. "The Ukrainians of Rome thus not only joined the celebration of the World Vyshyvanka Day but also acquainted the Italians with the Ukrainian culture. Our national traditions are extremely rich, let's tell other peoples about them!" noted the activist, thanking all the participants.

The event was organized by the Congress of Ukrainians of Italy and the EuroMaidan-Rome organizing committee.

Photos by Mari Kornilevska and Alesya Tataryn

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Vote counting at Bihadi Village Council in Parbat put off

Counting of votes at Bihadi Village Council in Parbat district has been put off due to load-shedding.
Wheat harvest to reach 1.87m tonnes

Nepals winter wheat harvest is expected to jump 8 percent to 1.87 million tonnes in the current fiscal year despite hailstorms in key producing areas, the governments preliminary estimate showed. Wheat is the third largest cereal crop in Nepal after paddy and maize.
Unilever to acquire Qualas beauty & personal care and home care brands London  Unilever announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire the beauty & personal care and home care brands of Quala, the Latin American consumer goods company.

Founded in 1980, Quala now has a strong presence in ten countries in Latin America: Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Its beauty & personal care and home care portfolio includes leading local brands Savital/Savile (Haircare and Skin Cleansing), eGo (Male Haircare and Styling), Bio-Expert (Haircare), Fortident (Oral Care) and Aromatel (Fabric Conditioners); with a combined turnover of over USD 400M in 2016.

Paul Polman, CEO Unilever, said: We are delighted to be acquiring Qualas beauty & personal care and home care portfolio. Quala has done an outstanding job of building strong and competitive local brands. The inclusion of these brands in our stable will consolidate our leading position in Haircare globally, and contribute to our Oral Care and Male Grooming businesses, complementing very well our existing offering.

Miguel Kozuszok, Executive Vice President, Latin America, Unilever, added: Qualas brands will give us an even sounder footing in Latin America, broadening our offering in Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador. We look forward to continuing to grow these great brands.

Michael De Rhodes, Chairman, Quala, said: Following a strategic review, we have decided to focus our efforts and resources on accelerating growth on our core business. As a result of this transaction Quala intends to increase its investment in innovation, continue broadening our product and brand portfolio, and maintaining our leadership positions in the region.

Qualas Savital/Savile is the number one brand in haircare by volume in Colombia, and has a good presence in the rest of the North Latin America region. It uses Aloe Vera as the core ingredient across the brand, and incorporates other functional ingredients  such as Keratin, Biotin and Argan Oil  as variants that appeal to consumers. eGo is the number one male hair grooming brand in Colombia and Mexico, and has presence across eight markets; with 85% of its turnover coming from styling.

Bio-Expert is a Haircare brand with a strong, on-trend natural positioning. Fortident is the number two oral care brand in Colombia and Ecuador, showing steady market share growth. Aromatel is a strong brand that rapidly achieved the number two position in fabric conditioners in Colombia and Ecuador, and will complement well Unilevers laundry business in those markets.

The acquisition of Qualas beauty & personal care and homecare business reinforces Unilevers commitment to our long-term model of compounding growth and sustainable value creation. The active management of the portfolio through bolt-on acquisitions such as this one, and the sustained investment in our existing brands, will help us deliver continued growth ahead of our markets, Polman added.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

Related links Acquisitions and disposals
Authorities in Pakistan have unleashed a crackdown on social media activists accused of criticizing and "ridiculing" the army in their online postings.

An official announcement late Sunday said the cyber crime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has been ordered to swiftly move against "elements" who are engaging in these "condemnable" activities.

"Ridiculing [the] Pakistan army or its officers on social media in the name of freedom of speech is unacceptable" and "a serious offense" under the law, it quoted Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan as warning.

Khan explained that the constitution does not permit citizens to indulge in activities that undermine the "prestige, reputation and honor" of the military institution.

The minister directed the FIA to take strict action against anyone found guilty of posting the content on social media "intentionally or unintentionally."

Military criticized

The crackdown comes amid sustained criticism of the military for issuing a controversial statement days before it was recanted last week. The move purportedly undermined the authority of civilian Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

The civil-military rift stemmed from a controversial article in a leading English-language newspaper, Dawn, published last October that suggested the army was reluctant to crack down on Islamic militants plotting attacks against neighboring Afghanistan and India from sanctuaries on Pakistani soil.

The report outraged the military leadership at the time, pressuring the Sharif government to set up a high-powered commission to investigate the matter and identify officials responsible for leaking information about a security meeting chaired by the prime minister himself.

The commission submitted its findings late last month, prompting Sharif to oust a key foreign policy aide along with a senior information ministry bureaucrat for allegedly leaking details of the top-level meeting to the media.

Hours after the prime ministers office announced the removals, the military "rejected" Sharifs actions as "incomplete," refueling speculations of a showdown between the civilian and military institutions.

But the lingering crisis defused last week when the military unexpectedly announced it had resolved the "Dawn Leaks" row with the government and had retracted its statement that "rejected" Sharifs actions as incomplete.

Reaction mixed

Opposition parties criticized the government for not making the inquiry report public while social media activists slammed the army for agreeing to maintain secrecy on the whole issue.

Pro-democracy groups, however, have declared it a rare victory for civilian leaders over army generals in a country where tensions between the two in the past have prompted military leaders to oust elected governments and impose years of dictatorial rules.

The last military coup in Pakistan was staged in October 1999 ousting Sharifs then-elected government before he was forced into exile in Saudi Arabia along with his family.

Sharif returned to Pakistan after almost eight years, and his party won the 2013 election to return him to power for a third time in the country's troubled democratic history.
On May 15, 1988, the Soviet Union began withdrawing from Afghanistan after eight years of military intervention that cost an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Soviet soldiers their lives and killed or displaced millions of Afghans.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described the Afghan intervention, which began in late 1979, as a costly drain on the Soviet economy with no clear victory in sight.

Soviet troops entered Afghanistan en masse in December 1979, following infighting involving communist factions that had culminated with the ouster of the countrys president, Nur Mohammad Taraki, by supporters of a more radical rival, Hafizullah Amin. The invading Soviet forces killed Amin and replaced him with a Soviet loyalist from a rival faction.

The intervention came at the height of the Cold War, with the Soviets seizing large swaths of the country. The Soviet occupation further strained relations with the United States.

President Jimmy Carter responded by implementing economic and other sanctions against the Soviet Union, as well as holding up arms control talks and barring American athletes from attending the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.



The U.S. armed the Mujahideen, along with other interested countries, among them Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China.





For Afghanistan, the Soviet withdrawal did not mean an end to the fighting, however. By 1996, the strict Islamic rebels known as the Taliban, who had been trained in religious schools across the border in Pakistan, took control of the Afghan capital, Kabul.



In a twist of historical irony, the very Afghan rebels the United States armed to oust the Soviets would ultimately harbor al-Qaida, the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden, that orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington.
The Syrian army and its allies are on the verge of seizing the rebel-held district of Qaboun on the edge of the capital Damascus after more than two months of aerial strikes and artillery shelling, rebels and state media said Sunday.

The rebels said they still hold a small pocket within the neighborhood in the northeastern edge of the capital, although it has been mostly reduced to rubble after about 80 days and hundreds of aerial strikes and missiles.

The army resumed its bombardment in the district Wednesday after a one-day ultimatum it gave the rebels to surrender and agree to evacuate to rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

Rebels, families evacuate

The regime has threatened to destroy what is left of Qaboun and will not accept anything but a military solution, Abdullah al Qabouni from the local council of the district told Reuters.

Hundreds of rebels and their families had been evacuated this week from the adjacent Barzeh district after rebels there decided to lay down their arms and leave to rebel-held Idlib province. They included some from Qaboun.

There were unconfirmed reports from a local source in the district that an agreement had been reached to evacuate the rebels from Qaboun Sunday. About 1,500 fighters and their families are now trapped in an area about one kilometer square.

The loss of Qaboun after Barzeh is a another blow to rebels battling to keep a foothold in the capital and facing government troops backed by Russian air power and Iranian-backed militias.

A news bulletin on state television said evacuations had begun, quoting the governor of Damascus. No other details were provided on the numbers.

Most of the residents of the once-bustling area, that had sheltered thousands of displaced people from other parts of Syria, had fled in the last two months as the bombing escalated.

UN criticizes forcible displacement

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has promoted the use of such evacuations, along with what his government calls reconciliation deals for rebel-held areas that surrender to the government, as a way of reducing bloodshed.

But the United Nations has criticized both the use of siege tactics, which precede such deals, and the evacuations themselves as amounting to forcible displacement.

The Sunni rebels accuse the government of seeking to evict Sunni inhabitants in these areas in demographic changes they say would eventually pave the way for Iranian-backed Shiites who back President Assads rule to take over their homes, a claim the authorities deny.

Army advances were made possible after tunnels between Qaboun and Barzeh were cut and the army isolated the areas from the rest of the main rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta.

The tightening of the siege in the two districts, where tens of thousands of people lived, forced the hands of rebels to agree to deals worked out elsewhere that force them to pull back to northern Syria.

They besieged us and even medicines for children or any supplies were no longer left ... and people died of hunger, said Ahmad Khatib, who was among those who left on Friday.

The densely populated rural Eastern Ghouta district of farms and towns has been besieged since 2013. It remains the only major rebel bastion near Damascus and the fall of Qaboun and Barzeh have removed a main line of defense that protected it, rebels say.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Moscow on Sunday to rally against a bill to tear down Soviet-era low-rise apartment buildings.

Protesters, mostly young and middle couples, gathered on a central street to rally against arguably Russia's largest redevelopment project to pull down entire neighborhoods of Soviet-era prefabricated buildings. City Hall has insisted the buildings are too dilapidated and outdated, while many residents and activists see the plans as a ruse to make way for high-rises in some of Moscow's leafiest neighborhoods.



The State Duma rushed to pass the first reading of a bill on the demolition in Moscow last month which will force the residents in what City Hall says are dilapidated blocks to vacate their apartments in exchange for other housing. Faced with growing criticism, the parliamentary speaker, however, suggested postponing the second reading pending a public debate.



Carrying placards "No to the demolition of the constitution!" and the flags of their neighborhoods, Muscovites chanted "Resign!" in reference to Moscow's mayor and City Hall. Police estimated turnout at Sunday's rally as low as 5,000 people while volunteers of the White Counter group, which attends opposition rallies to provide independent crowd tallies, said just over 20,000 people showed up.



Alexei Matveyev, a 36-year-old bank clerk from a north Moscow neighborhood, carried a placard reading "No to violation of the constitution and property law." He said the bill under discussion is rushed and disregards residents' interests.



"People who live in these blocks bought the apartments in order to live in quiet leafy low-rises," Matveyev said. "We are happy in our house. We don't want to live in tower blocks."



Fyodor Markushevich, a 40-year-old father of four, lives in a neighborhood in Moscow's west which has been recently taken off the list for re-development but he fears that once the bill passes the redevelopment plans would be redrafted again.



"Everyone is sick of it," he said. "We understand that we live in a city where everything is done for profit and it's hard to change that."



The five-story pre-fabricated buildings to be torn down, known as "khrushchevki" after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, were built in the 1950s and 1960s to tackle an acute housing crisis. The demolition plans, however, ignored some of the city's most dilapidated housing in less attractive neighborhoods but included good quality apartment buildings in what have recently become expensive neighborhoods.



Under the plan proposed by Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, about 5,000 low-rises will be torn down in the next several years to make way for new developments. The mayor insisted that residents would be offered housing of the equal size in the same neighborhoods, but residents fear that they will be expelled from their quiet, comfortable neighborhoods to high-rises. The first blocks are due to be demolished before the end of the year, and Sobyanin said some residents would be relocated as early as this fall.



While authorities insist that the buildings wouldn't be demolished if residents vote against it, residents have been skeptical pointing to how the voting on Moscow's government website has been rigged in the past.
Israeli officials are reported to be shocked and "astonished" after a U.S. official allegedly told them the Western Wall  Judaism's holiest site  is in the West Bank and "not your territory."

The exchange, reported by Israel's Channel 2 television, is threatening to create a fierce diplomatic storm as Israel gets ready for a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump later this week.

According to Channel 2, Netanyahu's team asked the U.S. official if the prime minister could join Trump at praying at the Western Wall.

The American reportedly shot back "no" because this is "not your territory" and said it is part of the West Bank, sparking a shouting match between the Israeli and American teams.

A White House spokesperson told VOA "these comments were not authorized by the White House. They do not reflect the U.S. position and certainly not the president's position."

The Western Wall, in east Jerusalem's Old City, is the remnant of the ancient temple, destroyed more than 2,000 years ago. It is Judaism's holiest religious site.

The area is also home to the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site.

Israel captured the Old City and east Jerusalem in 1967 and later annexed it to the rest of the city  a move the international community does not recognize.

The issue of the wall and the mosque is one of the most sensitive issues surrounding the Middle East peace process. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as a capital of a future state.

The diplomatic controversy erupted on the day the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, arrived to take up his new post.

Friedman's first stop was the Western Wall, where he said he "prayed for the president. I wished him success, especially on his upcoming trip."

Friedman is an orthodox Jew and a strong supporter of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank.

But Trump has said Jewish settlements "don't help the [peace] process."
The Hawaiian Islands are not only home to the most active volcanoes in the world, Kilauea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island, but also boast a unique natural environment. Born by volcanic activity of a very active hot spot in the middle of the Pacific Plate, they are a showcase of natural history.
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Two key players in Silicon Valleys battle to define the future of transportation are teaming up just as a common enemy faces new challenges. Waymo, the self-driving division of Googles parent company, and ride-hailing company Lyft are partnering to test driverless-car technology, the companies confirmed Sunday. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Waymo is giving hundreds of people access to their own self-driving cars Both companies face a bitter foe in Uber and are seizing the moment as their rival stumbles. Uber, which is valued privately by investors at close to $70 billion, dwarfs Lyft in the ride-hailing arena, while Google is neck and neck with Uber in a race to develop autonomous vehicles.

We can confirm that we are partnering with Waymo to safely and responsibly launch self-driving vehicle pilots, a Lyft spokeswoman said in an email. Waymo holds todays best self-driving technology, and collaborating with them will accelerate our shared vision of improving lives with the worlds best transportation.

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Waymo also confirmed the partnership, which was first reported by the New York Times. Were looking forward to working with Lyft to explore new self-driving products that will make our roads safer and transportation more accessible, a spokesman said in an emailed statement. Lyfts vision and commitment to improving the way cities move will help Waymos self-driving technology reach more people, in more places.

Uber has faced ever-worsening setbacks that have made the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut vulnerable. The company is in a legal battle with Waymo over allegations that it is using stolen trade secrets for its self-driving car program. Last week district judge William Alsup referred the case to federal criminal prosecutors for investigation.

On Monday he dealt a further blow to Uber.

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In documents issued late last week but unsealed Monday, judge Alsup did not suspend Uber's driverless-car program, but he gave Waymo broad power to scrutinize Uber's program.

A Waymo attorney and technical expert will be allowed to monitor Uber's ongoing business. They will also have the power to ask for a large number of documents that Uber has so far not handed over, including records of meetings, and phone calls with Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who took the documents. Uber must return the documents by May 31. Levandowski, who recently stepped aside as head of Uber's self-driving efforts, is now legally barred from working on anything related to LIDAR, the key self-driving technology that he is accused of stealing.

The Waymo lawyers are now in a super-position to prove their case, said Chris Broderick, an attorney focusing on trade secrets issues with Manatt, Phelps, and Phillips LLP.

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Meanwhile, Lyft has been benefiting from a wave of consumers who have quit Uber in disgust following missteps during the Trump administrations immigration ban, a sexual harassment scandal and a leaked video of Ubers chief executive cursing at a driver. Waymo recently began to recruit Phoenix-area residents to join one of the largest efforts yet to put ordinary people inside self-driving cars.

The deal appears to play off the assets each company brings to the table. Lyft, which is privately valued at $7.5 billion, doesnt have the resources to invest in self-driving car technology. The company has said it is not going to attempt to do so. But Lyft has a network of consumers who use the companys app. Waymo, which is not consumer-facing, could benefit from that network as it races to bring the technology to the public.

The competition to develop autonomous vehicles is fierce, attracting the attention of traditional automakers as well as technology companies such as Apple. In pointing out Tesla's potential vulnerabilities, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas noted that, There have been numerous developments that suggest to us the continued preparation of an assault by large tech firms on the market for shared, autonomous, electric mobility.

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PUERTO RICO

Development bank strikes deal on debt

Puerto Ricos development bank has entered into a deal with financial creditors that would allow it to avoid a lengthy bankruptcy proceeding, the governor of the debt-swamped U.S. territory said Monday.

The liquidation agreement must be formally approved by creditors of the Government Development Bank, which for decades played a major role in Puerto Ricos financial affairs. A financial oversight board and the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico also must sign off on the pact.

But Gov. Ricardo Rossello said in a statement that the restructuring support agreement, as the deal is known, was negotiated in the past two months and is backed by a significant portion of its major stakeholders. The deal focused on the bank is one piece of an overall $73 billion public debt load that the government of the struggling island is seeking to restructure. Puerto Rico is mired in a decade-long recession.

Rossello said the agreement would allow bondholders and other creditors to exchange their claims against Puerto Ricos development bank for one of three tranches of new bonds with varying payment terms.

 Associated Press

LAWSUITS

Walmarts pregnancy policy is at issue

Two former Walmart employees filed a lawsuit accusing the retailer of treating thousands of pregnant workers as second-class citizens by rejecting their requests to limit heavy lifting, climbing on ladders and other potentially dangerous tasks.

The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court in Illinois on Friday by Talisa Borders and Otisha Woolbright, who say that until 2014, Arkansas-based Walmart had a companywide policy that denied pregnant women the same accommodations as workers with disabilities.

The class action could include at least 20,000 women who worked at Walmart while pregnant before the policy change, the lawsuit says.

Randy Hargrove, a company spokesman, denied the womens claims in a statement, saying that Walmarts pregnancy policies have always fully met or exceeded both state and federal law. Borders and Woolbright say that the retailers old policy violated a federal law requiring employers to treat pregnancy as a temporary disability and provide work accommodations to pregnant women. Walmart changed its policy in 2014 to treat pregnancy as a disability.

Woolbright says she was fired from a Florida Walmart after injuring herself lifting deli trays that weighed up to 50 pounds. Borders says she was reprimanded at an Illinois store for asking co-workers to climb ladders and lift heavy boxes while she was pregnant, then forced to go on unpaid leave.

 Reuters

Also in Business

American International Group on Monday named an insurance industry veteran as its new chief executive. In hiring Brian Duperreault, 70, AIG is giving in to the demands of investor Carl Icahn, AIGs fourth-largest shareholder, who has been pushing for changes at the insurer. Duperreaults appointment caps more than two months of uncertainty for shareholders after the outgoing CEO, Peter Hancock, said in March that he would step down. AIG said it will pay as much as $40 million to free Duperreault from a noncompete agreement with Hamilton Insurance Group, the firm he founded and ran, in addition to a $16 million annual pay package.

A former Bank of America senior vice president and her husband were charged with embezzling more than $2.7 million by making charitable donations on behalf of the lender and then using intimidation and threats to get the money back for their personal use. Palestine Ace, 45, of the banks global wealth and investment management division, and her husband, Jonathan Ace, 46, were each indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud over the alleged scam targeting nonprofit groups in Boston and Atlanta, the U.S. attorneys office in Boston said Monday.

U.S. home builders are feeling more optimistic about their business prospects. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo builder sentiment index released Monday rose to 70 this month, up from 68 in April. A measure of current sales conditions for single-family homes rose two points to 76, while an outlook for sales over the next six months gained four points to 79. Builders view of traffic by prospective buyers declined one point to 51.

A New Hampshire man who was injured in a house explosion is thanking Siri for saving his life. Christopher Beaucher told WMUR-TV that he was checking on his mothers vacant cottage in Wilmot on May 1. When he went inside and switched on a light, the house exploded, burning Beauchers face and hands. With injured hands he grabbed his cellphone and asked his iPhones voice-controlled virtual assistant, Siri, to call 911, he said. Im very, very, extremely lucky to be alive, he said. The New Hampshire fire marshals office is investigating the blast.

Federal regulators warned a Pittsburgh restaurant against serving horsemeat again. KDKA-TV first reported that Cure Restaurant hosted a special dinner with Canadian chefs on May 8 that included horse tartare. The Agriculture Departments Food Safety and Inspection Service said that Justin Severino, the restaurants chef and co-owner, received a warning letter after he illegally brought horsemeat into the country. Severino said the meat came from a sustainable farm in Canada and isnt part of the regular menu.

 From news reports
Powers Boothe, seen in 2012, died May 14. He won an Emmy Award in 1980 for playing cult leader Jim Jones in the TV drama Guyana Tragedy. (Fred Prouser/Reuters)

Powers Boothe, a tall, gravelly voiced character actor who received an Emmy Award in 1980 for playing cult leader Jim Jones in the TV drama Guyana Tragedy and went on to play sinister roles in TVs Deadwood and in movies such as Tombstone, Sin City and The Avengers, died May 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 68.

Mr. Boothes publicist confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause.

After Guyana Tragedy, Mr. Boothe portrayed other memorable antagonists, including ruthless saloon owner Cy Tolliver in Deadwood, the gunman Curly Bill Brocius in Tombstone (1993) and a corrupt senator in Sin City (2005) and the sequel Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). He played Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., the White House chief of staff, in director Oliver Stones Nixon (1995) and a sheriff in Stones U Turn (1997).

On TV, he was also the power-hungry Vice President (and later President) Noah Daniels on Foxs 24. More recently, he appeared as industrialist Gideon Malick in the film The Avengers (2012) and on ABCs Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and was a businessman and political kingmaker on the ABC drama Nashville.

The well-received 1985 John Boorman film Emerald Forest, based on a true story, provided Mr. Boothe one of his rare outings as a protagonist. He played an American engineer who was in South America to oversee the construction of a hydroelectric dam and whose son is kidnapped in the Amazon. New York Times film critic Janet Maslin said Mr. Boothe makes a hero of [his character] without losing track of the mans limitations.

Powers Allen Boothe was born to a farming family in the west Texas town of Snyder on June 1, 1948. He attended Southern Methodist University and later did theater work with repertory groups before making his way to New Yorks theater scene.

He told the Associated Press in 1981 that he made ends meet at first by working in a Broadway restaurant, and his family was always ready to welcome him back.

They kept telling me, Come home and well have a place for you on the farm,  he said.

He eventually found roles and appeared on Broadway in 1979, as a cowboy in James McLures well-received but short-lived one-act comedy Lone Star. On-screen, he had small parts as an actor in The Goodbye Girl (1977), as a salesman in the Al Pacino police drama Cruising (1980) and as a military officer in Red Dawn (1984).

He fared better on television. In addition to portraying Jim Jones, he played the title character in Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (1983), an HBO drama series based on Raymond Chandlers hard-bitten detective.

Besides his wife, the former Pam Cole, survivors include two children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Boothe told the Los Angeles Times in 2007 that he relished his reputation as a go-to guy for menacing roles.

Theres something about playing the baddies that people like, he said. Theyre more fun and people tend to remember them, particularly if you do them well.


The Rejuvenation store in New York is divided into areas dedicated to each room in the home, including kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom and office. Here the shade wall has dozens of handblown glass shades. (Francis Dzikowski)

Rejuvenation has been selling classic American products for the home for 40 years. Theres lighting both new and refurbished, cabinet hardware, and furniture in the Northwest modern style, reflecting the retailers Portland, Ore., roots. So its fitting that for the debut of its first Northeast store, in Manhattans Flatiron District this spring, Rejuvenation displayed a restored wooden bench from Central Park in the front window.

Rejuvenation, a general store for useful and beautiful products for the home, opened its first East Coast location in New Yorks Flatiron district. (Francis Dzikowski)

This rare and vintage relic of New York, which dates to 1939, is priced at $6,500. But Rejuvenation is mainly known for its more basic and industrial home accoutrements: oil-rubbed bronze push-button switch plates ($20), schoolhouse-style pendant lamps ($215) and canvas-and-steel laundry bins ($66-$319).

Were a general store of sorts, says Alex Bellos, Rejuvenation senior vice president. We want to help you with your home improvements. We aim to help you add value to your home.

Rejuvenations New York store, its eighth overall, is appropriately located in an 1895 building, with mosaic floors, a gilded coffered ceiling and cast-iron pillars. Walls of little wooden drawers hold crystal doorknobs, jadeite-colored knobs and cobalt-blue house numbers; lighting of all kinds hangs from the ceiling in clusters, and there are surprises such as round leather mirrors, Japanese towels and orange zippered pillows. The light table, as it is called, is outfitted with dozens of different lightbulbs that you can switch on and off to test their glow. Kitchen and bath fixtures are shown on tubs and sinks. There are shelves of industrial laundry bins made by a Massachusetts company that has been in business since 1921.

[A dream kitchen fit for a family : Style, function and a 360-degree water view]

Lighting was Rejuvenations original specialty. The business was started in the 1970s in Portland by Jim Kelly. He restored old lamps he had salvaged and sold them to people reclaiming the local Arts and Crafts-style and Victorian homes. He also stocked old doors, windows and claw-foot tubs that renovators were looking for. He expanded by creating his own line of locally made lighting, reproductions based on vintage styles, and gradually added other home items. The store was bought by Williams Sonoma six years ago, and it has expanded the product line and the number of bricks-and-mortar locations. The philosophy is to stock products that straddle the line between vintage and modern, and manufacture many of them in the companys own Oregon factory. They also sell architectural salvage and antiques.



The store stocks its large selection of cabinet hardware and drawer pulls in small wooden drawers. (Francis Dzikowski)

A new line by O&G Studio, a Rhode Island design firm run by Sara Ossana and Jonathan Glatt, includes modern versions of classic rockers and ladder-back chairs, in colors such as lipstick red.

So what about a Rejuvenation store in Washington, which is full of old houses and eager renovators? Bellos says the District has been on his scouting list for quite a while. We need the right location and the right architecture, he says. We are looking.

Rejuvenation, 3 W. 20th St., N.Y. 212-488-3460. rejuvenation.com.
Barron Trump is seen with his mom, first lady Melania Trump, at last months White House Easter Egg Roll. Barron will attend St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, beginning in the fall, the first lady announced. (Olivier Douliery/SIPA Pool via European Pressphoto Agency)

First lady Melania Trump announced Monday that her son, Barron, will attend a private Episcopal school in Maryland, beginning this fall.

The announcement answered one of the lingering questions surrounding the first familys unusual living arrangement. The first lady and 11-year-old Barron have been living at Trump Tower in New York since Donald Trump took office in January, while the president has lived at the White House.

Trump has said his wife and youngest child will relocate to the White House after the school year ends, which meant finding a local school for Barron.

Melania Trump said Monday that they have chosen St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, for their son.

It is known for its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence, she said in a statement. The mission of St. Andrews is to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning, and service, all of which appealed to our family.  We look forward to the coming school years at St. Andrews.

Founded in 1978, St. Andrews, a day school, has an enrollment of 580 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade, according to its website. Class sizes are small, and all of its graduates go on to college, the school said.

As we came to know Barron through the admission process, it became clear that he, like all of our newly enrolled students, will be a great addition to St. Andrews, school administrators wrote in a letter to parents Monday.

A spokesman said the head of the school, Robert Kosasky, would not have any additional comment out of respect for students privacy.

Barron now attends Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

St. Andrews is located in Potomac, about 17 miles northwest of the White House and a 30-minute drive in light traffic.

School leaders are working directly with the Secret Service to ensure that  logistics and security will continue to work smoothly and discreetly next year for all of our students and families, the letter to parents said.

The most recent school-age children of presidents have attended Sidwell Friends, an elite Quaker school with campuses in Washington and Bethesda, Maryland.

President Bill Clintons daughter, Chelsea, and President Barack Obamas daughters, Malia, graduated from the school. Sasha Obama is a sophomore.

President George W. Bushs daughters had graduated from high school and were headed to college when he was elected.

President Jimmy Carter is the only recent president to send his child, daughter Amy, to District of Columbia public schools. She attended Stevens Elementary and Hardy Middle.
A seized endangered plowshare tortoise is seen inside a bag in Sepang, Malaysia, on Monday. Malaysian customs stopped an attempt to smuggle hundreds of endangered tortoises into the country from Madagascar. (Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Malaysia has seized 330 endangered tortoises that were smuggled into the country, customs officials at Kuala Lumpur airport said Monday.

Five plowshare and 325 Indian Star tortoises had been flown into the Southeast Asian country from Madagascar on May 14 and were documented in the flights manifest as stones, airport customs deputy director Abdul Wahid Sulong told reporters.

The tortoises are valued at $277,000, and the local address to which they were shipped was found to be false, he added.

Plowshare tortoises are native to Madagascar and are listed as critically endangered on International Union for Conservation of Natures Red List of Threatened Species because of poaching. Indian Star tortoises are listed as threatened. Both are extremely popular as exotic pets.

Malaysia has been singled out by wildlife conservationists as a transit point for the illegal trafficking of endangered species to other Asian countries.

A Malaysian customs officer displays a seized plowshare tortoise. The animals, which are considered critically endangered, are prized as exotic pets. (Ahmad Yusni/EPA)

Earlier this month, Malaysia seized more than $2 million worth of scales from pangolins at Kuala Lumpur airport in the largest haul seen in the country. Pangolins, the worlds most poached animal, look like anteaters with scales. The live in Asia and southern Africa.


The White House residence is grappling with two major vacancies: at left, William Allman, the White House curator, who is retiring, and Chief Usher Angella Reid, who was recently dismissed. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post; Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Four months in, President Trump has a startling number of big jobs to fill, from the head of the FBI to key diplomatic posts and top jobs in Cabinet departments  but closer to home, the inner sanctum of the White House is grappling with its own quieter state of flux.

Typically cut off from political turmoil, the residence has lost two senior staffers crucial to the daily operations and preservation of the historic home and all the demands placed upon it.

The jobs of White House chief usher and curator have come open and are waiting to be filled by the Trumps  an unusual occurrence in an institution where long tenures are typically prized.

On May 5, the White House announced that it had dismissed chief usher Angella Reid, who managed the nearly 100 people responsible for keeping the house running. Four days later, longtime White House curator Bill Allman, who had been thinking of retiring since last year, announced he was leaving the crucial post of overseeing the residences collection of more than 200,000 historic items.

Such back-of-the-house jobs are not often in the limelight but they are critical, said Stewart McLaurin, the president of the White House Historical Association, which works closely with both the curator and the chief usher.

It is important for people to appreciate that there are functions and roles. . . that care for the White House over the course of time, no matter who is president, he said. The house, which has been around since the 1800s, is a symbol of freedom in America and around the world.

The Trump administration emphasized that Reids departure had nothing to do with Allmans retirement. The deputy usher is serving as acting chief usher, and Allman  who has worked at the White House for 41 years  will stay on as curator until June 1 and has an experienced team under him.

But the departures could be a challenge for the first lady, who will play a role in searching for replacements for these key jobs even before she moves to Washington and has a chance to adjust to White House life.

The chief usher functions as general manager, helping the first lady organize day-to-day activities and major events like state dinners, and overseeing the entire residence staff  the people who see first families at their most vulnerable.

Gary Walters, who was chief usher from 1986 to 2007, witnessed a brokenhearted George W. Bush stretched out on the White House lawn with his ailing springer spaniel, the night before Spot was to be put to sleep. His successor, Adm. Stephen Rochon, worked closely with a South Dakota manufacturer to custom design a playset for Barack Obamas daughters. A member of Rochons staff saw the president and first lady jamming to Mary J. Blige on their first night at the White House, according to Kate Andersen Bowers book The Residence.

These most senior jobs are often filled from within, Walters said. You get familiar with the ways of the house and the family.

The Trumps, who own and manage hotels, might be tempted to hire from the family business for chief usher. But Reid, brought in by the Obamas from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel group, was criticized by some who found her ill-suited to manage the large team of ushers, butlers, housekeepers and others  some of whom are from families whose members have worked at the White House for generations.

Three people with knowledge of the situation said Reid was not well liked by some on the staff she managed, but that it was a stark break with decorum for the Trumps to fire her suddenly.

The curator, meanwhile, is tasked with overseeing the art, furniture and decorative objects that are part of the houses history. Allmans retirement means the White House is losing its institutional memory in terms of the history of the house, said Betty Monkman, who worked with Allman when she served as curator from 1997 to 2002.

Allman helped Laura Bush restore the Lincoln Bedroom, consulting historical accounts to bring in new curtains, wallpaper and upholstery; and worked with Michelle Obama and her designer Michael S. Smith to update the Family Dining Room, adding abstract art and modern decor to its collection of antiques.

Very early on I wanted to light candles on the mantel in the East Room. He kindly pointed out, very patiently, how curatorially that could not happen and why, Smith said. He understands that part of the magic and resonance is that this is a living house. It is not a stationary museum.

Already, the Trumps have begun to shift the look in the White House to their tastes. After touring the house with Trump  who loves showing off the Lincoln Bedroom to visitors  Time magazine reported that the modern art favored by the Obama family is mostly gone, replaced with classic oils, including portraits of Trumps favorite predecessors, like Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. Trump also personally paid for a large crystal chandelier in the presidents private West Wing dining room, according to the report.

Trump combed White House storage to furnish the Oval Office for his first day in office, removing the brick red curtains hung by Obama and replacing them with Bill Clintons gold swags. Ronald Reagans terra-cotta rug  designed with a central presidential seal with radiating rays  and George W. Bushs two sofas and wood coffee table were also placed there pending a more extensive redesign. Meanwhile, the Trumps have tapped New York designer Tham Kannalikham, a veteran of Ralph Lauren Home, to redecorate the private quarters.

They are both very interested in the history of the White House, said Stephanie Grisham, the first ladys spokeswoman. But as for now, two people who know a lot about that history wont be around.
Angel C. Dye, center, was able to receive her undergraduate degree from Howard University thanks in part to the generosity of people who stepped in to help. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

Angel C. Dye graduated from Howard University on Saturday with a bachelors degree from the College of Arts and Sciences, and shes heading off to a masters program in fine arts this fall at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Hers was one face among those inside Burr Gymnasium on a chilly morning where the threat of rain hovered. The historic university, celebrating its sesquicentennial, awarded 2,173 degrees, all stories of achievement, and no doubt many of them threaded with tales of sacrifice and struggle, of overcoming great odds.

Dyes story is like that, too, but in addition to the grit and fortitude it took to finish, hers is graced with generosity and the magic that sometimes can happen between strangers, even when its just voices over the telephone.

I worked really hard to get here. I am really proud of myself for being at this point in my life, Dye, 22, said post-ceremony Saturday as she stood in the crowd in her cap and gown, surrounded by family and friends who had traveled from Texas and Wisconsin.

Dye, like so many Howard students, had come to college  she from Dallas  with more hope than money and soon found herself behind a financial wrecking ball at a university battling its own fiscal troubles. By the time she was featured in a Washington Post Magazine article last spring about Howard and its struggles, she had been kicked out of her dorm, owed $20,000 in back tuition and was living off campus in tenuous circumstances. Dye had refused to go home, so she continued working to pay what she could, started a GoFundMe page and was attending classes even though she wasnt registered.

Angel C. Dye, left, celebrates the day with her best friend, Renee Walter, after the 2017 Howard University commencement ceremony. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

E. David Ballard II, a retired medical doctor and Morehouse College graduate, read the article at his home in Duluth, Ga. Something moved him, he said, and he immediately told his wife, Linda. They got in touch with Dye by phone and were impressed with her commitment and enthusiasm. Soon, they were calling back. They wanted to help, they said. Dye had raised about $8,000 on her page. The Ballards decided they would pay off the tuition she owed. Within days they had wired the $20,000 to the university.

I was convinced it was the right thing to do, David Ballard said.

Education really is the key to everything, Linda Ballard said.

It was amazing, said Dye, who couldnt believe what was happening.

The three have never met, but have stayed in regular contact.

I would eventually love to meet them in person, Dye said. I sent them thank-you cards, a graduation announcement. I kept them in the loop on everything that was happening with me. They made such a huge investment to my life.

Dye took out a $40,000 Parent Plus loan to finish senior year, a loan for which she and her mother, Sharon Cobb, had repeatedly been rejected. Everything began to fall into place, including her acceptance to graduate school, a two-year program with a full-ride fellowship, including a teaching assistant job.

Angel C. Dye. left, is embraced by her grandmother Jean Malone after Howard Universitys commencement ceremony Saturday. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

So many good things just happened back to back to back, said Dye, a published poet. It felt like God and the universe were affirming to me that I was on the right path. Because certainly when I had to move out of my dorm last year, and the day when I was distraught and I was praying and I was asking God, Please give me a sign, because I dont think Im in the right place. 

That path has been affirmed many times over, Dye said. She even got a shout-out from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a Howard graduate who was the commencement speaker. She mentioned Dye and two other students in her speech. Dye and her mother both said the moment made them cry.

The Ballards plan to keep investing in young lives. Their philanthropy began before learning of Dye and will continue. Their efforts to help people in need began while they were living in San Diego, where, with Lindas urging, they set up a foundation to help foster children with their education. David Ballard said they will be partnering with Morehouse to set up a scholarship fund to help other rising juniors and seniors who run into financial walls and are at risk of dropping out.

Whenever we can use whatever little we have to bless somebody and make their world a little bit easier, just like people have done for us along the way, we do those types of things, and when its time for us to meet our maker, we can say that we tried our best to do well with what we had, David Ballard said.

They want Dye to do the same. She is planning to get a doctorate, then help teach young people who start out with little in life.

Its the kind of paying it forward that they hope to inspire, David Ballard said.

We currently live in a society where if you dont have money and you dont have resources, what everybody is telling you now is youre kind of on your own, he said. I look at, especially people of color, were bright, were smart. We do some of everything when were given a chance. And so we look at Angel like, if we can give her a chance, and well just see how far she can take it. And if she can do that, it makes us happy.
Police have arrested a security assistant at a middle school in Montgomery County for allegedly having inappropriate sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl, the latest in a string of school-related sex allegations in the Maryland school system.

Mike Anthony Lievano, 21, who worked at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring, allegedly engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with a student at her home and at his home, according to police.

Police said the student  in eighth grade  told them that she initiated contact with Lievano at school, and that she and Lievano began communicating by text message and started a personal relationship in late March.

School officials said that Lievano, of Silver Spring, was placed on administrative leave after they learned of the allegations. Schools superintendent Jack Smith on Monday issued a statement on the case shortly after it became public.

I am angered and deeply troubled by the allegations against Mr. Lievano, said Smith, adding that he and others would not tolerate such behavior. The district has expanded its efforts on preventing, recognizing and reporting child abuse in recent years, he said.

Mike Anthony Lievano, 21, of Silver Spring. (Montgomery County Police /Montgomery County Police)

The Lievano case comes about six weeks after the arrest of Mark Christopher Yantsos, 57, the head of security at Richard Montgomery High School on charges of sex abuse of a minor and a fourth-degree sex offense.

[Security team leader at high school in Rockville charged with sex offense]

It also follows a case at Rockville High School that drew national attention, involving two male students accused of raping a 14-year-old girl in a school bathroom in March. Prosecutors recently dropped the rape charges in that case, but filed child pornography-related counts over lewd texts discovered during the investigation.

The cases have raised concerns about safety among parents in the school system of 159,000 students, Marylands largest.

[Threats and safety concerns follow Rockville High rape case]

Lievano had worked at Col. E. Brooke Lee since mid-February. He previously was a part-time security assistant at Rockville High School from September 2015 until February 2016. Between the two school positions, he worked in private security, school officials said.

Police said that when detectives interviewed Lievano he made admissions related to his contact with the student.

Police charged Lievano with sexual abuse of a minor, a third-degree sex offense and a fourth-degree sex offense by a person in a position of authority. Lievano turned himself in late Sunday night, police said. He is being held on a $10,000 bond.

In a letter home to parents, Lee principal Kimberly Hayden Williams said a support team including school psychologists and counselors would be on campus Tuesday to assist students.

These charges are troubling and completely unacceptable, particularly given that security staff are placed in schools to keep students safe, she wrote. The charges represent a violation of the core values of our school and school system.
Loudoun parks and recreation office in Middleburg to close

The Loudoun County Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Services will permanently close its office in the Middleburg Community Center on June 30. The department has offered programs at the location under a space-use agreement with the Middleburg Community Center since 1980.

County staff members evaluated participation rates, revenue-to-expenditure rates and the number of activities offered at other county community centers. All showed a steady decline in all categories at the Middleburg site for several years.

The offices preschool program will end in June. A month-to-month lease through August will allow events, camps and swim classes planned for the summer to continue as scheduled. The department will work with the Middleburg Community Center to offer future camps, classes and events. The programs offered by the Middleburg center and its other partners will continue.

For information, email prcs@loudoun.gov.

Balch Library displays Leesburg memorabilia

Thomas Balch Library, 208 W. Market St., Leesburg, is hosting an exhibit of items of local interest, including Coca-Cola bottles minted at the Leesburg Coke plant from 1932 to about 1944; a 1921 calendar from Max Daviss Junkyard; old bottles from Pattersons Drug Store and Purcell and Littlejohns Pharmacy; advertising from the former Peoples National Bank; and a menu from the Laurel Brigade Inn. The items are from a collection owned by Billy and Judy Fisher. The exhibit can be seen all month during regular library hours.

For information, email balchlib@leesburgva.gov or call 703-737-7195.

Fauquier schools offer Arabic, Turkish classes

The Fauquier County public school system is accepting applications for its summer STARTALK Arabic and Turkish language program.

Classes will be 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. July 10 to 20 at C.M. Bradley Elementary School, 674 Hastings Lane, Warrenton. (There will be no classes July 14.) The cost is $75. Because of a reduction in a federal STARTALK grant, bus transportation and lunch will not be provided.

Arabic and Turkish classes will be offered for rising fifth-grade through rising ninth-grade students. The program will include one off-site field trip, activities and interactive language learning.

STARTALK, part of the National Security Language Initiative, is funded through the National Security Agency. Its mission is to increase the number of Americans learning, speaking and teaching critical-need foreign languages.

For information or an application, email startalk@fcps1.org or call 540-422-7031.
Hamza Khan, left, meets with other members of the Muslim Democratic Club of Montgomery County in Silver Spring in 2016. Kahn has formed a political action committee to recruit, train and support Muslim American political candidates. (Bonnie Jo Mount/Washington Post)

A newly formed political action committee based in Potomac says it will train 30 Muslim Americans to run for state and local offices in Maryland in 2018 and also will recruit hundreds of other candidates across the country.

If we are not at the table of democracy, we may end up on the menu of authoritarianism, said Hamza Khan, a longtime Democratic activist in Montgomery County who is executive director of the Pluralism Project. By training Muslim candidates in the skills they need to run for and win political office, we intend to empower Muslims to take back control of their narrative in the American experience.

Khan announced the recruitment of the 30 Maryland candidates on Monday but would not identify them or say which offices they will seek.

Just over half the candidates are women; their average age is about 39 years old, and 95 percent were born in the United States, Khan said. Half of the candidate pool is from Montgomery County, which is believed to have the states largest Muslim population.

Few Muslims have run for elected office in Maryland before, and most who have are men, Khan said, which is why the Pluralism Project particularly encouraged Muslim women to run.

They are a marginalized community within a marginalized community, he said.

The Pluralism Project is a hybrid PAC, which means it is a blend of a traditional political action committee and a super PAC. Hybrid PACs can raise unlimited amounts of cash to support candidates through advertisements and limited amounts of money to donate directly to candidates.

Khan said his group plans to focus its attention on training, not fundraising, for specific races. Candidates will be given tips on giving stump speeches, raising money and developing a field plan.

Khan said the committee spread the word about its efforts by connecting with local mosque boards, youth groups, labor unions and progressive groups. All have seen a surge of interest and activism, he said, since the 2016 campaign and election of President Trump, a Republican.

Democrats in Maryland are trying to harness that energy to defeat popular Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who has said he will seek a second term in 2018.

We hope to keep Maryland blue and to deliver the governors house, Khan said.
Dishonest humans have been around for a long time. They once scammed the unsuspecting with paper bags full of fake cash. Now they use the telephone and the Internet.

Every week I receive at least one email or phone call from someone who has Googled the phrase federal grant. Theyve received a phone call from someone claiming to be from the government, eager to give them money  usually between $7,000 and $9,200  just because theyve been good citizens.

All they need to do to get the money is pay a processing fee or some taxes.

Most of the folks who reach out to me have been suspicious and searched online. They found a column of mine from October 2013 headlined If the U.S. Government Grants Department calls you, hang up quickly. Its a scam.

[If the U.S. Government Grants Department calls you, hang up quickly. Its a scam.]

They dodged a bullet and just want to tell me that the scam is alive and well. Some want to register a complaint. (I send them to the Federal Trade Commissions website: ftccomplaintassistant.gov.)

But some tell a sadder tale. I paid 250 dollars due to me actually thinking my Grant that I applied for was finally here, one person wrote. I borrowed the 250 dollars from my mother hoping the Grant will help us out with our bills and help me get back in school.

A woman in California was taken for $600. She wrote that it really put me and my 1 year old in a [hole] and there is nothing I can do. I feel taken advantage of and I was hopeless. They really just let people do this for a career? Its wrong and they should be held accountable for what they do.

Yes, they should. Most are calling from outside the United States, employing technology that spoofs caller I.D., making it look as if the call came from Washington, or some other U.S. city. Sometimes the caller I.D. even reads Internal Revenue Service or FBI.

When I get a call, I often try to engage these scammers in conversation. They usually hang up right away, but last year I spoke with a man who seemed intrigued at the prospect of speaking to a journalist. He said he was in Pakistan, part of a boiler-room operation that called numbers in the United States and pretended to offer grants. Hed had a legitimate job before, he said, but it didnt pay as much as the scam job, which was around $200 a month.

That paycheck salved any aches in his conscience. Besides, he was convinced he was working with the tacit approval of the U.S. government. He said he found it inconceivable that a country as powerful as the United States would allow the scam to continue without the participation of U.S. officials. He figured someone here must be getting a cut.

Another category of people I hear from are women who have been approached on Facebook or a dating site by someone claiming to be a lonely U.S. soldier, sailor, airman or Marine. The women are typically foreigners, excited at the idea that a strapping Yank would be interested in them.

[Love a man in uniform? Online dating scammers hope so.]

A British woman emailed me to say shed sent 400 pounds  about $520  to a person pretending to be a U.S. Navy physician. God only knows why I [have] become so gullible, she wrote.

A woman in Slovakia borrowed 3,500 euros  about $3,800  to send to someone she thought was a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. It is my first and only loan in my life, she wrote me. I have to repay it in 3 years, until 2018. I did not earn a lot of money in my life.

She added: After revealing this deception, I could not go back to normal life. I had a car crash, I could not concentrate on work. I understood that my life is broken forever, because the person whom I believed and paid is just an unknown liar.

An unknown liar. Its probably a good idea to start from the assumption that any stranger who calls or emails you is exactly that.

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
PRTC receives award for bus improvements

The National Capital Chapter of the American Planning Association recently recognized the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commissions TIGER bus program with an Outstanding Implementation Project Award.

TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) is a grant program through the U.S. Department of Transportation that provides federal funding for capital investments in surface-transportation infrastructure projects, according to a statement. PRTC received $9.65 million in TIGER grants for three projects:

The purchase and installation of 75 bus security cameras.

The purchase of 13 new,

40-foot, clean-diesel replacement buses.

The purchase and implementation of a Computer Aided Dispatch/Automatic Vehicle Location system for the entire fleet.

House of Mercy hosts underwear drop-off

House of Mercys U Is for Undies event will collect packages of new underwear June 8, which is Do More 24, a regional day devoted to giving. Many women who seek help at House of Mercy say they have to choose between underwear and food.

The nonprofit organization will have a large bin in the parking lot at 8170 Flannery Ct., Manassas, for donors to drive through and drop off underwear of any style or size. Volunteers will provide tax receipts, if desired.

For information, email help@houseofmercyva.org or call 703-659-1636.

New sidewalk is part of safe routes program

A new sidewalk was recently completed on Antietam Road in Woodbridge, between Woodfern Court and Old Bridge Road. The sidewalk is the first project in the county completed as part of the Safe Routes to School program, Ludvik Kulczycki of the countys Department of Transportation said in a statement.

The sidewalk is near Antietam and Old Bridge elementary schools, Lake Ridge Middle School and Woodbridge High School.

The project, which cost $930,000, was completed on time and under budget, according to county officials. Federal funds paid 80 percent of the cost to complete the sidewalk; the county contributed the remaining 20 percent, Kulczycki said.

County relaunches demographics app

Prince William Countys Geographic Information Systems Division recently relaunched the online application Demographic Mapper.

The system allows anybody to create a map of Prince William County and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park based on demographic attributes from the latest U.S. Census data sets, county demographer Brian Engelmann said in a statement.

Geography, population, income, housing, economics, race, ethnicity, age groups and gender are among categories the website addresses at pwcgov.org/demographics.
Bilal Ahmed, 43, covers his face as he leaves court with his attorneys, Peggy Bennett and Barry Coburn, on Jan. 28, 2016. On May 15, the former dentist pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting five male patients and two employees. (Keith Alexander/The Washington Post)

A former Georgetown dentist pleaded guilty Monday to five counts of sexually assaulting five male patients at his practice while they were under anesthesia.

In addition to counts concerning the patients, 44-year-old Bilal Ahmed also pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting two employees at his former practice.

The incidents occurred between 2010 and 2014, prosecutors say, at Universal Smiles at 2311 M St. NW.

Prosecutors initially charged Ahmed, of Falls Church, Va., with sexually assaulting one patient in 2016 after he was arrested by New York authorities at John F. Kennedy International Airport after deplaning a flight from Pakistan.

[Georgetown dentist charged with sexually assaulting patient during procedure]

Since his arrest, prosecutors discovered additional victims.

Ahmeds dental license was suspended in the District in 2014. He remains on home confinement and is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 10 by D.C. Superior Court Judge Zoe Bush. Ahmed faces decades in prison.

Correction: A previous version of this report misspelled the name of Bilal Ahmed.
A Maryland man pleaded guilty to weapons and child pornography charges Monday after a raid of his bunker last year uncovered a cache of firearms, explosives and other illicit materials.

Caleb A. Bailey, 31, of Waldorf pleaded guilty to illegal possession of unregistered machine guns, rifles, destructive devices and child pornography in federal court, according to a statement from the U.S. attorneys office in Maryland.

Bailey ran as a delegate for Donald Trump before the Republican National Convention and was one of three top vote-getters in the race in Marylands 5th Congressional District, said officials with the Maryland Republican Party, when an indictment was announced in May 2016.

The case against Bailey began when a package filled with hundreds of rounds of ammunition burst at a U.S. postal facility in Capitol Heights, Md., a court affidavit states.

Investigators said Bailey had attempted to ship ammunition through the mail without a proper permit. Authorities linked Bailey to the package after he had called postal employees to inquire about the undelivered package and traced his payment card to the shipping fee, the federal government said.

[Maryland man indicted on charges of child porn, weapons offenses]

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives searched Baileys home and found an underground bunker stocked with guns, explosives, covert recording devices and hundreds of images depicting child pornography, according to the statement from the U.S. attorneys office. Investigators said Bailey secretly recorded people in the bathroom of his RV and Maryland hotels, some of whom he had stayed with while competing in ATV races, the government states.

Bailey is set to be sentenced in November and faces 10 to 27 years in prison.

Justin Wm. Moyer and Ovetta Wiggins contributed to this report.
Prince George's County police charged Michael Proctor with murder for allegedly killing his girlfriend, Turkessa Paige, on April 13. (Prince George's County police department)

An 35-year-old Oxon Hill man confessed to Prince Georges County police that he killed his girlfriend and disposed of her body in a dumpster in April, officials said.

Authorities charged Michael Proctor, of the 4500 block of Wheeler Road, with first- and second-degree murder in the death of 41-year-old Turkessa Paige.

On April 27, a family member reported Paige missing. Detectives interviewed Proctor Friday and he admitted strangling her in their apartment on April 13th, police said.

Police are actively searching to locate Paiges body, officials said.

Investigators did not release a motive in the case.


Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, right, gestures as he participates in a debate with Corey Stewart, left, and state Sen. Frank Wagner, center, at Goochland High School in Goochland, Va., in April. (Steve Helber/Associated Press)

RICHMOND  Ed Gillespie has a commanding lead in the race for the Republican nomination for Virginia governor, with more than double the support of either of his rivals, according to a new Washington Post-Schar School poll.

The former chairman of the Republican National Committee enjoys stronger support in nearly all regions of the state and among various demographic groups than either of the two other Republican candidates. Overall, 38 percent of likely Republican voters favor Gillespie in the June 13 primary, compared with 18 percent for Prince William County supervisor Corey Stewart and 15 percent for state Sen. Frank Wagner (Virginia Beach).

About a quarter of respondents say they havent yet formed an opinion.

While the Republican contest had been seen as a test for the future of the Republican Party in the wake of President Trumps disruptive victory last fall, the race seems to be turning in a predictable direction.

Six in 10 likely Republican voters see Gillespie as the most electable in the November general election compared with his rivals. Gillespie has a huge cash advantage over his challengers for the nomination, with some $3.3 million available when campaign disclosures were filed March 31. Stewart had about $409,000 and Wagner about $178,000.

Stewart had been aiming to carry the Trump brand of subversive and filter-free politics to Virginia, but is struggling to gain momentum. Although he served last year as the Trump campaigns Virginia chairman  until being fired for defiance  Stewart has convinced only 14 percent of Republican likely voters that he would be best suited to support the presidents policies, according to the poll, which was co-sponsored by The Post and George Mason Universitys Schar School of Policy and Government.

Gillespie is seen as the best Trump supporter of the three by 37 percent; Wagner is almost the same as Stewart, at 12 percent. Republican-leaning registered voters who strongly approve of Trumps performance as president support Gillespie over Stewart by a wide 20-point margin, 35 to 15 percent.

Being supportive of Trump may not be a good thing, though, in a general election in the only Southern state that Trump lost last November. The presidents approval rating among all Virginia residents is 36 percent, which is even lower than his national approval rating of 42 percent in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month.

Whats more, while some 20 percent of Virginians strongly approve of President Trumps job performance, 52 percent strongly disapprove.

The other factor that doesnt seem to be working in Stewarts favor is his energetic campaigning on the issue of preserving Confederate monuments and war memorials. Republican voters seem somewhat perplexed by the topic  54 percent have no opinion on which candidate best represents their views.

Only 11 percent say they agree with Stewart.

[Do Corey Stewarts Confederate antics help Gillespie or hurt the GOP brand?]

I like Corey just because there just doesnt seem to be a gray area with where he stands, said Darryl Updike, 56, of Bedford in southwest Virginia. He said its smart leadership to stake out an extreme position and then have wiggle room for compromise.

Others question why Stewart decided to spend so much time on the Civil War. The fixation on Confederate monuments really turned me off, said Jay Beckerman, 51, a federal employee who lives in Woodbridge. I consider myself a conservative, but I dont know that thats one of the things we need to conserve, he said.

Beckerman said he had been interested in Stewart, who is his county chairman, but now leans toward Gillespie. I think name recognition and being seen as somewhat of a centrist is important in the general election, but I still want to pick a guy that has got some conservative values because I think thats what Virginia needs to move the economy forward, he said.

Overall, 26 percent of Republican voters say Gillespie does the best job of representing their views on the matter of Confederate statues. Gillespie has said he does not support relocating Confederate statues but believes the matter should be left up to individual localities.

Gillespie also has the edge in demographic groups and most regions of the state that had been aligned with Trump. Among Republican-leaning registered voters, 35 percent of whites who didnt graduate from college favor Gillespie, with 14 percent for Stewart and 12 percent for Wagner. Republican men, women, those who identify as very conservative, old, young and middle-aged all favor Gillespie by significant margins  usually double either of the other two candidates support.

Russell Martin of Richmond, a moderate who has voted for both Democrats and Republicans, said he doesnt know much about Wagner or Stewart and likes Gillespies stand on issues.

I like some of his pro-business stuff as far as getting the economy going, said Martin, a 32-year-old telephone lineman. He just sounds focused on the economy-type stuff, like I heard him saying in one of the interviews about making sure we are creating jobs and having work.

Southwest Virginia, which went most heavily for Trump last fall, also favors Gillespie, at 34 percent among Republican-leaning registered voters, compared with 12 percent for Stewart and 8 percent for Wagner. Northern Virginia Republicans favor Gillespie by an even wider margin, 41 percent to 12 percent for Stewart and 11 percent for Wagner.

The only region where another Republican comes within striking distance is Tidewater, where Wagner  who has represented the area in the General Assembly for 25 years  gets 26 percent to Gillespies 32 percent  a difference that is not statistically significant. Stewart is at 10 percent there.

Even there, though, voters are keeping an eye on who they think has the best chance of winning in November against a Democrat.

Peter Kane, of Virginia Beach, was initially leaning toward Wagner for the primary but shifted allegiances to Gillespie after concluding the longtime local lawmaker wasnt likely to win.

Although Id like to see Frank Wagner at the top of the ticket, I just dont think he has the name recognition in Northern Virginia and Richmond, said Kane, a 61-year-old college professor. Hes well known down here and has been in the Senate and House forever. But he just hasnt gotten the word out like Gillespie has.

Two Democrats are vying for their partys nomination in the June 13 primaries  Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam and former congressman Tom Perriello.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) is prevented by the state constitution from seeking a second consecutive term. Virginia is just one of two states with gubernatorial contests this year  New Jersey is the other  and the race is being closely watched by the national parties as an early test of the political landscape in the Trump era.

The Washington Post-Schar School poll was conducted by telephone May 9-14 among a random sample of 1,602 adults in Virginia, including landline and cellphone respondents, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three points. The error margin is 4.5 points among Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters, and seven points among the sample of 264 Republican likely primary voters.

Scott Clement contributed to this report.
Arlington Board chair Jay Fisette (D) speaks during a 2015 tour of the newly built offices and homeless shelter of the Arlington Street Peoples Assistance Network. Fisette participated in two programs Monday focused on the regionwide need for affordable housing. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Tens of thousands of families in Northern Virginia need housing that doesnt bust their household budgets, and the efforts of governments, nonprofits and private developers are not keeping up, several experts and advocates said Monday at a conference on affordable housing.

Neither the funds nor the political will exist to make a serious attempt to solve the problem, experts at the annual State of Affordable Housing seminar said. Expected cuts in federal housing funds under the Trump administration will not help matters.

About 120 activists, advocates and officials met in Arlington and urged each other to think creatively about how to build less expensively in limited space, and find new supporters among the business, law enforcement and education sectors to help persuade local and state governments to devote money to affordable housing.

At the same time, a high-level local brain trust gathered in a closed-door meeting at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments in the District to discuss the same issue.

That group included Prince Georges County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D), Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), Fairfax County Board of Supervisors chair Sharon Bulova (D), Alexandria Mayor Allison Silberberg (D) and Arlington County Board chair Jay Fisette (D), along with business and philanthropic leaders, said the councils executive director, Chuck Bean.

Bean said the gathering could lead to a regional work group focused on affordable housing.

Fisette, who also attended the seminar in Arlington, declared a moral imperative to create affordable housing in the wealthy communities around Washington  a statement that others agreed with.

We pat ourselves on the back for developing 1,000 units when we need 30 or 40 or 50,000, said developer Jim Edmondson of the real estate and consulting company E&G Group. We need more resources or we are not going to solve this problem in my lifetime or my grandchildrens lifetime.

Several speakers noted that families, seniors and people with disabilities who manage to get into affordable housing often also need supportive services to live on their own.

But money for those services is entirely separate from housing, and the regions poorest residents often dont have access to the support they need to remain in stable situations, advocates said.

As good as housing first is, without deep resources on a long-term basis, its set up to fail, said Michael Scheurer of Cornerstones Housing Development Corp., which operates a homeless shelter in Reston.

The seminar was held at the Church at Clarendon, which sold the air rights over its property to create eight stories of apartments that range from luxury to affordable  an example of the ways in which housing nonprofit groups are trying to find the resources they need.

Other options include cutting the number of parking spaces, which cost several thousand dollars each, when building an affordable housing complex near public transit.

Edmondson said his firm developed a property at 2321 Fourth St. NE in Washington with only one parking space for each four apartments  and even those are not fully used.
Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer held onto a candle and hope that racists cannot gain a foothold in his college town at the start of this week, one night after white nationalists evoked the days of the KKK with a torch-lit rally to save a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Candlelight vigil against hate in Cville, Signer (D) wrote on Twitter after the Sunday event. These are the kind of torches I like to see.

The hopeful mood did not last long.

Signer, a Jewish author and lawyer who became mayor in January 2016, soon drew a hail of racist and anti-Semitic assaults on Twitter. They began Sunday and kept coming Monday.

I smell Jew, one message said. If so, you are going back to Israel. But you will not stay in power here. Not for long.

[Alt-rights Richard Spencer leads torch-bearing protesters defending Lee statue]

The attacks were only part of the fallout from a startling weekend in Charlottesville, where white nationalist Richard Spencer led two rallies Saturday. His appearances continued to reverberate Monday in the Virginia governors race, as the candidate who based his campaign around Confederate symbols remained conspicuously mum.

Corey A. Stewart, one of three Republican gubernatorial contenders, made the preservation of the states Confederate memorials a rallying cry for his campaign. There is no indication that he attended the rallies. But unlike the two other Republicans and two Democrats in the race  all of whom condemned Spencers explicitly racial appeals  Stewart did not comment as the events made national news.

Only a jerk would talk politics on Mothers Day, Stewart tweeted Sunday  although earlier in the day, he had tweeted about his plans to cut taxes and create jobs.

Gillespie, the front-runner in the GOP primary race, chided Stewart for his silence on the ugly display of hateful rhetoric and intimidation tactics.

In a blurry, live Facebook video on Monday evening, Stewart denounced a laundry list of targets: fake news like The Washington Post; weak establishment Republicans like his chief GOP rival, Ed Gillespie; his Democratic rivals, for not condemning their partys long history of racism; sanctuary cities; corporate monopolies like Dominion Virginia Power; and Charlottesville City Councilman Wes Bellamy, who stepped down from the Virginia Board of Education over a series of tweets he made between 2009 and 2014 that included gay slurs, references to sexual assault and anti-white comments. Stewart made no mention of Spencer.

[Do Corey Stewarts Confederate antics help Ed Gillespie or hurt the GOP brand?]

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Perriello, a Charlottesville native, went on Monday to Lee Park, where the statue stands, and called for an end to Lee-Jackson Day as a state holiday recognizing the Confederate leaders and for a state commission on racial healing and transformation. The other Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, also supports scrapping Lee-Jackson Day.

Once an obscure Internet figure promoting white identity, Spencer rose to prominence during Donald Trumps presidential campaign. He coined the term alt-right  referring to a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state. Trump denounced the alt-right, but Spencers followers have counted his victory as a win for the movement as Trump espoused hard-right stances on undocumented immigrants, Muslims and political correctness.

[Lets party like its 1933: Inside the disturbing alt-right world of Richard Spencer]

On Saturday, Spencer led two rallies in the town where he once attended the University of Virginia. He was protesting a City Council vote in February to remove a statue of Lee from the downtown park. A court injunction has halted the removal for six months.

What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced, Spencer said at an afternoon protest, which he broadcast via Periscope video. You will not replace us. You will not destroy us. You cannot destroy us. We have awoken. We are here. We are never going away.

At a rally that night, dozens of torch-bearing protesters chanted You will not replace us and Russia is our friend. Spencer tweeted a photo of himself standing in the crowd carrying what appeared to be a bamboo tiki torch.

On Sunday, the regular protest outside Richard Spencers office and apartment in Old Town Alexandria took on an added level of concern as word spread about the previous nights events in Charlottesville.

People brought it up. They were kind of alarmed, said Jonathan Krall, one of the organizers of the Grassroots Alexandria protest group, which is part of the Indivisible network. There were these pictures of torch-wielding Nazis. Thats scary. Thats straight out of a B-movie.

Krall and others, who didnt want to be named because Spencers supporters have attacked opponents online, said they got strong support from Alexandria residents to keep up the pressure on Spencer and his alt-right allies with the biweekly protests, posters that welcome everyone to public and private spaces, and efforts to make sure police are not targeting minorities.

Although the Alexandria City Council and mayor in November 2016 declared itself a hate-free zone  with no place for intolerance, activists like Krall think the city could do more.

Spencer is the symptom of white supremacy which exists in our society, Krall said. The solution to him is to improve inclusion in our society for everybody  and until we take those steps, people like Spencer will be empowered.

Stewart has also held several rallies at the Lee statue and elsewhere, criticizing the planned removal as historical vandalism and unfurling the Confederate flag at several events. He is chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors and was chairman of Trumps Virginia campaign until he was fired in October for participating in a protest establishment pukes at the Republican National Committee headquarters.

Signer voted against removal of the statue, saying in a written statement ahead of the vote that he would prefer to add monuments to civil rights victories to tell the full story of race through our public spaces.

Id rather rebut them and overcome them than purge the public realm of irritants to our values, he said in an interview Monday.

Signer said the Twitter attacks were the first time he had faced anti-Semitism in public life  although he definitely experienced attacks from trolls on Twitter after writing some pretty critical pieces about Donald Trump.

A U-Va. lecturer and author of a book about demagogues, Signer has written two opinion pieces on how the president fits that description, including one for The Washington Post.

I absolutely believe this is linked to the sort of politics that the Trump campaign trafficked in, he said. If you remember that closing argument ad, when they talked about global financial conspiracies keeping regular people down, there was very clear messaging.

Signer said he was not upset by what he called the politics of bullies.

In a time when youve seen legitimacy conferred on a really toxic politics of intimidation from the top down, including the sort of blessing of the alt-right movement from the White House, I think its a sign youre doing the right things when these trolls try to attack you from anonymous accounts, he said.

On Twitter, Signer responded to the attacks with a mix of defiance and humor.

Here is what this great country faces in this age of @realDonaldTrump-a sitting mayor subjected to anti-Semitism. I will not be intimidated, he said in one tweet.

This garbage white supremacy wont even be a footnote in our history. #leave #resistance #welcomingcity, said another.

To someone offering a supportive tweet  Mr. Signer, I am so embarrassed that you received this message from an American  he replied: Well, lets not be too sure. Could have been a Russian.

Fenit Nirappil and Patricia Sullivan contributed to this report.
An airplane prepares for landing at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. An Afghan Special Immigrant Visa holder arrived there in mid-March and was denied entry; hes still in custody nearby. (Tim Fadek/Bloomberg News)

 It has been two months since the flight landed at Newark Liberty International Airport, delivering Abdul to a country that had promised him safety.

But the 25-year-old Afghan, holding a visa that allowed him to move to the United States after five years of serving the U.S. government in Afghanistan, has never officially set foot on U.S. soil. Instead, he stepped off the plane into a bewildering journey through U.S. immigration detention, during which he was stripped of his visa and placed in a holding facility for illegal immigrants without ever being told why.

Advocates say Abdul is the first known person to have his Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) revoked upon arrival to the United States but is among a few recipients of that visa to face a heightened level of scrutiny  and to be held in detention  since President Trump promised to tighten the nations borders.

Because the special visas are reserved for those who have risked their lives to help the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, program advocates say Abduls detention sends a troubling message to others who might consider helping the U.S. military at a time when the Trump administration is weighing an expanded military role in Afghanistan.

I dont understand why Im being held here as a prisoner when I served the American government, Abdul said in a recent interview through an interpreter at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center just outside the airport here.

[Afghan visa program extended despite pushback from immigration foes]

After Abduls trip from Kabul on March 13, U.S. border officials denied him entry, kept him in an airport hallway for nearly two days, initially denied him access to a lawyer and had him sign a document that he couldnt understand, he said. The document stated that Abdul had been stripped of his visa.

U.S. officials have provided no reason for denying Abdul entry. A rough transcript of his interview, as prepared by border officials, includes no questions or answers pertaining to a national security threat or criminality, instead hinting at a miscommunication about bureaucratic aspects of his visa.

ICE, which denied Abduls parole from its facility last month on the basis of his visa having been revoked, told him in a letter that the agency is currently investigating the basis of that revocation.

Abdul has a theory: I think that its because Im from a Muslim country, and Im a Muslim.

Abdul, who agreed to speak with The Washington Post on condition that his last name not be used because he fears the Taliban could take revenge on his family, landed in the United States two days before Trumps revised travel ban on citizens of six majority-Muslim countries  which did not include Afghanistan  was set to go into effect. Federal judges have since suspended the ban.

But civil rights advocates say Trumps position sent a message to U.S. border authorities, who they say have increasingly singled out Muslims for additional scrutiny.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group, says it documented a significant increase in complaints of harassment involving U.S. border agents treatment of Muslims during Trumps first 100 days in office, rising from 17 during the same period last year to 193 this year.

The volume and intensity of these stops and encounters seem to be of a different type than what weve seen previously, said Johnathan Smith, the legal director of Muslim Advocates, another civil rights advocacy group, noting heightened questioning based on their perceived religion or national origin, and requests for social media passwords and electronics access.

Abduls lawyers  Jason Scott Camilo and Farrin Anello along with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey -- and advocates from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) say Abdul is a casualty of that profiling. And while he appears to be the first SIV-holder to have lost his visa upon arrival, several others have experienced lengthy airport detentions in the past few months; one family with small children was held at Los Angeles International Airport for four days and was nearly deported before a judge intervened.

[This family got U.S. visas after risking their lives for America. Then immigration officials tried to deport them.]

What does it say if you served for years, you go through this whole, long process, and then you finally get here and we put you in jail? said Becca Heller, IRAPs director.

More than 40,000 Afghans have benefited from the SIV program since Congress created it in 2007. Successful applicants for the visas must show that they have worked for the United States for at least two years and that they face an ongoing serious threat in their home country.

Thousands of Afghans have put themselves, and their families, at risk to help our soldiers and diplomats accomplish the U.S. mission and return home safely, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a proponent of the program, said in a statement this month after Congress agreed to include an additional 2,500 visas in this years budget.

But other lawmakers who have pushed for stricter immigration laws have long tried to curtail the program, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, arguing that the visas are costly and applicants deserve deeper scrutiny. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said he supports giving immigration relief to Afghans who served the U.S. government. Having said that, there must be reasonable limits on these programs, including ensuring the proper vetting of applicants to reduce any abuses of the system, he said.

A beating, a bomb and a way out

Abdul was 9 when the United States military arrived in Afghanistan. His family, ethnic Tajiks from a village outside Kabul, had already moved in an effort to escape the Talibans violence. When Abdul was 19, a friend helped him land a job as a waiter in the dining hall on a U.S. military base. He was later promoted to become a cashier at the U.S. Embassy.

But in 2014, the Taliban warned people in his village that harm would come to anyone who worked for the Americans. As Abdul was returning home from work one day, two men pulled up on motorcycles and beat him with a cable in the street. After a close call with a roadside bomb in 2015, his boss, a former U.S. soldier and government contractor, provided him with temporary housing on the U.S. base and helped him apply for a visa.

It was dangerous for me to be in Afghanistan, so they were happy for me to be safe, Abdul said of his co-workers when he got the visa.

Abduls arrival at Newark quickly turned into an ordeal. On his second night in detention, Abdul said two border agents told him that his visa had not been accepted, and they asked him to sign a sworn statement acknowledging that fact. I didnt know what it was, but I signed it, he said.

The interview transcript, reviewed by The Post, gives no indication of why or when Abduls visa was revoked.

Abduls lawyers have questioned the documents accuracy and validity, given his limited understanding of English. Authorities, for example noted that Abdul speaks Pashto when he actually speaks Dari, and they appeared to believe that Abdul planned to stay with his former boss and sponsor, Marion Leon Goins, in Ohio, though a resettlement agency had arranged housing for him elsewhere in the state  a disparity that could have played a role in the outcome.

Mr. Goins indicated that he was unaware of your arrival to the United States, why would this be the case if you intend to reside with him? the officer asked, according to the transcript.

Goins told The Post that his conversation with border authorities went very differently.

They asked me: Did I sponsor him to come over? And I told him, Yeah,  Goins said. And they told me that they were going to release him.

Immigration authorities scheduled Abdul for removal from the United States on a flight the following night. A federal judge, responding to an appeal from Abduls lawyers, blocked his deportation. At a court hearing Wednesday, Abduls lawyers submitted a motion to terminate his case. The government has until June 7 to respond, and Abduls next court hearing is scheduled for June 14.

Department of Homeland Security and State Department officials told lawmakers during a recent House Homeland Security Committee hearing that their agencies conduct meticulous vetting of visa applicants, a process that continues up to and through a visa-holders arrival. A Customs and Border Protection spokesman told The Post that interviews with passengers upon arrival also are critical aspects of that process: We rely upon the judgment of our individual CBP officers to use their discretion as to the extent of examination necessary.
Long after the Black Hawk helicopter carrying Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke flew off into the bright Utah sky, James Adakai stood in the airport parking lot with an angry frown frozen on his face.

As chairman of a tribal commission established to oversee the Bears Ears National Monument, Adakai, who is Navajo, felt he deserved a place in a meeting Zinke arranged at the airport to discuss the monuments fate. Instead, Zinke met and toured the site in helicopters with Utah government officials and others who adamantly oppose the first U.S. monument designated at the request of Native American tribes to preserve artifacts and sacred lands.

You see how they do us? Adakai said.

Zinke was on his first trip to southern Utah since President Trump signed an executive order to review Bears Ears and 26 other monuments. Zinke stepped into the center of a land dispute that is as old as the Indian Wars.

The fight over Bears Ears is not the usual row between politicians who want to mine and drill the land and conservationists who want to preserve and ogle its natural splendor.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke greets Heidi Redd of San Juan County in Utah on a trip to hear cases for and against the monument there. (Francisco Kjolseth/Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

It also pits natives who reside on reservations across three states against many Anglos  as some Navajo and Hopi people call white residents  who live in San Juan County. In its largest city, Blanding, banners streaming #RescindBearsEars and homemade signs attached to fences that said No Monument told Zinke where folks stood.

Supporters such as the Utah Dine Bikeyah shouted their counterpoint  Protect Bears Ears!  everywhere Zinke appeared in public, as he tried to keep a poker face. Im in listening mode, he said, trying to hear every side.

[Bears Ears is a national monument now. But it might take a fight to save it.]

Zinke is expected to submit a recommendation to Trump in early June, following a public comment period that started Friday. But conservationists wondered whether the Trump administration had already betrayed its intent.

As he signed his executive order two weeks ago in Zinkes office at Interior, Trump criticized former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, the Democrats who, respectively, created Bears Ears and another Utah monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Its time to end these abuses and return the control of the land to the people, the people of Utah, Trump said. The president turned to praise Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a staunch opponent of the monuments, who stood at his side.

Hatch was an early Trump supporter who helped him carry Utah in the presidential election when his victory there was in doubt. He is also chairman of the Finance Committee, which will debate the tax overhaul and health-care bills the president desperately wants to pass.

(The Wilderness Society)

When he was done signing the order, Trump handed the pen to Hatch, who said he would cherish it.

Zinke and Hatch were back together at a meeting in Salt Lake City that kicked off the secretarys Utah trip. In remarks afterward, Zinke kept to his balanced public tone.

I think they are smart, capable, passionate, and have a deep sense of tie to their culture and want to preserve it, he said of the monument advocates.

Hatch wasnt as polite, describing the Navajo, Hopi, Ute and Zuni tribal leaders who spearheaded the push for the designation as clueless.

The Indians, they dont fully understand that a lot of the things that they currently take for granted on those lands, they wont be able to do if its made clearly into a monument or a wilderness, the Salt Lake City Tribune quoted Hatch as saying.

The senator was asked to name something tribe members do now that a monument would disallow.

Thatd take too much time, Hatch replied. Just take my word for it.

At the Blanding airport 300 miles south of Salt Lake the following day, Leonard Lee, a Navajo activist who stood near Adakai, spat on the ground before sharing his thoughts about Hatchs comment. It was an insult, he said.

Monumental divisions

San Juan County, among the poorest in Utah, isnt divided just by the issue of Bears Ears. Its population is almost equally split between white residents, at 49 percent, and American Indian and Alaska Natives, at 47 percent, according to 2015 Census Bureau estimates. Together, African Americans and Asian Americans barely make up a single percentage point.

A visitor center, bank and hardware store are among the few modern-looking buildings on a Main Street lined with aging hotels and a dollar store. The city has one traffic signal, a four-way flashing red light managing the intersection of Main and Center streets.

The county recently got a welcome shot of good news that distracted it from the battle over Bears Ears. Its population increased by 1,000 from 2015 to last year, making it one of the proportionally fastest-growing counties in the nation, with some newcomers lured by its gorgeous canyon country.

Bears Ears was projected by the Obama administration to be a tourism draw that could spark the economy and provide more jobs to an area where 30 percent of residents live in poverty, dragging down the median household income to about $41,000.

So why do so many oppose the monument?

We didnt feel like the previous administration gave us much of a chance to let them know what we thought needed to be done, said Bruce Adams, a member of the San Juan County Commission who is a rancher in Monticello.

Adams spoke on a cellphone while on horseback herding cattle, the wind distorting the reception to break up his voice, which undulated as he moved side to side in the saddle.

[Trump issues a review of monuments, vows to return land to the people]

Echoing Trump, whom he supported, as did a majority of voters in the county, Adams said the designation was an abuse of the Antiquities Act.

The act says artifacts of historic and scientific significance should be protected, using the smallest amount of land to protect them. If you read the designation, theyre trying to protect cedar trees and small animals. They dont need protection, he said. If you want to protect an Indian ruin, thats a different story.

Adams suggested, tongue in cheek, that 160 acres could protect the sacred artifacts in Bears Ears.

Theyre not just anti-monument, theyre prejudiced, Davis Filfred, a representative of the Navajo nation, said. San Juan County has mistreated our people, mismanaged our funds. I wouldnt side with them any day.

Filfred acknowledged that Zinke took time Sunday to meet for an hour with a contingent representing the tribes. But that short meeting followed months of requests that were not answered, he said.

The meeting was tense because the secretary didnt appear to adequately honor a prayer ceremony, and the delegates read ill will in his body language. Filfred said Zinke leaned back against a wall as if hes already decided to rescind or amend the monument.

A clear majority of the Navajo, not to mention other tribes, agree that Bears Ears deserves protection. But a few oppose it.

Rebecca Benally, a San Juan County commissioner, and Susie Johnson-Philemon, who wrote a resolution against the designation, are members of the Aneth chapter of the Navajo nation.

The Aneth chapter is the only chapter thats 100 percent in San Juan County, she said. Others are in Arizona and New Mexico voting on a Utah issue. Its really sad that they never came to hear us out. The only people that stood with us is the San Juan government and the Utah legislature.

A spiritual place

After the Black Hawk touched back down, Zinke offered a birds-eye assessment of Bears Ears, calling it drop-dead gorgeous.

Its just as hypnotizing from the ground. Bears Ears buttes tower skyward in mountains of red rock near dazzling canyons

It looks like a miniature of another American beauty, Grand Canyon National Park, but unlike that wonder, Bears Ears is easily accessible by ribbons of two-lane highways that cut through rock and branch off onto dirt roads.

That access is part of the new monuments problems.

A highway in Monticello, the seat of San Juan County, runs past ancient areas such as Newspaper Rock, where native etchings of animals and pottery in sandstone record 2,000 years of human activity.

Viewers can reach across a thin rail and nearly touch it.

The thought of that ever happening makes Heidi Redds skin crawl. Redd, the former owner of Indian Creek Cattle Country Dugout Ranch, which is completely within the monuments boundaries, has lived there in tranquility for 50 years.

Outdoor enthusiasts had started to visit more in the past few years, but now that Bears Ears is a monument, its secret is out, and she believes thousands will come to gawk. She and other supporters say funding should be released to hire staff and protect the monument.

Its something that needs to be addressed now, Redd said. This will be unintentional vandalism. People dont know they shouldnt lean on a wall. Its funding we need to protect the things that need protection.

Redd is a strong supporter of the Bears Ears monument designation who speaks of the place with a religious reverence.

This is a spiritual place, she said, with spirits in the crevices of stone that speak.

[With new monuments in Nevada, Utah, Obama adds to his environmental legacy]

Zinke traveled to Redds remote ranch to hear her point of view in a private meeting the day after his air tour. Using flat mountains with steep cliffs as the backdrop of a speech following the meeting, Zinke promised to respect all sides in the debate.

Departing from other monument supporters who met him, Redd said: Im impressed with Zinke. He respects the beauty of this place.

Bears Ears beauty has a Hope Diamond quality that is hurting the people who love and seek to possess it, causing what Redd called friction between neighbors.

The respect for one another has been greatly trampled, unfortunately, she said.

One concern for the land is cattle stepping on ruins, said Josh Ewing, a member of Friends of Cedar Mesa who lives in the countys southernmost city of Bluff. When he met Zinke, he handed the secretary a list of 300 native antiquities sites dispersed through Bears Ears.

We conservatively estimate that there are 100,000 sites, he said.

There will absolutely be strong legal challenges to any effort to shrink or minimize this monument, Ewing said. I anticipate that the tribes will quickly respond, and Friends of Cedar Mesa will take legal action if necessary.

But Zinke and Trump appear to be setting themselves up to be the first interior secretary and president to possibly undo or dramatically scale back a monument designated by their predecessors.

Before leaving the airport, frowning with anger, Adakai said natives should manage the land that once belonged to their ancestors.

We do not want drilling and strip mining the lands, he said. We want to preserve it for future generations.


Technical Director Erhard Huttel, from Germany, in the inner storage ring of the SESAME facility. (Dean Calma/International Atomic Energy Agency)

Theyve built a machine in the desert in the heart of the Middle East. Israelis will use it  and so will Iranians, Jordanians, Turks, Pakistanis and many others. Scientists from countries recently at war or without diplomatic relations will work side by side  Muslims, Jews, Christians and atheists sharing the pursuit of knowledge.

This may seem an impossible dream, and indeed the project took decades to materialize and often came close to disintegration. As the saying goes: The difficult we do immediately;the impossible takes longer.

The project is called SESAME  as in Open, Sesame!  and it is an acronym for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East.

The machine functions a bit like an X-ray. About 50 of these light sources exist around the world, and they are prized among researchers for their versatility. They can reveal the atomic structure of matter, making them useful for everything from biology to chemistry to archaeology.

The new machine is in Jordan, about a 45-minute drive from the capital of Amman. The leaders of the project and many dignitaries will formally dedicate the facility in a ceremony on Tuesday, with Jordans King Abdullah II presiding.

Its a beacon, one lighthouse, in this era where there is killing, beheadings, gassing. We are showing a different way, said Eliezer Rabinovici, 70, a physics professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the founders of the endeavor.





The project has been raked by political and financial crosswinds. The internationalism at the core of SESAME had to overcome fierce nationalistic passions. Security remains a concern.

But SESAME shows the centripetal force of the global scientific enterprise. Scientists speak the common language of mathematics, and they search for truths that are almost invariably universal, and not defined by political or cultural boundaries. Science is arguably the most international human endeavor; the only thing that comes close is the Olympic Games, which happen for a couple of weeks every two years and are centered on competition rather than collaboration.

That is one reason the scientific community in the United States was so outraged by President Trumps proposed travel ban affecting a number of Muslim-majority countries.

Scientists depend increasingly on elaborate machines, such as particle accelerators, supercomputers and space telescopes  shared tools on a colossal scale. The premier example of this is CERN, the research facility outside Geneva where physicists used a particle accelerator to search for theoretical Higgs boson (found!).CERN is run by 28 member or associate states.

But science is not immune to political turmoil.

SESAME was roiled in 2010 when two Iranian scientists with connections to the project were killed in separate incidents. This was part of several attacks on Iranian scientists perceived to have connections to Irans nuclear program. The government in Tehran accused Israel and the United States of involvement in the attacks, which both countries denied. The SESAME council later issued a condemnation of the assassinations.

Tensions also flared at a meeting held in 2010 shortly after Israeli commandos attacked a Turkish-owned ship carrying aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, recalled Khaled Toukan, chairman of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission.

We were on the verge of withering away, he said. It has not been easy. But we made it.

Rabinovici said the council resolved not to discuss politics or issue political statements. He said in an email that scientists also never discuss their religious faith.

In an article on the project, Rabinovici noted that there continue to be some bitter feelings from things that have happened over the years. Asked to elaborate, he replied, Lets concentrate on the good feelings.

Money has been and continues to be in short supply for SESAME. And the worlds richest country, the United States, has not given money directly to the project.

SESAME traces its origin to an optimistic period in the mid-1990s after the signing of the Oslo accords. One day at CERN, the laboratory in Geneva, an esteemed Italian physicist named Sergio Fubini approached Rabinovici, the Israeli physics professor, in a corridor and said it was time to test Rabinovicis ideals about Arab-Israeli collaboration.

They decided to join forces with others to found an organization called the Middle Eastern Science Committee.

Rabinovici and Fubini traveled to Egypt and enlisted the support of that countrys minister for scientific research, Venice Kamel Gouda, and she helped organize an international meeting in November 1995 in the Red Sea resort of Dahab.

That was only a few weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated. Gouda asked all the scientists present  Arabs and Israelis alike  to stand for a moment of silence in memory of the slain Rabin.

I will carry that moment of silence with me for as long as I live, Rabinovici says.

Then came a powerful earthquake on Mount Sinai  magnitude 6.9.

We thus got clear signs from above that something is happening here.

The next major advance was serendipitous, spurred by something happening in Germany. The Germans had a synchrotron-light source, and wanted to build a new and more powerful one.

Synchrotron radiation is a kind of side-effect of high-energy physics experiments that send particles spinning around a ring. These particle accelerators give off light in various wavelengths that comes off like mud off a spinning tire, says Herman Winick, a physicist at Stanford University and a pioneer in developing light sources. Mirrors and other devices can focus that light into a beam that can be used as a probe of matter.

(International Atomic Energy Agency)

Winick recalls asking German colleagues in 1997, What are you going to do with the old machine? The answer: Were going to call in a junkyard dealer and sell it for scrap.

Winick says he persuaded the Germans to offer the machine, named Bessy, to scientists in the Middle East.

SESAME began to take shape as an organization. The project initially had nine full members: Israel, Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Cyprus and the Palestinian Authority (Bahrain stopped paying dues and has dropped out). The United States, the European Union and a number of other countries became observers, without membership.

The projects leaders decided in 2000 to put the facility in Jordan. (Its obvious that most of the people involved would not come to Israel, Rabinovici said.) The next challenge would be persuading scientists in the region

that this would be a world-class facility.

When I had first heard about it, I didnt believe that it would work and I didnt want to be involved in it, Zehra Sayers, a Turkish scientist, said in an email to The Washington Post. This was an old machine donated by Germany, probably it would not work properly when assembled in Jordan, and who was going to use it? Nobody in the Middle East even knew what a synchrotron meant.

But the backers of the project assured her that the key elements would be rebuilt and modernized  they were  and she became a supporter. Shes now the chair of the scientific advisory committee, and intends to use the light source for a project to study how a protein in a bacterium latches on toiron.

More troubles lay ahead. The roof fell in during a snowstorm. Egypts support withered after the revolution of the Arab Spring. Rabinovici feared that the project was collapsing and went to the Finance Ministry of the Israeli government asking for a new infusion of money. The government pledged $5 million if other countries matched it. Turkey, Jordan and Iran then pledged the same amount each, although Iran so far has given only a fraction of its pledge, leaders of the project say.

The E.U. has also provided funds. Conspicuously, the United States has not, to the frustration of project leaders.

They suspect that one reason is the involvement of Iran. The scientists say that synchrotron technology has nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

In Congress, two physicists, Reps. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) and Bill Foster (D-Ill.), pushed for authorization of money for SESAME, but got nowhere.

Its a shame, an embarrassment, that the United States has not put, as far as I know, a dime into the SESAME project, said Holt, who is now the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The suspicion is that, because Iran is a member, thats a third rail that nobody wants to touch, Winick said. I am disappointed and embarrassed.

SESAME is not quite ready for experimental research. The most essential hardware is in place, but the two beam lines of the light source wont be ready for research efforts for another few months.



SESAME magnets spin particles and radiation comes off like mud off a spinning tire. (Dean Calma/International Atomic Energy Agency)

Gihan Kamel, an infrared beam line scientist from Egypt, works in a SESAME lab. (Dean Calma/International Atomic Energy Agency)

There ought to be many more beam lines for researchers, project leaders say. And among the immediate logistical challenges is the need for on-site lodging.

But the backers of SESAME are exultant.

Among those traveling to Jordan for the dedication ceremony this week will be Edward Witten, an acclaimed mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton  Albert Einsteins old haunt. Witten says of SESAME, Its like news from another world in which there is peace in the Middle East.

A thousand years ago, during Europes Dark Ages, the Islamic world was home to many of the greatest scientists on the planet. Today, many young scientists in the Middle East and in developing countries generally will go abroad, to the United States, Europe or Japan, to get advanced degrees, and many never return. SESAME could reverse that brain drain, the promoters hope.

Rabinovici said the key to SESAMEs existence is the persistence of the people who believed in it. He notes that mathematicians have a concept known as an existence proof. Its a hypothesis proved to be true by the construction, and irrefutable existence, of the thing being hypothesized.

Im very persistent, Rabinovici said. Its not always good in research. Sometimes in research you have to let go. Sometimes your old ideas, which you love, are wrong. But I am persistent, and I thought it was a very important thing  to show that such a thing is possible.

Read more:

Cosmic breakthrough: Physicists detect gravitational waves from violent black-hole merger

Why people are marching for science: There is no Planet B

In cutting-edge experiment, scientists shine a light on antimatter

This key conclusion follows from the basic laws of physics: Scientists rebuke Scott Pruitt

The nations top scientists cant get through to Trump  and theyre alarmed
AUSTRIA

Ruling coalition partner chooses new leader

Austrias junior government coalition partner chose a new leader Sunday and gave him the unprecedented authority he demanded as a condition for leading his party into expected early elections this fall.

Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz told reporters that senior officials of his Peoples Party agreed to let him choose all ministers of any government he would head, as well as to nominate candidates for parliament, party outsiders among them.

Kurz said the party also agreed to contest at least the next elections under a name change.

The power grab is significant in a party in which provincial governors have historically had an outsize say in running federal affairs.

With few exceptions, that has led party heads to resign in frustration in recent decades. The latest did so Wednesday after less than three years as party leader and vice chancellor.

The center-right Peoples Party is a distant third among voters.

The often cantankerous Peoples Party-Social Democratic coalition has shown increased signs of fraying over the past months. Still, Social Democratic Chancellor Christian Kern had resisted Peoples Party calls to move up elections from next year.

But on Sunday, Kern told the state broadcaster ORF, I assume that there will certainly be an election this fall.

 Associated Press

MEDITERRANEAN Sea

Hundreds of migrants rescued, 7 found dead

Rescuers saved 484 migrants from boats in the Mediterranean this weekend and found the bodies of seven men who had died in the attempt to get to Europe, Italys coast guard said.

More than 45,000 people have reached Italy by boat from North Africa this year, a more than 40 percent increase compared with the same period last year, the International Organization for Migration says.

The migrants were rescued from four rubber boats by the Italian coast guard and navy, an aid group, and two private vessels, the coast guard said.

The coast guard gave no details of the migrants origins, but most arriving in Italy are originally from sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh.

 Reuters

RUSSIA

Thousands in Moscow protest demolition plan

Thousands took to the streets of Moscow on Sunday to rally against a bill to tear down Soviet-era low-rise apartment buildings.

The redevelopment project involves the razing of entire neighborhoods of Soviet-era prefabricated blocks.

City officials insists that the buildings are dilapidated and outdated, but critics see the project as a ruse to make way for high-rises in some of Moscows leafiest neighborhoods.

Carrying placards and flags representing their neighborhoods, Muscovites chanted Resign! in reference to the mayor and other officials. Police estimated turnout at 5,000. Volunteers of the White Counter group, which provides independent crowd tallies, said about 20,000 people showed up.

The prefabricated buildings were erected in the 1950s and 60s to tackle an acute housing crisis. The demolition plan, however, ignores some of the citys most dilapidated housing in less attractive neighborhoods but includes good-quality buildings in what have recently become expensive neighborhoods.

Under the plan proposed by the mayor, about 5,000 low-rises will be torn down in the next several years to make way for new developments.

 Associated Press

Palestinian hunger striker calls snacking video fake: Palestinian hunger strike leader Marwan Barghouti denies the authenticity of a video purportedly showing him eating secretly in his cell and is preparing to see his protest to the end by refusing to drink water, his attorney said. Khader Shkirat said Barghouti has lost nearly 29 pounds since the protest began. Barghouti and hundreds of other Palestinian prisoners held by Israel launched the strike April 17, demanding better conditions. Last week, Israeli authorities released a video that they said showed Barghouti snacking in his cell.

Nepal votes in first local elections in 20 years: Millions of Nepalis voted for representatives in municipal and village councils for the first time in two decades, a sign that the countrys fractious democracy may be stabilizing. Crucial local posts have been occupied by government-appointed bureaucrats because elections could not be held amid a 10-year insurgency and delays in drafting a new constitution. Nearly 50,000 candidates were vying for 13,556 positions.

 From news services
I applaud Catherine Rampell for her May 12 op-ed, An elite plan that fails poor students. However, she may not have gone far enough: The plan to eliminate grades at elite private schools will hurt all students, not simply the disadvantaged. The evidence is clear as a bell: Many public schools have eliminated class rank over the past two decades as a result of community pressure. Has the admission mania abated? Quite the opposite.

My faith in the integrity, sense of equity and work ethic of admissions professionals will play out: They will work tirelessly to crack the code of the inflated prose descriptions on the new transcripts; they will spend more time calling college counseling offices to find what they need to make institutionally beneficial decisions; they will watch ever more closely school groups of applicants; and, as Ms. Rampell pointed out, standardized testing (and the advantages of test preparation) will all too often win the day.

When the University of Michigan and Boston University have more than 60,000 applications to read and UCLA has 100,000, their admission officers will do all they can to set their own standards, while the elite independent secondary sector turns away from setting their own.

Fred Siegel, Washington

The writer is a retired vice president

at George Washington University and

retired associate provost for enrollment at

the University of Delaware.
President Trump meets with Aya Hijazi at the White House on April 21, after she was freed from nearly three years of detention in Egypt. (Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

Donald Trump has made it clear enough that he has no interest in pursuing the traditional U.S. human rights strategy of pressuring foreign regimes, including U.S. allies, to release political prisoners, stop torture or allow free elections. But what about an America First campaign to deter other governments from mistreating or unjustly imprisoning U.S. citizens  in some cases, simply because they are Americans?

A bit haphazardly, the Trump administration has already made a start at such a policy. If it wants to build on it, there is plenty of opportunity.

The start includes Aya Hijazi, a 30-year-old Egyptian American who was freed in late April after Trump raised her case with strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. Hijazi and her husband had been imprisoned for nearly three years on bogus child abuse charges; they had established a nonprofit to help Cairos street children, thus drawing the attention of a security apparatus that targets all civil society groups with American connections.

Releasing Hijazi was an easy way for Sissi to pander to Trump without altering the most repressive regime in Egypts modern history. Trump, in turn, was foolish to embrace the dictator, who is slowly driving his country over a cliff.

Still, Hijazi was freed. So was the family of Xie Yang, a courageous Chinese lawyer who released a damning account of how he was tortured after his 2015 arrest. When his wife and children fled to Thailand, Chinese agents tracked them down and had them arrested. They were on the verge of being forcibly returned to Beijing when U.S. diplomats spirited them out the back door of a local jail, according to a report by the Associated Press. Xies wife, Chen Giuqiu, and her two daughters  one of whom is a U.S. citizen  arrived in Texas in March.

As The Posts Simon Denyer reported, they are not the only prisoners the administration has sprung from China. In April, American business executive Phan Phan-Gillis was deported two years after being arrested on spying charges. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly raised her case during his first visit to Beijing.

If Trump chooses to make such cases a priority, there are plenty more out there. North Korea is now holding four Americans, including University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier. Iran has at least four, including businessman Siamak Namazi and his 80-year-old father, Baquer, who was jailed when he traveled to Tehran in an attempt to free his son. Venezuela keeps Joshua Holt, who was arrested on bogus weapons charges after he traveled to Caracas to marry a Venezuelan. And at least three more Americans are among the 40,000-plus political prisoners imprisoned by the Sissi regime.

The abuse of Americans abroad is in part the inevitable result of a nation of immigrants and the resulting ubiquity around the world of U.S. passport holders. But its probably been encouraged by the failure of the past several administrations to take it seriously enough.

President Barack Obama, like a couple of presidents before him, preferred to downplay cases where U.S. citizens were held. For more than a year the State Department would not say anything in public about the Hijazi case. When Post reporter Jason Rezaian was arrested in Iran, Obama declined to connect his jailing to the ongoing nuclear negotiations. Rezaian and several other Americans were finally released only after the administration agreed to a prisoner swap.

Obama did manage to free an Egyptian American, Mohamed Soltan. But that took a year, and the administration eschewed some of the tough measures recommended by State Department human rights staff, such as expelling Egyptian military attaches in Washington if a deadline for Soltans release was not met.

Ive always felt we should be more militant about getting unjustly detained Americans out of prison, said Tom Malinowski, the former State Department assistant secretary in charge of human rights during the Obama years. Malinowski defends Obamas record of advocating for imprisoned Americans, but said, I think if we were willing to signal in several such cases that we are prepared to go to war for our people, fewer countries would mess with Americans in the future and quick, quiet diplomatic solutions would become easier when they do.

Of course, Malinowski does not mean actual war, but tough steps such as expelling envoys and holding up aid payments. Neither he nor other human rights advocates see it as a substitute for a global policy. The Hijazi release is not going to change the disastrous situation in Egypt or the threat it poses to vital U.S. interests.

Still, Trump has an opportunity to carve out a role as a fierce defender of Americans abroad, distinguish himself from past presidents and score a few relatively easy wins. If he seizes it, even those of us who despise his values-free foreign policy will have to give him some credit.

Read more from Jackson Diehls archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
PRESIDENT TRUMP will face what may be his toughest meeting yet with a foreign leader this week when he welcomes Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the White House. Mr. Erdogan is a blustery and autocratically minded man, rather like Mr. Trump, and he comes to Washington with a list of demands that senior U.S. officials rightly regard as unacceptable. Mr. Trump would do best by saying so directly  while urging the Turkish ruler to consider a change of course.

Syria will likely top the agenda. Though they are NATO allies, the United States and Turkey have come perilously close to a breach over how to fight the Islamic State. U.S. generals believe the only way to capture the jihadists capital, Raqqa, is by backing the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are dominated by Syrian Kurds. But Mr. Erdogan considers the Kurds enemies because of their connection to Kurdish militants in Turkey and their aspiration to carve out a ministate along the Syrian-Turkish border.

Last week Mr. Trump opted to accept the Pentagons plan to arm the Kurds. Mr. Erdogan responded by saying he would seek to have the decision reversed as soon as possible. He proposes an alternative plan under which Raqqa would be captured by a Turkish-backed force, including Syrian Islamist militias.

The U.S. plan for Raqqa is far from perfect  it would probably have the end result of returning the city to the control of the regime of Bashar al-Assad  but it is better than the Turkish alternative. Its not clear that Mr. Erdogans force has the capacity to recapture the city, and even if it succeeded, the result might be to empower groups linked to al Qaeda. More broadly, Mr. Erdogans strategic aims are misguided. Eventually he will have to accept the inevitability of Syrian Kurdish autonomy, if not a statelet.

Mr. Erdogans other demands will likely include the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based spiritual leader whom Ankara blames for a failed 2015 military coup. But Turkey has never offered persuasive evidence that Mr. Gulen was involved in the coup, and extradition is likely to be blocked by U.S. courts. Rather than attempt to mollify the Turkish ruler on this matter, Mr. Trump should urge him to end the sweeping persecution of suspected Gulen followers and Kurdish political leaders that followed the coup. Tens of thousands have been purged from state jobs, and thousands imprisoned; Turkey now has more journalists in prison than any other nation.

Mr. Trumps approach until now has been to ignore or even endorse Mr. Erdogans autocratic abuses. He was quick to place a congratulatory call to the president last month after he narrowly won a flawed referendum on a huge expansion of his powers. The White House may believe that Turkey is too strategically important to risk alienating over domestic political matters.

The problem is that Mr. Erdogans domestic and foreign policies are linked. Once he prided himself on observing democratic norms and sought membership in the European Union and rapproachment with the same Kurds he now bombs and jails. His domestic turn to autocracy has been accompanied by a nationalist policy of strenuously opposing legitimate Kurdish aspirations and deepening ties with Vladimir Putins Russia. Mr. Trump should tell him that he is on the wrong track, both in Syria and at home.
Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is House minority whip. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) is the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Last week, President Trump met in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov  a staunch defender of Russian aggression abroad and repression at home. In that meeting, according to the White Houses official readout, the president emphasized his desire to build a better relationship with Russia. The meeting came just days after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered a speech to State Department employees outlining how he would approach U.S. diplomacy during his tenure, telling them that our country would no longer insist that nations we partner with respect democratic and human rights principles.

Together, these developments constitute an alarming abdication of Americas role as the worlds leading democracy, and they reflect this presidents striking rejection of the principles enshrined in the landmark 1975 Helsinki Final Act.

During our tenures in Congress, we both have been privileged to chair the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission, the bipartisan, bicameral body that the Helsinki Final Act created. That commission put pressure on Communist governments that failed to deliver on human rights commitments, helping usher in the downfall of totalitarian communism in Europe. It has been a powerful tool in democracys arsenal, and it has contributed to the achievement of key U.S. foreign policy goals.

Tillerson himself acknowledged during his January confirmation hearing that American leadership requires moral clarity. We do not face an either/or choice on defending global human rights. Our values are our interests when it comes to human rights and humanitarian assistance. So he should understand what Helsinki is all about  that true security is brought about not only through military power but also by standing up for basic democratic values in places where they are denied. These include respect for the rights of minorities, an independent press, and the freedom to believe, live and express oneself peacefully according to ones conscience.

In 1975, in spite of a highly polarized relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, rising political populism, extremist political violence and xenophobia, and large-scale westward migration, 35 governments forged a consensus in Helsinki that many thought unachievable. In doing so, they leveled the playing field between political leaders and civil society and helped institutionalize an enduring practice in American diplomacy to engage with nongovernmental representatives as well as governments.

Today we see similarities to the global situation at the time of the Helsinki Commissions creation, particularly when it comes to the way we approach Russia. The need to stand up for human rights there is urgent. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up efforts to repress human rights activists, often through violence. During their travels, previous secretaries of state Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and John F. Kerry all made time to meet with civil society activists at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassadors residence, in Moscow. But during his closely watched visit there this month, Tillerson chose not to.

Tillersons failure to meet with human rights and civil society activists was a break from precedent that simply does not comport with American values and interests. Trumps meeting with Lavrov could further be seen as a tacit endorsement of Russias nefarious actions at home and abroad. Silence can be deafening  and in this case, it shouted to the Putin regime and its dissidents alike that the Trump administration may diminish human rights issues as a priority in U.S. diplomacy. We must not allow that to happen.

Just days before Tillerson flew to Moscow, accounts surfaced of secret prison camps in Russian-controlled Chechnya, reportedly ordered opened by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, where gay men have been systematically detained and tortured. This pogrom against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, and the broader crackdown throughout Russia on opposition, human rights, pro-democracy and anti-corruption activists in advance of Russias 2018 presidential election, demands a vocal U.S. government response.

Strengthening democracy in Russia is the most powerful means to advance LGBT protections there. A Russian society that respects individual liberty is one that will, ideally, protect its most vulnerable.

Earlier this year, both of us met with Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian pro-democracy activist who has survived two poison attacks. He and others who are facing danger as they promote freedom of expression and real democracy in Russia, including Alexei Navalny, who himself has been attacked in recent days and nearly blinded, are looking to the United States to play its traditional role as a protector of democratic norms. They are watching Trump and Tillersons actions and listening to their words very closely.

Tillerson should seize any opportunity to engage with Russian civil society leaders moving forward  in the long tradition of his predecessors and in the name of American global leadership. This September, he is scheduled to host the Community of Democracies ministerial meeting, and we urge him to make this engagement a priority and to reiterate that the United States will stand up for its values and Helsinki principles in a world that needs to be reminded of our commitment to them.
As members of the team that developed the Bureau of Land Managements Methane and Waste Prevention Rule, we write to thank Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) for joining their Democratic and independent colleagues in successfully opposing a congressional resolution to overturn that rule.

The United States is the largest natural gas producer in the world, yet the public does not benefit fully from this energy resource. Between 2009 and 2015, oil and gas producers on public and Indian lands leaked, released or flared enough gas to supply more than 6 million households for a year. This wasted gas pollutes the air and costs federal taxpayers, states and tribes millions in lost royalties. The BLM rule will require producers to repair leaks, replace outdated equipment and use industry-developed best practices to reduce other losses. But the rule faces another threat: At President Trumps direction, the Interior Department stated that it will review and suspend, revise, or rescind the rule. Thus far, this administration has focused on environmental rules costs, willfully ignoring the climate crisis and the public-health benefits of reducing pollution. Any changes to the methane rule must be made through a fair and open rulemaking process. If the department engages in such a process, its experts will conclude  as before  that there are cost-effective ways to reduce gas waste, recoup appropriate royalties for the public, reduce impacts on nearby communities, and protect public and Indian lands, air, water and wildlife for future generations.

Amanda Leiter, Washington

The writer was deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals in the Department of the Interior

in the Obama administration.

Alexandra Teitz, Chevy Chase

The writer was counselor to then-Bureau of Land Management Director Neil Kornze.
Nicholas Weaver is a computer security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif.

A massive cyber-extortion attack known as WannaCry wrought havoc across the globe last week, taking out much of Britains National Health Service and, in a delicious bit of irony, the Russian Interior Ministry.

The attack was a long time coming, representing the inevitable merging of two plagues that have long ravaged the Internet: the invention of programs that can rapidly infect digital systems and the rise of Internet crime. Without action, WannaCry represents just the first of what will undoubtedly be a long nightmare of self-propagating criminal attacks.

The first Internet plague arose in 1988 when a small program, written by computer scientist Robert Morris Jr., escaped. This program, clearly written as an interesting experiment, ran on a single computer and, from there, attempted to contact other computers. Once it found another computer it attempted to exploit the victim using one of several vulnerabilities. When successful, it copied itself over and started running: First two computers ran the program  then four, then eight. Exponential growth caused it to quickly spread to all vulnerable systems on the Internet. Combined with a bug that caused it to effectively overload its victims, this acted to effectively shut down the Internet of 1988.

This was the inadvertent dawning of the worm, a program that spreads on its own from computer to computer. Since that time weve seen many other worms, including Code Red (the first widespread worm in the modern era, infecting 300,000 systems over 13 hours), Slammer (spreading worldwide in 15 minutes and even infecting a nuclear power plant), Blaster (silently infecting hundreds of thousands of Windows computers) and Witty (which took down network security monitors belonging to the U.S. Army).

The second plague crept up on us more subtly in the form of criminals seeking to make money. From spammers hawking Viagra to online bank-robbers seeking to take control over corporate accounts, this plague is organized crime that doesnt care much about the damage done as long as it makes money. One particularly vile criminal strain involves ransomware: Malicious programs that encrypt a victims files and demand money to access them.

The ransomware epidemic is fueled by multiple factors, most notably the presence of both online criminal communities enabling specialization and Bitcoin. Criminal communities enable specialization: Somebody good at coding can write a ransomware framework and sell it to someone whos good at attacking computers. Many of these communities are Russian, as Russia has a long history of sheltering cyber-criminals who dont attack Russian interests.

WannaCry is simply the merging of these two plagues. Dealing with such worms is a technical problem  one that researchers have and will continue to focus on. But dealing with online criminals is a policy and economic problem.

Even when we can identify criminals, far too many escape capture unless they are foolish enough to go on vacation from their Russian sanctuary. And since we cant seem to dissuade Russia from directly attacking Western democracies with its hacking and information operations, it is highly doubtful we can get Russian cooperation on cybercrime.

There is a potential, however, to disrupt payments: Dont play whack-a-mole on criminals, play whack-a-mole on criminal business models. In the past, cyber-criminals used Liberty Reserve until the U.S. government shut it down and arrested its founder for money laundering. This proved a substantial blow to the criminal underground.

Likewise, ransomware actually looked poised to take off earlier with payments through Green Dot MoneyPak and similar networks, but pressure from the Treasury Department has stifled the cash-out network used by criminals to convert MoneyPak into currency. That leaves Bitcoin as the only game in town for those wanting to conduct cyber-extortion at scale.

Perhaps it is time for the United States to actually take meaningful action against Bitcoin. For non-criminal transactions, Bitcoin is decidedly inferior to all the alternatives, as it is expensive, cumbersome and surprisingly slow. Bitcoins only superiority over other electronic payment systems is its censorship resistance: There is no central authority that can say thou shalt not. Thus, it is only superior for criminal uses such as drug deals or extortion.

U.S. Bitcoin exchanges can be pressured to not enable ransom payments, and the Treasury Department can exert pressure on foreign Bitcoin exchanges to either comply with U.S. money-laundering laws or be cut off from all international bank transactions (not just those transactions which originate in the United States). There is also a possibility for a technical solution: Clogging the Bitcoin network with spam transactions.

Unless something can be done about the presence of payments through criminal-friendly Bitcoin or other means, we can only expect these two merged plagues  the crimeware worms  to continue to create chaos.
JORDAN EDWARDS should not be dead at the age of 15. But the African American teen was shot and killed on the night of April 29 by a suburban Dallas police officer. Jordan died when officer Roy Oliver of the Balch Springs, Tex., police department discharged his weapon at a moving car in which Jordan was riding. Balch Springs police are not authorized to shoot at moving vehicles, unless they reasonably believe firing at the driver might be necessary to end an immediate threat to the officer or others. Nothing about the situation  Jordan was a passenger  seems to indicate that exception applied. Mr. Oliver has been fired and arrested on criminal charges.

That is well and good, in terms of retrospective accountability. What remains to be seen, however, is whether this eminently avoidable tragedy will catalyze necessary policy changes on a national basis. Specifically, despite widespread acknowledgment that it is more often than not futile, and dangerous, for police to try to stop moving vehicles with gunfire, officers around the country continue to do so. And civilians continue to lose their lives as a consequence. The Post database of fatal police shootings has recorded 193 incidents in which police shot and killed people inside vehicles, only 86 of whom were reportedly armed. It stands to reason that these fatalities represent only a portion of all police shootings at vehicles.

Many big-city departments have a flat ban on deadly force against moving vehicles; New York was the first to adopt such a policy 45 years ago. As it happens, the 2016 edition of the Balch Springs departments own instructions to officers states the rationale for avoiding such shootings well: Because of the low probability of penetrating a vehicle with a handgun, officers threatened by an oncoming vehicle should attempt to move out of its path, instead of shooting. And yet Balch Springs, like many of the countrys 16,000 police agencies, still allowed an exception that can, on occasion, swallow the rule.

To be sure, its all too easy, in this era of terrorist truck and car attacks, to imagine cases in which officers might have no choice but to shoot at a vehicle and its occupants. That reality argues against an inflexible ban. Still, such truly justifiable cases are likely to be exceptional, not weekly, occurrences; and the Post database suggests that American law enforcement has shot at a vehicle at least weekly since January 2015. Police need to focus anew on both training and doctrine, with an eye toward the identification and adoption of best practices, so as to eliminate the risk of another young person winding up dead before his time. As the Balch Springs police policy clearly and correctly says: Foremost to any consideration of the application of lethal force is the preservation of human life.
Preet Bharara, a scholar in residence at New York University Law School, was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 until this March.

The most dramatic hearing I helped to arrange as chief counsel to a Senate subcommittee took place 10 years ago Monday, when James B. Comey, then deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, described how he and FBI Director Robert Mueller intervened at the hospital bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The encounter occurred in 2004, after White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales tried to overrule Comeys and Muellers legal objection to a secret terrorist surveillance program. When the White House nonetheless sought the ailing Ashcrofts blessing to proceed, Comey prepared to resign. Ultimately, Comey and Mueller prevailed.

(Jenny Starrs,Julio Negron/The Washington Post)

Jim Comey was once my boss and remains my friend. I know that many people are mad at him. He has at different times become a cause for peoples frustration and anger on both sides of the aisle. Some of those people may have a point. But on this unsettling anniversary of that testimony, I am proud to know a man who had the courage to say no to a president.

And in the tumult of this time, the question whose answer we should perhaps fear the most is the one evoked by that showdown: Are there still public servants who are prepared to say no to the president?

Now, as the country once again wonders whether justice can be nonpolitical and whether its leaders understand the most basic principles of prosecutorial independence and the rule of law, I recall yet another firestorm that erupted 10 years ago over the abrupt and poorly explained firing of top Justice Department officials in the midst of sensitive investigations. The 2007 affair was not Watergate, the more popular parallel invoked lately, but the lessons of that spring, after the Bush administration inexplicably fired more than eight of its own U.S. attorneys, are worth recalling.

When the actions became public, people suspected political interference and obstruction. Democrats were the most vocal, but some Republicans asked questions, too. The uproar intensified as it became clear that the initial explanations were mere pretext, and the White House couldnt keep its story straight. Public confidence ebbed, and Congress began to investigate.

In response, the Senate launched a bipartisan (yes, bipartisan) investigation into those firings and the politicization of the Justice Department. Early on, the then-deputy attorney general  Comey was gone by then  looked senators in the eye and said the U.S. attorneys were fired for cause; although such appointees certainly serve at will, this assertion turned out to be demonstrably false. We learned that the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, David C. Iglesias, was fired soon after receiving an improper call from Republican Sen. Pete V. Domenici pushing him to bring political corruption cases before the election. We learned that Justice Department officials in Washington had improperly applied a conservative ideological litmus test to attorneys seeking career positions, to immigration judges and even to the hiring of interns.

Ultimately, amid the drumbeat of revelations, every top leader of the department stepped down under a cloud. Finally, Gonzales himself resigned. Strict protocols were put in place severely limiting White House contacts with Justice officials on criminal matters. The blow to the morale and reputation of the department was incalculable.

For me, the past week has been deja vu all over again. To restore faith in the rule of law, three obvious things must happen: First, we need a truly bipartisan investigation in Congress. That means no partisan nonsense  just a commitment to finding the facts, whatever they may be, proving (or disproving) Russian interference in our election and anything related. Congress is a check and a balance, and never more important than when a bullying chief executive used to his own way seems not to remember the co-equal status of the other two branches.

Second, the new FBI director must be apolitical and sensitive to the law-enforcement mission, not someone with a long record of reflexive partisanship or commentary on the very investigative issues that will come before the bureau. Unfortunately, some of the candidates paraded by cameras this past weekend reality-show style fall into that category. I cant think of anything worse for FBI morale, for truth-finding or for public trust. More than ever the FBI needs a strong and stabilizing hand, which means somebody who has not spent most of his or her career pandering for votes, groveling for cash or putting party over principle.

Finally, I join in the common-sense call for an independent and uncompromised special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation. Given the manner of Comeys firing and the pretextual reasons proffered for it, there is no other way. My former colleague, now-Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, is a respected career prosecutor but has mostly deserved the doubts he generated with his peculiar press-release-style memo purporting to explain Comeys sudden sacking. He can still fix it. The move would not only ensure the independence of the investigation, but also provide evidence of Rosensteins own independence.

History will judge this moment. Its not too late to get it right, and justice demands it.
SHANE PARIS SISSOKO was three months old when he was murdered in Montgomery County in 2001. Lemuel Wallace, 37, blind and developmentally disabled, was shot to death in 2009 in a Baltimore park. Latiqua Cherry, a Prince Georges mother, was stabbed nine times before her body was set on fire in May 2015. Prince McLeod Rams was 15 months old when he was drowned or suffocated in Virginia in October 2012.

Common to all of these deaths is that the killer had secretly insured the victims lives and made themselves sole beneficiaries. The apparent ease with which the killers were able to obtain policies shows that sufficient safeguards are not in place. Particularly worrisome  actually, horrifying  are the instances in which, with little or no scrutiny, hundreds of thousands of dollars of insurance is obtained on the lives of young and very vulnerable children.

Each state establishes regulations for the insurance industry, and insurers establish underwriting guidelines for the sale, review and approval of policies. Compliance can be spotty, particularly with independent agents anxious for sales and commissions. That much of the business is now conducted online makes it easier for someone with bad intent. That certainly seemed to be the case in the death of Cherry. Two months before her murder, ex-boyfriend Maurice Wigfall went shopping on the web for a policy that didnt require a medical exam. After submitting what prosecutors believe was her forged signature, he purchased a $50,000 policy. He was sentenced this month to life in prison.

Dennis Jay of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud told us there are ample ways the industry could tighten procedures and police those involved in selling these policies. Nowhere is this more critical, Mr. Jay wrote in a recent letter to this page, than when young children are involved.

In finding Moussa Sissoko guilty of killing his son during last years retrial, Montgomery County Circuit Judge Michael Mason asked: Why would you put a $750,000 policy on a newborn infant? It seems to make no sense, just on its face. Why didnt that question occur to the company writing that policy? Why did an insurer sell a $444,083 policy  one of three  on Prince, also killed by his father? If, as the industry claims, it sets rigorous standards, wouldnt a simple credit check have revealed Princes father was lying when he claimed his income was $200,000 and his net worth $2 million?

Two terrible cases in the state of Washington prompted lawmakers to impose new procedures and standards for the sale of juvenile life insurance policies: the drowning in 1999 of a 10-year-old boy adopted by a couple in financial distress who purchased $650,000 in life insurance, and the 2003 drowning of a 3-year-old by her stepfather, who had a $200,000 policy on her. New York sets maximum life insurance limits for juveniles. Other states, including Maryland and Virginia, need to follow their lead and tighten a system that turns children into prey.
Chris Whipple is a journalist and filmmaker.

On the morning of Dec. 16, 10 former White House chiefs of staff gathered in Denis McDonoughs West Wing office for a meeting with Reince Priebus. Seated around a long table, Democratic and Republican gatekeepers  from Jimmy Carters Jack Watson to George W. Bushs Andy Card  gave Donald Trumps incoming chief of staff some advice. On one point above all, they were unanimous: The president cannot govern effectively, they said, without a chief of staff empowered to execute his agenda. Priebus dutifully took notes. Given the president he was about to serve, the former chiefs knew, he had a herculean challenge ahead of him.

The continuing, unprecedented dysfunction of the Trump presidency  the botched immigration orders, the Borgias-like intrigue in the West Wing, the inability to pass legislation through both houses of Congress, the ham-handed firings of his national security adviser and FBI director  is remarkable to behold. But it shouldnt be surprising. As I learned researching my book, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, for which I interviewed all 17 of Priebuss living predecessors, the president cannot govern effectively without a chief of staff who is first among equals. The chief wears many hats. But he is above all the person the president counts on to turn his policies into reality and, when necessary, to tell him what he does not want to hear.

Since the days of Richard Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, every president has learned, often the hard way, that he cannot govern effectively without empowering a chief of staff as his gatekeeper. Nixons successor, Gerald Ford, tried to run the White House according to a model he called the spokes of the wheel  with a handful of advisers reporting directly to him, at the center. The result was chaos; after a month, Ford tapped an ambitious young disciplinarian named Donald Rumsfeld to enforce a chain of command. Carter, horrified by the Watergate scandal personified by Haldeman, chose not to appoint a chief at all; but 2 years into his term, unable to prioritize his agenda and bogged down in minutia, he realized his mistake and named Hamilton Jordan. Bill Clinton tried to run his own White House, with his childhood friend Thomas F. Mack McLarty as his amiable but un-empowered chief. After a year and a half, with his agenda stalled, Clinton brought in a tough taskmaster as McLartys replacement. Former Office of Management and Budget director Leon Panetta was given the authority he needed to whip the White House into shape. Known for managing the West Wing with an iron fist inside a velvet glove, Panetta set the stage for Clintons reelection. He did it by telling Clinton hard truths.

Trump seems unaware of these lessons, or determined to flout them as a disruptor. Pitting advisers against one another may work in a family real estate empire, but modern history shows that it is a formula for failure in the presidency. Like Trump, Ronald Reagan wanted to shake up the establishment, but he intuited something Trump has yet to grasp: As a Washington outsider, he needed a consummate insider to get things done. He found that person in James A. Baker III, a smooth-as-silk 50-year-old Texas lawyer. Baker knew what was doable on Capitol Hill and was not afraid to tell the president what he did not want to hear.

It is abundantly clear that Priebus is no Baker. No competent chief would allow an executive order on immigration (a core Trump campaign promise) to be dispatched without vetting it with the departments involved. Its also hard to imagine Baker or Panetta allowing a president to squander his political capital on an ill-fated health-care bill with almost no chance of passing the Senate. (Bakers highly effective Legislative Strategy Group, or LSG, staffed by savvy operators such as Richard Darman and congressional liaison Kenneth Duberstein, knew how to count votes.) But Priebuss greatest failure has been his unwillingness to confront the president with the painful truth. The habitual and flagrant lying that has become the hallmark of Trumps presidency is unprecedented in White House history. (Not just the presidential tweets but the constantly changing falsehoods of Trumps surrogates.) Priebuss predecessors never would have tolerated this; though they were fiercely loyal to the president  from Fords Dick Cheney to Barack Obamas Denis McDonough  their respect for the office of the presidency transcended their allegiance to the boss. Trump desperately needs a person like this as chief of staff. He cannot succeed as president if he is surrounded by sycophants.

It is time for Priebus, who has lost his authority and credibility, to go. But there will be little his successor can do unless the president makes it clear that his chief is first among equals. In the end, only Trump can give a new chief of staff the authority needed to run the White House effectively; only Trump can choose to pay attention when his chief of staff tells him unpleasant truths. Trump can continue to try to govern by himself  his gut instincts unchecked, his advisers warring, his executive orders mired in the courts and legislation dead on Capitol Hill. Or he can empower a chief of staff to take charge, advise him honestly on difficult choices and implement his agenda. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Trumps presidency hinges on which path he chooses.
President Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (L) and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak at the White House on May 10. (AP/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Regarding Anne Applebaums May 12 op-ed, Why are these men smiling?:

It galled me when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laughed off a reporters question about the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey. An agent of a despotic regime that tampered with a U.S. election openly mocked the American peoples curiosity and concerns about the integrity of their institutions in front of the president of the United States, and the president did nothing  except allow a Russian photographer (but not an American one) into the inner sanctum.

Again, President Trumps cavalier disregard of the law and his scorn for honest debate put America last.

Steve Norton, Washington
Medical marijuana advocates are concerned the Trump industry could crackdown on the industry. (Richard Vogel/Associated Press)

A little-noticed document issued by President Trump has put advocates of medical marijuana on edge, raising questions about the long-term security of programs authorized in 29 states and the District that have broad public backing.

In a signing statement that accompanied Trumps signature on the bill passed this month to keep the government open, the president noted a handful of objections on legal grounds. One was to a provision that prohibits his administration from interfering with state-run medical marijuana programs.

White House aides indicated that none of Trumps objections to Congresss work signaled immediate policy changes. But given how vocal Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been in opposition to relaxing marijuana restrictions, those who support the burgeoning industry are worried about what could come next.

It just creates a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty is deeply concerning for patients and providers, said Michael Collins, deputy director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that has sought to roll back the nations war on drugs. We had thought medical marijuana wasnt really in play in terms of a crackdown.

Such concerns are being voiced more broadly about the direction of marijuana policy under the new leadership at the Justice Department.

(Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

Sessions last week directed federal prosecutors to get significantly tougher on drug defendants than they had been under the Obama administration. And a task force launched by Sessions is looking at changes in enforcement, particularly regarding marijuana, a drug that remains illegal at the federal level despite significant movement in numerous states in recent years to loosen restrictions.

The eight states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use could be at greater risk for federal intervention than those that have approved only the dispensing of medical cannabis or cannabis-infused products to patients with a doctors recommendation.

As a candidate for president, Trump repeatedly voiced support for medical marijuana, a concept that has been increasingly embraced by fellow Republicans at the state level. Of the 29 states that have authorized programs, Trump prevailed in last years election over Democrat Hillary Clinton in nine of them.

Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac poll last month found that 94 percent of Americans  including 90 percent of Republicans  supported allowing adults to legally use marijuana for medical purposes if their doctors prescribe it.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said this year that he expects states to be subject to greater enforcement of federal laws against marijuana use, but he also said Trump sees a big difference between use of marijuana for medical purposes and for recreational purposes.

Sessions, however, said at an appearance in Richmond in March that medical marijuana has been hyped, maybe too much.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to discuss what steps might be taken related to medical marijuana but said the provision in the spending bill is of concern to officials.

The Department of Justice must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives, said spokesman Ian Prior, who wouldnt discuss the issue further.

Justin Strekal, political director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the May 5 signing statement is troubling, even if a federal crackdown is not in the offing, because it could have a chilling effect on a nascent industry.

Of particular concern, he said, is the impact it could have on investors in dispensaries in states where programs are just coming on line. Prosecution of a single business in one state could have a devastating impact in that regard, he added.

The provision in question, which has been part of federal law since late 2014, prohibits the Justice Department from spending money to interfere with state medical marijuana programs. It was co-authored by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who, by his own description, is a very strong supporter of Trump.

I will treat this provision consistently with my constitutional responsibility to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, Trump wrote in the signing statement.

Signing statements became prevalent under President George W. Bush and have often been used to preserve objections rather than to signal new action.

President Barack Obama continued the practice, routinely citing provisions in spending bills that he said conflicted with authority granted to him under the Constitution.

Trump also objected on constitutional grounds to several other sections of the first spending bill he signed, including one related to a program that helps historically black colleges and universities get low-cost construction loans. That prompted an outcry from African American lawmakers, prompting Trump to release a statement about his commitment to HBCUs.

Tom Angell, founder of Marijuana Majority, said comments from Trump and the Justice Department on medical marijuana dont necessarily mean a crackdown is coming, but its a concerning signal.

Essentially, [Trump is] saying he reserves the right to ignore this congressionally approved provision, Angell said.

If the administration moves in that direction, it wont be without a fight, Rohrabacher said.

The congressman, who has used cannabis himself to ease pain from severe arthritis in his shoulders caused by years of surfing, said he is confident his side would prevail in court because Congress clearly has the power of the purse.

Rohrabacher said it appears that members of the administration are working to reposition Trump on the issue of medical marijuana.

I think there are a lot of people running around trying to paint the president into a corner on this, Rohrabacher said, adding that he is eager to talk to Trump about it directly.

In August 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled a similar provision passed by Congress prevented the Justice Department from spending money on prosecutions in states where medical marijuana was legal, as long as those being prosecuted abided by state law.

More broadly, James Cole, a deputy attorney general in the Obama administration, had directed prosecutors to enforce all federal drug laws  even in places that had legalized marijuana  but said they should look to states regulatory systems to determine whether their intervention was necessary.

Cole wrote that federal authorities should essentially stay out of states that had robust regulatory systems in place.

Coles memo is among the policies now being actively reviewed by the new leadership at the Justice Department.

The issue of medical marijuana will need to be revisited by Congress in coming months. The provision sponsored by Rohrabacher expires on Sept. 30, at the end of the federal fiscal year, and would have to be adopted again to stay on the books.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.
Lawmakers expressed shock and concern after learning that President Trump had revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during a meeting in the Oval Office last week, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Obviously, they are in a downward spiral right now and have got to figure out a way to come to grips with all thats happening, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said of the Trump administration.

The chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline is creating an environment that I think makes  it creates a worrisome environment, he said.

[Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador]

Trumps disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State, according to the officials. The information Trump relayed, officials said, had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government.

(Bastien Inzaurralde,Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

The news created a sensation as it spread through Washington and up to Capitol Hill on Monday, where senators were returning for evening votes.

If the report is true, it is very disturbing, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. Revealing classified information at this level is extremely dangerous and puts at risk the lives of Americans and those who gather intelligence for our country. The President owes the intelligence community, the American people, and Congress a full explanation.

A spokesman for House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) emphasized the importance of safeguarding sensitive intelligence.

We have no way to know what was said, but protecting our nations secrets is paramount. The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration, Ryan spokesman Doug Andres said in a statement.

The revelation came at a sensitive time for the president, who less than a week ago cited this Russia thing with Trump in explaining why he fired FBI Director James B. Comey, who was leading an investigation into Russias interference with the 2016 election. Investigators are already probing possible coordination between Trumps campaign and the Russian government, and the president has struggled to shake the issue as he tries to advance his legislative agenda.

The news is likely to raise questions on Capitol Hill about Trumps handling of classified information. It could also increase pressure on investigators looking into Trumps possible ties to the Kremlin.

And it could pull attention away from Republicans policy priorities this week. The Senate GOP is working to hammer out the details of a health-care plan, and the House is returning from a one-week break.

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee called the news a slap in the face to the intel community.

Risking sources and methods is inexcusable, particularly with the Russians, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) tweeted around 6 p.m.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the panel, said the report was of the gravest possible concern.

This kind of disclosure could harm national security by jeopardizing important sources of information needed to disrupt terrorist attacks, Wyden said in a statement.

In Moscow, a Russian Foreign Minister spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, posted a statement on Facebook denying that classified information was provided by Trump, calling the reports yet another fake. But denials by Moscow were expected to avoid being pressed for further details.

As senators gathered for their first vote of the week, Republicans and Democrats said they were worried about the developing story. The House was not in session Monday evening.

Pretty terrifying, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). If true, it is astonishing, appalling and should be investigated. It was astonishing and absolutely surprising. I would never have imagined the chief executive of our great nation would undertake that kind of disclosure.

Sen. John Thune (S.D.), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said, I would be concerned anytime were discussing sensitive subjects with the Russians. Thune reacted after an initial briefing on the news report and said he had not reviewed details.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said hed only heard the basics of the report but called them very serious. He noted that fewer than 25 senators are ever given access to the nations most sensitive secrets and he learns things he cant even talk about with other senators.

If the reports are true, its very damning, very damaging, Manchin said, adding that such disclosures would be extremely dangerous and concerning to all.

Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) said had he just read The Post story and, if true, that would be genuinely shocking.

Its disturbing if true, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said.

Several senators said they did not know the details of The Post report but called the news troubling nonetheless.

This is not the appropriate move on his part, and I just think its part of a pattern of recklessness that weve got to get a handle on, said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, We certainly dont want any president to leak classified information, but the president does have the right to do that  I think any president needs to be careful.

About a dozen reporters continued to stake out a bipartisan health-care meeting around 7 p.m., intent on asking questions about Trump. The scene was reminiscent of the prior week, when Capitol Hill was consumed by news of Comeys firing.

McCain, clearly flustered by reporters pressing for answers, walked off the Senate floor and said he hadnt read the reports, adding, I cant comment on every breaking news story.

Later, he said: Thats why its classified. They have a reason to classify it, okay? And when they say its classified, if it was public knowledge, then it could hurt the national security of the United States. Thats why we classify. He said the news would be disturbing if true.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was silent as he walked from his office to the Senate floor. Asked how concerned he was about Trump sharing information with Russian officials, he looked straight ahead, offering no reaction.

Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the Republican whip and a candidate to replace Comey as FBI director, said he didnt have any information about that at all.

Im just not going to answer a hypothetical question, he told reporters.

Sean Sullivan and Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost
On his first full day on the job, French President Emmanuel Macron appointed a former political foe as prime minister and flew to Berlin to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Domestically and internationally, the moves were seen as attempts by Macron to build a broader base for the untested political movement that brought him to power and to affirm his commitment to restoring the historical Franco-German alliance at the heart of the European Union.

Macrons campaign was marked by its unabashedly pro-E.U. rhetoric, and he was greeted in Berlin by throngs of supporters and a smiling Merkel, who is generally known for her stoic demeanor.

The German leader said in a news conference that the two had agreed on the historical significance of the Franco-German relationship. She added, Europe can only prosper when France and Germany prosper.

It is a tradition for French presidents to make their first official trip abroad to Germany , but Macrons visit carried special significance.

Under his predecessor, the historically unpopular Francois Hollande, the vision of Germany and France as the twin engines of Europe significantly receded. This was largely because of Frances economic malaise, which has deepened in recent years.

On Monday in Berlin, Macron  who again called for a renewal of the European project  vowed to confront those domestic issues head-on. He acknowledged that high unemployment remains a problem in France and called for efforts to fight it. He also conceded that Merkel is eager for him to push through important labor and business reforms at home before major regional projects aimed at boosting Europes economies can be launched.

I believe in mutual trust, and in order to reach that, everyone needs to do what they need to do, he said. In France, I need to apply in-depth reforms.

A key ally for Macron in passing any liberalizing measures  a famously difficult sell in France  will be his prime minister, named Monday as Edouard Philippe.

Picking Philippe  the mayor of Le Havre, a port city in northern France  is viewed as a careful political calculation by Macron, who won the presidency without an established party structure behind him. The mix of a centrist president and a right-leaning prime minister further shakes up Frances ossified political establishment, which was uprooted in the course of the two-phase presidential election.

Macron, an independent, on May 7 became the first candidate in modern French history to win the countrys top job without belonging to the center-left or center-right parties that have run the country since 1958.

But Philippe, 46, is a member of Frances traditional conservative establishment and previously backed Alain Juppe, who was defeated in the presidential primaries last fall. Philippe earlier worked as an assistant to Juppe, a former prime minister. After Juppes defeat, Philippe opted to back Macron instead of his partys candidate, Francois Fillon, whose campaign never recovered from a public-spending scandal.

[Macron won from the middle. Governing from there wont be easy.]

As a prominent member of Frances center-right Republican party, Philippe could attract other conservatives to the new presidents coalition.

Macron, who was finance minister under Hollande, a Socialist, left his post last year to found his own party. His campaign sought to transcend the left-right divides with a crossover message in an age when many voters in the West have turned against globalism and establishment politicians.

To a certain extent, the political careers of Macron and Philippe share an affinity for mixed partisan affiliations. Before rallying to Juppes side in the early 2000s, Philippe was a member of the Socialist Party and a young devotee of Michel Rocard, a Socialist leader and former prime minister. Macron, likewise, served in the Economy Ministry in a variety of capacities during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative.

As the political debate in France and elsewhere has increasingly centered on the issue of national identity in a globalized society, traditional partisan boundaries are being redrawn. In addition to conservatives such as Philippe, leftist heavyweights  such as former Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe, a Socialist  were early supporters of Macron instead of their own parties candidates.

[Video: What Emmanuel Macrons victory means for France and the world]

In an interview with The Washington Post before the May 7 presidential runoff, Philippe  who had previously criticized Macron  reiterated that Macron has to implement what he promised, that is to renew the political system, the government, to mix the right and the left.

I will help him, Philippe added, because he needs help.

As recently as January, however, he was less convinced of Macrons potential as a leader.

In an op-ed for the newspaper Liberation, Philippe wrote: Who is Macron? For some, impressed by his power of seduction and his reformist rhetoric, he would be the natural son of Kennedy and [former far-left political leader Pierre] Mendes France. We can doubt that. The former had more charisma; the latter more principles.

In Berlin, Macron and Merkel were slated to discuss several important issues, including Europes asylum system, job creation, joint European defense, and short- and medium-term measures to cut bureaucracy and reboot the E.U.

In practice, Merkel is likely to insist that Macron at least embark on domestic reforms before she agrees to the sweeping E.U. initiatives he has promoted for months. Nevertheless, on the heels of Britains departure from the E.U. and the rise of populists across the continent, the leaders meeting was seen as reassurance for Europes embattled political establishment.

I for one am very aware of the responsibility at this critical point for the European Union, when we can and must take the right decision for the benefit of the people in our countries, Merkel said.

Faiola reported from Berlin. Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report.

Read more

A new political opposition in France  people who dont vote

Emmanuel Macrons unlikely path to the French presidency

Why the populists didnt win Frances presidential election

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
Alice Weidel, a member of Germany's right-wing Alternative for Germany party, delivers a speech after her nomination as one of the campaign leaders for the next German general election. (Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images)

The far rights drubbing in the French election exposed the biggest challenge for European nationalists: convincing voters that they are no longer a bunch of intolerant haters. To argue that point, welcome to the political stage Alice Weidel, the improbable new voice of Germanys far right.

In person, the cardigan-wearing former investment banker eschews fiery rhetoric in favor of almost academic answers. But theres something else that distinguishes her from the populist pack. After days spent campaigning for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the 38-year-old lesbian goes home to her partner and two sons.

My election and my high acceptance within the party show that, contrary to public perception, my party is tolerant, said Weidel, one of two politicians elected last month to lead the AfD into Germanys national elections in September.

Weidels rise is the latest expression of a growing, if seemingly ironic, trend. In their policies, nationalist movements in the West often oppose full gay rights, including same-sex marriage. But many such parties are increasingly trying to portray themselves as more tolerant than their images suggest, in part by making space for gay men and lesbians.

[With Le Pen defeat, Europes far-right surge stalls]

AfD candidate Jorg Nobis, left, Alice Weidel and the federal chairman of AfD, Jorg Meuthen, in Berlin on May 8. (Clemens Bilan/European Pressphoto Agency)

This, observers say, amounts to an attempt to broaden their appeal  not only to gays but also to voters who view such movements as overtly bigoted and exclusionary.

Weidel is a signpost; she is there to say, Look, were not only old, angry white men,  said Cornelius Adebahr, a fellow at Carnegie Europe.

The efforts in Europe echo the moment last year when Donald Trump held up a rainbow flag, a symbol of the gay community, at a presidential campaign stop in Colorado. In doing so, he took a page from far-right Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders, who has for years portrayed his campaign against Muslim immigration as a way to protect gays from bashing by religious zealots.

Opponents, however, call such efforts disingenuous  optics that do not gel with nationalist voting patterns, actions and internal musings on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. In France, for instance, the National Fronts Marine Le Pen, despite equivocating on the issue at first, in February included a repeal of same-sex marriage  legalized in France in 2013  in her campaign pledges.

More recently, however, gays have been promoted to the partys highest ranks. National Front leaders Florian Philippot and Steeve Briois were outed by French journalists in recent years. Nevertheless, Philippot is now Le Pens right-hand man, and two weeks ago, Briois was named the partys interim chief.

[How the far right is trying to woo an unlikely ally  Jews]

Le Pens views are a far cry from those of her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the 1980s, the elder Le Pen  an anti-Semite who referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a detail of history  was as outspoken about gays as he was about Jews. During the AIDS crisis, he advocated for the creation of concentration camps for those infected with HIV.

Despite her massive loss, Marine Le Pens different strategy may be gradually working. Although the party opposes same-sex marriage, a 2015 poll showed that support for her party among gay couples rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 32 percent in 2015  right after the November terrorist attacks in Paris.

If you look at the history of the National Front, it was always a homophobic party  but with lots of homosexuals, said Frederic Martel, author of The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968.

Enter Germanys Weidel, who last month was selected to help lead the AfD and is now tasked with helping the party avoid political implosion.

Founded in 2013 on the back of German angst over bailouts for Greece, the AfD morphed during the refugee crisis into an anti-immigrant nationalist movement that has opposed the building of new mosques and advocates leaving the euro currency union. Should the AfD crash and burn following losses by nationalists in the Netherlands and France, it would amount to a massive setback for the far right in Europe.

[In Germany, right-wing violence flourishing amid surge in online hate]

After strong gains last year in local elections, the AfD has taken a severe hit in recent months, with its poll numbers falling to single digits. Its problems came after explosive remarks by one of its prominent politicians, Bjorn Hocke, who appeared to play down Germanys World War II guilt and Adolf Hitlers atrocities.

Besides turning off potential supporters, his comments fueled a tug of war between moderates and hard-liners for the soul of the party. Caught up in the dispute, Frauke Petry, the face of the party, abruptly announced last month that she would step aside as its lead candidate.

In her place, the AfD elected two replacements: the more moderate Weidel and a hard-liner, Alexander Gauland, 76. Weidel concedes that it was an attempt to appease both sides of the movement.

Since then, some of her fiercest critics have been German gay groups. Markus Ulrich, spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, dismissed Weidels election as a clever strategy meant to distract from the AfDs hard-line platform.

Does the AfD stand for equal rights? For respect? For diversity? Definitely not, Ulrich said.

Yet Weidels appeal also stems from a characteristic that has helped her rise in the AfD: She is not a traditional politician. An economist, she graduated best in class at the University of Bayreuth and earned her doctorate in 2011. She worked in China for six years and speaks Mandarin. Her day job is consulting for start-ups.

In an interview with The Washington Post, she said she saw no contradiction between her partys stated stance in favor of traditional families with a father and mother and her life with her female partner and children. Germany offers civil partnerships, she said, and she and her party remain in favor of keeping the status quo.

[Islam is Europes new fascism, and other things European politicians say about Muslims]

The pushback within the AfD against a lesbian as one of its leading voices, meanwhile, has been surprisingly muted. Some far-right websites have jabbed at Weidel. But for the most part, even fervent nationalists in the party appear to be backing her.

We are fostering traditional values but arent ostracizing anyone, said AfD politician Andreas Gehlmann, who once heckled a colleague from another party speaking about gay issues. We also have black people in the AfD.

Weidel condemns AfD politicians such as Hocke. Although she was initially attracted to the party because of its anti-euro stance, she also fiercely defends its anti-immigrant position  particularly against the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees, many fleeing the Syrian war.

She says that neither she nor her party is anti-Islamic. But she described some conservative Muslims as enemies of freedom and said that those who do not integrate pose a risk to German culture.

She generally dismisses the criticism by fellow gays and lesbians.

I was labeled by a gay magazine as the most dangerous homosexual in Germany, Weidel said. I called up my partner and said, In Germany, especially in Berlin, we cannot show up at gay parties anymore. She was like, Weve never done that, and we wont do that, so I have no problem.

James McAuley in Paris, Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin and Annabell Van den Berghe in Brussels contributed to this report.

Read more

A Trump bump to reorder European politics? Not so fast.

Ahead of pivotal European elections, rightist websites grow in influence

The rise of Trump has led to an unexpected twist in Germanys election: A resurgent left

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
Security researchers have found digital clues in the malware used in last weekends global ransomware attack that might indicate North Korea is involved, although they caution the evidence is not conclusive.

An early version of the WannaCry ransomware that affected more than 150 countries and major businesses and organizations shares a portion of its code with a tool from a hacker group known as Lazarus, which researchers think is linked to the North Korean government.

This implies there is a common source for that code, which could mean that North Korean actors wrote Wannacry or they both used the same third-party code, said John Bambenek, threat research manager at Fidelis Cybersecurity.

White House homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert said Monday that investigators were still working to determine who was behind the attack, which infects computers with a virus that encrypted data and is accompanied by a demand that victims pay a ransom to decrypt it. Thats the attribution that were after right now, he said at a White House briefing. It will be very satisfying for me and for all of our viewers, I think, that if we find them that we bring them to justice. . . . I dont want to say we have no clues. . . . The best and the brightest are working on that.

Several security researchers studying WannaCry on Monday found evidence of possible connections to, for instance, the crippling hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 attributed by the U.S. government to North Korea. That hack occurred in the weeks before Sony released a satiric movie about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

(Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

A Google security researcher tweeted a small bit of computer code Monday afternoon that highlighted similarities between that attack and an earlier version of WannaCry. The attack was first reported Friday and has hobbled hundreds of thousands of computers by encrypting data on the machines. The hackers offer to unlock the data for bitcoin payments of $300.

Software company Symantec, maker of popular security software, published a blog post also pointing to the possible connections, writing, While these findings do not indicate a definite link between Lazarus and WannaCry, we believe that there are sufficient connections to warrant further investigation.

Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm, also pointed to similar links, writing, We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack.

However, Bambenek cautioned that the links are circumstantial. It could be a freak coincidence, he said. The code in question is not a large portion of the overall Wannacry malware so its plausible that the attackers got it from somewhere else.

The irony, he noted, is that the ransomware attack was enabled by a leak of National Security Agency hacking tools. The similar could be true here  that this stuff leaked out from North Korea, but it just hasnt been found yet, he said.

[Putin blames U.S. cyberspies for developing leaked virus]

Global markets appeared to largely avoid problems Monday amid worries of digital chaos in the wake of the attack.

The spread of the WannaCry virus has slowed as new cyberdefenses have been put in place, but the malware still found its way into hundreds of thousands more computers while businesses and governments assessed the damage and planned their next moves.

Few problems were reported on stock exchanges and other financial systems Monday. Asian stock markets rose, probably on news of higher oil prices and a new Chinese government spending plan  sending some exchanges to two-year highs.

In Europe, stock markets were generally flat, but no serious hacker-linked disruptions were reported in early trading. Wall Street exchanges closed slightly higher. Among the hot stocks were firms selling online protection services.

In Japan, the governments Computer Emergency Response Team said as many as 2,000 computers at 600 companies were affected by the ransomware, and the government set up a new crisis management office to deal with cyberterrorism.

Chinas state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that the virus infiltrated a range of networks, including railway operations, mail delivery, hospitals and government offices.

In France, automaker Renault said one of its plants was closed Monday as a preventive step while engineers looked at the fallout from the cyberattack.

[New hacking tools breed new fears and defenses]

The virus has mainly infiltrated systems in Europe  particularly Britains health-care network on Friday  but financial exchanges were closely watched in the first full trading day since the malware surfaced.

Some eight to 10 U.S. entities, including a few in the health-care sector, reported possible Wannacry infections to the Department of Homeland Security, a U.S. official said. But none reported that they had data encrypted or that they suffered significant disruptions.

Bossert said Monday that the situation was under control at the moment in the United States.

We are continuing to monitor the situation around clock . . . bringing all the capabilities of the U.S. government to bear, he said, adding that as of Monday, no federal systems were affected.

While factories, hospitals and schools were disrupted in China by the attack, the spread of the virus appeared to be slowing. State media said 29,000 institutions had been hit, along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

The growth rate of infected institutions on Monday has slowed significantly compared to the previous two days, said Chinese Internet security company Qihoo 360, according to Reuters. Previous concerns of a wide-scale infection of domestic institutions did not eventuate.

South Korea reported that just five companies were affected, including the countrys largest movie chain. In response, the Korea Internet and Security Agency in Seoul raised its warning level to 3, or cautious, on a scale of 1 to 5.

In the South Korean city of Asan, an electronic panel meant to show bus arrival times instead displayed a message demanding bitcoin payment. The CGV movie chain, South Koreas largest, said that about 50 of its theater complexes were attacked by the ransomware but that films were still running as scheduled.

Researchers discovered a kill switch on the virus that stopped its spread from computer to computer, potentially saving tens of thousands of machines from further infection. There were fears, however, that new versions of the worm, without this vulnerability, could eventually be released.

The worm took advantage of a vulnerability in Microsofts Windows operating system. Although the flaw has been patched by the company, not all users had applied the update.

The vulnerability exploited by the ransomware is believed to have been first identified by the U.S. National Security Agency and later leaked online.

The ransomware program, which is spread through email, encrypts computer files and then demands the bitcoin equivalent $300 to unlock them.

The attack hobbled operations at Russias Interior Ministry, Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica and Britains National Health Service.

Speaking at a news conference after an economic conference in China, Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalists that Russia had nothing to do with the WannaCry virus.

With regard to the source of these threats, then I believe that Microsoft has spoken directly about this, Putin said. They said that the first sources of this virus were the United States intelligence agencies. Russia has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Brian Murphy in Washington, Anna Fifield in Tokyo and Andrew Roth in Moscow contributed to this report.

Read more:

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, newly designated new leader of the People's Party , talks to journalists in Vienna on May 15. (Leonhard Foeger/Reuters)

Austria appeared headed Monday toward early elections after a breakdown of its coalition government, potentially paving a path to power for the far-right Freedom Party.

The turn of events adds to Europes already crammed election season while setting up the European far rights best chance for a victory this year after losses in the Netherlands and France.

On Monday, senior Austrian officials were locked in meetings in Vienna, negotiating the timing of new elections after the ruling coalition, made up of the center-left Social Democrats and the center-right Peoples Party, found itself at a political impasse. Though the coalition was set to govern until 2018, an early vote is now expected no later than autumn.

Austrias anti-Islam, anti-migrant Freedom Party is topping some key opinion polls.

The people are so fed up with the grand coalition that they prefer anything else, said Peter Hajek, a Vienna-based political scientist.

[Austrian nationalists hope for a Trump bump]

In recent weeks, the alliance between the Social Democrats and the Peoples Party has frayed amid infighting that deepened markedly last week with the resignation of Reinhold Mitterlehner, former chief of the Peoples Party. The Social Democrats and their junior partners, the Peoples Party, have argued over a batch of measures, holding up major decisions on education and tax policy.

Meanwhile, the Peoples Party has been in the throes of a leadership upheaval that resulted in the crowning Sunday of a new chairman: Sebastian Kurz, a 30-year-old rising star who has been serving as Austrias foreign minister.

Kurz has taken a sharp anti-refugee stance in recent months, currying favor with harder-right elements in Austria while also managing to sidestep the aggressive tone of the Freedom Party. Though his Peoples Party polls in third place overall, Kurz is widely seen as Austrias most popular politician.

When taking over the top job Monday, he won significant concessions for new powers from his party elders  including the right to rename it the New Peoples Party on election ballots. Soon after winning, Kurz reiterated his call for early elections.

[Austrian president suggests women wear headscarves to fight Islamophobia]

After Kurzs elevation, Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern of the Social Democrats conceded Sunday that there was no way to prevent a snap vote.

On Monday, Kern said he was aiming for an orderly process toward an early vote and expressed hope that a few initiatives on the government's agenda could still be pushed through before and during the summer.

Kern said he would like to see Kurz become vice chancellor. Even if he does, it appears that such a deal would simply create a placeholder cabinet that would usher in new elections.

Before deciding on taking the job, Kurz told reporters Monday that in my opinion, it's necessary to first agree on a date for new elections.

Given the distribution of public support for Austrias various parties, a coalition between at least two parties appears almost inevitable. The Freedom Party might actually be hurt by Kurzs rise, analysts say, suggesting that he may poach some of its traditional voters. Nevertheless, the Freedom Party still has a good shot of being asked to help form a new government with Kurzs Peoples Party, or possibly even the Social Democrats.

[Defeat of far-right Austrian presidential candidate boosts E.U.]

Both mainstream parties campaigned last year against the Freedom Partys Norbert Hofer, who narrowly lost his bid for the ceremonial post of president. Ever since, both parties, already shifting to the right, have begun to sound even more like the Freedom Party on a number of key issues, particularly on immigrants. And neither party appears to be explicitly excluding the possibility of a coalition government with the Freedom Party.

The last time the Freedom Party formed part of the government  in the 2000s  the coalition was considered a failure, leading to a fissure among the partys supporters. But since Hofers loss, the Freedom Party has moderated its stance on a number of issues. For instance, it has backed off suggestions that it might seek a referendum on leaving the European Union similar to one held last year in Britain.

Read more:

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Protesters hold signs and march outside the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., where judges heard arguments on President Trumps travel ban last week. A different court  the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals  will take up another challenge Monday. (Steve Helber/AP)

A federal appeals court that President Trump has frequently criticized is to hear arguments Monday on whether to restore his controversial travel ban  a significant step in the legal battle that has prevented Trump from implementing one of his signature initiatives on immigration.

A three-judge panel with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit will join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in deciding whether Trump ran afoul of the Constitution when he tried to temporarily shut down the U.S. refugee program and suspend the issuance of new visas to residents of six Muslim-majority countries.

The 9th Circuit blocked Trumps first travel ban, and now a different set of judges on the panel will weigh a revised version.

The 4th Circuit, which is based in Richmond, heard arguments on the matter last week.

[All the times Trump personally attacked judges  and why his tirades are worse than wrong]

The views of each side are familiar by now. Those challenging the ban say it is unconstitutional and motivated by Trumps desire to discriminate against Muslims, and they point to Trumps comments and those of his advisers as evidence to prove their case. The Justice Department argues that the executive order is well within the presidents power, and that lower courts have been wrong to second-guess him on a matter of national security.

Last week, a federal judge in Michigan ordered the Trump administration to turn over communications from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other advisers  whose comments judges nationwide have pointed to as they have ordered to freeze the ban. That case is separate from the two that have put Trumps latest ban on hold.

U.S. district judges in Hawaii and Maryland have ordered key sections of the presidents order frozen, and to fully reinstate the measure, the Justice Department would have to win in both the 4th and 9th circuits  or escalate the dispute to the Supreme Court.

The three judges considering the matter in the 9th Circuit  Michael Daly Hawkins, Ronald M. Gould and Richard A. Paez  were appointed by President Bill Clinton. The 4th Circuit heard the case with all its judges, a step the 9th Circuit declined to take.

[President Trumps lawyers on revised travel ban repeatedly asked about campaign promises]

Trump has not been shy about criticizing judges who rule against him, but he seems to have particular ire for the 9th Circuit. When U.S. District Judge William Orrick blocked his executive order on stripping federal funding from sanctuary cities, Trump incorrectly attributed the decision to the 9th Circuit as he wrote on Twitter, First the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban & now it hits again on sanctuary cities  both ridiculous rulings. See you in the Supreme Court! Orrick is a lower-court judge whose rulings would be reviewed by the 9th Circuit.

Trump then wrote that the circuit had a terrible record of being overturned  a claim that is highly debatable  and he said later that he had absolutely considered breaking up the court.

The arguments are scheduled to begin at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time (9:30 a.m. in Seattle).
(The Washington Post)

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trumps disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trumps decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trumps meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

This is code-word information, said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.

(Bastien Inzaurralde,Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

[Lawmakers express shock and concern about Trump disclosure of classified information]

The revelation comes as the president faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI Director James B. Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trumps subsequent admission that his decision was driven by this Russia thing was seen by critics as attempted obstruction of justice.

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak  a key figure in earlier Russia controversies  into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

For almost anyone in government, discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.

White House officials involved in the meeting said Trump discussed only shared concerns about terrorism.

The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation, said H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, who participated in the meeting. At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.

McMaster reiterated his statement in a subsequent appearance at the White House on Monday and described the Washington Post story as false, but did not take any questions.

In their statements, White House officials emphasized that Trump had not discussed specific intelligence sources and methods, rather than addressing whether he had disclosed information drawn from sensitive sources.

The CIA declined to comment, and the NSA did not respond to requests for comment.

But officials expressed concern about Trumps handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into the Islamic State, they said, could hinder the United States and its allies ability to detect future threats.

[On Russia, Trump and his top national security aides seem to be at odds]

It is all kind of shocking, said a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials. Trump seems to be very reckless and doesnt grasp the gravity of the things hes dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And its all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day, the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic States territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

(The Washington Post)

The Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive, and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling, said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russias presence in Syria. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and perhaps disrupting it.

[Political chaos in Washington is a return on investment in Moscow]

Russia and the United States both regard the Islamic State as an enemy and share limited information about terrorist threats. But the two nations have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia could identify our sources or techniques, the senior U.S. official said.

A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, I dont think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.

At a more fundamental level, the information wasnt the United States to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments  and even individual agencies  are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated, even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.

The officials declined to identify the ally but said it has previously voiced frustration with Washingtons inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.

If that partner learned wed given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first, that is a blow to that relationship, the U.S. official said.

Trump also described measures the United States has taken or is contemplating to counter the threat, including military operations in Iraq and Syria, as well as other steps to tighten security, officials said.

The officials would not discuss details of those measures, but the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed that it is considering banning laptops and other large electronic devices from carry-on bags on flights between Europe and the United States. The United States and Britain imposed a similar ban in March affecting travelers passing through airports in 10 Muslim-majority countries.

Trump cast the countermeasures in wistful terms. Can you believe the world we live in today? he said, according to one official. Isnt it crazy?

Lavrov and Kislyak were also accompanied by aides.

A Russian photographer took photos of part of the session that were released by the Russian state-owned Tass news agency. No U.S. news organization was allowed to attend any part of the meeting.

Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout. Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, the services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.

One of Bosserts subordinates also called for the problematic portion of Trumps discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients, efforts to prevent sensitive details from being disseminated further or leaked.

White House officials defended Trump. This story is false, said Dina Powell, deputy national security adviser for strategy. The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced.

But officials could not explain why staff members nevertheless felt it necessary to alert the CIA and the NSA.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said he would rather comment on the revelations in the Post story after I know a little bit more about it, but added: Obviously, they are in a downward spiral right now and have got to figure out a way to come to grips with all thats happening. And the shame of it is, theres a really good national security team in place.

Corker also said, The chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline is creating an environment that I think makes  it creates a worrisome environment.

Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian prime minister earlier this year. He has also faced criticism for seemingly lax attention to security at his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders, but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points  and often ignores those.

He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it, and that has big downsides, the second former official said. Does he understand whats classified and whats not? Thats what worries me.

Lavrovs reaction to the Trump disclosures was muted, officials said, calling for the United States to work more closely with Moscow on fighting terrorism.

Kislyak has figured prominently in damaging stories about the Trump administrations ties to Russia. Trumps first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign just 24 days into the job over his contacts with Kislyak and his misleading statements about them. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from matters related to the FBIs Russia investigation after it was revealed that he had met and spoke with Kislyak, despite denying any contact with Russian officials during his confirmation hearing.

Im sure Kislyak was able to fire off a good cable back to the Kremlin with all the details he gleaned from Trump, said the former U.S. official who handled intelligence on Russia.

The White House readout of the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak made no mention of the discussion of a terrorist threat.

Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria, the summary said. The president also raised Ukraine and emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.

Julie Tate and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

Read more:

Trumps new Russia expert wrote a psychological profile of Vladimir Putin  and it should scare Trump

On the campaign trail, Trump was very worried about revealing Americas secrets

Presence of Russian photographer in Oval Office raises alarms
The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium at its notorious Sednaya military prison near Damascus to clandestinely dispose of the bodies of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, the State Department said Monday.

Thousands of executed detainees have been dumped in mass graves in recent years, said acting assistant secretary of state Stuart Jones. What were assessing is that if you have that level of production of mass murder, then using the crematorium would . . . allow the regime to manage that number of corpses . . . without evidence.

We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison, he said in a briefing for reporters.

The Syrian regime, Jones said, has treated opposition forces and unarmed civilians as one and the same, continuing to systematically abduct and torture civilian detainees, often beating, electrocuting and raping these victims, and authorizing the extrajudicial killings of thousands.

The State Department distributed satellite photographs it said documented the gradual construction of the facility outside the main prison complex and its apparent use this year. Jones said that newly declassified information on this and other atrocities by the government of President Bashar al-Assad came from intelligence community assessments, as well as from nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and the media.





These atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran, Assads main backers, Jones said. Neither government commented on the new U.S. allegation.

[How a woman in England tracks civilian deaths in Syria, one bomb at a time]

Accusations of mass murder and incinerated bodies, evoking the Holocaust, contrasted with last weeks Washington visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. They were pictured shaking hands and broadly smiling with President Trump before an Oval Office meeting in which discussions centered on Syria.

The Russians also met with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Jones said the release of new intelligence comes at an opportune time to remind people about the atrocities that are being carried out inside of Syria all the time.

The newly released information included a satellite photo of the snow-covered Sednaya complex with an L-shaped building labeled probable crematorium. Assessment of the facility, Jones said, included the presence of the discharge stack, the probable firewall, the probable air intake  this is in the construction phase  this would be consistent if they were building a crematorium. In a photo taken Jan. 15, he said, were look[ing] at snowmelt on the roof that would be consistent with a crematorium.

Jones said the information had not been shared with the Russians. He also said he was not suggesting that either Russia or Iran was involved with the facility.

But Tillerson, he said, was firm and clear with Minister Lavrov. Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad. A key point that took place in that bilateral meeting was telling Russia to use its power to rein in the regime.

The regime must stop all attacks on civilians and opposition forces, and Russia must bear responsibility to ensure regime compliance, Jones said.

Jones called Tillersons meeting with Lavrov productive. But I would not say that they mapped out a specific way forward on how to address the issue of Syrian atrocities, or even how to move forward on the Geneva process on the eve of the next round of years-long United Nations efforts to bring representatives of Assad and the rebels to the negotiating table, due to begin Tuesday.

One of Lavrovs principal goals in last weeks meetings was to solicit Trump administration support for a cease-fire and the establishment of safe zones within Syria as part of a May 4 pact signed by Russia, Iran and Turkey. The Turkish government has backed anti-Assad rebels in Syria along with the United States, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due to meet with Trump at the White House on Tuesday.

[U.S.-Turkish relations deeply strained ahead of Erdogans visit to White House]

Although Trump has also called for safe zones within Syria and said he discussed them early this month in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the administration more recently has been publicly lukewarm about the Russia-led plan.

In light of the failures of the past cease-fire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical, Jones said. Earlier truces negotiated under the Obama administration were violated by both Syria and Russia.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump said the United States should concentrate on the fight against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and cease involvement in Syrias civil war. But he changed course last month, approving a cruise missile strike on a Syrian government air base after concluding it was used by Assad to launch a chemical weapons attack against civilians.

Jones described the continued brutality of Assad as a threat to the region, as well as to the national security interests of the United States and our allies. Asked if there is consideration of military action to destroy the crematorium, he said, Were not going to signal what we are going to do and what were not going to do.

At this point, we are talking about this evidence and bringing it forward to the international community, which we hope will put pressure on the regime to change its behavior, Jones said.

Cease-fires under the Russia-Iran-Turkey agreement, in designated parts of northwestern, central and southern Syria, have largely held in recent weeks. But violence continues on other fronts not included in the plan, and suggests that Assads forces are positioning themselves to launch an all-out assault on the largest of the safe zones, Idlib province, when the deal breaks down. If that happens, almost a million displaced civilians could find themselves caught in the crossfire between pro-government forces and an al-Qaeda-linked coalition that appears willing to fight until the end.

More than 400,000 people have died in the Syrian civil war, according to the United Nations, with at least half the entire prewar population of about 22 million now living as refugees or displaced from their homes. Many of the dead are civilians killed by government action, including, Jones said, well-documented airstrikes and artillery strikes, chemical weapons attacks, arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, starvation, sexual violence, and denial of essential services such as food, water and medical care.

According to numerous nongovernmental organizations, Jones said, the regime has abducted and detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people between 2011 and 2015, a period in which Amnesty International has said that nearly 18,000 detainees died. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated in March that at least 106,727 people were still arrested or had been forcibly disappeared.

Prisoners are held in a network of prisons across Syria. The Sednaya detention complex, run by Syrias powerful military police about 20 miles outside Damascus, is the most notorious. A recent Amnesty International report described it as a human slaughterhouse.

Jones cited multiple sources in saying that the regime is responsible for killing as many as 50 detainees per day at Sednaya, where he said up to 70 people were packed in cells designed for five. Former prisoners have described mass hangings.

[A journey into Syrias secret torture wards]

In interviews with The Washington Post, former detainees described conditions so atrocious that many prisoners died from torture, medical neglect or starvation.

Most political prisoners said they had been held in the Red Building, a facility the regime largely emptied of mostly Islamist and jihadist prisoners in the early months of the anti-Assad uprising that began in early 2011. Among those taken from the cells and hanged, former prisoners said, were students, engineers, activists and human rights lawyers.

Louisa Loveluck in Beirut contributed to this report.

Read more:

How a woman in England tracks civilian deaths in Syria, one bomb at a time

He says he went to Syria to rescue his wife from ISIS. Now he sits in prison.
Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf appears at a presidential campaign rally in Tehran on May 14. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)

Iranian presidential hopeful Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf withdrew Monday from the race to unseat the countrys moderate leader, in a move to unite conservatives behind fellow hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi in the homestretch for Fridays election.

The two candidates were the top conservative challengers to President Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatist whose government negotiated a 2015 deal with world powers to rein in Irans nuclear program in exchange for lifting international sanctions.

Ghalibaf and Raisi, who were polling neck and neck, seized on widespread discontent about the slow-growing economy. Although sanctions relief has allowed oil exports to resume, the limited growth has not greatly improved the lives of ordinary Iranians.

Ghalibaf ran on job creation and boosting cash subsidies. But his withdrawal Monday solidified Raisis status as the front-runner for conservatives, who have struggled in past elections to coalesce around one candidate.

Recent polls showed Rouhani with a comfortable lead over Raisi, but such surveys are unreliable in Iran, which limits political activity and free expression.

I ask my supporters throughout the country to use all of their potential to elect Raisi, Ghalibaf said in a statement carried by state media.

The promise of Irans 1979 Islamic revolution can only be achieved by changing the status quo, he said. He called a vote for Raisi a crucial decision to preserve the unity of the revolution.

[Rouhani issues rare criticism of security forces and ruling clerics]

Ghalibafs withdrawal was likely an orchestrated move to shore up support behind a single principlist candidate and pose a potent challenge to Rouhani, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank based in Washington. Irans hard-line conservatives are widely known as principlists.

Irans political right has been scrambling to field a single candidate who could counter Rouhanis coalition of technocrats, pragmatists and reformers, Taleblu said.

Although Rouhani is still favored to win, it is highly likely that Ghalibafs voters will flock to Raisi, Taleblu said.

Raisi, a 56-year-old Shiite cleric, has close ties to Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who last year appointed him as head of Irans largest charitable foundation, the Astan Quds Razavi. He served for years on the judiciary, including on a 1988 panel accused of sentencing thousands of political prisoners to death.

But he has limited political experience and gave weak performances in three televised presidential debates. His links to Irans powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps and hard-line ruling clerics could push undecided voters to the Rouhani camp. Rouhani, 68, is also a Shiite cleric.

So far, Raisi has received support from the shadowy corners of the Iranian security establishment, Taleblu said. But he has failed to touch off a national movement.

A survey released Monday by the official Islamic Republic News Agency said that about 67 percent of voters plan to cast ballots for president.

High voter turnout has generally favored moderate and reformist candidates in Iran. Over the weekend, Rouhani picked up endorsements from opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi and Academy Award-winning Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi.

Karroubi, a reformist candidate who led protests following the disputed 2009 presidential election, is under house arrest. Rouhani supporters chanted the names of Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, another reformist leader under house arrest, at rallies nationwide.

As a candidate in 2013, Rouhani had pledged to free Karroubi and Mousavi, as well as Mousavis wife, Zahra Rahnavard.

Read more

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In an appearance on CNBC television Monday, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger said that the US health care system is ridiculous in its complexity. Appearing alongside his fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, the 93-year-old said, The amount of waste from overtreatment of the dying is just disgusting.

While Mungers net worth of $1.43 billion makes him small fry when compared to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Buffetts $73.4 billion, he still ranks in the top 0.01 percent of the wealthiest Americans.

His comments take up a common theme in the current debate between the two big business parties on the state of health care in America today: people are living too long. They argue that manyespecially the elderlyare receiving costly and unnecessary medical treatments, health care costs are skyrocketing, and something must be done about it.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Pricean ardent opponent of Medicaid and Medicare, the government insurance programs for the poor and seniorswas asked recently in an interview on Fox News about how the House Republicans American Health Care Act (AHCA) would widen the ratio of premium prices between young and older people from the current 3:1 to 5:1, allowing insurers to charge older people drastically more.

Well, its pricing for what an individuals health status is, and thats important to appreciate, the HHS secretary remarked. Someone is going to pay for health coverage for the American people and the question is, how do you do that. Prices answer is that older peoples health insurance premiums should skyrocket simply due to the natural process of aging.

Rep. Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has another novel idea. Commenting that the AHCA would require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool, Brooks said, That helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, theyre healthy, theyve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.

In other words, a child born with a congenital heart defect, a teenager living in poverty who develops diabetes, a miner who has black lung diseaseall conditions that contribute to increased health care costsshould be punished with higher premiums, or be priced out of the insurance system altogether, because they presumably are not leading good lives.

References to overtreatment of the dying are not restricted to Republicans like Munger. Ezekiel Emanuel, a close adviser to the Obama administration and one of the key architects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is a Democrat.

Emanuel wrote in 1996 that services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

According to this rationale, health care for someone with Alzheimersthe most common form of dementia and the sixth leading cause of death in the USis yet another example of overtreating a condition that mainly affects the elderly. As the disease is ultimately fatal, and there is as yet no cure, health care experts like Emanuel reason, why squander health care dollars on elderly patients who are sure to die, sooner rather than later?

Obamas former adviser is also in agreement with Price and others who argue that in their vision of a patient-centered system, everyone should have access to health care; whether people can afford it is another question.

Emanuel wrote in 2008: We are used to being able to spend our money on what we want. If we want a fancier car, a smaller, faster computer with more memory, or a luxury vacation, we can pay the extra cost for such things and skimp somewhere else if necessary. The key is that it is our decision. And if youre out of a job and struggle to pay your rent and utility bills, you will just have to skimp on luxuries like food and health care.

As we wrote on Emanuel in 2009, before passage of the ACA: A costly treatment for metastatic colon cancer, at best prolonging life an average of twenty to thirty weeks, should not be allowed. [Emanuel] bemoans the fact that Medicare pays for two colon cancer drugsErbitux ($40,000 per patient), which can extend life for seven weeks, and Avastin ($50,000 per patient), capable of prolonging life for two to five months. [9] He does not question the astronomical prices the pharmaceutical companies charge for these drugs (emphasis added).

Billionaire Munger would agree that such drug prices are indeed ridiculous. But it is the for-profit health care system that is responsible for the soaring cost not only of medications, but of hospital stays and medical procedures. In America, private insurers make obscene profits from selling insurance policies, and pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers charge prices that bear little or no relation to the actual costs of research and development.

Obamacare is based on this for-profit model. Its key component, the individual mandate, requires people without insurance coverage from their employer or a government program to purchase it from a private insurance company or pay a tax penalty. If you are too poor to buy coverage, you can obtain a hardship waiver and have the privilege of remaining uninsured.

Like Obamacare, the Republican AHCA is based on the subordination of the health needs of the populationyoung and old, sick and healthy aliketo the profit requirements of the health care industry and the Wall Street banks that dominate the economy as a whole.

The AHCA, or whatever bill is eventually crafted and signed into law, will build on this reactionary, for-profit foundation, and skew it even more in the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the vast majority of the population. The House Republican plan guts Medicaid and would mark the effective termination of this program for the poor as an entitlement.

But the ruling elite demands that they cut deeper and remove any vestige of reform in the health care system. The AHCA would allow states to obtain waivers to strip protections for those with preexisting conditions, and would allow insurers to offer barebones plans that exclude maternity care, emergency visits, prescription drugs and other vital health services.

And they must tackle the greatest problem of all, in their view: The population is living too long. Thus come the howls from Munger and others about overtreatment of the dying. That men and women who have toiled their entire lives in factories, mines, schools and in the health care industry itselfand in many cases suffered serious health problems as a resultshould be treated with dignity and the best care available at the end of their lives is an alien concept to these reactionary minds.

Two days before taking office, Donald Trump vowed to repeal and replace Obamacare, and that people would be able to have plans that are great plans And its going to be much less expensive.

Completing the lie, he said, And well do thingsbecause there are people that cant afford it. And nobody is going to be dying on the streets with a President Trump. In fact, a 2009 study found that this is already happening at an alarming rate, with 45,000 deaths every year in the US linked to lack of health coverage.

Almost four months into Trumps presidency, it is not an exaggeration to say that not only will people be dying in the streets, but that a reduction in life expectancy for the working class is a deliberate bipartisan aim to be achieved by the withholding and rationing of health care for all but the rich.
A European tour by the Burmese (Myanmar) head of government Aung San Suu Kyi this month has been marked by shameless hypocrisy, outright lies and cover-up of the campaign by the military and nationalist thugs to terrorise the countrys Rohingya Muslim minority.

On May 2 in Brussels, the European Union headquarters, Suu Kyi, flatly rejected a fact-finding investigation mission proposed on March 24 at the annual meeting of the 47-member UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva.

The militarys campaign in Rakhine state, bordering Bangladesh, seeks to drive Rohingyas from the country. The offensive began last October after attacks, allegedly by Rohingya militants, on border posts that killed nine members of the security forces.

The clearance operation has the full backing and complicity of Suu Kyis National League for Democracy (NLD) government.

UN reports from February, based on hundreds of interviews with refugees in Bangladesh and satellite imagery, provided evidence of murders, rape, pillaging, kidnappings and the burning of whole villages. Over 70,000 Rohingya had fled the country, joining over 300,000 living in squalid camps in Bangladesh, with many more dispersed throughout South and South East Asia.

At a joint press conference with Suu Kyi, EU foreign affairs commissioner Federica Mogherini said the EU supported the UNHRC mission, saying it would the reveal the truth about the past by establishing the facts.

Standing beside Mogherini, Suu Kyi declared: We do not agree with it. We have dissociated ourselves from the resolution because we do not think it is in keeping with what is happening on the ground.

As state counsellor and foreign minister, Suu Kyi heads a hybrid government in which the NLD shares power as a junior partner with the countrys military. Both groups are mired in anti-Rohingya chauvinism that dominates the Burmese political establishment.

This coalition was established under a 2008 constitution imposed by the military junta that exercised a brutal dictatorship for over half a century. The generals continue to retain veto power over constitutional changes and exercise direct control over key state bodies, including the defence, home affairs and border security ministries.

The Brussels statement is not Suu Kyis first attempt to cover up the militarys crimes against the Rohingya. Last November, her office issued a statement that no crimes were being committed because the armed forces command said so.

On April 6, as UN reports made clear the extent of the pogrom, and international concerns increased, Suu Kyi made a rare personal statement. She told the BBC no cleansing operation was underway in the closed-off province and expressed her support for the army. They are free to go in and fight, she said, military matters are to be left to the army.

Military commander Min Aung Hlaing, who played a major role in installing Suu Kyi, made the militarys position clear in March. He said Rohingya were illegal Bengali immigrants who had no right to live in Burma.

In reality, many Rohingya families have lived in the region for generations, but have been largely denied citizenship.

Suu Kyis Brussels statement was her most explicit on an international stage. Long promoted by the Western powers as a democrat, she publicly supported the pogrom in Rakhine and rejected any international scrutiny.

Nevertheless, the European political establishment continued to fete her. Mogherini said there was one point of difference but many other issues of agreement, and other progress during the NLDs 12 months in office.

Suu Kyis trip included meetings with the Pope and Belgiums King Philippe and Prime Minister Charles Michel. She also met Britains Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles and was granted the Freedom of the City of London, the financial capital. That award cited her non-violent struggle over many years for democracy and her steadfast dedication to create a society where people can live in peace, security and freedom.

The UNHRC resolution itself proposed a watered-down investigation based on the assumption of cooperation from Burmese authorities. It was drafted as a result of direct intervention by EU diplomats at the Geneva meeting.

The UN has been complicit in covering up developments in the Rakhine region. Since 2012 the campaign against the Rohingya has continued with various levels of violence without any major UN response. The intensity of the current offensive has created a large refugee outflow, creating a regional crisis that forced the UN to act.

Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raas al-Hussein urged the Geneva meeting to at a minimum establish a Commission of Inquiry (COI), the UNs highest form of investigation, and al-Hussein spoke of a review by the International Criminal Court.

EU diplomats blocked the COI proposal, eventually settling on a more limited fact-finding mission, with the clear intention of protecting Suu Kyi. The Burmese UN ambassador rejected the plan, however.

Significant geopolitical and economic interests are involved. The Obama administration worked to bring the NLD into office to wedge Burma away from China as part of Washingtons strategy of undercutting Beijings influence in Asia. Washington took advantage of the juntas need to end Western sanctions and lessen its economic and political dependence on China.

With an eye to its own global interests, the EU jumped in to begin the lifting of sanctions. EU corporations covet Burmas largely untapped natural resources and potential as a cheap labour platform.

As part of its own machinations, Suu Kyis government has maintained a relationship with Beijing. In April, she sent Burmese President Htin Kyaw and a delegation to China to sign economic agreements and reaffirm Burmas support for the One China policy.

Beijing, in turn, promised to help the regime in its efforts to end conflicts with ethnic groups along Chinas borders and gave Burma a non-interference assurance in the Rakhine. Suu Kyi spent five days in China last August and is due to arrive again on May 14 to discuss further participation in Chinas One Belt infrastructure initiative across Eurasia.
Yesterday, a week after his victory in the runoff against neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron was inaugurated as president of France in the Elysee palace.

As he takes office, the program of Frances eighth president since World War II already faces the opposition of the vast majority of the French people. Sixty-one percent of the population says it wants to deny him the majority in the National Assembly he would need to carry out his program of militarization and imposing deep social austerity by decree, based on the previous Socialist Party (PS) governments labor law. His reactionary program has no democratic legitimacy.

The atmosphere of yesterdays ceremony resembled more that of the coronation of a monarch than of the entry into office of an elected magistrate. With the financial aristocracy hoping to use Macron and Frances perpetually renewed state of emergency to ram through its policies and crush social protest, the new president and the media were seized by the militarist and monarchist hysteria that is rapidly spreading in the ruling elite.

Macron arrived at the Elysee in an ACMAT military truck that stopped on the Champs-Elysees at the location where an Islamist murdered policeman Xavier Jugele on April 20, three days before the first round of the presidential elections. This bow to the armed services, and Macrons actions when he stopped on the Champs-Elysees, provoked boundless and absurd enthusiasm in the media.

People came up to him and sought refuge in his arms. In another epoch, the kings touched their subjects suffering from scrofula after their coronation. There is a bit of that in this, said a TV pundit on France2, while ex-Le Monde editor Eric Fottorino explained that Macron was not made of the same stuff as ordinary men: Steel mills make specialty metals. He is made of another metal.

Macron then gave a speech directed entirely to the banks, the army and the intelligence services. The French people chose hope and the spirit of conquest on May 7, he began, proceeding to sketch an imperialist foreign policy whose megalomania rivals that of the colonialists of 19th century France. We have an immense role, Macron explained, to correct all the excesses of the ways of the world. That is our calling.

He said France needs a European Union that is more efficient, more democratic, more political because it is the instrument of our power and sovereignty. I will work on this.

After hinting at the vast economic and geostrategic appetites of French imperialism, Macron said that France has doubts about itself and feels threatened. The solution he proposed was radical free market shock therapywork will be deregulated, enterprises will be supported, initiative will be encouragedtogether with the incitement of the law-and-order hysteria stoked up by Macrons PS predecessor, Francois Hollande.

Everything that makes France a safe country, where one can live without fear, will be built upon, he said. Republican secularism will be defended, our police forces, our intelligence agencies, and our armies will be reinforced and supported.

The media were overjoyed at this banal declaration by an ex-Rothschild banker that he intends to continue and intensify Hollandes unpopular policies of war and austerity. He wants to cut to the chase, enthused BFM-TV editorialist Ruth Elkrief, who praised Macrons will to make things different.

Another journalist of the 24-hour news channel could not restrain his enthusiasm: We will all remember this spectacular image of Emmanuel Macron on a military vehicle.

This type of militarist delirium is the product of a bankrupt social order. After decades of austerity, the capitalist class has nothing to offer to the workers and feels surrounded on all sides by crises for which it has no solution. The Republican salute Macron gave to Le Pen, the political descendant of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime, in his victory speech on election night reveals not only the frame of mind of French ruling circles, but the type of police state regime Macron intends to set up.

If journalists put forth visions of Macron as a king miraculously curing France of scrofula, it is because the ruling class knows it has no solution to the social crisis and is itself desperately looking for some sort of miracle that will make Hollandes right-wing, free-market agenda popular.

The election of MacronHollandes former economy minister, who never won elected office before becoming president of Francecannot, however, overcome the crisis of capitalism. It will solve nothing. By extending Hollandes discredited policy agenda, which only intensified war, unemployment and the refugee crisis, the French and European bourgeoisie will only intensify under Macron the crises they could not resolve under Hollande.

Macron is flying to Berlin today to deal with the explosive conflicts over financial policy that are tearing apart the euro zone, and, in particular, its Franco-German axis. After naming his prime minister today and the ministerial cabinet tomorrow, Macron will travel at the end of the week to Mali, a country devastated by a neocolonial war launched by Hollande in the aftermath of NATOs imperialist war in Libya in 2011.

Macron named Philippe Etienne, a former French ambassador to Germany and then Russia, to the influential position of the Elysees diplomatic councilor. This underscores the importance for Paris of the European crisis where, as Hollande admitted after NATOs decision to topple a pro-Russian government in Ukraine with a fascist putsch, there is the danger of total war with Russia, the worlds second-largest nuclear power. However, Macron is proposing a major military escalation, increasing military spending to 2 percent of GDP and bringing back the draft.

The circumstances of Macrons inauguration vindicate the call of the Parti de legalite socialiste (PES) for an active boycott of the presidential runoff between Macron and Le Pen.

The PES alone issued this call. It insisted that the critical question was to elaborate a politically independent, revolutionary perspective for the working class, to prepare for the struggles that will erupt in the aftermath of the election. It opposed those who cited the mortal dangers posed to the working class by Le Pen to justify giving support to Macron, whose militarist and authoritarian policies also pose mortal threats to the working class.

The PESs perspective contrasted sharply with the parliamentary orientation and thinly disguised support for Macron of forces such as Jean-Luc Melenchons Unsubmissive France (UF) movement and the New Anti-capitalist Party. Today, as Macron and the media work together to shift the political atmosphere far to the right, their accommodation to the medias lies that Macron was the lesser evil is starkly exposed.

What will emerge in France and internationally is a collision of revolutionary dimensions between the working class and a ruling elite set on a policy of war and dictatorship. Four million voters in France spoiled their ballots or submitted blank ballots out of opposition to both candidates, and 70 percent of the population opposed the PSs labor law when it was rammed through last year in the face of mass protests. The critical issue now is the political preparation of a revolutionary leadership in the working class to oppose the drive to dictatorship and war.
The neo-Nazi terrorist cell in the German army (Bundeswehr) is much larger than previously thought. This conclusion is based on a detailed article in the latest edition of Der Spiegel.

According to the news magazine, investigations are on-going into seven people who were allegedly involved in preparing attacks against high-profile German politicians, including former President Joachim Gauck, Justice Minister Heiko Maas (Social Democratic PartySPD) and the minister president of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow (Left Party), as well as Jewish and Muslim organisations.

Along with Franco A, Matthias F and Maximilian T, who are all in custody, the right-wing extremist circle was likely composed of at least seven people, according to information from investigators, Der Spiegel wrote. The suspects include a man who lives in the French city of Strasbourg, a lieutenant in the reserves who studies in Vienna, First Lieutenant Josef R, who, like Franco A, was stationed at the German-French barracks in Illkirch, and First Lieutenant Ralf G.

Ralf G was based at the General Field Marshall Rommel Barracks in North Rhein-Westphalia. The barracks are named after Erwin Rommel, who, as commander of the Africa Corps, was built up by Hitler as a peoples hero. Colleagues had taken note of Ralf G because of his right-wing comments. He allegedly said, Konigsberg was German, is German and will always remain German, and if the refugees on the borders at least had weapons, we could shoot at them.

There is much to suggest that Ralf G is part of a more widespread neo-Nazi network, which, like the Freikorps in the Reichswehr during the Weimar Republic, is preparing to murder politicians and suppress revolutionary unrest. According to information from Der Spiegel, Ralf G was allegedly known to Maximilian T, the suspected author of the death list. Ralf G had boasted to Maximilian T: In Illkirch, there is a group of officers prepared to commit acts of violence who are gathering weapons and munitions to be ready to fight on the right side if a civil war breaks out.

It is clear that the neo-Nazi network is present in several barracks and has been built up over many years. According to a soldier stationed in Illkirch between 2010 and 2013, a right-wing extremist network already existed shortly after the establishment of the German-French unit in Illkirch, Donaueschingen and Hammelburg. He said that no secret was made of their right-wing ideas among officers and soldiers. They chanted right-wing slogans and insulted soldiers with Eastern European roots, calling them canister heads.

The exposure of a neo-Nazi network in the army is the sharpest expression of a major shift to the right by the ruling establishment. Hardly anyone in the political establishment or the media has expressed outrage or demanded that there be consequences. Instead, what has predominated are right-wing attacks against the Defence Ministry for initially offering quasi-criticisms of the army and calling for minimal measures in response to the scandal, even as it sought to downplay the scale of the terrorist cell and its broader significance.

It is totally inappropriate and absurd to place the entire army under Wehrmacht [the name of the German army under Hitler] suspicion, former Defence Minister Volker Ruhe (Christian Democratic UnionCDU) complained in Welt am Sonntag. This amounts, he wrote, to a caricature of the army.

The chairman of the parliamentary Defence Committee, Wolfgang Hellmich (SPD), described Defence Minister Ursula Von der Leyens order to search all locations for Wehrmacht memorabilia as a hectic response. He criticised the minister for speaking of a cleansing process.

Such statements are in line with those of the far right. The chairman of the Berlin State Alternative for Germany (AfD), Georg Pazderski, described Von der Leyens searches as a threat to the internal integrity of the force. He denounced the measure as an effort to train soldiers to be yes men and informers. Von der Leyen was, he said, emerging as the armys gravedigger.

The AfDs anger was also directed at an order from Von der Leyen to stop the distribution of the current edition of the army songbook, which includes songs from the Nazi period, such as the Westerwald Song and the Tank Song. In an interview with DPA, Pazderski raged, Censoring the armys traditional songbook is paranoid. He denounced Von der Leyen for setting into motion a wave of intellectual terrorism and censorship that threatened to strip the army of its last bit of identity.

Pazderskis remarks say a great deal about the character of the army, which has, in reality, always stood in the militarist traditions of its forebears, the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht. It was initially called the New Wehrmacht and was built up by Hitlers generals and former Wehrmacht officers in the 1950s. Pazderski knows this identity very well. He was a soldier for 41 years and retired in 2012 with the rank of colonel in the general staff.

The dangerous developments in Germany confirm the warnings made by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) and the World Socialist Web Site. The return of German militarism and the systematic restructuring of the army into an interventionist force capable of waging war to uphold the interests of German imperialism around the world require the revival of the old fascistic traditions and structures. The same right-wing extremist circles that described as intellectual terrorism criticism of statements such as Hitler was not vicious (Humboldt University Professor Jorg Baberowski) are now agitating along the same lines against criticism of neo-Nazi tendencies in the army.

They are intervening so aggressively because strong antimilitarist sentiments predominate in the population. According to a poll published on Thursday evening by ARD Deutschlandtrend, Germans trust in the army is falling rapidly. While 59 percent said they had strong trust or trust in the army in July 2016, only 49 percent feel this way now. Just as many have little or no trust.

Another recent survey, conducted by the European Broadcasting Union, found that 78 percent of young people in Germany observed a rise in nationalism and thought this was a bad thing. Only 11 percent viewed growing nationalism as a positive development. Almost two-thirds of young people declared they were not ready to fight in a war. By contrast, the poll showed that more than half of young people in Europe were prepared to take part in a large uprising against those in power.
The cyberattack that hit some 200,000 computers around the world last Friday, apparently using malicious software developed by the US National Security Agency, is only expected to escalate and spread with the start of the new workweek.

The cyber weapon employed in the attack, known as WannaCrypt, has proven to be one of the most destructive and far-reaching ever. Among the targets whose computer systems were hijacked in the attack was Britains National Health Service, which was unable to access patient records and forced to cancel appointments, treatments and surgeries.

Major corporations hit include the Spanish telecom Telefonica, the French automaker Renault, the US-based delivery service Fedex and Germanys federal railway system. Among the worst affected countries were reportedly Russia, Ukraine and Japan.

The weaponized software employed in the attacks locks up files in an infected computer by encrypting them, while demanding $300 in Bitcoin (digital currency) to decrypt them and restore access.

Clearly, this kind of attack has the potential for massive social disruption and, through its attack on institutions like Britains NHS, exacting a toll in human life.

This event, among the worst global cyberattacks in history, also sheds considerable light on issues that have dominated the political life of the United States for the past 10 months, since WikiLeaks began its release of documents obtained from the hacked accounts of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clintons presidential campaign.

The content of these leaked documents exposed, on the one hand, the DNCs machinations to sabotage the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, and, on the other, the subservience of his rival, Hillary Clinton, to Wall Street through her own previously secret and lavishly paid speeches to financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.

This information, which served to discredit Clinton, the favored candidate of the US military and intelligence apparatus, was drowned out by a massive campaign by the US government and the corporate media to blame Russia for the hacking and for direct interference in the US election, i.e., by allegedly making information available to the American people that was supposed to be kept secret from them.

Ever since then, US intelligence agencies, Democratic Party leaders and the corporate media, led by the New York Times, have endlessly repeated the charge of Russian hacking, involving the personal direction of Vladimir Putin. To this day, none of these agencies or media outlets have provided any probative evidence of Russian responsibility for hacking the US election.

Among the claims made to support the allegations against Moscow was that the hacking of the Democrats was so sophisticated that it could have been carried out only by a state actor. In a campaign to demonize Russia, Moscows alleged hacking was cast as a threat to the entire planet.

Western security agencies have acknowledged that the present global cyberattackamong the worst ever of its kindis the work not of any state agency, but rather of a criminal organization. Moreover, the roots of the attack lie not in Moscow, but in Washington. The WannaCrypt malware employed in the attack is based on weaponized software developed by the NSA, code-named Eternal Blue, part of a bundle of documents and computer code stolen from the NSAs server and then leaked by a hacking group known as Shadow Brokers.

Thus, amid the hysterical propaganda campaign over Russian hacking, Washington has been developing an array of cyber-weapons that have the capability of crippling entire countries. Through the carelessness of the NSA, some of these weapons have now been placed in the hands of criminals. US authorities did nothing to warn the public, much less prepare it to protect itself against the inevitable unleashing of the cyber weapons it itself had crafted.

In its report on the global cyberattacks on Saturday, the New York Times stated: It could take months to find out who was behind the attacksa mystery that may go unsolved.

The co-author of these lines was the New York Times chief Washington correspondent David E. Sanger, who, in addition to writing for the newspaper of record, finds time to lecture at Harvards Kennedy School of Government, a state-connected finishing school for top political and military officials. He also holds membership in both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group, think tanks that bring together capitalist politicians, military and intelligence officials and corporate heads to discuss US imperialist strategy.

All of this makes Sanger one of the favorite media conduits for leaks and propaganda that the CIA and the Pentagon want put into the public domain.

It is worth contrasting his treatment of the WannaCrypt ransomware attack with the way he and the Times dealt with the allegations of Russian hacking in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election.

There was no question then of an investigation taking months to uncover the culprit, much less any mystery going unsolved. Putin and Russia were declared guilty based upon unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo. Ever since, the Times, serving as the propaganda outlet of the US intelligence services, has given the lead to the rest of the media by endlessly repeating the allegation of Russian state direction of the hacking of the Democratic Party, without bothering to provide any evidence to back up the charge.

With the entire world now under attack from a weapon forged by Washingtons cyberwarfare experts, the hysterical allegations of Russian hacking are placed in perspective.

From the beginning, they have been utilized as war propaganda, a means of attempting to promote popular support for US imperialisms steady escalation of military threats and aggression against Russia, the worlds second-largest nuclear power.

Since Trumps inauguration, the Democratic Party has only intensified the anti-Russian propaganda. It serves both as a means of pressuring the Trump administration to abandon any turn toward a less aggressive policy toward Moscow, and of smothering the popular opposition to the right-wing and anti-working class policies of the administration under a reactionary and neo-McCarthyite campaign painting Trump as an agent of the Kremlin.
The relationship between Washington and the new South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in has been put to an early test after North Korea launched a ballistic missile early Sunday morning, the same day as a Chinese-sponsored economic forum opened in Beijing. During Moons campaign, and in the week since being elected, he and his Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) have held out the prospect of talks with Pyongyang, leading to speculation that Seouls new strategy could cut across its alliance with the United States.

The Norths test fire took place at 5:27 a.m., at a site approximately 100 kilometres north of Pyongyang. This was the same location as another experimental launch, on February 12, of a Pukguksong-2 intermediate-range ballistic missile. The latest missile, which Pyongyang claimed could be fitted with a nuclear warhead, flew 700 kilometres for about 30 minutes, before falling into the Sea of Japan. Japanese officials stated it reached an altitude of over 2,000 kilometres, and suggested it could be a new type of projectile.

Underscoring the recklessness of the North Korean regimes actions, US sources have claimed the missile landed barely 100 kilometres off the coast of the Russian city of Vladivostok. CNN reported that Russia had placed its missile defence and retaliation systems into combat readiness.

Both Washington and Seoul were quick to denounce the launch. The White House called North Korea a flagrant menace. It added: Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea. The statement also stressed that the US was working closely with South Korea and Japan to maintain our ironclad commitment to stand with our allies.

While the rhetoric is in line with previous statements from Washington, it is somewhat muted compared to last months, when the Trump administration threatened military strikes on the North should it carry out another nuclear or Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) test. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told ABCs This Week program: Having a missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, because hes absolutely not going to do it. Until he [North Korean leader Kim Jong-un] meets our conditions, were not sitting down with him. She proceeded to threaten that the US would tighten the screws on Pyongyang.

While not naming Seoul, Haley again brushed aside the notion of talks with Pyongyang for the time being in a Twitter post: There are no excuses that justify N. Koreas actions. This was close to home for Russia. China cant [sic] expect dialogue. This threat is real.

Both Trump and President Moon have held out the possibility of talks with the North, but only under the right conditions. The launch could be a response to recent so-called Track 2 talks between former US officials and North Korean representatives in Norway. The Trump administration is demanding that North Korea first agrees to give up its nuclear and missile programs, before formal discussionsa price that Pyongyang appears to have indicated it considers too high.

During a session of Seouls National Security Council, Moon said: We keep our door open for dialogue with North Korea, but we must act decisively against North Korean provocations so that it will not miscalculate. He added, however: We must show that dialogue is possible when the North changes its attitude. He and the ruling DPK have long viewed the development of closer relations with Pyongyang as the means of gaining access to cheap, North Korean labor, such as at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which was closed under former president Park Geun-hye.

The situation remains unstable and unpredictable. The Trump administration, facing intense pressure from the Democratic Party and the mass media over the firing of FBI director James Comey and allegations of ties with Russia, could embark on a military adventure against North Korea to deflect from its domestic crises. A major provocation by the North, such as testing a nuclear device, could also trigger open conflict.

Chinas Foreign Ministry declared that it opposes relevant launch activities by North Korea that are contrary to Security Council resolutions, but called on all sides to show restraint and avoid a further escalation of tensions in the region.

Beijing is justifiably concerned that Washington is using each bellicose action taken by North Korea to ramp up its military presence in the region, which has included the dispatching of naval strike groups, such as that led by the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson; and the installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in South Korea. The purported threat from North Korea is also providing the rationale for the Abe government in Tokyo to accelerate the remilitarisation of Japanese imperialism.

Since Moon took office on May 10, he has emphasised the alliance with Washington as the foundation of South Koreas diplomatic and security policies. He spoke with Trump in his first phone call with a foreign leader after the election, declaring: The South Korea-US alliance is more important than at any other time, given the growing uncertainties over the security situation of the Korean Peninsula. Both sides are dispatching envoys to pave the way for a summit, with Moon planning to meet Trump in Washington at an early date.

At the same time, Moon is attempting to mend ties with China over the placement of THAAD in South Korea, which angered Beijing and led to retaliatory economic actions. These have included the closure of South Korean-owned stores in China and a decline in sales for other South Korean-owned companies.

Im aware of Chinas interests (regarding THAAD), and we should work together to understand each other better, Moon reportedly told Chinese President Xi Jinping, the second foreign leader he spoke to by phone. I hope you pay attention to our struggling companies in China. The THAAD issue would be more easily resolved only if North Korea does not stage additional provocations, he claimed, echoing Washingtons demand that Beijing put more pressure on the North.

After Moons election, the Chinese government invited a South Korean delegation to attend the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation being held Sunday and Monday. Seoul decided to send a group led by Park Byeong-seok of the ruling DPK. The two sides are expected to discuss THAAD and North Korea on the sidelines of the event. Park also reportedly spoke briefly with Kim Yong-jae, the head of Pyongyangs delegation.

There are concerns in US ruling circles that either North Korea or China could drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Jon Wolfsthal, a former senior National Security Council nonproliferation official, and Abraham Denmark, former deputy assistant secretary of defense, warned: A key part of Moons platform was to restart a policy of engagement toward North Korea that will immediately conflict with Washingtons growing desire to squeeze and isolate North Korea like never before. They advised the Trump administration to continue with its coordinated strategy with Seoul, saying that, without it, putting real pressure on Pyongyang would not be possible.

In a further sign of Washingtons militarist agenda, however, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced last Wednesday that it had established a Korea Mission Center, aimed at harnessing the full resources, capabilities, and authorities of the Agency against North Korea. Former CIA senior analyst John Nixon stated that he believed cooperation with the Souths National Intelligence Service would be very high.

US Forces Korea also recently established a new unit, the 524th Military Intelligence Battalion, aimed at gathering human intelligence on the North, supposedly through contacts, such as defectors and other high-level political figures from other countries, who have visited North Korea.

The CIAs announcement could also explain the reasons for the visit of its director, Mike Pompeo, to South Korea at the end of April. US imperialism is pushing for even more coordinated operations with the South Korean military and intelligence agencies, as it continues to prepare for the prospect of war with North Korea and, ultimately, with China.
Aaron Hernandez's fiancee Shayanna Jenkins has raised doubts over the circumstances surrounding the ex-NFL player's suicide last month, hinting at foul play despite authorities confirming the cause of death.

In a two-part interview with Dr. Phil McGraw, set to air Monday and Tuesday, Jenkins expressed doubts about what actually happened inside Hernandez's prison cell the day he was found dead.

During her Dr. Phil appearance, Jenkins said she believed the letter left behind by Hernandez "was a note of love," but way he addressed her in his final letter was unusual.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available on iOS and Android.

"I did see that it was addressed to Shay instead of you know babe or bae, the way he would refer me as - that was a little odd to me. But as far as the content, he seemed to be his loving self," she said, according to Daily Mail. When asked if the handwriting on the note belonged to Hernandez, Jenkins said: "(It) was similar, but I feel like, again, you have nothing but time in there so I feel like it's easily duplicated or could be."

Read:Aaron Hernandez Suicide Facts And Rumors

In a preview of the interview Friday, McGraw told Today that Jenkins doubted Hernandez committed suicide given he had just been acquitted of two murders and had another one on appeal.

He was very positive, so excited to come home, she told McGraw, according to Today. I spoke to him the night before and he was so, you know, Daddys going to be home, and I cant wait to sleep in bed with you guys, and I cant wait to just hold you and love you. I just know the feedback that I was getting from our last talk had nothing to do with suicidal thoughts.

While talking about her last conversation with Hernandez, Jenkins said: "I felt like we were looking so bright. We were going up a ladder to a positive direction."

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The former New England Patriots tight end, who was jailed for life without parole for the murder of Odin Lloyd, was found hanging from his prison cell window April 19 at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts.

His suicide came just days after he was acquitted of the 2012 double murder of Daniel Abreu and Safiro Furtado.

Read:Aaron Hernandez's Family May Not Get Paid By The Patriots, Report Says

During a hearing Tuesday in which Hernandezs conviction for the murder of Lloyd was vacated, his appellate attorney, John Thompson, brought up doubts about the nature of his death.

Thompson reportedly said his recent correspondence from Hernandez he expressed his interest in pursuing an appeal in the 2013 Lloyd murder case.

Hernandez's lawyer, Jose Baez, also said investigations into his death, as well as conversations with his loved ones, showed no indication he was considering suicide.

I have no indication from any conversations with Aaron or any conversations anyone has had with Aaron that weve investigated that makes that true, Baez told TMZ in April, noting that the family wasnt buying the suicide story.

I think that its such a long shot of a theory that I dont give it a shred of credibility at this point, he said.

After Hernandez's death, three handwritten notes were found next to a Bible in his cell. The notes were written to his fiancee Jenkins, his daughter Avielle and the last to his attorney Baez.

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Culiacan (Mexico) (AFP) - Friends and family have paid their final respects to slain journalist Javier Valdez, who apparently paid with his life for his award-winning reporting on the country's violent drug gangs.

Media and rights groups protested earlier Tuesday to demand the Mexican government catch the killers of the fifth and most high-profile journalist murdered this year in the country's drug-trafficking ganglands.

The front pages of major newspapers displayed portraits of the martyred Valdez, 50, an Agence France-Presse contributor who was shot dead in broad daylight on Monday in northwestern Sinaloa state.

Journalists took part in a demonstration in downtown Culiacan carrying pictures of Valdez on Tuesday.

Later on Tuesday, the same day Valdez was cremated, friends and loved ones paid their respects at a funeral service. Relatives said his ashes will be interred at a cemetery in Culiacan.

The awarding-winning journalist was one of the most prominent reporters on Mexico's deadly drug war. He had been a contributor to AFP for more than a decade.

President Enrique Pena Nieto said he had ordered "an investigation of this outrageous crime." He vowed to defend press freedom, "fundamental for our democracy."

- A wave of journalist killings -

Press rights group Articulo 19 said that was the first time Pena Nieto had reacted publicly to the recent wave of journalists' killings -- a sign of rising pressure on the president.

The killing fanned a wave of anger at the authorities, with rights groups saying corrupt officials are preventing journalists' killers from being punished.

"How long will there be killings without pity and with impunity?" said Valdez's own weekly publication, Riodoce.

"Murderous impunity," ran the headline of an editorial in La Jornada, the national daily for which Valdez worked as Sinaloa correspondent.

Some media in Sinaloa canceled their Tuesday editions in protest.

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"This wave of violence shows the state of emergency in which Mexican journalists are living," said Emmanuel Colombie, Latin American director of Reporters Without Borders.

"The Mexican government must take action proportionate to the seriousness of the situation and strengthen protection for journalists as soon as possible."

Numerous media and human rights organizations including Amnesty International called for an impartial investigation.

They accused the authorities of failing to prosecute those responsible for killing journalists in broad daylight, sometimes in front of their families.

"It has become brazen and cynical," said Ana Cristina Ruelas, Mexico director of Articulo 19, a group that defends press freedoms.

"The state is not capable of investigating properly and that is an inducement for them to keep killing journalists."

Articulo 19 says 105 journalists have been murdered and a further 23 have disappeared since 2000.

Of those cases, 99.7 percent remain unsolved, meaning the culprits have gone unpunished, it says.

- Risking his life -

Valdez had written extensively for Mexican newspapers.

"Being a journalist is like being on a black list," he wrote in a recent book about drug gangs and the media.

"Even though you may have bulletproofing and bodyguards, (the gangs) will decide what day they are going to kill you."

His last contribution to AFP was 11 days ago, about the extradition to the United States of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, former head of the notorious Sinaloa cartel.

Valdez's brother Rafael said the reporter had been "very happy" in recent days and had not indicated having received threats.

"He was very reserved when it came to his work. He never talked about it so as not to drag people into it," Rafael Valdez told AFP.

"I asked him why he risked his life (for his work) and he replied: 'It is something I like doing, and someone has to do it. You have to fight to change things.'"

Mexico ranks third in the world for the number of journalists killed, after Syria and Afghanistan, according to media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez went to dinner on Mothers Day evening. (TMZ)

Last week, when the list of guests for Derek Jeters number retirement ceremony was released by the New York Yankees, there was one noticeable omission. Can you guess who was missing from the list?

If you guessed Alex Rodriguez, youre correct! His name wasnt on the list, meaning he wouldnt be attending the Derek Jeter Day festivities. Despite A-Rods role on the Yankees during the Jeter years, the relationship between the two isnt great. In fact, a recent interview between the two of them was so aggressively awkward that it went viral. (And the report that Jeter was hopping mad at having to do an interview with him only fanned the flames of discord.)

[Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Baseball contest now]

So what would Alex Rodriguez be doing on Derek Jeter Day if he wasnt going to be celebrating Derek Jeter at Yankee Stadium? Since the ceremony fell on Mothers Day, A-Rods publicist said that hed be in Miami spending the day with his mother.

But according to TMZ, thats not what he did. Instead of spending the day with his mother or paying his respects to The Captain, they found Alex Rodriguez taking his girlfriend Jennifer Lopez out to dinner in New York on Sunday evening. And TMZs tone about the whole thing was very HOW DARE HE!!

But TMZ jumped the gun somewhat, forgetting that airplanes exist and make routine flights between Miami and New York City. Because while A-Rod was caught taking his girlfriend out to dinner on Sunday evening, that doesnt mean he wasnt doing something else in another location on Sunday morning.

And, in fact, he was doing something else in another location on Sunday morning. A-Rods publicist updated TMZ on Sunday night, showing that A-Rod was true to his word. He spent the morning in Miami celebrating Mothers Day with his own mother and members of his family. And TMZ could have figured this out by looking at A-Rods Instagram, where he posted a picture of his family celebrating Mothers Day.

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Mami, Gracias por todos los sacrificios que has hecho durante nuestra vida, para nosotros, tus hijos. Te quiero mucho. #HappyMothersDay #FelicidadesMama #Family #Familia A post shared by Alex Rodriguez (@arod) on May 14, 2017 at 9:47am PDT

And then he flew to New York that evening to take his girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, out to dinner.

Before they got the update from A-Rods publicist, TMZ said this is a bad look for Alex. But is it? Granted, they were reacting under the assumption that A-Rod had lied about spending Mothers Day in Miami, but shouldnt Alex Rodriguez get to do whatever he wants? He and Jeter dont seem to have a good relationship anymore, and being there would only be incredibly weird for everyone involved. The awkward conversations, the awkward questions, it would have made the day about the A-Rod/Jeter relationship instead about Jeter himself.

Given all the complications, it was probably a wise decision for A-Rod to not attend Derek Jeter Day. And instead, he decided to do relatively normal things: spend time with his mother and take his girlfriend out to dinner. Its not like he attended a meeting of the I Hate Derek Jeter Club. But if he had, that would be worth writing home about.

     

Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher

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Ricky Whittle as Shadow Moon and Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday in Starzs American Gods. (Photo: Starz)

Warning: This recap for the Head Full of Snow episode of American Gods contains spoilers.

What is belief? What does it take to believe? Shadow finds himself drawn into a world that is not the reality that any of us know. How much proof would you need to believe you could call down snow? Think of it like love, says Mr. Wednesday. Shadow didnt believe in love until Laura. So you didnt believe until you did, then the world changed because you believed. American Gods is a kaleidoscope of beliefs, offering a prismatic spectrum of fantasy and philosophy. But it also has interesting things to say about how and why we do the things that we do  which makes the show much more than a simple light show.

The plot

Shadow meets the third sister, Zorya Polunochnaya (Erika Carr), who plucks the moon from the sky to protect him  in the form of a silver dollar. He challenges Czernobog (Peter Stormare) to another checkers match, which he wins; Czernobog still gets a swing of the hammer, but only after he helps Mr. Wednesday. Shadow and Wednesday then pull a con outside of a bank. Wednesday tells his bodyguard to think hard of snow; as the old man makes signs and business cards, snow begins to fall. He puts up an out of order sign on the ATM and pretends to be a security guard taking after-hours deposits. When a police officer calls the guards supervisor, Shadow answers to make the scam seem real. They run into Mad Sweeney, who demands the return of the coin he gave Shadow. Shadow tells him he left it on Lauras grave, but when the leprechaun digs up her coffin, she is missing. Shes waiting in Shadows hotel room.

Tales of the gods

Anubis (Chris Obi)  the jackal-headed god who weighs peoples hearts before sending them on to the underworld  takes a woman who has died in her apartment in Queens. He balances her heart with a feather (It was a very heavy feather. We had it made special, he says in the book), and she is allowed to choose her doorway into the afterlife. A Jinn (Mousa Kraish) says he doesnt grant wishes, but he somehow manages to give a struggling salesman (Omid Abtahi) the things he wanted most.

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A1 Security Services

Game of Thrones is a wonderful show, but theres never been much room for lightheartedness. American Gods turns on a dime from self-serious gods musing on the nature of goodness and death to a doddering old man  complete with music that could have been pulled right out of Curb Your Enthusiasm  swindling folks of their cash with a con that must be as old as banks themselves. Is there another show on TV now that can move between comedy and tragedy so deftly?

Sex and violence

Reading Neil Gaimans version in print feels like a dream, to use Shadows own words. Everything  including Shadow himself  feels a little disconnected from reality in a way that makes the gods feel more real than people. By contrast, the TV version feels lurid, as if everything is bathed in neon lights. When there is violence, the blood comes in gouts. When there is sex, it is both graphic and poetic. Everything is turned up, even the little things. In the book, Zorya Polunochnaya only kisses Shadows eyelids and Wednesdays overtures to Zorya Vechernyaya are much more subdued; here both circumstances are more carnal and forward. Surprisingly, it all still feels true to the spirit of the book. Its like reading an old favorite with a slick new font.

Pablo Schreiber as Mad Sweeney in Starzs American Gods. (Photo: Starz)

From page to screen

Pablo Schreiber does an amazing job as the sad-sack leprechaun, and its clear why the showrunners decided they wanted to see more of him. In the book, he appears once near the beginning and once halfway through. In between, things go very badly for him, but were never given specifics. Here well get to enjoy much more of his awful run of bad luck.

The music

St. James Infirmary Blues  like In the Pines from the first episode  is another traditional folk song (with its roots going back possibly more than 200 years) that is best known in its incarnation as a blues song from the early 20th century. Again the shows composer recorded a version with Mark Lanegan on vocals for American Gods. Though the lyrics seem to be referring to a dying or dead woman  the song is accompanied by Shadows first sight of his dead(ish) wife, Laura  the song is about the dying wishes of a man whos lived a poor life of gambling and drinking. So it might also be about Shadow himself, who is a dead man walking, having promised his head to Czernobog when all is said and done.

Godly thoughts

Zorya Polunochnayas comment about kissing  Disgusting. But in a nice way. Like bleu cheese. Or brandy  feels like vintage Gaiman. Compare that to a line from an episode of Doctor Who he wrote a few years back: Bitings excellent! Its like kissing, only theres a winner. Both suggest making out with Gaiman would be quite the adventure.

Add Scott Thompson (The Kids in the Hall) to the growing list of comedians to be found populating this show. The next episode will provide our first glimpse of Dane Cook as the man Laura was cheating on Shadow with.

American Gods airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Starz.

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The Syrian military interrogators threat was blunt and chilling.

Youll see how well force you to confess, the interrogator told Mazen Alhummada, a human rights activist, after he was arrested while sipping tea at a cafe in March 2012 and taken to one of President Bashar Assads most notorious prisons, the detention facility at Messe Military Airport outside of Damascus.

In a powerful new film, Syrias Disappeared: The Case against Assad, Alhummada describes in stomach-turning detail what happened next.

They brought a clamp and it has a handle that hed put around the penis, Alhummada says. Of course, after stripping you of underwear and you remain naked as God created you. And he put the clamp and started tightening and tightening and tightening, squeezing your penis until you feel like hes going to cut [it] off.  And a man from behind puts a pole up your anus and is hitting you like this.  The human brain cant imagine it.

Mazen Alhummada, a human rights activist who was detained and tortured in Syria. (Screen capture from Syrias Disappeared: The Case Against Assad)

Unimaginable, but as Syrias Disappeared argues, all too real under the Assad regime. The film, the work of former BBC producers Sara Afshar and Nicola Cutcher, methodically documents the brutality of the Assad government, its crackdown on democratic protests during the Arab Spring of 2011 and its jailing of activists like Alhummada. It includes gripping firsthand testimony from some of the victims about what happened to them, and haunting images  some never seen before  by a former regime photographer, code-named Caesar, who worked inside Syrian government prisons.

These are torture chambers  full stop, says Stephen Rapp, President Obamas former ambassador for global criminal justice and war crimes, who is prominently featured in the film. When I finally gained access to the images, in April 2014, and sat at the computer and went through them one after another  its like pictures of hell. The most excruciating, painful sort of things you can imagine  eyes gouged. You also see pain on the face, the frozen images of the last moments of life.

Story continues

The photographs, which show rows of emaciated, brutally beaten bodies, have been compared to images from Nazi concentration camps, and have been displayed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. And they are what moved Afshar and Cutcher to make the film.

When she first saw the photographs, I was really shocked, Afshar, the director, said in an interview with Yahoo News. I thought they would make a huge impact in terms of people talking about this evidence of mass atrocities.

Caesar, the man credited with smuggling 50,000 photos said to document Syrian government atrocities (disguised in a hooded blue jacket). (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

But the timing wasnt right. In 2014 it was the rise of ISIS that dominated world attention. The photographer, Caesar, who defected from the regime and smuggled the photographs out, testified before a House committee (wearing a hood), expecting the photos would shock the worlds conscience and mobilize the international community to bring Assads government to justice.

But nothing happened. Obama, who had rejected proposals to arm moderate Syrian rebels and stepped back from retaliating against Assad over a chemical weapons attack the year before, focused his attention elsewhere, ordering U.S. airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.

Rapp, for his part, remains disappointed that the president he served did not do more to step up the pressure on Assad when it might have made a difference. I believe we should have done more militarily to make Assad pay a price for these crimes, Rapp said in the interview with Yahoo News. I wish we would have been more robust, and I was disappointed, frankly, by that.

But Rapp said he is proud that his office at the State Department did begin the process of documenting the Syrian regimes abuses, including arranging for the FBI to examine and authenticate the Caesar photos. The bureau concluded in a report that the photos showed no signs of manipulation and appeared to depict real events.

The FBI conclusion would appear to refute the Syrian governments claim that the photos were doctored, but it didnt faze Assad. The film includes an excerpt from this reporters interview with Assad for Yahoo News in February, when he was confronted with copies of the photos and the FBI report. Its just propaganda, its just fake news, they want to demonize the Syrian government, Assad said. In every war, you can have any individual crime. It happened here, all over the world, anywhere, but its not a policy.

But Rapp, who has prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, has a different take. He is now working with Spanish lawyers and a German prosecutor to bring court cases, based on the Caesar photos and the testimony of witnesses like Alhummada, charging senior Syrian officials with war crimes and human rights abuses. And while getting those officials into foreign courts is a challenge, he is convinced that the evidence is overwhelming  as strong, he says, as he has ever seen.

Youve got facilities there that are part of the regime, under the control of the president, he says in the film. So they cant say, Oh, it was a bunch of crazy thugs that were doing it and we were against that, we wanted people treated humanely, but boys will be boys, we just didnt know. Well, now they know, and theyre not doing anything about it, not punishing a single soul!

So you then have a case under international law of so-called command responsibility that makes commanders responsible if they know and they dont do anything. You dont even need to prove they gave an order. Its enough! So this makes this, you know, the legal equivalent of a slam-dunk.

But whether Rapp and his colleagues will ever be able to successfully bring such a case is far from clear  at least as long as Assad remains in power. Even assuming international arrest warrants are ever issued, no Syrian official responsible for the regimes crimes is likely to leave Syria, he acknowledges. And Russia, Assads chief ally, has vetoed a Security Council resolution to refer the Syria case to the International Criminal Court.

Alhummada (Screen capture from Syrias Disappeared: The Case Against Assad)

But Afshar and Cutcher hope their film will stir the international community into action. Afshar was mildly encouraged when President Trump responded to Assads more recent use of chemical weapons with a Tomahawk missile strike  a step Obama never took.

Id really like President Trump to watch the film  and to see the Caesar photos and to hear the testimonies of [Alhummada and others depicted in the film].  It should be heard by everybody at the highest levels in America and all around the world.  This is happening on all our watches. We all have to take responsibility and then decide what we need to do as individuals to stop these atrocities.

There will be a screening of Syrias Disappeared at the United Nations Association in New York on Tuesday, May 16, UNA-NY: Events.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:
By Francois Murphy VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria's youthful foreign minister took over as leader of the country's main conservative party on Sunday and called for a snap parliamentary election that center-left Chancellor Christian Kern admitted he could not prevent. Kern's Social Democrats (SPO) and Sebastian Kurz's conservative People's Party (OVP) are coalition partners and have dominated Austrian politics for decades, but are now at daggers drawn. An early election would give the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), currently leading in opinion polls, a good chance of entering national government less than a year after its candidate lost a presidential runoff. However, some surveys have suggested the OVP would leap from third to first place if the 30-year-old Kurz, who takes a tough stance on immigration, became its leader. Forming a government in Austria usually requires at least two parties. "There will definitely ... be an election, I assume in the coming autumn," Kern told ORF TV. He had resisted the idea of a snap election, calling for the coalition to keep working until its term ends in more than a year's time. Hours later, the OVP leadership appointed Kurz as their leader and also handed him sweeping new powers including the ability to pick the party's list of candidates for parliament. Kurz told a news conference he would meet the chancellor on Monday and suggest they jointly propose a parliamentary election be held after the summer. A spokeswoman for Kern said the chancellor was unaware of any meeting with Kurz on Monday. Kurz is a star of Austrian politics and widely seen as his party's best hope of reviving its fortunes. The previous OVP leader, Reinhold Mitterlehner, quit on Wednesday after failing to stop in-fighting among his ministers. MACRON-STYLE Kurz plans to include people from outside the OVP in the party's list of candidates, which would carry his name and that of the "New People's Party" - a striking power grab in a country of consensus-driven politics. The move also carries echoes of new French President Emmanuel Macron's novice-heavy list of parliamentary candidates. "We have decided that we are starting a movement, that we are relying on valued forces within the People's Party but at the same time bringing new people on board," Kurz told a news conference on Sunday evening, declining to provide names. Calling a snap election requires a majority in parliament. The FPO supports the idea -- it and the OVP are three seats short of a majority. Kern, who took over as chancellor and SPO leader only a year ago, accused the OVP and Kurz of failing to honor a commitment they made in January to a package of measures aimed at breathing new life into their coalition and eroding support for the FPO. But that package failed to put an end to the squabbling that has marred the centrist coalition. "It was the case from the first day onwards that there was a group within the OVP that wanted to work with us (Social Democrats) constructively ... and then there were some who were less interested in this government succeeding. They have now prevailed within the OVP," Kern said. The package included a series of law-and-order measures such as a ban on Muslim face-covering veils in public places. Kurz has made a tough line on immigration one of his hallmarks, to the point that the FPO has accused him of stealing its ideas. (Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Callista Gingrich, wife of the former speaker of the House of Representatives, attends the annual meeting of the Iranian resistance, presided over by the National Council of Resistance of Iran in Villepinte, near Paris, on June 22, 2013. (Photo: Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images)

The Trump administration will reportedly nominate Callista Gingrich, the wife of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, to be the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

Two sources close to the president spoke to various media outlets  including the Associated Press and CNN  on the condition of anonymity about President Trumps decision ahead of his first trip overseas as president, which will include a stop at the Vatican.

Gingrich, a devout Catholic, is the president of Gingrich Productions, a multimedia production company based in Arlington, Va. In partnership with conservative nonprofit Citizens United Productions, it produces historical and public policy documentaries that present their worldview, founded in American exceptionalism and Catholicism.

Recent patriotic films include A City Upon A Hill, America At Risk, Rediscovering God in America and Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny. The partnership also produced two films on the late Pope John Paul II: Nine Days That Changed the World and Divine Mercy: The Canonization of John Paul II.

Gingrich, who lives in McLean, Va., is the author of childrens books about Ellis the Elephant, who travels through time to learn about U.S. history. Most of the book titles are based on the lyrics to well-known patriotic songs, such as Sweet Land of Liberty, Land of the Pilgrims Pride and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista leaves a closed-door meeting with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Washington on March 21, 2016. (Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)

Before heading Gingrich Productions, she was a staffer on the House Committee on Agriculture and in the office of Congressman Steve Gunderson, R-Wis., according to her official bio.

She is the president of the Gingrich Foundation, a nonprofit that established the Newt and Callista Gingrich Scholarship at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she studied music as an undergraduate.

But Gingrich, who is 22 years younger than Newt Gingrich, 73, also made news for her reported role in her husbands divorce from his second wife, Marianne Gingrich, in the late 90s.

Marianne Gingrich said her husband of 18 years admitted to six-year affair with Callista, and sought an open marriage so he could see them both. That happened at about the same time Gingrich was leading the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

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While presenting himself as a family values candidate during the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, Newt Gingrich adamantly rejected the allegation that he sought an open relationship, but admitted to certain moral shortcomings that drove him to seek mercy from God.

Ive made mistakes at times. Ive had to go to God for forgiveness. Ive had to seek reconciliation, he said.

Callista Gingrich, wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, speaks during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 20, 2016. (Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Gingrich reportedly played an important role in her husbands conversion to Catholicism. She sings in the professional resident choir at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The group recorded a CD titled Pope John Paul II: A Celebration of Life and Faith in 2005, and sang for Pope Benedict XVI during his 2008 Apostolic Journey to the U.S.

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A hundred years ago, in Fatima, Portugal, two children were said to have received the first of several visions of the Virgin Mary while they were tending their familys sheep. The children, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, died young, victims of the Spanish flu epidemic that was devastating Europe, but their little town became a gathering place for countless pilgrims. On Saturday, the two were canonized by Pope Francis in a large outdoor mass in Fatima, becoming the youngest saints in Catholic history who were not martyrs.

A crowd of around half a million people gathered for the occasion outside the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima, the epicenter of the small Portuguese farm town. The sanctuary attracts millions of religious devotees each year, making it one of the worlds most visited shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Many visitors slept outdoors in anticipation of Saturdays mass, with some choosing to arrive days earlier to pray at the shrine and recite rosaries in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Before delivering the mass, Pope Francis also prayed before the tombs of the Marto siblings.

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The pope proclaimed the siblingss sainthood at the start of the mass, generating widespread applause from the crowd. We can take as our examples Saint Francisco and Saint Jacinta, whom the Virgin Mary introduced into the immense ocean of Gods light and taught to adore him, the pope said. That was the source of their strength in overcoming opposition and suffering.

At ages nine and seven, Francisco and Jacinta, along with their older cousin, Lucia Dos Santos, were said to have received three messages from the Virgin Mary. These messages were later regarded as the secrets of Fatima. The first two secrets allegedly referred to visions of hell, which believers take to be a prediction of communism and World War II. The third secret was the source of speculation for many years, before the Vatican declared in 2000 that it referred to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981. John Paul II later donated one of the bullets that struck him to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima.

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On May 13, 2000, John Paul II beatified the Marto siblings, or declared them blessed, on the 83rd anniversary of their first apparition. Their cousin, Lucia, was beatified in 2008, three years after her death at age 97. At the time, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would waive a stipulation under ecclesiastical law that requires prospective saints to have been deceased for five years before a case for beatification can be made.

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Before the Marto siblings were granted sainthood on Saturday, the church required a second miracle to be attributed to them, as is customary for prospective saints who are not martyrs. The miracle in question was approved in 2013 after a Venezuelan boy fell from a window, received a severe brain injury, but ultimately made a full recovery. The boys parents, Joao Baptista and Lucila Yurie, shared their story at the Fatima shrine on Thursday. According to Baptista, both he and his wife prayed to the late shepherd children for their sons recovery. We feel immense joy to know that this was the miracle that led to this canonization, but mostly we feel blessed by the friendship of these two children that helped our boy and now help our family, Baptista said on Thursday.

With their canonization, the Marto siblings enter an elite group of deceased Catholic figures. A 2014 report from the Pew Research Center found that only 30 percent of popes have been canonized throughout Catholic history, with just seven being canonized in the last 1,000 years. Although canonization was once the result of popular demand, it is now rare in the Catholic Church. In addition to the popes approval, todays canonization process requires an investigation on behalf of church authorities into the life, writings, and legacy of a prospective saint. Prior to the Marto siblings, the most recent canonization took place on October 16, 2016, with seven deceased figures achieving sainthood at a mass at St. Peters Square in Rome.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
cameronabadi

While North Korea was once again busying itself with a missile launch, China hosted its One Belt, One Road forum, centered around Chinese President Xi Jinpings trade initiative of the same name.

While some world leaders sat out Chinas diplomatic shindig, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (India claims the initiative goes against state sovereignty), others gladly partook. For example, there was Czech President Milos Zeman, who joked with Russian President Vladimir Putin that journalists should be liquidated. Putin replied that journalists neednt be liquidated, only reduced. He also played a song on the piano.

Back in Russia, thousands turned out for a protest in Moscow against the planned demolition of Soviet-era apartment complexes, which brought out people who werent previously politically involved or engaged. (One exception: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who did not organize the rally, but whom police removed, along with his wife and son, from the protest site.)

Slightly further west, Emmanuel Macron formally replaced Francois Hollande as president of France, vowing at his inauguration to not back down from his campaign promises and to get straight to work.

In other European leadership news, German Chancellor Angela Merkels center-right CDU bested Martin Schulzs SPD in regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia. Schulz, the SPDs candidate for chancellor, had said that North Rhine-Westphalia was a bellwether for this coming autumns federal elections. If that is the case, it is not one that bodes well for him. The CDU state win is expected to give Merkel momentum. (Also potentially of note: The far-right AfD is now in 13 out of 16 state parliaments.)

As for President Donald Trump? His week will feature visits from Muhammad bin Zayid Al Nuhayyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi; Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey; and Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia.

After that, hell then embark on his first foreign trip as president to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, and the G-7 in Sicily and NATO summit in Brussels.

Photo credit: Nicolas Asfouri-Pool/Getty Images
DAKAR (Reuters) - Militia fighters from Central African Republic's (CAR) Christian minority attacked a U.N. base for the second consecutive night, a U.N. official said on Sunday, after a week of violence that has killed six peacekeepers at the southeastern border. Access to the town center of Bangassou to recover the wounded and the dead has been impeded by fighting although 24 injured people had been treated at a nearby hospital, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said. Fighting in and around Bangassou, in a region on the Congolese border previously sheltered from years of conflict, has also caused an undetermined number of civilian deaths. An attack on Monday on a U.N. convoy killed five peacekeepers. Radio France International, citing a local source, said hundreds of fighters had taken part in the attacks this weekend and had killed at least 30 people. It was not immediately possibly to verify the toll. "They fired on the camp overnight and we responded," said Herve Verhoosel, spokesman for the U.N. mission (MINUSCA) by telephone from the capital Bangui. "We don't think that this is over and it is likely that the assailants return." In recent months, roaming militias spurred by ethnic and religious rivalries have stepped up violence despite pledges to take part in a government-led disarmament program. Aid workers say that militias seem to be exploiting security voids after Ugandan and French soldiers left in the past few months when their missions ended. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Sunday he was "outraged" by the attacks on the 13,000-strong mission. Prime Minister Simplice Sarandji condemned the attacks in a statement on local radio on Sunday and said those responsible would be brought to justice. Central African Republic has been plagued by inter-religious violence since 2013 when mainly Muslim Seleka fighters seized power and ousted then-President Francois Bozize, prompting reprisal killings from anti-balaka militias drawn from the Christian minority. (Reporting by Emma Farge; Additional reporting by Crispin Dembassa-Kette in Bangui; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Sunday U.S. institutions are under assault  not only by the Russians but by President Donald Trump as well.

Clapper said he found the firing of FBI Director James Comey very disturbing, in an interview on CNNs State of the Union. On ABCs This Week, Comey said Russia probably is looking at Comeys dismissal as a win.

Read: Graham Calls On President To Release Taxes; Dems Demand Special Prosecutor

But U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said the president has the right to fire whomever he wants for whatever reason.

Tuesdays sudden dismissal of Comey touched off a firestorm and comparisons to Watergate. When Trump spokesmen cited a memo written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as the basis for the firing, the No. 2 person at the Justice Department threatened to resign. The memo outlined the shortcomings of the FBIs investigation into Hillary Clintons emails. During the campaign, Trump praised Comey and the FBI for their investigation.

"I think in many ways our institutions are under assault, both externally, and that's the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system," Clapper said on "State of the Union." And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

Asked: "Internally from the president?"

"Exactly," Clapper replied.

Clapper said he thinks the public at large  is concern[ed] about it.

People had issues I'm sure with Director Comey, some of his decisions, that's fine ... but I think as far as his stature as a leader and his integrity, people are very upset about the way he was treated," Clapper said.

Read: New Device Cleans Air, Produces Energy, Runs On Light

Clapper said on This Week the Russians first objective was to sow doubt, discord and dissension in this country. He said they must be celebrating at this point.

Clapper said he was at the Hoover Building the day Trump invited Comey to the White House for dinner Jan. 27. The New York Times reported it was at that dinner that Trump asked Comey to pledge his loyalty but Comey demurred, saying he could pledge only his honesty.

Story continues

Clapper said he thinks Comey was uneasy about the dinner, fearing it would appear compromising to his independence and that of the bureau, but that he went as a matter of professional courtesy.

clapper

Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Haley, however, defended Trumps right to fire administration personnel as the CEO of the country.

He can hire and fire whoever he wants. That's his right. Whether you agree with it or not, it's the truth. And what he's trying to do is find his own team, figure out how he's going to do it. Were there better ways he could have done that? That's for everybody else to decide. But we have to remember, he can hire and fire anybody else that he wants to do," she said on This Week.

After the firing, Trump issued a veiled threat to Comey, warning him to think twice before leaking anything about their meeting.

But he acknowledged the whole Russian controversy could be playing into Moscows hands.

Trump met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Thursday in the Oval Office but declined to allow U.S. media to monitor the session although the Russian news agency Tass had access.

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Republican candidate for Georgias Sixth Congressional District Karen Handel with House Speaker Paul Ryan, May 15, 2017. (Photo: David Goldman/AP)

DUNWOODY, Ga.  House Speaker Paul Ryan urged a well-heeled crowd in suburban Atlanta Monday afternoon to back congressional candidate Karen Handel as the one true choice over her Democratic opponent in the hotly contested runoff election June 20.

We need someone whos tested and true, Ryan said, criticizing Handels opponent Jon Ossoff for never holding government office before and for living just outside the district hes running to represent. We need Karen Handel.

There is so much at stake in this election right now  you have a big responsibility, Ryan said.

The crowd of several hundred cheered when the speaker said he needed Handel in Congress to help repeal and replace Obamacare and reform the tax code this summer. Both Ryan and Handel stressed her background as the former secretary of state of Georgia and her previous experience leading a local Chamber of Commerce.

Do we really think a career staffer with a flimsy inflated resume is going to be able to get anything done? Handel asked, referring to Ossoff, her 30-year-old opponent who has worked as a Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill and is now the CEO of a small business. No! We need experience, folks. We need someone with the track record that I bring.

One word was conspicuously absent from both politicians remarks: Trump.

The president is not as popular with voters in the affluent district as he is with most Republicans. He won the district by just two points in November. Handel was criticized by her GOP opponents in the first round of the election for remaining somewhat distant from Trump, but the strategy paid off for her. She came in second in the crowded field, far ahead of any other Republican. Ossoff narrowly missed the 50 percent threshold he needed to avoid the June 20 runoff.

Since then Handel has more openly embraced Trump. The president headlined a fundraiser for her and touted her in remarks at an Atlanta conference for the National Rifle Association.

Story continues

Georgias Sixth Congressional District special election to replace Rep. Tom Price, who resigned to become secretary of Health and Human Services, is already shaping up to be the most expensive congressional race in U.S. history. Democrats, fired up by antipathy to Trump and anger over the Republican health care plan, and Republicans, eager to defend a seat that has been held by the GOP for decades, have both poured millions into the race.

Handels supporters urged attendees to match the enthusiasm of the dozens of protesters who lined up outside the Marriott and protested Mondays event  shouting about Trumpcare  their term for the unpopular Republican replacement for Obamacare that passed the House earlier this month.

A crowd awaits candidate Karen Handel and House Speaker Paul Ryan, Dunwoody, Ga., May 15, 2017. (Photo: David Goldman/AP)

Some of the events speakers said they agreed with Democrats that the election is a referendum on the Republican Party  making their votes more vital.

Im going to tell you something: I dont like seeing all these Jon Ossoff signs out there, said Ginger Howard, Republican national committeewoman for Georgia. She told attendees to pick up Handel signs and to drive their friends to the polls on June 20.

This district has been represented by some great, great people: Newt Gingrich, [U.S. Sen.] Johnny Isakson, Tom Price, said Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston. I dont want to wake up on the morning of June 21 and know that yall have a congressman named Pelosi-off. (Several speakers compared Ossoff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.)

Ryan, who in some polls is less popular than Trump nationally, was warmly received by the room. Dozens crowded around the speaker seeking selfies with him.

Its a unique district for a Republican district here in Georgia, said Seth Weathers, an Atlanta-based Republican political consultant. Youve got a bit more of an establishment centrist Republican voting populace, and they typically align well with Paul Ryan.

In a Gallup poll taken last month, Ryans national approval rating slipped to 30 percent from 48 percent last November, which could partially be driven by the unpopularity of his bill replacing Obamacare.

Signs lay on the ground during a protest against a scheduled visit by House Speaker Paul Ryan at a campaign event for Republican candidate for 6th congressional district Karen Handel in Dunwoody, Ga. on May 15, 2017. (Photo: David Goldman/AP)

Handel has carefully threaded the needle on healthcare, condemning a loophole that would have exempted members of Congress from the bill but ultimately coming out in support of its passage in the House earlier this month as a first step, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Republicans stripped the provision exempting themselves before passing it.) Ossoff has sharply criticized the bill.

George and Jeanne Houston, both retired residents of the district, attended the event to support Handel. George Houston praised her integrity and humility, mentioning that he saw her drive up to a recent campaign event in an older car. The couple, who are in their 70s and on Medicare, said they are not sure about the health care plan currently being worked out in the Senate.

Preexisting conditions [are] something Id like to see covered, George Houston said.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:
By Aaron Ross KINSHASA (Reuters) - At least one person has died from the Ebola virus in Democratic Republic of Congo, the Health Ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, signaling a new outbreak of the disease which killed thousands in West Africa. The case was confirmed from tests on nine people who came down with a hemorrhagic fever in Bas-Uele province in the northeast of the country on or after April 22, a ministry statement said. Three people have died of fever. Other samples are still being tested, and six people remain hospitalised. "Our country must confront an outbreak of the Ebola virus that constitutes a public health crisis of international significance," the ministry said. An investigation team led by the ministry of health with WHO support was expected to reach the scene of the outbreak in the coming days, the WHO said. The ministry said it should arrive on Saturday. "It is in a very remote zone, very forested, so we are a little lucky. We always take this very seriously," the WHO's Congo spokesman, Eugene Kabambi, said. This latest Ebola outbreak is Congo's eighth, the most of any country. The deadly hemorrhagic fever was first detected in its dense tropical forests in 1976 and named after the nearby river Ebola. That experience helped Congolese authorities respond effectively to an outbreak in 2014 that killed 49 people. At the same time, a separate outbreak killed more than 11,300 people and infected some 28,600 as it swept through Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia and caused alarm around the world. In June last year, WHO declared Liberia free of active Ebola virus transmission. Liberia was the last country still fighting the world's worst outbreak of the disease. "Our country is full of people well-trained in this matter and our health professionals also helped contain similar epidemics in other countries," the health ministry said in its statement. The GAVI global vaccine alliance said on Friday some 300,000 emergency doses of an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck could be available in case of a large-scale outbreak and that it stood ready to support the Congo government's efforts to bring the epidemic under control. Under an agreement between GAVI and Merck, the developer of an Ebola vaccine known as rVSV-ZEBOV, it said up to 300,000 doses of the shot would be available in case of an outbreak. "The WHO and others will determine if and when deployment of vaccine into this outbreak is warranted," it said in a statement. "There are 300,000 doses of Ebola vaccine available if needed to stop this outbreak becoming a pandemic," said GAVI's chief executive Seth Berkley. "The vaccine has shown high efficacy in clinical trials and could play a vital role in protecting the most vulnerable." (Additional reporting by Kate Kelland in London, Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Joe Bavier; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Andrew Heavens)
A South Carolina woman has been jailed without bond after cops alleged last week that she killed her father when her parents decided to evict her from their home.

Brittany Simpson, 31, was living rent-free in her parents' Mount Pleasant home until Tuesday, when court documents allege she called 911 to report that an intruder came through the door and shot them.

Read: Teen Molests Girl, 4, After Climbing Through Her Bedroom Window on a Ladder: Cops

"Someone just came in the back door. Someone just came right in," Simpson said in the call.

Police arrived while 66-year-old Robert Simpson was still alive and an officer had to kick in the master bedroom door to help him. That help, however, came too late.

Simpson's wife Susan Simpson related to police that she heard her husband scream followed by gunshots. She ran to the bedroom to find blood pouring out from under the master bedroom door.

Brittany Simpson initially told cops that an intruder entered the home and shot her father. However, her sister first cast doubt on that story before police say they found Brittany's clothes along with a gun in a nearby creek.

Police say Brittany later confessed to carrying out the crime herself. In court documents, investigators note that Simpson's mother had recently sought to kick her out of their home.

Read: Dad Allegedly Drowns Newly Adopted 10-Year-Old Son: 'You're Going to Die Tonight'

She was later charged with murder.

The suspects attorney, David Aylor, released a statement to People, but did not address the alleged confession or how his client intends to plead.

The only thing that I can confirm is that Brittany was currently on disability and was not working, Aylor said. Though she wasnt currently working, she was still a pretty active person in regards to recreational activities and things like that, her disability wasnt hampering her from that.

Story continues

Watch: Dad Kills Baby Daughter Who Survived Cancer Because He Was Jealous: Cops

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A patient being treated at a psychiatric hospital in Illinois has reportedly been shot and killed by police after holding a nurse hostage in a stand-off that lasted for several hours.

A SWAT team killed the patient, named as Tywon Salters, 21, a prison inmate who was being treated at the Delnor Hospital in the Chicago suburb of Geneva.

The armed officers reportedly moved in after negotiations broke down, according to CNN.

Kane had taken the member of staff hostage after grabbing a gun from a police officer after he was brought to the hospital for treatment.

Hostage negotiators and the SWAT team rushed to the hospital when the incident began at around 1pm local time, according to Kane County Sheriffs spokesman Patrick Gengler.

The inmate was believed to still be holding the gun on a female hospital employee at about 4pm local time, with the hospital placed on lock down.

Mr Gengler said Salters was being held on charges related to a stolen vehicle and had been in the custody of the county jail since 11 April.

The prisoner was transferred to the hospital on Monday, but Mr Gengler said he could not release details as to why he was hospitalised at this stage.

The lock down has now been lifted from the hospital and no other injuries have been reported.
Washington (AFP) - Democrats kept up the pressure on Donald Trump Sunday over his firing of FBI director James Comey, as members of both parties said the president must turn over any secret recordings of the two men's conversations.

Trump tweeted Friday that "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

White House spokespeople later refused to say whether the president's conversations were in fact being secretly taped.

But Democrats appearing on television Sunday said the abrupt firing of Comey -- who was leading an FBI inquiry into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the Russia links of several Trump associates -- amounted to obstruction of justice. They called the president's tweet a clear attempt at intimidation.

If the current administration did make tapes, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer told CNN on Sunday, "the president should turn them over immediately, of course. To destroy them would be a violation of law."

He argued later on NBC that it was important for the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor in the case because such a person would have "the ability to actually prosecute people for violations of law."

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, said that as his panel continues to investigate the Russia matter, it wants to "make sure those tapes, if they exist, are preserved."

- 'Tapes will be subpoenaed' -

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said that the Judiciary Committee, of which he is a member, needs Comey to appear before it to "clear the air."

"You can't be cute about tapes," the South Carolina lawmaker told NBC. "If there's tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over."

Trump's tweet, he added, was "inappropriate." And while he had no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump team, Graham said, "the president needs to back off and let the investigation go forward."

Story continues

The senator said he was "1,000 percent" sure that Russia had attempted to interfere with the election but that there was no evidence it had affected the outcome. Regardless, he said Moscow should be "punished."

Senator Mike Lee, a conservative Republican and also a member of the Judiciary Committee, told Fox News that it was "probably inevitable" that any tapes would have to be turned over.

"If, in fact, there are such recordings, I think those recordings will be subpoenaed and they will probably have to turn them over," said Lee.

However, Lee gave Trump the benefit of the doubt, saying, "As far as I'm aware, he is fully cooperating and he is willing and eager to see this investigation" through.

- A Comey replacement -

Trump said Saturday that he will nominate a new FBI chief as early as this week, telling reporters that he was considering some "very well-known, highly respected, really talented people."

White House officials have named several possible candidates, including the acting FBI director, Andrew McCabe; Republican Senator John Cornyn, and Judge Michael Garcia of the New York Appeals Court. An association representing FBI agents has endorsed former Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican who was once an FBI agent.

Graham said that that was exactly what was needed. "When you talk about a new person to lead the FBI," he said, "how about an FBI agent who is above reproach?"

Lee made a counterintuitive suggestion meant to draw bipartisan support: Merrick Garland, the judge nominated last year by former president Barack Obama to the Supreme Court but never given a hearing by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Schumer, while proffering no names, agreed that the next FBI leader should be someone of strong character but no strong political leanings.

"First, the nominee should be not a partisan politician, not part of either party. This demands a serious, down-the-middle investigation," he said. "Second, it ought to be somebody who is experienced... and third, it should be someone with courage."

If anyone attempts to interfere with or block the investigation, Schumer said, "you need somebody who is going to stand up."
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said he supports blocking the confirmation of a new FBI director until the Justice Department appoints a special prosecutor to lead an investigation into potential ties between Trump campaign advisers and the Russian government.

I think there are a lot of Democrats who feel that way, Mr Schumer told CNNs Jake Tapper. We'll have to discuss it as a caucus, but I would support that move, because who the FBI director is, is related to who the special prosecutor is.

Read more

Trump should be impeached over Comey Firing, says Harvard professor

Democrats renewed their calls for a special counsel after President Donald Trump fired James Comey, who had been heading the Russia inquiry.

Mr Schumer said last week that if the American people are to have faith in the impartiality of the Russia probe, a special prosecutor must be appointed to get the investigation out of the hands of the FBI and far away from the heavy hand of this administration.

He told CNN: To have that special prosecutor, people would breathe a sigh of relief, because then there would be a real independent person overlooking the FBI director.

Since a new FBI director could be confirmed with a simple majority, Mr Schumer acknowledged that the 46 Democrats and two Independents in the Senate would need the support of a few of their Republican colleagues.

So far, most Republican senators have been united in their opposition to the appointment of a special prosecutor. Senator John McCain has instead been calling for the creation of a special congressional committee to conduct the Russia probe.

Removal of Director Comey only confirms need for select [committee] to investigate, Mr McCain tweeted.

Mr Schumer said the nominee for FBI Director should not be a partisan politician, and should have a willingness to stand up to possible pressure from the Trump administration.

The Justice Department interviewed several candidates over the weekend for the FBI director role. Replacements for Mr Comey reportedly include current acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, former George W Bush homeland secretary adviser Fran Townsend, former Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher, special agent Adam Lee, Republican Senator John Cornyn and judges Michael Garcia and Henry Hudson, according to CNN.

However, others have suggested other names, including Judge Merrick Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination was squashed by Republicans.
Donald Trump used to tape conversations and meetings in his Trump Tower offices prior to becoming President, according to three unnamed high-ranking former employees.

The claim comes after the President appeared to threaten the sacked FBI chief James Comey, tweeting that he "better hope there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.

At a press briefing on Friday, press secretary Sean Spicer repeatedly refused to say whether Mr Trump was secretly recording meetings with visitors.

Mr Spicer would only say the President has nothing further to add on that. The tweet speaks for itself.

James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

However, three high-ranking former employees have now told the Wall Street Journal that Mr Trump had one or more recording devices that he used to tape phone calls from his office.

There is no federal law governing the recording of conversations, and surveillance rules varies by state.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available on iOS and Android.

Taping conversations is legal in New York, where Trump Tower is, and in Washington DC, so long as one of the participants is aware that it is being filmed.

Some former associates of Mr Trump have said they can prove he recorded phone calls, because tapes of their conversations with him were submitted as evidence in court cases.

In 1989, Pratt Hotel Group sued claiming Trump Holdings had illegally interfered with attempts to buy a construction site next to the Trump Plaza casino.

Video not available for syndication

Trump says Comey was fired for 'not doing a good job'

During the lawsuit, the Presidents legal team produced a recording of a conversation between Pratts president and Mr Trump, contradicting Pratts version of events.

Story continues

Democrat Senators have demanded that any tapes of conversations concerning the contentious firing of FBI director Mr Comey, who was investigating Mr Trumps ties to Russia, must be made public.

Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said on Twitter: Mr President, if there are tapes relevant to the Comey firing, its because you made them and they should be provided to Congress.

Many commentators have explicitly compared the firing to the Watergate scandal, in which the Republican administration wire-tapped the offices of Democratic National Committee headquarters.

In 1973, in an incident which became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Richard Nixon fired the special prosecutor looking into Watergate.
Donald Trump "cannot imagine Russia is pleased" with North Korea's latest missile test as it landed closer to Russia than Japan.

North Korea's ballistic missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and US militaries said.

"With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil, in fact  closer to Russia than to Japan  the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased," the White House said in a statement.

North Korea had been "a flagrant menace for too long," it said, and Washington maintains its "ironclad commitment" to stand with its allies in the face of the serious threat it poses.

The latest "provocation" should serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against the North, it added.

http://players.brightcove.net/624246174001/default_default/index.html?videoId=5427292683001

North Korean defector: Kim Jong-Un would launch a nuclear attack if his rule was threatened

The North's launch was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile," the US Pacific Command said.

Read more

North Korea 'launches ballistic missile'

Japanese Defence Minister Tomomi Inada said the missile flew for about 30 minutes, travelling about 800km (500 miles) and reaching an altitude of 2,000km (1,240 miles)  a flight pattern that could indicate a new type of missile.

David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the missile could have a range of 4,500km (about 2,800 miles) if flown on a standard, instead of a lofted, trajectory  considerably longer than Pyongyang's current missiles.

He said the launch may have been of a new mobile, two-stage liquid-fuelled missile North Korea displayed in a huge military parade last month.

The flight path of the ballistic missile was a considerable distance from Russian territory and posed no threat to Russia, the Russian defence ministry said.

Story continues

A Kremlin spokesman said earlier that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is visiting Beijing, was concerned about the missile test.

North Korea is widely believed to be developing an intercontinental missile tipped with a nuclear weapon capable of reaching the United States, which Mr Trump has vowed not to let happen.

The North's state media said the nation will bolster its nuclear capability unless the United States abandons its hostile policy.

"The United States should never expect us to give up our nuclear capability," the main Rodong newspaper said in a commentary carried by the Korean Central News Agency.

It said Mr Trump's "maximum pressure and engagement" policy is only aimed at "stifling us" and will compel the North to "strengthen our nuclear deterrent at the maximum speed."

Mr Trump has previously said he would be "honoured" to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un under the right circumstances.

Yesterday, a top North Korean diplomat said the reclusive state was open to dialogue with the Trump administration under the right conditions.

kim-jong-un.jpg

North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un watches a military drill marking the 85th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People's Army (Reuters)

South Korea and Japan also swiftly condemned the launch, which jeopardises South Korean leader Moon Jae-in's willingness for dialogue with the rival North.

"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," a senior presidential secretary said.

"The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters the launch was "absolutely unacceptable" and Japan will respond resolutely.

Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said he and his South Korean counterpart agreed "dialogue for dialogue's sake with North Korea is meaningless."

China's foreign ministry expressed opposition to the missile test and called on all sides to exercise restraint.

A Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said countries "should not do things that further escalate tensions in the region".

In Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping told Russian counterpart Mr Putin their countries are both playing an "important role as a balancing power" in world affairs by seeking a peaceful way out for of the crises in Syria and the Korean Peninsula.

kim-jongun.jpg

Kim Jong-un inspects the North's defences (AFP/Getty)

Last month, North Korea launched the Pukguksong-2 missile, an upgraded, extended-range version of its submarine-launched ballistic missile, from the same site.

South Korean and US military officials said the launch was a significant development as it successfully tested a solid-fuel engine from a mobile launcher. The missile flew about 500km with an altitude of 550km.

The North attempted but failed to test-launch ballistic missiles four times in the past two months but has conducted various tests since the beginning of last year at an unprecedented pace.

It also conducted its fourth and fifth nuclear tests last year.

The launch also comes as troops from the US, Britain, France and Japan gather on remote US islands in the Pacific for drills that are partly a message to North Korea.

The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korean navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula.

Additional reporting by agencies
Italy's famed city of Venice has grappled with flooding and encroaching waters since the Middle Ages. But as global warming speeds up sea level rise, the charming destination is steadily slipping underwater.

Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn calls attention to this threat with his arresting, larger-than-life sculpture in the sinking city. Support features two 5,000-pound hands bursting out of the Grand Canal and grasping the walls of the historic Ca' Sagredo Hotel.

SEE ALSO: Sobering visualizations reveal how sea level rise could transform cities in your lifetime

"I have three children, and I'm thinking about their generation and what world we're going to pass on to them," Quinn said in an interview. "I'm worried, I'm very worried."

Yet the sculpture, which was unveiled on May 13, is also a call for action  a plea to scientists, policymakers, and citizens alike to address human-caused climate change and its many impacts on communities and the environment.

A post shared by Lorenzo Quinn (@lorenzoquinnartist) on May 11, 2017 at 10:28am PDT

"Something has to be done," the 51-year-old artist said.

Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage property, was founded in the 5th century atop a mosquito-filled marsh. Spread over 118 islands and initially supported by wooden pillars, mud, and marble foundations, the city was never all that structurally sound.

A post shared by Lorenzo Quinn (@lorenzoquinnartist) on May 14, 2017 at 3:45am PDT

Now rising sea levels are pushing more water into Venice and coastal cities around the world. Scientists estimate that if global warming exceeds 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, about 80 percent of the world's coastline could see more sea level rise than the global average.

Quinn said he initially conceived Support for this year's Venice Biennale, a famous contemporary visual arts exhibition, but the project wasn't accepted. So Quinn and the gallery that represents him, Halcyon Gallery in London, decided to work directly with Venice city officials to install the sculpture. He built the hands from his workshop in Spain in just three weeks.

Story continues

Happy Birthday @artistlorenzo from all of us at Halcyon Gallery! Here's to an exciting new project in Venice & many more years of creation  pic.twitter.com/V1oYyV4UYo  Halcyon Gallery (@HalcyonGallery) May 7, 2017

The hands "symbolize tools that can both destroy the world, but also have the capacity to save it," the gallery said in a press release.

"At once, the sculpture has both a noble air as well as an alarming one  the gesture being both gallant in appearing to hold up the building whilst also creating a sense of fear in highlighting the fragility of the building surrounded by water and the ebbing tide," according to the gallery.

Quinn said he modeled the two hands after those of his 11-year-old son. The sculpture is made of a polyurethane foam covered by a resin, and four pillars reaching 30 feet deep anchor the hands to the bottom of the Grand Canal.

The hands will be on display through Nov. 26, the last day of the Venice Biennale.

After that, Quinn said the sculpture will likely go on tour. The artist has received multiple requests to install the hands at other UNESCO World Heritage sites, such as Italy's Pisa, and cities suffering the effects of climate change.
The family booted from a JetBlue flight over a birthday cake is addressing their situation, which left their kids in tears as they were removed from the plane.

Read: Jetiquette: How Good Manners Can Help Avoid a Bad Situation on a Plane

Cameron and Minta Burke, of New Jersey, had boarded the New York to Las Vegas flight with their two children earlier this month in a family trip to celebrate Minta's 40th birthday.

The family said they put their cake in the overhead compartment of the plane but were instructed to move it to the floor. The family says they complied, but the flight attendant wasnt satisfied  then everything took a turn.

Video of the May 3 incident, which shows one of the couples children in tears, has been seen across America.

My two children are screaming and crying," Minta told Inside Edition. "They were confused not knowing what is going on. They were traumatized."

When she told me that I was being non-compliant then I said, Ma'am have you been drinking? Because her behavior was just not normal," Cameron added.

Law enforcement boarded the plane and did their best to calm everyone down.

I don't see any wrongdoing at all, one officer was recorded saying in the video.

JetBlue ordered the whole plane evacuated and refused to let the Burke family back on.

Unfortunately, they're going to have to re-book everyone, the officer was recorded telling the distraught family.

JetBlue is standing by their decision to boot the Burkes, claiming they put the birthday cake "in a compartment reserved for safety equipment and refused multiple requests from the crew to remove the items."

Read: Rough Landing: Brawl Erupts on Southwest Plane as Flight Attendant Tries to Break Up Melee



"The video does not depict the entire incident and only starts after the objectionable behavior occurred," a spokesman said. The customers became agitated, cursed and yelled at the crew, and made false accusations about a crewmember's fitness to fly."

Story continues

Though the family did receive a refund and a free trip the next day, they are considering legal action against the airline.

Watch: One of World's Largest Rabbits Dies Mysteriously After Flight on United

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There are clear grounds to impeach Donald Trump after he fired FBI Director James Comey, according to a former US Labour Secretary.

Robert Reich said that it is no longer a question of if, but when the process to remove the president from office begins.

In the aftermath of last weeks firing of Mr Comey, the White House scrambled to provide an explanation for Mr Trumps actions.

Officials sought to protect the President from accusations by Democrats and others, that he had fired him because he was heading the investigation into the possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russias alleged efforts to influence the presidential election.

By my count, there are now four grounds to impeach Trump. The real question now is whether there's the political will. pic.twitter.com/OmgFygAcTP  Robert Reich (@RBReich) May 10, 2017

Writing for the Alternet news magazine, Professor Reich said Mr Trumps own statements on why he fired Mr Comey provided ample evidence that he engaged in the obstruction of justice - a charge which led to impeachment proceedings being brought against both Presidents Clinton and Richard Nixon.

The question is no longer whether there are grounds to impeach Donald Trump," said the academic and author, who was US Secretary of Labour under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997 and previously served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

"It is when enough Americans will put their loyalty to America ahead of their loyalty to the party.

Read more

Nixon was only President apart from Trump to fire his Attorney General

He added: Its worth recalling that the illegality underlying Nixons impeachment was a burglary at the Watergate complex, while the illegality underlying Clintons was lying to a grand jury about sex with an intern in the White House.

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Trumps obstruction is potentially far more serious. It involves an investigation about whether Trump or his aides colluded with Russia in rigging a presidential election  the most direct assault on American democracy in history.

Mr Trump insisted last week, that he was going to fire Mr Comey regardless of recommendation. But he also admitted that he pressed Mr Comey during a private dinner to tell him whether he was personally under investigation.

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The US leader later took took to Twitter to say that Mr Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversation before he starts leaking to the press!

Mr Reich said that the barely concealed threat from the President also amounts to an impeachable offence.

Here, the law is also clear. Seeking to silence, intimidate or even influence someone who is likely to offer evidence in a congressional or criminal proceeding is also an obstruction of justice  and an impeachable offence, he wrote.

The decision on whether to impeach Mr Trump would ultimately be decided by the US House of Representatives.

Under the current Congress, 22 members of Mr Trump's Republican Party would have to join with House Democrats to apply pressure on Speaker of the House, Republican Paul Ryan, to allow such a bill to be heard.

Read more

Donald Trump is going to be impeached soon, according to five experts

Mr Ryan described Mr Comey as a dedicated and worthwhile public servant last week, but deflected questions when he was asked about the bombshell firing.

I'm going leave it to the President to talk about and defend his tweets, Mr Ryan said.

Professor Reich conceded that under the usual run of things, somebody would have to find a smoking gun on Mr Trump for Republicans to move to impeach their own partys President.

As a result his fate could hinge on the midterm elections of 2018, when the balance of the House could change.

But the commentator predicted that if Mr Trumps approval ratings in the polls continue to plummet, particularly among independent and Republican voters, it was not inconceivable that 22 Republicans could decide to move against their President rather than risk losing their own jobs and control of the House in the midterms, which are just 18 months away.

If Mr Trump was forced to resign, as President Nixon was, Mr Reich claimed that most House Republicans prefer Vice President Mike Pence to Donald Trump anyway.

The last straw for Mr Trump could be if the economy goes into recession, he wrote.

Hell be fired when enough Americans decide they cant abide him anymore it will come out that Trump did something incredibly stupid  like giving a nod of approval to one of his campaign bottom feeders like Roger Stone to tell a Russian operative to go ahead with their plan to interfere in the 2016 election.

Acting head of the FBI Andrew McCabe has said the bureau will continue its probe into the Russia affair - but will not routinely update the White House on the investigation after calls for a fully independent enquiry.
Vanita Gupta, the former head of the U.S. Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, called Attorney General Jeff Sessions harsh new sentencing policy incredibly disappointing in an interview Monday.

Last week, Sessions directed all federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious, readily provable offense, including those that carry mandatory minimum sentences  effectively reversing course on Obama-era policies aimed at drug sentencing reform.

Gupta, who also served as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama administration, said the move was not entirely surprising given Sessions record in the Senate of resisting criminal justice reform. Still, she told Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, the new policy marked a resounding step backwards into the 1980s of failed policies in our criminal justice system that resulted in us having the highest incarceration rate of industrialized nations in the world.

Its a real throwback in a lot of ways, and very troubling, Gupta said, arguing that Sessions seems more guided by politics and rhetoric than evidence showing that mass incarceration is ineffective as a means of promoting public safety.

Evidence-based criminal justice reform is one of the few issues that has brought Americans of all political stripes together over the last several years, she said. Yet the attorney general and [the Trump] administration seem to be out of line with the evidence and the momentum for reform.

Guptas comments echoed a statement issued by former Attorney General Eric Holder last week, in which he called Sessions new tough sentencing policy dumb on crime.

Gupta had some equally harsh words for the presidents newly created commission to target voter fraud and its co-chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a leading proponent of restrictive voting laws.

In addition to the fact that several studies have found no evidence of mass voter fraud in the U.S., Gupta said there is simply no way to take this commission seriously or to think that it is in any way independent, given that Kris Kobach has been named at the helm of it.

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Kobach, who has publicly supported Trumps unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud during the 2016 election, insisted on CNN Monday that the commission is not set up to disprove or to prove President Trumps claim, nor is it just looking at the 2016 election.

Were looking at all forms of election irregularities  voter fraud, voter registration fraud, voter intimidation, suppression  and looking at the vulnerabilities of the various elections we have in each of the 50 states, he said.

But Gupta isnt buying it.

It really just feels like a response to a political promise, she said, adding that more than anything, the commission seems to be setting the stage for efforts at mass voter suppression down the road.

I think those of us who care about voting rights are deeply, deeply troubled by this commission, Gupta said.

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Archaeologists have dug up 17 mummies and other artifacts from ancient Egypt near a historical animal graveyard, and they expect to discover even more.

Agence France-Presse reported the mummies, which were not of ancient royals, were uncovered in catacombs a few hours southwest of Cairo while the experts were following a trail of burial shafts. They are the first such find for this particular area, which is close to an ancient animal cemetery.

Read: Make Eye Contact with a Mummy

AFP reported the 17 mummies were not the only discovery: There were limestone and clay sarcophagi, the decorated coffins often used in ancient Egyptian burials, documents written in the ancient Egyptian script called Demotic on papyrus and gold, and animal coffins.

The discovery is still at its beginning, Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Enany told reporters.

The mummies still need to be officially dated, but its possible they are from the 300 years before Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C., known as the Late Period, or from a period shortly afterward during which Ptolemy, Alexanders general, and his family ruled the land until 30 B.C.

mummies-discovered

Photo: Getty Images

As rare as such a find may be, ancient Egyptian artifacts have emerged quite a bit recently. Last month, several mummies were uncovered in a noblemans tomb at Luxor, a city in the ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes where you still can find the Luxor and Karnak temples, as well as two royal tombs: the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

Also last month, officials announced they had found another pyramid, one that dates back about 3,700 years, a period during which there was a quick turnover in pharaohs.

Read: Lost Pyramid Found in Egypt

The pyramid was in ruins, and the remains of its interior were found at a royal burial site south of Cairo near the Bent Pyramid. That pyramid is about 1,000 years older than the remains found, and got its name from the bent look it has with a steeper angle on its top half than its bottom half. It may have been the ancient Egyptians first attempt at making a smooth-sided but more sloped pyramid.

Story continues

Mummies are not exclusive to ancient Egyptians, but that society is the one that made the process famous. Preserving and wrapping a dead body was meant to prepare the dead for the afterlife, and the process included removing and storing internal organs in canopic jars, including the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines. The brain was also removed through the persons nose.

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Berlin (AFP) - Berlin on Monday slammed Ankara's refusal to allow German lawmakers to visit a NATO base near Syria and warned it could move its troops elsewhere.

The German foreign ministry described as "absolutely unacceptable" Turkey's latest ban on a visit to the Incirlik base in southern Turkey, used by the international coalition fighting the Islamic State group.

Germany has about 250 military personnel stationed there, flying Tornado surveillance missions over Syria and refuelling flights for partner nations battling IS jihadists.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Turkey's position was "unfortunate" and that Germany, while continuing talks to resolve the issue, would also "search for alternatives to Incirlik", including in Jordan.

A defence ministry spokesman said Jordan offered "the best conditions" after Berlin had also looked at Kuwait and Cyprus since Turkey first denied such visits to German MPs for several months last year.

The spokesman cautioned however that any move would involve shifting hundreds of containers of materiel and would take several months.

Turkey rejected the latest lawmakers' visit because of anger over Germany granting political asylum to some of its military officials since last year's failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer suggested.

He said Ankara's reason may be "individual decisions of independent German authorities in connection with military members".

Merkel stressed that, since Germany's military missions always require parliamentary mandates, "it is absolutely essential that our lawmakers are able to visit our soldiers".

- Hundreds have sought asylum -

German media have reported that over 400 Turkish military personnel, diplomats, judges and other officials and their relatives had sought political asylum in Germany.

They fear being caught up in Turkey's crackdown against those Erdogan blames for the coup -- supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive US-based Islamic preacher who has denied the charges against him.

Story continues

The vast crackdown has heightened tensions between Turkey and Germany, which is home to a three-million-strong ethnic Turkish population, the legacy of a massive "guest worker" programme in the 1960s and 1970s.

Both countries have sparred over a range of issues, including civil rights in Turkey, freedom of expression, the military campaign against Turkey's Kurdish minority and a prospective Turkish referendum on reintroducing the death penalty.

Relations were strained further since the arrest of Turkish-German journalist Deniz Yucel on terror-related charges in February, and during the referendum campaign in April to boost Erdogan's powers.

Another row last year, centred on a sensitive historical question, had led Turkey to deny German lawmakers the right to visit Incirlik for several months.

The German parliament had voted in June to recognise the Ottoman Empire's World War I-era massacre of Armenians as a genocide.

After the vote, a furious Erdogan accused German lawmakers of Turkish origin of having "tainted blood".

Armenians say up to 1.5 million people were killed between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.

Turkey rejects the claims, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

That row was only resolved after Merkel made clear the Armenia resolution was a political statement and not legally binding, allowing German lawmakers to visit Incirlik in October.
If you're a gin drinker in Canada, imbibe cautiously. Canadian liquor authorities are recallingBombay Sapphire London Dry Gin after it was found that the bottles may contain almost twice as much alcohol as claimed on the label.

Although all affected bottles have since been removed from store shelves, some of the bottles may have been purchased, the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) reported.

Drinking a 77 percent spirit as if it were 40 percent alcohol, as advertised on the label, could result in higher impairment, sickness, stomach irritation and more, said Aaron White, senior scientific advisor to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in the U.S. [7 Ways Alcohol Affects Your Health]

Some people are sensitive to the taste of alcohol and may notice that the gin drink is stronger than normal, White told Live Science. However, it's also possible that drinkers would not notice the higher concentration quickly enough, which could lead to more significant impairment, he said.

"In terms of the effects on your brain and how you feel, or subjective experience, it takes half an hour to an hour for alcohol to be fully absorbed," White said. "One concern might be that you've already started on your second drink before you realize that the effects of the first drink were stronger than you anticipated."

The overall effect of alcohol on a drinker depends on the amount of alcohol consumed, White said. This, in turn, depends on several factors: the concentration of alcohol in the drinks consumed, the number of drinks the person consumes and how quickly the alcohol is consumed, White explained.

"If you drink more-concentrated alcoholic beverages, your blood alcohol content is going to rise more quickly," he told Live Science. "So, if you accidentally drink too much highly concentrated alcohol at once, your blood alcohol level could rise very quickly, and that's one of the key predictors of amnesia [blacking out] from drinking."

Story continues

Alcohol also irritates the stomach, causing inflammation of the stomach's lining, which can lead to the queasiness that is associated with hangovers, White said. He explained that drinking even a shot of normal, 40 percent gin could aggravate the stomach lining, so a shot with 77 percent alcohol would really cause irritation.

For people who tend to consume many drinks, having a beverage with a higher concentration of alcohol could prove deadly, warned Mark A. Celio, an assistant professor at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island.

"In the case of very heavy consumption (approximately 15-20 drinks, which is not unrealistic), it could be deadly," Celio wrote Live Science in an email. "Someone who drinks heavily and often may be able to tolerate a blood alcohol level of 0.20, but might instead reach as high as 0.40 [with the higher-concentration drink], which is extremely dangerous."

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario issued the recall after a quality assurance check discovered that some bottles had not been properly diluted, the CBC said. Officials from Bacardi, the alcohol conglomerate that owns Bombay Sapphire, told the CBC that no more than 1,000 cases of the 1.14-liter (38.5 ounces) bottles of gin were affected.

"[These bottles] inadvertently entered the bottling line during a short period of time (max 45 minutes) when they were switching from one bottling tank to another bottling tank," Bacardi officials said of the alcohol recall in a statement to the CBC.

Original article on Live Science.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called on President Donald Trump Sunday to release his tax returns as Democrats ramped up calls for a special prosecutor to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign in the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Trump touched off a firestorm last week by dismissing Comey without warning and later confessing in an NBC interview he was thinking about the Russian investigation when he acted, touching off comparisons to Watergate.

Graham, in an interview on NBCs Meet the Press, Comey will be called before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain what happened at a January White House dinner to which he had been summoned. Sources close to Comey told the New York Times the president asked the FBI director to pledge his loyalty and that Comey declined, saying he would pledge only his honesty. Trump, however, denied asking for the pledge and tweeted Comey had better hope there arent any secret tapes.

Read: Republicans Defend Obamacare Replacement, Say Medicaid, Sick Won't Be Hurt

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said if any White House tapes exist, he would try to subpoena them.

We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear. So, I have asked, others have asked, to make sure the tapes are preserved if they exist, Warner said.

Graham said he plans to ask Comey to testify about the dinner.

I think it was inappropriate. I think it requires somebody like me, a Republican, to call Comey before the Judiciary Committee to let him explain that conversation. Right now, I do not believe President Trump is a subject or a target of any investigation regarding collusion with the Russians, said Graham, who ran for president last year but dropped out early in the presidential primary cycle.

I would advise the president not to tweet or comment about the investigation, as we go forward. The Russians did interfere in our election. I dont think they changed the outcome. I have no evidence of collusion. But the president needs to back off here and let the investigation go forward. We need to call Comey and get to the bottom of all this.

Story continues

Read: Former Fed Chair Bernanke Rejects President's Tax Plan

Graham also said investigators have yet to find evidence of improper business dealings between the Trump organization and Russia regarding the election or anything else.

However, if you can show me there is a reason for that to  theres suspicion of that, then we need to get financial documents. I just cant  ask for documents unless I have a reason. But the president should turn over his tax returns. He should do that. I dont have a reason to subpoena them. If I get that reason, Ill do it. But he should turn over his tax returns.

Graham said hes also open to the idea of subpoenaing the returns of all of Trumps businesses to see if Russian money was involved.

I'm open-minded to all things Russia. The bottom line is I think Russia tried to affect our election, undermine our democracy. I want them to pay a price, he said.

Graham, however, said its premature to appoint a special prosecutor because the investigation has yet to move from a counterintelligence investigation to a criminal one.

comey trump

Photo: Reuters

Democrats, however, disagreed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the American people need to be assured the investigation will be conducted in a nonpartisan manner.

Schumer, on both Meet the Press and CNNs State of the Union, said Democrats will block the nomination of a new FBI director until a special prosecutor is appointed.

To have that special prosecutor, people would breathe a sigh of relief, because then there would be a real independent person overlooking the FBI director, Schumer said on State of the Union. He also noted a special prosecutor would be immune from firing except for cause and can look into any attempts to thwart the investigation.

Schiff said it is clear the Justice Department memo on Comeys handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation Trumps spokesmen cited as a pretext for the firing was false. The memo was written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at Trumps request.

That wasn't why Comey was fired. And what disturbed me most, frankly  is the fact that it was addressed to the attorney general. The attorney general was supposed to have recused himself from anything involving Russia, and here he is, recommending the firing of the top cop doing the Russia investigation, in clear violation of what he, the attorney general, had committed to doing. And now we have the attorney general participating in the interview of new directors of the F.B.I., underscoring, I think yet again how imperative it is we have an independent counsel, Schiff said on CBS Face the Nation.

rosenstein

Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

(Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he would not involve himself in the Russian investigation after it became clear he denied during Senate confirmation hearings that he had met with any top Russians. It was subsequently revealed he had met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.)

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called Comeys firing another win on the Russians scoreboard.

Their first objective was to sow doubt, discord and dissension in this country, Clapper said on ABCs This Week. And the Russians have to be celebrating with a minimal expenditure of resources and what they have accomplished.

On State of the Union and This Week Clapper said he had only limited knowledge of the FBIs investigation, putting his remarks on being unaware of any collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign into perspective.

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GettyRussian troops have begun to retreat from Ukraines Kherson region, just the latest humiliating pullout to leave pro-Kremlin military bloggers and propagandists fuming.Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu handed down the order on Wednesday afternoon to pull out to the other side of the Dnipro River. The move came after Russian troops reportedly began blowing up bridges as they pulled out, with Russian flags being removed from buildings in the center of Khersonthe only regional capital ca
A healthy New Jersey mother died after giving birth because of a health issue her care team missed. (Photo: Getty Images)

A heartbreaking story of a neonatal nurse who died 20 hours after giving birth has been circulating on the Internet, with many expressing outrage over her senseless death.

In 2011, Lauren Bloomstein was a 33-year-old first-time mom with a healthy, active pregnancy, according to the groundbreaking investigative story, The Last Person Youd Expect to Die in Childbirth, published May 12 by ProPublica and NPR. Especially comforting to the Moorestown, N.J., mom was the fact that she would give birth at the Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, where she worked in the neonatal department.

When she was 39 weeks and six days along, Bloomstein and her husband, Larry, headed to the hospital for her to be induced, a common procedure that kick-starts contractions. Afterward, Bloomstein began experiencing stabbing pain near her kidneys or liver, so doctors increased her epidural dosage, and on the evening of October 1, she gave birth to her daughter, Hailey Ann Bloomstein. In a video of the mother and daughter, published in the story, Bloomstein can be seen lovingly gazing into her daughters eyes.

However, Bloomsteins pain never subsided, and hospital staff, chalking up the problem to acid reflux, a common side effect of labor, administered an antacid and painkillers.

Soon, Bloomsteins blood pressure spiked, so the hospital ran a test for preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication marked by high blood pressure that affects up to 8 percent of pregnancies. Her results were not abnormal for the condition; however, Larry kept pushing for answers. It was only when he called his own colleague for help that he learned his wifes condition was most likely HELLP, a severe type of preeclampsia that if not treated immediately could lead to internal bleeding and stroke.

In Bloomsteins case, her elevated blood pressure caused bleeding in the brain, and she had decreased levels of blood platelets (cells that help the body form clots to prevent bleeding). Making matters worse, the hospital didnt have a sufficient supply on site to use in surgery.

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A few hours later, Bloomstein died.

[E]very year in the U.S., 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,000 nearly die  by many measures, the worst record in the developed world, according to ProPublica/NPR. American women are more than three times as likely as Canadian women to die in the maternal period [defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the start of pregnancy to one year after delivery or termination], and six times as likely to die as Scandinavians. In every other wealthy country, and many less affluent ones, maternal mortality rates have been falling; in Great Britain, the journal Lancet recently noted, the rate has declined so dramatically that a man is more likely to die while his partner is pregnant than she is. But in the U.S., maternal deaths increased from 2000 to 2014. In a recent analysis by the CDC Foundation, nearly 60 percent of such deaths were preventable.

Why do so many women die as a result of pregnancy complications or childbirth?

While its impossible to understand the entirety of the circumstances surrounding Bloomsteins death, according to Hal Lawrence, MD, executive vice president and chief executive officer of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), there are multiple general factors. Women are having babies later in life, and advanced age often means underlying issues with diabetes and blood pressure, for example, he tells Yahoo Beauty. Obesity is also an issue  more than half of women in this country have BMIs greater than 30, which can complicate a pregnancy. And IVF rates have increased, which can lead to multiple babies and more high-risk pregnancies to begin with.

Also concerning is inadequate federal funding that goes toward maternal care versus infant care  ProPublica/NPR reports that only 6 percent of block grants in 2016 went toward programs for mothers versus 78 percent devoted to infants.

For Bloomstein, miscommunication between hospital staff members worsened her odds of survival. Despite abnormally high blood pressure readings, she was inadequately monitored, including an eight-hour period when she simply wasnt monitored at all. In a deposition following her death, Bloomsteins ob-gyn admitted that she might have been recommended to be monitored more closely, in retrospect.

In 2012, Larry Bloomstein filed a complaint against Monmouth Medical Center, and the New Jersey Department of Health ultimately found fault with the hospital. Among its findings: There is no record in the medical record that the Registered Nurse notified [the ob-gyn] of the elevated blood pressures of patient prior to delivery, and there is no evidence in the medical record of further evaluation and surveillance of patient from [the ob-gyn] prior to delivery. And finally: There was no evidence in the medical record that the elevated blood pressures were addressed by [the ob-gyn] until after the Code Stroke was called. Larry Bloomstein also sued the hospital, his wifes ob-gyn, and five nurses.

Their daughter, Hailey, is now 5 years old and lives with Larry and his new wife, whom he married in 2014. By far the hardest thing for me to accept is [what happened] from Laurens perspective, he told ProPublica/NPR. I cant, I literally cant accept it. The amount of pain she must have experienced in that exact moment when she finally had this little girl.  I can accept the amount of pain I have been dealt. But [her pain] is the one thing I just cant accept. I cant understand, I cant fathom it.

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Two Belgrade High School students pose in the outfits they were dress coded for. (Photo: Josie Espinoza)

A number of students at Belgrade High School in Montana staged a protest of the schools dress code on Friday, May 12  and were sent home because of it.

Josie Espinoza, a freshman at the school, posted details of the aftermath to her Instagram account. Today I was dress coded in front of everyone for my shorts not meeting requirements. I was publicly embarrassed by my teacher in front of the whole class. Then had to be sent home to change because I was a distraction,' she captioned the post.

Espinoza tells Yahoo Style that she knew her outfit did not abide by the schools regulations. I was wearing a black romper that did not go past my longest finger and my straps did not make the one inch rule, so I was sent home because I didnt make dress code, she says.

Belgrade High Schools dress code clearly states that straps must be worn and must be one inch wide and hemlines must reach below the students longest finger when shoulders hang loose. Espinoza was looking to send a message to the school administration.

Fifteen other students followed suit and were also sent home for disobeying the dress code. Espinoza shared a memo on Snapchat the night before the protest that was widely circulated to her classmates.

This memo was circulated to a number of Belgrade High School students the night before the protest. (Photo: Josie Espinoza)

If we dont break this dress code nothing will ever happen, the notes on Espinozas Snapchat read. And guess what girls will still be seen as sexual objects instead of strong women who have back bones and that can stand up for what they believe in. Do guys really think writing a letter will get us anywhere? No it wont because they will end up [in the] trash where everything else a student does. Because all they care about is how the school looks. Stand up for once in your life.

Espinoza shares that along with Fridays incident involving dress coding, she was also recently reprimanded for another outfit.

Earlier that week I was dress coded because my shorts didnt make dress code requirements, and I thought they would be okay  due to the fact that very [few] people get dress coded in our school, she says. If youre in a different classroom  each time you will get dress coded differently. If Im in my first period Im going to get dress coded, but if Im in my seventh period I wouldnt.

Story continues

She says the difference in coding lies in her teachers judgement of the rules. Not all teachers enforce it because some of them may feel like its not fair I suppose, Espinoza says.

Aside from the fact that she feels its not properly regulated across the school, she believes it is fundamentally sexist.

Its a sexist dress code and it needs to be changed  or it needs to be equally enforced, she says. It bothers me because I feel like dress codes are put in place mainly to set boundaries for the female students in that school and their motto is dress for success. If youre going to make us dress like professionals, you should treat us like professionals. Its not professional for them to stand us up in class and point out why were violating dress code.

The student believes that the idea that girls might be a distraction in the classroom is not right. I feel like it demeans boys more than it demeans girls because boys are seen as animals, and they cant control themselves around girls shoulders or seeing girls thighs.

Espinoza also feels that female students are more often coded than male students at her high school. 90 percent of dress code violations are girls, she says. Our own principal said that its a fact that more girls get dress coded than male students.

The schools principal, Paul Lamb, said dress coding at the high school is not related to the idea that female students might be a distraction.

Thats not the reason and thats not what were telling our students  that theyre being distracting to the boys, Lamb told KBZK. What the administration here is saying is they are in violation of the dress code and it needs to be changed.

Lamb also told the news outlet that he is open to discussing the code with students. I would appreciate if instead of a protest they would sit down with us about trying to make a change if they want a change to be made, he said.

Since the protest on Friday, Espinoza shares that she hasnt received a response from the schools administration and no changes have been made to the code. She has an idea of what she hopes the school will consider in potentially altering the code.

I hope that instead of doing arm length, which can depend on your body type, that they change it to maybe the inseam and allow spaghetti straps. It gets hot in our classrooms, and we dont have any air conditioning  so I feel that it needs to be changed for how hot it is outside. However, Principal Lamb told KBZK that the lack of air conditioning in the school is only an issue for two months of the year.

The freshman in high school has the support of many of her classmates  and even her parents. My parents totally agree with me, she says. They think that I need to stand up for what I believe in. The dress code is not fairly enforced and things need to be changed in our school.

She adds: Our goal is not to have people dress like sluts  but to have an equally enforced dress code.

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ICE agents (shown here in photo in Atlanta) are not allowed to enter school grounds in New York City without a valid warrant. (Photo: AP)

A U.S. immigration agent was turned away from an elementary school in Maspeth, Queens, where he was reportedly looking for a fourth-grader.

Eric Phillips, press secretary for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, tweeted about the incident, saying the agent did not have a warrant:

Mayor's been briefed on a fed immig agent showing up at Queens' PS58 Thurs. asking about a 4th grader. School turned him away. A 4th grader.  Eric Phillips (@EricFPhillips) May 13, 2017

De Blasio announced a new policy in March to prevent such a thing from happening. He issued a directive to the NYPD to not allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents onto school grounds unless they had a valid warrant.

The borough president of Queens, Melinda Katz, weighed in on the situation via Facebook saying: As a mother, I am deeply troubled and horrified at this attempt on the part of federal immigration agents to reach any child in our schools. P.S. 58 officials did the right thing by following proper protocols of the city administration, stopping the agents at the door and protecting their students.

As a mother, I am deeply troubled and horrified at this attempt on the part of federal immigration agents to reach any Posted by Queens Borough President Melinda Katz on Sunday, May 14, 2017

NYC Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina echoed those sentiments in a statement saying that all students, regardless of their immigration status, are welcome in the New York City public school system. State law mandates that all children ages 5-21 are entitled to a free public education.

The citys immigration affairs commissioner is investigating the incident and told CBS2 they were trying to find out who the agent was, if he was impersonating an officer, or was from a different government agency.

The episode is a sample of the larger story playing out nationally as the Trump administration steps up deportation efforts, particularly when it comes to criminal who are undocumented.

Story continues

Earlier this week ICE announced it had made 280 immigration related arrests in raids conducted across the country targeting gangs like the Bloods, Surenos, MS-13 and the Crips. In total the agency made 1,300 arrests, sweeping up citizens, foreign nationals, and undocumented residents alike.

The school, P.S. 58, has not issued any statements regarding the incident.

A central platform of President Trumps campaign was immigration reform and promising to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. He has also alleged, with no evidence, that illegal immigrants, millions of them, voted in the election.

Trump signed an executive order this week to create a presidential advisory council on election integrity.

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India on Monday urged the UN's top court to stop Pakistan executing an Indian national convicted of spying, as Islamabad hit back accusing its rival of "time-wasting and political grandstanding".

In an emergency hearing called only days after India lodged its case, lawyers and officials for New Delhi urged the International Court of Justice to halt the death sentence imposed on Kulbhushan Sudhir Jadhav saying his rights had been violated by Islamabad.

Jadhav was arrested in the restive southwestern province of Balochistan in March 2016, where a separatist insurgency has raged for years.

He was "an innocent Indian national, who, incarcerated in Pakistan for more than a year on concocted charges, (has been) deprived of his rights and protection accorded under the Vienna Convention," Deepak Mittal, an official with India's ministry of external affairs, told the court in The Hague.

Mittal insisted Pakistan has failed to respond to all Indian demands for information about the case, snubbing requests for documents including the charge sheet, and has failed to provide Jadhav with consular access.

Islamabad has also not responded to a visa application by Jadhav's parents seeking to travel to Pakistan to visit their son.

- 'Miscarriage of justice' -

Jadhav "has been denied the right to be defended by a legal counsel of his choice," Mittal said at the start of day-long hearing, adding that a confession was forced out of him.

"All that we know is what we have seen in the media in Pakistan," he added.

But Pakistani representatives told the court Jadhav "has confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan".

Mohammad Faisal, from the Pakistani foreign affairs ministry, said the tribunal had been shown a video of the confession which was available on-line "for viewers to decide for themselves whether commander Jadhav is confessing voluntarily".

Story continues

Faisal also showed the court a picture of a passport which he said was found in Jadhav's possession bearing a completely different "and Muslim" name.

"India has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to provide an explanation for this passport which is the most obvious indication of covert and illegal activity," added Faisal.

India has denied however he was a spy, and last week lodged a rare protest at the ICJ accusing Pakistan of "egregious violations of the Vienna convention".

The case has highlighted the recent sharp uptick in tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals, with the two sides outlining starkly different accounts.

"India believes that the farcical nature of the proceedings and unjust trial by a Pakistan military court... has led to a serious miscarriage of justice," said Mittal.

India is seeking the immediate suspension of the death sentence against Jadhav who it claims was kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring.

- 'Far-fetched' story -

But lawyer Khawar Qureshi, appearing for Pakistan, shot back that Jadhav "is a terrorist" and New Delhi's story was "far-fetched at best."

"India invoked the jurisdiction of this court improperly," he said. "This court exists to ensure that states engage in peaceful resolution of disputes. This court does not exist for time-wasting and political grandstanding."

The court's president Ronny Abraham said the tribunal would publicly deliver its decision on whether to grant an emergency stay of execution "as soon as possible."

New Delhi ultimately wants the tribunal to order Islamabad to annul the sentence.

It also wants the ICJ, set up in 1945 to rule on disputes between nations in accordance with international law, to declare that the Pakistani military court violated the Vienna Convention by imposing a death sentence on Jadhav and broke human rights laws.

India and Pakistan routinely accuse one another of sending spies into their countries, and it is not uncommon for either nation to expel diplomats accused of espionage, particularly at times of high tension. But death sentences have rarely been issued in recent years.

The case comes as relations have plummeted since a deadly attack on an Indian army base in the disputed region of Kashmir in September, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammed.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Former president Mohammad Khatami, considered the spiritual leader of Iran's reformists, urged voters on Sunday to re-elect President Hassan Rouhani and support his policy of seeking to end Iran's isolation from the rest of the world. Iran's hardline security and judicial powers, which operate separately to the presidency and are close to Iran's ultimate authority - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - have banned media from publishing Khatami's image or mentioning his name. But Khatami has played a prominent role in elections by using social media to urge voters to back pro-reform candidates. "We have started on a path with Rouhani and we have come half way. We have resolved some problems and bigger problems remain for us to resolve on this difficult path with him," Khatami said in a video message released on social media. "It is now your turn to renew your vote for our dear Rouhani in order to strengthen hope for a better future," he said. Rouhani, a pragmatist Muslim cleric, was elected in a landslide victory in 2013 on promises to ease the Islamic Republic's international isolation and open up society. He is standing for a second term against five other candidates, mostly prominent hardliners, on May 19, with a run-off a week later if no candidate wins more than 50 percent of votes cast in the first round. In his first term, Rouhani pushed through a landmark agreement with global powers to limit Iran's nuclear program in return for the lifting of international financial sanctions. However, even his supporters acknowledge he has made relatively little progress on his domestic agenda, after promising Iranians would enjoy the same rights as anyone else. (Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday challenged US concerns over moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, in what Haaretz newspaper called his "first public dispute" with the Trump administration.

US President Donald Trump had promised during his campaign to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, whose status is one of the thorniest issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But there has been no movement on that pledge so far.

The Palestinians and the Arab world fiercely oppose a move, and the international community has warned that it could spark fresh unrest.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that Trump was still seeking to assess whether relocating the embassy would help or harm chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

"The president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process," Tillerson said, going on to suggest that Israel itself might be less than fully committed to a move.

"I think it'll be informed, again, by the parties that are involved in those talks and most certainly Israel's view on whether Israel views it as being helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction."

Netanyahu hurried to remove any doubt -- and preempt protest within his right-wing government -- in a statement issued by his office.

"Israel's position has often been expressed to the American administration and to the world," it said.

"The transfer of the American Embassy to Jerusalem not only will not harm the peace process, but the opposite. It will advance it by correcting a historic injustice and by smashing the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

Israel occupied the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 1967. It later annexed east Jerusalem in a move never recognised by the international community.

In 1980, Israel declared "reunited" Jerusalem its capital in a move unrecognised by major states.
Rome (AFP) - Italy has broken up a mafia ring accused of infiltrating one of the country's largest migrant reception centres and capitalising on asylum seekers with the help of a Catholic association, police said Monday.

The Arena clan, a family belonging to the powerful 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate, allegedly made a fortune by supplying services for the centre at Isola di Capo Rizzuto and syphoning off money from the state destined for the migrants.

"Over 500 agents overnight arrested 68 people... accused of mafia association, extortion, carrying illegal weapons, fraud, embezzlement to the detriment of the state, (and) theft," police in Catanzaro, a city in Calabria, said in statement.

Their investigation revealed "that the clan controlled, for profit, the management of the reception centre" at Isola di Capo Rizzuto -- which has held up to 1,500 migrants at a time -- for over a decade.

Police arrested Leonardo Sacco, the 35-year-old head of the Catholic Misericordia association which runs the centre, who has boasted of links to high-powered political figures.

Local priest Edoardo Scordio was also detained in the sting.

- Cash for spiritual guidance -

"Some 32 million euros ($35 million) went straight into the clan's pocket," assistant prosecutor Vincenzo Luberto said, adding that Scordio had received 150,000 euros for offering "spiritual guidance" to the migrants.

Police say the Arena clan, through Sacco, awarded contracts for services such as the centre's food supplies to associations it set up specifically for the purpose, as well as to other 'Ndrangheta families.

It also provided food services to the reception centre on Lampedusa, the Italian island which for several years was the frontline of the migrant humanitarian crisis, the biggest influx in Europe since World War II.

The head of the country's anti-mafia commission, Rosy Bindi, said the sting was "an important result in the fight against the 'Ndrangheta and the infiltration of mafia in the management of migrants".

Story continues

About 175,000 people are currently living in reception centres, where the state provides food, clothing, Italian lessons, psychological support, health care and a small amount of pocket money.

Italy's finance ministry has estimated the 2017 budget for migrant reception at three billion euros, depending on how many people are rescued in the Mediterranean and brought to the country.

More than 45,000 people have arrived so far this year, a 44 percent increase from the same period in 2016.

- 'Ghost' migrants -

Raffaele Cantone, Italy's anti-graft chief, said the mafia infiltration at Isola di Capo Rizzuto "is unfortunately, I believe, just the tip of the iceberg, and certainly not a one-off case".

The Calabrian centre had long been on the authorities' radar: In 2015 Italy's L'Espresso magazine published an investigative report alleging that managers at the camp were stealing funds earmarked for migrants and making money by starving them.

"If the organisation was supposed to provide 500 meals, it provided 300 and the rest went hungry," prosecutor Nicola Gratteri said.

The Crotone prefecture said in 2014 that it appeared the official number of people recorded at the centre was grossly inflated, with management pocketing funds from the state for "ghost" migrants.

A health inspection in 2013 revealed that asylum seekers were being given miserly portions of out-of-date food, and that the centre was illegally hosting 70 unaccompanied minors who went barefoot and slept in a hangar with only two toilets.

The Arena clan hit the headlines in 2012 after police seized assets from them worth 350 million euros, including one of Europe's largest wind farms.
On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Jenna Dewan Tatum admitted to dating Justin Timberlake shortly after his breakup with pop superstar Britney Spears in the early 2000s. At the time, Dewan Tatum was a backup dancer for NSync.

Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan Tatum. (Photo: Getty Images)

Interestingly enough, Dewan Tatum can be seen dancing with Timberlake during the NSync performance at the 2002 Grammy Awards, when he happened to be singing the groups hit song Girlfriend. But dont say that Dewan Tatum (just Dewan at the time) was a rebound chick, as Cohen made the mistake of doing. Dewan Tatum insisted that that was not the case.

Dewan Tatum also cleared up a rumor that was huge news at the time. It was reported in supermarket tabloids that Timberlake and Spears, after they broke up, got into an epic dance-off at a club. Dewan Tatum said that it never happened, though she and Cohen agreed how cool it would have been if it had.

Check out why Simon Cowell will not be returning to American Idol:

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Jordan Peele made an announcement on Talking With Chris Hardwick that will get fans of Get Out excited. The film has grossed over $200 million worldwide, and is even getting some buzz for the upcoming awards season. Although, the movie that everyone is talking about could have been a lot different. Jordan told Chris that he wrote many versions of the script, with many different endings. He also revealed that they had originally shot one of those different endings and it's going to be available when the movie comes out on Blu-Ray and DVD. The Key & Peele star didn't want to give away too much information about the alternate ending, but he did say "It doesn't go as well" as the current ending. While Jordan refused to give away that alternate ending, he did say there were many more that were just on paper. Jordan explained one of those endings, saying, "Rod comes to break into the gated community, finds his way in. He's looking for Chris and he sees Chris looking in a window on Main Street, and he goes 'Chris!' and Chris turns to him and goes, 'I assure you, I don't know who you're talking about.'" Which would've been a pretty creepy ending.
Jordan Peele made an announcement on Talking With Chris Hardwick that will get fans of Get Out excited. The film has grossed over $200 million worldwide, and is even getting some buzz for the upcoming awards season. Although, the movie that everyone is talking about could have been a lot different.

Jordan told Chris that he wrote many versions of the script, with many different endings. He also revealed that they had originally shot one of those different endings and its going to be available when the movie comes out on Blu-ray and DVD. The Key & Peele star didnt want to give away too much information about the alternate ending, but he did say that it doesnt go as well as the current ending.

While Jordan refused to give away that alternate ending, he did say there were many more that were just on paper. Jordan explained one of those endings, saying, Rod comes to break into the gated community, finds his way in. Hes looking for Chris and he sees Chris looking in a window on Main Street, and he goes Chris! and Chris turns to him and goes, I assure you, I dont know who youre talking about. Which wouldve been a pretty creepy ending.

Talking With Chris Hardwick airs Sundays at 11 p.m. on AMC.

Watch: The one Get Out Easter egg Jordan Peele didnt think wed find

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Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or leave your comments below.
By Maayan Lubell JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Jordanian citizen stabbed and wounded an Israeli police officer who then shot him dead in Jerusalem's Old City on Saturday, Israeli police said, the latest in a string of street attacks. Police spokeswoman Luba Simri said the officer was walking down a street when he was attacked by a 57-year-old Jordanian who had arrived in Israel for a visit a few days earlier. "The terrorist rushed toward him, whipped out a knife that he had in his possession, stormed him and began stabbing him. The police officer responded with determination and in a professional manner, managed to activate his weapon and neutralized him," Simri said. Ten seconds of security camera footage released by the police appeared to show a man, knife in hand, lunging toward a policeman falling backwards onto the ground, then jumping on him while wielding the knife and making stabbing motions. Israel's ambulance service Magen David Adom said the police officer was not severely wounded. Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al Momani disputed the Israeli account of the incident, which he described as an "ugly crime." "The Israeli government as the occupying power bears responsibility over the shooting of a Jordanian citizen in occupied eastern Jerusalem today that caused his martyrdom," al Momani told Jordanian state news agency Petra. In response, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement that Israel expected Jordan to condemn the attack. There has been sporadic violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories since October 2015, although it has not often involved Jordanians. Jordan and Israel signed a peace accord in 1994. Thirty-seven Israelis, two American tourists and a British student have been killed in the street attacks which have slowed in recent months, though not stopped. At least 244 Palestinians have been killed since the violence began. Israel says at least 164 of them were carrying out stabbings, shootings or car ramming attacks. Others died during clashes and protests. Israel says the Palestinian leadership is inciting the violence. The Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank, denies incitement and says that in many cases Israel has used excessive force in thwarting attackers armed with rudimentary weapons. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories that Israel captured in the 1967 war, for a future state. Peace talks between the sides broke down in 2014. U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to try and broker a historic peace deal to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is due to travel to the Middle East this month and meet separately with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on May 22-23. (Additional reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman; editing by David Clarke)
As a part of federal probe into Russias link with Donald Trumps campaign team, the Justice Department sought the presidents former campaign manager Paul Manaforts bank records, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Manafort came under scanner for his financial dealings and his possible role in alleged ties between Trumps associates and Russia.

The department requested Manaforts bank records from Citizen Financial Group Inc. in April, according to the Journal. The report added that it was unclear whether that was the only bank from where prosecutors sought Manaforts records.

Apart from this, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. are looking into real-estate transactions made by Manafort, the Journal reported.

In March, a NBC News report said a bank in Cyprus investigated accounts linked to Manafort. However, he closed those accounts. Sources told the news outlet at the time that he was linked to 15 bank accounts and 10 companies in the country. Court documents reportedly showed at least one of those accounts received funds from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is known to be a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rather than giving out the information, Manafort shut the accounts before a 2012 banking crisis following which Cyprus government took over the bank and told NBC the assets it took over did not include any accounts linked to Manafort.

In the same month, the Associated Press (AP) reported that before taking up job as Trumps campaign manager Manafort secretly worked for Deripaska.

We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success, Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government. with a plan to greatly benefit the Putin Government, according to the AP.

Story continues

In a separate report in March, the AP reported that according to international wire transfers and public court documents filed in a 2014 legal dispute in the Cayman Islands, Manafort was suspected of routing financial transactions through Cyprus.

AP found that a Manafort-linked company received a $1 million payment in October 2009 from a mysterious firm through the Bank of Cyprus. The $1 million payment left the account the same day  split in two, roughly $500,000 disbursements to accounts with no obvious owner, the AP report said.

He stepped down from the role of Trumps campaign chief last year after coming under radar for his financial transactions and alleged lobbying work for Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Russia Ukrainian president and other pro-Russia figures. He also reportedly set up a shell corporation and took $13 million worth loans from Trump-related businesses on the day he stepped down.

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On Monday's Morning Joe, hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinksi claimed that Kellyanne Conway secretly hates working for President Donald Trump. Scarborough and Brzezinksi alleged that the former campaign manager and counselor to the President, who often takes to news shows to defend Trump, holds a different view of the President when the cameras are not rolling. Brzezinksi claimed that after Morning Joe stopped filming, Conway said, "I need to take a shower." Scarborough alleged, "She said 'This is my summer vacation, my summer in Europe and I'm basically going to get through this.'" He added, "It was interesting after the Access Hollywood tape came out. That's when she started referring to Donald Trump as her client." As of now, Kellyanne Conway has not responded to these claimed.
The dinosaurs would have survived the devastating asteroid that hit the Earth had it struck 30 seconds sooner or later, scientists say.

Man may not have become the planets dominant species if the timing of the asteroid had been even slightly different, a BBC documentary will say tonight.

The programme, The Day the Dinosaurs Died, broadcast on Monday at 9pm on BBC2, follows a team of scientists who drilled into the crater where the asteroid struck 66 million years ago.

MORE: Remains of one of the last ever dinosaurs found in Moroccan mine

MORE: Worlds biggest dinosaur footprints discovered at Australias Jurassic Park

The asteroid landed 24 miles off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, opening up a 111-mile wide and 20-mile deep crater.

The BBC documentary uses animation to recreate how the dinosaurs extinction happened (Picture: BBC)

When scientists drilled into the crater, they found the rock was rich in sulphur compounds.

They believe that when the asteroid vaporised this type of rock, the reaction filled the air with dust that blocked out the sun.

In turn, this cooled the planet to a temperature below freezing for a decade, wiping out the dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs flee as the asteroid hits (Picture: BBC)

Those not killed by molten rock or tsunamis would have perished from starvation as their food supply was also destroyed.

The asteroid, estimated to have spanned nine miles, was travelling at 40,000mph.

But had it landed a few seconds sooner or later, it could have ditched in the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, causing substantially less damage.

Sean Gulick, professor of geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, who organised the drill, said: That asteroid struck Earth in a very unfortunate place.

The asteroid caused huge devastation to Earth (Picture: BBC)

Professor Joanna Morgan, of Imperial College London, who co-led the study, said up to 100 billion tonnes of sulphates were thrown into the atmosphere by the asteroid.

That would be enough to cool the planet for a decade and wipe out most life, she said.

However, smaller animals  and, ultimately, humans  were given the chance to thrive.

BBC presenter Professor Alice Roberts told The Times: Just half a million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, landscapes had filled with mammals of all shapes and sizes.

Chances are, if it wasnt for that asteroid we wouldnt be here today.
For the past 50 years women have been urged to have regular mammogramsbreast X-rays that help healthcare providers find suspicious lumps. But experts have disagreed about exactly when women should begin to get this breast cancer screening test.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) says women at average risk of breast cancer should start screenings at age 50, and the American Cancer Society recommends starting at 45. And up until recently, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) said all women should start having regular mammograms at 40.

Now, a new update to ACOGs recommendations walks back from that one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, they say women should start screening no later than age 50 but should have the choice to begin soonerin their 40s.

The new recommendations also say that individual women and their doctors can decide whether to screen every year or every two years.

ACOGs change acknowledges that all of the potentially conflicting screening strategies have merit, says Chris Zahn, M.D., ACOGs vice president for practice activities. Though all three groups work from the same body of research, the results are open to different interpretations that can lead to differing advice, he says.

ACOGs update resolves some of that conflict by emphasizing the importance of a womans individual decision-making within a set of rough guidelines, rather than telling women exactly what to do.

There has been so much confusion around the guidelines and how different they are, says Lisa Schwartz, M.D., professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Schwartz wasnt involved with crafting the new guideline.

This change, which suggests that the mishmash of advice is starting to come together, Schwartz says, should help ease some of that confusion for women wondering what to do.

Women trying to decide when to get a mammogram need to understand the evidence, and they should consider their own cancer worries so that they make informed choices that are right for them, says Marvin M. Lipman, M.D., Consumer Reports chief medical adviser.

Story continues

Heres what the different groups recommend and what to consider:

Weighing Testing's Benefits and Harms

The benefits of mammograms are obvious, Lipman saysfewer deaths from breast cancer. The American Cancer Society, for example, in its recommendations, points to research involving hundreds of thousands of women showing that regular screening has cut breast cancer deaths by 35 to 50 percent.

The risks of breast cancer screening, though less familiar to consumers and even to some doctors, are of increasing concern to many experts. The two main risks:

False alarms: Mammograms often cause false positives, results that initially seem worrisome but prove to be harmless on follow-up tests. For example, a recent review by the USPSTF found that 42 percent of women who get screened every two years for 10 years starting at age 50 will have at least one false positive.

Getting screened every year makes it more likely that youll experience a false alarm, as does starting in your 40s, Lipman notes. False alarms can cause needless anxiety and lead to more mammograms, which expose you to radiationand sometimes to unnecessary biopsies.

Overtreatment: Some cancers detected by mammography and then treated are unaggressive tumors that would have never have caused harm. Treating these cancers subjects women to stress and the potential risks of cancer therapysurgery, chemotherapy, and radiationwithout any benefits.

The task force estimates that at least one in eight tumors detected by mammography would never have spread and that for every woman whose life is saved by mammography, two or three will be treated without good reason.



Factoring in Your Breast Cancer Risks

Its important to note, Schwartz says, that the three major groups recommendations are directed at women of average risk for breast cancer.

That means if youre at high riskif youve had breast cancer before, you have a first-degree relative who had breast cancer, youve had genetic testing and know you carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 genetic mutation, or youve had a history of multiple chest X-rays or radiation treatments to the chest (as with lymphoma therapy)these recommendations dont apply to you. Youll need to talk with your doctor about an optimal screening strategy for you.

If youre not in that group, however, other, less weighty risk factors may help you decide when to get your first mammogram and how often to screen.

These risk factors include:

 A personal history of noncancerous breast conditions, including atypical hyperplasia or dense breasts.

 Menstrual periods that started before age 12 or continued after 55, or not having a child before 30.

 A history of hormone replacement therapy.

 Obesity, smoking, or excessive alcohol consumption.

The higher your risk, the more aggressive you may want to beby, for example, starting at age 40 or 45 instead of 50 or getting screened once per year instead of every two years, Lipman says.

4 Key Questions to Consider

Below are the questions to consider, the positions of leading health groups on each issue, and the advice of our experts.

1. When Should You Start Screening?

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: Recommended starting no later than 50. Women should have the option to start at 40.

American Cancer Society: Recommended starting at 45. Women should have the option to start at 40.

U.S. Preventive Services Task Force: Recommended starting at 50. Women should have the option to start at 40.

What to know: Breast cancer becomes much more common after age 50, and starting screenings sooner increases the chance of false alarms and, possibly, unnecessary treatment. On the other hand, cancers that develop before menopause tend to be more aggressive, making it more important to catch them early.

CRs take: The more risk factors you have for breast cancer, and the less concerned you are about the chance of being called back for more tests or receiving treatment unnecessarily, the more reasonable it is to start having mammograms in your 40s.

2. How Often Should You Have a Mammogram?

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: Every year or every two years, depending on preference.

American Cancer Society: Every year from age 45 to 54, then every two years.

U.S. Preventive Services Task Force: Every two years.

What to know: Breast cancer that appears before menopause tends to spread faster. But frequent tests make false alarms and unnecessary treatment more likely.

CRs take: If you opt to screen in your 40s, annual tests make sense, switching to tests every other year when you reach age 50 or so. People who start screening in their 50s may be better off with testing every other year, Lipman says.



3. When Should You Stop?

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: Women 75 and older should talk with their doctor about whether testing continues to make sense for them.

American Cancer Society: Continue as long as you have a life expectancy of 10 or more years.

U.S. Preventive Services Task Force: Not enough evidence to recommend screening after 74.

What to know: Theres little hard evidence for the benefits of breast cancer screening in women 75 and older. Although researchers know that about a quarter of breast cancer deaths occur in women older than that, they also say that the older and sicker you are, the less likely it is that mammography will extend your life.

CRs take: The American Cancer Societys advice to consider your overall health and life expectancy makes sense. A woman already diagnosed with a different kind of cancer or dealing with another serious health problemsuch as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or heart failuremight want to focus more on managing those problems. Someone in good health, however, might prefer to continue screening, especially if she has risk factors for breast cancer, Lipman says.

4. What About Breast Exams?

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: Women 25 to 39 should have the option to screen every one to three years, and women 40 and older should receive them every year.

American Cancer Society: Not recommended.

U.S. Preventive Services Task Force: Not enough evidence for or against to make a recommendation.

What to know: Though having your doctor check your breasts for lumps (or doing so yourself) may seem sensible, little research backs up the practice, Lipman notes. Instead, these exams may create anxiety and lead to needless follow-up tests.

CRs take: If you notice something abnormal, tell your doctor.

Correction: This article has been updated. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that women should start getting mammograms no later than 50, not starting at 50.

Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website.





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A Tennessee musician died after dousing himself in kerosene and lighting himself on fire, according to local authorities. The event was streamed on Facebook Live.

The Memphis Police Department told FOX13 Saturday that local musician Jared McLemore, 33, set himself on fire in an effort to commit suicide on Facebook Live. Shortly after he set himself on fire, he ran into a neighboring bar where his ex-girlfriend Alyssa Moore was working. He was reportedly rushed to a local hospital in critical condition for severe burns and later died from his injuries.

Read: Can Families Sue Facebook For Violent Videos Of Victims?

Witnesses said the incident occurred around 12:30 a.m. Saturday morning. At least one individual could be seen attempting to intervene during the Facebook Live feed before McLemore burst into flames and ran out view of the video.

Upon McLemore entering Murphys bar in midtown Memphis, a number of patrons reportedly attempted to put out the flames with their shirts, local news station WREG reported Saturday.

It looked like a movie, like someone wearing a flame-retardant suit, local musician Kimberly Koehler, who was playing a show at the bar, told WREG.

Koehlers bandmate and boyfriend Jim Duckworth, who was also present, told WREG that an overwhelming smell of kerosene filled the room. He added, Before you see anything, the smell filled the room.

Read: Facebook Live Violent Videos: Zuckerberg Says Company Is Hiring 3,000 People Combat Problem

McLemore reportedly had a history of domestic violence against Moore, who works as an audio engineer and owns a recording studio. WREG reported that court records indicate McLemore was arrested in August 2016 after strangling Moore and threatening to kill her on two different occasions in a 24-hour period. He was placed on probation in April and ordered to undergo mental evaluations. Its not clear whether McLemore complied with the order.

According to a GoFundMe page for Moore  which had raised more than $13,000 over its initial goal of $6,300 by Sunday  the gig was her first time back to work since an altercation with McLemore just a week before during which he allegedly threatened her with a gun.

Story continues

Jared McLemore

Photo: Jared McLemore/Facebook

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By Sharon Bernstein

(Reuters) - The mayor of the Virginia college town of Charlottesville was the target of anti-Semitic tweets on Sunday after speaking out against white nationalists who converged on a local park carrying blazing torches the night before.

Mayor Mike Signer said two protests led on Saturday by Richard Spencer, a leader of the "alt-right" movement, came on the same day the city held its annual Festival of Cultures event, which celebrates diversity in the home of the University of Virginia.

"You're seeing anti-Semitism in these crazy tweets I'm getting and you're seeing a display of torches at night, which is reminiscent of the KKK," Signer, who is Jewish, said in a phone interview. "They're sort of a last gasp of the bigotry that this country has systematically overcome."

Signer issued a statement on Saturday criticizing the torch-carrying marchers as either "profoundly ignorant" or aiming to instill fear.

"I smell Jew," posted an anonymous Twitter user with the handle "Great Patriot Trump." "If so, you are going back to Israel. But you will not stay in power here. Not for long."

The protesters converged on Charlottesville's Robert E. Lee Park, where a statue of the Confederate general that the city council voted to remove is located. The city also voted to remove a statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, located in another park. Both changes have been put on hold amid ongoing litigation.

The Charlottesville protests were the latest of several in the U.S. South in recent months over the removal of statues celebrating leaders of the Confederacy, the slave-holding group of states that broke with the North in the early 1860s, prompting the 1861-1865 Civil War.

Spencer, an avowed white nationalist, is credited by some with coining the term "alt-right" to describe online and social media communities on the far right that include white supremacists.

Story continues

Trump, as president-elect, condemned an alt-right conference in Washington in November organized by Spencer where some attendees gave Nazi salutes and yelled "Hail Trump!" after a speech about white nationalism.

At the Saturday afternoon rally, Spencer led chants of "You will not replace us."

Later that night, he tweeted a photo of himself holding a burning tiki torch, his face illuminated with the hashtag "torchlight."

The Charlottesville Daily Progress reported that chanters also cried: "Russia is our friend," and "Blood and soil."

Spencer did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The torchlight protest lasted only about 10 minutes, when police arrived on the scene after violence erupted, the newspaper said.

Charlottesville police did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Signer said officers would be investigating to see whether any laws were broken.

In recent years, a string of Southern states have moved Confederate-era monuments to museums, an effort that intensified after a white supremacist killed nine blacks in a South Carolina church in June 2015.

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, Calif.; Editing by Frank McGurty and Peter Cooney)
President Donald Trump threatened to cancel all future press briefings Friday morning in a series of tweets arguing that "it is not possible" for his staff to speak with "perfect accuracy" to the American public.

Following his early morning Twitter rant, he also stated the same thing in an interview with Fox News' Jeanine Pirro on Friday afternoon.

Trumps comments came after contrasting accounts from White House Staff members regarding the firing of the former FBI Director James Comey. The president was asked about this during his interview and Pirro also asked him what could be done to rectify the inaccuracies presented to the media.

"We dont have press conferences," said Trump. "We just dont have them. Unless I have them every two weeks and do it myself. We dont have them. I think it's a good idea."

Read: Sean Spicer Hides In Bushes, Denies Russia Ties In Melissa McCarthy 'SNL' Sketch

In the pair of tweets talking about doing away with press briefings, Trump said he will have his spokesperson communicate with the public via written responses only.

During the Fox News interview, the president also commented upon the performance and treatment of his spokespeople including press secretary Sean Spicer and principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who conducted two briefings in Spicer's absence this week.

"You have a level of hostility thats incredible and it's very unfair," said Trump.

"Sarah Huckabee is a lovely young woman. You know Sean Spicer. Hes a wonderful human being. Hes a nice man, he added.

Since Trump took office in January, the routine White House press briefings have been a major source for newspaper articles, comedy sketches and come under scrutiny on social media as well.

Story continues

Heres a list of some of the most memorable moments from the press briefings that made the headlines.

The first press briefing by newly appointed Press Secretary Sean Spicer was on Jan. 21 when he made his first statement to the media as the president's spokesperson. The media had pointed out President Trumps inauguration ceremony was attended by a lesser number of people compared to his predecessor. However, the president and his supporters disagreed with that and Spicer said he wanted to set things straight, the Washington Post reported.

This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration  period  both in person and around the globe. Even the New York Times printed a photograph showing a misrepresentation of the crowd in the original tweet in their paper, which showed the full extent of the support, depth in crowd, and intensity that existed, Spicer had said.

These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong, he added.

Read: 5 Possible Reasons Sean Spicer Is Getting Fired As White House Press Secretary

In March, Spicer was seen conducting the briefing with his flag lapel turned upside down. According to the U.S. code, an upside-down flag is a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.

15 seconds after the briefing had begun, the pin was straightened. However Spicer made national headlines.

In April, while talking about the seriousness of the United States in dealing with the Syrian President Bashar Assads use of chemical weapons, Spicer told the reporters that someone as despicable as Hitler didn't even sink to using chemical weapons.

He was immensely criticized for his comment and his oversight about Hitler's use of gas chambers to kill Jewish people and others did not go over well.

However, he later appeared on CNN to apologize:

Frankly, I mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison. And for that I apologize. It was a mistake to do that.

Melissa McCarthy has been doing impersonations of Spicer and his press briefings on Saturday Night Live, however she returned to this weeks show to perform a culmination of her frequent guest appearances this season.

On Saturdays episode, McCarthy was seen portraying an angst-ridden Spicer whose anger was replaced with worry Trump has been lying to him amid tensions in the White House regarding the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

If there were to be no press briefings conducted by Sean Spicer, the comedy writers would have to look elsewhere for their material.

Related Articles
Men are just as prone to depression as women. It just doesnt always look the same. (Photo: Getty Images)

Depression is an equal-opportunity attacker: Neither fame, nor beauty, nor even a royal crown will necessarily render you immune to mental health struggles. What else wont protect you against depression? Gender.

Rates of depression may be higher in women than in men, but struggles with mental health are ubiquitous among both sexes  even if men remain less likely to open up about it than their female counterparts. According to a June 2015 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussed by Yahoo Health, close to one in 10 American men suffer from depression or anxiety, but fewer than half get treatment.

Generally speaking, guys grow up conditioned to hide their feelings, for good or for bad, and thus, feelings often get mislabeled or go untreated altogether. But one brave gentleman, Jacob (not his real name), is hoping to change that by sharing details from his decades-long struggle. They are details he has kept hidden until reading, on Yahoo, a powerful online confession from one brave young woman, Katelyn Marie Todd, about her daily struggles with depression. The story hit a powerful chord with him and inspired him to pay it forward, so to speak, by sharing his own story.

Ive been fighting depression for as long as I can remember, Jacob tells Yahoo Beauty. I am a recovering alcoholic, and every day I fight. I fight for my son and wife. But what gave me kind of an aha moment was something I read in Yahoos previous article [discussing Todds confession]. The article mentioned that for men, depression often demonstrated itself in different ways, such as anger. Thats when it hit me. I have, over the past couple years felt as though these feelings of anger might be depression. That comment solidified it in my mind.

I know that the more angry I get, the more self-destructive I become, he explains. Ive had times where I went over the top. I would be angry at the wrong things or the wrong people, and for sure I was very angry at the way I felt. What was wrong with me? Why was I feeling like this? How could I think these thoughts?

Story continues

Now, Jacob says, he is on a mission to free himself. Throughout the years Ive successfully built a prison consisting of invisible bars that were forged with fear and self-doubt. My insecurities led me for most of my life. Ive battled my demons for years. They almost won on a few occasions, but Im still here fighting, he says. And part of winning that fight is recognizing that his anger, the self-described raging volcano inside of him, is depression manifested.

Women are wonderful torturers of themselves, psychologist Barbara Greenberg, PhD, tells Yahoo Beauty. They are much more likely to be self-destructive. Men, on the other hand, are much more likely to lash out against others if theyre depressed.

And while, yes, of course, there are indeed guys out there who experience depression via sadness, crying, and a lack of energy, most males are more likely to express their depression in a masked sort of way, Greenberg explains. In my experience, it is much more common for men to present not with depression but with external problems, like substance abuse or anger.

Why? Societal expectations, in short. Theres a lot of shame in men being depressed because men are raised to be strong, Greenberg says. Its a cliche, but to be strong is a really important thing [for men in our society], so to be publicly crying or depressed and sad is simply not consistent with how men think they are supposed to express themselves. Real men dont cry, real men dont get sad, real men are tough  thats the societal stereotype, and its led to depression becoming a source of humiliation and shame for many.

How do we flip that script? According to Greenberg, it all starts with giving boys and men permission to be both depressed as well as to talk about it. Anyone raising boys, be it parents, guardians, etc., needs to teach them the vocabulary of emotion, she urges. If you teach boys the vocabulary of emotion, it is a blessing. Because people thirst more than anything else for the language to describe what ails them, she adds. And make that language nuanced: Disappointed, sad, angry  these are all different emotions that can be specifically verbalized and thus specifically understood and released, not repressed.

Adults are much more likely to see boys as bad and girls as sad,' Greenberg continues, and that is truly very unfair. This tends to happen most often with depressed teenage boys, she says, who might act out by punching walls or otherwise showing extreme anger. But depression hiding beneath anger by no means ends with adolescence  or with material success. Approximately 80 percent of my practice is female, but when many of these women bring their husbands in, even the most successful guys will break down and cry about their sadness and loneliness in life, she says.

We need to raise awareness in everyone that this is what depression looks like in men, she says, and we need to raise awareness in men that there is no shame in their feelings. Men need to be educated that they too can suffer from depression, often silently.

And that is precisely why men like Jacob sharing their stories is so important. Its unusual for a man to be this open, Greenberg adds. He could start a dialogue that could save lives because men historically keep these things to themselves. But he made himself vulnerable, and if his confession resonates with even one person, if even one person seeks therapy, he could save a life.

Read more from Yahoo Style + Beauty:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyle and @YahooBeauty.
By Paul Carrel and Michel Rose BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President Emmanuel Macron agreed on Monday to draw up a roadmap to deeper European Union integration and opened the door to changing the bloc's treaties to facilitate ambitious reform. A day after Macron's inauguration, the two leaders struck a consensual tone in Berlin after talks in which they sought to reinvigorate the Franco-German relationship and the European project that has been shaken by Britain's planned exit. The run-up to the meeting had been marked by a row among senior German politicians over how to respond to Macron's calls for closer EU integration, with some concerned that Berlin would be asked to pay for struggling states that resist reforms. Merkel said that Germany needs France to succeed, emphasizing that "Europe will only do well if there is a strong France". "We agreed that we want to develop a road map for the European Union's medium-term perspectives," she said in a joint news conference with Macron. "There is a common conviction that we cannot only deal with Britain's exit (from the EU), but instead that we must above all think about how we can deepen the existing European Union and especially the euro zone." With Germany's economy -- Europe's largest -- outperforming that of France, the traditional Franco-German motor at the heart of the EU that has often misfired in recent years. Monday's meeting was an effort to inject some dynamism into the partnership. Crucially, both leaders said they were open to the idea of changing the EU's treaties. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, an arch conservative who has come to personify Berlin's focus on fiscal rectitude, had suggested that Macron's idea of creating a budget and finance minister for the euro zone was unrealistic because it would require politically thorny changes to the EU treaty. But both leaders said they could tackle treaty change. "In the past, the subject of treaty change was a French taboo. It will no longer be the case," said the French president, who earlier arrived at the chancellery to cheers from a crowd chanting "Macron! Macron!" and waving European flags. Merkel said that, from Germany's viewpoint, treaty change would be possible, adding: "I would be ready to do this, but first we will work on what we want to reform." "NON" TO EUROBONDS Macron sought to allay concerns among German conservatives that he could push for the euro zone to develop into a "transfer union" in which Germany is asked to bankroll other states. The president, a 39-year-old former investment banker, said he did not support the idea of so-called Eurobonds, which could allow euro zone countries to issue debt jointly, with some benefiting from lower risk premiums thanks to Germany's creditworthiness. "I have never defended (the idea of) Eurobonds or the mutualization of existing debt in the euro zone," he said. A staunch European integrationist, Macron pledged after taking office on Sunday to restore France's standing on the world stage, strengthen national self-confidence and heal divisions that the bitterly fought presidential campaign had opened up. Largely unknown to the wider public three years ago, Macron enjoyed a meteoric rise to the presidency, beating Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front on May 7 after a long campaign exposed deep splits over France's role in Europe. He sought on Monday to show solidarity with Germany on the migrant crisis -- an issue on which Merkel has pressed for EU countries to work together -- by saying that a common asylum policy was one area where Paris could cooperate with Berlin. "We need more pragmatism, less bureaucracy and a Europe that protects our citizens," he added. In turn, Merkel said she is open to a Macron proposal to create a level playing field between EU countries and other international trade partners. A former economy minister under France's previous president, Socialist Francois Hollande, Macron is the youngest post-war French leader and the first to be born after 1958, when President Charles de Gaulle set up the Fifth Republic. Merkel, 62, has been chancellor since late 2005, when Jacques Chirac was French president. Europe's so-called Franco-German motor has often worked best in the past when leaders of opposite political persuasions have been in power. (Additional reporting by Andreas Rinke and Michael Nienaber; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and David Goodman)
(AP/John Locher)

Newly crowned Miss USA 2017, Kara McCullough, a government scientist, said that affordable health care for U.S. citizens is a privilege. She made this statement during the televised pageant at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas on Sunday.

As part of the competition, the top five finalists are required to answer a question onstage. Each question is different and the topics usually involve current events. This year, the questions were provided by The Skimm, a daily e-mail that breaks down the top headlines. The contestants had 30 seconds to form an opinion and deliver a response in front of a live audience.

McCullough, who represented the District of Columbia, was asked whether affordable health care for all U.S. citizens is a right or a privilege.

Im definitely going to say its a privilege, she began.

As a government employee, I am granted health care and I see first-hand that for one to have health care, you have to have jobs. So, therefore, we need to continue to cultivate this environment that were given the opportunity to have health care as well as jobs to all American citizens worldwide.

"I'm definitely going to say it's a privilege." Listen to your new #MissUSA talk about healthcare in the USA. pic.twitter.com/CzPBeaTYHO  Miss USA (@MissUSA) May 15, 2017

With efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act happening in Washington, its obvious that a polarizing question like this would get some divisive responses on both sides. Here are some reactions from Twitter.

Oooofff saying health care is a privilege might not go over too well #districtofcolumbia #MissUSA  Dani  (@DaniVanHawaiian) May 15, 2017

She said healthcare is a "privilege" & you need a job for it. But ppl with disabilities & diseases who cant work need it the most?? #MissUSA  smadgirl (@Ashlaayejane) May 15, 2017

Dang I wanted Miss D.C to win but I'm sorry affordable health care is not a privilege. Health care should be a human right! #MissUSA  Kandacy Adams (@_KandKand) May 15, 2017

So what if people don't agree with Miss USA's comments. As far as I remember, that's definitely a right, not a privilege. #MissUSA  Lenora Patterson (@DrLPatt) May 15, 2017

No, #MissUSA didn't misunderstand the question. Healthcare is a privilege not a right. Perhaps y'all misunderstood the Constitution  Antonia Okafor (@antonia_okafor) May 15, 2017

Healthcare according to #MissUSA is a privilege,so is walking across that stage and representing the USA and women.  Ali (@Alisocialdaily) May 15, 2017

#MissUSA is correct. US healthcare is currently absolutely a privilege. It still SHOULD be a right.  Emmerbetic (@Emmerbetic) May 15, 2017

The 25-year-old works at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She graduated from South Carolina State University with a degree in chemistry with a concentration in radiochemistry, according to her bio.

Story continues

Miss USAs parent company, The Miss Universe Organization, was sold to WME/IMG by Donald Trump in 2015.



Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:
A woman died on Mothers Day after saving her daughters life by pushing her out of path of an oncoming car.

Diane Aluska, a mother of three, saw a car reversing fast towards them and managed to get her 16-year-old daughter Jenna out of the way.

There is no doubt she saved her daughters life, Suffolk County police Detective Sergeant James Murphy told the New York Post.

Read more

This Mothers Day, please don't thank your mum for being 'strong'

The pair had attended Mass and were walking out of a bakery in Lindenhurst, Long Island, when 80-year-old driver Ann Riolo mistakenly reversed her car towards them.

She had thought that she had put it in drive, Mr James Murphy told reporters.

She left it in reverse, hit the gas, started speeding backwards, lost control, and jumped the sidewalk.

capture2.jpg

Diane and Jenna Aluska (Facebook)

Aluska put her hand on her daughters shoulder to try and get her out of the way, and Jenna avoided the worst impact of the crash.

The car clipped the 16-year-old, but killed her mother.

After hitting the women, Riolo then crashed the car into the local fire department building.

At the last second you could see the mother kind of throw the daughter out of the way and sacrifice herself to try and save her own daughter so that was pretty heartfelt, witness Joe Biggs told CBS.

Both women were taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital where Aluska died. Jenna was reported as being in a stable condition, according to police.

Jennas father, Kenneth Aluska, told The Post that he and his son would have to inform Jenna during a hospital visit that her mother had died.

Ms Riolo was treated for minor injuries at the same hospital. It is not clear whether criminal charges will be brought.

Her car, a Toyota Corolla, has been impounded to carry out a safety test.

This appears to be non-criminal, a tragic accident, Mr Murphy said.

We are taking the car in to investigate, but it appears to be non-criminal.
Scientists have identified a giant sea creature that washed up on a beach in Indonesia last week.

The bizarre carcass left people on the island of Seram perplexed when it washed ashore, given its huge mass and strange shape.

The remains appeared to include tusks and tentacles, leading some online observers to contemplate that it may have been a long lost sea monster.

However, the truth, as always, is a little more simple.

MORE: Gigantic creature washes up in Indonesia  and no one knows what it is

MORE: Huge rotting sea creature that washed ashore is turning the water red

A closer examination of the animal has revealed that it is probably a baleen whale.

It was discovered by fisherman Asrul Tuanakota, 37, who initially thought it was a boat caught in shallow water.

The sea creature has been identified (Picture: Facebook/PataSiwa Kumbang AmaLatu)

Blood from the remains had turned the coastline bright red as locals crowded around the beast to take photos and inspect it.

But George Leonard, the chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, told the Huffington Post that the remains most likely belong to a baleen whale.

He said: Trying to identify huge ocean creatures half a [world] away from a grainy video is tough to do; but once people start sharing specific information that begins to narrow in on defining characteristics of the creature, the identity begins to come into focus.

Seram is close to the migration routes for baleen whales, so one could have have been swept ashore.

Edith Widder, chief executive of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, also told the Huffington Post the creature was probably a baleen whale.
Monster of the deep? Or just a really funky dead whale?

A monstrously huge creature that washed ashore on a remote Indonesian beach, oozing a mysterious red fluid, is probably a baleen whale in an advanced state of decomposition, experts said.

The nearly 50-foot-long (15 meters) marine creature was lying on Hulung Beach on Seram Island, Indonesia, and was first discovered by 37-year-old local resident Asrul Tuanakota, who initially mistook the creature for a boat, the Jakarta Globe reported.

Despite the blob's bizarre appearance, it's clearly a baleen whale, said Alexander Werth, a whale biologist at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

"There is lots of stuff in the ocean that we don't know about  but there's nothing that big" that remains unknown, Werth said.

Two dead giveaways revealed that the creature was a whale, Werth said: the grooves, or "throat pleats," and the upper jaw where the two racks of baleen plates, used for filtering out food in the whale's mouth, would have been. [Whale Photos: Giants of the Deep]

While scientists can say for sure that the whale belongs to the genus Balaenoptera, it's not clear exactly which species it is: It could be either a blue whale or a Bryde's whale, Werth said. However, Bryde's whales are not usually that big. The creature could also be a fin whale, said Moe Flannery, the collections manager in ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences. (The creature is definitely not a humpback, she added.)

Nasty gases

The beached whale is clearly in an advanced state of decomposition and likely has been dead for anywhere from two weeks to several months, Werth and Flannery said. The decomposition, and the gases produced by the associated bacteria, have inflated segments of the carcass like a balloon, Werth said.

"It must stink to high heaven," Werth told Live Science.

Baleen whales typically have many bacteria in their guts that produce gas, Werth said. These keep reproducing once the whale dies, creating a foul stench and inflating the bodies, he said.

Story continues

"That's yet another reason you don't want to be close to these things, not because it's a scary, spooky creature, but [because] it would just be releasing some pretty foul, noxious gases," Werth said.

Though smelling the decomposing whale is not dangerous per se, people shouldn't be bathing in or drinking the water nearby, he added.

Normally, when a massive whale dies, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where the corpse serves as a feast for a year or two for an entire ecosystem of worms, hagfish, sharks and other marine creatures, Werth said.

However, if a ship swiped the animal, causing internal injuries that did not allow gases to escape, or if the whale had a bacterial infection that produced huge amounts of gases, the animal could inflate like a balloon  enough to float to shore, Werth said. On the other hand, this ill-fated whale may simply have died in warm waters, which tend to fuel more bacterial growth. That, too, could rapidly produce enough gas after death to make the animal float rather than sink, Werth said.

"If it dies in really cold, polar waters, there's a greater chance it will sink," Werth said.

This phenomenon is not unique to whales: Two human bodies that presumably were submerged during colder weather popped up in a Central Park pond in New York during warmer weather, Werth said.

Tides or currents may explain why the floating whale carcass made it ashore, Werth added.

Mysterious cause of death

While it's tough to determine a cause of death in an animal in such an advanced state of decomposition, some clues can still be gleaned from the carcass, Flannery said. For instance, if the a ship struck the whale, signs of trauma such as fractured ribs would still be apparent. Identifying a bacterial infection would be difficult this far after decomposition. However, if the animal died of domoic acid toxicity, sometimes caused by algal blooms, a urine sample could reveal that, Flannery added.

At the least, researchers always try to take a tissue sample, which contains DNA that would reveal the species of whale and the gender, she said.

As for the reddish tinge in the water surrounding the whale, that is probably a combination of blood and grease, Flannery said.

"Whales are full of oil, and it's kind of orangey," Flannery told Live Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations
BEIJING (Reuters) - Nepal is in talks with China to build a cross-border rail link that may cost up to $8 billion, and funding could be expected after Nepal formally signed up to Beijing's Belt and Road initiative, a Nepali finance ministry official said on Sunday. Yug Raj Pandey, an under secretary at Nepal's Ministry of Finance, told Reuters the proposed 550 kilometer-long railway would connect China's western Tibet region to Nepal's capital of Kathmandu and will carry goods and passengers. The Himalayan nation officially signed an agreement two days ago to be part of President Xi Jinping's ambitious plan to build a new Silk Road, he said on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. "Now we are a member of (the initiative) we can get some specific project assistance from China's government. We expect it for the railway," he said. "Once we connect by railway then we can increase our trade and invite more tourists to Nepal." Pandey said the two countries had been in discussions for the past five months about the project, which could cost $7-8 billion and take up to eight years to complete. He said Nepal planned to start preparing a detailed project report for the railway, and that they had yet to decide how much funding they will seek from China. The railway will travel over 400 kilometers in China to the Nepal border, and then about another 150 kilometers from the Nepali border to Kathmandu, he said. "Our first priority is railway, and second will be hydropower projects and cross-border transmission lines between Nepal and China," he said. China last year agreed to consider building a railway into Nepal and to start a feasibility study for a free trade agreement with impoverished, landlocked Nepal, which has been trying to lessen its dependence on its other big neighbor India. Pandey declined to comment about India's opposition to parts of the Belt and Road initiative, in particular an economic corridor China is building in Pakistan. China has touted what it formally calls the Belt and Road initiative as a new way to boost global development since Xi unveiled the plan in 2013, aiming to expand links between Asia, Africa, Europe and beyond underpinned by billions of dollars in infrastructure investment. (Reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Randy Fabi)
By Ju-min Park and Idrees Ali

SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea, defying calls to rein in its weapons program, fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday, days after a new leader came to power in South Korea pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.

The U.S. military's Pacific Command said it was assessing the type of missile that was fired but it was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile". The U.S. threat assessment has not changed from a national security standpoint, a U.S. official said.

Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada said the missile could be a new type. It flew for 30 minutes before dropping into the sea between North Korea's east coast and Japan. North Korea has consistently test-fired missiles in that direction.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the missile landed 97 km (60 miles) south of Russia's Vladivostok region.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the launch a message by Pyongyang to South Korea after the election of President Moon Jae-in, who took office on Wednesday.

"You first have to get into Kim Jong Un's head - which is, he's in a state of paranoia, he's incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him," Haley told ABC's "This Week" program, referring to North Korea's leader.

Haley added that the United States will "continue to tighten the screws," referring to sanctions and working with the international community to put pressure on Pyongyang.

The White House mentioned Russia in its earlier statement about the launch. "With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil  in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan  the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased," the White House said, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The launch served as a call for all nations to implement stronger sanctions against North Korea, it added.

Story continues

The missile flew 700 km (430 miles) and reached an altitude of more than 2,000 km (1,245 miles), according to officials in South Korea and Japan, further and higher than an intermediate-range missile North Korea successfully tested in February from the same region of Kusong, northwest of its capital, Pyongyang.

An intercontinental ballistic missile is considered to have a range of more than 6,000 km (3,700 miles).

North Korea is widely believed to be developing an intercontinental missile tipped with a nuclear weapon that is capable of reaching the United States. Trump has vowed not to let that happen.

Experts said the altitude reached by the missile tested on Sunday meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it traveled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000 km (2,500 miles), experts said.

Kim Dong-yub of Kyungnam University's Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul said he estimated a standard trajectory would give it a range of 6,000 km (3,700 miles).

"The launch may indeed represent a new missile with a long range," said Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, referring to the estimated altitude of more than 2,000 km (1,240 miles). "It is definitely concerning."

Speaking in Beijing, Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, told reporters Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping had discussed the situation on the Korean peninsula, including the latest missile launch, and expressed "mutual concerns" about growing tensions.

Putin is in Beijing for a conference on a plan for a new Silk Road. Delegations from the United States, South Korea and North Korea are also there.

The launch, at 5:27 a.m. Seoul time (2027 GMT Saturday), came two weeks after North Korea fired a missile that disintegrated minutes into flight, marking its fourth consecutive failure since March.

'CLEAR VIOLATION'

South Korea's new president Moon held his first National Security Council in response to the launch, which he called a "clear violation" of U.N. Security Council resolutions, his office said.

"The president said while South Korea remains open to the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, it is only possible when the North shows a change in attitude," Yoon Young-chan, Moon's press secretary, told a briefing.

Moon won Tuesday's election on a platform of a moderate approach to North Korea and has said he would be willing to go to Pyongyang under the right circumstances, arguing dialogue must be used in parallel with sanctions.

China, North Korea's sole main ally which nevertheless objects to its weapons programs, called for restraint and for no one to exacerbate tensions.

"China opposes relevant launch activities by North Korea that are contrary to Security Council resolutions," China's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said North Korea's missile launches were a "grave threat to our country and a clear violation of U.N. resolutions".

Ambassador Haley said the launch was not the way for North Korea to earn a meeting with Trump, who has said he would be "honored" to meet Kim Jong Un under the right circumstances.

Trump said in an interview with Reuters in April that a "major, major conflict" with North Korea was possible but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome. On Saturday, a top North Korean diplomat said Pyongyang was open to dialogue with the Trump administration under the right conditions.

Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said among the responses expected from the Trump administration would be further pressure on all countries to fully implement U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions against North Korea.

North Korean attempted but failed to test-launch ballistic missiles four times in the past two months. It has conducted various tests since the beginning of last year at an unprecedented pace. It also conducted its fourth and fifth nuclear tests last year.

(Additional reporting by Dustin Volz and Matt Spetalnick in WASHINGTON, Linda Sieg and Nobuhiro Kubo in TOKYO, Christine Kim in SEOUL, and Ben Blanchard and Denis Dyomkin in BEIJING; Writing by Jack Kim and Soyoung Kim; Editing by Neil Fullick, Robert Birsel and Will Dunham)
By Jack Kim and Ju-min Park SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea fired on Sunday a ballistic missile from a region near its west coast that flew 700 kilometers (430 miles), South Korea's military said, days after a new leader took office in the South pledging to engage in dialogue with Pyongyang. The missile was fired early on Sunday from a region named Kusong located northwest of Pyongyang, where the North previously test-launched an intermediate-range missile it is believed to be developing, the last time in February. Japan said the missile flew for 30 minutes and dropped in the sea between the North's east coast and Japan. Sunday's launch is the first in two weeks since the last attempt to fire a missile ended in a failure just minutes into flight. Japan swiftly issued a protest. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said North Korea's firing of a ballistic missile was a violation of U.N. resolutions and that Japan strongly protested the action. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe repeated the protest in comments to reporters. "North Korea's repeated missile launches are a grave threat to our country and a clear violation of UN resolutions," Abe told reporters, adding Japan will stay in close touch with the United States and South Korea. The launch is the first since a new liberal president took office in South Korea on Wednesday saying dialogue as well as pressure must be used to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula and stop the North's weapons pursuit. President Moon Jae-in has called an emergency National Security Council meeting in response to the launch, the presidential Blue House said. The North attempted but failed to test-launch ballistic missiles four consecutive times in the past two months but has conducted a variety of missile testing since the beginning of last year at an unprecedented pace. Weapons experts and government officials believe the North has accomplished some technical progress with those tests. U.S. President Donald Trump warned in an interview with Reuters in late April that a "major, major conflict" with the North was possible, but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome to the dispute over its nuclear and missile programs. (Additional reporting by Linda Sieg in Tokyo; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Mary Milliken)
SEOUL (Reuters) - A senior North Korean diplomat who handles relations with the United States said on Saturday that Pyongyang would have dialogue with the U.S. administration if conditions were right, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. Choe Son Hui, North Korea's foreign ministry director general for U.S. affairs, made the comment to reporters in Beijing as she was traveling home from Norway, Yonhap said. "We'll have dialogue if the conditions are there," she told reporters when asked if the North was preparing to hold talks with the Trump administration, according to Yonhap. When asked if North Korea was also getting ready to talk with the new government in South Korea, of liberal President Moon Jae-in, Choe said: "We'll see." The comments by Choe, who is a veteran member of the North's team of nuclear negotiators, came amid stepped up international efforts to press North Korea and ease tension over its pursuit of nuclear arms. U.S. President Donald Trump warned in an interview with Reuters in late April that a "major, major conflict" with the North was possible, but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome to the dispute over its nuclear and missile programs. Trump later said he would be "honored" to meet the North's leader, Kim Jong Un, under the right conditions. A U.S. State Department spokesman said the United States remains open to talks with North Korea but it would have to "cease all its illegal activities and aggressive behavior in the region." "We have been clear over the past twenty years that we seek nothing but a stable and economically prosperous Korean peninsula," the spokesman said in an email. Choe was in Norway for so-called Track Two talks with former U.S. government officials, according to Japanese media, the latest in a series of such meetings. A source with knowledge of the latest meeting said at least one former U.S. government official took part but the U.S. administration was not involved. South Korea's Moon, elected this week on a platform of a moderate approach to North Korea, has said he would be willing to go to Pyongyang under the right circumstances and said dialogue must be used in parallel with sanctions to resolve the problem over North Korea's weapons. North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests in defiance of U.N. and U.S. sanctions and is also developing long-range missiles to deliver atomic weapons. It says it needs such weapons to defend itself against U.S. aggression. (Reporting by Jack Kim. Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by Robert Birsel and Alistair Bell)
By Jack Kim and Ju-min Park SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea said on Monday it had successfully conducted a newly developed mid-to-long range missile test on Sunday, supervised by leader Kim Jong Un and aimed at verifying the capability to carry a "large scale heavy nuclear warhead." Kim accused the United States of "browbeating" countries that "have no nukes" and warned Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland is in the North's "sighting range for strike," the North's official KCNA news agency reported. The North fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday in a launch that Washington called a message to South Korea, days after its new president took office pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue. The missile was launched at the highest angle so as not to affect the security of neighboring countries and flew 787 kilometers (490 miles) reaching an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers (1,312 miles), KCNA said. Experts said the altitude reached by the missile tested on Sunday meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it traveled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000 km (2,500 miles), experts said. "The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead," KCNA said. "If the U.S. awkwardly attempts to provoke the DPRK, it will not escape from the biggest disaster in the history, Kim said, strongly warning the U.S. should not to disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in the DPRK's sighting range for strike and that it has all powerful means for retaliatory strike," KCNA said. DPRK is short for North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea is believed to be developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching the mainland United States. The U.S. military's Pacific Command said the type of missile that was fired was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile". The United Nations Security Council is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss North Korea's latest missile launch, diplomats said on Sunday, which was requested by the United States and allies South Korea and Japan. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the launch a message by Pyongyang to South Korea after the election of President Moon Jae-in, who took office on Wednesday. "You first have to get into Kim Jong Un's head -- which is, he's in a state of paranoia, he's incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him," Haley told ABC's "This Week" program, referring to North Korea's leader. The report on the missile's flight was largely consistent with South Korean and Japanese assessments on Sunday that it flew 700 km (435 miles)and reached an altitude of more than 2,000 km (1,243 miles), which is further and higher than an intermediate-range missile tested in February from the same region, northwest of Pyongyang. "North Korea's latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile," Washington-based monitoring project, 38 North, said in an analysis issued on Sunday. "It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the U.S. base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)," it said. (Editing by Sandra Maler)
cameronabadi

North Korea launched what appears to be a new type of ballistic missile on Sunday, extending the range and flight time over other recent tests, a development that could potentially put U.S. bases in Asia within Pyongyangs range.

The launch of the as yet unidentified missile could signal advances over known North Korean capabilities, adding to tensions in the region as the Trump administration seeks to prevent Pyongyang from developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. The test also presents an early challenge to South Koreas new president, who was elected this month after vowing to return to conciliatory policies toward Pyongyang.

The test may represent a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile, said John Schilling, an engineer and analyst with 38 North, a project of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins, adding that the launch could be a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The missile flew for about 30 minutes, during which it traveled about 620 miles and reached a height of 1,200 miles, according to early assessments.

The U.S. Pacific Command said in a statement that the flight was not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile, but analysts said that if the missile were to be fired on a standard trajectory it could travel about 2,800 miles, potentially endangering the U.S. air base in Guam.

It was the 10th ballistic missile test for Pyongyang so far this year, one more than the nine tested at this point in 2016.

The White House has applied more pressure on Beijing in recent weeks to take a harder stand with the regime of Kim Jong Un to curb his ballistic missile and nuclear programs. In a statement Saturday night, the White House brought Russia into the discussion, noting that the missile splashed down closer to Russia than Japan, adding that the president cannot imagine that Russia is pleased.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Beijing for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two leaders said in a statement they had discussed the security situation on the Korean peninsula and had concerns, but did not offer specifics.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said that its missile defense systems tracked the North Korean missile for 23 minutes before it fell about 310 miles from the Russian coast.

Given its altitude, the range is considerably longer than the estimated range of the Musudan missile, which showed a range of about 3,000 km [1,864 miles] in a test last year, wrote David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists in a blog post on Sunday.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who only took office on Wednesday after his predecessor was impeached, held his first National Security Council in response to the launch, which he called a clear violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Photo Credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images
By Jack Kim and Ju-min Park SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's successful missile test-launch signals major advances in developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, such as mastery of re-entry technology and better engine performance key to targeting the United States, experts say. The isolated country has been developing a long-range missile capable of striking the mainland United States mounted with a nuclear warhead. That would require a flight of 8,000 km (4,800 miles) or more and technology to ensure a warhead's stable re-entry into the atmosphere. The North's official KCNA news agency said the new strategic ballistic missile named Hwasong-12, fired on Sunday at the highest angle to avoid affecting neighboring countries' security, flew 787 km (489 miles) on a trajectory reaching an altitude of 2,111.5 km (1,312 miles). The details reported by KCNA were largely consistent with South Korean and Japanese assessments that it flew further and higher than an intermediate-range missile (IRBM) tested in February from the same region, northwest of Pyongyang. Such an altitude meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance traveled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000 km (2,500 miles), experts said. The test "represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile", John Schilling, an aerospace expert, said in an analysis on the U.S.-based 38 North website. "It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the U.S. base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)." KCNA said the test launch verified the homing feature of the warhead that allowed it to survive "under the worst re-entry situation" and accurately detonate. The claim, if true, could mark an advancement in the North's ICBM program exceeding most expectations, said Kim Dong-yub, a professor at Kyungnam University's Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul. Kim, a former South Korean navy officer, added the trajectory showed the North was clearly testing the re-entry technology under flight environments consistent for a ICBM. The North has successfully launched long-range rockets twice to put objects into space. But many had believed it was some years away from mastering re-entry expertise for perfecting an ICBM, which uses similar engineering in early flight stages. Sunday's missile launch also tested the North's capability to carry a "large-size heavy nuclear warhead", the state news agency said. "The test-fire proved to the full all the technical specifications of the rocket ... like guidance and stabilization systems ... and reconfirmed the reliability of new rocket engine under the practical flight circumstances," KCNA said. On Monday, South Korea's military played down the North's claim of technical progress on atmospheric re-entry, saying the possibility was low. "HELL OF A RIDE" North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper devoted half of its six-page Monday edition to coverage of the missile test, with vivid color photographs of the launch and jubilant leader Kim celebrating with military officers. The pictures featured a long nose-coned projectile that appeared to be similar to missiles displayed during an April 15 military parade for the birth anniversary of state founder Kim Il Sung, the current leader's grandfather. The nose cone resembles that of the KN-08 ICBM the North is believed to be developing, and the lofted trajectory tests re-entry by putting the missile through extra stress, said Joshua Pollack of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review. "This is an advanced missile, if their claims are true," he said. KCNA said Kim accused the United States of "browbeating" countries that "have no nukes", warning Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland was in the North's "sighting range for strike". North Korea, which is banned by UN resolutions from engaging in nuclear and missile developments, has accused the United States of a hostile policy to crush its regime, calling its nuclear weapons a "sacred sword" to protect itself. The North's leader, Kim, has said it was in final stages of developing an ICBM. It was difficult to say when the North will have a reliably tested ICBM ready to deploy, said Lee Choon-geun, a senior research fellow at South Korea's state-run Science and Technology Policy Institute. "When it comes to actual deployment, developed countries have tested at least 20 ICBMs and their success rate should be around 90 percent. It is not there yet," he said. But the new engine used for Sunday's test signaled a major step forward in the intermediate-range missile development, one that can be modified for an ICBM flight, Lee added. The lofted trajectory that would have result in more than 40 times the gravitational force at re-entry also raises questions about the stability of the payload and how much stress it can withstand, said Munich-based aerospace engineer Markus Schiller. "We do not know if the re-entry vehicle survived this hell of a ride, and even if it did, we do not know if North Korea can build a payload that will also survive this ride." (Additional reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Clarence Fernandez)
Obama speaks after receiving the 2017 Profile in Courage Award at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston last week. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Former President Barack Obama says his decision not to retaliate following Syrias deadly chemical weapons attack on its own people in 2013 took the most political courage of his eight-year tenure as commander in chief.

I actually think that the issue that required the most political courage was the decision not to bomb Syria after the chemical weapons use had been publicized and rather to negotiate them removing chemical weapons from Syria, Obama said in an interview with Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy, which was published Monday.

That decision has come under renewed scrutiny following last months deadly sarin gas attack on Syrian civilians carried out by Syrian President Bashar Assad. President Trump subsequently ordered the bombing of a Syrian airfield and criticized Obama for not following through on a threatened military strike after Assad crossed what Obama had said was his red line.

Now, we know subsequently that some [chemical weapons] remained, so it was an imperfect solution, Obama said. But what we also know is that 99 percent of huge chemical weapons stockpiled were removed without us having to fire a shot.

Obama said that, as president, what you discover is that you generally get praised for taking military action, and youre often criticized for not doing so.

Related: Obama: You get the politicians you deserve

His decision not to retaliate wasnt a slam dunk, Obama added, but I thought that it made sense for a variety of reasons for us to see if we could actually try to eliminate the prospect of large-scale chemical weapons use rather than the political expedience of a one-time shot.

The publication of Obamas interview  which was conducted last week in Boston while he was receiving the Kennedy Award for Political Courage  came on the same day the Trump administration accused the Syrian government of killing thousands of prisoners and burning the bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital.

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We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison, Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, told reporters.

The State Department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it said is a building in the prison complex that has been modified to support the crematorium, the Associated Press reported. U.S. officials believe that as many as 50 detainees are being slaughtered per day at the facility.

Assad, Jones said, has sunk to a new level of depravity.

Read more from Yahoo News:
Vanita Gupta, the former principal deputy assistant attorney general and acting head of the Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division under President Obama, spoke to Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric about Attorney General Sessions rolling back Obama- era guidance on sentencing, the firing of FBI Director James Comey and President Trumps newly created Election Integrity Commission.

Obama Deputy AG calls Sessions guidance a resounding step backwards

Vanita Gupta, the former principal deputy assistant attorney general and acting head of the Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division under President Obama, spoke to Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric about the rollback of Obama-era guidance on sentencing by AG Sessions. She called it a resounding step backwards into the 1980s of failed policies in our criminal justice system.

Obama Deputy AG calls for special counsel on Russia investigation

Vanita Gupta, former principal deputy assistant attorney general and acting head of the Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division under President Obama, spoke to Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric about the Russia investigation and the need for a special counsel to look into the matter.

Obama Deputy AGs concerns over Trumps Election Integrity Commission in two words: Kris Kobach

Vanita Gupta, former principal deputy assistant attorney general and acting head of the Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division under President Obama, spoke to Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric about President Trumps creation of an Election Integrity Commission. She described her concerns in two words: Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state.
Just 29 percent of Americans approve of President Donald Trumps decision to fire FBI Director James Comey as the investigation into Russian interference with the U.S. election heats up, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday indicates.

Trump fired Comey Tuesday and admitted in an NBC interview Thursday he was thinking about the Russian inquiry when he decided to fire Comey. The action touched off howls of protest among Democrats and comparisons to Watergate.

Read: Clapper Says US Institutions Under Attack  From President

Earlier, Trump spokesmen explained the firing by citing a memo written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein criticizing the FBI investigation of Hillary Clintons emails, sparking a threat by Rosenstein to resign.

Forty-six percent of those queried agreed with the statement Comey was fired to slow down the FBI investigation of Russian interference. Among Democrats, the percentage was 74 percent. Just 38 percent said they thought the firing was based on Comeys handling of the investigation into Clintons emails, including nearly two-thirds of Republicans.

donald trump

Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Seventy-eight percent said they would have more confidence in a special prosecutor investigating Russian interference compared with 15 percent who picked Congress.

Read: Graham Calls On President To Release Taxes

The NBC/WSJ poll, conducted Thursday-Saturday, 38 percent of Americans disapproved of Comeys firing and 32 percent were undecided. Among Republicans 38 percent approved compared to 9 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of independents. Just 8 percent of Republican disapproved, compared to 66 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of independents.

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The poll also indicated Trumps approval ratings dropped a point from last month to 38 percent, 20 percent higher than Comeys approval rating. Fifty-two percent have a negative view of Trump.

Thirty percent of those queried said their impression of Trump was negatively affected by the Comey firing.

The poll queried 800 U.S. adults, nearly half by cell phone, and had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

Trump repeatedly has attempted to downplay Russian interference in the election, calling it fake news and demanding more attention be paid to who leaked the revelations of former national security adviser Michael Flynns ties to Russia. Flynn misrepresented his meetings with Russian Ambassador James Kislyak and was fired 18 days after then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates advised the White House of the problem.

Yates testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week she was unsure what went into Flynns firing because she herself was after she warned the White House because of her refusal to defend Trumps first executive order banning travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries.

I dont have any way of knowing what, if anything, they did, Yates testified. If nothing was done, then certainly that would be concerning.

Yates warning came Jan. 26, one day before Comey was invited to the White House for dinner with Trump where he reportedly was asked to pledge his loyalty and declined.

Democrats Sunday used the firing to again demand a special prosecutor. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on CNNs State of the Union a special prosecutor would give Americans more confidence in the system.

To have that special prosecutor, people would breathe a sigh of relief, because then there would be a real independent person overlooking the FBI director, Schumer said on State of the Union. He also noted a special prosecutor would be immune from firing except for cause and can look into any attempts to thwart the investigation.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS Face the Nation whats even more concerning than the firing itself was Attorney General Jeff Sessions involvement, given that he had pledged to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

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Caracas (AFP) - Venezuela's opposition Sunday urged the armed forces to consider dialogue, despite its loyalty to embattled President Nicolas Maduro in the country's deadly political crisis.

"I am appealing to Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez to open the doors of a sincere debate in the armed forces," said Julio Borges, the speaker of the National Assembly, the only opposition-led government body.

Opposition leaders believe Maduro and some of his supporters met this week with Padrino Lopez to rally support for his plan to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

"If (key supporters and) Maduro have the right to give a partisan argument to the military on the chaos Venezuela is going through, we ought to have that right as well," Borges argued.

Elected in 2013, Maduro, the handpicked successor of the late long-time leftist firebrand Hugo Chavez, is resisting pressure for an early vote, calling the crisis the result of a US-backed conspiracy. His opponents have branded him a dictator.

Protesters also oppose his plans to elect an assembly -- and do it sidestepping the country's political parties -- to overhaul the constitution, dismissing it as a way to put off elections.

Increasingly violent near-daily protests that began April 1 have left a toll of 38 dead, and hundreds wounded and under arrest.

Dozens of mothers dressed in black were out on Caracas's streets Sunday to mark a Mother's Day of protest, hours after violent unrest in the towns of Caja Seca and Pueblo Llano.
Preet Bharara speaks during an event in New York City last year. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

A U.S. attorney who was fired by President Trump is joining the call for an independent prosecutor in wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

For me, the past week has been deja vu all over again, Preet Bharara wrote in an op-ed (Are there still public servants who will say no to the president?) published Monday in the Washington Post.

Bharara, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 until his firing in March, says that three obvious things must happen in order to restore faith in the rule of law.

Last week, Trump sparked a political firestorm by firing Comey, who had been overseeing the FBIs investigation into whether the Trump campaign had ties to Russia.

First, we need a truly bipartisan investigation in Congress, Bharara wrote. That means no partisan nonsense  just a commitment to finding the facts, whatever they may be, proving (or disproving) Russian interference in our election and anything related.

Second, the new FBI director must be apolitical and sensitive to the law-enforcement mission, Bharara argued, not someone with a long record of reflexive partisanship or commentary on the very investigative issues that will come before the bureau. Unfortunately, some of the candidates paraded by cameras this past weekend reality-show style fall into that category.

The White House interviewed eight possible replacements for Comey over the weekend. Among them were acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, New York Court of Appeals Judge Michael Garcia and former Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher.

More than ever the FBI needs a strong and stabilizing hand, Bharara wrote, which means somebody who has not spent most of his or her career pandering for votes, groveling for cash or putting party over principle.

Finally, Bharara joined the growing chorus of voices calling for a special counselor to oversee the Russia investigation, considering the changing narrative offered by the White House to justify Comeys ouster.

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Given the manner of Comeys firing and the pretextual reasons proffered for it, there is no other way, Bharara wrote. My former colleague, now-Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, is a respected career prosecutor but has mostly deserved the doubts he generated with his peculiar press-release-style memo purporting to explain Comeys sudden sacking. He can still fix it. The move would not only ensure the independence of the investigation, but also provide evidence of Rosensteins own independence.

According to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday, 78 percent of Americans said they would prefer the Russia investigation be led by an independent prosecutor or independent commission.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday that Democrats would consider refusing to vote on a new FBI director until a special prosecutor is named.

Although most Democrats on Capitol Hill have called for a special prosecutor, just 11 Republican members  three senators and eight House members  have done so, according to the Washington Post.

History will judge this moment, Bharara added. Its not too late to get it right, and justice demands it.

In his op-ed, Bharara referenced a 2007 report by the Justice Departments inspector general concluding that aides to former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broke Civil Service laws in applying a conservative ideological litmus test to hiring decisions.

The point of this is to be watchful & vigilant, Bhahara tweeted, to make sure political hiring at DOJ remains a thing of the past.

Read more from Yahoo News:
Beijing (AFP) - Russia had nothing to do with a massive global cyberattack, President Vladimir Putin said Monday, criticising the US intelligence community for creating the original software.

Hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries have been hit by the ransomware attack, which has been described as the largest-ever of its kind.

It began Friday and struck banks, hospitals and government agencies among a variety of other targets, exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

"As for the source of these threats, Microsoft's leadership stated this directly, they said the source of the virus was the special services of the United States," Putin said.

He was referring to a weekend blog post by Microsoft president Brad Smith stating that the US National Security Agency had developed the code being used in the attack.

It was leaked as part of a document dump, according to researchers.

"A genie let out of a bottle of this kind, especially created by secret services, can then cause damage to its authors and creators, Putin said on the sidelines of an international summit in Beijing.

"This completely doesn't concern Russia."

The US has accused Russia in the past of mounting several cyberattacks.

In March the Justice Department indicted two officials of Russia's Federal Security Service and two criminal hackers whom they allegedly hired to steal data from some 500 million Yahoo user accounts.

While there was "no significant damage" to Russian institutions such as banks and hospitals, Putin said the incident was "worrisome" and warranted immediate talks "on a serious political level".

"There is nothing good in this and calls for concern," he said.

"A protection system from these manifestations needs to be worked out."
A New Jersey Congressman called an activist a ringleader of opposition to him in a fundraising letter to the constituents employer, which ultimately led to her resignation.

Republican Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen wrote a fundraising letter in March to Lakeland Bank in Caldwell, New Jersey which called for early donations to his 2020 campaign because he was under threat by organized forces.

Below the letter, there was a note that read P.S. One of the ringleaders works in your bank! It appears to be in the same ink and handwriting as Mr Frelinghuysens signature on the letter.

Read more

Democrats and Republicans prepare for fight over future of Trump probe

He was referring to Saily Avelenda, a senior vice president and legal counsel at the bank.

She was not fired by the bank, but told WNYC that she had to write a statement explaining the situation to her CEO. The pressure she felt to defend her political involvement outside of her employment is what led her to resign, she said.

WNYC reported that the letter was on the Congressmans 2020 re-election campaign stationery and addressed to board member Joseph ODowd.

According to Federal Election Commission records, Mr ODowd has given $700 to Mr Frelinghuysen during previous elections and contributes to lobbying groups for bankers who have met with Mr Frelinghuysen.

In the letter he said groups, both national and local...are already hard at work to put a stop to an agenda of limited government, economic growth, stronger national security.

The letter came attached with a news article quoting Ms Avelenda as a member of the group called NJ 11th for Change, made up of almost 7,000 constituents in Mr Frelinghuysens district. The group formed in the wake of Donald Trumps election win and called for Mr Frelinghuysen to hold town halls with his constituents, something he has not done in four years.

The representative has held telephone town halls, where interaction can be more controlled by his office.

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The group holds weekly protests outside of his office in New Jersey and scheduled trips to his DC office.

NJ11th for Change has also organised so many phone calls to the representatives office that it prompted him to say: For people who have jammed our lines and made it difficult for us to meet our constituent needs, it would be nice for you to back off.

I thought my Congressman put them in a situation, and put me in a really bad situation as the constituent, and used his name, used his position and used his stationery to try to punish me, Ms Avelenda said.

A lawyer told WNYC that Mr Freylinghuysens letter is not illegal because he used campaign stationary to write the letter not his official Congressional letterhead.

Mr Frelinghuysen is considered a powerful member of Congress after becoming chair of the House Appropriations Committee, which determines all federal funding.

His office responded in a statement saying the Congressman is in no way involved in any of the bank's business and is unaware of any of the particulars about this employee's status with the bank.

The statement referred to the note at the bottom of the fundraising letter as innocuous.
Moscow (AFP) - The world's biggest oil producers Russia and Saudi Arabia on Monday called for extending an output reduction deal ahead of an OPEC meeting later this month.

"To underscore the determination of oil producers to ensure market stability, predictability and sustainable development -- the joint actions of the participating producers should be extended by 9 months, through March 31, 2018," the countries said in a joint statement published Monday by Russia's energy ministry.

The statement added that Russian energy minister Alexander Novak and his Saudi counterpart Khalid Al-Falih, who met in Beijing on Monday, had "agreed to do whatever it takes to achieve the desired goal of stabilising the market and reducing commercial oil inventories to their 5-year average level."

The ministers will consult with other oil-producing countries with "the goal of reaching full consensus on the 9-month extension" they are seeking, the statement said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday in Beijing he was optimistic about the prospect of measures to maintain "stable and fair oil prices."

"I recently met with the executives of all our largest oil companies and the energy minister behind closed doors," Putin told reporters. "We discussed this topic and we support this kind of proposal."

OPEC members agreed in November to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day for six months beginning from the start of the year in a bid to reduce the glut of oil supplies and shore up prices.

The move was partly matched by non-cartel producers led by Russia.

OPEC is set to convene on May 25 in a meeting where its members and Russia are expected to roll over an agreement to cut production.
Fans had much to look forward to on this weeks second-to-last episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Melissa McCarthy. With tensions in the White House seemingly reaching a fever pitch over the last week with President Donald Trumps firing of FBI Director James Comey and mumblings of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer hiding in bushes and demanding darkness, the SNL writers certainly had plenty of material with which to work.

Saturdays episode opened with a bang, beginning with a parody of a President Trumps NBC News interview with Lester Holt Thursday. But far and away Saturdays fan favorite was McCarthys Sean Spicer Returns sketch, during which the show mercilessly skewered the chaos that followed Comeys Tuesday dismissal.

Aidy Bryant opened the sketch  which was the No. 1 trending video on YouTube well into Sunday afternoon  as Principal Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was present Wednesday at a White House press briefing about President Trumps decision to fire Comey. The sketch wasted no time before poking fun the alleged bush hiding that many fans speculated would be a highlight of Saturdays episode. McCarthys Spicey could be seen peering in from outside the White House looking confused and distraught.

Read: Watch Sean Spicer Impersonator Melissa McCarthy Ride A Podium Around NYC In Hilarious 'SNL' Stunt

Spicey wasnt absent from his motorized White House podium for long, however, as he returned to his press throne to further accost the room of inquiring journalists. Spiceys back, Sarahs out! said McCarthy to huge applause from the SNL audience. The 8-minute clip finds Spicey attacking New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush (a recurring bit), denying the Trump administrations alleged Russia ties and defending the presidents decision to fire Comey. The highlight, however, was McCarthys character addressing rumors of Spicers own impending dismissal.

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Just a day ahead of the episodes airing, McCarthy took the streets of NYC in full Spicer makeup atop the motorized podium to build hype for Saturdays episode. Fans were thrilled to catch the comedian going full Spicey on pedestrians and passing cars as she cruised around Fifth Avenue. If the clips nearly 2 million views are to be believed, McCarthy more than delivered.

Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on 'SNL'

Photo: Saturday Night Live/NBC

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After firing James Comey from the post of FBI director Tuesday, President Donald Trump began his search for Comeys replacement. On Saturday, several candidates were interviewed for the role and among them was Alice Fisher, a high-ranking official at Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration.

The FBI has never had a woman director and if Fisher is selected for the role, she would become the first woman to head the bureau.

On Saturday, Trump said, along with his team, he is working to get a new FBI director likely by next week, which is just before he jets off on his first foreign trip since he assumed the office. The president will be visiting the Middle East and Europe on May 19. He was asked by reporters in Virginia whether people should expect the announcement related to the FBI director by Friday, to which he replied: Even that is possible.

I think the process is going to go quickly. Almost all of them [the candidates] are very well-known, Trump said. Theyve been vetted over their lifetime essentially, but very well-known, highly respected, really talented people. And thats what we want for the FBI.

Fisher was the first candidate to be interviewed for the post of the FBI director. The 50-year-old does not have an experience in the bureau but served as assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department under Bushs second term as the president. Currently, she is a partner at the Latham & Watkins law firm, where she specializes in white-collar criminal and internal probe.

During her confirmation in 2005, Fisher garnered opposition from Democrats over allegations she was involved in discussions about policies at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At the time, the then Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, blocked her nomination for allegedly attending a meeting about controversial and abusive interrogation tactics used at the U.S. military prison camp. She said she did not recall attending such a meeting. Bush used a recess appointment to name Fisher the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division.

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Fisher also has the role of deputy special counsel to the Senate special committee to her credit, the committee which investigated former President Bill Clintons Whitewater scandal. She was most recently in news when she gave testimony March 23 to the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Neil Gorsuch as the Supreme Court judge.

Judge Gorsuch possesses a keen intellect, commitment to fairness and decency, and a deep and abiding passion for the law. He has always brought a thoughtful, reasoned, and practical analysis to any issue. Further, Judge Gorsuchs stellar resume demonstrates both a life-long love of learning and an ongoing commitment to teaching and mentoring the next generation, Fisher wrote in the testimony.

As a lawyer, Judge Gorsuch is exceptional. As a colleague, he is beloved and respected, with seemingly unlimited reserves of courtesy, kindness, and good humor.  He is a man of the highest personal integrity, deeply dedicated to serving his country, and I cannot think of a better place for him to do so than on the United States Supreme Court, she added.

Following are other candidates considered for FBI director post, according to the Associated Press.

Ray Kelly, former commissioner of the New York City Police Department

J. Michael Luttig, the general counsel for Boeing Corp

Larry Thompson, deputy attorney general under Bush

Paul Abbate, a senior official at the FBI responsible for the bureaus criminal and cyber branch

Andrew McCabe, FBIs acting director

Michael Garcia, former New York prosecutor

John Suthers, former U.S. attorney and Colorado attorney general

Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBIs Richmond office, Virginia

Henry E. Hudon, a federal judge in Richmond

Frances Townsend, former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Bush

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Self-driving is emerging from being a niche technology towards being a mainstream automotive technology. Many experts consider self-driving the way of the future. But with the advancement in driving, it also brings out complexities.

All traffic laws and legislation related to driving have been enacted with regards to humans behind the wheel. The prospect of cars being autonomously driven based on automotive technology may throw out a lot we know and think about driving.

It raises questions legislators are yet to find answers for. For starters, if self-driven cars are involved in an accident, who is held responsible? A human driver wasnt in control of the vehicle and the manufacturer cannot be indefinitely liable for every vehicle it ever made.

Read: Are Self-Driving Cars Safe? One In Four Cars On U.S. Roads In 2035 Will Be Self-Driven, Study Says

While we might be way behind the curve, when it comes to making the technology a part of our everyday life, legislation is finally catching up. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 33 states in the U.S. have introduced self-driving legislation, including 20 just in 2016.

Governors in Arizona and Massachusetts have woken up to the task and even passed executive orders on self-driven vehicles.

In September 2016, the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration issued a new policy for self-driving which covered a number of aspects including guidelines for vehicles, state policy, current tools and new tools required to regulate self-driving.

Yet, this is just the beginning. In terms of self-driving legislation, a recent development might be the one to pave the way to the future.

The senate began debating self-driving in February with Senators John Thune and Gary Peters announcing they would be working with the Transportation Committee to draft a self-driving bill.

Their proposals include:

Updating existing vehicle standards: New standards will have to be formed keeping in mind there may be no driver behind the wheel. The law could actually allow cars to remove pedals or even the steering wheel itself.

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Differentiation between semi and fully autonomous vehicles: This was the leading cause of Ubers fallout with the California DMV. The company could not accept autonomy as defined by the DMV.

Universal standards for self-driven cars: The legislation will have to be stringent and would require standards such as a mandatory minimum number of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors on cars.

The bill might make it possible to test fully self-driven cars on public roads. But, it will also have to take into account that different states might pass different self-driving laws, which might pose a new challenge altogether for both the vehicle manufacturers as well as authorities.

Read: Apple, Tesla Write Letter To Persuade California State To Change Proposed Self-Driving Rules

California became the first state to propose self-driving regulations in April. The state has been getting flak on account of its regulations being too strict and requiring a driver to be present in a self-driving car at all times.

We might have just scratched the surface when it comes to self-driving legislation, yet it turns out we are slowly making progress and there is a possibility of self-driving cars going mainstream by as early as 2020.

Legislation could make or break the future of self-driving. In any event, it will certainly be determining it.

Related Articles
Retro vibe The retro vibe this summer goes beyond just the cat-eye silhouette of the 1950s or the aviators of the 80s. This retro trend is all about the double wire rims, as shown by Emporio Armani, Michael Kors, and Phillip Lim.

The MIDO Eyewear Show in Milan is the worlds largest optical and sunglass exhibition, showcasing the best of Italian-made eyewear. The president of MIDO, Cirillo Marcolin  whose namesake company, Marcolin, is one of the worlds leading eyewear groups  underscores the term made in Italy and its reputation for excellence.

MIDO is where international players, small artisans, avant-garde companies, and young designers come together to talk about eyewear, discuss new technology and research, and find out about market trends. And clearly, Americans favor European style: In 2016, U.S. consumers bought more than 30 percent of the sunglasses exported from Europe. Now, thats a lot of shade to throw around!

So here are the five hottest sunglass trends for this summer. Be warned  theyre colorful and bold!

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow@YahooStyleand@YahooBeauty.
Not only is childcare more than rent, it often costs more than college. Its time to stop talking about family values and start putting them into practice

It doesnt matter whether you have children or not, childcare is an issue that affects all of us. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

Its supposed to take a village to raise a child. In America, however, it takes a really big bank account. Indeed, childcare costs in America are so astronomical that theyve even become an issue for the wealthiest 0.001%. Ivanka Trump, for example, has made tax deductions for childcare one of her signature issues. And on Mothers Day, Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive, called for America to improve its childcare policies and better support working mothers in a post on her personal Facebook page.

Sandberg pointed out that the United States is one of the only developed countries in the world that doesnt guarantee paid family leave  and the only developed country in the world without paid maternity leave. Further, child care for two children exceeds the median annual rent in all 50 states.

Not only is childcare more than rent, it costs more than college, in many cases. According to a recent report from the think tank New America, full-time care in child care centers for children under the age of four is $9,589 a year, while the average cost of in-state college tuition is $9,410. This means a family earning the median household income would spend one-fifth of its income on childcare.

If youre an individual earning minimum wage, then childcare costs two-thirds of your income. Parenting isnt just expensive  it can be financially devastating. And yet, pro-life zealots never seem to argue for more affordable childcare as a means to reduce abortion. Its ironic that many factions of America are passionate about protecting the rights of fetuses but are quite happy to leave them to fend for themselves as soon as theyre born.

Americas lack of support for parents isnt just financially costly, it takes a big emotional toll. Research shows that American parents are less happy than their childless peers. This happiness gap exists in other developed countries, such Great Britain and Australia, but is significantly larger in America.

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Researchers found that the negative impact of becoming a parent disappeared in countries which gave parents the tools to combine work and family. Indeed parents in Norway, Sweden and Finland, places where the government provides greater support for working families, reported greater levels of happiness than non-parents.

Sandberg lost her husband, former SurveyMonkey chief executive Dave Goldberg, in 2015. Her post emphasizes the particular difficulties that working single parents face  an issue which she was criticized for not addressing in her 2013 book on women in the workplace, Lean In.

Before, I did not quite get it. I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home, Sandberg admitted. And Sandberg points out that that while she is financially privileged, for many single parents, there is no safety net. 35% of single mothers experience food insecurity. Yet America is the richest country in the world.

Sandberg doesnt just call for policy changes, importantly, she also calls for an attitudinal shift. Americas childcare policies are stuck in the 1950s. Theyre designed around heterosexual family units where the men work and the women stay at home. But as Sandberg points out, Since the early 1970s, the number of single mothers in the United States has nearly doubled. Today, almost 30% of families with children are headed by a single parent, and 84% of those are led by a single mother  our attitudes and our policies do not reflect this shift.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that attitudes and policies in America will reflect this shift anytime soon. The lack of childcare support in the US is emblematic of just how much the country is geared around the individual and profit and how resistant it seems to be to supporting the greater good.

Indeed, in a recent town hall Congressman Rod Blum asked why should a 62-year-old man have to pay for maternity care? Blum is hardly the only person asking this question. The why should I have to pay? attitude is deeply entrenched in American society.

It doesnt matter whether you have children or not, childcare is an issue that affects all of us. A lack of a safety net for working parents helps increase income inequality and drives women out of the workforce. Its time that America stopped talking about family values and started to put them into practice.
NAIROBI (Reuters) - South Sudan's ousted army chief Paul Malong returned to the capital Juba on Saturday, saying he had no intention of staging a revolt against President Salva Kiir's government. Kiir dismissed General Malong - the man who has led his campaign against rebels - on Tuesday without spelling out his reasons. Malong then left Juba with a convoy of vehicles for his home state of Aweil in the northwest, raising speculation over his next move. On Friday, Kiir said Malong was in a "fighting mood" and had not obeyed orders to return, raising the prospect of further turmoil more than three years into an ethnically-charged civil war. "I was asked to come back and I have come back to listen why I am needed here," Malong told reporters upon his arrival in Juba. "If I wanted to rebel, I would have rebelled here (in Juba). I had guns here and these solders do not belong to anybody. If I was about to fight, I would have fought here," he said, adding that he will seek permission to return to his home state. Several other senior officers have left the army in recent months, accusing the military of rights abuses and ethnic bias. One, Thomas Cirillo Swaka, has announced the formation of his own rebel force and threatened to topple Kiir. South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011 but plunged into civil war in 2013 when Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy, Machar, a member of the Nuer ethnic group. Malong is also a Dinka. The conflict has pitched parts of the oil-producing country into famine, paralysed public services and forced a quarter of the population - 3 million people - to flee their homes. On Tuesday, Kiir promoted Malong's former deputy General James Ajongo as army chief. Ajongo joined the Sudan People's Liberation Army, the formal name of the South Sudanese military, in 1983, when the SPLA was still a rebel group fighting for independence from Sudan. (Writing by Aaron Maasho; editing by Ros Russell)
By David Nelson, CFA

Investors seem to have stumbled into the middle of a good old-fashioned tug of war. On one side, strong corporate earnings, sales and margins look to push stocks higher. On the other side is a paralyzed Washington, where both sides of the aisle believe the only thing that matters is I win and You lose.

The casualty is investor confidence with little impetus to drive shares higher. The realization that key parts of the administrations economic agenda (i.e. tax reform) are at risk.

S&P 500  1 year (Source: Bloomberg)

Investors may not care about health care or even the turmoil surrounding the Trumps firing of FBI Director James Comey, but they do care about earnings. Some economists believe there could be as much as a $1 bump in S&P 500 (^GSPC, SPY) earnings per share for each percentage cut in the corporate tax ratenot to mention $2 trillion in corporate funds held hostage offshore. With strong bi-partisan support, repatriation could add hundreds of billions of dollars to a potential infrastructure spend.

As tax reform slips in the cue, so does the increase in earnings, making the valuation argument that much more real.

XLF S&P 500 financial sector  1 year (Source: Bloomberg)

Given the backdrop, its easy to see why key aspects of the Trump Trade have stalled. Financials (XLF) are pretty much where they were after the election, and the developing bearish head and shoulders pattern speaks to the rising concern. If tax reform can slip, so can deregulationand for that matter just about anything else in the agenda. I dont want to get into the politics, but you can do the math.

Lost in all the noise is some good news

There is some good economic news, as the administration put together an important trade deal with China last week. American beef exporters have long sought access to mainland China, and any progress is certainly good news for those in the Midwest. The US will also be exporting LNG (liquefied natural gas). China is a huge importer of LNG, and the US is growing its export capability exponentially. All of this could pay dividends when negotiations with China turn to North Korea.

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Why arent the markets down that much if people are worried?

In the absence of any clear direction, money flows to the new safe haven trades. In the old days, if you were concerned about growth, you turned to Proctor & Gamble (PG) or Campbells Soup (CPB) and maybe a drug stock or two.

Today you turn to Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), and Facebook (FB). These are the new consumer staple companies people cant live without. More important than food and shelter, they also have the added benefit of having very large market caps and, in the case of Apple, the biggest. Meanwhile, underneath the surface, theres been a rolling correction from one sector to the next.

The price action is eerily similar to the middle of 2015, when fewer and fewer stocks were participating. I went to the charts, and at least for now, theyre not alarming.

NYSE % stocks above 200 day moving average  1 year (Source: Bloomberg)

The percentage of stocks above their 200-day moving average is still healthy, but clearly heading in the wrong direction. The same can be said for the advance decline line.

All in all, US markets continue to digest conflicting information. Earnings and revenue growth look healthy, but valuations are hardly compellingdemanding some sort of positive catalyst to drive the next leg higher. Until we get it, the tug of war continues with investors stuck in the middle and, at least for the moment, unwilling to commit.

*At the time of this article some funds managed by David Nelson were long SPY.

-

Please contact your Belpointe investment advisor representative if there are any changes in your financial situation or investment objectives.

Investment advice is offered through Belpointe Asset Management, LLC. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Insurance products are offered through Belpointe Insurance, LLC and Belpointe Specialty Insurance, LLC. It is important to read our email disclosures available at this link: http://belpointe.com/disclosures.
The United States Supreme Court has quelled an attempt by Republicans in North Carolina to reinstate a controversial voter-identification law that a lower court said targeted African American voters with an almost surgical precision.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal following the ruling last year by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, but did not indicate that it had done so based on the merits of the case.

The voter identification law, championed by state Republicans, required people to show photo ID at the polls, reduced the number of early voting days, eliminated same-day registration, and got rid of out-of-precinct voting.

Read more

Feds say Texas voter ID purposely discriminated against voters

Chief Justice John Roberts, in a statement that accompanied the courts ruling to not reinstate the law, said that uncertainty around who was actually able to file an appeal on behalf of the state led the court to its decision. Lower courts had agreed with the administration of former President Barack Obama and civil rights groups who argued that the law violated the Constitutions equal protection clause and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

Although the law was stopped last year, it preceded a decline in early voter turnout by African Americans in the 2016 election. Black early voter turnout dropped by 8.7 per cent compared to 2012 rates, or about 66,000 votes. It wasnt clear if a lack of enthusiasm may have led to that decline, but other data from southern states with racial voting data did not show a similar decline during that time.

The North Carolina law was enacted in 2013 following a Supreme Court decision that eliminated the Voting Rights Act requirement that states in the South with histories of voter discrimination  including North Carolina  receive approval from the federal government before changing voting rules.
Adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who stay on their medication may be safer when they get behind the wheel than those who don't, a new study suggests.

Researchers found a link between a person's use of prescribed ADHD medications and a reduced risk for motor vehicle accidents: U.S. men with ADHD were 38 percent less likely to be involved in a car crash during the months when they received medication for the condition, compared with the months when these same men were not receiving medication.

For U.S. women with ADHD, the rates of motor vehicle crashes were 42 percent lower during the months when the women had received their ADHD medications than during the months when these same women went without treatment, according to the findings. The research was published today (May 10) in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. [10 Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp]

The researchers concluded that people with ADHD are more likely to have motor vehicle crashes than people who do not have the condition, but that taking medication may help to reduce this risk, said lead study author Zheng Chang, a postdoctoral researcher in medical epidemiology and biostatistics at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

This is the first study to examine the association between the use of ADHD medication and motor vehicle crashes in the U.S., Chang told Live Science.

Previous studies have suggested that people with ADHD are more likely to be involved in motor vehicle crashes, because many of the symptoms of the disorder, such as inattention and impulsivity, may interfere with the ability to drive safely. However, researchers also thought that the use of ADHD medication could have a protective effect, reducing unsafe driving behaviors and resulting in fewer crashes and injuries.

In one study done in Sweden and published in 2014 in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers found that the use of ADHD medication in men was tied to a lower risk of traffic crashes, but it was unclear whether women's use of ADHD medications had a similar effect.

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ADHD medications and car accidents

In the new study, the researchers tracked more than 2 million American adults who had been diagnosed with ADHD between 2005 and 2014. The data came from a health insurance claims database that contained patient information from more than 100 health insurers, including inpatient and outpatient hospital visits as well as prescriptions filled.

To determine whether individuals with ADHD had been involved in car crashes, the researchers looked at visits to hospital emergency rooms resulting from motor vehicle accidents.

The findings showed that ADHD medications were associated with a reduced risk of motor vehicle accidents in both men and women, Chang said. In a separate analysis, the researchers estimated that up to 22 percent of the car crashes could have been avoided if the patients had received ADHD medications at some point during the entire study period, he noted.

Chang said he suspects the findings may actually underestimate the effect of ADHD medication on car accidents. That's because the study did not include crashes in which people did not seek out medical services, Chang said.

"Many (possibly most) vehicular collisions do not result in an emergency room visit," two other researchers wrote in an editorial accompanying the study that appeared in the same issue of JAMA Psychiatry. In addition, the data did not include car crashes that involved a person dying at the scene, the editorial noted.

In all, the new study probably underreports the benefits of appropriate ADHD medication and its effects on driving safety, suggestedthe editorial authors, Dr. Vishal Madaan, a child psychiatrist, and Daniel J. Cox, a professor of psychiatry and neurobiology, both at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville.

Both of the editorial authors acknowledged receiving research support from pharmaceutical companies. [10 Facts Every Parent Should Know About Their Teen's Brain]

Madaan and Cox suggested that another limitation of the study is the way the researchers defined a patient's "use" of the ADHD medication; this was based only on whether he or she had filled the prescription during a given month. This "may have little bearing on whether the medication was active in the driver's body at the time of the driving mishap," the editorial said.

It is not uncommon for people with ADHD to forget to take their prescribed medications or for the medication to have worn off at the time of the crash, especially if the accident occurred later in the evening, the editorial said.

But overall, the editorial concluded that the study findings confirm and extend the existing evidence for the influence of ADHD medications on accidents. The results "have impressive implications for [the] judicious use of ADHD medication," the editorial said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations
Moscow (AFP) - Thousands of people protested in central Moscow on Sunday against the city's plan to tear down Soviet-era apartment blocks as part of a controversial urban redevelopment programme.

The measure, announced in February by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, prompted an outcry from many residents who see a ploy to funnel state funds into construction companies.

It would also ride roughshod over property rights, they say, while forcing many homeowners to move to neighbourhoods with lower property values.

Muscovites yelled "Hands off Moscow" and "No to demolition" while shouting down envoys from the office of the mayor, a staunch supporter of President Vladimir Putin who had served as his chief of staff.

"Let us keep our houses!" fumed Svetlana Ilyina, a 59-year-old engineer. "It's Sobyanin who should be demolished. This is in the interest of developers and the authorities who will receive huge kickbacks."

Moscow police said five thousand people attended the protest, while organisers said thirty thousand had gathered.

White Counter, an unofficial citizen group which places volunteers with counters at rally entrance points, put the turnout at just over twenty thousand.

"Me and my girlfriend live in a quiet, leafy neighbourhood, and now they want to deport us to a less prestigious neighbourhood," said Pavel Kuznetsov, 38, whose home is in one of the buildings slated for demolition.

"I felt anger, and that's putting it lightly," he told AFP.

Moscow and most other Russian cities have thousands of the prefab five-story buildings built in the 1960s and 1970s under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

The city's previous administration had overseen a program to move people from the most worn-out "khrushchevkas", as the buildings are known, to more modern housing.

But the current mayor is pushing for a more sweeping renovation program that would require extensive amendments to current zoning restrictions and other laws.

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Supporters say the extensive project, initially valued at some 3.5 trillion rubles ($61 billion, 56 billion euros), would allow the city to replace the small, worn-out buildings with high-rise housing in the fast-developing capital of 12 million, which faces a housing crunch and rising rents.

A relevant bill passed parliament in a first reading but stalled after the outcry from apartment owners, which quickly escalated into a political issue.

Many opposition figures have supported the protest against the bill, with Alexei Navalny, a leading Putin critic who is campaigning for the presidency, visiting the rally on Sunday before he was led away by police as the crowd shouted, "We're with you Navalny!"

Rossiya 24 state TV meanwhile aired a programme touting the mayor's plans, while making no mention of the protest.

One of the mayor's aides, Anastasiya Rakova, tried to address the protesters Sunday but her voice was drowned out by shouts of "Shame" and "Stop lying!"
Photo credit: Getty

From Woman's Day

The movie version of the Broadway hit Chicago finally came to came to Netflix streaming this spring, but not many people know that several of the characters in the famed musical were based on real women who were jailed together in Chicago in 1924. Roxy Hart was a version of the auburn beauty who shot her secret boyfriend while her husband was at work. Velma Kelly was inspired by a former showgirl turned gunwoman. And the innocent, Hungarian ballerina was inspired by an Italian immigrant accused of murdering her missing husband.

We know what happened to Roxy and Velma-they charmed their way into acquittals just like their real-life counter parts. But what happened to the woman who inspired the ballerina? Her story is now being told in a new book, Ugly Prey: An Innocent Woman and the Death Sentence that Scandalized Jazz Age City. In the early 1920s, Sabella Nitti was a recent Italian immigrant on trial for the murder of her missing husband. There was no evidence, no motive, and no proof the decayed corpse found in a drainage ditch was Francesco Nitti. But prosecutors wanted a win. Lovely defendants were almost always acquitted after batting their eyelashes at the all-male juries. Sabella was easy, "ugly" prey. What follows is an excerpt from the book:

From the audience, reporter Genevieve Forbes studied the defendants, paying attention to every detail about the woman. If it were up to Forbes, she would find Sabella Nitti guilty and hang the old woman that very night. Forbes was disgusted by Sabella.

To Forbes, Sabella was a peasant who looked  and smelled  like she had just walked out of a field. Sabella was a compact woman with a muscular frame built during a lifetime of work. Her olive skin had deepened like tanned leather after years of toiling in the Mediterranean sun. She had long, thick black and gray hair that she piled onto her head in a messy bun secured with pins and comb. Several times, Forbes wrote the word "greasy" in her notebook as a description of this little woman's appearance.

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The judge peered down at the packed courtroom. The gallery was crowded with spectators who had read about the murder trial in the newspapers and wanted to be there for the big moment. "Has the jury reached a verdict," the judge asked.

The foreman stood. "We, the jury, find the defendant Isabella Nitti, otherwise known as Sabella Nitti, guilty of murder and we fix her punishment at death."

The stunned courtroom sat in silence. Sabella patted her hair and looked hopefully around the room. She hadn't understood a word. Forbes inspected her from across the room. Stubby fingers, she wrote, ingrained dirt in the finger nails.

Until someone translated the verdict, Sabella would not know she was scheduled to hang in just ninety-five days.

The Cook County criminal courthouse connected to the jail through a covered walkway. In the courthouse, the secretary typed the day's verdict, and it was further processed with signatures and official stamps. Across the way, Sabella sat in her jail cell, unaware that her fate was sealed with the ding of a typewriter and the squish of a rubber stamp.

"Sabella," someone should have said, passing her a cookie or a wedge of cheese to fill her empty stomach. "The jury reached a verdict this afternoon. I regret I have bad news the sentence is death. They will hang you in early October. You will stay here until your execution date."

But what were her fellow inmates supposed to do? Have someone gently hold her hand while another woman acted out choking noises? There needed to be a translator. Someone to calm her down with hope  her lawyer was working on an appeal, there was a chance.

The reporters lingered in the hallway, walking past Sabella's barred cell as if she were on display at Lincoln Park Zoo. Some of the more opportunistic reporters probably wouldn't have hesitated to tell Sabella the verdict if only they knew how to speak Barese. Hell, they would tell her in Italian if they were able. Instead, they looked at her face for signs. Did she know she was going to hang? No, not yet.

In Chicago, two sides emerged. One side viewed the verdict suspiciously. The scales of justice tipped by Sabella's lack of beauty. In the past  and perhaps in the future  a woman only needed fashionable attire, a powder puff, and an air of vulnerability to earn an acquittal. "Can beauty be convicted?" several newspapers questioned.

The other side embraced the verdict, and saw it as a form of equal rights. If women wanted the vote, if they wanted to have jobs and compete with men, then they had to accept the same penalties men faced. Never mind that juries were devoid of women, and the law was written by men. Or the police, coroner, and coroner's physicians were all men.

Attorney Helen Cirese read about the case in papers. She sensed something was wrong. The original trial attorney seemed terribly incompetent. He was confused at times and overwhelmed by the prosecution. At one point, the defense attorney wanted to know why the corpse wasn't wearing underwear. Where did the underwear go-did the prosecution steal it?

Cirese felt sympathetic toward the doomed woman. Sabella cried when she heard the verdict and tried to commit suicide by ramming her head against the wall. She was alone and terrified.

Cirese had too much time to read about the case in the papers. At twenty-three, she was a young and capable lawyer who was struggling to prove herself. Cirese had two strikes against her. She was female and she was beautiful. For traditionalists, it made no sense that Cirese was ignoring marriage opportunities in favor of a law career. No law firm would hire her.

Cirese shared an office with several other Italian American attorneys. They talked about the Nitti case. They saw possibilities in overturning the verdict. There were risks, however, to taking on such a case. If all their efforts failed and Sabella swung, their names would be attached to the failure. It was a fear that prevented other attorneys in Chicago from offering their services.

Five Italian American attorneys decided to team together and take the case. Did Cirese want in?

Cirese thought about the case and the risks. She had nothing to lose. The men of the Chicago legal community didn't accept her anyway.

When Cirese stood outside Sabella's cell in late July, Sabella saw a tall and slender woman smiling through the bars. The two women likely started with a careful mixture of Italian, Sicilian, and Barese that was supplemented by hand motions, facial expressions, and long pauses to see if the intended message was correctly understood. Even if Sabella understood little of what Cirese said, the young attorney's presence was reassuring. It was the most time anyone had spent with her since she was incarcerated.

After their first meeting, Cirese made it a point to visit Sabella each week. At times, Cirese brought along Margaret Bonelli, the wife of attorney and defense team member Nuncio Bonelli. Sabella seemed to find Margaret comforting. She reached out to Sabella with a compassion the condemned woman had rarely experienced in her life.

When Cirese wasn't sitting with Sabella at Cook County Jail, she helped the defense team on the appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. The paperwork was sent down to Springfield, a distance of a little more than two hundred miles. And then they waited.

The decision came back in September-just a few weeks before the execution. The execution was suspended until the Illinois Supreme Court had a chance to review the case. That was the good news.

The bad news was the high court still had the option to side with the trial judge and allow the execution to proceed. And they had a lengthy list of other cases to consider. Sabella would not know her fate until the spring.

Sabella was still at risk, but Cirese was feeling confident. She even saw the six-month wait as an advantage. With the help of Margaret Bonelli, Cirese planned to transform Sabella over the winter from a disheveled and foreign woman into a comely American mother. The makeover was one part of the plan. Cirese had other goals for helping Sabella appear more refined. Sabella was tasked with learning English and practicing American mannerisms. No more grunting in court or staring at the floor when asked a question.

The high court's decision came as the weather began to soften. Cirese entered the jail and headed to the woman's block to deliver the good news to Sabella. The court ordered a new trial and the nonsense evidence used by the prosecution in the first trial was deemed inadmissible.

The prosecution prepared for battle. Someone in Cook County needed to pay for their crimes, and Sabella was ugly prey the attorneys could target. They weren't giving up.

Neither was Helen Cirese.

From UGLY PREY by Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi. Copyright  2017 by Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi. Reprinted with permission from Chicago Review Press.

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In Trump's world, you don't have to be a scientist to land a high-level science job.

President Donald Trump has reportedly picked Sam Clovis  a conservative talk show radio host and climate change denier  to be the "chief scientist" of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research division. If appointed, he'll oversee key scientific work on everything from nutrition to the effects of rising temperatures on food supplies.

SEE ALSO: Here's why thousands of scientists are (and aren't) marching on Saturday

The top position is supposed to be filled by "distinguished scientists with specialized or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics," according to the 2008 Farm Bill.

Yet Clovis, who was one of Trump's earliest campaign advisers, doesn't exactly check off the required boxes, according to reports by the Washington Post, ProPublica, and other outlets.

Donald Trump , then a presidential candidate, greets then-campaign co-chair Sam Clovis during a 2015 stop in Iowa.

Image: scott olson/Getty Images

He does hold bachelor's degrees in political science and government, along with a master's in business administration and a doctoral degree in public administration, his LinkedIn page shows. He's also spoken publicly of his 25-year service in the Air Force and emphasizes his expertise in foreign policy and national security.

But Clovis has never taken a graduate course in science and has published almost no academic work  two bare-minimum requirements of any fledgling scientist.

Instead, the Iowa native is better known for his conservative radio show "Impact With Sam Clovis" and for passionately advocating for Trump on television. He also made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2014.

Clovis's leadership of the USDA's Research, Education, and Economics division would be his third agriculture-related role with Trump. On the campaign trail, Clovis advised Trump on agricultural issues, and he is now the senior White House adviser within the USDA.

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Climate change can affect livestock production by increasing heat stress experienced by farm animals.

Image: USDA

As the division's undersecretary, Clovis would oversee the USDA's extensive scientific mission and its economic bureaus, including the Natural Agricultural Statistics Service and the Economic Research Service.

Catherine Woteki, who was the undersecretary during the Obama administration, said appointing Clovis to that position would be like tapping someone without a medical background to lead the National Institutes of Health, one of the world's foremost medical research centers.

"This position is the chief scientist of the Department of Agriculture. It should be a person who evaluates the scientific body of evidence and moves appropriately from there," she told ProPublica.

The USDA's undersecretary for research, education, and economics has historically consulted on a wide range of issues for which a scientific understanding is crucial, including the Zika and Ebola outbreaks and homeland security issues related to food safety, Woteki told the news organization.

Image: USDA

Climate change-related issues also fall under the undersecretary's purview. Yet Clovis has decried the mainstream scientific consensus that human activity is primarily to blame for global warming as "junk science."

"I dont think theres any substantive information available to me that doesnt raise as many questions as it does answers," Clovis said in a 2014 interview with Iowa Public Radio. "So I'm a skeptic.

The Trump administration's hostility toward scientists and their research hardly comes as a surprise.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Administration said it would not reappoint half the expert members of a board that advises the agency on the integrity of its science.

Instead, Trump's EPA will potentially consider replacing the academic scientists with people who work for chemical and fossil fuel companies  as in, the industries whose pollution the EPA is supposed to regulate.
Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump is set to nominate Callista Gingrich, wife of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, to be the next US ambassador to the Vatican, CNN and The New York Times reported.

The nomination is expected to be formalized before Trump meets with Pope Francis on May 24 in Rome, and once the Office of Government Ethics gives its approval, CNN reported Sunday.

A self-described devout Catholic, Gingrich, 51, currently heads Gingrich Productions, a multimedia company.

Newt Gingrich, 73, was one of the few big-name Republicans to support Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

He was speaker of the House of Representatives -- second in line in the US presidential succession chart -- from 1995 to 1999, and was notably vociferous in his calls to impeach president Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

The potential nomination carries some controversy: Callista Gingrich is the former speaker's third wife, and had a multiyear sexual relationship with him when she was a young congressional aide named Callista Bisek and he was still married to his second wife.

After a messy divorce from his second wife in 1999, he married Callista the following year. He credits Callista with his conversion to Catholicism.

Trump mentioned the possibility of the ambassadorship in January, but the Gingrichs have been so frustrated with the slow vetting process that they have threatened to withdraw Callista's name, The New York Times reported.
Trump speaks at the National Peace Officers Memorial President Donald Trump speaks at the 36th Annual National Peace Officers memorial service, Monday, May 15. 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Donald Trump paid tribute to the brave souls who sacrificed their lives in the line of duty.

Trump spoke outside the U.S. Capitol Monday at the 36th Annual National Peace Officers Memorial Service just after signing a proclamation to mark Peace Officers Memorial Week and Police Week.

He said attacks on our police are a stain on the fabric of our society.

He added that its time to work with our cops, not against them.

Trump says it is his duty as president to keep America safe from crimes, safe from terrorism and safe from all enemies  foreign and domestic.

He says that at the center of that duty is the requirement to ensure law enforcement personnel are given tools and resources they need to do their jobs and come home to their families safely. (AP)

See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Tumblr.


More than anything else, the performance of the economy during the next several years is likely to determine whether Donald Trump succeeds or fails as president.

So hows he doing? And how should we measure his success in the future?

Well, for starters, the economy has earned a solid B since Trump took office in January, according to an exclusive Trumponomics Report Card Yahoo Finance has developed to track the economy during Trumps time in office. The reasons may be surprising: Trump has earned top marks for wage growth, for example, while manufacturing employmenta key focus for Trumphas been strong so far in his presidency. The rise of the stock market, on the other hand, hasnt boosted the Trump economy as much as breathless financial-market headlines might suggest.

In coming months, Trumps economic grade is likely to benefit from GDP growth, which was weak in the first quarter but is expected to bounce back strongly in the second. Job gains will buoy Trumps grade for months, if the current pace of job growth persists. One weak spot could be exports, which are vulnerable to a rising dollar, along with trade friction. Overall, the Trump economy is off to a strong start, making it Trumps challenge to simply manage an economy on the verge of boomingwhile also doing no harm.

Our Trumponomics Report Card assesses the performance of the economy on six key measures, comparing Trumps record to that of six prior presidents at the same point in their first terms. We limited this analysis to first terms only, since thats when most of the policy changes a new president might favor are likely to go into effect. So we measure Trumps performance against that of Barack Obama starting in 2009, George W. Bush starting in 2001, Bill Clinton starting in 1993, George H.W. Bush starting in 1989, Ronald Reagan starting in 1981 and Jimmy Carter starting in 1977. Prior to that, the data is less consistent and in some cases unobtainable.

Story continues

The blue dots in the graphic above represent the performance of the Trump economy, relative to that of the other presidents. Since were comparing Trump with 6 other presidents, there are 7 dots, including one for Trump and 6 for the others. The one exception is exports, because that data only goes back to 1993; so we have only three presidents to compare Trump against, or 4 dots total.

Moodys Analytics is providing the data for the report card, and offering analysis on the current state of the economy to help explain the results. The benefit of this tracker is whether youre a Trump supporter or a Trump detractor, its not political, says Ryan Sweet, director of real-time economics at Moodys Analytics. Its very transparent. The data tells the story. To that end, weve published a full explanation of our methodology for those who want to dig into the numbers.

Heres an overview of Trumps economic performance on the six indicators were following.

Employment: The economy created 522,000 new jobs in March and April, which is our starting point for measuring presidential performance on the economy. (Our methodology explains why.) That places Trump third out of the 7 presidents were looking at, behind Jimmy Carter in 1977 and George H.W. Bush in 1989. The Carter economy, while known for malaise, was actually bouncing back from a nasty recession in the mid-1970s, while the Bush economy was in the late stages of a prolonged boom. The worst performer on jobs at this point in his presidency was Obama, who inherited the worst recession since the 1930s and was down 2.2 million jobs in just his first two months.

Manufacturing employment. Trump has decried the loss of manufacturing jobs, yet employers created 41,000 of them in March and April, giving Trump better marks at this stage than the other presidents, except for Carter and Reagan.

Average hourly earnings. This is the real surprise of the Trumponomics Report Card, given that earnings growth has been the single-biggest missing piece of a recovery that began in 2009. But the labor market was tightening up just as Trump took office, with a shortage of workers in some sectors and regions pushing wages up. This seems likely to continue and perhaps intensify, with wages rising even faster during the next couple of years.

Exports. Theyre down under Trump so far, but they were down more under Obama and George W. Bush at the same point in their presidencies. They rose at the beginning of Clintons first term, which was before the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect.

The S&P 500 stock index. It rose sharply in the weeks following Election Day last November, but that is not reflected in our report card, which uses Trumps first full month in officeFebruaryas a baseline from which to measure future gains. (Again, our methodology explains why.) Since February, stock-market gains have been modest, with Trump ranking third out of the 7 presidents. This might seem to represent a bias against Trump in the way we measure his performance on the economy, but the same methodology will benefit him in other ways, as on GDP growth.

Real GDP per capita. This is a big-picture measure of economic growth, relative to the size of the population. This is the only indicator in our report card thats released quarterly rather than monthly, and we wont have relevant data until the government publishes second-quarter numbers in late July. But Trump is likely to score well. First-quarter GDP growth was a weak 0.7%, but we dont assess Trump on that numberwe only use it as a baseline against which to measure future growth. Since second-quarter growth is forecast to be much strongerwell above 3%Trumps grade on this measure could rank near the top.

Theres already contentious debate over how much credit Trump deserves for an economy that was gaining strength when he was elected. During Trumps first year or so, the Trumponomics grade will largely reflect conditions as the new president found them when he entered the White House. As his tenure progresses, however, the grade will become all Trumps. Presidents inherit economies, says Sweet. But within 6 to 12 months, this will become the Trump economy.

Well maintain the Trumponomics Report Card throughout the Trump presidency, and update it several times per month, as new data comes in. When there are meaningful changes, well highlight them with fresh news coverage on Yahoo Finance. We also plan to add more features to the report card, allowing users to plumb the economic data for each president. We hope this project helps our audience better evaluate the Trump presidency, and generate thoughtful discussion of Trumps policies and effectiveness. Please share your insights in the comments section below, or reach out to us on Twitter or Facebook.

Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman. Hes reachable at rickjnewman@yahoo.com.
By Alex Bregman

President Trump is launching an Election Integrity Commission to conduct an investigation into voter fraud in the United States. Its doubling down on his previous claims of widespread voter fraud in the country.

So what has he claimed?

That 3 million to 5 million votes were cast suspiciously in 2016 from undocumented immigrants, people registered in more than one state or dead people, and thats why he lost the popular vote.

He tweeted about this just days after the election.

And he did so again to members of Congress days after being sworn in as president.

So what is Trumps evidence?

The White House cited certain studies. Press secretary Sean Spicer said earlier this year, I think theres been studies. There was one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who had voted were noncitizens. Theres other studies that have been presented to him. Its a belief he maintains.

However, Trumps evidence actually combined two studies, and neither backs up his claims.

First, the 14 percent noncitizen figure came from a political science blog hosted by the Washington Post. The original column received three rebuttals, and studies of that study actually found it didnt back up its claims.

Second, the Pew Research study that Spicer cited, which is from 2012, focused on issues with inaccurate voter registration, either when people move out of state or are deceased.

Heres what the author of that study had to say about it: If you look at the numbers, youre more likely to get bitten by a shark whos won the power ball lottery than, you know, find someone who has committed voter fraud.

Trump had faced criticism over his claims even from some in his own party. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said, I am begging that the president share with us the information you have about this or please stop saying it.

The president is not backing down from announcing hes launching a major investigation. But what might he find?

According to experts, a person is more likely to get struck by lightning than to engage in illegal voting activities. One report specifically found that election voter-fraud rates were less than 1 percent.

So as the president goes full steam ahead with his widespread investigation, when it comes to the facts about voter fraud, at least you can say, Now I get it.
Heres a look at some of the stocks the Yahoo Finance team will be watching for you today.

Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) tops our list this morning after news that its self-driving car unit Waymo is teaming up with ride-hailing company Lyft on products and technology for autonomous vehicles. There arent a lot of details on the collaboration, but its safe to say its a blow to Ubers self-driving car program. Waymo is already battling Uber in court, accusing it of stealing trade secrets.

Tesla (TSLA) shares fell in early trading. Morgan Stanley has turned bearish on the electric carmaker, downgrading the stock to equal-weight from overweight. The investment firm cites increased competition from larger tech companies such as Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet, and also points out that Model 3 deliveries could be much lower than anticipated this year and next.

Were also watching shares of United Continental (UAL). The parent company of United airlines is back in the headlines after the carrier said some of its cockpit door security procedures were mistakenly posted online.

And theres a mega deal in the medical Industry. Pantheon (PTHN) shares surged in early trading after lab equipment maker Thermo Fisher (TMO) said it will buy the drug-development technology company for $5.2 billion. That translates to about $35 a share in cash, a 35% premium based on Pantheons closing price on Friday.
Photo credit: Getty

From Redbook

About one in three Americans will have at least one anxiety disorder during the course of their lives. If we look only at women, the number is even higher - about 40 percent.

What is it about being female that makes women more vulnerable to anxiety? Are women born anxious, or are we raised to be that way?

There's some evidence that women's fluctuating estrogen levels can fuel anxiety. But differences in upbringing may be even more influential. People - particularly parents - respond to children's fears in markedly different ways depending on gender. When girls are anxious, adults are more likely to be protective and allow them to avoid scary situations. Boys are told to suck it up. "There's an assumption that boys should be courageous and face their fears. With girls, we permit this sort of reluctance or avoidance of situations," says Carmen McLean, an assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. But this protection, she says, has lasting consequences. "You are teaching the girl, 'If I feel a little bit nervous, that means I should not do something.' A boy learns, 'If I feel this way, I should act anyway.' He learns, 'I can do it, and my anxiety goes down.' He feels more confident and has more efficacy. A little girl doesn't learn that lesson."

A large body of dispiriting research shows just how much boys are encouraged to be independent and brave while girls are dissuaded from the same behavior. Parents have been found to be more controlling with daughters than with sons - and controlling parenting is linked to a greater risk of anxiety disorders in kids. In a University of California, Berkeley study, researchers videotaped ten-minute interactions of mothers and fathers with their preschool-age children. The families were told to "create a world" out of a sand tray and small toys. When boys asserted themselves by, for example, telling their parents where to put a toy, parents were more likely to praise them. When girls were assertive, parents were more likely to interrupt, talk over, or disregard them. This gives girls the message that they don't have control over their environment. And feeling out of control is a core belief among the anxious.

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When girls are anxious, adults are more likely to be protective and allow them to avoid scary situations.

Barbara Morrongiello, a professor of psychology at the University of Guelph, has conducted a fascinating series of studies looking at how parenting interacts with gender to affect children's risk-taking behaviors. When Morrongiello was on maternity leave in the early 1990s, after her oldest son was born, she spent a lot of time at playgrounds and noticed huge differences in what boys and girls were encouraged to do - and not to do. "I saw much more encouragement [expressed] to boys and caution to girls," she says. Morrongiello had a hunch that these different messages might be contributing to high injury rates for boys: After age two, boys have two to four times more injuries than girls.

Although Morrongiello isn't an anxiety researcher, her findings may be critical for understanding the gender disparity in rates of anxiety disorders. Morrongiello and her colleague Theresa Dawber conducted a study that observed forty-eight sets of parents and toddlers on a playground. Parents and kids first played freely on a slide, swings, and jungle gym for ten minutes. Then the grown-ups were instructed to teach their children how to slide down a pole similar to what you'd see at a fire station.

Both boys and girls were just as skilled at navigating the playground equipment. Still, parents more often warned girls about safety and the risk of getting hurt, whereas they tended to encourage independence in boys. They also were more likely to physically help girls, even when girls didn't ask for assistance. For example, parents spontaneously helped girls during 67 percent of their attempts to slide down the pole. By contrast, they physically helped boys only 17 percent of the time. Incredibly, even when boys requested help, parents often initially denied their requests and urged them to try again on their own. Parents were so hands-off with their sons that several boys tumbled off the pole and onto the ground. While these actions may protect girls from physical injury, they could also instill feelings of vulnerability.

Feeling vulnerable and believing that the world is a dangerous place are common convictions of the anxious mind. If we want to tackle the rates of anxiety disorders among women, we need to increase our efforts to raise brave girls.

Adapted from On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety by Andrea Petersen. Copyright  2017 by the author and reprinted by permission of Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

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By Julia Love KING CITY, Calif. (Reuters) - On an overcast spring morning, about 40 Mexican men turned out in the pre-dawn hours to board a bus for California's Salinas Valley where they would harvest 16 acres (6.47 hectares) of lettuce over the next three days. Hector Manuel Morales, 20, came north from Mexico to work the fields with his three cousins. He said his family worried about his journey, spooked by President Donald Trump's talk of a crackdown on illegal immigrants. But he does not anticipate problems. While about half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally, Morales and the other men have H-2A visas, which allow them to work temporarily as seasonal agricultural laborers on American farms. "We are not violating any law here in the U.S.," he said. "We come to work." His co-worker Rafael Gonzalez Arredondo, 23, said listening to Trump's statements about Mexico was "difficult, but we are going to show him that Mexicans are hard working people, that we are not what he says." The men came to the country through a labor brokerage company, Fresh Harvest, which brings in H-2A laborers to work on farms in need of temporary workers. This year, the companys owner, Steve Scaroni, says he expects to bring in about 4,000 workers. Companies like Fresh Harvest are attractive for farmers who want to employ legal workers but do not want to deal with the considerable government red tape and regulations associated with the H-2A program. Employers who bring in workers on the visas must provide them with free transportation to and from the United States as well as housing and food once they arrive. Wage minimums are set by the government and are often higher than farmers are used to paying. Still, Scaroni says he could find work for even more people if he had enough housing. While use of the H-2A program has steadily increased over the past decade, it still accounts for only about 10 percent of the estimated 1.3 million farmworkers in the United States, according to government data. In 2016, the government granted 134,000 H-2A visas. Alfredo Lopez Granados, 27, from Michoacan, Mexico has come north to work on an H-2A visa five times. He misses his family back home, he says, but the decision is not difficult. "Once you are here," he said, "in one day you make more than you make in a week in Mexico." (To see a related photo essay, click here: http://reut.rs/2qdtfnb) (Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke in Los Angeles and Mica Rosenberg in New York; editing by Diane Craft)
Since 1989, 2,005 people have been exonerated from prison in the U.S.

Ricky is one of those exonerated  after serving nearly 40 years for a crime he didnt commit. In 1975, a man was robbed and murdered in Rickys Cleveland neighborhood. Days later, armed police kicked in the door of the home where 18-year-old Ricky lived. Based on the testimony of one young boy who claimed to have witnessed the murder, Ricky and two of his friends were convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.

To be sent to prison for something you didnt do is so indescribable, says Ricky now. You have to fight every day to maintain the person that you are. His mother told him, Dont them turn you into a prisoner. She died while he was imprisoned. I couldnt even grieve for my mother because they had made me so callous, Ricky laments.

Watch: Life After a Wrongful Conviction

Ricky believed that his case was forgotten, but the Ohio Innocence Project was fighting to discover the truth. The witness who testified that Ricky and his friends had committed the murder recanted and Ricky was released. After 39 years, I was finally able to walk out.

Ricky is the longest-serving prisoner to have been exonerated in the U.S. After his release, he met with his accuser, who is now a middle-aged man. It was important for me to go to this guy and say, I understand now. Because in a way, he was a victim just as much as we were, Ricky says. I wanted him to move on with his life, as I was going to move on with mine.

Attorney Mark Godsey of the Ohio Innocence Project explains that it took years of effort to exonerate Ricky. Attorney Brian Howe had law students going door-to-door in the Cleveland neighborhood looking for witnesses who remembered the case. Mark is a law professor at the Cincinnati University College of Law and a former prosecutor. He says that, since its founding in 2003, the Ohio Innocence Project so far weve freed 24 Ohioans who together have served 450 years in prison for crimes they didnt commit.

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Watch: How Wrongful Convictions Happen

Mark also notes that in many of the cases the project investigates, the prisoners turn out to be guilty. When we confirm guilt, thats what we love, he says  it means that the real perpetrator is behind bars.

Like other exonerated prisoners, including Nancy and Clarence who are also here to speak to The Doctors, Ricky still feels the trauma of his time in prison.

"To read more about the stories of Ricky, Nancy and Clarence, and to learn about wrongful conviction and its causes, read Mark Godsey's Blind Injustice, a best-selling new release on Amazon.com. Join the Blind Injustice Facebook Group, here.
Ricky, Nancy, and Clarence have all been imprisoned for terrible crimes  crimes they never committed. Now the three of them join The Doctors to discuss the lingering trauma of these experiences, and how they are able to move forward.

Ricky says that the company of the other wrongfully imprisoned means everything to him. We never pass up an opportunity to meet and be together, because we know theres that level of understanding amongst us. We have our family and our friends, but they can never really understand the depths of our emotional trauma. He adds, When I see these guys, I just automatically light up!

Watch: Life After a Wrongful Conviction

All three suffer from anxiety and difficulty sleeping. Psychotherapist Dr. Mike Dow tells them, I dont think theres any amount of therapy that can erase what happened to you.

PTSD Specialist Dr. Eugene Lipov explains, I look at PTSD as a biological phenomenon. When the body is put through an extreme circumstance of any form, the fight-or-flight response is kicked into gear. You know exactly what Im talking about! he says to Clarence, who is nodding. A mild sound can set it off.

He says the same is true for Jennifer, who was raped and then, decades later, suffered the additional trauma of learning she had helped convict the wrong man of the crime. I cant even imagine how horrible that would feel, Dr. Lipov tells her.

Watch: Healing the Pain of Wrongful Imprisonment

Their brains have adapted to help them survive in horrible circumstances, he explains, but now those adaptations are causing them continual stress. But Dr. Lipov has a treatment  an injection to turn off nerve fibers created during the trauma, and return the brain to its original state. The procedure has been used to help returning veteran Special Operations officers.

Now Dr. Lipov offers this treatment to Jennifer, Clarence, Nancy, and Ricky. You dont have to live in misery forever.

ER Physician Dr. Travis Stork reassures them that The Doctors will take care of any travel and logistics to help them get treated. I truly hope and pray that the three of you can find some hope and peace in all this, because your stories are compelling as any Ive ever heard.
A high profile prosecutor fired by Donald Trump, has defended his former colleague James Comey and called on more public officials to stand up to the power of the White House.

Preet Bharara, who was one of 46 United States attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama ordered to resign by Mr Trump, said the firing of Mr Comey had impacted morale at the agency.

Jim Comey was once my boss and remains my friend. I know that many people are mad at him. He has at different times become a cause for peoples frustration and anger on both sides of the aisle, he said.

"78 percent of Americans believe an independent commission or special prosecutor should handle the investigation into Russias interference" https://t.co/fBNlEHxK4T  Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) May 15, 2017

Some of those people may have a point. But...I am proud to know a man who had the courage to say no to a president.

He added: And in the tumult of this time, the question whose answer we should perhaps fear the most is the one evoked by that showdown: are there still public servants who are prepared to say no to the president?

Video not available for syndication

Donald Trump says James Comey told him multiple times he was not under investigation

Mr Bharara, who was fired at the United States attorney in Manhattan in March after he refused the order to stand down, recalled in an piece for the Washington Post, how Mr Comey and then FBI Director Robert Mueller intervened in 2004 when the White House tried to overrule their objection to a secret terrorist surveillance programme.

He said that when the administration of George W Bush sought to push ahead, Mr Comey threatened to resign. Mr Comey and Mr Mueller won the day.

For me, the past week has been deja vu all over again. To restore faith in the rule of law, three obvious things must happen: First, we need a truly bipartisan investigation in Congress, he said.

Story continues

That means no partisan nonsense - just a commitment to finding the facts, whatever they may be, proving (or disproving) Russian interference in our election and anything related.

Mr Bharara also said the new FBI director must be apolitical and sensitive to the law-enforcement mission. Finally, he said, there should be a special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

Given the manner of Comeys firing and the pretextual reasons proffered for it, there is no other way, he said.

History will judge this moment. Its not too late to get it right, and justice demands it.
Apple announced Friday that it will be investing $200 million in smartphone glassmaker Corning as a part of its $1 billion advanced manufacturing jobs fund aimed to promote U.S. job creation. On paper, while the investment might sound like one of the companys many ventures, but according to analysts, Apple might have made the investing, not just for job creation, but for the furtherance of technologies for its upcoming products.

Read: Apple And AR: Company Reportedly Teaming Up With Carl Zeiss For Augmented Reality Glasses

Corning, for the uninitiated, is the largest smartphone display glass brand and the company behind Gorilla Glass.

The company stated that its investment would support Cornings R&D, capital equipment needs, and state-of-the-art glass processing.

Oppenheimer analyst Andrew Uerkwitz told CNBC that the investment might be targeted at Apples move away from a metal frame in its previous iPhones to a glass one in iPhone 8. Switching to a glass frame is essential for the device and for the companys rumored long-range wireless charging concept.

Metal can interfere with wireless charging technology, Uerkwitz told CNBC. That means you need glass on the back of the phone, but glass that wont break. Or you need to use ceramics. Corning has a long history of investing in both glass and ceramics.

Another analyst, Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights stated that the investment might be more than what it seems  Apple might be looking to partner with Corning to develop glass for its Snapchat style AR glasses, another rumored upcoming product. Moorhead states that the companies are working together to develop a special glass that magnifies visuals to deliver a proper augmented reality experience.

You need specialized glass in the headset, glass that properly magnifies the 180-degree experience of AR. Also, that glass has to be really light. Corning could develop that for Apple, Moorhead said.

Both technologies have previously surfaced in rumors, leaks and even the companys own patent filing.

Story continues

Read: iPhone Wireless Charging: Apple Wants You To Charge Your Device Via Wi-Fi In The Future

In April, Apple filed a patent with the U.S. patent and Trade Mark office for long-range wireless charging, which would let you charge your device over Wi-Fi. The patent called Wireless Charging and Communications Systems With Dual-Frequency Patch Antennas illustrated a way to transfer power to devices over data communication frequencies. The company could reportedly use a smart connector accessory, which might help users charge their iPhones over Wi-Fi.

The AR Glasses too, even though they currently sound far-fetched might be launched by the end of the year. Apple has reportedly augmented reality expert Jeff Norris from NASAs Jet propulsion Lab to help with the development of the product. A report published in March said that Apple had hired 1,000 engineers to work on the project in Israel. The technology might also be featured on the companys upcoming iPhone 8.

Apple has also reportedly engaged glass maker Carl Zeiss to make a frame for the glasses, a report said in January.

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On Friday a major piece of malware hit the web, and throughout the weekend infected hundreds of thousands of computers, taking down everything from businesses to the U.K.s National Health Service. The software, dubbed WannaCry 2.0, is whats known as ransomware.

A type of malware that burrows into your computer, ransomware encrypts the files on your machine, keeping you from being able to access them. The malwares creator then asks that you to pay a fee to unlock your data.

The first round of the WannaCry 2.0 attack seems to have passed. But chances are the creator, or some other hacker, will repurpose the malware and send it back into the wild again.

Heres how can you avoid this software, and what can you should if your machine is infected. The biggest tip I can give you is to simply keep your computers software updated.

And of course, never pay these ransoms.

Ransom?

Lets start with the basics. A particularly nefarious form of malware, ransomware is a piece of software criminals use to lock you out of your computer by encrypting its files and holding them for ransom for a specific dollar amount. WannaCry 2.0 uses a vulnerability in Microsofts (MSFT) Windows operating system to attack users computers.

The vulnerability was originally made public when a hacking group released the exploit online, claiming to have stolen software exploits from the National Security Agency.

If your machine is infected, and you dont pay up, you can potentially say goodbye to your photos, tax documents, pay stubs, and any other documents youve saved throughout the years.

This isnt some idle threat, either. If you dont pay, your documents will disappear or simply stay locked up until you completely reformat your system.

Ransomware programs sometimes require you to pay in Bitcoin, an anonymous currency that cant be tracked.

However, criminals have increasingly begun demanding payment in the form of iTunes or Amazon gift cards, since the average person doesnt know how to use Bitcoin, according to McAfees Gary Davis.

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The amount you have to pay to unlock your computer can vary, with some experts saying criminals will ask for up to $500.

To be clear, ransomware doesnt just target Windows PCs. The malware has been known to impact systems ranging from Android phones and tablets to Linux-based computers and Macs.

Where it comes from

According to Davis, ransomware was actually popular among cybercriminals over a decade ago. But it was far easier to catch the perpetrators back then since anonymous currency like Bitcoin didnt exist yet. Bitcoin helped changed all that by making it nearly impossible to track criminals based on how victims pay them.

There are multiple types of ransomware out there, according to Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor with the computer security company Sophos. Each variation is tied to seven or eight criminal organizations.

Those groups build the software and then sell it on the black market, where other criminals purchase it and then begin using it for their own gains.

How they get you

Ransomware doesnt just pop up on your computer by magic. You actually have to download it. And while you could swear up and down that youd never be tricked into downloading malware, cybercriminals get plenty of people to do just that.

Heres the thing: That email you opened to get ransomware on your computer in the first place was specifically written to get you to believe it was real. Thats because criminals use social engineering to craft their messages.

For example, hackers can determine your location and send emails that look like theyre from companies based in your country.

Criminals are looking are looking up information about where you live, so youll click (emails), Wisniewski explained to Yahoo Finance. So if youre in America, youll see something from Citi Bank, rather than Deutsche Bank, which is in Germany.

Cybercriminals can also target ransomware messages to the time of year. So if its the holiday shopping season, criminals might send out messages supposedly from companies like the US Postal Service, FedEx or DHL. If its tax time, you could receive a message that says its from the IRS.

Other ransomware messages might claim the FBI has targeted you for using illegal software or viewing child pornography on your computer. Then, the message will tell you to click a link to a site to pay a fine  only to lock up your computer after you click.

Its not just email, though. An attack known as a drive-by can get you if you simply visit certain websites. Thats because criminals have the ability to inject their malware into ads or links on poorly secured sites. When you go to such a site, youll download the ransomware. Just like that, youre locked out of your computer.

How to protect yourself

Ransomware attacks vulnerabilities in outdated versions of software. So, believe it or not, the best way to protect yourself is to constantly update your operating systems software and apps like Adobe Reader. That means you should always click that little update notification on your desktop, phone, or tablet. Dont put it off.

Beyond that, you should always remember to back up your files. You can either do that by backing them up to a cloud service like Amazon (AMZN) Cloud, Google (GOOG, GOOGL) Drive or Apples (AAPL) iCloud, or by backing up to an external drive.

That said, youll want to be careful with how you back up your content. Thats because, according to Kaspersky Labs Ryan Naraine, some ransomware can infect your backups.

Naraine warns against staying logged into your cloud service all the time, as some forms of malware can lock you out of even them. Whats more, if youre backing up to an external hard drive, youll want to disconnect it from your PC when youre finished, or the ransomware could lock that, as well.

Naraine also says you should disconnect your computer from the internet if you see your system being actively encrypted. Doing so, he explains, could prevent all of your files that have yet to be encrypted from being locked.

Above all, every expert I spoke with recommended installing some form of anti-virus software and some kind of web browser filtering. With both types of software installed, your system up to date, and a backup available, you should be well-protected.

Oh, and for the love of god, avoid downloading any suspicious files or visiting sketchy websites.

What to do if youre infected

Even if you follow all of the above steps, ransomware could still infect your computer or mobile device. If thats the case, you have only a few options.

The first and easiest choice is to delete your computer or mobile device and reinstall your operating system. Youll lose everything, but you wont have to pay some criminal whos holding your files hostage.

Some security software makers also sell programs that can decrypt your files. That said, by purchasing one, youre betting that it will work on the ransomware on your computer, which isnt always the case. On top of that, ransomware makers can update their malware to beat security software makers offerings.

All of the experts agree that the average person should never pay the ransom  even if it means losing their files. Doing so, they say, helps perpetuate a criminal act and emboldens ransomware makers.

Even if you do pay up, the ransomware could have left some other form of malware on your computer that you might not see.

In other words: Tell the criminals to take a hike.

More from Dan:

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
By Jeremy Wagstaff and Jim Finkle

SINGAPORE/TORONTO (Reuters) - Technical staff scrambled on Sunday to patch computers and restore infected ones, amid fears that the ransomware worm that stopped car factories, hospitals, shops and schools could wreak fresh havoc on Monday when employees log back on.

Cybersecurity experts said the spread of the virus dubbed WannaCry - "ransomware" which locked up more than 200,000 computers - had slowed, but the respite might only be brief.

New versions of the worm are expected, they said, and the extent of the damage from Friday's attack remains unclear.

Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organizations deemed not worth the price of upgrading or, in some cases, machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions that proved too difficult to patch without possibly disrupting crucial operations, security experts said.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available on iOS and Android.

Marin Ivezic, cybersecurity partner at PwC, said that some clients had been "working around the clock since the story broke" to restore systems and install software updates, or patches, or restore systems from backups.

Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks, a rare and powerful feature that caused infections to surge on Friday.

Code for exploiting that bug, which is known as "Eternal Blue," was released on the internet in March by a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers. The group claimed it was stolen from a repository of National Security Agency hacking tools. The agency has not responded to requests for comment.

Hong Kong-based Ivezic said that the ransomware was forcing some more "mature" clients affected by the worm to abandon their usual cautious testing of patches "to do unscheduled downtime and urgent patching, which is causing some inconvenience."

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He declined to identify which clients had been affected.

The head of the European Union police agency said on Sunday the cyber assault hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries and that number will grow when people return to work on Monday.

"The global reach is unprecedented ... and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations," Europol Director Rob Wainwright told Britain's ITV.

"At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up, I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn (on) their machines on Monday morning."

MONDAY MORNING RUSH?

Monday was expected to be a busy day, especially in Asia which may not have seen the worst of the impact yet, as companies and organizations turned on their computers.

"Expect to hear a lot more about this tomorrow morning when users are back in their offices and might fall for phishing emails" or other as yet unconfirmed ways the worm may propagate, said Christian Karam, a Singapore-based security researcher.

Targets both large and small have been hit.

Renault said on Saturday it had halted manufacturing at plants in Sandouville, France, and Romania to prevent the spread of ransomware in its systems.

Among the other victims is a Nissan manufacturing plant in Sunderland, northeast England.

Hundreds of hospitals and clinics in the British National Health Service were infected on Friday, forcing them to send patients to other facilities.

German rail operator Deutsche Bahn said some electronic signs at stations announcing arrivals and departures were infected.

In Asia, some hospitals, schools, universities and other institutions were affected. International shipper FedEx Corp said some of its Windows computers were also breached.

Telecommunications company Telefonica was among the targets in Spain. Portugal Telecom and Telefonica Argentina both said they were also targeted.

A Jakarta hospital said on Sunday that the cyber virus had infected 400 computers, disrupting the registration of patients and finding records. The hospital said it expected big queues on Monday when about 500 people were due to register.

In Singapore, a company that supplies digital signage, MediaOnline, was rushing to fix its systems after a technician's error had led to 12 kiosks being infected in two of the island country's malls. Director Dennis So said the systems were not connected to the malls' or tenants' networks.

"RANSOM" PAYMENTS MAY RISE

Account addresses hard coded into the malicious WannaCry software code appear to show the attackers had received just under $32,500 in anonymous bitcoin currency as of 1100 GMT on Sunday, but that amount could rise as more victims rush to pay ransoms of $300 or more to regain access to their computers, just one day before the threatened deadline expires.

The threat receded over the weekend after a British-based researcher, who declined to give his name but tweets under the profile @MalwareTechBlog, said he stumbled on a way to at least temporarily limit the worm's spread by registering a web address to which he noticed the malware was trying to connect.

Security experts said his move bought precious time for organizations seeking to block the attacks.

Researchers remained on high alert for new variants that could lead to a fresh wave of infections. Researchers from three security firms dismissed initial reports on Saturday that a new version of WannaCry/WannaCrypt had emerged, saying this was based on a rushed analysis of code data that proved erroneous.

The MalwareTech researcher warned on Twitter on Sunday: "Version 1 of WannaCrypt was stoppable but version 2.0 will likely remove the flaw. You're only safe if you patch ASAP."

Bryce Boland, Asia Pacific chief technology officer for FireEye, a cybersecurity company, said it would be straightforward for existing attackers to launch new releases or for other ransomware authors to start copying the way the malware replicated.

The U.S. government on Saturday issued a technical alert with advice on how to protect against the attacks, asking victims to report any to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Department of Homeland Security.

(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard, Neil Jerome Morales, Masayuki Kitano, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Jose Rodriguez, Elizabeth Piper, Emmanuel Jarry, Orathai Sriring, Jemima Kelly, Alistair Smout, Andrea Shalal, Jack Stubbs, Antonella Cinelli, Dustin Volz, Kate Holton, Andy Bruce, Michael Holden, David Milliken, Tim Hepher, Luiza Ilie, Patricia Rua, Axel Bugge, Sabine Siebold and Eric Walsh, Engen Tham, Fransiska Nangoy, Soyoung Kim and Mai Nguyen; editing by Mike Collett-White/Mark Heinrich)
LONDON (Reuters) - Friday's cyber attack hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries and that number could grow when people return to work on Monday, the head of the European Union's police agency said on Sunday. Cyber security experts say the spread of the virus dubbed WannaCry - "ransomware" which locked up computers in car factories, hospitals, shops and schools in several countries - has slowed, but that any respite might be brief. Europol Director Rob Wainwright told ITV's Peston on Sunday programme the attack was unique in that the ransomware was used in combination with "a worm functionality" so the infection spread automatically. "The global reach is unprecedented. The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations," he said. "At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up; I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn (on) their machines on Monday morning." He said Europol and other agencies did not yet know who was behind the attack but "normally it is criminally minded and that is our first working theory for obvious reasons". "Of course there are amounts that are being demanded, in this case relatively small amounts - $300 rising to $600 if you don't pay within three days," he said. "(There have been) remarkably few payments so far that we've noticed as we are tracking this, so most people are not paying this, so there isn't a lot of money being made by criminal organisations so far." Wainwright said Europol had been concerned about cyber security in the healthcare sector, which deals with a lot of sensitive data, but declined to comment on whether Britain's National Health Service had been adequately funded. Defence minister Michael Fallon told the BBC the government under Prime Minister Theresa May was spending around 50 million pounds on improving the computer systems in the NHS after warning the service that it needed to reduce its exposure to "the weakest system, the Windows XP". "The NHS was not particularly targeted. There were the same attacks applied to Nissan on Friday and in other areas of the economy and indeed around the world," Fallon said. "But let me just assure you, we are spending money on strengthening the cyber defence of our hospital system." (Reporting by Elizabeth Piper; editing by Mark Heinrich)
Astronaut Mike Massimino, who was on the final Space Shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, marvels at what Hubble has accomplished. (GeekWire Photo / Geof Wheelwright)

NEW ORLEANS  Its apparently not enough that Mike Massimino is a former NASA astronaut, a best-selling author and an engineering professor. Hes also raring to go back into space, this time as a tourist.

In an hourlong interview with GeekWire at the Collision media and technology conference in New Orleans last week, the 54-year-old Massimino talked about his yen for spaceflight as well as his views on commercial space exploration and the legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope, which he helped repair on two different space shuttle missions.

Massimino, a down-to-earth New Yorker, started with his observations on the state of the commercial space race. He said the students in his classes at Columbia University are deeply enthused over the idea of working at any one of several space companies.

The top students in the country want to go to work for these places, he said. Im talking about SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic. The cool thing about them is that theyre run by these entrepreneurs, who are some of the best entrepreneurs of our time: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, for example. Theyre interested in space travel  they see that as being the future.

NASA astronaut Mike Massimino mugs for the camera with the Hubble Space Telescope in the background during a spacewalk in 2009. (NASA Photo)

Massimino is happily surprised at how much commercial space ventures have achieved. I always wondered if the technology was ready to be sort of handed over  or was it just too expensive or too complicated for any company to do  to actually launch things, and particularly people, he said. I was afraid that it might be a little early and that it might not work, but they have had some amazing accomplishments.

He cited recent achievements such as SpaceXs launch and landing of its Falcon 9 booster as strong examples. And he wondered how many people realize the magnitude of the accomplishments.

Its not easy getting off the planet, he says. People talk about it like theyre going around the corner  Oh, were going to go to here and then were going to pick this up and then were going to sell you this You know, our country, which went to the moon, we have not launched astronauts into space [from U.S. soil] since 2011. Its not just that you get the keys to the car and go.

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Massimino said astronauts need to have confidence in the organization and team that puts them into space  and brings them back to Earth.

Even when I was space, floating above the planet, I remember looking down and thinking to myself, Wow, Im pretty far away from home. Traveling really fast around the planet, it was like I gotta get back there. You know, theres a lot of possibilities about where you might end up, he said. The thought went through my mind after my spacewalk, when I was looking back at the planet, Im glad someone smarter than me is figuring out how to get [us] home.'

Looking forward to being a tourist

Massimino says he would love to go back into space, as long as hes off duty.

I really want to go as a tourist someday. I want to go and I want to complain. I want to complain about the drinks, I want to complain about everything, Massimino said with a grin.

When youre flying in space as an astronaut, you think, Im going to get to go into space, but really you have like a million things to worry about. You gotta fly the spaceship, you gotta make sure everythings working, and theres a lot on your mind, he said. Its a big responsibility  and stress and the danger and all that. Then theres the euphoria of being there, being able to travel and look at the window and experience all of it, which outweighs anything you have to do to get there.

Massimino was happy to contrast that experience with what he thinks space tourism could be like.

I think going as a tourist would be the way to go, he said wistfully. You just hang out. You know, its hey, dont bother me, Im not flying the spaceship. We have an emergency? Why dont you take care of it? Although if you had an emergency, I think Id probably jump to it and do something. So I hope I get a chance to go back as a tourist.

Space has to be international

Looking beyond the commercial side of the space effort, Massimino says America needs to work with other countries to push the frontier of exploration outward into the solar system. He recalled the time in 1993 when Congress was one vote away from cutting off funding for the International Space Station.

I dont think we can explore space at the level we want to without international cooperation. Maybe the private companies will figure out how we can go to the moon and Mars without the governments help, but I dont think even thats possible, he says. With the International Space Station, the key word there, I think, is international. The way we were able to get that going  and the way it was saved when it almost got killed  was our commitment to our international partners.

He said the United States has to continue its leading role in space.

Our international partners  the countries of Europe, Japan, Canada and Russia as well  they look to the United States for that leadership, Massimino said. Theyre dependent on us. They want to participate, and they cant do it without us, and we cant do it without them.

That doesnt mean every space project taken on by NASA, or by commercial ventures, will bear fruit.

Even when I was an astronaut, we would often get projects started and then canceled, he recalled. We had these follow-ons to the space shuttle  the orbital space plane and the X-38 and all these other things. And they would get canned.

A newly released image, based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments, shows the Crab Nebula in an assortment of wavelengths. (NASA / ESA / G. Dubner  IAFE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires, et al. / A. Loll et al. / T. Temim et al. / F. Seward et al. / VLA / NRAO / AUI / NSF / Chandra / CXC / Spitzer / JPL-Caltech / XMM-Newton / ESA / Hubble / STScI)

Humbled by Hubble

There was an interesting moment during the interview when Massimino, who served as a spacewalking repairman for Hubble during two sets of spacewalks in 2002 and 2009, asked to see the latest images from the space telescope on my smartphone.

Massimino was as excited and impressed as any parent would be at their childs college graduation.

Amazing, thats incredible, he said, looking at the pictures. Hubble was, in my opinion, the best flight you could be on. All spaceflights are great, and getting a chance to go anywhere would have been great, but theres something special about Hubble.

Thats not to say the missions were easy. You go up there, you rendezvous, you grab the telescope so theres so robot stuff there, and thats cool, he said. You rendezvous with this free flier, this giant free flier thats about the size of a school bus, and then you spacewalk for five days straight  no days off in between from the spacewalks. Its complicated, interesting stuff, but thats what you want to do. So I always felt like anyone who was on that flight would be very lucky indeed.

Social media pioneer

Massimino made history during his 2009 shuttle mission as the first astronaut to send a tweet from space. Since then, social media has made a big difference in how astronauts and space travel are perceived.

I saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon when I was 6, and wanted to grow up to be an astronaut, he said. By the time I was 8 or 9, I realized that was going to be impossible. I wasnt Neil Armstrong. I mean, who are these guys? Theyre fearless test pilots. I was afraid of heights. And these guys go to the academies and theyre tough guys and they fly these really fast airplanes, and theyre fearless. And I was scared of my own shadow. So I was like, I dont think this astronaut thing is going to work.'

Thankfully for Massimino and the space program, the astronaut thing ended up working after all, despite his qualms. Today, theres a new dynamic at work in the interaction between astronauts and the public at large.

I was the first guy to tweet, but now every astronaut tweets and sends Instagram and all that stuff. People can engage with it and they can see the astronauts and humans, as kind of regular people, and share the experience, he said. Its so accessible  and even the internet now. When I was a kid, I used to have to go to the library and see what books were on the shelf. Good luck there. Now, here we are, Googling a picture of the Hubble image right here. So its just the accessibility of information. I think the social media, the interaction with the people that are doing it, it just gives us a sense that were all traveling.

More from GeekWire:
By Jeremy Wagstaff SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Hackers either working for the Vietnamese government or on their behalf have broken into the computers of multinationals operating in the country as part of an increasingly sophisticated cyber espionage campaign, cyber security company FireEye said. Nick Carr, senior manager of FireEye's Mandiant Incident Response team, said in an interview the same group was also responsible for hacking into the computers of Vietnamese dissidents and journalists. He said it was impossible to identify or locate the hackers precisely or confirm they were working for the Vietnamese government, but the information they sought would be of very little use to any other party. The attacks are unrelated to the WannaCry ransomware worm that has ravaged computers around the world since Friday. "All the activity we have seen is of interest to the nation of Vietnam," Carr said in a phone interview ahead of Monday's publication of a FireEye report on hacking in Vietnam. The government rejected the accusation. "The government of Vietnam does not allow any form of cyber-attacks against organizations or individuals," said foreign ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang. "All cyber attacks or threats to cybersecurity must be condemned and severely punished in accordance with regulations and laws." Carr said FireEye had observed the group, which it called APT32, targeting foreign corporations with interests in Vietnam's manufacturing, consumer products and hospitality sectors since 2014. In several cases, he said, the hackers sought information about the companies' operations and their adherence to local regulations, something he had rarely seen other hacker groups attempt. Victims included a German manufacturing company about to build a factory in Vietnam, a Chinese hotel developer planning to expand its operations in the country, and the local office of a British-based global consulting firm. He said in most cases the companies were household names. He declined to identify them, citing client confidentiality. Executives, human resources and finance staff were targeted, he said. FIRST TIME The report marks the first time a cybersecurity company has pointed to Vietnam as the source of state-motivated cyber-attacks. It is also the first time FireEye had assigned the label APT - standing for advanced persistent threat, a term usually reserved for state-sponsored hacker groups - to a group outside China and Russia. Robert Trong Tran, who directs PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) cybersecurity services business in Vietnam, said before the publication of the report that he was not aware of any cases of European companies being hacked. PwC declined to comment on the FireEye report. Amanuel Flobbe, chairman of the Vietnam European Chamber of Commerce's Information and Communications Technologies committee, said that while European companies in Vietnam had been damaged by hackers, it was no different to hacks seen elsewhere. Vietnam has long been vulnerable to hacking, both criminal and politically motivated. In January, Microsoft listed it behind only Mongolia of countries infected with malware, with more than double the worldwide average. Carr said the hackers "could do a lot of damage or could have a lot of impact on the organizations' competitive advantage, their ability to successfully navigate investigations and regulations." In the case of the German manufacturer, he said, "one would suspect the timing isn't coincidental and the government has an unfair advantage." The same group was responsible for earlier attacks on local and foreign journalists, as well as dissidents and the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia and Southeast Asia, he said. It was the same group that Chinese cybersecurity company SkyEye Labs called OceanLotus in 2015, Carr said. SkyEye, a part of internet company Qihoo 360, wrote that the group was behind attacks on Chinese government agencies, research institutes and companies. It did not identify Vietnam as the source of the attacks. SkyEye did not respond to requests for comment. Carr said that his own research confirmed it was the same group, but that he didn't have any recent evidence that APT32 continued to target China. The group is also linked to attacks on journalists, activists, dissidents and bloggers in Vietnam reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2013. It has also targeted Vietnamese overseas and broke into the computers of a Western national parliament, Carr wrote in the report. Vietnamese media organizations have also been targeted, he said. (Additional reporting by Mai Nguyen in Hanoi, editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
The "WannaCry" ransomware attack seen in a graphic on May 14, 2017 (AFP Photo/Jonathan JACOBSEN, Valentina BRESCHI) (AFP)

Washington (AFP) - Questions are swirling over who is responsible for the security flaws exploited by hackers in the world's biggest ransomware attack to date, which crippled thousands of businesses and public organizations around the world. Here are some answers:

- Who bears the blame? -

Because hackers exploited a security hole in some Windows versions discovered by the National Security Agency, Microsoft says the intelligence agency bears some responsibility.

"This attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem," Microsoft president and general counsel Brad Smith said in a weekend blog post.

Steven Weber, faculty director at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, said "the fault is pretty distributed -- there are plenty of people to blame."

Weber said the NSA's primary mission is intelligence: "If I were sitting at the NSA I would push that argument right back to Microsoft," he argued. "They would say, 'It's our job to stockpile those weapons and use them against our adversaries.'"

Other factors were the large number of old, outdated software programs in use and often ineffective security systems.

Cornell University computer scientist Stephen Wicker blamed "profound ethical lapses" both on the part of the US government and the computing public.

The flaws "were known to the NSA and CIA, but were kept secret by those organizations to be exploited for their own data collection purposes," Wicker said.

But he added that a large number of businesses and other users failed to install a patch issued by Microsoft in March, and also share the blame for spreading the malware.

President Donald Trump's homeland security advisor Tom Bossert dismissed the idea that the US is to blame.

"This was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data," Bossert told reporters.

Story continues

"This was a vulnerability exploit as one part of a much larger tool that was put together by the culpable parties and not by the US government."

- How did hackers get this tool? -

Microsoft effectively confirmed analysts' diagnosis that the ransomware known as "WannaCry" was designed to exploit NSA software that was leaked earlier this year by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers.

President Vladimir Putin has said Russia -- which has been accused of cyber meddling in several countries -- had nothing to do with the massive cyberattack, and criticized the US intelligence community for creating the original software.

But Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer for IBM Resilient Systems, has suggested that a state-sponsored actor, most likely Russia, was probably responsible for the initial hack of the NSA.

"Whoever got this information years before and is leaking it now has to be capable of hacking the NSA and/or the CIA, and willing to publish it all," Schneier said in a recent blog post.

"The list of countries who fit both criteria is small: Russia, China, and... and... and I'm out of ideas."

James Lewis, a cybersecurity specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he believes the exposure of the flaw likely "leads back to Moscow" -- but that the hackers who designed the malware are probably not Russian.

"One of the rules in Russia is that Russian criminals are not allowed to hack Russian targets," Lewis said. "This does not fit the pattern of Russian-sponsored activity."

"The cybercrime market is really innovative," he added, "and they are quick to take advantage of vulnerabilities."

- What about computer security at large? -

The attacks came a day after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for improved cybersecurity in the federal government and better cooperation with the private sector.

But few see this or any single initiative as a silver bullet.

Weber said the attacks show the risks of an overreliance on computerized systems that are not fully secure.

"We have built an increasingly digital society on a very insecure foundation and we are starting to see the consequences of that," he said.

Weber warned there is no single entity capable of fixing this problem in the near future, since security depends on so many factors.

"If you want to look for an upside, it would be this would be a wakeup call," to improve computer security, he said.

At the same time, Weber noted that the attack could prompt more people to shun digital technology and turn back to analog systems that can't be hacked.

Weber said there are already some signs that the public is losing confidence in the digital world as a result of security problems.

"For Silicon Valley and technology companies, their future depends on these underlying systems working," he said.
1. Yes. Taxpayers are funding its operation; they should have a voice in the naming process.

2. Yes. The city should operate with a spirit of inclusivity. Residents will be responsive.

3. No. Public input can be problematic; rejection of suggestions can be divisive for residents.

4. No. Residents elect council members to make decisions on their behalf. No input is needed.

5. Unsure. Its hard to say whether public input would be more of a benefit or a hindrance.

Vote

View Results
By Ritah Kemigisa

The Mayor of Kampala Erias Lukwago has accused the central government for wanting to take off the administration and governance role of the Kampala lord Mayor through the minister of Kampala.

Addressing a stakeholders meeting of Division mayors and councilors at city hall, the lord Mayor Lukwago says the KCCA amendment bill which is before parliament seeks to vest all powers to the minister something he says is dangerous.

He says the role of the central government according to the KCC Act 2010 is to administer the operations of the city and not govern it adding that the amendments in the bill are wrong because they dont conform to what is stipulated in the constitution.

Lukwago says according to the constitution of Uganda Article 5, the power of administration is to the central government and shall execute this role through the Resident City Commissioner and governance to the Authority which is KCCA.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries has ordered for a temporally closure of all livestock markets following an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the districts of Mbarara, Lyantonde, Isingiro, Sembabule and Kiruhura.

The State Minister for Animal Industry Joy Kabatsi has confirmed the re-outbreak of the disease saying it originated from Isingiro district where, traders buy infected bulls from neighboring Tanzania.

Authorities have been directed by the ministry to vaccinate all cattle before crossing the border.
By Samuel Ssebuliba

African governments have been urged to formulate common policies that will help address the issue of migrants on the continent.

Currently it is estimated that over 1.4 billion people are migrants globally, with Africa hosting the third highest number of migrants after Europe and America.

While addressing the 3rd Pan-African Forum on Migration today, President Yoweri Museveni said African countries have abundance of resources and so there is no need for people to die while making dangerous journeys to Europe.

He said African leaders have to create conducive environments for people to prosper and live a good and peaceful life.

He has added that during this forum, leaders should discuss a holistic approach to migration including development, employment, human rights, peace and security, climate change and humanitarian dimensions.
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A Kansas abortion clinic that was among the first in the country to open after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade has been inundated with patients. Some drive 10 hours or more to get there, coming from Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and even Louisiana. But thats only if they can get an appointment. Planned Parenthood clinics in the state, including this newest one, are only able to take about 10% to 15% of the patients seeking abortions. Kansas is one of the few states in the region still providing abortions in the wake of the court's ruling.
The Interfaith Shoulder to Shoulder Network group in La Crosse is taking a page out of the no smoking handbook to snuff out hostility, too, with its Hate Has No Business Here campaign.

The organization endorsed member Wale Elegbedes idea to provide what he described as a practical and easy way for businesses and people living in La Crosse and the surrounding areas to help our cause with increasing peace, tolerance and understanding.

Shoulder to Shoulder is piggy-backing on the national Main Street Alliances initiative to thwart hatred, encouraging businesses and residents to download alliance posters from its own Facebook page to bring anti-hate messages home.

One poster encourages solidarity with Muslims, refugees and immigrants in the Coulee Region. The other voices respect for women, the value of black lives, harmony with the LGBT community and support for immigrants, refugees and members of all faiths.

I think this can serve as our community traffic light and reminder to leave hatred, unconscious bias and xenophobia out of our businesses and homes, said Elegbede, a native of Lagos, Nigeria, who has lived in La Crosse for 18 years and is an American Muslim.

Hopefully in time, these will be left out of our hearts as well, adds the Shoulder to Shoulder Facebook page.

The concept is similar to all the signs that say no weapons allowed inside a building or no smoking. If we start to force ourselves to practice leaving out hatred, fear of others, unconscious bias, xenophobia, Islamophobia, fear of people with disabilities, etc., we can change our society for the better, Elegbede said.

The alliance also encourages people to sign a statement, in support of the campaign, and it offers the option of buying posters in bulk instead of downloading just one.
The race to lead the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has become a debate about salvaging the party's fortunes in a once-blue-leaning state that, in recent elections, has become steadily more red.

Party delegates will elect their next chairperson at the state Democratic Party convention in Middleton June 2-3.

They'll either re-elect the current chairwoman, Martha Laning, or pick one of three challengers: Glendale Mayor Bryan Kennedy, Madison attorney Eric Finch or Joe Donovan, a retired small business owner from Crivitz.

Laning succeeded Mike Tate in 2015 at the post, which effectively means being chief executive of the party's day-to-day operations. A businesswoman and community activist, Laning then was viewed as new blood for the party, having had little background in Democratic politics outside a run for state Senate in 2014.

Now the 2017 state convention finds Wisconsin Democrats back on the ropes. The last election brought one of their most punishing defeats yet, while collective bargaining changes and a right-to-work law have steadily eroded the membership and financial clout of their organized labor allies.

Yet it's also a time of heightened energy among the party's grassroots. Many are outraged and roused to action by the presidency of Republican Donald Trump.

The party chairperson race, in part, centers on what Democrats must do to channel that enthusiasm into wins at the ballot box. Another key question: how to regain support for Democrats in rural Wisconsin, which swung heavily toward Republicans in 2016.

Donovan and Kennedy have said Laning shares blame for the November election results. Kennedy also said Laning isn't doing enough to recruit candidates or represent the party in the media.

"We have an almost invisible party chair," Kennedy said.

Laning, 52, of Sheboygan, defends her stewardship of a party she said was in dire straits when she took over two years ago.

'Candidates need help'

"Our candidates need help, and that has been lacking in a lot of areas," Laning said. "We've made progress on it, but we have more work to do."

Finch, 30, said he would be a more aggressive spokesperson for the party and bring technological savvy that could help the party communicate in the digital age.

"We need somebody that actually understands the future of campaigns," Finch said.

Donovan, 67, has said he's running to help Democrats regain their status as Franklin Roosevelt's party of working-class Americans.

"Working-class people do not have confidence that the Democratic Party stands for them. We have to instill that confidence," Donovan said.

2016 failures still loom large

For most of 2016, Wisconsin Democrats thought the 2017 convention would be a time to celebrate.

It didn't pan out. Despite Wisconsin's history of voting Democratic in presidential elections  the state had done so each time since Ronald Reagan  that tide turned last year. Wisconsin, by voting narrowly for Trump, played a key role in sending him to the White House.

Democratic nominee and former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold also lost to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson despite Feingold leading in the polls until the very end of the campaign.

Last year's failures still loom large as Democrats debate their way forward.

Much has been said about 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton declining to campaign in Wisconsin after the primary election. Clinton lost the state to Trump by about 22,000 votes.

Laning said there were "many, many requests from the DPW team" for Clinton to come to the state.

Kennedy has said Laning should have personally contacted Clinton campaign brass at its New York headquarters to sound the alarm about Wisconsin in the campaign's closing weeks.

Laning said Democrats "far more influential than I" tried to do just that  to no avail.

"I did not personally call (Clinton campaign manager) Robby Mook," Laning said. "We reached out as a team, and I had full faith in the people who were reaching out."

Donovan, Finch and Kennedy all said they supported Sanders during last year's primary.

Donovan has criticized Laning's reversal on her superdelegate vote at last year's Democratic National Convention. Laning said in 2015 that she would cast her superdelegate vote for whoever won the Wisconsin primary. Sanders won it by 13 points, but by that point Laning had shifted to say she would back the presumptive nominee, which turned out to be Clinton.

"As a state chair, I think the better decision would've been, 'Wisconsin voted, you've spoken, and we're with you,' " Donovan said.

Organizing, candidate recruitment discussed

Democrats' dismal ending to 2016 was due largely to an election wipeout in nearly all of Wisconsin outside the Madison region, the city of Milwaukee and a few college towns.

Stressing economic issues is key to reconnect with voters, Laning, Donovan and Kennedy said. The candidates also generally agree the party needs more of a permanent infrastructure to support its candidates and share its message year-round.

Laning said that, since she became party chairwoman, she has prioritized improving party finances and beefing up its organizing capacity. Earlier this year the party hired six new organizers that she said will help create a year-round presence for the party and connect with activists and groups outside the party.

Kennedy has said Democrats missed an opportunity when no candidate challenged state Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler, who's backed by conservatives and Republicans, in the April spring election.

"We can talk to people. We can encourage people to run, but it's their decision," Laning responded.

Kennedy stresses his organizing credentials as the former president of American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin, a union representing teachers in K-12 schools, technical colleges and state universities.

Kennedy's platform calls for a statewide organizing push in 2017 and recruiting Democratic ward captains in every voting ward of the state. He said a massive organizing effort would enable Democrats to reconnect with voters and present the party's priorities in a new light.

"We can't keep going to people and saying: 'These are the five bills Democrats want to pass,' " Kennedy said. "What we need to start doing is talking to people and engaging around what our values are."

Finch said he has been on the front lines of political organizing, having worked as a field organizer in 2014 for the state party's coordinated campaign. He said he wants to bolster the party's online and digital presence while ensuring what he describes as a "truly democratic process" in the primary for governor in 2018, when Republican Gov. Scott Walker may see a third term.

"We do have to rebuild the party from the ground up," Finch said.

Donovan was an officer in local Democratic Party units in Milwaukee County, where he lived for much of his life, and Marinette County, where he grew up. He said he views county parties as the building blocks of the state party.

If elected chairman, Donovan said he would strengthen county parties by giving them more support and helping them add members.
A Republican bill unveiled Monday would set an expiration date for all state administrative rules  a proposal conservative business groups cheered and Democrats worried would overburden state agencies.

The new system would upend the process for reviewing both nettlesome regulations that businesses say stifle the states economic growth and longstanding protections for consumer health and workplace safety.

Under the proposal from Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, and Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, new regulations would expire after seven years unless in the year before an expiration date a state agency flagged the regulation for review.

Legislators on certain committees would be able to object to rules being extended, which would then require the rule to be rewritten and go through the normal rule-making process.

Existing regulations would sunset on a timeline to be set by the Legislatures Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules. The bill also requires agencies to eliminate the use of words and phrases that are outdated or that are now understood to be derogatory or offensive.

The bill would effectively flip the onus for cleaning up the states hundreds of pages of administrative rules from legislators to state agencies, Steineke said. Rather than legislators combing through the administrative code for rules they want to eliminate, agencies would have to keep tabs on which rules they want to keep.

I anticipate the way this is going to work (for) the vast majority of rules, the agencies will petition the Legislature to adopt them and the vast majority of rules will be re-adopted, Steineke said.

The states administrative rules, many of them written over the decades by state agencies to flesh out regulatory details not spelled out in legislation, have the force of law and regulate businesses in a variety of ways.

They cover the gamut of state regulations, from clean drinking water, air quality, food safety and voting rules to pet licensure, campground permitting and amusement park ride safety. There are rules governing disposal of hazardous waste, high school graduation standards, nondiscrimination in afterschool programs and how the state runs health programs for the mentally ill and seniors.

Steineke said state agencies will be the first line of defense to preserve important, noncontroversial rules.

Theres enough checks and balances, Steineke said.

Currently, state regulations are in place permanently unless repealed by the agency or challenged by the administrative rules committee.

The bill is supported by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity  a trio of powerful business-aligned interest groups that have helped Republicans gain and retain control of all three branches of state government.

WMC president Kurt Bauer said in a statement that the states recent designation as a top-10 state for doing business in Chief Executive magazine was the result of Republican efforts to improve the states regulatory climate. He called the latest bill a game-changing reform.

This legislation would build on the great work that has been done over the past six years to improve Wisconsins regulatory climate and push back on the ever-growing regulatory state, Bauer said.

Rep. Gary Hebl, D-Sun Prairie, a member of administrative rules committee, said the bill panders to conservative business groups while creating more red tape for agencies. He said the current process for the committee to review rules has been working just fine.

It really suffocates what these agencies have to do and creates more work for them unnecessarily, Hebl said. Imagine the amount of work that entails. Its a monstrosity.

Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, said the bill would jeopardize clean water protections, weaken financial safeguards and undermine workplace fairness rules. Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, R-Kenosha, said it would upend departments that serve children and families and protect natural resources by forcing them to spend all their time reworking administrative codes.

This bill creates more red tape than it cuts, which makes me think that it is more about getting rid of old rules that Republican donors want changed than it is about protecting Wisconsin residents and businesses, Barca said.
Like the ghost towns left behind after the California gold rush fizzled, many of the frac sand mines dotting western Wisconsin sat dormant a year ago.

Piles of golden sand sat untouched next to stationary rail cars, with skeleton crews stopping by only occasionally to check on the idle facilities.

It was a far cry from the boom times of a few years ago, when sand mines and processing facilities popped up constantly across the landscape.

But even faster than the industry rose from the ground up because of the regions high-quality sand, it ground to a near halt, with hundreds of workers getting laid off, as a result of plummeting oil prices. For western Wisconsin residents, it was a crash course on the volatility of the gas and oil industry.

Through the slump, company officials insisted the frac sand industry would bounce back.

The big question is when, industry consultant Kent Syverson, chairman of UW-Eau Claires geology department, said last May.

He now has the answer: 2017.

The industry was fairly dormant for a while, but now it has reawakened, Syverson said last week. These mines are going full out again.

Representatives of several companies with regional frac sand mining operations confirmed Syversons assessment.

We are running pretty much full time, back to 24 hours a day, said Sharon Masek, manager of mine planning and industrial relations for Superior Silica Sands in Wisconsin. Were pretty much back to our peak levels of employment.

That means employment at Superior Silicas five mines in Barron and Chippewa counties has reached close to 200, up from about 70 last year when two of the facilities operated part time and two were completely shut down, Masek said. The company, based in Fort Worth, Texas, is seeking to further boost its western Wisconsin workforce in the coming weeks.

The buzz of activity is refreshing after a tough 2016.

Its great, Masek said. I love coming to work in the morning when there are trucks all over the place and its tough to find a place to park.

Now hiring

For Hi-Crush, which operates frac sand mines in Augusta, Blair, Whitehall and Wyeville, the rebound also is well underway.

Chief financial officer Laura Fulton said the mines are ramping up and should all be operating at full capacity  producing a combined 10.4 million tons of sand per year  by late June or shortly thereafter. The Houston-based company temporarily shut down the Whitehall plant when the Blair operation started in March 2016. The Wyeville facility, near Tomah, is the only one of the four mines that operated throughout the downturn.

Hi-Crush has hired 91 workers so far this year, roughly doubling its 2016 employment level, and is seeking an additional 20 to 25, Fulton said.

We think its the beginning of a rally, she said. Everything seems to be really positive.

The story is similar for Fairmount Santrol, which operates industrial sand mines in Menomonie, Bay City and Maiden Rock and owns a processing facility in Hager City.

We are operating at full capacity and looking for additional staffing at some of our plants, said Aaron Scott, the Sugar Land, Texas-based companys mining director.

While depressed oil prices also led to cutbacks for Fairmount Santrol, Scott emphasized that diversification helps it weather the ups and downs of the oil and gas market. The company also supplies sand for the glass, foundry, roofing, construction and water filtration markets.

We think the long-term market outlook remains bright, Scott said.

Strong demand

Apparently, so do industry observers, as Masek cited a report showing the consensus of analysts is that demand for frac sand will exceed its 2014 peak of 53 million tons this year. After dipping to 37 million tons in 2016, projections call for demand to climb to 79 million tons in 2017 and 107 million tons in 2018.

Samir Nangia, who follows the frac sand industry as director of consulting for IHS Energy Insight, said all indications are that the sector is mounting a strong comeback after the doldrums of last year.

Really strong demand is driving the change, Nangia said, adding that IHS projects demand for frac sand will increase by more than 60 percent this year in the U.S.

Its a boom-bust cycle, and it looks like the boom has just started, he said.

Wisconsin is the nations leading producer of sand used in hydraulic fracturing  the drilling technique commonly known as fracking that involves injecting a mixture of sand, water and chemicals deep into underground wells to force oil and natural gas to the surface. Wisconsin sand, prized by frackers for its ideal size, shape and durability, is shipped to drilling sites in several states, including Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as Canada.

Rising demand for sand is a result of more wells being fracked and more sand being used per well, Nangia said. The analyst indicated the number of wells being fracked in the U.S. now totals 10,600, up 28 percent from last year but still well below the 19,790 wells in 2014.

Rich Budinger, spokesman for the Wisconsin Industrial Sand Association and vice president of mining operations for Fairmount Santrol, said oil prices are probably the No. 1 indicator of the health of the oil and gas industry. He tied the industrys slump directly to oil prices plunging below $30 a barrel after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced late in 2015 that it was not planning to limit production. The price of West Texas Intermediate Crude finally surpassed $50 a barrel again late in 2016 and closed last week at $47.84.

When the price got up to around $50, it was kind of a green light for the oil companies that they could make money again, Syverson said.

Syverson believes the frac sand industry, which has attracted criticism from environmentalists for its destruction of the regions sandstone hills and potential impact on air and water quality, can play a key role in diversifying the regional economy.

This resurrection of the sand boom is important because its happening at a time when some communities are suffering because agricultural prices are low, Syverson said.

Texas competition

One factor still weighing heavily on the share prices of frac sand companies involves renewed interest in lower quality, but cheaper, sand from Texas, where the most fracking is occurring.

While the northern white sand found in the Midwest remains the highest quality and generates the highest yields for fracking , it costs $60 to $70 per ton to ship it to Texas, and more companies are exploring the possibility of using Texas sand instead to save on transportation costs, Nangia said.

In the past, most companies were unwilling to use this lower quality sand, but now it seems more of them are open to the possibility, he said.

It may not matter much in the short term if analysts are right about the impending surge in demand for frac sand.

If the projections hold true and theyre going to need so terribly much sand, then they will need the Texas sand and all of the other sand as well, or they wont be able to meet demand, Syverson said.

Another new development is that some frac sand companies are beginning to use finer grain sand they once rejected  and allowed to sit in settling ponds at mine sites  because frackers have learned they can inject those fine grains into smaller fractures and thus extract more oil and natural gas by stimulating a higher percentage of shale formations, he said.

Second chance?

Despite the fresh lesson on the volatility of the oil and gas market, many laid-off frac sand workers have returned to the industry.

Not as many are skittish as you might think, Superior Silica Sands Masek said. Many of them loved their jobs and were happy to come back, although some said they were worried about supporting their families and needed something more secure.

Fulton said Hi-Crush has had a similar experience, with most workers willing to give the industry another chance.

The pay is good, and the hours are steady, Fulton said.

While Fairmount Santrols Budinger acknowledged there is risk that goes along with being involved in a global market, he pointed out that a positive aspect of the latest slowdown is it pushed sand companies to become more efficient.

Theres nothing like an industry downturn to bring focus to cost control, Budinger said. Because of that, maybe our industry can withstand a little more volatility than it could two years ago.

After dipping to 37 million tons in 2016, projections call for demand for frac sand to climb to 79 million tons in 2017 and 107 million tons in 2018.
Removing a condom during sex without consent would be classified as sexual assault under a bill being introduced by state Rep. Melissa Sargent, D-Madison.

Under the legislation, if a person were to remove or tamper with a sexually protective device during intercourse without the partner's permission, state law would say there was no valid consent for the act.

"This is clearly a sexual crime. There are victims and predators," Sargent said. "I think this is a good example of how it is that the Legislature can take action to not only help people know that this is wrong, but also help people understand that this is something that is happening, and if it happened to them, theyre not alone."

The act has been the subject of recent media attention after an article published last month in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law discussed the possible criminal and civil remedies for victims of nonconsensual condom removal, known as "stealthing."

"The practice puts partners at risk for unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and, survivors explain, it feels like a violation of trust and a denial of autonomy, not dissimilar to rape. Nonetheless, the law is largely silent in the face of what this Article will argue is widespread violence," author Alexandra Brodsky wrote.

Brodsky did not respond to an interview request to discuss Sargent's proposal.

According to the article, the women interviewed who had experienced "stealthing" said they did not consider it to be directly equivalent to sexual assault, but one referred to it as being "rape-adjacent." The article also cites men who write online about their experiences in "stealth" condom removal and share tips on how to do it successfully.

Although Brodsky's article focuses primarily on women who were "stealthed" by men, she notes men can also be victims of the practice.

The types of devices covered under Sargent's bill include "a male or female condom, spermicide, diaphragm, cervical cap, contraceptive sponge, dental dam, or any other physical device intended to prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted infection."

It would not cover a situation in which a woman lied about being on birth control or a man tampered with a woman's birth control pills. The bill deals strictly with physical contact, Sargent said.

Advocacy groups that support survivors of sexual assault haven't yet taken a position on the bill.

Dominic Holt, spokesman for the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said the group is looking into the legislation.

"We understand that this issue is receiving a fair amount of attention in our field," Holt said. "We havent yet seen a consensus about how to address it."

Erin Thornley-Parisi, executive director of the Dane County Rape Crisis Center, said she's glad Sargent is looking at ways to address the problem, but she wants to make sure the bill wouldn't have any unintended consequences that could backfire on women.

"I'm really glad shes forward-thinking about how to protect victims," Thornley-Parisi said.
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Monday, May 15, 2017

Family and friends had a visitation this past week to pay the respects of 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran George Taylor. However, when they arrived at the Georgia funeral home, Taylors body was not in a coffin but instead laying on a table with an American flag simply draped over his body. The funeral home did not place the veterans body in a coffin after an issue with a $9,000 payment that was supposed to come from Taylors life insurance. The insurance company required proof of a death certificate before overnighting the payment, but the check did not arrive on time. The next day, after an agreement was reached, Taylors body was placed in a casket for the following service.

See Amanda Ulrich, This Was Very Disrespectful to My Dad: Family Lashes Out at Funeral Home After the Body of Vietnam Veteran Was Put on Display Without a Coffin Because They Couldnt Pay $9,000 Fee, Daily Mail, May 13, 2017.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/trusts_estates_prof/2017/05/vietnam-war-veterans-body-displayed-without-a-coffin.html


VOA Learning English presents Americas Presidents.

Today we are talking about Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States.

Fillmore is also likely the least remembered president. He has been called uninspiring and having only some competence.

But Fillmore provided an example of the American dream come true. He rose from a poor family to become a wealthy man. He was elected to Congress four times and nominated for vice president under Zachary Taylor. When Taylor unexpectedly died in office in 1850, Fillmore took his place.

Early life

Other presidents campaigns, such as Andrew Jacksons, had spoken proudly of their candidates modest beginnings. William Henry Harrisons supporters especially linked him with the image of a simple house called a log cabin  even though William Henry Harrison was a wealthy man.

But Millard Fillmore really was born in a log cabin. His family was poor. They raised him and his seven brothers and sisters in a rural part of New York State.

Fillmore did not receive much education as a child. However, he was very interested in learning  so interested that he fell in love with his teacher, Abigail Powers.

The two married after he launched his career as a lawyer. They had two children, a son and a daughter.

Millard Fillmore soon entered politics. He won elections to the New York State Assembly, and then to the U.S. House of Representatives.

After eight years in Washington, DC, Fillmore returned to New York. He failed to be elected governor, but succeeded to become comptroller of New York. In other words, he oversaw the states finances.

At that time, Americans were preparing for another presidential election. President James Polk was retiring from the White House after only one term, as he had promised.

The opposition party, the Whigs, nominated Zachary Taylor as their presidential candidate.

Taylor, a popular war hero from the South, owned slaves. But the Whigs realized that many anti-slavery voters in the North would not support Taylor. Party leaders were looking for someone to balance the ticket  a Northerner voters would consider a friend of business.

They found Millard Fillmore.

In 1847, the Whigs nominated Fillmore as Taylors vice president. The two men had never met. And, when they did meet, they did not like each other very much.

Taylor was short-legged, poorly educated, and rarely seemed concerned about his physical appearance. Fillmore was taller, learned, and elegant. Their personalities did not fit together any better than their appearances did.

But a majority of voters liked them. The Whigs won the election, and Fillmore returned to Washington.

A vice president without a voice

As vice president, Millard Fillmore was the leader of the Senate. But President Taylor did not seek his advice on the major political issue of the day.

At the time, both lawmakers and the public were debating whether the government should  and could  ban slavery in the territories the U.S. had gained after the war with Mexico.

In general, Northerners did not want to permit slavery in new states. But many Southerners did. The debate was so heated that one of the Southern states, South Carolina, threatened to leave the Union.

President Taylor did not want to expand slavery. To restrict it, he proposed a change to the rules so California and New Mexico could enter the Union quickly as slave-free states.

But before Taylors idea could get too far, he became sick. Fillmore learned the president was not well and prepared for the worst. It came.

Taylor died after being in office for only 16 months. The following day, Fillmore was sworn-in as president.

Presidency

One of Fillmores first acts as president was to show where he stood on the slavery issue. He appointed a man who opposed Taylor to secretary of state.

That man, Daniel Webster  and others  wanted to pass a compromise bill on slavery. With Fillmores support, they succeeded.

The Compromise of 1850 included several measures related to slavery. Two measures limited it: California was admitted as a free state, and the slave trade in Washington, DC ended.

On the other hand, New Mexico and Utah were left open to slavery, and both the federal government and ordinary citizens were required to return suspected escaped slaves to their owners. That last measure, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, targeted even free African-Americans and enslaved people who had escaped to free states.

The Compromise aimed to end the conflict between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces. But neither side was really satisfied.

And President Fillmore did not help matters. He was personally opposed to slavery. However, he did not act on his beliefs. Instead, he tried to keep the South in the Union by strongly enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.

By the end of Fillmores three years in the White House, many members of his Whig party were angry with him. Party leaders did not nominate him again for the next election.

But their chosen candidate was not successful either. Fillmore turned out to be the last Whig president.

Legacy

The end of Fillmores presidency included difficulty in his private life, too. His wife, Abigail, became sick on the day the next president was sworn-in. She died within a month. Soon after, Fillmores daughter died, too.

To help deal with their loss, Fillmore tried to stay active in politics. In the presidential election of 1856, Fillmore served as the candidate for a new party -- the Know-Nothing Party.

The Know-Nothings were strongly opposed to immigration. They especially wanted to limit the number of Irish Catholics who could come to the United States.

Fillmore did not agree with the partys anti-immigration policies. But he did not have a chance to put his opinions into policy. Fillmore finished third out of the three major candidates in the election.

After that loss, he finally retired to the city of Buffalo, New York. There, Fillmore married a second time -- to a wealthy widow named Caroline McIntosh. He remained an important figure in the citys charities and other causes.

But the political situation in the country grew only more intense. Americans continued to be divided over the issue of slavery. Fillmores time in office and his compromise bill may have delayed but did not stop the American Civil War.

Im Kelly Jean Kelly.

Kelly Jean Kelly wrote this story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

______________________________________________________________

See how well you understand the story by taking a listening quiz. Play each short video, then choose the best answer.

Quiz - America's Presidents: Millard Fillmore Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz

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Words in This Story

uninspiring - adj. not causing people to want to do or create something : not inspiring

competence - n. the ability to do something well : the quality or state of being competent

modest - adj. not very large in size or amount

ticket - n. a list of the candidates supported by a political party in an election

elegant - adj. showing good taste : graceful and attractive

ordinary - adj. normal or usual

figure - n. a person who has a specified status or who is regarded in a specified way

charity - n. an organization that helps people who are poor, sick, etc.

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The United Nations says economic success in Southeast Asia has caused an increase in crime and terrorism.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said economic success has led to major improvements in infrastructure and a lessening of border controls in the region.

Aldo Lale Demoz is the deputy executive director of the UNODC.

He said this success has also led to growing security challenges -- including those posed by transnational crime and terrorist groups.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, reported the regions merchandise trade was $1.06 trillion in the first six months of 2016. About a quarter of that was among ASEAN nations.

Somchai Seanglai is an advisor to the Thai justice minister.

He agreed that increased trade has led to the possibility of an increase in such crimes as human trafficking, drug trading and counterfeit goods -- along with the possibility of terrorists being able to move across borders more easily.

Aldo Lale Demoz said the large amounts of money involved in transnational crime is a threat to countries in the region. It is estimated to exceed $100 billion a year.

Thisis nearly double the legitimate GDP of countries such as Myanmar, he said.

Another concern is fear of terrorist attacks from those linked to the Islamic State. U.N. officials said at least 1,000 people have travelled to the Middle East as foreign fighters. Some of them are now returning.

ASEAN leaders met recently in Manila. They promised to deal with challenges and threats across borders that undermine the stability and well-being of ASEAN member states and the region.

Jeremy Douglas is the Asia Pacific UNODC regional representative. He said the meeting showed the need for countries in the region to work together.

The leadership of the region agreed to start to prioritize securing borders of this region to counter transnational organized crime and terrorist threats, which appear to be expanding and growing in certain parts of the region, he said.

He said Thailand has been working to stop criminals from crossing its borders. And eight countries have created special teams at ports to watch ships and reduce the risks of trafficking.

Douglas said the region must create a common security strategy.

At present there are different levels allowing international crime groups to take advantage of these differences, he said.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Ron Corben reported this story for VOANews.com. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted his report for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, or visit our Facebook page.

____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

transnational  adj. operating in or involving more than one country

merchandise  adj. describing goods that are bought and sold

legitimate  adj. real, accepted or official

GDP  n. Gross Domestic Product -- the total value of the goods and services produced by the people of a nation during a year not including the value of income earned in foreign countries

undermine  v. to make (someone or something) weaker or less effective, usually in a secret or gradual way

counter  v. to do something in defense or in response to something

strategy  n. a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time

allow  v. to make it possible for something to happen


News reporters in Cameroon say they are having problems doing their work because of government restrictions on the press.

They say the restrictions have affected their reports about a strike in English-speaking areas and fighting with Boko Haram militants.

Eight journalists have been arrested in connection with their stories about the strike in English-speaking areas. The protest started in November.

In March, the National Communication Council, or NCC, suspended another 18 reporters and media organizations.

NCC says reporters must respect rules

The NCC said they failed to respect norms and ethics for professional journalists.

Some of those suspended had published reports critical of government actions to deal with the strike. Others had reported on concerns over the return of Nigerian refugees displaced by Boko Haram fighters.

Peter Essoka is president of the NCC. He told VOA that journalists must report news in a responsible way. "If you don't respect what is supposed to guide a nation, there is chaos, he said. Do you allow for chaos because you are talking about freedom? No."

Journalists say freedom of the press is at risk

Journalists in Cameroon say press freedom is at risk.

Kini Nsom works for the Cameroon Post newspaper in Yaounde, the capital. He criticized an April 23rd warning from the NCC. It said that the media should not report on demands for secession or a return to federalism.

"We know that a newspaper is a marketplace of ideas, Nsom said. We can talk about federalism, not necessarily promote it When you slam a ban a topic like that, you cannot say the press is free in Cameroon," he added.

Eugene Nforngwa is the editor-in-chief of the Standard Tribune. He says the government restrictions have had a bad effect on the country's journalists.

"For instance, we have criminal libel which is like a permanent axe over the head of a journalist, which means that the simple fact that you can go to jail for doing journalism is a deterrent to free work. And so you find that a lot of journalists have gone into self-censorship."

2014 and 2016 Laws

Officials have arrested journalists under a 2014 anti-terrorism law and the revised penal code of 2016.

Issa Tchiroma is Cameroon's minister of communication and a government spokesperson. He says all arrested journalists will get a fair trial. He added that some of the journalists were arrested for reasons other than their work.

"I am mostly thinking of those who are accused of threats to public security, national integrity or being accomplices with terrorist activities. For each of these cases, they were brought before competent courts which rule in all freedom and all independence."

Some journalists in Cameroon have started wearing black as a silent form of protest. Two media rights groups, Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders, each downgraded the countrys rating in press freedom studies released last month.

I'm John Russell.

Moki Edwin Kindzeka reported on this story for VOANews.com. John Russell adapted this story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. ________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

norms  n. models for correct or acceptable behavior

ethics  n. rules of behavior based on ideas about what is morally good and bad

chaos  n. disorder; disorganization

secession  n. the act of separating from a nation or state and becoming independent

promote  v. to move up, from one level to another

topic  n. issue or subject

libel  n. the act of publishing a false statement that causes people to have a bad opinion of someone

axe  n. a sharp tool for cutting

deterrent  n. something that makes someone decide not to do something

censorship  n. the custom of examining writings and taking out things considered offensive or bad
Countries involved in Chinas Belt and Road development program have agreed on an action plan for a long list of goals.

Twenty-nine heads of state met in Beijing for two days during the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. Vladimir Putin was among the leaders attending. Officials from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund also were there.

Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke at the gathering on Sunday.

He said no country can rely only on itself in a world in which nations are interdependent and face worldwide problems.

China has promised $124 billion for infrastructure and development projects in countries taking part in the Belt and Road project.

The broad plan includes a Silk Road Economic Belt for trade activity on land, and a Maritime Silk Road for trade over the sea. The term Silk Road describes the ancient trade paths that connected China and Europe and the world.

The proposal involves many borders, trade routes

Xis plan is very large, spreading across continents and many countries.

We have every reason to have full confidence in the prospects for the Belt and Road initiative, said Xi. At the same time, the Belt and Road initiative is an expansive project and the road ahead is very long and cooperation is key.

VOA spoke to University of Chicago political science professor Dali Yang about the project.

He said that Xi did not offer details about when loans would be made. He said that Chinese banks were still trying to recover from bad past experiences in countries such as Venezuela.

More than 100 countries and organizations attended the meeting in Beijing. Most welcomed Chinas effort to increase trade. However, not all countries have officially supported the project.

Some countries, such as the United States and North Korea, were present as observers.

Germanys Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Brigitte Zypries, attended the meeting. She said German companies, but not the government, had asked to take part. But, she added that more information was needed.

It is obviously relevant to know what is going to be built and (that) the procedures to take part in this building are the same for every company and every country, she said.

U.S. officials also voiced concerns about openness and fairness.

A way to fight many problems

During his speech on Sunday, Xi described his plan and presented development as a way to fight many problems, from terrorism to poverty.

China is already pushing development in Asia through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

The Belt and Road effort calls for the creation of six economic corridors, or areas, that would link up to 65 countries by land and sea.

These nations represent 60 percent of the worlds population and 30 percent of the worlds total economic production.

It is estimated the total cost to all countries involved would be $900 billion.

China is proposing to provide $124 billion of that total. In 2016, Chinese companies invested $170 billion in foreign projects.

The plan also includes cooperation on scientific and social development. Xi has offered to establish 50 scientific laboratories in countries taking part. He also has promised to train 5,000 foreign scientists and invite 500 foreign research groups to visit China.

The plan also will launch hundreds of anti-poverty projects and health care projects, Xi said.

Some experts say China may be trying to increase its worldwide influence too quickly.

Mohan Malik is with the Institute of Asian Security in Hawaii. He says China is seeking to build, in his words, an empire. But he warns that China risks imperial overreach by attempting such a huge group of projects.

David Kelly directs research at the private group China Policy. He says that, if the program succeeds, many could benefit. But he notes that the outcome could be a measure of Chinas influence in the world  good or bad.

If it doesnt work, if it runs into problems, if its impractical, if its too costly, if it falls over, it will cost China's standing in the world. And that is what worries the people.

Im Mario Ritter.

Bill Ide and Saibal Dasgupta reported this story for VOA News with additional material from Victor Beattie. Mario Ritter adapted it for VOA Learning English. Kelly Jean Kelly was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

initiative  n. a plan or program that is meant to solve a problem

relevant  adj. important, related in an appropriate way

procedures  n. established ways of doing things

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Chinese officials are reported to have ordered Uyghurs studying in schools outside of China to return to their hometowns by May 20.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) says news of the order came from sources in the Xinjiang area of northwest China and in Egypt. They said that family members of some students are being detained until they return home.

RFA and VOA are each part of the U.S. government-supported Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic minority group in China and Central Asia. Most live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Chinese officials reportedly launched the campaign in the Xinjiang area at the end of January.

One Uyghur student studying at Al-Azhar University in Egypt told RFA that some students who returned home from Egypt seem to have simply disappeared. We havent been able to contact any of them, said the student, who spoke with RFA on the condition of anonymity.

There is a dark cloud hanging over every Uyghur students head, the student added. All of them are very depressed. They are really scared now.

Another Uyghur student in Egypt said that some students who returned to Xinjiang were jailed after their arrival.

Police detained two sisters after they were called back to Xinjiangs Hotan area, the student said.

The older sister was reportedly sentenced to three years in jail. The younger sister was sentenced to a political re-education program.

The student added that his own father has been detained for the past two months. They are forcing us to do this by locking up the parents of each student to make them go back, he added.

Some Uyghur students studying in Egypt have said they will stay there until the school term ends. Others have reportedly tried to avoid the order by fleeing to Turkey. However, they are being stopped at the Turkish border and denied entry, other sources said.

Political views investigated

Police and officials in southern Xinjiang told RFA that the campaign is an effort to investigate the political ideas of the students ordered home.

A police officer in a village of Peyziwats Barin County said that the aim is to identify their political and ideological stance, and then educate them about our countrys laws and current developments. We have a directive from the top, he added.

Those ordered home to Barin township include Uyghurs studying in Turkey, France, Australia, and the United States, party officials in three villages told RFA.

We have five students studying abroad: two Chinese and three non-Chinese, the party secretary of one village said. So far we have brought back two Uyghurs. One of them was studying in America, and the other one was in Turkey.

Another party secretary said that three people from his village are now studying overseas: One was in the United States and two were in Turkey.

One girl studying in Turkey has yet to return home, the party official said.

Right now we are talking to her parents about this matter, he said. We are telling them she should come back within the next two weeks, otherwise things wont be good for any of us.

A government official has been ordered to talk to students parents about the new policy, he said.

Bai Kecheng is chairman of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association in Egypt. The association is a program of the Chinese consulate. He told RFA he did not know about the orders for Uyghurs to return home.

The consulate doesnt know about this either, he said. [The orders] may have come from Xinjiang local authorities.

Uyghur restaurants and stores near Egypts Al-Azhar University are closing as the students leave for home, sources told RFA.

It has been at least a month now that our business has been slow, one restaurant owner said.

Our food was consumed mostly by the Uyghur students, since the locals dont really like it. Our business has suffered great losses due to the lack of students here, he said.



This report came from the Uyghur language service of Radio Free Asia. It was adapted for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

source - n. a person, book, etc., that gives information

anonymity - n. the quality or state of being unknown to most people

scared - adj. afraid of something

stance - n. a publicly stated opinion

consulate - n. the building where a consul lives and works
On Nov. 1, Linn Benton Food Shares warehouse in Tangent received two truckloads of food and household supplies arranged by the local branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Country

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Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda, Republic of Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
Macau has all the assets and potential to become a leading smart city in Asia. However, according to consultants who have been studying the smart city concept, it needs to fully coordinate its efforts and assets to achieve this.

Last week, a group of experts from Doxa Innova & Smart, a Barcelona-based strategic consultancy, visited Macau in partnership with the Science and Technology Development Fund (FDCT) and China Green Building and Energy Saving (Macao) Association.

The consultants reiterated the significance of having a holistic vision and department collaboration to produce a smart city.

What we find is that in most cities different departments of the cities work in isolation, so each of them work [] on their issues but not in a coordinated way, said Maria Galindo, an international smart city business manager from Doxa.

According to Galindo, a region can maximize synergy by coordinating their efforts and working together in projects with different departments, stakeholders and agents.

You [then] have more resources and greater capacity for being innovative, more flexibilityand so more capacities to the whole strategic vision for the city, she added.

The team said Macau should take advantage of the ongoing innovation and technology within its reach.

The local government has included plans to turn Macau into a smart city in its Five-Year Plan. However, it currently does not have an entity to align the relevant departments.

When asked whether Macau could become a smart city if the government fails to produce an entity that oversees the process, the experts replied that it could stagnate the growth in its development.

Part of our research is to come up with a master plan [and] to help the Macau government [] to come up with a more holistic and more achievable approach to make Macau a smart city, explained Josep-Ramon Ferrer, an international senior advisor and institutional business development director of Doxa.

Currently, researchers are interviewing different government departments, stakeholders and companies to understand the smart city projects that are currently in development.

Meanwhile, the consultants have agreed that the gaming industry plays a crucial role in the regions plan of becoming a smart city.

For the gaming industry and for the smart city program, we need to look at how we can improve the quality [of the service provided] to the touristsSo this is a big part of the smart city program progress, said Macau-based Edmund Lei, director general of China Green Building and Energy Saving (Macao) Association.

In response to queries on what the region currently needs to effectively develop the territory into a smart city, the experts said Macau needs a governments model to integrate agents, environmental stakeholders and citizens with the smart city plan.

Without leadership, a clear road map and vision, its going to be difficult to achieve that goal, said Lei.

This is important, as well as commitment. If we only do it halfway, well go back to the start and all efforts will be wasted, he concluded.

The experts held a talk last week at the FDCT center, inviting guests from relevant departments.
Six Japanese making a documentary about indigenous people in the tightly controlled Indonesian province of Papua were deported for lacking journalist visas just days after the country was the official host for World Press Freedom Day.

The head of immigration in Jayapura, the provincial capital, said the six who were working for Nagamo Production House were arrested on Monday and deported on Thursday.

The official, Yopie Watimena, said Friday they were traveling on tourist visas and had shot footage of the Mamuna and Korowai tribes in the hinterland of southeastern Papua.

Its the latest in a series of arrests and deportations of foreign journalists despite President Joko Jokowi Widodos 2015 announcement that Papua and West Papua were open to the international media.

Indonesia was this years official host for U.N. World Press Freedom Day, which the government marked with a four day international conference in the capital Jakarta from May 1-4.
Chief Executive Chui Sai On stated that the government is committed to optimizing Macaus top-level policy efforts in order to further integrate with the countrys development in the Belt and Road initiative.

Chui made these remarks on Saturday prior to his departure for Beijing, where he took part in yesterdays opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

According to Chui, unimpeded trade, financial integration and people-to-people exchanges were the three main goals regarding Macaus participation in the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (collectively known as the Belt and Road initiative).

Chui also introduced details of the governments plan. Domestically, Macau will work closely with regional partners such as the Guangdong Province and the Fujian Province. Externally, the government will tap Macaus extensive network of returned overseas Chinese, as well as the regions links with Portuguese-

ww wspeaking countries, to actively seek closer ties with them and other nations in Southeast Asia.

Chui stated the government plans to set up a scholarship encouraging local students to join exchange events in places covered by the Belt and Road initiative.

He added that taking part in the Belt and Road initiative has given Macau further opportunities to serve the country and to strengthen the One country, two systems principle.
Emmanuel Macron was inaugurated yesterday as Frances new president at the Elysee palace in Paris, and immediately launched into his mission to shake up French politics, world economics and the European Union.

The 39-year-old Macron is the youngest president in the countrys history and the 8th president of Frances Fifth Republic, which was created in 1958. A former economy minister with pro-

business, pro-European views, Macron is the first French president who doesnt originate from one of the countrys two mainstream parties.

Macron takes charge of a nation that, when Britain leaves the European Union in 2019, will become the EUs only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

He met for an hour with his predecessor, Francois Hollande, in the presidents office, taking a last few minutes to discuss the most sensitive issues facing France, including the countrys nuclear codes.

In a visibly moving moment for both, Macron accompanied Hollande to his car, shaking hands and applauding him along with the employees of the French presidency who gathered in the palaces courtyard.

The two men had known each other well. Macron was Hollandes former adviser, then his economy minister from 2014 to 2016, when Macron quit the Socialist government to launch his own independent presidential bid.

In his inauguration speech yesterday, Macron said he will do everything that is necessary to fight terrorism and authoritarianism and to resolve the worlds migration crisis. He also listed the excesses of capitalism in the world and climate change among his future challenges.

We will take all our responsibilities to provide, every time its needed, a relevant response to big contemporary crises, He said.

Macron announced his determination to push ahead with reforms to free up Frances economy and pledged to press for a more efficient, more democratic EU. France is a founding member of the 28-nation bloc, which Britain plans to leave in 2019, and its third-largest economy after Germany and Britain.

About 300 guests, officials and family members gathered in the Elysee reception hall, including Macrons wife, Brigitte, wearing a lavender blue dress by French designer Nicolas Ghesquiere for Louis Vuitton.

Macron himself wore a dark suit from French brand Jonas and Cie, a tailor based in Paris, that cost 450 euros ($491), according to his team.

The new first lady briefly posed for photographers with her husband at the front porch of the palace after Hollande left. The couple will now live at the Elysee palace.

Outside the Elysee, few dozen supporters waved French tricolor and European blue flags at the arrival of the new president.

Following the ceremony and military honors at the Elysee palace, Macron was to go to the Tomb of the Unknown soldier, at the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Elysees Avenue, a tradition followed by all heads of states in Frances modern history.

Macrons first visit abroad will be to Germany today, to visit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.

Macron will also have to name his prime minister and form a government in the next few days.

He has promised to reinvigorate French politics by bringing in new faces. His Republic on the Move movement has announced an initial list of 428 candidates for the 577 seats up for grabs in Frances lower house of parliament in June. Macron is seeking a majority of lawmakers so he can pass his programs.

Many of the Republic on the Move candidates are newcomers in politics. Their average age is 46, compared to 60 for the outgoing assembly. Half of them are women. Only 24 are lawmakers running for re-election, all Socialists.

Hollande described the terrible ordeals that marked his five-

year term, from deadly attacks to Greeces debt crisis, and defended his unpopular presidency in a series of tweets minutes after leaving the Elysee Palace.

Hollande noted his accomplishments in getting the Paris Agreement on climate change, legalizing gay marriage and doing everything possible to ensure that Greece stays in Europe.

We lived through crises but we held together. France remained France, he tweeted. Sylvie Corbet, Paris, AP

Hollande tweets to defend his 5 -year presidency

As he left the French presidency, Francois Hollande described the terrible ordeals that marked his five-year term, from deadly attacks in France to Greeces debt crisis. Hollande defended his unpopular presidency in a series of tweets minutes after leaving the Elysee presidential palace in the hands of his successor and protege, Emmanuel Macron. The messages were directed at members of his once-powerful Socialist Party, which is now on the verge of a collapse. Hollande vaunted his efforts to produce the Paris Agreement on fighting climate change, legalizing gay marriage in France and doing everything possible to ensure that Greece stays in Europe. He tweeted that we lived through crises but we held together. France remained France.
On his first full day in office, French President Emmanuel Macron moved quickly yesterday on fronts both foreign and domestic, naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister before flying off to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Appointing Philippe to the top job in his government ticked several boxes for 39-year-old Macron, Frances youngest president, who took power on Sunday.

Philippes age reinforced the generational shift in Frances corridors of power and the image of youthful vigor that Macron is cultivating. Philippe is also relatively unknown to voters, fulfilling Macrons campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces.

Philippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers. Hes also a member of the mainstream-right Republicans party that was badly battered by Macrons victory in the presidential campaign.

As such, Philippe could possibly attract other Republicans to Macrons cause, as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass his promised economic reforms.

Shortly after Philippes appointment, Macron was scheduled to travel to Berlin on his first foreign trip as French leader. The visit signaled his intentions to move rapidly on campaign promises to revive support for the beleaguered European Union by reforming and strengthening it.

We will need a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe, because its the instrument of our power and our sovereignty. I will work on that, Macron said Sunday, his inauguration day.

Germany is looking to Macron to revitalize France as an economic power and political heavyweight in the EU, which is facing complex divorce proceedings with its current No. 2 economy, Britain.

When Britain leaves the bloc in 2019, France will be the EUs only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

As a candidate, Macron called for a new Franco-German deal that would involve much more structured cooperation on investment, on European border security, and on defense.

Macron is the conservative Merkels fourth French president in nearly 12 years as chancellor. She built a solid relationship with Macrons predecessor, Socialist Francois Hollande, despite their political differences  notably with their joint effort to secure an accord to calm the fighting in eastern Ukraine in tense talks in Minsk, Belarus in 2015.

Germany is keen to continue the Franco-German diplomatic drive to keep a lid on the situation in Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists are battling the government.

Merkel has praised Macrons embrace of European unity but has offered few concrete details about the way forward for German-French relations. Sylvie Corbet, Paris, AP
The trial of the citys former top prosecutor Ho Chio Meng continued yesterday for another session after Hos lawyer, Oriana Pun, was unable to complete her closing arguments during last Fridays court session, during which the prosecution repeatedly leveled accusations against Ho.

The morning session focused on Hos alleged abuse of his previous powers to outsource contracts to shell companies, and on Hos alleged establishment of a criminal ring operating several shell companies.

Previously, a few witnesses had been called to testify on Hos leading roles within said shell companies.

When the afternoon session started, prosecutor Chan Tsz Kin declared that each contract which had been outsourced to the shell companies represents a single crime.

1,359 contracts total 1,359 criminal behaviors, said Chan, who also noted that Ho Chio Meng, when faced with a large number of objective facts, denied accusations made against him, used excuses to shirk his responsibilities, did not confess or cooperate, adding that Ho lost a chance of getting a commuted sentence. The prosecutor even cited Zhang Dejiang, Chairman of the National Peoples Congress and the official responsible for overseeing Hong Kong and Macau affairs, that the Prosecutor Generals power should be used cautiously, for the people, and according to the law. Chan referred to this remark to indicate how Ho should have used his power as the MSARs Prosecutor General.

Supervising others should start from supervising ourselves with higher standards, Chan said, while approaching the last segment of his closing submission.

He then suggested that the court should consider the fact that Ho Chio Meng was a high-ranked official, and that regardless of the amount of money involved in his case, the case still has a deep and negative impact on the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) and prosecutors.

As such, Chan requested that the court punish [Ho] heavily.

According to Chan, the prosecution requests for Ho Chio Meng to pay more than MOP 70 million to the MP.

Moreover, the prosecutor requested that the court make a fair judgment.

Following the end of the prosecutions closing arguments, Ho Chio Mengs lawyer, Oriana Pun, began by expressing that she was not trying to be offensive.

Pun said that the case relates to Ho Chio Mengs life and death. The lawyer criticized the probe made by the Commission Against Corruption (CCAC). Pun said that many facts in the accusations against Ho were based on investigations led by CCAC, which she deemed very suspicious. In addition, Pun accused the prosecution of making the presumption of guilt, and to have based the indictment on biased evidence and CCAC investigations.

According to Pun, CCAC did not verify some of the evidence provided by Ho Chio Meng, and their investigation was biased against Ho, being inconsistent with the facts.

She accused the CCAC of having a rich imagination throughout the investigations in Hos case.

Even if Ho Chio Meng sneezed it would have been equal to giving an instruction, said Pun.

During a previous trial session, a CCAC commissioner provided a PowerPoint file that the court accepted as evidence.

However, the file had not been previously included in the indictment file. Pun expressed her disagreement towards this incident, deeming that the file violated the debate and was mixed with other evidence.

It gives people a feeling that the entire thing is real, complained Pun, while insisting on the CCACs alleged biased investigation. [If] a lie is true after being said many times, why is the PowerPoint needed? asked Pun, adding that the file contained many mistakes.

Pun also indicated that the prosecution department, when investigating Ho Chio Meng and therefore themselves, had only two options: either they could understand the case, or they could

be against Ho.

According to Pun, some of the facts have not been confirmed, so the court should refuse to accept them as evidence. Witnesses should only speak about facts, [if they] talk about feelings their statements should be disregarded, explained Pun, adding that CCAC did not invite a professional organization to properly assess some of the evidence.

Pun also remarked that wrong investigations lead to wrong answers.

Many of the testimonies given by MP employees have reservations, and I hope that the court can spend some effort to look at some of the accusations, said Pun.

Its not that we dont want to find witnesses, clarified Pun, adding that some of them cannot come, some of them dare not come because they have been influenced by the news or by other reasons. We dont have enough time to prepare all the documents.

The lawyer suggested the court to not listen to the testimonies selectively.

If people say you committed crimes but, in reality, you did not, then it is extremely difficult for you to prove your innocence, said Pun.

Presumption of innocence and the benefit of doubt are with the defendant.

According to Pun, Ho Chio Meng, as the previous leader and a high official of MP, needed to handle confidential and sensitive information at times, just like it was also necessary for him to meet with some people discreetly.

The lawyer also said that Ho, as Prosecutor General, could not name certain people and places in court, including those which are more important than himself, and that he needs to defend.

Until now, Puns closing submissions have denied accusations against Ho that deem him guilty of fraud, specifically related to Wang Xiandi, a woman allegedly hired by Ho to work for MP but did not work for the department.

Ho also stands accused of keeping pieces of agarwood seized by the Customs Service in his personal collection, back in 2013.

Hos lawyer said that the agarwood never left the MP, deeming that these accusations should not be made against Ho because his subordinate did not file records according to the regulations.

For the one and a half days that the closing submission session lasted, the prosecution used two mornings to lay out accusations against Ho.

Hos lawyer presented her submissions in one afternoon. The closing submission sessions were previously planned to take place on May 11 and May 12. As Hos lawyer did not complete her closing submission, court resumes today.
The International Ladies Club of Macau (ILCM) marked its 35th anniversary with its Annual Charity Ball on Saturday at J.W Marriott, raising over MOP1.2 million.

Some 270 participants attended this years ball, where the group launched its digital bidding system to increase convenience for bidders.

Incepted in 1982, the main purpose of the club was to provide a social platform for women to gather and perform charitable works together.

Sophie Lei, president of ILCM, sat down with the Times to share how the club has lent society a helping hand over the years.

Lei first came to know about the club in 1989, when the club members had already been visiting orphanages and elderly homes.

I thought that it was a very good idea, other than social events that we do, we know how to share [with the needy], she said.

She said the club currently has more than 200 members, nearly 80 percent of who are expatriates.

Nowadays, other than the expats, we have a good number of local people who [have] joined the club, she said.

The association usually has a list of 23 charitable associations that they assist, including individuals in need.

ILCMs volunteers assist local charities through hands-on volunteer aid and monetary grants. They also distribute donations and sponsorships through funds raised by ILCM fundraisers.

The groups Community Services team also liaises with businesses and charities, and helps them obtain financial grants that are beyond ILCMs budget.

ILCMs latest annual report, dated from June 2015 to June 2016, states that the club distributed over MOP1,253,000 to fund or purchase water filters, food, youth events, oxygen machines, educational trips and materials, building repairs, the partial purchase of a van and other expenses.

Lei admitted that it is currently harder to raise funds for the needy as the residents have a greater awareness of these associations.

Its not that easy for us to raise money as before, because people know that if they want to help someone, they can go directly to them. But that was also the growth of the society that we love to see, because people are really aware that there are some less fortunate people around, Lei explained.

While the ILCM Facebook page has over 1,200 members, Lei noted that the page has also served as a platform for both expats and locals to seek and gather relevant information  not all of them are actual club members.

However, Lei hopes that they will eventually formally apply to be official members of the ILCM.

ILCM aims to acquire 400 members by the end of June.

They pay a membership fee [of MOP500] to cover administration costs of the club. But we are so proud to say that we dont have any paid staff. Everything is volunteer work, the club president said.

Meanwhile, Lei expressed her hopes that the local government would allow wives of expatriates residing in the region the opportunity to work and contribute to society.

I think they [government] should think about granting special working permits for these ladies to find a job. A lot of these ladies are professionals, Lei said.

Their kids are growing up and they have nothing to do [because] they are not allowed to work. So this is something that we feel bad about. We hope that if the government allows [], they can contribute, she concluded.
Lawmaker Jose Pereira Coutinho recently presented a written enquiry urging the government to pay more attention to the environmental conditions of public spaces, especially regarding the Ferreira do Amaral Square in the city center.

The enquiry addressed several environmental issues as well as lack of maintenance of the space, and included photographic proof of the statements.

Coutinho claimed that refuse accumulates in the area over extended periods of time without any noticeable efforts from the responsible cleaning company.

The problem constitutes a serious public health matter and seriously affects the tourism image of the city, he wrote in the enquiry.

Construction flaws, unrepaired damage and maintenance problems were also addressed, as they have resulted in cases of poor ventilation and water accumulation, potentially causing serious health problems for residents.

Traffic in the area was addressed mainly in relation to public transportation and the fact that, according to the lawmaker, the roundabout does not support the traffic congestion primarily caused by buses. The enquiry questioned whether there is any scientifically-based plan to relieve the traffic pressure on the mentioned square.

The enquiry also recalled that last week, the Public Security Police Force (PSP) revealed that a body was found along the underpass connected to the same square.

The PSP said in its statement that it had ruled the case a suicide and forwarded it to the Judiciary Police for further investigation. RM
A woman has confessed to writing graffiti on a Hawaii mountain area considered sacred by some natives.

Hope Cermelj, 64, admitted to spray-painting words on asphalt, telescopes and portable toilets at Mauna Kea mountain west of Hilo, but she denied defacing rocks, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported on Friday. Hawaii officials found stop bombing and stop D.U. messages spray-painted within the Mauna Kea Ice Age Natural Area Reserve on April 28.

Cermelj identifies as a member of a sovereignty group known as the Lawful Hawaiian Government and considers herself a subject of the Hawaiian kingdom.

Her actions were in protest to military training taking place nearby, she said. She decided to write the messages after hearing explosions while near the summit.

Cermelj said she acted alone and has no idea who vandalized the rocks.

Hawaii activists who agree with her message nevertheless have called Cermeljs actions a desecration of a sacred place. Mauna Kea is sacred because it is considered the meeting place of the gods, native Hawaiians say.

Cermelj is facing USD1,000 worth of fines and up to a year in jail, according to the report. She is scheduled to appear in Waimea District Court on June 22.

Cermelj was placed under house arrest, and she cant leave the island because of the vandalism, she said.

I did the wrong thing; I made the wrong decision, Cermelj said. And I will suffer the consequences in the de facto state of Hawaii.

Cermelj said she depends on Social Security and does not have the money to pay the fine. She is willing to go to jail or help remove the graffiti.
Ahmad Dawoud recalls the day 10 years ago when a Lebanese soldier asked to search his taxi. Then 17, the Palestinian didnt wait for the soldier to find the weapons hidden in the trunk.

He jumped from the car and fled into the nearby Palestinian refugee camp, where the Lebanese army has no authority.

But it was not long afterward that Dawoud, who once admired the radical groups that have sprouted in the camps in Lebanon, decided he was tired of running. That same year, in 2007, he surrendered to authorities and spent 14 hard months in jail.

Although he was released without a conviction, he couldnt erase the biggest strike against him: As a Palestinian in Lebanon, he is a stateless, second-class resident in the only country where hes ever lived.

Today Palestinians mark 69 years since hundreds of thousands of them were forced from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel. Many settled in the neighboring West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

As refugees, various U.N. charters entitle them and their descendants to the right to work and a dignified living until they can return to their homes or such settlement is reached.

But Palestinians in Lebanon suffer discrimination in nearly every aspect of daily life, feeding a desperation that is tearing their community apart. Many live in settlements officially recognized as refugee camps but better described as concrete ghettos ringed by checkpoints and, in some cases, blast walls and barbed wire. The U.N. runs schools and subsidizes health care inside.

In Lebanon, there are 450,000 refugees registered in 12 camps, where Lebanese authorities have no jurisdiction inside. Our lot is less than zero, Dawoud said in a recent interview outside Ein el-Hilweh, the crowded camp in Sidon that is one of the most volatile.

On peaceful days, children play in the damp alleys and merchants park their carts of produce along the camps main streets. But the place feels hopelessly divided along factional and militant lines, and it frequently breaks down into fighting between Palestinian security forces and militants or gangs that capitalize on the general despair.

Last month, 10 people were killed in a flare-up that drove out thousands of the camps estimated population of 75,000. Palestinians are prohibited from working in most professions, from medicine to transportation. Because of restrictions on ownership, what little property they have is bought under Lebanese names, leaving them vulnerable to embezzlement and expropriation.

They pay into Lebanons social security fund but receive no benefits. Medical costs are crippling. And they have little hope for remediation from the Lebanese courts.

Doctors are prohibited from working in the Lebanese market, so they find work only in the camps or agree to work for Lebanese clinics off the books, and sign prescriptions under Lebanese doctors names. That leaves them open to employer abuse, a condition normally associated with low-skill work.

If a young boy gets in trouble because he is Palestinian, the prosecutor writes in his note to the judge, He is Palestinian, meaning: Do what you wish to him. Be cruel to him. Forget about his rights, said Sheikh Mohammad Muwad, a Palestinian imam in Sidon.

The crush of war refugees from Syria has made it even harder for Palestinians here to find work. Nearly six in 10 under age 25 are unemployed, according to the U.N.s Palestinian relief agency UNRWA, and two-thirds of all Palestinians here live below the poverty line.

UNRWA country director Claudio Cordone said they feel trapped in political limbo and see an almost total lack of meaningful political prospects of a solution to their original displacement from Palestine.

Lebanese politicians say that assimilating Palestinians into society would undermine their right to return. But Palestinians say they are not asking for assimilation or nationality, just civil rights.

They starve us, so we go back to Palestine. They deprive us, so that we go back to Palestine. Well, go ahead, send us back to Palestine! Let us go to the border, and we will march back into Palestine, no matter how many martyrs we must give, Muwad said.

For those in the camps, the line between hustling and criminality is often blurred. Unemployed and feeling abandoned by the authorities, many turn to gangs for work.

Adding to this is a widely shared disaffection with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which many Palestinians now see as having sold out their rights with the failed Oslo Accords of 1994.

This has helped fuel the rise of radical Islam  a shift in the occupied Palestinian territories that is reflected by Hamas rising popularity, and one outside the territories in the meteoric trajectory of militant groups such as Fatah al-Islam in the volatile and deprived Nahr al-Bared camp.

Growing up in Nahr al-Bared, a camp much like Ein el-Hilweh, Dawoud felt a strong affiliation for Fatah al-Islam, his gateway to radical extremism. They were the only ones who seemed honest, he said. Of course, later I figured out they were just like everyone else, too.

In 2007, the Lebanese army razed most of Nahr al-Bared to crush Fatah al-Islam.

By that time, Dawoud already was in Ein el-Hilweh, and his arrest was the beginning of a slow falling out with the gangs that once sheltered him and treated him like a brother. After his stint in prison, they began to feel they couldnt trust him, and he was chased out of Ein el-Hilweh in 2013. Now, he can only enter the parts of the settlement firmly under PLO control.

With no job, no prospects and little wealth, Dawoud now runs errands for others in his white 1980s-era BMW  all done under the table, of course. Palestinians cannot apply for the red license plates that identify taxis and other commercial vehicles.

I dont even think about marrying and getting into those situations, he said, waving off starting a family at age 27. His ambition now is to apply for a visa to leave Lebanon. But first he needs a travel document, and for that he needs to be on good terms with the Lebanese authorities.

Not all Palestinians live in camps, but even the most privileged among them endure discrimination. At a panel on Palestinian labor rights at the American University of Beirut, Muhammad Hussein asked a Lebanese Labor Ministry official why he was denied work even in sectors that are formally open to Palestinian employment.

The 22-year-old graduate showed the official an email he received from a marketing firm in Dubai refusing his job application on the grounds that the Lebanese office had to give priority to Lebanese workers.

The problem isnt finding vacancies, Hussein said. Its getting the job. Philip Issa, AP
Authorities in the Philippines have rescued four girls and arrested a mother and two other women for allegedly livestreaming sexually exploitative videos of children to men paying by the minute to watch from the United States.

Three sisters ages 8, 9 and 12, and an 11-year-old found in a separate rescue, are now in a shelter for abused children while the women face prosecution.

The arrests came just two weeks after Filipino authorities raided the home of an American man suspected of similar cybersex crimes, arresting David Timothy Deakin, 53, in his townhouse. During that bust, agents from the National Bureau of Investigation rescued two girls, 10 and 12, who had spent time in Deakins home, and made one of the largest seizures of illicit digital content in the Philippines. Dozens of hard drives and a handful of computers must now be analyzed to search for other possible victims, as well as buyers.

Deakin denied wrongdoing.

They got it twisted around like somehow I was using those girls, he told The Associated Press after his April 20 arrest.

The series of arrests and rescues underscore a rapidly growing crime in which children, even toddlers, are made to remove their clothes and touch themselves in obscene ways while adults, often their parents, train video cameras on them in exchange for payment from pedophiles abroad. Police in the Philippines are collaborating with their counterparts in Europe, Australia and the U.S. to investigate and prosecute.

The Australian Federal Police and U.S. FBI separately provided Filipino authorities information that led to the arrests of the mother and two other women on May 5, rescuing four girls. They were allegedly making the girls engage in sexually explicit acts while men in Australia and the U.S. watched. The women have been charged with human trafficking, child abuse, child pornography and cybercrime.

Police officer Arlyn Torrendon said she was part of a team that rescued three of the children and arrested the three women, including the mother of the siblings, Friday in a house in Bacolod city on an island about 445 miles (717 kilometers) south of Manila.

The children were innocent. They were not even aware that they were being used in a crime, Torrendon told the AP by telephone from Bacolod.

She said the children came from an impoverished family; their mother was a widow.

Gen. Liborio Carabbacan at the National Police Women and Children Protection Center said the incidents are increasing in the Philippines because many people are gaining access to the internet and English fluency is common, making it possible to communicate with would-be customers. Also, he said, parents and relatives, motivated by greed, are often not even aware that it is against the law to exploit their children.

The livestream abuse happens in many of Philippines densely populated, impoverished neighborhoods, said attorney Gideon Cauton, who works with the nonprofit International Justice Mission. The organization provides social workers, shelters, lawyers and even former U.S. police detectives to local law enforcement, who dont have enough resources to tackle all cases of online sexual exploitation of children.

In metropolitan Manila, where gleaming condominium high-rises and stores selling designer clothes and cars stand in stark contrast to the squalor of the slums, Cauton pointed to Wi-Fi antennas rising from rooftops above a long stretch of shanties and rundown houses. In the past, the antennas amid crushing poverty were red flags, sparking suspicion of cybersex crimes. Today pocket Wi-Fi, cellphone internet and other technology have rendered those irrelevant, driving the crime even further behind the scenes.

This type of crime is really hidden, he said. Usually the family and community, they are complicit, and these are tight-

knit communities, very dense areas.

In the U.S., the proliferation of crimes, along with new mandatory reporting, led to 8.2 million reports last year to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Childrens CyberTipline related to online child sexual exploitation. That compares with 8.3 million reports in the 17 years prior. AP
President Donald Trump said Saturday that we can make a fast decision on a new FBI director, possibly by late next week, before he leaves on his first foreign trip since taking office.

Even that is possible, Trump told reporters when asked whether he could announce his nominee by Friday, when he is scheduled to leave for the Mideast and Europe.

Eight candidates to be the bureaus director were in line Saturday for the first interviews with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, at Justice Department headquarters. They are among more than a dozen candidates Trump is considering, a group that includes several lawmakers, attorneys and law enforcement officials.

I think the process is going to go quickly. Almost all of them are very well-known, Trump said aboard the plane that took him to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he gave the commencement address at Liberty University. Theyve been vetted over their lifetime essentially, but very well-known, highly respected, really talented people. And thats what we want for the FBI.

The Trump administration is looking to fill the job, which requires Senate confirmation, after Trump abruptly fired Director James Comey on Tuesday.

The first candidate to arrive was Alice Fisher, a high-ranking Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

Among those interviewed was Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBIs Richmond, Virginia, office. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe also interviewed for the permanent post despite his repeated willingness to break from White House explanations of Comeys ouster and its characterizations of the Russia investigation.

Also interviewed Saturday were Michael J. Garcia, a former prosecutor and associate judge on New Yorks highest court; GOP Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate leader and a former Texas attorney general; and U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a George W. Bush appointee who struck down the centerpiece of the Obama administrations health care law in 2010.

Frances Townsend, former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush, and former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers also met with Justice officials.

Rogers came endorsed by the FBI Agents Association, which said his diverse background makes him the best choice for the job. He is the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who also worked as an FBI special agent based in Chicago in the 1990s.

Fisher and Townsend were the only women on the list of candidates. The FBI has never had a female director. Each has worked in high-profile positions in the Justice Department.

Fisher formerly served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Departments Criminal Division. She faced resistance from Democrats during her confirmation over her alleged participation in discussions about detention policies at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba.

Among other roles, Townsend led the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which at the time handled requests for government surveillance warrants in terrorism and espionage cases.

Sessions has faced questions over whether his involvement in Comeys firing violates his pledge to recuse himself from investigations into Russian interference in the election. Some lawmakers have alleged the firing was an effort to stifle that FBI probe.

Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said Sessions and Rosenstein are involved in the interviews because the FBI director reports to them as attorney general and deputy attorney general. They can make recommendations, but the president will ultimately make the hiring decision. AP
Will market meddlers never learn? Chinas government has made preparations to support the Hong Kong stock market, if needed, to create a positive atmosphere before July 1, when Xi Jinping is expected to visit the former British colony for the first time as president. State-backed institutions have set aside funds to ensure stable trading before the 20th anniversary of Hong Kongs return to Chinese sovereignty, Bloomberg News reports.

Mainland authorities may mean well in wanting to insulate global investors from a local issue: the risk of renewed protests against Beijings perceived encroachment into the citys affairs. Yet there are at least three reasons why their gambit wont work. Even if it did, the long-run consequences would be damaging.

Leave aside the resources needed to prop up a USD4.4 trillion market that trades $9 billion in stocks every day. The first point to note is that Hong Kongs exchange isnt like those in China. The latter are dominated by retail investors who herd into and out of stocks depending on the prevailing sentiment. They were hardly calmed in the summer of 2015 by a ban on sales by major shareholders. With mainland stocks in free fall, a disastrous experiment with market-wide circuit breakers last year lasted all of four days.

In Hong Kong, by contrast, 44 percent of the free float in stocks comprising the Hang Seng Index is owned by institutions. To fund managers, any irrational, short-lived panic would be a buying opportunity.

Theyre even shrugging off the most recent rout in the Chinese stock market, which has been sparked by fears over Xis deleveraging push. The Hang Sang China Enterprises Indexs valuation discount to the mainlands CSI 300 Index has continued to narrow this year.

The second reason to resist intervention is legal. Any form of mass buying could fall afoul of the Securities and Futures Commissions rules against market manipulation. Whether Hong Kongs regulator would dare to make its displeasure known is debatable, but the legality of buying in concert in a supposed free-market haven raises questions.

Finally, not all rescues are born equal. When the Hong Kong Monetary Authority bailed out the stock market during the Asian financial crisis in 1998, the goal was to prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy of collapse that threatened to break the citys currency peg to the U.S. dollar. While the move was controversial at the time, drawing scorn from the U.S. Federal Reserve, the citys laissez faire reputation has survived  especially considering what the Fed has done with its balance sheet since 2008.

That reputation is worth preserving. Any unnecessary interference in Hong Kongs stock market could forever raise risk premiums. If Beijing ever needed a bounty of reasons to stay away from spreading cheer and cash, its special administrative region offers them all. Nisha Gopalan, Andy Mukherjee
The imprisonment of a Christian politician for blaspheming Islam has triggered an outpouring of anger and support around Indonesia.

Nightly candlelight vigils have been held in cities across the sprawling archipelago since Tuesday when the governor of the capital Jakarta, Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama, was found guilty and sentenced to two years prison.

Months of huge protests against Ahok by Islamic hardliners and the unexpectedly severe sentence have undermined the reputation of Indonesia, the worlds most populous Muslim nation, for practicing a moderate form of Islam.

Indonesians abroad also held vigils in cities including Amsterdam, Toronto and Melbourne, Australia.

Ahok was moved to a detention center outside Jakarta after thousands of supporters converged Tuesday on the high-security prison in the capital where he was initially sent. His lawyers plan to appeal.

The U.S. State Department, U.N. Human Rights Office, Amnesty International and the U.K. ambassador to Indonesia have criticized the sentence, which was imposed despite prosecutors downgrading the original charges and seeking a non-custodial sentence of two years of probation.

The blasphemy case was a decisive factor in Ahoks defeat to a Muslim candidate in last months election for Jakarta governor.

Hard-line Islamic groups opposed to having a non-Muslim leader for the city capitalized on the blasphemy controversy to draw hundreds of thousands to anti-Ahok protests in Jakarta that shook the centrist government of President Joko Jokowi Widodo.

The blasphemy accusation engulfed Ahok in September after a video surfaced of him telling voters they were being deceived by opponents who said a specific verse in the Quran prohibited Muslims from voting for a non-Muslim leader. AP
Pledging more than USD100 billion in financing, Chinese President Xi Jinping called yesterday for closer cooperation across Asia and Europe in areas from anti-terrorism to investment as leaders from 29 countries gathered to promote a Chinese initiative that could increase Beijings global influence.

The Belt and Road Initiative calls for building ports, railways and other facilities in a vast arc of 65 countries. Other countries welcome the investment, but governments including the United States, Russia and India have expressed unease that Beijing also might be using the effort to increase its political stature.

Speaking before an audience that included Russian President Vladimir Putin, Xi said his government has no desire to impose our will on others. But he called for economic integration and cooperation on financial regulation, anti-terrorism and security  fields in which Chinas heft as the worlds No. 2 economy would make it a dominant player.

We should foster a vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, said Xi. He called for stepped-

up action against terrorism and what he called its root causes of poverty and social injustice.

In a reminder of potential security threats, North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile yesterday that flew for a half-hour and reached an unusually high altitude of 2,000 kilometers.

The launch was seen as a challenge to a new South Korean president who was elected last week and came as U.S., Japanese and European naval forces gathered for war games in the Pacific.

The Belt and Road is Xis signature foreign policy initiative. The two-day meeting that started yesterday gives the Chinese president a platform to promote his image as a global leader and free trade advocate in contrast to President Donald Trump, who has called for import restrictions.

China is hardly the first government to promote regional trade links. Japan has given billions of dollars in grants and low-cost loans to Southeast Asian nations to build ports and other facilities, and governments including South Korea have launched trade initiatives. But Beijings effort is the most ambitious and is backed by Chinas financial muscle and status as the biggest global trader.

Chinese officials have said previously that Belt and Road is purely commercial, though Xis comments Sunday indicated Beijing sees that as including a broad array of regulatory and other coordination with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Some diplomats and political analysts say Beijing is trying to create a political and economic network centered on China, push the United States out of the region and rewrite rules on trade and security. The United States and Japan, which Beijing sees as rivals for influence in Asia, are not part of Belt and Road.

China and Russia already are partners, along with Central Asian governments, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security group widely seen as an effort to counter U.S. influence in the region.

Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan echoed Xis theme that economic development would help to nurture political stability and neutralize support for radical groups.

The Russian leader complained about illegal sanctions  a possible reference to U.S. trade penalties imposed on Moscow over Ukraine  and warned that trade protectionism is creating a breeding ground for terrorism.

Closer economic integration should change the very political and economic landscape of the continent, bringing Eurasia stability, prosperity, said Putin.

Referring to Beijings plan, Erdogan said, This is going to be the kind of initiative that puts an end to terrorism.

Xi called for regional cooperation in finance  a field where Chinas huge state-owned banking industry and $3 trillion of foreign currency reserves would make it the dominant player.

We should establish a sustainable financial system that keeps risk under control, said Xi.

The president also announced additional Chinese financing for Belt and Road totaling 780 billion yuan ($113 billion).

That includes lending totaling 380 billion yuan ($55 billion) by two noncommercial state banks, up to 300 billion yuan ($43 billion) from state-owned commercial lenders and a 100 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) contribution to the Silk Road Fund, set up in 2014 to finance infrastructure projects.

Xi said his government also would provide aid worth 60 billion yuan ($8.7 billion) to developing countries and international organizations.

He said Beijing plans to announce dozens of new investment and other agreements during the two-day event.

Pakistans government announced it had signed memoranda of understanding on Saturday with China on possible projects worth a total of $500 million. That is on top of railway, power and other projects announced previously in an economic corridor linking Chinas far west with the Indian Ocean that Pakistani officials have said are worth up to $55 billion.

Other leaders at the gathering included Premier Paolo Gentiloni of Italy and President Michelle Bachelet of Chile. No major Western leaders attended, though Britain, France and Germany were represented by top finance officials.

A U.S. delegation was attending the meeting, led by Matt Pottinger, special assistant to Trump and senior director for East Asia at the National Security Council.

The United States and other governments have said Belt and Road is a natural outgrowth of Chinas status as the biggest global trader, and U.S. officials have said they want to work with Beijing on infrastructure. But they also have expressed concern that Beijing might undermine human rights and international standards for lending or leave poor countries with too much debt.

Pottinger spoke in the afternoon at a side event at the forum, where he stressed the importance of private-sector participation in major infrastructure projects, according to remarks released by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He was due to meet Monday with Chinese officials and representatives of U.S. companies looking at potential Belt and Road opportunities, said embassy spokeswoman Mary Beth Polley.

Details on which companies were involved and what activities the work group will undertake were not immediately available, Polley said.

Chinese state-owned lenders have put up most of the money for Belt and Road, but Beijing says it wants projects to attract private investment.

Speaking at yesterdays event, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Beijing needs to make its initiative more transparent to attract partners.

I know the United States has been among those countries apparently most skeptical, said Paulson, who was in office in 2006-09. The more China can demonstrate the Belt and Road Initiative is open to outside participation in this way, the more it will be embraced by global and even American firms and suppliers.

India delivered an implicit criticism Saturday in a statement that said such an initiative should meet international norms and not create unsustainable debt.

India has objected to Chinese state-owned companies working in the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both sides. New Delhi sees that as an endorsement of Pakistans control.

No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity, the statement said.

Belt and Road, named for dual trade routes through the Indian Ocean and Central Asia, is the biggest of a series of initiatives launched by Beijing over the past decade to gain a global leadership role to match its economic success.

China led the creation in 2014 of a new regional lender, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to finance ports, highways and other projects.

Xi promised to avoid forming a small group of allies, which he said might harm regional stability.

Instead, he said, Beijing wants partnerships of friendship and a big family of harmonious coexistence. Joe McDonald, Christopher Bodeen, AP

Beijing suddenly has blue skies, clean air

Visiting officials were greeted by blue skies in Beijing, which are unusual most of the year but common at major events like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, national legislative meetings and any time large contingents of visiting dignitaries are in town. Yesterday morning, the concentration of PM2.5  the small particles that pose the greatest health risk  was near zero, according to a U.S. Embassy pollution monitor. Beijing typically averages a level about three times the World Health Organizations recommendation of no more than 25 for any 24-hour period, and occasionally spikes into the hundreds as occurred earlier this month. As with past extravaganzas like the 2008 Olympics and 2015 China Victory Day Parade, China leaves nothing to chance and every detail is crucial in the drive to advertise Beijings largesse.
SOUTH AFRICA  Talk to any farmer around the world and their connection to the land will quickly become the focus of the conversation.

But in South Africa, that connection to the land is often complicated by ownership questions dating back to the initial legislation that began apartheid. The Natives Land Act of 1913 was the first piece of major segregation legislation enacted. Essentially, the act prohibited white people from buying more native land, but forbid blacks from purchasing land from whites. The act also prohibited black people from share-cropping or tenant farming on white-owned farms.

Although the law was repealed in 1991, most of the land in South Africa remains in the hands of white people. President Jacob Zuma has proposed a plan to expropriate land without compensation to speed up land transfers. Thats a radical departure from the willing seller-willing buyer approach that has been used. Government subsidies initially helped black farmers purchase land.

It has also left many farmers questioning how much investment to make in their farms.

Johannes Loubser, whose family has operated dairies near Cape Town for five generations, only partially joked that if a group of visiting journalists returned in 20 years they may find a black family owning the property.

Omri Van Zyl, head of the Agri SA cooperative, said land reform must be economically sound or we will have a South Africa that is food insecure within fifteen to twenty years.

He believes it is critical to empower more blacks to get into production agriculture and agricultural processing, but financing and lack of infrastructure are major obstacles.

The policy uncertainty regarding land reform specifically in terms of property rights must be addressed, Van Zyl said. Banks and foreign investors are wary of backing projects until land issues are resolved. About a third of the countrys farmers have disappeared since apartheid ended.

South Africa has a population of 51 million living on roughly 300 million acres. In comparison, Idaho has 53.4 million acres. Roughly 40,000 commercial farmers contribute 12 percent of the countrys gross domestic product. Food is also grown by 170,000 to 180,000 small scale farmers. Another 3 million households are involved in agriculture on a subsistence level. Helping to make those subsistence and small scale farmers more productive involves knowledge transfer and capital. And land.

One cooperative in South Africa works closely with black farmers over the course of four years to help them learn financial management and also pool resources to access tractors and other equipment to boost yields. About 3,500 farmers have participated in the program, boosting grain yields from 1 ton per hectare to 8 to 10 tons per hectare. One hectare is equal to 2.47 acres.

Vito Rugani, one of South Africas largest carrot producers, is trying a different approach to helping his farm workers gain wealth. He gives his 230 workers shares in the farm. With the dividends earned, the workers bought themselves a farm to subdivide so they can build homes on their own land.

Its unheard of to do this kind of thing, Rugani said. Its anathema to say these people can have their own house and land.

Finding housing for his workers has been difficult over the years. Some live in squatters areas near town, others live in government-provided communal housing and a few are tenants on the farm. But as he has invested in improving the skills of his labor force, he wanted his employees to have stable housing.

The new government doesnt want private ownership, Rugani said. The old government didnt want black influx to agricultural land in white areas. Its an ideological conflict and the poor person gets left out.

Rugani farms near Johannesburg, in the northern part of South Africa. Rossouw Cillie farms east of Cape Town, in the southern part of the country, which historically had greater black participation in agriculture.

Cillie provides housing for his 800 acres workers along with a medical clinic, library and day care program. His father established a primary school nearly 50 years ago on Laastedrif (the name of the farm) but high school students must board at a town about 25 miles away.

His long-term strategy is to hire fewer people so he can pay them better. Farmers will be required to pay a minimum wage of 20 Rand per hour starting later this year, up from 20 Rand per day. Cillie pays his workers on a piece rate which is already about 40 percent higher than the new minimum, thanks in part to a BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) program that he has participated in since 2002. Through that program, workers are encouraged to learn skills and participate in farm decisions.

Still, progress is slow. Many workers clean and trim vegetables into pumpkin cubes or cauliflower crumbles by hand to add value to raw produce. With an unemployment rate of nearly 27 percent, keeping workers employed is a high priority. Agriculture employs roughly 870,000 people on farms, about 5 percent of the population.

Correcting past mistakes and encouraging future agricultural production is a delicate balancing act. Since 1994, 8.39 million acres have been restored to tribal organizations bringing native owned land to 13 percent of the total. Freehold land, primarily in white hands, accounts for 202.5 million acres  but only 16 percent of that arable. The rest is grazing land.

This, perhaps, is the biggest challenge with land reform.

The new (South African) government doesnt want private ownership. The old government didnt want black influx to agricultural land in white areas. Its an ideological conflict and the poor person gets left out. Vito Rugani, South African carrot producer
SEATTLE  Idaho asked a federal appeals court May 12 to reinstate its ban on spying at farms, dairies and slaughterhouses after a lower court judge sided with animal rights activists who said the ban violated free speech rights.

Idaho lawmakers in 2014 made it a criminal offense to enter agricultural facilities by misrepresentation to gain access to records or to make undercover audio or video recordings. The states large dairy industry had complained that videos of cows being abused at a southern Idaho dairy unfairly hurt business.

Animal rights activists, civil rights groups and media organizations sued, saying the law criminalized a long tradition of undercover journalism and would require people who expose wrongdoing to pay restitution to the businesses they target.

A federal judge in Idaho agreed, blocking the law as an unconstitutional infringement of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution safeguarding free speech, the first time such a law had been struck down.

Seven states have similar measures  Kansas, North Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Utah, Missouri and North Carolina. Legal challenges are pending in Utah and North Carolina.

Idaho deputy attorney general Carl Withroe told three 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges in Seattle that the law is a time-honored and legitimate exercise of the states police powers.

States have a right to criminalize lying on job applications or concealing their purpose to gain access to  and harm  such private facilities, he said.

All this law does is require the person to get consent before entering the facility and recording, Withroe said. Idaho has no plans to try to prevent distribution of any recordings made in violation of the law, he said.

The judges expressed skepticism. Trespassing is already a crime in Idaho and the law seemed to target the views of animal rights activists or those who want to expose the practices at the agricultural operations, two of the judges said.

Justin Marceau, a lawyer for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, told the judges that activists have long engaged in misrepresentation, such as by not revealing their true purpose, to gain access to private property to investigate matters of public concern. Its within their First Amendment rights to do so, he argued.

The Idaho statute poses a substantial risk of criminalizing lawful  and constitutionally protected  news-gathering activity and chilling the very journalism that has previously led to positive changes and a healthier food supply, the Washington, D.C-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said in court documents filed with the appeals panel.

People caught surreptitiously filming Idaho agricultural operations face up to a year in jail and a $5,000 fine  stiffer penalties than state law calls for in animal abuse cases. A first animal cruelty offense in Idaho is punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $5,000.

The dairy industry pressed for the measure after the Los Angeles-based animal rights group Mercy For Animals released videos that showed workers at Dry Creek Dairy near Murtaugh beating and stomping cows in 2012.

The Idaho statute poses a substantial risk of criminalizing lawful  and constitutionally protected  news-gathering activity and chilling the very journalism that has previously led to positive changes and a healthier food supply. Washington, D.C-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press court documents
TWIN FALLS  A felon wanted in connection to a break-in and theft last year led law enforcement on a short pursuit Monday morning through Twin Falls that ended when sheriffs deputies crashed into the back of his Volkswagen to stop the vehicle.

The pursuit began about 7:30 a.m. when Twin Falls County Sheriffs deputies spotted Robert James Troglia, 45, of Twin Falls driving a 2003 Volkswagen at Washington Street North and Addison Avenue East, sheriffs office spokeswoman Lori Stewart said in statement.

The deputies attempted to stop Troglia, who was wanted on two warrants for burglary and grand theft and a warrant from the parole commission, Stewart said. Idaho Department of Correction records show Troglia was a fugitive from parole for burglary convictions out of Twin Falls and Ada counties.

When the deputies tried stopping Troglia Monday morning, he fled and the deputies gave chase, ending the pursuit at Third Avenue West and Gooding Street when they intentionally crashed into the vehicle to stop it using a precision immobilization technique, known as a PIT maneuver.

Troglia and his passenger, 29-year-old Vicki Guzman of Buhl were arrested at the scene. Guzman was taken into custody on suspicion of harboring a wanted felon and possession of a controlled substance, marijuana and paraphernalia.

Troglia was arrested on the outstanding warrants, and the sheriffs office planned to request additional charges for eluding, grand theft, unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and trafficking in methamphetamine.

Court records show the burglary and grand theft warrants were issued Sept. 28, about a month after police say Troglia kicked down a door and stole more than $1,100 worth of electronics and furniture from a Twin Falls home.

That burglary occurred about 1:45 p.m. on Aug. 21 at a home in the 300 block of Jefferson Street, court documents said. The homeowner called police and told officers his home-surveillance system showed him a burglary was in progress.

When officers arrived, they found the back door of the house was kicked in and discovered the thief had taken a 50-inch flat screen television, a coffee table, a drill, the home-surveillance camera and other electronics totaling $1,190. But the surveillance system had captured images of the suspect, and police believed Troglia was the thief.

Both Troglia and Guzman are expected to be arraigned Tuesday in Twin Falls County Magistrate Court.
TWIN FALLS  High schoolers interested in auto body technology, welding, drafting or food processing can soon take classes at the College of Southern Idaho.

The Expanded Technical Dual Credit program will accept a limited number of students for this fall. Teens must be going into their senior year of high school.

Its among a few new initiatives CSI is pursuing to help high schoolers accelerate their education. The college is adapting to a changing student body, with high schoolers making up nearly half of its total enrollment.

Plus, some of CSIs technical programs arent full and have low student numbers.

It just seemed like a win-win situation, CSIs executive vice president Todd Schwarz said. We are always looking for ways to get technical education into the hands of those students.

Participating high schoolers will take classes for one to two semesters. They can earn basic technical certificates, industry certifications or continue on to pursue an associates degree.

Through the Idaho Department of Educations Fast Forward program, each public school student has $4,125 available to use from seventh through 12th grades.

Money can be used to pay for dual credit classes, where teenagers earn high school and college credits simultaneously.

Obviously, Fast Forward and dual credit have had a significant impact on us, Schwarz said.

CSI is trying out another new program for high schoolers this fall: the Dual Credit General Education Academy. It will allow 25 students from Magic Valley high schools to earn 40 college credits over two years.

Its geared toward teenagers interested in science, technology, engineering or math. Those interested must be entering 11th grade next school year and have at least a 3.0 grade point average.

As for technical classes, CSI offered a similar program for high schoolers 20 years ago.

Schwarz said he thinks it was funded by a private grant and discontinued when that money dried up.

It was way back when I was a drafting instructor and I thought it was the stupidest idea Id ever heard of, he said.

But with time, things change.

Since the Idaho Department of Education implemented Fast Forward in 2014, I thought it would be great if high school kids could benefit from having access to technical programs, Schwarz said.

Fast Forward will pay $75 of the $130 per credit cost for classes. The rest will be split between the CSI Foundation and the student.

Students will be offered zero interest payment plans for their portion, if needed.

It may be complicated for high schoolers to participate, though, because there are high school graduation requirements to meet, Schwarz said, and potential issues with transportation and class scheduling.

He said his original goal was to have 40 high schoolers taking technical classes. I would feel really fortunate if we had 10, he said.

But in CSIs welding program, there are usually more interested students than the college can accommodate, Schwarz said. The high school program isnt coming at the expense of other students.

High schoolers will have participate in a competitive entry process for the welding program, he said. It wont be an automatic sign up like some other technical programs with vacancies the college wants to fill.

Class schedules will vary by program. For drafting, students spend five to six hours a day in class.

Students would have to forgo whatevers going on at (high) school, Schwarz said. They would have to make sure they get their graduation requirements in order.

But the welding program, for instance, has morning or afternoon sessions.

The new Expanded Technical Dual Credit program is a great opportunity for high school students who are ready, said Joe Woodland, welding teacher at Twin Falls High School.

In high school, its common for students to test the waters to figure out a possible career, Woodland said. But for a core group of students who are committed to welding, they have a great advantage over (everyone) else.

Woodland will have about 10 seniors in his third-year welding class in the fall. Of them, five have the grades and ability to do well in CSIs new program, he said. Two or three really want to do it.

He plans to help them apply.

It may take a couple of years to build a pipeline of students who are prepared to enter CSIs technical programs while in high school, Woodland said.

But CSI officials are looking forward to welcoming high schoolers on campus this fall  even if there are some unknowns.

Were excited and a little nervous, Schwarz said. We hope the students can pull it off. Its a bit of a challenge.
KIMBERLY  Fourth times a charm for the Rock Creek fire levy?

On Tuesday Rock Creek Rural Fire Protection District residents will go to the polls and once again vote on whether to OK raising their property tax levy to help hire more firefighters for the growing district.

The proposal would increase the fire district levy from .00115 to .002, amounting to a $538,000 increase in tax collections. The levy hasnt gone up since the district was created in 1992. This would increases taxes about $7 a month for the average homeowner, said district spokesman Taylor Hunsaker.

It needs a two-thirds majority to pass, which is why it hasnt despite getting majority support the last two times it has been on the ballot. A narrow majority of voters rejected it the first time in November 2015, but it got 64 percent support in May 2016. Last November, 61 percent of the districts voters favored it.

The district spans from North 3300 East, just east of Chobani, to North 5000 East, between Murtaugh and Milner, and from the Snake River to Magic Mountain north to south.
TWIN FALLS  The Rev. Lynn Bryson doesnt express his fears out loud anymore, only his trust.

As a college student, he once declared his three biggest fears: getting a brain tumor, becoming paralyzed and dying from cancer.

Bryson faced all three of those fears by the time he was 25, but they didnt conquer him.

I dont express my fear out loud anymore, Bryson said. I only express my trust in God. Ive learned to let God lead us. I believe he led us to Twin Falls.

Bryson and his wife, Debbie, moved to Twin Falls in March. He leads Twin Falls Seventh-day Adventist Church with a congregation of 200 members. The churchs former pastor retired last May.

Bryson has ministered for 28 years at six churches before coming to Twin Falls. The Brysons have an 8-year-old daughter and two college-aged sons.

Bryson has shared his story of survival with with thousands of people across the country and the globe for the past 30 years.

He hopes by sharing his struggles it will help others cope and thrive when they encounter tragedy, stress or crisis in their own lives.

Its the Lords story, he said. Its not my story. I just survived.

Bryson was 24 in 1986 when when he went on a mission trip to Mexico. He was with a group of 80 people building a church. Bryson and a group of five boarded a small plane bound for another remote village. The airport was just a strip of flat dirt high up in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

They were about 400 feet up after take off when the plane began plummeting to the ground.

As the ground neared, Bryson didnt feel scared.

There was a sense of peace that washed over me, he said. That Im going to be OK. I felt so safe in that cloud of Gods love.

After impact, he recalled dangling by his seat belt and realizing his legs were numb. He didnt know it at the time, but his back was broken.

I was in pain, Bryson said. My back and my legs were numb.

All five passengers survived the plane crash, but Bryson was the most seriously injured. Unconscious and having seizures, some local farmers put him in the back of a station wagon. He almost died before being flown to San Diego.

I dont remember the rescue because I was in a coma, he said.

A fat embolism that went from his leg to his brain was keeping him from waking up. He stayed in the coma for a week.

I knew people were visiting me, and I thought I was talking to them, he said. If you know someone whos in a coma, talk positively.

When Bryson eventually woke up he learned he was paralyzed from the waist down. It took him three weeks to sit up in bed, and he was in therapy for nearly three months in Portland, Ore.

It was depressing at first, he said.

Then Bryson got news that terrified him.

The doctors discovered he had a brain tumor unrelated to the accident. He was 25.

The biopsy was scarier than the plane crash, Bryson said. I was scared to death.

He was also angry at God. Why would God let him survive a plane crash but let him die of cancer?

The tumor was cancerous and had to be removed. Surgery might be successful, doctors told him. But if it wasnt, hed be blind or brain dead.

When I finally surrendered to the Lord this flood of peace like I experienced in the plane flooded my heart, he said. I cannot explain the peace unless youve experienced it.

Told hed be in a coma for two days to two months, he surprised everyone when he woke up an hour after surgery.

With radiation, the rest of the cancer was gone in six weeks, and hes been cancer free for 30 years.

Not only did Bryson survive, he thrived.

In 1990, he met his wife, Debbie, and and he walked down the aisle at their wedding. It was the first time he walked. July marks their 27th wedding anniversary.

At age 50, he went back to his former seminary school Andrews University. Some of his professors were his age or former peers. Last May, he finished the degree he started before his plane crash.

Bryson, now 55, used forearm crutches on May 3 at his church in Twin Falls to help him stand up and walk to the pulpit in front of the church. The congregation built a ramp before his arrival to make getting to the front of the church easier for him. His weakened quad muscles dont allow him to extend his legs or support his weight from a sitting to standing position.

After almost dying twice, Bryson said he doesnt let every day stress get to him.

And even though he feels a bit jittery on take offs and landings, he still flies on airplanes.
Seniors wellness

The Twin Falls Senior Center will hold a presentation for senior citizens at 12:15 p.m. Monday at 530 Shoshone St. W. Connie Campbell of Syringe Place will talk about nine trigger foods to avoid with arthritis.

Free; 208-734-5084.

Diabetes wellness

Living Well with Diabetes workshop, 1 to 3:30 p.m. Tuesdays, through June 13, at Twin Falls Senior Center, 530 Shoshone St. W.

Qualis Health presents the program developed by Stanford University for individuals to learn how to better manage their diabetes.

Topics: healthy eating, safe exercise, managing medications, communication skills, dealing with depression and stress, and preventing low blood sugar.

The class is free and all ages are welcome. Pre-registration is required: 208-734-5084.

Victims support

Support group for victims of domestic violence, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. every Tuesday at the Mini-Cassia Shelter Haven of Hope, 323 First St., Rupert.

Information: Rachel, 208-312-7021

Blood drive

The American Red Cross has scheduled a community blood drive from noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday, at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 847 Eastland Drive N., Twin Falls.

Blood and platelets donors are needed. To schedule an appointment to donate, use the free blood donor app, visit redcrossblood.org or call 800-733-2767. Completion of a RapidPass online health history questionnaire is encouraged.

Alzheimers support

Alzheimers Association, Greater Idaho Chapters Caregiver Support Group meeting, 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Twin Falls Senior Center, 530 Shoshone St. W.

The group meets on the third Wednesday every month.

Information: Pattie Dennis, 208-734-4264 or 208-539-4290.

Grief support

Suicide Prevention Action Network of south-central Idaho offers a free support group for anyone who has lost someone to a suicide.

The support group meets from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Church of the Ascension, 371 Eastland Drive N. in Twin Falls, and is open to everyone.

Information: Donna Stalley, 208-733-1462.

Recovery support

Safe Harbor will hold Al-Anon meetings at 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Recovery group meetings at 7 p.m. Thursdays at 213 Fifth Ave. W. in Twin Falls,

A meal will be provided at 6 p.m. Thursday; donations accepted.

Information: 208-735-8787.

Seminar

What you should know about Medicaid and Estate Planning seminar, 9 to 10:30 a.m. Thursday at Twin Falls Senior Center, 530 Shoshone St. W.

Sean R. Beck of Quade Law provides information on Medicaid planning and family trusts, wills, durable power of attorney, and living wills.

Make reservations at fileclerk@charquadelaw.com. Information: Quade Law office, 208-367-0723.

Asthma education

Free asthma education class for patients and caregivers to assess and manage asthma will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday.

The class is presented by St. Lukes Magic Valley Medical Center and meets on the third Thursday of each month.

Pre-registration is required. To register and for location of the class: 208-814-8765.

Anxiety support

Anxiety Support Group, 6 p.m. every Thursday at Magic Valley Fellowship Hall, 801 Second Ave. N., Twin Falls.

Support for those who experience anxiety, panic attacks or depression. Learn about the signs, symptoms of anxiety and depression, and coping skills.

Information: Cathy Shaddy, 208-410-2768.

CPR, first aid

St. Lukes Magic Valley Education Department is offering a Heartsaver Pediatric CPR, First Aid and AED class, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Learning Center, 840 Meadows Suite 2, Twin Falls.

The course provides training for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid and using an automated external defibrillator.

Cost is $60. Pre-registration is required, 208-814-9050.

Health fair

North Canyon Medical Center Health Fair, 7 to 11 a.m. Saturday at 267 N. Canyon Drive in Gooding.

The event includes health informational booths, free breakfast, and tours of the new Medical Plaza.

Blood work is available for the health fair panel, $35 (comprehensive metabolic panel, lipid panel, TSH thyroid, complete blood count; must fast 12 hours before the blood test); Hemoglobin A1c), $15; PSA (prostatic specific antigen) for men, $15; and testosterone testing for men, $15.

Lab work is available at the following locations: 7-11 a.m. Saturday at North Canyon Medical Center; 7-10 a.m. May 22 at Hagerman Valley Senior Center, 140 E. Lake St.; 7-10 a.m. May 23 at West End Senior Center, 1010 Main St., Buhl; and 7-10 a.m. May 24 at Wendell Senior Center, 380 First Ave. E.

Participants may register on the day of their blood work, at any location.

Happy babies

Happiest Baby on the Block class, 6:30 to 9 p.m. May 23 in Oak Room 2-4 on the lower level of St. Lukes, 801 Pole Line Road W., Twin Falls.

Learn a step-by-step approach to soothing your baby, and receive a parenting kit to use at home.

Cost is $15; pre-registration is required: 208-814-0402.

Joint replacement

Free community education class on joint replacement (hip, knee or shoulder surgery), 6:30 p.m. May 23 at BridgeView Estates, 1828 Bridgeview Blvd., Twin Falls. Meet in the lobby.

Topics: Preparing for surgery, recovery time, insurance coverage, care after surgery, discharge planning and long-term rehabilitation. Tours of the BridgeView rehabilitation facility are available.

Pre-registration is required, Amy at 208-280-0047 or Sarah at 208-280-0045.

Blood drive

The American Red Cross has scheduled a blood drive from 1:30 to 6 p.m. May 24 at the American Legion Post 77 Wilbur C. Hall main room, 132 E. Wayne St. in Paul.

To schedule an appointment, contact Wyatt Saunders at 208-679-1215.

CPR, infant safety

Infant safety and cardiopulmonary resuscitation class, 6:30 to 9 p.m. May 24 in Oak Rooms 2-4 on the lower level of St. Lukes Magic Valley, 801 Pole Line Road W., Twin Falls.

New parents, grandparents and caregivers learn CPR and what to do if an infant chokes. The class isnt a certification course.

Free; no registration required. 208-814-0402.

Health fair

Pomerelle Places annual health fair, 1 to 5 p.m. May 24 at 1301 Bennett Ave. in Burley. Lab screenings include wellness $50, A1C $15 and prostate $15, and will be provided by Cassia Regional Medical Center. Vendors will be available to answer questions about their services. Open to the public.

Information: 208-677-8212.

To do for you is a listing of health-related activities, events and education. Submit information by noon Thursday for publication in the following Mondays edition to ramona@magicvalley.com.
When it comes to water, you want not too little, and not too much.

Lately, seems as if Idaho is getting stuck with one or the other.

On Wednesday, Acting Governor Brad Little tacked Custer, Elmore, and Gooding counties on to a State Disaster Declaration that already included a majority of Idaho counties. At this pointas this was written, anywayalmost three-fourths of Idaho counties are listed by the state as disaster areas owing to flooding.

You see it in remote parts of Custer County and in the population center at Boise, where part of the greenbelt is shut off from access because of high river water.

The water managers seem to have done an effective job of keeping the conditions from creating more damage, at least to this point. But the challenge continues, and there are limits to what they can do.

The snow precipitation report from the National Resources Conservation Service lists snowpack levels by basin around the western half of the country. In Idaho, the accumulated precipitation so far this year is mostly in the range of 140 to 160 percent of normal, compared to generally around 105 to 95 percent at this point last year.

The Little Wood and the Big Lost are the highest, at 177 percent, but the Boise River and the Snake River above the Palisades Dam are at 159 percenthigh levels. The lowest in the state is the Clearwater Basin at 121 percent.

That portends a real possibility of more problems ahead, if the melting doesnt organize itself just right.

Thats some background for the governmental push and pull over Idaho and its disaster status, one partly approved and partly not.

The procedure is that (often after an initial request from the county level) states make the request for federal help, and the fedsmeaning the president or a disaster agency, or both, sign off (which they usually do). In late April, President Donald Trump did sign a state-requested declaration covering Cassia, Franklin, Gooding, Jefferson, Jerome, Lincoln, Minidoka, Twin Falls and Washington counties for their flooding and related problems in March.

Another declaration covering Bonner, Boundary, Clearwater, Idaho, Kootenai, Latah, Shoshone and Valley counties awaits action.

However, another declaration requested by the state, covering Ada, Canyon, Custer, Payette and Washington counties (for December and January snowstorms) wasunusuallyrejected. Federal Emergency Management Agency Acting Administrator Robert Fenton turned down the state request: After a thorough review of all the information contained in your initial request and appeal, we reaffirm our original findings that the impact from this event is not of the severity and magnitude that warrants a major disaster declaration.

Gov. C.L. Butch Otter said in response that The window is closed for this particular effort to get federal help addressing snow-related destruction and preventing additional damage statewide. But we have one Presidential Disaster Declaration approved and another pending, so were exploring every opportunity to help our communities address their most serious recovery needs.

The state may need to push hard, since it now may be behind the curve on helping some of these areas with recovery. It raises a question, given how uncommonly such requests are dismissed, whether the new administration is taking a new path on federal assistance.

If it is, Idahoans have all the more cause to watch closely, maybe with some apprehension, the rate of snow melt this spring.
The Red Cross Sunday in Yemeni capital Sanaa sounded the alarm over health crisis in war-devastated Yemen pointing out that 115 people have died of cholera in less than a month.

We now are facing a serious outbreak of cholera, said Dominik Stillhart, the director of operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Stillhart quoting figures compiled by the Yemeni Health Ministry noted that 115 people died between April 27 and Sunday (May 14).

Yemen, the Arab poorest country, has been torn apart by a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran for more than two years.

The countrys health facilities have been largely destroyed and the few still existing suffer significantly to meet medical demands as the war still ravages lives.

Over 8,500 other suspected cases of cholera have been reported across the country. 2,300 cases were reported last week in 10 governorates, Stillhart pointed out.

This is the second outbreak of the waterborne disease in the country in less than a year.

The humanitarian situation in Yemen is catastrophic, Stillhart said, adding that there are up to four cholera patients in one single bed.

The outbreak has been sparked by insalubrity caused by piles of trash lining up in the streets.
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.
SCAT and TABAN Airlines to expand, increase flights in Georgia

Kazakh air company SCAT Airlines plans to expand its flight destinations to all of Georgia's three intentional airports in the capital of Tbilisi, seaside resort of Batumi and western city of Kutaisi, while the Iranian Taban Airlines will increase its flight frequency.Georgian Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development said the SCAT Airlines will launch its regular flights from Aktau to Kutaisi and also resume regular flights from Aktau to Batumi.Aktau-Kutaisi-Aktau flights will be performed twice a week - on Tuesdays and Thursdays from May 22 to the end of summer on Boeing B737, while Aktau-Batumi-Aktau flights will be performed four times a week  on Wednesdays, Fridays, and weekends.TABAN Airlines started its flights to Georgia last February with several different destinations, while this year the air company is increasing its flight frequencies to the existing Tehran-Tbilisi-Tehran route in summer season.From May 22 until September the air company will perform six flights per week except Saturdays on Airbus A310, Boeing B737 and 757 instead of the existing two.
Azerbaijan, Turkey define scope of preferential trade deal

Turkey and Azerbaijan have already identified 68 groups of products that will be covered by a preferential trade agreement to be signed by the two countries, Ahmet Ataker, secretary for trade at the Turkish Embassy in Azerbaijan, told Trend.He said that most of them are groups of various agricultural products.Ataker said the work on the deal is underway and the agreement is expected to be signed before year-end.The agreement will open a new page in the Azerbaijan-Turkey trade relations, he noted."Turkeys main goal is to sign a free trade agreement with Azerbaijan," said Ataker.Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci earlier said the preferential trade agreement is expected to be signed at the 6th meeting of the Azerbaijan-Turkey High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council, to be held in the first half of 2017.Trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey amounted to almost $553 million in January-March 2017, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee.
President involved in public discussions over Constitution

By Messenger Staff

Georgias President accepted Parliament's offer and will now be personally involved in the public discussions aimed at informing the people of Georgia about the planned amendments to the countrys main legal code.It was President Giorgi Margvelasvilis wish to be part of the public discussions after he boycotted the special State Constitutional Commission which drafted the changes.The State Commission was the initiative of the Georgian Dream ruling team in order to improve the drawbacks in the Constitution caused by the previous United National Movement leadership in 2010.Margvelashvili proposed that he be the co-chair of the State Constitutional Commission together with the Prime Minister and the Parliament Speaker. However, his offer was turned town, and the commission was chaired solely by the parliament Speaker and composed of 73 members from the ruling party, opposition, NGOs, experts and a number of court representatives.At the final stage of the four-month activities in April, some of the opposition and NGOs quit the Commission, accusing the ruling team of fitting the changes to its own interests, an accusation that was dismissed by the Georgian Dream party.After the Commission presented the draft of the changes, a nine-member special commission must now organize meetings in the regions of Georgia to inform people about the planned amendments.A particularly of noisy meeting has already been held in western Kutaisi. In the following meetings on May 8 in Batumi and on May 9 in Zugdidi, the President will also participate.The ruling team believes the President made 'the right step' through becoming involved in the process.For his part, Margvelashvili disagrees with several key points in the draft.One of the points is about the indirect election of the president and depriving the president of the position of Commander-in-Chief.The President is also against giving all undistributed votes - those gained by parties which failed to appear in Parliament - to the party gaining first place in an election.Margvelashvili says if approved, the change would be the illegal grabbing of the peoples votes.The first public discussion in Kutaisi showed that only interested people - and not many of them - appeared to participate in the process.It will prove to be most enlightening as to how useful the discussions will be when a wide spectrum of people are not involved in the process and when the ruling team has 116 seats in the legislative body, when 113 votes are necessary to approve the amendments.
The News in Brief

Conflict in Georgia discussed at CoE Committee of Ministers



On May 3, during its 1285th meeting, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe meeting at the level of Deputy Ministers, returned to the discussion of the agenda item the Council of Europe and the Conflict in Georgia and reiterated the unequivocal support of the Council of Europe member States for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia within its internationally recognized borders.



The Committee stated that referendums and elections recently held in the territory of Georgias occupied regions, as well as Russias effort to sign the so called treaties with Georgias regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia impede peaceful conflict resolution, undermine the ongoing efforts to strengthen security and stability in the region, clearly violate Georgias sovereignty and territorial integrity and have no legal validity.



The decision highlights that Russias continuing illegal military presence in the two regions prevents Georgia - the only sovereign state under international law over its regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia - from exercising legitimate jurisdiction over these regions.



Therefore, the Committee deeply regretted that despite the constant calls, Russia continues to build artificial obstacles along the administrative boundary lines (ABLs), which divide families and communities, violate human rights and fundamental freedoms and complicate the settlement of the conflict involving two member states.



The body expressed profound concern over further deterioration of the human rights conditions in Georgias occupied regions, including with regard to the right to education in native language, the right to freedom of movement, the right to property, the right to liberty and security.



They also expressed their concern over the closure of the two crossing points across the ABL of the Georgian region of Abkhazia. [The closure] is detrimental for freedom of movement and livelihood of the local residents and will further deteriorate humanitarian situation, the decision reads.



The Committee encouraged the Secretary General to continue the submission of his biannual consolidated reports on the conflict in Georgia to the Committee of Ministers.







Crucial Points for Georgia



Mikheil Janelidze, the Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, welcomed the recent decision of the Committee of Ministers Deputies on his twitter post and emphasized that it was a clear message of member states to Russia.



On Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia released a statement emphasizing that the Deputies latest decision, which is focused on Russias policy with respect to the occupied territories of Georgia will be an important step towards defining the international status of the occupied regions.



These laudatory statements of the Georgian officials refer to several particular elements in the document:



In Article 3, the reference is made to Georgia as the only sovereign state under international law on territories of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region/South Ossetia. In the same article, Russia is said to be preventing Georgia from exercising its jurisdiction including through military presence.



Article 4 frames the conflict as involving two [CoE] member states, i.e. Georgia and Russia, which goes against the Russian official narrative of it being a conflict between Georgia on one side, and the states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia  on the other.



Article 7 makes reference to authorities exercising effective control in Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region/South Ossetia. Although Russia is not mentioned directly in this context and one may infer the article to refer to the authorities in Tskhinvali and Sokhumi, this legal formula constitutes a core element for the legal definition of occupation. This should be seen especially in conjunction with



Article 8, which calls on Russia to secure immediate and unrestricted access to the territories beyond the control of the Government of Georgia to the Council of Europe bodies thus implying that the Russian authorities do have effective control on such access.

(civil.ge)







Ushguli to be captured by Wall Street Journal and National Geographic again



A village settled at the highest location in Europe and a UNESCO cultural heritage monument, the Svanetian village of Ushguli, will be captured once again by well-known media outlets according to Georgias Tourism Administration.



As reported, the Wall Street Journal and National Geographic editions have shown interest in Ushguli and its residents.



A press-tour from Great Britain will visit Georgia. In addition, a short film and article will be prepared within the framework of the team that will be published by Wall Street Journal, National Geographic and Star Airlines.



Six visitors will take part in the process, including Nat Geo journalist Robert Reid.

(ipn)




@amysherman1

The tony Fort Lauderdale beachside hotel where Adam Putnam campaigned for Florida governor Monday was entirely different territory from the historic Polk County Courthouse where he debuted his candidacy last week, surrounded by crates of Florida oranges and the sounds of a marching-band fiddle.

In Broward, the most liberal county in the state, Putnam knew to offer the sort of business-friendly message that binds Republicans together.

Whether you grow up in downtown Pompano or in a small town in the middle of the state like where Im from we need to have a job climate in Florida that doesnt require you to leave your town to find a decent career, Putnam said at the Hyatt Regency Pier 66.

Keep reading here.

Miami Herald photo by Emily Michot of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam speaking with Bob Swindell, with the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, and Jose Basulto, with Memorial Hospital System.
@martindvassolo

Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Monday renewed his threat to veto the state Legislatures budget, disappointed in lawmakers for rejecting his funding wishes.

Ive got a lot of options, Scott said during an appearance at Miamis Jungle Island. I can veto the whole budget. I can veto a portion of the budget, a line of the budget. And I can do a special session. So Im looking at all those options.

Although Scott himself remained noncommittal about his plans, the joint appearance with Florida Sen. Jack Latvala  who called for a special session to meet Scotts demands  may provide an indication as to Scotts mindset.

Latvala, the Senate budget chief, backed Scotts proposed funding for Visit Florida and slammed lawmakers who did not seek to include the funding in the budget.

Wasnt my call or wed still be sitting in Tallahassee today, said Latvala, a Clearwater Republican.

Latvala  whom Scott called a strong supporter of tourism and economic development  said he looked forward to returning to Tallahassee for a special session if Scott vetoed the budget. When asked if he would call a special session, Scott maintained he is considering all of his options.

Im hopeful that the governor will exercise his prerogative, will call us back to Tallahassee, will make us do the right thing for economic development in Florida and for education in Florida, Latvala said.

Scott hosted the press conference to announce that Florida saw 31.1 million visitors in the first quarter of 2017, a new quarterly record for the state, while also criticizing the Legislature for slashing Visit Floridas ad budget by two-thirds to $25 million.

One out of every six jobs in our state is tied to tourism, and unfortunately this year our Florida Legislature has been very short-sighted, he said.

Latvala praised Scott for his commitment to tourism and the states economic development, while House members for calling for funding cuts to Visit Florida.

Ive spent my life in the business world and owning my own business, and I know when you stop advertising, when you stop marketing, you start dying, he said. Im hopeful that we wont have to experience that with our tourism industry in Florida. Im hopeful that the governor will call us back to Tallahassee and make us finish the job.

Following the press conference, Scott responded to a report in the Naples Daily News that uncovered Visit Floridas hiring of a German company in March to market Florida to travelers from Syria, calling it a clerical error.

No dollars were spent marketing in that country, he said. No public or private dollars were spent. It was a clerical error.

He also fielded a question about whether he supports a permanent ban on drilling for oil near Floridas coast, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubios proposal for Florida to share in the revenue of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while extending a ban on drilling within at least 125 miles off the coast until 2027.

The current ban is set to expire in 2022.

I have not seen that proposal, Scott said of Rubios plan. Whats important to me is that we keep this environment pristine.

Pressed on whether he would support a permanent ban, he added, if somebody has an idea...Id like to see how youre gonna do it and keep everything pristine.

Photo credit: Chabeli Herrera/The Miami Herald
Aleksander Hynna, legal counsel at Justice Canada

Wendy Gordon, House of Commons Law Clerk Office

Emily Landriault, University of Ottawa

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) finished its 2017 annual conference in Ottawa last Wednesday.One of the talks I attended was entitled "Demystifying Legislation: Drafting and Research" and featured three speakers who discussed how federal legislation comes about and how to research legislative intent.The three speakers were:Hynna described the often complex process that leads to the presentation of government bills in Parliament.Many players are involved: Cabinet, political staff, Justice department legal counsel and jurilinguists, departmental subject matter experts, etc.One interesting detail was the care with which those involved try to ensure that drafts in English and in French take into account legal issues and vocabulary from both the common law and civil law traditions. Drafts have to be truly blingual and bijural. English and French legislative drafters receive the same instructions and each drafts a version of the bill in light of what the colleague from the other language is creating. The process is not one of translation but rather of "co-drafting".Hynna was able to give attendees the feeling of being inside the drafting room (an actual office space). He described in detail what he calls the back-and-forth "drafting shuttle" with drafts going back to departments and experts for comments which then get incorporated into newer versions, etc.Gordon explained the process of drafting private members bills , bills sponsored by backbenchers which are not official government legislative proposals.In the previous (41st) Parliament, 503 private members bills were introduced in the House of Commons. 34 made it all the way through Parliament and received royal assent. Most died on the order paper, Some 58 actually made it far enough in the debates but were defeated.According to Gordon, royal assent is not the only measure of success. Often, bills are introduced to allow local constituents to have a voice in the political process, to spark debate, to put the parties on official record on a controversial issue, etc.One important fact Gordon stressed is that her office, which is in charge of drafting private members bills, takes its role very seriously despite the low odds of success.Contrary to government bills, private members bills are written in one language and translated. Research input comes from the Library of Parliament. MPs can ask for help on any topic within obvious limits: is the matter federal? does it comply with the Constitution? is there a similar bill on a similar topic in front of Parliament? As well, a private members bill can not raise money.Drafting is done on a first come first served basis but not all bills are equal when it comes to them being introduced in the House. Priority is based a raffle or draw to establish an "order of precedence" for presentation in Parliament.Finally, Landriault outlined the various sources for finding the intent being federal legislation. This is more familiar territory for any Canadian law librarian. She described sources such as government websites for backgrounders, the LEGISinfo parliamentary site for more recent bills as well as online parliamentary materials such as Hansard and committee reports and evidence. For earlier bills, print Hansard and print committee documentation are part of the law librarian's tool kit.She did draw attention to the less well-known RIAS that help determine background for regulations. RIAS stands for the "regulatory impact assessment statement", a backgrounder that accompanies proposed regulations published in thept. I and official versions of new regulations published in thept. II.

Labels: conferences, government of Canada, law libraries, legislation, library associations, library instruction
It fills up my soul, says goster grandparent Mary of her experience as a Senior Corps volunteer at Missoula Aging Services.

During Senior Corps Week, May 15-19, we would like to thank our wonderful Senior Corps volunteers for their immense service to our community! We also extend our thanks to the many organizations with which we partner to facilitate that service.

Senior Corps volunteers are age 55 and over, putting their wisdom and experience to work and dedicated to helping their community. Last year over 600 Senior Corps volunteers served more than 100,000 hours from Condon to Lolo to Frenchtown!

Senior Corps works in countless ways to make communities in Missoula County and nationwide stronger. Foster grandparents mentor and tutor students, senior companions help vulnerable adults remain in their own homes, and RSVP programs provide services with food banks, Meals on Wheels, Habitat for Humanity, law enforcement, disaster services and veterans programs.

So often as we get older, we feel worthless, says Senior Corps volunteer Bev. Thanks to this program, I never feel that way.

One community partner tells us: Senior Corps volunteers add a unique energy and pizazz to the makeup of our volunteer force with their life experience and work ethic; they bring a vibrancy to the texture of our community.

If you are interested in becoming a Senior Corps volunteer, learning more about the programs or would like to share a story about how a Senior Corps volunteer made a difference in your life, please contact us at 728-7682 or recruit@missoulaagingservices.org. Happy Senior Corps Week!
I'm shocked to see that the Democrats are running a musician and poet for the open Congress seat.

Rob Quist was a supporter of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Many people quote Montana values as the bedrock reasons to vote for a candidate. If you support a socialist, is that a "Montana value"?

The Quist website mentions his opponent as a New Jersey multi-millionaire. Greg Gianforte is a resident of Bozeman.

Gianforte states, "We founded RightNow Technologies 20 years ago in our Bozeman home and grew it into the towns largest commercial employer, creating over 500 high-paying Montana jobs, employees with an average Montana salary near $90,000 a year." Ask Quist how many high-paying jobs he created in Montana, or anywhere?

For a true sense of the Gianforte character, visit his family foundation website (https://gianfortefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/giving-2016.pdf) for a copy of their 2016 report. There is a pie chart showing over $51 million in donations since it was founded in 2005. Also, for 2016, over $8 million in donations, with $2.7 million for the Bozeman area and $3.1 million for other Montana areas. Quist, how much has your foundation donated to Bozeman and Montana?

Your choice is simple. I like those New Jersey values over those of Quist.

Walt Rucinski,

Libby
Three new academic programs will be launched next fall at Butte Central Catholic Schools, officials announced Monday.

A college-prep program, an academic resource program for students with special needs, and a computer-based enrichment program for elementary students are on tap for 2017-18.

The programs are designed to elevate the schools ability to meet the diverse educational needs of its students, said Butte Central Catholic Schools President Don Peoples Jr.

We are very excited to unveil three new academic programs this fall, he added. The programs will strengthen both instruction and learning in our schools.

The Bishop Thomas Scholars Academy for high school students will prepare college-bound students and boost their academic opportunities.

Named in honor of Bishop George Leo Thomas from the Butte Central Class of 1968, the academy embodies Bishop Thomass spirit of leadership, said Peoples. Thomas is bishop of the Diocese of Helena.

Students attend two 45-minute sessions weekly before or after school to focus on mathematics, writing, and English. Students will also explore science, social studies, computer science, fine arts, and Catholic studies. Academic lectures and guest speakers will be built into the program to broaden the worldview of students.

The primary academy goals are to prepare students for ACT and SAT college placement exams and to bolster student opportunities for college admissions and scholarships. Students who complete the program will earn the designation Bishop Thomas Scholar each year.

We really believe the Bishop Thomas Scholars Academy will provide our students with the best college preparatory program in Montana, said Butte Central Catholic High School Principal Kevin St. John.

English teacher Chris Barefield and the entire Butte Central teaching staff will provide instruction and leadership.

The academy will be open to all Butte Central High students, who must apply and demonstrate a hard-working approach to academic success.

Second, the Esther (Sullivan) Cote Academic Resource Program will expand to the high school to provide personal and academic support to students with special academic needs. It will build upon the program started last fall at Butte Central Elementary.

The program was named in honor of Esther (Sullivan) Cote, Butte Central Class of 1944 graduate, as a tribute to the Cote family. She and husband John Harp Cote, also a 1942 graduate, are lifelong supporters of Catholic education.

In recent years, Pope Francis and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have challenged Catholic schools to serve all students, including those with special academic needs, said Peoples. We are truly proud to answer this call and better serve our students.

Karla Ahlborn, a longtime special education teacher and Butte Central staff member since 2011, will lead the program by developing Individual Student Support Plans for those with special academic needs.

She will assist students and their teachers with modifications of their instructional plan and ensure they have access to a successful educational experience, added Peoples.

Finally, the district will start an innovative, computer-based MobyMax academic enrichment program at the elementary level.

It will provide students in grades kindergarten through eighth with individual learning activities in mathematics, reading, language arts, science, and social studies.

The adaptive MobyMax curriculum comprises an individualized education plan for each student.

Its exciting to implement technology-based learning opportunities for our students, said Butte Central Elementary Principal Susie Hogart. I know our teachers cant wait to introduce MobyMax to our kids.

Peoples, too, is excited.

We are very proud to bring these new programs to Butte Central Catholic Schools, he said. We believe they will strengthen our schools and help us bring out the best in our students.

Details: 406-723-6706.
MISSOULA  Sitting on a bench alongside the Clark Fork River, Bruce Farling was having a little bit of difficulty concentrating on an interview about his retirement from Montana Trout Unlimited.

Theres another one, Farling said as a fish snapped a bug off the surface of the water. In roughly 20 minutes, rising fish distracted him nine times.

To be fair, that was part of the job description for the post of executive director, which Farling is leaving after 23 1/2 years.

We wanted someone who was passionate about natural resource issues like water quality, instream flow, mining practices, timber practices, said Marshall Bloom, a former Montana TU chairman who served on Farlings selection committee. And they had to be someone who loved trout.

While the national demographic profile of Trout Unlimited members is a 50-ish man with an above-average income, Montana doesnt quite match. It has more younger members, more women, and more people with lower incomes in its cross-section. As Farling explained the increase from 1,700 to 4,300 on the dues roll, it wasnt all doctors and lawyers we picked up.

Instead, it was people invested in or spurred to action by the chance to protect or expand fishing opportunities. That ranged from habitat restoration projects to legislative campaigns defending Montanas stream access laws.

About 10 years ago, the national Trout Unlimited leadership came out and said stream access isnt something to focus on, Westslope TU Chapter President Mark Kuipers said. Thats because the stream access stuff was so red hot politically. In Wyoming, if you float a river through private land, you cant even put an anchor in the streambed  thats trespassing. But Bruce said, 'This is one of our key things, and were not going along with that.' That was a huge thing, a courageous thing. We have the best stream access laws in the nation.

Before that, it was figuring out a way to protect the rare arctic grayling through landowner cooperation. And challenging plans to build a gold mine on the headwaters of the Blackfoot River. Or finding ways to counteract the proliferation of invasive lake trout in Yellowstone Lake and Flathead Lake. Or supporting scientific research into the causes of whirling disease and other fish threats.

Bruce really had a gift for working with diverse stakeholders across the state, said Chris Schustrom, Montana TU state council president. He can gather people you wouldnt think would come together, from both sides of the political aisle, to get things accomplished. Its not just people who fish but people who care about water.

Rare among Trout Unlimited states, Montana has a small but full-time professional staff to develop research, supervise construction projects, and oversee legislative activity. In addition to helping people get interested in fishing, the organization has been instrumental in improving more places to fish.

The Jefferson River is a lot better than it used to be, Farling said. Thats helped spread the use that was crowding the Big Hole and Beaverhead. The Blackfoot, Clark Fork, and Bitterroot havent fished so well in 100 years. If theres more demand, lets increase supply.

That also means staying vigilant about new threats to the fishery. Last years outbreak of fish-killing parasites on the Yellowstone River or the slower-moving progression of illegal pike introductions in trout waters keep the Montana TU staff alert and active. Progressive changes to snowpack and water temperatures present an even longer-term challenge to protecting native cold-water fish populations. Meanwhile, fly fishings popularity aggravates more conflicts between commercial outfitters and recreational anglers in popular rivers.

Farling will spend the next several weeks unplugging from his executive directors role and advising incoming ED David Brooks. Sitting next to the Clark Fork on a sunny morning, he looked ready for something new.

Im thinking a lot about what Im not going to be doing, Farling said. Paperwork. Budgets. Raising money. Hiring. Supervising. Theres at least four or five fish feeding right there.
Republican Sen. James Lankford called for "clarity."

Republican Sen. John McCain pronounced himself "disappointed."

And Republican Sen. Marco Rubio essentially shrugged. He said he was "surprised" by the sacking of FBI Director James Comey, but added that, "It's a decision the president's made, and we'll go from here."

It is not exactly a portrait of righteous indignation.

Not to paint with too broad a brush. Some GOP officials did speak more forcefully against what Donald Trump did Tuesday night (and some supported it). But there was no mistaking a certain tepid tone to many responses, and it was almost as troubling as the firing itself.

For those who just flew in from the Amazon rainforest:

In an ominous echo of Richard Nixon's infamous "Saturday Night Massacre," Trump fired the man who has been investigating his campaign's ties to Russia, which meddled in last year's election with the goal of helping elect Trump president. Comey sought to find out whether Trump or his surrogates colluded with that effort.

Instead, he was given the ax, a fact he learned on television. The explanation for this was spectacularly risible. In a terse letter, Trump claimed he was responding to concerns from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, that Comey mishandled the investigation of the nothing burger that was Hillary Clinton's emails.

Comey did, in fact, botch the investigation, violating Justice Department protocol by publicizing unsubstantiated claims against a candidate in the midst of a campaign. But this happened last summer, and if it were really the reason for his dismissal, he'd have been gone right after Trump took power.

More to the point, it would require the credulity of a particularly stupid toddler to believe Trump, who loathes Clinton, just booted the FBI director because he treated her unfairly. No, it is painfully obvious that this is about Russia. Like Nixon in 1973, Trump is apparently faced with an investigation that is going places he doesn't want it to go. Like Nixon, he has responded by firing the investigator.

The stench that rises from this is unmistakable, the reek of power abused and justice obstructed. It strongly suggests that we are governed by an ongoing criminal conspiracy. The situation needs, demands and requires an independent investigation.

We can't rely on the Justice Department for that, given that its leadership is complicit in Comey's firing. That leaves Congress, which is why the anodyne Republican reactions are so worrisome. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has flatly ruled out a special prosecutor.

Shame on all of us if that is the last word here. We are supposed to be Americans first, before we are Rs or Ds. That's a principle from which many Republicans have turned in recent years, repeatedly choosing themselves and their wealthy patrons over the greater American good. The healthcare debacle is but the latest glaring example.

But GOP leaders must stand up for the country this time or risk losing it. If they don't get that, the rest of us  liberal, conservative, American  must make unceasing noise and apply unstinting pressure until the party that launched eight investigations of Benghazi decides to treat this at least as seriously.

If you are not appalled, you are not paying attention. The Trump administration constitutes a clear and present danger to American democracy.

We need a special prosecutor and we need one now.

-- Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald.
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a bill that will increase health care costs for hundreds of thousands of Montanans and put coverage at risk for many across the state.

After failing to reach the votes needed to pass legislation earlier this year, politicians in D.C. changed the bill. Unfortunately, they did not fix the provisions that would result in over 20 million Americans losing coverage by 2026 and many more facing steep increases in out-of-pocket costs for insurance. Instead, House GOP leaders made the bill even worse, by eliminating protections for Americans who have pre-existing conditions, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and even pregnancy.

The bill effectively ends Montanas bipartisan Medicaid expansion program, which extended coverage to over 77,000 Montanans who would otherwise be uninsured and saved the state over $22 million in the first year. Throughout the 2015 session, we heard from Montanans across the state who faced serious health conditions but were unable to access coverage. Montanas Medicaid expansion is saving lives, but now that health insurance could be ripped away from individuals who desperately need coverage.

Instead of helping make insurance more affordable, this bill actually makes it more expensive, by scaling back tax credits and subsidies provided to individuals who are accessing coverage through the health insurance marketplace. This will have a disproportionate impact on older Montanans, as well as those at lower incomes. Studies show that Montanans who are buying insurance from the marketplace could see out-of-pocket costs (such as premiums, deductibles, and copays) increase by an average of $4,606.

One of the most damaging and long-lasting changes would be to the overall Medicaid program. The House bill is proposing deep cuts in federal Medicaid dollars. States, particularly rural states like Montana, will be forced to make devastating decisions, as Congress attempts to cut over $800 billion in federal Medicaid dollars. Today, one in four Montanans (over 240,000 individuals) receive coverage through Medicaid. Children, seniors, low-income pregnant women, and people with disabilities all rely upon Medicaid for affordable coverage. If this bill becomes law, tens of thousands of Montanans could face loss in coverage.

The House GOP amended the bill to also eliminate some of the most popular provisions of the ACA, including protections for individuals who have pre-existing conditions. States would receive almost automatic approval to waive the requirement that prohibits insurers from charging people higher premiums for coverage based on their health condition. Those with pre-existing conditions would face skyrocketing costs for insurance. According to the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, over 400,000 Montanans had a pre-existing condition in 2009, the most recent year of information.

If insurers were to charge people the full expected cost of their condition, an individual with metastatic cancer could face premiums exceeding $100,000, according to one analysis by the Center for American Progress. Having a baby, without any complications, could run more than $15,000 more in premiums per year. Montanans facing a pre-existing condition would almost certainly run the risk of losing coverage, as a result of outrageous premium costs.

Congress can and should consider ways to lower health care costs and continue to expand access to coverage. This bill is not it. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is time for each of us to tell Congress to do their job and protect the health care that Montanans need and deserve. The health care coverage of hundreds of thousands of Montanans hangs in the balance.

-- Heather O'Loughlin is co-director of the Montana Budget and Policy Center in Helena.
MUSCATINE  Businesses could begin selling fireworks in Muscatine County as soon as June 1, but with some exceptions.

Governor Terry Branstad legalized the retail sale of consumer-grade fireworks last week, which allows Iowans to buy and use fireworks each year from June 1 through July 8, and from Dec. 10 through Jan. 3.

Monday, the Muscatine County Board of Supervisors agreed to allow fireworks sales in the unincorporated areas of the county for the first sales period beginning June 1. However, Planning and Zoning Administrator Eric Furnas said only existing retail businesses in commercially zoned areas will be eligible to sell fireworks this summer.

"It won't just give people a blank check to set up a tent in their front yard to start selling fireworks," Furnas said. "If you have zoning, you can regulate sales just like you can regulate any other type of enterprise in zoning districts."

Furnas said to be eligible to sell fireworks, a business, such as a hardware or convenience store, must be located in an appropriate district and designate only a portion of its floor space to selling fireworks.

The Iowa law requires vendors to obtain a state license and insurance, and comply with the state fire marshal's safety rules.

The new legislation also allows the sale of fireworks in temporary structures, such as tents, from June 13 to July 8, but Furnas said current Muscatine ordinance does not allow vendors to sell from temporary structures.

"With temporary structures right now, our definition of a roadside stand is specific to the sale of agriculture and produce products, Furnas said. "So, we believe our definition of roadside stand would prohibit someone from putting up a fireworks roadside stand."

Because the governor signed the bill into law less than a month before fireworks sales will begin, Furnas said several counties have been struggling to adopt new ordinances and regulations in place to regulate this year's season.

Last week, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors passed a 90-day moratorium on sales of fireworks, until the county has time to implement specific regulations.

The Muscatine Board of Supervisors, though, said there was not enough time to change its regulations, and it will "ride out" the first sales period and see how many businesses are interested in selling fireworks.

Furnas said he is not "too worried," because vendors will have to obtain a state license, which could cost up to $1,000 dollars, and comply with state safety regulations.

Board members did express concern, though, that residents will hear fireworks sales are legal and attempt to sell them without the proper licensing.

After the first sales period this summer, board members will possibly consider new regulations to comply with state law.

Furnas suggested requiring vendors to apply for a special use permit, so that the Board of Adjustment has a chance to review every proposed site for safety hazards.

The state legislation also legalized the use of fireworks, from June 1 to July 8, and again from Dec. 10 to Jan 3. Fireworks can only be set off from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. during those sales periods, and from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. on July 4 weekend.

Furnas said the law allows residents to set off fireworks only on their own property. Permission is required to use fireworks on public properties.
Les emplois a Rennes sont abondants et varies. Il y a quelque chose pour tout le monde. Que vous soyez a la recherche dun emploi []
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
Kiambu Governor William Kabogo has announced that he is back in the Kiambu gubernatorial race.

In a press briefing yesterday, Kabogo announced that he will vie for the same seat as an independent candidate, joining a long list of politicians who have taken this route after defeat in the recently concluded party primaries.

Kabogo lost to Ferdinand Waititu Babayao by close to 300,000 votes. It remains unclear how he intends to close that huge gap.

Having consulted my wife, Kiambu residents and friends I hereby announce my independent candidatureI will be on the ballot. At the end of the day, we are one people with the same dream, Kabogo said.

READ: How The God of Waititu Has Worked Wonders for the Incoming Kiambu Governor

Kabogo noted that the nomination process was flawed, and also decried a propaganda campaign against him.

It is not a battle about who is stronger or better at spreading propaganda, but rather its about the vision that will take all of us to what we have the potential to become, he said. There are a lot of things said about me but those who want to seek the truth will find it. Some of them have hurt me and my family but we are strong.

Watch clip.

On rigging claims, Kabogo said, The elections had many flaws and since our campaign was about transformation, we have the evidence that there was rigging My silence was as a result of the peace pact that I signed. The younger Kabogo would have handled things differently.

Kabogo also thanked his supporters for standing with him. I thank voters who came out in large numbers, for everyone who voted for me, I want to say Asante. I am proud of you and for those who did not vote for me I thank you as well.

READ: As You Laugh at Kiambu for Electing Waititu, This is What He Did in Thika Yesterday

Read his full statement below.

[showad block=6]

Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Afternoon.

Happy Mothers Day to our great women in Kiambu county and the country at large and to my dear wife who is here with me.

I want to thank you for coming for this press briefing.

Let me start by giving honour to Whom all honour is due, and that is God.

Today being a Sunday, a day of worship for me, I am reminded of the faithfulness of God and I am grateful for the gift of life and for the great people of Kiambu that He has entrusted me with to provide leadership.

I dont take this privilege for granted and in my reflections I acknowledge that leadership comes from God and it takes God to lead His people. I am only a servant.

I have served the great people of Kiambu for the last four years as Governor and despite many obstacles & challenges, I say thank you to God for enabling me, and to you all, thank you for trusting me.

I couldnt do it without His help and the honour of moving Kiambu County and its great people to the place of its destiny humbles me greatly.

The development agenda that we have had is no doubt open for everyone to see. There is no challenge to our record and what we have achieved together.

The transformation that we have attained as a county in the last four years is second to none.

We want to continue to make this the place where you choose to Live, Work and Grow.

There is no limit to what we can achieve as a people, united under God.

For those who doubted, for those who questioned, for those who had little faith if our campaign was on the right track with right minded people to ask for a second term to serve the great people of Kiambu county, the shambolic nominations we witnessed answered one question.

There was a clear quest to stop our development agenda and subvert the wishes of the people of Kiambu.

The elections we witnessed had many flaws and this was evident across the country. The nomination exercise was highly driven by non-issues.

Our campaign was about transformation and the issues confronting us but our opponents chose the propaganda mill whose evidence we have here today

There are a lot of things that have been said about me that are not true but only those who want to seek the truth will find it. Some of them have hurt me and my family but we are strong.

I will not dwell in that game of play but stick to the issues and the agenda that will propel our great people to great heights in this county.

Our campaign was about pushing the wheel of success and the development agenda for the hardworking people of Kiambu.

I sincerely thank voters who came out in large numbers to get their votes counted and their voices heard.

To everyone who came out to vote for me on the 25th April, men, women, the young and the old, I want to say thank you.

You braved the chilly weather and stood for many hours in long queues to vote for me. From Ngoliba to Kinale from Githobokoni to Nachu, thousands of you came out to vote and I am proud of you and I thank you once more.

To those who didnt vote for me, thank you for still turning out to vote and exercising your democratic right and to let us know that as a team we still have some work to do in pushing forward the development agenda.

Thats the power each one of us has been given by the Constitution.

Make no mistake, my silence for the last couple of weeks was as a result of a peace pact that I signed and I wanted to honor. The younger Kabogo would have handled things very differently but now my thoughts turn to, what will be good for the County.

In recent weeks, I have met thousands of people and have received phone calls from people from all walks of life; men and women, young and old telling me the fight must go on. This is not my fight. It is our fight.

It is not a battle about who is stronger or who is better at spreading propaganda but rather its about the Vision. The Vision that will take all of us to what we have the potential to become, the Vision that will take us where we need to be and the Vision that will make Kiambu the place where people choose to Live, Work and Grow. THAT is the Vision that consumes me and propels me forward.

After much deliberation and having consulted with my wife and the rest of my family, I stand here today to announce my independent candidature for a second term as your Governor. Due to public demand, I have decided to honor the wishes of the people of Kiambu.

I stand with you.

At the end of the day we are one people with the same aspirations, the same dreams and desires and with God on our side, our differences will melt away in the face of the greater good that is before us.

That is, making Kiambu the best county in service delivery and a place with equal opportunities for everyone, regardless of status, religion or age. A place of choice for people to Live, Work and Grow.

Whether you are a Kikuyu, Luo or Kamba  tribe will not define us.

Whether you are a Christian or Muslim  Religion will not divide us.

Whether you are Young or Old of Age  Experience will not stop us.

Whether you are a man or a woman  Gender will not separate us.

It is these differences that make us richer, better, stronger as the people of Kiambu. We are One People and will always be One People.

The answers we are looking for, the solutions to our problems, the cure to what is ailing us does not lie in those that are afraid to confront the common enemy of development and democracy in our county but the brave ones who will not shy away from saying, I can do the impossible. Yes, I can be who God says I am and I can do what He says I can do.

With purpose and great determination, I promise every man, woman and child in this county that I will break my back to give you the best leadership; I will break sweat to bring investment into this county I will exhaust all ideas in my mind to make this county great.

To our detractors, watch this space. We will do it through Gods help, and with His help and as we work together as One People we will pull through all obstacles and challenges.

God bless you, God bless Kiambu County and God bless Kenya.

Thank You.
A man on Sunday slashed and injured his wife and son in a heated row over the high cost of maize flour.

According to reports, the 24-Year-Old man attacked his wife, Mercy Njeri, accusing her of spending too much money on unga.

The incident occured in Ruringu, Nyeri County at around 5 pm.

The woman and her two-year-old son were admitted at Consolata Mathari Hospital while the man surrendered himself at Nyeri Central Police Station.

The incident comes amid the Unga crisis that has seen the prices of maize flour rocket to the highest levels ever witnessed in the country.
Nairobi gubernatorial hopeful Miguna Miguna on Saturday unveiled his running mate.

Miguna settled on 24 year old James Karihe Gathungu, a former student leader at Laikipia University. Miguna told the media that he is seeking to inject youth blood into Nairobi leadership.

Kenyans have functioning brains. They can tell the difference a transformative leadership and one based on impunity. And we are not afraid of anybody. They can come with any money they have stolen and we will deal with them, he said during the unveiling ceremony.

Miguna is hoping to replace Kidero as an independent candidate, and he said it is within his constitutional right to do so. Independent candidates are not going to beg anyone to run. We are occupying a space guaranteed by the constitution.

Mr. Gathungu graduated in 2015 with a Bachelor of Science in Statistics from Laikipia University.

READ: Miguna Miguna: Donald Kipkorir is a Mediocre Male Socialite

He described Miguna as a great man who will make a great governor.

And I am proud to run with a man who will be one of the great governors of this century, Miguna Miguna. Our faith that we can shape a better future is what the Nairobi dream is all about, he said.

A future free of huge traffic jams, a future where Nairobi will compete to be the best investment destination globally. The promise of our county is that the rules are fair. If you work hard and play by the rules, you can earn your share of Nairobis blessings. Gathungu added.

Additional reporting by Nation
Old Sonoma Road open house scheduled for May 20

The Open House for Old Sonoma Road has been rescheduled for Saturday, May 20 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the site, 2344 Old Sonoma Road.

For more, contact Molly Rattigan at 707-253-4112 or molly.rattigan@countyofnapa.org to make alternative arrangements.

Materials will be posted at www.countyofnapa.org prior to the Open House.

Auditor-Controller wins national excellence in financial reporter award

For the 12th consecutive year, the Napa County Auditor-Controllers Office has won the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting from the Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada for its comprehensive annual financial report (CAFR).

The CAFR tells the financial story of the County, provides details on fiscal policies, and includes 10 years of statistical data.

The Certificate of Achievement is the highest form of recognition in the area of governmental accounting and financial reporting, and its attainment represents a significant accomplishment by government and its management.

The 2016 CAFR is available here: http://www.countyofnapa.org/auditor/

Check out the Napa County roundup in this months Napa Valley Marketplace Magazine

Our Working for you section provides a brief overview about Napa County happenings, projects, and issues were focused on. Read the four-page spread here: http://issuu.com/wescographics/docs/countyof_napa?e=16844208/48174610

Agricultural Commissioners office launches Think Local, Plant Local campaign

May is Glassy-winged Sharpshooter Awareness Month.

The Agricultural Commissioners Office is asking Napa County residents to Think Local, Plant Local by purchasing plants only from local retailers where plants have been inspected before sale.

Keep the Glassy-winged Sharpshooter from being introduced into Napa County!

For more information, call 1-866-BUG-SPOT or visit bugspot.org.

May is CalFresh Awareness Month

May marks CalFresh Awareness Month, which is a comprehensive effort across Napa County to increase access and participation in food assistance, reduce hunger, and promote healthy eating.

To apply online, visit c4yourself.com. Applications can also be mailed or submitted in person 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, at 2751 Napa Valley Corporate Drive, Building A, in Napa, and 4381 Broadway St., Suite 101, in American Canyon.

For more information about CalFresh, including eligibility requirements, call 707-253-4511.

Upcoming road construction projects on Silverado Trail

Here are some projects on the Silverado Trail that might impact your commute:

 PG&E is replacing poles along the Trail from Trancas to Conn Creek Road. Minimal delays are expected, work hours are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday through July 31.

 PG&E will also be performing maintenance to critical infrastructure on Pope Street in St. Helena. The maintenance work will require the closing of the Pope Street Bridge. Work Hours are Monday through Saturday  through May 20 from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

 Napa Countys contractor Argonaut Construction will be placing an asphalt overlay on the Silverado Trail from Zinfandel Lane to the city limits of St. Helena (approximately  mile south of Pope Street) from May 22 to mid-June, with a one-week break from Memorial Day to June 6. Work hours are 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Napa County groundwater has returned to normal levels

Napa County groundwater has returned to normal levels after recent rains washed away years of drought influence on the valley floor.

The 2016 Comprehensive Groundwater Monitoring Program Report, which provides an in-depth look at the communitys groundwater levels, was released Tuesday.

This is the third annual monitoring report, which builds upon extensive groundwater studies that began in 2009 and continue today. It is a part of the implementation of water resources recommendations of the 2008 Napa County General Plan Update.

Napa County and other public agencies have been actively monitoring local groundwater resources since the mid-1900s.

Find out more here: http://countyofnapa.org/groundwater/

Come work with us!

Is your career ready for its next challenge? Bring your expertise to our Napa County team. Find open positions and apply here: http://www.countyofnapa.org/jobs/

Engage with us

Follow our social media accounts on Facebook (Napa County, California  Government) and on Twitter (@countyofnapa). Visit us online at countyofnapa.org to locate county services and programs, contact departments, search for records and documents, and find events and agendas, and much more.

Sign up for emergency alerts

Get safety and community messages straight to your mobile phone by joining Nixle, Napa Countys emergency mass communications system. Text your ZIP code to 888777 to receive local updates during storms, wildfires, and other emergencies.
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I grew up surrounded by the Civil War  quite literally, since there was an old earthwork fort just two blocks from my house. The cities where I lived and traveled were studded with monuments to the Confederacy  theres even a street in Richmond, Virginia called Monument Avenue precisely because it is lined with statues to Confederate heroes.

I grew up hearing the tales of my ancestors who fought in the war (all on the Southern side) and of the leaders who waged the improbably successful campaigns against the hated Yankees  the stoic Robert E. Lee, the daring but eccentric Stonewall Jackson, the wily and ruthless Nathan Bedford Forest, and the dashing cavalry leader J.E.B. Stuart. My father loved to tell the tale of his great aunts who, after the war and to the end of their days, refused to accept any letters addressed to them in Shepherdstown, West Virginia on the basis that there was no such state.

The Confederate battle flag was ubiquitous at my high school and my college. It adorned cars, hung on dorm walls, and flew outside of homes. In other parts of the South it flew over public buildings, even the state capitol in South Carolina.

It never occurred to me as a child that there was anything unusual about this, or that other people and other places might not live in the shadow of the war  or would even want to.

But by the time I was in college, murmurs were starting that the battle flag might make some people, particularly black people, uncomfortable or angry because of its implicit connection to slavery. By the time I was working for a national newspaper a few years later, the Confederate flag was in retreat across the South; even South Carolina was considering removing the pennant from the top of the state capitol.

Now, even those imposing stone monuments are under pressure. The city of Charlottesville, Virginia, where I went to college, is in the midst of an emotional debate over removing a huge statue of Robert E. Lee from a grassy park downtown. The city of New Orleans is in the process this week of removing four statues of Confederate leaders.

Such moves to remove reminders of the Confederacy have provoked enormous backlash. Many Southerners, the white ones at least, reacted with fury to efforts to remove the battle flag from public places. One of my more memorable assignments in my career was covering a huge pro-Confederate flag rally in Charleston, South Carolina at the capitol building. Thousands of people turned out and at one point, the crowd spontaneously burst into a round of The Bonnie Blue Flag, a rousing rebel favorite during the war: We are a band of brothers, and native to the soil, fighting for the liberty we gained through honest toil

I have watched all these changes mostly with resignation. While I wouldnt have thought of it in these terms when I was a child, it now seems obvious to me that black people would be, at best, uncomfortable being surrounded by reminders of a time when their ancestors were bound in slavery. And later those confederate symbols were adopted by white Southerners intent on oppressing the supposedly emancipated blacks in the post-war era, so the flag and other symbols represented a real and visceral threat to black people.

And yet, I also completely understand the anger and bafflement of white Southerners who are suddenly being told that the symbols and monuments they loved are bad and hurtful. For the most part, we were not taught to revere these symbols as an overt act of racism or white supremacy, but rather as an honorable part of our culture and history.

It is deeply unsettling to discover that others see these symbols in a much darker light.

Napa is being rocked by just such an event now, in the form of the battle over the Napa High School Indian logo (symbol or mascot  choose your favorite term for it). I certainly dont intend to weigh in on either side of the debate, but my own experience of watching the furor over Confederate symbols does give me a keen appreciation for the emotions involved on both sides.

On one hand, I can see how some Native Americans could see the mere depiction of their people, however dignified, as an appropriation of their heritage by a culture that stands on the ruin of their former civilization. Being surrounded by such reminders would be extremely painful and could even be seen as a deliberate provocation by a conqueror.

On the other hand, I can perfectly understand the bafflement and outrage of Napa High students and alumni who are suddenly being accused, explicitly or implicitly, of racism for supporting a symbol that they revere. They, like me, were not introduced to their symbol as a sign of white supremacy, but rather as a sign of honor and pride, and arguments otherwise feel like a very personal attack.

Whatever way the decision goes at Napa High School, I hope both sides come away with some empathy for the opposing viewpoint. Not all symbols mean exactly the same thing to everyone. However painful the debate, I think (or at least I hope) that we all gain a better understanding of each other and ourselves in discovering that.
Last week, behavioral researchers at Brown University held a colloquium covering, among other things, "analytic thinking ... and fake news sensitivity." At an informal gathering afterward, the conversation turned to the not-completely-unrelated topic of Donald Trump.

Earlier that week, syndicated columnist George Will had offered an amateur diagnosis of sorts. Noting Trump's off-base statements about the Civil War and other topics, Will wrote that the president suffers from a "dangerous disability" -- not only because he's ignorant, and ignorant of his ignorance, but because he "does not know what it is to know something."

It turns out Will is on to something, and not just because a few academics agree with him. His observations about Trump may have prompted him to independently discover a kind of meta-incompetence known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Brown cognitive psychologist Steven Sloman, who brought up Will's column after the colloquium, is something of an expert on ignorance of one's own ignorance. Earlier this year, he co-wrote the book "The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone." It describes a series of experiments in which people were asked to assess how much they knew about the way various systems work, from toilets to single-payer health-care systems. People generally rated their knowledge of those systems as high, but when asked to explain in detail how those systems actually worked, most couldn't.

One Brown guest speaker, psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Yale, has also done work on self-reflection and overconfidence. That put both he and Sloman in a good position to evaluate Will's analysis of Trump.

Neither went so far as to call Trump's lack of self-awareness a disorder. Sloman said that the knowledge illusion is a common form of human fallibility, but that Trump takes it to an exceptional degree. And for most people, the knowledge illusion is punctured once they realize they can't explain heath care or toilets or zippers as well as they thought. Not so Trump. When asked to explain something, he changes the subject, his confidence in his knowledge unwavering.

Trump's assumptions of expertise go beyond ordinary appliances and policy issues. He recently advised the Navy on how to improve aircraft carrier technology: "It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it's very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out."

Both Sloman and Pennycook study a trait called reflectivity, which can predict whether people are likely to be highly deluded about their own knowledge. The standard reflectivity test includes questions such as this: If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? And this: In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

For most people, these questions take a moment's thought, though the less-reflective types will blurt out the most intuitive and wrong answer: It's not 100 minutes for the widgets and not 24 days for the pond.

Pennycook borrows the definition of bull - actually using the more colorful slang - from philosopher Harry Frankfurt: information that's presented with no concern for the truth. In an earlier study, he gave subjects randomly generated phrases such as "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty," which he called "pseudo-profound" bull. Low scores on the reflectivity test correlated with people seeing deep meaning in the statements.

In another recent paper, he examined the connection between reflectivity and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Named after psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the effect describes the way people who are the least competent at a task often rate their skills as exceptionally high because they are too ignorant to know what it would mean to have the skill.

Pennycook and his colleagues concluded that the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to one's very ability to reason and reflect. They asked subjects to take a test of reflectivity and to guess how they did. Many of those who were unreflective thought they did well, since they had no idea what it would mean to be reflective and therefore were too incompetent to evaluate their own performance.

This is getting close to Will's diagnosis of Donald Trump as a person who thinks he knows everything but in fact doesn't know what it is to know something. The Dunning-Kruger effect and the knowledge illusion aren't disorders, but are part and parcel of being human. Some people, however, are much more subject to these than others. And Trump seems to occupy an extreme end of the spectrum.

Is there any hope for Trump? His experience as president may make him more aware of how little he knows, said Sloman. Trump recently told reporters, for example, that "Nobody knew health care was so complicated." He couldn't quite bring himself to admit being wrong without sharing the blame with the rest of the world -- but perhaps it's a start.
In March Josh Phelps, the young native St. Helena entrepreneur and winemaker, announced that he had sold his interests in the Taken Wine Company to Trinchero Family Estates, the company that produces the brand.

Phelps started the company with his childhood friend Carlo Trinchero back in 2009. The two friends had made a couple barrels of cabernet from grapes sourced from some of the best vineyards available to them and ended up with about 100 cases of wine.

In an interview with the St. Helena Star in December 2013 the two partners described how they coined the name of their new company.

Each time they sent off their naming proposals to the oracle of the Internet, they received the same results: That name was taken. So finally, in a stroke of humorous insight, they used the rejection as inspiration and The Taken Wine Company brand was born.

According to Phelps in that interview, their target customer was the young professional who had a passing interest in wine, but who might have been reluctant to spend big dollars on a bottle: young people who might pick up a bottle for a special dinner or a date. With a certain price sensitivity in mind, they pegged their wines to sell between $18 and $30.

In a publication called Grail, Phelps said the label had grown from the initial 100 cases in 2009 to about 50,000 cases in 2016 under the companys partnership with Trinchero Family Estates.

Now, according to a press release, Phelps said the time had come to set out on his own to start a new wine company, and so he sold his interest in the brand to Trinchero Family Estates, the company that still produces it.

According to the press release, Josh Phelps is forging his own entrepreneurial path in St. Helena and intends to continue to produce wines under the guidance of his renowned winemaking father, Chris Phelps.
Governor Rick Scott announced that Florida set another record by welcoming the highest number of quarterly visitors in the states history with 31.1 million visitors in the first quarter of 2017. This represents a 2.5 percent increase over the same period in 2016.



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Lower gas prices have fueled record-breaking domestic travel to Florida. VISIT FLORIDA estimates that a record 27.1 million domestic visitors traveled to Florida in Q1 2017, reflecting a 3.2 percent increase over the same period last year.

But a strong U.S. dollar has continued to stifle visitor growth from Canada and overseas since 2013. Estimates also show that 2.7 million overseas visitors and 1.3 million Canadians came to the Sunshine State in January-March 2017, unchanged from the first quarter of last year.

Instead of addressing the impact of economic factors such as fuel prices and currency exchange rates on tourism in the Sunshine State, Governor Scott took another swipe at the Florida Legislature for defunding VISIT FLORIDA.

I am proud to announce today that Florida set another record by welcoming 31.1 million visitors during the first quarter of 2017, the highest number of quarterly visitors in the states history, said Scott. This historic number would not have been possible without the significant funding we have invested in VISIT FLORIDA over the past few years. It is disappointing that the Florida Legislature made a shortsighted decision to jeopardize the growth of our tourism industry and the 1.4 million jobs that rely on it by cutting funding to VISIT FLORIDA by 67 percent. Now is not the time to take our foot off the gas. In business, you would never stop marketing when you start to see great results. Instead of decimating funding to VISIT FLORIDA, we should be investing in tourism marketing so we can continue to bring record visitors to our state.

Photo and chart credit: Brevard Times
Florida teacher was arrested after a Broward County Sheriffs Deputy discovered her in the back of a car of with a partially-dressed 15-year-old boy.



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Just after 2 a.m. on Thursday, May 11, 2017, the deputy found Pamela Stigger moments after she had engaged in sexual acts with the boy in the car parked near the intersection of Northwest 70th Avenue and Northwest 58th Street in Tamarac, Florida . Stigger, who is a teacher at Forest Glen Middle School, had been the victims teacher in the past.

The boy told investigators that Stigger was giving him a ride home when she pulled her car over and began kissing him. According to the arrest report, Stigger said that it was the boy who was trying to seduce her and that she was only trying to mentor him.

The Florida drama teacher now faces felony charges including two counts of sexual battery and one count of lewd conduct.

Photo credit: Broward County Sheriffs Office

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Posted by Mark Williams | May 15, 2017





It's been a long time since Chevrolet had a decent off-road vehicle in its stable. You might have to go all the way back to the original S-10 ZR2 or Blazer ZR2 in the mid- 1990s to the mid-2000s. And the fact that GM employees who worked on the 2017 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 had experience with the Hummer brand was not lost on us. No matter how Chevy got to this point, we take it as a good sign that it's back on the off-road trail and producing an impressive pickup.

Here are the five standout features you'll find on the ZR2. This isn't a comprehensive list, but these are the ones we find most intriguing.

Outstanding Shock Absorbers

Those who spend a lot of time on bad roads will drool over the Multimatic Dynamic Suspensions Spool Valve shock absorbers. The spool-valve technology allows the Multimatic tuners (GM does not own this technology) to deliver an impressive range of high- and low-speed capabilities. The shocks take up a lot of space under the truck, but their range of capability is wider than any factory-offered shocks we've experienced. No matter how hard we pushed them, we couldn't get them heated.

Transfer Case Tech

It's no surprise that the transfer case, which houses the 4x4's low-range gearing, is the heart of this off-road machine, but what surprised us is the versatility and flexibility of the system. It allows for front- and rear-locking differentials in each of the four drivetrain modes  two-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, 4-High lock and 4-Low lock  and it also offers a tire-spinning Off-Road mode that gives the stability and traction control system a little more latitude before power is pulled from the engine.

Steering Control

This is an often overlooked aspect of many pickups, but there are some players  especially now that many systems are electronically controlled  that are doing a solid job of tuning steering systems to accommodate a wider range of driving situations. For example, the Ford F-150 Raptor has three separate settings, depending on which mode you select. Likewise, the Ford Super Duty (without electronic controls) offers a ratio-changing gear to give the driver better control at speed or in parking lots. Although the ZR2 has neither of those capabilities, it does have an impressively smooth and adjustable on- and off-road feel. In fact, even with the front locker engaged and the wheels at full lock, you do not get the typical "crow hop" that many other pickups exhibit.

Spare Tire Options

We normally don't like anything that decreases the amount of room available for a load in a pickup's bed, but in this case, we'll make an exception. GM Accessories will offer a spare tire carrier for the bed of both the 6.5-foot extended-cab and 5.5-foot crew-cab beds so ZR2 owners can move the spare from under the truck into the bed, where it's easily accessible. That's crucial when off-roading. If it were us, we would want a spare under the truck and in the bed, just in case our spare gets a flat. And that's possible, because buyers can purchase the carrier for the bed and keep the other spare under the truck.

Payload and Towing

We know that when engineers put a truck like this together, they look very closely at all the trade-offs. As we've seen with the Raptor and the Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro, the trade-off for off-roading capability is less payload (noted on the door tag here) and towing capacity  two important factors for pickup buyers. We like the fact that the new ZR2 sees only a small reduction in both these areas. It's rated to tow a respectable 5,000 pounds (down from a max towing of 7,600 pounds from the regular Colorado) with payloads of 1,100 pounds for extended cabs and more than 1,200 for crew cabs (down from roughly 1,500 pounds in both configurations for the regular Colorado).

Cars.com photos by Mark Williams; manufacturer images
08:54

India's refusal to join China's high-profile Belt and Road initiative is 'regrettable' but New Delhi's boycott will not at all affect the cooperation in infrastructure development among its neighbouring countries, a report in a Chinese state-run newspaper said on Monday.



The two-day Belt and Road Forum which is being attended by leaders from 29 countries, including Pakistan, has been boycotted by India due to sovereignty concerns over the $50 billion (Rs 3.25 lakh crore) China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.



'While India recently issued an official statement saying it would not be part of the 'One Belt and One Road' (B&R) initiative, it will not affect the trend towards cooperation in infrastructure development among its neighbouring countries at all,' Global Times said on Monday.



'India was openly sceptical of Chinas Belt and Road Forum hours ahead of the opening of the event, mainly due to concerns over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a key project of the B&R, and whether it might influence the disputed Kashmir region,' it said.



The B&R is a grand economic cooperation and development plan open to everyone, and is aimed at improving infrastructure in countries along the B&R route, thus benefiting the local people, it said.



'China would never force any country to participate in the B&R if it was too sceptical and nervous to do so. It is regrettable but not a problem that India still maintains its strong opposition to the B&R, even though China has repeatedly said its position on the Kashmir dispute would not change because of the CPEC,' the article said.



Referring to the statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs on March 13, a day before the two-day B&R summit, it said India also cited the potential debt burden as one of its other concerns, saying that, 'connectivity initiatives must follow the principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create an unsustainable debt burden for communities'.



'It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbours' debt burden, the neighbours appear willing to take on more,' it said.



On Saturday, Pakistan and China inked new deals worth nearly $500 million (Rs 3,250 crore), covering airport, port and highway construction, it said.



The article further stated that given the active responses from countries along the route, there is no way for India to impede its neighbouring countries from cooperating with China in infrastructure development.



'China has formally invited India to join the B&R. If India doesnt want to take a part on the stage, then it should just be a good member of the audience. The role is still available if India changes its mind, but it may only be a small role if it is left too late,' it said. -- PTI



IMAGE: Chinese President Xi Jinping makes a toast during the welcoming banquet for the Belt and Road Forum at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sunday. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/Reuters


11:41

Update on the triple talaq hearing in the Supreme Court.



The All India Muslim Personal Law Board today told the Supreme Court that triple talaq is a matter of faith being practiced by Muslims for the last 1,400 years and hence the question of constitutional morality and equity did not arise.



The Muslim body also equated triple talaq with the Hindu belief that Lord Rama was born at Ayodhya.



"Triple talaq is there since 637. Who are we to say that this is un-Islamic. Muslims are practicing it for last 1,400 years. It is a matter of faith. Hence, there was no question of constitutional morality and equity," former Union Law Minister and senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for AIMPLB, said.



"If I have faith that Lord Rama was born at Ayodhya, then it's a matter of faith and there is no question of constitutional morality," Sibal told a five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar.



He also referred to the fact that the source of triple talaq can be found in Hadith and that it came into being after the time of Prophet Muhammad.



The AIMPLB is advancing arguments before the bench which also comprises Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer.



Yesterday, the Centre had told the apex court that it will bring a new law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community if all forms of divorce including triple talaq are struck down.



Today is the fourth day of the hearing on a clutch of petitions challenging triple talaq, polygamy and 'nikah halala' which is going on before a bench comprising members of different religious communities including Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Hindu and Muslim.
NEW DELHI: In a bid to build industry ready talent for the IT sector in India, Nasscom's IT-ITeS Sector Skills Council (SSC) in association with Edcast on Friday launched the 'Basic Learning for Future Technologies platform' website.

The website was launched by Nasscom President R. Chandrashekhar.

It will give students, universities and corporations, access to basic and advance level courses on the latest in technology.

"These courses will help the learners gauge the basic concepts of new technologies helping them build their skills to advanced levels thereby making them industry ready," a statement said.

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Aviation technologies to offer online bachelors degree

by Pete Rosenbery

CARBONDALE, Ill.  Southern Illinois University Carbondale this fall will offer an online bachelors degree specialization in aviation maintenance management.

The online program is for graduates of two-year aviation maintenance technician schools, avionics, and other aviation-related programs who already are working in the field, and gives students an opportunity to earn a bachelors degree in aviation technologies, Karen Johnson, associate professor in the Department of Aviation Technologies, said. Students will be able to use prior coursework from accredited institutions in addition to work experience as required credit hours.

Classes will begin with the fall 2017 semester in August. It is possible, based on a students own pace, applicable credit hours, and work experience, to earn the bachelors degree in one year, Johnson said.

The online offering is the first for aviation technologies and SIUs aviation program, Michael Burgener, aviation technologies department chair, said. Aviation program faculty will teach the courses.

This new program in aviation technologies will allow aircraft technicians working in industry to complete their Bachelors degree online while continuing in their careers, Burgener said. They dont have to disrupt their lives by leaving work and enrolling in a traditional university program.

Information on the program and courses is available online or by contacting Rachel Lee, academic adviser. For additional information on the Department of Aviation Technologies program, visit their website.
(B&R Forum) Quotable quotes of world leaders at Belt and Road forum Xinhua Weibo Facebook Twitter Reddit Diigo Delicious Digg Linkedin MySpace Sina Weibo Kaixin Renren Q-zone Tencent Weibo Sohu Weibo NetEase Weibo Source: Xinhua | 2017-05-14 22:32:33 | Editor: huaxia Chinese President Xi Jinping and world leaders attending the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation pose for a group photo in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. Xi attended the opening ceremony of the forum and delivered a keynote speech. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei) BEIJING, May 14 (Xinhua) -- World leaders gathered in Beijing Sunday for the opening of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, sharing their views on how to better advance the Belt and Road Initiative. The followings are some quotable quotes of the representatives of the Belt and Road partners: Chilean President Michelle Bachelet speaks at a plenary session of high-level dialogue at the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chilean President Michelle Bachelet -- The breadth of the One Belt, One Road, the high level of participation and its strategic dimensions, highlight its capacity to become the biggest economic cooperation project in place today. Czech President Milos Zeman speaks at a plenary session of high-level dialogue at the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei) Czech President Milos Zeman -- The One Belt, One Road Initiative is the most significant project in all our modern history. I salute China for this courageous, long-term project. Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn speaks at a plenary session of high-level dialogue at the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn -- The Belt and Road Initiative is the largest and non-conflicting economic cooperation of the 21st century. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras speaks at a plenary session of high-level dialogue at the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras

-- We highly value the importance of this initiative for people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and tourism, and we see the great opportunities in the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif speaks at a plenary session of high-level dialogue at the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif -- Let me make it very clear, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, an economic undertaking, is open to all countries in the region. Special envoy of British Prime Minister Theresa May, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond -- It is my belief that Britain, lying at the western end of the Belt and Road, is a natural partner in this endeavor. Special envoy of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Minister of Economic Affairs Brigitte Zypries -- The Belt and Road Initiative aims to improve infrastructure between Asia and Europe. This will bring the world's two largest trading partners in Asia and Europe closer. Peter Thomson, President of the UN General Assembly -- The Belt and Road Initiative brings enormous benefits to all involved and serves as a main driver of the global transformation emerged by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim -- For those in the less developed community, our greatest task is to raise our aspirations to meet those of the people living in the countries that are still in need of many more investment for development. The Belt and Road Initiative is most remarkable for just the size of the aspiration. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde -- The Belt and Road Initiative is about connecting cultures, communities, economies, and people, and about adding new economic flavors by creating infrastructure projects that are based on 21st-century expertise and governance standards. World Trade Organization Director-General Roberto Azevedo -- Infrastructure is essential. A lack of proper transport network was on top of the trade cost list and the One belt, One Road is hugely important in responding to this need. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum -- The One Belt and One Road Initiative is a pioneering, international framework based on an "open platform concept," which does not need a leader, but a curator who acts as a catalyst and coordinator for ensuring win-win outcomes. Xinhua Weibo Facebook Twitter Reddit Diigo Delicious Digg Linkedin MySpace Sina Weibo Kaixin Renren Q-zone Tencent Weibo Sohu Weibo NetEase Weibo Back to Top Close
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 02:20:06|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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JERUSALEM, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday urged the United States to move its embassy to Jerusalem, responding to an earlier statement by U.S. State Secretary Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson suggested on Sunday that moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem might not impact the Trump administration's efforts to reach a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

He told NBC that President Donald Trump "I think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region, and understanding, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have."

In the evening, Netanyahu released a statement, charging that the move "won't harm the peace process."

According to Netanyahu, transferring the embassy will "advance peace" by "shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

Israel occupied East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Shortly later, it annexed the territory, in a move condemned internationally.

The Palestinians want to establish a state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 03:15:44|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, May 14 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has strongly condemned attacks against the civilian population and the United Nations in Central African Republic (CAR), urging authorities to investigate and bring those responsible to justice, said a UN statement on Sunday.

The UN chief reiterated that attacks against United Nations peacekeepers "may constitute a war crime," said the statement.

"The Secretary-General is outraged by the attacks perpetrated by suspected anti-Balaka against civilians and the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) on May 12-13," the statement said.

These attacks led to significant population displacement, an undetermined number of civilian casualties and the death of one Moroccan peacekeeper, bringing to six the number of peacekeepers killed in the Central African Republic this week, according to the statement.

"The Secretary-General offers his condolences to the family of the bereaved peacekeeper and the Government of the Kingdom of Morocco," it said.
CAPE TOWN, May 14 (Xinhua) -- South African Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa began a 24-hour pro-Palestinian hunger strike on Sunday evening as the plight of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails drew more international attention.

Ramaphosa was joined by Communications Minister Ayanda Dlodlo and Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi.

Ramaphosa ate his last meal ahead of the hunger strike before 6 p.m. on Sunday. He will only be allowed to have salt water, which is what Palestinian prisoners have been surviving on for the last 26 days, before ending the strike at 6 p.m. Monday.

The strike is solidarity with about 1,600 Palestinian prisoners who have been on hunger strike in 200 Israeli jails since April 17 to demand better prison living conditions.

The prisoners are on strike to draw international attention to the plight of Palestinian political prisoners, many of whom are held in solitary confinement.

South African anti-apartheid struggle veterans and several organizations have launched a campaign codenamed DignityStrikeSA to show solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners.

The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, named after anti-apartheid hero Ahmed Kathrada, lauded Ramaphosa for his actions which "will inspire other South Africans to follow suit".

Ramaphosa was considered to be the most senior politician endorsing the demands of the Palestinian prisoners.

Earlier this month, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) affirmed its position that the Israeli state's pattern of arbitrary arrests and detention without trial of Palestinians "bears the hallmarks of apartheid South Africa".

According to figures provided in February by Israel's Prison Service, at least 6,820 Palestinians, including hundreds of minors, are incarcerated in Israeli prisons.

Most of them are jailed for participating in the struggle against the Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 04:41:21|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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By Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Sarantos Zilakos, a young Greek electrical engineer, is leaving work each afternoon since 2011 with a warm smile on his face. He returns home to his wife and 17-month-old daughter proud, because he feels he is making his own contribution to a major project that has been praised internationally as a success story of bilateral cooperation between Greece and China.

Zilakos, 31, is working at the department of cranes maintenance at Piraeus Container Terminal (PCT), a COSCO SHIPPING subsidiary which runs the site in the past seven years posting impressive results.

Piraeus has never witnessed such glory, he told Xinhua in a recent interview as state leaders were gathering at Beijing to discuss the Belt and Road Initiative in which Greece's largest port holds a key role.

After the Chinese investment at PCT piers have been expanded and upgraded, modern cranes have been erected, the terminal has been linked to the railway network connecting the port to central Europe, the number of containers loaded and discharged has skyrocketed.

Cargoes loaded and unloaded at the port totaled 3.74 million TEUs (20-foot equivalent units) in 2016, up from 880,000 TEUs in 2010, when COSCO Shipping's subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminal (PCT) took over the management of Piers II and III.

Born, raised and still living at Piraeus, son of a seafarer, Zilakos has witnessed the change up close. He is optimist that the work done inside the port will help Greece recover from a seven year acute debt crisis, in particular after COSCO SHIPPING also purchased the majority stake in Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) last year.

According to the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, the total value of the PPA agreement amounts to 1.5 billion euros (1.6 billion dollars) until the expiration of the concession in 2052.

The PPA's privatization will help create 125,000 jobs, according to a survey of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, one of Greece's leading think tanks.

"The local society has embraced the port because it is not only the premises of the port which are blossoming, but also the other stores outside and our partners are flourishing," Zilakos told Xinhua.

"One store after the other was closing due to the economic crisis which hit Greece. Today all our partners who are running their businesses outside the port and are cooperating with COSCO SHIPPING have opened new stores, new entrepreneurs have joined in... All these are fundamental. These are great steps for the local economy," he said.

In a country suffering from high unemployment -- with rates reaching up to 65 percent among youth -- the investment has opened prospects for jobs. Several young people are sending their CVs to PCT, including many of Zilakos' friends.

Currently thousands of Greeks are working at the port along with a small number of Chinese managers. People of different philosophies find the common ground and collaborate harmoniously to achieve the best results, the young electrical engineer noted.

Working conditions are very good, he said. All employees are offered a free meal during their shift.

"Each one of us here is a member of a team. We do not take into consideration whether someone is Chinese or Greek. We are all working as a team and we all learn from each other," Zilakos told Xinhua.

"The management is listening to the employees, they discuss our ideas and views and this helps us become more productive," he underlined.

After the success story of PCT through win-win Sino-Greek cooperation he is convinced that bilateral cooperation can be successful also in other fields, he said.

"Greece, our country, is going through very difficult years this period and it is very important for such a small country with so many problems today to become a junction, an international junction (for trade)," Zilakos stressed.

He strongly believes that China can help Greece become this junction. He sent his CV to PCT in 2011 because he was impressed with the Chinese and their working style.

Before his work for PCT, as an employee of a Greek company, in 2008 he spent seven months at Dalian, a coastal city in northeast China's Shenyang province, for ship repairing works.

He was impressed with how quickly constructions were erected within just a few hours and innovation in technology.

When he heard that Chinese investors arrived at Piraeus and electrical engineers are needed, he applied for a position at PCT and he was happy he made this decision, he told Xinhua.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 05:56:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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PYONGYANG, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Monday confirmed the test firing of a medium long-range ballistic missile one day earlier.

The official Korean Central News Agency said the test fire of a new gorund-to-ground strategic ballistic missile "Hwasong-12" was successfully carried out on Sunday by scientists and technicians in the field of rocket research.

DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un guided the test fire on the spot, said the report.

"The test fire was conducted at the highest angle in consideration of the security of neighboring countries. The test fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead," it said.

The missile "accurately hit the targeted open waters 787 km away after flying to the maximum altitude of 2111.5 km along its planned flight orbit, said the report.

"Kim Jong Un hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," said the report.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 06:07:06|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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By Raimundo Urrechaga

HAVANA, May 14 (Xinhua) -- On the second Sunday in May, Cuba celebrates Mother's Day with unique fervor: phone lines collapse from overload, people scramble to buy flowers before they sell out, and restaurants are packed to the rafters with extended families.

For more than a decade, Kenia Coba, a young resident of the central province of Cienfuegos, about 220 km southeast of Havana, dreamed of one day being the center of that attention.

But motherhood was elusive. After several years of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, Coba and her husband decided to get help from their local fertility clinic.

Doctors said she suffered from polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrine disorder that leads to the formation of ovarian cysts.

"I underwent surgery and then had several (fertility) treatments, including six artificial inseminations last year that didn' t work," Coba recalled.

"Afterwards I was put into a program for in vitro fertilization, in which I finally got an embryo to hatch and it's the baby that fills my life with joy today," Coba told Xinhua as she held her baby, Marco Antonio, in her arms.

"All those years were very painful because every time I tried and failed to get pregnant, it was frustrating. However, thanks to the revolution, today I am a happy mother," she said.

Not only did Cuba's state-run health service help Coba realize her dream of becoming a mother, but it did so free of charge.

Fertility treatments in other countries are often prohibitively expensive, with in vitro fertilization (IVF) ranging from 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. dollars. That may not sound like much, until you consider that most couples don't get pregnant on the first or even second try.

Each year, around 3,000 Cuban couples from the central provinces of Camaguey, Ciego de Avila, Sancti Spiritus, Villa Clara and Cienfuegos undergo fertility treatment at the Gustavo Aldereguia regional hospital in Cienfuegos, where Coba was treated, according to Dr. Praxedes Rojas, director of the institution.

"In Cuba the whole process is free of charge, from appointments to medicines and treatments," said Rojas.

"Since the assisted reproduction program began in 2010, our regional center has registered more than 500 births and we hope to continue raising that figure in the coming months and years," she said.

Three more fertility clinics in Cuba cater to the growing number of couples who are waiting until their late 30s to have children.

Cuba's socialist ideal of providing universal healthcare is coupled with the state's awareness that as the birth rate declines, the overall population is aging, potentially lowering productivity and burdening the economy.

Last year, the population of Cubans 60 and over reached 19.6 percent, while the fertility rate registered 1.6 children per woman.

At the same time, official figures showed that in 2016 the Cuban government spent 5.8 billion Cuban pesos (242 million U.S. dollars) in social security payments.

If this trend continues, by 2030, 30 percent of the Cuban population will be 60 and over and the government will have to allocate around 10 billion pesos (417 million U.S. dollars) to social security.

To reverse the trend, Cuban lawmakers approved a set of laws in December 2016 to promote childbirth by strengthening maternity rights for women in both the public and private sectors.

Xinhua recently interviewed with Haydee Franco, director of policies and projections at the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, on the impact and scope of the legislation.

According to Franco, the new legislation expands existing maternity benefits, such as financial incentives received monthly by the parents, and also encourages greater family integration in the area of childcare.

"We have included in these laws the extension of those rights to the maternal or paternal grandparents, so they can enjoy the benefits that were previously exclusive to the mother or the father," said Franco.

The benefits are paid until the infant is a year old, said Franco.

If the grandparents are still employed state workers who assume the care of the baby, they have the right to be compensated with 60 percent of their average monthly salary.

"This also encourages the mother to go back to work earlier with the simultaneous social benefit of maternity leave and her normal monthly salary. Therefore, this will lead to a greater income for Cuban families," she said.

For the first time, women who work in Cuba's budding private sector also have access to the maternity benefits.

"For these workers, the new laws will consider pre and postnatal maternity leave, six weeks before the child is born and 12 weeks after. They will be guaranteed the right to receive the corresponding economic benefit and social security," said Franco.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 06:47:15|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 (Xinhua) -- A new book, by University of Washington (UW) geologist David R. Montgomery, tries to be upbeat about rebuilding Earth's soils.

The book, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life," is a good-news environment story compared to the author's first popular book, "Dirt," which was about how erosion undermined ancient civilizations around the world in places like modern-day Syria and Iraq.

"This new book was my attempt to ask the question: Can soil be restored at scale? On real farms, not in some little yard in Seattle. Could it be done on real, commercial farms in the developed world, as well as on subsistence farms in the developing world?" Montgomery was quoted as saying in a news release from UW.

Available this month, a decade after the first pop-science book, "Growing a Revolution" weaves a travelogue with history and science to tell of visits to farms in North and South Dakota, site of the famous Dust Bowl, as well as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Africa and Costa Rica. These farmers use technology ranging from hand-powered machetes to enormous modern no-till seeding machines.

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion caused the phenomenon.

The success of "Dirt" brought invitations to speak at farming conferences. Along the way, Montgomery met farmers who talked about successes in restoring health to degraded soils. "I kept running into examples of farmers who had restored fertility to degraded land. So I started asking, what did you do? How long did it take? I began to recognize patterns among farmers who had been successful not just in restoring soil, but in restoring profits to their farms."

Seeing approaches that worked in very different situations, the UW professor of Earth and space sciences sought out the common ground for building fertile soil as a consequence of farming.

These farmers had moved away from tilling their fields, which chops up worms, erodes soil and disrupts beneficial microbes. Instead they focused on boosting soil health, thereby bolstering a crop's natural defenses. "It boils down to a combination of three factors: Park the plow to minimize soil disturbance; grow cover crops, including legumes to get nitrogen and carbon into the soil; and grow a diversity of crops, so that you can break up the pest and pathogen carryover problem," he said. "Those three principles -- ditch the plow, cover up, grow diversity -- were common among the farmers that had restored degraded soils and returned profitability to their farms."

He intentionally did not seek out "alternative" or "environmental" practices. The most farms he visited were not certified organic. Most farmers were motivated by economic worries and the skyrocketing costs of herbicides, pesticides and diesel. By nurturing healthier soils that can retain water, suppress pests and don't require as much fertilizer, pesticides or work of diesel-powered machines, they reduced their costly inputs by at least 50 percent and up to 90 percent.

Beyond the economic payoff for farmers, adopting these practices produces environmental benefits by reducing chemical use and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere to help counter climate change, Montgomery said.

"I think there's a big opportunity to make conventional agriculture more 'organic-ish' by adopting this suite of practices," Montgomery said. "By moving away from high-disturbance, high-input agriculture you can reap many of the benefits of soil health without necessarily going fully organic."

American soils are currently estimated to have lost about half their pre-agricultural organic matter, a key ingredient in fertile soil.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 07:07:20|Editor: liuxin

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SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 (Xinhua) -- A new study indicates that applying a strategic approach to studying helped college students improve their exam scores by an average of one-third of a letter grade.

Published in Psychological Science, the study was inspired by meetings that lead author Patricia Chen, a postdoctoral research fellow in Stanford University's Department of Psychology, had with less-than-enthused students after they received their exam grades.

Many of these students, Chen noticed, lamented their poor performances despite the great deal of effort that they had put into studying. The classic complaint seemed to be, "I studied really hard, and I'm just as smart as (another student). I don't understand why I didn't do well."

From the students' responses to her question, "Describe to me how you studied for the exam," Chen gleaned the insight that many students fall short of performing to their potential because they don't employ a strategic approach to their learning. "Blind effort alone, without directing that effort in an effective manner, doesn't always get you to where you want to go."

The research team, which included Desmond Ong, a Stanford doctoral student in psychology, homed in on one important aspect of strategic learning -- engaging in self-reflection to identify and use resources wisely. The researchers developed a "Strategic Resource Use" intervention that blends educational and social psychological theories and "prompts students to think deliberately about how to approach their learning effectively with the resources available to them."

The intervention was administered through brief online surveys sent to college students in an introductory statistics class about one week before their exams. Students in the control group received a business-as-usual exam reminder. Students in the intervention group received the same exam reminder and a short Strategic Resource Use exercise: They were asked to think about what they expected to be on the upcoming exam and then strategize what kinds of resources they would use to study most effectively.

The students then were asked to explain why each resource they chose would be useful to their learning and then describe how they planned on using their chosen resources.

As results, students who strategized their resource use before studying outperformed comparable classmates in the control group by an average of one-third of a letter grade in the class.

Why was the intervention so effective? The researchers found that the brief intervention exercise made students more self-reflective about how they approached their learning. In turn, this metacognition enabled students to use their resources more effectively, as their self-reports showed. "It's not merely about using a greater number of resources for studying. The important point here is using resources more effectively," Ong was quoted as saying in a news release from Stanford.

The strategic thinking also provided students with other psychological benefits, including feelings of empowerment regarding their education. Students who had taken the intervention perceived a greater control over their learning and expressed fewer negative feelings about their upcoming exams.

Chen proposes that the principle behind Strategic Resource Use can be applied beyond academics, including parenting, losing weight or learning a new skill at work. "Actively self-reflecting on the approaches that you are taking fosters a strategic stance that is really important in life," she said. "Strategic thinking distinguishes between people of comparable ability and effort. This can make the difference between people who achieve and people who have the potential to achieve, but don't."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 07:52:29|Editor: liuxin

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SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 (Xinhua) -- A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear case Monday against U.S. President Donald Trump's travel ban.

The U.S. Courts for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, Northern California, ruled on Feb. 9 against reinstating a travel ban signed on Jan. 27 by Trump as part of an executive order.

The president subsequently issued a revised order on March 6, taking Iraq off the list of countries whose citizens are blocked from entering the United States for 90 days but keeping six other Muslim-majority countries on the list.

The travel ban in the second order was blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii, thus throwing the case again into the 9th circuit court.

In initiating the legal challenge on March 9, Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin noted that the new order, compared with the initial ban, "nothing of substance has changed: there is the same blanket ban on entry from Muslim-majority countries."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 08:58:35|Editor: liuxin

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SYDNEY, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Australian mining giant BHP Billiton has announced its first major re-brand in 16 years with the company to be known as only BHP from Monday.

BHP, the world's largest mining company, adopted the "BHP Billiton" name after a merger with South Africa's Billiton in 2001.

The company has chosen to go back to its original moniker to recapture the company's status as a household name rather than being known as a multinational corporation.

The "Think Big" re-branding strategy also includes a new company logo with a bold uppercase "BHP" replacing the lowercase insignia introduced at the time of the merger in 2001.

Geoff Healy, chief external affairs officer at BHP, said the campaign would help demonstrate the important role BHP plays in the Australian economy.

"We fundamentally believe that, as society changes, it is up to us to make the case more confidently and effectively for the positive role that well-run and responsible companies play in society," Healy told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Monday.

"We will take the opportunity to change our logo and move to a brand that Australians have known for generations -- BHP."

BHP, which is headquartered in Melbourne, conceded that "BHP" was "used colloquially around the world" since 2001 despite the official name.

A series of 30-second television commercials as well as print and online advertisements will be run around Australia to promote the company going back to its original name.

The re-brand comes as the company faces pressure from U.S. hedge fund Elliott International to shift its primary stock market listing away from Australia.

Scott Morrison, Australia's Treasurer, said the proposal was "unthinkable" and "contrary to the national interest."

BHP shares were worth 17.55 U.S. dollars apiece on Monday, giving the company a valuation of 87.8 billion U.S. dollars.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 10:04:38|Editor: An

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MADRID, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Spain shares a multipolar vision of the world with China, said Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, on the eve of his trip to China for the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which is being held on May 14-15 in Beijing.

In a written interview with the Chinese press, the Spanish head of government highlighted that his country's commitment to multilateralism to help resolve conflicts is similar to that of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Rajoy said it was normal that with its development and growth, China has assumed an international responsibility in line with its importance, and he believes China's leadership is vital on issues such as nuclear non-proliferation and the fight against climate change.

He also said that it is good for the world that the Chinese economy continues to grow, adding that the Chinese leadership was correct to use a growth model which helps boost internal growth in the service sector.

"Sometimes we fall into the trap of not realizing that a large part of the lifestyle we enjoy in the West would not be possible without the change experienced in China in the past 20 or 25 years," explained Rajoy.

The Spanish leader noted that the new Chinese economic model generates more sustainable growth and that the proof is China's signing of the Paris Agreement on fighting climate change.

He said the transformation was a challenge, but also an opportunity, because it offers a chance for quality growth.

As regards the Belt and Road Forum, Rajoy hopes that it would help discover the "best way to cooperate".

He also expressed his optimism that it would have tangible results in the form of a joint communique which would be a reference for the development of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative in the coming years.

He said Spanish companies "which have earned deserved international recognition in the world of infrastructures, energy and telecommunications" want to participate in the Road and Belt Initiative.

In his eyes, this intention is also "a splendid idea" to increase bilateral cooperation.

Rajoy noticed that Spain and China have maintained their own "Silk Road" over almost three centuries to effect a link between China and Europe and America. "We can also do it in the 21st century," he added.

Ports such as Valencia, Seville or Cadiz have been the focal points for contact with China, while now it is the trains departing from China that transport a myriad of Chinese goods to Europe and beyond, said Rajoy.

The cargo train running to and fro between the Chinese city Yiwu and the Spanish capital of Madrid is serving to strengthen commercial relations between Spain and China, and the Spanish prime minister believes it can possibly do more.

He said the integration of the rail link between Yiwu and Madrid with the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road would allow Spain to become a 'hub' for connections with north Africa and Latin America.

He also expressed satisfaction that trade balance with China is improving, with a record of exports worth over 5 billion euros (about 5.47 billion U.S. dollars) in 2016 and an expected further growth.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 10:19:55|Editor: liuxin

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SEOUL, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Three out of four South Koreans expected newly-elected President Moon Jae-in's good management of state affairs, a survey showed on Monday.

According to the Realmeter poll, 74.8 percent of respondents showed a positive outlook for Moon's handling of state affairs. Those who gave a negative outlook were 16.0 percent, while 9.2 percent was on the fence.

The survey, commissioned by local broadcaster CBS, was conducted on 1,516 voters from Wednesday to Friday. It has 2.5 percentage points in margin of error with a 95 percent confidence level.

President Moon won a landslide victory in the five-way presidential by-election, which was held last week. He won 41.1 percent of the total votes.

"Justice" was picked as the most important value Moon should keep in mind in his state management, the survey showed. It was followed by communications with people, harmony, equality, peace and decentralization.

The policy agenda people considered the most significant was economic recovery and better livelihood, followed by reform and the removal of deep-rooted evils.

The most significant reform agenda was the reform of the so-called politically-motivated prosecutors, trailed by political reform, media reform, conglomerate reform and bureaucratic reform.

Support for Moon's ruling Democratic Party advanced 3.0 percentage points from a week earlier to 44.7 percent.

The main opposition Liberty Korea Party posted 13.0 percent in support scores, down 4.5 percentage points from the previous week.

The minor progressive Justice Party ranked third, with a 9.6 percent approval rating. It marked the party's highest ever and was up 1.3 percentage points from a week earlier.

Support for the centrist People's Party tumbled 4.8 percentage points to 8.8 percent, logging the first single-digit rating since the party was created in February last year.

The minor conservative Righteous Party garnered 8.3 percent, up 0.9 percentage points from a week earlier.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 10:45:10|Editor: An

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by Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, May 14 (Xinhua) -- The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative offers enormous opportunities for all the countries involved and Greek business community warmly supports all the efforts to deepen the two countries' cooperation under this context, President of the Greek-Chinese Economic Council Fotis Provatas said recently.

In an interview with Xinhua at an economic forum before the Belt and Road forum opens in Beijing, Provatas said the Greek entrepreneurs are confident that bilateral cooperation under the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road will benefit both nations, the international trade and the world economy.

The Greek-Chinese Economic Council was established seven years ago, as COSCO SHIPPING subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminal (PCT) was taking over the management of a part of Greece's largest port, with the aim to promote the economic ties between Greece and China.

The remarkable results at PCT in recent years have made the council's mission easier, Provatas said, adding the terminal has been expanded and the infrastructure upgraded, while the number of containers passing through Piraeus has quadrupled.

He added that Piraeus is turning into a major transport hub for the products of major multinationals.

COSCO SHIPPING also acquired the majority stake in Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) in 2016 by presenting an impressive plan for the port's upgrading.

According to the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, the total value of the PPA agreement will amount to 1.5 billion euros (1.6 billion U.S. dollars) when the concession expires in 2052.

The PPA's privatization will help create 125,000 jobs, according to a survey of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, one of Greek leading think tanks.

At the crossroads of three continents, Piraeus plays a key role in the Belt and Road Initiative that was proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, said Provatas.

"We are living in a new era. The Chinese government's policy is steadily progressing ... Greece is about the sea first of all. There are the sun and good people, but mainly the sea. There was no way that the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road from China to Europe would not pass through Greece and Piraeus port," Provatas noted.

The initiative also offers numerous opportunities to strengthen trade and cultural exchanges among all countries involved, the Greek businessman stressed, hailing China's leading role in changing the international economic landscape.

"We believe that the Chinese leadership will proceed with wisdom to tap the opportunities available today to restructure the economic and business relations in the world," he added.

Provatas believes that Greece and Europe will hold a very important role in today's world.

"Today we are in a very good stage. Everybody agrees that Greece and China should move forward. Greek entrepreneurs stand by the side of the Chinese because they know that as long as this port is growing, this will be the best example to attract more Chinese investments to Greece," Provatas said.
The file photo taken on Dec. 10, 2015 shows a China Southern Airlines passenger aircraft at Auckland Airport, New Zealand. (Xinhua/Tian Ye)

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, May 14 (Xinhua) -- The cooperation between New Zealand's largest city Auckland and China has made great achievements and boasted great prospects under the framework of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, said Chinese Consul General in Auckland Xu Erwen.

New Zealand is the first western developed country to participate in the initiative.

"This creates opportunities for the two countries to open new growth momentums and explore new development path," Xu told Xinhua.

As the largest city in New Zealand, Auckland has one third of the national population and is an important trade, cultural, education, and technological center.

Xu said Auckland is an aviation hub heading to south Pacific island countries and major cities in South and North America. It connects China and New Zealand across the Pacific Ocean.

As an economic growth engine in New Zealand, Auckland maintained practical cooperation with many Chinese provinces and cities under the B&R framework, she said.

The number of Chinese tourists visiting New Zealand grew rapidly in recent years, and most of them entered the country via Auckland.

The number of flights between Auckland and major Chinese cities increases rapidly, with 150 direct flights per week in peak seasons, which boosts bilateral cooperation, brings more benefits to two peoples, and enables more quality kiwi products to enter the Chinese market.

Chinese culture has received increasing popularity among New Zealand people, with frequent cultural exchanges between the two sides, Xu said, adding that New Zealand's second Chinese Culture Center will soon be established in Auckland, offering a newplatform for bilateral cooperation.

Financial cooperation deepens between Auckland and China, she said, adding that major Chinese banks have established branches in Auckland, which will support trade and investment cooperation between the two countries and will also provide financial support for Auckland's infrastructure, energy, and commercial programs.

Chinese enterprises have expressed enthusiasm in participating in Auckland's infrastructure projects, Xu said, stressing that the cooperation between the enterprises of the two countries will fundamentally improve Auckland's infrastructure of hotel, railways, roads, ports and wharfs, which will boost the sustainable development of local tourism.

Xu said the capital and technology brought by the Chinese enterprises will join hands with Auckland's advanced management experience, technological innovation and research and development to form a great innovation capability for economic growth. Enterprises of both sides have been establishing long-term, stable partnerships in the agricultural and husbandry area.

Xu said the Belt and Road Initiative contains huge opportunities for the two countries and will benefit people in all South Pacific countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 12:05:46|Editor: Yamei

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by Feng Yingqiu

YANGON, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's peace process is gaining momentum as it heads for the second meeting of the 21st Century Panglong Peace Conference slated for May 24, an inclusive dialogue designed to open to all ethnic armed groups.

A latest meeting of the Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee (UPDJC), chaired by State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and held late last week, has unprecedentedly agreed on self-legislation of region or state governments, achieving a breakthrough in the political dialogue between the government and cease-fire armed groups.

The consent is one of the 21 detailed facts agreed and which will be submitted to the upcoming second meeting of the Panglong Peace Conference in Nay Pyi Taw for approval.

The facts cover sovereignty, equality, self-legislation, federal union principle or structure and delegation of authority and democracy system.

The granting of rights for self-drawing of constitution of their own nationalities' states will be the first ever in Myanmar's history.

However, the regional constitution shall not be against the country's overall constitution and the constitution be applied within the regions, some ethnic leaders clarified.

The other points of the agreements reached at the meeting were related to sectors of economy, social affairs, farmland and natural resources and environment.

Aung San Suu Kyi, at the UPDJC meeting, called for working for the success of the Panglong Peace Conference, describing Myanmar's peace process as part of the world's and saying that the process can be taken as an important lesson and example for other countries in conflicts.

The UPDJC meeting discussed a range of matters dealing with probable signing agreements in the Panglong peace conference and adopted decisions on some sectors in the agenda related with politics, economy, social affairs, farmland, environment and security.

Meanwhile, Myanmar's peace commission also negotiated deals with non-ceasefire signatory armed groups to the Nationwide Cease-fire Accord (NCA) last week to enable them to attend the Panglong Peace Conference.

The negotiation, which took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand, covered areas proposed by the armed groups' Delegation for Political Negotiation (DPN), for them to sign the ceasefire pact.

The DPN consists of seven non-ceasefire signatories, mainly the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Kayinni National Progressive Party (KNPP) and New Mon State Party (NMSP).

Myanmar's previous government and eight armed groups mainly involving Kayin National Union (KNU), Arakan Liberation Party (ALP) and Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS)/Shan State Army (SSA)-South signed the NCA on Oct. 15, 2015.

As part of its efforts for national reconciliation and peace, the incumbent government sponsored the first meeting of the 21st Century Panglong Conference in Nay Pyi Taw in August 2016 after its takeover and the second of its kind is to be followed as scheduled.

The government is also making efforts to bring in those non-NCA signatories to join the signing and enable them to be included in the peace process.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 12:45:55|Editor: Yamei

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PHNOM PENH, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's keynote speech delivered Sunday at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation truly reflects China's commitment to a world of peace and prosperity, a Cambodian official and a scholar have said.

In his speech, Xi highlighted that the Belt and Road should be built into a road of peace, prosperity, opening up, innovation and connection of different civilizations, adding that China would contribute an additional 100 billion yuan (about 14.5 billion U.S. dollars) to the Silk Road Fund.

Besides, two Chinese banks will set up special lending schemes worth a total of 380 billion yuan (about 55.1 billion U.S. dollars) to support Belt and Road cooperation.

Cambodia's Secretary of State and spokesman for the Council of Ministers Phay Siphan said that he totally agrees with Xi's idea, saying that the capital increase in support of the Belt and Road Initiative would bring enormous benefits to the countries involved.

"President Xi's remarks showed China's commitment to upholding peace and stability," he said. "I believe that the initiative will become the symbol of peaceful development and the symbol of international cooperation with mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity."

"I highly appreciate the initiative, which could help build a world of peace and development for all," he added.

The official said China's additional funding for the initiative is good news for the countries involved in the initiative and "will provide greater opportunities for countries to develop infrastructure and economy-driven sectors."

Joseph Matthews, director of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Education Center, said he completely endorsed the idea Xi raised at the forum.

"Without peace, economic development of any region or country is impossible," he told Xinhua. "The Belt and Road Initiative is the beginning of a new era of development in the region, and in future this road will be known as the Peace Road."

According to Matthews, China's generous contribution to regional development is laudable and encouraging.

"Most of the countries on the Belt and Road are poor and are struggling to meet the basic requirements of their people. This contribution will open the door for new development in the region."

Matthews said that for Cambodia, China is the biggest donor and contributor to the development of its infrastructure and industrial sectors.

"The Belt and Road Initiative will definitely help to maintain development and sustain the growth Cambodia has achieved in the past two decades," said the scholar.

In his speech, Xi called on countries to forge partnerships of dialogue with no confrontation and of friendship rather than alliance.

"President Xi's statement about 'creating partnerships rather than alliance' is a very meaningful and powerful message to all countries that are seeking strategic and military alliance in the region, and acting like a provocateur," Matthews said.

The Belt and Road Initiative was proposed by Xi in 2013 with an aim to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient Silk Road routes. It comprises the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 13:16:10|Editor: liuxin

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- More than seven percent of university students surveyed said that they have experienced harassment from unidentified people on their college campuses.

The survey, which polled 601 students from over 100 Chinese universities, revealed that 7.58 percent of the respondents had experienced harassment, according to an article in Monday's edition of China Youth Daily.

Moreover, about 65.24 percent said they had heard of similar situations experienced by their classmates.

However, the article quoted some students as saying that in many cases victims dare not to directly confront their harassers and many felt ashamed to tell their families or teachers.

Students surveyed also said that enhanced security is required on university campuses. A total of 58.81 percent of the students said their campuses allow members of the public to enter freely, while 81.38 percent said universities should take measures to control entry.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 13:16:13|Editor: liuxin

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SEOUL, May 15 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in has decided to dispatch a former prime minister under the Roh Moo-hyun government to China as a special envoy on the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Senior presidential press secretary Yoon Young-chan told a press conference on Monday that former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan was picked as the special envoy to China.

Lee was sent to China as a special envoy in February 2003 when late President Roh Moo-hyun, for whom Moon served as chief of staff, was inaugurated, according to the presidential Blue House.

The Blue House said in a press release that President Moon selected Lee who can best understand his diplomatic vision and foreign policy.

It noted that Lee has a ripe experience on matters on China and maintains close relations with Chinese figures.

A senior presidential official, who declined to be identified, told Xinhua that the special envoy will discuss a broad range of issues, including the THAAD and the DPRK.

As the two issues are inter-connected, the official said, they would be handled together.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 13:46:38|Editor: liuxin

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SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Two militants were killed in a gunfight in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said Monday.

The gunfight broke out at Waripora area of Handwara in frontier Kupwara district, about 87 km northwest of Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir.

"Two militants were killed in a brief gunfight in Waripora village of Handwara yesterday," a police spokesman said. "Acting on a specific information regarding the presence of militants, police along with army launched a search operation, during which militants present in the area fired upon the search party. The fire was retaliated, ensuing in gunfight."

Police said, the slain militants belonged to Lashker-e-Toiba and their identities were being ascertained.

Indian army or police have not suffered any casualty or damage in the standoff.

The police spokesman claimed recovery of assault rifles and ammunition from the gunfight spot.

"Two assault rifles and two pistols along with some ammunition have been recovered from the gunfight site," the spokesman said.

Last week an Indian army officer was kidnapped and subsequently killed by militants in the region. The officer was at home on leave and had gone to attend wedding ceremony of his cousin.

Militants in the region usually target families and individuals for their possible links with Indian police and defense agencies. Even people having associations with pro-India political parties are targeted at times.

Militant groups opposing New Delhi's rule are engaged in a guerilla war with Indian troops in the region since 1989. Gunfight between the two sides takes place intermittently.

Kashmir, the Himalayan region divided between India and Pakistan, is claimed by both in full. Since their independence from Britain, the two countries have fought three wars, two exclusively over Kashmir.
Chinese Ambassador to Nepal Yu Hong (2nd L in front) and Foreign Secretary of NepalShanker Das Bairagi (2nd R in front) sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Kathmandu, Nepal, on May 12, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhou Shengping)

KATHMANDU, May 13 (Xinhua) -- As Nepal and China signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on bilateral cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative earlier this week, many believe that the deal will boost development of infrastructure and connectivity projects in the Himalayan country.

Various sections of society including mainstream media in Nepal have welcomed the government's move to sign the MoU with China.

"It is indeed a historic milestone for Nepal to sign the deal with China under the Belt and Road framework that has opened up a new door with multiple opportunities for infrastructure development and economic growth," connectivity expert Surya Raj Acharya told Xinhua on Saturday.

Cross broader highways, railways, transmission lines and internet connectivity will contribute to bringing drastic changes in Nepal's socio-economic landscape, he said.

Acharya believes that the Belt and Road Initiative is an important agenda for Asia since the region has emerged as the hub of global economy.

The initiative will "improve physical connectivity and deepen economic integration among Asian countries and thereby unleash full potential of Asia," Acharya said, adding that "the benefits that Nepal can reap by getting connected to the global value chain through China will be in an unimaginable scale."

The MoU signed between Nepal and China was aimed at enhancing cooperation on promoting connectivity of facilities, trade connectivity, financial integration and connectivity of peoples.

Nepal's Foreign Secretary Shanker Das Bairagi said that the country's participation in the Belt and Road Initiative has brought new tremendous opportunities creating a win-win situation between China and Nepal.

Foreign Affairs Analyst Nishcal Nath Pandey told Xinhua on Saturday that Nepal's participation in the initiative will open new prospects of opportunities both for China and Nepal.

Meanwhile, the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation to be held in Beijing has attracted huge attention from the government, media and various sections of society in Nepal. Mainstream daily newspapers, online media outlets, television channels have given coverage regarding the forum.

"The Belt and Road Forum is a good platform for Nepal to promote its investment potential in the field of infrastructure, energy and tourism," Lekhnath Pandey, a diplomatic correspondent with the Kathmandu-based Himalayan Times Newspaper, told Xinhua.

Nepali Deputy Prime Minister Krishna Bahadur Mahara is leading a delegation to China to attend the forum in Beijing on Sunday and Monday.

"Our high level participation in the Belt and Road Forum shows that the Belt and Road Initiative is highly important for us and we want to reap benefits for achieving socio-economic development," he told Xinhua.

The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, was proposed by China in 2013 with the aim of building a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient trade routes.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 14:01:46|Editor: liuxin

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SEOUL, May 15 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday picked special envoys to be dispatched to China, the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Union.

Senior presidential press secretary Yoon Young-chan made an official announcement of the special envoys in the presidential Blue House.

Moon's office said in a press release that Moon picked figures who can best understand his diplomatic vision and foreign policy. They are set to leave as soon as schedules are tuned up with counterparts.

Moon won a landslide victory in the May 9 presidential by-election. Since his inauguration soon after the victory, the new leader had a series of phone conversations with his counterparts of the world powers and promised to send special envoys for discussions on current situation on the Korean Peninsula.

Moon decided to send Lee Hae-chan, who served as prime minister under the Roh Moo-hyun government, to China as special envoy on the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Lee is an influential figure in Moon's ruling Democratic Party as he is a lawmaker and one of co-chiefs who led the party's presidential campaign.

He was dispatched to China as a special envoy when late President Roh, for whom Moon served as chief of staff, was inaugurated in February 2003.

The Blue House said Lee has a ripe experience on China and maintains close relations with Chinese figures.

A senior presidential official, who declined to be identified, told Xinhua that the special envoy will discuss a broad range of issues, including the THAAD and the DPRK.

As the two issues are inter-connected, the official said, they would be handled together.

Moon's special envoys to the world powers will deliver his handwritten letters to his counterparts to express his willingness for a cooperative diplomacy, while meeting with a wide range of senior government officials to explain the new government's policy and vision and exchange in-depth opinions on the development of bilateral relations, the Blue House said.

Meanwhile, President Moon selected Hong Seok-hyun, former chairman of the Joongang Media Network, as a special envoy to the United States.

Hong worked for the Roh administration in 2005 as the country's ambassador to Washington and has since built a broad range of personal connections in the United States.

Rep. Moon Hee-sang, a lawmaker of the Democratic Party, will be sent to Japan as special envoy. He is a former National Assembly vice speaker and a sitting senior advisor of the ruling party.

He built a broad personal network in Japan when he was the chief of the South Korea-Japan Parliamentarians' Union from 2004 to 2008.

Rep. Song Young-gil of the Democratic Party will be dispatched to Russia as the lawmaker serves now as vice chief of the South Korea-Russia diplomatic committee comprising lawmakers of the two nations.

Song built connections with Russian figures when he served as a mayor of the country's west port city of Incheon from 2010 to 2014. In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded him the order of peace and amity.

Cho Yoon-je, a professor at Sogang University in Seoul, was picked as a special envoy to the EU and Germany. He served as an economic aide to former President Roh and was former ambassador to Britain from 2005 to 2008.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 14:11:51|Editor: liuxin

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TOKYO, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) plane disappeared from radar on Monday morning in the southern part of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost prefecture, government sources said.

There were four people on board the plane, when it lost contact with a ground controller at around 11:50 a.m. local time, the defense ministry said.

The LR-2 reconnaissance plane was flying in a westerly direction from Hakodate airport in Hokkaido, the ministry added.

The twin prop plane is 14 meters in length and has a capacity of 10 people. A stretcher for transporting emergency patients is installed in the aircraft, and the plane is also used for reconnaissance missions by the GSDF.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 15:12:01|Editor: xuxin

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KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Nine Taliban militants were captured following a special operation in Afghanistan's northern province of Kunduz on Monday, police said.

"On specific intelligence inputs, Afghan Special Operation Forces carried out a raid in Chahar Dara district early Monday, capturing nine armed militants," Gen. Shir Aziz Kamawal, commander of 808 Spin Zaar Police Zone based in the region, told Xinhua.

The security forces also destroyed two weapons depots during the operation, the source added.

No security force member was harmed during the raid and the detainees were shifted to an army base for questioning in the province, 250 km north of Afghan capital of Kabul, the source noted.

The Kunduz province, as well as neighboring Baghlan and Takhar provinces, has been the scene of heavy clashes over the past couple of months as Taliban has been trying to challenge the government forces in the once relatively peaceful region.

In a separate development, a would-be suicide bomber named Ahmad surrendered to security forces and handed over an explosive belt to the army personnel in eastern Nangarhar province on Sunday, an army source told Xinhua.

The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since late last month when the militant group launched its annual rebel offensive in different places of the country.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 15:42:16|Editor: ying

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MANILA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Philippines on Monday lauded China for pushing forward the Belt and Road Initiative, saying the "bold and fresh" undertaking of Chinese President Xi Jinping will provide more opportunities to the Philippines and the region.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte arrived in Beijing on Saturday for the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation which was officially opened by President Xi on Sunday.

"We note that (Xi) desired the Belt and Road as a bridge for peace, a road to prosperity, a way to boost inclusive growth and balanced development, and to promote equality," the Philippine government said in a statement on Monday.

The Philippines shares the view that a peaceful environment is needed to achieve development goals, it said.

"We are looking forward to the One Belt, One Road Initiative in promoting a prosperous and peaceful community of nations," the statement read, referring to the initiative on the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road brought up by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The initiative is aimed at building a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient Silk Road routes.

It added that the Philippines was pleased to hear that the Belt and Road Initiative is meant to help developing countries to create more opportunities for growth and uplift the lives of people, which are also the priorities of the Duterte administration.

Duterte's cabinet members said the China-proposed initiative would be beneficial to the Build-Build-Build infrastructure plan of the Philippine government.

The Philippines can make use of the initiative to attract more investment for Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines, said Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana shared the sentiment, saying that the insurgency and crimes in the country's South are driven by the lack of economic development opportunities.

"And if we can bring in the infrastructure development in the South, it will be included in this One Belt, One Road, the investment will come, then maybe we can address some of the problems, economic problems in the South, and improve the security situation in the country," Lorenzana said.

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who was recently appointed as the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) by Duterte, said the Philippines will benefit more from the initiative which promotes inter-connectivity.

He noted that the Philippines, due to its archipelagic nature, should improve its infrastructure and inter-connectivity, and the Belt and Road Initiative provides international context for the infrastructure plan of the Duterte administration.

Philippine officials also believe that the Belt and Road Initiative is more than infrastructure inter-connectivity. It is believed to expand the market basis, diversify financing schemes and reinforce people-to-people connectivity, among others.

Duterte's spokesman Ernesto Abella said the Belt and Road Initiative "touched on peace and cooperation, inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 15:52:58|Editor: xuxin

Members of the Thai Royal Navy's aircraft carrier "Chakri Naruebet" wave during the International Maritime Review held at Singapore on May 15, 2017. The Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) hosted the first Singapore International Maritime Review (IMR) on Monday in celebration of its Golden Jubilee, the Ministry of Defence said in a press statement. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)

SINGAPORE, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) hosted the first Singapore International Maritime Review (IMR) on Monday in celebration of its Golden Jubilee, the Ministry of Defence said in a press statement.

The ministry said the event was attended by 46 warships and four aircraft, as well as more than 30 navy chiefs, vice navy chiefs and directors-general of coast guards and more than 40 flag rank officers, from 44 participating nations.

Speaking at the review, President Tony Tan Keng Yam said, "The gathering of navies around the world for the first Singapore IMR is a testament to the strong friendships and extensive network Singapore enjoys across the world."

He added that multilateral cooperation is key to ensure a stable maritime order as well as safe and secure seas as most of the security threats are transnational in nature.

Apart from conducting a land review of the berthed warships, President Tan boarded the recently commissioned Littoral Mission Vessel, RSS Independence, for the sea review of warships anchored off the base.

He then renamed the Changi Naval Base, which hosts more than 100 foreign warships a year, into RSS Singapura, Changi Naval Base.

The renaming will serve as a reminder to Singapore's sailors of the RSN's heritage and the RSN's vital role in defending Singapore, Tan added.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 16:03:05|Editor: ying

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BUENOS AIRES, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Argentine analysts hailed China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative as an open and inclusive multilateral global project that promotes development.

The reaction followed Chinese President Xi Jinping's keynote address delivered at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation that is being held on May 14-15 in Beijing.

"While in some parts of the world, they propose building walls, China is inviting international integration and cooperation," international law expert Paola de Simone told Xinhua on Sunday.

Political scientist Juan Manuel Karg highlighted the initiative's "multilateral" aspects, as it aims to boost trade and cooperation, through building trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia, Africa and Europe.

Underscoring his country's commitment to the initiative, Xi also announced China will contribute an additional 100 billion yuan (14.5 billion U.S. dollars) to the related Silk Road Fund.

"Latin America is not part of the route, properly speaking, but it will benefit as a supplier to countries that are on the route. The speech said the project is not just for Asia, Africa or Europe. It includes us," said De Simone.

In fact, two Latin American presidents, Mauricio Macri of Argentina and Michelle Bachelet of Chile, take part in the forum.

In a recent interview with Xinhua, Macri praised the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative for helping boost communications and interconnection between countries.

"Argentina is ready to serve as a bridge between Asia and Latin America," De Simone added.

The South American country, she said, could take advantage of the 60 billion yuan (8.7 billion U.S. dollars) in aid China offered developing countries and international organizations that take part in the initiative to drive development and improve living conditions around the world.

The Belt and Road Forum, the highest-level international meeting on the Initiative since Xi proposed it in 2013, attracted more than 20 foreign heads of state and government as well as delegates from more than 100 countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 16:13:09|Editor: xuxin

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SANAA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Ministry of Public Health and Population on Sunday night declared a public health emergency in the capital Sanaa as a result of the spreading cholera epidemic, which has killed 115 people so far since April 27, the country's state news agency Saba reported late on Sunday.

"This declaration came after the cholera epidemic spreads across the capital's districts and neighborhoods," the health ministry said in a statement cited by Saba.

"The number of infected cases has exceeded the normal rates and the health system can not cope with this unprecedented health disaster, in which the number of infected patients has increased to 2,567 during the past two weeks," said the ministry.

The ministry sent an urgent call to all international and local health organizations to help address the worsening situation, in which the ministry said that the situation "is threatening with an unprecedented health and humanitarian disaster."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned Sunday of a very serious cholera outbreak in Yemen as hospitals are struggling to cope with increasing numbers of patients.

At a press conference in Sanaa, the ICRC Operations Director Dominik Stillhart said more than 8,500 suspected cholera cases have been reported in 14 governorates of Yemen from April 27 to May 13.

"Unfortunately, 115 people have died from cholera (during this period). This is extremely serious," he said.

"The conflict has taken a very serious toll on the water supply, the health system, the sanitation system as well as the economy and that all are about to collapse," he added.

The cholera outbreak in Yemen was first announced by Yemen's Ministry of Public Health and Population on Oct. 6, 2016.

The World Health Organization has warned the healthcare system in Yemen is on the verge of collapse as many hospitals have shut down. It said only 45 percent of Yemen's hospitals are operational at the moment, but are facing shortages of supplies and staffs.

Late last month, the ICRC's director for the Middle East, Robert Mardini, said the ICRC is stepping up its operations and doubling its budget for Yemen this year to 90 million U.S. dollars.

Yemen, the impoverished Arab country in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, has been involved in a civil war since two years ago.

The war pits Iranian-allied dominant Houthi movement, backed by forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, against their foe of Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

The capital Sanaa and most of the northern provinces are under control of Houthi rebels.

The war has killed more than 10,000 people, half of them civilians, and displaced over 2 millions, according to humanitarian agencies.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 16:13:13|Editor: ying

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Belt and Road Initiative offers many practical opportunities to change people's lives, and UNICEF is very happy to cooperate, senior UN official Anthony Lake said Monday.

In an exclusive interview with Xinhua, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) chief praised the Belt and Road Initiative, calling it an "extraordinary strategic vision."

Lake said while there is a focus on trade and infrastructure, he is also looking forward to the human development the initiative can deliver.

"It is human beings that make development happen, and it's human beings that benefit from development," Lake said.

The UNICEF chief said the healthy growth of children is among the great accomplishments the initiative can make.

Lake said work needs to be done on children's health and reducing child mortality. The key to future prosperity is educating children so they want to contribute to their societies and become good citizens.

The key priority for UNICEF is to reduce inequality, and he is looking forward to cooperating with the Chinese government on this issue, Lake said.

"You have to focus education on the most disadvantaged children, so that when they grow up, they can compete in an even playing field with the children of the wealthy and better-off," said Lake.

"Shifting educational resources and helping improve education of the poor is the best investment you can possibly make," he said.

Unlike China, children in some nations don't have a childhood, so it is imperative for countries to work together and give these children a better chance to grow up, according to Lake.

"I wish while children in China are enjoying their own childhoods, remember out there in the world there are those who are not," said Lake. "If they can have a better life, that will not only be good for their countries, but for China as well."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 16:18:16|Editor: xuxin

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MOSCOW, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The share of modern weapons and military hardware of the Russian Land Force has reached 42 percent, Mikhail Popov, deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council told the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper published on Monday.

"The Land Force units are receiving new types of weapons and military hardware, which now comprise 42 percent of their equipment. Receipt of new types of weapons and military hardware will increase the combat capabilities of the Land Force units," Popov said. ( The share of modern weapon systems and military hardware accounted for 58.3 percent of the Russian Armed Forces in late 2016, said Popov.

Popov added that a total of 36 military units of unmanned aviation, equipped with about 2,000 modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), had been produced in the Russian Armed Forces.
Cholera-infected Yemenis receive medical treatment at the corridor of a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen, on May 13, 2017.(Xinhua photo)

SANAA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Ministry of Public Health and Population on Sunday night declared a public health emergency in the capital Sanaa as a result of the spreading cholera epidemic, which has killed 115 people so far since April 27, the country's state news agency Saba reported late on Sunday.

"This declaration came after the cholera epidemic spreads across the capital's districts and neighborhoods," the health ministry said in a statement cited by Saba.

"The number of infected cases has exceeded the normal rates and the health system can not cope with this unprecedented health disaster, in which the number of infected patients has increased to 2,567 during the past two weeks," said the ministry.

The ministry sent an urgent call to all international and local health organizations to help address the worsening situation, in which the ministry said that the situation "is threatening with an unprecedented health and humanitarian disaster."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned Sunday of a very serious cholera outbreak in Yemen as hospitals are struggling to cope with increasing numbers of patients.

At a press conference in Sanaa, the ICRC Operations Director Dominik Stillhart said more than 8,500 suspected cholera cases have been reported in 14 governorates of Yemen from April 27 to May 13.

"Unfortunately, 115 people have died from cholera (during this period). This is extremely serious," he said.

"The conflict has taken a very serious toll on the water supply, the health system, the sanitation system as well as the economy and that all are about to collapse," he added.

The cholera outbreak in Yemen was first announced by Yemen's Ministry of Public Health and Population on Oct. 6, 2016.

The World Health Organization has warned the healthcare system in Yemen is on the verge of collapse as many hospitals have shut down. It said only 45 percent of Yemen's hospitals are operational at the moment, but are facing shortages of supplies and staffs.

Late last month, the ICRC's director for the Middle East, Robert Mardini, said the ICRC is stepping up its operations and doubling its budget for Yemen this year to 90 million U.S. dollars.

Yemen, the impoverished Arab country in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, has been involved in a civil war since two years ago.

The war pits Iranian-allied dominant Houthi movement, backed by forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, against their foe of Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

The capital Sanaa and most of the northern provinces are under control of Houthi rebels.

The war has killed more than 10,000 people, half of them civilians, and displaced over 2 millions, according to humanitarian agencies.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 16:32:49|Editor: xuxin

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TOKYO, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) plane with four crew members on board disappeared from radar on Monday morning in the southern part of Hokkaido, in Japan's northernmost prefecture, the defense ministry said.

There were four crew male members on board the plane when it lost contact with a ground controller at around 11:50 a.m. local time, according to the defense ministry.

The four members included a pilot, a backup pilot and two mechanics, the ministry said.

The LR-2 reconnaissance plane took off in poor weather from Okadama Airport in Sapporo City at about 11:20 a.m. The light plane was heading for Hakodate Airport in the same prefecture.

The plane disappeared from radar about 30 km west of Hakodate Airport, the defense ministry said.

The twin prop plane is 14 meters in length and has a 10-person capacity. A stretcher for transporting emergency patients is installed in the aircraft, and the plane is also used for reconnaissance missions by the GSDF.

The jet belongs to the GSDF's Northern Territory Air Force in Sapporo City and was scheduled to transport a patient from a Hakodate hospital.

GSDF officials and firefighters are looking into the possibility the plane was involved in an accident and have deployed around 60 personnel to the area the plane disappeared from radar.

Helicopters are also carrying out searches from the sky.

Japan's Meteorological Agency said their was light rain and cloud in the area and there was a low atmospheric pressure in the area where the plane went missing.

The JMA said due to a cold westerly front coming in the atmospheric pressure in the area the plane was flying could have become unstable.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 16:42:54|Editor: xuxin

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Haditha, Iraq, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Three suicide bombers and two civilians were killed when the bombers affiliated with Islamic State (IS) group attacked the town of Haditha in Iraq's western province of Anbar, a local security source told Xinhua on Monday.

The attack occurred in the early morning when three suicide bombers infiltrated into al-Teen outskirts of Haditha, some 200 km northwest of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and holed up into a house, the source said on condition of anonymity, adding the householder was shot dead.

The security forces rushed to the scene and surrounded the house, the source said.

The security forces exchanged heavy fire with the suicide bombers and forced them to blow up their explosive, killing them all along with killing another family member and wounding four others, the source said.

In the first half of 2016, the Iraqi security forces and the paramilitary Hashd Shaabi units, backed by anti-IS international coalition had reclaimed large parts of the Sunni heartland of Anbar province, including the provincial capital of Ramadi and Fallujah.

However, areas near the border line with Syria and desert areas near the freed towns and villages are not yet cleared from IS militants, who frequently used them to carry out attacks.

The IS attack came as the Iraqi security forces backed by anti-IS international coalition are carrying out a major offensive to drive out the IS militants from their major stronghold in the western side of Mosul in northern Iraq.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 16:42:56|Editor: ying

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Two Chinese companies on Monday signed a contract with Kazakhstan's national railway company to buy 49 percent of an inland port near the China-Kazakhstan border.

China COSCO Shipping Corporation and Jiangsu Lianyungang Port Co. will each hold 24.5 percent of the dry port located in the Khorgos-East Gate special economic zone, according to a statement from China COSCO Shipping.

The dry port is about 15 km from the Khorgos port in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on the border of the two countries. From the port, railway cargo can reach Lianyungang in east China's Jiangsu in five days and reach Europe in about 10 days.

Xu Lirong, chairman of China COSCO Shipping, said the dry port is the company's first overseas railway investment project since the corporation was established.

The company aims to build it into an important trade passageway and a model project for China and Kazakhstan under the Belt and Road Initiative.

China COSCO Shipping is a state-owned company set up in early 2016 after the merger of COSCO and China Shipping.
People traveling between Pangani and Tanga town are helped by a rope on May 12, 2017 to crosses a River after Nema Tongani bridge in Pangani District Eastern Northern Tanzania. The bridge was swept away by flooding water following on going heavy rainfall in countrywide. (Xinhua/Stinger)

ARUSHA, Tanzania, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The incessant rains have wreaked havoc in eastern and coastal areas of Tanzania due to flooded roads, which in some areas has destroyed people's properties and some people are forced to close business.

Tanga is one of the regions which are highly affected with rains in the East African nation.

Reports said that some districts like Lushoto in Tanga Region have no connection with the regional headquarters as the roads are impassable due to floods, caused by fast-flowing water from mountains that end up turning the road into a river.

Bukoba residents in western northern Tanzania are stranded after flood swept road and bridge at Kemondo, Bukoba-Geita highway in Kagera region on Friday evening following heavy rainfall in Tanzania. The road also connects with neighboring Uganda. (Xinhua/Stinger)

Frasser Kashai, Tanga Regional Police Commander admitted that Lushoto-Mombo road in the region is one of the highly affected roads.

According to him, apart from floods, some of the road sections are covered by fallen trees.

The regional police chief said travelers from the country's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam to northern tourist capital of Arusha and vice versa were on Wednesday and Thursday stranded after water overflowed the road around Mombo and Mkumbala sections in Tanga region.

"We have stopped buses on both sides of the flooded section to avoid any risk," Kashai said.

Later in the day (Thursday) when water began to recede, Kashai said police permitted the traffic to flow in the style of one bus at a time in slow speed.

But the regional police chief said the road will remain closed during the night for security reason.

"For security reasons, no passenger or private motor vehicles will be allowed to move across the flooded area after 7 pm (local time)," he said, adding that the decision was made to avoid catastrophe in case the downpour intensified through the night as has been the case in recent days.

In Coastal Tanzania's district of Rufiji, heavy rains have destroyed swathes of rice farms within five wards in Rufiji river delta, posing serious food security concerns in the area.

Khatibu Chaurembo, Kibiti District Council chairman identified the affected wards as Mpakakioni Kongoloni, Mtunda, Mbuchi, and Salali.

He said the council had already sent a team of experts to conduct evaluation exercise on how to assist the victims who need assistance.

"Rice farmers always celebrate pours but we have never experienced destructive rains like this for the past 10 years," he said.

The chair added that the council would meet the district and regional disaster coordination committees to see how to bring assistance to farmers who have suffered huge losses after investing fortunes that have now gone with the floods.

In Tanzania's eastern region of Morogoro, reports cited three districts of Kilombero, Mahenge, and Malinyi as the highly affected with floods, where some places rendered people homeless and roads impassable.

Ulrich Matei, Morogoro Regional Police Commander admitted on the impacts of floods, though he had no figures of people who are homeless and those who have died across the region.

The Tanzania Meteorological Agency (TMA) has said that periods of heavy rainfall are likely to continue in some parts of the country especially the coastal strip during the month of May.

According to its monthly forecast, showers with occasional thunderstorms are expected over some areas in the regions of Tanga, Dar es Salaam, Morogoro and Coast as well as in Unguja and Pemba Islands.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 17:43:57|Editor: xuxin

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TOKYO, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of Okinawa's reversion to Japan from U.S. military rule on Monday described the continued presence of U.S. military bases on the island as "the biggest impediment to development."

In a statement to mark the occasion, Onaga said that even after the reversion "Okinawa continues to suffer from incidents and accidents linked to U.S. bases, environmental and other concerns," adding that the bases are the "biggest impediment to development" in his prefecture.

Local people in Okinawa have been hoping to see a significant reduction in their base-hosting burdens since the reversion, but the reality of the situation has been somewhat different.

In May 1972, Okinawa was ostensibly returned to Japanese control, with the area to be used for U.S. military facilities covering just less than 30,000 hectares.

And while as of January this year, the area is now less than 19,000 hectares, the pace of reduction compared to mainland Japan is comparatively slow.

Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture which accounts for just 0.6 percent of the total county's land, accommodates more than 70 percent of the total acreage of Japan-based U.S. military facilities.

The disproportionate amount of military-related crimes, accidents and instances of pollution on the tiny island has also led to a steady rise in anti-U.S. military sentiment in Okinawa.

Other sources of resentment have been a joint pact between Japan's central government and the United States to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma within Okinawa.

Onaga, a staunch opponent to the base being relocated to the coastal Henoko region on the island, said, "I will devote myself to tackling matters such as the bases issue to build a peaceful and prosperous Okinawa for future generations."

Onaga who has sued and been counter-sued by the central government over the long-running issue, has said he will do everything in his power to see the base relocated off the island completely rather than to the coastal Henoko area in Nago.

The Okinawan chapter of Japan's Defense Ministry last month, however, started constructing seawalls to surround an area in a coastal region on the island for the relocation the base amid uproar from local citizens.

The Okinawa Defense Bureau launched full-scale operations to build seawalls around a site to be filled with sand and earth that will prevent sediment spreading.

The Defense Bureau's new phase of construction follows maritime reclamation work in February involving dropping concrete blocks into the sea off the coast of Henoko from vessels equipped with large cranes.

The vessels dropped 220 blocks, each weighing 14 tons to form barriers in four areas in the sea where the seawalls will be built.

The construction work has drawn staunch criticism from local residents and officials in Okinawa. Protests to the reclamation work have been frequent.

In February, Onaga visited the United States in person to convey his message of resistance to the relocation move to U.S. President Donald Trump.

Onaga may now look to block the central government's reclamation work by refusing to issue a permit necessary for coral reefs to be moved in the area in which land is being reclaimed from, informed sources have said.

The Okinawa governor has floated numerous other ways he may try to block the central government's plans and protect the lives of Okinawans, including not approving any changes in the construction design of the new base, which involves a V-shaped runway being build on the reclaimed land.

The fact that the waters that the central government is planning to reclaim for construction of the base are home to the endangered dugong, which is a large marine mammal and cousin of the manatee, has also been mentioned as additional armament for Okinawan officials to use against the central government to try and block or impede its base-building plans.

The central government, however, despite the protracted standoff with Onaga, local officials and citizens, has maintained its stance that the relocation plan remains the only way forward in line with a pact made with the U.S. under its broader security alliance.

Nevertheless, Onaga said Monday he will devote himself to solving the U.S. base issue on behalf of the current and future generations that will continue to bear an undue burden of hosting U.S. military forces if the situation remains unchecked.

On Sunday, civic groups and labor unions demonstrated in Okinawa to mark reversion day and called for a stop to the relocation of the Futenma base.

The marches began on Friday and concluded on Sunday with a rally in Henoko, with organizers saying more than 2,000 people took part.

Nago City Mayor Susumu Inamine instructed the crowd to continue to fight for democracy and for Okinawa to come under its own rule. He also vowed to the crowd that he would not allow the replacement facility to be built in Henoko.

Protestors were seen on the streets wearing headbands and carrying placards reading: "No U.S. military bases in Okinawa!" and "U.S. military get out of Okinawa!"

One protestor in her twenties said she feels scared by the presence of so many U.S. military personnel, particularly when she reads about their involvement in incidents of rape and assault.

She said she didn't want her young sister to grow up knowing the same fear.

A man in his sixties said that living near the town of Kadena, near Kadena Air Base, had become increasingly difficult as he'd got older, due to the unbearable levels of noise from the jets taking off, landing and flying overhead.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 17:49:38|Editor: ying

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China's cyberspace authority Monday warned computer users to install and upgrade computer security software to avoid ransomware attacks.

Police and various government authorities have taken response measures against a global ransomware attack, and Internet security companies including Qihoo 360, Tencent and Kingsoft Security have also acted to provide increased security services, according to a statement issued by the cybersecurity coordination bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).

The spread of the ransomware is ongoing, but is slowing down, the statement said.

About 18,000 IP addresses in China have been confirmed as infected with the "WannaCry" ransomware, which began to spread worldwide Friday, according to the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center (CNCERT).

Another 5,471 IP addresses, mostly in Beijing, Shanghai and coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, are likely to have been infected by the computer virus, according to the center.

"Intranets in many industries and enterprises involving banking, education, electricity, energy, healthcare and transportation have been affected in different extents," it said.

The ransomware has paralyzed the online payment systems at some petrol stations across China since Friday, and also invaded some colleges encrypting papers and other documents.

Once a computer is infected by the ransomware, almost all documents and programs will be encrypted and users are asked to pay to remove the virus, said Han Zhihui, a computer engineer at CNCERT.

Currently, the cybersecurity industry is not aware of an effective means of decryption, Han said.

Han said users could re-install the operating system on infected computers, but risk of losing important data and documents.

The cyberspace authority said this global cyberattack has once again shown the unprecedented internet security challenges, calling on all sectors to address cybersecurity issues.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 17:54:42|Editor: xuxin

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WELLINGTON, May 15 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand will provide a further five million NZ dollars (3.4 million U.S. dollars) in relief assistance to pressing humanitarian crises across Africa and the Middle East, said Foreign Minister Gerry Brownlee on Monday.

"An estimated 45 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen, of which 20 million face starvation and famine," Brownlee said.

Monday's announcement brings New Zealand's assistance to relief efforts across the four countries to more than 7 million NZ dollars since March, he said, adding that it also brings New Zealand's total assistance to the Syria regional response to 27 million NZ dollars since 2012.

"Conflict and insecurity have exacerbated drought conditions, causing widespread humanitarian need," Brownlee said.

New Zealand will provide 2 million NZ dollars to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen and Nigeria, and another 2 million NZ dollars to the World Food Programme in South Sudan and Somalia.

"Not only will this provide emergency food assistance, it will also help fund food security initiatives such as school meals for children," he said.

One million NZ dollars will also be offered to support the International Committee of the Red Cross in Syria, where an estimated 13.5 million people are in need of assistance due to continuing conflict, he said.

"The aid will go towards providing household items, as well as providing healthcare to the sick and wounded," Brownlee said, adding that the funding will also be used to train female heads of households so they can start income-generating activities.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 18:20:01|Editor: xuxin

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ASTANA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A low-enriched uranium bank (LEU) authorized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will open in Kazakhstan on Aug. 17, under the witness of IAEA chief Yukiya Amano, the country's energy minister said Monday.

More than 70 percent of the construction work of the IAEA-sponsored nuclear fuel bank has been finished, and it is expected to be completed and put into operation in July, Kanat Bozumbaev said in the Majilis, the lower house of the parliament.

The reserve of uranium in the bank will be "inviolable," which will be used only in case of a crisis situation, he said.

In 2009, Kazakhstan initiated the establishment of an international nuclear fuel bank in its territory under the auspices of the IAEA. It signed an agreement with the IAEA on the matter on Aug. 27, 2015.

The bank will host up to 90 tons of low-enriched uranium, sufficient to run a 1,000 MW light water reactor.

The bank is fully funded by voluntary contributions and has no impact on the IAEA budget. The amount of donor contributions is about 150 million U.S. dollars to operate the bank for at least 10 years. The donors are the Nuclear Threat Initiative (50 million U.S. dollars), the United States, (49.54 million dollars), the United Arab Emirates (10 million dollars), Kuwait (10 million dollars), Norway (5 million dollars) and the EU (up to 27.4 million dollars).

Kazakhstan is a leading producer of uranium, boasting more than 15 percent of global uranium reserves.
LUSAKA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- African countries should support China's Belt and Road Initiative considering the immense benefits it will avail, a development expert said on Monday.

"Although I know that not all African countries will directly benefit from this initiative, I think Africa will do well to support it because of the spill-over effects that are expected to come with this project," Haggai Kanenga with the School of Development Studies at the University of Zambia (UNZA) told Xinhua in an interview.

Africa, he said, should support the initiative as it will complement the African Union (AU) Agenda 2063 aspiration, which has a component of unlocking infrastructure on the economic in order to spur development.

The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by China in 2013, aims to revive the ancient trade routes that span Asia, Africa and Europe and promote economic engagement and investment along the routes.

The initiative, he added, came at a time when Africa was trying to promote economic integration, adding that African countries should take advantage of this.

According to him, Africa should also take advantage of China's vast experience in infrastructure development.

This initiative came as Africa tries to improve infrastructure after realizing that without infrastructure, no meaningful development will be realized, he added.

He however called on all stakeholders to ensure that risks associated with the problem are handled to ensure its smooth implementation.

According to him, a huge project like this was likely to have asszociated risks due to the huge number of regions involved and he urged China to take advantage of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation to consult with other stakeholders on how to minimize the risks.
by Tan Shih Ming

SINGAPORE, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Singaporean shares closed 0.27 percent higher on Monday, as investors shrugged off threats from a ransomware attack that locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries.

With little evidence of widespread disruption in the region on Monday, investors appeared unalarmed by the weekend cyber attack, at least for now.

Maybank Kim Eng Research said "the Straits Times Index appears overextended, with immediate resistance at 3,290 points, with underlying support at 3,212 points."

Singapore's benchmark Straits Times Index rose 8.92 points to 3,264.21 points. Trading volume was 2.78 billion shares worth 1.4 billion Singapore dollars. Decliners outnumbered advancers 271 to 202.

Among top actives, Genting Singapore jumped 6.5 percent to 1.15 Singaporean dollars. It reported first-quarter net profit soared to 181.1 million Singapore dollars from 10.8 million Singapore dollars a year ago, bolstered by 96.3 million Singapore dollar gain on sale of 50 percent stake in Jeju resort.

Although its quarterly revenue slipped 4 percent to 586.6 million Singapore dollars on lower gaming and non-gaming takings, its gaming turnover grew 8 percent quarter-to-quarter on strong VIP and premium mass business.

ComfortDelGro fell 5.2 percent to 2.55 Singaporean dollars. It recorded first-quarter net profit of 82.5 million Singapore dollars, buttressed by special dividend from Cabcharge Australia. However, its quarterly revenue dipped 2.4 percent to 972 million Singapore dollars, dragged mainly by foreign-exchange translation losses and weak taxi business.

Among top gainers, DBS Group Holdings rose 0.4 percent to 20.77 Singaporean dollars, while Jardine Cycle and Carriage became one of the top losers by falling 3.1 percent to 45.04 Singapore dollars. (1 U.S. dollar equals to 1.40 Singapore dollars)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 19:05:33|Editor: xuxin

David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), addresses a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland, May 15, 2017. The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP) on Monday vowed to jointly step up support for desperate refugees fleeing South Sudan. In an updated response plan presented here in Geneva on Monday, the two agencies said that they were seeking 1.4 billion U.S. dollars to provide life-saving aid to South Sudanese refugees in the six neighboring countries until the end of 2017. (Xinhua/Xu Jinquan)

GENEVA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP) on Monday vowed to jointly step up support for desperate refugees fleeing South Sudan.

In an updated response plan presented here in Geneva on Monday, the two agencies said that they are seeking 1.4 billion U.S. dollars to provide life-saving aid to South Sudanese refugees in the six neighboring countries until the end of 2017.

The South Sudanese refugee response plan so far remains only 14 percent funded, they said.

"Bitter conflict and deteriorating humanitarian conditions in South Sudan are driving people from their homes in record numbers," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.

According to the UN information, the situation in South Sudan continues to worsen, with a combination of conflict, drought and famine leading to further displacement and a rapid exodus of people fleeing one of the world's most severe crises.

A UN source said that with more than 1.8 million refugees, one million of them are children, having sought safety in the neighboring countries, South Sudan has now become the world's fastest growing refugee crisis.

UNHCR said that the current rate of people fleeing South Sudan exceeds the humanitarian community's already pessimistic estimates, and the number of people fleeing to Sudan in March surpassed the expected figure for the entire year.
LONDON, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Ireland has beaten Belgium by a slim one-fault margin to win the second leg of the FEI Nations Cup Jumping Europe Division 2 series in Drammen, Norway.

When the best eight of the 13 competing nations returned for the second round it all came down to the last man into the ring, Irish army captain Geoff Curran, to decide the result.

The 37-year-old could afford a single mistake, but an additional time fault would draw his team level with the crack Belgian side, and any more than that would see victory slip from Ireland's grasp. So when his 13-year-old gelding, Ringwood Glen, put a toe in the water a tense silence descended on the arena.

"I had a feeling that I might have been in the water and I knew I was tight enough on time, but I kept the same plan of doing eight strides down to the last fence. It worked in the first round and thankfully again in the second, but I didn't plan on being quite that tight to the time allowed," said Curran.

Crossing the line with just 0.21 seconds to spare he clinched it however. And it was a gutsy result for the side that was already in the lead at the halfway stage despite a shaky start when Alexander Butler (Hallowberry Cruz) retired at the triple combination, but bolstered by solid performances from Cameron Hanley (Quirex) and Mark McAuley (Utchan de Belheme).

The experienced Belgian foursome of Olivier Philippaerts (H&M Legend of Love), Niels Bruynseels (Gancia de Muze), Pieter Devos (Dream of India Greenfield) and Gregory Wathelet (Coree) were firm favourites to win this leg of the seven-round series, but 17 faults left them lying in a surprising sixth place after the first round. They re-grouped with only four to add second time out, but couldn't overtake the fighting Irish when finishing with 21 faults.

France lined up third with 24 faults, bolstered by the only double-clear of the entire competition from anchor partnership Alexis Deroubaix and Timon d'Aure. Neither Ireland nor France were competing for points yesterday however as they both belong in the Europe Division 1 series, so Belgium maintains the lead in Division 2.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 19:05:43|Editor: xuxin

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GENEVA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Swiss government on Monday announced it obtained an observer status in the Arctic Council in the organization's latest ministerial meeting.

As an observer, Switzerland can contribute expert knowledge to the Council at the level of working groups, particularly in the interdisciplinary area of climate change research.

Usually, observer status enables non-Arctic states that have demonstrated sufficient interest in the Arctic to participate in the Council's meetings and working groups.

"Polar research is very similar to high-altitude research in the Alps. A number of Swiss institutes are internationally renowned for their high-caliber research on snow, the atmosphere, natural hazards, permafrost and mountain ecosystems," the statement from the Swiss government said.

"Swiss scientists have conducted research on glaciology in the Arctic for over a hundred years, making a substantial contribution to global climate research. Switzerland is known in this research community as the 'vertical Arctic nation,'", the statement added.

Founded in 1996, the Arctic Council is an intergovernmental forum promoting the environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainable development in the Arctic.

The Council comprises eight Arctic states and organizations representing Arctic indigenous peoples. Observer states also include China, France, Germany and Japan.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 19:15:04|Editor: MJ

A pedestrian walks past piers of a trestle in Lianyungang City, east China's Jiangsu Province, May 15, 2017. Piers of a trestle here are decorated with various paintings as an aim to embellish the city. (Xinhua/Zhu Huanan)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 19:41:04|Editor: ying

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NANCHANG, May 15 (Xinhua) -- About ten people have been killed in a traffic accident in an east China tourist site on Monday afternoon, local police said.

A bus collided with a truck at around 5:30 p.m. on a road of Mount Longhu in Yingtan City, Jiangxi Province, police said. The injured have been rushed to hospital.

Mount Longhu, or Dragon Tiger Mountain, is a world natural heritage and a national tourist site. It is known as one of the birthplaces of Taoism with many Taoist temples.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 19:46:06|Editor: ying

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in Beijing from May 14 to 15 has sparked heated discussions in and outside the venue on the initiative of the century and on the course of globalization.

The following are some comments from intellectual and business circles around the globe:

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president of the Schiller Institute think tank in Germany

-- The Belt and Road Initiative will continue to grow and become a true world land bridge. It not only brings economic prosperity to all participating countries, but also serves as a true basis for a peace order for the 21st century.

Joseph Matthews, director of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Education Center

-- Without peace, economic development of any region or country is impossible. The Belt and Road Initiative is the beginning of a new era of development in the region, and in the future this road will be known as the Peace Road.

Marc Uzan, executive director of the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee

-- With the help of new financial institutions, the "One Belt, One Road" initiative opens a new chapter in the course of globalization. This initiative is an extremely important change of the global governance.

Jean-Francois Di Meglio, president of the Asia Center think-tank in Paris

-- The "One Belt, One Road" initiative can be seen as a reversal of the course of history with a Chinese power that is not only interested in its own development, but which asks what it can do for the rest of the world.

Ahmed Sallam, an expert in Chinese affairs and former Egyptian diplomat

-- The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative exceeded local limits and extended to provide extremely good benefits to a lot of states.

Luigi Gambardella, president of ChinaEU, a business-led international association in Brussels

-- The announcement (made by Chinese President Xi Jinping) of future investment plans was once again a firm commitment that China will continue to dedicate substantial resources to the success of the plan. This was instrumental to counter-argue the beliefs of those skeptics who feel that the investment levels in the countries along the road might have diminished over the past year.

Alicia Barcena, executive secretary of Chile-based Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

-- For me, it's a speech about the change of an era. Xi just made a very innovative proposal ... which has a panorama perspective, combining the objectives of all countries.

Suresh Sharma, executive director of the Kathmandu-based private think-tank National Institute of Strategic Studies

-- Nepal, a birthplace of Buddha and an apostle of peace, always has remained an admirer of this noble Belt and Road Initiative to bring peace, prosperity and brotherhood for the entire world.

Rehman Sobhan, chairman of Bangladeshi think-tank Center for Policy Dialogue

-- Huge resources are readily available with China and beyond. Asia is now poised to create a more integrated global order, the center of which is no longer in the Atlantic region, but in the Asia region.

(Shuai Rong, Liang Linlin, Qiao Jihong, Mahmoud Fouly, Naim-Ul-Karim, Santosh Ghimire contributed to the report)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 19:50:38|Editor: xuxin

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STOCKHOLM, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Swedish capital is planning to build a series of "green bridges" in the city in an effort to protect and extend the city's wildlife, Swedish Television reported Monday.

The Environment Administration and the Public Transport Administration plans to build five so-called "eco-ducts," or landscape bridges, that connect parks and wildlife areas that are separated by highways or other thoroughfares,

"An eco-duct is a large, stable and plant-enshrouded bridge that helps both animals and plants to spread. You could call it an extension of the forest," said Stockholm's vice mayor of environment Katarina Luhr.

One of the five eco-ducts will bridge a railway track that runs through the Alvsjoskogen forest in southern Stockholm.

Luhr, who is a member of the Green Party, said the aim is to create wider ecological diversity on both sides of the railway track as well as a larger forest that members of the public can access.

Currently, there are two landscape bridges in Stockholm. However, it is still unclear when the five new ones will become reality. A study is being conducted to investigate costs and other practical matters, according to Luhr.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:01:15|Editor: MJ

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KATHMANDU, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A team of 14 rope-fixing climbers on Monday stood atop the world's highest peak Mount Qomolangma, becoming the first team of 2017 to reach the summit from south face in Nepal.

Though other Sherpa climbers had already opened the route to the top of Qomolangma via China's Tibet last week, expedition from Nepal side was delayed this spring season owing to bad weather.

"A team of 14 rope-fixing climbers have reached the summit between 1:15 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. today," Gyanendra Shrestha, a Tourism Ministry official, told Xinhua on Monday.

Last year, the rope fixing task was completed on May 11.

"The first two summiteers are Pema Chhiring and Pem Chhiri who stood atop at 1:15, " Phurba Tenzing Sherpa, a record holder Qomolangma climber told Xinhua from the base camp.

Fourteen high altitude mountain guides were assigned for rope fixing from Camp II to top of the 8,848 meter peak under Expedition Operators Association of Nepal (EOAN).

Dambar Parajuli, President of EOAN, told Xinhua on Monday, "As the route is open now, the rope-fixing Sherpa will return to base camp and escort their clients to the summit."

The ascent of the 14 climbers has paved the way for all the commercial and independent summits of 2017.

According to Department of Tourism, 40 expedition teams comprising 373 climbers from various countries are conquering the world's highest peak this spring season. May is regarded as the perfect window for Qomolangma expedition in terms of favorable weather between winter and monsoon.

Many have expressed fears of traffic jam in Qomolangma region this season due to high number of climbers and their mountain guides and helpers.

Qomolangma has not only been an identity of the Himalayan nation but also a major source of revenue collection. The Himalayan country that charges 11,000 U.S. dollars per foreign climber earns millions of dollars annually.

This year, Mount Qomolangma has already recorded two tragedies including the deaths of famous Swiss climber Ueli Steck and the 86-year-old Nepali climber Min Bahadur Sherchan, who was in a bid to regain the title of oldest climber.

There were no expeditions in the spring of 2015 due to avalanches triggered by the devastating April 25 earthquake that killed 19 climbers, including high-altitude guides and helpers. The government had extended their permits for two years, which is ending this year.

There was no expedition in 2014 as well as 16 Sherpa guides were killed in an avalanche near Qomolangma Base Camp.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:16:23|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who is here for the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 15, 2017. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping on Monday called on China and the Philippines to step up communication on major issues concerning bilateral ties, in order to lead their relations toward healthy and stable development.

In his meeting with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Xi said the Philippines is a friendly neighbor of China and an important partner in Belt and Road cooperation.

Friendly cooperation for win-win results is the right track for China-Philippines ties, Xi said, noting that China is willing to work with the Philippines to align their development strategies to benefit people of both countries.

The Chinese president said the two countries need to strengthen cooperation in infrastructure construction, combating cross-border maritime crime, joint rescue operations, poverty alleviation, drug control and improving people's well-being.

They should seek substantial progress in key cooperation areas as soon as possible, and establish close exchanges and cooperation between legislative bodies and local governments, as well as in such fields as culture, youth, tourism and personnel exchanges.

China will enhance communication and cooperation with ASEAN countries to lift China-ASEAN ties to a new height, Xi said.

For his part, Duterte said the Belt and Road Initiative is conducive to Asian connectivity and economic growth, as well as to the Philippine's own employment prospects and prosperity.

Noting that the two countries have resumed dialogue and consultation, Duterte said the Philippines and China are important trade partners.

He said the Philippines is willing to maintain close contact, expand cooperation and promote cultural and people-to-people exchanges with China, and will work to strengthen cooperation between ASEAN and China.

The two presidents witnessed the signing of a series of cooperation documents in the fields of economy, technology, infrastructure, human resources, energy and press and publications after their meeting.

In a separate meeting with Duterte, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said friendly ties between China and the Philippines are in the interest of people from both countries.

Li urged the two sides to push forward cooperation in industrial capacity, infrastructure, finance, agriculture and fishery, as well as in people-to-people exchanges and poverty alleviation, so that the progress in China-Philippines ties will not only benefit their own peoples, but also promote regional stability and prosperity.

Li said that the Philippines holds ASEAN's rotating chair this year, and China will intensify coordination with the Philippines to forge a closer community of shared future with ASEAN countries.

Duterte said that ties between the Philippines and China are currently on the right track. He said the Philippines supports the "Made in China 2025" plan, and welcomes Chinese investment in the country.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:16:25|Editor: Hou Qiang

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Among the first foreign investors when China started to open up, Thai entrepreneur Dhanin Chearavanont believed the Belt and Road Initiative have unleashed unlimited potential in both Chinese economy and world economy.

"I see unlimited potential. There is no ceiling to this unprecedented initiative," Chearavanont, Chairman of Thailand's largest private company Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group), said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua on Monday.

Chearavanont's CP Group opened a branch in China in the late 1970s when the country just opened up to the world. The group's foreign business license issued by Shenzhen, a pioneering city of China's opening-up policy, was numbered 001.

"When I first came to make big investment in China, some people thought I was crazy. But I turned out to be right," he said.

Chearavanont found himself brimming with even more confidence in the future of China and the world as well after attending the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in Beijing on May 14-15.

Delegates from more than 100 countries and international organizations participated in the event, discussing how to build a more prosperous and inclusive world through the Belt and Road Initiative.

The initiative is a game changer for the world economy, he said, it is a great reform and great innovation that will influence the whole world.

"We live in a changing world and China is taking the lead of the changes," Chearavanont said.

The initiative, proposed by China in 2013, aims to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along ancient trade routes over land and sea.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a new model of international relationship that promotes inclusiveness, mutual benefit and win-win, Chearavanont said.

Chearavanont believes that Thailand will further participate in the initiative, and connecting Thailand's Eastern Economic Corridor with the Belt and Road Initiative will bring great opportunities to the less-developed part of Thailand.

"Thailand must develop because it won't be left behind," he said.

Chearavanont also called on ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries to take part in the initiative, adding that Chinese investment and market can "absolutely drive up" the economic growth of Southeast Asia.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:26:31|Editor: ying

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HARARE, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwe is on course to complete the Kariba South Expansion Project by December, which is being built by China's Sinohydro, an official said Monday.

Fullard Gwasira, spokesperson for the power utility ZESA Holdings, told Xinhua that the three-year project was now 85-percent complete.

"The project is moving beyond our expectations. We expected this project to be completed by December but indications on the ground are that we may do it earlier than December," Gwasira said.

Sinohydro is carrying out the 533-million-U.S.-dollar expansion project that will add 300 megawatts (MW) to Zimbabwe's electricity grid and help ameliorate power shortages in the country.

Gwasira said the first 150 megawatt unit was expected to come on stream in December and the second by the first quarter of 2018.

"We are very happy about this project because on completion, we would have made a huge milestone in terms of meeting national demand," Gwasira said.

Zimbabwe's power demand stands at 1,400 MW but is only able to generate 1,000 MW due to ageing power plants. It plugs the shortfall through imports from neighboring South Africa and Mozambique.

Meanwhile, Gwasira said the power utility had also made headway towards expansion of another power plant Hwange Thermal Power Station by Sinohydro.

Hwange Power Station is Zimbabwe's largest power plant with an installed capacity of 920 MW. The expansion project, at an estimated cost of 1.5 billion dollars, will add 600 MW to the national grid.

It is expected that Zimbabwe would be energy self-sufficient once the Kariba and Hwange power expansion projects are completed.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:26:36|Editor: xuxin

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by David Musyoka

NAIROBI, May 15 (Xinhua) -- African mobile phone operator Vodacom Group said on Monday it had agreed to acquire a strategic stake in Kenya's biggest mobile operator Safaricom from Britain-based Vodafone Group.

Subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals, Vodacom will fund the acquisition of a 34.94-percent stake in Safaricom by issuing 226.8 million new ordinary shares.

Vodacom, 65-percent owned by Vodafone, will pay the equivalent of 2.6 billion U.S. dollars for the stake; Vodafone will retain a 5-percent holding; while the Kenyan government owns 35 percent.

Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said in a statement that the transaction is set to further enhance its position as a leading African mobile communication company.

"The agreement Vodafone Group has reached with the Government of Kenya will ensure Safaricom continues to have strong Kenyan representation at board and management levels, and promotes the continued successful expansion of the company as well as the opportunity to drive M-PESA to other markets in the continent," Collymore said.

Collymore said completion of the transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including approvals from Vodacom minority shareholders, approval from the Financial Surveillance Department of the South African Reserve Bank and confirmation from the Kenya Capital Markets Authority that the transaction does not trigger an obligation for Vodacom to make a mandatory bid for Safaricom.

Safaricom's leading mobile money platform, M-Pesa, is an important driver of Kenyan economic growth, providing essential financial services to over 19 million customers.

Vodacom said in a separate statement that the proposed transaction will improve its presence in East Africa, jointly increasing the company's growth in financial services customers to 32 million and making it a formidable player in financial services on the continent.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:31:41|Editor: ying

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China's top insurance watchdog will conduct inspections to rectify market irregularities and protect consumer interests, according to an official statement released Monday.

From June to mid-October, local insurance authorities will conduct on-site investigations on 46 branches of 16 insurance entities, as well as seven part-time insurance agents, which had been ranked poorly in terms of customer complaints in the past two years, China Insurance Regulatory Commission said in the statement.

The inspections will focus on violations including fraudulent sales practices, fake or absent customer information, and failure to pay small insurance claims efficiently.

In addition, the insurance regulator will conduct case-by-case investigations into violations reported by the public, and punish typical behavior that hurts customer interests.

"We will never compromise on matters of principle, and we will not disregard violations for any reason," the regulator said in a statement.

The statement also called for toughened supervision on innovative insurance businesses, and said authorities will work to standardize sales behavior not only by insurance firms, but by agents and intermediaries.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:36:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who is here for the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 15, 2017. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping said Monday that China is willing to work with Kenya to push forward bilateral ties.

Xi made the remarks when meeting with his Kenyan counterpart Uhuru Kenyatta, who attended the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation that concluded Monday.

Xi said the comprehensive cooperative partnership between China and Kenya has developed rapidly in recent years, and the bilateral ties are at their best time in history.

Kenya is one of the pilot nations in China-Africa cooperation on industrial capacity and plays a leading and model role in China-Africa cooperation, Xi said.

He proposed that China-Kenya ties be upgraded to comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership, calling on the two sides to view bilateral ties strategically.

The two sides should keep their high-level exchanges, and continue to support each other on issues related to core interests and major concerns, Xi said.

Via the construction of the Mombasa-Nairobi railway, the two sides should build a corridor of industrial economy and jointly forge a new pattern of cooperation integrating the railway, Mombasa port and Mombasa special economic zone, Xi said.

He said the two nations should strengthen cooperation on people-to-people exchanges and advance the program of Chinese culture center. He also called for deepened cooperation on peace and security issues and the judiciary, to deal with transnational crimes.

The two sides should increase communication and coordination in international and regional affairs, Xi added.

For his part, Kenyatta said the forum had demonstrated to the world the tangible fruits of the Belt and Road Initiative, providing a historic platform for developing and developed nations to discuss cooperation on the basis of mutual benefit.

Kenya is willing to actively participate in the Belt and Road development and boost cooperation in such areas as trade, investment, energy, tourism and infrastructure, he said,

He added that Kenya wants to strengthen coordination and cooperation with China on issues related to African peace and development, and develop a strong Kenya-China comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership and robust Africa-China relations.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang also met with Kenyatta Monday, saying China is willing to better dovetail its development strategy with Kenya's, deepen cooperation in various areas and increase people-to-people exchanges, so that new vitality will be injected into bilateral ties.

Noting that the Mombasa-Nairobi railway, which is jointly built by the two nations, will soon be put into service, Li said that China supports Kenya in operating the railway, making it a model project in eastern Africa and the entire continent, which will boost cooperation on industrial capacity and infrastructure, help sustainable development and improve people's livelihood.

Kenyatta said Kenya wants to ensure bilateral ties stay at a high level and set a new model of Africa-China mutually beneficial cooperation with fruits of common development and shared prosperity.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 20:56:58|Editor: xuxin

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JUBA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Humanitarian agencies said Monday that they are seeking 1.4 billion U.S. dollars to provide life-saving aid to South Sudanese refugees in six neighboring countries until the end of 2017.

In a revised response plan, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP) urged donors to step up support for desperate refugees fleeing South Sudan.

WFP Executive Director David Beasley said the suffering of the South Sudanese people is unimaginable.

"They are close to the abyss. Violence is at the root of this crisis. Aid workers often can not reach the most vulnerable hungry people. Many are dying from hunger and disease, many more have fled their homeland for safety abroad," Beasley said in a statement.

The South Sudanese refugee response plan so far remains only 14-percent funded and agencies said communities hosting refugees are among the world's poorest and are under immense pressure.

Beasley added that the funding situation had forced them to cut food rations for many refugees in Uganda.

Currently Uganda hosts some 898,000 South Sudanese refugees, and 375,000 are in Sudan, 375,000 in Ethiopia, 97,000 in Kenya, 76,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and 2,200 in Central African Republic (CAR).

According to the UN, the situation in South Sudan continues to worsen with a combination of conflict, drought and famine leading to further displacement and a rapid exodus of people.

South Sudan has become the world's fastest growing refugee crisis with more than 1.8 million refugees, including 1 million children, having sought safety in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, DRC and CAR.

The UNHCR welcomed the outstanding generosity refugees have received in South Sudan's neighbouring countries, but is alarmed by a situation which is now critical.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said bitter conflict and deteriorating humanitarian conditions in South Sudan are driving people from their homes in record numbers.

"Countries like Uganda have done all one could expect, but won't be able to sustain support for refugees unless the rest of the world steps up," warned Grandi.

The agencies said the current rate of people fleeing South Sudan exceeds the humanitarian community's already pessimistic estimates.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:02:04|Editor: xuxin

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TRIPOLI, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Libya's national antiquities authorities issued a list of national archaeological objects that have been smuggled out of the country, local media reported on Monday.

The list included a sandstone statue and a pharaonic statue made from Black basalt stolen from Tolmeita village in World War II.

Khalid Al-Hadar, director of the office of the anti-archaeological smuggling, said that the list will be circulated to concerned international organizations, including the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as well as Italy's Carabinieri Art squad.

Al-Hadar said all Libyan embassies abroad will also have the list including statues and sculptures stolen during the Second World War.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:22:24|Editor: xuxin

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BEIRUT, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Lebanese army said Israeli drone and boat violated Lebanese air space and territorial waters, the National News Agency (NNA) reported on Monday.

"A spy drone belonging to the Israeli enemy violated, at 9:30 p.m. (GMT1830) yesterday (Sunday), the Lebanese airspace off Rmeish, and effectuated circular flights over the south," a communique by the Lebanese army said on Monday.

In another communique on Monday, the army said that "a military boat belonging to the Israeli enemy violated, at 8:20 p.m. (GMT1720) yesterday (Sunday), the Lebanese territorial waters off Ras Naqoura, and infiltrated some 315 meters into the sea where it stayed for five minutes."


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Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:27:02|Editor: xuxin

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ISLAMABAD, May 15 (Xinhua) -- At least four security personnel were injured when a blast hit their vehicle in southwestern Pakistan on Monday, local Urdu media reported.

The vehicle of paramilitary troops Frontier Corps was on its routine patrolling when it was hit by a roadside planted device in Splingi area of Mastung district in the country's southwest Balochistan province, Samaa News said.

Police said that the blast was triggered off by an improvised explosive device by unknown militants who fled the scene following the attack. Security forces cordoned off the area for investigations.

The injured troops were shifted to a nearby hospital. No group has claimed the attack yet.

Monday's attack was the second terrorist activity in Mastung over the last three days.

On Friday, 25 people were killed and 35 others injured when a convoy of the country's Senate deputy chairman was attacked by a suicide bomber in Mastung.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:47:42|Editor: xuxin

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MADRID, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A joint operation by Spanish and Ecuadorian police has led to the arrest of 24 people as well as the seizure of 5,529 kilos of cocaine, the Spanish Interior Ministry said on Monday.

Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido tweeted that "an operation by the police, together with those of Ecuador has permitted the interception of a boat with 5,529 kilos of cocaine and the arrest of 24 people."

The Interior Ministry added the 24 detainees were part of a "large organization" dedicated to smuggling drugs between Spain and South America.

"This is one of the largest seizures on cocaine in history and we have broken up an important narcotics smuggling operation," explained Zoido.

Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry also reported the interception of a second boat carrying 2,500 kg of cocaine close to the Canary Islands as part of a second joint operation; this time involving American, British and Portuguese authorities.

This boat, which is reported to have been sailing under a Venezuelan flag, is currently being taken to port in Las Palmas (Gran Canaria).
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:47:47|Editor: xuxin

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MOSCOW, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to approve the country's economic security strategy for the period until 2030, the Russian government said Monday.

"The implementation of the strategy should result in ensuring Russia's economic sovereignty and stability against external and internal challenges and threats," said a document published on the government's legal information website.

The strategy should also "strengthen social and political stability, guarantee dynamic socioeconomic development and improve the people's life quality," it said.

According to the document, the main challenges and threats to Russia's economic security include attempts of developed countries to use their advantages in economic development and high technology as a tool for global competition.

Russia also faces the threat of the use of discriminatory measures against key sectors of its economy, restricted access to foreign financial resources and technologies, and creation of international economic associations without participation of Russia.

Internal threats include the vulnerability of the information infrastructure of the Russian financial and banking systems, low rates of economic growth, high crime rates and corruption in the economic sphere.

The strategy will be implemented in two phases, said the document.

During the first phase, until 2019, the Russian government will develop organizational, regulatory and methodological measures to provide mechanisms for monitoring and assessing the state of Russia's economic security.

At the second phase, from 2019 to 2030, the country is to implement measures to neutralize these challenges and threats.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:52:22|Editor: xuxin

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By Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Seven out of ten Greek citizens expressed disappointment with the new austerity measures the government agreed to with international lenders, a poll released on Monday showed, ahead of the vote on the relevant bill in the Greek parliament scheduled for May 18.

Some 72 percent of respondents in the survey carried out by ProRata polling firm for Efimerida ton Syntakton (Editors' Journal) newspaper said that they considered the latest deal struck to conclude the second review of the third Greek bailout program as "bad" and "rather bad". Only 14 percent of participants responded it was "good or rather good".

Six of ten participants believe that the package of measures and relief countermeasures the Left-led government proposes by 2021 will not help in efforts for economic recovery and the national economy and their personal finances will be worse in 2018.

Government sources speaking to Greek national news agency AMNA defended the new round of measures as necessary to secure more aid by creditors to kick start the recession-hit economy.

The omnibus bill which includes new cuts in pensions also includes social protection expenditure to support the most vulnerable social groups, the sources noted.

The total worth of fresh belt-tightening measures was estimated at 4.2 billion euros (4.6 billion U.S. dollars) by 2021, while offset measures will reach 7.6 billion euros in the same period, the sources said.

As deputies debate the draft bill in the assembly from Monday labor unions plan strikes and rallies. On Tuesday Greek journalists will hold a 24-hour nationwide strike.

Ships will remain docked on Tuesday and Wednesday, while the umbrella unions of public servants and private sector employees ADEDY and GSEE have declared a 24-hour general strike for May 17.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:52:24|Editor: xuxin

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BAKU, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Azerbaijan is ready to negotiate the extension of an agreement to cut oil output made by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and some non-OPEC countries in 2016, Zamina Aliyeva, spokesperson for Azerbaijani energy ministry, told local media here on Monday.

The statement came ahead of OPEC's next official meeting on May 25 in Vienna. "The Azerbaijani delegation will discuss this issue in Vienna on May 25. Our position remains unchanged, and we consider it necessary to continue the steps that will help stabilize the global oil market," Aliyeva said.

According to Aliyeva, the proposals to extend the agreement through the second half of this year are ready for discussion. "But we must wait for the results of the Vienna meeting," she added.

OPEC agreed at a meeting in November 2016 to reduce oil production by 1.2 million barrels a day from the October levels.

One month later in Vienna, 11 non-OPEC oil-producing countries, including Azerbaijan, agreed to cut oil output by 558,000 barrels per day in the first half of 2017 with the possibility of extension, the largest contribution made by non-OPEC oil producers ever.

It was the first deal of those countries since 2001 to reduce oil output and ease a global glut, after more than two years of low prices that overstretched budgets of many countries and spurred unrest.

Azerbaijan has fulfilled its obligation to cut daily oil output by 35,000 barrels. The country's proven oil reserves amounted to 7 billion barrels at the end of 2015, according to British oil giant BP's Statistical Review of World Energy.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 21:58:04|Editor: xuxin

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by Chrispinus Omar

NAIROBI, May 15 (Xinhua) -- At least 26 people have been killed and 24,803 others displaced in 13 counties across Kenya by raging flash floods following heavy rains, a humanitarian agency said Monday.

The Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) said the flash floods have caused widespread destruction of property and infrastructure, as well as disruption of key activities such as farming and education in various areas of Kenya.

The most affected regions are in coastal, central, northeastern and other parts of western Kenya where heavy rains have washed away bridges and rendered many roads blocked.

"The floods have resulted in huge livestock losses in some areas, displacement of communities and disruption of livelihoods," KRCS Secretary-General Abbas Gullet said in a statement.

"The continuing huge livestock losses is exposing communities that had been affected by drought, further hampering their effective recovery," Gullet added.

He said approximately 6,906 people have been displaced in the coastal region following heavy rains and flooding in four counties, namely Kilifi, Mombasa, Taita Taveta and Kwale.

The heavy rains have also resulted in significant infrastructural damage to bridges, roads and water pipelines, and disruption of community livelihoods.

According to the Red Cross, assessments are ongoing to determine the scale of the damage and the required interventions.

Forecasts from the Kenya Meteorological Department indicate that rainfall is expected to continue over several parts of the country, with high intensity in western and coastal regions, as well as central highlands, notably areas around Mt. Kenya.

The situation is compounded by the fact that the ground is saturated and most of the rain water being received is converted to runoff.

Persons living in areas that are near major rivers have been put on high alert and advised to move to higher ground as the water level can be seen to be rising while some have already burst their banks leaving a trail of destructions and displacing many families.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 22:03:09|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Chinese President Xi Jinping , foreign delegation heads and guests pose for a group photo at the Leaders' Roundtable Summit of the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation at Yanqi Lake International Convention Center in Beijing, capital of China, May 15, 2017. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei)

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Leaders from 30 countries and three key international organizations attending a roundtable meeting of a forum agree to oppose all forms of protectionism, according to a communique.

Participants in the Leaders Roundtable of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation adopted a joint communique here Monday.

"We reaffirm our shared commitment to build open economy, ensure free and inclusive trade, oppose all forms of protectionism including in the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative," the communique said.

"We endeavor to promote a universal, rules-based, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system with WTO at its core," according to the communique.

On deepening economic and trade cooperation, leaders agree to uphold the authority and effectiveness of the multilateral trading system, and work together to achieve positive outcomes at the 11th WTO ministerial conference; promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation and enable the general public to benefit from trade, it said.

The leaders reaffirm to expand trade by nurturing new areas of trade growth, promoting trade balance and promoting e-commerce and digital economy, and welcome the development of free trade areas and signing of free trade agreements by interested countries, said the document.

The leaders vow to contribute to a stable and equitable international financial system, promote openness and connectivity among financial markets, including through mutual cooperation on payment systems and the promotion of financial inclusion, according to the document.

They agree to encourage financial institutions to establish commercial presence in relevant countries and regions, promote bilateral local currency settlement and cooperation agreements, and facilitate the development of local currency bonds and stock markets, and encourage dialogues to enhance financial cooperation and fend off financial risks, it said.

The leaders are determined to protect the planet from degradation, including through taking urgent action on climate change and encouraging all parties which have ratified it to fully implement the Paris Agreement, according to the communique.

They should manage the natural resources in an equitable and sustainable manner, conserve and sustainably use oceans and seas, freshwater resources, as well as forests, mountains and drylands, protect biodiversity, ecosystems and wildlife, combat desertification and land degradation so as to achieve sustainable development in a balanced and integrated manners, the document added.

The two-day forum is by far the most important meeting on the Belt and Road Initiative since Chinese President Xi Jinping first raised the concept in 2013. It is the largest-scale and highest-level international gathering initiated by China.

Named after the historic Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative is set to combine the rapidly expanding Chinese economy with the development of Asia, Europe, Africa and beyond.

29 foreign heads of state and government leaders attended the forum. Other delegates include officials, entrepreneurs, financiers and reporters from over 130 countries, which are home to more than two thirds of the world's population and their combined gross domestic product accounts for 90 percent of the world's total.

Representatives from the world's major economies including all G7 countries were present at the forum.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde also attended the forum.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 22:17:43|Editor: xuxin

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ISTANBUL, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The authorities on Monday spoke of transforming Istanbul into a smart city by means of high technology and innovation.

"The secret of creating a sustainable smart city, where energy is used in an efficient way without any loss, lies in high technology and innovation," Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said at the inauguration of an expo on world smart cities in Istanbul.

Kadir Topbas, mayor of Istanbul, echoed. "The solution lies in the transformation of the conventional systems into smart ones by using the driving power of high technology and innovation," he said.

Almost one fifth of Turkey's population of 79.814 million live in Istanbul, which accounts for over 30 percent of the national income, according to the latest data.

As part of the efforts to turn Istanbul into a smart city, the municipality recently launched several user-friendly applications, including mobile traffic, mobile navigation, smart buses and smart bus stops that can all be "easily accessed."

"With every system we create, we also aim to increase the life standard of Istanbulites," said Topbas.

Among the planned projects, power generation from the garbage collected across the city drew close attention at the fair.

A Turkish company, in cooperation with the municipality, seeks to generate power "in the very near future" out of gas produced from the garbage, a company official told Xinhua.

On display at the fair were smart transportation systems with alternative traffic solutions, smart banking systems, smart environmental systems for healthier life, smart security solutions including alternative surveillance systems, and waste to energy projects.

"All of them are developed in a way to obtain the largest energy saving," a municipality official said.

More than 10,000 representatives from over 100 global and local companies were joining the four-day event, while some 3,000 business people were present as well seeking cooperation and partnerships, according to press reports.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 22:28:20|Editor: Liangyu

Photo taken on May 15, 2017 shows the view of the 61st International Fair of Technics and Technical Achievements in Belgrade, Serbia. Cutting-edge technologies including latest tools and machines are in focus of the 61st International Fair of Technics and Technical Achievements here on Monday. (Xinhua/Nemanja Cabric)

BELGRADE, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Cutting-edge technologies including latest tools and machines are in focus of the 61st International Fair of Technics and Technical Achievements here on Monday.

Minister of Tourism and Telecommunications Rasim Ljajic said Serbia can "promote achievements of the technological revolution" and raise awareness of the importance of technological achievements.

"No wonder we call this event 'the fair of all fairs' -- not only because it is the oldest fair in Serbia, but also because it is the most significant," Ljajic said in his opening speech.

He said that the country should invest more in technology research and development, influence educated people not to leave the country, as well as to create better connection between science and the economy.

The technics fair is one of most important specialized exhibitions of its type in this part of Europe, and it hosts many relevant domestic and foreign exhibitors, among which are some key promotors of technical and technological trends in the world.
WINDHOEK, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Standard Bank said Monday that they have finalized a debt package of 120 million U. S. dollars with Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC).

Standard Bank has partnered the Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank (PTA Bank) to deliver the financing for the rehabilitation of existing power infrastructure at Kariba South Hydro Power Station and Hwange Thermal Power Station.

Standard bank has in the past entered into a funding arrangement with ZPC, which went towards their contribution into the 300MW expansion at Kariba South Hydro Power Station.

At a media briefing in Johannesburg, Tandiwe Njobe, regional head of Investment Banking at Standard Bank said this would go a long way in addressing the energy supply shortage which is critical for the future growth in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

"This funding will assist in improving access to power for Zimbabwe and Namibia, and in the medium to long term, benefits of improved power supply and reliability will also extend to other Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) members. The proceeds will be applied to significant capital expenditure which will increase capacity and improve efficiency of the power stations. Without reliable access to power, industry and economic growth are negatively impacted," said Njobe.

Standard bank expressed its commitment to fund infrastructural project in the continent. Njobe said they are willing to partner other stakeholders to address challenging issue in Africa.

"This is a landmark transaction in which we could leverage our sector and technical expertise in both markets, as well as our understanding of the regional power dynamics and local regulatory environments, to deliver value to ZPC and Namibia Power Corporation (NamPower). To make this transaction work we engaged with four regulatory bodies and key policy makers in four ministries in Namibia and Zimbabwe," she added.

Njobe said it was important for them to support the regional power sector through this loan facility. The funding would increase power generation in a region which has an on-going deficit and a clear need for dependable and sustainable power supply.

Africa is currently encouraging cross-border electricity arrangements and infrastructural projects for the benefit of the continent and region. Namibian Power Cooperation will also benefit from the deal since its getting power from Zimbabwe, said Njobe.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 22:43:34|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China's State Councilor Yang Jiechi said Monday that China supports UN role in global governance and is willing to increase cooperation with the UN in all areas.

Yang made the remarks when meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

Yang praised UN support for and participation in the Belt and Road Initiative and the forum. China is ready to enhance cooperation with the UN to make greater contributions to world peace and development.

Guterres congratulated China on the successful forum, highlighting the far-reaching significance of the Belt and Road Initiative and its synergy with the UN 2030 sustainable development agenda.

The UN is willing to work with China on the Belt and Road Initiative and appreciates China's adherence to multilateralism, Guterres said.
LUSAKA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A Zambian court on Monday acquitted the country's leading opposition leader of a charge of insulting police officers who went to arrest him last year.

The court acquitted Hakainde Hichilema after ruling that the prosecution team failed to show proof beyond reasonable doubt that the opposition leader insulted the police officers.

Magistrate Greenwell Malumani said the prosecution team did not conduct thorough investigations on the charges leveled against the opposition leader as evidenced by contradicting statement from witnesses.

The opposition leader was arrested last month when police officers raided his house in Lusaka, the country's capital.

He was later slapped with three charges including use of insulting language, treason and disobedience of lawful orders to give way to Zambian President Edgar Lungu's motorcade.

Last week, the state decided to discontinue the charge of disobedience of lawful orders.

However, the opposition leader and five of his co-accused are still facing a non-bailable charge of treason.

The court is next week expected to rule on whether Hichilema should be taken to a high court for trial.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 22:58:11|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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Zhang Dejiang (R), chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), meets with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is here for the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 15, 2017. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing)

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Monday, calling for more efforts to lift China-Hungary relations to a higher level.

China-Hungary ties have entered the best time in history with frequent high-level exchanges and solid political mutual trust, said Zhang when meeting Orban on the sidelines of a forum on the Belt and Road Initiative.

China and Hungary announced on Saturday the establishment of a comprehensive strategic partnership.

Zhang said he hopes the two countries will take the establishment of a comprehensive strategic partnership as an opportunity to lift bilateral relations to a higher level.

The NPC is willing to strengthen exchanges and cooperation with the National Assembly of Hungary, said Zhang.

Speaking highly of the Belt and Road Initiative, Orban said he is happy to see a comprehensive strategic partnership and he is committed to carrying forward Hungary-China ties.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 23:03:49|Editor: Liangyu

Relatives of Palestinian fisherman Mohammed Bakr mourn during his funeral in Gaza City, on May 16, 2017. Israeli naval soldiers opened fire and killed on Monday a Palestinian fisherman from Gaza, and arrested six other fishermen while they were fishing in the Gaza Strip sea, Gaza officials and medical sources said. (Xinhua/Wissam Nassar)

GAZA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Israeli naval soldiers opened fire and killed on Monday a Palestinian fisherman from Gaza, and arrested six other fishermen while they were fishing in the Gaza Strip sea, Gaza officials and medical sources said.

The sources said that Mohamed Baker, a 28-year-old fisherman was critically wounded by Israeli naval forces gunfire and six others were detained while they were on a fishing boat in Gaza waters.

The sources added that Baker was taken to an Israeli hospital while the six other fishermen were taken for questioning at Ashdod Seaport in central Israel, and their fishing boat was confiscated.

The medical sources said that Baker was shot in his chest and was in critical condition, adding that his death was declared on Monday afternoon at an Israeli hospital, and he died of his wounds he sustained from being shot earlier in the day.

Nizar Ayyash, chairman of Gaza Fishermen Association told Xinhua that Baker, the fisherman died of his wounds after he was shot by Israeli soldiers and was in critical condition, adding that six other fishermen were arrested.

There has been no immediate response from the Israeli army to comment on the incident.

Ayyas said that what happened was part of daily violations that the Israeli army is committing against the Gaza Strip in general and against the 3,000 Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip.
MANILA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) said Monday that troops killed the two militants of the Abu Sayyaf group in Bohol province in the central Philippines this April.

AFP spokesman Brig. Gen. Restituto Padilla said clashes broke out around 5:30 p.m. in Calape town in Bohol province on Monday, resulting in the death of one militant. The other one tried to flee but was eventually killed.

With the death of the two militants, Padilla said all the 11 Abu Sayyaf bandits that landed in Bohol province abroad three boats last April had all been neutralized.

"Bohol is now cleared of Abu Sayyaf elements," Padilla said, completing the job of killing all 11 who attended to raid the island on April 10. "It's all accounted for."

Abu Sayyaf is one of the smallest and most violent groups operating in the southern Philippines.

It is notorious for kidnappings, bombings and attacking civilians and the army.

The Philippine military has been fighting the Abu Sayyaf rebels since 2000.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the military to crush the Abu Sayyaf militants.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 23:18:59|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TOKYO, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A Japanese civil group on Monday filed a criminal complaint against officials involved in a dubious cut-price land deal between the government and the scandal-hit school operator Moritomo Gakuen.

The complaint, filed with the Tokyo District Court, alleges that seven former and current officials of the Finance Ministry and the ministry's Kinki bureau illegally destroyed official documents on the shady land deal and shall be held criminally responsible.

The government has rejected the opposition parties' demands to make these documents public, saying that they have been destroyed, while Japanese laws stipulate that official documents about transactions of state-owned land shall be kept for up to 30 years, said the complaint.

The complaint also said that such shady land deal possibly involved backroom political maneuvering and wrongdoings on the part of government officials as the deal was "unbelievable and unreasonable."

Moritomo Gakuen, a private-school operator, reportedly bought a 8,770-square-meter piece of land last June in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, for 134 million yen (1.2 million U.S. dollars), equivalent to only 14 percent of its appraisal price.

The land in question had been intended for a new elementary school with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife Akie as its honorary principal.

Yasunori Kagoike, head of the school operator, gave sworn testimony in both chambers of parliament stating he thinks the land deal involved "politicians' intervention."

The Abes, for their part, denied involvement in the land deal on many occasions.

Public opinion polls, however, showed that the majority of the Japanese people consider the Abe administration not doing enough to clear suspicions surrounding the scandal.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 23:34:05|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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by Xinhua writer Li Laifang

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A steadfast champion of globalization, Chinese President Xi Jinping has chartered a new course toward peace and common prosperity amid global challenges by reviving the Silk Road spirit.

The first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation closed Monday in Beijing with much success, including the signing of a series of cooperation agreements, a concrete move to revive the Silk Road.

Xi described the Silk Road spirit as "a great heritage of human civilization," with peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit at its core -- truly a new model.

The Belt and Road Initiative, which Xi proposed in 2013, represents the spirit of harmony that takes root in ancient Chinese culture. China was the beating heart in the system of ancient Silk Road. The revival shows the new vitality of ancient Chinese civilization.

Though reflecting Eastern philosophy, the initiative is international in its applications, just like paper, gunpowder and silk.

While the Western world tinkers with upgrades and recalibrations to a doddering economic model that has brought untold riches to a few, Xi is meeting global challenges head-on with a new model, one which may bring prosperity to all.

The world today has every reason to carry forward this great heritage, given poverty, skewed development, terror and turbulence are afflicting mankind.

The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road are a fresh solution to the great quandary of the contemporary world, promoting connectivity in policy, infrastructure, trade, finance and people.

Harmony is intrinsic to the open and inclusive initiative. And zero-sum mentality is losing ground along with outdated geopolitical maneuvering. The initiative hopes to create a big family of harmonious co-existence with win-win cooperation and exchange.

"Harmony without uniformity" is the traditional Chinese saying. It is natural for countries with different cultures to have differences, but they still can have mutually beneficial cooperation. After all, a piano does not bang out one note again and again.

With broad support already, China is inviting more countries to set off on the Belt and Road and move toward peace and common prosperity.

The future of mankind is shared. It is the only future for all.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 23:39:11|Editor: Yamei

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BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Following is the full text of the list of deliverables of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held on Sunday and Monday in Beijing.

List of Deliverables of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the important cooperation initiative of building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. To date, steady progress and fruitful results have been achieved in the implementation of the Initiative. The international community has welcomed the Initiative and its positive impact. China hosted the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF) in Beijing on 14-15 May 2017. The BRF is a major international event for countries and parties concerned to engage in consultation on building the Belt and Road and sharing the benefits. It is also an important platform for the participating parties to strengthen cooperation and synergize their development strategies. Before and during the BRF, national governments, local authorities and enterprises reached a number of cooperation agreements, policy measures and practical results. The Chinese side has put together a list of major deliverables of the BRF, which includes 76 items comprising more than 270 concrete results in five key areas, namely policy, infrastructure, trade, financial and people-to-people connectivity.

I. Synergize Connectivity of Development Policies and Strategies

1. The Chinese government signed memoranda of understanding on Belt and Road cooperation with the governments of Mongolia, Pakistan, Nepal, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Timor-Leste, Singapore, Myanmar and Malaysia.

2. The Chinese government signed Belt and Road cooperation documents with the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, the United Nations International Children's Fund, the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Health Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Criminal Police Organization.

3. The Chinese government signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Jointly Formulating China-Hungary Cooperation Plan with the government of Hungary, and signed bilateral cooperation plans to jointly build the Belt and Road with the governments of the Lao PDR and Cambodia.

4. The relevant departments of the Chinese government signed Belt and Road cooperation documents with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the World Economic Forum, the International Road Transport Union, the International Trade Center, the International Telecommunication Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, the International Development Law Organization, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Maritime Organization.

5. The National Development and Reform Commission of China signed the 2017-2019 Plan on Key Areas of Cooperation Between China and Greece with the Ministry of Economic Development of Greece.

6. The National Development and Reform Commission of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding to Jointly Coordinate and Promote Cooperation and Project Implementation with the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic.

7. The Ministry of Finance of China endorsed the Guiding Principles on Financing the Development of the Belt and Road with the ministries of finance of relevant countries.

8. The relevant departments of the Chinese government issued the following documents: Building the Belt and Road: Concept, Practice and China's Contribution, Vision and Actions on Promoting Energy Cooperation on the Belt and Road, Vision and Actions on Jointly Promoting Agricultural Cooperation on the Belt and Road, Guidance on Promoting Green Belt and Road and Vision for Maritime Cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative.

9. The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will be held regularly, and an Advisory Council and a Liaison Office will be set up.

10. The National Development and Reform Commission of China will establish the Facilitating Center for Building the Belt and Road. The National Development and Reform Commission of China has launched the official Belt and Road portal on the Internet and the Marine Silk Road Trade Index.

II. Deepen Project Cooperation for Infrastructure Connectivity

1. The Chinese government signed the agreements on international transportation and strategy coordination with the governments of Uzbekistan, Turkey and Belarus.

2. The Chinese government signed the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy with the government of Thailand.

3. The Chinese government signed the Memorandum of Understanding in the Field of Water Resources with the government of Malaysia.

4. The National Development and Reform Commission of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Implementation of Up-Gradation of ML-1 and Establishment of Havelian Dry Port under CPEC with the Ministry of Planning, Development and Reform of Pakistan. The National Railway Administration of China signed the Framework Agreement on Implementation of Up-Gradation of ML-1 and Establishment of Havelian Dry Port in Pakistan with the Ministry of Railways of Pakistan.

5. The Ministry of Commerce of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Strengthening Cooperation in the Field of Infrastructure with the Ministry of Public Works and Transport of Cambodia.

6. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in Information Technology with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Afghanistan.

7. The Ministry of Transport of China signed the memoranda of understanding on transport cooperation with the relevant government departments of Cambodia, Pakistan and Myanmar.

8. The Ministry of Water Resources of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Field of Water with the Ministry of the Environment of Poland.

9. The National Energy Administration of China signed the Energy Cooperation Roadmap with the Swiss Federal Office of Energy of the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communication of Switzerland, the Memorandum of Understanding on Roadmap for Studies of Diamer Basha Dam Project and the Hydropower Planning in North Pakistan and Agreement on the Adjustment of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Energy Project List with the Ministry of Water and Power of Pakistan.

10. The State Oceanic Administration of China signed the Protocol on Establishment of Joint Ocean Observation Station with the Ministry of Environment of Cambodia.

11. CHINA RAILWAY signed the Agreement for Further Cooperation on China-Europe Container Block Trains among Railways of China, Belarus, Germany, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Poland and Russia with railway companies of relevant countries.

12. The China Development Bank signed the Key Financing Documents on Indonesian Jakarta to Bandung High-Speed Railway Project with PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia, and financing cooperation agreements on port, electricity and industrial park with relevant institutions of Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Lao PDR and Egypt.

13. The Export-Import Bank of China signed the loan agreements on the modernization and reconstruction of Hungarian-Serbian Railway Line for Belgrade Center-Stara Pazova Section with the Ministry of Finance of Serbia, on road projects with the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Cambodia, the Ministry of Finance of Ethiopia and JSC "KazAutoZhol" of Kazakhstan, on urban railway line project with the Ministry of Finance of Viet Nam, on telecommunication project with Telekom Srbija of Serbia, on bridge project with the Ministry of Finance of Mongolia, on airport development project with Yangon Aerodrome Company of Myanmar, and on inland container depot project with the National Treasury of Kenya.

14. The Global Energy Internet Development Cooperation Organization signed the memoranda of understanding on energy cooperation with the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific of the United Nations, the League of Arab States, AU and the Interconnection Power Grid Authority of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

III. Expand Industrial Investment, Enhance Trade Connectivity

1. The Chinese government signed the economic and trade cooperation agreements with the governments of 30 countries, namely, Pakistan, Viet Nam, Cambodia, the Lao PDR, the Philippines, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Mongolia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Fiji, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Maldives, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Afghanistan, Albania, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Syria, Tajikistan, Nepal and Serbia.

2. The Chinese government signed the China-Georgia Free Trade Agreement with the government of Georgia. ( 3. The Chinese government signed the Framework Agreement for the Promoting of Investment and Economic Cooperation with the government of Sri Lanka.

4. The Chinese government signed the Agreement on Cooperation and Mutual Assistance in Customs Matters with the government of Afghanistan.

5. The Ministry of Commerce of China and the relevant agencies of more than 60 countries and international organizations jointly issued the Initiative on Promoting Unimpeded Trade Cooperation along the Belt and Road.

6. The Ministry of Commerce of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Concluding the Joint Feasibility Study of the China-Moldova Free Trade Agreement with the Ministry of Economy of Moldova and the Memorandum of Understanding on Launching the Joint Feasibility Study of China-Mongolia Free Trade Agreement with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia.

7. The Ministry of Commerce of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Construction of Cross-Border Economic Cooperation Zones with the Ministry of Industry of Nepal, and signed the Memorandum of Understanding on the Establishment of China-Myanmar Border Economic Cooperation Zone with the Ministry of Commerce of Myanmar.

8. The Ministry of Commerce of China signed the Outline of the Medium and Long-Term Development Plan for Investment, Economic and Technological Cooperation with the Ministry of Development Strategy and International Trade of Sri Lanka, the Memorandum of Understanding on Strengthening Trade, Investment and Economic Cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia, the Cooperation Plan on Promoting SME Development with the Ministry of Economy of Kyrgyzstan, the memoranda of understanding concerning SME cooperation with the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary, and the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation on Electronic Commerce with the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Viet Nam.

9. The National Development and Reform Commission of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Promoting the Major Projects under Industrial Capacity and Investment Cooperation with the Ministry of Economy of Kyrgyzstan, and signed the Framework Agreement on Enhancing Industrial Capacity and Investment Cooperation with the Ministry of Economy of the UAE.

10. The Ministry of Agriculture of China signed the Memorandum on Determining the Action Plan on Agricultural Trade and Investment with the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment Protection of Serbia, the Strategic Action Plan on Agricultural Cooperation with the Ministry of Agro-Industry of Argentina, the Five-Year Plan on Improving the Level of Agricultural Cooperation (2017-2021) with the Ministry of Agriculture of Chile and the Three Year Action Plan on Agricultural Cooperation (2018-2020) with the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation of Egypt.

11. The General Administration of Customs of China signed customs cooperation documents with the customs authorities of Kazakhstan, the Netherlands and Poland to deepen cooperation on mutual exchange of information, mutual recognition of inspection results and mutual assistance in law enforcement.

12. The General Administration of Customs of China signed a cooperation document with the International Road Transport Union to promote construction of international logistics corridors and implementation of the Convention on International Transport of Goods Under Cover of TIR Carnets.

13. The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of China signed cooperation agreements on inspection and quarantine with the relevant departments of Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Norway, Ireland, Serbia, the Netherlands, Argentina, Chile, and Tanzania, signed cooperation agreements in the field of NQI (National Quality Infrastructure, including standard, metrology, certification and accreditation) with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the relevant government departments of Ukraine and Azerbaijan, and signed the Joint Initiative on Strengthening Standards Cooperation and Building the Belt and Road with the relevant agencies of Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Greece, Switzerland, Turkey and other countries.

14. The Export-Import Bank of China signed loan agreements on industrial park projects, projects of power transmission and distribution, wind power project, water projects, dam project, satellite project, hydraulic factory projects with the relevant government departments of Belarus, Cambodia, Ethiopia, the Lao PDR, Kenya, Mongolia and Pakistan, loan agreements on power grid upgrading project,thermal power project, coal mine modernization project, tyre factory project, with relevant companies of Egypt, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia, and signed the Strategic Cooperation Framework Agreement regarding Lines of Credit with the Philippine Metropolitan Bank and Trust Company.

15. The China Development Bank signed financing cooperation agreements on chemical, metallurgical and petrochemical industries with relevant institutions of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Malaysia.

16. The China International Import Expo will be held from 2018.

IV. Enhance Financial Cooperation, Promote Financial Connectivity

1. The Silk Road Fund will expand by RMB 100 billion.

2. China encourages financial institutions to conduct Overseas Fund Business in RMB with the estimated amount of about RMB 300 billion, providing financing support for the Belt and Road Initiative.

3. The National Development and Reform Commission of China will set up the China-Russia Regional Cooperation Development Investment Fund, with a total scale of RMB 100 billion and the initial scale of RMB 10 billion to promote cooperation between China's Northeast and Russia's Far East.

4. The Ministry of Finance of China signed the memoranda of understanding on collaboration on matters of common interest under the Belt and Road Initiative with the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, the New Development Bank and the World Bank Group.

5. The Ministry of Finance of China will establish the Multilateral Development Finance Cooperation Center together with the multilateral development banks.

6. The China-Kazakhstan Production Capacity Cooperation Fund came into operation, and the framework agreement of cooperation was signed regarding full support of Chinese telecom companies' participation in the "Digital Kazakhstan 2020" Program.

7. The Silk Road Fund and the Interbank Association of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization agreed on the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding on the Basis of Partnership. The Silk Road Fund and the National Bank for Foreign Economic Activity of Uzbekistan signed the cooperation agreement.

8. The China Development Bank will set up the Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme for Infrastructure Development (RMB 100 billion equivalent), the Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme for Industrial Cooperation (RMB 100 billion equivalent), and the Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Credit Lines for Overseas Financial Institutions (RMB 50 billion equivalent).

9. The Export-Import Bank of China will set up the Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme (RMB 100 billion equivalent) and the Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme for Infrastructure Development (RMB 30 billion equivalent).

10. The China Development Bank signed Subscription Agreement for the Sino-French SME Fund II with Bpifrance, and signed Memorandum of Understanding on Sino-Italian Co-Investment Fund with Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, and conducts financing and bond underwriting cooperation with the Tejarat Bank of Iran, Banque Misr of Egypt, Hungarian Development Bank, Metrobank of the Philippines, Ziraat Bank of Turkey, Raiffeisen Bank International of Austria, Canadia Bank of Cambodia, and Maybank of Malaysia.

11. The Export-Import Bank of China signed framework agreements regarding lines of credit with Export-Import Bank of Malaysia, Export-Import Bank of Thailand and other Asian EXIM Bank Forum members, and will conduct practical cooperation in areas of on-lending and trade finance.

12. China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation signed cooperation agreements with the export credit agencies in Belarus, Serbia, Poland, Sri Lanka and Egypt, signed framework agreements with the relevant government departments, including the Ministry of Investment and International Cooperation of Egypt, the Ministry of Finance of the Lao PDR, the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Cambodia, the Investment Coordinating Board of Indonesia, Polish Investment and Trade Agency, National Treasury of Kenya, the Central Bank of Iran and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs of Iran, and signed framework agreements with financial institutions, including the Saudi Fund for Development, Isbank and Garanti Bank in Turkey, and the United Bank in Pakistan.

13. The People's Bank of China and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will jointly set up "the IMF-China Capacity Building Center" to provide training to the countries along the Belt and Road.

14. The Export-Import Bank of China and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization signed a joint declaration on enhancing cooperation on sustainable industrial development in the countries along the Belt and Road.

15. The Asian Financial Cooperation Association has been officially established.

16. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and major commercial banks in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Austria and other countries along the Belt and Road will jointly launch the Belt and Road Action Plan for Banking Cooperation, and establish a regular cooperation and exchange mechanism for banks along the Belt and Road.

V. Invest More in People's Livelihood, Deepen People-to-People Exchange

1. The Chinese government will increase its assistance to the developing countries along the Belt and Road. The total assistance over the next three years will be no less than RMB 60 billion.

2. The Chinese government will provide RMB 2 billion emergency food aid to the the countries along the Belt and Road. China will provide replenishment of US$1 billion to the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund to initiate the "China and United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Cooperation Initiative", and to support the implementation of 100 Happy Home Projects, 100 Anti-Poverty Projects, 100 Health Recovery Projects and other projects in the relevant countries. China will provide relevant international organizations with US$1 billion to jointly promote the implementation of international cooperation projects benefiting the countries on the Belt and Road, including 100 Refugee Assistance Projects covering food, tents, portable houses, etc, setting up "Refugee Scholarships", providing 500 refugee youngsters with education opportunities and financial support to 100 refugee athletes to participate in regional or international games.

3. The Chinese government signed the Executive Program of Cultural Agreement for the Years 2017-2020 with the government of Lebanon, and the Agreement on the Reciprocal Establishment of Cultural Centers with the government of Tunisia, and the Agreement on the Reciprocal Establishment of Cultural Centers with the government of Turkey.

4. The Chinese government signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation (2017-2020) with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

5. The Chinese government signed the Governmental Tourism Cooperation Agreement with the government of Poland.

6. The Chinese government proposes to launch the Belt and Road Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation Action Plan, including the Science and Technology People-to-People Exchange Initiative, the Joint Laboratory Initiative, the Science Park Cooperation Initiative and the Technology Transfer Initiative.

7. The Chinese government signed assistance agreements with the United Nations World Food Programme, the United Nations International Organization for Migration, the United Nations International Children's Fund, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the International Trade Centre, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

8. The Ministry of Education of China signed agreements on education cooperation with the relevant departments of Russia, Kazakhstan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia and Laos, signed the Agreement on Mutual Recognition of Higher Education Qualifications and Degrees with Cyprus and established a music education alliance with the countries along the Belt and Road.

9. The Ministry of Science and Technology of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Young Scientist Exchange with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Sport of Mongolia, the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation for the Establishment of Science Park and Innovation Infrastructure Development in Mongolia with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Sport of Mongolia, and the Memorandum of Understanding on Joint Funding to Research and Development Projects with the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary.

10. The Ministry of Environmental Protection of China issued the Belt and Road Ecological and Environmental Cooperation Plan, established the Big Data Service Platform on Ecological and Environmental Protection, and announced the Joint Initiative to Establish the International Coalition for Green Development on the Belt and Road with the United Nations Environment Programme.

11. The Ministry of Finance of China will establish the Research Center for the Belt and Road Financial and Economic Development.

12. The National Health and Family Planning Commission of China signed health cooperation agreements with the health authorities of the Czech Republic and Norway.

13. The National Tourism Administration of China signed tourism cooperation agreement with the National Tourism Development Committee of Uzbekistan, signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Furthering Tourism Cooperation with the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism of Chile, and signed the Implementation Plan for Memorandum of Understanding on Tourism Cooperation with Ministry of Tourism of Cambodia.

14. The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of China signed cooperation documents with Radio and Television Supreme Council of Turkey and the General Commission of Audiovisual Media of Saudi Arabia. China Central Television will set up the "Belt and Road News Alliance" with mainstream media of relevant countries.

15. The State Council Information Office of China signed the memoranda of understanding on media cooperation exchanges with the Ministry of Information of Cambodia, the Department of Information of Prime Minister's Office of Brunei Darussalam, the National Media Council of the UAE, the Ministry of Information of Palestine and the Department of Communication and Relations with Citizens in the Council of Ministers of Albania.

16. The State Council Information Office of China signed the memoranda of understanding on plans to promote think tank cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Cambodia, Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brunei Darussalam, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of of Palestine and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Albania.

17. The China Development Bank will set up the Experience Sharing and Capacity Building Cooperation Program for Belt and Road Partners, and the Belt and Road Scholarship.

18. China NGO Network for International Exchanges and over 80 Chinese NGOs jointly launched the Chinese Social Organizations' Action Plan for Stronger People-to-People Connectivity along the Belt and Road (2017-2020). China NGO Network for International Exchanges and over 150 civil organizations jointly set up the Silk Road NGO Cooperation Network. Silk Road Think Tank Association (SRTA) launched the International Think Tank Cooperation Program on Enhancing People-to-People Connectivity along the Belt and Road.

19. The Development Research Center of the State Council of China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation Jointly Building the Belt and Road Initiative with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. The Silk Road Think Tank Network (SiLKS), with over 50 international members and partners, released the Silk Road Think Tank Network Declaration on Joint Action.

20. The China International Cities Development Alliance signed Letter of Intent on Urban Development Cooperation with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, the World Health Organization and United Cities and Local Governments Asia Pacific.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 23:44:17|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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Liu Yunshan (2nd R), a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, meets with foreign delegates who attended the Thematic Session on People-to-people Connectivity at the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation, in Beijing, capital of China, May 15, 2017. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Liu Yunshan, a senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC), met with a group of foreign delegates attending the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation here on Monday.

China is willing to enhance exchanges between parties, think tanks and people so as to help build the Belt and Road into a road of peace, prosperity, opening up and innovation as well as a road connecting different civilizations, said Liu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.

The foreign delegates, who attended a session on people-to-people bonds during the forum, said they will continue to support the Belt and Road Initiative and bring more groups to participate.

In a separate meeting with Andres Pastrana, president of Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and former president of Colombia, Liu said the CPC values its exchange with the CDI and its member parties and stands ready to strengthen dialogue and mutual understanding with them.

Pastrana said the forum had great historic significance, noting that Colombia and other Latin American countries are ready to increase people-to-people bonds with China and actively engage in the Belt and Road development.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 23:49:21|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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MOSUL, Iraq, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi paramilitary units of Hashd Shaabi units on Monday freed eight villages from Islamic State (IS) militants on the fourth day of an operation aimed at driving out the extremist militants from the areas near the Iraqi-Syrian border in west of Mosul, the Iraqi military said.

The predominantly Shiite Hashd Shaabi units, backed by the army's helicopters, freed the villages which are scattered in north and south of the IS-held town of al-Qairwan, located in the rugged sprawling area southwest of Tal Afar and south of Sinjar, the Hashd Shaabi said in a statement.

In addition, the Hashd Shaabi units entered the village of al-Mabhal in north of al-Qairwan and are now fighting heavy clashes with IS militants holed up in the village, the statement added.

Meanwhile, the clashes continued for the second day at the edge of the nearby village of Tal al-Banat in north of al-Qairwan, where some of IS local leaders are believed to be holed up and using the villagers as human shields, the statement said.

The units are now surrounding the town from three sides, isolating the IS-held town and cutting off its supply routes on the main roads between the town and Tal Afar and Sinjar, the statement said.

The paramilitary units have fought sporadic clashes against IS militants and killed 39 of them, including some suicide bombers, along with destroying four car bombs and seizing three others and defused them before the militants blew them up, it said.

Explosive experts also defused 50 roadside bombs around al-Qairwan town, in addition to a booby-trapped house in one of the villages, the statement added.

The operation would enable the Hashd Shaabi units to secure the border areas between Iraq and neighboring Syria and cut off the IS supply routes between Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa, the capital of IS self-declared caliphate.

The operation came as the Iraqi security forces, backed by anti-IS international coalition, are carrying out a major offensive to dislodge IS militants from their major stronghold in the western side of Mosul in northern Iraq.

Mosul, 400 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, has been under IS control since June 2014, when government forces abandoned their weapons and fled, enabling IS militants to take control of parts of Iraq's northern and western regions.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-15 23:54:23|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ISTANBUL, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A group of Turks on Monday attempted to lynch an Afghan man in Istanbul over the killing of a Turkish young man, local media reported.

The incident erupted at the funeral of 24-year-old Ramazan Sahin, who was stabbed to death on Sunday night during a brawl between Turkish residents and a group of Afghans and Syrians in Istanbul's Sultangazi district, the Hurriyet daily said.

Some youngsters in the neighborhood started to beat the Afghan with sticks, as hundreds of others were waiting for the funeral, the report said.

The riot police dispersed the crowd later by firing painted capsules to identify the perpetrators, Hurriyet said.

The brawl broke out reportedly after the group of foreigners heckled women in the neighborhood.

About 60 people from both sides were involved in the fight, Sahin's uncle Salih Arslan was quoted as saying.

"We condemn those who have filled their houses with Afghans and Syrians just to gain 10 or 20 Turkish liras more," said Arslan.

According to the residents, similar incidents were happening frequently but "nobody intervened in them."

Turkey is hosting millions of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 00:14:44|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) meets with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who is in Beijing for the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation, in Beijing, capital of China, May 15, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Duo)

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called for heightened cooperation with the United Nations (UN) to promote world peace, stability and prosperity.

Li made the remarks when meeting with the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

China is a staunch supporter of UN's authority and its core role in safeguarding world peace and security and boosting global development, Li said.

"We are willing to play our role on the platforms such as the UN to implement the 2030 sustainable development agenda, and make concerted efforts toward world peace, stability and prosperity," he said.

Li noted the promotion of world peace, development and cooperation has become a consensus for all, calling globalization an irreversible historical trend.

Problems arising from globalization should be addressed while globalization is underway, he said, reaffirming China's support to globalization and facilitation of trade and investment.

Guterres said China is a vital pillar of safeguarding multilateralism and free trade, and the fair and orderly advance of globalization.

The UN is willing to step up cooperation with China and match the UN sustainable development agenda with China's development strategy to promote world peace and stability through sustainable development, he said.
NICOSIA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Cypriot Education Minister Costas Kadis on Monday said an agreement he signed with his Chinese counterpart Chen Baosheng on the mutual recognition of university titles is very important for Cyprus.

"The agreement is the catalyst for strengthening the co-operation in the field of higher education between the two countries," Kadis said

He added that it will turn Cyprus into a regional education and research centre and will attract even more foreign students.

There are over 100 Chinese young people studying in Cypriot universities, about half of them in the European University of Cyprus.

Kadis said that under the agreement he signed on Sunday in Beijing, academic degrees awarded by Cypriot universities will be automatically recognised by China at an academic and professional level, while Cyprus will recognise Chinese university degrees.

Kadis travelled to China to represent Cyprus on the two-day Belt and Road Forum for international cooperation which kicked off on May 14.

He also discussed with China's Minister of Culture Luo Shugang ways to promote cultural cooperation. The Cypriot minister said he welcomed the proposal of the Chinese Ministry of Culture to open a cultural centre in Nicosia.
WARSAW, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Polish President Andrzej Duda and visiting Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis declared close cooperation and joint view regarding security issues, following their meeting in Warsaw on Monday.

During a joint press conference, Duda informed that the talks concerned bilateral relations, the upcoming NATO Summit in Brussels and relations with Russia.

The two presidents also agreed that implementation of resolutions taken during NATO Summit in Warsaw was priority for the Baltic States.

Duda informed that they both agreed on an attitude towards the EU problems, including Brexit, which, according to the presidents, should have possibly mild and smooth course and provide good relations between the EU and the UK.

The Intermarium initiative was also among the topics raised. While expressing gratitude to his Latvian counterpart for his will to take part in the meeting on this matter, Duda emphasized it was an European initiative aimed at cohesion and development equalization within the EU.

Another initiative discussed was the Via Baltica project (connection between Baltic states and southern Europe) and power connections between the two countries.

"Our conversations confirm that our countries share a view on the current global and regional challenges such as regional cooperation and security politics," said Latvian President Vejonis, adding that Latvia and Poland closely cooperate for strengthening security in the Baltic Sea region.
NAIROBI, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China will strengthen collaboration with Kenya in scientific research and capacity development to revitalize conservation of the East African nation's wild flora, an official said on Monday.

Wang Qingfeng, the Director of Sino-Africa Joint Research Centre (SAJOREC) that is affiliated with Chinese Academy of Sciences said Beijing is committed to helping Kenya advance sustainable management of its botanical wealth.

"In the last five years since we signed a memorandum of understanding with National Museums of Kenya (NMK), we have intensified collaborative research to promote conservation of plant species," Wang said.

He spoke to Xinhua on the sidelines of the 21st edition of Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa (AETFAT) congress taking place in Nairobi.

SAJOREC which is housed at Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology (JKUAT) has sponsored the five day conference attended by hundreds of scientists and researchers to explore new measures to boost conservation of Africa's botanic treasures.

Wang said that sustainable management of wild flora is key to accelerate sustainable development in Africa.

"Communities are increasingly turning to native plants for raw materials, medical care, energy, fiber and food hence the need to enhance conservation of plant diversity," said Wang.

Kenya is among African countries that have benefited from technical and financial support from China to strengthen conservation of vital ecosystems like wild flora and fauna.

Wang noted that exchange programs between Kenyan and Chinese scientists have re-energized home grown initiatives to promote sustainable management of genetic resources.

"We have published several books and articles in peer reviewed journals on biodiversity conservation with our Kenyan partners, we are also promoting joint exploration to identify challenges facing wild flora in several parts of the country," Wang told Xinhua.

He added that Beijing will continue to support capacity development for African scientists to enhance their contribution to the continent's ecosystems protection agenda.

"Training the next generation of African scientists is key to boost biodiversity conservation," Wang said.

The establishment of Sino-Africa Joint Research Centre in Kenya has revitalized biodiversity conservation agenda in the country.

Wang said the centre has improved the capacity of Kenyan scientists and researchers to find solution to challenges facing wild flora like pollution and invasive species.

"Our future collaboration with Kenyan research institutions will focus on emerging threats to plant species," said Wang, adding that improved research capacity and technology will boost Kenya's capacity to contain threats to wild flora.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 01:05:21|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TEHRAN, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Iranian Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that the Islamic republic does not seek any "tension" with Saudi Arabia, Tehran Times daily reported.

"We hope they (the Saudis) ... make up for their past mistakes and create an atmosphere of agreement and negotiation," Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi was quoted as saying.

"Saudi Arabia has made strategic mistakes in Yemen and we hope they will become ready to hold talks with Iran in a fair atmosphere," Qasemi said.

Commenting on the recent remarks by the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman who had said that Saudi Arabia will take the "battle" inside Iran before its comes to Saudi Arabia, Qasemi said such "inconsiderate" comments originated from lack of true understanding.

Iran hopes that such remarks will not be repeated, because it will bring unfavorable consequences for them, he said.

The Iranian spokesman also said that Iran seeks to help establish peace, stability and security in the Middle East.

In January 2016, Saudi Arabia cut its diplomatic ties with Iran following attacks on its mission in the country during angry protests against the Saudi execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

Both Muslim states are also at loggerheads over their expansion of influence in Iraq, Syria, Yeman and Bahrain.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 01:24:53|Editor: huaxia

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VILNIUS, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Lithuanian government's agenda to implement necessary reforms to further the country's economic development is in line with the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) recommendations to Lithuania, prime minister Saulius Skvernelis said on Monday.

Skvernelis was speaking after meeting with Christoph Klingen, IMF mission chief for Lithuania, and other experts.

"I am happy that all the recommendations are consistent with the government's agenda and projects underway...this is yet another stimulus for us to move towards positive changes in the country," the prime minister was quoted as saying in a government statement.

Meanwhile, Klingen welcomed Lithuania's efforts to consolidate public finances and comply with strict fiscal discipline. He also praised Lithuania's sustainable economic growth amidst the country's serious demographic problems.

After completing the mission on Monday, the IMF projected that Lithuania's economy would expand by 3.2 percent this year and next, local website vz.lt reported.

In its World Economic Outlook published last month, IMF expected Lithuania's economy to grow by 2.8 percent and 3.1 percent this year and in 2018 respectively.

Despite the raised projections, the head of the IMF mission urged Lithuania to carry out comprehensive reforms to liberalize labor market, improve the governance of state-owned enterprises, and promote better education and innovation.

In the words of Klingen, Lithuania had already started to implement the most important structural reforms, therefore, it was crucial "not to stop in the halfway."

"We think that reforms of the education and social system, stimulating innovations, the fight against unemployment, and diminishing social exclusion are the main priorities," Klingen noted.

Lithuania became an IMF member in 1992. Enditem
Soldiers salute on tanks during the Victory Day parade in Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2017. Russia marks on Tuesday the 72nd anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. (Xinhua/Wu Zhuang)

MOSCOW, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The share of modern weapons and military hardware of the Russian Land Force has reached 42 percent, Mikhail Popov, deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council told the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper published on Monday.

"The Land Force units are receiving new types of weapons and military hardware, which now comprise 42 percent of their equipment. Receipt of new types of weapons and military hardware will increase the combat capabilities of the Land Force units," Popov said.

The share of modern weapon systems and military hardware accounted for 58.3 percent of the Russian Armed Forces in late 2016, said Popov.

Popov added that a total of 36 military units of unmanned aviation, equipped with about 2,000 modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), had been produced in the Russian Armed Forces.
KHARTOUM, May 15 (Xinhua) -- A UN official said on Monday that Sudan has made progress in its human rights record.

The comment was made by Aristide Nononsi, the United Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in Sudan, after his talks with officials of Sudan's National Human Rights Commission in Khartoum.

He also expressed readiness to provide technical support for the commission to perform its function.

Nononsi arrived in Khartoum on Friday in his third visit to Sudan to assess the country's efforts to fulfill its commitments to upholding human rights.
ADDIS ABABA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says it has only been able to meet 20 percent of the funds required to meet the more than 843,000 refugees registered in Ethiopia as of April 30.

In a report released on Monday, UNHCR put the amount of funding needed to meet the needs of the refugees at 307.5 million U.S. dollars. UNHCR just received 20 percent of the whole amount.

The funding is needed to meet the security, education, health, nutrition and food security, water and sanitation, energy access of the refugees as well as environmental protection of the camps and its surrounding areas.

The largest refugee group in Ethiopia are South Sudanese at 357,755 who have fled an internecine civil war that has consumed the world's youngest nation since December 2013.

The second largest group of refugees is from Somalia fleeing war and famine at about 249,000 while refugees from Eritrea fleeing economic deprivation stand at 169,655.

Smaller groups of refugees fleeing war in Sudan and from across the Red Sea from Yemen were also part of the group the UNHCR has registered as needing funding to meet their basic needs.
KIGALI, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA) Monday pledged stronger cooperation with the public in enhancing cyber security for all computers in Rwanda following reports of an outbreak of a security attack that has affected over 150 countries.

The cyber security attack is known as ransomware, bearing different variations like WannaCrypt, WannaCry, WannaCryptor or Wcrya.

The cyber-attack mostly affects computers that run Microsoft Operating Systems, by automatically encrypting the files and blocking the user's access.

"As we globally face this challenge in cyber security, as a country we strongly believe that an integrated strategy to ensure effective regulation to our cyber security is significant at this point," said the statement.

"Users are required to maintain daily backups of critical data including application, databases, mails systems, and user's files. Backups should be regularly tested for data restoration," it said.

It also urged installation of all computers with latest security updates. Other precautions include configuring the LAN perimeter firewall with a rule to block all incoming SMB traffic on port 445, upgrading all computers to Windows 10 to benefit from the latest protection from Microsoft.

"The Windows Defender Antivirus, which can detect the above malware, should also be enabled on all Windows systems. Ensure your Antivirus signatures are up to date as major vendors are all working to deliver updated signatures to detect/ prevent this," it said.

It also cautioned all users against opening any suspicious email especially one that have an attachment, or downloading any files that they are not sure of the source.

RISA reaffirmed commitment to address the threat to cyber security and encouraged the public to fully collaborate in order to minimize any negative impact.
MINSK, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank has predicted a 0.4 percent GDP decline in Belarus in 2017, the economist of the Belarusian office of the World Bank Kirill Haiduk told reporters here on Monday.

The economist explained the projected decline by the existing structural shortcomings and shrinking domestic demand.

According to the World Bank, the financial support from the Russian government will have only a temporary impact on the solution of internal and external imbalances.

The World Bank expects a weak recovery in economic growth in 2018-2019. The Belarusian economy can grow by 0.7 percent in 2018, the forecast for 2019 is plus 1.2 percent, Haiduk said.

In 2016, Belarus' GDP decreased by 2.6 percent.
CAIRO, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Egypt will receive two million barrels of crude oil from Iraq on Tuesday, reported the state-run Ahram online.

The expected first shipment is part of a deal with Iraq's state oil marketing company SOMO, according to the same source.

In light of an agreement reached last month between Baghdad and Cairo, Iraq will sell 12 million barrels of oil to Egypt, Egypt's Oil Minister Tarek El-Molla was quoted as saying by the official website.

Cairo has struggled to procure oil and natural gas for its domestic market needs from several sources in recent years.

However, recent surges in natural gas discoveries and projected finds in the country promise to help Egypt cut down on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports in the coming year.

Egypt, the world's eighth largest importer of LNG, has discussed deferring contracted shipments this year with its LNG suppliers to reduce purchases in 2018 and attain self-sufficiency in the alternative fuel source by the end of 2018.
BUJUMBURA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The appointment of a commission mandated to draft Burundi's new constitution is aimed at "correcting" errors of the past, the Burundian President's spokesman said Monday.

The appointment was made by Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza.

"The commission has been appointed in order to correct errors of the past. In 2015, Burundi faced problems because of misunderstandings around some provisions of the national constitution," said Jean Claude Karerwa.

According to him, the appointment of the commission mandated to suggest amendments to the constitution will avoid errors of the past.

However, some other groups including some political parties, some civil society groups as well as former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa, facilitator in the inter-Burundian dialogue, have said the amendment of the constitution should be done at the end of the talks initially set for this June.

Burundi has suffered turmoil since then when President Nkurunziza decided to run his controversial third term in violation of the national constitution and the 2000 Arusha Agreement that ended a decade-long civil war.

Protests against Nkurunziza's third term bid turned into a failed coup on May 13, 2015.

Over 500 people in Burundi are reported to have been killed during the crisis while some 400,000 people fled to neighboring countries mostly Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) and Uganda since the outbreak of the crisis.
RABAT, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has decided to maintain its 3.47 billion U.S. dollars' worth of Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL) for Morocco, local media reported on Monday.

The IMF's executive board completed the first review under the PLL Arrangement and reaffirmed Morocco's continued qualification for the PLL, Morocco's leading financial daily l'Economiste said.

In July 2016, IMF approved the two-year PLL arrangement for Morocco to withstand external risks and support the country's program to rebuild fiscal and external buffers and promote higher and more inclusive growth.

l'Economiste praised Morocco's solid macroeconomic performance in recent years, saying improving the business climate and governance, competitiveness, access to finance, and labor market policies will be essential to increase potential growth and reduce persistently high unemployment levels.

Morocco's first PLL arrangement of 6.21 billion dollars was approved on Aug. 3, 2012, while the 24-month second of about 5 billion dollars was on July 28, 2014.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 04:22:24|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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CARACAS, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Venezuela's Carabobo state governor Francisco Ameliach confirmed on Monday that a policeman had been killed in the state, bringing the death toll from protests in the country to 40 since April 1.

Writing on Twitter, Ameliach explained that a sniper had shot a police officer in the head during protests in the state's capital of Valencia, and another officer was injured.

Local media also reported two police motorcycles were burned along the Eastern Highway in Carabobo.

The street protests on Monday came after a call by the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) for a massive turnout by its supporters across the country.

Ameliach blamed the MUD for the attack, saying "Sectors of the MUD in Carabobo are leading the violence. Good men and women must reject them and work for peace."

Since anti-government protests began in early April, the country has registered 40 dead and around 600 injured while over 1,000 people have been arrested.

The MUD has been at loggerheads with the central government on a number of issues, including calling early elections and freeing political prisoners.
A cholera-infected child receives medical treatment at a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen, on May 13, 2017. (Xinhua/Mohammed Mohammed)

UNITED NATIONS, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that an estimated 7.6 million people live in areas at high risk of cholera transmission in Yemen, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters here Monday.

"Inadequate sanitation infrastructure, coupled with displacement, overcrowded shelters and settlements, increase the risk of person-to-person cholera transmission," Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here.

In response, the UN is supporting 33 diarrhoea treatment centers in Yemen, and ten oral rehydration therapy centers have been opened, he said.

The UN has established two emergency centers, in Aden and Sana'a, with Rapid Response Teams to monitor and treat contaminated water sources, he added.

A cholera outbreak in Yemen has killed 51 people in two weeks and caused around 2,752 suspected cases since April 27, the World Health Organization (WHO) said last Thursday in a statement on its website.

The cases were reported from 10 provinces, including the capital Sanaa, according to the statement.

The cholera outbreak in Yemen was announced by Yemen's Ministry of Public Health and Population on Oct. 6, 2016.

Yemen, the impoverished Arab country in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, has been involved in a civil war since two years ago. The war pits Iranian-allied dominant Houthi movement, backed by forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, against their foe of Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

The war has killed more than 10,000 people, half of them civilians, and displaced over 2 millions, according to humanitarian agencies.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 04:37:36|Editor: Liangyu

Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti (C) visits a naval base in Tripoli, capital of Libya, on May 15, 2017. Marco Minniti on Monday met with Libyan Prime Minister Fayez Serraj in the Libyan capital Tripoli in bid to step up bilateral cooperation. (Xinhua/Hamza Turkia)

TRIPOLI, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Libyan Prime Minister Fayez Serraj met with Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti on Monday in the Libyan capital Tripoli in bid to step up bilateral cooperation.

According to the prime minister's media department, both officials discussed issues of mutual concern, particularly matters of security cooperation between the two countries.

The discussion included battling illegal immigration, as well as training Libyan border security troops and coast guards.

The Italian embassy tweeted: "PM Serraj to Minniti: For effective fight against illegal migration, critical to concentrate on the South. Italy and Libya firmly on the same side in the fight against migrant smuggling."

Due to regional insecurity, thousands of migrants left Libya and headed towards Italy, with several drowning in the Mediterranean before reaching Italian shores.

Earlier last week, Serraj also met the Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano and discussed their joint efforts in fighting illegal immigration, human trafficking, and development projects in Libya.

The Libyan-Italian joint committee held a meeting in Tripoli to discuss illegal immigration and Libya's southern border security.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 04:57:55|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LA PAZ, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Bolivia and Brazil are asking Peru to join them in starting a joint intelligence center to fight organized crime along their common border, said Bolivian Interior Minister Carlos Romero on Monday.

"We have agreed on the urgent need to start a tripartite intelligence center between Bolivia, Brazil and Peru...to principally fight drug trafficking," Romero told the press in La Paz.

According to Romero, the intelligence agency was one of the major conclusions reached on Friday at a high-level meeting between Bolivia and Brazil.

Another deal was struck for the installation of a new radar system in Bolpebra, at the frontier of all three countries, to strengthen air control and surveillance against drug trafficking.

The two countries also agreed to share their criminal record databases and to implement a joint center for the search of illegal funds, an area in which Brazil has extensive experience.

"These are tasks to be implemented at once, which obviously respond to our shared responsibility when dealing with transnational crimes," said Romero.

The deals are reached after Bolivia identified growing operations on its territory by two major Brazilian gangs, Primer Comando Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho, which have committed to kidnappings, drug trafficking and illegal arms sales in the frontier regions of Beni, Pando and Santa Cruz.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets Donald Trump on May 16, 2017 in Washington for the first time as president, hoping to entice the American leader into major policy shifts to solidify a crucial but increasingly strained relationship. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

ANKARA, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday will have his first face to face talks with President Donald Trump with a tough agenda as Ankara has set it stakes high particularly on the issue of Syria.

Trump was the only Western leader congratulating Erdogan after his victory at the constitutional referendum on April which granted broader executive powers to the Turkish presidency.

But ties between the Turkish government and the Trump administration have not evolved as Ankara desired since Washington indicated that Turkey's demands are unlikely to be met because the U.S. has firm position on its cooperation with the Kurdish fighters in Syria in its bid to drive the Islamic State (IS) out of the war-torn country.

Turkey and the U.S. have been at odds particularly on a couple of issues that held bilateral ties captured. Ankara wants Washington to end cooperating with the People's Protection Units (YPG) against the IS in Syria, saying they are Syrian branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Yet Washington falls on deaf ears on Turkey's concerns, especially over arming YPG fighters ahead of a major offensive to drive the IS from Raqqa town of Syria, although Ankara warns that those weapons could end up with the PKK members.

On the contrary, one week before Erdogan's visit to Washington, Trump has given his authorization for the direct arming of the YPG fighters in an apparent message that Pentagon will continue cooperating with local Kurdish fighters as U.S. proxy on the ground for upcoming Raqqa offensive.

The U.S. partner Syrian Kurdish dominated alliance known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) since two years and Washington sees these forces as the most capable anti-Islamic State force in northern Syria. The SDF are now closing in on Raqqa, the de facto capital of the IS.

Whereas the Turkish government has long been proposing its NATO ally for launching Raqqa operation with Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters and Erdogan is expected to raise the offer once more during his talks with Trump.

Last week, the Turkish president sent a high level delegation including chief of army, head of intelligence agency and his close adviser to Washington to lay grounds for his upcoming meeting with the U.S. president.

"They presented a lot of documents to help clear the U.S. stance on YPG. Now we will have the final meeting, and then we will make our final decision. If we are strategic partners, we should make decisions in an alliance. If the alliance will be overshadowed, then we will have to take care of ourselves," Erdogan told reporters in Beijing on May 14, two days before a scheduled meeting with Trump in Washington.

He blamed U.S. bureaucracy left from Obama administration for American insistence for relying on the Syrian Kurdish militia.

A second hot potato for the meeting at the White House is the Ankara's demand from the U.S. temporary arrest and extradition of Fethullah Gulen, the self-exiled Islamic cleric in Pennsylvania who is accused by the Turkish government of masterminding failed coup attempt on July 15.

President Erdogan is also expected to ask release of Reza Zarrab, the Turkish-Iranian businessman, and Mehmet Hakan Atilla, the deputy general manager of the Turkish state owned Halk Bank, who are both on trial in the U.S. for violating sanctions on Iran.

Zarrap, who has both Iranian and Turkish citizenship, is accused of money laundering and breaching embargoes. The Turkish government asks Zarrab to be given to Turkey since he is a citizen.

Analysts are not hopeful for remarkable progress from the Erdogan-Trump meeting.

"All the signs are that this will not be an easy conversation. Ankara has set the stakes so high with regard to its demands that it has left itself very little room for diplomatic maneuvering," according to Semih Idiz, a columnist from Hurriyet Daily News.

"Washington, on the other hand, has made it amply clear that Turkey's demands are unlikely to be met because the U.S. has firm positions, or obstacles it can't overcome, that make it very hard to please Ankara," Idiz said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 05:08:09|Editor: huaxia

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NEW YORK, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Oil prices settled higher for a fourth straight session Monday as Saudi Arabia and Russia said crude supply cut deal needed to be extended into 2018.

Saudi Arabia and Russia energy ministers said Monday that supply cuts should be prolonged for nine months, until March 2018, which is longer than the optional six-month extension specified in the deal, according to the Reuters.

The ministers also said they hoped other producers would join the supply cut, which would initially be on the same volume terms as before.

The West Texas Intermediate for June delivery jumped 1.01 U.S. dollars to settle at 48.85 dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Brent crude for July delivery added 0.98 dollar to close at 51.82 dollars a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange. Enditem
BERLIN, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Turkey again denied German members of parliament access to the German Bundeswehr soldiers stationed at Turkey's Incirlik air base on Monday.

The Turkish government has not granted the necessary diplomatic clearance to the politicians for their visit, despite multiple requests by the Federal Foreign Office.

The Office called the decision "absolutely unacceptable," and is considering withdrawing its operations from Turkey.

"We have to think about how to continue in light of the current situation," Federal Foreign Office representative Martin Schaefer said in Berlin.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has confirmed that while the dialogue with Turkey is continuing, the German government "searches for alternatives to Incirlik."

Since the German Bundeswehr is a parliamentary army, "it is absolutely necessary for members of parliament to have access to their soldiers," Merkel said. The decision on where to deploy the Tornado units is expected within two weeks.

Turkey has not provided a reason for their official refusal. But a response to asylum granted by German government to Turkish soldiers is a suspected reason. The soldiers feared persecution after the failed military coup against Turkish president Recep Erdogan last year.

Around 260 members of the Bundeswehr and several Tornado surveillance aircraft are currently stationed in Incirlik. It is the base of operations for support missions by the international coalition against the terror organization Islamic State (IS).

It is the second time that Turkey refused access to the German troops stationed there following a similar refusal last year.
LISBON, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Portuguese economy registered the growth of 2.8 percent in the first quarter this year over the same period last year, the Portuguese National Statistics Institute (INE) said on Monday.

On quarterly basis, the country's economy grew by 1 percent in the first quarter, according to the INE.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) raised its projections for the Portuguese economic growth from the previous 1.1 percent to 1.7 percent this year, slightly below the government forecast of 1.8 percent.

Before starting a visit to a horticultural company in Odemira, some 200 km south of capital Lisbon on Monday, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said that the INE figure shows that "the Portuguese confidence was not unfounded" and that the combination of policies "is adequate."

"What the data has consistently demonstrated since mid-2006 is that the cycle of economic downturn has been reversed and has had a sustained growth," he said.

Portugal's Socialist government, which came to power in November 2015, has been reversing austerity measures imposed by the previous administration following a 78-billion-euro (84.76 billion U.S. dollars) bailout in 2011.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-05-16 05:58:33|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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WASHINGTON, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China increased its holding of U.S. Treasury securities in March for the second consecutive month, the latest data from the U.S. Treasury Department showed on Monday.

China added its treasuries holding by 27.9 billion U.S. dollars in March, with the total holding up to 1.0876 trillion U.S. dollars.

China's forex reserves rose for the third month in a row in April, as the cross-border capital flow became stable and the Chinese currency, Renminbi, stabilizes against the U.S. dollar.

Japan, which overtakes China as the largest holder of U.S. treasuries in last October, increased its holding by 3.4 billion dollars to 1.1185 trillion dollars in March.

By the end of March, overall foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities rose to 6.0793 trillion U.S. dollars from February's 6.012 trillion dollars.
Rape accused acquitted

The man of Lendore Village, Chaguanas, was before Justice Hayden St Clair Douglas charged with having sex with a minor under the age of 14 .

The incident allegedly took place at his home on October 20, 2006 when he was 17 and the girl was 13 .

After deliberating for almost four hours on Friday, the jury returned with seven jurors voting in favour of acquittal while two found him guilty .

The alleged victim claimed that she was invited over by the accused who then raped her. She did not report the incident to her family or police until February 2007 after she realised she was pregnant .

The State presented DNA evidence which proved the man was the father of her child .

The mans lawyers Sean Cazabon and Shane Kingston challenged the alleged victims claims that she was attacked by him .

In his defence, he admitted having sex with the girl but said they were in a relationship and he believed she was older since she told him she was 16 .

The case was prosecuted by Trevor Jones.
More action on child abuse

The division implemented a text message campaign in collaboration with bmobile that reached over 160,000 people and highlighted where victims of abuse can call for aid.

Commenting about initiatives to make it safer for children and easier for them to seek help, Minister of State in the OPM, Ayanna Webster-Roy said in a media release: I want the children of TT to know that your government, your leaders are working for you. You are important to us. You are our most valuable asset.

Regardless of your circumstances now, regardless of your station in life, know that we are committed to putting the right services in place to help you achieve your full potential. You are special. You are loved. She urged children who were troubled or abused to take action and speak to a trusted relative, teacher or someone in authority, or the Childrens Authority or the police.

She also urged adults and children to refrain from cyberbullying, stressing that its harmful impact could last a lifetime.

Development of a National Child Policy; establishing a National Child Registry; teaching parents and communities how to recognise the signs of bullying and abuse; teaching children about their rights, responsibilities and who to turn to for help; and providing counselling and parenting advice to parents and guardians are just some of the initiatives being pursued by the Government to protect children.

.The division is also working with local and international agencies to improve services to children.

According to a report from the Childrens Authority, from May 2015 to December 2016, it received almost 9,000 reports of abuse. We all have a role to protect our children from perpetrators of abuse and nurture children in an environment that encourages their development, the authority noted in a press release last month.

Endorsing the sentiment that preventing child abuse is everyones business and requires everyone to do their part, TSTT s VP of Mobile Services, Chevon Wilson, believes much more could be done through social media and mobile communications.

TSTT is deeply concerned about protecting and nurturing the youth of the nation. Everyday, our nations young people use our technology as part of routine social transactions, and so mobile communications is a viable medium through which important information can be shared.

Technology is not just about using a cellphone camera and social media. It can be a life-saving tool for a child in need of help, Wilson said in the release.

With so many people, even children, having access to a cell phone, there is a huge, untapped potential for using social media and mobile devices to detect and report child abuse, to promote awareness about child abuse and cyberbullying, to provide easily understood and easily accessible information to children themselves, and even to provide parenting resources and assistance to persons who might themselves be abusers and want to stop. TSTT is ready to help the relevant ministries and non-government organisations utilise the vast potential of mobile technology to minimise incidents of child abuse, Wilson said.

Anyone who suspects a child is being abused or neglected can call the ChildLine hotline at 131; the Childrens Authority at 996, or make a report to the police at 999. You can also go online and download a Childrens Services Directory: Reach Out: A Guide to Child Friendly Services and a child rights booklet: My Book of Rights & Responsibilities from the OPMs website (www.opm-gca.gov.

tt/), for further information.
Australia has effectively established an embassy in Rabat and proceeded to the appointment of Berenice Owen-Jones first Australian resident Ambassador to Morocco.

This was announced in a statement by Australias foreign Minister Julie Bishop. Australia and Morocco enjoy close ties and celebrated the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations in 2016. We share strong people-to-people links, with many thousands of Australians visiting Morocco each year, she said in the statement.

The Australian Minister underscored the importance of establishing an Embassy in Rabat saying that this will be an important addition to Australias diplomatic presence in Africa and part of the single largest expansion of our diplomatic network in 40 years.

She expressed hope that the embassy in Morocco will lead efforts to enhance bilateral ties and open new areas of cooperation, including expanding trade and investment links in food and agriculture, infrastructure planning and sustainable development, mining, oil and gas, and health.

The Australian Minister also lauded Moroccos efforts to fight global terrorism and violent extremism.

We work together as members of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. The new Embassy will enhance our ability to collaborate further on counterterrorism and security issues, she added.

Berenice Owen-Jones, who is expected to take office in June 2017, is a career officer with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and was most recently Director of Studies, Diplomatic Academy. In Canberra Ms Owen-Jones has held a range of positions including, Director, Security Policy and Clearances Section. She served overseas with DFAT at the Australian Embassy in Paris.
The death Saturday of a second Moroccan peacekeeper operating under the umbrella of the UN mission in Central African Republic (MINUSCA) was strongly denounced by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

The attack in the city of Bangassou also claimed the lives of civilians.

The Secretary-General is outraged by the attacks perpetrated by suspected anti-Balaka against civilians and the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), the UN Spokesperson said in a statement.

Guterres strongly condemned the attack on the UN peacekeepers, which, he said, may constitute a war crime. In the same vein, he urged Central African Republic authorities to investigate these attacks and bring the perpetrators before justice.

These recent incidents amply demonstrate that the situation in the Central African Republic is still fragile hence the need for continued and sustained regional and international support to overcome the challenges at hand, the Secretary-Generals spokesperson said.

The African Union, France and Spain have also strongly condemned the recent attacks against MINUSCA.

The President of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, condemns with no uncertain terms the despicable attacks by armed assailants on 8 and 13 May 2017 in Bangassou, in the south-east of CAR, and in the vicinity of this town, targeting the MINUSCA and causing several deaths and injuries among the UN peacekeepers, the pan-African organization said in a statement posted Sunday on its electronic portal.

Spain condemned the attack on civilians and a soldier of the Royal Armed Forces (FAR) contingent on Saturday and offered its condolences to the families of the civilian victims and the deceased Helmet, as well as to the authorities of Morocco and the CAR, said a statement from the Spanish Foreign Ministry.

Spain reiterates its support for the Central African Republic, the United Nations, MINUSCA and other international actors in their efforts to consolidate peace in the African country.

This Monday (May 15), France also expressed its condolences to Morocco following the death of the Moroccan blue helmet.

We express our deepest condolences to the families of the victims and to the Moroccan authorities, said the French Foreign Ministry, stressing that France condemns with the utmost firmness the attack on the city of Bangassou and the MINUSCA contingent, which resulted in numerous civilian casualties and the death of a Moroccan blue helmet.

All the light must be made on these odious acts, which can constitute war crimes and whose perpetrators must be brought to justice, insisted the French Foreign Ministry in a statement made public by its spokesman.

Reiterating support to the Central African authorities and to MINUSCA in implementing its mandate to protect civilian populations, France said it is determined to continue, in consultation with its European, African and international partners, its efforts for the stabilization and consolidation of peace in the Central African Republic.

The Moroccan peacekeeper was killed in a fire exchange after an attack by the anti-Balaka group on a Moroccan checkpoint in downtown Bangassou. The attack also claimed the lives of several civilians.

The attack came just hours after the UN held a memorial ceremony to honor five peacekeepers, four Cambodians and one Moroccan, killed on May 8 in a nearby village of Yogofongo, in a deadly attack perpetrated by suspected anti-Balaka elements. Ten peacekeepers, 9 Moroccan and a Cambodian, were injured in this attack.

CAR is emerging from civil conflict, which began in 2013, with clashes between the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel coalition and anti-Balaka militia, which are mostly Christian.
Photo: @fendifille/Twitter An infected NHS computer in the U.K.

Cybersecurity experts are warning that the devastating global ransomware attack, which has disabled some 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries since Friday, may resume and get worse when workers return to their computers on Monday. Though that attack, which caused the worst ransomware infection in history, has been halted, the remaining concern is that there are many computer systems, particularly in Asia, that were already infected by the WannaCry malware but wont be discovered until workers return to their jobs. In addition, copycat variants of the original ransomware used in the attack are being released, raising the likelihood that a second wave of crippling attacks may yet be in store over the coming week. Europol, the European Unions crime-fighting agency, says it expects the number of victims to grow.

Here in the U.S., the New York Times reports that the White Houses top security officials held a meeting over the weekend to assess the possible threat to American institutions and agencies. The U.S. was mostly spared by the ransomware plague on Friday, but that could change this week if new attacks are launched.

Related Stories Why Ransomware Is Such a Persistent Threat

Though an international criminal investigation is underway, it is still not clear who perpetrated Fridays attack, which seems to have started with people being sent encrypted email attachments containing malware that, when opened, exploited a flaw in older versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. WannaCry would then infect the computer and other vulnerable computers connected to the same network, encrypting their files before demanding a ransom of $300 in bitcoin in exchange for the decryption key. Once a computer was infected, users had essentially no recourse but to pay to decrypt them. All told, its possible the ransomware netted cybercriminals tens of millions of dollars before it was shut down. It even supported 28 languages to ensure computer users around the globe would be able to read and obey its ransom note, and researchers are still trying to determine how it was able to spread so quickly.

WannaCry incorporated a cyberweapon developed by the NSA to take advantage of the Windows exploit. The surveillance toolkit containing information about the exploit was stolen from the NSA by hackers who then leaked it, along with many other exploits, in a data dump last month. The identities and motives of the hacker group behind the leak, the Shadow Brokers, are not clear  nor is it known if its members had a role in developing WannaCry.

A Deutsche Bahn timetable display showing the ransomware screen on Friday. Photo: P. Goetzelt/AFP/Getty Images

Microsoft patched the targeted exploit in a security update released in March, but any un-updated Windows computers with operating systems older than version ten were still vulnerable. In addition, Microsoft issued an unprecedented emergency patch on Friday night for three versions of its operating system that it no longer supports, including Windows XP, the once-ubiquitous OS that is still running on many computers around the world, including some that arent so easy to update:

The release of the patch probably isn't going to help that 15m MRI machine that runs XP embedded whose maker went bankrupt 10 years ago.  Barry Dorrans (@blowdart) May 13, 2017

Europe and Asia took the brunt of Fridays ransomware attack. Particularly hard hit was the U.K.s National Health Service, where disabled computers at nearly 50 hospitals and other medical facilities meant that doctors could not access patient files, forcing some hospitals to divert incoming emergency-room patients. Some aftereffects of the infection are expected to continue on Monday as the countrys health-care system works to recover. A political firestorm is likely to brew in response to the attack there as well, with conservative infrastructure spending cuts already being blamed for the NHSs outdated, or at least un-updated, computer systems.

Elsewhere, Russia may have suffered the most overall attacks  including 1,000 computers at the countrys Interior Ministry, as well as banks, mobile-phone companies, and railroads. India, Ukraine, and Taiwan were also hard hit, as were institutions and companies in numerous countries, including FedEx, the German Deutsche Bahn rail system, the Spanish telecom Telefonica, the French carmaker Renault, and many others.

Ultimately, Fridays ransomware attack would have undoubtedly been worse had it not been for the efforts of a 22-year-old cybersecurity researcher in the U.K. who goes by the moniker MalwareTech. On Friday, while going through WannaCrys code, he discovered and inadvertently triggered what seems to have been a kill-switch built into WannaCry by its developers. That shut the malware down and stopped its spread, but the fix is only a temporary one. The flipped kill-switch doesnt help already infected and encrypted computers, and WannaCrys developers  or anyone other ransomware developer  can start a new attack by sending out a new version of the malware with the kill-switch removed. Thus, un-updated Windows computers remain highly vulnerable, and with the risk still great, cybersecurity professionals like MalwareTech are busy warning the masses.
Photo: Frank Franklin II/AP Photo

The evening that Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, plunging Washington into chaos and possibly propelling the nation toward a constitutional crisis, the presidents most persistent legal antagonist was flying high above America. On a cross-country JetBlue flight, Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York State, was watching a seat-back TV when he learned the news the way almost everyone else  including Comey  did, with a shocking flash. There was a group of lawyers on the plane who recognized me, Schneiderman said the next day. As the news spread through the cabin, he began to feel glances directed his way. The usual decorum fell away, and one passenger leaned over to Schneiderman. I bet you cant wait for the plane to land, he said.

It wouldnt be fair to say that Schneiderman is enjoying this turbulent political ride were on, but history has conspired to place him in a vital place on the ground. Since the election decapitated Democrats on the national level, putting Jeff Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice and leaving Republicans in control of congressional oversight, Schneiderman and other Democratic state attorneys general have led the legal resistance to Trump. Long before the Russians  or really anyone  dreamed of a President Trump, Schneiderman was investigating him, pursuing the allegedly fraudulent marketing of his for-profit university. And long before Trump was attacking federal judges, the leaky intelligence community, or law-enforcement officials with a reputation for stubborn probity, he was ridiculing New Yorks AG as a lightweight. The idea that Schneiderman, a compact, tightly wound Upper West Side liberal whose office is accustomed to pursuing consumer scams or busting upstate heroin rings (as he did last week), might be a last line of defense for what he calls bedrock principles of the United States  its frankly a little preposterous. But the framers of our Constitution designed our system to have hidden pockets of resiliency, and the power of the states is one of them.

For those of us who are protectors of the rule of law, the state attorneys general, Schneiderman said, we have a role to play, to make sure that the system survives. When his plane landed, Schneiderman started contacting his colleagues in other states, as well as Democrats in Washington, coordinating an emergency response. On May 11, he joined a group of 20 attorneys general in signing a letter to Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official overseeing the Russia investigation, calling for the appointment of a special counsel.

Even before Comeys firing, some well-placed congressional Democrats had been urging Schneiderman to probe the Trump campaigns suspected Kremlin connection, as far afield as that might seem for a state officeholder. But New York, of course, is home to the Trump Organization and its bank accounts. We have jurisdiction over everything because were New York, and every check clears New York, said former state attorney general (and governor) Eliot Spitzer, whose high-profile prosecutions on Wall Street demonstrated the offices national reach. There are odd jurisdictional hooks that sometimes come into play. Money laundering may be implicated here.

Schneiderman, however, said he is hoping that Comeys firing will spur Republicans to back a bipartisan probe. It is tremendously important that the FBI not be run as a political operation, he said. And its very important to Americans on both sides of the aisle. He said he talked with contacts who were with the FBI director in L.A. when he was canned who told him they were outraged by the sense of total disrespect conveyed by the abrupt move, with its strong-arm theatrics, like the firing letter delivered by Trumps loyal bodyguard. Its not the way you treat the director of the FBI, Schneiderman said, whatever your disagreements with him may be.

Like many Democrats, Schneiderman had contradictory feelings about Comey. He had relied on the FBI as a partner in investigations and had hoped its directors reputation for independence would provide a solid check on Trump. At the same time, he was highly critical of Comeys actions during the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Schneiderman campaigned for Clinton, and on Election Night, he absorbed the news of her defeat  which many attributed to Comey  at her party at the Javits Center. The next morning, he presided over an emotional meeting at the attorney generals offices in lower Manhattan at which he told his staff to rally and to begin thinking about how to play a rearguard role.

When Trump was elected, it became very clear to me, having known him for some time, that there were going to be new challenges, Schneiderman told me in April in an interview at his Broadway office, which looks out on the harbor and the World Trade Center memorial  a reminder of the stakes of law enforcement in New York. This is a president who doesnt like to see checks on his power, he said, and a Congress with a real reluctance to serve as a check on the Executive branch.

Before there was Lyin Ted and Little Marco, there was Clockwork Eric.

The states are able to serve as a backup, he said. Particularly New York, whose attorney generals office is perhaps the most powerful in the country, aided by the Martin Act, a state law that gives sweeping powers to investigate financial fraud. Past occupants of the office have used that power to raise their political profiles  both of Schneidermans immediate predecessors, Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, ended up as governor. Its no secret that Schneiderman would like to follow that example, and his confrontational stance toward Trump has made him a popular figure on the left. But it could also be an effective litigation strategy. Schneiderman and other state attorneys general led the successful counterattack against Trumps initial Muslim-nation immigration ban, and similar lawsuits could slow the administrations moves on civil rights and environmental regulations. I think that were in a situation now, Schneiderman said, where the confrontations provoked very early on have set up an unprecedented set of battle lines.

Firing Comey opened up a new front. Beyond the implications for the Russia investigation, Trumps actions have sent a very public message to the law-enforcement bureaucracy about the presidents tolerance for questioning. Schneiderman has experienced his vindictive streak firsthand, during his investigations of Trump University and, last year, of the Trump Foundations fund-raising practices. Trump filed an ethics complaint against him (it was dismissed) and set up a website to attack him. The New York Observer  Jared Kushners newspaper  published a memorably savage hit piece. The front page of the Observer was my picture as the Malcolm McDowell character in A Clockwork Orange, he recalled. So before there was Lyin Ted and Little Marco, there was Clockwork Eric. Ive seen the scorched-earth approach for years.

Trump vowed never to settle the Trump University case. He did, right after the election, for $25 million. It may prove to be a template for future legal dramas. Trump may have the power to squelch federal investigators, but Schneidermans office has a staff of some 650 attorneys and formidable resources. In what was widely viewed as a preparatory move for cases to come, he recently hired a public-corruption prosecutor who worked for Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for New York controversially ousted by Trump. (The Trump Foundation investigation, for one, is ongoing.)

If its hard to get checks on the presidency from Congress, were going to try to fill that space, Schneiderman said. Im willing to bet on the rule of law. I think at the end of the day, its what people want. I will bet on that to survive this presidency.

*This article appears in the May 15, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
John Cornyn. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Last week, Donald Trump fired James Comey because the FBI director had lost the trust of the American people  and because he refused to comport himself as the presidents private detective. According to Comeys confidantes, Trump asked his FBI director to pledge personal loyalty to him, seven days into his presidency. According to Trump, he was thinking about how much he despised the FBIs investigation into his campaign when he decided to just [fire Comey].

These developments have led some to wonder if the Trump administration might be less-than-wholeheartedly committed to the independence of federal law enforcement. Democrats have responded to such concerns by calling for concrete actions to safeguard the independence of the probe into Trumps campaign. Meanwhile some Republicans have issued statements assuring the American people that they are deeply concerned and principled (and not committed to doing anything, in particular).

I think we have a crisis of public trust right now and we need to restore that, Republican senator Ben Sasse told CBS This Morning. The FBI director has a ten-year term for a reason, because its supposed to be insulated from politics.

Sasse has not lent his voice to calls for a special prosecutor to take the reigns of the Russia investigation. But he and other elected Republicans agree with Democrats on the more modest request that Trump replace Comey with an apolitical figure.

Over the weekend, the White House demonstrated just how seriously it takes concerns about the erosion of public trust: To quell bipartisan fears about the politicization of the FBI, Attorney General Jeff Sessions  who had recused himself from all matters pertaining to the investigation of the Trump campaign (of which he was a member)  interviewed a sitting GOP Senator for the position of FBI director (and thus, for the role of leading the investigation into the Trump campaign).

That senator was Texass John Cornyn, a man so invested in an impartial investigation into the Trump campaigns Russia ties, he didnt ask a single question about that subject at last weeks Senate hearing with James Clapper and former acting attorney general Sally Yates. Instead, Cornyn devoted the entirety of his speaking time to echoing the Trump administrations concerns about leaks, unmasking, the imaginary Susan Rice scandal, and Yatess traitorous refusal to defend the presidents quasi-Muslim ban.

"I did not say it was lawful. I said it was unlawful."



Sen. John Cornyn tried to trip up Sally Yatesbut she was ready with the facts: pic.twitter.com/ZbdPzKJ8Cr  Splinter (@splinter_news) May 8, 2017

The Justice Department also interviewed former Republican congressman Mike Rogers for the position. Rogers served as an FBI special agent before leaving the bureau to enter politics in 1995. He held a House seat from 2001 to 2014. On Saturday, Rogers won the endorsement of the FBI Agents Association.

When Devin Nunes recused himself from the House Intelligence Committes Russia probe earlier this year  after the Republican congressman essentially sabotaged that investigation  Rogers said that the committees ranking Democrat Adam Schiff was equally to blame for the Committees loss of focus.

According to Bloomberg, Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein interviewed eight candidates in total, and do not currently plan on speaking with any more.

Here are the other six:

Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe: Picking McCabe would qualify as a legitimate gesture of goodwill. Comeys former deputy director is a career civil servant whose most prominent political ties tether him to the left side of the aisle. In 2015, his wife, Jill McCabe, ran for Virginias State Senate as a Democrat  and accepted $500,000 in contributions from the political organization of governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally. That bit of history led Republicans to demand McCabe recuse himself from the investigation into Hillary Clintons email server. McCabe refused. Its hard to imagine that his interview was anything more than a courtesy.

Former Justice Department official Alice Fisher: A prominent D.C. lawyer who may have helped devise the legal rationale for the Bush-era torture program during her previous stint at the DOJ.

Michael Garcia, associate judge on the New York State Court of Appeals: Former U.S. Attorney who brought down Eliot Spitzer. A Republican and ex-Bush administration official who would be the first Latino FBI director.

Former homeland security adviser to George W. Bush Fran Townsend: Townsend joins McCabe in the probably too reasonable of a choice to be true basket. The CBS national security analyst was a #NeverTrump conservative, who signed a letter declaring the mogul unfit for office during the campaign. She has also spoken out against Trumps Muslim ban and raised concerns about the independence of the Russia investigation.

AG @jeffsessions March 2nd recusal is from that day to no longer be briefed nor supervise #Russia investigation.  Frances Townsend (@FranTownsend) March 6, 2017

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson: One of the conservative judges who ruled Obamacare unconstitutional.

Adam Lee, FBI special agent in charge of the Richmond, Virginia, office: A lawyer and longtime bureau member, with nearly a decade of experience investigating corruption and white-collar crime. Also has some expertise on national-security concerns. A reasonable-looking pick, at least on first glance.
No one knew threatening the former FBI director would be this hard. Photo: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

After possibly admitting to obstruction of justice in a TV interview on Thursday, the next morning President Trump tried to smooth things over by publicly threatening his former FBI director, tweeting, James Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

In the pre-Trump era, a president publicly bragging about Nixonian behavior would likely spark outrage across the political spectrum. As the Washington Post notes, over the weekend there were technically bipartisan calls for Trump to turn over the tapes to Congress, if they exist. But the Republican effort to get to the bottom of the presidents shocking claim basically consisted of two GOP senators saying it would be great if the president would explain himself.

Sunday on Meet the Press, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said he thinks former FBI director James Comey should testify before the Judiciary Committee, which Graham sits on. Did the president ever say anything to the director of the FBI that would be construed as trying to impede the investigation? Graham mused. As for the recordings, If there are any tapes, they have to be turned over, Graham said. You cant be cute about tapes. If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over. I doubt if there are. But we need to clear the air.

On Fox News Sunday, Senator Mike Lee said he thinks its probably inevitable that the tapes will be subpoenaed by Congress, though he didnt suggest that he would have any role in making that happen. When asked what he thinks of the possibility that President Trump set up a taping system in the White House, Lee said, I dont know, noting that it hasnt always turned out well for other presidents.

United States Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) says it's "probably inevitable" that if there are White House tapes, they will be turned over to those investigating. See the full interview on Fox News at 2pm and 10pm ET. Posted by Fox News Sunday on Sunday, May 14, 2017

Unsurprisingly, Democrats had much stronger opinions on the possible recordings. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on CNNs State of the Union that if the tapes exist, the president should turn them over to Congress and investigators immediately, and to destroy them would be a violation of law. He said if they dont exist, Trump should apologize to both Jim Comey and the American people for misleading them.

Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said either his committee or another panel will absolutely subpoena the recordings. We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, dont mysteriously disappear, Warner said.

Several House Democrats have already attempted to obtain the tapes. Last week, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi sent a letter asking White House Counsel Donald McGahn to send any recordings of Trumps conversations with Comey to the House Oversight Committee. Then Representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, and Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, sent McGahn another letter requesting copies of the tapes.

The Presidents actions this morning  as well as his admission yesterday on national television that he fired Director Comey because he was investigating Trump campaign officials and their connections to the Russian government  raise the specter of possible intimidation and obstruction of justice, Cummings and Conyers wrote. The Presidents actions also risk undermining the ongoing criminal and counter-intelligence investigations and the independence of federal law enforcement agencies.

So far, nothing has come of these requests, and if the vast majority of GOP lawmakers remain ambivalent about the possibility that the president secretly taped the FBI director, perhaps nothing ever will.
Born to run  Frances economy. Photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

Frances new president, Emmanuel Macron, was sworn in Sunday, a week after the independent candidate defeated far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in nationwide elections. Macron, the countrys youngest president, started filling out his administration Monday, announcing the appointment of Edouard Philippe as Frances new prime minister. His portfolio will include implementing Macrons economic reforms, reports Bloomberg.

Right now, Philippe is a mayor of the port city of Le Havre and was elected to Frances parliament in 2012 as a center-right Republican, one of the major parties that Macron upended in the election after its candidate, Francois Fillon, got caught up in a corruption scandal. According to Bloomberg, Philippe was an ally of Alain Juppe, a former prime minister who came in second to Fillon in the Republican primaries.

Philippe has a reputation for being a big Bruce Springsteen fan, but otherwise the 46-year-old politician had a rather low-key national profile until Monday. He and Macron share similar qualities, besides their relative youth (Macron is 39): Both are graduates of Frances elite National School of Administration and both men spent most of their careers in the private sector.

Still, Macrons appointment of Philippe is a clear attempt to reach out to the to conservatives to build support going in to Frances parliamentary elections in June. Macron founded the party En Marche! just ahead of the presidential elections, and so his nascent organization is at a colossal disadvantage in these crucial parliamentary elections, where all 577 seats are up for grabs. Macron served as a minister in former president Francois Hollandes cabinet, and much of his support comes from the center-left Socialists  and theres speculation that many will decamp and run under the En Marche! banner. But even so, Macron needs more moderates from both sides to join up, or at the very least be willing allies as Macron tries to enact his agenda. Without even that baseline support, Macrons presidency could be paralyzed.

Which also means Philippes tenure could be short-lived. Outgoing president Hollandes Socialist Party is extremely unpopular, and the Republicans are likely to make big gains in the parliamentary elections. If En Marche! doesnt gain enough seats, or recruit enough politicians willing to form a coalition, the body can vote out Philippe and install a new prime minister  a move that would likely eliminate any chance Macron has of enacting his agenda. But Macron could also be anticipating a Republican wave, and hoping Philippe might still be a palatable choice as prime minister.

Macron is likely to start naming more people to his cabinet this week, reports the New York Times. Also on the early agenda of his presidency: a meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel.
People watch a TV screen showing North Koreas ballistic missile launch at Seoul Station in Seoul, South Korea, on May 14, 2017. Photo: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

North Korea is known for its over-the-top threats  like a recent video depicting the destruction of the U.S. Capitol  but there could be some truth to its claims about the missile it launched on Sunday morning. The ballistic missile traveled from Kusong, in western North Korea, over the country, and landed about 60 miles off the coast of Russia.

On Monday North Korean state media identified the missile as the Hwasong-12, a new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket thats capable of carrying a large-size, heavy nuclear warhead. The report included a threat from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the U.S.: Any provocation will be met with the biggest disaster in history, because the U.S. mainland and Pacific operation region are in the D.P.R.K.s sighting range for strike.

North Koreas missiles cant reach the U.S. mainland just yet, but Sundays test may have shown that its making progress toward that goal, and can already hit U.S. bases in the Pacific.

North Korea said the missile was purposely fired at a high angle to avoid hitting a neighboring country. In a blog post, David Wright, a director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that if the missile were fired on a standard trajectory, it would have a range of about 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles)  which puts the U.S. territory of Guam in striking distance.

This range is considerably longer than the estimated range of the Musudan missile, which showed a range of about 3,000 km in a test last year. Guam is 3,400 km from North Korea. Reaching the U.S. West Coast would require a missile with a range of more than 8,000 km. Hawaii is roughly 7,000 km from North Korea.

The U.S. militarys Pacific Command said the weapon fired was not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile, but according to missile expert John Schilling, the test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile. Schilling wrote on the website 38 North that it may mean the nation is getting closer to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile:

If North Korea has already conducted a successful test using the engines and other components of the first two stages of the KN-08, it may be closer to an operational ICBM than had been previously estimated. US cities will not be at risk tomorrow, or any time this year. since some tests have to be done with the full-scale system. With only one test of this reduced-scale system Pyongyang is probably some time from even beginning that process.

Tensions between North Korea and the Trump administration were running high in recent weeks, though President Trump recently said that under the right circumstances he would be honored to meet with Kim Jong-un. Sunday on ABCs This Week, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said the administration will continue to tighten the screws on the North Korean leader. She also stated the obvious: Having a missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, because hes absolutely not going to do it.

North Koreas intended audience might have been Russia and China, not the U.S. Beijing is currently hosting a trade and infrastructure summit with various world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carl Schuster, a Hawaii Pacific University professor and former director of operations at the U.S. Pacific Commands Joint Intelligence Center, told CNN that the launch tells China, North Koreas closest ally, I dont care what you think, Im independent. The missile landing so close to Russia says, I can touch you, too.

Schuster speculates that North Korea may be trying to get Russia to intervene against the increased sanctions being pushed by the U.S. Its his way of telling the Russians, You need to speak up, he said.
Richard Spencer, photographed shortly before he was kicked out of CPAC. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Richard Spencer  the white supremacist known for popularizing the term alt-right, getting booted from CPAC, and being punched in the face during Donald Trumps inauguration  led protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday over the citys plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Some local groups and individuals are waging a legal battle to keep the statue, citing its historic and artistic value, but the several dozen protesters who attended Spencers rallies made it very clear that their main concern was race  specifically, the need to protect their white heritage.

On Saturday afternoon, a group of protesters wearing white shirts and waving Confederate flags marched through the city, which is home to the University of Virginia. Were not white supremacists. We are simply just white people that love our heritage, our culture, our European identity, Orry Von Dize told NBC 29.

What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced! shouted Spencer, who attended UVA.

Later that night, the message got even less subtle. Around 9 p.m., torch-wielding protesters showed up in Lee Park and chanted slogans like You will not replace us, Russia is our friend, and the Nazi-era phrase Blood and soil.

In front of the Robert E. Lee statue pic.twitter.com/roWDjOOJGl  Allison Wrabel (@craftypanda) May 14, 2017

According to the Charlottesville Daily Progress, the event was short-lived. After about ten minutes, Spencers group clashed with counter-protesters and police dispersed the crowd.

Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer condemned the rallies in a statement posted on Facebook:

This event involving torches at night in Lee Park was either profoundly ignorant or was designed to instill fear in our minority populations in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK. Either way, as mayor of this City, I want everyone to know this: we reject this intimidation. We are a Welcoming City, but such intolerance is not welcome here.

Signer, who is Jewish, said he was the target of anti-Semitic tweets on Sunday. Youre seeing anti-Semitism in these crazy tweets Im getting and youre seeing a display of torches at night, which is reminiscent of the KKK, Signer told Reuters. Theyre sort of a last gasp of the bigotry that this country has systematically overcome.

Charlottesville is one of several cities that has seen protests in recent months over attempts to remove symbols of the Confederacy. In April, the Charlottesville City Council voted to sell the statue of Lee, but following local resistance a judge issued an injunction preventing them from doing so for six months.

Plaintiffs in the case posted a statement on Facebook disavowing Spencers group, and Saturdays protests. We remain committed to preserving the Robert E. Lee Monument in its park through the legal process in the courts because of its historic and artistic value, they said. We soundly and completely reject racism, white supremacy, and any other identity based groups that preach division and hate no matter which side of the issue they happen to support.

Hundreds gathered on Sunday night for a counter-protest to take back Lee Park. The Daily Progress reported that three people were arrested, including right-wing blogger Jason Kessler and someone who assaulted Kessler by spitting on him.

The group is putting up a sign on the Robert E Lee statue that reads "Black Lives Matter. Fuck White Supremacy." pic.twitter.com/ZnqkwnktWP  Allison Wrabel (@craftypanda) May 15, 2017

There have been about six speakers tonight, many talked about speaking out against injustices. pic.twitter.com/5k7Xnwfp15  Allison Wrabel (@craftypanda) May 15, 2017

We will not let you come in and take over, and have your way, Don Gathers told the crowd. I dont care whos in the White House, I dont care whos in Congress  We are going to take control of this city and we are going to do it the proper way, the legal way. It might take six months to take care of this situation, but were not going to give up the fight.
Photo: Denis Allard/REA/Redux

When Rupert Murdoch left his office on a recent Monday afternoon, the 86-year-old mogul was ambushed by a BBC reporter seeking comment on the ongoing scandals at Fox News. Nothings happening at Fox News, nothing, Murdoch declared. The response was practically Trumpian in its breathtaking denial, down to Murdochs insistence that Fox is getting record ratings.

In reality, in the ten months since Murdoch fired former Fox News chief Roger Ailes after dozens of women accused Ailes of sexual harassment, the networks parent company has spent $45 million to settle sexual-harassment claims. More than 20 minority employees are suing for racial discrimination. Megyn Kelly quit for NBC, Bill OReilly was fired, and co-president Bill Shine resigned under pressure. Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation of the network and have granted immunity deals to Ailess former lieutenants, including former CFO Mark Kranz and former PR chief Brian Lewis. And about those ratings: At 9 p.m., Fox News is losing in the key 2554 advertising demo to Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. (Disclosure: Im an MSNBC contributor.)

But by another measure, its true that not much is happening at Fox News. Many of Ailess top lieutenants remain, including Suzanne Scott, who enforced Ailess short-skirt dress code; Warren Vandeveer, who installed the in-house surveillance system; and John Moody, who enacted Ailess right-wing news agenda. A high-level employee told me that Murdoch is adopting a policy of willful ignorance about the Ailes era and doesnt want to know about the past.

An organization like Fox News doesnt become such a toxic workplace by accident. It happens only when management values profits and power structure over the fundamental rights of employees, particularly women and minorities who challenge that power structure. Its telling that Bill OReilly was ousted only after public outrage caused advertisers to boycott his show. The question now is whether Fox News will do the minimum to appear to address the various scandals or make substantial cultural change. And whether substantial change is even possible under Rupert Murdoch, who has not historically shown that he cares much about management problems.

After all, Murdoch must have known Ailes was a problematic executive when he hired him in 1996. Ailes had just been fired from NBC after an independent investigation found hed made an anti-Semitic slur to a senior NBC executive. (Ailes denied it.) Murdoch later declined to investigate Fox News treatment of women after Bill OReilly paid $9 million to settle a sexual-harassment suit with former Fox producer Andrea Mackris in 2004. A year later, Murdoch sided with Ailes during a programming dispute with Murdochs oldest son, Lachlan, which resulted in Lachlan quitting News Corp. and Ailes moving into Lachlans office. After firing Ailes last summer  with a $40 million golden parachute  Murdoch claimed he didnt know Ailes was paying out millions to secretly settle harassment claims.

Murdoch has publicly said he wants to create a work environment based on trust and respect, but even after firing Ailes, hes resisted cleaning house at Fox, battling his sons, James and Lachlan, who have wanted to make more sweeping changes. Last summer, Murdoch promoted Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy to serve as co-presidents despite the fact that Shine had enabled Ailess behavior for years and Abernethy had been accused of harassment by a former anchor. (Both men deny these allegations.) Murdoch also retained Fox News general counsel Dianne Brandi, even after it was reported that Brandi signed secret sexual-harassment settlements, including a $3.15 million payout to former booker Laurie Luhn. Earlier this year, Murdoch gave OReilly a new contract despite the fact that the New York Times had uncovered millions of dollars in private sexual-harassment settlements connected to the anchor. Murdoch similarly dug in when critics called for Shines firing. Sources say Murdoch changed his mind only to appease British regulators who will rule next month on his $15 billion takeover bid of the media company Sky.

Rather than bring in fresh management after Shines ouster, Murdoch promoted Shines deputy, Suzanne Scott, over the objections of senior executives. For years, Scott had helped cover up Ailess treatment of women, including rallying women to criticize accuser Gretchen Carlson in the press. She did Ailess dirty work, one female Fox executive told me about Scott. She would call the control room about adjusting dresses for length and cleavage, a high-level female employee added. (Through a spokesperson, Scott denies this.)

Inside Fox News, morale is sinking. Its the worst Ive seen it, a female manager said. Employees dont know when the harassment and racial-discrimination lawsuits will stop. I have people asking, Are we having budget cuts to pay for sexual-harassment lawsuits?  the manager told me. Employees wonder why Murdoch is allowing the slow drip of negative headlines to continue when he could answer them with a major change in management.

Murdochs advisers argue he is making positive changes, appointing a new head of HR and hiring female executives to head the finance and advertising departments. Employees now must attend sensitivity training sessions. And Ailess pantsuit ban has been lifted. According to sources, Scott has taken it upon herself to encourage women to wear pants on air. Ailes loyalists continue to be moved out: Last week, Foxs longtime head of graphics, Richard OBrien, left when his job was eliminated in a reorganization.

Still, in many ways, Murdochs response to this crisis at Fox News is following the contours of his reaction to the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed his British tabloids six years ago. Then, as now, Murdoch protected tarnished executives such as former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks. The phone-hacking episode forced Murdoch to shutter the 168-year-old News of the World and abandon his initial takeover bid for Sky. The price this time wont be the closing of Fox News, Murdochs most-profitable asset, but for the first time in years Fox faces real competition. Last week, Sinclair Broadcasting announced a $3.9 billion takeover of Tribunes TV stations, giving the conservative broadcasting company a coast-to-coast footprint. Theres speculation Sinclair could try to poach Sean Hannity or bring OReilly out of exile.

Some wonder if a kinder, gentler Fox News can replicate the ratings success that Ailess authoritarian culture maintained for 20 years. Under Ailes, Fox anchors and executives marched in lockstep, keeping off-camera drama out of view and working together to sell Ailess point of view. Now Hannity takes to Twitter to accuse a colleague of plotting to get Bill Shine fired, and competition from the left and the further-right has left Fox News with a programming challenge. The Murdochs are quietly looking for a new programming executive to run the network. According to sources, James wants to recruit David Rhodes from CBS News (Rhodes is under contract). Rupert is interested in Wall Street Journal editor Gerry Baker, or Rebekah Brooks. One source said Ruperts daughter Elisabeth is also being discussed as a candidate.

Any of these hires would be a radical departure from Ailes, but none more so than Elisabeth. A seasoned television executive in her own right, Elisabeth has positioned herself as a firm critic of the scandals that have resulted from her fathers management choices. In 2010, her ex-husband Matthew Freud told the New York Times: I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailess horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards. The following year, Elisabeth refused a seat on the News Corp. board to register her disgust at the phone-hacking scandal. She said phone hacking raised significant and difficult questions about how News Corp. fell so far short of its values. Elisabeths return to the fold would be a powerful signal that Fox News is entering a new era. But as long as her father is still running the show, Fox News will likely stay very much the same.

*This article appears in the May 15, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
Intelligence sharing. Photo: Alexander Shcherbak/TASS

Its a premise fit for a satirist less subtle than Andy Borowitz: A chatty president Trump mindlessly shares highly classified information with Russian officials in the Oval Office.

But weve been living in a ham-fisted satire of American political decay for at least six months now  and so that premise isnt a sketch-comedy conceit, but merely headline news. As the Washington Post reports:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trumps disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.



The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.



The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trumps decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trumps meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.

The president revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies, according to one U.S. official who spoke with the Washington Post.

That information concerned the details of an ongoing Islamic State plot. Trump reportedly disclosed not only the nature of that threat, and his administrations potential responses to it, but also the city in which Americas security partner gathered the relevant intelligence. That could be a problem, even if our unnamed ally forgives Trump (for he knows not what he does):

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said that the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russias presence in Syria. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and possibly disrupting it.

According to the Post, the presidents disclosure would be illegal  if anyone but the president (who enjoys immense power to declassify materials) had done it.

BuzzFeed News confirmed the Washington Posts story, with one official telling the outlet that its far worse than what has already been reported.

Administration officials offered a number of denials, which varied significantly in tone. First, Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell told CNN, This story is false. The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced. Then National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said in a brief press conference that the story that came out tonight, as reported, is false.  At no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed. As Vox notes, the Post never said that Trump revealed intelligence sources or methods. The paper reported that Trump naming the location could allow the Russians  who are extremely capable at intelligence gathering  to narrow down who the source was.

Watch McMaster's statement carefully: at no time were sources or methods discussed. WaPo report never said Trump revealed sources/methods. pic.twitter.com/SF3rWDqKFi  Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 15, 2017

Similarly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement that Trump didnt discuss sources, methods, or military operations with the Russians  though he didnt explicitly say that the story is false. Powell and McMaster were in the room when Trump met with the Russians, but Tillerson was not.

JUST IN: Tillerson statement on Washington Post report: Trump & Russians "did not discuss sources, methods or military operations  pic.twitter.com/mkeyMGRPkI  Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) May 15, 2017

Two Republican leaders expressed concern about the reports that the president divulged highly classified information. Obviously theyre in a downward spiral right now and theyve got to figure out a way to come to grips with all thats happening, said Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And the shame of it is, theres a really good national security team in place  but the chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline is creating an environment that I think makes  it creates a worrisome environment.

House Speaker Paul Ryans office said he hopes the president explains himself. We have no way to know what was said, but protecting our nations secrets is paramount, said his spokesman, Doug Andres. The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration.

But the reactions from most elected Republicans were oddly sanguine.

McCain just saw WP: "We certainly don't want any president to leak classified information but the president does have the right to do that."  Erica Werner (@ericawerner) May 15, 2017

.@SenatorRisch defends Trump revealing classified info to the Russians: "It's no longer classified the minute he utters it."  Alice Miranda Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) May 15, 2017

One may interpret Trumps audacious candor with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador Sergey Kislyak as a testament to his illicit friendliness with the Kremlin. Trumps meeting with the Russians did come on the morning after he dispatched James Comey, in an apparent attempt to derail the investigation into his campaigns alleged collusion with Russian hackers.

But an alternative explanation for Trumps disclosure is that he is a thoughtless, lazy windbag who refuses to prepare for diplomatic meetings, says whatever comes into his head at any given moment, and sees his classified intelligence briefings as little more than affirmations of his own importance.

Some of Trumps recent actions lend credence to the first interpretation; virtually everything hes done in his political life qualifies as evidence for the second.

This post has been updated throughout.
Photo: Courtesy of Retailers

As were certain youve realized by now, allergy season is upon us. But swapping out Zyrtec for Claritin for Allegra, trying to find the perfect concoction to soothe those puffy eyes, can be really annoying. So instead, after finding you the best air purifier, we reached out to the allergy sufferers in our lives (a bunch of whom happen to be co-workers here at New York Magazine) and found 11 people who swear by their home remedies for allergies. Trust them, theyre walking through the spring snot-free.

NeilMed NasaFlo Neti-Pot Nasal Wash System $17 The neti pot sounds like a gross idea, but it really helps if your sinuses are the main problem. Its just warm water and a bit of salt (they have specific salt that you can use it with, but I find it doesnt matter much), and its good in a pinch if you cant be talking like Elmo all day.  Arielle Baumgarten, actress $17 at Walmart Buy

Bragg Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar, 16 Ounce $12 I take a spoonful of apple-cider vinegar on its own twice a day. The taste is a bit of a thing to get used to, but if its too bitter, I know people who add it to tea or hot water with some lemon. Its great for lots of things, not just allergies, but I always buy a bottle come springtime.  Arielle Baumgarten, actress $12 at Amazon Buy $12 at Amazon Buy

Allergy Relief Drops Zone 1 $25 Allergena GTW is a homeopathic allergy tincture and everyone in New Mexico swears by it. Its a holistic thing where they make tinctures using allergens from different areas. So its specific to the plants youre reacting to in whatever area. (New Mexico is zone six, for instance.) We also used to eat local bee pollen, which is the same principle and is only effective if its local, or so goes the New Age logic.  Sophie Engel, student $25 at Amazon Buy $25 at Amazon Buy

Simply Organic Turmeric Root Ground $4 Turmeric is an anti-inflammatory, and any anti-inflammatory is supposed to work, so I have that fresh every day. I peel it and then grate it, but beware that it really stains your hands. Its supposed to be more effective if you mix it with something oily, so I mix mine with coconut oil, and then eat it with my yogurt. They say black pepper helps, too, but I dont do that. I should.  Carl Rosen, senior editor, New York Magazine $4 at Amazon Buy $4 at Amazon Buy

Allernest Homeopathic Liquid $40 Photo: ALBERTO E. VELASQUEZ/JOSE LUIS PRENDES A homeopathic doctor recommended this liquid and similar capsules to me. I kind of stopped using them because it was getting really expensive, but when I did use them, it really helped. My dad still uses them. He used to get one allergy shot a month since he was like 26 years old, and since he has been using these this past year, he hasnt gotten any shots. Ariel Shoglow, product-development manager $40 at Amazon Buy $40 at Amazon Buy

Aromatherapy Essential Oil Diffuser Humidifier $22 I found myself starting to feel my eyes being affected by allergies this season, so I bought an oil diffuser/humidifier for my office. My work friend borrowed it one day when she complained of allergies, and it worked for her, too, so she went ahead and purchased a diffuser and the three oils the next day.  Jennifer Hahn, marketing manager $22 at Amazon Buy $22 at Amazon Buy

Allergena For Pets $17 now 29% off $12 I have cats who are also affected by seasonal allergies, and I give them this in their wet food a few times per day. They sneeze and wheeze unless theyre on their drops. Homeopathy generally works best when taken 30 minutes before eating or drinking anything, but cats are trickier and seem to be fine with it being administered in their food.  Diana Ceres, contingent worker $12 at Amazon Buy $12 at Amazon Buy

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Stephanie Shepherd, Kim Kardashian. Photo: 2016 Denise Truscello/Getty Images

Though Kim Kardashian has made a career out of sharing the most intimate details of her life, not much is known about the women who help her behind the scenes: the nannies, the assistants. I have been particularly eager to learn more about Stephanie Shepherd, one of Kardashians most devoted employees, who has been her personal assistant since 2013. In the past few years, Shepherd has appeared with increasing frequency on Keeping Up With the Kardashians and racked up 681,000 Instagram followers, but I still have so many questions about her: How did she land the job in the first place? How much money does she make (not to be rude)? What is Kanye West like in person?

Today, I received a gift from God himself: an in-depth profile of Shepherd in Refinery29, complete with photos of her very own mansion in Beverly Hills. If you care as much as I do about Kardashian minutiae (if you are still here, of course you do), read it immediately. Reporter Arianna Davis covers everything you want to know: Where Shepherd lives, whom she dates, and what really happened during the Paris robbery. And as for how she got the job?

Shepherd tells me her career story from the beginning. After dancing for the Cleveland Cavaliers at 18, she moved to LA in 2009 to try for bigger gigs  and she got them, but they were assisting, not dancing ones. Choreographer Mikey Minden hired her as an assistant to help him and his main client, Erika Girardi (then an international nightclub performer, now a cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), saving Shepherd from her part-time job at the front desk of Golds gym.

Through Girardi and Minden she met Pussycat Dolls founder Robin Antin, who introduced her to Kardashian. Today, four years later, Shepherd says, Kim now also has a personal assistant, a house assistant, two kids, two nannies, and I was recently promoted to COO of Kardashian West Brands, so were looking for someone to fill my executive assistant position. Sometimes we look at each other like, wow, remember when it was just me and you?

Incredible. Read the whole story, which includes insights on West and the rest of the Kardashian sisters, here.
Joshua Brandon Vallum.

On Monday, Joshua Brandon Vallum will become the first person in the U.S. to be sentenced on federal hate-crime charges for killing a transgender person, the Associated Press reports. During the sentencing hearing in Gulfport, Mississippi, Vallum faces a federal sentence of up to life in prison for the 2015 murder of 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson.

As the Sun Herald reports, Vallum, who was a member of the Latin Kings street gang, was the first person to be prosecuted under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act for targeting a person on the basis of their gender identity. He pleaded guilty to the murder in December, according to the AP.

Vallum had previously dated Williamson, and allegedly plotted to kill her after one of his fellow gang members found out she was a transgender girl, according to the Sun Herald. He allegedly lured Williamson into a car in Alabama, and then drove her to his familys home in Mississippi, where he attacked her with a stun gun, stabbed her several times, and beat her with a hammer.

Per the Sun Herald:

The Latin Kings strictly prohibit its members from engaging in homosexual activity, though Williamsons friends said Vallum was willing participant in the on- and off-again relationship between the two. Vallum said he killed Williamson because he feared for his life if other Latin Kings found out he had been involved in a consensual sexual relationship with Williamson.

As BuzzFeed News reports, Vallum previously pleaded guilty to murder in Mississippi state court in July 2016. He is currently serving life in prison on the state murder charge, according to the Sun Herald. After he was charged under the federal hate-crime law in December, Vanita Gupta of the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division told BuzzFeed News, For this Justice Department, it is important for us to send an unequivocal message that violence based ones gender identity constitutes a hate crime. It is important for us to have spoken out on the bias motive.
Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Trumps presidency has inspired a surge of grassroots activism across the country, with citizens attempting to enact change on a local level. One such group that emerged post-election is NJ 11th for Change, which has been attempting to get their representative, Rodney Frelinghuysen  who has been described as New Jerseys most powerful congressman  to hold a town hall. In response, the Republican congressman has reportedly called out one of the groups organizers, Saily Avelenda, in a letter to her employer.

WNYC reports that in March, Frelinghuysen wrote a fundraising letter on campaign stationary to Joseph ODowd, who has previously donated $700 to the congressman. ODowd is also a board member at Lakeland Bank, where Avelanda was previously employed. The typed-out letter includes reference to organized forces  both national and local  who are already hard at work to put a stop to an agenda of limited government. An asterisk by local leads to a handwritten note at the bottom which reads P.S. One of the ringleaders works in your bank! Attached was an article in which Avelanda was quoted.

Avelanda tells WYNC that after her boss showed her both items, there were consequences. I had to write a statement to my CEO, and at my level as an assistant general counsel and a senior vice president, at this employer it was not something that I expected, she explained. I thought my Congressman put them in a situation, and put me in a really bad situation as the constituent, and used his name, used his position, and used his stationery to try to punish me.

She has since resigned from her job, citing the letter as one of the reasons. While the letter itself was not illegal, it does certainly present an optics issue for the congressman  and will probably be fodder for his next telephone town hall.
Representative Melissa Sargent. Photo: Courtesy of Facebook/Rep. Melissa Sargent

A lawmaker in Wisconsin has proposed new legislation that would classify stealthing  the act in which a person removes a condom during sex, without the other persons consent  as sexual assault, NBC News reports.

Representative Melissa Sargent, a Democrat, introduced LRB-3346 earlier in the month to curb stealthing, shortly after a report in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law highlighted the disturbing trend of nonconsensual condom removal. The report included interviews with victims who had thought they had been protecting themselves during sex by using a condom, but had actually been exposed to STDs and unwanted pregnancies when their partner stealthily removed the condom during intercourse without their knowledge.

Under LRB-3346, stealthing would be considered sexual assault in Wisconsin, as its victims do not consent to unprotected sex. NBC News reports that the bill clarifies that if an actor removes a sexually protective device such as a condom before or during sexual intercourse or other sexual contact without his or her partners permission, there has been no valid consent to that sexual act.

Sargent said in a statement that she believes that its time to get serious about consent and sexual assault, and that sexual-assault laws must reflect the fact that consent isnt carte blanche.

Sexual predators will continue to find new, egregious ways to violate and victimize others, and its important that as legislators we take concerted steps to be responsive as we become aware of it, Sargent said. This behavior is predatory and disturbing, and people should know we not only find it reprehensible, but that we wont tolerate it. Ignoring it is simply not an option.
President Donald Trump. Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump reinstated a Reagan-era rule called the Mexico City Policy  otherwise known as the Global Gag Rule  that bans federal funding for international nongovernment organizations that provide abortions. But on Monday, a White House official told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump will now significantly expand the policy to take even more money from global health groups than previous administrations.

Under Trump, the rule is being rebranded as the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy and will extend to Department of Defense programs, as well as those under the State Department and USAID. The expansion will affect nearly $9 billion in existing foreign aid  15 times more funding than it has under previous Republican presidents, according to the reproductive-rights group PAI. It will also affect providers that have programs for maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, tropical diseases, malaria, tuberculosis, and more.

Despite the Trump administrations ludicrous rebranding of the policy, the Global Gag Rule is unmistakably deadlier than ever, PAI president and CEO Suzanne Ehlers said in a statement.

Since the Global Gag Rule was implemented by Reagan in 1984, each incoming Democratic president has revoked the policy, and each incoming Republican president then immediately reinstated it. Under Trump, the expanded rule is expected to lead to an even larger increase in maternal and infant deaths, unsafe abortions, and unintended pregnancies worldwide, according to PAI.

As the Guardian notes, the expanded policy wont decrease the amount of foreign aid distributed through existing channels, but it will prevent the funds from helping organizations that provide abortions or even just promote abortion rights. Another piece of great news from the Trump administration during so-called Womens Health Week.
The Jinn/Salim scene was handled SO well

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It was so beautifully shot  I wanted to use gifs of the scene, but I didn't want to spoil it for people =)

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Yeah, that's nice and all....but we're never going to see them again, aren't we?



i read somewhere that all they do in the book is the story in episode 3.



Edited at 2017-05-15 02:37 am (UTC)

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This is pretty unreliable as a source, but both actors are credited for multiple episodes this season. I just hope that doesn't mean they are fast-tracking what occurs in the book down the line. I really, really hope they decide to change that bit.

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Also, i want someone to cum fire into my asshole too.



Edited at 2017-05-15 02:38 am (UTC)

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Keep Believing and it will happen one day 

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thanks bb. wanna burn my hole?

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That seems like it would hurt

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LOL I almost choked on my wine, and now my cat is staring at me like " that bitch better not die before I get my snacks "



Edited at 2017-05-15 03:40 am (UTC)

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how good is this? I'm thinking of watching it, but my taste is like superb, I dont like any of that flash/ green arrow/ 13rw stuff

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this is faaaaar from those shows.... have you seen Hannibal? That's more like it...

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Yea, Hannibal was good, but it was too much horror for my taste. This one is that scary too?

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my taste is like superb



enlighten us on your superb taste, sis.

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ok I need to know what's going on in those gifs

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Won't spoil too much =) just that the one on the left has led a bit of a repressed life and the one on the right is someone who can help him.

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tonight's episode of The Leftovers also had peen.



it's been a good day for penis.

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Watching that later tonight, great to know!





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Check out the leftovers post tbh

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Gurl, that scene had me all hot and heavy. The guy who plays Salim is so handsome. Hope we get to see more of him and the Jinn.

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we wont... 

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We won't as in, them together? Or they'll be featured separately or just the Jinn?



Lol I was so excited to see Scott Thompson (Team Sassy Science!). Then I saw the truck with pipes, and I was like, wellp!

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Also, if you want some more Omid check out this gif set from his time on Sleeper Cell with another qt, Michael Rady (Emily Owens MD, Unreal) :







http://crinkled-letters.tumblr.com/post/109167688938/romy7-michael-rady-omid-abtahi-in-sleeper



Thanks to hypertwink I'm not sure if we will, sadly, but imdb lists both actors for multiple episodes =) However, that's not a reliable source...Also, if you want some more Omid check out this gif set from his time on Sleeper Cell with another qt, Michael Rady (Emily Owens MD, Unreal) :Thanks tofor this heads up 

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The Salim and Jinn scene was beautiful. Also Mousa, can I holler? That towel scene had me sweating.

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And gosh, right? Hehe, I kinda wish they would show him without the fire effects because his eyes are stunning :



They did a beautiful job with it, I was so happy =)And gosh, right? Hehe, I kinda wish they would show him without the fire effects because his eyes are stunning :

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He was tracking the show's tag earlier and kept faving my tweets. Good thing I wasn't too thirsty on there but damn, sexy can I?

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I definitely enjoy the episode more compare to last week. Although, my mind keep trying to keep track or remember the characters from the book. That is kind of distracting me from enjoying the show.

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Ah, I get that totally =) When a new character pops up I try to think back on the novel and remember details from their scenes. Sometimes it's easy to turn my brain off, other times, not so much hehe.



Still, hope you'll be able to find a good balance and can enjoy sitting through the show without distractions!

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I think I need to watch this....

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(Def check it out =P It's a bit crazy, but it's a fun time especially with the cast involved.)



I think so too!(Def check it out =P It's a bit crazy, but it's a fun time especially with the cast involved.)

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Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ

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I'M STILL DOWNLOADING THE EP FML

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Still not sure what's going on but so here for this

Shadow and wednesday bickering about robbery had me laughing

Poor leprechaun. Is he going to be ok?

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Hehe, glad it's not turned you away just yet =P Though things will get crazier 



I love the banter between those two, it's so fun to watch haha!



And poor Sweeney, he's definitely ran out of luck...

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Things getting crazier is just how i like my fullerverse! Lol

Speaking of which, that scott thompson cameo made me feel so warm inside, i'm on the lookout for other ppl now

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It strikes me that Gillian Anderson in Lucille Ball drag actually looks uncannily like Julie Andrews. How does that happen?

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So he did get fired!! I knew something was up, good riddance.

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yup

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Yep

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Edited at 2017-05-15 02:52 am (UTC) you're really trying to #NotAllMen this. Incredible

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what about Bill the science guy tho?

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I concur

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you know, he seemed nice in American Idol, but that firing is pretty telling.



Everyone seems to be a douche on the inside...even those ONTDers on their high horse.

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ontd'ers being assholes (openly, not even on the side) isnt quite the same as someone sexually harassing/assaulting someone

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i didn't say they were. i said everyone's a douche.

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@ me next time sis



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I made a wish

L.A. Reid

swim away with the fish

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wow sis, i never knew you were so poetic! *swoon* 

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Must be hardcore for them to actually take it seriously and fire his ass.



Edited at 2017-05-15 02:42 am (UTC)

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My first thought tbh

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mte

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mte



The victim must have concrete proof that she was sexually harassed, considering how long It took sony to fire Dr. Luke

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From the Variety article:



Variety has confirmed that such a letter exists, but has further learned that there have been multiple claims made against Reid.







Don't know if that means more than one accuser or more than one specific claim from the victim.



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Exactly. There's no way there isn't solid, ironclad proof against him.

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I bet he got cocky and went after a woman(wife/daughter/mistress/whatever) close to one of the highest ups



I legit bet that'd be the only reason they'd ever come close to caring

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IG | Fifth Harmony on @Epic_Records's story pic.twitter.com/cwoKYupty3  Normani Updates (@NormaniUpdate) May 5, 2017





if simon knew about what was happening and still let them with l.a. when these girls were 15-16, he's trash too no wonder 5H seemed so happy during their recent 5h3 meeting at epic'sif simon knew about what was happening and still let them with l.a. when these girls were 15-16, he's trash too

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Isn't this instagram story from before he got fired?

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he was probably already fired tbh. those kind of news take a long time before they go public

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He's been on his way out for a while now. He's cost Sony a ton of money while delivering very little in return.

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screaming

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Simon has a history of his own

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simon really only cares about his money and his reputation so i feel like it's fair to just call him trash. these exec types share secrets so i wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that he knew but was more interested in potential profits.



after all, he didn't seem too concerned about the image change and song lyrics they put on those girls when they were still underage.

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I believe it tbh

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He got fired? Good. *bird man hand rub* Goooood.

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All you'd have to change



is everything you are

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that's all i can think of when his name is mentioned

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samesies

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MFTE

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me toooo, lol

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Wow...Sony sure knows how to pick 'em. LA Reid, Dr Luke, who's next, Sony?

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Don't forget Tommy Mottola

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bye @ him

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Jessie Reyez's new song "Gatekeeper" is about the gross, pervasive sexual harassment young women have to deal with in the music industry. It's a good song and it's an important one worth a listen imo:



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At any major record label really.

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*in the industry

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*in the male species

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Not just producers, men on every level.



I sort of knew (via blog/blog comments) a girl who married someone 30 years older than her who was sth of a legend in the metal scene, like my metalhead classmates had heard of him kind of famous. I think everyone side eyed the age gap and his very recent junkie past, but they legit seemed to love each other.....well, fast forward 7 years later and he's split from her, using again and subjecting his (female)tour openers to sexual harassment so bad, they went public with it and he got roasted.



AND THEN this asshole's reps release a statement that has the nerve to say that Wax Idols and King Woman "didn't communicate" with them and that "Bobby verbally hit on this girl, that's as far as it went" (I'm quoting btw)



Is it any surprise this shit keeps happening when men think that bc they're rich or famous, women should worship them? And when they have environments full of enablers to keep the status quo going?

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SO excited that it's not a series finale.

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I'm still celebrating!



Apparently they didn't write it as a series finale on purpose, a risky and cruel thing to do if next week's finale ends on a cliffhanger.

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I'm so relieved this isn't Clyde after a makeover by Sherlock.



"People who love each other don't make threats, Sherlock, they make promises." Who is she?! I'm so relieved this isn't Clyde after a makeover by Sherlock."People who love each other don't make threats, Sherlock, they make promises." Who is she?!

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My best guess, Moriarty after extensive plastic surgery. Although, I hope not, because I'll miss Natalie Dormer and her chemistry with Lucy Liu.

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John Cho will also recur this season as Billy Eichner's character's first real boyfriend.



YASSSSS! Bareback sex scenes with full frontal Cho pls. ty.

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lol Is that even allowed on Hulu? Asking for a friend.

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can't believe how fast the season went

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I'm actually a little sad about Shinwell's death, but I knew it was probably gonna go that way. Idk, was hoping for some redemption for his character, especially since he was trying to make good. I'm looking forward to the finale and next season.



Also, surprised it took me like 3 episodes to realize Nelson Ellis who plays Shinwell was also Lafayette on True Blood.

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I'm sad that he didn't get to finish what he started but at least he got to tell Joan the real reason he wanted to take down SBK, even if he really shouldn't have tried to do it by himself. It was an impossible mission for a CI on a crime procedural.

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I haven't watched tonight's episode but I have a feeling a cop is the leader of SBK. Shinwell said that the leaders are hard to get to, that they're almost untouchable. I know it's not much but that makes me think it's cops that are running SBK.







Also: I'm still shocked by Shinwell's death. I assumed he'd be around longer because his character has such a long run in the books. I thought he'd have a bigger role helping Jones and Sherlock next season. I really liked him, I'm so sad to see him go :(



Edited at 2017-05-15 05:49 am (UTC)

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Finally Blake!

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I did not understand the subplot with sherlock.

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Same. I feel like they must've cut some things out? Or there will be a big reveal next ep because I was so confused.

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I was really afraid Elementary would get cancelled this time, so glad it didn't. I hope they get notice/are able to write a proper series finale when the time comes

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I'm so glad Elementary was renewed. I love the cast and the writing.

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This was an intense episode. I don't know who that woman could be, but if she's meant to be someone Sherlock knows, why wouldn't they have introduced her earlier than the penultimate episode of the season?

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Global oil markets are still not stabilized. After a week of price shocks, in which analysts have suggested that crude prices could be hitting the $40 per barrel mark soon, prices are up again. Analysts are still not able to predict markets, with exception of Tanker Trackers or ClipperData. The media continues to hit on OPEC, questioning its overall power. A bearish sentiment rules the sector while traders seem to not be paying any attention to global developments, such as the growing willingness of OPEC and non-OPEC producers to extend the production cuts. The geopolitical risk premium (after the missile attack on Syria) seems to be absent in the majority of the analyses, something which is totally out of order when looking at the current geopolitical situation in the MENA region or North-East Asia.

By painting a bearish environment, which is not based on facts but rather on the already very questionable gut-feelings of the financial sectors, bulls have been put in a corner or are hiding behind closed doors. This could be changing very quickly, as fundamentals are stabilizing, and geopolitical risks increase. Trumps erratic behavior, combined with Putins power projections or North-Koreas warmongering, should be enough to put a risk premium on crude oil and gas (LNG) than currently is the case. The heating up of the Saudi-Iranian conflict also seems to reach its zenith.

Still, the market is watching OPECs struggling production cut impact on the market, based on historically high storage volumes in the U.S. and other OECD countries. It looks as if all analysts have become Calvinists, The Glass is always half empty. Reality shows that we have come from a much more detrimental situation, where the glass was almost empty, now the adagio should be The Glass is half Full.

Even that OPECs optimism, as presented by Saudi Minister of Energy Khalid Al-Falih at Davos in late January, when he stated that the OPEC production cut agreement as working so well cuts could be phased out in June, has not yet materialized fully, the green sprouts (of the impact of the agreement) have already grown into a young tree. Yes, U.S. shale oil has partly shredded a possible OPEC cut phase out, but so far, this has not resulted in higher (floating) storage volumes worldwide. This weeks EIA report surprised the market, as the latter reported a much higher than expected stock draw of U.S. storage volumes than expected. On 10 May the EIA said U.S. inventories fell by 5.2 million barrels last week vs. the 1.8 million barrel decline analysts expected. Crude oil prices veered back again.

Market sentiment (especially among hedge funds) remains negative, even after crude prices rose and stocks drew lower. Bloomberg reported that OPEC should be digging in for a long war of attrition against shale. The latter could be partly true, if U.S. shale operators and investors are able to counter increased drilling rig costs, higher material costs and a strong need for continuing investments. The count on this is however still out, as reports are emerging about price pressure.

An attrition war, which will be costly for both sides, could be in the offing. OPEC and major non-OPEC producers, such as Russia, should be bracing themselves for a continuation of the current production cut strategy for a pro-longed period of time, for sure into 2018. There has however been a major change in risks for both sides. When Saudi Arabia started its War on Shale, the Kingdom did not expect the costs be as high, but reality has hit them hard. After several years of struggling, Riyadh and a majority of OPEC members have understood that times have changed permanently. The oil market has become really global, shale has pushed the U.S. back into the lead. A war of attrition the coming years will not be impacting Saudi Arabia as much as it did two years ago. Structural changes in spending patterns of the Arab governments and drive for economic diversification has made countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, more resilient to crude oil price pressure. At present, the Kingdom and its Gulf counterpars are more able to keep pressure on shale oil than ever before. The last financial reports on Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait are showing much lower budget deficits already. Related: Oil Stabilizes As OPEC Ponders Deeper Cuts

The main risk for non-U.S. producers (OPEC-Russia) is not production volumes, but the role of financial institutions. As was the case in 2014, shale oil producers have been hedging heavily for 2017-2018, or even 2019. The latter will give U.S. shale oil enough breathing space to continue the current surge no matter what other oil producers will do. The real confrontation between OPEC (and Russia) and shale is expected to be in 2018. Costs could be high, it seems now a question of who will blink first.

In the meantime, the production cut agreement extension is gaining ground. OPEC and Russia have openly discussed a potential production cut extension. Other Non-OPEC producers, such as Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan have also expressed support for an extension. Around 1.8 million bpd will be removed from the market, making enough room on the market to counter the expected 1 million bpd of additional shale oil from the U.S., combined with possible additional volumes from Canada and Brazil, there is still a drawdown of stocks in place. World oil demand growth for 2017 has been left unchanged by OPEC in its MOMR this week at 1.27 million bpd.

The above mentioned bearish market picture could change dramatically in the near-term. OPECs 25 of May meeting is also surrounded by some possible surprises. Saudi Arabia has been very active lately to get other non-OPEC producers to join the production cuts. A possible change of approach by these parties could also be in the offing. The current agreement is a production cut, even if media always seem to look at it as if it was an export cut. OPEC sources and analysts are currently addressing the options of changes in the deal that would turn it into an agreement that includes also petroleum products and NGLs. The latter could dramatically change the overall picture, even for the U.S, markets, where OPEC members have an ever growing say in downstream operations. Related: Oil Prices Slip As The U.S. Rig Count Continues To Climb

At the same time, still not assessed fully by most, geopolitical risks are increasing. The King Salman-Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman  Saudi Minister of Energy Khalid Al Falih power triangle has been able to set up cooperation with Washington. President Trumps visit to Saudi Arabia is not coincidental, there are several reasons why Trump and King Salman will convene during the OPEC meeting on the 25th. Three reasons have been put forward already in the press, multibillion arms deals, the Iran issue and the Aramco IPO. Mohammed Bin Salman already has openly stated that international arms deals with the Kingdom will have very strict conditions attached to it. The listing of the Aramco IPO on the New York Stock Exchange is currently another boon that Trump would like to get. Also here are major strings attached. Taking a devils advocate approach, trying to look into the mind of the Deputy Crown Prince Mohamed bin-Salman, one big string could be a link between the Aramco IPO and arms deal on one side and a more pro-active support of the Trump Administration for a U.S participation in the OPEC-Russia production cut agreement. The latter has already been called for by Saudi Arabia several times.

When looking at the Iranian issue, which could have a major impact on oil prices and production, the fact that Trump is visiting Saudi Arabia at the same time that King Salman has called for a meeting of the Islamic Military Alliance (IMAFT) is not coincidental too. The U.S. president has been even invited to attend, together with President Sisi of Egypt, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and the Pakistanis. A military strategy or action against Iran could be in the offing, including U.S. military support.

Taking these issues while assessing the global oil market, a growing list of lights are on green/orange indicating a possible price rally. It is just a question of time (most probably just before 25th of May) that the first sprouts of a price recovery will show. Trumps statements and actions could be the final push to see oil reach $60.

By Cyril Widdershoven for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Floating oil storage globally declined by a third in the first quarter of the year, an unnamed source from OPEC told Reuters. The statement supports OPECs claims that the production cut agreed on last December with 11th non-OPEC producers has helped to relieve a glut that last year sent WTI below US$30 a barrel.

The unnamed source did not provide specific figures, and the statement comes on the heels of an official announcement from the energy ministers of Saudi Arabia and Russia that the December cut deal will be extended until the end of March 2018, which sent prices on a rally.

Yet, earlier this month, Reuters reported that there were 35 tankers with a combined capacity of 65 million barrels of crude sitting in the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia  one of the main global oil shipment routes. This, according to the report, highlighted OPECs failure to relive the glut.

Morgan Stanley chimed in, citing shipping and import data that showed that the global supply had not declined. On the contrary, the figures suggested maritime supply, and more specifically OPEC supply, actually went up in the first quarter of the year, by as much as 700,000 bpd.

This latest anonymous statement about falling floating oil storage is not the first one to come from OPEC. In late April, Aramcos chief executive, Amin Nasser, said the same: that the OPEC deal had helped to bring down floating oil inventories in the first three months of 2017, again without providing any reference figures.

This lack of specific numbers may have well contributed to skepticism about the success of the OPEC-non-OPEC deal. The latest announcement about a longer than expected extension of the cuts also highlights the arguable nature of this success, even as OPEC producers have started reducing exports, as well as production.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The diversification of energy sources that feed the American electric grid should be a national security priority to ensure a robust national grid system that can withstand natural disasters and terrorist attacks on U.S. infrastructure. But, according to a new paper by the Michigan Technological University (MTU), thats not enough.

The experts said that building resilience to cascading blackouts, attacks from hostile foreign entities, and other grid-threatening events requires the wide-scale development of solar resources while creating independently functioning micro-grids that will retain their ability to produce power in case of a mass outage. And the American military concurs:

"The U.S. military is extremely dependent on electricity now; it's not people fighting with bayonets," says co-author Joshua Pearce, professor of electrical and computer engineering. "If we put the money into PV-powered microgrids, it would be making us objectively more secure and we get a return on our investment as after the initial investment in [photovoltaic electricity] the military would enjoy free solar electricity for the next 25 years."

A quick skim of policy papers from a range of think tanks shows that concern regarding the security of the electric grid plagues lawmakers on both sides of the isle. The Heritage Foundation identified the systems weakest pointtransmission systemsin a 2014 report. The year before, a sniper attacked a power substation adjacent to San Jose, California, causing the site to be out of commission for roughly one month.

Natural disasters alone cost consumers $18-$33 billion in power outages and infrastructure carnage, and those tend to be limited in size and scope depending on the size of the tornado, hurricane, or earthquake. Larger attacks stemming from malice against American culture or foreign policy could cause worse damage. Related: Who Will Lead The Transportation Transformation?

An important component of cybersecurity in large electronic systems requires decentralization. Experts consider the American elections to be extremely resilient against hackers aiming to change votes in favor of their preferred candidates because of the sheer number of entities that would have to be attacked to produce results. Voting machines in the U.S. are not connected to the internet, and votes themselves are not recorded in a grand national repository where they could be manipulated in one fell swoop.

Instead, individual voting centers report to counties, which reports to state authorities, determine the winner of the state for the presidential race. State and local elections use a similar procedure to count poll outcomes. Decentralization is key.

The American grid also operates via three separate interconnections. Any one portion of the grid can temporarily support another in case of a modest blackout, but the three-legged system has many struggles. New mini-grids, propped up by locally installed solar panels, have begun popping up in New York City and other liberal hotspots. In the event of a widespread outage, these oases will be able to continue power generation. Related: U.S. Shale Spending Dwarfs Competition: Grows 10 Times Faster

The MTU paper designed a technical and economic feasibility plan to power the entirety of the United States with solar power on a hybrid micro-grid with the capability to store power to ensure against larger outages. The researchers said they would hire the same companies that provide a similar service for American military basesLockheed Martin, Bechtel, and General Electric.

Given the results, the challenge to meet grid resiliency with microgrid deployment is feasible because the resources to install these systems already exist domestically, the report reads. A note by Dr. Chelsea Schelly, an associate professor of Sociology at MTU, added that the militarys renewable energy policy could be used as a guide for state or national policies of the same kind.

"If we recognize that this capacity already exists, then we can start thinking about PV as a security measure by integrating micro-grids - and then creating local resilience based on military technologies, the professor said.

This process would protect against cyberattacks such as the those levied against Ukraine in December 2016. Russian attackers were suspected to be the perpetrators, but thats just a suspicion. The identity of the aggressors, who took down a fifth of Kievs energy consumption, is, frankly, irrelevant. Will it really matter WHO attacked the U.S. when a third of the country is suddenly in the dark, largely unable to work or live? Proactivity in decentralizing the grid, as several European countries have already done, would put the U.S. in a non-negotiable position of strength.

By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com

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Petronas, Malaysias state-owned energy company, and the worlds third-largest LNG exporter is exploring shorter-term contracts and smaller cargo sizes in an attempt to attract more buyers. LNG buyers have been looking for greater flexibility in the terms of their contracts as supply continues to increase, giving them more options on where to buy.

New demand creation is becoming a norm, Ahmad Adly Alias, vice president of Petronas LNG Trading & Marketing said.

In China, Petronas plans to work with a partner to sell smaller parcels to meet the demand of small buyers, Ahmad said. The company is also exploring LNG sales as a transportation fuel for trucks and ships, Reuters reported.

Prices have fallen approximately 70 percent since 2014.

In Japan 7 MMTPA in Petronass LNG contracts are coming up for renegotiation

The news that the company is considering more flexibility in its contracts comes as the company prepares to renegotiate with some of its largest buyers.

Japan, its biggest buyer, has contracts expiring next year through both Tokyo Electric Power Company and Tokyo Gas Co. Tokyo Electrics current contract is for 4.8 million tons per annum while Tokyo Gas is currently contracted to purchase up to 2.6 million tons per annum.

(Our) priority is to re-contract in Malaysia but probably volume-wise it will be changed. And, how we can agree to new terms and conditions with better flexibility or pricing, said Shigeru Muraki, executive advisor at Tokyo Gas.

We will compare with other sources, we will consider the diversification of supply sources or diversification of pricings.

Petronas Ahmad said the company was currently working with long-term buyers to renew the contracts but did not give details.

In the interview Monday, Petronas Upstream CEO Anuar said long-term contracts have almost become a novelty. Petronas could do both short- and long-term contracts, he said. Related: Floating Oil Storage Down By A Third: OPEC Source

One-third of the worlds LNG purchasing power has created a buyers club

LNG exporters have been forced to offer more attractive terms to their buyers as new supply comes to the market from the U.S. and Australia, but buyers are also looking for more lobbying power in negotiations by forming a buyers club.

Korea Gas Corp. (KOGAS), Japans JERA and China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), which collectively represent about one-third of the worlds LNG purchases, have formed a group to exchange information and cooperate in the joint procurement of LNG, in March of this year.

Market conditions signal an end to destination restrictions

Under the terms of the agreement, the buyers aim to extract concessions from producers that would give them supply flexibility, such as having the right to re-sell imports to third parties, something they are currently unable to do under so-called destination restrictions.

We have created a platform to share, discuss and solve our common issues such as traditional LNG business practices, including destination restrictions, said JERA spokesman Atsuo Sawaki.

Destination restrictions have made it impossible for LNG buyers to sell excess supplies, which they buy in fixed volumes as part of their long-term contracts. Because of this, buyers like KOGAS, JERA and CNOOC will be struggling with excess supplies in the next few years.

From a practical standpoint, the three members of the buyers club may be looking for a way to trade with each other:

- KOGAS buys supplies for winter;

- CNOOC buys for summer;

- JERA buys across both seasons.

This means the partners could potentially trade LNG to one another depending on demand within the group.

Other LNG shippers also talking contract flexibility

U.S.-based Cheniere Energy lined up long-term contracts with buyers in Asia and Europe while its Sabine Pass export facility was under construction. But the company has talked about flexible contracting and delivery for some time. Related: Oil Jumps As Saudis And Russians Agree To Extend OPEC Deal Into 2018

On the Cheniere Q1 2017 earnings call last week, Cheniere CEO Jack Fusco discussed how his company is addressing the issue of flexible contracting.

Were a full-service shop. So, a lot of the utilities around the world do not like the tolling model and they dont like the FOB model necessarily because they dont want to deal with shipping.

So, if youre utility and you need reliable supply, youd rather have that thing delivered directly to your dock, right? And thats what we offer. So, we offer more flexibility, more customer options, if you will.

Even back in October 2015, Chenieres Katie Pipkin, senior vice president of business development and communications, did an interview with Gastech in which Pipkin talked about Chenieres marketing group and the flexibility it has in contracting its so-called excess LNG.

Gastech: Do you have other avenues for sales in addition to these long-term contracts?

Pipkin: Yes, we have a Cheniere gas marketing operation as well. Our excess LNG, or LNG that is not sold under long-term contracts, is available to our marketing group to sell. For example, if we look at the nine liquefaction trains being developed at the Corpus Christi and Sabine Pass LNG facilities, on a combined basis, about 80 percent of that capacity will be sold under long-term contracts and 20 percent will be available for sale through our marketing group. Cheniere Marketing has strategically located offices in the UK, Singapore and Chile. LNG will be primarily sold under shorter terms and various pricing mechanisms through this business.

Cheniere shipped its hundredth LNG cargo in April.

By Oil and Gas 360

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Ahead of the OPEC meeting on May 25 when the cartel will officially announce an output cut extension into 2018, Libya reported its daily crude oil production had reached over 814,000 barrels per day.

A member of the board of the National Oil Corporation told Bloomberg yesterday that the resumption of production at the Sharara and El Feel fields had made the increase possible. This, based on a previous statement from Jadalla Alaokali, is more than 100,000 bpd more the amount Libya pumped at the end of April.

Sharara is the countrys largest oil field, which was shut down for three weeks because the pipeline that carried crude from it to the Zawiya export terminal was blocked. El Feel, also called the Elephant field, had been idle since 2015.

The current production rate is still far from the 1.6 million barrels the North African producer boasted before the 2011 civil war but significantly higher than what it produced last year. For this year, the NOC plans to bring the total up to 1.32 million bpd, up from an earlier target of 1.1 million bpd.

Libya has been exempted from the production cut deal that OPEC struck with 11 non-OPEC producers last December, as has been Nigeria, both having suffered production declines due to militant activity. Now both are ramping up output, while OPEC is preparing to extend the original agreement into 2018, according to a fresh joint statement from Saudi Arabias Khalid al-Falih and Russias Alexander Novak.

There is no talk that Libya or Nigeria will be pressured into joining the agreement, with the joint statement only saying that the minister hoped more oil producers will join the cuts, which will remain at the initially agreed level of 1.8 million bpd for the whole group, of which 1.2 million bpd will come from OPEC.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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The Power of Siberia gas pipeline that will carry Russian natural gas to China is moving ahead of schedule, with 720 km of the 3,000-km structure already built, Gazproms chief executive Alexei Miller told a Russian TV channel, as cited by local online media. Miller was also quoted as saying that Gazprom will settle the main terms of the deliveries via the Power of Siberia soon.

The pipeline is a key element in a 30-year gas supply deal between Moscow and Beijing worth US$400 billion in total. Under the terms of the deal, signed in 2014, the China National Petroleum Corporation, or CNPC, will buy 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Gazprom annually, starting in 2025. Before that year, it will be receiving smaller amounts of the fuel.

The full 38-billion cubic meter volume represented a fifth of Chinas oil consumption in 2014 and 60 percent of its imports in that year.

The Russian side committed to spend US$70 billion, including US$35 billion for the construction of the Power of Siberia, US$20 billion for field development, and another US$15 billion for a gas-treatment plant, to be built on the Russian-Chinese border in partnership with local chemicals major Sibur.

The contract is of strategic importance for the two sides, more so for Russia, which needs markets for its gas more than China needs specifically Russian gas deliveries  everyone is eager to export gas to China as Asias second-biggest economy shifts away from coal and into less polluting energy sources.

While Gazprom is limited in its choice of markets and is facing stern opposition in the European Union because of its perceived dominant position, China can pick from a host of gas suppliers, including the U.S. Just last week, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping struck a deal for U.S. LNG supplies, as well as some goods, to China.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The blog ad industry has blackballed me and all of my websites because of my political views, so I can no longer support this site through ads. Accordingly, I have posted

my resume

for prospective employers to view.
Flipkart is celebrating its tenth anniversary with the Big 10 Sale. The company began the sale on May 14 and will continue giving out offers till May 18. Today, the e-commerce giant is giving out offers on smartphones, tablets, electronics and fashion; giving up to 90 per cent discount on select products.

Flipkart will also introduce buyback guarantee during the sale. Under the scheme, Flikart promises to buyback your smartphone at an assured price. This offers you a guaranteed value for your phone when you make your next smartphone purchase on Flipkart.



Here are the best deals according to us:

Apple

Flipkart had promised that the Big 10 Sale will offer the iPhone 7 at the lowest price yet and it has stood to its promise. The iPhone 7 32 GB is available at a price of Rs 43,999 and the iPhone 7 128GB is available at Rs 50,999. The iPhone 7 256 GB is available at Rs 61,999. Over and above the discount, Flipkart is also giving up to Rs 20,000 off on exchange.

The offers extend even to its elder sibling, the iPhone 7 Plus. The 32 GB variant of the iPhone 7 Plus is available at Rs 54,999 while the 128GB variant is available at Rs 65,999. The iPhone 7 Plus 256GB is available at Rs 73,999, 20 per cent down from its launch price.

The three year old iPhone 5s is available at Rs 15,499 and iPhone SE at Rs 21,999.



Lenovo

Lenovo Vibe K5 Note 64GB: Coming to the lower mid-segment, Lenovo is offering the Vibe K5 Note at Rs 11,999 with a discount of Rs 2,000 on the previous price tag. The device is also available with exhange discount of up to Rs 10,500.

Another offering from Lenovo, the Phab 2 and Phab 2 Plus are also available at a flat discount of Rs 3,000. The Phab 2 32 GB is available at Rs 7,999 and the Phab 2 Plus 32 GB is avialable at Rs 11,999.



Motorola

Moto G5 Plus: Though there is no discount on the selling price, Flipkart is offering a massive exchange offer of up to Rs 15,000.

Moto M: The device is available at a flat discount of Rs 2,000. The price is slashed from 17,999 to Rs 15,999 for 64GB variant. The 32GB variant is available at Rs 13,999, Rs 2,000 lesser than the original price.



Moto X Play 16GB is available at a discount of Rs 5,000 at Rs 11,999



Samsung

Samsung Galaxy On Nxt: The device is available at a flat discount of Rs 3,000; down from Rs 17,999 to Rs 14,999. The offer is available on both Black and Gold variants.

Samsung Galaxy J5- 6 (2016 edition): The 16GB Black variant is available at a discount of Rs 3,300 at a price of Rs 9,990. However, the Gold variant of the same device is available at Rs 10,990.



Google Pixel

Google Pixel XL smartphone with 4GB RAM and 32 GB ROM is available at Rs 53,999 at a discount of 19 per cent. Over and above the discount users can also get up to Rs 29000 off with the exchange offer on this phone.
India's cyber security agency CERT-IN has sounded a high alert for internet users against the menace of a strong and globally active ransomware virus- 'Wannacry'-that critically infects computers and locks them remotely.

A critical alert has been issued by the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In), the country's nodal agency to combat hacking, phishing and to fortify security- related defences of the Indian Internet domain.

It has been reported that a new ransomware named as Wannacry is spreading widely. Wannacry encrypts the files on infected Windows systems. This exploit is named ETERNALBLUE, the CERT-In advisory states. It said the ransomware called 'WannaCry' or 'WannaCrypt' encrypts the computer's hard disk drive and then spreads laterally between computers on the same local area network (LAN).

The ransomware also spreads through malicious attachments to emails, it said. The cyber agency advised users to apply patches to their Windows systems in order to prevent its infection and spread. The ransomware virus is such lethal and smart that it also drops a file named '!Please Read Me!.txt' which contains the text explaining what has happened to the computer and how to pay the ransom.

'WannaCry' encrypts files with the following extensions, appending .WCRY to the end of the file name like .lay6. The anti-ransomware measures recommended by CERTIn are : Do not open attachments in unsolicited emails even if they come from people in your contact list and never click on a URL contained in an unsolicited email, even if the link seems benign.
As computer systems around the world are bleeding from the onslaught of computer virus 'WannaCry ', authorities in India are still trying to assess the damage done by the ransomeware-worm. As IANS reported that police computers across 18 units in Chittoor, Krishna, Guntur, Visakhatpatnam and Srikakulam districts of Andhra Pradesh were infected, there is no definite word on the extent of this cyber attack in India yet.

While the full impact of the recent attack remains unclear, how India Inc has fared in similar situations in the past warrants a look. Indian companies have been hit again and again by computer viruses. As per a report by Newflicks, Indians suffered losses amounting to Rs 34,110 crores due to cybercrime in 2011.



Hitting high



As per the report, almost two-third of the higher-ups in an organisation fall prey to cyber attacks. It shows that 64 per cent of the cases have directors and managers as the victims, whereas 53 per cent are general or administrative staff.

Where's the money at

The report states that 65 per cent of the cyber crimes were for illicit financial gains. Corporate rivalry follows in the list of motives, with 54 per cent cyber attacks meant for malicious damage to business operations, whereas 46 per cent fall under corporate espionage.

Interestingly, 18 per cent attacks are acts of war or terrorism from other countries, via the digital world.

Preferred game



Falling in line with the favourite motive of the hackers, almost three-fourth of the financial services companies suffered a cyber theft or faced a cyber attack.

The report shows that 72 per cent of the targets were financial services companies. Almost half the companies (44 per cent) belonged to pharmaceuticals and chemicals sector.

As for the safest sectors, infrastructure (two per cent) and construction (10 per cent) were the least bothered by hackers.

Expenses still spared



The increasing volume and growing frequency of cyber attacks across India have failed, though, to stir Indian companies into action. Two out of three companies spend less than five per cent IT budget on bolstering their cyber defences.

A little more than a quarter spend somewhere between 5 to 10 per cent of their IT budgeting on cyber security. Merely, two per cent dedicate 20 per cent to fend off cyber attacks.

Who's the thief?



In four out of five cases, the perpetrator is an external entity. Only 17 per cent of the cyber attacks were carried out by employees of the comapnies affected.

In case of internal jobs, almost every time men were found to be the culprits in India. 97 per cent of the cases of internal cyber attacks were carried out by men, 61 per cent of them involved employees aged between 31 and 40 years of age.


Ashraf Ghani not rejected Nawaz Sharif invitation to visit Pakistan: Afghan Ambassador

ISLAMABAD: Afghan Ambassador Omar Zakhilwal on Sunday dispelled the impression that President Ashraf Ghani has rejected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs invitation to visit Pakistan.



Comments by Zakhilwal, who is also President Ghanis special envoy for Pakistan, came following recent reports from Kabul that the Afghan president declined the invitation when the ISI chief met him last week.



Section of the Afghan media had earlier quoted credible sources as saying the president rejected the invitation and had also attached conditions that Pakistan should first take practical actions on Kabuls certain demands.



Pakistani media also started debate on the reported rejection of PMs invitation and some analyst argued that the three high level Pakistani visits to Afghanistan this month failed to reduce tension.



However, the Afghan ambassador said the impression about President Ghanis visit is untrue.



I confirm the Hon Speaker of Pakistan National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiqs statement that President Ashraf Ghani has not rejected the invitation to visit Pakistan. Instead, he rightly responded that the last visit by a leader to each others capital was made by him, visiting Islamabad in Dec 2015. It, therefore, was the Hon Prime Minister of Pakistans time to visit Kabul and that he would visit next, Zakhilwal told Daily Times.



He said President Ghani has also endorsed the visit of a high-powered Afghan Parliamentary delegation to Islamabad following the visit by a similar delegation to Kabul from Pakistan headed by Ayaz Sadiq.



He threw weight behind bilateral visits and said, sustained sincere and result oriented bilateral engagement between the government of our two countries is something that our government strongly believes in.



Zakhilwal said more important visits will take place from Kabul to Islamabad as this is the way both countries should move forward. He, however, did not share any specific visit and that when it will take place.



When asked about the tension along the Chaman border, he hoped that the border will reopen soon, adding that the positive aspect was that both sides were able to quickly stop cross-border shelling in 15-minutes talks.



It did not escalate further and lives were saved on both sides, the Afghan ambassador said. We are moving in right direction, he said while referring to the recent interaction between the two sides. He opposed closure of the border, which he called Durand Line, under any excuse as it affects bilateral trade and movement of the people.



Pakistan is the loser when the crossing points are closed. Their opening is more important for Pakistan as Afghanistan imports from Pakistan and Afghanistan is Pakistans market. When it is closed Pakistan loses and traders suffer, Zakhilwal said.



He pleaded for tension-free relations between the two countries and said both should use opportunities to avoid mistakes in the future.



There had been a lot of mistakes over the past one year and both have learnt a lot. 2016 was the worst year for bilateral relations and we hope 2017 will be better for bilateral relations.



When asked about Afghan leaders unwillingness to agree with Pakistans quest for an effective border management, he said Kabul never shied away from discussions on issues.



There are concerns in both countries about the presence of the armed opponents. Pakistan has concerns about India role in Afghanistan. There are any other issues and these need dialogue, he said.
Mustafa Kamal released from detention

Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) Chairman Mustafa Kamal and other party leaders was released from detention in the wee hours of Monday, police said. The leaders were detained along with several party workers for trying to enter Karachi's red zone.



City Senior Superintendent of Police, Adeel Hussain Chandio confirmed that the party leaders were released from detention after successful negotiations with the provincial government.



Talking to the media after his release the PSP chairman condemned the use of force to disperse his party workers and said that the provincial government should be ashamed for arresting citizens asking for water.



On Sunday, a heavy contingent of police resorted to baton charge and shelling to disperse hundreds PSP activists as they tried to march towards the Chief Minister House after the negotiations between PSP and the ruling PPP party ended without the parties reaching any consensus.



The PSP was insistent to march towards the red zone in Karachi but the Sindh government was reluctant to let them do so.



Hundreds of PSP activists had gathered at Shahrah-e-Faisal near FTC bridge after the provincial government imposed Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) in Karachi's Red Zone on Sunday ahead of an announced march of the PSP to the Chief Minister House.



The PSP delegation which held talks with the ruling PPP leaders was led by Raza Haroon.



The leaders of the protesting PSP kept announcing that they will march towards the Red Zone, however, law enforcement personnel erected barricades on all roads leading to the chief minister and governor houses.



Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar reacted to the development and said that the Constitution ensures the provision of holding all types of political gatherings.



He condemned the use of power against protesters and said that the provincial government was showing ignorance to the issues of Karachi and resorted to torture against those demanding their rights. "Use of force against peaceful political gathering is quite illogical," he said.



PPP leader Shehla Raza, while talking to reporters, defended the provincial government's move saying PSP workers were repeatedly asked to refrain from entering the Red Zone as it was an illegal activity.



She, however, said PPP believes in democratic rights of the people and works accordingly. She further said that



The protesters were initially approached to hold a dialogue regarding their demands, but when they challenged the writ of the government the due action was taken against them, she maintained.



While responding to the statement made by the interior minister, Shehla Raza mentioned that the government only used water cannon unlike the actions of the incumbent PML-N government in Punjab.



She bluntly compared the recent development with the Model Town tragedy, where police had resorted to live firing, which had resulted in the death of more than a dozen civilians.



Police have detained at least 16 leaders and workers of PSP, said Karachi-South DIG Azad Khan.



The DIG told media men that the arrested leaders include Mustafa Kamal, Dr Sagheer Ahmed, Raza Haroon, Iftikhar Alam, Hafeez. They would be booked on violation of Section 144.



He claimed that the protesters were given a No Objection Certificate to carry out the rally from Karsaz to FTC flyover, and they had agreed to it.



However, after reaching the FTC Bridge, the protesters were bent upon entering the Red Zone. This prompted the police to resort to baton charge, shelling and use water canon to disperse them, he explained.



The senior official also said that the representatives of the provincial government and police officials held negotiations with the PSP leaders but to no avail.



The law, which prohibits the assembly of more than four people in an area, was put in place hours before the PSP had to start its march towards CM House.



A large number of anti-riot police personnel had already been deployed at the road and almost all roads leading to the city's red zone had been sealed.



PSP chairman Mustafa Kamal had said on Saturday that he expected one million people to march towards the palace of the Sindh chief minister for their rights.



The rally was expected to move from the FTC building on Shahrah-e-Faisal. The rallying workers would register their protest against the poor governance of the PPP government in Sindh, it had been announced.



Kamal had previously criticised the government for failing to pay any heed to his partys 18-day sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club. A government delegation contacted us twice but instead of resolving our issues they tried to befool people, he had said at a press conference on Saturday.
From Greg Swank, 12-4-2 You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As...
The Minister of Energy, Hon. Boakye Agyarko on May 12, 2017 addressed the Committee of Ministers (COM) of the West African Gas Pipeline Project in Cotonou, Benin. The agenda of the meeting was to follow up on action points from the previous meeting held in Accra last year, provide feedback on WAGPs operational and financial issues as well as tariff issues and to finalize the Western Interconnection Agreement.



The meeting was hosted by the Benin Minister of Energy, Water and Mines, Dona Jean-Claude Houssou and brought together senior government officials from Ghana, Nigeria and Togo as well as key stakeholders such as West African Gas Pipeline Authority (WAGPA) and West African Pipeline Company Limited (WAPCo).



Proceedings were opened by Dona Jean-Claude Houssou. In his inaugural address, the Minister reinstated the importance of the project and urged for a fruitful deliberation. He further thanked his colleague Ministers present for taking time out of their busy schedule to honour the invitation.



Hon. Boakye Agyarko, chairman of the COM, in his address tasked all member states to work together and help ensure that the project succeeds. We need to dedicate ourselves in ensuring that WAPCo survives he said. He further urged stakeholders to find common ground in resolving key issues such as reliable supply of gas and payment guarantee.



Representative of the Nigerian Minister of state in charge of Petroleum Resources, Engr. Saidu A. Mohammed affirmed Nigerias commitment to the project. He emphasized that the Nigerian Government is working assiduously to ramp-up gas supply to about 70 mmscfd this year. According to Engr. Mohammed, the ramping up of gas supply will be achieved because the Nigerian Government is making headways in resolving onshore gas pipeline vandalization.



The COM re-affirmed its commitment to the project and tasked WAPCo to look into expanding its business model. The Ministers expressed their profound gratitude to the people and Government of Benin, for the warm hospitality accorded to them and their delegation during their stay in Cotonou.



Other dignitaries present were representatives from ECOWAS, Ghanas Ministry of Energy, N-Gas, WAGPA and WAPCo.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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KINGSBURY  Josh Pomykaj credits his daughter for saving his life, and he credits her school and the local fire department for teaching her how to do it.

If it werent for her, I wouldnt be here, said Pomykaj, who lived in a multi-family home at 1025 state Route 196 that was badly damaged in an early Friday morning fire. She was more calm than I was. She woke me up, and we got my father up. She knew to get everyone out of the house. I am glad she learned about it at school.

Mallory Pomykaj, who will turn 11 in June, said she was awakened by the sound of the fire, which started on the back porch and had already gotten into the kitchen.

Early morning fire damages multifamily home in Kingsbury KINGSBURY  An early morning fire on Friday left several residents homeless.

I woke up, and I heard crackling in the kitchen, Mallory said Monday. So I went down and woke everybody up.

She is a fifth-grader at Hudson Falls school, and the students there learn fire safety from the Hudson Falls Fire Department and school staff.

Josh Pomykaj said his truck was parked next to the porch and was badly damaged.

I am waiting for the insurance people to get back to me, he said, noting that others have already come forward to help.

He and his father and daughter will be moving to another of his landlords apartments this week.

My work (Speedway) and my fathers work (Wal-Mart) have stepped up, and other people are helping, too, he said.

The Red Cross has been in touch with those affected by the fire, and Pomykaj said he expects to hear from the group again this week.

Siterra Bovee, a close friend of the family, arranged for them to stay at a local campground for several days and has set up a GoFundMe account.

Bovee said Mallory is a brave little girl who saved everyone in her family.

Steve Sawn, assistant fire chief of the Kingsbury Volunteer Hose Company, said Thursday the rear section of the structure closest to the street was burning when firefighters arrived. That part of the building sustained extensive damage, but other parts of the building suffered only smoke and heat damage.

An official cause had not been determined as of Monday, according to Washington County Fire Coordinator Glenn Bristol.

There were several other people living in the house as well, but no additional information was available on them.
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In what could be a turning point in Chinas foreign policy toward North Korea, Beijing may be ready to support an increase in economic pressure against the isolated state to end ballistic missile and nuclear bomb testing. The People's Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK) on Sunday launched a ballistic missile just hours before China was to begin its most important global diplomatic event. The Chinese Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in Beijing, was attended by top world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Pyongyang's ill-timed move has sparked renewed world anger at the country's refusal to end its militaristic moves.





Analysts observing the incident noted that Beijing may now be ready to support Washington's call for the UN Security Council to implement new sanctions on the DPRK as a means to end what the West condemns as aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, while noting that Pyongyang is being routinely intimidated, nonetheless referred to the launch as "dangerous." Following an urgent request by Japan and the United States, the United Nations Security Council will gather an emergency session on Tuesday to craft a response to the most recent DPRK ballistic missile test. Foreign policy experts consider Sunday's missile launch a turning point, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Professor Su Hao, of China Foreign Affairs University, remarked that Pyongyang would "be held accountable and pay the price" for acting against UN security resolutions.





"This could also be an opportunity for China to show that it can initiate some plausible plans to handle the North Korean issue within the framework of the international community," he added, cited by SCMP. Other ways that have been floated as a means to get Pyongyang to come to the bargaining table include Beijing offering DPRK leader Kim Jong-un asylum, or cutting off North Korea's primary power source: Chinese oil. "But this would be the last measure China would want to ever use because the Chinese leaders fear the consequences would be too big to control, " said Lee Dong-ryul, of South Korea's Dongduk Women's University. In February, Beijing stopped importing North Korean coal.





































Days after South Korea elected a new president who might be favorable to better diplomatic ties with Pyongyang, North Korea launched a medium-range ballistic missile that might accommodate a large nuclear warhead into the Sea of Japan.

North Koreas latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never seen before from a North Korean missile, aerospace engineer John Schilling wrote on 38 North, a website dedicated to North Korea security topics. Despite Hwasong-12s classification as a medium-range missile, it could have allowed North Korea to test subsystems of ICMBs.





US President Donald Trumps frequent declarations about solving the North Korean problem may have forced Pyongyangs hand into accelerating ICBM development. The possible testing of ICBM subsystems in this low-key manner may be a North Korean hedge against the prospect of escalation with US forces, Schilling said.





It could represent significant progress toward the nations goal of reaching greater ICBM capabilities, according to various experts. The most recent test was not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile, US Pacific Command said in a statement. But David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated the projectiles range to be 2,800 miles.





The Korean-style missile was capable of carrying a large, heavy nuclear warhead, North Korean state-media outlet KCNA reported. Based on the missiles altitude and flight time, the DPRK may have launched a new type of missile, Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada said. The missile originated in Kusong, North Korea, before flying roughly 490 miles, where it landed in the Sea of Japan, just 60 miles from Vladivostok, Russia.












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Addressing participants at the National Policy Summit in Accra, he said government will host a port efficiency conference to learn best practices from countries in Africa and beyond to ease the stress of doing business in Ghana.

According to him, there is the need to reduce the level of human intervention as far as clearing of goods at the port is concerned.

READ ALSO: Confusion hits Tema Shipyard

We are very cognisant of the fact that our ports are very bureaucratic and, quite frankly, inefficient. You would see that a lot of the cost of doing business as far as the private sector is concerned is at the level of the port. You bring in goods and to clear them is sort of a tedious process and we have been looking at what to do to deal with this. How can Ghanas ports become first class in terms of clearance, he quizzed.

To answer his own question, Dr Bawumia said: we are calling the port efficiency conference and we are bringing in experts from within Africa and outside Africa. We have invited Dubai port, we have invited Singapore, Antwerp, and we want to see what some of the best in the world are doing that we are not doing.
This was after one person they were luring reported them to them police.

Narrating the incident to Accra-based Citi FM, the victim said he decided to inform the police because of the public information from the Bank of Ghana cautioning the general public against the blacklisted Ponzi scheme, MMM.

READ ALSO: BoG warns public against doing business with MMM Ghana

The gentlemen who approached my friend and I were not convincing in their product offering so I became suspicious and asked my friend whom I was with to ignore them. It was also because I had heard of the business in the news cautioning the public to be weary of the scheme.

It is unclear when MMMs Ghana operations commenced but checks by Citi Business News indicate its website is still functioning despite the caution from the central bank.

The Bank of Ghana issued a statement earlier calling on the general public to stop doing business with MMM Ghana.

The Central Bank said this is because MMM Ghana is operating a Ponzi scheme through a virtual office.

The statement said that the company, which claims to have over 10,000 clients, moves from place to place and mobilises deposits from the general public.

The institutions operations are contrary to section 6(1) of the Banks and Specialised Deposit-Taking Institutions Act, 2016 (Act 930) and also threatens the safety and soundness of the financial system, it added.

READ ALSO: Two alleged MMM agents appear in Court for cheating

It also added that the Bank of Ghana has not licensed it as a financial institution.

In Nigeria, 3 million persons are reported to have lost 18 billion Naira to the Ponzi scheme.

The countrys authorities have also had a tough time clamping down the operations of MMM.
The accused, Caleb Olalekan, 47, and Joshua Zion, 22, both residents of Amuwo Odofin area of Lagos, pleaded not guilty to a two-count charge of conspiracy and grievous harm.

The Prosecutor, Insp. Tony Elibeh, told the court that the accused committed the offences on April 27 at 2nd Rainbow, Amuwo Odofin, Lagos.

Elibeh said that the accused assaulted the complainant by giving her a punch on the mouth and in the process, removed her front tooth.

He said the accused claimed that the woman was abusing them, and they decided to teach her a lesson by beating her up.

The prosecutor said that Emmanuel reported the case to the police and the accused were arrested.

The offences, Elibeh noted, contravened Sections 411 and 243 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015 (Revised).

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Section 243 prescribes a seven- year jail term for grievous harm, if found guilty.

The Chief Magistrate, Mr Titus Abolarinwa, granted the accused bail in the sum of N100, 000 each and two sureties each, in like sum.
The Chief Magistrate, Mrs B. O. Osunsanmi, ordered that the defendant should remain behind bars, and adjourned the case until July 24 for sentencing.

The accused, whose address was not given, is standing trial on a two-count charge bordering on conspiracy and robbery.

The prosecutor, Insp. Simeon Imhonwa, had earlier told the court that the accused committed the offences at about 7.00 p.m. on March 9 at Ajah bus stop, Ajah, Lagos.

He said that the accused conspired with others still at large and robbed one Odedele Olumuyiwa of one Samsung phone, valued at N41, 000 at knife-point.

The prosecutor alleged that the complainant, who was on his way home after the days work, was attacked by the accused, who threatened his life with the knife.

The complainant who was waiting for public transport was accosted by the accused, who came with a knife and snatched his phone valued at M41, 000.

He was later apprehended by the police.

Imhonwa said the accused was apprehended by passersby who noticed what was going on.
Yes, I am a doctor and yes until Dr. J. J. Lamptey, of valley view clinic, Dzorwulu resurrects my sister to life and cease my pain, I will talk of him anyhow I deem fit on social media, in my home, in my sleep and everywhere I chose at any point. I hate it when colleagues try to play "he is your colleague nonsense on me." Did he treat me as a colleague? Did he treat my sister as a human? Would he administer 2g of chloramphenicol ( 6times the usual dose for a drug that has been banned since the '90s) together with Cipro, cefuroxime, and other fifth antibiotic to even a pig, let alone a girl who was walking, talking like you and I with a widal titre of 1/40 and 1/80 (O and H) claiming she has typhoid psychosis? she asked on her Facebook timeline.

Yes, I am a doctor and yes until Dr. J. J. Lamptey, of valley view clinic, Dzorwulu resurrects my sister to life and cease my pain, I will talk of him anyhow I deem fit on social media, in my home, in my sleep and everywhere I chose at any point. I hate it when colleagues try to play "he is your colleague nonsense on me.". Did he treat me as a colleague? Did he treat my sister as a human? Would he administer 2g of chloramphenicol ( 6times the usual dose for a drug that has been banned since the '90s) together with Cipro, cefuroxime, and other fifth antibiotic to even a pig, let alone a girl who was walking, talking like you and I with a widal titre of 1/40 and 1/80 (O and H) claiming she has typhoid psychosis? Will he refuse to call the immediate relative of the girl when she was dieing and ask that a taxi driver take her to 37 military and dump her? Will he charge freaking ghc1700 for a 3 day stay in a six-bedder room in a his clinic and demand immediate payment before she even lies down? Will he keep the dead body of the girl in the sun and insult the poor mother and sister of the deceased and bulley them to accept typhoid psychosis as a cause of death? Will he look on unconcerned as the "colleague " cradle her dead sister in a taxi in hot Accra sun from one police station to another for close to 5hrs,her body almost decomposing and being denied admission into a morgue because he refused to sign a coroners request? Do not anger me this evening. Delete your message from my inbox before I descend on you with three years of grief and pains. Until you feel what I felt in the hands of that doctor, I have no level ground to discuss anything with you. Until you stand and watch your only sibling being dissected in a pathlab, you have no moral grounds to call me to order. Until you have suffered negligence firsthand as I did, I have nothing to say to you.And may God help me not to be as callous fraudulent and wicked as this man all the days of my remaining life.
The accused, who resides in Ikeja, is charged with sexual assault.

The prosecutor, Insp. Clifford Ogu, told the court that the offence was committed at 40, Awolowo Way, Ikeja, between December 2016 and May 2, 2017.

Ogu said that the accused and the 17-year-old girls mother were neighbours at the shop.

The accused knew the girl from her mothers shop and he made advances at her.

The mother had been monitoring her daughters movement and when she was convinced of her relationship with the accused, she confronted her, the prosecutor said.

Ogu noted that the girl told her mother that the accused had been sleeping with her since last year.

Hence, the mother reported the case at the police station and the accused was apprehended, he said.

According to the prosecutor, the offence contravened Section 259 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015 (Revised).

The accused, however, pleaded not guilty to the one-count charge.

The Chief Magistrate, Mrs Taiwo Akanni, admitted the accused to bail in the sum of N250, 000 with one surety in like sum.
Ganiyu, who resides at No 9, Nurudeen Close, Orile Iganmu, Lagos, is facing a three-count charge of conspiracy, assault and stealing.

The prosecutor, Sgt. Christopher Okoliko, told the court that the accused committed the offences with some others still at large on April 30 at No. 9, Nurudeen Close, Orile Iganmu, Lagos.

He said the accused gave the complainant several fist-blows on his face that caused him injuries, over a misunderstanding they had.

When they had rendered him helpless, they stole his money and ran away. It was some neighbours that took him to the hospital and reported the matter to the police, he said.

Okoliko said the offences contravened Sections 171, 285 and 409 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2011.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Section 285 stipulates a three-year jail term for offenders.

The accused, however, pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The Chief Magistrate, Mr. A.A.Paul, granted the accused bail in the sum of N50, 000 with one surety in like sum.

He said surety must be gainfully employed and should show evidence of tax payment to the Lagos State Government.
The family made this known at a press conference due to the revelations made by Bugri Naabu over the death of the late Upper East regional chairman of the NPP, Adams Mahama.

According Bugri Naabu, the Gender Minister Otiko Afisa Djaba was involved in the killing of Adams Mahama.

The family of Gregory Afoko said the names mentioned by Bugri Naabu must be arrested and investigated.

A member of the family, Mr Robert Atong Asekabta who addressed the media said "So just as Gregory Afoko was arrested on the allegation of someone, it is our humble plea to the police that Madam Otiko Afisa Djaba, Mr. Rockson Bukari and Bugri Naabu himself be arrested or invited by the Police to assist in finding who actually killed Adams Mahama and for what purpose. The law must be seen to be applied equally to all manner of persons.

"What informed Kamal Deens alleged advice to the late Adams Mahama? What did he know beforehand that he was minded to advise the late Adams about his personal security? Why did he tell the late Adams to be prayerful? Why did the police not invite Kamal Deen to assist them in their investigations of the death of the late Adams? We think the police should have been interested. They must still be interested.

"We shall follow this press conference with a petition to the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and the Attorney-General for them to initiate criminal proceedings against the four: Kamal Deen Abdulai, Daniel Bugri Naabu, Rockson Bukari and Otiko Afisa Djaba in connection with Adams Mahamas death!

"The true killers must be found. We shall support any genuine moves by individuals and groups with the noble intention of helping to find the true killers of the late Adams Mahama," he stressed.

He, however, called on the police to release Mr Gregory Afoko.

READ MORE:Free Gregory Afoko Movement calls on IGP to arrest Bugri Naabu

Death of Adams Mahama

Adams Mahama died in the hospital following an acid attack on May 20, 2015.

He had been fighting for his life in the hospital after two assailants stopped his car whilst he was about entering his house midnight on Wednesday and poured the corrosive substance on his face and entire body.

Police investigations led to the arrest of Gregory Afoko, brother of the suspended national chairman of the NPP, Paul Afoko.
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The computer technology student, named Desmond Attipoe was arrested by the Ahenkro police in Afigya Kwabre District of the Ashanti region for threatening to circulate a fake nude picture of one Sheilla Osei Mensah if she does not offer him Gh800.

He was arrested last Saturday by four men at the Rockview hotel at Konum-Afrancho and was later handed over to the police, the Graphic Online reports.

Background

The student, Attipoe presented himself as a lady on Facebook and requested to be a friend of Sheilla, the 21-year-old private business woman at Suame.

After Sheila had accepted his request, Attipoe used his feminine status to require for more information from Sheilla. He subsequently sent another friend request as a white man and later asked to have Sheillas picture.

He later presented himself at Attipoe, picked a nude picture, edited that picture and placed Sheilas face on it.

Attipoe subsequently sent that nude picture to Sheilla on WhatsApp and began making financial demands.

Police say he threatened to circulate the picture if Sheilla failed to pay Gh800 or agree to have sex with him.
According to WiLDAF, "As a Womens Human Rights Organization whose efforts are directed towards championing substantive equality for women and men, we consider this feat as another significant milestone especially for Women's Participation and Representation in Public and Political sphere."

Supreme Court judge, Justice Sophia Akuffo has been confirmed as the next Chief Justice.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo told the media at a news conference at the Flagstaff House Friday, that he considers Justice Sophia as the best person to lead the judiciary at this time in history.

However, WiLDAF in a statement said "It is our hope that she will use her new position to advance women and girls rights issues when she is approved by Parliament and continue to serve as a positive role model to women and girls.
Premium Times reports that although Gentry's lawyers and friends made efforts to assist him in perfecting his bail conditions in other to secure his release, their efforts were foiled as all the magistrates in Lagos attended a state-wide conference and none of them was available to attend to his bail application as of Monday, May 15.

However, there are high hopes that he will be able to return home by Tuesday, May 16, 2017.

Gentry was arraigned at an Ogba Magistrate Court 1 sitting at Ogba, Ikeja, on three count charges under the State Criminal law 2011.

He was reportedly granted bail in the sum of N500, 000 as well as the provision of tax verification and two sureties, one of whom must own property in Lagos State, but was remanded in jail for failure to perfect his bail conditions before the end of the day.

According to earlier reports, Aigbe reported the alleged attack to the Lagos State Government through the Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Team.

The mother-of-two has since become an advocate for the Lagos State Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Team.

Gentry was subsequently slammed with a restraining order that keeps him no less than one mile of Mercy Aigbes location at all times.
Responding to people saying she should slow down, Mercy wrote on Instagram today, May 15, 2017,

"Did I hear someone say slow down? Even the Devil can't stop me."

This comes after the star in an interview with Broadway TV opened up on the details of the scandal that has trailed her and her husband, Lanre Gentry, for the past few weeks.

Mercy revealed that her husband once became furious and started to beat her in the presence of everybody.

According to her, the physical violence affected her sight and caused her to bleed internally from the abuse allegedly melted down to her on Sunday, April 16, 2017.
Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected!
Although the accused denied the charge, the prosecutor, Insp. Simeon Imhonwa told the court that the accused committed the offences with others still at large on April 3 at about 9.30 p.m. at No. 21, Ore-ofe St., off Governors Road, Ikotun.

He said the accused broke into the complainants house and robbed her of her wedding ring, two laptops, a phone, all valued at N575, 000 and N108, 000 cash.

The accused was apprehended by the police in his escape bid while accomplices fled in an unmarked car.

According to Imhonwa, police recovered one locally-made gun with two live cartridges from the accused.

The offences contravened Sections 295, 296 and 297 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015 (revised).

The Chief Magistrate, Mrs B.O. Osunsanmi, ordered that the accused be remanded in prison and directed that the case file should be sent to the State Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for advice.
The culprits identified as Rachel Shoaf and Sheila Eddy reportedly lured and murdered their friend, Skylar Neese by stabbing her over 50 times.

Daily Mirror reports that the sickening incident will be explored on an episode of CBS crime series, "Teens who kill".

The reports reveal that Skylar who was a brilliant student from Morgantown, West Virginia, disappeared on July 5, 2012, after sneaking out of her home to meet her friends.

The father of the deceased, Dave Neese reportedly informed the police that his daughter was missing after he discovered that she had not slept in her bed the previous night.

Daily Mirror reports that Skylar was driven to a remote area where she was stabbed multiple times and her body dumped and covered in dirt.

Rachel and Sheila reportedly helped with the search for Skylar and stayed in touch with the parents of the deceased for updates.

However, six months later, Rachel confessed to the crime and led the police to Skylar's remains.

Prior to Rachel's confessions and Skylar's discovery, Sheila who had been friend with her since they were kids shared a tribute on Twitter which read: "you'll ALWAYS be my best friend".

Rachel reportedly pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison while Sheila pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and is serving a 15-year term.

According to the reports, Skylar had been close friends with Sheila until they met Rachel in High School.

Skylar reportedly became upset over the closeness shared between Sheila and Rachel and also witnessed the pair indulge in lesbian sex during a sleepover.

Worried that their secret would be exposed, they came up with a plan to get rid of Skylar.

Speaking of his daughter's murder, Dave Neese said: [It was] kind of a defeated feeling  at least when we didnt know where she was there was a glimmer of hope, but now the hopes gone.

"When they murdered her, they murdered us  its the saddest feeling in the world.
Another young, beautiful woman who had her life in front of her was killed by a weak man. We cannot exhaust the conversation about domestic violence and physical assault in relationships.

The death of Mokoena fired up the tweets about violence in relationships. The hash tag #MenAreTrash were embedded in so many 140 word statements. They weren't a reaction to the beautiful South African's death. It was a backlash and rallying cry from women who have been ignored for a long time.

#MenAreTrash was trending before Mokoena's horrific death. A few days before, a lady announced that #MenAreTrash t-shirts were up for sale. This brought a lot of heat on social media.

Most guys felt that #MenAreTrash is a slur and an unfair indictment of all men. On the other side of the fence, the hash tag is an accurate description of men who have encouraged rape culture, misogyny and patriarchy to thrive.

As earlier stated #MenAreTrash is the language of the ignored, frustrated and unheard. When a group of people have been disregarded for a long time they usually result to rhetoric like this to get their point across.

A good example of this is the term 'white privilege'. This term is used to describe a system that only favours white people. White Privilege became very prominent in the last seven years especially during the emergence of the Black Lives Matter.

The point here is this, the term white privilege does not take into account the millions of white people who are poor and have never benefited from the 'system' just like many American minorities. It also lumps together white people who are not racist.

The use of white privilege to battle racism in the US might not further the conversation. White people who have never benefited from this privilege might feel slighted that they are grouped with racists. This won't advance the racism conversation.

ALSO READ: Men are scum movement dies in 2017

The #MenAreTrash situation is similar. Men who have never raised their hands on women, never raped, sexually assaulted a woman would be annoyed with the hashtag.

From a male perspective, a lot of guys who want to contribute to these sensitive topics choose not to do so because they feel insulted and herded with rapists. For me, I keep quiet when this hash tag starts to trend. If you have already judged every man based on the actions of others, then why talk or speak?

What I see on Twitter these days are gender wars, slurs and shots thrown from both camps. This doesn't help the conversation. This does not advance anything.
Yari, whos the Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF), was reacting to allegations that he stole money from the Paris Club loan refund.

An earlier media report had it that the property was traced to Yari by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

Yari however denied the claims via a statement signed by NGF spokesman, Abulrazque B. Barkindo.

The statement reads:

Reports on Governor Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar of Zamfara State, and Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum making the rounds in some online media which claimed that the governor is building a $3m hotel from monies stolen from the Paris-London Club refunds to states give cause for worry.

The reports contain harmful, damaging and libelous insinuations which remain largely unsubstantiated despite the fact that it attributes the leaks to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), officials in Lagos.

Governor Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar has said emphatically that he does not even own a plot of land in Lagos not to talk of a hotel. But the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission officials in Lagos claimed as follows: that they have found a hotel being constructed by Governor Yari of Zamfara state with $3m he stole from London-Paris Club loan refund to Nigerian states.

That apart from the $3million, Governor Yari also diverted N500 million from the Paris Club refund to pay off a loan, an Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) source revealed to an online medium.

The medium also added that EFCC officials in Lagos revealed that overall the governor embezzled the sum of N2.2 billion from the N19billion set aside illegally to pay consultants, all of which are wrong, harmful, libelous and misleading disclosures.

Governor Abdulaziz Yari is not building any hotel in Lagos nor were any monies stolen or embezzled from the Paris-London Club refunds to states or from any other source.

The online medium quoted the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) extensively as its source and the Nigeria Governors Forum is alarmed that the EFCC continues to feed the media fibs at the expense of its hard-earned reputation as the anti- graft agency that Nigerians used to respect.

This is perhaps why the EFCC has lost most of the high-profile corruption cases at the law courts after it had unfairly stage-managed media trials and caused their victims personal pain and public umbrage.

This report, typical of most of the exclusive leaks that are becoming characteristic of the sources that court some sections of the media, lacks detail and compelling evidence to be fit to print.

The sources were courageous enough to mention a hotel in Lekki area of Lagos but gave neither a street name nor any specific information on the property to give credibility to the allegations. This does no service to any investigation nor does it help the development of our country Nigeria.

The media, we all know, is entitled to perform its duties as watchdog of society, which is enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It is not, however, entitled to make unfair attacks, based on unfounded, false and unsubstantiated allegations against responsible public office holders.

The media should support the EFCC in ensuring that convicting people on the pages of newspapers shouldnt be the focus of the EFCC in its war against corruption. Instead, EFCC should channel its energies to comprehensive, thorough and credible investigation that can stand the scrutiny of legal examination in court.

There can be no claim to any semblance of due process when individuals are convicted on the pages of newspapers before they are arraigned only to be declared innocent at the end, all at the expense of their reputation and that of their immediate family, through such media hype.

The newspaper is not an alternative court, as far as our constitution is concerned, and all responsible journalists are obliged by the ethics of their profession to ensure that whatever goes into publication is verified and adjudged to be accurate.

I therefore urge, in the spirit of responsible journalism, balance and fairness, that journalists desist from absorbing hook, line and sinker scoops from fifth columnists whose actions are tantamount to dragging the reputation of the EFCC in the mud.

ALSO READ: NGF denies frozen accounts allegation
Ugochukwu noted that it was totally wrong for the group to force people who do not believe in Biafra to stay at home and stop motorist from moving in and out of eastern part of the country on the said day.

IPOBs spokesman, Emma Powerful, had in a statement asked its members to observe the stay at home exercise on May 30 to remember their fallen heroes.

In a reaction, Ugochukwu warned IPOB against provoking the Nigerian government and the military, stressing that it would be better to fight for a course within the ambit of the law.

Nobody is against your belief in Biafra and nobody is saying you should not exercise your rights in promoting your Biafra ideology, he said. But in doing so you must not breach the laws of the land.

The call by IPOB to all markets, transport companies, schools, banks, companies, civil servants, petrol stations, okada/tricycle unions, park management, artisans, National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) and Drivers Welfare in Biafraland, to shut down on that particular day in honour and remembrance of our fallen heroes and heroines is unlawful. This is a threat to Sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Nigerian Constitution.

ALSO READ: IPOB declares May 30 a work free day

The laws of the Land allow for freedom of movement and any attempt by any group including IPOB to force people from freely moving will be treated as treasonable, breach of public peace and confrontational which the Military and other security Agencies would not take lightly.

IPOB has no right to restrict movement of persons and vehicles on May 30 as it is against section 41 of the Nigerian Constitution (as amended) which provides that Every citizen of Nigeria is entitled to move freely throughout Nigeria and to reside in any part thereof, and no citizen of Nigeria shall be expelled from Nigeria or refused entry thereby or exit therefrom.
These were the words of Musa Fomson, the national coordinator of Northern Interfaith and Religious Organization for Peace at a meeting in Abuja at the weekend.

The cleric urged Nigerians to expect great harvest and abundance under the leadership of President Buhari.

President Muhammadu Buhari remains Gods answer to the prayer of Nigerians for a leader that would make afflictions, pains and hunger things of the past, he said.

Just like the biblical Hezekiah, God has put the enemy of the nation into shame by extending the life span of the president on earth.

The Lord revealed to the gathering of the anointed clergies that Boko Haram has long been defeated about a year ago and those carrying out attacks are the rebels that the devil has refused to release from the bondage of their past and doomed even on earth before judgment in the hereafter.

ALSO READ: President Buhari rumoured dead again

Boko Haram is an enemy of whom we shall hear no more even when persons freshly possessed of the destructive spirits operate under its name. The Lord shall make Nigeria triumph at every turn.

The enemies of the president are only fighting God and will meet their waterloo if they fail to turn away from their evil ways. The Lord shall keep President Buhari to fulfil his mission in Nigeria.
A certain had reported what turned out to be a fake news report of President Buhari's death.

National President of the forum, Gambo Danbatta expressed concern over the danger of such fake news and the consequences it poses to the country's democracy.

He said given the serious breakdown of law and order that this fake story about President Buharis demise could have caused, there was need to track down and unmask those behind the story with a view to bringing them to book.

He described as sad and depressing that desperate politicians have come to this sorry pass where the issue of mortality that applies to all has now become ready tools in the hands of those who think Nigeria must remain in their pocket.

He pointed that there are procedures for confirming a death before going to town with the story, such as contacting personal physician, lawyer, next of kin or in the case of a world leader, the official spokespersons.

"The persons behind the fake news site are fully intended to deploy it for evil, he said.

They registered it from Scottsdale, Arizona, the US in October of last year and updated the site for this evil plot sometimes in April this year.

"Thankfully, presidential aides were quick to calm Nigerians and assure them as the to the safety and health of Mr President, who was that time in the company of his best friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby at the Lambert Palace in London, the United Kingdom.

ALSO READ: Pray for good of President Buhari, APC enjoins Nigerians

"This has nothing to do with freedom of expression, which is not the same as freedom to lie, it is about criminals plotting to use fake news to destabilize the country.

"The office should work with the relevant stakeholders to shut down the fake site while creating an early warning system to identify similar sites that will proliferate in the days ahead and build the necessary alliances that would make it possible to shut them down within minutes."

According to Danbatta, collaborative efforts should be established globally to curb the menace of fake news as it has now been identified as an international concern.

"Our hope is that the real Metro newspaper would work with the British High Commission and the Nigerian authorities to track down those exploiting its name to commit crime. Those behind the fake news should be treated in this instance as no less than hackers who deserve to get the maximum punishment possible once identified," he said.
The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amb. Sola Enikanolaiye, disclosed this on Monday, May 16, in his address to the UN Security Councils open debate on "Women and peace and security: Sexual violence in conflict" in New York.

Enikanolaiye explained that after their freedom, the Federal Government would also ensure that the girls were freed from the ideological grips of the terrorist group.

"We seize this opportunity to assure you that following the recent release of 82 of the abducted Chibok school girls, government has intensified its efforts at securing the release of the abducted girls and the remaining ones, including freeing them from the ideological grips of Boko Haram terrorists," he said.

"Having regained their freedom, it is equally important that they regain their self-esteem and be assisted to return to their families and back to their schools.

"Furthermore, emergency teams of psycho-social counsellors and health professionals have been dispatched to the north east to assist with the profiling of victims for appropriate therapies, he said.

According to him, Nigeria has carefully and favourably considered joining the existing 108 countries to sign up to the Paris Principle and Commitment on the protection of children in armed conflicts.

The Permanent Secretary pointed out Nigerias active participation at the international Ministerial Conference marking the 101h Anniversary of the Paris process held in February.

"It is our conviction that this step will help to strengthen Nigerias commitment to global frameworks in further preventing the recruitment and use of girl-children as child or female bombers by Boko Haram," he sai.

ALSO READ: Freed schoolgirls to meet parents Friday

According to him, Nigeria recommit to ensuring that women and girls enjoy full rights and that those who have perpetrated sexual violence are dealt with in accordance with our national laws and international obligations.

"In addition, the Government of Nigeria has put in motion legal remedies for victims of Boko Haram terrorism in the form of rape and other sexual violence against children, abduction of children and other grave violations.

"Other remedies of legal and social nature taken so far by the Federal Government include diligent prosecution of 203 detained Boko Haram terrorists in competent courts of law.

"As well as the reintegration, reorientation and rehabilitation programmes designed to meet the peculiarities of each victim of sexual violence."

To achieve an enduring result in the search for workable solutions to the challenges of sexual violence in conflict, he said priority must be accorded to addressing the enabling environment and underlying root-causes of conflicts.
This was revealed to newsmen by the Chairman of the Chibok Community in Abuja, Mr. Hosea Tsambido on Sunday, May 14, 2017.

According to Punch, Tsambido said Many of the parents have identified their children through the photos and I was told that they are coming on Friday.

He also said he does not know if the Federal Government will be sponsoring the trip of the Chibok girls parents.

The community leader said I dont know. What the parents told me was that they were asked to come on Friday. I didnt ask if the government would sponsor the trip but usually, the government sponsors such trips.

This is coming on the heels of allegation by some of the family members of the girls that their daughters are being kept in jail by the government.

The Minister for Women Affairs had earlier told newsmen that the girls parents will travel from Borno state to meet their daughters in Abuja.

Yahi Dwata, an aunt to one of the released girls, Comfort Bulus, also confirmed that the Federal Government invited them to come to Abuja.
The book is titled Antidote for Corruption, and is currently being launched at the Shehu Musa Yar Adua centre in Abuja.

Guests in attendance include former first lady, Patience Jonathan, Senate President, Bukola Saraki; House of Representatives Speaker, Yakubu Dogara and former speaker, Ghali NaAbba.

There is no consensus on what constitutes corruption most definitions of corruption in Nigeria have been subjective, NaAbba said according to The Cable.

Corruption is not only in matters of finance, corruption also means deviance. It is simply a failure of leadership. It is social deviance. Nepotism, stealing and all social deviance is corruption, he added.

Mrs Jonathan is being investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for money laundering.

She is currently involved in a legal battle with the EFCC over the sum of $5.8 million which was linked to her.

The money is in a bank account which has been frozen and unfrozen severally since the case against her began.

Mrs Jonathan has accused the EFCC of trying to steal her hard-earned money which she claimed was gotten as gifts from friends.

ALSO READ: EFCC wants to take my hard earned money  Ex first lady says
The EFCC was said to have taken charge of the accounts on Friday, May 12.

This is the latest in a string of measures against the NIA following the discovery of N13 billion in a Lagos apartment in April this year.

The NIA had laid claim to the cash haul - $43.5 million, 27,800 and N23.2 million hidden inside Apartment 7B at Osborne Towers, Ikoyi.

According to Premium Times, which cited security sources, EFCC operatives on Friday compelled the NIA director of Finance and Administration to hand over the agency's accounts to an army officer attached to the Office of the National Security Adviser.

The report said the EFCC designated Jaafaru Mohammed, a brigadier general in the Nigerian Army, to assume the position of the Director of Finance of the NIA and commence a holistic audit of the agencys finances.

ALSO READ: Ikoyi Loot - NIA finance officials to appear before Osinbajo panel

The action is believed to be as a result of a week-long interrogation of four senior officials of the NIA by EFCC detectives.

It was gathered that the NSA had twice tried to impose Mohammed on the NIA as its new Director of Finance but officials of the agency rejected him.

The EFCC was said to have invited the senior officials from NIA's account department following Mohammed's rejection.

The EFCC on Friday reportedly detained the NIAs Director of Finance and Administration for several hours.
According to Vanguard, the Niger state Police Command Public Relations Officer, DSP Bala Elkana confirmed the attack.

Elkana explained that Saturdays attack was a reprisal, following the killing of a herdsman by villagers.

He said It is confirmed that the attack was a reprisal to an earlier killing of a herder by the villagers. The killing of a herder was managed, but it appears they were not satisfied and decided to retaliate.

Twenty one people were killed, while eight people sustained various degrees of injuries during the attack.

The state police spokesman also revealed that mobile policemen and personnel of the Department of State Services (DSS) have been dispatched to the troubled area to maintain peace.

According to reports, the herdsman was killed during an argument over payment for a piece of land.

The villagers accosted the cattle rearer to pay for the land which he leased, and the herdsman reportedly refused, saying the land belongs to him.
"It is funny to read a report that the minister went as far away Houston to say that there was a disagreement between the Senate and House of Representatives over the PIB which has delayed its passage and that he has been speaking with the House to take the version of the bill being worked on by the Senate. The statement was unfortunate because the minister was only demonstrating lack of knowledge of how a bicameral legislature functions."First, one would have expected that such a critical bill aimed at reforming the oil sector which is the mainstay of the national economy would be a priority of the Minister when he combined the post with that of being Managing Director of the NNPC. The current National Assembly started work on the bill when it waited for so many months without anything coming from the executive branch.

ALSO READ: Nigeria loses $15bn for non-passage of PIB"Again, it is not unusual for there to be differences in the contents of a bill on the same issue being worked on by the two chambers of the National Assembly. There is already an inbuilt legislative processes for reconciling the two versions of a bill through what is called harmonization process by the Conference Committee of both chambers. So, there is no need for a minister to dabble into the process."Kachikwu is just jumping into the issue at this point because he knew we will in the next few weeks pass the PIB and we think the remarks he made on the issue was an unnecessary diversion aimed at creating needless controversy."As part of our own legislative agenda, we had decided long time ago that after the passage of Budget 2017, our next major assignment is to pass the Petroleum Industry Governance Bill and immediately fast-track the process of passage of the Host Community Bill and the Fiscal Regime Bills which are also related to the reforms of the petroleum sector," Abdullahi stated.The Senate spokesperson further advised the minister to refrain from making statements which may give wrong impression to the international community that the legislature and the executive are not on the same page on critical issues affecting the national economy.
Saraki stated this in Abuja on Monday, May 15, at the launch of "Antidotes for Corruption: The Nigerian Story, " a book written by Senator Dino Melaye.

He said that when backed by legislation, whistle-blowing would have greater value "and it is hoped that we can pass it before July this year."

He mentioned other anti-corruption legislation being considered by the Senate.

This includes the Proceeds of Crime Bill, the Special Anti-Corruption Court, which will be done through constitutional amendment and the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Bill.
Gov. Aminu Tambuwal disclosed this on Sunday during a stakeholders meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC) held in Gwadabawa Local Government Area.

This was sequel to the centralisation of the payment of the salaries of workers of the local governments.

About two weeks ago, some banks alerted the Commissioner of Local Governments about the existence of the unclaimed money, the governor said.

He said the recent verification of council staff was aimed at ascertaining genuine workers.

The exercise was not aimed at witch hunting anyone but to ascertain the actual workforce and monthly wage bill of the local governments, Tambuwal said.

He said many farmers in the state were defaulting in repayment of agricultural loans obtained from commercial banks and assured the banks of the governments support in recovering the money.

The money belongs to the Central Bank of Nigeria and we will support any action to recover it.

This is to enable other farmers to benefit from the gesture as the money is not a bonanza.

Tambuwal called on the people to continue to pray for President Muhammadu Buhari as well as for sustained peace and unity of Nigeria.
Sheriff was declared as the chairman of the PDP by a High Court in Port-Harcourt, Rivers state.

According to Ogor, a large number of PDP Reps are solidly behind the factional chairman, Ahmed Makarfi.

This is coming after a PDP member in the House, Ehiozuwa Agbonayinma told reporters that all the party members are in support of Sheriff.

ALSO READ:Police stop

Speaking further, Ogor said Let Agbonayinma give you ten names of lawmakers that are with Sheriff, then Ill buy into that.

He sits in meetings with us, there is no way he can mention Sheriffs name in that meeting.

If out of over 140 members, you have two or three people supporting Sheriff, you know that is very insignificant and inconsequential, the minority leader added.
Ekweremadu prayed for the president during a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stakeholders meeting in Enugu.

We must always remember that the President of the country, Muhammadu Buhari, is in London for medical treatment. We must pause at every opportunity to remember him in our prayers, he said according to NTA.

This is not about PDP or All Progressives Congress, APC, or any other party for that matter. He is the President of every Nigerian, irrespective of political divide, ethnicity, and religion. Besides, we are all human and prone to illness.

It is, therefore, not only our prayer that God in his infinite mercy and grace will heal and bring him back at the earliest possible time to continue to lead this great country, but we also pray for divine vision, wisdom, and protection for him at all times. This is the least we owe him as a nation, he added.

Buhari left Nigeria on Sunday, May 7, for an indefinite medical vacation in London after months of ill-health.

The president has been ill since January when he travelled to London for a supposed 10 day vacation which eventually lasted 49 days.

ALSO READ:President Buhari rumoured dead again
The goal of the Nigeria Education Fair is to provide the general public a wide range of education options to choose from when making necessary education decisions.

Whether it is a parent looking for the appropriate primary/secondary school, or a young adult looking for the right university to complete an undergraduate/postgraduate programme, the fair is a one-stop shop for everyone in the maze of education decision making - this includes professionals seeking to advance their careers with the relevant professional skills and certifications.

At the fair, parents will be able to compare schools' academic records, teaching methods, instruments, fees, curriculum types, scholarship opportunities or even have one-on-one meeting with school management and the likes. Professionals will also find the fair highly valuable as they are able to meet and discuss with the management of various strategic professional bodies.

The event details are as follows:

The Nigeria Education Fair is free to attend and it is opened to the general public.

Kindly contact us for more details as follows: Email: info@nigeriaedufair.comWebsite: www.nigeriaedufair.com

Telephone: 0708 477 3701 / 0805 497 5630
This couple living in California decided that their full country was not enough for them to marry, then they packed their things and said they were going to marry at Mount Everest.

Not only did they have to plan for this wedding for a year, they also had to train for the extreme conditions that have killed almost 300 people in the last few decades.

But you know what they say about love and extremes;

It took them three weeks to reach the 17,000-foot-high Base Camp Everest. On this journey, they suffered the freezing temperature and altitude sickness together.

So we imagined, what if Banky W and Adesua decided, oh, CMS Cathedral is not enough for us, let us go and marry at Mount Everest?

First of all, when you try to even raise the issue with your Nigerian parents, they'll be like,

Then when they see that you don't want to backdown, the next question they'll start asking is;

And when you still insist, and think an Everest wedding will stop your family from showing up at the wedding, you'll see all of them marching to Everest like,

And of course, this guy said it best;

All of them will gather at the foot of the mountain like,

But in the end, when you think about how beautiful the photos are,

Or how much stress it took them to make this possible. You can only but hope that their marriage will stand the test of time.
Over 2,000 civilians and rebels evacuated the Qabun district on Sunday, after similar departures from the Barzeh and Tishrin neighbourhoods earlier last week.

"With the seizure of these three neighbourhoods, the regime now controls almost all the capital," said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

In the east of the capital, "the rebels now only hold a part of the Jobar district, most of which is destroyed", he said.

In the south, the Tadamun and Hajar al-Aswad neighbourhoods as well as the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk are now mostly controlled by jihadists including the Islamic State group, he said.

The so-called reconciliation deals that led to the latest evacuations from the capital have dealt a heavy blow to the armed opposition, following their defeat in the northern city of Aleppo in December.

"With Aleppo retaken and Damascus about to be, the rebels no longer present a political or military alternative," said Syria expert Fabrice Balanche.

"The regime is therefore not under any threat and doesn't need to make any concessions," added Balanche, a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute think-tank.

For President Bashar al-Assad, regaining control of the capital was vital to retain power after anti-government protests that began in 2011 before spiralling into civil war.

Regime 'success'

His fortunes have sharply reversed since July 2012, when thousands of rebels seized several of the capital's neighbourhoods before a two-week counteroffensive by elite regime troops repelled them.

More recently, in March, rebel groups and jihadists from former Al-Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham Front briefly entered Abbassid Square near the city centre in a surprise assault from Jobar, before being pushed back days later.

But the capital, with its approximately 1.6 million inhabitants, has largely been insulated from the civil war and has endured far less destruction than other major hubs such as Aleppo and the city of Homs in northern Syria.

"The regime was reinforced by Russian and Iranian foreign troops at the expense of a defenceless people," said Mohammed Alloush, head of Jaish al-Islam, the most powerful rebel faction in the opposition-held Eastern Ghouta area outside Damascus.

He said the population displacements caused by the local reconciliation deals amounted to "crimes against humanity".

"The regime now plans to swallow up Jobar in the next phase before setting its sights on Eastern Ghouta," Alloush said.

He said the evacuations were a "betrayal" after backers of the regime and rebels signed a deal in the Kazakh capital earlier this month aimed at paving the way towards a lasting ceasefire in Syria.

On May 4, regime allies Russia and Iran and rebel backer Turkey inked a deal to introduce so-called "de-escalation zones" in the country.

Under the deal, four zones are to be created in the northwestern province of Idlib, parts of the central province of Homs, the south, and the opposition enclave of Eastern Ghouta near Damascus.

The capital is not included in the plan.

Rebel offensive 'doomed'

The regime has long touted "reconciliation deals" as the best way to end the conflict and views the latest evacuations as a success.

"It's a turning point in the conflict," said government advisor on national reconciliation Ahmad Munir Mohammed.

"It's a victory for the Syrian state," he added. "Reconciliation is a defeat for those waging war against Syria."

He denied that the deals were changing the country's demographics.

"Those who wanted to regularise their status (with the regime) stayed, and those who left did so at their request," he said.

Syria analyst Joshua Landis said the evacuations underlined that "the suburbs of Damascus cannot hold out against the regime".

He said the intervention of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah in support of the Assad regime in 2013 "doomed the Damascus rebel offensive" by severing supply routes from neighbouring Lebanon.

"The regime and its allies cut the legs out from underneath the Damascene rebels," said Landis, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Aron Lund, a fellow at The Century Foundation, said the army taking control of the three Damascus districts would weaken the armed opposition in Eastern Ghouta.

"The long-term situation of the rebels there looks very bleak," he said.

"Qabun, Barzeh and Tishrin, which are now being retaken by the army, have contained smuggling tunnels that supplied Eastern Ghouta," he said.
"The major decisions on the direction that this country takes must be taken by voters," Kurz told reporters in Vienna.

He said that he would meet on Monday with Chancellor Christian Kern and the president to propose a joint parliamentary motion for elections to be held "after the summer".

Austria's unhappy "grand coalition" between Kern's centre-left Social Democrats (SPOe) and the centre-right OeVP is meant to govern until late 2018.

But after months of failing to agree much in the way of reforms to boost Austria's lagging economy, the head of the OeVP, Reinhold Mitterlehner, resigned last Wednesday.

Two days later Kurz, who aged only 30 is seen as the rising star of Austrian politics, called for the coalition to pull the plug.

Earlier on Sunday Kern, 51, who has been chancellor for just a year, had said he was resigned to Austrians going to the polls in the autumn.

The OeVP "made it quite clear that they don't want (to be in coalition) any more", Kern said on public TV.

Nail-biter

If the vote happens it will set up another tense election in Europe in 2017 following those in the Netherlands and France and others scheduled for Britain in June and Germany in September.

It could see Austria's populist Freedom Party (FPOe), currently riding high in opinion polls, enter or even lead a new coalition with the SPOe or the OeVP.

Last year the FPOe's Norbert Hofer, 46, who says Islam "has no place" in Austria, came close to being elected as Europe's first far-right head of state since 1945.

The FPOe's rise has mirrored that of other populist groupings in Europe on the back of concerns about immigration and terrorism and more established parties bleeding support.

But while the post of Austria's president is largely ceremonial, the prospect of early elections gives the FPOe the chance of winning real power.

The party, led by social media-savvy Heinz-Christian Strache, 47, is running neck-and-neck with the SPOe on around 30 percent in opinion polls.

The OeVP is lagging behind in the low 20s. However surveys suggest that Kurz could revive his party's fortunes and even make it the most popular force.

Haider 2.0?

The last time the FPOe entered government was in 2000 after it came joint second with the OeVP in elections under flamboyant but controversial former chief Joerg Haider.

This prompted an outcry in Israel and Europe -- with even temporary EU sanctions -- that someone who could praise Hitler's "orderly" employment policies could be in office.

However the reaction is likely to be more muted this time because the party has toned down its rhetoric and because populists have gained ground Europe-wide.

So far neither of Austria's main parties has openly excluded the possibility of governing alongside the FPOe.

The OeVP meeting also approved giving Kurz extra powers in overhauling the chain of command and handpicking staff and election candidates, including from outside the party.
HRW workers interviewed all 16 earlier this year in the southeastern town of Obo, which has since 2009 served as a base for Ugandan forces in an African Union Regional Task Force set up to destroy the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

One 15-year-old, given the name "Marie" to protect her identity, gave birth six months ago after being raped by a Ugandan soldier in fields near Obo airstrip, HRW said.

"Fifteen of the women and girls interviewed said they became pregnant, but in each case, the soldier who fathered the child left the country and has not provided any support," the report stated.

US special forces were fighting alongside the Ugandan troops until last month when a planned withdrawal began.

"Ugandan and African Union authorities should conduct proper investigations, punish those responsible, and make sure that the women and girls who were sexually abused or exploited get the services they need," said Lewis Mudge, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The report said more cases of sexual violence had been documented by the United Nations, whose investigators spoke to Obo women afraid to give details, and the BBC, whose report included a 12-year-old girl who gave birth.

The defence ministry in Kampala did not respond to the allegations, according to HRW.

The US command did not acknowledge the charges against Ugandan soldiers, Mudge said in an email. "They say the Ugandans are not engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse."

Ugandan soldiers may join the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSCA operating in CAR but HRW said the allegations of sexual abuse should be investigated first.

Some MINUSCA soldiers and French troops who were deployed in the strife-torn country between 2013 and 2016 have also been accused of exploiting women and children.
"DRC's armed forces have been waging operations to back up the police since end March in Kasai," the army's (FARDC) Brigadier General Leon-Richard Kasonga told a news conference.

Violence in Kasai was sparked by the killing of tribal chief Kamwina Nsapu last August and has killed hundreds of people and displaced 1.27 million more.

The UN has accused the Kamwina Nsapu rebels of recruiting child soldiers while also criticising the country's government of using excessive force against the insurgents.

"Our troops respect international humanitarian law and human rights... we have acted professionally," said Kasonga on Monday, although he did not provide a civilian death toll.

In March, UN experts Michael Sharp, an American, and Zaida Catalan, a dual Swedish-Chilean national were abducted and shot dead while investigating reports of more than 40 mass graves in the region.
The crews were trained in Italy "to monitor Libyan territorial waters... and contribute, together with Italy and Europe, to security in the Mediterranean", Minniti said in remarks translated into Arabic.

A Libyan naval officer told AFP the vessels had been due for delivery in 2014, but this date was pushed back because of violence and instability in the North African country.

Libya has long been a stepping stone for migrants seeking a better life in Europe. People smugglers have stepped up their lucrative business in the chaos which has engulfed the country since its 2011 revolution.

Minniti said on Monday another six patrol boats would be handed over to Libya soon after the training of the crews.

Libya's authorities have complained about lacking the means to deal with the floods of migrants who try crossing the Mediterranean in makeshift boats.

Italy registered nearly 42,500 migrant arrivals by sea by mid-April, 97 percent of them from Libya, Minniti said in a joint letter written with his German counterpart to the European Commission.

In the letter dated May 11, which AFP obtained a copy of on Sunday, Minniti and Thomas de Maiziere said they "are convinced that we all must do more" to "prevent that hundreds of thousands of people once again risk their lives in Libya and on the Mediterranean Sea in the hands of smugglers."

Last year, a record 181,000 migrants reached Italy, 90 percent of them from Libya.
The 330 ploughshare and radiated tortoises seized at Kuala Lumpur International Airport Sunday were worth $276,784, Abdul Wahid Sulong, deputy director of the customs department told AFP.

All of the reptiles were found alive, he added.

"It is a big haul. It could be for the local market or for re-export. We are investigating," the enforcement agency said in a statement.

"Based on public tip-off, customs officials raided the cargo area of the airport and found five suspicious crates," the statement added.

"It had arrived at KLIA on an Etihad Airways flight from Antananarivo airport in Madagascar."

The golden-domed ploughshare tortoise is native to Madagascar and due to poaching is the most endangered tortoise on the planet.

Madagascar's radiated tortoise -- considered one of the most beautiful species of the animal -- is also rapidly nearing extinction due to rampant hunting for its meat and the illegal pet trade.

Abdul Wahid said the contents of the crates were labelled as stones and the address of the recipient was found to be false.

Malaysia bans the import of critically endangered animals. Anyone found guilty of the offence can be jailed for up to three years and fined.

Elizabeth John, senior communications officer of the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network (Traffic), said the tortoise haul followed on the heels of other busts of animal products originating from Africa, including rhino horn and pangolin scales.

"With the string of recent seizures of wildlife from Africa, Malaysian enforcement agencies are sending a strong warning to smugglers that they mean business," she told AFP.
The deaths came after 12 women were killed in a strike by the US-led coalition fighting IS in the east of Syria's Raqa province on Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Right said.

The Monday strike hit the town of Albu Kamal in the early hours of the morning, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.

"They hit a residential area at 3:00 am while people were sleeping, causing the high toll," he said.

He added that IS was using some apartments in the area targeted as local headquarters.

The deaths came after 12 women were killed in a US-led coalition strike on Sunday.

The Observatory said that strike hit vehicles carrying farmworkers home from fields in the afternoon.

IS has lost swathes of the territory it once held in Raqa province, though it still holds Raqa city and some areas to the east.

A US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces is battling towards Raqa city, the jihadist group's most important remaining Syrian bastion.

The US military said in May that coalition strikes in Syria and Iraq had "unintentionally" killed 352 civilians since it launched operations against IS in 2014.
Yemen is witnessing a devastating war between the Iranian-backed Huthis and the Saudi-supported government, and less than half of the country's health facilities are functioning two years into the conflict.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday the cholera outbreak has killed 115 people and left 8,500 ill between April 27 and Saturday.

This is the second outbreak of cholera in less than a year in Yemen, the Arab world's poorest country.
The latest twist in the months-long legal battle, which has dealt a stinging setback to Trump's young administration, took place in the western city of Seattle where a crowd rallied in protest at the contested immigration ban.

Three judges from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals were considering Trump's challenge of a judge's order blocking his ban on refugees and nationals from six Muslim-majority countries.

A Hawaii-based judge in March issued a preliminary injunction -- which applies nationwide -- against the order on grounds it was motivated by anti-Muslim bias.

The Trump administration says the temporary ban, which concerns travelers from Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, is motivated by national security concerns.

The government's lawyer Jeffrey Wall also reiterated on Monday that Trump's rhetoric against Muslims during the election campaign should not be taken into account by the judges who appeared sceptical.

Wall said that Trump had clarified over time that "what he was talking about was Islamic terrorist groups and the countries that sponsor or shelter them."

He also argued that the ban was not based on religion and that those challenging it -- the state of Hawaii and an imam -- have no standing in the case.

However Neal Katyal, the attorney representing Hawaii, dismissed those arguments telling the judges that Trump clearly was singling out Muslims and that his campaign rhetoric was still relevant today.

"We have not seen anything like this in our lifetime in which a president is establishing a disfavored religion," Katyal said.

He said Congress had set rules on vetting foreigners before they enter the United States and Trump could not claim sweeping powers and take a "magic eraser" to long-standing policies.

Monday's hearing came a week after a federal court in Maryland also heard arguments on whether to uphold a separate judge's decision blocking the ban.

The scope of Trump's revamped ban, signed in early March, was reduced from his original January effort, which blocked travelers from seven-majority Muslim countries, including Iraq, as well as all refugees.

The first decree -- which prompted mass protests and sowed chaos at US airports -- was blocked on grounds it violated a ban on religious discrimination, a ruling upheld on appeal.
The Current Iowa, the new sister hotel of Hotel Blackhawk, will hold open interviews this week.

The new Davenport hotel is seeking full- and part-time employees for the hotel, as well as its two restaurants and rooftop bar. Prospective employees are invited to open interviews/open houses scheduled for: Tuesday and Wednesday, 1-4 p.m.; Thursday, 4-7 p.m.; and Sunday, 1-3 p.m. Job-seekers should first arrive at the Hotel Blackhawk for the interviews.

Positions include: guest experience supervisor and agents, front desk, night audit, sous chef, restaurant supervisor, cooks, servers, bartenders, hosts, banquets and events supervisors, event servers, room inspectors, and housekeeping.

Set to open in July, The Current is in the historic Putnam Building at 2nd and Main streets, Davenport. Part of Marriott's luxury Autograph Collection, The Current and Hotel Blackhawk are projects of developers Amrit and Amy Gill, owners of Restoration St. Louis.

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/thecurrentiowa/ or contact Kori Eller, human resources director at Hotel Blackhawk, 563-484-5913 or HR@hotelblackhawk.com.
On a personal and professional level, friends and colleagues mourn the deaths of Bettendorf couple Dr. Dianne Giammetta, an obstetrician and gynecologist with UnityPoint Trinity and medical director at Rock Island County Health Department, and her husband Dominic Don Giammetta, the owner of Freds Towing, Davenport.

The couple died in a plane crash Friday afternoon in Christian County, Kentucky.

Dr. Dianne Giammetta was a respected and valued member of our UnityPoint Health  Trinity family, said Rick Seidler, president and CEO, UnityPoint Health  Trinity. Dr. Giammetta's dedication to her patients and their exceptional care improved the health of women and families throughout the greater Quad-Cities community, he said. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Giammetta family during this difficult time.

Lori Freemire, of Denver, formerly of Bettendorf (where her husband Mike served as mayor) met the couple when the Freemires first moved to the Quad-City area in 1996.

Although they did not know each other there, they had common friends at the University of Iowa when Freemire was in graduate school and Dianne Giammetta was in medical school.

"We met Don and Dianne when we first moved to the Quad-Cities back in 1996," Freemire said.

The Freemires met the Giammettas through other friends, and become immediate friends, Freemire said.

Additionally, Dianne Giammetta became Freemires doctor, and delivered their son, Spencer, now 16.

Freemire called her physician and friend such a brilliant, talented woman who was compassionate. What she will remember most about her was her smile, said Freemire, who burst into tears. She was just a wonderful person, she really, truly was.

Freemire remembers that the doctors mother had cancer a number of years ago and Dianne was by her side the entire time.

Dianne Giammetta loved her nieces and nephews, and was super-close to her family, Freemire said. She poured her life into her patients, Freemire said.

She added that Dianne Giammetta loved to bake and cook.

Jane Flesher, of Pleasant Valley, also was a close friend. "We were best friends in high school at Bettendorf High School. We swam together and played in band together," Flesher said.

Dianne Giammetta always was there for Flesher, "like when my dad died."

"She was so talented. I don't think people knew all the talents that she had," Flesher said. While she was in medical school, she made a quilt for Flesher's wedding. "My favorite color is red, so of course it was red."

"She could just pull things together. She was a beautiful seamstress - that goes along with the surgery," Flesher said. "She played piano, and did a beautiful job.'

"You never knew what talent she had, how smart she was," Flesher said. "I didn't realize that until later in life. She didn't talk about it. She was very humble."

Dianne Giammetta also was a dedicated advocate for all her patients, Flesher said. "She would call them back right away. And she always looked out for what was best for her patients."

The investigation into the crash continues. Randy Graham, emergency management director for Christian County, whose county seat is Hopkinsville, said representatives from the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration were at the crash site all day Saturday.

They finished up their documentation and retrieval of the plane Saturday, he said. The safety board contracts with a company that retrieves the airplane and associated parts, he said. These will be taken to Springfield, Tennessee, and they will make sure they have all the parts and go through the debris, he said.

No cause for the crash, which remains under investigation, has been determined yet, he said.

According to the board, the aircraft was flying from Davenport to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and crashed near Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Giammetta was flying a Beechcraft BE36 Bonanza, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The Giammettas were the only ones on the plane.
Like thousands of other mothers across the Quad-City area this Mother's Day, Krissi Taylor, of Davenport, talked about her son.

While other mothers joined their children at brunch or on family outings, Taylor stood at the corner of Bridge Avenue and Kirkwood Boulevard, where her son, Akeim Hill, 17, of Davenport, was found after he was shot Friday. He later was pronounced dead at Genesis Medical Center - East Rusholme Street.

About 50 friends and family members gathered in solemn tribute to Hill, with several speaking about him and the violence that ended his life. The brief gathering was reverently quiet except for the traffic and occasional bursts of music from passing vehicles.

I want to come up with some plan to stop this in Davenport, Taylor said. I cant stop Chicago and I cant stop Rock Island.

Taylor described her son as a brother, a son, a best friend and a comedian.

This is our new generation. Weve got to stop it. When you hear them yelling Savage (a reference to Savage Life, a Davenport gang) stop it.

Her sons funeral will be Saturday, she said.

I dont want to see my son go in the ground," she said, thanking those who attended the vigil, then broke into sobs.

Her friend Aja Parks, of Peoria, Illinois, was in tears. That was my godson, she said. I watched him being born.

We need to save our children. Mothers are supposed to go first, not the kids.

Many attendees wore red shirts, because red was Hills favorite color. Many also wore shirts with photos of Hill and Gone too soon printed on them.

Among those with customized shirts was Camarion Ballard, 11, a student at Fillmore Elementary School, Davenport, who was in tears during the vigil.

Everyone in the world should be safe and feel happy, Ballard said, carrying a sign that said Please help save our children.

In connection with Hills death, James Bailey Jr., 17, of Davenport, has been charged with first-degree murder and first-degree robbery. An investigation continues by the Criminal Investigations Division of the Davenport Police Department. Anyone with information is encouraged to call the Davenport police, 563-326-6125, or submit an anonymous tip via the mobile app CitycConnect Davenport, IA.
The Jewish Federation of the Quad-Cities and the Bettendorf Public Library present: NATO Today: Relevant or Obsolete?

The presentation by Navy Captain Alison McCrary will be 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 6, at Bettendorf Public Library, 2950 Learning Campus Drive. The event is free and open to the public.

The presentation will look at NATO operations and organizational developments over the past 15 years, the decisions taken at the recent Warsaw Summit and the question of Russia and how the Alliance and the nations within it approach European and worldwide security and defense. Additionally, how the Jewish State of Israel fits within NATO will be discussed.

McCrary currently serves on the joint staff as officer in charge of joint reserve support to the U.S. Military Delegation to NATO in Brussels, Belgium and liaison to the Pentagon.

In her civilian career, McCrary has worked for Deere & Co. in manufacturing and business analysis, started up a hazardous-waste remediation corporation and served as vice president and CEO of a non-profit business education corporation.

For more information, call 309-793-1300 or aross@jfqc.org
1. High in mid-80s, chance of rain today

A good Monday to all. It's going to be another fantastic day in the Quad-City region, but some some scattered showers and thunderstorms could drop by late afternoon or evening.

Here are the weather details from the National Weather Service.

Scattered showers and thunderstorms are possible between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. The chance of precipitation is 30 percent. Skies will be partly sunny with a high near 85 degrees.

Tonight isolated showers and thunderstorms are possible before 8 p.m. The chance of precipitation is 20 percent. Skies will be mostly cloudy with a low around 66 degrees.

Tuesday will be mostly sunny and breezy with a high near 86 degrees. South winds between 10 to 20 mph will gust as high as 30 mph.

Tuesday night will see a 20 percent chance of showers after 1 a.m. Otherwise it will be mostly cloudy with a low around 67 degrees. South winds will gust as high as 25 mph.

2. Brady Street road update

Here's a status report on the Brady Street road project from the city of Davenport.

Weather and an issue with asphalt production has delayed resurfacing the two left/west lanes of Brady Street between River Drive and 7th Street. The contractor was able to apply the first asphalt layer, however application of a second layer is still necessary.

This will result in three-hour rolling closures at each street, alley and driveway intersection west of Brady along this stretch today and Tuesday. Drivers should use an alternate route.

Finish work in these lanes will follow resurfacing. All work in the two left/west lanes of Brady should be completed by May 23, with work flipping to the two right/east lanes on May 24.

Work will continue north of 7th Street:

 The left/west curb lane of Brady between 8th Street and Palmer Drive remains closed through June 1 for construction at Palmer College of Chiropractic.

 The right/east curb lane of Brady between 8th and High streets will remain closed for sidewalk and side street work.

3. I-80 ramp, overpass work

Bridge deck reconstruction work on the I-74 bridge over I-80 require lane reductions on I-80 in each direction from 7 p.m. until 6 a.m. Sundays through Friday until mid-August. Also, the westbound I-80 exit ramp connecting to I-74 is closed until the project is complete. Westbound I-80 traffic wanting to travel onto I-74 will be detoured using the westbound I-80 off-ramp at exit 295A, then south on Business U.S. 61 to I-80 (exit 123A), and then east on I-80 to the I-74 interchange.

Guardrail updates will also close several I-80 overpass bridges between Davenport and rural Scott County also.

 Utica Ridge Road from 210th Street to Forest Grove Road will be closed beginning today until May 30.

 North Division Street from West 76th Street to Slopertown Road will be closed from Tuesday until May 30.

 110th Avenue from 210th to 200th streets will be closed from May 22 to June 6.

 Jersey Ridge Road between 210th to East 67th streets will be closed from May 31 until June 14.

 Wisconsin Avenue from 210th to 200th streets will be closed from June 1 to June 15.

4. Road closes in Rock Island County

The Rock Island County Highway Department reports that County Highway C (252th St. W) will be closed beginning today until Thursday from County Highway SS (162nd Ave. W.) to Illinois 92 for road work.

5. Mother of slain teen speaks out at vigil

Like thousands of other mothers across the Quad-City area this Mother's Day, Krissi Taylor, of Davenport, talked about her son.

While other mothers joined their children at brunch or on family outings, Taylor stood at the corner of Bridge Avenue and Kirkwood Boulevard, where her son, Akeim Hill, 17, of Davenport, was found after he was shot Friday. He later was pronounced dead at Genesis Medical Center-East Rusholme Street.

About 50 friends and family members gathered in solemn tribute to Hill, with several speaking about him and the violence that ended his life. The brief gathering was reverently quiet except for the traffic and occasional bursts of music from passing vehicles. Read more.

6. Miss District of Columbia crowned as Miss USA

Kara McCullough, a 25-year-old scientist working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was crowned Miss USA on Sunday in Las Vegas. She will go on to compete on the Miss Universe contest.

Fifty-one women representing each state and the nation's capital participated in the decades-old competition. The runner-up of the night was Miss New Jersey Chhavi Verg, a marketing and Spanish student at Rutgers University, while the second runner-up was Miss Minnesota Meridith Gould, who is studying apparel retail merchandising at the University of Minnesota. Read more.
What exactly does Uber have to offer that other companies do not? The ride-hailing service doesn't own its cars or employ drivers. It's basically a smartphone app that connects passengers to drivers using their own vehicles. Rival apps now do much the same thing.

Uber rightly sees the future as driverless cars that one can summon to one's doorstep for a ride to work or a coffee. But so do General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, Tesla and other auto giants currently snapping up their own ride-hailing services.

Uber does have a uniquely unpleasant CEO, in the person of Travis Kalanick. Also a co-founder, Kalanick had shown himself to be a serial breaker of social and business norms, not to mention laws. He is the face of Silicon Valley's "bro culture."

Dan Lyons, chronicler of the phenomenon, describes the bros as good-looking, arrogant, glib and disrespectful to women. They are "jerks," he says, who, in addition, "don't know how to run companies."

Uber's been sued for using a software tool to trick officials in cities that did not authorize its services. Managerial outings at Uber include trips to escort bars. Female employees have accused managers of groping their breasts. The company's reputation has become so toxic that a video of Kalanick verbally abusing one of its drivers became news.

So why do capitalists put enormous valuations on companies run with all the social maturity of an unruly frat house? Kalanick's conduct was so immature that at the age of 40, he promised investors he would "grow up."

The answer may be that many of the investors are themselves bros. They admire those overly confident rule breakers and share their indifference to ethical concerns. Where others see arrested development, they see disrupters. Where others see repellant behavior, they see tough entrepreneurs.

Because they were hatched from the same amoral culture, the investing bros are blind to the reality that there are limits to anti-social behavior, even on the entrepreneurial frontier. An inability to distinguish between total jerks and tough but savvy managers can end in financial pain.

Why did supposedly sophisticated investors put so much money into Valeant, a company whose business model was to buy essential drugs and then jack up prices to obscene levels? Example: Valeant charged Americans $2,000 a day for a cryptococcal meningitis drug that cost $22 a day in Britain.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's second in command, said about Valeant, "I'm holding my nose." And other traditional investors have echoed that sentiment.

But hedge funder William Ackman liked Valeant's style and urged other investors to join in the pillage. Did he think such blatant acts of piracy would go unpunished? The stock cratered, and Ackman lost more than $3 billion of his nearly $4 billion investment.

Recall how 32-year-old Martin Shkreli -- the bro of bros -- shot off a 5,455 percent hike in the price of Daraprim, a 62-year-old HIV drug. A pill once priced at $13.50 later cost $750.

Shkreli liked to be seen playing video games and hanging with rock musicians. Twitter recently suspended his account for posting lies about dating a female journalist. (He Photoshopped pictures of them together.)

The bros are clearly not brimming with social intelligence, a valued skill for corporate managers. The bro culture is already the subject of parodies and TV series. That means its days, at least in the current form, are numbered.

Google's parent company is currently suing Uber for allegedly stealing its self-driving technology. The Wall Street Journal recently questioned whether Uber can survive competition from the big boys. Really, do you want to place your chips on managers who are promising to grow up?
The Passamaquoddy Tribe is now using most of its land in Maine that it acquired through funding from the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act both to slow the rate of climate change and to generate millions in revenue by offsetting emissions from polluters on the other side of the country. The revenue from the sale of carbon offset credits, in turn, will help the tribe grow its businesses, leading to greater tribal self-determination.

On April 20 the tribe's project was recognized by the Climate Action Reserve, North America's premier carbon offset registry, receiving one of the three Project Developer of the Year Awards for generating the most carbon offset credits in 2016, with 3.2 million credits issued. The award was presented during the Navigating the American Carbon World conference in San Francisco, the largest gathering for discussion about climate change policy and carbon markets in North America.

Michael-Corey Hinton, an attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based law firm that has represented the Passamaquoddy Joint Tribal Council concerning the project, points out, "The Climate Action Reserve award is significant because it acknowledges that tree growth on Passamaquoddy tribal lands removed more carbon from the atmosphere than any other carbon offset project developed by the Climate Action Reserve in 2016. The award is recognition that the tribe is taking major steps to clean up the air and signals the seriousness with which the tribe has approached its role as a steward of the environment."

Along with helping address climate change, the project is generating significant revenue for the tribe on an ongoing basis as the carbon credits are sold, with each ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere counting as a credit. With credits recently selling in the range of $11 to $14, the 3.2 million credits issued to the tribe could be worth between $35 million and $45 million. The tribe recently sold nearly half a million credits, with a percentage of any credits going to project developer Finite Carbon. It is believed that the tribe's project will be awarded 100,000 credits per year for the next 25 years.

Hinton notes that project revenue has already been put back into triballyowned businesses, such as Passamaquoddy Maple and Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Co. "This means that a triballyowned project is actively supporting the future of other Passamaquoddyowned businesses. This is the essence of selfdetermination and epitomizes the beauty of the project. Lands associated with these other businesses were carefully considered for the capandtrade project during consultation with tribal leadership, JTC Forestry and the business managers, and the land management decisions that support the project also support other businesses."

He explains, "For example, some Passamaquoddy Maple acreage was included in the project C meaning that those sugar maple groves included in the project will be protected for generations to come. This means that the protection of those trees has already generated revenue that's being invested back into the company."

While the revenue will support tribal business, Hinton cautions that the "revenue potential for this project is not unlimited and is certainly not without strings attached. The tribe has been and must continue to be vigilant with respect to maintaining forest lands, and this will require additional investments in the tribe's capacity to manage its bountiful natural resources."

How the program works

In 2014 the tribe partnered with forest carbon project developer Finite Carbon to start the first carbon offset project for a tribe with trust land in the eastern United States. The Passamaquoddy Tribe Improved Forest Management Project is a 98,571-acre Improved Forest Management project in Maine developed to the California Compliance Offset Protocol for U.S. Forests under a 100-year agreement. The primarily sprucefir and northern hardwoods forestland supports sustainable timber production and provides for a variety of cultural, recreational and wildlife objectives.

"The Passamaquoddy Tribe Improved Forest Management Project builds upon our sacred commitment to the protection of our forest resources and creates unique training and employment opportunities for our tribal members," says Ernie Neptune, Passamaquoddy tribal forestry supervisor, in a release. "This project is in line with the sustainable forestry activities that we have practiced since time immemorial but is unique in how it allows forest landowners to benefit from an innovative program designed to curb carbon emissions."

Under the program, Finite Carbon helps landowners get paid for the carbon that's stored in their trees by selling carbon credits through California's cap-and-trade program. California requires heavily polluting companies to offset their emissions by purchasing carbon permits from the state or carbon offsets from landowners who have been issued credits for verified projects. Carbon sequestration, a process in which the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is pulled from the atmosphere and stored, can help slow climate change, and forests currently sequester approximately 10% of the U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. The California Air Resources Board (ARB) program issues offset credits to projects throughout the U.S. Finite Carbon, which is based in Pennsylvania, sells the credits for the landowners and gets paid a percentage of the credits it creates. There have been concerns, though, with how California's cap-and-trade program will fare, with both legal challenges and credits not always selling well at the quarterly auctions. However, the program did win a significant legal battle in the state's court system in April.

According to the tribe's filings with California ARB, the lands owned by the tribe are located in Washington, Hancock, Penobscot, Somerset and Franklin counties. The area consists of most of the tribe's trust land, excluding portions of Indian Township that may be considered for possible economic development, selected shoreline buffers around lakes that are suitable for future camp leases to tribal members and areas managed by the Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company.

The portion of the Passamaquoddy project at Indian Township borders two other Finite Carbon forest offset projects, the 19,100-acre Downeast Lakes Land Trust's Farm Cove Community Forest and the 21,800-acre West Grand Lake Community Forest, a joint project of DLLT and the Lyme Timber Company. The Farm Cove project was the first forest carbon project in the nation to receive compliance offsets from California ARB in November 2013. Approval process outlined

Passamaquoddy Chief Ralph Dana of Sipayik notes that the project was approved by the Joint Tribal Council in 2014 but then became "somewhat dormant" without the followup required when the joint council was not meeting for a long period of time in 2016. After changes in tribal leadership, in March of this year the joint council agreed to continue with the process that had been started and resolved some final issues with the project.

Corey Hinton's firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, has formally represented the Joint Tribal Council with respect to the project since January 2014. Hinton says that the joint council has voted consistently to support the project over the past three and a half years, and numerous public meetings have been held about the project. He believes the project epitomizes the joint council's "pursuit of economic development opportunities that balance long-standing natural resourcedriven policy with a need to create new tribal revenue streams. Put another way, the tribe is largely doing, as a matter of existing policy, what is required to maintain an economically viable capandtrade project."

Chief Dana agrees, noting, "We have had a forest management plan for sustainable responsible stewardship of our resources, which will continue. We will continue doing what we're doing now."

According to Dana, the plan allows for some timber harvesting, as long as it's sustainable and the tribe does not cut more than is grown on the land. Any cutting must be below the natural growth level, and clear-cuts cannot be larger than 40 acres. He also points out that the tribe is not giving up its rights to the land. Tribal members can still hunt and fish, trap and cut wood and gather plants and firewood on the land, along with having camp lots.

Hinton comments, "The Passamaquoddy people are only here today because of the value that has traditionally been placed on protecting the environment, and that is what this project is about." Noting that the joint council already had conservative tree harvesting policies in place, he says the carbon project complements those goals "by ensuring that lands enrolled in the California capandtrade program will be maintained and protected under tribal control for the next 100 years. By committing tribal trees to sustainable growth, the JTC is saying that the Passamaquoddy Tribe supports efforts to both lower carbon emissions and clean up the air that all humans breathe."

Hinton also notes that the tribe is stepping up to this effort at a time when policies to combat climate change are being rolled back at the federal level. He observes, "The Passamaquoddy Tribe is standing with the State of California as part of California's effort to not just recognize the deleterious impact of carbon emissions but to actively remove them by growing trees that remove those harmful elements from Earth's atmosphere."

Concerns raised about project

But while the program has been generating significant revenue for the tribe and has helped offset carbon emissions by big polluting companies, some tribal members have been critical of it.

Madonna Soctomah, who formerly was a tribal councillor and a tribal representative to the legislature, recalls that presentations about the issue were made to the Joint Tribal Council by Hinton, but she says, "There was no transparency on that issue. People don't know a whole lot of information about it. Things of that magnitude normally would be discussed and voted on." She says under the Sipayik Constitution tribal officials are to thoroughly vet issues with the people they represent. "There was no vote by Pleasant Point," she notes. Although a non-binding referendum was held at Indian Township, Sipayik did not hold a referendum.

Soctomah says, "They didn't consult with tribal people about their right. The land is each and every Passamaquoddy people's inherent right. That's the tragedy. We were not consulted. Where have our culture and traditions gone?"

Another tribal member, Dwayne Tomah, also believes a referendum should have been held. He says "a decision of that magnitude" should have included more involvement with tribal members.

Chief Dana agrees that before the Joint Tribal Council approved the agreement in 2014 that the council should have held a referendum vote, which would have helped with the process. However, "to hold a referendum after the fact would make things more difficult."

Soctomah also is concerned about the impact on future generations. Of the 100-year agreement for the tribal trust lands, she notes that those tribal lands "are held by the Passamaquoddy people as a whole. They will be responsible, if there's any occurrence not legally carried out, by the California representatives on the ARB board. It's disturbing. Future generations will be liable if anything is not properly documented for the ARB board." She compares the situation with the U.S. national debt, saying the tribe is doing the same "by creating a possible liability for future generations after we're gone."

As for how the land will be used, she says, "Traditionally, we don't use the land like that. Native people have high reverence for the land. Mother Earth is who we have a connection to. We hold that sacred. Why jeopardize that with our future generations? It's speaking to our culture."

Tomah states, "I'm disappointed in our tribal governments in getting involved with big oil corporations and against traditional ways of thinking. Those are the world's largest polluters, and we're doing business with the world's largest polluters." He says the agreement is in conflict with the traditional values held throughout Indian country. He also is opposed to the restrictions that will be placed on the tribe's lands. "How can we govern ourselves with these restrictions?" he asks. "It shows the power of money and what it's doing to the traditional ways of our people. I want to be a good steward of our environment. We need to protect it."

But Chief Dana notes that, considering the challenges faced by the tribe, when there are opportunities "where we can develop economic infrastructure and long-term resources for the benefit of the tribe, we need to be doing that."

He says of the decision to proceed with the carbon offset project, "I really need to put a lot of thought in how does this affect my children and grandchildren and what it means for them." He adds, "I want to do the best job I can looking down the road and make sure we do this right and are very diligent. The long-term vision is important. These projects help get us there."
Driving by Killians in Spearfish, the facility looks the same from the outside, but inside, new creativity and collaboration are brewing.

Killians Food & Drink, formerly Killians Tavern & Steakhouse, located at 539 W. Jackson Blvd., is a Spearfish favorite, where locals know they can get a unique, creative and delicious meal, with a cold craft brew.

Nick Caton opened Killians in 2012, and since then, it has allowed his creative spirit to reflect his menu and atmosphere, and a new spirit of globalism has arrived on the menu.

I wasnt even sure what I was starting, Caton said when he opened Killians. I just knew there was an opportunity.

The previous restaurant on the site was a steakhouse, so when Caton first opened it, he kept to the roots. Now, it has grown to offer a wide variety of creative menu options from hand-crafted burgers to one-of-a-kind appetizers and other specialized menu items.

Caton was looking for a way to continue evolving Killians, as well as make upgrades to the facility, and it resulted in a new partnership in early January.

Mona Jackson, also of Spearfish, bought the Killians building at the beginning of the year and with the purchase, she and Caton have formed a partnership that both say will enhance dining opportunities and culinary creativity.

I really use the word collaboration, Caton said. I wasnt done evolving into what I wanted Killians to be. I knew it was no longer the Killians Tavern & Steakhouse concept I started, so now its an opportunity to do whatever we want. We want to be creative and have fun and use the whimsy and creative to make a new concept that is flexible and moving.

Jackson will help with the financials and marketing of the restaurant. Killians recently put up a new sign reading Killians Food & Drink, and Caton and Jackson have already started offering new menu items and special events to patrons.

While keeping all the customer favorites, including burgers and steaks, Caton and Jackson want to expand to offer vegan and vegetarian options, as well as Indian and Thai dishes.

Meat and potatoes  while thats fine and great, there are so many other desires, Caton said. Vegetarian, vegan, Paleo and gluten free options are so important to diners. Ive been doing some of that naturally for so many years because I cook from scratch, but this is an opportunity to outline that in the menu.

Killians is known for its rotating and evolving menu, and while Caton and Jackson have been experimenting with new dishes, Jackson said they are not sure which new dishes will stay on the permanent menu and which will be rotating specials.

Right now were taking the time to explore and see how people are reacting, Jackson said.

Killians tested new Indian dishes at the annual Taste of Spearfish in January, including their tandoori chicken skewers, a roasted chicken with a yogurt and spice tandoori marinade. Jackson showed Caton how to make the traditional Indian dish, which is now available on Killians appetizer menu.

For Jackson, the collaboration with Caton is a return to roots. Her family owned an Indian restaurant called Nirvana in Charlottesburg, Va. Her mother and grandmother cooked, while she ran the front of the house.

I really enjoyed that experience; it was really hard work, because restaurant business is very difficult work, Jackson said. I really enjoyed working with my customers, getting to know them, just the feeling of satisfaction that someone came in, had a good meal and enjoyed themselves and I got to be a part of that experience.

Jackson, who has an accounting background, moved to Spearfish in 2014, when her husband, Tom Jackson, Jr. accepted a position as the President of Black Hills State University. At the time she never thought of returning to the restaurant business.

It never crossed my mind in all these years, Jackson said. But I knew this was a town for opportunity.

Caton, who also owns Barbacoas in Spearfish, met Jackson through catering events at BHSU. A friendship formed and Jackson often went to Caton to bounce around ideas. Their conversations segued into a possible partnership at Killians.

Caton also has an extensive background in the kitchen, working in restaurants much of his life. His experience cooking in a variety of restaurants from sushi to European infusion dining has helped him tailor a creative eatery for Spearfish residents and visitors.

Im really passionate about hospitality. I love the instant gratification of doing a job well done and knowing it immediately, Caton said. I love the ferocity of the business, and the idea that only the top persevere. Its a lifestyle choice.

His vast experience in a variety of dishes has allowed Killians to host special sushi nights, Indian nights and a Rasta Pasta night, which featured reggae music and noodle dishes.

In Spearfish I just love the atmosphere we have, he said. Were isolated and it provides us with options for a concept. I dont have to fall into any one niche. As long as Im putting out a good product, people respond to that.

With a new partnership comes new events. Killians hosted a six-week music series featuring Spearfish and regional musicians. Killians also offers a build-your-own Bloody Mary and mimosa bar coupled with a limited brunch menu on Saturdays and Sundays. Caton recommends patrons follow Killians Facebook page to see upcoming events and featured menus.

And although there have been small changes coming to Killians, Killians is still Killians.

Im really enjoying my partnership with Nick, Jackson said. Hes learning from me and Im learning form him. We compliment each other in terms of our skill sets.

Everything about us is different in every way. Thats the beauty of this business. We still want good food, good drink and good hospitality. Theres a way to make that mean fun for everyone.
PIERRE | After difficulty getting through the Legislature in 2015, state governments new Obligation Recovery Center seems to be getting its feet firmly into place.

Gov. Dennis Daugaard wanted state government to have another tool that could be used to sweep every corner for cash. Along the way, thousands of residents who owe money for unpaid fines or taxes are facing the loss of hunting and fishing privileges, or their ability to get a driver's license or vehicle registration if they don't pay up.

The Republican governor, an assortment of his Cabinet members and aides, and a core of the Legislatures leaders pressed for the centers authorization two years ago. They prevailed in the closing days.

Along the way, the backers of HB 1228 battled past objections from some lawmakers and faced down opposition by lobbyists for collection agencies that once had state contracts.

Since that difficult birth, and the unsteady beginning that followed, the centers operations gradually grew to where they are today, deep and broad.

The governor appointed Scott Bollinger as commissioner for the state Bureau of Administration on Feb. 24 of this year, with the appointment taking effect March 1. Bollinger had been deputy commissioner since January 2016.

Nobody likes a call from a debt collector. I mean, nobody does, he said.

Through the end of April, the center collected about $1.25 million thats gone back to state departments and agencies, according to Bollinger.

I think thats fairly significant. I think were starting to do what we intended to do, he said.

He added, I think were seeing the benefit of that.

The recovery centers reach has steadily grown longer by the month.

Bollinger succeeded Jeff Holden, who left state government for the private sector after about two years as commissioner.

Bollinger previously was director of operations for the state Department of Corrections from 1991 through early 2016. While at corrections, he served on the recovery centers implementation group in 2015, and he was part of the team that reviewed responses from vendors to the states request for proposals for managing the center.

We helped them in the evaluation, Bollinger said.

CGI Technologies and Solutions received the state contract in 2015. It runs through 2020. The two sides by mutual agreement can extend the contract for five more years, and another five years after that, taking it to 2030.

The contract allows CGI to charge 20 percent in addition to the money owed.

State governments Nov. 30, 2015, news release announced the contract with CGI Technologies and Solutions to manage the new center.

The release noted, The center will collect debts such as unpaid taxes, university tuition or fees, and court costs owed by criminal defendants.

Startup took 15 months, from mid-March 2015 when the legislation achieved final passage in the South Dakota Senate, until the centers first month of operation, in mid-July 2016, when the center officially began as a branch of the state bureau.

The center reached 88 agreements on debt-payment plans during July. Ten months later, as of April 30, more than 6,000 of the payment agreements are in place.

The legislation carried sanctions that seemed minor during fractious fights in the Senate and the House of Representatives. But they proved significant.

The center and its related operations in several key offices of state government began notifying holders of South Dakota licenses for fishing and hunting in September 2016.

The message: License holders couldnt get them again without first paying off the debt completely or at least putting debt-payment plans in place.

Through April more than 32,000 notices went out, saying peoples fishing and hunting licenses would be blocked unless they paid off debts or worked out plans.

The same notification process followed in November 2016 for motorists regarding driver's licenses and vehicle registrations, both new and renewal.

That month, the motor vehicle division sent 283 vehicle registration notices, and the driver licensing program sent 425 driver's license notices.

The numbers quickly piled up. Through April, the two agencies sent 2,650 vehicle registration notices and 3,804 driver's license notices.

A $50 debt triggers a block on a hunting or fishing license. A $1,000 debt is the threshold for a driver's license.

For its collections services, CGI stated:

Without a focus on recovering obligations due the government, most agencies are recovering significantly less than they could. As a result, states and municipalities are losing many millions of dollars each year.

Sen. Terri Haverly, R-Rapid City, served on the centers original advisory group. Daugaards office announced the hiring of three vendors to assist CGI in a July 12, 2016, news release. In that release, Haverly said fees collected on past-due obligations would fund the center.

She said this was good news. South Dakotans who do pay their outstanding amounts owed will not have to subsidize those who dont, she said.

CGI received $52,100 in the first year of the contract in fiscal 2016 and has been paid $113,336 through May 4 for fiscal 2017, according to state governments website. The companys 23-page contract runs until Nov. 14, 2020.

The center is paid a 20 percent cost recovery fee. The fee is calculated by multiplying the principal amount of the debt by 20 percent. How much is out there? There is the hint of an answer in a table at the end of the contracts appendix: more than $176 million.

That amount covers money owed to, or through, only six sets of agencies in state government.

They are the states courts, Department of Social Services, Department of Revenue, Department of Labor and Regulation, Board of Regents and Department of Corrections. The money owed ranges from fines and restitution to debts and claims.

Referrals to outside collection agencies began in March. There were 237 that month totaling $180,010 in debt. The outside collectors generated 64 payments totaling $24,906.

There werent any new referrals to outside collection agencies in April.
Search of Chelyabinsk Region ex-governor suspected of taking bribes appealed

MOSCOW, May 15 (RAPSI, Lyudmila Klenko)  A court ruling to put former governor of Russias Chelyabinsk Region Mikhail Yurevich suspected of taking 26 million rubles ($451,600) in bribes on the federal and international wanted list has been appealed, lawyer Igor Trunov told RAPSI on Monday.

Earlier, a court in Yekaterinburg dismissed investigators motion to arrest Yurevich in absentia.

Investigators believe that Yurevich regularly received bribes. Their amount was estimated at 26 million rubles.

Moreover, he allegedly instigated Oleg Grachev, who had been appointed to the position of the First Deputy Governor of the region, to spread libel about ex-chairman of the Chelyabinsk Regional Court Fyodor Vyatkin.
Man acquitted of double homicide demands $23,000 from Russian authorities

MOSCOW, May 15 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul)  Russian national Sergey Senin acquitted by jurors of double homicide has filed a claim with court seeking to collect over 1.3 million rubles ($23,000) in compensation from the Finance Ministry, his attorney Igor Sholokhov told RAPSI on Monday.

According to case papers, on July 13, 2003, unknown persons broke into premises of a businessman in the Tatarstan Republics town of Tetyushi to steal an iron safe with money. Two security staffs were shot dead.

Senin, who was charged with the crime, pleaded not guilty. In 2006, charges against Senin were dropped. He exercised the right to rehabilitation and recovered compensation from the Russian authorities. However, 10 years later, in 2016, he was arrested again and charged with double murder, illegal possession of weapons and robbery, Sholokhov said.

Jurors in the Supreme Court of Tatarstan have acquitted the man. In February 2017, Russias Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

On May 25, the Supreme Court of Tatarstan will consider Senins claim for wage loss indemnity amounting to 399,000 rubles. On May 31, a district court in Kazan will hear a lawsuit lodged by the man demanding 1 million rubles in damages for unwarranted prosecution.
Dadins lawsuit over compensation for unlawful prosecution set for May 31

MOSCOW, May 15 (RAPSI, Lyudmila Klenko)  The Zheleznodorozhny City Court of the Moscow Region will review a lawsuit filed by Russian activist Ildar Dadin demanding 5 million rubles ($89,200) from the Finance Ministry, on May 31, RAPSI learnt on Monday from the press-service of the Moscow Regional Court.

Dadin, who was convicted and later acquitted of numerous violations of protest laws, is seeking compensation for moral damages inflicted by unlawful prosecution as well as staying in detention and under house arrest for two years.

Dadin was convicted and sentenced on December 7, 2015. Initially he received a 3-year prison term. The Moscow City Court later reduced the sentence to 2.5 years. He was acquitted on February 22 when the Supreme Courts Presidium overturned his 2.5-year prison sentence and ruled to release him. The court held that criminal proceedings against Dadin should be dismissed because of the absence of elements of a crime in his actions.

The Supreme Court explained that the article of the Criminal Code prohibiting violations of protest laws excludes possibility of criminal prosecution if at the time of crime there were no active court rulings regarding administrative liability of a defendant. These rulings have to be issued at least three times in the period of 180 days.
Russian law enforcement officers arrest alleged ISIS recruiter in Bashkiria

MOSCOW, May 15 (RAPSI)  Law enforcement officers of Russias Republic of Bashkortostan have arrested alleged recruiter for ISIS terrorist organization prohibited in Russia, RIA Novosti reported on Monday.

According to a representative of the regional Federal Security Service (FSB) directorate, the alleged recruiter was arrested in early May. During the investigation, it was revealed that he shared radical beliefs of the terrorist organization and was inducing people into its activities. He also allegedly helped recruits to travel to Syria.

A criminal case over contributing to terrorist activity has been launched with the defendant being put in detention by a courts ruling.
Moscow goes on rally over its renovation

MOSCOW, May 15 (RAPSI) - A number of rallies were held in Moscow in recent days after a monumental resettlement project had been unveiled. Over 1.6 million people are to be moved from the citys five-storey Khrushchevka houses which authorities are going to demolish.

As a result Moscow residents went out into the streets either to support the project or to protest against it.

On Saturday those willing to move into modern flats and to get more information about the resettlement went to rallies in different districts of the city. One of the largest gatherings took place in southeastern district of Kuzminki where residents spoke to municipal authorities and asked about new flats, their location and guarantees that their property rights would be preserved.

Next day thousands of Muscovites joined a protest rally in the center of the city to express their concerns over the renovation project. Most protesters fear that they would be forced to leave their flats, left without any choice and that their property rights would be violated. Some residents are also concerned about the quality of the new accommodation, its location , lack of services and infrastructure.

Alexander, one of the protesters, told RAPSI that he used to live in the Moscow suburbs of Pavshinskaya poyma. After he realized that there was no place there even to park his car he bought a flat in Khrushchevka and moved to Dorogomilovo district of Moscow. His house was crossed out of the renovation project but Alexander says that it might be a matter of time when it is demolished and he is forced to move to a skyscraper.

Many of the protesters carried banners that read 'Hands off our homes' and 'My house is my castle'.

Organizers of the rally that was duly agreed with Moscow authorities put the number of protesters at up to 60,000 while police put the number at 8,000.

Moscow police told that there were no reports of detentions or violence.

Moscow's Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said that all requests of concerned residents would be taken into consideration. We shall carefully consider all the substantive requests made at the rallies in Moscow on the renovation program, including those who oppose the program. In the course of work on the project, opinions of Muscovites will be scrutinized, he said.

Residents should feel safe about their rights, including the right t to justice, according to Sobyanin.

In the meantime, a bill triggering the renovation process has passed its first reading in the parliament. It is expected to be extensively amended taking into account concerns of Muscovites.
Guwahati : Conflicts raised in between opposition Congress and Hills State Demand Council (HSDC) for seat sharing ahead of the polls of Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council (KAAC) is scheduled on June 12 next.

The two main opposition parties had earlier announced that both parties will go to fight jointly against Bharatiya Janata Party in the council election.

'We are still hope that both parties will fight jointly in the polls,' Congress Assam unit president and Rajya Sabha MP Ripun Bora said.

'Congress has already offered eight seats to HSDC in the 26 members council, but the regional party demanded three more seats. We have discussed the issue in a crucial party meeting held in Guwahati last night. We hope HSDC will also come forward with the issue and discussion is going on,' Ripun Bora said.

The Assam state election commission had recently announced the poll dates of the KAAC and poll date is scheduled on June 12 next.

According to the state election commission notification, the last date of filing nomination papers is scheduled on May 19 and counting of polls will be held on June 17.

Meanwhile, a top source of HSDC said that, if seat sharing issue with the Congress would not final then the regional party will go to fight in the council poll alone.

On the other hand, Congress is likely to announce its candidate list on May 17 or 18.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Guwahati : The special court of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Guwahati will pronounce the judgement in two first cases registered by the NIA on May 15, which related to siphoning off the multi-crore rupees government funds and diverting it to the coffers of the now disbanded militant group Dima Halam Daogah (Jewel).

The court will pronounce the judgment of the two NIA cases after seven years, which were registered in 2009.

NIA had registered two cases (RC-01/2009 and RC-02/2009) at its Delhi headquarter in Jun 2009.

The anti-terror probe agency had registered its first case in the country on June 5, 2009 following took over the investigation of FIR no 170/2009 of Basistha police station in Guwahati and registered its second case on same day after took over the investigation of FIR no 03/2009 of Diyungmukh police station in Dima Hasao district.

The investigation agency had already filed chargesheets in both cases and there were a total of 15 accused in the first case of whom 10 are in judicial custody, three out on bail and one had released after serving sentence.

In the second case, two are in judicial custody out of 16 accused persons.

The anti-terror probe agency had registered the first case after the Assam police apprehended two persons namely Phojendra Hojai and Babul Kemprai and recovered cash amount of Rs 1 crore along with two pistols and letter from their possession. The money had been siphoned from the development funds alloted to the North Cachar Hills Autonomous Council in connivance with the contractors and other government servants and was being sent to militant group DHD (J) for procurement of arms and ammunition for waging war against the state. During investigation, eight numbers of M-16 rifle made in Singapore, one 9 mms pistol baretta, 12 walkie-talkie sets with chargers and one telescope Bushnell were also recovered.

In the second case, the anti-terror probe agency said in their chargesheet that, some persons, workers of NC Hills Autonomous Council were going hand over huge amount of money to DHD (J) militants somewhere between Haflong to Diyungmukh for the purpose of procuring arms and ammunition and for promoting terrorist activities with a view to wage war against the state, Assam police stopped and checked a Scorpio vehicle bearing registration number AS-08-5133 in which Golon Daulagpu, Jibangshu Paul were traveling and recovered cash amounting of Rs 32.11 lakh from their possession. During investigation, five numbers of M-16 rifle, three numbers of SLR rifle and other weapons were also recovered.

NIA had already submitted chargesheets in both cases and included former DHD (J) leaders and present members of the Council Jewel Garlosa alias Mihir Barman, Niranjan Hojai, Redaul Hussain Khan, Mohit Hojai, Babul Kemprai, Phojendra Hojai, Partho Warisa, Vanlalchhana, Malsawmkimi, Debasish Bhattacharya, Sandip Kumar Ghosh, Karuna Saikia, Jayanta Kumar Ghosh, George Lawmthang, Golon Daulagupu, Jibangshu Paul, Samir Ahmed as accused persons.

Among the accused persons, Samir Ahmed was released after serving sentence.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Guwahati : Assam's Hamren police on Sunday arrested a youth following his suspicious post against Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council (KAAC) Chief Executive member (CEM) Tuliram Rongang in social media.

According to the reports, Baithalangso police had arrested Kangtir Bey hailing from Dongkamukam following his suspicious Facebook post the KAAC CEM.

'We have arrested the youth after a complaint lodged by Rensing Timung against him,'A a police official said.

A case (40/2017) under section 384, 292 (A) of IPC and 392 of RW section 64 IT act was registered against the youth at Baithalangso police station.

Recently, a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) officer was arrested for his Facebook post agaisnt a lady Assam BJP legislator.

Apart from this, another youth was arrested after he posted suspicious comment against Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal in social media.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
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Protests are rattling genteel Charlottesville, Virginia, hometown of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, over the city's plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a downtown park.
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One could argue that no group of peoples has soaked up and adopted hip hop culture like Asian communities around the World. From fashion, to dance, and lyricism there have been no shortage of participants, and in some cases leaders, in the sub culture. Yet it is the rappers that are finding it hard to find acceptance among their peers.

So consider filmmaker Salima Koroma's debut documentary Bad Rap which follows four Asian-American rappers and their quest for acceptance and legitimacy in the Hip Hop world. Her documentary, a film which she shot, edited and produced, debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. It will be out on VOD on May 23rd and we have the trailer here for you.

Hip-hop culture has transcended many racial and cultural boundaries after its founding in the 70s by African-American and Latino youth in the South Bronx. Since then, rappers have emerged as legitimate pop culture stars around the world and hip-hops global movement has become increasingly more diverse. Yet the face of rap in America remains primarily black, brown, and white. BAD RAP follows the lives and careers of four Asian-American rappers trying to break into a world that often treats them as outsiders.Featuring dynamic live performance footage and revealing interviews, BAD RAP will turn the most skeptical critics into believers.

From the battle rhymes of crowd-favorite Dumbfoundead to the tongue-in-cheek songs of Awkwafina; the unapologetic visuals of Rekstizzy to the conflicted values of LyricksBAD RAP paints a memorable portrait of artistic passion in the face of an unsung struggle.
(UPDATE: We have been provided a trailer with English subtitles)

It was back in February that we shared the first teaser for Gilles Coulier's Belgian crime drama Cargo and, already, we were much impressed by what was on offer. Veteran character actor Sam Louwyck - I first came across him in Ex Drummer and his presence in anything since has been a sure fire mark of quality - takes the lead inwhat promises to be one of the stronger pictures of the year.

In the cold waters of the North Sea, Leon Broucke jumps overboard from his fishing boat in front of his eldest son, Jean. The old man slips into a deep coma, leaving his son with a huge debt and responsibility for the family business. The absence of his father sets off an aftershock of conflicts between him and his two brothers: Francis is torn between his family and leaving with his secret lover, while William returns home to escape his life of crime and redeem himself. Desperate to build a future for his eight-year-old son, Jean turns to his brother's criminal past.

There are no English subtitles on the trailer but they're really not necessary to appreciate what's on display here. Check it out below.
And here it is: a dark box. Inside the box are two Amarays and a booklet. The contents taken out of the slipcase. All contents opened.

It's a four-disc set: you get Phenomena in the 116-minute original Italian cut and the 110-minute International cut, the 83-minute (!!) Creepers, and the CD soundtrack. The booklet is a 60-page softcover one, and quite sturdy, using thick paper. In it, you get several essays and interviews, and a detailed description of the differences between the versions. It's not massive, but a nice addition to the huge amount of on-disc extras. The (back-)end!

Now where is that fly-swatter...

British distributor Arrow Video UK is no stranger to re-releasing their older catalogue titles, and this month sees the re-release of Dario Argento's 1985 horror thriller. Like many of his films, it is a decidedly weird affair, with atmosphere taking precedence over a logical plot. The story is about a schoolgirl who can telepathically communicate with insects, and she uses this power to solve a gruesome string of murders. It stars a 15-year old Jennifer Connelly, a year before her breakthrough inSeveral different cuts ofexist, with the worst among these probably being the R-rated US version known as, which is cut (or gutted, rather) by a full 30 minutes. Yet in all its forms the film has earned itself a big number of fans over the years, and Dario himself often refers to it as his favorite work.Arrow Video's new Limited Edition boasts the longest cuts in Italian and English, and as part of many extras they've put inas well for good measure, and the soundtrack CD. Oo-er!On top of that, the boxset is quite pretty, so here is a gallery of shots of it. Click on the edge of the pictures to scroll through them, or at the centre of each to see a bigger version.
Over the weekend, two notable series made their full-season debuts on competing streaming services. Each confounds, to a degree, assumptions I'd made about the relative strengths (and weaknesses) of those services. Both are definitely worth sampling.

A prickly, confrontational affair , I Love Dick presented its first 8-episode season on Amazon Prime. I watched the pilot episode when it aired last year, but found it off-putting and uninviting.

Of course, being male and middle-aged, I'm not part of the target audience, and so perhaps I was responding more as a grouchy, out-of-it man. Also, I spent a few days in Marfa, Texas, about nine years ago, and felt like it didn't represent my brief experience in the small town.

After watching all eight episodes, however, I realized that I Love Dick is less about reality, or any approximation thereof, and more about personal obsessions. It follows Chris (Kathryn Hahn), who accompanies her husband Sylvere (Griffin Dunne) from New York City to West Texas, where he has received a fellowship to research a book on the Holocaust.

Intending to leave immediately after the trip to present her short subject at a film festival in Venice, Chris is dismayed to learn that the festival has pulled it because of a cease and desist order from a music group. (She insisted on using the music in spite of already receiving a C&D.) Rather than pursue the matter instantly, as any filmmaker I've met would do, Chris drops it like a hot potato because she has developed an instant crush on the titular Dick (Kevin Bacon), an uber-macho artist who disdains her.

That's the essence of the first, or pilot, episode. From there, it expands outward to explore a bit of Marfa native Devon (Roberta Colindrez), fellow fellowship recipient Toby (India Menuez), Dick's stymied institute head Paul (Lily Mojekwu) and others. The focus, however, most often remains on Chris, benefiting from a marvelous performance by Kathryn Hahn, who inhabits her character's dawning realization that she doesn't really know what she's meant to do with her life.

Based on a book by Chris Kraus that mixed fiction and memoir, the series was created by Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins. They moved the setting to Marfa and drew inspiration from Donald Judd, an artist whose foundation helped the town to become known as a haven for modern art and artists.

For me, with my prejudices and limitations noted above, I Love Dick is more a thought-provoking show that seeks to be illuminating. I'd suggest sampling a couple of episodes to see if it resonates on your wavelength before committing to a full season.

Master of None, created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, returned with its second season on Netflix, a service that appears intent on appealing to everyone throughout the world by producing as many shows as possible, each aimed at a slightly different, algorithm-driven niche audience. Ansari stars as Dev Shah, an actor in New York who experienced various trials and tribulations in his personal and professional life during the first season, which ended with his move to Italy to learn how to make pasta.

As the new season begins, three months have passed and, once again, he is facing a turning point in his life. He is in his 30s and feels like he should have certain things nailed down, like his profession and his relationship status. Both remain in flux as he rather reluctantly returns to New York, having decided not to pursue a career in the culinary arts.

He quickly stumbles into a hosting gig on a food show, which grants him a minimum of financial stability for the moment, if not creative fulfillment. Still yearning for a romantic partner, he resumes the dating prowl, a seemingly endless, forever frustrating quest for a possible match. A platonic friend from Italy arrives for a visit; she and Dev spend a lot of time together, but she has a longtime boyfriend, so how could that ever work out?

The show soars high when it subverts expectations. Episode 4, "First Date," expertly captures the daunting, sometimes deadening repetition of its titular subject, as all the dates mash into one. Episode 6, "New York, I Love You" whirls around a welcome international variety of voices as previously unseen characters share the hopes and dreams and everyday reality of living in a giant metropolis.

Episode 8, "Thanksgiving," lifts above all others by focusing on Denise, Dev's childhood friend, and her relationship with her family over the years. No spoilers, but it's truly exceptional and features a lovely turn by Angela Basset as Denise's mother.

Even when it falls closer to earth, as when it treads more familiar relationship ground, its acute, refined sense of humor (and sense of place) marks Master of None as an above-average viewing experience. It's the kind of streaming show that is a pleasure to binge, since there's more than enough variety in the subjects and methods to keep it all feeling fresh.


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 "What Real-World Criminal Cases Tell Us About Genetics Evidence" | Main | Arizona Attorney General sues feds seeking decision on fast-tracking capital habeas cases 

August 13, 2013

Key follow-up documents from AG Holder's big sentencing speech

I expect to post today some commentary and reactions to the Attorney General's big and important sentencing speech yesterday (basics here and here). But, especially for lawyers and public policy advocates, as important as the speech may be some of the documents that the Justice Department released along with the speech.

First, linked via the Justice Department website from the text of AG Holder's speech is this notable eight-page DOJ document titled on its cover "SMART on CRIME: Reforming The Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century." The document expands on many of the themes appearing in AG Holder's speech and even has some of the same key text. Here are snippets from this introduction of this document:

At the direction of the Attorney General, in early 2013 the Justice Department launched a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system in order to identify reforms that would ensure federal laws are enforced more fairly and  in an era of reduced budgets  more efficiently.... The preliminary results of this review suggest a need for a significant change in our approach to enforcing the nations laws. Today, a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities. However, many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate this problem, rather than alleviate it. The reality is, while the aggressive enforcement of federal criminal statutes remains necessary, we cannot prosecute our way to becoming a safer nation. To be effective, federal efforts must also focus on prevention and reentry. In addition, it is time to rethink the nations system of mass imprisonment.

Second, and right now available via a link at The Huffington Post, is this offical three-page memorandum from the Attorney General to all US Attorneys explaining in detail the new "Department Policy on Charging Mandatory Minimum Sentences and Recidivist Enhancements in Certain Drug Cases."

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 Some more notable reactions to the Sessions Memo | Main | Notable review of Colorado's recent experiences and concerns with polygraph testing of sex offenders 

May 14, 2017

"Dismissals as Justice"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by Anna Roberts available via SSRN. Here is the abstract:

More than a third of our states have given judges a little-known power to dismiss prosecutions, not because of legal or factual insufficiency, but for the sake of justice. Whether phrased as dismissals in furtherance of justice or dismissals of de minimis prosecutions, these exercises of judicial power teach two important lessons. First, judges exercising these dismissals are rebutting the common notion that in the face of over-criminalization and over-incarceration they are powerless to do more than rubberstamp prosecutorial decision-making. In individual cases, they push back against some of the most problematic aspects of our criminal justice system: its size, harshness, and bias. Second, these cases converge on shared principles of justice. These principles conjure a vision of a very different criminal justice system: one in which an alleged criminal act is viewed not in isolation, but within a broader context that includes the apparent motivations for it, and the states role in and response to it. There is no logical reason to confine these principles to this procedural context, and the Article urges their broader consideration.

May 14, 2017 at 04:27 PM | Permalink

Comments

A small number of states prohibit motions to dismiss by the defense. However, these are made throughout the trial. I saw these preliminary motions on Perry Mason, from the 1950's.

Prosecutors may appeal the dismissal, raising costs to the taxpayer.

Overall, I support these dismissals. I also support the making of such a dismissal per se evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecutor should then pay all costs out of personal assets, since wrongful prosecutions are not part of the job duties. Misconduct should include trivial prosecutions. I steal a $1 pack of gum. The prosecutor initiates a tribunal costing $thousands. A guy attacks me. I punch him in the face. He hits his head and dies. The prosecutor is going after the crime victim. The judge dismisses.

Make these prosecutors pay all costs. This liability is for their own good, since immunity is justification for violence in formal logic. The latter has more certainty than the laws of physics.

Posted by: David Behar | May 14, 2017 8:55:51 PM

Believe it or not, I actually support this (at least in the abstract). The judicial branch has the power (and likely the duty) to not allow itself to be used as an instrument of injustice. Obviously, the standards have to be high, and the power has to be used with extreme care, but . . . .

This sort of thing could be used to justify Gideon (which, of course, is not really in the Sixth Amendment).

Posted by: federalist | May 15, 2017 10:13:17 AM

As to Gideon, for those who have not seen it: http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/05/panelists-look-back-one-case-personally-recall-gideon-v-wainwright/

Posted by: Joe | May 15, 2017 4:01:31 PM

That SCOTUSBlog entry is long on pathos and short on analysis--although it's telling to see that the admission that the Court has constitutionalized Crim Pro. In other words, made it up.

Like I said, from the standpoint of reality, I have no quarrel with Gideon---you simply cannot have a functioning CJ system now without lawyers for the accused, and if you had such a system, it would work serial injustice on literally a daily basis. But, and here's the thing, had Gideon been based strictly on the idea that courts simply cannot be expected to ratify injustice, then Gideon wouldn't have metastasized into the utter nonsense decisions that have come down the pike--e.g., Frye and the alien decision re: effective assistance of counsel. Also, there would likely be limits on how much counsel is required for serial offenders etc.

Posted by: federalist | May 15, 2017 4:13:38 PM

The above commentators brought up Gideon, and are lying about it. I am not deviating from the subject of the paper. I have to inject a couple of facts into their lawyer bullshit.

Gideon was found with $23 in quarters (like $230 today), nearby, and right after a juke box was broken into. A stolen bottle of wine was sticking out of his pocket. Not one to run from a crime scene, he was in a booth outside, calling for a cab. He was a career criminal and alcoholic.

He put on an excellent pro se defense. How could a jury ignore a guy with $23 in quarters. Who has that in his pocket? He said, he had those quarters winning at gambling.

Pro se criminal litigants do better than public defenders. They do not hand carry and force themselves to accept a plea deal 90% of the time. The study to which I referred upset Bruce. That is when Bruce started picking on me. His specialty really stinks, and is likely violating a host of Rules in statutes, because they are lazy and worthless. His specialty is violating the right to a fair trial on a mass scale, far worse than before Gideon.

So Gideon, writes a Supreme Court cert on toilet paper or a paper bag, or whatever. It is displayed alone at the Constitution center in Philadelphia, and lit up eerily like a religious icon. It is a religious icon of the religion, of the cult of lawyer employment.

The court certs. Based on that, all 2000 unrepresented defendants in his jurisdiction are released, except him. He has to wait in jail, probably longer than his sentence would have been (5 years with good behavior). He turns down the offer of the ACLU and of the public defender lawyers. He is no fool. He demands a commercial grade defense lawyer. That guy inserts a shadow of a doubt into the second jury's mind. He is freed. Now Gideon got commercial grade defense. All others, since Gideon, have been getting government grade defense lawyers, unless the case is followed by the media.

He goes home, immediately relapses into his lifelong alcoholism. He repeatedly beats up the wife, remarries, and dies a few years later of an alcohol related cancer. The Supreme Court killed Gideon by freeing him.

Why? To generate massive lawyer employment, and to downgrade the quality of the defense. The judge in the first trial did a good job of looking out for his procedural, technical legal rights. The Supreme Court read the same Sixth Amendment as everyone else. They decided to just make up a new right without legislation or amendment. That is prohibited by Article I, and nowhere is it supported in Article III.

Posted by: David Behar | May 15, 2017 6:35:59 PM

To summarize. The Supreme Court picks out a cert from a paper bag, for the appearance of false piety. As a result, the sentence of a guilty criminal is extended, but this guilty criminal is found not guilty on retrial by a sleazy defense lawyer. The life of the criminal is ruined.

However, thousands of lawyers have to be hired. These lawyers force plea deals on their clients 90% of the time. Yet, around 20% of their clients are innocent. They do nothing to save these innocent clients from false convictions.

But, there is one huge success. They are collecting paychecks at tax payer expense.

Posted by: David Behar | May 16, 2017 12:43:31 AM

I was on a jury in a case where we, unanimously, would have preferred dismissal.

It was a violent crime cases where we all decided that the defendant's actions were fully warranted, but were, also, against the law.

The full jury drafted a statement for our foreman to read to the judge, requesting the most minimal sanction possible - probation, which the judge agreed with.

I called defense counsel a year later and was happy to be informed that the case had been reversed and a re trial was unlikey.

Posted by: Dudley Sharp | May 16, 2017 12:33:49 PM

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 "Dismissals as Justice" | Main | The challenge of taking stock of impact of Holder Memos to gauge possible impact of new Sessions Memo 

May 14, 2017

Notable review of Colorado's recent experiences and concerns with polygraph testing of sex offenders

The Denver Post has this interesting article about the monitoring and testing of sex offenders in the Centennial State. The piece is headlined "Colorados pricey polygraph testing of sex offenders under fire as critics target accuracy, expense: Psychologist calls states $5 million polygraph program 'grossly excessive' as state legislature examines cost." Here are some excerpts from the extended piece:

Colorado has spent more than $5 million to administer polygraphs on convicted sex offenders over the last seven years despite concerns that the tests are so unreliable they cant be used as evidence during civil or criminal trials. Polygraphs help officials decide which prisoners convicted of sex offenses are suited for release from prison by probing their sexual history, attitudes about their crimes and whether they are committing new offenses. They also guide how offenders on parole or probation are supervised. The polygraph really gives useful information, said Lenny Woodson, administrator for the Colorado Department of Corrections Sex Offender Treatment and Monitoring Program. And weve made it clear in our standards that it isnt to be used in isolation. Were using as many avenues as possible to make treatment decisions. But a bipartisan cross-section of legislators and a retired judge have joined with offenders and their families to question the validity of the tests. They contend too much weight is placed on what they argue is little more than junk science. Flawed polygraphs can complicate efforts for low-risk sex offenders to get paroled and lead to new restrictions for parolees or probationers, critics say. Failure to take the tests can lead to sanctions, including eventual revocation to prison. Studies show that up to 70 percent of U.S. states polygraph sex offenders, but experts have testified that Colorado uses the tests aggressively, even polygraphing juvenile offenders for consensual sexting. Critics contend an entrenched and profitable cottage industry, rife with conflicts of interests, has grown up around polygraphing sex offenders in Colorado. To me, there is no question that it borders on a scam, said Senate President pro tem Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling. We incentivize the people who give the polygraph tests to have inconclusive results so an offender has to go back and pay for another one on a more regular basis. Colorados polygraphing is grossly excessive, said Deirdre DOrazio, a psychologist who serves as an expert on a high-risk sex-offender task force in California, during testimony in federal court in Denver in 2015. DOrazio led a team of consultants that issued a report for the Colorado department of corrections in 2013 blasting how it manages sex offenders and how it uses polygraphs. She returned to the state to testify for Howard Alt, then 51, who a decade earlier was convicted for having sex with a 15-year-old girl and possessing nude computer images of teenage girls. After his release from prison, Alt had taken 28 polygraphs, often with competing results. The treatment provider that tested Alt had a fiduciary incentive conflict to fail him, DOrazio said. The firm was making money on outcomes that are not in the offender clients favor by requiring him to pay for more tests and treatment, she said. A deceptive finding on one sex-history polygraph had prompted supervision officials to bar Alt, a former software developer, from accepting a job that would raise his salary from $60,000 to $200,000 annually. Months later, the polygrapher found Alt to be truthful on the same questions even though he did not change his answers, showing the sanction against him was unwarranted, DOrazio said. It is not a scientifically valid procedure, DOrazio testified. It has a high false-positive rate, which means misclassifying people who are telling the truth as being deceitful. So there is a lot of controversy about using the polygraph in high-stakes decisions.... The state of Colorado, relying on court fees paid by those convicted of sex crimes, picks up the tab of the polygraphs for those who are in prison and also often for the indigent who are out on parole or probation. But when the state fund that pays for the tests runs out of money, parolees and probationers who dont have the money to pay for them risk running afoul of their supervision requirements. Revocation to prison can occur for refusing to take the polygraphs, defense lawyers say.... In addition to the legislators, C. Dennis Maes, former chief judge of Pueblo District Court, has criticized the use of polygraphs in Colorado. He has written to the chief judges of all judicial districts in the state and to Nancy Rice, chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, urging a halt to polygraphing sex offenders, pointing out the results cant be admitted as evidence during civil or criminal trails. After his retirement, he represented a sex offender on probation, and was shocked when the results of his polygraph were admitted as evidence during a court hearing. The Constitution applies to everyone, Maes said. It doesnt apply to everyone except sex offenders. The Constitution was designed to protect those that might be the most easily attacked by the government, even sex offenders. You dont see polygraphs in any other area of the law. You can be the most prolific bad-check writer ever and you dont have to take them, but you do if youre a sex offender.

The Denver Post has this companion article headlined "Professional polygrapher holds position of power on states sex-offender treatment board: Jeff Jenks firm will receive $1.9 million to test sex offenders in Colorado prisons as he sits on the Colorado Sex Offender Management Board"

May 14, 2017 at 08:48 PM | Permalink

Comments

I do not want to be repetitive.

See me here.

http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2017/05/new-jersey-supreme-court-upholds-polygraph-exams-for-sex-offenders-under-supervision.html

Posted by: David Behar | May 14, 2017 8:59:26 PM

Polygraph all sex accusers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahZTWBB26Cw

This also justifies the removal of the Israeli equivalent of Jeff Sessions, based on his policy prosecutorial immunity of false accusations of sexual offenses. The overwhelming fraction of allegations are false, especially where the parties knew each other. The chance a normal woman will be sexually assaulted by a stranger is infinitesimally small.

I have proposed the penalty for false statement to government officials by lying feminists be the maximum, 2 years of prison for a second degree misdemeanor. All false accusers of President Trump should be prosecuted and receive that maximum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MINmFpO0F4A

Feminist groups suborning false allegations should be sued by the victims of the false accusations. The responsible officials of such feminist groups should not be able to hide behind any corporate veil.

In Italy, the false allegation got a feminist 12 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg369fkEd9M

Back to the Israeli immunity granted to feminist false accusers. They made Israeli women unmarriageable, and unemployable.

Israeli men should convert to Islam, which still respects the patriarchal family.

Posted by: David Behar | May 15, 2017 12:29:37 AM

Let me make this this perfectly clear to everyone, including those who have been hindered by a law degree and ex-prosecutors who are now judges (some of the lowest life forms on earth and now members of both state and federal Supreme Courts).

The entire sex-offender industry as it is currently constructed is a SCAM with a capital S. It's false premises financially benefit LE, monitoring companies, state evaluators/therapists, polygraph examiners and you name it. Money is its mother's milk and you can follow the money. It is a cheap way for lawmakers to prey on soccer moms unfounded and misguided fears to become ever more efficient and lying vote-whores.

It will truly take some Herculean efforts to turn the way this battleship is going to the detriment of both taxpayers AND the Constitution.

Posted by: albeed | May 15, 2017 7:39:10 AM

albeed-

Well Said!

Posted by: kat | May 15, 2017 2:28:34 PM

Not really albeed. Based on the original 2002 doe v Smith decision the registry scheme built over the last 15 years or so is plainly illegal in its face. No new judgement is needed.they plainly stated what was legal AND what would have made it ILLEGAL every one of those items are now required on pain of decades of prison.

Posted by: rodsmith3510 | May 15, 2017 11:47:14 PM

How long before former sex offenders decide to become militant and organize themselves against these restrictions the way Black Panthers and others banded together to combat police brutality and other injustices against the "have note?"

Posted by: william r. delzell | May 16, 2017 10:07:06 AM

Polygraph generally worthless and no better than flip of a coin. As stated by the Supreme Court, some studies have found that "the accuracy rate of the control question technique polygraph is little better than could be obtained by the toss of a coin, that is, 50 percent.See Iacono & Lykken, The Scientific Status of Research on Polygraph Techniques: The Case Against Polygraph Tests, in 1 Modern Scientific Evidence, supra,  145.3, at 629"

U.S. v. Scheffer, 118 S.Ct. 1261, 1265, 523 U.S. 303, 30910 (U.S.,1998)

Posted by: Michael R. Levine | May 17, 2017 7:40:27 AM

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 Notable review of Colorado's recent experiences and concerns with polygraph testing of sex offenders | Main | One last chance to RSVP for "Behind the Bench: The Past, Present, and Future of Federal Sentencing" 

May 15, 2017

The challenge of taking stock of impact of Holder Memos to gauge possible impact of new Sessions Memo

As reported and reviewed a bit here, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued on Friday this important new charging and sentencing memorandum to direct the work of federal prosecutors. As I stated in my first post about what will be known as the Sessions Memo, I think this is a very big deal in terms of both the substantive instructions and enforcement tone being set for federal prosecutors by the new Attorney General.

But just how big a deal is the Sessions Momo? This is a critical question that really cannot be answered for years, and all the nuanced particulars involved here cannot be unpacked in a single blog post. But I still thought it might be useful this morning to explain what I see as the challenge of figuring out how big a deal the Sessions Memo really is. And part of that story relates, as the title of this post suggests, to the uncertainty that must still attend any assessment of the impact and import of different charging memos released by former Attorney General Eric Holder.

To begin, I think nearly everyone who follows modern crime and punishment generally accepts what John Pfaff has been stressing for a decade concerning the impact and import of prosecutors on the severity of our criminal justice system and the size of our prison populations. At the risk of oversimplification, Pfaff has effectively highlighted that how prosecutors do their work matters so much practically to who goes into prison and for how long. Consequently, new DOJ instructions about how federal prosecutors must do their work would seem to be a very big deal. (Of course, Pfaff also stresses that the federal criminal justice system prosecutes and imprisons less than 10% of all those subject to prosecution throughout the US, so there is necessarily some ceiling on how much new guidance toward federal prosecutors will impact the nation as a whole.)

Because prosecutors matter a lot, federal prosecutorial policies matter a lot. But just how much? Notably, former Attorney General Eric Holder issued at least three significant guidance memos to federal prosecutions: a first one in May 2010 allowing more charging/sentencing discretion, a second one in Aug 2013 urging less use of certain mandatory minimums, and a third one in Sept 2014 cautioning again using certain charges to induce a plea in drug cases. Arguably, the May 2010 general charging/sentencing memo was the most consequential and far-reaching of AG Holder's instructions to federal prosecutors. But if you look at the basic data assembled in this NBC News discussion of the Sessions Memo, federal prosecutorial charging practices did not appear to change all that much until after AG Holder in Aug 2013 really delivered aggressively and consistently the message that DOJ was now taking a much different approach to drug cases and others.

In some subsequent posts, I hope to unpack more fully the data on federal prosecutorial practices in the Obama years under AG Holder's guidance. For now, my goal was to highlight that we did not see a massive sea change in federal prosecutions or sentences as soon as AG Holder first announced new guidance in May 2010. (I also must note for those eager to praise Prez Obama and AG Holder for their reform efforts, note how Holder was not so quick off the dole. AG Sessions set forth his policy by May of his first year in office; AG Holder took until May of his second year in charge.) Importantly, it seems it was really only when AG Holder fully doubled down, in speeches and policy directives and other actions, on charting a much different prosecutorial path starting in August 2013 that the numbers in the federal system saw some real significant movement. I hope to discuss that movement and its meaning in coming posts as well.

So, after a lot of words, my message here is stay tuned: stay tuned to this blog for some coming number crunching about the Holder legacy and Sessions course change, and also stay tuned to see how AG Sessions and others inside DOJ and other parts of the Trump Administration follow up on this initial memo. What follows may prove to be much more important than what we have seen so far.

Prior recent related posts:

May 15, 2017 at 11:18 AM | Permalink

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Private Chelsea Elizabeth Manning will be released from Leavenworth Prison in Kansas on Wednesday, May 17. When she's finally free, the transgender soldier and leaker of national security secrets will remain an active duty  albeit unpaid  soldier, still eligible for health insurance and other benefits.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing hundreds of thousands of secret documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. According to the New York Times, her sentence was "by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction," and after she came out as transgender in 2013, many in the LGBT community decried her sentence as unjust, and tried to frame her actions as those of a troubled, despondent young soldier who was disillusioned with her life and job on multiple levels.

Included in Manning's leak was video footage of a United States Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

Manning was named  and then infamously un-named  a grand marshal of the 2013 San Francisco Pride Parade. Following backlash from both sides of the issue of awarding a convicted military secret leaker and/or whistleblower such an honor, Manning was named an honorary grand marshal in 2014's San Francisco Pride festivities.

Last year, we learned that Manning had attempted suicide in her cell in July, and subsequently was punished by a military disciplinary board and sentenced to two weeks in solitary confinement. Unable to groom herself or present as female in military prison, Manning had grown frustrated, despite being allowed to receive hormone treatments. At the time she wrote of the suicide attempt, "I am feeling hurt. I am feeling lonely. I am embarrassed by the decision. I dont know how to explain it."

Thanks to a January commutation from outgoing President Barack Obama, she's being released a full six years before her official date of parole eligibility and her court-martial conviction remains under appeal.

Current President Donald Trump was none too thrilled with the pardon.

"Pvt. Manning is statutorily entitled to medical care while on excess leave in an active duty status, pending final appellate review," said Army Spokesperson Dave Foster.

If Manning's appeal is denied, she could then be dishonorably discharged, which would mean a loss of health care benefits  including a loss of eligibility for government-funded sex reassignment surgery for which she's already been approved.

Manning changed her name and underwent hormone treatment while in prison. According to her lawyer, the soldier suffered abuse while incarcerated. "Like far too many people in prison, particularly transgender women, Chelsea Manning has had to survive unthinkable violence throughout the seven years of her incarceration," said attorney Chase Strangio.

In a new statement released by the ACLU, Manning said, "For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea. I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world."

Previously: Barack Obama Commutes Most Of Chelsea Manning's Sentence


For the second time in three months, lawyers for the Trump Administration are presenting arguments in support of the president's executive order temporarily banning travel and/or immigration from a half dozen Muslim-majority nations, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will have to decide again whether to rule on the constitutionality of the text of the order as it stands, or on the full context of the order and Trump's public comments specifically referring to banning Muslims. As CNN reports, a different three-judge panel from the appeals court is hearing the arguments Monday than the three judges who previously denied the administration's attempt to appeal a lower court ruling from Seattle back in February  and this round stems from the quick ruling by a federal judge in Hawaii the day that a revised version of the president's order was set to take effect, on March 15.

The case is State of Hawaii vs. Donald Trump, and as the LA Times reports, the judges this time are Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, based in Phoenix; Judge Ronald M. Gould, based in Seattle; and Judge Richard A. Paez, based in Pasadena. All three were appointed by President Bill Clinton, and the panel was randomly selected based on which judges on the court were sitting during the month of May. Though all the judges are

One can likely guess that this trio of judges is not going to reach a different conclusion from the previous three, given that the order was not fundamentally different from the first one  it addresses some of the judges' concerns, like the banning of travelers with valid visas, and removed Iraq from the list of suspect countries, but it still singles out six countries and judges have continued to wrestle with how to square the semantics of the order with Trump's and his deputies' earlier statements that suggest the order was designed to punish Muslims. As US District Court Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii said in his ruling in March, "A review of the historical background here makes plain why the Government wishes to focus on the executive order's text, rather than its context. The record before this court is unique. It includes significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the executive order and its related predecessor."

As CNN notes, the administration appears to be hoping that there will be a conflict between the Ninth Circuit's decision and another pending decision on the same executive order from the Fourth Circuit, where a 13-judge panel heard arguments last week. If the two rulings don't concur with one another, that automatically sends the case to the Supreme Court.

At issue is how broad the executive branch's power is crafting such orders, and whether the order can be taken on its face given the broader context and earlier public statements of religious animus. Cornell Law School professor Stephen Yale-Loehr tells CNN that he thinks "No matter how the two courts rule, I predict this case will go to the Supreme Court. The issue is too important for the Supreme Court to pass up."

The Ninth Circuit arguments, as they were in February, were broadcast live, and can be heard here.

Previously: Federal Judge In Hawaii Blocks President Trump's Revised Order On Travel And Immigration
The victim in Friday's tragic, dramatic collision with a Tesla commuter shuttle on eastbound I-580 has been identified as 50-year-old Sroeuy "Philip" Khin, a deputy in the Alameda County Sheriff's Office who was heading home at the time after a night shift at the Santa Rita Jail. As ABC 7 reports, Khin was a Cambodian-born father of four who lived in Stockton, and he worked "long hours" for the sheriff's department to help support his family. He also reportedly worked for the Stockton Police Department.

Khin was driving a white Volkswagen Beetle that was struck from the rear near the Altamont Pass on Friday morning, killing him immediately. As we saw from the photos earlier, the entire rear portion of the VW appeared sheared off but it seems it was actually compacted by the force of the impact.

Per ABC 7, while the incident remains under investigation, it seems that Khin's vehicle was either stalled or moving very slowly in the second lane of the freeway. California Highway Patrol Captain Christopher Sherry tells the station, "At the same time, the driver of a 2016, white Tesla touring bus was also driving Eastbound 580 east of Grant Line. For reasons still under investigation, the front of the tour bus collided with the rear of the Volkswagen Beetle."

The Tesla shuttle bus was ferrying employees to Tesla's battery-making plant in Lathrop, outside of Tracy, and was apparently traveling at 65 miles per hour at the time of the crash. The driver earlier told first responders that he had the rising sun in his eyes and failed to see the smaller vehicle until it was too late.

51 passengers on board the bus, as well as the driver, all escaped with only minor injuries.



NBC Bay Area has photos from the crash scene and its aftermath.

Khin leaves behind a wife and four children, and friends describe him as having been "very outgoing and very social."

Previously: One Dead In Collision With Tesla Commuter Shuttle On I-580
SIOUX CITY | The three lone survivors from a school bus crash in Tanzania will begin their long road to recovery Monday at Mercy Medical Center.

A 12-year-old boy named Wilson, a 12-year-old girl named Sadia and a 13-year-old girl named Doreen were scheduled to arrive in Sioux City via private aircraft Monday afternoon. The Sioux City hospital will donate tens of thousands of dollars in medical care to treat the three children, who sustained multiple fractures in the May 6 crash that killed 33 other seventh graders, two teachers and the bus driver.

Kevin Negaard, Jennifer Milby and Manda Volkert, all medical volunteers providing humanitarian assistance with Siouxland Tanzania Educational Medical Ministries (STEMM), were among the first people to come across the crash, which occurred after the school bus careened off the road into a ravine in the east Africa nation's northern region.

Dr. Steve Meyers, a Dakota Dunes-based surgeon and president of STEMM, local humanitarian organization which sends aid and volunteers to Tanzania a few times ever year, described Negaard, Milby and Volkert as being "American heroes" for their efforts.

"I think there would be three more coffins if it wasn't for Kevin, Jen and Manda," Meyer said during a news conference Monday morning at Mercy.

Milby bristled at the thought of being considered a hero. Instead, the nurse practitioner was happy to be of assistance.

Despite that, Milby said it's a surreal feeling knowing that the three children she helped in Tanzania will be receiving medical assistance so far from home.

Meyer noted he communicated with members of Congress, the U.S. military, even Vice President Mike Pence to secure the use of a medical evacuation plane to transfer the young patients to the United States.

"The U.S. government finally said no," Meyer recalled. "But Samaritan's Purse (an international humanitarian organization headed by the Rev. Franklin Graham) agreed to send a modified cargo plane to bring the three kids and their moms, as well as a Tanzanian doctor and nurse to Sioux City."

Negaard said he's excited to be reunited with Wilson, Sadia and Doreen. The latter can't talk because of her injuries. Instead, she writes down her thoughts in a notebook.

"I'd love to see what Doreen's writing about now," Negaard said. "I bet she's already filled a lot of notebooks."

Negaard also shared a personal story about Wilson, whom he said "has such a sweet smile."

"When I called (Milby and Volkert) two of Wilson's girlfriends, his face just lit up," Negaard said. "Soon, Wilson actually will be reunited with his girlfriends."

In addition to Mercy, a team of local doctors also will be donating their services to treat the three children. Sioux City's Ronald McDonald House will also house the three children's parents for the two to three months the treatment is expected to take.

Meyer also publicly thanked the community for their support.

"We're living in a crazy political time but, instead of building walls, we're knocking a few of them down," he said. "Instead of creating chaos, we showing compassion."

"You got to put your faith in God," Meyer added. "He always has a plan."

The Tanzanian trip was the first one attended by Negaard, Milby and Volkert, who is a nurse.

Milby said she went because of personal issues.

"I was beginning to have questions about my own faith," she said. "This trip was to help me as well as to help others."

The day of the bus crash was a quiet one for Milby and her crew. In fact, they had planned on going on safari that day.

"We got there late and I'm never late for anything," she said.

Instead, Milby and other STEMM volunteers discovered a mangled, yellow school bus at the bottom of a ravine.

"So many things conspire to put us in the right place at the right time," Milby said. "It was unbelievable."

Meyer nodded his head in agreement.

"When God said he has a plan, you say yes and put your faith in him," Meyer said.
DES MOINES  Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey said Monday he would be interested in taking a post in the Trump administrations agriculture agency, but he expects hell be around Iowa quite a while given the time-consuming process of getting appointed and confirmed to a federal post.

Speculation surfaced last week that Northey, 57, a Spirit Lake farmer in his third term as state ag secretary, was in line for a newly created position in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The same reports said former Morningside College professor Sam Clovis, an agricultural adviser to Trump during the campaign, is being eyed for a USDA post.

Northey told reporters Monday he discussed that option with new USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue during a recent central Iowa event, and the two had several previous conversations.

"We don't know for sure that this is going to happen," Northey said of the possible appointment to become undersecretary for farm production and conservation, a position that would oversee the Farm Service Agency, Risk Management Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

"I think all along I've said if there was a place that I could serve and felt like I fit, something that I was interested in and had some strengths in, I'd be interested," Northey told reporters Monday.

However, he said, to date there has been no formal signal from the Trump administration about developments at the USDA, and he knows other people also have spoken with Perdue. He also noted that the process of getting confirmed by the U.S. Senate like would take two to four weeks after an appointment is made.

Certainly very interested in being able to work with them whether its from here or from there, Northey said. Whichever way, Im around for quite a while, whether thats another year and a half or several months.

According to an article posted Friday by agweb.com  an online report of the Farm Journal  Northey is expected to become undersecretary for farm production and conservation, one of three positions created under Perdues USDA reorganization. Agweb.com quoted Jim Wiesemeyer, senior vice president of policy and trade issues for Informa Economics Inc., as saying you can almost go to the bank on the appointment. The company specializes in agribusiness analysis.

Agweb.com also reported that Clovis is being considered as undersecretary for research, education and economics. A conservative activist and former Sioux City talk radio host, Clovis was appointed senior White House advisor to the USDA the same day as Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration.

Northey said it would be an amazing experience to be part of the USDA and expected it would be beneficial for Iowa as well if he were in an influential federal policy post.

I know hes had that with lots and lots of folks as hes trying to put his puzzle pieces together of where all the strengths are and who he needs in different positions, Northey said of his conversations with Perdue, a former governor of Georgia. You know he just announced the reorganization of USDA, so some of these positions are even new to what theyve had and the way that theyre formed.

If Northey were to leave for the federal post, his replacement for the rest of his term would be named by the governors office. The position is up for election in 2018.

Northey and Clovis were among those who advised the Donald Trump campaign on agricultural issues.
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SIOUX CITY | The Iowa High School Musical Theater organization has given several awards to the North High Drama Club.

A Monday release by the Sioux City School District summarized that North's production of "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" was awarded Outstanding Student Orchestra, Outstanding Ensemble and Outstanding Overall Production.

North High students Kari Swanson and Jennifer Parra received awards for Outstanding Performance in a Principle Role. Isabel Hamburger, Quinn Kimbell, Mary Baker, Jackson Baker and Isaiah Green were recognized as Special Performance in a Principle Role.

The entire cast will perform, along with the other 37 schools being honored, at the awards showcase in Des Moines on June 5. In addition, Swanson and Parra will perform a finale showcase with other honored Iowa high school students.
President Donald Trump shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador to the US in a White House meeting last week, according to The Washington Post.

H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser who participated in the meeting, told the Post that Trump and the officials, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak, discussed "common threats."

"The President and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation," McMaster told The Washington Post. "At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly."

According to the Post, Trump described details to Lavrov and Kislyak about how ISIS hopes to use laptop computers as bombs on planes.

"I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day," one official with knowledge told the Post described Trump as saying, before the President reportedly relayed specific intelligence.

CNN has yet to confirm the details of The Washington Post report.

The White House has not responded to requests for comment.

Laptop threat

In April, CNN first reported that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies believed that ISIS and other terrorist organizations had developed new ways to place explosives in laptops and other electronic devices to evade airport security screening methods. US intelligence suggested that terrorists had obtained sophisticated airport security equipment that allowed them to test how to effectively conceal explosives in electronic devices, CNN reported at the time.

That intelligence led the Trump administration to ban travelers flying out of 10 airports in eight countries in the Middle East and Africa from carrying electronic devices larger than cell phones aboard planes. The United Kingdom, which possessed the same intelligence, placed a similar prohibition on passengers flying from six countries, including two that were not on the US list.

Officials told CNN that the ban came about following the collection of intercepted material and "human intelligence."

The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly considering expanding the electronics ban to flights from Europe to the United States.

Congressional reaction

A bipartisan group of senators appeared surprised on Monday when told about The Washington Post story, and members of the Senate intelligence committee said they were not briefed on the matter.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters that the report was "troubling, if true."

Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said it would be "very, very problematic" is true.

"I would say it's disturbing but I think we've got to find out more before I could comment," said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican. "I just can't comment on every news story so but obviously ... it's not a good thing."

Sen. James Risch, an Idaho Republican, defended Trump on the story, telling reporters: "The minute the President speaks about it to someone, he has the ability to declassify anything at any time without any process."

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia tweeted the Washington Post story, and added: "If true, this is a slap in the face to the intel community. Risking sources & methods is inexcusable, particularly with the Russians."

Alarm bells

The Wednesday meeting between Trump, Lavrov and Kislyak had already raised alarm bells in Washington, primarily because it came one day after Trump decided to fire FBI Director James Comey while the bureau investigated his campaign's alleged ties to Russia.

The meeting, a personal request from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who asked that they meet when he spoke with Trump, earlier this month, was supposed to remain behind closed doors without any media coverage. But a photographer from Russian state-media Tass attended the meeting and took photos of a laughing Trump with Lavrov and Kislyak.

No US media were allowed into the meeting.

Though an angry White House official told CNN they felt "tricked" by the Russians, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "proper protocol was followed" by not allowing media into the meeting.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump slammed Hillary Clinton for storing classified information on her private email server.

"Crooked Hillary Clinton and her team 'were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,' Trump tweeted in July. "Not fit!"

The irony: Trump was quoting Comey, who investigated Clinton's email use, in his tweet.

CNN's Evan Perez, Jodi Enda and Barbara Starr contributed to this report.
Domtar Corporation designs, manufactures, markets, and distributes communication papers, specialty and packaging papers, and absorbent hygiene products in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and internationally. It operates through two segments, Pulp and Paper, and Personal Care. The company provides business papers, including copy and electronic imaging papers used in inkjet and laser printers, photocopiers, and plain-paper fax machines, as well as computer papers, preprinted forms, and digital papers for office and home use. It also offers commercial printing and publishing papers, such as offset papers and opaques used in sheet and roll fed offset presses; publishing papers, which include tradebook and lightweight uncoated papers for publishing textbooks, dictionaries, catalogs, magazines, hard cover novels, and financial documents; and converting papers for envelopes, tablets, business forms, and data processing/computer forms. In addition, the company provides papers for thermal printing, flexible packaging, food packaging, medical packaging, medical gowns and drapes, sandpaper backing, carbonless printing, labels and other coating, and laminating applications; and papers for industrial and specialty applications, such as carrier papers, treated papers, security papers, and specialized printing and converting applications. Further, it offers absorbent hygiene products, including absorbent briefs, protective underwear, underpads, pads, washcloths, and body patches under the Attends, Indasec, IndasSlip, and Reassure brands; and baby diapers, training and youth pants, and bed mats under the Comfees, Chelino, Nene, and Bambino brand names. The company serves merchants, retail outlets, stationers, printers, publishers, converters, and end-users. Domtar Corporation was founded in 1848 and is based in Fort Mill, South Carolina. As of November 30, 2021, Domtar Corporation operates as a subsidiary of Karta Halten B.V.
Gear4music (Holdings) plc engages in the retail of musical instruments and equipment in the United Kingdom, rest of Europe, and internationally. The company provides electric, acoustic, and bass guitars, and related accessories, such as guitar amplifiers and effects pedals; drums and percussion products consisting of electronic drums, acoustic drum kits, drum pads, hybrid drumming products, cymbals, snare drums, individual drums, and drum hardware and accessories, such as noise controllers, parts and spares, and drumsticks; and pianos and keyboards, such as digital, stage, hybrid, and grand pianos, as well as MIDI keyboards, synth key products, and accessories. It also provides orchestral instruments, such as woodwind, string, electric strings, brass and world instruments, and percussion products, as well as related accessories. In addition, the company offers live sound and lighting products comprising PA systems and speakers, microphones, wireless systems, monitoring systems and related products, mixers, recorders, accessories, lights, head lights, and lighting controllers and effects, and haze, fog and smoke, and bubble effects machines; and studio and production recording equipment, such as audio interfaces, monitors, microphones, mixers, controllers, synthesizers, headphones, outboards, audio computers, drum machines, furniture, and synth accessories, as well as studio software, sequencers, samplers, and drum machines. Further, it provides DJ equipment, such as controllers, decks, mixers, headphones, effects units, controllers, and furniture, as well as scratch and mobile DJ products, and vinyl accessories; and home audio products comprising headphones, portable audio, podcasting, turntables, Hi-Fi, home cinema, and installation products. It serves through 20 Gear4music branded websites and showrooms in 15 languages in York, Sweden, and Germany. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in York, the United Kingdom.
Derwent London plc owns 83 buildings in a commercial real estate portfolio predominantly in central London valued at 5.4 billion (including joint ventures) as at 30 June 2020, making it the largest London-focused real estate investment trust (REIT). Our experienced team has a long track record of creating value throughout the property cycle by regenerating our buildings via development or refurbishment, effective asset management and capital recycling. We typically acquire central London properties off-market with low capital values and modest rents in improving locations, most of which are either in the West End or the Tech Belt. We capitalise on the unique qualities of each of our properties - taking a fresh approach to the regeneration of every building with a focus on anticipating tenant requirements and an emphasis on design. Reflecting and supporting our long-term success, the business has a strong balance sheet with modest leverage, a robust income stream and flexible financing. As part of our commitment to lead the industry in mitigating climate change, in October 2019, Derwent London became the first UK REIT to sign a Green Revolving Credit Facility. At the same time, we also launched our Green Finance Framework and signed the Better Buildings Partnership's climate change commitment. The Group is a member of the 'RE100' which recognises Derwent London as an influential company, committed to 100% renewable power by purchasing renewable energy, a key step in becoming a net zero carbon business. Derwent London is one of only a few property companies worldwide to have science-based carbon targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Landmark schemes in our 5.6 million sq ft portfolio include 80 Charlotte Street W1, Brunel Building W2, White Collar Factory EC1, Angel Building EC1, 1-2 Stephen Street W1, Horseferry House SW1 and Tea Building E1. In 2019, the Group won several awards including EG Offices Company of the Year, the CoStar West End Deal of the Year for Brunel Building, Westminster Business Council's Best Achievement in Sustainability award and topped the real estate sector and was placed ninth overall in the Management Today 2019 awards for 'Britain's Most Admired Companies'. In 2013 the Company launched a voluntary Community Fund and has to date supported over 100 community projects in the West End and the Tech Belt. The Company is a public limited company, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange and incorporated and domiciled in the UK. The address of its registered office is 25 Savile Row, London,
Parker-Hannifin Corporation manufactures and sells motion and control technologies and systems for various mobile, industrial, and aerospace markets worldwide. The company operates through two segments, Diversified Industrial and Aerospace Systems. The Diversified Industrial segment offers sealing, shielding, thermal products and systems, adhesives, coatings, and noise vibration and harshness solutions; filters, systems, and diagnostics solutions to monitor and remove contaminants from fuel, air, oil, water, and other liquids and gases; connectors, which control, transmit, and contain fluid; control solutions for extreme corrosion resistance, temperatures, pressures, and precise flow; and hydraulic, pneumatic, and electromechanical components and systems for builders and users of mobile and industrial machinery and equipment. This segment sells its products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and distributors who serve the replacement markets in manufacturing, packaging, processing, transportation, construction, refrigeration and air conditioning, agricultural, and military machinery and equipment industries. The Aerospace Systems segment offers products for use in commercial and military airframe and engine programs, such as control actuation systems and components, engine build-up ducting, engine exhaust nozzles and assemblies, engine systems and components, fluid conveyance systems and components, fuel systems and components, fuel tank inerting systems, hydraulic systems and components, lubrication components, pilot controls, pneumatic control components, thermal management products, and wheels and brakes, as well as fluid metering, delivery, and atomization devices. This segment markets its products directly to OEMs and end users. The company markets its products through direct-sales employees, independent distributors, and sales representatives. The company was founded in 1917 and is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio.
The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless.



The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well.







By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism.
iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- The so-called WannaCry cyberattack has affected hundreds of thousands of computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Windows XP software, creating havoc around the world.



Here's a timeline detailing how the attack spread:



Friday, May 12: Morning



The first appearance of the cyberattack was registered in Europe at what would have been 3:24 a.m. Eastern time, according to a report by The Financial Times.



Telefonica, a Spain-based telecommunications company, was among the first major organizations to report being hit by the attack, and institutions in England's health care sector first reported problems by late morning on Friday, according to the FT.



The malware locked computers and blocked access to patient files in England's public hospitals.



NHS Digital, the body of the Department of Health that uses information and technology to support England's health care system, told ABC News it was working closely with the National Cyber Security Center and other agencies to fix the damage.



"We are continuing to work around the clock to support NHS organizations that have reported any issue due to yesterday's cyberattack," NHS Digital said in a statement Saturday.



Chris Camacho, chief strategy officer at the cybersecurity firm Flashpoint, told ABC News that health care companies were particularly ripe for ransomware attacks like this one because patient records are so critical to care.



Theres nothing you can do but pay once youre hit, Camacho said in an interview. If you need that data back, youre going to pay.



By Friday afternoon, 16 National Health Service (NHS) facilities reported that they were affected by the cyberattack.



Friday, May 12: Afternoon



The attack spread to a large swath of different organizations around the world, including the French car company Renault, the Russian cellphone operator MegaFon and U.S.-based FedEx.



A FedEx spokesperson confirmed to ABC News that it was among the victims of the attack.



Like many other companies, FedEx is experiencing interference with some of our Windows-based systems caused by malware, the spokesperson said in a statement. We are implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible. We regret any inconvenience to our customers.



The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Friday that it was "aware of reports of ransomware affecting global entities."



A cybersecurity researcher from the security company Proofpoint discovered an unregistered domain buried in the code of the virus, and shared his findings on social media.



A 22-year-old British researcher identified online as "MalwareTech" saw the findings and activated a "kill switch" for the attack, slowing its spread.



"I was actually panicking because because one of my analysts made a mistake and they had said by registering the url we had started the infection," the unnamed researcher told ABC News. "So, I was panicking looking through the code and I realized that actually no, we had stopped it."



Microsoft also issued a statement, calling the circumstances painful.



"Seeing businesses and individuals affected by cyberattacks, such as the ones reported today, was painful," according to the statement. "Microsoft worked throughout the day to ensure we understood the attack and were taking all possible actions to protect our customers."



Saturday, May 13



Experts anticipated that an update to the malware could be released, therefore increasing its spread.



"Currently the spreading of the ransomware is slowed down dramatically because a researcher found a logic bug in the malware, not because the companies around the world are having good security practice," Matt Suiche, founder of Comae Technologies, a cybersecurity company in the United Arab Emirates, told ABC News on Saturday.



"I'd even say this update probably already happened," he added.



Microsoft rolled out an additional security update for its customers to further protect Windows platforms.



Monday, May 15: Morning



President Trump's homeland security adviser Tom Bossert told ABC News' Good Morning America that the unprecedented global cyberattack sends an "urgent call for collective action" by governments throughout the world.



Bossert said he expected the number of people affected would rise as more workers logged into their work computers on Monday.



The attack had hit more than 200,000 hospitals, corporations, government agencies and other organizations in 150 countries by Monday.

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
(EDGE) A hacker associated with Anonymous has taken over the social media accounts of various pro-ISIS groups and filled their feeds with gay porn.

Pink News reports that WauchulaGhost just hacked into the Twitter account of the violently homophobic group again, as he did a year ago. He targeted the group then, after the murder of $9 people in the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre.

WauchulaGhost said that ISIS' social media was surprisingly easy to hack, saying it took him less than one minute to fill their Twitter feed with gay porn. He said that he's not daunted by the barrage of death threats and beheading videos he's been sent since last year, saying, "Daesh [ISIS] have been spreading and praising the attack, so I thought I would defend those that were lost. The taking of innocent lives will not be tolerated," he said of the Orlando shooting.

He's acting because someone needs to "stand up" to this extremist group, saying, "We started to take over their accounts with porn and gay pride images basically just to troll them. We thought that putting the naked images would offend them."

He told CNN after the first hacking, "I get beheading images... death threats.'We're going to kill you' and that's good because if they are focusing on me they are not doing anything else."

"If the social media people like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram would stand up and do something it would help," WachulaGhost told CNN. "Sometimes you have to stand up and make a change for the good. One thing I do want to say is we aren't using graphic porn and our purpose is not to offend Muslims. Our actions are directed at Jihadist extremists. Many of our own [group of hackers] are Muslim and we respect all religions that do not take innocent lives."

WauchulaGhost said that if the government would step up and monitor this hate speech on social media, he wouldn't have to.

Editor's Note: The original EDGE story claimed 29 people were murdered at the Pulse nightclub, not 49. We have corrected this error.
(WB) The daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro on Saturday led a march through the Cuban capital that commemorated the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

Mariela Castro, who directs Cubas National Center for Sexual Education that is known by the Spanish acronym CENESEX, and more than 2,000 people marched from the Havanas oceanfront to a pavilion that is near the Habana Libre hotel in the Vedado neighborhood.

She noted to her supporters after the march that CENESEX first commemorated the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia  which is May 17  in 2007.

This years International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia campaign will feature events in Havana and in the city of Santa Clara that highlight anti-bullying efforts in Cuban schools. Mariela Castro told her supporters the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia commemorations help promote acceptance of LGBT people on the Communist island.

Each time more people understand that homosexuality is not a sickness, but phobias . . . continue to be, she said, referring to the previous International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia events that have taken place in Cuba. People understand that homosexuality is not dangerous, but homophobia and transphobia are.

CENESEX on Friday honored Rev. Troy Perry, who founded the Metropolitan Community Church, at a gala in Havana. He is among those who rode alongside Mariela Castro in 1950s-era cars and joined her on stage at the pavilion as she spoke.

New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Gender Rights Maryland Executive Director Dana Beyer, representatives of the British Embassy in Cuba and Freedom to Work President Tico Almeida are among those who also attended the march. Several Cuban LGBT rights advocates who work independently of CENESEX and have publicly criticized Mariela Castro were also walking alongside march participants and listening to her speech.

Im here to just lend support, solidarity, to build bridges with the community, to let them know that they have support from the diaspora abroad, Mark-Viverito, who is In Havana with a delegation of more than a dozen Latino leaders from the U.S. and Puerto Rico, told the Washington Blade during an interview before the march began.

Reynaldo, an activist from Havanas Playas del Este area who works with CENESEX, told the Blade as he and a handful of his colleagues were standing along the march route before it began that it is important to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia in Cuba because it is a Socialist, machista and sexist country.

We have the need to make our fight against all types of discrimination, whether it is because of sexual orientation, because of gender identity, more visible, said Reynaldo. We have this need to be recognized socially.

Diva, a transgender woman from Havanas Miramar neighborhood, told the Blade as she marched along the citys oceanfront that it was important for her to participate because the fight for tolerance and acceptance of LGBT Cubans is one that has been taking place for many years.

It is important because we are fighting for our rights as the gay community, the LGBT community, said Diva.

Jovanna from Havana was marching with her oldest son. She was concise when she told the Blade why she was taking part.

I am a lesbian, she said.

Supporter refers to Mariela Castro as our new president

Mariela Castros uncle, former President Fidel Castro, in the years after the 1959 revolution that brought him to power sent gay men and others to work camps that were known by the Spanish acronym UMAPs. The government forcibly quarantined people with HIV/AIDS in state-run sanitaria until 1993.

Fidel Castro in 2010 publicly apologized for the UMAPs during an interview with a Mexican newspaper.

The Cuban government since 2008 has offered free sex-reassignment surgeries to trans women.

Mariela Castro told reporters last week during a Havana press conference that 35 people  roughly half a dozen a year  have undergone the procedure. Independent activists with whom the Blade regularly speaks have pointed out the low numbers of sex-reassignment surgeries that have taken place in Cuba.

The Cuban constitution defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Mariela Castro, who is a member of the Cuban National Assembly, on Saturday made no mention of independent activists campaign to spur lawmakers to discuss the issue of nuptials for gays and lesbians.

Mariela Castro told Hatzel Vela, the Havana-based reporter for WPLG, a South Florida television station, in a recent interview that her father understands her LGBT-specific efforts and is supportive of them. She has also repeatedly denied speculation that she will succeed her father as president in 2018 when he expected to step down.

A woman who was listening to Mariela Castros speech at the pavilion described her as our new president to her friends.

 Michael K. Lavers, Washington Blade courtesy of the National LGBTQ Media Association.
NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 12 May 2017 - Four Hour Spacewalk Completed. NASA

Expedition 51 Commander Peggy Whitson and Flight Engineer Jack Fischer of NASA concluded their spacewalk at 1:21 p.m. EDT. During the spacewalk, which lasted just over four hours, the two astronauts successfully replaced a large avionics box that supplies electricity and data connections to the science experiments.

The astronauts also completed additional tasks to install a connector that will route data to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, repair insulation at the connecting point of the Japanese robotic arm, and install a protective shield on the Pressurized Mating Adapter-3. This adapter will host a new international docking port for the arrival of commercial crew spacecraft.

Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 1,247 hours and 55 minutes working outside the station during 200 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory. The first spacewalk in support of International Space Station assembly and maintenance was conducted on Dec. 7, 1998, by NASA astronauts Jerry Ross and Jim Newman during space shuttle Endeavours STS-88 mission. Astronauts completed attaching and outfitting of the first two components of the station, the Russian Zarya module and the U.S. Unity module.

On-Orbit Status Report

EXPRESS Pallet Controller Assembly (ExPCA) Extravehicular Activity (EVA) #42: EV1 Peggy Whitson and EV2 Jack Fischer performed the ExPCA EVA today. At the start of In-Suit Light Exercise (ISLE) Prebreathe, a water leak was discovered at the Service Cooling Umbilical (SCU) for Fischers suit. The leaking SCU was subsequently disconnected and the functioning SCU was shared between the two EMU suits which impacted EMU battery capability, resulting in the EVA being shortened to 4 hours 12 minutes. During that time, the following tasks were completed:

Planned Tasks

ExPCA R&R

Pressurized Mating Adapter (PMA) 3 forward shield install

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) 1553 terminator install

Secure Multilayer Insulation (MLI) on Japanese Experiment Module Remote Manipulator System (JEMRMS)

Get-ahead Task

COL Articulating Portable Foot Restraint (APFR) relocation to PMA3

Mobile Servicing System (MSS) Operations: Robotics Ground Controllers powered up the Mobile Servicing System (MSS) in support of todays EXpedite the PRocessing of Experiments to Space Station (ExPRESS) Carrier Avionics (ExPCA) EVA. IVA Crew Pesquet maneuvered the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) into position, then EV2 Fisher installed the Articulating Portable Foot Restraint (APFR) on the SSRMS Latching End Effector (LEE) and ingressed it. Pesquet then maneuvered the SSRMS for EV2 to remove and replace the failed ExPCA on the Express Logistics Carrier #4 (ELC-4) with the spare ExPCA. When the failed ExPCA was stowed, Pesquet maneuvered the SSRMS to position EV2 for APFR egress, then Pesquet backed the SSRMS to a park position.

Todays Planned Activities

All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.

ECON-M. Observation and Photography

Calf Measurement

LAB BelAir Wireless Access Points (WAPs) Power down and Disconnect

External Wireless EVA Inhibit

ISS HAM Radio Power Down

EVA COTS UHF Communication Unit (CUCU) Verify off

USOS Window Shutter Close

Extravehicular Activity (EVA) In-Suit Light Exercise (ISLE) Preparation

USOS Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Communication Configuration

 routine ops (LF link and VHF receiver health check). Headset Audit

Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) Purge

Study of veins in lower extremities

Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) In-Suit Light Exercise (ISLE) Prebreathe

LCG stowage into the crew bag

Orlan MK No. 5  unit deinstallation

On MCC Go Transfer of brine and urine from - to Progress 435 (DC1) Rodnik H2O Tank 2

Orlan-MK No.5  Pressure Gauge Deinstallation

Removal of water tank from Orlan-MK No.5

Crewlock Depress

Stowage of pressurized gloves -10 into the crew bag

Crewlock Post Depress

Swapping electrical umbilical connector cover from Orlan-MK No.5 to Orlan-MK No.6

Crewlock Egress

SSRMS ExPCA R&R EVA Support

Post-EVA Orlan-MK No.5 Equipment Stowage

ExPRESS Carrier Avionics (ExPCA) Setup

CALCIUM. Experiment Session 6

ExPRESS Carrier Avionics (ExPCA) R&R

Orlan No.5 Stowage in Progress 435 (DC1)

AMS Terminator Install and Photo

CP3 High Definition (HD) Camera Install [Not performed due to shortened EVA]

CASKAD. Bioreactor Transfer - No. 04 at +4 deg C. Deactivation of - thermostat No.02

ExPRESS Carrier Avionics (ExPCA) Cleanup

LAB Nadir EWC Antenna Install [Not performed due to shortened EVA]

PMA3 Forward Shield Install

Inventory of the Hardware Connected to the Outlets in RS

PMA3 Forward Shield Install

JEMRMS Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) Repair

LAB Nadir EWC Antenna Install [Not performed due to shortened EVA]

Crewlock Ingress

EVA Glove Photo Setup

Crewlock Repress

Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) Post-EVA Activities

Post Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Communication Deconfiguration

EVA Glove Photo Downlink

Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Camera Thermal Blanket Stow

Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Camera Image Downlink

Photo/TV Extravehicular Activity (EVA) GoPro Downlink

External Wireless Instrumentation System (EWIS) Network Control Unit (NCU) Enable

LAB BelAir Wireless Access Point (WAP) Connect Power Cable and Power ON

Completed Task List Items

None

Ground Activities

All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.

EVA Support

Three-Day Look Ahead:

Friday, 05/12: ExPCA EVA #42

Saturday, 05/13: Water dispensing for Electrowetting Drawer, Skinsuit height measurement, EVA camera disassembly/Airlock deconfig/debrief

Sunday, 05/14: Crew off duty, Fluid Shifts hardware gather, Ultrasound setup in Russian Segment

Monday, 05/15: Genes In Space, Fluid Shifts/Chibis, NRCSD #11 CubeSat deploy, OsteoOmics biocell fixation

QUICK ISS Status  Environmental Control Group:

Component  Status

Elektron  On

Vozdukh  Manual

[] 1  SM Air Conditioner System (SKV1)  Off

[] 2  SM Air Conditioner System (SKV2)  On

Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Lab  Standby

Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Node 3  Operate

Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Lab  Operate

Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Node 3  Standby

Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA)  Process

Urine Processing Assembly (UPA)  Standby

Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Lab  Full up

Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Node 3  Off
For some, market globalisation is an unstoppable progression. For others, it just needs to be stopped, or at least slowed down and made more inclusive and sustainable. A good example of market globalisation associated with societal discontent is the EU.

Arguably, academic exchanges across the borders of member states played a key role in the cultural and professional integration of the EU. Progress in ICT also played a big role. But the segment of the population who did not go to university and/or is not connected through the internet in a functional and professional way are failing to benefit from globalisation. And the most marginalised and vulnerable people are not even in the EU, but in rural Africa. Here electricity, mobile-internet networks and ICT are least available. Rural professionalisation is much needed to integrate millions of African farmers into the global market. The EU has a good reason to help Africa in this. The majority of economic immigrants to the EU are the rural youth of Africa. European support to agribusiness development and rural employment in Africa has the potential to take out economic incentives to migration.

Globalisation brought foreign manufacturers, exporters and supermarkets to African capitals. Although these multinationals have added competitive pressure on local retailers, industry and traders, they also created new value chains for African agriculture. But value chains often fail to go the last mile, all the way to the farm gate. Mostly because of too many small or micro farms and generally poor communication and transportation infrastructure. The gap between value chains and farmers is filled by rural entrepreneurs and agribusinesses, who procure and aggregate agro-commodities from all rural corners and then sell them to local and multinational buyers. Value chains are driving the rise of rural middlemen and agricultural cooperatives. Integration into value chains means access to information, finance and technology for middlemen and cooperatives. These are nowadays competing to procure agro-commodities at the farm gate and sell to multinational companies. Competition is inevitably driving down the price for both middlemen and cooperatives. More collaboration has instead the potential to help both retain additional value. Middlemen could procure agro-commodities from cooperatives and offer brokering and management services in return. While cooperatives have the potential to keep middlemen straight and honest.

Hybrid business models, like cooperatives with subsidiary companies, cooperatives hiring professional managers, and different forms of social enterprises such as agro-enterprises with sustainability certifications  already market more than 50% of the agricultural product of the EU. Similar cooperative agribusiness and social entrepreneurship can be developed in Africa with the financial and technical support of the EU and the rest of the global community.
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Mexico City is a palette of primary and pastel colors. Splashes of hot pink, lavender cream, and neon green cover the cracked walls of buildings in hip neighborhoods like La Roma, Condesa, and Juarez. Succulent branches drip from the balconies of seemingly every apartment buildingits as if owning plants are a requirement for residency.

Every day during our stay in this bustling city of nearly nine million, billowing clouds hung low on the verge of rain. When the showers did come, they would only last for 30 minutes before the sun would take over once again.

The Mexico City coffee scene is tucked away, its members inhabiting small spaces scattered in between shops and restaurants. Here, coffee is an occasionrarely an on-the-go pick-me-up. You order an AeroPress, French press, or Chemex at a counter and sit down to chat or read a book. Things start late and end latethe average business hours for the cafes in this guide are 9am8pm. And just remember, an order takes 15 minutes to come outgood coffee takes time.

Chiquitito Cafe

One of Chiquititos two locations is in La Condesa, where the streets are marked by trendy desayuno spots and late-night mezcal joints. Chiquitito roasts their own beans, which they get from a small producer in Boca del Monte, Veracruz. Choose from a standard menu of espresso and milk beverages (alternative milk options are available, as is the case at most specialty cafes in the city), the latter of which all come adorned with effortless latte art. For those looking to really slow things down, Chiquitito offers a number of manual brew options, including V60, AeroPress, Chemex, and French press. For sweet treats, try a matcha latte and vanilla chai, or a pan dulce. For those who come for lunch, Chiquitito also make stuffed, savory sandwiches in-house.

Chiquitito Cafe has multiple locations in Mexico City. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook Twitter , and Instagram

El Ilusionista Cafe

Finding El Ilusionista Cafe isnt a work of magic. This corner spot in a smaller, residential neighborhood in Escandon has a spacious, open interior filled with wooden picnic benches and windows that face out to the streets. A multi-roaster, they brew with beans from around the globe, and go full coffee science on their beveragesyou can count on your coffee being ground and brewed on display right in front of you; even French press ratios are weighed on scales. At El Ilusionista, the baristas work on an array of manual brewers, from Clever drip to Chemex to siphon. In addition to a simple espresso and tea menu, standouts include seasonal options like cold brew with cardamom, and lavender ice cream affogatos. Take your time here and grab a sandwich while youre at it.

Distrito Fijo Club de Ciclismo

If you thought bikes and coffee were only an established pairing in the United States, think again. Distrito Fijo Club de Ciclismo is a trendy bicycle shop and cafe set in the lush, quiet streets of Juarez. De Ciclismo also offers bicycle repair and tune-up services, as well as memberships for their bicycle club, which basically consists of a bunch of people riding bikes, playing ping pong, and attending events at the cafe like after hours beer tastings and film nights. Their coffee is all organically grown in Chiapas and roasted in the city, and can be paired with a variety of food options, like waffles and burgers. Explore the upstairs retail/hang out space or take a seat on the sidewalk patio, replete with bike racks, of course. Get a classic espresso drink or manual brew of Chemex, Dripper, and AeroPress. A small tea menu is also available.

Cafe Avellaneda

Cafe Avellaneda is a tiny nook of a coffee bar and roasting space in the dense yet cozy artists neighborhood of Coyoacan, home to the world-famous Frida Kahlo Museum. Avellanedas owner, Carlos de la Torre, is the two-time winner of the Mexican Brewers Cup and also proudly roasts his shops Oaxacan beans in Mexico Citya portion of every cup of coffee sold is donated to a partnered coffee farm to combat coffee leaf rust. One especially unique offering, in addition to small cookies alongside each in-house beverage, are Mexican coffee cocktails. Try Avellanedas version of an espresso Old-Fashionedtonic water with espresso and a twist of lemonor something more appropriate to the region. Their Juanito cocktail is espresso with tamarindo (a sweet, citrusy soda), juniper, tonic water, and a twist of grapefruit.

Borola Cafe

If Borola Cafe is a mad science lab for coffee, manager Miguel Santamaria is the scientist behind the experiments. With four locations throughout Mexico City, the multi-roaster is obsessed with the science of coffee and only plays with beans harvested in Mexican states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero. The goal is to make Mexican coffee supreme and to support the countrys coffee producers. Borolas San Angel location, in particular, is considered the best-kept secret in the area. Upon entering, a customer told me, Youre coming in for the best coffee here. Its going to be a treat. An espresso menu is paired with a manual brew menu, which offers an array of just about every method you can think of, including siphon, AeroPress, Kyoto, and Chemex, the lattermost of which is a specialty at Borola. Watching Santamaria behind the bar is like watching someone in competitionhe weighs, grinds, smells, and stirs with precision, all while maintaining a relaxed and friendly demeanor. If youre looking for good conversation with coffee-crazy people, this spot is a must.

Cafe Negro

Cafe Negro is yet another of the many coffee joints in Coyoacan, just outside the central area of the city. Roasting their own coffee, Cafe Negro only serves Mexican options, and proudly supports small producers. The mottokeep it simplemakes sense for a coffee shop whose name translates to black coffee. To satisfy a sweet tooth, Cafe Negro offers an extensive, in-house pastry menu of pan dulces, cakes, croissants, and more. Despite it being one of the larger cafe spaces in the area, Cafe Negro can feel extremely fullmany residents and students from the neighborhood can be found here lounging on laptops amongst the succulents, clean white brick walls, and elaborately designed floors. If you can find a seat, enjoy the friendly customer service and take your time to sip on a matcha latte or a carefully prepared French press, siphon, or espressowhile youre at it, grab a hearty desayuno to stay and a sandwich to-go.

Katrina Yentch is a Sprudge contributor based in Los Angeles. Read more Katrina Yentch on Sprudge.
Coffee is a veritable thing now. More than just a prop used to ridicule the younger generation, its also something that gets bandied about to sell deodorant or toothpaste or insurance or whatever. But now coffee is getting the Hollywood treatment. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the new movie Coffee is like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritus Oscar-winning Babel, but with well, you know.

Premiered at last weeks Beijing International Film Festival, Coffee is the sixth feature film from Italian-born director Cristiano Bortone and is a panoramic snapshot of a globalized world in the grip of cultural and financial turbulence. The movie follows three stories from different countries that never formally intersect, but they mirror each other in mood, motif and message. And are about coffee in some form.

One plot involves an Italian ninja-level coffee expert who has to take a minimum-wage warehouse job, where a motley gang of co-workers tap his inside knowledge to mount a heist of kopi luwak. The story is ludicrous. I mean, there are actual coffee heists that could be pulled from that would be far more compellingand not nearly as side-eye inducingthan a super coffee dude being coerced into stealing poop coffee.

But as the plots move away from coffee as their center, they seem far more interesting (at least to a coffee bro who hasnt seen the movie). In Belgium, an Arab storekeepers search a beloved antique coffee pot that was stolen leads him a troubled young man and his virulently racist father. And in the Chinese story line, a coffee corporations handsome hotshot executive is dispatched to a rural factory, where he struggles with the morality of illegal and dangerous production methods and meets a lovely young artist/eco-coffee farmer.

The Hollywood Reporter describes Coffee as both heavy-handed and a little too fond of fortune-cookie philosophy but also a technically polished and good-looking production featuring solid performances across the board plus some well-staged, pacy thriller elements in its final act, which maybe sounds a little bit like a few coffee documentaries?

Honestly, it looks good enough for me to spend the 100 minutes needed to watch it, should I ever find a way of getting my hands on a copy. Be on the lookout for Eric J. Grimms official review. Eventually.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.

*all media via Cineuropa.org
The wait was finally over. The long-awaited debut of 'The Wonder from Down Under' happened Sunday (May 14), in front of a sizable and vocal crowd at Harrah's Philadelphia.

Christen Me N, the 11-time Group I winner and New Zealand's 2015 Harness Horse of the Year, qualified impressively two weeks ago over the Philly oval. He did so in a 1:53.4 clocking, under minimal urging. Today's test was a non-winners of $21,100 in their last five starts, going for a purse of $17,500.

His debut wasn't without drama however, as the nine-year-old gelded son of Christian Cullen-Splendid Dreams interfered with Scott Rocks before the start, causing a recall. Trainer Jo Ann Looney-King took little time to ponder an equipment change for his next start. "We probably won't be putting anymore Murphy Blinds on him for starters," Looney-King said after the race.

As the wings folded, Christen Me N (Tim Tetrick) settled into an early fifth, as Always At My Place (Joe Bongiorno) was sent hard to the lead. As they approached three-eighths, the 32-time winner edged to the outside, where he travelled uncovered to the five-eighths marker. The Josh Green trainee Poisonous (Brett Miller) angled off the cones from the three-hole, towing Christian Me N into striking range. Tetrick bailed on cover at the final one-eighth pole, sweeping past for the victory under minimal urging in a time of 1:51 flat. The official margin of victory was a head. Poisonous fought gamely for place, while Scott Rocks (George Napolitano Jr.) was third. He paid $6.20 to win.

"Tim [Tetrick] loves him at this point, and we are pleased," Looney-King continued. "When you get a horse from the other side of the world, there is a certain amount of uncertainty, so now we can continue on." As far as the future is concerned, the husband/wife team are excited. "We are looking forward to having a lot of fun with him and butting heads with the big boys in the future."

The future may arrive in two weeks time, as Christen Me N has been invited to the Ben Stafford Jr. Memorial for aged pacers, which will take place on Sunday, May 28 at Harrah's Philadelphia. The purse for that event is $150,000.

(Harrah's Philadelphia)
High Stakes Farm, Mac Lilley Farms and Seelster Farms each held open houses for the general public on Sunday, May 14, as the southern Ontario Standardbred breeding nurseries opened their gates to commemorate Mothers Day 2017.

In addition to the breeding farms, the popular fractional ownership endeavour The Stable (thestable.ca) held a successful Spring Showcase of its two-year-olds in training at the Tomiko Training Centre. For a recap of the Spring Showcase, which took place in Campbellville, click here.

Seelster Farms, located in Lucan, opened its facility to the public from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. The open house at Seelster was an officially recognized fundraiser for the Canadian Cancer Society (voluntary donations were graciously accepted on their behalf).

Standardbreds get up close and personal during Seelster Farms open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017

Seelster Farms was buzzing with more than 1,500 individuals visiting the farm during the Mother's Day open house, Seelsters Ann Straatman said via release. The Seelster team was pleased to show off more than 40 young foals with their mothers along with the farms eight stallions. Guests were part of London's annual Shunpiker's tour as well as local families. Nearly all were from outside the horse racing industry and everyone did their best to make them feel welcome by fielding questions and introducing them to the newest addition to the farm, a Wheeling N Dealin colt out of Gramola, born at 6:15 a.m. that morning.

Youngsters observe Standardbreds during Seelster Farms open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017

Standardbreds get up close and personal during Seelster Farms open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017

High Stakes Farm, located in Moffat, opened its gates from 1:00 p.m. until 4:00 p.m. The open house at High Stakes was an officially recognized fundraiser for the Ontario Standardbred Adoption Society.

Scores of people were coming and going at High Stakes throughout the afternoon. Trot Insider spoke with many of the people in attendance, many of which were from outside the industry and heard about the open house in the Milton Champion or online.

Members of the public mingle with some Standardbreds at High Stakes Farm during its open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017 (SC Photo)

Members of the public mingle with some Standardbreds at High Stakes Farm during its open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017 (SC Photo)

Mac Lilley Farms, located in Dutton, hosted its event from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. The farm helped promote the 250th anniversary of horse racing in Canada with a commemorative mile by Il Sogno Dream and information display.

Il Sogna Dream, pictured on his way to the track at Mac Lilley Farms to trot a commemorative mile during the farms open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017 (SC Photo)

In addition to showcasing its mares and foals, the Hands On Horses Team from the Ontario Harness Horse Association providing rides in jog carts around the racetrack at Mac Lilley Farms. The Glencoe 4-H horse club members passing out cupcakes and drinks to the guests.

Il Sogna Dream, pictured trotting his commemorative mile at Mac Lilley Farms during the farms open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017 (SC Photo)

(Left to Right) Alex Lilley, Ruleen Lilley and Linda Rainey, pictured after Il Sogno Dreams commemorative mile at Mac Lilley Farms during the farms open house on Mothers Day, Sunday, May 14, 2017 (SC Photo)
On Sunday, May 14 at Hippodrome 3R, driver Louis-Philippe Roy experienced what most drivers only dream about: recording eight wins on a single program.

Roy was down to drive in 11 of the 13 races on the card. Little did he know it would be a history-making afternoon. The prior record was six wins on a program, set by Yannick Gingras in 2013.

I knew I had some competitive horses, Roy said, but I didn't think before the races that eight of them could win. Some of them really surprised me and were feeling really good yesterday.

It was really great to have my parents in the winners circle for the eight races, Roy added, especially my mom, as it was Mothers Day.

Only three of his 11 drives Sunday were race favorites on the morning line, which did not prevent him from achieving eight victories. Of these eight victories, one was from the tenth post position, twice from the nine-hole (both posts are in the second tier behind the #1 and #2 horses) and twice from Post 7.

That is tough to do on a fast track, which was not the case at H3R Sunday, as constant rains had the track listed as sloppy with a five-second allowance.

I was happy to have a break of a race to clean my face and my eyes. Roy laughed. It was really muddy out there.

In the ninth race, Roy was driving the race favourite, Code Word, who broke stride leaving from Post 5 and Roy could not get him back on stride and was in seventh place on the outside by a dozen lengths after the start. They raced on the outside the entire mile and still were able to come on and win by a half-length.

I was just trying to get him back pacing in a hurry, Roy explained. Because I know he is a really good horse when he feels good like he was yesterday.

Roy seemed to be all over the track Sunday, racing on the front end when possible, but most of the time he was two and three-wide with horses on the sloppy track.

Some horses were feeling so good, Roy said, that I wasn't concerned at all using them earlier to make sure that I stay close of the leaders. The track was good enough that I was not worried when I had to go three-wide with some of them.

When will Roy be coming back to drive again at H3R?

I'm not a 100 per cent sure, Roy said, but I might be there on May 28th for the last elims of the four and five-year-old Quebec. For sure I will be back on Sunday, June 4 for the All-Stars Driving Tournament. I really look forward to competing then.

So, after a long drive from Toronto to Quebec, then driving and winning eight of the 11 races he was in, what did Louis-Philippe Roy do to celebrate after the races Sunday?

We went to a restaurant with friends, Roy said, and they then went to karaoke afterwards, but I had to miss it, I was too tired from all the travelling.

By the way, Roy concluded, I would like to congratulate karaoke contest winner, Guillaume Desrochers, for his interpretation of Femme liberee in an even better way than Cookie Dingler!

(Quebec Jockey Club)
Mohawk Racetrack hosted a nine-race qualifying session on Monday morning (May 15) which featured a returning OBrien Award winner and three-year-old pacers eligible to the $1 million Pepsi North America Cup.

After having been away from charted miles since her victory in the Matron Stakes last fall, two-time OBrien Award winner Caprice Hill made her 2017 qualifying debut in Race 2 for trainer Tony Alagna, driver Doug McNair, and owner Tom Hill (of Hamilton, Ont.). The career winner of 15 of 25 starts and $1.22 million in purses started from Post 6 and raced third through the majority of the mile. The Kadabra mare would finish second in her tilt, though. She was individually timed in 1:56.2 and finished four lengths in arrears of the victor.

The winner of the dash was the Luc Blais-trained and Sylvain Filion-driven Lookslikeachpndale, who got the job done in 1:55.3. The five-year-old son of Muscle Hill left from Post 2 and made it to the lead after the :29.3 opening quarter. The bay went on to cut the middle fractions in :58.1 and 1:26.4 before capping things off with a :28.4 final quarter. Lookslikeachpndale is owned by the Determination stable of Montreal, Quebec.

In the next tilt (Race 3), another OBrien Award winner was putting in some more prep work, as Beyond Delight, the 12-1 fourth choice in Trot Magazine's 2017 Pepsi North America Cup Spring Book, made his second qualifying effort of the year.

Sylvain Filion was at the controls of the Tony OSullivan trainee, as Beyond Delight started from Post 2 and made every pole a winning one. The son of Bettors Delight sliced the fractions in :28.2, :57.3 and 1:26.2 and came home with a :28.1 final quarter. The colts win time was 1:54.4 and the margin of victory was a head. Beyond Delight is owned by Jeffrey and Michael Snyder (of New York, NY) and the Four Friends Racing Stable (Moorestown, NJ).

Later in the card (Race 7), NA Cup eligible McMac (55-1 in Trots Spring Book) parlayed a front-end mile into a 1:54.3 victory for trainer Bob McIntosh and driver Paul MacDonell. The Mach Three colt started from Post 6 and raced wide past the 28-second quarter pole before settling down on the pylons. The bay went on to cut the middle fractions in :56.1 and 1:25.3 before cruising home in 29 seconds. The win time was 1:54.3 and the margin of victory was a neck.

Blayde Hanover (1:54.1), I Jasmin (1:59), Major Master Piece (1:55.4), Janderson (1:58.1), Jake (1:56.3) and Witch Dali (1:55.2) also recorded wins during the session.

To view the harness racing results from the Monday qualifying session at Mohawk, click the following link: Monday Results  Mohawk Racetrack (Qualifiers).
Former Freehold Raceway drivers room valet Michael Luchento, 59, of Manalapan, NJ, passed away at Cranbury Center, Monroe on Friday, May 12.

Born in Jersey City, Luchento was a resident of Parlin, NJ, before settling in Manalapan. He was employed by Freehold Raceway for 20 years as valet to the harness drivers. He was a drummer and an avid fan of the group Rush. Michael had Fabry disease, and served as a pioneer for clinical trials that led to FDA approved enzyme replacement therapy.

Luchento was predeceased by his mother, Carmella, and brother, George. He is survived by his father, Natale; wife, Cheryl; son, Michael Jr.; wife, Lauren; daughter, Amanda and fiance Braden Price; brother, Tom and sister in law Carol; and sister in law, Alice. Michael was a favourite uncle to many nieces and nephews and a pseudo dad to many friends of the family.

Visitation will take place on Tuesday, May 16 from 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. at Freeman Manalapan-Marlboro Funeral Home, 344 Route 9 North, Manalapan. The funeral mass will be held Wednesday, May 17 at 10:00 a.m. at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church, Englishtown. Burial will take place after the service at Old Tennent Cemetery, Manalapan.

Donations to honour Michael's memory can be made to fabry.org or the Fabry Support Information Group 108 NE 2nd Street, Suite C, P.O. Box 510, Concordia, MO 64020.

To leave a condolence or find directions, visit freemanfuneralhomes.com.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolence to the family and friends of Michael Luchento.
It has been announced that longtime horseman Roy Saul, 79, passed away on Thursday, May 11.

Saul was involved in harness racing in six decades and was an owner-trainer-driver for some 40 years, compiling 735 driving wins and 759 training wins at tracks coast-to-coast.

A veteran of the Korean War, Saul got his start with Lou Rapone and eventually became one of the leading drivers and trainers at several of his hometown Illinois tracks such as Fairmount Park and Cahokia Downs.

Sauls most recent successes came with such horses as Profiler Mindale and Bluebird Hi Ho, both of which were winners on the lucrative Indiana circuit, with the latter well known for his ability to pace final quarters as fast as :26.

My, my, he recalled, I remember back when I broke in when a :29 quarter was pretty specialand today the real good ones can come home in :26.

Survivors include sons Louie (Colleen), Roy, Jr. (Denise), step-daughter Angie Ogden, five grandchildren, brothers Jay and Allen, sisters Pauline Wilson and Virginia Kennedy and many nieces and nephews.

Memorial contributions on behalf of Roy Saul can be made to Shriners Hospital for Children, St. Louis, Missouri.

Funeral services will be held on Friday, May 19 at the Kassily Mortuary Chapel, Fairview Heights, Illinois.

Saul will be buried with military honours at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Roy Saul.
The essential component of totalitarian propaganda is artifice (het toepassen van kunstgrepen. svh) . The ruling elites, like celebritie...
A cold snap is coming later this week and will help drop temperatures in both islands.

Wednesday may be fairly warm with northerlies out of the sub-tropics, but by Thursday and Friday a shot of cold air will race north from the Southern Ocean and spread over the country.

It appears that the bulk of the coldest air will be surging northwards east of the South Island - but the whole of New Zealand will be affected by it as it brushes by, says WeatherWatch.co.nz

It doesnt look long lived - with a high on Friday already starting to push the coldest weather more to the east of New Zealand.

Today Dunedin has a high of 15 degrees - the daytime high on Thursday and Friday is 7.

Invercargill also has a daytime high of 7 on Friday, Gore 6 degrees and Queenstown 5...then a high of 4 on Saturday in Queenstown.

There may be a few snow showers too, although this doesnt look to be an overly wet system. Some alpine highways may get snow in the lower South Island, says the weather organisation.

Friday afternoon temperatures.

Further north and Wellington should climb to 17 degrees thanks to the sub-tropical northerly on Wednesday but the high is only 12 by Saturday.

Gisborne has highs close to 20 degrees this week but only 14 degrees on Saturday.

The cold snap will brush northern areas.

Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga and Whangarei will all be in the late teens for a time this week, then highs in the mid-teens by Friday and Saturday.

A high pressure system rolls in this weekend - with temperatures gradually lifting as the southerly flow fades by Sunday and Monday.

Friday PM temperatures, map shows the main surge of cold air just to the east of New Zealand.
By Olivia Rose

THE OPPOSITION Free National Movement (FNM) led by Hubert Minnis emerged victorious in the Bahamas general elections.





The Bahamas elected Minnis as their new leader, defeating Perry Christies Progressive Liberal Party in a 34-5 parliamentary split, according to local media.





Although it was a deemed a closely-contested general election, Minnis managed to perform a clean sweep at the polls.





Official results were not complete as of late Wednesday, but early returns showed that Minnis easily won his seat and that his FNM party would hold the majority.





"My fellow Bahamians, the people have spoken, Minnis, a physician, said in a victory rally before thousands of supporters.





"We have been given a mandate for change.





Minnis was campaigning on a platform for change, seeking to impose term limits on the prime minister and promoting Bahamian ownership in the economy, according to his website.





Christie conceded defeat and made a congratulatory telephone call to Minnis, wishing him success.





"I understand as perhaps do few others, the challenges that await Dr Minnis and I wish him only success on behalf of our nation. He has my full support for a smooth transition, he said.





Allegations of corruption and unemployment dominated the election.





Christie, finishing his second non-consecutive term as prime minister, was criticised for defiantly boasting that "not even God could stop him, in a video posted by Tribune 242.





"I support the FNM because I feel Christie was not doing a good job in the five years we gave him, Nassau resident Jmeail Dames said of the prime ministers current term.





According to local media, the extensive delay to the opening of the $4.2 billion Chinese-funded Baha Mar mega-resort along with rising unemployment and sluggish economic performance were some of the major factors that provided momentum to Minnis platform for transparency.





"Dr Minnis has endured trial after trial and emerged victorious. He has a task ahead of him, said FNM supporter Travis Edgecombe.





"But I do believe that his new administration will provide new and innovative plans to create opportunities for Bahamians.





More than 180,000 people were registered to cast their ballots for the 39 seats in the House of Assembly.





The election was closely monitored by international observers the Caribbean Community, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Organisation of American States and the United States.




By Daisy Handfield

AN ADVERT seeking experienced police officers to join the Royal TCI Police Force has attracted more than 2,000 applicants from across the region.





Commissioner of Police James Smith shared this news during a press conference at the police headquarters in Providenciales on Thursday, April 27.





He spoke about the recruitment process after one media house alleged that the force had recently recruited dozens of officers from Jamaica.





Commissioner Smith said the jobs were advertised across the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Caribbean, and no one has been recruited yet.





He explained that the force is looking for qualified police officers who are ready to go straight to work; whether from Turks and Caicos Islands or any other country.





"We are at the point now where we are beginning to shortlist these applicants to get the very best into the force.





"Not only does that mean we can get our boots on the ground quickly with experienced individuals, that means that we do not have the financial burden and problem of finding somewhere to house them, somewhere to train them and having to worry about the long training period, he said.





He added that it takes about two years to train police officers and an even longer period to train a marine branch officer.





The Commissioner said: "You first get the basic skills, then you get the specialist skills which you will need to be out on the water in dangerous conditions. It is not an easy business.





"My push is to get the best people as quickly as possible, but completely in line with the TCI constitution which says that we will take the best people for the job.




By Delana Isles

THE RENTAL of private homes through vacation accommodation websites must be regulated, according to a leading tourism expert.





Former Bahamian Tourism Minister, Vincent Vanterpool-Wallace, has strongly urged the Turks and Caicos Islands Government to put regulations in place as soon as possible for Airbnb and Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO) rentals.





Vanterpool-Wallaces suggestion came just a few weeks ago during a business conference hosted by energy supplier FortisTCI.





It also came at a time when the Government is only now talking about regulating this emerging vacation rental service, despite many hotels protesting the unfair advantage private accommodation rental has over traditional options.





Vanterpool-Wallaces warning also mentioned the potential and known damage that these business have had on other countries - such as the Bahamas - and what it can do to the Turks and Caicos Islandss very highly rated and sought after tourism product.





The former CEO of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation noted that a study of some Caribbean countries has indicated that the Turks and Caicos Islands has the highest potential for bad deals where AirBnB and VRBO are concerned.





"The bad deal is that Airbnb has the potential to disrupt the business model that was put in place herewhen you begin to see some new clusters of people coming inyouve got a problem.





Vanterpool-Wallaces reference to the local business model harkens back to earlier statements he had made at the FortisTCI conference.





Those statements related to investors in the TCI developing a business model that attracts a particular high end and wealthy cluster of clients, who stick together when seeking out vacation spots.





Drawing reference to the Bahamass vacation rental situation and the damage that has been done to the countrys reputation through some of these places, Vanterpool-Wallace stated that the Turks and Caicos Islands has to be careful to guard its reputation.





"There is such a thing as the economic value of reputation and that has to be guarded as closely as you possibly can.





"So, with Airbnb youve got to decide where they are located and where not to, you have to deal with the licensing, how youre going to licence them, you have to deal with inspections to make sure they are up to par, and they have to pay their taxes.





He pointed out that if these things are not in place, then these people are taking advantage of the reputation and the economy of the country and they are not contributing anything.





He noted also that the Turks and Caicos Islands especially, does not have a full appreciation for what it has, and how important it is to preserve its tourism product.





"The birds of a feather idea, if you want to preserve that, and make it stronger, you have to try to figure out what it is youre doing very well and why, and making those things stronger.





"Because you need those birds coming back and continuing to flock here, the former Bahamian minister urged.





Vanterpool-Wallaces statement is especially relevant to the TCI right now, as the new Government battles with having to regulate the popular and controversial industry.





Back in March, Premier Sharlene Cartwright Robinson promised that regulations will be put in place to ensure protection of the TCIs product.





At that press conference held on March 2, she said: "We want to do that from two stand points and that is to make sure that we are not losing revenue, to make sure that it is regulated and also the issue of national security, because we want to know who is renting where.





"In the recent unsettling environment as it relates to crime, we want to know where people are in this country and it is important to know where tourists are in these stand-alone villas and heavily-bushed and not well lit areas.





However, she did accept that not all of these rentals are illegal or unregulated, but that the industry of itself has to be regulated and managed better.





Back in February, information reaching the Weekly News pointed to scores of unregulated villas, condos and private homes in the TCI.





A call was made at the time from the owners of the Regent Grand and other hotels for greater regulatory practices to be put in place by the government.




For the 26th consecutive year, Altrusa International of Longview/Kelso honored 12 local high school students who rose above adverse challenges to set and attain worthy personal goals, according to a press release.

The students were nominated by their counselors, principals and/or teachers.

Students were honored at a Youth Awards Luncheon held at Teris restaurant. The theme for the event was taken from a Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places Youll Go, that reflects the belief the journey of life includes challenges, but with support, the rewards are attainable, states the release.

Students received a certificate of achievement, a copy of the book and a cash award.

Dennis Weber, vice chairman of the Cowlitz County commissioners, was the guest speaker.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that intelligence services should beware of creating software that can later be used for malicious means - a reference to global 'ransomware' attacks that researchers say exploited a hacking tool built by the U.S. National Security Agency.

Speaking to reporters in Beijing, where he is taking part in a conference, Putin said that there was no significant damage to Russian institutions, including its banking and healthcare systems, from the computer worm known as WannaCry.

"But as a whole it is worrying, there's nothing good about it, it is a source of concern. As regards the source of these threats, I believe that the leadership of Microsoft have announced this plainly, that the initial source of the virus is the intelligence services of the United States," Putin said.

"Once they're let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators," he added.

"So this question should be discussed immediately on a serious political level and a defence needs to be worked out from such phenomena."

Putin said that Russia was not behind the attack.

Around 1,000 computers at the Russian Interior Ministry have been affected, a spokeswoman for the ministry told Interfax news agency. A source familiar with the matter said the ministry did not lose any information in the attacks.

Putin said Russia had last year sought an agreement with the previous U.S, administration on cooperation in the field of cyber security, but that Washington had dragged its feet and no deal was concluded.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to acknowledge what security experts had already widely concluded: the ransomware attack that hit computers around the world on Friday leveraged a hacking tool, built by the NSA, that leaked online in April.

Reuters
hidden

By Devika Agarwal

Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry of India (ASSOCHAM India) in a recent letter has urged Prime Minister Modi to amend the 2016 Guidelines on Computer Related Inventions (CRI Guidelines) to allow for software patents to be granted in India. The letter raises concerns that the present CRI Guidelines which do not permit patentability of software adversely affect innovation by start-ups and also hit investments in the ICT sector. It further argues that software patents are granted in countries abroad, and by not permitting software patents, the CRI Guidelines are not aligned to the Digital India initiative. At present, the Indian Patents Act and the CRI Guidelines prohibit patents on software. However, software patents have in fact been granted recently by Indian Patent Offices to companies like Google, Apple and Facebook. This leads one to question whether patents on software are indeed denied in India (as argued by ASSOCHAM) or are patent offices in India inclined to grant software patents in spirit.

Law on software patenting in India

Inventions in the field of software may fall in the category of computer programs (which are protected under copyright law in India) or business methods. While software is said to constitute a set of computer programs, a business method can be understood as inventions which combine software with business methodology. In other words, business methods refer to novel ways of doing business by software and internet companies. A popular example of a business method is Amazons 1-Click system which gives an option to regular users of Amazon to make purchases online without the need to enter their payment and contact details manually every time, thereby enabling purchases through a single click.

Section 3(k) of the Patents Act excludes the following inventions from patentability: mathematical or business method; computer programs per se (by itself); or algorithm. What is confusing about the patentability of computer programs under section 3(k) is the use of the phrase per se. Until 2015, there was no uniformity among the four patent offices (Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai) in India on the issue of grant of software patents (a fact which was also noted by the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) in the case, Yahoo v. Controller, and Rediff). In the absence of any guidelines on the issue of patents on computer related inventions (CRI), it was found that while some patent offices refused to grant software patents, others were inclined to grant patents on software. In order to remove inconsistencies related to grant of software patents in India , the Controller of Patents issued guidelines related to CRI first in 2015 (known as CRI Guidelines 2015). Under the 2015 guidelines, patent offices in India were prohibited from issuing business method patents while computer programs could be patentable on the fulfilment of certain conditions.

The CRI Guidelines 2015 were decried by open source activists in India who claimed that the 2015 Guidelines would adversely impact innovation by start-ups in India; they argued that the 2015 Guidelines violated section 3(k) of the Patents Act which expressly prohibited software patents. This led to the recall of the 2015 Guidelines in December 2015 and fresh guidelines were subsequently issued in February 2016. The 2016 Guidelines altered the earlier position to the extent that even patents on computer programs could not be granted unless the inventor could show that the invention included a computer program in conjunction with a novel hardware (also known as novel hardware requirement). Business methods continue to remain non-patentable under the 2016 Guidelines.

Business method patents routinely granted by Indian patent offices

While the 2016 Guidelines cleared the legal ambiguity related to software patenting in India, recent trend indicates that software patents (particularly business method patents) are routinely granted by Indian patent offices. As many as four business method patents have been granted in India in 2017.

Business method patents granted to Facebook

Facebook was granted a patent (Application No. 830/CHENP/2009) in February 2017 on a method for generating dynamic relationship-based content, personalised for members of the web-based social network. Facebook claimed that section 3(k) was not applicable in this case because the invention implements a technical process and has a technical effect. On 25th April, 2017 Facebook was granted another patent (Application No. 6799/CHENP/2009) on a method to share its user-profile data with third party applications on Facebook. Facebook in its patent application stated that its invention was not merely a computer program as the said invention includes hardware limitation and provides technical improvements and benefits like checking privacy setting associated with the user profile. The Chennai Patent Office accepted this submission and accordingly granted Facebook a patent for its invention.

Apples patent on media management program

In May 2017, the Kolkata Patent Office granted a patent (Application No. 461/KOLNP/2009) to Apple on a method for browsing data items with respect to a display screen associated with a computing device and an electronic device. Notably, one of the issues raised during the examination of the patent application was whether the invention fulfilled the novel hardware requirement. Apple argued that its invention brings about an improved technical effect and therefore, should be patentable. Surprisingly, Apples argument was accepted by the patent office which accordingly granted Apple a patent on the said invention.

Patent granted on Googles information retrieval system

Most recently, Google was granted a patent on an invention titled, phrase identification in an information retrieval system. In this case too, Google argued that its invention is not an algorithm or a computer program per se, but provides a technical solution to a technical problem of how to automatically identify phrases in a document collection.

The trouble with the grant of the aforementioned patents is that the subject-matter of these inventions in all the cases was business methods. The internet companies argued that their inventions included a novel hardware and therefore, did not fall afoul of section 3(k). Even though novel hardware is not defined in the CRI Guidelines (leaving patent examiners free to interpret the meaning of the phrase), it is worth noting that business methods are absolutely prohibited under Indian law and the novel hardware requirement is applicable only when the invention is a computer program. Such patents indicate that while software/business methods are prohibited under Indian patent laws, patent offices in the country show a proclivity towards granting such patents.

Devika Agarwal is a Research Fellow at Centre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade. She is also a Volunteer at Strategic Advocacy for Human Rights. Views expressed are personal.
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By Sanjay Pandey

Since May 12, 2017, the world is witnessing one of the worst ever recorded Ransomware attacks in internet history. As per the latest reports, WannaCry, a kind of ransomware, has spread to 150 countries, locking down over 200,000 computers worldwide. The damage caused has been devastating. UK's health services had to turn away patients, FedEx had to turn away customers, Russias interior ministry computers were reportedly locked down, Renault had to shut its computers and Spains largest telecom company, Telefonica, had to ask its employees to shut down their computers.

The absence of any reports from India may not be a reason to cheer, however. Many, due to obvious reasons, may not be reporting and may be silently paying the criminals to unlock ransomed files. While technical solutions are being found to control the spread of WannaCry, the potential of such attacks to cripple national infrastructure requires a comprehensive strategy to combat such future attacks.

On the reactive side, besides technically taking care of the locked system, it is required that such acts be severely punished. Just like in traditional crimes, punishment for ransomware attacks needs to be imposed not only on those who engineer such attacks but also on those who facilitate such attacks.

It is common knowledge that ransomware exploits vulnerabilities which exist within the operating systems of computers. WannaCry too, exploited a known Server Message Block protocol vulnerability in Microsoft Windows operating systems since Windows XP. While Microsoft, in a departure from its past practices, in order to stall the progress of WannaCry, issued patches for operating systems it no longer supports publicly (Windows XP), its liability for having left these vulnerabilities in the system cannot be washed away. While Microsoft did issue an update in March to address the vulnerability, one can argue that the company did not do enough to stress the importance of the update. It's only now, when the focus of the entire world is on Windows, that the update is being brought into focus. The payment of damages from makers of operating systems with such gaping holes will not only adequately compensate the victims but also act as a future deterrent to such negligence on part of software manufacturers.

On the preventive front, in order to protect the national critical infrastructure in India, as mandated in section 70A amended IT Act 2000, a National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre has been set up. Towards this goal a National Cyber Security Policy was rolled out in 2013.

While these are good measures, India can take a leaf out of the 11 May, 2017, US presidential executive order on cyber security. This order provides a 240 days window to complete risk assessment of all federal networks of importance. It also mandates the presenting of a strategy to combat cyber terrorism in a span of 90 days from the date of signing of the order. Considering the urgency of the situation, the time frames to get national infrastructure risk assessed and for developing a clear policy of public-private partnership in combating such crimes is urgently required.

Besides macro level efforts, since the strength of any security effort is measured by the strength of the weakest link, the implementation of best practices cannot be left as mere guidelines. At a micro level, backing up resources and keeping the systems updated needs to be made mandatory. Negligence towards any of these best practices needs to be penalized on the same lines as those who unleash such attacks.

In this entire episode, the chilling fact is that ransomware are not a new phenomenon. The first ransomware program, AIDS Trojan, surfaced way back in 1989. It attacked the health industry and demanded a ransom for unlocking files on users computers. Since then, this crime has grown. In 2016 alone, as per estimates of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation, USA) cyber criminals pocketed USD 1 billion through Ransomware. Ransom figures in recent attack, as per Bitcoin accounts, are growing with each passing day.

If this has to stop, besides local measures, a coordinated global effort is required. Severe punishments to perpetrators and facilitators of such attacks besides mandated preventive measures seem to be the only remedy to wipe out the travails of WannaCry like attacks in future.

Sanjay Pandey is an Indian Police Service officer currently posted as ADG Homeguards in Mumbai and is a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP)
IANS

Even as companies around the globe are preparing for an imminent cyber attack, the computers of two village panchayats in Kerala were hit, with messages demanding $300 in virtual currency to unlock the files. Officials who on Monday opened the office computer at the Thariyode panchayat office in the hilly district of Wayanad found that four of their computers have been hacked.

"The four computers were switched on as usual and they were unable to open the any document files as the virus displayed messages demanding a payment of $300 in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock files and return them to the user. We have informed the district authorities about this," said Santhosh, a panchayat official. Likewise another village panchayat at Aruvapulam near Konni in Pathanamthitta district on Monday morning got a similar virus message when their computer was switched on. Officials attached to the two offices said the computers that have been affected did not have any major documents as they continue to rely on paper files.

IT experts are working on these systems on how best to come out of this cyber attack.

IANS
The Rs 30,000 smartphone segment is an interesting one indeed. Popularly known as the budget-flagship segment, this price bracket sees phones that offer a compelling package of features that sets them apart from the run-of-the-mill smartphones in the market.

The Samsung Galaxy A5 falls in this very segment and brings with it a nice assortment of features that help it stand apart. But is that enough? Let's find out.

Build and design: 7.5/10

I quite like the build of this phone. It has a metal frame and is covered by 2.5D glass on the front and back. The back is a bit of a sore point because it's a fingerprint magnet, and also because it doesn't seem very scratch resistant. I say this because the review unit we received was heavily scratched on the back, which doesn't lend me much confidence in its ability to survive the hardships of day-to-day use.

Scratch-able back aside, the phone feels heavy and sturdy and the front glass was pristine.

Two volume buttons are present on the left side and the power button is on the right. At the bottom you will find the USB-C port and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. Strangely enough, the single speaker is present on the right side of the device, above the power button. It's an odd placement and we'll talk about that later in the performance section.

A home button with an in-built fingerprint sensor is at the bottom of the front face. Backlit capacitive buttons are present on either side of the home button.

I like the fact that the glass curves rather seamlessly into the frame, and I must admit, I like the phone's design. It's understated in black and looking at the phone, you know it's worth the asking price, at least in terms of build quality. It doesn't feel cheap and it's well-finished.

Features: 8.5/10

The actual hardware powering the phone is a bit underwhelming. You get an Exynos 7880 octa-core processor which is clocked at 1.9 GHz. This is backed by 3 GB of RAM. Internal storage is only 32 GB, but at least it can be expanded by up to 256 GB via a microSD card.

The problem here, of course, is that the similarly priced OnePlus 3T offers a Snapdragon 821, 6 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage at the same price.

The A5 offers a 5.2-inch Amoled display with a Full HD resolution (1920x1080). The front and rear cameras are 16 MP f/1.9 units.

You get the expected assortment of connectivity options including 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, etc. While you do get a USB-C port, it's a USB 2.0 port, so transfer speeds are limited. A 3,000 mAh battery provides the juice.

As mentioned earlier, these specs are underwhelming. However, the speciality of the A5 is the fact that it fully supports Samsung Pay  including MST  and that it's IP68 water and dust resistant.

These are some pretty handy features to have on a smartphone, especially at this price.

Display: 7.5/10

There's really not much to say about the display. It's a 5.2-inch Full HD Amoled display that's almost exactly like every other Amoled display that Samsung makes. Colours aren't that great, but they're not that bad either. Brightness is good, but it's best to adjust it manually.

Indoors, the display just seems too dull. I had to keep adjusting it manually for best effect. It's bright enough to use in bright sunlight, however.

The pixel density is over 400 so everything is quite sharp as well.

Since it's an Amoled display, Samsung supports an always-on mode, which is nice to have.

Software: 7/10

It's disappointing that Samsung didn't include Android 7.0 Nougat support for the phone. It comes with Android 6.0 and a great deal of Samsung customisation. As a Samsung veteran, you'll not find the customisations to be anything new.

You get the usual rounded squares for icons, a detailed control panel and a handful of customisation options.

All these are normal for Samsung. The feature that stands out is Samsung Pay integration.

Put simply, if you have an account with a supported bank, you can use Samsung Pay for any kind of card payment in the wild. This includes payments via magnetic strip- and NFC-based card readers.

The best part is that the Samsung Pay card is persistent on the home screen, lock screen and within some apps. It's always at the bottom of the screen with a little tab sticking out. Whenever you want to pay, you simply pop out your phone, swipe up from the bottom to pull up a card you want to use and then authenticate the transaction with your fingerprint.

Given that the phone has a few redeeming features, I'd assume that one of the primary reasons you'd pick up this phone is for Samsung Pay support. Since it's so well-integrated, you won't have any complaints with the feature.

There is an assortment of Samsung bloatware, but it's easy to ignore all of it.

Performance: 7.5/10

Performance is where the Samsung Galaxy A5 falls far short of expectations.

The OnePlus 3T set very high expectations as far as performance figures are concerned in this price range and is easily 2-3 times as powerful as the A5.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the A5's performance was simply acceptable and nothing more. The phone stutters regularly, especially when using heavy apps, and the moments when everything felt smooth and functional were very few.

I expected a fluid experience, and didn't get one. The Exynos 7880 chipset that powers the phone isn't a very powerful one, but it should have been sufficient to make the device seem smooth. To add insult to injury, a Rs 12,000 Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 handily beat the A5 in a number of benchmarks, that's how bad the performance is.

The speaker is another sore point here. While the odd positioning of the speaker on the right side of the device is not such a big deal, the tinny audio it manages to churn it out is downright disappointing. I could barely make out the audio even in a quiet room. Samsung should have had the sense to use a more powerful speaker.

Samsung Pay worked perfectly. It was one of the few highlights of the phone. Payment was smooth and easy and there were never any hiccups in my experience.

The IP68 rating means that the phone is water and dust resistant. I tested the water resistance by leaving the phone under a running tap and also in a bucket of water. Other than a notification that there was water in the charing port, the phone ran exactly as it should have. There was no water damage at all.

Performance in games was alright. Games were playable and the phone didn't get too hot in use.

Camera 7.5/10

The 16 MP front and rear cameras on this phone are actually quite nice. They captured some very nice colours and detail in good lighting.

There are a number of manual camera settings in the camera app, but I found that the camera was good enough that I didn't really need to mess with the settings.

The selfie camera also managed to take detailed and sharp selfies  as sharp as can be expected from the puny sensor on a smartphone.

The camera response was also quite fast.

Low light performance wasn't too great, but at this price, few cameras can offer more, so I'm not complaining.

If you want a better camera though, the Huawei Honor 8 is a better bet. For better selfies, the Vivo V5 Plus is a better option.

If you don't care that much, the A5's camera is not bad at all.

Battery life: 8.5/10

At almost 13 hours in our standardised testing, the battery life was quite impressive. Despite being a 3,000 mAh unit, Samsung's power management solution appears to be working wonders as far as battery life is concerned.

The phone routinely lasted me a full work day, which includes dozens of calls, hundreds of messages and emails and at least a couple of hours spent listening to music and browsing the web.

Battery life is impressive.

Verdict and price in India

I'm in two minds about the Samsung Galaxy A5. On the one hand, Samsung Pay and IP68 certification are really nice. On the other hand, the OnePlus 3T offers dramatically more performance for the same price.

Even when it comes to cameras, the Vivo V5 Plus offers a better selfie camera and the Huawei Honor 8 offers a better rear camera.

The A5 is not a bad phone, but it's not the best by any means. It's well-built, but not exceptionally so. It has a good camera, but it's definitely not the best option around. It's also limited to Android 6.0 for now.

In the end, I think this phone lives or dies by Samsung Pay. If you want Samsung Pay, this is the phone for you. If not, there are far better alternatives to be had.

Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Get technology news, gadgets reviews & ratings. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison.
All should have love, respect for motherland like mothers : Mayor

BSS, Chittagong :

Chittagong mayor AJM Nasir Uddin on Sunday said that all must love and respect their motherland the way they show love to their mothers.

The mayor said mother is the name of a shelter that defends her children with affection, fondness and love throughout her life.

"In the same manner we all should show love and respect to our beloved motherland Bangladesh like our mothers", the mayor added.

Chittagong mayor came up with the comments while handing over 'Ratnagarbha Ma (a mother giving birth to excellent children) Award' at his residence this morning.

'Bangabandhu and National Four Leaders Memorial Council' arranged the function marking the International Mother's Day on Sunday.

Executive President of the Council Mohammad Jahir presided over the function while ward councilor and vice-president of the Council Hasan Murad Biplob, its founding general secretary Abdur Rahim, senior vice-president Hasina Jafar and Chittagong city Awami League leader Belal Ahmed, among others, addressed it.

Later, the mayor handed over 'Ratnagarbha Ma Award' to Fatema Juhora Begum for her outstanding contributions to society.
Katrina photobombed Salman's picture

We all know that Katrina has done some serious roles but we also know that Katrina Kaif is a kid at heart!

This time 'Tiger Zinda Hai's director Ali Abbas Zafar gave us yet another proof about the starlet's cuteness when he posted a picture where Katrina is seen photobombing a picture in which Salman Khan's giving an intense look.

The director shared the snap on Twitter with the caption, "A very serious Katrina kaif and super focused @BeingSalmanKhan on the set of @TigerZindaHai #behind the scenes. Friday Feelings :)"

Salman and Katrina are currently in Abu Dhabi to shoot for their highly anticipated film.


Prisoners must have adequate access to treatment

MEDIA report on Monday said 63 jails out of a total of 68 in the country have no doctor for more than 1.5 lakh prisoners. The disclosure is highly disturbing and need immediate attention. How can it be believable that almost all prisons have no physicians, no medicine and such other healthcare facilities for thousands of inmates living in congested environment. It is invariably a serious violation of basic human rights that all human beings are entitled to health care and more so for prisoners as they have no liberty to visit a doctor. There is no doubt they are subject to serious negligence by jail authorities because they are treated as sub-standard human beings. Every jail has a hospital or treatment ward but Jail officials are misusing medicine and other supplies to their own benefits depriving the inmates.



The country's overcrowded jails lack adequate ventilation, water supply and cleaning where most prisoners suffer from stomach, skin and such other killer diseases. Poor prisoners are helpless in this situation where lack of timely treatment is only aggravating their health problems. We can't leave them in utter neglect; they deserve better treatment.



The situation in Dhaka Central Jail, which being located in the capital, is somewhat good with two physicians to run a dilapidated hospital inside the prison. But over 111 posts of doctors are remaining vacant in other jails throughout the country where name shake hospitals exist without doctors and medicine. Some other reports said only nine ambulances are available to jails across the country to shift prisoners to hospitals. It just shows the utter neglect that the jail population is exposed without timely access to life saving treatment. The condition has further worsened recently as many nurses in jail hospitals have quit their jobs leaving jails without physicians and nurses even to attend emergency calls.



Disclosure said in last one and a half months at least seven prisoners died after they had been taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital from Dhaka Central Jail. The fact is that very delayed treatment was made available to them pushing them to death. It is not clear how many inmates die each year for lack of real time treatment but in some estimates the number is no less than thousand. But such death is insignificant to the authorities because jail inmates are not treated with compassion and dignity.



It is true that every jail has a hospital or hospital ward but the service is mostly available to hardcore criminals and wealthy and politically powerful people in exchange of regular payment to doctors and jail officials to live in better condition. Most hospital authorities use them to mint illegal money.



Jail authorities claim that they transfer prisoners to city hospitals after an inmate report serious illness. But it is more said than done. What is noticeable is that massive corruption and misuse of resources are denying access to treatment to prisoners in need for such treatment. We suggest the situation must improve without delay.






High cost of migration stalling manpower export

ILLEGAL visa selling is blamed for increasing cost of migration of Bangladeshi workers abroad, though the government has enacted a law in this regard to stop this unlawful activity. According to the Expatriate Welfare Act of 2013, if any one is found illegally involving in selling or buying of visa he will be sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. But this practice of illegal visa selling has not stopped so far, it was alleged, as per a report of our daily.



According to migrant workers, when the citizens of Philippines, India, Nepal and Pakistan recover their costs of migrations abroad within three to four months on joining their work, the Bangladeshi workers need minimum two years to recover the cost of migration. Officially the formal cost of migration of a worker going to Saudi Arabia is Tk 165,000. But he has to pay agencies or brokers minimum of Tk 600,000 to avail of the work permit and visa. At the same way, a worker formally needs to pay Tk 37,575 to get a job in Malaysia, while the reality is that, every migrant has to pay Tk 3 to 4 lakh for this.



Some leaders of Bangladesh Association of International Recruitment Agencies (BAIRA) have blamed illegal selling of visa as the main cause of increasing cost of workers' migration. They alleged that some recruiting agencies are involved in selling group visa illegally. When any foreign company gives order to such agencies to recruit a group of workers they sell the visa to other agencies at high rate. They also retain their profits pushing the cost of migration.



A section of dishonest officials of the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) and the concern ministry also collect grafts from the expatriates while they go to those offices for clearance. This along with increased competition for each visa by many candidates pushes the price of migration up.



There is no easy solution to this; it needs a fundamental change in the mindset of our countrymen who have no qualms about selling their lands to go to a place where they need to work a minimum of 18-24 months to get that money back. It makes no sense whatsoever. All authorities concerned should ensure that job opportunities must exist in our own country to keep our workers away from crowding for migration. If a person can work in the country why would one want to go abroad? This allure of the foreign country must stop. Our migration system is one of the most illegal and unethical one aimed at deceiving the poor helpless people. It is time we must create enough jobs at home to stop our young people from falling into job givers' trap at home and abroad.
Cholera strikes Yemen's Sanaa

A nurse attends to a boy infected with cholera at a hospital in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Yemen.

Reuters :

Cholera has killed at least 115 people in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, the local Saba news agency said, after authorities on Sunday declared a state of emergency over the outbreak and called for international help to avert disaster. Sanaa is controlled by the armed Houthi movement, which is aligned with Iran and fighting a Western-backed, Saudi-led coalition. More than 10,000 people have been killed and millions displaced in more than two years of war, which has also destroyed much of the country's infrastructure.

Only a few medical facilities are still functioning and two-thirds of the population are without access to safe drinking water, the United Nations has said.

"What is happening today exceeds the capabilities of any healthy health system, so how can we (cope) when we are in these difficult and complicated conditions," Saba quoted the Houthi-run administration's health minister Mohammed Salem bin Hafeedh as saying.

The ministry, after meeting in Sanaa with U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick and other international officials, called on humanitarian organizations and aid donors to help it avert an "unprecedented disaster".

It declared a "state of health emergency in the capital," the agency said. Saba said 8,595 suspected cholera cases were recorded in Sanaa and other Yemeni provinces between April 27 and May 13, while laboratory confirmed

cases were 213. The acute diarrhoeal disease, which can be fatal within hours if left untreated, has killed 115 people, the agency said. The World Health Organization (WHO) earlier put the death toll at 51. It has also said that 7.6 million people in Yemen live in areas at high risk of cholera transmission.

A cholera epidemic late last year petered out but outbreaks are becoming more frequent.

Sanaa has been worst hit, followed by the surrounding province of Amanat al-Semah, WHO data has shown. Cases have also been reported in other major cities including Hodeidah, Taiz and Aden.

Some 17 million of Yemen's 26 million people lack sufficient food and at least three million malnourished children are in "grave peril", the U.N. has also said.


BNP demands AG`s removal

UNB, Dhaka :

Describing Attorney General Mahbubey Alam as a threat to an independent judiciary, BNP on Monday demanded his removal. "The state's chief law officer has threatened the Chief Justice and other justices during the hearing of a case on parliament's power to remove its judges. The government's true colour has

been exposed with the media reports on it," said BNP senior joint secretary general Ruhul Kabir Rizvi.

Speaking at a discussion, he further said, "The current Attorney General is a threat to an independent judiciary, and he should be fired."

Rizvi alleged that Mahbubey Alam harassed BNP leaders and activists by influencing the judiciary while dealing with the cases filed against them. "The government has long been carrying out various evil activities to suppress the leaders and activists of BNP and other opposition parties through the Attorney General."

He also said Mahbubey Alam has been working as a government representative in the court to implement its various programmes for obliterating democracy. Mentioning that Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha has clearly said the judiciary has lost its independence, the BNP leader said the country's common people also 'fully agree' with the Chief Justice's observation.

He also said though people are in favour of the independence of the judiciary, the current government does not want it. Accusing the Prime Minister of trying to establish her dominance over all the state organs, Rizvi said Sheikh Hasina is now angry with the apex court as it is 'challenging her supremacy'.

He also said the government is demonstrating its supreme power by not issuing a gazette notification on the rules determining discipline and conduct of lower court judges repeatedly ignoring the Supreme Court's directives.
HC upholds 65-day ban on fishing in EEZ

The High Court on Monday upheld the government's order that imposed a 65-day ban on fishing in Bangladesh's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the Bay of Bengal from May 20 to July 23 every year.

An HC bench comprising Justice Naima Haider and Justice Abu Taher M Saifur Rahman passed the order after rejecting a rule in this regard.

Barrister ABM Altaf Hossain argued for the petitioner while deputy attorney general Mokhlesur Rahman represented the state.

Talking to reporters, Mokhlesur said the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock published a gazette on May 20, 2015 imposing the ban in accordance with Section-55 of the Marine Fisheries Ordinance.

According to Mokhlesur, sea fish and shrimp harvesting through commercial trawlers have been propitiated in the country's EEZ of the Bay of Bengal for 65 days from 20 May to 23 July considering the breeding of sea fishes and their conservation, after Sunday's ruling.

However, the EEZ is an area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea, extending seaward to a distance of no more than 200 nautical miles (370 km) from its coastal baseline.

Marine Fisheries Association president Ahsan Iqbal Chowdhury filed the petition with the High Court seeking the cancellation of the government order.

Later, the same HC bench stayed the effectiveness of the gazette and issued the rule asking the government to explain as to why the gazette should not be declared illegal.

The HC rejected the rule on Monday and provided the legality over the gazette in this regard.
Shafat`s driver, bodyguard held

Two more suspects of a rape case started by two university students have been arrested in Dhaka.

Driver 'Billal', who allegedly helped employer Safat Ahmed rape the girls in a Banani hotel, was caught at a hotel in Dhaka's Nawabpur on Monday, said RAB-10 chief Jahangir Alam Matubbar.

Rahmat Ali, alias Azad the bodyguard who is ac cused of aiding the rape of girls at gunpoint, was arrested in Gulshan around 7pm.

He was armed at the time of his arrest, said Krishnapada Roy, Joint Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police.

Theirs are the third and the fourth arrests made in the high-profile case that accuses five.

Safat, son of an owner of Apan Jewellers, was arrested last week in Sylhet.

A prime accused, he was caught along with Shadman Sakif, a friend he had in common with the victims, who is said to have aided the crime.

The university students said Safat had invited them to his birthday at Banani's The Raintree on Mar 28.

He then raped the girls along with friend Nayem Ashraf and had his aides film their assault, according to the case details.
Ransomware strikes BD

50 computers, bank, TV channels affected so far: Many organisations hiding information

Staff Reporter :

An international cyber attack, known as ransomware struck Bangladesh, affecting at least fifty computers so far, experts said on Monday.

"The ransomware attacked at least fifty computers so far in Bangladesh, which means such cyber attack began spreading across the country. Based on emails sent to us by the affected people, we counted the figure," Tanvir Hasan Zoha, Advisor, Crime Research and Analysis Foundation (CRAF), told The New Nation yesterday.

"Only windows are affected by the Ransomware," he added.

CRAF, a non-government research organisation, in its Facebook page also said a branch of a bank in Bangladesh was also infected with virus caused by the attack.

Besides, a college student became the victim of ransomware attack, it added.

Replying to a query, Zoha said this is not the real figure right now as the news of more affected people continue pouring in the CRAF. "The number of the affected computers may rise in a day or two. Two private television channels have also been affected," he said.

Apart from these, the IT expert also said a large number of organisations have also been affected but they are trying to hide the information considering their reputation.

When asked about how and in what way such attack can be averted, Zoha requested people not to open un-trusted emails.

"We shouldn't be panicked. We will have to be aware of the virus and careful when we will check our emails," he said.

Bangladesh Network Operators Group Board of Trustee Chariman Sumon Ahmed said some institutions, including Asian TV, and many personal computers were also affected.

He also said but most of the organistions are unwilling to be named.

Bangladesh and Bhutan Kaspersky Lab Distributor Chief Executive Officer Prabir Sarker said a number of personal computers were affected by Ransomewar.

National Data Center Director Tareq Barkat Ullah said computers in government organisations are safe as Linux operating system is being used in all computers.

Meanwhile, an emergency meeting was held in presence of State Minister for Post and Telecommunication Tarana Halim yesterday to discuss the situation.

Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission will air cautionary message on all TV channels.

The cyber attack began spreading across the globe on Friday and by Monday had locked up computers in more than 150 countries, with experts warning of an even wider impact as more employees logged on and checked e-mails, according to agencies.

European Union police agency Europol said on Monday the attack had hit 200,000 machines.

"These attacks help focus the minds of chief technology officers across corporations to make sure security protocols are up to date, and you often see bookings growth at cybersecurity companies as a result,"" said Neil Campling, head of technology research at Northern Trust.

The ransomware worm that stopped car factories, hospitals, shops and schools over the weekend worldwide, with Asia having escaped the worst so far, could wreak fresh havoc when employees log back on, cyber security experts warned.

"Individuals or organisations are not encouraged to pay the ransom as this does not guarantee files will be released. Report such instances of fraud to CERT-In and law enforcement agencies," a CERT-In press statement said.

The spread of the virus WannaCry, which locked up more than 100,000 computers, had slowed on Sunday, but new versions of the worm were expected even while the world was yet to take stock of the extent of damage from Friday's attack.

Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks.

Code for exploiting that bug, known as "Eternal Blue", was released on the internet in March by a hacking group known as Shadow Brokers.
Bodies of 3 BD citizens to be sent home from NY today

Bodies of three Bangladesh nationals, who died in a car crash in the USA, will be sent home from New York on Tuesday night.

The namaj-e-janaza of the three deceased will be held at Jamaica Muslim Center (JMC) after the Zuhr prayers on Tuesday, Shameem Ahsan, Bangladesh Consul General in New York, told UNB.

Consulate's representatives will also participate in the janaza, he said.

He said, that Shamim Hossain, first secretary of the Consul General of Bangladesh in New York, has already visited houses of the three victims and met the injured at the hospital. He spent almost whole day with the bereaved members of the families and at the hospital.

Hospital authorities were requested to ensure best possible treatment to the injured national, said Shameem Ahsan, adding that the Consulate has taken necessary action to expeditiously attest funeral and other papers on its receipt. Three Bangladeshi expatriates-Shamsul Islam, 61; and Ataur R Dulal, 34, of Mymensingh and Raihan Islam, 28 -- were killed and another was injured critically in a car crash in Northern State Parkway near New York city of USA on Saturday.
People have their own vision embodied in the Constitution and that is flouted

The political leaders who failed to establish good governance during their times in power are coming with long term visions of their own. The new visions unless come from new leadership appear unconvincing.



Besides, those who flout the nation's vision as enshrined in the Constitution cannot expect their visions of doing good to the people will be taken seriously by others.



The real crisis of the country is not vision but the absence of competent leadership for saving and working the democratic Constitution successfully. This is also no less a crisis that police can no longer be trusted as the people's friends for the protection of law.



No vision has been shown for failed leaders to give up and make way for the new ones. There is no vision for democratising their parties though both the parties in their respective visions talk of parliamentary democracy, good governance and improving quality of services to the people. Then answers have to be given to the question what were the difficulties for them in not following the Constitution of the people.



There is no vision either for getting rid of young musclemen as political workers, many of whom earn money through crimes of muscle power with political impunity. Our leaders have no vision for political reforms necessary in party politics for the success of democracy.



The original Constitution of 1972 is the nation's vision for good governance and democratic way of life. The people's vision of living in safety and security of life and property under the rule of law remains ignored.



The fundamental thing about democracy is accountability of the government to the people. At no level the government officials, known as public servants, feel obliged to serve the people. For that, they must be paid extra. Those who are honest are considered not smart enough and loyal enough.



Any true politician would know that politicisation of police meant abusing law politically by police. This is not believing in democracy when journalists are encouraged to be party activists of their undemocratic politics.



This is not good governance when police are suspected to be committing crimes hand in hand with other criminals.



In the recent shocking rape case in a Dhaka hotel the part police played is being questioned. The OC of Banani Police Station had to be suspended for complicity. Many such instances of indiscipline are published in the media almost everyday.



It is suspected that many other ways of corruption will be resorted to by others when corruption is endemic. The owners of the jewellery shop is in trouble losing money for alleged involvement of his son in the offence of rape. There is no protection of rule of law.



Law is an excuse, abuse of law is the reality.



The judiciary is hindered to play its role of safeguarding the rights of the individuals and helping good governance possible. If the judiciary does not become strong in saving the criminal justice system from being used politically to deny freedom then there will be more frustration and insecurity in public life.



Though facing all kinds of challenges from the government, the judiciary is the only democratic institution still surviving and fighting for survival.



As our last resort for freedom and justice the judiciary has to be saved. The lawyers and judges must join together to uphold the cause of justice and save the judiciary from being used politically.



The police are to be saved as impartial law enforcers. The police cannot be the political arm of the government destroying its professional role and image.



Now we are living in a situation where the democratic institution of free election is in denial. The election under the sitting partisan government is not an insurance for a free election. We have a Parliament without the democratic opposition which is contrary to the Constitution. The journalists as party activists are not the fourth pillar of democracy.



We are tolerating all wrongs and injustices still we call ourselves a nation of heroes. The United Nations and the Amnesty International have been expressing anxieties for forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. The incidents of terrorists committing suicide when surrounded by police are unheard of elsewhere. But for the people, it is living in panic for the safety and security of life.
A sprawling package of bills to reform Louisiana's criminal justice system might be moving toward success as an agreement in principle has been struck between Louisiana's district attorneys and proponents of the Justice Reinvestment Task Force.

Wikimedia

An agreement in principle has been reached on four bills that constitute the centerpiece of the Justice Reinvestment Task Force's legislative package, which should enable consideration of those bills to advance during the final three weeks of the session.

Pete Adams, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys' Association, says the agreement was the product of negotiations that involved his group, proponents of the legislation and Gov. John Bel Edwards and his staff. He spoke with The Independent by phone on Monday morning.

"We have reached an agreement in principle on the four major bills," Adams says. "I expect it will be announced on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday where three of those bills have been made Special Order of the Day for consideration."

The bills on the Senate calendar for Tuesday are Senate Bills 220, 221 and 139. The fourth bill in the package, SB16, cleared the House Administration of Criminal Justice Committee last week with amendments and now awaits consideration by the full House, possibly as early as Monday afternoon.

Those four bills constitute the heart of the year-long formal effort to reduce the financial and human costs of what one proponent of the reforms calls "Louisiana's draconian approach to criminal justice."

Will Harrell, Southern regional policy director for the ACLU, tells The Independent that he is optimistic but not complacent about the prospects of the major pieces of legislation making it into law.

"It's not an easy task," Harrell says. "There are so many elements in the mix. I think we're getting there but the clock is running on the session. I'm concerned about the possibility of an intentional delay that could cost us as the time grows short."

Harrell says legislators are doing due diligence on the issues. He adds that public support for the reforms is as broad as the coalition that has been pushing it. Those groups range from the ACLU to Louisiana Family Forum.

Harrell says he's worked on criminal justice reform in eight different states and that each of them has produced multi-year efforts. He expects the same thing in Louisiana and he says the compromise worked out with the district attorneys is based on continuing the review of the state's criminal code.

"At the end of the day, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who has not been touched either directly or indirectly by the toll that our draconian approach to criminal justice has exacted on our state," Harrell says. "What we're trying to undo is 40 years of failed criminal justice policies."

Harrell says the core bills were derived from the analysis of statistics provided by the Department of Corrections.

"The Pew Foundation brought us the data-driven analysis of what's been taking place here," Harrell explains. "They said, 'Here it is. Take it or leave it.' We've taken some of it and left some of it. I expect we'll be revisiting this again in the years ahead."

He says data-driven criminal justice reform efforts in Texas have been ongoing for more than 15 years. The Mississippi reform efforts are in their third year.

One element of the reform effort that will continue after this session is the formation of a task force to examine the creation of a felony class system in Louisiana's criminal code. Creation of the felony class system was part of the original SB220 by Senate President John Alario. It was stripped from the bill when it was considered by Senate Judiciary C on May 2 after Adams and the LDAA objected that the proposal needed more study.

The bill was amended to create the Louisiana Felony Class System Task Force. Adams and the LDAA wanted greater influence in the review process. In all, more than 60 changes were made to SB220 by the committee, most of those the product of negotiations involving the DAs and the governor.

SB221, also by Alario, would amend the state's habitual offender law by reducing the amount of time that could elapse before earlier convictions could be removed from an offender's record. The habitual offender law allows tougher sentences for repeat offenders. The bill also reduces the severity of sentences that can be imposed using the habitual offender statute. The bill would not affect sentencing involving sex crimes or crimes of violence.

Data from the DOC reveals that the majority of state prisoners admitted into the system each year are now for parole violations. Parole violations range from failure to report to a parole officer to failure to pay fees or the parolee having committed another crime.

SB139 by Sen. Danny Martiny of Jefferson Parish reforms the state's sentencing and parole guidelines. Adams tells The Independent that he expects SB139 to be amended on the Senate floor on Tuesday as part of the compromise reached on the overall package.

The House Administration of Criminal Justice Committee sent SB16 to the floor of the House but with amendments. The bill authored by Justice Reinvestment Task Force member Sen. Dan Claitor of Baton Rouge seeks to put the state's criminal code in line with rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States on the issue of life sentences without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders.

The court ruled in 2012 that life sentences for juvenile offenders without the benefit of parole was unconstitutional. In 2016, the court reaffirmed the decision involving a Louisiana case, Montgomery vs. Louisiana, saying that the 2012 decision applied retroactively to all juveniles who had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Claitor's bill would create a path to possible parole for the roughly 300 Louisiana inmates who were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole while they were juveniles. However, as amended by the committee, the bill would still allow prosecutors to pursue life without parole sentences in some cases involving a juvenile. In other words, the state law would be in apparent violation of the Supreme Court's Montgomery decision.
The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option.
The Carbondale Police Department has reported that Lee Batie, the subject of a missing person report, was located Tuesday by the Illinois State Police in central Illinois, according to a release from the department.

The release said he was found to be safe and in good health.

Carbondale police said in a Monday news release that at 8:40 p.m. this past Thursday, officers responded to the 1400 block of Old West Main Street in reference to a report of a missing person. Officers learned that Batie, 78, was last seen at 12:30 p.m. Monday, May 8, leaving his apartment.

Police said Batie was recently diagnosed with Parkinsons disease and has early onset dementia.

 The Southern
MURPHYSBORO  Once upon a time in Murphysboro, mothers with about half a dozen children could somehow manage to make room or one more meal for someone elses child.

They would also challenge the establishment on some need for their children and, if someone elses child got out of line, didnt wait to check with that childs parent, often doling out the correction or punishment themselves.

While their names might not be familiar to many in Murphysboro, they still have meaning to a handful of Murphysboro residents, mainly those who graduated from the citys once-segregated schools, the first-through-eighth-grade Carver and Douglas Schools (for high school, they attended the integrated Murphysboro Township High School). Some graduates of those two schools have paid tribute to some of the oldest surviving mothers, and other moms in the city, in a recently produced photo book simply titled Matriarchs of Murphysboro.

The project was an idea of members of the Murphysboro Black Alumni Society, who wanted to find a way to raise funds to contribute to scholarships they award to graduating Murphysboro high school seniors. This past week, society members awarded $1,000 scholarships to four students and awarded a past graduate another $500 award to help her with college expenses.

In the past few years, society members estimate they have awarded at least $1,000 in scholarships to Murphysboro high school graduates.

The photo book

The book prominently features seven women, the oldest living mothers of some of the schools past graduates, and includes photos of several dozen more mothers. In addition to Luella Hughes, the seven featured are Rosie Robinson; Erie Booker; Earlene Sanders, who was 90 when she passed on April 17 at her home in Murphysboro; Maggie McIntire; Ettarene Kerrens; and Aaron Freeman.

There are also pictures of 42 other mothers from the community who are still living. Another section includes mothers from the community who are now deceased and also includes the names of women whose families were not able to supply a photo of their matriarch. The book includes pictures of women such as Pearl Watson, whose family farmed and sold produce and whose prominence led to a road in Murphysboro being named in their honor, according to Deborah Shaffer, president of the society. In addition to the homemakers, they include the photos of Murphysboro mothers who were teachers, pastor's wives, a school cook and an employee of the Woolworth store that was once in the city.

"A lot of these women, growing up, they had a big influence on my life," Shaffer said. "All the mothers, they pitched in to help raise the kids in the community. It didn't matter if you were their's or not, if you were out of order or doing something you shouldn't (be doing), they would kind of get you back in line. We had that kind of understanding."

All adults themselves, Shaffer and others use courtesy titles as they refer to the women in the book  "Mother," even if they are not their mothers, or "Mrs."

The photographs for the book were taken by Martin Bankhead, a former graduate of the Murphysboro schools, of Bankhead Studios in Raleigh, North Carolina. The photo book costs $100; Bankhead matched the money raised from the sales of the photo books.

Mothers to many

I think the true meaning of matriarch of Murphysboro is  when they said it takes a community to raise a child, thats truly what happened," said Hughes' daughter, Joyce Sherrill Stephenson.

"They would treat you as your mother (did; they would) treat the other mothers children as if they were the mothers, making sure they were safe, making sure they had some food if they were hungry, and if they needed to spend the night, my mother was always the one (who allowed it)."

She said some families, like hers of 14, had many children, but a few more in their house never seemed to matter.

"You got 10 kids, we got 10 more staying with us," Stephenson said. "We would sleep on the floor. But thats what other mothers did, they would take care of other mothers kids."

The production of the books was a one-shot deal, Shaffer said. Pre-orders were taken and no additional copies are available.

"It's just a beautiful book," Shaffer said. "It's just a historical (product). This book will last forever and (can) pass on to the children, the grandchildren."
OLIVE BRANCH  When the rain wouldnt quit earlier this month and the Mississippi continued to rise, Alexander County officials looked at what is left of the Len Small Levee and knew one thing  water was going to come through.

And it did.

Alexander County Engineer Jeff Denny said about a mile of the levee is gone as a result of last years flood in January. Denny said The New Years flood breached the levee, leaving the hole that water is currently moving through, damaging farms, homes and public roads.

Denny said it shouldnt be this way. The county participates in Public Law 84-99, which is a rehabilitation program through the Army Corps of Engineers.

If theres a flood, you have damage to your levee system, they come in afterwards and make whatever repairs you need, Denny said.

He said to even be considered for this program, which pays about 80 percent of the costs for repairs, the levee district has to make regular repairs and inspections, all of which are paid for through levee district funds. He said while they have made sure to meet these standards, the Corps still denied to help them make repairs to the Len Small Levee.

Denny said before any money is allocated, the project has to pass a cost benefit analysis. He said after the Corps surveys an area damaged by flooding, they have to come up with a score above 1. The Len Small levee and the surrounding area scored around 0.8  just under the threshold to receive aid.

Denny and others in the county weren't pleased.

Its pretty frustrating," Denny said. "You go through these hoops and do all these things the Corps says and then when you really need their help they tell you, You're out of luck.

He said typically there has not been a big issue in getting funding for repairs through PL 84-99. However, he suspects the size of the breach and the cost to repair it threw off the needed ratio.

The cost to repair the levee, Denny said, would come to $15 million, or nearly 200 times the yearly allotment the levee district receives from its tax base.

Alexander County Treasurer Jerry Smith said on 2015-payable 2016 tax records, the Len Small Levee District received about $74,005.

According to Jim Tafflinger, treasurer for the Len Small Levee District, this figure comes from the $3 per acre tax on property within the district. This rate is less than half, Tafflinger said, of the $7.50 that the East Cape Levee District to the north charges. He said the district may consider raising the rate to help offset the cost of repair, but no decisions have been made.

Smith said because the levee district is a private, taxable entity the county would likely not contribute to the repair effort.

This all leaves a question mark over the future of the Len Small Levee and its surrounding land and homes. Denny said the county has been working with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the Office of Water Resources on how to fix the levee and they have essentially designed a new levee that would be set back from the original, with its ends tying into the existing levee system.

However, one thing stands in its way.

The problem we have now is, with the water flowing back through there, we dont know what we are looking at as far as, like, additional scouring of the ground, Denny said, adding that it could be weeks before the water recedes enough to know how much more damage was caused by this years flood. He said it could mean going back to the drawing board and struggling even more to find funding.

Tafflinger said part of the problem with PL 84-99 is its scoring system. He said the Army Corps looks at damage to utilities, roads and homes  but not farmland, which makes up most of the district.

He said there has been talk of getting out of the group all together, as Tafflinger said it doesnt make sense to do all the work jumping through the Corps hoops to not get help in the end.

He said it may be up to levee district residents to fix the levee.

Its farmer built from the beginning, he said.

In the past, Tafflinger said, the levee district has worked out a plan with local farmers to pay a percentage of the repair costs and reimburse for fuel in exchange for them repairing the levee with their own equipment. That reduces the cost of repairing the levee, especially when compared to what Tafflinger described as the out of touch with reality, estimates the Corps gives.

This plan, combined with low interest loans, Tafflinger said, may be the route they take this summer. However, he said, it is dependent on when grounds get planted and farmers have time to do it.

Denny said the hole in the levee flooded about 20,000 acres in Alexander County, which is far worse then had there been a proper levee in place, forcing residents and officials alike to realize the need to repair the wall.

Everyone sees the effects now of not having a levee in place, Denny said.

How this repair shapes up is still up in the air, though.

We will just have to wait and see, Tafflinger said.
iStock/Thinkstock(MOUNT WASHINGTON, Ky.) -- A Kentucky woman received a Mother's Day surprise Sunday when she gave birth to her son while on the way to the hospital.



Christy High of Mount Washington, Kentucky, said her son was ready to come as she was riding in the back seat of the family car.



"I tried reasoning with him [the baby] and asked for a few more minutes, but he wasn't cooperating," High joked. "He wailed [when] he came out, and that was the first time my husband knew what was going on. He said, 'What was that?' and I said, 'It's Oliver. It's OK.'"



"I wouldn't have it any other way than how it went down," she added. "He will always be the best Mother's Day gift I ever got."



High, who is now a mom of two, told ABC News that she went into labor in the early morning hours of May 14.



As her husband, Jon High, was driving her to the hospital, her water broke, she said.



Oliver Joseph High was born two weeks early at 6:10 a.m., weighing 6 pounds, 10 ounces.



High, a hypno-doula, delivered her son herself and placed him on her chest where he immediately began nursing, she said.



Staff at Clark Memorial in Jeffersonville, Indiana, greeted the family upon their arrival.



High said her husband is "ecstatic" about the couple's bundle of joy.



"He was very nervous being the driver, I'm sure, but he was my rock star," she added. "He got us here safely and he is an amazing father."



Oliver joins big sister Rowan, 3, who was born on St. Patrick s Day in 2014.

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
South Carolina State University graduate Kara McCullough is gaining praise for not only winning the title of Miss USA on Sunday but also for her work ethic.

Congratulations to our loyal daughter, Miss Kara McCullough, for winning the prestigious title of Miss USA. S.C. State University is beyond proud of her, as she accomplished a momentous feat, S.C. State President James E. Clark said in a prepared statement Monday.

This national platform will increase the level of exposure to Karas commitment to STEM education awareness. Her recent win also puts the world on notice about S.C. State University -- that from these hallowed halls, graduates are transformed to leaders with the potential to leave an indelible mark in the world, Clark said.

McCullough was named Miss South Carolina State University during the 2012-13 academic year. She graduated in May 2013 with a bachelors degree in chemistry, with an emphasis in radiochemistry.

The 25-year-old works in Washington in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, where the NRC reports she has been for nearly four years as an emergency preparedness specialist.

McCullough reviews emergency plans for both new and operating nuclear facilities, including nuclear power plants. She's also a member of one of the agency's incident response teams.

Vic McCree, executive director for operations at the NRC, said, "The NRC is proud of Kara not just for winning the Miss USA pageant, but for her hard work and dedication to regulating nuclear facilities as an emergency preparedness specialist in the agency."

McCree added, "We are pleased that such a multi-talented young woman is part of our dedicated and excellent staff."

McCullough was active at S.C. State.

She held the title of Miss Black and Gold for the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., Beta Delta Chapter, and was a member of S.C. States Honors College, the American Chemical Society, the Health Physics Society, the American Association of Blacks in Engineering and the American Nuclear Society.

McCullough was also inducted into the Alpha Nu Sigma Honor Society, the Golden Key Honor Society and the National Society of Black Engineers.

She served as the secretary for the Chem Phi Chem Society and the Louis Stokes-South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation Program.

McCullough was also a volunteer with the Dream, Believe, Know it, Foundation, an organization that provided education programs, workshops and seminars.

The Virginia Beach, Virginia, native is the daughter of Betty Ann Parker-McCullough and Artensel E. McCullough. She represented the District of Columbia during Sundays pageant.

She will represent the United States at the Miss Universe 2017 pageant.

Her victory marked the second year in a row that the Miss USA crown went to the District of Columbia.

As she joked earlier in the competition, McCullough hoped to win the crown to give D.C. "back to back" wins "like Drake." Miss D.C. 2016 Deshauna Barber won the competition last year.

Miss New Jersey Chhavi Verg was the runner-up and Miss Minnesota Meridith Gould was the second runner-up.

Among the top five  Minnesota, Illinois, South Carolina, New Jersey and District of Columbia  four were women of color, which didn't go unnoticed, with social media celebrating the #blackgirlmagic on the Miss USA stage.

Miss South Carolina USA 2017 is Megan Gordon, a native of North Augusta.
The hurricane season will begin June 1  and no one should have to tell South Carolinians about the risk. After devastating flooding in 2015 that was triggered in part by a tropical system and Hurricane Matthew a year later in October 2016, the state has ample reason to ensure readiness.

Around the nation, Hurricane Awareness Week concluded May 13. The annual observance is about asking people to determine their risk factors and know what to do for preparedness.

On Friday, S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, emergency management officials, state agency directors and local officials participated in South Carolinas annual Hurricane Tabletop Exercise.

The governor leads the annual exercise to ensure that state agencies, local emergency managers and local governments are prepared to respond should a hurricane or other natural disaster threaten South Carolina. This year's exercise focused on pre-landfall and post-landfall coordination, including evacuations and sheltering, but will also involve discussion of lessons learned from Hurricane Matthew.

South Carolina will observe its own Hurricane Awareness Week from May 28-June 3, when the S.C. Emergency Management Division, agencies of the State Emergency Response Team and county emergency managers will be engaged in activities to highlight disaster preparedness in the state

On Sunday, May 28, the official 2017 South Carolina Hurricane Guide will be released via The Times and Democrat and nine other newspapers on or near the coast. The guide will also be available in 20 S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles offices and at any Walgreens store statewide. The guide will be available for download at www.scemd.org.

In preparing for this years storm season, South Carolina officials and residents can look to the Matthew experience. Locally, The T&D Region again fulfilled its mission as a primary coastal evacuation zone, but the hurricane reinforced the reality that hurricanes are a threat beyond the coastline.

 Matthews winds ripped through The T&D Region Friday night, Oct. 7, and Saturday morning, Oct. 8, downing trees and power lines, leaving the entire region a declared natural disaster area.

 A peak wind gust of 64 mph was reported Saturday morning at the Orangeburg Municipal Airport. The gust was the highest recorded in the Midlands during the hurricane.

 The Orangeburg Airport recorded 6.28 inches of rain with other reports including 9.7 inches in Santee, 8.4 inches in Holly Hill and 4.5 inches in North.

 Power outages were a major issue. About 20,431 Department of Public Utilities customers were without power at 1 p.m. Saturday, the peak of the outage.

 In total, there was $6.7 million in damage to Orangeburg Countys homes from Matthew, with 21 destroyed, 145 receiving major damage, 222 with minor damage and 105 more suffering some impact.

 Twenty-eight businesses caught Matthews wrath, with nine destroyed. Commercial property damage reached a total value of $505,500.

 Damage to public properties reached $50,275.

 Orangeburg County crop assessments showed a 15 to 20 percent loss in cotton and a 5 percent loss for peanuts and soybeans.

 The overall value in residential, commercial and public damage reached $7.3 million.

Local disaster officials stressed the storm is proof of the need to be prepared for hurricanes, particularly with regard to supplies to sustain a family while power is out. These include food, water, shelter and clothing.

Matthew re-established the wisdom of Orangeburg County Emergency Services Director Billy Staleys words: We encourage them to continue to prepare and make sure they have a plan that sustains them for five days. We always encourage people to plan for five days as we have seen with the last couple of disasters we had, we can anticipate long-range power outages or power outages in excess of three days."
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By Azernews





By Laman Ismayilova

The Indian Embassy in Baku will hold an event in the State Musical Theatre named after Rashid Behbudov to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Azerbaijan and India.

The Embassy invites everyone to enjoy colorful and enchanting Indian Dance and Song Show on May 15. The show will start at 19:00.

India has close and friendly relations with Azerbaijan and was among the first countries to recognize Azerbaijan and establish diplomatic ties.

Last year the trade and economic exchanges between India and Azerbaijan progressed from strength to strength, increasing by 63 percent in 2016 as compared to 2015.

India has recently facilitated the visa application procedures for Azerbaijan.

From now on, Azerbaijani nationals would be able to get online e-Visa for visits to India for recreation, sightseeing, casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business.



Earlier in December 2016, Azerbaijan revealed the list of countries, whose citizens will be able to visit the Land of Fire fast and without tedious procedures. India became one of the 81 countries who is able to take advantage of ASAN Visa system, which will make life of many foreigners easier.
By Azernews





By Amina Nazarli

The Parliamentary Committee on Labor and Social Policy Issues is discussing a bill on Tourism.

Head of the Social Legislation Department of the Parliament Adil Valiyev, addressing the discussions, noted that a number of issues remain open in the bill mentioning the issue of the recreational zones.

One of the major problems in the draft law is related to the issuance of permission for construction of such zones, according to the MP.

The matter is who will supervise the construction. We need to come to a joint agreement with the Culture and Tourism Ministry, so that entrepreneurs have no additional problems with this issue, he said.

Valiyev also noted that the article of the bill on tourism expertise should be prepared more concisely.

The draft law also requires amendments to the article on the State Tourism Register, according to him.

There are certain problems with the online system. It is necessary that an appeal to the Registry service is made online, and then the activities of the applicants are checked, Veliyev said, emphasizing the need for simplifying the process

The department head at the Culture and Tourism Ministry Mahir Gahramanov, spoke of the necessity to carry out coordination work to represent Azerbaijan's tourism opportunities as a tourist product.

The invited Turkish experts noted that, in Azerbaijan like as in Turkey, it is necessary to present a separate document for the work of enterprises and an investment document for the start of construction for the development of recreational zones. We seek to reduce to zero the obstacles entrepreneurs face in this regard, increase the number of places of residence, expand the infrastructure, thereby develop the region and eliminate unemployment, he said.

He noted that it is necessary to identify the places with thermal springs, and plan how they can be used. "However, these issues are not within the competence of the Ministry of Culture, but should be decided by the relevant structures," Gahramanov said, stressing that it is the ministry's responsibility to present these resources as a tourist product.
By Azernews





By Amina Nazarli

The Baku International Policy and Security Network Expert Council and Russian Center of Lev Gumilev signed an agreement on cooperation.

The agreement was signed in Baku by Director of the Lev Gumilev Center Pavel Zarifullin and Director of the Baku International Policy and Security Network, PhD Elkhan Alasgarov.

The event was timed to coincide with the 105th birthday anniversary of the outstanding Russian scientist-Turkologist, Lev Gumilev, who is the author of numerous scientific works on the history of ancient Turks and their influence on the ethnogenesis of the modern Russian people.

Speaking about the traditions of friendship and cooperation between the peoples of Russia and Azerbaijan, the parties expressed their intention to promote development and strengthening of the ties between the intellectual elites of the two countries.

The parties plan to hold joint meetings of representatives of the expert community, the intellectual elite, as well as Turkologists in order to promote cooperation and strengthen scientific and socio-cultural ties

On the same day, an expert discussion was held on the Baku Network platform, dedicated to Lev Gumilev's creative heritage and its significance for Russia and Azerbaijan.
By Azernews





By Rashid Shirinov

Today, Washington is not interested in resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in any of its variants, said Mikhail Chernov, an expert at Russias Center of Strategic Conjuncture.

Chernov, made the remark as he commented on the recent remarks by U.S. co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Richard Hoagland, who said that the U.S. and Russia, despite the existing differences between them, closely work on resolving the Karabakh conflict.

Hoagland, talking to Voice of America also noted that all three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group have closely cooperated to achieve a peaceful resolution to the Karabakh conflict and they try to resume full-fledged negotiations between the parties to the conflict.

Mikhail Chernov told Day.Az that there's nothing new or revolutionary in the statement of the American diplomat.

Azerbaijan and Armenia mean diametrically opposite things by the resolution of the conflict. As for the U.S., at the moment I do not see that Washington is interested in resolving the conflict in any of its variants, the expert said.

He further noted that with rising tensions in the Middle East, the U.S. is interested in Azerbaijan as a possible instrument of pressure on Iran. From this point of view, Americans do not need the calm Azerbaijan, Chernov said.

The expert reminded that there is the Russian military base in Armenia, and Armenia is the link to the Middle East for Russia and the transport corridor to Iran. It is unlikely that Americans need peace and absence of conflict along the road through Zangezur to Iran, he assumed.

Chernov added that the possible international intensification around the conflict does not always mean that it will soon be resolved.

Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a lengthy war that ended with signing of a fragile ceasefire in 1994. Since the war, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

While the OSCE Minsk Group acted as the only mediator in resolution of the conflict, the occupation of the territory of the sovereign state with its internationally recognized boundaries has been left out of due attention of the international community for years.

Armenia ignores four UN Security Council resolutions on immediate withdrawal from the occupied territory of Azerbaijan, thus keeping tension high in the region.
By Azernews





By Sara Israfilbayova

Regulating the Syrian crisis will be at a table of talks between the Russian and Turkish leaders in Ankara.

The military of Russia and Turkey will discuss the borders of de-escalation in Syria at a meeting in Ankara, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a news conference on the results of his visit to China, RIA Novosti reported.

Firstly, we will discuss, of course, constantly with the Syrian side on the specific boundaries of the de-escalation territories and secondly, the elements of control will be discussed: how, where and what will control, Putin told.

The agreement on the creation of de-escalation zones signed by Iran, Russia and Turkey in the Kazakh capital, Astana, is the latest in a series of ceasefire proposals aimed at ending Syria's war, now in its seventh year.

The document envisages the cessation of hostilities between the sides, conditions for returning refugees, the restoration of destroyed urban infrastructure and the access of humanitarian organizations. Moreover, the checkpoints to control the movement of civilians and the ceasefire regime will be created along the de-escalation zone borders.

The memorandum specifies that a six-month renewable truce begins on May 6 and that the government's air force will halt all flights over the de-escalation areas.

The four zones cover areas in the provinces of Damascus, Idlib, Latakia, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Deraa and Quneitra.

A deal on the so-called de-escalation zones in Syria has been received with mixed reactions by residents of the affected areas.

While some were optimistic that it would benefit civilians, others expressed doubt over its sustainability.

High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini said that the Syrians, as a first step, need to implement the decisions taken on the cessation of hostilities and the de-escalation of violence, as well as to guarantee that humanitarian aid reaches all people in need and this what the EU is focused on at the moment and especially the political track.

Armed conflict continues in Syria since March 2011. Government troops are confronted by militants of different armed rebel groups. Russia has begun airstrikes on terrorist facilities in Syria since 30 September 2015. The Russian military involvement follows an official request from President Bashar Assad to President Vladimir Putin.
Deyaar Development, one of the UAEs largest property development and real estate services companies, has selected Yardi Voyager 7S to perform lease and property management across its extensive project portfolio.



Alongside Voyager 7S, which streamlines property accounting, lease and property management, Deyaar has adopted Orion Business Intelligence. This powerful, fully mobile solution has more than 200 built-in key performance indicators and flexible reports and dashboards that help monitor and improve property and portfolio performance.



The UAE market has successfully emerged as a dynamic hub for global real estate, combining technology and state-of-the-art infrastructure to offer an international standard of living, said Hani Fansa, chief financial officer of Deyaar Development.



Since Deyaar is fully committed to design smarter lifestyles through up-to-date leasing and property management services, we have adopted Yardi software to support the full range of our business' services, help us enhance processes, and maximise customer satisfaction.



We are extremely pleased to announce that Deyaar Development has selected Yardi to support its operations in Dubai, said Neal Gemassmer, vice president of international for Yardi. Our solutions are used to manage assets in some of the most dynamic cities worldwide which serves to further demonstrate not only our multinational culture but our focus on continued innovation of real estate technology solutions. - TradeArabia News Service
The NFPA 285 testing, which has been made mandatory by the new UAE fire code, will help create fireproof buildings in the emirates, said leading industry experts at a key summit in Dubai, UAE.



The NFPA 285 is a standardised fire test procedure for evaluating the suitability of exterior, non-load-bearing wall assemblies and panels used as components of curtain-wall assemblies on buildings where the exterior walls are required to be non-combustible.



More than 200 industry players attended a joint seminar by leading players in the building sector - Alupex, Knauf Insulation and Siderise - to discuss the implications of UAEs new Fire and Life Safety code.



Alupex is a major brand from Interplast Company, a unit of Group Harwal. It has experience in manufacturing aluminium composite panels for more than 11 years at its factory in Sharjah, UAE.



Knauf Insulation is one of the worlds largest manufacturers of insulation products and solutions with more than 40 years of experience in the industry, while Siderise is a leading UK-based manufacturer of firestop and acoustic barrier systems for the curtain-walling industry.



Building contractors, developers and consultants were given an in-depth analysis of the new test known as NFPA 285 made mandatory by the new fire code.



"It is important to note that NFPA 285 is an assembly test, all of the components of the facade need to be tested together in a full-scale system," stated David Adams, the managing director of Knauf Exeed Insulation in the Middle East and South Asia.



"The cladding system contributes to flame spread resulting in risk of multiple simultaneous secondary fires. If the external cladding or insulation contributes to the flame spread, then there is a risk of secondary fire spread to all levels of a building," noted Adams.



"The NFPA 285 test will ensure that every material that goes into a system meets the fire safety norms. Only approved non-combustible thermal insulation should be used. Glass mineral wool insulation, which has better thermal insulation and is non-combustible, is what we recommend for better fire safety," he added.



Pravin Kulkarni, the general manager of Interplast Company, highlighted the companys Alupex A2 NFPA 285 tested wall assembly that meets the stringent standards set by the new fire code.



Chris Hall, the commercial development officer at Siderise, manufacturer of Lamatherm perimeter firestop and cavity barrier, said: "The primary criteria when choosing insulation and materials should be their fire resistance capacity."



"The new code ensures that tests shall be conducted for the entire assembly that is intended for use on the building facade, including wall panels, cavities, insulation, panel rails, joint sealants, seams, fasteners, barriers and other construction details," he added.



Abhishek Chhabra, the business development manager at Thomas Bell-Wright International Consultants, which offers NFPA 285 testing and certification in the UAE, spoke about the importance of third-party certification in ensuring that all components of the system are fully tested for fire safety compliance.-TradeArabia News Service
The UAEs Health and Prevention Minister Abdul Rahman Mohammed Al Owais has issued a ministerial decree on the declaration of death which is expected to support the national organ transplantation programme.

The decree covers three main provisions, namely death resulting from cardiac-respiratory arrest; death resulting from complete loss of brain functions; and pediatric brain death guidelines.

Dr Amin Hussein Al Amiri, Assistant Undersecretary for the Ministrys Public Health Policy and Licensing sector, emphasised that the UAE is keeping abreast of the latest developments in global health legislations and international health standards and is modernising the state health legislative initiatives to improve local services according to global standards.

Sustainable health solution

Dr Al Amiri said that the recently issued ministerial decree complements the national program for organ transplantation as embodied in Federal Law No 5 of 2016, that excludes stem cells, blood cells and bone marrow transplants. It is a sustainable health solution, especially for individuals suffering from cancer, heart disease, pulmonary failure, hepatic fibrosis, and kidney failure. He reiterated the UAEs commitment to criminalise illegal organ transplant procedures, saying these violate human dignity.



Clinical death

After studying similar regional and global cases, a national committee composed of all local health authorities prepared the latest resolution in consultation with the General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Endowments. The decree was made in response to the urgent need to enact legislation on the declaration of death in a bid to protect hospitals and enable doctors to stop the suffering of brain-dead patients. The question of clinical death is a medical and legal problem, while the issue of organ transplants has raised vital ethical issues such as the clear definition of death and the timing and manner of authorising the transplant procedures.

Patient protection

He said a number of patients diagnosed with kidney and liver failures, among others, will go abroad to seek organ transplants. Out of desperation, however, they fall prey on false promises of non-specialised centres, especially those located in some Asian countries. Worse, they might become infected with AIDS and viral hepatitis as a result of the fraudulent procedure. The ministerial resolution, he said, will protect UAE patients from becoming victims.

Moreover, the resolution aims to help contribute to the enhancement of the countrys medical tourism. Significant investments are expected to pour into the country with the opening of new international centres specialising in organ transplants. It also allows the establishment of a national organ bank and a database to record all individuals who signify their wish to donate their organs upon their deaths.

Our role is to spread this culture and the importance of social and educational awareness within this context. We also hope to establish an environment where people will be motivated to donate their organs to help thousands of patients in need of transplants, reduce the burden on hospitals, lessen the costs on the state and society, and urge insurance companies to cover organ transplants, he said.

An organ donor can save 5 to 8 lives

Dr Al Amiri explained that organ transplant will take place only in accredited public and private hospitals with Ministry-approved standards and prior approval of competent authorities to ensure patient safety and implementation of correct procedures.

According to him, one donor can save five to eight lives. Organs that have been successful transplanted include the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and intestines, while tissues include bone, tendons, cornea, skin, heart valves, nerves, and veins. Worldwide, kidney transplantation is the most common, followed by liver then heart. He pointed out the importance of keeping the identity of the donor and his family confidential as well as the name of the beneficiary.

Cardiac arrest and loss of brain functions

Dr Al Amiri also noted that the resolution differentiates between the declaration of death resulting from cardio-respiratory arrest and death resulting from complete loss of brain functions. This serves as a guide to hospitals, especially for those with intensive care units. Brain death is defined as an irreversible cessation of all functions of all parts of the brain.

The decree also explained the conditions and exceptions for the declaration of brain death, including proper diagnosis through clinical preliminary examination, then the brain reflexes test with the visual response to light. It also covers the observation period, or intervals between clinical tests, and protocols. The results of these tests should be duly recorded along with the electrical brain layout. The time interval between the tests varies according to the age groups, from 48 hours for infants to 6 hours for adults.

Lastly, confirmation tests should be done either through electroencephalogram (EEG), cerebral vascular imaging, or apnea test with explanation of how it is performed and general considerations. The apnea test is positive if there is no respiratory activity during the separation of the patient from the ventilator.

Pediatric brain death

For pediatric brain death, the decree mandates 48- hour observation period for infants aged 7 days to two months; 24 hours for infants aged two months to 1 year; with 2 electroencephalograms separated by a period of 24 hours and both showing the absolute lack of effectiveness of brain or one ECG showing brain inactivity and lack of blood flow to the brain confirmed through CT scan or radioisotope; and children aged 1 year and until puberty, the same adult protocol is followed except the observation period which must be at least 12 hours. After puberty, the same protocol for adults is followed.

Sustainable organ transplant program

Dr Ali Abdul Kareem Al Obaidli, chair of the National Organ Transplant Committee, praised the completion of procedures allowing the expenditure of the national organ transplant program, including organ donation upon death. He said that the efforts of the countrys wise leadership and the Ministry of Health and Prevention will lead to the establishment of a sustainable program for organ transplants given that the UAE enjoys modern health infrastructure and the willingness of the citizens and residents to donate their organs as per the results of various surveys and studies in support of the National Organ Transplantation Program.

Clear criteria

Dr Marwan Al Mulla, director of the Department of Health Regulation of Dubai Health Authority, said this Ministerial decree No. 550 of 2017, which set the standards in the declaration of death according to the Federal Law on Medical Liability No. (4) of 2016, will lead to the rearrangement of priorities for hospital-based healthcare programs to prevent patients in critical conditions to be moved to less efficient healthcare centres.

It also seeks to increase the hospitals capacity and capability to receive more emergency cases that require intensive and continuous care. The decree aims to provide financial support to patients, their families, and healthcare providers, in addition to establishing clear criteria that will lend credibility to the process of death declaration. Lastly, it strives to promote organ donations to help critical patients according to relevant legislations.  TradeArabia News Service
Investment bank Audacia Capital and Dr Abdul Karim Msaddi, founder of the Dubai Neuro Spinal Hospital, have entered into a partnership to establish a leading neuroscience and spine centre of excellence and an advanced oncology centre in Dubai.



Audacia Capital is leading a group of Saudi and Qatari investors to inject Dh180 million ($49.01 million) into the new 120-bed facility due to open in Dubai Science Park, by late 2018.



The new state-of-the-art hospital will provide leading neuroscience, spine, orthopedic and oncology care, and bring cutting-edge radiosurgery treatments to patients of both the UAE and region for the first time. Oncology and neurosurgery are some of the most sought after specialties for treatment abroad in the region.



Emad Mansour, founder and CEO of Audacia Capital, said: The Neuro Spinal Hospital is renowned for its highly experienced team who are already bringing the most advanced techniques, treatments and technology to the UAE, and delivering quality care through various specialist services. Audacia Capital is committed to supporting this excellent work, which is aligned with the UAEs vision to establish itself as one of the top medical tourism destinations around the world, by driving growth and expansion into new specialist treatments that arent available elsewhere in the region. The new hospital will have state-of the-art medical equipment and be able to attract top international talent across various medical specialties.



He continued: This investment is in response to the growing demand for specialist healthcare within the country and region. We are very proud to have established this partnership, and confident that the new facility will be a game changer for healthcare in the UAE.



Dr Abdul Karim Msaddi established the Neuro Spinal Hospital in 2002, which currently offers neurosurgical, neurological, spinal and orthopedic care through an expert team of specialists, advanced equipment, technology and evidence-based techniques.



Dr Msaddi said: We are very pleased with our new partnership with Audacia. Our shared vision for excellence is what we believe will make this project a success. We aim to bring world-class health care services to Dubai to reduce the practice of referring patients outside the region for treatment. We are committed to excellence in clinical care, innovation and education. Spreading knowledge for the benefit of the community through our educational conferences and courses is something we will remain dedicated to. This new hospital, and the range of education programs it will bring to Dubai, supports our mission.



He continued: Dubai has established a global reputation for innovation in many fields and we are pleased to play our part in enhancing the UAEs reputation as a destination for quality healthcare. Thanks to the visionary leadership of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and the support of the Dubai Health Authority, we were able to attract this investment from GCC investors. With this support, I believe that we will also be able to attract top talent from around the world and bring home the latest technologies, for the benefit of all patients across the region. - TradeArabia News Service
Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), a leading international aluminium smelter in Bahrain, revealed that its safety, health and environment (SHE) senior manager Mohd Khalil has been honoured with The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) 2017 Guardian Angel Award.



Khalil was presented with the award for his exceptional commitment and contribution towards the safety and health of Alba employees, said a statement from the company.



Khalil joined Alba in 1997 as a security officer. His innovative ideas and commitment to safety led to his promotion as the fire engineer followed by fire chief in 2013. He was made manager - SHE, Fire and Security Department in 2016 and in the same year, was promoted to senior manager, it said.



He has constantly endeavoured to cultivate a culture of safety for employees and contractors alike. He is commended for successfully streamlining Albas health and safety procedures to achieve higher levels of efficiency as well as introducing surprise safety visits in all areas of the company, added the statement.



Khalil will be presented with his RoSPA Guardian Angel Award at a ceremony at ExCeL London on June 20, it said.



Albas chief executive officer Tim Murray, said: Khalil deserves the award for his tireless efforts towards setting high standards in safety.



His ownership for safety is remarkable and has set an example on taking Safety into Tomorrowland, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
Abu Dhabi Ports in conjunction with Abu Dhabi Emergency, Crisis and Disasters Management Team is preparing to conduct an emergency response for maritime transport accidents exercise at Zayed Port on May 17.



Abu Dhabi Ports is the master developer, operator and manager of the emirate's commercial and community ports as well as Khalifa Industrial Zone.



The exercise aims to enhance communication and joint planning for emergency response and crisis management with participating entities, said a statement from the company.



Eleven government entities will participate in the exercise, including the National Emergency Crisis and Disaster Management Authority (NCEMA, Crisis Response Office  Abu Dhabi), Abu Dhabi Police, Critical Infrastructure and Coastline Protection Authority (CICPA), General Command of Abu Dhabi Civil Defense, Department of Municipal Affairs and Transport, Environment Agency  Abu Dhabi, Health Authority  Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), Waste Management Centre (Tadweer), Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA), and Emirates Red Crescent, it said.



Captain Mohamed Juma Al Shamisi, CEO of Abu Dhabi Ports, said: The objective of this marine transport emergency and crisis response exercise in Zayed Port is to determine the roles and responsibilities of the participating entities, highlighting their capabilities and identifying areas that require improvement.



The joint exercise will enhance our ports and the participating entities individual capabilities in encountering possible dangers that do require the participation of all sides, he said.



Oure ports has the resources, expertise, and capabilities to deal with emergencies and crises through the Crisis and Emergency Response Centre, and Control Room, National Defense Centre for Fires and Rescue, as well as the necessary equipment to respond to oil spills and hazardous material in Zayed Port. We look forward to taking part in this exercise and to see efficiently we will perform, he added.



Commenting on the upcoming joint exercise, Mohamed Al Tamimi, acting vice president regulations, HSE and security, Abu Dhabi Ports, said: The preparatory stage for the joint exercise outlines the roles and responsibilities of the participating entities.



Observers will be assigned from among the participants to evaluate the exercise. First steps and priorities taken by the response teams will be formed, he said.



Incident classification on an emergency level will be highlighted, and the leading and coordinating decision making entity will be determined. The joint exercise will ensure the availability of all resources and requirements in order to monitor the potential risks of crises and how to address them better and in a real-life scenario, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
The WannaCry ransomware attack has continued to spread, impacting over 10,000 organisations and 200,000 individuals in over 150 countries, according to reports.



While measures have been taken to slow the spread of the malware, new variations have begun to surface, said a report on The Verge.



Europol Director Rob Wainwright told the BBC that the cyberattack is unprecedented in its scale, and noted that it will likely continue as people return to work on Monday.



While Microsoft took the unusual step to issue a patch for Windows XP, the patch will only work if installed, and authorities have been warning businesses to ensure that their systems are updated.



Meanwhile, Microsoft said governments around the world should treat the attacks as a "wake-up call". It blamed governments for storing data on software vulnerabilities which could then be accessed by hackers.



It says the latest virus exploits a flaw in Microsoft Windows identified by, and stolen from, US intelligence, a BBC report said.



Many firms have had experts working over the weekend to prevent new infections. The virus took control of users' files and demanded $300 (230) payments to restore access.



The ransomware attack began on Friday afternoon, where it affected Englands National Health Service, prompted automaker Renault to idle factories in France, and many others.
Saudi Arabia-based Acwa Power has obtained the green signal from Egypts Ministry of Electricity to establish a power plant with a capacity of 2,250 MW at a cost of $2.2 billion in Luxor, a report said.



The ministry negotiated with Luxor governorate to allocate the required land for the project on a usufruct system for 25 years, reported Daily News Egypt.



Under the state guarantee, the government is obliged to pay the companys dues if the Ministry of Electricity fails to pay, it added.



The ministry will sign four agreements with Acwa Power regarding purchasing the energy produced by the project as well as organising the gas supply, state guarantees, and the usufruct system, the report said, citing sources.



The ministry seeks to complete the agreements in the middle of next year.



Hassan Allam Construction will provide 25 per cent of total investments to Dayrut power plant, while General Electric (GE) and Chinese Sepco will supply and install all equipment for the project.



The new power plant will consist of three units with a capacity of 750MW each, operating on a combined cycle system.
Saudi Arabias Alfanar Energy recently signed a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC) for 50mw PV plant under Feed  in  Tariffs Programme, a report said.



The project is located at the proposed 1.8 GW Benban solar complexes in the Aswan governance of Egypt, added the Saudi Gazette report. The project will be one of the first utility scale solar plants in Egypt.



Alfanar Energy has secured non-recourse finance for the project in the order of $55 million from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Islamic Corporation for the Development of Private Sector (ICD).


Saudi Aramco has awarded the National Petroleum Construction Company (NPCC) a new contract for four offshore platforms and associated submarine pipelines, cables and tie ins for Al Safaniya, Zuluf and Berri oilfields.

These EPC contracts for Al Safaniya, Zuluf and Berri Oilfields include engineering, procurement, fabrication, load-out, transportation, installation, hook-up and pre-commissioning work of four offshore platforms (SSS Wellhead Decks) with the associated four subsea pipelines, three submarine cables and downstream tie-ins, said Aqeel A Madhi, CEO of NPCC.

Madhi added that this third contract comes under the scope of the long-term agreement (LTA) between Saudi Aramco and NPCC, signed in October 2016, to help with offshore oil and gas producing platforms and related facilities in the Arabian Gulf.

Saudi Aramco has signed a six-year agreement with NPCC and other contactors. Under the agreement, contractors will be responsible for delivering a number of offshore oil and gas producing platforms, tie-in platforms, pipelines, power cables, and all the related facilities, as required under the current master plan for Saudi Aramco's offshore fields.

Entering into such a strategic agreement with a global major, Saudi Aramco, is an endorsement of NPCCs state-of-the-art expertise, Madhi said.

He stated that these two new contracts will be implemented in 23 months.

NPCC team is qualified and well trained, with years of experience of delivering such projects with NOCs and IOCs, said Madhi.  TradeArabia News Service
Action Hotels, a leading owner, developer and asset manager of branded three- and four-star hotels in the Middle East and Australia, has selected Novotel as the brand partner for its new hotel in Melbourne.



Novotel Melbourne South Wharf, located at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, marks Action Hotels fourth property in Australia and the third in Melbourne.



It is pegged to open Q1 2018 with 347 rooms, 30 more rooms than originally announced, making it the second largest hotel in Actions portfolio. Actions total operating rooms and development pipeline now stands as 3,214 rooms.



Action has built a long-term strategic relationship with AccorHotels and the Novotel Melbourne South Wharf is the 13th hotel together - nine are operating - and it is the second Novotel-branded hotel for Action. Novotel is one of AccorHotels midscale brands, comprising 480 hotels and resorts across 59 countries.



Sheikh Mubarak A M. Al Sabah, Founder and Chairman of Action Hotels said he is delighted to be partnering with AccorHotels once again.



The Novotel Melbourne South Wharf, which is ideally located to service the largest convention centre in the Southern hemisphere. We are very excited about this addition to our Australian portfolio and the potential of this hotel which will offer premium midscale accommodation with best-in-class customer service and quality in a highly sought-after business and leisure destination.



Meanwhile, AccorHotels Pacific chief operating officer, Simon McGrath acknowledged that the significant investment in infrastructure represented by this new Novotel hotel will further increase the capacity for Melbourne to attract significant events, conferences and exhibitions and cater to the domestic and international travel markets.



"Novotel is a leading worldwide brand that is thriving globally and in the Australian market, and we are delighted to be again partnering with Action Hotels Group and Sheikh Mubarak on a fourth local hotel project under the brand. We believe this latest partnership in Melbourne will deliver an out-standing 4-star hotel for Melbourne that will provide great support to the citys strong events calendar and tourism industry, McGrath said. - TradeArabia News Service


Sofitel The Palm has appointed Lars Heemann as the new food and beverage (F&B) director for the award-winning five-star property.



With over 24 years experience in the hotel industry, Heemann has worked with prestigious hotel brands across the globe and brings his extensive knowledge of the hospitality and F&B industry to his new role at Sofitel The Palm.



Raised in Hamburg, Germany, Heemann started his career at Marriott Hotel, Hamburg as a casual waiter. Following five years with the hotel, he moved to London where he worked for both Morriott Hotel Marbel Arch and Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square.



In 2002, Heemann ventured to the US where he took the position of event service manager at JW Marriott Desert Ridge, Resort & Spa, Phoenix until 2004. Lars next role brought him back to Germany, where he reprised the role of catering and conference services manager at The Ritz-Carlton, Wolfsburg. In this role, he was responsible for leading and managing all activity in the hotel and ensuring it was executed to the highest standard.



In 2008, Heeman joined Hotels Astoria & Angleterre, St Petersburg as the director of group and event sales, before being promoted to director of F&B in 2011. Continuing his journey in Russia, Heemann took a job in Moscow at Hotel Metropol as director of F&B. Here he increased the hotels profit and revenues by 14.1 per cent, and managed the hotel conversion from state to privately owned. - TradeArabia News Service
Baros Maldives has announced the appointment of Daniel Draxl as its new marketing manager.



Draxl is already known in the hospitality industry through his previous appointment as marketing manager for the Kitzbuehel Tourism Board at his hometown in the Tyrolean Alps (Austria).



Draxl has been involved in the tourism industry for 15 years having specialised in tourism while at school and doing internships with the Solring Hof Sylt in Germany, Dorint Sofitel Schweizerhof Berlin, La Borne Imperiale in Burgundy, Hilton Conrad in Brussels and The Dolder Grand, Zurich. He holds an Austrian-French double Bachelors degree in International Business Studies and a Masters degree in Business Studies from four universities in Italy, France, Germany and Spain. He is fluent in German, English, Italian, French and Spanish.



Although this is his first appointment outside Europe, Draxl sees similarities through having previously worked in one of the most prestigious destinations in the Alps. Even if the destinations are completely different, there are similarities in the positioning, like understated luxury and elegance, he says.



He brings to his appointment at Baros Maldives a good understanding of the main markets together with 100 per cent service orientation, dedication, and high level of motivation in promoting Baros as an outstanding bijou property. Draxl said he joined Baros Maldives because of its exceptional reputation as one of the most prestigious resorts in the world. There is a great team and established structure here with special attention paid to details. From the very first moment I could feel the trust management gives in all we do.



During the next few months, he said, we have the challenges of promoting the changes at the resorts Cayenne Restaurant, in the exclusive Baros Residence as well as in the Baros Pool Villas and Deluxe Villas. In addition, the traditional Sails Bar is to be refurbished. He said that Baros Maldives, although opened in 1973, is constantly evolving, keeping it modern and stylish while retaining its acclaimed status as the most romantic resort in the Maldives. - TradeArabia News Service
A coal-bed methane company in the midst of bankruptcy has received another extension on a hearing before the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, but the states regulatory body appears to be reaching the end of its patience.

Storm Cat Energy has 2,432 wells on state, federal and private land across two counties in northern Wyoming, which either need integrity testing or reclamation, and is short $10.8 million in bonds.

The bankrupt Denver-based company also has a series of wastewater pits, some of which may need to be reclaimed, and has failed to provide production reports.

The companys drop-dead hearing date to address these delinquencies was scheduled for this month but has been moved to June 13.

Trouble with Storm Cat and the commission began more than a year ago, when questions of delinquent taxes and idle wells were first raised by state regulators.

Storm Cats president, Chris Naro, told the state in May 2016 that Storm Cat was attempting to transfer its assets to Summit Gas Resources and that the deal would hopefully be completed by November. Reclamation obligations and bonding responsibilities would then be transferred to the new company.

But things have not proceeded as planned.

In an April 6 letter to Storm Cats lawyer, Commission Supervisor Mark Watson implied that the company was running out of time.

The show cause hearing against Storm Cat Operating has been continued month to month since May of 2016, Watson wrote. These continuances have been granted on ongoing and reportedly progressing negotiations.

The commission is no longer satisfied that the complexities of the bankruptcy proceedings are slowing bonding issues, however, he said.

WOGCC has determined that negotiations have not progressed in the manner that Mr. Naro and Mr. Schoonmaker (Summits executive) have led us to believe, Watson stated.

The commission then set a drop-dead date of May 1, but the commission recently gave the company yet another month to provide information on how it plans to proceed.

The commission has asked Storm Cat and Summit for a detailed list on which wells will be in production and which will be plugged. It also asked for a list of which pits will be used for wastewater and which will be reclaimed. The two companies will be required to show bonding amounts and name the company that will be providing the insurance.

State regulators have not threatened to pull the companys current bonds.

Weve been in communication with them on a weekly basis, said Kimberly Mazza, spokeswoman for the commission. Had that not been the case, we do have that authority to pull the bond and couldve taken a different route. Because theyve communicated with us, weve been monitoring the situation. We know where things are at.

The company has posted its pit bonds in full for $6.4 million. However, its idle wells are not fully covered. Wyoming requires idle well bonding at $10 per foot after production stops. As of February, the company had posted about $2.8 million of a $13.6 million obligation for idle wells.

Storm Cat and Summit are both represented by Tom Throne of Sheridan before the commission.

Throne said he could not speak to the details of the bankruptcy proceedings but that the parties hoped to be ready by next months commissioners meeting.

We are working to get the wells transferred from Storm Cat to Summit so that the Commission will be adequately protected on the bonding, he said. There are some wells that will not be put on production and there are some wells that will be. We are working on a plan to have those (non-producing) wells plugged.

Mazza, with the commission, said these types of delays are not unusual in a bankruptcy case.

Storm Cat was one of many companies that jumped on the opportunity to draw natural gas from coal beds only to see the industry plummet with the falling price of natural gas.

Since 2014, defunct companies, from CBM and more traditional industries, have left 4,650 orphaned wells littered across the landscape of northern Wyoming. Thousands more were left on federal land. In contrast, before the CBM bust, only 500 wells were orphaned in the state over nearly two decades, according to the commissions records.

In recent years, the commission, with the prodding of Gov. Matt Mead, developed a plan to clean up the landscape year by year.

To address the cost, the state instituted a fund, fed by a tax on oil and gas operators.

The state has plugged 1,754 wells since 2014, and continues to do so, on an almost monthly basis. Each well costs between $5,000 and $7,000 to plug.
Have an event, trend or general energy happening youd like to see in the Energy Journal newsletter? Send it to Star-Tribune energy reporter Heather Richards at heather.richards@trib.com. Sign up for the newsletter at www.trib.com/energyjournal.

This week in numbers

Friday oil prices: West Texas Intermediate (WTI) $47.82, Brent (ICE) $50.79

Natural gas weekly averages: Henry Hub $3.2, Wyoming Pool $2.86, Opal $2.89

Baker Hughes rig count: U.S. 885, Wyoming 23

Contura

Contura Energy, which operates the Belle Ayr and Eagle Butte mines, reported revenue of $95.8 million from its Powder River Basin coal mines.

The company, formed out of the Alpha Natural Resources bankruptcy, took in a total $509 million in the first three months of the year.

It sold 8.8 million tons of PRB coal, 2.2 million tons of northern Appalachian coal, and 1 million tons of central Appalachian coal.

Central Appalachia delivered the highest return this quarter.

Methane rule survives senate

A controversial rule that mandates on the ground checks for methane leaks and limits venting and flaring of gasses on public land survived a Senate vote that would have eliminated the Obama-era regulation.

The rule was first brought before Congress in February, but unlike other regulations passed in the final days of the previous administration which were swiftly eliminated, opponents to the methane rule failed to secure enough votes to do away with the methane rule.

The Bureau of Land Management has been criticized by industry groups and states like Wyoming for developing a rule that regulates air quality, the purview of a separate federal agency.

However, proponents of the rule argue that the BLM's primary role is to manage public resources, in this case natural gas. The rule would bring in millions to state and local coffers, they say.

The rule may still be repealed or slimmed down. It is contested in a court case and faces a review by the Department of the Interior.

Storm Cat hearing delayed again

The coal bed methane company Storm Cat Energy found itself before the state regulators again last week, and will get yet another continuance on its show cause hearing.

The state has questions regarding the company's thousands of wells in northern Wyoming, some of which require testing and others which need to be plugged and abandoned.

Storm Cat, however, is in the midst of a bankruptcy case and attempting to transfer its assets to Summit Energy. The company first asked for an extension on the hearing last spring, with expectations that the transfer would be completed by November.

The matter will come before the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission again next month.

Citizens group suspended

An advisory board to the Bureau of Land Management made up of Wyoming citizens was suspended by Washington recently as the Department of the Interior reviews such coalitions nationwide.

The suspension confused and frustrated members in the state who represent industry, environment and local government.

It is unclear whether the suspension will be lifted by the fall. An upcoming summer meeting was cancelled.

Washington has been cleaning house in its various agencies since President Donald Trump was elected in January. The suspension was billed by a Washington spokesman as a way to restore trust in federal agencies and increase the public's ability to weigh in on issues that affect their communities.

The potential and the intrigue of the PRB

EOG Resources, the top producer of Wyoming crude, made it into the black in the first quarter of 2017.

In a recent earnings call, an executive for the Houston-based firm spoke of the premium drilling that Wyoming's Powder River Basin offers the company. Though EOG's activities in northern Wyoming were limited in the first quarter, executives said operations would likely increase throughout the year.

Catching up to development

Landowners in Laramie County will host a panel Wednesday about oil and gas development in the region to educate the public on issues like emergency response, environmental impacts and state regulations.

Much of Wyoming's new oil and gas development in recent years has taken place in the southeast corner of the state, where the DJ Basin oil and gas play is located.

The event is being led by the Cheyenne Area Landowners Coalition and the Powder River Basin Resource Council. The council has a long history of citizen oversight regarding development from issues that arise during coal mining to the impact of fracking.

Experts from state agencies including the Department of Environmental Quality and the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission will be on the panel, as well as local leaders.

The panel will be held at 6 p.m., Wednesday at the Kiwanis Community House in Cheyenne.

Money for cop cars

Sinclair Oil Corporation is donating cash for cars in the small town of Hanna in Carbon County.

The Hanna Marshall's Office recently bid on two used cop cars from Greenwood Colorado with donations from the oil refinery located just east of Rawlins.
Casper City Councilman Chris Walsh seemed to single-handedly upend a long-running city tradition last week.

When Interim City Manager Liz Becher announced that the budgets would be delivered to Council members by courier on Friday, Walsh said hed come pick it up himself.

Walsh, a former police chief, said he had been responsible for delivering budgets in the past and saw no need for a current city employee to deliver one to him.

I will absolutely come here and pick that up, he said. Im not going to have city staff waste time coming to my house.

Following that, all of Walshs colleagues on Council said that they, too, could come pick up the budgets from City Hall.

***

City staff has stopped ranking City Councils meeting agenda items according to their three previous goals: downtown, infrastructure and recreation.

Council held a goal-setting meeting last month, and while the results of that meeting have not yet been finalized, they agreed there was no need to continue the scorecard that had been used to identify whether an item matched one of the three goals.

I stopped looking at it a year ago, said Mayor Kenyne Humphrey.

Councilman Charlie Powell believed there was some value in noting whether agenda items met the bodys stated goals but agreed that scorecard method could go.

Its a way of making a statement of good faith to the community that we have a strategic plan and the things were doing are intended to implement that plan, he said.

That was the idea, anyway.

***

Motorcycle noise is coming back to Council  maybe  despite everyone agreeing laws and policies will do no good.

At the work session last Tuesday, Powell reported receiving a call from a concerned resident.

But Walsh said in his experience as police chief ramping up enforcement was almost impossible.

It is not practical, he said. You cant apply the common-sense standard of whats too loud.

A police officer has to stop the motorcycle, run the engine while using a decibel meter and take into account the ambient noise.

And the biggest problem? The motorcyclist is usually long gone by the time officers respond to a call, and if theyre not, its a car chase a police officer is unlikely to be interested in.

As for whether the Casper Police Department even has decibel meters?

Interim Chief Steve Schulz was uncertain.

For now, it looks like the city will work to support public service announcements focusing on motorcyclists voluntarily avoiding noisy riding.

***

The state is really turning the screws on the city of Casper.

Wyoming owns the Goodstein lot, the empty plot across from Raccas and Art 321. It has been leased by the city for public parking, and now the state is planning to double the fee.

A year ago... we did enter into a dollar a year lease, Becher said. They have agreed to let us lease it again for $2 for the next year.

Powell protested: It went up 100 percent.

We may have to take up a collection, Becher joked.
The official tapped with running the state departments of Health and Family Services will look into merging the two, he said in an interview Monday afternoon.

Tom Forslund has been director of the Wyoming Department of Health since March 2011, shortly after Gov. Matt Mead was sworn in. On June 1, he said, he will also be director of the Department of Family Services, as current director Steve Corsi is resigning to take a job outside of Wyoming.

Forslund, who served as Casper city manager before moving to the Health Department, said he will be overseeing both departments through the end of Meads second and final term.

What he has asked for us to do is take a look at the structure of the two departments and see if they should be looked at, merged partially or totally, Forslund said. And in light of the fiscal problems the state is dealing with, can we gain some efficiencies through consolidation?

That is not a decision that certainly has been made in this point in time, he said. I would have to visit with the governor, and the governor would have to visit with the Legislature and such.

Meads chief of staff, Kari Gray, said a merger of the departments is not Meads idea but Forslunds. Mead simply wanted to Forslund to lead both.

There is no preconceived notion of what is going to come out of that, she said.

Meads final term as governor will end in early 2019  a relatively short time for someone to run the Department of Family Services.

The key to this is to have effective leadership, Gray said. And at this point in time, it seems that we had a proven leader and it might be difficult to find someone who might be willing to take on a job for such a short period of time.

Mead, in a statement sent Monday morning, praised Forslund.

Tom Forslund is an extraordinary administrator, the governor said. He has proven his capability at the Department of Health and is well able to manage both agencies.

Nebraska, Idaho and Montana have one agency that runs both health and family services, usually called human services, Forslund said. And the federal government has the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

It may make sense for Wyoming to have one agency, too. Forslund said that there is some overlap between the two.

For instance, when DFS takes children into custody, the Wyoming Department of Health provides the money for their health care coverage, he said.

Large agencies

The Health Department is the giant of the states agencies, with a roughly $1 billion annual budget of state and federal funds, Forslund said.

Medicaid accounts for a large portion of the agencys budget. The federal government matches approximately half of the states spending on the health care program.

DFS is also a large agency in terms of state spending, though minuscule compared to the Health Department.

Foslund said DFS has an annual budget of about $142 million in state and federal money.

Four divisions compose the Health Department, and Forslund said there is a senior administrator in charge of each. He plans to set up a similar structure in DFS, he said.

I will appoint an acting senior administrator, because its temporary at this point in time, until the final decision is made about what theyre going to do about structure, he said.

Career

Forslund is from Iowa but has worked in Wyoming for the majority of his professional career. He was Caspers city manager for 23 years. For two years before that, he was assistant city manager, he said.

Forslund said he never spoke to Mead about a pay raise. He said he earns $203,000 a year.

Gray said Forslund will not get a pay raise for taking on additional responsibilities.

State revenue is down due to lower prices and production in oil, natural gas and coal. In the budget bill adopted by the Legislature in March, Mead must eliminate 90 positions, or find an equivalent in savings of about $6 million by July 1, 2018, Gray said.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the Cowboy State during the 2016 election, Wyoming Secretary of State Ed Murray recently said, at a time when President Donald Trump has announced a panel to look into his unsubstantiated claims of illegal voting.

Murray, the states chief elections official, discussed voter fraud during a Wednesday interview with the Star-Tribune.

I dont believe there is any widespread, or even a scintilla, of voting fraud, he said.

There are isolated cases, he added.

Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee is looking into 27 cases of alleged illegal voting by noncitizens and felons, Murray said.

Lee was out of town Thursday and Friday. The Star-Tribune emailed her with questions about the cases. She did not reply.

Im following that very closely, Murray said.

Murray said he didnt know at this time how many cases of alleged illegal voting were being reviewed across the state.

Natrona County Clerk Renea Vitto said there were a handful of voting complaints in the Casper area.

Three noncitizens who were in the process of becoming Americans cast ballots, believing they had the right to vote, she said.

There were reports of five felons who voted. But when Vittos staff reviewed court records, they discovered some of the voters had only misdemeanor convictions, she said.

It ended up being only two felons who voted, she said.

Five instances of illegal voting is a normal number in Natrona County, she said.

Vitto said her office always sends letters to the voters, letting them know they were not supposed to vote. If they vote in the following election, she forwards the information to the district attorneys office for possible criminal prosecution.

However, Vitto said she has never seen a case of a person voting illegally a second time. She believes people likely vote believing they were allowed to and not because they intended to break the law, she said.

According to the Associated Press, Trumps commission will look at allegations of improper voting and fraudulent voter registration in states across the nation. The group plans to complete its work with a report to the president by 2018.

In Wyoming, lawmakers changed the law in the 2017 legislative session to allow nonviolent convicted felons to have their voting rights automatically restored after theyve completed their sentences, without having to apply to the Department of Corrections, as is required now.

The law goes into effect July 1.

It specifies that people who were convicted outside the state will still have to apply to the Corrections Department to get their voting rights restored.
LARAMIE  The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees has approved establishing an honors college.

Associated Vice President for Undergraduate Education Anne Alexander says elevating the current honors program will help UW recruit more top-achieving students and compete with other schools that have adopted such programs.

Additionally, an honors college could require enrolled students to take part in activities such as undergraduate research, study abroad or internships, which are currently encouraged but optional for honors students.

Alexander says a more rigorous system would demand more of honors students, in turn making them more well-rounded, experienced graduates.

The trustees approved the idea last Friday and the honors college would be fully established by fall 2020.

A search for the first honors college dean is underway now.
CASA GRANDE  An Arizona man has become a neighborhood pirate with his replica of the Pirates of the Caribbean ship, the Black Pearl.

While Steven Hills three-story ship did not escape from Davy Jones locker, a giant squid can be seen attacking the ship, which stands in his backyard, The Casa Grande Dispatch reports.

He and his wifes love for the Disney franchise inspired him to construct the ship a year ago, Hill said.

He used the Ponderosa pines in his backyard to support the ships tree-house design. Although Hill has never worked on a movie set, he said the ship was not too hard to make. He found that the most difficult part of the project was ensuring safety.

A tree is a living thing, he said. They do move and change. I built the ship so it could rock forward on a hinge off the side of the guest house as the tree grows without tearing the ship apart.

The hull of the ship is about 80 square feet, and its upper deck is about 300 square feet. He thinks it can support about 20 playing children. Already, some neighbor kids have come over to act out their own pirate adventures.

Hill added rudders, anchor chains, sails, captains quarters with a bed and desk and faux cannons to make his ship appear as close the Black Pearl as possible. It also has a crows nest, from which Hill can see Eloy.

It took a lot of trips to the Salvation Army and Goodwill to get the details right, he said.
A pair of University of Arizona grads are getting a hard, real-world lesson in the power of the Internet and viral marketing  and its not exactly what they bargained for.

Sunny Co Clothing, launched by recent UA grads Alan Alchalel and Brady Silverwood, posted a photo of one of its swimsuits on Instagram on May 2.

The company offered one of the $64.99 suits, free except for the cost of shipping and handling, to anyone who reposted the image and tagged the account by the following afternoon.

In just 25 hours, the San Diego-based company's account grew from 7,000 followers to 784,000, and eventually the account was shut down, the company said.

Sunny Co pulled down the offer and promised to make its best effort to fulfill more than 50,000 promo orders for the red, one-piece "Pamela" suits, saying, We truly had no idea the response was going to be so overwhelming and we are very sorry for any confusion."

But that didn't save the company from the wrath of the Internet, as Sunny Co was flamed mercilessly on social media by people calling the whole thing a scam and worse.

If you say gullible really slow it kinda sounds like repost for a free swimsuit from sunny co clothing,  one tweeted, while another created a fake Sunny Co Twitter account and tweeted, We are currently looking for a sweatshop to make the 37 million red swimsuits needed thank you for your patience!

Others mocked the company by riffing on its Pamela one-piece in posts, such as one featuring a wrestling team in red tights.

In a news release last Thursday, Silverwood and Alchalel reiterated that they were completely caught off guard by the viral success of the promotion, and said they were moving at light speed to fulfill orders that are planned for shipment within three to six weeks.

"We are committed to fulfilling the 50,072 Pamela orders that were placed using the discount code 'Sunny' on May 3, 2017," Silverwood said Monday in a prepared response to the Star. "If customers haven't received a refund from us yet, that means we are working hard to fulfill your order."

Customers who inadvertently paid full price for the Pamela swimsuit since the promotion's inception can file a claim for a refund, the company said in its release, adding that the company had issued nearly $73,000 in refunds.

All sales were final for customers who paid just shipping and handling, the company said.

If the aim was publicity, the promo was a big success.

Sunny Co noted that it was picked up by major media outlets including TIME Magazine, Seventeen, AdWeek, TeenVogue, The Washington Post, CNET, Perez Hilton, AOL Lifestyle, Buzzfeed, E! News, Vogue and the New York Post.

But it was a bit of an unwelcome distraction for the company's UA founders as they headed toward graduation.

"Two weeks ago the only thing on my mind was graduation from the University of Arizona, Silverwood said in the news release a couple of days before UA commencement. Now, with graduation only two days away, it's the last thing on my mind.

According to the companys news release, Sunny Co Clothing was founded in Arizona in November 2015 as Sunny Skirts LLC, launching sales in August 2016 with a popular line of school-colors game-day skirts, sold to students at over 28 colleges nationwide.
David Ivers has been named Arizona Theatre Companys new artistic director.

Ivers, who succeeds 25-year ATC veteran David Ira Goldstein, comes to the company with impressive bona fides:

He has been artistic director of the Tony-winning Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City since 2011, was associate artistic director at Portland Repertory Theatre, and has directed plays at such prestigious companies as The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and The Guthrie Theatre.

He has had a long association with Utah Shakespeare; he first worked there as an actor in 1992.

He came as an intern actor, recalled Fred Adams, who founded the company in 1961. David is a phenomenal actor, but hes also a very sensitive and alert director. He has a wonderful communicative skill with casts and crews. I think thats a strength. We are sorry to lose him.

Several good candidates were interviewed, said Lynne Wood Dusenberry, the chair of ATCs board. The companys Tucson-Phoenix operation  it is the only regional theater to stage full seasons in two cities  can present unique challenges.

We felt David Ivers was the one who got a sense of ATC the best, she said in a phone interview.

We feel weve found someone who will be a leader. David Ira is finishing a remarkable career, and this season has made us all happy and proud as a board and a theater company. We just believe thats what we will continue to do. We believe (Ivers) has the same hopes and goals and can help us get there.

He does have big plans: He wants to see the theater more fully represent the Tucson and Phoenix communities with diverse programming, casts and theater staff. He hopes to engage families, up the profile of the theater in the communities and across the state, partner with other theaters in and out of Arizona and cultivate new works.

But first, he said, he wants to look and listen.

I have a lot to learn, he said in a phone interview from Cedar City. The first order of business for me is to listen. I plan to do a listening tour with the staff, constituents and audiences.

That is necessary before anything else, he said.

Coming into any community and mandating things is the opposite of community.

ATC, like many professional theater companies in this country, has struggled financially. In June of last year the company announced it would suspend operations if it didnt raise $2 million by July 1. That did not give him pause.

I was aware of the challenges, he says. But what I think is so extraordinary and made me want to walk through the door is ATCs limitless potential.

And he isnt intimidated by fundraising  he was key in raising $40 million for the new multi-theater Utah Shakespeare complex, which opened last year.

That was another reason he won over the board, said Dusenberry.

We are looking much better fiscally, said Dusenberry. We are moving toward a sustainable working model, and that was important to David Ivers. ... We know he can help us continue with fundraising.

ATC is now on a hunt for a managing director, which shares equal billing with the artistic director. The two will work closely together so the board decided to hire the artistic director first, allowing that person to weigh in on the selection. Its almost a marriage, really, said Dusenberry.

Goldstein, who tried to step down four years ago but remained at the boards request while the financial crisis was weathered, will be with ATC through June 30. Ivers begins July 1.

He plans to settle in Tucson with his wife and two children, who are 5 and 8. He will be in and out of town for the rest of the year, as he has directing commitments to fill.

I really am excited about the theaters next chapter, said Ivers, 47.
We've collected a few front pages from newspapers.com to give you a look at some May 15 papers in history. With a subscription to newspapers.com you can search the Arizona Daily Star and many other newspapers using keywords or dates, and download articles or pages.
When the Regional Transportation Authority plan was presented to voters in 2006, it was estimated that the half-cent sales tax that would fund much of the infrastructure work would bring in $2.1 billion over its 20-year life.

It is an understatement to say the next several years did not fit neatly into those projections.

The Great Recession took a massive bite out of sales-tax revenues, with the ratio of taxable retail sales to disposable income plummeting to historic lows. Through 2013, $100 million less than forecast went into RTA coffers, according to a previous analysis done by the University of Arizonas Eller College of Management. Revenues were $200 million short of 2005 projections as of June 2016, according to the recent RTA audit covered in last weeks column.

However, the recession is just the most dramatic factor behind what another recently released Eller analysis says will be a roughly 24 percent  or $500 million  revenue shortfall through 2026. Also at play are shifting patterns of consumption, with consumers spending more on untaxed services and less on the goods that are taxed, as well as changing patterns of income, with more coming from so-called transfer payments, like Social Security and workers compensation. Online retail is also growing in popularity, though sales taxes are still assessed on purchases from stores that have a legal nexus to the county, like Home Depot or Best Buy.

Ellers conclusion?

It is hard to imagine real RTA revenues ever returning to 2007 levels, the executive summary of the most recent report reads.

At the same time, the recent audit concluded that, even with the serious shortfalls, The RTA plan partners seem well-positioned to complete the remaining RTA plan projects as promised to the voters in 2006.

Given the magnitude of the shortfall, how is that possible?

The RTAs Jim DeGrood had some insight for the Road Runner. One of the key factors is that, while the Great Recession was terrible for sales-tax revenues, it created a very favorable bidding environment in which numerous contractors fighting for work pushed final award amounts substantially below estimates.

When we did original cost estimates, they were done with the backdrop of an overheated economy, he said.

Marana Mayor Ed Honea said that was seen clearly with the major Twin Peaks Road rebuild between Silverbell Road and Interstate 10, which came in millions of dollars under projections.

They basically bid it for cost, he said of the firm that eventually won, adding that many companies were just hoping to keep their employees working through the slow post-recession years. We did get several projects that came in cheaper than we thought they were going to come in by quite a bit.

Though the recession started almost a decade ago, some projects are still coming in well under estimates. For example, eight contractors put in for the Houghton Road widening, which was originally estimated at $16.9 million, and the winner  Phoenix-based Pulice Construction  won with an $11.3-million bid.

Lower construction costs, however, arent enough to cover the shortfalls. Thats why, for the remainder of the RTA term, the member jurisdictions agreed to direct all federal surface-transportation-program funds and state-highway fund dollars to potentially cash-strapped RTA plan projects as needed, according to the audit.

As a result, No major project delivery impacts are anticipated as a result of the diminished revenue projections, meeting materials from the March 23 RTA board meeting state.

At the same time, Honea said the redirecting of those state and federal funds means the sort of side projectspreviously paid for by those dollars wont be seen moving forward.

Its pretty much going to be what we promised to people we would do, and well do that, he said. We think we can pull it off, and thats going to be all were going to do.

DOWN THE ROAD

Three county road projects are slated to start Monday, May 15. On North First Avenue, crews will work from River Road to Ina Road through Saturday, May 20. Shifts will be from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., during which lane restrictions and reduced speeds will be in effect. All three projects have the same shifts and traffic impacts.

Crews will also repave South Nogales Highway from West Los Reales Road to West Lumber Street, work that is expected to last through May 27.

East Old Spanish Trail, from South Melpomene Way to East Escalante Road, will also see some repaving work, which is slated to last through May 27. The work includes a new turn lane to Saguaro National Parks east entrance.
A 10-month-old baby died from his injuries on Mother's Day and his mother and her boyfriend were arrested on child abuse charges.

Tucson police officers found the baby, Jose Valenzuela, with life-threatening injuries on May 11 at an apartment complex at 2800 S. Mission Road. The injuries reportedly were the result of rolling off a couch, Tucson police said in a news release Monday.

However, when the baby was taken to a hospital doctors told police the baby had "significant new and old injuries that were not consistent with a fall from a couch." The baby died from his injuries May 14.

Police arrested the baby's mother, Salma Rodriguez, 25, on two felony counts of child abuse. Rodriguez's boyfriend, Ivan Portillo Herrera, 22, was arrested on one felony count of child abuse.
ABC/Randy HolmesBastille will embark on a quick North American headlining tour this fall. The five-show run will begin September 9 in Pittsburgh and will hit cities in Virginia, New York and Rhode Island before returning to Pennsylvania to wrap things up September 14 in Philadelphia. Visit BastilleBastille.com for ticket info.

Along with the tour announcement, Bastille has also shared a live video of frontman Dan Smith and guitarist Will Farquarson performing the band's track "bad_news," which you can watch now via YouTube.

Bastille will be touring in support of their sophomore album Wild World, which features the singles "Good Grief" and "Blame."

Here are Bastille's fall tour dates:

9/9 -- Pittsburgh, PA, Stage AE

9/10 -- Norfolk, VA, Constant Convention Center

9/12 -- Albany, NY, Palace Theatre

9/13 -- Providence, RI, Lupos Heartbreak Hotel

9/14 -- Philadelphia, PA, The Fillmore

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Help India!

Raigad (Maharashtra), (IANS): The Communist Party of India (CPI) On Monday accused the RSS of using the Bharatiya Janata Party governments at the centre and states to pursue its fascist agenda.

Against this backdrop, the CPI also signaled a shift in its policy by announcing plans to mobilise and unite all secular, democratic and Leftist forces in the country to combat the RSS-BJP.

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The CPI said that following the BJP victory in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and capturing power through manipulation in Goa and Manipur, it is clear that the RSS is directly behind the fascistic offensive using the Modi Government and the BJP-led governments in different states.

UP is almost burning since the government of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath took over without a single day free of attacks on Dalits, minorities and women, it said.

CPI National Council Secretary Atulkumar Anjan claimed that gangrapes and molestations are so rampant that women generally fear traveling in buses or trains even with their families in UP.

All the organisations of the RSS have been given a free hand to launch any type of offensive to hasten the caste and communal polarisation. The administration and police either remain mute or extend help to RSS outfits in their offensive, he said after a weekend two-day CPI National Executive Committee at Karjat in Raigad, here followed by a daylong CPI Mumbai Executive Committee meeting on Monday.

By distracting peoples attention through such divisive agenda, the centre is pushing through the remaining agenda of disastrous course of economic liberalization, with prices soaring while healthcare and education going out of reach of the masses, he added.

The CPI NE feels that all secular, democratic and left forces, not merely the political parties but mass organizations, have to come together to counter the intensified offensive of the Modi Government and RSS Parivar, Anjan urged.
Help India!

By Dr Syed Zafar Mahmood, President, ZakatIndia.org

National boundaries do not always remain constant; on account of various factors these keep changing after every few decades or even over a century or so. This ground reality supports the hypothesis that if ever there is a clash between national interest and human interest then the latter should prevail. This is the main reason behind the healthy practice among decent world societies of trying to know what decisions have been taken abroad on an issue before these are picked up for domestic adjudication.

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Trans-judicial communication

In India even at the time of framing the Constitution several world statutes were thoroughly scanned to know the best practices abroad and these were incorporated while drafting our own basic code. The well known lawyer Anne Mary Slaughter calls this life enhancing practice as trans-judicial communication. Human rights advocate Rajiv Dhawan has authored well researched articles on the utilization of foreign decisions by the higher judiciary in India.

Commonwealth judicial colloquium

The commonwealth judicial colloqiums held in Bangalore in 1988 and 1998 had emphasized the desirability and utility of the national judiciary taking cue from decisions abroad. In Kharak Singh v UP Government, Bennett v Union of India, Maneka Gandhi v Union of India, Sunil Batra v Delhi Administration, Hussain Ara Khatoon v Bihar Government the Supreme Court has banked upon the judicial decisions taken on the relevant issues in different countries.

Famous cases

In the famous US case Wolf v Colarado Justice Frankfurter opined that no nation should violate the fundamental liberties recognized by the judiciary in various countries while he included in his judgement an entire table of relevant court decisions taken in Canada, England, Scotland, India and Australia.

Thematic categories to seek support from abroad

Justice Breyer vigorously argues in favor of reference to foreign sources of law to provide points of comparison and claimed that this camparativist view would carry the day. For this purpose, he talks of specific thematic categories as (i) guidance for determination of reasonableness, (ii) making sense of an ambiguous phrase, (iii) logical reinforcement of our own judgements and (iv) empirical support for assertions that are made about the likely consequences of legal reforms that are being advocated through court decisions.

Negative message emanating from the Indian State

In the recent past the executive and the judiciary in our country have either tried to interfere in the civil and personal matters of Muslims or at least, because of their pronouncements, a message has gone among the masses that they consider Muslim practices as regressive and extremist and that theyre taking the initiative for course correction. In 2017 there has been an enhancement in the intensity and number of such instances. Hence its important to reflect on this phenomenon.

The opening paras above clarify that when a national level decision is on the anvil how vital it is to know what treatment has the issue received abroad and to utilize that information for framing the opinion in the country unless it is decided to counter argue against the external trends.

57 Muslim countries plus 22 with Muslims as prominent minority

We are also aware that Islam is not confined to India; rather, there are 57 Muslim countries and 22 others where  quite like India  Muslims comprise prominent minority. Adding to them the Muslims spread over rest of the globe their gross number makes up more than one fifth of humanity. And, only ten percent of the global Muslims are in India.

Obviously, before making changes in the civil and personal laws and practices of selectively one tenth of worlds Muslim community the Indian State including the judiciary shall have to apprise itself as to what treatment has been given to these issues by their counterparts in 57 Muslim countries and 22 those where Muslims are prominent minority. Then the views of the well known experts of Islamic jurisprudence  in India and abroad  should be obtained. Thereafter the decision should be taken at the national level factoring these rich inputs which need to be discussed in the body of the decision. It does not behove a decent and mature society to take a national decision in respect of a faith and related practices disregarding what the peoples densifying 79 countries have to say as they practice the same faith; also this upheaves democratic values.

India: Home to 90% Hindus and Sikhs, 10% or less others

On the other hand, more than ninety percent of the Hindus live in India, so is the case with the Sikhs. Therefore if there is a nation that has right to interfere in their religious precepts and practices it is India alone. But  conversely  out of the world Muslims, ten percent or less live in India and much lesser Jews and Christians. Therefore the leaders of all the various wings of the State need to seek out abroad the sanctum sanctorum of the amending right of their personal law. My 46 year old friend Pankaj Sharma and his family live in UK for four decades. But the State there has no exclusive right to interfere in his faith and traditions, it didnt ever think of doing so.

Muslim World League and OIC

Since 1962 the holy city of Mecca hosts the headquarters of Muslim World League representing Muslim nations and societies from all over the world. The UNO values it as a consultant body. Regularly working under it is an Islamic Fiqh (jurisprudence) Council that voices the world Muslim community and happily counsels any nation regarding the nuances of Muslim faith and practices.

Likewise, since 1969 the headquarters of Organization of Islamic Cooperation are in Jeddah. With 57 members this is the biggest world body second only to the UNO. Only recently in February 2017 it had declared at its international conference that marriage and family life are the backbone of smooth world order and for this purpose the OIC proposes to coordinate with the world community in order to strengthen these institutions, to enhance respect for women and to nurture the related values. Detailed resolutions were passed on which the OIC Secretariat has been working. Organs of the Indian State should reach out to MWL and OIC and seek their authentic representative views.

Al-Azhar University and King Fahad Complex

Including Cairos Al-Azhar University and Madinahs King Fahad complex for Quranic publications and education there is no dearth of authentic experts on Islam in the world besides umpteen of them in India whose well documented opinions should form the basis of any move by the judiciary, executive or the legislature in India. I would appeal to the generosity of the honble Courts, the parliament and the government to take suo moto cognizance of these submissions.
Help India!

By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter

Moradabad: About 50 Dalit families from Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh have decided to convert to Islam after the recent spate of violence unleashed on Dalits by Thakurs of Uttar Pradesh. The families blamed ignorance and subsequent torture of their community under the patronage of UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for this decision.

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They also took out a procession march in which they immersed the statues of Hindu gods and goddesses into Ramganga river in Moradabad.

The president of Indian Valmiki Dharma Samaj, Lalla Babu said, We have given our hope in Hindu religion, which we were practicing until now.

The group of people blamed the BJP government in the Uttar Pradesh for targeting Dalits in Saharanpur and Sambhal and subsequently framing them in police cases.

Thr group claimed to have high expectation from Yogi government, but they are disappointed and see the state and the central government as Anti-Dalit.

As it was reported, a group of Bajrang Dal members reached Chhatarpur Park of Jigar Colony, where the procession was being carried, and tried to pursuade them to not convert but Dalit families refused to pay attention to their demands.
Written by A. H. on 15 May 2017

When we talk about anime, we probably don't always give due weight to its backgrounds - the all-important images that give every series or film a sense of place and atmosphere.

Thankfully, this vital element of the art form is the subject of celebration in London starting later this month, as the city's House of Illustration hosts a show entitled Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan.

The exhibition will feature artwork from the likes of the original Ghost in the Shell theatrical film and more in a similar vein, as the description from the official web site expounds upon:

This is the UKs first ever exhibition of handmade background illustrations for classic sci-fi anime films. It will feature drawings and paintings from some of the most influential productions in the genres 1990s heyday, including Production I.Gs phenomenally influential 1995 film Ghost in the Shell.

This collection of artists, who share an interest in presenting convincing visions of future worlds, have had a defining influence on the style of anime we think of as typical today.

The show will include Hiromasa Oguras watercolour paintings for Ghost in the Shell, an anime epic that informed pioneering sci-fi works such as The Matrix and Avatar. Inspired by Asias emerging megacities and based on photographs of Hong Kong, Oguras work depicts the striking contrast between a derelict Chinese town and ruthless urban development.

Pencil drawings by Takashi Watabe  one of the most important Japanese illustrators of his generation  for 2008s sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence will also feature. His meticulously realistic style has become a hallmark of Japanese anime films as a whole.

The exhibition will also include work from Patlabor: The Movie (1989) and Metropolis (2001), by Mamoru Oshii and Atsushi Takeuchi.

The show runs from Friday, 26th May through to Sunday, 10th September 2017 - tickets cost 7.50 for adults and 5 for concessions.

For more information and to book tickets, head over to the House of Illustration web site.
Two weeks ago, some Chinese researchers announced in the review "Molecular Plants" they've mapped the genome of more than 20 sylvatic species of Camellia Sinensis, the plant of the tea. The results of their study could open the door to the creation of others typologies of the beverage.

In 2006, it was already announced, by Mrs Amita Bhattacharya and others colleagues of the Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology, that there were experiments on the tea, creating a transgenic variety of it, tastier and more beneficial than others. So, a traditional drink, known for being highly natural, could become in some way artificial.

The spread of the tea

The business opened by new typologies of tea could be gainful, above all because of the spread of the tea in the last years. Imported in Europe since the XVI siecle, it thrived in England, where it was drunk as a beneficial substance. From there, it was exported also in North America.

Farmed also in India and Sri Lanka, after China and East countries, nowadays the culture of the tea is more and more extended. Also in Europe, there are some festivals entirely dedicated. The last one happened in April, in Italy: at the "In Te" in Bologna, over 5 thousand visitors tasted over 300 typologies of tea, looking forward the 2018 edition.

The Pusztai affair

Yet, a question rise with transgenic variety: is it really beneficial?

In the United Kingdom, the 1998-experiment led by the well-known and expert scientist Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Institute (Scotland) left some doubts on it. The transgenic variety of potatoes eaten by rats apparently was dangerous, creating cancer in the animals.

But the results of the experiment were discussed for lack of method by the Royal Society Peer Review, which entered the fray between the scientist and the supporters of the modified food.

Someone supposed the results were obstructed by some companies which had interests in OGMs.

Transgenic salmon

Even so, nowadays the concerns seem to be exceeded. Beyond the transgenic crops, in fact, in 2015 also a transgenic variety of salmon was approved for commercial production and sale by US Food and drug administration, making it the first modified animal to be accepted for human consumption.

Also, there are other problems with transgenic operations, especially "transhumanism" (so called the genetic modifications of animals with human genes). The real question is not if the OGMs are a benefit or not, but if we want to intervene in the natural development of the species. Particularly in the case of the plants of tea, that have its taste because of a millennial (natural) evolution.
Corbyn: The man

Jeremy Corbyn, I feel, has been given a raw deal by the press and the right wing media painting him out to be some nutter. Granted no one is perfect and that unfortunately these days applies to politicians of whatever hue but in Corbyn maybe we have something different just for once.

Corbyn could be regarded as a left wing extremist in his views with his dubious support for people like Fidel Castro. Perhaps some of his words about Hamas and Hezbollah being his friends should have been thought through but aren't we all guilty of flippant throwaway comments at times if that's what it was.

Corbyn says he does not do insult and in his battles with first David Cameron and then Theresa May he has read out communications to him from members of the public to ask the Prime Minister of the day questions. This is something as far as I am aware that has never been done before by any leader of the opposition.

Corbyn: Like a Biblical prophet

When Jeremy Corbyn appeared on 'The Andrew Marr Show' some time ago Marr compared Corbyn to John the Baptist. In the Bible John, the Baptist was obviously not on the parliamentary salary Corbyn is on but joking aside I can see why Marr made the comparison.

Jeremy Corbyn running with the religious theme for a while does have support from many Christian groups.

There is actually a page on Facebook by Christians supporting him through prayer and a Christian group called Christians on the Left formerly The Christian Socialist Movement which also backs him.

I'm not painting out Corbyn to be some kind of prophet here but if you look at what he espouses it links in with Christ's Sermon on the Mount.

Some time ago Corbyn got into trouble with some for saying Jesus was a socialist but looking at Christ's teachings I can see what he means.

If Corbyn were to become Prime Minister his relationship with Trump would be different to May and Trump himself is backed by the Christian right notably people like Kenneth Copeland. As to emphasise this Corbyn said jokingly there would be no hand holding with Trump as May did when she met him at the White House.

Some aspects of Corbyn worry me; namely his stance on immigration and I understand kindness shown to the stranger fleeing wars or famine. However, there are those who wish to enter the UK for dubious reasons too and another factor is more people in the country means more strain on the NHS, welfare, jobs etc.

Corbyn no pacifist

Corbyn has stated that he opposes nuclear weapons but it seems he has compromised on this one with Trident supporting ministers in his shadow cabinet. Corbyn did not and does not support the bombing of Assad or IS and thinks the so-called war on terror has been handled wrongly so far.

Corbyn has said in any crisis he would seek a peaceful solution first but at the end of the day if all peaceful means had failed he would use military force but only and ever as the last option.

Corbyn said he wants to appoint a Minister of Peace if he is elected to 10 Downing Street and while this might seem odd there are also merits in this.

Whatever happens to Corbyn come June 8th Corbyn is what he is and indeed has brought something different to the table from the run of the mill Blairite politicians.
North Korea's ambassador to the UK defiantly said his nation would carry on with missile launches and the awaited 6th nuclear test regardless of what sanctions the US would impose it on it. The USA could probably send a hundred aircraft carriers off its coast and this would probably make the regime in Pyongyang more determined.

The nation just wants to survive and if nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them ensure this so be it. At the end of the day, North Korea may be bluffing as it knows full-scale war with the US and others would mean the possible destruction of the regime in Pyongyang.

On the other hand, Kim may feel that having nukes and the power to deliver them would make any potential enemy think twice before instigating a military attack as the North could hit back hard with nuke tipped missiles.

North Korea's goal

It seems for a while now the North Koreans have been pressing ahead with the idea of ICBMs or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that could hit the west coast of the U.S. Also testing shorter range missiles capable of hitting Japan and South Korea have been on the agenda so North Korea is looking at all aspects of its defence or offence it seems.

North Korea also has a substantial military in conventional terms well capable of doing damage in the air, at sea or on the ground.

How well it would fare against South Korean, American or Japanese forces is open to question and could North Korea totally rely on China in any crisis or conflict?

North Koreas response to Trump

Despite the poisonous atmosphere that currently surrounds the situation between the U.S. and North Korea Pyongyang has responded positively to Trump's overture.

The overture was that Donald Trump would be willing to sit down and talk with his North Korean counterpart Kim if circumstances were right.

Of course, any talk of talks has to be seen as welcome in this atmosphere of tension between the two sides. Kim Jong-un has been painted in the western media as a buffoon or an overgrown kid but in reality, Kim may be smarter than the western media give him credit for.

Despite all the aspirations to run with the big boys in the nuclear club, Kim knows his people suffer starvation and deprivation on a large scale and his nuke tests and missile launches may not only be for the survival of his regime but also to re-start talks: talks that might lift the sanctions on his crippled nation which relies on outside charities to feed a good number of its population.

Trump's new sanctions and a new kind of missile

In the wake of the missile launch which successfully flew this time and crashed into the sea of Japan, Trump is threatening tougher sanctions. Trump also stated that the missile would upset the Russians more than the Japanese as it landed nearer to them than it did to Japanese territory.

It would appear if the Japanese and South Korean statements are anything to go by, that the North Korean missile was a new type. Whether it was an ICBM as mentioned earlier in this article can only be speculated upon.

So the tense and often confusing situation between all sides in the standoff grinds on.
Nick Clegg had the audacity to label Theresa May as being 'petty' to cut the number of child asylum seekers during her time as home secretary, yet I am afraid that is the word that best describes the former Liberal Democrat leader. His personal attacks on the Prime Minister are what cause people to lose faith in their politicians.

We all know Mr. Clegg loves to play the popularity card. When he became Liberal Democrat leader in 2007, he said David Cameron and Gordon Brown both engaged in 'punch and judy' Politics in reference to their weekly exchanges during Prime Minister's Questions.

In comparison to his promises to scrap tuition fees and oppose 'Tory cuts', his words have suddenly become redundant. Like in 2010, the former deputy prime minister deserves to be branded with the word 'hypocrite.'

One could easily draw up a list of the amount of personal attacks he has made against Mrs May. In fact, I urge you to read my report on the Liberal Democrat's stinging insults to save myself the disdain of repeating them. But I think the most shocking accusation is the one where he said the EU is nothing like North Korea in interfering in elections. How many times have EU politicians made statements against the Conservatives over the last month?

Has Mr. Clegg had a short-term memory loss?

What about the times Denmark, Ireland, France and Holland were asked to repeat their referendums on changes to the EU's political structure until the superbloc achieved the outcomes they desired? Sometimes it just feels like the former Liberal Democrat leader has learnt nothing during his time in politics.
Kulbhushan Jadhav the former Indian navy official, was renamed as Mubarak Hussein Patel in the hearing in ICJ (International court of justice) today.

What was the Allegation?

Pakistan government has allegations against Jadhav that he was involved in various terrorist activities in addition to having waged war against Pakistan. He has been arrested in Baluchistan, on the Pakistan border on a charge for terrorism and spying for Indians intelligent agency, the research and analysis wing (RAW).

Kulbhushan Jadhav took volunteer retirement from the navy and established a small business in cha bahar, Iran in 2003.

According to the Pakistani government, he was arrested inside Baluchistan in mashkel due to his illicit entry into Pakistan via Iran. They added that Jadhav has details about secret documents related to the Pakistani Government. Jadhav also knew personally Haji Baloch, who was connected to the mastermind of the Safoora bus attack, where 45 Islamic passengers were shot dead. On 10th April 2015, the Pakistani government made an allegation against him that his goal was to sabotage the China-Pakistan Economic corridor and that he made the Gwadar port a special target. In addition, it was claimed that he was spying for the Indian government. He was Sentenced To Death by the Field General court Martial (FGCM), which was approved by Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa.

What is all about?

Indian government officials will put Jadhav's case in the Netherlands based ICJ today around 1 pm Indian time. Both sides will get the chance to make their arguments for 90 minutes each. The Indian government has denied all allegations. They said that Pakistan cooked up all stories after knew about the renamed Mubarak Hussein Patel's background.

In addition, the Indian government rejected the fake and bogus videos admitted against KUL Bhushan Jadhav.

In ICJ, President Judge Ronny Abraham of France will probably meet legal representatives of both the countries today. The court will take some interim steps until the final judgment. A legal representative from India, Harish Salve will represent this case.

The Indian government says Jadhav, the former Indian naval officer, is totally innocent. He was abducted by Pakistan who were violating international law. Also, the government accused the Pakistani government of breaking New Delhis right VCCR (Vienna convention on a consular relation. Both the countries have signed up the protocol to VCCR, so it is compulsory for them to perceive in the ICJ for the settlement.

What is the protocol?

After 1971, this is the second time that both countries will appear after 18 years in International court, due to their signature to follow protocol to VCCR. This made them compulsory to achieve a settlement for this dispute. Whilst India stayed away from ICJ, New Delhi have pursued second-time intervention of the judicial arm of united nation against Pakistan

Pakistan can challenge courts decision but in this case, the chances are very small, says Geneva-based lawyer Shashank Kumar, know serving as a clerk in ICJ.

Today, the court would not give his final decision but take provisional measure for this case he says.

The Court will review both side issues presented by both the countries and can take jurisdiction of this case after granting provisional measure too.
In a shocking admission of defeat already. Nick Clegg has admitted British democracy will be enslaved to the Conservatives.

The former Liberal Democrat leader said no political party stands a chance against the Tories, including his own, despite predictions they may win more seats than in 2015.

The former deputy prime minister said Theresa May's overwhelming popularity meant it is impossible for any opposition party to challenge her.

'British democracy is paralysed'

Speaking at the Convention on Brexit and the Political Crash, Mr. Clegg said British democracy has become paralysed due to the lack of competition between political parties in Britain.

He said the left-wing vote in this country will be split between his party, Labour and the Scottish National Party, which will cause the Conservatives to pick up dozens of seats.

The Liberal Democrat said that due no political party standing a chance of overthrowing the Tories, British democracy is stuck, implying the opposition have enabled Mrs May to create a one-party state.

However, this is not the only occasion where Mr. Clegg has personally attacked her in this General Election so far.

He branded the Prime Minister as robotic, brittle and a petty character who will fail in forthcoming Brexit negotiations.

'Nixonian paranoia'

Mr. Clegg accused his former colleague during the Coalition years of 'Nixonian paranoia' in trying to gain political advantage prior to the Brexit talks.

He also accused the Tories of transforming into a UKIP-duplicate whilst pushing Britain into a hard Brexit that will cause economic misery for millions of people.

But the former deputy prime minister said during the Coalition years, she was a tough negotiator who did well to win support for her policies back then.

He claimed Mrs May was petty over her policy to cut child asylum seekers in a bid to deliver minuscule savings.

He said she has no emotional intelligence.

The former Liberal Democrat leader said this was best demonstrated when she stated Britain will be withdrawing from the European Union's Single Market and Customs Union.

Mr. Clegg said she is not being held to account over the fundamental architecture of her own kind of Brexit.

He added: 'How much more extreme can it get?'

The Liberal Democrat accused the Prime Minister of hysteria after she blamed EU politicians for interfering in the general election campaign.

'Curtain-twitching conspiracy'

He branded it a curtain-twitching conspiracy and said the EU is nothing like North Korea.

But the former cabinet minister was also taken to task by Sky News over his failure to acknowledge last year's referendum result, which saw 52% of voters who voted support leaving the EU.

Yet he hit back, saying he does not intend to reopen an argument that has already been won by the Leave side, instead suggesting Mrs May deserves proper scrutiny.

He labelled her type of Brexit as a destructive one.

The alternatives that he proposed included rejoining the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA), which Britain was a member of until it joined the Common Market in 1973.

Nick Clegg served in the Coalition years as deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015.

He gained political popularity during the first leaders' debate in the 2010 general election, with the phrase 'I agree with Nick' being coined to show people's solidarity with the then Lib Dem leader.

This helped skewer David Cameron's chances of winning an overall majority at the time, causing the Conservatives to go into coalition with Mr. Clegg's party.

Despite this, the then deputy prime minister became universally unpopular for supporting the tripling of university tuition fees from 3000 to 9000 a year.

He also lost huge swathes of support for supporting 'Tory cuts' and increasing the VAT rate from 15% to 20%.

Mr. Clegg resigned as Lib Dem leader after the 2015 General Election due to his party only gaining 8 seats, its worst defeat since the 1920s.

He then went on to serve as the party's Brexit spokesman following last year's referendum result.
For 50 years, Philomena Lee kept a secret to herself  then the entire world got to hear about it.

Originally from Limerick, the retired nurse now lives an inauspicious life in the south of England, close to her daughter Jane, son Kevin and her grandchildren. Keeping her family nearby is important to Philomena, as her history is one of loss, abandonment and forced adoption.

Losing her mother aged six, and consequently split up from her three brothers and sent to a convent along with her two sisters by her father, Philomena emerged in 1952 as a naive 18-year-old and went to live an aunt.

After a liaison with a man at a country fair she became pregnant, and was ostracised by her family out of shame and sent back to a convent in Roscrea, County Tipperary.

Fallen women

In compensation, she was made to work in the laundry along with other so-called 'fallen women' and was only allowed access to her young son, Anthony, for an hour a day. When he was only three Anthony was taken from the convent against her will; the nuns at Roscrea had agreed to sell him for adoption to an American family.

She left the convent and made a new life for herself in England, marrying a fellow nurse and having two more children. She never let on about their half-brother until Anthonys 50th birthday.

The resultant search for Anthony, which reached the top level of the White House, was turned into a Bafta-winning and Oscar-nominated film, with the role of Philomena played by Dame Judi Dench.

When I heard that Judi Dench was interested in playing me, I was absolutely thrilled, laughed Philomena, now aged 84 and remarkably free of bitterness given her ordeal. I loved her in As Time Goes By.

Enter Tony Blair's spin doctor

The journey from secret revelation to Oscar night began when a mutual friend put Jane in contact with journalist Martin Sixsmith.

At a loose end after having just been forced to resign from his position as one of Tony Blairs spin doctors, he reluctantly (at first) took up the story.

Ive done many things in my life  worked for the government, worked for the BBC, been a historian  this was something I hadnt done before: a human interest story, he recalled.

The more Philomena and I worked together, the more I thought it was worthwhile. It was a detective story but my first responsibility was to help Philomena find her son.

Despite a refusal by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary to help (even though they knew exactly where Anthony was), Martin discovered hed been adopted by a professional couple from Missouri. His name had been changed to Michael Hess and hed become a successful lawyer and member of the Republican party. Hed advised Ronald Reagan and when George Bush Senior became President, was appointed as his chief legal counsel. But Michael always knew hed been adopted and, from 1977, had made frequent trips to Ireland and the Sean Ross Abbey convent, now a school for the disabled, hoping to find his birth mother.

Steve Coogan

Angry at her treatment at the hands of the Catholic Church, Martin turned her story into a book, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, which attracted the interest of Steve Coogan. Although known for his comedy, the Catholic Coogan has always had an interest in adoption stories as his parents have acted as foster parents to orphaned and abandoned children for much of his life.

I didnt know much about him, I dont really follow comedians, Philomena said of the Alan Partridge star. When we met him at Martins house he was such a gentleman but Id got him mixed up with Rob Brydon!

Coogan wrote a script with Jeff Pope, who won a Bafta in 2007 for TV drama See No Evil: The Moors Murders as well as penning the recent ITV drama about the murder of Rhys Jones, and cast himself in Sixsmiths role.

Then he contacted Judi Dench.

He came and read it to me and I immediately wanted to do it, remembered the Mrs Brown star. The only thing that concerned me was playing a real-life person, and somebody who is still alive. I felt the responsibility to tell Philomenas story very heavily on my shoulders. We must not sell her short.

When we had the wrap party we were sitting all around and I was talking to Philomena when they interrupted proceedings to show us a clip of the film.

They showed a scene of Anthony as a little boy and I was aware of this hand being placed on my shoulder. `Oh look at him she said. Her passion for the boy really is inspiring. Every time I have spoken to her she has said how much she loved Anthony.

Philomena is on BBC2, Saturday at 9pm
The North Korean's are at it again. It seems they can never get it right when it comes to doing their ballistic missiles and sometimes nuclear tests. This is because this time they launched their middle to long-range ballistic missile test just four days after the new South Korean president was being sworn in and as U.S, Japanese and European natives gathered for joint war games in the pacific. The USS Carl Vincent, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korea navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula. This is according to Seul defense ministry.

But then again if you think about it, is there really ever a right time to do these things? Keeping in the mind the sanctions on nuclear warheads and development, it is clear that the countries already with nuclear capabilities don't want new members to enter their selected team.

Kim Jong-Un on the United States.

North Korea's leader Kim Jong-Un, however, believes that the United States looks down on countries that don't have nuclear capabilities and so is determined to arm his people properly. To what end he wants to do this, however, is still not clear, at least not to the public. Maybe he want's to do something good for his country and wants it to be safe before he can do that, or maybe...

I'd rather not go into that train of thought. Russias president Vladimir Putin warned against intimidating the North Koreans, telling reporters "we are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers,". He said this at an international forum in Beijing.

The North Korean dictator is said to have witnessed the test and hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing.

According to the North Korean News Agency KCNA, the missile, which reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the sea of Japan, flew for about 30 minutes. Russia disputes claims that the missile launched on the weekend landed dangerously close to the Russian city of Vladivostok.

Missile said to have been close to Russian city Vladivostok.

The United States said on Sunday that the North Korean medium-range missile crashed into the sea just 60 miles off the Russias pacific coastline. Russia's ministry of defense on the other hand said it's early warning systems had tracked a missile that landed more than 300 miles from the coast and that it never posed any threat to Russian territory on its flight. The North Korean rocket followed a trajectory away from Russia and at a significant distance," the ministry said in a statement on Monday morning. "This missile launch posed no threat to the Russian Federation."

Pyongyang's aggressive push to boost its weapons program also makes it one of the Trumps administration's most urgent foreign policy worries, though Washington is struggling to settle on a policy. North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket," capable of carrying a large heavy nuclear warhead.
Oceans and seas cover over two-thirds of the earth's surface, provide food and minerals, generate oxygen, absorb greenhouse gases and keep climate change in check, determine weather patterns and temperatures, and serve as highways for sea-borne international trade. Oceans and seas can play a major role in contributing to achieving sustainable development, economic growth, and livelihoods.

UNCTAD is supporting developing countries to identify the opportunities and challenges that the oceans economy can bring. It also supports national trade and other competent authorities to design and create an enabling policy and regulatory environment that promotes the development and emergence of sustainable oceans economic sectors through the definition and implementation of national and regional oceans economy and trade strategies.

UNCTAD obtained a new mandate on oceans and seas at the UNCTAD 14 Conference (Paragraph 100(t) of the Nairobi Maafikiano). UNCTAD's Oceans Economy pillars help to implement this mandate to pursue sustainable and inclusive development, in line with SDG14, and technological capacity, innovation, and policy and regulatory coherence in areas within and beyond national jurisdiction.
In the wake of #President Trumps known instability and #sore approval ratings, Senate republicans are beginning to display signs of drifting away from him as they begin their attempts to create a customary Republican program that will safeguard their political prosperities.

To imagine a party that is not behind its leader is to look back into the years before the #Republicans held office with admired leaders such as George W Bush and Ronald Reagan. Whilst those presidents may have had passed some deeply unpopular legislations and bills, and favored movements that many in the country didnt like, they still mostly retained the support of their party, the Republican Party.

Trump's supporters drift away

Several Republicans have been publicly forthcoming in their questioning of President Trumps resolution to get rid of the director of the FBI, #James Comey. After all this fractiousness, many were then quietly demoralized when Trump made threatening noises against Comey and any attempt he may have in leaking negative data or information about the president. Even those who did support Trump's Comey move have complained off-record and in private that that it was an ill-timed move that created yet more chaos.

Republicans are also not happy about #Trump's imminent budget focus with its stanzas that may remove funds for the national drug control office whilst a vicious and problematic opioid epidemic rages on throughout America.

Also, many in the Republican Party are not at all sure about Trump's impending withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement and they say that they will not support it.

A stand-off is not likely

Up to this date, Republicans have resisted from staging what could look like an intervention or #stand-off with the president en masse, partly to avoid any damage this may do in the work they want to get done by the end of the year: they want to put tax bills and health care on the President's agenda within the year's end.

Even though Trump is still supported by high ranking members of the Party, such as Paul Ryan, the drift from the boss is sending an arctic chill across Washington.

And with the #White House reeling from one crisis to another, Trump is unintentionally obstructing those Republican efforts to fulfill and follow through on his promises and programs.

It's a tidal wave of dramas and fiery press and nerves are frayed. Kevin Madden, a Republican operative with experience working on Capitol Hill describes these sorts of distractions as growing into serious obstacles to aligning the main and pressing interests of Congress.

The playbook of a unified party

This is the playbook of a party who have full control of both Congress and the White House: lawmakers attempt to utilize the full force of the presidency to drive through legislative primacies, in a clear and synchronized manner, with plenty of message and theme repetition used to slam dunk. But President Trumps transitory and ephemeral use of his pulpit for policy messaging has created chaos and distractions in this known method described above.

Lurching from crisis to crisis every day, #Washington has become the home of two demoralized parties it seems. Only time will tell if swift action is going to be taken and whether the Party of No becomes the Party of Not Following Its Leader. Many are of the opinion that Trump will need to learn the rules of politics in Washington if he is to regain control of his party's good graces. After all, Trump is a hustler and a New York business man, he is used to creating diversionary drama and tactics - chaos creation, if you will - to get what he wants.
The District Of Columbia just claimed its second consecutive Miss USA crown over the weekend. Kara Deidra McCollough, a 25-year old chemist who was born in Italy, was crowned the winner of the prestigious beauty pageant in front of an applauding crowd in Las Vegas, Nevada. Coming in second is Miss New Jersey, Chhavi Verg, and at third place is Miss Minnesota Meridith Gould.

McCollough was crowned by the reigning Miss USA winner, Miss District of Columbia, Deshauna Barber. This year's Miss USA will be representing the United States at the upcoming 66th Miss Universe pageant.

Beauty and brains

McCollough currently works as a radiochemist at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She graduated from South Carolina State University, where she studied nuclear chemistry. Aside from her academic accolades, the stunning 5-foot 10-inch brunette also has an outreach program that teaches children about science and technology. Her program also aims to inspire and help women who have interests in mathematics, engineering, and the sciences.

Answers to controversial issues

One of the biggest factors that likely gave McCollough the win was her answers to some very tough questions regarding two particularly controversial topics. The first question that was asked was regarding her thoughts about healthcare being a privilege to US citizens.

The titleholder affirmed her belief that healthcare is indeed a privilege and that it is only given to those who have jobs, but that everyone should strive for an environment that gives people the right opportunities to acquire healthcare.

The second question was regarding her stance towards feminism. McCollough immediately responded by saying that the term should be called "equalism" instead.

She then mentioned that woman are just "as equal as men," especially when it comes to opportunities in the workplace. She also mentioned that woman are capable of taking leadership roles in different fields, including in offices or in medical science fields.

Equal opportunity

The recently held beauty contest actually included five contestants who had immigrated to the country while they were young.

The contestants include those from Florida, Hawaii, Connecticut, and North Dakota. The pageant's first runner-up even shared her story about coming to the country from India while she was four years old. Verg explained that the definition of being American is now slowly changing and that it does not necessarily require a specific skin color.
The biggest story to dominate the news cycle over the last week has been Donald Trump's decision to fire James Comey as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In response, Trump has criticized the media over their coverage of the story, which is getting a mixed reaction on Fox News.

Fox News on Comey

As the 2016 presidential election was coming to a close, then FBI Director James Comey shockingly brought up Hillary Clinton's private email server issue relating to her time as Secretary of State during the Barack Obama administration.

Despite Clinton leading in the polls at the time, the speculation brought on by Comey cast further doubt over whether or not she could be trusted, which many Democrats blame for Donald Trump's victory. While Comey was a top enemy for Democrats, he's recently become a thorn in the side for Republicans ever since he was tapped to lead the investigation into what role Russia played in the election, including what their impact was on the Trump campaign. With Comey reportedly not willing to cooperate with the president, he was fired last week causing instant criticism from the media. Though most at Fox News have given Trump the benefit of the doubt, host Chris Wallace wasn't as forgiving. During the May 14 edition of "Fox & Friends," Wallace clashed with a fellow host at the network.

Joining the crew at "Fox & Friends" on Sunday morning was Chris Wallace, with the highlighted topic covering James Comey's firing from the FBI. Co-host Pete Hegseth defended Donald Trump and his criticism of the press, saying, "you can understand his frustrations. It's been about Russian collusion since the beginning." Not stopping there, Hegseth added, "His critics have tried to make him look illegitimate."

Its a Big Story: Chris Wallace Rebuts Fox Hosts Complaints About Comey Firing Hysteria https://t.co/LllARPpRBr (VIDEO) pic.twitter.com/k0otCNisIJ  Mediaite (@Mediaite) May 14, 2017

Pushing back from Pete Hegseth's comments, Chris Wallace put the blame on the lap of Donald Trump.

"This is a big story, Wallace said. "This is the first time in history that a president has fired an FBI director who was conducting an investigation that was directly investigating him and his associates," Wallace continued. In addition, Wallace went on to rip Trump for his use of Twitter, as it was clear that not all Fox News hosts were on the same page when it comes to covering the White House and the commander in chief.

Next up

As even hosts on the more conservative Fox News debate over whether or not Donald Trump was right in firing James Comey, it doesn't appear like the rest of the mainstream media is willing to back off. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and stands by his decision, as questions still remain around the issue at hand.
The Washington Post is reporting that North Korea has tested a new missile that national security experts fear is one step closer to a working ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear weapon. The missile was launched from a site near the North Korean border with China, flew in a high arc of 1240 miles, and then hit the ocean 435 miles away from the launch pad.

Why is the missile test a problem?

The missile, Hwasong-12, was a smaller version of the KN-08 ICBM, a single-stage, liquid fuel rocket. The flight tested a reentry vehicle capable of delivering a nuclear warhead from outside the Earths atmosphere.

If the missile had been launched on a flatter trajectory, it would have had a range of 2,800 miles, placing much of Asia, including the American territory of Guam, within range.

However, North Korea does not yet have a nuclear weapon small enough to fit on top of a rocket. Nevertheless, the North Koreans may be a year away from developing a working ICBM capable of reaching the United States.

What is the United States and her allies doing about the North Korean missile threat?

The United States, under President Donald Trump, is mulling a range of diplomatic, economic, and military options in dealing with North Korea. While a number of economic sanctions are still available to put pressure on Pyongyang, Washington is placing much of its hopes of stopping North Korea on diplomatic pressure from China.

The idea is that Beijing will come to recognize that a nuclear-armed neighbor to its immediate south is as much a threat to China as it is to South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

Japan is very concerned about the prospect of a North Korea with nuclear-tipped missiles and has joined in a military buildup. The newly elected leader of South Korea, however, has expressed a preference for a diplomatic solution.

On the military front, the United States has started a military buildup around North Korea, with navy ships off shore and assets in South Korea, including a THAAD anti-missile battery.

The American military is also planning a test of a long-range anti-ICBM system that it hopes will ensure the North Koreans that it is capable of stopping a nuclear strike.

The one option that the Trump administration would like to avoid is the first strike on North Korean missile and nuclear sites. Such an attack would also likely include artillery batteries that North Korea has deployed that could level Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is they are not suppressed. Any war on the Korean peninsula would be a bloodbath on both sides. Nevertheless, the United States may launch such an attack if it is the only way to stop a nuclear attack.
Former US Attorney General Sally Yates testified in front of the Senate as part of a parliamentary investigation into possible cooperation between Donald Trump's electoral staff and Russian intervention in the US election. Yates testified that she warned Don McGhan's White House advisor that Trump's National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, had come up with "troublesome" procedures regarding his telephone conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and lamented Vice President Mike Pence, the Washington Post says.

Yates was fired after warning the White House

Yates was removed on January 30, just three days after warning the White House about Flynn lying about the content of his conversation with Kislyak. The content of the talks were the sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia and the possibility of their abolition if Trump comes to power.

This conclusion is supported by the time of the conversation. On December 29, 2016, the same day that former President Barack Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomatic officials and further measures due to Russian hacking of documents related to Hillary Clinton and interference in the elections. Flynn resigned on February 13 because of lying to Pence, but only after media discovered this scandal, and more than two weeks after Yates warned the White House.

In other words, instead of releasing his incriminating adviser to Flynn, Trump dismissed The State attorney warning him of the affair.

That Trump is very concerned about Yates's testimony and intends to discredit her as an unreliable witness suggested his tweet.

Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017

Serious disturbance of national security

Trump's shift from the affair to the question of how the affair data "spurned" is similar to the accusation that Obama was eavesdropping him.

Although FBI director James Comey testified that there is no evidence for that, Trump continues to argue that the charge is "very robustly proven".

But, according to Yates, the case with Flynn is a serious disturbance of national security, because he brought himself in a situation in which Russians can blackmail him because of his talks with Kislyak.

The investigation remains to find out why the Trump administration waited two weeks to settle an advisor caught in secret agreements with the Russians - and why did it do so only after pressures from the media and the public.
If you Google "Paso Canoas border," the first search results are likely to consist of information for travelers and backpackers crossing the border from Panama into Costa Rica. You will have to search a bit further before you find news articles about a full-blown migrant crisis that is overwhelming Costa Rica's southern border crossing. The Costa Rican government is doing its best to process the thousands of people on a long journey through Central America to the United States by issuing migrants a traveling visa called, Laissez Passer as of last April, to travel north to the United States.

Unfortunately, migrants are finding that, as they arrive in Nicaragua, the border has been closed to passing migrants, and many are living on the border in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions -- unable to continue their journey.

Where are the migrants coming from?

Tens of thousands of migrants, overwhelmingly from Haiti and the Congo, have flooded Central American borders. While many claim to be from the Congo, it is suspected that most are from Haiti. Migrants claim to be from the Congo in order to avoid deportation back to Haiti. Governments cant afford to deport people back to the Congo and migrants do not have documents, so its a way to continue the journey.

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Brazil opened its borders to Haitian refugees but the relief benefits have since expired, leaving little opportunity to make a living, so individuals and families are journeying north through South and Central American countries with the hope of entering the United States.

Post-earthquake in 2010, President Obama opened U.S borders to Haitian refugees -- but it has since been revoked.

Dangers of the journey

The Costa Rican government is doing its best to implement programs, provide amenities, and issue visas to the giant influx of migrants entering the southern border. Costa Rican communications minister Mauricio Herrera Ulloa stated that the country is very overwhelmed, as this problem was unforeseen, but officials are working to protect the human rights of those journeying north.

Shelters have also been set up in old warehouses that provide migrants with a place to stay and food. The International Organization of Migration (IOM) provides workshops to educate people about the dangers of human trafficking. With an estimated 40,000 migrants on the trail north, the possibility of becoming a victim of trafficking and exploitation is a potential issue.

While Costa Rica and IOM are able to provide commodities and workshops on the border once migrants reach Nicaragua, they are not permitted to advance any further.

The Central American migrant crisis has become a question of government resources and responsibility. Many fled their homeland of Haiti after a natural disaster that left large numbers of people with nothing. In the immediate aftermath outside governments offered assistance but not in a sustainable way. Now, tens of thousands of people are migrating through South and Central America with no real rights or protection, but most governments have stopped helping Haitians. The future of these migrants is uncertain, and in order to provide a more stable future, an international effort must be put forth.
In the few months that Trump has been in the throne, Republicans have achieved few of their #legislative priorities. Case in point: repealing the #Affordable Care Act. Second case in point: cutting taxes. Both have been drained and weakened by chaos and confusion in the White House with daily and weekly dramas cutting off decent Senate or House support.

So when President Trump suggested in the last few weeks that Senate rules and regulations should change so that it is easier for #Republicans to garner their bills through swiftly, Senator Mitch McConnell roundly and coherently rejected the notion.

Lawmakers are also diverging from the presidential agenda, if you could call it that, by forging through with #bipartisan measures and controls on stronger sanctions against Russia. Republicans also said no this month to many of the trump administrations priorities put forward as part of a short-term spending measure, which had in it some funds to build a wall along the US/Mexican border

It's clear that there are signs of weariness and change afoot in the Republican Party, and that most of this is being played out in the Senate. Watch this space to see what happens next in a confused washington.
Over the last two weeks, Donald Trump has made questionable decisions when it comes to the area of foreign policy. The president's latest move has been to taunt North Korea on Twitter, which has resulted in increased tension between the two nations.

Takei on Trump

Earlier this month, Donald Trump shocked the world when he decided within 48 hours to launch nearly 60 tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase. The decision was made after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, killing close to a 100 in the process, including women and children.

The move by the former host of "The Apprentice" received mixed reviews, with critics on the political left predictably not approving, though many supporters of the president, like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, also voicing their displeasure on various social media platforms and on cable news. Just one week later, the United States dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in history on an eastern location in Afghanistan, targeting tunnels used by the Islamic State (ISIS). The news prompted North Korea to speak out, using it as a way to promote their nuclear testing program. As expected, Trump lashed out at the country on Twitter, tweeting, "North Korea is looking for trouble" while noting that even if the United States doesn't get help from China, "we will solve the problem without them!" In response, North Korea's vice foreign minister accused Trump of "making trouble" by sending out "aggressive" tweets.

The issue has since dominated the headlines while the word waits to see what the next step will be. Commenting on the issue with a series of his own tweets on April 14 was actor George Takei, who didn't hold back his thoughts on the issue at hand.

Dropping bigger bombs doesn't make you the bigger man, Donald.  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 13, 2017

Trump hopes big explosions will take our attention off #RussiaLago. But even the "mother of all bombs" won't keep the noose from tightening.  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 13, 2017

Taking to his official Twitter account on Friday was George Takei, who continued his war of words on social media against Donald Trump.

"Dropping bigger bombs doesn't make you the bigger man, Donald," Takei tweeted out. "Trump hopes big explosions will take our attention off #RussiaLago. But even the "mother of all bombs" won't keep the noose from tightening," he continued.

Trump now threatening to bomb a third country in his fledgling and we hope short-lived presidency. But this one is armed to the teeth. SMH.  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 14, 2017

It's about to get very interesting, and possibly dangerous. https://t.co/4rGGkDz4Ff  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 14, 2017

Not stopping there, the former star of the "Star Trek" TV series piled on his criticism.

"Trump now threatening to bomb a third country in his fledgling and we hope short-lived presidency," George Takei wrote, before noting that North Korea is "armed to the teeth." Takei then tweeted out an article questioning Trump's rhetoric towards the rival nation, while adding his own message, stating, "Does he know what he's doing? Or is this the mother of all distractions?"

You know things have gotten upside down when China is urging calm and sounds like the most reasonable voice in the room.  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 14, 2017

Takei doubles down

"You know things have gotten upside down when China is urging calm and sounds like the most reasonable voice in the room," George Takei said of the issue between the United States and North Korea.

"You know it's bad when you find yourself googling 'North Korea nuclear weapons how many,'" he noted, before concluding with his final tweet on the matter as of press time, stating, "Understand that the rest of the world puts both Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump into the same unbalanced, nuclear-armed state leader basket."

You know it's bad when you find yourself googling "North Korea nuclear weapons how many"  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 15, 2017

Understand that the rest of the world puts both Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump into the same unbalanced, nuclear-armed state leader basket.  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 15, 2017

As it currently stands, North Korea has threatened to start their nuclear testing whenever Kim Jong-un gives the military the order, which could take place as early as next week. The White House has not elaborated further with their response.
Reality Steve always does a great job of spoiling what will happen on "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" each season. Now he has revealed that rachel lindsay will really change up the way that she does the hometown dates. Normally, the lead will go to the hometown of the final four guys and meet their families. Instead, this time around the final four guys will come to her in her hometown of Dallas, Texas.

Details revealed of how Rachel changes things up this season

One thing going on this season is that Rachel Lindsay has a sister who is very pregnant.

It turns out that when it is time for hometown dates she will be so far along that traveling won't be a good idea. Normally, the family of "The Bachelorette" gets to go to a tropical location and meet the final two guys, but that is just not going to work out for her sister. This is something new that they had to deal with and find a way to make it work.

Now Reality Steve doesn't know exactly how this will work. Will all four guys meet her family at the same time or different times? Everyone is going to have to just wait and see how it goes down. It may end up being four dates with her family or all four guys at once plus some alone time or something.

One thing about this is that Reality Steve lives in Dallas.

That is going to make it really easy for him to spoil what ends up happening on these dates. He is going to have connections all over the place that will be able to tell him what they see and Steve may even be able to show up and scout some of it out himself.

The other thing everyone is curious about is if Rachel will end up meeting the guy's families.

That is unknown right now. They may end up flying the families of the final two guys to her finale and then she gets to meet them. Normally, it would have been her family there. They could bring their family to Dallas to meet with her family or something like that as well. Since they are changing things up, everyone is just going to have to wait and see how it all plays out on this season of "The Bachelorette" because it is going to be different than we are used to seeing.

At least they will mix things up which is going to be nice. It gets boring when it happens all the time the same way.

What do you think of the way that Rachel Lindsay is doing her hometown dates different? Do you think that this will work out okay? Sound off in the comments section below on your thoughts, and don't miss new episodes o "The Bachelorette" with Rachel Lindsay when they start airing in May on ABC.
There's trouble brewing in the Kardashian household once again, as evidenced by Sunday's episode of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians." The eldest sibling, Kourtney, was outraged that the father of her children and her former flame, Scott Disick, brought a woman to their recent family trip to Costa Rica. The 38-year old entrepreneur, reality TV star, and mother of three accused Disick of "playing the victim" when confronted about the issue, PEOPLE reported. The explosive new episode showed Kardashian teaming up against Disick once again, but Kourtney believes that this is the last straw.

Scott Disick admits he is a 'horrible sex addict'

On Sunday's episode of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," Scott Disick admitted that he is a "horrible sex addict," which was the reason why he could not stay loyal to Kourtney Kardashian. Kourtney commented, "Scotts so lucky, because I am the coolest baby mama on the planet." The eldest Kardashian added that it was about time to confront her former partner and tell him that there was no hope in reconciling with him following the stunt he pulled in Costa Rica. She said, "I need to have a conversation with him just to finally say we will never be back together. Its probably better for both of us."

Kourtney Kardashian confronts Scott Disick, tells him 'it's done'

There's no hope for the former flames of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," as Kourtney finally put a lid on any hopes that they would reconcile.

Disick, on the other hand, seemed to be holding out hope that the pair would get back together. But when Kourtney said "it's done," he responded with "That's all I've ever wanted you to say."

How will Kourtney and Scott co-parent moving forward?

The "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" stars are parents to three children, Mason Dash, Penelope Scotland, and Reign Aston, who shares his older brother Mason's birthday.

Some viewers believe that their fights were all just for the cameras. But there seems to be one thing missing in Scott's life -- a wife. Back in 2011, he intended to propose to Kourtney, but the latter did not want to get married because things were good at the time. According to E! News, Disick shared his thoughts on being a single parent, saying, "Every night, you go to bed with our kids and I have to sleep alone, sad and miserable. That's my life." It seems that he'll have to get used to it, though, as Kourtney no longer sees a future with her former flame.
It used to be that once a TV comedy or drama developed a following and got some notice from worthy critics, it was safe for several seasons. Times have changed on the TV viewing landscape and viewing on-demand and shorter run cable series are stealing the masses away from appointment TV. The networks have to give their prospectus next week, showing whats going to be new and exciting for next season to their New York bosses, and as always, some fan-favorites are taking the fall, and will not be seen come this fall 2017.

The major blows

For CBS, America's most watched network thanks to its lock on very successful franchises, the mainstays are staying in place.

Friday night favorites, Hawaii Five-O and Blue Bloods lead-in by MacGyver got welcome early news of safety. The newer promising shows were not so lucky.

Doubt, the courtroom drama that starred Catherine Heigl with a stellar supporting cast, including Laverne Cox, Elliott Gould, and Dule Hill, began in a flash of advance fervor and the stamp of approval from the critical world. Sadly, the glamor only lasted for two episodes, and there will be no second chance. Pure Genius, the medical drama that meshed computer tech savvy into medicine, and pulling on the talents of Dermot Mulroney, won't get a saving prescription. The show never managed to gain a full viewership point in the crucial 18-49 demographic.

Bull is the new drama survivor, breathing life into shows still created by real writers and real scripts.

ABC truly wields the ax

Fans are fuming on social media about Last Man Standing being stricken from the schedule after six seasons. The comedy certainly had its following, but numbers tell the story for networks, and the last season came to a low.

Tim Allen always seems to resurrect himself, and Last Man Standing will have immortal life in syndication, and on its Hallmark Channel home.

Dr. Ken, starred, was produced, and created by the real-life doctor, Ken Jeong. The comedy will have no lucky charm of a third year, since its leaving the ABC lineup after two seasons.

The funny man of medicine can always return to his film career. After all, he left his practice for putting bigger studio bucks in his pockets.

Another notable absence will be American Crime starring the gifted combination of Felicity Huffman and Regina King. The drama got wide critical acclaim, and even Golden Globe nods, but pumping up the numbers is even tougher than courtroom prosecutions. Shonda Rimes couldnt work enough magic to keep The Catch from being caught in the cuts after two seasons. Secrets and Lies, The Real ONeals, Conviction, and Jenna Elfmans latest incarnation on imaginary Mary will say so long, too.

New shows not so hot for NBC

Timeless, Powerless, and Emerald City turned out to not be gems for NBC.

Maybe the trick is to not have anything less in the title if ratings are the key.

Favorites leaving FOX

Sleepy Hollow had a slow build but built a strong fan base over four seasons. The Ichabod Crane continuing story had a dramatic dip in viewers for its last season, and that, unfortunately, is the reason for the shears. Rosewood, the police procedural with the smart and sexy Morris Chestnut, drew its fan base through its first season as a lead-in to Empire, but shifting twice to Thursdays, then Fridays, proved fatal this past season.
Powers Boothe has died at the age of 68. He was best known for his TV role in Deadwood, as well as in films Sin City, The Avengers and Tombstone.

According to Powers Boothes publicist, the actor died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Los Angeles on Sunday. His publicist added that the cause of death was due to natural causes, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Stars and fans pay tribute

Actor Beau Bridges was the first of many people to express their sadness over the actors passing. Several fans had also tweeted to pay their respects.

It's with great sadness that I mourn the passing of my friend Powers Boothe. A dear friend, great actor, devoted father & husband, Bridges tweeted.

It's with great sadness that I mourn the passing of my friend Powers Boothe. A dear friend, great actor, devoted father & husband.  Beau Bridges (@MrBeauBridges) May 14, 2017

Actress Lea Thompson also paid tribute to Powers Boothe, posting a photo of herself with the actor. "I loved acting with you #powersboothe you were a gentleman and a great actor #rip #RedDawn #Wolverines," the actress captioned the accompanying photo.

I loved working with Powers Boothe. A towering Texas gentleman and world class artist. Rest In Peace, amigo. pic.twitter.com/Gw3hdbA3JV  Robert Rodriguez (@Rodriguez) May 15, 2017

And actor Robert Rodriguez also posted a tribute for Boothe on social media following the news of his death. "I loved working with Powers Boothe. A towering Texas gentleman and world class artist.

Rest In Peace, amigo," Rodriguez tweeted, along with a photo of himself with Boothe.

Powers Boothes renowned works

The actors first foray into television came in the form of Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones. In the show, he played the titular character, Jim Jones.

Powers Boothe won an Emmy award for the role back in 1980.

He accepted his award in the midst of an actors strike and was the only nominated actor who attended the ceremony. "This is either the most courageous moment of my career or the stupidest," he said after collecting the coveted prize.

More television and film roles

In the years that followed, Boothe went on to play notable antagonist roles. He played Cy Tolliver in Deadwood and Curly Bill Brocius in Tombstone, according to NBC News.

He also played a corrupt senator in Sin City. In addition, he played the role of Gideon Malick in the 2012 film The Avengers, as well as Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC.

Family background and funeral plans

Boothe was originally from west Texas but moved to New York City so he could carve an acting career.

He was survived by his wife of 50 years, Pam, and their two children.

The late actors publicist also announced that a funeral service is being planned. It is slated to take place in the actors home state, and that a public memorial is being considered.
Spoiler alerts for the week of May 15th indicate something big for "The Young and the Restless." Fans of the CBS daytime drama are in for a treat, as "Y&R" has cast "The Talk" co-host julie chen. On Wednesday, Chen will portray herself as she meets her biggest fan, Hillary Curtis.

Hillary's agenda

Hillary Curtis is the owner and co host of "G.C. Buzz," a talk show in the fictional Genoa City. She initially came to town to punish Neil Winters, who, decades ago, was a drinking buddy of her mother. Hillary blamed Neil, because her mom died from alcoholism.

Ms. Curtis schemed, scammed and manipulated until she ended up married and divorced from Neil and also his adopted son Devon Hamilton. Hillary Hamilton is young and definitely restless.

In an effort to make Devon believe she has moved on, Hillary began dating Jordan, a photographer for Brash and Sassy, Jordan is going on location in Hollywood to shoot photo's of Lilly Ashby, the official Brash and Sassy spokesmodel. They will be accompanying other cast members from "The Young and the Restless," who will be in Tinsel town on business. Victoria Newman, the company owner, along with her children, and ex-husband Billy who works for her, will be on hand.

Hillary envisions herself as more important than she realy is.

She continually is trying to prove that she is a powerful business woman, and a successful talk show host. Meeting Julie Chen will certainly be a highlight for her. Spoiler alerts indicate that Chen is Hillary's favorite talk show host. It's not been mentioned on the show, but viewers know Ms. Curtis will milk this one for all it's worth.

She will more than likely take selfies with Chen, and use the opportunity to boost ratings for her own talk show.

Hooray for Hollywood

This trip to California will be a memorable one for all the Genoa City residents who are headed there. As Hillary is trying to make her mark and photo bomb Julie Chen, Jordan will be snapping away, obtaining photo's of Lilly and trying to increase her profile as a model, and also doing his best not to let his feelings for her show.

Billy is attempting to score a big deal for the company, while Victoria's goal is to get her ex to fall in love with her again. Bringing their children along is certainly a plus. Everyone will have their own agenda. Fans of "The Young and the Restless" know that this trip to Hollywood will be one to remember for a very long time.
On Sunday morning, North Korea defied the world and launched a ballistic missile in a new test in defiance of United Nations (UN) sanctions. This action naturally prompted reaction around the world, including from the United States Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley.

Haley's reaction

Reaction from Nikki Haley came hours after the missile was launched when she was being interviewed on ABC's 'This Week.' She said that the missile test appeared to send a message to South Korea and their newly elected President, Moon Jae-in. She also suggested that North Korea's missile program was "getting kind of close to home" for Russia since the missile landed closer to them than Japan.

Haley blasted the missile test, saying that "it is not a way to sit down" with President Donald Trump. This test came after a top diplomat in North Korea said that they would be willing to meet with the administration for negotiations, "if the conditions are set."

Haley also cautioned that the United States would continue to "tighten the screws" on North Korea. She also added that Kim-Jong Un was in a "state of paranoia."

Reaction from the White House

The White House reacted by saying in an official statement that "North Korea has been a flagrant menace for far too long." It was also suggested by the White House that Russia should be concerned, due to where the missile landed. These would be comments that Nikki Haley would echo hours later.

The White House statement also added, "the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased."

North Korea's missile test

North Korea launched an unidentified ballistic missile off Kusong early Sunday morning. According to South Korea officials, it flew 430 miles after spending around 30 minutes in the air before landing in the Sea of Japan.

Today, North Korea announced that the missile it launched was a new ballistic missile.

They also added that this missile can carry a large, heavy nuclear warhead and warned that military bases the United States controls in the Pacific were within its range. American officials are calling it an intermediate-range ballistic missile, thought to have the longest range yet of any the country has tested.

North Korea's state news agency also said that leader Kim-Jong Un "declared that the D.P.R.K. is a nuclear power worthy of the name whether someone recognizes it or not." The state news also added that Kim-Jong Un said that if the U.S. provokes North Korea, it will not escape "the biggest disaster in history."
A visitor takes a close look at an Inspur Group Co Ltd's exhibit at CeBit, the world's biggest computer and software fair, in Hannover, Germany. ZHANG FAN / XINHUA

Big server maker plans to construct cloud computing centers overseas

China's biggest server maker Inspur Group Co Ltd aims to increase the contribution of its overseas revenue stream to 40 percent of its total sales by 2020, as it scrambles to tap into opportunities brought by the Belt and Road Initiative.

Sun Pishu, chairman and CEO of Inspur, said the company will step up efforts to build cloud computing centers overseas to help promote regional connectivity in the Eurasian continent. It currently generates 20 percent of its revenue from abroad.

"IT facilities have become the same important infrastructure as water, electricity and transportation," Sun said.

"The Belt and Road Initiative is not only about connecting ports, railways and highways, but also to free up the flow of information and data and to enhance digital links among the economies," Sun added.

The Shandong-based company's IT products are available in 108 countries and regions. It has built more than 30 cloud computing centers in China and helps more than 110 local government organizations to boost their governance via cloud products.

Sun Pishu, chairman and CEO of Inspur Group Co Ltd [Photo/Xinhua]

"China is the most sophisticated IT market and the largest data producer in the world," Sun said. "Our four decades of experience in building information infrastructure is of great value to other developing economies." Last year, the China Development Bank promised to offer Inspur 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) in financing from 2016 to 2020, which among other purposes would be used to accelerate the latter's overseas expansion.

Inspur has already built an education cloud platform for the Thai government to boost local students' learning efficiency. Its prowess in super computers also helped scientists from Saudi Arabia map the genome of the date-palm tree, whose fruit is a staple food in the region. It has also established cooperation with about 20 countries on tax informatization.

"When venturing into markets related to the Belt and Road, Inspur not only exports products and services, but shares its experience in leveraging information infrastructure with other developing economies," Sun said.

To date, the Chinese IT conglomerate has held more than 500 overseas training programs on big data, cloud computing and tax informatization systems, which it said helped countries like Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa and Vietnam train more than 10,000 technicians and officials.

In March, Inspur signed a strategic cooperation agreement with an affiliated organization of the Ministry of Commerce to expand similar initiatives and provide more training opportunities for economies related to the Belt and Road Initiative.

Xiang Ligang, a telecom expert and CEO of telecom industry website cctime.com, said as Chinese heavyweights narrow the technology gap with Western counterparts, more companies will expand their overseas footprint in the future.
Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank [Photo/Agencies]

The China-led Belt and Road Initiative serves as a constructive platform to help achieve common prosperity for regional economies and contributes to global development, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said on Sunday.

China's growing influence can be applied through the initiative to help other countries work through their differences and foster the development of free trade and investment, Kim told China Daily on the sidelines of the ongoing Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing.

The initiative consists of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

Global and regional trade and investment still face many hurdles"sometimes even within a single country", Kim said. Trade between states or provinces and another state or province "can be very complicated".

"What is needed in terms of tackling these barriers is that you need to have convening power," he said. "You need to bring all the different parties together, and you need to get them to sit in a room and work out these kinds of differences.

"There's a huge incentive for countries to come together at a meeting or platform that's convened by China. Everybody wants to work with China."

Kim made the comments against a background of rising anti-globalization and anti-trade sentiment in some developed countries. Meanwhile, many economiesespecially in some underdeveloped regionsare in dire need of investment in infrastructure.

President Xi Jinping said in a speech on Sunday morning that China is willing to contribute to building a global free trade network, share its development experiences with other countries and increase funding through the Belt and Road Initiative to bolster global growth and promote the common development of the international community.

Kim praised Xi's leadership in pushing the initiative.

"The most important thing about his speech is how incredibly ambitious he is," Kim said. "He set a very high bar for what we should try to accomplish.

"There are very few leaders in the world who, because of their own position, their own charisma, their own ideas, can push the entire region forward. President Xi can do that."

In a meeting with Kim on Sunday, Premier Li Keqiang said that China is willing to cooperate with the World Bank to conduct research on how to create new growth engines for the country, as China presses ahead with its economic restructuring, according to a China Central Television report.
President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan (second from left), and Uzbekistan's President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and his wife, Ziroatkhon Mirziyoyeva, attend a welcoming ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 12, 2017. [Photo by WU ZHIYI/CHINA DAILY]

Deals signed with one of first neighbors to back Belt and Road

Chinese and Uzbekistani enterprises signed agreements and deals of more than $10 billion, just days before the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

The deals were signed during Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev's first state visit to China, which began on Thursday, Assistant Foreign Minister Li Huilai said on Friday. Mirziyoyev will also attend the forum in Beijing on Sunday and Monday.

In his meeting with Mirziyoyev on Friday, President Xi Jinping said Uzbekistan is a close and important neighbor of China.

Xi said Uzbekistan was among the first countries to support and participate in the building of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The two countries have harvested achievements in their cooperation to build the initiative, and this has created a mainstream that leads bilateral cooperation, he said.

Xi added that China is ready to work with Uzbekistan to fully tap into the potential and push for new progress on cooperation in building the initiative.

He said the two sides should strengthen the synergy between their development strategies and jointly plan the priorities for directions, areas and programs of bilateral cooperation.

Additionally, they should fully tap into the potential for economic and trade cooperation, expand the scale of bilateral trade, optimize the trade structure and achieve long term, steady and healthy development of bilateral trade, Xi said.

He said China is willing to expand cooperation with Uzbekistan in production capacity, investment, industrial parks and infrastructure construction on the basis of equal footing and mutual benefits.

Mirziyoyev said China is a great neighbor of Uzbekistan, and that under the current international situation, China is a crucial and positive factor in promoting world peace, stability and development.

He said Uzbekistan appreciates China's support for the country's taking its own development path, one that adapts to its own national condition, and that his country firmly supports the one-China policy.

He expressed Uzbekistan's support for China in safeguarding its rights and interests and major concerns, as well as its position in combating the "Three Evil Forces"  separatism, extremism and terrorism.

He said Uzbekistan will deepen cooperation with China in areas such as economy and trade, investment, production capacity, infrastructure and water conservation; strengthen exchanges regarding localities and culture; and reinforce coordination and collaboration within multilateral frameworks.

After the talks, the two leaders signed a joint statement and witnessed the signing of cooperative documents covering such areas as economy and technology, transportation and shipment, medical care, agriculture, hydropower, small and medium-scale enterprises, infrastructure, tourism and exchanges.

Assistant Foreign Minister Li told reporters that the two neighbors have seen achievements in the Belt and Road Initiative, such as the completion last year of the longest tunnel in Central Asia. Chinese builders finished the tunnel, which has a total length of 47.3 km, in Uzbekistan in 900 days.

"The project has elevated Uzbekistan's role as a regional transportation passage," Li said.

He added that companies from the two countries also are discussing hydropower projects in Uzbekistan.


Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal arrives for the 28th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the Heads of State and the Government of the African Union in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, January 31, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

ALGIERS - Algerian Prime Minister, Abdelmalek Sellal on Sunday stressed the fight against terrorism and various forms of criminality require joint action between international security services and strong commitment of the international community.

"The world is witnessing considerable upsurge of terrorism and its new forms while allying with drug, arms and human traffickers, as well as with cyber-criminality and money-laundering," Sellal said in his opening notes at 1st African Union Police Cooperation Mechanism (Afripol).

"This is a global organized and multifaceted threat to our security, which requires joint action, coordination and cooperation between international security services, as well as strong and genuine commitment of the international community," he added.

The Algerian official further suggested strengthening the operational and technical capacities of the African police services by developing texts, creating centers of excellence in training and judicial inquiry, and generalizing innovative practices and exchange of information and experience.

He stressed that Algeria has always called for dealing with roots of any crises, urging to separate religious or ethnic alibis from terrorists, draining the sources of funding, as well as confronting the nurturing matrices of radicalization, both academically and politically.

Sellal further added that authorities have to fight the sources of terrorism such as ignorance and poverty, in addition to establishing real national reconciliation policies to bring peoples together and avert hatred and rancor.

He concluded that the outcomes of the 1st General Assembly of Afripol would hopefully provide effective actions that would safeguard world's peace.

The first general assembly of Afripol kicked off Sunday in Algiers, in the presence of Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC) Mahamat Moussa Faki.
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HA NOI  Samsung Viet Nam (SEV) last weekend sponsored water filtration systems for 10 pre-schools in the northern Thai Nguyen and Bac Ninh provinces, with the support of four other organisations.

The other four are Samsung South Korea, Energies Sans Frontiere, Seoul Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, and Ha Noi University.

The project valued at more than VN2.2 billion (US$96,000) starts from the campaign Businesses uniting for community and combating climate change with an aim to bring clean water that ensures health checks and contributes to a better life of the futures generations in Viet Nam.

The systems were built and equipped based on innovative and modern technology using rainwater and groundwater.

Each system is expected to meet demands of 200 to 500 people a day with the capacity of about 1,000 litres of drinking water and 5,000 litres of water for daily use per day.

According to the previous field survey by ESF experts, most pre-schools daily use hundreds of litres of drinking water that cost on an average VN5 million per month paid by students.

Speaking at the ceremony, Hyunwoo Bang, SEVs vice president said, For children, school is considered a second home where they live, study and play. In order to develop healthily and comprehensively, clean water plays a really important role. We always keep in mind that providing children with a safe and clean water source will contribute to the improvement of the quality of life and build a solid foundation for their future.

Over the years, Samsung has been actively involved in social and charitable activities to support the development of local people. In Thai Nguyen and Bac Ninh, Samsung Viet Nam sponsored the construction of Hope School for disadvantaged children. In addition, Samsung has organised many educational support programmes for students in universities such as Samsung Talent Programme and Samsung Software Challenge contest.  VNS
HA NOI  Following recent complaints that several banks in Viet Nam have stopped providing ATM services at night, the State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV) has ordered all banks nationwide to provide ATM services 24/7.

Local media reported that many ATMs on the outside of buildings and shopping malls were turned off when the venues shut, stopping customers using the service, the central bank said.

The SBV has asked all banks and card payment service providers to review their entire ATM systems and ensure smooth operation of ATMs by adjusting ATM working hours.

A Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Agribank) representative told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that State Bank rules dictate that all ATMs operate 24/7. However, the central bank does allow banks to turn off ATMs as long as their opening times are listed at the facilities and on the banks websites, the representative said.

Hoang Chi Mai, a resident of Thanh Xuan District in Ha Noi and Agribank customer said she often withdraws money at an ATM booth on Nguyen Trai Street near her house.

The security guard locks up the booth at 10:00 pm. I thought these ATM booths were open around the clock, Mai said.

According to Nguyen Hoang Minh, deputy director of the SBVs HCM City branch, several banks have stopped providing ATM services at night to prevent criminals from stealing money from customers accounts.

With thieves carrying out increasingly sophisticated activities, police have advised lenders to prepare measures to cope with the situation, Minh said.

The central bank will check if local banks follow the correct protocol for this adjustment, he added.

Tran Quang Thoai, an expert in this field, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that although the banks decision aimed to ensure the security of customers assets, some methods of tackling card fraud have created problems.

To gain understanding from customers, these adjustments should be publicised properly, Thoai said. All changes should not be carried out too suddenly, he added.

Dozens of fees

Many card users have complained about the recent hike in ATM fees, claiming that banks are making profits from ATM services through various fees imposed on their fast growing clientele base, but banks said that the fees are not enough to cover the costs of operating the machines.

Local media reported that an ATM card holder is subject to dozens types of fees. For example, Agribank charges up to 25 types of fees at ATMs, BIDV collects 20 types of fees and Techcombank charges 13 types of fees.

An Ninh Thu o (Capital Security) newspaper quoted Nguyen Toan Thang, general secretary of the Viet Nam Bank Association as saying that the ATM service had developed for 20 years now and there were 53 card issuers nationwide with a total issuance volume of more than 100 million cards. The ATM network had been expanded with more than 17,000 ATMs machines nationwide.

He added that to meet the increasing demand for transactions, banks have to invest in system maintenance, technology innovation, products and services diversification and the integration of value-added services like mobile banking, internet banking and SMS banking.

While there may be many types of fees for card payment services listed, customers do not have to pay them all but only the services they use, Thang said.

It is lawful for banks to charge fees to offset their investment costs and cover huge expenses they have to pay to maintain the system, Thang added.

Recently, some commercial banks have asked the central bank for its approval on a roadmap to increase transaction fees at ATMs, aiming to cover part of the banks investment in the ATM systems.

A representative from a big Vietnamese lender told Dan Tri (Peoples Knowledge) newspaper that with banks investing large sums to set up the ATM systems, fees of VN7,000 to 10,000 per transaction is too little compared to the billions of ong spent to set up, maintain and upgrade ATMs annually.

Not to mention that after each transaction, banks have to send a message announcing account balance to clients, which costs VN700-800 per message, 2 to 3 times above the charge rate for individual subscribers applied for a normal message, he said.  VNS
HA NOI  Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Company Limited (BSR), the operating and managing unit for the Dung Quat Refinery, has sent invitations to 15 domestic and foreign investment funds in preparation for its initial public offering (IPO) in the third quarter of 2017.

Tran Ngoc Nguyen, Chief Executive Officer of BSR, said that the equitisation progress will allow investors to be early benefactors of the companys plan to develop the national oil refining market.

BSR has submitted its net worth auditing process to authorities in order to publish the official results this month. The company has also finished its equitisation strategy and submitted it to the Vietnam Oil and Gas Group for approval, while actively looking for share buyers and strategic investors.

The companys equitisation progress aims to pave the way for future strategic investment plans in the oil refining and deep processing fields.

BSRs aim for increased oil production and a more diverse range of products requires investors with financial strength, experienced human resources and a deep understanding of oil refining technology.

Pham inh Thuong, deputy head of the Department of Legislation of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said at a recent BSRs conference that the company needs major reconstruction to prepare for a successful IPO, such as a clear set of rights and responsibilities for the shareholders.

At the end of 2016, Nguyen Hoai Giang, BSRs Chairman, told the press that the company must diversify its shareholders. As such, BSR is looking for investors amongst potential foreign oil companies as well as domestic commercial banks.

Since 2010, many potential investors from Japan, Venezuela, Russia and the Republic of Korea have expressed their interest in BSRs shares. The companys current return on equity is about 17 per cent.

Starting January 1, 2017, BSR has been authorised by the Prime Minister to operate individually via Decision 1725/Q-TTg. This means the company now competes fairly with imported products with regular market pricing without government subsidies.  VNS
HA NOI  The Government will likely ease the requirement for seafood enterprises to submit declarations of conformity with food safety regulations, officials said at a conference on Saturday.

The conference was held by the ministries of Health, Industry and Trade and the Natural Resources and Environment, the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) and local seafood companies. It was designed to resolve issues rising from the implementation of an April 2012 decree on the Food Safety Law for food producers in Viet Nam.

At the conference, VASEP proposed the Government remove the requirement on declaration of conformity with technical and food safety regulations as it takes seafood firms 15 days to complete the required procedure, which is too long and costly.

In addition, the requirement is not included in the Food Safety Law, therefore, the firms should not have to comply with it, VASEP said.

Deputy Minister of Health Truong Quoc Cuong said VASEPs request is reasonable as the Food Safety Law only requires seafood firms to declare whether their products meet the technical standards or not.

Cuong said that the ministry would try to amend the regulation within two or three months to meet the demand of VASEP and seafood firms, as well as the Food Safety Law.

At the conference, VASEP also proposed the Government cut down the number of procedures for food safety declarations from seafood firms and the time they spend checking those documents.

The association added that the Government should reduce the number of working days to three from the current 15 which Government agencies spend on checking documents, and inspecting and certifying the quality of seafood products, so that local firms can save cost, time and efforts.

According to Decree 38, Government agencies have to check, process and certify a seafood producers documents and products meet the technical and food safety standards within 15 working days from the day the product samples and documents are submitted.

Responding to those requests, the deputy health minister said the ministry has used the level-four public service portal since late 2014 and all documents of seafood firms are now processed online, which is a big improvement for local companies.

However, the ministry has only deployed the online service system in Ha Noi and HCM City as there are still difficulties with the IT system in other provinces and areas, he added.

Regarding the 15-day issue, Cuong said that the required period is appropriate as Government agencies need a lot of time to inspect, compare, cross-check and certify the documents and products while they have to make sure Vietnamese products match other markets regulations.

In the ASEAN region, Singapore and Malaysia are the two countries that need Vietnamese firms declarations of conformity with food safety and technical standards to post-check the products, he said.

Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Quoc Khanh said that both Government and local producers should do their best to make their documents clear in order to reduce the time Government agencies need to review them.

In addition, local producers should hire a third-party company to complete checking and certification procedures to save costs, time and efforts as companies do not have a department that specialises in those activities, he added.  VNS
HA NOI  Two Vietnamese advertising online markets, ChoTot and ImSold, which both belong to 701Search, will be handed over to Telenor ASA, a Norwegian telecommunication company, in June.

Additionally, Telenor reached an agreement with Schibsted to divest from a joint venture with Schibsted in Latin America and bought back its stakes in markets of Malaysia, Viet Nam and Myanmar, ICTnews.vn reported.

Telenor also signed an agreement with Singapore Press Holdings to buy shares in advertising online sites in Malaysia, Viet Nam and Myanmar with a deal worth US$110 million.

ChoTot was launched in 2012 and is a leading advertising online market in Viet Nam.

The change of shareholders will not affect the business strategy of ChoTot as Telenor joined the board of management of 701Search in 2013 and is an important part of the company, CEO of ChoTot said in a press release.

Telenor is one of the largest telecom corporations in the world with revenues of more than $15.3 billion last year and is currently active in 13 countries.  VNS
HA NOI  The State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV), MNR Joint Venture and IBM Viet Nam held a ceremony to launch a new data centre in Ha Noi on Monday.

The centre, which is part of the FSMIMS project sponsored by World Bank, is located at 64 Nguyen Chi Thanh, Ha Noi, covering an area of 2,000 square metres.

It is the first data centre of the countrys banking sector, replacing the centres dispersed in 63 provinces and cities as before.

The centre was designed and built following world standard Tier 3 with a high readiness of up to 99.983 per cent and the total interruption time of only 1.6 hours per year.

Nguyen Kim Anh, SBV deputy governor, said that with World Bank funds, the FSMIMS project was successfully implemented and put in operation. The establishment of the data centre is an important milestone in the modernisation process of SBV information and technologys foundation in conformity with the development orientation of the countrys banking sector in the context of integration trend.  VNS
HA NOI  Finnish Professor Jarmo Anttila from the South Ostrobothnia Music Institute provided a trainning course to improve the pedagogical knowledge of piano teachers at the Ha Noi College of Arts (HCA).

The month-long course included 16 trainnees, exposing them to various international methods and materials in order to update their knowledge of international piano teaching schools and practicing methods.

"The Vietnamese teachers were very interested," said piano teacher and Doctor of Musicology, Professor Anttila. "The new methods were well received by the teachers. It seems that they want to use the methods in their own teaching. Particularly they were interested in the Finnish Piano School, Lang Lang Piano School and Chord accompaniment."

Other piano school techniques includes the Colour Keys Method, the Russian School of Piano Playing, Suzuki Piano School and Thomson Piano School which Professor Anttila introduces to the trainnees.

"In Viet Nam, more attention is paid to technical issues. Pupils here are very skilled in technique. In Finland, more attention is paid to the singing sound and to the structure of music. The pedal is used in Finland more," said the professor.

The trainnees were introduced to various approaches, analysing and practicing international piano teaching and methods. They also discussed musical talent; how to find a musically gifted child; what is the best age to start; how to awaken interest in music and how to encourage and improve students, including beginners and not gifted children.

"Lecturing and practicing the methods of different piano schools is very useful for Vietnamese teachers in their works at the HCA," said Duong Minh Anh, principal of the HCA.

"Our teachers learned a lot from Prof Anttila who is a veteran with about 40 years of experience. He helps the HCA teachers to access different piano schools in the world with a view to finding their own personal way of teaching."

The training course was held as one of many exchnge activities under a co-operation agreement between Ha Noi and South Ostrobothnia in a various fields of culture and tourism since 2008.

Prof Anttila came to Viet Nam in 2015 to attend a workshop and perform under the Finnish-Vietnamese Traditional Music Dialogue project.  VNS
HA NOI  Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong met on Saturday with constituents in the capital citys districts of Ba inh, Tay Ho and Hoan Kiem in preparation for the third session of the 14th National Assembly (NA).

The capitals constituents applauded the leadership and management of the Party Central Committee, Politburo and Government, saying their efforts have created positive changes in social spheres.

Many expressed their belief in the Partys determination to combat corruption and other negative phenomena, saying recent disciplinary measures against several senior officials proved that there is no prohibited areas and discrimination on the grounds of positions and rankings.

Hailing the constructive opinions of voters, the Party leader informed them of the main contents of the third sitting of the 14th National Assembly.

Law building is one of the core and fundamental tasks of the NA. The legislature is not only the highest State power organ but also the highest representative agency of the people, Trong said.

Therefore, it needs to include representatives from all social strata as well as ethnic groups and religions, to ensure the voice of the entire people in making laws.

The number of specialised lawmakers should be increased, experience from foreign countries should be learned and public opinions should be taken into account, he noted. He thanked the constituents for advocating the Party Central Committees deeds to build a stronger and more transparent Party.

The prevention of corruption, negative phenomena and wastefulness in recent time has seen major strides, especially in 2016 when many serious cases were brought to light, he added. But he agreed with constituents that the fight against corruption and negative phenomena has not yet lived up to public expectations, and should be stepped up.

There are a lot of things to do. This is an arduous struggle that requires patience and high determination, he said, adding that the Vietnamese law and policies are strict but also humane.

Regarding the State apparatus and personnel, he said the Party Central Committee will hold a conference to discuss how to evaluate officials.

Pertaining to the punishment of Party members found to have violated the law, the Party chief said it is essential to increase vigilance over provocative information on whether the punishment is hard or soft.

The Party Central Committee has considered the punishment calmly, objectively, comprehensively, and thoroughly and will push ahead with the disciplinary measures according to law, responsibility and morality.

He also took note of the voters concerns about other issues, such as measures to assist the consumption of farm produce, environmental protection, State-run businesses restructuring, public and bad debts.

PM with Hai Phong voters

Also on Saturday, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and NA deputies from the northern city of Hai Phong met with voters in o Son District to answer questions on economic development and anti-corruption measures ahead of the legislatures third plenary session.

Most local voters hailed the efforts and good performance of the Prime Minister and other cabinet members in managing and operating the national economy, ensuring defence and security, and increasing investor confidence.

They expressed approval of anti-corruption measures taken by the Central Steering Committee for Corruption Combat and Prevention, the National Assembly and the Government, especially the role played by the head of the steering committee - Party General Secretary Trong, in directing the handling of 12 serious corruption cases in 2017.

On local issues, the voters asked the Prime Minister to consider adjusting the citys development plan and assisting the locality in carrying out projects important to the citys development.

Phuc welcomed the voters opinions on anti-corruption work, stressing that NA deputies and he himself will reflect the voters aspirations to the legislature and the Government, in order to increase the effectiveness of corruption and wastefulness prevention, and the settlement of serious corruption cases.

On behalf of the Hai Phong NA delegation, the PM explained to local voters the mechanisms and policies to support the implementation of a number of projects in the city, especially the coastal road project to connect six provinces and cities in the north, which the PM described as a vital contribution to Hai Phongs industry, agriculture, services and tourism development.  VNS
Viet Nam NewsBEIJING  President Tran ai Quang on Sunday met with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Secretary General of Japans Liberal Democratic Party Toshihiro Nikai on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing.

President Quang affirmed to Sharif that Viet Nam attaches importance to co-operation with Pakistan and noted his hope that the two countries will promote mutual visits and friendship exchanges on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties.

He suggested the two countries make the best use of their bilateral co-operation mechanisms and push forward negotiations and signing of collaboration agreements in the realms of culture, sports, tourism, aviation and maritime transport.

The President also urged the two countries to fully tap their strength in an effort to bring bilateral trade to US$1 billion in the next three years.

At the same time, Viet Nam and Pakistan should expand their collaboration at multilateral forums, join hands to combat cross-border crimes and sign pending judicial assistance agreements.

PM Sharif shared President Quangs views on the two countries potential for co-operation and the need to strengthen bilateral collaboration, particularly in economy and trade.

President Tran ai Quang (right) met on Sunday with Secretary General of Japans Liberal Democratic Party, Toshihiro Nikai, in Beijing.  VNA/VNS Photo Nhan Sang

At the meeting with Nikai, who is also Chairman of the Japan-Viet Nam Friendship Parliamentary Alliance, President Quang expressed his hope that the Liberal Democratic Party and Nakai himself will contribute more to the Viet Nam-Japan relationship.

He suggested the two countries increase visits and meetings at all levels, particularly at high levels and between the two countries parliamentarians.

The President appealed to Japan to continue providing official development assistance to Viet Nam.

Viet Nam backs the extension of international trade and welcomes Japanese investors to the country, as well as cultural, educational and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries, he said.

Praising Viet Nams role in the region, Nikai expressed his support for Viet Nams hosting of APEC 2017.

He affirmed that Japan hopes to foster its extensive strategic partnership with Viet Nam and highly values co-operation and exchanges between the two countries legislative bodies.

Nikai, in his capacity as Chairman of the Japan-Viet Nam Friendship Parliamentary Alliance, pledged to step up relations between the two parliaments.  VNS
President Tran ai Quang visits Fuzhou City of Fujian Province, China.

FUJIAN  Chinese businesses are encouraged to invest in projects using high technology in Viet Nam, President Tran ai Quang said at an economic-trade cooperation seminar on Saturday.

The seminar was held in Fuzhou City of Fujian Province, attracting representatives of nearly 300 businesses from Viet Nam and China.

President Quang, who is on a State visit to China, stressed that with total registered investment capital of over US$11.2 billion, China is one of the 10 biggest foreign investors in Viet Nam. It remains the biggest trade partner of Viet Nam for more than 10 years with bilateral trade approximating $72 billion in 2016.

Thanks to favourable sea, road and air connections, Viet Nam is a gateway for Chinas products to enter ASEAN markets and is Chinas largest trade partner in the 10-nation ASEAN bloc.

He added that aside from a number of famous destinations like Ha Long Bay, a Nang City and Nha Trang City, the continuous opening of air routes will help attract more and more Chinese tourists to Viet Nam.

Targeting a green economy, sustainable development and average GDP growth of 6.5-7 per cent by 2020, Viet Nam treasures all resources, of which private businesses and foreign investment are important driving forces for economic growth. It is also working to improve the investment environment and national competitiveness to attract more domestic and foreign resources, Quang noted.

The Vietnamese leader asked Vietnamese and Chinese firms to continue initiating innovative ideas in order to create a new momentum for bilateral economic partnership.

He suggested Chinese companies invest in infrastructure, logistics, electronics and support industries while protecting the environment and engaging in social activities in Viet Nam.

President Quang asked the two sides to facilitate their strong products access to each others markets.

Fujian Governor Yu Weiguo highlighted the close relationship between Fujian and the Vietnamese people and the two sides economic links.

Trade between Fujian and Viet Nam reached $3.4 billion in 2016, up 13.8 per cent year on year, and $820 million in the first quarter of 2017. In the last three months, 35 businesses from Fujian invested $270 million in Viet Nam.

Yu emphasised that economic, trade and investment relations with Viet Nam are one of the driving forces of the provinces development.

Flight route proposed

During his stay in Fujian, the President met with several provincial officials, including You Quan, Secretary of the provincial Party Committee and Chairman of the Fujian Peoples Congress Standing Committee, and Yu Weiguo, Governor of Fujian.

At the meetings, President Quang expressed his delight to visit Fujian, which is rich in historical traditions and a pioneer in Chinas reform and door opening process.

Hailing past outcomes of exchanges and co-operation between Viet Nam and Fujian, the President stressed that there is substantial potential for the two sides to expand their collaboration.

The leader expressed his wish that Fujian will step up mutually beneficial co-operation with Vietnamese localities and share experience in socio-economic development, poverty reduction and administrative reform while promoting economic, trade and investment ties with Viet Nam.

He also suggested the Chinese province increase imports of Viet Nams agricultural, forestry and fishery products, and encourage local businesses to invest in such areas as infrastructure, high-tech agriculture and clean energy in Viet Nam.

The President called on Fujian to diversify people-to-people exchanges with Vietnamese localities and support collaboration between Vietnamese and Chinese universities through the exchange of students and scientific research.

At the same time, the two sides should step up cultural and trade promotion and accelerate the opening of their direct air route, first establishing a flight between Fujians Xiamen city and Viet Nams HCM City, he said.

For his part, You Quan affirmed that the provincial Party Committee and authorities always attach importance to co-operation and friendship with Viet Nam and wish to work with Vietnamese localities to materialise common perceptions reached by the two countries high-ranking leaders and boost collaboration in a more efficient and pragmatic fashion, thus contributing to enhancing the comprehensive strategic partnership between Viet Nam and China.

Following the meeting, President Quang and local leaders signed an agreement on the establishment of friendly co-operation between Viet Nams northern province of Quang Ninh and Fujian.

Earlier the same day, the President visited the Fuzhou Administrative Service Centre, a model of one-stop-shop administrative services.

On this occasion, President Quang and his spouse also visited the ancient quarter of Sanfang Qi Xiang, a famous destination in Fuzhou. Quang Ninh has opened a pavilion introducing its tourism at the site.  VNS
HA NOI  One of main causes of increasing Vietnamese deforestation is the poor forest land management awareness among concerned agencies, a Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development official said.

Deputy minister Ha Cong Tuan said some forest managers helped rangers to destroy forests while forest inspectors lacked co-ordination with other relevant forces in protecting forest land and handling violations.

To reach the goal of sustainable forest management in 2030, the Government is completing policy, legal documents and action frameworks to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, according to the deputy minister.

Tuan said the Party Central Committees instruction to strengthen the Partys leadership for forest development, protection and management was promulgated on January 2017.

Concerned agencies are reviewing and adjusting their forest- and forest land-use planning.

Provincial authorities are implementing projects involved in improving livelihoods for local residents.

Vo inh Tuyen, deputy chief of Agriculture Department, at Government Office, said to manage and develop forest effectively, the agriculture ministry should work with relevant ministries and offices to map out an action plan that highlights the role of local authorities.

The agriculture ministry was assigned to review the plan to transfer one hectare of protective forest to production forest.

Deforestation continues

Earlier, the media reported that some 377ha of forest cover, including 273ha of natural forest land in zones 310 and 311 of Song Hinh Commune in Song Hinh District, the coastal south-central province of Phu Yen were destroyed and handed over to the Thao Nguyen-Phu Yen Breeding Joint Stock Company to raise cows.

The agriculture ministry is inspecting documents and decisions of related units on the change in the use of forest land that were issued between 2012 and March 2017.

Binh Phuoc province faces increasing deforestation. The provinces natural forest acreage reduced from 127,800ha in 2002 to 58,000ha in 2016.

Recently, Bu op forest farms project to combine growing forest and breeding on 575ha at Bu op District was suspended; however, over 100ha of forest was destroyed.

There are 14 million hectares of forest nation-wide. Forest cover in Tay Nguyen ( the Central Highlands) province has been reducing rapidly. During five years ( 2010-2014), the forest cover in the region reduced down to 48.5 per cent.

Viet Nam aims to increase the nationwide forest coverage to 42 per cent by the year 2020, and 45 per cent by 2030.  VNS
CENTRAL REGION  Bottom trawling is a particularly destructive method of fishing, in which huge weighted nets are dragged on the sea floor, catching everything in their path.

Nguyen Van Viet, a fisherman from Hoai Nhon District in the province of Binh inh, said locals here considered bottom trawlers to be sea demons.

The setup is either one trawler or two trawlers running in tandem, dragging a huge net with very fine holes, scooping up fish of all sizes. Other than the fact that all sea creatures are caught and bycatches are discarded, the ecosystem along the sea floor is irreparably damaged, Viet said.

Trawlers operating illegally in this part of the sea not only threaten the sustainability of sea resources but are also a menace to other fishermen.

Dangers

Just last week, 33-year-old fisherman Tran Anh, from the province of Quang Tri, nearly met his maker. At around 10pm, he was on his small boat, when he saw two high-capacity trawlers, dwarfing his own vessel, approaching at high speed. He repeatedly signalled his presence, but the two boats kept speeding towards him. As they got closer his boat and everything on it  fishing nets, the days catch  was thrown into the water due to the wake. Luckily, Tran Anh managed to grab a flashlight before his boat sunk entirely, and was rescued by a nearby squid boat.

The captain of the other vessel, Tran Binh, wanted to give chase and demand that the trawlers return to help salvage Tran Anhs floundering boat. However, the trawlers had already turned off their lights and vanished.

Anh had memorised the licence plates of the two trawlers, later found to be from neighbouring Quang Ngai Province.

In a single night, Tran Anh lost his entire livelihood  estimated at VN50 million (US$2,200)  and would struggle to provide for his poor family of five, with three children still in school.

Head of Tran Anhs village, Tran Luan, said his case was just the most recent out of 30 similar incidents since April in this village alone, causing total losses of VN300 million ($13,200), not a small sum for the poor fishermen here.

Nguyen Van Hien, 32, a fisherman from the same village, fully aware of the dangers posed by reckless trawlers, has deployed lights on the ends of his driftnets to prevent them from being torn apart by trawlers, all to no avail. Tran Ngoc Lam, another fisherman, complained of 35 missing nets in just one day in late March.

The fishermen here are very worried, since their nets are destroyed by the irresponsible trawlers. Local authorities are running a charity campaign to support Tran Anh. Concerned agencies really need to take stricter measures to protect the fishermen, Tran Luan said.

Authoritys response

Nguyen Hoai Nam, head of the Quang Tris Department of Aquatic Resources Exploitation and Protection, said the province is trying to locate the two runaway trawlers. Putting an end to illegal operations of trawlers is an uphill battle, Nam said, citing aggressive and even violent reactions by the operators of trawlers when the authorities try to subdue them last April.

In addition, Nam suspected that trawler operators even hired informants to keep an eye out for authorities.

We once deployed a patrol boat to watch over an island as a diversion, then quickly sped towards the sea around Trieu Lang Commune, but the trawlers somehow escaped in time, Nam said.

Nguyen inh Cuong, deputy head of the local border guard, shared Nams suspicion, adding that 3-5 patrols are deployed every month, but its hard to catch the trawlers, especially when their operations are unpredictable.

Under current law, violators caught bottom trawling will be subject to maximum fine of VN50 million ($2,200), in addition to having their boats and tools confiscated.

Change in policy

Nguyen Viet Thang, Chairman of the Viet Nam Fisheries Association, claimed that the oversight of these boats and their operations has been quite lax recently.

Previously, with the Sea Resources Protection Ordinance, there were fisheries protection departments at local levels and specialised work forces who had the authority to arrest and issue fines directly to violators. These units did their job quite well so the bottom trawlers were kept in check, Thang said.

After the Fisheries Law took effect, agriculture and fisheries inspectorates took over these units, with the catch, however, that inspections require an order, and are pre-planned, and regular, which sort of defeats the purpose, leaving near-shore areas open to the risk of over-exploitation, Thang added.

Suggesting amendments to the Fisheries Law, Thang proposed the reinstatement of local fisheries protection units, which oversee exploitation in near-shore areas and have the authority to fine violators, while the open sea is the jurisdiction of central fisheries protection units.

According to Nguyen Van Trung, Director of Fisheries Department at the Directorate of Fisheries, under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, bottom trawling is a traditional method used by fishermen in shallow areas.

However, the boats used are small and rudimentary, and still, their activities are heavily limited, with strict regulations on the time, location, and the size of the mesh used, Trung said.

Additionally, most of the catches, up to 90 per cent, from trawlers are used as food for aquaculture, so a change can only happen if locals switch to using industrial food in place of raw and fresh food, he added.

The high-capacity trawler boats pose a grave threat to fish and other sea creatures in breeding season, however, the activity itself is not yet explicitly prohibited, but strictly limited to certain zones, Trung said.

The agriculture ministry also discourages the building of bottom trawler boats, and gradually, this form of exploitation will be banned, he added. Vo Thien Lang, vice chairman of Viet Nam Fisheries Association, said the draft amended Fisheries Law has already provided policies to support fishermen in giving up bottom trawling and switching to other jobs.  VNS
A group of officials, including those from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, review the landslide areas in Binh Thanh Commune in ong Thap Provinces Thanh Binh District.  VNA/VNS Photo Chuong ai

A group of officials, including those from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, review the landslide areas in Binh Thanh Commune in ong Thap Provinces Thanh Binh District.  VNA/VNS Photo Chuong ai

ONG THAP  The ong Thap Provinces Peoples Committee has asked the Government to provide VN82 billion (US$3.6 million) in funds to move local residents property from landslide and flood-prone areas to new residential areas.

The funds would also be used to build the new residential areas for households living in erosion-prone areas along riverbanks.

The southern province has asked the Government to conduct research to build a 2.3-km embankment along the Tien River in Thanh Binh District.

In Thanh Binhs Binh Thanh Commune, four landslide cases occurred in early April, with a total length of 210m and eroded area of 3,250sq.m.

The landslide areas are located 15-25 metres from National Highway No 30. More than 200 households as well as infrastructure was affected.

According to the provinces Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the landslide situation is getting worse.

At least 45 communes, wards and towns in the province have been hit by landslides at different levels.

Last Thursday, a group of officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development visited ong Thap to inspect the landslides in the province.

The officials said that sand over-exploitation was one of the causes of the landslides.

Tran Quang Hoai, deputy head of the ministrys Department of Irrigation, praised the efforts of ong Thap in relocating residents living in landslide-prone areas and building construction works to mitigate the risk of erosion.

ong Thap authorities should speed up the process of building erosion-prevention works and inspect the quality of the works, he said.

Infrastructure projects and residential areas should not be built along landslide-prone areas, he said.  VNS
HCM CITY  HCM City Department of Health on Saturday launched a campaign calling on the community to take part in the prevention of dengue fever and Zika as part of ASEAN Dengue Day.

At the launching, the departments head, Nguyen Tan Binh, said that the campaign aims to improving awareness of the community in the prevention of the diseases in the city.

As of now, many people still fail to destroy mosquitos and their larva at their work and homes, Binh said.

Unless larva and mosquitos are absolutely destroyed, it can lead to an outbreak of the epidemic, he added.

He told peoples committees in the citys districts to increase fines on violators.

Since this beginning of this year, the city has recorded 20 incidences of Zika and more than 6,000 incidences of dengue fever, a decrease of 4 per cent compared to the same period last year.

Heavy rains have occurred since the beginning of this year, Binh said, adding that they could help cause the increase of dengue fever incidences this year if we do not carry out effective preventive methods right away.

After the launching, health officials of the department and the District 8 Preventive Health Centre came to the houses of residents in the district to educate and encourage them to destroy mosquitoes and larva.

ASEAN Dengue Day is an advocacy event agreed upon during the 10th ASEAN Health Ministers Meeting in 2010.

In Viet Nam, health departments in the country organise several programmes to mark the day each year.

Since 2005, dengue fever has become one of the most important public health problems and has received international attention, according to World Health Organisation.  VNS
IPU Secretary General Martin Chungong (centre) at a press conference after the closing session of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) conference Saturday in HCM City.  VNS Photo Bo Xuan Hiep

Xuan Hiep and An Phuong

HCM CITY  Parliaments should take stronger action to respond to climate change by maximising their roles as legislators and supervisors as well as enhancing international co-operation to ensure no one is left behind, said a Vietnamese National Assembly (NA) official.

Speaking at the closing session of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) conference that ended on Saturday, Tong Thi Phong, vice chairwoman of the NA, said climate change was among the most serious threats to sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific region.

Climate change represents a serious threat to human health and well-being. It can affect health through direct natural disasters, such as floods and storms, but also through communicable disease, food insecurity and population displacement, she said.

The NA has discussed potential measures to promote lawmakers role in effectively carrying out sustainable development goals (SDGs) and ensuring that no one is left behind, according to Phong.

She said all parliaments were urged to use the IPU/UNDP Self-Assessment Toolkit as a useful way of identifying how to advance sustainable development.

Phong also said parliaments of participating countries were responsible for co-ordinating with the United Nations (UN) to empower parliaments and delegates in carrying out SDGs.

Gender disparity, which requires women to handle a heavy workload with limited decision-making authority, has made them more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Women and children are the most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, she said.

Parliaments should continue to support the vulnerable, especially poor people, women, children, and hard-to-reach populations.

In addition, the NA should monitor and wisely mobilise resources for the effective implementation of the sustainable development agenda, and encourage international organisations and developed countries to support developing countries in reaching these goals.

Martin Chungong, IPU Secretary General, thanked Viet Nam for successfully hosting the seminar and emphasised that climate change is a serious threat that requires urgent action. Climate change is not going to wait for us. It will continue to cause destruction, he said, adding, Well-being for all is key.

Participating parliaments should scale up efforts and ensure that they are consistent with the sustainable development agenda, he said. It takes every member of IPU to make SGDs happen, he added.

Climate change remains an economic, social and environmental challenge to the achievement of SDGs due to the regions high level of vulnerability to climate change.

Recommendations

Participating parliaments have drawn up strategies and recommendations to advance parliamentary engagement with SDGs in the Asia-Pacific region.

Without concrete responses, climate change could put people at risk, endanger government revenue and increase poverty, causing social fragility and further inequalities, the parliaments said.

Commitments to climate change responses of each country need to be integrated into sustainable development plans, and transferred into actions by government at all levels, the business sector and all citizens.

Support from developed countries to developing countries in the form of financial resources, technology transfer, transparency and capacity building are the triggers for climate change action in developing countries.

Through their budgetary functions, parliaments can play a vital role in advancing SDG implementation. Delegates expressed their hope that the outcome of the conference would be brought to the attention of all the parliaments of the world and other relevant stakeholders.

The IPU is expected to bring the recommendations of the conference to the attention of the global parliamentary community at the 137th IPU Assembly in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The regional seminar on sustainable development goals for parliaments around the Asia-Pacific region attracted the participation of representatives from parliaments of more than 20 IPU-member nations and international organisations.

Organised by the Vietnamese NA and the IPU, the three-day event discussed topics related to the conference theme Responding to Climate Change - Actions of Legislators to Achieve SDGs.

Viet Nam is one of the countries most at risk from climate change, with the Mekong Delta one of three deltas worldwide vulnerable to rising sea levels, experts said.

According to climate-change scenarios, by the end of the 21st century, about 40 per cent of the Mekong Delta, 11 per cent of the Red River Delta, and 3 per cent of other coastal provinces would be under seawater.

HCM City, the southern economic hub, is forecast to lose more than 20 per cent of its area to the sea.

About 10-12 per cent of the countrys population will suffer direct impact from climate change and about 10 per cent of national GDP will be lost.  VNS
HA NOI  Some VN62 trillion (US$2.7 billion) of official development aid (ODA) is the amount proposed by the Ha Noi Peoples Committee to build two new railway routes in the city.

The 6km urban railway route number 2, connecting downtown Tran Hung ao Street and the Thuong inh Ward in Thanh Xuan District, is expected to cost some VN35 trillion ($1.5 billion), of which $1.3 billion will be funded through aid from Japan.

The system will consist of 6 underground stations passing through the Hai Ba Trung, ong a and Thanh Xuan districts, and is expected to handle 714,000 passengers per day in 2020 and 1.7 million by 2040.

The 8km urban railway route number 3, consisting of 7 stations, will connect the Ha Noi Railway Station on Le Duan Street with Hoang Mai District.

It is expected to cost some $1.2 billion, of which about $1 billion will be borrowed from foreign investors, such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and is estimated to attract 488,000 passengers per day in 2020.

The construction of the routes is expected to take place from 2020-25.

The Ha Noi Peoples Committee has requested that the Ministry of Planning and Investment ask for approval from the Prime Minister to use the aid from Japan and ADB for construction of the routes.

It is reported that representatives from Japan and ADB expressed their interest in sponsoring the construction of the two railway routes during meetings with Vietnamese authorities.  VNS
The 42nd Plenary Meeting of the Human Resources Development Working Group (HRDWG) takes place in Ha Noi on Sunday.  VNA/VNS Photo An ang

HA NOI  As a dynamic region with rapid economic growth, the Asia-Pacific region has become a primary driving force for the global economy thanks to its abundant human resources with high skills, which are effectively combined with quality institutional frameworks and close collaboration among member economies, said a Vietnamese official.

In his opening remark at the 42nd Plenary Meeting of the Human Resources Development Working Group (HRDWG) on Sunday, Deputy Minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs Doan Mau Diep said the high quality human resources are increasingly important for the development of each country, since both the world and region are experiencing large changes under the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution, especially digital technology.

Our urgent task is to promote regional cooperation, study and make timely assessments on the impacts of digital technology on human resources development, based on which is the proposing of pioneer solutions to increase the adaptability of the labour force in the digital age, he said.

Diep expressed his hope that the meeting would focus discussions on the Framework of Human Resources Development in the Digital Age for consensus.

If approved, this will be the outcome document of the APEC High-level Policy Dialogue on Human Resources Development in the Digital Age, with significant contributions to the development of high quality human resources, enhancement of job quality and connection among people in the APEC region, he added.

Talking with Vietnam News Agency (VNA) on the sidelines of the meeting, Christina Maria Schonleber, Vice Director (International Secretariat) of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), said the fourth industrial revolution will benefit the labour market, especially in the digital age, and create opportunities for development of skills, with the assistance of new technologies.

The development of the digital age will lay a foundation for development in the future, she said, adding that the labour market needs to develop further, particularly enhancing transnational connections and expanding vocational training.

Established in 1990, the HRDWG has conducted work programmes on developing human resources, touching on issues ranging from education to labour and capacity building. In addition, the HRDWG has responsibility to help build cultural awareness and promote gender equality.

Sustainable urbanisation amid globalisation

Also on Sunday, representatives from APEC members and relevant international organisations gathered in Ha Noi to discuss ways to boost sustainable urbanisation in the context of globalisation and climate change.

Addressing the event, Bui Thanh Son, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) Chair, stated that together with the increasing urbanisation and its role in socio-economic development, there were many associated problems and challenges having high-level impact on the environment and the people.

They require changes in urban development and management approaches, he said, stressing the need for multi-sector, integrated strategies and solutions to support well-managed urban development, and problem-solving and innovative methods for sustainable and inclusive development.

The dialogue, held within the framework of the second APEC Senior Officials Meeting (SOM2) and related meetings, focussed on discussing institutional framework and policy for sustainable urban development and urbanisation, linkages in regional urban development towards sustainability, urban housing development adaptive to climate change, and development models of energy efficiency and green growth.

The Policy Partnership on Science, Technology and Innovation (PPSTI) Group hosted a Workshop on APEC Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in Ha Noi the same day to provide an overview of the framework and regional trends in the enabling environment, education, employment and entrepreneurship.

During two days, the panels also focused discussions on perspectives on cultivating a STEM-enabling environment, closing the gender gap in STEM-education and building the future workforce, and strengthening and sustaining women in this field.  VNS
HA NOI  The spread of WannaCry ransomware has been wreaking havoc across the world since Friday, and several Vietnamese businesses and agencies are advised to take cautions.

The VNCERT, under the Ministry of Information and Communications, has issued warnings as well as offered protection measures to all users to guard against the ransomware and its variations, which target Microsoft Windows - an operating system that is widely used in Viet Nam, especially the outdated Windows XP.

Kaspersky has listed Viet Nam among the top 20 countries most affected by this ransomware; the other countries and territories include Russia, Ukraine, India, Taiwan, and mainland China.

The VNCERT said the ransomware is extremely dangerous as it is capable of stealing information and decrypting the entire system that has been infected.

Once the computers data have been encrypted, or locked down, a message would appear saying that the users files are no longer accessible. Should they want to get their data back, users are asked to pay up large sums of money to get a decryption key. The longer the users wait, the higher the ransom money. The hackers behind WannaCry only accept ransom paid via BitCoin, a digital currency that ensures that the transaction cannot be traced back.

WannaCry exploits a Windows vulnerability codenamed EternalBlue, which has been patched by Microsoft in an update deployed on March 14. However, not everyone has installed the patch yet, and those who have not are vulnerable to WannaCry.

The exploitation of EternalBlue, suspected to have been developed using a hacking method leaked from US National Security Agency, allows the malware to spread through file-sharing protocols set up across the internal networks of organisations, many of which criss-cross the globe, according to Financial Times.

WannaCry developers have prepared a Q&A section in various languages, offering infected users localised instructions on how to recover data and how to pay the ransom.

Vu Ngoc Son, deputy head of the anti-malware department of Bkav Corporation, the largest internet security firm in Viet Nam, said that the WannaCry ransomwares behaviour is not new, but he believes that the use of this ransomware will not really ease up as it can directly earn large profits for hackers.

Bkav recommends that all computer users immediately install updates and security patches and hotfixes via Windows Update. Users are also advised to back up valuable data regularly.

Currently, an estimated 200,000 victims in 150 different countries are reported to have been hit by the cyberattack. VNS
A NANG  A group of 17 tourists from Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province who were on a field trip to a Nang were admitted to the citys General Hospital on Sunday night, suffering from food poisoning.

They had eaten chicken rice at a local restaurant near the My Khe beach on Sunday evening.

Dr Vo Thi Thu Ha said the patients were taken to the hospital with vomiting and diarrhea, but 10 were discharged the next day. She said seven victims would need treatment for several more days.

It was the first food poisoning reported in the city this year. The case is under investigation. No food poisoning case was reported in the city last year.

a Nang hosted 5.5 million tourists in 2016, 1.67 million of them foreigners.

The city issued safety food licences for over 3,300 qualified food courts and restaurants in early 2017, and the heaviest fine for violations is from VN100 million (US$4,500) to VN200 million (nearly $9,000).  VNS
HA NOI  Deputy Prime Minister Trinh inh Dung on Monday visited households affected by the landslide on the banks of Hau River in An Giang Provinces My Hoi ong Commune.

The landslide, which occurred on April 22 in My Hoi Village, caused 14 houses to collapse into the river, leaving 107 families homeless.

Local authorities had reported to Dung that the landslide was caused by water flow.

Dung has asked local authorities to support families affected by the incident and help them settle in as soon as possible.

The Deputy PM has instructed local authorities to work towards finding solutions to protect residents and their properties. As landslides can be a recurring problem, there is a pressing need to conduct surveys and examine the situation closely so that long-term solutions can be executed, he added.

Dung has also asked provincial authorities to work with relevant agencies from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to identify the reasons for such a landslide as well as to determine safe spots for the rehabilitation of affected residents.  VNS
HCM CITY  Tan Son Nhat airport customs officers on Sunday found elephant tusks and tails, leopard skins, and wild animal claws worth VN2 billion (US$90,000) in the luggage of a Vietnamese woman who had been on a flight from Africa to HCM City.

The name of the woman was not disclosed.

Checking the luggage of the 62-year-old passenger, the officers found nearly four kilogrammes of elephant tusks, nine elephant tails, three leopard skins and many claws, all of which were from animals listed in the Red Book, according to the HCM City Customs Department.

Last month, the airports customs officers detected several smuggling cases of rhino horns, elephant tusks and pangolin scales worth a total of over VN10 billion ($450,000), transported from Africa to HCM City.  VNS
HA NOI  The Ministry of Industry and Trade has decided to set up an inspection team to supervise the multi-level marketing activities of Nha Khac Lam Co., Ltd.

According to the ministrys decision 1667/2017, Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh asked the inspection team to examine and verify all multi-level marketing activities of the company.

All violations will be penalised as stipulated.

He also asked relevant authorities to take measures to protect the rights of those who were involved in multi-level trading with the company.

The team will be led by Le Thi Phuong Hoa, deputy chief inspector of the ministry. Representatives of the ministrys Competitiveness Management Department, Marketing Management Department and Legal Department will join the team.

On May 10, the ministrys Competition Authority sent a document with information of the operation of Nha Khac Lam Co., Ltd to departments of industry and trade in localitites across the country.

The ministry affirmed that the company had not yet completed procedures to get a multi-level registration certificate, which meant it was not allowed to organise multi-level marketing activities.

The ministry required the departments of industry and trade in localities to closely monitor the operation of the company.

Nha Khac Lam Co.,Ltd, formerly known as MTV Gano Excel Viet Nam Co., Ltd, is located on 631 Nguyen Trai Street, District 5, HCM City. The current legal representative of the company is Huynh Vinh Loi, who is also deputy head of Thien Ngoc Minh Uy Co., Ltd.

After amending the Business Registration Certificate at HCM Citys Department of Planning and Investment, the company undertook procedures to obtain the multi-level registration certificate. However, despite not completing procedures, the company knowingly implemented multi-level marketing activities.

Last month, Thien Ngoc Minh Uy was fined a total of VN1.5 billion (US$70,000) by the ministry for 80 separate offences, and earlier this year, it was fined VN215 million ($9,590). The offences included breach of the contracts it signed with network members, failing to meet the level of required training for new members, operating without notifying the local authorities and violating label regulations on its goods.

The company was ordered to stop all multi-level marketing activities and was required to fulfil all obligations to members of its network.  VNS
Virginia Tech and Lowes have joined forces to empower Lowes employees.



The pair have collaborated to develop an exosuit  a wearable suit with lift-assist technology  currently in pilot at Lowes Christiansburg, Virginia, store. The lightweight exosuit is designed to help employees lift and move product through the store more efficiently.

Lowes Innovation Labs, the disruptive technology hub for Lowes, worked with robotics expert Alan Asbeck, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Virginia Tech College of Engineering who specializes in building wearable technology, to collaboratively design a prototype of an exosuit employees could wear to help make lifting products easier.



Over the past couple of years, human assistive devices have become an area of interest, Asbeck said. Our technology is different in that it includes soft and flexible elements, and our approach is unique in that we are putting our prototypes in a real-world environment for an extended period of time.

Asbeck, along with four undergraduate and four graduate students in the Assistive Robotics Laboratory, has since been designing a soft, lightweight exosuit intended to reduce the fatigue some Lowes employees may experience while on the job, which frequently requires lifting and moving heavy or bulky products. As the user bends and stands back up, the suits carbon fiber legs act like a bow and arrow, storing the users energy then returning it to them. This helps the user spring back up with greater ease.



The first four suits are currently in use by the stocking team at the Christiansburg store. During the coming months, Asbeck and his team will work with Lowes to assess the physical impact of the suits. Lowes will also lead employee engagement studies to better understand the impact that the exosuit has on the work experience.

Lowes is committed to exploring opportunities that improve the workplace experience, said Kyle Nel, executive director of Lowes Innovation Labs, the companys disruptive technology hub. As a way to support our employees, we found a unique opportunity to collaborate with Virginia Tech to develop one of the first retail applications for robotic exosuits.


HUDSON  Is it possible to support five 21st century households with the income from a family-run dairy operation?

It may sound like an idea best left to a bygone era or perhaps something only a large, automated operation could accomplish. However, Hansens Farm Fresh Dairy proves the areas long-held family farms can thrive through ambition, innovation and hard work.

We feel like we were in on the ground floor of the local food movement, said Jordan Hansen, marketing director. More and more people want to buy food from their neighbors. Its good for the local economy, and its good for the environment.

Hansens Farm Fresh Dairy has grown considerably in 13 years and now sells products at eastern Iowa grocery stores, co-ops, farmers markets and other locations. Dozens of area eateries use the products in their recipes, too. The dairy also sells milk, butter, cheese and ice cream and products of local entrepreneurs at its two retail outlets in Waterloo and Cedar Falls.

Today, the dairy supports Jay and Jean Hansen and four of their five children  Brent, Brad, Blair and Blake  and their families. (Daughter, Lynn, lives in Omaha with her family.)

Jay Hansen represents the fifth generation of his family to run the farm. According to the dairys archives, his two-times maternal great-grandfather, Christian Frederick Brandhorst, purchased the land southwest of Hudson in May 1864.

For decades, the farm produced a variety of crops and animals, which helped the operation achieve self-sufficiency. In the 1950s, the farm narrowed its focus to dairy operations, said Jordan.

Today, the original Christian Brandhorsts original plot of 150 acres has been expanded to 440 mostly contiguous acres.

Jay and Jean Hansen settled at the farm in the 1970s to work alongside Jays father, Jack. In 1975, they started their family. Over the years, they encouraged their children to find other careers; they didnt want them to feel obligated to the homestead.

They listened  for a while. After working at other dairy farms, Blake, the youngest boy, returned to the homestead. Blair followed.

Together, they calculated how to slowly and deliberately increase their closed herd from 100 to 150 head.

The idea was to open an on-farm creamery that would allow them to produce their own milk to sell, said Jordan, now Blakes wife. If they could cut out the middleman in the dairy production process, theyd be able to increase the farms income.

That, Blake and Blair believed, would allow the farm to provide them with enough income. They sold milk to the local co-op for market price and began developing plans to open an on-site creamery.

It was a big commitment, and they invited their older brothers to return and help.

Blake also put a new face on dairy farming  namely, a wallaby. He was introduced to them while traveling in Australia. He brought some to Hudson, where they became an attraction in their own right.

This was right around the time we were starting the creamery, so the wallaby was incorporated into the logo, Blake said.

Its another unique touch for the family business, said Jordan, who noted, Its not the typical Holstein. (The couple has since switched to kangaroos.)

After opening in 2004, Hansens Farm Fresh Dairy sold whole milk at a few smaller Cedar Valley locations like Randalls Grocery, as well as farmers markets, recalled Jay.

Other groceries contacted the dairy about stocking the milk. Meanwhile, customers started asking for skim and 1 percent milk.

The processing to make the other types of milk meant there was leftover cream, said Blake.

It was easy to find a use for this excess, Jay added. We made ice cream, then butter, then cheese curds, he explained.

Increased demand and the rapidly expanding product line positioned the dairy to open a retail outlet, Jordan added. In 2006, the family opened its first store at Ridgeway and Kimball avenues in Waterloo, followed about one year later by its East 18th Street location in Cedar Falls.

The Cedar Falls store was supposed to be a temporary thing  a way to sell a lot of milk quickly, Jordan recalled. It turned out to be such a success that we ended up buying the location  the building, the land, the gas station.

These experiences help the Hansens reinforce their reasons for keeping a closed herd  animals that were all born and raised on their homestead.

Today, the dairy works to balance producing enough to meet demand while not reaching the point of overproduction, said Jordan. The familys commitment to maintaining a closed herd limits the dairys ability to grow at the rate of a large-scale production. This contributes to relative shortages of some products, which can frustrate some customers.

At this time, 150 cows supplies the dairys retail and wholesale customers. The family would like to grow the herd to 500, which will require a major overhaul of the farms infrastructure.

Wed need to tear down the old barn and build a new one, said Jay. A new barn is a huge project. We have a site picked out and the water situated  but it will still take something like two years before we can get to that.

The family has been somewhat surprised by the public desire to see their operation up close.

It was a little shocking, but then again, it wasnt, Jordan recalled. People today really want to see where their food comes from. Were a local brand. Were transparent about our operation, and that makes us accessible. So it makes sense. Most kids have no real agriculture around them, other than what they drive by.

Each year, up to 5,000 visitors get to see where milk comes from at the dairys Tour Center. Visitors can schedule tours and experiential learning opportunities.

Jean, Jordan and other guides discuss the farms history, production and family farming. They also offer a behind the scenes look at what things like organic, hormone-free and farm-to-table mean.

This is an in-the-trenches experience, Jordan said. You see how the milking is done. We bottle feed calves and hand-milk cows. There isnt glass between visitors and the cows; you get right in there where they live.
Post announces coming events

WATERLOO  American Legion Post 138 at 728 Commercial St. has several events planned.

On Tuesday there will be bingo at 6:15 and 7 p.m. Open pool is planned from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Hot dogs, brat patties and riblets are set for 11 a.m. Wednesday.

A pepper tournament will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday. On Sunday, bingo is planned for 1:15 and 2 p.m.

Kiwanis Club meets Tuesday

WATERLOO  The Waterloo Noon Kiwanis Club will meet Tuesday at the Waterloo Elks Lodge.

Lunch will begin at 12:10 p.m. Featured speaker will be Grant Veeder, speaking about the Black Hawk County Courthouses and jail.

Guests are welcome. For more information, call President Bruce Jacobs, 215-8267.

Hearst screening beauty movies

CEDAR FALLS  The next movie in the Hearst Center for the Arts A Thing of Beauty series is Dangerous Beauty at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

Admission is free and no tickets are required.

Geneological group to meet

WATERLOO  The Northeast Iowa Geneological Society will meet at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Allen College.

Lorna Lincoln will give tips on using One Note for Genealogists.

People are welcome to come for a meeting and then are asked to join.

For more information, go to https://sites.google.com/site/neigsblackhawkcounty/home.

Retirees potluck set for Thursday

WATERLOO  The Supervisors Club will host the monthly retirees potluck Thursday for all former and current members of the club.

Bring a dish to share and table service. Social hour begins at 5 p.m., with serving at 6 p.m. Contact Reno at 215-5689 for reservations or questions.

Diabetes group meets Thursday

CEDAR FALLS  Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare will offer a free support group for all people with diabetes and their family members from 1 to 2 p.m. Thursday in the foundation conference room of Sartori Memorial Hospital.

Guest nutritionist Huda Alsultan will speak about healthy food for a healthy heart. These programs are free and open to the public.

Church to hold graduate event

WATERLOO  High school and college graduates are welcome to attend a community-wide baccalaureate service at Antioch Baptist Church at 5 p.m. June 4.

African-American students who are from the Cedar Valley area and graduated in August 2016 to this month are encouraged to participate.

A coalition of African-American churches in the Cedar Valley is the sponsor of this event. Students who wish to take part must RSVP by Friday.

For more information, contact Miriam Tyson at 291-7698 or mtexcellence12@gmail.com.
WATERLOO  The Jesse Cosby Neighborhood Center is entering its second half-century of service to Waterloo and Black Hawk County with a spruced up look and beefed-up programming for multiple generations of individuals  especially young people.

The center, in the historic 77-year-old former St. Peter Claver Catholic Church at 1112 Mobile St., is getting some much-needed and long-overdue renovation and spruce-up work to the tune of about $75,000, funded in large part by a $41,800 grant from the Black Hawk County Gaming Association, the Guernsey Foundation private donations and volunteer time and labor.

Some of the work consists of pretty basic items  new siding on the senior center addition to the building, some kitchen and bathroom renovation, doors, carpeting, painting ceiling tiles, office furniture, electrical work and some pending improvements to the front steps.

Its a little TLC for an agency whos all about that when it comes to serving the immediate east Waterloo community and Black Hawk County.

Its the most extensive work done to the center in about 40 years, according to center director Jesse Henderson, Jesse Cosbys great-nephew.

The senior center was built in 78. This probably the most work since the senior center was built. Henderson said.

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of that renovation work will be a mural on the walls of the centers administrative offices  an artwork by well-known local artist and book illustrator Cheryl Chaveevah Banks Ferguson, also an award-winning former Courier staff writer.

The mural depicts the history of the agencys namesake, Jesse Cosby, and his service to the Cedar Valley as a musician, entertainer and philanthropist in numerous activities.

I love working on new art projects, especially like this one; it has such significance to the center and to the memory of Jesse Cosby, Ferguson said. I have to make myself NOT spend every free hour up there.

Cosby, a U.S. Army World War II veteran known for calling square dances and forming vocal music groups, left his dream for a community center as his bequest. The center was founded in 1966. It provides a variety of programming to seniors, disadvantaged families and crime victims.

The center is celebrating its history and heritage with a number of activities this summer and fall  including the re-forming of a community choir for a 6 p.m. June 3 concert fundraiser for the center at nearby Payne AME Church.

Also a Jesse Cosby Weekend is planned in September, for the weekend following Labor Day, to draw more attention to the center and its expanded programming. Its hoped Fergusons mural can be completed by that weekend celebration.

The center, despite funding challenges in recent years, is hardly resting on its laurels. It is about to enter into its third year of the summer Youth Employment Services program for young people ages 13 through 15  providing them real-life work experience and job skills in a number of social service agencies and private employers. The young people receive a stipend for their work.

It started out two years ago with a handful of young people. Last year, the center received funding to put about two dozen young people through the program  but had applications for twice that number. Organizers, like Shara Baker, a retired family support worker for Waterloo Schools, are gearing up for even greater success this year.

This year its not only grown but its expanded, Baker said. It includes the summer portion of the program, but it has three other components that are year round. Were hoping to change a lot of things  not just provide something during the summer, a means of having some money in your pocket, keeping you off the street, out of trouble.

Yes, we want to continue to do that and grow in that area, she said. That is the entry point. Thats the door that the kids come through. But once they get through the door, we want to help them to mature in whatever areas they need to mature in  education, leadership skills, as well as arts and music aptitude.

We realize we have some gifted and talented kids running around out there. And they have not discovered that, Baker said. It gives them a dim view of themselves. We want to bring out some good things in there. Theres some treasures in there. Somebodys got to help them uncover that glow thats within them. We want to be part of that.

We are continuing to look for funds, Baker said. It takes $600 to sponsor a young person for that program. Last year we had 24. We had 50 applications but we just didnt have the money. We want to do better this year.

Past supporting organizations have included the Northeast Iowa Food Bank and St. Vincent de Paul, and the program has received financial and other support from private sector businesses in addition to the Cosby Center itself. Organizers are hoping to expand that base of support.

After participants reach age 15 they are eligible for additional resources and programming through the University of Northern Iowa Center for Urban Education and other organizations.

The issue is that theyre learning the responsibility of work, Baker said.

The deadline for young people to apply for the program is today. Orientation and work begins in early June. The center may be contacted at 234-1793 for more information on that and its other programs and financial support needs.
INDEPENDENCE  A man who was at the heart of the issues over caring for aging sex offenders has died.

William Russell Cubbage died Friday at the Mental Health Institute in Independence, according to Buchanan County Attorney Shawn Harden. He was 88.

Cubbages death came almost two weeks after a district court judge dropped criminal charges against him for allegedly grabbing a female MHI employee between the legs in January 2016.

In ruling issued May 2, Judge Brad Harris found that Cubbage was incompetent to stand trial on a charge of assault with intent to commit sexual abuse. There was also no substantial probability that Cubbage could be restored to competency within a reasonable amount of time, Harriss ruling continued.

Sex offender found incompetent to stand trial INDEPENDENCE  A convicted sex offender accused of grabbing a woman at the state Mental Heal

The decision came following a mental health report and an agreement between the state and the defense.

Cubbage --- who suffered from dementia and had a lengthy record sex crimes involving children and was removed from a nursing home after sexually assaulting a 95-year-old resident in 2011 --- was accused of grabbing the MHI worker while she was assisting him in the shower in January 2016.

The MHI charge was put on hold in March 2017 after the defense questioned his competency to stand trial.

With the dismissal of the criminal charge, Cubbage was returned to MHI under a mental illness hospitalization order, Harden said.

Cubbage was convicted of sex offenses in 1987, 1997 and 1991, and he was later diagnosed with pedophilia and a personality disorder and was committed to treatment at the Department of Human Services Civil Commitment Unit for Sexual Offenders in Cherokee in 2002 under the states sexually violent predator statutes.

In 2010, he was released from the Cherokee facility after he was diagnosed with Alzheimers with other physical and mental ailments, and a doctor determined he no longer met the criteria of a sexual predator. He was released from the sexual predator commitment and placed under commitment for those with serious mentally illness.

Because Cubbage needed full-time care, he was placed at the Pomeroy Care Center in Pomeroy. In August 2011, an 8-year-old child who was visiting the center witnessed Cubbage sexually assaulting a 95-year-old woman, according to court records.

He wasnt charged criminally in the Pomeroy assault, but the state began a court action to return to the Civil Commitment Unit for Sexual Offenders. This was dismissed in 2014, and he was returned to the Department of Human Services and eventually placed at MHI in Independence.

The family of the 95-year-old woman from the Pomeroy incident sued the care center and the state, and the center filed a cross claim against the state. A district court judge threw out the claims against the state in a ruling was upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court in a split decision in April 2017.
EVANSDALE  Marit Beisners work with Retrieving Freedom is familiar to her kindergarten class at Cedar Heights Elementary School.

Victor, the black Labrador puppy Beisners family is fostering as it trains to be a service dog, comes to class with her every day in Cedar Falls until lunch time.

This is our third puppy weve fostered with Retrieving Freedom, she said.

The nonprofit organization prepares service dogs for military veterans, children with autism and people with diabetes. One of its bases of operation is in Waverly.

Beisner, her husband and two sons have created Victors Quest, a communitywide effort to educate students and the general public about service dogs. By engaging people in the 8-month-old puppys two-year journey to becoming a service dog, they are hoping to raise funds covering the entire $20,000 for his training, housing, veterinarian bills, food and supplies.

Recently, students at Poyner Elementary School took up the cause. Beisner connected with the schools fifth-graders. Ive seen what a difference its made at my school, so it was so exciting to involve kids at another school, she said.

The effort started with Poyners fifth-grade expanded learning program students. It was really coincidental how all the pieces fell together, said teacher Sally Goodenbour.

Students were talking about doing a service project when she learned about a grant opportunity that could help. The Iowa Realtors Associations Project Jack awards pay-it-forward grants in which funds are passed on to others. So the class applied for the money and received a $250 grant.

Service projects were also a topic in music teacher Deb Barschows classes because they related to the theme of a concert students were preparing for. That led to including all fifth-graders in the effort.

Suggestions for service projects involving military veterans or animals at the humane society brought an idea from Clare Struck, the supervisor of Barschows student teacher at the University of Northern Iowa. She also supervised student teachers at Cedar Heights and knew of Beisners involvement with Retrieving Freedom.

The project started with a visit to Poyner from Beisner and Victor in March and a subsequent field trip to Retrieving Freedoms facilities. From there, the students began making plans to educate their peers about service animals and raise money for Victors Quest. They used a portion of the grant to buy books about service animals, supplies for a bake sale and bracelets handed out for donations.

Students also planned a grand finale May 1 that Victor attended and involved just a variety of activities, said Goodenbour. Children could visit stations with games like pin the vest on the service dog or they could decorate paw print cookies, among the options. They were also invited to make a donation.

These were all ideas that originated with the students, said Beisner. It was so empowering to see the kids as leaders.

Between fundraising, donations and the remaining grant dollars, they are contributing $464.72 to Victors Quest.

To donate to the cause, go online to retrievingfreedom.org/blog/post/support-victor-s-quest-to-be-a-service-dog. To learn more about Victor, search for RFI Victors Quest on Facebook.
CHARLES CITY -- A fire caused heavy damage to the roof and attic of a home in Charles City late Sunday.

No one was injured in the blaze at the residence at 611 Pfeiffer St. The residents, who were home at the time of the fire, safely escaped, according to a news release from the Charles City Fire Department.

Fire Chief Eric Whipple said a bystander across the street from the scene was injured, but it was not related to the blaze.

The department responded around 10:30 p.m. to a report of the home's porch and roof on fire.

Upon arrival, smoke and fire was seen coming from the homes roof and attic area. Entry was made, and firefighters found that the fire was solely above the ceiling in the attic.

Firefighters attempted ventilating the roof, but the blaze had expanded across the homes entire attic space, and having firefighters on the roof was a hazard to their safety, according to the fire department.

Inside the home, firefighters tore down ceilings to extinguish the fire.

Charles City fire officials say the blaze started outside near the front door, and may possibly have been caused by improperly discarded smoking material.

There was heavy fire damage to the attic and roof, and major water damage to the rest of the home.

The fire remains under investigation.

The people in the home were renting it, according to Whipple. He said he didn't know the names of the occupants.

The home is owned by Jerry and Roxanne Redmond, according to Floyd County Assessor online records.

The fire department was assisted at the scene by the Charles City Police Department, Floyd County Sheriffs Office, AMR Ambulance, Floyd County Search and Rescue, and MidAmerican Energy.
Clarification added: 5/26/17: A statement from Iowa Rep. Timi Brown-Powers on May 26, 2017 said her inclusion on a list of endorsements was not approved by either herself or her campaign. The story below has been updated to reflect that.

WATERLOO -- Iowa State Rep. Abby Finkenauer, D-Dubuque, who is making a bid for the U.S. 1st District congressional seat, announced 22 endorsements Friday.

Her list includes two Black Hawk County officials. Iowa State Rep. Ras Smith, D-Waterloo, and Nathan Gruber, Black Hawk County Democrats vice chair, announced their support.

Im endorsing Abby for Congress because we need someone who sees whats really happening in our communities, Smith said in a statement. She is a truth teller who wont sweep the tough facts under the rug, and who isnt afraid to fight the hard fights.

The announcement came as incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Rod Blum wrapped up a series of town halls throughout the district where some attendees criticized his positions on health care and an independent investigation into Russias possible interference in the 2016 election.

Finkenauers list of endorsements includes current and former state lawmakers, county party leaders, district activists and labor leaders. Finkenauer, 28, is the first Democratic candidate to announce she is running for Congress; she made her bid official May 3.
HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. (AP)  Authorities have released the names of an Iowa couple killed when their plane heading to Alabama crashed in southern Kentucky.

Christian County Sheriff's Office spokesman Capt. Chris Miller says in a news release that the 69-year-old pilot, Dominic Giametta, and his 55-year-old wife, Dr. Dianne Giametta, were killed in Friday's crash near Hopkinsville. The statement did not indicate their hometowns, but media outlets report the couple was from Bettendorf, Iowa.

She was an obstetrician and gynecologist with UnityPoint Trinity and medical director at Rock Island County Health Department. Her husband was the owner of Freds Towing, Davenport.

The statement says the plane was flying from Bettendorf to Muscle Shoals, Ala.

The Federal Aviation Administration says the crash involved a Beechcraft Bonanza, which seats up to six people.

No cause for the crash, which remains under investigation, has been determined yet.

Giammetta was flying a Beechcraft BE36 Bonanza, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The Giammettas were the only ones on the plane.

EARLIER STORY

HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. (AP)  Authorities say two people were killed when a plane heading from Iowa to Alabama crashed in southern Kentucky.

Christian County Emergency Management Director Randy Graham said Saturday that the remains of the pilot and passenger have been sent to Louisville for autopsies. There were no survivors.

The National Transportation Safety Board has interviewed a witness and the property owner where wreckage was spread over a wide area.

The NTSB says the plane was flying from Davenport, Iowa, to Muscle Shoals, Ala., when it crashed on Friday afternoon near Hopkinsville.

Federal Aviation Administration says the crash involved a Beechcraft Bonanza, which seats up to six people.

No identities have been released.
Career center

JOANNE HANSEN

WATERLOO -- Kudos to the Waterloo Schools superintendent and the Waterloo Board of Education for finding the funding within the budget (without a school bond) for more career center expansion.

I really hope the Waterloo Career Center is a wonderful aid for our students, keeping them in school and wanting to graduate with job skills. I am very impressed this can go forward without a $40 million new building.

Comey firing

DAVE GIBSON

CEDAR FALLS -- So-called President Trump dumped another Nixon on Tuesday May 9. Yes, that Nixon, the guy who resigned Aug. 9, 1974, in disgrace rather than being impeached. Trump committed a Nixon when he fired the Attorney General Sally Yates for upholding the Constitution concerning his travel ban. He committed a second Nixon when he fired the New York district attorney who was investigating Trump for mafia ties and other crimes. He committed the May 9 Nixon, rather Jeff Sessions, U.S. attorney general, who is under investigation for collusion with the Russians to throw the November election, did, by firing FBI director James Comey.

Funny thing is, Comey was investigating Sessions for colluding with the Russians to throw the election. Trump is running like a rabbit from a coyote.

Run, rabbit, run!

We are witnessing a constitutional crisis, a classic Nixon. We need to let a certain congressperson, Rep. Rod Blum, know were mad as hell and were not going to take it anymore. All it takes to get the ball rolling to kick Trump out is one Congress member, with a modicum of morals and a spine stiffer than Jello, to file impeachment papers.

The center cannot hold.

Mob rule

LAVAL PELOQUIN

WASHBURN -- I attended Congressman Rod Blum's town hall meeting May 10. Among the 800 or so attendees was a rabble whose purpose seemed to be disruption and irritation. I observed one citizen with a copy of "Rules for Radicals." Certainly, the tactics used were right out of that text. The enemy (Blum) was picked, personalized and polarized. They also followed the dictum "in a fight anything goes." Statements not in keeping with OFA's agenda were shouted down and drowned out.

This is not what democracy looks like. This is what intimidation and bullying look like. Their goal was to hate, discourage and ridicule Blum. Ridicule is, according to Saul Alinsky, man's most potent weapon. Mr. Blum did well in the face of this nonsense. I read Alinsky's works while in college during the '60s-'70s era. I also recently read Organizing for Action's bulletins on how to direct, disrupt and demoralize these meetings.

I did not see a paid "Indivisible" representative this time, but they were likely there. The loss of civil discourse, as seen at this meeting, does not bode well for our future. I was ashamed for these fools. Fear and intimidation could herald in a totalitarian regime. Good luck kids!

Town hall

MATTHEW COHEA

CEDAR FALLS -- Its sad to see the low level liberals have reached, including here in the Cedar Valley, attempting to force their PC views on anyone who will pay attention to their temper tantrums.

Congressman Rod Blum made attendees to his recent Cedar Valley town hall meeting show IDs to prove they live in the 1st District. I did not attend the meeting, but read and saw coverage of the event.

Many of those in attendance refused to allow the congressman to even finish answering questions posed to him. I understand passion for your point of view and fully believe in First Amendment rights. Does the left? Showing up at an event like that with the sole purpose of booing and jeering the speaker is a childish way of exercising your freedom of speech.

After eight years of the security blanket that was President Obama, the left has had to take their thumbs out of their mouth and kick and scream because they no longer have their way.

Liberals on both coasts snubbed their nose at the First Amendment by denying conservative speakers to talk at their universities. I was hoping we were more civil here in the heartland. I was sadly mistaken.
Q. Recently an article mentioned a recipe was from the University of Northern Iowa cookbook. How can we get a copy of this book?

A. According to UNI, the "Best Bites" UNI Dining Service cookbook is available both on campus at Biscotti's and off campus at University Book and Supply.

Q. How can I contact the Schoitz Foundation? Is there a phone number or office to go to? What are the requirements to apply for financial support from this organization?

A. According to the foundation website, "We will award grants to nonprofit organizations that meet certain criteria defined by our board of directors using the interest earned from the initial $50 million investment. Organizations within a 30-mile radius of Waterloo are eligible to receive grants and will need to apply for funds directly via an application. We are not currently accepting applications, but hope to start the process in 2017." The foundation offices will be in the US Bank building at 425 Cedar St. You can call the director, Shelli Panicucci, at 232-2870 or email Shelli@OttoSchoitzFoundation.org.

Q. Has a list of the Irish Fest bands been released? If so, what bands are coming?

A. There are too many to list here -- go to iowairishfest.com for a full schedule.

Q. When does the future really begin?

A. That's a question for philosophers, not The Courier.

Q. What happened to Justin Roberts, the weatherman on Channel 2's morning news?

A. He recently left the station -- apparently his contract wasn't renewed. It looks as if he's doing an afternoon show with Dan Eggers on Newsradio 600 WMT AM.

Q. Hypothetically, if an investigation shows Trump did collude with the Russians and Putin in the 2016 election, who would be next in line for the presidency? Would Pence still be legitimately elected?

A. Vice President Mike Pence still would be next in line should Trump resign or be impeached. Some liberal commentators have noted as head of Trump's transition team, Pence was in position to know about any collusion and also could be implicated in any scandal and removed from office. If that happened, House Speaker Paul Ryan would be next in line for the presidency, followed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, Orrin Hatch.

Q. Will the worker who identified Steve Stephens at the McDonalds in Pennsylvania receive the $50,000 award?

A. Authorities have not announced if the employee (or employees) at the Erie, Penn., restaurant who recognized Stephens, stalled him and called 911 will receive a reward.

Questions are taken on a special Courier phone line at 234-3566. Questions are answered by Courier staff and staff at the Waterloo Public Library.
Advertisement

By The Associated Press

May. 13, 2017 | LOUISVILLE, KY

By The Associated Press May. 13, 2017 | 10:12 PM | LOUISVILLE, KY

Ten protesters have been arrested after blocking the entrance to a Louisville abortion clinic.



The Courier-Journal reports that Louisville Metro Police responded to a call Saturday morning about people loitering in front of the EMW Women's Surgical Center.



The protesters were arrested for trespassing after refusing to move away.



The Rev. Joseph Spurgeon of the Sovereign King Church in Sellersburg, Indiana, says the protest was held at the Louisville abortion clinic because it is the last one operating in Kentucky.



The state has sought to shut down the clinic for being out of compliance with laws related to its agreements with a local hospital and ambulance service. A federal judge last month ordered the clinic to remain open until a lawsuit aimed at preventing its closure is resolved.




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The 2017 Emerging Architect Prize has been awarded to the Brussels studios MSA/V+ for the work NAVEZ - 5 social units at the northern entrance of Brussels. The housing project that fulfills the double ambition of the local authorities: to represent the urban revalidation scheme with a landmark at the entrance of the city and to provide exemplary apartments for large families. The client is the City of Schaerbeek.

The Jury conveyed that housing is a vital topic throughout Europe and felt that MSA/V+ understood well and solved brilliantly the constructive and economic constraints of the programme and its site: 5 flats in a very small corner at the northern entrance of the city of Brussels.

The international jury appreciated the high quality of the flats, which are unique and all provided with natural light from all orientations, outdoor spaces, impressive views and dynamic spatial experiences both in common and private spaces.

They also recognised that the architects had carefully and meticulously worked with the integration of the building in the neighbourhood and the request to create a landmark.

Located at one of Brussels main entrances, the building is a social housing operation and a flagship project for the new identity of that neighbourhood. The building provides a solid and comfortable basis for families in need and stands with an open angle, welcoming commuters entering the capital. It advocates for a strong desire for architecture for all.

This one-piece construction closes a steep triangular block, and develops a smooth textured brick facade playing with the light of the ever-changing Belgium sky. This scripture echoes with the surrounding, full of details, art Deco perennial buildings and stands up to the impressive road and railway infrastructure.

As most projects in Brussels, the building had to face a fascinating but difficult context. To face the small, noisy and mainly northern orientated plot, the building uses key architectural features.

It develops long folded apartments around a southern opened courtyard and a complex staircase that intertwines with individual stairs, allowing internal volumetric movements and kilometrical views to the surrounding landscape.

The plans articulations, intricate as lace-work, and the progressive section, passing from split-level to inverted duplexes, provide all the apartments of this perennial construction with light from 4 orientations exposition, outdoor spaces, impressive views and numerous spatial experiences.

Being a visible part of a broader scheme, great expectations, local and regional, were put on the shoulders of this building. An exhaustive participative process was followed to establish a dialog with the inhabitants and the different competent administrations. It enabled to explain, develop and amend urban and architectural issues, diminishing recurring Brussels conflicts and allowing to exceed strict building regulations.

Because the building shelters people in need and because social housing shouldnt be treated differently than more prestigious building, the project is developed in order to provide a solid basis to live in.

The construction is comforting and perennial, you can sleep soundly, nails can be banged in the walls. With super insulated envelope, soundproofing, triple glazing, balanced ventilation with heat recovery from exhaust air and solar panels for hot water production, the building is passive

The inhabitants comfort and low consumption are ensured, while theyre still able to open all the windows. The maintenance costs have been reduced to the maximum by avoiding air conditioning through calibrated exposure, by allowing natural light in nearly all the spaces and by the absence of an elevator, which the inhabitants didnt notice, their ascension being eased by the spatiality and powerful views.

Special details, avoiding thermal bridges, and on site workers formations were developed to assemble the subtle white brickworks in order to obtain this strong texture to play with light and pay tribute to the heritage art-deco facades of the area.

The accolade will be presented to the winners on May 26, 2017 at the Awards Ceremony, which will take place at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona.

Within the scope of the awards ceremony (between May 20 and 25), the finalist and winning buildings of the current edition will organize activities to open their doors to the public. The EU Mies Award Day on May 26 will also include the opening of two exhibitions:

- "Made in Europe", which will present some of the models collected by the Prize since 1988 in 11 containers.

- "2017 EU Mies Award exhibition" will include models, texts, sketches and drawings of the works. The exhibition will travel around Europe and internationally in the next 18 months, with its first stop at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts Brussels in September 2017.

During the same day, "Mies Talks" on 'Collective housing and regeneration' and 'Contemporary architecture and heritage' will allow Winners, Finalists, shortlisted, clients and people interested to debate on the emerging topics highlighted by the Jury.

All images courtesy of MSA/V+

> via Mies van der Rohe Award
NORTHEAST, KY, May 15, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Braidy Industries, Inc. is a U.S. aluminum firm with big plans. They have recently announced that they will be making a $1.3 billion investment into a new, state-of-the-art rolling mill in Northeast Kentucky. This will be the first new aluminum mill built in the United States in 30 years, representing a significant investment into the future of the U.S. economy and the Appalachian region.



During an interview of Fox News, Braidy Industries Chairman and CEO Craig Bouchard said, "We are on the cusp of a boom and by the way... Appalachia is going to lead that boom. It's the best place to go and we are spending 1.3 billion dollars to prove our point there."



Once operational, the mill will have the capacity to produce 370,000 metric tons of aluminum, per year, for the automotive and aerospace industries. For an additional competitive advantage, the company will be leveraging new nano-crystaline technology to improve molten metal-based manufacturing. The facility itself will be roughly 2.5-million-squre feet with room for expansion. Seated on a 370-acre site, it will be conveniently located near rail, barge, and road transportation routes.



Northeast Kentucky is ideally situated, being less than eight hours from 50 percent of the U.S. population and 60 percent of the manufacturing plants in the United States. This creates a significant advantage for Braidy Industries ability to service both the automotive and aerospace sectors with high-quality U.S. aluminum.



Northeast Kentucky is poised for an economic boom. Braidy Industries has discovered the benefits of locating there. Geographic convenience along with a low cost of doing business, makes this region an ideal destination for both light and heavy manufacturing companies. With some of the lowest power rates in the country and a surplus of cheap water, manufacturing businesses can save significantly by locating in Northeast Kentucky.



"There is significant momentum in Appalachia and we believe that Braidy Industries is just the start of an economic boom in this region. With a skilled workforce ready to work, businesses can easily locate here and be operational within weeks or months. This is an affordable place to do business and Ashland Alliance is here to help companies looking to locate in the region." Tim Gibbs, President and CEO of Ashland Alliance.



For more information, contact:



Tim Gibbs

Ashland Alliance

606-324-5111 office

606-207-0042 cell

[email protected]



OR



Amanda Clark

Vice President of Operations

Ashland Alliance

606-324-5111 office

606-831-2963 cell

[email protected]



# # #
ABC/Image Group LA Dan + Shays Dan Smyers tied the knot with his longtime girlfriend Abby Law this weekend in Nashville, according to People.

While details are few, we know the Saturday wedding was set to include the avid animal advocates three rescue dogs, Chief, Joy, and Ghost, dressed in matching tuxes and a dress. Since Dan and Abby are both non-meat-eaters, there were also plenty of vegetarian and vegan options on the menu.

Though weve yet to see a photo of the newlyweds, Abbys social media accounts already reflect her new married name, Abby Law Smyers.

Dans musical partner Shay Mooney is also planning a wedding with his fiancee, Hannah Billingsley, who's also the mother of his little one, Asher James. Shay predicts a fall wedding for the couple, since they currently have their hands full with a soon-to-be four-month-old.

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
May 15, 2017 | By Benedict

An 18-year-old student from Tamil Nadu in India has used 3D printing to create what could be the worlds lightest satellite. The 3D printed carbon fiber device weighs just 64 grams, and will be launched on a NASA sounding rocket on June 21.

You only have to look at the never-ending supply of ultra-compact CubeSats to realize that small, lightweight satellites are becoming an important area of space research.

Its easy to see why too: by making satellites as small as possible, it becomes possible to pack dozens of them on a single launch. They can then be ejected either individually or as a cluster into the required area of the atmosphere, and in no time at all youve got a bunch of orbiting devices collecting potentially vital information to send down to earth.

But even ultra-compact CubeSats look a little bulky when compared to a tiny satellite that was recently developed by an 18-year-old student in India.

In fact, Rifath Shaarook, an 18-year old student from Karur district in Tamil Nadu, has built what could be the lightest satellite in the world. The KalamSat, which weighs just 64 grams, is made from a 3D printed carbon fiber polymer, and was chosen as the winner of the Cubes in Space contest organized by NASA and IDoodle learning. Amazingly, the satellite is going to space.

On June 21, NASA will pack the tiny satellite on a sounding rocket to be launched from Wallop Island, off the Eastern Shore of Virginia, for a 240-minute sub-orbital space flight mission. Once up in the atmosphere, the 3D printed satellite will be in a the micro-gravity environment of space for 12 minutes, before in begins its downward trajectory back towards the ocean.

The launch will be a huge achievement for Shaarook, who will become the first Indian student to have an experiment flown by NASA.

But the launch could be great news for 3D printing as well. One of the main roles of the satellite is to see how 3D printed carbon fiber fares in space. Should the device survive those 12 minutes in space, other satellite developers on Earth will have good reason to try using 3D printed carbon fiber polymers themselves.

The Cubes in Space contest, in which Shaarooks lightweight satellite came out on top in the Space Kidz India program, encourages students to design an experiment that could be sent to space.

Our goal is to help kids from around the world learn to problem-solve, to get them inspired about learning, to learn skills and develop interests that will prepare them to succeed in the future, its organizers say.

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Richard Hunt wrote at 5/16/2017 3:16:06 AM:What does it do ?




May 15, 2017 | By Tess

An assistant professor from the University of Utahs School of Computing has put his 3D design and printing chops towards a particularly ambitious project: recreating a full-scale replica of a popular outdoor climbing route. The project has involved 3D scanning, extensive 3D modeling, and 3D printing.

The project, which is specifically recreating the climbing route Pilgrimage located in St. George, Utah, is being led by assistant professor Ladislav Kavan and his colleague Emily Whiting, an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. The pair, who studied together as postdoctoral students in Zurich, were inspired to recreate a climbing route based on their own experiences climbing in Switzerland.

The idea was to combine their shared hobby of climbing with their expertise in computer modeling. "To us, the idea of being able to take famous routes from different places around the world and still climb them at our home gyms was the exciting part," said Whiting.

And while this is certainly not the first attempt to recreate a climbing route for training purposes (wooden replicas of climbing mountains have been in use since the 1980s), it may be the first time that 3D modeling and printing technologies have been used for that end.

According to the research duo, a team was assembled that included Nada Ouf, a computer science graduate from the University of Pennsylvania; Zhenyu Shu, from the Ningbo Institute of Technology Zhejiang University in China; Christos Mousas, a doctoral researcher at Dartmouth; and Liane Makatua, an undergraduate at Dartmouth.

Together, the group was able to capture a 3D model of the Pilgrimage climbing surface using hundreds of photos taken of the climbing route from various angles. Then, using multiview stereo software, the team was able to stitch together many photos to create a 3D model of the climb.

Of course, 3D printing a whole mountain face could be incredibly laborious and expensive, so the team had to find a slightly different approach. Ultimately, they decided that if they could track a climbers ascent of the route, they could pinpoint the specific handholds and footholds used and recreate them.

To do this, the researchers video-taped someone climbing up the route and mapped out the climbers skeletal structure. This mapping was then overlaid onto the 3D model of the mountain, which allowed the team to accurately place a number of handholds and footholds.

The actual fabrication process (which is still in progress) has consisted of using a computer-operated router to create foam models of the different holds, which are then overlaid with a silicon mold. The researchers then filled the molds with a casting resin for the final part.

According to Whiting, the team is still working on finding the best materials for capturing the textures of rock for a more accurate climbing experience. "Sandstone in one location versus granite in another location will have those tactile differences, and we are still working to capture that properly," she explained.

In addition to giving climbers the chance to train remotely for a particular climbing route, the project also has a conservational value. That is, as popular climbing routes are used more and more, the rocky surface of the mountain inevitably begins to erode and wear down. A 3D printed replica of a climbing route could help cut down on the number of climbs and help to preserve the environment.

As Kavan commented: The rock is taking a toll. The climbers are practicing over and over again until they get itbut it is kind of destroying the rock."

Another inspiration for the project was Dean Potters infamous Delicate Arch climb in 2006. Potter notoriously climbed the soft and iconic sandstone arch, much to the horror of nature preservationists everywhere.

Delicate Arch, Utah, USA

Kavan thinks that in the future, 3D printed replica climbs could be used to make locations such as the Delicate Arch more accessible. "If you can take things that aren't even accessible and you don't even have access at all and still be able to bring it to your gym, it's exciting to us," commented Whiting.

The researchers also believe in the potential to one day crowdsource other climbing routes, as climbers could submit their photos to a special database that could then map out and 3D model routes from around the world.

The research project was recently presented by Kavan at the 35th annual Association for Computer Modeling conference in Denver.

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May 15, 2017 | By Benedict

A group of Russian organizations that includes the Roscosmos-associated Energiya Rocket and Space Corporation and Tomsk-based electron beam specialist TETA has developed a prototype of an electron beam metal 3D printer. The group says the 3D printer could be used in space.

A group of Russian organizations says it has developed an electron beam 3D printer

Metal 3D printing is, for the most part, quite unlike fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing, the most common kind of additive manufacturing. Where FDM uses spools of stringy plastic, metal 3D printing techniques like selective laser sintering (SLS) and selective laser melting (SLM) use metal powders.

And its not just about the different forms these materials take, either. The way they are processed is also totally different. FDM melts its plastic before squeezing it out into shapes onto an empty print surface, while metal 3D printers use a precisely controlled laser to melt or sinter shapes on a bed of powder.

But metal 3D printers can also work a bit like FDM 3D printers. They just require much more advanced technology to do so.

Wire-feed additive manufacturing is about as close to FDM as metal 3D printing gets. Thats because the process uses fine metal wire (similar in form to the spools of stringy plastic used in FDM) as a printing material instead of powders.

But metal, of course, cant easily be melted. Try feeding metal wire through an FDM 3D printer, and the relatively low-temperature hot-end wont be able to extrude it. Thats why wire-feed additive manufacturing requires something like an electron beam to supply the necessary energy to process the wire.

And when youre talking about electron beam additive manufacturing, theres pretty much only one company you need to know about: Sciaky, a Chicago-based 3D printing company, has perfected what it calls the EBAM 3D printing process, and has even supplied its metal 3D printing technology to companies like Airbus and Lockheed Martin.

U.S. company Sciaky currently leads the way in electron beam 3D printing

According to Russian sources, however, Sciaky could finally have a serious competitor.

Thats because a new electron beam metal 3D printer has been developed by a group of Russian organizations that includes the Roscosmos-affiliated Energiya Rocket and Space Corporation, electron beam specialist TETA, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Tomsk Polytechnic University.

The group says its new 3D printer uses an electron beam to process metal wire feedstock, and can produce 3D printed objects measuring up to three cubic meters, up to a weight of around one metric ton.

The group says the 3D printer could even be used in space.

According to TETA, a Tomsk-based electron beam company that has supplied electron beam technology for the 3D printer, the printer can process materials like titanium, tantalum, and wolfram, and could be used by rocket and aircraft manufacturers, potentially bringing Russian aircraft production into a new and exciting age.

At present, we dont know many details about this collaboratively produced 3D printer, but its existence does raise some interesting questions: How will this machine compare to Sciakys now industry-standard EBAM 3D printers? Will the 3D printer accelerate Russias plans to build a base on the moon? Will the printer be marketed internationally, or will Russia keep a lid on the technology to gain an advantage over other countries?

A prototype of the electron beam 3D printer will be showcased at U-NOVUS-2017, an exhibition being held in Tomsk between May 17-19. The event is sure to answer some of those questions.

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May 15, 2017 | By Tess

WinSun founder and chairman Ma Yihe has been quoted as saying his company could feasibly build Donald Trumps infamous border wall both cheaply and quickly using its construction 3D printing technology. Whether he was making a serious proposition or not, its clear that Ma Yihe thinks his companys 3D printing tech would be up to the task.

Most of our readers will be familiar with WinSun, as the Chinese 3D printing construction company has claimed many headlines for its various 3D printed structures, including a 3D printed villa, traditional Chinese courtyards, public toilets, and more. And while the company has provoked its share of healthy skepticism over the quality of the structures it is 3D printing, it has been an undeniable pioneer of 3D printing construction.

WinSun 3D printed courtyard wall

In a recent interview with the South China Morning Post, Ma Yihe lightheartedly stated: Donald Trump could build his wall much cheaper and in less than a year. We could definitely do it. Maybe at around 60 per cent of the projected cost and three to four times faster.

Whether he was making a serious offer to the controversial 45th president of the United States, or was even condoning the plan for a Mexico-US border wall is not clear. What is clear is that WinSuns founder believes that his 3D printing technology could be a cheap and fast solution for one of Trumps most egregious campaign promises.

Based in Jiangsu province, WinSun owes its construction feats to its innovativeand highly secretive3D printer, which reportedly measures 40 meters in length, 10 meters in width, and 6.6 meters in height. Only about 100 people at the company are trained in its operation, and the printer has 129 international patents protecting its parts, including its spray nozzle, composite materials, and more.

WinSun founder Ma Yihe

(Image: Zigor Aldama, SCMP)

According to Ma Yihe, WinSuns massive 3D printer is capable of producing structures based on traditional architectural plans or 3D models. Due to the technologys size, it 3D prints the concrete structures in-house, and the parts for whatever building is underway are then shipped to the site for assembly. This feature helps to cut back on on-site air and noise pollution caused by construction, though it presumably causes huge transportation and petrol costs.

In terms of materials, WinSun says it has developed a special 3D printing ink made from 100% recycled materials sourced from industrial and construction waste. We can create new composite materials that are not only eco-friendly but also have improved properties; the high plasticity of our special glass-fibre reinforced concrete, for example, gives good anti-seismic and wind-load resistance, explained WinSuns founder in an interview.

Additionally, like most 3D printing technologies, WinSuns construction 3D printer is capable of making buildings using significantly less material that traditional construction methods would require (30 to 60 percent less materials). Ma also said his companys technology can cut back construction times by 50 to 70 percent, labour by 50 to 80 percent, and overall costs by 50 percent.

WinSun 3D printed courtyard

In the past, WInSuns 3D printed buildings have been criticized for their ugly appearance, though the company is hoping to improve its aesthetics with the help of new brick-like facades, which can be screwed on as panels on top of the rougher 3D printed surface. The composite material is called crazy magic stone, and Ma Yihe described it as looking like natural stone but with more durable properties.

Currently, some WinSun employees have even moved into a five-storey building 3D printed by the company to trial what it is like living there.

Last year, WinSun announced a few exciting partnerships that will see its technology used across the globe. Through a deal with Saudi Arabias Al Mobty Contracting Co., WinSun will help to 3D print 30 million square meters of construction projects in Saudi Arabia. The company will also be offering its expertise for the Hyperloop initiative proposed by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

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The Power. wrote at 5/16/2017 11:07:44 PM:BS




by Ashutosh Jogalekar

We live in a fractured age when many seem to be convinced that their beliefs are right, and that they can never agree with the other side on anything to any degree. Science has always been the best antidote against this bias, because while political truths are highly subjective and subject to the whims of the majority, most scientific truths are starkly objective. You may try to pass a law by majority vote in Congress saying that two and two equals five, or that DNA is not a double helix, but these falsehoods are not going to stay hidden for too long because the bare facts say otherwise. You may keep on denying global warming, but that will not make the warming stop. What makes science different is that its facts are true irrespective of whether you believe they are true.

But combined with this undeniable nature of scientific facts exists a way of doing things that almost seems paradoxical to proclamations about hard scientific truth. That is the essential, never-ending role of doubt, skepticism and uncertainty in the practice of science. Yes, DNA is a double helix, and yes, it almost seems impossible that this fact will someday be overturned, but even then we should not hold the fact as sacrosanct. Truth in science, no matter how convincing, is always regarded as provisional and subject to change. Some scientific facts are now so well documented that they approach the status of truth, and yet considering them so literally would mean abandoning the scientific method. Seen this way, truth in science can be considered to be an asymptotic limit, one which we can always get closer to but can never definitively reach.

Its this seemingly paradoxical and yet crucial yin-and-yang aspect of science that I believe is still quite hard to grasp for non-scientists. Niels Bohr would have appreciated the tension. Bohr bequeathed to the world the concept of complementarity. Complementarity means the existence of seemingly opposite ideas that are still required together to explain the world. In the physical world, complementarity was first glimpsed in the behavior of subatomic particles which can sometimes behave as waves and sometime as particles, depending on the experiment.

Waves and particles may seem to be contradictory concepts, and yet as the pioneers of quantum mechanics showed us, you cannot explain reality without assuming that electrons or photons are both. In his later life, Bohr extended the idea of complementarity to many aspects of the human world; good and evil, freedom and restraint, war and peace. He realized that all of these seemingly paradoxical aspects of the human and physical world have to essentially co-exist, not just if we want to understand reality as it is but if we want to develop tolerance for opposing ideas. Niels Bohr played a very significant role in making us comfortable with paradox and uncertainty.

In some sense the twentieth century was the age when science once and for all destroyed Platonic notions of certainty. The one idea from that time that really struck at the heart of certainty was Kurt Godels incompleteness theorem. Godel showed us that we can never know everything even in the supposedly pristine and completely precise world of pure mathematics; even in this world we could keep on finding facts that are unprovable, and so mathematics will always be inexhaustible. At about the same time, Max Born and Werner Heisenberg demonstrated the fundamental probabilistic nature of the subatomic world. In one way, neither of these ideas destroyed certainty as much as they redefined it, but they did tell us that certainty is a very slippery concept, and one that needs us at the very least to recalibrate our expectations from both the physical and the abstract universe. At the same time, neither development portended the end of science in any shape or form; mathematicians went on proving important theorems in spite of Godel, and physicists went on discovering important facts about the material world in spite of Heisenberg.

Some people are confused about how certainty and uncertainty can both co-exist at the same time in science, while too many opportunists (creationists and climate change deniers for instance) are ready to pounce on shreds of uncertain knowledge in the peripherals to declare the entire edifice uncertain and hollow. As science communicators, I think that we still fail to convey this co-existence of hard facts and room for doubt to non-specialists, and this failure is a significant reason for so many of our troubles in establishing a dialogue about science with the public.

One of those few who did a remarkably accessible job communicating the role of uncertainty in science was Richard Feynman. In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, he made the point that many people look for certainty as an emotional aid; hence the rise of systems like religion. But as Feynman says, the only way we can make scientific progress is if we remain skeptical, if we expose even the best-known facts of science to the glare of doubt. To do this requires fearlessness, the courage to abandon even your most cherished beliefs in the face of evidence. But the scientists of lore understood well this need for courage. There is a reason why the Royal Society, when it was founded in 1660, chose at its motto the Latin phrase Nullius in verba: Nobodys word is final. At the time, this way of looking at the world, of not regarding any authority including the Kings as the final word, was a novel and revolutionary way of doing things. It marked a great transition from the age of kings to the age of reason.

And it was a message that Feynman emphasized throughout his career:

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think its much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about some things, but I am not absolutely sure about many things, and there are some things which I dont know anything aboutsuch as whether it means anything to ask why we are here, and what the question might mean.

But I dont have to know an answer. I dont feel frightened by not knowing. By feeling lost in this mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. It doesnt frighten me.

Skepticism engendered by fearlessness is an integral aspect of science; not only as some formal, abstract protocol, but as a necessary tool without which progress would be impossible. I would say the same attitude applies to the conduct of our social and political affairs, although as current events demonstrate, its been exceedingly difficult to profess doubt and uncertainty in the political arena.

Today I find myself troubled by what I see as the misplaced conviction and lack of skepticism on both the left and the right in this country and in other lands. The real problem of course is not lack of skepticism in the beliefs of others but skepticism regarding ones own beliefs: as Feynman again memorably put it, The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

The bedrock of presumed certainty in what one sees as hard, incontrovertible facts not only roots ones beliefs in certain sacred values, but it often simply precludes one from understanding subtleties and rationally responding to arguments on the other side. The concept of sacred values was popularized by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in trying to explain why otherwise intelligent people sometimes become irrationally wedded to their viewpoints. The central reason is that humans tend to infuse scientific facts and findings with their own preconceived moral meanings. Once that happens it becomes quite difficult to accept or agree with facts that seem to collide with those values.

This knee-jerk disapproval manifests itself on both sides of the political aisle. The right is too skeptical even of the basic facts of global warming, while the left holds the science of global warming perfect and sacrosanct and believes that the science is largely settled. The right believes that genetics and race play a disproportionate role in mental qualities like IQ and creativity, while the left believes that environment can almost completely compensate for any such differences. In fact the left fears the rights viewpoint so much that it gropes for support for the equality of all human beings in science, even when science and human value systems should really be kept separate from each other. The right looks into science for the contention held by some of its members that one gender may be inferior to the other. The left is so fearful of this contention that it is quick to interpret any studies demonstrating even subtle or uncontroversial gender differences as evidence of discrimination against one gender or another.

Generally speaking, the right is quick to point out differences rather than similarities while the left is quick to assume that pointing out differences is tantamount to pointing out inferiority or superiority. The lefts sacred values are purportedly equality and justice; the rights are purportedly freedom and God. Each side is frightened to give even a little ground for fear that the other side may declare victory. This fear is causing both sides to closet themselves into bubbles and echo chambers, into rejecting  as is being done on college campuses for example  even the possibility of exposing themselves to the other sides viewpoints and engaging with them. And the profligacy of social media, because of its ability to quickly surround yourself with like-minded people, creates an enduring illusion of your convictions being absolutely right.

Part of the solution to reconciling our sacred beliefs with each other is to again go back to that notion of complementarity extolled by Niels Bohr and to realize that many of our beliefs simply may not be completely compatible with each other, but that they still have to co-exist in order for us to form a complete picture of the world and to live in harmony. This point was made very clearly by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a 1996 commencement address at the University of Toronto; the talk was appropriately titled A Message to the 21st Century. Throughout his life Berlin emphasized the plurality of human thoughts and values, and this theme was what he expounded upon:

The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many timesthese values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equalityif men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.

Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truththe noblest of aimscannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on.

It is the inability to grasp this fundamental tussle between different values that in part leads people to believe in holy truths. Human beings are uncomfortable with multiple answers, especially if they seem contradictory; but multiple, contradictory, complementary answers comprise the very essence of the world. Berlin however is honest and reflective enough to admit that he sees no straightforward solution to the dilemma. This is perhaps because the only solution is to admit the dilemma and live with it, to respect a plurality of opinion and abide by the views of multitudes, to recognize that the contradictions that man presents are the contradictions that man contains. In fact this reconciliation with differing views lies at the heart of both liberal democracy and scientific exploration.

Many decades before Feynman, another famous scientist had eloquently advocated for openness in both science and politics:

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry  There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.

More than almost anyone at the time, Robert Oppenheimer knew how crucial open inquiry was, again not as a formal, pedagogic aspect of science but as an error-correcting tool. Error correction is an important part of both pure and applied science. It can allow you to discover fundamental particles and mathematical theorems, but it can equally allow you to build a better integrated circuit and invent new drugs for cancer. As Oppenheimer realized, the atomic bomb had made this need for correcting error literally a matter of life and death. Even the politicians  deeply susceptible as they are to the effects of integrated circuits, cancer and atomic bombs  should be able to get on board with that urgency.

But perhaps we should leave the last word on the many virtues of doubt, uncertainty, self-skepticism and openness to a man who told us a cautionary tale about the horrific ends that result from the acts of men and women who throw all these values out of the window, convinced as they are of the indelible truth of their own beliefs. As he bent down to pick up mud from a pond at Auschwitz, Jacob Bronowski issued a plea to question our beliefs that is as ominous and heartfelt as it is relevant to our modern times.

Its said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. Thats false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistakenwe have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.

You may be mistaken. Think it possible.
Here's where you'll want to eat this week.

(Courtesy of Reem's)

Reem's Opens in Fruitvale



Reem Assil, a graduate of La Cocina's culinary incubator program, opens her first brick-and-mortar bakery in Fruitvale tomorrow, May 16. The eponymous Reem's will serve her delicious Arab street food including her specialty, mana'eesh, delicious fresh-baked flatbreads topped with a plethora of toppings like za'atar, goat cheese, parsley, tomatoes, and more--all reminiscent of her Palestinian-Syrian upbringing. You'll also fine plenty of mezze spreads all made in-house, as well as Red Bay Coffee. Dive in to discover why the The San Francisco Chronicle named her one of their Rising Stars for 2017.

// 3301 East 12th St, Suite 133 (Fruitvale), Reemscalifornia.com





Presidio Twilight Begins Again

Off the Grid Markets and The Presidio Trust bring back the fourth season of The Presidio Twilight, the weekly picnic at dusk. Sit in lantern-lit cabanas surrounded by fire pits while you stuff your face with selections from a rotating list of vendorsNew England lobster rolls from Lobsta Truck, Korean fried chicken sandwiches from Koja Kitchen, and pork belly baos from The Chairman. It all goes down every Thursday from 5pm-9pm.

// Main Parade Ground at The Presidio, offthegrid.com

Brunch Comes to August 1 Five



August 1 Five, the modern Indian restaurant that received an impressive and elusive 3.5 stars from food critic Michael Bauer earlier this year, is launching weekend brunch service. Dishes will meld Indian ingredients and flavors with American brunch favorites, like pancakes with seasonal berries and a cardamom whipped cream or a more tropical version of pancakes made with coconut, dates, gooseberry chutney, and creme fraiche. Wash it all down with a Silk Smitha, their take on a Bloody Mary made with tomato water, aquavit, Benedictine, ginger, and chili oil.

// 524 Van Ness Ave (Civic Center), august1five.com

Brae X in Situ: Cookbook Talk, Signing, and Tasting with Chef Dan Hunter



Chef Dan Hunter of Australia's Brae Restaurant (recently ranked number 44 on the World's 50 Best Restaurant list), will be in San Francisco during his upcoming US tour for his debut book: Brae: Recipes and Stories from the Restaurant. Find him at In Situ in conversation with Lucky Peach co-founder Christopher Ying on Monday, May 22, at 6:30PM. There will be a book signing as well as a reception with small bites and drinks. Tickets will go fast.

// In Situ at SFMOMA, 151 3rd St. (SoMa); tickets ($98) at eventbrite.com.

Cellar Series at The Morris



Paul Einbund, wine authority, sommelier, and co-owner of The Morris, is launching a new monthly educational program called Cellar Series at The Morris. The interactive, hands-on (read: there will be drinks to drink!) classes will be individually themed. The first session is all about chartreuse, where you'll learn how to integrate the liqueur into cocktails and sip on rare pours from Einbund's personal collection that dates back to the 1940s. You'll also learn about its history, distilling process, and how to pair the otherworldly yellow-green spirit with food.

// 2501 Mariposa St (Mission); reserve at info@themorris-sf.com
A variety of refractive surgery techniques, which reshape the corneal stroma using laser energy, have been marketed as simple and safe alternatives to glasses or contact lenses. Laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis (LASIK) is the most common of these procedures. Although there are few high-quality prospective studies of long-term outcomes, complications, or stability for refractive surgery procedures, there is at least general agreement that more than 90% of appropriately selected patients achieve excellent uncorrected distance vision. In addition to well-recognized contraindications (e.g., unstable refraction, pregnancy and lactation, chronic eye disease, systemic illness, corneal abnormalities), there are other conditions that warrant caution (e.g., excessively dry eyes, contact lens intolerance, chronic pain syndromes). Postoperative dry eye, which may in part represent a corneal neuropathy, usually resolves after six to 12 months but persists in up to 20% of patients. Up to 20% of patients may have new visual disturbances, particularly with night driving. Vision-threatening complications are rare. Intraocular lenses, implanted following cataract extraction, may be an alternative to LASIK in older patients. Although the overall dependence on corrective lenses is markedly reduced, many patients still require glasses or contact lenses after LASIK, particularly in low-light conditions and as they age. Most patients report satisfaction with the results. Family physicians can help patients make informed decisions by exploring their values, preferences, expectations, and tolerance of uncertainty and risk.
On Sunday the British daredevil broke the worlds record for the oldest skydiver when he completed a tandem dive with three generations of his family at an airfield in Honiton, England, bailing out at 15,000 feet.

The previous record was held by Canadian Armand Gendreau, 101 and three days, who skydived in June 2013.

Hayes is 101 and 37 days. "No offense to him, but I want to bring that record back to the [United Kingdom] where it belongs, Hayes told local news outlet Devon Live before the jump. And after the jump? Im absolutely over the moon.

Making the jump with him  the stunt was an effort to raise money for the Royal British Legion  were his 16-year-old great-grandson, Stanley; his grandson, Roger, 50; his son, Bryan, 74; and his great-granddaughter, Ellie, 21.

Even without the skydiving, Hayes life would make for an interesting read.

His father served with the Royal Engineers during World War I and fought at Verdun. Hayes was a telegraph operator for the Royal Engineers during World War II and was recognized for heroism for his actions in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and France  the last for his bravery during the D-Day invasion.

His best friend, Sgt. Edgar Robertson, was blown up by a bomb as the two were digging a ditch together. Hayes suffered shrapnel injuries in the explosion.

How I came home from World War II I do not know, he said. I was so near to the edge of everything. I lost any amount of friends in no time at all.

Having survived so much danger, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane counts as just fun.

"Hopefully, I will be doing this when I'm 102 or 103, he said. [It] just depends on the luck of the draw.
Ballot stamps cause minor issue in Brown, turnout in Codington 63%

While there was a minor issue counting some ballots in Brown Co., local election officials said Tuesday night went pretty well. SD voter turnout 57.5%


Announces Offer to Sophisticated Investors to Raise AU$860,000

Sydney, May 15, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Revolution Metals Ltd today announces a capital raising and offer to Sophisticated Investors to raise AU$860,000 to facilitate the Dalmorton Goldfields project.



The purpose of the Offer is to raise $860,000 to enable the Company to:



- complete a 3 hole drilling program to further delineate the Mt Remarkable gold resource;



- preparation of trial mining (bulk sample) of 20,000 tonnes of surface ore for 3,000 ounces of gold;



- fund the working capital requirements associated with the Company continuing with the commercialisation of the mineral assets associated with the company's two exploration tenements, EL8118 and EL8723;



- fund preparation for an initial public offer (IPO); and



- underwrite general working capital requirements and establishment costs.



The Directors are of the view that the full subscription of $860,000 will provide the Company with sufficient working capital to carry out its objectives as detailed in the Information Memorandum.



Details of the Offer



Pursuant to this Information Memorandum, the Company invites investors to apply for 8,600,000 Shares, at an issue price of 10 cents each to raise $860,000.



The Shares offered under this Information Memorandum will rank pari passu with the existing fully paid Shares on issue.



The minimum individual subscription is 50,000 Shares or $5,000.



This Offer is being made to targeted investors known to the founding shareholders and executive management, or who qualify as Sophisticated Investors or Professional Investors. This underlines the rationale for the short offer period and Closing Date of 30 May 2017.



No offer of securities is made on the basis of the electronic version of the Information Memorandum accessible through this website. An application for securities can be made by completing the Application Form attached to or accompanied by a paper form of the Information Memorandum and then lodging the form and the application monies in accordance with the details set out in the Information Memorandum and the relevant Application Form.



No Advice



Nothing contained on this website or in the Information Memorandum constitutes investment, legal, business, tax or other advice. In particular, the information on this website and in the Information Memorandum does not take into account your investment objectives, financial situation or particular needs. In making an investment decision, you must rely on your own examination of the Company and the securities and terms of the offering, including the merits and risks involved. You should consult your professional adviser for legal, business or tax advice.



To register interest in investing in Revolution Metals Ltd, please visit:

http://www.revolutionmetals.com/investor-form.asp



To view the Information Memorandum to Sophisticated Investors, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/896RY2S3



For complete project overview, please visit:

http://www.revolutionmetals.com





About Revolution Metals Ltd





Revolution Metals Ltd is an Australian public company and developer of mineral resources. The focus of the company is to develop mineral assets of economic grade to production, providing investors with rapid return on investment. Revolution's current tenement holding comprises 40 square kilometres of mineralized gold, silver, nickel, cobalt and lead bearing structures in northern New South Wales, Australia.

The primary gold bearing ironstone and quartz deposits of Mt Remarkable, Pine Creek and Alice Cornwall, are part of a field of numerous reefs and historical artisanal workings with over sixty identified as producing gold over a century ago.


Kidston Solar Phase One 50MW Update

Sydney, May 15, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Genex Power Limited ( ASX:GNX ) (Genex or Company) is pleased to provide shareholders with this latest update regarding the construction program for the Company's Phase One 50MW Kidston Solar Project (KSP1 or Project).



Genex advises that the construction of KSP1 continues to remain on time and on budget for first generation in Q4 2017 and Practical Completion in Q1 2018. Key activities since the last update (refer ASX announcement 20 April 2017) include:



- First delivery of First Solar Thin-Film solar modules complete;

- First delivery of NEXTracker components underway;

- Piling rigs mobilized to site ahead of pile delivery;

- Ergon switchyard equipment 75% installed and equipment earthing underway;

- Solar farm substation earth-grid installed;

- Laydown area for materials storage and component assembly 100% complete; and

- Site clearing approximately 90% complete.



Commenting on the recent progress of KSP1, Managing Director of Genex Power Michael Addison said, "Genex's focus on project delivery continues with the project continuing to perform to budget. Kidston is now a hive of activity with 65 people employed on site. The outlook for wholesale electricity and Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs) remains robust which underpins the potential to deliver strong cash flows to Genex".



The Federal Government, through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has provided $8.9 million funding to support the construction of the $126 million Project at Genex's Kidston Solar Farm.



To view figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/8XPF6PS4





About Genex Power Ltd





Genex Power Limited (ASX:GNX) is focused on developing a portfolio of renewable energy generation and storage projects across Australia. The Company's flagship Kidston Clean Energy Hub, located in north Queensland, will integrate large-scale solar generation with pumped storage hydro. The Kidston Clean Energy Hub is comprised of the operating 50MW stage 1 Solar Project (KS1) and the 250MW Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project (K2-Hydro) with potential for further multi-stage wind and solar projects. The 50MW Jemalong Solar Project (JSP) is located in NSW and provides geographical diversification to the Genex Power Limited portfolio. JSP was energised in early December 2020 and commissioning is now underway. Genex is further developing its energy storage portfolio via the early stage development of a 50MW/75MWh standalone battery energy storage system at Bouldercombe in Queensland. With over 400MW of renewable energy and storage projects in development, Genex is well placed as Australia's leading renewable energy and storage company.


Tourism Services Agreement Signed

Sydney, May 15, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - SmartTrans Holdings Limited ( ASX:SMA ) (SmartTrans or the Company) is pleased to announce the signing of a new agreement extending SmartTrans' e-Commerce and payment processing services into the large and rapidly growing Chinese tourism market to Australia. The agreement to market and sell Kangur Tours products online in China will target Chinese tourists prior to arrival in Australia and seek to establish ongoing e-Commerce purchasing realationships both in Australia and upon return to China.



- SmartTrans continues to expand the product range on its RooLife e-Commerce platforms with the addition of Kangur Tours tourism packages



- Tourism packages and campaigns will connect Chinese tourists to Australian businesses ahead of their visit to Australia and establish e-Commerce links for ongoing purchases



- Tourism agreement takes advantage of the rapidly growing tourism market from China and opens up further opportunities for payment processing in new sectors



- SmartTrans RooLife partnership with Shanghai-listed Dodoca generated first revenue in April and continues in May



- SmartTrans RooLife partnership with established e-Commerce partner Wjike generating revenue in May



- RooLife provides Chinese consumers with confidence of Australian-made authenticity, matching demand from Australian exporters with demand from Chinese consumers



- RooLife is aiming to become one of China's largest online market places for Australian goods generating multiple revenue streams for SmartTrans via marketing fees, acquisition of customers, commissions on sale of products and transaction fees



This new partnership is expected to add to the Company's e-Commerce sales revenue which is building via the strong partnerships with Shanghai-listed Dodoca and established e-Commerce partner, Wjike.



The range of products being sold online has continued to expand with growing sales volume being achieved across the board, led by Tim Adams' Wines, MorLife health food products and SoapNut's cleaning and personal grooming products.



SmartTrans' Chinese marketing team are working closely with the teams from Dodoca and Wjike with key brands Morlife, Tim Adams Wines and SoapNut being actively marketed in May with Mothers' Day and "Healthy for Summer" campaigns.



The Company is growing the number and variety of products available on its e-Commerce platform and with the addition of tourism products and services, is gaining exposure to a new and rapidly growing sector. Chinese arrivals and spending are up approximately 20 per cent year-on-year to 1.2 million visitors to Australia in the 12 months to September 20161 and expenditure reaching $9.1 billion.



SmartTrans generates revenue through the provision of marketing services, the acquisition of customers, commission on sale of products and transaction fees.



Connecting Chinese tourists to Australian businesses ahead of their visit and then introducing Chinese tourists to Australian products and businesses when they are in Australia is one of the targeted growth areas for SmartTrans RooLife e-Commerce and mobile payments business.



The link between tourism and shopping is well established and SmartTrans is positioning itself to take advantage of the growing number of Chinese tourists visiting Australia.



Shopping in Australia is a favourite pastime for many Chinese tourists who seek authentic, quality products, with the prevalence of counterfeit goods being a significant concern for shoppers in China.



Shopping by Chinese tourists in Australian also establishes a connection between Australian businesses and Chinese consumers that can be maintained after those tourists have returned home to China.



SmartTrans' Managing Director Bryan Carr commented: "We are delighted to be seeing growth in sales revenue and to be continuing to broaden our service offering. Our latest agreement with Kangur Tours to market and sell a range of travel, accommodation and tours in Australia to Chinese tourists is not only another direct revenue opportunity but presents the opportunity to promote and sell other products and services by extension, such as real estate and education services."



SmartTrans is in discussions with an additional range of potential partners to further strengthen its RooLife platforms and anticipates further announcements on this front in the near future.





About SmartTrans Holdings Limited





SmartTrans Holdings Limited (ASX:SMA) is a leading Australian technology and software provider that has developed a mobile and online billing and payment platform for the China market The company has agreements in place with China Mobile, China Unicorn, China Telecom CMPay, UnionPay and Alipay. With the growing use of the smartphone as a billing device in China, the company is experiencing significant uptake of its technology in that market. SmartTrans has also developed cutting-edge proprietary logistics software which is used by some of Australia's leading blue-chip organisations who have long term contracts in place with the company. SmartTrans is assessing growth opportunities for its logistic offering in China to complement its mobile and online payments platform.
They reported that: Somali parents were more likely than non-Somali parents to have refused the MMR vaccine for their child (odds ratio, 4.6; 95% confidence interval, 1.2-18.0). Most of them refused vaccines because they had heard of adverse effects associated with the vaccine or personally knew someone who suffered an adverse effect. Somali parents were significantly more likely to believe that autism is caused by vaccines (35% vs. 8% of non-Somali parents). Somalis were also more likely to be uncomfortable with administering multiple vaccines at one visit (odds ratio, 4.0; 95% confidence interval, 1.4-11.9) and more likely to believe that children receive too many vaccines.

Forty seven cases were unvaccinated, one case had 1 dose of MMR vaccine and two cases had 2 doses of MMR. The vaccination status of one case was unknown.

The authors concluded that: Statistically significant differences in perceptions and use of vaccines were reported by Somali and non-Somali participants. Somali parents are more likely to believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism and more likely to refuse the MMR vaccine than non-Somali parents. These beliefs have contributed to an immunization gap between Somali and non-Somali children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25002000

The complete publication is available at http://www.jabfm.org/content/27/4/458.long

*****

On January 21, 2011, I published my original review: Autism, Vaccination and Immigrants - Yet another Clear Correlation It was later translated to Russian.

Here it is, as previously published.

*****

Autism and Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) seem more common among young Somalis in Minnesota and among immigrant communities in several western countries.

At least as late as 2003, Ethiopian-born immigrants to Israel had no recorded cases of autism.

[That is correct: Not a single one!]

*****

The medical literature contains several reports of a higher prevalence of autism among immigrant communities worldwide.



The earliest report I could find was published on March 6, 1976 in the Australian Medical Journal. According to Haper and Williams, relatively more New South Wales children who had at least one foreign-born parent whose native language was not English, carried a diagnosis of infantile autism. The authors attributed the behavioral changes to environmental stresses, adjustment difficulties and a confusing language environment leading to de-compensation of an already vulnerable child.[i]



Autism was a purely psychiatric disorder at the time. Just nine years earlier, Bruno Bettleheim had published his widely read The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, where he promoted his sad and offensive "refrigerator mother" theory of autism.



Gillberg and Gillberg reported in 1996 that of 55 thirteen-year-old children with autism they investigated, 15 (27%) were born to parents, at least one of whom had migrated to Sweden. In several cases, the affected child was the first born in Sweden after the mothers arrival to the country.[ii]



In 2006, Maimburg and Vaeth [iii] reported results of a population-based, matched case-control study of infantile autism in Denmark and stated that the risk of infantile autism was increased with foreign citizenship.



Across the Atlantic in 2007, Canadian physicians were reporting similar findings from Montreal to Vancouver and some complained that there was little research to understand why.[iv]

At the time, I talked to a few informed parents in Montreal and reviewed with them the local situation.



I was told that for years, the mother tongue of students in Montreal schools was French 42%, Non-English 36% and English 22% and that most if not all non-English-speaking immigrant children attended French schools.



The parents also claimed that the citys French schools enrolled a significant number of children with Pervasive Developments Disorders and provided me with school year 2001-2002 data from a Special Needs School in a Montreal French School Board. Of the 185 students aged 4 to 13 in that French school, 56 (30.3%) carried a diagnosis of Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD).



The demographic data are illustrated in the following table.



Students in a Special Needs School in Montreal  2001-2002 Mother-language French Mother-language Creole (Haitian) Mother- language Other Total No. of Students 85 39 61 185 Students with PDD 17 18 21 56 % with PDD in Group 20 46 34 30

Table I



The above data very strongly suggest that in Montreal French schools, children of immigrants had a relatively higher prevalence of PDD than French-Canadian-born children.



To please the genetic crowd, I will concede that Haitian, Arab and Asian children are genetically different from French children. But it is also a fact that they have different vaccination patterns.



As an example, the Regional Program of Vaccination for the Province of Quebec [v] states that Hepatitis B vaccination is recommended and available free of charge to children whose families (or at least one parent) immigrated from regions where hepatitis B is highly endemic. The lists of hepatitis B-highly endemic countries that followed the above recommendation included 47 countries from the Sub-Sahara, 18 from Asia, 4 from the Middle-East, 24 from the Pacific Islands, 5 from the region of the Amazon in addition to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.



According to the Canada Communicable Disease Report of May 1, 2002, "the only thimerosal-containing vaccine in routine use in the infant immunization schedules of some Canadian jurisdictions is hepatitis B vaccine."[vi]



More recently, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported that The influenza vaccine and most hepatitis B vaccines are multi-dose vaccines, which contain thimerosal as a preservative. For immunization of infants against hepatitis B, parents or guardians in some provinces and territories have the choice of a thimerosal-free vaccine. [Updated 12/2/2010] [vii]



The Federal Canadian Immunization rules [viii] are in effect in all Canadian Provinces including the Province of Quebec. Part 3 of the Canadian Immunization Guide exclusively deals with Immunization of Persons New to Canada.



It includes the following statements:

New immigrants, refugees and internationally adopted children may be lacking immunizations and/or immunization records because of their living conditions before arriving in Canada or because the vaccines are not available in their country of origin.

Only written documentation of vaccination given at ages and intervals comparable with the Canadian schedule should be considered valid.

Therefore health care providers in Canada who see persons newly arrived in the country should make the assessment and updating of immunizations a priority.

*****



Section 341 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 imposed certain vaccination requirements on all persons seeking green cards in the United States. These requirements apply to persons seeking to adjust their status to permanent residence in the U.S. as well as to those who apply for immigrant visas to enter the U.S.

Under New Vaccination Criteria for U.S. Immigration the CDC [ix] presently lists vaccines for the following diseases as currently required: Mumps, Measles, Rubella, Polio, Tetanus and diphtheria, Pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib), Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Rotavirus, Meningococcal disease, Varicella Pneumococcal disease and Seasonal influenza.



The human papillomavirus (HPV) and zoster (Shingles) vaccines were removed from the list of required vaccines for immigrant applicants in December 2009.



After carefully reviewing the Canadian and United States vaccination practices related to immigrants, the following is very evident:

Both countries take vaccination of immigrants very seriously

Immigrants and refugees will likely have a 100% compliance with US vaccine requirements and Canadian recommendations

Improperly administered or poorly documented vaccinations WILL be repeated as needed

The following is quite evident in most Western and developed countries:

The present generation of children is the most vaccinated ever

The present generation of young parents is also the most vaccinated ever.

This is particularly relevant to this discussion of both immigrant children and children born to immigrant parents in Canada, Israel and the United States.



****



In 2008, Somali parents in Minnesota were alarmed and devastated when they started noticing disproportionally high rates of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) among their children when compared to their schoolmates in preschool programs.



As expected, those parents asked a simple question: Why was this happening?



They also hoped to get an answer.



The situation attracted a lot of attention [x] nationwide. Any mention of some relationship to vaccination among immigrants was promptly squashed with the argument that many Somali children born in Minnesota also had a high prevalence of autistic disorders.



As of July 24, 2008 the Somali tragedy in Minnesota was still a mystery [xi] and the Minnesota Department of Health was still scrambling to put together a "pre-pilot program" to assess autism in the general population. The DOH claimed that its failure to assess the situation and come up with accurate statistics about autism among immigrant children with autism was in part because of laws restricting access to school data.



The Minnesota Department of Education on the other hand had no difficulty stating that in the Minneapolis' early childhood and kindergarten programs, more than 12 percent of the students with autism reported speaking Somali at home. According to Minneapolis school officials, more than 17 percent of the children in the district's early childhood special education autism program are Somali speaking.



At the time, Somali-speaking students constituted almost 6 percent of the district's total enrollment in early childhood/kindergarten special education programs.



A special education official in the Minneapolis school district was quoted as saying I've been working to get somebody to look at this and pay attention because it feels like this is too specific [to Somalis]. It's got to be preventable. The same official also reported that she knew of an apartment building in the city were almost every Somali family has at least one autistic child and added They're given more [vaccines] then we get, and sometimes they're doubled up. Then their children are given immunizations. In Somalia, their generations have not received these immunizations, and then suddenly they're getting just a wallop of them in the moms and then in the babies. That's certainly a concern that's been expressed to me by the Somali population.



On March 31, 2009, the MN Department of Health published Minnesota and the Somali Community - Report of Study. [xii] Only one statement was highlighted in Bold character: This study did not attempt to identify possible causes or risk factors for ASD.



The following paragraph was the only mention of the Somali issue in the 2-page report:



"Administrative prevalence of Somali children, ages 3 and 4, who participated in the MPS ECSE ASD programs was significantly higher than for children of other races or ethnic backgrounds. This is consistent with what families and others observed. Because of the studys limitations, it is not proof that more Somali children have autism than other children; however, it does raise an important question of why Somali children are participating in this program more than other children.



On January 15, 2011, the Minnesota Autism Spectrum Disorder Task Force that included two state senators and two state representatives in addition to delegates from several agencies and professional organizations issued an Interim Report" [xiii] in which the Somali tragedy was discussed in the following sentence: However, a Minnesota Department of Health and CDC report showed that Somali American children enrolled in Minneapolis Public Schools had an administrative prevalence of up to seven times higher.



*****



The Israeli Paradox



For those who do not know the terribly sad story of the Jews in Ethiopia, I would like to suggest History of Ethiopian Jews, a remarkable review. [xiv]



Page 2 of the review is particularly relevant to the present discussion.



It is unlikely that vaccines or medications ever reached the poor Ethiopian Jews who had been isolated for years under atrocious conditions and were waiting to be secretly evacuated to Israel, in the dark of the night. Certainly their concerned saviors could not care less whether they were vaccinated and had completed, signed and stamped Yellow cards.



For their part, the government and social organizations looking after the refugees during their first months in Israel had plenty to do treating their diseases, improving their health and nutrition, providing them with much needed psychological support and relocating  them in general. Whether or not the refugees were up to date vaccination-wise was certainly NOT a priority: These new citizens had in all likelihood survived all the infectious diseases that Israel had vaccines for.



*****



I recently discovered a remarkable Israeli File Review Study by Kamer, Zohar et al [xv] that was published in 2003 and that I somehow had missed all these years.



For accurate reporting, the authors reviewed a national Israeli registry of 1,004 Jewish children who were diagnosed with PDD. (Arab children were not included)



They also examined relevant data available from the Israeli National Bureau of Statistics and found that those Jewish children born in the years 19831997 and living in Israel at the time belonged to four distinct groups:

Group 1: Native Israelis of non-Ethiopian extraction: 1,198,300

Group 2: Native Israelis of Ethiopian extraction: 15,600

Group 3: Immigrants of non-Ethiopian extraction: 110,300

Group 4: Children born in Ethiopia: 11,800



Data related to the prevalence of Pervasive Developmental Disorders among those groups are summarized in Table II.



PDD Prevalence among Jewish children in Israel 1983-1997 Born Abroad Israeli-born Ethiopian Other Total Ethiopian Other Total PDD 0 59 59 13 991 1,004 Total 11,800 110,300 122,100 15,600 1,098,300 1,113,900 Rate/10,000 0 5.3 4.8 8.3 9.0 9.0

Table II



There were significant differences in PDD prevalence between Israeli-born children and immigrant children. But unlike the situation in Canada and the United States, the estimated prevalence of PDD among first-generation Ethiopian children in Israel at the time was 0 (Zero) per 10,000 while among Israeli-born children who were not of Ethiopian origin, the estimated prevalence was 9 per 10,000.



Not to belabor the point, not a single immigrant child of the 11,800 born in Ethiopia and living at the time in Israel carried a diagnosis of PDD.



Native Israeli children had a higher prevalence of PDD than foreign born children. Among the children who were born in Israel, those born to non-Ethiopian parents had a higher prevalence of PDD when compared to those children who were born to Ethiopian parents.



A genetic immunity to autism among the Ethiopians is unlikely because:

1. Autism does occur in Ethiopia

2. Children of Ethiopian extraction born in Israel do develop autism



Trying to explain every aspect of the paradox is not easy.



I do propose that Jewish Ethiopian immigrants to Israel, both infants and adults, probably received no vaccinations in Ethiopia in the rural distant areas where they lived. Their immigration journey was hasty, at night and cloaked with secrecy unlike Somali refugees who stayed in pre-immigration camps for relatively long periods of time waiting to come to the United States and certainly available for catch-up measures.



The Ethiopian infants may also have been older when they started their pediatric vaccinations in Israel.



Group 3 included children of non-Ethiopian origin who came to Israel in the 1990s. These children had more PDD than Ethiopians but less that Native Israelis. A plausible explanation could be that many if not most children from that group came from post-USSR countries, where vaccination programs were limited when compared to those of Israel.

Conclusions

There has been a continuing barrage of attacks on Dr. Andrew Wakefield and on anyone who dares to say that a vaccineautism connection has not as yet been properly ruled out.



It is evident that the CDC and its supporters have not done, and will never propose to do, a vaccinated v unvaccinated study, the only way to rule out such a connection.

A thorough discussion of the subject requires attention to the childs and his or her mothers vaccination profiles.



In this review, I have shown that Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorders seem to be more prevalent among children of immigrants in some western countries.



The fact that such disorders have not been reported among Israeli children born in Ethiopia, and in all likelihood differently vaccinated, speaks for itself.



Similarly, the fact that children born in Israel to women of Ethiopian origin (who may have had different vaccination profiles) are relatively less likely to carry a diagnosis of PDD than children born to non-Ethiopian and Israeli mothers is also worth noting.



This review is as close as anyone can get to an unvaccinated v vaccinated study without undertaking such a study and a Zero PDD count among Ethiopian-born children in Israel should be convincing enough that the issue is by no means settled, as some would like us to believe.



*****

References:

i Haper J, Williams S. Infantile autism: the incidence of national groups in a New South Wales survey. Med J Aust. 1976 Mar 6;1(10):299-301.

ii Gillberg IC, Gillberg C. Autism in immigrants: a population-based study from Swedish rural and urban areas. J Intellect Disabil Res. 1996 Feb;40 ( Pt 1):24-31.

iii Maimburg RD, Vaeth M. Perinatal risk factors and infantile autism. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2006 Oct;114(4):257-64.

iv http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/06/06/autism-immigrants.html Accessed 01/14/11

v http://www.santepub- mtl.qc.ca/mdprevention/fiches/immunisation/paysendemiciteVHB.pdf Accessed 01/15/11

vi http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection/H12-21-28-9.pdf Accessed 01/19/11

vii http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/im/q_a_thimerosal-eng.php Accessed 01/19/11

viii http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/cig-gci/p03-11-eng.php Accessed 01/11/11

ix http://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/laws-regs/vaccination-immigration/revised-vaccination-immigration-faq.html#whatvaccines Accessed 01/11/11

x http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/health/01autism.html Accessed 01/16/11

xi http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2008/07/24/2687/a_mysterious_connection_autism_and_minneapolis_somali_children Accessed 01/17/11

xii http://www.health.state.mn.us/ommh/projects/autism/reportfs090331.pdf Accessed 01/17/11

xiii http://archive.leg.state.mn.us/docs/2011/mandated/110065.pdf Accessed 01/17/11

xiv http://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=791&page=1 Accessed 01/17/11

xv Kamer A, Zohar AH, Youngmann R, Diamond GW, Inbar D, Senecky Y. A prevalence estimate of pervasive developmental disorder among Immigrants to Israel and Israeli natives. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2004 Feb;39(2):141-5.





F. Edward Yazbak MD, FAAP

Falmouth, Massachusetts






Patrick: My wife and I had a son in Kindergarten in a Catholic School in Jacksonville, FL. In 2013 and 2014 respectively, two of our other children graduated from the Eighth Grade of this same school. We were also very active members of this Parish and 100% faithful to the Magisterium.

Cathy: We learn so much from other parents here, so thank you for taking time to share your story. Give us a little bit of a history as to what lead up to the filing of the lawsuit.

Only in Jacksonville for a short stay, I leaned over to my mother-in-law while we were at Mass and asked her, Where do the Flynns go to church? She smiled and said, Here. I whispered back, Well, if you see him, point Patrick out to me. We didnt see him in the church that morning, but as I crossed the street to the parking lot after Mass, there he was. I asked if we could share his story here, and he said yes.

Ever since the Bishop in Patrick Flynns diocese declared that vaccines were mandatory in order to attend diocesan schools, Flynns been fighting to get his youngest back into school. Never having a problem submitting an exemption for any of his children before, he was not willing to kowtow to the Bishops demands. Id been following the Flynns story because several of my own family members in the same diocese found themselves in the same position. As luck, or the Holy Spirit, would have it, I ran into Patrick Flynn while I was in Florida two weekends ago.

Thanks to Patrick Flynn for the title for this piece. Some of our readers may have heard about Patrick before. Polly Tommey caught up with him while the Vaxxed bus was in north Florida last month.

For each year of our childrens enrollment in the past, the school accepted the State of Florida Department of Health form DH-681 whereas we have claimed our religious exemption from the vaccination policy in compliance with Florida law (all Florida public and private schools are bound to comply with the religious exemption). None of my four youngest children are vaccinated by choice supported and based upon my faith.

Cathy: Then things changed. Things happened abruptly, too, if I remember correctly. Principals were telling families that their children were not going to be invited back for the upcoming school year. I remember telling family to switch schools! But it wasnt the principal who made the announcement; it was the Bishop.

Patrick: Following the announcement that beginning with academic year 2015-16, the Diocese of St. Augustine would no longer honor the law, and will now reject Floridas Department of Health Form DH-681, I personally and verbally appealed to the Pastor of my church and the Principal of its school to please reconsider.

Cathy: I was crushed upon hearing that the principals hands were tied. Scores of families were not being heard, including extended family members of mine. I knew someone would have to do something drastic about the Bishops decision. That someone turned out to be you!

Patrick: The men of the Church have made this disastrous and unfortunate decision based upon the declarations of the National Catholic Bioethics Center (lay people with no ecclesiastical authority) namely that a): Catholics need not worry about the presence of aborted fetal material in some of the required vaccines; b): Since the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) does not describe vaccinations as intrinsically evil, no Catholic may refuse to vaccinate on the basis of religious belief and; c): The group conscience of the parishes and Diocese trumps the individual consciences of Catholic parents concerning the health, well-being and nurturing of their children (in direct conflict with the CCC and sovereignty of conscience).

Cathy: Our readers are familiar with the ethical problems associated with vaccine ingredients, including the use of aborted fetal cell lines. One would think that that ingredient alone could allow a faithful Catholic to opt out of vaccine mandates, but I was shocked that families were still be told that they had to adhere to the vaccine schedule to send their child to the Catholic schools. Could you go to your priest for help?

Patrick: The Pastor of our parish agreed with our decision but felt he could not do anything about it because the edict is coming straight from the Bishops.

Cathy: Im so sorry. What happened next?

Patrick: I then had my attorney issue two letters (one in October, another in December) on my behalf to Diocesan leadership requesting response. No response was issued to either formal letter. I wrote two appeals (one in October, another in January) to the Bishop of the Diocese. Responses from Estevez office were just form letter reiterations of the new policy. I attempted to schedule a personal appointment with the Bishop. The appointment was first scheduled then abruptly cancelled by the bishops staff.

Cathy: How unfortunate. It sounds like you needed to make some big decisions. Is this when the lawsuit was filed?

Patrick: Yes. I filed a lawsuit against Bishop Felipe Estevez, the Bishop of the Diocese of St. Augustine (Case # 15-3923). I am not looking to get rich off the Diocese. The purpose of the lawsuit is to compel the Bishop to reverse his new policy as it is destructive, immoral and illegal. I am also seeking reimbursement of my legal fees ($40,000.00 to date). Following resolution, it is my will and desire to mend the relationships with the men of the Church, continue our lives as active Parishioners with my son receiving a Catholic education in our school.

Cathy: No childs education should be withheld like your childs has. Hes lost two full years of Catholic school already. Whats happened during that time with the case?

Patrick: We had requested a hearing before Judge Cole to seek immediate injunction pending outcome to prevent my son from losing his place in the First Grade for the 2015-2016 school year. The hearing was set combined with a motion to dismiss filed by the bishop. Judge Cole ruled against us and against Florida Law by grossly misapplying the First Amendment religious protections.

My legal team, agreeing that the judges ruling dismissing the case was in error, strongly suggested we appeal. I decided to appeal but with new representation. In the hearing, my original attorneys failed to object when Judge Cole inappropriately scrutinized my private religious beliefs. I fired the original attorneys and hired new legal counsel for the appeal process. One of my new attorneys is Alan Phillips, a vaccine rights legal expert.

Cathy: Ah, Alan Phillips! Good for you for finding him. Hes one of the good guys.

Patrick: We are appealing our case. All written briefs, answers and responses have been submitted. The 1st District Court of Appeals heard our oral arguments on October 21, 2016. The Court changed the venue from Tallahassee to Gainesville for the benefit of the University of Florida law students. There were 200 of them in attendance with standing room only in the courtroom. Video of the hearing is available on the courts website.

Cathy: So, now you wait for the ruling. Tell us what people can do to help.

Patrick: As of May 12, 2017, we are still awaiting the ruling of the three judges of the Appellate Court.

Cathy: I pray that it is in your favor.

Patrick: Thank you so much for helping me to get this word out. Even people who vaccinate are shocked to hear of this unethical, constitutional overreach and then shocked further that it is being launched against Christian families by the leaders of the Catholic Church. The right of Catholic Schools to accept whomever they want to enroll is not absolute. They cannot lawfully discriminate against members of the five protected classes (Race, Color, Religion, National Origin, Age). I am dismayed and frankly shocked that with all the issues our culture is currently facing concerning faith and morals, that the bishops would expend their time and resources to force this overreach, the expulsion of unvaccinated children from their schools and denying them a Christian education. I am appealing for ongoing assistance with legal costs. I have borrowed most of the funds to date to pay for legal fees. I have launched a GoFundMe account.

Cathy: Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Let us know if there are any developments. We can share the information here and also on our Facebook page.

--

If after you read the story you feel called to do something to help, we invite you to share the link so that others can be aware of whats happening in Floridas diocese. We also invite you to consider contributing to a fund that Patricks set up. As you can imagine, this endeavor hasnt just taken time to fight but has also cost quite a bit, too. One more thing you can do is pray. Pray that justice prevails. Its been a Goliath-like fight for Patrick Flynn and his family. Lets give him, as well as other Florida families whove been affected, our support.

Cathy Jameson is a Contributing Editor for Age of Autism.

--

Patrick provided further explanation for some of the topics and issues surrounding the case.

Notes:

Under the new policy of the Diocese, only pre-K through 8 students will be denied their right to exemption. No such policy exists for the schools faculty, staff, visitors, clergy, Religious Education students or volunteers. This is selective discrimination and in rejecting our rights to exemption based upon our personal religious practices, this discrimination is against a protected class under the Federal Civil Rights Act in its amended form.

The exemption being claimed as stated in Form DH-681 states that immunizations are in conflict with my religious tenets or practices. No further qualification or explanation concerning my (my own, personal) religious tenets or practices is required, nor is any entity entitled to further explanation.

The Diocese assertion that Catholic Teaching does not state that vaccinations are intrinsically evil as the basis for their published position is irrelevant to the law and my rights under the law. In fact it really backfires on them and their position considering compulsory vaccination (their new policy) likewise is mentioned nowhere in the Churchs teachings, doctrine or Catechism. Therefore, as a Catholic, I am not bound to comply.

Contrary to popular belief, Catholic schools in Florida are indeed recipients of both State and Federal funds and therefore have accepted to comply with state education regulations.

The exemption to compulsory vaccinations is not something citizens need to apply for in any form. The exemption is already written into the law. The issuance of Form DH-681 is merely a notice of claim to that exemption. It is unacceptable and by all accounts, illegal for any public or private school in Florida to refuse admission on the basis of immunization policy to any minor student whose parent or guardian lawfully claims this exemption.

Cathy Jameson is Contributing Editor to Age of Autism.

--








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This Mother's Day, we celebrate our love for our Mothers.



However, this coming Tuesday, 16 May 2017, the Ottawa Police in apparent association with the Bell Baker firm is seeking to pursue a Motion in the Ottawa Court to declare a son to be a Vexatious Litigator. In so doing, the Ottawa Police and the abusive husband seek to not only prevent the son of the abused Mother from pursuing court action against both the Ottawa Police and abusive husband, but ever talking about it with members of the media or even with friends and family.



Tuesday's sought sweeping Motion that violates the very integrity of free speech and our ability as citizens to challenge the corporations that seek to abuse our rights through the court system or simply by spreading social awareness, is a threat to us all.



Perhaps the only sanction that is not being sought against the desire of a son to support the well-being of his mother is public flogging and other state-sactioned torture as practiced in certain countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.



If the Bell Baker law firm gets its way this Tuesday, any corporation based upon common law precedents will be empowered to unilaterally declare  however truthful your story of unfair treatment; social injustice; discrimination; abuse or even bad customer service at a local restaurant  that you have slandered them. Such a company or organization like the local police will then be able to demand through the court system that you pay a substantial indemnity to quote Bell Baker and/or get a court to order that you can never cause your story to be published.



What you hear about the Ottawa Police in the mass media only begins to scratch the surface of the human rights abuses of a clique of officers.



And now it has become apparent that even Moms can be subjected to the apparent archons in the police who apparently get a bizarre high from feeding off negative emotions which include fear, hopelessness, pain and suffering.



Many police officers sought their career for noble reasons but there are also those police officers who are little more than apparent criminals with badges who seek to exploit their position of authority to reign terror against targeted groups without any fear of accountability. Unfortunately, many of these constables rise to the top, and then seek to cover up the unlawful activities of lower ranking officers who are a part of their clique.



Even the Ombudsman for Ontario has noted the human rights abuses the go on in the Ottawa Police Services that are always accompanied by some pitiful justification that whatever their abuse they were just doing their job.



One activity that a clique of Ottawa Police officers seems to enjoy is kidnapping homeless people and then dropping them is rural areas outside of Ottawa.



A lawless group of apparent archons within the Ottawa Police apparently like to target black people, First Nations groups, the working poor, homeless people and any other group who they view as lacking a strong voice. So, rather than helping protect Dezrin from her abuser, this same apparent group joined her abuser in concocting a lie that Raymond suffered from mental illness so they could help perpetuate the same kind of oppression that the Ottawa Police has sought to inflict against other Canadians.



It is apparent that the Ottawa Police in apparent association with the Bell Baker law firm in Ottawa that works for the abusive husband is seeking to not only prevent the abused Mother from ever seeing her son again; but also to prevent the son from also fighting litigation to enable him to reunite with his Mother.



The Bell Baker law firm in apparent collusion with the Ottawa Police Services also furthermore appears to be seeking to prevent Raymond, the son from even supporting social awareness about the plight of his Mother and any public criticism by the son might have against the activities of the abusive husband along with his law firm that has sought to spread lies in tandem with the activities of the Ottawa Police. In January 2013, the abusive husband had committed bodily assault against the son with a kitchen knife which required many months of reconstructive surgery. By getting Raymond to be declared a Vexatious Litigant, Bell Baker seeks not only to prevent Raymond and his Mother from ever seeing each other again but also from such serious matters going before the court, along with those involving Detective Robert Griffin who in plain clothes and in an unmarked car stalked Raymond for months, uttering threats and subjecting him to harassment.



On 24 March 2017, Justice Macloed encouraged John Summers who is the Bell Baker lawyer of the abused husband to ensure that Dezrin has not been held prisoner by accompanying a Rabbi to visit Dezrin to ascertain her wishes. But, John Summers' client rejected the requested independent verification.



Dezrin who has become physically disabled under conditions of abuse and neglect since 12 June 2015 when Raymond and his Mother last saw each other, remains an apparent prisoner by her husband and under the enforcement of archons in the Ottawa Police.



On this Mother's Day, thanks to the unlawful activities of the Ottawa Police and one law firm in Ottawa, for the second year, a son who has previously celebrated every Mother's Day with his Mother will be without his Mother.



However, this story is not just about the plight of a son for his Mother, but concerns how the activities of the Ottawa Police and one law firm have sought to use this shocking case now in court to threaten the fundamental rights and freedoms of all Canadians that we have taken for granted.



Dezrin Carby-Samuels is not only a retired Registered Nurse, but a person of great empathy and compassion who has volunteered for her community Raymond has said.



Raymond adds that Dezrin has been nothing short of a role model of a human being.



But, she became subject to abuse at the hands of her husband. Raymond, like any other loving and responsible son sought to protect his Mom from that abuse and help her recover from a condition that she was diagnosed to have.



In response, her husband hired Ottawa Detective Robert Griffin and his cabal operating within the Ottawa Police to perpetuate the apparent Hell on Earth at her Kanata home that Dezrin has suffered. When Raymond had looked after his Mom, she was able-bodied and looking potentially forward to recovering from her condition. But her abusive husband used the police to evict and unlawfully block the son from seeing her on property she jointly owned. The result was that Dezrin was without the protection of her son who had sought to prepare meals that would bolster her recovery.



The so-called Elder Abuse Unit of the Ottawa Police under the auspices of an apparent lawless group of archons headed by Detective Robert Griffin literally threw Dezrin into full-time abusive conditions of her husband.



Archons in the Ottawa Police not only prevented her son's access to care giving for his Mom, but also by local social serve agents that Detective Robert Griffin subjected to apparent threats when he visited them on 15 June 2015 after Raymond and his Mom last saw each other in an office space that these social service agents were able to secure after Raymond's lawyer had sent a legal demand letter to John Summers' client. The result was that within weeks from being without her son in late April 2015, Dezrin could no longer walk, write or talk.



Raymond cried for days when he last saw his Mother on 12 June 2015 and saw how neglected she was, and how the Elder Abuse Unit under Detective Robert Griffin was lying the whole time that she was doing okay and was just fine.



If you view yourself as having the right to spread social awareness on your truthful negative experiences with corporations and to sue corporations without fearing being declared a Vexatious Litigant that would suspend your constitutional rights to pursue compensation for damages in court and to be able to express yourself through mass media organizations or the social media, it may important for you to show your solidarity, and if you can, and come to the Ottawa Courthouse at 9:30 am this coming Tuesday, 16 May 2017. As you celebrate Mother's Day today, a lot may be riding on basic rights and freedoms this Tuesday that you now take for granted.
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Assyrian Australians Plead for Second Special Refugee Settlement Deal

Maryam Shamoon (far left) was refused a humanitarian visa, after initially being allowed to apply with her brother's family. Australia's Assyrian community is pleading the federal government for another special refugee intake to allow them to reunite family members left behind. "If they can just lend another hand, you know, give us another 12,000 intake, just to release that pressure from what's happening overseas," Carmen Lazar, manager of the Assyrian Resource Centre, said. The Department of Social Services has confirmed that 11,400 Iraqi and Syrian refugees have arrived in Australia has part of its one-off humanitarian intake. In 2015 the Abbott government announced 12,000 additional humanitarian visas would be granted to persecuted groups in the war-torn country. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection said on Monday those visas have been filled. "All 12,000 additional places have now been granted visas," a spokesperson said in a statement. Pleas for a second special intake Australia's Assyrian community members told SBS World News they were in a constant state of desperation, as they hoped to bring relatives from the Middle East. Aleen Shamoon, who arrived in Sydney from Jordan six months ago after fleeing Iraq in 2014, is one of those separated from a loved one. Her husband, mother and brother's family all received humanitarian visas, but her 62-year-old aunt, Maryam, who had lived with them her entire life, was refused. "We're really upset because she is an older woman, she doesn't have anyone," Ms Shamoon told SBS News in Arabic. "She practically raised my brother. She is emotionally exhausted. She is an elderly woman, where is she meant to go?" The Shamoons applied for the visa as one family, which they initially passed. But when it came to the security checks, aunt Maryam was told she had to start again and apply separately. Ms Shamoon said her aunt was eventually rejected, forced to stay in Jordan and unable to afford rent. "When I speak to her, she is distraught. She is very worried," Ms Shamoon said. "There is no solution for her. What's left for her? She can't go back to Iraq because there is no-one there for her." Ms Lazar, said the Shamoons' case was not uncommon. "This is getting worse day by day, and this is not what we want," she told SBS News. "I know that the government of the day does not want to split families, but unfortunately this is happening." Application influx continues While the special intake target of 12,000 has been reached, families are still applying for visas, including Syrian refugee Manar Zaya. "The most important thing for us is my sister in law in Lebanon," Ms Zaya told SBS News in Arabic. "She has four children; her husband was killed in Syria. She has been waiting for five months since her application was approved. No one has spoken to her." Fellow Syrian refugee Falah Atwan is facing is a similar struggle. "My son has been in Turkey for almost five years," he said. "He fled from Syria. His cousin was killed in Syria. He applied for him to come here, all the forms, and we haven't received anything." SBS News contacted Immigration Minister Peter Dutton for comment, was a spokesperson reaffirmed that the refugee special intake was a "one-off" deal.
Pro-government Assyrian Forces Arrive in Syrian Town for Offensive

The Gozarto Protection Forces (GPF) arrived in the Deir Ezzor Governorate last week to partake in the government's upcoming offensive against the Islamic State (ISIL) terror organization. Made up of Assyrian fighters from the Al-Hasakah Governorate city of Al-Qamishli, the Gozarto Protection Forces have participated in several battles against the Islamic State in the past, including the liberation of Quraytayn in 2016 and defense of Sadad in 2015. While they are not a relatively big force, the GPF do possess well-trained fighters that have been battle-tested in this type of desert terrain. In the coming days, the Syrian Armed Forces are expected to launch an imperative push to capture the provincial cemetery in order to lift the siege on the Deir Ezzor Military Airport.
The Persecuted Religious Minorities in Iraq and Syria

Christmas mass at an Assyrian Orthodox church east of Mosul, Iraq. ( Reuters/Khalid al Mousily) "I'm here on behalf of the president as a tangible sign of his commitment to defending Christians and, frankly, all who suffer for their beliefs across the wider world," Vice President Mike Pence said at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians in Washington, D.C., last week. There the vice president acknowledged something that the previous administration, after some pressure, also recognized: some of the evil of religious persecution in the world today. Former secretary of state John Kerry would ultimately use the word "genocide" to call out the ongoing threat that the so-called Islamic State posed to Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria. Pence put more of a context on why one would ever take a moment to highlight the plight of Christians. "The reality is, across the wider world, the Christian faith is under siege," Pence said. "Throughout the world, no people of faith today face greater hostility or hatred than the followers of Christ. In more than 100 countries spread to every corner of the globe -- from Iran to Eritrea, Nigeria to North Korea -- over 215 million Christians confront intimidation, imprisonment, forced conversion, abuse, assault, or worse, for holding to the truths of the Gospel. And nowhere is this onslaught against our faith more evident than in the very ancient land where Christianity was born." The very existence of Christians as a people remains a question mark, as those who had to flee their homes look to return or hope for a life somewhere else. But they get lost in heated political debates and seem to have few sober leaders who will focus long enough on men and women and families needing practical hope and help. Pence's words were important in highlighting a reality that doesn't always make the headlines. The administration in which he serves ought to take to heart some of its own words, and some of the people Pence recognized in his remarks. He said, "Let me also say how deeply humbling it is for me to stand today before the courageous men and women who are with us, who have stood without apology for their faith in Christ and suffered persecution across the wider world." And then he named, among others, Father Douglas Bazi, a Chaldean priest who has been tortured by Islamic militants and will explain to you if you give him time that U.S. policy has not always taken into consideration the lives of the Christians in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. I've found encountering him to be a gentle rebuke, even as he radiates gratitude for so many Americans wanting to help his people and for their leaders wanting to use the U.S.'s role in the world for good and human freedom and flourishing. Looking at people who suffer such persecution as he and his people have endured can't but help prompt an examination of conscience, whether you're an average citizen or an influential policymaker. Pope Francis has been one of the first and most consistent voices talking about the fact that we have more persecuted Christians living in the world today even than in the first days of Christianity. Kudos to Mike Pence for saying some words about this. As Pence delivered his remarks in the nation's capital, Pope Francis prepared to mark the centenary of the Marian apparitions in F
May 11, 2017

A number of tribes in northern Sinai have taken up arms in the battle launched by the Egyptian military against Wilayat Sinai, the Islamic State's (IS) Sinai affiliate. Their involvement followed an April 29 statement by the Tarabin tribe in which it called on the tribes in the northern Sinai governorate to unite against the extremist organization.

In its statement, the Tarabin proclaimed, Facing the terrorist and immoral invasions of the Islamic and Arab nation, targeting our people and the entity of our state and violating all human and moral standards and traditions of Islam, strife is knocking on our doors that were once safe, and deceit is stealing the lives of our youths and depriving our tribes of their financial and moral assets in [northern] Sinai.

Days later, on May 3, the Tarabin announced the killing of eight members of Wilayat Sinai in clashes in the area of Ajraa and the capture of three others, including Asaad al-Amarin, a non-Egyptian leader in the organization. Amarin had been responsible for the organization's supplies and funding and had recruited a number of people to the group.

Sameh Eid, an independent researcher focusing on Islamic movements, told Al-Monitor, It is dangerous that tribes in Sinai are carrying arms. This will have momentary gains only. In the long run, civilians bearing arms will jeopardize the states stability. Arms should only be in the hands of the army and police.

If the tribes want to face Wilayat Sinai with arms, they must join the Egyptian army rather than acting independently. If the state approves of tribes using arms, it would be legalizing killing outside the law.

Eid also stated, The international community supports Egypt in its war on terrorism, but civilians taking up arms gives the impression that crimes are being committed in Sinai. The state must reject this and allow youths in the tribes to enlist in the army.

Moussa al-Dalah, spokesperson for the Tarabin, asserted in a May 4 interview on the Masa DMC television show, Not one person from Sinai tribes has raised his weapons against the state or the army. Sinai tribes have faced injustice, but none of them used their weapons against the state.

Dalah also remarked, Eighty percent of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis militants are foreigners, and only a few hail from Sinai, and they are the worst of people. In November 2014, some members of the extremist group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis pledged allegiance to IS under the banner of Wilayat Sinai.

Discussing part of the danger posed by Wilayat Sinai, Dalah claimed, We have confessions from people planting bombs. They receive $1,000 to carry out this mission, and if a policeman is injured, the mercenary is paid more.

Hussam al-Rifai, member of parliament from northern Sinai, told Al-Monitor, The tribes in Sinai did not want to carry arms at first, but the violations of Wilayat Sinai against them  increased. So, the Tarabin tribe picked up its weapons against the group, and the other tribes followed suit.

The tribes are well aware of the danger of carrying arms and believe that the army and police are the only ones who should bear arms to face outlaws. But the savageness and spread of infidels pushed the tribes to face the terrorist group in coordination with the army.

Rifai emphasized, The tribes will not take up arms against the state because they want to restore the stability that IS shook.

Arms possession is permitted with a license in Egypt, but tribes in Sinai typically have unlicensed weapons. The army has demanded that they hand them over, but only a few tribes have complied.

On May 5, the united Sinai tribes, some 30 of them according to Rifai, called on youths who had joined Wilayat Sinai to reconsider their actions. I warn all men who are being lured by IS to be careful and run away, a statement by the tribes read. Return to your families, tribes and loved ones before it is too late. The person who hands himself in before being caught red-handed will be safe. But the deceivers have only themselves to blame. God willing, we will watch you like hawks, and only those who learn from others fate will be satisfied.

Mohammad Nour el-Din, former deputy interior minister, told Al-Monitor, Civilians are not allowed to carry arms. This is a crime that tribes should avoid if they want to cooperate with the state to defy Wilayat Sinai in a lawful manner.

The tribes in Sinai coordinated with local armed forces, but the retaliatory measures of Wilayat Sinai and the killing of tribal sheikhs and members for cooperating with the army pushed the tribes to step back from their support for the state. But due to the violent and erratic blows of Wilayat Sinai against the tribes, the Tarabin tribe announced armed confrontation against the terrorist organization.

Wilayat Sinai has conducted several operations against tribes and others in Sinai. Among them, members of the group abducted a woman from her house in April 2015, claiming that she had cooperated with the Egyptian army. In November 2016, Wilayat Sinai announced the execution of two tribal sheikhs. Media outlets revealed that one of them was Suleiman Abu Haraz, a Sufi from the Sawarka tribe. The organization published photos of Abu Haraz's execution, further angering the tribes. The group has also recently targeted Christians, leading to mass displacements as Copts flee their homes to save their lives.

Underlining the importance of forcing the tribes to hand their weapons over to the police or armed forces, Nour el-Din, agreeing with Eid, remarked, Egypt is a sovereign state, and security institutions are the only ones that should carry weapons.

The Egyptian military has not officially commented on the Tarabins call to arms and announcement of killings. If the tribes continue to challenge Wilayat Sinai, it could encourage other civilians to do likewise, and in the long run that would also make it more difficult for the state to control the situation should the battle between the tribes and Wilayat Sinai worsen.
May 15, 2017

RAMALLAH, West Bank  When Khaled Meshaal, the former head of Hamas' political bureau, announced a Hamas policy document May 1 from Doha, Qatar, this brought a critical response from Islamic Jihad.

Strong relations have always existed between Islamic Jihad and Hamas, not only because both movements are Islamist, but also because they have both embraced armed resistance against Israel as the sole option to liberate Palestine. This is in addition to their military cooperation in the Gaza Strip and joint political stances rejecting PLO political discourse based on negotiations and recognizing Israel.

Islamic Jihad criticized the policy document where Hamas agreed on the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital, considering it to be a topic of national consensus. Ziad al-Nakhla, the deputy leader of Islamic Jihad, said in a press interview May 6, We are ungratified with a part of the document.  The document evolved toward a dead end  toward the quest for solutions and medium solutions to the Palestinian cause under the umbrella of so-called international legitimacy.

Nakhla added, Hamas' agreeing on the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders is not welcome. This is against the national consensus and would reproduce the labyrinth caused by the PLO's interim program.

He criticized Hamas for including in the document that the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders is a topic of national consensus. He said, Islamic Jihad opposes this wording. Does this mean that we do not have a sense of nationalism or that we are against the consensus?

He said, The wording is unfavorable and lacks regard for the feelings of fellow armed resistance members.

Islamic Jihad leader Nafez Azzam told Al-Monitor, We hope the document does not impact bilateral relations; we hope our ties with Hamas progress.

Commenting on the reason behind the Islamic Jihad opposition, he said all previous political initiatives that were based on the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders were fruitless and disdained by Israel, and based on that, Hamas cannot take the risk and count on this document to "obtain international support.

Azzam indicated that Islamic Jihad disagrees with Hamas' saying in the document that negotiations with Israel are a variable. He added, Refusing to negotiate with Israel is a constant for us. Thus, the stance on the negotiations cannot vary depending on the circumstances.

Commenting on the Islamic Jihad stance in case Hamas joins a political process with Israel under the umbrella of regional countries, he said, Lets not rush into things; we hope that things work out to our liking, namely the promotion of ties with Hamas.

Hamas leader Yahya Moussa told Al-Monitor, The Hamas policy document is supposed to enhance [Hamas'] relations with all forces and factions, most notably Islamic Jihad  which is the closest to Hamas, as their views converge on important national issues and general guidelines.

He said, The fact that Islamic Jihad does not agree on a part or rather an item of the policy document [the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders] does not affect bilateral ties.

Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad told Al-Monitor, The document is a drafting of ideas on national issues, which Hamas had put forward in recent years. He said, The entire document needs to be read, as it embodies Hamas' political positions as part of a national unanimous agreement.

Commenting on the criticism leveled by Hamas allies, he said, The Hamas document is not the Holy Quran; thus, it can stand criticism and disagreement. Islamic Jihad and Fatah have the right to criticize it. The criticism is not shameful and does not tarnish the document [as a whole] or affect the movement's relations. The document can be altered depending on the circumstances, policies and changes in the region.

On the future of Hamas-Islamic Jihad relations in light of the new policy document, Iyad Barghouthi  a political writer who focuses on Islamist movements  told Al-Monitor, Their unified stance on the national cause, namely that Palestine is an occupied territory, is what brought the two movements close to each other. Based on that, in case Hamas joins the political process and makes particular commitments with Israel, as the PLO has done, it will clash with Islamic Jihad. Yet if the policy document is not translated into actions on the ground, bilateral ties will remain unchanged.

Many, including Fatah, saw the Hamas policy document as being close to the PLO's 1988 political declaration, which formally announced the PLO's acceptance of establishing a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Barghouthi said, The Hamas policy document points to the movements political pragmatism. It raises fear within Islamic Jihad that Hamas would join the political process with Israel just as the PLO has done.

Nevertheless, Moussa denied that the document would pave the way for Hamas to join the political process like the PLO. He said, There is a difference between the PLO document and the Hamas policy document. Hamas confirmed in the document that Palestine is for the Palestinian people and that not an inch of it will be ceded. Yet the consensus prevails over the Palestinian arena on the establishment of a state within the 1967 borders. Hamas will not be an obstacle to this solution.

Although Hamas and Islamic Jihad emphasized their strong bilateral ties and said they will not be affected by the document, these relations depend on Hamas' inclination to enforce the content of the document via a political process with Israel under the sponsorship of regional countries such as Qatar and Turkey. Differences may grow bigger unless the document only serves as a declaration of a political stance that allows Hamas to open up to the world.
May 15, 2017

The nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers ended a decadeslong crisis that removed sanctions on nearly 80 million Iranians and potentially averted another military confrontation in the Middle East involving the United States. The talks to reach agreement on a deal required bilateral negotiations between Iran and the United States, at the foreign ministerial level, breaking a three-decade taboo on direct negotiations between the two countries.

While it was clear that US President Barack Obama had sought an opening with Iran  he shook hands with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif behind closed doors in New York  Irans leadership, in particular the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, never trusted the opposing side enough to allow discussions to go beyond the nuclear file.

Today, with the United States continuing to maintain non-nuclear sanctions against Iran, thus hindering foreign investment in the country, President Hassan Rouhani is making a pitch, to the public and to Khamenei, to pursue additional talks with Washington to resolve outstanding issues.

With a wall of sanctions, they created distance between half of the world and the world, Rouhani said at a May 14 campaign rally in the historic city of Esfahan, once the capital of the Safavid Empire and in a proverb referred to as half of the world. Rouhani added that tourism in 2013, before the deal lifted some sanctions, was less than that recorded in April this year.

Referring to the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, by its Persian acronym, BARJAM, Rouhani said, We established a bridge between Iran and the world with BARJAM. If the Iranian people allow it, if the supreme leader supports and guides it, with Dr. Zarif the rest of the sanctions can be removed.

Rouhani's statement was not a fluke. During the third and final presidential debate on May 12, Rouhani made similar comments on being prepared in his second term to remove the remaining sanctions against Iran. For someone who served as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council for 16 years, Rouhani was well aware of what he was saying: Any negotiations concerning the broad list of US sanctions on Iran, whether in regard to Iran's missiles program or human rights, will need Khamenei's permission to proceed.

During the nuclear negotiations, Khamenei was clear in requiring that the talks be confined to the nuclear file. In April 2015, however, Khamenei said that if the nuclear negotiations were positive, and the United States puts aside its typical ambiguities  we will be able to negotiate with them on other issues.

It is a smart campaign strategy for Rouhani to dangle further talks with the United States with the aim of lifting more sanctions in front of the Iranian public. A large number of voters likely support such an effort. In addition, Rouhani has clearly put the burden of moving to eliminate the sanctions on the supreme leader's shoulders rather than on his own. While the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions has alleviated pressure on Irans struggling economy, many European firms remain fearful of investing in Iran due to the remaining US sanctions, some of which threaten to punish third parties that violate them.

This would not be the first time that a discussion of a grand bargain between the United States and Iran has been broached. In the early 2000s, during George W. Bushs presidency, Zarif, as Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, and the highest-ranking Iranian official in the United States given the absence of an embassy there, was reportedly involved in behind-the-scenes exchanges that sought to resolve a number of issues with Washington.
May 15, 2017

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  Israels Reshet Bet radio station announced April 29 that Israel has laid out a plan  the first of its kind  to establish a railway from Israel to the Gaza Strip through the Erez border crossing to facilitate the entry of goods to Gaza and the movement of people into and out of the Strip.

In an article in Yedioth Ahronoth, writer Matan Tzuri quoted Kamil Abu Rukun, the head of the Land Crossings Authority at the Israeli Defense Ministry, as saying that the plan will expand the Erez crossing and that the station would be built in agricultural fields near the Erez settlement.

During his meeting with the heads of settlement blocs in the Gaza envelope, Abu Rukun said that the main driver behind the plan was the widening humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and its increasing impact on vital sectors, as well as the potential impact of such crises on Israel's security.

In its report, Tzuri also cited Alon Shuster, the head of the Sha'ar Hanegev settlement bloc, as saying that the plan will have international political and financial support.

The Erez crossing is dedicated to Palestinian merchants, foreign delegations and missions, and Palestinian medical patients. To cross it requires permits from the Israeli authorities in coordination with the Palestinian Authoritys (PA) General Authority of Civil Affairs.

Mohammed al-Maqadmeh, the director of information at the PA's General Authority of Civil Affairs, which monitors the implementation of agreements with Israel, told Al-Monitor that the Erez crossing is dedicated to businessmen and merchants who have common interests with the Israelis.

Who will construct the railway, where the workforce would come from and how long the project would take are all still to be revealed. Israel has said only that the project will be implemented soon, according to Yedioth Ahronoth.

Asked about Israel's railway plan, Maqadmeh said that any step taken to facilitate the passage of people and the transport of goods will certainly be in our own interest. However, he said, this project has a political dimension and isn't merely a procedural step. We do not trust unilateral steps because they serve the Israeli agenda and Israeli interests, he added, noting that there is no set protocol governing the crossing at present and that they have not yet been informed of any specific plans.

Maher Tabbaa, the director of public relations and media at the Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry, called Israel's announcement of a plan to establish a railway to Gaza a media stunt.

Tabbaa told Al-Monitor, We have heard many Israeli statements regarding the Gaza Strip, including Israels announcement last year of its intention to receive Palestinian workers from Gaza to work in Israel and restore the labor activities between Gaza and Israel. But this has yet to occur. He expects the announcement of the railway plan is part of an Israeli attempt to look humane before international institutions and Western society and lead the world to think that it is taking steps to ease the siege on the Gaza Strip.

Tabbaa stressed that Palestinian traders and businessmen are very rarely granted such travel permits. According to the General Authority of Civil Affairs, 1,830 Palestinians traveled through the Erez crossing during the first week of May. The authority counted 152 foreigners who left the Gaza Strip through the crossing, while 129 foreigners arrived, and the Israeli authorities approved a single permit for a trader from Gaza.

Maamoun Abu Amer, a media commentator on Israeli affairs, believes that the plan to build a railway with Gaza is part of Israeli efforts to separate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.

He said the move is a sign that the Israelis have laid out a plan to increase Gaza's dependency on Israel. Abu Amer said, This step will likely be followed by an agreement to bring in Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip to work inside Israel.

It is noteworthy that Israel does not forbid, in principle, the entry of Palestinian workers from Gaza to work in the agricultural fields of the Gaza envelope as long as calm prevails with the Gaza Strip. But the Israeli security apparatus objects to such entries for security reasons.

Abu Amer said that Israel is interested in preserving calm in Gaza, citing as evidence that it rejected a formal request from the PA to stop deducting the cost of electricity consumption in Gaza, worth $11 million, from the Palestinian taxes.

He said that Israel is currently working to preserve calm in Gaza and added that the state comptroller's report issued Feb. 28 on the Israeli war on Gaza in 2014 had criticized the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not trying to prevent it. Abu Amer added that the report has left the Israeli government leery of being blamed for a new conflict and eager to maintain stability and economic cooperation with the Gaza Strip.

For nearly 10 years, Israel has kept all of the commercial crossings with Gaza virtually closed, leaving only the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south open for the entry of commercial goods. Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian patients are forced to go to hospitals in Jerusalem, the West Bank or Israel via Erez.

Several international and UN institutions, such as the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, have warned of a humanitarian and health disaster looming in Gaza due to the continued closure of the crossings and the ongoing Israeli blockade.
May 15, 2017

Tension continues to rise with only one week to go before US President Donald Trump's visit to Israel May 22. The Israeli right had originally hoped to turn his visit into a modern-day version of the coming of the Messiah, but the real world refused to cooperate. The blasts of the shofar announcing the Messiahs arrival have been replaced by a bitter political skirmish with the potential to turn into a real political struggle as soon as Trump leaves, tearing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition, and maybe even his party, to shreds. It might all happen even before the Trump administration defines its basic principles on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or puts together a comprehensive peace plan.

The opening salvo was fired right here, in a May 8 Al-Monitor interview with HaBayit HaYehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett. In it, he complained about Israel, i.e., Netanyahu, having made no effort to influence its future or for that matter the incoming president. Instead of filling the vacuum that has emerged between the two administrations, the Israeli government has lowered its head, waiting to find out what lies in store for it. Days later, on May 13 in a press briefing by US national security adviser H.R. McMaster, it was revealed that Trump is considering recognizing the Palestinians' right to self-determination during his visit to the region.

Although Israel has long recognized this right, that has not helped to lower the flames on the right. To the contrary, Bennett actually turned them up, asserting, We cannot continue to run a bunker policy, or Israels fate will be decided by others.

Once again, Bennett rose to explicitly criticize Netanyahu, who continues to maintain radio silence on every step Washington takes. Netanyahu is walking on tiptoe, quietly freezing West Bank settlement construction and restraining himself from pressuring Trump until these days of rage are over or at least until the presidential visits end peaceably.

This game of ping-pong was ratcheted up a notch on May 14, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that Trump is carefully considering his election promise to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem. According to Tillerson, his deliberations will take into account the two parties' positions, with particular emphasis on the Israeli position, as well as on the question of how the move might affect the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

It is not as if anyone in Jerusalem is actually waiting for the embassy to be moved, as much as they might want that to happen. Yet Tillerson's remarks provoked an expected reaction by Bennett, in which he called on Netanyahu to make it clear that we expect the US administration to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem and recognize a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.

In the past, Netanyahu would have responded harshly to such a provocation and issued a brusque statement condemning Bennett. This time, however, he rose to the challenge. Just moments after Bennett issued his statement, the prime minister's office released a statement of its own, calling on the secretary of state to support moving the embassy: Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem will not only not harm the peace process, it will advance it by correcting a historical wrong and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel.

Netanyahu himself does not believe this  but on the other hand, he is fed up with losing prestige among the right and bleeding voters to Bennett. In other words, the prime minister is stuck between a rock and a hard place, between Israel's right-wing electorate and Trump.

Bennett learned something from Netanyahu in the last 2015 elections when the prime minister gobbled up a significant part of Bennett's electorate in the final days leading up to the vote. Now Bennett is the one eating away at him on the right, drawing clear lines to distinguish himself from Netanyahu by putting indirect pressure on Trump.

In any other circumstance, Netanyahu would back away from the pied piper that is Bennett. The problem is that he is facing Trump, the orange-haired man that no one in the world wants to upset. This includes Netanyahu, who doesnt want to end up like former FBI Director James Comey.

This sense of awe, not to mention abject fear of Trump, has left Netanyahu paralyzed. He is like a deer in the headlights, utterly unable to move. Bennett's announcement was the electric shock that jolted Netanyahu into action and forced him to release his statement on moving the embassy to Jerusalem benefiting peace.

The drama is also playing out behind the curtains. Tillerson's remarks implied that the Americans were expecting help from Netanyahu. In recent conversations between the concerned parties, the possibility was raised that Israel would either hint at or quietly acquiesce to reports that there are serious security consequences to moving the embassy. Doing so would allow Trump to climb down off his high horse. While Netanyahu did not explicitly confirm that he would agree to such a gesture, he did give it consideration.

The idea was shelved, however, on May 14. Netanyahu's breaking point had been reached: He prefers the calculated disappointment of the US administration over the continued cannibalization of his right-wing voter base by Bennett. How will the Americans respond? It looks like we'll find out in the coming days.

As of now, no one in Jerusalem  or anywhere else, for that matter  knows how determined Trump is to broker the ultimate deal between Israel and the Palestinians. As far as Netanyahu is concerned, the deal will be nothing short of a nightmare, and he has to wake up from it somehow. So far, however, that hasn't happened. While he doesn't (yet) miss former President Barack Obama, at least openly, that unfamiliar feeling is starting to stir in the dark. If Trump presents Netanyahu with a cruel choice, the biggest problem that the prime minister will face will be from within his own party.

According to a senior political source who spoke on condition of anonymity, these problems  coupled with criminal investigations against Netanyahu that never seem to ease up  led him to state repeatedly to his associates on May 14, The current government will finish up its term in October 2019. This translates as, Dont start eulogizing me prematurely. I'm not going anywhere. Anyone who tries to take advantage of this weakness to show off their nationalist and right-wing fortitude will be dealt with severely.

A week before the leader of the free world pays a visit, Netanyahu is trying to buttress his leadership in Israel. The question is to what extent Likud members buy into it. In other words, what will scare them more: the rage of a scarred and weakened Netanyahu, or the rage of Likud voters solidly seated on the far right and unwilling to hear about a two-state solution or the establishment of a Palestinian state? The sense is that sometime in the near future, all the players in the Middle East will have to decide.
May 12, 2017

Following the May 3 meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and US President Donald Trump, the Palestinian leadership expects US shuttle diplomacy to be launched in June on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Abbas received the red carpet treatment in Washington, and Trump showed public warmth toward him and even praised him for the Oslo Accord. More so, Abbas was encouraged by the content of his meeting in the Oval Office.

Still, a senior PLO official close to Abbas told Al-Monitor that despite the positive impressions of his meeting with Trump, Abbas came back to Ramallah with more questions than answers. Abbas entourage believes that their strategy to embrace Trump and take him at his word on the ultimate deal will actually bear fruit. The analysis in Ramallah is that the Trump administration has decided to explore the possibility of starting a peace process in the months to come. They estimate that during his May 20 visit to the region, Trump will balance his pro-Israel attitude with a rapprochement to some of the Arab positions. What remains open is his real intent beyond launching a peace process, and if he himself will engage in negotiations.

The Palestinians know that Trump works closely with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, international negotiations envoy Jason Greenblatt, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. As to the May 20 trip, Abbas is encouraged by the fact that Trumps first visit as president is to Saudi Arabia, and that in this first visit abroad the president also plans to visit the Palestinian Authority. This seems especially encouraging with a president who was considered  upon taking office  as holding views close to those of the Israeli pro-settlement Habayit HaYehudi party and as being Islamophobic in his values.

Based on Abbas Washington meetings, Ramallah believes that the aims of Trumps regional visit are multiple. The US president wants to appear to be a man of peace. Visiting Riyadh, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Vatican is designed to reflect an image of global peacemaker in the face of radical fundamentalist Islam. Ramallah also believes that Trump wants to fortify the anti-Islamic State coalition with the pragmatic Arab states, primarily Egypt and Jordan. He wants to signal strong opposition to Iran in relation to its regional ambitions, arms development and sponsorship of terror. Following that line, Trump wants to signal to the American Jewish community his resolute commitment to Israels security. The Palestinians assume that Trump will leave the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, but may offer recognition of West Jerusalem as Israels capital. In addition, Ramallah estimates that Trump intends to accept the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 as one of the bases for a regional initiative on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

According to the PLO official, it was Abbas who raised the 2002 Arab initiative in the Oval Office, and he received no negative reactions, neither from the president nor from his advisers. The official is confident that Trump now understands that there is no alternative to a two-state solution. He said that Trump also shared with his Palestinian guests that he will continue to resist settlement expansion.

A senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official aware of the preparations for Trumps visit told Al-Monitor that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is confident that he can convince Trump to stay away from any new peace process initiative based on the Arab initiative. The official believes that Trumps visit to Israel is in keeping with his campaign promise to be Israels best ally and to make a statement on the recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital. On the issues related to the peace process, the official sounded condescending, sayung, Netanyahu is at his best when it comes to negotiating with the US terms for a peace conference framework. Just as he convinced Trumps predecessors, we have no doubt that he will convince the Trump administration that vis-a-vis a pragmatic Netanyahu, there is no Palestinian partner. Trump will understand that at the end of the day, the Palestinians will say no again.

The senior PLO official is convinced of Abbas awareness that there will be no two-state solution as long as Netanyahu is prime minister. The Palestinian diplomatic aim is to convince the United States and the international community that there is a link between the fight against the Islamic State and the Palestinian issue, and therefore, the Arab Peace Initiative must be internationally recognized. As for the near future, the official said that depending on Trumps actions after the visit, we will see if the next Palestinian steps are in the realm of diplomacy or of resistance to the 50-year-old occupation.

On the Palestinian side, the best-case scenario expected by the PLO official is that of US shuttle diplomacy being launched shortly after the visit, headed either by Greenblatt or by a more senior member of the administration.
May 15, 2017

Palestinian Authority (PA) head Mahmoud Abbas met with US President Donald Trump in the White House for the first time on May 3. Shortly after, Abbas announced during his meeting with Arab ambassadors in Washington on May 4 his decision to take unprecedented and painful steps against Hamas, which Washington considers a terrorist organization.

Abbas said during his meeting with the Arab ambassadors, I will take unprecedented steps against Hamas since it halted the [Fatah-Hamas] reconciliation. The measures will be painful if the movement does not take back its actions, in reference to Hamas refusal to hand over the Gaza Strip to the consensus government.

The White House wrote in a statement issued after the meeting between Abbas and Trump: President Trump emphasized the importance of making a clear commitment to preventing inflammatory rhetoric and to stopping incitement, and to continue strengthening efforts to combat terrorism.

The Palestinians have many questions about the measures that Abbas will take against Hamas, and they are wondering why his threats coincided with his visit to Washington.

Although Abbas did not reveal the measures he would take against Hamas, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said in an interview with Army Radio on the evening of May 4, Abbas is serious about halting power and water funding in the Gaza Strip, and he has every intention to stop paying the salaries of Palestinian Authority employees in Gaza.

The PA pays Israel around 70 million shekels per month ($19.4 million) to supply Gaza with Israeli power, which provides 30% of the power in the Gaza Strip. Several media outlets, including Israeli Channel 10, revealed April 27 that the PA asked Israel to stop supplying power to the Gaza Strip through Israeli lines.

Hamas official spokesman Hazem Qassem condemned Abbas threats to the movement and told Al-Monitor, Abbas made these threats when he was in Washington, which proves that they were the result of American demands.

He added, Abbas is trying to get Trumps approval by punishing Hamas. Since Abbas received an invitation from the White House to visit  Abbas threatened to take punitive measures against Gaza to prove that he is the legitimate and sovereign leader of the Palestinian territories.

On April 4, the consensus government made the sudden decision to slash PA employees salaries in Gaza by 30%. Observers considered this an attempt to ruin Gazas economy.

Israeli writer Zvi Barel, who is an expert on Palestinian affairs, wrote in an article published in Haaretz newspaper on April 29 that Hamas rule in Gaza and its refusal to empower the consensus government to control the city do not justify the PAs measures against Gaza. Barel believes that Abbas measures served as dowry for Trump, who has made the war on terrorism one of his key foreign policy principles.

Barel said, If Abbas wants to punish Hamas as part of a political process rather than a domestic step, this will help him convince Trump that he is fighting terrorism and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is deluding Trump and the world when he claims that there is no Palestinian partner to negotiate with on peace. Abbas steps can also serve as a suitable response to Israeli allegations that Abbas does not represent Gaza and, therefore, cannot be a negotiating party.

Qassem noted, Clearly, the United States, Israel and Abbas want to remove Hamas from the political scene to give the negotiations the needed public and international momentum. But this will fail now, just like it always has.

Abbas claimed that his threats were prompted by Hamas objection to the reconciliation, but Qassem refused this justification. He said, Abbas is effectively impeding the reconciliation because he does not want to solve the Gaza employee crisis or activate the Temporary Leadership Framework of the PLO as per the reconciliation agreement signed in 2014. For this reason, I do not think the reconciliation deadlock prompted these threats. Abbas is trying to please Trump and push for resumption of settlement negotiations, which we refuse.

Qassem added, Hamas will not make any concessions under such pressure from Abbas. It will form a popular national front to reject the siege that Abbas is threatening to impose and will take regional steps to mobilize political and financial support for the Gaza Strip. The term "siege of the Palestinian Authority" is a metaphor used by Hamas to describe Abbas' threats.

Political analyst and former editor-in-chief of Felesteen newspaper Mustafa al-Sawaf told Al-Monitor, Abbas threats to Hamas are love letters to Trump. Abbas wants to be included in the US-Israeli alliance to eliminate Hamas and put Gaza at the mercy of his [Abbas] settlement project.

Sawaf expects these unprecedented measures to have life-changing effects, which means that Abbas will take measures that affect the lives of people, like cutting power and water supplies, halting treatment abroad and banning welfare payments in Gaza in order to push people to reject Hamas.

He added, Abbas also wants to prove to Trump that he alone represents Palestinians and is the sole ruler and decision-maker in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, knowing that Abbas legitimacy as Palestinian president has been over since 2010.

Talal Okal, a professor of political sciences at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, agrees that Abbas threats aim at regaining legitimacy over Gaza and ending Hamas rule there to prove that he has the final say in any new negotiations.

Okal told Al-Monitor, Hamas rule over Gaza makes Abbas look weak in front of Trump. This explains Abbas inclination to take unprecedented measures against Hamas.

Okal strongly ruled out a remarkable role for Trump in the history of negotiations with Israel. He probably cant force Israel to implement international resolutions that are in the Palestinians interest, like UN Security Council Resolution 242, which states that Israel must retreat from the Palestinian territories they occupied in 1967.

He added, My expectations are low for any new negotiations between Israel and Palestinians under Trumps auspices.

It seems that Abbas threats to punish Hamas will not benefit him much, as Hamas is still facing the Israeli blockade. He cant even prove himself as the sole representative of the Palestinian people because Gaza is still under the rule of Hamas, which won the most parliamentary seats in the 2006 legislative elections.
May 15, 2017

A small statue in Zico House, a multi-use art space in Beirut, shows a female figure on a chair whose body is convulsed in its desire to scream out her pain. It depicts Leila, one of the Syrian women whose stories have inspired a marriage of forms and words in a storytelling event organized by the Syrian Female Journalists Network (SFJN) in Beirut on May 10.

The small clay statues belong to Syrian artist Oula Haidar, whose female figures reflect the stories of Syrian women that are collected in a book titled Out of the Shadows. The focal point of the event at Zico House is to give Syrian women a voice in narrating their lives and struggles, and to create awareness of sexual violence.

The book is based on the interviews with many women in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan as part of the Female Storytellers Project. SFJN  a nonprofit organization established four years ago that works with more than 70 journalists based in different countries  aims to build bridges between the media and Syrian women to enhance and empower both men and women working in the field of media.

We wanted to change the image of women and challenge the way gender and equality issues are addressed in the media, Milia Eidmouni, a Syrian journalist who is the co-founder and regional director of SFJN, told Al-Monitor. We only see women as victims  poor and uneducated. The coverage of success stories is rare. Our main goal is to link Syrian journalists with women who could speak to them, give them advice and train them on gender perception while covering the news.

The Female Storytellers Project started in 2015, after SFJN volunteers spoke with women who they met through acquaintances or during conferences, and whose stories struck them.

While working with a relief agency in Lebanon and while helping the SFJN, I met a lot of women who wanted to share their story, Oula Haidar, a Syrian sculptress and graphic designer now living in Scotland, told Al-Monitor. I suggested to the rest of the team to write an article about successful stories by women for International Womens Day, but each of them gave so many details that we simply could not edit it out. We then decided to highlight every story through the publication of a handbook in Arabic and translated into English.

Then the team members added the idea of sculptures to bring a face to the words and a voice to read out the stories. They planned to display the statues and launch the book first in Lebanon, then in Europe.

During the exhibition, people could hear a voice narrating the lives of the women who have been raped, jailed, kidnapped, forced to abandon their families or tortured. Equally forceful statues describe the situations the women have been in.

I read these stories many times and tried to put myself in the shoes of the women to recognize what was important in every story and better represent their feelings, Haidar said. I have placed Reem  who still feels the icy coldness of the prison running through her body  sitting next to a wall. Leila, for example, still hears a scream inside her, so I represented a woman on a chair, trying to scream out her pain.

A line in the book reads, [Leila] still believes that her plight is the same as all the women who live at the mercy of a patriarchal mentality, whether it is legal or social. That mindset is what prevented her from moving on from the damage that had defined her life for so many years, just because she was born a female.

For the artist, the art of storytelling allows these women to be heard. If they speak, they will not feel bad about themselves. Moreover, it will be a record of what happened to women during the uprising against [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad, particularly those who ended up in jail," Haidar said. In the end, the stories are all about women fighting against patriarchal rules.

Eidmouni said, Until now, talking about sexual-based violence is totally taboo in Syria. We hope this project can give women the push to speak up, to seek out support and feel that they are not alone. Maybe it will also reach Syrian policymakers  for them to decide to open shelters for women for example.

Another aspect to recounting Syrian female lives is the impact it could have on the residents of Western host countries.

It could be useful for the refugees image in the media, especially in Europe, Haidar said. People have a very limited view of what is a Syrian woman, in a scarf and staying at home to take care of the kids. At least thats what I see in Scotland. They dont even believe Im Syrian because I dont fit their idea of it. But instead, they could see that women do things  in Syria and elsewhere.

The same idea drove Rachel Clarke, a German storyteller and creative director of the Storytelling Arena in Berlin, to seek out Syrian women to participate in her monthly storytelling event.

In August 2015, a lot of Syrian refugees arrived in Germany and I volunteered as a German teacher. As my students began sharing their stories with me, I invited some of them to tell their story during my storytelling events, Clarke told Al-Monitor. These events were successful, so I reached out  through my network  to women who consented to share their story on stage.

This work led to an event in October 2016, this time with only women. I met with Rana, a painter who told her story of wanting to be a painter as a child. She would hide her paints and brushes from her mother. Her husband encouraged her to get a fine arts degree and continue painting. When she started telling her story on stage, people forgot about her hijab and identified with her story, which also gave us an insight that [we are] able to break through stereotypes we can have about Arab men dominating womens lives.

Firsthand accounts, delivered on stage or retold by SFJN, may be a way to reach out, speak up and break the stereotypes brought by the Syrian war.
May 15, 2017

The Donald Trump administration on May 15 accused Bashar al-Assad's regime of building a crematorium at the Saydnaya prison complex outside Damascus in an effort to destroy evidence of mass murder. In pointed comments just days after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with the president at the White House, US officials said Moscow and Tehran must rein him in before the United States can support their diplomatic efforts in Syria.

The Assad regime has sunk to a new level of depravity, and it has done so with seemingly unconditional support from Russia and Iran, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told journalists at his White House press briefing.

In a shift, the Trump White House suggested it was willing to work not only with Russia but also with Iran to try to end the killing in Syria and advance a political transition if they helped bring an end to Assads atrocities. Trump has previously lambasted the nuclear deal with Iran and supported calls for additional sanctions over the country's ballistic missile program.

The United States remains open to working together with both Russia and Iran to find a solution that leads to a stable and united Syria, Spicer said. But in order for us to work together to bring an end to the violence in Syria, Russia and Iran need to acknowledge the atrocities of the Assad regime and use their influence to stop them.

The comments followed a uniquely horrifying briefing by the State Departments top Middle East diplomat, who laid out a devastating list of alleged regime atrocities over the past six years of the Syrian civil war. Most shockingly, acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones said the United States believes that the Assad regime has built a crematorium to burn the bodies and destroy the evidence of the mass murder of thousands of detainees at the regimes Saydnaya military prison 45 minutes outside of Damascus. Jones said the Syrian regime is believed to have detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people since the war began in 2011 and until 2015.

The regime is responsible for killing as many as 50 detainees per day at Saydnaya, Jones told journalists at a State Department press briefing May 15. Credible sources have believed that many of the bodies have been disposed of in mass graves.

We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Saydnaya prison complex that could dispose of detainees remains with little evidence, Jones said. Although the regimes many atrocities are well documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison.

Jones, who had to pause several times during the briefing, said Russia had to use its influence over the Assad regime to halt the atrocities and attacks on civilians that have killed the vast majority of the more than 400,000 people estimated to have been killed in six years of war.

We are appalled by the atrocities carried out by the Assad regime, he said. And these atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support of Russia and Iran.

The regime must stop all attacks on civilians and opposition forces, Jones said. And Russia must bear responsibility to ensure regime compliance.

The State Department distributed satellite photos of the Saydnaya military prison complex and suspected crematorium building during the briefing. They offered a stark contrast with the photos of a smiling Trump and Lavrov meeting at the Oval Office last week that were distributed by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Trump told the press pool after his May 10 meeting with Russian diplomats that hed had a "very, very good meeting" with Lavrov. Both sides, he said at the time, want to end the the horrible, horrible killing in Syria as soon as possible, and everybody is working toward that end.

The unusually direct and graphic State Department case laying out the horrors committed by the Syrian regime was intended to bolster Washingtons appeal to the Assad regimes chief foreign sponsors to use their influence to rein him in, officials and experts said.

We want Russia to guarantee that the Assad regime will comply with its obligations  and do everything they can to cease the hostilities against civilians, a State Department official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. Once again, we provide this as [an] indication that the Russian government is not abiding by its responsibilities  and is enabling and complicit in the Syrian regimes crimes against the Syrian people."

The Trump administration is trying to use the Russian governments desire to work with it on Syria to try to ramp up pressure on Russia to use its leverage on Assad to advance a Syria political solution, said Aaron Stein, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council.

I think this is a part of a broader effort to put pressure on Russia to try to put meaningful pressure on the regime to make concessions, Stein told Al-Monitor. Whether or not it will work, I have no idea.

The Trump administration has considerably hardened its stance against Assad since the chemical weapons attack in Idlib province on April 4, Stein said.

We have seen Trump speak in multiple interviews about the imagery of children being killed with chemical weapons being very powerful on him, Stein said.

I think the question is what about sequencing, Stein said. Can [Assad] go at the end of negotiations, or does he have to go as a precursor to negotiations.  I still think the [United States] would be flexible on this issue.

The question, he added, is whether or not Russia will deliver the regime.

The White House said May 15 that it is unimaginable Syrians will choose to keep Assad. UN-mediated political transition talks in Geneva could eventually lead to new Syrian elections.

The Trump administration believes that Syrias political future should be decided by Syrians in a free, credible and transparent process, the White Houses Spicer said May 15. However, we also believe that in a free process, it is unimaginable that Syrians will choose to continue under Assads leadership.

Syria will never be stable and secure as long as Assad is in power, Spicer said.

UN-mediated talks between the Syria regime and opposition are due to resume in Geneva on May 16.

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, speaking to reporters in Geneva on May 15, said he was glad to see the new US administration get more involved in Syrian peace efforts.

I am encouraged by the increasing engagement, increasing interest by the US administration in finding a de-escalation, a reduction of violence, de Mistura said.
May 15, 2017

Exposing torture and helping victims seek justice has been a major field of activity for Turkeys Human Rights Association (IHD) over the past three decades. The group has filed countless lawsuits, particularly against police officers in the countrys mainly Kurdish southeast. But one application the IHD received in late April was nothing like what it was accustomed to. The alleged victims of torture were police officers themselves. Families and lawyers reached out to the IHD through email and social media to convey the allegations.

On April 26, Turkey witnessed the largest single purge in the police since the failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016, which the government blames on US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen and his followers, who have been entrenched mostly in the police and the judiciary. Some 9,000 police officers were suspended from office, while more than a thousand people, including police, teachers and other public servants, were detained. The torture allegations relayed to the IHD pertained to this latest wave of the crackdown.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, IHD co-chair Ozturk Turkdogan detailed the claims of one of the police officers, which in fact reveal how an entire group of detainees had been allegedly maltreated. The claims figure also in the detainees interrogation report, meaning that the authorities are aware of the allegations. The police officer, who has requested anonymity, said that groups of 15 detainees were kept in 6-square-meter (64-square-feet) rooms in the polices financial crimes unit rather than in the anti-terror department. Late at night, when most of the staff was gone, policemen would come and take the detainees one by one to a special room for interrogation, stripping them naked, hooding them with plastic bags and threatening sexual assault with bottles, according to the account. Two detainees who got sick kept vomiting for days, but were denied medical treatment, the officer claimed.

Commenting on the allegations, Turkdogan said, Turkey had made significant progress in efforts to stamp out torture. As part of those efforts, anti-terror departments  where torture was rife  were equipped with cameras. Those people were taken to the financial crimes department because there were no cameras there. He explained that the said group remained in police custody for a whole two weeks after the government extended detention periods via legislative decrees, made possible by the state of emergency declared after the coup attempt. This is a long period that allows for the effacing of torture traces, he said.

Allegations of torture have become widespread in Turkey amid the massive crackdown that followed the coup attempt. Only a few days after the putsch, the countrys official news agency disseminated images of detained soldiers with scarred and bruised faces. Government sources claimed the injuries were the result of scuffles during the coup attempt, but allegations of torture continued, both from police stations and prisons. Yet, in most cases, following up on those allegations with a view of taking legal action has been impossible since victims are reluctant to be identified and elaborate on what they endured.

According to Turkdogan, a large number of police officers and soldiers, arrested as part of the crackdown on Gulen followers, have been victims of torture. He offered the following explanation on why they shy away from speaking out: Those people have become victims for the first time. They come from a section of the state that used force on behalf of the state. Many of them were the torturers in the previous cases. This, of course, does not justify the use of torture against them. The second reason is cultural. They belong to a conservative culture and have had religious education. They are reluctant to speak out because they believe that [their accounts of] torture will make them look degraded, humiliated and alienated in the eyes of society.

For Turkdogan, the claims of police officers torturing colleagues reflect not only the worsening state of human rights in Turkey, but also the decay in the state apparatus. The notion of police officers torturing each other after working side by side for years is terrible, he said. This shows how degenerated the state system in Turkey has become.

According to the Justice Ministrys latest data, 148,000 people have been detained since the coup attempt, and 48,000 sit behind bars pending trial. Judging by those figures, Turkdogan sees another big trauma in the making in an already distressed society. Assuming that at least half of the 148,000 detainees were subjected to torture and maltreatment, and taking into account their families as well, the trauma on the [Gulen] community will be very big. Turkey will have to deal with this trauma as well, Turkdogan said.

Despite the incessant nature of the torture allegations since the putsch, the Justice Ministry, prosecutors, the parliaments Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights and Equality Institution remain mum on the issue. The silence of the bar associations is particularly chilling. What lies behind this silence is a widespread concern that defending the rights of the Gulen community might be perceived as support for the community itself. Torture is a crime against humanity. Standing up against torture does not mean upholding one particular community, but upholding human dignity, Turkdogan said.
May 12, 2017

Ankara and Moscow have made impressive progress recently on some tricky diplomatic issues. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met May 3 in the Russian resort of Sochi to discuss energy, weapons, tariffs, sanctions and the complexities of the Syrian civil war  even agreeing to set up de-escalation zones there.

But they can't seem to find their way past the "tomato crisis." Clearly, the symbolic tomato  while important  isn't really the problem.

The countries' relations have been strained since Turkey shot down a Russian millitary jet in November 2015. Sanctions ensued, on both sides. Most recently, Turkeys Ministry of Agriculture in March imposed a 130% tariff on Russian wheat and other grains, and sanctions on rice, peas and sunflower oil from Russia. In 2016, Turkey bought $720 million worth of sunflower oil, $76 million of corn and $490 million of wheat from Russia.

It's interesting that Russian Agriculture Minister Alexander Tkachev reacted to the Turkish sanctions using the same language Putin used to describe the jet incident  the event that marked the start of the trade war: that Turkey had stabbed Russia in the back. The agriculture minister claimed Russian farmers would lose $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion annually. After the Sochi meeting, Turkey agreed to lift the sanctions.

As for the economic impact on Turkey, of the country's overall $1.9 billion worth of fruit and vegetable exports in 2015, $875 million worth was sold to Russia. That figure plummeted to $331 million after the Russian bans, the Daily Sabah reported. Russia now has lifted or agreed to lift sanctions on oranges, tangerines, strawberries, pears, cucumbers, apricots, apples, peaches, plums, grapes, onions, broccoli and carnations.

But not tomatoes.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said after the Sochi summit that even though Turkey would abolish the wheat embargo, Russia would continue restrictions on tomatoes, possibly for another three to five years.

Tomatoes are big business in Turkey. Ali Kavak, chairman of the Mediterranean Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Exporters Union, told Turkeys pro-government Yeni Safak daily May 4 that before the crisis, Russia imported 380,000 tons of the total 540,000 tons of tomatoes exported annually by union members. Now other neighboring countries are taking Russias place. Curiously, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan import tomatoes from Turkey and sell tomatoes to Russia. Russians also have invested in greenhouses to grow their own tomatoes.

The Daily Sabah reports Turkey sold $259 million worth of tomatoes to Russia in 2015, but only $87,000 in 2016.

So what did Turkey gain at the Sochi summit? Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci told NTV that Russia had lifted the restrictions on work permits in contracting, tourism and timber sectors and hiring of Turkish workers. But another major issue still hiding among the tomatoes is non-resumption of visa-free travel between the two countries. So far, only businesspeople can travel without visas.

After the meeting, Putin said relations were totally restored, but Erdogan mentioned that their agreement did not cover tomatoes. Erdogans praise of cheaper and tastier Turkish tomatoes did not impress the Russians, but Putin at least kept hope alive, saying, We cant forever keep our markets closed to Turkish tomatoes. Growing tomatoes in Russian greenhouses is much more costly than buying them from Turkey.

So why does this particular embargo continue?

It's not only about the tomatoes as a particular produce. Many issues need solutions, and these are all grouped under the label of tomato crisis. For example, Tkachev recently said, For Turkish tomatoes to be allowed into Russia, we have to discuss our meat exports to the Turkish market.

Reciprocal sanctions by the two countries have severely affected their trade volume, which stood at $31.2 billion in 2014, $24 billion in 2015 and only $16.8 billion in 2016. This year, trade volume for the first quarter was $4.88 billion. Of that figure, only $498 million worth was Turkish exports to Russia. The trade volume target was once $100 billion.

In other words, Turkey suffered more from the sanctions. Even lifting the tomato ban is not likely to restore equilibrium. But opening the way for this symbolic produce would also mean most problems between two countries are solved.

Meanwhile, tomatoes continue to be a news item because of their high prices in Turkey. In April, a 61% price surge in tomatoes led the Turkish market in price hikes.

If Russians are not buying them, why did tomato prices skyrocket in the domestic market?

Earlier this year, when demand was low because of Russia's ban, much of Turkey's tomato crop rotted. Now there's a shortage, and Turkey's tomato exports have grown 40%, according to Bulent Tufenkci, minister of customs and trade.

Citizens today pay $2-$4 (7-15 Turkish liras) per kilo (2.2 pounds) of tomatoes, which last year cost about a dollar. Yet they wink and smile, saying, We are glad Russia is applying the embargo. Imagine how much we will be asked to pay for tomatoes here if we also sell to Russia.
May 14, 2017

WASHINGTON  The Trump administration may issue waivers of some Iran nuclear-related sanctions in the coming days as it adheres, for now, to its commitments under the Iran nuclear deal, while carrying out a comprehensive review of its Iran policy.

Notification of the waivers might be issued as early as May 17, a day before Donald Trump is due to depart for Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy and Brussels on his first foreign trip as president, sources told Al-Monitor, while cautioning that the anticipated action and timing could change. That is also a couple of days before Iran holds presidential elections May 19.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has made reaching the Iran nuclear deal with six world powers a centerpiece of his re-election bid, but has come under criticism from political rivals that Iranians have not felt the economic benefits from sanctions relief that the deal promised.

The Trump administration is conducting a National Security Council-led interagency review of its broader Iran policy. US officials said that until the review is completed, the administration will continue to adhere to terms of the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

We are continuing to review the JCPOA, a State Department official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. While that review is underway, we continue to implement our commitments.

Waivers of one set of US sanctions on Iran, under the Iran Freedom Counterproliferation Act, are set to expire 120 days after they were last issued by the Obama administration, and would need to be reissued the week of May 15 for the United States not to be in breach of the JCPOA. Waivers of some other US nuclear-related sanctions on Iran are not set to expire until after 180 days, so would not need to be reissued until a few weeks later.

"The Trump administration has made clear that at least until this review is completed, we will adhere to the JCPOA and will ensure that Iran is held strictly accountable to its requirements," the State Department official said. Once we have finalized our conclusions, we will meet the challenges Iran poses with clarity and conviction.

US officials have declined to offer a time line for when the interagency review of US policy on Iran and the JCPOA will be completed.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson certified in an April 18 letter to Congress that Iran was adhering to the nuclear deal, which went into effect in January 2016, after years of negotiations.

But addressing reporters a day later, Tillerson harshly denounced Irans support for terrorism, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria and proxy groups accused of destabilizing countries in the region. The Trump administration intends to pursue a comprehensive policy toward Iran that addresses those malign behaviors, he said.

A comprehensive Iran policy requires that we address all of the threats posed by Iran, and it is clear there are many, Tillerson said April 19. Whether it be assassination attempts, support of weapons of mass destruction, deploying destabilizing militias, Iran spends its treasure and time disrupting peace.

The JCPOA completely ignored all of the other serious threats that Iran poses, Tillerson said.

But asked whether the United States should then break out of the deal, Tillerson said he did not think that would be constructive. We just dont see that thats a prudent way to be dealing with Iran, certainly not in the context of all of their other disruptive activities, he replied.

Trump himself took another swipe at the deal the next day.

It was a terrible agreement, it shouldn't have been signed, it shouldn't have been negotiated the way it was negotiated," Trump, meeting at the White House with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, said April 20.

And though his administration had just two days earlier formally certified Irans compliance with the deal, Trump said Iran was not living up to its spirit.

"They are not living up to the spirit of the agreement, I can tell you that, Trump said. And we are analyzing it very carefully, and we will have something to say about it in the not-too-distant future."

It was anticipated that any US sanctions waiver issued by the Trump administration this month would likely be accompanied by a similarly harsh foot-stomping such as those from Trump and Tillerson that followed the certification of Iranian compliance with the deal last month.

US officials are at least keeping in mind the May 19 Iranian elections, although it is unclear how much that vote might restrain the officials' comments on Iran.

Notably, Irans Rouhani has recently hinted in the final days of the campaign that if he wins a second term, he might be willing to pursue negotiations with the United States on issues beyond the Iran nuclear deal, to try to get non-nuclear sanctions on Iran removed.

"I will engage myself in lifting all the non-nuclear sanctions during the coming four years and bring back the grandeur of Iran and the Iranian people," Rouhani, speaking at the third and final presidential debate, said.

The Trump administration is aware of the Iranian political calendar, former US Iran nuclear negotiator Richard Nephew said. But it is still likely to accompany any nod to Irans compliance with the deal with harsh rhetoric about Irans regional behavior.

I think they [US officials] are sensitive to the fact that this is not a random week in May, that this is sensitive time for the Iranians politically, Nephew, now with Columbia University, told Al-Monitor.

I dont think anything attached to JCPOA will get through this administration that doesnt have some dose of the negative picture, [because of] their own internal political requirements, he said.
After Atherotech filed for bankruptcy last year, one of its propriety technologies is back on the market thanks to another Birmingham company.

VAP Diagnostics Lab, a new clinical research lab, has formally relaunched the VAP+ Lipid Panel.

Atherotec spun out of UAB in 1999 after UAB's Dr. Jere Segrest developed a novel cholesterol test technology in the early 90s. It grew to 300 employees. In late 2010, New York investment firm Behrman Capital bought Atherotech, and in 2016 the firm filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection after investors pulled funding. All of those employees lost their jobs.

VAP Diagnostics has acquired rights to the technology and assumed all of Atherotech's debt in order to halt patient billing and collections.

"A dedicated team of people fought very hard to bring back the VAP+ Lipid Panel, and their efforts have paid off," Kenneth French, Director of Clinical Operations for VAP Diagnostics Lab, said in a press release. "We have overcome major challenges and enter the market as a new company that has international corporate backing and global distribution capabilities focused on long-term, sustainable growth."

VAP Diagnostics estimates that more than 10 million results have been reported using the technology since its introduction.
A news conference will be held Tuesday to reveal more details about Constellation, a proposed mixed-use project in downtown Huntsville.

Developer Scott McLain and his partners will gather at 10:30 a.m. at SpringHill Suites by Marriott at the former Heart of Huntsville Mall property on Memorial Parkway at Clinton Avenue.

McLain said his team will provide site plans, renderings, a construction schedule and other details concerning the redevelopment project.

"Constellation will feature nearly 1.5 million square feet of improvement, including apartments, hotels, retail, office, and parking decks," McLain said.

Equibase Capital Group, LLC, of Chicago, is working with McLain of Coldwell Banker Commercial and McLain Real Estate to bring the long-awaited project to fruition. This week's news conference will be the first public event about Constellation since McLain announced the nearly $180 million live-work-shop project three years ago.

In February, McLain told AL.com there have been many changes since 2014, but none that dramatically change the scope of the project. A groundbreaking date is not yet available and the names of future tenants are still unknown.

Follow AL.com on Tuesday for more details about Constellation.
MCPSS valedictorians.jpg

If you can't attend a graduation ceremony, you can watch it live from the USA Mitchell Center this week, or buy a DVD. (MCPSS photo)

All Mobile County Public Schools graduations held at the University of South Alabama Mitchell Center will be broadcast live by mcpssTV on www.mcpssthewire.com and its 24-hour channel, according to MCPSS.

The channel is available on Comcast (channel 15), AT&T U-verse (On Demand channel 99) and Roku boxes.

Graduations from Augusta Evans Special School, Citronelle High School and Williamson High School will be posted soon on the mcpssTV YouTube channel.

Here is the schedule of remaining graduations at the Mitchell Center this week:

Monday, May 15:

Vigor High School at 1:30 p.m.

B.C. Rain High School at 4:30 p.m.

Tuesday, May 16:

Blount High School at 10 a.m.

Theodore High School at 3 p.m.

Wednesday, May 17:

Bryant High School at 10 a.m.

Davidson High School at 3 p.m.

Thursday, May 18:

LeFlore High School at 10 a.m.

Baker High School at 2:30 p.m.

Friday, May 19:

Mary G. Montgomery High School at 10 a.m.

Murphy High School at 3 p.m.

To order a professional-quality DVD of any of these graduation ceremonies, call mcpssTV at (251) 221-3119. DVDs are $20 each.
Centre in Cherokee County is suing scores of carpet and textile companies, as well as chemical manufacturers, that it says are responsible for polluting the city's water.

The suit, filed today in Cherokee County Circuit Court, says the companies put harmful chemical compounds into the raw water supply upstream of Centre Water's intake site "in or near the City of Dalton, Ga."

The lawsuit is similar to one filed last September in Etowah County Circuit Court, by Gadsden's Water Works and Sewer Board. It was announced in a news release by Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, of Montgomery, the same firm that filed Gadsden's lawsuit last year.

That suit was filed in September a week after the Alabama Department of Public Health instructed consumers that exposure to elevated levels of two synthetic compounds, known as PFOS and PFOA, in the water can lead to a number of health problems over time in pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and formula-fed infants, among others.

Those man-made chemical compounds are used in making non-stick, stain-resistant and water-proofing coatings on fabric, cookware, firefighting foam and other products. Perfluorochemicals, or PFC, break down slowly in the environment.

Rhon Jones, an attorney with the firm, said the suit "seeks to hold those responsible who have contributed to the PFC contamination of the Centre water source."

"Safe and clean drinking water is vitally important to Centre," Jones said. "The EPA has acknowledged that these carpet manufacturers are responsible for PFC concentrations in that area. We believe those PFCs have migrated downstream to contaminate the Centre water supply.

"The polluters must bear the expected multi-million dollar cost cleaning up and removing the PFCs from the water system. Some of the highest PFC test results in North America, if not the world, have been recorded near the discharge sites for these carpet manufacturers."

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management and ADPH are working with the water works and sewer board to monitor the chemicals in the community's water system, officials said.
A 75-year-old Cullman woman was killed in a hit-and-run Sunday afternoon.

Alabama State Troopers identified the victim as Helen Virginia Duke. The crash happened in Cullman County.

Trooper Curtis Summerville said lawmen were notified of the of incident at 3:10 p.m. Duke was a pedestrian on Schwaiger Road inside the Good Hope city limits when she was struck. Authorities didn't release any additional details.

Summerville said troopers are searching for a possible Ford vehicle with damage to the passenger's side rear view mirror. Anyone who may have witnessed the crash, seen the suspect vehicle or have knowledge of the whereabouts of the vehicle is asked to contact the Decatur Trooper Post at 256-353-0631.
Birmingham police are searching for a man who they say robbed a business on Sunday afternoon.

Sgt. Bryan Shelton said a black male wearing a mask entered a Chevron gas station, located in the 2000 block of Green Springs Highway, at approximately 3:45 p.m. Sunday. He was armed with a gun and stole the gas station's cash register, Shelton said.

The business will remain closed until the cash register is found.

Anyone with information should call police at 205-254-1700.
The trial for a teenager charged with the 2016 slaying of a 33-year-old Army veteran Mike Gilotti outside his Hoover home continued today with the teen taking the stand.

Charleston Wells, now 17, testified on his own behalf and said one of the other four co-defendants was the shooter. However, another co-defendant also testified Monday, pointing the finger to Wells as the shooter.

Heather Gilotti also took the stand Monday, and told the court the last words she ever said to her husband: "Babe its ok. It's a clean wound, its all going to be okay." Gilotti died on the threshold of their home.

Wells is charged with murder in the Jan. 5, 2016 slaying of Gilotti outside his Lake Cyrus home. Gilotti was a father of two.

After Heather Gilotti's testimony, the prosecution rested its case.

Wells then took the stand. He told the court that while he was involved in some of the breaking and entering of vehicles in the days and hours leading up to Gilotti's murder, he was not involved in the shooting. Darrian Bryant, 17, 18-year-old Ahmad Johnson, and 20-year-old De'Ron Lucas are also charged with murder in Gilotti's death.

Wells said Bryant and Johnson were the ones who approached Gilotti. Wells said while the group was breaking into cars in the Lake Cyrus neighborhood, they saw a man walk out of his home. The group was down the street, and Wells said Bryant fired a shot towards Gilotti.

Gilotti, who was deployed as a tank commander and officer in Iraq, did not hear the shot, Wells said. "The man, he didn't pay attention to it."

Immediately after the shots were fired, Wells said he and Lucas jumped in the truck. Bryant and Johnson then walked up the street and approached Gilotti, and asked him for the time.

According to Wells' testimony, Gilotti told the teens the time, and then asked why they were out so early.

Wells said then Bryant tried to hit Gilotti in the head with his gun, but Gilotti ran around his car and toward the house. Johnson stepped towards Gilotti and fatally shot him, Wells said.

When Johnson and Bryant ran back to the truck and drove away, Wells said he asked Johnson why he had shot Gilotti. "I said, 'Why did you shoot that man?' and [Johnson] said "Shut the f*** up or I'll shoot you too.'"

Another teen charged in the crime, Darrian Bryant, also testified Monday, but said Wells was the shooter.

Bryant told Heather Gilotti in court, "I'm sorry for your loss. And I'm sorry for what my friend did. I hope you can move on with your life."

Charleston Wells with his attorneys, Tom Mesereau and Charles Salvagio, during jury selection Monday (Ivana Hrynkiw | ihrynkiw@al.com)

According to Bryant, he went on several trips with Wells, Johnson, and Lucas to break into cars-- including a trip to Fultondale where Bryant said Wells stole a 40-caliber pistol from an unlocked car.

On the night of Jan. 4, 2016, Bryant said he, Johnson, Wells, Lucas, and another teen named Ahmad Thompson were at a girl's house. Then, the five went to Tuscaloosa to continue breaking into cars.

According to Bryant's testimony, the group stole a green Ford F-250. Ahmad Thompson drove that car, along with Charleston Wells, to a nearby gas station. Johnson, Lucas, and Bryant followed in a stolen Tahoe.

"I wanted to go home... I ended up going to sleep," Bryant said. "I went to sleep on the highway, and I woke up and I was in Lake Cyrus."

Bryant said he, Wells, and Johnson got out of the truck and began to break into cars again. Lucas stayed in the truck in the driver's seat. As they are walking up the street, Bryant said a man walked out of his home, about two houses up from where the teens were. All the teens got back into the F-250.

"De'Ron Lucas was lost. He didn't know where to go," Bryant said. "Something changed... We stopped in front of [Gilotti's] house...Charleston Wells opened the door and got out to ask him for directions."

Bryant said Wells left the passenger door open and Johnson got out, too. Then, Bryant overheard Gilotti say to go up the street and make a right, then make a left to get out of the neighborhood.

Bryant said, "Well, Charleston got out and asked for directions... then Charleston leaned up and closed the door." Bryant said Wells moved in closer to Gilotti. "He upped his pistol... he drawed down on Mr. Gilotti." Bryant said Wells chased Gilotti around the side of his car and towards the home. "After that, it was the gunshot."

Bryant said Johnson, who was standing outside of the truck, pulled his gun as well. When they got back in the car to drive off, Bryant said he heard Gilotti screaming "Help me."

When asked if the gun was the same one Wells stole from a vehicle in Fultondale, Bryant replied: "It's the same one."

Prosecutors have said they will not object to youthful offender status at Bryant's arraignment later this week.

On cross examination from one of Wells' attorneys, Thomas Mesereau, Bryant admitted to lying several times to investigators before he was arrested. He also said he did not know Wells nor Johnson had guns on the morning of Gilotti's death until he saw them draw their weapons.

Mesereau questioned Bryant about his deal with prosecutors, and Bryant said he was not sure what his deal entailed, or if he would be granted youthful offender status. "I just want to help Ms. Gilotti out in her husband's murder," he said.

Heather and her husband were married just six days shy of eight years.

Heather said every morning, she and her husband woke up around 4:30 a.m. The couple would alternate between Gilotti going to the gym or Heather going on a morning run, because someone needed to stay home with their 5-year-old and 1-year-old sons. Jan. 5, 2016, was Gilotti's day to go to the gym.

He and Heather woke up at their usual time, and after Gilotti gathered his things, he asked his wife, "Ok Heather I'm leaving, is there anything else you need before I go?" Heather said. She followed him to the door, and locked it behind him.

Heather went into the kitchen to unload the dishwasher, and as she was reaching for the first dish, she heard what she said sounded like a tree being struck by lightning.

Immediately after, she said her husband scream, "Oh shit Heather, I've been shot, call 911!"

Heather heard her husband banging on the door and gasping for air. She listened for the sound of another person, and then heard a loud engine pulling off.

"I knew there was going to be lots of blood," Heather said. She ran to bedroom and grabbed a towel, and tried to unlock the family's gun safe. She was "too flustered," though, and said she ran back to front door. When she didn't hear anybody else, she opened the door and said she saw Gilotti standing, bent over and bleeding.

"I'm asking him, 'Mike what happened," but he couldn't talk at that point. He just reached with his hand to show me."

Heather, a physical therapist with some medical training, called 911 and guided her husband to the ground. She said she was frantic and couldn't understand what the dispatcher was trying to direct her to do, but she knew she had to perform CPR. "He's still panting, just gasping for air."

While crying on the witness stand, Heather repeated what she said were her husband's last words: "God, forgive me for my sins."

"I shook him and I said, 'Babe its okay. It's a clean wound, it's all going to be okay." Heather said while doing CPR, "All I heard every time I was compressing was just gurgling."

While Heather was tending to her dying husband, she said her young child was right inside the home. "My son was sitting at the base of the stairs, yelling for Mike. I kept trying to get him to go back in the room, but he wouldn't listen."

A former Hoover police forensic analyst, Justin Cole, also testified Monday and told to the court about the 40-caliber shell casing found in the Gilotti's front yard. He said while that shell casing was found, the bullet (or its fragments) which "passed right through" Gilotti was never recovered. Cole said officers were able to find where the bullet impacted the right side of the home, between the front door and the windows. Police charted and measured the scene off of that impact point.

He said the home's "Welcome" mat was covered with blood.

Cole also detailed items found in several of the stolen vehicles that he processed and which items police detected fingerprints from. Several of those prints were identified as belonging to Wells, Johnson, and Bryant.

Others who testified on Monday included a Lake Cyrus resident whose car was broken into on Jan.4, and a Hoover police sergeant.

The prosecution rested Monday afternoon, and the defense will continue presenting their case on Tuesday.
More than 50 men and women killed in the line of duty as Birmingham police officers were remembered outside of City Hall Monday morning for making the ultimate sacrifice.

Birmingham Mayor William Bell, Police Chief A.C. Roper, Jefferson County District Attorney Pro Tem Danny Carr, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and others honored the 51 slain officers who have died in Birmingham since 1900. "If we do not give honor to those who have fallen, then they have fallen in vain,'' the mayor said to the hundreds of officers in attendance. "The work that you do continues the long legacy of making sure our society is protected and we do it with honesty and integrity and a demand that all individuals be treated as God would have them treated."

Monday marked the beginning of National Police Week. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed a proclamation which designated May 15 as Peace Officers Memorial Day. Bagpipes played, there was the symbolic Riderless Horse and wreath-laying. Birmingham police lieutenants Sean Edwards and Scott Thurmond read the names of those Birmingham officers killed in service over the past 117 years.

Chief Roper said it is a sacrifice that the City of Birmingham knows all to well.

"Some may think it's fashionable to proclaim that the age of heroes has passed, but if you're looking for heroes, just look around at these men and women standing here because just like them, our fallen heroes placed the benefit of others above themselves,'' Roper said. "So many times, our officers have put themselves in harm's way, thousands of times, and moved through it unscathed. But we all recognize the fact that we don't know how the next call will end."

The chief said the names of the 51 slain officers represented 51 dreams, 51 hopes and 51 grieving families. "We will never forget their sacrifice,'' he said. "We must, and we will, always remember."

Carr told the crowd that few people truly understand the value that police officers bring to a community. "Thank you for what you do, thank you for the courage you show each and every day to be that line between order and chaos,'' he said. "God bless each and every one of you."

June 17 will mark the 13th anniversary of the last time a Birmingham police officer was killed in the line of duty. West Precinct Officers Carlos Owen, Robert Bennett and Harley Chisholm died in a hail of gunfire in 2004 at an Ensley drug house. A fourth officer, Michael Collins, was wounded but survived the attack. Kerry Spencer fired the shots that killed Owen, Bennett and Chisholm. He, along with co-defendant Nathaniel Woods, were convicted and sentenced to death. They remain on Death Row at Holman Prison.

Attorney General Marshall said Monday that, so far this year, there has been a 24 percent increase in officer deaths nationwide compared to last year. "That is a statistic that we cannot accept and that this nation should not tolerate,'' he said.

In Alabama, 544 officers have lost their lives since 1845. "It's important we acknowledge that in Alabama, no other department has faced the loss as much as what we've seen here with the Birmingham Police Department,'' Marshall said.

But, he said, the department is not alone. In September, an Alabama Department of Corrections officer and decorated veteran died after he was assaulted and stabbed by an inmate earlier in the month. Kenneth Bettis, 44, of Monroeville, was killed by inmate Cleveland Cunningham who stabbed Bettis at the dining hall in Atmore's William C. Holman Correctional Facility on Sept. 1. Cunningham stabbed Bettis in retaliation for being denied an extra tray of food during the afternoon meal. "Officer Bettis, a man who served with distinguished military service, gave his life in the service of his community,'' Marshall said.

He also remembered Lowndes County sheriff's Deputy Levy Pettway, 61, who was killed last month when his 2001 Ford Crown Victoria he was driving left Alabama 21 and struck several trees at 11:53 a.m. while he was on duty. Pettway was a reserve deputy for the sheriff's department and a school resource officer at Calhoun School. And, he remembered Florala Officer Lance Price who died in December 2016 after suffering a massive heart attack, also while on duty. "Three lives that we've lost of men who were willing to give their lives to others,'' Marshall said.

Marshall said police officers are "professionals who, every day, walk toward danger, not away from it...and are the barrier between order and chaos, decency and lawlessness. "I pledge to do everything within my power to make sure you have the resources necessary to carry out your duties and that your story is heard throughout communities in Alabama,'' he said. "You are heroes, and you are my heroes."

Here is the list of Birmingham Fallen Officers.

1. J. Wafe Adams- EOW: 3/28/1900

2.George W. Kirkley- EOW: 3/28/1900

3.William P. Walton- EOW: 3/18/1902

4.James H. Mullin- EOW: 9/27/1903

5.James Whaley-EOW: 8/12/1904

6.Samuel H. Hamilton-EOW: 5/12/1907

7.Willis A. Smith-EOW: 3/10/1908

8.John W. little-EOW: 11/7/1908

9.George Clinton Eubank-EOW: 11/23/1909

10.Loner Denson Camp-EOW: 6/19/1910

11.W.C. Wallace-EOW: 11/8/1910

12.Abner C. McGhee-EOW: 12/1/1910

13.William Benjamin-EOW: 9/29/1913

14.Hugh Tulley-EOW: 10/13/1913

15.John Acquilla Moore-EOW: 12/5/1913

16.George A. Sims-EOW: 1/22/1918

17.John Dickerson Newby-EOW: 10/15/1919

18.Sam P. Dobyns-EOW: 9/19/1920

19.Walter C. Hollums-EOW: 8/18/1923

20.Virgil Ray Payne-EOW: 2/12/1927

21.Alexander A. Manley-EOW: 5/26/1927

22.Elsie Turner Lewis-EOW: 3/3/1928

23.Henry Francis Mills-EOW: 8/8/1930

24.Lee Edward Buckalew-EOW: 5/23/1931

25.William Ira Latham-EOW: 10/24/1932

26.Dumas Froy Phillips-EOW: 4/23/1934

27.Forest J. Harris-EOW: 2/8/1935

28.James M. Early-EOW: 4/15/1935

29.Homer Earnest Poore-EOW: 6/30/1936

30.James Tillman Moser- EOW: 1/31/1939

31.Newton Edward Wolff-EOW: 7/12/1941

32.Fred R. Brockman- EOW: 11/3/1953

33.Herbert C. Osborn- EOW: 7/24/1962

34.Azell L. Harris- EOW: 5/4/1969

35.Kenneth Lee Spencer-EOW: 7/13/1969

36.Henry L. Thompson-EOW: 10/16/1972

37.Felix Underwood-EOW: 10/7/1973

38.William Stanley-EOW: 8/9/1975

39.James Earl Rhodes-EOW: 3/11/1978

40.Albert Eugene Ballard-EOW: 11/29/1979

41.Edward K. Alley, Jr.-EOW: 12/25/1980

42.Robert D. Patterson-EOW:10/31/1982

43.Sharon K. Robinson-EOW: 4/7/1984

44.Marcus L. Reid-EOW: 4/7/1984

45.Frank H. Dunn-EOW: 10/14/1986

46.John Martin Huffman-EOW: 5/21/1992

47.Sandy Sanderson-EOW: 1/29/1998

48.Joseph Jerome Daniels-EOW: 11/18/2002

49.C. Robert Bennett-EOW: 6/17/2004

50.Harley Alfred Chisholm, III-EOW: 6/17/2004

51.Carlos Winston Owens-EOW: 6/17/2004
MCA NashvilleKip Moore is heading back to the United Kingdom for another series of headlining shows in the fall, and this time, hell be taking Drake White along as his opening act.

Our crowds in Australia, all over Europe, and Canada are some of our most passionate, Kip tells Conde Nast Traveler. And that is a special thing."

He adds, "Its a downright euphoric feeling on stage watching all these different walks of life and ethnicities singing your songs and [being] super passionate about what youre doing. Its a beautiful thing."

In August, Kip will also play a couple of shows in Ireland, as part of the Harvest 2017 festival.

His current single, More Girls Like You, just broke into the top-25.

Heres the itinerary for Kip Moores fall 2017 tour of the UK, with tickets going on sale this Friday:

10/2 -- Birmingham, England, Birmingham O2 Institute

10/3 -- Manchester, England, Manchester O2 Ritz

10/4 -- Glasgow, Scotland, Glasgow O2 ABC

10/6 -- London, England, London O2 Shepherds Bush Empire

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
The Amazon city of Iquitos, Peru, is only reachable by air or river. Residents say they want a road, despite the risks.

Iquitos, Peru  Late afternoon is the busiest time in the muddy harbour of Iquitos in the Amazon basin, in the northeast of Peru. Men haul stacks of bottled soda and kilos of rice on their backs, motorcycle taxis load passengers and their luggage, and an old man strolls around selling hammocks, which boat passengers use to sleep in.

Travelling by cargo boat is the most economical way to move around the Amazon region. The boats travel along rivers lined with communities.



Illegal loggers plunder Peruvian Amazon

Iquitos is a city of almost half a million inhabitants that flourished during the rubber boom of the late 19th century.

But today, parts of the historical centre are abandoned: buildings have collapsed, leaving only their facades, while the land is slowly being reclaimed by the jungle. Many of the older buildings that remain intact have been turned into casinos or supermarkets.

The city has been expanding with little planning. Houses on stilts with corrugated iron roofs cluster on the bank of the Amazon in front of the main tourist boulevard, the Malecon Tarapaca.

Yet, Iquitos is the main transport hub of the jungle, from here people and goods travel to communities along the river banks in the Amazon forests. It takes nine days of travel upstream on the Maranon River to get to the nearest town of Saramiriza, from where the road network to the rest of Peru starts.

During his campaign in 2016, President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski promised to connect Iquitos to Saramiriza by road to boost economic development. He has promised to finish the project before he leaves office in 2021.

Many residents of the region support the presidents plan.

They should construct this road as quickly as possible, says Rosa Samara, who lives in Barranca, a community four days by boat from Iquitos.

Samara, 61, came to Iquitos to visit her parents and now lies in her hammock waiting for the boat to leave. We will save so much time travelling and be able to sell our products more quickly. I actually voted for the current government because they promised to build this road.

With only one asphalted road connecting Iquitos to Nauta, a smaller town 92km to the south, the Loreto region, of which Iquitos is the capital, is the most underdeveloped in Peru.

Vegetables like lettuce, tomato and cucumber dont grow easily in the sandy soil of the jungle. So, they are imported from the western coast, which increases the price of the produce.

Fresh fragile jungle fruits such as camu camu or acai cant be exported using the slow cargo boats because they do not have electrically driven coolers to keep produce fresh.

Traveller Carlo Yumbato Delaira, who used to live in the city of San Lorenzo along the river bank but moved to Iquitos to find economic opportunities, is on a trip to visit his family.

San Lorenzo produces everything: meat, fish, cassava. But they simply cant export it. Thats the problem, the 47-year-old says.

Of course there will be an environmental impact when they construct the road, but the people are desperate. There is so much unemployment. New laws prohibit people [from making] a living from logging, but there is nowhere else to turn to.

Carlos Gregory Garcia Wong, an engineer working on the project, shows a map of Loreto with the future road connections illustrated. Besides the planned road of 700km to Saramiriza, there is a line drawn northwards to Colombia and one going east towards Brazil.

In Loreto, the people believed a road connection was a fantasy because the main roads through the jungle were always rivers, Garcia, who works for the regional transport and communications office, says.

He thinks the project may take longer than the scheduled time.

There are a lot of difficulties when constructing roads through the Amazon jungle: We have to cross rivers and swampy parts, work around nature reserves, the 31-year-old engineer explains.

The preliminary studies will already cost three years and we are only just starting with these, so the road will not be finished before 2021.

Environmental impact

Critics fear the project may be detrimental to the local environment. They point to a road that was built in another jungle in southern Peru as an example of the potential environmental costs. Built in 2011, that road project, called the Interoceanic Highway, opened access to the Madre de Dios jungle for outsiders.

According to Manuel Delgado, a veterinarian and environmentalist in Madre de Dios, the road attracted immigrants from the Andes mountains.

These migrants bring their farming methods into the jungle because they work fine for them in the mineral rich soil of the Andes, Delgado explains. This results in the quick depletion of the soil, because, compared to the volcanic Andes soil, the sandy underground of the Amazon is poor in minerals.

Luis Campos Baca, president of the Peruvian Amazon Investigation Institute, a government body based in Iquitos, says his institute is researching the many opportunities for sustainable agriculture of jungle fruits in the region.

Giving the forest such an economic value offers indigenous people an incentive to protect it against logging and other invasions.

Campos adds that such projects should be stimulated first, after which a road will be the lifeline that brings the fruits to the market.

Sitting on a terrace outside his office, Campos explains how the Interoceanic Highway, which was meant to connect Brazil with the Peruvian port cities, gave loggers and farmers an unintended entry into pristine jungle areas.

What went wrong with the Interoceanic Highway is that it was rushed through. It was an Odebrecht-project, so there was corruption involved, he says referring to the Brazilian construction firm behind the project, which was at the centre of a bribery case.

The governments at that time didnt care too much about environmental assessments. Now, we will take our time and investigate first.

A beautiful dream

President Kuczynski has said he knows there are environmental concerns over the road project, but he believes strong enforcement of environmental laws will mitigate any environmental damage.

But Murilo Reis, who owns a private reserve some 400km outside of Iquitos, isnt reassured. He says existing water transport infrastructure should be further developed.

The impact on the jungle will be one of destruction, with people having another access to pristine areas. Socially there will also be a negative impact: People currently living along the river, will lose a lot of commercial activity. They will have to move to the road.



People & Power  Perus Rotten Wood

Reis, a Brazilian-born nature guide, says that in 1976, Brazil built a similar road through the jungle, from Porto Velho to the city of Manaus, which like Iquitos, had flourished during the rubber boom.

The road deteriorated quickly afterwards because maintenance costs were too high in the jungle where rivers continuously change route. Nowadays, the Brazilian government stimulates water transport by subsidising cargo ships with electronic cooling systems.

But even using improved cargo ships, the trip would still be a long journey. Taking off from the harbour, the cargo boats slowly move upstream, stopping at small jungle towns along the banks. Loading and unloading take hours because theyre done with rusty manual cranes.

Most of the people do hope a road will be built in the near future. Travellers on the deck of the boat dream that one day their trip will be counted in hours instead of days.

Despite the environmental impact a road might have, the passengers say their region has to be developed. Samara, the woman travelling to Barranca, says there is always a price tag to development.

Everything we humans do has a risk. Only God knows what will really happen, she says.

But the owner of the cargo boat, 49-year-old Cesar Paladines, sitting at his desk while his employees walk back and forth loading stock, says he doesnt believe there will ever be a highway.

He explains that there has been talk about this road connection for years, and before that there was talk about a train track  a project which never started, despite the expensive studies conducted.

Connecting Iquitos to Nauta already took so many years to realise, and that was just a 90km stretch, Paladines says with a sigh. This is all a beautiful dream, but it will never happen.
Bethlehem, occupied West Bank  Abd al-Qader al-Lahham remembers the sweet taste of fruit, the rolling hills of olive trees, the rippling fresh springs, and the sheep, cows and camels grazing until sunset on his land in the now-destroyed Palestinian village of Beit Itab in Jerusalem.

Now 97 and the oldest resident of Dheisheh refugee camp, Lahhams life in the compact concrete maze of Bethlehems largest Palestinian refugee camp contrasts starkly with the pastoral life he once knew before the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. This became known as the Nakba, or catastrophe, among Palestinians.

The happiest times of my life were in my village, Lahham told Al Jazeera. When I fall asleep, I dream of those days.

Lahham owned some 100 dunams (25 acres) of land in Beit Itab. To this day, he still holds the official ownership title.

We used to eat straight from the crops on our farms. Our land provided everything for us. Life was good then, he said.

Today, he spends his days venturing to and from the camps mosque five times a day, slowly making his way past graffiti and murals of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces that decorate the narrow streets.

Watch our documentary series Al-Nakba

In 1948, Lahham, then 28, was in a nearby village tending to his sheep when the sound of bombs interrupted the quiet evening. He passed through villages whose residents were fleeing their homes as Zionist militias invaded the area. His family and fellow villagers had already been expelled, so Lahham continued travelling with his sheep until he arrived in the Bethlehem-area village of al-Khader.

It was only after three days that Lahham finally found his family hiding in a mosque in the village of Artas. The family rented a house in Artas for some time, then one day Lahham took his axe and tools to Bethlehem city and built two houses on a hill that would later become Dheisheh refugee camp.

After experiencing this, you hope that one day you will be able to forget it all. But I can never forget what happened. by Abd al-Qader al-Lahham, 97-year-old Palestinian from Beit Itab village

We lived a bitter life, Lahham said, pointing to the crumbled ruins of the homes he built decades ago. People werent able to find even a small piece of bread. It got so cold in Bethlehem that many left to a refugee camp in Jericho [Aqabat Jaber], where four to five families were living in one tent. People were living in a miserable situation there.

The United Nations began developing the western part of the hill for displaced Palestinians after the 1948 war. A UN representative approached Lahham and his family and offered them a tent, $7, and the promise of a room in the newly established refugee camp, but he refused, he said.

Soon, however, the UN had expanded its camp and reached the area where Lahham was residing. During this time, some Palestinian families were reduced to cutting the colourful cloth attached to their tents to sew dresses for their girls and women, while others were collecting weeds around the camp to sell to local kitchens for their livelihoods, he said.

The UN eventually provided Lahham and his family with a room in the camp and continued to build to the east of the hill. At least 3,000 Palestinian refugees migrated to the camp after it was built. The camp is now home to some 15,000 residents, according to the UN.

The approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were displaced from their lands in 1948 believed that they would eventually be able to return to their homes and that the conditions in the refugee camps were only temporary.

After experiencing this, you hope that one day you will be able to forget it all. But I can never forget what happened. It remains bitter and continues to burn, Lahham said.

Lahhams grandson, 27-year-old Hisham, was 18 when he visited Beit Itab for the first time.

I felt like my village was so far away from where we live now in the camp. I always thought it would be like travelling to Europe, Hisham told Al Jazeera. In reality, Beit Itab is not more than an hours drive from Bethlehem city.

Hisham said that his grandfather had instilled in him since he was a child that Dheisheh refugee camp was not, and would never be his home. The familys home was a place far away from the tightly spaced buildings in the camp, untouched by Israeli soldiers and the violence that has characterised the nearly half-century occupation of the West Bank.

Their home was a place where the vegetables grew without being watered; where fresh, open air nourished the mind, and where the sheep could roam freely.

Immediately, when I saw my village, I felt like I was home  in a way I never felt in the camp, Hisham said.

In Beit Itab, parts of which were destroyed by the Israelis, Hisham says he found everything exactly as his grandfather described it, with crumbling stone buildings and orange and fig trees planted by his grandfather and uncle. Relying on his grandfathers memories, he was even able to locate the remains of his familys old home.

When I roamed around the village and would find myself lost, I called my grandfather. He could describe everything to me as if he had never left.

But Saleh Abd al-Jawad, a professor of history and political science at Birzeit University, told Al Jazeera that this was not a typical case.

While some villages were partially destroyed, most of some 418 to 530 villages were completely erased by the Israelis who planted forests on top of them, Jawad said. Even elders with original memories would not be able to describe what their villages look like now.

Hisham acknowledged that he did not have original memories of the village to compare with his familys life today, but I believe that if we were back in our village, we would be more happy  Everything is bad in the camp and everything is beautiful in our village.

According to Jawad, these stories in Palestinian oral history provide a comforting alternative to the harsh conditions of the refugee camps.

Through their grandparents, the younger generations of Palestinians begin to understand that they had a very different life before their displacement, he said. They tend to compare this idea of a beautiful past with their current misery in the camps.

While Hishams grandfather is the last member of his family who holds original memories of their village, Hisham is determined to pass down the knowledge to future generations.

After my grandfather, we will lose an important part of our history, Hisham said. I will not be able to tell his stories in the same way. But just like we have passed down the history of Palestine from generation to generation, I will also work to send these messages to my children.
Demonstrators flooded the streets of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip on Monday to mark the anniversary of the Nakba, or the dispersal of 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Nearly seven decades on, the number of registered Palestinian refugees has swelled to more than 5.3 million. They live in United Nations-run camps throughout the region, including in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

The Nakba, or catastrophe, is remembered each year on May 15.
British media is applauding May for rhetoric that would have been deemed autocratic coming from a foreign leader.

Lets play a game. Who said it, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Theresa May?

Well start with an easy one: [We are] not a country you can pull and push around.

Yes, thats the Turkish president, ahead of last months constitutional referendum which increased his control of state power.

If Europe continues this way Europe will be damaged by this.

You said Erdogan again? Well done.





How about this one: Threats have been issued by European politicians and officials  All of these acts have been deliberately timed to affect the (election) result.

A bit of menace. Touch of paranoia. Sounds like Erdogan?

Close but no, thats Theresa May, in London earlier this month after details of a disastrous dinner with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker were leaked to the press.

In the same speech, May called on voters to give me your backing to fight for Britain.

In the British media, it is increasingly said, with good reason, that Turkey is on the path to autocracy. But much less commented upon is the relatively new prime ministers emerging demagogic streak.

Crushing political dissent

Take Mays announcement last month of a snap UK general election on June 8. Politically, the move made sense. The Tories are far more popular than a disorganised and disorderly Labour opposition.

Earlier this month, the Conservatives won sweeping victories in local elections. The general election is almost guaranteed to produce a sizeable victory for May, and a proxy endorsement of her Brexit leadership.

If the departure from the EU does work out, May will claim credit as the leader who delivered. If it fails, and the UK crashes out without any deal, then the prime minister can present herself as the last guardian of interests of the British people. by

So how does the prime minister explain her decision to go to the polls early? As a necessary opportunity to crush political dissent. At this moment of enormous national significance, she declared, there should be unity here at Westminster, but instead there is division.

Leaving aside that opposition  division  is a sine qua non of parliamentary democracy, the reaction to Mays comments in significant sections of the British press was striking. Such rhetoric coming from Turkey  or just about anywhere else  would have been decried as autocratic. Instead, the following days Daily Mail splashed with a full-page photograph of Theresa Mays face and the imploration to crush the saboteurs. Late last year, high court judges who ruled that the British parliament would have to vote on the start of the process of leaving the European Union were branded enemies of the people.

The response to Mays accusation that European leaders are seeking to meddle in the UK general election was similarly tendentious. While some broadsheet newspapers criticised the intemperate language, much of the coverage depicted the British prime minister as Churchillian, a strong woman standing up to overbearing Brussels mandarins.

So far Mays pitch is proving remarkably successful at home. Having created the most serious peacetime crisis in modern UK history  Brexit  May is presenting hers as the only party capable of guiding the ship of state off the rocks. The British public overwhelmingly agree, apparently.

And yet, despite enjoying huge opinion poll leads, May seems petrified of engaging with voters, particularly those who have concerns about a Brexit process that appears increasingly chaotic and half-cocked.

Continuation of the Manichean rhetoric

The Tory general election campaign has been stage-managed to the point of control freakery. Earlier this month, the prime ministers team barred journalists from a factory visit in Cornwall. Before that, Conservatives were accused of filling an event in Leeds with party members rather than local people. Coming from a leader who said she was too busy meeting voters to participate in a televised pre-election debate, this all feels rather curious.

Some blame Mays backroom staff for the highly controlled campaign. The Tories have brought back Lynton Crosby, the Australian spin doctor who ran David Camerons successful general election campaign in 2015. But the overall approach is very much in keeping with the prime minister herself.

OPINION: Brexit is still happening, just not the way May hoped

The eerily autocratic catchphrase strong and stable government has been Mays mantra  literally. The phrase been repeated so often by the prime minister and her party that the Tory leader struggled for words when asked by a BBC anchor to speak without soundbites.

May is tapping into a rising time of nationalism, particularly in the wake of the Brexit vote. The British electorate is far from satisfied  as Brexit attested  but there is a yearning for a government that will realise the promises made last summer. May, effectively, is presenting herself as the only politician who can make Britain great again.





But in playing to the gallery at home, May pushes the European Union further away. She has depicted herself as the bloody difficult woman the EU negotiators will live to fear, but the UKs bargaining position is very weak. The prime minister and her team have shown little evidence of the kind of creative thinking that will be needed to forge a deal that can avoid seriously damaging the British economy.

The prime minister is a product of a very particular strain of English exceptionalism. Born in 1956, the daughter of a vicar in southern England, May cleaves to the notion of Britain as a global power, a nation that can still boldly go it alone in the world. It is a sepia-tinged vision shared by much of the British political and media elites.

That belief in British self-sufficiency makes the UK both poorly suited to negotiate a process as complex as Brexit and particularly ripe for demagogic leadership.

If the departure from the EU does work out, May will claim credit as the leader who delivered. If it fails, and the UK crashes out without any deal, then the prime minister can present herself as the last guardian of interests of the British people. Either way, the Manichean rhetoric  of good versus evil, of us versus them  is likely to continue. Britains right-wing press will be delighted.

Peter Geoghegan is an Irish writer and broadcaster based in Glasgow. His most recent book is The Peoples Referendum: Why Scotland Will Never Be the Same Again.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Despite a White House more pro-Israeli than ever and a morally bankrupt PA leadership, BDS gives Palestinians hope.

As President Trump and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met on May 3, Palestinians held their breath, but not because we expectd any progress towards just and comprehensive peace to emerge from the meeting. Quite the opposite.

First, Trumps bias towards Israels far-right regime of occupation and apartheid does not bode well for bringing about respect for international law and human rights principles.





The US has been arming Israels wars on Palestinians and Arabs, and generously funding and protecting Israels system of oppression, well before Trump. Obama, after all, has committed a record $38bn in military aid to Israel over ten years, even as domestic health, education and employment programmes face severe cuts across the US.

But Trump takes this decades-old US complicity to the next level.

Take Israels settlements built on occupied Palestinian and Syrian land as an example. Despite recent rhetoric to the contrary, Trump stands out in politically and financially supporting them, when almost the whole world considers them as flagrantly illegal under international law and as a fatal obstacle to peace.

Trump also frequently refers to Israels policies to justify his own, whether on ethnic profiling, the refugee and Muslim ban, or the racist wall with Mexico, which Benjamin Netanyahu openly champions.

Trumps Middle East team must be the most dishonest broker in the history of US peacemaking. Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman explicitly support Israels fanatical, settler-influenced government, with Kushner and Friedman deeply invested in financing extremist settlement groups.

One has to be clinically delusional or irreparably opportunistic to expect any good to come out of this administration in the pursuit of freedom, justice and equal rights for Palestinians.

The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization created a Palestinian Authority that was designed to act as a sub-contractor for the occupation. by

Second, the Netanyahu government, widely termed the most racist in Israels history, is not just putting its illegal settlement expansion on steroids. It is too busy with its gradual ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities, including within present-day Israel, land grab in the occupied West Bank, especially in East Jerusalem, its denial of Palestinian refugee rights, and its tightening siege of Gaza to reassure even some of its ardent apologists of its intentions to end its system of injustice.

Drunk with power and impunity, Israeli government ministers have shed the veneer of supporting a two-state solution and cheered Trumps rise to power as a rare opportunity to bury the Palestinian right to self-determination.

Third, the current Palestinian leadership lacks a democratic mandate to negotiate on behalf of the people. Abbas mandate elapsed in 2009, and he has ruled ever since mostly by decree. A hunger strike by more than a thousand Palestinian political prisoners demanding dignity and freedom is further nourishing popular resistance to the occupation, while also revealing the steep unpopularity of Abbas leadership.

The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) created a Palestinian Authority that was designed to act as a sub-contractor for the occupation, temporarily carrying out some of Israels responsibilities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory until the dismantling of the occupation within five years. That occupation is turning 50 next month.





This endless, fraudulent peace process has made a just and comprehensive peace further away than ever by serving as a fig leaf for Israels intensifying colonisation.

The PA leaderships fawning willingness to comply with Trumps dictates is decried by many Palestinians as an irresponsible  to put it mildly  attempt to be politically relevant at the expense of Palestinian rights.

Its strong commitment to the ongoing security coordination with the Israeli occupation is a case in point. Applauded by Trump as going unbelievably well, this collaboration defies the Palestinian national consensus and violates a March 2015 decision by the PLO against it.

A truly accountable and representative Palestinian leadership would instead embark on a massive diplomatic and political battle to convince world parliaments and governments, and eventually the UN, to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel, as was done on apartheid South Africa, until it fully complies with the UN-stipulated rights of all Palestinians.

As Israel drops its already worn-out mask of democracy, its support base in the US, including among Jewish millennials, continues to erode. A December 2016 poll released by the Brookings Institution, for instance, reveals that 46 percent of all Americans and 60 percent of Democrats support imposing sanctions or taking tougher measures against Israel to stop its illegal settlements.

Growing at an impressive rate in the past few years, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights has not only set an example of how to advocate for Palestinian rights. It has also found common cause with vulnerable communities facing escalating attacks by the Trump administration, enhancing mutual solidarity with movements defending the rights of indigenous communities, refugees, blacks, women, workers, immigrants, Muslims and LGBTQI communities.

Given the three factors above, most Palestinians place their hopes on the emerging, cross-movement global resistance to the rise of the xenophobic right and its relentless quest for a more savage world order benefiting the few at the expense of the many.

Palestinians and many communities across the world struggling for justice are realising that isolated, we all fail. United, we can prevail.

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and co-recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award. He writes here in his personal capacity.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Al Jazeeras Marwan Bishara says the result of the election may have unintended consequences for Irans regional policy.

Voters in Iran will be heading to the polls on Friday to elect a new president, in a crucial election seen by many as a potential battleground between Reformists and Fundementalists.

The Reformist front-runner is incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, who signed 2015s historic nuclear deal with world powers. The fundementalist favourite, on the other hand, is Judge Ebrahim Raisi, who is the protegee of Ali Khamenei, Irans powerful supreme leader.





The result of the May 19 election will undoubtedly shape Irans domestic politics for the coming years  but will it also effect the countrys foreign policy?

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeeras senior political analyst, offers his view on the impact the election might have on Irans regional policies and ambitions.

How will Irans presidential elections impact its foreign policy?

Marwan Bishara: I expect the impact to be more stylistic and rhetorical than substantial.

Generally speaking, a presidential election in Iran is more likely to shape the domestic agenda rather than the foreign one, because the fundementalist vs Reformist divide that shapes Irans election campaigns is more relevant to internal politics.

When it comes to foreign policy, the Iranian president only serves as the second in command to Khamenei, who is the actual head of state and commander-in-chief of the countrys armed forces.

READ MORE: All you need to know about Irans presidential election

Irans national security, and by extension its foreign policy, lie within the authority of the supreme leader and the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), which works according to his guidelines.

THE TWO SIDES OF IRANS POLITICAL SPECTRUM:  The conservative fundementalist establishment, which controls most of Irans economic might through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commercial enterprises and the vast financial resources of the religious endowments. Candidates: Ebrahim Raisi, Mostafa Mirsalim The Reformist bloc, which prefers political, economic and social liberalisation and an opening up of Iran to foreign investment.

Candidates: Hassan Rouhani, Mostafa Hashemitaba, Eshaq Jahangiri

The SNSC was formed under a revision that was spearheaded by Khamenei in 1989  the very same year he became the countrys supreme leader.

While the president presides over the SNSCs dozen or so members and selects its secretary, any decision by the council must be approved by the supreme leader to go into effect.

Once the decision is approved, the president has considerable influence over its implementation  but mostly in the diplomatic sphere.

However, when it comes to national security and regional affairs, other powerful establishment figures such as the head of the Republican Guards, also exercise considerable influence over execution of policy.

But that is not to say that the election of an ideologue like Raisi would not have certain unintended consequences for Iran and its regional policy.

Before we get to these unintended consequences, how then do you explain the change of policy between ex-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Rouhani leading to the signing of the nuclear deal?

Bishara: The elections in and by themselves are important because they express the mood of the nation. The supreme leader doesnt have as much influence over the results as he has over the ruling establishment.

A new president usually comes with a popular mandate and does have influence. But he does not have the kind of executive authority that, say, a Turkish, Russian or US president has.

In contrast to what many believe, so-called moderates in Iran may use less bombastic slogans, but they are no less nationalistic than the conservatives. by

Furthermore, the strategic and regional environment have changed greatly in the time between Ahmadinejad and Rouhanis presidential tenures.

During ex-US President Barack Obamas second term in office, Washington was readier to strike a nuclear weapons deal with Tehran. Iran was also in a stronger negotiating position thanks to progress in its nuclear enrichment programme and the US failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere, which emboldened it regionally.

In addition, Irans economic stagnation under Ahmadinejad was the main reason that propelled Rouhani to the presidency with a mandate to break out Irans diplomatic isolation and improve its economy through increased oil revenues and investments. Rouhanis resounding victory in the last presidential election echoed loud and clear in the supreme leaders chambers.

Khamenei was well aware of those challenges, as well as the opportunities that lied ahead and decided, after a direct appeal by the US president, to grant Rouhanis government the latitude necessary to reach a deal with the US and improve economic relations with the West.

OPINION: Irans presidential election puts populism to the test

Khamenei himself has approved the deal  even if it arguably violated some of his red lines. And although he remained a vocal critic of the West, Khamenei later asked its critics to seize their attacks on the nuclear deal.





It was clear during the final presidential debate last week how the two leading opposition candidates  Raisi and Mohammad Ghalibaf, who recently dropped out of the race  were more eager to criticise Rouhani for the lack of economic dividends from the nuclear deal, than for its signing.

Iran is likely to continue with its pragmatic policy towards the US and the West in general.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Tehran has been quite practical in its dealings with the US since the Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani presidency of the 1990s (following the first US Gulf War), through Mohammad Khatamis, (following the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan), and even during the Ahmadinejad presidency (following the US/Iranian backing of the sectarian Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq).

Iran has benefitted greatly from Obamas decision to change the US Middle East strategy from on-shore intervention  Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya  to off-shore balancing. This allowed Tehran to gain considerable power over Iraq and to expand its influence in neighbouring Arab countries, leading to deepening sectarianism in the likes of Iraq and Syria.

Obamas insistence on early withdrawal from Iraq and his reluctance to intervene in Syria have de facto enhanced Irans influence in the region.

I dont think the next Iranian president, regardless of his identity or ideology, could or would roll back Irans gains from the nuclear deal or take the country back into isolation.

What are the unintended consequences you mentioned earlier regarding Irans Middle East policy?

Bishara: The advent of a more ideological president like Raisi is likely to complicate Tehrans regional role without enhancing its influence. If anything, it could very well backfire against Iran.

In contrast to what many believe, so-called moderates in Iran may use less bombastic slogans, but they are no less nationalistic than the conservatives.

Moderates like Rouhani reckon that Irans would benefit from a certain degree of liberalism and openness to the outside world, while the conservatives, like the fundamentalist Raisi, feed on the sentiments of hostility towards the US. They see relations with the West as corrupting and counterproductive.





Under Rouhanis presidency, Iran has been more aggressive and indeed more cynical in pursuing its interests in the Middle East than it was under Ahmadinejad  at times trampling over its neighbours stability to attain greater strategic and political leverage.

Iran has been very effective in advancing its regional interests under the banner of moderation and reform as Rouhani justifies and defends Khameneis Middle East policies.

A more ideological government would alienate Russia and give the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel more reason to push back against Irans strategy in Iraq, Syria and the Gulf region.

Meanwhile, the Iranians are watching with alarm on the eve of the elections, as Saudi leaders are aggressively trying to enlist US President Donald Trumps support against Tehran ahead of his upcoming visit to the kingdom later this week.

Reports from Washington speak of Saudi plans to buy $100-300bn of US arms and invest $40bn more in the US economy, in the hopes that money will buy them leverage and influence with the Trump administration.

Emboldened by Trumps rhetoric, Saudi leaders have already threatened to move the battle to Iran before Iran spreads further in the Gulf region, soliciting a counter Iranian threat to attack the kingdom.

If such unfortunate escalation continues and Iran elects an extremist ideologue, itll make it easier for Riyadh, Washington and Tel Aviv to build a regional coalition against Tehran. Otherwise, expect more of the same under a second-term Rouhani government.

Alas, the choices of leadership in Iran, like those in the rest of the region  and beyond?  seem to balance between bad and worse.
Fighters reportedly attack farmers in city of Maiduguri as food shortages in the countrys northeast worsen.

Boko Haram fighters over the weekend killed at least six farmers who were working on their land near the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, according to civilian militia members and locals.

The fighters, on motorcycles, attacked the farmers who were preparing their fields for the rainy season outside Amrawa village, 16km from the Borno state capital, on Saturday afternoon.

The gunmen attacked the farmers with machetes as they were clearing their farms that have been taken over by weed in preparation for the rains which start in few days, said Ibrahim Liman, a civilian militia member.

WATCH: Boko Haram: Behind the Rise of Nigerias Armed Group

Residents raised the alarm and local militia members pursued the attackers to the nearby village of Sojori, witnesses told AFP news agency.The vigilantes fought the terrorists and killed four while the rest fled, said Liman.

At least 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.6 million made homeless in northeast Nigeria since the start of Boko Harams armed campaign in 2009.

Nigerias government and military maintain that Boko Haram is a spent force, but intermittent attacks and suicide bombings pose a constant threat, particularly in remote areas.





Saturdays attack underscored the vulnerability of rural communities even as the authorities are encouraging displaced people to return home and rebuild their lives.

Northeast Nigeria is in the grip of severe food shortages after farmers missed three rainy seasons in a row because of the conflict.

Crops have been destroyed and food stores looted, while farmers have been either killed or forced to flee to safety in vast camps for the displaced.

Most of the remote region relies on subsistence agriculture, but domestic and international aid agencies are now having to provide food, shelter and healthcare.

The Nigerian authorities mooted a deadline of May 29 to close the camps for the displaced in Maiduguri, though few humanitarian organisations working there believed the date was feasible.

In March last year, Bornos governor, Kashim Shettima, said about 950,000 of the 3.2 million private homes in the state had been destroyed or damaged by years of fighting.

Makeshift camps

Schools, municipal buildings, electricity and water infrastructure and health-care facilities have also been affected.

Those who have returned to their hometowns have found themselves forced into makeshift camps, with water shortages and lack of sanitation increasing the risk of disease.

The insecurity has also affected food distribution, with about 5.1 million people in Borno and the neighbouring states of Yobe and Adamawa said to be severely food insecure.

READ MORE: The women who love and loved Boko Haram

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on Monday that more than one million displaced people or refugees had returned to the region from within Nigeria and outside the country since October.

Cheick Ba, NRC director in Nigeria, said the region was ill prepared to cope given the level of destruction, echoing widespread concern from international aid agencies.

In Damasak, in the far north of Borno near the border with Niger, 180,000 people had returned since December but they lacked the resources to resume farming, the agency said.

The UN has said about $1bn is required for Borno, Yobe and Adamawa this year but funding so far is well short of that goal, despite warnings of famine-like conditions in parts of the region.
Police stop Muhammad Rabbani of campaign group Cage after he landed at Londons Heathrow Airport in November.

A British Muslim activist was arrested after he refused to handover the password to his laptop and mobile phone when he was stopped by police at Londons Heathrow airport in November.

Muhammad Rabbani, the international director of the campaign group Cage, was released on bail after the incident and could be charged under terrorism laws when he reports to the authorities on Wednesday.

The 35-year-old was held under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, which gives police a broad range of powers to search individuals at ports of entry without grounds for suspicion.

Cage, which provides legal advocacy for those affected by British terrorism legislation, said Rabbanis devices contained details about an investigation into torture complicity by a UK ally.

Prevent: A story of community resentment

According to the organisation, Rabbani agreed to share details on the devices relating to himself, but not information about Cages clients, which he said would constitute a breach of confidentiality.

It said after his refusal to handover the credentials, the devices were seized by the police and have not been returned to Rabbani since.

Im facing prison due to the existence of a power that has been operating at the UK borders for 17 years now, Rabbani said in a statement.

Using this power, officers can compel a person to surrender their passwords without cause and theres also no right to remain silent.

No suggestion of offence

Cage said police officers had assured Rabbani that he was not being accused of any crime, and it questioned why such powers were being used when there was no suggestion of an offence being committed.

Ibrahim Mohamoud, Cage spokesperson, said governments should not interfere in the work of human rights defenders, especially those investigating international law violations such as torture.

He said the incident had disrupted an ongoing investigation Cage was carrying out, without specifying details about the case.

The Metropolitan Police, which is responsible for the Greater London area, does not name individuals who are the subject of investigations, in accordance with its policies.

In a statement sent to Al Jazeera, it said: On Sunday, 20 November 2016, a 35-year-old man was stopped under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at Heathrow Airport.

He was subsequently arrested under paragraph 18 of schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Schedule 7 powers

The legislation under which Rabbani was held has been frequently criticised by human rights groups for its allegedly discriminatory implementation and impact on civil liberties.

Under the powers police have, anything a person has on them can be confiscated, including communications and data storage devices.

The British civil liberties group Liberty described the law as breathtakingly broad and intrusive and said ethnic minorities were disproportionately targeted with Asians 42 times more likely to be stopped than white people.

The symbolical power of compelling one to hand over of passwords, the figurative boundary between the personal and the private sphere, is also a nascent frontier in the governments ill-informed counter-terrorism strategy. by Tanzil Chowdhury, University of Manchester

Weve long argued that schedule 7 is ripe for misuse and discrimination, Liberty said on its website.

We believe it contravenes the basic rights to liberty and respect for private life, as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, and is therefore unlawful.

Tanzil Chowdhury of the University of Manchesters School of Law told Al Jazeera, the legislation was being used to villify communities.

Schedule 7  has been used disproportionately against Muslim, Asian and Black communities, he said.

In recent Home Office statistics, drops in the use of Schedule 7 power were noted among all ethnic groups except for Asians which saw a 2 percent increase in the year ending September 2015.

This has the effect of vilifying an entire community who have to continually answer the charge of its imagined criminality.

Chowdhury also warned of of the negative message the polices handling of Rabbanis case sent to Muslims, and condemned the core infringement of a persons privacy.

The symbolical power of compelling one to hand over of passwords, the figurative boundary between the personal and the private sphere, is also a nascent frontier in the governments ill-informed counter-terrorism strategy.

Alleged abuse of the power came to international attention in 2013, when David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained under schedule 7, also at Heathrow.

Miranda was held because authorities believed he was carrying filed relating to NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

A British judge later ruled that authorities had acted lawfully.
Gunfire was heard early on Monday in Ivory Coasts two main cities, according to witnesses, as the military pressed an operation aimed at ending a mutiny by soldiers demanding bonus payments.





In the commercial capital of Abidjan, shots were heard from two military camps in the east of the city, a nearby resident told the Reuters news agency. Frequent gunshots were also heard in the countrys second city of Bouake.

Ive been hearing the sound of Kalashnikovs and a heavier weapon, one Abidjan resident told Reuters.

That began at around 5am (05:00 GMT) and its lasted an hour. Its intense, added the resident who lives near the US embassy and the presidential residence.

There was heavy shooting at the northern entrance to the city and in the city centre. Its calmed a bit but were still hearing gunfire, said one Bouake resident. A second resident confirmed the shooting.

The mutineers often fire in the air to express their anger over the non-payment of bonuses.

READ MORE: Mutinying soldiers seal off Ivory Coasts Bouake

Negotiations on Sunday evening to convince the mutineers to lay down their weapons failed and the situation remains tense, Al Jazeeras Ahmed Idris, reporting from the outskirts of Abidjan, said.

The situation is dangerous in terms of what will happen if a full-blown confrontation erupts between loyal forces and mutineers  the civilian population will be caught in the crossfire.

Six people were wounded by gunfire on Sunday, and one of three protesters shot and wounded on Saturday in Bouake died of his wounds.

The unrest came as authorities launched a military operation to re-establish order after soldiers who staged a mutiny on Friday over bonus payments refused the armys demand to disarm.

The mutineers, most of them former rebel fighters who fought to bring President Alassane Ouattara to power, sealed off Ivory Coasts second-largest city, Bouake, and used gunfire to break up protests against the revolt.

Their revolt began in Bouake when a spokesman for the group dropped demands for extra pay promised by the government during negotiations to end a previous mutiny in January.

Under a deal negotiated with the government in January, the soldiers were to be paid bonuses of 12 million CFA francs (18,000 euros) each, with an initial payment of five million francs that month.

The 8,400 mutineers were due to get the rest of the sum this month.

But the government has struggled to make the payment, with a budget hit by the collapse in the price of cocoa, Ivory Coasts main export.

Last year, the government unveiled an ambitious plan to modernise the 22,000 strong military, part of which would involve the departure of several thousand men, particularly ex-rebels, who will not be replaced.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right protesters bore torches in scenes critics say were reminiscent of KKK rallies.

The mayor of Charlottesville, in the US state of Virginia, has been the target of anti-Semitic tweets after speaking out against far-right white nationalists who converged on a local park carrying blazing torches the night before.

Mayor Mike Signer said two protests led on Saturday by Richard Spencer, a leader of the alt-right movement, came on the same day the city held its annual Festival of Cultures event, which celebrates diversity in the home of the University of Virginia.





The protesters gathered on Charlottesvilles Robert E Lee Park, where a statue of the Confederate general that the city council voted to remove is located.

The city also voted to remove a statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, located in another park. Both changes have been put on hold amid ongoing litigation.

Reminiscent of the KKK

The Charlottesville protests were the latest of several in the US South in recent months over the removal of statues celebrating leaders of the Confederacy, the slave-holding group of states that broke with the North in the early 1860s, prompting the 1861-1865 Civil War.

Youre seeing anti-Semitism in these crazy tweets Im getting and youre seeing a display of torches at night, which is reminiscent of the KKK, Signer, who is Jewish, said in a phone interview with the Reuters news agency.

Theyre sort of a last gasp of the bigotry that this country has systematically overcome.

READ MORE: Battle over Texas confederate monuments heats up

Signer issued a statement on Saturday criticising the torch-carrying marchers as either profoundly ignorant or aiming to instill fear.

I smell Jew, posted an anonymous Twitter user with the handle Great Patriot Trump.

If so, you are going back to Israel. But you will not stay in power here. Not for long.

Charlottesville rejects the alt-right's message of hate. Lee Park has been reclaimed. #NotInOurTown #LoveTrumpsHate pic.twitter.com/ZyM1tXuaGn  Jennifer F Smith (@JFSmith434) May 15, 2017

Spencer, a well-known white supremacist who heads the National Policy Institute, is credited by some with coining the term alt-right to describe online and social media communities on the far right that include white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis, among others.

Although previously confined to websites, online media forums and social media, the alt-right came into the spotlight during the US election campaign and has been increasingly moving to protests and street confrontations in recent months.





In November, media attention honed in on the alt-right when, during a speech at a National Policy Institute conference in Washington, DC, Spencer chanted Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory! as the audience gave Nazi-like salutes.

Steve Bannon, Trumps chief strategist who is on the National Security Council, was previously the executive chair of the far-right Breitbart News blog, which he has described as the platform for the alt-right  although they were late to champion it and many alt-right supporters describe them as alt-light.

Violence erupts

At the Saturday afternoon rally, Spencer led chants of You will not replace us.

Later that night, he tweeted a photo of himself holding a burning tiki torch, his face illuminated with the hashtag torchlight.

READ MORE: What is the alt-right and what does it stand for?

The Charlottesville Daily Progress reported that chanters also cried: Russia is our friend, and Blood and soil.

The torchlight protest lasted only about 10 minutes, when police arrived on the scene after violence erupted, the newspaper said.

Charlottesville police did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Signer said officers would be investigating to see whether any laws were broken.

In recent years, a string of US southern states have moved Confederate-era monuments to museums, an effort that intensified after a white supremacist killed nine black people in a South Carolina church in June 2015.

Growing anarchist movement

The growth of far-right groups across the US since President Donald Trumps election has been accompanied by a massive surge in membership for socialist organisations and anti-fascist activist groups.

During Trumps inauguration on January 20, hundreds of anarchists and anti-fascists were arrested during a black bloc action, in which they covered their faces and clashed with police.

During that demonstration, an anti-fascist activist punched Spencer as he was being interviewed by reporters on camera. The video subsequently went viral on social media outlets and in the news.

The following months, protesters clashed with police and set fires at the University of California  Berkeley, leading to the cancellation of a talk by far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

More recently, far-right protesters and anti-fascists clashed in Berkeley as violence erupted during pro-Trump rallies.
Edouard Philippe, a 46-year-old centre-right French politician and lawyer, has been named prime minister by Emmanuel Macron, Frances new president.

Macron announced Philippes appointment on Monday, his first day in office after his inauguration on Sunday.

Upon taking over his official duties from Bernard Cazeneuve, the outgoing prime minister, Philippe said he is principally rightwing, and yet the general interest must dictate the engagement of the state, of elected officials and of the citizen.

Philippe has been a member of the Union for a Popular Movement and later the Republicans. He has also served as a member of the National Assembly.

He is mayor of the northern port of Le Havre and an MP for the region since 2012 who studied at the same universities as Macron and shares many of his views on the economy and social issues.

Young modernisers

By picking Philippe, Macron appears to have sent a signal to attract other young modernisers from the Republicans to his new centrist party, La Republique En Marche (Republic on the Move or REM), which will contest parliamentary elections in June.

Al Jazeeras David Chater, reporting from Paris, said Philippe is the ideal person for Macron and they share common ideals.

He is the man who Macron believes can increase the number of defections from the right wing inside the National Assembly, he said.





This prime minister can perhaps bring enough people with him, enough defectors to the Republican On The Move party, to insure the next major battle. We are really in the campaign for that battle already  the parliamentary elections.

If Macron wins a sufficiently big majority, perhaps even an absolute majority, he can get through all the reforms that are important to him.

Reaction to Philippes appointment came from across the political spectrum, and predictably was mixed.

Bruno Retailleau, leader of the French Republican senators, criticised it, saying that Macrons tactic involves weakening the right in the parliamentary elections and destabilising the electorate.

Sacred alliance

Reacting via Twitter, Francois Bayrou, leader of the Democratic Movement Party, said: I am very happy with [Philippes] nomination because of his human qualities and because of the composure thus promised to France.

By contrast, Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader who lost the presidency to Macron, said in a statement that Philippes nomination is the perfect summary of the last 10 years in France, this sacred alliance between the old right and left.

The Greens criticised Macrons liberal intentions and renewed their appeal for the creation of an environment ministry.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the defeated far-left candidate, also criticised Macrons choice, saying in a statement that the new president has just acquired the entire traditional political class and returned to the old order.

Macron, a former minister and investment banker, was elected as the countrys youngest-ever leader since Napoleon on May 7.
Government offices, banks and hospitals around the world are bracing themselves for a possible repeat of Fridays global cyberattack, while tech giant Microsoft pinned blame on the US government for not disclosing more software vulnerabilities.

Cybersecurity experts said the spread of the worm dubbed WannaCry  ransomware that locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries  had slowed but that the respite might only be brief amid fears it could cause new havoc on Monday when employees return to work.





New versions of the worm are expected, they said, and the extent  and economic cost  of the damage from Fridays attack were unclear.

Britains National Cyber Security Centre joined others in warning of more cases of ransomware attacks this week, predicting that the problem could be at a significant scale because some infected machines have not yet been detected, and existing infections can spread within networks.

The warning echoed that from Europes policing agency earlier on Sunday. Europol said that the malware attack was at an unprecedented level, and that the numbers were still increasing.

It is believed to be the biggest online extortion ever, hitting British hospitals, German rail and companies and government agencies.

Officials urged organisations and companies to immediately update their security software.

READ MORE: What ransomware is and how to avoid it

The malicious software used in the attack, which has the ability to automatically spread across large networks by exploiting a known bug in Microsofts Windows operating system, was stolen from the US National Security Agency.

Brad Smith, Microsofts president and chief legal officer, criticised governments for stockpiling software code that can be used by hackers.

In a post on Microsofts blog, Smith wrote: An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.

He added that governments should report vulnerabilities that they discover to software companies, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.

The NSA and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the Microsoft statement, Reuters news agency reported.





Speaking to Al Jazeera on Smiths post, Larry Magid, a technology journalist and CEO of ConnectSafely.org, said: There is some speculation that this code was being stored in the NSA labs, potentially as a cyberweapon that the US might have used against its own adversaries. And that is a big concern because code, unlike physical weapons, is very difficult to protect.

Magid added that there should be more cooperation to prevent future attacks: There needs to be better sharing of information between government and the private sector, especially tech companies, and obviously people need to be educated.

Meanwhile, an executive at a cybersecurity firm that helped block Fridays attack said that new variations of the malicious worm are circulating  and that researchers expect one to develop that cannot be stopped.

Ryan Kalember, senior vice president at Proofpoint Inc, said that millions of devices could be vulnerable if they have not applied security patches over the weekend.

He said if a new variant without a kill switch popped up, organisations would be on their own to prevent it from taking over their computers.

Proofpoint and a British cybersecurity researcher teamed up on Friday to derail the attack.
Gunfire has erupted in several cities in Ivory Coast, according to witnesses, as the military presses an operation aimed at ending a mutiny by soldiers demanding bonus payments.

Heavy gunfire was heard early on Monday in the east of the commercial capital, Abidjan, and Ivory Coasts second largest city, Bouake, which remains sealed off by mutinuous soldiers.

Later in the day, gunfire broke out a military camp in the port city of San Pedro, and mutineers blocked the main border crossing with neighbouring Burkina Faso.

Many businesses and schools have closed operations in Abidjan and other cities for fear of worsening unrest, and APBEF, Ivory Coasts banking association, has decided to shutter all banks.





Al Jazeeras Ahmed Idris, reporting from Abidjan on Monday, said the four-day mutiny had paralysed economic activity and brought large parts of the country to a standstill.

It looks like the crisis is spreading gradually  There is fear that if things escalate, it could result in loss of lives and injuries to many people, he said.

Heavy shooting was also heard in Daloa, a hub for the western cocoa-growing regions.

A spokesman for the mutiny denied that any clashes occurred in Bouake and said the renegade soldiers were firing in the air to dissuade any advance on the city.

On Sunday six people were wounded by gunfire in Bouake and one of three protesters shot and wounded there the previous day died of his wounds.

Mutiny over bonus

The unrest comes as authorities conduct a military operation to re-establish order after soldiers who staged a mutiny on Friday over bonus payments rejected the armys demand to disarm.

The mutineers, most of them former rebel fighters who fought to bring President Alassane Ouattara to power, have used gunfire to break up protests against the revolt, which began when a spokesman for the group dropped demands for extra pay promised by the government during negotiations to end a previous mutiny in January.

On Sunday, loyalist troops were deployed to Bouake and a delegation was sent in to meet leaders of the mutineers.

However, negotiations  to convince the mutineers to lay down their weapons have failed and the situation remains tense, Al Jazeeras Idris reported on Monday.

READ MORE: Ivory Coast launches military operation to quash mutiny

The situation is dangerous in terms of what will happen if a full-blown confrontation erupts between loyal forces and mutineers  the civilian population will be caught in the crossfire.

Under a deal negotiated with the government in January, the soldiers were to be paid bonuses of 12m CFA francs (18,000 euros) each, with an initial payment of five million francs that month.

The 8,400 mutineers were due to get the rest of the sum this month.

But the government has struggled to make the payment, with a budget hit by the collapse in the price of cocoa, Ivory Coasts main export.

Last year, the government unveiled an ambitious plan to modernise the 22,000 strong military, part of which would involve the departure of several thousand men, particularly former rebels, who will not be replaced.
Mother of 23-year-old victim who was killed in attack north of Delhi had alerted authorities about one of the accused.

An Indian woman was gang-raped and then brutally murdered by men who smashed her skull with bricks after she had threatened to inform authorities, police in the northern state of Haryana said on Monday.

Two men were arrested for rape and murder in Sonipat town, and six more were being investigated after the victims mother accused them of involvement, Ashwin Shenvi, superintendent of police, told the Reuters news agency.

The 23-year old woman, a labourer, was taken by the men  at least one of whom knew her  by car from near her home in Sonipat to the nearby city of Rohtak, where they raped her, Shenvi said.

When she said to them she would complain, they hammered her skull in with bricks, he said. The way that they brutalised her is horrific.

READ MORE: A dark trade  Rape videos for sale in India

The woman had gone missing on May 9, and her decomposed and mutilated body was found in an open field in Rohtak two days later. Attempts were made to disfigure her completely to prevent identification of the victim, local media said, citing a post-mortem report.

The mother of the victim had previously registered a complaint against one of the accused for pressuring her daughter into marrying him, but the disagreement was settled between the two parties, Shenvi said.

Sonipat is 44km north of Indias capital, New Delhi.

Shock and outrage

Sexual violence against women is a highly charged issue in India.

Womens rights activists and politicians have demanded justice for the victim, whose case resembles many aspects of the fatal gang-rape of Jyoti Singh, a student on a bus in New Delhi in 2012.

The case sparked nationwide protests about entrenched violence against women and the failure of authorities to protect them.

When the accused in Jyoti Singhs case were punished, our village spoke about the verdict. We thought at least this will deter men, but unfortunately even today girls are not safe and men are not scared, the mother of the victim in Sonipat told the NDTV broadcaster.

India has enacted tougher jail sentences for rapists and promised to try those accused through fast-track courts but rape, acid attacks and domestic violence remain common.





Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said that the Rohtak gang-rape case will be heard in a fast-track court, the Hindustan Times reported. Additionally, the Haryana government announced financial assistance of Rs.10.5 lakh [$16,381] for the victims family.

Opposition leader and Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi expressed deep shock and outrage over the incident, highlighting the need for revisiting the issue of womens safety.

A team by the National Commission for Women, a womens rights group, visited the victims family in Sonipat, and demanded capital punishment for all those involved in the gang-rape and murder.

Indian media also reported a gang-rape in the city of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi over the weekend.

On average, 50 crimes against women are registered every day by police in Delhi, including at least four cases of rape, according to a senior official in the federal home ministry.
A Palestinian fisherman has been killed after the Israeli navy opened fire on a vessel it accused of breaching the blockade north of the Gaza Strip.

Nizar Ayash, the Palestinian fishermens union chief, said Mondays shooting and the arrest of four other crew happened in one incident, and two more arrests were made when the military boarded another Gaza boat overnight.

An Israeli military spokesperson confirmed the shooting.

A vessel deviated from the designated fishing zone in the northern Gaza Strip, she told AFP news agency.





Naval forces in the area called upon the vessel to halt and fired warning shots into the air.

She said the boat ignored the warning and the navy then opened fire.

The dead mans family identified him as Mohammed Bakr, 25. His body was transferred to a morgue in Gaza ahead of his funeral later on Monday.

Bakrs death came as Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, Israel and the world held rallies to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the Nakba.

The Nakba, or the Day of the Catastrophe, marks the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, the destruction of more than 500 villages and towns, and the creation of the state of Israel.

Fishing off the northern part of the territory adjacent to Israel is limited to six nautical miles offshore and the Israeli navy regularly fires at Palestinians at the zones outer limit.

Such incidents rarely result in deaths, however.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said several boats were chased in separate incidents over the past 24 hours.

Israeli blockade

Israel and Palestinians in Gaza have fought three wars since 2008 and the territory has been under an Israeli blockade for 10 years.

The Israeli military says it patrols Gazas waters to prevent the smuggling of weapons into the territory and to stop attacks.

READ MORE: Who killed Gazas fisherman Muhammad al-Hissi?

UN officials have called for the blockade to be lifted, citing deteriorating humanitarian conditions, but Israel says it is needed to keep Hamas, which runs the strip, from importing weapons or materials used to make them.

In 2016, Israel detained at least 70 Gaza fishermen who had strayed beyond the border, a senior naval commander said.

About 4,000 fishermen work off the coast, more than half of whom live below the poverty line.
Deadly air raid on Abu Kamal reported just hours after deaths of 12 women blamed on coalition strike in nearby Raqqa.

An air raid has killed 23 civilians in a Syrian town on the border with Iraq held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), according to a monitoring network.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Right (SOHR) said Mondays deaths in Abu Kamal were caused by an earlier morning air strikes by jets belonging to the US-led coalition fighting ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

They hit a residential area at 3am while people were sleeping, causing the high toll, he said.

ISIL, also known as ISIS, was using apartments in the targeted area as local headquarters, he said.

The coalition, in an emailed response to the Associated Press news agency, said it did not conduct air strikes on Abu Kamal on Monday.

READ MORE: US says Assad using crematorium to hide mass killings

In February the Iraqi air force, which is battling ISIL across the border in Mosul, carried out air raids in Abu Kamal and another nearby border town.





Mondays deaths in Abu Kamal followed those of 12 women the previous day in a raid on Akayrshi, a village in the east of Syrias Raqqa province.

Referring to the Akayrsh incident, SOHR said the women died when the US-led coalition struck vehicles carrying farm workers home from fields in the afternoon.

The attack wounded 12 other women, local sources inside Raqqa province told German news agency DPA.

They said the raid targeted a car in which the workers were returning from cotton fields.

#YPG controlled AlAtahana  Tal Maz  AlMalali villages in the northern countryside of #Raqqa yesterday.     (@Raqqa_SL) May 14, 2017

Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, an activist group opposed to both ISIL and the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, confirmed the news of the womens deaths in a Facebook post.

It said at least three coalition air strikes hit civilian cars over the weekend.

Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently also said via Twitter that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had taken control of several villages as part of an ongoing, multi-pronged offensive on Raqqa.

The coalition said that it did conduct strikes near the western edge of Akayrshi on Sunday and that it would assess the reports.

Heavy bombardment

Fighters of the SDF, an alliance of Syrian Kurds and Arabs, were about 4km from the northeastern edge of Raqqa city and 16km from its northwestern edge, the SOHR said on Sunday.

It said US-led coalition fighter jets were heavily bombarding ISIL positions in Raqqas rural outskirts.

In November, the SDF started a major offensive aimed at capturing Raqqa, which has been occupied by ISIL since 2014.

On Friday, the SDF announced it would soon begin a final attack to capture the province.

The announcement followed US President Donald Trumps decision on Monday to approve direct arms shipments to the SDFs main fighting elements  the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG)  to ensure a clear victory over ISIL.

The war on Raqqa has already seen the YPG capture large expanses of the surrounding province with help from the US-led coalition bombing ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

This week, following months of fighting, the SDF seized the strategic town of Tabqa, to the west of Raqqa, and a major hydroelectric dam nearby.

Tabqa lies on the banks of the Euphrates River, about 55km west of Raqqa, the provinces main city which has at least 300,000 residents.

Tabqa was taken by ISIL in August 2014, following its capture of Raqqa in early 2014.

The battle for Tabqa was marked by fears that the dam would be severely damaged and collapse, leading to massive flooding downstream.

The SDF said in a statement that Tabqa would be turned over to a civilian council once fully secured.

READ MORE: Syrias civil war explained from the beginning

It also said the authority that oversees the Tabqa dam would remain a national Syrian institution that will serve all the regions of Syria without exception.

Trumps decision to arm the YPG revived a dispute with Turkey, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling for an immediate reversal.

Turkey views the YPG as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought the state in the southeast of Turkey since 1984 and is considered a terrorist group by the US and the EU.
French and German leaders announce they agreed on a road map for future EU reform and pledge close cooperation.

Frances new President Emmanuel Macron secured backing on Monday from key ally Chancellor Angela Merkel for his bid to shake up Europe, despite scepticism in Berlin over his proposed reforms.

Macron said in a joint news conference he would be an open, direct and constructive partner of Germany and also called for more pragmatism in bilateral relations.

Merkel also underlined the need for closer cooperation in order to push new EU initiatives forward, and promised to be a trusting, friendly and close partner of France.

Berlin hopes to gain new momentum and support from Paris for reforms of the European Union in general, but particularly for the eurozone. While Merkel and Macron did not decide on any specific measures, they agreed to stick to a road map of talks and negotiations.

We can give the entire [European] construct a new dynamic, Merkel said, adding that Europe could progress only with a strong France within.





Germany and France are the eurozones two biggest economies. It is a long-standing tradition that French presidents choose the German capital for their first official visit.

During his campaign, Macron presented ideas on reforming the eurozone, noting the currency bloc cannot go on as it is if it wants to avoid falling prey to protest and populism. Among reforms he wants to see are setting up a separate budget for the 28-member group, as well as giving it its own parliament and finance minister.

But the proposals sent alarm bells ringing in Berlin, and initial relief about his victory against far-right leader Marine Le Pen had quickly given way to fears about his reform plans.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned such deep-reaching reforms would require treaty changes, which were not realistic at a time when Europe is being hit by a surge of anti-euro populism.

READ MORE: EU future tops agenda as Germanys Merkel hosts Frances Macron

But at the press conference following their talks, Merkel adopted a conciliatory tone and offered what appeared to be a key concession.

From the German point of view, its possible to change the treaty if it makes sense, she said.

Macron said France and Germany had come at a historic moment in their history and both have a responsibility to fight against populism and restore faith in the European project.

He also announced he would initiate deep reforms in France in order to tackle unemployment.
State media says latest test was aimed at verifying missiles capability to carry a large scale heavy nuclear warhead.

North Korea said on Monday it had successfully launched a new type of ballistic missile in its latest test which it said was aimed at building capacity to launch nuclear missiles.

The North fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday in a launch that came just days after South Koreas new President Moon Jae-in, who has called for closer engagement with Pyongyang, was inaugurated in Seoul.





Sundays launch was of a new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket named the Hwasong-12, the official Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

Leader Kim Jong-un personally oversaw the test, it said, and hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing.

Kim accused the United States of browbeating countries that have no nukes and warned Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland is in the Norths sighting range for strike, KCNA reported.

EXPLAINED: Why North Korea tests nuclear weapons

The missile was launched at the highest angle so as not to affect the security of neighbouring countries and flew 787km reaching an altitude of 2,111.5km, KCNA said.

Experts said the altitude reached by the missile tested meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it travelled.

But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000km, according to experts.

It represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile, aerospace engineering specialist John Schilling wrote on the respected 38 North website.

The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead, KCNA said.





It appeared to demonstrate an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that could reliably strike the US base at Guam in the Pacific, he said, and more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

In a statement after the launch, US President Donald Trumps White House called North Korea a flagrant menace and urged far stronger sanctions against the isolated nation.

The North says it needs atomic weapons to defend itself against the threat of invasion and has carried out two atomic tests and dozens of missile launches since the beginning of last year.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have heightened in recent weeks due to Pyongyangs nuclear programme and missile tests and threats from Trump that the US could take unilateral action against it in retaliation.

The timing is particularly significant because South Korea has a new president  testing him is partly what this is about, Al Jazeeras Andrew Thomas, reporting from Seoul, said. This is also a sign that they dont feel intimidated by Donald Trump, he added.

It does seem that this may be a new type of rocket that is being tested  that makes this the most significant launch in at least a year.
Protests and vigils in occupied West Bank, Gaza and Israel as Palestinians mark forced displacement from lands in 1948.

Palestinians commemorated the 69th anniversary of the Nakba, the day of catastrophe, in which Israel was officially declared a state following the forced removal of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and the destruction of over 500 villages and towns.

People across historic Palestine  including Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip  held rallies, marches and candlelight vigils on Monday, as well as sounding sirens.

Israel has made publicly commemorating the Nakba increasingly difficult for Palestinians, with a Nakba Law that authorises Israels finance minister to revoke funding from institutions that reject Israels character as a Jewish state or mark the countrys Independence Day as a day of mourning.

At least 13 Palestinians were injured after Israeli troops fired rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas at demonstrators outside of the Beit El settlement and military base near Ramallah, according to emergency workers.

READ MORE: How Israels violent birth destroyed Palestine

Thousands of people in the central West Bank cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem poured into the streets carrying Palestinian flags and keys symbolic of the right of return for refugees who lost their homes during the Nakba.

Monday also marks the 29th day of a hunger strike launched by 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. Prisoners children are expected to deliver speeches following the march in the West Bank.

Marwan Barghouti, a hunger striker and jailed Palestinian leader, urged Palestinians to engage in civil disobedience on Nakba day.

Barghouti, who has reportedly lost 13 kilograms so far in the course of his hunger strike, vowed to continue until the prisoners demands were met.

Prisoners are calling for better medical services, installation of a public telephone in all prisons to allow communication with relatives, more visitation rights with family members as well as other improved conditions.

My son and the other political prisoners are only fighting for freedom. We are people like everyone else; we have mothers, we have colour in our eyes, we love. But unlike other people, we dont have a homeland, At a Nakba protest in Ramallah, Mahmoud Ziadeh, father of political prisoner and hunger striker Majd Ziadeh, told Al Jazeera:

Ive been living Nakba every day since I was born. But theres no bigger Nakba than our childrens strike, a mother of a hunger-striking prisoner said.

Meanwhile, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who participated in the failed Oslo Accords to bring about a two-state solution to the Israeli occupation, has demanded an Israeli apology over the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.

Our nation marking 69 years of the Nakba, our national catastrophe, is symbolised in our exile and the systematic denial of our rights, said Erekat in a statement.

READ MORE: Why is Israel afraid of the Nakbas March of Return?

Palestinian refugees of the Nakba and their descendants have lived and outside of Palestine since 1948, with millions of them still stateless or languishing in surrounding refugee camps.

Israel has prevented them from returning to their homes. Palestinians have cited UN Resolution 194 that they say preserves their Right to Return to Palestine.

Generations of Palestinians who remain in Palestine know nothing but a life under military occupation.

For me, I was born under occupation. I was raised under occupation. I live every day under occupation, Palestinian journalist Elyia Gorbia told Al Jazeera at the demonstration in Ramallah.

Its only getting worse. They are increasing their occupation strategy, the settlements are expanding, and more lands are being confiscated to build settlements. The number of prisoners in jails is also increasing. Daily attacks are increasing, she said.
Three prisoners captured, 17 shot dead, and 57 still at large in a mass jailbreak from Buimo jail, according to reports.

Prison guards have killed at least 17 prisoners after a mass breakout at a jail in Papua New Guinea (PNG), according to reports, with dozens of inmates still on the run.

The incident took place in Buimo jail in the Pacific nations second-largest city, Lae, on Friday, but only became public after media reports on Monday.

Unfortunately these incidents, tragic as they are, happen all too frequently in Papua New Guinea as there is poor accountability with police and security officers, Kate Schuetze, Amnesty Internationals Pacific Researcher, told the Reuters news agency.

The PNG Post-Courier and The National newspapers both cited local police as confirming 17 people were killed, three were caught and 57 were still at large.

These are undesirable people and will be a threat to the community, Lae police metropolitan commander Chief Superintendent Anthony Wagambie Jr said of those who escaped, warning the public to be vigilant.

The majority of those who escaped were arrested for serious crimes and were in custody awaiting trial.

A good number were arrested by police last year for mainly armed robberies, car thefts, break and enter and stealing.

Buimo is the same prison where police shot dead 12 inmates during a jailbreak last year. The jail, one of the largest in the country, has been criticised in the past for overcrowding and for poor prisoner conditions.

Wagambie urged family members and associates of the escapees not to harbour them.

I am warning them that they will be caught. They must do what is good for them and surrender, he said.
Court hears case for secret ballot in no-confidence motion against Jacob Zuma amid allegations of intimidation of MPs.

South Africas top court is debating whether legislators can cast secret ballots in a no-confidence vote in President Jacob Zuma as hundreds protest in Johannesburg demanding his removal.

Zuma, who has been implicated in a series of corruption scandals, has survived similar votes in the parliament the past.

Baleka Mbete, parliament speaker and a senior official of Zumas African National Congress (ANC), said she had no powers to agree to a secret ballot.

The ANC holds a majority in parliament.

The opposition believes the latest motion will have better prospects if it is conducted in secret.

READ MORE: Thuli Madonsela on Jacob Zuma and fixing South Africa

Dali Mpofu, a lawyer representing the opposition United Democratic Movement party, told the Constitutional Court in televised proceedings that the speaker had an obligation to arrange for a private ballot.

Richard Calland, a member of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC), told Al Jazeera the opposition was lobbying for a secret ballot because ANC legislators were under pressure to vote in Zumas favour.

They [the opposition] believe, as do many of us, that some of the back bench men of the ANC would not be able to exercise a free will when voting on this matter because they all fear for their jobs, fear for their future, he said.





Therefore, the secret ballot is necessary to protect them and the constitution.

Thousands of South Africans have staged protests in recent weeks demanding Zumas resignation, and opposition parties, religious groups and civil society activists have joined forces against him.

The protests began when Zuma dismissed Pravin Gordhan, his widely respected finance minister.

The dismissal led to a sharp fall of the countrys currency and stock markets, causing losses worth millions of dollars.

Mmusi Maimane, leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) party, has appealed to ANC legislators to vote with their conscience.

ANC members of parliament will have to choose between what is best for themselves and what is best for South Africa, he told protesters gathered outside the Constitutional Court on Monday.

They did not swear [their oath of office] to be faithful to Jacob Zuma, or to the ANC  . They promised to be faithful to South Africa.

Gap in the rules

The constitution calls for a secret ballot to elect the president, but it is silent on the procedure for a no-confidence motion, according to Calland, the CASAC member.

Theres a gap in the rules. Theres a gap in the constitution  . And thats why the matter has ended up in court, he said.

The ANC was led by Nelson Mandela to power in the 1994 post-apartheid elections.

OPINION: Is the downfall of the ANC in South Africa inevitable?

However, the party has lost popularity under Zuma in the face of a number of candals and a failure to address slow economic growth, high unemployment and glaring income disparities

South Africas Constitutional Court last year found Zuma guilty of violating the constitution after he refused to repay taxpayer money used to refurbish his private rural 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.
Syrian troops and allies move towards Iraqi and Jordanian border areas as US-backed groups rout ISIL, say rebels.

The Syrian army and allied armed groups have started moving large numbers of troops to a desert region on the countrys border with Iraq and Jordan as US-backed rebels make advances nearby, according to rebel sources.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency on Monday, rebel sources and commanders said that hundreds of Syrian soldiers and fighters from Iranian-backed militias have in recent days poured into the town of Sabaa Biyar, located in a sparsely populated desert territory that stretches to the Jordanian and Iraqi border known as the Syrian Badia.





In recent weeks, US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters had been advancing in the area, from which the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) recently pulled out.

Sabaa Biyar, a remote town near the strategic Damascus-Baghdad highway, was captured by the army and its allies last week as they sought to prevent areas left by ISIL from falling into the hands of Western-backed rebels such as the FSA.

They have sent big reinforcements from artillery to tanks and armoured vehicles, Major Issam Al Reis, the spokesperson for FSAs Southern Front group, told Reuters.

The Syrian army was not immediately available for comment.

READ MORE: Syrias de-escalation zones  We dont trust Russia

Syrias military has been alarmed by two months of FSA advances against ISIL that allowed the rebels to secure a large swath of sparsely populated territory stretching from the town of Bir Qassab, some 50km southeast of Damascus, all the way to the borders with Iraq and Jordan.

The regimes plan is to reach the Iraqi-Syrian border and cut the road on our advance further towards the north east against [ISILs] strongholds there after they lost territory in the Badia, Reis said.

Syrian government fighter jets struck rebel outposts near the borders with Jordan and Iraq last Tuesday, while over the past few days they stepped up surveillance missions in the Badia and struck rebel outposts in the town of Bir Qassab.

Jordan alarmed

The push by the Syrian army and its Iranian-backed allies could risk bringing them to close to the Tanf base near the Iraqi border, where US special forces operate and train FSA rebels, rebels told Reuters.

Yet, the presence of Iranian-backed fighters from Iraq and Lebanons Hezbollah in that area has alarmed Jordan, a US ally, which backs rebel groups.

READ MORE: Syrias civil war explained from the beginning

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said the kingdom did not accept the presence of pro-government armed groups as much they fought the threat of the groups such as ISIL.

The kingdom has long been trying to prevent opposition-held southern Syria from falling to ISIL.





Rebels say the ultimate goal of the Syrian armys push in the Badia was to link its forces with Iraqs paramilitary groups on the other side of the border.

The Damascus-Baghdad highway was a major weapons supply route for Iranian weapons into Syria until ISIL seized large territory along the Iraqi-Syrian border, according to regional intelligence sources.

Rebels say they have this week to target outposts they believed were manned by militias backing the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian desert will not accept new occupiers. It it got rid of Baghdadis caliphate [ISIL head] not so that Irans terrorist militias take its place. It is our strategic depth, said Captain Ahmed Tamer, the head of the Ahmed Abdo Martyrs Forces.

Rebel evacuations

Elsewhere in Syria, the government and rebels have reached population transfer agreements where rebels and their families are besieged and then evacuated to Idlib, an opposition stronghold.

On Sunday, around 1,500 rebels and their families were moved from the Damascus neighbourhood of Qaboun after years of controlling the area. Backed into a corner as Syrian government forces besieged them, the rebels agreed to move to Idlib.

The loss of Qaboun followed the fall of Barzeh, another neighbourhood rebels recently left, and is another blow to rebels as they battle to keep a foothold in the capital and face government troops who are supported by Russian air power and Iranian-backed militias.

READ MORE: The history of Hezbollah, from Israel to Syria

Assad has promoted the use of such evacuations, along with what his government calls reconciliation deals for rebel-held areas that surrender to the government, as a way of reducing bloodshed in the six-year-old civil war.

However, the United Nations has criticised both the use of siege tactics, which precede such deals, and the evacuations themselves as amounting to forcible displacement.

The Syrian army has been steadily defeating pockets of rebellion near the capital, with the help of Russian air power and Iranian-backed armed groups.
Trump administration says it has evidence Syrian authorities are burning bodies at Saydnaya prison near Damascus.

The US administration has accused the Syrian government of installing a crematorium in a military prison in order to destroy the remains of thousands of murdered prisoners.

Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the state departments Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, gave reporters satellite pictures apparently showing snow melting on the roof of the facility.

Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium, he said, referring to a military jail north of Damascus.

Although the regimes many atrocities are well documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya.





Jones said the information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US intelligence community and that as many as 50 people per day are thought to be hanged at Saydnaya.

He did not give an official estimate for the total number killed, but cited an Amnesty International report that between 5,000 and 11,000 people had died during the 2011-2015 period in the prison.

President Bashar al-Assads Syrian government, he alleged, had detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same period.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said later in the day that the Assad regime has sunk to a new level of depravity.

Spicer said the government in Damascus had done so with seemingly unconditional support from Russia and Iran.

In his press briefing, Jones said Russia had aided or passively looked away while the government carried out atrocities.

Satellite photograph

The latest satellite photograph presented by the state department dated to January 2015, more than two years ago.

It was not immediately clear why the US waited to present its evidence.

Syrias war, now in its seventh year, has killed nearly half-a-million people and displaced more than half of the countrys pre-war population.

READ MORE: Air raid kills 23 civilians in ISIL-held town

One newly-released image, a commercial satellite photograph dating back to January 2015, shows snow melting on the roof of a building attached to the Saydnaya military complex.

This, along with an earlier picture allegedly showing heavy-duty ventilation systems on the structure, appear to support earlier claims by rights groups that Saydnaya is an execution centre.

Jones said the state departments information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US intelligence community.
Ex-president, who is in Ivory Coast, accused of authorising the killings of unarmed protesters in October 2014 uprising.

A closely-watched trial of Burkina Fasos Blaise Compaore, former president, and members of his cabinet is under way in the capital, Ouagadougou.

Compaore, who fled to neighbouring Ivory Coast during a popular revolt in 2014 against his attempts to change the constitution and extend his 27-year-rule, is being tried in absentia.

Along with 34 ex-government ministers, Compaore faces assassination charges for allegedly authorising the use of force against unarmed protesters during the uprising that toppled him, killing at least 24 people.

READ MORE: Coup attempt thwarted, says Burkina Fasos government

Al Jazeeras Nicolas Haque, reporting on Monday from outside the court in Ouagadougou, said defence lawyers had launched an appeal questioning the format of the trial.

The judges who were nominated by the national assembly are in fact politicians belonging to the ruling party, he said, adding that a separate appeal had also been launched by the lawyers of the victims.

They [victims] say they want to be represented in this trial  at the moment they are not, as they are being represented by the prosecution, Haque said.

Important moment

Some Burkinabes say they are disappointed that the post-Compaore government led by Roch Marc Kabore has not delivered on its reform pledges and express regret at Compaores absence.

Still, they welcomed the opening of the trial  the first in a series of cases being investigated to be brought to trial.

What most people here want is to see Compaore himself to take part in this trial, Haque said.

So its really an important moment for people in Burkina Faso  not only for justice but also to record the history of actually what happened during that uprising in October 2014.
US President Donald Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russian officials during a meeting last week, potentially jeopardising a source of intelligence about ISIL, The Washington Post reported on Monday, citing current and former US officials.

The newspaper said the information Trump relayed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak had been provided by a US ally through a highly sensitive intelligence-sharing arrangement.

The ally had not given Washington permission to share the material with Moscow, and Trumps decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the Post said, citing unnamed officials.

WATCH: Donald Trump set for first foreign trip as US president

During his Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump went off-script and began describing details about an ISIL threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft, the officials said.





The officials are also quoted as saying that Trump indicated the town under ISIL control where this information was obtained, giving rise to the possibility that ISIL could learn more about collection methods of the information or even who got the information in the first place, Al Jazeeras Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said.

While discussing classified matters with an adversary would be illegal for most people, the president has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that Trumps disclosures broke the law, the Post said.

Trumps meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak at the White House came a day after he fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the agencys investigation into possible links between Trumps presidential campaign and Moscow.

Asked about the disclosures, Trumps national security adviser, HR McMaster, who participated in the meeting, said no intelligence sources or methods were discussed that were not already known publicly, the Post reported.

This story is false. The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced, said Dina Powell, deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy.

US officials have told Reuters news agency that US agencies are in the process of drawing up plans to expand a ban on passengers carrying laptop computers onto US-bound flights from several countries in conflict zones because of new intelligence about how armed groups are refining techniques for installing bombs in laptops.

So serious are assessments of the increased threat that Washington is considering banning passengers from several European countries, including Britain, from carrying laptops in a cabin on US-bound flights. The United States has consulted about the intelligence with allied governments and airlines.

READ MORE: Trump defends Comey dismissal amid calls for probe

According to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Monday, a majority of Americans, including a growing number of Republicans, want to see an independent investigation to sort out any connections between Russia and Trump during the 2016 election campaign.

The May 10-14 poll, which was conducted after Trump fired Comey, suggests the public is increasingly uneasy with allegations of meddling by the Russians in the US election. Trumps dismissal of Comey intensified calls by Democrats for an independent probe.

According to the poll, 59 percent of adults, including 41 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats, agreed that Congress should launch an independent investigation into communications between the Russian government and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
By the time when Beijing was ready for the two-day grand forum of Belt and Road, good news came from eastern Chinas Zhejiang Province. On Saturday, May 13, the 1,000th freight train connecting China and Europe departed Yiwu and bound for Madrid. A record so far with an increase of 612 trips over the same period last year.



The Yixinou line runs freight services twice per week with a lead time of 16 days. This allows goods from China to arrive in Europe in a shorter time than via shipping by sea.



The train carries Yiwus small commodities such as household items, toys, decors, and garments to Europe. Upon return, European goods such as wine, olive oil and cosmetic products are imported to China. Trains returning from Europe are now scheduled for once a month.



The Yixinou line launched its maiden trip in November 2014. This rail link, measuring over 13,000 kilometers, is by far the longest in the world.



Since then, Yiwu has started operation of a direct rail freight service to London. The Yiwu-London line passes through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France.



As part of their intercontinental rail freight services, the CR Express has now developed a total of 39 train routes connecting 16 cities in China to Europe. Rail freight provides a cheaper shipment method to air, and a more time-efficient option than sea.



According to logistics expert Wang Jianming from Yiwu, the launch of the Yixinou lines not only strengthens trade ties between China and Europe, but also promotes people-to-people and cultural exchanges.



He reveals that the city of Yiwu is also holding discussions with European countries such as Latvia and Poland to establish partnerships and collaborations in trade, education and logistics sectors.



Wang is optimistic that collaborations between China and Europe will flourish as the CR Express runs on a more frequent basis.










English News B&R initiative offers opportunities for Philippines economic plan: officials

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 15 Mai 2017



The forum on Dutertenomics and the Belt and Road initiative was hosted by the Philippine delegation attending the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation started on May 14 in Beijing.

By Yu Jinghao from People's Daily



The forum on Dutertenomics and the Belt and Road initiative was hosted by the Philippine delegation attending the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation started on May 14 in Beijing.



They believed that as the core of the Dutertenomics is to create jobs and stimulate economy through dozens of major infrastructure projects, the Belt and Road initiative put forward by China will offer tremendous opportunities for the Philippines in terms of infrastructure upgrading, poverty alleviation and job creation.



Government officials including Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, Secretary Carlos Dominguez of the Department of Finance, Director-General Ernesto M. Pernia of National Economic and Development Authority, Secretary Benjamin Diokno of the Department of Budget and Management, Secretary Arthur Tugade of the Department of Transportation, and Chairperson of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority talked about their suggestions on how to align the two proposals.



On the forum, the Philippines' goal of economic growth in 2017 was declared to be 6.5% to 7.5%, and the goal for the period from 2018 to 2022 has been set at 7% to 8%.



To realize the target, the country has launched a large-scale infrastructure projects named "Build! Build! Build!", based on which an estimated 8.4 trillion pesos ($170 billion) would be invested on the construction of infrastructures.



About 20% of the capital will be raised through foreign loans. In addition, the Duterte administration's infrastructure spending would reach 7.4% of GDP by 2022.



Tugade introduced a batch of domestic infrastructure construction projects such as the Luzon Expressway, Mindanao Railway, Manila's Metro Rail, new terminal of Clark International Airport and Subic-Clark Railway, to the attendees.



He also announced a plan to build the city of Clark, 80 kilometers to the north of Manila, into a new urban center, in a bid to relieve the traffic burden of the capital city. So far, the country has kicked off the planning and construction of the new city.



Tugade said Chinese investment is welcomed in the Philippines, and he appreciated China's $75 million non-reimbursable assistance to build bridges spanning the Pasig River to help relief the traffic burden in Manila.



Improved relations with China have brought the Philippines a massive opportunity for development, said Ricardo L. Saludo, Managing Director of Center for Strategy, Enterprise & Intelligence.



The Philippines can connect its ongoing massive infrastructure planning with the Belt and Road initiative, which advocates integration and interconnectivity, to attain new impetus for the country's economic development, he added.



An international transportation pivot surrounding the Subic Port and the Clark Airport is being planned, Saludo disclosed. The sea-air transport system will serve as an international center for transportation and logistics abreast of Singapore and Chinas Hong Kong.



By then, the Philippines will benefit from the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road by shipping Chinese products to Indonesia, Australia and even the whole world, Saludo noted.



More : Chinas Belt and Road initiative will bring great chances for the Philippines to implement its Dutertenomics, an economic strategy unveiled by the Philippine government to transform its economy, Philippine officials attending a forum on Monday agreed.The forum on Dutertenomics and the Belt and Road initiative was hosted by the Philippine delegation attending the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation started on May 14 in Beijing.They believed that as the core of the Dutertenomics is to create jobs and stimulate economy through dozens of major infrastructure projects, the Belt and Road initiative put forward by China will offer tremendous opportunities for the Philippines in terms of infrastructure upgrading, poverty alleviation and job creation.Government officials including Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, Secretary Carlos Dominguez of the Department of Finance, Director-General Ernesto M. Pernia of National Economic and Development Authority, Secretary Benjamin Diokno of the Department of Budget and Management, Secretary Arthur Tugade of the Department of Transportation, and Chairperson of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority talked about their suggestions on how to align the two proposals.On the forum, the Philippines' goal of economic growth in 2017 was declared to be 6.5% to 7.5%, and the goal for the period from 2018 to 2022 has been set at 7% to 8%.To realize the target, the country has launched a large-scale infrastructure projects named "Build! Build! Build!", based on which an estimated 8.4 trillion pesos ($170 billion) would be invested on the construction of infrastructures.About 20% of the capital will be raised through foreign loans. In addition, the Duterte administration's infrastructure spending would reach 7.4% of GDP by 2022.Tugade introduced a batch of domestic infrastructure construction projects such as the Luzon Expressway, Mindanao Railway, Manila's Metro Rail, new terminal of Clark International Airport and Subic-Clark Railway, to the attendees.He also announced a plan to build the city of Clark, 80 kilometers to the north of Manila, into a new urban center, in a bid to relieve the traffic burden of the capital city. So far, the country has kicked off the planning and construction of the new city.Tugade said Chinese investment is welcomed in the Philippines, and he appreciated China's $75 million non-reimbursable assistance to build bridges spanning the Pasig River to help relief the traffic burden in Manila.Improved relations with China have brought the Philippines a massive opportunity for development, said Ricardo L. Saludo, Managing Director of Center for Strategy, Enterprise & Intelligence.The Philippines can connect its ongoing massive infrastructure planning with the Belt and Road initiative, which advocates integration and interconnectivity, to attain new impetus for the country's economic development, he added.An international transportation pivot surrounding the Subic Port and the Clark Airport is being planned, Saludo disclosed. The sea-air transport system will serve as an international center for transportation and logistics abreast of Singapore and Chinas Hong Kong.By then, the Philippines will benefit from the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road by shipping Chinese products to Indonesia, Australia and even the whole world, Saludo noted.More : Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport (MNL)



Dans la meme rubrique : < > Yunnan dispatches sci-tech experts to South Asia, Southeast Asia, builds bridge of int'l technological cooperation China's Beidou reaches world-leading level: white paper Silk Road e-commerce promotes trade among Belt and Road countries Pour toute information, contactez-nous au : +(235) 99267667 ; 62883277 ; 66267667 (Bureau N'Djamena)
Following intense fighting that broke out this morning in Bangassou (Mbomou Province), Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders is calling on all parties to agree to a ceasefire in order to access wounded people in urgent need of life-saving medical care. In the space of a few hours, MSF treated 21 wounded people in Bangassou []http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Appa-sourceTheAfric...










English News Financial integration provides key support to Belt and Road construction: official

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 15 Mai 2017



The fund with more capital will better play its leveraging role to mobilize resources of en-route countries and capital from international financial organizations, boost Chinas trade and investment cooperation with other en-route countries, the deputy governor noted, adding that fruits from Belt and Road development will benefit more as a result.

By Wang Guan from Peoples Daily Chinas decision to inject capital into the Silk Road Fund is necessary, a senior official of China's central bank said Sunday, stressing the importance of financial integration to Belt and Road development.



The remarks of Yi Gang, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, came after Chinese President Xi Jinpings announcement that China will contribute an additional 100 billion RMB (about $14.5 billion) to the Silk Road Fund, when he addressed the opening of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation last Sunday.



"It is very necessary to increase the capital of the Silk Road Fund at the current stage," Yi said, adding that financial integration is an important support to the Belt and Road construction.



The Belt and Road countries are mostly developing economies with an enormous funding demand to solve the capital shortage in infrastructure construction and other big projects, Yi explained, further pointed out that they are in need of support from the international community to secure economic and social development.



While funding the Belt and Road construction, the fund has demonstrated its flexibility and efficiency. Having injected new capital to finance important projects, the fund guaranteed the medium- to long-term fiscal sustainability and got fair returns on its investment, Yi noted.



The official said the decision to inject capital into the Silk Road Fund stemmed from an enormous funding demand. The fund has had a large reserve of projects at the early stage, and the demand for funds will be greater in the future.



The capital boost will help the fund promote the Belt and Road construction while maximizing its advantage of flexibility and high efficiency, the official explained.



The fund with more capital will better play its leveraging role to mobilize resources of en-route countries and capital from international financial organizations, boost Chinas trade and investment cooperation with other en-route countries, the deputy governor noted, adding that fruits from Belt and Road development will benefit more as a result.

He stressed at the same time that the capital boost will not change the market-oriented operating principle of the fund, which means it will be a self-financing organization that shall independently bear risks and obligations.



It will get fair returns on its investment while funding Belt and Road construction, Yi said, adding that by this way, the goal to jointly build the all-shared routes through consultation will be realized.



Based on concept of openness, inclusiveness and mutual benefit as well as the principle of internationalization, specialization, marketization since its founding, the fund has enhanced cooperation among Belt and Road countries in infrastructure construction, resource exploitation, industrial and financial sectors.



As of the first quarter of this year, the fund had signed 15 project agreements with promised investment amounting to $6 billion in aggregate. The investment covered en-route regions such as Russia, Mongolia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, North Africa and Europe.



The fund has additionally allocated $2 billion to establish the China-Kazakhstan capacity cooperation fund.



Xi also pledged at the opening ceremony that China will encourage financial institutions to conduct overseas RMB fund business with an estimated amount of about 300 billion RMB ($43.5 billion).



Designed to finance the Belt and Road initiative, the Silk Road Fund was founded in December 2014 and is jointly backed by China's foreign exchange reserves, China Investment Corp., The Export-Import Bank of China and China Development Bank.



Dans la meme rubrique : < > Yunnan dispatches sci-tech experts to South Asia, Southeast Asia, builds bridge of int'l technological cooperation China's Beidou reaches world-leading level: white paper Silk Road e-commerce promotes trade among Belt and Road countries Pour toute information, contactez-nous au : +(235) 99267667 ; 62883277 ; 66267667 (Bureau N'Djamena)
The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ministry of Health and Population of Egypt today ( May 14, 2017) marked the fourth United Nations Global Road Safety Week during a regional celebration held at WHO premises in Cairo. The week and its related campaign Save Lives: Slow Down draw []http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Appa-sourceTheAfric...










English News Xi launches Belt and Road forum to map out new global vision

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 15 Mai 2017



"The Belt and Road Initiative is rooted in a shared vision for global development," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the forum's opening."Running through Asia, Europe and Africa and extended to the whole world, it is far-reaching in geography and in ambition."

By Li Ning from Peoples Daily World leaders gathered in Beijing Sunday for the opening of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, to embrace a Chinese solution to stimulate global growth and promote prosperity for all.



Addressing the opening of the most prestigious international gathering China has ever launched, President Xi Jinping said the Belt and Road Initiative is "a project of the century" that will benefit people across the world.



A total of 29 foreign heads of state and government leaders attended the forum, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.Other delegates include officials, entrepreneurs, financiers and journalists from over 130 countries, and representatives of key international organizations, such as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde.



The two-day forum, which also features a round-table summit of global leaders on Monday, is one of the highest-level assemblies in today's world. At its center is Xi's grand plan to better combine the rapidly expanding Chinese economy with the development of Asia, Europe, Africa and beyond.



Named after the historic Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed by Xi in 2013 to chart out new territories for international cooperation.

"Spanning thousands of miles and years, the ancient silk routes embody the spirit of peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit," Xi told an audience of more than 1,500.



"The Silk Road spirit has become a great heritage of human civilization," he said. By linking countries and regions that account for about 60 percent of the world's population and 30 percent of global GDP, the initiative is a perfect example of China sharing its own wisdom and solutions for global growth and governance.

"The pursuit of this initiative is based on extensive consultation and its benefits will be shared by us all," Xi said. All countries, from either Asia, Europe, Africa or the Americas, can be international cooperation partners of the Belt and Road Initiative, he said. Xi noted that the humankind has reached an age of great progress, great transformation and profound changes, while the world is fraught with challenges.



Global growth requires new drivers, development needs to be more inclusive and balanced, and the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be narrowed. Hotspots in some regions are causing instability and terrorism is rampant. Deficit in peace, development and governance poses a daunting challenge to mankind. "This is the issue that has always been on my mind," he said.



With the Belt and Road Initiative, China wants to turn the legends of the ancient Silk Road into a modern story of inclusive growth and cross-continental cooperation.



"The Belt and Road Initiative is rooted in a shared vision for global development," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the forum's opening."Running through Asia, Europe and Africa and extended to the whole world, it is far-reaching in geography and in ambition," he said.



Earlier this week, White House spokesperson Sean Spicer said the United States will continue to work with China under the Belt and Road Initiative. "It's a major trade initiative," he said.



A multi-dimensional infrastructure network is taking shape, one that is underpinned by economic corridors, featuring land-sea-air transportation routes and information expressway, and supported by major railway, port and pipeline projects.



But more importantly, the leaders will also work to identify future cooperation areas, and seek ways to advance policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people exchanges between nations.



At Sunday's forum, Xi proposed that the Belt and Road should be built into a road of peace, prosperity, opening up as well as innovation, and one that connects different civilizations.



"The forum shows the world how far China has come towards its dream of national rejuvenation," said Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore."It has once again put China on center stage," he said.



Dans la meme rubrique : < > Yunnan dispatches sci-tech experts to South Asia, Southeast Asia, builds bridge of int'l technological cooperation China's Beidou reaches world-leading level: white paper Silk Road e-commerce promotes trade among Belt and Road countries Pour toute information, contactez-nous au : +(235) 99267667 ; 62883277 ; 66267667 (Bureau N'Djamena)










English News Xi's speech on Belt and Road Forum hailed by delegates

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 15 Mai 2017



Xi's speech has a rich content and broad horizon, Martin Jacques, senior researcher at Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) under Cambridge University told the People's Daily.

By Pei Guangjiang, Huang Fahong from Peoples Daily The keynote speech delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation, with rich content and broad horizon, shows Chinas strong sense of responsibility as a major country, domestic and overseas delegates attending the meeting hailed.



In his speech delivered on Sunday, Xi elaborated the Silk Road spirit, sum up the achievements of the Belt and Road development, and depicted the magnificent blueprint of the initiative. The Belt and Road construction has ushered in a new chapter as a result.



The glory of the ancient silk routes shows that geographical distance is not insurmountable. If we take the first courageous step towards each other, we can embark on a path leading to friendship, shared development, peace, harmony and a better future, he stressed.



"It suggests a new era not only for the Belt and Road construction, but also the common development of the world," praised Stephen Perry, Chairman of the UK-based 48 Group Club. What he said was agreed by other attendants.



The historical experience of cooperation among countries linked by the ancient Silk Road through Asia, Europe and Africa is important in the 21st century when the world is facing very serious challenges, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on the opening ceremony.



Russia appreciates China's proposal of the Belt and Road initiative since cooperation among different countries is still important in modern world, he added.



Xi's speech has a rich content and broad horizon, Martin Jacques, senior researcher at Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) under Cambridge University told the People's Daily.



He said Xi's call upon people with different ideologies and skin colors for common development is completely different with the rising tide of anti-globalization in many western countries for his stress on unity, cooperation and inclusiveness.



Executive Chairman Jack Ma of Alibaba Group said that Xi's speech has reflected Chinas strong sense of responsibility as a major power.



"Aiming at inheriting the Silk Road spirit and addressing the current challenges faced by mankind, the Belt and Road development has went beyond the scope of countries and regions, Ma stressed, adding that its mission is to bring more energy, equality and all-shared benefits to the world.





"The Belt and Road development opened a new approach for win-win cooperation between the countries," said Mushahid Hussain, Chairman of the Committee on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) under Pakistani Parliament.



Pakistan appreciates China's spirit to share development fruits with each country through the joint construction of the CPEC, part of the open and inclusive Belt and Road routes, he added.



Multilateralism and economic globalization are of significant meaning, former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said, adding that many countries now hope to engage into the Belt and Road initiative.



"In addition to China, I hope each country could open their polices to a greater extent," stressed Raffarin, who was also in China for the forum as representative of the French President.



Dans la meme rubrique : < > Yunnan dispatches sci-tech experts to South Asia, Southeast Asia, builds bridge of int'l technological cooperation China's Beidou reaches world-leading level: white paper Silk Road e-commerce promotes trade among Belt and Road countries Pour toute information, contactez-nous au : +(235) 99267667 ; 62883277 ; 66267667 (Bureau N'Djamena)
Are Zionists worse than Islamists? According to how the mainstream media, the U.N., the E.U., NGOs, universities and academia, U.S. government officials, and Arab and Muslim propaganda tend to whitewash Islamism  including horrific acts of Islamic-inspired terrorism  and denigrate Zionism, the answer is yes. Here's a handy guide.

Islamism: Can there be any serious argument about a religious-political system that seeks to enshrine and enact its laws (sharia) on lands it occupies, and attempts to conquer through jihad (holy war)? Sharia law essentially abuses women, endorses so-called honor killings and female genital mutilation, demands male supremacy, is biased against all "infidels," glorifies those who chop off the heads of Jews and Christians or who otherwise murder infidels, stones adulterers, puts to death apostates, cuts off the hands of thieves, severely punishes those who criticize Mohammed or Islam, treats non-believers as second-class citizens (dhimmis), and is anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-democracy. Its ultimate goal is Islamic supremacy and triumphalism. What positive things have Islamists brought to the world at large?

Zionism: According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the term was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum and generally refers to "the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism has come to include the movement for the development of the State of Israel and the protection of the Jewish nation in Israel through support for the Israel Defense Forces." The Jewish people's basic right to self-determination owing to its long history of being persecuted and living as a diaspora community is potent and self-evident. Israel is an open democracy that respects all civil rights and grants equal rights to women, minorities (25% are Arab and non-Jews), and gays. It has an independent judiciary, a robust free press, and excellent health care and educational systems. It upholds freedom of religion and worship with full and complete access to religious sites  in short, classic Western liberal values. This is all enshrined in its Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.

Moreover, Zionism has unleashed the potential of Israelis to endeavor in tikkun olam  repairing of the world. It is the "Start-Up Nation" and shares with the world amazing life-saving technologies and devices  innovations in computers, biomedicine, water, and agriculture. It is a first responder to humanitarian crises and natural disasters around the world. This is a deep expression of Jewish values. Jews have no interest in conquering land or taking over the land of others  there is no jihad equivalent.

Despite the above contrasts, Zionists continue to be slandered, libeled, and demonized, while Islamists are respected and in some cases labeled as victims.

Zionists and all Jews are routinely accused of stealing Arab lands, of oppressing Arabs, and of being colonizers  though the facts and international law refute these allegations. The Bible, the San Remo Conference, the U.N., and other sources clearly support the Jewish people's claims to the lands. Israel has more legitimate claims to territories it gained in 1967 because it acquired them in a defensive war (as per international law) and because those areas were not legally part of another sovereign nation. But the false claims against Jews enable the justification of the incessant acts of terrorism and murder targeting Jews via suicide homicide bombings, stabbings, car rammings, missile and rocket attacks, and infiltration tunnels. This is likely also because Muslims are viewed as victims of Western colonialism and prejudice and because systemic social ills in Muslim societies are rarely if ever exposed.

Yet it is hard to see how Muslims are really so oppressed. Today, there are 56 Islamic countries with a population of 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, including 22 Arab states with a population of 400 million. In contrast, there is one tiny Jewish state  Israel  with a population of 6.5 million Jews and 1.2 million Arabs, whose population has actually swelled since 1948. Israel's land mass is one 625th the size of the Arab world. The total Jewish population on the planet is a mere 14 million. Israel is the true "David" even though it is portrayed as the "Goliath."

It is the Islamists who refuse to recognize the nation-state of the Jewish people. Just read and listen to what they repeatedly say in public. Two recent examples:

On official Palestinian Authority TV, Fatah Central Committee member and Commissioner of Treasury and Economy, Muhammad Shtayyeh stated, "The Fatah Movement never demanded that Hamas recognize Israel. To this moment, Fatah does not recognize Israel. The topic of recognition of Israel has not been raised in any of Fatah's conferences" (Official PA TV, 'Topic of the Day,' March 26, 2017, translation in Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) bulletin, 'Fatah leader: Fatah and Hamas agree Israel has no right to existFatah is the largest party within the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), which is headed by Mahmoud Abbas, who is also the president of the Palestinian Authority, which governs the Palestinian Arabs in Judea-Samaria/West Bank.

Hamas' Political Bureau head, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, stated on Lebanese TV that "Our principles say that our land is all of Palestine, including the land that is under occupation [i.e., Israel] ... [The proposal to establish a Palestinian state in Judea/Samaria and Gaza] is a tactical step that does not harm the right of the Palestinians to all of the land of Palestine" (Amad, independent Palestinian news website, March 28, 2017, translation in PMW bulletin, 'Fatah leader: Fatah and Hamas agree Israel has no right to exist,' April 21, 2017). Note: Hamas- the Islamic Resistance Movement- is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and rules in Gaza; its charter refuses to recognize Israel in any borders and until recently contained genocidal clauses against all Jews.

Moreover, Palestinian Arabs want an ethnically cleansed state, free of Jews.

This does not engender confidence that peace can be obtained with Islamists  full, equal peace. Because of political correctness, many tiptoe around expressions of Islamic law because, of course, we just can't criticize another religion or judge it  even if its sacred texts call for subjugating non-believers. But when it comes to the Jews and their miniscule state, it is open season. Meddle away !

The irony is that these very same appeasers are acting just like the dhimmis Islamists expect them to be, but ultimately, they too will be victims of its burning desire to cleanse the world of infidels. It is not Islamophobic to note that at this time in history, the Muslim world is dominated by bad and dangerous ideas and beliefs that we in the West must counter  or ignore at our peril.

It should be clear that those who equate Zionism with Islamism, or who go so far to claim that the former is worse, have a nefarious agenda that, at its root, amounts to Jew-hatred. What else could explain condemning a positive movement while elevating a negative one?
Genuine elections in democratic countries are periodic, inclusive, free, and competitive between different parties based on international standards such as transparent monitoring and independent election commission. This is how lawmakers and executives are elected by citizens in a democracy, providing people the opportunity to hold their representatives accountable. This process also obliges the losing side to accept its fair defeat and recognize the mandate of the winning side until the next elections.

In total contrast, the structure of elections in Iran resembles elections in an one-party state. All candidates believe and must adhere to principles representing an ideological political system, which include the guardianship of the Islamic jurist based on the absolute power of a supreme leader (Vilayat-e Faqih).

Understanding the role of the supreme leader in Iran's political system, it is necessary to remember that all candidates must be approved by the Guardian Council in order to stand in any elections. Members of the Guardian Council are selected both directly and indirectly by the supreme leader. This powerful body makes all election rules and is also responsible for supervising the election and approving its outcome. It has even the power to nullify votes and disqualify candidates. For instance, an elected female M.P. was barred from entering the parliament following the council's decision to nullified her votes because a picture of her had emerged online where she did not adhere to the compulsory Islamic dress code. It did not help that the picture were taken during a trip abroad and not in Iran.

Since there is no independent election commission in Iran, it is impossible to have a transparent election. Although there has not been real, serious opposition in previous Iranian elections, there was a massive vote-rigging in 2009, which altered the result in favor of then-sitting president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Providing fake statistics of votes and manipulating the number of participants are also ways the regime fabricates public support for the system or a particular candidate. In my personal experience, as I was an election monitor for one of the candidates during the 2009 elections, I witnessed firsthand massive rigging of votes at my polling station. When the polling station closed, I verified that the counted number of cast ballots at my polling station was 1,500. But the number announced the next day for that polling station was 2,200, which is an "increase" of almost 50%. It is the supreme leader, and by extension the Guardian Council, who decides which candidate will get the fake votes.

Another piece of evidence for the theatrical nature of Iran's elections is campaign advertising. There is an official state television network in Iran, and the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, directly appoints its head. The state television network cannot be independent because the supreme leader always prefers and supports a specific candidate, such as in 2009, when Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad.

Overall, according to Freedom House, more journalists have been repressed and jailed since the 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani, who presented himself as a "moderate." Without free media, there will not be real free and fair elections.

The Iranian women usually boycott elections in Iran. Women who register as a candidate have systematically been excluded from standing for election during the last 37 years, since the Guardian Council has decided that one of the necessary qualifying conditions is being male. This decision sidelines nearly half of Iran's population. The clerical regime sees them as a second-class citizens.

Despite receiving billions of dollars after the nuclear agreement last year, Tehran has failed to resolve social and economic problems. This is because a majority of this money is being spent on terrorist groups in the region and to back the dictator in Syria, despite purported "moderate" President Rouhani holding office.

There are six candidates who were selected by the powerful Guardian Council. The candidates belong to two parts of the same system, which believes in the Vilayat-e Faqih and in the "values of the Islamic Republic and its revolution."

One candidate is the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani, who is a symbol for the suppression of the Iranian student movements in 1999 and 2003. Rouhani previously held senior positions at the security apparatus of the "Islamic Republic." According to his own memoirs, he was the first person who introduced the compulsory hijab in the country. During his presidential term, Iran is the second country in terms of executions and the world's leading executioner per capita. Economic meltdown and social problems have caused increasing protests by the middle class of Iran's society. Due to the social and economic crises, many "Iran experts" suggest that Rouhani has no chance of keeping his presidency for another term.

Another candidate is Ebrahim Raisi, an Iranian cleric who heads the richest religious financial conglomerate in Iran, the Astane Quds Razavi. He is known for his role in the mass execution of political prisoners in Iran over the last 30 years. He and Rouhani's justice minister were appointed by the founder of the Islamic Republic in Iran, Khomeini, to carry out and supervise the massacre of tens of thousands of political prisoners in the summer of 1988. Raisi is supported by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and is believed to be the supreme leader's preferred candidate.

The third candidate is Mohamad Bagher Ghalibaf, former police chief and currently the mayor of Tehran. During the suppression of the Iranian student movements in 1999 and 2003, he was the head of police, while Rouhani served as the secretary of the National Security Council. This means that Rouhani was Ghalibaf's boss when repressive security organs under his command crushed the students who rose up for freedom and democracy.

In short, the three main candidates have had an effective and significant role in the domestic repression and human rights abuses that occur frequently and systematically in the Iran.

Why do voters not care about the upcoming sham presidential elections in Iran? There are several reasons. The truth is that the Iranian people, and the youth, which constitute two thirds of the population, do not really want the regime's constitution and reject its backward medieval ideology.

The Iranian people believe and see that the so-called election is a selection between oppressors and corrupt politicians.

Under the realities explained above, how could the people of Iran really convince themselves to vote on 19 May? Well, they will not, but that will not stop the regime from declaring huge participation. Fraud and lies are the benchmarks of an election held in a theocracy like the one ruling Iran.

Hamid Bahrami is a freelance journalist and former political prisoner in Iran. He is a human rights and political activist. He left Iran recently and now lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
Americans have become a wilting, withering mass of weak, needy crybabies who have departed far and away from the strength of back, intellect, and character of America's Founders, who created a system that none other has ever equaled. Rather than follow along the path that made America a strong, economically thriving and prosperous nation, many Americans, especially Millennials, pursue petty and paltry pleasures, as would a sloth and a glutton, and claim their slightest whim to be a "right."

Some things, like food, shelter, clothing, water, and health care, are critical to our lives. However, they are not "rights." Even if they were made rights, this would set in motion a confiscatory requirement to satisfy that right at the expense of others, much as America currently chafes against our current welfare system.

Just as many of us witnessed Tennessee's House Democrats release a collection of fifty bills called "The People's Bill of Rights" in February 2017, more and more, Americans hear a clamor from their progressive countrymen of all rank and file, for wants and desires to be provided through government funds, the taxpayers' dollars. Now, not only do many across the nation demand health care as a right, but they also demand a $15-per-hour minimum wage and free university educations.

In March, Chris Enloe of TheBlaze reported Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.)'s tweet, which stated: "Healthcare is a right, not a privilege."

My good friend, retired U.S. Army Colonel Kurt Schlicter, editor for Townhall, tweeted back: "Guns are in the Bill of Rights, but they aren't one [according to Democrats]. The right to have one pay for your healthcare is not [in the Bill of Rights], but it's a right?"

In a study published by the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield detail in the ranks of America's contemporary poor that eighty percent have air-conditioning, fifty percent own a personal computer and can access the internet, and two thirds have cable TV. A household receiving $50,000 in welfare benefits is still considered poor if its pre-welfare income falls below the poverty line, even though its members are living, in many respects, better than the middle class of 1964.

According to Rector and Sheffield, our government has spent 22 trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars fighting poverty since 1964 and President Johnson's Great Society. The study also documents and charts $1 trillion spent annually on 90 means-tested welfare programs.

Over one hundred years of Marxist propaganda, the kind found in President Woodrow Wilson's treatise entitled "Constitutional Government in the United States" and President Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 "Second Bill of Rights," seems to have done its mischief well. Arguing for corrupting the Constitution, Wilson saw it as a vessel to further the progressives' agenda, while FDR viewed it as a means to assure equality, "economic security," and the pursuit of happiness. Wilson spoke of our rights as "privilege," and FDR framed them as "political rights."

Our rights are God-given and natural, and they exist simultaneously among all people. The rights of free speech, freedom of religion, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures  to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness  are inalienable rights. They are not privileges to be granted or rescinded, as some past presidents, Obama included, have interpreted them. And in the pursuit of "true individual freedom" through "economic security," Roosevelt and Obama offered the antithesis of the right to one's own private property.

A true right does not impose any obligation on another. One's rights to free speech, religious liberty, self-defense, and assembly, among others, impose no obligations on anyone else, except to allow each other to use these rights without interference.

Ayn Rand wrote in 1961 ("Man's Rights"), "If some men are entitled by right to the product of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor."

Even if most Americans are willing to accept the theft of their labor, their wealth, to fund real health care, we already know that government is not a trustworthy guardian of such an enormous responsibility. What did America receive under Obamacare, other than $2 trillion more debt, the loss of doctors, a rise in premiums, a massive tax and a welfare law that contained 20 new taxes, and a huge expansion of Medicaid? And so far, the Republican plan isn't much better.

In the meantime, Americans rename privilege and benefits "their right" while ignoring their own misguided lifestyles and poor choices. Too many Americans spend more than they save, and too many prefer the government security blanket over the pride of one's own independence.

Some Americans bemoan the public corruption our country is suffering and the associated moral and constitutional crises. However, the country on the whole has failed to promote the values that would have prevented these problems. Corrupt leaders continue to advocate and implement measures that negatively impact businesses and families, that also limit individual liberty and true free-market capitalism, expanding government in the process.

Other Americans have become fanatics for their various causes. They are in the streets, ironically demanding their own demise as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enslave not only their fellow countrymen, but themselves, however unwittingly. They accept the collectivization of rights, and soon they will accept the collectivization of property.

Friedrich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, puts this struggle in proper perspective: "Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of human interaction comes into existence through a process of variation, winnowing and sifting far surpassing our capacity to design ... motivated by [our] needs and desires within the community."

Sadly, this trend toward fascism, this malaise, has permeated the ranks of our country's future leaders, our children, and left them with false expectations. Outside family, churches, and communities, the marketplace is the vanguard for moral truths in a free-market society, and positively influencing the community through clear decent and moral principles, Judeo-Christian principles, improves businesses and betters people's lives. In asking the next generation to return to a true capitalist value-based society, America's conservatives ask for something that has not existed in their lifetime, but it is necessary to avoid self-induced destruction, and to ask is righteous.

Freedom and moral truths and the strength of men's will in a free society, unfettered by superfluous regulations, enabled America to succeed. They are the facilitators who fuel innovation, support free thinkers, and encourage people worldwide to become who they choose to be, not who the state demands they must be.

When government guarantees equality and "economic security," it suppresses creativity, ingenuity, and reward systems that enable people and nations to grow and prosper. Have Americans learned nothing from history?
For all of his stage-crafted gravitas and preening, James Comey was a bantamweight, yearning to be anointed with the heavyweight crown by securing a lifetime sinecure from the Deep State.

After all, his most prominent prosecution in his career as U.S. Attorney was convicting Martha Stewart -- not for actual insider securities trading, but for lying to the FBI and misleading her investors by proclaiming her innocence. No matter, Comey the hi-octane prosecutor saved the securities industry from the ravages of Martha -- the master manipulator of stuffed endive ginger dip.

And with that coveted scalp, later as assistant AG under John Ashcroft, Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to be the special prosecutor who nailed Dick Cheneys aide Scooter Libby -- not for the actual unmasking of Valerie Plame, a purported undercover CIA operative -- but for obstructing the investigation. Fitzgerald, and Comey knew from the beginning the identity of the leaker, Colin Powells assistant Richard Armitage. While both Armitage and Powell continued their duplicitous silent assent to damaging Ws second term, Comey did nothing to stop this miscarriage.

Comeys reputation as an even-handed government lawyer isnt as fair-and-balanced as it would seem at first blush. His participation in the whitewash of the Clinton Whitewater cover up, when he was assistant counsel for the Senate Whitewater Committee, was accompanied by a simultaneous assertion that the Clintons engaged in a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.

Later, as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, his Vidi aquam over the corrupt Bill Clinton pardon of Marc Rich, an alleged quid pro quo for campaign contributions, betrayed Comeys own role as a prosecutor working for Rudy Giulianis successful conviction of Richs tax evasion fifteen years earlier.

To what end was Comeys convenient and cynical equivocations? Mere warm-ups for his disgraceful tenure at the FBI.

Comeys fitness report while heading the FBI is a compendium of incompetence, and dissembling, beyond his blockade-running interference for Hillarys email felonies, and AG Loretta Lynchs deliberately compromising encounter with Bill Clinton on the Phoenix airport tarmac:

The FBI ignored the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombing.

The FBI ignored U.S. Army psychiatrist and jihadist Nidal Hasan before he murdered 31 people at Fort Hood.

The FBI ignored the San Bernardino terrorist killers Farook and Malik; then in an unforced fiasco bullied Apple for a needless unlocking key to the killers IPhone.

An FBI agent was actually following the Garland, Texas shooters without notifying local law enforcement that armed men were about to carry out a terrorist attack.

The FBI ignored Orlando nightclub massacre terrorist Omar Mateen, while under intermittent surveillance, whose lies to the FBI were known by the FBI interrogators.

The FBI has done zero investigation into who leaked classified info on Michael Flynn, nor the unmasking of more than a thousand private U.S. citizens, along with who spied on Trump and members of Congress.

The FBI has demurred in investigating the Clinton Foundation

Overcoming his record in hardcore prosecutions of first-order crimes, Comey became an accomplished sifter of fly ash, alternating hiding behind investigation protocols when politically convenient, then asserting prosecutorial zeal when personally advantageous.

For all of the dubious claims that Comey hated the Clintons, and discomforted the Democrats, his own carefully constructed slow-walking misdirection methods made him indispensable to the Clintons political viability, while allowing them to evade criminal indictments. Until Trump fired him, Comey also had been the Democrats most productive enabler for subverting the Trump presidency, by creating a persistent cloud of innuendo, promoting interminable suspicions of unspecified, undefined, and unsubstantiated misdeeds committed by unidentified perpetrators.

Still, Comey elicits undeserved sympathy. Michael Barone says untimely intersections with the Clintons have rendered him another hapless victim, Can something be said in defense of Comey? He was put in a terrible position by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Obama Justice Department.

Baloney.

It is a myth that Comey is a dispassionate balanced arbiter of justice. As WSJs Kimberly Strassel pointed out,

So what should an honor-bound FBI director do in such a conflicted situation? Call it out. Demand that Ms. Lynch recuse herself and insist on an appropriate process to ensure public confidence. Resign, if need be. Instead Mr. Comey waited until the situation had become a crisis, and then he ignored all protocol to make himself investigator, attorney, judge and jury.

Convincing the Deep State to trust him as investigator, attorney, judge, and jury is precisely how Comey measured himself for a lifetime Kevlar wardrobe. Comey bet that the Deep State power of the federal government rested with the Democrats, confident Hillary would shake off the tarnish from the email scandal, Benghazi, and her string of unindicted crimes and misdemeanors.

But Comey didnt count on Donald Trump. Comey thought Trump a fool, more blusterer than disrupter, with an untethered temperament, and not a threat.

Instead Trump dropped his own bunker buster MOAB on Comeys underground warrens, ending Comeys sinecure, while unmasking the Democrats reliance on Comey to facilitate their malfeasant undermining of the president.

Trumps manner in firing Comey, by all conventional assessments, has been a crippling political communications debacle. It is hard to imagine Trump deliberately intending to create such a firestorm to accompany a seemingly unremarkable personnel move that on the surface should have been endorsed by all sides of the political establishment.

Still, the collateral political damage that Trump brought upon himself in the manner of getting rid of Comey doesnt negate the need to have done it, and thereby commencing the war against the Deep State. Trump had to start it, somehow, someplace. Comey was as good as any place to begin, maybe the best.

Mercilessly Trump fired the first consequential blow against the Deep State. Thats why we voted for him.

Now Trump needs to finish what he started. Cleaning up his communications farce in the meantime would only be a bonus. After all, we cant savor the disruption, and its aftershock, if we have to apologize for it.
There were real accomplishments in President Trump's first 100 days, despite obstruction from Democrats and many in his own party. Granted, these accomplishments were less than one might hope, but they do confirm the president's intention of actually fulfilling his promises. Unlike his predecessor, who was so concerned about managing spin that he never got around to governing, Trump is a doer. He resides in the real world, not in the world of fake news and fake politics.

In less than four months, Trump has rescinded some of the Obama-era regulations on energy and financial services, provided much-needed moral support for our military and our police, and appointed an outstanding conservative to the Supreme Court. For many Americans, the president has also restored a sense of hope, evident perhaps in a rising stock market and increasing small business activity. Certainly, Trump's promises were overblown to begin with, and many of his legislative reforms will be blocked, at least for the moment, by Democrats in the Senate. But there seems little doubt that he will continue to push his agenda.

Trump has identified serious problems in our government and society, and his response is that of a builder: take action to change things. That recipe for success seems obvious, but to most on the left, it's not. The progressive mind can't get past the rhetorical level where they declare themselves a "champion for workers and families" and rant about how they will "fight, fight, fight." That was Hillary on the campaign trail.

Now there's DNC chair Tom Perez. Without a single concrete proposal for actual improvement, he's reduced to swearing at the president. Gutter talk directed at the president of the United States is a new low. Along with riots, flag-burning, and physical assaults on Trump supporters, it's evidence of the Democratic Party's estrangement from the real world.

President Trump is not a politician  he is a builder. The American people, who are wiser than all of the talking heads put together, recognize that quality and find it attractive. Trump's strength is his understanding of how the real world operates. That is not the instinct of a politician. It's the attitude of a man who, despite his wealth and fame, never divorced himself from listening, negotiating, and solving problems.

That's the difference between a president who thinks in terms of actually winning and one who just issues empty threats and makes empty promises. For Obama, the "red line" was just words. For Trump, the red line is real. "My whole life is about winning," Trump said. "I don't often lose." In just four months, the world has begun to respect America once again, and the likelihood of crossing the red line has greatly diminished.

A man who is focused on accomplishment doesn't need to engage in babble to maintain support. The public will continue to support him if it sees the country making progress  and the signs of progress are irrefutable. It's to the president's credit that he labels the media "fake news" ("Their priorities are not my priorities, and not your priorities," he said in Harrisburg) and that he won't kowtow to politicians from either party. Trump's comments on Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer struck a chord: Schumer, the president said, is a "weak leader" whose "rudderless" behavior is "hurting innocent Americans."

"Rudderless" is another way of saying "uncommitted." The Democratic Party seems uncommitted to any value other than political advantage. When Trump was losing, he pressed on, certain that his values were those of the American people. He understands their needs: the need for real wage growth, the need for security in a dangerous world, the need for an end to the kind of political correctness that undermines all faiths and traditions.

Let the babblers in the media and the Democratic Party, including the Democrats' current babbler-in-chief, Tom Perez, say what they like. None of that can change the fact that Trump intends to restore America to what it should be  the world's greatest economy and greatest military power. And I suspect that the president hasn't lost any sleep over any of his critics on the left.

That's one reason the left, and the so-called mainstream media, hate him so much. He literally doesn't speak their language. And the one word that is least a part of their vocabulary is "winning." The progressive mind is focused on abnegation and defeat. They believe that Americans should be ashamed of their military power and their standard of living. The solution, from their point of view, is to bring America down. That's why Obama spent more time apologizing for America's sins of the past than working for future success. The idea that Americans should be proud of their power and success drives the left nuts. But isn't it better to win than to lose? What would be the consequences in the long run of losing to the Chinese or to Islamic radicalism?

Clearly, Donald Trump thinks in terms of action rather than words. His immediate response is not "Whom is he going to offend?," but "How can I help the economy?" or "How can I make us safer?" That's the kind of mind that puts the real world ahead of political theater. During the campaign, Trump pledged "to never stop working for us," and that persona of a "worker" and a "doer" is key to the president's identity.

Donald Trump is not a Martian. He is very much of this Earth  and of the earth. And he doesn't have his head in the clouds of rhetoric. He is a man who knows how to get things done. Despite obstruction from Democrats in Congress, the president is going to accomplish a great deal during his four, and hopefully eight, years.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
The most recent budget revisions for the state of California contains $15 million to defend illegal aliens from deportations.

Breitbart reports that Governor Jerry Brown is making good on a promise he made last January to defend "every man, woman and child" in danger of being deported.

It is certainly controversial, to say the least, for a state government, within the United States, to start providing taxpayer dollars to fight efforts by the United States to deport people who have entered the country, or overstayed their visas, in violation of the law. To find this controversial spending proposal, just in the summary document of the budget, you have to comb through to the Department of Social Services section, and then read all of the way through to page 38, in the Health and Human Services subsection  where you find under "Immigration Services" an increase of $15 million to $30 million "to further expand the availability of legal services for people seeking, "deportation defense[.]" ... President Donald Trump ran and was elected on a platform of cracking down on illegal immigration. Trump's Attorney General, former Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), has been carrying out the President's promises by focusing federal law enforcement resources on cracking down on illegal immigration. The Trump administration's focus on this issue, conversely, has been a rallying cry for the progressive Democrats that control the levers of political power in California. Legislation authored by State Senate President pro Tem Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) to make California a "sanctuary state" is rapidly advancing through the legislative process. In addition, the state legislature has produced stinging anti-Trump resolutions. Last week, it was announced that the California legislature extended a controversial contract for former Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder and his law firm, at $25,000 per month, focused on taking an aggressive posture against the Trump administration. Sacramento Democrats are not the first to engage in this very aggressive funding of efforts to stymie federal immigration enforcement. Several large cities around California with Democratic mayors and city councils have already entered into this space.

Suppose Republican governors decided to pick and choose which federal law to uphold and which to defy. We'd have liberal Democrats screaming about "nullification" and the danger to the Constitution.

Technically, California's efforts to defend illegals from deportation is not nullification. It is much worse. It's revolution. It is taking an active part in defying the law, enabling Californians to avoid the consequences of breaking federal immigration law. The feds aren't asking California to deport people  they are doing that themselves. The proceedings will take place in federal immigration courts. The cases will be heard by federal judges. That the state of California will seek to short-circuit federal deportation procedures using taxpayer money is outrageous.

Is there a remedy for this arrogance? Congress could try to withhold funds, but that is proving to be harder than it should be. Since California voters see fit to return politicians to office who defy the federal government, it's likely this power-grab by the state will continue for the foreseeable future.
A while back, President Trump declared CNN "fake news" on Twitter. If you thought that was overstating it, get a load of its latest claim that the public is just pining for a special prosecutor on the increasingly hoary claim that "Russia hacked the election."

Really? Really really rilly rilly? I find that extremely hard to believe, just on the surface. I hear no such talk in bank lines, on the headlines of supermarket tabloids, on radio talk show banter, at gas stations, at Starbucks, and even in politically correct classrooms. So color me skeptical.

Unfortunately, skepticism is what's lacking in the reportage from the writer, who had otherwise been a fairly good journalist, Chris Cillizza, who wrote this tripe under his own byline. You'd think he'd know better.

CNN's Cillizza cites an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll purporting to represent the entire nation from a tiny sample of 350 people, not all of them so much as registered voters. Citing President Trump's skepticism about the Democrats' demand for a special prosecutor, Cillizza writes:

The public very much disagrees, according to new numbers from a NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday. Almost eight in ten people  78%  said they would prefer an investigation led by an independent prosecutor or independent commission. Just 15% said they preferred an investigation led by Congress.

It's nothing but a partisan hack. The strange poll, with its far-fetched conclusions, is the Democrats' bid to use polls to pressure President Trump into doing what President Obama always refused to do even in the face of the most egregious scandals (Loretta Lynch on the tarmac with Bill Clinton, Lois Lerner using IRS resources to illegally target dissidents and then retiring with a comfy pension). NBC/Wall Street Journal's poll is led by a former Democratic Party operative with a long record of activism for progressive causes, and this one appears to be just another errand in that service. The tiny poll sample of a mere 350 people should be the first clue. The Democratic talking points on special prosecutor should be another. And who's paying for this remains a worthy inquiry Cillizza could look into, instead of merely transmitting this partisan tripe, if he wants to preserve his journalistic reputation.

But perhaps even more important, the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has a long record of inaccuracy. They were one of the surprised ones on election night 2016, for one, forecasting a Hillary Clinton victory with a four-point margin the day before elections in 2016. On Nov. 6, NBC's headline blared, "Final NBC/WSJ Poll: Clinton Holds a Four-Point National Lead Over Trump."

They also reported an 11-point Clinton lead in October, just after embarrassing "locker room talk" tapes were released by Clinton supporters in the television industry. Conservative Treehouse has an excellent piece debunking the accuracy of that one, unpacking the factors that call into question the poll's objectivity there, too.

Now they're beating the drum for a special prosecutor despite a massive absence of evidence that any Russian hacking of the election took place, and that any sitting Trump operatives colluded with the Russians to make that happen. The evidence remains that Russians were on friendly terms with Hillary Clinton, had gained a great deal from gamy deals connected to her Clinton Foundation, and fully expected her to win on election night. There's not a scintilla of evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election.

The sad story remains that Clinton was a poor candidate, showed contempt for voters, ran a very low-energy sickness-plagued campaign, refused to go to Wisconsin to campaign, and had a historic pendulum swing against her. That's why she lost. The Democrats remain in denial about this and now want to enshrine their "narrative" blaming the Russians into the historic record through a special prosecutor.

Trump should treat this with the contempt it deserves. He's vindicated on calling CNN "fake news."
The newly minted vice chairman of the commission that will be looking into voter fraud in the U.S. says the group will also examine voter "suppression" as well as other irregularities.

Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, who was named vice chairman of the "Advisory Commission on Election Integrity," made it clear that the commission would take an expansive view of issues concerning elections in America.

Washington Times:

"In addition to focusing on voter fraud and election irregularities, the commission will also be looking at claims of voter suppression, claims that certain laws suppress turnout, things like that," Mr. Kobach said on CNN. "So, we'll be looking at evidence of all of these questions." Mr. Kobach, as secretary of state in Kansas, pushed the state's proof-of-citizenship requirement to try and prevent illegal immigrants from voting in his state. The president signed the executive order last week to launch the "Advisory Commission on Election Integrity." Vice President Mike Pence will serve at the panel's chairman. Mr. Kobach said the group has two goals. "There's really two goals. One goal is to, for the first time, to have a nationwide fact-finding effort to see what evidence there is of voter fraud across the country," he said. "The other half is, if there is agreement among the commissioners that this system works pretty well or that system seems to have some flaws, the commission may say, well we recommend states try this, or don't do that. If there's a recommendation for federal legislation, that might come up, too." Mr. Kobach said the goal was to help states find better ways to execute their own elections, and not create additional federal laws unless the commission felt that recommendation was necessary.

The problem in the past with investigating voter fraud claims is that each state has its own rules and procedures to ensure that only eligible voters cast ballots. Problems with registration rolls in many states have been well documented, including dead people carried on the rolls years after they're gone, voters who have moved and are eligible to vote in two states, and the enormous problem of false or fake voter registrations. The commission should be able to see these problems from a national perspective and judge how much of a problem voter fraud actually is.

But by its very nature, voter fraud is hard to detect. You can't judge how big the problem is by the number of prosecutions, as liberals are wont to do. If there are organized efforts to commit voter fraud, it stands to reason that there are organized efforts to cover it up. That will be a major challenge for the commission.

If the commission investigates claims by Democrats that voter ID laws lead to voter "suppression," it should be able to put those claims to rest once and for all. There's also a good chance that the commission will be able to determine the scope of the illegal alien vote.

Commission chairman Vice President Mike Pence has a huge task ahead of him. But discovering the extent, if any, of election fraud is well worth the effort.
Senator Dick Durbin, who never seemed to see anything wrong with what Obama or Hillary did, is now running off his mouth about Trump:

"Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin says President Trump has become a danger to the country and destroyed his credibility in front of the nation and the world."

The Russia-Trump collusion story is a big scam made up to divert attention. The only laws that appear to be broken are the surveillance of political opponents and the unmasking of private citizens' names, and that was done by the Obama administration, not by Trump.

Everything Trump is doing is to give the power, money, and freedom back to the people, where it belongs. Nothing Trump has done can be perceived as dangerous.

Some Democrats and some in the media had called for James Comey to be fired until Trump actually fired him. Then the herd of non-thinkers called Trump "dangerous" when he actually did it. On a daily basis, the media and Democrats are out to destroy Trump no matter what he does. They are the ones who are dangerous and have no credibility.

Giving the power and money back to the people is truly what Durbin, the bureaucrats, the Democrats, and the media are scared of. They have amassed a massive amount of power in D.C. for themselves, and they can't stand to watch an outsider take it away. The people and economy would have been in much greater danger if Hillary had won, and we would have continued the rapid descent toward socialism. The nation has a lot more credibility when we lead from in front versus behind. It is much smarter, because leading from behind is following.
Tick...tick...tick... North Korea is a step closer to having an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear attack on American cities, a weapon it may well use, or sell to Iran, a nation that sees Armageddon as a religious destiny it should hasten. North Korea now claims that it has successfully launched a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear payload.

Fox News reports:

North Korea said Monday that the medium-range strategic missile it tested over the weekend is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The communist dictatorship's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the Hwasong-12, launched early Sunday Korea time, was "capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead." North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was said to have witnessed the test and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," according to KCNA. North Korean propaganda must be considered with wariness, but if confirmed, the claim marks another big step forward in the country's escalating efforts to field a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Outside experts don't believe the North can do that yet, but each new test pushes them closer to the goal. Earlier Sunday, officials told Fox News that the U.S. military believes Pyongyang launched a KN-17 medium-range ballistic missile  the first successful test in four attempts for the Pyongyang regime. North Korea made three attempts last month to launch the KN-17, but failed each time. Officials believe North Korea aspires to use the missile to target ships. The missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and U.S. militaries said.



2016 propaganda video from North Korea depicted a nuclear attack on Washington, D.C.

Make no mistake: North Korea's flourishing nuclear missile program would not exist in its threatening form without Bill Clinton's asinine nuclear deal with North Korea enabling its progress. Lifezette reminds us of the disgraceful history:

On Oct. 18, 1994, Clinton approved a plan to arrange more than $4 billion in energy aid to North Korea over the course of a decade, in return for a commitment from the country's Communist leadership to freeze and gradually dismantle its nuclear weapons development program, according to The New York Times. The "complex" deal was to de-escalate the situation on the Korean peninsula, where the two Korean nations never negotiated a peace treaty after the Korean War ended in armistice in 1953. "This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world," said Clinton in 1994. "It's a crucial step toward drawing North Korea into the global community." The drawing-in never happened. North Korea has become more isolated and dangerous. And after years of furtive activity in North Korea, attempts to placate the Communist state seem to have only encouraged its dangerous leaders. "The North Korean deal of 1994 is the prototype for why open societies should not negotiate arms control agreements with rogue regimes," said Robert Kaufman, professor of public policy at Pepperdine University. "The North Koreans duped Jimmy Carter  an emissary of Clinton  and the Clinton administration to subsidize the North Korean nuclear program in exchange for the counterfeit promise that North Korea would limit itself to civilian nuclear power." Kaufman said the agreement tranquilized the West while the North Koreans proceeded to cross the nuclear threshold, which they announced in 2002 after pocketing billions from the West.

The most charitable interpretation is that Clinton and his SecState Madeleine Albright were duped by the NoKo commies. They bet on the trustworthiness of a hereditary communist dictatorship. We all must live with the consequences and try to clean up their mess before it destroys us.
In a statement celebrating "Women's Health Week," President Trump called for better access to health care for women as well as ensuring paid family leave for both men and women.

Politico:

"Ensuring affordable, accessible, and quality health care is critical to improving womens health and ensuring that it fits their priorities at any stage of life," Trump said in his statement, issued on Mother's Day. "Under the current health-care system, however, the lack of choice in health insurance and in health-care providers, along with skyrocketing premium and out-of-pocket costs, are failing our citizens, our families, and, in particular, our women." In addition, Trump said: "Women are living longer, healthier lives than their mothers." "The number of women dying from heart disease and cancer  the top two killers of women in America  has been decreasing for decades," he continued in the statement. "Thanks to new breast cancer treatments, our health care professionals have saved lives and improved the quality of life for millions of women. We must continue to foster an environment that rewards these needed advances in research." The president said he is committed to working with Congress on behalf of paid family leave for mothers and fathers, and to "invest in the comprehensive care that women receive at community health centers."

Complaints from women's groups that the Republican replacement for Obamacare shortchanges women's health is bogus. With more insurance choices, women will be able to tailor a policy commensurate with their own needs. With the Obamacare mandate for everyone to pay for prenatal care and birth control, women didn't have a choice  even if they were beyond childbearing age or had no plans to become pregnant.

As for family leave, the GOP's position has been evolving in recent years to embrace the concept, although Democrats want workers to be paid for extended leave as well as having their jobs protected. Current policy already includes family leave for federal workers, and most union contracts include it. There are several bills before Congress to mandate family leave nationwide, and Republicans will probably pass one of them before 2018.
The message is being sent out loud and clear: the American left is moving toward violence as a tactic in its quest to grab the political power to which it believes it is entitled. John Daniel Davidson is absolutely correct in his observation that the "The American Left is talking itself into Violence." He cites a lot of examples. Here is a sample:

Jennifer Carnahan, the new chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, received a torrent of racist hate mail and at least one threat of physical violence that forced her from her home for a weekend. Carnahan, who is Korean-American, was targeted after publically apologizing and calling for the resignation of those responsible for an offensive image posted to the 7th Congressional District Republicans Facebook page. It didn't matter that Carnahan didn't post the image, or that she did everything right. The folks sending the hate mail called her racist, and threw a few racial epithets directly at her for good measure. Last month, left-wing activists in Oregon caused the cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade by threatening to drag "fascists" off the parade route  and by fascists, they meant the Republican Party of Multanomah County. In an email, the activists warned, "we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out as we will not give one inch to groups who espouse hatred toward lgbt, immigrants, people of color or others."

The signs are everywhere that a mass phenomenon is underway and is being tolerated  from the failure to suppress antifa armed thugs shutting down political speech in Berkeley...

...to nods and winks from authority figures. When a revered Civil Rights-era hero, who carries a steel plate in his skull owing to injuries from a police baton, implicitly encourages the ongoing wave of violence, a lot of people take it quite seriously.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., urged students on Saturday to help recreate a sense of hope that has been lost in America today and to participate in civil disobedience if necessary. In a commencement speech that focused largely on Lewis' life growing up and his involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Lewis ended it with an examination of the current state of affairs and a thinly veiled critique of America under President Trump, whom he did not mention by name. (snip) Paralleling what he said earlier about getting into the way of things he saw as unjust during the civil rights era, Lewis encouraged his audience to do the same when they leave college. "Go out there, get in the way, get in trouble  good trouble, necessary trouble and make some noise," he said to cheers.

"Good trouble" is a wonderful (yet horrifying) catchphrase. It is memorable and readily defensible. Yet in the minds of the violent factions of the left, it can be appropriated to provide blanket permission to misbehave. The expression "good trouble" can be picked up by anyone from nonviolent demonstrators seeking "symbolic arrests" to antifa thugs to (God forbid) potential future Weathermen-like terrorists.

From the standpoint of Lewis, it is not an explicit call to violence, of course. He is citing nonviolent Civil Rights-era heroes, and he is one himself. So he is bulletproof in uttering these words. But his words exist in the context that John Daniel Davidson chronicles.

We face a threatening situation: large numbers of people have become deranged with TDS, and among them, it is statistically certain there will be people inclined to violence due to what we might call pre-existing conditions: crazies looking for a cause or a trigger. So people are acting out, and at the same time, they are told there is "good trouble, necessary trouble" by a secular Civil Rights saint, no matter his personal context in creating the repression.

Violence can be intoxicating to certain disturbed minds. We have seen leftist terrorists before. (See Radical Son.) I don't like the volatility of the mixture we face as the left still cannot reconcile itself to electoral defeat and spirals toward the fringe.
Just as China apparently joins the U.S. in a bid to check North Korea's nuclear ambitions, in steps Russian president Vladimir Putin, giving just-in-time succor to North Korea's brutal regime. Sure, it's some sort of power -alancing gambit against hyper-power U.S.-China. But with North Korea brazenly stepping up its nuclear launches, it's not the time to start in against the U.S. over Syria, which seems to be the real bone in Putin's craw, according to his statements. It's actually a good way to lose credibility and wind up on the losing side of any possible confrontation.

According to a report in the New York Post:

"I want to confirm that we are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers, including with the Korean Peninsula and North Korea," Putin said at a Chinese economic summit in Beijing, saying it would be "harmful and dangerous." But in comments apparently directed at the US, Putin said "intimidating the DRPK is unacceptable," using the acronym for North Korea. "At the same time, we understand that what we have observed in the world recently, and specifically flagrant violations of international law and incursions into the territory of foreign states, changes in regime, lead to such kinds of arms races," he said.

Intimidating? Can he tell us again who is doing the intimidating with the illegal nuclear launches, which CNN notes are well within the reach of Guam now?

And not just Guam, but Russia itself. And not just within range, but aimed squarely at and headed in the direction of Russia. Last May 2, Pyongyang sought to save face for its failed missile launch by claiming that it had aborted its mission solely because it was headed for Russia.

Maybe it's telling the truth. Maybe it's lying.

But it ought to be a wake-up call to Putin that Russian cities are at stake here. Yes, there are plenty of cities in Russia's Far East. It's not an empty quarter, and any of those cities could find itself on the receiving end of these illegal missile launches, whether North Korea intends to make them that or not. Who is to say North Korea would have the power to control all its missiles, if its face-saving claim about aborting the launch is actually true? Russia is probably in more danger than any of North Korea's purported targets solely for North Korea's technological backwardness.

Yet here we have Putin, saying the main thing is to not intimidate North Korea? Russia, frankly, should be intimidating the hell out of the North Koreans. Maybe that's the problem. The urge to appease is not a good image for Russia, but that is what we are looking at here. And Russian cities are in danger as a result.

Putin attempts to sound sensible and reasonable in his call for a peaceful solution to North Korea's crisis. It's frustrating, because Putin knows very well how bad a communist regime can be. There is no need to preserve such illegitimate regimes.

His attempt is actually an old Russian game described pretty well by Julia Ioffe in a recent issue of The Atlantic:

Lavrov tried to play the part of the impartial referee: Let's not fight until we know what happened. "We have insisted that  we have a very thorough investigation of all that," Lavrov said. And whoever doesn't want to have a very thorough investigation, "this will mean that they simply don't want to establish the truth." (That said, while Lavrov was in Moscow calling for an investigation, the Russians in New York were busy vetoing a UN resolution that called for an investigation, saying it already presupposed the culprit.) This was classic Russia, but it was also the only thing left to Russian decision-makers in the face of such a stunning and unexpected reversal. Taken by surprise, Lavrov had to steer everything back onto the playing field in which Russia excels: bureaucracy. If a terrible thing occurred, who could be against an investigation? Don't you want to know the truth? Of course you do. But Russia means something very different than its Western counterparts do when it says "investigation" and "truth," as it did when it insisted on an investigation after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. That investigation took years, during which the memory of children's toys and vacation guides and limbs scattered among sunflowers faded, and years during which Russia conducted its own investigation anyway, which predictably absolved it of any blame.

It works only if the other side doesn't notice. With the aggressive provocations of North Korea increasingly clear, the U.S. is right to notice.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on CNN's State of the Union that Democrats might boycott a vote on a new FBI director until President Trump names a special prosecutor in the Russia investigation.

The idea of a boycott was floated last week by several Democrat senators. Schumer is the highest ranking Democrat to date to embrace the idea.

Politico:

"Yes, I think there are a lot of Democrats who feel that way," Schumer told host Jake Tapper when asked whether he would support a move to block any potential FBI director until an independent investigator is named. "We will have to discuss it as a caucus, but I would support that move, because who the FBI director is, is related to who the special prosecutor is." The president's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey last week raised eyebrows from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, especially given the FBI's ongoing investigation into Trump's campaign. The president did little to calm concerns about Comey's dismissal when he told NBC News in an interview that he weighed the Russia investigation, which he called a "made-up story," as he made up his mind to fire the FBI director. As the Senate's minority party, Democrats would have little power to truly block a new FBI director, whose nomination would need only a simple majority to clear the bar of confirmation. But a partisan battle over the head of the FBI would be new territory for the Senate, which typically confirms the bureau's director with essentially universal bipartisan support. (Comey was confirmed by a vote of 93-1 in 2013.) Schumer predicted that the plan would enjoy "broad support" among Senate Democrats, as well as among the American people.

Republicans don't need the Democrats to confirm an FBI director. A simple majority of 51 senators is all that's required for a quorum and confirmation vote.

But Schumer wants to taint any Trump nominee to the post to raise questions in the public's mind of the independence of a new director. A partisan confirmation would be more of a nuisance than anything else, but it's all about embarrassing the president for the Democrats. This is another Democratic tantrum, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In the meantime, the FBI is being run by deputy director Andrew McCabe. He is on the short list of replacements for Comey despite the fact that McCabe's wife received more than $500,000 in 2015 for her state Senate campaign from a group run by Clinton crony Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe. Deputy director McCabe was heavily criticized for his role in the Clinton email investigation, and Democrats may not look unkindly on his nomination.

Whoever becomes the new FBI director will have his hands full avoiding the partisan minefield that Democrats have set up.
The drug lords, street thugs, and Mugabe wannabes running Venezuela these days are trembling in their boots this morning. Seems the European Union has issued a Stern Warning to them about violence against protesters. This being the E.U., I will have to clarify: the E.U. is against it.

That'll fix 'er. Which brutal dictatorship doesn't listen eagerly and take heed dutifully when the august bodies of the European Union issue their pronunciamientos?

EU foreign ministers said in a statement Monday that "violence and the use of force will not resolve the crisis in the country." They said people's rights "must be respected, including the right to peacefully demonstrate. It is crucial that all parties refrain from violent acts." The ministers, meeting in Brussels, said that the EU "is fully committed to helping Venezuela find peaceful and democratic solutions and is ready to use all its possible instruments" to help.

The Associated Press dryly notes that 38 people have already been slaughtered and 750 have already been wounded in the current round of increasingly bloody protests. It leaves out that most are unarmed protesters victimized by hooded, Marxist regime-linked thugs, known as colectivos, driving around on motorcycles and shooting into crowds in a Leninist tactic to enforce terror.

In other words, exactly the sort of good global citizens who will heed the wise words of the European Union.

This would be the same E.U. that has praised and enabled the Chavista regime for years, first as a means of getting back at Meester Boosh, who was loathed for his weaknesses and unfeared by Chavista and Eurotrash alike.

Such as this, from 2009: European parliamentarians praise Venezuelan participatory democracy

Or this, in 2013: European Politicians Praise Venezuela's "Social Development" and Chavez's "Will to Fight for Justice"

Or this, in 2016: EU praises Venezuela for gov't-opposition talks

(Note that it doesn't praise the opposition in this case, just the oppressive government. The talks, by the way, ended in failure.)

...to do a quick Google search. The praise has extended for years.

Now they want more dialogue, which is their way of saying more status quo. The Chavistas have played this tune as with a fiddle, effectively using the diplomatic nicety-speak to sledgehammer the legitimately elected opposition and entrench themselves in power even further. These enabling statements were the diplomatic cover the thugs needed to bring things to their current state of Marxist war against the people.

Now they issue a stern warning about violence, which will amount to "see, I protested" as a means of covering their keisters after years and years of praise and enablement.

Is it any wonder the European Union is as morally bankrupt as it is  and uninfluential? These people are zeros. No wonder so many of Europe's nationals no longer have a use for this pathetic courage-free entity and just want out. Its behavior on Venezuela is Exhibit A.
President Trump boldly promised to move the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during his presidential campaign, a move that has been promised and abandoned many times before. Swamp-dwellers in Foggy Bottom think they know that such a move is impossible because the Arab street would explode with protest, and it would torpedo any hope of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, the elusive Holy Grail of American diplomacy.



U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv. Photo: Amir Cohen/Reuters

Yesterday, SecState Rex Tillerson added fuel to the fire of speculation that the promise of an embassy move was so much vaporware. Haaretz exults:

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Sunday that while President Donald Trump still hasn't made a decision on whether or not he will move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an important part of his deliberations is how such a move would impact the Trump administration's efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," Tillerson explained that "the president, I think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region, and understanding, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have." This is the first time that a senior figure in the Trump administration has admitted publicly that the embassy move, a promise Trump made during the election campaign, is being weighed as part of the larger effort to reach a peace agreement. Tillerson added further that Trump was "being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process." In recent weeks, press reports in Israel indicated that the Trump administration was not planning to move the embassy.

We have heard this story many times before. But it holds less and less water than ever before. Eugene Kontorovich explains why in a must-read article in the Wall Street Journal:

While the Palestinian issue was once at the forefront of Arab politics, today Israel's neighbors are preoccupied with a nuclear Iran and radical Islamic groups. For the Sunni Arab states, the Trump administration's harder line against Iran is far more important than Jerusalem. To be sure, a decision to move the embassy could serve as a pretext for attacks by groups like al Qaeda. But they are already fully motivated against the U.S. Another oft-heard admonition is that America would be going out on a limb if it "unilaterally" recognized Jerusalem when no other country did. An extraordinary recent development has rendered that warning moot. Last month Russia suddenly announced that it recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Note what happened next: No explosions of anger at the Arab world. No end to Russia's diplomatic role in the Middle East. No terror attacks against Russian targets. Moscow's dramatic Jerusalem reversal has largely been ignored by the foreign-policy establishment because it disproves their predictions of mayhem. To be sure, Russia limited its recognition to "western Jerusalem." Even so, it shifted the parameters of the discussion. Recognizing west Jerusalem as Israeli is now the position of a staunchly pro-Palestinian power. To maintain the distinctive U.S. role in Middle East diplomacy  and to do something historic  Mr. Trump must go further. Does the U.S. want to wind up with a less pro-Israel position than Vladimir Putin's?

Indeed, the bargaining leverage has utterly changed to the detriment of the Palestinians, and the author of The Art of the Deal knows how to take advantage of that:

Moving the embassy to Jerusalem would also improve the prospect of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It would end the perverse dynamic that has prevented such negotiations from succeeding: Every time the Palestinians say "no" to an offer, the international community demands a better deal on their behalf. No wonder no resolution has been reached. Only last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas insisted that new negotiations "start" with the generous offer made by Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Relocating the embassy would demonstrate to the Palestinian Authority that rejectionism has costs. If Mr. Trump nonetheless signs the waiver, he could do two things to maintain his credibility in the peace process. First, formally recognize Jerusalem  the whole city  as the capital of Israel, and reflect that status in official documents. Second, make clear that unless the Palestinians get serious about peace within six months, his first waiver will be his last. He should set concrete benchmarks for the Palestinians to demonstrate their commitment to negotiations. These would include ending their campaign against Israel in international organizations and cutting off payments to terrorists and their relatives.

Do it, Mr. President!
The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001 had a disorienting effect on the British left. A brief, shocked silence was rapidly followed by attempts to make sense of the outrage. On the Leninist left and among its sympathisers the narrative that it was payback for American imperialism in the Middle East was quick to emerge. The root cause of the attack was not Islamist fanaticism, they argued, but crusader power  US support for Israel, the punitive sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 war against Saddam Husseins invasion of Kuwait, arms sales to Saudi Arabia, exploitation of the regions oil. The British government was on the side of the imperialists  and it was crucial that the imperialists were defeated. (This is Lenins doctrine of revolutionary defeatism, developed in World War I, according to which the left in any country engaged in an imperialist war should support the defeat of its own ruling class in order to bring on the revolution.)

The analysis was simplistic and met deserved scorn from many left and liberal critics, but after Blairs decision to support US military intervention in Afghanistan, the knee-jerk anti-imperialism of the Leninists gained a wider hearing. The SWP went all-out for the most opportunist popular front ever. The minuscule party  with an unstable membership of less than 2,000  ditched SPEW and the Socialist Alliance to set up the Stop the War Coalition, with the aim of attracting the mosques to the anti-imperialist cause. It soon became an alliance of Trotskyist and Stalinist Leninists and the Islamists of the Muslim Association of Britain, with a sprinkling of Labour leftists (among them Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell), Greens, anarchists, CND (by now controlled by the hard left), Scottish and Welsh nationalists and Liberal Democrats.

Opposing the Blair governments political and military support for the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001-02 was not popular: overturning the Taliban and catching Osama bin Laden were objectives shared by an overwhelming majority of Britons. But opposing Blairs subsequent backing for the US invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein was different. The 9/11 link to Saddam was, to say the least, not persuasive  and the official rationale for the invasion shifted suspiciously from Saddams support for terror to weapons of mass destruction. Taking out Saddam by force seemed a massive risk. US President George Bush appeared to be preparing for an intervention that was at best opportunist, half-thought-through and dangerous  and Blair seemed to be tagging along uncritically. It was more complex than that, but Stop the War, with the SWP firmly in command and the CPB playing a key supporting role, found itself in the position of being the only organisation in place with the means to mobilise popular opposition to war. Its high point was the 15 February 2003 demonstration in London against intervention in Iraq, which attracted perhaps 1 million people.

It would be ludicrous to claim that many of the 15 February demonstrators were signed-up Leninists. But the Stop the War organisers and spokespeople for the movement for the most part were: Rees and German from the SWP; the organisations chair, Andrew Murray, a leading figure in the Stalinist Straight Left fraction of the 1970s and 1980s (a bizarre secretive group that operated both in the CPGB and the Labour Party), who had become a member of the CPB central committee and an official for the train drivers union Aslef; the Labour MP George Galloway (expelled from the party in autumn 2003 for bringing Labour into disrepute after calling on British troops to refuse to obey orders); Kate Hudson, chair of CND and a member of the CPB. And they had media support too  most importantly from the comment editor of the Guardian, Seumas Milne, another veteran of Straight Left.

The Leninist-Islamist alliance (minus most of the Labour hard left and the CPB, at least formally, but backed by many conservative Muslims) was subsequently the basis for a new electoral party, Respect (Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community, and Trade Unionism). German failed miserably as its candidate against Ken Livingstone in the 2004 London mayoral election; but Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow on a Respect ticket in the 2005 general election. The Scottish Socialist Party, without Islamist support, also did well in the 2003 Scottish Parliament election, winning six seats.

The Leninist revival was, however, patchy and short-lived. It bore the seeds of its own destruction in the blurring of aspirations required by the anti-war popular front: deference both to Muslim moral conservatism and to Scottish nationalism north of the border.

Despite their organisational zeal and campaigning efforts, the micro-parties recruited fewer new members from Stop the War than they had expected, and the new recruits, though often as ardent and narrow-minded as any class-against-class communist of the early 1930s, chafed at the bit of party discipline.

While the high-ups in the SWP and CPB engaged in the Stop the War love-in with Islamists, pacifists, Greens, the Scottish National Party and the traditional Labour hard left, undermining their own arguments for a distinctive revolutionary party, the narcissism of small differences disorganised the movement on the ground  where it was amplified by articulate (if hardly independent-minded) novices radicalised by campus identity politics.

The Leninists embrace of Islamism was particularly problematic: if everyone could agree that Islamophobia was bad and it was easy enough for Galloway and leftist intellectuals to declare anti-imperialist solidarity with Islamists, the culture clash between Leninist and Islamist anti-imperialisms could not be avoided in campaigning activity, particularly where the rights of women and gay people were at stake. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Leninist left could not find a narrative to rival that of the SNP.
(ANSA) - Rome, May 15 - Elizabeth, Angelica and Francesca Halilovic, three Roma sisters who died in a fire in their family's camper van in Rome last week, were caught by the flames in their sleep and burned alive as they were unable to get out of the torched vehicle, according to an autopsy Monday. Police are still combing Roma camps for a suspect in the fire that killed the girls Tuesday night as part of a suspected feud between Roma families.

The girls, aged 4, 8 and 20, were burned alive while their eight brothers and parents escaped the blaze.

Rome investigators opened a homicide probe after the two children and young woman died in the Centocelle district of the capital.

The homicide probe was opened after shards of glass and traces of flammable liquid were found outside the vehicle and video footage caught a man with a Molotov cocktail.

Survivors of the blaze in the camper, which was home to a family from Bosnia made up of 11 children plus the parents, told investigators that they had recently received threats.

Another camper was reportedly torched in the area recently.

The camper was in a shopping centre car park, with the Halilovic family having recently moved from a Roma camp, reportedly amid tensions.

The incident shocked Italy and moved Pope Francis to send a message to the family.

The Sant'Egidio lay Catholic charity, which does a lot of work with Roma, said the incident showed "the Roma have been the victims of unprecedented violence".

Former premier and centre-left Democratic Party (PD) leader Matteo Renzi called for "harsher punishment than normally envisaged for whoever caused the fire" while the Codacons consumer group said "the camper should not have been there, it is a sign of urban decay".

Amnesty International Italia said the "tragic deaths...repropose the issue of the right to proper housing" on the part of Roma families.

President Sergio Mattarella said the incident was "a horrendous crime, whoever committed it".

He said "when you kill children you are below the level of a human being".

Mattarella said "the culprits must be found and severely punished".

Lower House Speaker Laura Boldrini tweeted "three sisters burned alive in the camper in which they lived. An aberrant act, full of hate and violence." Pope Francis sent a "message of comfort" to the family.

It was taken to the Halilovic family by Papal Almoner Msgr Konrad Krajewski who went there to "bring a greeting and concrete aid to the parents and eight children", the Vatican press office said.


(ANSA) - Vatican City, May 15 - Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez told ANSA in an interview that he believes the Pope will convince US President Donald Trump to change his mind on climate change. Pope Francis dedicated his 'Laudato Si' encyclical to climate change and will be meeting with Donald Trump on May 24, who has signed an executive order dismantling Obama-era environmental legislation.

In the eyes of Sanchez Sorondo, the choices adopted on climate by Trump "are against science, even before being against what the Pope says. In the election campaign he even said it was a Chinese invention to criticize America. But this president has already changed about several things, so perhaps on this as well".

He added that "today the Chinese are actually very collaborative as concerns the commitments they took on climate with the Paris Climate Conference (the Conference of the Parties, or COP2)".

The Argentinian bishop, who spoke last week at the University of the Holy Cross at an event marking the two-year anniversary of the Pope's encyclical, said that "when he was preparing the 'Laudato Si', oil lobbies did everything in their power to prevent the Pope from saying what he did, meaning that climate change is caused by human activity that employ fossil fuels.

Perhaps the oil companies wanted a 'light' encyclical' - a romantic one on nature that wouldn't say anything at all.

Instead, the Pope followed what the scientific community says.

If the president does not follow science, then that is the president's problem." On his opinion that the Pope will manage to "convince" Donald Trump, Sorondo said that "they will come to an agreement, since the president claims to be a Christian, and so he will listen to him." Monsignor Sorondo, who for almost 20 years has been at the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, works closely with the Pope, who has entrusted him with such key issues as global warming, the migrant emergency, human trafficking, natural resource management and participatory democracy, underscored that today "even large capitals that have thus far invested in fossil fuels are beginning to be concerned about the effects of climate change and see new investment and research opportunities to find different energy solutions that are 'clean' or renewable." Some countries are ahead of the rest, he said, citing Germany, but the trend is gaining traction elsewhere as well, "in part because energy from fossil fuels (coal and oil) costs a great deal". "In America, oil companies," he said, "in addition to being those that earn the most, receive the most advantages and are subsidized by the state. The result is that the poor pay for the rich." The Pontifical Academy of Sciences focuses on these issues and Sorondo announced that a meeting would be held in November on the effects of climate change on human health. He noted that Trump's turnaround on the COP21 commitments taken by Obama was made possible by the fact that the latter "had used a decree without going through Congress, which his successor has now been able to do". The danger is now that "the US president influences others, and scientific findings are being cast doubt on" and "truths begin to be denied". Sorondo stressed that it was during the Paris conference that climate change deniers were found to have been paid by oil sector lobbies. He added that global warming was leading to the migration crisis and new forms of slavery for "tens of millions of people".


ANSAmed - Tomorrow's events in the Mediterranean

(ANSAmed) - ROME, MAY 15 - The following are some of the main events scheduled for tomorrow in the Euro-Mediterranean area: HAMMAMET - Start of 'Pamed 2017', the Mediterranean fair of animal productions and agri-business (until the 19th).



WASHINGTON - Visit of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who will meet US President Donald Trump (also on the 17th).



BRUSSELS - EU, meeting of the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA).



STRASBOURG - EU, meeting between European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Moussa Faki Mahmat, president of the Commission of the African Union.




Migrant-rescue ships to stop landing in Sicily for G7 Gabrielli says move to ensure police not overstretched

(ANSAmed) - ROME, MAY 15 - Italian Police chief Franco Gabrielli said Monday that ships involved in the rescue of asylum seekers in the Mediterranean will not be allowed to dock in Sicily until after this month's G7 summit in Taormina. He said the move, which kicks on Monday and runs until May 28, "derives from the need to not put a burden on the police involved in summit security".



Gabrielli said the ships carrying rescued asylum seekers would be diverted to ports in other regions in this period. On Sunday Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti said the armed forces were making a big contribution.



"There are 7,000 armed-service officials who help the Carabinieri (police) and (State) police with anti-terrorism measures and around 3,000 will be deployed for the G7," she said. Pinotti added that "our defence forces are recognised the world over as among the world's best and we should be proud of them because there are great professionals who know how to relate to populations they must help and restore stability where there is conflict. "And it is a defence that is called to defend our country at a time when the security challenges are many". (ANSAmed).




Mogherini 'supports greater involvement in southern Libya' Focus on Africa at EU foreign ministers meeting

(ANSAmed) - BRUSSELS, MAY 15 - The EU Foreign Ministers Council meeting on Monday in Brussels will be almost entirely dedicated to Africa, underscored EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini on her arrival.



She added that the choice that there is an ongoing ''change of perspective'' by Europe towards Africa, with the continent no longer being seen solely as a ''beneficiary of humanitarian aid'' and instead becoming a ''true partner in the economy, immigration, security and attention to the young''. These issues will be looked in in-depth during a working lunch in which the head of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki, will take part.



After noting that the rescues at sea are a ''legal and moral duty'', Mogherini stated her support for ''the appeal by Germany and Italy for work to be stepped up in southern Libya'' to control migration flows across the desert, where as many die as at sea.



She noted that the EU ''is already doing this'' through operations in Niger and Malta. (ANSAmed).




(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, MAY 15 - Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) secretary general Saeb Erekat called Monday for Israel to recognize the 'Nakba' and apologize in the interests of ''achieving just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine''. Erekat was referring to the day's commemorations by Palestinian communities for the 'Nakba', for 'catastrophe' of the founding of Israel and the dispersion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. He added that the day signified ''exile and the systematic denial of our rights'' for Palestinians. ''We are calling on the Israeli government,'' Erekat said, ''to open its 1948 archives and show the nation itself the truth about what was done to our population, including ethnic cleansing policies and shooting at Palestinians returning to their own homes.'' Erekat also called on the UK to apologize to Palestinians for the 1917 Balfour Declaration for a ''Jewish home''.



Palestinians on Monday are marking the 69th anniversary of what they call the 'Nakba', or 'catastrophe', of the founding of Israel on May 14, 1948, the war that followed and the dispersion of an estimated 700,000 of their population. Like every year, numerous ceremonies are planned across the West Bank, Gaza and everywhere there are Palestinian communities in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The Palestinian news agency WAFA reports that the anniversary this year coincides with a hunger strike underway by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. It added that ''the Israeli government continues to deny the rights'' of the Palestinian population and refrains from implementing international resolutions, including 194'' on returning Palestinians to their homes.



Adopted on December 11, 1948, it states that ''refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible''.

(ANSAmed)
TUNIS - Tunisia will continue to be a country open to the coexistence of religions, Tunisian prime minister Youssef Chahed said in a visit to the island of Djerba.



The visit was undertaken alongside Interior Minister Hedi Majdoub and Tourism Minister Selma Elloumi Rekik during celebrations and traditions connected with the traditional pilgrimage by Jews to the ancient Ghriba synagogue. Organized every year on the 33 days after the Jewish Passover, the ritual is at the heart of traditions of Tunisia's Jewish community. One of the legends claims that the Ghriba synagogue dates back to the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, when some Jews fleeing Palestine took refuge in Djerba in 586 BC. Every year Djerba welcomes thousands of Jews, most of whom from Israel and Europe, as well as thousands of tourists. In addition to over 2,500 Jews, about 12,000 visitors go to the island for the pilgrimage, according to Tourism Minister Sella Elloumi Rekik.(ANSAmed).


WASHINGTON, DC - The Trump administration on Monday accused the Syrian government of carrying out mass executions in a prison outside Damascus and of burning the bodies in a large crematorium there to hide the evidence.



The US Department of State said about 50 prisoners a day are being hanged in the military prison of Saydnaya, about 45 minutes from Damascus.



Acting US Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones said the Assad government "has sunk to a new level of depravity" with the support of Russia and Iran.



Jones presented declassified photographs showing how the military prison building was modified to create the crematorium.



In February, Amnesty International said that no less than 13,000 prisoners have been hanged in Saydnaya prison in the five years since the start of the revolt and subsequent civil conflict in 2011. The State Department report was based on interviews with 31 former prisoners and more than 50 officials and said the executions were authorized by close collaborators of Syrian President Bashar al Assad.



Despite Syrian authorities' past denial of mass executions, Amnesty International said former prisoners called Saydnaya prison "the slaughterhouse" and groups of 20 to 50 people were hanged there once or twice a week, following show trials lasting only a few minutes.


Accompanied by VIPs and senior government officials, Sheikh Ahmed toured the worlds second biggest airport B2B event spread over 15,000 square metres in Zabeel Halls 4, 5 and 6, at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC).



Sheikh Ahmed said: The aviation industry expansion in the Middle East continues to surpass average global growth rates. Future projections are equally promising and are behind the ongoing and considerable investment in aircraft, technology and infrastructure. The Airport Show brings together solution providers from around the world giving them the opportunity to explore the latest trends and bring forward innovative products and services designed to support ongoing industry growth and service enhancements.



Sheikh Ahmed met with the exhibitors, who explained about their latest technology products and services being offered for the aviation sector. Among the stalls that Sheikh Ahmed visited were emaratech, which described its latest baggage handling system being showcased at the Airport Show; General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) in Dubai, which is displaying the latest smart technologies being used to enhance customer experience; General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) Saudi Arabia, who explained the latest facilities and expansion of airports in Saudi Arabia; Dubai Police, who described the latest training program and security centres; Oman Airports Management Company (OAMC), who are showcasing their unique virtual reality applications; Huawei, which is showcasing a range of its latest smart solutions including the smart modular data centre and aviation cloud solution; TAM Europe, Denmark Pavilion, Aaqius Switzerland, Nuctech Company and others.



His Highness Sheikh Ahmed also visited the World Travel Catering and Onboard Services Expo Middle East (WTCEME), co-located with the Airport Show, where he visited stands of Emirates Flight Catering, Pinar from Turkey, Unilever, Pearls, who launched a new beverage product at the show and other exhibitors.

He also met with the representatives of Women in Aviation Middle East, which hosted its 2nd General Assembly today at the Airport Show. In line with the vision of the UAEs leadership to empower women and enhance their participation across all sectors, Airport Show is supporting Arab Women in Aviation which aims to promote the higher participation of women in the Middle East's robust aviation sector.

Daniyal Qureshi, Group Exhibitions Director, Reed Exhibitions Middle East, organisers of the show, said: We have experienced a much larger interest in Middle East aviation developments and the Airport Show in particular over the last year, signaling the growing confidence of international suppliers in the regions expansion programmes. We have experienced an almost 10% growth in exhibitors this year, with new country pavilions and more security, ICT and passenger technology companies than ever before at the event. We also have larger delegations from Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan, highlighting the collaboration that Dubais aviation authorities and integrators have built with authorities in the region.



Abdulla Mohammed Al Busaidi, Head of Media from Oman Airports Management Company, added: We have been participating in the Airport Show for five years and have been increasing our participation every year. The Airport Show is a great platform to connect with aviation industry players from across the world and to explore latest technologies, meet with solution providers to implement the latest smart solutions in our airports. We have had a highly rewarding participation all these years and expect equally fruitful participation this year too.

Explaining the latest intelligent baggage handling system by emaratech, Martin Sattrup Christensen, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), BBHS Intelligent Baggage Handling, said: We are showcasing the new system for baggage handling which reduces manual handling by 99 per cent. Airport Show is an ideal platform to explore the latest technologies and showcase our latest offerings.



Come GEORGES-PICOT, President, TDA Lefebure, said: The Airport Show is a strong platform, particularly to tap into numerous opportunities in the Middle East aviation sector. We are showcasing a unique Flex Pit to connect the aircraft to electricity. During our previous participations, we received tremendous business interest and we are confident of a strong interest this year too.

International Pavilions

The 17th edition of the Airport Show has a significant international participation with eight dedicated country pavilions for global exhibitors to showcase and launch their products, services and solutions for the aviation industry.

The Germany Pavilion celebrated its 17th year of participation in the Airport Show and has the largest participation this year with 34 exhibitors showcasing at the event, in addition to seven pavilions dedicated to exhibitors from France, Switzerland, UK, China, Denmark, Benelux and North America.

The France Pavilion, which made its first appearance at the Airport Show nine years ago, is organised by Business France, providing the participants of the worlds leading B2B event for the airport industry the opportunity to gain insights into their latest portfolio of products and expertise in different domains.

The SWISS Pavilion is being organised by T-LINK, which serves export oriented Swiss companies an ideal networking platform to access the local market and extend present business relationships.

The Swiss and UK pavilions have 12 exhibitors each this year, while the North American pavilion has seven exhibitors, and China, Denmark and Benelux pavilions have 23 exhibitors.

Huawei also hosted its Global Aviation Summit today, where experts discussed the most innovative ICT constructions in the aviation industry.

Global Airport Leaders Forum (May 16-17).

Co-located with Airport Show, the 5th Global Airport Leaders Forum (GALF) will open tomorrow with more than 36 eminent aviation industry leaders and experts discussing the global airports outlook 2026, airport capacity, how airports can most effectively respond to the requirements of airlines, onboard retail, the latest technology trends and other highly relevant aviation industry issues.
Mohamed Hamed, AlMasria's commercial director, confirmed that the lease is for a period of one year.

FlyEgypt signed a three-month wet-lease contract in December 2016 with Slovakian ACMI/Charter specialist Go2Sky for B737-800 OM-GTE which the Egyptian hybrid carrier has been using on flights between cities in Germany and Italy and the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el Sheikh. The aircraft is still on wet-lease to FlyEgypt.

As well as the two leased aircraft, FlyEgypt also operates two B737-800s on scheduled passenger flights from Alexandria Borg el Arab and Assiut in Egypt to Amman Queen Alia in Jordan and to Kuwait, and also Sohag in Egypt to Kuwait.
Warte Abubair Ali is a 26-years-old and earnt her certification in civil aviation in 2015 in Denmark. She has been hired as a pilot for Iraqi Airways' Boeing 737 flights.



The Minister of Transportation in Iraq Kazem Finjan al-Hamami said: "The ministry has noted she met all the requirements of success and excellence from the finest institutes, and wishes her further success.
Airline network planning departments face several challenges, such as proactively and accurately informing network planners about which markets to serve and determining the right markets in which to codeshare. Under the new multi-year agreement, Royal Jordanian will benefit from the Sabre Network Planning suite of technology, which will help it address these challenges.

Through the suite  which includes Schedule Manager, Slot Manager, Profit Manager, and Fleet Manager  Royal Jordanian will be able to optimise its network of flights based on a number of market conditions. The airline will also enjoy more accurate forecasting and analysis of its network compared with its competitors, enabling it to deploy its aircraft more effectively.

We are among the most successful carriers in the Levant region, and have an opportunity to keep growing, said President/CEO of Royal Jordanian Captain Suleiman Obeidat. We operate more than 500 flights per week to 44 destinations across the Middle East, Europe, the US, the Far East and Africa. In order to maintain our strong reputation and performance, we need to adapt ourselves to the needs of the regional market we serve, and make sure we are using our resources efficiently. Sabres technology will give us a new level of insight, enabling us to make better network planning decisions that will improve our profitability and enable us to invest more in enhancing the experience for our passengers.

Royal Jordanian already has a strong brand and a history of great success in the Middle Eastern region, said Dino Gelmetti, vice president EMEA, Airline Solutions at Sabre. The market conditions of the region are now rapidly evolving; larger carriers are facing increased competition from low-cost carriers, so airlines like Roya Jordanian are adopting industry-leading data and technology to be more responsive to sudden market and competitor changes.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of the Parliament of Armenia Galust Sahakyan addressed a congratulatory message on the occasion of Family Day, press service of the Parliament told Armenpress.

The message reads:

Dear compatriots,

I congratulate you on the Family Day.

First of all, this holiday is born inside us from our emotions and feelings, and leaning on the values and system of values, becomes home and a hearth, a country and a state, honour and dignity.

The family itself is a special system of values, in our case a full national system of values, pride and wealth. The history shows that through military and generally by means of any power it is impossible to conquer any country or people, the way of moral assaults is elected, where the main target is the family.

The country is the big family combining united efforts and feelings, where everybodys contribution, service, love and compassion are considered important and necessary. Just as are we concerned to keep firm our families, preserve them, so too we devotedly think for defending our country and vice versa.

We are the best bearers of this way of thinking, and we have proved it with our honourableness and special attitude towards the family hearth. We continue remaining like that, because our attitude towards the family, parent, child, relative is natural and sincere, because we dont need anything artificial for family warmth, because the psychology of treating the family hearth like a hotel is alien to us.

Once again congratulating you on this holiday full of human warmth I wish peace, welfare and solidarity to all the families.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said One Belt, One Road Chinese initiative aims at reaching peace, thus it is closely related with the UN goals and principles, RIA Novosti reported.

This project aims at uniting people, it is created not only for the development, but also for peace. Thats why this initiative is so closely related with the UN action plan which aims at sustainable development and reaching firm peace, the UN chief said in an interview with CGTN TV.

On the sidelines of One Belt, One Road strategy, a high-level forum dedicated to the international cooperation is being held in Beijing on May 14-15. The forum is attended by presidents and prime ministers of 29 states.

In 2013 China announced One Belt, One Road economic development strategy which aims at creating infrastructure and establishing mutual ties between the Eurasian states. It envisions two components: the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. As of 12:00, May 15, Yerevan Police Department (YPD) received 99 violation-related reports regarding the Yerevan City Council election.

The YPD told ARMENPRESS 8 reports were called in by citizens, 25 by police officers, 37 from media, 6 from observers, 2 from district electoral commission members, 15 from representatives of political forces and 6 from other sources.

Police are currently investigating 36 reports, including vote buying, obstruction of observers, multiple voting reports.

The remaining 63 reports are being verified.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Yelk blocs Edmon Marukyan told a press conference the result of Yerevan City Council election have formed as result of voting of citizens who participated in the election.

For the record, the election results formed as result of voting of citizens who participated in the election and Yelk bloc was able to the keep the vote of every citizen who voted for it, Marukyan said while reading the blocs statement.

Nikol Pashinyan, mayoral candidate from the bloc, said he will withdraw his candidacy and work in the Parliament.

We are not aware of withdrawal information regarding our other candidates. I dont think withdrawals will happen, because our candidates who were elected to the Yerevan City Council had active participation in the campaigning. We havent yet discussed the issue of a Yelk bloc faction leader and secretary in the City Council. Well discuss and inform you, Pashinyan said.

The opposition bloc Yelk received 21% votes in the May 14 Yerevan City Council election.
DOHA, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenia and Qatar discuss the possibility of visa liberalization between both countries.

The issue has been discussed during the meeting between President Serzh Sargsyan and Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha.

Armenias Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the State of Qatar Gegham Gharibjanyan told Armenpress correspondent the citizens of Qatar will arrive in Armenia not only for business, tourism or agricultural purposes, but also for the fact that the flight lasts only two hours.

It is very close, in contrast to Europe, Qatar Airways operates this flight, and in near future the flight will be operated two times a week. This will significantly boost tourism since people not only from the Gulf countries, but also from Asia and America will arrive in Armenia, the Ambassador said.

We need to present ourselves. I am convinced that if we correctly present our brand, we will succeed, he said. As for the economic partnership, the Ambassador stated that if the Armenian side is able to present several economic programs, over which currently the Ministry of Economic Development and Investments is working, the Qatari side can be interested in them.

The economic cooperation doesnt depend on emotions, it depends on a concrete interest. We must present a program where they will see their interest, Gegham Gharibjanyan said.

The Ambassador also attached importance to the agreement reached between the President and the Emir of Qatar on cultural programs which will be implemented in autumn.

15 years later I attach great importance to this visit since now the experience of state-building increased in Armenia, and we can pass to practical relations. Yes, my residence is in Abu Dhabi, but as an Ambassador I keep active ties with the authorities of the State of Qatar, the Ambassador said.










YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Levon Arazyan, a judge of the first instance court of the Ararat and Vayots Dzor provinces, has been caught red-handed by the national security service while accepting the bribe.

A criminal case has been filed on the same day, and the judge has been detained.

Charges have been pressed against Arazyan for personally demanding and accepting a bribe from a defendant, in order to act in his benefit in a court case.

The defendant had to pay a fine under the law, and the judge demanded 600 dollars for ruling a lower fine.

Investigation continues.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan on May 15 met with Executive Director of Qatar Airways Akbar Al Baker within the frames of official visit in the State of Qatar, press service of the Presidents Office told Armenpress.

The sides discussed the process of bilateral partnership in the aviation field and the development opportunities. President Sargsyan said the flights operated by Qatar Airways play a significant role in expanding the bilateral inter-state relations agenda.

The President stated that the existence of direct flights significantly contribute to increasing the number of tourists visiting Armenia from the Gulf countries, including from Qatar.

Stating that Armenia adopted Open Sky policy since 2013, the Armenian President said the policy run by Armenia in civil aviation and air communication field provides new opportunities to the Armenian and foreign airlines by ensuring equal and free competitive conditions for all.

Serzh Sargsyan said Armenia will welcome and assist Qatari investors in all spheres of Armenias economy, including the aviation sector.

Executive Director of Qatar Airways Akbar Al Baker informed President Sargsyan that the Emir of Qatar tasked him to develop mutual partnership with Armenia and assured that he will do everything to fulfill the task. Akbar Al Baker said the airlines sees a potential to develop the cooperation and seeks to develop the mutually beneficial relations.










YEREVAN, 15 MAY, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, on 15 May, USD exchange rate down by 0.03 drams to 484.14 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 3.84 drams to 530.28 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.14 drams to 8.60 drams. GBP exchange rate up by 3.01 drams to 625.75 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price is up by 124.90 drams to 19164.97 drams. Silver price down by 1.10 drams to 253.72 drams. Platinum price up by 170.34 drams to 14351.35 drams.
Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who has been president of the board during the Oscars So White years, is not seeking reelection to the board. Oh, and in other news, Netflixs chief content officer would very much like one of the seats on the board.
Responses to our 2017 Catching Up With You reader survey are rolling in. This is what we asked of you four days ago:

The Rifftides staff is interested in what our readers around the world are listening to. Please take a moment to send a message with your name, location and brief information about the most recent music on your smartphone, CD player, tape deck, 8-track, iPod, wire recorder, turntable or cylinder machine. Many of you listen to a wide range of music that the rest of us would like to know about. Dont concern yourself with genres or eras; who needs pigeonholes? We will keep track of your responses and compile a report when we have a sizeable list.

Sizeable, indeed. It will require several installments to get all of the responses posted. Heres the first set, with the names of the Rifftides readers, where they are and what theyre listening to. Where possible, we include links.

Jonah Orlofsky, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Brad Mehldau-Chris Thile

Eddie Palmieri, Sabiduria

Abe Carnow, Los Angeles, California, USA

On the CD player: The Film Music of Ralph Rainger: Thanks for the Memory by the Chuck Berghofer Trio with Jan Lundgren, Joe La Barbera and guest Sue Raney. Wonderful CD. I love movie tunes, and when I hear Love in Bloom, I remember my favorite comic, Jack Benny. (Might have heard about this from your blog).

On the record player: Van Morrison Saint Dominics Preview, still a great record. Cant say that rock and roll was ever great, but there are some fine records from that period, and Im still a big Van Morrison fan. Been listening recently to True Flight, Victor Rendon, Latin jazz, really a fine album. Also, been listening to Stacy Sullivan with Jon Weber, Stranger in a Dream, tribute to the wonderful Marian McPartland. Big fan of Marian McP, like Gene Lees and you, one of my music teachers.

Fran Morris-Rosman, no location specified

The remastered and totally brilliant Ella Fitzgerald Sings The George And Ira Gershwin Songbook, a boxed set from Verve (now Universal Music). I have had my vinyl set since 1978, and this one sounds incredibly fantastic.

Buddy Dearant, Orleans, Massachusetts, USA

Ive been listening to Stan Getz since I was 14 and over the years have bought everything he recorded. I cant pick afavorite but if I had to it would be Focus.

Lately Ive been listening to Warne Marsh meets Gary Foster, a Japanese import from years ago, released on LP only.

Dayna Stephens, Paterson, New Jersey, USA

Kurt Rosenwinkel, Caipi, ending less singable melodies with Kurts unique way of harmonically dressing them. One of those records that gets better the more times you hear it.

Jim Northover, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Im a regular reader of Rifftides. Just purchased from iTunes the Savoy Volume 1 CD. I Listen to WKCR (mainly Phil Schaap) and KUCR on Saturday mornings, WCDB Albany and BBC 3Jeff Smiths program. For your interest, I include a link to the Toronto Duke Ellington Society, of which I am a member.

Robert Payne, Topeka, Kansas, USA

Listening to jazz from across the shore a lot more these days thanks to downloading and subscribing. Bands and people I love: Phronesis, Michael Wollny, Tim Garland, Gwilym Simcock, Kit Downes, Mammal Hands, Jasper Hoiby, Pablo Held and Nat Birchall Thats just a start. Phronesis especially has become my favorite working group. Check out their Alive and see why.

John Hollenhorst, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

I listen mostly to mainstream jazz. I especially love bebop and hard bop, as well as what used to be called West Coast Jazz or Cool Jazz. My heroes? Monk, Trane, Miles, Evans, Duke of course and Blakey, Shorter, Chet, Mulligan, Pepper, Stan Getz all the usual suspects. But I love anyone who dedicates himself or herself to exploring and creating great improvised music that is expressive and melodically inventive. I love hearing a great solo and not knowing who the musician is. Once I hear it, though, I want to know.

Nearly all my listening these days is via on-line streaming. I use a wonderful app called TuneIn Radioin my iPhone and on my desktopwhich allows me to listen to nearly any radio station around the country and around the world. Since my local public radio station abandoned jazz a couple of years ago, I listen now mostly to WUCF in Orlando, Jazz-24 in Seattle-Tacoma, KNTU at North Texas U, Jazz Wyoming and the generally-distributed Jazzworks program heard on many public radio stations. Without public radio I would be lost. I have become a sustaining contributor to three public radio stations. And, by the way, thanks for your blog. I find it to be very informative and always interesting.

Alan Matheson, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Ive been listening to Joe Marsalas recordings as collected on the long-gone* Chronogical Classics series from France. Chicagoan Marsala shared a liquid and sometimes gritty sound similar to Pee Wee Russell that also reflected Marsalas love of Jimmie Noone. Marsalas records as a leader are among the best small band swing and pre-bop recordings of the era (1936-45) with excellent side players including Bobby Hackett, Buddy Rich, Eddie Condon, Dizzy Gillespie and the amazing harpist Adele Girard. Id read about these records for years but never had then all in one place. Recommended!

*(Not quite long-goneclick here.DR)

Cha Cha, no last name, no location given

I am listening to the just-released CD, Wild and Free, on High Note. It is a live recording of Mark Murphys 1980 gig at the Keystone Korner and includes various songs from throughout his career at that point, as well as a few which, to my knowledge, were never recorded for a studio album. This is Murphy at his strongest artistically: by this time his voice had developed some grit but become a more flexible and expressive instrument. His phrasing and sense of the dramatic is in full evidence during his performance of Body and Soul, which I feel is even more compelling than the one he recorded for Muse in the 1970s.

Later:

PS: You can add to my comment re: Wild and Free that my location is Astoria, Queens, New York City, USA. I used Cha Cha because my numerous jazz friends, including Mark Murphy, have known me by that nickname for years.

#

Stay tuned. There will be more reader reports soon. You may still respond. Include your name andpleaseyour location; thats important. To join in, scroll down and use the comment box on the main page.
I think India has a very good case on violation of all international norms and treaties, Rohatgi said.

File photo of former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav who has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of 'espionage'. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday is set to hear the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of espionage, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi on Monday expressed optimism saying that India has the upper hand in the matter.

"I think India has a very good case on violation of all international norms and treaties," Rohatgi told ANI.

He further reiterated that Pakistan's trial of Jadhav had rejected all international laws as well as human rights, as he was tried in a military court without the presence of an attorney.

The ICJ on May 9 put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.

The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.

India earlier contended that it was not informed of Jadhav's detention until long after his arrest and that Pakistan failed to inform the accused of his rights, an official release from the ICJ said.

India further said that, in violation of the Vienna Convention, the authorities of Pakistan were denying it, its right of consular access to Jadhav, despite its repeated requests. It also pointed out that India learned about the "death sentence against Jadhav from a press release."

India submitted that it had information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy, and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan" on March 3, 2016, and that the Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on March 25, 2016.

India also asked the ICJ to declare the decision illegal being violative of international law and treaty rights and restrain Pakistan from acting in violation of the Vienna Convention and international law by giving effect to the sentence or the conviction in any manner, and directing it to release the convicted Indian National forthwith, if Pakistan is unable to annul the decision.

Pakistan had claimed that Jadhav was arrested from the Baluchistan province last year. A military court sentenced him to death, alleging he was involved in espionage and anti-national activities. Pakistan also claimed that he was "a serving officer in the Indian Navy."

India outrightly denied the claims, saying Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was running a business, and adding he was a retired Navy officer.

Pakistan has turned down 16 requests from India for consular access to Jadhav.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) last month for his alleged involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan.
The 61-year-old judge was last seen in public in Chennai on Tuesday, a couple of hours after SC ordered his arrest,

Chennai: As the hunt for Calcutta High Court judge Justice CS Karnan dragged on, desperate police teams are at their wits end and still remained clueless about his whereabouts.

"Where is he (Karnan)?" was a question that headlines thoughts of police teams from West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, which scrambled across towns for the sixth day on Monday and were on a wild goose chase to find and arrest the judge. They also stared at the possibility that the judge, who is on a warpath with the Supreme Court, may have fled the country.

The 61-year-old judge was last seen in public in Chennai on Tuesday, a couple of hours after the apex court ordered his arrest forthwith in a contempt case.

With Justice Karnan, who hailed from Tamil Nadu, remaining elusive, his disappearance and the plight of the police going round in circles also drew ridicule in the social media.

The Supreme Court held Karnan guilty of contempt and sentenced him to a 6-month imprisonment, and directed his immediate arrest in an unprecedented order against a sitting High Court judge. The court ordered West Bengal's Director General of Police to carry out the arrest and lodge him in a jail.

"And in the end top police officers of two states of India are not able to locate a High Court judge - are we joking or this is the state of affairs of police and judiciary?" asked one Dinesh Jain.

"If the Intelligence cannot keep an eye on parsons like Karnan, who has been in the news in the last 6 months if not more, can they be relied upon for other important duties?" was a question posed by another netizen.

Targeting Kannan, a query was also posed--"a judge doesn't believe in law and they claim they have the right to pass judgement."

For the record, a senior police officer in Chennai told PTI on Monday, "The whereabouts of Justice Karnan is not known yet. A West Bengal police team continues its search for him."

The role of Tamil Nadu police was limited to providing logistics and technical support to the visiting team, he said.

A local police team was liasoning with the West Bengal police personnel, who have already questioned several persons, including the kin of Karnan as part of efforts to locate him.

Justice Karnan left for Chennai from Kolkata by an early morning flight on Tuesday last, hours before the apex court ordered his arrest.

Till couple of hours after the court order, Justice Karnan, who was staying at the Tamil Nadu government state guest house in Chennai, was meeting and discussing nonchalantly with media persons and visitors. He then went incommunicado when the full impact of the apex court ruling dawned on everyone.

A posse of policemen, headed by an assistant commissioner of police-cadre officer from Kolkata, landed in Chennai the next day.

When the police team arrived at the guest house, it did not find either the judge or the two lawyers who had accompanied him.

Initially it was rumoured that Justice Karnan was somewhere in Tindivanam, about 100km from Chennai, and later it was said that he had gone to the temple town of Kalahasti in Andhra Pradesh but came back empty-handed.

Police teams also reportedly rushed to a holiday destination called Tada near Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh border after picking his mobile phone signal.

Word had also spread that Karnan had fled to Sri Lanka through Madurai, but that information turned out to be false as no one by the name of Karnan had passed through the Madurai airport customs.

Karnan moved the Supreme Court on Thursday seeking recall of the order holding him guilty of contempt of court and sentencing him to a six-month jail term.

A petition on his behalf was mentioned before a five- judge bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar, which agreed to look into it. Karnan's lawyer again moved the apex court today for relief but without success.

When the Chief Justice of India asked about the whereabouts of Justice Karnan, Advocate Mathews J Nedumpara, who mentioned the plea on behalf of the judge, said he is "very much in Chennai".
On the presidential polls, Kumar said the BJP needed to form a consensus on the next President.

New Delhi/Patna: Amid ongoing speculation that the JD(U) and BJP could be looking at the possibility of reuniting before the 2019 general election, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar once again slipped in some good words for Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday. He also ruled himself out as a prime ministerial candidate for the 2019 polls.

Speaking to the media in Patna, Mr Kumar said that was for the people to decide who had the potential to become Prime Minister, and that during the last general election the people had chosen Mr Modi. The person in whom the people will see potential will become Prime Minister. People saw potential in Narendra Modi during the last elections, he has become the PM, Mr Kumar said.

He pointed out that five years back, when Mr Modi was Gujarat chief minister, he was not anywhere in the frame for the post of Prime Minister. He then added: But it happened because he (Modi) was capable of that, and the people of our country voted him to power.

As for himself, Mr Kumar said: I am the leader of a small party and I have no national ambitions. Mr Kumar said he does not have the capacity to become PM.

As a party president, I will try to expand the JD(U) in other states, but it does not mean that I will dream of the Prime Ministers post, said the Bihar chief minister The JD(U) chief also stuck to a middle path in the EVM controversy. While he felt elections should be held with EVMs, he also said that all apprehensions about the use of EVMs must be cleared. While several parties have alleged that the BJP had rigged the recent elections by tampering with EVMs, Mr Kumar said: We have seen how elections were conducted earlier. I do not wish that time to come again.

While Mr Kumar tacitly praised Mr Modi, he also spoke about Opposition unity ahead of the 2019 general election. Questioned on the move for a grand alliance of non-BJP parties ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, Mr Kumar said the Opposition parties should be united at the national level. Like Bihars Grand Alliance, there is a need for the unity of all non-BJP parties.

While speculation raged over the JD(U) moving closer to the BJP, reports of differences between Mr Kumar and his ally, RJD supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, continued to surface.

On the presidential polls, Mr Kumar said the BJP needed to form a consensus on the next President. Will be good if Pranab Mukherjee becomes President again, Mr Kumar said, and added: But it is for the ruling party to take the initiative. Mr Kumar had a brief meeting with the President last week at Rashtrapati Bhavan, sources said.
Support from the BJD, which has more than 32,500 votes, can give the Opposition a fighting chance against the ruling NDA in the election.

New Delhi: After the Jaganmohan Reddy-led YSR Congress came out openly in support of the BJP for the presidential polls, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), which has been equidistant from both the Congress and the BJP, has begun sending mixed signals. Despite being routed in the recent civic polls in Odisha by the BJP, the BJD is yet to come on board with the Opposition on extending support to a non-NDA presidential candidate.

Three top Opposition leaders  Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury  have already met BJD chief and Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik over the issue. However, though Mr Patnaik agreed with the need for all Opposition parties to come together to stem the tide of right-wing forces, he has not yet come on board officially, sources told this newspaper.

They said that despite the BJP rapidly gaining ground in the state, the BJD chief was still obsessing about the Congress and felt that the Congress was still enemy No. 1.

It is on this apprehension that Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who has taken the lead in getting the Opposition to flock together for the presidential polls, has not opened any direct channels with Mr Patnaik, and has rather asked other parties to carry forward the dialogue.

Another factor which was preventing Mr Patnaik from making up his mind was the BJP floating the name of Draupadi Murmu, who is a tribal woman from Odisha, as one of the NDAs presidential candidates. If the ruling party at the Centre throws up the name of Ms Murmu, then it will become very difficult for Mr Patnaik to not back her considering his regional compulsions.

Support from the BJD, which has more than 32,500 votes, can give the Opposition a fighting chance against the ruling NDA in the election.

Mr Patnaiks party is traditionally opposed to the Congress, but has also woken up to the increasing threat it faces the state from the BJP. In the recent panchayat polls in Odisha, the BJP improved its tally by 850 per cent, eating mostly into the Congress traditional votes.

Interestingly, in the last presidential polls in 2012, it was Mr Patnaik and AIADMKs J. Jayalalithaa who first fielded P.A. Sangma as an independent candidate. Mr Sangmas candidature was quickly supported by the BJP and its allies, leading to a contest against UPAs nominee Pranab Mukherjee.

With the NDA having nearly 410 MPs and over 1,600 MLAs, the estimated votes the coalition could muster added up to nearly over 5,32,000.

Jagan Mohan Reddys YSR Congress has pledged its support to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The TRS and the AIADMK have also given clear signals that they would support the ruling coalitions candidate.

If these two parties support NDA, then it would easily be able to get the 5,49,441 votes needed to get its candidate elected.
The KMC started awareness against dengue from the month of January.

Kolkata: The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has urged police stations to remove the condemned vehicles that have been lying in front of them for a long period of time.

A good number of vehicles involved in accidents or crime have been lying abandoned in front of some of the police stations in the city. These vehicles can turn out to be the breeding ground for mosquitoes that will encourage diseases like dengue and malaria as water will accumulate in them particularly with the onset of monsoon, a top official of KMCs health department said.

The KMC started awareness against dengue from the month of January, after delivering a warning that the global climate change may trigger more dengue cases this year. We have made a list of the vehicles that are lying abandoned in front of police stations. We have already started the process of issuing notices for taking suitable steps. The same process is being followed even for government offices, buildings, and also institutions, mayor in council (health ) Atin Ghosh said.

The civic body is following the process of issuing notices for a certain period of time and then following it up with a second notice, allowing a certain amount of time.

If there is non compliance after back to back notices, we will initiate a case as per the law against the offender, a senior official said.

He further said that the police administration has often cited lack of space behind keeping the vehicles in front of the police stations. However, this time we are pressing upon them to make necessary arrangements and also keeping a close watch at these vehicles, he added.
The state government is preparing a list of private developers who have been promoting their projects in the name of PMAY.

The state housing department has claimed that it has instead sought a clarification from the Centre on the issue of executing public private partnership (PPP) projects under PMAY.

Mumbai: In the past too, the state government had made an appeal to the general public, not to fall prey to advertisements of private developers who claimed to sell subsidised homes under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). The state housing department claimed that there are still a few developers who are claiming to sell homes under PMAY but we have till date not approved any private project.

The state housing department has claimed that it has instead sought a clarification from the Centre on the issue of executing public private partnership (PPP) projects under PMAY.

In May 2016, Mhada took suo-moto action against Pune-based Maple Group for publishing misleading newspapers advertisements to promote their flats as affordable homes under PMAY.

The state government is preparing a list of private developers who have been promoting their projects in the name of PMAY. The list will be sent to union housing ministry in New Delhi.
Officials of the UIDAI got a whiff of the matter and reported the matter to police.

Jaipur: Osama bin Laden is dead and gone but a Saddam Hussain operating an E-Mitra kiosk centre in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district tried to make an Aadhaar card for the slain Al Qaeda terrorist.

However, officials of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) got a whiff of the matter and reported the matter to police.

Police have arrested Saddam Hussain Mansuri, 25, who runs an Aadhaar card registration centre in Mandal town. The accused had allegedly uploaded a blurred picture of Laden along with other details.

UIDAI officials found discrepancies in the application and forwarded the matter for investigation, SP, Bhilwara, Pradeep Mohan Sharma told PTI.

He said the state IT department had forwarded the complaint to him and a case was filed against Mansuri with the Mandal Police Station on Friday evening, Sharma said.

Mandal Circle officer, Chanchal Mishra, said that the accused will be produced before a court today and will be taken on remand for further interrogation into the matter.

She said that a case under the IT Act has been registered against the accused.
The photographer received a message from a man who wanted to propose to his girlfriend at the beauty spot Hawks Bill Crag in Arkansas.

London: This might be termed as the most awkward photo shoot ever!

According to Mirror, Jacob Peters, a photographer, has opened up about his irreversible mistake during a photo shoot in which he was meant to capture a romantic marriage proposal.

The photographer received a message from a man who wanted to propose to his girlfriend at the beauty spot Hawks Bill Crag in Arkansas, USA, at sunrise - and he wanted to keep it a secret.

Jacob accepted the job, left his home at 2.30 a.m. and arrived at the park at 4.45 a.m.

After 45 minutes, the snapper was convinced he was going the wrong way and turned around, but some teenagers pointed him in the right direction again.

The couple came, she said yes, Peter took pictures from a distance and all appeared to be a smooth start to a happily ever after.

But later that morning, when Peter texted the man to congratulate him, the man apologised for being over an hour late.

He quickly realised he had photographed the wrong proposal.

"Basically I spent six and half hours, 40 USD in gas and food, 450 photos, and took the wrong couple's photos," he wrote on his Facebook page.

The photographer appealed for help on his Facebook page to find the couple in the photos and has since posted an update to let his followers know they came forward.

After which he wrote, "The couple has been found and contacted and they now have their photos."
Erdogan and other top Turkish officials have pressed for the US to reverse its strategy.

Turkey has been pressuring the US to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesn't want them spearheading the Raqqa effort. (Photo: AP/AFP)

Washington: The United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Islamic State militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to US interests in the volatile Middle East.

The Turks are fiercely opposed to the US plans, seeing the Kurdish fighters as terrorists. And when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visits the White House this week, the most he and President Donald Trump may be able to do is agree to disagree, and move on.

"The Turks see this as a crisis in the relationship," said Jonathan Schanzer at the Washington-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

The challenge is hardly new. Long before Trump took office, US presidents have grappled with the fragility of partnering with Turkey's government and the Kurds to carry out a Middle East agenda.

Past administrations have sought a delicate balance. Too exuberant in its support for the Kurds, and the US risks pushing ally Turkey toward US geopolitical rivals like Russia or emboldening the Kurds to try to create an independent state - a scenario that would destabilize multiple countries in the region. Too little cooperation with the Kurds risks squandering a battlefield ally with proven effectiveness against extremist threats and who has staunchly supported Washington.

Trump has made his priorities clear. His administration is arming Syrian Kurdish fighters as part of an effort to recapture the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State group's self-declared capital. Coupled with the US-backed fight in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Raqqa is seen as a key step toward liberating the remaining territory the militants hold.

Turkey has been pressuring the US to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesn't want them spearheading the Raqqa effort. Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish group, known as the YPG, a terrorist group because of its ties to the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party inside Turkey. The United States, the European Union and Turkey all agree the YPG is a terrorist organisation.

The Turks fear any weapons the US provides the Syrian Kurds could well end up with their ethnic brethren in Turkey, who've fought violently as part of a separatist insurgency for more than three decades.

As a nod to Turkey's concerns, the Pentagon has promised tight monitoring of all weapons and greater intelligence sharing to help the Turks better watch over their frontiers. Kurds are an ethnic group predominantly concentrated along the borders of four countries - Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

But a face-to-face confrontation on the matter between Trump and Erdogan seems inevitable. Erdogan and other top Turkish officials have pressed for the US to reverse its strategy, however low the prospects of Trump changing his mind.

As a result, experts see Erdogan using the meeting to confront Trump on a host of other Turkish grievances. Those include extraditing the Pennsylvania-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blames for fomenting a failed coup last summer, and dropping US charges against Reza Zarrab, a Turkish businessman accused of money-laundering and violating US sanctions in Iran.

"I see this trip as a new milestone in Turkey-US relations," Erdogan said, as he prepared to fly to Washington.

The US, too, has a wish list for Turkey. Washington is concerned by rising anti-Americanism in Turkey that Erdogan's government has tolerated since the July coup attempt. The US also has pressed unsuccessfully for the release of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor, and other detained US citizens.

Trump also has much at stake. His willingness to partner with authoritarian rulers and overlook their shortcomings on democracy and human rights have alarmed U.S. lawmakers of both parties. Trump's premise has been that he is focusing on deal-making. That puts added pressure on him to get results.

Trump has gone out of his way to foster a good relationship with Erdogan. After a national referendum last month that strengthened Erdogan's presidential powers, European leaders and rights advocates criticized Turkey for moving closer toward autocratic rule. Trump congratulated Erdogan.

Now, the American leader may try to cash in. "Trump has prioritized protecting US national security interests over lecturing allies on democratic values or human rights," said James Phillips, a senior research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Heritage Foundation. "I don't think the president will lose any sleep if he is criticised for meeting with President Erdogan, as long as it pays dividends for advancing his foreign policy agenda."

But Erdogan may not be amenable to accepting the US military support for the Kurds in a quid pro quo. Last month, the Turkish military bombed Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, in one case with American forces only about six miles (10 kilometres) away.

His government has insisted it may attack Syrian Kurdish fighters again. The US, whose forces are sometimes embedded with the Kurds, has much to fear.

Barack Aydin of the Washington-based Kurdish Policy Research Center, said the key ought to be a broader peace process between Erdogan's government and Kurdish opponents in Turkey, which would eliminate these problems. "That would be a very good start," Aydin said.
US National Security Adviser General HR McMaster said President Trump would take a call after he returned from his foreign trips.

US National Security Adviser General HR McMaster has said the Trump administration is working on a policy that would apply to both Pakistan and Afghanistan. (Photo: AFP)

Washington: With the aim of not allowing extremists to use Afghanistan to launch terror attacks in any part of the world, US National Security Adviser General HR McMaster has said the Trump Administration is working on a policy that would apply to both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

General HR McMaster further revealed that there is a need for a more effective strategy to prevent the problem of terrorism from settling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region broadly, reports the Dawn.

Media covering the White House were told by the US National Security Adviser that America was considering a proposal to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

A decision is likely to be made after President Trump returns from his foreign trips later this month, he said.

General John Nicholson, commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, has made a request for a "few thousand" more American troops during recently held congressional hearings earlier.

Currently, there are about 8,400 US troops in Afghanistan, along with about 4,500 from NATO and other allied nations.
PBSO K9 Kasper took a bullet that was meant for his K9 Partner. He is currently recovering and is in stable condition.

Suspect Phillip Oshea, again fired shots at the deputies while we were attempting to apprehend him. During the gunfire, K9 Kasper was shot. (Photo: Twitter)

Houston: A bomb-sniffing dog is being hailed as a hero after he took a bullet meant for his handler during a shootout.

K9 Kasper, who has protected President Donald Trump in the past, is recovering after being shot in the side when deputies with the Palm Beach Sheriffs Office (PBSO) exchanged gunfire with a wanted man who was killed.

Phillip Oshea was accused of a shooting and robbery on Friday in Jupiter, Florida. Later that day, deputies came to apprehend him, and he fired shots at them, Fox 13 News reported.

During the gunfire, PBSO K9 Kasper was shot while protecting his handler, the sheriffs office said in a Facebook post that included a photo of the wounded dog on a veterinarians operating table.

Deputies had pursued OShea to Jupiter following a shootout off Okeechobee Boulevard in which a police officer was injured while diving for cover.

Details of the final shootout were scant, but police said it took place in a parking lot.

During the encounter, Kasper was struck in the left hip by gunfire. The bullet missed his vital organs, and it was removed with surgery at Palm Beach Veterinary Specialists, according to a video posted on Twitter by the sheriffs office.

The bullet was out and Kasper had recovered from anesthesia. The video showed him walking out of the clinic with relative ease.

Hes on antibiotics and is walking fairly well, all things considered, said Michele Tucker, the veterinary centers managing director of patient services, on the video.

Kasper, a bomb-sniffing, patrol and street crimes dog, has protected Trump during his visits to Florida.
One killed in police firing as 75 per cent votes cast in first phase.

Nepalese Armys bomb disposal team detonate explosives during the local elections in Bhaktapur, Nepal, on Sunday. Two explosive devices were planted across from a candidates house. (Photo: AP)

Kathmandu: Millions of Nepalese on Sunday voted in the countrys first local-level polls in two decades as the Himalayan nation took a crucial step towards cementing democracy amid political turmoil.

Authorities recorded a 71 per cent voter turnout with sporadic election-related violence reported and one person killed in police firing in Dolakha district, 120 km east of Kathmandu. The election commission has postponed polling in three centres, one each in Kavre, Kalikot and Dolakha districts.

Date for fresh voting will be announced shortly, officials said. First phase of local poll passes peacefully with estimated 71 per cent turnout, the election commission said.

The voting took place in almost 18,438 polling centres. Chief election commissioner Ayodhee Prasad Yadav thanked the voters for the overwhelming participation in the local- level elections.

He said voting was conducted in a free and fair manner. The first phase have concluded in a peaceful manner. Ballot boxes from remote locations are being airlifted to the respective headquarters in some districts, he said.

Vote counting in Kathmandu and Lalitpur municipalities are expected to begin tonight while counting in other parts of the countries are likely to begin tomorrow morning. Though the process was by-and-large peaceful, some instances of violence were reported.
The refugees have said previously they were specifically asked about their links to Snowden by Hong Kong authorities.

Hong Kong: A group of refugees who sheltered fugitive whistle blower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong are facing deportation after the city's authorities rejected their bid for protection, their lawyer said Monday.

The impoverished Philippine and Sri Lankan refugees helped the former National Security Agency contractor evade authorities in 2013 by hiding him in their cramped homes after he initiated one of the largest data leaks in US history.

They have spent years hoping the government would recognise their cases and save them from being sent back to their home countries, where they say they were persecuted.

However, immigration authorities rejected their protection claims Monday saying there were "no substantial grounds" for believing they would be at risk if they went home.

"The decisions are completely unreasonable," their lawyer Robert Tibbo told reporters, saying the procedures had been "manifestly unfair" towards his clients.

The refugees have said previously they were specifically asked about their links to Snowden by Hong Kong authorities.

"We now have less than two weeks to submit appeals before the families are deported," said Tibbo alongside the refugees, who were visibly distressed. He said there was a risk his clients could be detained and their children placed in government custody.

One of the refugees, Vanessa Rodel from the Philippines, who lives in Hong Kong with her five-year-old daughter, broke down over the news. "The first thing on my mind is I don't want to be detained and I don't want me and my daughter to separate," she said.

Another of the refugees, Ajith Pushpakumara from Sri Lanka, the government had "taken his whole life" with the decision. After leaving his initial Hong Kong hotel bolthole for fear of being discovered, Snowden went underground, fed and looked after by the refugees for around two weeks. Their stories only emerged late last year. As well as Rodel and Pushpakumara, the group includes a Sri Lankan couple with two young children.

The adults say they experienced torture and persecution in their own countries and cannot safely return. Their lawyers and some city legislators have said two of the Sri Lankan refugees have been targeted by agents from their home country who travelled to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is not a signatory to the UN's refugee convention and does not grant asylum. However, it is bound by the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) and considers claims for protection based on those grounds. It also considers claims based on risk of persecution.

After government screening, claimants found to be at risk of persecution are referred to the UN's refugee agency, which can try to resettle them to a safe third country. But with fewer than one percent of cases successfully substantiated by city authorities, most refugees live in fear of deportation. Hong Kong's 11,000 marginalised refugees spend years in limbo, hoping the government will eventually support their claims.

Lawyers for the Snowden refugees separately lodged an asylum petition with the Canadian government in March and called for that process to be expedited Monday. Human Rights Watch also urged the Canadian government to "intervene swiftly and protect them" following the rejection of their petitions in Hong Kong.

The refugees faced "dire risk if sent back to their countries", said Dinah PoKempner, general counsel at the rights group.
Chinese daily Global Times said India would never succeed in stopping other neighbours from joining OBOR, or seeking Chinese infrastructure.

Chinese President Xi Jinping leaves a news conference at the end of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Monday, May 15, 2017. Xi on Monday appealed to foreign leaders at a forum on a Chinese trade initiative to resist pressure to close markets. (Photo: AP)

Beijing: On the concluding day of the two-day One Belt and Road (OBOR) summit being held here, China said Monday that India will have a very "small role" to play should it ever decide to join the initiative in the future.

Describing India as the "onlooker", the Global Times said in its report that New Delhi appeared more anxious than the (actual) players.

It described as strange and a contradiction that India cares about its neighbours' debt burden, but those very neighbours appeared to be willing to take on more.

India, it said, would never succeed in stopping other neighbours from joining OBOR, or from seeking Chinese infrastructural assistance.

It may be recalled that India had on Saturday had issued a strongly-worded statement on the eve of the event.

"We are of the firm belief that connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality. Connectivity initiatives must follow principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities; balanced ecological and environmental protection and preservation standards; transparent assessment of project costs; and skill and technology transfer to help long term running and maintenance of the assets created by local communities. Connectivity projects must be pursued in a manner that respects sovereignty and territorial integrity," said MEA spokesperson Gopal Baglay.

Confirming that India had received an invitation to participate in the six separate forums that China was organising as part of OBOR, Baglay said, "We have been urging China to engage in a meaningful dialogue. We are awaiting a positive response from the Chinese side."

Pointing out that enhancing physical connectivity should bring greater economic benefits to all in an equitable and balanced manner, he said, "We are working with many countries and international institutions in support of physical and digital connectivity in our own immediate and near neighbourhood."

Citing examples, the MEA spokeperson said that under the 'Act East' policy, India are pursuing the trilateral highway project; under the 'neighbourhood first' policy, we are developing multimodal linkages with Myanmar and Bangladesh; under 'Go West' strategy, we are engaging with Iran on Chabahar Port and with others in Central Asia on International North South Transport Corridor.

The two-day Belt and Road Forum is being attended by leaders from 29 countries, including Pakistan, has been boycotted by India due to sovereignty concerns over the USD 50 billion CPEC.
The Justice Committee of the House of Representatives said there was insufficient substance to proceed.

The dismissal of the complaint, filed in March, bars any new impeachment case against president Rodrigo Duterte until March 2018. (Photo: File)

Manila: Philippine lawmakers on Monday killed an impeachment complaint accusing President Rodrigo Duterte of crimes against humanity for the thousands of people who have died in his anti-drug crackdown.

The Justice Committee of the House of Representatives, which is dominated by Duterte allies, declared during the first hearing on the matter that while the complaint was sufficient in form, there was insufficient substance to proceed.

The decision to stop the impeachment complaint, which also accused Duterte of murder, corruption and unexplained wealth, was expected. But the president's critics hope the procedure could bolster a lawsuit against him before the International Criminal Court for alleged extrajudicial killings by showing that domestic efforts to stop Duterte have failed.

The dismissal of the complaint, filed in March, bars any new impeachment case against Duterte until next March.

Since taking office in June, Duterte's war on drugs has killed 7,000-9,000 suspected drug dealers and addicts, according to human rights groups. The government refutes that, releasing data on May 2 showing nearly 4,600 people have been killed in police anti-drug operations and homicides found to be drug-related.

During Monday's hearing, Rep. Rodolfo Farinas, the majority floor leader, questioned Rep. Gary Alejano on whether he had personal knowledge of allegations he made in his complaint, including the more than 8,000 people killed in the anti-drug war and the billions of pesos supposedly in Duterte's bank accounts.

Alejano said he had no personal knowledge as a witness, but that he had personal knowledge as a complainant based on official records, affidavits of witnesses and Duterte's public pronouncements. His appeals to be allowed to explain were rejected.

Opposition Rep. Edcel Lagman urged the committee to allow Alejano to be heard, saying to determine substance, there only needs to be a recital of facts on offences charged and determination that they are under the committee's jurisdiction.

"While it is true that an impeachment proceeding is a political exercise, it is not a partisan enterprise," Lagman said.

After an executive session, several lawmakers pointed to Alejano's lack of personal knowledge about the alleged crimes, calling his allegations hearsay. Forty-two of 49 committee members then voted to declare the complaint sufficient in form but insufficient in substance.

A frustrated Alejano told reporters that he'll discuss with his colleagues from the Magdalo party whether they should file their own complaint before the ICC.

He said it was clear that the procedure "was railroaded" and that the House "is not independent."

"Now that they have killed the impeachment, which is the only way for the people to hold the president accountable, where will we exact justice from him, he is immune to suits," Alejano said.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said that Alejano's complaint "was from rehashed, trumped-up charges aimed at undermining the duly constituted government."
Police were alerted to the gruesome discovery when the building's management reported a rank smell coming from the couple's Brisbane home.

Volke, who met his wife while they both worked as escorts, was seeking treatment for mental health problems. (Representational image)

Sydney: Police who found a dismembered body being cooked on a stove top in an Australian apartment thought they had stumbled on a Halloween prank, they told an inquest Monday.

Australian chef Marcus Volke is alleged to have murdered his Indonesian transgender wife Mayang Prasetyo in 2014 and attempted to cover it up by cutting up her body and cooking it.

Police were alerted to the gruesome discovery when the building's management reported a rank smell coming from the couple's Brisbane home.

When officers arrived Volke told them he needed to lock up his dogs but instead he bolted the door and fled, hiding in an industrial bin where he killed himself.

Constable Liam McWhinney told a coroner's inquest in Brisbane that when he and his partner Senior Constable Bryan Reid got into the apartment they discovered bloodstained floors and human feet being cooked in a pot.

"Originally I thought it was some sort of sick prank Halloween or something. When I put two and two together, I realised it wasn't a prank," McWhinney told the inquest, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported. Reid recalled a foul odour in the apartment.

"It was a bad smell, it was something I hadn't smelt before I can't really describe it," he told the Queensland coroner. "I'm thinking it could well be a murder that's happened."

Volke, who met his wife while they both worked as escorts, was seeking treatment for mental health problems in the weeks leading up to the death, the three-day inquest, which began Monday, was told.
Schulz's SPD won just 31.2 percent of the votes, well below the 39.1 percent it garnered five years ago, final results showed.

Berlin: Germany's Social Democrat chief Martin Schulz acknowledged Monday that his party faced a "rocky road" to national elections after it was soundly beaten in a key state by Chancellor Angela Merkel's party.

The chancellor, meanwhile, hailed the strong victory in North Rhine-Westphalia on Sunday and vowed to do "everything we can" to ensure that her party also prevails in general elections set for September 24.

Schulz's SPD won just 31.2 percent of the votes, well below the 39.1 percent it garnered five years ago, final results showed.

Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) gained significant ground in the state, for decades an SPD stronghold, coming in as the top party with 33 percent. She said her party would now gear up for the national campaign.

"We are aware that this new phase will be an exhausting one," she said, but added that the grand right-left coalition led by her party has a good record to show. Schulz, for his part, admitted that "we suffered a difficult moment last night."

"One thing that is totally clear is that, before general elections on September 24, we'll have a long way to go. It is a rocky road, but the SPD is a battle-hardened party and we will put up a fight in the elections," he said.

With a fifth of Germans 13.1 million eligible to vote in North Rhine-Westphalia, elections in the western state are closely watched for hints to the federal outlook.

It carried even higher stakes this year, being the last regional vote before the national election and having a direct impact on the SPD's ability to close a nationwide gap of around 10 percentage points with the CDU.

The SPD had already suffered two setbacks since Schulz took over the party leadership, with the CDU scoring strong victories in the small states of Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein.
India's lawyer Harish Salve argued that there was no guarantee that Jadhav would not be executed while the court was in session.

Dr. Deepak Mittal, joint secretary of India's Ministry of External Affairs, right, and his delegation wait for judges to enter the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands, Monday, May 15, 2017. (Photo: AP)

The Hague (Netherlands): The International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday began hearing India and Pakistan in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case.

The ICJ, which is holding public hearings in the case at the Great Hall of Justice in Peace Palace at The Hague in Netherlands, has given 90 minutes each to India and Pakistan to present their case.

India will present its case from 1:30 to 3:00 pm IST and Pakistan from 6:30 to 8:00 pm IST.

Jadhav, a former Indian Naval officer, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on April 10, 2017, allegedly for spying for Indian intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW).

Highlights:

India's attorney Harish Salve

Salve wraps up his argument, says India submits that it has a strong prima facie case pertaining to ICJ jurisdiction and to the merits of the case, seeks provisional measures until the court has adjudicated the case.

Salve asks the court to rule that -

1. Pak should take all measures necessary to ensure that Jadhav is not exceuted

2. Report to the court about its action in pursuance of first point

3. No action should taken which prejudices Jadhavs and Indias rights

Salve reminds the court that Jadhav has neither consular access nor legal representation 'even at this stage'.

Even the existence of any other remedy in the domestic law of Pakistan does not bar this court from having jurisprudence in this case, Salve said.

The bigger the charges, the more the need for punctilious adherence to the conventions. The Vienna Convention embodies a vital code of conduct that will given to a person arrested in another state. Violation of the rights of individual under Article 36 is a violation of the rights of the sending state, he added.

The trial was conducted without informing the individuals his rights and also without consular access to India, which is again in violation of the convention, Salve argued.

There are multiple arguments through which it can be established that ICJ has the jurisprudence to hear the case, the Indian lawyer stated.

The law provides for all disputes arising out of the Vienna convention is mandated to be heard by ICJ. Thus the court would have jurisdiction, prima facie, in listening to the case, Salve argued.

Salve said that the need for consular access to a person charged for terrorism is all the more important, based on the courts previous observations and judgements.

India refutes all allegations, and continues to say that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran and the case is based on a confession extracted from him.

In its submission to court, India has enclosed an article where Pakistan has said the verdict was based on irrefutable evidence, that it would not be overturned and that Pakistan would stand by the order.

The appeal filed by Jadhavs parents was in desperation, without knowing the charges or the evidence against him. It is unknown in case of Jadhav as to who will appeal for clemency. It is farcical to allege that Jadhav has committed serious offences, Harish Salve said.

"There is no assurance that until this court is in session, that Jadhav would not be executed. Thus, there is need for intervention", Salve argued.

There have been three instances where the ICJ instituted measures:

Plausibility context in Costa Rica vs Nicaragua case; Belgium and Senegal standard of plausibility.

In Paraguay vs USA, the court decided that government of US was asked to take steps to give rights of access of Paraguan national.

In Germany vs USA, court held that execution of the German national was an irreparable damage to justice.

Pakistan has refused consular access and also failed to provide evidence and documentation from the so-called trial, which has made India unable to represent Jadhav illegally, Salve said.

India's attorney Harish Salve argued that the present situation was 'grave' and that is why India had sought the intervention of the ICJ. There have been 3 instances where the court has entertained cases pertaining to the violation of Vienna Convention, Salve said.

Indian lawyer Deepak Mittal
The present situation, attorney Harish Salve said before the court, was grave and that is why India had sought ICJ's indulgence.

Dr. Deepak Mittal, joint secretary of India's Ministry of External Affairs, left, greets Pakistan's Syed Faraz Hussain Zaidi as they wait for judges to enter the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands. (Photo: AP)

The Hague: India on Monday called for immediate suspension of its national Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearing Jadhav's case, India argued that human rights which are basic had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan.

All request for consular access to 46-year-old Jadhav had fallen on "deaf ears", it said.

Read: Jadhav's death sentence human rights violation: Highlights of India's argument at ICJ

The present situation, attorney Harish Salve said before the court, was grave and that is why India had sought ICJ's indulgence.

India also fears that Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before its arguments are heard, Salve alleged, reiterating the urgency of the issue.

The Indian national, who had been arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death on allegations of espionage and subversive activities, had been framed on the basis of confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody, Salve added.

The ICJ has asked India to present its case first, followed by Pakistan later in the day. Both sides will get 90 minutes each to argue their case before the UN's principal judicial body.

It also said that India could avail a "short extension" beyond 90 minutes to present its case, the judge had said in his opening remarks.

On the other hand, according to media reports, Pakistan is likely to base its case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against India on the confession statement of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav, a media report said.

Senior Pakistani government officials stated that the incarcerated Jadhav's confession is the "crux" of Islamabads case, Geo News reported.

A Pakistan military court had awarded the death sentence to Jadhav last month for espionage and subversive activities.

Jadhav had been arrested on March 3 last year.

India had appealed against the death sentence on May 8 alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan after its 16 requests for consular access were denied.

The next day, ICJ stayed the sentence.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, has asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy.

India acknowledges that Jadhav had served with the Navy but denies that he has any connection with the government.

The ICJ was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.
Putin said he was briefed by his defence minister after North Koreas latest missile test.

Beijing: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Moscow was opposed to any new countries acquiring nuclear weapons, but that the world should talk to North Korea rather than threaten it.

Putin, speaking in Beijing, said nuclear tests of the type that Pyongyang had been carrying out in recent weeks were unacceptable, but that a peaceful solution to rising tensions on the Korean peninsula was needed. I want to confirm that we are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers, including with the Korean Peninsula and North Korea, said Putin, who said any such move would be harmful and dangerous.

But at the same time, we understand that what we have observed in the world recently, and specifically flagrant violations of international law and incursions into the territory of foreign states, changes in regime, lead to such kinds of arms races, he added.

Putin did not specify what countries he had in mind, but he has in the past repeatedly criticised the United States for military operations in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and accused it of trying to oust legitimate governments.

In this connection, we need to act in a joined-up way, (and) strengthen the system of international guarantees with the help of international law and with the help of the UN Charter, said Putin. We need to return to dialogue with North Korea and stop scaring it and find ways to resolve these problems peacefully.

The Russian leader said he thought such an approach was possible because of what he called the positive experience of holding talks with Pyongyang in the past. If you recall, there was a time when North Korea announced it was suspending this kind of (nuclear) programme, but unfortunately certain participants in the negotiations process did not have enough patience. I think we need to return to this.

Putin said he was briefed by his defence minister after North Koreas latest missile test. This missile launch presented no threat to us, but it, of course, escalates this conflict and there is nothing good about that.

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday that a ballistic missile fired by North Korea had crashed into the Sea of Japan around 500 kilometres (310.69 miles) off the Russian coast.
by Mathias Hariyadi

It is important to maintain a strong bond with ones flock in carrying out ones pastoral work. Participants were sent out to seven Parish parishes in Palembang. For Bishop Aloysius Sudarso, priests should reinforce and support people's morals vis-a-vis the challenges and obstacles of their daily life.

Jakarta (AsiaNews)  More than 150 diocesan priests and bishops from 37 dioceses from across the country took part in the 12th edition of the Indonesian Diocesan Priest Forum, known as Unio Indonesia, held at the seat of the archdiocese of Palembang, South Sumatra, from 2 to 7 May 2017.

Titled Priests smell like sheep" (paraphrasing Pope Francis), the meeting focused on the importance for priests to maintain a strong bond with their flock in performing their pastoral work. Hence, forum participants were sent out to seven parishes in Palembang to bring evangelical joy to parishioners and experience the daily life in 103 Catholic families.

"Priests are required to present Gods blessing, as well as reinforce and support people's morals vis-a-vis the challenges and obstacles of their daily life, Mgr Aloysius Sudarso, Archbishop of Palembang, said. Priests have a duty to offer moral assistance, not only to our common friends, Catholics, but also to ordinary citizens, Indonesians."

Mgr P C Mandagi, of the diocese of Amboina in the Moluccas, and Mgr Antonius Subianto Bunjamin of the Diocese of Bandung (West Java) focused their remarks on the future challenges facing diocesan priests in Indonesia.

One of the suggestions reached at the end of the meeting stressed the urgent need for continuing education of priests. This is often overlooked in Indonesia since people often believe that once ordained, a priest has already completed his education.

Public officials also attended the Unio Indonesia forum. South Sumatra deputy governor opened the meeting, whilst provincial authorities sponsored the event, hosting a courtesy dinner for all the participants.

Before the conference ended, Fr Paulus Christian "Koko" Siswantoko, diocesan priest in the Diocese of Purwokerto, Central Java, was elected Unio Indonesias new president in lieu of Fr Siprianus Hormat, a diocesan priest in the diocese of Ruteng, Flores.

The meeting ended with the celebration of Mass in many parishes in Palembang.
by Christopher Sharma

They are the first elections in 20 years, a first step towards the "secularism" promised by the Constitution. 73% of voters participated. Apart from some episodes, they took place in a peaceful and enthusiastic manner.

Kathmandu (AsiaNews) - Yesterday the first phase of local elections was successfully held in all three provinces involved. The first after 20 years, these elections represent the first step towards the institutionalization of the new Nepalese lay constitution.

The Nepal Electoral Commission estimates that more than 73% of voters expressed their preference on local representatives. Except for sporadic violent episodes, yesterday's vote was "peaceful and enthusiastic with an important level of electoral participation."

There was concern about these elections due to previous conflicts between the government parties and those who support the madhesi and thari minorities. Among the incidents, a clash with the police district of Dolakha during which a person was killed and ten injuries; The theft and destruction of two urns in the Kalikot district, in northern Nepal by some members of the Maoist Party; And the explosion of a bomb in the Nuwakot district, without casualties, while other weapons were disicovered by security forces in various locations. However, the elections were mostly peaceful.

Originally announced as a single phase vote, the elections were then divided into two rounds for security reasons. In the first phase, 281 local units of 34 districts voted in the three, four and six provinces; While the remaining 41 districts of the provinces one, two, five and seven will hold their elections next June 14.

UML leader and former Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli Shrama praised the results: "This is a crucial step towards institutionalizing the secular constitution to protect the rights of minorities in this country. This was very important because some Hindu fundamentalist groups have always been a threat to secularism. Now nobody can question it, because it has been approved by the people at the local level. "

Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal congratulated the participation, adding that "the government is proactive in establishing a female and minority leadership at the local level."

The Catholic Church commented that democracy and popular choice are supportive of peace and social solidarity, and that this is why regular elections must be punctual. Over the past few weeks, the Church has repeatedly spoken out about the elections, exhorting them to be "peaceful" and "free".

Yesterday's election involved nearly 5 million voters, of the total 14 million in the country. The counting of votes began early this morning and election results and should be published within three days as promised by the Commission.
Arrested by government even pregnant women or those who have just given birth. In several cases, women were detained in the hospital immediately after the delivery of her baby and before they had a chance to recover. Others were jailed while visiting their husbands in jail. In the first two weeks of May, 1257 people were arrested, 264 were imprisoned.

Istanbul (AsiaNews) - As Turkey celebrated the Mothers day on Sunday, more than 17,000 women, many of them with babies, have been deprived of enjoying the day as they are obliged to spend it in prisons across Turkey. A number increased in recent months, in the wake of a repression campaign launched by the authorities.

According to Turkeypurge, website documenting arrests and repression, especially after a coup attempt on July 15, prisons in Turkey turned into a hub for Turkish women, as the government adopted a policy of imprisoning those who, in some cases, have just given birth or are pregnant.

In several cases, women were detained in the hospital immediately after the delivery of her baby and before they had a chance to recover. Many women were jailed as they were visiting their imprisoned husbands, leaving the children stranded in the ensuing chaos.

Since July 2016, Turkish authorities have arrested more than 45,000 people, including teachers, soldiers, intellectuals, opposition politicians, businessmen, journalists, activists and ordinary citizens. More than 135,000 public servants have been either suspended or dismissed.

The crackdown is aimed at Kurds, and sympathisers (real or assumed) of the movement led by Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, US.

According to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other government leaders Gulen was behind the coup in Turkey that killed 270 people, wounding thousands.

For instance, Filiz Y., a 30-year-old woman who gave birth at Mersin City Hospital on Feb. 7 was detained over alleged links to the Gulen group, which the Turkish government accuses of masterminding a coup attempt on July 15, 2016.

In another example, Fadime Gunay, who gave birth to a baby boy late on Jan. 29, was taken into custody on Jan. 30.

Police reportedly waited outside Antalyas Alanya Baskent Hospital for hours in order to detain Gunay, whose husband was recently taken into custody over alleged links to the Gulen group.

In one case, a woman reportedly lost her sanity under torture while in police detention, yet she was thrown back into prison, despite a diagnosis to that effect.

Another woman was jailed because her husband, a journalist, remained at large. In many cases, the government has jailed the wives of businessmen who are seen as supporting the opposition to Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in addition to seizing all their businesses and personal assets.

The practice of jailing of women in big numbers has added a new dimension to the massive government witch-hunt that has been launched against critics, mainly targeting members of the Gulen group.

None of the women has any criminal record. They are not yet convicted, and in most cases, not even indicted, but have been put in pre-trial detention as punishment.

At least 1257 people were detained, with 264 of them put under arrest, in operations targeting the Gulen group and Turkeys Kurdish minority in the first 15 days of May.
India did not attend the Beijing summit because it is against the US$ 57 billion Kashmir corridor project between China and Pakistan. President Xi Jinping got 27 countries to sign up to fund the ambitious Chinese infrastructure plan. He says China will share and not interfere in the social models of the countries concerned, renewing Chinas push for globalisation.

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies)  The One Belt, One Road (OBOR) summit currently underway in Beijing to build a new land and sea Silk Road fulfils Chinese President Xi Jinpings dream of unifying China, Central Asia, Europe, India, and Africa.

Thirty heads of state and government and delegates from over 100 countries attended the summit opening yesterday, in addition to the leaders of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. India was absent however.

Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged US$ 124 billion on Sunday for his new Silk Road plan to forge a path of peace, inclusiveness and free trade, and called for the abandonment of old models based on rivalry and diplomatic power games.

For several observers, Xi is using international summits to strengthen China's global leadership ambitions. His support for globalisation appears to run counter to US President Donald Trump, who is promoting "America first", and has questioned free trade initiatives.

Still, US delegate Matt Pottinger said US companies are ready to get involved in China's Silk Road project. "US firms can offer the best-value goods and services required over the life of a project.

Pottinger, who is US President Donald Trump's special assistant, noted that "US firms have a long and successful track record in global infrastructure development, and are ready to participate in Belt and Road projects.

For Xi, countries "should build an open platform of cooperation and uphold and grow an open world economy". At the same time, "We should jointly create an environment that will facilitate opening up and development, establish a fair, equitable and transparent system of international trade and investment rules," he added.

UK Finance Minister Philip Hammond said on Sunday Britain is a natural partner. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif praised China's vision and ingenuity for having put in place an unprecedented project in history.

Fears of hegemony

Some Western diplomats expressed disapproval of both the summit and the plan as a whole, considering it an attempt by China to promote its influence worldwide.

Australian Trade Minister Steven Ciobo said that whilst the new Silk Road offers business opportunities, there are national interests to defend.

Still, China is willing to share its development experience with the rest of the world, Xi said, but we will not intervene in other nations internal affairs, export our social system and development model, nor force others to accept them.

"In advancing the Belt and Road, we will not re-tread the old path of games between foes. Instead we will create a new model of cooperation and mutual benefit," Xi said.

One of the issue faced by the OBOR initiative is financing. Up to now, China has pledged US$ 113 billion. However, according to the Asian Development Bank, at least US$ 8 trillion is needed by 2020.

In fact, "We need joint effort among Belt and Road countries to boost financing cooperation," Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China's central bank, said.

To sustain the projects, Belt and Road nations should allow companies to play a key role, as government resources are limited, Zhou added. The active use of local currencies will also help to mobilise local savings, lower remittance and exchange costs, and safeguard financial stability.

At the forum, finance ministries from 27 countries, including China, approved a set of principles that will guide project financing along the new Silk Road.

Germany, which was not among the countries that approved the financing guidelines, said its firms were willing to support the Belt and Road initiative, but more transparency was needed.

The summit was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. There were also several European leaders, including the prime ministers of Spain, Italy, Greece and Hungary.

Indias criticisms

India boycotted the meeting because of its opposition to one of OBORs core projects: the economic corridor between China and Pakistan, which runs through the controversial Kashmir area occupied by Pakistan.

"No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity," said Indian foreign ministry spokesman Gopal Baglay, adding that there were concerns about host countries taking on "unsustainable debt."

For Chinas Global Times newspaper, "It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbours' debt burden, the neighbours appear willing to take on more".

On Saturday, Pakistan signed new deals with China on Saturday worth nearly US$ 500 million, including airport, port and highway development.

Pakistans repayments on its debt will peak at around US$ 5 billion in 2022, but will be more than offset by transit fees charged on the new transport corridor.

Nepal too signed an agreement with China to build a cross-border rail link that may cost up to US$ 8 billion.
Kim Jong-un shows that his rockets can leave and re-enter the atmosphere. The dictator continues to carry out his tests taking advantage of Trump's distraction with the FBI scandal and Xi Jinpings world trade summits.

Pyongyang (AsiaNews/Agencies)  North Korea claimed that the missile it tested yesterday was a new type of rocket capable of carrying a large nuclear warhead.

The missile, launched at a steep angle, reached an altitude of 2,000 kilometres and travelled about 700 kilometres, landing in the sea west of Japan.

North Koreas missile appears able of leaving and re-entering the atmosphere, which is crucial to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), South Koreas Yonhap news agency reported.

However, repeated missile tests by Pyongyang this year have sparked international alarm and raised tensions with the US. The US and Japan have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

ICBM's are considered to have a range of about 6,000 kilometres, but analysts believe the missile tested on Sunday can travel about 4,000 kilometres if fired at a standard trajectory rather than upwards.

Reports indicate that North Korea's top leader Kim Jong-un oversaw the test, noting that he told the scientists and technicians involved "not to be complacent" but to build further "nuclear weapons and methods of delivery" until the US made "the right choice".

In a statement, the White House said that the latest provocation" should "serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions".

South Koreas newly elected president Moon Jae-in, who is open to dialogue with the North, said it was a "reckless provocation", whilst China, North Koreas only real ally, is urging restraint.

In a report, the Japanese government said the missile is thought to have flown for about half an hour before falling into the sea.

For Tokyo, the test reconfirmed the reliability of the new missiles engine and verified the homing feature of a warhead at the time of atmospheric re-entry and accurate performance of its detonation system, the report said. Thus, North Korea is a nuclear power worthy of the name.

John Schilling, an engineer who specialises in rockets, said the test shows a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile.

Sun Xingjie, a Korean affairs specialist at Jilin University, said that it is actually perfect timing for Kim.

Chinese President Xi Jinping's main priority these days is to revitalise Chinas trading strategies at a number of international meetings in Beijing, whilst US President Donald Trump is occupied with the FBI scandal.

In short, " nobody has kept an eye on Kim, Sun said. If the other countries fail to act in concert, North Korea will probably keep using this tactic, pretending to be talking while carrying out more tests.
Microsoft warns national security agencies not to "store up" viruses  to only let them leak- but to make them known. South Korea, almost untouched. Russia, Britain, Germany, France hit as well as universities in China, Italy and Greece.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The Ransomware cyberattack, which hit more than 200,000 computers over the weekend in 150 countries, is due to the carelessness of government intelligence agencies. Microsoft's lawyer, Brad Smith, accuses the US National Security Agency (NSA) in particular of "storing up" and "developing" a virus as a result of possible web attacks, which would then be stolen.

The code used in the weekend attack was developed by the NSA. Smith has said that Microsoft has long been calling for a "Geneva Digital Convention" demanding governments make computer vulnerabilities known rather than storing them, selling them, or exploiting them.

Microsoft is at the center of the debate because cyber-criminals exploited a weakness in Microsoft Windows. The company had sent updates in March to stop it. It is likely that those who were hit did not make the necessary updates.

The South Korean government has announced today that only nine computers across the country have been hit. But there are fears that with the resumption of work after the weekend, there may be many new attacks.

The Ransomware virus takes possession of all the files on a computer and asks for $ 300 ransom to release them.

On Friday May 12 and Sunday 14, some computers in the interior ministry, banking and railways were hit in Russia. In France, the Renault car company had to stop some production. In Germany, Deutsche Banh (railways) was hit. In Britain, the National Health System went into tilt and seven hospitals could not yet operate until seven o'clock in the afternoon.

Universities in China, Italy and Greece were also infected
D uring the past three years, it seems as if time has slowed down. I know thats not scientifically possible, but still something has change...


(Duplass/Bigstock.com) (Duplass/Bigstock.com)

Law students in Australia are being paired up with refugee families to help them complete key administrative tasks involved as part of the immigration process.Filling in forms and checking documents can be hard for people who have left fled their home and when they arrive in Australia there can also be language as well as legal and administrative difficulties.The students from the University of Wollongong in New South Wales are being paired with refugee families in a pilot project to help them complete important paperwork such as visa and citizenship applications.They are also helping them with more immediate needs like housing, education and health to make sure their applications are in place.'Refugees need greater support navigating the complex immigration process. Once in Australia, refugees need legal advice and legal applications are often interrupted by more immediate needs,' said Emily Glen of Illawarra Multicultural Services (IMS) which is co-ordinating the project along with Wollongong council.It is hoped that the programme, Supporting the Unification of Refugee Families (SURF), will also be beneficial for the students who will learn about other cultures, how to work with interpreters and helping people who have often gone through the trauma of conflict in their homeland.'Family unification and citizenship are pivotal aspects of the settlement process and that's the focus of the SURF process,' added Glen.One of the university's law lecturers, Niamh Kinchin, explained that 20 student volunteers will be assisting refugee families, spending one evening a week providing clerical assistance with the completion of forms for family reunification and citizenship.'It's a fantastic opportunity for our students to make a difference to the community and gain valuable skills and experience in the meantime,' she said.The Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbery said it is important to encourage refugees to settle as they bring skills, talents and strength to the city. 'We have a strong tradition of welcoming refugees into our city and partnering with the University of Wollongong and Illawarra Multicultural Services for the SURF program is our newest contribution to this tradition of welcome,' he said.
ATCO will transition more than 2,500 of its drivers in Canda to utilize the Shell Fleet Navigator Card.

Shell Canada has agreed to provide its services to the gas industry company's business units in the provinces of British Colombia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, according to the company.

ATCO is a diverse company providing products and services to many different industries, said Josh Ferguson, national sales manager, commercial fleet, Shell Canada. We are thrilled to be working with each of their business groups to develop customized programs and ultimately, help streamline ATCOs fleet operations.

The Shell Fleet Navigator Cards online management tool, eTRACTM, will enable ATCOs fleet managers to easily manage fuel spend and gain important insights to help identify new efficiencies.
Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The United Arab Emirates Ministry of Energy launched an incentive program that will call for up to 10% of car fleets of federal ministries and agencies to be electric vehicles.

The program is designed to encourage motorists to buy new zero-carbon-emissions electric vehicles through alternative vehicle insurance plans and registration, attractive electric vehicle car prices, and more, according to Gulf News.

Suhail Al Mazroui, minister of energy in the UAE, said an upswing in access to cost-effective electrics cars will see more such vehicles in both the private sector and the government sector.

The program, dubbed Incentives for Using Electric Vehicles, will also educate potential electric vehicle buyers on the benefits of going green to reduce greenhouse gases in the UAE.
There were a lot of car fans that has been slobbering over this 2017 Honda Civic Type R for years. Japan and Europe always had a version of this car, and as it arrived in the US, it is surely worth the wait.

The total look of this car is like a 2017 Honda Civic hatchback that spent a full weekend in the hands of a prop master from the Fast and Furious. With its looks, it comes with some of an outlandish wing, a hood scoop, fiddly aerodynamic appendages, high-bolstered red seats with race-harness pass-through holes, a dubious triad of tailpipes and red Honda badges.

To prove that this 2017 Honda Civic Type R is a seriously desirable machine, one should check out the car's under the hood system and inside its wheel wells. A 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder VTEC engine powers this Japanese beast with a variable intake and exhaust timing that belts out 306 of horsepower and 295 lb-ft of torque using a 91 octane fuel. The Type R was also rated at 22/28/25 mpg city/highway/combined, beating most rivals. These are just the reasons why fans have been clamoring to get their hands on this one.



For the transmission, the only one that is available is the six-speed manual, which benefits from a short-throw shifter and shorter final-drive ratio to enhance the vehicle's acceleration as well as its responsiveness. As to the gearbox, it also works with the engine control unit (ECU) to enable rev-matching.

Certain upgrades also had to be made for the 2017 Honda Civic Type R to control the much power flowing through the front wheels. An additional benefit also comes from the variable-ratio adjusting in the dual-pinion electric power steering system. When it comes to invisible upgrades, it has to do something with a lot of extra rigidity added to the body, which is made even stiffer with the applied structural adhesive at the joints of the body shells. This car is a genuinely impressive road beast that shows aggressiveness and balance.
Recent reports suggest that MINI is one to also join the bandwagon for coming up with an electric vehicle. The fifth MINI Superhero is expected to come 2019 as an Electric Vehicle. It comes as good news to industry experts as it may well be an interesting addition to future electric vehicles to come out in a couple of years.

MINI's boss Peter Schwartzenberg brought up the Superhero idea. He explained that MINI would trim down its lineup to just five core models called the Superheroes. With the 2019 MINI Superhero as the fifth, the other four are  Mini Cooper, Mini Cooper Convertible, Mini Clubman and Mini Countryman.

The elusive fifth Superhero will come in as an Electric Vehicle and still has yet to be named. According to Sebastian Mackensen, global head of MINI, the electric car is not meant to just have an "electric car" offering. He continued that it is an electric car that he hopes people will buy.

Many industry experts and car enthusiasts ask what type of car it will be built on. Upon analysis, it may somehow resemble that of MINI Countryman for being the biggest model MINI has ever built. This may be MINI's answer to the ever growing popularity of SUVs entirely dominating the market.

Other reports suggest that the fifth MINI Superhero may be a practical and small city car powered by batteries and electric motors. It may be like a Rocketman. Such model is proven popular as it is perfect for crowded cities.

Even though the redesigned Countryman released back in March is expected to help MINI's sales, it may not be enough. It is common knowledge that MINI's sales drastically dropped last year for only selling 52,030 vehicles in the United States. The fifth Superhero may help the British company gain back its momentum, but it has yet to be seen.

The fifth of Mini Superhero lineup is definitely something to watch out for. It is elusive at this point, as the British company has yet to provide more details on its upcoming EV. Any latest news relating to this development will immediately be reported so stay tuned.
Thank you for reading!

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The former Kern County sheriffs deputy looks into the eye of the camera, takes a breath and proceeds to tell the world he is contemptible, a 
Robert Price and The Californian welcome your comments and suggestions. To offer your input by phone, please call 395-7649 and leave your comments in a voice-mail message or send an email to soundoff@bakersfield.com. Please include your name and phone number. Phone numbers and addresses wont be published.
Harold Pierce covers education and health for The Californian. He can be reached at 661-395-7404. Follow him on Twitter @RoldyPierce
Firefighters are battling a large brush fire in Polk County.

The 400-acre fire was reported near Tiger Lake Road in Lake Wales just before 4 p.m. Sunday.

The fire is 50 percent contained.

Polk County Fire Rescue said 26 personnel are at the scene. The Florida Forest Service is assisting.

State Road 60 was closed due to smoky conditions.
Crews are still working on yet another brush fire at Pasco County's Starkey Wilderness Park.

Starkey Wilderness Park closed after brush fire

The fire burned more than 25 acres

This is the third fire in the past two weeks

It was calm at the park's entrance Sunday afternoon. The park closed to the public as crews worked to control the third significant fire in the park in the last two weeks.



The Sandy Branch fire, which was started by a lightning strike Saturday, has burned over 25 acres.



Last week, nearly 2300 acres were scorched from another fire and the week before that, a third fire burned about 40 acres. That one is fully contained.



The Florida Forest Service said because of the amount of crews they have in the area and the widespread unstable conditions, it's not safe for people to come back into the park.



"We still have dozers and engines in here working so we have heavy equipment moving around. There is some interior smoke and interior fire in some of these and they'll be mopping up that Sandy Branch for a while trying to get that smoke reduced. And also there's falling trees, Judith Tear with the Florida Forest Service said.



Despite the fires burning, the fire danger for Pasco County did fall after the range last night, now classified as a low risk.

But, the Forest Service said the area is not out of the woods yet. They want to remind everyone that outdoor burning is still banned here in the county as well as throughout the region.



"It was a good rain. But we're still far short on rainfall. Later in the week it's supposed to be hot and 94 and dry. You can see we had rain there was lightning there still was a fire," Tear said.



"I know when you get a little bit of rain I want to run out there I want to burn my leaves and stuff like that. I'm going to ask you to hold off doing that because it still is dry and it's still very, very windy and if it gets away you, you're responsible for that fire," she added.



Right now it isn't clear when Starkey Park will reopen. The newest fire, dubbed the Sandy Branch fire, is now 80% contained. And Pasco County officials say the Suncoast Bike Trail is open, but all Starkey trails are closed.
Here's your Tampa area forecast for late Monday into Tuesday morning, with a preview of the rest of the week's conditions.

Clear skies, mild temperatures Tuesday morning



Hot, dry conditions through Thursday



More moisture over the weekend



High pressure to the north of the area will allow the east wind to remain in place overnight. Clear skies and mild temperatures will greet us Tuesday morning.

Lows will be in the mid 60s north to low 70s around Tampa Bay.

Hot and dry conditions will be with us for the most part through Thursday.

With the east wind and a sea breeze, enough moisture may lead to a stray shower Wednesday and Thursday afternoon near the coast, but the rain chance is less than 10 percent.

More moisture will be around over the weekend for a few scattered showers.



&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;


A 70-year-old man was killed Monday morning when he was struck by a semi along State Road 60.

Man, 70, struck and killed by semi in Lake Wales

Investigation ongoing

Bay News 9 Traffic resources

According to the Polk County Sheriff's Office's Traffic Unit, Franklin Guthrie Waters was struck and killed while walking in the middle of the westbound lane of SR 60 just east of Old Bartow Road.

Witnesses saw Waters walking along the east shoulder of the road prior to the crash. It is unknown why he was in the middle of the road - whether he was attempting to cross, or simply walking.

There is reduced illumination in the area and the speed limit is 55 mph.

Deputies said the driver of the semi, 27-year-old Dwayne Thomas of Orlando, was heading westbound on SR 60 when he was unable to avoid striking Waters.

An investigation is ongoing.



Neither excessive speed, distraction, or impairment on the part of Thomas are suspected.
A man rushed to Tampa General Hospital late Monday morning after being rescued from the Hillsborough River downtown has died.

Man falls off dock near Tampa Convention Center

Man was pressure washing deck when he fell

Divers found man after he didn't resurface

Gofundme page for Johnnie Norton

According to police, Johnnie Norton, 53, was pressure washing a dock outside the Tampa Convention Center at 11 a.m. when he fell into the water. A witness said the after Norton fell, he went under water and did not resurface.

Tampa police divers responded immediately and searched for several minutes before recovering the man underwater. Officials said the man was taken to TGH, where he was pronounced dead.

Police said Norton was an employee of C&W Services who was subcontracted to pressure wash the docks outside the convention center.



More information will be provided as it becomes available.
N. Oregon Coast History Talks: Tillamook Fire, Beach Bill in Seaside

Published 05/15/2017 at 2:23 AM PDT - Updated 05/15/2017 at 2:43 AM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Seaside, Oregon)  The hubbub continues for the Oregon Beach Bill anniversary with a special talk in Seaside this month, while the museum in Tillamook looks at a fire that changed the town's history.

The Tillamook County Pioneer Museum presents Out of the Ashes: Tillamooks 1905 Courthouse and the Countys Growth in the Early 20th Century as part of their Great Speaker Series on Saturday, May 20. It starts at 1 p.m. in the Museums Main Gallery. Presented by Dr. Lori Gates, this program will feature photographs and stories from the Oregon coast museums archives.

(At right, the old courthouse in Tillamook in 1910) . From turn-of-the-century political turmoil to the Great Depression, Tillamook Countys second courthouse witnessed the growth of Tillamook County. Tillamook Countys first courthouse burned to the ground due to an unknown cause in 1903. During a turbulent time for county government, plans for a replacement were accompanied by more controversy. This talk will focus on the 1905 Tillamook County Courthouse building, now the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, as it changed through its years as a courthouse (1906-1933) and reflected the changing times for Tillamook.

Suitable for all ages, this program is free and open to the public. For more information call the Pioneer Museum at 503-842-4553.

In Seaside, the dramatic reminiscences of the Oregon Beach Bill continue, with a special presentation by the head of the Cannon Beach History Center on Thursday, May 26.

This year, the 50th anniversary of Oregon's Beach Bill, is the time to celebrate the beautiful  and singularly protected  beaches of the Oregon coast. Enacted in July 1967, the Beach Bill was intended to safeguard beaches from development and provide the public free and uninterrupted use along Oregon's 362 mile-long coastline

For decades Oregonian's enjoyed the beautiful and pristine beaches without a second thought of who might actually own them. It easily could have been a different story. What if Governor Oswald West had not protected them in the early 1900's? Then, decades later, what if the Beach Bill had not passed?

Next in Seaside Museums History & Hops series, Elaine Trucke, Seaside native and executive director of the Cannon Beach History Center & Museum, will present For the Love of our Beaches. It's a discussion of the circumstances and history that led to Tom McCalls iconic trip to Cannon Beach and the subsequent legislation that keeps our beaches public.

When first introduced, the bill faced steep opposition. Ultimately Oregonians fought for their beloved beaches. One dramatic display after another led to overwhelming public support for the bill, including a media company that brought the wrath of the state's people upon its politicians with an unprecedented letter-writing campgain. History & Hops will be held on Thursday, May 25 at 6 p.m. at the Seaside Brewing Company, 851 Broadway.

Graduating Cum Laude from Eastern Oregon University with dual degrees in Anthropology and Sociology, Elaine Trucke has served as the Cannon Beach History Center & Museum's director for the past seven years. In that time she has worked with the Smithsonian, provided historical information to OPB, KGW, and KATU. She also contributes a monthly historic article to the Cannon Beach Gazette. Trucke is an avid hiker, historian, mother, and pluviophile. (503) 738-7065. Oregon Coast Lodgings for this event - Where to eat - Maps - Virtual Tours

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In the wake of two recent hangings at the Orange County jail, some county officials say they are worried they don't have the money for additional protections required by a proposed law for inmates with mental health and substance abuse issues.

The "Sandra Bland Act" introduced by Sen. John Whitmire, a Democrat from Houston, was passed unanimously by the Senate on Thursday. It requires that county jails provide people with mental health and substance abuse issues treatment options and that jail deaths be inspected by independent law enforcement agencies.

The legislation was named for Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman who was found hanging in a Waller County jail cell three days after she was arrested in July 2015. A State Trooper arrested Bland after stopping her for a minor traffic violation and the two got in a heated verbal exchange. The Trooper accused Bland of assaulting him.

A grand jury declined to indict anyone in Bland's death.

Her death was ruled a suicide.

According to a study by the Senate Judiciary Committee, 26 people have committed suicide in county jails last year.

Whitmire told lawmakers on Thursday that there have been 16 deaths by suicide in Texas county jails this year.

One of the incidents this year occurred at the Orange

County Jail in February when Rosa Bonilla, 35, was found hanging in her cell. She died two days later at Christus St. Elizabeth Hospital in Beaumont.

The autopsy is pending.

Bonilla was arrested on a misdemeanor drug charge by the Orange Police Department.

Less than two months later, John Victor Marcotte, 59, was found hanging in his cell in Orange County in April. Marcotte survived.

Orange County Sheriff Keith Merritt said he's in support of adding additional mental health protocol to the jail, but said he's concerned about "unfunded mandates" like the "Sandra Bland Act."

"They pass laws and we don't have the money to fund the stuff like training," he said.

Merritt said he doesn't believe the legislation would have much impact on jail protocol other than possibly updating the department's yearly mental health training.

Orange County Judge Stephen Brint Carlton called the act's new requirements "great," but said they could be expensive to implement.

"I haven't seen where the state is providing any extra money to the county," he said.

Other than Bonilla, the only other death by suicide at the Orange County Jail in the past 10 years was in June 2015, according to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

Orange County took a financial hit last January when commissioners voted to pay the family of inmate Robert Montano $3.1 million in a wrongful death lawsuit.

Montano died in county custody in October 2011 after being held in solitary confinement at the county jail for four days.

In the past 10 years, only two inmates have died by suicide at the Jefferson County Jail, according to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. The last incident was in August 2014.

Jefferson County Sheriff Zena Stephens, who called herself an "advocate for mental health issues," said the county has policies in place to address mental health in jails. The jail screens people for mental illness and has a contract to have a psychiatrist visit the jail for 10 hours a week, she said.

Stephens said she'd like to see more mental health services in place but said the problem always come back to funding these programs.

But like Orange County, Stephens said her only concern with the legislation like the "Sandra Bland Act" is financial and would like to see funding from the state for additional mandates.

"The ideas are great," she said. "No one believes that people suffering from mental illness should be locked away."

NKrebs@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/Natalie_Krebs
Three teens in connection to last week's kidnapping of an Orange County attorney "are expected to be transferred to the Orange County Jail today," according to a press release from the Orange County Sheriff's Office.

German Adalid Borjas-Benitez, 19, Henrry Eduar River-Antunez, 17, and Erik Pagoada-Bustillo, 17, were arrested and booked into the Jefferson County Correctional Facility on Friday, according to a press release from the Orange County Sheriff's Office. The three suspects are undocumented immigrants from Honduras, and were arrested in Port Arthur, spokesperson Janois Strause said in a press release.
The Green Mountain Care Board said it has to postpone its decision about Green Mountain Surgery Center until the board appoints new members, according to Burlington Free Press.

Here are five key points:

1. A decision was set for early July following a final public hearing in April.

2. The board pushed this date back after three board members failed to reach a consensus over the certificate-of-need application.

3. Several months ago, two board members left, leaving the board with three members. Five board members comprise the Green Mountain Care Board.

4. Amy Cooper, a principle of the ASC proposal, told Burlington Free Press, "This has been a very long process already." The surgery center's proponents have waited for a decision since filing the CON nearly two years ago.

5. Opponents include Vermont Association of Hospitals, claiming the ASC will boost costs and provide unnecessary duplicate services.
The North Carolina Senate passed a budget proposal including an amendment to repeal the state's certificate-of-need laws, drawing criticism from hospital groups, according to Daily Advance.

Here are five things to know;

1. Jeffrey Sackrison, president of Windsor, N.C.-based Vidant Bertie Hospital and Edenton, N.C.-based Vidant Chowan Hospital, said repealing the legislation will not lower costs, which proponents are claiming.

2. Mr. Sackrison said the CON laws create obstacles for physicians that legislators need to address. However, he argued rural hospitals can provide services for residents in the area and therefore the surgery center would not be necessary to provide such services, according to Daily Advance.

3. Elizabeth City, N.C.-based Sentara Albemarle Hospital President Coleen Santa Ana also opposed the law, telling Daily Advance in an email that the law allows her affiliated hospitals to offer care despite patients' difficulty paying.

4. State Rep. Bob Steinburg, R-Chowan, said although he understands opponents' worries, he said he will likely support the repeal, choosing to vote "on the side of free enterprise."

5. Fairfax, Va.-based George Mason University researchers found North Carolina has the third most restrictive CON system in the nation. Currently, 37 states have such regulations.
Here are the 10 states with the most surgeons, based on data from the Kaiser Family Foundation gathered from Redi-Data in April 2017.

1. California: 4,965

2. New York: 3,925

3. Texas: 3,297

4. Pennsylvania: 2,757

5. Florida: 2,632

6. Ohio: 2,205

7. Michi8gan: 1,953

8. Illinois: 1,893

9. Massachusetts: 1,663

10. North Carolina: 1,442
A worldwide ransomware attack on Friday hit organizations across multiple continents, infecting FedEx and bringing down operations for at least 16 of the U.K. National Health Service's facilities.

Here are six new developments to know.

1. Security experts report the ransomware variant exploits a vulnerability discovered and developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to The New York Times. Shadow Brokers, a group that regularly posts stolen software and hacking tools developed by the U.S. government, released the tool online last month.

2. Microsoft created a patch for the vulnerability, according to The New York Times. However, many organizations  including hospitals  had not appropriately updated their systems.

3. Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, penned a blog post on Sunday blaming the U.S. government for not working with technology companies to address software vulnerabilities.

"This attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem," he wrote. "Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage."

4. Preliminary evidence shows infections in at least 14 countries, Reuters reported Friday afternoon. Since then, security experts discovered the ransomware infected more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries. At least 1,600 U.S. organizations have been infected with the ransomware, including FedEx, Forbes reports.

5. Once infected, each affected organization received a similar message that requests at least $300 in bitcoin to unencrypt their files, according to Reuters. The ransomware attackers have already received roughly $32,500 in bitcoin as of 7 a.m. EDT on Sunday.

6. Security experts expected these estimates to increase Monday when people returned to work, according to CNN. However, a 22-year-old U.K. security researcher  who goes by the online name 'MalwareTech'  discovered a "kill switch" in the software's code, according to BBC.

"It was actually partly accidental," he told the BBC. The researcher noticed the ransomware contacted a single web address while infecting its targets. He decided to register it for $10.69, and "unexpectedly triggered part of the ransomware's code that told it to stop spreading," BBC reports.

While MalwareTech's fix stopped the ransomware variant from distributing to new devices, it does not fix systems already infected, according to BBC.
Newburyport, Mass.-based Anna Jaques Hospital is the third health system to join the proposed merger between Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Burlington, Mass.-based Lahey Health, bringing the total number of health systems interested in merging up to five.

The board of trustees signed a letter of intent to explore the possibility of joining the proposed merger Monday.

The hospital has previously collaborated with Beth Israel Deaconess in various capacities. AJH and Beth Israel Deaconess have maintained a clinical affiliation since 2010. AJH is also a member of the Beth Israel Deaconess Care Organization network.

AJH is the third entity to join the Beth Israel Deaconess-Lahey Health merger. The other two hospitals include Boston-based New England Baptist Hospital and Cambridge, Mass.-based Mount Auburn Hospital.

The proposed merger is pending regulatory approval.

"Joining the new BIDMC/Lahey/Baptist health system presents a compelling and unique opportunity to position Anna Jaques for long-term strategic growth and continued success," said Mark Goldstein, President and CEO of Anna Jaques Hospital. "It would further expand and enhance clinical services in our region. BIDMC and Lahey Health share our vision and commitment to high-value, community-based healthcare, and have a proven track record of strengthening their community hospital affiliates. After years of working collaboratively with BIDMC, we look forward to exploring this next step in the evolution of our relationship."
Brentwood, Tenn.-based Quorum Health Corp., signed a definitive agreement Friday to sell two hospitals in Tennessee.

The 36-hospital operator will sell Henderson County Community Hospital, a 45-bed hospital in Lexington, and 45-bed McKenzie (Tenn.) Regional Hospital to SHS Tennessee.

Officials expect to close the transaction by Aug. 1., pending regulatory approval.

Editor's Note: The article was updated to reflect an updated announcement from Quorum Health Corp. In a previous press release, Quorum mistated the health system acquiring the two Tennessee hospitals.
Police fatally shot an inmate being treated at Geneva, Ill.-based Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital Saturday after he stole a correctional officer's gun and held two nurses hostage, reports ABC 7 Chicago.

Here are six things to know.

1. Delnor Hospital clinicians were treating Tywon Salters, an inmate at Kane County Jail, for an undisclosed illness since May 8. He'd been in custody since April 11 after authorities charged him for possession of a stolen vehicle.

2. Around noon on May 13, Mr. Salters grabbed a correctional officer's handgun and held a nurse hostage in his third floor hospital room, according to Joseph McMahon, Kane County State's attorney.

3. Mr. McMahon told ABC 7 Chicago Mr. Salter traveled to the hospital's ground floor and stationed himself in a small room near the emergency department, where he took a second nurse hostage, after the first nurse escaped. Specific details are still under investigation and it is not clear how the first nurse got away from Mr. Salter, according to the report.

4. Once the hostage situation commenced, the hospital immediately evacuated the ED, discharging patients or sending them to other hospitals, a Delnor Hospital spokeswoman told ABC 7 Chicago. Hospital officials placed the rest of the facility on lockdown. No visitors were allowed, but all other hospital operations ran normally, according to the report.

5. After negotiators failed to coax Mr. Salters out of the room, SWAT officers entered the room about 4 p.m. and fatally shot him, Lt. Patrick Gengler of the Kane County Sheriff's Office, told ABC 7 Chicago.

6. Police said the two nurses held hostage were not severely injured, and one SWAT officer sustained a minor injury when a bullet hit his protective gear, according to the report. Delnor Hospital resumed normal ED operations at 6 p.m.

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At a prison in the city of Lae in Papua New Guinea, prison guards have shot dead 17 inmates after a mass breakout. Reportedly, three prisoners have been recaptured while 57 others managed to escape and remain at large. Police Chief Superintendent Anthony Wagambie reportedly said a majority of the escaped inmates committed serious crimes.
South African speedster Dale Steyn is reportedly set to miss the four-match Test series against England in July-August due to a shoulder injury. According to reports, Steyn has said that his recovery is going well, but it is taking a little longer than he expected it to. Notably, South Africa will tour England in May and play matches of all three formats until August.
Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show with Ross McEwan, centre, Chief Executive of the Ulster Bank parent brand RBS and Richard Donnan, Ulster BankOs Head of Northern Ireland. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show meeting exhibitors. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show this afternoon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show this afternoon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show this afternoon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show this afternoon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show this afternoon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured meeting exhibitors at the Ulster Bank stand during a visit to Balmoral Show this afternoon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show with Cyril Millar, RUAS President. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show with Cyril Millar, RUAS President. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show with Cyril Millar, RUAS President. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show with Cyril Millar, RUAS President. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Winners and Highly Commended companies from the Henderson Wholesale Local Supplier Awards, including Daily Bake, K&G McAtamney, Irwins Bakery, Genesis Crafty, Around Noon, Hovis, Milgro and Moy Park, are pictured with Sales & Marketing Director Paddy Doody and Fresh Foods Director Neal Kelly from Henderson Wholesale. The awards took place today (Friday 12 May) at Balmoral Show, rewarding the produce and practices of the food producers, farmers and growers in Northern Ireland. Photo by Simon Graham

Winners of the Henderson Wholesale Local Supplier Awards, including Daily Bake, Around Noon, Genesis Craft and Moy Park, are pictured with Fresh Foods Director Neal Kelly and Sales & Marketing Director Paddy Doody from Henderson Wholesale. The awards took place today (Friday 12 May) at Balmoral Show, rewarding the produce and practices of the food producers, farmers and growers in Northern Ireland. Photo by Simon Graham

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured meeting exhibitors at the Ulster Bank stand during a visit to Balmoral Show this afternoon. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex is pictured at Balmoral Show this afternoon. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

13 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The Prime Minister Theresa May is on a brief visit to Northern Ireland. She arrived at the Balmoral Show in Balmoral Park, near Lisburn in County Antrim on Saturday. Elizabeth Warden (Federation Chairman) Women's Institute and Lesley Martin and Dorothy Robb with the Prime Minister Theresa May at the Balmoral Show.

13 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The Prime Minister Theresa May is on a brief visit to Northern Ireland. She arrived at the Balmoral Show in Balmoral Park, near Lisburn in County Antrim on Saturday. Elizabeth Warden (Federation Chairman) Women's Institute and Lesley Martin and Dorothy Robb with the Prime Minister Theresa May at the Balmoral Show.

13 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The Prime Minister Theresa May is on a brief visit to Northern Ireland. She arrived at the Balmoral Show in Balmoral Park, near Lisburn in County Antrim on Saturday. Elizabeth Warden (Federation Chairman) Women's Institute and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire accompany the Prime Minister Theresa May on her visit to the Balmoral Show.

13 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The Prime Minister Theresa May is on a brief visit to Northern Ireland. She arrived at the Balmoral Show in Balmoral Park, near Lisburn in County Antrim on Saturday. Elizabeth Warden (Federation Chairman) Women's Institute with the Prime Minister Theresa May at the Balmoral Show.

The first Balmoral Show to run into the weekend has been "a dream success" insist organisers, with a decision already taken to hold a second four-day event next year.

Visitor numbers are yet to be confirmed, but Royal Ulster Agricultural Society boss Colin McDonald was confident that the 100,000 mark had been smashed for the first time in the show's 149-year history.

Mr McDonald told journalists that the show was now attracting more than double the number of visitors which the old site at the King's Hall in Belfast had brought in.

He said: "The Saturday attendance is better than we could have expected and it's clear we have got a new audience as well.

"The new audience is one that couldn't have come previously because the show wasn't open on Saturday.

"But it is now open and people have come."

Mr McDonald said that the show's first Saturday had "the same Balmoral buzz" that we have had on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

"It's been a dream success," he added. "A lot of thanks are due to the exhibitors, because they have had to do a third extra work with only thanks from us.

"It's cost them money, it's cost them time and yet they've done it."

And he said: "We've already another four-day show booked for next year."

The show moved from the King's Hall in Belfast to the former site of the Maze prison in 2013.

Among the guests who attended the show this year were the Prime Minister, Theresa May, and the DUP leader, Arlene Foster.

Mrs Foster, who grew up on a small farm in Co Fermanagh, said that for her the Balmoral Show was a combination of both work and leisure.

She said: "I've been cooking scallops, eating sausages and doing all sorts of things, so it's been wonderful.

"I always look forward to Balmoral.

"I had my son up with me on Wednesday, so we did the sheep and the cattle.

"It was lovely to see the Dexters and going around the stands and hearing how people are getting on with their businesses, which I am still interested in from my time as Enterprise Minister.

"The food end [of the show] has really come into its own - it's wonderful because people have an appreciation for what we're making here in Northern Ireland and selling across the world."

Plans are already under way for future shows.

"I'm not thinking about the Balmoral Show next year - I'm already planning Balmoral Show 2019," Mr McDonald added.
JP Morgan has snapped up an office building in Dublin with the capacity to house 1,000 staff as it ramps up its Brexit contingency planning.

The US banking giant - which said earlier this month it plans to move up to 1,000 London jobs to Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg in a bid to secure its EU business after Brexit - has acquired the 200 Capital Dock building in the Irish capital.

Carin Bryans, senior country officer for JP Morgan in Ireland, said: "Given the momentum of our local businesses, this new building gives us room to grow and some flexibility within the European Union."

It is also understood that the expansion is down to the success of its existing operation in the city, where it currently employs 500 people.

The building, purchased from real estate firm Kennedy Wilson, measures 130,000 square feet and is situated in Dublin's docklands area.

The chief executive of JP Morgan's corporate and investment bank Daniel Pinto said at the beginning of May that a "substantial portion" of the lender's business in London will have to be moved to the EU.

"We will have to move hundreds of people in the short-term to be ready for day one, when negotiations finish, and then we will look at the longer-term numbers.

"We have to plan for a scenario where there is no UK-EU passporting deal, and we have to move a substantial portion of our business to continue serving our European clients," he said.

JP Morgan will relocate between 500 and 1,000 front and back office staff from London, with custody business roles destined for Dublin, treasury services set to settle in Luxembourg, and investment banking positions bound for Frankfurt, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is understood that the relocation drive will take place ahead of spring 2019, when the two-year window for Brexit negotiations draws to a close, and the UK is expected to lose passporting rights for financial services.

Kennedy Wilson boss Mary Ricks added: "The Dublin occupier market is buoyant and we are in active and advanced dialogue with both Irish and international companies attracted to our visionary Capital Dock development and looking to base themselves in the heart of Dublin."

A growing list of financial services firms have confirmed relocation plans following the Brexit vote, with HSBC moving 1,000 staff to France, AIG set to shift a string of executives to Luxembourg and Lloyd's of London opting for a subsidiary in Brussels.

JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon previously indicated around 4,000 of the bank's 16,000 UK employee base could move as a result of Brexit.
Stone from Conexpo is exported from Belfast

Stone from Conexpo is exported from Belfast

A Northern Ireland firm is to supply 55,000 tonnes of stone for a road in Holland.

Quarrying firm Conexpo's latest deal follows a 200,000-tonne order for the new A15 extension to the Port of Rotterdam - Europe's busiest motorway. Conexpo sources one million tonnes of gritstone every year from its Co Down quarries.

The stone is processed and exported from its 5m quayside plant on a site in Belfast Harbour Estate.

Conexpo, which is owned by the McCluskey family, was founded 25 years ago. It also has a hub at Avonmouth Docks in Bristol.
An MLA has voiced his disgust at the potential scrapping of a bus designed to inspire children to study science, technology, education and maths - STEM subjects - due to the current Stormont impasse.

The STEM Module, which was launched in 2009, is a mobile laboratory and workshop equipped with everything required to deliver a high-tech learning experience to schools.

The Department for the Economy and the Department of Education fund it, and it is run by the Education Authority (EA).

However, the EA has now revealed that, due to a 22m reduction in its budget for 2016/17, it has started "a number of strategic reviews of its services", one of which is the STEM bus service.

In 2014/15, 33,825 post-primary pupils used the service - nearly a quarter of the total school population for that age group.

The service was also used by 4,960 primary school pupils during that period.

In a statement the EA said: "One of the reviews looked at the operation of the STEM Module. At this time no decision has been taken in relation to the future delivery of the STEM Module."

In a letter to North Antrim DUP MLA and former education committee chairman Mervyn Storey, which has been seen by the Belfast Telegraph, EA director of education John Collings said funding for the bus was "no longer ring-fenced".

He added that, because of the cutbacks, "the EA board agreed to a savings plan for 2016/17 which included the possible decommissioning of the STEM Module as one of a range of options for making savings".

Mr Storey said scrapping the bus would be "short-sighted" due to its future effect on Northern Ireland's economy.

The letter also indicated that an options paper would be brought before the EA's education committee for consideration after a meeting of the directorate's management team and the Department of Education.

It further revealed that staff of the STEM Module have been "advised that normal service delivery is to continue, at least to the end of this academic year, by which point future plans should be clearer".

Mr Storey, who championed the project, said he was "disgusted the STEM bus could be mothballed by the end of June".

"I wanted to see an extension of the service, not the end of the STEM Module," he said.

"Schools are struggling in relation to their own budgets and they can't recruit staff to cover certain subjects, so this is an invaluable resource.

"It gives schools access to equipment they wouldn't have the resources to purchase in their technology departments, and it is used in GCSE and A-level work, so its loss would have a huge impact.

"It creates another challenge for hard-pressed principals in how to give access to courses and facilities.

"I have never seen the STEM Module as a luxury.

"The staff have been told that no decision has been made beyond June and it is a difficult time for them too.

"We are one of the only education authorities in the UK that has this and for it to be mothballed would be a dereliction of responsibility and duty on behalf of the EA.

"STEM subjects are key to employment and something which employers are looking for."

He laid the blame for the EA's budget squeeze at Sinn Fein's door.

"This is where the real inequality lies - pupils will now be disadvantaged due to Sinn Fein's failure to form a government and make difficult decisions," he claimed.
Northern Ireland teachers are better paid than their English and Welsh counterparts and their industrial action is harming schools, the head of the Education Authority has said.

Teaching unions are engaged in industrial action in a bid to improve working conditions and pay, with some taking to picket lines.

Read More

In a letter sent to all teachers, Education Authority Gavin Boyd said the action was "seriously affecting the education of children and young people" and "the effective operation of schools".

He also said teachers had been "confused by misinformation on a number of key issues". He said that teaching unions had rejected an overall offer of 2.5% on pay in 2015/16.

From an employers perspective it has been disheartening to hear some say that our teachers are not valued. Gavin Boyd

"The average teacher's pay in Northern Ireland is just over 40,000 per annum," he added.

"This compares very favourably with other graduate professions locally and is actually higher than the average teacher's pay in England and Wales."

He added: "There have been no reductions in teacher's pay."

He did however, concede that tax rises and pension contributions had risen affecting pay, but that this was a part of a wider government strategy.

"Public sector pensions remain attractive and in general offer much better terms than those available in the private sector."

Unions have reacted angrily, branding the missive as "fake news".

Chris Keates, General Secretary of NASUWT-The Teachers Union, said: "Teachers will not be persuaded or intimidated by the fake news presented in the letter issued today by the employers.

The letter from Gavin Boyd will simply infuriate teachers who are continuing to endure the painful reality of real terms cuts to pay, job insecurity and excessive workload, including as a result of a punitive inspection system.

Mr Boyds letter to teachers and principals cannot hide the facts of the destructive impact of excessive workload on teachers lives or that the value of teachers pay has fallen by around 20% since 2010.

It is a pity that employers and ministers have spent their time denying the concerns of teachers.

The employers should start to devote more of their time to addressing the genuine concerns of teachers rather than peddling misinformation.

Justin McCamphill, NASUWT National Official Northern Ireland, said: Todays letter only serves to patronise teachers. It offers nothing by way of substance or fact.

The NASUWT has provided the Management Side and the Department of Education with a clear agenda and way forward which will address the concerns of teachers and enable teachers to focus on teaching and leading and managing teaching and learning.

The letter issued today is misleading and will do nothing to resolve the concerns of teachers.
The Labour Party has defended leader Jeremy Corbyn over his arrest in 1986 at a protest rally involving IRA sympathisers.

Mr Corbyn was detained after joining a picket at the Old Bailey organised by the Troops Out Movement to oppose the "show trial" of a group including Patrick Magee.

Magee was later convicted of murdering five people at the 1984 Tory party conference in Brighton. But a party spokesman said: "Jeremy was at the Old Bailey to lobby for a fair trial.

"A number of serious miscarriages of justice had taken place at the time, which helped fuel the conflict, making peace in Northern Ireland harder to achieve and increasing insecurity across the UK.

"Lasting security comes from peace through negotiated agreements. Jeremy worked tirelessly to bring about that peace in Northern Ireland through dialogue, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement."

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry was questioned about the matter on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show after the Sunday Times report was published.

"There were negotiations going on behind the scenes and there were people speaking openly and this is something which has been known for 30 years and it has been dragged out at this particular time because there is a general election on," she said.

"I don't think people should judge Jeremy by trying to talk to people who might be open to a settlement in Northern Ireland."

She added that Mr Corbyn's position was "not having open support for the IRA".

Meanwhile, the PSNI has been urged to investigate after a Conservative councillor in England posted a foul-mouthed tweet about the Irish during the Eurovision song contest.

Nick Harrington severely rebuked Ireland after it awarded 'nul points' to UK entry Never Give Up On You by Lucie Jones.

The tweet read: "#Eurovision2017 thanks Ireland. You can keep your f*****g gypsies! Hard border coming folks!"

Mr Harrington was quickly suspended by his local Conservative branch in the Warwick area of Coventry and his comments are being examined by police in Surrey.

But the Labour Party in NI also reported him to the PSNI for a 'hate crime' after the insulting remark during the annual song-a-thon.

Party secretary Kathryn Johnston said: "In the very week that Ireland was visited by Prince Charles and Camilla and Theresa May in a misguided attempt to copperfasten hard Brexit/hard border, Nick Harrington has laid bare the reality of Tory hate speech and the contempt in which they hold the electorate of Northern Ireland who voted by a majority of 55.8% to Remain in last June's European Referendum.

"Nick Harrington should immediately be expelled from the Tory party and Theresa May should apologise to the people of Ireland before respecting the democratic will."

Mr Harrington's Twitter account appears to have been deleted since the tweet.

No one from the PSNI was immediately available for comment.
Brussels [Belgium]





Describing the Afghanistan-

region as the breeding ground for international terrorism, European

(EP) Vice President Ryszard Czarnecki has said there is a need for the European Union and the United States to review their respective

policy to foster long-term peace in the region, rather than pouring millions of Euros in aid to Afghanistan, and trying to win a war that cannot be won.

In an opinion piece titled "Time to Revisit the Durand Line" published in EP Today, Czarnecki warned that

will continue to interfere and destabilize areas across the Durand Line, with the objective of retaining control over it as it borders

He suggests that there is an immediate need for the west to take a hard look at this artificial border, and restore the natural and historical frontier between these two countries for the sake of peace in the region.





"Balochistan and portions of the Pashtun-dominated tribal areas of

that were forcefully taken away and merged into British India need to be restored to their earlier status as the sovereign territory of Afghanistan," he said.





Czarnecki said the September 11, 2001 attack on the

Trade Centre in New York was a wake-up call for the West to re-visit its policy. Instead, they decided to send their troops to counter militants and allowed roots of the problem to fester.





"Since 2001, thousands of U.S. and European troops have lost their lives in

and will continue to do so as long as we choose to bury our heads in the sand," he added. - More




MEPs in Co Louth yesterday to discuss Brexit. From left: Esteban Gonzalez Pons, Esther De Lange, Mairead McGuinness, Sean Kelly, Elmar Brok and Brian Hayes

Brussels and Britain are in dispute over when the Irish border should be dealt with in Brexit talks, David Davis has said.

The Brexit Secretary rejected the EU's demands for the UK's fee for exiting the bloc and the issue of the border to be included in the first stage of talks.

Negotiations on the structure of the talks "will be the row of the summer", he predicted.

On ITV's Peston On Sunday, Mr Davis said that the EU talks team was deliberately putting pressure on the UK by making Northern Ireland and the 'divorce bill' early obstacles that had to be dealt with in order to move on to trade.

Mr Davis acknowledged there would be a "row" over the sequencing of talks, with the UK insisting that talks on a trade deal must feature at an early stage.

He insisted it was "wholly illogical" for Brussels to argue that progress must be made on agreeing the financial settlement and the border before talks can progress to the UK's future relationship - including the Government's desired trade deal.

Mr Davis said the position adopted by the EU and chief negotiator Michel Barnier was based on a "wrong interpretation of the treaty".

The position set out by Brussels was aimed at ensuring "the negotiating pressure is on us - that's why it is designed this way" with "the most difficult bit, the funding and Northern Ireland" established as hurdles to be crossed before trade talks.

Mr Davis said: "How on Earth do you resolve the issue of the border with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland unless you know what our general borders policy is, what the customs agreement is, what the free trade agreement is, whether you need to charge tariffs at the border or not? You can't decide one without the other."

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams called Mr Davis' remarks a direct challenge to the Irish Government and the negotiating stance outlined by Mr Barnier when he visited Dublin last week.

"Mr Davis made it clear that he does not accept that the first items to be resolved are the border and the divorce bill for Britain," said Mr Adams.

"These remarks emphasise the need for the Irish Government to urgently press the European Council to secure for the North special designated status within the EU. Without that protection, the effect of Brexit on the North's economy and, in particular, our agricultural and agri-food sectors will be enormous.

"The border region will be especially hard-hit and the fundamental human rights guarantees of the Good Friday Agreement will be significantly undermined.

"The Irish Government is a co-equal guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement. It must fulfil its responsibility to defend the Agreement and to defend the decision of the people of the North in the referendum last year to remain within the EU."

Mr Davis said the UK would adopt technology to cover the transport of goods between Northern Ireland and the south.

The Government wants a "frictionless" arrangement to avoid a return to borders of the past when the area was heavily militarised due to the IRA threat.

Last week Mr Barnier told a joint sitting of the Irish Parliament that the border, citizens' rights and "the financial settlement" must be first priorities.

Sinn Fein Stormont leader Michelle O'Neill will be among a delegation visiting Strasbourg this week to press for special status for Northern Ireland.
Aaron O'Kane pleaded guilty to punching the baby and his brother in the face in a bedroom in the Carnhill Estate on April 30.

A 26-year-old man, who was remanded in custody at the Magistrate's Court in Derry last week after he admitted punching an eleven-month-old baby in the face during a fight with his brother, has been released on bail from the same court.

Aaron O'Kane from Carnhill Eastate in Londonderry pleaded guilty to punching the baby and his brother in the face during a fight.

O'Kane came home drunk and attacked his brother when his brother was in a bedroom with the baby. O'Kane fell into the baby's cot during the incident and when his brother lifted the baby from the cot O'Kane swung at his brother. At least one punch hit the baby in the face.

Opposing bail a police officer told District Judge Barney McElholm that the baby and the brother were both treated in Altnagelvin Hospital for facing bruises they sustained in the assaults. The officer then handed in to Mr. McElholm an album of photographs showing the injuries.

The officer described O'Kane's attitude in the police station after his arrest, when O'Kane laughed and smiled, as rank. He said in front of the custody sergeant O'Kane made a threat against his brother.

The police officer said O'Kane "is not wise". He said the defendant was being investigated by the Metropolitan Police "for threatening to send bombs to a pay day loan company in London in 2012."

The police witness said O'Kane's actions in attacking the baby were an act of complete madness and he said if released on bail he believed O'Kane would re-offend or attempt to interfere with witnesses.

Defence solicitor Seamus Quigley said O'Kane had made full admissions to the two charges.

"They are guilty pleas all day long and there would be no mileage in the defendant interfering with any witness", he said.

Mr. Quigley said O'Kane would be willing to live at any Simon Community hostel outside of Derry and he described O'Kane as now being contrite for his awful actions.

Mr. McElholm asked "how could any human being continue to throw punches at another person who is holding a baby?"

However the District Judge said the court was acutely aware that O'Kane could well serve the equivalent of the maximum sentence of six months for the offence while in prison remand. He said there was also a presumption in favour of bail.

O'Kane was released on his own bail of 750 to attend court again on June 8.

As part of his bail conditions he can only reside at an address approved by the police and he's banned from consuming alcohol and illegal drugs. He was also ordered not to enter within ten miles of the Bishop Street courthouse except for court appointments and he's also to be electronically tagged.

"If there is one breach he will be returned to custody so he has been well warned", Mr. McElholm said.
Police officers at the scene of an incident at the Falls Park in West Belfast on May 15th 2017 (Photo - Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Police officers at the scene of an incident at the Falls Park in West Belfast on May 15th 2017 (Photo - Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Police officers at the scene of an incident at the Falls Park in West Belfast on May 15th 2017 (Photo - Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Police officers at the scene of an incident at the Falls Park in West Belfast on May 15th 2017 (Photo - Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Police officers at the scene of an incident at the Falls Park in West Belfast on May 15th 2017 (Photo - Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Police officers at the scene of an incident at the Falls Park in West Belfast on May 15th 2017 (Photo - Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Police officers at the scene of an incident at the Falls Park in West Belfast on May 15th 2017 (Photo - Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Police are investigating the report of a sexual assault on a female in west Belfast.

The incident which was reported to police on Sunday May 14 happened in the Falls Park.

A spokeswoman said the investigation is at an early stage and enquiries are ongoing.
Detectives investigating the attempted murder of a former British agent in the IRA are probing a new DNA lead.

Martin McGartland told the Belfast Telegraph that he hopes police will finally now track down the IRA gunman who tried to kill him outside his Tyneside home 18 years ago.

The former Special Branch agent was shot and seriously wounded as he sat in his car in Whitley Bay in June 1999.

A Northumbria Police detective involved in the attempted murder investigation has informed him that the force is "pursuing a line of enquiry regarding the unidentified DNA at the scene".

Mr McGartland said: "I believe they may now have matched the DNA to a named person on their database but have so far been unable to arrest the individual.

"He may be living in a different jurisdiction like the south of Ireland. I hope that this development could lead to the IRA gunman who tried to kill me being brought before the courts and charged. If someone is found guilty of my attempted murder, they will be going to jail for a very long time."

Mr McGartland said that, since the shooting happened after 1998, it was not covered by the Good Friday Agreement.

"Anyone convicted won't be put behind bars for a token two years. They will be facing a lengthy sentence," he added.

However, the former agent said that while he hoped there might now finally be progress in tracking down the IRA assassination team, he had "little faith" in Northumbria Police.

"My experience of the force over the past 18 years since I was shot has not been a positive one. I have grave doubts about them but I hope this time that I am proved wrong and they deliver," he said.

Mr McGartland was ambushed after he got into his car outside the house in Whitley Bay where he had been living under a new identity. A gunman appeared at the window and fired into the vehicle. He was shot six times in the hand, chest and stomach. His life was saved by neighbours who used cling film to stop the blood flow from his wounds.

"I was left with life-changing physical and psychological disabilities which mean that neither myself nor my partner can work as she is now my carer," he explained.

In a letter sent to Mr McGartland, a Northumbria Police detective said he was currently investigating forensic evidence from the crime scene.

"I am pursuing a line of enquiry in this case regarding the unidentified DNA at the scene. We have recently obtained a sample that has eliminated a further individual," the officer said.

"This had been an outstanding enquiry for some time and I hope the fact that this has been completed provides you with some assurance investigations are ongoing and that I am active in trying to progress this enquiry."

The detective added: "A forensic review is awaited and I will seek to have this progressed soon when the scientist is available.

"There remains a key line of enquiry that I am actively seeking to pursue. This relates to the unidentified DNA."

Republicans Harry Fitzsimmons from Belfast and Scott Monaghan from Glasgow were arrested and questioned about the attempted murder in November 1999, but they were both released without charge.
Rev David Latimer attended the funeral of Brendan Duddy at St Eugene's Cathedral in Londonderry and paid public tribute to his peacemaking efforts

Presbyterian minister David Latimer has appealed for people in Northern Ireland to work together before it is too late.

Political powersharing at Stormont collapsed earlier this year after the Democratic Unionists fell out over a botched green energy scheme which is predicted to massively over-spend.

The Rev Latimer, from First Derry Presbyterian Church, attended the funeral of Brendan Duddy at St Eugene's Cathedral in Londonderry and paid public tribute to his peacemaking efforts.

He added: "We have suffered together and felt pain together, we now need to move forward together - for we all belong to this place.

"There can be no going back because we have come too far. Work together before it is too late."

During the Troubles, First Derry was frequently a target for attack; sometimes missiles were launched from the other side of Derry's historic walls and paint bombs thrown.

Mr Latimer has been a conciliatory figure in a largely nationalist area and has spoken openly about his friendship with late Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness.
The scene on Clara Street in east Belfast where an arson attack took place on Sunday evening with a woman being taken to hospital with injuries to her legs. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

The scene on Clara Street in east Belfast where an arson attack took place on Sunday evening with a woman being taken to hospital with injuries to her legs. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

The scene on Clara Street in east Belfast where an arson attack took place on Sunday evening with a woman being taken to hospital with injuries to her legs. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

The Scene at Clara Street after a woman was left injured in a suspected petrol bomb attack on a house in east Belfast. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

The Scene at Clara Street after a woman was left injured in a suspected petrol bomb attack on a house in east Belfast. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

The Scene at Clara Street after a woman was left injured in a suspected petrol bomb attack on a house in east Belfast. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

The Scene at Clara Street after a woman was left injured in a suspected petrol bomb attack on a house in east Belfast. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

The Scene at Clara Street after a woman was left injured in a suspected petrol bomb attack on a house in east Belfast. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

A woman has been treated in hospital after a suspected petrol bomb was thrown at a house in Belfast.

It happened at her house in the Clara Street area on Sunday May 14.

At around 11.35pm it's believed a petrol bomb was thrown at the house.

The woman inside suffered burns to her legs.

She was taken to hospital for treatment to her injuries which are not believed to be life-threatening.

The house sustained smoke damage.

Detective Sergeant McPhillips would appeal to anyone who may have noticed any suspicious activity in the area to contact Detectives at Reactive and Organised Crime at Musgrave on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference 1427 14/05/17.

Alternatively, if someone would prefer to provide information without giving their details they can contact the independent charity Crimestoppers and speak to them anonymously on 0800 555 111.
A Catholic priest who was raised as a Protestant has been beatified in the first such ceremony in Ireland.

Fr John Sullivan was recognised for his work with the sick and dying.

It is the first step on the road to sainthood.

Cardinal Angelo Amato said Fr Sullivan had been "exemplary" in his religious duties.

He added: "Those who knew him considered him a saint, and in my opinion he had reached a high degree of perfection.

"Even though he came from a rich family, once he became religious he was oblivious to comfort and contented himself with what was necessary," said Cardinal Amato.

The member of the Jesuit order was born in Dublin in 1861 and attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen in Co Fermanagh.

Representatives from the school were present at the ceremony in North Dublin's Gardiner Street Church.

It was conducted by the Cardinal assisted by the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin.

After the beatification Fr Sullivan will be called "Blessed" and will be celebrated annually on May 8.

During the ceremony relics relating to him were blessed, including the "Sullivan Cross" which he would take with him when visiting the sick.

The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Michael Jackson, was also present.

Portora's other alumni included the playwrights Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett.

After leaving the school, he studied at Trinity College Dublin.

In 1896 aged 35 he converted to Catholicism before entering the Jesuit order in 1900.

The clergyman taught at Clongowes Wood College in Dublin until his death in 1933, aged 71.
The number of people being jailed is at its lowest in seven years.

The Irish Prison Service said there were just over 15,000 committals to jail last year involving 12,579 offenders, a drop of more than 10% on the numbers from 2015 and the lowest since 2009.

Some 8,439 people were jailed for not paying a court ordered fine, a 15% fall on the previous year's figures.

Tanaiste and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said there had been even greater reductions in the number of people being sentenced to prison over unpaid fines with the number of committals halved in the first three months of this year.

"We must continue to ensure that violent offenders and other serious offenders serve appropriate prison sentences while at the same time switching away from prison sentences and towards less costly non-custodial options for non-violent and less serious offenders," she said.

"It is clear that the Fines Act which came into effect in 2016 is having an impact and further decreases are expected this year with provisional figures for the first quarter of 2017 showing decreases of up to 50% on the same period in 2016."

On average there were 3,718 prisoners in custody on any day last year, including 140 women.

Th e Irish Prison Service annual report revealed it costs on average about 69,000 euro to jail a prisoner for a year.

Fiona Ni Chinneide, acting executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, said t he fall in prison committals is very positive.

She said: "(It) marks a shift away from Ireland's chronic over-reliance on prison as a response to failures in social policy.

"The clear statement by the Tanaiste that prison should be a sanction of last resort is strongly welcomed."

However, the trust criticised the lack of published prison reports for almost three years.

"(It) means that we don't know enough about the realities on the ground in Irish prisons," Ms Ni Chinneide said.

"In July 2017, Ireland will be quizzed by the UN Committee against Torture on how it protects against potential human-rights abuses behind prison walls.

"Now is the time to strengthen and better-resource key systems of prisons oversight, including prison inspections, monitoring and independent complaints mechanisms."

The Irish Prison Service also confirmed that 441 prisoners were on the run.

The vast majority of these inmates - classed as "unlawfully at large" - had been granted temporary release and were coming towards the end of their sentences, a spokesman said.

Most of them failed to return after getting release on compassionate grounds or to attend programmes, courses, rehab or training to support them when they have completed their sentences.

There were 12 incidents of prisoners absconding from Shelton Abbey open prison in Co Wicklow last year, with two still at large, and two incidents of inmates leaving Loughan House in Co Cavan, both of whom returned.

A spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said: "We will vigorously pursue any person who absconds from custody.

"They will be followed, they will be sought and their return to custody will be sought no matter how long it takes. There is a lot of work being done trying to find people who are unlawfully at large, with An Garda Siochana, to get them back into custody."
A councillor has been suspended after a tweet apparently sent from his account during Eurovision referred to Irish "gypsies".

The message, which appeared on Nick Harrington's account during the song contest on Saturday night, was criticised as "appalling".

Screenshots of the tweet, which were posted online by people criticising the councillor, read: "#Eurovision2017 thanks Ireland. You can keep your f***** gypsies! Hard border coming folks!"

The content appears to be a reference to Ireland having given the UK no points in the jury voting round, and implies there will be hard border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic after Brexit.

Councillor Andrew Mobbs, leader of Warwick District Council, said: " I am appalled and horrified at the comments made, and this morning we suspended councillor Harrington from the Conservative group at Warwick District Council with immediate effect for six months.

"There will be an investigation.

"The local Conservative association has also suspended him from the party."

Of the comments he added: "These are certainly not the views of the Conservative group at Warwick District Council or the Conservative party."

Mr Harrington's Twitter account has been deleted.

UK Eurovision entry Lucie Jones tweeted: " Oooooh Ireland. It burns!!" after votes were revealed, but later added: "Ps- the Ireland tweet was a total lad joke."

A spokesman for Warwickshire Police said: "We can confirm that we are in receipt of a complaint regarding a tweet by a man in Warwickshire.

"It is being investigated and inquiries are ongoing."
Part of me never gave a hoot about Mike Nesbitt lying face down on a hotel floor with two women over him. I could imagine various scenarios between the innocuous and the horrific, some of which made claims on my sympathy and concern, some of which suggested that pity and disdain might be more appropriate.

It may do him no harm now that the story is out, that he hit the floor in a joke fight with a woman. He may seem ridiculous behaving like that, but he also might be seen to be sparing the woman.

But we can easily imagine a few reasons why Nesbitt wanted to keep quiet about it.

It makes him look like a tube. But he also spared the woman, until she was identified in the Sunday papers.

Nesbitt is a media professional. He knows how journalists work and how audiences react, and he has traded in the past on his ability to advise others on how to manage the media to their advantage.

So he saw his advantage, in this case, in staying silent.

Lets see if that plays well for him.

In the past there have been potentially damaging rumours about other politicians and they have handled the crises in the same way.

They stayed silent and the story died.

That can be a good strategy in some circumstances because often the media will not run a story without a counterbalancing response.

But even no comment is a response and enough to enable a story to run, and it always sounds like an admission of guilt. In those cases where silence worked, there was no hard evidence of misfortunes or misdemeanours.

In Mikes case there was evidence of something having happened. He was face down on a hotel floor.

He couldnt brush that fact away by ignoring it and hoping that the rest of us would too.

But he could, for a time, withhold from us the actual meaning of that event, though the Press was going to speculate and probe. Some rallied to him, saying: Hes only human; weve all been in difficult and embarrassing situations; none of us is perfect.

And journalism being what it is, needing to refresh a story or drop it, the strategy of saying nothing might indeed have seen interest wane and the question of why he was face down on a floor simply disappear.

The problem for Mike is that he is a politician.

He is selling himself to the electorate, and some who might otherwise have voted for him may think: this guy wants us to trust him but he did not trust us to know the answer to the most intriguing question he had raised  what was that all about, when he was face-down on the floor of the Stormont Hotel?

And while not saying might have worked as a media management strategy, there was a greater consideration here than the prospects of Mike defending his good name.

There is the question of the medias role in a democracy and its right to enquire into the behaviour of public figures.

If the media is defeated in the exercise of that right, then democracy is damaged.

And a politician seeking votes through the democratic system should have sufficient regard for that system to acknowledge that the media is integral to it.

That doesnt mean that he has to answer every question any reporter ever puts to him, but Mike Nesbitt is astute enough to know the relevance of the questions that arose from that incident, whether their ultimate bearing was on his health or his good sense.

He is not the only one who thinks he can steer his political course without explaining himself to the media.

In John Finucane, the Sinn Fein candidate for North Belfast, we have an ambitious political project, an attempt to unseat Nigel Dodds. And it is driven by a confidence that he need hardly talk to the local media at all.

John gives few interviews. He puts his effort into addressing political meetings, glad-handing, and he has taken up tweeting.

He trusts that he can get his message across in near media silence.

This is bizarre.

Politicians and candidates are usually eager to be interviewed. They accept  or have done till now  that publicity is the element in which they live and breathe, that they die without it.

But John can manage mostly in the thinner ether of cyberspace.

Maybe he is just so new to this that he needs to ease himself in.

One thing is for sure, and that is that he is following the guidance of a party publicity machine which will make cogent and careful decisions on where to place him when there are cameras and microphones around. Sinn Fein is often accused of control freakery, conducting itself like a cult rather than a party.

Keeping its star candidate away from the media hardly counters that perception.

But John Finucane knows he can ride on the reputation of the party he represents and that the very surprise of his being chosen to fight this seat carries news value with it.

So he can, for now, confine himself mostly to public meetings and limit himself to saying things he is comfortable with saying.

And he can maintain a presence in social media, supported by other bloggers who routinely endorse the party line.

He has just given an interview to Alex Thomson on Channel Four News, so well get a sense from that of how he handles himself.

The US President Donald Trump has been saying that he is so fed up with fake news that he might stop giving briefings and simply issue statements. That would suit his autocratic temperament, though it wouldnt solve his problem  which is his tendency to blurt out the first thought that floats across the front of his brain. That thought has usually slipped his grasp before he has finished articulating it.

But do Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists want to be identified with anti-democratic methods?
The UK's National Health Service fell victim, its hospitals forced to close wards and emergency rooms and turn away patients (Stock image)

The president of Microsoft Brad Smith has laid some of the blame for last week's ransomware cyberttack at the feet of the NSA and called for "urgent collective action".

Smith criticised US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency, for "stockpiling" software code that can be used by hackers.

Cyber-security experts say the unknown hackers who launched the attacks used a vulnerability that was exposed in NSA documents leaked online.

Writing in a blog post, Mr Smith said: "We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world."

He likened this to "the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen".

"They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world," Mr Smith said.

We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits, he said.

We need the tech sector, customers, and governments to work together to protect against cybersecurity attacks. More action is needed, and its needed now.

Microsoft said it distributed a patch two months ago to help protect computers from some forms of attack but not all machines were updated.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: "Microsoft officially confirms @NSAGov developed the flaw that brought down hospitals this weekend."

Extraordinary: Microsoft officially confirms @NSAGov developed the flaw that brought down hospitals this weekend. https://t.co/zQ6785YpFf  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 14, 2017

Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, said "criminals" were responsible, not the US government.

Mr Bossert said the US has not ruled out involvement by a foreign government, but that the recent ransom demands suggest a criminal network.

Mr Bossert told ABC's "Good Morning America" that the attack is something that "for right now, we've got under control" in the United States.

So far, not many people have paid the ransom demanded by the malware, Europol spokesman Jan Op Gen Oorth said.

Eiichi Moriya, a cybersecurity expert and professor at Meiji University, warned that paying the ransom would not guarantee a fix.

"You are dealing with a criminal," he said.

"It's like after a robber enters your home. You can change the locks but what has happened cannot be undone."

Read more

Read More

The worldwide "ransomware" cyber attack has spread to thousands more computers as people across Asia logged in at work, disrupting businesses, schools, hospitals and daily life.

But no new large-scale outbreaks have been reported, and British officials said a feared second wave of infections had not materialised.

The new infections were largely in Asia, which had been closed for business when the malware first struck.

In Britain, where the health service was among the first high-profile targets of the online extortion scheme, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said "we have not seen a second wave of attacks".

He said "the level of criminal activity is at the lower end of the range that we had anticipated".

The malware, known as "WannaCry," paralysed computers running factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems, hitting 200,000 victims in more than 150 countries.

Among those hit were Russia's Interior Ministry and companies including Spain's Telefonica and FedEx in the US.

If NSA builds a weapon to attack Windows XPwhich Microsoft refuses to patchesand it falls into enemy hands, should NSA write a patch? https://t.co/TUTtmc2aU9  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

This is a special case. Had @NSAGov disclosed the vuln when they discovered it, hospitals would have had years -- not months -- to prepare. https://t.co/HJj1TsfQYn  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

In light of today's attack, Congress needs to be asking @NSAgov if it knows of any other vulnerabilities in software used in our hospitals.  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

Despite warnings, @NSAGov built dangerous attack tools that could target Western software. Today we see the cost: https://t.co/u6J3bcHnXE  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

Though the spread of the ransomware slowed on Monday, many companies and government agencies were still struggling to recover from the first attack.

Carmaker Renault said one of its French plants, which employs 3,500 people, was not reopening Monday as a "preventative step".

Britain's National Health Service said about a fifth of NHS trusts were hit by the attack on Friday, leading to thousands of cancelled appointments and operations.

Seven of the 47 affected trusts were still having IT problems on Monday.

The British government denied allegations that lax cybersecurity in the financially stretched, state-funded health service had helped the attack spread.

Prime Minister Theresa May said "warnings were given to hospital trusts" about the Microsoft vulnerability exploited by the attackers.

NHS Digital, which oversees U.K. hospital cybersecurity, said it sent alerts about the problem - and a patch to fix it - to health service staff and IT professionals last month.

Tim Stevens, a lecturer in global security at King's College London, warned that the incident should be a wake-up call to both the public and private sectors to incorporate security into computer systems from the ground up, rather than as an afterthought.

"This thing cannot be brushed under the carpet," he said. "It is so visible and so global. There is going to have to be change at levels where change can be made."

In Asia, where Friday's attack occurred after business hours, thousands of new cases were reported on Monday as people came back to work.

The Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre, a non-profit group, said 2,000 computers at 600 locations in Japan were affected.

Companies including Hitachi and Nissan Motor Co reported problems but said they had not seriously affected their operations.

Chinese state media said 29,372 institutions there had been infected along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

Universities and other educational institutions in China were among the hardest hit, possibly because schools tend to have old computers and be slow to update operating systems and security, said Fang Xingdong, founder of ChinaLabs, an internet strategy think tank.

On social media, students complained about not being able to access their work, and people in various cities said they had not been able to take their driving tests over the weekend because some local traffic police systems were down.

Railway stations, mail delivery, petrol stations, hospitals, office buildings, shopping malls and government services also were affected, China's Xinhua News Agency said - citing the Threat Intelligence Centre of Qihoo 360, an internet security services company.

In Indonesia, the malware locked patient files on computers in two hospitals in the capital, Jakarta, causing delays.

Experts urged organisations and companies to immediately update older Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows XP, with a patch released by Microsoft to limit vulnerability to a more powerful version of the malware - or to future versions that cannot be stopped.

The attack held users hostage by freezing their computers, popping up a red screen with the words, "Oops, your files have been encrypted!" and demanding money through online bitcoin payment - 300 US dollars at first, rising to 600 US dollars before it destroys files hours later.

As cyber-security firms worked around the clock to monitor the situation and install a software patch, new variants of the rapidly replicating malware were discovered on Sunday.

One did not include the so-called kill switch that allowed researchers to interrupt the malware's spread on Friday by diverting it to a dead end on the internet.

Ryan Kalember, senior vice president at Proofpoint - which helped stop its spread, said the version without a kill switch could spread.

It was benign because it contained a flaw that prevented it from taking over computers and demanding ransom to unlock files but other more malicious ones will likely pop up.

"We haven't fully dodged this bullet at all until we're patched against the vulnerability itself," Mr Kalember said.
The UK's National Health Service fell victim, its hospitals forced to close wards and emergency rooms and turn away patients (Stock image)

A 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst accidentally shut down vast numbers of attacks by the devastating WannaCry ransomware by buying a domain name hidden in the program for about 8.29.

The domain name is believed to have been written into the software by the hackers to act as a kill switch.

Each time the program tried to infect a computer, it would try to contact the webpage. If it failed, WannaCry would carry on with the attack, but if it succeeded it would stop.

The analyst, who tweets as MalwareTech and works for Kryptos Logic, a security firm, admitted he had not realised that buying the domain name, for just $10.69, would have this fortunate effect.

WannaCry has infected tens of thousands of computers across the world, shutting down vital systems used by the NHS in Britain.

Speaking to the Daily Beast, MalwareTech said he noticed the domain name, a string of nonsensical letters ending in gwea.com, in the code.

I saw it wasnt registered and thought, I think Ill have that, he told the website.

#WannaCry propagation payload contains previously unregistered domain, execution fails now that domain has been sinkholed pic.twitter.com/z2ClEnZAD2  Darien Huss (@darienhuss) May 12, 2017

After buying the domain name, he pointed it to a sinkhole server in the US, hoping simply to get more information about WannaCry.

Immediately we saw five or six thousand connections a second, MalwareTech said.

He said this appeared to have stopped large numbers of attacks, but confessed he had done this completely by accident.

And he warned people should still take precautions because the hackers could simply slightly alter the program to carry on making attacks.

If we did stop it, theres like a 100 per cent chance theyre going to fire up a new sample and start that one again, he said.

As long as people dont patch, its just going to keep going.

His realisation that he had helped stop some of the attacks, particularly in the US, was played out on his Twitter account.

Some analysts are suggesting by sinkholing the domain we stopped the infection? Can anyone confirm? he wrote.

I will confess that I was unaware registering the domain would stop the malware until after I registered it, so initially it was accidental.

Dan Goodin, security editor at the ArsTechnica blog, wrote: The virally spreading worm was ultimately stopped when  MalwareTech  took control of a domain name that was hard-coded into the self-replicating exploit.

The domain registration, which occurred around 6am California time, was a major stroke of good luck, because it was possible only because the attackers had failed to obtain the address first.

The address appeared to serve as a sort of kill switch the attackers could use to terminate the campaign.

MalwareTech's registration had the effect of ending the attacks that had started earlier Friday morning in other parts of the world.

As a result, the number of infection detections plateaued dramatically in the hours following the registration. It had no effect on WCry infections that were initiated through earlier campaigns.

Ryan Kalember, of security firm Proofpoint, told the Guardian that MalwareTech should get the accidental hero award of the day.

Hacking tool developed by NSA

Mysterious hacking ground Shadow Brokers - claimed in April to have released a 'cyber weapon' hacking tool that was developed by the National Security Agency.

The NSA had developed the Eternal Blue weapon to gain access to computers around the world but the tool was stolen and leaked by Shadow Brokers. It is thought a criminal gang may then have used the 'cyber weapon' to gain access to computers including NHS systems.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lambasted the agency on Twitter following the attacks on Friday.

"Despite warnings, @NSAGov built dangerous attack tools that could target Western software. Today we see the cost," Mr Snowden tweeted.

If NSA builds a weapon to attack Windows XPwhich Microsoft refuses to patchesand it falls into enemy hands, should NSA write a patch? https://t.co/TUTtmc2aU9  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

This is a special case. Had @NSAGov disclosed the vuln when they discovered it, hospitals would have had years -- not months -- to prepare. https://t.co/HJj1TsfQYn  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

In light of today's attack, Congress needs to be asking @NSAgov if it knows of any other vulnerabilities in software used in our hospitals.  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

Despite warnings, @NSAGov built dangerous attack tools that could target Western software. Today we see the cost: https://t.co/u6J3bcHnXE  Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 12, 2017

Global attack: At least 74 countries affected

The malicious software behind the onslaught appeared to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was supposedly identified by the US National Security Agency for its own intelligence-gathering purposes and was later leaked to the internet.

Russia appeared to be the hardest hit, according to security experts, with the country's Interior Ministry confirming it was struck.

All told, several cybersecurity firms said they had identified the malicious software, which so far has been responsible for tens of thousands of attacks, in more than 60 countries.

That includes the United States, although its effects there did not appear to be widespread, at least initially.

In the US, FedEx reported its Windows computers were "experiencing interference" from malware, but would not say if it had been hit by ransomware.

Chris Wysopal of the software security firm Veracode said criminal organisations were probably behind the attack, given how quickly the malware spread.

"For so many organisations in the same day to be hit, this is unprecedented," he said.

The security holes it exploits were disclosed several weeks ago by TheShadowBrokers, a group that has published what it says are hacking tools used by the NSA as part of its intelligence-gathering.

Shortly after that disclosure, Microsoft announced it had already issued software "patches" for those holes.

But many companies and individuals have not installed the fixes yet or are using older versions of Windows that Microsoft no longer supports and did not fix.

By Kaspersky Lab's count, the malware struck at least 74 countries.

In addition to Russia, the biggest targets appeared to be Ukraine and India, nations where it is common to find older, unpatched versions of Windows in use, according to the security firm.

Spain, meanwhile, took steps to protect critical infrastructure in response to the attack.

Authorities said they were communicating with more than 100 energy, transportation, telecommunications and financial services providers about the attack.

Spain's Telefonica, a global broadband and telecommunications company, was among the companies hit.

What is ransomware?

Ransomware does not traditionally aim to steal personal or sensitive data held on a computer or system, instead focusing on blocking access to and threatening to delete files.

Aatish Pattni from cyber security firm Check Point, said the version of Wanna Decryptor used in the attack was a new piece of malware.

"The ransomware used in this attack is relatively new - it was first seen in February 2017, and the latest variant emerged earlier today, Friday 11 May," he said.

"Even so, it's spreading fast, with organisations across Europe and Asia being hit.

"It shows just how damaging ransomware can be - and how quickly it can cause disruption to vital services.

"Organisations need to be able to prevent infections taking hold in the first place, by scanning for, blocking and filtering out suspicious files content before it reaches their networks.

"It's also essential that staff are educated about the potential risks of incoming emails from unknown parties, or suspicious-looking emails that appear to come from known contacts."

A map showing the spread of 'Wanna Decryptor' infections around the world is available here.

How can ransomware infection be prevented?

Security experts say users should ensure their computer software is always up to date. Often important security updates are contained within these downloads and can prevent known viruses from infecting a device.

Users should also be vigilante in relation to email and not open any links or downloading attachments in emails from unfamiliar or possibly suspicious sources.

Experts also warn that software, apps and other programs should never be downloaded from unofficial sources as this is another common method for hackers to secretly install malware onto computers.

Pete Turner, from cyber security firm Avast, said: "It's critical that organisations and employees, particularly those in our most critical sectors like healthcare, start to think pro-actively about how to protect themselves from ransomware."

Further information on how to protect systems from ransomware is available from the National Cyber Security Centre.
Shutterstock.com

Acne is something all of us have to deal with in our lives at some point. The American Academy of Dermatology explained that the condition is caused by a chronic inflammatory of the skin. "This is often characterized by pimples, blackheads and whiteheads. They may surface on the face, neck, chest, back, shoulders and the arms." Acne usually begins in puberty and affects many adolescents and young adults, but it can occur at any stage of life.

Approximately 85 percent of people between the ages of 12 and 24 experience at least minor acne. Some causes of acne could be the abnormal growth of cells within the hair follicles. When a hair follicle gets to the point of breach, the oil that is enclosed seeps into the surrounding skin and then this spreads into other areas. Acne is a booming business and people spend an estimated 3 billion a year of various treatments. Here are 6 causes of acne that are quite surprising.

Genetics

Stress

Peanut Butter

Your Cell Phone

Scrubbing Your Face

Not Washing Makeup Brushes

Skipping Your Shampooing

Acne could be genetic, especially if both parents suffered from significant acne, the probability is you will as well. Researchers believe that 81 percent of your acne problem is genetic, while only 19 percent believe that external factors like food and lifestyle cause breakouts. Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine found "certain genes are commonly expressed in patients who suffer from acne wounds, but no particular genes have been named as causing acne ." Researchers believe that commonly procured traits such as skin thickness and pore size play a role in the predominance of acne. "More research is needed before scientists can predict who will develop acne by studying their genetics."Overall there are an estimated 8.3 million American adults who suffer from stress. When it comes to acne, researchers are still baffled if stress causes acne. They don't know exactly how stress worsens acne. "They do know that cells that produce sebum have receptors for stress hormones. Sebum is the oily substance that mixes with dead skin cells and bacteria to clog the hair follicles, leading to a pimple or acne cyst," WebMD reported. When a person with acne experiences a lot of stress "somehow, theyre upregulated," Lisa A. Garner, MD, FAAD explained to the site. "This means that more oil is produced to clog the hair follicles to allow more acne to form."Sorry peanut butter lovers, but your favorite spread could be causing acne. Peanut butter has its benefits, like the heart-healthy monounsaturated fats. But here is the bad news. The oils in peanuts and your peanut butter are very tough for the body to break down, celebrity nutritionist Nilli Grutman told newbeauty.com. "The liver is one way to release toxins, and if the liver becomes overloaded, it slows down and its ability to eliminate waste is hindered." She added that if the toxins cant get out through the liver, they get ejected through the skin and this leads to acne.Germs and bacteria live on many surface areas. They thrive on the refrigerator door, table and counter tops and live on your cell phone. Cellphones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats, Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona told livescience.com. Cell phones are dingy and all those germs are transferred to your face. "I see people talk on their phone on toilets." With this, breakouts start around your chin, cheeks, forehead and mouth. To prevent this, make it a habit and wipe down your cell phone with alcohol. Other things that you want to wipe down to prevent acne are commonly handled objects like remote controls, keyboards and your steering wheel.A common mistake people make when they initially see acne is to scrub their face. "Their skin gets worse because excess exfoliation causes inflammation and swelling of clogged pores," Dr. Jessica Wu said in a conversation with glamour.com. There is also a misuse of the cleaning brush, which makes it worse. Limit your exfoliation to only twice a week. Wash your face with lukewarm water and a gentle cleanser.When was the last time that you washed your makeup brushes? The bristles collect dirt and bacteria after use and if you never wash them, you are clogging your pores with dirt, grime and oils. You also risk getting a staph infection. The lack of cleaning your brushes also ruins makeup application. "One of the biggest reasons to use makeup brushes in the first place is so your makeup goes on more smoothly than if you simply use your fingers," goodhousekeeping.com reported. After using the brushes wipe them down with makeup remover and immerse them in soap and warm water.

If you have oily hair, keep it clean and keep your hair away from your face. When you have oily hair it gets on your face and can cause breakouts. "A natural oil called sebum, produced by glands in the skin, blends with old skin cells and blocks pores," CNN Health explained. Another thing to consider are the products that you are using on your hair like gels and hairsprays as they could also cause acne.

Acne may happen for many reasons. The culprit can be from genetics, stress, foods, not washing our makeup brushes or hair. If over the counter products and tweaks in your lifestyle is not helping, contact a dermatologist to help find what alternatives are right for you.

Corine Gatti-Santillo is a freelance digital journalist, editor, and content producer. She is also the The Christian Post Voices Editor. She is also a former editor at Beliefnet.com.
Rep. Gary Alejano (left) gestures as he explains the impeachment complaint against Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte at the House of Representatives in Manila, May 15, 2017.

Congressional allies of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday scuttled an impeachment complaint seeking his ouster for a brutal war on drugs which, rights groups say, has led to thousands of deaths.

The complaints dismissal by the Congressional Justice Committee effectively ends the impeachment case, which was filed in March.

A frustrated congressman, Gary Alejano, argued to keep the complaint alive, but he was aware he didnt have the numbers needed to push it through the 292-member House of Representatives where Duterte has a supermajority.

We can clearly see, and without a doubt that my impeachment complaint is sufficient in form and substance that was required by the rules on impeachment, he argued.

The dismissal is not expected to be overturned and it thwarts filings of new impeachment complaints against Duterte within one year, giving the president sufficient time to further consolidate support from allies.

Alejano emphasized that the complaint was culled from authentic records and from open sources that included policy statements, public speeches and media pronouncements of President Duterte.

All of us have heard him in his speeches where he ordered the police and troops and armed civilians to hunt down and kill all drug users not just once, but repeatedly, he said.

Duterte, 72, had even promised cash rewards to whoever killed suspected drug pushers, and vowed to pardon police officers who may be charged and found guilty of killing criminals, according to Alejano.

The congressman said that he verified his allegations from available official records, including statements made by several witnesses in extrajudicial killings attributed to police.

Undemocratic complaint

Two of the witnesses were a former police officer in Dutertes inner circle and a self-confessed hitman, who have also testified that Duterte personally ordered previous killings when he was still a city mayor in the south.

But Majority Leader Rudy Farinas questioned the complaint, saying Alejano did not have personal knowledge of the killings which, he said, were taken mostly from news reports.

A heated argument ensued, with Alejano later accusing the pro-Duterte congressmen of railroading the complaint because they were not willing to prosecute the president.

What is now our recourse?, Alejano said, adding that he and his advisers were now mulling the possibility of joining a complaint filed against President Duterte at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Alejano filed the impeachment complaint last month, accusing Duterte of orchestrating the murders of thousands of drug addicts and dealers in his drug war.

But Rep. Harry Roque, who voted against the complaint, insisted it was rightfully dismissed as it is undemocratic given that the people overwhelmingly gave President Duterte a mandate to lead and he has been in office for less than a year.

As pointed out by our other colleagues, Rep. Alejanos complaint is insufficient in form and substance as he has no personal knowledge on his alleged grounds for impeachment, he said. May this this serve as a warning to others not to trivialize the impeachment process.

According to official statistics, police officers have shot dead almost 2,700 suspects during anti-drug raids since Duterte took office in June. About 5,700 drug-related deaths, including those shootings allegedly perpetrated by vigilantes, were also under investigation.

Rehashed

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said the charges filed against Duterte were rehashed and aimed at undermining his government.

Duterte has also appeared to backtrack from earlier boasts that he had personally killed drug pushers and addicts  clearly made in front of television cameras.

This came as the Philippine leader sent last week his top choice for the foreign department portfolio, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, to explain his administrations war on drugs to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva as part of the U.N.s Universal Period Review.

But instead of explaining the government policy, Cayetano attacked the local and international press whom he accused of peddling alternative facts.

A consortium of rights groups, which monitors the Philippines compliance to the international body, said Cayetanos report glosses over the numerous extrajudicial killings happening in various parts of the country.

It said the governments relentless anti-drugs campaign targeted mostly the poor and have resulted in the killings, disappearances, torture, illegal arrests, among other forms of human rights abuses.
Thai narcotics police box up packages of crystal methamphetamine following a press conference at the Office of the Narcotics Control Board in Bangkok, May 2, 2017.

Thai police Monday announced the arrests in central and northern provinces of a dozen drug traffickers allegedly linked to a busted Lao kingpins network and the confiscation of methamphetamine and marijuana valued at about 312 million baht (U.S. $9 million).

The announcement of the arrests tied to efforts to traffic drugs to Malaysia and European countries came after reports surfaced that nine drug traffickers were killed in a weekend shootout with Thai soldiers near the Myanmar border. At a press conference in Bangkok, police officials did not comment on the reported shooting in northern Chiang Rai province because police were not involved in that incident.

Deputy National Police Chief Gen. Chalermkiat Sriworakhan told reporters that the arrests of the 12 unnamed suspects were an extension of Operation Chaiya Sayop Pairee 1 in January, which resulted in the arrest of Xaysana Keopimpha  a Laotian citizen dubbed the ASEAN drug lord. Xaysana could face the death penalty if convicted. Police also did not reveal information about the suspects nationalities.

Maj. Gen. Thanai Apichartsenee, one of commanders with the Thai national polices Narcotics Suppression Bureau, said all of the suspects were linked to Uzman Salamang, who is believed to be a close associate of Xaysana. Thai authorities placed a bounty of 2 million baht ($58,000) on Uzman, who fled to Laos in 2012, Sirinya Sitthichai, secretary general of the Thai Office of Narcotics Control Board, said earlier this year.

We believe all of them are linked to the networks of Uzman Salamang. They have an aim to traffic the drugs to Hat Yai district of Songkhla province. However, we have to investigate further, Thanai said Monday.

Chalermkiat announced that along with the arrests, police confiscated more than 1.5 million yaba (methamphetamine) pills and more than a ton of marijuana.

A yaba pill is priced at 200 baht ($5.75) and the marijuana at about 1,000 to 1,500 baht ($29 to $43) per kilo in the domestic market, according to a central investigation police who asked not to be named. The price would increase five to 10 times if it reached foreign markets such as Malaysia, Australia and European countries where much of it was destined to be sent.

Thanai said two of the suspects are former police officers who were fired because of their roles in pangolin smuggling from Malaysia. High demand for pangolin, an animal native to Africa, in some cultures that value its meat as a delicacy and use its scales in traditional medicine, fueled an international criminal trade that severely threatened its survival.

Lt. Gen. Sommai Kongvisaisuk, the head of the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, told reporters there were 400 million to 500 million yaba pills stockpiled on the other sides of Thailand border.

I am losing sleep because of it, he said.

Reports of shootout

Members of a Thai army ranger unit apparently killed nine traffickers in a shootout Saturday night in Chiang Rai province  a part of the notorious drug-producing Golden Triangle straddling Laos and Myanmar, officials said according to reports.

The commander of the 31st Ranger Regiment Task Force told the Thai Post that the shootout occurred at a pass along bamboo wilderness in Ban Pamee in Chiang Rais Mae Sai district.

On Sunday, Chiang Rai Gov. Narongsak Osotthanakhon went to the scene.

Our security forces engaged and killed nine armed men. We learned that 15 smugglers crossed the line and we found 700,000 yaba pills, Narongsak told Agence France-Presse.
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For Immediate Release, May 15, 2017 Contact: Emily Jeffers, (510) 844-7109, ejeffers@biologicaldiversity.org Regulators Warned Not to Ignore Risks of Trains Full of Liquefied Natural Gas Lawsuit Threatened if Feds Rubber-stamp National LNG Shipping Plan WASHINGTON The Center for Biological Diversity today threatened to sue federal regulators if they approve a railroad industry request to ship liquefied natural gas nationwide without carefully studying safety and environmental risks. Today's letter to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration notes that the agency currently prohibits most railroad shipments of liquefied natural gas, or LNG. Transporting LNG by rail is inherently dangerous, and risks explosions, pool fires that are impossible to put out, and other accidents that can harm public health and the environment, today's letter points out. Federal agencies can't turn a blind eye to the dangers of trains full of explosive liquid natural gas rolling through our communities, said Emily Jeffers, the Center attorney who sent the letter. Officials who ignored the law in approving a pilot LNG-by-rail project in Alaska shouldn't be allowed to repeat that dangerous mistake on a national scale. After the Federal Railroad Administration approved the country's first LNG-by-rail shipments last year, exempting an Alaska pilot project from federal regulations on transporting hazardous materials, a lawsuit by the Center uncovered documents showing the secretive approval process violated the National Environmental Policy Act. Last week DeSmogBlog reported on the flawed Alaska approval process and revealed that the Association of American Railroads has petitioned the federal government for new rules that would allow LNG-by-rail nationwide. Today's Center letter spelled out the studies and public input procedures required by federal law before officials consider allowing this explosive condensed gas to be shipped throughout the country. These federal statutes are essential in ensuring the environmental impacts of this decision are fully examined, and the public is given the opportunity to comment, Jeffers wrote in the letter. She later added, If the agency fails to act, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration will be putting our communities in danger and violating the law, and the Center will take action seeking legal remedies. The oil and gas industry is desperately looking for new ways to transport expanding supplies of natural gas derived from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), which exceed current pipeline capacity. But LNG carries many of the same public-safety risks as the oil trains that have repeatedly derailed and caused deaths and damage to property and the environment in recent years. A 2014 explosion at an LNG facility in the state of Washington injured five workers and forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes. Experts say pool fires may be the biggest risks of shipping LNG by rail. If LNG spills near an ignition source, evaporating gas will burn above the pool of spilling LNG. A pool fire is intense, burning far more hotly and rapidly than oil or gasoline fires. It cannot be extinguished  all the LNG must be consumed before it goes out. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.3 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Media Advisory, May 15, 2017

Contact: Patrick Donnelly, (702) 483-0449, pdonnelly@biologicaldiversity.org

Rural Residents, Conservationists to Oppose Water Bill at Tuesday Hearing

CARSON CITY, Nev. A coalition of Nevadans will be at the state legislature Tuesday afternoon to voice their opposition to proposed state water-law revisions that would make it easier to siphon groundwater away from rural Nevada, which could devastate local ecosystems and economies.



Rural residents, ranchers, conservation groups and farmers will express their concerns during the hearing over portions of the proposed bill, known as A.B. 298, which have the potential to hurt existing water-rights holders and the environment.

The proposed bill alters Nevada water law to more readily facilitate inter-basin groundwater-export projects, similar to those already proposed by the Southern Nevada Water Authority in eastern Nevada. Such projects have the potential to dry up springs and wetlands, and cause the water table to draw down. This would in turn have devastating effects on Nevada's wildlife, endangered species and residents of rural eastern Nevada.

What: State Senate Committee on Natural Resources hearing where Nevadans will voice strong opposition to proposed changes to state water law

When: 1:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 16

Where: Nevada Legislature, 401 S. Carson Street, Carson City, Nev., 89701, Room 2144

Media availability: Those opposing the bill will be available for media interviews before and after the hearing.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.3 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
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
Opinion | 04 November 2022 | Interviews

India needs to connect OPD with the cashless insurance network to bring them into the digital economy

After having raised $1.2 million from Entrepreneur First and GrowX Ventures in 2021, how do you see the perfor...Read more
Amri Botha and Carina Coetzee from advertising agency, ninety9cents were pretty shocked and pleasantly surprised, when they were announced as the winners of the Ster-Kinekor Cinemark 48-hour competition at the Ster-Kinekor Cavendish Cine Prestige complex in Claremont, Cape Town on Monday, 15 May 2017!

Winners, Amri Botha and Carina Coetzee with Lynne Wylie from Cinemark

Botha and Coetzee will go on to join other Young Lions at this year's Cannes Festival for the opportunity of being crowned the Young Lions of Cannes 2017 in the 'Film' category, which follows the same 48-hour format. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the Young Lions competition take place in Cannes, France, from Saturday, 17 June to Saturday, 24 June.

Return flights

Accommodation during the festival

Entry into the Cannes Young Lions competition

A full weeks registration to attend the festival

Cinemark will be flying the winning team to Cannes, courtesy of Air France, to attend the festival and compete in the global competition. The prize list comprises of:

"We were actually expecting something different for Unicef but when we received the brief, we decided to go for it and so glad we did," an excited Coetzee told me. The teams only had 48 hours to complete the task, from brief to concept to shooting, editing and the final production of a 60 second commercial. Botha says the win is a massive achievement for the two of them who worked together finding a creative concept to fit the theme, cyber-bullying. We did this project not just to win but because cyber-bullying is such a big issue in the world today, she added. Amri says it was very important for them to get the right message across to make young people stop, pay attention and listen because it is such an important topic. In addition to their trip of a lifetime, the winning teams commercial will also be flighted in Ster-Kinekor cinemas, and will be used by Unicef South Africa to boost its current anti-bullying campaign.
What's it like as a person of colour working in the ad industry?

Its the constant conflict of working for a place thats responsible not only for your income, but often the proliferation of damaging stereotypes about your race.

Everyone wants to change for the better. Thats the first lie I tell myself every day. Its the first of many things I tell myself to believe that what I do matters, that it has meaning, that I should keep going. The world we live in is a collection of stories we tell ourselves. And we learn these stories from one another, from art, from movies, from music and yes, from advertising. And because its advertising that I get to make most of the time, its the lies I tell in advertising that Im most concerned with daily.

Happy to clean? The trope of black people dancing when theyre happy is one of the most used stereotypes in advertising, such as in this ad for Sunlight Liquid.

A brief arrives on my desk from the client, a Brand.

My art director and I need to sell The Product, and we need a smart, creative way to do it.

Weve got 45, maybe 30 seconds to communicate to an audience who have grown up with ads invading their lives and so want to listen to the Brand about as much as they do their own parents.

Noble savage? The idea of black women as wild, exotic animals is another stereotype.

There are a few things we could do now to be effective at our jobs. We can do research and talk to the people around us. We can think about the Brand and what it stands for. We can consider what we know about people, and all the things we dont know about people, and construct an insight from that. Then we can build that insight into an idea, and that idea into a creative execution.

Alternatively, there are the stereotypes we could lean on instantly. The other ads that the client, our colleagues and the audience have all seen hundreds of times over. The lies that shape our shared understanding of the world.

Theres the mechanically racially balanced cast of black, white and brown families sharing meals at a restaurant themed around appropriation of a First Nations American culture. What traditional ad men refer to as cappuccino-skinned women, showing off clothing and make-up, their hair replaced so any semblance of their blackness is whittled away. Or maybe its been teased out into something that represents the exoticism and ferocity of some pseudo-Africa that colonisers feared and fetishised. Were making these commercials in Africa, but somehow, were making them for Western eyes, begging our masters to take us back.

All for one: The idea of the multi-cultural friend group used to be a staple of rainbowist advertising.

These are the ideas that are more comforting to look at because theyre familiar. Its like Joseph Goebbels said, A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth, and everybody wants the truth, right?

The black story?

As a person of colour, you can walk into a brainstorm with a real insight, with a real idea and how to translate it creatively, but seven times out of 10 its misunderstood, says Neo Makongoza, a senior copywriter and my colleague at Native VML. In 2017, where marketers are looking for The Black Story more and more, its imperative that you dont isolate black people.

Neo has worked in the industry for over a decade, for four different major agencies, and in that time he has never reported to a black creative director. His best experience in that time has been with our current creative director, a white man who understands that he isnt the authority on identity in South Africa or anywhere else. When a brief comes in, Neo feels that hes empowered to bring his unique perspective as a black man to his work.

The white saviour: This Feed a Child advert, which showed a black child being fed like dog, caused an uproar.

Its glaringly and disgustingly obvious what the social stereotypes are about black people. And what we seem to enjoy is reflected [in commercials]. Verbatim. Without any emotional intelligence, says Neo. The people releasing those stereotypical commercials are drawing their ideas from a particular insight, but they are misinterpreting that insight.

The idea that black people will dance for literally anything is one of the most consistently perpetrated stereotypes in South African advertising. Black janitors dance while mopping.

Black students dance while looking for spare change. And black flight attendants dance because theyve had a long day at work and just need to cut loose. Maybe one of those would be fine.

But when you see it repeated again and again, it becomes a hypnotic sentiment: black people are just bodies shifting in the atmosphere to illustrate how okay we are despite how messed up the world is all around us.

Neo laughs when I suggest this. He goes straight for the jugular; the laundry detergent commercials where black mamas are so pumped that their laundry is done they break out into song and dance.

Safety dance: A black woman dances in an advert for Doom pesticide.

The cultural insight is that black people love dancing, he says. But Im not gonna dance because Ive hung my washing on the line. Thats a chore. Black, white, Indian, whatever. Nobody dances to that.

And yet this is consistently how laundry is sold in South Africa. In commercials that tie into even older lies about black people being pleased by the act of labour. Like the maids, butlers or slaves of old minstrel shows, black mothers are presented as eager to do hard work. Even in the independent space of their own homes.

In the visual landscape of Ad Land, however, the realities of their independence dont need to be probed. Shes so pumped because her whites are coming out whiter that nobody has to stop and ask how her blacks are doing.

The real story

Neo pitches me the ideal version of that same ad. He switches to the voice of a character, a woman working late one evening to get her laundry done.

My husband works tirelessly. Underpaid. Sometimes he doesnt know where our next meal is going to come from. But every day he goes out there, trying to work towards getting that income. And the thing that brings him the most pride is wearing his uniform clean. Fade out Neo stops for a moment. Can you imagine the power of that story? If you wanna capture the emotional essence, capture the truth of that essence. She slaves on Sunday, washing with her hands, she loves that soap because washing with her hands is so hard, bra, but the soap helps.

Neo says that story comes from his reality. From his mother making him shine his shoes every Sunday night while she washed his school uniform by hand.

Thats the reality of that ad, he says. It doesnt help to a point where I need to ululate about it. It helps in that Ive done my washing so when my husband steps out again, theres a level of decency to him, and I can thank the brand for that.

But thats just a matter of representation in the hypothetical world of stories. The real issue is in the offices of agencies where people like Neo and me work every day, surrounded by our black peers. Native is probably the first agency either of us has worked at where we feel like our voices are heard and our identities are respected.

[Black creatives] dont want to be seen as revolutionaries, he says. For anyone who comes from a previously disadvantaged family, myself included, speaking out is not something you want to do when youre trying to feed your family. And yet Neo says he tries to raise the red flag as early as possible in every project hes on. If you dont say something, theres perpetuation thats been around for so many years, it will just carry on. And it will get worse.

An unfamiliar narrative

Both Neo and I have been in rooms before where our insights are overlooked because they arent coming from a familiar place. Whats lived-in for us can feel outlandish to the traditional world of advertising. That kind of thing doesnt always align with the designs of white colleagues. Our experiences can be easy for them to dismiss just because theyre unfamiliar.

I feel insulted. I feel like my point of view wasnt taken into consideration, says Neo of those situations. And when it falls flat it doesnt become a matter of I-told-you-so. It becomes bigger than advertising. It becomes a failed society.

And that is prejudice in action. Its the assumption that the lies weve told are the reality we live in. When the reality is something else entirely. And we keep hoping that the world will change, but it wont unless we can change the stories we tell one another. Because all of us are used to telling lies to make it through the day. Whats different is often just the reasons we tell them.

Black parents are not trying to teach you the value of responsibility. They have nothing else to offer you except an education. And they hide behind the teachings of that value to make them feel better about their situation, says Neo. If [black parents] told you the real truth about where they are economically and why they cant provide for you the things that would help you soar like your counterparts do, it would leave you in the same place they are. Bitter and feeling like the world has cheated you out of something.

And the lies we have to tell in order to fit into this normalcy is called the advertising industry. No one wants to hang out with the deadbeat guy from Soweto whos struggled all his life, who is telling war stories, a victim of racial segregation, and now hes here because he fought the good fight. Neo sighs in a moment of self-reflection.

Everyone wants to hang out with the guy whos able to go to Maboneng with them on a Saturday, and not talk about the struggle, and be comfortable enough to talk about the good times that prevail right now. Those are the kinds of people that our counterparts want us to become. And those are the types of people we do become because we want to succeed just like our counterparts did. So this financial need to bridge this gap lands us in a situation where were letting ourselves go in order to accommodate our socioeconomic situation. And I cant blame anyone for that. Were compromising for our own livelihood.

Changing the narrative?

We share a moment of silence when he says this. A moment of recognition not just for the industry were in, but the world too. Theres no doubt that theres a shift happening, that with more black creatives working in our industry, the dynamics of representation are changing. But theyre not changing fast enough. Theres been a noticeable shift in the way many brands advertise in South Africa  Neo and I have both had the chance to produce work with black people in front of the camera and black voices getting to fight for a change away from the rainbowism of our youth.

But its not enough yet. For every piece of work where were sharing real South African insights, theres something where all were managing to do is get a black face in front of the camera, palette-swapping a global vision of whiteness with a black face. As long as were being dictated to by global strategies, by global imagery and global agendas, as long as were still trying to build an image of the future based on a lie from the past, South African advertising is going to be compromised.

Advertising is often deplorable. Its every sell-out artist looking to cash in on capitalisms sweet dream to survive another day. But creating an advertising campaign is also an immensely collaborative experience. It involves copywriters, art directors, designers, strategists, human beings aligning for a moment to try to make something that will, sure, sell a product, but also, hopefully, carry a message. A message in a bottle that the future can understand.

Everybody wants to change for the better. Thats the first lie I tell myself every day. Its the first of many things I need to tell myself in order to not just believe what I do, but to practise what I believe. That if were going to live in a better world, we have to first believe that the pieces well need to build it exist in the here and now. If Im trying to sell any lie, its that one.

Republished with permission from City Press. Click here for the original.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has mobilised its resources to curtail an outbreak of Ebola after the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ministry of health (MoH) informed it that of the five samples collected from suspected cases, one tested positive by RT-PCR for Ebola virus subtype Zaire. Additional specimens are currently being tested and results, including sequencing, are awaited to describe the outbreak.

The WHO regional director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, has visited Kinshasa DRC, to discuss with national authorities and partners ways to mount a rapid, effective and coherent response.

The outbreak is in the Likati health zone, Bas Uele Province, in the northern part of the country bordering Central African Republic, which is around 1,400kms from the capital. So far, 11 suspected cases including three deaths have been reported.

Speaking at the meeting, Moeti said: I am here to assure the government of DR Congo that in collaboration with the UN system and other partners, we will work together to respond to this outbreak. WHO has already mobilised technical experts to be deployed on the ground and is ready to provide the leadership and technical expertise required to mount a coordinated and effective response. I encourage to public to work with the health authorities and take the necessary preventive measures to protect their health."

The Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) has been activated to provide additional support if required. Reinforcement of epidemiological surveillance, contact tracing, case management, and community engagement are under way.

The first recorded case was a 45-year-old male. He was transported by taxi to hospital and was dead on arrival. The driver also fell ill and later died. A third person who cared for the first case also be-came ill and has subsequently died. At present, 25 contacts of the second patient who died are being followed. Of the cases and deaths, one has been tested PCR-positive for Ebola.

This is the eighth outbreak of Ebola virus disease since its discovery in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. On 20 November 2014, in line with WHO recommendations, the Ministry of Health of DRC and WHO declared the end of the Ebola virus disease outbreak that started on 24 August 2014 and resulted in a total of 38 laboratory confirmed cases and 28 probable cases including 49 deaths in Boende, Equateur province.

Chronology of Ebola in DRC

2014: 66 cases of EVD including 49 deaths diagnosed initially in Equateur province (Watsi Kengo, Lokolia, Boende, and Boende Muke).

2012: 62 cases including 34 deaths Orientale Province -Isiro (Bundibugyo virus)

2008-2009: 32 cases including 15 deaths in Kasai-Occidental (Zaire virus)

2007: 264 cases including 187 deaths in Kasai-Occidental (Zaire virus)

1995: 317 cases including 245 deaths, in Kikwit, Bandundu Province

1977: one case with one death in Tandala, Equateur Province

1976: 318 cases including 280 deaths in Yambuku - (Zaire virus)

The full extent of the 2017 outbreak is still not yet clear. Extensive investigation and risk assessments are being conducted and the findings will be communicated accordingly. WHO does not recommend any restriction of travel and trade to DRC based on the currently available information.
Back in 2011, when critics got into a flap about the R595m that former Shoprite CEO Whitey Basson made when he exercised a chunk of the share options he'd received as part of his remuneration package, chairman Christo Wiese told the Financial Mail: "I would pay R1bn in the middle of the night for another Whitey."

Whitey Basson

At Shoprite's AGM in late October 2016 Wiese again jumped to the defence of Basson's remuneration package. This time he told testy investors, who'd questioned the R100m (including a cash bonus of R50m) paid to Basson in 2016, "I would have been happy to pay him much more."

Shoprite's recent shocking Sens announcement about Basson's Put option is proof that Wiese was not exaggerating. Far from it. It seems Wiese actually understated the generosity he (on behalf of his shareholders) was prepared to heap upon Basson, who retired from the group in December. The Sens announcement released last Friday revealed the existence of a remarkable and hitherto unheard-of employment agreement that obliged Shoprite to repurchase any shares put to it by Basson.

A few days earlier, on 2 May, Basson notified Shoprite that he was exercising the put option at the middle market price of R211. It turns out this was a five-year high for the share.

If shareholders approve the transaction, Shoprite will have to repurchase 8.7m of Basson's shares at this price, which means handing over R1.8bn to the man who is largely responsible for building the group into the largest food retailer in Africa. Wiese's comment about being happy to pay Basson so much more will come back to haunt shareholders as they face an eye-popping R144m/year in additional interest costs to fund his generous gesture.

Some analysts have expressed concern that Basson's decision to sell all but 400,000 of his Shoprite shares is an indication that he believes the group is now ex-growth. Others say it's an appropriate move for someone who must walk away and let a new executive team put their stamp on the business.

At this stage, despite Wiese's 45% voting bloc, it's not a dead certainty the transaction will get the necessary 75% shareholder approval. It's difficult to see why shareholders, particularly the Government Employees Pension Fund with a 16.3% holding, would vote in support. It's not as though Basson will ever do another full day's work for the group. A R144m/year interest bill is a hefty thank you and not the sort of gesture hard-nosed investors are inclined to make.

If it is blocked, it is unclear what happens to Basson's right in terms of the employment agreement. Presumably he could pursue the matter through the courts.

It wouldn't be the first time this year Wiese failed to get his way with a controversial deal. In February a plan to combine Shoprite with Steinhoff's African brands was called off when key shareholders were unable to reach agreement on the share-exchange ratio to be applied.

While there's little debate about the contribution Basson made to Shoprite during his 37 years in the driving seat, there is huge debate over the nature and origins of this little-known employment agreement. It's a debate that will grow in the weeks between now and when the shareholders get a chance to vote on it.

Jean Pierre Verster of Fairtree Capital says the issue is not about how much value a CEO creates: "This put obligation leads to a misalignment of interests between the company and its executives."

Verster says inevitably if it is in the interests of the executive to sell the shares, it will not be in the company's interest to buy them. "R211 isn't extremely expensive but it is close to full value, which means it's in [Basson's] interest to sell - but would the company be buying if it weren't obliged to?"

Perhaps even more disturbing is that no-one outside the company seems to have been aware of the employment agreement giving Basson the extremely lucrative put option. There was certainly no sign of it back in 2011 when Basson sold the approximate 10m shares in the high-profile R595m deal.

The company says the agreement was concluded in December 2003 but analysts have been unable to find any trace of it, either as a note to subsequent remuneration reports or as a contingent liability. Analyst Syd Vianello said he was unaware of any such agreement anywhere in the past 15-20 years.

Amazingly, given the money and the parties involved, shareholders might never have been any the wiser were it not for the JSE's listings requirements. The JSE's Andre Visser says because it is a specific repurchase and involves a related party, shareholders have to give approval.

In addition, because the repurchase price is at a premium to the average price at which the share traded in the previous 30 business days, Shoprite must obtain a fairness opinion.

Shareholders will be provided with this opinion, full details of the repurchase and the date of the meeting "in due course", says the company. This means shareholders will have plenty of time to mull over the latest controversial agreement involving SA's wealthiest businessman - and to wonder how many other similar employment agreements are waiting to be detonated.

Source: Financial Mail
In partnership with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Habitat for Humanity SA is calling on South Africans to join them in their Nelson Mandela International Build Week from the 17-21 July in Orange Farm, Gauteng.

Announcing the campaign, Patrick Kulati, Habitat for Humanity SAs national director said, 67 homes for 67 families will be built during Habitats Build Week with the help of active citizens. We need the help of South African corporate teams to come together from across all sectors not only to help build the homes but also to use their financial resources to help build the community of Orange Farm beyond the construction of the homes.

For more information, go to www.habitat.org.za.
The successful delivery of mega housing projects and substantial investments in tourism as the engine room for growth in Gauteng will be largely dependent on the quality of the province's road infrastructure.

 Mirko Vitali via 123RF

Over the past three years, premier David Makhura has laid out his vision for a much more integrated Gauteng City Region where partnerships between the public sector, business, labour and civil society will determine both the direction and the pace of development. This was, again, a dominant theme in his recent State of the Province Address.

One of the consequential announcements he made concerns the envisaged development of 31 mega housing projects to be delivered within the medium-term framework. From earlier announcements on this plan, it is clear that each of these developments will yield no fewer than 15 000 units, either within an existing cluster or as a new nodal development project.

Impacts on all aspects of mobility in the province

Such projects will have inevitable impacts on all aspects of mobility in the province. At SANRAL we have to calculate this into our medium and long-term planning for the upgrading of the existing network and the planning and construction of new freeways.

Premier Makhuras multi-pronged approach in ensuring Gauteng mobility remains at the core of future planning processes is welcomed. It contains a combination of policy choices to curb urban sprawl, densification along transit nodes, initiatives to address the spatial legacies of apartheid and substantial investments in quality public transport both within the individual cities and between the urban metropoles.

Passenger rail, the Gautrain, bus rapid transit systems, commuter buses and taxis are all elements of this mix. But so is roads - especially the planning, construction, and funding model for expansions to the existing Gauteng freeway network.

The provinces own projections as contained in the Gauteng 2055 Vision show sustained population growth over the next decade from the current 13.2 million people to 15.5 million in 2020 and 18.7 million a decade later. Already 88% of the total freight tonnage in South Africa is transported on roads and 94% of daily motorised person trips are road-based.

Private vehicle ownership accelerates at an even-faster pace as more and more people move into the middle class.

Impact of trends on traffic patterns

The impact of these trends on traffic patterns should not be underestimated. And the importance of the national and provincial road network as the primary transport arteries should not be taken too lightly while longer term plans for densification, public transport and rapid rail systems are being implemented.

SANRAL does not see the construction of more freeways and additional roads as a panacea for urban mobility or a cure for congestion. The issues are much more complex to be reduced to single-faceted responses. Similarly, any solution that reduces the importance of well-managed roads  and a planned process of new freeway development  also does not take into account the realities of the regional economy.

The direct impact of modern freeways on a regional economy is well-illustrated by the developments that followed the construction of GFIP. The success of major recent residential developments such as Heritage Hill near Roohuiskraal, Waterfall City next to the Allandale Road off-ramp, and Serengeti Estate in Ekurhuleni can be directly attributed to the availability of an upgraded freeway while extensions to major retail centres such as Menlyn and Mall of Africa would not have been feasible without GFIP.

Johannesburg no longer most congested city

A global study based on the 2016 TomTom Traffic index recently found that Johannesburg is no longer the most-congested city in sub-Saharan Africa and that improvements in traffic movement can be directly attributed to the construction of GFIP, the introduction of open road tolling and the addition of intelligent transport systems linked to SANRALs management of the network.

Some of the most exciting recent announcements made by premier Makhura to grow Gautengs tourism potential and grow the provinces role as a regional logistics hub are heavily dependent on the extension of the freeway network.

Plans for the extension of the GFIP network through the addition of 158km of new road and upgrades to 223km have been on the drawing board for some time. These roads will further reduce traffic pressures near O R Tambo airport and contribute to the growth of the West Rand District, identified as a priority corridor by the Gauteng government.

How these freeways are to be funded will be decided by the national government in consultation with the province. SANRAL is an agency of government and implements policy decided on by cabinet including the user pay principle as defined in the National Development Plan.

Estimated five years for construction to start

Different opinions over funding should, however, not delay the planning and preparations for the construction of GFIP stages 2 and 3. It will take an estimated five years for construction to start once the green light for the programme has been given. Construction will have to be preceded by more rounds of public consultation, updated environmental impact assessments, land acquisitions, and procurement processes.

In the meantime, road congestion in parts of Gauteng that are vital to the implementation of the Gauteng Vision 2055 is building up. If this is not addressed a traffic situation can soon develop that is similar to what existed prior to the start of construction on the current GFIP network.

SANRAL is looking forward to work together with the Gauteng government to develop an infrastructure network that is, in the words of Premier Makhura, the lifeblood of the provinces social and economic transformation agenda.
The legal interpretation of the Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPIA) legislation impact is often dealt with at a high-level with management, which then fails to provide support in unpacking, analysing and interpreting the specific impact and remedies.

This is according to Anne-Marie Pretorius from the consulting firm Bizmod, who adds, PoPI is by no means new, yet we still find that many organisations of various sizes are battling with compliance.

In South Africa, cybercrime has become a national crisis, as data breach risks are growing and South African businesses are unprepared for the growing risk of cyber-attacks.

Many organisations struggle to implement the intent of the Act in a practical way that does not hamper the day-to-day running of the business. At the centre of any compliance implementation is the ability to interpret legislation into practical guidelines or interventions, which will enable businesses to comply at a process, systems, people and data level.

The 2015 Information Security Breach Survey, undertaken by PWC, showed that 90% of large organisations reported suffering a security breach in 2015. It found that 59% of employees steal proprietary corporate data when they quit or are fired and 68% of funds lost because of a cyber-attack were declared unrecoverable. The average time to detect a malicious or criminal attack by a global study sample of organisations was 170 days.

Guidelines

Pretorius provides these guidelines for organisations struggling with compliance and data breaches:

Analyse the primary facing unit, operational and application areas, while structuring the various work streams including process analysis, contracting, people change management and systems.



Conduct a gap analysis by converting the PoPI Act into key questions. Standardise this across the impacted areas and create a heat map of impact.



The heat map of impact enables the organisation to identify impact across the dimensions of business areas and implement PoPI compliant business processes and controls within the organisation.



Enhance operational systems, controls and technologies to support compliance, thereby bringing about compliant business solutions.



Establish programme education throughout the organisation with training, awareness and change activities that raise sensitivity and understanding of the PoPI Act.



Recruit a permanent employee to fulfil the role of Privacy Officer. This allows for a permanent business-as-usual capability, allowing for sustainability.

The PoPI act creates significant impact on business as complying with it requires changes of most processes and systems which then have a direct impact on employees behaviour. The organisation is accountable for overseeing its PoPI compliance and therefore it needs to identify and design pragmatic steps and interventions for sustainable results, concludes Pretorius.
Cigarettes and smoke have no place in modern life. This was the message conveyed to South Africans by the Minister of Health, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, on World No Tobacco Day 2016. The Minister went on to emphasise that, on an international level, there is a worldwide movement by governments towards a smoking-free society, and that he is confident that, within his lifetime still, there will be no smoking anywhere in the world.

There is currently no specific legislation that regulates the composition, labelling, marketing and sale of e-cigarettes in South Africa. The Tobacco Products Control Act of 1993 (Tobacco Products Act), which regulates the sale and use of traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products (and strictly prohibits the advertising and promotion of these products), does not extend to e-cigarettes. The reason for this is that, as a general rule, the vape solutions used in e-cigarettes do not contain tobacco and, therefore, these products do not qualify as tobacco products in terms of the Tobacco Products Act.

In terms of the Medicines and Related Substances Act of 1965 (Medicines Act), nicotine-containing e-cigarettes that are sold as a substitute for tobacco products (or as a medicinal aid to quit smoking) require registration with the Medicines Control Council for lawful sale, and may only be sold in pharmacies, on prescription. However, in practice, this is not the case. E-cigarettes are marketed in South Africa as consumer products, as opposed to medical devices. They are widely available at kiosks in many shopping malls, tobacconists and other retail outlets.

E-cigarettes are considered to be a relatively new technology, which has gained increased popularity in the past few years. As such, there appears to be a divide, worldwide, on the pros and cons of these products, particularly as it has not been possible to determine the long-term health consequences of use or secondary exposure.

In April 2016, the UK Tobacco Advisory Group of the Royal College of Physicians published a report, which suggests that, based on the available data, the use of e-cigarettes may be 95% less harmful than smoking tobacco products. A report published by the WHO in August 2016 on this topic paints a somewhat different picture on the potential health risks for e-cigarette users, and emphasises that second-hand exposure to e-cigarette vape has the potential to cause adverse health effects for bystanders.

On a national level, the Vapour Product Association (VPA), which is a self-regulated body that represents the local vape products industry, recognises that there is a need for proper regulation of the industry. It strives to work with the Government to develop appropriate industry legislation. In January 2017, the VPA hosted a round table discussion by a panel of experts on the topic of building policy consensus on achieving a smoke free South Africa. In considering and discussing the views expressed by both the WHO and the UKs Royal College of Physicians, the panel was in agreement that the use of e-cigarettes is a safer alternative to smoking tobacco products. As such, the recommendation was made to implement local legislation with sufficient safety measures on the one hand, but ensuring the continued availability, accessibility and affordability of e-cigarettes as an attractive alternative for smokers.

In conclusion, it is clear that the Government is serious about curbing the smoking habits of South Africans in order to save lives. Recent indications suggest that the Department of Health views vaping in the same light as smoking, and proposes to amend the Tobacco Products Act to regulate e-cigarettes (both nicotine-containing and nicotine-free variants). While the vaping industry and experts agree that appropriate regulation is required, they believe that it would be in the publics best interest to implement regulations that maintain accessibility to and affordability of e-cigarettes, in combination with setting the necessary product safety requirements. Whether or not the Government will take heed of these suggestions remains to be seen.
Investec property and workplace specialists Giant Leap has launched FutureSpace, a high-end, flexible office-on-demand at 61 Katherine Street in the heart of Sandton, Johannesburg.

The office is intended to be more high-end than other flexible office space with tenants able to rent the space for varied amounts of time.

Linda Trim, director at Giant Leap, says the new 2,000m office could be thought of as a mix between "a five-star business-class lounge and on-demand, sharing economy services, such as Uber and Airbnb".

"FutureSpace is a fully fledged office with everything a business could want from high-speed, fibre wifi, concierge and support staff, to meeting rooms, video conferencing and barista coffee and food," she says.

Robin Magid, executive director of Investec Properties, says, "We plan to role out many more offices in the business centres of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town with Giant Leap - as well as creating an international presence starting in London. All will be in high-end locations and close to good transport links."

The offices will likely appeal to SA's growing millennial workforce. Research by Deloitte consulting group has shown that millennials' work demands are moving away from traditional office design.

Millennials, according to consulting group Deloitte, are those who born between 1982 and 2000, who grew up with PCs and are either in the early stages of their careers or going to start work in the next few years. As many as half of SA's office workers are part of the millennial generation, says Jonathan Hall, marketing director at workplace design consultancy, Tower Bridge.

Hassan Shaikh, founder of Revolve, a specialist corporate and retail interior design group says office design can affect whether a company generates future business. This is true for small as well as medium-sized companies. "There is a direct correlation between how a potential new client perceives your offices and whether they want to do business with you," he said.

"Potential clients must want to spend money with you. If a run-down, out-dated office is the first impression potential clients have of your business, what is it saying about your business?," Shaikh said. "That its run-down and out-dated. You have to spend money to make money and the design of your office space is worth the investment."

Source: BDpro
Chevron will invest R3.6 million into a new Chevron-funded facility for the Centre for the Advancement of Science and Mathematics Education (Casme) in Durban to address the educational challenges facing the communities surrounding its Lubricant Manufacturing Plant (LMP) based on the South Basin of the Port of Durban.

South Africa spends 6.3% of its GDP on education, compared to South Korea, which spends 4.6%. However, 27% of pupils who have attended school in South Africa for six years cannot read, compared with 4% in Tanzania and 19% in Zimbabwe. (The Economist, January 2017).

South Africa needs to set new benchmarks for success in order to meet this educational urgency, said Chevron South Africa chairman, Shashi Rabbipal, at the opening of the Casme initiative. The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education, Umlazi District, supports this funding and it has been used to expand the Lamontville Education Centre to include a Science Resource Centre.

The beneficiary communities of the investment include Bluff, Wentworth, Merebank, Isipingo, Montclair, Glenwood, Umlazi, Lamontville and Chesterville. Chevron draws its employees from and has its local roots in these communities.

The private sector has a pivotal role to play in implementing workable solutions in education in South Africa. By far the best solution involves seeking and nurturing high value partnerships with other stakeholders in education.

Addressing Stem needs

We need to look at the demands of a modern economy on the one hand and the enormous projected growth in number of learners, especially at high school level. In 2025, there will be 21.3 million secondary learners in South Africa (The Global Rise in Education) and these learners will need clear pathways into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) careers.

Therefore, as a leader in an industry with a strong science and technology orientation, it is critical for Chevron South Africa to invest in education in the communities from which it sources its workforce and to complement its massive investments into infrastructure, resources and other areas of the economy.

We are addressing learners who stand to benefit through a tuition programme for Grades 10-12. Three hundred learners from five schools started their Saturday classes in the early part of the year, with tutors offering expert guidance in mathematics, science and English.

The countrys National Development Plan has set a number of ambitious targets for mathematics and science learner achievement by 2030, including the creation of 30 000 artisans a year.

These targets are critical if the country is to meet its goals of alleviating poverty, inequality and unemployment. However, government alone cannot solve the crisis in mathematics and science education in South Africa; it requires the collective effort of all stakeholders.

He concluded that teachers are at the core of quality and innovative teaching and learning, and so at the heart of the programme is ongoing support for local teachers through training and mentorship from the Casme team of seasoned facilitators. The programme is three-pronged tackling the issue of resources for teaching, support for teachers and creating opportunities for learners.

The Centre for the Advancement of Science and Mathematics Education (Casme) is a non-profit education development institution based in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. Casme focuses on teacher professional development and support, through training and provision of resources for science and mathematics teaching, in under-resourced and previously disadvantaged communities. For more information, go to www.casme.org.za.
Although South Africa is renowned as a premium tourist destination and known to have world-class private medical facilities, the country has a very low key medical tourism industry.

HONGQI ZHANG via 123RF

Americans rate South Africa as quite low on their list of preferred destinations, at number 27 on a list of forty. Canada is the preferred destination for Americans followed by the UK, Israel, Singapore, India, and Germany. Brazil and China are at numbers 22 and 23 respectively and Mexico at 29.

Currently, there seems to be very little interaction between the travel medicine fraternity and medical tourism. It was certainly startling to realise the extent of the burgeoning industry which was put in perspective at the World Medical Tourism and Global Healthcare Congress held in the Chinese resort town of Boao which is situated on the island of Hainan an hours flight from Hong Kong.

About 750,000 Americans travel internationally in search of healthcare. The number of medical tourists travelling to Asia alone is expected to have surpassed 10 million last year, with Thailand, India, and Singapore expected to control more than 80% market share. The industry projects annual growth of 15% with a value of 32 billion dollars by 2020. Contrary to popular belief some of the major procedures striven for are not cosmetic and dental care but cardiac, oncological, orthopaedic, and infertility treatment. There seems to be bidirectional movement currently with the major growth areas being the Asia-Pacific region, Eastern and Western Europe, North America and South America.

The high-end market is dominated by American institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic, John Hopkins and Mayo Clinic and they actively market their facilities and expertise which comes at considerable cost. These consumers are more willing to pay for private facilitates and cost is usually not a factor. They are aware of screening facilities and the benefits of preventative interventions and seek the very best of the high technology market. South Africa is experiencing a similar situation, although on a much smaller scale as dollar flush consumers from countries such as Angola and Botswana seek the services of private health care institutions here.

Growing medical tourism market driven by affordability

The growing medical tourism market is driven by outbound patients seeking care and procedures in foreign countries as it is either exorbitantly expensive in their home countries, waiting lists for the procedures are extremely long and sometimes run into years, or are not available at all. They seek quality accessible medical care at an affordable price. The range of savings for American medical tourists has been estimated to be about 30% if they travel to Brazil, 50% if the destination is Costa Rica, more than 50% if they travel to Thailand and a staggering 90% for certain interventions performed in India.

A practical example is the full treatment course for Hepatitis C with the drug Sofosbuvir which cost $84,000 in the USA and $900 in India. China is now actively marketing its medical tourism industry and is currently building a fully-fledged medical tourism city close to Boao in Hainan which will have oncological, cardiac, orthopaedic, haematological, and other units available with plans for units that can perform micro and nanosurgery.

Aging world population

The worlds population is also aging. Projections are that by 2050 there will be two billion earthlings aged 60 or older, with 80% living in low or middle-income countries. In fact, by 2020 those over 60 will outnumber children under the age of five for the first time. There is a definite association between longevity and income and in the Western World, as well as in countries with rapidly growing economies such as China, it is projected that the population will live longer. This will fuel the need for medical procedures and hence the projections for the growth of medical tourism.

There is also a concomitant awareness of anti-aging procedures, whether experimental such as stem cell therapy or touted as alternative medicine. Travel medicine practitioners should be aware of current developments as internet research is often undertaken by potential medical tourists. The Botox and cosmetic procedures industry is massive in the Asia Pacific region and is projected to grow exponentially.

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has identified some risks associated with medical tourism and this is dependent on the destination country involved:

 Communication may be a problem if different languages are involved and this increases the chances of misunderstandings.

 Some institutions may reuse needles between patients which can transmit diseases such as hepatitis and HIV.

 Some countries are known to be a source of counterfeit or inferior quality medication.

 Antibiotic resistance is increasingly becoming a global problem. Resistant bacteria can spread if hygiene standards are not maintained.

 Some countries obtain their blood supply from paid donors. This may not always be screened and blood-borne diseases may spread in this manner.

 The risk of DVTs is increased if a patient flies soon after surgery.

The CDC advises those planning to obtain medical services and procedures in foreign countries to be mindful of the abovementioned risks and also recommend a few other considerations:

 Consult a travel medicine practitioner four to six weeks before travel so that an adequate fitness to travel assessment can be done. The risks of the procedures to be performed and its impact on travel can also be discussed.

 The qualifications of the contracted health care providers in the foreign country have to be verified.

 A written agreement has to be in place as to the scope and costs of the procedures.

 The legal recourse if a problem arises pre, during and post-travel has to be ascertained.

 If the language in the foreign country is different to the country of origin, ensure that good translating facilities are in place.

 Copies of all medical records, including allergies, medications used and underlying medical conditions should accompany the patient.

 All medication should have trade, scientific and generic names written down as well as the directions of usage.

 Arrangement for follow-up care upon return with the usual local health care provider should be arranged before departure to the foreign country.

 After the procedures in the foreign country, all required records, notes and follow-up advice post surgery has to be obtained by the patient.

 If the trip involves tourism as well, the patient has to ensure that all planned activities such as swimming are permitted post-surgery.

South Africa is being increasingly marketed as an ideal medical tourism destination. The superb tourist attractions, world-class private medical facilities, highly rated accommodation and recuperative spa facilities and the very favourable exchange rate certain makes for an attractive alternative to the more established countries. Travel medicine practitioners should try to stay abreast of the latest trend and developments.
Swaziland Tourism recently exhibited at WTM Africa 2017, showing that this small, landlocked country in Southern Africa has big aspirations for its tourism industry. We asked Swaziland Tourism Marketing Manager, Bongani Dlamini, to tell give us some insight on what this kingdom has to offer.

Felix Lipov via 123RF - Sunset in Mlilwane Game Reserve with a traditional Swazi hut

Tell us about Swazilands tourism offering and why its a royal experience

Swaziland offers the adventurous traveller an African experience with a cultural twist. With a variety of accommodation available, you can either backpack and rough it in the wilderness, or enjoy true luxury at one of the many safari lodges. The Kingdom of Swaziland is known for its beautiful and pristine landscapes and presents visitors with the opportunity to explore and discover wonders such as the big five and other spectacular wildlife. With a diverse ecosystem, Swaziland boasts a variety of fauna and flora indigenous to the region and promises remarkable sightings throughout your adventures.

The Kingdom of Swaziland is one of the few remaining executive monarchies in Africa and has a rich cultural heritage, which is still preserved within the daily lives of Swazis. These cultural traditions have given life to a variety of local delicacies that can be enjoyed during your stay. The authentic African cuisine, colourful culture and breath-taking landscapes, are what make Swaziland the perfect safari destination for those looking for the true royal African experience.

What might travellers and travel trade not know about Swaziland?

Swaziland forms part of the Responsible Travel initiative, which is an approach to tourism that maximises the benefits to local communities, minimises negative social and environmental impact and helps people conserve fragile cultures and habitats found within the region.

This initiative has assisted in the development of communities within Swaziland and supports efforts to maintain the pristine natural environment Swaziland is known for. Along with conservation benefits, Responsible Travel has also helped to introduce trade markets within Swaziland and provides a steady income for locals who create beautiful crafts and traditional arts for the visiting traveller. These arts and crafts can be purchased during your travels and serve not only as a support local initiative but also make lovely mementos of your ventures on this African gem.

How does Swaziland plan to grow its tourism industry and attract more inbound travel from Africa? What is the strategy?

Swaziland is currently looking at investing more time and efforts into cross platform advertising and publicity, to grow awareness regarding attractions and destinations located within the region. We are closely working with tour operators as well other industry partners, as a means to ensure that we offer travellers the best experiences at the best rates according to travel and tourism standards.

We are also heavily vested in showcasing our destination amongst the best of the best in the world at trade shows such as the World Travel Market Africa, which we hope will aid growth and tourism trade within the kingdom over the next few years.

What did you hope to achieve by participating in World Travel Market Africa 2017? What was the response from buyers and fellow exhibitors like?

The Swaziland Tourism Authority have participated at the World Travel Market Africa for a few years and it has always been a huge success for us and our stand partners as we promote the Kingdom of Swaziland together. It is encouraging to see the interest grow year-on-year, and we look forward to being part of this prestigious event again next year.

Swaziland looks to further our investment within the tourism trade markets and to substantially grow our partnership with the tourism industry by introducing the consumer and travel trade, to our wonderful destination at hosted events such as the World Travel Market Africa.

What is the lasting impression you wanted to leave delegates with about Swaziland?

Swaziland may be small, but it has a lot to offer its visitors. What it lacks in size it certainly makes up for with heart, soul and boasts phenomenal business etiquette. Swaziland offers a kaleidoscope of travel opportunities, business ventures, world class accommodation and is certainly a one of a kind African safari destination.
The PandaLabs Q1 report identifies prominent tactics, attack methods and shifts in the industry. According to the report, developments in cybercrime, cyberwarfare, and AI mark the first quarter of 2017.

 solarseven via 123RF

The cybercrime industry continues to grow on the back of profitable attacks. The development of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) and organisations like Vdos, an organisation specialising in DDoS attacks, indicate the professionalism of the cybercrime industry. In Q1 the company continued to see new and adapted attack methods such as RDPatcher, malware detected by PandaLabs in its attempt to access the victims endpoint and prepare it for rental on the dark web.

Politically motivated cyber attacks

Fuelling the continued development of the cybercrime industry are politically motivated cyber attacks. In recent months, cyberwarfare has become a popular tactic in enforcing political agendas. In Q4 of 2016, the company saw some of the first high-profile instances of cyberwarfare, with accusations of Russias interference in the 2016 US elections.

The gravity the development is clear as countries like Germany have now begun to develop cyber-command centres to monitor online activity  this quarter France and the Netherlands reconsidered electronic voting procedures to avoid situations like the 2016 US elections.

Targeted IoT device attacks

Targeted attacks on IoT devices continue to threaten our safety in line with the ever-increasing number of IoT devices. In February, at the European Broadcasting Union Media Cyber Security Seminar, security consultant Rafael Scheel demonstrated more ways these devices can breach unsecured networks by creating an exploit that would allow an attacker to take control of a Smart TV using only a DDT signal.

Recent developments in robotics and AI have led to that belief that the fourth industrial revolution is not far off. Robotics and AI technology could do more than just take over jobs - introducing virtual assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo, can become a dangerous inroad for hackers.

A perfect device for eavesdropping

Introduced in February 2017, Google Home can tune into your home IoT devices while waiting to be called on - making it the perfect device for eavesdropping. Police recently requested access to an Amazon Echo device as it may have held evidence that could be useful to their case.

Over the course of 2016 Ransomware attacks earned criminals billions of Rand. Fuelled by its profitability, Ransomware attacks continue to increase, with new variants created daily.

In Q1 PandaLabs discovered ransomware variant WYSEWYE -that allows the attacker to select and take control of specific folders on the victims endpoint, ultimately demanding a ransom to give back control to the victim.

For more, view the full PandaLabs report.
WASHINGTON, US: A fast-moving wave of cyber attacks swept the globe on Friday, apparently exploiting a flaw exposed in documents leaked from the US National Security Agency.

Image via Wikimedia

The attacks - which experts said affected dozens of countries - used a technique known as ransomware that locks users' files unless they pay the attackers a designated sum in the virtual currency Bitcoin.

Affected by the onslaught were computer networks at hospitals in Britain, Russia's interior ministry, the Spanish telecom giant Telefonica and the US delivery firm FedEx and many other organizations.

"International attack"

Britain's National Cyber Security Centre and its National Crime Agency were looking into the UK incidents, which disrupted care at National Health Service facilities.

"This is not targeted at the NHS, it's an international attack and a number of countries and organisations have been affected," British Prime Minister Theresa May said.

Russia's interior ministry said that some of its computers had been hit by a "virus attack" and that efforts were underway to destroy it.

The US Department of Homeland Security's computer emergency response team said it was aware of ransomware infections "in several countries around the world."

"More than 75,000 detections"

Jakub Kroustek of the security firm Avast said in a blog post update around 2000 GMT, "We are now seeing more than 75,000 detections... in 99 countries."

Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu cited 45,000 attacks in 74 countries, saying that the malware, a self-replicating "worm," was spreading quickly.

In a statement, Kaspersky Labs said it was "trying to determine whether it is possible to decrypt data locked in the attack -- with the aim of developing a decryption tool as soon as possible."

"Kill switch"

On Saturday, a cybersecurity researcher told AFP he had accidentally discovered a "kill switch" that can prevent the spread of the ransomware.

The researcher, tweeting as @MalwareTechBlog, said the discovery was accidental, but that registering a domain name used by the malware stops it from spreading. Computers already affected will not be helped by the solution.

However @MalwareTechBlog warned that the "crisis isn't over" as those behind it "can always change the code and try again".

The malware's name is WCry, but analysts were also using variants such as WannaCry.

"It's unequivocally scary," said John Dickson of the Denim Group, a US security consultancy.

Dickson said the malware itself, which exploits a flaw in Windows, was not new but that adding the ransomware "payload" made it especially dangerous.

"I'm watching how far this propagates and when governments get involved," he said.

Forcepoint Security Labs said in a statement that the attack had "global scope" and was affecting networks in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Mexico.

In the United States, FedEx acknowledged it had been hit by malware and was "implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible."

Britain's National Health Service declared a "major incident" after the attack, which forced some hospitals to divert ambulances and scrap operations.

Germany's Deutsche Bahn computers were also impacted, with the company reporting on Saturday morning that display panels in the stations were affected.

"Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

Pictures posted on social media showed screens of NHS computers with images demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

It demands payment in three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received in seven days, the files will be deleted, according to the screen message.

A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, Kaspersky said.

Although Microsoft released a security patch for the flaw earlier this year, many systems have yet to be updated, researchers said.

"Unlike most other attacks, this malware is spreading primarily by direct infection from machine to machine on local networks, rather than purely by email," Lance Cottrell, chief scientist at the US technology group Ntrepid.

"The ransomware can spread without anyone opening an email or clicking on a link."

Growing ransom demands

The sort of ransom demands have been growing precedent at medical facilities. In February 2016, a Los Angeles hospital, the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, paid $17,000 in Bitcoin to hackers who took control of its computers for more than a week.

"Ransomware becomes particularly nasty when it infects institutions like hospitals, where it can put people's lives in danger," said Kroustek, the Avast analyst.

A spokesman for Barts Health NHS Trust in London said it was experiencing "major IT disruption" and delays at all four of its hospitals.

"Ambulances are being diverted to neighboring hospitals," the spokesman said.

Two employees at St Bartholomew's Hospital, which is part of Barts Health, told AFP that all the computers in the hospital had been turned off.

Some said the attacks highlighted the need for agencies like the NSA to disclose security flaws so they can be patched.

"These attacks underscore the fact that vulnerabilities will be exploited not just by our security agencies, but by hackers and criminals around the world," said Patrick Toomey of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Source: AFP
NEW YORK, US: Fiat Chrysler is recalling more than one million US pickup trucks due to a software defect that disables side airbags, according to documents released by US auto safety regulators.

Fiat Chrysler said it was aware of two injuries and one fatality potentially related to the problem, according to a chronology submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The defect impacts just over one million Ram pickup trucks manufactured between 2013 and 2016, said documents from the NHTSA. In September 2016, Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.9 million vehicles to address a defect with air bag deployment, which it said was tied to at least three deaths.

Source: AFP
Although the government won't challenge the high court decision declaring the nuclear build deal unlawful, it will ensure its new agreements are watertight.

Source: Earthlife Africa Johannesburg

South Africa wil restart the process of negotiating new agreements with Russia, the US, China, Russia and South Korea, says energy minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi.

It is important to note that there is no intention to table the current agreements, but we will embark to sign new agreements with all the five countries and table them within a reasonable time, she says.

I dont agree with the view that we have failed the nation as the department and we also dont agree with the view that National Energy Regulator of South Africa has failed the nation.

Kubayi said while the department accepted the ruling it didnt necessarily agree with it. Major concerns had been raised, and it would fix what needs to be corrected.

There are things we could have done better but we think as well that the judgement in certain areas has over-reached  it has gone beyond one issue. It was as if the judgement was based on public opinion, not on the law.

I would rather have a process that is clean; that is clinical and that when it is scrutinised it can pass the test of scrutiny, she explains.

In April, the Western Cape High Court ruled in favour of NGOs Earthlife Africa and the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute.

The court found that agreements with the various countries were unlawful and unconstitutional. Public oversight and participation had been lacking.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the decision by South Sudan's Media Authority to suspend the activities of the Al-Jazeera English bureau in Juba until further notice.

 pavalena via 123RF

The Media Authority, whose members are appointed by President Salva Kiir, issued its order on 1 May. The bureau's staff is banned from covering anything to do with South Sudan.

The ban follows a series of Al-Jazeera reports about the ongoing clashes between government forces and rebel troops. The Qatari TV news channel reported on 20 April that many civilians had been displaced by fighting in the southern county of Kajo-Keji. Its references to the significant losses sustained by the government forces in the course of this fighting seem to upset the authorities.

RSF regards the closure of the Al-Jazeera bureau in Juba as an attack on media pluralism and the freedom to inform.

South Sudan has fallen 30 places in RSF's World Press Freedom Index since the start of the civil war and is ranked 145th out of 180 countries in the 2017 Index.

This statement was originally published on rsf.org.
We are a full-service Market Research Agency and now part of SA's leading Management Consulting firm IQbusiness. We use technology and a deep understanding of human motivations to uncover powerful insights to help our customers to grow.
Myanmar ambassador Myo Myint Than met with President Abdul Hamid and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina separately in Dhaka on May 11, according to a government press release.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have long sought shelter in neighboring Bangladesh. But Bangladeshs president said the repeated exoduses have imposed a strain on the impoverished nation.

The UN estimates close to 100,000 Rohingya were among the recent swell of arrivals in the wake of the October 9 crackdown. They joined another 300,000 to 500,000 Rohingya refugees sheltering in camps around Coxs Bazar.

Both countries should engage in discussions about a process to repatriate them to Myanmar, said the president.

"Bangladesh has been bearing the brunt of repeated exoduses of Rakhine Muslims into Bangladesh," President Abdul Hamid said at the Bangabhaban meeting in Dhaka.

Similarly, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina urged the outgoing Myanmar ambassador to convey to his government that a repatriation timeline must be identified, the prime ministers press secretary Ihsanul Karim, said.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Myanmar Ambassador Myo Myint Than at Gono Bhaban

"Together we should find a solution to resolve the issue and as a neighbor we always want to resolve the issue through dialogue," the prime minister reportedly said.

The outgoing Myanmar ambassador said his government is serious about resolving the Rohingya issue and has already agreed to implement interim recommendations suggested by the commission led by former UN chief Kofi Annan.

However, the Myanmar government has recently come under fire for refusing to cooperate with a UN Human Rights Council probe to investigate allegations of rape, extrajudicial murder and torture of Rohingya in northern Rakhine State.

Via the outgoing ambassador, the prime minister also extended an invitation to Myanmar State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to visit Bangladesh.
Snehana  Oil Massage By A Masseuse The word Sneha' in Sanskrit stands for oily substance and 'Snehana' means the application of oily substance on the body. It involves the application of oil on the body by a trained person. There are different types of oil massages. Some of which are described below.

Ayurvedic Massage It is based on the chakra system. The Chakra System states that the human body is the physical manifestation of energy swirls of the chakras. In physical terms, these chakras are associated with the endocrine glands. So, physically, Ayurvedic massage deals with balancing hormones in order to make the body healthy and beautiful. Hormones play a major role in maintaining the condition and complexion of the skin. Therefore, this massage form is especially beneficial for those looking to improve their skin tone and texture.

Swedish Massage This type of massage is mainly a muscular therapy, but it helps in maintaining suppleness of the skin. The Swedish massage is known for its ability to release muscle tension. It employs five basic movements to restore muscle and skin to their normal relaxed state.

Thai Massage This massage combines stretching and massage movements. It is relaxing as well as invigorating. The improved blood circulation enhances the complexion and gives it a healthy glow.

Ubtan The quintessential traditional spa of India, it involves a combination of exfoliation and oil massage. After massaging the body with oil, a mixture of turmeric, yogurt, milk, sandalwood, natural camphor and some other herbs is applied and is rubbed off using a mixture of oil and flour. The first step opens pores and hydrates the skin. The second provides nourishment to the skin and the third step exfoliates. It is a complete beauty regimen and a highly effective one too.

Abhyanga  Self Body Massage This is the practice of massaging the body by yourself with warm oil. It invigorates the senses, ensures good hair growth and imparts lustre to the skin. The importance of Abhyanga has been stated in many Ayurvedic texts. Some have even gone on to say that it is a practice that can prevent many skin and health problems. However, one needs to know the correct way to do it before adopting this practice. Steps For Abhyanga

1. Mix massage oils of your choice. It is best to use cold pressed oils. The types of oils will be discussed further. Warm the oil mixture and add a few drops of essential oil of your choice. In summer, you may also add some natural camphor for its cooling effect on the skin.

2. Start from the head and work your way down. Massage your stomach and lower abdomen in a circular motion with a light hand.

3. Do not use jerking movements or excess pressure on any part of your body. Do not massage over injured body parts, which is best if left to the professionals.

4. Wait for an hour for the oil to get absorbed on to the skin.

5. Rinse with a warm shower. Do not use soap and if you need to, you can use a mild soap-free cleanser.

6. Pat dry and feel your skin breathe!

Types Of Massage Oils A massage oil consists of one or two carrier oils and a few drops of essential oils. Carrier oils are cold pressed oils whose primary function is to lubricate and hydrate the skin tissues. Essential oils are potent substances that get mixed very quickly into the bloodstream upon application. That is why only a few drops are used.

A Few Carrier Oils 1. Coconut Oil It has antimicrobial and antifungal properties. It is rich in antioxidants. Thus, it makes an ideal massage oil that hydrates disinfects and detoxifies the skin. It also has a cooling effect on the skin, which makes it best suited for use in warm weather, although in warm climates like that of India it can be used throughout the year.

2. Mustard Oil Mustard oil is rich in Vitamin E. It is an excellent remedy for blemishes and acne. It removes tan and lightens the skin tone. It promotes hair growth and provides lustre to the skin. It is a key ingredient of the traditional Ubtan. It acts as an exfoliating agent by separating the dead cells from the skin.

3. Olive Oil Olive oil has numerous benefits for the skin. It mobilizes cellulite, reduces redness and treats sun damage. It also has excellent hydrating properties. It is rich in Vitamin E. It reduces stretch marks. It is antifungal in nature. All these properties make it one of the best choices for a carrier oil. Use oils that have been extracted through cold pressing. This method ensures that the oil retains maximum qualities as compared to other methods of extraction.

A Few Essential Oils 1. Geranium Oil

It makes the skin smooth and reduces fine lines. It promotes hormonal balance. It reduces redness and inflammation. It makes the skin glow and is ideally to be used in warm weather.

2. Tea Tree Oil It has a cooling effect on the skin. It reduces the appearance of scars and blemishes. It is used to treat acne. It is also an effective remedy against dandruff.

3. Jasmine Oil This fragrant oil makes the skin soft and supple. It improves the elasticity of the skin and tones the tissues. It has a sweet aroma that instantly lifts the mood.
When Shimmer Is The New In; PeeCee's Baywatch Premiere Look Fashion Trends Dona

Priyanka Chopra has been going on steaming the social media with her new and exclusive looks of her recent visit to Miami. The world premiere of her movie, Baywatch took place in Miami this weekend.

For the premiere, she wore a midnight shimmery blue wrap dress from Halston and jewellery from Nirav Modi.

Her pair of strappy stilletoes were not even an inch away from perfection and we think PeeCee carried it really well.

She looked stunning in the overall lookbook.

What looked more stunning was her shimmery dual-shaded eye shadow to complement her outfit.

She looks too good. Doesn't she?
Places Where Weed And Different Forms Of Drugs Are Legal Pulse oi-Syeda Farah

Rules for possessing and growing weed and other drugs vary from country to country. Even though weeds, or marijuana, are used as medicinal drugs to some extent, it is not being legalized completely.

However, here is a list of countries, where it is all cool and okay for people to possess drugs in a certain quantity.

Carrying these drugs even in public in these countries that have passed on the rules will not land a person into trouble!

You May Also Like To Read: Drugs That Give A Kick Like Marijuana

Check out on the countries' list where carrying weeds and other drugs is legalized in a way!

India Though Marijuana is banned in India, it is widely used in the form of bhang'. It is widely cultivated on the Indian ghats and is often consumed as thandai, which is a traditional drink which people relish during the festival of Holi. Uttarakhand', which is a state in India, legalised cannabis cultivation but only for industrial purposes. The Netherlands When marijuana cultivation became legal in this country, it became easier for the coffee shops to procure and sell marijuana at their counters. It is just like lighting up a bud! Also Read:List Of World's Costliest Drugs That Will Shock You! Spain This is a heaven on earth for smokers, as the Spanish are free to grow cannabis for private consumption! There are legal weed dens' found across Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, and these clubs invite strict memberships. Colorado Here, both locals and tourists can buy and possess up to 28 grams of weed for their personal use. There are many cannabis-friendly hotels and dispensaries that allow people to light up whenever they wish to! Uruguay The law in this place directs people to be the residents of the country to use weeds, and the other condition is that the person should be over the age of 18 to legally buy marijuana here! Peru If you are caught with over 8 grams of cannabis, then there are chances of you getting into legal trouble! While you can use marijuana for personal use, growing and selling of it is prohibited. Jamaica Residents of this place can also grow up to five plants, especially for the use of religious purposes. It plays a very important role in Rastafarian culture' where most of the traditions are rooted in the use of wisdom weed.' Argentina Even though cultivation, sale, and transportation of the drug are illegal here, it is decriminalised. Locals are allowed to smoke a bong in the privacy of their homes band. Alaska People who are above the age of 21 can possess up to 28 grams of weed. They can also grow up to six plants of marijuana as long it's done in private. Sounds cool, right? Maine People of this place feel that they are in heaven, as the Mainers won the right to possess a whopping 71 grams of marijuana! It is literally double the limit that people can possess in other countries!

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 22:05 [IST]
JERUSALEM -- No decisions on whether to increase U.S. forces in Afghanistan have been made yet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters in Israel Tuesday.





Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford said national security leaders have not gone to President Donald J. Trump yet with Afghanistan troop recommendations for 2017 and beyond.





'One of the key discussions we are going to have is what are the horizons for the mission in Afghanistan and how do we articulate it,' Dunford said in an interview. 'I expect [Defense] Secretary [Jim] Mattis and I and others will brief the president soon.'





Any increase in the NATO and U.S. mission to Afghanistan must be viewed in context, the general said. In the past year, Afghan forces have taken a lot of casualties in battling the Taliban and other groups. Army Gen. John M. Nicholson, the commander of Operation Resolute Support in Afghanistan, described the situation in Afghanistan as a 'stalemate' during testimony before Congress last month.





SECURE, STABLE AFGHANISTAN

Dunford said the situation is clearly not moving in the direction Afghan President Ashraf Ghani wants it to. Last year, Ghani announced a four-year plan, which looked at what was possible for the future of his country. It included a listing of the goals for a secure and stable Afghanistan.





The president has spoken with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, and the organization has begun conversations with troops contributing nations. The chairman will be in Brussels next week to speak with fellow NATO chiefs of defense. And on his three-day trip, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has been meeting with the ministers of defense for the counter-ISIS coalition.








TRIESTE, ITALY (BNS): Shipbuilder Fincantieri has handed over the last of the four U212A "Todaro" class conventional submarines to the Italian Navy on May 11.



The submarine, "Romeo Romei", was delivered at Fincantieri's shipyard of Muggiano (La Spezia). It is the last of the four U212A "Todaro" class twin units ordered by the Naval Armament Unit  NAVARM for the Italian Navy.



The other unit of the platform, "Pietro Venuti", was handed over in July 2016, the shipbuilder said.



All the platforms feature highly innovative technological solutions and are entirely built with amagnetic material, using the most modern silencing techniques to reduce its acoustic signature.



"Romei" has a surface displacement of 1,509 tonnes, an overall length of 55.9 meters, a maximum diameter of 7 meters, and can exceed 16 knots underwater. It has a 27-person crew.



The Italian Navy is already operating two U212A class of submarines  "Todaro" and "Scire"  delivered by Fincantieri in 2006 and 2007.



All submarines of the class have been built as part of a programme launched in 1994 in cooperation with the German Submarine Consortium. While four units have been built for Italy, six platforms have been built for the German Navy under the project.




Indian Navy and Royal Singapore Navy officials ahead of the SIMBEX naval drill. An Indian Navy photo/Twitter

NEW DELHI (PTI): Indian Navy will join the Singapore Navy in carrying out a mega maritime exercise in the Indian Ocean where the Chinese Navy has been trying to increase its influence.



Four warships of the Indian Navy and long range anti-submarine warfare aircraft P-8l would be part of the exercise with the Singapore Navy (RSN) which starts this week.



The aim of the exercise will be to enhance and expand coordination between the two navies in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).



Indian naval ships Sahyadri and Kamorta are in Singapore on a port visit from May 12 to May 21 during which they will participate in the 'International Maritime Review' (IMR) as well as International Maritime Defence Exhibition (IMDEX).



Indian Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba will be attending the events ashore, Navy Spokesperson Capt D K Sharma said.



Organised by the Singapore Navy, the IMR is likely to be attended by navy chiefs of at least 30 countries.



After the IMR and the IMDEX, four Indian naval ships and the anti-submarine warfare aircraft P-8l would exercise with the Singapore Navy as part of a bilateral exercise, SIMBEX.



Indian naval ships Sahyadri, Shivalik, Jyoti and Kamorta will be part of the SIMBEX.



Held since 1994, this year would be the 24th edition of the annual maritime exercise between the two countries which aims to further cement the defence cooperation between the two countries.



"The visit of the Indian Naval ships seeks to underscore India's peaceful presence and solidarity with friendly and harmonious countries towards ensuring good order in the maritime domain," the Indian Navy said in a statement.




INS Rajput at Yangon, Myanmar. An Indian Navy photo/Twitter

VISAKHAPATNAM (PTI): INS Rajput, Indian Navy's frontline guided missile destroyer, had entered Yangon, Myanmar for an Operational Turn around (OTR) from May 11-13.



The ship was given a traditional welcome, according to a Navy release.



Capt RA Shah, Commanding Officer, INS Rajput laid wreath for the martyrs of the First and Second World War at Yangon War cemetery, it said.



During the visit, 35 Indian Naval officers visited the Myanmar Naval Training Command and 35 Myanmar Navy officers and 160 under trainee sea cadets visited the ship and were given a guided tour of the ship, said the release.



The sea cadets interacted with the junior officers of the ship during the visit, it added.






HYDERABAD (PTI): India plans to launch next month its most powerful rocket that is capable of transporting a heavier 4-tonne communications satellite and described as a "game-changer" in the first of its kind space mission.



Aiming for a greater share of the multi-billion dollar global space market and to reduce dependency on international launching vehicles, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said it is hoping to launch the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle(GSLV) Mark-III in the first week of June.



A successful launch of this rocket will be yet another major step towards being self-reliant in the country's space programme.



The ISRO currently has the capability to launch payloads of up to 2.2 tonnes into the intended orbit and anything above that it had to tap foreign launch facilities.



"GSLV Mark-III is our next launch. We are getting ready.



All the systems are in Sriharikota. The integration is currently going on," ISRO Chairman AS Kiran Kumar told reporters in Hyderabad on May 12.



"The whole process of assembling the various stages and then integrating the satellite into the heat shield, these activities are going on. First week of June is when we are targeting this launch," he said.



The ISRO views operationalisation of this rocket as a "game-changer" mission.



GSLV Mark-III will be India's most powerful launch vehicle built to lift the heaviest Indian communications satellites to space. It can put satellites weighing 4 tonnes in space, double the weight that the current GSLV-Mark-II can lift.



It will also enable ISRO to launch from India heavier communications spacecraft to geostationary orbits of 36,000 km. Because of the absence of a powerful launcher, ISRO currently launches satellites above 2 tonnes on European rockets for a big fee.



Noting that communications satellites built beyond the capacity of 2.2 tonnes have to be launched from foreign soil, Kiran Kumar said efforts are on to launch satellites up to four tonnes and even beyond in India itself.



The GSLV Mark-III is intended to launch satellites into geostationary orbit and as a launcher for an Indian crew vehicle.



It features an Indian cryogenic third stage and a higher payload capacity than the current GSLV.



The satellite would carry Ka and Ku-band payload along with a Geostationary Radiation Spectrometer (GRASP) payload to monitor and study the nature of the charged particles and influence of space radiation on spacecraft and electronic components.



It would also employ advanced spacecraft technologies including bus subsystem experiments in electrical propulsion system, indigenous Li-ion battery and indigenous bus bars for power distribution, among others.



The technology on lithium ion batteries developed by ISRO is good for space programme in terms of cost-effectiveness, but it requires the efforts of industry to develop it to reduce costs, Kiran Kumar said.




LCA Tejas.

NEW DELHI (PTI): India's light combat aircraft (LCA) Tejas has "successfully" test fired an air-to-air missile, paving the way for powering the indigenously-built aircraft with missiles having beyond visual range (BVR) capabilities.



The test-firing was conducted on a manoeuvrable aerial target at the interim test range in Chandipur, Odisha on May 12.



The defence ministry said the objective of the test was to assess integration of the Derby BVR missile with avionics, fire-control radar, launchers and missile weapon delivery system of Tejas.



"The flawless launch was demonstrated with all on-board systems performing satisfactorily and the missile scored a direct hit on the target with complete destruction of it.



"The test firing achieved all its planned objectives. The Derby firing is a major step towards clearing BVR capabilities on light combat aircraft for FOC (final operational clearance)," it said in a statement.



The sensors at the interim test range tracked the target and the missile.



"The missile launch was performed in lock on after launch mode for a BVR target in the look down mode and the target was destroyed," the statement by the ministry said.




The K9 VAJRA-T self-propelled howitzer. An L&T photo

NEW DELHI (PTI): Engineering conglomerate Larsen and Toubro (L&T) has been awarded a contract to supply 100 self-propelled howitzers to the Indian Army for nearly Rs 4,500 crore.



The first batch of the 155mm/52 calibre tracked self-propelled (SP) gun  K9 VAJRA-T  will be delivered later this year and the entire supply will be made within next 42 months.



L&T, supported by its South Korean technology partner Hanwha Tech Win (HTW), had bid for the contract in 2011.



The contract valued at about at Rs 4,500 crore is the largest order placed by the Defence Ministry (MoD) with an Indian private company, Jayant Patil, Head of Defence and Aerospace at L&T, said.



Among the four bidders, L&T emerged as the sole qualified aspirant, after a series of user trials and evaluations, based on the

performance of the K9 VAJRA-T self-propelled howitzer.



The K9 VAJRA-T gun is an enhanced version of HTW's K9 Thunder  a world class self-propelled howitzer, customised and co-developed by L&T and HTW to suit the specific requirements of the Indian Army.



HTW's K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer is among the best in the world with over 1,000 units already in service in South Korea and few other countries.



Patil said the award of the contract affirms L&T's position as India's leading private sector defence company with capabilities to

design, develop and manufacture state-of-the-art platforms and systems for the Indian armed forces.



Patil said the contract envisages delivery of the 100 guns in 42 months with associated engineering support package and maintenance throughout their life cycle.



The guns will have over 50 per cent indigenous content and will be delivered from L&T's manufacturing facilities, Patil said.



L&T had inked a deal with Hanwha Techwin (HTW) last month to jointly manufacture the self-propelled howitzers for Indian Army.






SEOUL (AP): North Korea test-launched a ballistic missile that landed in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and US militaries said.



The launch is a direct challenge to the new South Korean president elected last week and comes as US, Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.



It wasn't immediately clear what type of ballistic missile was launched, although the US Pacific Command said that "the flight is not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile."



Outside militaries will closely analyse what the North fired. While Pyongyang regularly tests shorter-range missiles, it is also working to master the technology needed to field nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach the US mainland. Past North Korean missiles have flown farther than Sunday's test, landing closer to Japan, but this launch follows a series of high-profile failures.



Whatever the type of missile, the launch forces the new South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, to put dealing with Pyongyang, at least for now, above the domestic economic agenda he'd made a priority during his early days in office.



Moon, a liberal who favours a softer approach to the North than his conservative predecessors, strongly condemned the launch during an emergency national security meeting, calling it a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions and a serious challenge to international peace and security, according to senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan.



"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this provocation occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," Yoon told a televised conference.



"The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."



Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the missile flew about 800 kilometers from a launch site on North Korea's western coast for about 30 minutes and landed in the Sea of Japan, but not inside Japan's exclusive economic zone. Japan's Defence Ministry says the missile likely reached an altitude of 2,000-kilometers.



Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters Sunday that the launch is "absolutely unacceptable" and that Japan will respond resolutely.



South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the missile was fired early Sunday morning from near Kusong, in North Phyongan province.



North Korea's past satellite rocket launches have been called clandestine tests of ICBM technology, but it is not believed to have tested a true intercontinental ballistic missile yet.



The Trump administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable and has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.




Admiral Sunil Lanba interacting with his Singaporean counterpart Lai Chung Han in the presence of naval officials from both sides in Singapore on Sunday. Indian Navy photo/Twitter

SINGAPORE (PTI): Indian Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba on Sunday held extensive talks with his Singaporean counterpart Lai Chung Han and explored ways to further step up maritime cooperation between the two countries.



Lanba arrived in Singapore on Sunday to participate in an event Monday to commemorate 50 years of the Singaporean Navy and witness a mega exercise between the navies of the two countries.



Four warships of the Indian Navy and long range anti-submarine warfare aircraft P-8l would be part of the exercise with the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN). The aim of the exercise is to enhance and expand coordination between the two navies in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).



In their talks, Lanba and Lai touched upon a number of issues concerning maritime security and deliberated on ways to boost cooperation between the two navies.



Admiral Lanba will be attending the International Maritime Review (IMR) on Monday, an event being organised by the RSN to celebrate its 50th years of establishment. The event is being attended by navy chiefs of at least 30 countries.



He will also attend the International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (IMDEX) 2017.



"Besides attending the IMR and IMDEX 17, the visit aims to consolidate existing Maritime Cooperation initiatives as well as explore new avenues," Indian Navy spokesperson Captain D K Sharma said.



Indian naval ships Sahyadri and Kamorta have also arrived in Singapore to participate in the IMR and IMDEX.



Defence cooperation between India and Singapore is on an upswing in the past few years. India has signed a defence cooperation agreement with Singapore in 2003, which was renewed in 2015.



The Indian Navy and Singapore Navy are partners in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), a multilateral maritime cooperation forum, conceptualised and pioneered by the Indian Navy in 2008.



Both the countries have been conducting the bilateral exercise 'SIMBEX' (Singapore India Maritime Bilateral Exercise) since 1994. The latest edition of the exercise is scheduled to be conducted off Singapore from May 18 to 24.



Warships from both the countries regularly visit each other's ports.



The last visit by the Chief of the Naval Staff to Singapore was by then Navy chief Admiral R K Dhowan in 2015.



Singaporean Navy chief Lai had last visited India in February 2016.



"Singapore share similar maritime challenges such as coastal security, large coastal shipping and fishing fleet, wherein both navies have opportunities to learn from each other's experiences. In addition, ground exists for cooperation on a number of issues common to both navies," said Sharma.


Middle East Briefs

Parallel to the Centers scholarly work, Middle East Briefs provides a brief analysis of a single issue at the top of the regions political, social, or economic agenda. Targeted primarily at decision-makers and opinion leaders, the publication was launched in 2005.

Latest Brief

August 2022  How Close is Iran to the Bomb? The Limits of Nuclear Breakout

Gary Samore

Middle East Brief 149 (Summary)  The question of Iran's nuclear capabilities has been a major issue in US foreign policy for several decades. While many analysts have probed the politics of decision-making inside the Iranian regime, the technical dimensions of Iran's nuclear program are less understood. In our latest Middle East Brief, Gary Samore discusses what Tehran would need to do to build a nuclear bomband how quickly it could do it. Samore presents three possible scenarios in which Iran might obtain nuclear capabilities: breakout, sneak out, and creep out. US foreign policy towards Iran will only be effective, Samore suggests, if we accurately understand the technical foundations of Tehrans nuclear aspirations.





Read Middle East Brief 149 (PDF)
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A LGBTQ support group has started in Dauphin after a woman heard local youth who identify with a sexual minority were inflicting self-harm.

I wanted to do something, we wanted to do something at the DFC (Dauphin Friendship Centre) because were so passionate about youth, said Terra Matthews, an indigenous two-spirited woman living in Dauphin, who works as an administrative assistant with DFC.

Support groups for LGBTQ individuals are rare in rural communities, though some area schools have picked up the slack in starting gay-straight alliances.

Submitted Terra Matthews, who started a LGBTQ support group in Dauphin, poses with a sign promoting the group and a pair of puppets, supporters of the new collective providing a safe space for people a part of a sexual or gender minority.

In Manitoba, only Winnipeg and Brandon offer year-round programming to members of the LGBTQ community, outside of schools and post-secondary institutions.

Jason Fiedler, LGBT program facilitator at the Sexuality Education Resource Centre in Brandon, said this was the only rural group he knew about in Westman  though a collective in Boissevain was in the planning stages the last he checked.

This means something, he said of the burgeoning Dauphin group, which started last month. For the longest time, kind of the story in the LGBT community was either you run away or as soon as youre old enough and you have a few dollars, you move to the city, Fiedler said.

This can change the LGBT culture because there are members of the LGBT community that are rural. The way we view LGBT people can change if theres more representation in different places and acceptance in different places.

Matthews, who is bisexual, found it quite difficult when she was coming out of the closet in British Columbia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a feeling that continued once she moved to Dauphin in 1993.

Today, she wants to present a welcoming environment for youth and members of the surrounding LGBTQ community at large, who may be starving for acceptance.

At the first meeting in April, about 10 people attended, Matthews said, including the grandfather of a person who identifies as transgender.

It was really nice to see a grandfather come in and say, what can I do to help? she said. That made doing this worth it, totally worth it.

Since then, Thursday night meetings have become biweekly. Attendance is sparse, but Matthews believes its important to provide an option for people, some too fearful to step through their doors.

As long as they know that Ill be there twice a month, Matthews said, Ill keep going.

She intends the group to be youth-run and youth-led, with Matthews acting as a guide to facilitate what attendees want  discussions, workshops or guest speakers, she suggests.

In Dauphin, Matthews said, she is regularly outing herself as two-spirited when she interacts with people who hold a heteronormative world view that people fall into distinct genders, either male or female.

She believes education is needed to inform others about the wide-ranging identities within the LGBTQ spectrum. It can make society more accepting and help people struggling to understand where they fit.

Mike Tutthill, executive director with the Rainbow Resource Centre in Winnipeg, was excited to learn of the Dauphin group.

He said being able to celebrate sexual orientations and gender identities not often acknowledged while growing up is invaluable.

People are looking to create space to have these conversations. We know that with LGBT folks, oftentimes were sort of outside of familial expectations and expectations of society, said Tutthill, originally from Brandon. Were coming together to be able to learn from one another and celebrate our identities.

The only other LGBTQ rural group he was aware of in Manitoba is Reaching Rainbows in Altona.

 ifroese@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ianfroese
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Racism against black Canadians, as speaker after speaker demonstrated to Cicely-Belle Blain, is both subtle and insidious.

Its not always overbearing, but its there, and it adds up, Blain shared with an understanding audience at the Black Canadian Studies Associations 2017 conference in Brandon.

The message was one of the key takeaways Blain took from listening to black speakers from across the country.

Ian Froese/The Brandon Sun Cicely-Belle Blain, a Vancouver-based activist who founded the citys Black Lives Matter movement, speaks at a keynote panel Saturday to close out the 2017 conference of the Black Canadian Studies Association, held at Brandon University.

It really is the Canadian way to cover up the issues that we have, and act like everybody is super polite and super friendly, Blain said following their address. But that doesnt take into account things like police brutality or microaggressions, the smaller pieces of racism.

For example, Blain defined the latter as the remarks people make to be friendly, like commending Blain for their intelligence  an assumption, the other person believes, that black people are not usually intelligent.

They seem so small (these microaggressions) but when they add up, its really a compounding experience of racism.

Blain was the final keynote speaker Saturday when the three-day conference, held every two years by the Black Canadian Studies Association, concluded at Brandon University.

Blain spoke about Black Lives Matter, a movement brought to Vancouver last year. The group has organized vigils for the victims of police brutality and held healing spaces for the black community as well as queer people of colour after events like the Orlando nightclub shooting.

Much of their activism is diplomatic, Blain said, to ensure their voices are acknowledged and not tossed aside by authorities hesitant of radicalism.

Blain also shared the unique perspective of being a non-binary person of colour, outside the gender binary of male or female.

Because they identify as non-binary, Blain expressed the tendency of black people to call each other brothers and sisters  a form of kinship  can be exclusionary.

It made me feel included being called a sister, but at the same time, Im being put into this gendered box.

The conference was brought to Brandon after the Black Canadian Studies Association heard BU president Gervan Fearon  the first black person to head a post-secondary institution in Canada  speak at the 2015 conference in Halifax about black leadership.

Fearon then tapped Demetres Tryphonopoulos, BUs dean of arts, to organize the conference.

Sixty-seven academic papers were submitted to the national conference this year  a high amount for a BU conference, explained the universitys vice-president academic and provost, Steve Robinson.

Ian Froese/The Brandon Sun Kimani Peter, foreground, a student organizer at OCAD University in Toronto, said the 2017 conference of the Black Canadian Studies Association, held over the weekend at Brandon University, gave him a wide variety of perspectives on the history of black Canadians and the current activism efforts underway across the country.

Ninety people attended from across the country.

Among them was Kimani Peter, an undergraduate student at OCAD University in Toronto, formerly known as the Ontario College of Art and Design.

You know its a good conference when youre looking at the syllabus and youre asking yourself, How can I be at two places at once?

Many conference attendees were professors, graduate students and black community organizations that delve into this subject matter for work or study, Peter explained, but he described his learning as more of a hobby.

Peter, who also submitted a paper at the conference on black entrepreneurship, hopes to take the knowledge he has gleaned and do something with it.

Its exciting to come to a national conference where all of these identities converge in terms of how blackness is experienced all over the country, Peter said. To hear the Nova Scotian experience, the Vancouver experience and the Montreal experience, all under one roof, is really why I wanted to come (to this conference) for such a long time.

 ifroese@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ianfroese
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 13/05/2017 (2006 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In advance of the summer construction season, Brandon City Council will consider a bid from Zenith Paving for four major road-building projects.

Included in the list for the summer projects is Durum Drive  new curb, gutter and driveway approaches between Garnet Place and Prelude Bay; Centennial Boulevard  new curb, gutter, driveway approaches between Fotheringham Drive and Governors Road; Victoria Avenue East  new curb, gutter, sidewalk ramps, driveway approaches, resurfacing and overhead pedestrian signage at Douglas Street, between Park Street and Douglas Street, as well as water service replacements.

The fourth project is in the 00 blocks of 24th and 25th streets  new curb, gutter, sidewalk ramps, driveway approaches, land drainage sewer, a new sidewalk along 24th Street, and storm sewer installation on 24th Street.

Council will consider the $1.15-million bid at Mondays meeting.

Also on the agenda is a presentation from the Brandon Environment Committee to promote Eco Day in May. The event will take place on May 27 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Global Market, and will feature free giveaways of compost and white spruce seedlings.

Denise Jubenvill of Manitoba Infrastructure will present to council on proposed upgrades to Victoria Avenue and 34th Street.

A development concept for 21 Willowcrest Ave. will be discussed, which proposes the development of 194 residential units.

A $70,000 proposal from Davies Park Executive Search will be considered by council to find qualified applicants for two top jobs in Brandon  city manager and chief of police.

A bylaw to provide financial assistance to Brandon Riverbank Inc. for the Festival Park project will be read a first time.

Council meets at Brandon City Hall on Monday at 7 p.m.

 The Brandon Sun
Opinion

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This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Its probably too much to ask that governments feel sincere affection toward the Parliamentary Budget Office, whose oversight and second-guessing of public spending plans is bound to irk the denizens of the Langevin Block. But it sure would be good for democracy if successive governments would stop trying to undermine its vital work.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for instance, has been an outspoken critic of a flaw in the PBOs design that leaves it vulnerable to the whims of obscurantist governments. But so misguided is his proposed remedy, laid out in the recently tabled budget implementation bill, that one wonders if he truly wants to strengthen the office, as he says, or merely to undermine it in new and more creative ways. The test will be whether Trudeau listens to the critics, including the former and current parliamentary budget officers, and changes course.

Created in 2006 as part of Stephen Harpers push for accountability in the wake of the Liberal sponsorship scandal, the PBO proved to be a greater nuisance  and a bigger boon for the country  than the former prime minister likely ever imagined. The tumultuous tenure of Kevin Page, Canadas first parliamentary budget officer, reflected both the positions promise and its limitations.

Under Pages leadership, the PBO exposed faulty government accounting of the costs of F-35 jets, the Afghan war and tough-on-crime legislation, among other wonky numbers buried in outsized omnibus bills or obscure departmental planning reports. So irritating proved the office and its leader that the Tories waged war on Page, denying him access to departmental records, denigrating him in Parliament and demonizing him in the media. He left after a single term.

As the Liberals pointed out at the time, this subversion should not have been possible. The key problem, as many transparency advocates have argued, is that the office falls incongruously under the purview of the Library of Parliament and its head serves at the pleasure of the prime minister. As Page wrote before leaving the post in 2013, In watchdog parlance, I am appointed by the person who I am supposed to watch. That clearly makes no sense.

The new legislation acknowledges as much by seeking to make the head of the PBO an independent officer of Parliament, like the auditor general or the privacy commissioner. Thats what critics, including the Star, have long called for.

If only it stopped there. Instead, as if to ensure the watchdog is not made too independent, the bill goes on, proposing a series of reforms that would limit the offices access to information and eliminate important aspects of its mandate. As both Page and his successor, current PBO head Jean-Denis Frechette, have argued, the bill would do more harm than good.

For instance, the proposed legislation would allow the Speakers of the Senate and the House of Commons a troublingly tight grip on the PBOs purse strings, thus allowing government the option to subvert unwanted analyses. It would also require that the PBO provide a detailed annual work plan for approval, which would potentially limit its ability to respond to unexpected events.

As Frechette wrote in a recent, scathing report, Should Canada enter into a recession, be struck by a natural disaster or deploy its armed forces abroad, the PBO will be unable to provide [Parliament] with the timely analysis  [it] needs to hold the government to account, unless, of course, the government generously and expeditiously grants permission. No other watchdog is so dependent on the co-operation of the watched.

The bill would also quietly remove the PBOs one mechanism for forcing government departments to share information, without providing a new one. And it would strictly limit the kinds of analysis that the PBO or parliamentarians can initiate, barring, for instance, the sort of requests that led to the offices bombshell reports on defence procurement.

Its not too late to change this misguided suite of reforms. If the government truly wants a strengthened PBO, it can have it. But thats a big if.

The Trudeau government has already felt the watchdogs bite. In the days after the Liberals tabled their first budget, PBO analysts suggested the governments growth projections were based on distorted data and that the finance department was suppressing research that would corroborate the claim. The government knows well the political risks of giving the PBO sharper teeth. Lets hope it has the courage to do it anyway.

 Toronto Star
Opinion

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This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG  At first glance, the latest Census of Agriculture released by Statistics Canada last week offers a hopeful glimpse at the future, so much so that the Canadian Federation of Agriculture concluded it shows that agriculture is poised for success.

While the number of farm operators in Canada continues to shrink, that shrinkage has slowed.

The average age of farmers continues to rise and average farm sizes continue to grow, but the proportion of young farmers (under 35) rose for the first time since 1991.

It appears more women are going into agriculture. They now make up 28.7 per cent of farm operators, up from 27.4 per cent in 2011.

Not surprisingly, the value of farm machinery and equipment owned and leased by farmers increased 15.4 per cent over the past five years, while equipment, land and building values rose a whopping 37.5 per cent since the last census.

Crop farmers are becoming more diversified and pulses continue to be a rising star. Canada is now the worlds largest producer of lentils.

Better market conditions and prices underpinned an 11 per cent increase in hog production.

The first set of data released from the census last week also features some troubling undercurrents, however.

This census seems to defy the old adage in farming that they arent making any more land. It found 8.8 million acres more cropland in production, most of it on the Canadian Prairies. Some of that came from returning fields that were flooded by overland flooding in 2011 cropping, but farmers are also clearing, draining and working up pastures in order to grow more crops.

The acres in perennial hay and alfalfa crops have dropped by 2.8 million acres and other pasture lands are down 2.2 million acres. Some of that is due to more farmers choosing to exit cattle ranching.

The problem is pasture land is generally not suitable for annual crops because it is prone to erosion, so this could have long-term repercussions.

But the conversion of marginal lands to crop production is only a symptom of a much bigger issue  farmers ongoing search for profitability.

The census report shows on average, for every dollar in gross farm receipts, farms incurred 83 cents in expenses in 2015, virtually unchanged since 2010.

Using that measure, the census report concludes farms were as profitable in 2015 as they were in 2010. That doesnt tell the full story.

Oilseed and grain farmers saw their margin shrink, with costs now consuming 79 cents of every dollar they earn, up from 76.

That doesnt mean crop farmers dont make money. They do. There have been years when their return on investment (ROI) for crops such as canola and wheat have been in the double digits.

Those ROIs vary dramatically from year to year and are more frequently negative than high, which leaves farmers relying on their own equity and government supports to stay afloat  and pushing the land harder in a bid to grow their way out of low returns.

When you consider production has increased steadily over the past 30 years and there were some whopper crops in 2013 and 2015, its apparent the gains from those productivity increases are being captured by those who supply the seed, the herbicides, fungicides and fertilizer  not the farmers.

Its something that invites reflection in light of recent export targets set for the sector in a report led by consultant Dominic Barton for the Prime Ministers Economic Advisory Council.

There may be lots of economic activity generated from growing crops for export, but those doing it face more uncertainty than ever.

As the current generation of farmers eases toward retirement, those who replace them will face tough choices  especially if climate change creates the kind of volatility in growing conditions the models predict.

Will farmers of the future continue to focus on driving productivity at the expense of their own margins? Or will they turn to farming practices that are less focused on yield and more on maintaining or increasing their share of the wealth?

 Laura Rance is editorial director for Farm Business Communications. She can be reached at laura@fbcpublishing.com or 204-792-4382. This column recently appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.
Enterprise Ireland has said export growth to the UK last year slowed to just 2% from 12% in 2015.

The agency said the slowdown was mainly due to a decline in food exports and showed the need for companies to diversify in the wake of Brexit.

Overall, exports from Ireland grew 6% in 2016, with the biggest growth markets being the US and Canada and Asia/Pacific regions.

Enterprise Ireland has today published a new strategy to assist Irish exporters increase business into the Eurozone by 50% by 2020.

Speaking at the launch of the Enterprise Ireland Annual Business Results and Eurozone strategy, An Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: "Just as the country was recovering from the double hit of the property bubble collapse and the global financial crisis, our biggest trading partner has decided to leave the EU which will have serious implications for Irish businesses, their employees, and the State itself.

"While we strongly disagree with the UKs decision to leave the EU we nonetheless accepted it as the democratic wish of the UK electorate.

"The years ahead will be challenging, especially on foot of Brexit. It will require the best efforts of the Government and Irish businesses, supported by Enterprise Ireland, to lessen the risks as best we can.

"But we are ready. We will continue to be pro-active, adaptive and strategic in our approach. Through this new Eurozone Strategy we are demonstrating to everyone that Enterprise Ireland and the Government will fight hard on the front line to win for Irish business and our people."
The latest Construction Index from Ulster Bank shows the rate of house-building is on the rise.

The financial institution says April was the busiest month since October 2016, and was the third month in which the pace of expansion has sped up.
By Noel Baker

More than 10,000 complaints of antisocial behaviour were made to local authorities in the last two years, many relating to housing, according to new figures.

Data collected by the Irish Examiner under Freedom of Information shows 10,572 complaints were lodged with the 31 different local authorities in 2015 and 2016, although one council had incomplete records for last year, meaning the final figure might be higher.

The number of antisocial behaviour complaints received by Dublin City Council rose by almost one third last year, with the council getting 1,385 notifications.

There was also an increase in the number of complaints lodged with Fingal County Council, up to 653 last year compared with 610 in 2015. In South Dublin County Council, figures showed 725 complaints in 2015 and 710 up to the end of November 2016.

Outside the capital, the local authorities with the largest number of complaints lodged across both years included Wexford County Council (563 cases), Limerick (450), Louth (397), Wicklow (383), Sligo (311), Kilkenny (304), Tipperary (300), Cork City (300), Cork County Council (239), Kildare (240), Offaly (234), Waterford (222), Meath (198), and Carlow (183).

By contrast, Galway County Council said it had logged just five complaints across the two years. Galway City Council said more than 15 warning letters were issued across 2015 and 2016.

When it came to steps to remove problem tenants from council housing, just 12 evictions were actually carried out across the two years, with Dublin City Council having the most, with four.

Adding in other measures such as voluntary surrender, orders for possession and exclusion orders, at least 100 people were removed or moved from properties.

Limerick City and County Council repossessed 13 properties on foot of formal notices, and currently has 15 exclusion orders granted by the district court under section 3 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1997 barring them from particular housing estates within the city and county for up to three years.

A council spokesperson said: These orders have proven to be particularly effective, with jail sentences being imposed for breaches.

The council also co-operated with gardai to use powers granted under Section 20 of the same 1997 Act to have unauthorised occupiers suspected of antisocial behaviour removed from properties in five cases.

However, complainants or neighbours of those alleged to engage in antisocial behaviour are just as likely to move. The figures show that at least 108 people requested or were granted a transfer to another property as a result of the antisocial behaviour of others.

Issues with alleged anti-social behaviour and tenancies are not limited to social housing. Latest figures from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB), a statutory body which seeks resolution of disputes between tenants and landlords, among other responsibilities, said it received 279 complaints of antisocial behaviour last year, representing 6% of all contacts, and up from 163 notifications in 2015.

So far in 2017, the RTB has received another 96 complaints, representing 5% of complaints lodged with it.

An RTB spokesperson said it prioritised enforcement in cases where it has made an order, for example against a landlord for failing to prevent antisocial behaviour in a property, but which were not complied with.

The positive position is that these types of cases have reduced in numbers over the years, said the spokesperson. The number of requests to enforce for cases of anti-social behaviour is in single digits. The RTB has not had to pursue legal enforcement as parties have complied with the order [due the threat of proceedings if they dont].

At least 2,616 social housing units were vacant nationwide as per the most recent data provided, although many of those were in the process of being re-let, or were between tenancies.

This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner
Details of a new bill to abolish the so-called "baptism barrier" in schools will be announced today.

The Solidarity party's Equal Participation in Schools Bill would ensure that schools are not able to discriminate in admitting children on the grounds of religion, and would make the curriculum more inclusive.
Update 8.40pm: A member of the Public Accounts Committee has said an inquiry may be held into the sale of a Naval Service boat - which is already back on the market at six times the price.

The L.E. Aisling is already back for sale in the Netherlands, less than two months after it was sold at an auction in Cork. Its new asking price is six times higher.

Fine Gael's Alan Farrell says the matter is now likely to be looked into at some level.

But Deputy Farrell says the market for former Naval vessels is limited - and the value would always fall as a result: The costs of changing it into a civilian yacht would be quite significant therefore the price of the vessel is limited.

If it was to be sold in Ireland again, clearly a decision was made about how much the vessel should reach as opposed to how much it cost to maintain it here in Cork.

Update 4pm: The group representing Defence Forces personnel has voiced concern, after an Irish naval service boat was put back on the market - for six times its selling price.

The L.E. Aisling was put on the market in March and sold to a Dutch shipbroker for 110,000.

But without any refurbishment work being done on it, the vessel is back up for sale again - with an asking price of close to 700,000.

Gerard Guinan of PDFORRA says a higher reserve price should have been set - and the Naval Service may have lost out on money: I cant say with any degree of certainty that the price realised was far less than what it should have been because I dont know the condition of the ship.

But yet, you know if the price released in excess of or less than what it should have been, we would have concerns.

Earlier: A naval vessel sold by the Government two months ago is back on the market - at six times its sale price.

The L.E. Aisling is now back on sale in the Netherlands as a fisheries patrol vessel, despite its new owners confirming that no extra work has been done on the vessel.

The boat now carries an asking price of more than 650,000. The Government sold it for 110,000 to Dutch ship broker Dick van der Kamp just seven weeks ago.

Fine Gael TD and member of the Public Accounts Committee Alan Farrell said the PAC is now likely to hear more about the sale.

"The difference between the value being sought at the moment on the open market versus the value achieved at a public auction a number of weeks ago presents a difficulty to me as a member of the Public Accounts Committee and as a former member for five years of the Defence Committee," he said.
By David Raleigh

A post mortem is expected to be carried out today on the body of well-known Limerick criminal defence solicitor John Devane.

Mr Devane, (55), a father of two, from Janesboro, Limerick, was found dead at his home yesterday, around midday.

Gardai said they do not suspect foul play and that a post mortem was normal procedure following a sudden death.

Limerick District Court will be adjourned briefly this morning to hear tributes from Mr Devane's colleagues.

Mr Devane, a controversial figure, had been one of the country's top earning solicitors through the criminal legal aid scheme. His clients varied from shoplifters to some of the most feared gangland criminals. He had represented all sides in the murderous Limerick feud.

Mr Devane had been battling ill-health in recent years and was using a wheelchair and crutches in the months prior to his sudden death. He returned to work last year following a 12-month hiatus after recovering from surgery, but continued to struggle with his health.

In 2012, Devane was found guilty of assaulting rival solicitor John Herbert during an altercation, at Limerick District Court on June 9, 2011. Devane denied grabbing Mr Herbert by the neck and attempting to head butt him.

However Devane, with a practice at Quinlan Street, Limerick, escaped a criminal conviction after paying a 1,000 donation to charity.

In 2008, he offered to mediate between rival criminal factions in an effort to bring peace to the streets of the Treaty City.

In the same year, he published the first of three planned books. He revealed in Nobody Heard Me Cry, he had been a victim of a Limerick paedophile ring, involving members of the gardai; the judiciary; and the clergy.

As a mature student he graduated in Law from UCC and went on to become one of the country's highest paid solicitors.

He represented 450 soldiers in a suit against the State in the army deafness damages claims, and 800 prisoners who were forced to slop out from their own jail cells.

Devane unsuccessfully ran as an independent candidate in the 2007 general election in the Limerick East constituency.

During the political campaign trail when then Fianna Fail Taoiseach Bertie Ahern visited the Jetland Shopping Centre, in Limerick, Devane confronted him in front of a crowd demanding Ahern "tell the truth about his personal finances".

During the publicity stunt, Devane had planned to produce a 5 plastic sword he had purchased from a local shop and ask Ahern to "fall on it", however gardai seized it moments beforehand.

The pair met again in more colourful controversial circumstances when Devane served Ahern with a subpoena to appear as a witness in the case of two anti-war protestors charged with criminal damage and trespass at Shannon Airport.

Paying tribute to Devane, fellow solicitor, Sarah Ryan, said: "John was John, and there was never a dull moment when he was around. I'm sure he won't be annoyed if we smile when we think about him."

Further tributes are expected to be paid by colleagues and members of the judiciary at Limerick District Court, Monday morning.

Brian O'Connor, a cousin of Mr Devane's, added: "John was an immense character, and a fiercely determined advocate of the underdog with whom he identified."

"He was a very loving and giving family man. We were all very proud of him," he added.

Funeral arrangements have yet to be announced.
First Lady Melania Trump has announced that her son, Barron, will attend a private Episcopal school in Maryland beginning this autumn.

Eleven-year-old Barron is finishing the current school year at a private institution in New York.
Kelvin MacKenzie "will not return" to The Sun after a column in which he compared Everton midfielder Ross Barkley to a gorilla provoked outcry.

Parent company News UK announced its decision to part company with the tabloid's one-time editor, whose column from April 14 led to a printed apology.

MacKenzie told the Press Association he would "refuse to allow" the controversy to tarnish his decades working with the newspaper, adding there were "plenty of opportunities out there".

A News UK spokeswoman said: "Further to our statement on 15 April that Kelvin MacKenzie's services as a columnist for The Sun were suspended, we can confirm that Mr MacKenzie's column will not return to The Sun and his contract with News Group Newspapers has been terminated by mutual consent."

The opinion piece featured a photograph of a gorilla's eyes below a close-up of Barkley, whose grandfather was born in Nigeria.

A storm of criticism followed, which saw Everton bar The Sun's reporters from its stadium and Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson reporting MacKenzie to the police for "racial slurs".

MacKenzie said: "I refuse to allow this latest controversy to cast a shadow over the decades of great times I have had with The Sun.

"There are plenty of opportunities out there and I agree with Winston Churchill who said: 'Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm'.

"I did try to book a room at the 'Where Did It All Go Wrong?' rest home, but they had all been taken by Labour MPs."

The columnist was suspended from The Sun shortly after the column was published and a story headlined Ross Barkley: Sun Apology followed.

MacKenzie had written: "Perhaps unfairly, I have always judged Ross Barkley as one of our dimmest footballers.

"There is something about the lack of reflection in his eyes which makes me certain not only are the lights not on, there is definitely nobody at home.

"I get a similar feeling when seeing a gorilla at the zoo. The physique is magnificent but it's the eyes that tell the story."

The article came on the eve of the 28th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool fans died.

MacKenzie's departure from the newspaper follows a career chequered with controversy.

He was editor of The Sun when it published a front-page article headlined 'Hillsborough: The Truth' in the aftermath of the 1989 disaster at Sheffield Wednesday's stadium.

The article claimed Liverpool fans were to blame for the tragedy.

MacKenzie apologised in 2012, but many shops in the city still refuse to stock the title.
Woden and Belconnen residents will be able to try new rapid bus services from their regions for free in a public transport package to be unveiled in the upcoming ACT Budget.

About $150,000 will be set aside in next month's budget to fund the trial of the new black rapid bus from Belconnen to Gungahlin and the green rapid bus from Woden to the city, via Manuka and Barton.

Meegan Fitzharris said funding for new ticket machines and a new ticketing system for bus and light rail would also be included in the budget. Credit:Karleen Minney

The services will run 15 minutes between 7am and 7pm, Monday to Friday.

ACT Labor promised an extra seven rapid bus routes during the 2016 election campaign.
Prison staff tried to revive a man who died inside the Alexander Maconochie Centre after his cell mate raised the alarm about his condition.

ACT Policing have opened an investigation into the death of the 29-year-old man, which is the second inside the prison within the last 12 months.

A 29-year-old man died inside the Alexander Maconochie Centre on Saturday night. Credit:Rohan Thomson

Justice Minister Shane Rattenbury appeared on ABC Canberra on Monday morning to answer questions about the incident.

"On Saturday night around 7.30 there was a call made to AMC staff ... by a fellow cellmate concerned about his cellmate," Mr Rattenbury said.
Two teenagers accused of using a replica pistol to "scare" a boy with severe autism as they tried to rob him outside a north Canberra supermarket went home to watch a television show about serial killer Ivan Milat, court documents allege.

The boys, aged 16 and 17, each faced the ACT Childrens' Court charged with attempted aggravated robbery using an offensive weapon on Monday. Neither has entered pleas.

Police say the two boys, aged 16 and 17, went looking for the severely autistic boy outside Dickson Woolworths on Sunday night. Credit:Richard Briggs

Court documents said witnesses called police after two teenagers approached the boy outside Woolworths at Dickson shortly before 7pm on Sunday.

The 16-year-old boy allegedly pushed him against the wall and said, "this is a robbery, give me what you have". He pointed a multi-coloured hand-held pistol at the boy's head and demanded cash as the 17-year old alleged offender watched on.
A play area at the University Preschool and Childcare Centre at the Australian National University campus has been closed after lead-based paint was discovered on an exterior courtyard wall.

The discovery of the lead-based paint followed a warning last week to parents of children at the Heritage Childcare Centre next door to consider having their children blood-tested, after high levels of lead were found in two of 37 samples taken at that centre.

The Heritage Childcare Centre on the ANU campus in Canberra was the first to have samples of lead paint discovered. Similar paint has now been found at the University Preschool next door. Credit:Daniel Burdon

After the findings at the Heritage Childcare Centre, further testing was carried out at the University Preschool (UPCC), while inspections of interior areas of the centre in April and last week did not find any areas of risk for children.

The ANU last week said there were no concerns for lead-based paint at the UPCC, but the paint was discovered after maintenance staff removed hedges from the courtyard at the weekend, allowing a more detailed examination of areas previously inspected.
Australians lost a startling $300 million to scams in 2016, a figure which only accounts for those cases known to authorities.

The record losses combine those reported to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network, which number more than 200,000.

Investment scams accounted for the greatest losses, at a total of $59 million, followed by dating and romance scams, which netted nearly $42 million.
China's leading energy equipment producer has said it will increase construction in central and western parts of Asia, as part of the development of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Tebian Electric Apparatus Stock, based in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, will strengthen cooperation with China's neighboring countries, including Tajikistan, "to share advanced technologies in electric transformation and energy saving", publicity manager Chen Dan said.

She made the remarks to about 50 journalists from home and abroad who visited the company's headquarters on Sunday.

Tebian is a global manufacturer of high-performance transformers that was founded nearly 30 years ago.

"Our technologies help nations minimize energy loss during electric power transmission," Chen said. "Such aid has increased since China proposed the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. It has helped the company seek a greater share of the power infrastructure business in Central and West Asia."

Tebian has won contracts for a $500 million state grid project in Tajikistan and a $580 million north-south grid project in Kyrgyzstan since the initiative was proposed. The latter project is the largest energy deal between China and Kyrgyzstan.

"It's an energetic company, as the average age of our employees is 31 and it includes talent from a variety of ethnic groups," Chen said.

She added that the company expects the younger generation to make significant contributions to speeding up the development of technologies abroad under the initiative.
"We believe the bid materially undervalues the prospects for Fairfax given the growth in Domain, the digital transformation of mastheads and the strategic value with changed media laws," Martin Currie Australia chief investment officer Reece Birtles said.

The new $1.20 cash offer is at the lower end of TPG's initial proposal, but requires no structural changes and comes with some greater certainty. Fairfax shares closed 6 per cent higher at $1.14 on Monday.

"Private equity only go into these acquisitions believing they can earn 15 per cent [returns]. We also believe Fairfax can provide those returns to shareholders, hence the board should reject the bid and restate their confidence in the future prospects of Fairfax as a standalone business."

Alex Waislitz, the head of Thorney Opportunities, which owns about 2.4 per cent of shares, said: "While the revised offer is clearly superior in that it is an offer for the entire company, TPG may need to offer more than $1.20 if it is to win the support of all shareholders".

A spokesman for TPG, which owns just less than 5 per cent of Fairfax, said the offer of $1.20 a share was a 41 per cent premium to Fairfax's share price before news broke that it was interested in bidding for the company, and nearly 30 per cent higher than the stock after management said it was looking into a spin-off of Domain.

The consortium's initial approach came as Communications Minister Mitch Fifield announced major changes to ownership regulations that will eliminate the "two out of three" and "reach" rules, which have long restricted mergers and acquisitions among Australian media companies.

The purchase will be subject to Foreign Investment Review Board [FIRB] approval. And it may also be considered by the Tax Office, which has nearly given up trying to recover $628 million in unpaid taxes and penalties from TPG following its restructure and sale of Myer in 2009. A Tax Office spokesman confirmed it advises FIRB on foreign takeovers and takes into consideration the "character of the investor".
Trump should have done just that if he truly believed Comey was incompetent and his presence had undermined public confidence in the bureau. Instead, the President chose to wait, presumably to see how potentially dangerous the FBI's inquiry would be.

The allegations about Russian links to Trump advisers focus on his campaign team as well as his now former national security adviser, Mike Flynn. Federal prosecutors are reportedly trying to have Flynn's colleagues appear before a grand jury, which suggests criminal charges are being considered.

As Trump began assembling his administration in December, the Herald expressed concern about the then President-elect's links to Russia. As we argued in April, "if these sort of allegations were raised in Australia, voters would expect at the very least an independent inquiry".

It's up to Congress to appoint a special prosecutor with enough powers to hold the executive to account. But both the Republican leader and the White House are resisting.

The White House says it wants the FBI inquiry to continue, although Comey's request for extra resources to help the investigation went to newbie Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein  the man who wrote the memo that Mr Trump cited in his termination announcement about Comey. What's more, Rosenstein will have the final decision on the appointment of  and limits to the operations of  any special counsel on the issue. That's a last resort given a special prosecutor is off the table and the ongoing inquiries by congressional committees have been marred by conflicts of interest and members recusing themselves.
The alternative presidential candidate may not have been any better. She, unfortunately, was perhaps more obsessed by her place in history rather than her country's appropriate place in the world. China, however, has chosen to look outward to build partnerships and influence with trust and trade. If President Macron can now achieve some sort of fiscal unity in Europe then the giants of China and Europe will be able to achieve world preeminence without resorting to military might. It should be an interesting century for my children and grandchildren and is a welcome change in world history. Terence Golding Bolwarra The latest "reckless and provocative" missile launch by North Korea demands immediate retaliatory tweeting.

William Lloyd Denistone Why exploit animals for food we don't need? It's a shame that people such as Nan Howard (Letters, May 15) who have compassion for their fellow humans (whether sentient or not) seem incapable of extending that compassion to other sentient animals. Non-human beings have the capacity to suffer, to feel affection, stress, joy, contentment and fear and to value their life. Who are we to exploit them, to ignore their feelings, enslave and slaughter them? All for foods we simply do not need. Mike O'Shaughnessy Spence (ACT)

It's not babies who get aborted, it's foetuses that get aborted. Big difference, Nan Howard. Carsten Burmeister Mosman Parents free to sleep While your article about baby sleep consultants is nestled in your business pages, it gives the impression that the demand for sleep consultancy services can only be met through the private sector ("Boom times for baby sleep whisperers"., May 15). Karitane and Tresillian are NSW government health services that offer free telephone and online consultations to support parents with baby sleep issues.

These services are womanned by well trained child and family health nurses with extensive experience in the field. I've used these services with both my babies and they helped me enormously. Sleep-deprived, stressed parents don't need to spend up big to get relief. Ann Fenton Marrickville Flawed global comparisons mislead us on tax burden The danger of publishing the top marginal rate of tax as a basis for comparison was glaringly illustrated by the letter from John Harrison (May 15) who read your story and apparently assumed he would be paying the highest rate of tax on his entire income although he has only just reached the threshold at which it begins to be applied on any further income. Comparing tax rates really requires something more than just quoting the top marginal rate. For example, a friend in Berkeley, California, self-employed and making $100,000 a year was paying federal and state income tax totalling about 33 per cent of income. Similar to Australian rates. However, this didn't include his property tax of $12,000 a year which went among other things to funding the primary school system and local police force  both included in the Australian income tax number. On top of that his health insurance for a family of four was about $25,000 a year for cover that didn't appear to be as comprehensive as Medicare. He was seriously thinking of moving from California to Australia to gain the benefit of a much lower total tax rate.

And quoting British tax rates never seems to include the National Insurance levy. So we end up with people thinking they are hard done by because they don't consider the difference between marginal and total and the population in general feeling we are much more highly taxed compared with other countries than we are. Mike Rose Newport Where's our compassion for sick refugees? We read with dismay of the untreated illnesses of two refugees in offshore detention at Nauru ("'The system here is broken': sick refugees await medical transfers", May 15). Nauru is not equipped to deal with their complex medical issues. Australia is.

While the Department of Immigration says that medical transfers to Australia are a matter for Nauru, it is a fact that Australia sent the refugees there in the first place in order to avoid our responsibility. These refugees have every right to ask us for protection and care. If the list of Australian values is still open for addition, we suggest compassion be added to direct us to at least provide the medical care that is in our capacity to give. Margaret Downie, Denise Weelands Erskineville It seems that the government has conveniently created in-built bureaucratic levels of obfuscation when it comes to responding to the medical transfers of refugees. So, refugees who qualify for urgent medical transfer need to first approach staff at International Health and Medical Services which in turn negotiates with Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and then a final decision is made by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. Really? How's this for a thought, the Australian government has placed these refugees in the detention facilities and runs these facilities, therefore it is our sole responsibility to ensure that refugees in need of urgent medical treatment are transferred to Australia. Leo Sorbello Leichhardt

Cyber the real threat Many months ago now, when the Liberal Party announced its $50 billion investment in submarines, I wrote to the Herald to say that our greatest threat in the future was far more likely to be cyber-based rather than a land-based invasion. Maybe the letters editor might now, in view of the enormous invasion of hundreds of countries by cyber criminals, find my views worthy of publication ("British researcher finds 'kill swtich'", May 15). Annette Kent Hunters Hill Natural gas for NSW We note your newspaper's article about the Queensland Hunter Pipeline and the proposal to build a pipeline through the Hunter Valley ("Plea not to export NSW gas", May 15). Santos is not working with Queensland Hunter Pipeline and has no plans to send any of the gas from the Narrabri Gas Project via their proposed pipeline route through the Hunter Valley.

Santos has always been clear that the natural gas from the Narrabri Gas Project will be made available to the NSW domestic market. Bruce Clement Santos vice-president Asia, NSW & WA Oil Assets Punishing the jobless Social Services Minister Christian Porter using quantitative research alone to understand the problem of unemployment is concerning ("Walking the welfare tightrope", May 15). Many long-term unemployed are suffering depression and other mental health issues as a result of their situation and use drugs to "self-medicate". The government's proposed punitive measures will result in increased homelessness and crime. More case workers are needed to help the unemployed access psychological services and training first.

However, the constant drive to shrink the public sector, combined with the private sector's drive to increase profits, is reducing the job pool. It's estimated there are 10 available people for every available job. What we need is a government that is honestly increasing the supply of work rather than punishing the most vulnerable for "bad behaviour". Anne Matheson Gordon Hunger strike lie What Marwan Barghouti is dressing up as a prisoner strike for the rights of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel is actually more about an internal Palestinian power play  the strike followed hot on the heels of Barghouti being passed over for Fatah deputy leader and having his allies sidelined by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ("Focus on leader as hunger strike in fourth week", May 15) . Barghouti's friend Elias Sabbagh says it's time to "free the Palestinian people and release their prisoners". Around 95 per cent of the Palestinians live in areas administered by either Hamas in Gaza or Fatah in the West Bank, and while Israel has offered the Palestinians a state three times, their leadership has refused, without even a counter-offer, and more recently refused to even talk.

As for releasing the prisoners, many are detained for crimes of violence, including murdering Israeli civilians, and when Israel has released prisoners in the past, to gain the freedom of Gilad Shalit or to encourage peace talks for example, many of those released have returned to their terrorist ways. Danny Samuels Malvern (Vic) Banking's victims It is nice to hear that there might be new rules to improve accountability and provide greater penalties for executives in the banking and financial sectors who are involved in serious fraud or misconduct ("New rules on executive and bank misconduct could change APRA" ,May 15). But what about the victims of these financial misdeeds? Will there also be rules for them to be more adequately compensated than has happened in the past? Francine de Valence Haymarket

Ahead of the curve Meredith Williams (Letters, May 15), as a letter writer I went out on strike with the Fairfax journalists as well. In fact, I think I went out well before anyone else did. I haven't been published for yonks. George Manojlovic Mangerton There's a reason banks are being targeted Anna Bligh, chief of the bankers association, says banks are an "easy political target" ("New rules on executive and bank misconduct could change APRA", May 15). Now she should ask why.

Rory McGuire Pyrmont Whingeing familiar Apparently our Treasurer thinks any arguments made by the banks over the new tax applied to them are some sort of exaggerated, end-of-the-world whinge ("Treasurer slams bank 'whinge' but says levy won't increase", smh.com.au, May 15). Well, I guess he and his party would know about such things. They do have form predicting the apocalypse, or at least the end of Whyalla and moderately priced legs of lamb. Tony Sullivan Adamstown Heights Holding the line

Turnbull's main concern is hoping he remains Prime Minister at least till September 14 this year ("Coalition gets budget life but still trails Labor", May 15). By doing that he would have been PM longer than his arch-enemy, Tony Abbott. Con Vaitsas Ashbury Ransom payout slim Ransomware sounds like something you'd see on a catwalk or red carpet ("Perpetrators of global cyber attack have earned only $35k, despite causing massive damage", smh.com.au, May 15) Rod Matthews Fairfield
With that in mind, let's look at a few big dramas that faced our nation, and which are perhaps not as dealt-with as you might have assumed.

Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Julie Bishop have had plenty to get on with, OK? Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

So when you have a situation that is genuinely terrible it's easy to assume the reason you haven't heard anything about it is that it's all been all taken care of  you know, like the Great Barrier Reef presumably is!  rather than because nothing is resolved and the whole thing is still a baffling nightmare.

In these days of 24-hour social media cycles, it's hard to follow a single story for too long. After all, the central question all media outlets are now forced to confront can be summed up as "is this story as interesting as a picture of a cat in a bow tie?", and 98 per cent of the time the answer is that Mr Tiddles is adorable.

In all the recent drama about global ransomware attacks it's easy to forget that Australia had it's own issue  only it began last year and is still ongoing.

To recap: late last year the government began an initiative to stop people on benefits from claiming more than they were entitled to by combining different government data about individuals  most significantly data from the Australian Taxation Office  to see if there were any discrepancies.

The problems with this system turned out to be legion, but one huge one is that Centrelink's determination as to whether someone deserves a payment is whether they've earned anything in the last fortnight, whereas the ATO data was averaged out from an entire year. So someone who was on the dole for a few months before getting a job would be slugged for having claimed undeserved benefits, despite having been earning nothing at the time of the actual claim.

Even the Commonwealth Ombudsman ruled that the debt collection system was "neither reasonable nor fair" earlier this year, which Human Services Minister Alan Tudge optimistically chose to interpret as an endorsement of the program.

And those affected can fight a debt letter, obviously: provided they have all their financial and official correspondence for up to seven years conveniently on hand, can understand complex bureaucratese, and have entire mornings available to spend waiting on hold at the horrendously understaffed Centrelink helpline.
If there are two things that I am highly susceptible to it's glamour and also supreme comfort. You might think these two weaknesses exist on quite opposite ends of a spectrum, but I assure you they do not.

I know this because I just wore striped silk pyjamas to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Sydney and I've honestly never felt so great. Or comfortable. Like, movie star in the 40s great, or Coco Chanel smoking cigarettes in her white silk pyjamas kind of great. There's nothing quite so chic as a slightly louche woman who really doesn't care for either fools or fashion.

This is exactly the kind of person that I hoped to become when I finally added my striped silk set from Olivia Von Halle to my basket after months of scrolling through their Instagram feed and noting that Alexa Chung once wore the same pair that I bought. I spent a lot of time idly wondering if I too could wear pyjamas to a pool party like the people on Instagram did. Or in the streets of New York.

The answer is ... hopefully.
Labor MP Anne Aly has thrown down the gauntlet to Foreign Minister (and unofficial Minister for Fashion) Julie Bishop, by starring in a fashion show during day two of Fashion Week Australia in Sydney.

As Bishop, who coined the term "fashion diplomacy" and is a patron of the Australian Fashion Chamber, was out running with diplomats during a Heads of Mission visit to Cairns, Aly graced the catwalk at Carriageworks in Thomas Puttick's show.

Labor MP Anne Aly walked the runway for Thomas Puttick's show. Credit:Stefan Gosatti

The counter-terrorism expert was a star in the diverse cast of models that featured other women of varying ages, cultural backgrounds and sizes. All models donated their appearance fee to White Ribbon.

Puttick simply "asked" Aly to participate in his first Fashion Week outing which showcased his ethical and sustainable designs.
Raia Darin-Cooper. "Many people think that it is about the physical behaviours without understanding that this is a really serious mental illness and the levels of distress that people can feel caught in an eating disorder is extraordinary," says Christine Morgan, CEO of the Butterfly Foundation, whose Mayday campaign aims to draw attention to the "unacceptable" number of deaths from eating disorders and the need for specialised treatment. Morgan adds that there are many other misconceptions about eating disorders, including that someone is being difficult, simply wants to lose weight and should just "choose" to eat. She adds: "I think that there is a lot of stigma that goes with the binge eating component of binge eating disorder and bulimia nervosa. I think that there's a sense that that's just people indulging in eating and they don't understand that people with those illnesses will be bingeing in a way that causes such psychological distress and they're eating foods they wouldn't normally eat  it's not comfort eating. I think there's a lot of focus unfortunately on the eating and exercise behaviours which are but the outcome of what is happening in the head. There's more focus on those behaviours than there is on the underpinning psychological issues that need to be dealt with." When Raia's family initially sought help, they experienced what many others dealing with an eating disorder or a loved one's eating disorder have also experienced: misplaced focus and a complete lack of understanding.

"It was almost back to the days of asylums where, if you didn't put on weight you were confined to your bed in a room with white walls," says Raia's sister, Este Darin-Cooper, of the "specialist" care facility she was admitted to. "If you put on a kilo you might get a book for a day or you might get off bed rest and get to walk around for an hour or two. The focus really was just on putting on weight." Although Este, just a year younger than her sister, admits that for those with anorexia nervosa weight gain can be a matter of survival, it is "really only a symptom of the illness not the underlying cause". "They put on the weight and then they're considered ready to go forth and enter the world again," Este says. "It's very easy to put on weight  you can force feed someone or, if they're in a hospital environment, they can put on the weight. They go out, lose it and go back to hospital and it becomes this cycle in and out of hospital. If they haven't learned to function in the world as a teenager or young adult because they haven't had that social development or emotional support then it's much easier to escape back into the safety of the hospital. It's not really setting up one to live long-term." Although Raia put on weight, returned to school and, following an astounding result in her HSC (despite all the school she missed Raia received a final score of 96.9), then to university where she would study nursing, she was still facing an intense daily battle with the illness. "The illness isn't cured by putting on weight," Este says. "The illness is there because of a mental heath condition. It's often not visible. The weight is only a symptom of the illness, not the illness itself."

Este and her family decided to speak for the first time about Raia after becoming involved with the Butterfly Foundation and hearing the stories of others. "The difficulties we faced in treatment were from when she got sick in 1992 up until when she died in 2005, but to listen to some of the other families that the Butterfly Foundation interviewed whose experience was much more recent - not much had changed," Este says. Morgan adds that understanding of the disorder is evolving, slowly. "We know that it's an epigenetic disease of genetically vulnerable people being triggered by environmental stressors and trying to lose weight  there's always a weight component in there or an eating component in there," Morgan explains. "But we've still got such a long way to go. It's estimated that less than 23 per cent of people with an eating disorder today will be in treatment." Following Mayday promises by federal Health Minister Greg Hunt, the Butterfly Foundation is working with the government to change this statistic and look at a dedicated eating disorders Medicare approach and to implement training and service development among health professionals.

Tragically, by the time Raia, who Este describes as "very caring and empathetic", took her life, her family was expecting it. "The health system had failed early on so that was what we were faced with at the end," says Este, who emphasises that they do not place the blame on any one doctor, but the system as a whole. "It should never be too late, but it made it so much more difficult at that later stage because she hadn't had that holistic treatment at the beginning. It was a little bit of a waiting game. "It is a system failing - doctors need to be better supported to understand what eating disorders are... but also there needs to be funding for better treatments and treatments that aren't just addressing physical symptoms because it's not a solution  it's a stop-gap measure to keep people alive." Although Raia's case is more common than it ought be, Morgan insists  as I also know  that it's possible for the story to end differently; it's possible to find a way out. "There is always hope for somebody with an eating disorder and I hold on to the fact that there is always hope for us improving what is happening here in Australia  that everyone with an eating disorder or at risk of an eating disorder has access to the treatment when they need it."
Of course nothing should really come as a surprise when it comes to baby names. Doesn't everybody enjoy it when those lists of banned baby names are released?

So the news that the name Kylo Ren, named after the villain in Star Wars: The Force Awakens played by Girls' Adam Driver, sure is interesting if not terribly startling.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

According to The Social Security Administration, which just released its annual list of popular baby names in America, leaping 2368 spots to 901 is Kylo. The name came in at 3269 in 2015, making it the fastest growing baby name in America.

Naming your baby after a villain is becoming quite popular, according to the founder of Babynamewizard.com, Laura Wattenberg who told the Associated Press that villains make for more popular names than heroes.
"That kind of survival isn't what I want," Ms Gabrielides told Fairfax Media during an interview in which she responded to questions by typing on her iPad.

Ms Gabrielides was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in July last year and has recently lost the ability to speak.

She has largely lost control of her hands, and faces eventually having to communicate via technology that tracks her eye movements.

Anne and Paul Gabrielides at their Winmalee home. Anne suffers from motor neurone disease and can no longer speak. Credit:Wolter Peeters

"Along with that is the difficulty of breathing and swallowing every day. I want to suck up as much of life as possible, but there will come a time when I will want to say, 'No, that's enough'."

The 53-year-old wants the legal right to end her life with medical assistance at the time of her choosing and has the support of her husband, Paul, their twin sons Michael and Christopher, 31, and daughter Eleni, 20.

Terminally ill NSW residents over the age of 25 would have the legal right to end their own lives with medical assistance under draft legislation expected to be introduced to state Parliament within months.

To qualify under the draft Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill, the patient would have to be, in "reasonable medical judgment", expected to die from their illness within 12 months and be experiencing "extreme pain, suffering or physical incapacity".
Mr Rajalingam asked Ms Sharobeem how she spent $11,025 at a cosmetic clinic. "Lily Room is where I was getting treatment, it was a personal purchase." But you would attend every three months, she was told. "I don't think so," she replied Mr Rajalingam then read out a series of transactions at the clinic over a three-year period, including $2000 in August 2012 and $950 in November 2012, then a further $1250 a few months later. In 2013, there were regular bills for $950 and $1000, before a $1600 bill in March 2014. "It might have been the case I deliberately put one in and the bookkeeper was misled," she told ICAC. "I don't think it was deliberate at all that I claimed reimbursement."

In other evidence on Monday, Ms Sharobeem admitted she used two fake names to bill the Immigrant Women's Health Service for two extra salaries every week for a year from mid-2014 to earn an extra $100,000 from the public purse. The former Australian of the Year finalist also routinely filled in time sheets for her sons, Richard and Charlie, under fake names. The commission heard that Ms Sharobeem used the names Emma Adley and Emy Adel on timesheets for work she claimed to have performed as a facilitator or a group leader at community group activities. The commission heard that for 12 months from May 2014 she billed the organisation as Emma Adly for $61,000. The commission says she never did the work. Ms Sharobeem said she did the work but concedes she filled out timesheets inaccurately and after the fact, using fake names so other staff didn't know she was being paid. In earlier evidence, she claimed only she had the skills to perform the tasks.

For a year from March 2014, Ms Sharobeem also billed the IWHS as Emmy Adel for $38,000 in group leader fees for work it is alleged she never performed. She was paid $35 an hour for the work, approximately double what other employees were paid for similar work, the commission has previously heard. The money was in addition to her annual salary of around $80,000 from the IWHS. On one occasion, she billed the organisation four times for the one day, while other examples had her billing the organisation for shifts on Anzac Day and Easter Monday. Ms Sharobeem also admitted she submitted timesheets on behalf of her son Richard under the name Rachie Kakel and for her son Charlie under the name Charl Gamal. She insists her sons did work for the money but she used fake names so staff were not aware her children were being paid by the organisation. Mr Rajalingam asked if the board knew of the IWHS-approved payments to her or her sons. She replied it did not, adding that the board did not review her salary in more than a decade working there.

Ms Sharobeem acknowledged it was a mistake that she "didn't keep records". "It's deliberately my fault," she said. The ICAC heard Ms Sharobeem has a dishwasher and fridge in her home that was claimed as reimbursement. She also received reimbursement for nearly $1300 from a transaction at Bing Lee that was declined. She has argued in evidence the bookkeeper was trying to set her up or was incompetent.

In a dramatic development after lunch, Ms Sharobeem's counsel, Arjun Chhabra, sought an immediate adjourment, expressing fears for her health. "I do so based on the health and condition of Ms Sharobeem and certain observations over luncheon adjournment," Mr Chhabra told acting commissioner Reginald Blanch, QC. "In my opinion she's not in a position to continue giving evidence this afternoon." The acting commissioner agreed to adjourn. In earlier evidence, Ms Sharobeem conceded for the first time she cut receipts she submitted for reimbursement because she didn't want the bookkeeper to know details of an invoice.

The commission has alleged Ms Sharobeem routinely cut off details of purchases from credit card receipts to hide information about where she was buying goods and claim reimbursements without submitting the invoice. Why were you cutting receipts? Was it to hide purchases from the bookkeeper? "Sometimes." She says she stopped cutting receipts when she was told to stop by the IWHS auditor, Nathan Boyd. Was it only you cutting receipts, she was asked.

"Up until the time Nathan told me not to, I was cutting receipts in front of the bookkeeper," Ms Sharobeem said. The acting commissioner interjected, asking: "Were scissors used?" "Sometimes scissors were used, sometimes tearing, sometimes removing staples," she replied. "It was to reduce bulk and to hide information because it was for clients." Later, the commissioner asked if Ms Sharobeem cut receipts to get reimbursement. "Yes, before the time he [the auditor] told me to stop." In earlier evidence, Ms Sharobeem said she had never used scissors to cut receipts.
Less than 24 hours after marking Mother's Day, a bloodied Linda Connors was found sprawled in bed inside the townhouse she shared with her two children.

Not long after her eldest son, Simon, made the horrific discovery, police pulled over the 55-year-old woman's car in St Peters in Sydney's inner-west on Monday morning.

Behind the wheel was her 28-year-old son Nathan White. Also in the car was a crossbow, a pitchfork wrapped in a towel and the family dog.

Police said the car's number plate was automatically detected by a passing police car, with an alert advising officers to pull the car over.
A ruptured gas main at the Gold Coast has closed a street and caused minor traffic delays, as emergency services work to make the area safe.

Three Queensland Fire and Emergency Services crews had been on the scene at Napper Road and Smith Street in Arundel since about 3.15pm, a QFES spokeswoman said.

She said the incident was "very much ongoing", as fire crews were working to access the pipe work, isolate the gas valve and dissipate the gas fumes in the meantime.

A Queensland Police spokesman confirmed Napper Road had been closed to traffic in both directions.

Queensland Ambulance Service crews were also on standby but there were no reported injuries.
Marcus Volke was working as an escort in Melbourne's club scene to pay off his credit card when he met and struck a deal with Indonesian woman Mayang Prasetyo, who desperately wanted to stay in Australia.

It was an agreement that involved them living for a long time together, but eventually it led to their deaths.

In October 2014 Volke, 27, murdered, disfigured and began cooking the remains of Ms Prasetyo  born Febri Andriansyah  at their Brisbane flat, before evading police and taking his own life in an industrial bin.

An examination of their deaths and the response from police began on Monday, with Coroner Terry Ryan hearing evidence from first-response officers, an investigator and member of the Queensland Police dog squad.
A man with a suspected gunshot wound is yet to make a formal complaint to police after appearing at a Gold Coast hospital on Sunday evening.

The 31-year-old arrived at Gold Coast University Hospital about 7pm with a suspected gunshot wound to his arm.

Queensland police are searching for two men who robbed and punched a woman in her home overnight. Credit:Glenn Hunt

Police were called to the hospital however the man has not made a complaint.

Meanwhile, police are searching for two men who bashed and robbed a woman in a Coomera home late Sunday night.
Another Andrews government's level crossing removal project is under attack, this time in Essendon where locals and Moonee Valley Council are fighting to overturn a plan to put busy Buckley Street underneath the rail line.

Residents, traders and the council want the government to dump its preferred plan to lower the road beneath the rail line, and instead sink the railway tracks in a trench.

Plans to put Buckley Street in Essendon under the railway line has angered locals, says Roz Shaw. Credit:Eddie Jim

So strong is opposition to the government's plan that Moonee Valley Council has voted to seek legal advice on challenging the government's plans.

A protest meeting is planned for Sunday, and follows a meeting last month that attracted almost 500 people.
Accused drug mule Cassandra Sainsbury has been reunited with her family, including her fiance Scott Broadbridge, who arrived at the Colombian prison where she is being held carrying a single red rose.

The 22-year-old South Australian woman was also visited by her mother, Lisa Evans, and sister, Khala Sainsbury, in a separate meeting at the El Buen Pastor women's prison in the Colombian capital Bogota on Monday, local time.

It is the first time the former personal trainer has seen her family since she was arrested at El Dorado International Airport on April 12, allegedly with 5.8 kilograms of cocaine hidden inside 18 headphone boxes in her suitcase.

Ms Sainsbury's family did not speak to waiting media as they arrived and left the prison, after signing deals with separate Australian networks.
Cairo: Could the gods be blessing Egypt's floundering tourism sector that hinges largely on its ancient past as a cradle of mankind?

Virtually every week, it seems, new aspects of Egypt's history are being unearthed.

A number of mummies inside the newly discovered burial site in Minya, Egypt, on Saturday. Credit:Reuters

The latest find, announced on the weekend by the country's Antiquities Ministry includes at least 17 well-preserved mummies found in a necropolis in the village of Tuna al-Gabal, about 210 kilometres south of the capital, Cairo.

The discovery, by University of Cairo students, surprised many because the ancient burial site on the fringes of the western desert was mainly known as an area where thousands of mummified birds and animals had been discovered over the years.
Paris: Newly inaugurated French President Emmanuel Macron appointed a conservative prime minister on Monday in a move to broaden his political appeal and weaken his opponents before parliamentary elections in June.

Edouard Philippe, 46, a lawmaker and mayor of the port city of Le Havre, is from the moderate wing of the main centre-right party, The Republicans, and will provide a counterweight to former Socialist members of parliament who have joined Mr Macron's cause.

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe at the handover ceremony in Paris. Credit:AP

Mr Macron wants to smash the left-right divide which has dominated France for decades, and his start-up centrist Republic on the Move (REM) party (formerly called En Marche), which is just a year old, needs to forge a wide base of support.

Success in the parliamentary elections is vital to his chances of pushing through his plans to cut state spending, boost investment and create jobs, after years of economic malaise and high unemployment.
Paris: Newly minted French President Emmanuel Macron will use his first international trip, a day after being sworn in, to try to persuade Germany to build a common eurozone budget.

Mr Macron, a 39-year-old Europhile who used his inaugural address on Sunday to promise to "reform and relaunch" Europe, was sworn in during a pomp-filled inauguration at the Elysee Palace, joined by his wife Brigitte Trogneux, family and 300 dignitaries.

Promising to restore flagging French self-confidence, he repeatedly underlined the importance of France's place in the European Union "which protects us and enables us to project our values in the world".

However, he added, the 28-member bloc needed to be "reformed and relaunched".
Washington: "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace opened his show this week by highlighting who was not on his guest list.

As President Donald Trump's decision to abruptly fire FBI director James B. Comey continues to dominate the news, Wallace said he wanted to feature a White House official "to explain the president's reasoning and to discuss the fallout."

Wallace said that on Saturday morning, the White House announced it would not make anyone available to discuss that topic - but did offer to book senior officials to talk about the president's upcoming foreign trip.

"When we said we were going to focus on Comey for at least the first half-hour of this program, they put those officials on other shows," Wallace said.
A television screen at Seoul Station on Sunday shows a news broadcast on North Korea's ballistic missile launch. Credit:Bloomberg A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said initial assessments showed the missile landed 97 kilometres south of Russia's Vladivostok region. The missile flew further and higher than an intermediate-range missile North Korea successfully tested in February from the same region of Kusong, north-west of its capital, Pyongyang. A television screen at Seoul Station on Sunday shows a news broadcast on North Korea's ballistic missile launch. Credit:Bloomberg US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the launch a message by Pyongyang to South Korea after the election of Moon, who took office on Wednesday.

"You first have to get into Kim Jong-un's head - which is, he's in a state of paranoia, he's incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him," Haley told ABC's This Week program. Haley added that the United States would "continue to tighten the screws" on North Korea, mentioning sanctions and working with the international community to put pressure on Pyongyang. Moon held his first National Security Council in response to the launch, which he called a "clear violation" of UN Security Council resolutions, his office said. The United Nations Security Council is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss the launch, diplomats said on Sunday. The US military's Pacific Command said it was assessing the type of missile that was fired but it was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile".

The US threat assessment has not changed from a national security standpoint, a US official said. An intercontinental ballistic missile is considered to have a range of more than 6000 kilometres. The White House mentioned Russia in its earlier statement about the launch. "With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil - in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan - the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased," the White House said, referring to US President Donald Trump.

The launch served as a call for all nations to implement stronger sanctions against North Korea, the White House added. North Korea is widely believed to be developing an intercontinental missile tipped with a nuclear weapon that is capable of reaching the United States. Trump has vowed not to let that happen. Experts said the altitude reached by the missile tested on Sunday meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it travelled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4000 kilometres, experts said. Kim Dong-yub of Kyungnam University's Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul said he estimated a standard trajectory would give it a range of 6000 kilometres. "The launch may indeed represent a new missile with a long range," said Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, referring to the estimated altitude of more than 2000 kilometres.

"It is definitely concerning." Speaking in Beijing, Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, told reporters that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping had discussed the situation on the Korean peninsula, including the latest missile launch, and expressed "mutual concerns" about growing tensions. Putin is in Beijing for a conference on a plan for a new Silk Road. Delegations from the United States, South Korea and North Korea are also there. China, North Korea's sole main ally, which nevertheless objects to its weapons programmes, called for restraint and for no one to exacerbate tensions. "China opposes relevant launch activities by North Korea that are contrary to Security Council resolutions," China's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Moon won Tuesday's election on a platform of a moderate approach to North Korea and has said he would be willing to go to Pyongyang under the right circumstances, arguing dialogue must be used in parallel with sanctions. "The President said while South Korea remains open to the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, it is only possible when the North shows a change in attitude," Yoon Young-chan, Moon's press secretary, told a briefing. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said North Korea's missile launches were a "grave threat to our country and a clear violation of UN resolutions". Loading North Korea attempted but failed to test-launch ballistic missiles four times in the past two months. It has conducted various tests since the beginning of last year at an unprecedented pace. It also conducted its fourth and fifth nuclear tests last year.
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Although foreign investment approvals in real estate continue their upward trend, the resultant effect on property prices in Australias two biggest capitals has remained modest, a new government paper has found.The recently released Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) Annual Report found that residential real estate applications increased by 19% to $72.4bn in 2015-16 compared to $60.8bn in 2014-15.Alongside this, the total number of applications approved for residential real estate jumped from 36,841 to 40,149 between the two financial years. Overall, residential property approvals made up 96.9% of all foreign investment approvals in 2015-16.Approvals for development (including new dwellings, vacant land and redeveloped existing property) accounted for 85.4% of all residential property approvals during this financial year.While 5,877 approvals were given to established dwellings (temporary homes for non-residents while in Australia or as houses for Australian staff of foreign-owned firms), this dropped by 36% from the previous year.This shows that the FIRB regime is working, said Charles Pittar , CEO of international property website Juwai.com.Foreign investment is going right where Australia wants it and is one of the few bright spots of the economy.By location, 44% of all residential approvals were in Victoria while 32% were in New South Wales. For approvals in the remaining states and territories, 17% were in Queensland, 4% in Western Australia, 2% in South Australia and 1% in the Australian Capital Territory.FIRBs annual report also cited a 2016 paper issued to the Treasury which examined the effect of foreign investment on property prices. In Sydney and Melbourne, it was suggested that foreign buyers increased prices by between $80 and $122  a modest rise compared to the average jump of $12,800 in these two capital cities.By country, China continues to dominate in real estate with $31.9bn worth of investment in residential and commercial properties approved. This is followed by the United States ($8.2bn), Singapore ($4.6bn), United Arab Emirates ($3.6bn) and Canada ($3.2bn).Despite the large proportion of Chinese investment, this represents a slow down between this financial year and the last, said Pittar.Over the past year we have seen growth in Chinese investment level off, from a white hot 90% growth in Chinese buyer inquiries via Juwai.com in 2015 to 28% in 2016. Growth will probably be lower still this year, unless it receives some sort of push from loosening regulations in China.The low number of divestments which were forced due to non-compliance also shows that foreign investors are very well behaved, he said.The rate of noncompliance is so tiny as to be almost invisible. While estimates show that one in 20 wealthy Australians cheat on their taxes, fewer than one in 1,000 foreign investors cheat in the property market.Pittar also said that concerns about Chinese investors were overblown.Despite the rapid growth in Chinese investment, the US owns about four times more of Australia than China does, so worries that were selling off the country to the Chinese are unwarranted.
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A meeting between the Treasury and high level banking executives around the Federal Budgets bank levy has been slammed by those who attended.In a report by The Australian, sources described the briefing as a complete shambles after bank heads were summoned at the last minute the day after the Budget was released.These people were roaming across our balance sheets without any understanding of the components and the likely impact on the economy, one attendee told the paper.Were going to be penalised for the high level of liquid assets that the regulators say we have to hold, which means six basis points in tax for every dollar of assets.The source said the measure was crude and would make safety at the banks a lot more expensive.Another attendee said that while the main justification for the tax was to help reduce the deficit, four different reasons were provided for implementing this policy. This included as a payment for the banking industrys implicit government guarantee, levelling the playing field for the smaller banks, and helping the major banks become unquestionably strong.It was a complete shambles, the source told the paper. In the end we were told the meeting was to discuss technical issues in relation to the tax, not a debate about its merits, and we should direct those questions to the minister. When inconsistencies were highlighted, the Treasury people said they were only public servants implementing government policy.The briefing was held to outline the technical legislative design of the major bank levy, a Treasury spokesperson told Australian Broker.As is routine with industry consultation, assumptions underlying the design of the levy were tested and feedback sought. As is often the case, some technical issues were raised that will require further consideration over coming days, the said. Anna Bligh , CEO of the Australian Bankers Association, also criticised the meeting for leaving more questions than answers.Not only has the government kept the banks and the public in the dark on this new tax, it is now clear that they have kept Treasury in the dark too, she said.This was policy on the run which played fast and loose with the banking sector, she said. Alarmingly, Treasury officials also confirmed the government was abandoning normal processes in preparing the legislation.The banks have been given until today (15 May) to make a submission with the Treasury confirming it will provide draft legislation to the banks on Wednesday (17 May). The banks will have 24 hours to respond and the draft will not be released for public consultation.Serious questions need to be asked about the indecent haste with which this new bill is being shoehorned into Parliament in a way that will avoid normal drafting and review processes and the scrutiny that should accompany such a critically important piece of legislation, Bligh said."At the very least, the government needs to put this process on hold and start where it should have started in the first place, and that is detailed discussions with banking representatives who understand the daily business of banking, both here in Australia and globally, before they take this any further."
U.S. Senate candidates break records for spending in Pennsylvania

Im not sure that people get persuaded by these ads, said Matthew Jordan, head of Penn State's Department of Film Production and Media Studies.
State Senator Steve Santarsiero (D-10) presented a check to Yardley Borough Police Chief Joseph Kelly for $68,600 for the purchase of a new police vehicle and motorcycle during a visit to the station. Our police put themselves on the line every day to keep our community safe, said Sen. Santarsiero. Dating back to when I was a Lower Makefield Township Supervisor more than...
Bachelor in Paradise star Amanda Stanton want nothing more than to move on with her life following her split from Josh Murray but the 27-year-old single mom admits that the breakup has been difficult.

Bachelor in Paradise: Amanda Stanton Working on Book, Josh Murray Considers Taking Legal Action Against Former Fiancee>>>

When we were on the show, it felt like I had met the love of my life, Stanton told Us Weekly. Its really hard, I think, to move on from that. I think were both having a hard time moving on.

Stanton first competed for Ben Higgins on The Bachelor season 20 while Murray first got engaged to Andi Dorfman on The Bachelorette season 10. The pair met and eventually got engaged in the third season of Bachelor in Paradise. However, their relationship off-screen was very different. Theres a lot of things and situations in the real world you dont experience while youre there [in Paradise], she said.

Murray moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Orange County to be with Stanton and her two young daughters, Kinsley and Charlie, but they broke up last December. In February, the couple was spotted getting cozy in Los Angeles Murray even said that hes single but has been spending some time with the single mom and is even open to reconciliation. On March 20, however, Murray called the cops on Stanton to settle a dispute over a car. Since then, Stanton has been working on her book while Murray has threatened to take legal action against his former fiancee.

Though her relationship with Murray didnt turn out as expected, Stanton remains hopeful about love as she tries to adjust to life as a single woman. Shes even considering finding love on dating apps.

I feel like this is the age where it gets really hard, she admitted. I remember a couple years ago, I was like, Online dating is so weird. I would never do that. And now its like, I need to do that to meet someone. I get it now!'

Meanwhile, Stanton has also been rumored to be heading to Bachelor in Paradise for its fourth season.

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(Image courtesy of ABC)
Independent merchant buying group The IPG has announced its first conference and exhibition.

Due to be held on 3 November at Mercedes Benz World in Brooklands, Surrey, the event will bring together IPG members and suppliers for a day and evening of business and networking.

"Our Conference will be enlightening for IPG members and suppliers alike," said Robin Beal, managing director of The IPG. "We will make clear our bold plans for the next three years, which will enable our merchant members to continue to grow and compete further against major groups and the increasing number of online sources. We will also be offering insight for attending suppliers on how they can benefit from the proposed member enhancement."

The Conference will also give attendees the chance to take part in exhilarating Mercedes Benz driving experiences on the famous Brooklands track. In the evening, delegates will meet for dinner at the Hilton Cobham, offering the chance to discuss and debate the opportunities ahead.

"We are delighted with the response from our supply partners and membership to our Conference and we are looking forward to an exciting and thought-provoking day," Mr Beal concluded.
Mercer County calls for investigation after voting machine problems

Mercer County's clerk called for an investigation into voting mishaps on Election Day. Prosecutors said they'll review the matter.
In 2014, barely two months after the Narendra Modi government took charge, the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) called a meeting to discuss the possibility of advancing its revival by two years and subsequently going in for a stake sale. Three years later, despite some improvements, the state-owned carrier continues to struggle financially and is unlikely to achieve its target of making a net profit in FY19.
Leading e-tailer Amazon claimed it acquired more new customers from tier-2 and tier-3 cities across the country during its four-day 'Great Indian Sale' that concluded on Sunday.

"Our customers' acquisition drive in 2017 saw 235 per cent annual growth in tier-2 and tier-3 cities during the four-day sale since May 11," said the Indian subsidiary of the US-based e-commerce giant in a statement here.

The company, however, did not disclose the number of customers it acquired during the sale and from which cities across the country.

Acceleration in customer acquisition, however, saw a whopping 500 per cent growth in tier-4 towns like Singrauli, Alwar, Dholpur, Muzaffarnagar and Shivpuri.

"Prime members accounted for 35 per cent of the orders and sales on May 11 were the largest on the back of 85 per cent growth in the first quarter," noted the statement.

Purchases by paid prime members grew 100 per cent over its similar sale in January.

In the wireless category, global brands like Apple and Samsung saw 30 times and 16 times sales growth, while BPL's Exclusive television sets and washing machines grew 24 times.

"We are humbled at the huge response to the sale, which surpassed our expectations in prime member subscriptions, new customer acquisition and in setting new benchmarks," said Amazon India Vice-President Manish Tiwary in the statement.

Brands like Arrow, Levis, Fila, Sparx, Woodland have grown 11 fold, while premium watches like Casio, Citizen and Times clocking 6 times and handbag brands like Caprese, Baggit, and Hidesign grown, 11, 13 and 8 times respectively in terms of units.

"Customers also latched onto our exchange and zero cost EMI adoption during the sales," the statement said.
Merger of Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd (CPCL) with Indian Oil Corporation is inevitable, taking CPCL's viability into account in a volatile situation, says IOC's Chairman. The public sector firm held talks with Naftiran Intertrade, the Swiss subsidiary of National Iranian Oil Company, which is yet to come forward and dilute its shareholding to pave the way for the merger.
Chakravarthy Narayan was in for a shock when he went for a meeting with the human resources manager at an IT (information technology) services company last month. A day ago, a conversation at his office had veered around how resources could be rationalised. As a programme manager, Narayan managed around six teams but little did he realise that he was being let go.
As the generic medicines debate is catching on, Business Standard takes a look at the top brands in generic medicine in the country. Anti-diabetic drugs rule the top 20 list. Multinational (MNCs) also have a fair share in the list, with nine brands.
With plenty of discounts and exciting deals, Flipkart opens its day 2 of the 'Big10 Sale', which will go on until May 18. The second day of this huge sale will see a significant cut in the price of Apple products like iPhone 5S 16GB, which available at Rs 15,499, iPhone 7 and iWatch along with other electronics like laptops and desktops, TVs, tablets, smartwatches and other gadgets.
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Netflix, the worlds leading video-on-demand (VOD) service, proposes to set up a production facility in India, the companys management said in a recent analysts call, as the pressure to localise content grows in a market that has enormous potential for the VOD business.

Speaking to investors, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said, We are already building our production capabilities outside the United States. Today, we are filming local shows in 13 different countries, including India and Japan. We think, it is going to be a combination of big global interest in original programming, complemented with a growing number of local-language original series in each country.

During his maiden visit to India in March, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Reed Hastings spent time meeting media and entertainment chief executives here, besides catching up with Bollywood celebrities, to understand the content requirements of the domestic market.

Some tie-ups were announced such as the one with Shah Rukh Khans Red Chillies Entertainment, where the movie stars films would be exclusive to for the next three years. Beside, an English-and-Hindi-language adaptation of author Vikram Chandras book Sacred Games, Netflixs first original series in the country, is being produced in partnership with Anurag Kashyaps Phantom Films.

But, sector experts say with rival Amazon Prime Video upping the ante in India in terms of local productions, Netflix will have to do more if it has to sustain viewer interest in a competitive market. The Jeff-Bezos-led Amazon.com has already lined up as many as 18 original shows for Amazon Prime Video in India  all of which have hit the floor and are in various stages of production.

The investment on these original shows, the largest outside the US, is billed at Rs 500 crore, a quarter of the Rs 2,000-crore budget Amazon has set aside for its Prime Video service in the country, launched in December 2016.

In an earnings concall last month, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said India was an important investment area for the company and that it saw significant potential for its business in the country.

While Amazon spent $3 billion (or Rs 19,500 crore) in content production in 2016, Netflixs spending was $6 billion (or Rs 39,000 crore) for the same period. But, much of this was in countries such as the US, which is the worlds largest VOD market at $25 billion (or Rs 1.62 lakh crore). The global VOD market is pegged at $50 billion (or Rs 3.25 lakh crore) in size.

Though Amazon and Netflix have not indicated their overall content budgets for 2017, analysts estimate it will be double the amount spent by the two last year, as their attention shifts to international markets, where both have aggressively expanded in recent years.

At the above-mentioned analysts call, Netflix CEO Hastings said about Amazon: We do think about all of that (Amazons work) and their tremendous track record. On the other hand, they are doing great programming and they will continue to do that. But, the market is vast.
Xiaomi, which become Indias second largest smartphone manufacturer focusing only on the online market, is now trying to push offline sales. The move will be led by opening Mi Home stores, says Manu Jain, managing director, Xiaomi India, and will help the company reach its goal of $2 billion in revenue in 2017. Edited excerpts of an interview with Alnoor Peermohamed.

What investment has Xiaomi planned for setting up stores in India?

We are making significant investments, but more important than that is experience and profitability. Like all other businesses, we want Mi Home to be profitable.

Have you any target for store profitability?

There is no particular figure, but we want it to be as soon as possible. In the first year here we were making a lot of investments but the second year onwards, once we scaled up our business, we were able to easily make profits. Similarly for Mi Homes, we are willing to make a huge investment at the beginning, but once that is done we want to become profitable as soon as possible.

What is your expectation of offline sales? Will that proportion be similar to what you have in China?

In China everyone has already bought a smartphone, they are upgrading. India is still a predominantly first-time-buyer market. Not everything we do in China can be replicated in India, we customise our business strategies locally.

In China, around two-thirds of our sales is still online. In India, till about last year, only about 10% of our sales were offline. With us expanding to more third-party stores and opening Mi Homes we think we can push the pedal on the offline business. I would be very happy if offline sales make up around 25% by the end of this year.

That is still an inverse of Indias smartphone market today-- 30% online and 70% offline. In India one out of every three phones sold online is a Xiaomi phone. So if you remove Xiaomi, the share of offline to online smartphone sales will be 80:20. If you remove a few other online-exclusive brands that ratio will become 90:10. So we want 75-80% online this year. The share of offline will grow. In the next few years it could be 50-50, but not now.

Will offline margins be lower than online?

The cost of online operations is much lower than offline and hence our profit margins are higher online. But it is only a matter of time before we perfect our business model and ensure that our offline business is as cost efficient as our online business. We think we can achieve the same cost efficiencies, but this will not happen from day one, it will take us a few months to get it right.

Has this happened in China?

In China our efficiencies are comparable, they are not yet level but quite similar.

Stocks have been a problem for Xiaomi. What are you doing to solve this?

We are expanding our manufacturing base in India, but I cannot share the details now. Two-and-a-half years ago, we used to sell 10,000 phones a week, today that is close to 300,000 per week. But we still face out-of-stock situations, and the only way to get around this is to manufacture more phones. The one promise we are making is that at Mi Homes we will always have phones in stock.

Xiaomi had initially said it wanted to make profits from digital content rather than from hardware

We are working on that, it continues to be our philosophy. We sell phones because these are vehicles to deliver our operating system. When you make money from hardware, you make money only once.

If you go to our browser, which is one of the most popular in the country, the advertisements you see are monetised. We did $1 billion in revenue last year and a small portion of that was our MiUi revenue. This will continue to grow and is hugely profitable.
Sale of a company often leaves employees high and dry, but not in the case of Snapdeal that may offer a Rs 193 crore bonanza to its staff if the homegrown e-commerce firm is taken over by larger rival Flipkart.

According to sources, if the deal goes through, the founders will give half of their payout ($30 million) for the proposed scheme which would cover all current employees of Snapdeal.

Snapdeal has about 1,500-2,000 staffers.

"The founders have asked the Board to carve out $30 million (about Rs 193 crore) from their settlement for payouts to the Snapdeal team. They want to ensure that the team does not get sidelined in any manner," they added.

Some former senior executives of Snapdeal, who have left the firm in the past 12 months, could also benefit from the process.

E-mails sent to Snapdeal did not elicit any response.

The intent is also to compensate for the ESOPs that were issued to senior employees.

The value of their shares and options have eroded and would be worthless once the deal is signed, one of them said.

Interestingly, the deal-linked payment would also be extended to employees who do not own ESOPs to reward those staying on with Snapdeal till the proposed transaction with Flipkart is complete.

If the deal goes through, Snapdeal founders will get $60 million (cumulative), of which half will be given to employees.

Japanese conglomerate and Snapdeal's largest investor SoftBank has initiated the process to sell the beleaguered online marketplace to bigger rival Flipkart.

It has managed to get Board members, which also includes the founders (Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal) and early investors Kalaari and Nexus Venture Partners, to agree to the potential deal.

Nexus Venture Partners could get close to $80 million and a stake in the merged or new entity, while Kalaari could get about $70-80 million.

According to regulatory filings, SoftBank currently owns over 30 per cent in Snapdeal, while Nexus has roughly a 10 per cent stake and Kalaari holds 8 per cent share in the firm.

A non-binding term sheet to start the due diligence by Flipkart for Snapdeal is expected to be signed soon between the two parties.

In the past few months, Snapdeal has seen a number of voluntary and involuntary exits. While the company has hiked salaries by up to 15 per cent, employees are concerned about their future as the impending takeover looms ahead.

One of the leading contenders in the Indian e-commerce space, Snapdeal has seen its fortunes failing amid strong competition from US-based Amazon and Flipkart.

Compared to a valuation of about $6.5 billion in February 2016, the sale to Flipkart could see Snapdeal being valued at about $1 billion.

SoftBank had recently said it suffered a loss of $1 billion (Rs 6,500 crore) on its investment in Snapdeal during 2016-17, almost matching the money it put in the home-grown marketplace.

The deal between Snapdeal and Flipkart, if completed, would mark the biggest acquisition in the Indian e-commerce space and change the landscape of the sector that is witnessing intense competition among players.
As digitisation and automation become the new normal, information technology (IT) majors like Infosys, Cognizant and Tech Mahindra are seeing a spate of layoffs and this trend may continue for the next 1-2 years, say experts.



Pink slips are likely for jobs in manual testing, technology support, and system administration since these are increasingly going to be managed by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics process automation based systems.
In a bid to make India economically independent, Yoga guru Ramdev and his associate Acharya Balkrishna of the home-grown FMCG company, Patanjali Ayuveda, are now working on a unique renewable source of energy  Bull Power, reported the Economic Times on Monday.
The 'ransomware' cyberattack that has hit as many as 200,000 victims in over 150 countries should be treated by governments around the world as a "wake- up call", IT giant Microsoft has said.

The virus exploits a flaw in a version of Microsoft Windows first identified by US intelligence.

The attacks exploited the computers because they were running outdated versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system.

The National Security Agency (NSA) alerted Microsoft about the issue three months ago and Microsoft released an upgrade that patched the flaw, but many users were yet to run it, CNN reported.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said yesterday in a blog post that his company, its customers and the government all share the blame, the report said.

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call," Smith wrote while also noting how "cybersecurity has become a shared responsibility between tech and customers."



But he also blamed the governments. The security flaw that hackers used to launch the attacks on Friday was made public after information was stolen from the NSA, which routinely searches for flaws in software and builds tools to exploit them, the report said.

The government is not legally bound to notify at-risk . That's wrong, says Smith.

He argued there should be "a new requirement for governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them."



He said tech companies, customers and the government need to "work together" to protect against attacks.

"More action is needed, and it's needed now," he said.

The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.

The ransomware is a type of malicious software that infects a computer and restricts users' access to it until a ransom is paid to unlock it. It demands users pay USD 300 worth of cryptocurrency Bitcoin to retrieve their files, though it warns that the payment will be raised after a certain amount of time. The malware spreads through e-mail.
Ousted AIADMK leader T T V Dinakaran and his aide Mallikarjuna will be produced before a Delhi court on Monday after expiry of their judicial custody.

On May 1, Dinakaran and Mallikarjuna were sent to the judicial custody till May 15.

The Delhi Crime Branch earlier recovered Dinakaran's five bank accounts from Chennai, through which transactions of huge amount were carried out, after which the police sought for further remand of the ousted AIADMK leader.

As per sources, most of the amounts were paid to a Hawala Operator.

Dinakaran's Chartered Accountant was also called by the crime branch for questioning in the matter.

The crime branch officials also recovered mobile phone of alleged middleman Sukesh Chandrashekhar from Chennai and also found the details of communication between Chandrashekhar and Dinakaran.

Earlier on Friday, a Delhi Court sent Chandrashekhar to judicial custody till May 12.

Dinakaran had reportedly, through Chandrashekhar, sought the 'Two Leaves' symbol of the AIADMK by allegedly trying to bribe an Election Commission official.

The Crime Branch recovered approximately Rs. 1.3 crore and two luxury cars, a BMW and a Mercedes from Chandrashekhar.

Chandrasekhar was picked up from the Hyatt hotel and was produced at the residence of Special Judge Poonam Chaudhry, who allowed the Delhi Police's plea to interrogate the accused for eight days.

During his third day of interrogation by the Crime Branch of the Delhi Police yesterday, Dinakaran finally accepted that he met Chandrashekhar, the man alleged to be the middleman in his bribery dealing with the Election Commission.

Dinakaran, sources said, initially refused to have known Chandrashekhar.

He later accepted meeting him when Chandrashekhar himself gave the details of his meeting with the former.
India might have escaped the worst of WannaCry, the ransomware that affected Windows-based computer systems across the globe over the weekend, said experts on Monday. Industry, however, was on high alert to avert any attack.

The ransomware, first detected last Friday, locks down computers and demands a ransom to unlock the data stored in these systems. It had affected about 150 countries across the globe, with Russia and the UK being the worst affected. India, too, reported a number of cases of computers being locked down, including some computers of the Andhra Pradesh police.

The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said few incidents of the attack had been reported in the country. So far, the impact of this ransomware has been reported in England, Russia, Spain, Germany, USA, and some academic institutions in China. Very few reports come from our country, a CERT-In official said in a webcast on Monday.

The agency has issued advisories to organisations and individuals to protect themselves. Do not pay the ransom, it will encourage the attackers Report the incident to CERT-In and the local law enforcement agencies so that we can work on it, the official said.

Not everyone is convinced, though.

If you look at the heat map, India is among the most affected, said Balaji Venkateshwar, a cyber security researcher. Most of the worlds ATM networks run on Windows XP; India, too, could be affected.

Others said companies and the government should be more open in acknowledging cyber challenges and dealing with it.

In India, we are not talking openly about cyber security. Whenever there is a scare, people say let us get on a defensive mode, said Mishi Choudhary, director at Software Freedom Law Centre.

She added, When the ATMs were hacked last year, how long did they take to come out with the truth?

On Monday, banks, airlines, large information technology (IT) organisations and manufacturing companies across sectors issued advisories to employees to not open any unknown attachments and asked them to follow safe cyber practices.

Our IT department is in the process of updating all endpoints such as laptops and desktops with latest Windows patches. ICT has also initiated safe back-up of data. Antivirus is also being updated to cover the ransomware attack, an AirAsia India spokesperson said.

Hotels, too, had padded up to protect their systems.

Our security systems and software are being updated with recommended patches released from software development companies. Suspected emails, malicious websites and advertisements have been blocked at gateway and endpoint access through which attackers usually prompt users, said Ajai Kumar, chief information officer, Lemon Tree Hotels.

For the past 72 hours, about 2,000 techies at HCL Technologies have been glued to their computers, protecting clients from any attack. It is all hands on deck for the Noida-based tech major, which has formed crack teams of cyber security experts to protect data of hundreds of clients.

We have been working round the clock. Almost 200 cyber security experts are protecting servers. This will continue till the threat of this malware passes, said a senior executive at HCL Technologies.

The banking sector is relatively well protected from cyber attacks, said Suresh Rajagopalan, president, Software Products with FSS, a payments technology leader that handles ATM operations.

According to our interaction with the banks, they are protected, he said. A majority of the banks have beefed up their cyber security, especially after introducing mobile banking. But given the large network, especially of public sector banks, and their infrastructure in some remote places, it may not be possible for them to update all the antivirus patches and others on a day-to-day basis.

Banks, both private and public, said they had not detected any attack on their networks.

State Bank of India Chief Information Officer Mrutyunjay Mahapatra said the banks core system run on software that could not be corrupted easily from outside. ATMs work on the vulnerable Windows network, and the bank was updating systems with latest patches available from Microsoft to protect their systems.

We are also making sure that physical security around the ATMs is adequate so that sensitive entrance points are not compromised, he said, adding, It is not easy to transmit malware through ATM networks, as these are usually heavier than what the bandwidth is able to transmit.

Bankers said there was no specific advisory by the Reserve Bank of India or CERT-In. However, the central bank has a standard hygiene advisory: whenever there is a software update available, it has to be implemented.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) N, set up to provide IT infrastructure for the GST roll-out, will not be impacted by the attack, as its systems do not run on Microsoft software, the networks CEO Prakash Kumar said.

The GSTN is gearing up to handle about 3 billion invoices every month under the new indirect tax regime and will complete the beta testing of its software on Tuesday. Our software is not based on Microsoft Windows operating system and hence we are immune. We operate on Linux software which is not affected by the ransomware attack, Kumar told PTI.

Some experts sounded a note of hope.

I feel Russia and western Europe were the focus of the attack, said Saket Modi, founder of Lucideus, a digital security firm, adding, We have not seen a significant impact.
The fallout from an unprecedented global cyberattack which has hit more than 200,000 victims could worsen as people return to work, European and British policing and security agencies warned.

An international manhunt was under way for the plotters behind the world's biggest-ever computer ransom assault which has affected more than 150 countries.

The indiscriminate attack, which began Friday, struck banks, hospitals and government agencies, exploiting known vulnerabilities in old Microsoft computer operating systems.

US package delivery giant FedEx, European car factories, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, Britain's health service and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network were among those hit.

Europol executive director Rob Wainwright said the situation could worsen on Monday when workers return to their offices after the weekend and log on.

"We've never seen anything like this," the head of the European Union's policing agency told Britain's ITV television, calling its reach "unprecedented".

Wainwright described the cyberattack as an "escalating threat".

"I'm worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn on their machines on Monday," he said.

The warning was echoed by Britain's Cyber Security Centre: "As a new working week begins it is likely, in the UK and elsewhere, that further cases of ransomware may come to light, possibly at a significant scale."

The 5,500-strong Renault factory in Douai, northern France, one of the most important car plants in the country, will not open on Monday due to the attack, sources told AFP.

Images appear on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the locked files will be deleted, according to the screen message.

Bitcoin, the world's most-used virtual currency, allows anonymous transactions via heavily encrypted codes.

Experts and governments alike warn against ceding to the demands and Wainwright said few victims so far had been paying up.

On Sunday, security firm Digital Shadows said that transactions totalling $32,000 had taken place through Bitcoin addresses used by the ransomware.

The culprits used a digital code believed to have been developed by the US Security Agency -- and subsequently leaked as part of a document dump, according to researchers at the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.
Two suspected Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militants, believed to have been involved in a suicide attack on an army camp in Panzgam last month, were gunned down by the security forces in north Kashmir's Kupwara district on Sunday.

"Acting on specific information about the presence of militants in Waripora area of Handwara, police along with '21 Rashtriya Rifles' launched a search operation. During the operation, militants present in the area fired upon the search party.

"The fire was retaliated and in the ensuing encounter, two militants were killed," a police spokesman said here.

He claimed the militants were affiliated with LeT adding that their identity was being ascertained.

Two AK-47 rifles, two pistols, four AK magazines, two pistol magazines, two grenades and some more articles including maps and cash, were recovered from the encounter site, the spokesman said.

Speaking to reporters after the encounter, Commanding Officer of 21 RR, Kuldeep Matoo, said the militants were involved in the 'fidayeen' (suicide) attack on an army camp in Panzgam area of Kupwara on April 27 in which three soldiers, including an officer, were killed.

"We have found a yet to heal grazed wound on one of the eliminated terrorists which is indicative of a likely involvement of these two terrorists in the Panzgam suicide attack. We have found some other evidence also among the war- like stores, confirming their involvement in the Panzgam incident," Matoo said.
Sacked AAP Minister Kapil Mishra on a hunger strike against Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal and Health Minister Satyender Jain, in New Delhi on Wednesday. (Photo: Dalip Kumar)

Sacked Delhi minister Kapil Mishra's indefinite fast against the AAP on Saturday saw high drama with a ruling party legislator attempting a counter fast outside the former's house, but was detained by police.

Sanjeev Jha, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislator from Burari, attempted to hold a counter hunger strike outside Mishra's Civil Lines house to demand that he present proof of his bribery allegations against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Jha was detained by the police, who said the legislator did not have the requisite permission.

Mishra, who began his hunger strike on Wednesday, accused Kejriwal of using Jha as a pawn to disrupt his agitation. He insisted that he will present proof of his allegations only to investigative agencies.

He is on fast demanding that Kejriwal reveal the source of funding of the foreign trips of five AAP leaders - Sanjay Singh, Ashish Khetan, Satyendar Jain, Raghav Chadhha and Durgesh Pathak - in the last two years.

"I would like to advise Jha against sitting on a hunger strike as he is being used as a pawn," said Mishra, and alleged that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will resort to "new drama" to distract attention from the "foreign trips controversy".

"They must know that I will handover the evidence only to investigative agencies. But Kejriwal wants that I hand them over to the 'thief' who then will judge himself and then proclaim himself to be innocent (referring to Kejriwal). That is not going to happen," he asserted.

AAP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia dubbed Mishra's hunger strike as "BJP facilitated".

Mishra declared that Kejriwal's attempts to foil his "Satyagraha" will not be successful.

Mishra alleged that the Chief Minister has asked "at least 20" MLAs to launch hunger strikes to counter him "but only one (Jha) was willing".

He said that Jha should be provided security, alleging that there could be an attack on Jha to portray Mishra in bad light.

"I would urge the police to provide security to Jha. Those who can attack me can go to any extent to prove me wrong," said Mishra, who was hit by a man on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a team of doctors examined Mishra and advised immediate hospitalisation, but he refused.

"He needs immediate hospitalisation but has refused to do so. We have asked him to drink more water," said a doctor.

Mishra on Friday too had refused hospitalisation despite his weakening condition. Mishra said he will drink only water during his fast.

Jha has accused Mishra of "lying" and declared he will join the agitation if he can prove his allegation of having seen Health Minister Satyendar Jain handing over Rs 2 crore to Kejriwal at his residence.

"If Mishra can prove his allegations to be true, I will myself join him in demanding Kejriwal's resignation as the Chief Minister," Jha told the media.

He also wrote a letter demanding to know when and how did he go to Kejriwal's residence when he saw the Chief Minister being handed over the cash.

"It has been six days that you levelled the allegation, but have not presented any proof. Rather you have been changing your statements. It proves that you have been lying," Jha said in the letter which was uploaded on social media sites.

Mishra in his reply, said he has the evidence and will hand them only to probe agencies.

Sisodia said the fact that police refused to let Jha hold a counter agitation goes to prove that the Bharatiya Janata Party was behind Mishra's hunger strike.

"Police have not allowed Jha's hunger strike, which he wanted to launch demanding proof of Mishra's allegations. It is evident that (his) Mishra's hunger strike is being facilitated by the BJP," Sisodia told the media.
The terrible situation in the Kashmir valley and its continuing deterioration has been much commented on in both the state and national media, but with little impact on government policy. There is still no peace process, nor talks with dissidents; administration is feebler than ever and political leadership is yawningly absent. Meanwhile more and more youth are taking to the streets, including girls and protests have spread across urban and rural south Kashmir. Though confrontation between stone-pelters and security forces has reduced somewhat, both continue to be injured. Pandit transit colonies have been targeted. Armed attacks on security forces are growing and there have been a spate of bank robberies. Most recently five policemen and a young army officer were brutally murdered by militants, and Zakir Bhat of the Hizbul Mujahedeen, the successor to Burhan Wani, warned the Hurriyat to accept that the Kashmir conflict is a religious and not political issue or face retribution.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will be holding public hearings in the Indian national on Monday.

The International Court of Justice on May 9 put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.

The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.

India earlier contended that it was not informed of Jadhav's detention until long after his arrest and that Pakistan failed to inform the accused of his rights, an official release from the ICJ said.

India further said that, in violation of the Vienna Convention, the authorities of Pakistan were denying it its right of consular access to Jadhav, despite its repeated requests. It's also pointed out that India learned about the "death sentence against Jadhav from a press release."

India submitted that it had information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy, and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan" on March 3, 2016, and that the Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on March 25, 2016.

India also asked the ICJ to declare the decision illegal being violative of international law and treaty rights and restrain Pakistan from acting in violation of the Vienna Convention and international law by giving effect to the sentence or the conviction in any manner, and directing it to release the convicted Indian National forthwith, if Pakistan is unable to annul the decision.

Pakistan had claimed that Jadhav was arrested from the Baluchistan province last year. A military court sentenced him to death, alleging he was involved in espionage and anti-national activities. Pakistan also claimed that he was "a serving officer in the Indian Navy."

India out rightly denied the claims, saying Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was running a business, and adding he was a retired Navy officer.

Pakistan has turned down 16 requests from India for consular access to Jadhav.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) last month for his alleged involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.

On Monday, the ICJ, which is the UN's principal judicial organ, is holding a public hearing at the Great Hall of Justice housed in the Peace Palace at The Hague in Netherlands where the two countries will be asked to present their case over the contentious Jadhav issue.

India on May 8 moved a petition before the UN Body to seek justice for Kulbhushan Jadhav, 46, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan after its 16 requests for consular access to the former naval officer was consistently denied.

A Pakistani military court awarded death sentence to Jadhav last month for alleged espionage and subversive activities. Pakistan has also not responded to the request for visas applied by Jadhav's family. Jadhav was arrested on March 3 last year.

The previous case related to shooting down of Pakistan's maritime reconnaissance aircraft Atlantique by the Indian Air Force(IAF) in the Kutch region on August 10, 1999, killing all 16 naval personnel on board. Pakistan claimed the plane was brought down in its air space and sought 60 million USD in damages from India for the incident.

A 16-judge bench of the court on June 21, 2000 voted 14-2 to dismiss Pakistan's claim. The decision was announced by bench president Gilbert Guillaume of France at a public sitting. The verdict was final and there was no appeal.

The ICJ found that it has no jurisdiction to entertain the application filed by Pakistan on September 21, 1999.

Public hearings in the case titled 'Aerial incident of August 10, 1999 (Pakistan vs India)' lasted four days ending April 6, 2000. Arguments centred on the court's jurisdiction in the case which had to be determined before its merits could be considered by the 16 judges.

The Atlantique case was ousted by the ICJ on the issue of jurisdiction and not on merits. Both parties had agreed that the question of jurisdiction would be decided first and only then would the issue of merits be taken up.

Guillaume said the court would first have to decide whether it had the jurisdiction to go into the case as contended by New Delhi after the Indian delegation led by the then Attorney General Soli Sorabjee, raised preliminary objections to its jurisdiction.

Pakistan opened the first round of oral arguments, India replying them, and then Pakistan following with its second round, with India making its response thereto.

India argued that the court did not have jurisdiction in the matter, citing an exemption it had filed way back in 1974 to exclude disputes between India and other Commonwealth states, and disputes covered by multilateral treaties.

Sorabjee told the court that Pakistan was "solely responsible" for the incident and Islamabad must "bear the consequences of its own acts."

Pakistan's Attorney General Aziz Munshi had sought a speedy resolution, saying its application had to be concluded quickly so that it did not remain an irritant in Indo-Pak relations.

Pakistan had also sought to politicise the case by referring to the Kashmir issue, the Kargil conflict, Indo-Pak relations and alleged motives for the shooting.

Pakistan wanted the court to intervene while India was opposed to its assumption of jurisdiction on the basis of Islamabad's application.

It urged the court to "dismiss the objections raised by India and accept its jurisdiction." India maintained that none of Pakistan's arguments is 'sound' and does not provide a basis for invoking the court's jurisdiction.

Sorabjee expressed happiness with the court's verdict. "We are very happy. The court has accepted all our contentions," he had said.

Former supreme court judge B P Jeevan Reddy and Pakistan's former Attorney General Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada were co-opted into the bench as ad-hoc judges.

As per ICJ rules, when it does not include a judge possessing the nationality of the state party to a case, the state may appoint a person to sit as a judge ad-hoc for the purpose of the case.

The court also recalled that its lack of jurisdiction does not relieve States of their obligation to settle their disputes by peaceful means.

The choice of those means admittedly rests with the parties under Article 33 of the UN Charter, it said, adding, they are nonetheless under an obligation to seek such a settlement, and to do so in good faith in accordance with the Charter.

As regards India and Pakistan, that obligation was restated more particularly in the Simla Accord of July 2, 1972. Moreover, the Lahore Declaration of 21 February, 1999 reiterated "the determination of both countries to implementing the Simla Agreement," it said.

Accordingly, the court reminded the parties of their obligation to settle their disputes by peaceful means, and in particular the dispute arising out of the Atlantique incident in conformity with the obligations which they have undertaken.

India's External Affairs Ministry while hailing the verdict especially welcomed the court's positive observations on the principles enunciated in the Simla agreement and Lahore Declaration as the basis for an Indo-Pak rapprochement.

Through its comments, the court has vindicated India's stand on these landmark agreements that are the very cornerstone of India-Pakistan relations, a ministry spokesman had said.
Pakistans latest declaration limiting the circumstances under which it will subject itself to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will have no bearing on the Kulbhushan Jadhav consular access matter that India has raised before the world court, say legal experts.
India fears that Kulbhushan Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before its arguments are heard, India's attorney Harish Salve said at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) today.

The Indian national, who had been arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death on allegations of espionage and subversive activities, had been framed on the basis of confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody, Salve added.

As the ICJ began hearing Jadhav's case, India argued that human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan.

We want appropriate legal representation for Jadhav, India told the UN's main judicial body which has stayed his death sentence.

New Delhi has called for immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

All requests for consular access to 46-year-old Jadhav had fallen on "deaf ears", it said.

The present situation, Salve said before the court, was grave and that is why India had sought its indulgence. He described Jadhav's trial process as "farcical" and stressed that Pakistan did not respond to Jadhav's mother's plea to see her son.

India is presenting its case first, followed by Pakistan later in the day. Both sides will get 90 minutes each to argue their case.

India may avail a "short extension" to present its case, the judge said in his opening remarks.

India had appealed against the death sentence on May 8 alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan. On May 9, ICJ gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

The ICJ was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.
With the Pakistan government admitting that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief Hafiz Saeed is involved in terrorist activities, noted Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam on Monday frowned over the development saying it could be a part of Islamabad's conspiracy to get into the good books of United States and the United Nations.

"I doubt it to be a conspiracy of Pakistan. If they won't provide details about the Mumbai attack, then Saeed would be revealed and then Pakistan could claim that they arrested Saeed, but no evidence was found against him. They are just trying to portray themselves as good in front of the United Nations and America," Nikam told ANI.

Highlighting his skepticism over the move, he asked that if Pakistan believes that Saeed supports terrorism, then why haven't they filed a complaint against him and have not revealed the areas where his organization is promoting terrorism.

Earlier on Sunday, Pakistan government admitted that Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed is involved in terrorist activities and was spreading terrorism in the name of jihad.

Its interior ministry told a Federal Review Board, which was formed to review the detention of Saeed and four of his aides under an anti-terror Act, countered the Lashkar chief 's claim that he was being prevented from raising the Kashmir issue.

As per reports, the Pakistani government informed the review board that, "The government detained the Jamaat-ud-Dawa leaders on pressure of United Nations (sic) and international organisations."

On January 28, the Punjab government had placed names of Hafiz Saeed, Abdullah Ubaid (Faisalabad), Malik Zafar Iqbal Shahbaz (Markaz Tayyaba Muridke), Abdul Rehman Abid (Markaz Tayyaba Muridke) and Qazi Kashif Hussain of Multan in fourth schedule of Anti Terrorism Act. On February 30, they were put under house arrest for 90 days.

Earlier, the interior ministry had given recommendation to the Punjab government and intimated it that Jamatud Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation were engaged in certain activities which could be prejudicial to peace and security.
Appealing to the youth of Kashmir to question those who instigate them to join the "so-called freedom struggle", Union minister Jitendra Singh on Sunday hit out at the separatists, saying if stone-pelting is a "holy task" then they should make their own children pelt stones and risk their lives.

Singh rejected separatists as being stakeholders in Kashmir and said that real stakeholders are the state's youth below the age of 40 who constitute 65 per cent of its population.

"I have made this appeal to youth of Kashmir that time has come for you (youth of valley) to raise this question-mark on those (separatists), who instigate you to join this so- called freedom struggle," Singh told reporters.

The minister said, "If they (separatists and others) feel that this struggle of stone-pelting is so holy and a holy task, they should set an example of sparing one child from their own family to become a stone-pelter or lay down his life. This duplicity is not going to work now".

"Kashmiri youth has rejected this duplicity. That is why, 66,000 youth came out for seeking government jobs yesterday despite hostile circumstances. Hurriyat today stand exposed," he said.

"We have 65 per cent of youth below the age of 40 years. So the real stakeholders of Kashmir are the youth. Those who keep complaining that government is not holding talks, have got their minds fixed on two or three names and those names have already lost their relevance," he said in an apparent reference to Hurriyat leaders.

Singh said, "many of the separatist leaders are now losing their credibility for the fact that they stand totally exposed. You cannot have your children lodged in safe havens of Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi or abroad. You cannot go after government jobs for your children and then ask your neighbour's children to become stone pelters".

"Regardless of all that is happening, I have confidence that things are going to turn for the better sooner rather than later," he said to a question on the situation in Kashmir.

"The evidence of this is in the fact that inspite of such hostile circumstances, yesterday itself, youth in a huge number of more than 65,000 came out to try their luck for the post of police sub-inspector when the number of posts were just 700," he said.

Singh said the youth of Kashmir want to be part of the development journey of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"So this itself is an indication and evidence of the fact that the youth of Kashmir want to be part of mainstream India and all want to be part of the development journey led by Prime Minister Modi".

"Youth of Kashmir also realise their stake of being part of Modi's development agenda. They are also conscious of the fact when youth in other states are taking benefit of schemes initiated by Modi, the youth of Kashmir must not be left out. They are serious and conscious about it," he said.

Asked about militant leader Zakir Musa's recent comment on "Islamisation" of Kashmir, he said that as far as Islamisation is concerned, it is a universal phenomenon.

"Kashmir being vulnerable territory and having majority population of Islam, is sought to be used by certain elements to carry forward this agenda. But the saving grace is that Kashmir has been traditionally known for a composite culture. It is this tradition that is resisting any such attempt of Islamisation," he said.

On the government holding talks with stakeholders, Singh said talks and engagement with stakeholders are already on.
As the impact of the worst northeast monsoon in 140 years unfolds across Tamil Nadu, farmers sowed a third less land than they did in 2015-16, water levels in six major reservoirs continued to plunge, and suicides in the farm sector increased over five years.

In the midst of this agrarian turmoil in a state that produced 5.6% of Indias rice in 2014-15, the agriculture ministry has predicted a record national harvest.
In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, and countries' leaders and delegates attending the Belt and Road Forum pose for a group photo on stage at the China National Convention Center in Beijing (Photo: AP/P

As India on Sunday skipped China's Belt and Road forum to oppose the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Islamabad and Beijing vowed to conclude the contentious economic route.

While opening the two-day Summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping said "all countries should respect sovereignty" and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said CPEC had no "geographical boundaries".

In a veiled reference to India, which is dead against the CPEC as it goes through Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, Sharif said the issues of CPEC "must not be politicised".

In addition, Xi pledged about additional $14 billion for the construction of the Belt and Road project, of which CPEC is the chief component.

The grand project aims to connect Asia, Europe and Africa through a network of roads, sea links and railway lines.

New Delhi, which had been non-committal about attending the forum despite repeated offers by Beijing, made its intentions clear about skipping the event.

"No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity," India's External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay said on Saturday.

The CPEC has emerged as a thorny issue between India and China, whose ties have been under strain over issues including Beijing blocking New Delhi's bid for the Nuclear Suppliers Group and Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama's visit to Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India.

India's absence at the summit will certainly not be liked by Beijing, which was keen on New Delhi joining the connectivity event.

India claims Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and says allowing a road to be laid through the region will compromise its sovereignty.

However, China is continuously pushing for the corridor, which will give it access to the Arabian Sea.

"All countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major concerns," Xi said on Sunday.

The summit was attended by leaders of 29 countries and delegation of over 100 countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the prominent heads of state.

Sharif, who heaped praises on the project, said the CPEC was open to all the regional countries.

"Let me make it very clear that CPEC is an economic undertaking open to all countries in the region. It has no geographical boundaries. It must not be politicized," he said here on the opening day of the event.

Sharif said the Belt and Road "rejected the encirclement for any country. It is about connectivity. It is about emancipation.

" belongs to all of us, those who are participating and those who are not as yet."

Of the six corridors of Belt and Road, to New Delhi's interest is the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar route.
As part of precautionary measures, banks did not operate some automated teller machines (ATMs) running on old software in view of threat from ransomware 'WannaCry'.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked banks to follow the instructions of government organisation CERT-In on ransomware, which has impacted various IT networks in over 150 countries.

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has come out with a list of dos and dont's and webcast on how to protect networks from the global ransomware attack.

Most ATMs were running fine, there could be some which may not have updated Microsoft's Windows operating system, sources said.

Such ATMs could be prone to attack so as precautionary measure banks running such ATMs refrained from feeding cash, sources added.

However, there was no official information in this regard from the RBI in this connection till late evening.

There are a total of 2.2 lakh ATMs in India, of which few may be running on old Windows XP.

In a separate malware attack last year, 3.2 lakh debit cards were compromised in the country. Data of the users who transacted from ATM machines of Hitachi were compromised during three months of May, June and July last year. The Hitachi ATMs deployed by many White Label ATM players and Yes Bank were impacted by the malware.
The cyberattack that spread malicious software around the world, shutting down networks at hospitals, banks and government agencies, was thwarted by a young British researcher and an inexpensive domain registration, with help from another 20-something security engineer in the US.

Britain's National Cyber Security Center and others were hailing the cybersecurity researcher, a 22-year-old identified online only as MalwareTech, who unintentionally at first discovered a so-called "kill switch" that halted the unprecedented outbreak.

By then the "ransomware" attack had crippled Britain's hospital network and computer systems in several countries in an effort to extort money from computer users.

But the researcher's actions may have saved companies and governments millions of dollars and slowed the outbreak before computers in the US were more widely affected.

MalwareTech, who works for cybersecurity firm Kryptos Logic, is part of a large global cybersecurity community who are constantly watching for attacks and working together to stop or prevent them, often sharing information via Twitter.

It's not uncommon for them to use aliases, either to protect themselves from retaliatory attacks or for privacy.

In a blog post yesterday, MalwareTech explained he learned on Friday that networks across Britain's health system had been hit by ransomware, tipping him off that "this was something big."



He began analysing a sample of the malicious software and noticed its code included a hidden web address that wasn't registered. He said he "promptly" registered the domain, something he regularly does to try to discover ways to track or stop malicious software.

Across an ocean, Darien Huss, a 28-year-old research engineer for the cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, was doing his own analysis. The western Michigan resident said he noticed the authors of the malware had left in a feature known as a kill switch. Huss took a screen shot of his discovery and shared it on Twitter.

Soon he and MalwareTech were communicating about what they'd found: That registering the domain name and redirecting the attacks to the server of Kryptos Logic had activated the kill switch, halting the ransomware's infections.

Huss and others were calling MalwareTech a hero today, with Huss adding that the global cybersecurity community was working "as a team" to stop the infections from spreading. "The 'hero' is a bit strong," MalwareTech said Sunday. "I sort of did what I could."



Both said they were concerned the authors of the malware could re-release it without a kill switch or with a better one, or that copycats could mimic the attack.

"I think it is concerning that we could definitely see a similar attack occur, maybe in the next 24 to 48 hours or maybe in the next week or two," Huss said. "It could be very possible."



Who perpetrated this wave of attacks remains unknown.

This is already believed to be the biggest online extortion attack ever recorded, disrupting services in nations as diverse as the US, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Spain and India.

Europol, Europe's policing agency, called the attack unprecedented and said computers in more than 150 countries have been affected. Two security firms, Kaspersky Lab and Avast, said Russia was hit hardest.

These hackers "have caused enormous amounts of disruption- probably the biggest ransomware cyberattack in history," said Graham Cluley, a veteran of the anti-virus industry in Oxford, England.

In Russia, government agencies insisted that all attacks had been resolved. Russian Interior Ministry, which runs the national police, said the problem had been "localized" with no information compromised. Russia's health ministry said its attacks were "effectively repelled."



The ransomware exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was purportedly identified by the US National Security Agency for its own intelligence-gathering purposes. Hackers said they stole the tools from the NSA and dumped them on the internet.
In the wake of a worldwide cyber attack using ransomware that encrypts Windows systems, cyber security experts say India might see a larger impact on safety and more computers infected when offices open on Monday morning after the weekend break.
Prime Minister on Sunday said social entrepreneurs can benefit from Swachh Bharat programme as it has huge business element, while stressing on the need to convert waste into wealth.

A large number of youth, in the role of social entrepreneurs, are coming forward to partake in Swachh Bharat, he said.

The Swachh Bharat mission provides opportunities for a large number of social entrepreneurs to emerge, Modi said.

"Waste to wealth is a belief that is gaining momentum. Lot of social entrepreneurship is being devoted towards this," Modi said while speaking at the commemoration of 90 years of Essel Group here.

The prime minister further said, "If we consider waste as waste, then we have lost our precious possession."



He said there is a crisis of natural resources shortage and it can be tackled in a scientific manner with proper management and judicious usage.

The prime minister also said entrepreneurship has been inherent part of Indian system that has been passed on from one generation to another.

Modi highlighted the importance of family values in India, saying it is the biggest gift to the world.

"Today, even in the most advanced countries, revival of family values have become a part of election manifesto," the prime minister said.
West Bengal's finance minister, Amit Mitra, may skip the meeting called by union finance minister Arun Jaitley in New Delhi on May 18, on grounds of ill health.

"I had viral fever and till recently was barely able to speak because of a sore throat. If my health permits, I will attend the meeting", Mitra said here on the sidelines of a meeting with industry officials.
India will continue to oppose talks on a proposed investment facilitation agreement at the World Trade Organization (WTO), senior government sources say.

A demand to put the topic on the official agenda for the December ministerial conference in Argentina was opposed by India earlier this week. The government feels allowing such a discussion at WTO would be akin to handing over policy space to decide on things such as the foreign direct investment norms and arbitration clauses.

Things like investment facilitation and arbitration are bilateral and should remain so, a senior official said, under condition of anonymity. To bring anything like this on the table should require the unanimous support of members, he added.

With the December meet coming nearer, negotiations are heating up on the topics to be discussed. Once the official agenda is framed, nations are bound by WTO norms to discuss those and not introduce newer ones.

With only seven months left, we dont have enough time or capital to deal with another issue. Instead, the issue of food stockpiling, which has a deadline till December, should be focused on. A lot of work remains to be done, the official added.

Last week, a total of five proposals on the subject of investment facilitation was placed before the WTOs General Council, its highest decision-making body, for addition to the official agenda. The countries asking for this are Argentina, Brazil, China, Pakistan, Russia and a grouping of Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey and Australia.

India, supported by Uganda, Ecuador, Bolivia and some other countries, asked General Council chair Xavier Carim to take it off the agenda. Thereafter, informal discussions on the issue had started.

While the scope of each of these proposals vary, they are loosely based on the G20 Leaders communique on investment, announced in 2016 at the Hangzhou Summit, senior government sources from one of these nations told Business Standard. The document itself pushes for global investment policy making and rejects protectionism on trade and investment in all forms. Indias stance is being seen as a form of protectionism, one of them added.

The Government of India has challenged the legality of such a discussion, citing legal precedents such as the Marrakech agreement of 1994. The Doha Work Programme from 2004 has also given the issue a miss, it has said.

A multilateral agreement on investment will severely hinder the right to regulate investment in strategic sectors like defence and power, another official added.

A similar draft on investment facilitation, proposed by Germany at a G20 technical experts meeting in Berlin earlier this month, was opposed by India along with the delegations of America and South Africa, he added.

Indias push for a proposal on trade facilitation in services has met with some resistance from other nations.

The government has hinted that it is willing to take genuine concerns on board. While African nations have suggested the proposal is too broad for a meaningful discussion, traditional rivals on the issue like America, the European Union, Canada and Australia have expressed sharp concern.
Shri Rajnath Singh inaugurates second meeting of National Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction Theme of the meeting is Disaster Risk Reduction for Sustainable Development: Making India resilient by 2030"

The Union Home Minister Shri Rajnath Singh inaugurated the two-day second meeting of National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (NPDRR) here today. The theme of the Second meeting of NPDRR is Disaster Risk Reduction for Sustainable Development: Making India resilient by 2030. The Union Minister for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Shri Kiren Rijiju and Additional Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Dr. P. K. Mishra were also present on the occasion. The NPDRR is a multi-stakeholders National Platform headed by the Union Home Minister and it promotes participatory decision making in disaster management, and strengthens federal policy of our country. Speaking on the occasion, Shri Rajnath Singh said that NPDRR is a multi-stakeholders National Platform for sharing the experiences in disaster management and for making a collective effort for disaster risk reduction. He emphasized the role of prevention and mitigation in reducing disaster losses. He pointed out that 1 extra Rupee spent on disaster preparedness and mitigation could save 10 Rupees of disaster loss. He recollected global agreements like Sendai Framework, Sustainable Development Goal and Paris Agreement on Climate Change (COP21) for disaster risk reduction. He highlighted the ongoing efforts of Governments in disaster risk reduction like preparation of disaster management plan and policy, development of early warning systems, construction of cyclone shelters and saline embankments, raising of disaster response forces at national and state levels and capacity building of communities through continuous training and awareness programme.

Shri Rajnath Singh also shared the recent initiatives of Government of India for increasing the regional co-operation, like launching of dedicated satellite for South Asian Countries, Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR) 2016 and setting up of SAARC disaster management centre. He appealed to the stakeholders to prevent preventable death caused by disasters and also prepare an action plan for vulnerable communities of societies. As sustainable developments are closely related with better disaster management, he urged all stakeholders to make all development initiatives disaster resilient. He informed that 14 pre-events were organized as build up to this meeting.

Shri Kiren Rijiju, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, informed that India is a disaster prone country and stressed the need to continuously enhance our preparedness and risk reduction measures.

He referred to 10 point-agenda for disaster risk reduction given by our Prime Minister during AMCDRR 2016 and urged the participants to draw concrete plans to implement this agenda into reality. He requested the disaster managers to give proper consideration to geo-physical condition of the particular State/UTs, while making any action plan for disaster risk reduction.

Shri R. K. Jain, Member, National Disaster Management Authority in his welcome address highlighted the achievements of Government of India in disaster risk reduction. A film emphasizing the theme that Disaster Management is Everybodys Business was screened. Further, version 3.0 of National Database on Emergency Management (NDEM) was launched by Shri Rajnath Singh. This version of 3.0 is device independent and browser independent and equipped with latest resource mapping tools and audio and video conference facilities. The Union Home Minister also chaired a Ministerial Session which was attended by the Union Minister of Women and Child Development Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Shri Radha Mohan Singh, Ministers of State for Home Affairs, Shri Hansraj Gangaram Ahir & Shri Kiren Rijiju and Ministers from states of Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. Prof Jagdish Mukhi, LG of Andaman and Nicobar Islands also participated. Shri Rajnath Singh informed that growing population, unplanned urbanization and climate change are the new challenges posing new disaster risks to the country. He emphasized the primary role of States and Union Territories in disaster management and urged them to equip themselves for facing these new disaster risks. He lauded the initiatives and preparedness of States. He appealed to all the State/UTs to continuously upgrade their preparedness and plan for making the country disaster resilient. While stressing the need for political commitment, he emphasized the need for bilateral and regional cooperation among the States, Union Territories and Central Government. Ministers from Union and States highlighted their initiatives in disaster risk reduction and endorsed their commitment to make the country disaster resilient by 2030 in line with the Prime Ministers 10 point Agenda.

Besides opening and Ministerial sessions, this NPDRR meeting will have one Plenary Session, one session on outcomes of pre-events, four technical sessions on four priority areas of Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, one technical session on monitoring of Sendai Framework and a closing cum valedictory session. Along the meeting, innovative ideas by start-ups in disaster management and best practices in disaster management by the States are displayed in the exhibition area.

The meeting is being attended by over 1000 distinguished guests including State Ministers, Parliamentarians, Heads of Local Self Government, Heads of specialized disaster management agencies, academicians, representatives from private sector organizations, media and civil society organizations.
The European Union (EU) will hold high-level talks with the United States in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss a possible US airline ban on carry-on computers.

The US Department of Homeland Security sparked deep concern in Europe last week when it said it would soon decide on extending to European airlines a ban on eight mostly Muslim countries.

"The commission will host high-level talks at the political and technical level with the US authorities this Wednesday afternoon in order to jointly assess any new threats and work toward a common approach to address them," European Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said at a press conference on Monday.

Schinas said Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos and Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc took part in a conference call Friday with Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to discuss the possible laptop ban.

But he could not say whether Kelly would attend the talks Wednesday.

A US ban on now ubiquitous laptops could cause havoc, with more than 3,250 flights a week scheduled to leave EU airports for the US this summer, according to industry data.

Some experts also say there is a security risk in putting them with checked luggage given the danger of their batteries catching fire.

In March, Washington banned passengers from eight countries in North Africa and the Middle East from bringing laptop computers, tablets and other electronic devices larger than cellphones as carry-on items.

Britain followed with a similar ban applying to incoming flights from six Middle East and North African countries.

The move, which requires passengers to put the devices into checked baggage, came amid concerns that jihadist groups were devising bombs disguised as batteries in consumer electronics items.

A bomb that blew a hole in the fuselage of a Somali airliner in February 2016, killing one person, is believed to have been built into a laptop computer carried into the passenger cabin.
Italy's Atlantia bid 16.3 billion euros ($18 billion) for Spain's Abertis on Monday in an effort to create the world's biggest toll road operator with a market value of more than 36 billion euros.

While Atlantia said its cash-and share offer was friendly and the two have been in talks for weeks, Abertis said it would not respond until it is legally obliged to. It was not immediately clear whether the Spanish company's main shareholder, whose backing is crucial, was on board.

Both are trying to diversify away from their respective home markets and had already agreed a merger in 2006, but this fell through due to Italian government opposition.

Atlantia, which is controlled by the Benetton family, is keen on a tie-up with Abertis, which gets a third of its core earnings from France and has extensive operations in Latin America, to help it diversify away from low-growth Italy.

Abertis in turn needs to find new business opportunities as it faces the expiration of motorway concessions in Spain and a deal would allow the combined group to generate around 60 percent of core earnings outside Italy.

Criteria, which has a stake of 22.3 percent in Abertis, said in a statement it would carefully consider the offer, while a source close to the holding company said it and Abertis could take weeks or even months to give a response.

However, Atlantia's offer contains a number of sweeteners for the Spanish side and an Italian source told Reuters that the bid did have the backing of Criteria.

Atlantia's bid is structured as a cash offer of 16.5 euros per Abertis share - a touch above the Spanish stock's closing price on Friday but below the 17 euros per share Criteria asked for, according to sources.

The bid also includes the possibility for Criteria or other shareholders to opt for a payment in shares and sets a minimum acceptance level of the share offer at 10 percent.

BENETTON BIGGEST

Atlantia slides showed the Benetton family would be the top shareholder of the combined group with an estimated stake of 25.5 percent. The equity component of the offer, if accepted, would allow Criteria to own a stake in the combined group of around 15 percent, higher than previously expected.

Atlantia is also offering three board seats for Abertis's shareholders and said it would not delist the Spanish group from the Madrid stock exchange.

"Over the past few weeks we have worked to design a offer that is friendly ad attractive for all shareholders, stakeholders and the management of both companies," Atlantia's Chief executive Giovanni Castellucci said.

"We believe we have achieved this goal."

The share component of the offer envisages the issuance of n new Atlantia shares on the basis of a swap ratio of 0.697 Atlantia shares for each Abertis one.

Atlantia said its offer aimed to secure at least 50 percent plus 1 share of Abertis.

Credit Suisse and Mediobanca acted as financial advisers to Atlantia.

BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo have arranged a 14.7 billion euro financing package to fund the bid.
As the race to bring to the public intensifies, two of Silicon Valleys most prominent players are tying up.
Angela Merkels Christian Democratic Union has won a resounding victory in a regional election in Germanys most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW). The CDU is now in pole position to be the largest party when Germany next goes to the polls in September. But Merkel wont be taking anything for granted just yet.
Editors note: North Korea recently tested a ballistic missile that landed in the sea between North Korea and Japan. North Korean leaders claim to hold nuclear weapons capabilities that could reach the U.S., although other recent missile tests have cast doubt on those assertions.
jumped more than 2% to its highest in more than three weeks on Monday, topping $52 a barrel after Saudi Arabia and Russia said that supply cuts need to last into 2018, a step towards extending an Opec-led deal to support prices for longer than first agreed.
A recent escalation of violence in Pakistan inspired by reports of blasphemy online has highlighted the need for the countrys restrictive laws to be changed.
When Donald Trump wanted to do something about the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria, he had the U.S. Navy lob 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield (cost: $89 million). The strike was symbolic at best, as the Assad regime ran bombing missions from the same airfield the very next day, but it did underscore one thing: the immense costs of military action of just about any sort in our era.
A series of recent developments and actions coming out of the White House shows that there is a crisis of credibility with President Donald Trump, a top American Democratic Senator said on Sunday.

"There is a crisis of credibility with the president. I mean, so many things, I mean, there's so much factual fabrication, and then backsliding and contradiction," Senate Minority leader Charles Schumer told CNN.

Schumer asked Republicans in Congress to stop "choosing party over country at a time where we can ill afford it" and to stop saying things they know are "deliberately false" in a show of "loyalty" to President Trump.

"We need our Republican colleagues, not every day, but on the occasions when it's necessary, such as for a special prosecutor, such as what has happened in the last week, to speak out, because this is country. This is an issue of country, not party," he said.

"Our credibility, the credibility of the presidency with the American people, and of our country with the world, is rapidly eroding because of this crisis of credibility," Schumer said.

"The people in the White House have an obligation, if they know something is false, not to say it. I know they work for the president. They're supposed to be loyal, but they don't have to say things if they know that they're deliberately false," he said in response to a question.

With the Department of Justice in the process of interviewing candidates for the position of Director of FBI, Schumer said the candidate should be independent and non- partisan.

"The nominee should be not a partisan politician, not part of either party. This demands a serious, down-the-middle investigation. Second, it ought to be somebody who is experienced. You need a really good prosecutor here, somebody who knows how to do it," he said.

"It should be someone with courage. If there is interference or attempted interference to shut down the investigation, to misdirect it, you need somebody who is going to stand up. So, those are my three criteria. I'm not going to name any specific people, nor criticise or evaluate any people who have been named until they name somebody. But the criteria are pretty obvious," Schumer said.

Schumer also said he would support blocking the nomination of a new FBI director until a special prosecutor is appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

"There are a lot of Democrats who feel that way. We will have to discuss it as a caucus, but I would support that move, because who the FBI director is, is related to who the special prosecutor is," he said.
The Maharashtra government last week suspended the licences of 17 companies for sale of genetically modified (Bt) cotton seed, because samples of refugia or non-Bt hybrids, taken in May-July of 2016, have apparently shown the presence of Bt seed.
is locked in upper circuit for the second straight trading days at Rs 149, up 10% on BSE after the company said it has entered into a long term agreement with large private sector bank.
Arms in air and smile on their face, this is how scores of fans gather outside Jalsa every Sunday to greet one of Bollywood's greatest actors.

This time, there was a special fan for whom Amitabh Bachchan had 'the best wave and smile.'

It was his dearest daughter Shweta Nanda Bachchan.

The 'Shahenshah' of Bollywood shared an adorable picture on Instagram where he is seen flashing his best smile and waving for his daughter Shweta while he is outside his bungalow to greet the 'well wishers'.

"Sunday well wishers .. and the best wave and smile for the daughter SHWETA ..", the 'PINK' star captioned the picture.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Excise and Prohibition department on Sunday night seized huge amounts of illegal liquor near the Dhobi police station in Bihar.

Ever since the liquor ban has been imposed in Bihar, illegal alcohol is being seized regularly from different parts of state.

In a similar incident, a Bolero which was coming from Jharkhand to Bihar was stopped at the Dhobi police station check post.

450 litres of raw spirit was seized from the car.

"450 litres of liquor can be used in making 25000 bottles of country made liquor and would cost around 70-80 thousand," said Excise and Prohibition inspector.

There were two culprits in the car out of which one successfully fled from the spot where, the other got caught.

The Bihar Government had instituted a tough prohibition law this year to prevent consumption of liquor in the state. Starting April 1 this year, country-made liquor was banned. Then the ban was extended to Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Chinese President Xi Jinping said Monday a total of 68 countries and international organizations have signed One Belt and One Road (OBOR) cooperation agreements with China.

He said that OBOR is aimed at galvanizing global cooperation and is open to all.

President Xi made the remarks at the Leaders' Roundtable Summit of OBOR Forum for International Cooperation.

On the concluding day of the two-day One Belt and Road (OBOR) summit being held here, China said Monday that India will have a very "small role" to play should it ever decide to join the initiative in the future.

Describing India as the "onlooker", the Global Times said in its report that New Delhi appeared more anxious than the (actual) player.

It described as strange and a contradiction that India cares about its neighbours' debt burden, but those very neighbours appeared to be willing to take on more.

India, it said, would never succeed in stopping other neighbours from joining OBOR, or from seeking Chinese infrastructural assistance.

It may be recalled that India had on Saturday had issued a strongly-worded statement on the eve of the event.

"We are of the firm belief that connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality. Connectivity initiatives must follow principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities; balanced ecological and environmental protection and preservation standards; transparent assessment of project costs; and skill and technology transfer to help long term running and maintenance of the assets created by local communities. Connectivity projects must be pursued in a manner that respects sovereignty and territorial integrity," said the Ministry of External Affairs.

Confirming that India had received an invitation to participate in the six separate forums that China was organising as part of OBOR,

A spokesman said, "We have been urging China to engage in a meaningful dialogue. We are awaiting a positive response from the Chinese side."

Pointing out that enhancing physical connectivity should bring greater economic benefits to all in an equitable and balanced manner, he said, "We are working with many countries and international institutions in support of physical and digital connectivity in our own immediate and near neighbourhood."

Citing examples, the MEA spokesperson said that under the 'Act East' policy, India are pursuing the trilateral highway project; under the 'neighbourhood first' policy, we are developing multimodal linkages with Myanmar and Bangladesh; under 'Go West' strategy, we are engaging with Iran on Chabahar Port and with others in Central Asia on International North South Transport Corridor.

The two-day Belt and Road Forum is being attended by leaders from 29 countries, including Pakistan, has been boycotted by India due to sovereignty concerns over the USD 50 billion CPEC.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A day after a video surfaced where a man was being brutally beaten up by a group of cow vigilantes, Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Bhupendra Singh on Monday said that he has ordered an inquiry in the matter and will ensure justice is done in the case.

The MP Minister said that the guilty once caught, will be severally punished for their unwarranted deed.

"This is a serious incident. The moment I got to know about the incident I ordered an investigation in the matter. And once the investigation report comes, we will prosecute the guilty and se that justice is done," Singh said.

Cow vigilantes in Ujjain city of Madhya Pradesh brutally thrashed a man on the suspicion of him hurting a cow.

The incident took place on Saturday when a group of men claiming to be ' gau rakshaks' cornered a man and started beating him ruthlessly, accusing him of beating a cow.

The victim who sustained severe injuries after the incident was rushed to the nearby hospital.

The police took action after a video of the same incident went viral and registered a case against the miscreants.

Four people have been arrested while the others are on the run.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Berating the brutal gang-rapes that have sent shock waves to the nation, Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) on Monday urged the government to grant capital punishment to every rapist in every rape case.

DCW chief Swati Maliwal told ANI, "It is pretty harrowing to observe that in India a girl is raped in every single minute. It is high time that Indian government sends strong message to the nation by granting capital punishment to every rapist in every rape case."

"We need to slaughter the nerves of the rapists in order to put a full stop to the ever increasing rapes. This is only plausible, if the government makes swift legal moves with the help of fast track courts and reaches out to the verdict of capital punishment," Maliwal added.

The comments from the DCW chief come after a 22-year-old woman, hailing from Sikkim, was allegedly gang-raped by three men in a moving car in Gurugram.

She was attacked at around 2 a.m. when she was returning from Delhi to her residence.

The woman had gone to visit Connaught Place with her friend on Saturday night.

The incident comes days after a 23-year-old woman was brutally gang-raped, mutilated with sharp edged weapons and murdered in Haryana's Rohtak district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
US President Donald Trump waves before delivering keynote address at Liberty University's commencement in Lynchburg, Virginia, US, May 13, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is trying to determine how keeping his promise to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem could affect his hopes of brokering a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, his secretary of state said on Sunday.

Since taking office in January, Trump has shown signs of shelving his campaign pledge to move the embassy from Tel Aviv, while vowing to do what is necessary to clinch a Middle East peace agreement.

"The president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told NBC's "Meet the Press." He spoke just days before Trump starts a Middle East trip that includes meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal and indivisible capital and wants all foreign countries to base their embassies there. The relocation is strongly opposed by many US allies as the Palestinians also claim the city as their capital.

Tillerson said Trump's decision would depend greatly on how it is seen by governments in the region, including "whether Israel views it as being helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction."

His comments drew a quick response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Israel's position has been stated many times before to the American administration and the world," Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

"Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem will not harm the peace process, it will do the opposite. It will advance it by righting a historical wrong and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

Reuters
Commissioner Gurugram on Monday said that the police has registered the complaint of the 22-year-old victim who was allegedly gang-raped by three men in a moving car in Gurugram and have formed a SIT to investigate the matter.

Commissioner Gurugram Sandeep Khirwar said that the police has registered the case and will try to nab the accused as soon as possible.

"A woman who was living in Gurugram has registered a complaint, that on the intervening night of Friday while she was returning to her PG, few men dragged her and took her into a car, raped her and then left her in some area of Delhi," said Khirwar.

"We have registered a case and now are investigating the matter. We have constituted a SIT. We will try to nab the culprits as soon as possible. We are gathering the CCTV footage to find the absconders," he added.

Khirwar further said that the police is also trying to figure out about the lapse where it was not able to prevent the crime from happening.

"We are investigating the whole matter, and will also work to gauge the lapse from the side of the police," he said.

In yet another incident of sexual assault, a 22-year old woman belonging to the north-eastern state of Sikkim was allegedly gang-raped by three men in a moving car in Gurugram, and thrown out on a Delhi road later.

According to reports, at around 2 pm, as she neared her house, she was dragged by three men into their vehicle - a Swift car. They then took turns to rape her in the moving vehicle while heading to Najafgarh in the capital.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The evil of human trafficking swallowed another victim, as an innocent woman is battling for her life after being engulfed by false promises.

Gulam Hyder, husband of Rubeena Begum who was trafficked to Oman, registered a police complaint in Falaknuma Police Station under IPC section 420, against the agents who allegedly misled his wife.

Hyder informed ANI that his wife was offered a job for Rs. 80,000 for one month in Dubai.

Rubeena Begum departed for Dubai in February 2017. Post her arrival, Rubeena was redirected to Oman where she was tortured by her employer daily.

Hyder further alleges that his wife is facing sexual harassment and other physical tortures.

Hyder has formally requested the External Affair minister Sushma Swaraj to look into the matter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Expressing confidence in India after Pakistan on Monday presented its arguments before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the death sentence awarded to former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav by the Pakistani military court, defence expert Captain Anil Gaur said that today's argument has been very fruitful for India.

"India has demolished Pakistan's argument totally and has put four points in which it has said that at firstly the jurisdiction of ICJ is very much there because both India and Pakistan are the signatories of the Vienna Convention. Secondly, this matter is not a bilateral matter. Third is that no consular access, no proper intimation, no access of Jadhav to his council and others have been given. Fourthly whatever excites the security, that is not over and above the Vienna Convention," Gaur told ANI.

He added that Pakistan has not been able to give any justification in its claim towards giving death sentence to Jadhav except for the doctored video confession which was displayed on the television and that's all they had to show there.

"We should be successful in stopping the execution, letting Jadhav off the hook and allowing consular access to him by our Indian authorities, so that he can be given a fair trial. Whatever Pakistan is saying that Jadhav was a spy for the Indian agency, had been proved wrong by our arguments," he asserted.

Meanwhile, former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee said that India can counter Pakistan's argument of lack of jurisdiction by pointing out that actually the trial by the Pakistan military was like a kangaroo court.

"There is a question of lack of jurisdiction. Merit is a different thing, on merits India may lose but Indian may not lose by rising of the question that the ICJ has no jurisdiction to go into the matter. I think Pakistan has a weak case," he added.

He further said that the jurisdiction must be ousted by necessary implications which is not the case here.

"India has a strong case and we should succeed," Sorabjee added.

Pakistan while presenting its case at the ICJ on Jadhav matter claimed that "India has used this court as the scene of political theatre."

"India has used this court as the scene of political theatre. We will not respond in kind," Mohammad Faisal, DG south Asia and SAARC, said.

"India has been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name," Faisal added.

He also claimed that India's application on Kulbhushan Jadhav is unnecessary and misconceived.

There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistan's accusations on Jadhav, Pakistan's lawyer Khawar Qureshi said.

Qureshi also said that Jadhav has 150 days to appeal his sentence.

Meanwhile, the ICJ declined to play the alleged confessional video of Jadhav when Pakistan's offered it as evidence during the afternoon session of the court.

Expressing the fear that Jadhav might be executed before the hearing was over, India accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".

Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, India's lead attorney Harish Salve said.

The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhav's execution.

While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), took less than an hour.

India wants the ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month.

On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy.

However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On the concluding day of the two-day One Belt and Road (OBOR) summit being held here, China said Monday that India will have a very "small role" to play should it ever decide to join the initiative in the future.

Describing India as the "onlooker", the Global Times said in its report that New Delhiappeared more anxious than the (actual) players.

It described as strange and a contradiction that India cares about its neighbours' debt burden, but those very neighbours appeared to be willing to take on more.

India, it said, would never succeed in stopping other neighbours from joining OBOR, or from seeking Chinese infrastructural assistance.

It may be recalled that India had on Saturday had issued a strongly-worded statement on the eve of the event.

"We are of the firm belief that connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality. Connectivity initiatives must follow principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities; balanced ecological and environmental protection and preservation standards; transparent assessment of project costs; and skill and technology transfer to help long term running and maintenance of the assets created by local communities. Connectivity projects must be pursued in a manner that respects sovereignty and territorial integrity," said MEA spokesperson Gopal Baglay.

Confirming that India had received an invitation to participate in the six separate forums that China was organising as part of OBOR, Baglay said, "We have been urging China to engage in a meaningful dialogue. We are awaiting a positive response from the Chinese side."

Pointing out that enhancing physical connectivity should bring greater economic benefits to all in an equitable and balanced manner, he said, "We are working with many countries and international institutions in support of physical and digital connectivity in our own immediate and near neighbourhood."

Citing examples, the MEA spokeperson said that under the 'Act East' policy, India are pursuing the trilateral highway project; under the 'neighbourhood first' policy, we are developing multimodal linkages with Myanmar and Bangladesh; under 'Go West' strategy, we are engaging with Iran on Chabahar Port and with others in Central Asia on International North South Transport Corridor.

The two-day Belt and Road Forum is being attended by leaders from 29 countries, including Pakistan, has been boycotted by India due to sovereignty concerns over the USD 50 billion CPEC.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Principal Secretary of Karnataka Revenue Department was on Monday arrested in the illegal mining case.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT) arrested Ganga Ram Baderiya, Principal Secretary Government of Karnataka, in connection with the Janthakal illegal mining case.

He is likely to produced before court on Tuesday. He was arrested for his file notings in 2007 as commissioner of mines during H. D. Kumaraswamy's Chief Ministership to renew the mining lease.

Baderia, IAS officer Karnataka 1989 batch, was promoted to the post in March this year from Secretary Revenue department (Disaster Management, Bhoomi and UPOR) Government of Karnataka.

Janthakal Enterprises, a mining company, is involved in the illegal mining case. Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde's report names Janthakal Enterprises, a mining company, involved in the illegal mining case.

Kumaraswamy and Dharam Singh are already facing SIT cases in Janthakal illegal mining case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing the case of former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of being a spy, noted public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam on Monday said India will continue to battle the legal fight against Pakistan.

"Against Pakistan our legal fight will not get over here. We have fervently appealed before the ICJ that a provisional relief be granted in favour of India by allowing consular access to Jadhav. The question is that why Pakistan is denying consular access to Jadhav. That is what we said in the ICJ," Nikam told ANI.

He further said that Indian lawyer Harish Salve had categorically quoted various instances as to how Pakistan has violated human rights, how it has deliberately committed the breach of the Vienna Convention and how it is overlooking the international laws.

"We fear and we have base for that fear. What if Pakistan does not give a fair trial to Jadhav as we gave to Ajmal Kasav. The main reason and thrust of Islamabad's allegations is based upon the so-called confession of Jadhav and this has been extracted by the ill treatment," he added.

Nikam said that Jadhav did private business in Iran and the Iran Government agreed with that but still he was kidnapped, adding he was forced to give statements which are against the law.

"Pakistan denied to give him health and mental support. Only when he is mentally stable would he be able to give right statements and who knows in what kind of situation he is in. According to the Vienna Convention consular access should be given as both the countries are signatory of the convention," he asserted.

Meanwhile, Foreign policy fellow at Brookings India, Dhruva Jaishankar said that Salve gave the Indian position quite clearly and he largely argued that since Jadhav had been denied consular access, this was the breach of the Vienna Convention and also his Indian nationalism was known by Pakistan because they have mentioned in the FIR Jadhav's Indian nationality.

"I think it presents reasonably strong case for India as to why the court has the jurisdiction over this issue. Salve focused on the possibility of the argument because many of the evidences are unknown regarding this case. This was done in a military court, the proceeds have not been made public," he said.

Jaishankar added that from India's point of view, if the court says that it has the jurisdiction, it will be quite an embarrassment for Pakistan in terms of the proceedings forward with the death sentence of Jadhav.

"India is trying to make its best effort to use the international laws to make sure that Jadhav is not unfairly tried. There are many aspects of the case we do not know about," he said.

Demanding for the immediate suspension of the death sentence awarded to former navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, India has requested the ICJ to pass provisional orders to desist Pakistan from carrying out the sentence awarded by its military court.

India also sought a declaration that the sentence handed out to Jadhav was in violation of the Vienna Convention.

In April, a Pakistan military court awarded the death sentence to Jadhav for allegedly carrying out espionage and subversive activities in the court.

Jadhav was allegedly arrested in Islamabad on March 3 last year.

India contested Pakistan's claim saying that he was abducted from Iran.

India had appealed against the death sentence on May 8 alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan after its 16 requests for consular access were denied.

The next day, ICJ stayed the sentence.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, has asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy.

India acknowledges that Jadhav had served with the Navy but denies that he has any connection with the government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing the case of former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, the Congress Party on Monday said India stands strongly with the former.

"This is not a moment for recrimination, disputes and questions. I think the entire country stands as one behind Jadhav and India's plea at the ICJ. I have no doubt that justice, compassion and truth will prevail but ultimately these are international court proceedings and we must remain sober, restrained and balanced in the waiting of the verdict whether interim or final," Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi told ANI.

He further said that even if the arguments take a long time, the balance of convenience is clearly in the favour of India.

"Till the court gives its orders Pakistan cannot give a death sentence or render in fructuous the case by carrying out the death sentence on Jadhav. Till such time any major decision is taken, no precipitate action by Islamabad can or should be allowed to be done," Singhvi asserted.

He added that India has a strong case and the entire country hopes that the case turns out to be well at the ICJ.

Meanwhile, senior advocate P. P. Rao said that unless Pakistan's case is known, the edited merits of both the sides cannot be obtained.

"Maybe Pakistan will raise the question of jurisdiction in the Court of Justice to entertain this matter. India must be prepared to answer all these objections. Till a hearing is concluded the stay will continue," Rao said.

He said that India should put all its strength, adding that this is a very crucial stage.

Echoing similar views, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Nalin Kohli said Pakistan, despite of being a signatory of the Vienna Convention is choosing to follow the procedure that has been mandated on them.

"There is no doubt that the Kulbhushan Jadhav issue has been conducted and the trial that has been done in Pakistan appeared to be more of Kangaroo court proceedings," he added.

Kohli further said that the Government of India has very firmly been putting across the point of view on all of these grounds through senior Indian lawyer, Harish Salve and it is believed that it's a strong case that ICJ will take cognizance of.

Pakistan on Monday while presenting its case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Kulbhushan Jadhav issue claimed that "India has used this court as the scene of political theatre."

"India has used this court as the scene of political theatre. We will not respond in kind," Mohammad Faisal, DG south Asia and SAARC, said.

"India has been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name," Faisal added.

He also claimed that India's application on Kulbhushan Jadhav is unnecessary and misconceived.

There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistan's accusations on Jadhav, Pakistan's lawyer Khawar Qureshi said.

Qureshi also said that Jadhav has 150 days to appeal his sentence.

Meanwhile, the ICJ declined to play the alleged confessional video of Jadhav when Pakistan's offered it as evidence during the afternoon session of the court.

Expressing the fear that Jadhav might be executed before the hearing was over, India accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".

Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, India's lead attorney Harish Salve said.

The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhav's execution.

While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), took less than an hour.

India wants the ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month.

On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy.

However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India on Monday told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that immediate steps must be taken to stop Pakistan's from carrying out the death sentence of former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav.

Noted lawyer Harish Salve, representing India, told the court that India couldn't arrange for defence aide to Jadhav due to the denial of consular access by Pakistan.

He said India made innumerable requests for consular access but Pakistan refused to provide documents relating to the case and consular access to him.

"Jadhav was framed on confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody," Salve said.

Demanding provisional measures to stay Jadhav's execution, Harish Salve gave instances as to when the International Court of Justice ordered provisional relief to death row convicts pending trial in the ICJ.

He told the court that it is imperative to prevent irreparable damage to Jadhav's rights.

Refuting the allegations levelled on Jadhav by Pakistan, Salve argued that India's case is that throughout his incarceration, Jadhav was denied consular access.

Salve told the court that Jadhav's tape was doctored.

Asserting that India relies on the Vienna Convention, Salve argued that the Vienna Convention doesn't provide any exception as to providing consular access.

Salve citing Nicaragua, Germany and Mexico's examples said that India seeks annulment of death sentence announced by Pakistan's military court for Jadhav.

"Pakistan's conduct violates the Vienna Convention. The more serious the charge, the greater the need for procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the accused," Salve told the court.

Salve raised doubts over Pakistan military court's impartiality, saying that Jadhav's appeal was heard by a military court, presided over by a two-star general, whereas his death sentence was confirmed by a four-star general.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pakistan on Monday told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that India is using the court as a stage for political theatre, adding that solid evidences were provided regarding alleged spy Kulbhushan Jadhav's 'activities'.

Pakistan's counsel Khawar Qureshi while presenting Islamabad's stance in the ICJ on death sentence handed to Jadhav said that the former naval officer entered into Islamabad through Iran using fake passport.

He told the court that Pakistan had given India all information regarding Jadhav's investigation, but didn't receive any response from New Delhi.

Qureshi claimed that Jadhav was given 150 days to clarify himself and argued that the ICJ must not give relief to the alleged Indian spy.

"India is fielding arguments based on misrepresentation and contradiction. It didn't present evidences in the International Court of Justice provided by Pakistan," he said.

Pakistan argued in the ICJ that it will use all legal resources to safeguard its people and land.

"It is written in an agreement that every country will see the matter of arrested person in accordance with merit," Qureshi said.

The Pakistani side consists of six individuals, which included Moazzam Ahmad Khan, Ambassador of Pakistan to UAE as Agent, Mohammad Faisal, DG (South Asia & SAARC) as Agent, Syed Faraz Hussain Zaidi, Counsellor of the Pakistan Embassy in the Netherlands as Adviser, Q.C. Khawar Qureshi as Counsel, Asad Rahim Khan as Junior Counsel and Joseph Dyke as Legal Assistant.

Earlier, joint secretaries at the Indian External Affairs Ministry, Dr Deepak Mittal, Dr VD Sharma, and Indian counsel Harish Salve completed their statements before the judges.

India argued that immediate steps must be taken to stop Pakistan from carrying out the death sentence of former Indian naval officer Jadhav.

Mittal, who argued first, said that Pakistan had held Jadhav on concocted charges adding that his human rights was "thrown to the winds".

Sharma said India has been seeking consular access since it was informed of Jadhav's arrest adding that request for defense a lawyer was denied and visa to his parents was also not given despite repeated pleas.

"India and Pakistan are both parties to convention, hence are under court's jurisdiction. Consular access was denied repeatedly and Islamabad didn't provide any document to India despite requests," he said.

"There is an immediate threat that execution would be carried out before court can decide the case on its merit," he added.

Noted lawyer Harish Salve, representing India, told the court that India couldn't arrange for defence aide to Jadhav due to the denial of consular access by Pakistan.

He said India made innumerable requests for consular access but Pakistan refused to provide documents relating to the case and consular access to him.

"Jadhav was framed on confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody," Salve said.

Demanding provisional measures to stay Jadhav's execution, Harish Salve gave instances as to when the International Court of Justice ordered provisional relief to death row convicts pending trial in the ICJ.

He told the court that it is imperative to prevent irreparable damage to Jadhav's rights.

Refuting the allegations levelled on Jadhav by Pakistan, Salve argued that India's case is that throughout his incarceration, Jadhav was denied consular access.

Salve told the court that Jadhav's tape was doctored.

Asserting that India relies on the Vienna Convention, Salve argued that the Vienna Convention doesn't provide any exception as to providing consular access.

Salve citing Nicaragua, Germany and Mexico's examples said that India seeks annulment of death sentence announced by Pakistan's military court for Jadhav.

"Pakistan's conduct violates the Vienna Convention. The more serious the charge, the greater the need for procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the accused," Salve told the court.

Salve raised doubts over Pakistan military court's impartiality, saying that Jadhav's appeal was heard by a military court, presided over by a two-star general, whereas his death sentence was confirmed by a four-star general.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing the case of former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of being a spy, his friends continued to pray for him.

"The stay on execution has lit a ray of hope. But now everything depends on today's hearing. We are continuously praying that the judgement should be in Kulbhushan's favour. He is an ordinary and innocent man, he must be released," said Vandana Panwar, Kulbhushan Jadhav's friend.

"We gave a free trial to a terrorist like Kasab and Pakistan hasn't even revealed in what condition Kulbhushan is in. We hope we will get justice from the International Court of Justice and bring him back to India," Jadhav's friend Vijay Kanojiya said.

Kanojiya said there are almost 70,000 signatories that there should be a discussion at the White House regarding this case.

Praveen Bhoj another friend, said, "India has international support in this case. We hope that Kulbhushan gets justice. We thank the present government for pursuing this case so well."

The ICJ on May 9 had put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.

The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.

Last month, Jadhav was sentenced to death by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) for his alleged involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Mohun Bagan defeated Kingfisher East Bengal 2-0 in the semi-finals of the Federation Cup at the Barabati Stadium in Cuttack, Odisha on Sunday.

Darryl Duffy's 35th-minute header and Balwant Singh's 84th-minute strike proved to be the difference between the two sides as the defending Champions progressed to the final of the Federation Cup where Bengaluru FC wait for the challenge.

It was a bright start for Kingfisher East Bengal in the semi-finals and the Red and Golds could have taken the lead as early as the eighth minute when Plaza failed to tap home from close range after Rafique had found the Trinidad & Tobago forward in the box.

Three minutes later, Rafique himself saw his header from inside the box being denied by a fine Debjit save.

There were more bright spots for Kingfisher East Bengal but the Red and Golds failed to capitalise on them. In the 16th minute Rowllin Borges's shot earned a good save by Mohun Bagan's custodian Debjit Majumder and seven minutes later Wedson came close to drawing first blood when his shot from distance curled inches over the goal.

For Mohun Bagan, the first real attempt at goal came in the 25th minute when a Sony Norde free-kick was parried away for a corner after Darryl Duffy was brought down. Sanjoy Sen's men grew into the match and took the lead in the 35th minute when Darryl Duffy's deft header off a Sony Norde cross crept into the back of the net.

Kingfisher East Bengal dominated possession and shots on goal, but the Red and Golds had nothing to flaunt for their prowess, while Mohun Bagan made sure that the Mariners had their finishing boots on as Bagan lead 1-0 at half-time.

Mohun Bagan's midfield sat deep in the second half and protected the Mariner's defence for much of the half, trying to safeguard the slender lead.

The Bagan defence too became compact and proved impenetrable for the Kingfisher East Bengal duo of Plaza and Wedson. Sanjoy Sen's men attacked the counter and Sony Norde almost came close to doubling the lead when his shot in the 60th minute flew inches near the goal.

Three minutes later, Rafique had a golden opportunity to equalise proceedings after a long ball in the box had left the Bagan defence in tandems. Rafique, however, failed to shoot the ball home from hand shaking distance to add to Kingfisher East Bengal's missed opportunities.

In the 78th minute, Debjit Majumder made a reflex save to deny Plaza's header from close range. The Mariners defence line accompanied by its custodian held on for the remainder of time and Balwant Singh doubled Bagan's lead in the 84th minute when he scored after Katsumi Yusa found him in the box.

The full-time scoreline read 2-0 as Mohun Bagan progressed to the final.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the Pakistan government admitting that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief Hafiz Saeed is involved in terrorist activities, noted Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam on Monday frowned over the development saying it could be a part of Islamabad's conspiracy to get into the good books of United States and the United Nations.

"I doubt it to be a conspiracy of Pakistan. If they won't provide details about the Mumbai attack, then Saeed would be revealed and then Pakistan could claim that they arrested Saeed, but no evidence was found against him. They are just trying to portray themselves as good in front of the United Nations and America," Nikam told ANI.

Highlighting his skepticism over the move, he asked that if Pakistan believes that Saeed supports terrorism, then why haven't they filed a complaint against him and have not revealed the areas where his organization is promoting terrorism.

Earlier on Sunday, Pakistan government admitted that Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed is involved in terrorist activities and was spreading terrorism in the name of jihad.

Its interior ministry told a Federal Review Board, which was formed to review the detention of Saeed and four of his aides under an anti-terror Act, countered the Lashkar chief 's claim that he was being prevented from raising the Kashmir issue.

As per reports, the Pakistani government informed the review board that, "The government detained the Jamaat-ud-Dawa leaders on pressure of United Nations (sic) and international organisations."

On January 28, the Punjab government had placed names of Hafiz Saeed, Abdullah Ubaid (Faisalabad), Malik Zafar Iqbal Shahbaz (Markaz Tayyaba Muridke), Abdul Rehman Abid (Markaz Tayyaba Muridke) and Qazi Kashif Hussain of Multan in fourth schedule of Anti Terrorism Act. On February 30, they were put under house arrest for 90 days.

Earlier, the interior ministry had given recommendation to the Punjab government and intimated it that Jamatud Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation were engaged in certain activities which could be prejudicial to peace and security.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Monday joined the nation's political top brass in expressing grief over the demise of veteran Indian Information Service (IIS) officer I. Ramamohan Rao.

Gandhi took to twitter to praise the sincere contribution of the former PIO to the Government of India.

"A veteran of the Indian Information Service, Ramamohan Raoji rose to the pinnacle of his career& embodied the best values of his profession," tweeted Gandhi.

"A former PIO to GoI, he worked with four Prime Ministers including my father. My sincere condolences on his passing," he added.

Union Information and Broadcasting Minister M.Venkaiah Naidu also condoled the passing away of Mr. Rao, describing it a huge loss to Indian Information Service fraternity.

"Shocked to know about demise of Ramamohan Rao, Former PIO,PIB GoI. Big loss to Indian Information Service Fraternity," Naidu said in a tweet.

Frank Naronha, Principal Director General of the Press Information Bureau, also expressed grief on the demise of Mr. Rao and tweeted, "I.Rammohan Rao, former PIO #PIB passes away. He was a legend and an inspiration to so many of us. Rest in peace, sir."

Union Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore too took to the twitter to express gratitute to Rao.

"Saddened by the demise of former PIO, PIB Sri Ram Mohan Rao," he tweeted.

The final rites of Rao, were performed at Lodhi Crematorium in Delhi on today afternoon.

I. Ramamohan Rao, Editor-in-Chief, Asian News International (Print) passed away on 13 May 2017 after a brief illness.

A widely respected personality, he was the harbinger of the vision that has sustained the information spectrum of the country since independence.

All through his long and illustrious career with the Government of India, Mr. Rao had the distinction of being selected to contribute to setting up of many new organisations in the nascent Nation and handling others during sensitive periods. This was because of the faith that his superiors reposed upon him, a faith that he stood up to at all times.

Mr Rao embarked upon his career by joining the Press Information Bureau (PIB) in 1956. His early career was with the Defence Public Relations Organisation wherein he was totally involved in the Indo-China War 1962 and Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 and 1971.

He covered the most famous battles of the 1965 War in the Western front, and handled the delicate task of guiding the western press to the graveyard of Patton tanks, when they were all being taken in by the Pakistani propaganda.

During the 1971 War, he was with the Army Headquarters in Delhi, working closely with Field Marshal SHFJ Manekshaw -- who gave him the privilege of being the inly person who could smoke the cigarettes kept in Manekshaw's office -- and facilitating an objective coverage of India's glorious victory.

The photograph depicting the Indian paratroopers dropping at the Battle of Tangail was released by Mr Rao and it made it to the front pages of most global newspapers. He was latter questioned for releasing a photograph taken during a paratroopers' training exercise at Agra with an equivocal caption, but it did the trick when the surrendering Pakistani commander, Lt General Niazi referred to that picture as the one that broke his morale and will to fight.

He was also closely associated with the efforts of the Government to build the defence structure of the country. He served with the United Nations Emergency Force in the Gaza Strip where he did the country proud as its representative in the information domain. He rejected the offer from the United Nations to join as a permanent employee at New York, telling them his own country needed him much more.

As Director of Public Relations, Ministry of Defence, Mr. Rao was actively involved in path-breaking events like the 1982 Asiad, The Non-Aligned Summit in 1983 and the Commonwealth Heads of Government meet in Delhi.

During the challenging phase of insurgency in the North-East, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir it was his ideas of communication that ensured a dynamic, real time and correct flow of information. This played a crucial role in containing the challenges and set a benchmark for such communication which continues to date.

The concept of defence reporting in the country was scripted by him and has been continuing on the same lines ever since.

He served the Information Division of the Research and Analysis Wing at a time when the organisation was new and finding its roots. He also headed the News Service Division of the All India Radio during the turbulent years, which saw the Blue Star Operation and the assignation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The Government of India recognised his extraordinary skills and he was elevated in the hierarchy to the newly created Indian Information Service which he went on to head for seven years before his superannuation.

He served with all the Prime Ministers since independence and has the unique distinction of being Principal Information Officer and official spokesperson to four: Rajiv Gandhi, VP Singh, Chandrashekar and PV Narasimha Rao.

He was deeply involved in countering the proxy war promoted by Pakistan in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir and assisted in communication operations during the Kargil conflict.

The government was not ready to let go of Mr. Rao but he thought it prudent to make way for the younger generation in affairs of state and after the Kargil War, declined all the advisory offers that came his way.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ensuring speedy justice by fast track courts over the horrific Rohtak gang-rape incident, Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar on Monday said the culprits involved in the brutal crime will not be spared.

"Two of the culprits have been nabbed. The police is actively investigating the matter. Culprits involved in such ghastly acts won't be spared, will ensure speedy justice by fast track courts," Khatta told the media here.

On May 9th, a woman was brutally gang-raped and murdered, wherein later her mutilated body was found in an empty plot in Haryana's Rohtak.

The incident came to light when the victim's body was found in the city's IMT area.

The victim had allegedly refused a marriage proposal, following which the accused reached her home a week later with his friends.

A heated argument broke out which resulted in the woman slapping him.

In revenge, the accused along with his friends allegedly raped and murdered her.

The family of the victim said that on May 9, at least five to six youth abducted her from the gate of a private company.

After that the accused took her to a deserted place and gang-raped her.

The victim's mother said that the accused have been pressurizing the woman for marriage for the past one year.

The forensic reports suggested that the victim was mutilated with sharp-edged weapons.

Later, the accused tried to run her over to hide her identity.

"The victim was tortured and her body was mutilated after the gang rape. She was killed after being raped involving at least seven people.

Her skull was smashed in a way which indicates that she was run over by a vehicle in order to hide her identity," the forensic team has stated.

The victim was living with her mother and brother and used to work in a private medicine company.

The woman's parents had filed a missing complaint, based on which the police tracked her parents down.

The parents were called to Rohtak to identify her body.

The distraught parents have claimed that this ghastly attack was carried out by the girl's neighbour and have demanded capital punishment for the rapists.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
South African pace spearhead Dale Steyn has ruled himself out of the Test series against England later this year as he continues to recover from a shoulder surgery.

The Proteas are scheduled to play four Tests against England, starting early July.

Steyn has been out of action since the Perth Test against Australia last November with a broken bone and he was selected in an SA 'A' squad who will also tour the UK to get some much needed match practice.

The 33-year-old had got his right shoulder fractured during Australia's first innings of the opening Test against South Africa, which the Proteas went on to win by massive 177 runs at the WACA Ground in Perth.

However, the right-arm pacer has withdrawn from those matches, stating that he wants to concentrate on getting back to full fitness for the home season that starts with the Bangladesh Test series in September.

"My recovery is going well but it is taking a little longer than I expected it to," Sport24 quoted Steyn as saying at the CSA Awards on Saturday.

"I am able to do a lot of things, like running, hiking and gym work, but bowling is not one of them, and I won't be ready in time (for England)."

"Obviously, one of the reasons for me playing with the A side was so that I could get some match fitness before the Tests. So, before that Bangladesh series, I will need to play a bit," he added.

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U.S. President Donald Trump is mulling how moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would affect the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said in an interview that Trump is concerned about how moving the U.S. embassy would affect the Mideast peace process, VOA News.

"I think it'll be informed, again, by the parties that are involved in those talks and most certainly...whether Israel views it as being helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction," Tillerson said.

Following this, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted in a positive way, saying, "Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem will not harm the peace process.It will advance it by righting an historical wrong and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1967 and regards the entire city as its eternal capital. It has long urged the international community to relocate embassies there. Meanwhile, the Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

The Palestinians have maintained that an embassy move would kill any prospect for peace.

Trump promised to relocate the U.S. embassy as one of his campaign pledges but is yet to make a decision.

He will meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders as part of his first foreign trip later this week.

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The Green Tribunal (NGT) on Monday asked counsel of all the parties to file report within a week in Tugalkabad Gas leak matter.

The tribunal has also asked All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to file a complete report regarding impact of the gas leak on health of the people.

It also directed joint inspection and constituted a committee of Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), MoEF, HPCB, health safety department and others.

It also asked the transport authority not to release the vehicles seized after the incident.

The next hearing in this case is scheduled to be held on May 29.

Earlier the tribunal issued notice to the Delhi government, the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee over chemical spill in the Tughlakabad container depot.

On May 6, as many as 475 school students were admitted to four hospitals after a gas leaked from a container truck parked near a school in Delhi's Tughlakabad area.

The incident occurred near the Rani Jhansi Girls School in Pul Prahladpur, Tughlakabad.

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The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) will hold a closed-door meeting on May 16 to discuss North Korea's latest missile test.

Citing a well-informed source, the TASS news agency reported that the meeting was requested by the United States and Japan.

Pyongyang on Sunday launched yet another missile test from the northwestern city of Kusong despite growing threats of increased sanctions from members of the international community.

The missile, which flew 430 miles and reached an altitude of more than 1,245 miles, went further and higher than the nation's last successful test launch.

Following the launch, a statement from the White House called North Korea a "flagrant menace" and urged "far stronger sanctions" against the reclusive nation.

"With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil - in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan - the president cannot imagine that Russia is pleased," the statement added.

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Pandemonium prevailed in Uttar Pradesh Assembly during the first session on Monday, as the opposition protested vociferously against the deteriorating law and order situation in the state.

The Opposition created ruckus, and some even resorted to hurl paper balls at Governor Ram Naik during his address.

After becoming the 21st Chief Minister of the state, Yogi Adityanath had vowed to take stringent steps in improving the law and order in the state, saying, there would be no leniency shown towards it.

The newly elected 17th legislative assembly had convened this session for passage of the UP GST bill amongst others.

The GST Bill has already been cleared by the Parliament and now requires nod of the states to notify rule and regulations by the respective state governments for its pan-India implementation from July this year.

The proceedings of the UP assembly for the first time were telecasted live on Television.

The decision was taken in a meeting between Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Assembly speaker Hriday Narayan Dexit.

People also should directly see the activities of their elected representatives in house, said Adityanath.

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Of Rs 0.15 per share

Kriti Industries (India) announced that the Board of Directors of the Company at its meeting held on 11 May 2017, inter alia, have recommended the final dividend of Rs 0.15 per equity Share (i.e. 15%) , subject to the approval of the shareholders.

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Sales rise 17.77% to Rs 6819.15 crore

Net profit of Chennai Petroleum Corporation declined 31.09% to Rs 170.81 crore in the quarter ended March 2017 as against Rs 247.88 crore during the previous quarter ended March 2016. Sales rose 17.77% to Rs 6819.15 crore in the quarter ended March 2017 as against Rs 5790.18 crore during the previous quarter ended March 2016.

For the full year,net profit rose 38.81% to Rs 1029.75 crore in the year ended March 2017 as against Rs 741.86 crore during the previous year ended March 2016. Sales rose 7.13% to Rs 27669.92 crore in the year ended March 2017 as against Rs 25828.60 crore during the previous year ended March 2016. ParticularsQuarter EndedYear EndedMar. 2017Mar. 2016% Var.Mar. 2017Mar. 2016% Var.Sales6819.155790.18 18 27669.9225828.60 7 OPM %4.647.03 -6.785.22 - PBDT256.86339.32 -24 1643.681032.32 59 PBT178.89264.65 -32 1365.05758.63 80 NP170.81247.88 -31 1029.75741.86 39

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GMR Infrastructure rose 2.11% to Rs 16.95 at 11:17 IST on BSE after the company announced entering into agreements for divestment of its fully-owned Indonesian coal mining entities to Indonesia's PT GEMS.

The announcement was made after market hours on Friday, 12 May 2017.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 124.02 points, or 0.41% to 30,312.17.

On the BSE, 3.64 lakh shares were traded in the counter so far, compared with average daily volumes of 23.54 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock had hit a high of Rs 17.05 and a low of Rs 16.70 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 18.60 on 24 April 2017. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 10.25 on 9 November 2016.

The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 12 May 2017, rising 6.75% compared with 2.47% rise in the Sensex. The scrip had also outperformed the market in past one quarter, rising 12.93% as against Sensex's 6.54% rise.

The large-cap company has equity capital of Rs 603.59 crore. Face value per share is Re 1.

GMR Energy Netherlands BV, and GMR Infrastructure Overseas, subsidiaries of GMR Infrastructure, entered into conditional share purchase agreement (CSPA) with PT Golden Energy Mines Tbk, Indonesia for selling 100% equity shareholding. The company will also sell mandatorily convertible bonds (MCB's) in PT Dwikarya Sejati Utama (PT DSO), PT Duta Surana Internusa (PT DSI), PT Unsoco (PT UNS) and PT Barasentosa Lestari (PT BSL). This agreement is subject to the parties securing various statutory approvals.

GMR Infrastructure reported net loss of Rs 381.93 crore in Q3 December 2016 as against net profit of Rs 40.01 crore in Q3 December 2015. Net sales rose 250.45% to Rs 85.58 crore in Q3 December 2016 over Q3 December 2015.

GMR Group is a leading global infrastructure conglomerate with interests in airport, energy, transportation and urban infrastructure.

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Sales decline 15.60% to Rs 196.75 crore

Net profit of Hindusthan Urban Infrastructure declined 76.27% to Rs 3.41 crore in the quarter ended March 2017 as against Rs 14.37 crore during the previous quarter ended March 2016. Sales declined 15.60% to Rs 196.75 crore in the quarter ended March 2017 as against Rs 233.12 crore during the previous quarter ended March 2016.

For the full year,net loss reported to Rs 1.55 crore in the year ended March 2017 as against net profit of Rs 1.59 crore during the previous year ended March 2016. Sales declined 3.79% to Rs 646.01 crore in the year ended March 2017 as against Rs 671.46 crore during the previous year ended March 2016. ParticularsQuarter EndedYear EndedMar. 2017Mar. 2016% Var.Mar. 2017Mar. 2016% Var.Sales196.75233.12 -16 646.01671.46 -4 OPM %6.7711.79 -6.567.02 - PBDT7.2619.70 -63 10.4817.64 -41 PBT2.8916.03 -82 -4.744.60 PL NP3.4114.37 -76 -1.551.59 PL

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Nestle India fell 2.34% to Rs 6,660 at 12:11 IST on BSE after net profit rose 6.8% to Rs 306.76 crore on 8.7% rise in net sales to Rs 2475.68 crore in Q1 March 2017 over Q1 March 2016.

The result was announced after market hours on Friday, 12 May 2017.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 128.85 points, or 0.43% to 30,317.

On the BSE, 8,406 shares were traded in the counter so far, compared with average daily volumes of 6,394 shares in the past one quarter. The stock had hit a high of Rs 6,780 and a low of Rs 6,581 so far during the day.

The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 7,390 on 29 July 2016. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 5,701.05 on 9 November 2016.

The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 12 May 2017, rising 5.84% compared with 2.47% rise in the Sensex. The scrip had also outperformed the market in past one quarter, rising 10.68% as against Sensex's 6.54% rise.

The large-cap FMCG company has equity capital of Rs 96.42 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Nestle India said its total sales increased by 9.1% in Q1 March 2017. Domestic sales increased by 9.7% in Q1 March 2017, mainly due to increase in volumes across product groups, including rebuild of Maggi noodles, supplemented by marginally better realisations mostly from carry over pricing. The growth of 0.6% in exports was largely impacted by lower sales to Nepal and Bhutan.

Suresh Narayanan, chairman and managing director of NestlIndia said the company is glad with the increased volume based growth, across categories, during the first quarter of 2017. Innovation and renovation, as also volume based growth, are core business strategies outlined by Nestle India almost 18 months back and that this strategy is now playing an important role.

Nestle India is a subsidiary of Nestle S.A. of Switzerland. The company manufactures internationally famous brand names such as Nescaf Maggi, Milkybar, Kit Kat, Bar-One, Milkmaid And Nestea, etc.

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The National Highways Authority of India signed an MoU with the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Limited (TIDCO) for the development of a Multimodal Logistics Park in the Ponneri Industrial Node area near Kamarajar Port in Tamil Nadu. The MoU was signed in the presence of the Road Transport and Highways and Shipping Minister Shri Nitin Gadkari and Shri M. C.

Sampath, Minister for Industries of Tamil Nadu government.

Speaking on this occasion, Shri Gadkari said that it is an important agreement for the development of an integrated, multi-modal transport infrastructure in the country.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is planning to develop Mutimodal Logistics Parks in under its Logistics Efficiency Enhancement Programme (LEEP) in 15 locations all over India at a cost of Rs 33,000 crore, including Rs 1295 crores investment for the Chennai Region. The proposed logistics parks will bring down the overall freight costs, reduce vehicular pollution and congestion and will enable reduction of warehousing costs. All this is expected to result in lower logistics costs.

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V. O. Chidambaranar Port is all set for a four-fold increase in the capacity of two of its Coal Jetties - Jetty I and II from 6.25 MTPA to 24 MTPA. The VOCP Trust signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation Limited (TANGEDCO) for the upgradation of Coal Jetty I and II in New Delhi today. The Minister of Shipping and Road Transport and Highways Shri Nitin Gadkari and Minister for Electricity, Prohibition and Excise, Government of Tamil Nadu Shri P. Thangamani were present on the occasion.

Speaking on the occasion, Shri Gadkari said that the project would benefit both TANGEDCO and the VOCPT. It would make coal handling by the jetties much more voluminous and efficient, and thus bring down logistics costs. He said this would also allow for cheaper production of electricity, which would be very beneficial for industrial growth.

With the upgradation of the coal jetties, TANGEDCO will be able to handle additional volume of coal cargo for the upcoming new power plants in Uppur and Kadaladi in Ramanathapuram district in Tamil Nadu.

In addition to this, there will be quicker turnaround of vehicles with the deployment of high tech handling equipments like two ship unloaders, each with a minimum 2000 TPH capacity and a high capacity conveyor system of 4000 TPH. This enhancement of handling capacity and upgradation of infrastructure will result in reduction of logistics costs. TANGEDCO will therefore be able to utilize the services of the Port in a more cost-effective way. With the power generation from TANGEDCO's Tuticorin plants being linked to the National Grid, this would enable availability of additional power at reduced costs, which, in turn, can fuel industrial growth and employment generation.

The project is the outcome of Ministry of Shipping's Project Unnati, under which a study, 'Unlocking National Ports Potential' was done to improve the handling capacity of CJ-I & II. The estimated cost for upgrading CJ-I & II is about Rs.800 Cr. As per the MoU, initially Coal Jetty-I will be upgraded in about 24 months by constructing a new Coal Jetty-I of 300m x25m along with repair of the existing CJ-I. CJ -II will be upgraded thereafter. The upgradation will give a competitive edge to VOC Port and will help it maintain its lead position in coal handling.

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At least 10 persons were killed in a road accident in China's Jiangxi province on Monday, police said.

A bus collided with a truck on a road of Mount Longhu in Yingtan, Xinhua news agency quoted police as saying.

The injured have been rushed to hospital.

Mount Longhu or Dragon Tiger Mountain is a world natural heritage and a national tourist site. It is known as one of the birthplaces of Taoism with many Taoist temples.

--IANS

py/vt

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A team of 14 rope-fixing climbers on Monday stood atop the world's highest peak Mount Everest -- Mt Qomolangma for the Tibetans -- becoming the first team of 2017 to reach the summit from south face in Nepal.

Though other Sherpa climbers had already opened the route to the top of the Everest via China's Tibet last week, expedition from Nepal side was delayed this spring season owing to bad weather, reports Xinhua news agency.

Qomolangma in the Tibetan means the Goddess Mother of Earth.

"A team of 14 rope-fixing climbers has reached the summit between 1:15 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. today," Gyanendra Shrestha, a Tourism Ministry official, told Xinhua on Monday.

Last year, the rope fixing task was completed on May 11.

"The first two summiteers are Pema Chhiring and Pem Chhiri who stood atop at 1:15, " Phurba Tenzing Sherpa, a record holder Everest climber told Xinhua from the base camp.

Fourteen high-altitude mountain guides were assigned for rope fixing from Camp II to top of the 8,848 meter peak under Expedition Operators Association of Nepal (EOAN).

Dambar Parajuli, President of EOAN, said on Monday, "As the route is open now, the rope-fixing Sherpa will return to base camp and escort their clients to the summit."

The ascent of the 14 climbers has paved the way for all the commercial and independent summits of 2017.

According to Department of Tourism, 40 expedition teams comprising 373 climbers from various countries are readying to scale the world's highest peak this spring season. May is regarded as the perfect window for the Everest expedition in terms of favourable weather between winter and monsoon.

Many have expressed fears of traffic jam in the Everest region this season due to high number of climbers and their mountain guides and helpers.

The Everest has not only been an identity of the Himalayan nation but also a major source of revenue collection. The Himalayan country that charges 11,000 US dollars per foreign climber earns millions of dollars annually.

This year, Mt Everest has already recorded two tragedies, including the deaths of famous Swiss climber Ueli Steck and the 86-year-old Nepali climber Min Bahadur Sherchan, who was in a bid to regain the title of oldest climber.

There were no expeditions in the spring of 2015 due to avalanches triggered by the devastating April 25 earthquake that killed 19 climbers, including high-altitude guides and helpers. The government had extended their permits for two years, which is ending this year.

There was no expedition in 2014 as well as 16 Sherpa guides were killed in an avalanche near the Everest Base Camp.

--IANS

pur/vt

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At least two persons died, including a woman, and five others were injured when a car jumped off from a flyover on Monday, the city police said.

The accident took place in Punjabi Bagh area of west Delhi when a speeding car jumped off from the flyover around 9 a.m., a police officer told IANS.

The two killed in the accident have been identified as Rajat and Ritu.

"Three critically injured were shifted to All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Trauma Centre while two people were shifted to Mahavir Hospital," the officer said.

All the passengers in the car were in the age group of 18-20 years and were going to Narela in west Delhi to appear in an examination.

--IANS

sp-aks/ruwa/vt

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At least 27 Islamic State militants were killed in airstrikes by international coalition against IS posts in the IS-held areas in Iraq's western province of Anbar on Sunday, an Iraqi army source said.

According to intelligence reports, the US-led coalition aircraft conducted an airstrike on an internet cafe used by IS militants as a headquarters in the town of al-Qaim near the border with Syria, leaving some 20 of them killed, Nouman al-Zoubaie, commander of the army's 7th Division, told Xinhua.

Another airstrike destroyed an IS post in the city of Aana killing six militants, Zoubaie said.

In addition, an international airstrike bombed a booby-trapped vehicle and killed its driver, he added.

In a separate incident, a booby-trapped car detonated at a busy intersection in Karrada district in central Baghdad, leaving a civilian killed and five others wounded, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The airstrikes in western Iraq and Baghdad car bombing came as the Iraqi security forces, backed by anti-IS international coalition, are carrying out a major offensive to drive out IS militants from their major stronghold in the western side of Mosul in northern Iraq.

--IANS

ahm/

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Seventy-eight per cent of Americans believe an independent commission or a special prosecutor should handle the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election, according to a new poll.

The NBC NEWS/Wall Street Journal poll issued on Sunday asked the people whether they would rather see an independent investigation or Congress handle the probe, The Hill magazine reported.

Just 15 per cent picked Congress, while 78 per cent supported an independent commission or special prosecutor.

The results follow a week of upheaval in the investigation.

On May 9, President fired Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey who was leading the probe. Since then, Trump and various members of the administration have pushed back on the need for an independent commission to continue the investigation.

The FBI was probing Russian interference in the election as well as whether members of Trump's presidential campaign colluded with Moscow.

Trump on Saturday confirmed he believes the investigation should go forward in "the House, the Senate, the FBI", reports The Hill magazine.

Although polls show a partisan split when asked whether they agree with the President's decision to fire Comey -- 58 per cent of Republicans approve while 66 per cent of Democrats disapprove -- there is strong agreement on questions of who should run the ongoing investigation.

Very few Americans asked in the poll had no opinion, with low single digit responses.

Meanwhile, Trump's job approval rating remains at 39 per cent, but 30 per cent say Trump's decision to fire Comey has given them a less favourable impression of the President and 61 per cent say the firing has not changed their opinion of the President.

The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted from May 11 to 13 among 800 adults.
The principal shooting of actor Ajith Kumar'S upcoming Tamil spy thriller "Vivegam", slated for release in August, has been completed.

"With the completion of the latest schedule in Bulgaria, the makers have finished the principal shooting. Except for some patchwork, the rest of the shoot is wrapped up. The post-production work is already underway," a source from the film's unit told IANS.

Directed by Siva, the film marks his third-time collaboration with Ajith after "Veeram" and "Vedalam".

The film also stars Kajal Aggarwal and Akshara Haasan as the leading ladies while Vivek Oberoi plays the antagonist.

Ajith will be seen as an Interpol agent on a mission to investigate a series of murders.

Produced by Sathya Jyothi Films, the film has music by Anirudh Ravichander.

--IANS

hp/rb/vt

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Bangladeshi writer and human rights activist Shahriar Kabir is tracing in a documentary the legacy of the Sufi movement and Bhakti cult through five countries to drive home the message of secular humanism and amity across religions.

"The Sufi trail began in Turkey and continued through Iran, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Along the way it picked up a lot of influence from Hinduism, Buddhism and local traditions and became bigger," the veteran war crimes researcher told IANS from West Bengal's Murshidabad where he is shooting a part of the hour-long documentary.

"I want to highlight secular humanism. Religious extremism has reared its head all over the world. Although we are fighting religious extremism politically and culturally, we have to address it theologically. No teaches one to kill," he explained.

Kabir has already shot relevant portions in Pakistan.

"Hinglaj is an important Hindu pilgrimage place in Balochistan and I was surprised to see Muslims worshipping there. I intend to capture this amity and highlight the tolerance which has been in existence since ages," Kabir said.

In Murshidabad, Kabir is set to meet the bauls, the wandering minstrels of Bengal, to underscore the significance of their faith: a synthesis of unorthodox Sufi strain in Islam and the idea of Bhakti or devotion.

This apart, on Kabir's itinerary are north India, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha, south India.

"It will take at least a year to complete the project," he added.

--IANS

sgh/in/vt

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The BJP has betrayed the people during its three years in power at the Centre and totally failed to fulfil its electoral promises, CPI-M General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said here on Monday.

The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader also wondered what all the celebrations planned by the BJP-led central government on completion of its three years in power were about, and added that it was rather a "celebration of failure and betrayal".

"They (BJP) have failed to fulfil every single promise they made to the people before the 2014 general elections," he told the media here.

The CPI-M leader said the Bharatiya Janata Party had promised to generate two crore new jobs every year.

"No new jobs have, however, been provided; (on the other hand) thousands of people are losing their existing jobs," he said.

He said the country's information technology sector is expected to lose one lakh jobs this year.

"On the industrial front, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced 'Make in India', 'Startup India', 'Digital India' and many more things. But no significant investment has been made in the last three years," Yechury said.

"What celebration they (BJP) want to hold on May 26 (on the completion of three years of the Modi government)? This must be a celebration of failure and betrayal."

Yechury also accused the government of anti-farmer steps. "The government promised to increase the minimum support price of crops but that was not done."

The Left leader said that according to government figures, 12,000 to 16,000 farmers committed suicide every year since 2014.

He visited the Tripura capital on Monday while on way to address a public rally at Belonia in southern Tripura.

The National Democratic Alliance government will hold a programme in Guwahati in Assam on May 26 to mark its three years in office at the Centre.

Yechury also flayed the Centre on the Jammu and Kashmir issue, saying "its Kashmir policy has proved to be an "utter failure".

Yechury accused the government of betraying Parliament, the country and its people by not fulfilling its own assurance.

"The BJP-led government backtracked on its promise held out to an all-party delegation that visited the violence-hit state in September last year."

"The Centre said it will implement confidence-building measures and start a political dialogue with all stakeholders, did nothing in the last six months, leading to the situation turning from bad to worse," the CPI-M leader said.

Yechury said cow vigilantes, anti-Romeo squads and others indulging in moral policing in Uttar Pradesh were members of private armies raised by the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

"These private armies are taking laws in their hands. In the name of protecting laws, they are killing Dalits and members of the minority community. They are terrorising the people. We demand an immediate ban on all these private armies."

On the July presidential election, Yechury said the CPI-M wants a secular, democratic and neutral personality for the highest constitutional post in the country.

"Discussions among various opposition parties are on. The issue is likely to be finalised next week."

--IANS

sc/tsb/vt

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Palermo (Italy), May 15 (IANS/AKI) An Italian coastguard vessel docked in Sicily's western port city of Trapani on Monday with 512 migrants and the bodies of a further seven on board.

The migrants and the corpses were picked up in the Mediterranean at the weekend, the coastguard said.

A further 14 migrants were rescued from a small fishing boat off Sardinia on Monday after setting sail from Algeria overnight, they said.

The migrants were due to receive medical treatment at a migrant reception centre in Assemini, according to the coastguard.

More than 45,000 people have reached Italy by boat from North Africa this year, a more than 40 percent increase on the same period of 2016, says the International Organisation for Migration, while over 1,200 migrants have died attempting the perilous sea crossing, according to IOM

Most of the migrants arriving in Italy are now from sub-Saharan Africa or from Bangladesh.

--IANS/AKI

vd

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A state of emergency has been declared in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, after an outbreak of cholera killed scores of people, the media reported on Monday.

Hospitals in the city, which is controlled by the Shia Houthi rebels, are crowded with cholera patients, the BBC quoted the Red Cross as saying.

The number of suspected cases in the country has tripled in a week to more than 8,500, it said.

Dominik Stillhart, director of operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross, told a news conference in Sanaa on Sunday that there were 115 deaths from cholera nationwide from April 27 to May 13.

"We now are facing a serious outbreak," he said.

Sanaa has been worst hit, followed by the surrounding province of Amanat al-Semah, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

--IANS

ksk/vt

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After India skipped the Belt and Road forum over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Beijing on Monday said the transborder route "is not directed at any third parties".

China also sought to ally India's fear of meddling in the Kashmir dispute through the planned road, saying the $46 billion project will not affect its position on the matter.

"We have noted the statement by the spokesperson of India's External Affairs Ministry. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is an initiative on economic cooperation. It is not directed at any third parties, not relevant to disputes over territorial sovereignty and does not affect China's position on the Kashmir issue," China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

India gave the two-day mega Belt and Road conference a miss, raising objection to the CPEC corridor which passes through Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that New Delhi claims as its own.

On the eve of the OBOR forum, Indian issued a statement saying it cannot "accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity".

CPEC is the key artery of China's Belt and Road project that aims to connect Asia, Europe and Africa through a network of roads, railway lines and ports.

"Regarding the issue of Kashmir which the Indian side is concerned about, we have been stressing that the issue was left over from history between India and Pakistan, and should be properly addressed by the two sides through consultation and negotiation."

China maintains neutrality on the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan.

"President Xi Jinping also said that we should build the Belt and Road into a road for peace. All countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major concerns."

Meanwhile, a Chinese daily said India's absence at the summit was regrettable and called New Delhi as "nervous and anxious".

--IANS

gsh/rn/vd

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Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury on Monday asked Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to immediately ban the "Gau Rakshaks" or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads in the state.

"Gau Rakshaks or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads are all illegal and unconstitutional groups. The Uttar Pradesh CM must ban these outfits immediately (in his state)," the CPI-M General Secretary said while addressing a public meeting in Belonia of southern Tripura.

He said: "These 'Gau Rakshaks' or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads are the private armies formed by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh).

"These private armies are taking the law in their hands. In the name of protecting law, they are killing Dalits and minorities. They are terrorising people."

The public meeting was organised in connection with the state conference of CPI-M's students wing Students Federation of India (SFI).

The Left leader said the BJP had been trying to topple the Left Front government in Tripura. "Their dream will be shattered by the people of the state."

"You might have heard (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi's 'Mann Ki Baat', but have you heared Modi saying a single word about the 22 crore unemployed youths in India, suicide by thousands of farmers, price rise and religious division and ethnic disturbances in the country," Yechury said.

"Modi and his party are taking the country back to the dark ages... we have to fight it out to make a shining and bright India," the CPI-M leader said.

Tripura Chief Minister and CPI-M politburo member Manik Sarkar, party's central committee member and state's Health Minister Badal Choudhury, and SFI's national and state leaders also addressed the gathering.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Rapper Drake took model Ava Van Rose on his tour for six weeks after reaching out to her on Instagram.

It all started when Drake's bodyguard contacted her offering tickets to his Dublin gig in February, reports aceshowbiz.com.

She told the Irish Sun newspaper: "His bodyguard private messaged me on the day of the gig in Dublin asking would I like to go to the gig, so obviously I said yes. He texted me saying I was one of the prettiest girls he'd ever seen and that he worked for Drake."

"I thought it was a catfish straight away. But no, he was genuine and my friend and I went to the concert and then back to the Fitzwilliam Hotel for the after-party. It was so surreal and Drake was lovely, they all were."

"We had a great night and then they asked me to join them on tour, so I said yeah. They arranged for me to go and booked the flights over. I was hanging around with the friends and family backstage."

She also met Drake's father.

"Drake's dad was there and he was such a nice guy, we got on really well. I also became pally with his cousin Tonya. We went to Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and all over but the best concert was London, that was amazing."

"We met everyone, he had so many famous people at his gigs! Nicki Minaj, Rita Ora, Chris Rock were all there and were introduced. Jamie Foxx wasn't allowed into one of the backstage parties for some reason and I was, how mad is that?" she added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Investigations are on to assess the full extent of the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo which is believed to have already claimed three lives, WHO has said.

WHO Regional Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti on May 13 visited Kinshasa to discuss with national authorities and partners ways to mount a rapid, effective and coherent response in order to stop the ongoing Ebola outbreak.

The visit follows notification by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government of an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Likati health zone, Bas Uele Province, in the northern part of the country bordering Central African Republic.

The Likati health zone is around 1,400 kilometres from the capital Kinshasa.

"To date, the outbreak is reported in a remote and hard to reach area and appears to be geographically relatively limited. However, investigations are ongoing to assess the full extent of the outbreak and, therefore, high vigilance still needs to be maintained," WHO said on Saturday.

On May 10, 2017, a multidisciplinary team led by the Ministry of Health of DRC and supported by WHO, under the new WHO Emergency Programme, and partners, was deployed to the Likati health zone, Bas Uele Province to conduct an in-depth field investigation.

The Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) has been activated to provide additional support if required.

Reinforcement of epidemiological surveillance, contact tracing, case management, and community engagement are under way.

"We are grateful to WHO and other partners for the swift support in carrying out investigations that led to the confirmation of this outbreak," said Oly Ilunga Kalenga, Minister of Health of DR Congo.

"A strong multi-sectoral response, better coordination, public awareness, community engagement and adequate resources will be critical in our efforts to stop the outbreak," he added.

The first case occurred on April 22 in a 45-year-old male. He was transported by taxi to hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival.

The driver also fell ill and later died. A third person who cared for the first case also became ill and subsequently died.

At present, 25 contacts of the second patient who died are being followed. Of the cases and deaths, one has been tested polymerase chain reaction PCR-positive for Ebola.

This is the eighth outbreak of Ebola virus disease since its discovery in 1976 in DR Congo.

The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed more than 11,300 people.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Facebook has been criticised by an anonymous group of ex-Muslims for censoring anti-Islamic posts and banning pages that promoted such content for violating community rules.

The group included former Muslim-Australians, who allege that the social networking giant banned pages with thousands of followers after users flagged them as "disrespecting" the Islam, The Australian reported on Sunday.

"Restrictions to these platforms would be overwhelmingly damaging for ex-Muslims who are too afraid to go public with their views due to the taboo of leaving and criticising a religion," the report quoted a spokeswoman for the group as saying.

The banned pages were formed to band together ex-Muslims to denounce their former .

"Anti-Islamic pages ripped from cyberspace include the Ex-Muslims of North America page -- which soon resurfaced -- and a page called Mufti News which parodied Muslim news," the report noted.

The group also accused Facebook of banning several Arabic-based Atheist pages and asked the company to reconsider its community guidelines to allow for a more diverse conversation on the Islam faith.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Urging the government to do more for working women, Facebook's chief financial officer (CFO) has asked the US administration to raise the federal minimum wage for mothers to remove inequality and poverty.

In a Facebook post, Sheryl Sandberg said both the government and employers should made an extra effort to help parents, especially single mothers, who were struggling to raise their children.

"We all have a responsibility to help mothers as well as fathers balance their responsibilities at work and home," she said in the post on Sunday on Mother's Day.

She added that it was time for country's public policies to catch up with what families deserve and what the values demand.

"To start, it's long past time to raise the federal minimum wage. Two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women. Raising the wage would reduce pay inequality and help millions of families living in or near poverty," Sandberg said.

The 47-year-old executive said nearly 40 per cent of US households with children, relied on a woman as the most significant breadwinner.

"Childcare for two children exceeds the median annual rent in all 50 states. How are parents supposed to work if they don't have a safe and affordable place to leave their kids," she added.

Sandberg also called for more protections for mothers, fathers, gay and transgender parents as well as for adoptive parents who seek a leave of absence from their job.

Sandberg, an influential voice in the corporate US, is a widowed mother of two. Among other things, she is known for her book "Lean In" that was published in 2013.

Sandberg is one of the country's wealthiest women, with a net worth estimated at $1.38 billion.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Breaking his silence on the brutal rape and murder of a 22-year-old woman in Haryana, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Monday said the Rohtak case will be tried in a fast-track court and the guilty will not be spared.

Interacting with the media in New Delhi, Khattar said such heinous crimes would not be tolerated at any cost and that the guilty would be punished.

He said that those involved in the Gurugram rape incident would also be punished.

The Haryana Police have formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to investigate the crime.

Taking suo motu cognisance of the brutal gang-rape in Haryana -- reminiscent of the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case in Delhi, the National Commission for Women (NCW) had on Sunday sought a fair and speedy trial in the case.

NCW Chairperson Lalitha Kumaramangalam said on Sunday: "We have written to the officials concerned to ensure a speedy and fair inquiry. We have also sent a team to inquire into the matter."

A young woman from Haryana's Sonepat district was abducted, gang-raped and brutally murdered. The woman went missing on May 9. Her body was found on the outskirts of Rohtak town, 70 km from the national capital, early on Friday.

The rapists had allegedly inserted a sharp-edged weapon in her private parts. Police also said that sedatives were found in her stomach. Her head and face were smashed with a blunt object and later crushed under the wheels of a vehicle, according to the police, to hide her identity.

Two men, including her neighbour Sumit who was stalking her, were arrested. He was pressurising her to marry him but she had refused.

Police officials alleged that Sumit planned the gang-rape and murder to teach a lesson to the woman.

Stray dogs had eaten the victim's face and lower portion of her body, which was spotted by a passerby on a vacant plot of the Industrial Model Township (IMT) near Rohtak town on May 11.

The incident happened only days after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence awarded to four convicts in the December 16, 2012, Nirbhaya gang-rape case.

The distraught parents of the victim have demanded immediate death penalty for the accused. The mother of the victim said on Saturday that she wanted to kill the accused herself.

Police officials said that more men could be also involved in the gruesome gang-rape and murder.

S.K. Dhattarwal, Head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS), Rohtak, said that the post-mortem examination of the body indicated sexual assault, mutilation of private parts and murder.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has appointed Ovais Sarmad of India as the Deputy Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the forum where the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change was negotiated.

Sarmad's appointment comes as the Paris Agreement faces a potential crisis if the US goes through with President Donald Trump's threat to disown it.

Stephane Djuarric, the spokesperson for Guterres, said Monday that Sarmad's position will be at the Assistant Secretary-General level.

The highest ranking Indian in the UN bureaucracy is Atul Khare, the Under-Secretary-General, Department of Field Support, who plays a crucial role in the peacekeeping operations.

Sarmad is currently the Chief of Staff to the Director General of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the UN body that deals with international international migration issues and assists migrants as well as governments.

Djuarric said that Sarmad "was a key team member negotiating the agreement" that led to the US joining the IOM.

Now Sarmad's diplomatic skills may be called upon as the landmark Paris Agreement is at risk of being reneged by its most important party, the US, which is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

A 1982 commerce graduate of Osmania University in Hyderabad, he has a chartered management accountancy qualification from London and is an expert in finance and management.

After a career in public and private sectors in London, Sarmad joined IOM in Geneva in 1990.

During his 27-year career at the IOM, he has also worked as Chief of Budget, Director of Resource Management, Director of the Global Administrative Centre and Chief of Mission to the Philippines.

He succeeds Richard Kinley of Canada. The UNFCC is headed by Patricia Espinosa, the Executive Director appointed by then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last year.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Hong Kong Immigration Department on Monday rejected an asylum request of migrants who sheltered US whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The department rejected the requests of the seven applicants on Friday, but the news only became public on Monday after their lawyers spoke to the media, Efe news reported.

"The director of immigration does not believe in our clients," Robert Tibbo, one of the lawyers of the refugees, said after the decision.

Tibbo added that Hong Kong authorities believe his clients have not presented sufficient evidence, despite Snowden saying publicly that they had given him shelter.

The migrants are accused of secretly sheltering the former CIA agent in their homes in 2013 when the whistleblower was fleeing authorities in the US after leaking a list of classified documents that revealed massive surveillance programmes carried out mainly by Washington.

According to the lawyer, the government's decision is due to the fact that his clients, four adults and three children, are involved in a case of international spying.

"The decisions to reject their claims in Hong Kong came on the same day for people who submitted asylum claims years apart from one another," he said.

The defence lawyers have 15 days from last Friday, the day on which they were officially notified of the government's refusal, to file an appeal through the immigration department, which could order the deportation and detention of the asylum seekers in the coming days.

The case affects a Filipino woman, Vanessa Mae Rodel, and her four-year-old daughter, Ajith Pushpakumara, as well a Sri Lankan soldier, Supun Thilina Kellapatha, his wife, Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis, and their two children.

According to Tibbo, the department reactivated the adults' asylum claims after their identities were revealed in media reports last year.

The asylum seekers have complained publicly several times of having been persecuted in Hong Kong by Sri Lankan authorities, although the Hong Kong government has never acknowledged this claim.

They have also sought asylum in Canada, whose government began processing the request three weeks ago.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday began a public hearing in the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, the alleged Indian spy sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court.

The Hague-based court started the hearing with a briefing about the case. India's legal team, led by former Solicitor General Harish Salve, was present in the court and was scheduled to first argue its case.

This would be followed by arguments from the Pakistan team led by Attorney General Ashtar Ausaf.

The Indian team is expected to focus on the violations of the Vienna convention by Pakistan on the issue of denying consular access to Jadhav, and on the lack of transparency in the Pakistani military court, which India said was "illegal".

India moved the ICJ last week to save Jadhav after Pakistan denied consular access despite 16 requests.

Pakistan has said the Indian move to approach ICJ was an attempt to divert attention from "state-sponsored terrorism in Pakistan" and that it was analysing the ICJ's authority in the matter.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Central government on Monday told the Supreme Court that if the latter invalidates the men-centric triple talaq that is discriminatory to Muslim women, then it would bring a new divorce law that would be fair and equal to both men and women in the community.

As Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi argued against triple talaq and stressed the need to strike it down, the five judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar asked him if this is done, then what will happen to Muslim men who went to end their marriage.

"If we accept that giving unfettered rights to a husband is bad and we strike down triple talaq, then where will Muslim men go for divorce," asked Justice Uday Umesh Lalit who, along with the CJI, Justice Kurian Joseph, Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman and Justice S. Abdul Nazeer are on the constitution bench.

Without losing a moment, Rohatgi told the bench that if they strike down all three practices - triple talaq, nikah halala and polygamy, then the government will bring a new law.

At this, Chief Justice Khehar said that the top court was not just the "guardian to the Constitution but also that of the Minorities Act".

At the outset of the hearing, the Attorney General urged the court to examine not just the validity of the triple talaq vis-a-vis the Constitution but also that of the nikah halal and polygamy too.

However, the court, citing the limited time that is available, said that as of now, it would focus on the validity of triple talaq, leaving other two issues for the future.

In the course of the hearing pointing to the inertia in the evolution of the Muslim Personal Law, Rohatgi said that as far as Hindus were concerned, various steps were taken to bring their laws in conformity with the Constitution but that has not happened with Muslims, who had a Shariat Act in 1937, then in 1939 and then some change in 1986 in the wake of Shah Bano case.

The court was apparently unimpressed when he said that he cited the Constitution's Article 14 and 15 to highlight the discrimination being faced by the Muslim women, noting that these articles are all against the state.

Terming his position "very difficult", the court said that attempts to invoke Article 14 without the state was a "white wash".

As Rohatgi emphasised on gender equality of Muslim women including with their counterparts in other religions and in other Islamic countries, the court said that he was talking of gender equality, equality between religions and equality between the people of different countries and in this way, all marriage laws should go and civil marriage was the only course. The court said that marriage as an institution is crystallised by religion, drawing an objection from him and inviting a comment from the bench that if marriage was not rooted in religion, then what was it.

Appearing for the All India Muslim Per sonal Law Board, senior counsel Kapil Sibal told the bench that the "issue is not talaq, the issue is patriarchy" or a state of society which is inherently discriminatory of this or that religion.

Describing the issue as "highly complex" which can't be resolved easily, he referred to Hindu Code under which customs are still protected, noting that even under 2006 Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, a father can bequeath his entire property to his son without giving anything to his daughter.

Noting that the Constitutions protects personal laws and all patriarchal societies are discriminatory, Sibal said that all law s that applies to Hindus, Muslims, and other religions must be tested on the grounds of discrimination.

Representing the government, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court that Islam ic practices as practised in India were not "pure Islam" but an "anglicised" form of the religion.

--IANS

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(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.)
A 40-year-old man has been arrested from central Kolkata for trying to sell improvised guns and ammunition to criminal elements, the Kolkata Police said on Monday.

"Pramod Yadav from Bihar's Banka district was arrested from the area in front of Gwalior Ghat yesterday (Sunday) evening for illegal arms trading," an officer from Kolkata Police's Anti Rowdy Squad said.

"Two improvised 8 mm pistols and 10 rounds of cartridges were seized from him," the officer said.

According to the police, the buyers who came to meet Yadav, fled from the spot sensing trouble when the police arrested him.

He would be presented before court on Monday for legal action, the officer said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India on Monday demanded before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Pakistan annul the death sentence of alleged spy Kulbushan Jadhav and see that he was not executed as his trial was held under "farcical" circumstances in violation of the Vienna Convention.

"I urge the ICJ to ensure that Jadhav is not executed, Pakistan reports to this court that the action (of not executing him) is taken and that no action is taken that might prejudice the rights of India in the matter of Jadhav," noted lawyer Harish Salve submitted in his over hour-long presentation before ICJ President Ronny Abraham in the Hague.

The ICJ had last week stayed the execution of Jadhav on a petition by India, which approached the UN court after 46 years on an issue with Pakistan.

The former Indian Navy officer was awarded the death sentence by a Pakistani military court last month, a year after he was arrested on espionage charges. India says Jadhav has been kidnapped and framed. Islamabad has rejected 16 Indian requests for consular access to Jadhav, who is held at an unknown prison in Pakistan.

The brunt of Salve's argument was that the entire matter of arrest, chargesheet and trial of Jadhav were all done in violation of the UN Charter and Vienna Convention in farcical circumstances and on concocted charges as Jadhav was not given legal assistance to defend himself.

Salve, who led the Indian legal team at the Hague-based ICJ, said the matter was "grave and urgent" and hence India approached this court which took up the case "at such a short notice".

The Indian lawyer told the court that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran on March 16, 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and confession was extracted in custody before a magistrate. He was incommunicado and the trial was also held incommunicado.

He urged the ICJ President to take note of the farcical nature of the circumstances of the military court.

Salve said the provisions of the Vienna Convention recognised that any prisoner has a right to be tried by an independent tribunal as established by law and he should be tried in his presence and defended by legal aid assigned to him. In Jadhav's case all the basic provisions of human rights were "thrown to the wind", he said.

The facts presented by India establish the violation of all principles of UN charter and Vienna Convention because of the nature of the trial which destroyed any credibility or sanctity of the army court's decision sentencing him to death, he said.

Salve cited three past similar cases in which the international court had intervened. These cases include Paraguay versus the US in which the court decided that the American government needed to take steps to give rights of access of a Paraguayan national.

In Germany versus the US, Salve said, the court held that execution of a German national was "an irreparable damage to justice". He also referred to a case between the US and Mexico in which lives of 54 Mexicans were at stake as they faced execution.

After the court adjourned for a three-hour break to hear Pakistan's arguments, Salve told the media outside that he expected India to be provided justice by the court.

Earlier, Deepak Mittal, Joint Secretary, of the Pakistan, Afghanistan, India Desk at the Ministry of External Affairs, told the court in his opening remarks that there was a fear that Jadhav may be executed soon even before the decision of the UN court.

"Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed."

"India learnt from press reports that the death sentence was awarded to Jadhav on the basis of an alleged confession. Pakistan has not provided the chargesheet, any documents on the case despite repeated requests.

"It is clear that Jadhav has been denied of his right to seek legal counsel. Jadhav's parents have applied for visa to travel to Pakistan which has fallen on deaf ears."

V.D. Sharma, Joint Secretary (Legal and Treaties) in the MEA, said Pakistan had failed to comply with all its legal obligations by denying consular access to Jadhav since his arrest in March 2016.

Sharma also urged the court to restrain Pakistan from "giving effect to the sentence awarded by the military court" and to direct it to annul its decision.

The day-long hearing, which began on Monday morning, involves two sessions of an hour-and-a-half each to India and Pakistan to make their cases.

Pakistan's session is to begin in the afternoon.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India and Pakistan on Monday clashed at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the fate of alleged spy Kulbushan Jadhav with New Delhi invoking the court's jurisdiction to see that the death sentence against him was annulled immediately.

Pakistan rejected the plea on the ground that India had no right to invoke the jurisdiction of the UN's highest court because the Vienna Convention does not provide for matters relating to spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.

However, Islamabad suffered a jolt when it was not allowed by the court to play the video containing a purported confession by Jadhav, a former navy official, who India says was abducted from Iran and taken to Balochistan.

At the end of the day's proceedings, ICJ President Ronny Abraham announced that the verdict in the matter would be given "as soon as possible" and the date delivered in a public sitting.

The Indian case was put up strongly by noted lawyer Harish Salve who demanded that Pakistan should annul Jadhav's death sentence and see that he was not executed as his trial was held under "farcical" circumstances in violation of the Vienna Convention.

"I urge the ICJ to ensure that Jadhav is not executed, Pakistan reports to this court that the action (of not executing him) is taken and that no action is taken that might prejudice the rights of India in the matter of Jadhav," Salve said in his over 90-minute presentation.

The ICJ had last week "stayed" the execution on a petition by India, which approached the UN court after 46 years on an issue with Pakistan.

Jadhav was awarded the death sentence by a Pakistani military court last month, a year after he was arrested on espionage charges. India says Jadhav has been kidnapped and framed. Islamabad has rejected 16 Indian requests for consular access to Jadhav, who is held at an unknown prison in Pakistan.

The brunt of Salve's argument was that the entire matter of arrest, chargesheet and trial of Jadhav were all done in violation of the UN Charter and Vienna Convention in farcical circumstances and on concocted charges as the Indian was not given legal assistance to defend himself.

Salve said the matter was "grave and urgent" as Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran on March 16, 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and his alleged confession was extracted in custody before a magistrate. He was incommunicado and the trial was also held incommunicado.

The lawyer urged the ICJ President to take note of the farcical nature of the circumstances of the military court.

Salve said that the provisions of the Vienna Convention recognised that any prisoner has a right to be tried by an independent tribunal as established by law and he should be tried in his presence and defended by legal aid assigned to him. In Jadhav's case, all the basic provisions of human rights were "thrown to the wind", he said.

The facts presented by India establish the violation of all principles of the UN charter and Vienna Convention because of the nature of the trial which destroyed any credibility or sanctity of the army court's decision sentencing him to death, he said.

Salve cited three past similar cases in which the international court had intervened. These cases include Paraguay versus the US in which the court decided that the American government needed to take steps to give rights of access of a Paraguayan .

In Germany versus the US, Salve said, the court held that execution of a German was "an irreparable damage to justice". He also referred to a case between the US and Mexico, in which the lives of 54 Mexicans were at stake as they faced execution.

Pakistan mounted a strong defence of its case with Counsel Khawar Qureshi rejecting India's attempts to invoke ICJ's jurisdiction in the case, saying that the provisions of the Vienna Convention did not apply to spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.

Rebutting India's case, he asserted that this forum is not a criminal court of appeal nor does it exercise criminal jurisdiction.

"India's plea for invoking provisions of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention is not relevant in this case. The Vienna Convention was adopted for better communication between friendly countries. But it cannot apply in this case of a spy set up by a state. It is clear from the Vienna Convention that the provision being sought under Article 36 by India cannot be entertained by this court," Qureshi said in his 45-minute reply to arguments put forth by Indian counsel Harish Salve earlier.

The lawyer claimed that India had on September 8, 1974, told the ICJ to exclude itself from its jurisdiction in disputes with Pakistan and from any interpretation and obligation of multi-lateral treaties.

He also noted that Pakistan had reservations over the jurisdiction of ICJ on matters it considered as impinging on its national security.

Qureshi also dismissed India's charge that Jadhav was kidnapped.

"No evidence was provided by India to back the charge that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran. We have a long border with India where millions of people reside. If we wanted, one of them could have been picked up. To say that we abducted Jadhav from Iran and brought him to Pakistan seems at best to be far fetched," Qureshi said.

He said that India had at no point made any comment on the Muslim name of Jadhav on the passport seized from him. "This requires explanation," he added.

Qureshi said that the issue of consular access to Jadhav was not considered as he was accused of spying and it was not considered to be applied on terrorists.

Overall, the relief India is seeking from this court is not available and the "provisional measures" sought by India cannot be initiated, Qureshi said.

He said that parallels drawn by Salve of the precedents of cases relating to involving the US and other countries, including Mexico and Germany, were not relevant and factually incorrect.

At the outset, Qureshi said that India was invoking the jurisdiction of the court for "political theatre" and described as "bizarre" the description of Jadhav's trial as a kangaroo court.

Dismissing India's contention that it invoked the jurisdiction of the court because of the "imminent" possibility of execution of Jadhav, Qureshi said the court was bound to settle disputes between countries peacefully and not waste time on issues sought to be raised for political purpose.

In this regard, he cited the possibility of clemency which was mentioned by Pakistan Foreign Advisor Sartaj Aziz.

Qureshi also said that India did not respond to communication from Pakistan in January this year seeking cooperation in the probe relating to Jadhav.
The Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) is expected to hear on Monday the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, the alleged Indian spy sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court.

An Indian legal team led by former Solicitor General Harish Salve is already in the Hague.

"We may have a hearing on Monday?," Salve said, after India won the stay over Jadhav's death sentence at the ICJ last week.

India is scheduled to first argue its case. This would be followed by arguments from the Pakistan team led by Attorney General Ashtar Ausaf.

The Indian team is expected to focus on the violations of the Vienna convention by Pakistan on the issue of denying consular access to Jadhav, and on the lack of transparency in the Pakistani military court, which India said was "illegal".

India moved the ICJ last week to save Jadhav after Pakistan denied consular access despite 16 requests.

Pakistan has said the Indian move to approach ICJ was an attempt to divert attention from "state-sponsored terrorism in Pakistan" and that it was analysing the ICJ's authority in the matter.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday said the hacking of an RSS worker in Kannur last week has come as a shock and also slammed the BJP's demand for imposition of AFSPA in the district.

Speaking in the state assembly that reverberated with the killing of an RSS local office bearer on Friday, Vijayan said that with the peace talks in February things were going on smoothly in Kannur, known as a hot spot for political murders. He said more than 240 peace talks had been held across the district.

Coming down heavily on the BJP, Vijayan said the party is trying to misuse the Governor and accused two senior leaders of having spoken in a threatening tone against the Governor.

"Soon after this murder took place, a Facebook post by state BJP president Kummanem Rajasekheran showed the celebration of the CPI-M."

"But no one knows where this purported celebration took place, and the police have already begun a probe into this. The police will go forward and register a case if it is found to be wrong," the Chief Minister said.

On the demand for imposition of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in Kannur, he said: "No one with a sense of respect for democracy will ever seek imposition of AFSPA, as we all saw what happened when it was imposed in the northeast."

He also came down heavily on the Congress party after they kept intervening during his reply and said that he failed to understand why the Congress was getting impatient when he was attacking the BJP.

Vijayan assured the House that the police is doing a clean job and has taken two suspects into custody and will crack the case soon.

Earlier, the Congress-led opposition came down heavily on the ruling CPI-M and the BJP for the recurrence of political killings in Kannur district, with both these parties settling scores against one another by destroying peace in the district.

Seeking leave for an adjournment motion, senior Congress leader and legislator from Kannur district K.C.Joseph said the peace talks that took place three months back in Kannur have gone haywire with the brutal murder of a BJP leader Biju on May 12.

"It has now surfaced that Biju's murder was a well-planned and executed to revenge a killing, though Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan described it as a one-off incident. But what should be noted is that, 18 murders have taken place after you assumed office in May last year," he said.

"Of these, eight political murders alone have taken place in Kannur with five BJP and three CPI-M workers getting killed. These two parties are on a revenge killing and we have seen the Kerala Governor P. Sathasivam being dragged into this. Kannur is the headquarters of the CPI-M, and in Kannur the police works as the B Team of the CPI-M. Unless the state government acts tough, freely and fairly, nothing can be done," said Joseph.

On Friday, Biju an RSS worker, also the 12th accused in a murder case involving a CPI-M worker last year at Payyanur, was knocked down by an Innova car and hacked to death.

An angry state BJP leadership called on Sathasivam on Saturday and sought the imposition of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in Kannur.

A few senior BJP leaders also came down heavily on Sathasivam for not acting over the political killings, which it alleged have been engineered by the CPI-M.

Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala said that AFSPA was imposed in the Northeast for a specific reason.

"Please check on facts and for information a few stray incidents that took place there should not be generalised. You can find for yourselves how AFSPA helped the people there," said Chennithala.

Chennithala attacked Vijayan and said the CPI-M is solely responsible for the current state of affairs and through its actions the party is "giving more and more space and visibility to the BJP".

"You are indirectly helping the BJP through these acts of violence. We are not at all for invoking the Governor in all this. But we strongly condemn the manner in which the BJP is trying to use him as their tool," added Chennithala, and protesting the Speaker's decision for not allowing a discussion on the topic, he took the opposition out of the house.

BJP's lone legislator in the 140-member Assembly O. Rajagopal said the need for imposition of AFSPA is just in Kannur district only and not for the state.

"The sad fact in Kerala is any upright officer who takes an impartial stand is branded as an RSS/BJP activist and that's most unfortunate. If there has been any emotional statement made against the governor by BJP leaders, it was just an overreaction and nothing beyond that," he clarified.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Reality TV star Kylie Jenners new beau and rapper Travis Scott was arrested for inciting a riot during his concert in Rogers, Arkansas.

He was arrested on May 13, reports usmagazine.com.

The Rogers Police Department said that the "Antidote" rapper, 25, was arrested soon after he left the stage at the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion.

Police officials said during the concert, Scott, whose real name is Jacques Webster, "encouraged people to rush the stage and bypass the security protocols to ensure concertgoer safety".

Several people were injured as the crowd rushed to the stage, including a security guard and a member of the police department. The injured people were treated at the scene by members of the Rogers Fire Department and Mercy Medical.

The star was released without bail at night, according to TMZ.

Scott was charged with inciting a riot, endangering the welfare of a minor and disorderly conduct, and was transported to the Benton County Sheriff's office. Scott was previously arrested for a similar incident in Chicago in August 2015.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
North Korea has said that a missile it tested on Sunday is capable of carrying a large nuclear warhead, state media reported on Monday.

The country's leader, Kim Jong-un, supervised the launch of the Hwasong-12 missile that reached an altitude of 2,111.5 km and flew 787 km, according to state news agency KCNA.

The test was "aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead", CNN quoted KCNA as saying.

North Korea warned Washington not to provoke it, saying the "US mainland and Pacific operations" are within range of Pyongyang missiles.

KCNA said the test showed North Korea "has all powerful means for retaliatory strike" should Washington take any military action to stop its nuclear weapons program.

Analysts called this North Korea's most successful missile test ever and a significant advancement in its quest to build a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), reports CNN.

"North Korea's latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile," aerospace engineer John Schilling wrote on the blog 38 North, published by the US Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

US officials said the missile launched near the city of Kusong, in western North Korea, flew across the country and into the Sea of Japan or the East Sea, hitting the water about 60 miles from Vladivostok in eastern Russia.

Russia, however, said the missile fell 500 km from its coast.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday condemned the test as "dangerous" but warned against "intimidating" Pyongyang.

Speaking in Beijing on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum, Putin called for a peaceful solution to the ongoing tensions on the Korean peninsula, Russia's Sputnik news agency reported.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The CBI has registered a case against a Lieutenant Colonel and some yet unidentified DRDO officials for their alleged involvement in a Rs 500 crore scam in Bengaluru by transferring over 12 acres of land to a person, an official said on Monday.

Separate CBI teams on Monday conducted searches at seven places, including the residential and official premises of the accused persons, in Karnataka and Telangana and recovered some incriminating documents.

Lieutenant Colonel M.G. Thimmaya, a "private person" N.H. Rustumji and other unidentified officials of Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO) -- an agency under the Defence Ministry -- were on May 12 booked under sections of cheating and criminal conspiracy of Indian Penal Code and Prevention of Corruption Act.

It is alleged that Thimmaya, the then Estate Manager DRDO, and other officials of the agency entered into a criminal conspiracy with Rustumji, a resident of Bengaluru, during 2004-2006 and transferred over 12 acres of land in his favour, the CBI FIR said.

Thimmaya is currently posted in Bengaluru.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a preliminary investigation into the case on September 8, 2016 on the complaint of Defence Ministry's Director (Vigilance) Atul Kumar Singh.

Singh forwarded his complaint to the CBI on April 6, 2016.

"Thimmaya and other DRDO officials abused their official position while transferring the land when its matter was sub judice in the Supreme Court," the FIR said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Newly sworn-in French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday named Edouard Philippe, the 46-year-old Mayor of Le Havre city, as his Prime Minister.

Philippe is a member of the centre-right Les Republicains party and is close to Alaine Juppe, the former Prime Minister, reports CNN.

The 39-year-old former investment banker and economy minister was inaugurated on Sunday as the 25th President of France and also the youngest in the nation's history in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace.

Macron is counting on winning votes from centre-right supporters in the legislative elections next month.

His party Le Republique en Marche is scrambling to get 577 candidates together to contest every seat in the country.

Philippe, a lawyer with experience working in the private sector, was born in Rouen and grew up a Left-wing environment.

He was a socialist in his younger days before switching his allegiances to the right.

He has only been a member of Parliament for one term, serving in the National Assembly representing the constituency of Seine-Maritime in Normandy, northern France, since 2012.

He has been Mayor of Le Havre since 2010.

Macron was sworn-in as the President after his landslide victory over far-right National Front leader Marine le Pen, with 66 per cent of the vote in the run-off poll held on May 7.

He is also slated to travel to Germany later on Monday to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The Mamata Banerjee ministry in West Bengal was expanded on Monday with the induction of two ministers.

Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi administered the oath of office and secrecy to Ujjwal Biswas and Chandrima Bhattacharya at Raj Bhavan.

Biswas, who touched Banerjee's feet after taking oath, would be a cabinet minister. Banerjee said he would look after Correctional Administration.

Bhattacharya, who also took the Chief Minister's blessings, has been inducted in the ministry as Minister of State with Independent Charge. She would take care of e-governance independently, and also serve as Minister of State for Health under Banerjee.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee, several members of her cabinet, bureaucrats, the Commissioner of Kolkata Police and West Bengal's Director General of Police were among those present during the solemn and brief function.

Biswas had functioned as the Minister for Technical Education in the first Mamata Banerjee cabinet from 2011 to 2016 but was kept out when Banerjee took office for the second term last year.

With Bhattacharya's induction, the number of women in the 44-member West Bengal ministry has now gone up to five, including Banerjee, who is the state's first woman Chief Minister.

"Chandrima will take charge of health and e-governance and Ujjwal will take care of jail (Correctional Administration) department. Abani Mohan Joardar who holds the Correctional Administration portfolio, will be in the ministry but without any portfolio. He is not well," Banerjee said after the programme.

Bhattacharya, who recently won the Kathi Dakshin assembly seat in a bypoll, returns to the ministry after nearly a year.

Bhattacharya was Minister of State for Health, Law and Judicial Affairs from 2011 to 2016, but lost from Dum Dum North in the 2016 assembly polls.

Biswas won from Krishnanagar Dakshin seat in Nadia district. According to informed sources, a reshuffle in Banerjee's ministry is on the card. "The possible reshuffle could be done after Banerjee's return from Delhi," the sources said.

The Chief Minister is scheduled to leave for Delhi later on Monday for a scheduled meeting with Congress President Sonia Gandhi the following day.

--IANS1

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday announced that she has kept her options open on the issue of common opposition candidate for the presidential election.

"My options are always open when it comes to betterment of the country and the party," Banerjee told reporters in New Delhi.

She, however, said that she would be in a position to speak more on the issue after meeting Congress President Sonia Gandhi, whom, she said, she had known for long.

"Now I can't say anything, I don't know anything. Let me meet her, then I'll be able to say (on common presidential candidate issue)," said Banerjee, who is also the Trinamool Congress chief.

Asked about the possibility of her tying up with the Left parties at the national level while they fought in the state, she said: "The Left, Congress and even the BJP were against Trinamool in the state. But it is their problem."
The Delhi High Court on Monday remarked that marital rape is a "serious issue" which has notoriously become a "part of the culture".

A division bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C. Hari Shankar hearing a PIL against the penal code provision that protects husbands from being tried for the rape of their wives, also asked how many countries have made marital rape an offence.

"It's (marital rape) a very serious issues... Is it an offence in the world? In how many countries is marital rape an offence?," the bench said. It added: "Marital rape is part of the culture. See, how difficult is it for women to register a rape case."

The court's remark came while hearing a PIL filed by NGO RIT Foundation, challenging Indian Penal Code's Section 375 saying it does not consider sexual intercourse of a man with his wife as rape.

The Union government had earlier defended the provision saying "exception 2 (to Section 375 IPC) deals exclusively with private affairs of husband-wife based on traditional social structure and hence can't be said to be unconstitutional and in violation of Articles 14 to 21 of the Constitution".

Section 375, which defines "rape" also contains the exception provision which states that the rape law would not apply to assault or sexual intercourse by a husband on his wife who is above 15 years.

The PIL has sought to declare the provision unconstitutional as it discriminates against married women sexually assaulted by their own husbands.

The plea has said that the law as it stands today amounts to a state-sanctioned license granted to the husband to violate the sexual autonomy of his lawfully wedded wife and is therefore, a violation of the Right to Privacy guaranteed to the wife under Article 21 of the Constitution.

"The exception to section 375 arbitrarily discriminates between women as it keeps the age of consent at 15 years for women who are in a wedlock whereas the same is 18 years in case of any other woman," it has stated.

The court posted the matter for July 18.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A major fire has broken out in a chemical factory in Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, police said on Monday. The casualties so far has been the livestock.

Two cows and a calf were burnt to death and over a dozen of these animals were injured in the late Sunday night blaze. The fire broke out in the Pandav Nagar industrial area around midnight, the police added.

It took three dozen fire brigades from neighbouring Noida and Meerut, besides Ghaziabad itself, to douse the inferno that spread due to the gusty winds, an officer said.

The blaze was continuously fed by the regular explosions in the chemical factory as the stockpiles of chemicals exploded along with the LPG cylinders kept inside.

All neighbouring factories have been vacated, a district official informed. The fire also spread to a paint factory in the vicinity.

The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) team has also been called to oversee rescue of any persons trapped inside the blazing factory campus.

District Magistrate Ministi S. and other senior officials are present at the spot.

Official on Special Duty (OSD) at the District Magistrate's office Sunil Sharma told IANS on phone that the situation was under control now and the assessment of the damage was being done.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Teams of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) would inspect the excavation being carried out at an archaeological site in Haryana's Fatehabad district to verify claims of it being the oldest civilisation in the world.

Archaeologists have recovered artefacts pre-dating the Harappan Civilisation from the site, located in village Kunal in Fatehabad district.

NASA and ISRO inspection is likely to be done in October this year, 2017, Haryana Archaeology and Museums Minister Ram Bilas Sharma said on Monday.

"The recovery of artefacts, estimated to be 6,000 years old, strongly indicated that the civilisation that had flourished in Kunal was in fact the oldest civilisation in the world. The Harappan Civilisation, considered so far to be the oldest civilisation, flourished about 3,500 years ago," the Minister said.

The artefacts recovered included ornaments and pots, apart from spherical structures.

The Haryana government is considering to establish international-level museums at Kunal and Rakhigarhi.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Indian Navy's capability has been significantly enhanced on the east coast, as the sealine is "strategically important" to the nation in addressing security issues and threats from the rivals, a senior naval officer said here on Monday.

"There has been a progressive enhancement of the Indian Navy's capability on the east coast to increase the military assets on this coast as well as in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands," Vice Admiral H.C.S. Bisht, Flag Officer, Commanding-in-Chief, Eastern Naval Command, Visakhapatnam, said at a programme.

The Vice Admiral said the maritime domain of the Bay of Bengal has achieved renewed significance on several fronts, particularly due to the Look East policy.

"The Bay of Bengal is strategically important for India as it provides considerable leverage against rivals and helps in addressing the security issues that directly threaten Indian interest, including terrorism, piracy, smuggling and insurgency," he explained at a workshop on "India's Maritime Connectivity: Importance of the Bay of Bengal", organised by the Observer Research Foundation.

The navy commander also claimed that the infrastructural development would help "further increase India's maritime connectivity and achieve economic progress".

Talking about China's increasing footsteps in the region through its new policies, Bisht said there was an amount of skepticism about their military initiatives.

"China is slowly and surely increasing its political, economic and military influence in inevitable competitions with the US and India. The Chinese strategy is to develop dependencies among nations like Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh through their initiatives like the maritime silk route and the recently introduced 'One Belt, One Road' initiative," Bisht said.

"But, there is an amount of scepticism about their military initiatives in the region," he said.

Asserting that the opportunities and threats necessitate a coordinated approach to achieve success, Bisht said that "cooperation rather than destructive competition is the need of the hour".

"The maritime domain of the Bay of Bengal offers the potential of being a medium of choice for regional cooperation, regional security and share economic progress for the countries that border it. Cooperation rather than destructive competition is needed in the Bay of Bengal," he added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actor Irrfan Khan, who balances his work in the international and Indian film world, says he has never faced discrimination over his accent.

Often, Indian actors who work in films abroad flaunt an unnatural accent in English for their international projects. Has Irrfan had any issues as such?

"No. Fortunately, when I did my first international film, I had to play a Bengali in it and had to have an accent. And there were some films for which I had to acquire a foreign accent. Bengali was as important to me as an American accent. I had to do it," he said.

"Every time you have to adapt to the where the character is from and you have to adapt to his accent. It's a part of the job. Whether you're doing a Paan Singh Tomar or whatever... As an actor, accent is something you have to acquire. It's not about Indian or American accent," Irrfan told IANS here.

"If it's needed for a project, I acquire it... But I haven't faced discrimination (over it)," he added.

The actor, who has earlier featured in foreign films like "A Mighty Heart", "The Namesake", "Slumdog Millionaire", "The Amazing Spider-Man", "Life of Pi" and "Jurassic World", is busy promoting his forthcoming Hindi film "Hindi Medium" these days.

Soon, he will fly out to New York to shoot his next Hollywood movie "Puzzle".

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bihar Chief Minister on Monday said that he is not in the race for the post of Prime Minister in 2019 elections.

The Janata Dal-United (JD-U) leader said he had no personal aspiration for the post.

"I am not a contestant for the post of PM in 2019 general elections. My party is a small one. I was given the mandate to run Bihar," told the media here.

When asked about reports of a move to form a grand alliance of non-BJP parties ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Chief Minister said opposition parties should be united at the level.

"Like Bihar's Grand Alliance, there is a need for the unity of all non-BJP parties."

"Anyone can emerge as a candidate for the top post if he or she has a capacity for it. The candidate for the PM post will come before the people at the right time," he said.

"Modi had emerged as a candidate for the top post in 2014 because he was capable of it as per people's wishes," Nitish said.
Six persons were injured as the protest by opposition parties over the shifting of 'Dharna Chowk', a popular venue for staging protests, turned violent on Monday.

The activists of the opposition parties clashed with another group of protestors demanding shifting of 'Dharna Chowk' from Indira Park in the heart of the city.

All opposition parties had supported the march to Indira Park called by Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) to demand the government to withdraw its move to shift 'Dharna Chowk' to city outskirts.

However, even before they could reach Indira Park, another groups said to be residents of areas surrounding the park and morning walkers started a 'sit-in' supporting the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government's stand.

Claiming that the protests at 'Dharna Chowk' was causing them inconvenience to them all through the year, the protestors including women demanded that it be shifted to some other place.

They were holding placards with slogans "Give our children a peaceful environment" and "Don't take away our freedom to move freely".

Opposition activists, most of them from Communist Party of India-Maoist, threw away the chairs and tried to remove the tent set up by the group, which resisted the attempts. Police baton charged the opposition protestors to bring the situation under control.

The opposition parties alleged that the government hatched a conspiracy to foil their protest.

TJAC chairman M. Kodandaram said policemen in civil dress attacked the opposition activists.

Main opposition Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and mass organisations have been running a campaign for over a month to oppose shifting of 'Dharna Chowk'. They had termed the government's move as an attempt to suppress the voice of dissent.

Kodandaram along with leaders of various parties and revolutionary balladeer Gaddar called on the injured at government-run Gandhi Hospital.

They claimed that their protest was successful. They threaten to intensify the agitation, if the government went ahead with its move.

'Dharna Chowk' has been the venue of thousands of protests by political parties, people's organisations, students' groups, employees' unions and others for over two decades.

Chief Minister Chandrasekhar Rao had last month defended the police move to shift 'Dharna Chowk' to the city outskirts saying that some parties were deliberately creating problems in the name of protests.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Only 10-12 per cent of 30 lakh new LPG connections provided to BPL (below poverty line) households in West Bengal under PMUY going for refills is a matter of concern, an official said here on Monday.

R.K. Mohapatra, Executive Director, Indian Oil and State Level Coordinator, West Bengal Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), expressed concern about "the poor level of cylinder refills" in the state, which is just "about 10-12 per cent of the new consumers".

"Thirty lakh LPG connections have been provided to BPL households in West Bengal under Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) within nine months of the launch of this scheme in the state," he said in a statement.

"They have to be made aware that a LPG cylinder is much cheaper than procurement of other sources of fuel like firewood which also creates health hazards from harmful smoke," Mohapatra said.

Oil marketing companies have fulfilled the annual target given to the state after the scheme was launched in the state on August 14, 2016.

Some 11.3 lakh out of the total of 30 lakh connections have been issued to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other economically underprivileged sections, Mohapatra said.

The state was marked as a priority state because of low LPG penetration of 51.5 per cent in comparison to the national average of 72 per cent at the time of launching PMUY.

The number of targeted beneficiaries in West Bengal is 1.06 crore which is to be achieved within the next two years, according to the statement.

"Data of BPL women who are the targeted beneficiaries of PMUY has been collected from Socio-Economic-Caste Census 2011. Over the next two years, the government has given a target for 95 per cent LPG penetration throughout the country," it added.

Under PMUY, LPG connections are provided in the name of women members of households having a bank account and Aadhar number.

Currently, Uttar Pradesh is leading in terms of providing PMUY connections.

In connection with catering to the state's LPG requirement, Mohapatra stated that a new bottling plant of IOCL, having a capacity to shelve out 250 TMT per day, will be commissioned at Panagarh in Burdwan district in March 2018.

Another bottling plant having an installed capacity of 120 TMT or 30,000 cylinders per day, is expected to be commissioned in March 2019, he added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday blamed the US for the global cyber attack that hit 150 countries since Friday and has crippled computer systems around the world.

Putin, who is currently in Beijing for the two-day Belt and Road Forum, said intelligence services should beware of creating software that can later be used for malicious means, Daily Mail reported.

"As regards the source of these threats, I believe that the leadership of Microsoft have announced this plainly, that the initial source of the virus is the intelligence services of the US," Putin said.

"Once they are let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators," he told reporters in Beijing.

Putin claimed there was no significant damage to Russian institutions, including its banking and healthcare systems, from the computer worm. "But as a whole it is worrying, there's nothing good about it, it is a source of concern."

He added that global leaders needed to discuss cyber security at a "serious political level" and said the US has backed away from signing a cyber security agreement with Russia.

The initial attack, known as WannaCry, paralysed British National Health Services (NHC) computers, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies around the world.

In China, universities and other educational institutions were among the hardest hit, with about 15 per cent of the internet protocol addresses attacked, according to Xinhua News Agency.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Congress on Monday condoled the death of former Principal Information Officer I. Ramamohan Rao and called it a huge loss to the Indian Information Service (IIS) fraternity.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi in a statement expressed condolences and said: "He was a wonderful human being."

Recalling his association with the late former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi said: "He was somebody who understood the landscape and nuances of government communication and was widely admired by friends and colleagues alike."

"The passing away of Rao is a huge loss to the Indian Information Service (IIS) fraternity," she said.

Gandhi also said the Congress party stands in grief with the family of Rao. "Our thoughts and prayers are with his family," she added.

Rao, 83, died on Saturday in Medanta Hospital, where he was admitted with renal ailments.

Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi also condoled his death and said: "A veteran of the IIS, Rao rose to the pinnacle of his career and embodied the best values of his profession."

"A former PIO, he worked with four Prime Ministers, including my father. My sincere condolences on his passing," the Congress leader said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bollywood star Ranbir Kapoor, an avid traveller, was on Monday announced as brand ambassador of online travel portal Yatra.com.

"I am an avid traveller myself and travel has played an important part in my films. So a partnership with a travel brand like Yatra was a natural fit for me. I am particularly excited to be part of this new journey and I am looking forward to a long and fulfilling 'Yatra' with the brand," Ranbir said in a statement.

Popularly known for portraying versatile and youthful roles on screen in films like "Tamasha" and "Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani", Ranbir has been chosen to endorse the platform as he is "technologically savvy, modern and has a passion for travelling".

On roping in the actor, Sharat Dhall, Chief Operating Officer (B2C), Yatra.com, said: "Ranbir's persona is in line with these qualities, and he also brings with him a sense of casual coolness that today's youth relates to."

The fact that Ranbir appeals to all age groups and demographics is also exciting for the brand officials, said Vikrant Mudaliar, Chief Marketing Officer, Yatra.com.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
After infecting over two lakh computers and crippling life in 150 countries, the global ransomware attack continued for the third day on Monday, with more reports of hacking pouring in from India, China and Japan as offices re-opened after a tumultuous weekend.

In Kerala, the computers of two village panchayats were hit, with messages demanding $300 in virtual currency to unlock the files.

Officials who opened the computer at the Thariyode panchayat office in the hilly district of Wayanad found that four of their computers had been hacked.

Likewise, another village panchayat at Aruvapulam near Konni in Pathanamthitta district got a similar virus message when their computer was switched on. IT experts were working on these systems.

In West Bengal's West Midnapore district, at least eight computers of the state-run electricity distributor were affected. Experts were ascertaining whether it was the same malware virus behind the world's biggest ransomware attack.

Some media reports claimed that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has ordered some ATMs to remain shut as a preventive measure.

When contacted, a Home Ministry spokesperson told IANS: "I am not aware about any such order issued by the Home Ministry. If the Finance Ministry did so, I don't know."

The government has already activated a "preparedness and response mechanism" to prevent any major cyber attack.

According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), it has activated a "preparedness and response mechanism" by instructing CERT-IN (Computer Emergency Response Team) to gather "all the information of the reported ransomware".

"MeitY has initiated contact with relevant stakeholders in public and private sector to 'patch' their systems as prescribed in the advisory issued by CERT-IN. MeitY has also requested Microsoft India to inform all their partners and customers to apply relevant patches," the ministry said in a statement.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had on Sunday issued an advisory, asking banks to put in place a software update at ATMs to prevent their systems being hacked.

In Japan, nearly 600 companies, including electronics major Hitachi and automaker Nissan, were reportedly affected by the global ransomware attack, officials confirmed on Monday.

In China, more than 29,000 institutions were infected with reports suggesting that around 30,000 institutions had been infected along with hundreds of thousands of devices, Xinhua reported.

The ransomware has paralysed the online payment systems at some petrol stations across China since Friday, and also invaded some colleges encrypting papers and other documents.

At least one Australian business has been affected by the global "WannaCry" ransomware attack, the nation's Cyber Security Minister confirmed.

The vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows software -- exploited by "WannaCrypt" -- crippled computers across the world, with hackers demanding hundreds of dollars from the users for them to regain control over their data.

After taking computers over, the virus displayed messages demanding a payment of $300 in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock files and return them to the user.

Europol has been analysing the virus and was yet to identify the hacking group behind the massive attacks.

The virus exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows software, first identified by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

In the US, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said in a blog post that the cyber attack should be treated by governments as a "wake-up call".

"We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the US military intelligence organisation National Security Agency (NSA) has affected customers around the world," Smith wrote in the blog.

"An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen," he added.

On Saturday, a section of computers at Andhra Pradesh's police departments were hacked. Computers in 18 police units in Chittoor, Krishna, Guntur, Visakhatpatnam and Srikakulam districts were affected.

The attack was the latest in the growing menace of ransomware in which hackers deliver files to computers that automatically encrypt their data, making it unusable until a ransom is paid.

The investigators were still trying to identify the hackers who initiated this.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the world struggles to tame the massive "WannaCrypt" attack, ransomware has emerged as the most dangerous cyber threat for both organisations and individuals in recent months, with global losses now likely running into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ransomware is a malicious software that locks a connected device, such as a computer, tablet or smartphone and then demands a ransom to unlock it.

According to Norton by Symantec, one of the global leaders in cyber security software, there was a 36 per cent increase in the ransomware attacks in 2016 and the ransomware families have grown three times -- from 30 in 2014 to 101 in 2016.

"In 2016, we identified over 100 new malware families released into the wild, more than triple the amount seen previously, and a 36 per cent increase in ransomware attacks worldwide," Tarun Kaura, Director, Solutions Product Management, Asia Pacific & Japan, Symantec told IANS.

India alone faces 4 per cent of the total ransomware attacks while the US is most affected, with 34 per cent of the ransomware attacks globally.

India has been ranked fifth in terms of global threat rank by destination, with 3.8 per cent global threat detection.

"Over 180 Indian companies were victims of 'ransomware' -- or online extortion schemes -- in the first six months of 2016," said Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in security software and solutions.

While most major ransomware groups tend to be indiscriminate in their attacks, consumers are often less likely to have robust security in place, increasing the possibility of falling victim.

"The average ransom demanded globally by attackers also saw an upward spike this year. The average ransom demanded to date in 2016 more than doubled from Rs 19,670 in 2015 to Rs. 45,428," a recent Norton by Symantec study highlighted.

"WannaCrypt" -- the ransomware malware used in Friday's massive cyber attack -- has the ability to spread itself within corporate networks, without user interaction, by exploiting a known vulnerability in Microsoft Windows.

Computers which do not have the latest Windows security updates are at the risk of infection.

--IANS

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It was coming. On March 14 this year, Microsoft released a security update which addressed the vulnerability in the 16-year-old Windows XP operating system that the hackers behind the massive ransomware attack exploited and created havoc in 150 countries.

The vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows software -- exploited by "WannaCrypt" -- crippled computers from hospitals in Britain to police stations in India, with hackers demanding hundreds of dollars from the users for them to regain control over their data.

Once Microsoft released the patch for the vulnerability -- exploited by hacker group "Shadow Brokers" after stealing a software from the US Security Agency (NSA) -- some Window XP users installed the update called "Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010" on their desktops and laptops.

There are nearly 150 million computers running Windows XP operation system globally. Those who didn't pay heed to the Windows XP patch are the ones who have fallen prey to the world's biggest ransomware attack.

Microsoft which had discontiued security updates to its out-of-date software, has also provided a security update for all customers using Windows 8 and Windows Server 2003, anticipating further attacks on these earlier platforms being used by millions.

According to the company, "customers who are running supported versions of the operating system (Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016) will have received the security update MS17-010 in March.

"If customers have automatic updates enabled or have installed the update, they are protected. For other customers, we encourage them to install the update as soon as possible," said Phillip Misner, Principal Security Group Manager, Microsoft Security Response Centre, in a statement.

Meanwhile, "WannaCrypt" locked up machines, encrypted files and demanded approximately $600 in Bitcoin for a recovery key.

According to global cyber security firms, paying heed to updates can only save your data from being put to ransom.

"Install the official patch from Microsoft that closes the vulnerability used in the attack. Ensure that security solutions are switched on all nodes of the network. If Kaspersky Lab's solution is used, ensure that it includes the 'System Watcher', a behavioural proactive detection component and that it is switched on," Altaf Halde, Managing Director of Kaspersky Lab (South Asia), told IANS.

"Run the 'Critical Area Scan' task in Kaspersky Lab's solution to detect possible infection as soon as possible (otherwise it will be detected automatically, if not switched off, within 24 hours)," he added.

According to Subhendu Sahu, Acting Country Manager for India, FireEye, the ransomware poses high risks to organisations using potentially vulnerable Windows machines.

"We can certainly expect follow-on attacks. Organisations seeking to take risk management steps related to this campaign should install the latest Windows patches. They should also use the indicators of compromise which are associated with this activity. FireEye has also taken steps to help secure its customers," Sahu told IANS.

As investigators were working to track down those responsible for the ransomware attack, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said the governments should treat this attack as a "wake-up call".

The news led software security providers to ramp up anti-malware software.

"Upon learning of these incidents, McAfee quickly began working to analyse samples of the ransomware and develop mitigation guidance and detection updates for its customers. McAfee has subsequently provided DAT (that contain data in text or binary format) updates to all its customers and provided them and the public further analysis on the attacks," Ian Yip, Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific, McAfee, told IANS.

If you are a home Windows XP user, patch immediately follow up with an upgrade. If you are running a vulnerable system and cannot install the patch for some reason, try doing the following:

"Disable SMBv1 (a server component) with the steps documented at 'Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 2696547' and as recommended previously. Consider adding a rule on your router or firewall to block incoming Server Message Block (SMB) traffic on port 445," said a report in the technology website Engadget.

"This is big and set to get bigger. We haven't seen anything like this since Conficker in 2008," Amit Nath, Head of Asia Pacific-Corporate Business at cyber security firm F-Secure Corporation, told IANS.

The Conficker worm infected millions of computers including government, business and home computers in over 190 countries.

Always make sure your files are backed up.

"That way, if they become compromised in a ransomware attack, you can wipe your disk drive clean and restore the data from the backup. Using Cloud storage with anti-virus scanning abilities to share files will help users to mitigate any possible threats," suggested Anand Ramamoorthy, Managing Director, South Asia, McAfee.

Remember this: "WannaCrypt" probably won't work across the internet for PCs behind a firewall or router.

"But if a server is connected directly to the internet or a PC is on the same network as an infected computer, it can spread quickly -- which is exactly what has happened," the Engadget report added.
In a boost to immunotherapy for cancer treatments, researchers have found a way to use light to guide the immune system to attack tumour cells.

In mice with melanoma on the ears, the optical control was sufficient to allow the immune system to nearly wipe out the melanoma with no toxic side effects, the study published online in the journal Nature Communications said.

The method is similar to "sending light on a spy mission to track down cancer cells", said lead author Minsoo Kim, Professor at University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York.

Immunotherapy is different from radiation or chemotherapy. Instead of directly killing cancer cells, immunotherapy tells the immune system to act in certain ways by stimulating T cells to attack the disease.

Several different types of immunotherapy exist or are in development, including pills called "checkpoint inhibitors" and CAR T-cell therapy that involves removing a patient's own immune cells and altering them genetically to seek and destroy cancer cells.

The problem, however, is that immunotherapy can cause the immune system to overreact or under-react, Kim said.

In addition, cancer cells are evasive and can hide from killer T-cells.

Aggressive tumors also suppress the immune system in the areas surrounding the malignancy (called the microenvironment), keeping T cells out.

If the immune system under-reacts, currently the only way to modify it is to pump more T cells into the body.

But that often unleashes a storm of toxicities that can shut down a patient's organs.

Kim's laboratory focused on how to overcome the immune-suppressive environment that cancer creates.

The researchers discovered that a molecule called channelrhodopsin (CatCh), which is active in algae and is light sensitive, could be introduced to the immune system via a virus and activated to control the T- cell response to cancer.

The researchers tested in mice an LED chip which could eventually be implanted in humans.

The team evaluated their methods in mice with melanoma on the ears.

The animals wore a tiny battery pack that sent a wireless signal to the LED chip - allowing researchers to remotely shine light on the tumour and surrounding areas, giving T cells a boost for their cancer-killing function.

The optical control allowed the immune system to nearly wipe out the melanoma with no toxic side effects, the study reported.

Future studies, Kim said, would determine whether the wireless LED signal can deliver light to a tumour deep within the body instead of on the surface area, and still have the ability to stimulate T cells to attack.

--IANS

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Karnataka's Principal Secretary, Revenue, Ganga Ram Baderia was arrested by the Special Investigation Team of the state's Lokayukta) for his alleged involvement in a mining scam a decade ago.

"Baderia gave permission to Janthakal Enterprises Ltd to export 1.2 lakh tonnes of iron ore on receiving Rs 10 lakh bribe from the mining firm when he was Director of the State's Mines and Geology Department in 2007," Lokayukta Inspector General of Police K.S.R. Charan Reddy told reporters here.

Baderia, a 1989 IAS batch officer, had also recommended renewal of the mining firm's lease, with forged documents for allowing it to mine iron ore from the reserved forest area in Ballari district, as evident from his official notings in the files.

"A court remanded Baderia to three-day police custody for interrogation," said Reddy, adding that the case against him, the mining firm and others was registered on April 5 on the Supreme Court's March 29 directive,

Since the mining scam occurred during the tenures of then Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy of the Janata Dal-Secular and N. Dharam Singh of the Congress in 2005-07, the apex court also made them and then 11 serving and retired officers as respondents in the case.

The top court's division bench comprising Justices P.C. Ghose and R.F. Nariman also restrained all other courts, including the Karnataka High Court from passing any order in the case.

"The permission to lift the old dump at Holalkere taluk in Chitradurga district, belonging to Janthkal Enterprises, was processed in 2007," said Reddy.

Baderia renewed the firm's mining lease for 40 years from 1985 to 2005 and from 2006-2025 on August 23, 2007 through two notifications.

According to a complaint by Right to Information (RTI) activist T.J. Abhraham to the anti-corruption body, the former Chief Ministers and many officials were involved in de-reserving forest areas in the rich mineral district of Ballari, about 330 km from Bengaluru.

Abraham filed the complaint with the findings of the former state Ombudsman Justice N. Santosh Hegde, who investigated the multi-crore mining scam in the state from 2001-2010 and indicted many politicians, ministers, lawmakers, officials and mining firms for their involvement in the irregularities.

--IANS

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A Singapore consortium consisting of Ascendas-Singbridge Pvt Ltd and Sembcorp Development Ltd along with Amaravati Development Corporation (ADC) will develop a 6.84 square km start-up area in Andhra Pradesh capital Amaravati.

Andhra Pradesh on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding towards this effect with Singapore government.

The Singapore consortium and ADC will form a special purpose vehicle Amaravati Development Partner (ADP) for development of the start-up area.

Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and Singapore's Minister for Trade and Industry S. Eswaran along with 59-member strong delegation participated in the MoU signing ceremony here.

Andhra Pradesh and Singapore also signed another MoU for economic development in Andhra Pradesh, enhancing capacities of government departments and agencies and promotion of bilateral trade and investment.

The start-up area comprises 6.84 sq km or 1,691 acres adjacent to the government core area of 900 acres in Amaravati.

The state government is confident that the start-up area will kick-start the economy in Amaravati and will trigger the city as the global destination of people, investments and jobs.

Singapore Consortium will have equity participation of Rs 306 crore (58 per cent) in ADP. ADC will make equity contribution of Rs 222 crore (42 per cent).

ADP will develop this area in 15 years in three phases. Under first phase, 656 acres will be developed in five years. The second phase will cover 514 acres and third phase 521 acres.

ADP will develop, provide world's best infrastructure, market and attract queen bees but final sale of the land will be done by Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA), a state government of agency.

Developed plots will be sold by auction or by negotiation to global best companies who can bring in large-scale employment.

Reserve price of land for first phase is Rs 4 crore per acre. A committee consisting of ADP and government of Andhra Pradesh will decide price for next phases.

After sale of 70 per cent of the developed land, the next phase will be started.

ADP will develop 8.07 lakh sq. ft. of state-of-the-art buildings for mixed-use within three years of the start of the project.

The 15-year Greenfield project is expected to bring in resident population of 1.25 lakh families and create 2.50 lakh jobs.

The cumulative contribution to the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) is expected to be Rs 1.15 lakh crore while revenue to government from taxes will be Rs 8,000 crore to Rs 10,000 crore.

Naidu said Amaravati would be developed as most liveable city with people first concept on par with Singapore and international standards. He said everything should be focused on people-centric development to provide wealth, happiness and health in the new capital.

Iswaran said the partnership with Andhra had started two years ago when Singapore companies prepared three master plans for Amaravati.

He said Singapore Prime Minister was likely to visit India in early 2018 and he will probably visit Amaravati.

--IANS

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A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear case on Monday against US President Donald Trump's travel ban.

The US Courts for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, Northern California, ruled on February 9 against reinstating a travel ban signed on January 27 by Trump as part of an executive order.

The president subsequently issued a revised order on March 6, taking Iraq off the list of countries whose citizens are blocked from entering the United States for 90 days but keeping six other Muslim-majority countries on the list.

The travel ban in the second order was blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii, thus throwing the case again into the 9th circuit court.

In initiating the legal challenge on March 9, Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin noted that the new order, compared with the initial ban, "nothing of substance has changed: there is the same blanket ban on entry from Muslim-majority countries."

--IANS

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Chelsea Manning, the transgender US soldier convicted of espionage for leaking national security secrets, will remain an active-duty following her release from a military prison, according to the Army.

Manning, whose sentence was commuted by former President Barack Obama, will not be paid after her May 17 release from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, but will be eligible for healthcare benefits and have access to commissaries and military exchanges, the Army told USA Today on Sunday.

Manning entered prison as a man named Bradley.

She later changed her name, identified as a woman and received hormone treatment while incarcerated.

While Manning's court-martial conviction remains under appeal, she will remain a private in the Army, said Army spokesman Dave Foster.

"Private Manning is statutorily entitled to medical care while on excess leave in an active duty status, pending final appellate review," Foster told USA Today on Sunday.

However, the Army refused to disclose the other terms of Manning's release, six years before her eligibility for parole, citing privacy concerns.

She was sentenced to 35 years for releasing hundreds of thousands of secret documents to WikiLeaks. Manning appeared at court martial in the uniform of an enlisted man.

Like all soldiers, Manning will be assigned to an Army post but it is unclear where and to whom she will report.

While in prison, Manning had received hormone treatment and care for gender dysphoria.

She had also been informed that she was eligible for sex reassignment surgery to be paid for by the government.

However, if the appeal of her conviction is denied, she could be dishonourably discharged, which mandates a loss of benefits, including health care.

Manning, who has a Twitter account managed by her supporters, said she was looking forward to her release, reports the USA Today.

"Celebrating a new hope, and a return of the sun."

--IANS

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All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) legislator Vikas Munda on Monday sought a CBI probe into Maoist commander Kundan Pahan's surrender in Jharkhand on Sunday.

Vikas Munda's father former Minister Ramesh Singh Munda was killed in 2008 by the Maoist who is facing 128 cases, including 70 murder cases, and carried a Rs 15 lakh award on his head.

He was also behind the beheading of police Inspector Francis Induwar in 2009.

"Common people killed by Maoists are given a compensation of Rs 1 lakh and Maoists who kill innocent people are rewarded Rs 15 lakh," Munda said.

He said: "There should be a CBI probe in the surrender of Kundan Pahan and he should be hanged."

The AJSU is part of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led ruling alliance in the state.

The main opposition Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) also questioned Kundan Pahan's surrender.

"Kundan Pahan has been portrayed as Robin Hood by the state government and the police. The way his surrender was publicised, it seems there is a hidden agenda of the state government behind the surrender of Kundan Pahan," JMM General Secretary Vinod Pandey said.

Jharkhand High Court has also taken cognisance of the development after the Advocate Association questioned the state government's scheme in which the cash reward for the capture of a Maoist is given to them after the surrender.

The association said public money is being misused in this manner.

--IANS

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A woman intruder from Pakistan was shot dead by BSF troopers in the early hours of Monday in Punjab's frontier district of Gurdaspur, a senior officer said.

Pakistan's border authorities later in the day refused to accept the body.

The woman, aged around 60, was shot dead near Bharial Border Out Post (BoP) around 3 a.m. when she refused to heed the warning to stop proceeding into the Indian territory, Border Security Force Deputy Inspector General R.S. Kataria said.

"BSF troops deployed at Bharial BoP in Gurdaspur sector observed suspicious movement of a Pakistan intruder who crossed the international boundary and entered the Indian territory.

"BSF troops challenged the intruder to stop, but she kept on moving towards the border security fence. Hence, BSF troops opened fire and the intruder succumbed to bullet injuries," the DIG said.

"The Pakistan Rangers were contacted to hand over the body, but they refused. The body was later handed over to Behrampur police station for the funeral," he added.

India and Pakistan share a 553-km international border in Punjab.

--IANS

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Several customers of IDBI Bank in Mumbai were pleasantly surprised when they received a text message from the bank saying Rs 5,000 has been deposited in their accounts. IDBI Bank thanks you for participating in the Debit Card Usage campaign. Congratulations for receiving Rs 5,000, the bank said. But customers delight was short-lived. Another message few hours later said the message of Rs 5,000 received by them has been erroneously sent by the bank. As part of the debit card usage plan, you have received Rs 100 which has been credited to your account. The IDBI Bank congratulates you. The second message left most customers fuming.
The Trump administration has signalled its intentions of backing out of commitments the US made at the Paris meeting of the UN Climate Convention in 2015. This matters because the US accounts for about 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Their reneging on their pledge may also encourage others to join them in free loading on other peoples efforts.
Even as speculation is rife over veteran leader Shankersinh Vaghela's probable shift to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after he 'unfollowed' Rahul Gandhi and others on social media, the local leadership is wary of his "pressure tactics".
Even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress withdrew their candidates in many wards and demanded repolling amid violent scenes during the West Bengal municipal elections, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Sunday dubbed this a conspiracy to tarnish Chief Minister Mamata Banerjees image and undermine her development work.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Monday tabled the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill in the state assembly even as pandemonium marked the inaugural day of the special session of Uttar Pradesh legislature.
A 19-year-old woman was allegedly raped by two of her acquaintances in a village in Panipat district, police said today.

The woman in a police complaint said she had gone to her aunt's home in Chulkana village where two men befriended her.

On May 7, the men told the woman that her mother had met with an accident and offered to accompany her home in Safidon village, the police said quoting the complaint.

They allegedly raped her near a river on their way to her home and fled, the police said.

A case has been registered against the two persons under relevant sections of IPC.

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The CRPF has conducted about 200 special operations with a "re-worked" strategy, apprehending 26 Maoists and seizing a huge cache of munitions, since the April ambush in Sukma where Naxals had massacred 25 of its personnel.

Of the 26 Maoists apprehended, 15 were involved in the deadly ambush in Sukma district in Chhattisgarh on April 24.

The force has also seized a huge assortment of arms and ammunition as part of these operations, an operations dossier revealed.

Newly appointed Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Director General R R Bhatnagar said today that a special focus was being laid on result-oriented operations in the south Bastar region of Chhattisgarh to curtail the strength and resources of Maoist cadres.

"Post the Burkapal incident in Sukma, we have reworked our operational strategy in south Bastar and the focus is now to conduct joint intelligence-based operations.

"Despite the harsh summers and sweltering heat, we have intensified our operations in those areas where there is a security vacuum. A number of special operations have been launched by us," the DG told PTI.

He said that the road construction work being done by the force in large parts of Chhattisgarh and a few other states will not suffer and that the CRPF will ensure their completion.

Bhatnagar, appointed as the force chief by the government two days after the April 24 ambush, recently travelled to Sukma and analysed the ambush spot, besides the site near Bheji where a dozen CRPF men were similarly killed by Naxals when they were out to conduct a road sanitisation exercise on March 11.

The operations dossier prepared by the security headquarters of anti-Naxal operations stated that after April 24, when 25 CRPF men were fatally ambushed by Naxals in Sukma, 98 such special operations were conducted in the worst Left Wing Extremism-affected district of the state.

All such tasks, the dossier accessed by PTI said, are either led by the CRPF or its special jungle warfare guerrilla force -- the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA).

The areas where these operations were launched in Sukma include villages of Karigundem, Minapa, Kasalpara, Milampalli, Tokenpalli, Phulampad, Bedapad, Gauraram, Palodi, Barmor, Potakpalli, Tumalpad, Aliguda and Regargatta.

In order to further step up offensive along the borders of Sukma, 36 such operations have been conducted till now in the neighbouring district of Dantewada while 55 have been launched in the villages and deep forest areas of Bijapur district.

"As part of these operations, it is being ensured that a good number of state police personnel form an essential part of the patrol party along with the CRPF.

"While the target is to have at least one-third strength of the squad from that of the state police, it will take some more time before these numbers are achieved for all the operations to be conducted in the future," a senior officer said.

The force, the dossier said, has also apprehended 26 Naxals as part of these post-Sukma operations, out of which 15 were involved in the Burkapal attack.

"Out of the 26, six Naxals had police warrants issued against them for various acts of violence and killing in the south Bastar area," the senior officer said.

The dossier, which has now been shared with the Chhattisgarh Police investigating the Sukma ambush, said during the attack, the CRPF men retaliated and killed two Naxal commanders identified as Anil alias Deva, who was the commander of platoon No. 24, and Ravi, commander of the Cherla LOS (local organisation squad) of the Maoists.

"Apart from these two, body of the third Maoist was recovered from the ambush site on April 27 by the CRPF. He has been identified as Mukkam Baman of Burkapal village," it said.

After the Burkapal ambush, it said, "the CRPF has apprehended 72 Maoists while 21 have surrendered before the forces in the entire LWE theatre. 17 arms, 4,304 rounds of ammunition, 291 kgs of explosives, two grenades, 85 improvised explosive devices and 5,125 detonators have also been seized. At least seven exchange of fire incidents have occurred till now between the CRPF-led security squads and the Naxals."



About 10 states are LWE-affected in the country.

After the Sukma attack, the strategic anti-Naxal operations command headquarters of the CRPF has been shifted from Kolkata to Chhattisgarh's Raipur for effective operational coordination between multiple security forces.

The lead anti-Naxal operations force is also deploying a fresh squad of about 2,000 CoBRA commandos in and around Sukma district.

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Three college students died and four others were injured when the car in which they were going to their examination centre fell off a flyover in west Delhi's Punjabi Bagh area this morning, the police said.

The families of Sanchit Chhabra and Ritu Singh, who died on the spot, have decided to donate their eyes, police said.

Rajat, who was behind the wheel, succumbed to injuries during treatment later on, they said. Other injured are Pranav, Garima, Rishab and Raja.

The Honda V-tec car had seven occupants. Police said the injured students, who are receiving treatment at a city hospital, have not regained consciousness yet.

As the car fell 30 feet down from the railway over-bridge flyover near Punjabi Bagh, it turned turtle throwing some of the occupants out. The others were stuck inside and police and fire department personnel rescued them.

All seven were first-year students of Delhi Institute of Professional Studies. They were on their way to IP College in Narela for their second semester examination when the accident occurred, a senior police officer said.

The students, who were in their teens, had assembled at Rajat's house in east Punjabi Bagh before leaving for their exam centre, police said. They suspect Rajat might be over speeding.

The police are waiting to record the statements of the injured students to ascertain the sequence of events.

Police said it is suspected Rajat lost control of the vehicle and it hit the flyover. The impact of the collision was such that the car hurled in the air, police said.

Eyewitnesses told the police there was a loud sound when the car hit the flyover and it was thrown beneath within seconds.

Police said the car belonged to Rajat and he had a valid driving licence. The forensic team inspected the car.

A senior police officer said they are looking at two possibilities-- either the rear tyre got punctured and Rajat lost control of the vehicle, or he was trying to overtake a vehicle which led to the accident.

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West Bengal state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury today wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, drawing his attention to the violence during yesterday's municipal poll and the "murder of democracy."



Chowdhury also wrote separate letters to AICC president Sonia Gandhi, AICC vice-president Rahul Gandhi and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

In his letters, Chowdhury said he had referred to the "ground situation" in Bengal where democracy was being trampled by the Mamata Banerjee government.

"I have given them a complete picture of yesterday's violence. It is the same letter that I had written to the State Election Commission yesterday," Chowdhury told PTI.

Chowdhury wrote at a time when West Bengal Chief Minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee is set to meet Sonia Gandhi to discuss a strategy for the presidential polls, much to the discomfort of the Congress' state unit.

Asked why he wrote to Modi, Chowdhury said, "The people of this country should know what kind of democracy is prevailing in the state, how the people are not allowed to vote freely and fairly here."



The election to seven municipal bodies in West Bengal was held yesterday amid violence and booth-capturing allegedly by the ruling Trinamool Congress as major opposition parties CPI-M, Congress and BJP demanded countermanding of the poll.

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Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba today attended Singapore's first International Maritime Review held at the country's prime Changi Naval Base here.

Lanba attended the review along with navy ships INS Sahyadri and INS Kamorta.

A total of 46 warships from 28 countries are in Singapore for the review, an event organised by the Republic of Singapore Navy's (RSN) to celebrate its 50th years of establishment.

Admiral Lanba will also attend the International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (IMDEX) 2017 tomorrow.

His visit aims to consolidate existing Maritime Cooperation initiatives as well as explore new avenues between India and Singapore.

Defence cooperation between the two countries is robust and is primarily focused towards Maritime Cooperation.

India signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement with Singapore in 2003, which was renewed in 2015.

Indian Navy and Singapore Navy are partners in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), a Maritime Cooperation construct conceptualised and pioneered by Indian Navy in 2008.

The Indian and Singapore navies will conduct bilateral exercise "SIMBEX" off Singapore from 18 to May 24.

Both countries have been conducting "SIMBEX" since 1994.

Both navies also engage in Navy to Navy Staff Talks, which commenced in 2004.

The 12th Staff Talks were conducted in March 2017 and the 13th Staff Talks are scheduled to be held in 2018.

The Singapore Navy has participated in all the MILAN- series interactions organised at Port Blair by the Indian Navy.

Warships of both countries regularly visit each other's ports.

Lanba, who arrived in the country yesterday, held extensive talks with his Singaporean counterpart Lai Chung Han and explored ways to further step up maritime cooperation between the two countries.

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AIADMK (Amma) faction leader TTV today sought in a special court the copy of a CD which allegedly has audio recordings of phone conversations between him and a co-accused in the Election Commission bribery case.

The response of Dhinakaran, who is in judicial custody, came on the Delhi Police's plea seeking his consent for taking the voice samples.

Dhinakaran's counsel told Special Judge Poonam Chaudhry that he should be given a copy of the CD which the police claimed had the audio recordings of telephone conversations between him and arrested alleged middleman Sukesh Chandrashekar and others.

The advocate said he would decide whether to give the consent for voice samples or not after going through the CD.

Dhinakaran, his close aide Mallikarjuna and alleged hawala operator Nathu Singh were produced from jail through video conferencing, as the court extended their judicial custody till May 29.

Chandrashekar has refused to give consent for the voice samples citing several Supreme Court and high court judgements that he has a right to deny.

The court listed the police's plea seeking voice samples of and Chandrashekar for arguments on May 18. The court would also hear Mallikarjuna's bail plea on that day.

Delhi Police's Crime Branch has submitted before the court that they needed the voice samples for their probe into the Rs 50 crore graft case.

Police said it has a CD containing the audio recordings of the phone conversations between and Chandrashekar and others and they wanted to compare the audios with the voice samples.

Dhinakaran was arrested here on the night of April 25 after four days of questioning for allegedly attempting to bribe an unidentified EC official to get the undivided AIADMK's 'two leaves' election symbol.

His faction had hoped to obtain the symbol for a by- election to the R K Nagar Assembly seat in Tamil Nadu, which was later cancelled by the Election Commission (EC) after the alleged scam broke out in the media.

The EC had frozen the AIADMK's symbol after two factions of the party -- one led by Dhinakaran's aunt Sasikala and the other by former chief minister O Panneerselvam -- staked a claim to it.

Dhinakaran has been accused of allegedly arranging the amount from undisclosed sources and getting it transferred from Chennai to Delhi through illegal channels.

Mallikarjuna was arrested for allegedly facilitating the Rs 50 crore deal between Dhinakaran and Chandrashekar, who was arrested on April 16.

Singh was held on the night of April 27 with the police claiming that he was given Rs one crore to be handed over to Chandrashekar. The money was meant to be paid as a bribe to someone in the EC, the police has claimed.
An Indonesian court today increased the jail term of an Australian woman convicted of killing a policeman on the resort island of Bali to five years after prosecutors appealed her original sentence.

Sara Connor, 46, was handed a four-year jail term in March after being found guilty along with her British DJ boyfriend of killing officer Wayan Sudarsa, who was beaten to death on a popular beach on the island.

The Briton, 34-year-old David Taylor, was jailed for six years.

Traffic policeman Sudarsa's blood-soaked body was found in August covered with dozens of wounds on his neck, chest and head.

Taylor, whose stage name is DJ Nutzo, admitted getting into a fight with Sudarsa on the beach after accusing the officer of stealing Connor's handbag. Mother of two Connor had maintained her innocence but judges found her guilty, ruling she had held the victim down during the fight.

Prosecutors appealed the four-year sentence for Connor, which was lower than the eight years they had recommended to the judges, arguing it would not have enough of a deterrent effect.

Bali High Court today increased the term by one year. The judges said the reasons were that her actions could impact the tourism industry and she had left the victim to die when he was lying face down on the beach.

"The defendant has damaged the image of Indonesian tourism, especially tourism on Bali," said judge Sutoyo, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

Connor did not attend the appeal hearing at the court in the Balinese capital Denpasar.

Bali, a pocket of Hinduism in Muslim-majority Indonesia, is a popular tourist destination known for its tropical climate and palm-fringed beaches.

Minor crime is common but murders are rare.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
How hard can it be to find a judge? Very hard if the judge in question is CS Karnan.

Desperate police teams from West Bengal to Tamil Nadu are at their wits end as they hunt for the Calcutta High Court judge, hoping to capture him and bring him to justice. But the 61-year-old has proved to be as elusive as he has been brash, defying the Supreme Court and passing his own judgements against his peers.

Clues that he could be in a temple town in Andhra Pradesh or a holiday resort in Tamil Nadu have proved to be dead ends. Police are now staring at the possibility that Karnan, who was last seen in Chennai, may have fled the country, perhaps to Sri Lanka.

A senior police officer in Chennai told PTI today: "The whereabouts of Justice Karnan are not known yet. A West Bengal police team continues its search for him." He said the role of Tamil Nadu police was limited to providing logistics and technical support to the visiting team.

Karnan's flight from justice--the Supreme Court ordered him arrested six days ago on contempt of court charges--has provided endless fodder for mirth and ridicule by netizens, not only against the country's security apparatus but also against the judiciary itself.

"And in the end top police officers of two states of India are not able to locate a High Court judge - are we joking or this is the state of affairs of police and judiciary?" asked Dinesh Jain, contributing his comments to a chorus of readers' reaction to a article on a national newspaper's website.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sentenced Karnan, a native of Chennai, to six months' imprisonment, and directed his immediate arrest in an unprecedented order against a sitting high court judge. The court ordered West Bengal's Director General of Police to carry out the arrest and lodge him in a jail.

"If the Intelligence (apparatus) cannot keep an eye on persons like Karnan, who has been in the in the last 6 months if not more, can they be relied upon for other important duties?" said another netizen in the readers' comments section.

Targeting the judiciary, another reader posted: "a judge doesn't believe in law and they claim they have the right to pass judgement."



The West Bengal police team has already questioned several persons, including Karnan's kin. Karnan left Kolkata for Chennai by an early morning flight on Tuesday, hours before the apex court ordered his arrest.

Until a couple of hours after the court order, Karnan, who was staying at the Tamil Nadu government state guest house in Chennai, was meeting and discussing nonchalantly with journalists and visitors. He then went incommunicado when the full impact of the apex court ruling dawned on everyone.

A posse of policemen, headed by an assistant commissioner of police-cadre officer from Kolkata, landed in Chennai the next day.

When the police team arrived at the guest house, it did not find either the judge or the two lawyers who had accompanied him.

Initially it was rumoured that Karnan was somewhere in Tindivanam, about 100 km from Chennai, and later it was said that he had gone to the temple town of Kalahasti in Andhra Pradesh. But the police team came back empty-handed.

They also reportedly rushed to a holiday destination called Tada near Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh border after picking his mobile phone signal.

Word also spread that Karnan had fled to Sri Lanka through Madurai, but that information turned out to be false as no one by the name of Karnan had passed through the Madurai airport customs.

Karnan moved the Supreme Court on Thursday seeking recall of the order holding him guilty of contempt of court and sentencing him to a six-month jail term.

Karnan's troubles started after he was transferred to Calcutta from the Madras High Court for his repeated allegations and run-ins with its chief justice and fellow judges. He claimed he was being discriminated against and being denied promotions because he is a dalit.

Last year, a recalcitrant Karnan stayed his own transfer order, which was suspended by the Supreme Court. Later, a constitution bench initiated contempt of court proceedings against Karnan after he repeatedly levelled allegations of corruption against Madras High Court chief justice and other judges.

On March 10 this year, the apex court issued a bailable warrant against Karnan to ensure his presence before it in the contempt case. Karnan appeared before the court on March 31, a first in Indian judicial history, and sought restoration of his judicial powers. The plea was rejected.

A belligerent Karnan told the Supreme Court he would never again appear before it, even if he was arrested and put in jail.

Since going underground, a petition on his behalf has been mentioned before a five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar.

When the Chief Justice of India asked about his whereabouts, Karnan's lawyer Mathews J Nedumpara said he is "very much in Chennai".

But whether he intends to emerge and surrender anytime soon is anybody's guess.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
How hard can it be to find a judge? Apparently very hard if the judge in question is CS Karnan.

Desperate police teams from West Bengal to Tamil Nadu are at their wits end as they hunt for the Calcutta High Court judge, hoping to capture him and bring him to justice. But the 61-year-old has proved to be as elusive as he has been brash, defying the Supreme Court and passing his own judgements against his peers.

Clues of his possible whereabouts in a temple town in Andhra Pradesh or a holiday resort in Tamil Nadu have proved to be dead ends. Police are now staring at the possibility that Karnan, who was last seen in Chennai, may have fled the country, perhaps to Sri Lanka.

A senior police officer in Chennai told PTI today: "The whereabouts of Justice Karnan are not known yet. A West Bengal police team continues its search for him." He said the role of Tamil Nadu police was limited to providing logistics and technical support to the visiting team.

Karnan's flight from justice -- the Supreme Court ordered him arrested six days ago on contempt of court charges -- has provided endless fodder for mirth and ridicule by netizens, not only against the country's security apparatus but also against the judiciary itself.

"And in the end top police officers of two states of India are not able to locate a High Court judge - are we joking or this is the state of affairs of police and judiciary?" asked Dinesh Jain, contributing his comments to a chorus of readers' reaction to a article on a national newspaper's website.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sentenced Karnan, a native of Chennai, to six months' imprisonment, and directed his immediate arrest in an unprecedented order against a sitting high court judge. The court ordered West Bengal's Director General of Police to carry out the arrest and lodge him in a jail.

"If the Intelligence (apparatus) cannot keep an eye on persons like Karnan, who has been in the in the last 6 months if not more, can they be relied upon for other important duties?" said another netizen in the readers' comments section.

Targeting the judiciary, another reader posted: "a judge doesn't believe in law and they claim they have the right to pass judgement."



The West Bengal police team has already questioned several persons, including Karnan's kin. Karnan left Kolkata for Chennai by an early morning flight on Tuesday, hours before the apex court ordered his arrest.

Until a couple of hours after the court order, Karnan, who was staying at the Tamil Nadu government state guest house in Chennai, was meeting and discussing nonchalantly with journalists and visitors. He then went incommunicado when the full impact of the apex court ruling dawned on everyone.

A posse of policemen, headed by an assistant commissioner of police-cadre officer from Kolkata, landed in Chennai the next day.

When the police team arrived at the guest house, it did not find either the judge or the two lawyers who had accompanied him.

Initially it was rumoured that Karnan was somewhere in Tindivanam, about 100 km from Chennai, and later it was said that he had gone to the temple town of Kalahasti in Andhra Pradesh. But the police team came back empty-handed.

They also reportedly rushed to a holiday destination called Tada near Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh border after picking his mobile phone signal.

Word also spread that Karnan had fled to Sri Lanka through Madurai, but that information turned out to be false as no one by the name of Karnan had passed through the Madurai airport customs.

Karnan moved the Supreme Court on Thursday seeking recall of the order holding him guilty of contempt of court and sentencing him to a six-month jail term.

Karnan's troubles started after he was transferred to Calcutta from the Madras High Court for his repeated allegations and run-ins with its chief justice and fellow judges. He claimed he was being discriminated against and being denied promotions because he is a dalit.

Last year, a recalcitrant Karnan stayed his own transfer order, which was suspended by the Supreme Court. Later, a constitution bench initiated contempt of court proceedings against Karnan after he repeatedly levelled allegations of corruption against Madras High Court chief justice and other judges.

On March 10 this year, the apex court issued a bailable warrant against Karnan to ensure his presence before it in the contempt case. Karnan appeared before the court on March 31, a first in Indian judicial history, and sought restoration of his judicial powers. The plea was rejected.

A belligerent Karnan told the Supreme Court he would never again appear before it, even if he was arrested and put in jail.

Since going underground, Karnan's lawyer has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court for hearings against its sentence.

A frustrated Supreme Court today told the lawyer, Mathews J Nedumpara to stop seeking the hearings.

"We are saying no and yet you continue to come again and again. We are liberal to you. It is for you to understand, we can be liberal and harsh," said a five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar.

Earlier, when Kehar bad asked Nedumpara about Karnan's whereabouts, the lawyer said he is "very much in Chennai".

But whether the judge intends to emerge and surrender anytime soon is anybody's guess.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Palestinians marching to remember those displaced at the time of the 1948 founding of Israel clashed with Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank today, leaving several wounded.

Annual marches are held on May 15 to mark what Palestinians call the "Nakba," or catastrophe in Arabic.

At a checkpoint on the outskirts of Ramallah, dozens of Palestinian youths hurled rocks at Israeli soldiers, who responded with rubber bullets and the foul-smelling riot control spray known as skunk.

A Palestinian emergency worker said that 11 Palestinians were taken to hospital, most of them wounded by rubber bullets. The extent of their injuries was not known.

Earlier, thousands of people carrying Palestinian flags marched through the city, many carrying large keys to symbolise their claims to the homes they lost in 1948.

"I come every year to commemorate this anniversary, this catastrophe," said Salha Orabi, a descendant of refugees and now a resident of the nearby Jelazoun refugee camp.

"The Nakba for us symbolises destruction," he added. "It is us who have left our homes and our land."



In Bethlehem, hundreds of Palestinians stoned Israeli troops guarding the tomb of biblical matriarch Rachel, a shrine venerated by Jews and Muslims, an AFP photographer said.

Soldiers fired tear gas and stun grenades, but the number of Palestinian casualties was not immediately known.

In the 1948 Nakba, mourned by Palestinians each May 15, more than 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in the war surrounding Israel's declaration of independence.

For the Palestinians, the right to return to homes they fled or were forced to leave is a prerequisite for any peace agreement with Israel, but it is a demand the Jewish state has rejected.

The anniversary came this year against the backdrop of a hunger strike by Palestinians in Israeli prisons, led by jailed leader Marwan Barghouti.

In what the Palestine Liberation Organisation said in a statement was a message from his solitary confinement cell, he said the fast, in its 29th day today, would go on indefinitely.

"My oath and pledge to the prisoners and our people is to pursue the battle for freedom and dignity until it reaches its stated goals," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The counting of votes cast in Nepal's first local-level polls held in two decades began today after an all-party meeting here.

The vote counting began in 11 local units of Kathmandu and 6 local units of Lalitpur district after an all-party meeting forged consensus at National Assembly Hall.

Ballot boxes from Ward Number 1 were opened first to begin the counting.

Helicopters were used for airlifting ballot boxes from mountainous districts to district headquarters.

According to Election Commission spokesperson Surya Prasad Sharma said helicopters were mobilised in Rasuwa, Dhading, Dolpa, Humla, Gorkha and Mugu districts.

The first phase of local elections was held successfully across three provinces yesterday to choose leadership in Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) and its 32 wards.

Millions of Nepalese voted in the country's first local- level polls in two decades as the Himalayan nation took a crucial step towards cementing democracy amid political turmoil.

The first phase of the local elections took place peacefully at 281 local units out of 283 in province 3, 4 and 6.

The second round of polls in provinces 1, 2, 5 and 7 will be held on June 14.

Local-level elections could not be held after 1997 largely as a result of the decade-long Maoist insurgency that claimed more than 16,000 lives in Nepal.

Nepal has been witnessing political instability.

Some Madhes-centric parties have opposed the elections until the new Constitution is amended to accommodate their views: more representation in the Parliament and redrawing of provincial boundaries.

The Nepal government has tabled a new Constitution amendment bill in the Parliament to address the demands of the agitating Madhesis.

Madhesis, mostly of Indian-origin, launched a prolonged agitation between September 2015 and February last year against the implementation of the new Constitution which they felt marginalised the Terai community.

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The Calcutta University would not allow students to sit for examinations without a minimum percentage of attendance, interim vice-chancellor of the university Asutosh Ghosh said today.

"We are ensuring that students (in undergraduate and post-graduate levels) will not be allowed to write their papers without the minimum percentage of attendance," Ghosh told PTI without specifying the figure.

"Different universities follow different yardsticks on this issue. However, the CU will enforce the rule strictly for regular absentee students," Ghosh said.

Citing the instances of educational institutions run by the Ramakrishna Mission or St Xavier's College, he said, "In RKM colleges and in St Xavier's, students have to attend classes regularly. They can be our models."



"If we have to instill discipline among students, we must ensure that they attend classes," he added.

Asked to compare with the situation in Presidenty University where VC Anuradha Lohia has curbed political activity on campus, Ghosh said, "The number of students in Presidency is far lower than CU. In the Bengali department, for instance, there are 30-40 students in a class which is many times lower than the number of Bengali students in CU. However we are serious on the issue."



Asked about media reports about some colleges taking in number of students exceeding their capacities, Ghosh said, "We have collected figures and it was found that some colleges admitted excess number of students in some cases. We have discussed the issue with the colleges so that such things were not repeated."



The interim VC was asked to comment on West Bengal Education minister Partha Chatterjee calling upon students to give first priority to studies and attend classes regularly.

"We are not in favour of students with 2-3 per cent attendance in colleges leading student bodies," Chatterjee had said last week.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Curfew was today relaxed for three hours in Banswara district of Rajasthan which witnessed communal clashes last week.

The situation is normalising, but police and administrative officials are keeping a vigil in areas where arson was reported.

"We have relaxed the curfew for three hours from 12 noon to 3 pm," said Banswara SP Kaluram Rawat.

He said that more than 90 people from both sides have been taken into custody as a preventive measure till late yesterday night.

"No fresh incidence of clash was reported in the sensitive areas where curfew was clamped on Friday.Few arrests too have been made for disturbing peace and harmony in the city," Rawat added.

Clashes on Thursday broke out during a religious procession of the minority community which led to stone pelting on the night.

On Friday, members of both the sides again pelted stones, torched houses and vehicles which prompted the district administration to clamp curfew in Kotwali Police Station area, which covers almost entire city area.

"We are continuously holding meeting with senior members of both the communities.They have assured their support to restore peace and communal harmony.We will take a decision to further relax curfew on the basis of the prevailing situation," the SP said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Deepti Sharma produced a stunning 188-run knock, the second highest score in women's one-day international, to set up India's massive 249-run win over Ireland in the quadrangular series here today.

The 19-year-old from Uttar Pradesh shared a record 320- run opening stand with Poonam Raut (109) as India rattled a commanding 358-3 after skipper Mithali Raj won the toss and decided to bat first.

Deepti's 160-ball superb innings was studded with 27 boundaries and two sixes, while Poonam hit 11 fours in her 116-ball 109 innings at the Senwes Park.

Deepti is now behind top-scorer Australia's Belinda Clarke, who had cracked an unbeaten 229 against Denmark in 1997 at Mumbai. The knock is best by an Indian as she betterd the unbeaten 138 by Jaya Sharma against Pakistan in 2005.

India bundle out Ireland for a paltry 109 in 40 overs to hand the rivals an embarrassing defeat.

Ireland never looked in the chase as they scored the first fifty in 18.4 overs, losing the wicket of opener Leah Paul (13) in the 17th over.

From there on, Ireland kept losing wickets and lost half their side in the 30th over for 75 runs.

Their downhill slide continued as they managed to bring up the team hundred in the 37th over before India quickly mopped up the tail.

Mary Waldron (35) was the top-scorer for Ireland, while Jennifer Gray contributed with a 46-ball 26 as only four batswomen could reach doubles scores.

Left-arm spinner Rajeshwari Gayakwad (4/18) scalped four wickets, while Shikha Pandey (3/16), who had provided the late charge with a 14-ball 27 for India, took three wickets, while DB Sharma (1/15) took one.

Earlier, Ireland put up a disappointing bowling performance as they were taken to cleaners by the Indian duo of Deepti and Poonam.

Rachel Delaney (1/44) claimed the only wicket by an Ireland bowler when she ended Deepti's innings by cleaning up the opener in the 46th over. Poonam too retired out in the last ball of that over.

Ireland's poor show reflected in number of Extra runs they conceded. They bowled as many as 23 wides to gift away 26 Extras.

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The DMK today hit out at Chief Minister K Palaniswami and Union minister M Venkiah Naidu for giving credit for Chennai Metro rail's launch to former AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa and pointed to efforts made by it for the project.

Giving details of the work done by his party-led government of 2006-11, DMK working president M K Stalin said such "lies were being peddled to overshadow" the role of his father and party president M Karunanidhi in the multi-crore project as chief minister.

Lies were being "constantly peddled with one single motive of overshadowing the role" of Karunanidhi in initiating his "dream project" for Chennai, he said in a statement.

"And this time it is the chief minister (Palaniswami) and Venkaiah Naidu who have gone to the extent of mouthing a blatant lie that it was Jayalalithaa who initiated this project," he said.

Stalin said the decision on the Chennai Metro rail project was taken in 2007 when Karunanidhi was chief minister.

The DMK government "went forward with the project proposal of Rs 14,600 crore", he said.

"During that time,I personally oversaw the project and I would like to note that the up and running line from Alandur to Koyambedu and the underground line from Thirumangalam to Nehru Park is the first leg of success for the plan initiated by the DMK government," he said.

Stalin, the then deputy chief minister, said he had visited Tokyo to secure funds from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and that it had "resulted" in a loan agreement under which the Japanese agency had to contribute 59 per cent of the funds for the project.

Subsequently, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs of the UPA government had approved the project in January 2009 and a 'General Consultant' was appointed by the DMK government the next month, he said.

The first tender was floated in February 2009 to set up the upper railway bridge (VIADUCT) for the project from Koyambedu to Ashok Nagar, he said, adding a total of nine tenders were issued by the DMK government for various tasks.

"When this is the reality, I am deeply shocked and amused by the words of the Chief Minister and Naidu who chose to twist facts to their needs," he said.

Yesterday, Palaniswami had alleged DMK government had delayed the Chennai Metro Rail work.

"When the Metro Rail project was approved by Government of India at a cost of Rs 14,600 crore, DMK was in power from 2006 to 2011,but spent only Rs 1,143 crore," he had said after flagging off the Thirumangalam-Nehru Park underground service.

He had said that from June 2011 to April 2017, the AIADMK government had spent nearly Rs 13,787 crore on the project.

Union minister Naidu, who had participated in the flagging off ceremony on Sunday with Palaniswamy, had said expansion of metro rail in the state capital was Jayalalithaa's dream.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An alleged drug peddler, hailing from Punjab, was today arrested after 10 kg poppy straw, a narcotic substance, was recovered from his vehicle on the Srinagar-Jammu National Highway, police said.

Bakshi Singh, a resident of Ludhiana in Punjab, was on way to Jammu in his private car when he was stopped for checking near Jawahar Tunnel, the gateway to Kashmir, a police officer said.

He said the search of the vehicle led to the recovery of 10 kg of poppy straw.

The drug peddler was arrested and booked under Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, the officer said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Several European countries are refusing to sign a trade statement at China's Silk Road summit, a diplomat said today, dealing a setback to Beijing's efforts to gain full support for its initiative.

France, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Portugal and Britain are among the European Union countries spurning the document, the diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Nearly 30 world leaders are taking part in the global summit on China's Silk Road plan, a huge infrastructure project which Beijing hopes will revive ancient trade routes from Asia to Europe and Africa.

The forum was to culminate today evening in a final communique from heads of state, with statements on topics spanning finance and relations between peoples.

The diplomat said all the European nations taking part in the summit's trade panel collectively decided to rebuff the text because they believe it does not sufficiently address European concerns surrounding transparency of public procurement and social and environmental standards.

China only presented the document to negotiators last week, telling them it could no longer be reworked, according to the official.

Beijing is seeking to cement its trade relations in Asia, Africa, and Europe through the summit, but some fear that these new Silk Roads serve the interests of Chinese exporters above all.

"It's very important for us and our companies that the calls for our projects under the Belt and Road initiative are transparent, that they are non-discriminatory, and that they comply with standards," German Economic Minister Brigitte Zypries said at the trade panel yesterday.

"I think there is still room for improvement in this area.
The Mishra-Kejriwal battle is hotting up, with family members taking sides in a public war of words.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's wife, Sunita, took potshots at his former disciple and now chief detractor, Kapil Mishra, on Twitter today.

"Law of nature never errs. Seeds of deceit, lies sown, so shall he @KapilMishra reap. Inevitable," the former income tax commissioner tweeted.

Mishra was quick to respond to the barb.

"Sunita ji is a very committed wife. She doesn't know what type of conspiracies are being hatched in her house. She is fulfilling her duties," the former minister -- sacked by Kejriwal last week -- said on Twitter



Mishra's mother, Annapurna Mishra, had fired a public salvo at Kejriwal last week, accusing him in an open letter of spreading "falsehood" against her son by saying he was associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In today's Twitter battle, Mishra suggested Kejriwal was using his wife's account to post messages.

"Sir @ArvindKejriwal return Sunita ji phone to her," tweeted Mishra, who had yesterday accused Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party of receiving illegal donations from shell companies.

In another message, the sacked minister said he was not going to "utter a single word" against Sunita Kejriwal.

"Sunita ji is unaware of truth. She is upset with her husband's downfall. I respect every negative comment from her side. (But) I will not utter a single word against her," Mishra tweeted.

Though Sunita is not seen to be dabbling in politics, her attack on Mishra was the second in a week.

She had called Mishra "stupid" without naming him in a tweet last week after the Anti-Corruption Branch registered an FIR against a company that belonged to Kejriwal's late brother-in-law, Surender Bansal, in another scam.

"My brother in law is no more n this stupid man is speaking all written script without any mind," Sunita had tweeted on May 8, a day after Bansal's death.

Mishra's mother, meanwhile, accused Kejriwal's "closest friends" of circulating "misleading photographs on the social media.

"How many lies, Arvind? How many... Lies will not help you. Be afraid of God," she said in the letter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Around 80 girls of a government high school here have gone on an indefinite strike demanding upgradation of their institution, fearing they will be harassed if they travel to a senior secondary school located in a different village for higher studies.

The stir by the girls, studying in class IX and X in Gothda Tappa Dahina village, entered its sixth day today. Of the 86 protesting students, 13 are on hunger strike, village head Suresh Chauhan told PTI.

"For higher education, girls of our village have to go to Kanwali village, located 3 km from here, after Class X," he added.

One of the girls on hunger strike said: "We fear harassment and molestation by youths of other villages and hence, we are demanding upgradation of our school up to Class XII."



The protesters said they would not stop until the government accepted their demand.

Meanwhile, the district education authorities said since the school did not fulfil the minimum condition required for the senior secondary level, it could not be upgraded.

"At least 150 students are required in Classes IX and X for the senior secondary upgrade but the Dahina village school has just 86 students in both classes," said Dharmbir Balrodia, District Education Officer (DEO), Rewari.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An aged female intruder, who tried to enter the Indian territory from Pakistan, was shot dead by the Border Security Force (BSF) early today in the Gurdaspur Sector.

According to BSF officials, the incident occurred near the Bharial border outpost at around 3 AM, when suspicious movement was noticed close to the fence along the Indo-Pak border.

Despite repeated warnings, the intruder kept marching towards the Indian side after which the troops opened fire, BSF Deputy Inspector General (DIG) R S Kataria said.

He said that the woman aged around 60, was shot dead near the Bharial border outpost.

Pakistani border authorities later refused to accept the body of the woman and it was then handed over to the civil authorities in Gurdaspur, Kataria said.

This is the second time that a woman intruder from Pakistan has been shot dead in recent past.

The previous incident had occurred about six months ago in the same sector, Kataria said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Four alleged drug peddlers, including a woman, were arrested from different locations in Punjab's Moga district and 13 grams of heroin was seized from their possession, the police said today.

Baldev Krishan was arrested from Badhni Kalan and 6 gram heroin was seized from him, they said.

From Kot Ise Khan, Satpal Singh and Pritam Kaur were arrested and 2 gram of heroin was seized. Bharbhoor Singh was arrested from Ajitwal and five gram heroin was seized from him, they added.

Cases under the NDPS Act have been registered against them, the police added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Four people, including two minors, were today killed and six others injured when their van collided with a trailer truck in Chhattisgarh's Surajpur district, police said.

The mishap occurred in the wee hours near Raghunathpur village under Premnagar police station limits on Surajpur-Tara road while the victims were returning after attending a marriage ceremony, said Station House Officer (SHO) Premnagar Ganesh Yadav.

As many as 10 people from Salkha village of the district, had gone to Nawapara village in a van to attend the wedding ceremony, the officer added.

While returning, the vehicle collided with the trailer truck, coming from the opposite direction, killing four of its occupants on the spot, the SHO said.

The deceased were identified as Dilraj Singh (35), Baljeet Sai (32), Surendra Singh (17) and Dilharan (12), he said.

The injured were rushed to Premnagar primary health centre from where two critically hurt were referred to Ambikapur district headquarter for further treatment, he added.

A case has been registered in this connection, the SHO said adding a probe was on.

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Future Lifestyle Fashions today reported an over three-fold increase in its net profit at Rs 18.93 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2017.

The company had posted a net profit of Rs 5.22 crore in the same period a year ago.

Total income from operations during the quarter under review stood at Rs 987.73 crore as against Rs 850.17 crore in the year-ago period, up 13.9 per cent, Future Lifestyle Fashions Ltd said in a BSE filing.

The company said during the quarter Lee Cooper business was carved out into a separate step down subsidiary.

This was done with a view "to enhance focus and execution of this particular business and attract further investment for this business".

The board of directors of the company has recommended dividend of 80 paise per equity share of Rs 2 each, it said.

Shares of Future Lifestyle Fashions ended the day at Rs 285.55 apiece, up 1.19 per cent from its previous close on the BSE.

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Former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said he is in agreement with US President Donald Trump's disruptive approach to politics and foreign policy.

"I'm a strong believer in the need for reform of government agencies and departments. They have gotten fat and sloppy and they're not user friendly. They are inefficient. They cost too much," Gates told CBS News on Sunday.

Gates, who has the rare distinction of serving in the Bush and Obama administrations said there was a need for disruptive approach on the foreign policy as well.

"Broadly philosophically, I am in agreement with his disruptive approach," Gates said.

"We've had three administrations follow a pretty consistent policy toward North Korea and it really hasn't gotten us anywhere. So, the notion of disrupting and sort of putting the Chinese on notice that it's no longer business as usual for the United States I think is a good thing," he said.

"I think when it comes to the issues I'd advise him to stick to the script. But, he is going to have some very tough conversations and he's going to be talking about some very tough and complicated issues in all of the places that he visits. Any time the President does things that are humanising, it's good," he said.

Trump leaves on a five-nation maiden foreign trip next week. He will visit Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, Brussels and Italy.

Gates strongly defended Trump's meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Oval Office.

"For a long time, Soviet foreign ministers would come in to see the President all the time, routinely. Jimmy Carter stopped that after the invasion of Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan resumed it in 1984, I think. And so the fact of a meeting like that is not that big a deal," he said.

Asked about the allegations of Russian interference in the US elections last year, Gates said Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to communicate to the rest of the world that Western elections are illegitimate.

"I think this is a guy who saw the US basically come out against him in his reelection campaign in 2012. He saw the US being behind all of the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and in Georgia and Ukraine and so on. So his view is the West has been interfering in his politics for years," Gates said.

"I think that he has decided, in a very strategic way, to turn the tables and do everything in his power to, as we've described Russian elections as illegitimate, to try and communicate to the rest of the world that Western elections are illegitimate," the former defence secretary said.

Gates said for the first time the US has been able to draw the attention of China on North Korea.

"I think that the disruptive nature, the tough talk on North Korea, the military deployments, sending the missile defence system to South Korea, I think these are all good things to have done."



As a result, Trump has gotten Chinese attention to a degree that his predecessors have not, that this is a very serious matter for the United States, Gates said.
Higher demand in West and South-East Asia could help India's grow this financial year (FY) to about $42 billion, an export promotion body said on Monday.

In 2016-17, the export totalled at around $36 billion.

According to Anil Sankhwal, Promotion Council (GJEPC) northern region chairman, Europe poses a challenge to exporters.

"But in the US, Middle-East nations and South-East Asia, demand is growing. We are expecting that our exports will reach about $41-42 billion this fiscal," Sankhwal told reporters in New Delhi.

He also expressed concern over imposition of 5 per cent import duty by Dubai on gold and diamond jewellery.

"The move would impact India's exports. We are discussing measures to deal with the situation as Dubai is an important market," Sankhwal said.

About steps to boost export, he said GJEPC is organising a buyer-seller meet in the national capital.

A three-day event  India SAARC-Middle East Buyer Seller Meet  started on Sunday.

"In this meet, 38 domestic manufacturers and 70 international buyers from South Asia, the Middle-East, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Qatar are participating," he said.

On display is a wide range of jewellery products by exhibitors.

"There is a huge potential in these markets. The event provides a platform to bring traders together and explore business opportunities," he said.
The government plans to build multimodal logistic parks at 15 places across the country with an investment of Rs 33,000 crore in a bid to bring down costs incurred on logistcs.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) today inked a pact with the Tamil Nadu government for one such park.

The NHAI signed an MoU with the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Ltd (TIDCO) in New Delhi today, for the development of a multimodal logistics park in the Ponneri Industrial Node area near Kamarajar Port in Tamil Nadu.

The MoU was signed in the presence of Union Road Transport and Highways and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari and Tamil Nadu's minister for industries M C Sampath.

Speaking on this occasion, Gadkari said that it is an important agreement for the development of an integrated, multi-modal transport infrastructure in the country.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is planning to develop mutimodal logistics parks under its Logistics Efficiency Enhancement Programme (LEEP) in 15 locations all over India at a cost of Rs 33,000 crore, including Rs 1,295 crore investment for the Chennai region.

The proposed logistics parks will bring down the overall freight costs, reduce vehicular pollution and congestion and will enable reduction of warehousing costs.

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In his almost three-decade-long career, he has established himself as one of the most dependable performers but Irrfan Khan says he is always trying to redefine the labels attached to him.

The 50-year-old actor says it does not matter to him whether he is called an actor or a star.

"If you are unable to innovate, then you are as good as dead. I'm here to redefine things and whatever I'll be called, I will redefine it," Irrfan told PTI in an interview.

He says acting has always been a passion for him. This is why he has this constant need to look for something new.

"It is the need to constantly innovate oneself and it comes from the fact that it keeps you on your toes... It keeps you alive," says Irrfan.

Starting from Mira Nair's "Salaam Bombay!" to "Inferno", the National Award-winning actor has build an impressive body of work in the Indian industry as well as in Hollywood.

But Irrfan says he still struggles to conform to the norms as an artiste.

"... We are social beings, we always try to fit in. I'm still trying to fit in. As you grow up, you are conditioned to carry yourself in a certain way. You have demands from your own self.

"I was not cut out to be an actor. I was the last person who could become an actor. If I told people I wanted to be an actor, they would have killed me. I couldn't even share it," says Irrfan.

He believes a person always has a choice either to mould one self according the social norms or stand out from the crowd.

"It depends on what you want. Sometimes you don't want to stand out. That's your calling. If you need to stand out, then you find the means to do so," he says.

Irrfan is one of the most sought after Indian actors in Hollywood and he believes it is only because the West is "familiar with his work".

"I think they find something in me, I don't know. But I'm not shifting to Hollywood."



The actor, who will be next seen in "Hindi Medium", says he was busy shooting back-to-back films but their release is not in his hands. Irrfan was last seen in 2016 film "Madaari".

"There is a time for every film. I am not such a big star who can plan my release. Sometimes, I have done films and they have released one after the other. I'll be completing four films this month. So, it's just the timing," he says about his year-long absence from Indian screens.

The actor, who will leave for Hollywood next month to start his next project "Puzzle", says it is a film he "was waiting for". The movie is being backed by the producers of "Little Miss Sunshine".

Meanwhile, "Hindi Medium", directed by Saket Chaudhary and also starring Pakistani actress Saba Qamar and Deepak Dobriyal, will release this Friday.

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The International Court of Justice (ICJ) today began hearing Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence by Pakistan.

India will be presenting its case first, followed by Pakistan later in the day. Both sides will get 90 minutes each.

India may avail a "short extension" beyond 90 minutes to present its case, the judge said in his opening remarks.

A Pakistan military court had awarded the death sentence to Jadhav, 46, last month for espionage and subversive activities.

India appealed against the death sentence on May 8 alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan after its 16 requests for consular access were denied.

The next day, ICJ stayed the sentence.

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West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will meet representatives of Indian Medical Association (IMA) next week for a discussion on issues related to the recently introduced West Bengal Clinical Establishment (Registration, Regulation and Transparency) Act.

IMA was recently informed by CMO that Banerjee has agreed to meet them on May 23, IMA national president K K Aggarwal said today.

The association, which has been demanding some amendments in the act, had written to Banerjee seeking an appointment next week for discussion, he said.

"We want the Mamata Banerjee government to consider some amendments. We want a discussion on the problems faced by the doctors after the new act came into force and the commission started functioning," he said.

Aggarwal along with IMA Secretary General R N Tandon and others had met West Bengal Governor K N Tripathi and submitted their objections regarding the Act.

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Award-winning German filmmaker Daniel Harrich, known for his investigative feature length movies, says as a director it is his obligation to bring compelling issues to the fore.

In "Master of Death", he exposed illegal military expeditions to Mexico and Colombia while "The Blind Spot" helped reopen the investigations into the Oktoberfest terror attack in 1980.

"There are certain places where if you expose important people, your life is in danger. In Germany, we can do it without fearing for our lives. So, I feel it is our obligation to do that kind of reporting work," Daniel told PTI.

"There are some people who may not like our work, but we have to do it. We believe in our work and the stories we have to tell. It is an important pillar of democracy," he adds.

The director, who has established a genre of investigative movies in Germany, is back with his latest feature, "Gift". The film exposes the problems of counterfeit drugs which land in India via Germany.

"We are not looking at India being the victim of fake drugs. It's about the German market. Part of the setting is India which has helped us tell our story," Daniel says.

The film is an amalgamation of facts and fiction. It is based on extensive research by Daniel and his team.

According to the filmmaker, it was during their research when they came across counterfeit drugs for the first time and made a 90-min documentary, "exposing the scale of such pharmaceutical companies rolling out fake drugs."



Daniel said they have been investigating in the field of pharmaceutical production and trade for nearly 15 years.

"It all started with a documentary project on thalidomide, a medicine made by a German company, a sleeping medicine, that ended up severely affecting pregnant women and resulted in thousands of dead and disabled children all over the world," he says.

The film, starring German stars like Heiner Lauterbach, Julia Koschitz, Luise Heyer and Bollywood actor Arfi Lamba, was shot in some of the slum areas of Mumbai.

Daniel says despite some minor hurdles, it was an "easy" shoot and he felt safe here as compared to Mexico, where he has previously shot for his films.

However, Arfi, who has featured in films like "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Loev", says the team did face problems with the unions in the industry.

"I did have some issues with the shoot. In Europe, if you're shooting, people try to cut prices to make you comfortable. But the moment our unions see a foreign crew, they double the price. It's discouraging when people are trying to bring jobs here."



The film is set to release on May 15 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

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President Pranab Mukherjee today asked lawmakers to improve the quality of debates in legislatures, saying India cannot remain a role model to the world simply because of the size of its electorate.

Delivering the first Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Memorial Lecture here, President Mukherjee lauded the parliamentary democracy in India and said Parliament's functioning is based on 3D's -- Debate, Dissension and Decision.

He said once a decision is taken by majority in the House, it becomes the decision of India.

"You cannot remain the role model to the world simply because of the size of your electorate," he said.

The president asked lawmakers of Parliament and state Assemblies to improve the quality of deliberation, discussion and debate in the House, saying people have vested power and privileges in them.

"...What is applicable to Parliament is applicable to legislative Assemblies in all 29 states," he said.

"There is a huge power and responsibilities vested in MPs and MLAs of all 29 states by 800 million people. If we do not use these power and privileges we have to blame ourselves and not anybody else," said Mukherjee, who has over four decades of experience as a lawmaker.

The president recalled prominent political personalities in the early days of Indian politics and asked the lawmakers to continue the tradition established by them.

Earlier, Sikkim Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling was conferred with the first Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Life Time Achievement Honour in Public Service by President Mukherjee.

The president lauded Chamling's contribution to his small state and said it's emerging as a role model for other states.

Those present on the occasion included Rajasthan's Governor Kalyan Singh, his counterpart in Punjab V P Singh Badnore, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and former chief minister Ashok Gehlot.

The programme began with the opening address of Gehlot who said Shekhawat, who was the vice-president between 2002 and 2007, was a warmhearted and fearless political leader who took birth in a very simple family and was elevated to the post of vice president of the country.

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India can play "a very important role" in resolving the dispute between Palestine and Israel, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said today, on the eve of his talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi here.

Abbas, who is being hosted by India ahead of Modi's first ever visit to Israel, said New Delhi's role will have significance as it has good relations with both the countries.

"There should be a role for India in making peace in our region. India has played this role (by supporting the Palestinian cause) and we are looking forward that India continues to play the same role," he said while delivering a lecture here.

"We know very well that India has good relations with Israel and Palestine. So India can play a very important role in bringing peace (between Israel and Palestine)," he said.

He said he will ask Modi tomorrow to use India's "good offices" in bringing in peace between Israel and Palestine.

Palestine is against any kind of military intervention to resolve the dispute, said Abbas who will also be meeting his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee tomorrow.

Abbas' comments assume significance as Modi is slated to visit Israel in a couple of months, which will be the first by an Indian Prime Minister.

India has been a vociferous supporter of the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinian president said during his meeting with Modi and Mukherjee, he will also apprise them of the ongoing political developments in Palestine and the Middle East.

Condemning terrorism by ISIS, Abbas said ending the "Israeli occupation" will greatly help in countering terrorism in the region.

"So, achieving this justice is the basis for success in fighting terrorism being practised by terrorist groups such as ISIS in the region. We condemn all their barbaric activities," he said.

The Middle East region, Abbas said, is living in a state of instability and conflict, especially after the Arab Spring, which is "castastrophic" for the region and its people.

"It has inflicted severest damage to the stability and integrity of the social fabric," he held.

Abbas also pitched for an agreement with India on religious tourism as Palestine has several religious shrines.

The Palestinian president is on a four day visit to India from May 14 to 17.

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India is giving a befitting reply to ceasefire violations from Pakistan, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said today.

He said people living in the border areas of Jammu and Kashmir are giving positive feedback about the Indian defence forces' response to the ceasefire violation by the neighbouring nation.

"India is giving befitting reply to ceasefire violations. The effective retaliatory action by India is also having a deterrent effect," said Singh, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

He said people living in the border areas said they have not seen such a good reply from India on incidents of cross border firing during the past years.

"I have met people living in those (border) area. They said there were incidents of ceasefire violations in past also but the kind of response being given now from the Indian side is encouraging.

"The kind of retaliatory action being seen now was never witnessed before," Singh, a Lok Sabha MP from Jammu and Kashmir's Udhampur constituency, told reporters here.

Pakistani troops had heavily shelled areas along the LoC in Rajouri district for the second consecutive day yesterday, causing heavy damage to buildings and forcing evacuation of a large number of border dwellers.

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India and Pakistan today crossed swords at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Kulbhushan Jadhav's case with New Delhi demanding the immediate suspension of his death sentence and Islamabad accusing it of using the world body as a stage for "political theatre" through a "misconceived" plea.

The two neighbours -- who last faced off at the ICJ 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft -- India took the Jadhav case to the world court, accusing Pakistan of violating the Vienna Convention and conducting a "farcical trial" for convicting Jadhav without a "shred of evidence".

After hearing the arguments of the two sides, the court said it will issue its order on India's request for provisional measures "as soon as possible".

"The date on which this order will be delivered at a public sitting will be duly communicated to the parties," the court said.

India demanded the immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the ICJ was over.

However, Pakistan asserted that Jadhav's execution was not imminent, saying that a time frame of 150 days is provided for seeking clemency and in Jadhav's case even if it started on April 10, 2017, the date of his conviction, the period could extend to well beyond August, 2017.

India made a forceful submission as the ICJ began hearing the case of the 46-year-old former Navy officer who was arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

"Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed," joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs Deepak Mittal told the court in his opening remarks.

Representing India, lead attorney Harish Salve said, "The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention."



Following India's arguments, Pakistan, in its submission before the UN's highest judicial body, said India's application on Jadhav, who was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities last month, was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed.

India has seen it fit to use the International Court of Justice as a stage for "political theatre" but "we will not respond in kind", Mohammad Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office said in his opening remarks in response to India's submissions earlier in the day.

Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a "spy" involved in terror activities, Pakistan asserted.

The ICJ also denied permission to Pakistan to play a purported "confessional" video of Jadhav at the public hearing here.

Later, after the hearings, Salve told a TV channel that the ICJ denying permission to Pakistan to play the "confessional" video was a setback to it.

Representing Pakistan, lawyer Khawar Qureshi said India has sought to persuade this court that Pakistan intends to execute Jadhav within days.

"Simply by referring to the clemency process available as a right to commander Jadhav. A period of 150 days is provided for in this regard which even if (it) started on April 10, 2017, which is the date of conviction at first instance, could extend to well beyond August 2017.

"There is also of course the potential for the writ petition of the High Court to be invoked as we believe India must be well aware," he said.

Earlier, Salve said Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access.

"The graver the charges, the greater the need for continued adherence of the Vienna Convention. Jadhav has been in judicial custody without any communication with his family," he said.

The rights of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are sacrosanct, Salve said, citing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that recognises that no one can be arbitrarily be deprived of their lives.

India had not been given the copy of the charges filed against Jadhav, Salve said.

"The need for a wholesome compliance is greater when charges are serious. We want appropriate legal representation for Kulbhushan Jadhav," he said.

Not just had all requests for consular access fallen on "deaf ears", the trial was conducted without providing Jadhav his rights. Pakistan did not even respond to Jadhav's mother's pleas to see her son, India told the court.

Human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan and the trial had been vitiated, India argued.

Though Pakistan says Jadhav has the right to appeal, two-star generals will hear his mercy plea, Salve stressed, questioning the impartiality of the process.

India asserted that it wants the ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

On India invoking the Vienna Convention, Qureshi said, "The Vienna convention article 36 which adopted to set up standards of conduct particularly concerning communications and contact with nationals of the sending state which would contribute to the development of the friendly relations among nations...The observation we made immediately is this is unlikely to apply in the context of a spy, terrorist send by a state to engage in acts of terror."



Faisal, in his submission before the court, claimed that India had been unable or "perhaps more accurately unwilling to provide" an explanation for Jadhav's passport which has a Muslim name on it.

"We submit that India's silence is telling. Indeed. India could and should have responded to a letter of request dated January 23, 2017, seeking India's assistance to investigate the criminal activity and links with people of India which commander Jadhav has revealed," he said.

Instead, India appears to have been in hyperdrive mode to brief its press that Jadhav took early retirement and was kidnapped in Iran from where he was brought to Pakistan to give a false confession presumably, Faisal alleged.

Jadhav, the latest flash point in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. India denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

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India's application on its national Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence was "unnecessary and misconceived", Pakistan told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) today.

Pakistan, which began its submission in response to India's presentation earlier in the day, said India was using the court as the "scene of political theatre".

"We will not respond in kind," Mohammed Faisal, a Pakistan Foreign Office official, said in his opening remarks.

India had been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name, he said.

Jadhav, 46, had been arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced death by by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

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The Islamabad High Court today adjourned the hearing of a petition by a Pakistani man seeking an order barring his Indian wife from leaving the country before the settlement of their legal issues.

Tahir Ali had moved the court last week against 20-year- old Uzma, an Indian national who had travelled to Pakistan earlier this month.

Tahir filed a petition on Friday, asking the court to arrange a meeting with Uzma and also stop her from going back to India.

The court accepted the petition and set the hearing date today.

"Nothing happened today and the court set the new date for hearing," Tahir told PTI, adding that the court fixed the hearing on May 22.

The court will also hear the petition of Uzma, who moved it a day after her husband.

Uzma, who ho has sought refuge at the Indian mission here, petitioned the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on May 12 to provide security for her journey back to Delhi and to issue duplicate travel documents which were allegedly stolen by her Tahir.

Uzma's lawyer, Malik Shah Nawaz Noon and First Secretary to the Indian High Commission Piyush Singh filed the petition on her behalf in the IHC stating that her husband had deceived her as he was already married, and that he stole her passport and other travel documents.

She also asked the court to exempt her from police reporting.

She has alleged that she was sexually abused after her forced marriage to the Pakistani man at gunpoint.

In her statement, recorded before a magistrate, Uzma has said that she came to Pakistan to see her relatives and not to marry Tahir. She has said she did not know Ali was already married and had four children.

However, Tahir said she knew about his marriage and children. He said he had told her about his family and that he lived in mountains away from the main cities.

Uzma had reached Pakistan on May 1 and travelled to Buner district in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to marry Ali on May 3. The couple reportedly met in Malaysia, where Tahir worked as a taxi-driver.

The case has attracted attention on both sides of the border.

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Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra today reviewed the preparations, including those related to the security, of the 40-day-long annual yatra to the holy cave shrine of Amarnath in Himalayas, starting next month.

Vohra, who is also chairman of the Sri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB), directed all the agencies concerned to keep a close watch and maintain effective coordination to ensure smooth conduct of the yatra, scheduled to begin on June 29 and end on August 7.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Secretary B B Vyas, Director General of Police S P Vaid, General Officer Commanding of Srinagar-based 15 Corps Lt Gen J S Sandhu, General Officer Commanding of south Kashmir-based Victor Force Maj Gen B S Raju and Chief Executive Officer of SASB R K Goyal and other senior civil, intelligence, BSF, CRPF and Air Force officers attended the meeting at Raj Bhavan, an official spokesman said.

The governor directed the DGP and the Kashmir divisional administration to strictly enforce the prescribed regulatory mechanism and ensure that only those pilgrims who have valid yatra permits were allowed to undertake the pilgrimage on the date and by the route for which they had procured advance registration.

Noting that various service providers, particularly ponywallahs, labourers, palki wallahs, tent and shop owners play an important role in the smooth conduct of yatra, the Governor directed Kashmir Divisional Commissioner and IGP Kashmir to ensure that all the service providers were enabled to function in a safe and secure environment in the yatra area.

The SASB has already insured all the service providers with an insurance cover of Rs one lakh and ponies for Rs 30,000 each against the accidental death in the yatra area, he said.

Vohra also advised the chief secretary to sensitise the disaster management agencies and ensure that all arrangements for the yatra were subsumed within the state's overall disaster management framework.

He also directed the chief secretary, GoC 15 Corps and all security agencies to pool their disaster related resources at designated locations in the yatra area.

The governor was informed about the steps being taken by the Pahalgam and Sonamarg Development Authorities for the proper collection and disposal of solid wastes to be generated during the yatra, the spokesman said.

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Classmates of Kulbhushan Jadhav were today glued to television sets, watching live proceedings, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearing India's plea on the death sentence given to its national Kulbhushan Jadhav by Pakistan.

"We are hopeful that we will soon be able to see Kulbhushan in our midst," Jadhav's classmate, who studied at the King George School at Dadar here, said.

"However, there is an apprehension that this being Pakistan...It will do what it wants, despite all our best efforts. We pray that Kulbhushan returns home safe from this ordeal, as soon as possible," he said.

While many of the schoolmates of Jadhav watched the ICJ proceedings on TV, a few others rang up each other to know the progress of the hearing.

Friends of Jadhav, former Navy officer sentenced to death in Pakistan on spying charges, have also undertaken a signature campaign in a bid to put pressure on Pakistan to secure their friend's release.

Jadhav, who was held guilty of espionage by a Pakistan military court, spent his early days in Parel and used to stay in the police quarters with his family in Maharashtra.

After studying at King George School, Jadhav went to the Ruia College here, before joining the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla in Pune.

India today demanded the immediate suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was over.

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The police today arrested a 32-year-old man for allegedly trying to rape a woman and assaulting her at Adraspally village on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

G Ganesh, the accused, allegedly tried to force himself upon the woman, a brick kiln worker, when she stepped out to attend the nature's call in the early morning of May 13.

When she shouted for help, he hit her causing serious injuries before fleeing, said inspector A Sattaiah of Shamirpet police station.

Some other women workers came to her rescue.

After she lodged a complaint, police today arrested Ganesh from his house in the same locality. Further probe is on.

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A 37-year-old man died after he tried to de-board a running train in south Kashmir's Anantnag district today, police said.

Mukhtar Ahmad Wagay, a resident of Kharwar area of Shopian, tried to de-board a running train, at Khanabal in Anantnag district resulting in his on the spot death, a police official said.

He said the dead body has been handed over to the legal heirs for last the rites after the completion all medico-legal formalities.

Proceedings under section 174 CrPc, which deals with cases of accidental death, have been initiated, the official said.

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The DMK today gave details of the work the party-led government had undertaken for the construction of the Chennai Metro to rebut Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami's charge that it had delayed the project.

DMK Working President and Leader of the Opposition M K Stalin said such "lies were being peddled to overshadow" the role of his father and party president M Karunanidhi in the multi-crore project.

Stalin said the decision on the Chennai Metro rail project was taken in 2007 when Karunanidhi was the chief minister.

The DMK government "went forward with the project proposal of Rs 14,600 crore", he said.

"During that time, I personally oversaw the project and I would like to note that the up and running line from Alandur to Koyambedu and the underground line from Thirumangalam to Nehru Park is the first leg of success for the plan initiated by the DMK government," he said.

Stalin, who was then the deputy chief minister, said he had visited Tokyo to secure funds from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and that it had "resulted" in a loan agreement under which the Japanese agency had to contribute 59 per cent of the funds for the project.

Subsequently, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs of the UPA government had approved the project in January 2009 and a 'General Consultant' was appointed by the DMK government the next month, he said in a statement.

The first tender was floated in February 2009 to set up the upper railway bridge (VIADUCT) for the project from Koyambedu to Ashok Nagar, he said, adding a total of nine tenders were issued by the DMK government for various tasks.

"When this is the reality, I am deeply shocked and amused by the words of the chief minister ... Lies are constantly being peddled with the motive of overshadowing the role of Kalaignar Karunanidhi in initiating his dream project for the city of Chennai," he added.

Yesterday, Palaniswami had alleged that the DMK government had delayed the Chennai Metro Rail work.

"When the Metro Rail project was approved by the Government of India at a cost of Rs 14,600 crore, the DMK was in power from 2006 to 2011, but spent only Rs 1,143 crore," he had said after flagging off the Thirumangalam-Nehru Park underground service.

He had said that from June 2011 to April 2017, the AIADMK government had spent nearly Rs 13,787 crore on the project.

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A middle-aged couple were found hacked to death in Baghda Mahuhari village in Tirkulwa area here, police said today.

The incident took place yesterday night when Sharif Umar (40) and Jasmina Khatoon (35) were sleeping in their house, they said.

The bodies have been sent for postmortem and no arrests have been made so far, the police said.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lent his name to a gala -- called Modi Fest -- being planned by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to mark the third year of its government at the Centre.

Modi, however, does not refer to his name but stands for Making of Developing India.

The festival will be kicked off by the prime minister with a series of events and a public meeting in Guwahati on May 26, and will conclude on June 15. Party chief Amit Shah is also likely address the media on the opening day.

The celebrations are planned to be held across 300 towns with seven programmes, a party leader said.

Ministers and BJP leaders will tour the country to highlight central schemes and make the people aware about the government's "successes", BJP leaders said.

"There will be at least one event in every district," a party leader said.

The BJP government, which celebrated its second year in power for 15 days with a series of programmes, wants this festival to be even bigger.

The massive saffron win in Uttar Pradesh, coupled with a fractured opposition which has so far been unable to challenge its surge, has given a boost to its top brass which has already set its eyes on the next Lok Sabha polls in 2019.

Shah believes that a continuous cycle of public outreach with an emphasis on highlighting the "pro-poor" policies of the Modi government, besides its "corruption-free" reign, will go a long way in maintaining the BJP's dominance in electoral politics.

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A Moroccan peacekeeper was injured today in a fresh attack on a UN base in the deeply troubled Central African Republic, after a compatriot died in another night raid.

The overnight assault on the camp in the southeastern city of Bangassou, which is near the Democratic Republic of Congo, was staged by the mainly Christian anti-Balaka group, the UN mission in the country (MINUSCA) said.

"The MINUSCA base was targeted by gunfire at night and the soldiers returned fire," a statement in French said.

"One of them was wounded. His life is not in danger," the UN mission, which is known by its French acronym, said, identifying him as a Moroccan soldier.

Early yesterday, another Moroccan soldier died in a similar attack on the base and a nearby Muslim-dominated area.

MINUSCA said the assailants were members of a wide coalition including the anti-Balaka group who "attacked civilian populations, targeting in particular Muslims", another sign of the violence between Muslims and Christians that has ravaged the country.

Medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres said: "In the span of a few hours, MSF has treated 21 wounded people at the hospital in Bangassou."



"We call on all the parties... To start a ceasefire and to allow us access to the wounded," a statement said.

On Monday, another Moroccan and four Cambodian soldiers were also killed in an attack on their convoy near Bangassou.

MINUSCA deployed 10,000 troops and 2,000 police to the CAR following bloody sectarian fighting that erupted after the 2013 overthrow of leader Francois Bozize.

Among Africa's poorest countries, the CAR descended into bloodshed pitting the anti-Balaka fighters against the mainly Muslim ex-Seleka rebels.

While calm has been restored to the capital Bangui, parts of the country remain under the sway of armed groups.

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Move over, Sherlock Holmes Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can help solve crimes by taking over the laborious task of analysing clues and finding links that human investigators might have missed.

The system, called (Visual Analytics for Sense- Making in Criminal Intelligence), will be able to perform the tedious part of a crime analyst's job in seconds, freeing them to focus on finer points of a case.

"Everyone thinks policing is about connecting the dots, but that is the easy bit," said William Wong, who leads the project at Middlesex University London.

"The hard part is working out which dots need to be connected," Wong said.

scans millions of police records, interviews, pictures, videos and more, to identify connections.

"An analyst can then say whether this is relevant or not and will adjust the results," said Neesha Kodagoda, also from Middlesex.

The system uses machine learning to improve its searches on the basis of such interactions with analysts, the 'New Scientist' reported.

When an unsolved crime lands on an analyst's desk, one of the first things they have to do is search police databases for incidents that could be related based on their location, time or modus operandi, and collect details of all of the people involved.

A lot of the information recorded in police reports is in side notes and descriptions, but the algorithms powering VALCRI can understand what is written - at a basic level.

Police in the UK are currently testing VALCRI with three years' worth of real, anonymised data, totalling around 6.5 million records.
The government has come up with a handbook detailing ways to deal with children in conflict with the law, emphasising on launching a database and a tracking system for their effective rehabilitation post incarceration, after procedural flaws were exposed in the aftermath of the 'Nirbhaya' case.

The standard operating procedure (SOP), prepared by the women and child development (WCD) ministry based on the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2015, aims at eliminating maltreatment of such children while protecting them from violence, abuse and exploitation.

The objective of all the stakeholders should be to rehabilitate and reintegrate children in conflict with the law into the mainstream, the SOP states.

The ministry has recommended a slew of activities as part of the rehabilitation process which include yoga, physical training, meditation, skill training, computer education, art and craft therapy, training in spoken English, dance and drama and sports.

It also enumerates individual care plans to be drafted for each child which is mandated in by the JJ Act.

The SOP has laid down a provision for professional course for a child in order to make him/her financially independent and recommended that child care institutions tie up with universities for such courses.

It has also advised that there should be a follow-up plan in place for all children in conflict with the law who are in institutional care.

"Institutions should conduct regular follow-up programmes for all released children to ensure the child does not get back to a difficult situation. Institution should maintain regular contact with the children and their families.

"Regular follow-up activities help to reduce the rate of recidivism. Institutions should conduct half yearly meets to get a feedback from the juveniles about their current situation and to ascertain the further interventions required for their successful rehabilitation," the SOP said.

Flaws were exposed in the procedural aspects of the JJ Act in the aftermath of the release of the juvenile convict in the 'Nirbhaya' gangrape case, prompting the government to work on a comprehensive plan for such children so that they do not become repeat offenders.

The juvenile convict in the gangrape and murder of a 23- year-old physiotherapy intern in Delhi in December 2012 was released in December 2015 and is believed to be working at a roadside eatery in South India.

Ministry officials say that there was no follow-up plan devised for his release.

The officials also say that while he was taught how to stitch and cook, it was a south India-based non-for-profit organisation which later trained him and presently monitoring him.

The ministry's SOP also has a provision for after-care whereby a tracking system is to be created by state governments through which children, once they leave child care institutions, will be tracked for minimum three years to analyse the transition.

The government may also set up a database of children leaving child care homes upon turning 18 every year and also create helpline numbers for those who are out of institutional care, where they can contact to seek guidance or counselling, whenever required, and can find solutions for their concerns.

The Supreme Court had earlier this month upheld the death sentence for four others convicted of the rape and murder of the woman who later came to be known as "Nirbhaya", the fearless.

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Press Council of India Chairman Justice (Retd) C K Prasad today said it would soon hold a meeting with journalists in the naxal-hit Bastar region of Chhattisgarh over their charges of harassment by the government authorities.

A section of media has alleged that the Chhattisgarh government and the security forces were harassing journalists working the naxal-affected areas of the state.

Speaking at the Indore Press Club today, Prasad said that the Centre had earlier formed a committee at the instance of the PCI to look into the complaints of harassment of journalists in Chhattisgarh.

He, however, said that he could not state at present whether the committee was doing its job in the right manner.

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He makes bad look really good in films.

Javier Bardem, the Oscar-winning Spanish superstar, says given his limitations with the English language, he finds it easier to portray villainous roles in Hollywood as they are "more connected to the impulse".

"I won't do anything which I don't enjoy. When I do anything in English, then the language is a barrier for me. I struggle with it. Performing and acting is about freedom and letting yourself go.

"When you are working in a language which you don't control, there is always reigns holding you back. That is why playing a villain is easier because I am more connected to the impulse, to the fury and to the emotions to express myself," Bardem told PTI during an interview here.

Bardem has already played two iconic Hollywood villains -- the ruthless killer, Anton Chigurh, in "No Country For Old Men" and a cyber-terrorist Raoul Silva opposite Daniel Craig's James Bond in "Skyfall".

The 48-year-old star returns to the space with "Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge" where he is in the role of the main antagonist, Captain Armando Salazar. The Disney film, led by Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, releases on May 26.

Apart from "Pirates", the actor has two more films lined up for release -- Darren Aronofsky's "mother!" and a Pablo Escobar biopic.

Bardem, whose wife, actress Penelope Cruz, was in the last Pirates film "On Stranger Tides", says he was surprised when producer Jerry Bruckheimer offered him a role in the film.

"I felt honoured but very surprised. It is a franchise that I have seen years ago and I really enjoyed it. It is huge at every level - artistically, creatively and also as a movie. When I read the script, I thought that it was a character I could have fun with."



The actor says he would often visit his wife on the sets of "Pirates 4" and had even jokingly asked why he was not cast in the film, not knowing that his turn will come soon.

"I used to visit 'Pirates' sets and I would joke and ask 'why haven't you cast me in the film?' I wanted to be a part of the series. I found the atmosphere to be very nice. Jerry really takes care of the people he works with."



Directed by Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, the Disney film also stars Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Brenton Thwaites, Kaya Scodelario, Kevin McNally and Orlando Bloom.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi today voiced concern over "exploitation" of rivers for "vested interest" which resulted in many of them drying up.

He praised the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh for coming out with a roadmap for conservation of the Narmada river, considered the 'lifeline' of the state.

Modi was addressing the concluding function of 'Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra', aimed at creating public awareness about conserving the river, here in Anuppur district.

"The document (the roadmap) was sent to me in advance and I went through it. It has details of what is to be done, by whom, and when. In my opinion, it is a perfect document for future vision," he said.

He lauded the BJP government for undertaking the Narmada conservation campaign.

Highlighting the poor condition of many rivers in the country, he said, "There is a river named Bharat Puzha in Kerala. It is a matter of concern whether this river will survive or not."



"We are forced to sweat it out now because we did not fulfil our responsibilities towards rivers. We exploited them for our vested interest," he said.

Referring to 2022, when India will complete 75 years of Independence, the prime minister called upon the people to work towards taking the country to new heights by then.

"If 125 crore Indians decide to walk one step for the country, in five years from now ((by 2022) we will move forward by 125 crore steps," Modi said.

The PM called upon the people to take a pledge to work towards all-round development of the country. "We should decide that as a family, as a society, and as a nation what I should do for development of the country."



He said the government has set itself the target of doubling the income of farmers by 2022.

Praising the Madhya Pradesh government's scheme to plant saplings of fruit-bearing trees on the banks of Narmada, Modi called it a futuristic programme.

"Those who sow foodgrains think of one year, but those who think of future, plant fruit-bearing trees."



Earlier, Modi performed a puja at the origin of the river, known as 'Ma Narmada Mandir', in Amarkantak.

Modi asked Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to share the document on Narmada conservation with other states.

The PM congratulated Chouhan and the people of Madhya Pradesh for the yatra that lasted for nearly 150 days. "I, on behalf of the people of Gujarat for whom every drop of Narmada is important, and also Rajasthan and Maharashtra, congratulate Madhya Pradesh on this great initiative."



The river courses through Maharashtra and also Modi's home state Gujarat. Rajasthan is one of the beneficiaries of the Sardar Sarovar Dam built on Narmada.

Modi deplored that the importance of the campaign for Narmada conservation was not appreciated widely in the country.

He praised the state government and Chouhan for ensuring the participation of more than 25 lakh people in the yatra.

The yatra, launched on December 11, 2016 from Amarkantak, concluded today after covering a distance of 3,344 km, traversing over 1,100 villages and towns.

He also spoke about Madhya Pradesh cities-- Indore and Bhopal-- emerging as the cleanest in the country as per the recent cleanliness survey commissioned by the Union urban development ministry.

Addressing the gathering, Chouhan said as part of the conservation plan, nearly six crore saplings of fruit-bearing trees will be planted on July 2 on the either side of Narmada.

Chouhan highlighted various other steps like setting up sewage treatment plants, construction of crematoriums and promotion of organic farming which, he said, were aimed at conserving the sacred river.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that North Korea's latest missile test was "dangerous", but he warned that Pyongyang was being intimidated and called for a peaceful solution to regional tensions.

"We are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers," Putin told reporters after an international forum in Beijing, adding however that "we must stop intimidating North Korea".

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Senior Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia has said that only when the word "secular" is removed from the Constitution will India become a "Hindu nation".

"This will ensure that only Hindus become prime ministers, chief ministers, judges and police chiefs," he said last night at a Bajrang Dal programme in the UP town.

Known for his controversial remarks, Togadia added that the stone pelters of Kashmir were "Pakistanis who just live in India".

"Pelting security forces with stones is an act of war," he said.

The VHP leader also suggested that just as Muslims pray at mosques on Fridays and Christians in churches on Sundays, Hindus should have a day for gathering.

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The hearing of the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old Dalit woman in Sonipat will be conducted in a fast-track court, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said today.

"Such kind of heinous crimes would not be tolerated at any cost in a civilised society and the guilty would be punished," he said.

The decomposed and mutilated body of the woman, who went missing from Sonipat on May 9 and was gang-raped and brutally murdered, was found near the Industrial Model Township in Urban Estate, Rohtak, on May 11. Stray dogs had bitten off the face and lower portion of her body.

The sheer brutality of the crime, reminiscent of the 'Nirbhaya' incident in Delhi which triggered nation-wide outrage, occurred barely a month after the BJP-led Haryana government launched 'Operation Durga' to stop harassment of women.

An autopsy of the victim had stated that the bones of the woman's skull were shattered into pieces and "some sharp-edged objects may have been inserted in her private parts".

"The findings suggest that it was a brutal rape and murder," said S K Dhatterwal, head of the department of forensic medicine at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak, who conducted the post-mortem examination.

Two persons, including the main accused Sumit, who is also a Dalit, have been arrested by the Haryana Police which has formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the case.

Police said the family of the victim have suspected the involvement of six more persons, out of whom five are related to the main accused.

The kin of the victim have also alleged that they had approached the Sonipat police about a month back with a complaint that Sumit was harassing their daughter, but there was no action.

The chief minister also promised strict action against those involved in the alleged rape of a 22-year-old woman at Gurgaon in the state.

The woman from Sikkim was allegedly raped by three men in a moving car and thrown out on a road in Delhi yesterday.

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A journalist working in an evening newspaper was today killed allegedly by unidentified persons, police said.

Shyam Sharma (38) was attacked with sharp-edged weapons by the unidentified persons and his body was found in a car in Kshipra police station area here, an official said.

Sharma was working in an evening newspaper, the officer said, adding the motive behind the killing was not yet clear.

A probe is underway, he added.

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Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is likely to meet Donald Trump for the first time on the sidelines of the US-Arab Islamic summit in Saudi Arabia this month during which he can brief the US president about the ongoing tension with India, a media report said today.

Efforts are underway to arrange a maiden bilateral meeting between Trump and Sharif on the sidelines of the summit on May 21, The Express Tribune reported.

The meeting, if takes place, will provide an opportunity to both the sides to listen to each other's perspective as well as concerns on a range of issues covering bilateral cooperation and current regional and international issues, the report said.

A senior Pakistani official, who preferred to remain anonymous, said the prime minister was already preparing a 'brief' for a possible interaction with the US president.

The official said the 'brief' includes the country's position on the current situation in Afghanistan and the way forward and the ongoing tension with India.

On both the issues, officials here believe that the US administration could play a more proactive role in order to prevent regional countries pitting against each other for their strategic interests.

Some of Trump's aides have openly expressed concern over the deteriorating Indo-Pak ties.

There are strains in ties between India and Pakistan over a number of issues including the cross-border terror attacks in India and sentencing of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav to death on charges of spying.

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The maiden session of the newly elected UP Assembly began on a stormy note today with opposition members throwing paper balls at the podium and the marshals trying to dodge them with files.

The customary address of Governor Ram Naik to the joint sitting of the two Houses of the state legislature was drowned in the uproar created by the opposition.

Slogan-shouting opposition members trooped into the Well despite Speaker Hridaya Narain Dixit's appeal at an all-party meeting to ensure smooth proceedings.

The governor was flanked by Dixit and Chairman of the Legislative Council Ramesh Yadav.

Chief Minister was present when the governor read the address despite the bedlam.

The address is a note prepared by the government highlighting its achievements.

For the first time, the proceedings were telecast live by Doordarshan.

#WATCH: Opposition creates ruckus on first day of assembly session over law and order,blow whistles & throw paper balls at Governor Ram Naik pic.twitter.com/UQuq5dyJK2  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 15, 2017

After the BJP came to power in the state, a decision was taken to telecast live the proceedings of the House so that people could benefit.

"Sara Uttar Pradesh dekh raha hai aap ko (the entire Uttar Pradesh is watching you)," a visibly annoyed governor told the shouting members, who kept throwing papers at the podium and creating din.

The opposition SP and BSP have decided to take on the government on the law and order front.
There is a need to preserve Indian culture in the UKandmake it more inclusive to have a "tolerant" society, experts at a panel discussion here have said.

The discussion was held at the Indian Gymkhana yesterdayas part of the India and the UK year of culture 2017.

Participatingin the discussion, Nanda Kumara, Executive Director of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, the largest cultural institute outside India,said the Bhavan is committed to spread the Indian art and culture and make "life more meaningful."



"We teach 23 subjects including dance, drama, music and yoga under one roof.I consider myself lucky to be part of the organisation which helps Indian art and cultureflourish in the UK," he said.

Noting that the Bhavan was open for everyone, he said 70 per cent of the students are girls and said Indian culture is "very special".

"We followthe motto- the whole world is a family and we should imbibe from others everything that is good," he said.

Trupti Patel, President of the Hindu Forum of Britain, described British society as "very tolerant" and said "because of us Britain has got a special identity."



"We should not lose our identity while we should respect others' culture as well," she said.

Mayura Patel, Chairperson, Croydon Hindu Council, said "let us try to be inclusive and engrave our values among children.We want our children to mix well with other children here. Unless we love our own culture how will others love it," she asked.

Lakshmi Kaul, Founder and ExecutiveMember of the Kashmiri Pandits in the UK, said "it is fairly easy to celebrate one'sethnicity here as you have the opportunity to interact with the best in the world."



Prabhakar Kaza, Director of Kaza Business Consultants Ltd., said "there is racism here but we should not be too sensitive about it. It is part of the social fabric."



His advise to youngsters is to "bring to the fore" whatever skills they have.

Earlier, Virendra Sharma, Labour MP, formally inaugurated an exhibition containing Indian craft work, embroidery, pottery, designing and handloom products along with handmade jewellery organised by a women's organisation 'Inspiring Indian Women'.

Rashmi Mishra, Founder of the Inspiring Indian Women said, "the exhibition was organised to give a platform toIndian artists to display their products and make them famous internationally."



In his brief address, Virendra Sharma said, "We have a moral responsibility to support all initiatives taken by women, particularly rural women who have special talent in their craftsmanship."



Mahendra Jadeja, President of the Retailers Association of Britain and Saleha, former Mayor of Lambethalso spoke on the occasion.

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Two CPI-M workers were arrested today for their alleged roles in the May 12 killing of an RSS worker at Payyanur town, even as the Centre said it was 'keeping an eye' on the politically volatile north Kerala district of Kannur.

Rinesh (28) and K P Jyothish (26) were arrested from Kannur today.

"We have arrested two CPI(M) workers. We are still ascertaining as to how many persons were involved in the crime," Kannur Superintendent of Police Siva Vikram told PTI, adding that police was on the lookout for more persons.

Two persons who had helped the accused to flee were taken into custody yesterday and were still being questioned, the police said.

While accusing the state government of not having "the political will to fight out violence and killings," Union minister J P Nadda said the CPI(M)-led LDF government should take moral responsibility for such incidents.

"We condemn the attacks on BJP-RSS workers and the political party which has indulged in such activities," Nadda told reporters here earlier in the day.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, on the other hand, hit out at the BJP for demanding imposition of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA) in Kannur.

Some people have sought imposition of AFPSA in Kannur, he said, adding that "they would do well to remember that in Manipur, where it had been implemented, 1,528 fake encounters and killings had been reported."



The victims ranged from a 12-year-old child to a 72- year-oldwoman, the chief minister added.

Kerala's democratic society, which stands for the human rights, cannot accept this, Vijayan said in a Facebook Post.

"How can a democratic party demand for such a law," he asked.

"The government is committed to take forward the peace efforts and ensure protection for life and property," he said adding that the state government would take an uncompromising stand against these type of incidents.

Earlier, in the assembly, Vijayan said a case would be registered against the BJP state president, if necessary, for allegedly "spreading false" reports related to the killing of the RSS worker in Kannur.

The RSS worker, Biju, an accused in the killing of a CPI(M) worker, was out on bail when he was attacked on May 12.

It was the first incident of political violence after peace talks were held between leaders of the CPI(M) and BJP- RSS in Kannur in January.

The BJP'S Kerala unit had submitted amemorandum to Kerala Governor P Sathasivam, seeking action and to declare Kannur a disturbed area and to impose AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) there to maintain law and order.

BJP leader Sobha Surendran today continued her attack against the governor, saying he should demit office if he was scared to take action against the chief minister.

"Why isn't the governor visiting Kannur? Why can't he seek a report from the government?" she asked in New Delhi.

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Two persons were today arrested from Amroli area here with fake currency notes of Rs 2,000 denomination with face value of Rs 72,000, police said today.

Accused Tulsi Sodhiya and Divyesh Kaleriya were arrested by the city crime branch sleuths when they were trying to circulate the fake currency of Rs 2,000 denomination in Amroli locality, DCP (Crime) Vishal Vaghela told reporters.

"They were circulating fake currency notes for 10 per cent commission. Primary investigation reveals that they had received such notes from a person from Rajkot, identified as Pratyush. More details will be revealed after he is arrested," Vaghela said.

The duo might have succeeded in circulating such notes in Surat market, but were arrested, police recovered 36 notes with face value of Rs 2,000 each from their possession, he said.

Recently, Surat police had busted a racket of printing fake currency notes using colour printer and had recovered notes with face value of Rs 4.34 lakh.

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A Delhi court has sent a 31- year-old man to jail for two years for assaulting a policeman who was chasing him from an alleged crime scene.

Additional Sessions Judge Manoj Jain also imposed a fine of Rs 30,000 on north west resident Naveen Shokeen and said that he obstructed constable Manish from doing his job.

The court's order came in a case in which the policeman was beaten up by Shokeen, while allegedly trying to escape with his associate in a car after assaulting another person.

"He (policeman) was in uniform and when he saw a quarrel, he parked his vehicle on one side, but by that time, all those persons boarded the (SUV) Tavera and left from there. He chased them and during such a chase, all the accused persons stopped their Tavera and then thought of teaching him a lesson. They knowingly and voluntarily obstructed him when he was chasing them in order to nab them," the court noted.

The court also observed that the manner in which the policeman was attacked "and his car was damaged has enough of potential to indicate that accused wanted to commit offence of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The cries of Manish attracted people which perhaps made the accused scared and eventually saved Manish from further harm," the court said.

According to the prosecution, the policeman, who was on duty, saw one Yogender Kumar being beaten up by four people and when he tried to stop them, they escaped in their SUV.

It further claimed that the cop chased the offenders in his car but the accused persons stopped their vehicle and assaulted the police official.

Two of the accused persons are yet to nabbed while the trial court, before transferring the case to the sessions court, had declared the fourth accused a proclaimed offender.

During the trial, the accused claimed innocence and said that he was falsely implicated in the case.

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The US today urged India and Pakistan to enagage in direct dialogue to reduce tension as they faced-off at the International Court of Justice over the the death penalty given to Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav.

"We believe India and Pakistan stand to benefit from practical cooperation," a State Department spokesperson told PTI.

When asked about the US' stand on the case of Jadhav, a former Indian Navy officer who is facing the death poenalty in Pakistan, the official said, "We encourage India and Pakistan to engage in direct dialogue aimed at reducing tension."



Jadhav, arrested in March last year, has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities. His sentencing has become the latest flashpoint in the India-Pakistan ties.

Pakistan has denied India consular access to Jadhav 16 times, claiming he was an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

His execution was stayed last week by the ICJ, which today hear arguments presented by both the sides.

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The VO Chidambaranar Port, one of the top 12 major ports in the country, and Tamil Nadu entity TANGEDCO today inked a pact to augment the capacities of two coal jetties at the port four-fold to 24 million tonnes for Rs 800 crore.

The pact will upgrade two coal jetties at VO Chidambaranar Port - Jetty I and II -- from 6.25 MTPA (million tonne per annum) to 24 MTPA.

"The VOCP Trust signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation Limited (TANGEDCO) for the upgradation of Coal Jetty I and II," Ministry of Shipping said in a statement.

Shipping and Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari and Minister for Electricity, Prohibition and Excise, Government of Tamil Nadu, P Thangamani were present on the occasion.

Gadkari said that the project would benefit both TANGEDCO and the VOCPT.

"It would make coal handling by the jetties much more voluminous and efficient, and thus bring down logistics costs. This would also allow for cheaper production of electricity, which would be very beneficial for industrial growth," he said.

With the upgradation of coal jetties, TANGEDCO will be able to handle additional volumes of coal cargo for the upcoming new power plants in Uppur and Kadaladi in Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu.

In addition, there will be quicker turnaround of vehicles with the deployment of high tech handling equipment like two ship unloaders, each with a minimum 2,000 TPH capacity and a high capacity conveyor system of 4,000 TPH.

This enhancement of handling capacity and upgradation of infrastructure will result in reduction of logistics costs, the statement said.

"TANGEDCO will therefore, be able to utilise the services of the port in a more cost-effective way. With the power generation from TANGEDCO's Tuticorin plants being linked to the National Grid, this would enable availability of additional power at reduced costs, which, in turn, can fuel industrial growth and employment generation," it said.

The project is the outcome of Ministry of Shipping's Project Unnati, under which a study, 'Unlocking National Ports Potential' was done to improve the handling capacity of CJ-I & II.

"The estimated cost for upgrading CJ-I & II is about Rs 800 crore," the statement said.

As per the MoU, initially Coal Jetty-I will be upgraded in about 24 months by constructing a new coal jetty while the second jettly will be upgraded thereafter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Mumbai-based female disc jockey was today arrested in connection with a high-profile racket in which people were "honey-trapped" and then blackmailed, police said.

In December 2016, the special operations group (SOG) of Rajasthan police had busted the inter-state racket in which a group of people allegedly extorted over Rs 15 crore from people by filming them in sexual acts only to blackmail them later by threatening to lodge rape cases against them.

The 21-year-old woman, wanted in the case since December last year, was arrested by the police in Mumbai's Andheri West, they said.

City-based doctor Sunit Soni had complained that the woman had convinced him to take her to Pushkar where they stayed at a resort in March 2016, police said.

Upon returning to Jaipur, the accused along with her accomplices had tried to extort Rs 1 crore from Dr Soni, they said.

When the doctor failed to pay up, the woman registered a rape case against him.

The doctor was in jail for 78 days, SOG IG Dinesh M N said.

He said the woman, a resident of the Brahmpuri area of Jaipur, had started a musical group in Mumbai which used to organise events in hotels.

With her arrest, a total of 32 people have been arrested by the police.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Mid-sized private sector lender Yes Bank today announced the appointment of computer hardware company Intel's executive Debjani Ghosh as an additional director on its board.

Ghosh's appointment as a non-executive director will be considered by the shareholders at the bank's forthcoming annual general meeting on June 6, a bank statement said.

She has been associated with Intel since 1996 and has held positions including country head and managing director for South Asia, the Yes Bank statement said.

"Ghosh is a senior and experienced leader and highly respected in the Indian technology industry for her strategic leadership and marketing acumen," the bank's managing director and chief executive Rana Kapoor said.

----------------------------------------------------------- Mullen Lintas wins integrated advertising mandate of Too Yumm



Advertising agency Mullen Lintas today said it has been appointed as the creative agency for RPG Group's packaged foods brand - Too Yumm.

Mullen Lintas was chosen after a multi-agency pitch that saw the participation of six agencies across India, it said in a statement.

The RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group recently announced its foray into the FMCG space with Guiltfree Industries, which launched Too Yumm.

The Too Yumm mandate includes strategic and creative duties for a high impact launch across markets for digital and mainline.

------------------------------------------------------- HDFC Life inks distribution tie-up with Catholic Syrian Bank



HDFC Life today said it has entered into a bancassurance tie-up with Catholic Syrian Bank to distribute its individual life insurance products to the private lender's customers.

With this partnership, HDFC Life will offer its leading range of individual life insurance, health and pension products to the Catholic Syrian Bank's 1.5 million customer base across all its branches over a period of time, a release said.

"We are proud to announce our partnership with Catholic Syrian Bank, our first bank partnership in Kerala. In keeping with our endeavour to increase our reach and access customers across geographies, this partnership would enable us to offer our products to over 1.5 million customers of Catholic Syrian Bank across Kerala and other states," said HDFC Life Managing Director and CEO Amitabh Chaudhry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Helen Reid

LONDON (Reuters) - A global "ransomware" attack disrupting factories, hospitals, shops and schools spurred investors on Monday to buy stocks expected to benefit from a pickup in cyber security spending by companies and government agencies.

The cyber attack began spreading across the globe on Fridayand by Monday had locked up computers in more than 150countries. European Union police agency Europol said on Monday the attack had hit 200,000 machines.

"These attacks help focus the minds of chief technologyofficers across corporations to make sure security protocols areup to date, and you often see bookings growth at cyber securitycompanies as a result," said Neil Campling, head of technologyresearch at Northern Trust.

Investors treated the attack as a buying opportunity for security stocks rather than a cause for concern over the risk it posed to companies, with the pan-European STOXX 600 index little changed and major U.S. indices up in midday trading.

In London, shares in cloud network security firm Sophos jumped more than 7 percent to a record high and security firm NCC Group rose 2.7 percent.

U.S.-listed shares in cyber security firms FireEye rose almost 8 percent, and peers Symantec and Palo Alto Networks were up more than 3 percent.

The attack would "refocus IT attention on updating security infrastructure and procedures" and benefit providers in email, network, and endpoint security, analysts at Wedbush wrote in a research report, highlighting Proofpoint and Splunk as stocks to watch. Proofpoint shares jumped more than 8 percent.

Analysts at Bernstein said desktop virtualization vendors Citrix Systems and VMware could indirectly benefit from the upgrade cycle, while defense companies Raytheon and BAE Systems should similarly get a boost in their commercial cyber security businesses. Government spending on computer security should also help General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Bernstein said.

Companies' spending on cyber security protection is set toincrease 10 percent in Britain and Europe by 2020, according toBrian Lord, a managing director of cyber and technology atcyber security firm PGI, as outdated IT systems get a refresh.

"In many companies there's been an increase in investment inIT but not in the security that sits around it, so thisinvestment is likely to play a bit of catch-up," said Lord, whospent 21 years at UK government intelligence service GCHQ.

The risks of security breaches, particularly when theyresult in the leak of sensitive customer data, has in the past had a direct impact on share prices as investor confidence is shaken.

"Reducing the cost of security breaches by only 10 percentcan save global enterprises $17 billion annually," MorganStanley said in a report published on Monday.

The U.S. broker upgraded its rating on networking equipmentgiant Cisco Systems to "overweight." Cisco shares were up 2.6 percent.

With few pure-play, publicly traded software and networksecurity companies in Europe, a London-listed cyber securityexchange-traded fund (ETF), whose holdings include Cisco and FireEye, was in demand, up 3.4 percent.

In Helsinki, Finnish digital security firm F-Secure jumped as much as 5.1 percent to a 16-year high.

(Additional reporting by Danilo Masoni and Megan Davies; Editing by Vikram Subhedar, John Stonestreet and Bill Rigby)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Helen Reid

LONDON (Reuters) - A global "ransomware" attack disrupting factories, hospitals, shops and schools spurred investors on Monday to buy up stocks expected to benefit from a pick-up in cybersecurity spending by firms and government agencies.

The cyber attack began spreading across the globe on Friday and by Monday had locked up computers in more than 150 countries, with experts warning of an even wider impact as more employees logged on and checked e-mails.

European Union police agency Europol said on Monday the attack had hit 200,000 machines.

"These attacks help focus the minds of chief technology officers across corporations to make sure security protocols are up to date, and you often see bookings growth at cybersecurity companies as a result," said Neil Campling, head of technology research at Northern Trust.

In London, shares in cloud network security firm Sophos jumped more than 7 percent to a record high and security firm NCC Group rose 2.9 percent.

Campling said Sophos was particularly likely to benefit as its customer base was dominated by small and medium-sized companies, whose IT systems were often less well protected than larger firms and hence more likely to fall victim to ransomware attacks.

U.S.-listed shares in cybersecurity firms Fireeye rose 4.8 percent in pre-market, and peers Symantec, Palo Alto Networks and Cyberark Software Ltd were all up 3 percent.

Companies' spending on cybersecurity protection is set to increase 10 percent in Britain and Europe by 2020, according to Brian Lord, a managing director of cyber and technology at cybersecurity firm PGI, as outdated IT systems get a refresh.

"In many companies there's been an increase in investment in IT but not in the security that sits around it, so this investment is likely to play a bit of catch-up," said Lord, who spent 21 years at UK government intelligence service GCHQ.

The risks of security breaches, particularly when they result in the leak of sensitive customer data, has had a direct impact on share prices as investor confidence is shaken.

"Reducing the cost of security breaches by only 10 percent can save global enterprises $17 billion annually," Morgan Stanley said in a report published on Monday.

The U.S. broker upgraded its rating on networking equipment giant Cisco to "overweight." Cisco shares were up about 2 percent in pre-market trade.

With few pure play, publicly-traded software and network security companies in Europe, a London-listed cybersecurity exchange-traded fund (ETF) whose holdings include Cisco and Fireeye, was in demand, up 1.8 percent by midday.

In Helsinki, Finnish digital security firm F-Secure jumped as much as 5.1 percent to a 16-year high.

(Additional reporting by Danilo Masoni, Editing by Vikram Subhedar and John Stonestreet)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Bill Berkrot and Natalie Grover

(Reuters) - Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc said on Monday it would buy Patheon NV, a Dutch manufacturer of drugs for clinical trials, for $5.2 billion as it seeks to complement its offerings in production and services for the biopharma industry.

The offer price of $35 per share represents a premium of about 35 percent to Patheon's Friday close. Thermo will also assume $2 billion in net debt, putting the cost of the deal at about $7.2 billion for Patheon, which generated $1.9 billion in revenue last year.

Thermo Fisher, the world's largest maker of scientific instruments, also supplies raw materials used in formulating experimental drugs and had been doing business with Patheon.

Thermo Fisher Chief Executive Marc Casper, in a telephone interview, called the deal a "hand in glove fit to ... our fastest growing part of the business."

As drugmakers increasingly vie to shave costs from clinical trials, Patheon's drug manufacturing capabilities will help Thermo Fisher grab a bigger slice of the fragmented contract development and manufacturing market, which the company estimates to be about $40 billion.

Patheon has manufactured more products that won U.S. approval than any peer.

The deal, which is expected to be completed by year end, will add to Thermo Fisher's adjusted profit by 30 cents a share in the first full year after close.

"This deal could help solidify Thermo Fisher's multi-year core growth reacceleration," said Evercore ISI analyst Ross Muken, who called the forecast conservative and sees it adding 35-40 cents a share to earnings.

"We put out numbers that we feel incredibly high confidence in our ability to achieve," said Casper, adding that he will update the forecast once the deal closes.

The CEO sees greater growth potential longer-term.

"There are very interesting opportunities to build out their footprint in Asia-Pacific, where they have not yet really penetrated," Casper said.

Thermo Fisher has reached agreements with JLL Partners and Royal DSM to tender their holdings representing about 73 percent of Patheon shares. That puts the company well on the way to securing 80 percent required under Dutch tender rules.

Thermo Fisher said it expects to realize cost-saving synergies of about $120 million by year three following the deal's close as there is little direct overlap in the two companies.

There has been a wave of consolidation in the contract research space recently including INC Research Holdings Inc's agreement last week to merge with inVentiv Health Inc in a $4.6 billion deal.

Thermo Fisher shares were up 0.5 percent at $172.41 on Monday afternoon, while Patheon shares were up 33.2 percent at $34.64, just shy of the offer price.

Goldman Sachs & Co is acting as financial adviser to Thermo Fisher, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is serving as legal counsel.

Morgan Stanley & Co is Patheon's financial adviser, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is its legal counsel.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot in New York and Natalie Grover and Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Martina D'Couto and Matthew Lewis)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The global ransomware attack has affected several computers of a state power distribution company in West Bengal but the central government computer system has largely escaped, officials said on Monday.

State agencies that manage government websites and build supercomputers have installed security patches issued by Microsoft Corp.

Federal Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters that there was no serious impact on India, with only isolated incidents in parts of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh states, and the government was monitoring the situation.

However, West Bengal Power Minister Sovandev Chattopadhyay told Reuters that several billing centres of the state's Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (WBSEDCL) had been infected by the ransomware worm.

"The full extent and magnitude of the problem will be realised by tomorrow," he said, the situation will be very serious if household electricity consumption data from the central server of the utility could not be retrieved beforehand.

A power department official who did not want to be named said billing for around 800,000 households was affected when the ransomware blocked access to files in the computers.

A senior official at the Federal Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said its Computer Emergency Response Team was gathering all possible information about the ransomware.

The cyber attack, which shut car factories, hospitals, shops and schools over the weekend, has proved less severe than anticipated in Asia, but industry professionals have flagged potential risks in the future.

Aruna Sundararajan, secretary of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told Reuters the government was constantly monitoring the situation and that a few stand-alone computers at a police department were "back in action" after being infected over the weekend.

It was not immediately clear what the police department did to secure its systems.

India's Informatics Centre, which builds and manages almost all government websites, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, a premier research institute that has built supercomputers, have actively installed patches to immunise their Windows systems, Sundararajan said.

Her ministry has also asked chief information security officers of all organisations run by provincial governments to follow guidelines issued by New Delhi to tackle the issue.
A hacker shared 10 upcoming episodes from season 5 of Orange is the New Black on Pirate Bay, after failing to extort money from Netflix. Facebook has tweaked its rights manager to help video content owners automatically block pirated content and even get the ad revenue from it. And in India, climactic scenes of new blockbuster movie Baahubali 2 got leaked, highlighting the problem of piracy, even as online video grows in popularity.
If everything goes right, Baba Ramdev's Patanjali could soon be helping farmers to power homes in the villages using bulls.

According to a report in Economic Times, the research of over one and a half years on the idea to generate electricity with the help of a bull's pulling power has yielded initial success.

Though the main purpose behind the research is to prevent bulls from going to slaughter, a successful model could transform villages in the country which are yet to be connected to the electricity grid.

Patanjali's Balkrishna, who is the brain behind this research has tied up with an Indian multinational automobile manufacturer and a Turkish partner. According to the report, a prototype has been designed and is being tweaked to generate more electricity.

So far the design, involving a turbine, has managed to yield nearly 2.5 kilowatts of power, the report said.

"At a time when more and more male bovines are being slaughtered, we want to change the perception that they (bulls) are not very valuable," the report quoted Balkrishna, as saying.

"While in the morning they can be used in the farms, in the evening they can be utilised for generation of electricity. We need to go back to the basics. In ancient times, bulls were used to ferry massive artillery. If their power is put to optimum use with the help of technology, they can be of tremendous use," Balkrishna said.

"We are undertaking research as to how more watts of power can be produced with the use of bulls so that a farmer can use them to light his household," he added.

Baba Ramdev's Patanjali Ayurved, which has given a tough competition to FMCG firms, personal care companies recently announced its plans to enter the restaurant business dominated by McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Subway in India.


Imagine an appliance that pulls out water from air! Kolkata-based Vikram Solar has teamed up with Israel's WaterGen to manufacture a harvester to address safe and clean drinking water issue.

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) has already been signed between the two firms to form a joint venture for manufacturing solar-powered water harvester using the Israeli technology that will suit the Indian conditions.

The technology is relevant to countries like India where a large part of population still does not have access to safe and clean drinking water.

"We are working seriously to finalise the joint venture.

Hopefully, the deal will get through in the next few days," WaterGen Business Development officer Maor Zrahyahu said.

A product with the unique water solution technology will be developed in a such way that is energy efficient and cost effective, he said without disclosing about investment.

This would help provide drinking water access to people in remote places making best use of easily available natural resources -- air and humidity, he added.

According to WaterGen, the water harvesting device can be of different sizes depending on the extent of water to be harvested from atmosphere.

A small device, which can be used at home, can produce produce up to 20 litres a day, while a medium-sized device can produce up to 450 litres and a large device up to 3,000 litres a day, he added.

WaterGen said it has systems that can produce up to 7,000 litres of clean drinking water a day depending on temperature and humidity conditions. The drinking water harvested from atmosphere is safe and can be tested for the quality.

Besides India, the Israeli company has entered into strategic partnerships with companies in other countries including Vietnam and North America.
With protectionist policies on the rise across the world, China seems to have taken the wheel to lead the next wave of globalisation with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Formerly known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR), the cross-continental initiative aims to revive the Silk Route of yore and initiate infrastructure development projects along it.

However, India has kept its distance from the initiative; New Delhi has been sceptical of BRI, reasoning that the price to pay for this agreement with China will be India's sovereignty.

Who attended?

The event in Beijing saw 29 heads of state - including Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan - coming together for the two-day Belt and Road Forum (BRF). They were accompanied by delegates from countries like Philippines, which are embroiled in conflicts with China in the South China Sea. Even the United States was represented by a delegation led by Special Assistant to the President, Matt Pottinger, as China managed to rope in the superpower shortly before the meeting.

Meanwhile, India remained absent from the BRF as a sign of protest against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and is being projected as a flagship project of BRI.

Sovereignty can't be compromised: India

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has been the bone of contention between India and China since it was ideated. The modern day Silk Route, as per the Chinese plan, originates in Kashgar in Xinjiang and terminates in Gwadar port in Balochistan, crossing Pakistan occupied Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan, Punjab and Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on its way.

"Guided by our principled position in the matter, we have been urging China to engage in a meaningful dialogue on its connectivity initiative, One Belt, One Road which was later renamed as Belt and Road Initiative. We are awaiting a positive response from the Chinese side," said External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay.

"Regarding the so-called China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is being projected as the flagship project of the BRI/OBOR, the international community is well aware of India's position. No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity," he said.

Another concern that India has in mind is the economical influence China might assert over the stakeholders of BRI through infrastructure development.

"Connectivity initiatives must follow principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities, balanced ecological and environmental protection and preservation standards, transparent assessment of project costs, and skill and technology transfer to help long-term running and maintenance of the assets created by local communities," MEA spokesperson Gopal Baglay said.

Voices similar to India

People of Balochistan, where CPEC ends, and PoK, which is on its way, are also not pleased with the project. World Baloch Organisation and World Sindhi Congress raised slogans outside the Chinese embassy in London. The Baloch people are apprehensive of the exploitation their resource-rich home might be put through should the Gwadar port is developed and connected to China through CPEC.

On the other hand, residents of Gilgit-Baltistan and PoK consider CPEC, and the umbrella initiative BRI, as means to grab these regions.

Other side of the coin

Not taking names, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took a jibe at India for its absence at BRF, stating that the $ 124 billion dollar project will translate into economic betterment for the entire region and 'must not be politicised'.

Meanwhile, Chinese premier Xi Jinping went on to say that investing into BRI does not indicate towards a change in China's policy on Kashmir; it still holds that the issue should be resolved by India and Pakistan by the means of bilateral talks.


Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday attended the 90 years celebrations of the Essel Group in New Delhi. Modi inaugurated the launch of Essel Group's two social initiatives during the event.

The initiates included Sarthi - a people's empowerment programme on subjects such as education, health and employment; and the DSC Foundation with a corpus of Rs. 5000 crore, to empower people in need.

The prime minister praised Essel Group's effort and said that while "Sarthi" presented a good blend of rights and duties, the DSC Foundation would help build a large number of job creators. He said the Swachh Bharat Mission had provided opportunities for a large number of social entrepreneurs to emerge.

Modi said that the programme was an illustration of Indian traditions. He said that India has had a tradition where successive generations take family values forward, and contribute to the family by adding their capacities and capabilities.

He recalled his earlier meetings with Shri Nandkishore Goenka and said the family has always been open to new ideas, and has taken every challenge as an opportunity, to create a presence in a range of initiatives from "soil to satellite."

The Prime Minister urged everyone present to work towards specific goals for what they could do for the country by 2022 - the 75th anniversary of independence.

Chairman of the Essel Group Shri Subhash Chandra thanked the Prime Minister for accepting the invitation for the event. He explained Essel Group's recent social initiatives on themes such as water supply, power supply, Swachh Bharat and Affordable Housing.
Osama bin Laden is dead and gone but a Saddam Hussain operating an E-Mitra kiosk centre in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district tried to make an Aadhaar card for the slain Al Qaeda terrorist.

However, officials of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) got a whiff of the matter and reported the matter to police.

Police have arrested Saddam Hussain Mansuri, 25, who runs an Aadhaar card registration centre in Mandal town.The accused had allegedly uploaded a blurred picture of Laden along with other details.

UIDAI officials found discrepancies in the application and forwarded the matter for investigation, SP, Bhilwara, Pradeep Mohan Sharma told PTI.

He said the state IT department had forwarded the complaint to him and a case was filed against Mansuri with the Mandal Police Station on Friday evening, Sharma said.

Mandal Circle officer, Chanchal Mishra, said that the accused will be produced before a court on Monday and will be taken on remand for further interrogation into the matter.

She said that a case under the IT Act has been registered against the accused.
Executive search firm Head Hunters India today said the job cuts in IT sector will be between 1.75 lakh and 2 lakh annually for next three years due to under-preparedness in adapting to newer technologies.

"Contrary to media reports of 56,000 IT professionals to lose jobs this year, the actual job cuts will be between 1.75 lakh and 2 lakh per year in next three years, due to under- preparedness in adapting to newer technologies," Head Hunters India Founder-Chairman and MD K Lakshmikanth told PTI, analysing a report submitted by McKinsey & Company at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on February 17.

McKinsey & Company report had said nearly half of the workforce in the IT services firms will be "irrelevant" over the next 3-4 years.

McKinsey India Managing Director Noshir Kaka had also said the bigger challenge ahead for the industry will be to retrain 50-60 per cent of the workforce as there will be a significant shift in technologies. The industry employs 3.9 million people and the majority of them have to be retrained.

"So, when we analyse these figures, it is clear that 30 to 40 per cent of the workforce cannot be retrained or re- skilled. So, assume that half of this workforce can continue to work on old skills, then the balance will become redundant.

"So, the number of people who will become redundant in the next three years will be about five to six lakhs. This will workout to, on an average, between 1.75 lakh to 2 lakh per year for next three years," Lakshmikanth explained.

However, he said job cuts will not take place in major cities like Mumbai or Bengaluru, but cities like Coimbatore or a few remote places, he said.

Lakshmikanth further said the IT services industry is passing through an uncertain time as the growth in digital technologies like cloud-based services is happening at a much faster pace and the companies are combining the learning of some of the new technologies and reskilling.

"Because of the changing technology, the most affected will be the professionals aged 35 and above, for it would be very difficult for them to get jobs," Lakhsmikanth said.

Asked if it is fair to blame US President Donald Trump's policy for job cuts, Lakshmikanth said it is not fair because he has fulfilled the promise after winning the elections.

"How can we blame Trump, for he has fulfilled the election promise of giving jobs to local people including IT professionals by tightening H1-B visa norms, which were being misused by companies by paying less to foreign professionals working in US. It is for companies to tackle the situation and such situation they have undergone in previous years. It is not new for them. They know to tide over it," he said.

Lakhsmikanth also said it is not fair even to target the Indian government as the IT industry grew on its own in India, but at later stages, respective state governments and central governments provided them facilities like land or creating special economic zones, among others.
(Beijing)  Two Chinese companies have taken a 49% stake in a project on Kazakhstans border with China, as the worlds second-largest economy looks to increase its investment in countries involved in the Belt and Road initiative.

China COSCO Shipping Corp. Ltd. and Lianyungang Port Group Co. Ltd. signed agreements on Monday with Kazakhstans national railway company to acquire the stake in a dry port in the Khorgos-East Gate Special Economic Zone, which borders Chinas northwestern Xinjiang region. The companies will each take 24.5% ownership.

The dry port is a transshipment hub  an intermediate destination for goods  directly connected by rail for shipping items from China to Europe. The hub is five days by train from the Lianyungang Port in eastern China and about 10 days rail travel to Europe.

The size of the deal has not been disclosed.

The project could serve as a model for Chinas massive Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, as it connects the initiatives Silk Road Economic Belt  a land area linking China with Europe through Central Asia  and an ocean-based 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which links countries to the south of China and leads to Africa and southern Europe, according to a COSCO statement.

From 2013 to 2016, Chinese enterprises invested over $60 billion in countries participating in the Belt and Road initiative, according to Ning Jizhe, director of the National Bureau of Statistics. The catchall program, announced in 2013, covers infrastructure projects in at least 65 countries, which combined are home to 62% of the worlds population and contribute almost a third of global annual economic output.

The dry-port investment is the second Sino-Kazakh logistics project under the auspices of the Belt and Road initiative. In 2013, the city of Lianyungang, a coastal city in Jiangsu province, partnered with Kazakhstans national railway company to establish a logistics hub in the Lianyungang Port, which was put into use in 2014.

Contact reporter Coco Feng (renkefeng@caixin.com)
Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech in Beijing during the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Summit on Sunday. Photo: China News Service

President Xi Jinping said he is glad to see positive responses and extensive support from the international community for the Belt and Road initiative, as representatives from more than 100 countries and international organizations wrapped up a two-day summit in Beijing on Monday.

Xi announced at a news conference late Monday that China will host another Belt and Road Summit in 2019, as participants have already been discussing gathering again to lay down more details of cooperation and plans in the cross-border initiative.

He also said that more than 270 cooperation projects or agreements have been signed during the summit, and Chinas plans to host an international import exposition has garnered enthusiastic responses.

Currently, 68 countries and international organizations have signed Belt and Road agreements with China, Xi said.

The Belt and Road program, borrowing the idea of ancient Silk Road trade routes, was raised by Xi in 2013 and has developed into an all-out national strategy to beef up roads, railways, ports and industrial parks to better link China with Europe and Central Asia by land, and with Africa and Southeast Asia by sea.

At the roundtable meeting attended by 29 heads of state and government leaders on Monday, Xi listed the challenges facing the world, including sluggish economic recovery, a growing development gap, and the effects of refugee crises, terrorism and military conflicts.

Many countries have development plans to deal with the challenges. But only by aligning their policies and integrating economic factors and resources on a global scale can countries create synergy to promote peace, stability and shared development, Xi said.

He emphasized the inclusiveness of the Belt and Road initiative, describing it as a brand of cooperation that goes beyond regions, and can only be achieved by joint planning and action.

The China Railway Express began running from Nanjing, Jiangsu province, to Moscow on June 29. Photo: Visual China

China promised on Sunday to inject 100 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) into the Silk Road Fund, and to extend 380 billion yuan in loans to support Belt and Road infrastructure, manufacturing and financial projects.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told CCTV on Sunday that representatives participating in the summit showed great interest in the Belt and Road program, and just a few hours after the summit started, they were talking about returning to discuss detailed plans.

People are saying, How do we make it happen every year, so that the next time, instead of signing agreements and just introducing our ideas, we are actually working on making them happen? he told CCTV.

Kim said the World Bank is investing $90 million to the Belt and Road countries, but it lacks the political and economic power to make the process more effective.

He is glad that China has initiated the Belt and Road program to push forward cooperation in these regions.

The China Development Bank issued $168.2 billion in countries along the Belt and Road routes between 2013 and 2016, bank President Zheng Zhijie told CCTV on Sunday. The money was used in energy, mining, transport infrastructure and other areas, he said. The bank has served nine countries along the routes, including Kazakhstan, Laos, Cambodia and Kuwait.

It has also participated in the planning of three economic corridors, including China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Pakistan, and Bangladesh-China-Indonesia-Myanmar, Zheng said.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde discussed on Sunday three policy priorities for better financial connectivity to the Belt and Road initiative.

Emerging and developing countries should improve their business and regulatory environment to attract foreign direct investment in high-quality infrastructure. The second policy priority is to push for more financial inclusion, Lagarde said at the summit.

She also urged countries to harness the power of fintech, or financial technology. She used China as an example in utilizing this power, saying that people can live without cash in Chinese cities such as Beijing and Hangzhou thanks to mobile payment platforms like Alipay and WeChat.

The Peoples Bank of China recently established a special commission on fintech to better coordinate the development and application of financial technology and manage its risks.

China also signed economic and trade agreements with more than 30 countries over the past few days.

China and Georgia signed a free trade agreement on Saturday in Beijing, which will take effect later this year or the beginning of next year, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China will levy zero taxes on 93.9% of products from Georgia, which will levy a zero percent tax on 96.5% of products from China.

Contact reporter Wu Gang (gangwu@caixin.com)
| BY Kim Shaw |

BHP says Think Big and drops the Billiton name in a new brand campaign launched today via Big Red, Melbourne.

The initial campaign includes two 30 second TV commercials, which will be accompanied by print and online advertisements and leveraged through social media. As the campaign progresses, the materials will grow and evolve.

Think Big will also be launched globally in a phased approach into other markets where BHP is located.

The cast of the Think Big brand campaign is largely BHP employees. For many, it was their first experience in front of the camera. Local crews worked at various locations including Broken Hill, the birthplace of BHP.

BHP Chief External Affairs Officer, Geoff Healy says Think Big was designed to demonstrate the important role BHP plays in the Australian economy and community and more broadly in global economic growth and development.

We fundamentally believe that as society changes it is up to us to make the case  more confidently and effectively  for the positive role that well-run and responsible companies play in society, says Healy.

The advertisements will talk about the importance of our Australian heritage, our contribution and our commitment to communities where we operate. The campaign will focus on what people can and should expect of us.

In launching Think Big, we will take the opportunity to change our logo and move to a brand that Australians have known us by for generations  BHP. This abbreviated simple expression of our organisation is used colloquially around the world.

Agency: Big Red

Production Company: Flinders Lane

Director and DOP: Germain McMicking

Creative: Campbell Smith, Marty Hungerford, Ted Horton, Alex Pappos

Music: David Hershfelder

Sound: SMR Productions

Editor: Jon Holmes
| BY Ricki Green |

How will Australia perform at Cannes this year? In the lead up to the Festival, Campaign Brief will be showcasing the work we hope will impress the judges

TKT, Sydney

Millennials have access to masses of information and, when it comes to education, theyre better off than any previous generation. But, somehow they missed out on the essentials needed for navigating everyday life. As The Massive Hit That Improves You A Bit, V Energy Drink is all about making people a bit better. And there was definitely room for improvement; both in millennials basic life skills and in the multitude of frankly boring how-to-videos available to them. Enter V Skills, 24 pieces of informative, entertaining branded content, focusing on teaching millennials life skills making them be a bit better at life.

Clemenger BBDO, Sydney

Hungry Jacks is famous for burgers, not breakfast. And with its competitor spending millions on promoting their breakfast menu, we needed a breakthrough idea to get the country talking about HJs as an alternative. Working with the insight that its hard to talk when youre tired, we created the Brekk-E-Tag  a device that orders breakfast automatically as customers approach the drive-thru. By simply pre-setting the tag with their favourite breakfast order online, customers could get their breakfast without having to say a word. Brekk-E-Tag was installed at Hungry Jacks Tumbi Umbi store on the NSW Central Coast, with tags being distributed directly to customers.

Clemenger BBDO, Sydney

As a technology partner to the 2016 Olympics, GE machines working at the Rio Games flooded social media with tweets in binary code, a language software engineers couldnt ignore. Contained in these tweets was a global tech challenge that coders lost their minds over. 109,000 people from 138 countries engaged in campaign, elevating GEs cred with the tech crowd and more importantly, it put GE on their list as place to work.

Clemenger BBDO, Sydney

Dry July is a charity that asks Australians to raise funds for cancer clinics by taking a month off drinking. Thats a tall order when you consider how prevalent alcohol is in popular culture. Up to one in five pop songs contain alcohol references. So to get people talking about Dry July, and to make it a little easier for those raising money, we worked with Australias largest radio network, Austereo to make its music go dry for July. They edited their tracks, censoring alcohol references. This was amplified by live reads, promo spots, social media posts and discussed on-air by radio hosts.

TKT, Sydney
| BY Ricki Green |

Former Facebook executive and highly experienced communications specialist, Ben Lightfoot (centre) has been appointed managing director, Ogilvy Brisbane, as the agency moves into its next phase of business growth.

With more than 20 years experience within marketing and communications, Lightfoot has worked with large multi-nationals, boutique independents and small start-ups around the world, and most recently within the APAC team at Facebook as head of large advertiser marketing.

Ogilvy Australia CEO David Fox said appointing Lightfoot, with his broad experience across technology, creative and management, was part of a push to future-proof the agency and continue its focus on innovation and digital integration.

Says Fox: Bens background with Facebook is ideally placed to take Ogilvy Brisbane into its next phase of growth, and matches the focus other Ogilvy offices have had in relation to digital, strategy, media and creative.

Hes also one of few within our industry to hold senior roles in both creative and management across brand, retail, direct and digital. Having someone of his calibre and broad experience makes him the ideal candidate to take our Queensland presence to the next level.

Lightfoot replaces Russ Vine, who has led the Ogilvy Brisbane business for the past 18 months, following the merger of local shop JuniorCru with Ogilvy Australia.

Fox said following the 18 months of integrating the Brisbane office into the broader Ogilvy family, Vine was keen to move on and find his next challenge and would be handing the reins over to Lightfoot to foster further growth, effective immediately.

Says Fox: Russ has been a committed leader and we wish him all the very best for the future. He leaves Ogilvy Brisbane in good shape and firmly integrated into the broader Ogilvy Australia structure and we thank him for his commitment.

To be successful in business you must move with change; now is the right time for expansion to ensure Ogilvy meets the changing requirements of the Brisbane market and under Bens new leadership we are excited about what the future holds for the team.

Internationally awarded for both strategy and creativity, Lightfoot brings broad international experience to the role. For the past seven years he has been based in Asia where he was CEO of McCann Worldgroup Singapore, and Group CEO of Publicis Advertising and Saatchi & Saatchi Indonesia, before joining Facebook.

He has also been championing the message of effectiveness as chairman and head of jury for Singapore, APAC & Global Effies since 2010.

Says Lightfoot of the new role: Im incredibly excited to be joining Ogilvy Brisbane as well as the wider Ogilvy Australia team. Right from the beginning of our discussions I have been really impressed with the way that Foxy and the Australian leadership team are challenging business structure, culture, best practice as well as embedding technology into the way they partner with their clients to address the needs of the business.

With the strong relationships already in place with Queensland Government as well as the new partnerships that are forming through recent wins, Im looking forward to bringing the experience of my last few years to build on what is already a very strong team.

Lightfoot starts at the Brisbane office immediately, reporting to David Fox.
Monday, May 15, 2017 at 10:08AM

Photo by Evan Blass



By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Lenovo is apparently bringing back its former flagship Moto X line along with the entry level Moto E line which were discontinued some years back. Now under the ownership of Lenovo, who seems to be ceding its own handsets to focus on Moto phones, we now have quite a range of upcoming Moto phones.

While these devices are likely going to different regions and being made available in various capacities. There's now more range than ever and, as a result, more confusion.

Aside from the Moto Z line and Moto G line that Canadians are familiar with. Lenovo is bringing back Moto X, Moto E as a value brand and Moto C, which is the entry-level line in certain markets. Visually, the slide provided by leaker Evan Blass, shows a familiar vein in terms of design across the lines with obvious differences (Moto Mods are only for Moto Z Play and Moto Z Force), battery life is augmented in the value segment and screen size options are available as you go up the chain.

What's clearly gone is any mention of Moto Mods, or any deep customization which Moto phones under Google were particularly famous for. Instead, there's a choice of materials pertinent to different lines and price points. We'll stay tuned to see which of these variants make it to Canada.

Source: Evan Blass Twitter
But lawyers for one of the men said he didn't have any links to outlaw motorcycle groups and was "in the wrong place at the wrong time" after his co-accused allegedly sparked a police stand-off that lasted four hours on Saturday.
Millennial Moms Review: 2022 Acura MDX is pretty close to the perfect family car

I dont know if perfect is attainable, especially considering weve got the world of options when it comes to modern vehicles. Were spoiled and, as such, we have very specific needs and wants. Driving-wise, the 2022 Acura MDX is one of my favourite ...
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.

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Nissan is seriously considering of offering the -virtually unknown outside Japan- extended-range hybrid system overseas, bringing the heat to established players, just as it does to its home market.



When the company launched the e-Power powertrain option for the Note hatchback (known as the Versa Note in the U.S.) in November in Japan, no one expected it to be such a sales hit.

The addition of the hybrid option propelled the Note to the top of Japans sales chart in January, beating along the Toyota Prius, which is considered to be the golden standard of Japanese hybrids.

It is a technology that clearly can fit outside Japan in all the key markets, said Daniele Schillaci, Nissans executive vice president in charge of global marketing and sales to AutoNews. We are thinking about moving forward faster on electrification, not only in pure EVs, but also in this e-Power technology.

Nissans system works in a similar way with that in the Chevrolet Volt. A 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol engine acts as an electricity generator that charges a lithium-ion battery pack, which in turn feeds an electric motor powering the wheels.

Unlike the Volt though, Nissans e-Power system cannot be charged with a plug. Nissans e-Power system keeps the petrol engine working continuously at its sweet spot, instead of revving up and down.

The Nissan Note e-Power returns 32.7km/lt (77mpg in our money), which is just shy of the Prius Plug-In Hybrids 87.5mpg, when measured by the same (Japan) standard.

There are no details about when Nissan is going to introduce the technology on overseas markets, but expect to hear more about it in the coming months.

PHOTO GALLERY
Chinese car manufacturer Great Wall is planning to build a factory in either Mexico or the United States, with the uncertain policy environment remaining a key factor for the location of it.



The news were confirmed by the companys boss Wei Jianjun on Friday to Reuters, who added that the significant shifts in U.S. policy are having a large impact on their plans for the new factory.

Great Wall, which claims to be Chinas largest SUV and pickup car maker, has already looked at three possible states in Mexico and two stated in the United States.

Our plans to go to the American market havent changed, he told reporters in Shanghai. First we want to see how things work and then make a decision.

U.S. President Trump applied pressure to some car makers in order to keep jobs in the United States, forcing them to scale back or even slash their plans to build factories in Mexico.

Another Great Wall executive previously said that the choice between building a factory in Mexico or in the United States is also depending on trade issues between the U.S., Mexico and China.

Great Wall is also planning to build a factory in Russia as well as the company aims to sell 100,000 cars globally overseas by 2020, up from 20,000 to 30,000 cars now.

Note: Haval HB03 Hybrid Pictured

PHOTO GALLERY
Karma Automotive has officially launched the Revero nearly five years after its predecessor, the Fisker Karma, went out of production.



During a special Delivery Day celebration, nearly 800 employees gathered to watch the first Revero cars being loaded onto trucks at the Moreno Valley production facility in California. The trucks are headed to Karma dealers across the country and the first Revero models should be in showrooms later this week.

In a statement marking the event, Karma Chief Revenue Officer Jim Taylor said Karma has moved from a product development company to an automotive manufacturer. He added the company has completed the critical steps to become a true luxury vehicle OEM and stated the launch is great accomplishment for Karma and its team members.

As a refresher, the Karma Revero is a plug-in hybrid which features a 21.4 kWh lithium-ion battery and electric motors that develop 403 hp (408 PS) and 981 ft-lb (1,330 Nm) of torque. This enables the rear-wheel drive sedan to accelerate from 0-60 mph in as little as 5.4 seconds before hitting an electronically-limited top speed of 125 mph (200 km/h). The car can travel up to 50 miles on electricity alone and up to 300 miles overall.

Photo Gallery
Mitsubishi has long since fallen off our radar among the most noteworthy Japanese automakers. But with Nissans patronage, its bound for resurgence. And the turnaround couldnt come on a more auspicious occasion.



While the parent company has been around a lot longer, the unit known today as Mitsubishi Motors (founded as the Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company) will mark its 100th anniversary this year. So to mark the occasion, designer Gabor Farkas has cooked up this rather slick design.

Weve featured some of Farkas past designs on this site before, and theyve all focused on the same brand. But this latest project takes things in a rather more forward-looking direction.

Called the Hyaku concept (from the Japanese for 100), the design study envisions a futuristic, self-driving electric coupe. Farkas has adopted the traditional Japanese aesthetic approach of Shibui, with clean, minimalistic lines unadorned by any extraneous elements. So while the LED strips and chrome details suggest Mitsubishis signature grille design, it doesnt actually need one.

The pillarless windows open unobstructedly, the sensors are hidden, and theres no extra aero appendages tacked on like you might find on, say, a Lancer Evo  which is likely to remain our favorite of Mitsubishis products for the foreseeable future.

The design also takes advantage of its compact electric powertrain components to allow for ample luggage space under the front hood while giving the vehicle a dynamic silhouette reminiscent of a classic grand tourer  or, in the designers words, a high-speed Shinkansen train.

All this in a form closer in size to a Nissan GT-R than a 370Z, for comparisons sake. And who knows, with the expertise of the Renault-Nissan Alliance in electric vehicles to bring to bear, it may not be that far off.

Photo Gallery
Upon seeing this picture of a previous-gen Chevrolet Impala split right in the middle with half the car tossed some 20 feet away onto the embankment, youd be forgiven to think that there is no way anyone made it out alive from this crash.



Fortunately, youd be wrong, as miraculously, there were no fatalities, only injuries, though wed probably have to attribute that to the fact that there were no passengers inside the Impala.

Tom Bond, a former U.S. Air Force ambulance driver who filmed the chilling video at the scene of the accident that occurred Saturday morning in California, told the Press Democrat it was the craziest thing Ive ever seen, and Ive seen many accidents.

According to California Highway Patrol (CHP) logs, Apol Lansang, 26, was driving her Chevrolet south on Highway 101 when she was hit by a northbound Toyota Sequoia driven by Kevin Fenty, 27, who drifted into the opposite lane of the road. While the incident is still under investigation, police told reporters that drugs are believed to have played a role.

The crash split the Chevy Impala into two, sending the passenger half of the car onto the hillside. While it was Lansangs car that was sliced, Fenty was the one who was ejected from his car  a sign that he may have not been wearing his seat belt.

The CHP said that both drivers were taken to the hospital, with Lansang suffering only minor injuries and Fenty with moderate. but non-life threatening, injuries.

Video and Screenshots via Tom Bond/Youtube

Warning  some readers may find the images in the following video disturbing

Video

Photo Gallery
Chinese automaker Techrules will display its first production electric supercar at the 2017 Concorso dEleganza at the Villa dEste.



This exclusive event takes place on the shores of Lake Como in Italy, from Friday 26th May to Sunday 28th May.

Following a very encouraging response to its debut at the Geneva Motor Show in March, the the 2017 Concorso dEleganza at the Villa dEste is an ideal event for our supercars next outing. This prestigious event reflects the exclusivity of Ren, with its unique design set to make it one of the stars of the show, said Techrules founder & CEO, William Jin.

This is the first of a number of exclusive events we hope to visit with the car over the coming year to showcase the first application of our revolutionary TREV technology which is nearing series production readiness.

At its peak, the Ren delivers a maximum power output of 1,305 PS (1,287 HP / 960 kW), while boasting a range of 1,170 km (727 miles) from 80 liters of diesel fuel (NEDC). Its also got a whopping 2,340 Nm (1,725 lb-ft) of torque, allowing it to accelerate to 100 km/h (62 mph) in just 2.5 seconds, before maxing out at 320 km/h (199 mph).

Thanks to its three-cockpit layout and dramatic design, the Ren will likely be one of the most striking vehicles on display at Villa dEste.

We created a design that reflects Rens stunning performance and innovation with a dramatic and distinctive fighter jet-style canopy and unique modular three-cockpit design. Futuristic elements such as the front laser headlights and star-burst reversing LEDs add to the visual appeal, with the finest materials used inside to assure the highest levels of luxury, said the cars designer, Fabrizio Giugiaro.

We are incredibly proud to have designed this supercar and look forward to sharing its unique characteristics to guests at the Concorso dEleganza at the end of the month.

While Techrules TREV technology will initially be integrated into the Ren, the engineering team is also currently developing variants of the technology for installation into conventional passenger and commercial vehicles.

PHOTO GALLERY
The role of Blender

Blender is of course an extremely popular tool, but its not always considered a go-to tool for Hollywood-level productions. This Operation Barbershop short is aimed at proving the software is capable of handling feature-quality work.

Blender has been ready for Hollywood-quality for years, Roosendaal told Cartoon Brew. As we all know, it mostly depends on the creative powers you can unleash on it. Put really good people together and you are ready to go. The recent news about Barnstorm VFX using Blender for The Man in the High Castle is a good example for that. Its a carefully crafted marketing delusion to think that proprietary tools like Maya will turn you into a great artist.

On the other hand, added Roosendaal, our work on Blender is never done. We know its strengths and its weaknesses. The massive Blender 2.8 Workflow project is meant to solve quite some of these, especially by upgrading the viewport to render realtime PBR (physically based rendering), and allowing you to configure Blender to match individual workflows better  including better integration of Blender in a mixed production pipeline.

In a post on the Blender Cloud site in April 2016 announcing the project, Roosendaal also set out the intentions of the animation test. From a (technical) Blender point of view, this work will give us nice new challenges. Well have to bring cartoony but convincing characters alive, made in a style somewhere inside the triangle Big Hero 6, How to Train Your Dragon and Despicable Me. We will use Blenrig extensively, the new dependency graph, OpenSubdiv, the new widgets, (a bit of) cloth sim, and we will align with the recode of mesh display and modifiers, to make it ready for the first generation of everything nodes.

Road to a feature

Before any production took place in Blender, Roosendaal first looked for a suitable theme or story to adapt to a feature film. He figured the Agent 327 series, already hugely popular in Holland, would appeal to international audiences. But he was also aware that launching into a feature project would require significant story development and funding. So, to begin with, the Agent 327 project was imagined simply as a test. This would be funded directly via the Institutes income from its Blender Cloud service.

Thats what we know how to do best, said Roosendaal of the decision to do a test. We also want to research and explore how to handle this comic and how to bring it to the screen as an animation movie.

Animation director Hjalti Hjalmarsson pitched an idea for the comical fight scene in Operation Barbershop. Initial storyboards were supplemented with others from storyboard artist Matias Mendiola who used Blenders Grease Pencil 2d animation. Pixar alumnus Colin Levy also came on board as co-director with Hjalmarsson. Most of the production was handled out of Blenders studio in Amsterdam, with remote contributions in the areas of storyboarding, rigging, sound, and grading.

Animating Agent 327

Artists completed Operation Barbershop inside Blender, with some work done in digital painting software Krita and other tools. To help speed up production, Blenders software team worked to optimize rendering of motion blur in Cycles (Blenders rendering engine) and to deliver efficient cloth simulation times.

Meanwhile, said Roosendaal, two people in the studio worked on our shot and task management software [named Attract], and on a very sophisticated render manager. These work entirely in Blender Cloud, which is perfect for remote work and collaboration. These features will become available for Cloud subscribers in the coming months. And of course, the software is on blender.orgs Git server for everyone.

Roosendaal says the animation test is just the beginning. The team has signed with an unnamed Hollywood agent for representation and is talking right now to investors, sales agencies, and possible co-production partners. We expect that the Operation Barbershop release will help us get connected even better, and we look forward to discuss agreements to further develop and produce the movie, Roosendaal said.

You can follow the progress of the Agent 327 project at www.agent327.com.
As the federal government moves towards legalizing marijuana, Health Canada continues to licence facilities to produce, and distribute cannabis for medical purposes.

One of those licences could soon be in the hands of a Kelowna businessman and entrepreneur

Inspectors from Health Canada were at a proposed West Kelowna production facility two weeks ago, and, if all goes well, Trent Kitsch could be licensed to sell medical marijuana by the summer.

Kitsch has been waiting for this opportunity for four years. He's spent several million dollars getting his facility up to Health Canada standards.

"Patience and persistence and little bit of naivety thrown in there too," said Kitsch of the four year wait.

"But, we really believe in Canada's future and are really excited to be part of Heath Canada's production, and reaching a lot of satisfied patients."

If licensed, he'll be able to both produce medical marijuana and sell it through the mail, to clients with a legally obtained medical marijuana card.

If the Kitsch name is familiar, it should be. He developed the SAXX underwear brand, and currently runs a successful construction company and winery.

He doesn't believe being in the cannabis business will harm his business reputation.

"I'm part of the open-minded set, and I believe cannabis has had a bad reputation for a lot of years, and I'm really part of the cannabis future. I believe the positive benefits of healing far outweigh the negative benefits.

"It's a matter of time before people become more educated as access increased. As stigma goes down, consumption is going to go up. We also believe in making very high-quality products, so I'm really attracted to the industry because of the opportunity to make great products and create a great lifestyle brand."

Kitsch also sees an opportunity as both a producer and seller for the recreational market once that becomes legal in 14 months.

"Our understanding is the federal government wants to ensure Canadians are healthy and safe, so it's possible in the future recreational market, licensed producers will be relied upon to produce cannabis for both medicinal and recreational markets," said Kitsch.

"I think the future of storefronts is going to be a big part of the cannabis distribution model. And as the provincial government and municipal governments put their say into distribution, we're going to become a big part of that we hope. Our dream is to have a number of stores."

But, the number one goal: a safe, quality product. Something he says may not always be the case now.

"The cannabis people currently consume from the streets or from dispensaries is often supplied from the gray or black market and is not quality assured. It hasn't been tested by a second party. Any Heath Canada cannabis is tested by a second party, so patients can be assured they are smoking something that won't be harmful to them."

He says he will have to have two batches come back clean from quality assured tests before he is able to sell to clients.

"I believe we are going to have a very high quality product that is not as mass produced. More hand-crafted, more high quality."

The company, DOJA has announced a go-public transaction and a $3-million equity raise to expand their future production capacity. It is focused on building a grass-roots shareholder base and is opening the investment up to accredited investors.

Those interested in investing or acquiring more information can contact the company by email at [email protected] or visit the website at www.dojamj.com.
Photo: lifehack.org

Do you know where your mind is?

We've all heard the question on the late-night TV: Do you know where your child is?

After making sure we do know, we should make up a sticker for our mirror, the fridge and our computer, asking ourselves where our mind is.

Not us, our mind.

Even the most frazzled of us know where we are, although we often wonder how we got there.

We've all started our car and parked it 15 minutes later without any recollection of what happened in between.

We don't remember stopping at red lights  or running the yellow ones  turning corners or crossing the bridge. Fortunately, our subconscious mind is more focused than our so-called conscious mind. It keeps us alive when we're gallivanting into the past or the future and a few dimensions in between.

Our mindlessness starts before we get dressed. While we're in the shower, before we lather up, our mind is running down metaphorical rabbit trails, imagining our own version of Alice in Wonderland.

Before we know it, we've kissed the kids and our spouse goodbye and before we stick the key into the ignition, we're off on another mind trip.

We have to ask ourselves why we go through life on auto-pilot, why it is only pain, disaster, emergencies and being cut off in traffic that yank us back into the now, where the present and our lives intersect.

So where is our mind?

Is it doing what it should or has it been usurped by the voice in our head? Has it taken over our lives, like a program taking over the computer? From deep within in its mechanical entrails a message shoots out, what am I, and the answer comes back, you're a computer, an iMac.

There's a problem if the answer comes back you're Microsoft Windows  Mac version  and the computer accepts it.

Many of us never ask Who am I and some who do are content with the lies, that we're"

not good enough

not smart enough

not worthy enough.

Instead of having the courage to be everything we should be, we believe the programming that was installed when we were little.

But our parents, our friends and our society were merely passing along their conditioning, just as our parents passed along our grandparents' chromosomes.

We can't do anything about our genes, but we can change our conditioning.

We can fight the misconceptions and half-truths we were force fed. We can go beyond the woulds, shoulds and coulds.

We are not who we were, we are who we choose to become.

We have to keep choosing at every moment. It isn't enough to say we will quit; we have to make that choice every time a nicotine fit or chocolate craving hijacks our wishful thinking.

Then we have to make it again after exhaling that final puff or licking the crumbs off our lips.

Practice might not make perfect, but it makes us better than we were. Every loss makes victory certain; every defeat increases knowledge and resolve.

We must, however, remember that our body is constantly eavesdropping on our mind, turning thought into our reality. If we have the sniffles on Monday, and think we'll have a sore throat on Tuesday, followed by a chest cold on Wednesday and a runny nose Thursday, and the flu on Friday, we'll be calling in sick.

Every word that shuffles through the cerebral cortex is a seed and the mind is as fertile as an Okanagan orchard  what's planted bears fruit, or thistles and thorns.

While our image was created, is created, by our conditioning, it's re-inforced by that voice in our head, the judge  whether it is our mother, our priest or third-grade teacher.

What reflects back from the external world depends on whether they told us we were smart or stupid, ugly duckling or black swan  and whether we believed them.

It determines how we deal with a spouse who yells at us because we don't make enough money or forgot to get milk or our boss telling us we are incompetent. If we believed, and still believe, we're not likely to harvest positive self-esteem.

But it's not to late to be what we could have been.

We can cut the conditioning that anchors us to our self-imposed limitations, and disembowel the past. We don't need it. We only need the now, the present, real life, as opposed to the imaginary one in our head.

We deal with now rather than what might have been or what might be and not whether we have the right haircut, whether Joe will like us or whether our children will get good grades or dent the new car.

That's what causes the mounting stress in our lives: being here, but wanting to be there, preferring this, but getting that.

Our thoughts sweep us along like a river in spring, pulling everything into the stream.

Occasionally, we can grasp a branch or a rock before we are washed back into the maelstrom of white foam. Sometimes, we flow along, complacent, almost blissful, sometimes we are battered by boiling currents, but we are always at the mercy of the river.

Every river has its rapids and water falls. One day, it's the Penticton channel, the next, Niagara.

Life is as it is. Our challenge, our choice, is to accept that  or not.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
Photo: The Canadian Press As the torch is passed to the provinces, many say they're facing difficulties meeting a July 2018 deadline.

Provinces have been protesting the large volume of work and heavy costs they say the Trudeau government has piled on them in its rush to legalize recreational cannabis across Canada by next year.

So far, however, the small province of New Brunswick has been taking the high road.

Unlike other members of the federation, New Brunswick isn't pressing for federal compensation to cover the bills of pot legalization, nor is it in a particular scramble to draw up the plans, the province's health minister said.

Provinces have been busy since the federal government tabled legislation last month to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana use, with a primary aim of keeping weed out of the hands of youth and criminals. Ottawa hopes to make it happen by July 2018.

"We didn't just wait for the federal legislation and then start  we started doing our homework and our due diligence well before, anticipating what the federal legislation was going to look like," New Brunswick Health Minister Victor Boudreau said in an interview.

"There's no question if the federal government is willing to help with some of the up-front costs  I'm sure we wouldn't say no to that. But I'm not necessarily saying that would be necessary just yet, either."

New Brunswick's enthusiasm is connected to the fact the province views pot legalization as a future driver for its struggling economy.

Premier Brian Gallant has been trying to position New Brunswick to ensure it gets a big percentage of Canada's eventual regulated-pot industry, which he predicts will generate "significant" growth.

Some provinces, however, aren't expecting meaningful windfalls  if any at all  once startup costs are factored in. They've also expressed concern about what they see as a hurried course set by Ottawa toward legalization.

Quebec Public Health Minister Lucie Charlebois warns that meeting the federal timeline will be a challenge as provinces, territories and municipalities race to develop complex pot-related rules, programs and strategies within their own jurisdictions.

Setting guidelines related to the minimum legal age, retail sales, public health, education and security are among the wide range of needs.
Photo: Twitter The Walrus's editor-in-chief Jonathan Kay has reportedly resigned from his position amid a cultural appropriate controversy.

The editor-in-chief of a Canadian magazine has stepped down amid a contentious conversation about cultural appropriation in Canadian media and literature.

A representative from The Walrus says Jonathan Kay resigned on Saturday evening.

On Friday, Kay wrote an opinion piece in the National Post defending the right to debate cultural appropriation, when somebody takes an image or experience from a marginalized culture without permission, and claims it as their own.

His piece was in response to backlash faced by Hal Niedzviecki, who resigned as editor of Write magazine and apologized for his article in the Writers' Union of Canada publication, after drawing ire for appearing to endorse the unauthorized use of indigenous knowledge and traditions.

After Niedzviecki resigned, a number of prominent figures in Canadian media pledged money to an appropriation prize.

Kay wrote in his column that he believes in open debate about issues like cultural appropriation.

But about Niedzviecki's resignation, he wrote, "the careers of editors-in-chief are brief and unpredictable," and he said he suspected he would eventually go the same way.

"Perhaps all the sooner, thanks to this column," he wrote.

In an email, Kay wrote that his reasons for leaving the magazine were "somewhat mundane"  that his interests as an editor no longer aligned with the priorities of the organization that produces the magazine, the Walrus Foundation.

"In recent years, the great success of Walrus Talks, which tend to feature a very different kind of content, have left their mark on the organization's list of priorities," he said of the lecture series that focuses on Canada's role in the world.

"It was my job to either respect that changing landscape or leave. I elected to leave. That's my decision, and I don't blame anyone for forcing me into it."
Photo: Contributed Kamloops RCMP responded to a suspicious fire at 5 a.m. on Sunday.

Emergency crews are calling an early morning fire at a home in Kamloops on Sunday suspicious.

Kamloops RCMP responded to the residence in the 1300 block of Dunbar Road at around 5 a.m. on Sunday. The occupants had reportedly escaped without injury but the home was severely damaged.

Police and fire crews were on scene collecting evidence and investigating Sunday morning.

Police are asking the public to drive past the area with caution, with Kamloops Fire having fire and safety equipment in use on the scene.
Photo: WMUR

A New Hampshire man who was injured in a house explosion is thanking "Siri" for saving his life.

Christopher Beaucher says he was checking on his mother's vacant cottage in Wilmot on May 1 when he saw something suspicious and went inside.

He tells WMUR-TV when he switched on a light, the house exploded into flames.

Beaucher's face and hands were badly burned. He grabbed his cellphone, but was unable to dial due to his injuries. He says he somehow asked his IPhone's voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri to call 911, believing he was going into shock.

Beaucher is still undergoing treatment for his injuries, but says he hopes to return to his job as a cook and tend to his farm.

Authorities are still investigating the explosion.
Photo: The Canadian Press Federal appellate court judges in Seattle will hear the appeal of Hawaii's challenge to President Trump's travel ban today.

For the second time in a week, government lawyers will try to persuade a federal appeals court to reinstate President Donald Trump's revised travel ban  and once again, they can expect plenty of questions Monday about whether the ban was designed to discriminate against Muslims.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled arguments in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judge's decision putting the ban on ice. They peppered Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall with questions about whether they could consider Trump's campaign statements calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., with one judge asking if there was anything other than "wilful blindness" that would prevent them from doing so.

Monday's arguments mark the second time Trump's efforts to restrict immigration from certain Muslim-majority nations have reached the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.

After Trump issued his initial travel ban on a Friday in late January, bringing chaos and protests to airports around the country, a Seattle judge blocked its enforcement nationwide  a decision that was unanimously upheld by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel.

The president then rewrote his executive order, rather than appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in March, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu blocked the new version from taking effect, citing what he called "significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus" in Trump's campaign statements.

"Again, in this court, the President claims a nearly limitless power to make immigration policy that is all but immune from judicial review," Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin wrote to the 9th Circuit. "Again, he must be checked."
Photo: The Canadian Press RCMP officers march in this 2012 file photo.

Bullying and harassment continue to be serious problems within the RCMP, and only significant changes to the way the national police force is run will make a difference, says a national watchdog.

In a report today, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP says the force lacks both the will and the capacity to address the challenges that afflict its workplaces.

The commission wants the federal government to bring in civilian governance or oversight for the paramilitary-style police force.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale ordered the commission report to see if the RCMP had properly acted on commission recommendations made in 2013. At the time, the watchdog said the Mounties must take fast and effective action to reassure both members and the public.

The RCMP introduced new harassment policies and processes in 2014 aimed at promptly dealing with workplace conflict before it escalates.

The latest report, however, says most complaints under the new policies involve allegations that managers abused their authority. These included accusations of abusive language, such as "you're dirt," "people here don't like you" and "nobody wants to work with you."

Others complained of being berated in public, punitive transfers or having leave arbitrarily denied.

"Organizational dysfunction in the RCMP has been well documented, and the commission's current investigation confirmed that the problems of workplace bullying and harassment persist," the report says.

In addition, they place "inappropriate emphasis" on the responsibility of the complainant to confront his or her harasser, and on the duty of supervisors and managers to report harassment, the report says.

 with files from CTV Vancouver
Photo: The Canadian Press Testing for the presence of illicit fentanyl.

A pilot project to test street drugs for fentanyl at the Vancouver safe injection centre Insite has found that about 80 per cent were laced with the potentially deadly opioid.

Testing of more than 1,000 drug samples over a nine-month period found more than 80 per cent of the heroin and crystal meth brought in by clients and about 40 per cent of the cocaine contained illicit fentanyl.

Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, medical health officer at Vancouver Coastal Health, says the drug checks resulted in clients reducing their dose and decreasing their risk of overdose.

Lysyshyn was to present the findings today at the 25th Harm Reduction International Conference in Montreal.

He says more testing of street drugs could save lives and help alleviate the public health emergency in Canada around opioid consumption and overdose.

Fentanyl is 100 times more toxic than morphine and a dose the size of a grain or two of sand can result in a fatal overdose. In British Columbia, more than 900 people died of apparent illicit drug overdoses in 2016, with about 60 per cent of the deaths linked to fentanyl.

"This study proves that the alarm bells that have been sounding over this public health emergency are fully warranted," said Rick Lines, executive director of Harm Reduction International.

"Street drugs are costing lives and this research confirms what we've long known  that supervised injection sites and drug checking can prevent unnecessary deaths."
Photo: City of Vernon

As if water from the heavens was not causing enough problems, now water from under the ground has washed out part of a Vernon road.

An broken irrigation water main washed away part of the shoulder of Old Kamloops Road near Haney Road.

The main failed early Sunday morning and caused earth to slide onto the road. Single-lane alternating traffic is in place until repairs are complete, anticipated to be 4 p.m. this afternoon, said Tanya Laing Gahr, with the city of Vernon.
Photo: Twitter

Longueuil police say they've arrested a man after 12,000 litres of liquid manure was sprayed outside the office of Quebec's professional farmers' union.

A 66-year-old man from Henryville, south of Montreal, was arrested and taken to hospital for an evaluation.

Police say he could face a mischief charge.

According to police, a tractor pulling a tank of the semi-liquid manure sprayed the substance in the parking lot of the Union des Producteurs Agricoles office in Longueuil about 6:30 a.m. Monday.

Patrice Juneau, a spokesman for the union, says the suspect is a dairy farmer who is facing financial difficulties and they don't wish to file a complaint against him.

Police say the exact motivation for the suspect's alleged actions remains unclear.

While cleaning off the product gives off a strong and nauseating odour, police say there is no danger to people living nearby.
A pair of cowboy celebrities have thrown their support behind saving the Kin Race Track.

The Okanagan Equestrian Society is raising money to pay for the legal defence for their coming court case with the City of Vernon and North Okanagan Regional District this summer to protect the historic track from being torn down.

The society would also like to restore the facility to its former status as a functional horse racing and equestrian riding facility.

The track has been the centre of debate for years and last year, it was decided to take the matter to court.

And now two Canadian celebrities have given a shout out to the society and the track.

Shaun Johnston and Amber Marshall who play Jack and Amy on CBC's hit television show Heartland, posted a video in support of the facility.

We want to give a shout out to those fighting to save the Kin Race Track, said Marshall in the video.

Johnston points out the Kin Race Track is the oldest standing race track in Canada. But recently it's fallen on some tough times.

The couple urge people to support the society in its legal quest to have the track remain an equestrian facility.

The city and equestrian society head to court on July 24 to argue the case in a New Westminster court room.

The society has been holding fundraisers and will have a dinner and dance this weekend.
Photo: Contributed

Peachland residents are gathering forces to prevent logging in the community's watershed.

The Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance aims to enlist the support of council in denying three logging companies renewals on timber cutting in the Peachland and Trepanier watersheds.

This during what the group calls "the worst runoff and boil-water notices the town has ever experienced."

How long should Peachlanders be expected to tolerate the dirty water advisory? the group asks in a press release.

While licenses to log are issued by the province, local councils have authority over watersheds, the group contends.

Peachland Council is currently reviewing Forestry Stewardship Plan Referrals from Tolko, Gorman Brothers and Westbank First Nation.

The group claims "poor forestry management" and "vast clear cutting" forced it to take action.

A walk and talk is planned on May 18 to see the impact of logging road-construction along Munroe Forestry Road and the effects of a mudslide on the community reservoir.

Organized group outings are also planned, including guided walks, hikes, mountain bike and dirt bike excursions, ATV and horseback rides to tour the watershed.

A community information meeting will be held June 6 at the 50+ Centre, 5672 Beach Ave., from 7 to 8 p.m. to raise awareness.

While we cant beat Mother Nature, we can certainly stop human intrusions which aggravate or ruin our environment, said chairman Joe Klein.

For more information, the group can be reached at [email protected] or 250-767-6456.
Photo: FWCP

Bird lovers' feathers are aflutter over a baby owl webcam recently set up near Langley.

There are estimated to be fewer than 20 northern spotted owls left in the wild in Canada, but now anyone with an internet connection can watch the breeding pair and their new chick.

The Fish & Wildlife Compensation Program and Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Program are hosting the owl cam at fwcp.ca.

This web camera will showcase Canadas most endangered owl as a breeding pair nest and raise this chick in May and June, said spokesperson Karen McKeogh. The camera is situated right over the nest  a hollowed out stump  giving us some great images. And this is the first time we have broadcast images of a nest, so we are excited to share what we see with others.

The breeding program started in 2007 with a goal to restore the wild population to over 200 adult owls by releasing up to 20 juveniles per year over the next 10 to 15 years.

The FWCP is a partnership between BC Hydro, the province of B.C., Fisheries and Oceans Canada, First Nations and public stakeholders to conserve and enhance fish and wildlife impacted by BC Hydro dams.

The first of the owls is expected to be released into the Bridge-Seton watershed near Lillooet in 2018.

The peak times for seeing activity on the nest is between 8 and 11 a.m., and 6 and 10 p.m., when the birds are fed.
Photo: Amazing Creatures

Lawn watering restrictions are now in effect across Metro Vancouver despite a soggy spring.

The regional district says the restrictions are aimed at conserving drinking water during the driest part of the year and will remain in effect until Oct. 15.

Residential lawn watering is permitted three days per week, with even-numbered addresses watering on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m., and odd-numbered addresses watering Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday over the same five-hour period.

Lawn watering is the first stage of what could be escalating restrictions under Metro Vancouver's plan to deal with possible water shortages.

The plan was reviewed after a severe drought in 2015, and a release from the regional district says proposed changes are currently being considered for the spring of 2018.

City of North Vancouver Mayor and Metro Vancouver Utilities Committee chairman Darrell Mussatto says a wetter-than-average spring is not an excuse to waste water and that early watering restrictions are a way to conserve the resource.

"These regulations are in place to help residents develop long-term habits for drier years," he says.

Lawn watering outside the designated periods is regulated separately by each of Metro Vancouver's 24 local authorities, but violators in Vancouver could face fines of up to $250.
Photo: The Canadian Press Innu leaders are fighting to keep kids as young as 11 from sniffing gas.

Fifteen years after the Innu of Davis Inlet were moved to a fresh start in nearby Natuashish, leaders are once again fighting to keep kids as young as 11 from sniffing gas.

"They're doing it right on the street," said Simeon Tshakapesh, deputy grand chief of the Innu Nation in Labrador.

He took a late-night walk three days after a fire May 8 at an abandoned house known for gas-sniffing injured two boys who, according to police, were 11 and 17.

The younger victim was flown to Toronto for treatment while the other was sent to hospital in St. John's, Tshakapesh said. RCMP described both their injuries as serious.

Tshakapesh wanted to see for himself what he calls a "solvent abuse epidemic" in the remote coastal community of 1,000 residents.

He figures about 20 people  some adults, several teenagers and some kids as young as 11  are getting high on gasoline in plastic bags.

The fire conjured old headlines back in 1993. Video recordings of kids at Davis Inlet sniffing gas and yelling that they wanted to die made international news. Media reports beamed images of decrepit housing without running water.

Almost a decade later, the federal government helped relocate residents to new homes in nearby Natuashish.

Tshakapesh said alcohol continues to flow in the officially "dry" community. He also described a range of street drugs from pot to cocaine.

Similar problems plague other small towns and big cities across Canada, he added.

The Mushuau Innu people who lived off the land for thousands of years are still struggling with white ways forced on them over the last century, the deputy chief said.

"We're stuck in two worlds," he said from Natuashish. "We have TVs, satellites, cellphones, the Internet, Facebook.

"The Mushuau Innu came out of the bush not even 50 years ago. We were a nomadic people."

About 60 people, including leaders and residents, met for four hours Friday to discuss solutions, Tshakapesh said. They include plans for more night patrols, prevention programs, summer camp and maybe a small theatre space or teen recreation centre where bored kids can gather.
UPDATE 3:03 P.M.

Police are still searching for the suspect in a Monday morning stabbing in Vernon.

At 10:57 a.m., RCMP received a report of a male had been stabbed at the Sundance Apartments in the 2900 block of 43rd Avenue.

The male, 45 years old, was transported to hospital and is currently in serious condition. RCMP officers combed the area at the time of the call, in addition to calling in a police service dog to assist with a search of the suspect, said Cpl. Dan Moskaluk.

The search for the suspect was unsuccessful, investigators with the Vernon North Okanagan RCMP General Investigation Section will remain on scene in the coming days and are continuing their investigation.

Moskaluk said police believe it was a targeted attack.

Anyone with information regarding this incident are asked to call the Vernon North Okanagan RCMP Detachment at 250-545-7171 or via Crimestoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

RCMP descended on a Vernon apartment complex in force Monday morning.

Police at the scene are refusing to comment on why there is such a large police presence at the Sundance Apartments on 43rd Avenue.

Several police cars and officers were seen at the low-income housing units.

While unconfirmed, Castanet was told there was a stabbing in one of the units.

The condition of the victim is not known at this time.

Castanet will have more information as soon as it becomes available.

Send your photos, video or comments to [email protected].
Photo: The Canadian Press Malcolm Uttley places sandbags along the canal at Tween Lakes Resort in Oyama.

Receding levels in some B.C. waterways mean the flood threat has been downgraded for parts of the Southern Interior and northwestern B.C.

The River Forecast Centre says flood watches are now down to high streamflow advisories for the Nicola River near Merritt and for the Salmon River in the Shuswap.

High streamflow advisories have also ended for the Kettle River in the Boundary region and the Bulkley River and its feeders around Houston, Telkwa and Smithers in Northwestern B.C.

But, in the northeastern part of the province, a flood warning remains in place for the Beatton River, and flood watches are still in effect for the Moberly, Halfway and parts of the Peace rivers, although Environment Canada forecasts an end to showers by Wednesday.

Near Kelowna, attention is shifting to the level of Okanagan Lake, which the Central Okanagan Regional District says is sitting just 35 centimetres below the flood mark, with much of the heavy snowpack still unmelted.
Photo: Contributed

High water levels have closed all boat launches at the north end of Kalamalka Lake.

Lakeside residents area at a risk of flooding due to the high water levels.

Boaters, wakeboarders and personal watercraft users can help minimize the risk by ensuring they are reducing speed near shore so as to prevent waves from damaging property, said the District of Coldstream in a release.

Anyone operating a power-driven boat in B.C. must adhere to a speed limit of 10 km-per hour within 30 metres of shore.

The District said they thank the public for their understanding.
Photo: Twitter

RCMP say a woman has died after being attacked by a large group of stray dogs in a remote Manitoba First Nation.

The Mounties say the 24-year-old woman was attacked while on her way home early Saturday morning in Little Grand Rapids.

Her body was found at a construction site hours later in the community 300 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.

A forensic investigation determined she died from the animal attack and her death is not suspicious.

RCMP are not naming the woman but several media reports identify her as Donnelly Rose Eaglestick.

Dozens of people from the First Nation gathered Sunday night at a candlelight vigil to remember the young mother.
Photo: CTV

Police in a suburb of Victoria shot and killed a cougar when it came near a school Sunday night.

The cougar was spotted about 9 p.m. by a mother walking with her children in Esquimalt.

It was seen again only 200 metres from Rockheights Middle School.

Conservation officers say relocating the animal wasnt an option.

The cougar was killed with a single shot, said police, who called it a sad, but necessary duty.

 with files from CTV Vancouver Island
Photo: The Canadian Press

A date has been set for a verdict in the trial of two British Columbia men accused of polygamy.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge in Cranbrook will issue her ruling July 24 in the trial of Winston Blackmore and James Oler, who are both associated with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Both men were at one time leaders of separate breakaway Mormon sects in the isolated community of Bountiful in southeastern B.C.

The mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is based in Utah, officially renounced polygamy in the late 19th century and disputes the fundamentalist group's connection to Mormonism.

Blackmore is accused of having two dozen wives, while Oler is alleged to have married five women.

Blair Suffredine, Blackmore's lawyer, says he will apply for a stay of the decision because of its reliance on evidence that was gathered while there was confusion around the legality of Canada's polygamy laws.

RCMP first began investigating allegations Bountiful residents were practising plural or "celestial" marriage in the early 1990s.
Photo: The Canadian Press U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer

Donald Trump will go down as one of the great presidents in American history, says his new trade czar.

Those remarks predicting historic greatness for Trump come from Robert Lighthizer.

He was sworn in today as the new United States trade representative.

A long congressional delay that held up his nomination ended last week, setting the stage for the launch of NAFTA negotiations.

Now that Lighthizer is in place, he can work with Congress to set negotiating priorities before the U.S., Canada and Mexico start trade talks later this year.

Lighthizer says Trump is bound for greatness because he will reverse dangerous, long-term trends in trade that have hurt American workers.
Photo: CTV

An orphaned cougar cub found on the streets of Courtenay has died at the Greater Vancouver Zoo.

Conservation officers tranquilized the cub last month after it was spotted wandering downtown in the Vancouver Island community.

It was transferred to the Aldergrove zoo for possible permanent placement.

But, her health rapidly declined late last week and ultimately saw her passing early Friday morning, the zoo said. Initial examination revealed long-standing accumulation of fluid in the chest as the probable cause, however final necropsy results are pending.

 with filers from CTV Vancouver Island
Christy Clark visits Dan Ashton, February in Penticton

The dust has yet to settle on the BC Liberal's stunning victory and leader Christy Clark's personal defeat and already there is speculation as to where Clark may land in order to win her way into the legislature.

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon Clark would say only that she hoped to win a seat in the legislature prior to the next sitting, likely in the fall.

After losing out to BC NDP candidate David Eby in her riding of Vancouver-Point Grey Tuesday Clark must decide whether to step aside as leader or ask an elected Liberal member to step aside, allowing her to run in a by-election.

Penticton Mayor, Dan Ashton, left the door open for Clark to airlift herself into that riding if she chooses.

Ashton did so when he took the unusual step of asking that his unpaid leave of absence from the city's highest office be extended.

He originally asked for the leave just before the election writ was dropped April 16.

Asking to have the leave of absence extended instead of resigning his seat is an unusual move - but one that would allow Ashton to keep his options open and return to the mayor's chair if indeed if he is asked to step aside for the good of the party.

For his part, Ashton says he did not ask for the extension to leave the door open for the premier, but rather because the original leave of absence ended today.

Ashton did say however he is fully prepared to work for the province, the party and the premier in any capacity asked of him.

In a similar situation in 2005, then Kelowna Councillor, Al Horning, resigned his council seat the day after he was elected to the legislature.
Prints from Calif., Mexico and the heart of Texas to spark dialog and show how art and prints compare favorably next to work from the greater region. Runs through 6/2.

Free Event

Night of the Arts at South Broadway features prints, movie and live music

Prints by Southwest of exhibit through June 2

ALBUQUERQUE, NM - Visitors to the South Broadway Cultural Center will soon have the opportunity to discover what contemporary artists from the southwest are thinking when the exhibition Prints By Southwest opens during Night of the Arts on Thursday, April 20. An artist reception that night will be from 5-8 p.m.

Prints By Southwest revisits last year's traveling exhibition, Desert Triangle Print Carpeta, which featured work from print makers from Tucson, Ariz. and El Paso, Texas. By including print makers from Albuquerque, the exhibition completes a dusty Bermuda Triangle - a zone of lost love - where a desert artist's best efforts often fall into oblivion.

In this sequel, the art agitator/collector reaches deeper into the cactus lands to bring in quality prints from California, Mexico and the Heart of Texas to spark dialog and show how their art and prints compare favorably next to work from the greater region. Prints By Southwest is a collection of etchings, serigraphs and relief prints inspired by (but not confined to) Mexican-American art, and the figurative tradition of the Taller de Grafica Popular of Mexico. The bulk of the prints were first shown in the Postre Prints exhibition, at Purple Gallery in downtown El Paso earlier this year. Prints travel easily. This exhibit aims to encourage others to create new print shows, which could travel throughout the region in pop-ups, coffee shops and museums, and to provoke artists to develop new themes and styles in order to push southwestern art into the 21st century.

Also that night will be live music in the John Lewis Theatre. Son of Hweeldi will bring their rich sounds of rock, soul, blues and a touch of world beat. Son Of Hweeldi, formerly known as Saving Damsels, was recently nominated for three New Mexico Music Awards. In 2013, Son of Hweeldi won Best Rock Album from the Native American Music Awards.

Following the music will be a screening of the movie Pollock. Pollock is a 2000 biographical film which tells the life story of American painter Jackson Pollock. It stars Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Jennifer Connelly, Robert Knott, Bud Cort, Molly Regan and Sada Thompson, and was directed by Harris.

Harden won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for portraying Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife. Harris received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his portrayal of Pollock. The film was a long-term personal project for Harris based on his previous reading of Pollock's biography. Night of the Arts is free. More information about South Broadway Cultural Center can be found at www.cabq.gov/sbcc.
Bimodal atomic force microscopy provides three-dimensional force vector maps with subatomic resolution. The cantilever is simultaneously oscillated laterally and vertically to determine the vector mapping over the buckled dimers on the Ge(001) surface.

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an extremely sensitive technique that allows us to image materials and/or characterize their physical properties on the atomic scale by sensing the force above material surfaces using a precisely controlled tip. However, conventional AFM only provides the surface normal component of the force (the Z direction) and ignores the components parallel to the surface (the X and Y directions). To fully characterize materials used in nanoscale devices, it is necessary to obtain information about parameters with directionality, such as electronic, magnetic, and elastic properties, in more than just the Z direction. That is, it is desirable to measure these parameters in the X and Y directions parallel to the surface of a material as well. Measuring the distribution of such material parameters on the atomic scale will increase our understanding of chemical composition and reactions, surface morphology, molecular manipulation, and nanomachine operation.

A research group at Osaka University has recently developed an AFM-based approach called "bimodal AFM" to obtain information about material surfaces in the X, Y, and Z directions (that is, in three dimensions) on the subatomic scale. The researchers measured the total force between an AFM tip and material surface in the X, Y, and Z directions using a germanium (Ge) surface as a substrate. Their collaborative partner, the Institute of Physics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, contributed computer simulations of the tip-surface interactions.

"A clean Ge(001) surface has alternately aligned anisotropic dimers, which are rotated by 90 across the step, meaning they show a two-domain structure," explains first author Yoshitaka Naitoh. "We probed the force fields from each domain in the vertical direction by oscillating the AFM tip at the flexural resonance frequency and in the parallel direction by oscillating it at the torsional one."

The team first expressed the force components as vectors, providing the vector distribution above the surface at the subatomic scale. The computer simulation supported the experimental results and shed light on the nature of chemical tip termination and morphology and, in particular, helped to clarify the outstanding questions regarding the tip-surface distances in the experiment.

"We measured the magnitude and direction of the force between the AFM tip and Ge surface on a subatomic scale in three dimensions," says Naitoh. "Such measurements will aid understanding of the structure and chemical reactions of functionalized surfaces."

The developed bimodal AFM approach will allow researchers to investigate the physical properties of materials in greater detail on the nanoscale, which should facilitate development of devices, nanotechnology, and friction/lubrication systems.
A new process called fiber nanoimprinting is accelerating the fabrication of nano-optical devices, such as this pyramid-shaped Campanile probe imprinted on an optical fiber (captured in a scanning electron microscope image). The gold layer is added after imprinting. The gap at the top is 70 nanometers wide.

Combining speed with incredible precision, a team of researchers has developed a way to print a nanoscale imaging probe onto the tip of a glass fiber as thin as a human hair, accelerating the production of the promising new device from several per month to several per day.

The high-throughput fabrication technique opens the door for the widespread adoption of this and other nano-optical structures, which squeeze and manipulate light in ways that are unachievable by conventional optics. Nano-optics have the potential to be used for imaging, sensing, and spectroscopy, and could help scientists improve solar cells, design better drugs, and make faster semiconductors. A big obstacle to the technology's commercial use, however, is its time-consuming production process.

The new fabrication method, called fiber nanoimprinting, could unplug this bottleneck. It was developed by scientists at the Molecular Foundry, located at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in partnership with scientists from Hayward, California-based aBeam Technologies.

Their work builds on the Campanile probe, which was developed by Molecular Foundry scientists four years ago. Its tapered, four-sided shape resembles the top of the Campanile clock tower on UC Berkeley's campus. The probe is mounted at the end of an optical fiber, and focuses an intense beam of light onto a much smaller spot than is possible with current optics. This enables spectroscopic imaging at a resolution 100 times greater than conventional spectroscopy, which only maps the average chemical composition of a material.

In contrast, the Campanile probe can image the molecule-by-molecule makeup of nanoparticles and other materials. Scientists can use it to examine a nanowire for minute defects, for example, leading to new ways to improve nanowires for use in more efficient solar cells.

But fabricating Campanile probes has been part science and part art. The same applies to other nano-optical devices, such as microscopic lenses and beam splitters, which split one light beam into several. These devices require milling a 3-D shape with sub-100-nanometer scale features on the tip of a wispy fiber, which is much trickier than fabricating a nanostructure on a flat surface such as a wafer.

"When we first made the Campanile probe, we sculpted it with an ion beam like Michelangelo. It took about a month," says Stefano Cabrini, director of the Nanofabrication Facility at the Molecular Foundry. "That pace is OK for research applications, but the lack of a mass-fabrication method has inhibited the wider use of nano-optical devices."

That's where fiber nanoimprinting come in. Its first step is the most time consuming: Scientists create a mold with the precise dimensions of the nano-optical device they want to print. For the Campanile probe, this means a mold of the probe's nanoscale features, including the four sides and the light-emitting 70-nanometer-wide gap at the pyramid's top.

"This mold can take a few weeks to make, but we only need one, and then we can start printing," explains Keiko Munechika of aBeam Technologies, which partnered with the Molecular Foundry to develop the fabrication process as part of the Department of Energy's Small Business Technology Transfer program. Several other aBeam Technologies scientists contributed to this work, including Alexander Koshelev. The company is now commercializing various fiber-based nano-optical devices (see additional information).

After the mold is created, it's off to the races. The mold is filled with a special resin and then positioned atop an optical fiber. Infrared light is sent through the fiber, which enables the scientists to measure the exact alignment of the mold in relation to the fiber. If everything checks out, UV light is sent through the fiber, which hardens the resin. A final metallization step coats the sides of the probe with gold layers. The result is a quickly printed -- not meticulously sculpted--Campanile probe.

"We can do this over and over and make a probe every few minutes," says Munechika.

There are several advantages to the faster production pace. Campanile probes are fragile, and now it's possible to give researchers a batch in case one breaks. Plus it's easier to optimize nano-optical devices if scientists are able to provide feedback on a device's performance, and an improved batch is quickly developed for further testing. The fabrication technique can also be applied to any nano-optical device, and has so far been used to create Fresnel lenses and beam splitters in addition to the Campanile probe.

"Instead of sculpting a one-of-a-kind device like Michelangelo, we now take the original masterpiece, make an imprint of it, and create many replicas in quick succession," says Cabrini. "It's a new capability the Molecular Foundry can provide to the science community."
What's it really like to work at Chicago startups and tech companies? Blue Sky's Inside Job lets people on the ground tell us in their own words.

Erika Linares, 24, Annual Medical Review Coordinator at Emmi Solutions

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We make online educational content for patients to help them better their health care. More specifically, the content helps patients prepare for procedures or helps them manage any chronic conditions.

The programs are written at a fourth-grade reading level. We have artwork in it, it's animated, they can watch it on their iPhone, tablet, laptop. It's super accessible, in different languages.

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Let's use colonoscopy. You'll watch it, and be like, "I know what to expect before, during and after my colonoscopy." Things people have questions and call the doctor about, our program will tell you. We try to alleviate the patients' fears. And for the doctors in their clinical settings, if they get less phone calls, they can be more productive with other things.

We have over 300 programs in our library. My job is to make sure these programs stay up to date. Let's just say for hysterectomy, something changes. So basically I send it to the doctor, the doctor watches it, and I say, "Hey, give me your feedback. What do you think of the program? How does it look? How's the art? Is it medically accurate?"

They will come back to me  sometimes we'll talk on the phone just to discuss if there are any changes that need to be made  and I log all that feedback into our system and then work with our editorial team to go over all of that feedback. We'll discuss it and say, "Oh, I think this is pretty important. I think we should update the program."

The meeting rooms here (in the Loop offices) are named after something health-related. This one here is called Radiology; you can see inside. This is the Morgue; it's for IT. There's the Emergency Department. The Police Box is where we record all our programs, and it's soundproof. I've had to record a few things in Spanish, like voice responses for hospitals.

Emmi used to stand for Expectation Management and Medical Information. But we don't use that anymore. In the company, we have about 175 people. I fall under production, which is about 40 people, and it's artists, writers, and then me and Kelly Hawthorne. She manages what I do, and she manages the medical adviser program.

I have the White Sox schedule at my desk because I need to know when games are because I live on the South Side, in Bridgeport. (She also has an article in her cubicle about Chance the Rapper.) I didn't go to Jones (College Prep)  I went to Lincoln Park High School  but I was good friends with Chance in high school. We used to all freestyle in high school  I did it just to be funny  and it was like, "Chance, take over, it's fine." I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so we kind of parted ways, but whenever I do see him, definitely, it's like "What's up?"

I studied community health at U of I. And I got my master's in health communication online. I graduated in 2013, and I saw a post, from my boss now, on LinkedIn that (Emmi) was looking for client services associates.

She responded, "Oh, it was an old post. I'll still send over your resume, though." I was bummed, but sure enough, I got a phone call or an email a couple of weeks later, saying, "Oh, we want to bring you in for an interview." It was a three-round interview. It was so scary. It was my first interview out of school, and I had to give a presentation.

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I started in January 2014, and I was in that (client services associate) position for a year. I helped patients who were calling and confused. It was email, chat and phone.

Coming to work for the first time in corporate America, I was very nervous. I'm coming to a place that's predominantly white, but seeing other women of color here, and the fact that my boss is a woman of color, and we like the same music  she loves Chance  and we like the same shows, you know, it makes me feel I can be myself, especially with my own boss.

The company as a whole, we're definitely like a family, but not a creepy family. We have happy hours on a weekly basis, we have beer on tap, and it's easy to get to know everyone by face. Each department has an outing once a year. Last year, we went to the racetrack in Arlington Heights. We had open bar, we were betting on horses.

It's really relaxed here, super chill. It's just really easy to talk to people and not feel like your voice isn't heard. I just came back from vacation, and I felt missed. Everyone cares about each other. It just feels very inclusive and like home.

As told to freelance reporter Erin Chan Ding. Stories are edited for length and clarity.

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Insurer Harken Health is closing its doors in Illinois and Georgia, ending an experiment to combine health insurance and care. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Insurer Harken Health is closing its doors in Illinois and Georgia, ending an experiment to combine health insurance and care.

The insurer, which operates five health clinics in Chicago, Skokie and Des Plaines, began selling plans in Illinois and Georgia in 2015. A subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, Harkenoffered its members unlimited free doctor visits at its health centers, which also offer wellness programs, such as acupuncture, yoga and meditation.

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Harken will continue to cover individual members and ensure they have access to care through the end of the year, the company said Monday. Harken will continue to serve members covered under its employer group plans through the end of their contracts.

Harken already had cut back on its presence in Illinois and Georgia following financial troubles. Last year, Harken lost nearly $64 million, and received infusions of $120 million from parent company UnitedHealthcare, according to a regulatory filing.

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Harken had about 26,000 members in Illinois at the end of last year, before it stopped offering plans on the Obamacare exchange. It continued selling plans outside the exchange this year to individuals in Illinois and Georgia as well as to employers.

Over the past year, a number of insurers exited Illinois' Obamacare exchange, including Aetna and its Coventry brand, UnitedHealthcare and Land of Lincoln.

About three-quarters of Harken's business was in Illinois at the end of last year. A Harken spokesman did not immediately respond Monday to a request for more details about current membership numbers.

Attempts to reach UnitedHealth Group for comment were not immediately successful Monday afternoon.

lschencker@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @lschencker
Mortgage servicer Ocwan Financial has been ordered by the state of Illinois to stop making loans, which the company calls a "vast overreach." (Kent Weakley / Sun Sentinel)

One of the nation's largest mortgage servicers is on the counterattack following a crackdown by regulators in Illinois and other states.

After the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation last month ordered Ocwen Financial to stop making new home loans or negotiating new loan-serving agreements with lenders in the state, the Florida-based company sued the agency, accusing it of a "vast overreach."

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Ocwen, which says a sudden shutdown of its operations could hurt hundreds of Illinois consumers on the verge of buying homes, won a breather April 28 when Illinois' cease-and-desist order and its move to put the company's licenses on probation were halted by a Cook County judge, pending the completion of a state administrative proceeding.

"The (cease-and-desist) order is not in effect and unlikely to be in effect anytime soon, so Illinois borrowers can feel comfortable that their loans will close," Ocwen spokesman John Lovallo said. "We've continued to fund all loans in Illinois that were in the pipeline at the time of the filing in order to ensure that no borrowers were harmed."

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In its April 25 lawsuit, the company cites specific loans in the pipeline that ranged in size from $185,000 to $368,000 in suburbs such as St. Charles, Oak Lawn, Franklin Park and Manhattan.

Illinois' effort against Ocwen mirrors steps taken by nearly two dozen states. In Illinois, the company last year serviced 56,512 home loans, meaning it processed mortgage payments for borrowers. Ocwen services about 1.3 million mortgages nationwide.

Illinois regulators said consumer complaints against Ocwen included inaccurate records, lost loan modifications, problems with property insurance payments, taxes being paid on the wrong parcels, and consumer debts wrongly reported to credit-reporting bureaus.

But Ocwen contends in its lawsuit that Illinois based its actions on activities in other states and on "vague and unsubstantiated" references to consumer complaints.

The company says the state's findings come from a 2015 examination by only six states  not including Illinois. Also, since then, Ocwen Loan Servicing has changed its business practices, modifications of which Illinois is aware, according to the lawsuit.

According to affidavits filed by Ocwen, Illinois hasn't examined the company's loan-servicing activities since 2012. And its Homeward Residential and Liberty Home Equity units, which are among the business units suing Illinois, received passing ratings from the state last year, the affidavits say.

A spokesman for the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation wouldn't comment on the specifics of the case, saying the agency is in discussions with Ocwen over its findings.

On April 20, the same day that Illinois and other states took action, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Ocwen. The agency alleges that rampant errors and runarounds  including ignoring customer complaints and wrongly initiating foreclosures on at least 1,000 people  cost some borrowers money and others their homes. The agency said Ocwen's missteps included botching the handling of escrow accounts, resulting in some borrowers paying wrong amounts. In 2013, Ocwen settled a similar case with the federal agency.

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Ocwen said in an April 21 news release that it "strongly disputes" allegations by the state agencies.

It says in its lawsuit against Illinois that the regulators' moves "are part of a concerted effort" to pressure Ocwen into "otherwise unsuccessful settlement efforts."

Ocwen Chief Executive Ronald Faris addressed the recent regulatory actions in a May 3 earnings call with analysts. He said that in addition to the federal effort, 31 states have actions pending against the company.

"We're attempting to work with all states, both individually and potentially as a group, to try to resolve their joint and individual concerns," Faris said. Ocwen hopes to reach an agreement soon with the regulators, but there are no guarantees that deals will be struck, he said.

"Where necessary, we have filed certain notices and legal actions to protect our interest and, frankly, to provide us more time to work together towards resolution," Faris said.

Besides Illinois, Ocwen also filed an emergency motion for a restraining order against Massachusetts. The orders by those two states required more immediate action, the company says.

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Ocwen has reached a tentative agreement with Massachusetts that allows the company to originate new loans in the state as long as it doesn't service them.

The troublesome news over the years has taken a toll on Ocwen's stock, which is trading at less than $3 a share, down from the $50 range it hit in 2013.

Kevin Barker, senior research analyst for Piper Jaffray, said Ocwen isn't the first company to fight back against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

"However, going after the states seems a little more aggressive than what we've seen from others," Barker said, noting that states could pull the company's license to do business.

byerak@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @beckyyerak
A shipment of 36 million pounds of soybeans sailed late last year from Ukraine to Turkey to California. Along the way, it underwent a remarkable transformation.

The cargo began as ordinary soybeans, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Like ordinary soybeans, they were fumigated with a pesticide. They were priced like ordinary soybeans, too.

But by the time the 600-foot cargo ship carrying them to Stockton, Calif., arrived in December, the soybeans had been labeled "organic," according to receipts, invoices and other shipping records. That switch - the addition of the "USDA Organic" designation - boosted their value by approximately $4 million, creating a windfall for at least one company in the supply chain.

After being contacted by The Post, the broker for the soybeans, Annapolis-based Global Natural, emailed a statement saying it may have been "provided with false certification documents" regarding some grain shipments from Eastern Europe. About 21 million pounds of the soybeans have already been distributed to customers.

The multimillion-dollar metamorphosis of the soybeans, as well as two other similar grain shipments in the past year examined by The Post, demonstrate weaknesses in the way that the United States ensures that what is sold as "USDA Organic" is really organic.

The three shipments, each involving millions of pounds of "organic" corn or soybeans, were large enough to constitute a meaningful proportion of the U.S. supply of those commodities. All three were presented as organic, despite evidence to the contrary. And all three hailed from Turkey, now one of the largest exporters of organic products to the United States, according Foreign Agricultural Service statistics.

Agriculture Department officials said that they are investigating fraudulent organic grain shipments. But it declined to identify any of the firms or shipments involved.

"We are continuing the investigation based on the evidence received," it said in a statement.

The imported corn and soybean shipments examined by The Post were largely destined to become animal feed and enter the supply chain for some of the largest organic food industries. Organic eggs, organic milk, organic chicken and organic beef are supposed to come from animals that consume organic feed, an added expense for farmers that contributes to the higher consumer prices on those items.

- - -

While most food sold as "USDA Organic" is grown in the United States, at least half of some organic commodities - corn, soybeans and coffee - come from overseas, from as many as 100 countries.

USDA officials say that their system for guarding against fraud is robust.

Under USDA rules, a company importing an organic product must verify that it has come from a supplier that has a "USDA Organic" certificate. It must keep receipts and invoices. But it need not trace the product back to the farm. Some importers, aware of the possibility of fraud, request extra documentation. But others do not.

Regardless of where organics come from, critics say, the system suffers from multiple weaknesses in enforcement: Farmers hire their own inspection companies; most inspections are announced days or weeks in advance and lack the element of surprise; and testing for pesticides is the exception rather than the rule.

These vulnerabilities are magnified with imported products, which often involve more middlemen, each of whom could profit by relabeling conventional goods as "organic." The temptation could be substantial, too: Products with a "USDA Organic" label routinely sell for twice the price of their conventional counterparts.

In recent years, even as the amount of organic corn and soybeans imported to the United States has more than tripled, the USDA has not issued any major sanctions for the import of fraudulent grain, U.S. farmers said.

"The U.S. market is the easiest for potentially fraudulent organic products to penetrate because the chances of getting caught here are not very high," said John Bobbe, executive director of the Organic Farmers' Agency for Relationship Marketing, or OFARM, a farmer cooperative. In Europe and Canada, he said, import rules for organics are much stricter.

Moreover, even when the USDA has responded to complaints of questionable imports, action has come too late to prevent the products from reaching consumers.

Four months after the soybeans arrived in California and after The Post began making calls about the shipment, county officials acting on behalf of the USDA showed up at the warehouse where the soybeans were being stored. The officials took samples to test for exposure to pesticides.

By that time, about 21 million pounds of the 36 million-pound shipment had already reached farms and mills. The customers who have purchased the soybeans said they were unaware there may have been a problem until a Post reporter called.

- - -

Gauging the extent of fraud in imported organics is difficult because there is little incentive for organic companies to advertise their suspicions about suppliers.

To test USDA claims that organic imports are rigorously monitored, The Post examined pesticide residue testing conducted on organic products in China.

China is the leading source of organic tea and ginger in the United States, and its food exports have drawn repeated scrutiny.

"In China, farmers have trouble following their own laws," said Chenglin Liu, a professor at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio. " So how can Americans expect Chinese farmers will follow U.S. organic rules?"

As in the United States, farmers in China seeking the "USDA Organic" label hire an inspection agency to certify that they meet the organic rules.

Using public-records laws, The Post obtained the results of pesticide residue tests conducted on farms with USDA organic certification in China. Although pesticide tests are not mandatory, inspection agencies are required to take samples from 5 percent of their clients, and The Post requested the results from the three most active inspection agencies overseeing Chinese farms.

The pesticide results showed very high levels of pesticide residue on some "organic" Chinese products. They also showed that the pesticide residue tests are applied unevenly.

One of the largest inspection agencies, a German company known as Ceres, appears to do rigorous testing.

Ceres conducts most of its tests on plant leaves, rather than on fruits, a method that can be more likely to detect pesticide use.

Their results from China, as a Ceres official said, were "quite shocking."

Of 232 samples that Ceres tested from the Chinese organic farms, 37 percent showed more than traces of pesticide residue.

"This is the reality we are battling with in China," said Albrecht Benzing of Ceres.

Some of the problem arises from pesticides from neighboring farms drifting over, experts said, and some is contamination from China's polluted soil and water.

For example, in Shandong province, the Laiwu Manhing Vegetables Fruits Corp. harvests ginger that has been grown organically. But the water available for washing the ginger is so polluted that it leaves pesticide residue.

"After the ginger is washed, the water leaves behind pesticide residues too high to be considered organic" in the United States, said Li Hongtao, a sales manager at the company. He said the ginger is sold as organic in some countries but not the United States or Europe.

The pesticide residue results that were obtained by The Post also indicate that enforcement of "USDA Organic" rules for pesticides are uneven and possibly arbitrary, with results depending on the inspection agency.

While Ceres found remarkably high levels of pesticide residue, others reported extremely low levels.

For example, Ecocert, a French inspection agency, reported pesticide residue on about 1 percent of 360 samples from China in 2015 - a level of cleanliness remarkable for any country, let alone China and its well-documented pollution.

This wide range of pesticide use detected by organic inspectors in China - nearly 40 percent at one company and 1 percent in another - suggests a variety of methods and standards at work. Ecocert said their results may be low because they chose samples from a large number of farms. Different firms may also use different thresholds for what constitutes a positive result. The next year, Ecocert said, its testing criteria changed slightly, and the percentage of samples with pesticide levels rose to 8 percent.

Critics say the disparity in results shows that certifying agencies can make any farm look organic.

"The certifying agencies can choose who and when they test," said Mischa Popoff, a former USDA organic inspector turned critic. "That's why the results they can get are completely arbitrary."

- - -

Each of the questionable organic shipments of corn and soybeans examined by The Post passed through Turkey, a country whose organic exports have provoked criticism from international authorities.

In 2013, for example, a report by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture found that half of European importers and Turkish handlers had detected pesticide residue on organic products from Turkey.

The United States has seen large spikes in the amount of organic corn and soybeans entering from Turkey, according to USDA statistics. Between 2014 and 2016, the amount of organic corn arriving from Turkey rose from 15,000 metric tons to more than 399,000 metric tons; the amount of organic soybeans coming from Turkey rose from 14,000 metric tons to 165,000. (The three shipments examined by The Post represent roughly 7 percent of annual organic corn imports and 4 percent of organic soybean imports.)

Such sudden jumps in organic food production draw scrutiny because the organic transition process is slow - it can take three years for conventional land to be converted into organic farmland.

"Where did all this big production come from? Where are these organic farmers?" Miles McEvoy, chief of the USDA's organic program, said to a group of U.S. organic farmers earlier this year.

The rise of imports has helped drop prices by more than 25 percent, hurting U.S. organic farmers, many of them small operations.

"My neighbor, small farm, lost $30,000 last year on 100 acres of organic corn," said OFARM's Bobbe. "In fact, there's so much coming in, we're finding buyers who won't take any corn."

- - -

To piece together the three questionable shipments, The Post was given records of the transactions by an industry expert who requested anonymity because they may conflict with the mandates of his employer. The documents included company invoices, shipping records and health certificates accompanying the shipments. Warehouse operators, importers, exporters and Ukrainian officials verified key documents and added details.

- The first of the shipments arrived at the port of Wilmington in Delaware a year ago. It consisted of 46 million pounds of "organic" corn.

The Romanian company that provided the corn is not a certified organic company, and receipts show that the corn was initially purchased at the conventional price, not the organic one.

The shipper is listed as Hakan Organics, a Dubai-based company with operations in Turkey.

Hakan Organics is listed as an organic handler in good standing with the USDA.

The first intended customer for the corn, Perdue Agribusiness, asked for additional paperwork and then refused to accept the shipment, because "we could not confirm all the proper documentation" that Perdue requires, a company spokesman said.

The Post could not determine who ended up purchasing the "organic" corn.

Since then, Perdue has not received any shipments from Hakan Organics, a Perdue spokesman said.

Hakan Organics continued to ship agricultural products to the United States.

Hakan Bahceci, the chief executive of Hakan, indicated by email that he would answer questions but then did not respond further.

- The second shipment, the soybeans from Ukraine and Turkey, arrived aboard the Four Diamond at the port of Stockton, Calif., in December 2016.

A set of health certificates that accompanied the soybeans allowed The Post to trace the soybeans from California back to Turkey and to their origin in Ukraine.

The health certificates and associated receipts indicate that they were not really organic. For one thing, the soybeans were fumigated with tablets of aluminum phosphide, a pesticide prohibited under organic regulations; some of the soybeans originated from ADM Ukraine, a company that does not produce or trade organic soybeans and did not sell or label them as such, a company spokeswoman said; and finally, the soybeans were originally priced at the level of conventional soybeans.

Invoices and other documents for those soybeans showed that they were originally priced at about $360 per ton. By the time they reached the United States, the price reached almost $600 per ton.

Global Natural, the Annapolis-based firm that was marketing the soybeans in the United States, said it has stopped selling "all potentially affected product." Company officials declined to answer further questions.

The importer of the soybeans is Agropex International.

Ashley Anderson, who is listed as the president of Agropex International, insisted that the soybeans that arrived in Stockton are legitimately organic.

- The third shipment involved 46 million pounds of "organic" corn that sailed from Romania to Turkey and then to Baltimore, arriving in March.

The Romanian producers of the corn, a company called Belor, is not a certified organic company and sold the corn at conventional prices, according to receipts. But by the time the corn from Romania reached the United States, it was labeled organic. Its price had risen 72 percent. As with the cargo aboard the Four Diamond, the value of the shipment increased by millions.

Dennis Minnaard of DFI Organics said his company had been set to buy some of the corn but rejected the shipment because the broker did not "take away our doubts" about its authenticity.

Yet that "organic" corn continued to be marketed to other customers, according to industry officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the private nature of the deals.

With "the complex supply chain of organic grain," Miles McEvoy, chief of the USDA's organic program, told concerned farmers at the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service conference earlier this year, "there are challenges."
The Illinois Condominium Property Act requires owners to provide various documents to prospective buyers who request them. A resale disclosure package, which includes items listed in the Condo Act, could run anywhere from $200 to $1,250 or more. (RubAn Hidalgo/Getty Images )

A condominium sale easily generates hundreds of pages of association documents, and each one costs money. Who pays varies, but buyers frequently get stuck with the bill.

"I've seen document fees run into four figures," says Sara Benson, principal managing broker at Benson Stanley Realty and president at Association Evaluation in Chicago.

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Section 22.1 of the Illinois Condominium Property Act requires owners to provide various documents and records to prospective buyers who request them. They include the governing documents and statements concerning reserve balances, litigation, insurance and anticipated capital expenditures.

The law allows associations to charge sellers a reasonable fee for out-of-pocket costs for providing the information. The Illinois Common Interest Community Association Act bears similar language.

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Buyers' attorneys and real estate agents often ask for additional documents like meeting minutes and budgets. Lenders have questionnaires that must be filled out before making a loan.

Some management companies handle document requests in-house, but many have turned to third-party providers. Nearly everyone has moved the process online. Typically, sellers, real estate agents, attorneys and lenders are referred to a website to choose the documents they want.

Payment is made at purchase but the amount is often added to the closing costs, Benson said.

Document requests have skyrocketed in recent years due to changes in the law and buyer demands for transparency, said Thomas Skweres, regional vice president at ACM Community Management in Downers Grove.

"It has become too burdensome to dump this on managers to do it all," he said. ACM uses a third-party provider. At Associa, a national property management company headquartered in Dallas, document requests go through its affiliate Community Archives.

"It's very user-friendly," said Lori Ritz, Community Archives closing administrator for Associa Chicagoland in Schaumburg. "There are options for what you can order all in one place and how quickly you want it back. You don't have to send an email or written request."

Normal turnaround is three to 10 days, but a four-hour rush is available, she said.

Prices vary widely from association to association. Package deals are usually more economical than ordering piecemeal. Rush fees and customized forms run extra.

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A resale disclosure package, which includes items listed in Section 22.1, could run anywhere from $200 to $1,250 or more. A lender questionnaire and paid-assessment letter might add a couple of hundred each.

"There's no cost to the association," Skweres said. "It's the individual homeowner who pays."

Benson, who recently was charged $700 for a paid-assessment letter, is outraged.

"How is it even legal for a for-profit management company to resell not-for-profit association documents that they do not even own?" she said. "The money is not going to the association. It's going to the management company or third-party provider."

In comparison, someone considering a stock purchase isn't charged for a prospectus, she added.

In Benson's view, providing documents should be included in the management contract.

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"Most associations have no idea their information is being sold," said association attorney David Hartwell of Penland & Hartwell in Chicago.

Management companies are entitled to fair and reasonable payment, said Hartwell, adding that he has seen some "exorbitant fees."

"The question is, 'What is reasonable?'" he said. "Many of these documents exist. No additional work needs to be done to them for any particular sale."

Two documents that do require extra effort are paid-assessment letters for foreclosures and lender questionnaires, he said.

Associations can take these steps to reduce the burden of document fees on buyers. For instance:

 Advise owners to save governing documents, budgets and other association information they receive, so they don't have to order additional copies.

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 Post governing documents and resale information on a password-protected website for all owners.

 Add the document fee schedule to your rules and regulations.

 Negotiate new management contracts to require disclosure of document fees. Or better yet, eliminate them.

pmckuen@aol.com







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Hackers have once again struck at Hollywood, this time claiming one of the summer's biggest blockbuster releases  Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales," the fifth installment in the highly profitable swashbuckling franchise, starring Johnny Depp.

The Walt Disney Co. chief executive Bob Iger told ABC employees in New York on Monday that hackers have claimed to have stolen a movie and would release it in segments until their demands, which include a pirate-like ransom paid with Bitcoin, are met.

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Iger didn't identify the movie and the Burbank-based Disney declined to comment. But a source with knowledge of the situation said the movie that was hacked was the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel.

"Pirates" is set to open nationwide on May 26. The last four installments in the franchise have been huge successes for Disney, collectively grossing nearly $3.73 billion worldwide.

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The theft comes a few weeks after hackers stole the latest season of Netflix's "Orange is the New Black." Hackers leaked episodes of the new season after Netflix refused to meet their demands.

News of the "Pirates" hack was reported by the Hollywood Reporter. The publication said that Disney is working with federal authorities to investigate the matter.

david.ng@latimes.com

@DavidNgLAT
Mary J. Blige attends the VH1 'Dear Mama' taping on May 6, 2017 in Los Angeles, Calif. (Rich Fury / Getty Images)

Mary J. Blige announced Monday she is coming to Chicago this summer as part of her "Strength of a Woman" tour.

Blige opens her summer tour of North America at the iconic Chicago Theater on July 30. Blige recently released her 13th sudio album, after which the tour is named, on April 28. The album debuted atop Billboard's R&B chart.

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Tickets go on sale Friday, May 19 at 10 a.m. For more information, visit www.maryjblige.com

cmueller@tronc.com

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Twitter @coreypmueller

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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)
Few things are as vexing in the theater as plays wherein the characters spend all their time on the phone. Unless you have some kind of exceptionally smart or distinctive metaphor for relationships conducted through the kind ministrations of Apple, or you really want to probe the utopian or dystopian effects of personal technology, the dramatic depiction of phone chatter or Facetime tends to result in a show where all of the energy gets sucked right into space. Or the floor.

That's pretty much what happens at Piven Theatre Workshop in the new play "Dance for Beginners," an autumnal romance between two lonely hearts of a certain age  one who lives in America, one in Australia. Hence the phones. For most of the 80 minutes of MT Cozzola's new play, gruff Jerry (Dev Kennedy) and determined Jenni (Laurie Larson) talk over the internet about their difficult lives, inching closer to a late-in-life union but never looking at each other.

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The director, Heather Bodie, does her best to mix things up: We see Jenni wearing earphones at one point; at another, Jerry clutches a little empty frame of plastic, so as to evoke the smartphone without the show needing a visible display. All of that would be fine if we were talking a setup of a few minutes here, but these conversations into thin air, alas, are the bulk of the show.

The title comes from the role this couple hopes that ballroom dancing will play in their relationship  they plan to meet in Blackpool, England, the resort town that long has been an international mecca for lovers of the foxtrot and the waltz. And thus we do see each of them trying to learn to dance  with a patient instructor named Dante (Dillon Kelleher). These scenes are better, since they have actual action and even a few steps to sweep across the floor of the venerable Piven stage.

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But for a show that purports to be about the transformative power of social dance, they sure are tentative in scope and execution. We don't see nearly enough of Dante demonstrating what he presumably can do, and Jerry and Jenni barely snip at a rug before we see them back on the phone. And the whole proceeding  conversation, dancing, the whole nine yards  moves grindingly slow. To put it bluntly, the show needs dancers.

Everyone's heart, clearly, is in the right place. There is warmth in the room and in the performances; I sensed people around me smiling and enjoying themselves. And in the dual quests that make up the action, there is occasional poignancy and an understanding of how this wonderful form of human endeavor can rehabilitate folks who thought they'd missed their chance at all kinds of things. I once watched people dance in the Blackpool Tower ballroom: the sight of couples of all ages, personalities and types swirling around the floor in a kind of gorgeous unison lives with me still.

Obviously, Evanston's venerable Piven can't show you that with this little low-budget play. But we can use our imaginations. If everyone gets off the phone.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

"Dance for Beginners" - 2 Stars

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When: Through June 11

Where: Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St., Evanston

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Tickets: $15-$35 at 847-866-8049 or www.piventheatre.org

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Watch the latest movie trailers.
"Saints for All Occasions," the new novel by J. Courtney Sullivan, is so unassuming that its artistry looks practically invisible. In fact, from the outside, nothing about this story seems noteworthy: Irish Catholics settle in Boston; they drink too much; they struggle with the church; they gather for a loved one's wake.

That sounds as fresh as a pint of last week's Guinness.

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Which makes this quiet masterpiece all the more impressive. In a simple style that never commits a flutter of extravagance, Sullivan draws us into the lives of the Raffertys, and in the rare miracle of fiction makes us care about them like they were our own family.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this novel is its elegant manipulation of time. In the present, the story takes place over just a few days - the period between when 50-year-old Patrick Rafferty loses control of his car and when he's laid out at his funeral.

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But within those hours, Sullivan spins the captivating history of his mother, Nora, reaching all the way back to a little Irish village in the late 1950s. This is a place where electricity is a luxury, and some girls are still subjected to arranged marriages. There we see nervous Nora preparing to leave everything and everyone she knows to join her fiance, Charlie, in the United States. "Charlie had said you could make yourself over in America, leave behind all that you didn't like," Sullivan writes. "Yet here she was, not yet to the front gate, and already it was clear that Nora was stuck with herself."

As Sullivan shows, though, Nora has no clear idea who she really is or what she'll be stuck with. Like any well-organized life, hers is one of carefully considered plans that will soon be shredded. She will never return to live in Ireland, despite her fiance's promise. She will not have the kinds of children she imagined. In this ingeniously plotted novel, Nora will be swept along a trajectory she can rarely perceive and only barely control.

And yet "Saints for All Occasions" is primarily the story of one woman's indefatigable efforts to control everything about those she loves - including, most notably, their pasts and their identities. As one of Nora's adult children notes, "His mother put no premium on the truth." Instead, her efforts are directed entirely at preserving her denials: Her eldest son does not have a drinking problem. Her daughter is not a lesbian. Her sister does not exist.

That final illusion is the spike around which the entire novel is wound. We know of Nora's sister, Theresa, from the first chapter - she's spent most of her life as a cloistered nun in Vermont. But how these two siblings fell out and what continues to bind them over the decades are the emotional mysteries that Sullivan tenderly explores. It's a story that draws us deep into the essential qualities of motherhood and the compensations of faith.

"This family has a way of forgetting what it doesn't want to know," Sullivan writes, and Nora depends desperately on that common predilection. "She wondered how much longer she could keep up the lie, even as she understood that she had committed herself to it for life." The most fascinating element of the story is watching a daring act of deception coalesce into the solid-seeming shape of history.

As Nora's family grows, the novel flows out into the varied lives of her children over decades of tumultuous life in and around Boston, where Sullivan herself grew up in an Irish Catholic family. Although the chapters are precisely knit together to maintain or expose old secrets, many of them are self-contained studies of character or social change. We watch neighborhoods shift with new waves of immigrants, and towns turn on themselves over school busing. We follow Nora's children as they alternately embrace or break away from her influence - settling in a Dorchester pub or grasping for WASPy urbanity that seems entirely alien to her.

Meanwhile, the convent in Vermont offers a parallel story in an entirely different register. If Nora's life is one of constant change and reaction, Theresa's is one of enforced stability and contemplation. And yet Sullivan proves to be just as deft and insightful about the complementary challenges that a monastic family faces. These alternating chapters about Theresa feel refreshingly anachronistic, thoroughly at odds with our modern-day requirement that religious characters in literary fiction suffer either madness or disillusionment. Without a breath of sentimentality, Sullivan dares to imagine the entwined trials and riches to be found in cloistered devotion.

Indeed, the ferocious discipline of these two sisters is matched only by the author's. Sullivan never tells too much; she never draws attention to her cleverness; she never succumbs to the temptation of offering us wisdom. She trusts, instead, on the holy power of a humane story told in one lucid sentence after another.

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I read parts of "Saints for All Occasions" to my wife over spring break, and for a week afterward, she kept asking, "What happened to Nora's sister? How did her son die? Was her daughter able to adopt a child?"

I don't blame her. To read this engrossing novel is to become invested in these "entirely resilient and impossibly fragile" people. They aren't really saints, of course, at least no more than the rest of us. But that's the point.

Saints for All Occasions

By J. Courtney Sullivan

Knopf. 335 pp. $26.95






Illa Doss, 55, lives in Chicagos Galewood neighborhood on the Northwest Side. She moved from the West Sides Austin neighborhood because of the fear of crime. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune)

Where you live  even down to the specific neighborhood  might have an impact on your blood pressure, a new study led by a Northwestern University researcher suggests.

The study authors looked at data from 2,280 African-Americans whose health has been tracked for decades and discovered what they called a "powerful effect": Those who moved out of highly segregated neighborhoods saw a drop in their blood pressure.

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The correlation between less segregated areas and lower blood pressure is likely related to less stress and better access to exercise, medical care and healthier food, researchers say.

The paper, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, is based on data from black participants in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study, or CARDIA, which was launched in the 1980s and ever since has tracked the health of several thousands participants in Chicago; Minneapolis; Oakland, Calif.; and Birmingham, Ala.

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Kiarri Kershaw, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern and lead author of the blood pressure study, decided to look at African-Americans who had moved and how that related to changes in their blood pressure. She found that blood pressure in those participants dropped 1 to 5 points. And, Kershaw said, those who remained in less segregated areas saw larger drops in blood pressure, between 3 and 5 points, than those who returned to highly segregated areas.

Kershaw said the data created an unusual opportunity because most research into how racial segregation affects health involves comparing groups of people in different neighborhoods, rather than being able to track individuals over time.

"Where you live influences where your kids go to school, so there's more opportunity for social and economic mobility, decreased exposure to violence and more economic investment back into the neighborhood," Kershaw said.

All that can add up to less stress and a healthier lifestyle overall, and, as a result, a lower blood pressure, which is a good indicator of risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Researchers used census data to determine how segregated a city or neighborhood was by taking the percentage of African-American residents and comparing it to the percentage of black residents in the greater metropolitan area.

Many of the study participants did not have high blood pressure to begin with, but even small decreases are beneficial, and blood pressure tends to increase as people age, Kershaw said.

"This is important for African-Americans because they do have a burden of higher (rates of) hypertension, and outcomes like heart failure, heart disease and stroke," she said.

Study participant Ronnie Porter wasn't thinking about blood pressure or his own health when he decided to move his family out of Chicago's Austin neighborhood on the West Side. But he did consider the safety of his two sons when he and his wife relocated to suburban Bellwood, later moving to Berkeley and then their current home in Westchester.

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"I just wanted a better environment for our kids," said Porter, now 57. "I was aware of things going on in the neighborhood. It's just that thinking as a parent of wanting the best for our children."

While Porter, a teacher, said he didn't experience anxiety before the move, he felt he was providing a better place to raise his family and eventually had another son and a daughter.

Another study subject, Illa Doss, 55, moved a few years into the study, from Austin to the Galewood neighborhood. She was 29 at the time and newly married. Her husband had his own home in Englewood but Doss, who was moving from her parents' home, said she wanted a better area to start a family than where either of them had grown up.

"They were not neighborhoods we thought were safe for our children," she said. "I wanted my children to go outside and not be fearful. We wanted them to walk to the corner store and be OK."

Kershaw said she hopes the research draws the attention of policymakers and fuels further development of programs that either seek to improve the quality of highly segregated areas in need or create opportunities for residents to move into other neighborhoods.

Thomas LaVeist, professor and chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at George Washington University, has also studied the relationship between racial segregation and health.

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"The issue is about neighborhood quality and the fact that segregated, predominantly black neighborhoods tend to be neighborhoods with fewer resources," he said.

Besides health resources and lower quality schools, these neighborhoods also tend to have fewer employment opportunities and suffer the stress of aggressive policing, all leading to higher stress, LaVeist said.

The findings of the new study, which LaVeist hadn't seen, aren't new, he said, but do provide another perspective on this area of research. He did point out that individuals in the study also, presumably, had the resources to move, which could be an indicator they had access to other tools and means to stay healthy.

Still, LaVeist said the findings support the same pattern that researchers have been seeing between segregation and health.

"It gives me additional confidence," he said.

kthayer@chicagotribune.com

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Twitter @knthayer
Lying in a hospital bed at Northwestern Memorial's Prentice Women's Hospital after giving birth in 2011, Erica Fleischer kept replaying what had just happened.

She had delivered her first child by cesarean section. Exhausted after 13 hours of labor, with the baby not yet descended, the Lakeview mom said she agreed to a C-section. But having encountered no major complications, she felt frustrated by the feeling that she might have been able to deliver vaginally.

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"All that was in my mind was, 'I don't want this to happen again next time,'" said Fleischer, 39.

A Consumer Reports study to be released Tuesday analyzed more than 1,300 U.S. hospitals and found that more than half had C-section rates above the national target of 23.9 percent set by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for low-risk births.

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Doctors are working to help decrease the rate of C-sections after the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) reported the procedure increased 60 percent from 1996 to 2011. Nationally, C-sections account for 32 percent of all births, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although ACOG has not designated a specific C-section rate each hospital should aim for, it suggests the national rate should be lower.

In Illinois, C-sections account for 27 percent of total births, according to 2015 data, the most recent available from the Illinois Department of Public Health. Overall the state's rate is lower than the national average, but Chicago doctors say they hope to bring the number of C-sections at their hospitals even lower. The World Health Organization suggests aiming for 10 to 15 percent.

To reduce the number of C-sections statewide, the Illinois Perinatal Quality Collaborative, a CDC-funded group working to improve women's and infants' health, is considering C-section reduction as its main target for 2018. The group is working with hospital and health officials to finalize the goal, which it hopes to announce at its annual meeting in November.

"This is something where we know we can see a measurable difference," said executive director and maternal-fetal medicine specialist Ann Borders.

Designating a target of fewer C-sections would mean the 100 hospitals in the Collaborative, including nearly all Chicago birthing centers, would use the same measures at the same time to scale back the surgery. Doctors from different hospitals could also compare their progress.

In January, ACOG issued new labor recommendations that might help lower cesarean rates. These build on guidelines issued in 2014, when ACOG and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine jointly expressed "significant concern" that C-sections are "overused."

In November, the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, launched a "Speak Up" campaign encouraging women to ask about C-section reasons and risks compared with vaginal delivery.

Chicago hospitals have been implementing many ACOG recommendations in recent years and noting results. Doctors at 10 Chicago area-hospitals said efforts include tracking the procedures among doctors and reconsidering how staffs manage labor.

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Hospitals and health experts recognize the need for C-sections if the baby or mother's life is at risk.

Erica Fleischer, left, co-leader of the International Cesarean Awareness Networks Chicago chapter, with her husband, Benjamin, and their two daughters, Nava, 6, center, and Rina, 2. (Alyssa Pointer/Chicago Tribune )

C-sections are performed for a wide variety of reasons, from stalled labor to pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening pregnancy complication, said Jeanne Mahoney, who leads an effort to scale back C-sections at the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM), a federally funded group promoting safe maternity care.

"When they're necessary, they're an important operation to have," Mahoney said. "But they are not without consequences."

C-sections, in general, carry more risk and have a longer recovery. Women are at risk for hemorrhages, for example. The surgeries can complicate future deliveries. Scars can rupture. Doctors also fear placenta accreta, a rare condition that can cause quick, fatal blood loss.

It is impossible to know whether an individual woman who had a cesarean birth could have otherwise safely and vaginally delivered, but health experts say implementing ACOG recommendations and rethinking labor can provide a better chance for patients to avoid a C-section.

"We have seen that even in the same hospital that we have great variability between providers as far as C-section rates," Mahoney said. "There's no blame here. It's really about doing the best thing for everybody."

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ACOG recommends vaginal delivery for its lower infection rates, fewer anesthetic complications and shorter hospital stays.

Reducing a common surgery is a complex challenge. Each patient is unique; each birth is dynamic. Not every hospital has the same staff or resources. Each serves a different patient population. For all these reasons, many doctors said pursuing fewer procedures must be balanced with trusting their judgment.

Susan Veazie's mother gave birth to her through C-section. Although Veazie didn't want one herself, she didn't fear the procedure, she said. Still, she hoped for a natural birth. But 20 hours after arriving at the hospital and with labor stalled, the River Forest mom requested a C-section. Throughout the process, she said it helped to feel involved in conversations and the final decision.

"I really felt supported," Veazie said. With her second child, born in April, she again hoped to deliver without surgery but had a scheduled C-section 11 days after her due date.

Three years ago, Rush University Medical Center maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Ramkrishna Mehendale took a hard look at hospital numbers. Digging through data for fiscal year 2014, he found that among low-risk patients, the C-section rate was 37 percent. He examined what preceded these surgeries. How long had the patient been laboring? Did some doctors perform C-sections more than others?

"We decided to focus really on the labor management because that could make the most difference," said Mehendale, the hospital's Patient Safety and Quality Improvement officer for Obstetrics.

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Now, doctors check a flowchart that lists centimeters dilated and hours pushed and tells them when they can consider a cesarean. It also directs doctors to first consider alternatives, like using forceps.

Streamlining these standards created a common baseline, Mehendale said. The hospital has since lowered the rate of C-sections among low-risk mothers to 24 percent.

Like Rush, other hospitals similarly track their progress in reducing C-sections.

Area hospitals including NorthShore Evanston Hospital, for example, monitor how often each physician performs C-sections, distributing an internal list by doctor within departments. Administrators hope letting physicians see how they match up with colleagues will encourage conversation.

Although using data helps, it has limits.

"I'm quite proud to say that we try not to provide unnecessary sections," said Dr. Dimitrios Mastrogiannis, director of obstetrics services in the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System. The hospital monitors C-section data, but specialists handle high-risk cases and complicated deliveries. So there's a limit, he said, to how low numbers can go while protecting patients.

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Presence Saint Joseph Hospital, where Health Department data show the highest percentage of 2015 total C-sections at 32 percent, regularly reviews procedures, according to regional chief medical officer Dr. Joel Spear. But he noted that the hospital treats complicated cases because of its Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, which offers specialized care for newborns.

Experts agree that scaling back cesareans is a difficult task. Safely reducing the procedure will require different approaches, ACOG noted.

Many hospitals are trying to target prevention at a woman's first birth.

"I think the big thing is to be patient with labor," said Dr. Whitney You, a maternal-fetal medicine doctor at Prentice Women's Hospital. "My job is to think in the long term."

In the last year, doctors delivered 12,000 babies at Prentice, the busiest birthing center in Chicago. Specialists also handle many high-risk cases. Northwestern was highlighted as one of the largest hospitals with a low C-section rate, at 17 percent of low-risk deliveries, by Consumer Reports.

To limit cesareans among low-risk, first-time moms, Northwestern does not permit cesareans for nonmedical reasons before 39 weeks. And like other hospitals in Chicago, it follows ACOG guidelines surrounding labor, which emphasize that time in labor alone should not be a reason for a C-section.

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ACOG does not specify an exact number of laboring hours before or after which a C-section should or should not happen  doctors say births are so individual that such a strict standard is impossible. But being more patient during labor, while monitoring a woman's risk factors and the baby's condition, is something experts agree on.

"The longer you wait, the more chances that the woman has of being able to push the baby out on her own," Mahoney said.

ACOG recommends incorporating doulas and midwives as a way to support women in labor and potentially avoid C-sections. Some hospitals employ midwives. A patient can also hire her own midwife or doula, someone trained to assist pregnant women. Because midwives do not operate, their instincts lean toward patience. When a labor is stalled, they might suggest a change in position to stave off surgery.

St. Anthony Hospital has the lowest percentage of total C-sections in the city at 14 percent.

"I think the biggest factor is our midwifery program," said Dr. Eden Takhsh, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology, and the hospital's chief quality officer.

Although treating a smaller population, it faced some similar challenges as bigger city hospitals. Straddling Lawndale and Little Village, patients tend to be low-income and high-risk, Takhsh said. The 14 midwives rotate, with a doctor always available in case of complications. The most complicated cases, about three to four patients a month, are sent to larger hospitals such as the University of Chicago.

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Erin Irwin, certified nurse midwife and director of midwifery services and Dr. Kenneth Nunes, obstetrician and chief of the Section of General Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago Medicine, discuss cesarean sections at Comer Childrens Hospital. (Kristen Norman/Chicago Tribune )

Midwives were key to the September opening of the University of Chicago Medicine's Family Birth Center in Comer Children's Hospital, said Dr. Kenneth Nunes, obstetrician and chief of General Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Previously, he said, the hospital built a reputation for treating high-risk cases, resulting in more interventions and C-sections. It also meant some patients avoided the hospital, he said, assuming a better chance elsewhere of vaginal delivery.

"Our priority was, how do we get people back to the University of Chicago to have good, normal laboring experiences?" he said.

In 2015 he hired certified nurse midwife Erin Irwin, who leads a team of five midwives. On a recent morning just after delivering a baby  without surgery, he noted  Nunes gave a tour of the new center, where all nine labor rooms were occupied.

Ideally, Nunes said, women meet their children in one of the rooms labeled "Natural Birth"  not on an operating table. The rooms have birthing tubs, which ACOG recommends for comfort during labor, and peanut balls, popular as a support to lie on or sit in a different position.

Some hospitals in Chicago allow women to try to labor after a previous cesarean. ACOG guidelines say some women who have had a cesarean may consider delivering vaginally, depending on risk factors such as incision type and number of previous deliveries.

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After her C-section, Fleischer connected with the International Cesarean Awareness Network and now co-leads its Chicago chapter. When she was pregnant with her second child, she switched to a medical practice that included midwives. She said she felt empowered by learning her options. Her midwife supported her through labor, she said, and this time, about 45 minutes after she was told to push, she delivered her daughter, now 2.

"She was on my chest right away," she said. "It was a really powerful experience."

Fleischer keeps a photo of when she met her first daughter, who is now 6. But she doesn't remember those few seconds after surgery. The memory remains hazed by drugs and her distress.

"This is just another day for my OB," she said. "But for me, this is how I became a mom."

abowen@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @byalisonbowen

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Adeer tick is seen under a microscope in the entomology lab at the University of Rhode Island in South Kingstown, R.I. (Victoria Arocho / Associated Press)

Scientists have a double-shot of bad news about ticks: There's a new, and potentially fatal, tick-borne illness called Powassan, and this summer looks like it might be one of the worst on record for an increase in the tick population.

"Tick-borne diseases are on the rise, and prevention should be on everyone's mind, particularly during the spring and summer, and early fall when ticks are most active," said Rebecca Eisen. She is a research biologist in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's division of vector-borne diseases.

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Laura Goodman, a senior research associate in population medicine and diagnostic sciences at Cornell University, concurred. "It's going to be a bad season," she said.

Approximately 75 cases of Powassan disease were reported in the United States over the past 10 years. Most cases have occurred in the Northeast and Great Lakes region, according to the CDC.

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Powassan is a virus that can be transmitted through a tick bite. Although rare, Powassan has been spreading, and more cases are likely this year, Goodman said.

Signs and symptoms of Powassan can include fever, headache, vomiting, weakness, confusion, seizures and memory loss. Long-term neurological damage also may occur, according to the CDC.

There's currently no specific treatment for the disease. People with severe Powassan often need to be hospitalized to receive respiratory support, intravenous fluids or medications to reduce swelling in the brain.

If inflammation of the brain (encephalitis) occurs, the fatality rate is approximately 10 percent, the CDC warns.

There's no vaccine to prevent Powassan. The best prevention is avoiding ticks.

And that may be harder to do this year, experts at Cornell University explained. Because of a milder winter in the Northeast, a dramatic increase in the tick population is expected in that region and possibly across the northern United States.

Eisen said that "the ability of ticks to survive and reproduce also is influenced by temperature and precipitation. Other factors include, but are not limited to, availability of hosts and suitable habitat, such as wooded or brushy vegetation."

Ticks that can transmit illnesses have expanded their geographic range and are now being found in places they weren't seen 20 years ago, she noted.

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Reforestation and increased deer populations are contributing to the expanding tick distribution, Eisen said.

Ticks carry not only bacterial diseases such as Lyme, but also viral illnesses like Powassan and parasitic diseases like babesiosis.

Since the late 1990s, the number of reported cases of Lyme disease in the United States has tripled, and the number of counties in the Northeast and upper Midwest that are considered high-risk for Lyme disease has increased by more than 300 percent, Eisen said.

In 2015, about 30,000 cases of Lyme disease were reported in Americans, but the number was likely much higher, according to the CDC.

To protect yourself from a tick-borne infection, the CDC recommends:

Learning which tick-borne diseases are common in your area.

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Avoiding places with thick vegetation, high grass and leaf litter.

Walking in the center of trails when hiking.

Using repellent that contains 20 percent or more DEET on exposed skin for protection that lasts several hours.

Using products that contain permethrin to treat clothing and gear  such as boots, pants, socks and tents  or wearing clothing pre-treated with permethrin.

Bathing or showering as soon as possible after potential exposure, to wash off ticks before they bite.

Removing all attached ticks as soon as possible.

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Treating dogs with products that kill and/or repel ticks.

Examining gear and pets. Ticks can ride into the home on clothing and pets, then attach to a person later, so carefully examine pets, coats and day packs.

Drying clothes in a dryer on high heat for 10 minutes to kill ticks on dry clothing after you come indoors. If the clothes are damp, additional time may be needed. If the clothes require washing first, hot water is recommended.

If the clothes can't be washed in hot water, tumble dry on low heat for 90 minutes or high heat for 60 minutes. The clothes should be warm and completely dry.

"It's especially important to take steps to protect yourself and your loved ones, including pets, from ticks during this season, as well as any time during the warmer months when you're outside," Eisen said.

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The tweet initially stumped Mary Ham. A traveler wanted to know if she could stow a spray-tan extender that resembled an alien blaster in her carry-on bag. The AskTSA specialist rifled through her mental file cabinet filled with agency rules and regulations, searching for an answer.

"I'm pretty sure this is fine," said the Transportation Security Administration employee of nearly 15 years, "but I want to be sure."

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She Googled the product and learned that it does not contain a battery, nor is it considered a power tool. She also consulted with her colleagues, including a former security officer who has assessed all manner of esoterica. After a minutes-long investigation, she nailed her answer: "Any tools longer than seven inches must be checked."

Ham tapped out a response, informing the passenger that she must pack the equipment in her checked baggage.

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Next question, comment or complaint, you're up.

In September 2015, the agency launched AskTSA, the social media-outreach program that upholds the tenet that there are no stupid questions. Through Twitter and Facebook Messenger, the 10-person team has assured passengers that, yes, they can board the plane with a vacuum, ostrich egg, "knife-nana" (a banana carved in the likeness of a cutting implement), Nana's metal knitting needles and bacon. That no, bricks, tent stakes and more than 3.4 ounces of sherbet or miso paste are not permitted as carry-ons. And that while the TSA does not ban the transport of marijuana, the feds do. The experts also assist distressed passengers who may have forgotten a valuable on the X-ray machine or experienced a touchy-feely pat-down.

"Travelers are on the go and don't have time to go online and submit a form or call us," said Jennifer Plozai, acting deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the TSA. "They need help in real time."

The TSA created the program to improve communication with travelers, 2.2 million of whom fly every day.

Its website covers the major screening and packing topics - for kicks, plug obscure objects into its What Can I Bring? tool - but people are still flummoxed. For proof, see the TSA's Instagram account of wacky items confiscated at checkpoints or harvested from AskTSA posts. (A buzzy aside: Bob Burns's TSA Instagram account earned fourth place in Rolling Stone's 100 Best Instagram Accounts in 2015. Put a ring - or collar - on that, No. 5 Beyonce and No. 14 Cats and Dogs of Instagram.)

"The airlines, airports and TSA all have to work together and improve the experience for the traveler," Plozai said. "We were not engaging with people."

Now they are chatting like old social media friends.

To date, AskTSA has responded to 185,000 inquiries and counting. The team, which works from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on holidays and weekends, fields about 800 submissions a day. During busy travel periods, the numbers spike; over spring break, for example, 1,500 travelers reached out daily.

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Plozai said that response times average about 25 minutes, depending on the complexity of the problem and the length of the virtual queue.

"Our goal is to respond to every single question within an hour," she said. "If necessary, we will call in additional help."

AskTSA operates out of the Transportation Security Operations Center, a Big Brothership in Virginia. From inside the Watch Room, the TSA works with the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, FBI and other law enforcement and security agencies to keep a collective eye on the country's transportation operations.

Plozai described the secured space as the "nerve center of TSA intelligence." Giant glowing maps light up the room, and no smartphones, even ones placed on airplane mode, are permitted inside.

I met the team on a weekday morning, just before the second peak of the day. (Busy times occur at 9 a.m., 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 4 p.m.) Before we entered the Watch Room, Plozai explained how the program grew out the individual Twitter accounts of TSA spokespeople.

The public clearly wanted to engage with the agency. The first AskTSA tweet came from a man named Alan, who asked: "What else does the TSA do besides airport security?" The answer: "Highway, rail, maritime, aviation transit and pipeline."

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Today, the majority of questions involve the security checkpoint experience. In one case, a grandmother was flying for the first time to visit family and sent AskTSA a three paragraph Facebook message. In another, a man with autism shared his unease about the scanning equipment. A week later, he followed up with a note inky with confidence.

"I opted to go through the big body scanner," he wrote, "even though I had TSA PreCheck!"

The next most-common topic: Is this so-and-so item permitted on the plane?

"A lot of the top questions are about food," Plozai said. "Fruit, mini-bottles of booze, crawfish, lemons."

People often attach photos to their queries, which helps the specialists better assess the object and provide a more accurate answer. She showed me images of a tiny, 3-D printed handgun wedged between a man's thumb and forefinger, a caped couple wielding "Star Wars" light sabers and a basset hound with moony eyes.

PreCheck issues also pop up quite frequently. For instance, the special lane is closed. The expert's advice: Go through the regular line and show the officer your boarding pass, so you can receive expedited service. Passengers also seek help when the PreCheck indicator is missing from their boarding pass.

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On Twitter, the specialist will switch to direct messaging (Facebook is already private) and ask the passenger for full name, known traveler number and airline confirmation number. The AskTSA member will check the information for any discrepancies, and if necessary, contact the carrier to update the customer's reservation and reissue a boarding pass.

"We do your bidding," Plozai said, "because we don't want it to be more complicated than necessary."

The AskTSA board often lights up when a new toy becomes hot, such as hoverboards, selfie sticks and drones, or a product gains notoriety, such as e-cigarettes and the fiery Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

"I saw the Samsung 7 Note is not allowed on planes. What about the regular phone?" a passenger named Christina recently tweeted. "Maybe a stupid question but I'm asking anyway."

The expert replied, "Currently, the Department of Transportation has banned the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 from aircraft. All other phones are good to go."

Viral moments implicating the TSA can land like a sack of scorpions at the feet of AskTSA. In March, the controversial pat-down of a male teenager at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport resulted in an uptick in comments, many incensed.

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"You people should be ashamed. I just had a pat down that took, maybe, 20-30 sec's," a traveler tweeted in response to the two-minute-long ordeal that a bystander captured on video. "This is perverse."

AskTSA responded, "Pat-downs are an important security measure to keep dangerous items off planes." The tweet included a link to the agency's blog, which details the procedure.

Of course, sometimes you need more than 140 characters to explain a position or spread your message. In the case of the Texas teen, the TSA consulted with the mother, who helped update its website's entry on traveling with children.

It also released a video demonstrating a pat-down, part of an instructional series that includes "TSA Cares: Screening for Transgender Passengers." That video, which was released in April, stemmed from a complaint issued by Kristin Beck, a transgender woman. The agency is also working with Denise Albert, a breast-cancer patient who went public after a discomfiting pat-down, to develop educational videos for travelers with cancer.

"The AskTSA social care program has allowed us to help passengers in real-time," Plozai said, "while also driving systemic changes."

On a Friday morning in mid-April, the questions were fairly standard - for AskTSA.

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Q: "Can I bring my plastic replica viking helmet with horns back from Ireland by wearing it onboard?"

A: "Plastic viking helmets are allowed through. Please check with your airline about wearing it on the flight."

In their responses, the specialists embrace exclamation points and Hallmark card-style wordplay.

A question about flying with candy inspired Josh Wagner to write,"Have a sweet day!" The send-off for a query about cake read, "Security will be a piece of cake for you."

Ham, one of six members covering the first shift, was barreling through the questions. Yes, an empty water bottle is allowed through security. For information on re-entering the country with Swedish candy, here's a link to Customs and Border Protection. To carry a bottle of ZzzQuil onto the plane, just let the officer know that you have a medically necessary liquid.

Then she received a picture of a small red bag. The traveler wanted to know if the piece of luggage was too small to be checked.

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"To be honest," Ham said, "I don't know what this means."

Remember the adage.

She gazed directly into the computer screen and started typing.

"Any size bag is allowed to be checked," she wrote.

She reread the sentence and deleted it.

"No bag is too small to check-in with your carrier."

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Still not right.

"Anthony, your red bag is good to go in checked or carry-on."

Then she posted it.

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On a sunny October day, a small bus with 17 passengers left a mountain village in Italy, headed for the famed coastal town of Amalfi. The zigzagging road offered glimpses of spectacularly craggy cliffs, small red-roofed villages and the glittering Mediterranean. Inside the bus, increasingly raucous laughter, lots of loud chatter and the occasional whoop filled the air.

It wasn't a school field trip, a study-abroad program or a family reunion. Until the day before, most of the people had never met.

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Other than three twosomes, all were complete strangers who'd signed on to take a tour of the Amalfi Coast designated as a trip for solo travelers. Some strangers shared hotel rooms. Others opted for single accommodations. But the group seemed to jell early on, hence the hoots and hollers from the back of the bus on the first full day.

This was a convivial group with the 11 solo travelers joined by a mother-daughter pair, a European couple, and a husband and wife from Canada. The group ranged in age from 27 to 66. Most were Brits.

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They bonded over hikes to the top of Mount Vesuvius and along the famed Path of the Gods, during excursions to Naples, Capri and Amalfi, and to the ancient city of Herculaneum. At the small, family-run hotel where the group stayed, buffet breakfasts and communal dinners also fostered camaraderie that seemed most pronounced during dinner, perhaps helped along by the wine.

Firm numbers are hard to come by, but travel experts say solo travel, whether as part of a group or totally alone, is on the rise.

The Visa Global Travel Intentions Study 2015 found that solo travel continues on an upward trend, with 24 percent of respondents saying they traveled alone on their most recent international leisure trip, compared with 15 percent in 2013. A 2016 TripAdvisor study, querying more than 36,000 travelers in 33 countries, found that 34 percent had traveled alone.

Janice Waugh, founder and publisher at SoloTravelerWorld.com, says the numbers of solo travelers have been growing dramatically, at least for the past five years.

"Whether you go independently or with a group, you are leaving behind the life that defines you on a daily basis and entering into a world that, whether in a big or small way, is on your own terms, and you're following your own interests," she said.

At Exodus Travels, the U.K. company that operated the Amalfi tour, 66 percent of its bookings came from solo travelers in 2016, compared with 50 percent the previous year, according to marketing and PR manager Robin Brooks. Additionally, the number of U.S. travelers jumping on the solo bandwagon has exploded. From 2015 to 2016, Exodus saw a 141 percent increase in the numbers of Americans booking without a companion.

Solo travelers are a big part of all of Exodus' tours, but the company has specifically designated 56 trips on its website as solo departures, catering to individuals rather than couples, families or groups of friends.

"People are looking for new experiences, new challenges, and we see the increase in solo booking as a continuation of this track," Brooks said. "Today's individuals and those of us who have that sense of wanderlust want to do things that make us happy, and if you don't have a traveling companion, that doesn't need to hold you back anymore."

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Indeed, there are many reasons to travel solo, either by necessity or by choice.

Simon Pressley, 45, an underwriting insurance manager from Gillingham, England, was one of three men and one of the 11 solo travelers on the Amalfi trip. He's unmarried, but many of his friends have young children at home and spend vacations with their kids.

"So either I have the choice of sitting at home or going for the family holiday with my friends," said Pressley, who's been on numerous Exodus tours.

Instead, he opts for solo travel because he can decide exactly what he wants to do and when he wants to do it, without making compromises to fit a companion's interests or schedules.

Caroline Woodhouse, a 50-year-old divorced law librarian from Bristol, England, finds that she has the time and urge to travel but not necessarily a regular travel companion, which until recently had been one of her college-age children. Another benefit of a group tour also appealed to her.

"I have always organized every detail of all of our holidays and so was very attracted to the idea of someone else doing the hard work of drawing up itineraries, organizing travel, guides and accommodation instead of me," she said.

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Woodhouse is planning a three-week trip to Peru as a solo traveler: "Going on this kind of holiday will enable me to be more adventurous and go to some of the places I would never go on my own."

Nicola Roberts, 38, a real estate agent from Reading, England, had split with her boyfriend and needed a holiday.

"Although I had friends and family to travel with, I decided to go alone and basically just try something different and do something a bit random," she said.

The Amalfi trip was the third Exodus tour for widow Moyra Storey, 66, a retired physiotherapist from Crieff, Scotland.

"I enjoy going on the trips and think of it a little like a cocktail party, as you can walk alone or chat to different people as you walk," she said. "And at supper, it's really good fun."

Terri Colby is a freelance writer.

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If you go

Exodus Travels (www.exodustravels.com) lists 56 trips designated as solo departures on its website, including the Amalfi Coast culture tour. For October 2017, that trip is priced at $1,475, which includes seven nights' hotel, all breakfasts and six dinners. There's no single supplement if you share a room, and a minimal add-on if you want your own space. Airfare is extra.

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Ours is a golden age of purloined documents and anonymous sources.

We wake up to newspaper stories sporting phrases like, "a person close to the investigation said." By midday, televised news alerts tell us that an official, unnamed "as he is not authorized to speak," denies the print media's scoop.

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The State Department writes a confidential memo about leaking. It is leaked.

On days like that, it's hard to refute President Donald Trump's partisans who say a "deep state" of leakers is out to get him.

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Yet it should be noted that leakers and counterespionage agents are nothing new. They have been dueling since biblical times.

The Book of Joshua reports that Rahab, a Jericho innkeeper, betrayed her king's confidence. The king of Jericho asked if a pair of Israelite spies were staying at her hotel. "Yes, but they've left," she replied. As the king's soldiers went off on a wild goose chase, Rahab warned the spies hidden on her roof to be careful going back to the Israelites' army. The king was after them.

From Rahab's day to ours, a few general rules seem to govern leakers and rulers.

Pursuing leakers can be as perilous as the secrets they reveal, but the impulse is virtually impossible to resist.

Imagine Jericho's king subsequently seeing Joshua's soldiers besieging his city. They're banging drums and blowing trumpets, fired up by the spies' intelligence reports. No surprise if he'd scream: "I'm going to get that Rahab woman if it's the last thing I do!"

In the 19th century, French military secrets wound up in German hands with infuriating alacrity. Sensing there was a leaker in its ranks, the army was determined to unmask him. Capt. Alfred Dreyfus appeared to fit the bill. He had opportunity  being attached to the War Department  and was Jewish. Anti-Semitism was rampant in conservative and clerical circles.

Though convicted of treason in 1894, evidence suggested Dreyfus was framed, and eventually he was exonerated. But the affair left deep and long-lasting scars on French society. The army only acknowledged Dreyfus' innocence in 1995.

While a king or general's desire for revenge is universal, leakers display a variety of motivations. Rahab explained that she was beholden to a higher truth. She told the Israelite spies: "I know that the Lord has given you this land."

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The moral high ground also was claimed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the "Pentagon Papers," a secret government study of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times in 1971. Having worked on the study, he become opposed to the war and said: "I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public."

Other leakers have more mundane motivations, like hurting a political rival. Still others harbor a festering resentment of the public official they serve. A spectacular example of such a leak sits on my bookshelves.

It is the histories of Procopius, who chronicled the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. The first five volumes glorify the sixth-century ruler's accomplishments, which were considerable: military victories, the great code of Roman law that bears his name. I've skimmed them  but I've read every word of the sixth volume.

It is called the "Secret History," because Procopius didn't dare publish it in his lifetime. It was his way of leaking to posterity what he really thought the emperor and empress were like: vain, cruel, ignorant, lazy and sexually dissolute.

You'll have to trust me on the details. I'd have a better chance of getting Redd Foxx's X-rated nightclub act into a family newspaper.

Richard Nixon didn't have Procopius' patience. When he wanted revenge, he wanted it right away. Before become president, he'd lost consecutive elections for president and for governor of California.

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After the second defeat, he told reporters: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." He never stopped wearing that chip on his shoulder.

As president, Nixon embarked on a hunt for leakers that ultimately begat the leaker who brought him down.

Asked by his grandmother what he did at the White House, one of the hunters said he plugged leaks. "So you're a plumber," she said. (Another version of the story says he didn't need prompting. He dubbed the Special Investigations Unit after his grandfather's trade.)

The "plumbers" broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, trying to get dirt on the Pentagon Papers' leaker. Then they broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building, leaving a trail leading to the White House. Nixon stonewalled. But Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein persisted, aided by W. Mark Felt, a leaker they code-named Deep Throat.

Felt had been passed over for director of the FBI, and his tips started a chain reaction.

Nixon's staffers went to prison, he resigned and a new word entered the lexicon of American politics.

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Plumber: A ham-handed sleuth who breaks a leaking pipe, causing a flood that drowns a presidency.

rgrossman@chicagotribune.com
Former death row inmate Anthony Porter, at the center of one of the most controversial wrongful conviction cases in Illinois history, was a no-show in federal court Monday even though he faced the threat of arrest for not coming in to explain why he'd skipped out on a recent deposition.

But instead of issuing a warrant for Porter's arrest, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Weisman decided to order him again to sit for his deposition, this time on June 6. If he fails to show for that testimony, he could then be taken into custody.

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Porter was supposed to give sworn testimony this month in the bombshell case brought by Alstory Simon, who has accused Northwestern University, its former star professor David Protess and others of conspiring to free Porter and convict Simon for an infamous 1982 double murder.

After Porter failed to appear for his deposition at a Loop law office, Weisman last week ordered him to come into court and explain his absence.

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While Porter did not show, his new attorney, Tara Thompson of the Loevy and Loevy law firm, told Weisman she needed more time to research the case and file a possible objection to the deposition based on Porter's mental state.

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"It was my hope and my desire that he would be here, although as the court can see, he is not," said Thompson, who is representing Porter pro bono. "That said, I do have concerns from conversations (with Porter) ... that there are competency issues at play here."

Protess taught investigative reporting at Northwestern's prestigious journalism school and founded the Medill Innocence Project, a key engine of the often successful local movement to unearth injustices.

He left the school in 2011 amid controversy over tactics allegedly employed by his students, including giving witnesses money for drugs, lying about their identities and flirting with witnesses.

Simon's $40 million suit alleges Protess and private investigator Paul Ciolino manufactured bogus evidence, coaxed false statements from witnesses and intimidated Simon into confessing to the August 1982 murders of Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green in a South Side park.

Northwestern, Protess and Ciolino have all denied wrongdoing.

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @jmetr22b
Chicago police officers and investigators confer at the scene where a Chicago police officer was shot in the 4600 block of West Maypole Avenue on May 12, 2017. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

A 25-year-old woman has been charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting a Chicago police officer during an exchange of gunfire on a West Garfield Park drug corner Friday, authorities said.

Deangela Eaton, of the 200 block of North Kenneth Avenue, also faces charges of aggravated battery, aggravated assault of a peace officer and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon.

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Police officers in an unmarked SUV on Friday afternoon witnessed what appeared to be a drug deal between a man and a woman in the 4600 block of West Maypole Street, according to police and a spokeswoman for the Independent Police Review Authority.

They pulled up toward the pair, and the woman turned around and fired shots, according to a news release from Chicago police.

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One officer, who was in plainclothes but was wearing a bulletproof vest was hit in the upper chest.

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Superintendent Eddie Johnson credited the vest with saving the officer's life.

The officers returned fire, shooting Eaton in the upper body, police said. She was taken in critical condition to Stroger Hospital. A handgun was confiscated at the scene, officials said.

Eaton remains at Stroger Hospital and was unable to attend an abbreviated bond hearing Monday at the Leighton Criminal Court Building. No details about the shooting were offered at the hearing.

The shooting came a little more than a week after two other plainclothes officers were shot May 2 with a military-style rifle in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Both officers were released from the hospital the next day.

An arrest warrant had been issued for Eaton on Thursday after she apparently failed to show up in court on a charge of aggravated assault of a police officer from February.

She had been arrested around 2:10 p.m. on Feb. 11 at an apartment in the 5700 block of South May Street in the Englewood neighborhood after the officer suffered minor injuries, according to police records. She was released on a personal recognizance bond the next day, records show.

She previously served two years on probation in a heroin possession case from 2014.
A former Lake Bluff teacher charged with public indecency following claims by students of past abuse surrendered at the Lake County Jail on Monday morning, according to authorities.

Charles Ritz III, who authorities said returned from California to Illinois to surrender, was still in custody Monday afternoon on $100,000 bail, according to officials with the Lake County Sheriff's Office and the Lake County State's Attorney's Office.

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According to Lake County Circuit Court records, Ritz faces a misdemeanor charge of public indecency/lewd exposure. A court appearance of June 22 has been set for him.

Ritz's attorney, Robert Deters, of Round Lake Beach, said Monday that he had no comment on the case.

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Last week, authorities said the allegations against Ritz date back to the 1980s, and the charge brought against him resulted from an investigation that began nearly a year ago when former students of Ritz reported to authorities that he had inappropriate sexual contact with them.

Ritz taught at Lake Bluff Junior High from 1975 to 1985, and records released by Lake Bluff School District 65 show that he resigned amid an investigation into claims that he engaged in "unacceptable behavior" involving two male students that occurred in a home in Waukegan.

Jim Moss, a former student who spoke in front of the school board earlier this year to outline his claims that Ritz sexually abused him in the 1970s, said last week the charge against Rich was "really good news."

"A major pillar in our effort has been addressed," said Moss, who came forward publicly, saying he felt it was important to put his name to the effort of protecting children.

Moss said he and another former student who also claims Ritz abused him as a child went to authorities last year after discovering that Ritz went on to have a long teaching career in California after leaving District 65.

Ritz was hired a short time later by Fullerton Joint Union High School District in Orange County, Calif., and spent 30 years teaching there before he retired in 2016. That district has also launched its own investigation into Ritz, according to published reports.

Lake County authorities did not elaborate on the specifics of the public indecency charge or whether it stemmed from alleged conduct involving any former students.

But in a news release Friday, Lake County State's Attorney Michael Nerheim confirmed that the complaints of former students prompted the investigation.

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"In those complaints, the students provided information regarding a number of incidents, dating from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, that occurred in the presence of Mr. Ritz," Nerheim said.

The release stated that investigators interviewed about 50 people, from California to Florida, and "uncovered extensive records spanning back nearly 30 years."

District 65 posted a statement on its website Friday, saying in part: "With the charge filed today by the Lake County State's Attorney's office, we are hopeful that Charles Ritz will be swiftly brought to justice and held accountable for his actions."

Though statutes of limitations often prohibit the prosecution of alleged crimes from decades ago, Nerheim said in the news release that his office was able to proceed with the case because Ritz "left the state of Illinois shortly after the commission of these criminal acts."

"When we launched this investigation 11 months ago, we knew it would present challenges because of the amount of time that had elapsed between the incidents and when we learned of them," Lake Bluff Police Chief David Belmonte said in the news release. "But those challenges did not diminish our resolve to investigate the matter and work on behalf of the victims and our entire community so we could learn as much as we could about the disturbing allegations and do whatever we could to hold responsible parties strictly accountable."

jrnewton@tribpub.com

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Twitter @jimnewton5
Hamud Ubidulwas arrested for allegedly exposing himself at Senn High School, Chicago police said. (Chicago Police Department)

An Uptown man suspected of exposing himself at a local high school was ordered held in lieu of $100,000 bail during a Sunday court hearing.

Hamud Ubidul, 62, was arrested Friday at Senn High School in Edgewater after several people reported seeing him masturbating and urinating on campus grounds, prosecutors and police said.

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Ubidul, who was a visitor to the school, was charged with public indecency and exposure at a school, a felony.

He appeared before a judge at the Leighton Criminal Court Building on Sunday afternoon.

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At least four witnesses, including students and a staff member, reported the incident to campus police, who detained Ubidul about 11 a.m., prosecutors said.

Ubidul told police he had a clinic appointment at the school but could not get in through the main entrance. He said he "had to urinate" because of his diabetes and chose to do so near a row of bicycles on campus, according to court documents.
A trooper was injured early Monday after a motorist rear-ended his police car on the ramp from Interstate 90/94 to the westbound lanes of Interstate 290, according to Illinois State Police.

The trooper was waiting for a tow truck to arrive to remove a vehicle from the ramp when a motorist hit his car around 12:40 a.m., Illinois State Police said.

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The trooper was in his car and had his emergency lights on, state police said.

The trooper was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital to be treated for back pain. No one was in the vehicle that was being towed.

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The man who crashed into the trooper's car was taken to Stroger Hospital, along with his passenger. Police did not know the driver's age, or the age and gender of the passenger.

No charges or citations had been filed.
Tyshaun Page, 20, boyfriend of Tatyanna Lewis, an 18-year-old woman who was killed after being repeatedly rammed by a Jeep into a tree by another woman, talks about the incident on May 15, 2017, in the Morgan Park neighborhood. (Alyssa Pointer/ Chicago Tribune) (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune)

Cook County prosecutors said Monday that a Facebook feud between two women fighting over a man turned deadly when one woman rammed her Jeep into her rival, pinned her against a tree and then backed up to run her over again.

Chynna Stapleton, 24, was ordered held without bail Monday on a first-degree murder charge in the death of Tatyanna Lewis, 18, the daughter of a Chicago police officer.

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"It's really sad that it's always women fighting over men. Ridiculous," Judge Maria Kuriakos Ciesil said from the bench.

Stapleton and Lewis had been fighting in person and on social media over Lewis' boyfriend, who is the father of Stapleton's child, prosecutors said.

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An in-person argument broke out between the two about 11:10 p.m. Friday on the Far South Side, near 114th Place and South May Street in the Morgan Park neighborhood, prosecutors said.

Their dispute escalated into a fistfight, and several bystanders joined in, according to Assistant State's Attorney Jamie Santini.

After the fight broke up, a bloodied Stapleton got into her 2002 Jeep Liberty with a 13-year-old in the back seat, prosecutors said.

Lewis kicked a passenger-side door as Stapleton was trying to pull away, and witnesses then heard Stapleton yell, "I've got something for you," Santini said.

Lewis and several others were walking off when Stapleton made a sharp turn, drove the Jeep over the curb and onto lawns on May Street, where witnesses saw her "barrelling down on them," Santini said.

Lewis tripped and fell as she tried to run from the Jeep, prosecutors said. Stapleton hit her with the Jeep and pinned her against a nearby tree, then put the car into reverse, Santini said.

Lewis was stuck to the front end of the Jeep, and as Stapleton reversed the car, she dragged Lewis along until Lewis was pulled under, according to prosecutors. Stapleton then stopped, shifted into drive and ran Lewis over with both the front and rear wheels of the Jeep.

Lewis was taken to a nearby hospital and pronounced dead. Lewis died of multiple blunt force injuries, according to the medical examiner's office, which ruled her death was a homicide.

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 13 Tatyanna Lewis, 18, in a photo provided by her boyfriend, Tyshaun Page, 20. (Tyshaun Page)

The Chicago Police Department said Lewis' father is on the force but released no other details.

Stapleton fled after hitting Lewis, leaving leaked vehicle fluids and car parts in her wake, prosecutors said.

Chicago police pulled her over about a mile and a half away, officials said. Officers noticed extensive damage to the Jeep and that Stapleton's face was bleeding. They also saw tree bark on the front end of the car, Santini said.

The 13-year-old in the back seat was physically unharmed, prosecutors said. The teen's relationship with Stapleton or Lewis was not immediately known.

Stapleton has no criminal history, her lawyer, Christopher Anderson, an assistant public defender, said in court. He said that Stapleton was provoked by Lewis' "provocative language" online and in person. Anderson also said witnesses saw Stapleton was beaten up at the scene.

Chynna Stapleton, 24, inset, ischarged with first-degree murder in the ramming death of an 18-year-old woman, Chicago police said. (Chicago Police Department, WGN-TV)

Kuriakos Ciesil noted, however, that the fistfight was over by the time Stapleton had gotten in the car.

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"Not only did you hit her, you dragged her," the judge said to Stapleton. "All the while you've got a 13-year-old in the back seat. ... You are a danger to yourself and society."

Onlookers in the gallery pounded on the glass separating them from the courtroom as Stapleton was led away after the hearing, drawing rebukes from sheriff's deputies.

Stapleton's father, 46-year-old Jesse Stapleton, declined to comment.

"She's not a monster," he said of his daughter. "That's all I've got to say."

Chicago Tribune's Elvia Malagon and Elyssa Cherney contributed.

mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com

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kdouglas@chicagotribune.com
State Auditor Frank Mautinos now-defunct campaign fund willfully violated an order to update disclosure reports initially filed in 2014 and 2015, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

SPRINGFIELD  The Illinois Board of Elections voted Monday to fine state Auditor General Frank Mautino's former legislative campaign $5,000 for failing to provide information during a probe into spending on gasoline and repairs for a personal vehicle.

The board voted 6-2 to impose the fine despite an objection that the state could be getting in the way of a federal investigation. The move came at the recommendation of a hearing officer who found that Mautino's now-defunct campaign fund "willfully" violated an earlier order by the board to update disclosure reports initially filed in 2014 and 2015.

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The decision follows a probe that was launched by election officials after a downstate group known as the Edgar County Watchdogs raised questions about why Mautino's fund reported spending more than $247,000 on fuel and car repairs over 16 years, which later expanded to include a look at $30,000 worth of expenditures to a local bank.

The federal government is also investigating, marking a stark turn of events for Mautino, who received overwhelming bipartisan support when lawmakers appointed him to a 10-year term in 2015 as the state's chief financial watchdog. Now, several Republican lawmakers are calling for Mautino to step down.

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Mautino declined to testify during the hearing process, but his attorney, Anthony Jacob, argued Monday that the committee did not willfully violate the order but rather "is not capable" of complying because it had been dissolved and no longer had staff to complete the paperwork.

Elections board member William Cadigan said that explanation "rings a little hollow" because the committee was able to hire attorneys and submit other documents the board has requested.

"There are people involved in this process that are perfectly capable of doing that," Cadigan said.

"It just baffles me as to how the committee can't do this and it can't do that and it can't do this, how can it hire a world-class attorney like you?" added board member John Keith.

William McGuffage voted against fining Mautino, contending the board should not take any action while a federal investigation is ongoing because it may be detrimental to that case.

"I think we should just stop this right now," said McGuffage. He added the board was "spinning its wheels" because the only person who could answer many of their questions is Mautino.

Member Andrew Carruthers said the federal investigation is a separate matter that should not interfere with the board's work.

"If we don't look at violations of the election code, who else will?" Carruthers said.

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Carruthers proposed forwarding the board's documents about the case to the attorney general and LaSalle County state's attorney for potential prosecution, but that effort failed on a 4-4 vote along partisan lines.

Jeffrey Schwab, an attorney for the Liberty Justice Center, which is affiliated with the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, said he was "somewhat disappointed" by the outcome of the hearing because the board did not address the underlying issues regarding the questionable spending.

Schwab said it was unlikely that Mautino or his campaign committee would actually pay the fine unless he re-opens the committee in order to run for office again.

"I believe nobody will every pay it," Schwab said.

Mautino attorney Jacob declined to answer further questions when contacted by the Tribune.

mcgarcia@chicagotribune.com

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Twitter @MoniqueGarcia
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Monday offered no clues on how he will attempt to come up with the cash locally to fund Chicago Public Schools, saying he will spend the next few weeks trying to pry education money out of Springfield.

Emanuel's comments were the latest example of his administration trying to keep the focus for CPS' financial problems on Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and state lawmakers.

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City officials say the budget this year is short $129 million  even after CPS made late-year spending cuts in the wake of Rauner's veto of $215 million in pension funding. Those officials also say the state is $476 million behind in making aid payments to the district.

The Emanuel administration has canceled briefings for aldermen on how the mayor plans to come up with the money, and now the mayor wants to let the spring session play out to see how education funding shakes out.

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"Today's May 15th. The state of Illinois has two weeks till the end of the (legislative) session," Emanuel said while standing in a room festooned with images of famous children's book characters like the Cat in the Hat at the newly opened American Writers Museum downtown.

"My entire focus is making the best use of the time, in the remaining two weeks, that Springfield fulfills their obligation to the children of the state of Illinois and, therefore, the children of the city of Chicago, that the children of Chicago are not treated like second-class citizens," he added.

The state disputes the amount owed the district and the Rauner administration blames the issue on a failure by Democratic state Comptroller Susana Mendoza, an Emanuel ally and Rauner critic, to make payments.

Although CPS can get through the rest of the school year with the cash it already has, it won't have enough to make a $700 million-plus pension payment at the end of June if the state does not come through with the funding owed to CPS, according to the city's chief financial officer. The amount CPS must pay into its teacher pension fund has risen after the district skipped pension payments for years under then-Mayor Richard M. Daley and Emanuel.

As the financial mess drags on, the Chicago Teachers Union was set to take a vote of no-confidence Monday on CPS CEO Forrest Claypool. Emanuel said Claypool "has a thousand percent my confidence," and said Claypool, too, is focusing his energy on trying to get Springfield to act rather than worrying about the CTU vote.

jebyrne@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @_johnbyrne
A view of the proposed Obama Presidential Center campus from the southwest shows the Museum Building, Forum Building and Library Building surrounding a public plaza in Chicago's Jackson Park. (Obama Foundation)

Fundraising for the Obama Foundation began to ramp up in 2016, with donations totaling more than $13 million, the most since it was founded in 2014, according to tax records released by the foundation on Monday.

But that total is expected to surge as former President Barack Obama, now free of his own self-imposed restriction over making direct appeals for donations while in office, begins to raise money to pay for his ambitious presidential center. It is expected to cost at least $500 million by the time it is completed in 2021.

The majority of last year's donations were collected from a fairly small group of the former president's most loyal and prominent supporters  nine donations in all that were worth $1 million or more. The fundraising total exceeded the combined $7.5 million that the Obama Foundation collected in 2014 and 2015.

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Among the biggest donors was the Lucas Family Foundation of the filmmaker George Lucas, which kicked in $1 million toward the presidential center. His wife, Mellody Hobson , a Chicago native and president of Ariel Investments, sits on the private foundation's board.

The family foundation of Glenn Hutchins, a co-founder of the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, donated $1 million, as did the family foundation of the investor Andrew Hauptman, owner of the Chicago Fire.

Andrew Hauptman's name emerged in emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, with one email referring to his intent to "meet with the folks from the Obama Foundation."

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He is chairman of Andell Inc., a Los Angeles-based private investment firm and family office he controls with his wife, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman. She is from the Bronfman family, whose fortune was built through the Seagram Co.

Daniel Levin and his wife, Fay Hartog-Levin, donated $1 million as well. He is the founder of the Habitat Co., a major Chicago developer where Valerie Jarrett once was chief executive. Fay Hartog-Levin is a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School who was appointed by Obama to serve as ambassador to the Kingdom of the Netherlands between 2009 and 2011.

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Another Obama-era political appointee, Louis Susman, gave as well.

Susman is a retired Chicago investment and top fundraiser for Obama's presidential bid who was nominated as ambassador to Britain in 2009. He and his wife, Marjorie Susman, donated $1 million toward the presidential center last year.

So did John Doerr, a prominent venture capitalist from California with an estimated net worth, according to Forbes, of $4.9 billion. When he and his wife, Anne, donated $1 million to the Obama Foundation last year it marked their second contribution in as many years.

The foundation has not released an updated estimated cost for the Obama Presidential Center since the first design plans were publicly released this month. It calls for three buildings in a campuslike setting in historic Jackson Park on the South Side.

But, in a significant shift, it will not house any permanent collection of presidential documents and artifacts maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration. Instead those records will be stored in existing NARA facilities and made available in digital format or on loan.

That decision freed the Obama Foundation from many stringent requirements concerning the center's design and endowment, including having to raise an endowment equivalent to 60 percent of the cost of the library portion of the center.

It also means that Obama Presidential Center will not receive the federal funds given to other presidential centers to support the library on their grounds. For example, NARA provided the library for George W. Bush $6.2 million in fiscal 2015.

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Even with this loss, though, the savings in not having to meet NARA requirements could more than make up for the loss of federal funds.
A screenshot of the warning screen from a purported ransomware attack, as captured by a computer user in Taiwan, is seen on laptop in Beijing on May 13, 2017. (Mark Schiefelbein / AP)

Last week's ransomware attack that brought down MRI scanners in the U.K., railroad ticket machines in Germany, interior ministry computers in Russia and parts of the FedEx network in the U.S. is bound to cause a backlash against spy agencies' cyberwarfare capabilities. It shows that services such as the U.S. National Security Agency hoard weapons that, by their very nature, target civilian infrastructure.

The WannaCry attack wasn't a big-time nation state operation, though it's likely that it may have originated in Russia. Last year, 75 percent of crypto ransomware  malware that encrypts files on the target machine to force its owner to pay a ransom in exchange for their decryption  originated from the Russian-speaking hacker underworld. The largest number of WannaCry attacks occurred in Russia and Ukraine. The hackers here weren't playing some political interference game: They were after money, in bitcoin. Researchers who tracked the bitcoin addresses hardwired into the malware found that tens of thousands of dollars had been paid before the spread of the virus was halted by a cybersecurity expert who accidentally found a flaw in WannaCry.

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That flaw, apparently the result of the hackers' rather clumsy attempt to prevent their malware from being analyzed, shows the attack wasn't highly sophisticated. Its main element was developed by the NSA, not the hackers  a vulnerability codenamed Eternalblue, which allowed the agency to commandeer old, pre-Windows 10 versions of the Microsoft operating system. The NSA code was released in April by a hacking group calling itself Shadow Brokers, which had apparently failed to find a buyer for a large trove of NSA cyberweapons.

After the recent leaks of hacking tools from the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency, cyberespionage critics, including NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, have criticized the agencies for hoarding vulnerabilities for their own use instead of flagging them to companies like Microsoft in the interest of public safety. Following the WannaCry attack, one of the biggest in history, Microsoft itself has joined the ranks of the critics. In a strongly worded blog post, Brad Smith, the company's president and chief legal officer, wrote:

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Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage. An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen. And this most recent attack represents a completely unintended but disconcerting link between the two most serious forms of cybersecurity threats in the world today  nation-state action and organized criminal action.

Microsoft and its peers shouldn't count on the NSA to hand over information about vulnerabilities; spies will be spies. Given the current regulatory environment, it's the responsibility of these companies themselves, with their enormous financial resources, to track down these gaps in the security of their products, paying to acquire information if necessary.

Smith, however, is right when he calls for a "Digital Geneva Convention" that would protect civilians against nation-states' cyberwars, just as the Fourth Geneva Convention defends civilians in time of conventional war.

How did the NSA plan to use Eternalblue in the first place is a good question. The fact that it only works against old Windows systems shows that it is specifically directed against civilian infrastructure, such as public sector networks that are often administered cheaply, by overworked and less qualified information technology professionals, on obsolete hardware, with software that won't run on Windows 10.

The newest version of the Microsoft operating system now holds just 26 percent of the global market. The share of Windows 7, released in 2009, is 48.5 percent and 7 percent of the world's internet-connected computers still use 16-year-old Windows XP. No matter how Microsoft pushes the newest system to customers (the upgrades are free), some systems stick with the old versions, simply because they can't afford the switching effort in terms of the time required and the old hardware's insufficiency. Expensive MRI machines used by the British National Health Service are a good example; medical equipment everywhere is likely to run antiquated systems  and it's exposed to attacks delivered through the internet.

The Russian interior ministry's computers affected by the WannaCry virus aren't military-use machines; they're old computers in police stations and service centers, the ones that are always the last to get an upgrade. For the German railroads, too, switching all the ticket terminals to Windows 10 is not exactly a priority.

It's easy to say everyone should be vigilant, install every patch released and, preferably, never miss an operating system update. Certainly many institutions and companies underinvest in this area. These civilian systems, however, will always lag behind  and that's why the NSA thinks old Windows vulnerabilities are worth hoarding.

It's tempting for an intelligence service to find ways to shut down an adversary's power grid or hospital system, or to hack traffic lights in a big city to cause chaos. But that's as unethical as shooting or torturing the civilians in war. It should be illegal to develop such weapons, just as it is to produce nerve gas for military uses. Intelligence agencies should be legally required to give up any cyberweapons that don't specifically target the military capabilities of adversary states.

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It would be naive to believe that would rule out the use of such cyberweapons. But it will improve intelligence services' accountability and, at the very least, force them to take better care of any dark stuff that comes into their hands. As it is, if they have a piece of malware, it's highly likely that even small-time criminals will have it, too.

Bloomberg View

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
The new American Writers Museum in Chicago is worth your time if you love to read.

Still with us here in the second sentence? Good, you qualify as a prospective visitor. This playful, thought-provoking museum encompasses the entire scope of American letters, from important novels, poetry and nonfiction books to potboilers, children's literature and, yes, even journalism.

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If you've ever had a favorite book (or wanted one), your interests will be piqued. You'll find everything from Vladimir Nabokov's shocking "Lolita" to Robert McCloskey's endearing "Make Way for Ducklings." Not to mention Richard Wright, Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather and Henry Miller, among others.

It sounds absurd, or even inappropriate, to see Nabokov ("Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins") quoted in proximity to McCloskey (Sample line: "Good morning, Mr. Mallard")  until you take in the entire message of the museum. While the obvious goals are to highlight American writers and promote a love of reading, the more profound achievement of the museum is to celebrate the power of the written word.

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Great writing inspires, delights, informs and sometimes enrages. American writing, protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, tells the ongoing story of our turbulent nation with unfettered creativity and zeal. That's the big idea this museum hurls at visitors through interactive exhibits, quotes, lists and the like.

Visitors check out a Chicago writers display during a preview opening of the American Writers Museum on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Monday, May 8, 2017. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

James Fenimore Cooper is represented in the museum because his "Leatherstocking Tales" of the 19th century shaped the myth of the American frontier by celebrating self-reliance. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut gets a shoutout via a digital waterfall of cascading words about book burners: "The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries," he once said. Not to harp on Nabokov, who wrote "Lolita" while traveling in the western U.S., but his work about a man's obsession with an underage girl survived censorship attempts. Critic Maureen Corrigan says of "Lolita" in an interactive video that "the characters are so alive that readers are drawn in to understand, if not necessarily sympathize with, the novel's world view." Want to disagree? The museum will spark all sorts of conversations about books.

The museum, which opens Tuesday, is the brainchild of Malcolm O'Hagan, a retired manufacturing executive from Maryland who saw a museum of Irish writers in Dublin and thought America needed a similar one. He organized a board that has raised nearly $10 million in private funding. It's located in a compact space on the second floor of 180 N. Michigan Ave. but packs a big punch of intellectual energy. John Updike, Octavia Butler and the Federal Writers' Project (which employed Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren in Chicago) get mentions, among scores more. As seen through the eyes of the museum, the American Revolution, the civil rights movement and rap music as an art form all stand as testaments to the potency of writing and literature.

The museum's setup is modern, thankfully, with lots of video screens and quick capsules of information, as if to cater to the depleted attention spans of young people while subversively wooing them to read nice long books. In a clever twist, some exhibits require visitors to manually flip the displays to get more information, as if turning the pages of an actual book. Whoa.

A final delightful example of the museum's focus on culture and politics: On Monday, at an opening ceremony, dignitaries including Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave speeches. But we were only half listening as we wandered amid a display focused on journalism. There we saw the snarky words of Mike Royko, the late, great Tribune columnist, lifted from a 1984 column and emblazoned on a banner. It's as if he were reaching out to remind us not to take those dignitaries in the other room too seriously: "In our City Hall, it's always been difficult to tell if people are working, on vacation, retired, or even dead or alive. And it's made little difference. The work level has been about the same."

Now that's some great writing.

Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.

Become a subscriber today to support editorial writing like this. Start getting full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks.
Most Illinois residents dont feel the immediate effects of the budget impasse. The courts have ordered Illinois to continue key operations  the DMV, prisons, and policing, for instance. Meanwhile, the state is spending more than it is taking in, and the backlog of bills has mushroomed from $4 billion to over $12 billion. Worse yet, Illinois is not funding universities and social service agencies.

Consequently, those who suffer most from not having a budget are the most vulnerable. Working-class college students who have been promised tuition grants have been betrayed. Regional public universities teeter on the brink of collapse. Rape crisis centers, elder care facilities, and domestic violence shelters go unfunded, forcing cuts to lifesaving programs.

Right now, about $800 million is sitting in a state account earmarked for universities and social services. Rauner refuses to use it, though, claiming that he opposes duct tape solutions to budgeting. Its like he wants people reliant on social services and universities to suffer until Democrats yield to his agenda. So far, Democrats are unmoved.

The Democrats and Rauner have, meanwhile, agreed to at least one duct tape budgeting solution. For the last two years they have funded K-12 schools. Lawmakers fear that if they dont fund schools, angry parents will descend on Springfield, demanding action and threatening retribution at the polls. If that happened, lawmakers would be forced to do their jobs and pass a full budget. So, instead, they agree to pass a partial budget for the constituents they fear  parents. This gives them cover to continue their battle without facing dire repercussions.

Sadly, while Rauner and the Democrats stall, debts pile up, borrowing costs soar, universities crumble, and our neighbors suffer. If lawmakers really care about the victims of the budget crisis, they will stop seeking the cover of K-12 funding. They will pass a budget for all of Illinois  and stop passing the buck.

 Joshua Salzmann, Chicago
An Aurora man has been charged with drunken driving after police said his vehicle was found stuck on a hill outside the Illinois Math and Science Academy.

David Kline, 28, 500 block of South Sumner Avenue, Aurora, was charged with drunken driving, improper lane usage, no insurance, illegal transportation of alcohol and resisting a peace officer at 1:21 p.m. Saturday, Aurora police said.

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According to police, an officer was dispatched to the area of Sullivan Road and Lincolnshire Drive for reports of an accident. A witness allegedly saw Kline's vehicle strike a mailbox. Minutes later, dispatch contacted the officer and reported that another caller stated that a vehicle had crashed at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, 1500 W. Sullivan Road.

Police arrived and found Kline's vehicle in the grass on top of a hill. He was apparently inside the vehicle attempting to get the vehicle off the hill, police said. Officers said when they approached Kline he became combative and refused orders to shut the vehicle off. They also said that Kline appeared intoxicated.

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Officers eventually took Kline into custody.

Erika Wurst is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News
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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 ...

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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 ...

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Frisch eyes upset of Boebert, but Pueblo County results could take time

About 9,000 votes are due in the next batch that Pueblo County posts, which could determine if Lauren Boebert will continue to represent CD-3 in Congress
Traditional black and white silver prints by prominent Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti. Runs through 6/24.

ABOUT THE EVENT

photo-eye Gallery will host an Opening for the exhibition Friday April 28th from 5 7pm, corresponding with the Railyard Arts Districts Last Friday Art Walk. Warm Regards will remain on view through June 24th, 2017.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Pentti Sammallahti is a traveler and a visual poet. Endowed with an extraordinary 15-year grant from the Finnish government Sammallahti has travelled widely from his native Scandinavia, across the Soviet Republics through Siberia, to Japan, India, Nepal, Morocco, Turkey, throughout Europe, Great Britain, and South Africa. Meticulously well-seen, Sammallahtis photographs are imbued with a sense of wonder, delight, and reverence for the world at large while reflecting on both beauty and the human condition. He focuses on the people and animals of far off places recording the relationships between them and their environment. A master craftsman, Sammallahti is always in pursuit of the perfect means to communicate his intentions by subtly toning each of his rich silver gelatin prints. Over the years, photo-eye Gallery has had the pleasure to receive Penttis prints in treasured bundles signed with "Warm Regards".

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Inspired by his grandmother Hildur Larsson, a newspaper photographer, and viewing Edward Steichens seminal The Family of Man at Helsinki Art Hall in 1961 Pentti Sammallahti began making images at the age of 11. At 21, Sammallahti was featured in his first solo exhibition marking the beginning of a professional career that would come to influence an entire generation of Finnish photographers. Prior to receiving the Finnish States 15-year artist grant, Sammallahti taught at the Helsinki University of Art and Design, and has released thirteen portfolios and monographs since 1979 including The Russian Way and Here Far Away. In 2003, at the opening of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, France, Pentti was named one of Cartier-Bressons 100 favorite photographers, and works by Sammallahti where exhibited from Cartier-Bressons personal collection. Penttis work can be found at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France, Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia, among others, and he has received awards such as the Samuli Paulaharju Prize of the Finnish Literature Society, State Prizes for Photography, Uusimaa Province Art Prize, Daniel Nyblin Prize, and the Finnish Critics Association Annual.
One of the PNCs major pitches is the free education policy. It implemented this policy in office and it proved to haves weaknesses.

The ruling Peoples National Congress has reportedly spent much money disseminating information about its polices in social and mainstream media.

Unlike previous elections, this election appears more sedate. Social media is playing an important role with almost all political parties advertising their messages on Facebook and using social media more effectively.

WE ARE going into the third week of this eight-week election campaign before polling in Papua New Guineas general election commences.

In what looks like a counter attack, opposition leader Don Polye on behalf of his THE party seemed to write a political suicide note by saying he will scrap the free education policy and introduce compulsory and subsidised education.

THE partys policy will make it compulsory to attend school and for parents to pay fees up to Grade 12. But technical and university education will be free.

Prime minister ONeill condemned the opposition saying this was a reckless policy that would set the country back, reverse development and undermine economic growth.

This is the most reckless opposition campaign to be seen in elections for a long time, he said.

These opposition policies would hurt families, will see people miss out on education and have funding decisions taken away from the local level and returned to Waigani bureaucrats.

How could anyone think that ending free education could be a good thing?

Under PNCs policy there are more children going to school but this has seen an increase in class sizes  many of which have doubled - Grade 8, 10 and 12 dropouts. These young people add to the already large number of unemployed youths and unskilled labourers.

So PNCs free education policy looked good in a short-term but is creating difficult issues in its implementation.

THE Partys education policy puts pressure on poor parents to pay fees to send their children to school. This is a tough policy but in the long-term will benefit the country largely by adequately financing schools and easing the burden of paying fees for higher education and colleges.

Compulsory education will produce a literate population. Today, even though education is free, many young people do not go to school and roam the streets.

Every country needs good policy on education and it seems Polyes policy will benefit PNG in the years to come and ONeills policy will just lead PNG into social, economic and employment problems.

Its my personal view that Polyes policy is what PNG needs and it speaks with more maturity than ONeills program, which lacks sustainability.
Liu Hualong, the Chairman of China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation Limited (CRRC), Chinas rail car manufacturer, has said the company is researching and developing locomotives that can travel at up to 400 kilometers per hour and also change tracks to better facilitate rail transportation between regions that utilize different track gauges. This is needed as Chinas rail gauge differs in width from that used by Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Russia, whose tracks also differ from gauges used in Europe.

Liu revealed the plans at a press conference on the One Belt, One Road initiative, held by the Information Office of the State Council. The press conference was hosted ahead of the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which has begun in Beijing. He also stated that China was developing trains and carriages, involving new technologies and products to better adapt itself to international transport and interconnection. This also included bespoke engineering, tailoring for specific international markets. Much of CRRCs engineering work is carried out in Dalian and Shenyang in Northeast China.

Liu stated that CRRC had, for example, received orders totaling RMB 10 billion (US$1.45 billion) from Malaysia in the past three years, with a specific brief to design carriages for female passengers as well as containing prayer rooms. He also said that in terms of international markets, CRRCs products are sold in 83 percent of all of countries that contain railways across the world.

The gauge changing technologies will be useful and will save time and inconvenience for passengers. At present, it can take up to eight hours to lift trains off bogies and onto new ones, while freight needs to be unloaded then reloaded onto new freight platforms.

Chris Devonshire-Ellis of Dezan Shira & Associates comments: The rail freight services envisaged by the Chinese will mainly compete with air cargo rather than shipping. Rail is ideal for transporting large, heavy goods, and equipment, and the OBOR infrastructure developments will require exactly that. It may well be that containers of Chinese goods are also transported along with this primary cargo, but the main benefit in having the train network developed is for heavy goods.



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Dezan Shira & Associates Brochure

Dezan Shira & Associates is a pan-Asia, multi-disciplinary professional services firm, providing legal, tax and operational advisory to international corporate investors. Operational throughout China, ASEAN and India, our mission is to guide foreign companies through Asias complex regulatory environment and assist them with all aspects of establishing, maintaining and growing their business operations in the region. This brochure provides an overview of the services and expertise Dezan Shira & Associates can provide.

Silk Road Briefing

Our new portal examining the multilateral trade and investment opportunities along the developing overland and maritime Silk Road routes, and updates of multilateral involvement and influence along them.

Chinas New Economic Silk Road: The Great Eurasian Game & The String of Pearls

This unique and currently only available study into the proposed Silk Road Economic Belt examines the institutional, financial and infrastructure projects that are currently underway and in the planning stage across the entire region. Covering over 60 countries, this book explores the regional reforms, potential problems, opportunities and longer term impact that the Silk Road will have upon Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.


Doing Business in China 2022 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in China. Compiled by the ...
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The 23rd World Festival of Sacred Music opened late on Friday in Morocco's old city of Fez, with China as guest of honor.

Held under the theme "Water and the Sacred," the festival was opened by Morocco's first lady Princess Lalla Salma.

Choosing water as its theme, this year's festival aims to promote respect for the environment as the natural extension of a spiritual approach.

The festival in 2017 will be an opportunity to explore the symbolism of water and urge the world to reconcile with the environment and mobilize for the future generations and the planet.

The nine-day festival will feature a number of renowned traditional artists from all over the world.

Starting in 1994, the annual festival was designated in 2001 by the United Nations as one of the major events contributing in remarkable fashion to the dialogue between civilizations.
An Auburn brewery is among the five finalists in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's inaugural Taste NY Craft Beer Challenge.

Prison City Pub & Brewery was one of the top vote-getters in the online vote, which began in early May and ended Friday. More than 170 breweries from across the state participated in the contest and more than 42,000 votes were cast.

The other finalists are Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, Genesee Brewing Co. in Rochester, Roscoe NY Beer Co. in Sullivan County and Southern Tier Brewing Co. in Chautauqua County.

The exact vote counts for each of the finalists weren't revealed. The governor's office said the breweries received more than 14,000 votes combined.

Prison City Pub & Brewery will be invited to attend the finals of the competition at Pier A in New York City Wednesday. The event will consist of a blind tasting judged by Cuomo and a collection of celebrities and experts, including chef Mario Batali and Buffalo Bills Hall of Fame running back Thurman Thomas. Judging categories will include appearance, aroma, flavor and drinkability.

Monday, Prison City co-owner Dawn Schulz said the winning breweries were instructed to select any beer of their choice, and bring a keg and the equivalent of five six-packs of it to the event.

About 250 to 500 people are expected to attend the event, she said. Prison City will bring several 32-ounce Crowler cans of its selection for judging, she continued, and kegs of both that and its Seward's Folly blond ale for attendees.

"We're super excited, honored and thankful for our customers, friends and family voting for us," Schulz said. "We're excited to represent the brewpub and Auburn, and drink a beer with the governor."

Advancing to the finals of the inaugural statewide competition is the latest honor for Prison City. The brewery won four medals at the national Best of Craft Beer Awards in January.

In 2016, Paste Magazine named Prison City one of its best breweries. Earlier in the year, the brewery's Mass Riot was selected as the top American IPA in a blind tasting conducted by Paste. Mass Riot beat out 246 other IPAs for the honor.

Two years ago, the brewery's Bleek Worden Belgian pale ale won a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival.

The downtown Auburn brewpub opened in December 2014. It has recently expanded to allow for increased beer production. That will allow Prison City to meet demand, including a growing number of patrons from outside Cayuga County.
Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed Sunday to give a fresh impetus to the Belt and Road Initiative, unveiling specific measures to carry forward the inspiring initiative that he called "the project of the century."

"A solid first step has been taken in pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative. We should build on the sound momentum generated to steer the initiative toward greater success," Xi said at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

Proposed by Xi in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative, which builds upon the spirit of ancient routes, is a transnational network mainly connecting Asia with Europe and Africa, with the aim of promoting common development among all countries involved.

HEFTY FINANCIAL SUPPORT

China's decision to scale up financial support for the Belt and Road, after billions of U.S. dollars of investment over the past three years, underscored the country's resolution to push forward the initiative.

Xi announced an additional 100 billion yuan (about 14.5 billion U.S. dollars) for the Silk Road Fund, set up in 2014 to finance the initiative, and new lending schemes worth 380 billion yuan equivalent.

In addition, China will encourage its financial institutions to conduct overseas yuan fund businesses with an estimated amount of about 300 billion yuan.

Xi said China will work with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS New Development Bank, the World Bank and other multilateral institutions to support Belt and Road projects.

Speaking of the initiative, Robert Kuhn, a U.S. expert on China, said, "What the Belt and Road does is not foreign aid, that is good but unsustainable. Starting with the Silk Road Fund, the initiative enables the host countries to develop their own economies."

CONSOLIDATE CONSENSUS

As the world's largest developing country that has lifted more than 700 million people out of poverty over the past three decades, China is willing to share its experience and resources with the less developed countries.

China's economic ascent proves that infrastructure development is an effective way to boost growth, and China is the only country with the will, capability and experience to help, said Zhai Kun of Peking University.

China aims to work with other countries to build the Belt and Road into an open platform of cooperation and a solution for challenges, including a lack of new growth drivers, development imbalance and terrorism.

"What we hope to create is a big family of harmonious co-existence," Xi said, adding that pursuit of the Belt and Road will not resort to outdated geopolitical maneuvering.

To ease concerns, Xi said China has no intention of interfering in other countries' internal affairs, exporting its social system and model of development, or imposing its will on others.

Xi said the Belt and Road will be open to all. All countries, from either Asia, Europe, Africa or the Americas, can be partners of the initiative.

So far, the initiative has won support from more than 100 countries and international organizations, of which over 40 have signed cooperation agreements with China.

LANDMARK SIGNIFICANCE

More than three years since being proposed, the initiative has gone beyond vision and become a reality, delivering tangible benefits to countries along the routes.

From Mongolia to Malaysia, Thailand to Pakistan and Laos to Uzbekistan, many projects, including high-speed railways, bridges, ports, industrial parks, oil pipelines and power grids, are being built.

Since 2013, Chinese businesses have invested more than 60 billion U.S. dollars in countries along the Belt and Road. The investment totaled 14.5 billion dollars in 2016 alone, accounting for 8.5 percent of total overseas investment made by Chinese enterprises.

Xi's Sunday speech also said China will expand China-Europe railway cargo services and establish new mechanisms, including a liaison office for the forum's follow-up activities and a research center.

With coordinated and sustained collaboration among all parties concerned, the forum will mark the start of the Belt and Road 2.0, said Jose Vinals, chairman of Standard Chartered PLC.
The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative will see "a modern China using modern methods to create a win-win output," if diplomatic dialogue can be maintained, a British expert predicted Sunday.

John Chipman, the director-general and chief-executive of the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), speaks to China.org.cn on May 14, 2017. [Photo/China.org.cn]

John Chipman, director-general and chief-executive of the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), made this statement to China.org.cn on the sidelines of the ongoing Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF) in Beijing.

With over 60 countries involved, accounting for 70 percent of the world's population, diplomacy has to go hand-in-hand with economic activity in order to gain widespread acceptance, said Chipman, underscoring the need for multilateral dialogue and communication to move the Initiative forward.

Proposed by China's President Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative, consisting of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, seeks to synergize efforts to boost policy coordination, facility connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration and people-to-people links along and even beyond the ancient trade routes.

Speaking on the broadness of the Initiative, Chipman said geopolitical requirements are as important as a geo-economic outcome, as some countries along the route are locked in disputes, often related to territorial claims, that may hinder progress of the multilateral efforts.

He cited the remarks made by Xi at the Forum's opening ceremony, that, "We should ensure that, when it comes to different civilizations, exchanges will replace estrangement, mutual learning will replace clashes, and coexistence will replace a sense of superiority."

Chipman warned: "Without efforts on diplomatic resolution, some of the promises of the Belt and Road Initiative may not be achieved."

While admitting its complexity, the veteran analyst argued that Western doubts and concerns over the China-proposed initiative may be over-hyped.

"I don't think the U.S. and the U.K. really have any special skepticism over the Belt and Road Initiative," he said and added that it is quite normal to see grand economic strategies come along with relatively high risks.

"If there are any economic opportunities in which it makes sense to cooperate, I think Western countries will be very much in favor," thus behaving in a more pragmatic manner.

They will tend to look at it on a project-by-project basis, not look at it only as a single strategy that needs support in all of its elements, he argued and echoed Xi's mention of the "Northern Powerhouse" in the U.K. in the sense of coordinating the two initiatives to deliver win-win output.

Closer China-UK ties

In wake of a likely Brexit scenario, many critics say the U.K. may seek a closer relationship with China as it drifts away from the European Union.

The U.K. may want to establish a new trading relationship with China as soon as it is legally able to do so, Chipman predicted.

This was in response to a remark by British Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Philip Hammond at the Forum that, "As we embark on a new chapter in our history, we want to maintain a close and open trading partnership with our European neighbors and at the same time to secure free trade agreements around the world with new partners and old allies alike."

And China may play a very large role in this.

"As China drives forward the Belt and Road Initiative from the East, we in Britain are a natural partner in the West, standing ready to work with all partner countries to make a success of this initiative and delivering the jobs, growth and higher living standards that must be our central ambition for all of our citizens," Hammond stressed.

Chipman said the IISS would follow the Belt and Road Initiative closely and work with the business community and the government to understand better how the policy works.

This reflects the fact that total trade between China and the Belt and Road countries in 2014-2016 exceeded US$3 trillion, and China's investment in these countries has surpassed US$50 billion.
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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Monday confirmed the test firing of a medium long-range ballistic missile one day earlier.

The official Korean Central News Agency said the test fire of a new gorund-to-ground strategic ballistic missile "DPRK,ballistic missile," was successfully carried out on Sunday by scientists and technicians in the field of rocket research.

DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un guided the test fire on the spot, said the report.

"The test fire was conducted at the highest angle in consideration of the security of neighboring countries. The test fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead," it said.

The missile "accurately hit the targeted open waters 787 km away after flying to the maximum altitude of 2111.5 km along its planned flight orbit, said the report.

"Kim Jong Un hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," said the report.
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French president Emmanuel Macron (L) shakes hands with the outgoing French president Francois Hollande during an inauguration ceremony at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, on May 14, 2017.(Xinhua/Chen Yichen)

Centrist Emmanuel Macron was sworn in as the eighth president of the French Fifth Republic in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace on Sunday.

After a warm welcome from outgoing President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace at around 10:00 a.m. local time (0800 GMT), Macron and Hollande held a closed-door meeting during which Macron was handed the codes to launch France's nuclear arsenal.

President of the Constitutional Council Laurent Fabius then announced the final results of presidential elections and Macron officially assumed the office.

In a speech to several hundred guests, Macron said, "The French have chosen hope and the spirit of conquest."

"I will not give up on the commitments made with regard to the French," said the new president.

"Nothing will make me renounce to defend the interests of France. From this evening I will be at work," he stressed.

During the coming five years of his governing term, Macron hopes to draw "one of the most beautiful images of our history," in which Europe must be more "efficient" and more "democratic."

Following the ceremony and a review of the guard of honor, the 39-year-old Macron will go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Elysees Avenue, a tradition followed by all his predecessors in France's modern history.

Macron won a runoff on May 7, beating far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen by a wide margin.

Macron, a pro-market advocate and ex-investment banker, offered a relief to the market and supporters for economic openness and closer European links.

In his first official visit abroad, Macron will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday in Berlin to forge closer links and seek ways to bolster integration in the European bloc.

Then, he will visit French army forces in the Sahel region, according to local media reports.
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A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear case Monday against U.S. President Donald Trump's travel ban.

The U.S. Courts for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, Northern California, ruled on Feb. 9 against reinstating a travel ban signed on Jan. 27 by Trump as part of an executive order.

The president subsequently issued a revised order on March 6, taking Iraq off the list of countries whose citizens are blocked from entering the United States for 90 days but keeping six other Muslim-majority countries on the list.

The travel ban in the second order was blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii, thus throwing the case again into the 9th circuit court.

In initiating the legal challenge on March 9, Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin noted that the new order, compared with the initial ban, "nothing of substance has changed: there is the same blanket ban on entry from Muslim-majority countries."
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The Philippines on Monday lauded China for pushing forward the Belt and Road Initiative, saying the "bold and fresh" undertaking of Chinese President Xi Jinping will provide more opportunities to the Philippines and the region.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte arrived in Beijing on Saturday for the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation which was officially opened by President Xi on Sunday.

"We note that (Xi) desired the Belt and Road as a bridge for peace, a road to prosperity, a way to boost inclusive growth and balanced development, and to promote equality," the Philippine government said in a statement on Monday.

The Philippines shares the view that a peaceful environment is needed to achieve development goals, it said.

"We are looking forward to the One Belt, One Road Initiative in promoting a prosperous and peaceful community of nations," the statement read, referring to the initiative on the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road brought up by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The initiative is aimed at building a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient Silk Road routes.

It added that the Philippines was pleased to hear that the Belt and Road Initiative is meant to help developing countries to create more opportunities for growth and uplift the lives of people, which are also the priorities of the Duterte administration.

Duterte's cabinet members said the China-proposed initiative would be beneficial to the Build-Build-Build infrastructure plan of the Philippine government.

The Philippines can make use of the initiative to attract more investment for Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines, said Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana shared the sentiment, saying that the insurgency and crimes in the country's South are driven by the lack of economic development opportunities.

"And if we can bring in the infrastructure development in the South, it will be included in this One Belt, One Road, the investment will come, then maybe we can address some of the problems, economic problems in the South, and improve the security situation in the country," Lorenzana said.

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who was recently appointed as the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) by Duterte, said the Philippines will benefit more from the initiative which promotes inter-connectivity.

He noted that the Philippines, due to its archipelagic nature, should improve its infrastructure and inter-connectivity, and the Belt and Road Initiative provides international context for the infrastructure plan of the Duterte administration.

Philippine officials also believe that the Belt and Road Initiative is more than infrastructure inter-connectivity. It is believed to expand the market basis, diversify financing schemes and reinforce people-to-people connectivity, among others.

Duterte's spokesman Ernesto Abella said the Belt and Road Initiative "touched on peace and cooperation, inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit."
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Over 40 civilians were killed by strikes of the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition on the city of Bukamal in the countryside of the eastern province of Deir al-Zour on Monday, pro-government Sham FM radio reported.

The report said the airstrikes targeted civilian areas in Bukamal city, which is controlled by the Islamic State (IS) group in Deir al-Zour.

The airstrike is the latest in a string of similar strikes that claimed the lives of civilians in the process of targeting IS positons.

Last Thursday, at least 11 people were killed and nine others wounded by a U.S.-led airstrike on the northern province of Raqqa.

The airstrike targeted one of the villages in the northern countryside of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the IS terror group, said the report.

The report said all those killed were civilians.

On Wednesday, at least 10 civilians were killed by U.S.-led airstrike against the town of Sour in the countryside of Deir al-Zour.

The U.S.-led anti-terror coalition has also been backing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in their push against the IS positions in Deir al-Zour and Raqqa province.

The coalition previously acknowledged the falling of civilian victims by the airstrikes on IS-held areas in Syria.
A growing number of Chinese visitors offer huge market potential, Fu Jing reports from Athens.

Before 56-year-old Elena Kountoura moved into politics, she was an internationally-renowned model in Paris and Athens, and a seasoned traveler to China, having visited in 1989 and 1998 to promote fashion.

She was struck by how wide the roads were in Beijing when she first visited, and by how there were so many bicycles. The second time, she was amazed at how cars had replaced the bicycles.

"Now, I am excited about my third trip to China," she said in an exclusive interview with China Daily.

Newly married couples from Shanghai pose for a photo during their mass wedding ceremony in the city of Chania on the Greek island of Crete. Provided to China Daily More than 200 Chinese tourists embark on their Aeggean Sea cruise from Piraeus Port in Athens, Greece. Ye Pingfan / Xinhua

The graceful model-turned tourism minister is busy with her trip to China, for which she is conducting warm-up and follow-up activities for Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' visit to the country for the Belt and Road Initiative Forum for International Cooperation.

Following his official visit to China last year, Tsipras is among dozens of foreign leaders attending the Belt and Road forum, which is being held in Beijing.

Sitting in her office, a stone's throw from the historic Greek Parliament building in downtown Athens, Kountoura said her trips to China offer profound perspectives to observe the country's rapid changes over the decades.

Kountoura said part of her mission is to attract more Chinese tourists to Greece. Two promotions are scheduled for Beijing and Shanghai in May and June, respectively.

Showing an Athens map printed in Chinese, she said: "I am ready to welcome China's growing middle class to visit my country, with its long civilization."

Kountoura expects direct flights between Beijing and Athens will help attract more Chinese tourists. It has been reported that Air China is re-launching its Beijing-Athens flight this year, with a stopover in Germany's Munich.

She promises that her ministry will work to ensure Chinese tourists can easily get a visa from the Greek embassy.

Kountoura said that more than 100,000 people applied for a tourist visa last year at the Greek embassy in China, and that additional tourists made their way to Greece via other European countries.

With tourism, one of the few growth sectors in the country's sluggish economy as it has battled through its sovereign debt crisis, the Greek government is aiming to increase the number of its inbound tourists, from about 28 million last year to 30 million this year.

Kountoura said China is a growing market for Greece, which has relied on tourism to contribute around one-fifth of its economic output and its new jobs.

Statistics indicate that tourists from China numbered around 200,000 last year. Greece is determined to boost that number to 1 million by 2021.

"If we have more direct flights, it will be easier and more convenient for Chinese visitors," she said. "I would like to welcome more Chinese. I hope the number will be 500,000 next year."

She said Greece is promoting the concept of destinations being open to tourists for 365 days a year, expanding its tourism sector to include holidays that focus on culture, adventure sports, nature and other areas.

As to trends among Chinese tourists, she noted that Chinese people who travel to Greece tend to stay for longer than six days.

"As we understand it, when Chinese people make such a long trip, they want to see more of Europe," she said. "They want to see Greece and another country. And usually they stay more than a week."

Kountoura said Chinese tourists are "good spenders", who leave behind more money than the average holidaymaker.

"Because Chinese, American or Australian tourists are coming from overseas, they have a bigger average of spending than Europeans. That's for sure," she said.

She also said many young Chinese couples are now traveling to Greece to get married, or for their honeymoon, something that has really taken off in the past two years.

"We still want to develop this product to make sure tourists enjoy their stay in Greece and have a wonderful time," she said.

But she said Greece is not only about its islands, noting that her country hosted the first International Western Silk Road Workshop in Alexandroupolis on April 26 and 27.

"Greece is supportive of the Belt and Road Initiative and tourism can contribute to the China-led proposal, especially by promoting cultural tourism," she said.

Contact the writer atfujing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/14/2017 page48)
A Cayuga County fire department will receive more than $88,000 to buy new equipment, U.S. Rep. John Katko announced Monday.

The Throop Fire Department has been awarded $88,752. The department will use the funding to purchase new self-contained breathing apparatus units.

Another fire company in Katko's district, the Palmyra Fire Department in Wayne County, will receive $163,917 for new equipment.

"It is imperative that central New York's first responders have the resources they need to perform their jobs safely and in a timely manner," Katko, R-Camillus, said in a statement. "The federal grants that these local fire departments received will ensure the safety of our firefighters as they continue to risk their lives for central New York each and every day."

The grants were provided through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program, which launched in 2001.

Other Cayuga County fire departments have benefited from the program in recent years. The Fleming Volunteer Fire Department received $546,429 in 2015 to buy a new fire truck. The Sennett Fire Department also received a grant that year  $17,143 to buy a new commercial washer and dryer system.
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Editor's note: President Xi Jinping continued his schedule of bilateral meetings with leaders attending the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on Sunday. Following are highlights of the two-way talks:

Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's president

Kazakhstan

China expects to push forward the Belt and Road Initiative with Kazakhstan to achieve more to benefit the two peoples, President Xi Jinping said during a meeting with Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

The Silk Road Economic Belt, which was introduced in Kazakhstan in 2013, has been actively endorsed by more than 100 countries and international organizations, Xi said.

After four years of joint efforts, bilateral cooperation on the initiative has entered a new stage featuring deep integration and mutual promotion, Xi said.

He also asked the two sides to strengthen cooperation in law enforcement and fighting the three evil forces - separatism, extremism and terrorism.

China supports Kazakhstan in playing a bigger role in international security affairs and contributing to global peace, he added.

Nazarbayev congratulated the successful opening of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

Xi's keynote speech answered many major questions facing the international community at the moment, he said.

Kazakhstan firmly supports the initiative and expects to deepen cooperation with China in fields including trade, agriculture, mining, railroads and technology, Nazarbayev said.

Joko Widodo

, Indonesian president

Indonesia

Efforts to integrate China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative and Indonesia's vision of "global maritime nexus" have borne fruit in enriched bilateral relations and a greatly enlarged space for cooperation, President Xi Jinping said in a meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Sunday.

Xi introduced the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative in Indonesia in 2013, while Widodo unveiled his concept of a global maritime nexus soon after assuming office in 2014.

The two countries should deepen pragmatic cooperation, promote infrastructure projects and promote balanced bilateral trade, Xi said.

Widodo said Indonesia has high praise for the Belt and Road Initiative and the forum. He said his country believes that building the initiative will bring more opportunities for economic cooperation with China.

Indonesia expects to deepen cooperation under the framework of the initiative, raise the level of trade and investment and discuss construction of an economic connectivity corridor - especially cooperation on major projects infields such as industry, agriculture, electrical power, ports and tourism, he said.

After the talks, the two presidents witnessed the signing of cooperation agreements, including an action plan to implement the comprehensive strategic partnership.
SF Holding, China's biggest private courier company, expects countries and regions participating in the Belt and Road Initiative to evolve rapidly and become the main forces behind the company's expanding international business, according to a senior executive.

"Countries and regions along the Belt and Road Initiative, especially Southeast Asian, South Asian and Eastern European countries, will become our core driving force in the future," said Ray Li, vice-president of the company's international business unit.

However, he conceded that currently the majority of SF Holding's delivery work is in European countries and the United States.

The company's service covers about 200 countries and regions, and it has about 124,000 employees in 14 countries. Last year, its international business revenue soared by about 309 percent to 1.1 billion yuan ($159 million).

"Our international business only accounts for about 2 percent of our total revenue now, so the potential is huge," Li told China Daily.

The company is upgrading its delivery service into an integrated operation covering the whole industry chain, such as funding, cross-border payments and market analysis.

The Shenzhen-listed company has been aggressively expanding its global express services. While it has partnered with local carriers to set up a network covering about 200 countries and regions, it has also established 10 international branches. The first was founded in Singapore in 2010, and its latest offices were established in Vietnam and Thailand.

Li said the rapid growth of cross-border e-commerce in the region is one of the key reasons for his confidence in the market.

"Many people have the misconception that the Belt and Road Initiative is asset-heavy and focuses on B2B, but I believe the key is to encourage the development of B2C and C2C (customer to customer) business," Li said.

grace@chinadailyhk.com
Agreement will see tariffs eliminated on majority of Chinese exports

The China-Georgia Free Trade Agreement will create more space for trade, services and investment activities within the Eurasian area, officials said on Sunday.

On Saturday, the two countries sealed the agreement to expand bilateral trade. The agreement will become operative sometime between the end of this year and early next year.

Once the agreement takes effect, Georgia will eliminate tariffs on 96.5 percent of Chinese exports, while almost 91 percent of China's imports from Georgia will become tariff-free immediately. A further 3 percent will be exempted from tariffs within five years.

Georgia's main exports to China are copper ore, iron ore, nuts, wine, spirits, gold and semifinished products. China ships construction machinery, manufacturing equipment, steel, electronics, textiles, garments and household appliances to Georgia.

Zhang Xingfu, deputy director-general of the Department of International Trade and Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Commerce, said the FTA negotiations achieved the goals of comprehensive content and balanced interests.

"It is also significant to the development of the Belt and Road Initiative and China's FTA strategic layout in the region," he said.

The FTA covers 17 items, including trade in goods, services, intellectual property rights and the rules governing them. It also includes new topics such as e-commerce, market competition and the environment.

Georgia agreed to further open its services trade covering finance, transportation and other sectors, while China will allow Georgia greater access to its tourism and ocean shipping markets.

Trade between China and Georgia amounted to $717 million from January to September last year, while Georgia imported goods worth $547 million from China, which is the country's fifth-largest trade partner after Canada, Turkey, Russia and Ireland, during the same period, according to Georgia's statistics agency.

Georgy Gakhariya, Georgia's minister of economy and sustainable development, said the agreement could result in higher levels of commerce.

"We hope this free trade agreement will help to increase trade with bigger economies such as China, the European Union and Turkey," he said.

"Georgia also has free trade agreements with the EU and all of our neighbors, such as Turkey and Russia. So Chinese investors who are interested in trading with big economies, such as the EU, can invest in our country."

This year, China will continue to push forward FTA talks with more than 20 economies and regions related to the Belt and Road Initiative after clinching 11 similar deals in the Eurasian region, the Ministry of Commerce said last week.

Contact the writers at zhongnan@chinadaily.com.cn
The Belt and Road Initiative is the only current significant engine for global economic growth, the head of a leading think tank says.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, an international political and economic think tank in Washington, said the initiative is already a remarkable achievement.

"This is a new perspective for the future. I think it is a new dynamic that is really gaining incredible momentum.

"The people who said the Belt and Road Initiative would collapse have been proved quickly wrong because the statistics now show it has become the new engine of growth for the world economy - in fact, the only one - and it will continue to be like that."

Zepp-LaRouche, who was speaking on the opening day of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, said the initiative now has a clear shape.

"In my mind it is pretty clear how it is developing because China has had an unbelievable economic miracle in the last 30 years, and in a certain sense what the Belt and Road Initiative does is allow China to export that economic miracle."

The German-born Zepp-LaRouche, 68, said greater connectivity would aid development in some of the world's most troubled areas, particularly in the Middle East.

"The initiative has changed the dynamic around many of the crisis spots already. Hopefully, we can enter a new era of mankind so we can stop having senseless wars with people suffering."

Zepp-LaRouche said her own institute, founded in 1984, was an early advocate of the underlying ideas of the Belt and Road.

Where China could make a difference is in its commitment to high-speed rail, she said.

"China has become a leader in fast-train building. By 2020 it will have 40,000 kilometers of fast rail, compared to none at all in the United States. If the United States wanted to do the same thing with much of its infrastructure in a terrible condition, it would have to ask the Chinese for their expertise."

She hoped the US would eventually join in and fully support the initiative.

"I think there were positive signs of this when President Xi met with President Trump in his Mar-a-Lago private residence in Florida. There has been good communication between the two, and while Mr Trump may not be at the forum, an early trip is planned to China."

Denis Depoux, Asia deputy president and senior partner of Roland Berger, a global consultancy, said the initiative could also be a boon to European companies.

"Many of the European infrastructure, industry equipment and services giants have a chance to leverage their experience in these regions, partner with their Chinese counterparts and develop a new, more inclusive, joint development approach."

The Belt and Road could remove many of the major barriers to development in many parts of the world, he said.

"Financing challenges, and first and foremost insufficient infrastructure, have hindered development. China's initiative brings structure, financing and political impetus, while the strong focus on infrastructure will swiftly enable easier trade and investment."

Contact the writers at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn
Liu Qibao (third from right), a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, meets with participants of the Thematic Session on Think Tank Exchanges of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing on Sunday. Han Haidan / China News Service

Exchanges between think tank institutes provide intelligent support for the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative worldwide, said Liu Qibao, head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

Liu, also a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, addressed the Thematic Session on Think Tank Exchanges of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing on Sunday.

Liu said the Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013, is a seed containing wisdom that is now putting down roots and bearing fruit.

More than 200 experts attended the session, including heads of think tanks, university presidents and international relations researchers.

"The international order is changing, and we need to include the Belt and Road in the research of international relations," Liu said. "China's growth has benefited from the world and at the same time been of benefit to the world."

Zeng Peiyan, chairman of the China Center for International Economic Exchange, said the initiative connects the Eurasian continent and looks to harness new possibilities for regional and global development.

The initiative meets the need for modern countries to grow economically and for establishing a human community of shared destiny, he said.

"On one hand, think tanks can analyze history and look for different ways of working together according to different countries' needs," Zeng said. "On the other hand, we can provide powerful experiences to increase collaboration between China and the world."

Those attending the session included former government officials, who agreed that countries not involved in the Belt and Road Initiative should also take part and work with China.

"The Belt and Road Initiative means a lot to countries not only in Asia and Europe, but also the whole world, and it could be the road that leads the world to communicate," said Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia.

With the world's political instability and the sluggish economy, the Belt and Road Initiative was written into a United Nations General Assembly resolution last year, which was a good start for world development, he said.

"The practical content of the Belt and Road is about investment. It's about investment in infrastructure."

Northern Australia, where there are "vast expanses of land and a smaller population", contains rich opportunities for Chinese infrastructure investors, he said.

"The best way these things are done is through combined investment. So across the enormous potential of northern Australia, we think there are good opportunities both for Chinese and Australian investors."

Henry Paulson, former US Treasury secretary, said the United States should pay more attention to the ambitious initiative.

"I am an American, and I believe US firms, expertise and capital can and should have a role to play. So I hope Americans keep an open mind as the Belt and Road develops and look for opportunities to participate.

"President Xi Jinping has taken a significant step by systemizing China's ideas and initiatives through the Belt and Road. I welcome his commitment to connectivity and the way that China is stepping up to develop not only its own infrastructure but that of other countries."

Wang Qingyun, Tian Ameng and Sun Ruonan contributed to this story.

renqi@chinadaily.com.cn
Minister thanks delegates for bringing people together

Song Tao (center), minister of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, talks to delegates at the people-to-people connectivity session of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing. Nian Qing / For China Daily

Delegates expressed their recognition for the Belt and Road Initiative and the importance of personal bonds at a session of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on Sunday.

Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, said the initiative proposed by President Xi is "bold and visionary".

"It has already, since its launch in 2013, made very important progress," she said. "I'm happy that the World Health Organization is part of the initiative, working with China and the countries along the Belt and Road corridor and all the partners to build a healthy Silk Road."

Irina Bokova, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said the initiative is another soft power and infrastructure platform to provide people of different generations with knowledge and an openness of mind.

"It equips youth with 21st century skills, skills ... in an increasingly interdependent society, skills to navigate across cultures and languages to find joint solutions, skills to have global citizenship."

The Thematic Session on People-to-People Connectivity was hosted by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and co-hosted by 12 ministries and commissions of China that may be involved in efforts to build ties between people from China and other countries in areas such as culture, education, health, science and technology and tourism.

With more than 400 attendees from 60 countries and regions, the session had the largest number of guests of the six thematic sessions of the forum. Among the delegates were 100 ministerial-level officials and more than 10 leaders of international organizations, such as the International Labor Organization and the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

Song Tao, minister of the hosting department, expressed gratitude to delegates for helping people come together since the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed. "China and the Belt and Road countries have had various forms of people-to-people exchanges and collaboration over the past three years, and that has helped people from both sides understand each other and become friends.

"This has laid a great foundation for people to understand and then to support the initiative, as well as bringing collaboration in other fields under the initiative."

The session on people-to-people ties provided a golden opportunity to further strengthen bonds among people, he said.

During the session, some people from Belt and Road countries that have worked with China over the past three years, such as Myanmar, Uzbekistan and Tanzania, were invited to talk of the benefits the initiative has brought to them.

Sanjeewa Alwis, a Sri Lankan employed by China Communication Construction Co to work for the Colombo Port City Project in his own country, said: "I am confident that Chinese enterprises can help us to create a better future...I believe that Colombo will become as prosperous a city as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

"I heard a sentence recently from my Chinese colleagues that I like very much. It's 'Let's roll up our sleeves and get down to hard work.' I hope we can work together to make the great vision a reality."

Contact the writers at zhaoxinying@chinadaily.com.cn and wangkaihao@chinadaily.com.cn
Miao Wei (center), minister of industry and information technology, attends a session on infrastructure connectivity, part of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in Beijing on Sunday. Zou Hong / China Daily

President calls for further development of trans-regional logistics network and global energy interconnection to boost economy

China will try its best to promote infrastructure connectivity, since that is the foundation of international cooperation and development, President Xi Jinping said while addressing the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on Sunday.

Xi also spoke about how to further enhance infrastructure connectivity.

"We should promote land, sea and air connectivity and the information expressway, concentrate our efforts on key passageways, cities and projects, and build a network of highways, railways and seaports," he said.

Xi proposed the further development of a trans-regional logistics network and global energy interconnection to achieve green and low-carbon growth.

China has tried to promote infrastructure connectivity under the Belt and Road Initiative since it was proposed by Xi in 2013.

The initiative aims to boost exchanges in trade, infrastructure investment and people-to-people understandings between China and the rest of the world.

Minister of Transport Li Xiaopeng said that so far, China has signed more than 130 bilateral and regional transportation agreements with other countries, including those on railways, roads and civil aviation.

"A more convenient international transportation network will be established (because of the initiative)," he said while hosting a panel session on Sunday afternoon.

According to the Ministry of Transport, 356 cross-border highway and railway routes had been opened between China and 15 Belt and Road countries by the end of last year.

Direct flights now link China with 43 Belt and Road countries.

In an earlier interview, Li said transportation and infrastructure connectivity are the cornerstones of the initiative.

More than 200 delegates from around 60 countries and international organizations attended the panel session on infrastructure connectivity.

"We want to be building bridges, not walls," said Jyrki Katainen, vice-president of the European Commission, adding that economic growth can be stimulated by improving infrastructure connectivity.

Tadeusz Szozda, chairman of the Organization for Cooperation of Railways, said the organization supports the initiative.

Through cooperation, customs clearance procedures for cross-border rail transportation can be simplified to reduce time and costs, thus promoting international trade, he said.

luowangshu@chinadaily.com.cn
A worker inspects power generation facilities at the Vitebsk hydropower station, the largest in Belarus, in April. The $200 million project, built by China National Electric Engineering Co, is part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Bai Xueqi / Xinhua

China plans to build water conservancy training centers that could offer tailored training for personnel from countries related with the Belt and Road Initiative, said a senior water resources official.

Liu Zhiguang, director of the Ministry of Water Resources' department of international cooperation, science and technology, said that these centers will integrate both scientific research and training.

They could offer targeted training on small hydroelectric facilities, electrification of rural areas, flood control and drought relief, water-saving irrigation, planning and management of water conservancy, and the design, construction and operation of water conservancy projects, he said.

China has helped train more than 2,000 technicians and managerial personnel from Asia, Africa and South America on water conservancy technology, such as flood control, drought relief and water-saving irrigation, according to the ministry.

The Hangzhou Regional Center (Asia-Pacific) for Small Hydro Power, established in 1981 and co-sponsored by the United Nations Development Program and the Chinese government, has drafted a plan for cooperation with Belt and Road nations, said Xu Jincai, director of the center.

He said the center set up a working team to offer training to developing countries under the leadership of the Ministry of Water Resources.

"The team also promotes the transfer of China's small hydropower technologies to other developing countries or carrying out demonstrations of the technology," he said.

Xu said that the center has offered training to 1,700 technicians or officials from 112 countries and regions since 1983.

In addition to English, it can also offer training in French and Russian. Meanwhile, the center also helps major Chinese water conservancy and hydropower enterprises to train staff to help maintain their facilities.

Since 2015, the center has built four overseas research and training centers or manufacturing bases for small hydropower projects, including the China-Pakistan Joint Research Center for Small Hydropower, and the China-Africa Research and Training Center for Clean Energy and Electrification in Rural Areas, which is based in Ethiopia, Xu said.

He said that the four centers have served as overseas bases to expand international cooperation. The China-Pakistan joint research center is now cooperating with Pakistani renewable energy authorities, a technology institute in Nepal and Sri Lankan sustainable energy authorities to promote hydropower technologies.
China is seeking increased support from international financial institutions, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to expand water conservancy and hydropower cooperation with countries along the Belt and Road, according to a senior water resources official.

Based on an analysis of other countries' needs and China's advantages, the nation will propose key areas and approaches for this cooperation, Liu Zhiguang, director of the Ministry of Water Resources' department of international cooperation, science and technology, said in an interview.

Chinese businesses will also be encouraged to participate in the cooperation to boost local economic growth, Liu said.

China has built a comprehensive flood control and drought relief system with 410,000 kilometers of river dikes and 98,000 reservoirs, according to the ministry.

With 6 percent of the world's fresh water and 9 percent of the world's arable land, China feeds 21 percent of the world's population, Liu said, adding that China has attached increasing importance to environmental protection when planning and constructing water conservancy projects.

To share its experience, China has signed water resource-related cooperation agreements or memorandums of understanding with more than 10 countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, and drafted cooperation plans with 13 others.

Twenty-three institutions affiliated with the ministry, which are qualified to conduct overseas business, were involved in 1,394 projects with a contract value of around $2 billion in more than 70 countries or regions from 2011 to 2016, according to the ministry.

Liu said that many of the projects have won praise from local governments and the public.

For example, the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric facility in Ecuador, which was designed by Yellow River Engineering Consulting Co and constructed by the Power Construction Corporation of China, withstood a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in 2016 and offered necessary electricity for disaster relief efforts. The facility also changed the country into a power exporter from an importer.

"We expect to take the opportunity of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation to establish a cooperation mechanism with more countries. We also welcome water resources officials and experts from Belt and Road countries to visit water conservancy and hydroelectric facilities in China," said Liu.

China also expects to enhance policy and technological communication and cooperation in flood control and drought relief regarding cross-border rivers, hydrological information sharing, personnel training and joint scientific research with Belt and Road countries, he said.

China has been making effort to overcome challenges that hinder its international cooperation in water conservancy and hydropower.

Some countries do not accept Chinese technical standards, and the nation still has a lack of people with knowledge of international rules and project operation in this field, Liu said.

Key standards

The Chinese government has translated 24 key technical standards related to water conservancy and hydropower, while it also encourages businesses to establish complete security management systems to improve their risk resistance capabilities, he said.

Xie Xiangrong, vice-president of Changjiang Institute of Survey, Planning, Design and Research, the designer of the Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest hydroelectric facility, said that as China is still a relative newcomer in the international market, it has yet to win recognition for its technical standards.

Few overseas water conservancy projects currently use Chinese standards, he said.

With more than 3,000 employees, the institute now has businesses in 45 countries and regions.

"The translation of Chinese standards has just started and the promotion still fails to meet the need of the Belt and Road Initiative," he said.

Xie said his institute has sent more than 120 employees to the United States for training in water resources and international project management, and organized various other training programs to deal with international projects.

However, more skilled staff are needed, especially those with expertise in coping with international economic fluctuations and political instability, the modification of contract clauses and technical standards, and expertise on collecting claim-related evidence.

houliqiang@chinadaily.com.cn
The New York State Senate is under fire for a questionable payroll practice that is allowing seven senators, including freshman state Sen. Pam Helming, to receive stipends usually reserved for committee chairs despite not holding those posts.

In Helming's case, she's listed as the chair of the Senate Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee and is slated to receive a $12,500 stipend in 2017. However, the chair of the panel is state Sen. Patrick Gallivan, a western New York Republican. Helming, R-Canandaigua, is the vice chair.

Helming said in a phone interview Monday that's she's looking to return the stipend. She's received two checks totaling $12,500, but hasn't cashed them.

She wasn't sure if the state comptroller's office would accept the return checks. If that's not an option, she said she'll explore other ways of returning the money to taxpayers.

"I have never represented myself as the chair of Crimes and Corrections because I'm not. I'm not the chair," she said. "And while it may be legal to issue a check to me, I'm not comfortable with it and I won't accept it."

The payment was allocated for Helming because Gallivan is receiving a separate  and higher  stipend after being listed as chair of the Senate Education Committee in documents submitted to the state comptroller's office. The person in that post receives an $18,000 bonus.

The actual chair of the Senate Education Committee is state Sen. Carl Marcellino. He doesn't receive the stipend for the chair because he gets a larger payment  $22,000  as majority whip. Senators may accept one stipend for either a committee chair position or leadership post.

The practice is not new. Over the weekend, Senate Republicans provided documentation showing that other senators have received committee chair stipends over the years even though they weren't the leaders of the respective panels.

In 2016, state Sen. Andrew Lanza, a Staten Island Republican, received an $18,000 stipend and was listed as chairman of the Senate Codes Committee. The committee was actually chaired by state Sen. Michael Nozzolio, Helming's predecessor who retired in 2016.

Nozzolio, R-Fayette, opted to accept his $22,000 stipend as majority whip of the Senate.

Lanza chaired the Senate Investigations and Government Operations Committee. But the position had a lower stipend  $15,000  than what's allocated for the Codes committee chair.

In addition to Senate Republicans that have benefited from the practice, three members of the Independent Democratic Conference, which has a power-sharing arrangement with the GOP, receive stipends despite not serving as committee chairs or having leadership posts.

IDC and Senate GOP leaders insist the bonuses are legal.

David Lewis, counsel to Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan, released an opinion declaring the payments as "proper under the authority of the New York State Constitution."

"The Legislature's allocation of institutional resources to its own members, a classic example of internal administrative prerogatives is properly left to the Legislature to make, in furtherance of the duties particular to that body, without interference from the other two branches of government," Lewis wrote.

He also dismissed claims that the Senate's stipend certifications could be subject to criminal charges, specifically filing a false instrument. That possibility has been raised by critics who believe the documents contain false information  that senators are inaccurately listed as committee chairs.

One good government group, Common Cause/New York, has referred to the documents as "fraudulent" and called for an investigation into the practice.

Shontell Smith, director of counsel and finance for the Senate Democratic Conference, released her own assessment of the stipends Monday. She considers the arrangement illegal.

"Senate leadership and their staffs may not lawfully file records with the comptroller that authorizes payments to senators for such allowances unless that specific senator explicitly holds the position listed in legislative law," Smith wrote.
If you had only one day in Beijing, what would you do? Yang Feiyue has a few tips from the experts.

Foreign visitors can visit such landmark destinations as Tian'anmen Square, the Palace Museum, the Temple of Heaven and the Great Wall if they have only a short stay in the Chinese capital that boasts a lot of famous historical and cultural sites. Photos Provided To China Daily

Beijing is a tourism destination all year round. It is most famous for historical and cultural sites, with natural and urban landscapes too. The Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace draw visitors from far and wide. And the capital also lets you sample gourmet food from across the country and abroad. So, one does not have to go to southwestern province of Yunnan or Chongqing, or Japan or South Korea to savor authentic cuisine.

Last year, the city saw an 80 percent growth in the number of tourists from the Belt and Road countries, compared with 2015, according to a report by China's biggest online travel agency Ctrip.

The Ctrip site also received 3 million visitors from those countries last year, up by more than 50 percent, compared with the previous year.

Most of the visitors were from Vietnam, Russia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar, Mongolia, Indonesia and India.

In a Ctrip's survey, 95 percent of inbound tourists from the Belt and Road countries showed a strong interest in China's history and culture.

Meanwhile, besides the regular tourist attractions, international visitors wanted interactive experiences, such as sampling traditional snacks and trying out Chinese calligraphy.

Most of the foreign visitors were aged between 35 and 50 and their average spending on a one-day trip was 300-800 yuan ($43-116).

So, what can you do if you have only one day in Beijing? China Daily asks Ctrip and some travel veterans for help, and this is what they suggest.

Landmark tour

Tian'anmen Square

It is a symbol of grandeur. It sits in the center of Beijing and is one of the biggest squares in the world. Covering an area of 440,000 square meters, the square can easily accommodate 1 million people. It has witnessed many momentous events. Once there, one can also visit the Monument to the People's Heroes and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong at the center of the square, the Great Hall of the People to the west, and the National Museum of China to the east. The Zhengyang Gate and Qianmen watchtower in the south are two ancient gate towers built in the 14th century.

Palace Museum

The museum, also known as the Forbidden City, offers a glimpse into royal life. The city was home to 24 emperors during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. The grand overall layout, imposing ancient palaces and halls, as well as a wide range of antique paintings, calligraphy and ceramics inside are bound to leave a deep impression. The Palace of Longevity and Health, where Emperor Qianlong's mother lived, was opened for visitors only two years ago.

Badaling Great Wall

It winds its way through high peaks in the north of the capital. It shows the Great Wall as it would have looked originally. Most of the preserved parts were built and reinforced during the Ming Dynasty to defend Beijing against the Mongolians. The wall allows 10 soldiers to march side by side. The watchtowers were built to accommodate soldiers, send messages, observe the enemy and store supplies. The northern part of Badaling is steeper than the south and offers better sights, and thus is more popular with tourists. There is a Great Wall Museum and Great Wall National Theater close by.

The Place

A modern business and leisure facility, The Place brings one back to the modern world after experiencing the historical sites. In addition to dining and shopping, The Place is known for its huge electronic screen, believed to be the third biggest in the world. It is 250 meters long and 30 meters wide and was designed by Jeremy Railton, an Emmy Awards winning stage master.

Spring tour

Geijing water town

Riverside stone-paved old streets, graceful houses and unique folk customs make the town in Beijing's northeastern suburb Miyun county an ideal getaway. It sits at the foot of the Simatai Great Wall and offers a stunning night view featuring polychromatic lights. Visitors can watch traditional liquor making, enjoy aromatic liquor, learn to cook at the Sima Spirit Workshop and understand Chinese dyeing history by watching the process at the Yongshun Dye House.

Simatai Great Wall

It runs 5.4 kilometers from east to west and is known for being perilous. It features various types of construction styles. The eastern part of the wall was built along steep mountain ridges, and the elevation goes abruptly up - from 295 meters to 986 meters - making for a breathtaking scene. The wall changes dramatically depending on the terrain. Some segments along the gentle slopes are wide, while other narrow parts allow only one person to pass at a time. The wall also features two-storey and three-storey towers. Hiking the wall there takes some stamina, but a cable car is also available.

The suburb tour

Longqing Gorge

The gorge is roughly 10 km northeast of Yanqing county. It covers 119 square km and features a concrete dam that is more than 70 meters high. Visitors can see a waterfall in summer and a icefall in winter. They can take a boat along a river flanked by cliffs, and enjoy the view of mountains along the way. A 258-meter elevator shaped like a dragon takes visitors to the top of the dam. The elevator has made it to the Guinness Book of Records for its length. Riding on a steel cable between the mountain top and the bottom of the gorge is a thrilling experience.

Guyaju Caves

Situated in the west of Yanqing county, the Guyaju Caves cover an area of 100,000 square meters. They served as residences. More than 100 stone rooms can be seen. Traces of human occupation are found at Guyaju, such as windows, stone beds, closets, lamp stands, and horse mangers.

Contact the writer at yangfeiyue@chinadaily.com.cn
President Xi Jinping chairs the Leaders' Roundtable Summit at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, on May 15, 2017. [Photo by Xu Jingxing/chinadaily.com.cn]

BEIJING - Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday elaborated on what had inspired him to come up with the Belt and Road Initiative, stressing that it is aimed at galvanizing global cooperation and is open to all.

Xi made the remarks at the Leaders' Roundtable Summit at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing.

"The Belt and Road development does not shut out, nor is it directed against, any party," Xi told the summit.

Proposed in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative is a grand plan to connect Asia with Europe and Africa along, and beyond, ancient trade routes by putting in place an unparalleled trade and infrastructure network.

At Monday's summit, Xi spoke of the myriad challenges the world faces: sluggish trade and investment, wobbling economic globalization, increasingly unbalanced development, impact from large-scale migration of refugees and immigrants, as well as wars, conflicts and terrorism.

Countries are exploring their own ways to deal with these challenges and have put forward many good development strategies and initiatives, but it is difficult to rely on a single country to manage or solve the global problems, Xi said, citing the inter-dependence between nations.

Only by aligning their policies and integrating economic factors and resources in a global scale can countries create synergy to promote world peace, stability and shared development, he noted.

Under these circumstances, the world may well draw wisdom and strength from the ancient Silk Road, which features the spirit of peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit, Xi said.

Though originating from China, the Belt and Road Initiative belongs to the whole world, while its development goes beyond regions, stages of development, and civilizations, according to the president.

He described the Belt and Road development as a "brand of cooperation" that is open and inclusive, and a global public good jointly provided by all parties.

Under the Belt and Road framework, Xi explained, all parties can join hands to meet the global challenges in the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits.

The initiative also enables countries to create new development opportunities and impetus, and leverage their comparative advantages for win-win results, to make progress toward building a community of shared future for mankind, he said.

Xi said he is glad to see positive responses to and extensive support for the initiative from the international community, with more than 100 countries and international organizations already engaging in it.

A total of 29 foreign heads of state and government leaders attended the two-day forum.
On May 14 - 15, the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which takes the theme "strengthening international cooperation and co-building the 'Belt and Road' for win-win development," will be held here in Beijing.

President Xi Jinping will attend the opening ceremony and host a round-table leaders' summit. 29 heads of state and government leaders and 3 heads of the most influential international organizations including the United Nations' Secretary-General will attend the round-table leaders' summit.

This marks a new height for China's "home field" diplomacy ever since China's successful hosting of the Beijing APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) economic leaders' meeting in 2015 and the G20 Hangzhou Summit in 2016.

This forum will function as a platform for enhancing the Belt and Road construction and have attracted worldwide attention.

Since Xi proposed the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, the B&R construction has obtained its first-stage achievement: evolving from individual projects to interconnected economic corridors and belts; paralleling the development of both land and sea routes; bridging the east to the west.

As a "China Proposal" embodied with oriental wisdom and major power's responsibility, the Belt and Road Intitiative has become a new pattern of improving global governance, a new platform of strengthening international cooperation and a new solution of promoting welfare for peoples in countries alongside the New Silk Road.

We have reasons to believe the B&R Forum will open up a new vista for international cooperation, enhance construction of the B&R onto a new stage, and inject new energy in structuring a more impartial, rational and balanced global governance system.

Byang Maorong, researcher with the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations; cartoon drawing by Liao Tingting
Xu Haoliang, assistant secretary general of the United Nations and director of the Regional Bureau for Asia and Pacific at the United Nations Development Programme. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The Belt and Road Initiative promotes the opposite of inward-looking mentality and "could indeed shape the 21st century international cooperation model", a senior United Nations official has told China Daily.

"The Belt and Road Initiative aims to promote shared prosperity based on voluntary participation and mutual benefits," United Nations assistant secretary general Xu Haoliang said.

Xu, who is also director of the Regional Bureau for Asia and Pacific, said the initiative's effects "could be transformational, particularly if it promotes economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Commenting on the role of the United Nations Development Program, Xu noted that a Memorandum of Understanding had been signed with China on the Belt and Road Initiative in September last year.

"UNDP's role will be to help engage the B&R Initiative stakeholders in promoting poverty eradication, environmental sustainability and inclusive social development," he said.

"We are already providing support in policy formulation and coordination, capacity building, and piloting projects. With operations in 170 countries and territories, and with 50 years of experience in global development, UNDP is innovating and strives to be a sustainable development advisor to the Belt and Road Initiative," he added.

Recently, the UNDP launched the 2017 Report on the Sustainable Development of Chinese Enterprises Overseas after surveying 550 Chinese enterprises and stakeholders.

The findings show that Chinese enterprises provide significant economic and social benefits to countries along the routes.

"We found, for example, that Chinese companies were employing more than 1.2 million local staff in 2015, which is a 30 percent increase from 2014. However, there are still improvements to be made by Chinese enterprises in environmental protection, gender equality, and communication with stakeholders," he said.

Asked about the UNDP's advice for businesses operating overseas, Xu said: "Our recommendation is to align Belt and Road investment planning and project implementation, including at the enterprise level, with the participating countries' development aspersions and the Sustainable Development Goals framework."

"This will allow Belt and Road investments to achieve the overarching objectives of win-win cooperation and sustainable development  through increased policy coordination, connectivity, investment, trade and people-to-people exchange," he said.
Premier Li Keqiang meets with Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sunday. LIU ZHEN / CHINA NEWS SERVICE

China is capable of maintaining financial stability and will strike a proper balancereducing leverage rates while sustaining economic growthand the government's top priority will be preventing financial risk, Premier Li Keqiang said on Sunday.

Li made the remark in a meeting with Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who is in Beijing to attend the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which started on Sunday.

Li expressed China's willingness to enhance its policy communication with the IMF, advocating a more globalized economy and fostering international trade and investment.

He also said China will keep a managed floating exchange rate system based on supply and demand.

Lagarde expressed her thanks to Li for China's support of the IMF, from multilateralism to international cooperation and trade. She said the IMF is willing to continue to enhance its communication and cooperation with China.

Lagarde said that while China has experienced encouraging economic growth, it has adopted a prudent approach to financial regulation and has a sound financial system.

The IMF upgraded its forecast for China's economic growth in its latest outlook in mid-April. It now expects growth of 6.6 percent in 2017, 0.1 percentage point higher than its January forecast.

An IMF statement following the report said the upward revision is the result of China's strong growth momentum and anticipation of continued policy support.

The report also raised its forecast for the global economy by 0.1 percentage point from its January projection. IMF Chief Economist Maurice Obstfeld said the improvement is due primarily to good economic news for Europe and Asia, and within Asia for China and Japan.
MA XUEJING/LI MIN/SU JINGBO/CHINA DAILY

Sustained focus on infrastructure overcomes perception that China's visionary drive for transcontinental development is an attempt at global dominance

The Belt and Road Initiative will continue to make emerging economies more competitive, narrowing the developmental inequity between landlocked countries and coastal regions, said business leaders and trade experts.

"Facts prove that China has become part of international efforts to pursue common development and common prosperity for countries and regions that need to gain new growth momentum via what they have and are good at," Yu Jianlong, secretary-general of the Beijing-based China Chamber of International Commerce, said.

And Yu contended that the initiative is not an attempt by China to exert its economic and political influence globally.

In 2013, China proposed the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road to build infrastructure, service and trade networks connecting more than60countries and regions in Asia, Europe and Africa.

Known as the Belt and Road Initiative, it aspires to improve the lives of around 4.4 billion people or 63 percent of the world's population. The initiative has gained support from over 100 economies and international organizations, with nearly 50 cooperation agreements signed between governments since 2013.

From a global perspective, bilateral and multilateral cooperation projects for infrastructure and production capacity expansion have come to be the hallmarks of the initiative.

But, the initiative has been perceived in some quarters as China's attempt to rise as a 21st century global superpower.

"China has been deliberately accused by certain foreign media of practising neo-colonialism in some countries, exploiting energy resources and other minerals and supporting authoritarian regimes," said He Jingtong, a business professor at Nankai University in Tianjin.

"I think none of this holds water. If you look at history, tell me when has China been a colonial power? If it hasn't been in the past, why should it be now?"

He said there are areas, of course, where there might be competition with companies from developed markets; but there is also a desire to identify areas for cooperation.Unfortunately, that has not received much attention.

The launch of a series of big-ticket projects like the high-speed railway projects in Indonesia, port expansion work in Djibouti and nuclear power facility in the United Kingdom are all shining examples of the achievements under the initiative so far.

Many more such game-changing projects are in the pipeline.

China has invested more than $50 billion in economies covered by the Belt and Road Initiative, data from the National Development and Reform Commission show.

Argentine Ambassador to China, Diego Ramiro Guelar, said the South American country will increase efforts to develop its energy and transport infrastructure over the next 30 years, thanks in large part to the bilateral partnership and participation in the initiative.

"China has big companies and rich experience to push forward development in railways, roads, water conservation and energy in Argentina," Guelar said.

In terms of developing regional connectivity and infrastructure development, China is working in aviation, power, rail, road and telecommunications projects with participating economies. Chinese companies are also working with foreign partners such as Volvo Construction Equipment, United Technologies Corp and ABB Group to develop infrastructure in various economies covered by the initiative.

The focus on infrastructure development has been unswerving and all-encompassing.

China has pushed forward six economic corridors: the New Eurasian Continental Bridge, the China-Mongolia-Russia corridor, the China-Central Asia-West Asia corridor, the China-Indochina Peninsula corridor, the China-Pakistan corridor and the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar corridor.

Together, the six corridors form a trade and transport network across Eurasia, laying a solid foundation for regional and trans-regional development plans.

Terence Foo, co-managing partner for China of the London-based law firm Clifford Chance, said the initiative seeks to reinvigorate the trading routes between China and the others. It marries China's unparalleled strength in building infrastructure with the need for more roads,ports, railways and pipelines in many of the economies along the two trading routes.

The Asia Development Bank forecast that $8.2 trillion is needed for infrastructure investment in Asia over the next decade.

Similar studies conducted by the World Bank suggest there is still considerable scope for further increase in density of railroads in Eurasia.

"However, the path is challenging as it calls for investment in economies along a broad and varied geographical, economic and political spectrum," said Foo. "We found Chinese investors tend to be more patient to wait for longer-term returns.

"The boost to infrastructure connectivity is a priority under the Belt and Road Initiative, because infrastructure development will require a high degree of coordination among countries and regions, the private sector and the public, as well as vast investments of financial capital and material resources," said Zhang Quansheng, vice-president of Caterpillar China.

Zhang said it is necessary for governments, companies and other stakeholders engaged in activities generated by the initiative to have a clear understanding of the key factors driving success or failure in countries and regions along the two routes.

Undeveloped infrastructure poses a bottleneck to economic development in economies along the two routes, where obstructions to financial and trade activities create severe constraints on economic growth, according to a report released by the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in March.

So, earlier this year, China began to spread public-private partnerships in countries and regions participating in the initiative, to facilitate the progress of projects. The idea is to minimize the risk caused by unfamiliar political, investment, security and legal environment and to broaden financing channels for companies.

China so far has established 75 overseas economic and trade cooperation zones in 35 countries and regions. These also helped create up to 950,000 jobs by the end of last year. These zones have paid more than $100 billion in taxes to governments in host countries over the past four years, according to data released by the Ministry of Commerce.
The workshop of Mengniu in Jiaozuo, Henan province. SHA LANG / FOR CHINA DAILY

China Mengniu Dairy Co Ltd, one of the country's biggest dairy producers by revenue, plans to add more products to suit local preferences in countries and regions covered by the Belt and Road Initiative this year, said its top executive.

The Inner Mongolia autonomous region-headquartered company also will continue to invest in traditional dairy production bases including New Zealand and Australia, as well as in European countries.

Its aim is to secure quality dairy resources and local customers.

In 2016, Mengniu signed a cooperation agreement with Lhasa municipal government to build modern upland pasture and processing factories as part of its "go west" policy and to take advantage of the Tibet autonomous region's rich resources to supply products to local as well as South Asian markets like Nepal and India.

At present, Mengniu has 1,500 cows out in the pastures. Its factory is expected to have annual production capacity of 50,000 metric tons. It has also invested in a halal dairy production base in Gansu province, targeting some domestic and overseas markets where 1.7 billion Muslim consumers live.

Jeffrey Lu, chief executive officer of Mengniu, said encouraging dairy consumption is a reflection of economic success in many markets along the Belt and Road Initiative. The types of foods people eat now include health food and convenient food segments.

"I think it's a combination of quality and innovation that is linked to growth and demand. Those two factors came together to create a big market," said Lu.

"The biggest opportunity for us is the closer connection with consumers in the Belt and Road markets as well as in the home market. Our products offer the same international standard in all markets."

To date, Mengniu's products have entered markets like Hong Kong, Macao, Mongolia, Singapore and Myanmar. Its portfolio ranges from regular temperature products to low temperature and frozen products. It has also formed partnerships with suppliers in Canada and Indonesia this year.

"Going overseas always brings challenges, particularly from a cultural prospective. Running a business in less familiar economies requires us to know the local culture, work with the locals, gain a thorough understanding of the legal environment, regulations and laws," said Lu.

"We developed new products to meet the preferences of local consumers in Hong Kong, Macao and Indonesia. In New Zealand, 80 percent of our staff are locals," he said. "After we acquired a large company in Australia in 2016, we retained 95 percent of their local employees."

Li Gang, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing, said: "Learning from foreign experiences and gaining advanced industrial technology will help Chinese dairy producers secure market share and further compete with other foreign rivals. So, they should keep diversifying their distribution channels and product portfolios in global markets."
Staff of China State Construction Engineering Corporation work on a project in Algeria. After entering the north African country in 1982, CSCEC has grown to be the largest construction company in Algeria. XINHUA

Technicians, laborers, supervisors... show visionary initiative's soft power

BEIJING  As China presses ahead with the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese workers have become key to transformation of countries and regions covered by what is arguably the greatest economic project of the century.

Besides contributing skills, expertise and labor, they mingle and live with local people and colleagues, learn from each other and enrich lives, thereby creating overall harmony and prosperity.

The following snapshots capture the essence of the human interest stories underlying the initiative.

A gauger in his 20s aces Algeria's rough terrain: In Algeria, the largest country in Africa, a young Chinese construction team from China State Construction Engineering Corporation are building a highway that penetrates the Atlas Mountains, a project that links the Mediterranean regions with the Sahara.

Among the workers is Yang Yang, a gauger in his 20s who has been working on the project since 2013.

The complicated terrain has made the highway the most difficult one of Algeria's infrustracture projects. For years, Yang led his fellow workers through the dangerous canyons of the mountains every morning, irrespective of the severity of the weather.

Yang knows the importance of his job to the whole projectjust a tiny error could result in tremendous losses. He would rack his brain, crunch big data using a calculator and a computer, all to ensure the accuracy and reliability of data.

He believes in 'no pain, no gain': Tunnel 2 was successfully integrated into the mainbody of the highway on Dec 15, 2016. With a length of 2,425 meters, the project is Algeria's longest highway tunnel to date.

Power man thrives in Guinea's broiling heat: The "Made by China" stamp is ubiquitous in the west corner of Africa.

About 150 km northeast from Conakry, capital of Guinea, a big waterfall appears above the Konkoure River. This is where the Kaleta Hydropower Station is located, a power project built by China International Water and Electric Corporation in merely three years.

"As builders, we have to work in the heat. Our hair is always wet (with sweat), and after a day's work, our clothes are soaked in sweat (too)," said Wang Xiaoyi, a Kaleta worker.

The torrid conditions continute to torment the Chinese workers at night too. The mini generator in their dormitory does not generate enough electricity to power air conditioners and electric fans. This makes sound sleep a distant dream.

But Wang persuades himself to carry on. "I tell myself to think of the people who live in utter darkness, that I should be like a candlelight to them."

Now, after supplying enough electricity to the capital and 11 provinces, the station was given a new mission: to produce electricity for neighboring countries such as Gambia, Senegal, Mali and Guinea-Bissau in the near future.

On the same river 135 km away from Conakry, the even larger Souapiti Hydropower Station is being built by CWE. Upon completion, Guinea, a country once short of power, will become a power exporter in West Africa.

China State Construction Engineering Corporation's airport project in Algeria. XINHUA

Chinese project head brightens Cambodia: Some desolate areas in the Southeast Asian country of Cambodia are turning habitable, thanks to Chinese help.

For instance, Stung Russei Chrum, a river running through the uninhabited valley in Cambodia's southwest, had been nothing but a "lonely island", excluded from the national electricity grid until 2010. That's when China Huadian Corporation began to build the biggest hydropower plant in Cambodia.

The construction of the plant was completed nine months ahead of schedule, quite a feat considering the difficulties confronting the Chinese workersminefields, rainstorms and a continuous lack of technicians.

"We had hand grenades dug up in construction sites even after the United Nations personnel demined the area," said Le Jianhua, head of the project, referring to a nearly 30-year civil war that officially ended in 1999.

Cambodian Minister of Mines and Energy Suy Sem spoke highly of the Chinese expertise, hard work and Chinese workers' cooperation with their Cambodian counterparts during and after the construction.

"Without them (Chinese workers), things would not have been done so smoothly, and the cost would have been much higher," he said.

With an installed capacity of 338 megawatts, the project has met almost half of Cambodia's peak-time power demand in 2013.

At the official launch in January 2015, Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen highlighted the project as a significant contribution to Cambodia's economic growth, social development and poverty reduction.

Keat Makara, a Cambodian college graduate who works as an operations supervisor with this project, has been eager to learn modern management methods from training offered by the Chinese.

"We lack experience, so we need to learn from the Chinese," he said in fluent Chinese.

In fact, the plant is among the six hydropower plants CHD has helped build and run for Cambodia since 2000. Together, they supply 47 percent of Cambodia's power, benefiting 72 percent of its villages.

However, CHD's mission is far from finished, at least in Le's eyes. "We have yet to train the Cambodian staff and help establish a management system as well as professional codes and standards. It's all for the plant's future development."
He Lifeng (right), head of the National Development and Reform Commission, speaks to Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing on Sunday. WANG ZHUANGFEI / CHINA DAILY

Belt, Road progress hinges on open world economy, NDRC head says

The head of China's top economic regulator called on Sunday for more policy coordination to support the Belt and Road Initiative in order to cope with challenges brought on by a growing anti-globalization trend that may put obstacles in key areas of cooperation.

Economies related to the initiative need to strengthen policy coordination in order to see further progress in implementing the initiative, said He Lifeng, minister of the National Development and Reform Commission.

President Xi Jinping proposed the idea to build the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in 2013.

"More progress can be achieved when all parties reach consensus to support and maintain an open world economy," He said.

Efforts include establishing concrete plans to implement the initiative and building platforms to bridge companies and states, the minister said.

He made the comments during a session on connectivity of development policies and strategies on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on Sunday.

China signed 12 cooperation agreements under the framework of the initiative with other countries including Singapore, Montenegro and Kyrgyzstan, as well as with international organizations such as the World Economic Forum and agencies within the United Nations.

"We emphatically share the spirit of the initiativepeace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit," said Joan Clos, undersecretary-general of the UN.

"We hope to provide technical assistance and develop collaboration frameworks on the financing of sustainable urbanization, as part of efforts to achieve common goals shared by the initiative and our agency."

Zhao Jinping, a senior researcher at the State Council's Development Research Center, a government think tank, said policy coordination in particular is important for Chinese enterprises making outbound investment along the routes, because political uncertainties and some level of protectionism in some countries will pose challenges to investors.

Li Tie, head of the NDRC's China Center for Urban Development, said policy coordination on risk management, tax policies and preferential policies of other types will be beneficial to supporting enterprises involved in the initiative.

Li said it will not take long to see improvement in trade and investment environment, with more infrastructural projects being built to fuel growth.

Direct investment made by Chinese enterprises in participating countries reached $50 billion during 2014-16, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
A 34-year-old Elbridge man is facing a felony charge after he allegedly strangled a woman until she blacked out.

New York State Police out of Elbridge said Hector Hernandez was arrested Thursday, May 11 following a domestic dispute. Police said Hernandez strangled a woman and prevented her from using her phone to call for help. They added that children were present at the time of the assault, which was around 9:30 a.m.

Hernandez was charged with second-degree strangulation, a class D felony. He was also charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief and endangering the welfare of a child, both class A misdemeanors, and second-degree harassment, a violation.

Police said the woman involved in the incident did not need to be transported to the hospital. Hernandez was arraigned in the Town of Skaneateles Court on Monday and remanded to the Onondaga County Justice Center on $5,000 cash bail or bond. An order of protection was issued, too.
A branch of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. [Photo/Xinhua]

Industrial and Commercial Bank of Chinathe world's biggest bank by assetsis gearing up to provide a full range of financial services for projects under the Belt and Road Initiative, a senior executive said in an interview.

The bank is hoping to capture "huge" opportunities that have presented themselves because of the opening up of an infrastructure financing gap in the countries and regions related to the program, said Zhang Hongli, vice-president of ICBC.

The bank has extended loans worth about $70 billion for more than 200 projects under the initiative, and financing for projects worth up to $400 billion is in the pipeline, he said.

The initiative, proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013, will accelerate the expansion of the bank's global footprint and its transition into becoming a truly global financial services provider, Zhang said.

"It represents huge opportunities for big commercial banks like us," Zhang said.

"There is a huge call for us to go international with our clients, who are making strategic investments in overseas markets," Zhang said.

Meanwhile, the bank is closely working with other commercial lenders, policy banks and multilateral development agencies to co-finance projects.

The latest example is an infrastructure project in Mozambique, where ICBC has partnered with financial institutions from South Korea, Italy and France to provide funding, Zhang said.

"We rely on local knowledge and work with lawyers and environmental specialists to ensure the projects are both financially and ecologically sustainable," he added.
China signed off on an agreement in Beijing on Sunday with 26 countries to improve policy coordination and jointly address the pressing challenges of a financing gap for projects under the Belt and Road Initiative.

The agreement - known as the Financing Guidelines for the Belt and Road Initiative - aims to create a long-term and stable financing mechanism to break a "funding bottleneck" for the development of the initiative, said Finance Minister Xiao Jie.

"The financing bottleneck is a key challenge for the development of the Belt and Road Initiative," Xiao said in a speech at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

"Over the long term, financing for the initiative needs the joint efforts of countries and regions," Xiao said.

"We need to develop a long-term, stable and sustainable financing system with diversified sources and proper risk management," he added.

The new guidelines are also aimed at broadening financing channels by encouraging the participation of private capital and investors, while pushing innovation and strengthening regulatory cooperation among governments, according to the Ministry of Finance.

The ministry also signed a memorandum of understanding on Sunday with six multilateral development financial institutionsincluding the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bankto strengthen financing coordination for the Belt and Road Initiative.

Also on Sunday, the governor of China's central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, called for a market-oriented approach to ensure sustainable funding for projects.

He said Chinese commercial banks needed to push the expansion of their networks in countries and regions connected to the initiative.

Chinese banks, led by Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, are already in discussions with multiple foreign banks and international financial institutions on forming a long-standing mechanism for the financing of projects under the initiative.

Zhou also called on using the currency of one country for the development of the Belt and Road Initiative to help reduce foreign exchange risks and maintain financial stability.

Meanwhile, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said his organization was committed to bringing capital to the table, to meet the huge financing demand for infrastructure development in the countries participating in the program.

Kim said that the World Bank could help provide funding and bring in other sources of capital through innovative tools to help address the financing challenges that come with a limited infrastructure budget.
Miao Wei (center), minister of industry and information technology, attends a session on infrastructure connectivity, part of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in Beijing on Sunday. ZOU HONG / CHINA DAILY

President calls for further development of trans-regional logistics network and global energy interconnection to boost economy

China will try its best to promote infrastructure connectivity, since that is the foundation of international cooperation and development, President Xi Jinping said while addressing the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on Sunday.

Xi also spoke about how to further enhance infrastructure connectivity.

"We should promote land, sea and air connectivity and the information expressway, concentrate our efforts on key passageways, cities and projects, and build a network of highways, railways and seaports," he said.

Xi proposed the further development of a trans-regional logistics network and global energy interconnection to achieve green and low-carbon growth.

China has tried to promote infrastructure connectivity under the Belt and Road Initiative since it was proposed by Xi in 2013.

The initiative aims to boost exchanges in trade, infrastructure investment and people-to-people understandings between China and the rest of the world.

Minister of Transport Li Xiaopeng said that so far, China has signed more than 130 bilateral and regional transportation agreements with other countries, including those on railways, roads and civil aviation.

"A more convenient international transportation network will be established (because of the initiative)," he said while hosting a panel session on Sunday afternoon.

According to the Ministry of Transport, 356 cross-border highway and railway routes had been opened between China and 15 Belt and Road countries by the end of last year.

Direct flights now link China with 43 Belt and Road countries.

In an earlier interview, Li said transportation and infrastructure connectivity are the cornerstones of the initiative.

More than 200 delegates from around 60 countries and international organizations attended the panel session on infrastructure connectivity.

"We want to be building bridges, not walls," said Jyrki Katainen, vice-president of the European Commission, adding that economic growth can be stimulated by improving infrastructure connectivity.

Tadeusz Szozda, chairman of the Organization for Cooperation of Railways, said the organization supports the initiative.

Through cooperation, customs clearance procedures for cross-border rail transportation can be simplified to reduce time and costs, thus promoting international trade, he said.
The city of Zhaoqing is expecting more factories and businesses in the auto parts, electronics and food processing industries to move to the city from Guangzhou in the months to come.

Zhaoqing mayor Chen Xudong said the city had laid the foundation for the development of the city's auto parts, electronics and food processing industries.

He said expansion of cooperation with Guangzhou is expected to help accelerate the city's construction.

"Zhaoqing has good infrastructural facilities and is eager to undertake the industrial transfer from the capital city of Guangdong province," Chen told an investment promotion conference for Zhaoqing city in Guangzhou on Monday.

"The co-operation will be a win-win deal, benefiting both sides," he said.

Located about 100 kilometers away from Guangzhou, Zhaoqing has rich land and natural resources, cheaper labor force and low production costs, creating great potential for economic growth, he added.

Guangzhou deputy mayor Ma Wentian said Zhaoqing has become a good destination for investment in Guangzhou.

Ma said he encouraged more companies in his city to set up their production facilities in Zhaoqing in the future.

Zhaoqing has attracted a total of 166 construction projects, worth 38.71 billion yuan ($5.61 billion) from Guangzhou since 2008.

These projects have involved equipment manufacturing, chemical, metal processing, machines and parts, food processing, electronics and service industries.

Situated in the western part of Guangdong province, Zhaoqing represents more than 30 percent of the total land area in the greater Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao bay area which also includes Guangdong cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, Huizhou, plus Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions.

But rent for workshops in Zhaoqing is less than two-thirds of the average rent in other areas in the prosperous Pearl River delta. The city's electricity price is 10 percent lower than the Pearl River delta average while the city's lowest monthly salary is 789 yuan, less than in Shenzhen. Zhaoqing is linked to other major cities in the country by advanced high-speed railway and expressway networks.
BEIJING - Two Chinese companies on Monday signed a contract with Kazakhstan's national railway company to buy 49 percent of an inland port near the China-Kazakhstan border.

China COSCO Shipping Corporation and Jiangsu Lianyungang Port Co will each hold 24.5 percent of the dry port located in the Khorgos-East Gate special economic zone, according to a statement from China COSCO Shipping.

The dry port is about 15 km from the Khorgos port in China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region on the border of the two countries. From the port, railway cargo can reach Lianyungang in east China's Jiangsu in five days and reach Europe in about 10 days.

Xu Lirong, chairman of China COSCO Shipping, said the dry port is the company's first overseas railway investment project since the corporation was established.

The company aims to build it into an important trade passageway and a model project for China and Kazakhstan under the Belt and Road Initiative.

China COSCO Shipping is a state-owned company set up in early 2016 after the merger of COSCO and China Shipping.
Alibaba founder and Chairman Jack Ma (second from left) talks with Ricardo Melendez-Ortiz, chief executive of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, at the forum on Sunday. WANG ZHUANGFEI / CHINA DAILY

China aims to build a digital silk road as it identifies innovation as the driving force to pursue the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday.

The nation will focus on frontier areas such as digital economy, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and quantum computing, Xi told the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing.

"Innovation is an important force powering development. The Belt and Road Initiative is new by nature and we need to encourage innovation in pursuing this initiative," he said.

Xi stressed the importance of advancing the development of big data, cloud computing and smart cities.

Alibaba Cloud, China's largest cloud computing provider, announced on Friday it will establish a data center in Malaysia this year, providing local and regional enterprises with scalable and cost-effective cloud capabilities.

Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, said the planned investment will add to its existing data centers in 14 locations worldwide, and will enhance future deployment in economies related to the Belt and Road Initiative as more Chinese companies conduct business there.

"President Xi's emphasis on digital economy and financial technology suggests huge potential to be unleashed under the Belt and Road Initiative, and is an orchestra baton to fintech firms that want to expand overseas," said ShengJia, chief executive officer of NCF Group, a payment platform for internet finance.

As the Belt and Road Initiative is set to push overseas investments to new heights, China should establish smart platforms using big data technologies to facilitate trade and investment, said Wu Qi, global vice-president of the consultancy Accenture.

Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, said at the forum that "the Belt and Road Initiative is what China has for future. The world will admire you not because of the GDP number but what you do to contribute to the growth of other countries".
BEIJING - For centuries, the "Four Great Inventions of Ancient China" - namely compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing - have been celebrated as technologies that have made a significant contribution to world civilization.

Today, novel technologies have once again shortened the physical as well as cultural distance between different parts of the world.

In a video that went viral online recently, foreign students in China have redefined the "four great inventions" of modern age: bike-sharing services, e-commerce, high-speed trains and mobile payment systems.

While technically speaking, these are not purely Chinese inventions, there's no doubt that Chinese innovation has made these technologies even more important to a closely connected world.

For instance, buyers from Europe can easily purchase Chinese goods through e-commerce services provided by Alibaba, China's Internet giant. With an extensive infrastructure network and multi-currency payment systems provided by Chinese firms, customers worldwide can have enjoyable and convenient online shopping experiences.

"Chinese people have a very good life, you can use the apps to benefit yourself a lot... In China there's a lot of good stuff that my country doesn't have," a student from Thailand said in the video, which was jointly produced by the Institute of Silk Road Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the People's Daily.

Students from more than 20 countries and regions said that technologies including Alipay (Alibaba's mobile payment system), bike-sharing apps and high-speed trains are among the things that they most want to bring back to their homelands.

Their dreams are coming true. In the same way China transported silk and tea via the ancient Silk Road, the country is now sharing knowledge and expertise via the Belt and Road Initiative.

The initiative proposed by China in 2013 aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along and beyond the ancient Silk Road trade routes.

Construction has started or neared completion on some large infrastructure projects along the Belt and Road, including the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway in Indonesia and the China-Laos railway.

Justin, an Indonesian student interviewed in the video, said he had a wonderful experience riding high-speed trains in China, as they were clean and efficient. In addition to trains, he wanted to bring China's online food ordering and online shopping services to his homeland.

"It's very convenient living here in China, all these apps are super integrated, everything is connected," he said.

China's Internet companies are not missing out on the opportunities that the initiative brings. JD.com, a major e-commerce site, has already started operating in Indonesia. It is planning to open more than 20 overseas warehouses in the next five years to store and transfer goods from over 100 countries and regions including those along the Belt and Road.

The initiative will evolve into a "smart highway carrying information, knowledge, and services across continents, not just goods," said Jerry Hultin, co-founder of Global Futures Group, a consulting firm.

For young international students, Chinese innovations that they want to take home are not limited to the above-mentioned fascinating technologies.

"I want to bring everything. It's not only the Chinese lifestyle that I want to take back, but all the technological advances," said a student from Romania.

As the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation which kicked off Sunday in Beijing, more technological cooperation among participating countries and regions are likely to be launched.

While delivering a keynote speech at the opening of the forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping underlined the role of innovation in pursuing the initiative.

"We should pursue innovation-driven development and intensify cooperation in frontier areas such as digital economy, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and quantum computing, and advance the development of big data, clout computing and smart cities so as to turn them into a digital silk road of the 21st century," Xi said.

Wu Hao, executive dean of the Institute of Silk Road Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the wishes of the international students reflect a bright future for international cooperation.

"The youth are the future of the Belt and Road," said Wu. "Their understanding and involvement in the initiative, to great extent, will decide the breadth and depth of cooperation."
Rao Pingru (left) displays one of his drawings during a book promotion for Our Story, an artistic memoir for his late wife. [Photo by SUN ZHAN/CHINA DAILY]

NANCHANGThe love between Rao Pingru and his late wife, Mao Meitang, has lasted beyond death.

After Mao passed away in 2008, less than five months before their 60th wedding anniversary, Rao, now 96, drew more than 200 pictures to memorialize his wife and compiled them into 18 albums.

His graphic memoir, Our Story, was published by Guangxi Normal University Press in 2013 and has sold more than 200,000 copies.

A French version was released in January, and more than 26,000 copies have been printed. In recent months, it was a best-seller in the China category on the Amazon France website.

An English version is expected soon.

"This story took place in China, but will be read and shared by audiences across the world," said Yin Muyun, who edited the book. "It helps the elderly remember the past and makes youth yearn for everlasting love."

Overcome by the death of his wife, Rao, a former magazine editor, picked up his pencils and crayons and drew everything he remembered about her, from their first date and wedding ceremony to their first argument and her last teardrop on her deathbed.

His granddaughter posted several pictures on Sina Weibo in 2012, which attracted attention from netizens and publishers.

"Art is the best way to reach people," Rao said. "I just wanted to record our story for our grandchildren, so they know more about their grandma."

The couple's story, which includes romance, war, separation, disease and death, began in 1946 when Rao and his father visited Mao's home to arrange their marriage.

A caption under that picture reads: "My father and I visited her home. Through an open window, I suddenly saw a beautiful 20-something girl sitting in front of a mirror putting on lipstick."

Both were born into wealthy families in Jiangxi province, and Rao said they fell in love at first sight.

Another picture shows Rao, too shy to say "I love you", singing the English lyrics"Rose Marie, I love you"from an old US song to express his feelings to Mao during a date in a park.

The memoir also tells of bitter experience.

When Mao looked after the children alone in Shanghai, her work involved carrying 15-kilogram bags of cement for the construction of the Shanghai Natural History Museum.

"Every time I walk past the museum, I pause and look. I don't know which steps were made from the cement she carried. I wonder if her disease may have been caused by that experience," Rao said, who added that in 1992, Mao was diagnosed with diabetes and uremia. He stopped working to care for her.

The last picture shows the family's final visit to the hospital on March 19, 2008.

"I saw a tear in the corner of her right eye. In the afternoon, she left me for good," Rao wrote in the caption under the picture.

He kept a handful of her hair tied with a red string, which he took to France, along with their wedding rings, for the book tour in January.

"Death parted my wife and I, but by drawing our story, she will be with me forever," Rao said.
Colleges and gas stations in China among the hardest hit, expert says

The unprecedented spread of ransomware that has swept across more than 100 countries since Friday has been cracked by a Chinese tech companyat least in part.

Qihoo 360, a major internet security company in China, issued a software patch at 3 am on Sunday that can recover the data encrypted by the unidentified attackers. The software can operate without internet access, and customers do not need to pay for it.

Zheng Wenbin, the company's chief security engineer, said the recovery kit was built around a flaw his team found in the malware.

"Some ransomware developers directly encrypt the original files. That would be hard to crack. Lucky for us, the attackers only encrypted the copy and deleted the originals. So all we need to do is find ways to recover the deleted ones," Zheng explained. "Sometimes a simple idea is the most effective."

Zheng said that in an experimental run, his software's recovery rate reached 100 percent. However, in reality, the longer a user waits before using the tool, the higher the chance is of permanently losing some data, because the more changes a user makes to existing files, the harder it becomes to recover deleted data. This is because deleted data is not immediately erased, but the memory space it occupies is considered free and the computer will use it to store other data.

For now, the recovery kit is in Chinese only. Zheng said he does not know if the company will provide the service in English or other languages, though he admitted that changing the user language would be "fairly easy".

By 360's estimation, at least 200,000 computers had been breached by the malware as of 7 pm on Saturday. The number was going up quickly across the globe.

Schools, especially colleges where a lot of students live on campus with their personal computers and laptops, have been hit hard. According to 360's report, the intranets within education networks were especially vulnerable to the ransomware, as a particular virtual gate that is easily penetrated remains largely open on college networks.

Also severely hit were gas stations. China National Petroleum Corp, one of China's largest gas suppliers, said on its website that the payment system in many of its gas stations could not function due to the virus. Luckily, by noon on Sunday, 80 percent of its stations had been reconnected to the company's central network, while credit cards, prepaid gas cards and online payment channels were being fixed.

Ransomware is a type of malware that deliberately encrypts a user's data through a virus or hack, then asks for a payment in exchange for unlocking the data.

This time, the attackers used a piece of malicious software called WannaCry, which takes advantage of a vulnerability in the Windows operation system used by most PCs around the globe, and demanded $300 in cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

The technology was reportedly stolen from the United States' National Security Agency.

Microsoft released a software update that could fix the weakness back in March, but not every user installs the latest patches on a regular basis.

Plus, Microsoft has stopped providing updates for older versions of Windows, including Windows XP, a classic product still widely used by many Chinese.

Microsoft issued later on Friday security updates for the outdated platforms including Windows XP, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2003. Phillip Misner, the company's principal security group manager, warned that customers should "use vigilance when opening documents from untrusted or unknown sources".
Ismailova Zukhra has just finished weeks of training on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at the headquarters of Huawei Technologies in China.

What impressed the college student from Uzbekistan was the 5G network she saw in the Huawei labs, which was so fast that it only took a few seconds to download a movie of 1GB size.

She said the internet speed in her country was still quite slow and it takes a long time to download a film online, adding that she was looking forward to use of 5G technology in Uzbekistan in the future.

Huawei has been doing business in Uzbekistan since 1999 and is now providing telecom and internet service for 60 percent of residents in the Central Asian country. But this is not the only way how this communication technology giant of China is transforming the life of people in that nation.

In 2014, Huawei signed a five-year agreement with Tashkent University of Information Technologies, one of the largest universities in Uzbekistan, inviting 10 students to undergo short-term training and internships in China.

This is part of the company's global, most heavily invested corporate social responsibility program, called Telecom Seeds for the Future. It was initiated in 2008 to help nurture ICT talent, enhance knowledge transfer and promote an in-depth understanding of and greater interest in the ICT sector.

It also aims to "improve and encourage regional building and participation in the digital community," as Huawei describes the program on its website.

The study trip to China, which lasts a few weeks, is intensive and includes various activities, such as learning innovative ICT technologies, having hands-on practice in labs, visiting Huawei to see global corporation operations, and taking part in various cross-cultural exchanges.

As of last year, the program has been spread to 96 countries and regions of the world's five continents, enabling 2,700 students from more than 280 higher education institutions across the globe to visit and study at the company's headquarters in China.

The year of 2016 alone saw 1,200 students come to China under this program. Huawei said it would continue investment on the program globally in the long run.
BEIJING -- China's cyberspace authority Monday warned computer users to install and upgrade security software to avoid being hit by the global ransomware attack.

A statement issued by the cybersecurity coordination bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China said the "WannaCry" ransomware attack, which began to spread worldwide Friday, has affected some enterprises and government offices in China.

Police, authorities in the industry, information technology, education, banking and cyberspace sectors as well as some computer security companies have taken response measures, the statement said.

Media reports have also helped increase public awareness of the virus and contain the spread of the attack, it added.

The authority said this global cyberattack has once again shown the unprecedented internet security challenges, calling on all sectors to address to cybersecurity issues.
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Hilder Edmund Malecela was invited to take part and shared her stories in the thematic session of people-to-people connectivity at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on May in Beijing. [Photo by Zhang Xingjian/China Daily]

"Before Chinese companies came, we had to pay over $50 each month to watch TV, but now we are paying just $3. Just like people in Beijing we can enjoy the best TV programs for only few bucks," said Hilder Edmund Malecela in Beijing on May 14.

Born in a small village of Dar es Salaam, capital city of Tanzania, Malecela never thought of coming to China and working as a professional voice character for Chinese TV dramas.

"Kung fu is my first impression of China as I have watched several interesting films starring Chinese martial artist Jackie Chan," Malecela said.

In 2011, a Chinese family TV series A Beautiful Daughter-in-law Era, a 36-episode light comedy about a modern Chinese couple, was introduced to African countries and gained huge popularity overseas.

The TV series was first aired on Shanghai TV channel on November 26, 2009, and was dubbed in Swahili and broadcast through the Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation in 2011.

"After watching the show, I developed a deep understanding of modern China due to the emotional entanglement and personal relationships depicted in the show. In addition to kung fu, Chinese traditional culture and modernization drive also resonated with me," she said.

"Meanwhile, I learned that Kenyan actress Josephine Moeni Waweru and actor Khamis Juma Swaleh were chosen to do voice dubbing for the two leading roles in the African version of the series. Their jobs were amazing and I longed to be a voice character since then," she added.

In 2013, Malecela got the support of Star Times Group, a technology provider, network operator, and content provider in China's television broadcasting industry, and finally came to China.

Because of her enthusiasm for Chinese culture and fondness of dubbing, she got the chance to work as a voice character for four months and participated in several TV dramas, including Jin Tailang's Happy Life and The Desire of the Old Daddy.

After going back to Tanzania, she shared what she had learned in China, dubbing in particular, among her colleagues and tried her best to integrate the skills with her own work, waiting for the next chance to learn more about dubbing.

In 2016, the Star Times Group held the first Star TV Drama Dubbing Contest in Tanzania and chose potential contestants to work in China. Malecela won the first prize.

At the beginning of 2017, she came to the headquarters of Star Times Group and worked in Beijing. So far, she has done the dubbing in Swahili for more than 20 Chinese TV dramas.

"I am so happy to realize my dream and work on such a good platform. Now, in addition to dubbing, I have learned other skills in the TV field such as editing and recording," she said.

"Dar es Salaam is 1,979 kilometers from Beijing, but Chinese TV dramas bridge us together. In the future, I want to be a cultural ambassador to promote Sino-Tanzania relationship," she added.

Related:

Millennial Road staged in Beijing for Belt and Road Forum
Chile's President Michelle Bachelet (second from left) photographed during a State visit in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Chile's President Michelle Bachelet, making a State visit to Beijing in the Belt and Road forum over the weekend, was feted by the Chilean community and its business associates in China on Saturday.

At the event, a kickoff for the Wines of Chile China Roadshow, Bachelet told guests at the Hilton Beijing that her ancestors were wine merchants who migrated from Chassagne-Montrachet in France to Chile in the 19th century, and became winemakers in their new homeland.

Since a free-trade agreement was signed between China and Chile in 2006, Chilean wine has enjoyed huge expansion in the Chinese market, becoming the number-three wine-exporting country to China after France and Australia. Chilean wines enjoyed a growth of 76 percent by volume and 73 percent in value exporting to China from 2014 to 2016, according to Wines of Chile.

"We have 26 wineries here to show our wines," Bachelet said.

"We celebrate the richness of our land and the hard work of our growers. We are also a country that is not afraid of new challenges," she added, noting that Chile is producing wines from new grapes, beyond the Bordeaux favorites, and more organic wines.

"China and Chile have this in common: We love wine," said Julio Alonso, president of Wines of Chile in China. "And if you love wine, you love Chile." The weeklong roadshow continues this week in Xiamen, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Dalian.

A week ago, a recent biography of Bachelet was released in a Chinese edition by China Social Science Press. Chilean Ambassador Jorge Heine, who hosted the book launch at the embassy in Beijing, said the book will introduce the contemporary development of Chile and the important role that the country plays on the world stage during the presidency of Michelle Bachelet to Chinese readers.

Heine told China Daily that the biography is more than an academic or political study, it's a good story for everyday readers.

"Michelle Bachelet has a tremendous personal story," he said. "This is a woman who was imprisoned and tortured during some dark years of Chile's history  her father died in prison. Michelle Bachelet earned her medical degree and that was the direction she wanted to go. She was really reluctant to get into politics herself."

The biography, by Chilean writer Patricia Politzer, is titled Michelle Bachelet in a Land of Men, and Heine said the president's achievements are particularly significant in a culture that continues to be male-dominated.
Egyptian journalist Wahid Mohamed Elmallah plays a Uighur ethnic musical instrument after visiting the Xinjiang Art Theatre in Urumqi, Northwest China's Xinjiang autonomous region, May 10, 2017. [Photo by Zhu Xingxin/chinadaily.com.cn]

Nearly 50 journalists from China and 22 foreign countries including Turkey and Singapore, arrived Wednesday in Urumqi, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, to participate in a media event themed Approaching the Core Zone (Xinjiang) of the "Silk Road Economic Belt".

Through visits to Xinjiang Software Park and some companies, the journalists are getting a closer look at the development of the AI industry and other industries serving the Belt and Road Initiative in Xinjiang.

The event will last until May 19.
President Xi Jinping and other delegates and guests take a group photo during the opening session of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, on May 14, 2017. XU JINGXING/CHINA DAILY

Assuming the chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2018, Singapore's priority for the regional bloc would be to advance cooperation, innovation and inclusive growth. This is a golden opportunity for ASEAN and China to cooperate and advance the Belt and Road Initiative (the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road) in the region, which will stimulate governments, multilateral organizations and the private sector to join forces to cultivate international cooperation and shared economic advancement.

The Belt and Road Initiative connects businesses and people around the world at reduced costs. This is a natural desire of economies craving a better tomorrow, particularly for an increasingly integrated Asia. Asia's intra-regional trade has surged to eurozone levels. Furthermore, high-level cross-border investments reflect the integration of complementary production capabilities and resources to serve both traditional Western consumers and surging Asian consumption.

According to the Asian Development Bank, Asia accounts for 60 percent of the world's growth. To sustain this growth, we need to identify and capture cross-country synergies and stimulate innovation. This is predicated on economic openness and good physical infrastructure which strengthens connectivity.

The Belt and Road Initiative's benefits are clear. In the long run, it promises a rosy outlook: affordable connectivity that will naturally lead to economic cooperation and innovation. In the short run, infrastructure investment will immediately stimulate global growth.

The intriguing consideration is that, in the intermediate term, the Belt and Road Initiative's promise of an attractive economic outlook inspires improvements in government behavior and capital markets. The gist of this logic is that the Belt and Road Initiative's obvious rosy outlook combined with severe resource constraints will induce disciplined economic behavior.

Infrastructure investment is costly. McKinsey estimates that $57 trillion in infrastructure investment is required between now and 2030 to simply keep pace with global GDP growth. For economic infrastructure alone, Asia will require $8 trillion. There are many other similarly startling numbers. No government alone can meet these capital needs, not even China.

Clearly, the private sector needs to chime in. The only way to attract private sector investors is to offer bankable projects: developments that will reliably get private sector investors back their principal and promised returns.

This means governments will have to behave: prioritize the selection of infrastructure opportunities and ensure good governance. Additionally, to live within tight capital constraints, governments have to learn to be economical in implementation; this includes raising productivity and driving innovation in developing infrastructure.

Besides, the Belt and Road projects by design require meaningful government cooperation. Governments will oblige if there is a win-win situation. This inter-government cooperation is a particularly fascinating possibility. ASEAN member states can definitely benefit from good infrastructure investmentnot just roads, transportation and ports, but also utilities such as water and electricity. This is a good opportunity for ASEAN and China to cooperate using complementary capabilities across countries. For example, Singapore can bring project management capability, airport engineering, and water management to the table, while railroad engineering can come from China. The list is long and impressive. Cooperation can be the impetus for long-lasting friendship among ASEAN, China, and other Asian economies.

Multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Asian Development Bank surely have great roles to play. They can contribute by cultivating information sharing, monitoring project implementation and enforcing governmental promises to alleviate fears of governments reneging on their commitments.

Moreover, they can guide the development of standard documentation for investment prospects, which will enhance investment instruments' tradability.

Bankability depends on liquidity. The need for capital may stimulate development in capital markets, including advancing appropriately governed and standardized securitization contracts. There could be obstacles. For example, projects could run into shortages of construction materials, while engineering, and project management capabilities may be lacking. These can be overcome.

The greatest obstacle to the attainment of the Belt and Road Initiative vision is economies' self-centeredness and short-term orientation. It takes leadership to do the right thing for us all: not to compete for short-term glory, political results and not to let national ego distort long-term rationality.

The Belt and Road Initiative vision is for the long termharmonious cooperation and shared development for the world. Singapore, ASEAN, China and other Asian economies, with long-term vision and courage, can show leadership to the world, which is now being threatened by nationalism, nativism and self-serving statesmanship.

The author is the dean of and Stephen Riady distinguished professor at the Business School of National University of Singapore.
President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in the National Convention Center in Beijing, on May 14, 2017. [Photo by Xu Jingxing/chinadaily.com.cn]

Globalization is facing some challenges, as even economies championing economic liberalism and free trade have witnessed waves of anti-globalization, and rising uncertainties in geopolitics have added to the tensions between major powers. What can be done to recalibrate global governance and fix the woes plaguing the world economy?

The promotion and implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative (the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road) could offer the desired answer. At the heart of the initiative is all-round inter-connectivity and cultural integration, which could help reduce, if not end, the injustices stemming from the different development levels, ideologies and political systems of different countries, and facilitate joint efforts to build a global community of shared destiny.

The Belt and Road projects are essentially about building global partnerships and securing peaceful coexistence. They are not about challenging the current world order, as China itself has greatly benefited from it.

The focus areas of the transnational proposalpolicymaking, infrastructure, trade, currency, and public mindseach serve carefully designed purposes. Interaction over policymaking will enable the economies along the Belt and Road routes to reach a consensus on development strategy, macroeconomic policy, and major projects.

Infrastructure connectivity, aimed at linking economic zones from Asia to Europe and Africa, will help developing (as well as developed) countries to benefit from participating in the initiative.

Trade exchanges are about co-building an expansive free trade network, accelerating international capacity cooperation, stimulating two-way investment, and enhancing the complementarity among the economies involved.

Free flow of currencies, on the other hand, is expected to create a secure, sustainable financing system that fits the economic reality.

And connecting public minds will serve as a bridge between different cultures and values.

Unlike what some misguided US realists have asserted, China's peaceful rise is happening because it is seeking to further integrate into and optimize globalization, and there is no sign of a so-called Thucydides trap between China as a rising major power and the existing one, that is, the United States. The Belt and Road Initiative also makes a strong case that such a trap can be avoided and the world's largest and second-largest economies can work together not only for mutual benefit but also for the benefit of the rest of the world.

Although the US has stayed away from the Belt and Road projects, its geopolitical and economic dominance means China will have to deal with it while implementing the initiative with other countries. It is thus important to maintain a healthy China-US relationship, especially because the two countries have no direct geopolitical disputes.

Washington's primary concern is whether Beijing, a rising major player, will challenge the US-led world order or help establish a new international system. That is why it does not show much interest in the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Let us not forget that China too has contributed greatly to the establishment of the existing world order as a founding member of the United Nations and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It has joined more than 100 international organizations and signed more than 300 international treaties and conventions. And being a beneficiary of global governance, China has no reason to challenge it.

The disputes over global governance and the existing world order are essentially about rule-making, which will probably define China-US interactions in the next two to three decades. The wise decision for the two sides would be to work together on new international rules to achieve more inclusive global growth.

The author is a former vice-minister of Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, and former vice-minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Moon Jae-in of the liberal Minjoo Party speaks during a celebration event in Seoul, South Korea, on May 9, 2017. [Photo/Xinhua]

Japanese media and foreign affairs pundits are doing the guesswork: the United States will be the first country newly elected Republic of Korea President Moon Jae-in will visit, followed by China, Russia and Japan.

The Japanese government is eager to reach out to Moonit arranged a telephone conversation between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Moon on Thursday. Tokyo also aims to organize a meeting between the two leaders on the sidelines of international conferences such as the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, in July and the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September.

Abe's office issued a statement congratulating Moon on his election victory and saying Abe wants to meet with him at an early date for a frank exchange of views and to work together to develop a future-oriented bilateral relationship.

There are reasons why Abe wants to "establish" ties with the Moon administration eagerly. First, Japan-ROK ties are strained because of the issue of "comfort women" (women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army before and during World War II). The two countries inked an agreement in 2015 to resolve the issue. The settlement included a written apology from Abe and a pledge by Tokyo to contribute $8.9 million to a foundation established by Seoul to support the surviving "comfort women".

The "final" and "irreversible" solution was to absolve Japan of all the responsibility and liability for the "comfort women". In return, Japan asked the ROK to remove the statue of a "comfort woman" from in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul.

Polls, however, show the majority of the people in the ROK are against the deal. And during his campaign trail, Moon claimed the agreement does not reflect the views of those women who were humiliated by the Japanese army and vowed to renegotiate the issue with Japan.

Moon won 41 percent of the vote in the election. But if he changes his stance on the "comfort women" issue, he could face a backlash from the voters.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, however, has said Tokyo will not renegotiate the agreement, which he claims is a "promise" made by the two countries.

Second, Abe and Moon are divided in their policies toward the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Abe seems interested in containing the DPRK, saying "dialogue for the sake of dialogue is meaningless". In contrast, Moon intends to engage with the DPRK and has said he is even willing to travel to Pyongyang "under the right circumstances". Which prompted The Japan Times to say the prospect of a rupture between the United States, Japan and the ROK is now "real".

Third, the territorial dispute over a pair of islescalled Dokdo in the ROK and Takeshima in Japan and which Moon visited in July 2016could also be a reason why Abe is so eager to build ties with the new ROK administration,.

And last, since the Japanese government does not know much about Moon, it wants to reach out to him before he announces any new policies. Japan sent its ambassador, Yasumasa Nagamine, back to Seoul in early April to study and develop ties with the successor to impeached and ousted president Park Geun-hye. Japan had recalled Nagamine in January in response to the installation of a girl's statue, a symbol of "comfort women", in front of the Japanese consulate in Busan. On April 28, Nagamine met with Moon's diplomatic advisory group, which said Moon wants to have talks with Abe at an early stage.

Moon's victory, it seems, will lead to a shift in the ROK's foreign policy, which will have an impact on the country's ties with its neighbors and allies while also influencing the situation in East Asia.

And given their differences over the DPRK, and "comfort women" and other issues, Abe and Moon will find it difficult to put bilateral ties back on track.

The author is China Daily Tokyo bureau chief.

caihong@chinadaily.com.cn
File photo shows Seoungju residents chant slogans during a protest against the government's decision on deploying a US THAAD anti-missile defense unit in Seongju, in Seoul, South Korea, July 21, 2016. The banner reads "Desperately oppose deploying THAAD". [Photo/Agencies]

The decision by the ruling Minjoo Party in the Republic of Korea to push for a parliamentary hearing on the controversial deployment of a US missile defense system in the ROK is an important step toward de-escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

It is also a welcome signal sent by the new ROK President Moon Jae-in that he wants to improve ties with China.

As the United States and the ROK accelerated the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in the ROK last month, the tense atmosphere on the peninsula worsened and the confrontation between the various parties became more acute.

The deployment of THAAD in the ROK has also soured relations between Beijing and Seoul, because Beijing sees it as an unacceptable move undermining its own security interests. Thus, the decision made by ROK's new ruling party could be a welcome game changer for both the situation on the peninsula and China-ROK ties.

Considering that disputes over the deployment of THAAD in the ROK have resulted in relations between Beijing and Seoul falling to their lowest ebb in years, the political transition in the ROK offers a good opportunity for Seoul to improve ties with Beijing.

A growing number of people in the ROK have also protested against the installation of the US anti-missile system, believing it could imperil the security of their country instead of shoring it up.

It would cater to the concerns of people in the ROK and those in neighboring countries if the ROK parliament were to vote against the deployment of THAAD in the ROK, or at least delay it.

Meanwhile, all parties concerned should demonstrate restraint and show political wisdom and strategic patience so that joint diplomatic efforts could be made to improve the current situation on the peninsula and work toward building lasting peace and stability in the region.
Students attend cyber defense class in the school in Poltsamaa, Estonia, December 4, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

ON FRIDAY, A COMPUTER VIRUS CALLED "WANNACRY" hit about 100 countries worldwide. The ransom ware encrypted data on the computers, demanding payments of up to $600 to restore access. Beijing News comments:

With computer security agencies taking responsive measures, the attack has weakened. Actually, the virus is not totally newit used the EternalBlue exploit developed by the United States' National Security Agency that was stolen by hackers.

The incident teaches us at least two lessons. First, there is nothing absolutely safe in the internet age. Even if developed by law enforcers, a powerful computer attack tool is at risk of being acquired by lawbreakers.

In early 2016, there was a debate between the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and some internet companies over the question of whether electronic device producers should leave a "backdoor" for legal enforcers to better strike at terrorists. Now we have the answerNo.

No one can ensure that such a "backdoor" will never be used by lawbreakers and the best choice is not to open such a door in the first place.

Second, it is important for computer users to purchase and install genuine software. If a computer user updates his or her windows operating system regularly, he or she is relatively safe. A patch released by Microsoft in March had already filled in a security loophole in the Windows operating system that could be made use of by the new virus. However, only genuine software could be updated. Computers that use pirated copies of the windows operating system have no choice; they will be exposed to the risk.

Fortunately, with the protection over copyrights strengthened, increasingly more people are acquiring the habit of using genuine products. Hopefully, next time the virus will not spread so rampantly.
The 2017 Leadership Cayuga class presented their projects at a community event last Thursday at Cayuga Museum Carriage House Theater. Among them was a proposal called, The Seven Wonders of Auburn, a shuttle tour spanning the city tying in the greater community to the Harriet Tubman National Park site. The list of the Seven Wonders was typical of many that have been produced in the city over the years, but the proposals concept was remarkably smart and should be taken as a good sign. It means that our community members and leaders are thinking about the future and considering how to capitalize on the incoming newly designed park.

Some of Auburns underrepresented and unknown sites would serve to truly expand that vision in a meaningful and effective way. The well-known historic properties of Auburns long-dead elite have been duly catalogued and established in promotional pamphlets and websites. However, todays heritage tourist is no longer so interested in basking in the opulence of the homes of dead rich white men. They seek the story of real people. Last year the Tenement Museum in New York City saw over 225,000 visitors.

There are plenty of vernacular, or domestic, neighborhoods in Auburn that can tell the story of the underrepresented immigrant groups that served Auburns well-to-do and made it a lively and diverse city. Beyond Tubman, African-Americans have shaped the city since first arriving as slaves of Colonel Hardenburgh. Their built heritage can be found all around the city, in particular among some of houses built west of South Street, many of which sprung up as the homes of domestic staff to the wealthy households nearby. Italian, Irish, Ukrainian and other immigrant groups have all made an impact on the structures that we pass by every day. Yet the story of those groups, and the homes they built and left to posterity, is not utilized in our tourism efforts nor is it recognized by our official historic narratives. We all remain servants to the rich of the past, feeling that it is a safer use of our resources to focus on their legacies. Attention to trends in tourism might make us think otherwise.

The two most popular and well-known sites in Auburn, the Tubman Home and the Seward House, tell that story, which contributes to their success. One tells the story of a courageous woman who was born into poverty and led the oppressed to freedom, and the other tells the story of an otherwise upper-class political family that risked their positons, fortunes and their lives to help in that cause. There is a real value to local tourism of incorporating these stories into the visitor experience. Todays traveler seeks a real and moving experience alongside the traditional wow-factor architecture. The importance of Auburns immigrant past through documentation, research and official recognition will go far to diversify our tourism portfolio. It might also give us insight into who we are and where our community came from.
Chinese President Xi Jinping makes a toast during the welcoming banquet for the Belt and Road Forum at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China May 14, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

BEIJING -- Pursuit of the Belt and Road Initiative denies outdated geopolitical maneuvering, targeting a new model of win-win cooperation in international relations.



Chinese President Xi Jinping said Sunday that in pursuing the initiative, China has no intention of forming a small group detrimental to stability.



Rather, the pursuit aims to create a big family of harmonious co-existence, Xi stressed in his keynote speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing.



These statements underline the essence of China's proposal to enrich current conventions of international relations, which has taken shape since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in late 2012.



The proposal, a Chinese approach to build a community of shared future for mankind, upholds such principles as peace, openness and prosperity, innovation and connecting different civilizations, transcending zero-sum mindsets.



Calling for the forging partnerships of dialogue without confrontation and of friendship rather than alliance, they also seek to avoid a Cold War mentality and "Thucydides Trap" -- the notion of an established power becoming so anxious about the rise of a new power that a struggle leading to war becomes inevitable.



Originating from careful meditation of the current world, which is growing increasingly multi-polar, economically globalized, digitized and culturally diversified, they offer a solution to many of the world's pressing challenges, including sluggish economic recovery and a degree of backsliding on globalization.



The proposals have generated favorable reviews, as seen by the popularity of the initiative, which has won support from more than 100 countries and international organizations, of which over 40 have signed cooperation agreements with China on the initiative.



Moreover, the United Nations, APEC and the Asia-Europe Meeting have all incorporated or reflected Belt and Road cooperation in resolutions and documents.

Looking back, China has staged impressive economic and social development over the past four decades. By proposing the initiative with principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, China identifies the key to solving problems plaguing stability in a nation and international relations: development.



Building on the spirit of peace and cooperation embodied by the ancient silk routes, China is willing to share its development practices and contribute more to global development.
Until recently, globalization was led by the west and benefited only a few advanced economies. After China's three decades of rapid growth, the Belt and Road Initiative hold potential for more inclusive globalization.

On the weekend, Beijing was flooded with almost 30 heads of state and government leaders, 1,500 delegates from over 130 nations, and over 70 international organizations for the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

As the forces of globalization are lingering in the advanced world, the Forum reflected new commitment to more inclusive globalization, particularly by emerging and developing economies. By 2050, their contribution to global GDP growth is expected to climb from 68 percent to 80 percent.

The Forum precipitates huge investments in new roads, railways and ports while facilitating access to vital capital, goods and services, especially to those economies that benefited so little from the post-war globalization. The investment in infrastructure is likely to accelerate industrialization and growth opportunities in nations where living standards remain low, but growth potential is high.

Focus on economic development

In the west, the Belt and Road (B&R) is still portrayed as a new plan. Yet, President Xi Jinping raised the initiative of jointly building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in the autumn of 2013.

If the original belt reflected the ancient world economy until the Italian Renaissance, the B&R includes countries on the original Silk Road through Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East and Europe. It also features a maritime road that links China's port facilities with the African coast, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean.

The B&R has potential to redirect domestic overcapacity and capital for regional infrastructure development to improve trade and relations with Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Europe  and, over time, across the Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The B&R has been compared with the post-war Marshall Plan, which was designed to support the European recovery and to insulate the Soviet Union. There are parallels, but also major differences.

Presumably, the Marshall Plan was created to help rebuild economies in Western Europe for four years beginning in April 1948. While there is no consensus on exact amounts, the cumulative aid may have totaled $13 billion (some $130 billion in 2016 dollar value). These efforts pale in comparison with the B&R, which involves far greater cumulative investments, which are currently anticipated at $4 trillion to $8 trillion, depending on timeline and scenario estimates (Figure 1).

Unlike the Marshall Plan, the B&R does not predicate participation on membership or tacit support of military alliances. It is focused on 21st century economic development  not on 20th century Cold War.

Huge expenses of geopolitics

The Marshall Plan was predicated on participation in the US-led North American Treaty Organization (NATO). Historically, almost 75 percent of the total aid went to just five countries: the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, which became NATO's core members.

Today, NATO still accounts for over 70 percent of all military spending in the world (United States 38 percent, non-US NATO: 32 percent), although friction about NATO financing by members reflects underlying pressures among the founding members.

While much is made about spending on humanitarian aid by the west, particularly the US and Europe, it should be seen in context. In 2016, world military expenditure is estimated to have been $1.68 trillion, according to SIPRI research. In turn, international humanitarian assistance reached a record high of $28 billion in 2015, according to the most recent Global Humanitarian Assistance Report (Figure 2).

In brief, west-led humanitarian assistance is less than 2 percent of world military expenditures, which is led by NATO. That's untenable over time, especially as more than 90 percent of global humanitarian aid goes to long and medium-term recipients.

Need for global cooperation

Unlike advanced economies, emerging and developing nations have neither the ability nor willingness to over-invest in military spending. In per capita terms, China ($156), India ($42), and even Russia ($481) invest a lot less than the US ($1,885), or major European economies ($500-$860) in military spending.

Moreover, China does not predicate entry to the B&R on membership in military alliances, as the US once did. That is vital. When NATO's rearmament replaced economic development as the west's primary goal in the post-war era and when the Cold War divided the world, instability and economic volatility surpassed stability and economic growth in the global agenda. That benefited mainly a few advanced economies but not the decolonizing nations, which were penalized by costly conflicts that were exported to the Third World as the direct result of the Cold War.

It is these historical failures in economic development that the B&R has potential to alleviate over time. Through renewed global cooperation, the rise of more inclusive multilateral inter-governmental development banks. and massive new infrastructure initiatives in pivotal emerging economies, the Belt and Road has the potential to change the 21st century  for the better.

The author is the founder of Difference Group and has served as research director at the India, China and America Institute (USA) and visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).





Figure 1 OBOR and Marshall Plan Expenditures ($ billions)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks during an election rally in Aachen, Germany, May 13, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

BERLIN - Exit polls showed on Sunday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Chrisitian Democratic Union(CDU) won North Rhine-Westphalia state election.

According to initial projections made by German local media ZDF and ARD, CDU secures 34.3 to 34.4 percent of the votes while the Social Democratic Party(SPD) lag behind, getting 30.6 percent of the votes.

Free Democratic Party (FDP) gets 11.9 to 12.2 percent and the right-wing Alternative for Germany(AFD) receives 7.6 to 7.7 percent. The Greens follows with 6.0 percent and the Left Party with 5.0 percent.

Sunday's vote was the last state election before the federal election set for Sept 24, and was widely seen as a vital pre-duel between Merkel's CDU and ex-President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz's SPD.

The result could greatly boost the morale of CDU in the national election, since it has scored success in three state elections this year, Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia.

In the past several months, some opinion polls have constantly showed Schulz will have the edge over his major competitor Merkel in the coming federal election. Some local media even dubbed it as "Shulz effect," and speculated Schulz might substitute Merkel since she lost momentum due to the migrant crisis.

But the recent setbacks dimmed the halo of Schulz since he failed to transform his popularity into votes.

SPD leader Schulz admitted a "crashing defeat" for his party, since his party lost 8.2 percent of the ballots compared to the 2012 election.

German local media also called the result as "political earthquake."

North Rhine-Westphalia has been governed by a center-left coalition of the SPD and the Greens since 2010, with the Social Democrat Hannelore Kraft serving as state premier.

Kraft retreated from all her functions in SPD after the election. She said it's sad the party lost so many districts and she "takes personal responsibility for this defeat."

North Rhine-Westphalia is the most populous among the German states with nearly 18 million residents accounting for 20 percent of Germany's population.
French President Emmanuel Macron reacts during his inauguration after the handover ceremony at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 14, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

PARIS - Centrist Emmanuel Macron was sworn in as the eighth president of the French Fifth Republic in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace here on Sunday.

After a warm welcome from outgoing President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace at around 10:00 am local time (0800 GMT), Macron and Hollande held a closed-door meeting during which Macron was handed the codes to launch France's nuclear arsenal.

President of the Constitutional Council Laurent Fabius then announced the final results of presidential elections and Macron officially assumed the office.

In a speech to several hundred guests, Macron said, "The French have chosen hope and the spirit of conquest."

"I will not give up on the commitments made with regard to the French," said the new president.

"Nothing will make me renounce to defend the interests of France. From this evening I will be at work," he stressed.

During the coming five years of his governing term, Macron hopes to draw "one of the most beautiful images of our history," in which Europe must be more "efficient" and more "democratic."

Following the ceremony and a review of the guard of honor, the 39-year-old Macron will go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Elysees Avenue, a tradition followed by all his predecessors in France's modern history.

Macron won a runoff on May 7, beating far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen by a wide margin.

Macron, a pro-market advocate and ex-investment banker, offered a relief to the market and supporters for economic openness and closer European links.

In his first official visit abroad, Macron will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday in Berlin to forge closer links and seek ways to bolster integration in the European bloc.

Then, he will visit French army forces in the Sahel region, according to local media reports.
LONDON - Friday's cyber attack hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries and that number could grow when people return to work on Monday, the head of the European Union's police agency said on Sunday.

Cyber security experts say the spread of the virus dubbed WannaCry - "ransomware" which locked up computers in car factories, hospitals, shops and schools in several countries - has slowed, but that any respite might be brief.

Europol Director Rob Wainwright told a British television program the attack was unique in that the ransomware was used in combination with "a worm functionality" so the infection spread automatically.

"The global reach is unprecedented. The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations," he said.

"At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up; I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn (on) their machines on Monday morning."

He said Europol and other agencies did not yet know who was behind the attack but "normally it is criminally minded and that is our first working theory for obvious reasons".

"(There have been) remarkably few payments so far that we've noticed as we are tracking this, so most people are not paying this, so there isn't a lot of money being made by criminal organizations so far," he said.

As terrifying as the attack was, cybersecurity experts say it's nothing compared to what might be coming especially if companies, organizations and governments don't make major fixes.

Had it not been for a young cybersecurity researcher's accidental discovery of a so-called "kill switch," the malicious software likely would have spread much farther and faster. Security experts say this attack should wake up every corporate board room and legislative chamber around the globe.

Darien Huss, a 28-year-old research engineer who assisted the anonymous British researcher who stopped the virus from spreading, said he was "still worried for what's to come in the next few days because it really would not be so difficult for the actors behind this to rerelease their code without a kill switch or with a better kill switch. Or we could potentially see copycats mimic the delivery or exploit method they used."

Reuters - AP
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear case Monday against US President Donald Trump's travel ban.

The US Courts for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, Northern California, ruled on Feb 9 against reinstating a travel ban signed on Jan 27 by Trump as part of an executive order.

The president subsequently issued a revised order on March 6, taking Iraq off the list of countries whose citizens are blocked from entering the United States for 90 days but keeping six other Muslim-majority countries on the list.

The travel ban in the second order was blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii, thus throwing the case again into the 9th circuit court.

In initiating the legal challenge on March 9, Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin noted that the new order, compared with the initial ban, "nothing of substance has changed: there is the same blanket ban on entry from Muslim-majority countries."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs a weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem May 7, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday urged the United States to move its embassy to Jerusalem, responding to an earlier statement by US State Secretary Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson suggested on Sunday that moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem might not impact the Trump administration's efforts to reach a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

He told NBC that President Donald Trump "I think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region, and understanding, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have."

In the evening, Netanyahu released a statement, charging that the move "won't harm the peace process."

According to Netanyahu, transferring the embassy will "advance peace" by "shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

Israel occupied East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Shortly later, it annexed the territory, in a move condemned internationally.

The Palestinians want to establish a state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
By LI XIANG in Beijing and PAUL WELITZKIN in New York | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2017-05-15 10:14

China and the US have reached a new deal that will ease market access in agriculture, financial services and energy, marking both sides' willingness to advance the trade relationship and alleviating fears of a trade war between the world's two largest economies.

The 10-part deal is the first result of the 100-day action plan that President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump agreed to pursue at their meeting at Mar-a-Lago in Florida in April. It will start in mid-July.

Under the deal announced by the Trump administration on May 11, China agreed to resume imports of US beef by July 16. In return, the US agreed to open its market to Chinese cooked poultry.

The agreement would also streamline the evaluation of pending US biotechnology product applications and facilitate the entrance of Chinese banks into the US banking market.

Beijing and Washington also agreed to discuss extending the initial 100-day action plan to a one-year plan.

Both sides will hold the first meeting of the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue during the summer this year.

Vice-Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said the deal was a result of cooperation based on the principle of mutual benefits, stressing that the agreement was not "a list of one side's concessions".

"The Chinese and US teams carried out nearly 30 rounds of consultation to achieve the agreement. It was a result of cooperation and reflected the expectations of the people of the two countries," Zhu told reporters at a news conference on Friday.

Vice-Commerce Minister Yu Jianhua said the agreement altered the expectation of a possible trade war between the two sides, adding that stable China-US relations will be a "positive force" for the recovery of the global economy.

In announcing the agreement on Thursday evening, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said "US-China relationships are now hitting a new high, especially in trade."

He hailed the agreement as "a herculean accomplishment" forged in record time.

"This will help us to bring down the deficit for sure," Ross said at media briefing in Washington. "You watch and you'll see."

In the energy sector, the US already is shipping some liquefied natural gas to China and said it could negotiate any type of contract, including long-term contracts, with US suppliers.

In financial services, China pledged to grant market access to US credit rating agencies and credit card companies and agreed to issue licenses to "two qualified US financial institutions" for the interbank bond underwriting and settlement business.

Ross told CNBC that the US also had agreed to treat Chinese financial institutions the same way as other foreign banks that want to open activities in the US.

"Clearly China, whose banks are among the largest in the whole world, wants access to the US banking market," he said. "As long as they can comply with the normal rules, they will get access."

In 2003, China imposed an import ban on US beef due to a case of mad cow disease in Washington state. It had conditionally lifted the ban, but few purchases have been made.

On the resumption of US beef exports to China, Ross said: "It's a very big market; it's at least a $2.5 billion market that's being opened."

The beef agreement also drew praise from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

"It's impossible to overstate how beneficial this will be for America's cattle producers," Craig Uden, president of the association, said in a statement.

"We look forward to providing nearly 1.4 billion new customers in China with the same US beef that we feed our families."
A projection of cyber code on a hooded man is pictured in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. Capitalizing on spying tools believed to have been developed by the US National Security Agency, hackers staged a cyber assault with a self-spreading malware that has infected tens of thousands of computers in nearly 100 countries. [Photo/Agencies]

LONDON - An unprecedented "ransomware" cyberattack that has already hit tens of thousands of victims in 150 countries could wreak greater havoc as more malicious variations appear and people return to their desks Monday and power up computers at the start of the workweek.

Officials and experts on Sunday urged organizations and companies to update their operating systems immediately to ensure they aren't vulnerable to a second, more powerful version of the software  or to future versions that can't be stopped.

The cyberattack paralyzed computers that run Britain's hospital network, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies worldwide.

Chinese media reported Sunday that students at several universities were hit, blocking access to their thesis papers and dissertation presentations.

The attack, already believed to be the biggest online extortion scheme ever recorded, is an "escalating threat" after hitting 200,000 victims across the world since Friday, according to Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, Europe's policing agency.

"The numbers are still going up," Wainwright said. "We've seen that the slowdown of the infection rate over Friday night, after a temporary fix around it, has now been overcome by a second variation the criminals have released."

Researchers discovered at least two variants of the rapidly replicating worm Sunday and one did not include the so-called kill switch that allowed them to interrupt its spread Friday by diverting it to a dead end on the internet.

Ryan Kalember, senior vice-president at Proofpoint Inc, said the version with no kill switch was able to spread but it contained a flaw that wouldn't allow it to take over a computer and demand ransom to unlock files. However, he said it's only a matter of time before such a version exists.

"I still expect another to pop up and be fully operational," Kalember said. "We haven't fully dodged this bullet at all until we're patched against the vulnerability itself."

The attack held users hostage by freezing their computers, encrypting their data and demanding money through online bitcoin payment  $300 at first, rising to $600 before it destroys files hours later.

The 200,000 victims included more than 100,000 organizations, Europol spokesman Jan Op Gen Oorth told The Associated Press.

He said it was too early to say who was behind the onslaught and what their motivation was, aside from the obvious demand for money. So far, he said, not many people have paid the ransom demanded by the malware.

The effects were felt across the globe, with Britain's National Health Service, Russia's Interior Ministry and companies including Spain's Telefonica, FedEx Corp in the US and French carmaker Renault all reporting disruptions.

Had it not been for a young British cybersecurity researcher's accidental discovery of a so-called "kill switch," the malicious software likely would have spread much farther and faster.

The 22-year-old researcher known as "MalwareTech," who wanted to remain anonymous, said he spotted a hidden web address in the "WannaCry" code and made it official by registering its domain name. That move, which cost just $10.69, redirected the attacks to the server of Kryptos Logic, the security company where he works. The server operates as a "sinkhole" to collect information about malware  and in Friday's case kept the malware from escaping.

Security officials urged organizations to protect themselves by installing security fixes right away, running antivirus software and backing up data elsewhere.

"Just patch their systems as soon as possible," MalwareTech said. "It won't be too late as long as they're not infected. It should just be a case of making sure installing updates is enabled, installing the updates, and reboot."

The ransomware appeared to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was purportedly identified by the US National Security Agency for its own intelligence-gathering purposes. The NSA tools were stolen by hackers and dumped on the internet.

Experts say this vulnerability has been understood among experts for months, yet too many groups failed to take it seriously. Microsoft had "patched," or fixed it, in updates of recent versions of Windows since March, but many users did not apply the software fix.

Worse, the malware was able to create so much chaos because it was designed to self-replicate like a virus, spreading quickly once inside university, business and government networks.

Microsoft was quick to change its policy, announcing free security patches to fix this vulnerability in the older Windows systems still used by millions of individuals and smaller businesses. Before Friday's attack, Microsoft had made fixes for older systems, such as 2001's Windows XP, available only to those who paid extra for extended technical support.

"The problem is the larger organizations are still running on old, no longer supported operating systems," said Lawrence Abrams, a New York-based blogger who runs BleepingComputer.com. "So they no longer get the security updates they should be."

Short of paying, options for those already infected are usually limited to recovering data files from a backup, if available, or living without them.

British cybersecurity expert Graham Cluley doesn't want to blame the NSA for the attack, though he said they have a duty to citizens who "are living an online life."

"Obviously, they want those tools in order to spy on people of interest, on other countries, to conduct surveillance," Cluley said. "It's a handy thing to have, but it's a dangerous thing to have, because they can be used against you. And that's what's happening right now."

AP
Literature lovers, publishers and distributors wan the UK book industry to bring in more translated and bilingual books from China.

During a seminar at the China Context event in London's Chinatown on Friday, leading experts, Sinolo-gists and academics explored ways to develop opportunities for literary exchanges between China and the UK.

In 2013, Britain licensed 574 titles from China, while the world's second largest economy licensed 2,521 from the UK.

Angus Phillips, director at Oxford International Center for Publishing Studies said: "The ratio of Chinese exports and imports have shifted over the last few years but partly that has been China exporting into their own region in Asia. Certainly there has been more interest in the UK in taking Chinese copyrights but I think it is a niche market compared to some of the best sellers that are going from the west into China."

He said more needs to be done to get people in the UK to read more Chinese literature trabslated into English.

"Translated literature remains at a very low percentage of only about 3 percent," Phillips added.

To boost sales of Chinese literature, Phillips suggested growing the pool of translators and agents in Britain for this market and also more dialogue between industry experts from both countries.

The seminar was part the first Chinese book festival at the China Exchange, which celebrates the best of Chinese writers and writing during three days of activities.

As China tries to raise its profile as a global publishing powerhouse the festival aims to not only engage and inspire audiences with the country's rich literary tradition, but provide a platform for conversations that will shape the future of the industry.

The book fair covered everything relating to China from history and biographies, to classical and con-temporary literation to Chinese learning materials and children's books.

Activities over the weekend included a creative writing panel discussion, open mic storytelling and poetry workshops.

Helena Zhang, program and venue manager at China Exchange, said she hopes to run the festival as an annual event "to enrich the culture diversity in the UK".

To contact reporter: boleung@mail.chinadailyuk.com

Editor: Chris Peterson
US-led airstrike kills 40 in Syria's Deir al-Zour

Xinhua | Updated: 2017-05-15 18:57

DAMASCUS -- Over 40 civilians were killed by strikes of the US-led anti-terror coalition on the city of Bukamal in the countryside of the eastern province of Deir al-Zour on Monday, pro-government Sham FM radio reported.



The report said the airstrikes targeted civilian areas in Bukamal city, which is controlled by the Islamic State (IS) group in Deir al-Zour.



The airstrike is the latest in a string of similar strikes that claimed the lives of civilians in the process of targeting IS positons.



Last Thursday, at least 11 people were killed and nine others wounded by a US-led airstrike on the northern province of Raqqa.



The airstrike targeted one of the villages in the northern countryside of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the IS terror group, said the report.



The report said all those killed were civilians.



On Wednesday, at least 10 civilians were killed by US-led airstrike against the town of Sour in the countryside of Deir al-Zour.



The US-led anti-terror coalition has also been backing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in their push against the IS positions in Deir al-Zour and Raqqa province.



The coalition previously acknowledged the falling of civilian victims by the airstrikes on IS-held areas in Syria.
Over the past several years, an increasing amount of creative work has been outsourced to China: everything from special effects for movies to programming for video games to architectural designs. These creative works are protected by copyright, but not always in a way companies expect. And because so much work in China occurs without a legally enforceable contract, once companies realize their IP portfolio is not nearly as robust as they thought, it is often too late to do anything about it.

As a general rule, the creator of an original work (e.g., a song, movie, or video game) owns the copyright in that work. This is true in the United States and in China and in most every other country in the world. The main exception to the general rule is for works for hire, which are works commissioned and paid for by a third party. But this is not a clear-cut exception: it depends on the facts, and it depends on which country youre in.

In the United States, a company will own the copyright to a work for hire by an employee if the work was made within the scope of that employees employment. A company will own the copyright to a work for hire by an independent contractor if the work was specially ordered or commissioned for use via a signed agreement that specifically states that the work is a work for hire and such work falls into one of nine statutorily defined categories (including motion pictures, translations, tests, and instructional texts). Many commissioned works (e.g., photography, software, and product design) do not fall into one of the statutory categories, and for those the company will need to have a signed contract that explicitly assigns the copyright. Even in the absence of a signed agreement, the company can argue that it has an implied license, but thats not a great position to be in.

In China, the presumptions are somewhat different. Chinas Copyright Law states that an employee will own the copyright to anything they create during the course of employment, except for engineering designs, product designs, maps, and computer software, and other works created mainly with the employers resources. For all other works, the employer essentially has a two-year exclusive license to use the copyrighted material, and thereafter a non-exclusive license. If an employer (a WFOE, say) wants to impose a different requirement on its employees, it needs specific language in a signed contract with the employee that assigns all rights in any work for hire to the employer. That contract should be in Chinese and governed by Chinese law, and it should be signed at the beginning of employment.

For independent contractors (whether individuals or entities), the contractor will own the copyright unless there is a specific agreement between the parties in which the contractor agrees to assign the copyright to the commissioning entity. And yes, this contract ought to be in Chinese and governed by Chinese law also.

This all sounds reasonably straightforward but a vast number of entities  including huge multinationals  still operate in China without proper agreements with their employees, let alone their independent contractors. These companies are essentially operating on the honor system, and sooner or later theyre going to pay by losing valuable rights.
DEAR DOCTOR: Our youngest daughter is starting college in New York City this fall, and on top of all the empty nest emotions my husband and I are dealing with, a friend has warned us about something she saw on the news called "rat urine disease." What is it? Should we be worried?

DEAR READER: There's nothing like a rare and off-putting health threat to get the 24-hour news cycle into a lather. We'll spare you additional worry and jump right to the point: No, you do not need to add rat urine disease to the list of challenges we all face when a child first leaves home.

That said, the reason that leptospirosis  that's what it's called  has created headlines is that three individuals in the Bronx contracted the disease last winter. One of them later died. But according to health officials in New York, leptospirosis is extremely rare. In a city of 8.5 million residents, between one and three cases of the disease are seen each year. Add in the fact that the disease is treatable with antibiotics, and the threat level plummets.

Now that you're (hopefully) breathing easier, let's talk specifics.

Leptospirosis is the name of the disease caused when leptospira, a corkscrew-shaped bacterium, enters the body. It produces a wide range of symptoms, many of which can be mistaken for other diseases. These include high fever, chills, nausea, diarrhea, rash, headache, jaundice and muscle aches. In some cases, infected individuals may not have any symptoms at all. Untreated, leptospirosis may lead to liver or kidney failure, or meningitis. Treatment is with antibiotics, with early diagnosis yielding the best outcomes.

Although the news reports your friend saw focused on rats, which are the most common carriers of leptospira in urban environments, the bacterium can be found in a range of animals. These include cattle, pigs, dogs and horses, other rodents, and some wild animals.

Infected animals, which don't show any disease symptoms, will continue to excrete the bacteria for several months or even several years. Humans become infected when they come into contact with either the urine of an infected animal, or its bodily fluids, other than saliva. You can also pick up the infection from a substance that carries the infected urine or fluids, such as soil, water or trash.

The bacterium typically enters the body through the skin, particularly if it is broken due to a scratch or a cut. It can also enter through the mucous membranes of the mouth, eyes or nose. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wide outbreaks of leptospirosis are usually caused by exposure to contaminated water, such as floodwaters. Person to person transmission is rare.

If you're still worried, recommend the following precautions to your daughter:

 Steer clear of rats and their habitats.

 If you do make contact, wash the affected body part thoroughly with soap and water.

 To clean areas where rats may have been, use one part household bleach and 10 parts water, which kills the leptospirosis bacteria. Wear gloves and goggles.

 If you develop symptoms after making contact with suspected rat urine, whether directly or in a rat-infested environment, seek medical care.
Frances highest court last week rejected the notion of a neutral gender.



The ruling upheld a lower courts decision denying a French citizen with a sex development disorder the right to use neutral as an official gender.



The Cour de Cassation, Frances supreme court, ruled that the distinction between male and female was necessary to the social and legal organization, of which it is a cornerstone, and that the recognition of a neutral gender would have profound repercussions on rules of French law and necessitate legislative changes, according to Agence France-Presse.



The plaintiff, a 65-year-old psychotherapist from eastern France known by the pseudonym Gaetan Schmitt, was assigned male at birth despite having intersex genitalia. Schmitt is married to a woman and has an adopted child but claims to be neither male or female.



In 2015, a family affairs judge in Tours ruled in Schmitts favor, but an appeals court overturned the ruling last year.



Schmitts attorney, Bertrand Perier, called the high court ruling a missed opportunity, in an interview with The New York Times. I dont see why Frances social or legal organization would necessitate gender binarism.



Perier said Schmitt was raised as a boy because his mother wanted a son.



Gaetan is neither a man nor a woman. They do not feel like a man or woman. They cannot become a man or woman. And they do not want to become a man or woman, Perier said, referring to Schmitt with a plural pronoun.



Only a few countries, including Australia, Nepal, India, and New Zealand, have a legal third gender. Other countries allow parents to delay declaring a gender for babies born with a sex development disorder, but only for a limited time.



Schmitt plans to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.



But even if that court reversed last weeks ruling and affirmed the family affairs judges declaration that Schmitt should have right to use a neutral gender because of a sex development disorder, the ruling would still link gender to biology.



Some activists say that is unacceptable and are pushing for laws like New Zealands, which allow transgender and cross-dressing people, in addition to those with intersex genitalia, to also use a third categorygender diverseas their legal gender.



But gender is inherently biological, according to a scientific study released earlier this year that found more than 1,500 sex-specific genes throughout the body.



The study by Moran Gershoni and Shmuel Pietrokovski at the Weizmann Institute of Science was looking for an explanation for the prevalence of certain diseases in men and women.



They found many genes are expressedor copied out to make proteinsdifferently in men and women in many more ways than previously imagined.



Overall, sex-specific genes are mainly expressed in the reproductive system, emphasizing the notable physiological distinction between men and women, the report, published in BMC Biology, said. However, scores of genes that are not known to directly associate with reproduction were also found to have sex-specific expression (e.g., the men-specific skin genes).



In addition to 1,559 sex-specific genes, Gershoni and Pietrokovski found over 6,500 genes with significant sex-differential expression. These sex-linked genes were found not only in reproductive organs and the mammary (milk-producing) tissue, but also the skin, skeleton, heart, brain, lungs, and stomach, among other areas.



For example, they found genes that were highly expressed in the skin of men related to the growth of body hair and genes highly expressed in women related to fat storage. They also found a gene mainly expressed in the brain of women that scientists think might protect the female neurons from Parkinsons, a disease with a higher prevalence and earlier onset in men, and a gene expressed in the liver of women regulating drug metabolism, providing molecular evidence for the known fact that men and women process drugs differently.



The study said more research is needed to understand how the differences between men and women cause disease and change the way each sex responds to treatment.

Courtesy: WORLD News Service

Publication date: May 15, 2017
Tennessee's governor signed a ban on late-term abortions into law on Friday, reports LifeNews.com.

The ban, called the Tennessee Infants Protection Act, prohibits abortions after 24 weeks and possibly even earlier. The law requires clinics to assess whether an unborn child is viable as early as 20 weeks, and if it is determined that the baby is viable, an abortion would also be illegal. Abortion doctors convicted of breaking this law could face felony charges.

Rather than being a 20-week abortion ban, as some have described it, the bill requires physicians to assess viability beginning at 20 weeks gestational age, absent a medical emergency, said Tennessees Gov. Bill Haslam.

Pro-life group Tennessee Right to Life was pleased with the new legislation and thanked the states governor for supporting pro-life values:

Tennessee Right to Life thanks Governor Haslam for his demonstrated commitment to doing everything possible constitutionally to defend and protect vulnerable unborn children, said Brian Harris, the organizations president. His administration has been tireless in supporting common-sense measures which affirm the dignity human life in our state and pro-life Tennesseans are clearly very grateful to the Governor, Harris continued.

The new law will be put into effect on July 1, 2017.

Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com

Publication date: May 15, 2017
The Nigerian president on May 7 greeted 82 Chibok schoolgirls who were released in exchange for Boko Haram militants. The latest release on Saturday marks the second time the government has negotiated with Boko Haram for some of the girls freedom.



Several military helicopters on Saturday transported the girls from northeastern Nigeria to Abuja, the capital city. By Sunday evening, presidential spokesman Garba Shehu had listed the girls names on his Twitter page. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari received the girls at his official residence and commended the groups that assisted with the release.



No human being should go through this kind of ordeal, Buhari said Sunday. Let me reassure Nigerians, especially relatives and friends of the remaining girls, that the federal government will spare no effort to see that they and all other Nigerians who have been abducted safely regain their freedom.



The International Committee of the Red Cross, the Swiss government, and other international and local nonprofits assisted in the negotiations and release, authorities said. Shehu said in a statement the rescue involved lengthy negotiations and the return of some Boko Haram militants held by authorities. Sen. Shehu Sani told CNN that discussions to free the remaining girls would begin at the end of the week.



Boko Haram in April 2014 kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from their boarding school in the northeastern town of Chibok. Some 113 girls still remain in captivity. The Nigerian government in October helped secure the release of 21 of the schoolgirls in similar negotiations, the government said. Femi Adesina, the presidents media adviser, said the girls were handed over to government officials who would supervise their rehabilitation.



It is heartening to know that the girls will be returning to their families who have been waiting for this day, Pernille Ironside, the Nigerian representative for the United Nations childrens agency, said in a statement. They will face a long and difficult process to rebuild their lives after the indescribable horror and trauma they have suffered in the hands of Boko Haram.



Nigerian forces have cleared out Boko Haram extremists from their stronghold in the Northeast, but the group has persisted with sporadic attacks. Female suicide bomb attacks continue on random targets across the Northeast, some of which civilian and security forces have been able to prevent. The United States and British governments both released statements last week warning their citizens that Boko Haram was targeting foreigners in the Bama area of Borno state near the border with Cameroon.



Amnesty Internationals Nigeria Director Osai Ojigbo welcomed the girls release and called on the government to ensure they receive adequate counseling to ease their reintegration.



The government should also respect their privacy and ensure that the girls are reunited with their families and not kept in lengthy detention and security screening, which can only add to their suffering and plight, Ojigbo said.

Courtesy: WORLD News Service

Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com

Publication date: May 15, 2017
ChinaAid Delegation Heads to Washington, D.C., with Wives of Abused and Tortured Lawyers, Congressional Hearing Scheduled for Thursday

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2017 / Christian Newswire / -- A ChinaAid delegation comprised of the wives of abused and tortured Chinese human rights advocates is traveling to the U.S. capitol to spotlight their husbands' cases on Thursday.

Photo: China Aid delegation meeting with Marco Rubio

Invited by U.S. Representative Ed Royce, the Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lee Ching-Yu, wife of jailed Taiwanese NGO leader Li Ming-Che; Dr. Chen "Gloria" Guiqiu, wife of human rights attorney Xie Yang; Jin Bianling, wife of lawyer Jiang Tianyong; and Wang Yanfang, wife of attorney Tang Jingling, will all testify regarding their husbands' cases during a hearing before one of the committee's branches, the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations. The hearing will be held in Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., on May 18, 2017, at 2:00 p.m. EDT.

According to Royce, the purpose of this gathering is to "examine the torture, disappearances, and detention of human rights lawyers and democracy advocates in China." As such, the witnesses will be presenting their husband's cases before the congressional audience.

The delegation will be in the capitol Tuesday-Thursday, and they will also be meeting with officials from the Trump Administration, members of Congress, and key NGO leaders.

In order to further spread awareness of abuses occurring in China, each of the witnesses and ChinaAid President Bob Fu, whose experience in a Chinese prison for preaching Christianity and connection to victims of similar atrocities led him to found the organization, will be available for interview. If you wish to arrange to speak with them, please contact Brynne Lawrence at (432) 553-1080 or media@chinaaid.org

ChinaAid hosts such delegations in order to expose China's human rights abuses to international leaders, which the Communist Party conceals, in hopes that those in the free world will act on behalf of those suffering for executing their right to freedom of belief and speech.

Contact ChinaAid





Office phone: (432) 689-6985





Media phone: (432) 553-1080




home World ACLJ meets with Trump to discuss case of American pastor jailed in Turkey

The conservative law group American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) met with President Donald Trump on Thursday to discuss the case of American Pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been languishing in a Turkish prison since last fall on supposed terror link charges.

Brunson, who served as a pastor of a Protestant church in Turkey's West Coast town of Izmir for 23 years, was detained in October due to his alleged ties to a terrorist organization.

ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow said he met with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to discuss the pastor's case and the results of the meeting had been positive.

"The president and vice president have taken a personal interest in resolving this," Sekulow told Fox News. "They are fully engaged. The vice president has told me that he has been in talks with officials in Turkey," he added.

Sekulow said he respectfully urged Trump to bring up the pastor's case in his scheduled meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Washington on May 16.

"I have full confidence that this matter will be successfully resolved in short order," said Sekulow.

Brunson has not been indicted but he was accused of having ties to the American-based Muslim cleric Fetullah Gulen, who is being blamed by Erdogan for the coup attempt last July.

The pastor was detained along with his wife on Oct. 7 last year when he was officially summoned to a local police station in Izmir. He thought he was called in to receive a long-awaited permanent residence card, but he was told that he was being deported for being a "threat to national security."

His wife was released 12 days later, but he was later transferred to a counter-terrorism center, where he was questioned and charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization."

According to the ACLJ, Turkey has acknowledged that there is not enough evidence against Brunson. The law group has maintained that the pastor is being held because of his Christian faith.

Brunson's family have attended high-level meetings on Capitol Hill to urge key Senators and the State Department to secure the release of the pastor.

"For 23 years, I saw him love and serve the people of Turkey. It was a shock when this peaceful man was accused of being part of an armed terrorist group, an accusation that is clearly nonsense," said Pam Brunson, the pastor's mother.

"He has been in prison seven months, and having visited him there [this past January], I have seen the tremendous struggles he is experiencing. I wake every morning with a deep sadness. Yet, because of the huge outpouring of prayers by God's people, God has sustained him and I believe he will be delivered," she added.

Apart from the meetings with U.S. officials, the ACLJ has also submitted written and oral statements to the United Nation, asking the organization to pressure Turkey into releasing Brunson. More than 280,000 people have signed ACLJ's petition to bring the pastor back to the U.S.
JORDAN  A historical marker honoring famed 19th century artist Sheldon Peck, who once lived in Jordan, will soon be placed in front of the site of his former residence at 5 Skaneateles St. by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation.

No date has yet been set for the unveiling.

Jordan historian Jack Horner said the house currently located on the site is not the home in which Peck and his family lived from 1828 to 1836. That home has been demolished.

Peck had a long career as an artist and portrait painter. He was also involved in the abolitionist movement, especially after he moved to Illinois.

A news article included with the historical marker's application said Peck was elected to represent Dupage County at the Illinois State Convention of Abolitionists in 1856. Also, his son Frank Peck wrote about fugitive slaves staying at the Peck home.

Peck's artwork is represented in the collections of major museums around the United States, such as the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

The Pomeroy Foundation believes that markers play an important role in local historic preservation by educating the public and fostering historic tourism, which in turn can provide economic benefits to the communities where the markers are placed.

The marker program commemorates historic people, places or things within the time frame of 1740 to 1917 by awarding grants to install the markers. It is a continuation of a similar program carried on by New York state in the 1930s.

Funding from the Pomeroy Foundation includes a standard marker, mounting pole and shipping. Grantees are responsible for the installation of the marker.

Peck was born Aug. 26, 1797, in Cornwall, Vermont. His ancestors were among the founders of New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Jacob, was a blacksmith and served as a private during the Revolutionary War.

In 1825, Peck married Harriet Corey, and the couple eventually had 13 children. They moved to what is now Jordan in 1828 and lived there until 1836, when they moved to Chicago, where they continued farming.

No records exist to indicate that Peck had any formal art education. It is said his work may have been influenced by William Jennys, a portrait painter in Vermont.

Peck primarily painted portraits between 1820 and 1869. Meanwhile, he was considered a radical abolitionist and staunch supporter of ending slavery, as well as equal rights. He was also involved in the temperance, public education and women's rights movements. According to some sources, he was a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

His youngest son, Frank, recorded details about his father's work in journals and often shared how his family's home was part of the Underground Railroad:

"Back in my boy hood days, my father, who was an abolitionist, helped the Negroes escape from slavery in the South. Our home was used as a headquarters for all opponents of slavery in this part of the country, a station for the underground railway. I can remember one incident as clearly as if it was yesterday when my father protected seven Negroes one night, when I was a small boy, helping them on their way to the Chicago district."

Peck died in Lombard, Illinois, on March 19, 1868. The Peck home in Lombard has been restored.
home US Montana governor vetoes bill aimed at banning late-term abortions

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock has vetoed a bill that would have banned late-term abortions, claiming that terminating a pregnancy is a "deeply personal medical decision."

Senate Bill 282, which passed the Montana House and the Senate in April, would have required doctors to try to save the life of a "viable fetus," which is defined in the measure as a fetus that has at least a 50 percent chance of survival.

The legislation also defined fetal viability at 24 weeks' into pregnancy and it would have prevented abortions beyond that point, even in cases of medical emergency, according to Think Progress.

In a statement issued on Monday, Bullock stated that lawmakers should not interfere in "deeply personal medical decision."

Marissa Perry, press secretary for the governor, has previously stated that Bullock "strongly believes a woman's medical decision should stay between herself, her doctor, her family, and her faith." She also pointed to the Democratic governor's record of vetoing pro-life bills.

Montana lawmakers have introduced several pro-life measures such as a bill requiring fetal anesthesia before abortions, a bill redefining life at conception and a bill restricting the performance of abortions to licensed physicians.

However, the Guttmacher Institute noted that the state "does not have any of the major types of abortion restrictions a such as waiting periods, mandated parental involvement or limitations on publicly funded abortions a often found in other states."

Bullock had also vetoed SB 329, known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would have banned abortions after 20 weeks into pregnancy.

Rep. Dennis Lenz (R-Billings), who supported the bill, said that he is offended when someone says men do not understand abortion.

"As someone who was born to an unwed mother a 11 years before Roe v. Wade a I know where I would be," Lenz said when the House passed the bill last month.

He contended that the legislation was important to protect the lives of babies. Rep. Carl Glimm (R-Kila) agreed with him and said that measure fulfills the government's role in protecting the vulnerable.

"I think that government is here to take care of those who are the most vulnerable, and I think that these babies are just that," he said.

The bill was based on the belief that unborn babies are capable of feeling pain at that period, but proponents of abortion call it "junk science."

According to the Centers for Disease Control, over 5,770 late-term abortions were performed at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy in 2013. An estimated 8,150 abortions were conducted between 18 weeks and 20 weeks.
Works by Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Whistler and other masters from The Collection of Hunt Henderson

World-class Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works  also including paintings by Renoir, Daumier and works on paper by Degas and Dufy  formerly owned by the pioneering New Orleans collector will appear across Christies auctions in May

During the early years of the 20th century New Orleans was more artistically engaged than any other city in the American South, thanks to its general cosmopolitanism and its historical and cultural ties to France. It boasted a flourishing opera scene, an estimable School of Art at Newcomb College, and, after its opening in 1911, its own art museum, the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art. Yet the city had only one art collector of truly national standing  the sugar magnate Hunt Henderson, who assembled a world-class collection of avant-garde art, from Impressionism through early Modernism, well before it was fashionable among his peers. Works formerly from The Collection of Hunt Henderson will be sold across Christies sales of Impressionist & Modern Art on 15-16 May, and in the American Art auction on 23 May. Highlights from the collection will be exhibited at the opening of the Christies Los Angeles flagship in late April 2017, and the full collection will be on view at Christies Rockefeller Plaza from 6 to 17 May. By all accounts, Hunt Henderson enjoyed a rich and varied life. His father William had founded the Henderson Sugar Refinery in 1876, and Hunt assumed control of the enterprise after his fathers death in 1900. He and his wife Jeanne travelled widely through Europe with their son Charles.

Hunts abiding passion, however, was modern art, and he bought his first Impressionist paintings from Durand-Ruel in New York no later than 1908. More purchases followed in rapid succession. Well-represented among these acquisitions was the work of Degas, whose mother was from New Orleans and who had himself visited the city  the only French Impressionist ever to travel to America. A delicately rendered pencil drawing of a horse and jockey by Degas is among the works now offered for sale, as is an important watercolour by Whistler, another of Hendersons favourite artists. Henderson also accumulated dozens of Japanese prints, of the variety that had served as inspiration to the Impressionists themselves in forging their new, modern mode of painting. Nor did he shy away from the artists most recent and experimental efforts, acquiring examples from Monets London, Venice, and nearly abstract Nympheas series shortly after their creation. The resulting collection is a world-class assemblage of avant-garde art, with the selection in the spring season at Christies expected to realise in excess of $23 million.

The five paintings presented in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 15 May  all but one purchased in 1913  reflect the scope and quality of Hendersons early collecting. The two Monets are both quintessentially Impressionist in their focus on the artists fleeting sensations before nature. One depicts with exquisite subtlety a frosty road beneath a snow-laden sky, while the other captures the bolder effects of an orchard suffused with late afternoon sun. The remaining three canvases show the Impressionists moving beyond the ephemeral moment, each in his own way. Renoirs Femme lisant is soft and idealised, intimate and dreamy. Cezannes Cote Saint-Denis, with its geometric latticework of trees, reflects an increasingly abstract conception of the landscape, while Gauguin has wholly transmuted his Breton vista into flat zones of brilliant colour.

The pieces from this collection are precisely what buyers are looking for in the current market: exemplary examples from masters of the period with impressive early provenance and exhibition histories, comments Cyanne Chutkow, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist & Modern Art at Christies. By the early 1920s, Henderson had expanded his aesthetic interests to incorporate the very latest directions in European modernism, which had received its sensational introduction in America not long before, at the 1913 Armory Show. Probably taking advice from the pioneering photographer and New York gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who was instrumental in promoting modernism to American audiences, Henderson acquired work by the most avant-garde artists of the day from both sides of the Atlantic  Picasso and Braque, Matisse and Derain, Georgia OKeeffe and Marsden Hartley, among others. An ebullient gouache by Raoul Dufy now on offer represents this important stage in Hendersons collecting, which put him well ahead of his time.

Open a larger version of this image James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), The Yellow Room, circa 1883-84. Watercolour and gouache on paperboard. 9 x 7 in (24.8 x 17.8 cm). Estimate: $500,000-700,000 This work is offered in American Art on 23 May at Christies in New York
On Thursday, Florida middle school teacher Pamela Stigger, 33, was arrested after she was allegedly caught having sex with a former student, 15, in the back of her car.

According to multiple reports, the 33-year-old was arrested in Tamarac, Florida. She has been charged with two counts of sexual assault on a minor between the ages of 12 and 18 along with one count of lewd and lascivious activity on a minor, WTVJ reports.
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Growing old isn't for sissies in "Potato Gumbo," and the specter of Alzheimer's can push people and families to their limits.

The play by League City thespian Jean Ciampi recently was chosen for a Dallas theater's spring series of staged readings of works by female playwrights.

"It is about our common struggles of aging and parenting adult parents," Ciampi said. "It's an interesting and tricky situation of role reversal when we must step in to parent our parents. It's a time that tests the limits for patience, love, tolerance and forgiveness on both sides. Unfortunately, there's no manual for how to do it, but isn't that a fundamental truth about parenting anyway?"

Ciampi's script also celebrates the entertaining camaraderie she witnessed among residents of a retirement community in Columbus, where her stepmother battled Alzheimer's.

More Information Want to read some of the Play? Intro: Act 1 of Potato Gumbo is on Ciampi's website, thewriterjean.com. See More Collapse

However, she noted, "The part of Gretchen in 'Potato Gumbo' isn't based on my (stepmother), other than her having Alzheimer's."

In the play, Gretchen convinces Thomas, a grieving widower at their retirement community, to run off with her to New Orleans, where she will perfect her recipe for potato gumbo at a Cajun cooking school.

Her friends and family wonder, "Is this just a zany idea, or is it the beginning of Alzheimer's?"

Thomas, who is developing a crush on Gretchen, worries whether he's up to getting emotionally involved with someone with her potential problems.

Ciampi said she wrote the role of Gretchen for her longtime friend, Annette Johnson of West Columbia (Columbia Lakes).

"She is a lovely actress and an amazingly gifted, vibrant and engaging 81-year-old force of nature," said Ciampi.

In September 2015, Ciampi directed Johnson in the first production of "Potato Gumbo," at Brazosport Center Stages in Clute.

"For a playwright, there's nothing more thrilling or fulfilling than to see the characters that have spent so much time in your head come to life on stage," Ciampi said.

"Gretchen is such a spirited woman," said Johnson. "I will never have another role as great as Gretchen."

Echo Theatre's managing artistic director, Terri Ferguson, was impressed with the play's handling of its themes.

"She's been in love with the play since she read it," Echo producer Eleanor Lindsay said.

"Adding the interpretation of a director and the perspective of each actor then adds layers of dimension and creativity," Ciampi said. "That's what takes a play from paper to art. The reading in Dallas has been an important next step for 'Potato Gumbo,' and, I'm hopeful, that the next full production will be scheduled in the upcoming season."

Meanwhile, Ciampi, who is married with children, goes about the business of submitting the play to other theaters for a possible production.

"There's a theater in Florida that's considering it for their season; so I've got my fingers crossed on that," Ciampi said.

Don Maines is a freelance writer who can be reached at donmaines@att.net
Homelands and Histories: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, is a new special exhibit on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

According to the Museum of Fine Arts, "Photographer Fazal Sheikh has captured images of refugees and other displaced or marginalized communities in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East... Sheikh spends weeks, months, or even years with the communities he portrays, developing an understanding of their history and culture and building a collaborative rapport with the individuals he photographs."

The collection of 75 photographs in the exhibit spans Sheikh's whole career from the 1980s to 2015. Each of the photographs in the exhibit is a part of a larger series that can be found in books that are also on display in the gallery.

"I've known Fazal for 30 years. Fazal was an under graduate at Princeton when I was a graduate student at the time. I have long admired Fazal's work, not only for the sensitivity of the portraits, but also for the deep sense of humanity that runs throughout his work. He is taking big issues like refugees or the Israel/Palestinian conflict and bringing it down to a human level," Malcolm Daniel, Curator of Photography at the Museum, said.

"I was born and raised in Manhattan, but I would spend summers with my father's family in Kenya," Sheikh said. "I suppose most of my work is about trying to reconcile the duality within me. I have to find a way to reach across different nationalities and religions. I think this is a thread that is woven throughout all these projects."

Sheikh's grandfather immigrated from what was north India at the time (now Pakistan) to Africa, but had passed away when Sheikh's father was young. Skeikh decided to travel to that part of the country because he was "always curious about what ray of his qualities was born to me."

When Skeikh arrived there, hundreds of thousands of Afghanistan refugees were living in the northern border area.

Some photographs in this series at the refugee village, called The Victor Weeps, includes portraits of young brothers Osman and Farid, who are both blind, titled "Blind Qari," ("One Who Knows the Koran by Heart") and a photograph of a hand missing a finger titled, "Mohammed Daud's Hand, One Year After Picking Up a Butterfly Mine He Thought Was a Toy."

Another series featured, called Moksha, depicts Vrindayan, a holy city in northern India, and the women in the city. This is the place to which many widows migrate when they have lost their husbands.

"In some communities in India, women are seen as being responsible for bringing the ill fate upon their husbands. The curious thing is that the very religion that perhaps put them in that position, is the thing they turn to for solstice. But they have also embraced the sisterhood amongst the women. That was very compelling to me," Sheikh said.

Ladli is another series of photos in India on display focusing on the young generation in India, and the issues they face such as the orphanage system, child marriage and dowry death. One photo in the series, titled Labhuben, depicts a six year old girl.

"Children are promised in marriage. They do this so the wealth stays within the connected family. She had already been promised to a 16 year old boy at the time of this photograph," Sheikh said.

Most recent, Skeikh was invited to be a part of a group of artists who would spend six to eight months in Israel and Palestine. The photos from this project, The Erasure Trilogy, shows the legacy of the 1948 Palestine War and the people and places that were effected.

"The interesting thing about this project is that I was given a great deal of fluidity between both Israel and Palestine. I was given great hospitality in both communities.

"One immediately second guesses their own sense of things there. It is such a complicated issue for one to begin to speak about.

"Usually what you read about the region is, it's this or that. You're going to have to pick a side. But that's not the way I feel most at ease," Sheikh said.

"I find that asking permission goes a long way. I have never been refused because of that. I always ask first to collaborate with a community. I was using Polaroid positive/negative film, so I was able to give a copy of the photos to the subjects. I remember once, I had given a woman a photo of herself, and she looked at it kind of blank until someone came by and convinced her that it was her. She had never seen herself, maybe only in a reflection of water," Sheikh said about his field of work.

Some of the photos have accompanying audio, where Sheikh reads the testimonials of his photograph subjects. Visitors can listen at https://mfah.org/visit/audio-for-homelands-and-histories-photographs-by-fazal-sheikh/.

Homelands and Histories will be at the Museum of Fine Arts in the Audrey Jones Beck Building through October 1, 2017.
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Montgomery Ward and Service Merchandise were the first to fall, then Bealls, then Mervyn's. Smaller merchants toppled in their wake, one by one hollowing out the sprawling San Jacinto Mall.

The long corridors are today mostly vacant. Sears, Macy's and J.C. Penney stand as the only remaining department stores, vestiges of last century's retail boom.

Now, an ambitious plan to transform the aging mall into an open-air shopping center has slowed as the property's oldest tenants struggle in a rapidly changing retail environment. A decades-old contract gave the stores the power to determine the fate of the redevelopment, and each has held out on approving it during months of negotiations interrupted by turmoil across the sector.

The arrangement puts the developer, Fidelis Realty Partners, in a bind. Its effort to make San Jacinto more competitive has been hindered by the very problems that led to the mall's downward spiral.

Houston-based Fidelis bought the property two years ago and has for months sought deals with each of the retailers as required under contracts signed in the early 1980s, when department stores lorded over a retail landscape dominated by enclosed malls. Facing steep challenges in a hyper-competitive industry, none has yet agreed to terms that would require wholesale renovations and new operating requirements.

"It's been slow and tedious," Fidelis CEO Alan Hassenflu said. "We didn't count on the myriad problems all the traditional mall department stores are having."

Department stores have for years lost customers to rising e-commerce sales and discount competitors, creating substantial challenges for mall developers. An anchor store closure often triggers a domino effect within a mall, toppling smaller retailers that relied on the bigger ones to generate foot traffic.

That dynamic has deepened the division between the nation's highest- and lowest-performing malls. The most successful, such as the Houston Galleria, have the financial means to evolve and expand. Beleaguered properties such as Greenspoint Mall, on the other hand, have become targets for redevelopment after years of steep losses.

The sluggish negotiations at San Jacinto illustrate some of the many complications faced in rejuvenating a dying mall. It's common for developers, retailers and investors to own different pieces of the same property, creating potential conflicts during the redevelopment process.

Covenants remain

Midcentury mall developers gave retailers land and money to build department stores in exchange for operating agreements that typically lasted 20 years or less, Hassenflu said. Many also negotiated so-called "restrictive covenants" that required the developers to seek approval from the anchors before making changes to the mall, contracts that often lasted decades longer.

In the case of San Jacinto, the three remaining department stores have occupied their buildings for far longer than required under the operating agreements. But the restrictive covenants remain in place, giving them the some control over the mall's future.

Department stores have long played hardball during redevelopment negotiations, leveraging their bargaining power to score cheaper rent or more favorable operating terms. Ed Wulfe, CEO and founder of commercial real estate firm Wulfe & Co., said that commonly occurred prior to the sector's steep decline, when such retailers were critical to a shopping center's success.

He recalled his effort to redevelop Meyerland Plaza in the early 1990s, when J.C. Penney was still a "1,000-pound gorilla." Negotiating with the retailer, one of several anchor stores there at the time, took several years and included many trips to the company's Plano headquarters, he said.

"It's high-stakes poker," he said. "Cold, hard business."

Such tension has at times led to court battles. In 2013, for example, Lord & Taylor sued the owner of the White Flint Shopping Center, an enclosed mall in suburban Maryland, in opposition to the developer's plan to raze most of the property and build a mixed-used center around the department store building without the retailer's consent.

Lord & Taylor argued the developer had breached its contract and sought compensation for profits lost during the construction period and the costs of reconfiguring its store to fit the new shopping center. A jury awarded the retailer $31 million in damages.

Such impasses are rare, said Rick LaTella, executive managing director for commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. Many department stores, he added, have acknowledged the need for renovation as the retail industry changes.

"The department store companies have had to become more flexible," he said. "They recognize they don't carry that big club anymore."

Mall's long decline

San Jacinto Mall opened in 1981 with nine department stores anchoring 1.2 million square feet of retail space. It was one of the region's largest shopping centers, a rainbow-colored destination with tangles of green plastic plants reaching for a painted blue skyscape.

Since then, decades of sunlight have bleached the entrance's bright colors, plants have been uprooted and parts of the painted sky have peeled away. Never updated or renovated, the mall lost many shoppers to big-box stores and other retailers that rose to prominence in the 1990s.

The property is now about half-occupied with 60 tenants hawking discount apparel and quick manicures. On a recent weekday afternoon, Duran Duran's "Sound of Thunder" reverberated in the empty corridors, harkening to the year the mall opened.

Baytown officials long ago prioritized the mall's redevelopment as they watched it edge toward obsolescence. Mayor Stephen DonCarlos spent years soliciting developers to undertake the massive project before at last finding a partner in Fidelis, which purchased the mall from Triyar Cos. in 2015.

"It has gone from a point of pride to frankly something of an embarrassment," DonCarlos said. "It's highly visible, a real target for us."

The city of Baytown is banking on the $100 million-plus renovation project to boost the property's tax value and satisfy consumer demand in a city that has grown about 10 percent since 2010, per state estimates. Census data shows it added only a handful of retail establishments during that period.

The city agreed to a package of sales and property tax rebates for the developer and committed to funding certain demolition and transition costs, incentives worth about $26 million.

DonCarlos, determined to see the project through, has participated in much of the negotiations process with the retailers, at times flying to Cincinnati for meetings with Macy's executives. He hopes to schedule meetings in Las Vegas this month at the International Council of Shopping Centers convention, an enormous trade conference where retailers, brokers and developers network and make deals.

"We'll get there," he said. "I've learned patience."

Demolition delayed

Fidelis has proposed demolishing the entire mall and building in its place a million-square-foot shopping center with green spaces and a new roster of retailers and restaurants. Premiere Cinema, which now occupies 20,000 square feet, would expand to an 80,000-square-foot standalone complex with bowling and an IMAX theater.

Meanwhile, Macy's and Sears would remain in their buildings, while J.C. Penney would occupy a new space built by Fidelis. None of the anchors opposes the idea, Hassenflu said, but the growing turmoil in the department store sector has impeded negotiations.

Macy's did not respond to a request for comment, and J.C. Penney declined the opportunity to do so. A Sears spokesman said only that the company will "continue to monitor developments" at the mall while serving customers there.

Each of the department stores has for years been closing stores nationwide and investing more heavily in e-commerce, playing catch-up in an industry that has become increasingly centered on technology and discounting.

Most recently, Macy's closed three Houston-area stores at West Oaks Mall, Greenspoint Mall and Pasadena Town Square.

Fidelis has crafted a contingency plan for department store vacancies as the project moves forward, but for now, the retailers are committed to keeping their stores. Each is holding out for the best possible deal, Hassenflu said, but he's optimistic they'll come to terms this year and allow demolition and construction to start in early 2018.

"I'm sympathetic to them," he said. "They're in the throes of a battle themselves."
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Friendswood ISD has named a district official as the lone finalist to be its next superintendent.

Thad Roher, an 18-year employee of the district who is the deputy superintendent over business operations, is slated to replace retiring Superintendent Trish Hanks.

After selecting its finalist Monday from six potential candidates, the district's board by law must wait 21 days before voting to hire Roher and is scheduled to vote to offer a contract to him on June 6.

"Thad came out as the clear candidate in this process and it lets our community know Mr. Roher will lead FISD into its future," school board president Rebecca Hillenburg said in a press release. "I can't wait to see Thad Roher roar!"

Roher, 49, has had a 26-year career in education and has been an administrator for 20 years. He has served as a K-12 principal in Haviland, Kansas, an assistant principal at Friendswood High School and an assistant superintendent of curriculum for both elementary and secondary education at Friendswood ISD.

"I did not aspire to be a superintendent of any school district," Roher said in a statement released by the district. "I wanted to be the superintendent of Friendswood ISD. I strongly believe in the principles and values this community was founded upon, and I am excited to continue and build upon the tradition of excellence at Friendswood ISD."

Roher graduated from Barclay College in 1991 with a bachelor of science degree in elementary education and received a master of science degree in education administration from Fort Hays State University in 1995. He graduated from Friendswood High School in 1986.

Since Superintendent Trish Hanks' announcement in January that she would be retiring, a search conducted with the help of the nonprofit Texas Association of School Boards garnered applications which led to the board's selection of six candidates, from which trustees unanimously chose Roher as the finalist.

In March, Marian Strauss and Bob Smith, both former superintendents in school districts and members of TASB's executive search team, visited Friendswood ISD faculty and school board members to determine qualities the district was looking for in its next superintendent.

"We take a few days, go to these campuses, talk to employees and find out what they'd like to see in a superintendent," Strauss said.

After garnering information from district employees and board members, Strauss and her team developed and published a list of qualifications desired in a superintendent.

Top priorities included a leader who understood the job of superintendent was not a nine-to-five job, someone who is committed to a partnership with the board, students staff parents and community and someone with prior experience in a large leadership role in a district.

"I don't really want to take a chance on a rookie," trustee Robert McCabe said.

At the March meeting with ESS, the board expressed their desire to have someone with the same interest in students and Friendswood as Hanks has had.

"We've all been really spoiled by (Hanks), I think," Hillenburg said.

"We have complete trust in her abilities and her desire to do what's right for the children in this district."

Hank has served Friendswood ISD for 32 years in various positions and served as superintendent for 15 years.

Her base salary for the 2015-16 school year was $192,037.

Hanks has said she plans to spend time with her grandchildren.
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At Young Ranch, a new single-family community being constructed in southwest Katy, homes continue to rise and the first homeowners have moved in.

The roughly 400-acre neighborhood south of Interstate 10 and between Anserra and Willow Creek Farms on Pederson Road is one of Katy's newest communities. While it continues to take shape, a Houston economy derailed by a downturn in the oil industry continues to affect the real estate market in Katy and elsewhere.

"The development has been pretty much as we planned," said Jeff Anderson, head of land acquisition at Beazer Homes, which is developing Young Ranch alongside Rylander Homes and M/I Homes. "(The community) is probably closer to about half completed."

As of March, 14 families have moved into homes at Young Ranch, according to Carrie Brown, a regional marketing director at Beazer Homes. Another 53 homes have been sold and 49 are under construction, Brown said. The community, which first opened last year, is planned to have about 900 homes when completed in the next several years.

A community pool and recreation center that will include an indoor training area, meeting space and outdoor kitchen will be completed around June, Brown said. The neighborhood's entryway, which will have a waterfall structure and lake, will also open soon.

Home prices at Young Ranch range from the mid-$200,000s to $600,000s, according Brown. That range is down from an estimate Brown said in Dec. 2015, which then had an upper price range in the $800,000s.

Since the oil price crash began in 2014, Houston's downturned economy has affected real estate markets. The high-priced home market has felt one of the toughest blows, leading to a slowdown in construction and sales of upper-tier homes.

Brown, however, said the original price ranges were a high estimate that existed before developers actually began building model homes for the community. She did not connect the oil downturn to the drop in prices or any slowdown with home sales.

"Beazer is right in line where we thought we would be," she said.

Young Ranch is split between Katy ISD boundaries and those of Lamar Consolidated ISD, meaning potential homeowners have an extra element to consider when buying a home. Katy ISD has plans for an eventual campus in the community's west side.

Developers are building the first homes in the north side of the community because that is the area with the easiest access to I-10.

Katy annexed land for the community in 2014. City officials say the community is a planned development district, not a master-planned community, which must feature more than 1,100 homes, according to City Planner Anas Garfoui.

"The community is shaping up well," Brown said. "We've invested a lot of time and money into it. It's exciting."

For information, visit www.youngranchtx.com.
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For 100 years, members of the military service have readied themselves at Ellington Air Field, poised to respond in service to their country from the sprawling complex tucked away in the Bay Area.

On May 20, the 111th Aero Squadron, which formed in 1917 and eventually would become the Texas Air National Guard operating out of Houston's hometown air base, will be inducted into the Lone Star Flight Museum's Texas Aviation Hall of Fame. The 111th operates under what is now known as the 147th Reconnaissance Wing.

41 YEARS AGO: Remembering Houston's fatal ammonia truck disaster

"Ellington, the 111th and the 147th have a very rich history worth of preservation," said Doug Owens, Retired Lt. General and CEO of the Lone Star Flight museum. "They have a long history of service to Texas and to the nation."

The airfield opened in 1917 as a training base. The 111th Aero Squadron, which originally operated out of Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, formed that same year.

"They shut the base at Ellington down for a couple of years, between 1921 and 1923, and moved operations up to the area around Hobby because there was an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease, strangely enough," said Master Sgt. Sean Cowher, public affairs superintendent for the 147th Reconnaissance Wing.

READY FOR CHANGE: As Pasadena evolves, relive the city's earliest days

Operations moved back to Ellington in 1923, the same year the 111th Aero Squadron, which had been recently reorganized and renamed the 111th Observation Squadron, began operating out of the base.

The squadron began flying Curtiss JH-6H Jenny biplanes, which were shipped in crates via railway and could fly 80-90 miles per hour - an extraordinary speed for that time.

The squadron trained, ran missions, worked with the North American Aerospace Defense Command and protected the Gulf Coast during disasters.

"The 111th has been involved in every major operation since World War II," Cowher said.

Ellington itself is was abandoned for several years after the construction of Hobby Airport in 1927, but during World War II, government officials saw the need for training and Ellington became the site for a bombardier school.

The base served as a training base for bombers until 1956, said Cowher, when the government gave it to the city of Houston.

"The city of Houston owns the field and we're tenants on it now," Cowher said.

"It's been an international guard base ever since. Currently, we run unmanned aerial systems (or drones) from here."

In honor of their history of service, the 111th Aero Squadron (now the Reconnaissance Squadron), will be inducted into the Lone Star Flight Museum Hall of Fame on May 20. The occasion will be the first official event in the museum's new facility at Ellington.

"The 111th was part of a general vetting process of nominees that were put together by our board of directors," Owens said. "Out of that vetting process, four selectees were chosen for honor, and the 111th Aero Squadron was one of those."

Other inductees are Former President George W. Bush, Major Gen. Ben Fallow and Al Mooney.

Owens said the 111th was a stand-out nominee, as they are one of the oldest flying units in the Air Force.

The Texas Aviation Hall of Fame, an organization celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, honors "famous aviators that were Texans and famous Texans that were aviators," Owens said.

Inductees are divided among four categories: aviation pioneers, warriors, leaders and entrepreneurs.

"For instance," said Owens, "we have Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to fly, in the pioneer section. Tex Hill, a famous World War II fighter pilot, is a warrior.

"There have only been three presidents in U.S. history that were pilots and all of them happened to be from Texas: (Dwight) Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, who is already an inductee, and George W. Bush, who we're inducting this year.

"They'll be in our leadership section.

"The one determining factor that is similar with all of these fine inductees, however, is that they're all from Texas."

The 111th, Owens said, would fall into the hall of warriors.

"They'll join the likes of the Tuskegee Airmen that were from Texas," he said. "They're very worthy of the honor. They have a tremendous lineage, a long history and a great deal of service to our nation and to Texas."

The Lone Star Flight Museum is at Ellington Field.

The new $35 million, 130,000 squarefoot facility has been under construction since 2016, but the decision to move the facility from Galveston was made following Hurricane Ike.
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The evolution of Rice Village is continuing with crews beginning a complete makeover of the retail space and streetscape on the south side of Amherst Street stretching from Kirby Drive to Kelvin Drive.

The transition from an all-brick facade to store fronts with varying colors, textures and roof lines along with widened sidewalks, new crosswalks, public art and soft seating area will be added with the goal of creating a vibrant setting within the shopping and dining destination.

"The transformation of Amherst will take a once sleepy back street and transform it into a vibrant setting for contemporary retailers and restaurants," says Tommy Miller, Managing Director, Trademark Property Co. "This will be our most significant renovation project in Rice Village by far."

Other elements of the Amherst makeover include removing the tops of several retail facades where greenery will be added to offer a visual glimpse of Rice Village's rooftop parking where shoppers can park free up to two hours.

Landscaped planter boxes will separate the widened sidewalks from vehicular zones while a new soft seating area with a crushed granite surface at the intersection of Amherst Street and Kelvin Drive will create another casual gathering spot.

"We envision the intersection of Amherst and Kelvin as the new heart of Rice Village," Miller adds. "Besides its sight lines to both parking garages, it offers several pathways to other shopping areas."

The all-new retail spaces on Amherst are expected to be available for new tenants as early as August. Tenants along Amherst will be announced as lease agreements are signed with newcomer Shake Shack opening at the corner of Amherst and Kirby Drive in November.

The transformation of the retail setting on Amherst follows the recent opening of Rice Village's Morningside Plaza, an engaging gathering place with free WiFi, comfortable seating and ample shade in front of D'Amico's Italian Market Cafe, Nao Ramen Houston and Hopdoddy Burger Bar.

Public art also is being added throughout Rice Village to create what Miller describes as "an energized sense of place."

Houston outdoor artist Daniel Anguilu is adding a mural on Amherst while another local outdoor artist, Tierney Malone is painting murals on both sides of Rice Village's Morningside parking garage. Earlier this year, California metal sculptor Nathan Mabry was commissioned to create an origami-shaped aluminum owl now perched above the sidewalk on Kelvin Drive just north of University of Boulevard. Last year, an inspiring mural by Houston artist Mario Enrique Figueroa, Jr., better known as GONZO247, was added on Morningside Drive.

"Everything we are doing is about improving the Rice Village experience for shoppers who have been neglected for years," adds Terry Montesi, Chief Executive Officer of Trademark Property Co.

Visit www.RiceVillageDistrict.com for additional information about Rice Village including store sales and new arrivals.
The news is breaking publicly that Autodesk is relocating the Lake Oswego office in the Portland area to downtown SE Portland just off of Burnside at 17 SE 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97214.

The old 1916 Towne Storage building is being renovated to its historic brick and amazing wood beam beauty. Instead of crumbing into pieces due to disrepair and the elements, it has become the largest renovation of a historic building in Portland.

The Autodesk Lake Oswego office has been the location for most manufacturing core product teams such as Autodesk Inventor and Fusion 360 as well as several other product and division employees working here. Autodesk has been in the Portland Oregon area for over 20 years and soon we will be more central and visible. I have been working in and around the building capturing the buildings structure in 3D using laser scanning and Autodesk products ReCap, InfraWorks, Revit, and Revit Live.

The building is next to the Salt & Straw future headquarters and tasting room and a block from Olympia Provisions but luckily there is a beautiful jogging trail on the esplanade around the river to work off the good local food and ice cream.



View of the new Autodesk office in Autodesk InfraWorks in 3D with all of Portland downtown in the model. I wish I could publish this directly to VR to view in an HTC VIVE. The building in Revit was relatively easy to get to VR using Autodesks Revit Live.





Early render of the restoration plans for the Towne Storage building.

Laser scan results of the exterior in Autodesk ReCap



Lots of work to be done before we move after the new year.

Stay tuned for more photos, design, and plans for Autodesk in Portland as they are made public.

I have been in the Lake Oswego office just over two years now and excited to relocate to the historic Towne Storage building.

-Shaan
April 29

At 9:30 p.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop at 5300 Bellaire Blvd. on a 2008 Ford Focus for having a defective license plate light. The driver was found to have a suspended license and was charged with driving while license invalid (DWLI) and the passenger was found to have open warrants as well as being in possession of marijuana.

May 1

At 10:22 a.m., Officer Andrade was dispatched to the City of Bellaire Police Department Lobby in reference to an identity theft. Officer Andrade met with the victims who stated sometime in April, an unknown suspect(s) opened a business banking account with Bank of America using their personal identifying information.

May 2

At 1:50 a.m., Sgt. D. Hollie was dispatched 4600 Fournace Place in reference to a subject in a white vehicle who fell asleep at the light. Sgt. Hollie observed the suspect's vehicle stopped at the light as it cycled through the color changes. Sgt. Hollie attempted to make contact with the suspect at the vehicle's driver window, who then awoke and drove through the intersection and into the 4600 block of Fournace Place. The driver showed several signs of intoxication and was subsequently arrested for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI).

At 12:14 a.m., a subject in 4300 block of Dorothy Street was attempting to unload his handgun and accidently fired a gun.

At 7:29 p.m., Officer Younger initiated a traffic stop in the 5900 block of Newcastle Drive on a Dodge Durango for showing expired registration. The traffic stop investigation found the driver to have a suspended Texas driver's license and no proof of financial responsibility. Officer Younger placed the driver into custody for driving while license suspended and transported him to the Bellaire Jail to be processed.

May 3

At 1:02 a.m., Officers Schwausch and Barrientos initiated a traffic stop on a white 2006 Toyota Camry at the 5400 block of IH 610 NB for defective equipment; driver headlight not functioning. The operator was arrested for driving while intoxicated.

At 11 p.m., Corporal K. Kramer was dispatched in reference to a theft that occurred at 5130 Bellaire Blvd, Randall's Grocery Store. The victim's purse was stolen from a grocery shopping cart after it was left unattended in the shopping cart return.

At 6:51 p.m., Officer Delgado was dispatched to the 7100 block of Newcastle Drive in reference to burglary of a motor vehicle. Upon arrival Officer Delgado made contact with the victim who stated an unknown suspect(s) broke out the front driver side window of her vehicle and stole her purse.

May 4

At 9:29 a.m., Officer Trujillo was dispatched to the 4300 block of Compton Circle in reference to a theft call. Upon Officer Trujillo's arrival, he spoke to the complainant who stated between 5:45 p.m. May 3 and 8 a.m. May 4 an unknown person went into the home and removed items.

At 4:36 p.m., Officer Delgado conducted a traffic stop in the 5200 block of IH 610 East Service Road on a 2008 Honda Accord, for no motor vehicle registration. Officer Delgado made contact with the driver who presented his name and date of birth and provided proof of financial responsibility. Officer Delgado observed the temporary plate affixed to the rear of the vehicle to be fictitious. The driver was placed in custody and charged with fictitious registration and warrants.

At 4:13 p.m., Officer Salinas conducted a traffic stop in the 4500 block of Bellaire Boulevard on a black Dodge Stratus for improper registration. After conducting an investigation on how the driver obtained the temporary license plate, Officer Salinas placed the driver in custody for fictitious license plate.

May 5

At 4:45 a.m., Corporal Porter observed a vehicle on the 4700 block of Evergreen Street stopped for the red light with its headlights off. Officer Ortega located the vehicle and observed the suspect in the driver seat. The driver appeared to be asleep with the vehicle running and in drive with his foot on the brake. After further investigation, the driver was found to be intoxicated. Officer Ortega placed the driver into custody for driving while intoxicated second offense.

At 8:45 a.m., Officer Guerra was patrolling the 6700 block of IH 610 East Service Road and observed a white Hyundai Elantra that showed expired 03/2017. Officer Guerra conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle and the driver was found to have a suspended driver's license and no proof of financial responsibility. The driver was taken into custody for driving while license invalid-enhanced and taken to the Bellaire Police Department for booking and processing.

At 11 a.m., Bellaire Police Detectives conducted a massage establishment inspection at 6706 Ferris St. Upon further investigation it was determined the owner was operating a massage establishment without a license and he was subsequently arrested for this offense.

At 3:05 p.m., Officer Younger was dispatched to the 800 block of Holton Street in regards to a theft. Officer Younger arrived at 3:13 p.m. and made contact with the reportee who advised a wedding ring was stolen from his residence by a contracted worker. The reportee advised a separate investigation was ongoing with a Montgomery County Sheriff Department and identified the suspect. Officer Younger collected the necessary information and will file a warrant for the suspect's arrest.

At 9:06 p.m., Officers Salinas and Carson were dispatched to a suspicious vehicle call in the 5300 block of Huisache Street where a large cargo van was backed in at home under construction. Officers Salinas and Carson arrived and made contact with a Hispanic male that was standing outside of the van. After conducting an investigation and speaking with the subject, Officer Salinas placed the suspect in custody for felony theft, failure to identify-fugitive from justice, and a Galveston County SO warrant.

At 12:46 a.m., Officer Bellard was on patrol in the area of the 7500 block of IH 610 Southbound when he observed a silver Honda with no visible license plate. Officer Bellard initiated a traffic stop on the vehicle and after further investigation the driver was arrested for driving while license invalid enhanced.

May 6

At 9:23 a.m., Officer Trujillo responded to the 4400 block of Camellia Lane in reference to burglary of a motor vehicle. Upon the officer's arrival he spoke to the victim who stated between 5 p.m. May 5 and 7:30 a.m. May 6 an unknown person entered the victim's vehicle and took a backpack.

At 3:30 p.m., Officer Bellard was dispatched to the business at 5130 Bellaire Blvd. in reference to a suspicious circumstance. Officer Bellard arrived on scene at 3:38 p.m. An unknown suspect obtained narcotics using a fake prescription. Officer Bellard determined a forging or altering a prescription occurred.

At 12:19 p.m., Officer Guerra was dispatched to the 4700 block of Willow Street in reference to a burglary of a motor vehicle. Between 6:30 p.m. May 5 and 11:52 a.m. May 6, an unknown suspect(s) made entry into the victim's car and removed a backpack. The victim advised Officer Guerra he did not recall leaving the door unsecured. There was no sign of forced entry.

At 7:30 p.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop in the 6800 block of South Rice on a 2005 Mazda 6 for invalid registration. The buyer's tag displayed was found to be counterfeit and the driver was arrested and charged with displaying a fictitious license plate.

May 7

At 4:35 a.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop in the 5400 block of IH 610 Northbound on a 2006 Chevy Silverado for failure to maintain a single lane of traffic. The driver was found to be intoxicated, was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated.

At 1:16 a.m., Officer Clisham initiated a traffic stop on a vehicle in the 5400 block of Bellaire Blvd. for having a defective left head light. While Officer Clisham was performing a consensual search of the suspect vehicle, one of the two suspects fled on foot. The suspect was apprehended at the intersection of Bellaire Blvd. and Alder St. after further investigation, and search of the suspect vehicle, the passenger was charged with felony possession of marijuana. The driver of the vehicle was also taken into custody and charged with class C no driver's license and fail to maintain financial responsibility.

At 4:32 p.m., Sgt. Hefferin was patrolling the area of the 8200 blockk of Chimney Rock South bound. Sgt. Hefferin observed a with no license plate displayed. Sgt. Hefferin conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle. During the investigation the driver was found to be operating a motor vehicle with a suspended driver's license and no proof of financial responsibility. The driver was later arrested and transported to the Bellaire jail without incident.

At 4:28 p.m., Officers Salinas and Manriquez conducted a traffic stop in the 5100 block of Jessamine Street on a red Nissan Altima for expired registration (January 2017). Officer Salinas subsequently placed the driver of the red Nissan in custody for driving while license invalid- enhanced.

At 5:41 p.m., Officer Lysack observed a white Dodge Charger bearing an expired paper plate traveling in the 7800 block of IH 610 Northbound. Officer Lysack initiated a traffic stop on the vehicle and upon further investigation discovered the driver had a not eligible texas drivers license. The driver was placed into custody and transported to the Bellaire Jail for the charge of driving while license invalid enhanced due to previous convictions.

At 9:27 p.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop in the 5400 block of Bellaire Boulevard on a 2006 Chevy Trailblazer for failure to maintain a single lane of traffic and impeding traffic flow. The driver was found to be intoxicated with three passengers under the age of 15 years of age. The driver was arrested and charged with felony driving while intoxicated.

At 9 p.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop in the 6800 block of Chimney Rock on a 2003 Mercedes for invalid registration. The driver was found to have a suspended driver's license, was arrested and charged with driving while license invalid (DWLI).
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U.S. Rep. Al Green wants voters to call for President Donald Trump's impeachment.

But the Houston Democrat is not actually going to file an impeachment resolution himself.

"The president fired fired the person who was overseeing the investigation of the president. That's pretty serious," Green said, citing Trump's firing last week of FBI Director James Comey, who was leading a criminal investigation into whether Trump campaign officials worked with Russia to sway last year's presidential election. "The act is the obstruction of a lawful investigation of the president's campaign ties to Russian influence in his 2016 presidential election."

OUSTING TRUMP: Houston congresswoman calls for Trump's removal over wiretapping claim

Green, however, does not plan to take formal action yet. Story continues below

"I am hoping the American people will weigh in," Green said. "I reserve the right to bring a resolution of impeachment, but I also think that it's appropriate to wait to see how leadership will respond."

Scroll through the gallery above to see what it takes to remove a president through impeachment
Mexican authorities discovered a tunnel connecting a prison to a house along the Texas-Mexico border over the weekend, according to local media reports.

El Blog del Narco reported that the tunnel was found Saturday after Tamaulipas officials uncovered a large amount of activity near the prison in Reynosa, which is roughly 15 miles across the border from McAllen, Texas.
Google Earth

A Woodlands doctor's license has been suspended by the Texas Medical Board for allegedly being drunk on the job.

Dr. Gregory Michael Gibbons, and emergency room physician, was temporarily suspended on May 12 and will remain so until the board takes further action against him.
A Texas family is suing T-Mobile after their baby died while his babysitter's attempts to reach 911 failed.

The Dallas-area family is saying the carrier is partly to blame for six-month-old Brandon Alex's death.

Brandon's babysitter tried for 40 minutes in March to call 911 after he fell from the day bed and was barely breathing.

The babysitter said she tried to call the Dallas' 911 call center but was put on hold three times, the longest exceeding 30 minutes.

ORIGINAL STORY: Dallas 6-month-old dies after babysitter couldn't reach 911

At the time, the city of Dallas' emergency dispatch system was being clogged with so-called "ghost calls" -- duplicate calls generated from legitimate 911 calls, city officials have said.

The problem went on for months and has been blamed partly on an issue with T-Mobile's network technology. The city's call center staffing was also scrutinized after the incident.

In the lawsuit, the babysitter on that day did reach the boy's mother, Bridget Alex, who raced home and rushed Brandon to the hospital. The baby was transferred to another hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

911 ISSUES: Houston 911 dispatcher charged for hanging up on calls

Bridget is seeking damages and compensation for "mental anguish, loss of consortium, grief, bereavement, loss of future financial contributions, loss of services, loss of advice, care and counsel, loss of society and companionship, medical, funeral, and burial expenses," among other things.

Since Brandon's death, T-Mobile has adjusted its cell phone network to try to solve the 911 problem, and the Dallas emergency call center added operators to relieve the burden of "ghost calls," city officials said.
Were entering the final week of the upfronts, the process by which various providers reveal whats canceled, whats renewed and what new shows are on tap for the fall season. So well pause from offering info on whats on Monday to give you an idea of what will still be on  or not  in the fall season.

ABC has canceled some shows, renewed several others, and there arent really any surprises. Of the cancellations, I cant cry over the departures of Dr. Ken, Imaginary Mary, Secrets and Lies or The Catch, although Dr. Ken was a hit for a minute and The Catch had potential that never quite clicked. Last Man Standing is done after six seasons, which is part of the reason Dr. Ken isnt going forward.

I am sorry about the cancellation of John Ridleys American Crime, an unusually smart, well-written and well-acted anthology series with one of the greatest core casts anyone could ever want in a show: Felicity Huffman, Lili Taylor, Regina King, Connor Jessup, Timothy Hutton and others. King won Emmys for her various roles, and Huffman was nominated, and so deserving.

I never felt that ABC quite knew what to do with this show. There was an odd tentativeness about it when they started it three seasons ago. Personally, I think it was just too sophisticated for them, and it was never given the right time slot.

Also canceled, The Real ONeals, which probably deserved more support from the network. The shows star, Noah Galvin, did a really bratty interview with Vulture in 2016, making disparaging remarks about Colton Haynes coming-out process. Some members of the LGBT audience were pissed off about that interview, and no doubt they were part of the core audience for the show. It deserved a shot, though. Good ensemble cast, and Galvin may be a jerk, but he was an appealing star. Yes, he copped to being a jerk and apologized. Martha Plimpton was, as usual, fantastic.

The bland, chirpy American Housewife got a renewal order, as did  major duh alert  Designated Survivor. Also coming back: Scandal, but its seventh season will be its last; Black-Ish, The Middle, The Goldbergs, Agents of SHIELD, Greys Anatomy, Speechless, Fresh Off the Boat, How to Get Away With Murder, Modern Family, etc.

Still unannounced at this writing: the fate of Quantico which is presumed to be safe for renewal.

CBS has cancelled 2 Broke Girls, but renewed Big Bang Theory, Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, Hawaii Five-O, Mom, Madam Secretary, Code Black, Life in Pieces, all three NCIS dramas, Scorpion, Zoo, Bull, MacGyver, Kevin Can Wait, Man With a Plan, The Good Fight Elementary, The Amazing Race and Superior Donuts. Among the CBS shows whose fate is still unknown is The Odd Couple. Over the weekend, CBS killed The Great Indoors, after one season. CBS holds its upfront presentation on Wednesday, May 17.

Fox will hold its upfront Monday, May 15, but so far, the network has axed three first-season shows: Making History (which I kind of liked), Zorn (which I kind of detested) and APB (at which I kind of shrugged). Also axed: Rosewood and Sleepy Hollow.

Renewed Fox shows include Gotham, Last Man on Earth, The Simpsons, The Exorcist, Empire, Star, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Mick, Lucifer and Lethal Weapon. New Girl has been renewed for one last season, its seventh. Bones ended after 12 seasons. The fate of the rest of the shows should be known today, including Bobs Burgers, Family Guy, Scream Queens, Wayward Pines, Prison Break, Shots Fired and 24 Legacy.

NBC also has its upfront presentation scheduled for Monday, May 15. The new comedy Great News, starring Andrea Martin, has been picked up for a second season, which is also in the major duh category  not just because its a funny show and Martin kills, but because Tina Fey is among the producers of the show. NBC also OKd a fifth season for The Blacklist, but dumped Blacklist Redemption after one season. Renewed shows so far include three of the Chicago dramas from Dick Wolf, but the jury is still out on the very weak Chicago Justice. Also renewed: Law & Order: SVU, The Night Shift, Blindspot, Shades of Blue, Superstore, The Good Place, Taken and This Is Us.

Canceled so far are Emerald City and Powerless. Timeless was also canceled...for a couple of days, but NBC reversed that decision this weekend and has okayed a second season. Im kind of glad, but its up to the showrunners to pump more life into it. The cast is superb and has great chemistry, but theres a bit of same old, same old from episode to episode.

The Carmichael Show is still awaiting a verdict, but Id be surprised and disappointed if it was canceled.

The CW will bring the 2017 upfronts to a close on Thursday, but much of its plan for the fall is already known. Renewed shows include Arrow, The 100, Supernatural, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, iZombie, Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, The Originals and Riverdale. Reign and Vampire Diaries both ended this season.

Canceled CW shows include Frequency and No Tomorrow.

In non-upfront news, The Hollywood Reporter says Jason Bateman has sealed the deal on a long-rumored season 5 of Arrested Development for Netflix.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV
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.
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The states top prosecutor on Friday charged a speeding Amtrak engineer with causing a catastrophe, involuntary manslaughter and other crimes in a deadly 2015 derailment that came after he accelerated to 106 mph on a 50 mph curve.

Prosecutors said they were in talks with engineer Brandon Bostians attorney to have him surrender on the charges.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro expanded on charges a Philadelphia judge approved a day earlier. The unusual judges order came after the family of a woman killed in the crash sought a private criminal complaint when city prosecutors declined to press charges as Fridays two-year deadline approached.

The judge had signed off on two misdemeanor charges over Rachel Jacobs death in the May 12, 2015, derailment. Shapiro approved a felony charge of risking or causing a catastrophe and a string of misdemeanors, including eight counts of involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment.

Lawyer Thomas R. Kline, who had sought the private complaint on the Jacobs familys behalf, said the charges wouldnt have happened had a courageous family, the Jacobs family, not stood up against the decision of a local prosecutor not to press charges.

That was clearly wrong, as evidenced by the attorney general not only reversing course but adding charges, he said.

The crash killed eight people and injured about 200 others.

The criminal case is sure to bring new scrutiny to the National Transportation Safety Board finding that Bostian had lost situational awareness on the curve in North Philadelphia. The speed limit climbs from 50 mph to 110 mph about a mile and a half after the curve.

The NTSB said it found no evidence that Bostian was impaired or using a cellphone during the Washington-to-New York run.

Bostian, in a lawsuit against Amtrak, said he was left disoriented or unconscious when something struck his train before it derailed. He had heard through radio traffic that a nearby commuter train had been struck by a rock. However, the NTSB concluded that nothing struck his locomotive.

The best we could come up with was that he was distracted from this radio conversation about the damaged train and forgot where he was, NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said at a May 2016 hearing.

Victims lawyers have questioned why Bostian would have sped up, rather than slow down, if he had been startled by something striking the train.

One thing he has never recollected is how or why he accelerated before the curve, said lawyer Robert Mongeluzzi, who with Kline represents about three dozen victims.

Other lawyers have called last years NTSB report on the crash a whitewash and a quantum leap.

Philadelphia prosecutors concluded this week that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Bostian acted with intent or conscious disregard for the passengers safety. But Mongeluzzi said that should be an issue for a jury.

Court records list addresses for Bostian in New York City and in Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston. Bostians lawyer has rarely commented and did not return messages seeking comment this week.

Amtrak has taken responsibility for the crash and agreed to pay $265 million to settle claims filed by victims and their families. Kline and Mongeluzzi, prominent Philadelphia plaintiffs lawyers, helped negotiate the settlement.

Jacobs, a technology executive, was a 39-year-old wife and mother. The other people killed included Justin Zemser, a Naval Academy midshipman; Jim Gaines, an Associated Press software architect; and Derrick Griffith, a college dean.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Missouri lawmakers sent Gov. Eric Greitens a measure Thursday that would limit how much money people could receive for medical costs in injury lawsuits, the latest in a series of proposals that Republican supporters hope will make the state more business-friendly.

The legislation , which the House passed 98-53, would limit people suing for medical costs to receive only the amount that they and the insurance company paid, instead of what is billed. It had passed the Senate by a 23-10 vote in February.

Its one of several measures approved this year by the Republican-led Legislature to limit lawsuits, including bills tightening guidelines for expert witness testimony and making it harder for people to prove discrimination in court cases.

The latest bill deals with how medical costs are calculated.

For example, if a woman was injured at work and underwent a medical procedure, the hospital may bill $70,000. But if the woman has insurance, she might pay $3,000 out of pocket and her insurance company might pay $47,000 under a negotiated rate with the medical provider.

Under current law, the woman could sue and recover $70,000 for the cost the hospital billed. But if the governor signs the new legislation, she could only recoup $50,000 because the insurance company negotiated a lower cost with her health care provider.

Supporters say the change would allow people to recover the real cost of their medical expenses and prevent lawyers from asking for more money than was warranted.

The Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry called it common sense legislation.

When someone wins a lawsuit the (judgment) should cover the actual expenses, not an inflated amount that in no way reflects the actual out of pocket damages, chamber lobbyist and general counsel Brian Bunten said in a written statement.

Critics argued that the legislation would punish people for purchasing health insurance, noting that their medical costs likely will be lower since insurance companies can negotiate lower rates.

Their health insurance premiums mean nothing, said Rep. Jay Barnes, a Republican from Jefferson City. Were going to give the benefit of that foresight to the wrongdoer.
Government use of aerial drones became much easier when the Federal Aviation Administration flipped the switch on new regulations last year.

The Austin American-Statesman reports since then, a number of Austin-area public safety agencies, including the Williamson County sheriffs office and San Marcos police, are jumping in.

Some of those agencies say their drone use is narrowly defined, but the programs are too young to have policies in place that satisfy critics who worry that drones would threaten privacy.

When you put a very powerful tool like this in the hands of government, the first thought is about privacy, said Adam Schwartz, a senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Schwartz said concerns about drones and surveillance are far-reaching, and include fears that they could be used to monitor and photograph protesters.

Of the Central Texas law enforcement agencies recently contacted for this report, only Williamson County and San Marcos confirmed that they intend to use drones for law enforcement purposes. Round Rock police are considering drones, but a spokeswoman said that department is early in the process and that drones were being researched for community outreach efforts.

Austin police arent pursuing a drone program in any official capacity. However, the Austin police union is researching the technology and pushing for drones to be used by the department.

The Williamson County sheriffs office plans to purchase three drones that could be used in SWAT situations, patrols and missing-person cases, spokeswoman Kristen Dark said.

Williamson County Sheriff Robert Chody declined to comment because his agency also is too early in the decision-making process. But a spokeswoman said no policy has been created outlining when or where authorities can use drones, and that budget negotiations will likely determine which and how many drones they purchase.

Meanwhile, the San Marcos Police Departments lone drone, which it already has purchased, will be used for investigations into vehicle crashes involving serious injury or death.

With any new technology, it makes sense for us to look at but also to deploy it intelligently, San Marcos Assistant Police Chief Bob Klett said. That is why we are delaying any other uses on it.

The FAA projects that drone use will explode in the coming years, according to a report last month predicting the number of drones flown in the United States to triple to 3.5 million by 2021. Their popularity continues to drive down costs  one of the more popular models for use by public safety agencies retails for about $1,000  allowing many departments to purchase drones without requiring the publics approval.

Schwartz said the publics input should be gathered before drones are used. In the case of San Marcos, the City Council did weigh in on the purchase of the DJI Phantom 3 drone, giving its approval. Williamson County commissioners could provide input during budget negotiations later this year. Round Rock hasnt purchased any drones.

Schwartz said public and political input is key to the use of government-operated drones. But even with public approval, he said, people need to remain vigilant about policies. Without a clear policy, nothing is in place to stop a police department from using drones for court-approved surveillance.

Concerns similar to Schwartzs had a role in ending an attempt by Austin police in 2012 to get their own drone.

We didnt feel like the council or community supported it, so it got dropped, said Ken Casaday, president of the Austin police union. Some were afraid that officers would abuse it in spying. It was silly, but people are concerned about that.

The unions research has an emphasis on search and rescue operations. Casaday said drones could be a force multiplier  a low-cost purchase that would increase the Austin Police Departments capabilities. But Casaday said he would want their use limited to life-saving operations.

It should be used for very specific circumstances, he said. I dont want to use it for surveillance, even though I think we might get to that one day.

Before the FAA created new regulations last summer, the Austin Fire Department had already been operating drones for more than a year under a rare exemption that made it one of the first public safety agencies in the country allowed to use drones.

The fire department had recognized their value in responding to wildfires in Bastrop.

I noticed the devastation and the distance, and I thought, how can one cover this much distance? said Assistant Chief Richard Daviscq, who helped spearhead the acquisition of drones for Fire Departments Robotics Emergency Deployment Team.

Even with a skeptical public, the fire department got City Council approval for a program. They have since purchased three drones  a now largely decommissioned Leptroncq, a DJI Inspirecq and a DJI Maviccq, which is used in a dog and pony show for recruits and to tape promotional materials, Davis said.

Today, the drones are used in wildfire situations, for search and rescue missions and during floods.

In my mind, without question, they are very beneficial, Davis said. It gives us immediate feedback, better situational awareness. It is just a smart way of operating.

At a recent drone demonstration, firefighters in a concrete training tower paused to watch the buzzing quadcopters hover above the parking lot of the Southeast Austin training center.

Its still viewed as a novelty, Davis said. Then people see it being used and it is an ah-ha moment.

But even a fire departments use of a drone raised concerns for Schwartz.

Once the fire department owns the drone, with the flip of a switch or a stroke of a pen that can be applied to the police, he said. Given the ease of the transference of all this equipment, it needs to be talked about.

Texas Search and Rescue, a volunteer group that assists public safety agencies around the state, also has a burgeoning drone program, said Brandon Goering, a founding member and a planning section chief of the group.

We have purchased our first drone, Goering said. That was the first step. Right now we are training with it, getting our ducks in a row to know what we can and cant do.

Texas Search and Rescue purchased a DJI Mavic, a nimble quadcopter that can fold up to about the size of a VHS tape. Austin firefighters already can essentially holster their DJI Mavic drone in a small pack, and one civilian fire official who operates the same model said he could see the drone easily being clipped to a belt loop.

Goering said he sees a lot of potential for the drone, especially with current camera technology. It already has a high-resolution 4K camera, but infrared cameras can be easily installed and some video software already has the capability to spot certain colors. For example, Goering said, a drone seeking a person wearing a yellow shirt could use a camera that pinpoint spots where that color is detected, possibly leading to faster discovery.

In disasters, such as floods, a drone can give quickly provide a map of the terrain. Eventually, authorities might be able to fly a drone capable of delivering a life vest to someone stranded in floodwaters.

I feel like we are just scratching the surface, Goering said. We have no lack of ideas. Each time we take it out, we come up with something new.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank and its many partners raised nearly $ 1.3 million and more than 100,000 pounds of food, which equates to about 5 million meals for the hungry during the 2017 Harvest for Hunger campaign.

(Jennifer Conn, cleveland.com)

AKRON, Ohio - The Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank celebrated a record-breaking 2017 Harvest for Hunger campaign with a festive luau.

To cap off the event on Friday, dancers sporting numbers wound through the room and lined up to reveal the total raised -- nearly $ 1.3 million and more than 100,000 pounds of food, which equates to about 5 million meals for the hungry.

"It was an inspiring campaign," said Dan Flowers, foodbank president and CEO. "We gathered at the bottom of the mountain we were about to climb."

More than 200 organizations held food and funds drives, including a freezing jump into Portage Lakes in February. Second Harvest Food Bank of North Central Ohio and the Greater Cleveland Food Bank participated in Harvest for Hunger, which served 21 counties.

Flowers said every dollar provides food for people whose gratitude is evident. "The love that flows back to you is the greatest gift," he said.

Top fundraisers in several categories received awards in the form of small metal shopping carts.

The campaign's top financial donors were FirstEnergy, Akron Children's Hospital, Shearer's Snacks and the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The National Association of Letter Carriers had the largest food drive this year collecting more than 35,000 pounds from Stamp Out Hunger.

Dan Flowers, foodbank president and CEO, thanked the many organizations that participated in the campaign.

Buehler's Fresh Foods, Dave's Supermarkets, Fishers Foods, Giant Eagle and Heinen's Fine Foods raised $515,291 and 2,871 pounds of food -- enough for 2 million meals -- through Check Out Hunger, which allowed shoppers to make donations at the register.

Co-chairs of the Harvest for Hunger campaign were Mark Cohen, Akron Beacon Journal publisher, and Jim Porter, GateHouse Ohio Media publisher.

To support hunger-relief programs like Harvest for Hunger, visit the Akron-Canton foodbank's website or call 330-535-6900.

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.

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AKRON, Ohio -- In honor of National Historic Preservation Month, the Greater Akron Innovation for Sustainability Network last week toured Cascade Lofts.

The GAINS group explored the positive impact of honoring old building stock, from cultural, environmental and economic perspectives. And they did it in the 35,000-square-foot lofts, which was once the Swinehart Tire and Rubber Co., but has recently been renovated into 24 loft apartments, along with the lower level Trailhead Event Space, and a local brewery pub, both coming soon.



Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy and Eric Olson, who works with both Ohio History Connection and Stewards of Historic Preservation, spoke to the group about the importance of preservation and the city's current guidelines.



Since 2012, the GAINS Network has regularly held meetings on the 2nd Wednesday of the month, often focusing on change, transition and resiliency.

Freelancer Shane Wynn captured the meeting in photos. Take a look at the gallery above.
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Falls resident Ben Shuber tagged Mayor Don Walters in a Facebook post notifying him he plans to peacefully chain himself to the north fountain on Front Street to save it.

(Ben Shuber)

CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio - Falls resident Ben Shuber loves the north fountain on Front Street so much he told Mayor Don Walters he plans to chain himself to the top to save it.

In a recent Facebook post, Shuber tagged the mayor with a photo of himself standing on top of the fountain with this message:

Dear Mayor: I love the fountain. For years we have made wishes in it. It appears you wish to destroy it? I will be chaining myself to the top in peaceful protest to stop this. #savethefountain

In response, Walters posted a photo of himself at the fountain, smiling serenely.

Under the plan to return Front Street to vehicular traffic to bolster business downtown, the north fountain is set to be demolished to make way for a new one, along with myriad other improvements. The city had asked engineers to try to keep the fountain but it was deemed too damaged to restore.

The Front Street fountain also appeared in an anonymous eBay post -- with Shuber on top -- for $1 million.

Shuber was inspired to do something after seeing a photograph of the old fountain with construction equipment all around it.

"I went right down there and climbed it," he said. Although he had always wanted to climb it he never had until he decided to reach out to Walters.

Shuber remembers tossing pennies into the fountain with his friends, making wishes over the years. Some guys guys liked to park their cars in front of it to take photos. He also remembers people pranking the fountain with detergent, causing it to overflow with bubbles at festivals.

"It would be cool if they could keep it because it's been there so long," Shuber said. "But I'll be happy if there's a fountain of comparable size and awesome-ness."

Many falls residents also weighed in on both sides. Some remembered it as a romantic place to take dates, while others called it plain ugly and said it can't come down soon enough.

"It's been there since I was a kid," Shuber said. "A lot of people will miss it."

Since the Facebook posting, someone listed the fountain for sale on eBay for $1 million and anonymously sent Shuber the posting.

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Heating downtown buildings with steam once involved wagon loads of seasoned local firewood, then rail cars of Ohio coal and finally cleaner, but still dirty, Kentucky coal.

Today the steam coursing under downtown city streets heating 94 buildings is fueled by shale gas from Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Cleveland Thermal, now owned by the privately held Corix Group of British Columbia, Canada, has gone 100 percent natural gas.

Making the switch to the cleanest fuel yet required a $25 million expansion of the Cleveland Thermal's E. 18th Street and Hamilton Avenue steam and chilled water plant.

And it required building a new 20-inch welded steel gas pipeline under E. 18th Street from Carnegie Avenue one and a half miles north to the plant, taking the total project cost closer to $26 million.

The company on Friday celebrated the big switch to cleaner burning natural gas with tours, speeches and the obligatory ribbon cutting.

The Hamilton plant's three new state-of-the-art gas boilers have been quietly operating for some time. Cleveland Thermal closed its ancient coal-fired Canal Road steam plant in the Flats in December when the Hamilton project finished ahead of schedule.

The Canal Road plant began sending steam heat under downtown streets in 1894, when Grover Cleveland was president. It pollution equipment has been out of date for some time.

Marc Divis, president of Cleveland Thermal, said switching to natural gas will reduce the company's carbon dioxide emissions by 49,200 tons a year.

That's an 84 percent reduction and the equivalent of planting a dense 19,000 acre forest.

Divis said the old plant has been shutdown for good but the company will continue to hold on to the property, just west of Progressive Field and the Quicken Loans Arena, overlooking the Riverview Parking lot.

Three 21-ton state-of-the-art gas-fired boilers at Cleveland Thermal's Hamilton Avenue plant produce enough steam to heat 6,000 Cleveland homes.

The new boilers are rated at 84 percent efficient, he said, meaning, in layman's terms, that they manage to squeeze 84 percent of the potential energy out of the gas -- energy turned into steam heat.

The Hamilton plant can easily heat the 30 million square feet of downtown space owned by the company's existing customers, he said, and has the capacity to add a lot of new customers.

And the new system captures waste heat from the boilers to run an on-site 1-megawat power plant -- which generates enough electricity to run the entire operation, he said.

The new boilers will use about 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas per year. The company currently has signed contracts for guaranteed delivery of the gas through 2019, said Divis.

Enormous manifolds safely handle 1.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year.

The Canal Road plant's now-closed coal burners, installed between 1946 and 1948, were rated in the mid-70 percent range, said Divis. That was state-of-the art at the time.

The old plant burned about 70,000 tons a year of very expensive Kentucky coal, the kind which is typically used in steel making because it is very high energy and fairly low sulfur.

The company switched to this "metallurgical coal" as a strategy to meet air standards, said Divis. The old boilers had some pollution controls.

Scott Thomson, president and CEO of the Corix Group, told the crowd that conversion to gas is the company's first step "toward the modernization and revitalization of historic infrastructure assets in downtown Cleveland."

"When Cleveland Thermal joined Corix in the fall of 2015, we made a commitment to support the vision to power the future growth in downtown Cleveland in a safe, reliable, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible way," he said.

In an interview Thomson said the company sees Ohio as an opportunity.

The company owns about 1,000 utilities. Corix is owned by the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, which manages public employee pension funds.
Rich Exner, cleveland.com

Making Ohio two states

CLEVELAND, Ohio - So, you want to secede from Ohio. How could you do it?

Cleveland.com has drawn its own lines for the fanciful new state of Western Reserve, with the idea that a smaller state, with more liberal politicians, would better represent Northeast Ohio's interests.

A new state would mean a new state government, with a different view on home rule, taxation, the environment and more. It could mean more competitive congressional districts and more debate.

How exactly you draw the new state -- what cities, suburbs, small town and farmland it contains -- would dictate all that.

So take a minute to consider what that might look like.

Where would you draw the border? Should our new state include Toledo? Akron? Youngstown? All three?

This post is part of cleveland.com's series, "Western Reserve: the 51st State?" For more stories, click here.

Below, weve mapped out six options, all of which keep counties intact so we can give you a better statistical snapshot of what the new state, and what would remain of Ohio, would look like.

Take a look at each. Then vote for your choice.



- Rich Exner, cleveland.com

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

A Northeast Ohio breakaway

We call this version the Northeast Ohio breakaway. It segregates 14 counties, from Vermilion east to the Pennsylvania line, to form our new state.



This would give the new state nearly 4 million people and would be the most Democratic-leaning of any of our options. Hillary Clinton out-polled Donald Trump in these counties, 50.2 percent to 45.5 percent.



Principal cities would include Akron, Canton, Cleveland and Youngstown.



What remains of Ohio, with 7.7 million people, would be largely Republican.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

By the numbers: A Northeast Ohio breakaway

A look at most recent census estimates shows a higher minority population (22.4 percent) in the 14 breakaway counties than the remaining 74 (18.3 percent), and a higher use of private K-12 schools (14.4 percent) than the rest of the state (12.5 percent).

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

Making the border the north-south population center

For this north/south option, we did the best we could to evenly divide the existing population of Ohio.



Another way to look at this boundary is that it is roughly aligned with the historical Lincoln Highway.



The 38 counties in the north that would become the 51st state and 50 counties in the south that would remain part of Ohio each have close to 5.8 million residents.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

By the numbers: The population center border

With this split, what remains of Ohio in the south ends up with higher incomes and higher education levels than what would become the new state.



The average family income in the south is $82,064, and 27.8 percent of the adults have at least a bachelor's degree. In the northern counties that would become the new state, these numbers are $77,624 and 24.3 percent.

Under this scenario, Trump would have defeated Clinton in the 2016 in both states. Over time, however, Democrats might do better in the new state - mainly because of traditional Democratic areas around Youngstown, Cleveland and Toledo.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

Making the border the north-south geographic center

Here's the easy way to split Ohio. Draw a line across the middle.



For this option, we calculated the geographic north-south center and made that the border, following the closest county lines.



This gives 6.5 million people to what would become the new state to the north, leaving 5.1 million people - mostly around Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton - to Ohio.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

By the numbers: The geographic center border

Under this scenario, Trump would have won both Ohio and the new state to the north. As for demographics, there is little difference in race. Incomes and the share of college-educated residents are a little higher in south Ohio.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

Making Interstate 71 the border

We don't have a lake, a river or even a mountain range to use as a diagonal border, so we used Interstate 71. Counties with just a slice of I-71 were assigned to the southeast.



This puts the major metro areas of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo in what would become the new state to the west. Our new state would have 7.8 million people, leaving 3.8 million for the eastern part of Ohio.



Akron would be the largest city in that remainder.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

By the Numbers: The Interstate 71 border

Trump would have won both states last election. But voters in what would in southeastern Ohio voted for Trump by a much wider margin - 58.6 percent to 36.8 percent. Trump would have won narrowly - 48.1 percent to 47 percent - in what would become the new state.



Other differences between the two areas under this proposal: The new state would be vastly more diverse (24.5 percent minorities versus 10.7 percent), as well as wealthier and more highly educated.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

East and west divide

Under this east-west scenario, would Ohio State football remain the power that it is today?

We noticed an interesting sports quirk. Ohio State University would be in the Ohio to the west, but its three most legendary coaches - Woody Hayes (Newcomerstown), Jim Tressel (Berea) and Urban Meyer (Ashtabula St. John) went to high schools in the new state to east.

Had we seceded long ago, would all three really have ended up "out-of-state" at Ohio State for their final college coaching jobs?

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

By the Numbers: east and west

Family incomes ($82,557) and adults with bachelors degrees (28.1 percent) are higher in western Ohio than they are in what would make up the new state to the east ($76,995 and 26.1 percent.)

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

The old Western Reserve extended

The sixth option is the one cleveland.com is using for its series of stories exploring the notion of seceding and forming a 51st state.



This boundary runs from Toledo east to the Pennsylvania border. We would call the new state Western Reserve because much of this territory was part of the Connecticut Western Reserve well before Ohio became the nation's 17th state in 1803.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

By the Numbers: Western Reserve and the rest of Ohio

Clinton would have won the Western Reserve vote. In fact, the Democrat presidential candidate would have won each election since Ronald Reagan.

Lyndon Johnson in 1964 would have been the last Democratic presidential candidate to win in what would remain of Ohio.

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Vote for your choice

So there are six options. Of course, you might have other ideas. But we have to draw the line somewhere.



Vote below to tell us which of these six options would be your pick to create America's 51st state.

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Rich Exner, data analysis editor for cleveland.com, writes about numbers on a variety of topics. Follow on Twitter @RichExner.

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.

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Rich Exner, cleveland.com

Related: Where the Western Reserve would be a winner or loser by seceding

See a breakdown at this link of where a new Western Reserve would lose or gain when it comes to jobs, taxes and spending if it were to secede from the rest of Ohio.
South Euclid sign outdoors.JPG

South Euclid Ward 1 Councilwoman Ruth Gray will get election opposition this fall from political newcomer Kenneth Atchinson.

(Jeff Piorkowski/special to cleveland.com)

Ward 1 Councilwoman Ruth Gray

SOUTH EUCLID, Ohio -- Kenneth Atchinson, a professor of computer science at Baldwin Wallace University, will attempt to unseat Ward 1 Councilwoman Ruth Gray in this fall's election.

Atchinson, a 22-year South Euclid resident who will be making his first run at political office, has the backing of Mayor Georgine Welo.

Gray, who confirmed that she will seek a fourth term, ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Welo in 2015.

"I think it's important to have council people that represent the needs of their ward, that speak to issues that are specific to the area," Gray said of her past work. "I always wanted to make sure we have good, transparent government and that we are fiscally responsible."

Gray, 55, has been outspoken in her belief that South Euclid should retain its municipal court after the majority of council last year asked the Ohio Supreme Court to look into merging it with a neighboring court. She said that, if re-elected, she would continue the work council's Recreation Committee has undertaken to provide the public, and particularly its youth, with wanted and needed recreational facilities.

Kenneth Atchinson

Recently, that committee worked to set up a strategic planning committee made up of residents that will determine those desires and needs.

"In my first term, I focused on establishing our good neighbor policies, and in my second term, I focused on our youth initiative," she said.

The youth initiative, which started in Ward 1, has since spread citywide. It provides, during the summers, a place where young people can go to take part in educational activities, and to eat.

"For many children," said Gray, an 18-year resident, "two of their three meals are eaten at school. During the summer, they don't have access to those meals."

Atchinson is not critical of Gray.

"Ruth Gray has done a good job," he said. "I think I can be a different voice."

Atchinson, 54, an engineer and graduate of Georgia Tech, and the possessor of a master's degree from Kent State University, also wants to help the young people of South Euclid.

"I have a passion for young residents and trying to get them employed and keeping them out of trouble," he said.

Atchinson's wife, Carmen Bode-Atchinson, served on the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Board of Education for five years, through 2011. The couple are parents to two adult children, both graduates of Brush High School.

Like Gray, Atchinson is a Princeton Boulevard resident.

Using his skills, which focus on computer and network administration and security, Atchinson believes he can be of service to council and South Euclid's residents, particularly in the area of providing city services at an economic cost.

"I am very excited that Kenneth Atchinson is running for Ward 1 councilperson," Welo stated in an email to cleveland.com. "Kenneth has been very active in our community, especially with our children.

"He worked side by side with retired councilman David Miller to bring programs to South Euclid.

"I fully endorse and support Kenneth Atchinson as he continues his family's service to our community."

Welo said the average age of South Euclid residents is 36, and that Atchinson's work with millennials at BWU "makes him the right candidate at the right time as more and more young people choose South Euclid to call home."

Neither candidate has filed petitions with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
CleveHtsWiley8.jpg

Empty seats in classrooms thanks to chronically absent students leads to real academic deficiences for students, making absenteeism a key issue for schools and for Ohio.

(Bob Sandrick, Northeast Ohio Media Group)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- If your child misses school for a doctor's appointment, it's no big deal, right?

Miss another when family visits from out of town? It happens.

Just have a crazy morning and miss the bus? No big deal. She'll make it tomorrow.

But it all adds up more than parents realize.

If a child misses just two days a month, national and local experts on school attendance note, that's missing 10 percent of school. It's enough to start lagging behind classmates, multiple studies show, and qualifies a student as chronically absent.

If it's a long-term pattern, students end up a year or more behind others, miss crucial third-grade reading benchmarks and have higher dropout rates.

"It's an early warning indicator," said Hedy Chang of Attendance Works, a national organization working to educate families and schools about the danger of absences. "As soon as kids miss two days a month, they can be academically at-risk."

Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University professor and leading researcher on attendance issues, said it may be obvious that students learn more when they are in school, but many still miss too many days.

"Being there really matters," Balfanz told a summit on chronic absenteeism hosted recently by the Cleveland school district. "The data clearly shows that the kids who thrive are the kids who come to school every day."

"When they miss school and when they miss so much school they miss 10 percent of school a year, which is a month, and become chronically absent, their outcomes really suffer."

That summit, hosted at FirstEnergy Stadium last month and attended by nearly 350 people from 18 districts -- plus multiple juvenile courts, social servive organizations and charter schools -- is just one of several ways that absence from school is receiving greater attention.

Here are a few key ones:

Chronic absenteeism will soon be graded

Chronic absenteeism will start being part of each school and district's state report card grades.

Your school and district will soon be graded on how well they are reducing chronic absenteeism on state report cards. That effort will become a small part of the school and district's overall grade each year, under the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act plan proposed this spring by State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria.

The state's goal under that plan is to cut its chronic absenteeism rate from 16.8 percent today to 5 percent in the next 10 years.

Districts will be expected to meet that 5 percent mark -- though only about 80 of more than 600 districts do now -- or to cut the rate each year.

Ohio's approach to truancy is changing

-- The state is also changing how it handles truant students -- a related, but slightly different problem -- to worry less about slapping truants and their parents with penalties and instead try to bring students back to school, where they can learn.

Schools will now have to work with students and parents before sending cases to juvenile court under the House Bill 410, which passed last year.

"I hope this will keep kids in school and help find out why they are not in school," said State Rep. Andrew Brenner, chair of the House Education Committee, who worked on the bill.

Absenteeism a focus for Cleveland schools, former President Obama

The Cleveland school distruct had posters and billboards with this message across the city for its 2015-16 attebdance campaign.

Former President Barack Obama's Department of Education started a public awareness campaign in 2015 about the need to improve school attendance. The department held a national summit on the topic last year and started releasing national data on absences.

The Cleveland schools, which had the worst attendance in Ohio for the 2014-15 school year, launched a "Get to School. You Can Make It" campaign in 2015 that trimmed its chronic absenteeism rate and boosted overall attendance above four other districts, including Columbus.

Attendance rate can mask real issues

Ignore the A your district or school may have on its report card, Chang says, or its 95 percent daily attendance rate.

"Ninety-five percent tells you how many kids typically show up each day," Chang said. "It doesn't tell you which kids over time are missing so many school days they may be academically at risk."

Easy to overlook missed days

Schools, she said, notice when a student quits school or doesn't show up for weeks at a time -- the events that trigger legal interventions for truancy. But teachers don't always pick up on students who miss a day here and there.

Parents underestimate missed days, too

And parents don't notice as well. At Cleveland's summit, Chang pointed to a study showing that 90 percent of the parents of chronically-absent students admit their children miss two days of school a month, but only 30 percent recognize that amounts to 10 percent of the school year.

Don't dismiss "excused" absences like days that children are legitimately sick, either, she said.

"Just because they're sick and you understand why it's happening doesn't make the absences OK in terms of academic performance," Chang said. "It still affects academic achievement."

Brittany Miracle of the Ohio Department of Education seconded that point.

"The fact that a student is not in school is what really matters," she said.

How much does it matter?

Missing school leads to lower test scores, here in Ohio and in states across the country, several studies have shown.

"Chronic absenteeism," the state notes in its ESSA plan, "is one of the primary causes of low academic achievement. It also is one of the strongest predictors that can be used to identify students who eventually will drop out.

Miracle showed the above graph at Cleveland's summit, depicting how Performance Index -- Ohio's composite score of test scores across all grades and subjects -- falls as the number of chronically absent students rises.

And Cleveland showed how its students' scores slide in both reading and math as absences increase.

Absences hurt in high school too

High school students can fall off-track to graduate if they miss school, the Cleveland school district told attendees at its summit on chronic absenteeism. Note how progress slopes down as absences increase.

That pattern continued for Cleveland high school students, who fell more and more off track to complete the courses and earn the test scores they need to graduate as they missed more and more days of school.

But while districts like Cleveland have some of the biggest issues with chronic absenteeism, Miracle told summit attendees that the issue is spread across Ohio.

High school is when absences are the worst

The percentage of chronically-absent students is very different by grade, ranging from a low of 10.4 percent for 4th and 5th grades to more than 28 percent for 12th graders. Much of that spike may be a "senior slide" as graduation nears, but all high school grades topped 20 percent.

State school board members noted this spring that these rates might even be understated. Since many high school students attend school part of the day, then leave, counting by the number of missed classes would make the numbers even worse.

Chronic absenteeism more prevalent in cities

Chronic absenteeism in Ohio -- as elsewhere -- is most pronounced in poor or urban areas. Districts that are both urban and poor had the highest chronic absenteeism rate, with the community schools (charters) -- which are mostly located in cities -- right behind.

The worst rate of chronic absenteeism in Ohio last school year was at the Lake Local schools near Toledo, at more than 38 percent, though that district disputes the total and there was likely an error.

Following close behind were Columbus, East Cleveland, Cincinnati and Youngstown.

Cleveland, which had the worst rate in Ohio at 35.2 percent in 2014-15, cut chronic absenteeism to 29 percent in 2015-16 with its "Get to School" campaign -- still way too high, but bumping it to seventh-worst in the state instead of the very bottom.

The Northeast Ohio districts with the best rates in 2015-16 included Solon at 2.4 percent, Rocky River at 3.7 percent, Aurora at 3.8 percent and Olmsted Falls at 4.2 percent.

Search below to see your district's daily attendance and absence rates and the rate of chronic absenteeism. All percentages are from the 2015-16 school year from the Ohio Department of Education.

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by Caspio

A poverty "tax" on attendance?

Balfanz told the Cleveland summit by video (above) that he looks at absenteeism as a key way that poverty "taxes" and drags down student success in school.

"When you live in poverty, it's harder to be in school every day," he said. "There's more to overcome."

Students may have to stay home to take care of siblings or elderly family members. They may have to work to pay bills or live in unsafe neighborhoods that make getting to and from school harder. Students in poor neighborhoods also see few examples of school leading to success in life, which undercuts their will to fight through obstacles to go to school.

Working with parents uncovers obstacles

Lori Hobson, who heads attendance efforts at the Cleveland school district

Lorri Hobson, who heads attendance efforts in Cleveland, said that when the district started calling homes during its attendance campaign, it often found that small issues were keeping kids from attending.

One student didn't have a bus pass because of miscommunication between parents and the school office, she said, while others had a bus driver who would pass their stop too early some days.

Other times, students didn't come because they didn't have clean clothes.

All are issues the district could solve, which brought the students back to class.

"Until you can identify the barriers, you can't change the culture in the district," Hobson said.

State Sen. Sandra Williams, a Cleveland Democrat, said helping families make the connection between school and success is important, so that parents encourage their children to attend.

"If you want your child to be successful, you have to do what you have to do to get them there," she said. "We have to figure out a way to impress upon people that a sound and quality education is the way to be successful."

Be proactive and don't blame, experts say

But changing that culture proactively is key, experts said.

Schools need to use conversations with parents to find solutions, not pass out blame, both Hobson and Chang said. That's also the new focus of the state's truancy efforts, which make returning a child to class the priority.

"Your kid has missed school," Chang said. "What are we going to do about it? Because I want your kid to achieve their hopes and dreams and how do we get them to school so they can achieve?"
Declaration of Independence

See Western Reserve's list of grievances against Ohio, in our Declaration of Independence

(Chris Quinn, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Why would Western Reserve want to secede from Ohio?

To illustrate all our grievances against the Ohio state government, we ventured to tailor the original 1776 Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson to create the United States of America. We're no Jefferson, and we're not looking to form our own country, but we're floored by how many of the complaints apply here. Take a look.

This post is part of cleveland.com's series, "Western Reserve: the 51st State?" For more stories, click here.

The unanimous Declaration of the district of Western Reserve:

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 Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among People, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Northern Ohio districts, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present Ohio Legislature, Governor and Supreme Court is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over this region. To prove this, let Facts about the Ohio legislators and governor be submitted to a candid world.

They have refused their Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

They have forbidden their mayors and city councils to pass and enforce Laws of immediate and pressing importance.

They have passed Laws depriving large districts of people of their right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

They have, through gerrymandering, dissolved the legitimacy of representative houses of government.

They have refused for a long time to institute representative legislative districts, depriving the people of their Legislative Powers.

They have erected new offices empowered to operate in secrecy and without accountability of swarms of highly paid officers.

They have worked to subject us to a rural jurisdiction foreign to our principles and given assent to acts of pretended legislation.

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.

For reneging on longstanding agreements to return portions of taxes for local governments to provide services to constituents.

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

They have abdicated Government here, plundered our lakes, ravaged our coasts and harmed the lives of our people.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

Rulers, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, are unfit to be the leaders of a free people.

We, therefore, the Representatives of Western Reserve, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of this district, solemnly publish and declare, That this district of Western Reserve is and of Right ought to be a Free and Independent states in these United States of America, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the state of Ohio, and that all political connection between them and the State of Ohio, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and Independent State, they have full Power to make laws, create legislative districts, elect representatives, assess taxes, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Want to join the movement and sign our Declaration of Independence? Join cleveland.com Tuesday, May 23, at the picnic tables in front of Masthead Brewing Co., 1261 Superior Ave. in downtown Cleveland. We'll be there from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., so get your best John Hancock signature ready.

Meanwhile, you can sign our change.org petition.

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Imagine a new Ohio. A smaller state carved out around Lake Erie, where we could keep our tax money nearby, empower cities to enact their own laws and elect a legislature closely matched between Democrats and Republicans. We could focus on solving urban problems.

Sure, it's a daydream.

But we in Cleveland feel stuck. We're a Democratic metropolis governed by Republicans who see the state very differently than we do. Fights erupt time and time again, over fracking and gun regulation and minimum wage. The state legislature overrules, takes our tax money and disperses it to rural areas.

This post is part of cleveland.com's series, "Western Reserve: the 51st state?" For more stories, click here.

Life could be better, if we were properly represented in a new state of Western Reserve.

To be clear, cleveland.com is not actually suggesting secession from Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and the mostly rural rest of the state. We're simply mulling the idea as a vehicle to show how little clout and control Northeast Ohio has over its destiny.

Think about it.

When Ohio was granted statehood in 1803, a party called the Democratic-Republicans set the boundaries. (The opposing Federalists wanted to make the Scioto River in Columbus the western end of the state.) And you had to be a tax-paying white man in order to vote.

The big state then encompassed both the Connecticut settlers of the Western Reserve in Northeast Ohio and the Cincinnati entrepreneurs selling goods to pioneers traveling down the Ohio River.

Now, Ohio includes all sorts of demographics and people: farmers and factory workers, Fortune 500 company executives, suburbanites in inner-rings and exurbs. Tiny Vinton County is getting its first grocery store; reinvigorated rustbelt Akron may get its first downtown grocery store.

We're very different. So hear us out.

We could return to our origins of the Western Reserve, which encompassed 14 of the 26 counties we've banded together in our new little state.

The demographics would make us pretty evenly split politically, Democrat and Republican, creating robust debates in our statehouse. The geography would mean we'd all care about the health of Lake Erie. And it would make Cleveland the largest, most influential city in the state.

Cleveland's issues would matter to all Western Reserve residents, unlike rural Republicans' dismissal of Cleveland's problems now.

The rural/urban, city/state friction is felt around the country.

"I do think we are seeing a rise in state local conflicts in a number of policies and an increasing willingness of state legislatures to exercise whatever power they have to rein cities in," said Fordham University law Professor Nestor Davidson, who focuses on local government. "I think it's an interesting thought experiment."

The National League of Cities wrote about the issue of preemption, when a state fights cities' rights to make their own laws.

"When decision-making is divorced from the core wants and needs of community members, it creates a perilous environment," the league writes in a February report. "Recent preemption has pitted rural- and suburban-dominated state legislatures against cities with large populations of low wage earners and ethnic minorities."

Davidson would rather see cities and states work together, rather than secede.

Achieving statehood is tough, for one thing. (Just ask Washington D.C. or Puerto Rico.) And it's not like Clevelanders are clamoring for independence.

But for fun and introspection, we're drawing up our own map of the new state, Western Reserve. (Don't worry, we'll give you choices of names and boundaries, if you don't like our version.)

Western Reserve would have 5.1 million people (slightly less than half of the current population of Ohio) who care about the issues of northern Ohio.

Our rhetorical construct will let us - and you -- explore all sorts of wonky stuff that affects us all, from gerrymandering to home rule. As the nation sees more and more conflicts between state and local governments, it makes sense to study the issues.

Take a look at what we'll cover in our two-week project:

Chili spaghetti vs. pierogi (for real)

Where the federal money goes. And where our local tax dollars go, too

How exactly you can form a new state. Who's tried - and failed.

How a new state would have changed presidential elections

Fracking, minimum wage and other issues where the state has overruled cities

What we'd put in our own perfect state constitution

What you'd choose for our state flag, song and flower

We want you to weigh in, in the comments or our Talk it Out post Wednesday. What do you think about a new state of Western Reserve?

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.
AKRON, Ohio -- Five children and two adults were killed Monday in an Akron house fire, police said.

The fire, which equaled the deadliest in the city's history, broke out at a home on Fultz Avenue near East Avenue.

Father Dennis Huggins, 35, and Angela Boggs, 38, were killed along with their children: Cameron Huggins, 1; Alivia Huggins, 3; Kylle Huggins, 5; Daisia Huggins, 6; and Jered Boggs, 14. A family dog also died in the fire.

All were found upstairs and several in a bedroom, according to Akron fire department spokeswoman Lt. Serjie Lash.

Seven people also died in a 1994 fire in Akron, officials said.

The fire broke out about 2:45 a.m. Monday at the home where the family lived.

Akron Fire Chief Clarence Tucker said his investigators, the Ohio Fire Marshal's Office and police are trying to determine the cause.

"A fire that is this severe, you can never rule out the possibility of arson," Tucker said. "But we have investigators here trying to determine the cause."

Ohio Fire Marshal investigator Robert Sharp said he could not elaborate on the evidence his five investigators collected.

He said they will test items from the home to see if they give any clues as to what caused the fire.

Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan called the fire "tragic" and pledged to help the victims' family members as well as the community heal from the deadly fire.

"My family, the Akron Fire Department, and the entire Akron community, are profoundly saddened by this devastating incident and this tragic loss of life," Horrigan said in a statement. "My deepest sympathies and prayers are with the family and loved ones of those who perished, and we pray for strength and healing in the difficult days to come. We will see to it that the victims' families are supported in this time of great sorrow and need."

Two neighbors called 911 to report the fire. One caller said flames were shooting from the home. Another described it as being "almost burnt up" several minutes later.

She said she heard explosion-like sounds.

"It just keeps popping," she told the dispatcher.

The fire ripped through the home and left the interior charred. Parts of the exterior were also severely burned.

The extensive water and fire damage made it initially unsafe for investigators to go into the home. A special response team arrived at the scene about 9:30 a.m. to help make it safe to enter the home and they were able to get inside about two hours later.

Akron Police Chief James Nice and Chief Assistant Summit County Prosecutor Brad Gessner were also at the scene.

Thomas said there is no indication that the fire is connected to an April 2016 fire that killed two people-- Lindell Lewis, 66, and Gloria Hart, 65 -- about two blocks away. That fire was ruled an arson and no arrests have been made in the case.

Lewis' brother, Willie Lewis, drove to the scene on Monday.

"It's heinous," Lewis said. "We're hoping that something may come up. Maybe this fire will bring something up. We're hoping for better results for this fire than ours."

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.

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Cleveland police car

A man was wounded in a shooting Sunday night in the Cleveland's Clark-Fulton neighborhood.

(cleveland.com file photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 32-year-old man was taken to the hospital Sunday night after he was shot on the city's West Side, police say.

The shooting occurred on the 3600 block of Newark Avenue, just west of Fulton Road and north of Storer Avenue in the city's Clark-Fulton neighborhood.

Police say the victim was taken to MetroHealth Medical Center with a wound to his right thigh. His condition was unknown.

No information on suspects or a motive was released Sunday night.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.
AKRON, Ohio -- Fire investigators fear that a house fire that broke out Monday morning could be the deadliest blaze in the city's history.

Akron Fire Lt. Seirjie Lash said firefighters have yet to get inside the home on Fultz Avenue near East Avenue of the extensive damage the fire caused. Lash said several people died in the fire, including children.

Firefighters have not been able to get into the home and Lash said they are unsure of exactly how many people died in the fire.

Family members have told investigators that several people lived inside the home, and they believe all of them were inside when the fire broke out. The family members range in age from less than a year old to 38 years old, Lash said.

A woman who identified herself as a relative of the family said seven people lived inside the home, including five kids and two adults. The youngest is believed to be about eight months old. The woman spoke to reporters at the scene but did not want her name published.

Firefighters arrived about 3 a.m. to find the two-story home fully engulfed in flames. The extensive water and fire damage has made it unsafe for investigators. A special response team arrived at the scene about 9:30 a.m. to help make it safe to enter the home.

The Ohio Fire Marshal is helping Akron investigators determine the cause of the fire.

Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan issued a statement calling the fire "tragic."

"My family, the Akron Fire Department, and the entire Akron community, are profoundly saddened by this devastating incident and this tragic loss of life," Horrigan's statement says. "My deepest sympathies and prayers are with the family and loved ones of those who perished, and we pray for strength and healing in the difficult days to come. We will see to it that the victims' families are supported in this time of great sorrow and need."

The outside of the home's front half is charred, along with the inside of the home.

The fire is about two blocks away from a deadly house fire that killed two in April 2016. That fire was ruled an arson.

The deadliest fire in Akron's history killed seven people.

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.
EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio (AP) -- Police say an officer suffered an accidental overdose after a drug arrest when he touched powder on his shirt without realizing it was the powerful opioid fentanyl.

He was treated with an overdose reversal drug after brushing off the powder with his hand and passing out Friday in East Liverpool, roughly 85 miles southeast of Cleveland near the Pennsylvania line.

Fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin, and a few specks can kill an adult.

East Liverpool police Capt. Patrick Wright says the officer had followed protocol and wore gloves and a mask when searching a car during the drug arrest. But Wright says the officer later instinctively wiped his shirt when another officer noticed powder on it.

Wright says the officer was fine by Sunday.
One of the most important aspects of a state is its name. We wanted something a little jazzier than North Ohio, even though that's pretty self-explanatory.

See our choice, and take a look at some other methods we could use to name the state.

Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

What would you name a new state, carved out of the northern part of Ohio?

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ohio got its name from a body of water; should northern Ohio?

Cleveland.coms theoretical state is made out of 26 northern Ohio counties, ranging from Lucas in the west to Ashtabula in the east. By splitting into two states, perhaps the legislature and culture would better represent northern counties interests.

Cleveland.com chose the name "Western Reserve," but there are so many other options. Here are some of the ones that didn't make the cut, and the reasoning behind them.

-- Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

Don't Edit

Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

The cleveland.com choice: Western Reserve

This is cleveland.com's official name for our new state. It reflects our region's history, and explains the traditional town square layout of of many of our towns.

So what was the Western Reserve?

It was a swath of land settled by Connecticut, beginning in 1662, according to the Western Reserve Historical Society. Many of the towns are designed to reflect the layout and aesthetic of New England. It was governed by Connecticut until 1800, and -- fun fact -- the party that surveyed the land before its sale was led by Moses Cleaveland.

West of Cleveland, the area still called the Firelands was named for land set aside to resettle Americans whose New England towns were burned during the Revolutionary War.

Don't Edit

Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

Maybe blend the names of two major cities?

It's not the catchiest name, but it could work. Other combinations could include:

Akrand

Youngsledo

Clevetown

Clashtabula

Feel free to suggest some other combinations in the comments. Something with Parma, maybe?

Don't Edit

Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

So many parallels

Ohio got its name from the river to our south. So why not take the name of the lake to our north?

Consider the parallels.

Ohio comes from an Iroquois word, probably meaning "great" or "beautiful."

Erie is the name of an American Indian tribe who lived in Northeast Ohio.

Ohio has three vowels and starts and ends with the same vowels. So does Erie. And they both have four letters.

Sure it may be confusing since Erie, Pennsylvania, already exists. But hey, maybe they'd want to leave their state for ours.

Don't Edit

Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

Taking a leaf out of the Dakotas' or the Carolinas' book

North Ohio or Northern Ohio -- pretty straightforward. Maybe a little boring. That leaves the rest of Ohio in a pinch though -- are they Southern Ohio? South Ohio? Leftover Ohio? Or like Virginia, just plain Ohio.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

We could name it after a king

Plenty of states are named after royal figures: Maryland, Georgia, the Carolinas, for example. So why not name the new state after Northeast Ohio's very own king, LeBron James? Maybe he'd run for governor too.

Don't Edit

Emily Bamforth, cleveland.com

Or we can go with a classic.

Keep the Cavs colors, but adopt the inspirational "Believeland" as our new state name. Hey, we already have the T-shirts.

Don't Edit

<a href="http://polldaddy.com/poll/9744137/">What should we call the new state of Northern Ohio?</a>

What do you think our state should be called?

Submit your own name in the comments, or vote in our poll to pick which is your favorite. Read more from our series about Western Reserve here.
DSC_3314RT.jpg

Dancers with Cleveland's Verb Ballets rehearse a new work by choreographer Dianne McIntyre based on interviews with citizens of Cuba.

(Susan Bestul)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Too bad it's impossible to be two places at once. The skill sure would come in handy Friday, when both Underground Classical and Verb Ballets and are holding intriguing events at the exact same time.

At least they're not similar in nature. One's the kickoff to a genre-defying concert series at Praxis Fiber Gallery. The other is an intimate dance showcase featuring the product of a research trip to Cuba.

Through Door No. 1 is Underground Classical, a contemporary concert series whose mission, in the words of director Jennifer Shaw, is to "bend the genres and redefine what chamber music can be."

Also high on the list of priorities there: highlighting local talent, offering concerts during the slower months of late spring and summer, and serving as a gateway to traditional classical music.

"My hope is that this will lead people to a greater appreciation for Western art music," Shaw said. "If we really want to program classical music, we have to consider allowing this crossover ..."

Jazz, too, has to be in the mix, Shaw said. Hence her choice to launch the 2017 series, not with a classical string quartet or piano trio, but with the Latin Jazz Septet. After that come Project Trio, a string group interested in everything from classical to metal, and Harpeth Rising, a classically trained folk trio.

It's these sort of acts, Shaw said, that made the first edition of Underground Classical a success, and encouraged her to go ahead and organize a second.

"We really packed the place and people really loved it," Shaw recalled. "People caught on, and they came back."

Door No. 2, meanwhile, leads to a new work by legendary choreographer Dianne McIntyre. Supported by the Cleveland Foundation's Cuba Fusion project, she turned the stories of three citizens of Cuba into biographical dances for Cleveland's Verb Ballets.

And that's just the Caribbean tip of the iceberg. In addition to the three dances born in Cuba, Verb Friday night also will present 11 other dances McIntyre crafted out of the stories of residents of Cleveland.

"The stories were just amazing," said McIntyre by phone from Washington, D.C. "With each person's story, [we're] learning quite a bit of history."

Consider her first Cuban subject, an employee at a Havana synagogue. Polish by birth, he came to the island nation as a child fleeing the Holocaust and went on to have what McIntyre described as a "quiet, easeful" life.

Another made a career out of what McIntyre said was her "calling" to preserve the traditions of Afro-Cuban dance, while a third rose out of poverty and became a nurse, fulfilling a dream that in most places would be regarded as perfectly reasonable, but in Cuba was "extremely far away, [like] a little girl dreaming of being a princess."

The moral of the stories? Transcending the time-space continuum may be impossible, but the ability to overcome enormous obstacles is hard-wired into the human spirit.

"People are so resilient," McIntyre said. "It's not like things are going to hold them back."

PREVIEW

Underground Classical

What: Performance by the Latin Jazz Septet.

When: 8 p.m. Friday, May 19.

Where: Praxis Fiber Gallery, 15301 Waterloo Road, Cleveland.

Tickets: Free. Go to undergroundclassical.org.

Verb Ballets

What: "Ballet UpClose Studio Series: Dianne McIntyre."

When: 7 p.m. Friday, May 19.

Where: Verb Ballets Studio, 3445 Warrensville Center Road, Shaker Heights.

Tickets: $15. Go to verbballets.org or call 216-397-3757.
TRUMP-INTEL

Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the United States, arrives for a meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, and President Donald Trump at the White House last Wednesday. (Photo by Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg)

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump's disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.



The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.



The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump's decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump's meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.



"This is code-word information," said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies."



The revelation comes as Trump faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI Director James Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump's subsequent admission that his decision was driven by "this Russia thing" was seen by critics as attempted obstruction of justice.



One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak - a key figure in earlier Russia controversies - into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details about an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.



For most anyone in government discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.



"The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation," said H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, who participated in the meeting. "At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly."



The CIA declined to comment and the National Security Agency did not respond to requests for comment.



But officials expressed concern with Trump's handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into the Islamic State, they said, could hinder the United States' and its allies' ability to detect future threats.



"It is all kind of shocking," said a former senior U.S. official close to current administration officials. "Trump seems to be very reckless, and doesn't grasp the gravity of the things he's dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it's all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia."



In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. "I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day," Trump said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.



Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States only learned through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence gathering method, but described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State's territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.



The Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.



"Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling," said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.



The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said that the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia's presence in Syria. Moscow and would be keenly interested in identifying that source and possibly disrupting it.



Russia and the United States both regard the Islamic State as an enemy and share limited information about terrorist threats. But the two nations have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.



"Russia could identify our sources or techniques," the senior U.S. official said. A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, "I don't think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out."



At a more fundamental level, the information wasn't the United States' to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments - and even individual agencies - are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.



The officials declined to identify the ally, but said it is one that has previously voiced frustration with Washington's inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.



"If that partner learned we'd given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first that is a blow to that relationship," the U.S. official said.



Trump also described measures that the United States has taken or is contemplating to counter the threat, including military operations in Iraq and Syria as well as other steps to tighten security, officials said.



The officials would not discuss details of those measures, but the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed that it is considering banning laptops and other large electronic devices from carry-on bags on flights between Europe and the United States. The United States and Britain imposed a similar ban in March affecting travelers passing through airports in 10 Muslim-majority countries.



Trump cast the countermeasures in wistful terms. "Can you believe the world we live in today?" he said, according to one official. "Isn't it crazy."



Lavrov and Kislyak were also accompanied by aides.



A Russian photographer took photos of part of the session that were released by the Russian state-owned Tass news agency. No U.S. news organization was allowed to attend any part of the meeting.



Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout.



Thomas Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.



One of Bossert's subordinates also called for the problematic portion of Trump's discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients, efforts to prevent sensitive details from being disseminated further or leaked.



Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian Prime Minister earlier this year. He has also faced criticism for lax attention to security at his Florida retreat Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.



U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points, and often ignores those.



"He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it - and that has big downsides," the second former official said. "Does he understand what's classified and what's not? That's what worries me."



Lavrov's reaction to the Trump disclosures was muted, officials said, calling for the United States to work more closely with Moscow on fighting terrorism.



Kislyak has figured prominently in damaging stories about the Trump administration's ties to Russia. Trump's initial national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign just 24 days into the job over his contacts with Kislyak and misleading statements about them. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from matters related to the FBI's Russia investigation after it was revealed that he had met and spoke with Kislyak despite denying any contact with Russian officials during his confirmation hearing.



"I'm sure Kislyak was able to fire off a good cable back to the Kremlin with all the details" he gleaned from Trump, said the former U.S. official who handled intelligence on Russia.



The White House readout of the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak made no mention of the discussion of a terrorist threat.



"Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria," the summary said. Trump also "raised Ukraine" and "emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia."





This story was written by Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post.
Northern Ohio attorneys react to Attorney General Jeff Sessions' tough on crime directive. And Some Ohio gubernatorial candidates make unusual moves to draw attention.

Read more in today's Ohio Politics Roundup:

War on drugs? Acting U.S. Attorney David Sierleja said Attorney General Jeff Sessions' memo last week pushing federal prosecutors to use all the might of the government to pursue drug and violent crime cases isn't a huge shift for his office, cleveland.com reporter Eric Heisig writes.

"To Sierleja, the memo shows that the Justice Department will give his office the tools to go after people accused of serious crimes in ways that President Barack Obama's administration discouraged," Heisig writes. "Sessions' memo, dated Wednesday, says prosecutors should charge and pursue 'the most serious, readily provable offense.' This includes charges that carry long sentences and mandatory minimum prison stints. Exceptions can be made, but those must be cleared by a U.S. attorney or an assistant attorney general."

"From my standpoint, the prior administration clearly wanted us to back off being as aggressive with drug prosecutions in certain areas," Sierleja said.

"Sierleja's statement will do little to quell concerns of local defense attorneys who fear Sessions' views on crime will return the area, and the country, to a time when defendants were given disproportionately long prison sentences, even though they were far from the worst of the worst," Heisig writes.

"The new policy memo is not a surprise to those who practice and follow criminal law. Before he was tapped by President Donald Trump to be attorney general, Sessions was an Alabama senator who has long professed a mentality pervasive during the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, when prosecutors sought to address the crack-cocaine epidemic and violent crime through aggressive enforcement of federal laws," Heisig writes.

Election 2018: "Getting the attention of voters and media is a big preoccupation for all political candidates," cleveland.com's Andrew J. Tobias writes. "In the past week, a couple of 2018 Ohio candidates did things -- some might view them as silly -- that stood out."

"Former State Rep. Connie Pillich, a Democrat who's running for governor, "warned" President Donald Trump on Thursday that if she's elected, she would refuse to deploy the Ohio National Guard, if Trump were to declare a "cover-up war" meant to distract from his political problems, such as the ongoing investigation into possible contacts between members of his campaign and the Russian government. She made the pronouncement in a news conference on Thursday in Columbus," Tobias writes.

Learn more about the political antics in this video.

Taxpayer dollars? Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican who's running for Ohio governor, told reporters last week that he plans to operate the secretary of state's office without taxpayer money for the next two years, Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Chrissie Thompson writes.

"All the other elected officials ask for more tax dollars," Husted told Enquirer reporters and editors Wednesday. "I'm asking for no tax dollars."

"To say his office isn't using taxpayer money is deceptive, critics say. Husted's department is actually running on millions in fees from new business owners, and they consider those fees a tax," Thompson writes. "To business owners, Husted is using taxpayer money either way."

"A fee is a tax. A tax is a fee," said Roger Geiger, executive director of Ohio's chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Although business owners appreciate Husted's efficiency in cutting costs in his office, "why should small businesses be paying for the entire cost of running elections?" Geiger said. "I think all taxpayers should pay."

Firefighters: Ohio just made it easier for firefighters diagnosed with cancer to be eligible for worker's compensation and benefits. But now GOP lawmakers in the Ohio House are proposing new restrictions, Columbus Dispatch reporter Jim Siegel reports.

"Firefighters, trial attorneys and Democrats oppose the amendment added this week to the Bureau of Workers' Compensation budget bill. It would remove the presumption that cancer came from the job if a firefighter failed to use, or improperly used, protective equipment while on duty," Siegel writes. "The proposal alters a law that took effect in early April. It says a firefighter who contracts cancer is presumed to have gotten it from the job if assigned to hazardous duty for six or more years and exposed to high-level carcinogens."

Kasich honored in NY: Ohio Gov. John Kasich was one of roughly 100 people on Saturday to receive an Ellis Island Medal of Honor Award, given annually to "American citizens who have distinguished themselves within their own ethnic groups while exemplifying the values of the American way of life," as described by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, which gives out the award. Past medalists include seven U.S. Presidents, "several" world leaders, two Nobel Prize winners and others, according to the NECO.

Kasich, who has described himself as Croatian and Czech, traveled to Ellis Island, New York on Saturday to receive the award, according to a photo posted to Twitter by Davar Ardalan.

Happy Belated Birthday to Kasich. The Ohio governor turned 65 on Saturday, Politico reports.

Opinion: "Trumpcare isn't the only threat to hundreds of thousands of low-income Ohioans who depend on Medicaid expansion for health care. So is the Ohio House's version of Ohio's proposed 2017-19 budget," cleveland.com editorial writer Tom Suddes argues. "Tucked into the Republican-run House's budget rewrite are amendments that could keep otherwise eligible low-income Ohioans from getting or keeping Medicaid expansion coverage."

"One booby-trap Ohio House Republicans slipped into the budget would require Kasich's administration to again ask federal Medicaid regulators to let Ohio impose so-called "Healthy Ohio" (somewhere, George Orwell smiles) requirements," Suddes writes. "Healthy Ohio is a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that, in effect, would require Medicaid clients to contribute to a 'Buckeye Account,' which is sort of like a Health Savings Account. (Historically, HSAs have been big faves of Statehouse Republicans, maybe because their banking pals can charge fees on HSAs.) But if Medicaid clients fail to contribute to the account, they can be kicked off Medicaid."

Ballot issue: Ohioans will decide in November whether to force lower government drug prices, Toledo Blade reporter Jim Provance reports.

The ballot issue would "would require the state and its programs to pay no more for prescription drugs than what the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs negotiates," Provance writes.

And guess what?

"It's likely to be an expensive campaign for an off-year election," Provance writes.

"We believe we can raise the money to get our message out," said Dennis Willard, spokesman for Ohio Taxpayers for Lower Drug Prices. "A 'yes' vote will mean lower taxes and lower drug prices for the sick and suffering and will teach greedy drug companies and CEOs a lesson."

"The opposition, Ohioans Against the Deceptive Rx Ballot Issue, includes a broad coalition including veterans, medical and safety professionals, labor, patients, business, and clergy," Provance writes.

The group "will do everything they can to ensure voters are thoroughly educated about the facts of this proposed statute," spokesman Jenny Camper said. "Health policy experts who have studied the proposal say it would be very damaging to Ohio and Ohioans."

Spending: Ohio is spending millions on information technology consultants, Columbus Dispatch reporter Randy Ludlow reports.

"State spending on information-technology consultants, contractual employees and other private services has ballooned to $452 million a year, while the number of generally less-expensive state IT employees has dropped," Ludlow reports. "As part of a preliminary inquiry into no-bid contracts uncovered by The Dispatch, the office of Ohio Auditor Dave Yost reports that spending on IT "personal services" has more than doubled from $207 million in 2011-12."

Get Battleground Briefing, our FREE politics newsletter, delivered to your inbox: Sign up here. Tips or links? Send here. Follow along on Twitter: @_marykilpatrick

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- This year, cleveland.com reporters are traveling across Ohio to ask the question: How does national politics affect you?

We're talked to folks across the state about healthcare. Jobs. Immigration. Manufacturing. The EPA.

We're logged hundreds of miles for our Ohio Matters project, collecting perspectives from different vantage points across Ohio. We've identified six areas that represent the state as a whole: farm country in Seneca County, the old industrial area in Jefferson County, rural Vinton County, Greene County with the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Columbus suburbs in Franklin County and the urban center of Cleveland in Cuyahoga County.

Ohio Matters is a series examining important national issues through the eyes of people living across the state.

What we've learned isn't so surprising, giving Ohio's reputation as a swing state in national elections. The Buckeye State is full of differing opinions and viewpoints.

Farmers concerned about how EPA regulations will affect their business. Suburban teachers worried about their classrooms. Workers in an old industrial town looking for new jobs. City dwellers worried about their healthcare.

Republican or Democrat, rural or urban, we've heard Ohioans out on what they want from Washington D.C. and President Donald Trump's administration.

We've listened to voters energized and excited about Trump. We've spoken to voters who express fear and worry about Trump.

Cleveland.com politics reporters Mary Kilpatrick, Andrew J. Tobias and Jeremy Pelzer are here to answer your questions about how folks in different parts of the state feel about Trump. You may be surprised to hear perspectives that differ from your own.

Please join us for a conversation in the comments today from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Comments on this topic will be reviewed by a moderator before they are published. To comment, click on the comment bubble just below the headline.

In our Talk it Out pre-curated conversation, comments are published after they are reviewed -- promptly -- to ensure they adhere to our community rules, which prohibit indecent, hateful, abusive or harassing comments, personal attacks, vulgar nicknames, personal information including telephone numbers and addresses, email addresses belonging to others, anything inciting criminal behavior and copyrighted material for which you do not own the rights.

Comments that are not on the topic of this discussion will not be published.

Criticism is fine, as long as it is respectful. We seek a robust and courteous discussion.

cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.
Cleveland State University Student Center

This file photo is of a scene at Cleveland State University, where school officials have announced they will monitor the social media posts of students. Today, guests columnists from the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio write that such a practice is troubling.

(Joe Mosbrook/CSU)

Christine Link is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio

CLEVELAND -- Cleveland State University is our alma mater, and we are proud of that, because it was an institution where we were absolutely free to explore our thoughts and attitudes as we grew as students.

Part of that growth was being allowed to affiliate with progressive groups that we agreed with. An equal part was having to confront groups with opposing views. Some of those views were deeply offensive; even oppressive.

The freedom to engage with that in a safe, open forum allowed us to grow into advocates.

Now the university has announced that it will designate some groups or individuals on campus as being unfit to speak there. Cleveland State has launched an "internal investigation" into anti-Semitic tweets that some former and current students made on personal accounts in recent years. CSU officials have pledged to actively monitor students' personal social media in the future, sending the message that beliefs that run counter to the university's will not be tolerated. This decision crosses a serious line.

Some of these tweets had hateful and oppressive things to say. They disparaged Jews on the basis of their ethnicity. They insulted black individuals because of their race and LGBT individuals because of their gender or sexual orientation.

Elizabeth Bonham is staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

But allowing the university to make itself the arbiter of what is "good" or "bad" speech leaves the campus community's First Amendment rights up to the whims of individuals in power. If history is any indication, once government officials have that power, they will always overreach. What's more, if we silence hateful attitudes -- and instead allow the school to censor them -- we lose the opportunity to learn how to engage with and defeat those attitudes.

CSU's investigation into student tweets was triggered by canarymission.org, an anonymous website that scours digital media for anti-Semitic comments. Recently, the site published a report on the Cleveland area, revealing tweets from local residents that purportedly used slurs against various groups. Some tweets contained no slurs, but only political statements critical of Israel and supportive of Palestinians. Regardless of the message, the university should not be silencing them.

CSU President Ronald Berkman is understandably concerned about what students say, but he cannot punish opinions students offer on private accounts.

As part of the internal investigation, school officials have called several current students into meetings to address the issue.

This is how free speech is chilled, and differing opinions are silenced. It also sets a dangerous precedent that any student who posts something on their personal social media account that university officials deem offensive could be in line for punishment.

In his letter to the campus, President Berkman pledged to proactively monitor students' social media accounts for speech that he deems offensive.

What about students who oppose abortion and post photos of fetuses? Or students who oppose police brutality and post curse words when referring to law enforcement? Or students who post graphic photos of Syrian people killed in the civil war?

CSU is opening a Pandora's Box of potential censorship. School officials should not position themselves as the arbiters of political speech, deciding what may be posted and what may not.

CSU says it will hold a campuswide event in the fall to promote civility and an inclusive atmosphere. That is an idea we can support. The best answer to speech we find challenging is more speech. It provides the opportunity for community members to discuss the underlying issues that led to the speech; for those who were impacted to discuss how it affected them; and for people to collectively determine ways to address hard issues in the future.

The university has a role in serving as a marketplace of ideas and providing space for people to process complex issues. Policing free speech undermines that role. A public university's power to run surveillance and conformity operations on student speech is constitutionally limited. Students may have their own values, even when offensive and even when counter to those of the institution.

CSU administrators should allow this to be a teachable moment that affirms students' First Amendment right to express their political beliefs on social media, no matter what those beliefs are.

Christine Link is executive director and Elizabeth Bonham is staff attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. Both attended Cleveland State University.

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Tami Wozniak-Smith has created a teacher professions program for the district which welcomes students from the charter and private schools.

(Mark Holan/special to cleveland.com)

PARMA, Ohio - At a time when the need for good teachers has never been greater, the Parma City School District has created a program to develop students who want to become educators themselves.

Tami Wozniak-Smith, a teacher who had worked in the district and at Holy Name, heads the Teacher Professions program. This year, there were twenty students in the program, and Wozniak-Smith is expecting a larger class next year.

"I got the results from my students' assessments," Wozniak-Smith said. "It was through the Ohio Department of Education, and they were required to write a 100-page portfolio. It's a huge undertaking, and it's in line with college standards for education majors. They all passed.

"This is a teacher professions program," Wozniak-Smith said. "The students who apply for this program are required to be seniors. By the end of the year, they will have visited over twenty buildings in the district and out of the district and have completed a portfolio which will give them college credit. They'll learn CPR. First Aid, and counseling."

It's a one-year program, and it's three-and-a-half hours every day.

"Most of them are going into education-related fields," Wozniak-Smith said. "For some of them, they'll say, 'This is just way too much work, and I'm not it for all the right reasons.' That's OK."

The program is in its second year, and Wozniak-Smith has been encouraged by the participation this year.

"Two years ago, I was teaching a class at Normandy," Wozniak-Smith said, "and it was the middle of the day, and an application came to my email. One of my colleagues said, 'You would be perfect for this position.'"

Kristen Plagemen, the director of the Career and Technical Education programs, saw the need for a program like this for students who want to check out the field of education.

"That spring the district was accepting applications for someone to create a program from scratch for all three high schools, charter schools and the private schools, Padua and Holy Name. It was the perfect opportunity for me.

She went to a seminar in Columbus with other teachers working on similar programs.

"The students at our high schools have the first dibs on the program, but if there are openings, then students from the charter and private schools are able to join."

There weren't any students from the charter or private schools this year, she said.

Wozniak-Smith doesn't know if the program is in danger of being cut as a result of the district's financial woes.

"Time will tell," she said, "but the first year of the program, the kids weren't sure about what it entailed. But this year, the kids were serious about becoming teachers. They're all attending either a two-year college or a four-year university in the fall. It's awesome."

Sixteen of her students were awarded college credit from graduating from the program. They received three college credits and three credits for other certifications.

"To walk out of high school with three college credits is awesome," Wozniak-Smith said.

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weekly outlook may 15.jpg

5-day weather forecast.

(Kelly Reardon, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Break out the sunglasses and sandals: 80-degree temperatures are headed to Northeast Ohio. Today, not so much. We're stuck in a northerly wind pattern, dragging in cooler air from Canada. But through Thursday, some strong southerly winds will instead bring in warm air from the Gulf of Mexico.

Also, little cloud cover most of the week will lead to plenty of daytime heating of the sun, helping our temperatures sky rocket. Friday, we're switching back to northerly winds, so expect quite a cool down.

Check out the forecast:

Temperatures

Temperature forecast.

Precipitation chances

Precipitation forecast.

Winds

Wind speed and direction forecast.

Pollen

Pollen forecast.

The How

A cool area of high pressure pushing in from eastern Canada will build south across the eastern Great Lakes today, bringing in lots of sunshine and therefore dry skies. Tuesday, a warm front is expected to pass through the Ohio Valley, triggering a slight chance of a shower. This will also help bring our temperatures into the 80s for the rest of the week through Friday. Wednesday, the warm front will have passed leaving no initiator of any showers.

Thursday evening, a cold front will track in, creating enough instability in the atmosphere to produce tall clouds conducive to forming thunderstorms. Friday, high pressure will make its way back.

Keep checking cleveland.com/weather for daily weather updates for Northeast Ohio, and don't forget to submit any weather questions you may have!

Kelly Reardon is cleveland.com's meteorologist. Please follow me on Facebook and Twitter @KelTellsWeather.

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BISMARCK, N.D.  TransCanada Corp. is reassessing whether oil producers in North Dakota and Montana are still interested in shipping crude through its long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline now that they have other new options to ship their product, including the Dakota Access pipeline.

The Calgary-based company's announcement this month comes with the Keystone XL still needing approval of its proposed route through Nebraska and with the Dakota Access, which was designed to transport about half of North Dakota's oil production, expected to be fully operational by June.

TransCanada announced in 2011 that it had secured five-year contracts to move crude from the oilfields of North Dakota and Montana via a proposed five-mile-long access pipeline. The $140 million project, designed to carry 100,000 barrels of crude daily from the rich Bakken and Three Forks formations, would meet with the Keystone XL in Baker, Montana.

Work on that access line was never started, and TransCanada spokesman Matthew John said the company plans to re-engage with prospective shippers "because of a lot of changes in the oil market."

John said the company also would be surveying Canadian shippers to firm up support for the entire Keystone XL.

"We are confident the project still has a need, absolutely," he said.

TransCanada first submitted its $8 billion Keystone XL project for review in late 2008. The company initially balked at allowing U.S. crude on the pipeline that's designed mainly to carry Canadian oil south but also passes through rich oil fields along the Montana-North Dakota border.

The company reversed its stance in 2010 under political pressure from officials in the two states. Montana's then-Gov. Brian Schweitzer had threatened to hold up Keystone XL's 280-mile route through his state if it did not agree to an "onramp." North Dakota's congressional delegation also pushed for access to the pipeline.

Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, said the state's oil producers likely still want the option of utilizing the Keystone XL.

"I don't think it's as critical as it once was," said Ness, whose group represents several hundred companies working in North Dakota's oil patch. "But I'm never going to say we don't want every option available."

When TransCanada first sought shipping commitments for the pipeline spur in 2010, North Dakota was producing about 342,000 barrels of oil daily. The state now puts out more than 1 million barrels daily and is the No.2 oil producer behind Texas.

The Keystone XL pipeline gained federal approval in March when President Donald Trump overturned former President Barack Obama's rejection of the project in 2015. It already had been approved by most of the states along the route.

But the project still lacks approval of a route through Nebraska. State regulators have begun reviewing TransCanada's proposed route.

Nebraska regulators plan to hold hearings on the proposed route in August and they likely will issue their decision sometime in the fall.

The company said it hopes to start a two-year construction phase of the pipeline in 2018.

Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority, said getting U.S. oil producers to re-commit to shipping on the Keystone XL "depends on the timing of the project."

"It's a completely different environment than what we had five years ago," he said. "It's really going to be up to market to decide the need."

Wyoming-based True Cos. had built a terminal to store oil for the Keystone XL link in southern Montana several years ago, though it's no longer being used for its original purpose.

"We repurposed it because it took such a long time," spokeswoman Wendy Owen said. "We'll take a look at it if it comes up again."
With Brexit negotiations between the European Union and United Kingdom set to be "very, very challenging," the vice president of the European Commission on Monday urged all parties to put aside their negative attitudes.

The softer stance taken by Jyrki Katainen on Monday was in contrast with the hard line from the Commission's President Jean-Claude Juncker, whose war of words with UK Prime Minister Theresa May cast uncertainties over the negotiations that are expected to start next month.

"We need a pragmatic attitude. Let's put all negative attitudes aside because the negotiation will be  technically speaking, judicially speaking  very, very challenging. People have no idea how complicated this negotiation is. That's why we need a pragmatic mind and good solution," Katainen told CNBC's "Squawk Box."

He added that the EU wants a "good package" with the UK. Both sides should be able to reach a deal in two years, he said.

"It will take some time because traditionally thinking, economically thinking, it's a very, very challenging task. Nevertheless, in the next two years we should have a divorce paper signed and a new arrangement placed between the EU and UK," said Katainen.

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There was a time, not so long ago, when the German Green Party, governing with Social Democratic Party (SDP), was forcefully advocating a federal EU government to preserve and advance the European project of a political, social, economic and monetary union.

More recently, Martin Schultz, the man leading the SPD in the general elections next September, is championing the same idea  with the fiscal union at its core.

The Greens lost power in 2005, and a German commentator quipped last week that Schultz "will get his bill for federalist ideas in the fall," anticipating that SDP will be trounced by the center-right Christian Democrats in the forthcoming elections.

Interestingly, calls for the federal Europe tend to be revived at times of crisis. In the aftermath of the last financial debacle earlier this decade, Germany's hard-put euro area partners pleaded for solidarity  a short-hand for issuing euro area bonds to finance their deficit- and recession-ridden economies. Germany refused, arguing that the euro area was not a federal state with a unified fiscal policy.

Don't blame the "populists"

As a result, the only thing Berlin offered was a devastating pro-cyclical fiscal austerity in countries already sinking into recessions, with soaring unemployment, poverty, Caritas soup kitchens, falling governments and changing political leaderships, with more than 120 million Europeans experiencing various forms of marginalization and economic precarity.

The ensuing social, economic and political problems have become the sources of "populism," "nationalism," EU exits and people's alienation from their once cherished dreams of peace, prosperity and brotherhood symbolized by the EU anthem of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony "Ode to Joy."

Now what? "More Europe" say those who believe that problems were caused by an inadequate integration process that allowed policy mistakes by incompetent national governments. To avoid similar mistakes in the future, they are now urging a unified fiscal policy to complete the monetary union.

That is what the French call the "fuite en avant"  a semiotic delight roughly translated as fleeing from an unsolvable problem.

Here is what that problem looks like: The fiscal union implies a euro area federal state with a common management of public finances. The area's budget, public debt financing, tax policies, transfer payments, etc. would be managed by a euro area finance ministry. That would also require harmonization of labor, health care and education policies, and a whole range of other social welfare programs.

Institutionally, this integration drive cannot stop at the finance ministry. There would also have to be a euro area executive and legislative authority to exercise administrative and democratic controls over tax and spend decisions.

If you think that this is "mission impossible," here is an even harder part to the story.

Shall we dream?

How could Germany, with a budget surplus last year of 0.8 percent of GDP and the public debt of 68.3 percent of GDP, accept a fiscal union with Spain running the euro area's largest budget deficit of 4.5 percent of GDP and a public debt of 100 percent of GDP?

France and Italy have similar public finance profiles. Last year, France had a second-largest euro area budget deficit of 3.4 percent of GDP and a public debt of 96 percent of GDP. During the same period, Italy ran a budget deficit of 2.4 percent of GDP and a public debt of 133 percent of GDP.

This means that half of the euro area economy (France, Italy and Spain), with serious structural problems of public finances, would become part of a de-facto federal state with a fiscally sound Germany.

Hard to imagine, isn't it? And yet, that's the program that the new French President Emmanuel Macron will apparently discuss tomorrow (Monday, May 15) when he visits the German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
Investors in the week ahead face some serious questions about how stable the economy is heading into the summer months. Stocks are still going strong, but indications that things could cool down would be at the very least a significant stumbling block. A look at a few things to keep in mind for the next five days:

Getty Images

A retail recession? Not so fast

Consumers say they're feeling good about their prospects, but it had not translated into retail sales. Until now. Friday brought with it news that spending actually picked up in April and wasn't as bad some previous readings had indicated. That's important. Why? Because consumer behavior is the missing link that connects strong sentiment surveys with fairly weak data points through the year so far.

How good can it get? Pretty good

The retail rebound had reverberations around Wall Street. Economists upped their projections for the second quarter, and it now looks like GDP could gain somewhere in the 3.5 percent range after a lousy 0.7-percent rise in the first quarter. Curiously, traders bailed out of retail stocks Friday, with the sector stumbling 1.8 percent, thanks largely to a plunge by JCPenney . So investors need to be leery of individual stocks that will suffer under various pressures. But as a whole, it looks like the worries about store receipts were overdone. For the week ahead: Keep an eye on some of other reports that come out. This week features readings on manufacturing (Monday and Thursday) and housing (Tuesday). Good indicators across the board would confirm better times ahead. And by better times, we mean that the stock market, despite multiple predictions of that ever-present correction right around the corner, can keep climbing.

French presidential election candidate Emmanuel Macron, head of the political movement En Marche !, or Onwards ! greets supporters as leaves a polling station during the the second round of 2017 French presidential election, in Le Touquet, France, May 7, 2017. Philippe Wojazer | Reuters

What everyone's buying

Despite all the good signs for U.S. stocks, here's a nugget to keep in mind: Everyone is in love with Europe. Since Emmanuel Macron prevailed in the French presidential election, the trade has intensified. Over the past week investors pumped a record $6.1 billion into funds that focus on Europe, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Of course, you always want to be wary of crowded trades. But this one is worth watching.

What could go wrong
As CEO of Beth Helmstetter Events, a full-service event design and planning studio in California, I've spent the last over 15 years in the wedding industry. In 2016, I applied my educational background in nonprofit administration with a personal commitment to philanthropy to create The Good Beginning, an online wedding registry for contributing to charitable causes around the world. In addition to (or in lieu of) a traditional wish list of home essentials, couples can invite their guests to join them in supporting a worthy charity. I was inspired by the experiences I had while planning weddings in places like Bali, as well personal volunteering missions in Haiti, Nicaragua, Sumba Island and in Los Angeles. I had a strong sense that my clients, and others, may share my personal instincts to give back. My business has let me marry my business experience with my personal passions while providing couples an outlet to support worthy causes in a way that is accessible, effective and impactful. Here are six things I've learned over the years.

Don't assume that business and charitable giving are mutually exclusive

When it comes to running a small business where your persona is considered part of the brand, you can assume many of the clients that are attracted to you are of similar mindset  echoing your values and appreciating your pursuit. When appropriate, embrace the opportunity to show people a different side of your company that aligns with your personal values. That insight could lead to deeper relationships with those in both your personal and professional networks.

Realize it's OK to make money and be charitable

Running a social enterprise can be confusing to some consumers, but with a bit of education and confidence in your charge, you should be able to communicate the charitable mission while also maintaining financial strength.

Beth Helmstetter

Use your platform for good

With maturity and success in your business, consider your brand's voice an extension of your own. It's your responsibility to take advantage of that attention and use your business as the springboard for your greater mission. It's not the time to be passive or take a hands-off approach. This may feel like a risk initially as you may worry about alienating clients, but from experience, I can assure you what you lose will be replaced with far more fulfilling business.

Cover your expenses

Understand that every social endeavor will demand an investment. It's a common misconception about nonprofits that every penny can be fed directly to the charitable organization at the forefront of that mission. However, the administration of running these businesses are very expensive and you have to understand that you will incur many expenses as you build, maintain and grow that social initiative. Be comfortable implementing and explaining how the funds are disseminated and why, for some ventures, a portion of your funds will need to be reinvested into the business to maintain its sustainability and longevity.

Don't be greedy

Stay true to the intention you set when you started your charitable mission: to help communities in need and initiate positive change. While you need to cover your expenses and cost to operate, the vast majority of income should be serving that goal for charity. If you are able to turn a profit from that business model, consider either reinvesting the funds into expanding the level of social impact your business commits to or making your own charitable donation.

Stay true to the intention you set when you started your charitable mission  to help communities in need and initiate positive change. Beth Helmstetter CEO of Beth Helmstetter Events

Prepare for growth
China is forecast to overtake the US as the world's biggest air travel market by 2024 but budget carriers have made little headway so far because of the dominance of the big three state players: Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines.

"Zhengzhou sits at the centre of a vast rail, highway and air transport network that forms the linchpin of China's development plans for its central and western regions," said Mr Fernandes, who has been trying to enter the Chinese market for years.

Under the proposal, which is likely to face opposition from China's three dominant state-owned airlines, AirAsia and its Chinese partners would establish a budget airline, pilot training centre and aircraft maintenance facility in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan.

Tony Fernandes, the co-founder and chief executive of AirAsia, signed a memorandum of understanding with his potential Chinese partners on Sunday on the sidelines of the Belt and Road forum in Beijing .

AirAsia , the Malaysian low-cost carrier, is planning to enter China , one of the last untapped markets for budget airlines, in a joint venture with the government of Henan province and Everbright, the state-owned conglomerate.

Unlike the 'fat and lazy' state-owned incumbents that AirAsia faced in Southeast Asia over the last 15 years, China's 'big three' carriers have large fleets of the latest, most fuel-efficient aircraft and are likely to use predatory pricing and their political leverage to stymie AirAsia.

Low-cost carriers such as AirAsia and China's Spring Airlines control less than 10 per cent of the Chinese market, compared to 56 per cent in Southeast Asia, 40 per cent in Europe and 32 per cent in the US, according to AirAsia.

While China is an enticing prize, analysts warned that it is a risky market for AirAsia, which is already struggling to build new businesses in India, Japan and Vietnam, and faces problems in markets such as Indonesia because of its rapid expansion.

Unlike Europe, which has an integrated air travel market, most Asian nations bar foreign investors from majority ownership of airlines. That has required AirAsia to execute financially complicated and politically delicate joint ventures to expand beyond its home market.

"The risk for AirAsia is that it's spreading itself very thin," said Corrine Png, a transport analyst at Crucial Perspective, a research house in Singapore. "They have found good partners but it's harder to operate a low-cost carrier in China than in Southeast Asia."

China is suffering an acute pilot shortage, she said, which explains why AirAsia intends to build its own flight school in Zhengzhou. In addition, unlike the "fat and lazy" state-owned incumbents that AirAsia faced in Southeast Asia over the last 15 years, China's "big three" carriers have large fleets of the latest, most fuel-efficient aircraft and are likely to use predatory pricing and their political leverage to stymie AirAsia.

"The China unit will be complex because there is local government support implied but competitors will lobby for protectionism at other levels," said Will Horton, an analyst at the Centre for Aviation in Hong Kong.

In an attempt to boost its political credentials in China, AirAsia announced the joint venture proposal during the Belt and Road forum, a high-level initiative designed to promote infrastructure investment connecting China with the rest of Asia and beyond. It said it also was "exploring" the possibility of using the Comac C919, China's rival to the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, which had its maiden test flight earlier this month.

Mr Horton said that while it was too early to say if this would happen, there would be "huge political wins" in ordering the C919 even if it resulted in higher costs for AirAsia.
Angela Merkel is widely tipped to secure a fourth term as German Chancellor after her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) defeated the Social Democrats (SPD) in a key state election on Sunday.

Preliminary results for the regional run-off in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, indicate that the CDU secured 33 percent of votes to the SPD's 31.2 percent in a vote which is largely seen as a bellwether for the country's upcoming federal election on September 24.

The SPD's vote is thought to be down by 8.6 percent since the last election in 2012, while the CDU is up by almost the same amount.

The CDU's victory serves a bitter blow to Merkel's chief opponent Martin Schulz, leader of the SPD, who had hoped a win in his hometown would boost his chances of unseating the German premier who has held a 12-year stronghold over the EU's largest economy.

Schulz had enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity this year and was once considered a strong contender to Merkel's continued dominance. However, Sunday's loss points to the waning support for the opposition party.

North-Rhine Westphalia, home to 13 million people or one-fifth of Germany's voting population has been governed by a coalition of the SPD and Green party since 2010.
Former Governor of California, actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made the commencement address at the University of Houston on Friday, told students that community is crucial and that there is no such thing as a "self-made man." The concept, he said, "is a myth."

The former host of NBC's "The Celebrity Apprentice" said that he wouldn't be where he is without the help of many other people, including "my parents, my mentors, my teachers."

TWEET

He told students, "It's important to recognize that at every step of the way, I had help. It's important to acknowledge that," and added, "As soon as you understand that you are here because you had a lot of help, you realize you need to help others."

"Don't just think about yourself," he said.

As if to underline his point about the importance of valuing the community's needs and not simply one's own, he opted to forego the $40,000 honorarium, appearing at the graduation event for free.

TWEET

Though Schwarzenegger ran for and held office as a Republican, albeit a centrist one, he has lately clashed with various forces in his party. In this speech, he seems to be echoing the progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who told an audience, in what came to be known as her 2011 "You didn't build that" speech, that "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody."

Indeed, some viewers saw implicit rebukes of President Donald Trump in the former Governor's speech. Marketplace reports: "During the 20 plus-minute speech, Schwarzenegger never once mentioned President Trump by name, but criticized much of what Trump stands for. Trump's presidential campaign was based on the premise that he is a successful, self-made businessman who was going to run the government as a business."

Schwarzenegger did sound a very different note from the one the President usually strikes when he encouraged graduates not to focus on themselves. Instead, he said, "give something back to your community. Make sure it's not about ME, it's about WE."

TWEET
Hackers claim to have stolen a Disney movie for a ransom  but the company is refusing to give in, according to CEO Bob Iger.

Iger made the comments to ABC employees during a company meeting in New York, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The hackers told the company they will release the first five minutes of the movie and then in 20-minute segments if the media company does not pay the fee via bitcoin.

The name of the film was not disclosed, nor how much the hackers wanted. The studio has two big films slated for this summer, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" and "Cars 3."

The news follows a report that hackers stole 10 episodes the upcoming "Orange is the New Black" season from Netflix. The cybercriminals uploaded the episodes after Netflix refused to pay a ransom as well. A Twitter user who goes by thedarkoverlord claimed to be behind the Netflix attack, and said he had more movies and titles from other media companies.

Tweet

Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Watch: Tech cos. livid with govt. over ransomware attack
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Benchmark equity indices in mainland China and Hong Kong closed higher on Monday as resurgent hopes for a significant public stimulus boost captured investors' attention more than did the release of a batch of poor activity and spending data. Weakness was evident nearly across the board and continued a trend of disappointing news from the world's second-largest economy in recent months. Industrial production expanded by an annual 6.5 percent in April, dropping from 7.6 percent in March and falling notably short of expectations while fixed investment data suggested a slowdown to 8.3 percent in April from 9.4 percent the previous month. Retail sales and fixed asset investment also underperformed forecasts. "This slowdown as a result of weakening demand is also reflected in the prices of key industrial commodities like iron ore," said Sebastian Lewis, content director for Greater China at S&P Global Platts in an email to CNBC on Monday, pointing out that the price of iron ore had dropped 30 percent since February alone. Partially offsetting the weakness, record steel output implied a positive read-through for construction while property development activity registered higher investment figures.

A Chinese flag flies in front of cranes at a construction site in the Fun City apartment complex, developed by China Vanke Co., in the Fangshan district of Beijing, China. Tomohiro Ohsumi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

In sum, slowing domestic consumption growth and softer external demand appear to have driven the slowdown from the start of this quarter, said Julian Evans-Pritchard, China economist at Capital Economics, in a note to clients on Monday. "For now at least, infrastructure and property investment are holding up, helping to stave off a sharper deceleration," Evans-Pritchard explained. "But we doubt the current strength in these areas can be sustained given that policy is being tightened and the property market is starting to cool," he added ominously. Chinese authorities have recently doubled down on efforts to rein in debt and prevent potential asset bubbles in areas such as property. Effects have been clearly seen in the short-term debt market where yields on five-year government bonds last week hit a two and a half year high, closing above those on 10-year bonds in a rarely seen example of yield curve inversion between the securities, as regulators focus on discouraging the use of borrowed money to buy government debt.

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India has repeatedly indirectly criticized one of China's flagship policy programs in a move that could worsen bilateral ties between the Asian heavyweights.

Over the weekend, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi rejected China's offer to participate in the ambitious "Belt and Road" global investment initiative, also known as "One Belt, One Road." Beijing had previously invited New Delhi to join the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor  a network of roads, railways and pipelines linking Pakistan's southern port of Gwadar to China's western Xinjiang province  which Chinese President Xi Jinping has deemed central to OBOR.

The crux of India's reluctance to the program is the fact that the $46 billion corridor will traverse Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, with officials declaring that the venture violated Indian sovereignty. Most of Kashmir has been divvied up between the two South Asian nations, but the Himalayan region still remains a hotly contested issue between New Delhi and Islamabad.

The corridor would "destroy any chance of a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute," Samir Saran, vice president of the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, said in a recent note. "In effect, Pakistan and China are suggesting that it is conceivable Kashmir can be segregated into separate units that merit unique economic, political and military engagement."

Beijing has said the project was strictly focused on economic cooperation and devoid of geopolitical issues, but in a strongly-worded statement on Saturday, New Delhi said it could not accept a project that ignored its core concerns on sovereignty.

It's not just the corridor, though: India has beef with the entire OBOR program.

The South Asian giant refused to send a delegation to a Chinese conference on the topic over the weekend, where Xi pledged $100 billion to finance projects. Saturday's statement also listed several concerns behind the venture, noting that any initiative promoting connectivity between countries must not create unsustainable debt burdens for communities. Indeed, the prospect of host countries struggling to pay back loans for infrastructure projects executed by Chinese companies has been one of the biggest criticisms of the program.
watch now

If the United States allows some of China's largest producers of freight rail cars into the country, they could end up eliminating up to 65,000 U.S. jobs, according to a study released Monday. "The pace of globalization and the arrival of entrants from countries such as China into the U.S. market, are threatening domestic competitiveness. In passenger rail manufacturing, the fallout is already being felt nationwide, from Boston to Chicago and Los Angeles," advisory firm Oxford Economics said in a report.



A U.S. railroad lobbying group, Rail Security Alliance, commissioned the report. Oxford Economics was founded in 1981 as a commercial venture with Oxford University's business college, according to its website.

The U.S. freight rail network is a $60 billion industry covering 140,000 rail miles and supporting 221,000 jobs, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. The worry for some is that state-owned Chinese corporations will enter the U.S. and sell Chinese-built freight rail cars far below the market price, forcing U.S. producers to close or relocate overseas. Oxford Economics estimates a minimum loss of 5,090 U.S. jobs from increased Chinese involvement in production, and a maximum loss of 64,280 U.S. jobs. The president of the Chicago-based US-China Chamber of Commerce, whose mission is to facilitate partnerships between businesses in the two countries, said China could pose a threat to jobs in the United States. "It seems [as] though the more investments come from China, the more jobs are going to lose," Siva Yam told CNBC in an email.

Australia's rail car industry almost eliminated

The study's findings are based on Australia's experience from the shift of its rail car production to China. Beijing-backed firms can borrow money far below the market rate and receive large subsidies, allowing them to sell products more cheaply than the going price in other countries.



A strong Australian dollar reduced the country's manufacturing competitiveness, and increasingly free trade with China allowed the Beijing-backed companies to take a greater share of Australia's freight railcar production, the report said.



"In under 10 years, all Australian manufacturers have largely ceased production or have gone out of business. The remaining producer, Bradken , has largely exited the Australian market," the Oxford Economics study said. The analysis found that most of Australia's railcar manufacturing is now controlled by CRRC, a Chinese state enterprise and member of the US-China Chamber of Commerce. The blue-shaded areas represent Australian firms, while the red represents merged Chinese state interests. Source: Oxford Economics, data compilation by German transportation consultancy SCI Verkehr on behalf of Amsted Rail "In the U.S. freight railcar market, the potential for disruption and loss to the U.S. economy may be even more acute than in Australia, especially given the larger size of U.S. freight railcar demand," the report said. The analysis projects a loss of up to $6.5 billion in U.S. gross domestic product. Some members of Congress are already concerned about the Chinese threat to U.S. freight manufacturing and jobs.



Chinese rail projects in the U.S. so far have typically focused on U.S. government-backed passenger rail. Under "Buy America" legislation, foreign companies that win contracts for federally funded projects must use some U.S. materials and build U.S. production plants.



"Buy America does not apply to all U.S. rail projects, and the U.S. freight manufacturing industry is particularly vulnerable, as it does not enjoy Buy America's protections," analyst Michelle Ker wrote in a February report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. That said, not all Chinese investment hurts U.S. workers. Chinese-owned companies added about 50,000 U.S. employees last year, for a total of more than 140,000 American workers, according to consulting firm the Rhodium Group. Watch: China's great leap outward
There's a good chance OPEC, Russia and other producers could deepen production cuts when they strike a new deal later this month, according to Citigroup.

Ed Morse, global head of commodities research at Citigroup, said he sees a 60 to 70 percent chance of the 1.8 million barrels per day of current cuts becoming larger as the producer group extends their deal to March 2018.

He said it is possible they could cut another 300,000 to 500,000 barrels per day, and Saudi Arabia would have to contribute the lion's share. OPEC, Russia and other oil producers first agreed to a six-month production cut in December.

Earlier Monday, Saudi Arabia energy minister Khalid al-Falih and Russia energy minister Alexander Novak said they would like to extend the current agreement by 9 months and that they would discuss it with other producers. OPEC is expected to approve an extension of the deal at its May 25 meeting.

"I wouldn't be surprised if they're working on a deeper cut," said Morse. He said the fact that they are discussing extending the deal does, in essence, make the cut bigger than if it had been extended by only six months, as expected.

He said producers would like to get oil to $60 per barrel. There has been market speculation that the cuts could be made deeper, though OPEC officials have not confirmed it.

Watch: Awaiting OPEC production decision
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will brief all U.S. senators Thursday on the ouster of James Comey.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the briefing will take place at 2:30 p.m., ET.

The White House initially cited a scathing memo Rosenstein wrote about Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation last year as part of its justification for firing Comey. However, Trump later told NBC News that he would have fired the FBI director "regardless" of what the Justice Department said.

Comey's ouster  and how the administration explained its timing  raised questions, as the FBI is probing Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Reports have indicated that Rosenstein expressed concerns about how the Trump administration portrayed his role in Comey's termination. But the deputy attorney general denied reports that he threatened to quit over the White House's handling of the Comey firing.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had called for a briefing from Rosenstein, and he and McConnell invited the deputy attorney general last week. After Trump's comments to NBC, Schumer said "the need for these briefings is even greater."

Separately, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called Monday for Rosenstein to brief the full House.
Aetna chief executive Mark Bertolini told employees in a private meeting Thursday that he thinks the United States "should have" a debate about single-payer.

"Single-payer, I think we should have that debate as a nation," Bertolini said in a video tape of his remarks provided to Vox by an attendee at the meeting.

You can read his whole answer in my story  but here in VoxCare, I want to catch you up on what has happened since the video leaked this morning.

More from Vox:

What does it look like when Obamacare explodes? This interactive graphic explains.

This is how democratic backsliding begins

Not even money can get liberals and conservatives to listen to each other

Bertolini had a previously scheduled earnings call with health care analysts on Friday, where he gave more detail about the type of single-payer system he thinks is worth debating. He gave the example of Germany, where the government contracts with private companies to provide a standardized set of benefits to all residents.

"If you look at Germany, they have four big funds that start with the base benefit from the German government and sell base buy-ups beyond that as a public private partnership," Bertolini said.

Here is the rest of Bertolini's answer to investors:

The discussion, which actually in an employee meeting got leaked to Vox and Sarah Kliff, which was on my Twitter feed  that's why I read my Twitter feed before I go for Q&A  was a comment by an employee that said people keep calling for single-payer. Right now, the debate is a group on the left saying, "We must have single-payer and a group"; on the right saying, "The government should get the heck out of health care; there is nowhere in the Constitution that says we need to supply people health care." I think instead of shouting back and forth across the stage, let's discuss what single-payer means. Is it a single source of financing, which does not yet get at the cost structure? Is it a health care system where the government owns the doctors and hospitals and operates them as well, like the NHS in the UK? What is that? So that when we start yelling single-payer back and forth, let's discuss that. Right now, in this country, the government doesn't run anything in health care other than the ACA, and they're doing a poor job of that. Aetna was the first financial intermediary for Medicare. We have the first check somewhere in my office to Hartford Hospital. We ran Medicare. The government didn't. So what is single-payer, what does that mean? Let's be clear when we say that, so that as the American public hears this comment about single-payer, they know what we're talking about.

This is a good point: Single-payer systems can come in all shapes and sizes. There are some, like England's, where the government both finances all health care and owns the facilities. There are others, like Canada's, where all citizens enroll in a government-financed plan but the doctor offices and hospitals remain privately owned.

And there are still others, like Germany, where citizens are required to enroll in nonprofit "sickness funds," which offer a government-mandated set of health benefits. There are actually way more than four funds, as Bertolini suggests. One recent brief estimated there are 200.
Silicon Valley workers are famously well-compensated: At Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and numerous other tech companies, even interns . But two of America's hottest companies are conspicuously absent from the list of the country's : Tesla, in Palo Alto, Calif., and SpaceX, in Hawthorne, Calif., both run by billionaire Elon Musk.

In 2014, a handful of former employees claiming unfair compensation brought suits against SpaceX that California courts joined into one class action lawsuit. The company agreed to settle in August 2016 and finalized a settlement for about $4 million in May, according to Inverse. Although one of the litigants sought to block the settlement, he lost.

According to a SpaceX company spokesman, "We deny the claims made by these employees, but rather than incur the expense, burden and uncertainty of continuing litigation, we elected to settle this matter so that we can continue to focus on our business."
In the report , American cybersecurity company FireEye said the same group  labeled APT32  had also targeted foreign governments, dissidents and journalists through malware and other commercially-available tools.

Hackers have been carrying out cyberattacks on multinational companies operating in Vietnam for several years now, seeking types of information that suggest a possible connection to the Vietnamese government, according to a Monday report.

APT refers to advanced persistent threat  one that involves a continuous hacking process using sophisticated techniques that exploit vulnerabilities within a network.

Nick Carr, a senior manager at FireEye's Mandiant team that responds to threats and incidents, told CNBC what set APT32 apart from other groups was the kind of information the hackers were looking for within a company's breached network.

"Several cases here, it appears APT32 was conducting intrusions to investigate the victims' operations and assess their adherence to regulations," Carr said. "That's where it starts to be really unusual and is a significant departure from the wide-scale intellectual property theft and espionage that you see from a Chinese group, or political espionage or information operations from a Russian group."

To be clear, the attacks carried out by APT32 are unrelated to the WannaCry ransomware that has hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries since Friday.

The FireEye report highlights that victims included foreign companies that had a vested interest in Vietnam's manufacturing, consumer products and hospitality sectors. It also said there were indications that APT32 was targeting peripheral network security and technology infrastructure corporations and consulting firms that had possible connections with foreign investors.

Among the victims were a German manufacturing company attacked in 2014, a Chinese company in the hospitality sector and an U.S. consumer products firm.

While FireEye did not confirm that the attackers were definitely part of the Vietnamese government, Carr said the timing of the intrusions corresponded with the victims' engagement with the Vietnamese government on regulatory matters.

"At the highest level, where I can say with certainty, is that APT32 accessed details and data from multiple victim organizations that would be of very little use to any party other than the Vietnamese government," Carr said.

FireEye said it did not convey its findings to the Vietnamese government through Hanoi's channels.

Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied the contents of the report. In an emailed statement, spokesperson Le Thi Thu Hang called the claims "ungrounded."

"The Government of Viet Nam does not allow any form of cyber-attacks against organizations or individuals," the representative said. "All cyber-attacks or threats to cybersecurity must be condemned and severely punished in accordance with regulations and laws."

The spokesperson added, "Viet Nam stands ready and looks to closely cooperate with the international community in the prevention and combating of cyber-attacks in any form."

CNBC also reached out to the American Chamber of Commerce and the European Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam about businesses affected by such attacks and did not immediately hear back.

The presence of APT32 reflects the growing number of new countries that have adopted advanced tools and techniques to potentially carry out cyber-espionage. Usually China, Iran, Russia and North Korea are considered to be the most active cyber-espionage threats, according to FireEye.

Carr explained that the group lured victims using ActiveMime files that essentially look like a Microsoft Word document. But when victims click on the file, it opens a web page that allows the attackers to take control of the device.

"From the minute you click to enable content, your system is compromised with nation-state-grade malware," Carr said.

Organizations and agencies in Vietnam remain vulnerable to cyber-attacks. For example, last year, airports in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City were hacked along with Vietnam Airlines' website and a commercial bank.
The long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12 (Mars-12) is launched during a test in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on May 15, 2017.

A former CIA analyst said Monday the Iranians are continuing to help North Korea with weapons technology as Pyongyang's new missile test over the weekend was described as "a significant advance."

North Korea's launch of an intermediate ballistic missile test on Sunday appears to be a new model and shows an improved capability to reach U.S. military bases on Guam. Also, experts said the new missile is a mid-range ballistic missile and suggests Pyongyang maybe getting more proficiency with reentry technology that could be used for longer-range missiles.

Such reentry mastery would be required for a nuclear warhead to withstand extreme temperatures and other stresses of atmospheric reentry of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

"It was a significant advance in terms of missiles that seem to be able to carry a fairly heavy warhead and carry it a fairly significant distance," said Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and now senior vice president for policy and programs with the Center for Security Policy, a national security think-tank based in Washington.

At the same time, Fleitz said there's "pretty credible information" that the North Koreans have received help in their missile program from Tehran. "It's going in both directions," he said.

North Korea on Monday touted the launch on state-run television. Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said the secretive regime's leader Kim Jong Un "hugged officials" who took part in the rocket test and gave them "the order to continuously develop more precise and diversified nukes and nuclear striking means."

According to Fleitz, North Korea's missile program is mostly based on old Soviet missiles but he said there's been "substantial collaboration between the Iranians and the North Koreans."

The former CIA analyst added, "The Iranians have been more successful in building space-launch vehicles. They actually further developed some of the designs that they received from North Korea  and they further designed other missiles they got from North Korea. And their improvements have gone back to North Korea."

For example, Tehran's Shahab-3 ballistic missile capable of reaching Saudi Arabia from Iranian land is based on technology from North Korea's Nodong-1 rockets. Also, Iran's Ghadir small submarine, which this month conducted a cruise-missile test, is a vessel remarkably similar to those used by Pyongyang.

Indeed, Fleitz said there are reports Iranian scientists have attended launches of North Korean long-range missile tests and even nuclear tests. It's not known if Iranian military or scientists attended the North's missile test Sunday and it's also not clear at this time how much help Tehran played in the development of the new missile known as the Hwasong-12.

"I suspect the North Koreans also have tried to find scientists  maybe former Soviet scientists  to try to help them develop these [weapons] programs," said Fleitz, who held U.S. government national security positions for 25 years.

Fleitz said the North Koreans have proved to be "very good at redesigning older missile designs and developing their own variants."

Experts say the North Koreans are essentially where the U.S. was in rocket technology during the 1950s.

"Fundamentally this is a problem with physics and engineering for them," said Todd Harrison, a defense expert and senior fellow of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank.

Added Harrison, "They don't have to have outside help. This is something with trial and error; you can figure this out over time."

Sunday's North Korea missile test was believed to be the first type of test where the hermit state achieved such a high angle and significant distance. Analysts say these kind of tests also could speed up the North's testing program as it moves further away from Soviet-era missiles and begins developing more of its own technology.

"Most likely this puts them a little bit closer to being ready to test an ICBM," said Jenny Town, the assistant director of the U.S.-Korea Institute in Washington and a managing editor at 38 North, which provides analysis of events in and around North Korea.

Even so, national security experts believe it might not be until after 2020 when Pyongyang could have an ICBM capable of reaching the U.S. mainland less than 4,900 miles away.

Yet experts say the missile test over the weekend showed the secretive regime is making progress and they also expect more testing of this particular missile in the next several months.

"I think there's some very tough times ahead coming as this missile program progresses," said Fleitz.

The former U.S. government intelligence analyst said he believes the day is coming when the U.S. and its allies will have to start shooting down the North's missiles because they will not know whether the missile is a test or an actual attack.

"If the missile looks very likely to strike Japan from North Korea, we have to shoot it down," said Fleitz. "Or what if the missile is going out towards Hawaii. We can't assume that it's a test."

To be clear, Fleitz said he's not advocating an outright attack today on North Korea. "I think it's a terrible idea because of the possibility of retaliation against Seoul."

Sunday's test is believed to be a liquid-fueled missile launched from a mobile launcher, and it's possible the chassis of the truck may have been one originally supplied to the North by the Chinese as a truck to transport lumber. Some of these Chinese-made transporter-erector launch trucks were displayed at the regime's April 15 military parade.

The missile landed in the sea between North Korea and Japan and near Russia. Based on KCNA's information, the medium long-range ballistic rocket flew 489 miles and reached heights of up 1,312 miles.

"If you took that same missile and launched it on a trajectory that was optimized for range, you could actually get a range of over 4,000 kilometers (or 2,485 miles)," said CSIS's Harrison.

In other words, the Hwasong-12 is capable of reaching targets such as the U.S. territory of Guam, which is located about 2,100 miles away from North Korea. Guam has a population of about 165,000, as well as 6,000 U.S. military personnel currently stationed on the island.

Harrison, who served as a captain in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, said the North Koreans decided not to test the missile to its range on this test because "it would have been a much more provocative trajectory flying over Japan. What they basically did was fly over their own territory and land over in the sea."

KCNA said the test was "aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly-development rocket capable of carrying a large-size nuclear warhead."

Also, KCNA said the missile was tested "at the highest angle in consideration of the security of neighboring countries."

"Instead of shooting it toward something, they are shooting it further up in the air so that when it comes down the reentry vehicle will simulate the conditions of actual reentry," said the U.S.-Korea Institute's expert Town. With this approach, she said the North might then be able to use the test results from such high-angle launches to learn more needed "that would be applicable to a three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile in the future."

"As it stands now, even though they say they are close to testing an ICBM, we would expect that their first few attempts would fail because it is a rather technical venture," Town said. "Every country that has ever tested ICBM's has always failed in their first few attempts."
The man who was shot to death by officers Friday afternoon on Highway 3 had fired at least one shot before he was killed, Billings Police Chief Rich St. John said in a release Monday.

The four Billings officers involved in the shooting were identified as 19-year-veteran Sgt. Clyde Reid; 20-year veteran Officer Steve Swanson; Officer Philip Tanis, who has been with BPD for two years; and Officer Michael Freeman who has been with the department for a year and a half.

Swanson was previously involved in a shooting at Billings Clinic in October 2015, the release said.

The involved officers have been placed on paid administrative leave.

Yellowstone County Coroner Lt. Bill Jones said a Monday morning autopsy was scheduled for the man who was killed on Highway 3. The mans identity will be released after the autopsy.

The shooting occurred Friday after police responded to a 2:30 p.m. report of an armed and suicidal man on Highway 3 between the airport roundabout and Zimmerman Trail.

Officers found the man in his vehicle about 10 minutes later. An hourlong standoff ensued, during which the man displayed a handgun several times.

At about 3:40 p.m. the man began walking toward officers and ignored their orders to stop. He was shot by four officers who were 80 to 100 feet away.

Officers provided medical aid, and the man was taken to Billings Clinic. During a Friday night press conference St. John said he had received "unconfirmed information" the man was dead.

Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office is investigating the incident.
U.S. stock index futures pointed to a higher open on Monday as traders digested news of an extension of an agreement to freeze oil output.

Oil prices jumped after the Saudi Arabian and Russian energy ministers said in a joint statement that an OPEC-led crude production cut would be extended from the middle of this year until March 2018.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih and his Russian counterpart Alexander Novak met on Monday in China's capital Beijing and jointly said that a deal to cut crude supplies in order to prop up the market would be extended from the middle of this year until March 2018.

Brent crude traded at $52.39 a barrel on Monday, up 3.05 percent, while U.S. crude was around $49.45 a barrel, rising 3.37 percent.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump is under pressure from lawmakers to turn over any tapes of his conversations with the former FBI chief James Comey.

On the data front, the Empire State manufacturing index dropped to negative 1 in May from a print off 5.2 last month. The National Association of Home Builders survey at 10 a.m. ET.

On the earnings front, Nippon Telegraph and Trivago posted quarterly results before the bell. Vipshop and Noah Holdings are all due to report after the market close.



In Europe, the pan-European Stoxx-600 index was 0.2 percent lower on Monday. In Asia, the Shanghai Composite in China closed 0.22 percent higher, while the Nikkei in Japan closed 0.07 percent lower.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Leon Cooperman's Omega Advisors bought two media stocks in the first quarter, according to a Monday filing with the U.S.

The hedge fund added new stakes in shares of Netflix and AMC Networks , buying 78,000 shares and 832,000 shares, respectively.

Omega increased its investment in Google parent Alphabet 's Class A shares, the hedge fund's biggest holding, worth just over $152 million at Monday's prices.

The firm also added a new position in Gigamon , which makes software to manage traffic online. Last Monday, an SEC filing showed activist hedge fund Elliott Management purchased a 15.3 percent stake in the stock, noting that shares are "significantly undervalued."

The filing also showed that in the first quarter Omega exited stakes in financial brokerage ETrade , and energy companies Williams Cos and Anadarko Petroleum Corporation . The hedge fund held less than 1 million shares each in the three closed positions.

Last September, the SEC accused Cooperman of insider trading. The billionaire hedge fund manager has maintained that the charges are "without merit."

Cooperman told CNBC in January that assets under management shrank by more than half to $3.4 billion.

With reporting by Dawn Giel and Amanda Lasky
Hillary Clinton has launched a political group as part of her effort to back activism for progressive causes and against President Donald Trump.

The former secretary of state  who lost to Trump in November  announced Monday the formation of Onward Together, which will help to fund activist groups. She tweeted that the organization will "encourage people to get involved, organize and even run for office."

The group's website features a quote attributed to Clinton, "resist, insist, persist, enlist." Activists have used the term "the resistance" for civic engagement opposing Trump's agenda.

Earlier this month, Clinton said she would focus on civic engagement after losing her bid for the White House.

"I'm now back to being an activist citizen and part of the resistance," she told a luncheon in New York.

In tweets, Clinton said Onward Together will work with several group focusing on encouraging people to run for office, criminal-justice reform, or Democrats' attempts to win a House majority.

Later Monday, the Republican National Committee criticized Clinton's move.

"If Democrats were smart, they'd realize it's time to move onward from Hillary Clinton altogether," said a spokesman for the RNC.

Watch: Clinton emails and Comey
An Israeli military officer inspects a supply shipment into Gaza. Source: Israel Defense Forces

At the end of this month, Gaza and its nearly two million residents may lose their electricity, boosting the likelihood of more violence between Palestinians and Israel. In late April, the Palestinian Authority decided it would no longer pay the bill for Gaza's most reliable source of power, to the Israel Electric Company. The Authority, which governs the Palestinians living in the West Bank, cut off payments in an effort to undermine rival Palestinian group Hamas, which governs Gaza. Gaza gets power from three sources: Israel, electric lines from Egypt which are unreliable and are currently out of service, and a power plant within Gaza that has run out of fuel. The power situation is already a source of great tension in the strip, which is squeezed between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean. Gaza already experiences rolling black-outs with power on for four hours, then off for 12. Professor Mohammed Alashi, a professor of finance at Islamic University in Gaza, said that if things get worse, normal life will come to a stop. "At the very least, you won't be able to connect to the internet, you can't complete your job, you can't turn on your computer. Turning off the power is equal to turning off life" said Alashi, who nonetheless added that he doesn't believe Israel will flip off the switch. "Israel is not in the mood to make or receive any kind of skirmishes on the border."

Israeli artillery fire near the Israeli-Gaza border on July 25, 2014. Ilia Yefimovich | Getty Images

Since Hamas evicted the Palestinian Authority and took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, money shortages have been a recurring catalayst for Hamas' violence, leading Israel to respond and resulting in several rounds of intense fighting. The Palestinian Authority's decision to stop paying salaries in Gaza was one of the reasons Hamas began firing rockets at southern Israel in 2014, prompting a war that lasted almost seven weeks. Hamas lashed out at Israel in a bid to remain relevant among regular Gazans. Professor Yousef Nasser, chair of economics at Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank, agreed that Israel is likely to keep supplying power to Gaza despite the bills going unpaid in order to prevent an increased chance of new fighting. "Israel does not want to be seen as an evil, hegemonic entity," Nasser said. "Second, Israel does not want to increase the pressure on an already explosive socio-economic situation." The Palestinian Authority stopped paying the bills because, Nasser said, "they want to see the downfall of Hamas. By making the people suffer, they assume that it will encourage an uprising against Hamas."

Hamas is 'feeling pinched'

Despite Israel evacuating all settlements and troops from Gaza in 2005, the country is still heavily invested in what happens in the strip, because of Hamas' ability to fire rockets into southern Israel. The economic activity that moves across the Israel-Gaza border is monitored by COGAT, or the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. COGAT estimates that Hamas collects about $27 million a month taxing food, cement and other goods brought by truck from Israel into Gaza. Hamas also taxes goods that are smuggled into the strip through tunnels that run from the other side of Gaza where it borders in Egypt. Israel estimates that Hamas is capable of paying its electric bills, but instead uses the money to fund its military wing, paying for missiles, guns and ammunition as well as tunnels that run underground into the Israeli side of the border.

An Iron Dome short-range missile defense system, positioned near the northern city of Haifa in Israel Getty Images
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe praised the Trump administration's tough stance on North Korea as he warned of growing threats from the rogue nation on Monday.

In an exclusive joint interview with CNBC and Broadcast Satellite Japan, Abe welcomed President Donald Trump's approach on curbing North Korean nuclear aggression in light of failures by previous U.S. administrations.

"President Trump says all options are on the table. He is demonstrating this position both by words and by action. We regard this highly," he said.

The international community had increased pressure on North Korea under the notion of strategic patience during the Obama administration, but that did not stop the pariah state's nuclear development, Abe noted.

"We would like to resort to diplomatic and peaceful means in resolving this situation and I think on this point, the U.S. and Japan share the same views. However, we are not pursuing dialogue for the sake of dialogue. We must firmly and solidly stand upon the principle of action for action."

Earlier on Monday, Pyongyang announced that it had successfully conducted yet another ballistic missile test over the weekend. The launch was designed to assess whether the newly developed mid-to-long range rocket was capable of carrying a large-scale heavy nuclear warhead, according to North Korea's state-owned media.
Just a day before the attack, President Trump signed an Executive Order on cybersecurity. But Congress has yet to find the right balance between the public and private sectors that would make information sharing about patches and threats far more effective.

As businesses wake up to the possibility that the WannaCry ransomware tool will spread beyond the already estimated 200,000 computers already infected across Europe, experts are calling for a stronger public-private partnership on cybersecurity . The wake up call from this latest attack: there was a patch that would have shored up the vulnerability.

Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly spoke with former Director of the National Security Agency General Keith Alexander about the attack, how businesses should be thinking about it, and the larger cost of not coming up with a public-private partnership on all things cyber.

Suzanne Kelly: Given your experience as both the head of the NSA, and what you're doing now with your own cyber company, you have a lot of experience recognizing certain symptoms of cyber attacks right off the bat. What were you thinking when you heard about this ransomware attack last week?

General Keith Alexander: Here's what I thought first: this has been largely touted as the year of ransomware, so we shouldn't be surprised to see an increase in these ransomware attacks. I suspect we're going to see more of these attacks throughout the rest of the year  criminals using Wannacrypt or things like that, to encrypt your computers for ransom. What this current attack is doing is using phishing to gain entry into your systems and lateral movement within a network to attack a large number of systems. They are attacking companies throughout the world. It is a huge, global issue.

More from The Cipher Report:

Ransomware nothing new  but scope significant

When the big one hits, who will be to blame?

Cipher Brief expert view: Trump's cyber executive order

Kelly: Let's talk big picture for a second. Security experts suspect that Russia was behind, or aided in, the recent leaking of hacking tools. If that's true, and this latest attack emanated from Russian hackers, how should we think about that? Does it mean that it was a miscalculation on Russia's part to leak the exploits, or should this be interpreted as a sign that perhaps Russia was not behind the attack? How are you thinking about it, given your experience?

Alexander: I think there are two parts to this issue. The first is the perception that Russia might help leak the tools and they threw them out there to embarrass the U.S., especially with our allies in Europe. If that's the case, then an unintended consequence is that by throwing these tools out publicly, their own people are the ones who are picking them up and using them. And it's interesting because when you look on the map, Russia is getting hit the worst from this ransomware attack.

The second part of this issue is I do think Russia has been behind a lot of the related leaks, and I think from their national perspective, it's been to push their agenda to create a bigger divide between Europe and the U.S. As our government gathers the information they need to understand who did this and why, I think that the governmenton both a classified and declassified levelneeds to reach back out to those that did this and hold them accountable. I suspect the leaks were facilitated in part by the Russian government, but that these attacks are an unintended consequence.

Kelly: What does this tell us about zero day exploits? If this attack was launched out of a stolen NSA trove of leaked tools, as some have reported, then how should we be thinking about that? If the government knew about the vulnerability, should they have widely shared it? How should the government walk the line between identifying and exploiting those vulnerabilities for national security purposes and then the responsibility to share that information if it can be used against the private sector? Is there a 'duty to warn' in cyber?

Alexander: I am not going to comment on any specific tools or leaks, but I can say that we had two seniors at NSA who worked out a relationship where more than 90 percent of everything we saw on zero days was pushed out to industry for patching. It didn't go to industry directly from NSA, it went through the right DHS channels to get to industry. It is important to note that before those tools got out publicly, Microsoft actually pushed out a patch to fix those vulnerabilities in March, so that's a step in the right direction. So the government was ahead in getting that information to the security vendors.
A daily morning look at the financial stories you need to know to start the day. STOCKS/ECONOMY -Stock futures are higher on a big boost in oil prices. OIL/ENERGY -U.S. crude prices are up almost 3 percent to the $49 a barrel level as the Russian oil minister has announced his country will join Saudi Arabia in extending production cuts through March of 2018. CYBER ATTACK -Thousands more ransomware cyber attacks have hit Asian victims this morning after the "WannaCry" virus hit 200,000 people and major corporations worldwide Friday, including the British National Health Service. President Donald Trump ordered an emergency meeting to discuss the attack Friday night. CYBER ATTACK (continued) -Microsoft President Brad Smith is criticizing world governments for their cyber security policies and is calling this attack a wake up call. TERROR/DEFENSE -North Korea's latest test launch of a mid-to-long range missile was apparently successful. -Another appeals court will hear arguments over the Trump administration's revised travel and immigration ban today. This time it's back before a 3-judge panel in the 9th Circuit. MOVING AMERICA -Alphabet and Lyft are working together to make self-driving cars. DEALS/NO DEALS -Thermo Fisher Scientific is buying Patheon for $7.2 billion. -21st Century Fox is reportedly willing to make concessions to win final approval of its deal to buy Sky. TOSHIBA WOES -Toshiba's plans to auction off its memory chip unit to cover massive losses in its energy division are hitting a legal snag.

A woman points to the website of the NHS: East and North Hertfordshire notifying users of a problem in its network, in London on May 12, 2017. Daniel Leal-Olivas | AFP | Getty Images
But they would have to buy health coverage for employees from an insurance agent or broker, or from an insurance company directly.

Under the proposal announced Monday, small businesses in the 33 states served by HealthCare.gov for SHOP would still use that exchange to determine their eligibility for the program.

The program, formally called the Small Business Health Options Program, is open to employers with 50 or fewer full-time workers.

Nationally, there are fewer than 233,000 people covered via SHOP plans  far short of the 4 million people that the Congressional Budget Office in 2014 had predicted would be covered by this year.

A top Trump health official said the suggested move was prompted by the failure of Obamacare to provide affordable health coverage through the SHOP program "to small businesses and to the American people."

Citing very low enrollment , the Trump administration on Monday proposed that beginning in 2018 small businesses would no longer be able to enroll workers in health insurance plans through the federal Obamacare marketplace HealthCare.gov

Small businesses that buy SHOP coverage in other states would be unaffected by the move, which was announced by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

And employers with fewer than 25 workers that are eligible for a Small Business Health Care Tax Credit through their purchase of SHOP coverage will still be able to get that credit.

CMS pointed to low participation by small businesses in the SHOP program in announcing the proposal to end sign-ups on HealthCare.gov, which would be accomplished through a change to regulatory rules. The public would be allowed to comment on the proposed rule change, and CMS could modify its proposal in reaction to those comments.

"Out of the nearly 30 million small businesses in the country, less than 8,000, just 0.1 percent of small businesses currently participate in the [federally faciliated]-SHOPs in 33 states," CMS said.

And just 38,749 people are covered through HealthCare.gov-sold SHOP plans, according to CMS.

Seema Verma, administrator of CMS, said, "Our goal is to reduce ACA burdens on consumers and small businesses and make it easier for them to purchase coverage."

"The ACA has failed to provide affordable insurance to small businesses and to the American people," Verma said. "The new direction will help employers find affordable health care coverage for their employees and make SHOP exchanges function more effectively."

CMS said the move will "reduce the federal government's role in health-care coverage decisions and make it easier for issuers to use their own enrollment systems for SHOP plans."

"Employers that have enrolled in SHOP coverage for plan years that began in 2017 would be able to continue using HealthCare.gov in 2018 for enrollment and premium payment, until their current plan year ends and it's time to renew," CMS said. "Employers can sign up for SHOP coverage taking effect in 2017 on HealthCare.gov until November 15, 2017."

The Small Business Majority, an advocacy group, said it was "very disappointed" in the proposal, calling it "just one more example of how the Trump administration would rather undo key parts of the Affordable Care Act that are good for small businesses, their employees, their families."

"Forcing small employers to make this extra effort just to enroll in SHOP will make it likely that SHOP usage dwindles to little or nothing," said John Arensmeyer, founder and CEO of Small Business Majority.

"As disappointing as this proposal is, it does not come as a surprise since the success of SHOP has not been a priority," Arensmeyer said. "Thanks to delays of key SHOP provisions like implementation of employee choice, and lack of efforts to ensure the SHOP marketplaces are robust and competitive, the program has not been nearly as successful as we had hoped."

Obamacare mandated the creation of the SHOP program to sign up workers at smaller companies in health insurance plans.

SHOP was designed to fill a need for people who did not work at larger companies that Obamacare now requires to offer health insurance to their workers or face a fine.

But unlike the other, better-known part of HealthCare.gov, which enrolls people in individual health plans, the SHOP portion of the exchange since 2014 has "failed to sign up significant numbers of small employers," CMS said Monday.

In contrast, HealthCare.gov signed up 9.2 million people in Obamacare individual health plans during open enrollment for 2017. Another 3 million people signed up for individual plans sold through state-run marketplaces.

In data released Monday, CMS said 19,651 small businesses used SHOP plans sold in states that run their own Obamacare marketplaces, covering nearly 194,000 people. The total number of employers using SHOP plans nationally, after including enrollment from HealthCare.gov, is 27,205 small business, with 232,698 people covered.

In the HealthCare.gov state of Florida, which has a population of 20.6 million people, just 579 business have enrolled in a SHOP plan, covering just 2,631 people.

In Texas, where 27.8 million people live, only 1,158 employers are using a SHOP plan, covering 5,753 people.

The District of Columbia, which operates its own Obamacare marketplace, has a population of fewer than 682,000 people, but it is the SHOP enrollment leader nationally, with more than 3,900 employers participating in SHOP, covering 64,805 lives, according to CMS.

Vermont, which also runs its own exchange, has a population of fewer than 625,000 people, but also has more than 4,000 small businesses participating in SHOP plans, which cover 46,099 people.

California, which like D.C. and Vermont operates its own SHOP exchange, has more than 4,300 small businesses using SHOP plans, covering almost 32,700 lives, CMS said.

Watch: HHS's Price on AHCA
Oil prices surged more than 3 percent on Monday after Saudi Arabia and Russia agreed to extend production cuts into 2018.

The headline sent U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude as high as $49.66 a barrel, solidly above the $48.20 support level for the first time in two weeks. Oil prices sold off sharply after WTI breached that level on May 2, causing prices to fall through a series of key technical levels, culminating in a "flash crash" to $43.76.

WTI prices eased back throughout the morning, while International benchmark pared gains after touching a three-week high of $52.63.

The gains further eroded heading into Monday's settlement after the U.S. Department of Energy forecast U.S. shale drillers would increase production by 122,000 barrels a day in June to a total of 5.4 million barrels a day. U.S. shale output has recovered strongly as oil prices held above $50 throughout much of this year, supported by OPEC-led production cuts.

John Kilduff, partner at energy hedge fund Again Capital, said he is now watching for WTI to break through $49.76 and $50.20, recent highs set in April. However, the rapid retracement of the last two weeks' losses makes the gains vulnerable to traders looking to take profits from Monday's rally, he added.

"For the bulls to regain the full upper hand, a close over $50 is what we need," he said.

WTI closed Monday's session at $48.85, up about a dollar at a two-week high.

Monday's gains were largely driven by short-covering, or winding down bets that oil prices will fall, according to Tamar Essner, senior director of energy and utilities at Nasdaq Corporate Solutions.

Last week, traders increased their short positions in oil futures and trimmed their bets that prices would rise, Essner noted. That made "the market poised for a reversal from the recent weakness on any bullish headline, which is what we're seeing today," she told CNBC in an email.

OPEC and a group of 11 oil-producing nations agreed to reduce their output by a combined 1.8 million barrels a day in the first six months of this year.

Crude futures had initially failed to rally last week on signs that OPEC and other oil exporters would keep the deal in place throughout 2017. But analysts said a strongly worded overnight statement from top producers Saudi Arabia and Russia calling for carrying over the accord through March 2018 was enough to spark a big gain.

"The market widely anticipated that cuts would be extended and yet it wasn't giving that any credence as reflected in prices languishing sub-$50. The onus was on OPEC to up the ante which is what they did today with the surprise announcement," Essner said.

That built on a two-day rally last week after the U.S. Department of Energy reported a larger-than-expected drop in the nation's crude stockpiles and a recovery in gasoline demand, which has been soft in recent weeks.

RBC Capital Markets projects WTI could break out to the 2017 highs near $55 a barrel if it can first crack $51, said Helima Croft, the firm's global head of commodity strategy.

"Right now we are in this sort of $50-$55 range because, yes, OPEC is willing to do whatever it takes, but shale production is also an issue," she told CNBC's "Closing Bell" on Friday. "This is the push-pull of the market right now."

Watch: Russia-Saudi Arabia agree to extended output cuts
You might know that Red Lodge is nestled at the base of the Beartooth Mountains or that Rock Creek winds its way through the quaint town as it
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The City of Philadelphia has taken another swing at Wells Fargo, this time alleging that the bank has been discriminating against minorities. In a federal court complaint, the city alleges that Wells Fargo pushed minorities into riskier loans with higher rates, even in cases where the borrowers had credit profiles that would have qualified them for lower-rate loans. The complaint charges that the problem has been ongoing since 2004 and is a violation of the Fair Housing Act, and comes in the wake of an important Supreme Court decision on the legislation. On May 1, the high court ruled that Miami could sue Bank of America for predatory lending practices that allegedly increased segregation. "The City of Philadelphia's investigation revealed that both the resources of the city and the lives of Philadelphia's citizens have been negatively affected by Wells Fargo's discriminatory lending practices," city Solicitor Sozi Pedro Tulante said in a statement. "The Law Department must take action in light of this evidence and halt these discriminatory practices on behalf of the citizens of Philadelphia."

A woman walks past a Wells Fargo location in view of City Hall, left, in Philadelphia, Thursday, May 11, 2017. Philadelphia's city council approved legislation to remove Wells Fargo as the bank handling the city's payroll. Thursday's legislation authorizes Citizens Bank to handle those services at the start of the next fiscal year in July. Matt Rourke | AP

The lawsuit comes amid a brutal period for Wells Fargo after the bank last September settled charges that it had created millions of fake accounts for customers without their knowledge. Recent disclosures from plaintiffs attorneys involved in other litigation against the bank show that the total accounts in question could number 3.5 million, from the original estimate of 2 million. In a related matter, Philadelphia City Council recently voted to change handlers of its $2 billion payroll account, switching from Wells Fargo to Citizens Bank. Wells Fargo recently faced a rowdy reception at its shareholders meeting, during which it faced a barrage of questions over the fake account scandal. Bank officials were contrite, promising to do better in the future.

Bank calls itself 'fair and responsible'

In the latest Philadelphia case, though, the bank fired back at the lawsuit, which it called "unsubstantiated." The allegations in the lawsuit "do not reflect how we operate in Philadelphia and all of the communities we serve," the bank said in a statement. "Wells Fargo has been a part of the Philadelphia community for more than 140 years and we will vigorously defend our record as a fair and responsible lender," the statement added. "We will continue to focus on helping customers in Philadelphia and its surrounding communities succeed financially, and on expanding homeownership in Pennsylvania and across the United States." Philadelphia is charging that it used loan data to conclude that Wells Fargo was unfairly targeting minorities for high-cost products. Experts the city hired found that 23.3 percent of the bank's loans to minorities were high-risk, compared to just 7.6 percent for whites. The city is charging that blacks with FICO credit scores above 660 were 2.5 times more likely to receive high-cost loans than whites. For Latinos, the figure was 2.1 times. In addition to getting Wells Fargo to stop the alleged discriminatory practices, the city is also seeking unspecified monetary damages. Correction: An earlier version misstated the source of the estimate for fake accounts. Watch: Lawyers seek to expand Wells Fargo fake account investigation
Businesses are still dealing with the fallout from a cyberattack that hit 200,000 victims in 150 countries, with many organizations and individuals wondering if they are at risk.

Ransomware  a malicious piece of software that locks files on a computer and demands payments to unlock them  is the name of the type of virus that infected the machines. Ransomware attacks have been on the rise and this particular malware known as WannaCry was called "unprecedented" by Europol.

WannaCry affected an exploit in the Windows XP operating system on PCs, and Microsoft shortly sent out a fix for the security flaw. But authorities such as the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), warned over the weekend that as the working week begins, further cases of ransomware could come to light.
"For the Russians, they've seen their sovereign wealth fund deplete quickly, and the oil revenues are a big part of the government budget," he said.

"For the Saudis, as for all the other exporters, low prices could really create enormous stress. They really want to solve this issue," said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit.

The deal to keep 1.8 million barrels of crude from the market is likely to embolden U.S. shale producers to ramp up their production, but it is also a deal that both Russia and Saudi Arabia would see as politically expedient and critical to their domestic finances.

The oil ministers of Saudi Arabia and Russia on Monday said they would consult other nations on an agreement to extend the current production deal between OPEC and non-OPEC producers by nine months, about three months longer than the market expected.

Saudi Arabia and Russia put their weight behind a new agreement to curb oil production, a deal analysts say should drive up crude prices but also underscores a growing alliance between the two countries.

The extension of the production deal was also announced just days before President Donald Trump visits Saudi Arabia on his first overseas trip, which also includes Israel and Rome.

"Think about what they get from Trump and the Republicans. They want to get a whole lot of precision-guided missiles," said Helima Croft, head of global commodities strategy at RBC. Besides discussing weapons deals, she said, Saudi Arabia wants to know the U.S. "fully has their back and we will do what it takes to roll back Iranian influence."

Russian energy minister Alexander Novak and Saudi Arabia energy minister Khalid al-Falih announced their support for an extension of the deal at a joint briefing in Beijing on Monday after a meeting of the G-20 countries.

Saudi Arabia had felt the pinch of lower prices, though several weeks ago it reversed a move to withhold some pay and benefits to government workers, a move analysts saw as a possible effort to ward off unrest.

Saudi Arabia also needs a high oil price to help its plan to diversify its economy away from crude, under its Vision 2030 plan. The cornerstone of that plan is the IPO of the state-owned energy company Saudi Aramco, which analysts say would do better with a higher oil price.

For Russia, higher oil prices have helped its economy. "This is the first year they were out of recession.  What was the only good news for Russia? The oil price. I don't think it's a coincidence they're extending it to March," said Croft.

Edward Morse, global head of commodities research at Citigroup, said he believes there's a 60 to 70 percent chance the deal could also include deeper cuts than the 1.8 million barrels a day already agreed to late last year. He expects the market to rebalance and West Texas Intermediate crude to be up to $62 per barrel by the end of the year.

He also said it's not surprising Russia and Saudi Arabia are moving closer together to solve their common problem of low oil prices.

"There are three giant oil producers in the world," he said. "Two of them are petro-states , demonstrably dependent on oil revenues for government budget purposes. One of them is not, in the U.S. They have common interests in increasing their revenues. They can do it at the margin. This is impactful."

He said one will end that relationship first. "I think Russia has more of a dilemma in a volume versus price tradeoff."

Saudi Arabia has borne the lion's share of the production cuts, announced in December and effective in January, and Morse said they would no doubt take on more if there are deeper cuts.

Even before the original deal was announced in December, oil prices ran up on speculation and continued to hold in the $50s for several months. But continuing large inventory builds in the U.S., rising production, and more supply from Libya and elsewhere ramped up speculation that the world would remain oversupplied.

"You have this new world order with Saudi and Russia," said Croft. "This is not a one-off, that Russia got involved in OPEC.  It's not like Russia joined OPEC, but you have this new framework. Putin's influence in the Middle East has done nothing but soar, as [the U.S.] pulled back."

She said the relationship between Saudi Arabia and President Barack Obama was not good, since he wanted broader U.S. relations in the region. "What they want to hear is the reset with Iran is over; goodbye to all of that," she said.

The Trump administration has taken a harsher tone with Iran, after the Obama administration struck a deal with Iran on its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against it.

"It's not an accident that the two countries [Russia and Saudi Arabia] were moving together at a time when maybe [the relationship between] the United States and Saudi Arabia was problematic," Morse said. "It's become a lot less problematic since President Trump was elected."

Chris Weafer, partner with Macro-Advisory, said Russia ramped up production ahead of the deal last fall, so its cuts have not been that painful. But a boost in the price of oil will help its budget, which is based on $40 oil.

"If it means $55 instead of $40, it's $25 billion for the budget," he said. "But in terms of politics, it means the Saudis owe the Russians a favor.  It means the Russian position in Syria which the Saudis criticized, they are no longer criticizing."

Weafer said there are also rumors that the Saudis would be interested in investing in Russian energy.

"We have the Russians supporting not just OPEC but mainly Saudi Arabia. [Extending] the production cuts is being pushed by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. For him, he wants the Aramco IPO to be successful, and for that, he needs $55 oil. I think that's why this deal has been pushed. For Russia, It's good politics," said Weafer.

Bin Salman is also behind the Saudi Vision 2030 plan to diversify the economy away from oil.

Croft said the timing of the OPEC production extension coincides with the Russian presidential election next March, another reason Russia may have been keen to strike a new deal.

"I don't think anyone thinks Putin will lose. He doesn't want protesters. I don't think Putin wants to risk a significant uptick in discontent going into those elections," she said.

Thousands of Russians protested last weekend about a plan by the city of Moscow to tear down Soviet-era housing.

"I think what greatly concerned the Kremlin was that ordinary people protested.  The idea of real people in the streets with some real issue, they freak, and they address it very quickly," said Weafer.

"Both leaders, both governments are concerned about social issues on the back of tighter budgets. For Saudi, the deputy crown prince has really staked a lot on the budget revisions, on the 2030 program, and also getting Aramco away at a very high rate," said Weafer.

Other members of OPEC are expected to endorse the agreement at their May 25 meeting.

West Texas Intermediate edged back toward $50, settling up 2.1 percent at $48.85 per barrel Monday, and Brent, the international benchmark, was at just under $52 per barrel.

Watch: Crude higher for fourth straight session
After lashing out at the media last week, Sears Holdings CEO Eddie Lampert is speaking out again, this time saying he is "taking a stand" to protect his company as its vendors have a change of heart.

"There have been examples of parties we do business with trying to take advantage of negative rumors about Sears to make themselves a better deal  a deal that is unilaterally in their interest," Lampert wrote in a blog post Monday.

This, as the embattled department store chain has been working with suppliers to try to ensure their level of credit risk is "both affordable and appropriate," Sears has said.

"In such a case, we will not simply roll over and be taken advantage of  we will do what's right to protect the interests of our company and the millions of stakeholders we serve," Lampert went on.

The CEO mentioned one of Sears' vendors that has been particularly troublesome of late: One World, a China-based subsidiary of Techtronic Industries that makes various power tools for Sears under the Craftsman brand.
Two major groups representing older Americans and doctors urged US senators Monday to be careful in making big changes to Obamacare, as their Republican counterparts in the House of Representatives have called for.

A letter to every senator from AARP urged them to oppose the House's American Health Care Reform Act, and to have the Senate "start from scratch" in writing new health-care legislation.

The AARP, previously known as the American Association of Retired Persons, said it wanted legislation "that ensures robust insurance market protections, controls costs, improves quality and provides affordable coverage to all Americans."

The House bill does not do that, said the AARP, calling it a "deeply flawed" and "harmful bill for older Americans," particularly since it would allow insurers to charge people age 50 to 64 five times the premium prices charged younger customers.

Five days before sending the letter to senators, AARP posted on its website a tally of how House members voted on the bill.

In its own letter to Republican and Democratic leaders in the Senate, the American Medical Association warned that "significant changes to the [Affordable Care Act] or Medicaid programs potentially threaten the ability for millions of Americans to obtain and retain coverage."

"Any new proposal should ensure that comprehensive coverage options remain available and affordable, regardless of income, age or place of residence," said the AMA, the largest group representing physicians in the United States.

The letters come almost two weeks after the Republican-led House passed the AHCA in a party-line vote. The Senate now is considering the bill, which would change Obamacare's subsidy method, as well as funding levels for Medicaid, the joint federal-state program covering mainly poor Americans.

A number of GOP senators have a dim view on the House bill, which is projected to lead to sharp drops in the number of insured Americans if it were to become law.

The Senate is widely expected to come up with its own version of the bill.

Watch: Miss USA says health care is a privilege
The "purpose" of a brand is an obvious concept to the average person: washing powders clean clothes, conditioner makes hair soft and a car gets someone from A to B. But having a higher reason for being could be what makes one brand get picked over another. Ariel, for example, ran an advertising campaign in India encouraging male partners to do their fair share of household chores, resulting in more than 1.5 million men pledging to "share the load". Having this mission helped Ariel increase sales by value and volume in the country by more than 100 percent.

The campaign also contributed to parent company Procter & Gamble topping a U.S. ranking of the ads that had the most business impact, by research company WARC. Having a mission to change society in some way has become somewhat fashionable in 2017. This year has seen Airbnb pledge free housing for refugees in the U.S., building supplies company 84 Lumber show a mother and daughter travelling to the U.S. from a Spanish-speaking country, arriving through doors in a huge border wall, and Audi spend an estimated $10.5 million on an ad campaigning for equality between men and women. Using marketing to promote a benefit to society may encourage someone to buy, but get communication wrong and brands risk the kind of backlash that Pepsi saw when it ran an ad showing model Kendall Jenner handing a cop a can of soda during a demonstration. Pepsi pulled the ad and apologized, saying it was "trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding."

watch now

Tamara Ingram, chief executive of advertising agency JWT, warned that trying to make a point about society won't work for every business. "Not all brands deserve a movement. It may not be worthy of changing society. Sometimes we get a bit fashionable about the role that a brand can play," she said, speaking at an event held by consultancy Oystercatchers in London last week. "If movement means engagement, involvement, excitement then I'm totally [in support of that]. If every brand has to be politically transformative for the world then I think that is a stage too far." Philanthropic founders Societal improvement isn't anything new for some brands. For Elizabeth Fagan, managing director of U.K. pharmacy chain Boots (bought by Walgreens in 2014), having a clear purpose makes it easier to do business. The pharmacy was founded by John Boot in 1849, and his son Jesse continued the company, championing people's right to have a basic standard of healthcare. "If you are a brand with purpose it makes it much easier to drive a framework for making decisions, whether that's a finance decision, a commercial decision, whether that's a people decision, whether that's a colleague decision," Fagan told the Oystercatchers audience. "For a brand that's been around that long, you want to hold on to the legacy, but you actually want to create a future that's contemporary. In 1849 people were living until they were 40, in 2017 people are living until they were 90 or 100."

Boots Chemists, England, circa 1935 The Montifraulo Collection | Getty Images
John Ryan, president of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS), has come out in support of the New York banking regulator's lawsuit filed on Friday against the federal OCC. He called its plans to offer special purpose charters to financial technology (fintech) firms, allowing them to compete with banks nationwide, "unlawful" and "harmful".

"CSBS strongly supports the lawsuit filed by the New York Department of Financial Services against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)," said Ryan in a forcefully worded statement.

"The OCC does not have the authority to issue federal charters to non-banks, and its unlawful attempt to do so will harm markets, innovation and consumers."

Even before New York joined the federal versus state stand-off, the OCC's federal fintech charter was already under threat from CSBS' own lawsuit filed in Washington last month and the departure of its champion Thomas Curry on 5 May at the behest of President Donald Trump.

The turf war over who gets to supervise fintechs is escalating with CSBS's rival 'Vision 2020' regulatory plan appearing to gain ground against the federal fintech charter.

Acting OCC head Keith Noreika, is not known to be a strong supporter of the Special Purpose National Bank (SPNB) fintech charter, which was previously championed by Curry. The OCC is an independent agency within the Treasury and is responsible for overseeing the nation's biggest banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo.

Other countries have nationwide fintech policies and support groups such as the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission's (SFC) Fintech Contact Point, unveiled last year, and the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Innovation Hub in the U.K. But the drive to introduce similar initiatives in the U.S. have been stymied by arguments over whether federal or state governments are best placed to encourage fintech innovation, while still providing effective consumer protection.

Ryan called the OCC's SPNB plan, "an unauthorized expansion of its authority" in a statement released late on Friday that went on to claim the federal fintech charter "threatens state sovereignty".

"State regulators already supervise a vibrant financial services marketplace that includes non-banks and banks," he said. "Where there are opportunities to further modernize state regulation of financial services providers, including fintechs, state regulators are committed to doing so through our recently launched 'Vision 2020' initiative."

Vision 2020

The state-backed 'Vision 2020' plan released by CSBS last week aims to make the U.S. state system of financial regulation pre-eminent, while still recognizing standards that can be applied across state lines to enable nationwide fintech innovation.

According to CSBS its rival plan, outlined in a statement released on 10 May, "will create consistent and data-driven solutions" that support innovation "by minimizing friction in the state regulatory system."

By 2020, state regulators plan to adopt an integrated fintech licensing and supervisory system across 50 States that will transform the interaction between industry, regulators and consumers.

"We are committed to a multi-state experience that is as seamless as possible," said CSBS chair and board member, Charles Cooper, in a statement. He is also the Texas Commissioner of Banking.

"Through Vision 2020, state regulators will transform the licensing process, harmonize supervision, engage fintech companies, and assist state banking departments," he said, while adding he wants to, "make it easier for banks to provide services to non-banks" and "make supervision more efficient for third parties."

The key actions under the Vision 2020 plan are to:

Redesign the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS): CSBS will redesign and expand the NMLS technology stack, so that the common platform for state non-bank regulation is able to use data and analytics more effectively to provide an automated licensing process for new applicants. The NMLS overhaul should streamline multi-state regulation and licensing of fintechs, enabling state resources to be focused on consumer protection and higher-risk cases. Transparency is promised via the NMLS Consumer Access platform. This was viewed 3.7 million times last year.

Harmonize multi-state supervision: CSBS has created working groups to establish model approaches to key aspects of non-bank supervision. The groups will work to enhance uniformity in examinations, facilitate best practices, and capture and report non-bank violations at the national level. To further streamline the process, CSBS will create a common technology platform for state examinations.





CSBS has created working groups to establish model approaches to key aspects of non-bank supervision. The groups will work to enhance uniformity in examinations, facilitate best practices, and capture and report non-bank violations at the national level. To further streamline the process, CSBS will create a common technology platform for state examinations. Form an industry advisory panel: CSBS will establish a fintech industry advisory panel to identify points of friction in licensing and multi-state regulation, and provide feedback to state efforts to modernize regulatory regimes. The panel will focus on lending and money transmission, and discuss a wide range of solutions. Individual state regulators have already been engaging the fintech industry in formal dialogue.





CSBS will establish a fintech industry advisory panel to identify points of friction in licensing and multi-state regulation, and provide feedback to state efforts to modernize regulatory regimes. The panel will focus on lending and money transmission, and discuss a wide range of solutions. Individual state regulators have already been engaging the fintech industry in formal dialogue. Assist state banking departments: CSBS education programs will try to make state departments more effective in supervising banks and non-banks. Updated standards and analytics will help U.S. States determine where new expertise is most needed, identify and address weaknesses, update supervisory processes, and compare themselves to others in order to learn from leading state departments. The higher standards will be validated through an enhanced CSBS accreditation program.

Make it easier for banks to provide services to non-banks: CSBS is stepping up efforts to address banks' 'de-risking' concerns about dealing with fintechs. At the moment many incumbent banks are cautious about doing business with non-banks due to regulatory uncertainty. CSBS will seek to allay these fears by increasing industry awareness about the strong regulatory regimes that it says already exist for compliance with laws about money laundering, cybersecurity, the Bank Secrecy Act, and so on.





CSBS is stepping up efforts to address banks' 'de-risking' concerns about dealing with fintechs. At the moment many incumbent banks are cautious about doing business with non-banks due to regulatory uncertainty. CSBS will seek to allay these fears by increasing industry awareness about the strong regulatory regimes that it says already exist for compliance with laws about money laundering, cybersecurity, the Bank Secrecy Act, and so on. Make supervision more efficient for third parties: Banks of all sizes work with a variety of third-party service providers, including fintech companies. CSBS supports federal legislation that would allow state and federal regulators to better coordinate supervision of bank third-party service providers. In other words, they recognize there is a role for federal legislation, but CSBS want to be the ones enforcing and interpreting it.

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The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear North Carolina's appeal of a court ruling that found its legislature intended to discriminate against minorities in enacting one of the toughest voter ID laws in the nation.

As is the court's usual custom, no explanation was given for turning down the appeal, and no vote was noted. Chief Justice John Roberts said the state had produced a "blizzard of filings" over who was authorized to appeal. He noted that although the court declined to hear the case, the refusal expresses no opinion about the merits of the issue.

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Shortly after the Supreme Court invalidated parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, North Carolina imposed a tough photo ID requirement, reduced the period for early voting by seven days, eliminated the ability to register and vote the same day, invalidated votes case in the wrong precinct, and ended pre-registration for 16-year-olds.

In a blistering decision last July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said the state legislature explicitly set out to discover the kind of accommodations that minority voters use most often and then to roll back or eliminate them, targeting African Americans "with almost surgical precision."

A month later, the Supreme Court declined to block the ruling, which prevented the state from enforcing the voter restrictions. The justice were deadlocked by a 4-4 tie at the time.

A lawyer for the state, urging the Supreme Court to take its appeal, said the photo ID law is more lenient than one upheld by the court eight years ago. The law's other provisions were in effect in two earlier state-wide elections "in which African-American participation increased," said S. Kyle Duncan, of Washington, DC.

North Carolina's attorney general is not defending the law.

The appeals court decision "insults the people of North Carolina and their elected representatives by convicting them of abject racism," Duncan said. "That charge is incredible on its face given the pains the legislature took to ensure that no one's right to vote would be abridged."

The changes in the law put North Carolina in the mainstream of current state election practices, he said.

Under President Obama, the Justice Department urged the court not to take the case and to leave the lower court ruling in place that blocks enforcement of the voting restrictions. The government's brief was filed one day before Donald Trump was inaugurated. His Justice Department did not take a position on the case.

The NAACP also urged the Supreme Court to leave the lower court ruling intact. Some state have similar election practices, the group said, but that fact "cannot save or protect voting restrictions that are adopted with racial

intent." And no other state "has simultaneously curtailed four different voting mechanisms disproportionately used by African Americans, while also imposing a strict photo ID requirement that excludes all forms of government-issued photo ID disproportionately held by African Americans," the NAACP said.
U.S. President Donald Trump (R) and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) shake hands during a joint news conference at the East Room of the White House February 15, 2017 in Washington, DC.

President Donald Trump is trying to determine how keeping his promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem could affect his hopes of brokering a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, his secretary of state said on Sunday.

Since taking office in January, Trump has shown signs of shelving his campaign pledge to move the embassy from Tel Aviv, while vowing to do what is necessary to clinch a Middle East peace agreement.

"The president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told NBC's "Meet the Press." He spoke just days before Trump starts a Middle East trip that includes meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal and indivisible capital and wants all foreign countries to base their embassies there. The relocation is strongly opposed by many U.S. allies as the Palestinians also claim the city as their capital.

Tillerson said Trump's decision would depend greatly on how it is seen by governments in the region, including "whether Israel views it as being helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction."

His comments drew a quick response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Israel's position has been stated many times before to the American administration and the world," Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

"Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem will not harm the peace process, it will do the opposite. It will advance it by righting a historical wrong and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."
Europe's largest tour operator TUI Group reported a wider second-quarter loss on Monday, causing shares to slip in trade, however its chief executive told CNBC that the firm remained confident about its performance.

On Monday, the tourism group announced an underlying EBITA loss of 177.7 million euros ($195 million) for its second quarter on a constant currency basis, impacted by the late timing of Easter this year, compared to a loss of 126 million euros a year prior.

Here are some of the highlights:

TUI Group saw an underlying EBITA loss of 177.7 million euros during its second quarter

Turnover for 2016/17's first-half results was up 8.2 percent reaching 6.69 billion euros, at constant currency rates

Hotels & Resorts division saw underlying EBITA climb to 122.8 million euros during the first half, up 27.9 percent from the year-earlier period

"Guidance remains unchanged despite a challenging environment", the CEO said in a statement accompanying the release.

For the first half of the 2016/17 financial year, TUI Group reported solid growth in turnover, up 8.2 percent to 6.69 billion euros, adding that it saw current trading for 2017's Summer period to be "in line with expectations".

The group also reaffirmed its full year growth guidance, with TUI expecting underlying earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization (EBITA) to rise by at least 10 percent.

"When you look at the performance in H1 and when you look at the underlying trends, I think it's very strong. Also we've had last year a profit increase of 14.5 percent and we guided for this year another profit increase of 10 percent  and the basis for that is a transformation story," Friedrich Joussen, CEO of TUI Group, told CNBC Monday.

"We have been a [tour] operator only and now we are a hotel and cruise company, and when you see the profit contributions it is cruise and hotel profits which are driving the performance."

"We are very certain and very confident that we actually can achieve our guidance of at least 10 percent EBITA growth for the full year."

Demand shifted from Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt in H1, says CEO

Over the past year, countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia have seen a decline in visitor numbers due to security concerns, with customers opting to go to other destinations; however despite the TUI CEO telling CNBC that the group saw some demand shift away from these nations, he remained positive on consumer confidence.
Tesco has announced a commitment to using 100 percent renewable electricity by the year 2030.



In a blog post on Monday, the U.K. supermarket chain's head of climate change and sustainable agriculture, Kene Umeasiegbu, wrote that Tesco's customers and colleagues expected the business to "play its part in caring for the planet."

Tesco has been stepping up its sustainability efforts in recent years. Since 2007, more than 700 million ($905 billion) has been invested in energy and refrigeration efficiency, with its electricity bill falling by 200 million annually.

Tesco said that since the historic Paris Agreement was reached at the end of 2015, it had been working with external partners to set new "science-based targets" to help it become a zero-carbon business.

Under the Paris Agreement, world leaders have agreed to make sure global warming stays "well below" 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Tesco said that in addition to its aim to source 100 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030, it had set the interim goal of 65 percent renewable electricity by 2020. Stores in the U.K. and Ireland will get 100 percent renewable electricity this year, it added.

In the global market, Tesco has invested 8 million in on site solar generation at sites in Thailand. It has also joined RE100, an initiative made up of some of the planet's biggest businesses, all committed to renewable power.

Tesco follows a long line of major businesses looking to boost their environmental credentials.



Last week Whitbread, the U.K.'s biggest hospitality company, said that since the beginning of April all its brands had been sourcing their purchased electricity in the U.K. from renewables.

Earlier this year, brewing powerhouse Anheuser-Busch InBev committed to securing all of its purchased electricity from renewable sources by 2025.
While the so-called Trump Bump in the stock market has kicked many investors' returns into high gear, some financial advisors have clients who have been more interested in a Trump Dump. Based solely on their dislike of President Donald Trump, these clients either have missed the recent market rally by selling off their stock holdings or have had to be talked off the ledge. "Some clients want to make changes in their investment portfolio, but it's not really based on Trump's policies," said certified financial planner Tom Henske, partner at Lenox Advisors. "It's that they just don't like him. They are confusing Trump the person with Trump the economic policymaker."

A frustrated stock trader at the New York Stock Exchange. James Leynse | Getty Images

The problem, advisors say, is that those investors are letting emotions drive their decisions, which studies show is anathema to good investment outcomes. Dalbar's 2016 Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior, for instance, shows that investor behavior is the largest contributor to underperformance over the long term, collectively costing investors more than $122 billion over a 20-year period. From the Nov. 8 presidential election day through March 1, the  a broad measure of U.S. stock performance  climbed 12 percent. Anyone who unloaded stocks after Trump's surprise election win missed that rally. And now, say advisors, for self-sidelined investors who want to get back into the market because they're enviously watching stock prices rise, there's no guarantee the upward march will continue unabated. Same goes for investors who love Trump and think the party will never end. "Investing, or not investing, based on your emotions can really set you up for failure, or at least not doing as well over the long run as you would otherwise," said CFP Mitchell Kraus, partner at Capital Intelligence Associates. More from Portfolio Perspective

How advisors manage client risk, decade by decade

Investors are in for a rude awakening about a stock market correction

The sad truth about Trump's attack on investor protections One of the biggest problems is the tendency for investors to follow the herd after a run-up in stock prices. As a result, they end up buying stocks at a premium, only to end up selling them at lower prices due to fear of them never going back up. "The problem is that we've evolved well as emotional creatures, not rational ones," Kraus said. "But good investing requires people to set their emotions aside and act on a rational basis, which is not our instinct." Kraus had a retired client call him around midnight on Election Night, panicked about her stock investments. "We talked about making logical decisions, not emotional ones," Kraus said. He was able to help her through her fear, and modified her portfolio slightly to reflect her lowered tolerance for risk. But "no one can predict where the markets are going," he added. "My goal is to be right more often than I'm wrong." Another client, however, decided to ignore Kraus' advice by moving entirely to cash after the election. And while the client has acknowledged missing out on gains worth well into the tens of thousands of dollars, she's now hesitant to get back into stocks, because her new fear is that the market is overvalued and on the verge of crashing.

Kraus and the client are working on a plan to dollar-cost-average her way back into the stocks. That is, spreading out stock purchases over time on a regular schedule regardless of price. He also is discussing the idea of socially responsible investing with the client. "That way, even if Trump doesn't match her values, her investing will," Kraus said. One of CFP Dana Anspach's clients had been buying diamonds with some of her cash, but then decided gold would be more useful if the economy implodes. "I told [the client] that if she's really convinced things are going to be that terrible, invest in self-sufficiency," said Anspach, founder and CEO of Sensible Money. "Grow a garden and stock up on batteries, gas, guns and ammunition. "Those types of things are likely to be more valuable than gold in an Armageddon situation," she added.

Making emotion-based money decisions is not good for your wealth. You really have to take a step back and know yourself, and know why you're making the decisions you are. Dana Anspach founder and CEO of Sensible Money

Eventually, Anspach said, the client realized that over-the-top anxiety about the future might be unwarranted, and agreed to leave her index funds alone but still is keeping a large portion of her portfolio in cash. Financial advisors say they have seen similar emotional investment decisions in the past, too, as some clients ran from the market on fears of previous administrations or economic shocks. But the result was always the same: The market, even if it dropped, always went back up  and then some. "Making emotion-based money decisions is not good for your wealth," Anspach said. "You really have to take a step back and know yourself, and know why you're making the decisions you are." Fear among clients drives advisors to learn how to don a psychologist's hat and find a way to be sensitive to clients' views, but help them understand the pragmatic reasons for staying invested. "When you can have an impact  when you can get people to make decisions that 99.9 percent of the time would be better than what they were thinking  it's very rewarding," Anspach said.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Bryan R. Smith | Getty Images

The VIX stays low

What's happening: Wall Street's fear gauge, the VIX, is the lowest it's been in years

Why it matters: A low VIX suggests investors are not concerned about the rise in geopolitics or the recent dysfunction in Washington, but that could be changing A well-watched fear index, the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, is getting low . Typically, a dip in the VIX tells us that stock market investors are not stressing over global risks like North Korea, though the country continues to test missiles. Sounds great, right? But skeptics argue that there are more than enough reasons for it to flip out, especially given the recent events in Washington and the "heightened" political environment. Any spike in the VIX could send stocks lower and have a direct impact on your 401(k), so keep an eye on this fear gauge.

Former FBI director, James Comey. Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Comey in the hot seat

What's happening: After being fired by President Trump, former FBI director James Comey is expected to appear in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee this week

Why it matters: This will be the first appearance of Comey since being fired, "Apprentice"-style Will his attendance as a private citizen, as opposed to as FBI director, allow him to share more, or be more candid, about the investigations into Trump's ties to Russia? That's the question. The Senate Intelligence Committee will likely try to find out. Comey could decline to appear or opt for a closed session. But, however this goes down, some fear that this investigation could finally cause the spike in the VIX and bring an end to the market's recent "Trump Rally." And anything that spooks the markets could affect your 401(k).

Supporters cheer during Rouhani's presidential election rally in Tehran. Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Iran goes to the polls and America is watching

What's happening: Iranian presidential election is being held this week and current President Rouhani may not be re-elected

Why it matters: The outcome could have an impact on the current U.S.-Iran nuclear deal and the price of oil Current President Rouhani championed the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Since then, Rouhani has been facing tough criticism by opposition candidate and hard-line Islamic cleric Raisi calling for Iran to distance itself from the West. Some Iranians also say the nuclear deal and the sanction relief haven't helped the economy and many citizens are frustrated. If Rouhani loses to Raisi , a break-up of the current nuclear deal may follow, which Middle East experts say could reignite U.S.-Iran tensions and would likely lead to Iran's oil being pushed off the international energy market. Bottom line? Lower supply, higher demand means oil prices go up, which means pain for you, potentially, at the gas pump.

Shoppers selecting plywood in a Home Depot store in Miami. Gaston De Cardenas | AFP | Getty Images

On the home front

What's happening: Home Deport gives Wall Street its quarterly report

Why it matters: Earnings from the largest home improvement retailer will give us a read on the state of housing Home Depot will deliver its first quarter earnings report on Tuesday. The strength of the home improvement giant serves as a barometer for the state of housing generally  its share price has more than tripled in the past five years as real estate has soared. Investors will now be looking for signs that the strength in housing, and the rise in the share price, can continue.

Chrissy Teigen and John Legend attend the White Party Dinner benefiting The Andrea Bocelli Foundation and The Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center. Andrew Goodman | Getty Images

Beauty brands report their earnings
A former supreme allied commander of NATO told CNBC on Monday that the "WannaCry" malware attack should be viewed as a "pandemic."

"The key here is its global nature. We've never seen something sweep across the planet at this speed. It's very worrisome," retired U.S. Adm. James Stavridis said in an interview on "Squawk Box."

On Friday, A worldwide ransomware attack hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, the head of Europe's cross-border police agency said Sunday. The attack affected hospitals, car factories, shops and schools.

"The global reach is unprecedented. The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations," Europol Director Rob Wainwright said Sunday.

President Donald Trump ordered his homeland security advisor to hold an emergency meeting Friday night to assess the threat posed by the attacks, a senior administration official told Reuters

Stavridis, now dean of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said he is seeing "mixed messages" on whether Friday's massive attacks could continue this week. Still, he said the initial attack is an opening of Pandora's box.

Ultimately, Stavridis said the U.S. and other nations need to be in the cloud and prioritize hard-drive backups and some computers that have the ability to be disconnected from the internet.

"Let's hope that this one will burn itself out," he said. "We outta wake up to the real potential of a devastating attack in this way."

 Reuters contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump boards Air Force One for travel to Atlanta from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S, April 28, 2017.

On Friday, President Donald Trump tweeted that Comey  whom he fired last week  "better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations." The tweet came after a New York Times report that Trump asked Comey  who as FBI director was supposed to be independent of the White House  for his loyalty at a January dinner. Comey would not make a pledge of loyalty, the newspaper said, citing people who have heard his account of the meal.

As Democratic and Republican members of Congress called on the Trump administration to release any possible recordings it made of former FBI Director James Comey , the White House still would neither confirm nor deny Monday if such tapes even exist.

Trump fired Comey as the FBI was investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia. U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that the Kremlin interfered with the U.S. presidential election in an attempt to shape its outcome. Trump last week told NBC News that he decided to fire Comey while considering "this Russia thing."

On Monday, press secretary Sean Spicer dodged several questions about any possible tapes for a second consecutive briefing.

"I think I made it clear last week that the president has nothing further on that," Spicer told reporters.

Spicer said that he "made it clear what the president's position is on that issue," without saying exactly what the president's position is.

Trump's tweet about possible Comey "tapes" only intensified concerns that he could try to affect the FBI investigation, which is still ongoing. Democrats have called for an independent inquiry.

Several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have urged the White House to release any recordings. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said that if tapes exist, "they need to be turned over."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also urged the Trump administration to give any tapes to Congress.

Watch: Haass on 'odd' US-Russia relationship
The Central Bank of Nicaragua has issued a commemorative 1,000-cordoba bank note commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the death of the nations iconic poet Ruben Dario.

Poet Ruben Dario died 100 years ago and is now being celebrated on a new note from the Central Bank of Nicaragua.

The Central Bank of Nicaragua has issued a commemorative 1,000-cordoba (worth the U.S. equivalent of about $34) bank note commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the death of the nations iconic poet Ruben Dario. The press release announcing the March 17 introduction of the note did not specify the amount printed.

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The new note measures 161 millimeters by 67 millimeters and maintains the green color used on the first note of this denomination, a regular issue, released in January 2017.

We have plenty on the off-metal 1943 Lincoln Cents and on the origin of Q. David Bowers column: A reader wonders how much his 1943 cent struck on a dime planchet is worth, while a long-time numismatist wonders why the origins of two new bronze 1943 cents were revealed.

The commemorative note has a portrait of Dario, a large daisy, and a verse from his poem Pax (Peace) on the face. The back shows a dove of peace and another extract from Pax. The note uses optically variable ink in the form of a feather quill and ink pot within a paper scroll, microprinting, and a watermark. It also has ultra-violet and infrared properties.

The design of the regular issue has Hacienda San Jacinto in Tipitapa on the face and Castle of the Immaculate Conception, Rio San Juan, on the back.

The 1,000-cordoba note is the countrys highest denomination.
A satirical bronze medal highlights the sacrifice of prisoners of war during the Second Boer War.

A satirical medal offered May 27 during Netherlands-based MPO Auctions latest sale mocks the British victors and recalls the sacrifice of prisoners during the Second Boer War.

The 1902 medal was issued to commemorate the Ragama Boer POW Camp in Ceylon. The first batch of prisoners arrived in Ceylon on Aug. 9, 1900, and subsequently others followed until some 5,000 prisoners had landed. Diyatalawa was the main camp. Mount Lavinia was the convalescent camp while foreign volunteers, dissidents and irreconcilables were housed at Ragama.

We have plenty on the off-metal 1943 Lincoln Cents and on the origin of Q. David Bowers column: A reader wonders how much his 1943 cent struck on a dime planchet is worth, while a long-time numismatist wonders why the origins of two new bronze 1943 cents were revealed.

In the wartime correspondence of Jeannot Weinberg, a Jewish POW in Ragama Camp, he writes, The Germans, Hollanders, Irish Americans are, with a few exceptions, a most disreputable lot. They are without exaggeration the scum of the scum.

Those last four words appear on the reverse of the medal.

The obverse depicts a man wearing a hat standing beside a palm tree, possibly chopping it down with machete, and hut on the left. The legend on the obverse includes the date and words translating to British civilization. The remaining legend on the reverse translates to Ragama Camp reminder.

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Most of the prisoners in Ceylon were repatriated to South Africa at the end of the war after signing the oath of allegiance to King Edward VII. Foreign volunteers and those who refused to sign were probably given passage on Dutch ships to the Netherlands, according to the auction house.

Legend suggests that these medals were struck over pennies of the South African Republic, but that is unlikely, the auction house said. The dies were made by C.F. Keyzer, a former employee of the NZASM, the Dutch-South African Railway Co.

The bronze medal weighs 10.13 grams and measures 30.4 millimeters in diameter.

It has a rough strike, and grades Very Fine to Extremely Fine, the auction house reports.

The medal has an opening bid of 750 ($ U.S.). For more details, visit the auction house website.
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North Dakota Insurance Commissioner Jon Godfread took his position just as the agency was being hit with budget cuts and cracks in the national health care insurance system began to show.

At the end of the day, we did really well, Godfread said of dealing with budget cuts of about 14.5 percent.

The insurance department budget, House Bill 1010, was passed with about $10.9 million in 2017-19 funding as well as authorization for 46 staff, a decrease of 3.5 staff, which resulted in the shuffling of some duties, he said.

Godfread said his previous role as vice president of governmental affairs for the Greater North Dakota Chamber prepared him for his new position.

Now, he is watching the congressional Republican effort to replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare.

The House earlier this month passed the American Health Care Act. Senate Republicans are expected to craft a significantly different version of the bill, with ultimate passage through both chambers far from certain.

The Legislature used 77 of its permitted 80 days this session, leaving three days to address any major changes to health care insurance.

I think theres going to be a need at some point, Godfread said. Were in the first period of a very long discussion.

North Dakota has three providers in the health care marketplace, but Godfread has expressed concern that the ACA, as it exists, could collapse under its own weight. He said the states market seems to be solid for 2018 but providers could pull out, as has occurred in several other states.

Godfread said one key state legislative policy victory was the passage of Senate Bill 2231, which addresses air ambulance service concerns in which patients have been hit with large bills from out-of-network carriers.

SB2231 requires hospitals to inform patients or their representative prior to referring them to air ambulance services on their network status. The law also requires air ambulance services not participating in the network to charge the average rate of participating members.

Youre literally a helicopter ride away from bankruptcy  due to no fault of your own, Godfread said. Its an issue all across the country.

He said the fix is within the states authority and should alleviate the problem.
The man who went missing on Wednesday evening in Morton County has been identified as 57-year-old Darvin "Darv" Gratz, of Mandan.

Authorities continue to search for Gratz, who was not located over the weekend, according to Morton County spokeswoman Maxine Herr. The man is believed to have drowned in the Missouri River and the focus of the search focuses now on recovering a body.

North Dakota Highway Patrol planes are flying over an area spanning from one mile north of the Fort Rice boat ramp to Cannon Ball, Herr said. Sonar and dive team members have also assisted, though the heavy current has impeded their abilities.

Planes are searching the area once per day, but that will increase to two times per day by the end of the week, Herr said. Boats may be called in to assist, because bodies of drowning victims tend to surface 10 to 15 days after a death.

"It's a waiting game right now," Herr said.

Gratz's nephew Jared Pfliger described his uncle as "a true North Dakotan all the way through."

He was born and raised in Mandan and most recently worked at the Tesoro Refinery in Dickinson, Pfliger said. A bachelor, Gratz enjoyed being with his nieces and nephews. Outside of work, he liked to hunt, fish and boat.

"He was a hard worker," Pfliger said. "If he wasn't fishing or camping, he was working."

Gratz was last heard from by family on Wednesday evening, when he was fishing on the Missouri River. His boat was found abandoned by the Fort Rice boat ramp on Thursday morning.

The family will be leading a search party on Saturday, and anyone who would like to help is invited to the Fort Rice boat ramp to search for Gratz, Pfliger said. The public is asked to bring boats if they have them.

"The more eyes we have on the river, the better," Pfliger said. "We just want to bring him home."

Pfliger said his uncle was driving a newer Tyee fishing boat and entered the water at the Fort Rice boat ramp. Anyone with information should contact the Morton County Sheriffs Department at 701-667-3330.
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If you work at Apple's One Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino as a computer programmer on an H-1B visa, you can can be paid as little as $52,229. That's peanuts in Silicon Valley. Average wages for a programmer in Santa Clara County are more than $93,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

However, the U.S. government will approve visa applications for Silicon Valley programmers at $52,229 -- and, in fact, did so for hundreds of potential visa holders at Apple alone.

To be clear, this doesn't mean there are hundreds of programmers at Apple working for that paltry sum. Apple submitted a form to the U.S. saying it was planning on hiring 150 computer programmers beginning June 14 at this wage. But it's not doing that.

Instead, this is a paperwork exercise by immigration attorneys to give an employer -- in this case, Apple -- maximum latitude with the H-1B laws. The forms-submittal process doesn't always reflect actual hiring goals or wage levels.

Apple didn't want to comment for the story, but it did confirm some things. It says it hires on the basis on qualifications and that all employees -- visa holders and U.S. workers alike -- are paid equitably and it conducts internal studies to back this up. There are bonuses on top of base pay.

Apple may not be paying low wages to H-1B workers, but it can pay low wages to visa workers if it wanted. This fact is at the heart of the H-1B battle.

Labor Condition Applications filed by Apple. This Labor Condition Applications (LCA) data lists the occupation, total number of workers per job title, the Apple average salary for visa workers, the area wage average and the difference. The LCAs don't represent Apple's actual hiring goals or wages. Apple may submit an LCA indicating plans to hire 150 people at a specific wage, only hire one person and pay a wage well above the government-allowed minimum. The data illustrates that the government allows a firm to pay an H-1B holder below the area occupation average.

The $52,229 computer programmer wage in Silicon Valley -- as ridiculous as it may seem in an area where rents are well above $2,000/month -- is allowed by law.

This is something that President Donald Trump's administration, and some in Congress, want to change. The administration wants to get rid of the H-1B lottery system and use wages and education instead as arbiters in the visa distribution.

[ Discuss this story. Join our H-1B/Outsourcing group on Facebook. ]

Paying low wages is "violating the principle of the program, which is supposed to be a means for bringing in skilled labor," said a senior White House official at a recent background briefing.

But the visa system is built on low wages. Some 80% of visa workers are paid below the occupational mean -- at least according to a government study.

This government data "means that the vast majority of companies are using the H-1B to either hire the best and brightest and vastly underpay them, or to just hire younger workers for entry-level jobs," said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.

There are two key paperwork steps needed to request an H-1B visa. First, a company must submit a document stating the salary, occupation and location for a class or type of worker. That's called a Labor Condition Application (LCA). It's filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, and is a matter of public record.

It's only after receiving approval for those labor conditions that a company can request H-1B visas for specific workers.

The tech industry says it needs visa workers to fill critical skills and supplement the workforce. Critics say if that's true, then the wages of visa workers should reflect their economic importance.

Congress set four wage level tiers for visa workers. Level 1 is intended for entry-level and is at the 17th percentile. Level 3 is the occupational mean, or the 50th percentile. Level 4 is at the 66th percentile.

The AFL-CIO argues, as do some other critics, that the prevailing wage should be set at the local 75th percentile.

If Congress changed the wage system to 75th percentile or some figure above the level 4 prevailing wage, employers "will use the H-1B program for truly specialized workers as measured by salary for a specific geographic location and specific occupation," said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University.

In the case of computer programmers in Santa Clara, this would mean a minimum wage of more than $123,000, by one estimate, or roughly 132% above the Level 1 wage minimum of $52,229.

"In other words, it is a more sophisticated way of selecting the best and brightest foreign guest workers," said Hira. "It doesn't bias towards high-wage occupations [software developers versus accounting] and it doesn't bias to high-cost areas" [Silicon Valley versus Cleveland, Ohio], he said.

Another issue is educational level and how that is factored into wages.

Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis, believes that most of Apple's H-1B workers have at least a master's degree. Even in occupation areas where Apple is close to the median -- according to the forms that Apple files with the government -- it is likely paying less than the median when education is factored in, he points out.

Another problem is how companies employing H-1B workers define a specific occupation, said Russ Harrison, director of government relations for the IEEE-USA. A firm can post a position requiring three years of experience and a bachelor's degree, and a salary to match, but then fill the job with a visa worker with a master's and more years of experience.

Congress, by law, has curbed the ability of the U.S. Department of Labor to conduct investigations, or random audits. Harrison cites a need for giving the government investigative authority.

There has been criticism of Trump's direction on H-1Bs, by some who see it as it an effort to restrict access to the program. But Trump's approach is not outside the mainstream.

The broad outlines of Trump's plan -- which call to move away from an random visa lottery and to raise wages -- are ideas that have found support among some Democrats and Republicans.

The random visa lottery disadvantages small employers, in particular. These small firms may be paying a wage to a visa holder on par with their U.S. worker employees, but they gain no advantage from it. They compete in a random lottery, perhaps submit one or two visa petitions, but generally lose out to an IT services firm that submits thousands of visa petitions, and then counts on lower wages to help move work overseas.

Colin Earl, the founder of Silicon Valley business software company Agiloft that hires H-1B workers, sees the level 1 computer programmer wage for Silicon Valley as "clearly exploitive."

"There is no shortage of minimally qualified people, so the primary effect of bringing in low-wage H-1B workers is just to depress wages for American workers. This is a bad practice and should be stopped," said Earl.

But if the system allowed him to hire a visa workers he wants, and pay the higher wage, Earl would welcome it because his firm already pays good wages. It hires H-1B workers "where we cannot find an American with the necessary skills and aptitude. I would add that we pay these people exactly the same as American workers."

The Trump administration has yet to present its H-1B reform proposal to lawmakers.

For critics, visa reform often presents a whack-a-mole problem. Congress may put in some reforms, but then raise visa caps. Higher visa caps may encourage more students from overseas to enroll in U.S. computer science programs, but critics warn it may discourage U.S. students from entering a crowded field. As the pool of young foreign workers increases, both from U.S. schools and overseas, it may put pressure on wages.

The tech industry believes the U.S. will ultimately benefit if makes it easier for foreign students to join the U.S. workforce. Critics want higher wages to discourage the industry from using the H-1B visa program from replacing U.S. workers.

Most H-1B workers are young, in their 20s and early 30s mostly, and critics such as Matloff argue that age discrimination is the major problem.

The arguments and complications to visa reform program are endless and unresolved, and despite the push for visa reforms, there's no certainty that Congress will take the issue up.
The cruel reality of a global ransomware attack that crippled computer systems in 150 countries on Friday is this: Attackers took advantage of under-prepared computer users and their organizations.

Enterprises -- including manufacturers, car makers, hospitals and government agencies -- were running older versions of Windows or hadn't patched even the newest Windows versions with a patch that Microsoft released in March.

And, truth be told, some unsuspecting users evidently clicked on email links or, more likely, a suspected compressed Zip file attachment that launched the ransomware known as WannaCry, also known as WannaCrypt or WannaCrypto.

Cry, indeed.

WannaCry spread laterally inside organizations, wormlike, via their networks in unprecedented fashion, experts said. It infected more than 200,000 users in more than 150 countries, British officials estimated over the weekend.

Experts expressed fears over the weekend that a variant of WannaCry would suddenly appear and infect more machines as workers returned to work on Monday, putting them out of reach of a kill switch found by a researcher shortly after the outbreak. But Europol, a European law enforcement agency, said the number of infected computers did not increase as expected early Monday -- a modest success.

Computers infected by WannaCry are frozen until ransom of $300 in bitcoin or more per device is paid. Officials in London said some surgeries at hospitals had to be delayed because patient records could not be accessed. The National Health Service of the U.K. sent repeated advice to its IT staff over the weekend, calling for them to isolate the infected computers and run the needed Windows patches on separate, uninfected and refreshed computers before adding them into the network.

The ransomware hit several countries in Europe before it spread to other computers, including ATMs in China and the Interior Ministry in Russia. In the U.S., even FedEx was hit, with the malware infecting "some Windows-based systems," the company acknowledged in an email, without elaboration.

[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]

The attackers used tools first developed by the U.S. National Security Agency to counter terrorists; the tools were stolen by a group called Shadow Brokers with reported ties to the Russian government. Some U.S. analysts said the attackers responsible for the WannaCry attack were more likely to be a criminal gang, however, motivated by the need to raise ransom.

A spy tale gone awry

What happened with WannaCry was an improbable spy tale layered on top of widespread lax cybersecurity by should-be smart users, IT staff and sophisticated companies.

"It was the perfect storm," said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan on Sunday.

"It was the public disclosure of the NSA-discovered Windows vulnerability combined with ransomware that was spread virulently using worm techniques and bitcoin's anonymous currency that has been used for criminal payments," she added.

"A 9-11 for the cyber world is yet to happen, but we just got a taste of it with WannaCry," said Melih Abdulhayoglu, founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Comodo, in an email.

What makes the WannaCry attack even harder to take is that it is likely to happen again. "I'd be surprised if we don't see many more of these formulaic stack [attacks] in the future," Litan said.

"It loudly calls out the need for timely patch management and other layered security measures that must be applied to endpoints and corporate networks," Litan said.

How to prepare for another attack

John Halamka, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said organizations need a multi-layered defense to reduce such risks. "It's a combination of policy, technology and education," he said in an interview.

The policy portion might be so extreme that all workstations in an organization might need to be "read-only," so that ransomware-laden emails cannot be accidentally opened and executed, he said.

Technology could be used to provide web content filtering so that no URLs or attachments ever arrive directly in an email and users can't click on any malware, he added.

Finally, education might include providing organization-sponsored internal phishing campaigns to train employees not to click on an unexpected attachment, Halamka said.

Many organizations have instituted such campaigns, including IDG, the parent of Computerworld, to train busy end-users to avoid clicking on links or attachments in email without more taking time for more careful consideration of what the link might do.

Hospitals sometimes need old Windows XP to run critical apps

Despite his advice, Halamka didn't blame hospitals for being tardy in updating to the latest Windows OS version or applying the latest patch.

"Each time a patch is introduced, the act of changing a hospital's mission-critical system often impacts its reliability and functionality," he said.

"Some mission-critical systems were created years ago and never migrated to modern platforms," he added. "In 2017, there are still commercial products that require [older] Windows XP for which few patches are available." He didn't elaborate on which products.

Healthcare organizations may put a top priority on application functionality and uptime over security, he noted. By doing so, they may not always have the most up-to-date software.

"Healthcare in general may be more vulnerable than other industries to cyberattacks -- and the scope of the impact to the National Health Service in the U.K. illustrates this problem," Halamka said.

Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, said WannaCry seems to have targeted Windows XP machines that are still prevalent in many organizations, especially in healthcare. "If you are running on three-generation-old XP, you are taking a pretty big risk and gambling your security every day," he said.

The WannaCry ransomware also attacked Renault and Nissan factories, which suggests that there should be alternatives to patching for devices like cars and widely dispersed internet of things devices that don't have a human being present to manage them all the time, said Tal Ben-David, vice president of Karamba Security , which provides cybersecurity software for connected and autonomous vehicles.

"A patching strategy would let hackers put lives at risk for months," he said. "The only answer is to harden car or other life-risking IoT systems to their factory settings, which would secure those systems against attacks without relying on security patches."

Many experts have urged hardening IoT devices to prevent hacks in coming years. But analysts and industry experts said enterprises can take the most obvious steps now by patching apps and operating systems with the latest updates.

Experts also reminded organizations to frequently back up data so that machines infected with malware or ransomware can be taken off-line and alternative machines can be brought online and connected with backed-up data.

U.S. CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) updated its advice on ransomware after Friday's attack first hit.

CERT urges users to take care when clicking on links in email, even if the sender is known. It also warns against revealing personal and financial information in email, which could become grist for future phishing attacks.

What is evident from WannaCry is that many, many organizations aren't sufficiently prepared for a widespread ransomware attack. Ransomware has been around for 30 years, but can now be spread quickly -- and globally -- in wormlike fashion.

WannaCry and other ransomware "reinforces the need for organizations to figure out how to classify, separate and wall off their data in order to reduce the risk of data being inappropriately accessed and permanently lost," said Don Foster, senior director of solutions marketing at Commvault, a data protection technology company, via email. "Discussions need to take place at the board level about an organization's data recovery strategy."

Gartner's Litan said that to some extent, IT staffers are on their own to protect against ransomware by taking basic precautions like backup. "All the security vendors have a long way to go" to protect against ransomware, she said. "Ransomware has been half the problem our clients have faced in the last year and a half."
Derek Larson, 32, of Mandan caught such a ridiculously big fish on Lake Tschida that he immediately turned the boat for town so he could find a scale and confirm his suspicion.

Meanwhile, the buffalo fish  a member of the sucker family and native to these waters  flopped around the boat causing a sizeable commotion, considering it weighed 57 pounds, eight ounces, and is the biggest of its kind ever recorded in North Dakota.

In fact, other than the paddlefish and pallid sturgeon species, its the largest fish of any kind ever recorded here, according to State Game and Fish department records.

Larson bow-fished the buffalo on the lake May 5, taking a shot at it after his fishing buddy, Jeremy Dosch, of Anamoose, aimed and missed.

And because fishing is such a competitive sport, Larson said the fact that his companion missed the first attempt made his successful one so much better.

Hes jealous now, he said.

Hes not saying where on Lake Tschida he was when he shot the buffalo in eight to 10 feet of water.

I cant disclose all the secrets; Ive been trying for a state record for a long time, he said. Lets just say I was in the right place at the right time.

His effort earned him a really nice state record certificate and a whopper patch from the department, along with a state record certificate from the Bowfishing Association of America.

Larson gave some thought to having the buffalo fish mounted, but, in the end, decided not to hang it on his wall. Considering its healthy girth and length of 45 inches, just shy of four feet, that would have taken some pretty major wall space anyway.

Its going to grow some really big tomatoes, instead, he said.

Larson said he and Dosch commonly bow fish at night, using lights to shine suckers and carp, which belong to the minnow family. Theres no limit, partly because carp are nonnative and invasive, and they killed more than 1,000 last weekend alone.

We do it a lot on Friday and Saturday night. Its our passion, he said.

Larson beat the previous record for buffalo, set in 2011 by Keith Huschka, of Dickinson, who pulled a 54-pounder out of the Heart River, the same river system that feeds Lake Tschida.

Larson's was the second record set this spring. Derek Barnick, of Tappen, caught a 31 pound, nine ounce, common carp in Lake Etta-Alkaline in Kidder County on April 21. Barnick was also using a bow.

The new buffalo and carp records, while taken with a bow, are for all fish regardless of how they were caught.
Jeremy Corbyn became misty-eyed today on stage at the Royal College of Nursing, declaring:

Nye Bevan once said of the NHS: It will last only as long as theres folk with faith left to fight for it. Be in no doubt that there are those folk. I am one of them.

How prophetic Bevan was  foreseeing the inevitable 24 hours/one week/two months (delete as appropriate) to save the NHS from destruction by the evil Tories. The architect of the health service predicted that the hour would come when it would need a champion, and lo, Corbyn has stepped forward to answer his call.

Except, inconveniently, there wasnt any such call. Bevan never said those fine words.

An actor portraying Bevan did say them, in 1997, in a BBC television play about him called Food For Ravens, by the Marxist playwright Trevor Griffiths. You can find the whole film on YouTube, but heres the relevant moment in which the actor, whom Corbyn appears to have mistaken for the real Bevan, delivers the line:

Its quite fitting that Corbyns pitch on the NHS revolves not around a fact, but around a romanticised fictional account of the health services history. He is the apex of Labours deployment of the NHS as a trump card (or perhaps Trump card, given the fake news element of his speech). Bevans supposed prophecy is all-too convenient, because it was invented as a left-wing political narrative for a 1990s audience.

Traditionally, healthcare is not the topic chosen by Labour when it is on the front foot  rather, it is a mountain fastness to which they retreat when at their weakest. If all else fails to win over voters, they can at least cash in the credit of the folk memory of Bevans gift to the British people.

Except the power of even that tactic appears to be wearing off. Partly thats due to endlessly crying wolf  time and again they have claimed that the abolition of the service is imminent under Tory government, and yet it has somehow survived 42 years of Conservative Prime Ministers since its creation. Partly, I suspect, its because the creation of the NHS, and the situation it replaced, are passing out of living memory. Specific to this election, of course, is the fact that even when Corbyn says something they agree with in theory, voters still tend to distrust him.

Under the pressure of those combined factors, the argument has worn so thin that it seems to have little traction any more beyond a core vote who already bitterly oppose the Conservative Party. In a variety of polls, the Labour lead on the NHS has been far lower than seen in the past, and earlier this year Opinium even found a Conservative lead in who could be trusted to manage it better (even though in the same poll they had scathing views of current health service performance).

Ultimately, whether voters buy Corbyns message on the NHS comes down to trust. They no longer seem to trust Labours message that the NHS will be destroyed unless Labour are elected. They dont appear to trust that Corbyn and his colleagues are competent enough to run the NHS. And the Conservative riposte to all this rests on another issue of trust  the question of whether anyone can trust that a Labour government wouldnt wreck the economy, undermining the tax base on which the NHS depends.
NORTH DUNDAS, Ontario  On May 9, 2017 at approximately 6:00am, Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Community Drug Action Team (CDAT) officers, assisted by OPP Tactics & Rescue Unit (TRU), Emergency Response Team (ERT), Canine Unit and Stormont, Dundas & Glengarry uniform patrol members executed a Criminal Code search warrant at a residence on County Road 13, North Dundas Township.

As a result, officers seized quantities of suspected methamphetamine (crystal/pills), Hydromorph Contin and marihuana. Also seized was a BB gun and cattle prod. Stolen item were also recovered (power tools and Honda pumps). Police arrested four (4) adults.

Joey CINNAMON (37) of North Dundas Township is charged with;

 Possession of Property Obtained by Crime (2 counts)

 Possession of Firearm Contrary to Prohibition (2 counts)

 Possession of a Controlled Substance for the Purpose of Trafficking

 Possession of a Controlled Substance

 Fail to Comply with a Probation Order (4 counts)

He was held in custody pending an appearance (bail) at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall.

The following were charged on May 11, 2017;

Meredith PINK (45) of North Dundas Township is charged with;

 Possession of Property Obtained by Crime (2 counts)

 Possession of a Controlled Substance for the Purpose of Trafficking

 Possession of a Controlled Substance (2 counts)

Philip MOYES (36) of Ottawa, Ontario is charged with;

 Possession of a Controlled Substance (2 counts)

 Fail to Comply with Recognizance

Misty HAMLIN (36) of Ottawa, Ontario is charged with;

 Possession of a Controlled Substance (2 counts)

The above three (3) accused persons were released and scheduled to appear at the Ontario Court of Justice in Morrisburg on June 6, 2017.
This is Up and Down, where we give a brief thumbs up and thumbs down on the issues from the past week.

Up

Expansion of the Painted Woods Wildlife Management Area demonstrates the power of cooperation. Local officials, farmers and ranchers, McLean County, the state Game and Fish Department along with the North Dakota Agriculture Department worked together on the project south of Washburn. The county and state and wildlife advocacy group partners purchased 255 acres to add to the management area. The expansion will help with flood control as landowners have been fighting the flooding of cropland. Its a win for all involved.

Down

The Dakota Access Pipeline drew the wrath of environmental groups during its construction in North Dakota. Opponents argued it wasnt a case of if, but when, spills occurred. State officials backed the project throughout the protests. Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, needed to maintain a clean record. That hasnt happened. The company has reported 18 leaks and a spill of more than 2 million gallons of drilling materials in an Ohio project. In South Dakota, Dakota Access reported an 84-gallon crude oil spill. The company needs to do better to maintain its reputation and the reputation of North Dakota.

Up

North Dakota gets to be a trailblazer with the storage of carbon dioxide gas. Last week the Environmental Protection Agency took a step toward giving the state primary authority to regulate federal Class VI wells for injecting CO2 into deep underground pore space for either long-term storage or for store-and-sell in enhanced oil recovery. Red Trail Energy, an ethanol producer in Richardton, is interested in underground storage. What makes the EPA decision important is it could lead to a cleaner coal future. Coal has been valuable in North Dakotas economy and a cleaner future opens the door for continued coal production.

Down

The North Dakota University System took some major budget cuts during the legislative session. The Tribune Editorial Board urged the schools to find reductions without increasing tuition. Unfortunately, that doesnt appear to be the outcome. The University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University plan to seek a 4 percent tuition increase and other schools also plan hikes. The 4 percent request is the maximum allowed by the Legislature. Students and their families shouldnt have to bear the burden of the budget cuts. The state needs to find ways to keep a college education affordable. In the end, that will benefit everyone.

Up

Jim Cossette lost his mobile home to a fire last week  thats a down. His neighbor, Kiana Keller, was quick to jump on Facebook and seek donations to help Cossette. Keller apparently doesnt know Cossette well, but that didnt stop her from wanting to help him. North Dakotans are well known for helping friends, neighbors and even strangers in need. Thats what makes this item an up.
I teach contracts and arbitration law, among other classes, and I find it increasingly frustrating to teach arbitration cases. So many involve plausible applications of contract law (like Kindred) but get the arbitration law flatly wrong. Others involve questionable applications of contract law or related doctrines, seemingly to avoid the effect of arbitration law. Heres a recent case by the Maryland Court of Appeals, Cain v Midland Funding , which falls into the latter camp.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Kindred Nursing v Clark , an arbitration case in which the Kentucky Supreme Court declined to enforce arbitration agreements between a nursing home and two patients. The agreements had been executed by relatives holding powers of attorney granting broad authority to enter contracts, but the Kentucky Supreme Court held that a power of attorney must specifically grant the authority to agree to arbitration. It was clear-- as it often is --that the U.S. Supreme Court would reverse. The Kentucky rule just cant be squared with governing federal arbitration law. Put simply, state law can't say that a broadly-worded power of attorney grants authority to enter contracts generally, except for arbitration clauses. Not surprisingly, then, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed in a 7 to 1 opinion authored by Justice Kagan.* The dissent wasnt on the merits, either; Justice Thomas does not believe the Federal Arbitration Act applies to proceedings in state court.

Cain involved an arbitration clause in a consumer credit agreement. I will reprint the relevant parts of the arbitration clause below, but heres what it says in substance:

Either party may bring any claim in arbitration or in court. For any claim (or counterclaim) filed in court, the defendant may insist on arbitration instead, except for claims filed on an individual basis in small claims court. Any dispute sent to arbitration must be arbitrated on an individual basis (i.e., not as a class action).

Midland Funding, an unlicensed collection agency, filed a collections action in Maryland small claims court and won a default judgment against Cain. Subsequently, a Maryland court ruled that judgments obtained by unlicensed debt collectors are void and that judgment debtors can collaterally attack such a judgment. Cain thereupon filed a class action in Maryland state court seeking damages and other relief, and Midland moved to compel arbitration. Two lower courts ruled in favor of arbitration but the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed, holding that Midland had waived the right to demand arbitration by filing its collection action in small claims court in the first place. Midland, the court reasoned, had an option to bring that claim in arbitration or in court. By electing to file suit, it waived the right to demand arbitration of all related claims.

Wait, what? The contract gives each party the right to file individual cases in small claims court, while insisting on individualized arbitration of all other claims, including counterclaims (many of which will necessarily be related to the claim asserted by the counter-claimant's opponent). So how does one waive a contractual right by asserting it?

To be sure, one can waive the right to arbitrate. I put the term in quotes because the arbitration cases often use it loosely to refer both to the intentional relinquishment of the right and to cases in which a party forfeits the right unwillingly. As an example of the latter category, consider a defendant in a court action that first files a motion to dismiss (likely unavailable in arbitration) and moves to compel arbitration only after losing the motion to dismiss. Most courts would refuse to compel arbitration on those facts. But Cain has nothing to do with this scenario, because Midland contracted for precisely the right it asserted.

The problem in Cain has nothing to do with any waiver of contractual rights. The problem is with the rights Midland contracted for in the first place. The contract preserves meaningful legal remedies for the lender and its agents, while denying borrowers their most effective remedy, the class action. Even if class actions do not provide much compensation, the threat at least has the potential to deter lender misconduct. Unfortunately, federal arbitration law makes it difficult, though not impossible, to argue that a clause like this is unconscionable. Thats a shame. As I have said before, public officials should be the ones to decide whether businesses can use contracts to opt out of class action liability. Despite my skepticism about the individual and social benefits of the class action, I would prefer they answer this question in the negative. But until we get to that point, I would also prefer that courts apply the law as it is.

*In Kindred Nursing, the only remotely plausible counter-argument is that the rule announced by the Kentucky Supreme Court requires a clear statement of the intent to grant an agent the authority to waive any fundamental right and thus doesnt single out arbitration. But there are two problems with this argument. First, even if this is what the Kentucky Supreme Court really meant, the rule might be preempted anyway. It isnt clear that the FAA allows states to disfavor arbitration agreements, so long as they also disfavor a couple of other types of contract. Second, it takes a really, really charitable reading to come away with the impression that the Kentucky rule doesn't target arbitration for unfavorable treatment. As Justice Kagans opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court notes, the category of fundamental clauses identified by Kentucky law appears to consist only of arbitration agreements. It is as if the rule were made applicable to arbitration agreements and black swans" (p. 7).

The arbitration clause in Cain (excerpt):

Either you or we may, without the others consent, elect mandatory, binding arbitration for any claim, dispute, or controversy between you and us (called Claims).

All Claims relating to your account  or our relationship are subject to arbitration  no matter what legal theory  or what remedy . This includes  counterclaims  and Claims made independently or with other claims. A party who initiates a proceeding in court may elect arbitration with respect to any Claim advanced in that proceeding by any other party. Claims and remedies sought as part of a class action, private attorney general or other representative action are subject to arbitration on an individual (non-class, non-representative) basis, and the arbitrator may award relief only on an individual (non-class, non-representative) basis.

What about Claims filed in Small Claims Court? Claims filed in a small claims court are not subject to arbitration, so long as the matter remains in such court and advances only an individual (non-class, non-representative) Claim.
As noted as an update in the prior post, May 17 is the first hearing in Puerto Rico's PROMESA restructuring cases (which also have new case numbers). However much interest these cases hold for the professional bankruptcy world, they are of critical importance to Puerto Rico residents. The idea of a government unit being bankrupt is frightening, with the anxiety heightened when the extent to which one's elected officials remain in charge is unclear. Sensitive to the number of stakeholders and high public interest, the courthouse has overflow space reserved for the first hearing. But even a capacious courthouse imposes natural limits on the in-person population.

If the court released audio recordings of hearings for free on its website, as happened in the Detroit bankruptcy, that would provide a window into the federal court process that could help build trust and legitimacy. Ordering and using hearing transcripts is critical to many parties and their lawyers, but that process is not a feasible form of education and access for others. In addition to being prohibitively expensive for residents to acquire, especially on an expedited basis, written transcripts provide insufficient contextual cues for those less familiar with federal courts and lawyers.



Releasing digital recordings does not appear to be standard practice in the District of Puerto Rico. Might this be an opportune moment for an experiment, or at least an exception?*
BRIDGEPORT - She was trained to help people, but police said Ayanna Woodward didnt even pause to see if the 80-year-old man she struck with her car was all right.

The 29-year-old Woodward, a certified nursing assistant, was arraigned Monday for allegedly killing David Hadden with her car while driving drunk.

Woodward, who is charged with misconduct with a motor vehicle, operating under the influence, evading responsibility and running from police, showed no emotion as she stood before Superior Court Judge William Holden.

The judge ordered her held in lieu of $20,500 bond.

Hadden was crossing Boston Avenue at Mill Hill Avenue about 4 p.m. on Friday when police said he was struck by a black 2004 Chevrolet Impala driven by Woodward.

Police said witnesses told them that Hadden was possibly carrying some milk as he crossed the street. The impact with the front of the car sent him flying up into its windshield and then over its roof onto the roadway as, they said, Woodward sped away.

Hadden died on arrival to Bridgeport Hospital.

Meanwhile, police said, another motorist followed Woodward, calling in her location. Officers said they caught up with her as she entered Interstate 95. They attempted to pull her over but instead she sped up, getting off at Exit 26.

Police said officers finally managed to box her in and took Woodward into custody. Inside her car they found a mason jar half filled with an alcoholic beverage.

They want me to sleep with his wife. They want me to sleep with my landlords wife, police said Woodward told them without any further explanation.

Police said she failed a field sobriety test and that, administered a Breathalyzer, she sucked on the tube instead of blowing, invalidating the test. Police said they did, however, taken a urine sample from her to later determine her alcohol/blood content.
I've always said that the companies that scale to become large, sustainable and independent franchises are the ones that offer a platform to the market. The constant evolution aspiration for a startup is to go from feature to product to platform -- to create a company where other companies are born and scaled on your technology offerings. A larger vision and the ability to execute on it is truly what separate the good from the great.

Things have changed a lot for Dyn over the 15 years since its inception -- and many of the biggest shifts have come since I joined the company almost eight years ago. Since 2008 we've seen a dramatic shift in the way SaaS tools and services are sold, and how growing SaaS companies are positioning themselves in the market. Like many SaaS companies, Dyn started as a small niche player in an important corner of the Internet -- Managed DNS -- and slowly carved out a space honing our product and beating competitors on service, pricing, relationships, and added-value until we grew to be the market leader. Along the way we selectively added complementary products -- traffic management, Internet intelligence and email delivery -- and continued to grow, ensuring our products worked so well in tandem and delivered such value that the only clear path forward was to deliver a platform sale to our customers.

Related: 11 Ways to Make Money While You Sleep

We're in the midst of a go-to-market and product transformation to reflect this evolution of our business and this move upstream we're making with the platform is the natural one for businesses that want to drive growth and continue innovating as an independent entity. For Dyn, it's no longer about selling feeds and speeds, but all about selling business value to enterprises.

We're certainly not alone in our platform-first approach. A recent Accenture Trend Report noted that 81 percent of executives say platform-based business models will be core to their growth strategy within three years. Creating integrated approaches to solving business challenges is not only good for customers, it's a differentiator for your business that can position you far ahead of the competition. Here are some keys to enabling -- and nailing -- the move to the platform.

Enable a Vision and the Rest will Follow

Shifting your business to a platform approach requires patience and isn't for everyone. But if your company has several complementary products that combine to create huge value for your customers and prospects, integrating the products and developing additional tools that continue to differentiate your business could propel your growth story. In 2015 we started a cross-company pivot away from product selling and towards a platform sell - delivering the value of all of our core DNS, data, analytics and traffic steering products into addressing the Internet Performance Management space, where we see huge potential for the company through the next 5 years and beyond. But before we saw a platform approach, we had to see the vision for how our existing products could deliver on a larger promise for our customers.

Related: 5 Habits of the Wealthy That Helped Them Get Rich

Having the vision for a platform sale is also necessary for any business to continue to be an independent player, especially in an ecosystem where companies with unique tools or services are targets for companies that already have a platform play. Building out a platform and successfully rolling it out to customers -- and ensuring they embrace it -- is a big challenge, but with big challenges come big opportunities.

Build What Customers Want - and Validate

It may seem obvious to build products well-tailored to customers' wants and needs but too many SaaS product development teams fall into the trap of iterating based on their own visions for the product rather that keeping to the goal of solving very specific customer problems and solving them well. At Dyn, we've kept our focus on this and it has helped us grow over the long-run, with 29 consecutive quarters of growth and counting.

Keeping a keen eye on the customer has meant each of our products and each of our acquisitions has been based on fulfilling a need. As customer needs have been filled we've constantly challenged ourselves and this has led to a natural progression in thinking from feature to product to suite to platform. The platform has always been the goal, but it has become the emphasis based on clear customer need. This "market-in" rather than "product out" mindset is imperative to understanding what customers truly want and enabling your business to deliver through the out years. It was critical for us to match our own maturation with the macro trends happening across the Internet infrastructure landscape and affecting CIO and CTOs of companies big and small. Timing is everything.

Empower Leadership for a Full Throttle Change

Building the vision and strategy and green-lighting the move to a platform approach was one of the most significant decisions our leadership has made over the history of the business. Not only did it signal a serious shift in our marketing and sales approach, it required a mammoth undertaking by our product and engineering teams to build the software that would enable our massive business shift. Many times products are utilized by customers with siloed interaction points. This user experience needs to be elegant with clean workflows and interfaces or via robust APIs.

Related: Habits of the World's Wealthiest People (Infographic)

While it was a true team effort to develop the strategy and action plan for the platform play, it was crucial for the plan to be communicated to leaders across our near 500-person business, to our regional offices in the UK, Australia and Singapore, and understood and internalized by all of our staff. Enabling this change was a huge decision and we've had to turn the company and ensure the message is resonating and being communicated across all departments and through all disciplines. We also based one of our biggest hires to date, our global head of sales, on his ability to grow our sales apparatus to meet this platform approach. If you want to have a big vision for your company's future, you truly have to go all in.

Reorg and Resize

You can't make a platform play without shaking up your organization significantly. We have shifted focus in many areas of our business and have had to reorganize teams and assets to meet the challenges we've placed on ourselves. This is never an easy proposition for a business, but if leadership articulates the vision, charts the course and firmly plants the flag, showing how your business can meet the opportunity before it, your business will be set to optimize for the exciting opportunities ahead.

At Dyn, our platform play has meant that we're now prepared to hunt down opportunities in business categories that are emerging as the big prospects of the future: automation, predictive analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), full cloud adoption, mobile and ever more globalization and global growth. Our internal reorganization has meant shifting focus for many of our best thinkers and the creation of new strategic groups that are helping the whole organization to shift to meet opportunity. We've developed a specific research group, integration group, partnerships and alliances group and a solution architecture team to set us on a footing for success.

Change is never easy, especially in already successful organizations, but if you want to be sustainable and impactful you need to see the future and set a foundation to get you there. Employees, long-time customers and other stakeholders might question a shift in focus after so many successful years of business. But moving to a platform play requires opportunism, guts, and vision with a commitment to taking on the challenges of tomorrow.

Related:

How to Position Your SaaS Business For a Platform Sell

Why Being Clueless Can Be a Great Thing

2008 Financial Crisis Did Not Stop These Indian Entrepreneurs From Taking Up The Challenge



Copyright 2017 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Anne Noble, who was president of the Connecticut Lottery Corp. during the wildly successful period well call the pre-scandal, sat in a generally empty second-floor meeting room of the Capitol complex on Friday, wiping away a tear. It was a moment of vindication for the former lottery chief, as lawmakers took hard shots at her successor.

The General Assemblys Public Safety Committee was aggressively hammering Frank Farricker, the acting Lottery president, on things like why he decided to accept a half million dollars from Scientific Games, the international lottery vendor, after Noble calculated that the flawed 5 Card Cash game should have resulted in a $4.2-million payment for failure to meet security terms.

They wanted to know why Farricker hired a $20,000 consultant whose son works for Scientific Games. They wanted to know at what point between last September and January, Farricker, the former Greenwich Democratic Town Committee chairman appointed to the lottery board by Gov. Dan Malloy, decided he wanted to apply for the presidents job.

Rep. Joe Verrengia, D-West Hartford, a former cop who is co-chairman of the committee, which has no control over the quasi-public lottery, wasnt happy that Farricker was giving him pushback and smirking at the desk on the far side of the circular committee table.

I think the question is fair, Verrengia said. I am trying to determine to what extent, if any, did that relationship have, with the Connecticut Lottery hiring a family member whos one of the biggest vendors for the state Connecticut? I dont know why youre laughing because, to be quite honest with you, this raises concern.

Farricker said the consultant is highly respected in the business. He said it was a command decision he made not to pursue Nobles recommended multi-millions, and instead accept $300,000 in credits and $200,000 in future staff training from Scientific Games.

The reality is the state of Connecticut and the lottery does not need vicious litigation, of which there is no clear and determined outcome for the purpose of what could ultimately result in the loss of tens of millions of dollars, Farrick said. It was strictly a business decision. Its not like we had a check sitting on the table for $4.5 million.

Farricker said that if Scientific Games were offended by a lawsuit, they might never settle, or abandon the state entirely. He said the lotterys deal to pay the vendor eight-tenths of a cent per transaction is about one-third of the going rate elsewhere in the country.

If Scientific Games left as the vendor, the lottery would have to replace 3,000 terminals, and infrastructure worth $15 million. There was very little good faith between lottery and Scientific Games at that point, Farricker said.

It was made clear to me by counsel that Scientific Games was not in any way interested in settling, Farricker said. There was not a good relationship between Scientific Games and Anne Noble. In fact, I would even make the claim that the relationship was somewhat toxic. We moved forward and now we have a very strong relationship with Scientific Games.

Cheating lottery agents figured out that the instant 5 Card Cash could be gamed at their terminals. The contest ran from May of 2014 until September of 2015, a year before Noble made a deal to leave the presidency and stay on as a consultant. Ten lottery agents were arrested last year for fraud and the state Department of Consumer Protection, which oversees the lottery, is involved in what seems to be a never-ending investigation.

Members of the committee went around in a semi-circle asking tough questions of Farricker, who sat for 31/2 hours taking it and dishing it back, knowing that as a quasi-public (The lottery was cut away from the state during the John Rowland years to make the agency more nimble and entrepreneur-like) theres not much the General Assembly can do.

What we looked forward to with this agreement was nothing but in the best interests of the lottery and the state of Connecticut, Farricker said. There was a strong desire on the board to keep a relationship with Anne. The skill set of the president of the lottery is, I can tell you, certainly not easy to find. This is a circumstance thats never occurred before in the state of Connecticut. It goes without saying that this is certainly brand-new territory.

A week ago, state auditors blasted the lotterys questionable retirement deal with Noble that will cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement benefits because the added months on the payroll in some permutation called severance employment totaling about $73,000 between September and January, resulted in her becoming fully vested. This prompted the leading legislative critic of the agency, Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, to say the lottery is out of control.

Fasano and now, the Public Safety Committee, have asked the lottery board to waive their attorney-client privilege and to cough up the records of the lotterys legal analysis for not going after the $4-million-plus. I find this to be a gross abdication of your duty to be transparent and accountable to the public, Fasano wrote Friday in a letter to Farricker, after the smoke cleared in Room 2-D.

Ken Dixon can be reached in the Capitol at 860-549-4670 or at kdixon@ctpost.com. See twitter.com/KenDixonCT. His Facebook address is kendixonct.hearst. Dixons Connecticut Blog-o-rama is at blog.ctnews.com/dixon/
Chinese specialists work in the installation of the equipment and start-up of an industry of fibers and organic substrate of coconut in the Cuban city of Baracoa, Guantanamo.

According to Granma newspaper, the plant is part of the coconut producing chain, a program devoted to the comprehensive development of the exploitation of this fruit, which maintains all its vitality despite the severe damage caused to the plantations by Hurricane Matthew.

Jorge Luis Ballester, acting director of the Baracoa business unit, told ACN that the plant should start producing soon, for which it has an initial batch of raw material (coconut carapace). In a second moment, he said, they will make use of carpentry to process coconut wood and will also produce ceiling tiles through plaster and fibers of the demanded fruit.

Ballester added that the production of the factory will be partly devoted to export. In many countries both lines have wide use.

In China, coconut fiber is used in the manufacture of mattresses and as thermal insulation panels in buildings; while the organic substrate is used to promote the development of agricultural crops.

According to Chinese specialists participating in the set-up of the machines, that industry can process between 150 and 250 kilograms of raw material per hour.
PAUL SCHNEIDEREIT: Treatment centre for PTSD in first responders, military opens in Nova Scotia

Imagine its your job, every day, to be ready to rush to scenes where men, women or even children had been killed or badly injured, often in horrific circumstances. Really, consider what that might be like. If youre like most of us, the thought ...
Opening dates, hours and new policies set for 2022 ski season

A price increase on all day and season passes at Seven Springs, Hidden Valley and Laurel Mountain ski areas goes into effect on Nov. 20.
Nothing like selective memory and hypocrisy when it comes to Labour and money

Stoking up the class war, Labours deputy leader Tom Watson condemned the fact so many millionaires on the latest Sunday Times Rich List are Tory donors.

Watson says at least 28 of the top 100 individuals or families had given money.

The fact that nearly a third of the UKs 100 richest people have given money to the Tories tells you all you need to know about where Theresa Mays priorities lie, says Watson. She claims to speak for working people, but shes beholden to the billionaires that bankroll her party.

What Watson failed to mention, however, is that Harry Potter author JK Rowling is also in the top 100 of the Rich List  she has given 1 million to Labour and donated 4,000 to Watsons deputy leadership campaign.

Nor did he tell of property developer Sir David Garrard  who is close to Watson, lending Labour 2.3 million. He also omitted to mention motor-racing tycoon Max Mosley, son of the Fascist Thirties blackshirt leader Sir Oswald, who in the past year has given a mere 500,000 to support Watson in his work.

Nothing like selective memory and hypocrisy when it comes to Labour and money.

What Watson, pictured, failed to mention is that Harry Potter author JK Rowling is also in the top 100 of the Rich List. She has given 1million to Labour and donated 4,000 to Watsons deputy leadership campaign

......................................................................................................................................

Oh Lords, it's a Lib Dem mess

Since they have just nine MPs, the list of approved Lib Dem spokesmen and women during the election includes no fewer than 15 peers.

Its not just that the party which championed Lords reform has 108 unaccountable and unelected members in the bloated Upper House.

Its also that  like all peers  none has a vote in the General Election. Has any party ever been so out of touch?

......................................................................................................................................

Ukip leader Paul Nuttall got a call on a radio phone-in from Tony Madge, leader of the Ukip group on Tamworth Council, resigning as a parliamentary candidate, saying: We have had infighting, two leadership elections and the farcical by-election in Stoke.

The loser at Stoke? Paul Nuttall.

Ukip Leader Paul Nuttall speaks with supporters at a pub in Boston, Lincolnshire, this week

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When Labour launched its election campaign, Comrade Corbyn was introduced by Broadchurch star Julie Hesmondhalgh, whod said in 2015 after he was elected: We are not going to win the Tory vote nor should we try to.

Labour candidates in marginal seats will thank her for that.

......................................................................................................................................

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry insisted on the Andrew Marr show yesterday that Labour can be trusted on defence.

But last year, when she was shadow defence secretary, she reportedly admitted at a review of Trident that she didnt know the meaning of Defcon One  Defence readiness condition one, the U.S. term for imminent nuclear war.

Can someone explain Defcon One and Two to me? Ive only ever seen it in films, she asked. A source close to her later denied she hadnt understood the term.

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry insisted on the Andrew Marr show yesterday that Labour can be trusted on defence, despite last year's suggestion that she did not know that Defcon One, or Defence readiness condition one, is the US term for imminent nuclear war

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MR MAY'S REAL COMEDY DOUBLE

After the Mays first joint TV interview on The One Show, Philip's fan mail has increased.

I wonder how many letters noted the likeness between the successful City fund manager and the delightful comedy actor Richard Wattis, who starred in the St Trinians films.

He often played the man from the ministry in his trademark thick-rimmed spectacles, and died in 1975, age 62.

Many have said Philip May resembles the late comedian Arthur Askey. But Wattis is not only a better lookalike, hes more appropriate  his uncle was a Tory MP in the Twenties.
The man who would be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland  Jeremy Corbyn  has found it necessary to insist that he is not a pacifist.

This declaration is designed to counter the charge that if he became PM, he would never order our armed forces to defend British territory against military aggression by others.

That charge is understandable. Not only is the Labour Leader a dedicated opponent of the British nuclear deterrent, but he was (and remains) against the sending of a naval task force to liberate the Falkland Islanders from an invading Argentine junta.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks about national security and foreign policy at Chatham House in London last Friday

But I for one believe Corbyn when he says he is no pacifist. Because he was fully behind the IRAs campaign of bombing to drive British troops  and indeed Britain as a state  out of Northern Ireland.

We were usefully reminded of the extent of that support by a report in yesterdays Sunday Times. It revealed that in 1986, Corbyn (already a Labour MP) had joined a picket outside the Old Bailey to oppose what they denounced as a show trial of a group that included Patrick Magee  the man subsequently convicted of murdering five people in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Conservative Party conference.

Corbyn was arrested for his part in this picket of the law courts, which had been to show solidarity with the Irish Republican prisoners put on trial by the British state.

As I say, this is merely a reminder of the truth about Corbyns role in a conflict which cost thousands of lives. Today, he insists his close connections with the Irish Republican movement were simply part of an attempt to bring about peace  and that later official talks by the British Government with the likes of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were merely a continuation of his efforts.

Bloodbath

This, however, is a contemptible distortion of the facts. Whereas the British Government sought to gain agreement between the two warring communities (Protestant and Catholic) on a peace deal, Corbyns aim was to enable Sinn Fein/IRA to win that dirty war.

This, for example, is why in 1993 Corbyn stood for a minutes silence at a Republican meeting in London to honour eight IRA gunmen who had been shot dead in an attack on Loughgall Police Station in County Armagh.

Mr Corbyn 'insists his close connections with the Irish Republican movement were simply part of an attempt to "bring about peace"  and that later official talks by the British Government with the likes of Gerry Adams (right, pictured together in 1995) and Martin McGuinness were merely a continuation of his efforts'

He declared then: Im happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland.

It needs pointing out that the British Government was far from wanting to remain in Northern Ireland against the wishes of the majority there. In 1990, the then Conservative Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, stated: It is not the aspiration to a sovereign, united Ireland against which we set our face, but its violent expression.

It was this violent expression  involving not just bombings but extortion and torture  with which Corbyn associated. He did not believe the people of Northern Ireland should have control over their own destiny, but that they should be compelled by force to switch their nationality.

In fact, if he had got his way and the British Army had been forced out by the IRAs campaign of terrorism, there would have been some sort of bloodbath in Northern Ireland, with countless more murdered on both sides of the sectarian divide. It was that which British governments down the years had been trying to prevent.

Gloated

There is nothing remotely wrong in wanting to see a united Ireland. It would be fine by me  if it could be achieved by consent in a referendum. But the Irish Government rightly loathed and pursued the IRA because Dublin knew carnage would result from incorporating the North against the will of its inhabitants, most of whom were and are against unification.

It is, in this context, significant that Corbyn voted in Parliament against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement  the first step in what became known as the peace process.

He preferred Sinn Fein/IRAs adamantine refusal to settle for anything less than complete victory for their campaign.

In fact, it was the IRA which eventually surrendered arms (along with the Protestant paramilitary gangs), having been thoroughly demoralised by the success of British military intelligence in penetrating its ranks. Thus it was the British Army  the very organisation that Corbyn regarded as illegitimate there  which was primarily responsible for bringing about the conditions for peace.

By the way, the British Prime Minister who signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement was Margaret Thatcher  whose murder was the prime objective of the Brighton bomber supported by Corbyn in his picket of the Old Bailey in 1986.

For many, this will all seem a long time ago. Cant bygones be bygones? But if a man is asking to be taken seriously as a possible Prime Minister, it is entirely legitimate to look at his political career as a whole and not just what he says during a general election campaign.

So its worth going back to 1984, in the wake of that attempt to slaughter the entire British Cabinet as they slept in their beds. There you will find Jeremy Corbyn  then, as now, the MP for Islington North  presiding as general secretary of the editorial board of the hard-Left political magazine London Labour Briefing. And you will discover that under comrade Corbyns general secretaryship, this publication gloated that the Brighton bombing demonstrated the British only sit up and take notice of Ireland when they are bombed into it.

'The truth is that while Jeremy Corbyn has never supported the use of military force by this country, he is much less censorious  indeed, not censorious at all  when radical paramilitary groups threaten the West'

And the same edition of London Labour Briefing  for which Corbyn had written the front-page story  contained a readers letter which hailed the audacity of the IRAs Brighton bombing and said: What do you call four dead Tories? A start.

So far as I know, Corbyn has never distanced himself from what was published under his aegis in that newsletter. Now it is far too late. Just as it is too late to pretend that he didnt call emissaries of the Middle Eastern terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah our friends.

The truth is that while Jeremy Corbyn has never supported the use of military force by this country, he is much less censorious  indeed, not censorious at all  when radical paramilitary groups threaten the West. He knows which side hes on. And its not ours.

This doesnt mean he may not have been right on occasion, like the proverbial stopped clock.

'President Putin, a man whose nostalgia for the days of the Soviet Empire has sent Russian troops annexing chunks of neighbouring Ukraine, must regard Jeremy Corbyn as a useful idiot'

Many, for example, may have agreed with his opposition to last years parliamentary backing for the use of RAF jets in the bombing of Islamic State in its Syrian redoubt. Corbyn, as leader of the Labour Party, told the BBCs Andrew Marr why he opposed it: You dont bring about peace by bombing.

Yet the same Jeremy Corbyn had been proud to speak at a commemoration for dead IRA terrorists, at which the events official programme had pronounced: Force of arms is the only method capable of bringing about a free and united Socialist Ireland.

Pathetic

That last phrase is telling. It was the fact that the IRA saw itself as aligned with sundry Marxist freedom fighters across the globe which will have attracted Jeremy Corbyn. It is not exactly violence that Corbyn detests, but arms in the wrong hands. As long as its radical Left groups, he has no problem with it.

Nato, however  now thats different. It was almost pathetic to see Labours would-be foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, forced by Andrew Marr on his show yesterday to watch five-year-old footage of Corbyn declaring, of the Western alliance which kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War: We on the radical Left see Nato as a major problem and we must campaign against it.

President Putin, a man whose nostalgia for the days of the Soviet Empire has sent Russian troops annexing chunks of neighbouring Ukraine, must regard Jeremy Corbyn as a useful idiot.

Alas for Putin, Corbyn will not become PM. But it remains remarkable that a man with such a long history of support for anti-British terrorism should even be considered for the job.
Remoaners like to complain that without EU protection for workers, Brexit will be a charter for ruthless employers to turn factories and offices into sweatshops.

Today, Theresa May will make clear that nothing could be further from her mind.

Pledging the greatest expansion in workers rights by any Conservative government, she will promise not only to retain all rights guaranteed by EU law, but to build on them.

Mrs May will pledge the greatest expansion in workers rights by any Conservative government

Under her, the living wage will increase in line with median earnings, workers will be represented in boardrooms and pensions will be safeguarded from greedy employers to prevent a repeat of the BHS affair.

There will also be new statutory rights to take leave after the death of a child or look after a sick family member, protection for those suffering mental health problems and more time off for training or retraining.

Along with her commitment to build more council houses, this workers revolution amounts to an audacious foray into traditional Labour territory.

Indeed, though many of these rights are already granted by the best employers, some will raise eyebrows among Tories wary of state intervention in private firms.

True, the Prime Ministers plans should make the Tories more attractive to voters in the Labour heartlands who have hitherto dismissed them as the bosses party.

But her challenge now is to match these rights with authentic Conservative policies to stimulate the growth that alone can pay for better working conditions.

This means keeping up relentless downward pressure on taxes, while investing in essential infrastructure and slashing red tape wherever possible.

If she can pull off the double act of extending workers rights while helping firms grow, she will truly prove her claim to govern for everyone.

Soft on terrorism

There can be no comparison between the actions of the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday and the ruthless IRA murder of Captain Robert Nairac.

In Londonderry in 1972, soldiers opened fire in panic and confusion, believing they were under attack. Five years later, in one of the vilest crimes of the Troubles, terrorists tortured and killed Captain Nairac in cold blood. They are believed to have fed his body into a meat grinder.

It has emerged that Jeremy Corbyn was arrested in 1986 for joining a picket outside the Old Bailey to show solidarity with IRA terrorists, including the Brighton bomber

Yet in an affront to justice, it was revealed on Friday that 18 soldiers may face charges over Bloody Sunday  while now it emerges that two IRA fugitives suspected of Nairacs murder were given immunity from prosecution by Tony Blair.

What sort of country persecutes those who risk their lives to defend it, while letting its vicious enemies escape justice?

In a sickening twist, it has emerged that Jeremy Corbyn was arrested in 1986 for joining a picket outside the Old Bailey to show solidarity with IRA terrorists, including the Brighton bomber.

Could there be any clearer proof that hes utterly unfit to be prime minister?

Hardly a month passes without new evidence that modern strains of cannabis cause serious mental illness, including psychosis linked to violent crime.

Yet driven by woolly-minded ideology  and a cynical bid for student votes  the Lib Dems will pledge in their manifesto to legalise this drug that has brought misery to countless families.

If these ageing hippies were truly committed to the welfare of the young, wouldnt they be urging police to enforce the ban they routinely ignore?

'Hardly a month passes without new evidence that modern strains of cannabis cause serious mental illness, including psychosis linked to violent crime'

Neither he nor his bride is thought to have attended their proxy wedding in Ghana, where both were born. Yet Albert Awuku is set to win the right to live in Britain, since his wife is a German national. Welcome to border controls, EU-style. Is it any wonder most voted Brexit?
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem pulled no punches when she was asked about Ivanka Trump in a recent interview, disputing Ivanka's claim that she is herself a feminist and comparing the First Daughter's opinions about maternity care to Nazi policy.

Refinery29 asked the 83-year-old what she thought about criticism that Ivanka was trying to 'co-opt feminism', but Ms. Steinem flatly disagreed with that assessment  and Ivanka's insistence that she is a feminist, period.

'She hasn't co-opted feminism. Nobody on earth thinks she's a feminist, are you kidding me?' said the activist, who was speaking as part of conference for Create & Cultivate NYC.

Scroll down for video

Gloria Steinem, 83, spoke out against Ivanka Trump, 35, in a new interview

The feminist icon said that despite Ivanka's claims, she is definitely not a feminist

Ivanka, 35, has stated several times that she considers herself to be a feminist, telling Harper's Bazaar in August: 'I am. Absolutely.'

However, Ms. Steinem  one of the most iconic voices of modern feminism  thinks Ivanka may talk the talk, but she doesn't walk the walk.

A feminist, she told Refinery29, is someone 'who believes in the full equality of the sexes'.

She explained that despite Ivanka's claim that she is feminist, her actions and public statements don't actually line up with feminist dogma.

'I have not seen her standing up and saying women should have a right to control their own bodies and decide when and whether to have children,' she said.

Specifically, she added, 'I saw her being interviewed by Cosmopolitan, and she was asked about her maternity leave policy, but it's only if you physically give birth. It's not for adoptive parents, not for fathers.'

Gloria, speaking at a Create & Cultivate event, said she doesn't see Ivanka actually standing up for women and women's rights

'It's perfectly natural for the [Cosmopolitan interviewer] to say "What about fathers, what about adoptive parents?" said Steinem. 'And when she asked that question, Ivanka stopped the interview.'

The interview, which took place in September of 2016, was cut short by Ivanka when journalist Prachi Gupta pushed her to clarify whether same-sex couples who adopt should be entitled to parental leave, after Ivanka herself brought up same-sex couples.

At the time, Ivanka was promoting her dad Donald Trump's newly-released plan for childcare and maternity leave. Gupta pointed out that Trump had previously said that pregnancy was inconvenient for business  stating a fact to which Ivanka took offense.

The interviewer continued to ask Ivanka to clarify points, which Ivanka found 'negative'  leading to her hanging up.

Steinem was a vocal Hillary Clinton supporter (pictured with her and Former US Secretary of State Teresa C. Younger on May 3)

Steinem also mentioned an interview Ivanka did in which she took offense to standard questions

Speaking of the policy that Ivanka was promoting, Steinem went so far as to compare it to a policy of Nazi Germany.

'That happens to be the same policy as every authoritarian regime on Earth that I know of, including Hitler's Germany. I'm not saying that she knows this, but [the Nazis] were paying women to have children. By accident, perhaps, that's her policy.'

Steinem was likely referring to the Nazi association called Lebensborn, which encouraged 'pure blood' women to reproduce. The program provided care for these children, essentially offering monetary help to women who birthed blonde-haired, blue-eyed offspring.

Steinem is not the first feminist voice this month to speak out against Ivanka, particularly in light of the First Daughter's new book.

She even compared the Trump administration's policy on maternity care and childcare to that of the Nazis

In Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, Ivanka highlights Reshma Saujani's non-profit Girls Who Code, lauding the founder for closing the tech industry's gender gap.

But Saujani was not flattered to be included  in fact, she seemed quite angry at the mention, twetting: '@ivankatrump Don't use my story in #WomenWhoWork unless you are going to stop being #complicit.'

Saujani, who criticized the president for ending Michelle Obama's education initiative for girls in developing countries on Monday tweeted a sharp rebuke the following day when Ivanka's book was released.

She accused Ivanka of 'using' her story and branded her 'complicit'  a common critique that was solidified in pop culture after Saturday Night Live ran a fake perfume ad mocking the first daughter for helping soften Donald Trump's message.

Ivanka highlighted Reshma Saujani's non-profit Girls Who Code in the new book Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success

But Saujani accused Ivanka of 'using' her story and branded her 'complicit'

Ivanka's book also includes the famous words of Jane Goodall, Mindy Kaling, Warren Buffett, and Sheryl Sandberg  all of whom have criticized her father or spoken in favor of his election rival Hillary Clinton.

Conservationist Goodall, famous for her work studying chimpanzees, was quoted: 'What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.'

Many of the quotes are from people who have expressed their support of Hillary Clinton or slammed President Donald Trump

Goodall told the Washington Post: 'I understand that Ms. Trump has used one of my quotes in her forthcoming book.

'I was not aware of this, and have not spoken with her, but I sincerely hope she will take the full import of my words to heart.

'She is in a position to do much good or terrible harm. I hope that Ms. Trump will stand with us to value and cherish our natural world and protect this planet for future generations,' Goodall added.

Ivanka's spokesperson issued a statement saying the book's manuscript was submitted before the election.

'Ivanka has always believed that no one person or party has a monopoly on good ideas,' according to a statement to CNN.

'When she was writing this book, she included quotes from many different thought leaders who've inspired Ivanka and helped inform her viewpoints over the years.'

Gooddall has previously likened Donald Trump's performance to 'male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals' and criticized his environmental policies.

Ivanka's book, a guide for women on succeeding in the workplace, is peppered with quotes from everyone ranging from Colin Powell to Jane Goodall (pictured)

Many celebrities, including Mindy Kaling (left) and Richard Branson (right) were quoted even though they have expressed support for Hillary Clinton or slammed Ivanka's father

Cynthia Nixon, Lauren Bush Laren, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, and Deepak Chopra were all quoted in the book as well, even though they have expressed their support of Clinton or slammed Ivanka's father.

Most disturbing to many Trump critics, however, is Ivanka's use of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou's work, which prompted Twitter users to call the First Daughter a 'travesty'.

Ivanka included a line from Morrison's Pulitzer-winning Beloved that reads: 'Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another'.

The quote, used to illustrate the horrors of slavery, was included in Ivanka's book before a chapter called 'working smarter'.

Ivanka then asks: 'Are you a slave to your time or the master of it? Despite your best intentions, it's easy to be reactive and get caught up in returning calls, attending meetings, answering e-mails...'

She also goes on to attribute Maya Angelou for writing: 'Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.'

Most disturbing, however, is Ivanka's misappropriation of the work of Toni Morrison (left) and Maya Angelou (right), which prompted Twitter users to call the first daughter a 'travesty'

Ivanka's former stepmother Marla Maples took to Instagram on Wednesday night to share a photo of herself posed with the memoir

But the line included in Angelou's memoir  which was a piece of advice the writer's mother gave her about living with the realities of racism  actually reads: 'Ask for what you want and be prepared to pay for what you get.'

Ivanka has insisted that, for ethical reasons, she will not be formally promoting her newest book with a tour and media appearances, but that isn't stopping her  or her family  from plugging her new memoir on social media.

The 35-year-old mother-of-three took to Instagram earlier this month to share a heartwarming video of herself having an after-work dance party with her sons Joseph, three, and Theodore, one.

When posting the 'Throwback Thursday' clip, Ivanka couldn't resist urging her 3.5 million Instagram followers to check out a new article outlining the things she says about motherhood in her book.

The slogan 'women who work' was the result of a brainstorming session in 2013 to help Ivanka break into the mass market and appeal to women who shopped at retailers like Macy's, according to a New York Times profile.




Netflix's latest hit show about the suicide of a 17-year-old girl is the most tweeted about series of the year, but critics of the show have raised concerns that it romanticises suicide.

Now British schools have waded into the debate, issuing warnings to parents over the drama about a high school student who kills herself and leaves behind 13 audiotapes detailing the events that led to her death, including sexual assault, substance abuse and bullying.

The American School in London is the latest to send a letter to parents expressing concerns it could 'appeal' to struggling students - and urging them to prevent teens watching alone.

St Olave's Grammar School in Kent sent a similar missive, alerting parents that children as young as 11 are discussing the 18-rated show, according to The Sunday Times.

A letter seen by the paper sent to parents at The American School in London, based in Finchley, warned parents: 'the creation of an elaborate suicide note that has a revenge-like quality to it may be appealing to students who are already looking for a "way out".'

WARNING: Schools are the latest to slam hit Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, sending letters to parents expressing concerns the show is 'romanticising teenage suicide'

While the Kent-based grammar school warned parents that children as young as 11 had been overheard discussing the show.

The school said: 'We are concerned that all ages may be watching it as Netflix can be accessed without parental control.'

The series, which was released March 31, is based on Jay Asher's young-adult 2007 bestseller.

It has proved hugely popular among teenagers, despite its 18 rating on the streaming site.

Concerned: A letter seen by the paper sent to parents at The American School in London, based in Finchley, warned parents the suicide note 'has a revenge-like quality that may be appealing to students who are already looking for a way out'

In the graphic final scene of the show, the protagonist Hannah is shown killing herself.

The show has clearly struck a nerve: it has 436,000 Twitter followers and nearly 3.1 million likes on Facebook, and its creators have defended it as honest and well researched.

Netflix and the show creators point out that several mental health professionals were consulted and they offer a 30-minute spin off called 'Beyond the Reasons' that delves deeper into the tougher topics portrayed, as well as links to a site with resources.

Selena Gomez, who is the show's executive producer, and has talked openly about her own mental-health struggles, previously said she was braced for a backlash.

'It's going to come no matter what. It's not an easy subject to talk about. But I'm very fortunate with how it's doing,' she said.

British schools are the latest in a long line of concerned and vocal critics of the hit show.

Last month Michael Jackson's daughter Paris, who tried to take her own life in 2013, called it 'extremely triggering' for young people 'in a dark place'.

Concerned: Last month Michael Jackson's daughter Paris, who tried to take her own life in 2013, called it 'extremely triggering' for young people 'in a dark place'

In an Instagram post , 19-year-old Jackson said that, as someone who has contemplated suicide, the show is an 'extremely triggering thing to watch.

She added: 'Please only watch this show with caution and keep in mind that it may put you in a dark place.

'If you are struggling please don't watch it. If you think you can handle it, please by all means check it out.'
With Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week just beginning in Sydney this week our home grown Aussies are doing their best to doll up for the occasion.

On Sunday the fabulous Dion Lee kicked off proceedings by sporting their Resort 2018 collection at Sydney's iconic Opera House.

Models and bloggers alike descended on the harbour steps including fashionistas Lindy Klim and Brooke Testoni.

Oops! Lindy Klim (left) and Brooke Testoni (right) attended Dion Lee's Resort 2018 collection on Sunday wearing identical dresses

Poll Who wore it best? Lindy Klim Brooke Testoni Who wore it best? Lindy Klim 62 votes

Brooke Testoni 24 votes Now share your opinion





The only issue was that they were wearing identical Dion Lee thigh-grazing dresses.

Miss Testoni, who blogs on her own website, opted for a black version and accessorised with a studded Dior handbag, R. M. Williams ankle boots and Dinosaur Design jewels.

The dress consisted of a shallow v-neck with blazer-like trimming and a button to cinch the waist. Miss Testoni's blonde hair was a stark contrast against the all-black ensemble.

Miss Testoni, who blogs on her own website, (pictured) opted for a black version and accessorised with a studded Dior handbag, R. M. Williams ankle boots and Dinosaur Design jewels

Ms Klim (pictured) chose to accessorise with a rectangular Bally purse and Tony Bianco 'sock' boots, keeping things neutral toned and light

In comparison mother-of-three Lindy Klim rocked a cream-coloured version of the straight-off-the-rack little number.

A thick ivory belt swept along her middle to define her waist.

Ms Klim chose to accessorise with a rectangular Bally purse and Tony Bianco 'sock' boots, keeping things neutral toned and light.

The Dion Lee dress was a good choice by both parties as the city quite literally rained on their parade during the afternoon show (pictured Brooke Testoni on the left and Lindy Klim on the right)

The Dion Lee dress was a good choice by both parties as the city quite literally rained on their parade during the afternoon show.

But no amount of wet weather will halt the fashion proceedings with brands like Alice McCall, Bianca Spender, Steven Khalil and Sass and Bide due to grace our runways on Monday.

Australian Fashion Week will run from May 15 - 19 at Redfern's Carriageworks with some shows due to appear in surprise offsite venues.
Australian mother-of-three Taryn Brumfitt made headlines when she encouraged women to embrace a positive body image.

And now, she has opened up once more in an honest post about mastering work and life, revealing that perfection is impossible and we shouldn't be striving for it to the detriment of our health.

'One thing I know for certain is that striving for perfection will only leave you in a big pile of a sh**ty mess (you being the sh**ty mess),' the ex bodybuilder wrote on her blog.

Australian mother-of-three, Taryn Brumfitt (pictured), made headlines when she encouraged women to embrace positive body image

She shared a 'reverse' before-and-after picture of herself on the Internet (pictured) with the aim of showing that 'having the perfect body isn't all it's cracked up to be'

'So, these days Ive stopped striving and rather I'm practising being kinder to myself, I can't do it all and nor can you, and if you are trying to  please stop now, it's a road to misery!,' she continued.

Ms Brumfitt's candid post also spoke about the balancing act so many women struggle with on a daily basis with regards to their work and life.

'These balancing acts are what so many women feel guilty about  they can't be a great mum, friend, wife, leader, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister or neighbour all at the same time,' she wrote.

Now, Taryn has opened up once more in an honest post about mastering work and life, revealing that perfection is impossible and we shouldn't be striving for it

'One thing I know for certain is that striving for perfection will only leave you in a big pile of a sh**ty mess (you being the sh**ty mess),' the ex bodybuilder wrote (pictured)

While she admitted that the past few years have been 'a bit of a juggle for me' as she navigates long-distance travel with raising three children, Ms Brumfitt also said: 'Balancing acts belong in the circus, not in real life!'.

She added that she has been consciously trying to find 'harmony' between the two aspects of her life. This sometimes involves saying no to things and being flexible.

'What I do believe is fundamentally important to human growth and accessing a joyous life, is practicing kindness to yourself,' Ms Brumfitt concluded.

Ms Brumfitt also said she has been trying to create 'harmony' between the two aspects of her life - long-distance travel for work and being a mum; she said it's often difficult

Since that moment in 2014, the 39-year-old has continued to direct the Body Image Movement - she even released a documentary

Taryn Brumfitt made a name for herself when she shared a 'reverse' before-and-after picture on the Internet.

The image showed her 'before' and 'muscle-bound', posing in a bikini on stage, and the 'after' showed her embracing her natural curves.

The two images aimed to prove that 'having the perfect body isn't all it's cracked up to be'.

Since that moment in 2014, the 39-year-old has continued to direct the Body Image Movement online.

She also released a documentary called 'Embrace', which centred around body positivity.

To read more from Taryn Brumfitt, click here.
Lianna Perdis only touched down on Australian soil at 5am on Sunday but she's already being whisked away in fashion week meetings and fittings.

The daughter of renowned makeup artist Napoleon Perdis, who will be perfecting the looks this year at the annual fashion affair, flew from Greece to Sydney with her father.

'The jet lag is a bit of a b****. I tried to get at least ten hours of sleep on the flight over,' the 17-year-old model told Daily Mail Australia.

Lianna's father renowned makeup artist Napoleon Perdis, who will be perfecting the looks this year at the annual Fashion Show, flew from Greece to Sydney with his daughter (pictured)

Lianna (pictured) exclusively revealed that she will be the last model walking in the show which will be held away from the usual Carriageworks site

'But I'm really excited to walk for Christopher Esber on Tuesday. I can't wait.'

Lianna exclusively revealed that she will be the last model walking in the show which will be held away from the usual Carriageworks site.

To prepare the 17-year-old will be nourishing her body with plenty of sleep and water.

'I truly believe in beauty sleep,' the model represented by Chic Australia said.

'I was awake at 9am on the weekend and my mum was genuinely surprised. She normally doesn't see me until 1pm.

'I drink water 24/7 too. It truly clears up the complexion. People are always wondering why I need to rush to the bathroom so often - it's the water I tell them.'

'I drink water 24/7 too. It truly clears up the complexion. People are always wondering why I need to rush to the bathroom so often - it's the water I tell them,' she said

'See I would say 'fresh faced' makeup looks are definitely on trend at the moment but fashion week is about artistry. So the models are sporting looks that we wouldn't necessarily wear in real life,' she said

Backstage at fashion week Lianna suspects there will be a lot of 'arty' makeup looks.

'See I would say 'fresh faced' makeup looks are definitely on trend at the moment but fashion week is about artistry. So the models are sporting looks that we wouldn't necessarily wear in real life.

'Either way the makeup should enhance a model's natural features. It shouldn't change their face in any way,' she said.

Lianna would never leave the house without doing 'her brows and mascara' because her famous father taught her about framing the face.

Between shows you won't find the school girl dressed head to toe in designer garb - instead she prefers to mix up her look with some vintage staple pieces, many of which she finds in her mother's closet

'So i'll fortunately be able to mix high designer with some of her things. Christopher [Esber] also gave me a couple of outfits which I'm really humbled by. I'll be in those too,' she said

'That and a little bit of Auto Pilot PH lip shine, which transforms your lips into a perfect pink shade depending on its pH levels,' she said.

Between shows you won't find the school girl dressed head to toe in designer garb - instead she prefers to mix up her look with some vintage staple pieces, many of which she finds in her mother's closet.

'I steal things from my mum's wardrobe all the time. How many clothes can one person wear in a day anyway?' she said.

'So I'll fortunately be able to mix high designer with some of her things. Christopher [Esber] also gave me a couple of outfits which I'm really humbled by. I'll be in those too,' she said.

Lianna walked in Christopher Esber's show at New York Fashion Week and considers the designer a close friend. But she still gets nervous walking

Currently living in Greece the pint-sized fashionista's regular day is much different to her fashion week schedule

Lianna walked in Christopher Esber's show at New York Fashion Week and considers the designer a close friend. But she still gets nervous walking.

'I am really calm and then completely anxious a second before I go out. "Don't look awkward" I tell myself. I get a bit of a rush of adrenaline but it's a great feeling. Fingers crossed I don't fall,' she said.

'Dad's biggest piece of advice is less is more. In life and in makeup. I try to keep that in mind when I'm at fashion week. Just because it's a big event doesn't mean you have to change yourself - dress as you normally would.'

Currently living in Greece the pint-sized fashionista's regular day is much different to her fashion week schedule.

'Dad's biggest piece of advice is less is more. In life and in makeup. I try to keep that in mind when I'm at fashion week. Just because it's a big event doesn't mean you have to change yourself - dress as you normally would'

Ultimately the 17-year-old wants to attend University in Sydney or Melbourne and live in Australia full time once she graduates

'My day starts off at 6.30am. I catch the bus to school at 7am. I get home around 4.30pm,' she said.

'My family really enjoy having LD [Lunch-Dinner] at around five or 6pm. It's unusual in Greece to eat dinner anytime before about 9pm but we like to have it earlier so the food can digest.

'So I don't really eat at 12pm. I'll just snack at school.'

Ultimately the 17-year-old wants to attend University in Sydney or Melbourne and live in Australia full time once she graduates.

She will make her debut at Australian Fashion Week on Tuesday at 8pm.
Scrubbing the toilet could be a tedious household chore - and many of us want the quickest and easiest options to get the job done.

But a new study has found some of the popular bathroom products you're cleaning with are better off not using anything at all.

Australian consumer watchdog CHOICE has put the supermarket products to the test - and the results may surprise you.

Australian consumer watchdog CHOICE has put the toilet cleaning products to the test - and five of them are better off not using anything at all!

Coles' Toilet Gel What did testers think of the Coles' Toilet Gel? Price: $2.30 Score: 40 per cent Comment: Equal lowest performance on test - not as good as plain water Advertisement

Woolworths' Homebrand Toilet Cleaner What did testers think Woolworths' Homebrand Toilet Cleaner? Price: $1.50 Score: 40 per cent Comment: Equal lowest performance on test - not as good as plain water Advertisement

'We test manual liquid toilet cleaners by using scrub tester against synthetic faeces,' the group said.

'We test three times and measure the soil removal by scanning the tile on a picture scanner, and then using colour assessment software to measure the area tile cleaned.

'Results scaled using a benchmark of 45% performance for tap water, and are rounded to the nearest 5% to account for variability in samples.'

Of the 21 toilet cleaning products tested on the market, five of them performed no better than water.

Scrubbing the toilet could be a tedious household chore - and many of us want the quickest and easiest options to get the job done (stock image)

Duck 5 in 1 Toilet Cleaner What did testers think of the Woolworths' Duck 5 in 1 Toilet Cleaner? Price: $3.60 Score: 45 per cent Comment: As good as plain water Advertisement

Oomph Toilet Gel What did testers think of the Oomph Toilet Gel? Price: $4.80 Score: 45 per cent Comment: As good as plain water Advertisement

Coles' Toilet Gel, Coles' Toilet Cleaner and Woolworths' Homebrand Toilet Cleaner were worse than not using anything at all after scoring the lowest at 40 per cent.

Duck 5 in 1 Toilet Cleaner and Oomph Toilet Gel worked just as well as using water after scoring 45 per cent.

Meanwhile, Easy Off Bam Power Cleaner Toilet offered the best dirt removal performance and good value for money after scoring 75 per cent.

And two of Aldi's Power Force Bright & clean OXY Thick Toilet Gel and Power Force Bright & Clean Thick Bleach were also recommended after scoring 70 per cent.

Easy Off Bam Power Cleaner Toilet Bleach & Hygiene What did testers think of the Easy Off Bam Power Cleaner Toilet Bleach & Hygiene? Price: $5.98 Score: 75 per cent Comment: Best performer in our test: can also be used to unblock drains and suitable for cleaning sinks and showers, and removes mould and mildew Advertisement

Aldi's Power Force Bright & clean OXY Thick Toilet Gel What did testers think of the Power Force Bright & clean OXY Thick Toilet Gel? Price: $2.19 Score: 70 per cent Comment: Equal second best performance in our test: grey water safe, septic tank safe and biodegradable surfactants Advertisement

New study has found some of the popular bathroom products you're cleaning with are better off not using anything at all (stock image)

CHOICE content producer Ashley Iredale said the study found shocking results after the group tested what works and what doesn't.

'We were as surprised as you are. A few of the toilet cleaners we tested actually did a worse job than using nothing at all,' he said.

'Rather than help dislodge dirt from the bowl, these products actually seem to seal it in with a protective coating, so you have to scrub even harder.

'But price isn't necessarily a guide to good porcelain polishing performance  while these were at the cheaper end of the spectrum, some other low-cost cleaners are among the best performers.'
A jilted woman has revealed how she set herself a 'therapy' challenge to find love by going on 30 Tinder dates in 30 days.

Sarah Mulvin, who lives in Australia, decided to get back on the dating scene in an effort to get over her ex-boyfriend.

The 44-year-old even embarked on an overseas trip to get her mind off following the bitter breakup - but when that didn't work, she turned to the popular dating app.

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Sarah Mulvin (pictured) has revealed how she set herself a 'therapy' challenge to find love by going on 30 Tinder dates in 30 days

The 44-year-old woman returned to the dating scene in an effort to get over her ex-boyfriend

'I don't think a psychologist could fix me,' she told Today Tonight Adelaide.

And so she decided to give herself a 'Tinder therapy' by going on 30 dates in 30 days - and she set herself a list of rules, including 'no sleepovers'.

She gave herself 24 hours from 4.20pm each day to find a date and they have to be 'young, hot, sexy and good looking'.

Ms Mulvin headed to Byron Bay and Sydney's Bondi Beach to go on a date every day for 30 days in her social media experiment.

Ms Mulvin, who has penned her experiment in her book called '30 Days of Tinders', said one of her biggest challenges was trying to find the next date within 24 hours.

'I was on a schedule. And I wanted to do it, I wanted to meet lots of people and I didn't want to get back with my ex,' she said.

'It was really fun though and you'd have to have a fun attitude. You can't be stressed. I wasn't sad because I was excited. I wasn't thinking about my ex.'

She even embarked on an overseas trip to get her mind off following the bitter breakup - but when that didn't work, she turned to the popular dating app

Despite not finding her love, Ms Mulvin - who went on 52 dates in 30 days - said the experiment has made her happier than ever

Speaking from her experiences, she said any profiles that have photographs of 'landscape or cartoons' are the 'married ones'.

Despite not finding her love, Ms Mulvin - who went on 52 dates in 30 days - said the experiment has made her happier than ever.

'I feel stronger, I have a lot of control. You have a lot of control dealing with the Tinder app because I get to choose who I get to meet,' she said.

'I get to choose who I get to go on a date with. I felt like I have a lot more control over who I get to date and I had a lot of choice.

'I find many Mr Rights and any Mr Rights.'
He was once running away from witch doctors who wanted to drink his blood.

Now 19-year-old Albino model Weah Bangura - originally from Sierra Leone in West Africa but moved to Sydney - is strutting on the catwalk.

This is just the cusp of Weah's incredible life story, one that has come to light as designers snatch him up for their shows at Australian Fashion Week.

The teenage man was never allowed to go outside, but it wasn't only to protect his skin from the sun.

Model Weah Bangura, 19, has become one of the hottest new faces of Australia Fashion Week

The 19-year-old Albino model walked for Sydney designer Justin Cassin's show on Monday

The witch doctors in his community thought albinos held supernatural powers and that the only way to access them was by killing him.

'They'll use every part of the body, crush our bones and drink our blood,' Weah told the Daily Telegraph.

'They even think putting albino hair on fishing string can catch more fish.'

Meanwhile, an 11-year civil war was ravaging his native country. It would eventually leave 50,000 people dead.

But Weah's mother planned their escape when he was four years old, covering his head with a blanket so nobody would recognise his distinctive features as they fled.

Weah was born in Sierra Leone, where the witch doctors wanted to kill him so they could drink his blood and crush up his bones

The witch doctors in his community thought albinos held supernatural powers and that the only way to access them was by killing him

Weah escaped when he was four years old, fleeing to a Cameroon refugee camp with his mother. A year later, they landed in Sydney

They landed at a Cameroon refugee camp and a year later arrived in Sydney.

Weah fell in love with fashion, which he said gives him the chance to escape the painful memories of his childhood.

'Fashion gives me freedom and none of my past matters,' he told the site. 'Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream and I don't want to wake up.'

That dream is only just the beginning for Weah, who walked in Sydney designer Justin Cassin's show on Monday.

Weah signed with FiveTwenty Model Management last year and has modelled for the likes of Toni&Guy and P.E Nation, and been featured in the pages of 10 Men and Oyster.

His manager, Ryan Hall, said the company sees a future for Weah in the US and European markets as well.
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Fashion shows aren't solely about the clothes anymore; designers have to fill their front rows with the biggest names in showbiz and stage their catwalk in the most breathtaking locations.

And it seems that Louis Vuitton has trumped them all - by flying its VIP guests to the The Miho Museum in Koka, south-east of Kyoto, Japan, for its showstopping cruise show.

Despite the mountainous location being 9,628km from the fashion giant's Paris headquarters, famous faces and fashion fans were more than happy to make the 24-hour journey to the Shigaraki mountains for a breathtaking 20-minute show.

Louis Vuitton flew its VIP guests to the The Miho Museum in Koka, south-east of Kyoto, Japan for its showstopping cruise show this weekend

Stars including the brand's face, Michelle Williams, Sophie Turner and Jennifer Connelly, held up the front row at the cruise show, which is the most elite and lucrative collection the brand offers.

Designer Nicolas Ghesquiere staged his catwalk on a suspension bridge emerging from the striking mountain range.

Whilst no one has confirmed the exact price of the show, other designers are estimating that it set the brand back around 5m.

As for the clothes themselves, Ghesquiere took all of his inspiration from Japanese elements and culture.

Models wore jackets emblazoned with dragons, kimono-esque belts and anime-inspired handbags.

The brand teamed up with cult designer, Kansai Yamamoto, who designed David Bowies iconic Ziggy Stardust jumpsuits. The legendary designer's colorful, avant-garde designs are inspired by the Momoyama period of Japanese art, which he tapped into for this weekend's offering.

Nicolas Ghesquiere, the head designer, staged his jaw-dropping catwalk on a suspension bridge emerging from the striking mountain range

Ghesquiere took all of his inspiration from Japanese elements and culture, including jackets emblazoned with dragons, kimono-esque belts and anime-inspired handbags

As well as the clothes, the makeup was inspired by Japanese anime and was graphic, bold and colourful

Ghesquiere took inspiration from Japanese women's biker film - Stray Cat Rock - when it came to creating his garments

The collection was full of expert tailoring, graphic prints, and vertiginous hemlines, which have all made the brand popular among the IT crowd

Models stormed the runway in glittering mini dresses emblazoned with kabuki masks, whilst flowing trousers were designed with Japanese manga in mind.

Models' jackets had been crafted from the material of obi belts and some ladies donned hats seemingly inspired by samurai armour.

Ghesquiere took inspiration from Japanese women's biker film - Stray Cat Rock - when it came to designing his edgier leather offerings that have made his designs popular with trendy stars like Miranda Kerr and Selena Gomez.

The luxury French fashion house teamed up with cult designer, Kansai Yamamoto, who designed David Bowies iconic Ziggy Stardust jumpsuits

Models' jackets had been crafted from the material of obi belts and boots were chunky and made from black leather

As well as more classic and pared back suits and totes, left, Louis Vuitton served up edgy lace up boots, graphic printed outfits and even matching caps

Big name model Selena Forrest was one of Louis Vuitton's clothes horses at the Sunday showcase

The brand has become a hit with stars like Selena Gomez and Miranda Kerr thanks to its edgy leather-clad designs

Despite the mountainous location being 9,628km from the fashion giant's Paris headquarters, famous faces and fashion fans were more than happy to make the 24-hour journey

The show was set in the stunning Shigaraki mountains and guests were driven to their hotels by drivers donning monogrammed Louis Vuitton gloves

Louis Vuitton is most famous for its luxury accessories, which came in abundance. As well as its classic patent boxy totes, there were clutches inspired by anime

Models emerging from the metal tunnel was one of the most showstopping entrances fashion has seen

Models stormed the catwalk, which had been staged at the beautiful Miho Museum

Designers have the challenge of staging their catwalk in the most breathtaking of settings - and Louis Vuitton pulled out all the stops this weekend

Louis Vuitton is the second luxury brand to put on a showstopping fashion show in recent weeks.

The glamour of France's fashion industry hit Los Angeles on Thursday as Dior lured a bevy of stars, including Charlize Theron and Rihanna, to the Santa Monica mountains for its latest runway show.

The couture house's 2018 cruise collection presentation saw around 800 guests decamping to a remote reserve on the edge of the upscale suburb of Calabasas, home to Jennifer Lopez, the Kardashian-Jenners and much of Hollywood's A list.

Around 50 models showcased a wardrobe with a music festival vibe inspired by Lascaux cave paintings, painter Georgia O'Keeffe and feminist shamanic healer Vicki Noble, with plenty of pleated skirts and bolero hats on show.

The remote location for the runway show was chosen by Maria Grazia Chiuri, who was lured from Valentino in July last year to become Dior's first female creative director of women's haute couture and accessories.

Designer Nicolas Ghesquiere, who masterfully staged his catwalk on a suspension bridge, has had a long love affair with Japan
Last week, she cut a solemn figure as she led mourners at the funeral of her uncle, Niclas Silfverschiold in Sollebrunn, Sweden.

But it was a much more cheerful Crown Princess Victoria who stepped out today to pay a visit to the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

The royal, 39, was impeccably co-ordinated for the visit in a grey trousers and jacket, with matching shoes and clutch bag.

And she smiled broadly for photographers as she made her way up the steps of the institute where she will present the Crafoord Prize for science later this week.

Princess Victoria of Sweden, 39, cut a cheerful figure as she arrived at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm this morning

Crown Princess Victoria with Professor Carl Folke on a visit to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The royal who shares a son and daughter, Estelle and Oscar, with her husband Prince Daniel wore her hair sleeked back and kept her makeup fresh and minimal for the engagement.

However she added a tiny splash of colour to keep things interesting with bright red nail polish.

Victoria, who will one day be Queen of Sweden, has been back in the public eye of late after taking an extended break earlier this year.

The first in line to the Swedish throne stepped out of the limelight after attending her final engagement of 2016 on 20 December.

The first in line to the Swedish throne looked business-like in a grey trouser suit with co-ordinating shoes and clutch

She spent Christmas and the early party of the New Year privately, even missing her aunt Princess Brigitta's birthday celebrations in January.

In February, the Swedish court informed the press that Princess Victoria and her husband Princes Daniel were taking a private holiday abroad.

The long-planned trip continued into this March, and was organised to give the Crown Princess to spend quality time with her children while they're still young and neither is in school.

The mother-of-two wore her hair sleeked back in a bun and kept her make-up to a minimum
A young mother whose husband of nine months and unborn son were killed when a drunk university student crashed into their car is on a mission to share her story and prevent drink-driving.

Kristian Guerrero, 25, had to endure an induced 24-hour birth after the crash in San Marcos, Texas, that killed her husband, Fabian Guerrero-Moreno, 23, in August last year.

The heartbroken mother posted a picture cradling her stillborn baby son Fabian James to Facebook, accompanied by a warning to drink-drivers, as she pledged to spend her life campaigning so that nobody else has to feel the same pain.

She wrote: 'This is me finally being able to hold my son. This is what being in an induced labor for almost 24 hrs after surviving a car crash that killed my husband and my son looks like.

Kristian said she'd shared the image to raise awareness as she didn't want her son and husband to have died in vain.

Survivor: Kristian shared the poignant picture of herself with her son, named Fabian James after his father, and urged people to stop themselves getting behind the wheel of a car after having a drink

Catastrophic crash: Fabian died at the scene, while Kristian was rushed to St David's South Austin Medical Center, where she endured the long process of giving birth to a son she knew was already dead

Kristian was just 19 weeks pregnant when the happy young couple, both from Texas, were hit as they drove home on August 2 last year.

San Marcos police said the driver of the other car Shana Elliott, then 21, was drunk at the time, according to KXAN.com.

Reports alleged the Public Relations student, who was later charged with two counts of intoxicated manslaughter, was wearing a bikini when she collided with the family car.

Fabian died at the scene, while Kristian was rushed to St David's South Austin Medical Center, where she endured the long process of giving birth to a son she knew was already dead.

Campaigning: Kristian Guerrero, 25, whose husband of 11 months and unborn son were killed when a drunk university student crashed into their car is on a mission to share her story and prevent drink driving

Update: Kristian, who said she would 'refuse to let my husband and my sons deaths be in vain', spoke out about life without them earlier this month

Kristina's story spread around the world, and recently she shared a second moving update, speaking out about the long term impact of drink driving as she struggles through life without her family.

Posting two pictures of both herself and Fabian travelling to their wedding ceremony, she compared the pair travelling separately to their wedding day and her journey now through life alone.

She explained how how much happier and more confident she had been when her husband was by her side, but is fighting to carry on.

'I feel you and baby James push me ever day,' she said. 'I love you both with every bit that is left of me.'

Missing you: Kristian explained how the nine months since she had left hospital had been hardm but that her husband and son remain constantly in her thoughts

Tragic: The young couple had been thrilled to be expecting a baby. In an an interview with NBC News, Kristian said: 'Fabian would just look at me, look at my stomach and smile. All he wanted was a son.'

The young couple had been thrilled to be expecting a baby.

In an an interview with NBC News, Kristian said: 'Fabian would just look at me, look at my stomach and smile. All he wanted was a son.'

As well as looking forward to the birth of their baby, the couple had celebrated Fabian's new US residency status just hours before the fatal car crash.
Bristol Palin posted a loving Mother's Day tribute to her mom Sarah on Instagram this weekend as she celebrated at home with her growing family.

The 26-year-old, who is herself a mother-of-three, shared a heartfelt message about the former Alaska Governor while spending time with her husband and children  including the newest addition to their family, Atlee Bay.

'Happy Mother's Day to my momma!!' she wrote, captioning a picture of Sarah and her husband taken several years ago. 'There's no one stronger, smarter, and more determined than this woman right here. Thank you for being the greatest mom & grandma in the world! We love you.'

Happy family: Bristol Palin spent Mother's Day with her growing family on Sunday

The 26-year-old posted a throwback photo of her parents as she shared a tribute to her mom, Sarah

She seemed to have a wonderful day herself, smiling as she bounced one-year-old Sailor Grace on her hip

It doesn't appear that Bristol was able to share the day with her mother, though she did spend it with her own three children.

The newlywed posted a photo of herself with her husband Dakota Meyer and her three kids  eight-year-old Tripp, one-year-old Sailor, and newborn Atlee Bay, who is only a week old.

Tripp is her only son with her high school boyfriend and former fiance Levi Johnson, while Sailor and Atlee are her children with Dakota.

'My [heart] is so full,' she wrote simply of the smiling snap, posed in the family's kitchen.

Her husband, meanwhile, shared the same photo, adding the caption: 'Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers from my family to yours.'

Bristol's 16-year-old sister Piper was visiting, and the doting aunt spent time in the pool with Sailor Grace

Meanwhile, Bristol's husband Dakota posted loving words for his wife

Boom! Tripp, eight, was filmed jumping into the family pool as the Meyers enjoyed the 75 degree heat

Auntie! Piper was visiting and meeting baby Atlee Bay for the first time

In another image of just himself and Bristol, posted earlier, he wrote a more personal message.

'Happy Mother's Day to the most beautiful, loving, hottest, hardworking, dedicated, person I've ever met. I appreciate you more than you could ever imagine. Thank you @bsmp2 for choosing me and for being my best friend.

The family spent part of the day outside enjoying the 75 degree heat  according to the screen on their refrigerator  and playing in the pool.

It was quite chilly in Bristol's home state of Alaska, but the couple has been living in a suburb of Austin, Texas, over the past few months, which would explain the warm temperature.

The proud mom uploaded a short video to her Instagram story showing Tripp running and jumping into the pool, making a splash.

Dakota uploaded video of Sailor potty-training and keeping busy with a movie on her tiny toilet

Willow didn't appear to be on hand to celebrate, but on Friday she posted an image of her mom and wrote 'Serious, how cute is our mom'

Over the weekend, Bristol shared a sweet snapshot of Tripp holding Atlee Bay

The proud mom also posted a video of Sailor sweetly feeding her father ice cream

Bristol's 16-year-old sister Piper was also on hand for the festivities, and she shared a picture of herself in the pool with little Sailor Grace. The loving aunt steadied her niece's floaty toy while the little girl played in the water with a pacifier in her mouth.

'Sailor loved swimming, I promise,' she wrote, commenting on the toddler's seemingly unhappy face as she adjusted to the pool.

Piper seemed thrilled to spend time with the little ones and meet her newest niece, Atlee Bay  whom she cradled in her arms while smiling for her Instagram Story.

It's unclear if 22-year-old middle sister Willow was at Bristol's house as well. However, Willow did kick off Mother's Day weekend with the first tribute to her mother, sharing a photo of the former Governor in ripped jeans and a plaid shirt.

'Serious, how cute is our mom,' she wrote, adding two heart-eyes emojis.
The newly-crowned Miss USA is being slammed on social media for her comments on feminism and healthcare, which many appear to find too conservative for their taste.

Kara McCullough, 25, was asked about both topics as part of Sunday night's pageant, during which she bested 50 contestants for the title in Las Vegas.

Viewers first seemed to rejoice when Miss District of Columbia, who works as a scientist at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, became a part of the contest, bringing more visibility to women in STEM.

Criticized: Newly crowned Miss USA Kara McCullough, 25, has prompted a social media firestorm for her comments about healthcare and feminism

Definition: Asked if she considers herself a feminist, the federal employee said: 'So as a woman scientist in the government, I'd like to transpose the word feminism to equalism'

However, many became disillusioned when she answered questions about feminism and healthcare.

The contestants were asked: 'What do you consider feminist to be and do you consider yourself a feminist?'

'So as a woman scientist in the government, I'd like to transpose the word feminism to equalism,' McCullough said. 'I try not to consider myself this diehard, like, "I don't really care about men".'

The South Carolina State University chemistry grad then elaborated, saying women are 'just as equal as men when it comes to opportunity in the workplace' and sharing her own experiences witnessing 'firsthand' the impact women can have on leadership.

Believing that women are equal to men, of course, is the definition of feminism. Unsurprisingly, many viewers took issue with Kara's redefining of the word.

'The gal who just won Miss USA said she doesn't believe in feminism!!! On live TV!!! This is why ppl think pageants are out of touch!!!!!!!!!' one of them tweeted.

Response: Many viewers took issue with McCullough's rebuttal of the word 'feminism' and her definition of the concept during a round of questions and answers

Questioning: Several people said they were happy to see a female scientist among contestants but explained that her stance on feminism and healthcare doesn't resonate with them

Comments: One viewer, who shared one of many messages in reaction to the 25-year-old's statements, said this is why people believe pageants are now out of touch

What's wrong with being a feminist Miss DC USA!?!? Who says feminists hate men? Gurl!!! #MissUSA pic.twitter.com/jr5Hc5p2DN  Makho Ndlovu (@makhondlovu) May 15, 2017

This was one of many messages posted on Twitter in response to McCullough's comments.

'I was happy that they crowned another black woman Miss USA... until I heard her thoughts on feminism and healthcare,' another person wrote.

Other viewers pointed out that Miss New Jersey's answer to the same question had resonated with them a lot more.

'Feminism is striving for equality and I do consider myself a feminist,' first runner-up Chhavi Verg said before speaking out against the 'misconception' that feminism is about 'women being better than men'.

'It's really not,' she added. 'It's a fight for equality.'

Two-fold: McCullough also attracted criticism for her answer to a question about healthcare and its place in the contemporary American society

Beliefs: 'Do you think affordable healthcare for all US citizens is a right or a privilege and why?' the five finalists were asked. McCullough replied: 'I'm definitely going to say it's a privilege'

"I'm definitely going to say it's a privilege." Listen to your new #MissUSA talk about healthcare in the USA. pic.twitter.com/CzPBeaTYHO  Miss USA (@MissUSA) May 15, 2017

McCullough also attracted criticism for her answer to a question about healthcare and its place in society.

'Do you think affordable healthcare for all US citizens is a right or a privilege and why?' the five finalists were asked.

'I'm definitely going to say it's a privilege,' McCullough said.

'As a government employee, I'm granted healthcare. And I see firsthand that for one, to have healthcare, you need to have jobs, so therefore we need to continue to cultivate this environment that we're given the opportunities to have healt care as well as jobs for all American citizens worldwide.'

One viewer tweeted in response: 'Miss DC just lost me with that answer....Affordable healthcare is a privilege? Girl bye.'

Elaborating: The scientist went on to say: 'As a government employee, I'm granted healthcare. And I see firsthand that for one, to have healthcare, you need to have jobs'

Stance: Some viewers praised the new Miss USA for bringing more diversity to the pageant, while still wishing she had aired different views during the broadcast

Another person reacted to McCullough's statement with this tweet: 'No thanks return to sender.'

Some viewers praised the new Miss USA for bringing more diversity to the pageant, while still wishing she had aired different views during the broadcast.

'Huge fan of #MissUSA being a black woman and a scientist and advocate for science education, but dang she could use a class on social issues,' one woman wrote.

McCullough, meanwhile, said she was 'extremely thankful' for her win and had told judges that she was committed to advocating for women in science, technology, and math.
Elle Fanning may only be 19, but she has a resume that rivals many stars twice her age.

This month alone, the teenager landed the cover of Vogue magazine and is in not one, but two movies being screened at the Cannes Film Festival in France - Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled and John Cameron Mitchell's How to Talk to Girls at Parties.

As if that weren't enough, LOreal Paris also announced today that the younger Fanning sister is its newest spokesperson, joining veteran A-listers like Naomi Watts, Susan Sarandon, Blake Lively and Eva Longoria.

She's worth it! Elle Fanning, 19, is the latest actress to join the LOreal Paris family. She follows in the footsteps of A-listers like Susan Saradon, Naomi Watts and Blake Lively

She's beguiling! In the first images of Elle released by the brand, she's seen wearing a red lip (it's Color Riche Matte in Scarlet Silhouette) that's evocative of Old Hollywood

Elle announced her new gig to her own 1.1 million Instagram followers this morning, writing: 'I can FINALLY let you all in on the mega SURPRISE!!!! I am officially a #lorealista!!!!! Thank you @lorealmakeup for welcoming me into your EMPOWERING and FABULOUS family!!! I am beyond proud to represent a company that celebrates WOMEN!!! BECAUSE WE ARE ALL #WORTHIT.'

The star, who just finished wrapping her first commercial for LOreal for a new mascara, has never been one to shy away from taking a beauty risk, and her willingness to experiment with make-up undoubtedly played a part in getting the brand's attention.

In a press release, Pierre Emmanuel Angeloglou, global president for LOreal Paris, said: 'Elle is a natural choice for the brand, as it highlights our love for beauty and cinema. Indeed, she is the face for the new generation as an accomplished actress, but also an inspiring canvas for makeup artists.'

Another direction: The younger Fanning sibling (big sister Dakota is 24) also stars in a series of images in which she has a nude pout and sexy, smoky eye make-up

Who me? Despite beginning her acting career at two years old, Elle looks 100-percent grown up in the sultry campaign images

In the first official images that LOreal shared of the blonde star, she is wearing a blue dress, creamy, deep red lipstick (Color Riche Matte in Scarlet Silhouette for those who are wondering), her fair skin is kept mostly natural, save for a subtle contour, and her lashes are predictably long and luscious, especially toward the outer corners.

A second set of images sees Elle in a nude lip with a smokier eye that provides a bit of edge to her cream chiffon blouse and black sequin skirt ensemble.

The looks are pretty and classic, if a bit safe, for the actress, who has made beauty headlines in the past for wearing glitter on her cheeks and under her eyes, and every color under the sun (including yellow, pink and blue - sometimes all together) on her lids.

All that glitters: Elle and her longtime make-up artist Erin Ayanian Monroe, who created this look last year, aren't afraid to play with sparkle

Sparkle for days: Glitter came in to play in a big way while Elle was filming and promoting the movie The Neon Demon

Starry eyes: Elle got into the red, green and gold spirit for the Gucci Resort after-party in 2016

Lids of a feather: From canary yellow (left) to peacock blue (right), the teenage star is willing to put every color of the rainbow on her eyelids

Many of those out-of-the-box beauty styles came courtesy of her longtime make-up artist Erin Ayanian Monroe, who has also worked with Elle's older sister Dakota, 23, in the past.

Hopefully Erin and Elle will continue to collaborate because the cosmetics company is clearly counting on her to seduce the Millennial consumer.

According to WWD, Elle has already had talks with with LOreal Paris executives about ways to use social media to connect with her peers. 'To have little beauty anecdotes or confidence-boosters, or something along those lines shared by LOreal, I think is a really crucial thing,' she told the site.

Elle told WWD she was a bit giddy after wrapping her first L'Oreal shoot in front of a castle in France. 'I got to say "Because youre worth it." I was like, "That is so cool,"' she said

We are family: Elle starred in the film 3 Generations with fellow L'Oreal spokesmodels Susan Saradon (center), 70, and Naomi Watts (right), 48

Additionally, the We Bought a Zoo star said she's excited to connect with other girls her age about beauty.

'[At 19 you're] just discovering who you are. Youre still even discovering your style and what type of woman you want to be. Its a crucial part of growing up. So to play into that area for [young girls] is what I am most looking forward to.'

Elle's LOreal announcement comes just days after her Vogue cover shoot debut.

In it, the actress harnessed her star-power in an ethereal shot by legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz and talked in her interview about her love life, her family and her temper.

Coming up roses! Elle harnessed her star-power in an ethereal front cover shoot for June's Vogue magazine

The single star - who is also wearing a rose-hued Valentino Haute Couture gown - described herself to the publication as 'super-romantic.'

However, she said she would like to meet someone 'organically.'

'I don't know where to find these people. But I also don't want to screw with the magic of organically finding someone,' she told them.

'Will there be a spotlight on someone?' she muses hypothetically about meeting a significant other.

Sweet: Elle described herself as 'super-romantic' to June's Vogue (pictured May 1 at the Met Gala in NYC)

She told Vogue that she wants to have a family, but is not to be there yet as she is still a teen. She said people her age are 'just going with the flow.'

She added: 'We haven't learned, you know, the hard ways of the world,' adding, 'We're not humans yet.'

Elle - whose older sister Dakota starred in I Am Sam aged seven - says there is no rivalry between the siblings.

A toast: The star was seen with Jessica Chastain at the Met Gala; there was talk about whether or not there was wine in her glass

She explained that they have been working together since they were tots, telling the magazine that when Dakota booked a lead in the Sean Penn drama I Am Sam, Elle was called on set to play that character's younger self.

By the time she was six, they were giving interviews together, she said, and mused over whether she would have chosen the same career if it were not for Dakota's influence.

'You think, "Gosh, if I didn't have a sister who started acting, would I be acting?"' she told them.

Siblings: Elle - whose older sister Dakota starred in I Am Sam aged seven - says there is no rivalry between the siblings. Pictured 2016

Despite her sweet-looking features, the Live By Night actress told Vogue that she has a 'huge temper.'

'My mom and my sister are always like, "That's not something you brag about,"' she told them, adding: 'But I tell strangers - I'm also very trusting of people - like, "I get so mad!"'
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Her sister had Buckingham Palace as the setting for her reception when she married Prince William.

Now Pippa Middleton is clearly keen that her own wedding should feature a palace  albeit a crystal one.

For this is the 100,000 (US$130,000) glass conservatory-style structure that she is having installed in the garden of her family home for Saturdays celebrations.

Not content with a traditional canvas marquee, Pippa, 33  who is marrying multi-millionaire hedge fund boss James Matthews, 41  has had the bespoke glass orangery shipped from Belgium.

Touch of glass: The view from the public footpath of the orangery being built at the Middletons' home

How it might look: One of the many lavish wedding marquees on PBI's website

Pippa Middleton has been seen picking up beauty products at the exclusive Santi London spa in Kensington, just five days before her wedding

A large marquee has been erected in the grounds of the Middleton family home in Bucklebury, Berkshire ahead of Pippa's wedding this Saturday

The original Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and plate-glass structure originally built in Hyde Park, London, in 1851

The process is being overseen by Peppers Marquees, which holds the only royal warrant for supplying marquees to the Prince of Wales.

According to sources, workmen have been busy since the weekend putting up the structure on a camouflaged stage in a field at the rear of Michael and Carole Middletons home in Bucklebury, Berkshire.

The building, expected to take up to six days to finish, is so large and distinctive that it can be seen from both the main road and a public footpath running alongside the estate.

Although there will be 100 or so guests at St Marks Church in the nearby village of Englefield for the ceremony, more than 300 are expected back at Middleton manor to dance the night away.

Pippa opted for monochrome chic and teamed her outfit with her favourite snakeskin flats

The scale of the structure erected for Pippa's wedding to her hedge fund manager beau is visible in this shot from a distance

Workmen can be seen preparing for the festivities at the weekend, which will be attended by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, as well as Prince Harry and his girlfriend Meghan Markle

The elaborate - and enormous - conservatory-style structure is in stark contrast to the average canvas wedding marquee

Clearly a fan of their offerings, Pippa was spotted returning to the 17 million mansion she shares with James Matthews clutching another bag of products.

In addition to beauty treatments, she's been hitting the gym hard and has joined Grace Belgravia, an exclusive club that promises to create the perfect Hollywood pins - at a cost of 55,000 for a lifetime membership.

The women-only Knightsbridge club and spa is home to the Capri Palace Leg School, which uses a method of treatment involving mud packs, bandages, hot and cold water and stone massages pioneered by Italian anti-ageing guru Professor Francesco Canonaco.

It's the second time in under a week the bride-to-be has been seen toting a bag of products from the exclusive beauty clinic

In just five days time, Pippa will wed her financier boyfriend James Matthews at St Mark's Church in Englefield, Berkshire

The bride-to-be has been busy with last-minute preparations for her wedding, including pampering treatments

One expert estimated that it would cost around 35,000 plus VAT for the structure and floor system  but that was just the basics.

With internal lighting, decor, carpeting, heating, sound and service marquees, the total could be more than double that.

Its from a Belgian company called PBI and they are shipped over especially for events.

'For the full works, your bill would easily be around the 100,000 mark, the expert said.

PBI Event Architectures website is crammed with examples of how spectacular the marquee could look on Pippas big day.

Pippa stunned on her sister's big day back in 2011, and she's expected to float down the aisle in a gown by Giles Deacon this coming Saturday

A spokesman for the firm declined to comment yesterday other than saying: Imagine I was the person putting it together, I would say strictly nothing. Lets leave it there.

'You can imagine that, whoever my client is, this isnt something that is shouted about from the rooftops.

Pippa, a former party planner, has decreed that her big day should have a relaxed country wedding feel  but is leaving nothing to chance.

Sources have told the Mail that Pippas father is tearing his hair out at the complexity of the arrangements. But he is hugely excited by everything, particularly in giving his youngest daughter away, they added.

Pippa, pictured at Wimbledon with James, has reportedly asked guests to bring a second outfit to change into for the evening reception

Although the Middletons maintain the wedding is a private family event, the eyes of the world will be upon it as it is being attended by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry with his girlfriend, actress Meghan Markle.

Pippas niece and nephew will also take a starring role  Princess Charlotte, two, will be a bridesmaid while three-year-old Prince George will be a page boy.

A controlled media facility has been arranged to capture their arrival at church, while normally accessible public footpaths in the area are being closed.

Pippa, who shares a 17million mansion in West London with her husband-to-be, was busy yesterday stepping up her pre-wedding beauty regime with a trip to a spa in South Kensington offering such treatments as 100 sugar cane facials.
Prince William has made a private visit to the homeless charity he first went to with his mother twenty-three years ago.

The Duke of Cambridge kept under the radar as he made a 30-minute trip to St Vincent's Centre in central London where he and brother Prince Harry were once taken by Princess Diana in 1994.

The centre is run by The Passage, an organisation established in 1980 which helps homeless people transform their lives by providing resources designed to encourage, inspire and challenge.

Prince William first visited St Vincent's Centre in central London with Princess Diana and Prince Harry in 1994 (pictured above)

The Passage runs the UKs largest support centre for homeless and insecurely-housed people and since its inception has helped more than 100,000 individuals.

The Duke was spotted walking into the centre in Victoria by a little known side road, only used by local businesses that have entrances on the quiet thoroughfare, and left unnoticed by workers using a nearby coffee shop.

William made a public visit to St Vincents in May last year when he was shown the centres revamped facilities from a new restaurant to training space.

During the previous visit, he was given a framed image featuring his mother and brother, by former centre user turned client ambassador, Mark Smith.

Prince William (above) was given a framed image featuring his mother and brother during his last visit

Prince William was presented with a photograph from the organisers of him and his mother during their visit last year

Prince William looked in high spirits when he visited The Passage homeless organisation in Victoria last year

The Duke of Cambridge first visited the centre with his mother Princess Diana in 1994

Touched by the memento, the Duke thanked him for the picture, remarking: 'Wow the t-shirts' in reference to what he and his brother were wearing.

He is an avid supporter of schemes and organisations that support the homeless, as was his late mother.

In 2009, he spent a night on the streets of London to raise awareness of the issue in an event organised by Centrepoint, a homeless charity of which he is patron.
If you're an actress or a model and you attended a red-carpet event sometime in the past week wearing any eye make-up color other than blue, you apparently didn't get the memo.

Since last Tuesday, at least ten A-listers stepped out wearing eyeshadow, mascara or eyeliner in various shades of blue, proving that the hue shouldn't just be reserved for music festivals or '80s-themed dance parties.

Below, we detail five ways to wear the bright trend - from a subtle pop of color to an abstract statement look - with inspiration from stars like Brie Larson, Amy Schumer and Kate Hudson.

Blue (wo)man group: Both Jaime King (left) and Brie Larson (right) complemented their Dior looks at the fashion house's Cruise 2018 show last week with blue eye make-up

WEAR BLUE ON YOUR LASHES

It wasn't just Priyanka Chopra's sequin Halston dress that stood out on the Baywatch premiere red carpet in Miami on Saturday.

Make-up artist Pati Dubroff created a stunning jewel tone eye look that incorporated three rich hues from the iridescent gown: Shimmering purple and aqua shadow on the eyelids and blue mascara on the bottom lashes.

Paired with a sleek low ponytail and a neutral lip, Priyanka, 34, proved that unicorn-esque eye make-up can look sophisticated.

For a similar look, try Maybelline Great Lash Mascara in Royal Blue.

Blue's clues: Can you tell that Priyanka Chopra is wearing blue mascara? The star's make-up artist applied a royal blue hue to her bottom lashes only

Complementary colors: The blue mascara shade paired beautifully with the jewel tone eyeshadows applied on the lid

TRY THE HUE UNDER THE EYES

A bold upside-down eye make-up look as seen on both Brie Larson, 27, Kate Hudson, 38, and Chrissy Metz, 36, is a fresh and unexpected way to play with color.

For the Christian Dior Cruise 2018 Show on Thursday, Brie opted for a neon blue look that extended up along half of her upper lash line and contrasted her navy blazer.

At the Los Angeles premiere of Snatched, Kate's under-eye area was smudged with a hint of light blue (NYX Vivid Brights Creme Colour in Endless Skies will help you recreate the look), making her eyes appear brighter.

Chrissy showed off an even subtler approach at the NBC upfronts earlier today, where she wore navy liner underneath her lower lashes.

The eyes have it: Brie Larson's bright blue eyeliner added a playfulness to her chic Dior ensemble on Thursday

Just a touch: Kate Hudson and Chrissy Metz jazzed up red carpet make-up looks with subtle swipes of blue under their eyes

CONSIDER COBALT A NEW NEUTRAL

Choosing a gold or silver eyeshadow hue to complement Haley Bennett's Lelet NY hair accessories ahead of the Dior show would have been the obvious choice.

Instead, make-up artist Jillian Dempsey opted for a pop of color in the form of a frosty blue Dior eyeshadow. The soft shade didn't overpower the 29-year-old Gone Girl actress' ensemble of a black corset midi dress and a long army green coat, but being an unconventional choice, it gave the look a welcome playful twist.

Ice queen: Haley Bennett looked elegant yet youthful with her metallic hair accessories and silvery-blue eyeshadow at the Dior show

USE BLUE TO MAKE A STATEMENT...

If you're going to wear blue eyeliner, you might as well go big - or so might Joey King and Ruby Aldridge say.

For a party toasting Marc Jacobs' Daisy fragrance in Los Angeles last week, Joey, 17, wore not one, but two shades of blue eyeliner that made her ocean blue eyes look even more mesmerizing than usual.

To get the look, make-up artist Jo Baker painted the upper lash line with a sky blue cream liner and then drew a winged line on top of the first with a turquoise cream liner (try Tarte Clay Pot Waterproof Liner in Blue Moon and Unicorn Kisses for a similar effect).

Ruby, 25, demonstrated an abstract take on the trend on Instagram. In a recent selfie, the model posed bare-faced, save for arched cerulean lines drawn along the crease above her eyes.

It's electric: Joey King rocked two vivid blue eyeliners at the same time at a Marc Jacobs fragrance event last week

Artsy: If you haven't yet nailed the cat eye, do like model Ruby Aldridge and draw a line of pigment along the crease above your eyes

...OR MATCH YOUR DRESS

Amy Schumer's make-up artist Andrea Tiller made a stop at Sephora before the premiere of Snatched last week to find a blue pigment in the exact same shade of royal blue as the actress' Antonio Berardi dress.

The artist settled on a mixture of three different shades of eyeliners from MAC, Urban Decay and Marc Jacobs Beauty to nail the color match.

Jaime King, 38, and Jenna Dewan Tatum's, 36, glam squads appeared to have had similar goals for recent red carpet events.

At the Dior show on Thursday, Jaime's icy blue smoky eye was the same color as the angel print on the front of her velvet dress and for the NBC upfronts for her new show World of Dance, Jenna's make-up artist Patrick Ta created a blue smoky eye inspired by her outfit.

Patrick revealed on Instagram that he used the UltraViolet Blue pigment from Pat McGrath Labs Dark Star 006 Kit to achieve the striking look.

True blue: Amy Schumer's make-up artist created the perfect royal blue eyeliner shadow by combining three different pigments
Oprah Winfrey has angered some of her followers with a Mother's Day post celebrating parents of 'fur children' - i.e. pet owners.

The talk show icon shared a photo of herself next to a woman named Jill, who was walking her dogs in a stroller when she posed for the snap, over the weekend.

Next to the picture, Oprah wrote a few words implying that several kinds of mothers - not just parents of human babies - could be honored on Mother's Day.

How it all began: The talk show icon shared a photo of herself next to a woman named Jill, who was walking her dogs in a stroller when she posed for the snap, over the weekend

'Happy Mothers day to Mothers of all varieties of children!' the 63-year-old host wrote.

While her caption was probably meant to inspire loving feelings among her fans, some were outraged at the idea that some could equate pet ownership with parenthood.

'No. I'm sorry. Owning a pet doesn't compare to raising human children,' one person wrote in a comment. Someone else added: 'No. Pets don't count sorry.'

Another follower urged Oprah to reflect on the meaning of Mother's Day, writing: 'I respect where you're coming from and everything here Oprah but come on. The origin of this holiday is not for people and their freaking animals lol.

'It's for women who work hard every day and night, to mold their kids (bio or not) into great adults. It's a tough job and shouldn't be undermined so the poor pet owners don't get their feelings hurt lol. Come on girl, respect!!'

Others, however, agreed with Opra's sentiment. One woman explained that she is unable to have children and has found solace in owning pets.

'Many people judge and say I don't know what it's like to have children,' she wrote. 'It's true but on the other hand they don't know what it's like to not be able to have children. My fur babies are my kids!'

Homage: Next to the picture, Oprah wrote a few words implying that several kinds of mothers - not just parents of human babies - could be honored on Mother's Day

Reaction: While the caption was probably meant to inspire loving feelings among her fans, some were outraged at the idea that some could equate pet ownership with parenthood

Opinion: Others, however, agreed with Opra's sentiment. One woman explained that she is unable to have children and has found solace in owning pets

Oprah has previously opened up about her own feelings about motherhood, and the heartbreaking experience of losing a son, Canaan, who was prematurely born when the host was just 14.

The star has also revealed she doesn't regret not having had children with her longtime boyfriend Stedman Graham, because she believes she would not have been a 'good mom'.

Instead, she founded the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, a boarding school in South Africa that houses 172 girls, in 2007 - and revealed it made her feel as if she had children of her own.

'Love knows no boundaries. It doesnt matter if a child came from your womb or if you found that person at age two, 10 or 20. If the love is real, the caring is pure and it comes from a good space, it works,' she told Good Housekeeping.

The star also drew another comparison between parenting and having pets, this time saying she'd had the patience to raise puppies - but not babies.

'For me it was perfect, because I didnt want babies,' she said of opening the school. 'I wouldnt have been a good mom for babies. I dont have the patience. I have the patience for puppies, but thats a quick stage! But this is so rewarding.'
A key gene that helps to explain an underlying cause of incurable bowel disorders, which affect around 300,000 people in the UK, has been identified by scientists.

A study found that blocking the effects of the beneficial gene can harm vital parts of the cell and lead to bowel disease.

The findings boost understanding of the cause of these lifelong conditions and could lead to new treatments, scientists say.

The findings could boost the understanding of the causes of lifelong bowl conditions

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) includes disorders such as Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. The causes of these conditions are unknown and there is currently no cure.

The gene, known as MDR1, governs an important extractor system for toxins in the gut, removing damaging substances from intestinal cells, scientists said.

A research team, led by the University of Edinburgh, showed that MDR1 function was lower in people with inflamed IBD compared with those without inflammation.

Experts then showed that mice without MDR1 had faulty mitochondria, parts of the cell known as 'batteries', which play a vital role in energy generation and cell health.

This mitochondrial dysfunction then resulted in colitis, inflammation of the inner lining of the bowel - a defining feature of IBD.

Researchers involved in the study analysed genetic data from 90,000 people, 40,000 of whom had IBD.

There is currently no cure for Inflammatory Bowl Disease

The university study also revealed that a drug called Mitoquinone, which protects the mitochondria against toxins, can reduce colitis and promote bowel recovery in the mice lacking MDR1. Scientists have described this as a 'significant step forward'.

Lead author Dr Gwo-Tzer Ho, honorary consultant gastroenterologist at the University of Edinburgh's MRC Centre for Inflammation Research, said: 'IBD has a serious impact on quality of life, with 6,000 new cases diagnosed per year in the UK.

'We have shown that MDR1 and mitochondrial function are important jigsaw pieces in the complex causes of IBD.

'Our studies highlight the importance of shielding the mitochondria from damage. This will open new approaches to drug targets that focus on the mitochondria to better design treatments for patients.'

The study, carried out with researchers at the University of Bristol and in the USA and Japan, was funded by the Medical Research Council and Crohn's and Colitis UK.
In a world where art and fashion often collide, a new collaboration between one of Ottawas most stylish boutiques and a talented local artist gave rise to a design dream team, curating a fashion and art crossover collection. Schad Boutique owner Chantal Schad worked with Montreal-based Art-A-Porter to bring local artist Heidi Conrods work off the wall and onto the backs of some of Ottawas most stylish men and women.

The limited-edition collection features tops and dresses that have been printed with the artists works. I think fashion provides a great new medium to showcase art, offers the boutique owner. Choosing your clothes is a means of expressing either how you feel, your personal tastes, or the image you wish to portray to others. Wearing the art you love is a natural extension of those elements.

In a world where art and fashion often collide, a new collaboration between one of Ottawas most stylish boutiques and a talented local artist gave rise to a design dream team, curating a fashion and art crossover collection. Schad Boutique owner Chantal Schad worked with Montreal-based Art-A-Porter to bring local artist Heidi Conrods work off the wall and onto the backs of some of Ottawas most stylish men and women.

The limited-edition collection features tops and dresses that have been printed with the artists works. I think fashion provides a great new medium to showcase art, offers the boutique owner. Choosing your clothes is a means of expressing either how you feel, your personal tastes, or the image you wish to portray to others. Wearing the art you love is a natural extension of those elements.

Most of the pieces from the collection came from a body of paintings created in 2016, where the artist explored the space between figuration and abstraction. I was combining portraiture and landscapes with abstract, painterly marks in attempts to create surreal worlds of the imagination or memory, says the artist. In one of the designs, called Magical Thinking, I combined a portrait of a womans face in profile, with painterly marks that appear to be floating in space.

The process of creating wearable art involves taking a high-resolution image of the artists painting or drawing and transferring it digitally onto the fabric. The designers at Art-A-Porter really have an eye for accentuating and/or cropping parts of the artwork to make it look interesting in three dimensions, as well as taking into consideration the proportions of the body, says Heidi.

Her pieces are all under $200 which puts them into the affordable category for this calibre of fashion, and it pleases Heidi to see her pieces worn, It is very exciting to see people wearing my art. I have always loved fashion and am often inspired by patterns and colours on certain fabrics and designs, so the combination of art and fashion in this project feels very natural.

This spring, make a statement with a piece of wearable art that lets you show off your cultural side in a personal way. Schad is only steps away from the National Gallery of Canada, so you can stroll along Sussex to visit an exhibit while wearing your own.

vintage bridesmaid dresses | purple bridesmaid dresses
Porn causes erectile dysfunction in men but doesn't affect the sex lives of women, new research reveals.

Men that regularly watch porn are more likely to become disinterested in sex and suffer from erectile dysfunction, the study found.

One in five men watch porn three to five times a week and three per cent admit they prefer it to sex with a partner, the survey revealed.

Watching porn is addictive in the same way as cocaine, with users building up a 'tolerance' for hardcore content over time that leaves them unsatisfied with real-life sexual activity, researchers said.

Yet, regularly watching porn has little effect on women, they added.

Porn causes erectile dysfunction in men but doesn't affect women, research has revealed

ARE YOU ADDICTED TO PORN? TAKE THE TEST Answer the 17 questions below, rating them by how much you feel they apply to you from 1 to 7. 1 = never, 2 = rarely, 3 = occasionally, 4 = sometimes, 5 = often, 6 = very often, 7 = all the time. 1. I felt that porn is an important part of my life. 2. I used porn to restore the tranquility of my feelings. 3. I felt porn caused problems in my sexual life 4. I felt that I had to watch more and more porn for satisfaction. 5. I unsuccessfully tried to reduce the amount of porn I watch. 6. I became stressed when something prevented me from watching porn. 7. I thought about how good it would be to watch porn. 8. Watching porn got rid of my negative feelings. 9. Watching porn prevented me from bringing out the best in me. 10. I felt that I needed more and more porn in order to satisfy my needs. 11. When I vowed not to watch porn any more, I could only do it for a short period of time. 12. I became agitated when I was unable to watch porn. 13. I continually planned when to watch porn. 14. I released my tension by watching porn. 15. I gradually watched more 'extreme' porn, because the porn I watched before was less satisfying. 16. I resisted watching porn for only a little while before I relapsed. 17. I missed porn greatly when I didn't watch it for a while. Add the scores for all the questions together. A score of 76 or higher suggests problematic levels of pornography use. Source: Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary Advertisement

Researchers from the Naval Medical Center of San Diego had 300 male and female patients fill out two surveys on their porn habits.

For men, researchers noticed a strong association between regularly watching porn and suffering from a lack of sexual desire and erectile dysfunction.

Study author Dr Matthew Christman, said: 'Sexual behavior activates the same "reward system" circuitry in the brain as addictive drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamines, which can result in self-reinforcing activity, or recurrent behaviors.

'Internet pornography, specifically, has been shown to be a super normal stimulus of this circuitry, which may be due to the ability to continuously and instantaneously self-select novel and more sexually arousing images.'

Regularly watching porn makes men disinterested in sex and causes erectile dysfunction

Watching too much internet porn can increase a person's 'tolerance' the same as narcotics, Dr Christman said.

Regular porn watchers are less likely to respond to real-world sexual activity and must increasingly rely on pornography for release, he added.

Pornography may also set up unrealistic expectations in young and inexperienced men, said Dr Joseph Alukal from New York University.

This could cause libido-sapping anxiety when real-world sex doesn't measure up to filmed fantasies, he said.

It is unclear why the aforementioned effects do not also occur in women.

The findings were presented at the American Urological Association's annual meeting in Boston on Friday.

This comes after researchers from Brigham Young University, Utah, found that self-proclaimed porn addicts may struggle to secure and maintain romantic relationships.

Porn use was not linked to relationship anxiety among those who described themselves as having a healthy habit.
Women who never have children are at a far greater risk of suffering from heart failure later in life, a major study suggests.

Mothers who have children but have an early menopause are also more likely to fall victim to the condition, experts found.

Results revealed that women who remain childless are 70 per cent more likely to suffer from heart failure in old age, compared to women who gave birth to one child.

They are also 175 per cent more likely - a risk of nearly three-fold - to be at risk of heart failure with 'preserved ejection fraction', where the left side of the heart does not relax as well as it should.

The research suggests that sex hormones linked to pregnancy and menstruation play a major role in protecting the heart.

Women who never have children are at a greater risk of suffering from heart failure in life life

VITAMIN D-RICH DIET CUTS EARLY MENOPAUSE RISK BY 17% Women can cut their risk of an early menopause by eating oily fish and eggs, a new study reveals. A high vitamin D intake via food and supplements lowers the risk by 17 per cent, according to researchers from Harvard University. Vitamin D is thought to slow the ageing of women's ovaries. Calcium-rich foods make women 13 percent less likely to suffer. This is thought to be due to cows' milk containing menopause-delaying sex hormones. Advertisement

Researchers from University of California, San Francisco analysed data on 28,519 post-menopausal women who were tracked for 13 years.

Some 5.2 per cent of the women were admitted to hospital with heart failure, a condition that results from the heart being too weak to pump blood efficiently.

The women, who had an average age of 62 at the start of the study, were one per cent more likely to suffer heart failure for each extra year in advance that their menopause arrived.

The scientists suspect this is because pregnancy causes a rapid increase in estrogen levels - a sex hormone that also protects against heart disease.

Lead researcher Dr Nisha Parikh, said: 'Our finding that a shorter total reproductive duration was associated with a modestly increased risk of heart failure might be due to the increased coronary heart disease risk that accompanies early menopause.'

The results are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Commenting on the research, Dr Nandita Scott of Massachusetts General Hospital, said: 'There remain many unresolved questions including the mechanisms of estrogen's cardioprotective effect, making this truly a work in progress.

'Altogether, these findings raise interesting questions about the cardiometabolic effects of sex hormone exposure over a woman's lifetime and continue to raise important questions for future research.'

In the US and the UK, the average age for a woman to reach the menopause is 51.

Around one in 100 women experience a premature menopause before the age of 40.
One in three mothers-to-be are suffering from 'scanxiety' - and potentially harming their unborn babies, experts have warned.

Guidelines in the US and the UK advise scans at 12 and 20 weeks to monitor the child's development.

But a new study in England shows that almost a third of expectant mothers are paying for additional private ultrasounds.

Experts warn the excessive intensity of radiowaves could be damaging for the foetus.

Scroll down for video

One in three mothers-to-be are suffering from 'scanxiety', which may harm their unborn babies

TIPS ON FINDING A REPUTABLE SCANNING CLINIC Check that your clinic is registered with the Care Quality Commission, to ensure it meets professional standards. Look online for clinic reviews and check how long the company has been established. Ask the clinic abut staff qualifications and experience. Any reputable firm will be happy to help. Your sonographer should be HCPC qualified. Some clinics do offer discounts to make the treatment affordable for everyone. However if you are being pressured to buy more packages than you need or can afford, consider going elsewhere. It's your body, your baby and your choice. If you feel overly anxious, speak with your midwife. Your scanning firm will work with him or her. And remember if you have a medical need, the NHS will scan you as part of your treatment. Advertisement

It is no secret that scans could be dangerous for unborn babies, and obstetricians are told to explain this to expectant mothers of a matter of course.

But despite the dangers, the rate appears to be rising.

The poll of 2,000 mums by parenting site ChannelMum.com found that one-third of expectant mothers are paying for the extra scans due to anxiety over their babies' health, leading to experts coining the phrase 'scanxiety'.

A further third confess they just want to 'check in' on their baby, without a specific medical reason.

One in five (20 per cent) of those having extra scans pay out for two, while 18 per cent buy three or more, a study reveals.

One in 50 even admit to forking out for nine or 10 additional scans - more than one a month during their pregnancy.

This is collectively costing expectant mothers millions of pounds, without a medical reason.

Private scan images range from 35 up to 1,000 for a repeat package, but clinics regularly offer discount vouchers and promotions on sites like Groupon to lure in extra customers.

The private scan industry is worth 42 million ($54 million) a year - enough to fund 1,620 experienced midwives in the NHS.

Worryingly, some clinics offer scans for longer than 30 minutes, which goes against medical advice, while others employ unregistered sonographers who are unable to provide an accurate diagnosis or offer support if a there is a problem.

There have even been reports of 'pop-up' scan firms offering to carry out the treatment at women's homes rather than in a clinic, as well as women being misdiagnosed as having a healthy baby when the pregnancy was ectopic.

Mervi Jokinen, practice and standards advisor at the Royal College of Midwives, said: 'Current advice by the National Institute For Health and Clinical Excellence is to have an early scan and then a screening scan for anomalies at around 18-20 weeks.

'These are recommendations based on the available research and takes into account the harm and benefit of scans.

'Any further scans beyond these recommendations should be clinically indicated and based on the needs of the women and her developing baby.

'It is of concern that women are needing this extra assurance. It may reflect a need for women to have more confidence in their pregnancy and this type of reassurance and support is, and can, be provided by their midwife.

'Anxieties caused by reliance on technology can have an impact on a woman's pregnancy, causing undue stress and anxiety.'

Although considered safe when used appropriately, ultrasound scans can fail to pick up birth defects or misdiagnose them.
Scientists claim that a pill made from natural ingredients could be just as effective as Plan B.

A controversial new study from the University of California at Berkeley found that certain chemicals in dandelions and mangoes can prevent sperm from meeting an egg.

The chemicals of lupeol and pristimerin, which are also found in aloe vera, the vine of tomatoes, olives and grapes, and Thunder God Root, limit the sperm's function to push through to the egg, the study claims.

Now, experts are working to manufacture the compounds into a variety of forms so men and women can use the ingredients as emergency contraception without the extra hormones.

It could also become the first unisex pill, able to be taken by both men and women without the current side-effects of heart disease, blood clots and depression.

A new study from the University of California at Berkeley, found that certain chemicals in dandelions and mangoes can prevent sperm from meeting an egg, being just as effective as emergency contraception

OTHER HEALTH BENEFITS OF THESE PLANTS Scientists claim that chemicals found in certain plants can prevent pregnancy. Here are some other benefits of those plants: Dandelion: Maintains bone health, helps weight loss, helps the liver and combats acne Aloe Vera: A helpful remedy for skin conditions, including burns, frostbite, psoriasis and cold sores. It also can be used for treating osteoarthritis, bowel diseases, fever, itching and inflammation Mangoes: Studies claim it can protect against certain types of cancer, it lowers cholesterol, improves digestion and promotes healthy sex Olives: High in Vitamin E, iron, copper, and calcium Thunder God Root: May improve some rheumatoid arthritis symptoms, and used to treat multiple sclerosis and used as a male contraceptive Tomatoes: May lower the risk of certain types of cancer including prostate, help with eye health and prevent depression Advertisement

Dr Polina Lishko, an assistant professor at the university's molecular and cell biology department, said she hopes the product can be available for consumers within the next three years.

She said: 'Sperms use their tail as a whip to push it through to the egg. The chemicals in the plants limit the whip, or its power kick. Without it, the sperm can't get to the egg and fertilize it.'

Researchers are confident in their findings and are now working to produce a pill, skin patch or vaginal ring with the ingredients for women.

Lishko said there needs to be a bit more research conducted before a form of the contraceptive would be available for men.

The pill would need to be taken no less than six hours after unprotected sex, because human sperm take about this long to mature once they enter the female reproductive system.

The plant chemicals apparently stop the sperm's power to kick through the cells that are blocking the female's egg.

Lishko said this offers an alternative to emergency contraception and birth controls that mess with the body's natural hormones.

Plan B, or the morning after pill, is a form of emergency contraception after having unprotected sex.

It contains levonorgestrel and can prevent pregnancy by interfering with ovulation or with the fertilization of an egg.

It is reported as being 95 percent effective in reducing the risk of pregnancy if taken within 24 hours of unprotected sex and 89 percent effective within 72 hours.

As it does tamper with hormone levels, side effects can include nausea, abdominal pain, breast tenderness, vomiting and a possibility of unexpected bleeding.

Across the country, there has been a bigger push for more sex education in schools.

Rates in teen pregnancy are declining because they are more informed and are using contraception methods correctly, experts claim.

The chemicals of lupeol and pristimerin, which are also found in aloe vera (pictured), the vine of tomatoes, olives and grapes, and Thunder God Root, limit the sperm's function to push through to the egg, the study claims

TYPES OF BIRTH CONTROL 1. Combination pills Combination pills contain two types of hormones: estrogen and progestin. They prevent pregnancy in three ways: By suppressing ovulation (your eggs stay put in your ovaries)

By thickening cervical mucus (making it harder for sperm to move)

By thinning the lining of the uterus (making it harder for an egg to attach there) Different pills will have different amounts of the two hormones over the course of the month. 2. Mini-pills Mini-pills contain only progestin. They prevent pregnancy by thickening your cervical mucus and thinning the lining of the uterus. The mini-pill was developed for women who are sensitive to estrogen. It has the same failure rate as the combination pill - about one in 10. Advertisement

Between 2007 and 2012, the number of new mothers aged 15 to 19 years old dropped 5.6 percent, while sexual activity of this age range increased.

Women have begun searching for alternative forms of contraception after hormonal birth control options have been proved to have unwanted side effects.

One study showed that women on the pill are more likely to be depressed, especially when the user is younger.

The report claimed that teens have an 80 percent increase in risk to start taking antidepressants after going on birth control.

In April, a Swedish and British study found that birth control in the form of a pill can trigger mood swings and fatigue.

For years, women prescribed the combined version of the pill - the most common form of contraception - have long reported feeling miserable.

It is widely believed that when the synthetic versions of the hormones estrogen and progesterone are ingested, it affects the chemical balance in the brain.

However, these potential side effects are not noted by any medical bodies, leaving many unaware of the risk.

Studies suggest that users of all types of hormonal contraception have a slightly higher chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer compared with women who do not use them.
Scientists have successfully re-awoken coma patients so they can communicate with their family by 'zapping' their brain with a low-intensity current.

Two people in a vegetative state, and another 13 in a minimally-conscious coma, were able to show new signs of awareness after receiving brain stimulation, New Scientist reported.

The effect lasted for up to a week, according to researchers at the University of Liege in Belgium.

The breakthrough study could be a huge step for families of people in a coma who show signs of awareness but cannot speak or move their muscles.

Experts say the method could also be developed to help out-patients with communication disorders who are living at home.

Two people in a vegetative state, and another 13 in a minimally-conscious coma, were able to show new signs of awareness after receiving brain stimulation in a trial in Belgium. Pictured: the equipment used in the trial

HOW THIS BRAIN STIMULATION WORKS Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) kits include either a head band or a cap that contains electrodes placed on specific parts of the scalp. It is hooked up to the mains and then electrical currents pass through to the areas of the brain. Different parts of the brain signal a different sensation, including feeling more calm or more focused. The kits can even be bought online - sold as a method to boost your brain function - for as little as 40 ($55). But people are increasingly building their own stimulation kits, with various YouTube videos and forums explaining how to create the circuit from scratch. Suggested methods include using teaspoons, sponges and battery packs to create electrical current. Advertisement

In the study, patients underwent a procedure called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) which uses electrodes placed on the head to stimulate targeted brain regions.

It is hardly the first time this method has been tested in a scientific study.

In fact, scores of studies have looked at making personal tDCS headsets for people to have at home, giving themselves occasional 'zaps' to boost their brain function.

But its use for coma patients is a new frontier.

In the study, a team led by neurologist Aurore Thibaut placed the headsets over the patients' prefrontal cortex, the area which controls consciousness.

Within two hours of receiving one 'zap', two of the patients showed signs of responsiveness by moving parts of their bodies.

Wanting to test it further, the team then started a second trial with 16 new brain damaged patients, who had not been able to communicate for at least three months.

They stimulated half of the patients' brains for 20 minutes a day, five days in a row. The other half were given a 'dummy' treatment - stimulation at such a low frequency that it had no effect.

By the end of the week, two patients were able to answer questions by moving parts of their bodies. Another nine showed signs of awareness, while the group without brain stimulation saw no changes.

Dr Thibaut told the New Scientist that they are pushing ahead with tests - but cautiously, given the lack of research on the long-term repercussions.

'You can find similar devices online, but we don't know the long-term effects yet,' she says.

'We need to see what happens when we use it for perhaps five hours a day, or what happens if we apply it daily for three months. We need to be really careful.'

It is not yet known whether the electrical currents, when applied to the scalp, reach further than the parts of the brain being targeted.

If the currents do reach further they may alter brain functions that did not need to be changed.

'We don't know how the stimulation of one brain region affects the surrounding, unstimulated regions,' Roy Hamilton, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Neurology and director of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation at University of Pennsylvania told Daily Mail Online last year.

'Stimulating one region could improve one's ability to perform one task but hurt the ability to perform another.'

In addition, what a conscious person is doing during tDCS - reading a book, watching TV, sleeping - can change its effects. Which activity is best to achieve a certain change in brain function is not yet known.

Professionals have not performed tDCS at the frequency levels some home users experiment with, such as stimulating daily for months or longer.

Small changes in the devices settings, including the current amplitude, length of stimulation and placement of electrodes can have unexpected effects.

Up to 30 percent of experimental subjects respond with radically different changes in brain activity to the majority.

Factors such as gender, handedness, hormones, medication, etc. could impact and potentially reverse a given tDCS effect.

Most research is conducted for the purpose of treating disease, with the goal of alleviating symptoms, with a detailed disclosure or risks as required of studies of human research subjects.

The level of risk is quite different for healthy subjects performing tDCS at home.
Just looking at pictures of striped objects such as zebras or deckchairs can trigger migraines and epileptic seizures in sensitive people, it was reported last week.

Researchers at the University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands suggest that the sharp contrast between stripes causes overactivity in the brain that triggers the symptoms.

But this isnt the only type of picture that can cause a physical reaction in the body  as these images show.

Ouch! we feel others' pain

Most of us feel sad if we see someone in pain, but in a 2009 study at the University of Birmingham 29 per cent of people felt physical symptoms such as tingling, stabbing, throbbing or aching in the same place the one in the image was hurt.

The studys author psychologist, Dr Stuart Derbyshire, says that several possible explanations include the idea that in almost everyone, when observing another persons injury, we activated the emotional areas of the brain, and if this emotional activity is intense enough, it can drive activity in sensory areas that lead to pain.

Don't peek at this if you're breastfeeding

Breastfeeding women can find their breasts leak milk when they look at a picture of a newborn.

For most women it would need to be a picture of their baby, but it can be stimulated by an image of any baby, says independent antenatal educator Bridget Supple.

The reaction, known as let-down response, occurs because the sight of the infant triggers the release of the bonding hormone oxytocin from the brain  the same hormone that releases milk for breastfeeding.

Supple says applying gentle pressure on the breasts, such as crossing your arms across your chest, can stop it.

Phantom allergies

Just seeing a picture of an allergen  such as dust, pollen or cat fur  has been shown to trigger asthma symptoms in people whose attacks are caused by allergies.

In a trial published in the Journal of Asthma in 2012, 19 asthmatics were asked to view 30 pictures depicting common allergens, then 30 pictures of neutral images such as faces.

They didnt know what was being tested, but were asked to report any allergy symptoms such as wheezing or tightness in the chest. Symptoms increased by 15 per cent when they were shown the allergic pictures, but nothing happened with neutral ones. The researchers suggested asthma patients learn to expect symptoms when they see something they are allergic to  and in this case their body made that happen.

Scratching's so catching!

An image of someone scratching, or of fingernail marks on the skin, or of something that triggers an itch, for instance head lice, can prime our body to notice the itchy signals that happen all the time on our skin but that the brain would mostly ignore.

This stimulus makes you likely to scratch, too.

And its not just psychological: U.S. scientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis recently discovered that the sight of someone else scratching actually causes the release of a chemical in the brain that communicates itch signals from the skin to the spinal cord.

Where you scratch in response to an image depends on the health of your own skin  people with skin conditions such as dermatitis scratch in different places from the person theyre watching, while those with healthy skin scratch in the same place as that person.

Are you feeling giddy?

This type of picture can trigger feelings of dizziness or a swimming head in people who are afraid of heights.

With any fear, we are hyper-vigilant to it and magnify the response as a type of survival mechanism  this can cause physical symptoms, says physiotherapist Steven Hodgson, from the Sheffield Vertigo and Balance Centre.

Pictures of complicated patterns such as zigzags or herringbone check can also cause dizziness in those whose balance is compromised by a problem such as an inner ear infection, or an ear disorder such as Menieres disease.

When we struggle with balance, we rely more heavily on information from the eyes to determine our position in a space, but busy patterns overload the brain.

We all join in a yawn - because it's cool

Yawning is also emotionally catching and 40-50 per cent of us yawn when seeing an image of someone else doing so.

A growing body of literature shows that yawning cools the brain, which stimulates arousal, and the spreading of this behaviour could promote collective vigilance in a group, says psychologist Professor Andrew Gallup, an expert on contagious yawning based at the State University of New York at Oneonta.

Keeping everyone awake at the same time would have been useful when hunting in tribes.

Brr! pass me my jumper

If youre feeling the need to get a jumper right now, youre experiencing what scientists at the University of Sussex recently named temperature contagion.

Neuroscientist Dr Neil Harrison found that when people looked at pictures of others holding their hand in ice water, their own body temperature fell slightly. This is possibly because much of human success comes from our ability to work together in complex communities  this would be hard to do it we were not able to rapidly empathise with each other to predict anothers thoughts, feeling and motivations, he told Good Health.

Exactly how that ends up as a drop in your own body temperature is not clear  but higher brain areas like the cortex can regulate the temperature to some degree and we believe thats whats at work here, he says.

Warmth doesnt seem to be as catching, according to Dr Harrisons research.

Keep calm and watch a tree

Do YOU feel calmer gazing at all that greenery?

Possibly thats because your heart rate is slowing.

Studies have shown that spending time in nature can lower heart rate and also raise activity in the para- sympathetic nervous system which calms the body  and you get similar effects looking at pictures of plants.

In a study that was published in 2012, researchers at VU University in Amsterdam found that people in hospital waiting rooms with pictures of nature on the walls felt less anxious than those in rooms that were bare.

Researchers in South Koreas Chungnam National University have also found that looking out of windows and seeing trees improves mental health.

One theory is that the greenness causes a reaction in the brain that lowers activity in areas controlling fear, such as the amygdala.

This allows the system that calms us to take over.

Crumpets mean a hole lot of anguish

When some people look at pictures of things with holes, such as the end of a watering can or lotus seed plants, it triggers a feeling of unease or anxiety. Others get tingles down their spine; a few even start to feel physically sick.

This is known as trypophobia, or fear of holes. Its thought as many as 10 per cent of the population feels unease seeing such pictures.

Were not sure why it occurs, but these type of images cant be easily processed by the brain, explains psychologist Arnold Wilkins, professor emeritus at the University of Essex.

He adds that the holes may also share the spatial characteristics of the markings of dangerous animals like certain poisonous snakes or frogs, so it might be that we see them as threatening or disgusting as an evolutionary hangover.
For me, the best part of a busy day was always the end of it  the chance to place my head on a pillow and dream of Daniel Craig.

But five months ago, sleep became a far less enjoyable experience. I began to feel an intense burning pain on the outside curve of the upper edge of my right ear. This was followed by a tiny blister, which over a number of weeks grew to 7mm.

It was exquisitely painful for something so small: the heat of a hairdryer felt like my ear was being barbecued.

Karen began suffering pain in her ear five months ago (stock image)

The pain was particularly bad when I put any pressure on my ear. As I have mild scoliosis  a slight bend in my spine  I am only able to sleep on my right side, which meant there was no respite for my ear at night.

I tried pushing two pillows together with my ear in the crevice between them, but during the night my head would sleepily search for the pillow, causing me to wake up in agony.

I went to my GP, who prescribed a steroid cream and said to come back if things didnt improve.

The cream was of no help and I resorted to herbal sleeping tablets. But the pain was greater than any tablet could cope with, and I started to feel faint with the lack of sleep.

At my wits end, I returned to my GP. As the sore had not healed, he felt a specialist should take a look because he couldnt be sure it wasnt skin cancer. His words terrified me.

Back home, I did what many of us do in that situation: I turned to Dr Google. My screen was soon filled with images of skin cancers. Basal cell carcinoma  with its waxy, speckled appearance  looked suspiciously like my own lesion.

Although this form of skin cancer doesnt tend to spread to other parts of the body, it can burrow deep into the skin, causing damage that way.

I read that around 5 per cent of skin cancers are found on the ear, and I spent the next few weeks in a state of anxiety. By now, it wasnt just the pain that was interfering with my sleep, but the worry, too.

Five weeks later, I had an appointment with a dermatologist at my local hospital. She made me lie down and carried out cryotherapy on my ear, freezing it with liquid nitrogen so she could take a sample of the tissue from the lesion for testing.

Thankfully, she was smiling when I went to get the results. Good news, Karen  its not cancer, she said.

It was, she told me, a chondrodermatitis nodularis helicis  a benign, albeit painful, nodule of the ear. Apparently, its a common condition, typically seen in men over the age of 40.

Karen was told she had a chondrodermatitis nodularis helicis  a benign, albeit painful, nodule of the ear (stock image)

Walayat Hussain, a consultant dermatological surgeon at Leeds Hospitals NHS Teaching Trust and a member of the British Association of Dermatologists, explains: It results in an exquisitely tender lump on the curved outer part of the ear which contains cartilage. It may only be a few millimetres across, and there is often a central core which may discharge a small amount of scaly material or create a shallow ulcer.

Pain is caused by the lesion pressing on nerves next to the cartilage.

Although the exact cause is not known, repeated frictional pressure on the ear seems to be implicated, as it commonly occurs in people who sleep predominantly on one side, adds Mr Hussain.

It can also be triggered by minor trauma, such as tight headgear or a telephone headset, or by exposure to cold. Reduction in the local blood supply of the ear by being exposed to persistent cold weather or with ageing prevents adequate healing.

Sunburn to the ear can also aggravate the condition.

Chondrodermatitis can persist for months, or even years. Treatment may include steroid creams to settle the inflammation, but if the condition does not ease, then a relatively simple procedure under local anaesthetic can remove the lesion and smooth out the surrounding cartilage, says Mr Hussain.

There are some simple measures you can take to ease the pain. Using a softer pillow may help. Mr Hussain also suggests making an ear protector to wear at night, by cutting a hole in a sponge and holding it in place with a headband, or making a hole in your pillow to reduce pressure on the ear.

Nneka Eze, an ear, nose and throat consultant based in Harley Street and St Georges NHS Healthcare Trust in London, says the simplest and most effective way to avoid this problem is to alternate sides when sleeping  but because of my spinal condition I couldnt do that.

So I typed pillow with a hole into Google  and up came a firm that makes exactly that (thepillowwith ahole.co.uk). It has a square hole in the middle for people with chondrodermatitis or similar ear lesions.

Reviews seemed positive so I bought one for 40. You place it over your usual pillow and position your ear in the hole so theres no pressure on it.

I also made a list of other things I stress my ear with  pressing my phone against my ear, wearing a tight headband to keep my hair back during yoga, and listening to Nirvana on headphones  and made adjustments to all of these things to keep further sores at bay.

Thankfully, the pillow worked a treat. After just three weeks, my ear was totally free of the sore  and Im once again enjoying undisturbed sleep and dreams of Daniel Craig.
Sharma (above) said he was threatened after he did not permit an illegal demolition

The Aam Aadmi Party government is under a cloud again. An India Today investigation has uncovered how people close to ruling dispensation in the Delhi government arm-twisted state department officials to secure projects and procure favours.

AAP officials denied any involvement in the alleged wrongdoings and promised to give up public life if the charges were proved.

The investigation, third in a series titled AAP Ka Scam, brings to focus an engineer of Delhi's Public Works Department who was allegedly pressurised, threatened and ultimately transferred, for what he claims his refusal to bend to the will of his seniors or political leaders.

Dinesh Sharma, an assistant engineer in the Public Works Department of Delhi, has accused Vinay Kumar of threatening and intimidating him over a drain project in Delhi's Mundka.

Vinay is the son of chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's deceased brother-in-law Surendra Bansal, who ran Renu Constructions.

Sharma claimed that on April 3 last year, he spotted three men demolishing a PWD drain in Mundka.

When he objected to it, he 'received a call from a person who introduced himself as Vinay Kumar from Renu Constructions and threatened to take his life if he intervened again'.

'Do you know who my mausa (uncle) is?' was the warning allegedly issued to Sharma, who reported the matter to seniors and filed a complaint.

Kejriwal under pressure: AAP officials denied any involvement in the alleged wrongdoings

He was transferred soon after.

What the engineer had discovered is an oft-practised method by dubious contractors - to demolish a perfectly good structure and get paid by the department to rebuild it.

This is done to compensate for unrealistic bids submitted to get public works tenders, often with the collusion of government officials.

Sharma said the firm behind the project was Renu Constructions. 'Renu Constructions had bid at very low rates - at just 42% of the minimum amount.

'Such low rates were not viable economically. The firm could not begin work while I was there as I demanded the work be done properly,' he said.

'My immediate senior asked the contractor to demolish the structure on a Sunday, the day I would not be on duty. However, I got to know about it and reached the spot to stop the illegal demolition,' Sharma said.

Sharma said when there was no action on his complaint in the department, he approached police against intimidation. 'Still, there was no action. Next, I wrote to ACP, Nangloi.'

Faced with an officer who wouldn't fall in line, the department decided to transfer him.

'It was in the end of April or the first week of May that my transfer file was sent to the secretariat,' says Sharma.

'On May 6, I left for America to visit my daughter. It was in my absence that I was transferred on May 10. I was relieved while I was on leave till May 22.'

The officer was relieved from his duties in Delhi PWD and sent to his original cadre in CPWD, all for, what he claims, standing up to the nephew of Arvind Kejriwal.

The issue has been picked by the Opposition to target AAP. Kapil Mishra, the sacked minister, told India Today TV that Bansal would be regularly seen in government meetings at the secretariat.

While Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia evaded questions posed by India Today all weekend, AAP leaders have strongly denied their involvement in the case.

'If you ever produce an iota of evidence that Arvind Kejriwal ever exercised even half an inch of his influence to favour any company, we will all give up public life,' said party leader Ashish Khetan.
High Court judge Justice Chinnaswamy Swaminathan Karnan in 2004

Previously I thought that the Supreme Court exceeded its jurisdiction in its dealing with Justice Karnan. Now, I argue that Karnan should not be sent to jail for six months and the SC should not have gagged the press from reporting anything Karnan said.

Karnan, a dalit judge, was duly appointed a judge of the Madras High Court on March 31, 2009. He was the senior most of 13 judges appointed on that date.

He came from the Bar and performed before the recommending judges. His appointment raised no eyebrows.

The then Chief Justice, KG Balakrishnan, has declared amnesia over the appointment.

Test of sanity

In recent years, Karnan indulged in 'conduct unbecoming', was transferred to the Calcutta High Court in 2016 where his odd behaviour continued.

No one thought of impeachment proceedings, which is only the prescribed way to remove HC and SC judges.

Instead, seven senior judges of the SC decided stripped him of all work, summoned him and then punished him. What an embarrassment! What an expensive farce!

The SC thought he was insane and ordered him to be medically examined. Which self-consciously 'sane' person would admit to such a procedure? Karnan refused. Karnan had not pleaded insanity.

The SC in fact pleaded insanity on his behalf. Had the SC already come to the conclusion that Karnan was insane?

Karnan talks with teams of doctors from a hospital at his residence in Kolkata

The Court should have declared him mentally unstable to do work and reaffirmed its earlier order depriving him of work.

Of course, this is assuming the Supreme Court had the power to virtually 'remove' him from office (which it didn't) or punish him (which also in my view it didn't).

The drama was too intense for the SC. Karnan had to be made an example of.

Now all HC or retired SC judges remain in fear lest a Chief Justice and senior colleagues of the Supreme Court found their conduct reprehensible.

Though Karnan had behaved abominably, the SC violated many procedures to make an example of him. What does this do for the independence of High Court judges? Or for judicial federalism?

District judges are better treated.

Karnan will retire from the judiciary from June 12 and be incarcerated till November 12. Karnan has disappeared pleading for lesser punishment.

The SC Court added: 'Since the incident of contempt includes public statements and publication of orders made by the contemnor, which were highlighted by the electronic and print media, we are of the view, that no further statements made by him should be published hereafter. Ordered accordingly.'

This is against the SC's own law.

Karnan will retire from the judiciary from June 12 and be incarcerated till November 12. Karnan has disappeared pleading for lesser punishment

Dangerous precedent

The Supreme Court faced a great dilemma in Gopalan's case (1950) whether a person deprived of life and liberty by law under Article 21 conceivably forfeited his right to movement, free speech, property, right to business.

The answer was convenient but not fulfiling. In the Prabhakar case (1965), Subba Rao J for five judges refused to accept a detainee lost his right to send a manuscript of his book 'Anucha Antargat' (Inside the Atom) to a publisher.

In Prabha Dutt (1982) the Court ruled that a journalist had a controlled right to interview a convicted prisoner in jail. This was affirmed in the Sheela Barse (1987) and Charulata Joshi (1999) cases.

In the famed Auto Shankar case (1994), Justice Jeevan Reddy made it clear that Auto Shankar convicted of six murders and on death row had every right to send his memoirs to a printer without fear of civil defamation from the police officers he criticized.

The decisions are clear: journalists can, within limits, interview pre-trial prisoners, detainees and convicts. Prisoners in jail could write works and have every right to publish them even if about their incarceration.

Did not Nehru write his Glimpses of World History for Indira in prison? Recently on May 12, 2017, it was reported that Abdul Wahid Shaikh, later acquitted of the Bombay Blasts, has written of his prison experience.

Gag order

There is another aspect to this. There used to be an American doctrine based on an 1879 case that a criminal 'not only forfeited his liberty but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being a slave of the state.'

In Sunil Batra's case (1978) Krishna Iyer blasted this doctrine to smithereens to prevent a death penalty prisoner being kept solitary confinement.

He went further to say humanity demanded that a 'convict was a guest in custody... until the terrestrial farewell whisks him away'.

In legal terms prison may deprive a person of movement, but not his humanity or personal rights including free speech.

Apply this to Karnan's case. Can he write his memoirs and send them to a publisher? Can he communicate with his family and ask them to inform the press of his terrible incarceration? Can a blanket order prevent the press from seeing him in jail?

The Karnan order defies everything the Supreme Court has stood for in its prison and free speech jurisprudence.

Was it protecting itself from Karnan's future, even if sober or even repentant, comments? Explanatory reasons are to follow. The punishment is too harsh. The censorship of the press unprecedented.
The first stop on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's tour of India on Monday was an IT facility set to help Ramallah build a similarly high-end tech hub.

While issues like the Middle East peace process will be the subject of talks between PM Narendra Modi and Abbas during his three day visit - links between the two countries in the tech sector are also top of the agenda.

Abbas, who touched down in India on Sunday, first visited the technology institute outside Delhi is where India is lending its IT know-how to help Palestine spur job creation in the tech sector.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (R) listens to a speech by Indian Junior Minister for Electronics and Information Technology P.P Chaudhary (L) during his visit to the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Noida

India agreed in October to spend $12 million financing a new IT hub in Ramallah in a sign of India's 'strong commitment to support (the) Palestinian cause', the foreign ministry said at the time.

Abbas and his delegation spent nearly two hours touring the Centre for Development of Advance Computing. The Palestinian leader will this evening attend a function at the India Islamic Cultural Centre in New Delhi.

Abbas will on Tuesday be formally welcomed at the presidential palace before meeting Modi, Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj.

On Tuesday Abbas will be formally welcomed at the presidential palace before meeting Modi (pictured), Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj

New Delhi is hosting Abbas ahead of Modi's visit to Israel in July - the first by an Indian prime minister.

India has traditionally voiced its support for Palestinian statehood, initially shunning diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

The frost has thawed, however, with India - the world's biggest arms importer - increasingly seeking closer defense ties with Israel, a top weapons exporter.
President Donald Trumps son Barron will be moving to Washington soon. And next school year, hell attend St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, Md., said a spokeswoman for Melania Trump, the first lady.

The school, which was founded in 1978, is in an upscale suburb a little over 20 miles from the White House. It offers preschool through 12th grade classes, which means Barron could technically graduate from the school, if his family stays in Washington that long. (Barron, 11, currently attends the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan. He remained in New York City to finish out the school year there.)

St. Andrews has about 580 students, according to its website, making it a medium- to large-sized private school for the area. The student-teacher ratio is 7-to-1, a lot lower than the national average of 16.1-to-1 in 2013, according to the National Center for Education Statistics . And tuition at St. Andrews runs from $23,490 for prekindergarten to $40,650 for high school . (For more on the cost of private schools as it relates to recent presidents, go here .)

Back in January, Leigh Anne Cahill, an educational consultant in Washington, suggested to Education Week that St. Andrews might be the pick.

So why does she think the Trumps went with St. Andrews? Its a great school, Cahill said. The school is affiliated with the Episcopal Church and does have that spiritual component, but its not overly religious.

And the school is known for its high-quality teacher training, Cahill said, which is informed by brain science. For instance, the teachers at the school are trained in the All Kinds of Minds program, which aims to use brain research to tailor instruction to different types of learners. (More on the schools connection to All Kinds of Minds here .)

The schools website touts St. Andrews connection to Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the brain research team at Johns Hopkins University, as well as its Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, which helps tailor instruction to students learning needs.

First lady Melania Trump said in a statement to the Associated Press that she picked the school because it is known for its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence. The mission of St. Andrews is to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning, and service, all of which appealed to our family.

Fun fact: Barron will be the first first kid in decades to attend a school other than the Sidwell Friends, Chelsea Clintons alma mater, and the school that both Obama girls attended. (Sasha Obama is still there, but Malia graduated last year and is planning to enroll in Harvard University.) President Jimmy Carters daughter Amy was the last first child to attend public school while living in the White House.

Most folks in the Washington private school community expected the Trumps to look outside of Sidwell Friends, in part because its so closely associated with recent Democratic presidents. And St. Albans School, Vice President Al Gores sons alma mater, was also considered out of the running. So was Georgetown Day School, which is known for its progressive curriculum.

So is it a good or a bad thing to be the school that the presidents child attends?

I would think its completely a double-edged sword, Cahill said. On the one hand, the school gets national attention. On the other, theres going to be a lot of media and political interference with this little guy.

Other parents are likely to consider Barrons presence as either a plus or minus. Youre probably going to have [some] applicants who want to go there because the presidents child is there and other parents who run away screaming, she said.

And then, of course, any school in which a presidential child enrolls has to begin thinking very seriously about security concerns, said Dick Jung, the director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington, of which St. Andrews is a member.

On the plus side, the school can get some pretty cool items for its gala auction, he said. Sidwell Friends, for example, got a signed copy of one of President Barack Obamas State of the Union addresses.

St. Andrews is already reaching out to parents who may have questions or concerns about Barrons presence on campus.

Some parents have reached out to us with questions and comments about how day-to-day life at St. Andrews might be affected, wrote Robert Kosasky, the head of school, and Rodney Glasgow, the head of the middle school, in a May 15 message to parents. We want to assure you that our community was at the center of our discernment process. School leaders are working directly with the Secret Service to ensure that Postoak Campus logistics and security will continue to work smoothly and discreetly next year for all of our students and families. We are committed to maintaining the positive feel, flow, and safety of our campuses.

And they are excited to have Barron join the community. As we came to know Barron through the admission process, it became clear that he, like all of our newly enrolled students, will be a great addition to St. Andrews, they wrote.

Photo: President Donald Trump, accompanied by first Lady Melania Trump, introduces their son Barron Trump from the Truman Balcony of the White House during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn last month. Susan Walsh/AP

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship project, the Namami Gange programme, will benefit from the change in political leadership in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where BJP recorded a massive win in recent state elections.

This is clear from the formation of long impending State Ganga Rejuvenation, Protection and Management Committees in three out of five Ganga main stem states - Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand (all BJP-ruled) - after recent Assembly elections.

A senior Water Ministry official said these committees were to be constituted immediately after NMCG was elevated to the status of an authority, but because of non-BJP government in all five Ganga basin main-stem states (except Jharkhand) the process was delayed owning to political differences.

Impending State Ganga Rejuvenation, Protection and Management Committees in three out of five main stem states, UP, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand, have been notified for fast implementation of the project

While UP was ruled by Samajwadi Party, there was a Congress government in Uttarakhand.

'Within days of the new government's take over in UP and Uttarakhand, State Ganga Committees in three states were notified for swift implementation of Namami Gange programme,' the senior water ministry official said.

The Ganges River The Ganges River is a trans-boundary river which flows through the nations of India and Bangladesh. The 1,569 mile river rises in the western Himalayas, and flows south and east through the Gangetic Plain of North India into Bangladesh, where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. In late May or early June every year, Hindus celebrate the 'avatarana' or descent of the Ganga from heaven to earth. Being a holy river, recognised in Hindu literature featuring in the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, many believe that the river's water can cleanse people of sin. Many people still drink the water believing it to be a healing elixir. Although over 400 million people live along the river, it is used extensively as a toilet, and for dumping household and industrial waste. The Ganga Action Plan began in 1985 as a huge effort to completely clean up the world's most polluted river. Advertisement

'These committees are still to be constituted in West Bengal and Bihar. It is being delayed as the governments there, especially in West Bengal, are not sending their recommendations and nominations for State Ganga Committees,' the official added.

According to the officials, along with the state committees, district committees will be formed that will be setup in all the districts where the river flows.

The main objective of these committees will be to streamline the work and fund along with execution on ground.

'Formation of these committees is vital as it will speed up the work at the local level. They will draw plan and channelise funds for each projects. Along with it they will supervise and monitor work at the grassroot level,' said a senior officer.

The officer added that the state and district committees will also communicate with local bodies in speeding up execution of work.

With the formation of these committees in three states, the clean Ganga project is expected to pick up pace.

'Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand are the two most crucial states as far as cleaning Ganga is concerned, as the river traverses more than 1000 kilometers in Uttar Pradesh and close to 500 kilometers in Uttarakhand.

'Besides, the pollution-free upper Himalayan reaches are very important for smooth flow of the river,' said a senior police officer.

He added: 'Uttar Pradesh government has already started sending positive signals, with UP CM Yogi Adityanath in favour of shifting tanneries in Kanpur, which are the major source of pollution.'

Giving an overview of Namami Gange's progress, senior ministry officer said, '63 sewerage management projects are under implementation in the five states with another 12 to be launched in the states.

'28 riverfront development projects and 33 entry-level projects for construction, modernisation and renovation of 182 Ghats and 118 crematoria have been initiated.

The 1,569 mile-long river rises in the western Himalayas and empties into the Bay of Bengal

'Cleaning of river surface for collection of floating solid waste from the surface of the ghats and river and its disposal are afoot and pushed into service at 11 locations,' the officer said.

He added: 'Real Time Effluent Monitoring Stations (EMS) has been installed in 572 out of 760 Grossly Polluting Industries (GPIs).'

Reports also say the Namami Gange programme is being directly watched by the PMO, which has taken strict note of delay in implementation of projects and are in fact monitoring the programme for better results.
A dog brutally attacked with acid and left for dead has made a remarkable recovery after six months at an animal rescue charity which feared she may not pull through.

Honey was found curled up behind a motorcycle and licking her horrific wound by Animal Aid Unlimited in Rajasthan, India, with a group of onlookers crowded round.

The third degree chemical burns had melted away a huge bit of skin on her back down to her muscle, and the rescue team weren't sure if the skin could heal.

Scroll down for video

Honey the dog was left for dead after being doused in acid in Rajasthan but was rescued by Animal Aid Unlimited which was called to help the stricken hound

Almost half the skin on the poor dog's back was melted right down to the muscle

'We will never know how someone could be so evil. But we did know that from this day on she would never be hurt again,' said a spokesperson for the charity.

'With almost half the skin on her back burned off we didn't know how she could heal, but we were determined to save her.'

But a video documenting Honey's heartbreaking story, which has had nearly 300,000 views on Facebook, shows the stricken hound's rescue and recovery back at Animal Aid Unlimited's sanctuary and treatment centre in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

The team wasn't sure if her body could heal but they started treating her right away

Each day they applied ointment, applied cling film to the wound and then covered it in bandage to protect it

Honey on her second day at Animal Aid Unlimited's sanctuary in Udaipur

When she first arrived at the centre six months ago, she had to be sedated while the team cleansed her horrific injuries and washed all traces of the acid away.

Each day they covered her in ointment and wrapped her torso in clingfilm, and then a bandage, to protect the huge burn and help it heal.

Throughout her treatment, she remained calm, still and patient - happily letting the Animal Aid Unlimited team tend to her injury.

One month on, Honey's skin had begun responding to treatment and the team began using honey on her wound to speed up the process - and one which inspired her name

Again, the wound was dressed in cling film and bandage to allow it to heal

But six months on Honey is unrecognisable; her wound has healed completely and the fur over it has even grown back

'We can't imagine anyone being so cruel to such a loving and sweet girl,' the spokesperson said.

The video then shows Honey one month after her rescue - while the wound was red raw, some skin had started to grow back. The team then started using Honey on the burn to speed up the healing.

And six months later, the skin had reformed and her fur had even grown back.

The spokesperson said: 'After this vicious attack almost killed her, it took six months for her wound to heal. We didn't know if her spirit could ever recover. But that's when love's immense power stepped in.'

Although there are still visible scars of her injuries, Honey can be seen bounding around the sanctuary and leaping into the arms of the care team

She is one of thousands of animals rescued from India's streets every year by the charity

Honey can now be seen happily bounding around the sanctuary, which is home to hundreds of rescued street dogs.

The video shows her leaping into the arms of her carers and also snuggling up for some down time beside her four-legged friends.

'We worried that such cruelty might have permanently hurt her soul. But watch how Honey responded to love,' the spokesperson added.

The video of Honey's remarkable six month recovery has been viewed nearly 300,000 times

Honey has also made four-legged friends and can be seen cosying up to one of them

Animal Aid Unlimited - set up by Erika, Jim and Claire Abrams-Myers 15 years ago after the family relocated to India from Seattle - rescues thousands of animals from India's streets every year.

About 50 dogs, 30 cows, 25 donkeys and five pigs who cannot be returned to the street now live at its sanctuary where it also cares for some 200 animals under treatment for injuries and illnesses at any one time.

The charity also runs education programmes to prevent suffering among animals.

Donate to the charity here.
Who runs the government of Bihar?

When a purported telephone conversation between RJD chief Lalu Prasad and Siwan don Mohammed Shahabuddin surfaced and sparked off a furore last week, the interpretations arrived on mass.

The first and foremost was how Lalu Prasad, being the boss of the single largest party in the Bihar ruling alliance, now has the Nitish government wrapped around his little finger.

When a purported telephone conversation between RJD chief Lalu Prasad and Siwan don Mohammed Shahabuddin (pictured) surfaced and sparked off a furore last week, the interpretations arrived on mass

But spare a thought for the ground realities. Notwithstanding Shahabuddin's utter dislike for Saurabh Kumar Shah, Nitish Kumar has refused to remove the 2009 batch IPS officer.

Shah has continued as Superintendent of Police in Siwan, a post he took charge of on August 3, 2015. In the leaked audio clip, Shahabuddin, a former four-time Lok Sabha member from Siwan, is heard telling Lalu Prasad that the Siwan police would trigger 'communal violence' and asked the RJD boss to get the SP removed.

The conversation was purportedly recorded on April 15, 2016, which is more than a year back, but the no-nonsense SP has stayed put in the district.

Lalu Prasad Yadav (left) and Nitish Kumar (right)

Shahabuddin was on that date lodged in Siwan Jail, serving out terms in several cases. The don has since been shifted to Tihar Jail in Delhi on the orders of the Supreme Court.

Clearly while the BJP has accused Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar of acting under pressure from Lalu Prasad, the fact suggests to the contrary.

Shahabuddin may still have Lalu's ears - and sympathy too - besides being a member of the RJD's national executive, but his dislike for Siwan's Superintendent of Police has failed to cut any ice with the CM, who holds the crucial portfolios of Home and General Administration in his government.

If nothing else, it clearly underlines the fact that Nitish Kumar does not buckle under pressure and that the don's diktats are no longer obeyed by the state government.

Does Lalu Prasad have the Nitish (pictured) government wrapped around his little finger?

Not only the SP, the Nitish government has even left the Block Development Officer untouched.

The don in the leaked tape has been heard telling a supporter that he will cut a block development officer to size for impounding a vehicle owned by an aide of the don.

The only disturbing question perhaps left unaddressed in this episode appears to be the absence of an official action against the RJD chief for talking to a convicted criminal in jail.

Neither Lalu Prasad nor anyone close to Shahabuddin has rejected the leaked tape.

Their studied silence on the issue is being considered their acceptance of the fact that the voices heard on the tape were indeed theirs.

In Patna, former deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi, who has made a series of allegations of corruption against Lalu and his family over the past few weeks, said a criminal case should be started against the RJD boss.

'Lalu has maintained constant contact with the jailed criminal. He has been patronising Shahabuddin, which is offence, and Lalu did both. The Nitish Kumar government should register an FIR against him and take strict action,' Sushil Modi said.

Mohammad Shahabuddin is a criminal turned politician. He was elected four times as a Member of Parliament from Siwan, Bihar, with the Rashtriya Janata Dal party of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and 2-times as MLA, to the Bihar Vidhan Sabha

A senior JD(U) leader, however, has a simple matter-of-fact political explanation to the vexed legal aspect.

'From challenging Shahabuddin's bail that sent him back to jail to transferring him to Tihar Jail much to the dislike of the dreaded don, Nitish Kumar has shown enough steel in his governance.

'But it will be a little too much to expect the government to institute a case against Lalu Prasad for patronising the criminals. It can bring down the grand alliance government,' he said.

'You only get the government you deserve,' another JD(U) leader explained.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar addresses a press conference along with Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav at the CM Secretariat in Patna on Monday

'Nitish Kumar broke ranks with the BJP in 2013 and contested the 2014 Lok Sabha polls alone, but the people of Bihar then backed Narendra Modi, whose government they had not experienced, instead of backing Nitish Kumar, who had delivered good governance in Bihar.

'Had people of Bihar then chosen Nitish over everyone then, he would not have been forced to stitch an alliance with Lalu.

'While Nitish will do everything to keep his government clean and upright one has to bear Lalu's limited say in the government.' That's the bottom line.
Superstar Rajinikanth on Monday said he has no political aspirations but will consider taking that path 'if it's God's will'.

He also said if he enters politics, he will be truthful and won't entertain people who want to make money.

'God decides what we have to do in life. Right now, he wants me to be an actor and I'm fulfilling my responsibility. God willing, I will enter politics tomorrow.

The film made the remarks at a fan event in Raghavendra Mandapam in Chennai on Monday

'If I enter, I will be very truthful and will not entertain people who are in this to make money. I won't work with such people,' Rajinikanth told his fans in Chennai.

The 66-year-old star described his brief stint in politics two decades ago as a 'political accident'.

In 1996, during Tamil Nadu Assembly election campaign, he had denounced the late J Jayalalithaa and her politics. His strong remarks are believed to have caused her defeat.

During his first foray into politics 21 years ago, Rajinikanth denounced the late J Jayalalithaa and her politics

'I did a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years ago. It was a political accident. Since then, politicians have misused my name on several occasions. But I have to clarify, I'm not joining any party,' he added.

The Tamil superstar said some parties have claimed his support for votes.

'They have associated my name with politics and some parties drag my name with money too. Some parties, for votes, even claimed I have supported them. That's why I have clarified that I don't support anyone. And nobody has my backing,' he said.

Rajinikanth made the statements at a meeting with fans he held after a gap of eight years at Raghavendra Mandapam in Chennai on Monday.

Nearly a thousand fans from across Tamil Nadu came to meet their icon, who also took pictures with Rajinikanth individually.

He also confirmed he will commence shooting for his next yet-untitled Tamil project with director Pa Ranjith from May 28.

He was accompanied by Tamil director SP Muthuraman at the meeting.
The battle between expelled AAP minister Kapil Mishra and party supremo Arvind Kejriwal has been heating up for quite some time.

And now Kejriwal's wife, Sunita, started a fresh altercation on Twitter and slammed Kapil Mishra for his allegations against Kejriwal.

'Law of nature never errs. Seeds of deceit, lies sown, so shall he @KapilMishra reap. Inevitable,' former income tax commissioner Sunita Kejriwal tweeted.

Sunita Kejriwal, the wife of the Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal (left) and sacked AAP minister Kapil Mishra after his press conference at his residence on Monday

Mishra, who has been fasting for the last five days and later admitted at RML hospital, was quick to respond to the barb.

'Sunita ji is a very committed wife. She doesn't know what type of conspiracies are being hatched in her house. She is fulfilling her duties,' Mishra wrote.

In another tweet, Mishra wrote 'Sunita ji is unaware of truth. She is upset with her husband's downfall. I respect every negative comment from her side. (But) I will not utter a single word against her.'

Mishra has accused the party of lying to the Election Commission (EC) about donations and money laundering through shell companies.

He also suggested that Kejriwal was using his wife's account to post such messages.

In a series of tweets, Mishra took a jibe at Kejriwal and wrote, 'Sir @ArvindKejriwal return Sunita ji phone to her.'

He has also called Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal corrupt and dared him to quit, failing which he 'would drag him by collar to Delhi's Tihar jail'.

Mishra also suggested that Kejriwal was using his wife's account to post messages

Mishra's mother, Annapurna Mishra, had earlier written a letter to Kejriwal and accused him of spreading 'falsehood' against her son.

Sunita Kejriwal had called Mishra stupid in a tweet last week, without naming him, after the Anti-Corruption Branch registered an FIR against a company that belonged to Kejriwal's late brother-in-law, Surender Bansal, in another scam.

Meanwhile, Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman Tajinder Pal S Bagga alleged that Kejriwal himself tweeted from the Twitter account of his wife to slam sacked Aam Aadmi Party minister Kapil Mishra.
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Travellers who are willing to build a stopover into their flight itinerary can save up to half the price of their air fare, exclusive data by Cheapflights for This is Money and MailOnline has revealed.

The savings made can be enough for a hotel stay in a bonus exotic city, with enough spare for cocktails and dinner.

We were tipped off by readers saying it is often cheaper to fly to split a journey in two. Instead of seeing the stop off as a few lost hours in the vortex of a faceless airport, they stay the night instead as a bonus trip.

Stopover: Either booking a flight with a stopover factored in, or booking two separate return flights, can mean huge savings for travellers

For instance, This is Money was told that rather than flying from London to Las Vegas, it can sometimes be cheaper to book a separate flight to Amsterdam or Paris, and then get a return to the Nevada gambling mecca from either the Dutch or French capital, if you're flexible.

This leaves enough savings for a glamorous stay and roam the charming streets of Paris, or hop on a bicycle in Amsterdam to explore.

We put these claims to global flight search and travel deals website Cheapflights.

Part of the reason is that the trick reduces air passenger duty liability from British airports, it says.

It reduces from 75 per person or 150 per couple (band B  long-haul) to just 13 per person or 26 per couple (band A  short-haul), as long as the traveller spends at least 24 hours in the stopover destination, which many airlines allow you to do.

Large saving: Flying from London to Cape Town, with a night stay in Istanbul, can cut the price of the flight almost in half

It revealed that travellers who are flexible on the route they take to their holiday destination can often save up to 50 per cent on their airfare and enhance their holiday.

For example, a direct flight from London Heathrow to Cape Town costs 2,033 return for two passengers, in the example found by Cheapflights.

But building in a 24-hour stopover in Istanbul for flights on the same date cuts the cost almost in half, leaving plenty of extra cash to enjoy an extravagant blow out in the historic Turkish city.

Other examples include London to Hong Kong, staying in Helsinki, saving 44 per cent on the return flight cost including the cost of a four star hotel; London to Beijing stopping in Warsaw for a 33 per cent saving; and London to New York via Reykjavik for a nine per cent saving.

Layover: There can be some pretty meaty savings by stopping overnight in certain locations to break up the flight (prices based on two people)

The idea of a stopover has been popularised by American chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain in his show 'The Layover' which sees him explore cities in 48 hours and 'Travel Man', starring British comedian Richard Ayoade, which has a similar concept.

Other examples it found were London to Los Angeles, stopping in Amsterdam; London to Rio de Janeiro via New York; London to St Lucia, via Paris and London to Johannesburg, via Abu Dhabi - although these are one-way flights.

Phil Bloomfield, global head of communications for Cheapflights, said: 'There's a whole host of indirect flight options available on long-haul routes, tempting holidaymakers to step beyond the transit area of their "layover" destination and experience a city they might not have otherwise visited.

'Most airlines will allow travellers to spend 24 hours or more in the layover city, at no extra cost, before continuing their onward journey.

'The indirect flights are often significantly cheaper than a non-stop fare, even when you factor in the cost of a hotel stay in the stopover destination. Travellers are essentially getting two holidays for the price of one.'

Fast and furious: Television shows such as Travel Man starring Richard Ayoade (here with actor Paul Rudd) may be encouraging people to factor in short stays

TIPS FOR THE 2-FOR-1 HOLIDAY TRICK

Flying indirect is a great way to bag a bargain flight and enhance your holiday experience. Cheapflights recommends:

FLIGHT TRICKS Have you managed to book cheaper flights using the same tactics? Or do you have any other sneaky tricks to bag rock-bottom flights? Let us know in the comments section below or e-mail: lee.boyce@thisismoney.co.uk

- Do your homework in advance to ensure you are aware of any visas, ESTAs or other documentation that might be required to get through customs and immigration in the stopover city.

- Find out if luggage will be checked all the way through to the final destination or if you need to re-check it in the connecting city.

- To ensure the ticket allows people to leave the transit area of the airport (most do but there are some exceptions)

- Ensure you arrive back at the stopover airport in plenty of time to catch your onward flight.

- Pick a stopover city where the airport is a close train ride into the city centre.

- Have a play around on booking websites such as Cheapflights or Skyscanner to see if the trick works, or pop into a high street agent such as Trailfinders, Flight Centre or STA Travel for advice.
Scamchat? It's feared WhatsApp may be used to facilitate insider trading easier

Banking giants are scrambling to keep track of messages on WhatsApp as concerns grow it could make insider trading easier.

It's feared the mobile phone app and others like it will help rogue staff keep their conversations secret  undermining efforts to clean up the City.

There has been a massive crackdown on illicit behaviour since the Libor scandal, when employees conspired to rig the markets using internet chat groups with names such as 'the Cartel'.

Most large banks record every text, email and phone call made by traders on their work phones and computers.

Many even use 'supercomputers' to scan all this information for swearwords or tell-tale phrases which suggest illegal activity. And from next year, international rules will toughen monitoring requirements even more.

But the rise of encrypted apps makes the process far harder.

Messages are delivered immediately, allowing criminals to cash in on secret knowledge almost straight away, and they are protected from prying eyes by unbreakable codes.

'Everybody wants that trade today  they don't want to wait for it  it has to be instant,' said Oliver Blower of banking surveillance firm VoxSmart.

Messaging apps offer a secure way to share confidential information, whether it is news of a big deal which has yet to be revealed to the market or secret attempts to fix prices.

Although bankers are forbidden from using their personal phones for business, it is still common as this allows conversations to be hidden from prying eyes.

Many staff are given work mobiles which they never use for fear of falling foul of the rules, a process known by compliance staff as 'top drawer-ing'  because the device sits switched off in their top desk drawer.

Instead, they use messaging apps on their own phones to chat about what they're buying and boast of profitable trades.

Bond dealers at one big Wall Street bank used WhatsApp to organise a party after big bets on the Brexit vote paid off, according to Bloomberg.

There are other rumours of a WhatsApp group set up by staff at a large hedge fund to swap market details.

For even more furtive exchanges, traders prefer Signal  which deletes messages within five seconds  and Telegram, which has been used by Islamic State terrorists because of its ultra-high security settings.

A spate of investigations recently has thrust the problem into the limelight.

In December, New York investment manager Navnoor Kang was charged with allegedly accepting 139,000 in bribes from a pair of bond traders in exchange for sending business their way.

His spoils are said to have included a 13,500 watch, sex with prostitutes and cocaine  and it is claimed that the gang used WhatsApp in a bid to avoid detection.

And in the UK, Jeffries trader Christopher Niehaus, 49, was fined 37,000 by the Financial Conduct Authority earlier this year for boasting about deals on the messaging service.

Some lenders are also seeking to regulate WhatsApp itself.

Blower's business has developed a system which will record the app's messages on phones owned by banks.

This was developed last year and he now has half a dozen major clients using it.

Blower said: 'You're starting to see a recognition that this is a problem.'
CNN's Anderson Cooper failed to have a defamation lawsuit claiming he sensationalized a story about dead babies thrown out of court.

The judge argued the Florida doctor who is suing the network showed enough evidence to move forward with his legal battle on April 28.

Last year, Dr. Michael Black filed a 208-page lawsuit against CNN and network host Anderson Cooper and senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, according to documents obtained by DailyMail.com.

CNN's Anderson Cooper attempted to have a defamation lawsuit filed against him, the network and his colleagues dismissed. However, the judge ruled the plaintiff Dr. Michael Black presented enough evidence so the case could move forward

The doctor works at St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Florida and led a pediatric cardiac surgery program at the hospital.

Anderson Cooper 360 ran segments that focused on the program and Dr. Black, which he claimed were fictitious in his defamation suit.

The network published Black's photo and a headline that implied he treated 'babies as sacrificial lambs' and claimed he made a 'total mess with newborn babies.'

Black accused the CNN of 'reckless disregard for the truth' by miscalculating the mortality rate for the program at St. Mary's.

The report claimed the mortality rate of infants who died after heart surgery was 12.5 percent, which is three times the national average.

The doctor said the calculations by CNN were 'fundamentally flawed pseudo-statistical analysis.'

Dr. Michael Black claimed CNN ran purposefully misleading stories claiming the number of babies who died after his heart surgery program was three times the national average. He said the producers knew their calculation was incorrect but ran the story anyways

Black is still a doctor at St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach, but was hit with numerous malpractice lawsuits after the CNN segments aired in 2015

He believes CNN had a preconceived goal in reporting its story, 'to manufacture an outrageous, headline-grabbing story about an incompetent, dishonest and inexperienced doctor leading a surgical program in crisis and recklessly operating on young children to profit at the expense of those children's lives.'

Cooper aired pieces about the hospital on the network. They ran the headline 'Secret Deaths: CNN Finds High Surgical Death Rate for Children at a Florida Hospital.'

The story claimed a total of nine babies died following heart surgery under Black's program.

CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen (pictured), Anderson Cooper and the network demanded the lawsuit be thrown out

However, Black claimed the producers were repeatedly told that the mortality rate they calculated was misleading and the hospital's mortality rate was in line with the national average of 3.3 percent.

The CEO of the medical center allegedly told CNN the percentage they had calculated was inaccurate because it only accounted for a portion of the heart surgeries.

The defendants argued the methodology they used to reach the 12.5 percent mortality rate was their choice and all this was presented to the audience showing how they got their number.

Black described the story as nothing more than a ratings grab about babies with life threatening heart problems that purposely left out his prestigious resume along with his career accomplishments.

The lawsuit seeks damages from CNN,host Anderson Cooper, correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, producer John Bonifield and employee Dana Ford. It also lists alleged source Kelly Robinson whose child went under cardiac surgery with another doctor and survived

For example, Black was the Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Stanfords Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital and is a Fellow of The Royal College of Surgeons of Canada in both general and cardiac surgery.

The television coverage was what reportedly led to the closure of the program. Black still is a doctor at the hospital but he was hit with numerous malpractice lawsuits by the parents of the babies featured in the segment.

Black claims he received death threats as a result of the coverage. One anonymous caller told him he would be 'butchered just like (his) patients.'

Black sued for unspecified damages for the harm to his reputation and livelihood.

Cooper  along with CNN and Elizabeth Cohen  demanded the lawsuit be thrown out of court and denied they defamed the doctor with their coverage.

The judge stated the doctor has provided enough evidence to make an argument that CNN knowingly and misleadingly presented false statistics and acted with actual malice.

DailyMail.com has contacted CNN for comment.
Christopher Delacruz is charged with murder after allegedly shooting a 56-year-old Magnolia man following a road rage incident

Sheriff's officials in Texas say a 21-year-old man is in custody and booked into a county jail for what authorities are calling a road rage slaying of a 56-year-old man.

Montgomery County Sheriff's Lt. Scott Spencer says Christopher Delacruz was detained without incident Saturday night not far from where the body of Jose Augusto Lozada was found on the side of a road in Magnolia, about 20 miles southwest of Conroe, near Houston.

Authorities say Lozada was shot in the head and torso when Delacruz, also from Magnolia, followed him home after a minor collision.

When an argument ensued, Spencer says Delacruz pulled a semi-automatic pistol from his vehicle and began firing.

56-year-old Augusto Lozada was shot in the head and torso and he died at the scene

The 56-year-old was shot in the head and torso and he died at the scene in his own driveway. A GoFundMe page has been set up by the victim's family.

When police were called, the evidence and investigation interviews pointed them to Delacruz as a suspect.

Delacruz was located in his truck near the crime scene waiting inside of his truck. According to police.

He was detained without incident and was charged with murder based on the evidence recovered during the scene investigation.
Support for the Turnbull government has dropped in the wake of last week's Federal Budget but voters have given their seal of approval to the Medicare levy increase and a multi-billion dollar bank tax.

An opinion poll out Monday shows the Coalition trailing the Labor opposition 47 to 53 per cent, a decline of one percentage point on last month.

The Newspoll, published in The Australian, found 45 per cent of voters believed they would be financially worse off as a result of the Budget, the highest number in the past three years.

Support for the Coalition, led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured), has declined in the wake of last week's Federal Budget

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gives Treasurer Scott Morrison a pat on the back after last week's Budget delivery. But 45 per cent of voters believe they will be worse off as a result of the Budget

Only 19 per cent said they would be financially better off.

But the Newspoll also revealed 54 per cent of voters approve of the Medicare levy being raised from 2 to 2.5 per cent, which is expected to rake in an additional $8.2 billion to help pay for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Sixty-eight per cent of voters agreed the new $6.2 billion bank tax was a good thing and 71 per cent said there was no justification for the big banks to pass on the levy to customers.

Despite Treasurer Scott Morrison saying the Budget was 'based on the principles of fairness, security and opportunity', only 39 per cent of voters believed it was 'fairer' than in previous years.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, however, extended his lead over Opposition Leader Bill Shorten as preferred prime minister 44 to 31 per cent in the Newspoll.

Another poll out on Monday, the Fairfax-Ipsos poll, showed the same level of support for the government and Labor, although the Ipsos result was an improvement for the Coalition.

A majority of voters have backed the increase on the Medicare levy from 2 to 2.5 per cent, the latest Newspoll has found (stock image)

Voters have also given the thumbs up to a new $6.2 billion tax on the big banks - 68 per cent agree it is a good thing (stock image)

Health Minister Greg Hunt noted the mixed result, but highlighted voter support for a key measure.

'Most significantly there is very strong support for the NDIS, Medicare levy,' he told ABC radio.

'Australians understand that that's fair.'

Senator Derryn Hinch said: 'It is no surprise that about 70 per cent of people think kicking the banks for $6 billion isn't a bad thing to do.'
Most Americans admit they dont know that much about charter schools and school vouchers, but many support these policies anyway, according to a new survey by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research .

Although earlier surveys have found similar results (heres one I wrote about in 2014 by PDK/Gallup ), these findings are particularly interesting now, given how much attention school choice has received under President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to spend $20 billion on a school choice initiative , while DeVos, best known as a billionaire who has long been an influential philanthropic booster of school choice. Her support for things such as online charter schools and vouchers for private schools helped fuel fierce backlash from Democrats over her nomination, which was among the most contentious of Trumps cabinet nominees. Vice President Mike Pence had to cast a historic tie breaking vote after two Republican Senators joined Democrats to vote against DeVos confirmation.

Ed Week Explainer: What Are School Vouchers and How Do They Work?

Despite that political drama which unfolded in February, and the rapid growth of charter schools and vouchers in some states and cities, 58 percent of respondents to the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Researchs April survey said they have heard little or nothing about charter schools. Sixty-six percent of respondents had heard little to nothing about school vouchers.

Thats pretty remarkable given the growth and high-profile politics around charters, Drew University Education Professor Patrick McGuin told the Associated Press. As much as policymakers are talking the heck about this, the debate really hasnt permeated the general publics discussion yet.

Meanwhile, 47 percent of respondents said they favored the idea of having more charter schools while 43 percent favored the idea of distributing more vouchers, at least to low-income students.

Related stories:
A Long Island mother was killed as she pushed her daughter out of the way of an oncoming car.

Diane Aluska was walking down the street with her daughter, Jenna, in Lindenhurst, on Sunday, Mother's Day, when a car careened towards them.

Eyewitnesses say Diane, 55, was able to move her daughter, 16, out of harm's way, but was pinned by the car herself, and fatally injured.

Diane Aluska, 55 (left), saved the life of her daughter, Jenna (right), 16, from Long Island, New York, by pushing her out of the way of an out-of-control car (mother and daughter pictured in January 2017)

Ann Riolo (not pictured) was backing her car out of a diagonal parking spot when she accidentally shifted the gear into 'drive', careening the car onto the sidewalk and trapping Diane (left) under the vehicle (Diane and Jenna pictured in October 2013)

The mom and daughter had earlier that day been at a nearby church and had just left a bakery when the accident occurred around 9.10am.

According to police, Ann Riolo, 80, was backing her car out of a diagonal parking spot, but accidentally shifted the gear into 'drive'.

The 2005 Toyota Corolla was sent careening onto the sidewalk.

Eyewitness accounts report that the 55-year-old mother was quick to think.

'Her mom sees the car jump the curb, she actually grabs her by her shoulder and pushes her,' Suffolk County Detective Sergeant James Murphy told the New York Daily News.

'She saved her life, without a doubt.'

Riolo hit both Diane and Jenna before crashing into the Lindenhurst Fire Department station on South Wellwood Avenue, police said.

Diane was pinned under the car and bystanders lifted it off of her, reported Newsday.

CPR was administered before ambulances arrived, but Diane died at the Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip, about four-and-a-half miles away.

Jenna and Riolo were treated for non-life-threatening injuries at the same hospital, police said.

Diane (left) was given CPR, but died at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center. Jenna (center) and Riolo (not pictured) were both treated at the same hospital for non-life-threatening injuries (pictured in 2015)

The Lindenhurst Fire Department is pictured, where Diane was pinned under Riolo's Corolla. The car was impounded but Riolo, currently, faces no criminal charges

Riolo's current state is unknown but officers say Jenna is expected to be fine.

According to police, the Corolla was impounded for a 'safety check', and the driver is currently not facing criminal charges.

'It appears to be non-criminal, just a terrible accident,' Sergeant Murphy said.
Five current and former Howard University students have filed a federal lawsuit claiming the school failed to quickly and fairly handle their reports of sexual assault.

In the suit filed on Wednesday, plaintiffs accuse the historically black college in Washington, DC of 'discriminatory and retaliatory response to multiple complaints of sexual assault and harassment.'

The group of women say that Howard often took several months to investigate sexual assault and rape reports, and in the meantime, their attackers were allowed to walk free.

In one case, one of the men accused of rape even had a key to his victim's room through his role as resident advisor, it is alleged. Several of the women claim that as a result of the school's unfair treatment, they dropped out of school, were fired from authority positions on campus or even became suicidal.

On Wednesday, five current and former Howard University students filed a federal lawsuit against the school, claiming that after reporting incidents of rape and sexual assault, the university failed to handle their cases fairly

The plaintiffs are named in the suit as Jane Does 1 through 5, according to Buzzfeed News, which first reported the case.

After Jane Doe 1 was raped by another student at Howard, she says she reported what happened to Candi Smiley, Howards Title IX Coordinator, in February 2016.

All she wanted, she says in the suit, was not to see him in her classes or living space. But she claims the only time Doe 1 heard back from Smiley over the next month was when the counselor asked her if she was talking about the rape report with her friends over text.

Days after this question, Doe 1 claims she was fired from her resident advisor position.

In response to what she deemed as unfair treatment, Doe 1 tweeted her grievances about the process and publicly named her alleged attacker.

'This is why people don't say nothing. They wanna avoid all this unnecessary bulls**t,' she wrote.

Several notable things happened after those tweets. First, a protest was held on campus in March 2016 where about 100 students showed up, chanting 'no means no' in solidarity.

Howards Dean of Student Affairs, on the other hand, allegedly told her: 'You embarrassed your family by doing that.'

Also, another student - named in the lawsuit as Jane Doe 2 - told the first victim that she had also been raped by the same student in a school parking garage the year before.

A protest was held on campus in March 2016 where about 100 students chanted 'no means no' in solidarity with one of the women

'Initially I was enraged, but I also had this weird feeling of vindication,' Jane Doe 2 told BuzzFeed News. 'When I was there, I felt like no one believed me. I felt like they were always on his side, they always believed his story, they were protecting him. It was all him, him, him.'

Doe 2 said that once her attacker became her RA the following year, she finally reported the assault to city and university police. Smiley allegedly told Doe 2 that the male student could not be moved until an investigation was completed, meaning that he still had possession of a key to her room as RA.

She ended up switching dorms herself, but says she was charged for the switch by the university.

Her grades dropped as she heard nothing back from the school about the case, she became depressed and 'was on the brink of losing her scholarship,' so she moved back home.

Howard then allegedly took away her Pell grant and need-based scholarship. Later, according to the complaint, the university told Doe 2 that they would send a collection agency after her.

Jane Doe 3 says in the suit that she was sexually and physically abused by a Howard police officer who she was dating in November 2014. She claims she asked for counseling services from the university after feeling suicidal, but never received the help she requested.

Meanwhile, Jane Doe 4 says she was raped by another student in a dorm room in March 2016. The university found months later that the student had, indeed, violated their sexual assault policy and banned him from school for a semester.

She later saw her attacker at a homecoming pep rally, but campus police allegedly said they needed to see proof he was banned in order to remove him because the Title IX office doesn't notify them about these cases.

Jane Doe 5 reported in April 2015 - a month before her own graduation - that she had been sexually assaulted by another student.

'When I had to leave this university because I didn't feel supported, it crushed my whole outlook on the university as a whole,' Doe 2 said

She asked to be able to finish her credits at another campus, but it took seven months and several administrative hoops to be told that those credits would count and she could finally graduate, according to the suit.

Linda Correia, the attorney representing the five students, says she was dismayed to learn about the way Howard handled these sexual assault reports.

'Our client's perspective is that if the university had taken action on that first report, he may not have been on campus,' Correia told Fox 5 about the man who assaulted both Doe 1 and 2.

'He may not have ever met our other client and she may not have been attacked.

'They have experienced depression, they have been suicidal and they expressed those things to the university and still the university failed to act.'

Vice president and chief communications officer for Howard, Crystal Brown, said in a statement: 'Sexual assault is a critical issue on campuses across higher education.

'Howard University takes very seriously all allegations of sexual assault, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and gender-based discrimination occurring on the University's campus or involving the University's students.'

But several of the students in the lawsuit say their feelings about the university have changed completely after this process.

'When I had to leave this university because I didn't feel supported, it crushed my whole outlook on the university as a whole,' Doe 2 told BuzzFeed News.

'You built this legacy, but you don't protect the students that are continuing the legacy. That is one of the biggest points that bothers me about this whole situation.'
Cyber attacks that took down huge corporations and organisations throughout the world over the weekend appear to be now hitting Australian businesses.

One business has been confirmed to have fallen victim to a malware attack, and the Federal Government is investigating two other similar reports.

The attack uses ransomware, which locks up a computer's data and informs the user it will be erased permanently if a certain amount of money isn't paid.

Ransomware that hit about 130,000 systems in more than 100 countries is now reported to have reached Australian shores

The attack hit Government computers in Russia, the NHS in the UK, railway ticket machines in Germany and Fedex deliveries in the US.

About 130,000 systems in more than 100 countries were affected, and the attacks apparently exploited a flaw exposed in documents leaked from the US National Security Agency.

Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security, Alastair MacGibbon, told the Sydney Morning Herald it was likely more computer systems in Australia would be hit on Monday.

'People going back to work on Monday may switch on their computers and see their systems have been impacted,' he said.

'We have one likely incident which is being investigated but we believe there could be more out there.'

Mr MacGibbon told the ABC the threat was not yet over, but a lack of activity in New Zealand was a positive sign for Australia.

'Unfortunately, there are some very smart and bad people out there who spend their times trying to make things worse for us, and this is not game over for us,' he said.

'We have seen no spike in accounts [in New Zealand], so that gives us some hope that when we turn on our computers in Australia we won't see a huge spike.'

Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security, Alastair MacGibbon (pictured), said the threat was not yet over, but a lack of activity in New Zealand was a positive sign for Australia

One Twitter user posted this picture of computers in their university lab that were infected with the ransomware - it has wreaked havoc after spreading quickly around the globe

This map released by cybersecurity experts, shows the impact of the ransomware around the world - with blue dots showing where attacks have been made. Russia is thought to be the worst affected, while Taiwan fears being the victim of a second wave. Europe was targeted first, meaning there were fewer incidents in the US because companies were able to prepare themselves better

The attacks were targeted at the UK and Europe first, giving the United States more time to prepare itself and thus soften the blow.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has not been so quick to blame the reported attacks on the same malware that infected the rest of the world.

She told reporters in Cairns there were 'literally hundreds' of ransomware cases in Australia every week.

'The difficulty is, of course, there are literally hundreds of instances of ransomware in Australia each week, so we're currently seeking to confirm whether these are examples of the particular ransomware that has caused so much havoc for example in the United Kingdom,' she said.

The virus demands AU$400 for the release of files and gives the user just three days to pay (pictured)

The virus infection resulted in a ransom message appearing on screens across the German rail network creating 'massive disturbances'

Cyber Security Minister Dan Tehan told ABC ransomware costs the Australian economy at least a billion dollars each year.

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the Government was keeping a close eye on how the malware outbreak could have impacted cyberspace in Australia.

'We are continuing to monitor the situation closely and stand ready to deal with any cyber-security threat to Australia's critical infrastructure,' he said.

Treasurer Scott Morrison said Australian authorities are working with overseas officials to address and desist the cyber threat.

'The government takes cyber security very, very seriously,' he said.

The identity of the culprits remains unknown but the EU's police agency Europol has launched a taskforce to investigate the crimes, with Russia expected to form a large part of the inquiry (file picture)

Pictures posted on social media over the weekend showed screens of NHS computers with images demanding payment of US$300 (AU$406) in Bitcoin, saying: 'Ooops, your files have been encrypted!'

The screen message also shows a message demanding payment within three days, before the price is doubled - and within seven days, before the files are deleted.

The ransomware known as Wanna Decryptor is believed to be responsible.

In April last year, a hacking group called the Shadow Brokers auctioned off the virus, claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, reported Softpedia.

The hackers, who have not come forward to claim responsibility, likely made it a 'worm', or self spread malware, by exploiting a piece of NSA code known as Eternal Blue, according to several security experts.

Ransomware: How do hackers take your data hostage?

Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, known as EC3, said the attack 'is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits.'

The centre says its Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce, made up of experts in high-tech crime, 'is specially designed to assist in such investigations and will play an important role in supporting the investigation.'

The attack, which has locked up computers and held users' files for ransom, is believed the biggest of its kind ever recorded.

Meanwhile Russia is believed to be the worst affected country with computers in its interior ministry hit and its second largest phone network - Megafon - also targeted.

Patients of the NHS in the UK saw their surgeries cancelled as hospitals failed to regain their files.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the Department of Prime Ministerand Cabinet for comment.

Australian businesses and organisations concerned about ransomware attacks can contact the ACSC on 1300 292 371 or visit their website.
A man has been arrested after his 55-year-old mother was found dead with extensive injuries to her body in a townhouse in Sydney's south on Monday morning.

Lynda Connors was found by her eldest son, 31, lying in bed covered in blood just before 7am in their family home on Florida Street, Sylvania.

He called emergency services but she was dead when police arrived. It's believed he found her wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries.

A few hours later his younger brother Nathan White, 28, was pulled over and arrested in St Peters, in the city's inner west. He was taken to Newtown Police Station for questioning over his mother's suspicious death.

Police are investigating the possibility she was killed with a crossbow, which was found in the back of Mr White's car, or a pitchfork, which has been seized.

Police have arrested Nathan White, 28, over the murder of his mother Lynda Connors, 55. Pictured are for forensics experts examining her home in Sylvania, in Sydney's south

Mr White (pictured) was arrested by police a few hours after his mother was discovered dead

Ms Connors was found by her eldest son, 31, lying in her bed covered in blood just before 7am

Police are investigating the possibility she was killed with a crossbow, which was found in the back of Mr White's (pictured) car, or a pitchfork, which has been seized

Miranda commander Superintendent Michael O'Toole said police were appealing for witnesses that may have seen something suspicious on Sunday night.

'The (older son) is very disturbed by what has happened. He is the one who came across the incident and called police to attend it,' he said.

He confirmed a crossbow had been found but would not be drawn on whether it had any connection to Ms Connors' death.

'There was a crossbow taken out of the vehicle, but there are other items (that have) also been taken out of the vehicle that the older son was in,' he said.

He refused to rule out the possibility she may died on Mother's Day, saying it was too early in the investigation to determine an exact timeline of events.

Ms Connors' death is being treated as suspicious by police.

A police source told the Daily Telegraph that Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway.

A police source said Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog (pictured) before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway in St Peters, in the city's inner west

It's believed Ms Connors eldest son found her wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries. Police are pictured outside the house early on in the morning before Mr White's arrest

Police are investigating the possibility Ms Connors was killed with a crossbow, which was found in the back of Mr White's car, or a pitchfork, which has been seized

Police are treating Ms Connors' death as suspicious and have set up a crime scene

Police taped off the townhouse complex on Florida Street, in the Sydney suburb of Sylvania

Neighbours claim Ms Connors and her two adult children had lived at the home for 20 years

Homicide detectives and local police officers canvassed the neighbourhood after the death

Superintendent O'Toole said Ms Connors eldest son was not in custody but was at Miranda Police Station assisting police with their inquiries.

Neighbour Janine McCrohon, 29, told the Daily Telegraph the death had 'absolutely shocked' her.

'The woman's car isn't here. We saw police leave the scene with her oldest son this morning.'

Another neighbour told Daily Mail Australia she didnt hear the disturbance next door and was woken by police.

The neighbour said the mother lived there with her two sons  and had done for about 20 years.

NSW Homicide Squad detectives have taped off the townhouse complex and are speaking to family and friends of Ms Connors.

Police have refused to rule out whether Ms Connors died on Mother's Day or early on Monday
Schapelle Corby isn't ready to return to Australia at the end of the month, her sister, Mercedes, says.

After living in Bali since being granted parole in February 2014, Corby has made a new life for herself on the island and is 'heartbroken' at the idea of leaving, including becoming separated from her boyfriend and pet dogs.

'We don't talk about what will happen when Schapelle is finally home,' Mercedes told Woman's Day.

Schapelle Corby's sister Mercedes has revealed the convicted cannabis smuggler isn't ready to come home to Australia

Mercedes is saying Schapelle is 'heartbroken' at the thought of returning to Australia for the first time since 2004 (pictured arriving at the International Airport in Bali on Friday)

Corby is due to return from the Indonesian island to Australia on Saturday May 27, after serving nine years for drug trafficking.

She is believed to be struggling to come to terms with the idea of leaving partner Ben Panangian, a Balinese paddleboarder who she met and fell in love with while in jail.

The convicted smuggler must also leave behind her two dogs Luna and May.

Following her prison sentence and probation period, Corby now must leave the new life she accustomed to in Bali for an uncertain future on the Gold Coast.

The 39-year-old may not be allowed to ever return to Bali once she leaves.

Mercedes Corby left for Bali on Friday where she said she was 'glad to be going over there to bring my sister home'.

The devoted sister has organised a room for her in the same Tugun home on the Gold Coast where she left from in 2004.

The 39-year-old has been living in Bali since she was granted parole in 2014 after she was caught with drugs in 2004

Schapelle's mother, Rosleigh Rose, said she is looking forward to taking her daughter to the beach where she used to play as a child.

'I'd love to take her to the beach to have a surf, to have the sand between her toes,' Ms Rose said however she is aware the times are going to be tough.

'I don't like thinking about it, it will be hard for her,' she said.

'I think she's kind of frightened.'

Mercedes Corby is adamant that although the times may be difficult the family will take things one day at a time.

Schapelle has made a new life in Bali and doesn't want to leave her boyfriend and dogs

The Australian consulate will organise a new passport to replace Corby's expired one and she will be deported on a direct flight to Queensland.

Both sisters will also escorted by Australian Federal Police officers at Brisbane Airport in order to shield the family through the terminal when she arrives.

The former beauty student was arrested in Denpasar airport October 2004 after being found with over 4kg of cannabis in a body board bag, which she has always maintained wasn't hers.
An Islamic preacher in Sydney's west has warned Muslim men they will go to hell if they seek a beautiful wife who doesn't wear a hijab and plucks her eyebrows.

Nassim Abdi mocked men who were more concerned about their prospective wife's 'supermodel' looks than her devotion to prayer.

'If your children are bad then youre responsible because you chose a bad wife, they could lead you to the hell fire. But as long as they have a beautiful wife,' he said.

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Nassim Abdi was up in arms about Muslim men who care more about beauty in a wife

The Sunni preacher, from the hardline Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association in Auburn, said a Muslim man would be blessed if he chose a 'righteous wife'.

However, he said many men were more concerned about their wife's looks than their devotion to masjid, the Arabic term for a mosque.

'The person needs to make sure his wife is a supermodel from top to bottom,' Mr Abdi said.

'Doesnt wear hijab. Doesnt pray. Does her eyebrows. Goes out and beautifies.

The fiery preacher theatrically listed the shortcomings of beautiful wives who didn't pray

'Doesnt care about the masjid. Doesnt want to be religious. Doesnt want to do this.

'Doesnt want to do that. As long as shes beautiful, thats what hes concerned about.

'Where are your priorities?'

Auburn's ex deputy mayor Salim Mehajer is married to Aysha, who has manicured eyebrows

All Blacks international Sonny Bill Williams (pictured right) is married to Alana Raffie

His lecture about fearing Allah didn't single out any high profile Australian Muslims who are married to beautiful women who don't wear a hijab.

However, his words would be critical of Auburn's former deputy mayor Salim Mehajer, whose glamorous estranged wife Aysha has manicured eyebrows and doesn't cover up her luscious hair.

New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Union international Sonny Bill Williams, a Muslim convert, is married to a former Brazilian nightclub dancer Alana Raffie, who also doesn't wear a hijab.

A small number of Muslim men in Australia are married to high-profile women who choose to wear a hijab.

The Project's Waleed Aly's academic wife Dr Susan Carland wears a head scarf but she also does her eyebrows.

The Project's Waleed Aly (pictured left) is married to Muslim convert Dr Susan Carland

Diversity activist Mariam Veiszadeh wears a hijab and is married to New South Wales Premier Glady Berejiklian's media director Ehssan Veiszadeh

Diversity activist and lawyer Mariam Veiszadeh, who wears a hijab, is married to Ehssan Veiszadeh, the media director for New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

In April, another fundamentalist preacher at the ASWJ Association told girls at a youth night that they would go to hell if they befriended non-Muslims or plucked their eyebrows.

Sheikh Mohamad Doar told a room of teenage girls in Sydney's west they needed to stop being friends with non-believers in a lecture that also covered Islamic fashion and grooming.

'The lady who plucks her eyebrows and the one who gets them plucked, they're both cursed by Allah,' he said.
An $8.8million necklace that belonged to Elizabeth Taylor is at the center of a lengthy legal battle after the Hollywood icon's estate accused Christie's auction house of botching the sale.

The diamond and ruby necklace - known as the 'Taj Mahal' - was famously given to the actress as a 40th birthday gift in 1972 by her then-husband Richard Burton.

A new lawsuit filed in Manhattan's Supreme Court on Thursday by Taylor's estate has accused the auction house of falsely advertising the pendant when it was up for sale as once belonging to the Indian emperor behind the creation of the Taj Mahal, Page Six reports.

Christie's sold the heart-shaped pendant to an anonymous VIP buyer for a whopping $8.8million at an auction of the legendary star's jewelry collection in New York in 2011 - the same year she died.

The auction house then gave Taylor's estate the proceeds of the sale.

An $8.8million necklace (above) that belonged to Elizabeth Taylor is at the center of a lawsuit after the Hollywood icon's estate accused Christie's auction house of botching the sale

But months later, Christie's refunded the sale when the buyer demanded his money back after realizing the necklace may not have belonged to emperor Shah Jahan, according to the lawsuit.

The auction house now has the necklace but wants Taylor's estate to give them back the money from the sale.

Taylor's estate has refused, claiming Christie's voided the sale unreasonably.

The lawsuit claims Christie's listed the diamond in its catalog as simply as an 'Indian diamond', but representatives later made television appearances saying it belonged to Indian royalty.

The Hollywood star's estate alleges that Christie's own research about the necklace revealed 'doubts about the diamond's age and supposed ownership by Shah Jahan well in advance of the auctions'.

The lawsuit also alleges that Christie's is holding on to some of Taylor's other possessions, including a $3 million emerald and diamond Bulgari ring.

The diamond and ruby necklace - known as the 'Taj Mahal' - was famously given to the actress as a 40th birthday gift in 1972 by her then-husband Richard Burton

In presenting it to Taylor for her 40th birthday in 1972 (above), Burton famously quipped: 'I would have liked to buy her the Taj-Mahal but it would cost too much to transport'

Taylor's estate initially sued Christie's in federal court in 2015 but the case was dismissed as both parties agreed to try and settle the matter privately.

Her estate filed a new lawsuit in state court on March 11 after those talks are believed to have failed.

A Christie's representative has disputed the claims made in the lawsuit.

'Both parties believe the other owes them money as a result of the auction,' the spokesperson said.

'We have been discussing this matter for some time, and the trust apparently decided to cease discussions and instead pursued legal action without notice.

'Christie's believes it is unfortunate that this issue cannot be resolved through mediation, especially given the success of the sale held for the trust's benefit.'

Burton showered Taylor with precious jewelry throughout their decade-long marriage. Taylor was able to keep the staggering collection of jewels as part of their divorce settlements

Christie's sold the heart-shaped pendant to an anonymous VIP buyer for a whopping $8.8million at an auction of the legendary star's jewelry collection in New York in 2011 - the same year she died

Burton had purchased the heart-shaped diamond pendant from Cartier in 1972.

In presenting it to Taylor for her 40th birthday later that year, Burton famously quipped: 'I would have liked to buy her the Taj-Mahal but it would cost too much to transport.'

Burton showered Taylor with precious jewelry throughout their tumultuous relationship.

The couple met on the Rome set of the lavish epic Cleopatra and embarked on a tempestuous love affair even though both were already married to other people.

In 1964, Burton became Liz's fifth husband and the marriage lasted for a decade.

Taylor was able to keep the staggering collection of jewels as part of their divorce settlements.
The Marine Corps hit back at critics who think that their new recruitment video, which features a female captain, is too 'politically correct.'

The branch released the commercial in an effort to appeal to women candidates at a time when the Marines are under fire for a sexual harassment scandal.

The advertisement, called 'Battle Up' starts out with a young girl stepping in to stop bullying in a hallway at school.

She then transforms into a young woman scoring on the rugby field, into an adult muscling through an officer training course, and finally into an officer in battle firing a rifle.

The advertisement, called 'Battle Up' starts out with a young girl stepping in to stop bullying in a hallway at school

The video then shows the woman transform into a rugby player, who pushes through her opponents and scores

The minute-long video ends with the woman, now a veteran, extending a helping hand to a homeless man.

The advertisement was shared on the Marine Corps Facebook page on Friday to mixed reviews.

While many people commended the spirit of the Marines and shared uplifting comments with the Marine Corps motto Semper Fi- which means 'always faithful' or 'always loyal'.

It then morphs to show the woman, now an adult, muscling through an officer training course in the rain and mud

The video then shows an officer going into actual battle battle and firing a rifle in the direction of the enemy

The minute-long video ends with the woman, now a veteran, extending a helping hand to a homeless man

However, others said they were disappointed in the Marines' new recruitment tactic, with some saying that women should not be in combat positions due to their physical ability, and others criticizing the branch for being 'feminist' and 'politically correct'.

One man, Chris Clark, wrote: 'Had to be a chick... tired of all this political correct b***s***... now let all of the man haters come out of the woodwork.'

The Marine Corps Facebook page, though, seemed to find this comment particularly infuriating, and responded: 'That's not a "chick", Chris. You're watching a Marine.'

Some people wrote that they were disappointed in the Marines' new recruitment tactic, with some saying that women should not be in combat positions, and others criticizing the branch for being 'feminist' and 'politically correct'

Chris Clark, wrote: 'had to be a chick... tired of all this political correct b***s***... now let all of the man haters come out of the woodwork'

The commercial marks the first time a woman has been featured so prominently, particularly in one that focuses on recruitment, a Marine Corps spokesman told the LA Times.

However, the spokesman said that the commercial has been in production for months, and was not meant to come in response to the Defense Department's announcement earlier this year regarding sexual harassment.

The Defense Department announced in March that it was investigating reports that hundreds of Marines shared nude photos of female service members on a secret 'Marines United' Facebook page.

The probe is looking into 500 men who are believed to be active-duty or discharged members of the Marines.

Those under investigation allegedly posted naked photos of female colleagues, denigrating them with sexually violent language. They are also accused of threatening those who exposed the behavior.

The new commercial took months to complete, and was unrelated to the Defense Department's announcement earlier this year regarding sexual harassment in the Marine Corps, a spokesperson said (stock image of marines)

'The commercial is an extension of the new brand idea we launched earlier this year, which was years in the making,' Gunnery Sergeant Justin Kronenberg said in an email to the San Diego Union Tribune.

'Battle Up took months to complete and was unrelated to the efforts underway to recommit ourselves to making sure all Marines are treated and valued equally,' he explained.

The marine featured in the ad is Captain Erin Demchko, a logistics officer who is serving as a deputy camp commander at Camp Courtney in Okinawa, Japan.

The message in the commercial is gender neutral, and says: 'No one knows where it comes from. Why some have it. And some don't. It's the fighting spirit, and it needs to be fed.'

However, Kronenberg also said that as far as appealing to women, it's not just as simple as putting them into commercials.

He explained that female prospects respond more positively to ads that feature women among men, or only men, above those that exclusively feature females.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon, pictured yesterday before appearing on the Andrew Marr Show, was forced to dismiss claims that Britains four nuclear missile submarines were vulnerable because they used an old computer programme

Personal information held by Government departments is being breached at least once an hour, a little-noticed study recently revealed.

The damning report  by the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC)  found insufficient measures were in place to stop sensitive data being lost, wrongly shared or hacked, potentially leading to significant harm.

There were an astonishing 8,995 data breaches in the 17 largest Whitehall departments in 2015  a staggering 24 a day, according to the report.

Some 98 per cent were at HM Revenue and Customs and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).

Concern is growing over whether other public bodies are vulnerable to the kind of cyber attack that crippled the NHS on Friday.

Scotland Yard has 10,000 computers using the outdated Windows XP system, which cyber criminals exploited, leaving thousands with cancelled operations or appointments.

Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon was forced to dismiss claims yesterday that Britains four nuclear missile submarines were vulnerable because they used a system based on the old computer programme.

He ruled out concerns over the threat to the operating systems used by the Trident nuclear deterrent.

In February Chancellor Philip Hammond warned that significant cyber attacks were increasing in frequency, with 188 foiled in just three months.

The recent PAC report said poor reporting of low level breaches, such as emails containing personal details being sent to the wrong person, reduces confidence in the ability of ministers to protect the nation from higher threat cyber attacks.

In some cases, a single breach would involve the disappearance, theft or inappropriate sharing of the personal information of thousands.

Scotland Yard, pictured, has 10,000 computers using the outdated Windows XP system, which cyber criminals exploited on Friday

In January 2015 MoJ officials lost two CDs with sensitive details on high-profile inquiries into police involvement in three controversial deaths.

The threat of cyber attack has been one of the UKs top four risks to national security since 2010.

Yesterday it was claimed that of the Metropolitan Polices 27,000 computers, 17,000 have been upgraded to Windows 8.1  meaning 10,000 are using the old system.

Scotland Yard chiefs have warned staff against opening suspicious emails that might contain the virus demanding a ransom payment to unlock computer systems.

Concern is growing over whether other public bodies are vulnerable to the kind of 'ransomware' cyber attack that crippled the NHS on Friday.

The Metropolitan Police insisted their systems have a number of layers of industry-leading security, which we have been monitoring closely over the past 24 hours.

Amid concerns that the Trident nuclear deterrent was vulnerable to a ransomware attack, Sir Michael told the BBCs Andrew Marr Show: We never comment on the different systems, obviously for reasons of security, that our submarines use.

But our Vanguard submarines I can absolutely assure you are safe and operate in isolation when they are out on patrol and I have complete confidence in our nuclear deterrent.

Officials last night admitted NHS hospitals had been sent a patch two weeks ago that protects against the virus  but apparently not all hospitals had updated their systems.

There were an astonishing 8,995 data breaches in the 17 largest Whitehall departments in 2015  a staggering 24 a day, according to the report. Some 98 per cent were at HM Revenue and Customs, pictured, and the Ministry of Justice

The Wanna Decryptor virus exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft computer systems that was first discovered and developed by the National Security Agency in the US.

The key to exploiting this was later leaked by a hacker group known as Shadow Brokers.

In March, Microsoft developed a patch that protects against the hack  but experts said few NHS organisations had downloaded it.

However, the patch would not have protected the many computers in the NHS still running Windows XP.

Roughly one in 20 NHS computers  4.7 per cent  run on this system.

NHS Digital said many of these cannot be updated because they are running MRI machines and other major pieces of equipment.

They have advised hospitals to take such items off their main internet networks and run them instead on smaller, more isolated systems to defend them from attack.
A British soldier training to become an officer at Sandhurst has been photographed holding a machine gun to a man's head in a sick mock ISIS execution.

The photographs show Private Robert Stewart, 20, pointing an AK-47 at a man who is kneeling on the floor with a balaclava covering his face.

Army chiefs have now launched an investigation after seeing the images which were posted on social media by Pte Stewart.

He uploaded the pictures of him standing with the replica weapons and wrote online: 'Captured a rare Gurkha worth 100 points. Do not show anyone.'

Private Robert Stewart smiled as he pointed an AK-47 at a man whose face was covered with a balaclava

Pte Stewart, from Newcastle, was wearing his uniform when he posed with other replica weapons in Germany

The shocking image is reminiscent of video clips and images of infamous ISIS executioner Jihadi John, reports The Sun.

Pte Stewart, who is based at Sandhurst, Berkshire, was taking part in Exercise Dynamic Victory in Germany when he posed for the photograph.

He was learning to become an officer on the 44-week course in Hohenfels - 90 miles north of Munich.

The paper reports that a friend said that Pte Stewart, from Newcastle, had been 'bragging' about the photograph and said he found it 'funny'.

Pte Stewart (pictured) is said to have uploaded the photographs on social media and wrote: 'Do not show anyone'

Pte Stewart, who is based at Sandhurst, Berkshire, was taking part in Exercise Dynamic Victory in Germany when he posed for the pictures

They said: 'It's immature and offensive. He's joking around about terrorism. He finds it funny. It's wrong.'

Pte Stewart serves in the Royal Logistic Corps and told the paper that he 'better speak to his bosses' when he found out the photographs had been leaked.

An Army spokesman said: 'We are aware of an incident involving soldiers posing with replica weapons. We expect the highest standards of behaviour, whether on or off duty.

'Any breaches of values and standards are treated very seriously and are dealt with administratively and may face sanctions including dismissal.'

Jihadi John, real name Mohammed Emwazi, 27, was killed on November 12 last year after US intelligence established where his wife and child were living in Raqqa, Syria.

The Londoner was 'evaporated' by a drone strike in the city.

ISIS paid tribute to Emwazi - once the world's most wanted man - in a bizarre obituary that praised him as an 'honourable brother' and highlighted his 'enthusiasm'.
Pairing adult education services for parents with early learning for their children shows some promising signs to help families out of poverty, according to the first study of a Tulsa, Okla. intergenerational program .

I wrote about CareerAdvance Tulsa back in 2014, when it was part of a wave of pilot programs exploring how to support low-income families and their children in ways designed to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty .

CareerAdvance, a partnership between the Community Action Project of Tulsa County, the citys Head Start and state early-child-care systems, and local community colleges, provides support for parents who do not have a college degree. Parents can earn stackable health-industry certificates through college courses timed to coincide with full-day, free early-learning programs for their children. The parents also receive peer mentors, up to $3,000 a year in tuition credits for meeting academic benchmarks, and in-kind supports like bus passes and child after-care.

The first report of the projects ongoing evaluation looked at its effects on Head Start children in the program, compared to a comparison group of students in Head Start. All of the 253 families in the study made on average a little over $15,000 a year for a family of four, and were matched on their parents demographics and career interests.

After a year, children whose parents were in CareerAdvance had attended more days of Head Start and were significantly less likely to be chronically absent than children in the control group. Participating parents reported less stress and significantly more career commitment and optimism than parents in the control group. And 49 percent of the participating parents had gotten jobs in the healthcare industry by the end of the year, compared to 31 percent of the comparison group.

The results are preliminary, but promising, considering the study is only in its first year. As Rebecca Goodman, a participating Tulsa mom, said back in 2014: I dont want a free ride to anything. ... I just need a little help to get to where I need to go for my family.

Photo: Rebecca Goodman folds clothes at home in Tulsa, Okla., as her daughter Madelynn and son Cooper look on. Goodman participated in Tulsas dual-generation education program through Head Start. Source: Shane Bevel for Education Week

Related:


A 15-year-old boy has been charged over the tragic death of a 32-year-old father following a sickening brawl on the weekend.

Father Rex Court, 32, was left fighting for his life after a fight broke out between up to 16 people at 9pm in Mount Gambier, in South Australia, on Saturday.

The father died following serious head injuries prompting the police to arrest a youth, 15, and charge him with murder, according to The Advertiser.

Rex Court (pictured) died following a brawl in Mount Gambier on Saturday when he and two friends were set upon by several men

Rex Court (pictured) was punched and kicked and sustained fatal head injuries

Superintendent Grant Moyle described the attack on the three men as 'cowardly'.

'A group like that attacking three people regardless of whatever may have instigated the fight is cowardly to say the least,' Superintendent Grant Moyle said.

The attack happened after Rex Court, 32, his friend Anthony Wilson, 26, and another 22-year-old man became involved in an argument with a large number of people - described as being in their late teens or early twenties - after leaving a pub.

The three men crossed the road when they were attacked by several of the men on Commercial Street East, according to police.

Police have declared the incident as a major crime following the death of a 32-year-old man

Police are investigating the incident that took place on Saturday and calling for witnesses and any person involved to come forward

The crime scene outside Jealouzy Fashion where the fight took place according to the owner

One witness, who did not want to be named, told The Advertiser the vicious attack was like nothing he had ever seen.

'I would have said about 20 kids in two separate groups, just kicking the absolute sh*t out of these two guys on the ground,' he told the publication.

'I've never seen anything like it. I've seen kicking before but this was literally run-ups, boots, boots  they were trying to kick them like they were lining up from outside 50 (metres).'

During the attack one of the men was knocked unconscious to the ground, another was punched in the head several times while the third was injured attempting to break up the brawl.

All the victims ended up being kicked and punched on the ground, according to police.

During the sickening brawl witnesses claim a black Ford Territory pulled up to the fight and two men jumped out to join in before fleeing the scene.

Two of the men, Rex Court and Anthony Wilson, were left with serious head injuries following the assault and were airlifted to Flinders Medical Centre.

Mr Court died from his head injuries and Mr Wilson is in a serious condition prompting South Australia police to declare the investigation a major crime.

Jealouzy Fashion put up this sign as a show of respect for the victims

Police investigating the crime scene to determine what took place on Saturday night

No weapons were believed to be involved in the attack, according to police.

On Sunday night a Mount Gambier youth, 15, was arrested and charged with murder.

'This is a very serious matter and is being investigated by Mount Gambier CIB and Major Crimes detectives have travelled to Mount Gambier to assist in that investigation,' Limestone Coast Superintendent Grant Moyle said.
The Russian government will view the shock firing of James Comey as 'another victory on the scoreboard for them', according to the former National Intelligence boss.

James Clapper, who retired in January, spoke about Comey's ousting during an interview on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday morning.

'What's unfolded now, here, the leader of the - the lead of the investigation about potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign has been removed. So the Russians have to consider this as a, you know, another victory on the scoreboard for them,' the 76-year-old said.

Clapper then went on to provide new details about Comey's dinner with Trump shortly after his inauguration.

Retired Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Russia likely sees Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey as 'another victory on the scoreboard for them'

Former DNI Clapper tells @GStephanopoulos Russians must consider firing of Comey "another victory on the scoreboard for them." #ThisWeek pic.twitter.com/GMS9mxl88j  This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 14, 2017

The New York Times reported this week the president asked the then-FBI Director to pledge his loyalty to him during the private meal at the White House.

'I spoke briefly with Director Comey about the dinner,' Clapper told ABC on Sunday.

'He conveyed to me that hed been invited and he was - and this is my characterization - uneasy with it, simply because of the optic or the appearance of potentially compromising his independence and that of the bureau.'

The former Director of National Intelligence then said it is a 'professional courtesy' to accept such an invitation from the president, but said it would be 'profoundly out of character' for Comey to have given Trump any sort of loyalty promise.

Clapper (left), who retired in January, spoke about Comey's ousting during an interview on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (right) on Sunday morning

'The Russians have to consider this as a, you know, another victory on the scoreboard for them,' Clapper (pictured with Comey in February 2016) said

During an interview Saturday night Trump denied making any such request of loyalty from Comey, but added: 'I don't think it would be a bad question to ask.'

Clapper continued his attack on Trump's White House while doing the interview rounds on Sunday.

During an appearance with CNN's Jake Tapper, he warned American institutions are under siege.

'The developments of the past week are very bothersome, very disburbing to me,' Clapper said.

'I think in many ways our institutions are under assault both externally  and that's the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system  and I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.'

Clapper went on to provide new details about Comey's dinner with Trump shortly after his inauguration. Trump and Clapper are pictured shaking hands on January 22 in the White House

Clapper said Comey (pictured on May 3) was 'uneasy' with being called to the White House for a private dinner with Trump

When Tapper asked if 'internally' meant from Trump, Clapper answered, 'exactly.'

Clapper then explained his belief that Trump is messing with the balance of the three branches of government.

'I think the founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances,' Clapper said.

'I feel as though that is under assault and it's eroding.'

Comey was shockingly fired by Trump on Tuesday. The president has since hinted he perhaps secretly recorded conversations he had with the former director, tweeting: 'James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!'

White House press secretary Sean Spicer refused to deny Trump had covertly recorded Comey, telling reporters on Friday: 'The president has nothing further to add on that.'
A seclusion room where a mental health patient was left to die in her own faeces continued to be used for two years after her death, it has been revealed.

And the now decommissioned room is expected to be back in use come June.

Miriam Merten was left abandoned, naked, without water and became covered in her own faeces while in seclusion at Lismore Base Hospital, in the New South Wales Northern Rivers.

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Miriam Merten died from a 'brain injury caused by numerous falls', a coroner's report found, following a long stint in seclusion at Lismore Base Hospital

Shocking CCTV footage made public last week showed Ms Merten naked and walking the corridor

The images showed Ms Merten naked in the background, while at Lismore Base Hospital

The seclusion room at Lismore Base Hospital (pictured) where Ms Merten was kept continued to be in use for two year's after her shocking death

Ms Merten had been admitted to the hospital on May 26, 2014, due to concerns over her wellbeing. The mother-of-two died on June 3.

A coroner's report found Ms Merten died from a 'brain injury caused by numerous falls' following a long stint in seclusion from 11.50pm to 5.10am on June 1.

The seclusion room where Ms Merten was kept was still in use for years after her horrific death, The Daily Telegraph reported.



A Northern New South Wales Local Health District spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia: 'The seclusion room was decommissioned as part of the redevelopment of Lismore Base Hospital in March 2017'.

'Recommissioning is expected to occur in June 2017, however, given the announcement of the independent review the practice of seclusion and use of the room will be subject to the implementation of any actions arising from the review,' the spokesperson said.

Ms Merten was reportedly in seclusion from 11.50pm to 5.10am on June 1

Ms Merten while in seclusion was naked with just a mattress on the floor

It is expected 'recommissioning' of the room will 'occur in June', although a review into seclusion announced by Health Minister Brad Hazzard could put a stop to that.

The room where Ms Merten was kept contained only a mattress and she was being monitored on a video monitor to check on her wellbeing.

Shocking CCTV images made public last week showed Ms Merten wandering the corridor naked and covered in her own faeces while the senior nurse is seen mopping the floor 'apparently oblivious' to the patient.

Miriam Merten sang in a choir for mentally ill people called the Hearing Voices Choir
Being a presidential bodyguard is a tough job.

You're expected to lurk out of sight, always alert and ready to tackle any would-be assassin.

But covert protection might now prove a difficult task for Choi Young-jae, thanks to his new legion of swooning online fans.

Special forces officer Choi Young-jae has captured hearts with his steely good looks

The 36-year-old, who is a bodyguard for South Korean president Moon Jae-in, has captured the internet's heart with his chiseled jaw-line and steely eyes.

Yulin Kuang tweeted: 'He looks like the square-jawed serious romantic lead, who's going to be his plucky heroine who accidentally captures his heart.'

Erika Heidewald said: 'Fangirling over the new Korean president's bodyguard is peak Twitter and I am so here for it.'

Another user advised tweeters to, 'Get a man who looks at you the way the new South Korean president's bodyguard looks at a man moving sort of suspiciously just out of frame.'

The 36-year-old is a bodyguard for South Korean president Moon Jae-in

Young-jae is also an officer in South Korea's Special Warfare Command, an elite unit on the front-line of defending the country from its neighbour North Korea.

Sadly however the president's office reported that Young-jae 'is "unfortunately" married and has two daughters.'

Sadly, the president's office has confirmed that Young-jae is married with two children

President Moon defeated rivals Hong Jun-pyo and Awn Cheol-soo to be elected president of South Korea.

The election comes just months after the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, the country's first female president.

The Korea Times suggested that President Moon may be deliberately hiring 'good-looking professionals' in order to create an attractive public face for the new administration.

President Moon Jae-in has replaced Park Geun-hye, who was impeached after a corruption scandal
A group of bereaved relatives have paid an emotional first visit to a war memorial, after many loved ones were controversially not invited to or told about its unveiling.

The Iraq and Afghanistan memorial was opened by The Queen at a service in March, an event attended by 2,500 people including former prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron, and senior royals.

Organisers faced criticism from some of the bereaved, who said they had not received an invitation or been made aware the ceremony was taking place.

Widow Wendy Rayner and bereaved mothers Julie Hall and Tracy Dunn-Bridgeman visited the memorial in London on Sunday, saying it was important to them to see the memorial in person.

Widow Wendy Rayner, centre, and bereaved mothers Julie Hall, right, and Tracy Dunn-Bridgeman, left, paid an emotional visit to the Iraq and Afghanistan War Memorial in Westminster, pictured

Ms Hall, centre, lost her son Darren Deady after he was shot in Afghanistan in 2010, while Mrs Rayner, left, lost her husband Peter when he was killed in Afghanistan by an explosive, also in 2010. Ms Dunn-Bridgeman's, right, son Jason died in action in Afghanistan in 2009

Ms Hall lost her son Kingsman Darren Deady after he was shot in Afghanistan in 2010 aged 23.

Tearfully the 52-year-old, from Westhoughton in Bolton, said: 'It is bittersweet, bitter because it brings it all back but sweet because I remember him.'

Ms Rayner's husband, Sergeant Peter Rayner, was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) during a routine patrol in Afghanistan in 2010.

At the time of the unveiling the florist, from Bradford, said some relatives felt they had been 'forgotten'.

Ms Dunn-Bridgeman, from Liverpool, said she had booked time off from her job as a medical secretary at Aintree Hospital on the understanding she had been invited to the unveiling.

Her son, Kingsman Jason Dunn-Bridgeman, died aged 20 in Afghanistan in 2009.

She said she understood not everyone could be invited to the memorial, but added that the handling of the invites made her feel 'disrespected'.

She said: 'I felt disrespected because it's as if we don't count; the people who are left behind don't count.'

The memorial, pictured, was officially opened by The Queen in March but organisers of the ceremony faced criticism because some of the bereaved families said they were not invited to the event or made aware it was happening

The memorial represents more than 300,000 people, both military and civilian, who served in conflicts in the Gulf region, Iraq and Afghanistan from 1990-2015, and those who supported them from the UK.

The three women travelled to London this weekend with some of their children to attend the Party At The Palace on Saturday.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry hosted the children of servicemen and women killed while serving in the Armed Forces.
Kim Jong-un has been pictured inspecting his new ballistic missile which he claims can carry a nuclear warhead before it was test-fired on Sunday.

The dictator gave the projectile, dubbed Hwasong-12, a once-over at its launch site in the Kusong region in images published by state media.

After the launch was deemed a success, Kim was seen laughing and celebrating with officials before vowing to carry out more nuclear and missile tests.

Kim Jong-un poses next to the Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, which he claims is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, before its launch on Sunday

The dictator personally oversaw the Hwasong-12 test, which took place a site in the Kusong region early on Sunday (pictured, Kim speaks to officials in charge of the launch)

Kim Jong-un (pictured left as the missile is moved into position) has claimed the new projectile can range the mainland United States

The Hwasong-12 has the longest rage of any ballistic missile the North has successfully tested, with experts estimating it can fly 2,500 miles

The missile travelled more than 400 miles before crashing into the Sea of Japan just off the Russian coast, according to the state-backed North Korean Central News Agency and South Korean analysts.

Hwasong-12, an intermediate-range ballistic missile, has the longest range of any weapon successfully tested by Kim's regime, with officials estimating it has a maximum range of 2,500 miles.

Kim claims the new weapon puts the United States mainland within 'sighting range for strike', though Los Angeles is located around 5,000miles from the launch site used on Sunday.

North Korea is attempting to develop inter-continental ballistic missiles, named Taepodong, though a successful test of one has yet to be verified.

Kim was said to have hugged officials in the field of rocket research after the launch, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing, state media reported.

The North fired the ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday in a launch that Washington called a message to South Korea, days after its new president took office pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.

According to KCNA: 'The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead.'

'If the U.S. awkwardly attempts to provoke the DPRK, it will not escape from the biggest disaster in the history, Kim said, strongly warning the U.S. should not to disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in the DPRK's sighting range for strike and that it has all powerful means for retaliatory strike,' KCNA said.

State media released images showing Sunday's successful test launch of the Hwasong-12, was was personally overseen by Kim

The new missile flew more than 400 miles on a high trajectory, which experts said was deliberately done to limit its range, before landing in the Sea of Japan

Graphic showing Sunday's Hwasong-12 launch (yellow) and how far it would likely have gone had it been fired on a regular trajectory (red). In white is an example flight path of an inter-continental ballistic missile, such as the Minutemen projectiles used by the US military

Kim Jong-un was pictured celebrating with officials having personally overseen the launch which took place in the early hours of Sunday morning

North Korea is believed to be developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching the mainland United States.

The U.S. military's Pacific Command said the type of missile that was fired was 'not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile'.

The White House responded to the missile test by calling for further action against Pyongyang: 'Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea.'

The North 'has been a flagrant menace for far too long', it added in a statement.

The missile came down in the Sea of Japan, allegedly only 60 miles from the Russian coast. The White House said it impacted 'so close to Russian soil... the president cannot imagine that Russia is pleased'.

Russia's defence ministry later said the missile landed about 300 miles from its territory and posed no threat.

The United Nations Security Council is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss North Korea's latest missile launch, diplomats said on Sunday, which was requested by the United States and allies South Korea and Japan.

After the launch (pictured), Kim pledged to continue carrying out missile and nuclear tests despite threats by President Trump

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un celebrated with soldiers and officials after launching the test

Kim used the launch as a fresh opportunity to threaten the US, saying that if provoked 'America will not escape from the biggest disaster in history'

The missile landed in the Sea of Japan near the Russian coast, according to South Korea

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the launch a message by Pyongyang to South Korea after the election of President Moon Jae-in, who took office on Wednesday.

Speaking to ABC's 'This Week' programme, Haley said: 'You first have to get into Kim Jong-un's head -- which is, he's in a state of paranoia, he's incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him.'

The report on the missile's flight was largely consistent with South Korean and Japanese assessments on Sunday that it flew 435 miles and reached an altitude of more than 1,243 , which is further and higher than an intermediate-range missile tested in February from the same region, northwest of Pyongyang.

Washington-based monitoring project 38 North said: 'North Korea's latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile'

'It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the U.S. base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).'

KCNA claimed Kim 'told the rocket scientists and technicians not to be complacent... and continue to build more... nuclear weapons and methods of delivery' until the US made the 'right choice'.

Kim then 'warned that the US will not be able to avoid the worst-ever catastrophe if it recklessly provokes our republic'.

He added 'all US mainland and US-Pacific regions are within the range of our attacks'.

Kim Jong-un, pictured, claimed his missiles now had the range to strike the US mainland
Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey remarked on Sunday that any qualified candidate for FBI Director is going to be very reluctant to step into James Comey's former role.

While speaking with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Woolsey - who worked as the Director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton - said he was worried by Donald Trump's decision to fire Comey this past Tuesday.

'I find this whole thing, this whole week, to be very troubling for inchoate ways and inchoate reasons,' he said.

James Woolsey, who served as the Director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton, spoke out on CNN on Sunday

He commented that Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey this week was 'troubling' in many ways

Before his termination, Comey had been heading an FBI investigation into the possible ties between Trump's advisors and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election.

Trump had also allegedly demanded loyalty from Comey during a private dinner at the White House in January, associates of the now fired FBI director claimed this week.

The New York Times reported that Comey told colleagues he was summoned for a one-on-one dinner with Trump seven days after the inauguration.

Trump reportedly asked Comey twice to 'pledge loyalty' to him as the new Commander in Chief. Sources claim Comey declined to do so, but said he told the President he would always be honest with him.

Trump had also allegedly demanded loyalty from Comey during a private dinner at the White House in January, associates of the now fired FBI director claimed this week

Sources claim Comey declined to do so, but said he told the President he would always be honest with him

Trump is said to have pressed Comey on whether that would be 'honest loyalty,' to which the FBI director said: 'You will have that.'

Woolsey made sure to comment on that alleged 'pledge of loyalty' during his interview.

'As far as loyalty is concerned, we're senior government officials - our loyalty ought to be to the Constitution.

'We're not in medieval England, people aren't trying to stage coups and so forth.'

When asked how he would have responded to the loyalty question, Woolsey said: 'I think a perfectly appropriate answer to the question "Are you loyal to me?" is, "Certainly, as long as you are within the operating room that you were given by the Constitution, Mr. President."

'I think it's going to be very hard to find a good FBI director who is willing to operate under the circumstances that we've seen this week,' he added.
Julie Bishop looked lean as she joined foreign diplomats for a jog along the beach on Monday morning.

The Foreign Minister, 60, ran along the Cairns Esplanade in Far North Queensland, ahead of a busy schedule.

She was joined by foreign diplomats that she is hosting in the city to promote Queensland trade investments.

Julie Bishop looked lean as she joined foreign diplomats for a jog along the beach on Monday morning

The Foreign Minister, 60, ran along the esplanade in Cairns, in Far North Queensland, ahead of a busy schedule

Ms Bishop is pictured on Monday morning (left) and jogging in 2010 (right)

Ms Bishop is a fitness lover and her commitment to jogging has been widely reported.

A departmental document in 2013 revealed her travel requests, which includes requiring one hour early each morning for exercise.

The document also said she is a non-smoker who does not drink coffee. She 'prefers to eat healthily but not a fussy eater and open to try local foods'.

'Prefers sparkling water, however will drink wine or Champagne at appropriate functions,' the document states.

Ms Bishop is pictured with a group of foreign diplomats jogging in Cairns

Ms Bishop is a fitness lover and it has been previously revealed she has a one hour jog every morning

MS BISHOP'S HEALTHY LIFESTYLE Ms Bishop goes for a one-hour jog early each morning. She is a non-smoker who does not drink coffee, despite getting only four hours of sleep each night. She drinks English breakfast tea with skim milk or peppermint tea. A departmental document says she 'prefers to eat healthily but not a fussy eater and open to try local foods'. Advertisement

'Not a coffee drinker. Prefers English breakfast tea with skim milk or peppermint tea - no need to provide in hotel room.'

In 2014, Ms Bishop told Fairfax jogging helps her focus and she always makes a point of going for a run despite getting just four hours sleep a night.

Ms Bishop is spruiking local businesses during her visit in Cairns.

'We will showcase Far North Queensland business and tourism by hosting a delegation of around 75 Canberra-based Ambassadors and High Commissioners in Cairns,' Ms Bishop said in a statement.

Ms Bishop is pictured with her partner David Panton (left) in January last year at the Liberty Belle marquee at Portsea Polo in Melbourne

Ms Bishop is spruiking local businesses during her visit in Cairns

Ms Bishop is pictured on Sunday night wearing a locally-produced scarf she bought while attending the showcase in Cairns

Ms Bishop is pictured greeting the Guatemalan Ambassador Connie Tarasena Secaira while attending the showcase

'This visit will provide foreign representatives with an insight into the diversity and dynamism of Queensland's economy, so they can better inform their home countries of the many trade and investment opportunities available.'

Local businesses will promote their products and services to the heads of foreign diplomatic missions at a showcase, Ms Bishop said.

The diplomats are also being taken to the outer Great Barrier Reef 'so they can see first-hand the unparalleled efforts being undertaken to protect' it.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk will host a dinner for the diplomats in Cairns.

Ms Bishop is pictured jogging on Monday morning along the Esplanade in Cairns, Far North Queensland

She is well-known for her commitment to her daily one-hour jog

Ms Bishop is pictured taking a morning run in Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia, in October 2015

The Foreign Minister is pictured jogging in China in February last year

The Foreign Minister wears a locally produced in Far North Queensland

Ms Bishop greets the Turkish Ambassador Vakur Gokdenizler on Sunday

The 60-year-old did a virtual reality tour of Australia's tropics while attending the showcase on Sunday night

Ms Bishop tries the tropical fruit mangosteen at the Cairns event

The Foreign Minister crosses paths with Queensland Treasurer Curtis Pitt (right) at the Sunday night event

Ms Bishop speaks to the media during a press conference while attending the Cairns showcase

Ms Bishop leaves the press conference in Cairns as she spruiks local Far North Queensland businesses to foreign diplomats

The Foreign Minister greets Zambian High Commissioner George Kanyamula

Ms Bishop is pictured with the Ecuadorian Ambassador Juan Salazar Sancisi
An overjoyed Louisiana father had wanted to share news on Facebook that his beloved partner had given birth to a healthy baby boy on Wednesday.

But Jean Luc Montou had to instead share a heartbreaking message with family and friends explaining that the love of his life Sarah Bertrand had died.

The tragic Facebook post quickly went viral and was shared more than 25,000 times. Montou said the 29-year-old passed away in front of him as he held their newborn son.

Jean Luc Montou's 29-year-old partner Sarah Bertrand died in Moss Bluff, Louisiana on Wednesday just 24 hours after giving birth to their son

'Sarah Bertrand didn't make it. Baby Julian Charles Montou was born at 4.31pm,' Montou's post began.

Montou explained that almost 24 hours after giving birth in Moss Bluff, Bertrand had gone into cardiac arrest.

'The doctors tell me that she had a pulmonary embolism from a blood clot that must have formed during labor. It just happened. She was fine all day and all night before,' he wrote.

'My last 24 hours with her was the happiest I'd ever been. I'm not sure why, but I've never been allowed to be past a certain point of happiness. I loved this woman like no other and she died in front of me while I held our son.

'Sarah was the absolute love of my life... She treated me better than I've ever been treated in my life by any other woman. She was an angel and the mother of my only son.'

Sarah, pictured with Jean Luc and his daughter Jane, went into cardiac arrest almost 24 hours after giving birth to the couple's son Julian

Montou has another daughter Jane who is believed to have been from a previous relationship. He said Bertrand had always looked after the girl as if she was her own.

He has written several emotional posts on Facebook in the days following his partner's death.

A GoFundMe page set up Montou quickly started trending as he explained that Bertrand did not have life insurance.

He said any donations would go towards his partner's funeral expenses and to help their newborn son.

'Sarah wanted everything for Julian and he made her so happy. I had never seen her so strong, so confident, and so joyful as when she held her new baby boy,' he wrote.

'She only wanted the best for our son and the least I can do is try to get help, since she won't be around to do so.

'While she will be missed so much, I want to honor her memory by raising Julian to be the best man I can make him, but it will be so hard with her sudden loss.'
A historic synagogue on Manhattan's Lower East Side was destroyed by a three-alarm fire Sunday afternoon.

Video show walls of orange flames engulfing Beth Hamedrash Hagadol synagogue at 60 Norfolk Street and sending dense plumes of black smoke into the air which could be seen as far as Brooklyn.

According to a witness at the scene, only a shell of the walls remain standing.

Scroll down for video

A roaring fire that gushed flames out of the windows and doors of the beautiful synagogue stunned witnesses Sunday afternoon

The building had been abandoned since 2008 but its landmarked status meant it couldn't be torn down

Firefighters brought the fire rapidly under control and no one was injured.

The synagogue had been sitting empty since 2008, reported the Lo-Down.

A few years later, the synagogue filed a hardship application with the Historic Landmarks Commission, asking permission to tear down the building, which had been landmarked since 1967.

Reportedly, the synagogue, which had been reduced to about 20 active members, was too expensive to upkeep and Rabbi Mendel Greenbaum asked to have it de-landmarked so it could be converted into condos.

The mysterious fire swept through the stunning building Sunday afternoon

After the fire was under control nothing but the shell of the building remained

Built in 1850 as a Baptist church it was purchased by the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol congregation in 1885 for $45,000

Reportedly, the synagogue was too expensive to upkeep and Rabbi Mendel Greenbaum asked to have it de-landmarked so it could be converted into condos

An eyewitness said the roof of the church was burned out and pictures show a blackened shell of the building

But after community outrage, the petition was withdrawn.

Reportedly, there was a small fire in the building only a week ago, but it was quickly brought under control.

An eyewitness to the fire, Alex Hernandez, told DailyMail.com that lately he's seen school kids in the building.

'They'll come at nighttime and want to jump the fence and go in the church,' he said.

Fire trucks remained on the scene well into the evening, getting the fire under complete control

Rivulets of water ran down the street from the three fire stations that responded to the afternoon blaze

He claims it was the 'kids' who started the small fire a week ago.

'There's a lot of people that go in there, there's a lot of bums that sleep in there too,' he said. 'Could have been one of them that did it.'

The Gothic Revival building was built in 1850 as a Baptist church and purchased by the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol congregation in 1885 for $45,000 (about $1.2 million today), according to Bowery Boogie.
Washington

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused take up an appeal in a case in which Neil M. Gorsuch, as an appeals court judge writing in dissent, had been sharply critical of involving the police in the matter of a student who disrupted a class with fake burps.

The high court, with now-Justice Gorsuch recused because it was a case he had handled below, declined without comment to review a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, upholding a school resource officers arrest and handcuffing of a New Mexico 7th grader for disrupting his gym class.

(See the recent analysis of federal data on student arrests by the Education Week Research Center.)

The 10th Circuit panel had ruled 2-1 that the officer was immune from liability because it was not clearly established whether the students classroom disruptions were in violation of a New Mexico law that prohibits interference with the educational process at any public or private school.

The majority also upheld qualified immunity for the officer over his use of handcuffs when he took the 13-year-old student from Cleveland Middle School in Albuquerque, N.M., to a juvenile detention center.

Writing in dissent in the lower court case, then-Judge Gorsuch lamented that a students classroom disruption that would have once resulted in a trip to the principals office and detention was now leading to the involvement of the police.

And maybe today the officer decides that, instead of just escorting the now-compliant 13-year-old to the principals office, an arrest would be a better idea, Gorsuch said. So out come the handcuffs and off goes the child to juvenile detention. My colleagues suggest the law permits exactly this option. ... Respectfully, I remain unpersuaded.

(Gorsuchs dissent in the 10th Circuit decision was cited repeatedly by Republican senators who supported his Supreme Court confirmation as an example of a case in which he did support the little guy.)

In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in A.M. v. Acosta (Case No. 16-984), lawyers for the mother identified as A.M. and student identified as F.M. stressed Gorsuchs dissent in the case and said, The recent criminalization of middle school antics and misbehavior is an issue of considerable public import to our nation.

To allow everyday acts of misbehavior to be criminalized creates serious consequences for our children: they are pushed out of school, into the criminal justice system, and introduced to institutionalization, the appeal said.

A coalition of juvenile justice and child advocacy groups filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the family .

This case is not simply about a 13-year-old jokester who acted as a class clown by burping in class, says the brief by the groups. Criminalizing such commonplace behavior will severely impair students education, health, and life chances.

A brief on behalf of Arthur Acosta , the Albuquerque police officer who arrested the student, said the family fails to acknowledge the true extent of the disruption from F.M.'s burping.

The act of burping, standing alone, was not what Officer Acostas arrest was based on; rather, it was the vehicle by which the school disruption occurred, the brief says. The officer reasonably believed F.M.'s classroom teacher when the teacher said the students fake burping prevented her from controlling her class, the brief says.

The brief for Acosta also told the high court that the case was not one of national importance since it turned on the interpretation of a New Mexico statute.

While the facts underlying [the familys] claims may be of interest because they are somewhat unique, the legal issue involved is nothing more than the application of New Mexico law to the qualified immunity analysis, the brief says.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court took action in two other school-related appeals on Monday.

In C.R. v. Eugene School District 4J (No. 16-940), the justices declined without comment to hear an appeal on behalf of an Oregon 7th grader who was disciplined for sexually harassing some younger students in a park adjacent to their school.

A key question for lower courts was whether the school had the authority to discipline the offender over what was technically off-campus behavior. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, had ruled last year that on the fact of this case, the school could discipline the 7th grader.

Meanwhile, in S.D. v. Haddon Heights Board of Education (No. 16-1054), the Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court to reconsider the case of a student with multiple disabilities who ran into trouble over a large number of absences.

The student and his family sued under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, but two courts ruled that the suit potentially implicated the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The Supreme Court said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, in Philadelphia, should reconsider the students case in light of the high courts February decision in Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools . In that case, the justices held that an exhaustion of procedures under the IDEA is not necessary in certain cases brought under other federal disabilities laws.
'You do start thinking the same': In a magazine interview, Riana Tromp, 30, said the family were 'very embarrassed' over the ordeal

It was the wild family road trip that bewildered Australia, stunned police and sparked a torrent of bizarre conspiracy theories.

And now the eldest Tromp sibling has shed light on why the tight-knit family fled their red currant farm in Silvan, Victoria, nine months ago.

In an interview with Woman's Day, Riana Tromp confirmed rumours her father, Mark, had suffered a mental breakdown.

Mr Tromp believed the family were in danger - and Riana confessed she, too, began to believe his claims.

'You do start thinking the same,' she was quoted saying.

She added that the family had never sought the spotlight.

'We're all very embarrassed'.

The family are said to be healthy and recovering from their ordeal. Daughter Ella is pictured here with father Mark in the months after their bizarre road trip

The family's disappearance sparked several conspiracy theories, including whether there was 'something in the water' at the family home or whether they were suffering a mass delusional disorder known as folie a deux

On August 29 last year, the family of five (Riana, 30, younger siblings Mitch, 25, and Ella, 22, and parents Mark and Jacoba) fled their home.

Investigators told Daily Mail Australia the family left behind the 'most bizarre, most unusual' scene.

'Picture this: keys in the cars, front door wide open, passports, telephones, business papers everywhere,' local Sgt Mark Knight said.

The family set off north at a cracking pace. But it wasn't long before some of them began to have doubts about the endeavour.

The family left their Silvan, Victoria, home deserted - the front door left wide open

The day after their departure, Mitchell Tromp parted ways with the family near Bathurst, New South Wales, saying it was all too 'stressful'.

Riana and Ella later ditched their parents at the Jenolan Caves, more than 800km north of Silvan.

Riana was found in the back of a stranger's ute - in what police described as a 'catatonic' state - and was taken to hospital.

Jacoba Tromp was found at a hospital and her husband was found a week after the clan disappeared in Wangaratta.

It was alleged Ella stole a car to get home, however police decided to drop charges against her in March.

Police dropped charges against Ella Tromp (right) over the alleged theft of a car

By that time, the family were all back working at the farm.

In her brief interview this week, Riana Tromp told Woman's Day she had received 'help' to get through her ordeal.

But, she said, the family were still working through the ordeal together.

The family did not return Daily Mail Australia's calls on Monday.
Donald Trump's lawyer has come under fire for posting an 'inappropriate' picture of his daughter on social media.

Michael Cohen shared a tweet praising his 21-year-old daughter, Samantha, for studying the University of Pennsylvania.

'So proud of my Ivy League daughter...brains and beauty channeling her Edie Sedgwick,' Cohen wrote, along with his daughter's Instagram account.

The tweet also featured a black and white photograph of his daughter taken during a modelling shoot, in which she was wearing black lingerie and leggings.

Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, has come under fire for posting this 'inappropriate' picture of his daughter on social media

A University of Pennsylvania student records search show there are two Samantha Cohens at the Ivy League school.

Moments after Trump's lawyer hit send, many on social media were criticizing his choice of picture.

'If my Dad tweeted a photo of me in my underwear I would throw up,' Julia Macfarlane said.

'Yep, she's gorgeous, however most fathers don't share lingerie pics of their daughters on social media Mr Creepypants,' another person wrote.

Cohen praised his daughter for studying at college in the tweet. The two are pictured together

21-year-old Samantha Cohen (pictured) studies at the University of Pennsylvania - prompting her father's tweet

Many took to social media to criticize Cohen for the picture he chose to tweet of his daughter

'Don't put your half naked child on Twitter!!! What kind of parent does that?' Mischa Henckel tweeted.

'She's lovely. But seriously dude, no cap & gown pics available? Think before you post. If she has got brains, she didn't get them from you,' another added.

But Cohen seemed unfazed by the criticism. The lawyer even replied directly to one person who wrote: 'POTUS wants to date his daughter, the VP calls his wife "mother," and DJT's attorney posts spank-bank material of his daughter.'

Cohen wrote back to the person: 'Jealous?'

He defended himself in another tweet to a critic, writing: 'Beauty and brains you a-hole! It's a modeling shot remake from an old Edie Sedgwick photo. #hater.'

Samantha Cohen told DailyMail.com she had no issue with her father posting the picture, and accused people of trying to 'stir up drama'.

Michael Cohen and his 21-year-old daughter, Sam, are pictured together in this photograph

Cohen responded to some of the criticism he was hit with directly on Twitter on Sunday night

'I finished a rough semester with a 3.75 GPA this spring, was asked to model for an up and coming photographer and just received some of the proofs,' the 21-year-old told DailyMail.com.

'My father, who has always been supportive of my endeavors, was merely expressing his pride. There is nothing inappropriate in the picture and those who seek to make it something it is not are merely Trump haters who are using this as an opportunity to stir up drama.

'I find it hypocritical that those who consider themselves liberal would criticize a woman embracing her body. There is nothing sexualized about the photograph... it is tasteful and it is demure.

'There is nothing inappropriate about my taking the photograph or my father's decision to share it. I am ashamed at these people for their reactions and believe it indicated more about their own perverted mindsets as nothing they are saying has any merit nor is it rooted in any truth.'

Prior to becoming Trump's personal attorney and a spokesman for the president, Cohen was an executive vice president at the Trump Organization. He joined the organization in 2006.

Cohen, according to the Washington Times, is also considering legal action against Buzzfeed, after the website published documents that included an allegation that he met with Russian spies.
A man was killed by a falling tree limb at a Mother's Day barbecue in New Jersey.

Lightning struck a tree on Sunday evening in Passaic, causing the 16-foot limb to come crashing down. It struck the man on the head, police said.

The incident occurred as skies darkened and a flash thunderstorm rolled through the city, knocking down several trees and power lines, and leaving residents without power.

A 28-year-old man was killed after a tree was struck by lightning and a 16-foot tree limb fell and hit him on the head around 5pm. The man, his wife and their two children were attending a family barbecue for Mother's Day in Passaic, New Jersey

The man, his wife and their two children were at a family backyard barbecue celebrating a birthday and Mother's Day, reported NorthJersey.com.

Police say lightning hit the tree at 4.58pm, causing the massive limb to fall in the backyard of 375 Paulison Avenue.

'It's an act of God, as unfortunate as it is,' Lieutenant Jonathan Schaer told the news website.

The 28-year-old man died from his injures, and Schaer says his name is being withheld pending family notification.

Six others were injured, including the man's wife and four other family members.

Five people were taken to St Joseph's Regional Medical Center and one was transported to St Mary's Hospital.

All the injuries however were non-life-threatening.

The lightning strike was part of a fast-moving storm that developed in upstate New York and came down across the region, uprooting trees and causing power lines to fall even though it lasted only minutes.

In Passaic, lightning strikes occurred elsewhere - causing two other trees to fall - including one on Pearl Street that damaged five vehicles and one on Carleton Place that damaged a transformer.

In a flash storm with heavy wind gusts across the north New Jersey region, trees were uprooted (pictured here in Rutherford, New Jersey) and power lines fell - damaging cars and other property

Wreckage sits in the backyard where family had gathered to celebrate Mother's Day and a birthday. Six other people were hit by the tree limb, but they all sustained non-life-threatening injuries

Rain and isolated thunderstorms, with wind gusts estimated at 50 to 60 miles per hour, swept through the area around 4.30pm and lasted about an hour, according to the National Weather Service.

The agency also received numerous reports of damage in the area from trees.

Passaic Mayor Hector Lora said he was in the area at the time of the lightning strike and arrived at the house just minutes after it occurred.

He said the city is connecting the family with resources to help them with processing information and planning the next steps, such as funeral arrangements.

'We are a community in shock and mourning from the loss of a resident on a day we celebrate families and mothers,' Mayor Lora told reporters outside the home.

'Continue to pray and continue to support the family.'
A Non-Commissioned officer in the Australian Defence Force was found guilty of sexually assaulting four of his superior officers earlier this year.

As punishment, he was fined only $700 and dropped just one rank.

A clipping from the Army News reveals the light punishment for the offender, which saw $2800 of their $3500 fine suspended, leaving the total owing at $700.

An Australian Army soldier was given just a $700 fine after he was found guilty of touching three superior officers in an 'intimate place' and committing an 'intimate act' with another (stock image)

It is in stark contrast to two other rulings for the month of March, one which saw an Officer dismissed for going AWOL for eight days, and another which saw an Officer who embezzled $27,000 dismissed, jailed for 180 days and fined almost the full amount they stole.

The court ruling for the NCO explains: 'The member was accused of assaulting four superior officers, by touching three of the officers on an intimate place and by an intimate act on the other superior officer.'

'The member was also accused of an act of indecency on one of the superior officers.

'The member pleaded guilty to the charges and was found guilty of the charges.

'The member was reduced in rank by one rank and fined $3500 (with $2800 suspended and the balance to be paid in one lump sum).'

A spokesperson for the Department of Defence declined to answer questions about the soldier's punishment for privacy reasons, but explained: 'following the conclusion of a Defence Force Magistrates hearing, an individual may be subject to administrative action'.

The punishment appears much less than that given to an Officer who was AWOL for eight days and an Officer who embezzled $27,000 - both who were dismissed from the Defence Force

'In the case mentioned, the reduction in rank involves loss of status, privileges, and financial loss (reduction in salary),' they said.

'In determining sentence under the DFDA, a Defence Force Magistrate must consider both the principles of sentencing applied by civilian criminal courts and the need to maintain discipline in the Defence Force.

'Some factors which may be taken into account in sentencing include the convicted persons rank, age, maturity, any previous convictions for service offences and the consequential effects of the persons conviction.

'All personnel involved in a Defence Force Magistrates hearing are entitled to available legal, welfare, pastoral and medical support as required.'

In 2015, it was revealed 22 members of the Australian Defence Force accused of rape were still serving or employed within Defence.

Of this number, revealed in published answers to a Senate Estimates hearing, the Department of Defence revealed 11 members were serving in the Navy, nine were in the Army, one in the Air Force and one serving in the Australian Public Service.

The highest rank of a permanent Defence Force member accused of rape is a Colonel equivalent, and their rape allegation is more than 20 years old, though the Department claim it only came to light in 2015.

Allegations of sexual abuse within the Defence Force stretch back decades and are constantly emerging.

In 2011, Australian Defence Force Academy Cadet Daniel McDonald, then 21, filmed himself having sex with a female cadet without her knowledge.

The video was broadcast to a number of other colleagues, and McDonald was sentenced to two year-long good behaviour bonds by the ACT Supreme Court.

During his trial, McDonald's bail conditions were loosened to allow him to continue studying at ADFA, provided he did not come within five metres of the woman involved.

Hastings Fredrickson (pictured), the ringleader of the notorious Jedi Council where personnel distributed images and videos of the women they had slept with, was given a 15-month suspended sentence for his crimes in 2015

He was not sacked until November 2013, when he was found guilty by a court, though he had been suspended since June 28 that year.

In 2013, the Jedi Council - which saw members of the ADF circulate videos and images of women they had slept with - came to light.

Accompanying the clips were often derogatory comments which included personal details about the women.

Ringleader Hastings Fredrickson, who dubbed himself the Wolf of Woolloomooloo, was sentenced to a 15-month sentence for his actions, but spent no time behind bars.

In response, then-Chief of Army David Morrison released a viral YouTube Video addressing the allegations.

In the sternly worded clip he said: 'Those who think it is okay to behave in a way that demeans or exploits their colleagues have no place in this Army.

He noted female soldiers were 'vital to us maintaining our capability now and into the future'.

'If that does not suit you, then get out,' he said in the address to Defence personnel.

'You may find another employer where your attitude and behaviour is acceptable but I doubt it.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the Department of Defence for comment.
A wealthy property tycoon says Generation Y can crack into the housing market while still enjoying their avocado on toast and regular coffees.

Zaki Ameer, 38, the founder of Dream Design property, says young Australian home purchasers should be looking to first invest rather than buy and choose cheaper properties in less desirable outer city suburbs.

And he said investing in a house or apartment can be achieved without making sacrifices, such as giving up the $19 avocado on toast for brunch and $4 coffees.

'I started investing when I was 25. I don't think I ever made any sacrifices of that kind to get into the property market,' he said.

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Zaki Ameer (pictured), the founder of Dream Design Property, said people can get a foothold into the property market by purchasing houses and apartments in less desirable suburbs

Mr Ameer said millennials looking to get a foothold in the property market should be looking outside inner-city areas (stock image)

'[The notion] you need to own your first home, I think that's a lie. Just continue to rent and invest your money.'

Mr Ameer managed to amass 15 properties in three years by investing and since starting his personal property advising company, about 1100 deals have been closed. He now has 25 staff.

Mr Ameer said around Brisbane, the city his company now has its eye firmly set, the suburbs worth investing in are Logan, Ipswich and Marsden.

In Melbourne, Sunshine, Albion and Melton are the pick, while in Adelaide, it's Angle Park and Elizabeth Downs. Over in Perth, look to Morley and Hamersley.

Mr Ameer acknowledged they might not be the first suburbs that come to mind for young home purchasers - and Sydney is not as cheap as it was even a few years ago, although there were still pockets of the western suburbs still worth investing in - but 'we've all got to start somewhere'.

Mr Ameer himself started investing in the western Sydney suburb of Mt Druitt.

Mr Ameer said young property owners should be first looking to invest rather than purchasing their own home

Mr Ameer said Generation Y can still keep renting where they currently are, but should purchase outside their comfort zone (stock image)

He added you would not be living in the home, merely renting it out, and in some cases the rental return can be higher than mortgage repayments.

Mr Ameer said it was still possible to purchase properties around Ipswich for about $180,000, which with a five per cent deposit and stamp duty you would need to have saved about $14,000, considerably less if you were looking in the $700,000 to $1 million price range.

He said young investors should also not expect to see a decent short-term return.

AMEER'S HOME TIPS 1. Be comfortable renting where you are 2. Owning your first home is a myth 3. Invest outside your comfort zone 4. Be comfortable with debt 5. Use a professional advisory property company 6. It takes time Advertisement

'It took me 10 years. Go with the mindset you have got to give it 10 years to see a full growth circle,' he said.

Mr Ameer has six key tips to help young property purchases get a foothold into the market.

'These tips have nothing to do with saving your money,' he said.

Mr Ameer's comments come as another young property tycoon says Generation Y needs to stop travelling and spending money on overpriced food to save for their first home.

Tim Gurner, 35, from Melbourne, has amassed nearly half a billion dollars since buying his first investment property when he was just 19 years old.

He said his generation can become home owners by changing their spending and lifestyle habits, despite Australia's housing affordability crisis.

Young property tycoon Tim Gurner (pictured) says Generation Y needs to stop travelling and spending money on overpriced food to save for their first home

Mr Gurner told the 60 minutes program on Sunday can become home owners by changing their spending and lifestyle habits

'When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn't buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,' he told Channel Nine's 60 Minutes program.

But like Mr Ameer, Mr Gurner notes: 'You might have to buy an investment property first'.

'You might have to share with mum and dad - you might have to buy with a friend,' he said.

'But you've got to get your foot in the door and you've got to slowly get up the ladder.'
The nurse seen mopping a floor while Miriam Merten wandered naked through a mental health facility before her death from brain injuries had been sacked from the same hospital two years earlier.

Christine Borthistle, who was slammed by a coroner for her 'monumentally disgraceful' act of 'complete indifference' over Ms Merten's death, had been sacked from Lismore Base Hospital for bringing flying foxes onto her ward.

The animal lover died unexpectedly aged 66 last month within days of being banned from nursing for five years.

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Nurse Christine Borthistle was an animal lover who had been sacked for bringing bats into Lismore Base Hospital

Nurse Christine Borthistle pictured mopping a corridor while Miriam Merten wanders the floor drugged and naked

Miriam Merten died of brain injuries after falling more than 20 times in Lismore Base Hospital

Ms Borthistle, also a registered wildlife carer, was warned in September 2011 for bringing bats and other animals into the hospital's mental health unit. She had admitted doing so but said she had stopped the practice after a complaint.

She was dismissed after being seen transferring a bat into the car of another wildlife rescue volunteer in the hospital's carpark, days after receiving a first and final disciplinary warning.

Ms Borthistle was told: 'Your continued unsatisfactory professional conduct and your failure to follow a reasonable and lawful directive, as well as your demonstrated lack of commitment to fulfill the employment relationship as a registered nurse within the health service in a safe and considered manner are incompatible with the expected standards of this organisation'.

The Industrial Relations Commission found Ms Borthistle's dismissal was 'harsh, unreasonable and unjust' in part because the health authority had failed to conduct a proper investigation and reinstated her in February 2012.

Before the 2011 disciplinary process Ms Borthistle had never been the subject of any allegations or investigations into her conduct as a nurse, she told the IRC.

In June 2014, Ms Borthistle was the senior nurse on duty when Miriam Merten, a 46-year-old mother-of-two, was admitted to the Lismore Base Hospital mental health facility.

Ms Merten, who was well-known in the ward, was drugged and thrown naked into a locked seclusion room. The room had no toilet, running water or furniture. A mattress was on the floor.

Nurse Christine Borthistle (pictured left) was captured on CCTV mopping the floor while Miriam Merten walked naked along a corridor

Christine Borthistle died 'unexpectedly' last month after being deregistered as a nurse

Nurse Christine Borthistle had worked at Lismore Base Hospital as a mental health nurse since 1997

It was the second time Ms Merten had been placed in seclusion that day and the fifth time during her eight-day admission.

During her time in the seclusion room, Ms Merten fell about 20 times, often on her head. Neither Ms Borthistle nor another junior nurse on duty ever entered the room.

Once released from the seclusion room after more than five hours, she was seen wandering a corridor naked and covered in her own faeces while Ms Borthistle mopped the floor.

In seven hours before being transferred to the hospital's intensive care unit on June 2, Ms Merten fell about 24 times.

A coroner found Ms Merten died the following day from 'traumatic and hypoxic brain injury caused by numerous falls and the self-beatings of her head not done with the intention of taking her own life'.

The coroner said in a judgement in September 2016: 'To see a mentally ill person in 2014 at a public hospital in NSW treated in such an appalling manner is really beyond comprehension'.

CCTV footage captured Miriam Merten locked in a seclusion room at Lismore Base Hospital

Miriam Merten was locked in a seclusion room, naked and without running water or a toilet, for more than five hours

A mattress left on the floor was the only comfort for Miriam Merten when locked inside a seclusion room

'The sight of the deceased wandering the corridor naked and covered in excrement while the senior nurse is seen to mop the floor apparently oblivious to her is horrific.

'While this appears not to be a system failure it is clearly a serious human failure.'

Ms Borthistle, who had been a nurse since 1972 and began work at Lismore in 1997 after 13 years at the former Rozelle mental health institution, surrendered her nursing registration in October 2015.

Mother-of-two Miriam Merten was left alone to wander a corridor after being held in seclusion for more than five hours

Miriam Merten, who died of brain injuries at Lismore Base Hospital, pictured with her daughter Corina

Christine Borthistle has died aged 66 after being deregistered as a nurse for five years

On February 17 a death notice appeared for Ms Borthistle stating she had 'passed away unexpectedly'.

Mourners wrote tributes remembering the mother-of-five, who was also a qualified solicitor, and was experiencing financial hardship.

RIP tiger mama, my beautiful friend, hugs and love to you,' one wrote. 'RIP. I understand your pain,' wrote another.

Nurse Christine Borthistle said she had been very fond of Miriam Merten

Miriam Merten pictured singing with Lismore's Hearing Voices Choir for people with mental illness in 2009

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian called the CCTV footage of Ms Merten 'disgusting and deeply distressing', while health Minister Brad Hazzard said the woman's last hours were 'beyond disturbing'.

Mr Hazzard and Mental Health Minister Tanya Davies launched a parliamentary inquiry and an independent investigation by chief pyschiatrist Murray Wright into the use of seclusion and restraint of mental health patients across NSW.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to support the removal of a controversial statue of pro-slavery Civil War general Robert E. Lee - just a day after Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer led a torch-wielding mob fighting to keep the same monument.

The demonstrators on Sunday night held candles - rather than the ominous torches of their rivals - so as to 'outshine their torches with our love', the Daily Progress reported.

But the protests weren't entirely peaceful. Police arrested three people at the gathering: one for assaulting a police officer and another for spitting on conservative blogger Jason Kessler - who was also arrested for 'disorderly conduct'.

Hundreds of protesters gathered on Sunday night in Charlottesville, Virginia, to support the removal of the statue of the pro-slavery Civil War general Robert E. Lee

This came just a day after the Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer - pictured at his own protests of about 100 on Saturday night - led a torch-wielding mob fighting to keep the same monument

The demonstrators on Sunday night held a candle-lit gathering so as to 'outshine their torches with our love'

Kessler was among the leaders at the gathering of white supremacists on Saturday night.

The marchers showed up in their dozens at the park in Charlottesville where the monument is on display, on at 9pm, crying 'Russia is our friend' and 'You Will not replace us', the Daily Progress reported.

But only ten minutes into the protest, police were also called because of an altercation among some of the marchers, forcing the demonstrators to scatter.

Public figures condemned the gathering, which some, including the city's Mayor, say echoed the practices of the Ku Klux Klan.

'[The event] was either profoundly ignorant or was designed to instill fear in our minority populations in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK,' Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer said.

'Either way, as mayor of this city, I want everyone to know this: we reject this intimidation. We are a welcoming city, but such intolerance is not welcome here.'

The controversy surrounding the statue began in April when Charlottesville City Council voted 3-2, to remove and sell the monument. The debate about the statue had been ongoing for a year and it has attracted leaders from the alt-right group including Spencer.

Some say the protesters actions mimicked those of the Ku Klux Klan. The city's Mayor said: '[The event] was either profoundly ignorant or was designed to instill fear in our minority populations in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK '

The ongoing debate surrounding the statue began in April when Charlottesville City Council voted 3-2, to remove and sell the monument (stock image of the statue)

But the council has a legal battle on its hands since a judge issued a court order halting the removal of the statue

The 39-year-old - who is credited with beginning the alt-right movement and has been quoted by Nazi propaganda - has been in the Virginia town leading protesters and giving speeches.

For now, the city council has a legal mountain to climb since a judge issued a court order halting the removal of the statue, for at least the next six months.

There has also been dissent over the council's decision to rename parks named after Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jackson, also Confederate Civil Wall general. There have yet to be any injunctions issued against this decision.
The Salt Creek attacker kept a sickening collection of rape pornography on his phone, which he watched on the day he kidnapped and assaulted two backpackers.

Former chef Roman Heinze, 61, was found guilty of violently attacking two tourists at the remote beach in Coorong National Park, southeast of Adelaide, last year.

He came before South Australia's Court of Criminal Appeal on Monday seeking permission to challenge the verdicts in relation to the attacks  but has had his appeal delayed until at least June.

Now, it has been revealed that Heinze was obsessed with violent pornography featuring bondage and rape.

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Salt Creek attacker Roman Heinze (pictured) kept a sickening collection of rape pornography on his phone, which he watched on the day he kidnapped and assaulted two backpackers

A judge branded the collection as 'extremely graphic, extremely violent, next level pornography' but jurors were only subjected to a 'watered down' version of it, the Adelaide Advertiser reports.

A suppression order  imposed because Heinze's defence team feared the information could affect his subsequent trials  meant details about it could not be published.

'He could never get a fair trial, they are so graphic and somewhat overwhelming potential jurors would be completely overawed by it,' defence counsel Bill Boucaut SC said ahead of the trial.

In March, Heinze was found guilty on six charges including indecent assault, aggravated kidnapping and endangering life.

But he is still to be sentenced for the crimes, with Justice Trish Kelly scheduled to hand down her penalties on Wednesday.

Former chef Roman Heinze, 61, was found guilty of violently attacking two tourists at the remote beach in Coorong National Park last year. Above, his arrest

In March, Heinze was found guilty on six charges including indecent assault, aggravated kidnapping and endangering life

He tied up a Brazilian woman with rope and sexually assaulted her before hitting a German woman in the head with a hammer several times. Above, a picture from the crime scene

Police found a box of Viagra, condoms and a bottle of Passion Pop inside Heinze's car

Justice Kelly revoked the suppression order ahead of the sentencing after prosecutors dropped charges that would have seen him stand trial for a fourth time.

Heinze met his victims, a Brazilian and a German, through the Gumtree website, where they had sought a ride to Melbourne.

The women, both 24, had only met each other through a mutual friend a few days before they decided to travel together.

He picked them up at a train station before driving them to a remote spot in the park in February 2016.

He grabbed the young Brazilian woman from behind and bound her with rope, cut her bikini off with a knife and sexually assaulted her.

Heinze met his victims, a Brazilian and a German, through the Gumtree website, where they had sought a ride to Melbourne

Prosecutors said Heinz' iPhone had two pornographic videos on it and he accessed them on the day of the Salt Creek attack

She previously told the court that she had been walking with him to spot kangaroos when he suddenly dragged her to the sand, sat on top of her and pulled out the knife.

The German woman said she woke to the sound of her friend screaming.

Heinze hit her on the head with a hammer several times before repeatedly ramming her with his 4WD.

TIMELINE OF ATTACKS 2014: Heinze indecently assaults a backpacker at a property in Adelaide's south after he agreed to give the woman a ride interstate February 2016: Heinze attacks two backpackers on a remote beach in Coorong National Park while camping He tied up a Brazilian woman with rope and sexually assaulted her before hitting a German woman in the head with a hammer several times and repeatedly ramming her with his 4WD Both managed to escape and Heinze was found in his bloodstained car further down the beach March 2017: A jury finds Heinze guilty of six charges, including indecent assault, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, endangering life, and causing serious harm May 5, 2017: Heinze was found not guilty of rape and false imprisonment against a former girlfriend May 11, 2017: A suppression order on Heinze's identity is lifted, naming him as the Salt Creek attacker Advertisement

Both managed to escape and he was arrested in his vehicle on the beach. Police found a box of Viagra, condoms and a bottle of Passion Pop inside.

Prosecutors said Heinz' iPhone had two pornographic videos on it.

He saved still images from the videos, which he accessed on February 7, 2016  the day he answered the Brazilian woman's Gumtree ad.

He also confessed to assaulting another woman, also a backpacker, in Hackham in September 2014.

Between that incident and the Salt Creek attack, he contacted 13 other backpackers on Gumtree and also accumulated depraved pornography on his computer and phone.

One of the women, who was from Japan, agreed to go to Salt Creek with Heinze.

But he cut the visit short because she revealed she had shared photos of him and his vehicle online.

Prosecutor Jim Pearce said Heinze became 'obsessed' with that woman afterwards.

Between August 2015 and January last year, he looked for information online about 'how to hurt a woman' during sex and if Japanese women 'like being raped,' the Advertiser reports.

He also searched online using terms including 'rape', 'fetish' and 'brutal.'

In November 2012, Mr Pearce said Heinze had spent 30 minutes online shopping for bondage products including a ball gag, a 'slave bondage set' and harnesses.

Heinze attacks two backpackers on a remote beach in Coorong National Park while camping

He picked them up at a train station before driving them to a remote spot in the park (above)

Mr Pearce previously told Justice Kelly that Heinze had shown no remorse and his prospects for rehabilitation were poor.

'There is no question of any remorse or contrition being demonstrated here,' he told the Supreme Court last week.

'Eventually he will be released, and that's inevitable one would think.

'But in meantime, the public will gain some protection by his incarceration.'

The appeal hearing will next be heard on June 26 when Heinze will seek permission to challenge his convictions.
Senator Lindsay Graham called on Donald Trump to stop tweeting and talking about the investigations into potential Russian interference during the election.

The long-time Senator discussed Trump's constant commentary in the wake of James Comey's shock dismissal during an interview on NBC's Meet The Press on Sunday.

Graham opened his remarks on the matter by saying he does not think the Russians interfered in the election, but said America needs to find out for sure.

'The president needs to back off here and let the investigation go forward. We need to call Comey and get to the bottom of all this,' he told Chuck Todd.

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Senator Lindsay Graham called on Donald Trump to stop tweeting and talking about the investigations into potential Russian interference during the election

'Nobody on the campaign that I know of colluded with the Russians. But we don't have all the evidence yet.

'We need to continue forward and protect these investigations.'

The South Carolina representative then went on to say Comey's replacement should not be a political appointee.

'I think it's time for an FBI agent to lead the FBI. When you talk about a new person to lead the FBI - how about an FBI agent who is above reproach?' he said.

Graham opened his remarks on the matter by saying he does not think the Russians interfered in the election, but said America needs to find out for sure

'The president needs to back off here and let the investigation go forward. We need to call Comey and get to the bottom of all this,' Graham said of Trump

'There's so many good agents, men and women out there capable of leading the agency. This is up to the president. He has a duty and obligation to pick somebody beyond reproach outside the political lane.

'I hope he'll do that. I'm ready to move on and pick a new FBI agent and get to the bottom of what Russia did.'

Graham was then quizzed by Todd about one of the names being floated as a potential replacement for Comey - Texas Senator John Cornyn.

'Let me ask you this - in this political environment, do you think it is the right time to have the first ever FBI director with an elected political background?' the veteran journalist asked.

Graham (right) was then quizzed by Todd (left) about one of the names being floated as a potential replacement for Comey - Texas Senator John Cornyn

John Cornyn is pictured speaking to the media on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on May 9

'No. I think it's now time to pick someone who comes from within the ranks or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on day one,' Graham said.

'You know who does the FBI director work for? To me, it's like appointing a judge. The president actually appoints the judge, but the judge is loyal to the law.

'The president appoints the FBI director, but the FBI director has to be loyal to the law.'
Accused drug smuggler Cassandra Sainsbury has been languishing in Colombia's El Buen Pastor women's prison since April 11  after allegedly being found trying to leave the country with 5.8 kilograms of cocaine.

The 22-year-old former personal trainer claims she was set up by a 'well-dressed black man called Angelo' who she thought sold her 18 sets of headphones the morning before she left the country.

The 'headphones' were all wrapped in black plastic of all different sizes  which Colombian officials found actually contained cocaine.

Cassandra Sainsbury, pictured at Bogota's airport, faces drug smuggling charges in Colombia

The young woman, pictured with mother Lisa Evans, could face 25 years in jail if she is found guilty - she claims she is innocent but some people are doubting her story

Ms Sainsbury's mother Lisa Evans and sister Khala Sainbury went public with the accused drug smuggler's story 19 days after the arrest as they asked for donations to 'free their innocent daughter and sister'.

Ms Sainsbury's fiance Scott Broadbridge also spoke out calling for donations for the young woman as she sat in a cell in the overcrowded jail  but seemingly inconsistent stories have people doubting her innocence.

In Colombia for business

On April 30 Khala Sainbury spoke to Daily Mail Australia about her sister's arrest and claimed she was in Colombia for a working holiday to promote her personal trainer business.

Ms Sainsbury's fiance, Scott broadbridge, left, and mother Lisa, right, got to Colombia a month after she was first arrested and charged

Mr Broadbridge who is due to marry the former personal trainer on February made a deal with Sunday night and will be paid for an interview with Cassie

Less than 24-hours later Ms Sainsbury's fiance, Mr Broadbridge, revealed she had not been working in the fitness industry for some time.

'Although Cassie is a PT, she is not currently personal training and hasn't been for 6 months. I don't know why that was mentioned at all,' Mr Broadbridge wrote online.

'She helped manage a commercial cleaning business that had both national and international clients.'

Daily Mail Australia also revealed there is no working visas for Australians wishing to gain employment in Colombia.

A naive traveler

Ms Sainsbury's sister claimed she was an 'easy target' for scammers because she was a naive traveler - but the 22-year-old's social media revealed she had been to at least five countries in just six months.

'It came to her already packaged and concealed and she put it straight in her suitcase. She's very naive,' Khala told 9 News.

Her mother claimed she was a naive traveler but she appeared to be well-traveled after visiting at leas five countries in six months

The young woman posted to Instagram a week before she was stopped in a Colombian airport to tell her followers about her trip which also took her to Las Angeles and China

Ms Sainsbury posted this image from Canada during another work trip earlier this year

In October, 2016 Ms Sainsbury went on a cruise to Vanuatu with her partner Scott Broadbridge and his father. The couple got engaged during the trip.

Then in January the former personal trainer went to Canada for a 'work trip' on her own - tagging photographs at the time with fitness-themes despite no longer being in the industry.

Then before she was arrested in Bogota, Columbia the blonde spent time in Las Angeles and China, sharing her travels with her friends.

She once again tagged the photographs with fitness-inspired words.

Buying headphones for the bridal party

Ms Sainsbury's defense has always been she thought she had bought 18 sets of cheap headphones for family members at home after befriending a local during the trip.

However Bogota residents, where she was caught with the drugs, say technology is expensive in Colombia  and headphones would be hard to find in the city.

'Colombia is not a country like Thailand where they have headphones in the market places like Dr. Dre Beats,' an Australian in Colombia said.

'Technology is considered expensive to buy here.'

The woman who claimed to have spent 'a lot of time in Bogota' said she had never seen headphones for sale there.

Ms Sainsbury's defense has always been she thought she had bought 18 sets of cheap headphones for family members at home after befriending a local during the trip - pictured here in front of the alleged headphones

The packages weighed more than headphones and were different shapes

While some people claimed to want to believe the former fitness fanatic's story they couldn't move past the weight of the package - almost six kilograms in total.

'Everyone knows that a extra 6kgs in headphones wouldn't feel right,' one person said.

'Always check your packages before putting them in your bag,' said another.

Family took more than a month to get to Colombia

Cassandra's mother, sister and fiance traveled to Colombia to see the young Australian after they had secured televison deals in Australia.

Her mother and sister negotiated a $1million deal with 60 Minutes before jumping on a plane with the television crew five weeks after the 22-year-old was arrested.

Ms Evans with Khala - Ms Sainsbury's older sister, who looked for her in prison a month after she was arrested after securing a paid interview with 60 Minutes

Mr Broadbridge negotiated his own deal with Sunday Night and also went to Bogota to see the young prisoner more than a month after she was taken into custody

Mr Broadbridge negotiated his own deal with Sunday Night and also went to Bogota to see the young prisoner more than a month after she was taken into custody.

Ms Sainsbury hit-out at her family's dealings with the media organisations and said she would be discussing 'whatever's been going on with the two stories' when she meets with them.

Father didn't want anything to do with her arrest

Cassandra's father Stuart Sainsbury claimed he didn't wan't anything to do with his daughter's arrest three weeks after she was first sent to jail in Colombia.

'I don't want to be tied up in all this,' the father, motorcycle enthusiast and fisherman said.

Cassandra's father Stuart Sainsbury claimed he didn't wan't anything to do with his daughter's arrest three weeks after she was first sent to jail in Colombia

'Listen, whatever is going on has nothing to do with me, and I have nothing to say about it.'

But hours later he completely changed his mind, crying on camera and claiming his love for the former personal trainer was 'unconditional'.

'She's just my kid, what parent thinks of her kid as a drug mule,' he said.

'I just love her, I can't change what's happened I just have to be here when she comes home,' he told 9News.

Her family claims she is terrified in prison but photographs show her smiling

Cassandra's mother said her daughter was terrified inside the walls of the notorious women's prison but a photograph of her grinning alongside another woman appeared to tell a different story.

Cassandra's mother said her daughter was terrified inside the walls of the notorious women's prison but a photograph of her grinning alongside another woman appeared to tell a different story

She has also been photographed smiling through the prison bars at television crews

The photograph showed Ms Sainsbury dressed in a pink top grinning alongside a fellow prisoner.

The young woman told News Corp later she had not given permission for the photograph to be released.

Footage of Ms Sainsbury smiling and waving at camera crews outside the prison gates also appear to go against her mother's claims she is miserable.

She is allegedly a bully

According to a prison guard the young woman is a bully and attention seeker, despite reports from her family claiming she is terrified of being a victim in jail

According to a prison guard the young woman is a bully and attention seeker, despite reports from her family claiming she is terrified of being a victim in jail.

A prison guard claimed to 9News the young woman has been bullying another English-speaking accused drug trafficker during her time in jail.

The young woman appeared with Ms Sainsbury in the smiling photographs.

'She is bullying another prisoner for taking a picture with her,' the guard alleged.

'But we believe Cassie wanted to take the picture.'

Plane tickets bought by unknown third party at last minute

Cassandra's ticket home via London on her 'all expenses work trip' was paid for by a third party in Hong Kong.

The ticket purchase raised red flags for the DEA who forwarded her passport information to Colombian officials.

Cassandra's ticket home via London on her 'all expenses work trip' was paid for by a third party in Hong Kong

Ms Sainsbury pictured here with her fiance before her doomed trip

'We found her because of an alert from the DEA,' Bogota airport's head of narcotics, Commander Rodrigo Soler, told News Corp.

Channel Seven reports that Colombian authorities had been forwarded her passport details as early as April 5 - six days before she was arrested at El Dorado International Airport.

She was in financial trouble

Ms Sainsbury has been living in Adelaide since she left her home town of Yorketown after the collapse of her gym Yorke fitness in 2015.

The young woman who was due to be married in early 2018.

Ms Sainsbury was in financial trouble in 2015 after the failure of her business

Colombian police have alleged Sainsbury was lured into becoming a drug mule because she was in debt and told it would be easy money.

Colonel Rodrigo Soler, anti-narcotics chief at Bogota's El Dorado International Airport, said Sainsbury was a perfect mark for drug smugglers.

He alleged she was likely told the job was pre-arranged and airport staff and police were paid off on both sides of the journey to let her through with the 5.8 kilograms of cocaine she carried in her luggage.
SCOTUS Rejects Review of North Carolina Voter ID Law Ruled Unconstitutional

Today, the US Supreme Court rejected hearing an appeal to the Fourth Circuit's ruling striking down several key components of North Carolina's controversial voter ID law, passed last year. Last summer, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that 5 key components, including the voter ID provisions, were unconstitutional and could not be enforced. Since SCOTUS refused to hear the appeal, the Fourth Circuit's ruling stands.

Although the voter ID law was upheld by the lower District Court, on appeal, the court found that lawmakers targeted African American voters ' with almost surgical precision.' Additionally, the appeals court found that the voter ID law was an attempt to 'impose cures for problems that did not exist.'

Discriminatory Provisions Struck Down

In addition to the voter ID provisions, the appeals court also rejected regulations that shortened the time for early voting, banned counting votes cast in the wrong precinct, banned preregistration of teenagers and same day registration. These provisions were found to have a disparate impact on African American voters.

Surprisingly, the court found that North Carolina could not point to single instance of a person being charged with in-person voter fraud, yet for some reason, the new voter ID law was meant to protect against exactly this "problem." Despite there actually being evidence of absentee voter fraud in the state, the Court of Appeals significantly noted that the new voter ID law excluded absentee voting, which gets used by white voters more than any other demographic.

Voting Restrictions

Under the Voting Rights Act, and other legislation, states may not impose restrictions on voting that are discriminatory. For example, voter ID laws can frequently have a discriminatory impact if the types of permissible identifications are not broad enough to include, or exclude, types of identification that a distinct group is more likely to have.

However, in 2013, a portion of the Voting Rights Act, which required nearly a third of states to get federal approval of any new voting laws, was struck down by the Supreme Court. Fortunately, the change to the law does not prevent discriminatory state laws restricting voting from being challenged in court under the Voting Rights Act.

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A man has been arrested after his 55-year-old mother was found dead with extensive injuries to her body in a townhouse in Sydney's south on Monday morning.

Lynda Connors was found by her eldest son, 31, lying in bed covered in blood at 6.45am in their family home on Florida Street, Sylvania. It's believed he found her lifeless and wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries.

A few hours later his younger brother Nathan White, 28, was pulled over and dramatically arrested in St Peters, in the city's inner west. He was taken to Newtown Police Station for questioning over his mother's suspected murder.

Police are investigating the possibility she was killed with a crossbow or pitch fork which were both found in the back of Mr White's car and seized for examination.

A close family friend also claimed Mr White had been struck over the head with a pool cue at a local pub roughly five years ago and hadn't been the same since.

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Police have arrested Nathan White, 28, over the murder of his mother Lynda Connors, 55. Pictured are for forensics experts examining her home in Sylvania, in Sydney's south

Mr White (pictured) was arrested by police a few hours after his mother was discovered dead

Ms Connors was found by her eldest son, 31, lying in her bed covered in blood just before 7am

Police are investigating the possibility she was killed with a crossbow, which was found in the back of Mr White's (pictured) car, or a pitchfork, which has been seized

A woman who said she had known Mr White since he was a child told the Sydney Morning Herald that he had recently started hearing voices.

'Over the past 12 months he had just fully isolated himself,' she told the publication.

'Before that he was fine, he had normal conversations and everything.

'He had always been a pretty good kid growing up. He has had a hard life, he only had his mum. It was only mum and the two boys.'

Miranda commander Superintendent Michael O'Toole said police were appealing for witnesses that may have seen something suspicious on Sunday night.

'The (older son) is very disturbed by what has happened. He is the one who came across the incident and called police to attend it,' he said.

A police source said Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog (pictured) before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway in St Peters, in the city's inner west

It's believed Ms Connors eldest son found her wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries. Police are pictured outside the house early on in the morning before Mr White's arrest

He confirmed a crossbow had been found but would not be drawn on whether it had any connection to Ms Connors' death.

'There was a crossbow taken out of the vehicle, but there are other items (that have) also been taken out of the vehicle that the older son was in,' he said.

He refused to rule out the possibility she may died on Mother's Day, saying it was too early in the investigation to determine an exact timeline of events.

Ms Connors' death is being treated as suspicious by police.

A police source told the Daily Telegraph that Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway.

Police are investigating the possibility Ms Connors was killed with a crossbow, which was found in the back of Mr White's car, or a pitchfork, which has been seized

Police are treating Ms Connors' death as suspicious and have set up a crime scene

Police taped off the townhouse complex on Florida Street, in the Sydney suburb of Sylvania

Neighbours claim Ms Connors and her two adult children had lived at the home for 20 years

Homicide detectives and local police officers canvassed the neighbourhood after the death

Superintendent O'Toole said Ms Connors eldest son was not in custody but was at Miranda Police Station assisting police with their inquiries.

A neighbour told Daily Mail Australia she didn't hear the disturbance next door and was woken by police.

The neighbour said the mother lived there with her two sons  and had done for 'about 20 years'.

NSW Homicide Squad detectives have taped off the townhouse complex and are speaking to family and friends of Ms Connors.

Police have refused to rule out whether Ms Connors died on Mother's Day or early on Monday
A gigolo who brutally murdered his Indonesian transsexual prostitute girlfriend was foiled in his attempt dispose of her body by cooking it when the power went out.

Marcus Volke is believed to have killed Mayang Prasetyo, 27, in their upmarket Brisbane flat in October 2014 in a domestic violence incident.

Standing over her lifeless body, the 27-year-old put his chef skills to work and chopped her into pieces before boiling them on his electric stove.

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A coronial inquest is investigating the gruesome death of Indonesian transgender sex worker Mayang Prasetyo who was killed and dismembered

It will seek to determine when, where, and how Mayang Prasetyo was brutally killed, allegedly by her partner Marcus Volke (L), 27, who then committed suicide

It seemed like a perfect plan and he may have gotten away with it if the huge pot hadn't boiled over and short-circuited his apartment's power.

'Gday, is this a 24 hour electrician?' he casually asked Brad Coyne, forced to call for help getting the power back on to complete his sick plot.

'Yeah I got a bit of a problem. Um, I was cooking on my stove, it's an electric stove and the stock pot boiled over, dripped down and got into the oven and basically made this big bang and then all the power turned off.

'Does it sound like something you'd be able to fix today?'

Volke attempted to dispose of the 27-year-old victim's remains by boiling them on the stove in their upmarket Teneriffe unit, police said at the time

Volke is believed to have killed Mayang Prasetyo, 27, in their upmarket Brisbane flat in October 2014 in a domestic violence incident

A few hours later Mr Coyne arrived at the Teneriffe flat and was confronted by a putrid smell, which the killer tried to explain away.

'You'll have to mind the smell, I'm cooking pig's broth,' Volke said.

The electrician was led around the house, where he saw garbage bags, bottles of chemicals and rubber gloves.

'We went into the bathroom which had laundry in it and there was a cupboard that had the washing machine in it - which I didn't know at the time had bits of his wife's body in it, like her head and arms,' he told the Scottish Daily Record at the time.

Mr Coyne got the power back on and tested the stove - not knowing Ms Prasetyo's feet were sitting half-cooked in the massive pot.

Still feeling something was off, he talked to the building manager on the way out - who immediately called police for a welfare check.

The murder-suicide was treated as a domestic violence situation that escalated, with police saying they had recovered a murder weapon from Volke

The remains of Ms Prasetyo's body being taken out of their flat in Brisbane

A coronial inquest is investigating what happened next, when two police officers arrived for a routine check that led to Volke slitting his own throat in a nearby skip.

Constable Liam McWhinney and his partner Senior Constable Bryan Reid arrived at the flat and initially found Volke cooperative and were not suspicious.

But when they asked if they could search the apartment, Volke told them he needed to secure his dogs, locked the door and fled.

Constable McWhinney said the pair gave chase but their quarry eluded them and they returned to the unit to search it.

The apartment complex where the victim was allegedly murdered and dismembered

Volke attempted to dispose of the 27-year-old victim's remains by boiling them on the stove in their upmarket Teneriffe unit, police said at the time

That was when they found the pot with Ms Prasetyo's feet simmering, and in disbelief thought it was a joke.

'Originally I thought it was some sort of sick prank Halloween or something  when I put two and two together, I realised it wasn't a prank,' Constable McWhinney told the inquest on Monday.

'There was a pool of blood at the base of the fridge.'

Meanwhile, Volke jumped over his balcony fence into a laneway behind his building, then over another fence.

Having self-harmed before fleeing the apartment, he left a trail of blood behind him, smearing both fences and officers could easily follow.

The death of Ms Prasetyo, who worked as a high-class escort to support her family in Indonesia and put her two sisters through school, sent shockwaves across Australia

Constable Liam McWhinney and his partner Senior Constable Bryan Reid (pictured leaving the inquest) visited at the flat to check on Ms Prasetyo

Volke sought refuge inside the industrial bin but was soon surrounded by 15 officers with no escape.

When police opened the bin they found he had slit his own throat with the knife he grabbed on his way out of his flat.

The crime scene took four days to clean up, and included disturbing items like rubber gloves, bleach, and 'squelching' carpet, along with a vomit-inducing smell.

The three-day inquest will, in part, determine what role police had in Volke's death, and whether they complied with Queensland Police policy and procedure.

The crime scene, which took authorities four days to clean up, was particularly disturbing, according to police

On Monday it also heard from Detective Sergeant Joshua Walsh that Volke saw a doctor for anxiety, depression and a sleep disorder two weeks before the murder-suicide.

Police also obtained medical records showing that he had sought treatment at Victoria's Ballarat Hospital when he was 16 years old.

Detective Sergeant Tom Jakes, the dog squads Senior Constable Robert Richardson and district duty officer, Senior Sergeant Sean McKay, are also expected to testify.

Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Carleau Mesidor, 39, was sentenced to nine months in jail for animal abuse

A Florida man was sentenced to nine months in jail for hanging his puppy by the neck and punching it in his face after becoming angry because she chewed on his shoe.

Carleau Mesidor, 39, of Bradenton pleaded no contest to one felony count of animal abuse after accepting a plea deal, according to theMiami Herald.

The brown mixed breed puppy, Zoey, has recovered from abuse that left her with a fractured eye socket, and was adopted into a loving home.

The judge made a finding that the abuse had been 'intentional torment.'

He was also fined $2,500, ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation and anger management and serve 24 months of probation.

Mesidor hung his puppy, Zoey (pictured) by a lanyard and punched her several times in the face for chewing on his shoe

While under probation, he can have no care, custody, control, possession or intentional contact with dogs.

During the abuse in October, Mesidor hung the puppy with a lanyard, and punched her several times in the face.

Pictures show her with an extremely red eye - a result of an orbital fracture. She also suffered other injuries.

He had three other dogs, all of whom were surrendered. Zoey took a month to recover and then found her forever home.

The mixed breed pooch was left with an eye fracture and other injuries

Zoey recovered for a month and then was adopted into a loving forever home, say police

'Zoey was adopted by a loving family, and she is very happy,' wrote the Bradenton Police on its Facebook page.

'This was a senseless, brutal attack on a helpless three-month-old puppy that will forever be etched in the minds of everyone involved,' Assistant State Attorney Lisa Chittaro said. 'Its one of the most barbaric cases we have dealt with. Animal cruelty will not be tolerated.'

Mesidor had previous arrests for possession of cannabis and parole violation.
A mother pit bull and her puppy who were rescued by the NYPD one year ago have finally been reunited.

Officers found Jamie and Zaza severely underweight and living in filthy conditions in April 2016.

It was only after the two were nursed back to health that the ASPCA discovered that Jamie was Zaza's mother.

Seeing each other earlier this month - for the first time since being rescued - the dogs gleefully jumped on each other, and gave each other ear kisses.

One year after they were rescued from 'deplorable conditions' in a Brooklyn home by NYPD officers, Jamie, five (left), reunited with Zaza, two (right)

When they were found by officers, the ASPCA said Jamie's (background) nails 'had grown so long they were curving into her feet' and Zaza (foreground) had a double-ear infection and an infection in the skin between her toes

The pair greeted each other enthusiastically, jumping around and giving each other ear kisses (Here, Jamie gives kisses to Zaza)

Jamie spent a year recovering from her abuse after officers in Brooklyn's 63rd Precinct rescued her.

Just four years old at the time, she was found with her coat and paws 'soaked in urine and feces and her nails had grown so long they were curving into her feet,' according to the ASPCA.

The organization cared for the dog during her recovery.

Both of then-one-year-old Zaza's ears were infected as well as the skin between her toes.

But she soon recovered and, just two months later, she joined NYPD Commissioner William Bratton in Take Your Dog to Work Day, an event that promotes pet adoption.

Zaza was adopted by Stacey Richman - who renamed her Dani - after she volunteered with her company at the ASPCA.

'I wasn't honestly expecting to adopt... I just saw this dog, and that was all she wrote. I needed her,' she told Gothamist.

'You could say it was fate. I really believe she and I were meant to find one another. I couldn't be more grateful for the day if I tried. She's the best thing to happen to me.'

Both dogs went on patrol with the NYPD (left, Zaza joins NYPD Commissioner William Bratton on Take Your Dog to Work Day) but were only discovered to be related after they were adopted

Zaza (left) and Jamie (right) were reunited by their adoptive owners - who've renamed them Dani and Lucinda, respectively - and they plan to arrange more meetings between the pair

And Jamie found a new home with Einat Lapidot and her husband, Matt Winum, who call their dog Lucinda.

They told Gothamist: 'We had wanted to adopt for a while and, when we walked into the ASPCA to look, we knew we wanted to rescue a dog that had the slimmest chances of finding a home.

'[She] had been in the Adoption Center a while and, the minute we met her, we knew she was meant to be with us!'

As soon as the adopters knew of the other's existence, they arranged for a meeting.

'[Their] story is an incredible example of how dogs can overcome past tragedy to become loving companions,' said Howard Lawrence, vice president of the ASPCA Humane Law Enforcement (Jamie during her 'special day out' with the NYPD)

Earlier this month, Jamie and Zaza met each other for the first time since being rescued.

'It's remarkable how they recognized each other immediately,' a spokeswoman for the ASPCA said in a statement.

'Jamie doesn't like other dogs much, but she seems to love Zaza! She was rolling around in joy (something her adopters said she's never done) and was giving Zaza lots of ear kisses.'

The owners plan for Jamie and Zaza to meet up again.

'[Their] story is an incredible example of how dogs can overcome past tragedy to become loving companions,' said Howard Lawrence, vice president of the ASPCA Humane Law Enforcement.
Investigators searched three properties Friday and Saturday for evidence related to the unsolved murder of eight members of an Ohio family over a year ago.

Police have made no arrests in connection with the searches, but they mark a major development in the long-stalled probe, according to Fox 19.

On April 22, 2016, seven adults and a teenage boy from the Rhoden family were shot dead at four separate homes near Piketon in Pike County, Ohio.

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Investigators searched three properties Friday and Saturday for evidence related to the unsolved murder of eight members of an Ohio family over a year ago

Police have made no arrests in connection with the searches, but they mark a major development in the long-stalled probe, according to Fox 19

They were all shot execution-style.

It is unclear if anything was found during the searches, and the properties searched included a 71-acre farm in Adams County.

The farm belonged to an ex-boyfriend of one of the victims, 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden, the Cincinnati Enquirer said.

Hanna was found shot dead next to her five-day-old infant girl who was left unharmed.

Husband-to-be Frankie Rhoden, 20, and his fiancee Hannah Hazel Gilley, 20, were among those killed with a gunshots to the head - their six month old son was spared

Christopher Rhoden Jr (left), 16, the youngest victim, and Hanna Rhoden (right) were both killed

Jake Wagner, 24, and Hanna had a daughter in 2013, and he was given custody of the child after the murders.

Records show that Wagner might have sold the farm in March of this year.

A second search took place at a farm in Piketon that belongs to some of Wagner's relatives, according to the Enquirer. The third property searched was a used car lot in Adams County.

Rhoden family members issued a plea in April on the anniversary of the killings, asking anyone with information to come forward.

Kenneth Rhoden (left), 44, and Christopher Rhoden (right), 40, were both killed in the mysterious massacre in Piketon Read

Gary and Dana Rhoden were also killed execution-style in the brutal and unsolved murder

Rhoden family members issued a plea in April on the anniversary of the killings, asking anyone with information to come forward

Leonard Manley, who lost his daughter, Dana Rhoden, and three grandchildren, lives on Union Hill Road near all the crime scenes. He spends his days tinkering after retiring two years ago from cutting timber.

He doesn't know who committed the crime and questions whether it will be solved in his lifetime.

Manley, 65, has long thought the killers knew the properties intimately, in part because Christopher Rhoden Sr. had a security system, as well as a pit bull and bulldog, that would have been hard for a stranger to get past.

Daily Mail Online revealed exclusively in the days after the murders that one of the bodies was left covered in dollar bills and CCTV cameras had been taken by the assassins

It was also revealed three of the four properties where the killers struck were being used for marijuana production leading to theories that the massacres were the result of a turf war

'You wake up at night, and you wonder. I get up of a night, 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. Can't go back to sleep, thinking about things,' Manley said.

The victims, Hanna Rhoden, Dana Rhoden, Clarence 'Frankie Rhoden, Christopher Rhoden Jr, Gary Rhoden, Hannah Gilley, Christopher Rhoden Senior and Kenneth Rhoden, all died of gunshot wounds.

Kenneth Rhoden was the only person who was shot once, dying from that single bullet to the head.

His brother, Christopher Rhoden Senior, was the only family member not shot in the head. He died of wounds to his head, torso and an extremity.

Daily Mail Online revealed exclusively in the days after the murders that one of the bodies was left covered in dollar bills and CCTV cameras had been taken by the assassins.

It was also revealed three of the four properties where the killers struck were being used for marijuana production leading to theories that the massacres were the result of a turf war.
Media personality Mark Latham has described Qantas boss Alan Joyce as a 'b*****d' for pressing charges against a pensioner who pied him in the face.

The Irish-born aviation boss copped a lemon meringue pie last week as he addressed a business breakfast in Perth.

Mr Latham said Mr Joyce had made himself a political target by campaigning for gay marriage, and pointed out that politicians occasionally copped facial cream pies too.

'Joyce is a bit of a b*****d,' he told Daily Mail Australia on Monday.

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Mark Latham said Qantas boss Alan Joyce was a 'bit of a b*****' for pressing charges

'He can't cop a soft, cream pie in the face: that's the message he's sent,' Mr Latham said.

Tony Overheu, a 67-year-old pensioner and practising Christian who is also opposed to gay marriage, has been charged with common assault after ambushing the Qantas boss from behind the stage.

Mr Joyce last week said he pressed for charges to send a message 'this type of behaviour isn't acceptable' but he declined to comment on Mr Latham's latest remarks.

However, Mr Latham said pressing for charges against an elderly man sent the message that he was 'an untouchable'.

'That we've all got to bow to this bloke because he's a political campaigner. I don't think the country should work this way,' he said.

'Alan Joyce has been running around the country like a quasi politician. He uses his position at Qantas for campaigning on same-sex marriage.

'I don't see how that has anything to do with the budget bottom line at Qantas.'

Qantas boss Alan Joyce and former Victorian premier Steve Bracks both copped cream pies

Mr Latham, a former federal Labor leader who last week joined the right-wing Liberal Democrats, said politicians didn't press charges and neither should Mr Joyce.

'Once you start campaigning like a politician, you've got to expect the odd form of protest,' he said.

'If I was ever hit in the face by a soft pie, a cream pie, you wouldn't think for a minute about trying to get this guy locked up.

'Alan Joyce should be big enough to say, 'I'm out there campaigning politically. The guy hasn't tried to harm me physically.

''I wasn't hurt physically. I'm not going to press charges against a 67-year-old pensioner'.'

Steve Bracks joked about copping a cream pie by appearing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in March 2001

Former Victorian premier Steve Bracks was pied in the face in October 2000 by a left-wing anti-capitalist protester, and joked about it five months later by allowing himself to be the butt of a joke at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Mr Latham said the lemon meringue pie Mr Joyce copped was much softer than an old pork pie.

'I would categorise this as a prank rather than an assault. People saying this is a form of assault need to have a good look at themselves,' he said.

He added the Chaser pranksters on the ABC did much worse.

'No one ever tried to put them in jail,' Mr Latham said. 'If it was someone from the ABC, one of Joyce's mates from the ABC, he wouldn't be doing anything.'

Tony Overheu with a lemon meringue pie moments before he slammed it into Alan Joyce's face

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce is covering in the remains of a $25.95 creamy lemon cake

On Tuesday last week, Mr Overheu left a room of 500 people aghast when he strolled up to Mr Joyce and shoved a $25.95 lemon meringue cake in his face during a speech at Perth's exclusive Hyatt Regency hotel.

He later told Daily Mail Australia his actions were a stand against 'corporate bullying' and said he had carefully selected the cake as it was soft and unlikely to do any injury to his target.

Mr Latham said throwing the book at the elderly pensioner who had hidden behind the stage with a lemon cake was 'over the top'.

'The guy publicly said his family and his wife got stuck into him. Going the rounds of the kitchen with his wife is punishment enough,' he said.
A blood-soaked man holding a knife and what appeared to be a human head stabbed a grocery store employee, police say.

The suspect walked into the Thriftway Harvest Market store in Estacada Oregon, at around 2.15pm on Sunday afternoon and stabbed the employee, who had to be airlifted for treatment.

The employees at the store confronted the murder suspect, and managed to restrain him until police arrived at the scene.

Twenty minutes after this incident unfolded, a 911 caller alerted police about a dead body in a home just ten miles away from the scene of the stabbing.

Neither the victims nor the suspect - who was also taken to a hospital when he was in police custody - have been identified but Sherriff deputies say both crimes are related, and they believe the man who entered the store may be behind the murder too, KGW reported.

A man soaked in blood, holding a knife and what seemed to be a human head, stabbed a grocery store employee at the Estacada Thriftway Harvest Market (the parking lot of the store is pictured)
A three-year-old boy died after he walked behind his father's car as the man was reversing the vehicle.

Police are investigating the accident, which occurred in Badgers Head in Tasmania on Sunday.

The young boy was struck by the vehicle, and later died while being transported to Launceston General Hospital.

A young boy died after he walked behind his father's car as the man was reversing the vehicle in Badgers Head in Tasmania (pictured)

Inspector Gary Williams of Tasmania Police said: 'Our thoughts are with the family at this tragic time, and it is asked that their privacy be respected'.

'Our thoughts also extend to the emergency service workers who attended this tragic accident,' he said.

A report will be prepared for the coroner, Tasmania Police said in a statement.
A man whose mother abandoned him in a cinema as a three-week-old baby has been reunited with his long-lost brother and sister 61 years later.

Robert Weston, 61, was left in a bundle of blankets at Birmingham's Odeon cinema on March 24, 1956.

The father of seven, from Plymouth in Devon, has spent decades searching for his biological family and after hiring a 'DNA detective' he finally tracked them down living in Scotland.

Robert Weston, whose mother abandoned him in a cinema as a three-week-old baby, has been reunited with his long-lost brother and sister 61 years later

Describing the moment he met brother half-brother Tommy Chalmers, 59 and half-sister Pat McBain, 54, at Inverness Airport, he told MailOnline: 'It was a culmination of feelings from over half a century really. Elation, shock, joy, wonderment.

'It's such an intense time. Beautiful too. I'm so lucky they are as lovely as they are. It was worth every minute of searching.'

Mr Weston was found by teenager Mavis Smith, 17, who was on a date watching The Ten Commandments when she stumbled upon him in the ladies toilets.

Usherettes at the cinema later described how they had seen an attractive and well dressed woman in her late twenties holding a baby in the cinema.

For years, these were the only clues that Mr Weston had of his mother.

As a young child he was put into foster care and adopted by publicans George and Irene Weston, who he described as 'fantastic people'.

Pictured: Mr Weston with his brother Tommy and sister Pat outside their family home

Pictured: Robert Weston as a two years old in 1958 at a childrens' home in Droitwich, Worcester

But despite a good upbringing, he never lost a crushing longing to discover his biological family.

He joined the Royal Navy at 16 and later became an English teacher and then a college lecturer, before starting a family of his own

Mr Weston got married and had six children, but found not being able to talk to his children about their roots was 'horrible'.

After 18 years his first marriage ended in divorce and he went on to marry his second wife Marie - the pair have a 19-year-old daughter.

Mr Weston continued to search for his parents, even setting up a Facebook appeal, but his efforts only bared fruit when he was contacted by an expert on genealogy.

Pictured: Mr Weston, far left, in 1958, he tracked down his half brother and half sister after hiring a 'DNA detective'

Julia Bell asked for a saliva sample and ran it through three data bases before it matched with Mr Chalmers.

Mr Chalmers, who lives in Moray, said he was not surprised to find out that he had a long lost brother.

He said 'I sort of always suspected, we sort of knew.

'Ive got four brothers and a sister and one died two years ago.

'But he told me that somebody had turned up in a local pub in Turriff claiming to be one of my fathers sons and we never heard from him again. He just came in and said this and that was it.

'This is one of the reasons we think there could be a second brother to Rob.'

Mr Weston's father, Charlie Chalmers, from Turriff, Aberdeenshire, died aged 74 in 1997.

Shortly after he passed away, the family found a mysterious letter that they believe was from Rob's mother.

Mr Chalmers said: 'This letter was found when my dad died, Ive never seen it  but there is a few in the family who have seen it.

Mr Weston said that he had forgiven his mother and would give her a 'hug' if he saw her again

'It was from Robs mum and she claimed that she couldnt afford to bring up two kids, there was a name mentioned like Laurie or Larry and were not sure if thats Robs proper name or the name of his other brother.

'Hopefully at some stage that letter will re-appear. '

Reflecting on the moment the family finally came together, Mr Chalmers said: 'It was emotional, were really happy that Robs got in touch.

'Hes a really nice guy, were happy for Rob and were happy for ourselves. When we met we had a really good time. It was good for us because it brought us all together.'

The siblings are now trying to help their brother track down more clues that could lead to finding his mother.

Despite being abandoned, Mr Weston said he has no ill feeling towards his mother.

He said: 'I've forgiven her. I love her, she's my mother and that won't change.

'If I was to see her now, the first thing I would do is give her a hug.'
Joshua Waite (pictured), 17, was placed in an induced coma after he was allegedly kicked once in the head by an 18-year-old man about 7.45pm on Friday

The aunt of a teenager fighting for his life after a fight in the car park of a McDonald's says their family are 'living a nightmare'.

Joshua Waite, 17, was allegedly kicked in the head once during an argument at the fast food restaurant in Redcliffe, North of Brisbane, about 7.45pm on Friday.

Paramedics arrived at the car park and took Mr Waite to Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital where he was placed in an induced coma.

His aunt, Raiha Hooker told the Brisbane Times hearing about her nephew's condition 'broke' her.

His family (father, left, and sister, centre, pictured) have barely left his bedside since he was admitted to Royal Brisbane Hospital

'It was an absolute shock and it was hard being in another country knowing your baby nephew was in such a situation and condition,' she said.

'It is a really sombre feeling, it is living a nightmare, it is heartbreaking.'

She explained the family had barely left the teenager's side throughout the ordeal, and had set up a crowdfunding page to help pay for his rehabilitation.

As of Monday afternoon, Mr Waite's condition remains critical, a spokesperson for the Royal Brisbane Hospital told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr Waite's aunt, Raiha Hooker, says the family are 'living a nightmare' and the news 'broke' her

Paramedics arrived at the car park in Redcliffe, north of Brisbane, and placed Mr Waite in an induced coma

'Joshy is an amazing caring soul - this is not fair, he is loved so much,' grandmother Jenny-Lynne Garrett told The Courier Mail.

Meanwhile friends have posted supportive messages to Facebook, telling Mr Waite to 'be strong' and 'get well soon.'

Police have charged Jake Law-Cobbo, 18, with one count of grievous bodily harm.

They will allege a group of people were involved in the argument before the 18-year-old man caused serious head injuries.

Law-Cobbo did not apply for bail when his matter was mentioned at Redcliffe Magistrates Court on Monday.

He is due to appear again at the same court on Wednesday, and will remain in custody until then.

Investigators have appealed to anyone driving by the area at the time of the alleged attack who may have dash cam footage to come forward.
$23.1M Malpractice Verdict for Brain Damage Birth Injury

This week, in a Chicago courtroom, a judge handed down a massive, record setting, $23.1 million malpractice verdict against a neonatologist. The verdict, according to the plaintiff's attorney, is believed to be the largest birth injury verdict handed down by a judge (as compared to a jury verdict).

The verdict was awarded to the parents of a five year old girl that will suffer from a lifetime of health issues as a result of the medical malpractice. Although the hospital was not found to be negligent, it will be footing the bill for $21 million, while the doctor, who was found negligent, pays the remaining $2 million himself.

Details of the Case

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2014, alleged that the young girl's brain damage was the result of the neonatologist's tardiness, and a failure to timely provide a blood transfusion. Now, the young girl suffers from epilepsy and cerebral palsy, among other health problems as well.

The infant doctor asserted that he accidentally left both his pager and cell phone behind at work when he left that day. During the mother's delivery, complications arose, which necessitated a c-section delivery. According to one source, when born, the infant showed no signs of life, required resuscitation and a blood transfusion. What's worse is that the neonatologist on-call was not present. This led to delays in the transfusion, which led to the brain damage, and other health issues.

Stipulating to Avoid Appeal

One of the more fascinating aspects of this case was a stipulation the parties entered into before the judge reached her verdict. Generally, during a lawsuit, parties may make agreements affecting the case called stipulations. Oftentimes, stipulations will require judicial approval, however, sometimes they do not. They can cover a wide range of topics ranging from when documents will be exchanged to agreements dismissing a party from a case.

In this case, the parties agreed that neither side would file an appeal based on the judge's ruling. This means that the judge's ruling becomes a final ruling immediately and the defendants cannot object to the amount awarded, nor the decree finding the doctor liable.

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A 12-year-old girl has allegedly been tied up and sexually assaulted by a knife-wielding man who snatched her as she walked to school on Monday morning.

The young girl was on her way to a primary school near Gosford, on the NSW Central Coast, when the man grabbed her from behind and pulled her into nearby bushes.

Police allege the man, who was wearing camouflage clothing and carrying a hunting knife, tied the girl up and sexually assaulted her until she managed to escape.

She reported the incident at school and was later taken to hospital for assessment.

A 12-year-old girl was taken to hospital after she was allegedly tied up and sexually assaulted as she walked to school (footpath she was snatched from pictured)

Police allege the man was wearing camouflage clothing and carrying a hunting knife when he pounced on the young girl (stock image)

Detectives from the State Crime Commands Child Abuse Squad and Brisbane Water Local Area Command have commenced an investigation.

A crime scene has been established at the eerie footpath the girl was snatched from and is being examined by specialist forensic officers.

Local police officers are also conducting extensive patrols throughout the area. Police confirmed they would be canvassing the neighbourhood on Tuesday as well.

The man is described as being in his mid-20s, 180 cm tall with grey-blond hair and blue eyes.

He is said to have a chubby build, and was carrying a camouflage bag and hunting knife at the time.

Disturbingly, he was wearing a knitted camouflage shirt, camouflage pants and a camouflage hat with a loose covering over his face revealing only his eyes and nose.

Members of the public are urged not to approach the man if sighted, but to contact Triple Zero immediately.

A crime scene has been established, which is being examined by specialist forensic officers
A Queensland father-of-two has recalled the horrific moment he came face-to-face with a 3.5 metre shark that left him without a leg and fighting for life.

Glenn Dickson, 25, was spearfishing off Hinchinbrooke Island, North Queensland in February when he was met by a bull shark.

'We had a moment where I looked him in the eye and he looked me in the eye and I knew that he was going to come back,' he told Sunrise on Monday.

Mr Dickson was left without his right leg and recovering in hospital for five weeks following the attack

After the shark attacked him for the first time, Mr Dickson said he knew the ordeal wasn't over.

The shark returned to attack him again, but the Queensland man said he was so badly injured from the first attack, he didn't feel a thing.

'I couldn't feel a lot that time because in the first attack he managed to go through all my tendons and nerves and bone,' he said.

Mr Dickson came within 60 seconds of bleeding to death and was unconscious for five days following the attack.

He survived thanks to his mates who worked to reduce blood loss during the 40km trip back to the mainland where he was taken to hospital by an emergency helicopter.

Mr Dickson is learning to walk on a prosthetic leg, but is holding out hope for a personalised prosthetic

Despite the severity of his injuries, Mr Dickson said he remembered every detail of the attack and the events leading up to it.

'I pretty much remember the whole event. I remember every bit as detailed as you can go,' he said.

His fiance Jessie-Lee Janssen said Mr Dickson's five-week recovery in hospital was 'pretty unpredictable'.

Ms Janssen said her fiance was plagued with serious infections including blood clots in his lungs.

Mr Dickson's (right) fiance Jessie-Lee Janssen (left) said his recovery process was traumatic

Now six-months after the life-threatening attack, Mr Dickson is learning to walk again with the help of a government funded prosthetic leg.

Mr Dickson and his family said they were extremely grateful for the leg, but because it only offered basic mobility, they were holding out for a 'dream leg'.

The Queensland man hopes to personalise his 'dream leg' so he can eventually run, swim, and play with his two young children again.

He also vowed to walk his wife down the aisle at their upcoming wedding.

The 'dream leg' will cost about $100,000.

Mr Dickson has vowed to learn to walk on a prosthetic leg so he can walk at his wedding to fiance Jessie-Lee Janssen (pictured together)

A GoFundMe page set up in Mr Dickson's name has amassed $53,000 in donations, just more than half of their $100,000 target.

Mr Dickson made headlines earlier this month when he was refused Centrelink disability payments.

Despite his battles, Mr Dickson said he refused to forfeit his positive outlook.

He said it was possible to go through a traumatic life changing event and come out the other side.
Papua New Guinea police have admitted a number of gunshots were fired into Australia's refugee centre on Manus Island during an altercation over the Easter weekend involving drunk officers.

The admission follows an Amnesty International report stating it had been found with a 'degree of certainty' that bullets were shot into the facility, despite police initially refuting the claims.

On Monday, Manus Province police commissioner David Yapu went against his original statement that drunken PNG soldiers had only fired shots into the air while drunk during the incident on Good Friday, and said charges could be laid this week.

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Papua New Guinea police have admitted gunshots were fired into Manus Island

Images shared by the Refugee Action Coalition show bullet holes in the walls of the Manus Island detention centre (pictured)

Bullet holes through walls and poles were captured throughout the detention centre

'Some of the shots were fired through the compound and some of the bullets penetrated through the walls,' Mr Yapu told Fairfax Media.

He was not able to pinpoint the exact number of shots fired at the compound.

Mr Yapu said his first comments, released after the claims of gunfire were raised, had stemmed from a 'preliminary investigation'.

It is understood a final report is yet to be released and the commissioner stated he expected to see progress on that this week.

Amnesty International's report said with a 'degree of certainty' shots were fired into the facility

'I think we can say with a degree of certainty that multiple shots were fired into the detention centre, as opposed to shots just being fired into the air,' Kate Schuetze, Pacific Researcher at Amnesty International, told Fairfax Media.

Pictures of holes in walls and gates were looked at by a military expert who concluded that the impact displayed was consistent with the use of gunfire, and additionally the sound of gun shots can be heard in the video footage.

Amnesty is calling for an impartial investigation by PNG and Australian authorities.
Hackers are already pumping out new ransomware designed to bring fresh chaos and extort more cash after the NHS and other victims fought them off today.

British computer security expert Marcus Hutchins, 22, became a hero when he discovered the WannaCry super-virus had a 'kill switch' and stopped it infecting 100,000 more PCs worldwide over the weekend.

Now the cyber criminals, who hit more than 225,000 victims in 150 countries in the biggest hack ever launched, have re-written their malware to remove the flaw discovered by Mr Hutchins.

Britain's FBI - the National Crime Agency (NCA) - said people must be prepared for a 'second surge' of malware - but it is yet to happen on the scale seen on Friday.

Rob Holmes, an expert from cyber security company Proofpoint, told the BBC: 'We're already starting to see new versions of the ransomware without the master kill switch'.

Analysis by Elliptic, who have been tracking the Bitcoin accounts linked to the hackers, says they have been paid around $54,000 (41,795) in ransom money since Friday.

The NHS is still struggling to get back on its feet following Friday's crippling attack, which means patients could have to wait a month or more to see a doctor after countless operations and appointments were cancelled.

Vast: Cyber criminals have hit more than 225,000 victims in 150 countries (pictured) in the biggest hack ever launched - with the NHS one of the hardest hit organisations

Hospitals and other organisations are braced for mayhem today as the NHS tries to get back on its feet following Friday's crippling cyber attack (pictured)

The 22-year-old computer security expert Marcus Hutchins, (known online as Malware Tech, pictured with a friend) has predicted 'another attack coming... quite likely on Monday' as he helps battle to stop it

Cash: Analysis by Elliptic, who have been tracking the Bitcoin accounts linked to the hackers, says they have been paid around $54,000 (40,200) in ransom money since Friday.

The NHS' IT arm NHS Digital was sent a 'patch' which could have protected them from the hack two weeks ago  but many hospitals and GP surgeries failed to download it, it has emerged.

Police say that fears that there would be more carnage as people returned to work today have not materialised, so far.

NCA Director General Lynne Owens said: 'As things stand, there is no indication of a second surge of cases here in the UK. But that doesn't mean there won't be one.

'We're trawling through huge amounts of data associated with the attack and identifying patterns.'

She said the agency cannot give a running commentary on the inquiry for 'operational reasons'.

Ms Owens continued: 'Because of the quantity of data involved and the complexity of these kinds of inquiries we need to be clear that this is an investigation which will take time.

'But I want to reassure the public that investigators are working round the clock to secure evidence and have begun to forensically analyse a number of infected computers.

'Specialist cyber-crime officers from the NCA and our partner regional organised crime units are speaking directly with victims.

'That includes visiting NHS sites to help protect victims and secure and preserve evidence. Those visits are continuing.'

She added that the NCA is in 'constant communication' with international partners, including Europol, Interpol and the FBI and 'the collaboration has been strong and effective'.

Europol spokesman Jan Op Gen Oorth said: 'The number of victims appears not to have gone up and so far the situation seems stable in Europe, which is a success.

'It seems that a lot of internet security guys over the weekend did their homework and ran the security software updates.'

The worst-hit NHS trusts will continue to postpone non-emergency operations today as IT experts work round-the-clock to get their systems back online.

There are fears cars, energy networks and even medical devices like heart monitors could be targeted by the criminals behind the unprecedented cyber attack.

Seven hospitals were last night still diverting ambulances from A&E departments. And trusts in Lincolnshire, Southport, Lancashire, Colchester and parts of London said they will have to cancel 'routine' procedures for at least another day.

GPs in some parts of the UK have even been told not to switch on their PCs this morning until they get the all-clear - and patients have been warned not to go to their surgery unless it is absolutely necessary.

NHS Digital said it had made health trusts aware last month of IT protection that could have prevented the attack.

It said in a statement: 'NHS Digital issued a targeted update on a secure portal accessible to NHS staff on April 25, and then via a bulletin to more than 10,000 security and IT professionals on April 27 to alert them to this specific issue.

'These alerts included a patch to protect their systems. This guidance was also reissued on Friday following emergence of this issue.'

As the Government faced further questions about its cyber-security systems last night:

Europol chief Rob Wainwright warned of a second wave of attacks after hackers released a new version of the ransomware, overcoming a temporary fix which slowed down its spread;

Experts warned the attack could spread far beyond the NHS as people return to work this morning and click on infected emails;

The number of people affected by the global hack rose to 200,000 victims in 150 countries;

A major manhunt was under way as global crime-fighting organisations sought the culprits, thought to be Eastern European gangs;

It emerged that hospitals were sent a 'patch' which could have protected them just two weeks ago  but few downloaded it;

The ransomware hit computers around the globe including in Germany where the rail network was infected

The 22-year-old IT expert who beat the cyber attack that has wreaked havoc across the globe has revealed to MailOnline he is working with government spooks to thwart a second virus - while being inundated with job offers after his identity was revealed.

Microsoft blames NSA 'for failing to warn them that Windows was vulnerable' Microsoft's top lawyer is laying some of the blame for Friday's massive cyberattack at the feet of the U.S. government. Brad Smith criticised U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency, for 'stockpiling' software code that can be used by hackers. Cybersecurity experts say the unknown hackers who launched this weekend's 'ransomware' attacks used a vulnerability that was exposed in NSA documents leaked online. In a post on Microsoft's blog, Smith says: 'An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.' Microsoft's lawyer says governments should 'report vulnerabilities' that they discover to software companies, 'rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.' Security experts say a cyberattack that holds computer data for ransom grew out of vulnerabilities purportedly identified by the National Security Agency. Microsoft has released fixes for vulnerabilities and related tools disclosed by TheShadowBrokers, a mysterious group that has repeatedly published alleged NSA software code. But many companies and individuals haven't installed the fixes yet, or are using older versions of Windows that Microsoft no longer supports and didn't fix. Chris Wysopal of the software security firm Veracode says criminal organizations are likely behind this, given how quickly the malware has spread. He says 'for so many organizations in the same day to be hit, this is unprecedented.' Advertisement

Marcus Hutchins, a keen surfer who lives in an English seaside town, prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected by registering a website domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the ransomware.

He is now working with the government's National Cyber Security Centre to prevent a new strain of the malicious software from emerging on Monday - but says he has no plans to leave his current job at US-based 'private intel threat firm' Kryptos Logic.

Although his bosses have rewarded him with an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles for his valiant efforts, Hutchins fears he could face future revenge from the hackers he has exposed after his name was posted on the internet.

The cyber expert, who lives at home in England with his parents and younger brother, told MailOnline: 'In future someone might want to retaliate - they could find my identity within seconds.

'If they know where I live, they could really do anything.

'A security blogger had people send heroin to his house and try to frame him after his identity was leaked and he even had death threats.

'I've seen posts about the terrible things people have done to him and for me in future it could be the same things.'

Darien Huss, who worked with Mr Hutchins to halt the attack, has praised him but warned: 'We've seen one where the kill switch feature is completely removed'.

There are fears the next strike could be a 'zombie' attack, which sees malware that has infected a computer coming back to life in systems that have already been fixed.

An 'emergency stop' was found after Hutchins searched for a weakness in the hack software and found a reference to a website address that nobody owned.

He purchased it, knowing this was a regular way to track a computer infection, but had not expected it to actually halt the spread of the ransomware.

The virus infection resulted in a ransom message appearing on screens across the German rail network creating 'massive disturbances'

The whizz-kid - who goes by the name MalwareTech online - has now spent the last 72 hours battling the virus while watching his Twitter followers climb by 20,000 and thousands of emails landing in his inbox.

Marcus Hutchins, pictured, prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected by registering a website domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the virus

Although no personal data has been lost in this attack, a report showed that personal information held by Government departments is breached at least once an hour.

Europol chief Rob Wainwright last night told the BBC the act was 'unprecedented in its scale' and warned more people could find themselves affected this morning. 'The numbers are still going up,' he said. 'The slowdown of the infection rate on Friday night, after a temporary fix, has now been overcome by a second variation...'

Last night, the National Cyber Security Centre warned that Friday's ransomware attack could 'recur'.

It said that 'compromises of machines and networks that have already occurred may not yet have been detected, and that existing infections from the malware can spread within networks. This means that as a new working week begins it is likely ... that further cases of ransomware may come to light ... It is [also] possible that a ransomware attack of this type and on this scale could recur...'

Hutchins shared this picture of his bedroom computer setup with MailOnline. It includes three screens as well as an Apple iMac computer

The NHS is now thought to be protected against further attack by this particular virus, because IT staff have been working over the weekend to boost defences. Crucially, sources told the Mail it never infected the 'NHS Spine'  the core of the UK health service IT system which connects every hospital, GP practice, ambulance service and health board.

RANSOMWARE: THE CYBER ATTACK THAT CRIPPLED THE WORLD What is ransomware? Ransomware is a type of malicious software that criminals use to attack computer systems. Hackers often demand the victim to pay ransom money to access their files or remove harmful programs. The aggressive attacks dupe users into clicking on a fake link  whether it's in an email or on a fake website, causing an infection to corrupt the computer. In some instances, adverts for pornographic website will repeatedly appear on your screen, while in others, a pop-up will state that a piece of your data will be destroyed if you don't pay. In the case of the NHS attack, the ransomware used was called Wanna Decryptor or 'WannaCry' Virus. What is the WannaCry virus? The WannaCry virus targets Microsoft's widely used Windows operating system. The virus encrypts certain files on the computer and then blackmails the user for money in exchange for the access to the files. It leaves the user with only two files: Instructions on what to do next and the Wanna Decryptor program itself. When opened the software tells users that their files have been encrypted and gives them a few days to pay up or their files will be deleted. It can quickly spread through an entire network of computers in a business or hospital, encrypting files on every PC. How to protect yourself from ransomware Thankfully, there are ways to avoid ransomware attacks, and Norton Antivirus has compiled a list of prevention methods: 1. Use reputable antivirus software and a firewall 2. Back up your computer often 3. Set up a popup blocker 4. Be cautious about clicking links inside emails or on suspicious websites 5. If you do receive a ransom note, disconnect from the Internet 6. Alert authorities Advertisement

But the biggest impact will come as hospital bosses try to reschedule the countless appointments and operations cancelled on Friday and over the weekend. The Government said 48 NHS trusts  roughly a third of the health service  were hit. Although most had resumed normal service by last night, seven hospitals  in London, Stevenage, Norfolk, West Cumberland, Hampshire, and Broomfield and Colchester in Essex  were still asking ambulances to take emergency patients to other sites.

Hospitals now have to try to fit in all cancelled procedures. The NHS is advising patients to attend hospital appointments unless contacted. Officials expect the most urgent cases to be postponed by no more than a day or two, but less urgent cases may not be seen for a month or more.

Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust in Merseyside last night told patients scheduled for surgery today 'not to attend unless we contact you directly'.

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals said: 'The majority of planned procedures and operations scheduled for 15 May are postponed  please do not come to hospital.'

And United Lincolnshire Hospitals said: 'Outpatient appointments, diagnostic tests and routine operations will all be cancelled. Our teams will be in touch directly with anyone whose appointment is able to go ahead as scheduled.'

York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which was hit by the attack on Friday, said some out-patient appointments had been cancelled on Monday - especially at Selby War Memorial Hospital - but most were not affected.

York trust chief executive Patrick Crowley told BBC Breakfast: 'Once the situation unfolded it became clear it was almost engulfing the organisation. At the last count, we had 2,000 of our 6,000 PCs out of action and, clearly, that's quite disabling for clinical services.

'Over the weekend, we've been working round-the-clock to get PCs back online and I'm pleased to say over half of them are back and recommissioned.'

Mr Crowley said: 'All our services are pretty much back as normal.'

He asked people to be patient, saying: 'Things may run a little bit slower.'

As some services are reliant to a degree on paper, Mr Crowley asked for 'a little bit of patience, a little bit of understanding and a lot of appreciation for a huge army of staff who've done so well to get these services back online'.

The NHS has been hit by a major cyber attack hitting computers, phones and emergency bleepers in hospitals and GP surgeries

Police at Southport Hospital following the NHS cyber attack on Friday where ambulances were diverted to other hospitals

This map released by cybersecurity experts, shows the impact of the ransomware around the world - with blue dots showing where attacks have been made. Russia is thought to be the worst affected, while Taiwan fears being the victim of a second wave. Europe was targeted first, meaning there were fewer incidents in the US because companies were able to prepare themselves better

Barts, which runs five hospitals in London, told patients to assume their procedure would go ahead  but said some would be cancelled at the last minute. In other parts, including Cumbria and Blackpool, GP surgeries and hospital staff were told not to switch their PCs on this morning.

PM calls 'Cobra' emergency hearing over NHS hacking crisis The Prime Minister's official spokesman announced a ministerial Cobra meeting would be held at 5pm, chaired by Home Secretary Amber Rudd and including the Health Secretary. Officials are meeting this morning about the crisis. The spokesman said: 'The Health Secretary has been working around the clock coordinating the NHS response to this, which has been a hugely impressive response. 'Both the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary pass on their thanks to the NHS staff who have been working around the clock over the weekend.' The spokesman said in December 2015, there were between 15 and 18 per cent of NHS England PCs running Windows XP, with the figure now at 4.7 per cent. It includes machines such as MRI machines where changing the operating system is not simple. He added: 'The NCSC and the National Crime Agency are working with a full range of international partners. It is complex but we are determined to find out who was responsible.' Asked if the Government would send thanks to the anonymous blogger who apparently halted the attack, he said: 'There have been many organisations and individuals working hard over the weekend and any actions taken to limit the damage is of course welcome.' Advertisement

Dr Krishna Chinthapalli, a registrar at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, said: 'If anything this one [attack] will raise awareness among the hacker community that hospitals are a target for them...'

Critics said the Government faces questions over ending in 2015 a 500million-a-year contract with Microsoft for updating and replacing its software. Officials insisted it was part of NHS decentralisation.

Security minister Ben Wallace said the NHS had followed some 'pretty good procedures' in combating the cyber attack, with technical staff restoring data and replacing security patches over the weekend at trusts across the country

He told BBC Breakfast the Government had put 1.2 billion into combating cyber attacks during the last strategic defence and security review, including a 50 million pot to support NHS IT networks.

And he defended the Government after a National Audit Office report in November warned that taking money away from NHS services would leave them vulnerable.

He insisted individual trusts have enough money to protect themselves against cyber attacks, saying: 'After the NAO report and indeed at numerous occasions after there are incidents, whether there are cyber attacks, small or large around the world, we pass on information to the trusts.

'We make sure the trusts are aware of their vulnerabilities and ask them to make sure they keep themselves up to date. What we don't do in our NHS is micromanage it from the desk.'

Mr Wallace said it was a 'red herring' to focus solely on the Windows XP operating system as being vulnerable, saying the virus had also attacked both Windows 7 and 8.1.

The 'real key' was whether trusts had regularly backed up data and whether they were installing security patches.

He said: 'Some security patches were issued by Microsoft back in March and some trusts absolutely clearly loaded those up to protect themselves. Of course, after this we have got to ask ourselves why was it not uniform.'

Mr Wallace also suggested there had been no statement over the weekend from Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt - despite him attending a meeting of the Government's emergency Cobra committee on Saturday - because it had been a 'criminal attack on an organ of the state', with the Home Office taking over in matters of 'defence of the realm'.

But Jonathan Ashworth, Labour's shadow health secretary, said it meant that since May 2015, individual trusts' operating systems 'have been extremely vulnerable'.

Three hospitals in Ireland have been targeted by the international cyber attack.

Health chiefs blocked external communication to servers until Wednesday to stop the spread of the 'ransomware' virus as officials confirmed that up to 20 computers had been affected.

'They were quickly isolated,' a spokeswoman for the Republic's Health Service Executive (HSE) said.

'We are not naming the hospitals. It's just to allow the hospitals themselves to deal with it and so that patients are not unduly concerned.

'Patient care is broadly unaffected.'

Almost 50 NHS organisations are still battling the 'super-virus' Thousands of NHS computers have been taken down by the malware The NHS is among many organisations around the world battling with an unprecedented cyber attack. Some 47 NHS organisations have been affected by malware in their systems, ranging from hospital trusts down to commissioning support units. Seven hospital trusts are still experiencing serious problems, among them St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, York Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the University Hospital of North Midlands Trust Here is the latest situation in the affected trusts: Barts Health NHS Trust, London: The cyber attack caused delays at all four Barts hospitals over the weekend, with routine appointments cancelled and ambulances diverted to neighbouring hospitals. Ambulance services were back to normal on Monday morning, the trust said, with trauma and stroke care fully operational. IT services are still compromised, causing delays and disruption, and the trust is asking patients to use other NHS services where they can. The trust said: 'All of our hospitals remain open for emergency care, and we are now accepting ambulances. We have reduced the volume of planned services on Monday and Tuesday to ensure we can continue to run services safely. 'However, some planned surgery and some outpatient appointments will be continuing at all of our hospitals. This will include all renal dialysis services.' Patients whose appointments need to be cancelled will be contacted directly. Those not contacted and due to visit one of the hospitals for treatment on Monday or Tuesday should do so as planned. James Paget University Hospitals Trust, Norfolk: Non-emergency surgery and clinic appointments were cancelled over the weekend but surgery and outpatient appointments have largely gone ahead as normal on Monday, with patients being informed of postponements. The trust said 'established back-up plans' had been implemented, and chief operating officer Graham Wilde said a large number of IT systems were brought back online over the weekend. Patients with appointments this week are advised to attend them unless they hear from the hospital, but those coming to A&E with minor illnesses were warned to expect considerable waits while manual systems are used. Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust: All outpatients and endoscopy appointments for Monday and Tuesday are cancelled because of difficulties with clinical information systems. Patients scheduled for surgery on either day should not attend unless contacted directly by the trust, and people are asked to use A&E at Southport and Ormskirk hospitals only in an emergency. Routine MRI and CT scans are cancelled for Monday and Tuesday. Patients will be contacted directly if they need to attend, the trust said. Dialysis and blood clinic (phlebotomy) patients should attend appointments as usual, while the pregnancy assessment unit at Ormskirk hospital will be open as normal. All antenatal clinics at Southport, Ormskirk and in the community will go ahead, including pregnancy ultrasound, and while gynaecology and sexual health clinics are operating as usual, the trust warned of delays. East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust: Non-urgent blood tests have been cancelled at the Lister, New QEII and Hertford County hospitals, the trust said, while the diabetic screening service is also suspended. Patients should assume appointments are proceeding as scheduled unless they hear otherwise from hospitals, the trust said. People needing A&E services are asked to attend only if it is 'absolutely essential'. The trust's switchboard is operating but at a reduced capacity, so patients may experience delays. Advertisement

NHS hack leaves bed-bound pensioner who can't use her legs without her painkiller prescription

A bed-bound pensioner has been left 'screaming the house down in pain' because she can't get her prescription - after the NHS hack led to a technology shut-down.

Liz Butterfield, 67, has been unable to get her medicine since her GP surgery switched off its computers following the cyber attack for fear of the malware infecting them.

Doctors at Marsh Medical Centre in Louth, Lincolnshire, said they cannot prescribe any controlled medications until their system is back online.

Liz, who is paralysed from the waist down due to a major spinal injury called Cauda Equina Syndrome, needs to take opiate-based Oxy-Norm eight times a day.

Liz Butterfield, 67, has been unable to get her medicine since her GP surgery switched off its computers following the cyber attack

She tried to make the bottle last - taking a dose every five hours instead of every three - but she ran out in the early hours of Monday.

Liz's son Chris Frear, 42, claims he's dialled 111 and 999 SEVEN times since he tried to collect the prescription for the first time on Friday, begging for help.

Each time he has been promised a call back but it's never come, and he can't take his mother to hospital without paramedics because she is paralysed.

Chris, a photographer, said: 'The hack has had a horrendous impact on mum. I hope they find out who did it, but the NHS have got to start taking responsibility too.

'The way they have handled it is appalling. It is a national disgrace. They knew that it was coming. They knew this was going to happen months ago.'

His mum Liz, a renowned watercolour artist of Louth, Lincs., who is now relying on paracetamol, said she is 'screaming the house down in pain'.

Speaking through tears Liz said: 'I need help but they don't care. Life is so painful recently and I need these drugs.

'When my son went to get the medication from the surgery on Friday he was told there had been a hack and that they couldn't get the tablets.

'They said they turned their computers off when the announcement was made.

'I take a morphine-based drug and if you suddenly stop giving that to somebody they can die.

'I am in agony. The pain comes over me and will not stop. It is getting worse. It starts in the middle of my lower spine and it shoots all the way down into my legs.

'I tried to go without this medication once before but I was crawling up the wall in pain and begging for it within 12 hours.

Liz, who is paralysed from the waist down due to a major spinal injury called Cauda Equina Syndrome, needs to take opiate-based Oxy-Norm eight times a day - but has run out

'I am getting withdrawal symptoms already. I have got cramps in my stomach, pain in my legs. I'm like a drug addict but usually they come off it a small dose at a time.'

Chris said his mum has been left 'in limbo', adding: 'My mum is in agony but I can't help. I'm doing everything I can but I'm not a painkiller.'

He said: 'The GP practice left us a voice mail saying the senior GP would not authorise any prescriptions of controlled drugs until the computer system comes back online.

'He is a gadget person and and doesn't like using pen and paper.

'This is not a new prescription but a regular repeat, so they have records to show that mum has had it before.

'The stuff is sat in a safe under lock and key at the surgery. All they have

to do is hand it over and have me sign for it as normal.

'They can update their system once it comes back online. But no. the senior GP is not having any of it.'

Dr Carl Deaney, of Marsh Medical Practice, said: 'We are following instructions from the clinical commissioning group to shut the system down.

'We have been told to switch off our entire system.'
A British student has been raped in Sicily after getting into a vehicle she believed was a taxi when she was separated from her friends.

The 21-year-old was found in a confused state by a motorway fly-over near the city of Palermo on the Italian island after a night out.

She told police she had flagged down a white car having been separated from her British friends, but was then driven to an industrial estate and attacked.

A British student has been raped in Palermo (pictured), Sicily after getting into a vehicle she believed was a taxi

The student, who was teaching at a school in Palermo as part of a university placement, was found by a security guard near the Giafar motorway bridge and taken to hospital.

Detectives said she had to fight through dense undergrowth to reach a road in the early hours of the morning.

She later told officers a tall man aged in his 50s or 60s had driven her to a secluded part of an industrial area to carry out the attack.

The 21-year-old was found in a confused state by a motorway fly-over near the city of Palermo on the Italian island after a night out

DNA samples were taken and police are looking through CCTV footage from the area.

According to Palermo Today, she had been out in the Via Roma and Piazza Sant'Anna areas of the city before becoming separated from her friends.
Australian mother-of-two Sara Connor has had her sentence increased to five years with Bali's High Court finding she has 'injured' the image of the Indonesian island.

The court's three judges upped Connor's jail term by one year on Monday, finding that Connor's initial four-year sentence was 'too light' over the death of police officer Wayan Sudarsa in August 2016.

Backing the appeal by the prosecution, the judges criticised the 46-year-old for not making 'any effort' to help Mr Sudarsa after be became embroiled in a fatal struggle with her British boyfriend David Taylor on Kuta Beach.

Bali's High Court has increased Byron Bay mother Sara Connor's sentence to five years for the fatal assault of a Bali police officer on Kuta Beach in 2016

The court's three judges upped Connor's jail term by one year on Monday, finding that Connor's initial four-year sentence was 'too light'

'The judges in appeal level have considered incriminating factors which have not been considered by judges in first level court (in their March decision),' Judge Sudharmawatiningsih said.

'The defendant left behind the victim and did not make any effort to help the victim even though she knew the victim was still laying facing down.

'The defendant has also injured Indonesia's tourism image, especially Bali's tourism image.'

When Connor was sentenced in March, her friends and family described being 'devastated' by the decision.

Within days, Connor's fears were realised when prosecutors announced they would be challenging the decision, arguing the term was 'unfair' and did not act as a deterrent.

The judges criticised the 46-year-old for not making 'any effort' to help Wayan Sudarsa after be became embroiled in a fatal struggle with her British boyfriend David Taylor (pictured together)

She was not in court on Monday to hear the Bali court's decision (Connor is pictured reenacting the scene on Kuta Beach)

Concerned any challenge on her part would see the sentence increased further, Connor's then legal team announced she would not be launching an appeal.

She was not in court on Monday to hear the Bali court's decision.

Taylor - who was sentenced to six years for his role in the fatal assault in company - became embroiled in a fight with Mr Sudarsa after confronting him over Connor's lost purse on Kuta Beach, which contained about $A300.

While Connor maintains she did nothing but try to separate Mr Sudarsa and Taylor during the melee, following her trial Chief Judge Made Pasek found in March she effectively pinned him down.

Mr Sudarsa's bloodied body was discovered in the early hours of August 17, having suffered dozens of wounds.

When Connor was sentenced in March, her friends and family described being 'devastated' by the decision

Both Connor and Taylor's trial heard evidence that it likely took Mr Sudarsa hours to die and that had someone intervened, the police officer's life may have been saved

Both Connor and Taylor's trial heard evidence that it likely took Mr Sudarsa hours to die and that had someone intervened, the police officer's life may have been saved.

The pair later destroyed personal items belonging to Mr Sudarsa and burned the clothes they were wearing on the night of the assault.

The sentence includes time already served and does not take into account remissions for good behaviour.

Connor may choose to launch a further appeal to the Supreme Court.

The prosecutor in Connor's case, Agung Jayalantara, said he would wait for a copy of Monday's judgment before making comment.

'I want to see the appeal judge's consideration first,' he said.
Judge Peter Ader (pictured) slammed Jumila Hussain for failing to be able to properly speak English despite living here for 41 years

A 70-year-old slum landlady who rented out her squalid outbuilding to migrants has been criticised by a judge for failing to learn English despite living in Britain for more than four decades.

Jumila Hussain, of Enfield, North London, made a huge sum of money by cramming migrant workers into the building outside her Stamford Hill home.

And the pensioner, who is originally from Pakistan, was slammed by Judge Peter Ader at Wood Green Crown Court for failing to be able to properly speak English despite living here for 41 years.

Hussain denied breaching an enforcement notice but was convicted after a trial last November and will be sentenced in three weeks' time on June 7, reported The Sun journalist Ben Perrin.

At a hearing last Tuesday, the judge is said to have asked her: 'Has it not been difficult for your living here for so long without speaking English?'

Using an Urdu interpreter, Hussain replied: 'My children were young and I didn't have any time to take any lessons.'

Hussain denied breaching an enforcement notice but was convicted after a trial at Wood Green Crown Court (above) in London last November and will be sentenced on June 7

According to the Sun's report, the judge said: 'Surely they have grown up now?'. But she replied: 'My brain doesn't work properly.'

Hussain's sons claimed her solicitors failed to represent her at trial, but the judge refused her permission to change them.

Previously, Judge Ader reprimanded Jeremy Corbyn (pictured) for trying to make a violent gangster 'sound like a peace campaigner'

She said she takes 'so much medicine I can't remember anything', but the judge told her: 'I don't believe a word of your medication stop making excuses.'

Previously, Judge Ader reprimanded Jeremy Corbyn for trying to make a violent gangster 'sound like a peace campaigner'.

In a character reference designed to secure the thug a soft sentence, the Labour leader pleaded for the good character of 28-year-old Yahya Salah.

Salah was part of a 13-strong gang who savaged student Mohammed Nur then left him for dead with brain damage in a McDonald's car park in Harringay.

Mr Corbyn appeared before Wood Green Crown Court in 2008 to claim Salah, a school friend of his son, had showed 'contrition' and turned his life around.

But his attempts to put a positive spin on the criminal did not impress Judge Ader, who said Mr Corbyn's reference made Salah 'sound like a peace campaigner'.
Jeremy Hunt finally broke cover on the huge cyber attack on the NHS today after days dodging questions.

The Health Secretary, who has been silent since the crisis erupted, said he was 'encouraged' there had not been a second wave of hacking.

He also insisted criminal activity had so far been at the 'lower end' of what had been feared.

The comments came after it was revealed the Care Quality Commission and Dame Fiona Caldicott, the national data guardian, raised fears about a 'lack of understanding of security issues' within Trusts.

They highlighted problems with 'ineffective' technology and said the 'cyber threat' was becoming a 'bigger consideration'.

Earlier today Jeremy Hunt ignored questions from journalists about the cyber attack as he left his London home

But Mr Hunt later broke his silence on the NHS cyber attacks saying he was 'encouraged' that there had not been a second wave

Despite the tight-lipped approach from Mr Hunt, Theresa May today insisted that Trusts had been told to up their game on cyber security. The PM has been campaigning in Oxford

But Mr Hunt made clear that Trusts had been told to up their game on cyber security by installing 'patches' to protect systems.

He said 'a great deal' had been done to try to improve the situation before the attack.

'Back in 2015 I was concerned we needed to do more ... advice was send out to all NHS trusts.'

The Prime Minister also stressed that the attacks had not been limited to the health service, and had affected organisations around the world.

'It was clear warnings were given to hospital trusts but this is not something that focused on attacking the NHS here on the UK,' Mr May said on the campaign trail in Oxford.

Hospitals were breathing a sigh of relief today as fears of further mayhem failed to materialise.

But patients could still have to wait a month or more to see a doctor as the health service races to rearrange countless operations cancelled at the weekend.

The worst-hit NHS trusts will continue to postpone non-emergency operations today as IT experts work round-the-clock to get their systems back online.

There are concerns cars, energy networks and even medical devices like heart monitors could be targeted by the criminals behind the unprecedented cyber attack.

Ms Rudd will chair a meeting of the government's Cobra response committee this evening - although Mr Hunt will attend.

A Downing Street spokesman said: The Health Secretary has been working around the clock coordinating the NHS response to this, which has been a hugely impressive response.

Both the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary pass on their thanks to the NHS staff who have been working around the clock over the weekend.

The spokesman said in December 2015, there were between 15 and 18 per cent of NHS England PCs running Windows XP, with the figure now at 4.7 per cent. It includes machines such as MRI machines where changing the operating system is not simple.

He added: The NCSC and the National Crime Agency are working with a full range of international partners. It is complex but we are determined to find out who was responsible.

Asked if the Government would send thanks to the anonymous blogger who apparently halted the attack, he said: There have been many organisations and individuals working hard over the weekend and any actions taken to limit the damage is of course welcome.

A review last year by Dame Fiona found 'significant use of software within the sector that is no longer supported by the manufacturer leaving systems exposed to common types of cyberattack'.

This map released by cybersecurity experts, shows the impact of the ransomware around the world - with blue dots showing where attacks have been made. Russia is thought to be the worst affected, while Taiwan fears being the victim of a second wave. Europe was targeted first, meaning there were fewer incidents in the US because companies were able to prepare themselves better

Jeremy Corbyn joked about Mr Hunt's refusal to respond as he gave a speech to nursing leaders in Liverpool today

The report said that the issue was 'one of the most pressing issues facing IT infrastructure' in the NHS.

Dame Fiona said a step change is needed after a global ransomware attack paralysed 47 trusts last month  14 months after the National Data Guardian report was finished.

It was issued to ministers in March last year having been requested by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt in September 2015 as a matter of urgency.

Ministers kept putting it on the backburner because they were distracted by political events such as Brexit, Dame Fiona said. She told the Hay Festival yesterday: On 2 September, 2015 I went to a meeting in Manchester to the NHS expo and I was giving a presentation. Jeremy Hunt had been on holiday, and I was warned by the civil servants that he had some bright ideas while he was away.

We were summoned in to see the minister. He made it clear by the end of 2015 we needed improved security across data on health.

He wanted that very clearly improved, and he wanted me to work with the CQC [Care Quality Commission] to make sure all the registered organisations in the NHS and social care were abiding by good, effective standards to protect data.

We actually delivered the report in March 2016, which was quite good given the scale of it.

Then of course there was work on the response, and blow me  June 2016  we all know what happened then. That held up the Governments response to the report, because they were busy looking at the referendum.

Work has gone on on the response to that report.

There have been various political events since then, culminating in a general election.

We are still waiting for the response. And if I use the word impatient about how we feel about it not having been published, I think you will understand that. I believe that when a new government comes in that will be at the top of their agenda.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: 'Jeremy Hunt has serious questions to answer over why systems to protect the NHS from cyberattack were not properly maintained.'

Seven hospitals were last night still diverting ambulances from A&E departments. And trusts in Lincolnshire, Southport, Lancashire, Colchester and parts of London said they will have to cancel 'routine' procedures for at least another day.

GPs in some parts of the UK have even been told not to switch on their PCs this morning until they get the all-clear - and patients have been warned not to go to their surgery unless it is absolutely necessary.

The 22-year-old IT expert who beat the cyber attack that has wreaked havoc across the globe has revealed to MailOnline he is working with government spooks to thwart a second virus - while being inundated with job offers after his identity was revealed.

Marcus Hutchins, a keen surfer who lives in an English seaside town, prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected by registering a website domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the ransomware.

He is now working with the government's National Cyber Security Centre to prevent a new strain of the malicious software from emerging on Monday - but says he has no plans to leave his current job at US-based 'private intel threat firm' Kryptos Logic.

Although his bosses have rewarded him with an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles for his valiant efforts, Hutchins fears he could face future revenge from the hackers he has exposed after his name was posted on the internet.

The cyber expert, who lives at home in England with his parents and younger brother, told MailOnline: 'In future someone might want to retaliate - they could find my identity within seconds.

'If they know where I live, they could really do anything.

'A security blogger had people send heroin to his house and try to frame him after his identity was leaked and he even had death threats.

'I've seen posts about the terrible things people have done to him and for me in future it could be the same things.'

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has been leading the response to the cyber attack while Mr Hunt has been notably silent

Hospitals and other organisations are braced for mayhem today as the NHS tries to get back on its feet following Friday's crippling cyber attack (pictured)

The ransomware hit computers around the globe including in Germany where the rail network was infected

The virus infection resulted in a ransom message appearing on screens across the German rail network creating 'massive disturbances'

There are fears the next strike could be a 'zombie' attack, which sees malware that has infected a computer coming back to life in systems that have already been fixed.

An 'emergency stop' was found after Hutchins searched for a weakness in the hack software and found a reference to a website address that nobody owned.

He purchased it, knowing this was a regular way to track a computer infection, but had not expected it to actually halt the spread of the ransomware.

The whizz-kid - who goes by the name MalwareTech online - has now spent the last 72 hours battling the virus while watching his Twitter followers climb by 20,000 and thousands of emails landing in his inbox.

Experts told Jeremy Hunt last year that NHS technology was outdated and the cyber threat was growing quickly

Although no personal data has been lost in this attack, a report showed that personal information held by Government departments is breached at least once an hour.

Europol chief Rob Wainwright last night told the BBC the act was 'unprecedented in its scale' and warned more people could find themselves affected this morning. 'The numbers are still going up,' he said. 'The slowdown of the infection rate on Friday night, after a temporary fix, has now been overcome by a second variation...'

Last night, the National Cyber Security Centre warned that Friday's ransomware attack could 'recur'. It said that 'compromises of machines and networks that have already occurred may not yet have been detected, and that existing infections from the malware can spread within networks. This means that as a new working week begins it is likely ... that further cases of ransomware may come to light ... It is [also] possible that a ransomware attack of this type and on this scale could recur...'

The NHS is now thought to be protected against further attack by this particular virus, because IT staff have been working over the weekend to boost defences. Crucially, sources told the Mail it never infected the 'NHS Spine'  the core of the UK health service IT system which connects every hospital, GP practice, ambulance service and health board.

But the biggest impact will come as hospital bosses try to reschedule the countless appointments and operations cancelled on Friday and over the weekend. The Government said 48 NHS trusts  roughly a third of the health service  were hit. Although most had resumed normal service by last night, seven hospitals  in London, Stevenage, Norfolk, West Cumberland, Hampshire, and Broomfield and Colchester in Essex  were still asking ambulances to take emergency patients to other sites.

The NHS has been hit by a major cyber attack hitting computers, phones and emergency bleepers in hospitals and GP surgeries

Police at Southport Hospital following the NHS cyber attack on Friday where ambulances were diverted to other hospitals
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell helped torpedo the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, but now McConnell and people close to him are pushing the idea of President Trump nominating Garland to run the FBI.

Utah Senator Mike Lee talked up the idea of a Garland nomination on Sunday, after floating the idea late last week.

Josh Holmes, a former top aide to McConnell, also talked up the idea, which Democrats say is driven by the ulterior motive of opening up another powerful federal judgeship.

'I think the senate majority leader thinks that's a fantastic idea,' said Josh Holmes, who now runs the strategy firm Cavalry LLC, speaking on 'Fox News Sunday.'

'He certainly thinks (Garland) will be qualified. And [McConnell] certainly thinks he would be somebody that he could support.'

The White House isn't dismissing the idea. Asked at Monday's press briefing whether Garland was under consideration, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the search was being conducted by the Justice Department.

'Once theyve conducted that search theyll present names for consideration by the president,' Spicer said, not using Garland's name but not knocking down the idea either.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thinks nominating federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland to run the FBI is a 'fantastic idea,' according a former top aide

Sen. Lee told 'Fox News Sunday': 'I think Merrick Garland would be a particularly good option, given that he would have so much support from both sides of the aisle.  I'm absolutely serious about this.'

Lee, a member of the Judiciary Committee that bottled up Garland, pointed to the role Garland played prosecuting the Oklahoma City bombers.

McConnell designed the strategy that resulted in Republicans stalling President Obama's nomination of Garland to the Supreme Court. He never got a hearing, though he kept his seat on the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

After Trump won, he nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the post, and Gorsuch got confirmed.

Pulling Garland off the D.C. Circuit would shift the balance from 7-4 to 6-5, as Trump's regulations, executive orders, and make their way toward the panel.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone 'not of partisan background' with 'great experience' and 'courage.'

Schumer declined to comment on a Garland nomination.

Eight candidates had interviews for the post by Monday, CNN reported.

Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor for the Russia probe.

As President Trump considers a replacement for fired FBI Director James Comey, lawmakers are urging the president to steer clear of appointing any politicians.

The advice came Sunday amid more criticism over Trump's dismissal of Comey during an FBI probe of Russia's meddling with last year's election and any ties to the Trump campaign. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said the Founding Fathers created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now 'eroding.'

'I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally - and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system,' Clapper said 'I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.'

When asked, 'Internally, from the president?' Clapper responded, 'Exactly.'

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. 'The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants,' she said.

In this Monday, May 8, 2017, file photo, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism hearing: 'Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Election'

White-collar defense attorney Alice Fisher is another potential candidate. She interviewed with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein.

Democrats want Sessions to recuse himself since he has already recused himself from any FBI investigations involving the election, after Sessions was revealed to have met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice during the campaign.

Other names floated include former New York Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly, and former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan. They are part of a list that reached a dozen this weekend.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, interviewed for the post, but is said to enjoy his role as the Number Two Senate GOP leader

Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has also been mentioned

Attorney Alice Fisher arrives at the U.S. Department of Justice on Saturday, May 13, 2017. Fisher is one of nearly a dozen candidates President Donald Trump is considering to succeed ousted FBI Director James Comey

Trump said he wants to make a fast decision, and he leaves for his first overseas trip as president Friday.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump for his actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because Trump may have 'tapes' of their conversations.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to 'reset.' He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration, ex-FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

'It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1,' said Graham, R-S.C.

'The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created,' Graham said, adding: 'I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all ... but we don't know all the evidence yet.'

Under Senate rules, Republicans could confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats' 48.

Calling Trump's remarks about possible taped conversations 'outrageous,' Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would 'absolutely' subpoena such tapes.

'We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear,' Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee.

The blowback against the firing of Comey angered the increasingly frustrated president, who made the decision after consulting only a small group of advisers, worried the news would leak out. Trump has openly vented his frustration with the media and Democrats on Twitter, musing about canceling press briefings and arguing that it's difficult for aides to know his thinking.

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One before his departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Saturday, May 13, 2017

The administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to replace Comey, just over half of the 14 being considered. Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday for the Mideast and Europe, his first overseas trip as president. He was also set to welcome foreign leaders to the White House, with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday and President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia on Thursday. A leader of the United Arab Emirates was scheduled to visit Monday.

Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNN's 'State of the Union'; Graham spoke on NBC's 'Meet the Press'; Haley and Warner appeared on ABC's 'This Week'; and Warner spoke on 'Fox News Sunday' along with Lee and Holmes.

Special Agent in Charge Adam Lee of the FBI's Richmond, Virginia office, leaves the U.S. Department of Justice on Saturday, May 13, 2017. Lee is one of nearly a dozen candidates President Donald Trump is considering to succeed ousted FBI Director James Comey

FILE - In this Jan. 3, 2006, file photo, then-Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Alice Fisher briefs reporters at the Justice Department in Washington. President Donald Trump is considering nearly a dozen candidates to succeed ousted FBI Director James Comey, choosing from a group that includes several lawmakers, attorneys and law enforcement officials
A jilted boyfriend gang-raped his ex-girlfriend with six other men then drove a car over her head to stop her being identified in India.

The mutilated body of the 23-year-old woman was found being torn apart by dogs after she was abducted from Sonipat and driven to the city of Rohtak in the country's north.

There she was raped and tortured with sharp-edged objects before having her skull smashed with bricks when she threatened to tell police.

Her attackers then crushed her with a car in a bid to conceal her identity, according to local reports.

A jilted boyfriend gang-raped his ex-girlfriend (pictured) with six other men then drove a car over her head to stop her being identified in India, it has emerged

Sumit Kumar and his associate Vikas allegedly abducted the woman, and gang-raped and tortured her. The two men are shown between two police officers after their arrest

The incident comes just days after the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for four men in the Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case from Delhi that had sparked nationwide revulsion and legal reforms.

A local man Sumit Kumar, whose age is not known, along with and half-a-dozen associates are alleged to have carried out the abduction.

Police announced on Saturday that they had arrested Kumar and an associate named as Vikas.

The victim's family members identified the body and told the police that Sumit and six to seven men had stormed their house and threatened the woman after she refused to marry him.

Station house officer Ajay Kumar confirmed: 'The victim was living with her mother.

'She had left for the job on May 9 around 7am when the accused, Sumit, along with his accomplice, Vikas, abducted her in a car'.

Police found the 23-year-old's mutilated body being torn apart by dogs at an industrial site in Rohtak district (pictured - an official exams the victim's body)

'We have recovered victim's body who was later identified as a resident of Kalupur Chungi area of Sonipat. The investigation is ongoing and we have arrested the prime accused Sumit and his accomplice, Vikas.

'Sumit has confessed to the crime and told us that they killed the victim after raping her,' Ajay Kumar said.

The autopsy report found her skull was smashed in an attempt to disfigure her.

'The postmortem has revealed that the victim was first intoxicated by mixing sedatives in a soft drink. It is believed that the victim was raped and killed after she fell unconscious.

'Her head has been crushed brutally,' said senior professor and forensic medicine expert Dr SK Dhatarwal.

'We have also found broken bones. The accused indulged in this brutal act to deface her.'

The victim's family members identified the body and told the police that Sumit and six to seven men had stormed their house and threatened the woman after she refused to marry him (pictured - the victim's body being taken away)

The victim's family told the police that Sumit was pressuring her to marry, but she turned him down her last year as he was unemployed.

He would stalk her and a week before she was abducted she had slapped the accused as he blocked her way.

Police say Sumit told them that after abducting the woman, they took her to Rohtak and stopped the vehicle near Parsvnath City. He asked the victim again to marry him but she refused. This infuriated him and he killed her, police say.

'I was in love with her and she also loved me. There was some altercation between us and I killed her with a brick,' Sumit said on camera.

The woman's mother has demanded that all those involved in the crime be hanged.

The brutality of the December 29, 2012, gang-rape and murder of a woman, who was named 'Nirbhaya'  meaning fearless  because of laws against naming rape victims, provoked intense anger and weeks of protests across Indian cities and also hit international headlines.

Government statistics show that almost 90 per cent of rapes in the country are committed by people known to the victims.
What Is Genetic Information Discrimination?

While most people tend to think of discrimination in terms of race, gender, disability, ethnicity, and age, another category exists that many people are unaware of entirely: genetic information. Not only do civil rights laws protect against discrimination on the basis of a person's genetic information, there are strong prohibitions against employers even conducting genetic testing on their employees.

A person's genetic information can include information that may not necessarily reflect a disability, but rather a personal trait, medical information, or other characteristics. When an employment action is taken that is based upon a person's genetic information, like a decision based upon race, it will be considered impermissible. The EEOC advises that, under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), employment decisions based on genetic information are never permissible because genetic information is 'not relevant to an individual's current ability to work.'

What Does Genetic Information Discrimination Look Like?

Generally, discrimination can be difficult to detect if there are no overtly discriminatory statements or actions taken against a person. In the genetic information context, for example, a manager's statement that an employee will not be promoted, or an applicant hired, because of something contained in a DNA, or other genetic, test would likely qualify as an overtly discriminatory statement. Even just requesting medical histories from applicants will usually be considered illegal under GINA.

However, like many other forms of discrimination, genetic information discrimination can happen behind closed doors. Despite the broad protections, proving a claim is no simple task. Unless it can be shown clearly that your employer knew the genetic information, and considered it in reaching their decision, it may difficult to prevail on a claim. The most common example occurs when an employer considers medical information acquired via a Google search, or an FMLA or ADA request, in deciding whether to not hire, not promote, demote, or discipline, that individual.

The Future of Genetic Information Discrimination

In the science fiction fantasy world, genetic information is used to determine nearly every aspect of a person's life. Though our world isn't at that point, the type of genetic information that is available via the currently available tests does provide a level of invasiveness that could inform an employer's decisions.

Fortunately, the laws in the real world provide remedies for employees and applicants that face this form of discrimination. If you believe that you've been discriminated against due to your genetic information, contacting a civil rights or employment attorney for a consultation could prove helpful.

Related Resources:
This is the moment a man accused of attempting to break into a gas station convenience store escaped the scene by stealing an open and running police car after officers were called to the site.

CCTV footage shows the shirtless Brandon Ramiro Cantu coolly strolling up to the empty squad car, opening the door and reversing out of the gas station in South Wayside Houston, Texas in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Cantu jumped into the deputy constable's marked SUV and took off northbound, while the officers were in the store, HPD Lt. Larry Crowson said.

Escape: Cantu hid close to the gas station he reportedly tried to rob

Daring: He waited until police were inside the store before strolling up to the running and open SUV

Drive: The joyride was short lived as he crashed into a ditch at the intersection

However his joyride was short lived as he crashed into a ditch at the intersection of Priest and Burden, close to his ex-wife's house, with police, using GPS tracking, in hot pursuit.

Cantu then reportedly forced his way into Leslie Elias's home after he 'busted the door.'

When in the her home Cantu pummeled her and another man while holding a knife and threatening to kill her.

'He grabbed a knife and he was hitting me all in my face here and swinging and trying to stab me,' Elias told Police One.

'He kept hitting me and said he was going to kill me, that he came to kill me.'

The man also in the house, who was brought into to protect her from Cantu, told abc13: 'He tried to hit me and then I am hitting him back.'

After police caught up with Cantu he fled the home and hid behind a nearby horse stable.

Open: Cantu about to enter the police car in Houston

Ready: The suspect starts to reverse out of the store in a daring escape

Incredible: Cantu drove to his ex-wife's house then he punched her and another man. Police drafted in dogs and helicopter to find him

He was eventually discovered by officers but only after they drafted in the specialist canine unit and a helicopter to find him.

The car thief's ex-wife was not harmed, the Houston Fire Department reported, and police said that they know of no injuries or accidents in the incident.

Police will confer with prosecutors to decide on charges in the incident, which likely would include evading arrest with a motor vehicle.

The suspect apparently hid close to the gas station after the Precinct 6 SUV showed up and waited until the deputies were inside the store to steal the car.
Jeremy Corbyn has drafted in a former Communist Party activist who once called for 'solidarity' with North Korea to help with Labour's floundering election campaign.

Andrew Murray, a former Morning Star journalist who only quit the Communists for Labour in December, is providing 'support' to the leader's office.

A senior party source confirmed has been seconded from the Unite union, where he is Len McCluskey's chief of staff.

The move caused fury among Labour moderates who have accused Mr Corbyn of guiding the party to disaster with his hard-left policies.

Andrew Murray, pictured at a Stop the War Colaition event in 2015, only quit the Communist Party in December to join Labour

Jeremy Corbyn, pictured giving a speech in Liverpool today, has brought in Mr Murray to 'support' Labour's election campaign

Thousands of Corbyn supporters turned up to a campaign rally in Leeds today to hear the Labour leader set out his vision ahead of the General Election on June 8

Former MP Tom Blenkinsop, who stood down in despair when the election was called, said it was the latest example of 'entryism'.

Mr Murray told the Guardian last year that he would not join Labour because of his deep-seated belief in Communism.

'All my children are in the Labour party,' he said. 'One has been in the Labour party a long time; the other three are all there as a result of Jeremy's surge.

'But no, I'm a member of the Communist party. That's where I am. Communism still represents, in my view, a society worth working towards  albeit not by the methods of the 20th century, which failed.'

However, Mr Murray seemingly changed his mind and joined in December.

In a Morning Star column in 1999, Murray reportedly quoted Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev, 'who remarked in 1956 that "against imperialists, we are all Stalinists"'.

Mr Murray is a former chairman of the Stop the War campaign group, in which Mr Corbyn was

The Communist Party announced last month that it will not stand any candidates against Labour on June 8, saying it will be campaigning for 'victory' by Mr Corbyn.

Labour supporters climbed into trees to catch a glimpse of Mr Corbyn at his Leeds rally today

Mr Murray is chief of staff to Unite boss Len McCluskey, a close ally of Mr Corbyn. Mr McCluskey and the Labour leader are pictured together in 2016

A 2003 article on the Communist Party website credited to Mr Murray voiced concern about the US trying to 'seize command' of North Korea.

'The clear desire of the USA to effect regime change in its second axis of evil target could well provoke an armed clash there, too,' he wrote.

'Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear.'

Unite is one of Labour's biggest financial backers, and last week its executive committee approved a 2.5million donation to the party's election warchest.

A spokeswoman for Mr Corbyn said: 'We do not comment on staffing matters.'
A German council has started confiscating privately-owned apartments to help ease an acute housing shortage made worse by migrants.

Six flats in the city of Hamburg, which has seen thousands of refugees and migrants arrive over the last two years, were handed over to a city-appointed trustee at the weekend, local media reports.

The houses, located in the central Hamm district, will now be renovated and rented out to tenants of the city's choosing against the will of the owner, who will be billed for the work which is estimated to cost a five-figure sum.

Six apartments Hamburg (pictured) have been seized by authorities and will now be renovated and rented out against the will of the owner to help ease the city's housing crisis

The apartments have been vacant since 2012 according to local paper Hamburger Abendblatt, which was translated by right-wing think-tank Gatestone Institute.

Hamburg was already struggling to provide housing for its 1.7million residents before migrants and refugees began arriving en masse in 2015.

City officials started confiscating commercial properties and converting them into housing the same year, as up to 400 migrants were arriving per day.

But the weekend's seizure marks the first time the powers have been applied to privately-owned residential buildings, Gatestone analysts say.

It is not known who the apartments will be rented to once they have been refurbished.

The city has already resorted to constructing temporary shelters out of shipping containers to provide emergency housing.

There are estimated to be around 700,000 rented apartments in Hamburg with between 1,000 and 5,000 extra apartments thought to be vacant.

Hamburg was already struggling to house its 1.7million residents before an influx of thousands of migrants which has made the problem acute (pictured, migrants arrive in Munich)

The local Socialist and Green party council recently established a hotline for people to call if they believe property has been left vacant for longer than four months, after which it can be taken over by a city trustee.

Similar legislation was put forward in Berlin in 2015, which is also suffering a housing crisis exacerbated by large numbers of migrant arrivals, but was shot down for being unconstitutional.

It is unclear why lawyers have not challenged the Hamburg laws, Gatestone reports.

Germany has accepted around 1.8million migrants and refugees over the past two years, according to figures published by the Die Welt newspaper.

This includes 300,000 who have been granted asylum in the country, and another 1.5million who are still being processed.

If accurate, this would mean Germany accepted the second-most refugees of any country in the world between 2015 and 2016, after Turkey which borders Syria.
A driver is facing attempted murder charges after slamming her car into a pedestrian in a California parking lot after a heated argument over littering.

In a video of the incident filmed by a bystander on Friday, the man can be seen accusing a driver and her passenger of littering before shouting profanities in the parking lot of the Beverly Hills Pavilions shopping center.

The confrontation later escalated and the driver plowed her car into the man, who was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in unknown condition. He has not been publicly identified.

In the clip of the incident, it appears that the argument was about littering. The man claims he saw the pair litter and starts shouting profanities at the driver and her passenger

The driver then circled the parking lot twice, and on the second time around, the man shoves shopping carts in front of her car

The two women in the car, Jamika Marie Abair, 22, and Sarah Huerta, 19, are facing attempted murder charges and are being held on more than $2million bail. Both women are from Long Beach.

In the clip of the incident obtained by KABC, it appears that the argument was about littering.

The man claims he saw the pair litter and starts shouting profanities at the driver and her passenger.

The driver then circled the parking lot twice, and on the second time around, the man shoves shopping carts in front of her car.

The driver then stops her car before accelerating into the man, who is slammed into a nearby wall before falling to the ground

The two women in the car, Jamika Marie Abair, 22, and Sarah Huerta, 19, are facing attempted murder charges and are being held on more than $2million bail. It is not immediately known who was driving the vehicle at the time of the incident

As the driver leaves, the man tries to get up off the ground, but is too injured to stand up. He was then taken to the hospital in unknown condition

The driver then stops her car before accelerating into the man, who is slammed into a nearby wall before falling to the ground.

As the driver leaves, the man tries to get up off the ground, but is too injured to stand up. He was then taken to the hospital in unknown condition.

It is not immediately known who was driving the vehicle at the time of the incident.

The Beverly Hills Police Department said that the event is under investigation, so it cannot release any further details.
An Australian Muslim female politician swapped parliament for the catwalk to showcase clothes for luxury womenswear designer Thomas Puttick at Sydney Fashion Week.

Islamic Labor MP Anne Aly took to the stage to model some of Puttick's latest collection in a bizarre change from her usual political business attire on Monday.

The 50-year-old Egyptian-born politician was chosen to grace the Fashion Week catwalk alongside other 'muses and inspirational women' instead of models.

Muslim MP Anne Aly (pictured) took to the catwalk on Monday at Sydney Fashion Week

The 50-year-old swapped the Senate chambers for the catwalk in a bid to raise money for White Ribbon

Puttick wanted to debut his designs with models like Ms Aly in a bid to celebrate diversity and raise money for anti-domestic violence charity White Ribbon, Buzzfeed News reports.

Musician Sarsha Simone and Sierra Leone refugee Aminata Conteh-Biger also walked alongside Ms Aly at the show.

Fierce snaps show Ms Aly strutting down the catwalk wearing a tight-fitting black dress with a thigh-high split, a white collared jacket and high-heeled boots.

The politician-turned-model donned the simple white jacket as a nod to the White Ribbon foundation which fights violence against women.

The politician-turned-model (pictured) donned the simple white jacket as a nod to the White Ribbon foundation which fights violence against women

Fierce snaps show Ms Aly wearing a tight-fitting black dress with a thigh-high split, a white collared jacket and high-heeled boots (pictured with fellow model)

Ms Aly has been a powerful advocate for diversity and female representation in parliament.

She was Australia's first female Muslim MP and has fought hard for her place in the Senate chamber.

'I was about eight years old when I started to realise just how the circumstances of my birth affected expectations of me as a woman, as a Muslim and as a minority,' Ms Aly has previously said.

Ms Aly is also a counter-terrorism expert and has written several books on terrorism and global security.

Ms Aly (pictured) was Australia's first female Muslim MP and has fought hard for her place in the Senate chamber
President Donald Trump is set to nominate as his ambassador to the Vatican Callista Gingrich, the third wife of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who had an affair with Gingrich and later helped convert him to Catholicism.

The nomination is expected to be formalized before Trump meets with Pope Francis on May 24 in Rome, and once the Office of Government Ethics gives its approval, CNN reported Sunday.

The White House didn't confirm or deny reports about the nomination.

'Nothings official until its announced,' said White House press secretary Sean Spicer, asked about it and whether it had been vetted with Vatican officials.

'The answer is we have no personnel announcements,' Spicer said, before moving on.

President Donald Trump is set to nominate Callista Gingrich, wife of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, to be the next US ambassador to the Vatican

Gingrich became a constant companion at her husband's side during his own run for president in 2012.

In a 1999 deposition during Newt Gingrich's divorce from his second wife, Callista Bisek testified that her relationship had begun with him six years earlier, AJC.com reported.

She and Gingrich married in 2000.

Gingrich was overseeing impeachment proceedings of former President Bill Clinton during part of that time.

In statements that rocked the 2012 presidential campaign while Newt Gingrich was on a roll, Gingrich's first wife, Marianne Gingrich claimed that Newt had asked her for an open marriage.

Describing the moment her ex-husband said he wanted an open marriage, Marianne told ABC: 'And I just stared at him and he said, ''Callista doesn't care what I do.'' He wanted an open marriage and I refused.'

She trashed her former husband throughout the interview, the first time she had spoken on TV since their divorce.

After a messy divorce from his second wife in 1999, Newt (right) married Callista the following year. He credits Callista with his conversion to Catholicism

Marianne Gingrich alleged her husband conducted his affair with Callista 'in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington'.

She added: 'He always called me at night and always ended with ''I love you. Well, she [Callista] was listening.'

Callista Gingrich also played a role in her husband's campaign. After a mass exodus of staffers in 2011, aides claimed she was responsible for insisting that he follow through on a planned trip to the Greek islands.

A campaign filing revealed she owed as much as $500,000 to Tiffany's due to a revolving charge account, Politico reported at the time.

A self-described devout Catholic, Gingrich, 51, currently heads Gingrich Productions, a multimedia company.

She penned a series of children's books, Ellis the Elephant, that she and her husband both frequently promoted. The former Agriculture Committee staffer is also a singer in the choir of D.C.'s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer wouldn't confirm the expected nomination of Callista Gingrich on Monday

Newt Gingrich, 73, was one of the few big-name Republicans to support Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

He was speaker of the House of Representatives -- second in line in the US presidential succession chart -- from 1995 to 1999, and was notably vociferous in his calls to impeach president Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

The potential nomination carries some controversy: Callista Gingrich is the former speaker's third wife and had a multiyear sexual relationship with him when she was a young congressional aide named Callista Bisek and he was still married to his second wife.

After a messy divorce from his second wife in 1999, he married Callista the following year. He credits Callista with his conversion to Catholicism.

Marrianne Gingrich told ABC News in 2012 when her ex-husband was running for president that he wanted an open marriage so he could continue to date Callista. He said the claim was not true.

Trump mentioned the possibility of the ambassadorship in January, but the Gingrich's have been so frustrated with the slow vetting process that they have threatened to withdraw Callista's name, The New York Times reported.

The former House speaker confirmed the discussions at the time but said he and his wife had been told to 'be very cautious' until an announcement.

Callista's name initially came up as a way to get her husband, an adviser to Trump in the transition, out of the way, a source in January had said.

Newt Gingrich is a regular guest on Fox News and has provided assessments of Trump's administration that are supportive but sometimes nagging.

He was talked about for a cabinet position in the days after the election, yet swatted the prospect down.

Gingrich told McClatchy he would be 'focused on strategic planning,' instead. He did not say whether it was his choice to remove himself from consideration for an official position or Trump's.
The Commonwealth Bank has kicked off an anticipated campaign against the government's proposed bank levy by claiming it is already the country's 'number one taxpayer.'

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government has faced strong opposition from Australia's four largest banks and Macquarie over the 0.06% levy on their liabilities announced.

The banks have threatened to pass on the costs of the levy to their customers.

Many observers believe the banks may be preparing a joint advertising campaign against the policy akin to the mining industry's successful $22million attack on the Rudd government's resources super profits tax seven years ago.

Scroll down for video

CBA Newsroom shared a post via the 'sponsored tweets' service which saw their CEO Ian Narev tell Nine News that the bank was already Australia's largest taxpayer

The bank has shown strong resistance to the proposed 0.06% levy on their taxes. Westpac, NAB, ANZ and Macquarie have all shared similar stances on the increase.

The Australian Bankers Association are yet to reveal any substantial plans to lead an advertising campaign.

However, on Monday CBA were using the 'promoted tweets' function on Twitter to endorse its resistance to the levy.

The feature on the social media site allows advertisers to share certain tweets to wider audiences beyond their followers.

The video the bank shared featured CEO Ian Narev informing Channel Nine News that CBA was already one of the nation's largest taxpayers.

'Commonwealth Bank paid $3.6 billion in tax last year, we're the number one taxpayer in the country,' Mr Narev said.

'What we've seen here is the government say 'we've got a gap in the budget, where can we go to find it?' and they've gone to the companies that pay the most tax.

'They haven't looked for others who pay less tax, they haven't looked for others that pay no tax, they haven't cut the spending, they've gone to their biggest taxpayers,' he continued.

A CBA spokesman told the Brisbane Times that promoting the bank's content on social media was a common feature of its advertising procedures.

'With the significant interest last week in our CEO's comments on the bank tax, we decided to promote his comments on Nine News to ensure it reached those covering the debate on the tax.'

CBA refused to comment whether it was planning to launch a wider advertising campaign challenging the tax increase.

The banks have indicated that if the levy is to stand, it will be their customers who will most likely foot the increase

The mining industry forked out more than $22 million on media advertisements against a tax increase in 2010 as part of a co-ordinated attack, with the government succumbing to the pressure and renegotiating the levy.

Hugh Stephens, director of social media consultancy Dialogue Group, told The Brisbane Times that CBA was likely to test a range of messages to see which was received the best response from the public.

'How are people responding to it, how are they liking it or re-tweeting it, versus replying something positive or something negative,' he said.

'They'd use that to be able to identify what are the different positioning statements they can use that seem to deliver the best response.'

On analysing their findings the bank could then proceed to deciding whether to run a wider advertising campaign on other platforms, Mr Stephens suggested.

Westpac, NAB and ANZ chiefs have all voiced their disapproval of the proposed tax, which would add a staggering $6.2 billion to their taxes over a four year period.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed US intelligence services for a 'ransomware' attack that has wrecked havoc around the globe.

Putin said intelligence services should beware of creating software that can later be used for malicious means after researchers said this weekend's WannaCry attacks exploited a hacking tool built by the US National Security Agency.

'As regards the source of these threats, I believe that the leadership of Microsoft have announced this plainly, that the initial source of the virus is the intelligence services of the United States,' Putin said on Monday.

'Once they're let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators,' he told reporters in Beijing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking during a press conference in Beijing, said on Monday that US intelligence services are behind the WannaCry cyber attack

Putin claimed there was no significant damage to Russian institutions, including its banking and healthcare systems, from the computer worm.

'But as a whole it is worrying, there's nothing good about it, it is a source of concern,' he said.

'So this question should be discussed immediately on a serious political level and a defence needs to be worked out from such phenomena.'

The Russian leader that the Kremlin was not behind the attack.

Around 1,000 computers at the Russian Interior Ministry have been affected, a spokeswoman for the ministry told Interfax news agency. A source familiar with the matter said the ministry did not lose any information in the attacks.

Putin said Russia had last year sought an agreement with the previous US, administration on cooperation in the field of cyber security, but that Washington had dragged its feet and no deal was concluded.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to acknowledge what security experts had already widely concluded: the ransomware attack that hit computers around the world on Friday leveraged a hacking tool, built by the NSA, that leaked online in April.

The extortion scheme has hit 150 countries including the US, Britain, Russia, China, Germany and France, and could wreak even greater havoc as more malicious variations appear.

The initial attack, known as WannaCry, paralysed NHS computers, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies around the world.

British IT expert Marcus Hutchins, 22, discovered a 'kill switch' for the cyber attack over the weekend, preventing more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected.

But despite slowing the spread of WannaCry, he fears that the ransomeware could have a 'backdoor', meaning hackers could easily inject a new strain of the virus to spark a repeat of the crisis.

Global cyber chaos was spreading this morning as workers booted up computers following the weekend's worldwide 'ransomware' attack (pictured)

As a loose global network of cybersecurity experts continued to fight the hackers, Chinese state media said 29,372 institutions there had been infected, along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

The Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Co-ordination Centre, a non-profit organisation providing support for computer attacks, said 2,000 computers at 600 locations in Japan were reported affected so far.

Government agencies said they were unaffected. Companies like Hitachi and Nissan Motor Co reported problems they said had not seriously affected their business operations.

In China, universities and other educational institutions were among the hardest hit, with about 15 per cent of the internet protocol addresses attacked, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Railway stations, post delivery, petrol stations, hospitals, office buildings, shopping centres and government services also were affected, Xinhua said, citing the Threat Intelligence Centre of Qihoo 360, a Chinese internet security services company.

The extortion scheme created chaos in 150 countries and could wreak even greater havoc as more malicious variations appear

Elsewhere in Asia, officials in Japan and South Korea said they believed security updates had helped ward off the worst of the impact.

The most public damage in South Korea was to cinema chain CJ CGV Co. It was restoring its advertising servers at dozens of cinemas after the attack left the company unable to display trailers of forthcoming films.

The attack was disrupting computers that run factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems in scores of countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Spain, India and Japan, among others.

Russia's Interior Ministry and companies including Spain's Telefonica and FedEx Corp in the US all reported troubles.

In France, auto manufacturer Renault said one of its plants, which employs 3,500 people in Douai, wasn't reopening today as technicians continued to deal with the aftermath of the cyberattack.

The company described the temporary halt in production as a 'preventative step.' The company gave no details on the degree to which the plant was affected by the malware. Renault said all of its other plants in France were open Monday.

Marcus Hutchins, pictured, prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected by registering a website domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the virus

Experts were urging organisations and companies to immediately update older Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows XP, with a patch released by Microsoft to limit vulnerability to a more powerful version of the malware - or to future versions that cannot be stopped.

Paying the ransom will not ensure any fix, said Eiichi Moriya, a cyber security expert and professor at Meiji University.

'You are dealing with a criminal,' he said. 'It's like after a robber enters your home. You can change the locks but what has happened cannot be undone. If someone kidnaps your child, you may pay your ransom but there is no guarantee your child will return.'

New variants of the rapidly replicating worm were discovered Sunday and one did not include the so-called kill switch that allowed researchers to interrupt its spread Friday by diverting it to a dead end on the internet.

The attack held users hostage by freezing their computers, popping up a red screen with the words, 'Oops, your files have been encrypted!' and demanding money through online bitcoin payment.

Just one person in an organisation who clicked on an infected attachment or bad link, would lead to all computers in a network becoming infected, said Vikram Thakur, technical director of Symantec Security Response.

'That's what makes this more troubling than ransomware was a week ago,' Mr Thakur said.

The attack has hit more than 200,000 victims across the world since Friday and is seen as an 'escalating threat,' said Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, Europe's policing agency.

'The numbers are still going up,' Mr Wainwright said.
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A Tennessee-based photographer has dedicated his life to exploring the depths of thousands of caves and cavernous areas across the United States and Central America.

Chris Higgins, from Knoxville, spends his free time exploring the more than 10,000 caves that are within hours of his home.

The photographer's images capture the gigantic scale of some of the hidden wonders, as well as the extreme measures he and his team must go to in order to discover and document such locations.

Chris Higgins, from Knoxville, Tennessee, spends his free time exploring the more than 10,000 caves that are within hours of his home. Pictured above, Higgins rappels down a cave near Chattanooga, Tennessee

The photographer's images capture the gigantic scale of some of the hidden wonders, as well as the extreme measures he and his team must go to in order to discover and document such locations. Pictured above left, the Space Drop in San Augustine, System Huautla, Mexico, and right, Jason Lavender moving gear from camp 1.5 in La Greta, System Huautla, Mexico

His adventures have taken him to the Bahamas, Peru, Greece, and more recently Mexico as he searches the world for more caves to document. Pictured above, Jason Lavender in the Low Rider Parkway 3,000feet down in Cueva Cheve, Mexico

He hopes his work will encourage others to adventure into the unknown, and also highlight the importance of such fragile environments.

His adventures have taken him to the Bahamas, Peru, Greece, and more recently Mexico as he searches the world for more caves to document.

The 29-year-old argues that cave photography is the most difficult subset of the genre, because as well as carrying heavy loads of gear, he must also climb vertical pitches, abseil, and often work in total darkness.

Higgins said: 'A lot of the time we don't fully know what a room looks like until we take a photo.

'Our lights will only let us see a small piece at a time but once it is lit with flashes we can see the whole room at once.

Higgins hopes his work will encourage others to adventure into the unknown, and also highlight the importance of such fragile environments. Pictured above, they climb the Space Drop in San Augustine, System Huautla

Growing up with a father who was also a caver, Higgins said he spend every weekend as a youngster crawling around in local caves. Pictured above, left, Matt Bumbalough hanging in Stephens Gap cave, Alabama

Higgins has traveled the world exploring caves in various locations. Pictured above, Higgins and his team explore an unidentified cave

'Imagine leaving the daylight with a 50-pound pack heading deep underground with everything you need to camp for seven days and all of your photo gear. Just remember what goes down must come up.'

Growing up with a father who was also a caver, Higgins said he spend every weekend as a youngster crawling around in local caves.

Today, however, he likes to go further afield; the aim of his work, he said, is to showcase places that have never been seen.

'I'm always in search of the biggest and deepest caves,' Higgins said. 'For one I like the personal challenge of reaching the limits of a cave but I also enjoy the struggle of dragging my camera gear to those limits.

'I like to pick caves that have never been photographed because even though all caves look similar they are all very different.'

Higgins and his team explore the Hall of Falls in Sparta, Tennessee. There are dozens of cavernous areas in Tennessee, just a drive away from were Higgins lives in Knoxville

Today, however, Higgins likes to go further afield; the aim of his work, he said, is to showcase places that have never been seen. Pictured above left, Mike Green Climbing the the grand cascades in San Augustine, System Huautla, Mexico, and right, Jason Lavender in the Low Rider Parkway 1000m down in Cueva Cheve, Mexico
Jeremy Corbyn and his most senior allies previously demanded that taxpayers be allowed to 'opt out' of funding the military.

The veteran left winger, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott all urged the introduction of a 'tax exemption' for 'conscientious objectors'.

The system would have allowed them to put the money towards a fund for 'promoting peace and security' instead.

The trio signed up to a Commons 'early day motion' on the issue in 2006, when they were lowly Labour backbenchers.

Jeremy Corbyn, pictured on the campaign trail over the weekend, previously signed a Commons motion calling for taxpayers to be able to 'opt out' of funding the military

Diane Abbott and John McDonnell, now shadow home secretary and shadow chancellor respectively, also signed the Commons motion in 2006

The motion casts fresh light on Mr Corbyn's real attitude to the military and protection of the nation.

Labour former security minister Lord West of Spithead said the idea was 'nonsense'.

'I think that is nonsense,' he told MailOnline. 'You cannot start allowing parts of your population to opt out of government spending they do not particularly like.

'It is a recipe for chaos.'

The peer added: 'You would have people saying, "I don't want to support money going on that bit of motorway.'

In a keynote security speech last Friday, the Labour leader insisted he was not a 'pacifist' as he struggled to persuade voters he can be trusted as PM.

But he was unable to name a single combat mission since the Second World War that he would have supported - a period of time that incudes the campaign to reclaim the Falklands.

THE 2006 COMMONS MOTION SIGNED BY CORBYN AND ALLIES That this House notes that on 2nd March 1916 all unmarried men aged 18 to 41 years were deemed to have enlisted in the British Army as a consequence of the Military Service Act 1916 which simultaneously introduced compulsory military service and the right to conscientious objection to military service to Great Britain for the first time; recognises that all taxpayers currently contribute a portion of their taxes to the military with no means to object on grounds of conscience; believes that 90 years after the right to withhold one's physical service to the military was first recognised by Parliament at the height of the First World War, a system to enable conscientious objectors to war not to contribute financially to the military via their taxes should be established; supports the principle of conscientious objection as a basic human right; and therefore believes the military portion of tax contributions from conscientious objectors to war should be directed to a Government-controlled fund specifically for promoting peace and security without violence. Advertisement

He indicated that he would end British airstrikes against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq if he wins the keys to Downing Street, and suggested he would abandon the key NATO tenet of mutual defence.

Mr Corbyn - who remains vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - also made clear he does not believe in the nuclear deterrent. His stance on security has caused so much chaos within Labour that his own defence spokeswoman, Nia Griffith, failed to turn up to the speech.

The 2006 Early Day Motion was tabled by another left-wing Labour MP, Linda Riordan, and titled: 'Consceintous objection from taxes for military purposes.'

It was signed by Mr Corbyn, as well as the now shadow chancellor Mr McDonnell, and shadow home secretary Diane Abbott.

Katy Clark, a Labour MP at the time and now a key aide to the Labour leader, was another signatory.

The text complains that 'all taxpayers currently contribute a portion of their taxes to the military with no means to object on grounds of conscience'.

It says a system should be established 'to enable conscientious objectors to war not to contribute financially to the military via their taxes'.

Instead of going on the armed forces, the 'military portion of tax contributions from conscientious objectors to war should be directed to a Government-controlled fund specifically for promoting peace and security without violence'.

EDMs are a way of MPs signalling their opinion on an issue, although they are not binding on the government.
The Myanmar delegation was led by former Myanmar ambassador to India U Wunn Lwin and member of MISIS and academics and researchers while the Chinese side was led by Mr He Zukun who is President and Secretary of the CPC Committee of YASS/Chinese Academy of South and Southeast Asian Studies (Kunming).

More than a hundred academics, researchers, media representatives, civil society representatives, and non-governmental organizations from Myanmar and China participated in the forum.

The delegates made presentations and offered perspectives on a range of issues from historical ties and cultural exchanges between Myanmar and China, and the economic cooperation of both countries, to China-Myanmar political relations and foreign policy.

During the forum, the Myanmar delegation also visited the border points 61 and 71 of Myanmar and China as well as visited the site in Mangshi where the Friendship Tree was plated by former Prime Minister of Burma U Ba Swe and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1956.
Hero paramedics saved a premature baby, who was born at just 26 weeks, after her mother was told by two hospitals that there was no room.

Kirsty Hogarth, 30, from Edinburgh, was told to prepare to give birth, when she suffered a rare health problem and began losing a lot of blood.

Her husband Greig, 25, called 999 and was told to prepare for a home birth by operator Fiona Smith.

When ambulance crews arrived to take her to hospital, they were told by operators at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and St John's in Livingston that they could not accommodate her.

The two-man crew of Stephen Foster and Dave McEwan immediately faced a problem, but told Edinburgh Royal that they were heading there and demanded hospital staff to make room for Mrs Hogarth.

Greig and Kirsty Hogarth with their daughter Nel, who was born three months early

Baby Nel was born minutes later on October 23, 2016, weighing just 1lb and 11oz

Mrs Hogarth got to hold Nel, who was due to be born on January 28, for the first time later that afternoon

On the way to the hospital, she was told that it was looking likely that she was suffering a miscarriage.

When she arrived at the neonatal unit she was told that she was 4ins dilated and a caesarean was no longer an option.

Baby Nel was born minutes later on October 23, 2016, weighing just 1lb and 11oz.

Mrs Hogarth got to hold Nel, who was due to be born on January 28, for the first time later that afternoon.

She told the Daily Record: 'I could have held her in the palm of my hand. I really doubted she would survive. If it had not been for the paramedics Nel would not have made it.'

Staff at the hospital did not give the family false hope and Mr and Mrs Hogarth were told to prepare for the worst.

Nel was struggling with oxygen and Mrs Hogarth was bleeding internally.

Staff at the hospital did not give the family false hope and Mr and Mrs Hogarth were told to prepare for the worst

Nel was struggling with oxygen and Mrs Hogarth was bleeding internally

She added: 'I had a total abruption of the placenta. Nel was at risk from a lack of oxygen and I was at risk from internal bleeding.

'It was only then that I realised how serious it was. I still don't think I have accepted how much I was in a bad situation.

'They said I was very, very lucky that I bled out rather than bled in. I could have lost Nel and lost my own life as well.'

Against all odds Nel continued to make progress, but not without setbacks.

Against all odds Nel continued to make progress, but not without setbacks. She is pictured with Mrs Hogarth at her father's football match for Salvesen AFC at the Tony Macaroni Stadium in Livingston

Six weeks after she was born, the baby was diagnosed with a life-threatening bowel infection, but managed to pull through.

And between Christmas and New Year, she was put into intensive care with an infection in her spinal fluid.

But the little fighter overcame all her illnesses and was allowed home on January 22, but remained on oxygen.

Mrs Hogarth described Nel as a 'diva' who enjoys going to swimming classes

On her homecoming she weighed 4lbs and 13oz and now seven months on she tips the scaled at 9lbs and 6oz.

Mrs Hogarth described Nel as a 'diva' who enjoys going to swimming classes.

The Hogarths remain ever thankful for the 'amazing' work by the paramedics, neonatal staff and 999 operator.
Microsoft's president and top lawyer has sharply criticized Donald Trump's administration for failing to do more to prevent Friday's massive cyber attack.

Brad Smith slammed US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency, for 'stockpiling' software code that can be used by hackers.

Cybersecurity experts revealed the unknown hackers who launched the weekend's 'ransomware' attacks used a vulnerability that was exposed in NSA documents leaked online.

As a result, parts of the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain was battered into submission and some surgeries and hospitals were forced to close their services.

Brad Smith (pictured) slammed US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency, for 'stockpiling' software code that can be used by hackers on Friday

In a post on Microsoft's blog, Smith said: 'An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.'

The tech giant's president and chief legal officer says governments should 'report vulnerabilities' that they discover to software companies, 'rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.'

US President Donald Trump ordered his homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, to hold an emergency meeting Friday night.

Donald Trump (pictured) has already called two emergency meetings over the attack

The meeting was called to assess the threat posed by a global computer ransomware attack, a senior administration official said.

Senior security staff held another meeting in the White House Situation Room on Saturday.

He believes there are three areas that need improving to prevent it happening again.

Microsoft need to address the issue with updates, their customers - companies and government branches - need to take responsibility and the authorities need to be held accountable, according to the lawyer.

Smith added: 'The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call.

'They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world.

'We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits.

'This is one reason we called in February for a new Digital Geneva Convention to govern these issues, including a new requirement for governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.

'And its why weve pledged our support for defending every customer everywhere in the face of cyberattacks, regardless of their nationality.

'This weekend, whether its in London, New York, Moscow, Delhi, Sao Paulo, or Beijing, were putting this principle into action and working with customers around the world.'

Hospitals and other organizations in the UK are braced for mayhem today as the NHS tries to get back on its feet following Friday's crippling cyber attack (pictured)

Security experts say a cyberattack that holds computer data for ransom grew out of vulnerabilities purportedly identified by the National Security Agency.

Microsoft has released fixes for vulnerabilities and related tools disclosed by TheShadowBrokers, a mysterious group that has repeatedly published alleged NSA software code.

But many companies and individuals haven't installed the fixes yet, or are using older versions of Windows that Microsoft no longer supports and didn't fix.

Chris Wysopal of the software security firm Veracode said criminal organizations are likely behind this, given how quickly the malware has spread.

'For so many organizations in the same day to be hit, this is unprecedented,' he added.
A man who photographed himself with a huge wad of cash, a Mercedes and some fancy trainers is set to face jail after police discovered he was running a crack cocaine ring with his brother.

Kenechi and Oluchi Ochereobia were discovered to have been running a network of drug couriers from Cardiff and Hackney, east London.

Police said Kenechi, of Cardiff, was controlling the operation through a central mobile phone number, which he and his brother used to contact hundreds of numbers via text when they had supplies of drugs available.

Kenechi (left) and Oluchi (right) Ochereobia were found guilty of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and will be sentenced next month

Police seized photographs of Kenechi posing with some expensive-looking trainers, a watch and a Mercedes with a large wad of cash in the background

The brothers would receive orders back, and then instruct others to supply the users in Norwich.

Their couriers would then collect the money in exchange for the drugs in Norwich.

When police questioned them, Kenechi said he was running a legitimate clothes distribution business, but he was unable to provide any tangible evidence of the business that would account for the amount of cash that was both seized and seen in the pictures.

Detective Sergeant Paul Harris, from the Met's Trident and Area Crime Command, said: 'This was a complex investigation spanning from Cardiff to Norwich via London.

'Kenechi Ochereobia tried to hide his involvement in the large-scale supply of drugs in Norwich by pretending to be a legitimate clothes distributor, while in reality he was getting younger gang members to run drugs across the country.

Frankie Dos Santos (pictured left and right) was arrested on a unrelated matter while travelling with Kenechi last summer, but a search warrant was then issued and he was charged on Monday, 16 January with conspiracy to supply Class A drugs

While carrying out a search, police discovered a safe with large amounts of cash stowed inside

'I would like to thank South Wales Police and Norfolk Constabulary for their support on this operation.'

The investigation was led by the Metropolitan Police's Trident and Area Crime Command with support from colleagues from South Wales Police and Norfolk Constabulary and launched in March last year after officers learned there was a drugs supply network operating out of London to supply drugs in and around the Norwich area.

Enquiries revealed that Kenechi was hiring vehicles and was travelling between Cardiff, London and Norwich in the hire cars to facilitate the dealing and oversee operations.

Kenechi was stopped in a hire car and arrested in Norwich in connection with an unrelated matter on June 10, 2016, along with Frankie Dos Santos.

Officers also searched a nearby address the pair had just visited and found Elliot Murawski along with 6,000 in cash hidden inside an oven at the house. Murawski was also arrested but were released from custody whilst enquiries continued.

Jaivon Prince (left) denied having any drugs in his possession, but after officers searched his home address and found wraps of heroin and crack cocaine with a street value of around 20,000 (right)

However, Murawski was stopped and arrested again on August 30, 2016 at Birchanger Services and he was found in possession of approximately 3,000 worth of heroin and crack cocaine. Officers were able to demonstrate that Murawski was a key part of the distribution network and was regularly in contact with Kenechi.

Further enquiries led officers to identify Calvyn Green as being linked to the network and he was arrested on September 6, 2016 at Ipswich Railway Station on a London-bound train from Norwich. He was found in possession of almost 2,500 in cash, as well as mobile phones that had been used to communicate with both Kenechi and those he was supplying the drugs to.

Two weeks later, officers stopped and arrested Jaivon Prince at Liverpool Street Station.

Prince initially denied having any drugs in his possession, but after officers searched his home address and found wraps of heroin and crack cocaine with a street value of around 20,000; he admitted to having two packets of drugs concealed within his body.

Elliot Murawski (left) pleaded guilty to possession with intent to supply Class A drugs. Calvyn Green (right) was found guilty of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs. He will be sentenced on Friday, 26 May

Prince was taken to hospital, where hundreds of wraps of heroin and cocaine were recovered, totalling around 2,000.

On October 13, 2016 three simultaneous search warrants were executed at the addresses of Kenechi and Oluchi Ochereobia and Dos Santos in Cardiff and London, and the three were all arrested.

Officers found around 23,000 in cash hidden in Kenechi's Cardiff home. Officers found several pictures that showed Kenechi posing with large amounts of cash - proceeds of his drug dealing.

The six men were all subsequently charged with two counts of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs - namely heroin and crack cocaine.

Murawski, of Norwich, and Prince, of Hackney, both pleaded guilty to the conspiracy on November 17, 2016 and Friday, March 17 respectively.

The other four were all found guilty on Friday, May 12 at Blackfriars Crown Court following a trial.

All six are due to be sentenced on Friday, May 26.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has told world leaders to stop 'intimidating' North Korea following the dictatorship's latest missile test.

Putin said attempts to bully Kim Jong-un's regime were 'unacceptable', though he admitted the missile test was equally wrong.

America and South Korea led calls for fresh sanctions after Kim tested a newly developed Hwasong-12 ballistic missile on Sunday, which the dictator claimed was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the US.

Vladimir Putin has said it is 'unacceptable' to try and intimidate North Korea after the dictatorship carried out a ballistic missile test on Sunday

Putin denied that the missile test had posed any threat to Russia, despite the projectile landing around 60 miles off the country's east coast

Putin said peaceful dialogue with the North, a position supported by China's Xi Jinping (pictured right), is the only way to resolve the situation

Putin said: 'We are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers. We consider (the missile test) counter-productive, harmful and dangerous'.

But, he added: 'We must stop intimidating North Korea and find a peaceful solution to this problem.'

Speaking at a Chinese economic summit, Put also denied that the test had posed any threat to Russia, despite the weapon landing 60 miles off his nation's east coast.

The Russian premier said peaceful talks must be held to resolve escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Putin joins China and new South Korean president Moon Jae-in in calling for talks with the North.

If discussions could be arranged, it would mark the first significant development in diplomacy with North Korea since the nation pulled out of six-party talks in 2009.

President Trump said earlier this month that he would be willing to participate in talks 'under the right circumstances', though his administration said that possibility was slim after the missile launch.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told ABC's 'This Week' that 'having a missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, because he's absolutely not going to do it.'

North Korea test-fired a Hwasong-12 ballistic missile on Sunday (pictured), believed to be the longest-range weapon ever developed by the regime

Kim Jong-un was pictured celebrating with his officials after the launch, and vowed to carry out more missile tests and nuclear detonations

Experts believe the North's new missile is the longest-range weapon ever successfully tested by the isolated nation.

After being fired from a launch pad in the Kusong region early on Sunday, the projectile travelled around 500 miles before dropping into the Sea of Japan.

Analysts say the missile was fired at an upward trajectory to artificially limit its range during the test. Fired in a straighter line, they estimate it would have a range of at least 2,500 miles.

While that is significantly longer than the rage of its other missiles, it still falls around 3,000 miles short of the US mainland.

Kim Jong-un personally oversaw the missile launch on Sunday, and was pictured celebrating with his officials afterward.

The ruler also pledged further missile tests and nuclear detonations, despite repeated warnings by President Trump.
A South Carolina woman has been arrested on charges of arson and attempted murder after authorities say she set her house on fire and trapped her family inside.

Willie Mae McQuilla, 67, was taken into custody on Saturday after allegedly admitting to torching her home in Sumter County when responding deputies stopped to question her.

Authorities say multiple people identified McQuilla as the suspect.

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'Fire starter': Willie Mae McQuilla (pictured left in her mugshot and right in her driver's license photo), 67, has been charged with arson and attempted murder for allegedly setting her house on fire and trapping her family inside

Raging inferno: Firefighters in Sumter County, South Carolina, received a call about a house on fire in Wedgefield late Saturday afternoon

McQuilla's relatives were able to escape the burning residence at 2290 Highway 261 South

The Sumter County Sheriff's Office said in a news release that McQuilla's family members, inclduing her husband and two grown children, were able to escape without injury.

The 67-year-old woman was charged with one count of arson and three counts of attempted murder.

The incident took place shortly before 5pm on Saturday when a call came in about a house fire in progress at 2290 Highway 261 South in Wedgefield.

Other 911 calls identified McQuilla as the alleged arsonist.

As firefighters headed to the scene, a sheriff's deputy stopped McQuilla for questioning, at which point she reportedly confessed to the crime.

A spokesperson for the Sumter County Sheriff's Office revealed to the Daily Mail on Monday that McQuilla told the officer 'she was tired of being disrespected.'

The woman was taken to the Sumter-Lee Detention Center to await a bond hearing, reported WIS-TV. Her next court appearance is scheduled for July 7.

The Red Cross is assisting those displaced by Saturday's house fire.
This is the moment a Tory MP's campaigner appears to attack a local with his van door before driving at him - in a row over election posters.

John Kilcoyne, 59, infuriated villager Adam Morres, 36, after he put up signs promoting MP Simon Hart in a field near the local's home in Manorbier, Wales.

Mr Morres tore them down and billed the local Tory party for rent and damages - but then caught Mr Kilcoyne putting them back up a day later.

Video appears to show the pair arguing before the volunteer sharply pulls his van door into Mr Morres's arm before seemingly mockingly saying: 'Watch out, watch out.'

John Kilcoyne (above), 59, infuriated villager Adam Morres, 36, after he put up signs promoting MP Simon Hart in a field near the local's home in Manorbier, Wales

A video appears to show Mr Kilcoyne - one of Mr Hart's closest allies - pulling his car door into Mr Morres and repeatedly driving his van at him

Police were called after tempers boiled over when guest house owner Mr Kilcoyne insisted he had permission to put them up.

A video appears to show Mr Kilcoyne - one of Mr Hart's closest allies - pulling his car door into Mr Morres and repeatedly driving his van at him.

Police arrived moments later and are now investigating the stand-off over the signs which have allegedly been torn down and reinstalled three times.

Meanwhile, Simon Hart's persistent campaigners have put the signs back up.

But Mr Morres claims police warned him not to touch them in case the MP accuses him of criminal damage.

Mr Morres, whose ex-partner, 37, rents the field from a private landlord, said: 'I'm absolutely disgusted. I was angry and irate and furious, but now I am just sickened.

'It was just his attitude towards me. The smug way he talked to my friend telling her, "No, I can't take them down" - it was horrible.

'And the fact he is working on behalf of an MP, I don't think that says very much about the calibre of them.

Mr Morres had already torn the signs (right) down and billed the local Tory party for rent and damages - but then caught Mr Kilcoyne putting them back up a day later (left)

The furore began on Sunday, May 7, when Mr Morres was out for a walk with his ex-partner in fields she rents for her horses. They spotted two blue signs supporting incumbent MP Simon Hart nailed to a fence post inside the field

'It's an appalling reflection on the Tory party. To be honest I would have voted Tory simply as I don't like the Labour Party.

'But after this, I would now campaign quite happily for anyone standing against the Tory Party.

'Normally, I would choose who to vote for based on their policies, but in this instance I will be choosing based on the party I think has employees who aren't going to attack me.'

The furore began on Sunday, May 7, when Mr Morres was out for a walk with his ex-partner in fields she rents for her horses.

They spotted two blue signs supporting incumbent MP Simon Hart nailed to a fence post inside the field.

Mr Morres claims he phoned the Electoral Commission who he said told him they could be removed, so he took them down the next day. Mr Kilcoyne is one of Simon Hart's (right) closest allies

Mr Morres claims he phoned the Electoral Commission who he said told him they could be removed, so he took them down the next day.

He sarcastically invoiced Camarthen West and South Pembrokeshire Conservatives 50 for rent and damages.

'The damages are in case our neighbours thought the signs meant we were Conservative voters,' he added.

He claims John Kilcoyne - named as the seconder on Mr Hart's 2015 election nomination document - came to both his home and his ex-partner's house, the following Tuesday.

He said he claimed he had permission of the land owner to put the signs up, and left.

Moments later Mr Morres spotted him back next to his ex's field getting new 'Simon Hart' signs out his van and the pair clashed.

Video appears to show the pair rowing before Mr Kilcoyne sharply pulls his van door into Mr Morres's arm before telling him to 'watch out'.

Mr Morres phoned the police and when he stood in front of the van to record the licence plate, he claims Mr Kilcoyne repeatedly drove at him,

Another video - taken moments before police arrived - appears to show the car inching towards him as he moves away across the road before driving off.

Astonishingly Mr Morres woke up the next day to find the signs had been reinstated.

'The police have told us not to touch them in case they get damaged and Simon Hart claims criminal damage,' said Mr Morres.

'Now we're stuck with them up there. It's like rubbing lemon juice into a paper cut.'

Dyfed-Powys Police said: 'The force received a report of an assault without injury at approximately 9.40am on Tuesday, May 9.

'The incident took place at Wheelers Way, Manorbier. The investigation is ongoing.'

The Welsh Conservative Party and Simon Hart refused to comment.

Mr Kilcoyne, from Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire, said: 'Have you spoken to Mr Hart?

'I'm in the same position as Mr Hart. There is a police officer dealing with it. I have nothing at all to add.'
Racist neighbours have left pig heads and vile messages of abuse warning a Muslim family not to build their dream home in Sydney's west.

Adnan Ali, who fled Iraq for Australia more than 20 years ago, knocked down his house in Toongabbie to rebuild a bigger home for his wife and five children.

But the dream quickly turned into a nightmare as locals began leaving severed pig heads and threatening messages on his empty block of land.

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Racist neighbours have left pig heads and vile messages of abuse warning a Muslim family not to build their dream home in Sydney's west

One message, scrawled on a chair on his front porch read: 'Leave now, don't waste your time and money you fat pig'

Mr Ali claims he is the target of a racist hate campaign by neighbours who don't want him living in their street.

'Why they are hating us, I don't know,' he told Channel Nine's A Current Affair program.

Mr Ali says his neighbours have used timber off-cuts to write messages on the building site, including 'f*** off wo*'.

'I don't know what they mean by wo*. In some areas they wrote ''this is your last warning'',' Mr Ali said.

Adnan Ali (pictured) knocked down his house in Toongabbie to make life more comfortable for his wife (left) and five children

Mr Ali claims he is the target of a racist hate campaign by neighbours who don't want him living in their street

Another message, scrawled on a chair on his front porch, read: 'Leave now, don't waste your time and money you fat pig.'

Mr Ali claimed he and his wife have also been verbally abused by angry neighbours.

'Lately they started calling me fat man. I think the pig heads are something against our religion,' he said.

'He came out there laughing and saying ''oink, oink, oink'' and ''fat man''.'

His wife said: '(A neighbour) starts, 'f****** Muslim - you immigrant, you refugee, you have two house and I don't have one house'.'

Now the builders of his dream home have reportedly told Mr Ali it is too dangerous for them to carry out the work.

'It's written f*** you, w*. I don't know what they mean by wog. In some areas they wrote 'this is your last warning',' Mr Ali said.

He says neighbours threatened tradesmen on the site with violence if the continued to build his home

He says neighbours threatened tradesmen on the site with violence if the continued to build his home.

A Masterton Homes spokesman told A Current Affair they were working with Mr Ali to find a solution.

'We advise that the builder in this story has been working with the family to progress building works and is in no way involved with the racist activities discussed in the story.'

Mr Ali claimed he and his wife have been verbally abused by angry neighbours he says don't won't him living on their street
Douglas Goldsberry, of Elkhorn, Nebraska, was arrested last week and charged with pandering and solicitation

A 45-year-old man in Nebraska has been accused of hiring more than 75 prostitutes to strip on his neighbor's porch as he watched from across the street for nearly four years.

Douglas Goldsberry, of Elkhorn, a suburb of Omaha, was arrested last week and charged with pandering and solicitation after police traced mobile communications from prostitutes to his phone.

Goldsberry lives across the street from a couple who claim that since 2013, women as young as 16 have been stripping on their porch, with some kicking on their door or ringing the doorbell and becoming angry when the couple wouldn't pay them.

The couple, who are in their 30s and have two young sons, say that pimps have peered into their windows and on one occasion, a woman urinated in their yard.

Goldsberry, who has been a chef in Elkhorn for ten years, admitted to police that he would send the prostitutes and masturbate or take photos of them from his window, according to WKRN.

He also told investigators that he had met with sex workers at hotels.

Prosecutor Eric Fabian said that some of the women hired to appear could have been younger than 16 years old.

The 45-year-old was arrested on Wednesday, the same day his wife filed for divorce, saying she hadn't heard from him since May 3.

Police found Goldsberry at an Omaha hotel with a suicide note and a power cord tied into a noose.

If convicted, Goldsberry faces up to four years in prison and a $25,000 fine. He remains in jail on a $100,000 bail.

The family who experienced the incredibly large number of prostitutes have filed a protection order against Goldsberry.

Goldsberry, of Elkhorn, Nebraska, lives across the street from a couple (their home pictured above) who claim that since 2013, women as young as 16 have been stripping on their porch, with some kicking on their door or ringing the doorbell and becoming angry when the couple wouldn't pay them

Goldsberry's lawyer, Nathan Lab, has asked for his client's bail to be lowered, calling the case an 'anomaly'.

'These allegations are still allegations,' Lab told the Omaha World-Herald. 'Let's focus on posting bail right now and getting him back to court.'

Douglas County District Court Judge Derek Vaughn rejected the request to lower bail.

Douglas County Sheriff Tim Dunning said the stripping happened about once a month but later escalated to up to eight times in one month.

Deputies conducted surveillance on two nights in late March, and on one night, women showed up at the house.

The women told police that they were hired through Backpage, a classified advertising website often used by escorts.

Police found texts on the woman's phone sent from Goldsberry.

'What we found out was, basically, this guy hasn't been paying these prostitutes either,' Dunning told the Omaha World-Herald.

The case is still under investigation by police.
A Slovakian couple who trafficked two women into Britain and tried to force them into sham marriages or prostitution have been jailed for a total of 12 years.

Jaroslav Slepcik and his wife Svetlana Plachetkova, both 38, recruited women from Lunik IX - a slum in Kosice, Slovakia - to Gravesend, Kent.

Once in Britain the couple - who will be deported upon their release from prison - tried to sell the victims to Asian men trying to gain EU citizenship.

Svetlana Plachetkova (right) and her husband recruited women to Gravesend, Kent. Once in Britain the couple tried to sell the victims to Asian men trying to gain EU citizenship. When they refused, the couple's son Simon Slepcik (left), 20, pimped them out as prostitutes

When they refused, the couple's son Simon Slepcik, 20, pimped them out as prostitutes.

The women, aged 18 and 32 at the time, had been told to travel without any cash and had their passports and identity cards confiscated by the family on arrival.

Sarah Przybylska, prosecuting, said: 'An aggravating feature is the attempted imposition of a debt bondage by claiming they were responsible for the cost of their trafficking.

'There was the use of physical violence, threats were made to both women - the younger victim was particularly vulnerable because of her impoverished background.'

The couple - who have three children - had begun negotiating a price with men looking for brides before sourcing the two women from Slovakia, the court heard.

When the victims refused and their prospective husbands began demanding their money back, the couple forced them to work as prostitutes.

The women were recruited from Lunik IX (pictured), which is a slum in Kosice, Slovakia

The younger victim only escaped after being taken to a flat with five men who had booked her services.

She was so distressed and terrified at what was about to happen that they realised she had been trafficked, and gave her enough cash to escape to a relative who was living in Wales.

In victim impact statements, both women said they still suffered nightmares and flashbacks to their ordeal, while the younger woman said she now has to sleep with the light on.

The second victim said she is now terrified of opening a door when she does not know who is on the other side. Both women have now settled in the UK permanently.

Jaroslav Slepcik fled to the Czech Republic when he came under investigation by Operation Svanetia - a joint investigation between the Metropolitan and Slovakian police - and had to be extradited to the UK.

Plachetkova and her husband were convicted of two counts of trafficking a person into the UK for exploitation and two counts of assisting unlawful immigration into a member state between June and July 2012 at Inner London Crown Court.

The women from Lunik IX (pictured) had been told to travel without any cash and had their passports and identity cards confiscated by the family on arrival

All three defendants were convicted of controlling prostitution for gain between the same dates.

Simon Slepcik was convicted of a sexual assault relating to touching the breasts and bottom of one of the victims.

He was also found guilty of one count of trafficking a person within the UK for sexual exploitation for walking one of the victims into Gravesend to meet clients.

The court heard he was still a teenager at the time of the offences, and it was found he had been manipulated by his parents because he spoke much better English than them.

Jailing Platchetkova and Jaroslav Slepcik for six years, Judge Jeremy Donne QC said: 'Both victims succumbed to the promises you made.

'You did tell them you were going to introduce them to men, but men who would be kind to them and care for them and provide them with a better life.

The married couple, who lived on this road in Gravesend, Kent, were both jailed for six years

'What they did not know was that you were in effect selling them to these men principally for the purpose of sham marriages to an EU national so they could make an application for residency in the UK.'

He continued: 'Clearly you were motivated by money and you clearly wanted more - if only to recoup the expense of bringing your two victims to this country.'

'You made it perfectly clear to both of them that you wanted them to embark on prostitution to pay back the debt you said they owed.'

Handing Simon Slepcik a community order, he said: 'You were working under the direction and at the instigation of your parents.

'You were involved because you had been at school in this country since the age of eight and you spoke much better English and were able to facilitate the prostitution of the younger victim.'

Simon Slepcik was handed a two-year community order and 200 hours unpaid work.

Plachetkova and her husband were both jailed for six years. They were told that they would face deportation on their release.
A dog in China has saved a newborn boy who was buried alive in the bush.

It's thought that the dog had smelt the baby, so it dug a hole in the ground to find him, according to Chinese media.

The baby, about a month old, was taken to the local clinic immediately and is currently recovering.

Life-saver: A dog (pictured) in China has saved a baby after digging him out from the ground

Remote bush: The pet dug a hole (pictured) after it thought there was a baby under the ground

The incident took place on May 6 in Chongqing, a municipality in south-west China, according to Pear Video.

The pet's owner, named Yang Jiali, was looking for the dog and finally saw it in the bush in Jiangjin, a suburban district.

Ms Yang said she saw the dog desperately trying to dig a hole in the ground. She then saw a baby lying in the hole. He was wrapped in a piece of white cloth.

According to Ms Yang, the baby was crying when she saw him being freed by the dog.

Ms Yang had just got the dog as a pet which ran out of her house, she said.

Heroic dog: The pet's owner was looking for the dog when she saw him freeing the little boy

In save hands: The boy was immediately taken to the local clinic for medical attention

The baby, described to be around one month old, was taken to the clinic of Wutan Town in Jiangjin District.

According to a doctor, named An Yue, the baby had low body temperature and a slow heart rate when he was brought to the clinic.

'His mouth was full of mud,' said Dr An.

The boy was later transferred to the Jiangjin Central Hospital.

A doctor from the hospital, named Li Feng, said the boy's life was not in danger, but he needed time to regain health.

Doctor Anyue said the boy had low body temperature and a slow heart rate when he arrived

The pet's owner pointed at the place where she saw the dog digging to save the month-old boy

It's understood that the boy is currently treated at the Jiangjin Central Hospital.

The local police have been alerted.

The police and doctors thought that the boy was buried because his family mistakenly thought he had died.

The police are trying to contact the boy's family as of writing.
Northern Alliance news sources report that at 7am on May 11, heavy weapons were used relentlessly to shell MNDAA bases at Hon-aik in the Kokang region. The MNDAA reportedly responded with ground force attacks.

Hostilities were expected to escalate and intensify as more soldiers are being deployed to the region, according to the report on May 11. An unspecific number of casualties and injuries were also reported.

Yesterday, the armed clashes were intense, commented Khun Gamani, an observer at the border, on social media. Government forces shelled the Kokang positions and advanced forwards. There were many casualties. It appears that the [Burmese] military is spending three billion kyat [US$2.2 million] per day in heavy weapons fire alone. They should realize, after wars in Kachin State in 2011 and 2015, and now in Kokang this year, that millions of dollars have been spent without bringing any benefits [to the people].

In recent days, Chinas special representative for Burma, Sun Gunxiang, met leaders of the Northern Alliance and the Wa in the Yunnanese capital of Kunming to discuss the ongoing peace process in Burma.

The Northern Alliance, as agreed in the recent Panghsang Resolution, maintains that only when all seven ethnic armed organizations, including the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and Shan State Progress Party (SSPP), are accepted and recognized by the Burmese govern

ment, will peace negotiations be able to proceed, Brig-Gen Tarr Jode Jarr, the deputy chairman of the TNLA, told reporters.

Chinas Special Representative Sun is due to speak next to the Burmese government to convey the outcome of talks in Kunming. Burmas State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi is slated to travel to Beijing on May 14 to attend the Modern Silk Road or One Belt, One Road (OBOR) project, an international forum based on a developing Chinese business model. The current armed conflicts in Kachin State and northern Shan State are reportedly on the agenda at the OBOR conference.

Han Yawnghwe, a Euro-Burma Office (EBO) delegate who closely follows ethnic affairs, said in a recent interview with The Irrawaddy that China will continue to exert influence over Burma until a resolution can be found to the armed conflicts in the northern regions.

By Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN)
Britain will not stand in the way of moves towards an EU army, Boris Johnson said today.

The Foreign Secretary gave the signal as he arrived for talks in Brussels on plans for a new military HQ in the Belgian capital.

Mr Johnson confirmed that the UK had reservations about the wording of the agreement, including the centre being called an 'operational headquarters'.

Denmark's Foreign Minister (left) Anders Samuelsen and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson shared a joke at the meeting in Brussels today

He said Britain would keep stressing the need for EU members of NATO to pull their weight in the alliance, especially by meeting the target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence.

But Mr Johnson said: 'We understand the vital importance to us all as European countries working together to strengthen our defences.

'We all want to see our European friends and partners spending more on defence. If they can get up to 2 per cent, that is terrific. We really want to encourage that as fast as possible.

'If they want to come together with other arrangements, we are not going to stand in their way. We are just working on some of the language to make sure that we get it totally right.'

The summit comes as new French president Emmanuel Macron holds his first meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.

France and Germany are backing European Commission proposals for a European Defence Fund which have sparked concerns in the UK over the possible creation of an EU army.

Mr Johnson played down suggestions that the other 27 EU foreign ministers might want to discuss his suggestion at the weekend that they will be required to pay a 'divorce bill' to the UK as a result of Brexit, rather than Britain paying the EU as much as 100 billion euro (85billion) as others expect.

He suggested that any bill was unlikely to be finalised until the whole Brexit package  including new trade arrangements  was agreed.

Mr Johnson was also seen deep in conversation with Lithuanian counterpart Linas Linkevicius

'There is a kind of unity in these negotiations,' said Mr Johnson. 'I would expect all this to be done as a bundle, as a package.

'As they say in Brussels: 'Rien n'est acquis avant que tout soit acquis'  Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. We have got to look at the money, the whole thing, the trade arrangements, we have got to look at that as a package.'

The agenda for the Brussels meeting focused on the problem of illicit migration from Africa, with Mr Johnson saying it is 'vital' for countries to work together to resolve the crisis and stabilise countries such as Libya and Somalia.
Former President Bill Clinton launched an apparent attack on Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies during a college commencement speech saying we must decide whether 'our common humanity is more important or our differences matter more.'

During the speech on Sunday at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York the Democrat said that Muslims are often scapegoated for Islamic terror attacks and that isolating them could backfire.

'Does it mean we shouldn't be tough on terrorism committed by Islamic radicals? Of course not,' said Clinton, who was receiving an honorary degree.

The former president recieves an honory degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York

'But it means we shouldn't go around in a blind stupor mixing apples and oranges and terrifying some of the talented, most devoted people in this country who want to make their contribution and who help make us better because diverse groups make better decisions.'

The speech was criticized by attendee Brad Karagin who said the tone was too political for a college commencement.

Karagin told 13wham: 'Sounded a little bit like a social justice warrior,' said Brad Karagin.

Luke Rafferty added .'Without being political it's still political because of our current president,' said Luke Rafferty.

Clinton, 70, also seemed to take a jab at President Trump's tough stance on Mexican immigration by apparently referring to the two-term Afghanistan veteran Miguel Perez Jr., a legal resident ordered back to Mexico for drug offences.

'It kind of embarrasses me that we let a person risk his life for us and then kicked him out,' Clinton said.

Clinton said 'our common humanity is more important or our differences matter more'

Bill Clinton launched an apparent attack on Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies during the speech

Return: Miguel Perez Jr. a legal US resident and war veteran was ordered back to Mexico for drug offences

He acknowledged that both the US and the world were undergoing significant changes due to globalization which he said oftentimes causes people to become unsettled and threatened, reported Time.

He noted, that often has detrimental effects, some of which are evident in current policies, but said that the country must embrace other cultures and peoples to succeed in the current technological upheaval.

'I am not arguing for any specific position,' he continued. 'I am just trying to say you don't need a world that will put the American experiment in peril by saying us and them is a better model than by expanding the definition of us and shrinking the definition of them.'
Ibrahim Taguri (pictured outside court today) was caught with nearly three litres of GBL - known as liquid ecstasy - and a class B stimulant in a room at the Ritz in January

A disgraced Liberal Democrat politician caught with 'chemsex' party drugs at the Ritz Hotel has been spared jail.

Ibrahim Taguri, 38, was caught with nearly three litres of GBL - known as liquid ecstasy - and a class B stimulant in a room at the exclusive hotel in Piccadilly, on 20 January.

Police then discovered two packages of crystal meth stashed in Taguri's top floor apartment in New Bond Street, Mayfair, while he was on bail on 31 January.

The Brent-born campaigner was appointed as the Lib Dem's chief fundraiser in September 2009 and was selected as the party's candidate for Brent Central four years later.

Nick Clegg announced the rising star would be a 'Race Equality Champion' in January 2015 - but he quit his roles two months later when a donations scandal was uncovered by Telegraph reporters.

Taguri admitted two counts of possessing Class A drugs, one count of possessing Class B drugs, and one count of possessing Class C drugs at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

Prosecutor Robert Simpson said: 'The first matter in time relates to an incident that occurred at the Ritz Hotel.

'The defendant was there with his girlfriend, she is a Miss Iman Asante.

'She has been charged with two counts of possessing Class C drugs, which were in fact diazepam and that sort of thing.'

The court heard Asante received a caution after admitting possessing diazepam.

Police also discovered a bag containing 2.96 litres of GHB in Taguri's hotel room.

'He admitted in interview that those were his drugs,' said Mr Simpson.

'10 days later there was a domestic incident where a call had been made to the police again by his girlfriend Miss Asante.'

Taguri admitted two counts of possessing Class A drugs, one count of possessing Class B drugs, and one count of possessing Class C drugs at Westminster Magistrates' Court (file picture)

When officers arrived at Taguri's top floor flat in New Bond Street they found two small packages of crystal meth which he admitted were for his personal use.

He later claimed he took crystal meth to cope with depression caused by his downfall.

Taguri said he felt 'let down' by the Lib Dems after he accepted a potentially illegal donation from an undercover reporter posing as a wealthy Indian businessman.

Gordon Shine, defending, said: 'Leading to these events he has been coping with depression.

'He was badly affected, he says, by malicious newspaper reports arising out of his candidacy as a Liberal Democrat candidate for the 2015 election.

'He says the party didn't help him and he felt very let down.'

Following his resignation in 2015 Taguri set up Campaign Finance Group and marketing firm Rebel Cause Ltd in Farringdon, but both businesses were dissolved in December last year.

The court heard he is currently going through a divorce - he claims he 'got involved with the wrong crowd'.

'He apologises to the court and these were all drugs which he obtained to mitigate against his depression,' added Mr Shine.

Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg announced Taguri would be his 'Race Equality Champion' in January 2015 - but he quit his roles two months later over a donations scandal

District Judge Mike Snow conditionally discharged Taguri for two years and ordered the forfeiture and destruction of the drugs.

He said: 'What makes the offences more serious is first of all there were a number of Class A drugs charges here, that's the crystal meth charges, and secondly that you committed these offence whilst on bail for the others.

'What makes the offences less serious is the fact you have no previous convictions and that you have pleaded guilty at the first opportunity.

'I'm satisfied that given your previous good character and given the amount of drugs that you had in your possession I should go outside those guidelines and give you a conditional discharge for all four matters.'

Taguri, of Brewers Court, Bishop's Bridge Road, Paddington, was given a 24 month conditional discharge after he admitted two counts of possessing Class A drugs, one of possessing Class B drugs, and one of possessing Class C drugs.
The moment a toddler was pulled from a baking hot car by police an hour after her father was shot dead in front of her in Baltimore has become a symbol of the record breaking homicide rates in the city this year.

Ernest Solomon, 26, was sprayed with bullets outside his car on March 27 in front of a busy carryout in West Baltimore and died soon after being taken to hospital.

In a bid not to contaminate the scene and inadvertently tamper with potential evidence police did not open Solomon's car immediately after the incident.

Shocked: Onlookers and police were visibly shocked when the baby was lifted from the car

Scene: Ernest Solomon was shot multiple times in front of his car and daughter

Murder: The 10-month-old baby, wearing a pink and white onesie under a black sweatsuit, was pulled from the car

However after hearing a 'whimper' emanating from the vehicle officers ordered car keys from Solomon's pockets to be returned to the scene so they could open the vehicle.

'The windows were tinted very dark when they looked inside the vehicle they discovered a baby, a little girl, who looked to be at least a year or less was in a car seat inside of that vehicle,' Baltimore police spokesman Detective Donnie Moses told WBAL.

The 10-month-old baby, wearing a pink and white onesie under a black sweatsuit, was pulled from the car as onlookers and police watched on with their mouths agape.

Ernest Solomon and his child pictured on a bed before the March shooting incident

Police are not sure how long the victim or the child had been there before the shooting but reports suggest officers were first called to the scene about 1:15pm but the unnamed baby was pulled out at around 2:45pm.

The girl, who was in a car seat, was taken to a local hospital as a precaution, but appeared to be fine and reunited with her family a day later.

The spokesman said police did not make a mistake in not opening and searching the car sooner.

'Who would think that a baby would be in that car in the middle of a shooting scene?' he said.

The shooting, for which no arrests have been made, marked Baltimore's 76th homicide of 2017 but since a further 48 have been slain suggesting the city will surpass all previous yearly murder records.

As of Friday 124 people had been killed in the city this year, including five in one bloody day on May 6, the deadliest of the year so far.

Freddie Gray died from spinal cord injuries six days after he was heavily arrested by police

Baltimore has not seen 100 homicides before the end of April since 1998 however violence spiked once again in the spring of 2015, following civil unrest prompted by the death Freddie Gray. The 25-year-old, who was arrested for carrying a switch blade, died from spinal cord injuries six days after he was heavily arrested by police.

That year was Baltimore's deadliest per capita in the city's history with 344 murders. The next year, marked its second highest, with 318 deaths.

This year, it is on track to beat both records and surpass all other big U.S. cities. The 124 slayings in Baltimore, with a population of 614,000, bring the homicide rate to 20.2 per 100,000 residents, reports the Washington Post.

The Maryland city went a decade with 300 or more killings each year in the 1990s before the numbers finally began falling in 2000.

The current 2017 statistics suggest the city currently has triple Washington's rate and higher than the homicide rates in New Orleans and Chicago, two places that have become national symbols of gun violence.

Despite the surge in violence the city is operating with hundreds of fewer officers than at any point over the past decade, the police force has shrunk in the past several years, from 2,900 officers to 2,700.

In January, the police union president Lt. Gene Ryan, in an interview with CBS Baltimore, called staffing levels dangerous.

'You get in a crisis mode like we're in right now with crime out of control and not enough uniformed officers on the street, I would say it's at a crisis point.'
A Chinese farmer looking for his missing goat came to a shocking discovery.

An 11ft-long python, which was trying to gobble the livestock whole, end up getting caught in a metal fence for about 10 hours.

The snake, which was injured by the grille, was treated by the forestry police before being sent back to the wild.

A python was seen being trapped in a diamond mesh fence while trying to eat a goat in China

Forestry police brought the python to the station and treated its wounds. They estimated that the snake had been trapped in the fence for over 10 hours

According to a report on local television, a goatherder from Ximeixiang, Fujian Province, said he had lost a goat on the night of May 7.

The man, whose name has not been revealed, went up to a hill the next morning to look for his goat.

He found his goat lying dead under a 3.4-meter-long (11ft) python.

'I walked up the hill for about half an hour and saw a goat and a snake,' he said.

'I got scared when I saw a snake of that size.'

The python measures 3.4 meter (11 ft) in length and about 21.5 kg (47 lbs) in weight

It has a diameter of 36 centimetres (1.1 feet), as measured by the forestry policemen in China

The python can be seen getting stuck in the diamond mesh fence and struggling to move.

Local forestry police arrived at the scene before 9am.

They said it was likely that the python had been trapped in the mesh fence for over 10 hours as the scales of the python can be seen peeling off.

They brought the reptile to the station and sterilised its wound.

In China, pythons are a first-grade protected animal species and are as valuable as pandas

The python was released back to nature after receiving the treatment from the forestry police

The python weighed 21.5 kg (47 lbs) with a diameter of 36 centimeters (1.1 feet).

According to China's list of endangered and protected species, python is marked as a grade-one protected animal species. Giant pandas are in the same category.

The python has been released back to nature by the forestry police.
A woman who claims to have suffered a botched $7,500 boob job from Thailand which left her needing a partial mastectomy has revealed she now cannot breastfeed her baby daughter.

Courtney O'Keefe, from Perth, Australia, contracted a life-threatening infection which she blames on a dodgy breast implant procedure at Pattaya Hospital four years ago.

The 28-year-old recently gave birth to a baby girl who she can't properly breastfeed due to her post-surgery infections and the amount of breast tissue that was removed, Nine News reports.

Scroll down for video

Courtney O'Keefe, from Perth, Australia, contracted a life-threatening infection which she blames on a breast implant procedure at Pattaya Hospital four years ago (pictured with her daughter, Harper)

The 28-year-old (pictured) travelled to Thailand in 2013 for $7,500 breast enlargement surgery

The botched procedure almost cost Ms O'Keefe her life - and she lost her job and was forced to move back in with her mother.

But despite still suffering from health complications including a heart condition four years after her surgery, she fell pregnant and gave birth to her five-month-old daughter, Harper.

Her partial mastectomy means she can't produce enough breast-milk to provide Harper with the nutrients she needs, Ms O'Keefe claims.

The new mum also says she feels like 'less of a woman' when she looks down at her chest.

'It makes me feel like less of a woman. That is how you feel when you look down and don't see anything there,' Ms O'Keefe said.

The botched procedure cost Ms O'Keefe her job at the time and she was forced to move back in with her mother

Ms O'Keefe (pictured) suffered months of surgeries and treatment after allegedly contracting the super bug

The new mum says she feels like 'less of a woman' when she looks down at her chest

Ms O'Keefe purchased the expensive cosmetic surgery tourism package in 2013 as a reward to herself for losing a staggering 35kg which made her breasts 'look like pancakes'.

The then 24-year-old was in 'agony' upon returning to Australia and her mother whisked her to hospital shortly after she arrived back home in Perth.

The surgery allegedly caused Ms O'Keefe to contract a foreign bug which quickly took over her body and caused her organs to shut down.

It was the beginning of an agonising six month ordeal after doctors diagnosed her with the a Thai superbug called pseudomonas aeruginosa.

'It was also turning septic and was starting to shut down my liver, my kidneys, my heart, my brain,' Ms O'Keefe told Daily Mail Australia last year.

'Mum and Dad had to come and say goodbye to me twice.'

Ms O'Keefe said she contracted a foreign bug which quickly took over her body and caused her organs to shut down

Ms O'Keefe purchased the expensive cosmetic surgery tourism package in 2013 as a reward to herself for losing a staggering 35kg which made her breasts 'look like pancakes'

A year after the surgery doctors finally removed her implants and because the infection had spread to her surrounding tissue, both her breasts were also removed.

It took six months of around the clock treatment administered every hour for Ms O'Keefe to finally regain her health enough to leave hospital.

The Thai hospital where Ms O'Keefe received her operation has denied any culpability for the infection and claimed she contracted the bug because she wasn't looking after herself enough post-surgery.

She has urged Australians looking at cosmetic treatment overseas to reconsider.

'Someone said to me if you wouldn't drink the water there why the hell would you have surgery there. That's so true. So true,' she said.
Labour has admitted it wants to raise an extra 4.5billion from workers earning 80,000 to fund Jeremy Corbyn's spending spree.

The admission has triggered speculation Labour will slash the threshold for the top 45p rate to 80,000 and re-impose a 50p rate of income tax.

The idea was not denied by Labour today as sources on the shadow Treasury team insisted it would not comment on 'speculation'.

Mr Corbyn outlined plans to spend an extra 37billion on the NHS at a speech to the Royal College of Nursing today.

Labour has admitted it wants to raise an extra 4.5billion from workers earning 80,000 to fund a spending spree by Jeremy Corbyn (pictured in Liverpool today)

Mr Corbyn outlined plans to spend an extra 37billion on the NHS at a speech to the Royal College of Nursing today (pictured)

Thousands of Corbyn supporters later descended on Leeds to hear the Labour leader at a campaign rally. Some climbed into trees to catch a glimpse of him

Labour will confirm the details of its tax plans when it publishes the final version of its manifesto tomorrow.

Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth today insisted 'every penny' raised in extra income tax would be ploughed into the NHS.

He told the BBC Today programme: 'I think what you'll see tomorrow is that when Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell outline the manifesto you'll see them explain how the individual tax bands will work.

LABOUR'S NEW TAX BOMBSHELL Slashing the threshold for the 45p additional rate of tax kicking in from 150,00 to 80,000

Reintroducing the 50p highest rate of income tax

Reversing cuts to the couples inheritance tax threshold so estates worth 425,000 attract death duties

Reversing cuts to corporation tax on business Advertisement

'But I believe, and as I understand it, we will raise something in the region of 4bn to 4.5bn from the income tax changes.'

On ITV's Good Morning Britain, Mr Ashworth also appeared to confirm that a 50 per cent rate will be introduced for the highest earners.

Presenter Piers Morgan asked him: 'How much are you going to tax the wealthy? I mean, are you going to go to a 50 per cent income tax?'

Mr Ashworth said: 'Yeah.'

At the RCN conference in Liverpool, Mr Corbyn said nurses had suffered cuts in the value of their pay over recent years, adding: 'We will not put you in that position.

'We will lift the public-sector pay cap and hand back decisions on pay to an independent review body.'

The Labour leader posed for selfies with nurses at the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool today (pictured) as he vowed to give them a pay rise

Mr Corbyn was given a standing ovation for his plans, which have prompted speculation about a dramatic rise in income tax for higher earners under Labour

Mr Corbyn said Labour would deliver an additional 7.4 billion a year for the NHS over the course of the next five-year parliament, including a total of 10 billion in capital funding to modernise buildings and IT systems.

Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth today insisted 'every penny' raised in extra income tax would be ploughed into the NHS (file)

This would cut waiting lists by one million by 2022 and allow accident-and-emergency departments to hit their four-hour target for waits, he said.

He also said he would restore training bursaries for nurses.

'We are ready to step in and save the NHS from the cuts and privatisation that have happened over the last seven years,' said Mr Corbyn.

'Our health service is being dismantled by stealth.

'Over the last seven years, our NHS has been driven into crisis after crisis.

'A&E departments struggling to cope. Waiting lists soaring.

'And - as we saw last week - the Tory cuts have exposed patient services to cyber-attack.'

Speaking on the campaign trail in Oxfordshire today Prime Minster Theresa May said Labour would 'wreck the economy', which would mean less money for the NHS.

Prime Minster Theresa May (pictured campaigning in Oxfordshire today) said Labour would 'wreck the economy', which would mean less money for the NHS

Mrs May blasted the Labour plans after meeting graduates at Tech Pixies, a digital marketing start-up company in Oxfordshire (pictured)

She said: 'What we've seen over the last few years under a Conservative government is record amounts of funding going into the National Health Service.

'We see more doctors in the National Health Service, we see more midwives, more GPs, more nurses in the NHS.

'The thing about the Labour Party's proposals is that you have to ask the question: where would the money come from?

'Because you can only fund the NHS, you can only ensure we have a first class NHS, if we have a strong economy to have the funding to put into the NHS.'

A Labour spokesman told MailOnline: 'We will be laying out our plans in full in the manifesto on Tuesday.'

Rise of the 'Re-Leavers' who voted AGAINST Brexit but now believe it MUST happen and could propel May to massive majority on June 8

Almost one in four voters who supported the EU at the referendum believe the result must be honoured and are set to re-elect Theresa May to get on with Brexit.

The new group, found by pollsters YouGov, breaks the myth that almost half the country are desperate to see the referendum result blocked.

In fact around two third of Britain want to see Brexit delivered and the constituency of hard Remoaners wanting it blocked is just 22 per cent of voters.

The group of 'Re-leavers' is set to bolster Mrs May's hopes of a big majority on June 8 on a manifesto set to prioritise striking the best possible deal with Brussels.

YouGove's results came as two new polls showed the Tory lead at 18 and 20 points with just three and a half weeks to election day.

Around 23 per cent of people, shown in light blue, have been found by pollsters YouGov. They voted to stay in Europe but now agree the referendum result should be honoured - and most of them support Theresa May to get on with the job

YouGov's director of international projects Marcus Roberts said: 'In the eleven months since the EU referendum, it has become a common theme that we are now a nation divided  52/48.

'However, while it is true that most people still think they voted the right way last June, when it comes to the composition of the Brexit tribes in the general election, it is not a simple as ''Leave'' and ''Remain''.

'There is a third group who change the dynamics of EU-related arguments  the ''Re-Leavers''.

'These are people who voted to Remain in the EU and many still think that leaving was the wrong decision, but crucially now believe the government has a duty to carry out the will of the British people.'

Among the crucial new group, Mrs May is backed by 45 per cent of them - compared to just 10 per cent who plan to vote for Labour.

The results suggest the Tories are set to sweep up votes across the country in an election dominated by continued debate over the Brexit vote.

Theresa May (pictured in Oxfordshire today) has won the confidence of the 'Re-Leavers' voters, the polling suggests, putting her on course for a landslide on June 8

'The fatcats keep the money and us lot get nothing!' Theresa May is berated by voter over cuts to disabled benefits

Theresa May was berated over cuts to disability benefits today as she went on an election walkabout in an Oxfordshire market town today.

The Prime Minister was confronted by Cathy, who has learning difficulties, during her visit to Abingdon.

The furious voter told Mrs May that the 'fatcats keep the money and us lot get nothing' .

But Mrs May insisted the government was trying to focus the limited money available on those 'in the most need'.

The Prime Minister was confronted by Cathy, who has learning difficulties, during her visit to Abingdon today

The rough ride for the premier was caught on camera, with Cathy initially telling her: 'I want you to do something for us.'

I'm angry and I would like someone to help me because I can't do everything that I want to do,' she said.

'The fatcats keep the money and us lot get nothing.'

Cathy said she wanted the government to reinstate Disability Living Allowance, which is being replaced by the Personal Independence Payment (PIP)

'I want my Disability Living Allowance to come back, not have PIP... I can't live on 100 a month,' she said.
A British backpacker accidentally hanged herself in an apartment in Thailand to 'frighten' her boyfriend after a 'silly row' on a night out, an inquest heard today.

Abigail 'Abi' Brown, 26, had been out with her partner James Brum in Phuket when she left him to return to their apartment 'in a huff'.

Miss Brown, of Waterlooville, Hampshire, described by loved ones as a 'gregarious fun loving girl with a zest for life', hanged herself when she got home.

Abigail 'Abi' Brown (right), 26, had been out with her partner James Brum (left) in Phuket, Thailand, when she left him to return to their apartment 'in a huff'

Miss Brown, of Waterlooville, Hampshire, described by loved ones as a 'gregarious fun loving girl with a zest for life', hanged herself when she got home after the night out

Today her mother Jane Rowland said she believed her daughter meant 'only to frighten him or upset him or make him realise how upset she was in that moment'.

She also told young couples to look out for each other when travelling to warm and exciting places with 'cheap and unregulated alcohol' to ensure they stay safe.

Mr Brum, 30, returned to the apartment later after giving his girlfriend three hours to 'cool off' when he found Miss Brown unconscious on January 7, the coroner said.

He called Mrs Rowland, 50, and her husband Rob at about 4am UK time - and she today described the 'complete shock' of hearing of her daughter's death.

She told Portsmouth Coroner's Court: 'James said "Abi is gone. We had a silly row, she went back to the room. She hung herself. She's died".

'He said [the row] was nothing. They did not really row. I did not see them all the time but they had a whole future planned. That night she had too much to drink.

'She had gone back in a huff. I know in her mind she thought he was going to follow her back, find her and they would move on and never have that row again.

Miss Brown's mother Jane Rowland (pictured outside Portsmouth Coroner's Court in Hampshire today) said she believes Abi 'did not mean to take her own life'

Mr Brum returned to the apartment later after giving his girlfriend three hours to 'cool off' when he found Miss Brown unconscious on January 7, the coroner said

'I truly believe Abi did not mean to take her own life. She meant only to frighten him or upset him or make him realise how upset she was in that moment.'

The inquest heard Miss Brown was physically and mentally fit and healthy and 'never took her life for granted except in that one moment'.

Mrs Rowland went on: 'James and Abi were a loving couple, they were going to get married and have four boys. They had a whole future planned.

'Even though James was a mixed martial arts fighter, he was more like a librarian as a person. He's soft and gentle.'

Following the inquest Mrs Rowland paid tribute to her daughter's desire to travel the world.

She said: 'Abi was a gregarious, fun loving girl with a zest for life. She could be in a moment and take you with her. She was wanderlust, thoughtful and generous.

'She had a wide network of friends and kept in close contact with them. We had a close relationship and she always told me everything.

'I can only come to the conclusion that on that night she had too much to drink, was upset and only meant to make James aware of how upset she was. I truly believe that Abi never meant the outcome to be fatal.'

The inquest heard Miss Brown was physically and mentally fit and healthy and 'never took her life for granted except in that one moment'

After the inquest Miss Brown's mother paid tribute to her daughter's desire to travel the world

A Thai police report said Miss Brown, who had travelled to India, the Philippines and Australia after giving up her job as a PA in London, was found unconscious in the room wearing a black vest and black trousers.

The inquest heard a post mortem found external injuries to Miss Brown's neck and the cause of death was given as asphyxiation or suffocation.

Coroner Samantha Marsh recorded a verdict of misadventure.

She said: 'Abi had a happy and bright future with James. The plan was to have four boys which may have changed after the first one or two.

'She had a healthy lifestyle and was physically and mentally fit and healthy. As far as you're aware, she and James' relationship was a loving one.

'In terms of Abi's history, she had never done anything like this before and there were no concerns of mental health issues.

'Unfortunately it seems like she had a very bright future with everything going for her and James.'

Miss Brown had travelled to India, the Philippines and Australia after giving up her job as a PA

Police speak to people outside the apartment in Phuket where Miss Brown's body was found, but there were no suspicious circumstances

She added: 'Abi undertook the task of putting something around her neck but I do not believe she deliberately intended the consequence of what she did.

'I am satisfied there is no third party involvement but I think it went wrong. James did not follow her back from the party like she thought he would have done.

'He did not come home for three hours, maybe he gave her time to cool off. He did not come home unfortunately and for that reason I am satisfied Abi's death was due to misadventure.

'I am very very sorry for your loss. It is a complete waste of what seemed like a very good life and future ahead for Abi and James together, and even for you, as future grandparents of four boys running around you.'

The coroner also thanked The Red Lipstick Foundation, a Hampshire-based charity offering support to families affected by suicide, for their support to Abi's family.

Speaking after the inquest, Mr and Mrs Rowland said: 'We will always be saddened by the death of our beautiful daughter Abi.

'There is no one to blame for this moment of folly but there is a lesson to be learnt.

'When young people travel to these hot, exciting places with cheap and unregulated alcohol they need to look out for each other and always stay safe.'
A mysterious rotting carcass that washed up on an Indonesian beach last week was once a whale, experts have said.

Fisherman Asrul Tuanakota, who discovered the 50ft (15m) creature on the northern shore of Seram Island last Tuesday, had guessed it could be a giant squid because it appeared to be covered in tentacles.

But Alexander Werth, a whale biologist at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, and George Leonard, chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, said on Monday that it was almost certainly a baleen whale.

The rotting remains of a giant sea creature that washed up on a remote Indonesian beach on Tuesday have been identified as a baleen whale

Two experts say distinctive jaw bones and what appears to be a feeding plate from the animal's mouth, used to filter food out of the water, gave its identity away

The pair said bones protruding from the mass of rotting flesh and what appear to be feeding plates from the animal's mouth used to filter food led to their conclusions.

Seram Island is also close to a migration route used by baleen whales, UPI reports.

The 'tentacles' are probably made from fatty blubber which has been torn into strips by scavenging predators, most likely sharks.

Whale carcasses typically sink into the depths of the ocean after death, though under the right circumstances the body can fill with gases as it decomposes, allowing it to float.

In such cases the body can then drift ashore, as seems to have happened in Indonesia.

Locals who discovered the corpse last week had guessed that it could be a giant squid because of what appeared to be tentacles hanging off its body

Researchers say warmer ocean waters could be making such events more common, as bacteria which feed on the corpse can spread more quickly.

Residents have asked authorities to help remove the decaying remains.

Earlier this year, a mysterious hairy sea monster was found on a beach in the Philippines.

It baffled locals who speculated the two-tonne creature was a kind of rare undiscovered dugong.

It was later identified as a whale - but had developed a strange appearance due to decomposition.
A 32-year-old man has been arrested and charged in the stabbing death of a South Carolina woman and the disappearance of her eight-year-old daughter, who remains missing, authorities say.

Jejuancey Fernando Harrington has been charged with murder in the case of 36-year-old Ella Lowery, the Marlboro County Sheriff's Office said on Saturday.

Lowery was found stabbed to death on May 5 in the Bennettsville home she shared with her daughter Iyana.

The Bennettsville man also was charged with kidnapping and the possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in connection to the child's disappearance, authorities said.

Jejuancey Fernando Harrington (left), of Bennettsville, South Carolina, has been charged with the murder of 36-year-old Ella Lowery (right) and with kidnapping her eight-year-old daughter. Lowery was found stabbed to death on May 5 in the Bennettsville home she shared with her daughter Iyana

It is believed that Harrington displayed a tool that could cut, slash or wound, when he allegedly kidnapped Iyana.

The girl hasn't been seen since, despite a massive search by state police and the FBI.

Police said that DNA recovered from a cigarette at the scene of Lowery's murder matches Harrington's DNA, according to WMBF.

Video courtesy of WMBF

Sheriff Charles Lemon says authorities remain focused on finding Iyana, whose DNA was recovered in Harrington's car.

'This is a major break in this case but there is still much work to do as the investigation is ongoing,' Lemon said. 'We are keeping our focus on finding Iyana Lowery and bringing her home.'

The Bennettsville man also was charged with kidnapping and the possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in connection to Iyana's disappearance. Iyana, pictured, is still missing

Police warrants show that there was a relationship between Harrington and Lowery, that was proven through phone records, Facebook records and witness accounts.

The type of relationship the pair had is unclear.

Harrington is still being held at the Marlboro County Detention Center, and it is not immediately known if he had an attorney.

Lemon said that a $10,000 reward is still available to anyone who can offer information that leads to the recovery of Iyana.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Marlboro County Sheriff's Office at 843-479-5605 or Crime Stoppers at 888-CRIME-SC.


Burmese Identity Card Burmese Identity Card

There are about 50,000 people in Laikha, Sai Kawng Kham, the head of SNLDs Laikha office, told Shan Herald after his party had met with villagers on May 11. However, more than 10,000 do not have ID cards.

His comment came after the SNLD had arranged a series of meetings with villagers in Parngsang, Namlue, Thatmauk, Wanheng and Nong Kaw to listen to their problems and learn more about their communities.

The villagers face several hurdles if they dont have ID cards, Sai Kawng Kham said. They asked us to help them obtain IDs and household registration documents. They said that they originally wanted the government to come to their villages and make the documents for them because they live so far from any major town.

He said that the reason so many villagers in that region do not have ID cards is because they never need them  they rarely if ever travel anywhere.

He added that those who do have IDs say they have never had to use them; some said they hid them under the roofing tiles of their thatched houses, and they sometimes became damaged.

On December 15, 2016, The Irrawaddy reported on its English website that of the 51 to 53 million citizens in Burma, only about 37 million own ID cards.

By Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN)
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These fascinating Victorian-era photographs show a widow's travel adventures across Asia, India and Europe.

Jane Stewart developed a love of travel during her time in India in the early 1860s and documented her trips in an album which has now emerged for auction.

Her travels took her across India to Egypt and the following decade closer to home in Europe with stop-offs in Greece, Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Norway.

The albums have remained in her family since her death in 1898 and have been in an attic at a house in Hampshire for the past 30 years. Her images have now emerged for auction and are tipped to sell for 2,400.

Fascinating Victorian-era photographs have emerged showing a widow's travel adventures across Asia, India and Europe. In one photo, thought to have been taken in the 1860s, she captured the Shwedagon Pagoda at Rangoon, Burma

Jane Stewart developed a love of travel during her time in India in the early 1860s and documented her trips in an album which has now emerged for auction. She captured a photo portait of this Turkish woman while on her travels

Mrs Stewart fell in love with travelling while she was living in India. One of her images from the country shows locals tending to their camels

Her travels also took her to the city of Lahore, in what is now Pakistan, where she captured images of this stunning building

Mrs Stewart continued her passion for travel following the death of her husband who served in the army on the sub-continent.

After visiting Asia, Africa and Europe, she returned to her native Scotland but carried on travelling with trips to the Isle of Skye.

The photos captured many popular tourist attractions of today while they were still relatively undiscovered, such as the Egyptian pyramids and the Taj Mahal.

Mrs Stewart's interest was not just in the landmarks but also the native population so there are images of locals going about their everyday lives.

The albums, which include pictures of the pyramids in Egypt, have remained in her family since her death in 1898 and have been in an attic at a house in Hampshire for the past 30 years

Mrs Stewart continued her passion for travel following the death of her husband who served in the army on the sub-continent. In one adventure in India, she captured images of the walls of Delhi (above)

Closer to home: After returning to Britain, Mrs Stewart took photos of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, which opened in 1864

Her global travels also took her to Bombay and the Elphinstone Circle (pictured). The albums are now going up for auction and could fetch thousands of pounds

Mrs Stewart was the daughter of Colonel Andrew McDouell of Logan, Scotland, and in 1860 married officer Lt Col Patrick Stewart of the Bengal Engineers.

While she was in India she travelled the length and breadth of the country at a fascinating time in its history in the aftermath of the Indian mutiny.

Her European sorties included trips to Monaco, Pisa, Prague, Nuremburg and Cologne.

The large photos - which were shot by local artists - measure 10in by 13in and have been kept inside a black leather bound album with her initials 'JS' on the cover.

After visiting Asia, Africa and Europe, she returned to her native Scotland but carried on travelling with trips to the Isle of Skye. One of her pictures shows what is believed to be Beirut, the captial of Lebanon in the mid to late 1800s

Another iamges shows a view of the city of Constantinople - now Istanbul - Turkey, which faces onto Seraglio Point, at the entrance of the Golden Horn

The photos captured many popular tourist attractions of today while they were still relatively undiscovered, such as the Egyptian pyramids and the Taj Mahal (pictured)

Gary Loftus, director Andrew Smith and Son auctioneers of Winchester, Hampshire, which is selling the albums, said: 'These photo albums were preserved in a family library following Jane's death and for the past 30 years have resided in an attic in Hampshire.

'Her travels took her to India and Egypt as well as locations across Europe include Germany and Austria before those countries were largely destroyed by bombing during the two wars.

'The images are historically interesting and since they come direct from the family they have not been touched or seen by anyone outside that close circle.'

The auction takes place on May 16.

Mrs Stewart was the daughter of Colonel Andrew McDouell of Logan, Scotland, and in 1860 married officer Lt Col Patrick Stewart of the Bengal Engineers. The album includes this image of ships in an unknown port

While she was in India she travelled the length and breadth of the country at a fascinating time in its history in the aftermath of the Indian mutiny. As well as architecture, she captured pictures of people going about their everyday lives in India

Mrs Steward also captured this image of columns standing among the ruins of a building, thought to be in Egypt. She captioned the picture with the words 'The Temple'

The large photos - which were shot by local artists - measure 10in by 13in and have been kept inside a black leather bound album with her initials 'JS' on the cover. This photo was captured with the words 'Interior of colonnade'

As well as India and Egypt, Mrs Stewart's adventures included trips to Monaco, Pisa, Prague, Nuremburg and Cologne
A famous New York author who penned biographies on Bobby Kennedy and Edie Sedgwick was worth a staggering $38.5 million when she committed suicide last month - but has left almost all her money to charity.

Jean Stein, 83, plunged from the 15th story of 10 Gracie Square on the Upper East Side, in Manhattan, on the morning of Sunday, April 30. She had landed on the an eighth-floor balcony below and died at the scene.

Now it has been revealed that the celebrated author, who was suffering from depression, had assets worth almost $40 million, including her $10 million co-op, $15 million in personal property and $13.5 million in security investments, papers show.

The majority of that vast fortune has been left to Stein's cultural charity, the JKW Foundation, while she also left donations to UCLA, the Jules Stein Eye Institute and the Whitney Museum.

Jean Stein who penned biographies for Bobby Kennedy and Edie Sedgwick, was worth a staggering $38.5 million when she committed suicide last month

Her daughters; noted magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation magazine, and Wendy vanden Heuvel, an actress and producer in New York, were left a collection of jewelry including an '18th-century diamond necklace stored in my vault,' books and pictures taken by famed photographer William Eggleston.

After their mother's tragic suicide, they had appealed to a judge to grant them permission to search Stein's apartment, which was sealed by the NYPD, to look for 'missing information' related to her estate.

She also left behind a treasure trove of celebrity gifts, antique jewelry and high-end art pieces.

Stein, who wrote a biography of Robert F. Kennedy, entitled American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy, left her interviews, manuscripts and tapes to the John F. Kennedy library.

Her collection of letters, drawings and signed books from William Faulkner went to the New York Public Library.

Her will also hinted at her life writing about the rich and famous.

Stein, 83, plunged from the 15th story of 10 Gracie Square (circled) on the Upper East Side, in New York on April 30. She landed on an 8th floor balcony of the building next door, at left

'I give my pair of French mirrors in the shape of butterflies that belonged to Truman Capote to Diane Keaton, if she survives me,' Stein wrote in the 2015 will, filed in Manhattan Surrogate's Court.

Her granddaughter Lila Blue Coley, was given her Steinway piano, and her other granddaughter Nicola Cohen, was bequeathed a piece by the sculptor Ed Kienholz titled 'Kitchen Sink.'

Stein's literary agent Bill Clegg also got an Eggleston shot, this time of the author at her desk at her parents' home.

It is not clear whether they found what they were looking for.

Stein, born in Los Angeles to renowned parents. Her father Jules C. Stein was the founder of the Music Corporation of America (MCA), which was once the largest talent agency in the world and took over Universal, and he also founded Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. Her mother Doris founded the Doris Jones Stein Foundation.

Her childhood home was a Beverly Hills mansion known as 'Misty Mountain', once occupied by Katharine Hepburn in the 1930s. When Stein's mother died, Rupert Murdoch bought the home, which is now owned by his son James.

She is survived by daughters Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation and a frequent guest on cable TV, and Wendy vanden Heuvel, an actress and producer, both of whom appealed to a judge to grant them permission to search Stein's apartment for 'missing information' related to her estate

Stein authored the best-selling book Edie: American Girl based on the life of socialite and Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick, in 1982 (pictured in 1982)

Stein wrote a biography of Robert F. Kennedy, entitled American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy and book Edie American Girl

She left the West Coast for school in New York, where she attended Miss Hewitt's now the pricey Manhattan girls private school the Hewitt School.

She then spent two years at Wellesley College before attending classes at the University of Paris.

While in Paris she met Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner during a trip to St Moritz, when she was 19 and he 56, and she later said they had an affair.

She then interview him and offered the interview in exchange for being made an editor at The Paris Review, according to the historian Joel Williamson.

She later returned to New York and as an assistant to director Elia Kazan on the original production of Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Stein went onto write the best-selling book Edie: American Girl based on the life of socialite and Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick, in 1982. A few years previously she wrote the biography of Kennedy.

Inside the castle in the sky: Glorida Vanderbilt raised her youngst two sons Anderson, left, and Carter in the same penthouse, seen here in 1976

Carter, left, killed himself from an upstairs balcony while his mother watched in July 1988

More recently, she wrote a cultural and political history of Los Angeles, West of Eden published by Random House in February 2016.

Stein was married twice, first to lawyer William vanden Heuvel in 1958, who worked in the Justice Department under Robert F. Kennedy, and then to Torsten Wiesel, a co-recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, from 1995 to 2007.

She was unmarried at the time of her death.

The apartment building from which she had leaped to her death from, was once home to heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and was where her son Carter Vanderbilt Cooper  the brother of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper  jumped to his death from in 1988.

Carter, who was two years older than Anderson, was 23 when he fell to his death in July 1988 as his mother tried to stop him.

Gloria recounted in a memoir how Carter woke up from a late afternoon nap, appeared in the doorway of her room, asking repeatedly 'what's going on?', then sprinted upstairs to the roof terrace. Gloria watched as sat on the parapet then swung over the edge, letting go after a few seconds.

Gloria then sold the duplex penthouse to Stein.

The prestigious limestone building was completed in 1930, when residents could moor their boats outside. It has been home to old New York families from Whitney to Mellons, as well as Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

And later Stein, an heiress to a Beverly Hills showbiz fortune who made a name for herself in Manhattan.

A doorman at Stein's building described her as a very nice person.

For confidential suicide support call the Samaritans on 116123, or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 1-800-273-8255.
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Incredible photographs have shown the vast shipyards and the workers tasked with building warships in less than a month to replace vessels destroyed by Nazi German torpedoes during World War Two.

The stunning pictures have revealed one of 18 emergency shipyards where cargo ships for Britain and the US could be built and launched in a matter of days thanks to the huge operations.

A total of 2,710 Liberty ships were built between 1941 and 1945 which is by far the biggest number of ships built to a single design.

The incredible images taken at Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland, show workers busy welding the ships together, climbing aboard to begin their work and using a rowboat to inspect the cutboard ways.

Workers gather to watch a launching ceremony of a Liberty ship. The vessels were sent to World War Two to replace those damaged or destroyed by German torpedoes

Two female welders wearing their protective headwear pose for a photograph at Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland

This picture of the shipway at Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland show the scale of the operation where the enormous vessels would be built and launched in less than a month

A ship slides off the shipway in the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland, ready to join the war effort against Nazi Germany

Enormous crowds gather for the launching ceremony to watch the ship being sent out to sea to replace another vessel in the US and British war effort

Some of the workers involved in the building of the Liberty ship Frederick Douglass at the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards

Other shots show the workers relaxing on their lunch break, posing for the camera and queuing up to being their shift.

The launching ceremony for the first ship to be built is also pictured with thousands of workers and guests watching on as it is slid off the shipways.

The black and white photographs show Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard on Baltimore Harbour, which was established in February 1941 after an order from the United States Maritime Commission.

The commission ordered the establishment of shipyards to build cargo ships for America and Britain to quickly and cheaply replace the ships lost to German torpedoes.

A total of 27,000 employees were set to work at Bethlehem-Fairfeild Shipyard to build these new Liberty ships.

A ship under construction at the yards in America with huge support structures surrounding it. A handful of workers can be seen on deck completing the building work

A group of workers sit around on the iron girders as they enjoy a lunch break having worked all morning constructing ships

Two workers look skyward at Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland as a colleague works on an inner bottom unit, which is the second layer of metal up from the outer surface of the bottom of the ship

Workmen at Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland, climb a huge wooden ladder to board a ship they are working on

Two electric welders take time out from their work to pose for the camera by pulling the victory sign having removed their protective welding masks

A Liberty ship surrounded by supportive structure and enormous ladders is almost finished as construction workers put the final touches to the vessel

A worker in corduroy overalls kneels to pose for the camera as a colleague stands in the background in Baltimore, Maryland

A chipper removes excess metal from a welded seam aboard the Liberty ship Frederick Douglass before it was launched to join the war effort

One worker turns a cable reel while a colleague guide the huge metal wire into the circular structure in Bethlehem-Fairfield

A cigarette hangs from a pipefitter's mouth at the yard. Pipefitters install, assemble, fabricate, maintain, repair and troubleshoot pipes that carry fuel, chemicals, water, steam and air. There are various pipes on a ship including heating, cooling, lubricating and various other systems

A worker with a personal monogram on his overalls stands in front of a pile of gas canisters away from the hustle and bustle of the may shipyard

A shipyard worker shows off a war bond - debt securities issued by a government to finance military operations and other expenditure in times of war. In practice, modern governments finance war by putting additional money into circulation, and the function of the bonds is to remove money from circulation and help to control inflation

A shipyard worker takes a break from building Liberty ships. Each Liberty ship was designed to carry over 10,000 tons of cargo, but often carried far more to meet wartime needs

Three construction workers get to work on the inner bottom units of the Liberty ships. The construction process was streamlined to the point where in some cases an entire vessel could be welded together and ready to launch in less than a month

Workers guide the a bottom shell plate into place as it is lowered by a giant crane. Shell plating is the outer-most structure on the hull of a steel or aluminum ship or boat

Two senior officers inside a boat hold onto a piece of rope attached to a worker in the water who is inspecting the cutboard ways of a ship - used for launching - ahead of a vessel being sent out to sea

Four suited Bethlehem-Fairfield guards pose for a picture at the base in Baltimore, Maryland. A total of 27,000 employees were set to work at Bethlehem-Fairfeild Shipyard to build these new Liberty ships

Each Liberty ship was designed to carry over 10,000 tons of cargo, but often carried far more to meet wartime needs.

The construction process was streamlined to the point where in some cases an entire vessel could be welded together and ready to launch in less than a month.

SS Patrick Henry was the first Liberty ship launched on 27 September 1941, attended by President Roosevelt.

In the speech delivered at the launching, Roosevelt referred to Patrick Henry's 'Give me Liberty, or give me Death!' speech of 23 March 1775.

Roosevelt said that this new class of ships would bring liberty to Europe, which gave rise to the name 'Liberty ship'.

So what exactly were Liberty ships and why were they built?

Liberty ships statistics Cost: US$2 million ($34 million in 2017) Built: 2,710 Active: 1 Preserved: 3 Displacement: 14,245 long tons Length: 441 ft 6 in (134.57 m) Beam: 56 ft 10.75 in (17.3 m) Draft: 27 ft 9.25 in (8.5 m) Speed: 1111.5 knots (20.421.3 km/h; 12.713.2 mph) Range: 20,000 nmi (37,000 km; 23,000 mi) Armament: Stern-mounted 4-in (102 mm) deck gun for use against surfaced submarines, variety of anti-aircraft guns Advertisement

The Liberty ship was a class of cargo ship built in the United States during World War Two.

Though British in conception, the design was adapted by the United States for its simple, low-cost construction which gave workers the ability to churn them out in a matter of days and weeks.

Mass-produced on an unprecedented scale, the now iconic Liberty ship came to symbolize US wartime industrial output.

The class was developed to meet British orders for transports to replace those torpedoed by German U-boats.

The vessels were purchased both for the US fleet and lend-lease deliveries of war materiel to Britain and the Soviet Union.

Eighteen American shipyards, including the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland, pictured above, built 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945, easily the largest number of ships produced to a single design.

Their production mirrored on a much larger scale the manufacture of the Hog Islander and similar standardized ship types during World War I.

The immensity of the effort, the sheer number of ships built, the role of female workers in their construction, and the survival of some far longer than their original five-year design life, all make them the subject of much continued interest.

Of the thousands built, only three Liberty Ships are preserved.

Two are now in museums and one is an operational travelling museum ship.
The family of a murdered nurse's aide paid tribute to her on Sunday two days after she was slaughtered along with her co-worker by the latter's abusive ex-boyfriend who she reported to police for threatening her just a week before her death.

Cindy Krantz, 48, was shot dead at Pine Kirk Care Center in Kirkersville, Ohio, on Friday along with 46-year-old nurse Marlina Medrano and 36-year-old police chief Eric Disario. e

All three were killed by Medrano's ex-boyfriend, 43-year-old Thomas Hartless, who took his own life.

On Sunday, Krantz's five children told how she spent her final moments trying to protect the elderly patients in her care from the gunman.

Cindy Krantz, 48 (left), was murdered along with her 46-year-old co-worker Marlina Medrano (right) by Medrano's abusive ex-boyfriend at the Ohio nursing home where they worked on Friday

'That doesnt surprise me at all because she was a caring lady,' her son's fiancee told The Columbus Dispatch.

Her grieving husband Chris said he fell in love with his wife's kindness.

'One of the things that I fell in love with was she had a really big heart.

Thomas Hartless, 43, (above in a previous mugshot) murdered the pair before turning the gun on himself

'The neighborhood kids  she was the kind that would give them all ice cream, she would round them up and take them all to Sunday school. She was that kind of person.'

It has emerged since her death that Hartless had a long history of domestic violence, kidnapping and making murderous threats to his former girlfriend.

In the days before her death, Medrano pleaded with police to protect her, telling them she feared she was about to die.

It is not clear what exactly was done after she made the report or if Hartless was arrested as a result of it. By Friday, he was free to kill her.

Hartless was the subject of three separate civil protection orders taken out by Medrano in the past year.

She asked for the most recent order just a week before her death, telling authorities she feared for her life.

Cindy Krantz's daughter Allison Burnett, 19, was among relatives who paid tribute to her this weekend. She is pictured being comforted by her boyfriend Derek Morris

Allison welled up on Sunday as she marked the first Mother's Day since her mom's death. She was told by police that her mother spent her final moments trying to shield the elderly patients in her care from the gunman

A tribute was left outside the facility on Saturday a day after the tragedy

'I no longer feel that my support can help Tom with his issues. I am afraid to be alone with him, that he will hurt me for good.'

In a December police report, she told how he had threatened to murder her and bury her in a grave that he had already dug.

Kirkersville Police Chief Eric Disario, 43, was killed by the gunman as he responded to the incident

'Thomas has even drove her out SR 79 north past the Wooden Nickel, beat her and then showed her a hole that he dug, advising her that he would put her in it if she did not stay with him.

'She stated that he is always threatening that he will hunt her down and kill her if they are not together,' the responding officer noted in his report.

In March, he beat and kicked her until she escaped to a neighbor's house. He then threatened to run her over, The Dispatch reports.

No one from the Attorney General's Office in Ohio was available to answer questions on why he was allowed to go free after she made the report.

Neither Licking County Sheriff's nor Kirkersville Police Department has addressed it either. The district's municipal court is responsible for handling protective orders.

Hartless had a long history of domestic violence against the woman and other previous girlfriends.

Hartless had a long history of abusing his girlfriends and was jailed in 2010 after one reported him for kidnapping her and keeping her in the woods overnight with her hands and feet duct taped. Medrano told police a week before her death that she feared he was about to kill her but he was not arrested

He was arrested in 2010 for kidnapping another woman who said he took her to the woods, beat her and duct taped her hands and feet. The man spent just eight months behind bars for it after having the charges dropped to abduction and aggravated menacing.

On Friday, Hartless ambushed the two women as they worked at Pine Kirk Care Center which has around 23 elderly residents.

Kirkersville Police Department Police Chief Eric Disario responded to reports of a gunman at the building.

In his last radio communication with colleagues, he told them he had the suspect in sight.

Police have been tight-lipped about how the deaths unfolded but Hartless is believed to have murdered the two women before shooting Disario and then taking his own life.

There was a large police presence at the care home on Friday afternoon after the killings

Elderly residents were evacuated and taken to be checked over at hospital but none were harmed
A former Episcopal priest who worked at an elite Rhode Island boarding school has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a student during trips to Boston in 1973.

Prosecutors say Howard White Jr., who was stripped of his priesthood by the Episcopal Church, received an 18-month sentence.

Prosecutors say the now 75-year-old White assaulted the boy during two overnight trips to Boston when the boy was 15 and 16, and White worked at St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island.

White, of Bedford, Pennsylvania, was freed on personal recognizance after pleading not guilty in December.

White's attorney tells The Boston Globe that he and prosecutors 'came to an agreement on a plea and sentence that we thought was fair.'

Former Rhode Island priest Howard White, left, exits Suffolk Superior Court in Boston on December 13, 2016, after indictments charging him with five counts of assault and battery for allegedly sexually assaulting a then-16-year-old boy in his care during trips the early 1970's

Prosecutors say the now 75-year-old White assaulted the boy during two overnight trips to Boston when the boy was 15 and 16, and White worked at St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island (seen in the above stock photo)

The victim's lawyer, Carmen Durso, said his client was satisfied with the outcome.

'He was pleased that he pled guilty,' Durso said.

'This is the first time [White has] acknowledged any responsibility. He was pleased he got jail time because he should be punished for what he did.'

According to Durso, his client was abused when he was a 15-year-old student at St. George's.

There were instances of abuse during trips to a number of places, including Canada and West Virginia.

White was one of six former staff members at St. George's who came under investigation due to allegations of sexual abuse.

St. George's in Rhode Island counts a number of prominent figures as alums, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson (left) and former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush (right)

But because many of the cases grew out of allegations of misconduct from 1970, statute of limitations prevented authorities from filing charges, according to Providence Journal.

Last August, St. George's agreed to a financial settlement with up to 30 former students who allege that they were molested by staff members at the school.

'This is a very unusual case in that the only reason they could prosecute him is because [White] left Massachusetts after abusing the victim,' Durso said.

'They were able to prosecute him because the statute of limitations stops when the perpetrator leaves the state.'

Durso said that his client tried to run away from White during a camping trip to Nova Scotia.

The then-teen fled and came upon a neighboring farmhouse. The boy then told the farmhouse residents that he was running away from a priest who was molesting him, according to Durso.

White then came to the farmhouse and convinced the residents that it was all just a misunderstanding.

'He was an Episcopal priest. He was very convincing,' Durso said.

'He was very good at covering his tracks.'

Durso said that when his client reported White to school authorities, the headmaster refused to believe him.

But when a second student came forward with similar allegations, the school terminated White.

'But White was allowed to go on to other places and abuse other people because there was never any punishment for what he did,' Durso said.

'He was never prosecuted; he was never branded an abuser.'

White has also been accused of sexual abuse in three other states, according to the Globe.

In August of last year, the Providence Journal reported that a graduate of St. Pauls School in Concord, New Hampshire, a prestigious Episcopal boarding and prep school, claims he was victimized by White.

According to the former student, the abuse took place during the time he was enrolled there from 1967 until 1971.

White was a chaplain and teacher at St. Pauls.

After news of White's arrest in the St. George's case made headlines in December, two accusers from Waynesville, North Carolina, came forward to allege they were raped and molested by the priest.

White, who had been living in retirement in Pennsylvania before his arrest late last year, was rector of Grace Episcopal in Waynesville from 1994 until 2006, according to The Citizen-Times.

In February 2016, the Providence Journal reported that White was sued in 1996 by a West Virginia man who alleged that White molested him when he was 11 years old.

The lawsuit claimed that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of West Virginia 'conspired' to cover up White's behavior to avoid 'public knowledge, criminal prosecution, disgrace and scandal.'

The plaintiff, Richard Albright, alleged that White sexually molsted him in 1969.

St. George's in Rhode Island counts a number of prominent figures as alums, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson; former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush; and Prescott Bush, the former US senator from Connecticut whose son, George Herbert Walker Bush, and grandson, George W. Bush, went on to become president.
A man has been charged with murdering his 55-year-old mother after she was found dead in a townhouse in Sydney's south on Monday morning.

Lynda Connors was found by her eldest son, 31, lying in bed covered in blood at 6.45am in their family home on Florida Street, Sylvania.

It's believed he found her lifeless and wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries.

A few hours later his younger brother Nathan White, 28, was pulled over and dramatically arrested in St Peters, in the city's inner west. He was taken to Newtown Police Station and charged with her murder, NSW police said.

He was refused bail and will appear in the Newtown Local Court tomorrow, police said.

Police are investigating the possibility she was killed with a crossbow or pitch fork which were both allegedly found in the back of Mr White's car and seized for examination.

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Police have charged Nathan White, 28, over the murder of his mother Lynda Connors, 55. Pictured are for forensics experts examining her home in Sylvania, in Sydney's south

Mr White (pictured) was arrested by police a few hours after his mother was discovered dead

Ms Connors was found by her eldest son, 31, lying in her bed covered in blood just before 7am

Police are investigating the possibility she was killed with a crossbow, which was found in the back of Mr White's (pictured) car, or a pitchfork, which has been seized

A close family friend also claimed Mr White had been struck over the head with a pool cue at a local pub roughly five years ago and hadn't been the same since.

A woman who said she had known Mr White since he was a child told the Sydney Morning Herald that he had recently started hearing voices.

'Over the past 12 months he had just fully isolated himself,' she told the publication.

'Before that he was fine, he had normal conversations and everything.

'He had always been a pretty good kid growing up. He has had a hard life, he only had his mum. It was only mum and the two boys.'

Miranda commander Superintendent Michael O'Toole said police were appealing for witnesses that may have seen something suspicious on Sunday night.

'The (older son) is very disturbed by what has happened. He is the one who came across the incident and called police to attend it,' he said.

A police source said Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog (pictured) before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway in St Peters, in the city's inner west

It's believed Ms Connors eldest son found her wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries. Police are pictured outside the house early on in the morning before Mr White's arrest

He confirmed a crossbow had been found but would not be drawn on whether it had any connection to Ms Connors' death.

'There was a crossbow taken out of the vehicle, but there are other items (that have) also been taken out of the vehicle that the older son was in,' he said.

He refused to rule out the possibility she may died on Mother's Day, saying it was too early in the investigation to determine an exact timeline of events.

Ms Connors' death is being treated as suspicious by police.

A police source told the Daily Telegraph that Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway.

Police are investigating the possibility Ms Connors was killed with a crossbow, which was found in the back of Mr White's car, or a pitchfork, which has been seized

Police are treating Ms Connors' death as suspicious and have set up a crime scene

Police taped off the townhouse complex on Florida Street, in the Sydney suburb of Sylvania

Neighbours claim Ms Connors and her two adult children had lived at the home for 20 years

Homicide detectives and local police officers canvassed the neighbourhood after the death

Superintendent O'Toole said Ms Connors eldest son was not in custody but was at Miranda Police Station assisting police with their inquiries.

A neighbour told Daily Mail Australia she didn't hear the disturbance next door and was woken by police.

The neighbour said the mother lived there with her two sons  and had done for 'about 20 years'.

NSW Homicide Squad detectives have taped off the townhouse complex and are speaking to family and friends of Ms Connors.

Police have refused to rule out whether Ms Connors died on Mother's Day or early on Monday
Theresa May today vowed to tackle 'injustice' in the workplace by making large businesses publish their ethnicity pay gap.

The PM has announced plans to force firms with at least 250 employees to publish the data in a bid to crack down on unfair pay differences.

The announcement is part of a package of measures designed to mount an audacious bid for Labour's traditional working class vote.

Theresa May, pictured today meeting stallholders in Abingdon market in Oxfordshire, has promised a 'new deal for workers' as she tries to woo traditional Labour voters

The 'new deal for workers' also includes measures to allow workers to take a year's sabbatical to take care for sick relatives and greater protections for people in the 'gig economy'.

Taken together they amount to 'the greatest expansion of workers' rights by any Tory government in history' and show Mrs May's determination to woo Labour voters.

Mrs May said: 'The fact that different ethnic groups are being paid less for doing the same jobs is an injustice which cannot be allowed in twenty-first century Britain.

'My plan will deliver a fairer deal for all workers, by extending rights and protections, guaranteeing rises in the National Living Wage and delivering a strong and stable economy.

'There is only one leader at this election who will put rights and opportunities for ordinary working families first.

'The choice next month is clear: economic stability and a better deal for workers under my Conservative team, or chaos under Jeremy Corbyn, whose nonsensical policies would trash the economy and destroy jobs.'

Under the manifesto pledge the current obligation for firms to report their gender pay gap will be extended to men of women of different ethnicities.

The PM, out campaigning in Oxfordshire today, has announced a package of measures on workers including plans to make large firms publish their ethnicity pay gap

Mrs May, pictured today in Abingdon Market in Oxfordshire, also announced plans to let bereaved parents take time off and give workers a year's sabbatical to care of sick relatives

And companies will also have to publish information on the pay gap at different grades of staff and age.

The package of measures also includes plans to allow employees with family members who fall sick  such as elderly parents  to take up to a year's unpaid leave to provide full-time care while their jobs are kept on hold.

While the national living wage for workers aged 25 and over, currently 7.50 will rise in line with average earnings until 2022.

A new statutory right for workers to receive information about key decisions affecting their company's future will also be introduced.

Workers who suffer the death of a child will have a new right to leave, and employees will be able to request leave for educational training.

And they have also promised worker representation on company boards - although this falls short of forcing firms to have employees in the boardroom.

Visiting a training facility in southern England today, Mrs May will say: 'I said I would use Brexit to extend the protections and rights that workers enjoy, and our manifesto will deliver exactly that.

'Our plans, backed up with strong and stable leadership, will be the greatest expansion in workers' rights by any Conservative government in history.

'By working with business, reducing taxes and dealing with the deficit we have delivered steady improvements to the economic prospects of working people.

Jeremy Corbyn, pictured today at the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool, said the suggestion Mrs May is standing up for workers' rights is a 'nonsense'

'Now is the time to lock in that economic growth and ensure the proceeds are spread to everyone in our country.'

But business groups raised fears that the measures will mean more burdensome red tape for firms.

British Chambers of Commerce director general Adam Marshall said businesses would be worried about the prospect of 'costly or bureaucratic new obligations, no matter how well-intentioned'.

And Mike Cherry, national chairman at the Federation of Small Businesses, said new employment regulations 'must be backed up with proper support for smaller businesses'.

While Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the suggestion that Mrs May is standing up for workers' rights is 'nonsense'.

After addressing the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool, the Labour leader told reporters: 'Would this be the same Prime Minister that presides over an economy where six million people earn less than the living wage, where a million are on zero hours contracts, that put in tribunal fees to prevent workers who suffer injustice at work from taking their case to an independent tribunal to get a fair hearing?

'This is such nonsense - this is a Government that has damaged working conditions, that hasn't ensured safety or security at work, that doesn't guarantee rights at work from the first day of employment.

'Look at what we're suggesting, and you will see a real charter for workers' rights.'
Viktoria Tautz, 34, outside the Old Bailey

A Hungarian nanny lost her temper and shook a baby so hard his eyes bled before she asked paramedics 'what am I going to tell his parents?', a court heard today.

Viktoria Tautz, 34, allegedly killed 10-month-old Joshua Paul by using 'excessive and dangerous' force while looking after him at his home in Turnpike Lane, north London.

The baby was being looked after by the childminder at his home on August 29, 2014, when he fell unconscious.

Paramedics arrived at the home at around 9.11am to find Joshua looking 'stiff' with fluid around his nose and mouth, the court heard.

A distraught Tautz travelled with the child to hospital and was heard to say: 'What am I going to tell his parents?'

He was rushed to North Middlesex Hospital before being transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital but died on September 1 in his parents' arms, the Old Bailey heard.

Tautz, who lives in Barnet, north London, will be assisted during her trial by a Hungarian translator. She denies one count of manslaughter.

Zoe Johnson, prosecuting, said Joshua died 'because of a head injury that caused bleeding in his brain, bleeding in his eyes and other brain and spinal injuries'.

Opening the trial, Ms Johnson told the jury: 'On that day, for whatever reason, the prosecution's case is that something snapped in the defendant and for a short while she lost her temper with Joshua and assaulted him, causing all those injuries.

'Her account of what happened whilst she was looking after Joshua does not explain Joshua's various injuries and therefore something else occurred - we suggest a dangerous and excessive shaking of Joshua - which the defendant has not revealed.'

Ms Johnson said the evidence 'points to Joshua having suffered an abusive traumatic head injury', with 'natural disease and other conditions having been excluded as an explanation' for his collapse and 'all those various injuries'.

The childminder told medics Joshua had been crying and that he 'shook twice' when she picked him up before he went floppy and stopped breathing

Joshua, who was born about 10 weeks early, was said to have a large head for his age but scans had not shown up anything of concern, Ms Johnson said.

The court heard how he was being monitored in relation to his head size and how a cranial ultrasound scan showed slightly dilated ventricles, but no bleeding on the brain or other abnormalities.

He was also born with two holes in his heart but they had subsequently healed, and Joshua had bouts of being more tired than usual and needed more sleep during the day, the jury was told.

Ms Johnson said Joshua's parents had instructed Tautz not to take him out of their one-bedroom flat and that she should not bathe him and should not open the door to anyone unless she knew who it was.

Tautz was not given a key to the property and had to change her clothes when she arrived at work because she had a kitten at home, the court heard.

Joshua's mother left the baby in the flat with Tautz on August 29 at 8.40am and said he was 'happy and playing' at the time.

Tautz, who was arrested on September 5, 2014, said in interviews that she had played a 'horse-riding game' with baby Joshua but he had not had any accidents and denied that she had shaken him.

London Ambulance Service was called at 9.07am on August 29 by a neighbour after Tautz emerged from the flat shouting for help and holding Joshua, who was unconscious and not breathing.

Paramedics arrived at 9.11am and found the baby boy lying on his back on the hallway floor while Tautz, who was 'very upset' and 'extremely distressed', was performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

The childminder told medics Joshua had been crying and that he 'shook twice' when she picked him up before he went floppy and stopped breathing.

Tautz, who lives in Barnet, north London, will be assisted during her trial at the Old Bailey by a Hungarian translator. She denies one count of manslaughter

Ms Johnson said Tautz began working for the family on June 16 after Joshua's mother returned to work.

She said Tautz was coming to the end of her employment with the family, 'clearly loved' baby Joshua and spent 'almost two months in quite testing circumstances'.

She added: 'You will hear from a number of medical experts and a group of these have concluded that Joshua suffered that head injury as a result of being shaken or shaken with an impact to the head.

'The defendant, Ms Tautz, was in sole charge of Joshua at the time of his collapse. She is charged with the manslaughter of Joshua Paul.

'No-one is suggesting that the defendant intended to kill Joshua, or even to cause him really serious harm.

'The prosecution's case is that the defendant dangerously and excessively shook Joshua and therefore she is responsible for his death.'

A series of medical tests were later conducted at Great Ormond Street Hospital, with CT scans revealing he had 'widespread brain swelling' and bleeding on the brain, within the membranes and into the spinal canal.

Doctors told Joshua's parents on August 30 their child had suffered 'a devastating and irrecoverable brain injury from which he simply would not survive', his brain was not showing signs of activity and his heart 'could stop at any time'.

He suffered three cardiac arrests at Great Ormond Street Hospital and died at 10.55pm on September 1.

The trial is expected to last up to four weeks.
For the last six months, drug mule Michaella McCollum's life has been a non-stop procession of sun-soaked holidays and late-night parties with an A to Z of reality stars.

Yet, as she brushes shoulders with her illustrious new friends, you would never know she was one half of the 'Peru Two' - one of the most high-profile drug trafficking cases of the 21st Century.

Since her release from jail last summer the 23-year-old has been regularly photographed enjoying the high life in an attempt to put a glossy veneer over her criminal past.

McCollum now has a celebrity manager who appears to have been tasked with turning her into a household name, and just this weekend she was out with a host of reality stars in Birmingham after Geordie Shore star Aaron Chalmers' MMA debut.

These days McCollum never appears to be too far from a camera lens documenting her every move and is often seen with a four-figure designer handbag on her arm.

She also has been rumoured to have been offered 250,000 for rights to a book, but perhaps the high life is not as lucrative as it seems, as McCollum was spotted signing on at a job centre in Belfast hours after a jaunt in Spain.

Michaella McCollum appeared a little worse for wear as she stepped out in Birmingham on Sunday, with a stain on her dress

Michaella relied on her designer clutch bag to protect her modesty, while enjoying a night out with the likes of MTV stars James Bryce and Jordan Davies

Her celebrity outings are a far cry from four years ago, before she had a drastic makeover, when McCollum (left, sporting a very different dark bun) and Melissa Reid were convicted of trying to smuggle 1.5 million of cocaine

McCollum was spotted signing on at a job centre in Belfast hours after a jaunt in Spain

The ex-convict, from Dungannon, Northern Ireland, was jailed in Peru in 2013 along with Melissa Reid for trying to smuggle 1.5 million of cocaine.

They were found in possession of 24lbs (11kg) of the drug hidden inside food packets in their luggage as they prepared to board a flight from Lima to Madrid.

Because of their looks, ages and backgrounds belying the crimes they had committed, their case drew significant media attention.

McCollum was released on parole last March after serving less than half of her sentence but initially had to stay in Peru, where she carried out voluntary work until August when she flew back to Belfast.

But while McCollum is intent on wiping out her past, anti-drugs campaigners have criticised her for her antics.

McCollum was also pictured with footballer Jamie O'Hara at the MMA debut of Geordie Shore star Aaron Chalmers, for she had secured ringside seats

McCollum pictured with Sara Goodhart ahead of the fight in Birmingham

McCollum, pictured, was released on parole in March 2016 after serving less than half of her sentence in Peru

Paul Hannaford, an ex-addict who tours the country warning children of the dangers, slammed McCollum for her rise to prominence, along with Jim Gamble - one of Northern Ireland's most respected police figures.

Mr Hannarford said: 'Drug traffickers have no regard for other people whatsoever, they just see it as a means for making large amount of money.

'They do not see the people they affect or the young children forced to live in crack dens.

'She got herself into the limelight for making thousands of people's lives a misery. I don't think she should be trying to make herself into some sort of star now.

'If I was working for a reality show channel I wouldn't go anywhere near her. In most jobs, if they found out you were a drug smuggler your CV would be thrown straight in the bin.

Before her latest celebrity night out, she sunned herself in Ibiza - the very place where her ill-fated smuggling plan was hatched four years ago - for almost a month

McCollum never appears to be too far from a camera lens documenting her every move and she seems to be rewarded handsomely for her efforts, as a four-figure designer handbag is always on her arm

'I could take her to some drug dens and it would make her cry.'

Before her latest celebrity night out, it appears she sunned herself in Ibiza - the very place where her ill-fated smuggling plan was hatched four years ago - for almost a month.

THE CONTRAST OF MCCOLLUM'S CO-DEFENDANT In stark contrast to her co-defendant, Melissa Reid has kept herself firmly out of the public limelight. Even when she landed in the UK after her release, she was taken out of the airport via a back door, which meant she did not appear before the waiting media. Melissa Reid (pictured with her parents) has kept herself out of the public limelight Since she was pictured kissing and cuddling a new boyfriend in August last year Reid, now 23, has otherwise disappeared from public view. She is said to be trying to rebuild her life in her native Scotland. Her father said last summer that Reid was 'just trying to get back to normality'. Advertisement

It has been claimed she hopes to use her notoriety to kickstart a reality TV career, but talk that she was being considered for Celebrity Big Brother were denied by the show's makers.

Mr Gamble told the Irish Independent: 'Ten minutes working in an HIV clinic for the church does not a reformed character make.

'Not seeking publicity or attention, going about your business of rehabilitating yourself, giving something back over a sustained period of time in a humble and unassuming way - that speaks louder than an apparently choreographed interview that lacked any form of challenge.'

McCollum was last month pictured joining the dole queue outside a Belfast job centre to sign on for taxpayer-funded handouts from the Government after returning from Ibiza, where she was on one occasion photographed with a 2,000 Chanel handbag.

At the time, one fellow job seeker said: 'I was surprised to see her there after all the photos of her enjoying herself on holidays abroad.'

Originally from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, McCollum can expect to receive 69-a-week Jobseeker's Allowance.

Yet in April last year, an Indian modelling modelling company contacted her on social media to discuss a partnership. MailOnline contacted the firm for comment but received no response.

It has been reported that McCollum has been offered a 250,000 tell-all book deal detailing her criminal exploits and time behind bars in Lima.

Sporting a very different look, McCollum struggles to hold back tears during her trial in Peru in 2013

Because of their looks, ages and backgrounds belying the crimes they had committed, their case drew significant media attention

But Mr Hannaford questioned her position as a potential role model and railed against the dangers of cocaine, and pointed out that the UK has the highest ratio of users of any country in the world.

He added: 'It's not just drug addicts who are affected, it's all of their families too, and not all drug users live in dens.

'They're people you see working in the city, or they are housewives. I know plenty of people whose lives, families and finances are being torn apart because they are spending literally thousands of pounds a week on cocaine and trying to hide it from their partners.'

Miss McCollum's representatives have been contacted for comment.
Scoot Airlines is coming to Australia with promises of 'the most affordable fares' as they offer customers return trips to Europe for under $1000.

The Singapore-based company has recently purchased eight 787 Dreamliner aircraft to start their foray into the Australian market.

The planes are billed as one of the most fuel efficient long-haul commercial planes which allows for the affordable prices.

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Scoot Airlines are offering return flights from Australia to Europe for under $1000

Dreamliners have a lightweight carbon fibre shell and specially designed engines and wings

The shell of the plane is made from lightweight carbon fibre, and combined with specially designed engines and wings allow the plane to operate at a significantly lower cost.

The Scoot flights will be based in Singapore and connect with flights leaving from Sydney, Gold Coast, Melbourne and Perth before arriving in Athens, Greece.

According to a report in 2016, Scoot were named the cheapest international airline in the world, with an average of $0.09 per kilometre.

The planes were unveiled at a company launch at the Boeing factory in Seattle, where the company offers similar bargain deals for their American customers.

The airline is less than five years old, after commencing operations in 2012.

The company is owned by Singapore Airlines, which also owns other budget airlines such as TigerAir.

The fuel efficiency of the aircraft allow Scoot to charge affordable prices for their fares
Louisiana has always been a backward place for criminal justice, the only state in the union that funds its public defenders' office with conviction fees, leaving a public defender's office that averages $238 spent on each accused.

If you're poor and arrested in Louisiana, you will rot in jail for months or even years waiting for a trial which will be indifferently argued by a grossly overworked public defender. As a result, the majority of poor arrestees plead guilty, and 85% of those accused of crimes are poor. Black people in Louisiana are jailed at four times the rate of white people.

Now, a group of civil rights attorneys and pro-bono high-ticket corporate lawyers have launched a class action against the Louisiana system, arguing "that Louisiana has systematically denied poor people their constitutional right to criminal defense."



It got worse as crime boomed and tough on crime policies followed. Caseloads for public defenders jumped from 69,000 in 1986 to 114,000 by 1992. During that same period, funding fell from $157 to $99 per case. A 1992 report commissioned by the Louisiana Supreme Court was "on the verge of collapse." Now it's finally happened. In each of the past six years, Louisiana's average caseload per attorney has been more than twiceand as much as five timesLouisiana public defender standards (PDF). By 2014, public defenders collectively had a budget of just $50 million to provide representation in nearly 250,000 cases, or about $200 per case. Two years later, in the spring of 2016, districts were so overburdened that 33 out of 42 public defender offices across the state had began refusing to accept certain new clients. It was around that time that lawyers from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Davis, Polk & Wardwell LLP, and Jones Walker LLP jointly began building their case.

Louisiana Can't Afford to Pay for Public Defenders, So Inmates Are Pleading Guilty

[Jake Scobey-Thal/Daily Beast]
Chelsea Manning will continue to receive health care and other benefits given to active duty soldiers after she is released from prison.

The army soldier, who was jailed for one of the largest leaks of classified documents in US history, will remain eligible for the benefits so long as her court-martial remains under appeal, USA Today reported on Monday.

She is scheduled for release from a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at some point on Wednesday after seven years behind bars.

After her release, Manning will technically be considered an active duty soldier, though she will not be paid a salary.

Chelsea Manning, 29, who is scheduled to walk free from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas on Wednesday after serving seven years for leaking classified military documents, will continue to receive health care and other benefits, the army said

She is scheduled for release from a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at some point on Wednesday after seven years behind bars. The United States Penitentiary is seen in Leavenworth, Kansas in the above stock image

Manning will continue to have access to commissaries - or special grocery stores tailored to servicemen and women and their families - and military exchanges, which are retail stores operated on military bases.

Manning, who still identified as a male named Bradley (above in 2013) when she was arrested, is expected to live in Maryland when she finally walks free

'Pvt. Manning is statutorily entitled to medical care while on excess leave in an active duty status, pending final appellate review,' a US Army spokesperson told USA Today.

The army declined to provide specifics as to other benefits that Manning will receive while she is released.

Manning said last week she can't wait to breathe the spring air and go swimming.

In an interview with The Guardian from her prison cell at Fort Leavenworth, Manning said: 'I'm looking forward to breathing the warm spring air again.

'I want that indescribable feeling of connection with people and nature again, without razor wire or a visitation booth. I want to be able to hug my family and friends again. And swimming - I want to go swimming.'

Manning is expected to live in Maryland when she finally walks free - the same state from where she sent WikiLeaks the classified military and diplomatic documents that landed her in prison.

The 29-year-old had served seven years of a 35-year stretch when Barack Obama commuted her sentence right before he left the White House.

Manning, who still identified as a male named Bradley when she was arrested, has been serving her sentence in an all-male jail.

She twice attempted suicide in jail where she was often kept in solitary confinement and went on a hunger strike last year in an attempt to get officials to allow her to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

Manning had served seven years of a 35-year stretch when President Barack Obama commuted her sentence earlier this year before he left the White House

'For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea. I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world,' Manning said earlier this week.

'I am forever grateful to the people who kept me alive, President Obama, my legal team, and countless supporters.

'Freedom used to be something that I dreamed of but never allowed myself to fully imagine.

'Now, freedom is something that I will again experience with friends and loved ones after nearly seven years of bars and cement, of periods of solitary confinement, and of my health care and autonomy restricted, including through routinely forced haircuts.'

Originally named Bradley, Manning became a hero to anti-war activists and a villain to government officials outraged over her leaking of classified files.

Three days before leaving office in January, then-president Obama slashed Manning's sentence by 28 years after more than 115,000 people signed a petition calling for her release.

Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union which lobbied on Manning's behalf, said that 'like far too many people in prison, particularly transgender women, Chelsea Manning has had to survive unthinkable violence throughout the seven years of her incarceration.'

Manning was an army intelligence analyst based in Baghdad in 2010 when she leaked the huge trove of files, which included footage of an Apache helicopter strike that killed two Iraqi journalists working for the British news agency Reuters.

The massive leak caused an international furor, exposing the private opinions of senior US diplomats and other top officials about Washington's allies and foes.

Manning was arrested after confessing her part in the leak to an online acquaintance, who alerted military authorities.

Her case sparked fresh controversy last year when she was put into an isolation cell as punishment for a suicide attempt.

She said she attempted to kill herself a second time while in solitary confinement.

'The transition out of these horrific institutions will not be easy, and part of what we hope is that Chelsea will find the space, love, and support to heal and build a life of her choosing,' the ACLU's Strangio said in a statement.
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Flaunted by models and celebrities, these days tattoos are often about attracting members of the opposite sex.

But not so for the women of the Tharu tribe, from central Nepal, who began marking themselves in order to deter members of the country's royal family from keeping them as sex slaves, according to folk law.

Photographer Omar Reda, 32, said the women of the Tharu tribe told him about the dark roots of their tattoo culture when he visited the town of Chitwan, where he captured these portraits.

The women of the Tharu tribe, located in central Nepal, are covered in intricate tattoos on their arms, hands, legs and feet. One reason for the markings was to save them from a life of sexual slavery, photographer Omar Reda said

According to Tharu folk law, their tattooing trend started during the Kingdom of Nepal era when the royal family would visit their village during the summer and take the most beautiful girls as slaves. In order to stop them, the girls began tattooing themselves in the hopes of repulsing their captors

In more recent times, tattoos were used as a mark of social acceptance, according to Omar. Unmarked women could not be spoken to, could not marry, and sometimes could not even touch objects the tribe used

The third reason given by the women for getting the tattoos was spiritual, as it is believed that the markings will allow the bearer to rise in heaven in her most beautiful form, Omar said

Tattooing, which used to be popular among the Tharu people, is fast dying out because contact with other non-tattooed tribes has led to the practice falling out of fashion, according to Sameera Maiti, an author on the culture

Omar, 32, a Lebanese designer based in Riyadh, explains: 'Tattooing plays a major role in certain communities. Some people use their body as an art canvas to reflect their status, ideology, and memorable stories.

'For the Tharu tribe in Chitwan, a Nepalese town, I found that the women's tattoos have three different stories.

'The first one was extremely shocking. During the era of the Kingdom of Nepal, the royal family used to spend their summer in the Chitwan area. They used to take the beautiful girls of the tribe as sex slaves.

'To stop these abductions, the tattoo trend started and the girls got inked in order to deform themselves, so they look ugly for the royal men.

'The second one was as shocking as the first one. Tattooing used to be mandatory for a girl during the teenage phase, or she will be estranged from her family and community.

'She won't be allowed to talk to or marry anyone in the tribe, and people won't even be allowed to take anything she has touched, like food and other objects. She must get inked in order to be accepted by her people.

'The third one was about beauty and the afterlife. Once a woman dies, she will rise in heaven in her most beautiful form.' The tattoos are a way of ensuring that happens, Omar added.

Tharu tribal elders tattoo the women using a mixture of mustard oil and cow dug which is then stabbed through the skin using a thorn from the Neem tree

Tharu people are also known to tattoo themselves as a form of medicine, believing that if a certain body part is experiencing constant pain or fails to heal, tattooing over it will allow the 'bad blood' to drain away and relieve the injury

While some Tharu tattoo designs represent animals or everyday objects, such as brooms or cooking pots, others (pictured above) are merely abstract patterns joined together for visual impact

Tattooing, known as leela in the native Tharu tongue, used to be very popular with both men and women but is now far less common among the young as they mix with non-tattooed tribes

Tribal tattooing, along with cave and body painting, is thought to be one of the oldest forms of art. While it is commonly used to beautify the recipient, Omar Reda says Tharu women used to get tattoos to make them unattractive to passing royals

Tharu tattoos typically covers the backs of the hands, fingers and the lower arm, as well as the ankles and feet. While some of the symbols used carry specific meanings, others a simply attractive geometric patterns
Troubled teenager Douglas Herridge has been cleared of the manslaughter of his stepfather, Colin Payne

A teenager who killed his stepfather with one punch to his head after he was refused pocket money has been cleared of manslaughter.

Douglas Herridge, then 17, struck former England squash player Colin Payne, 54, with what was described as a 'catastrophic blow' which led to his death.

Mr Payne had intervened in an argument between the teenager and his mother, Ina, in the study of their home in Dartford, Kent on November 19 last year.

Mrs Herridge gave evidence for the prosecution at the trial and her 'stoicism' was praised by the judge.

Judge Jeremy Carey said at the end of the trial: 'What mother could possibly cope with a situation in which she has had to give evidence for the prosecution and the defendant is her natural child.'

Mrs Herridge declined to comment as she left court today, other than to say: 'This has been a very stressful time.'

Mrs Herridge had not spoken to her son since her partner died but later sat with him outside the court during the trial.

The teenager has been living with his father while on bail during the proceedings.

The jury had been told Mrs Herridge had refused to lend her son money before the attack, due to his behaviour.

Squash champion Colin Payne had intervened in a row between Herridge and his mother, Ina. Mrs Herridge gave evidence for the prosecution, telling court how she saw her son land one punch on her partner and he dropped to the floor

The row escalated, with Herridge becoming upset, wound up and verbally abusive to his mother.

Herridge then lashed out at Mr Payne when he came into the room and told him he could not speak to his mother that way.

The father of two, who previously won the over 50s British squash title, slumped to the floor from the blow which struck him below his left ear and jawline, described by a pathologist as the 'most vulnerable' area of the head.

Mr Payne collapsed unconscious and Mrs Herridge, a 42-year-old NHS risk manager and former nurse, tried in vain to save her partner.

The court heard Mr Payne had told Herridge's mother he was scared of her son before the incident unfolded

After he was cleared of manslaughter, Herridge left court with his father David today. He declined to comment and his father said the matter was between the family.

Herridge was originally charged with murder but Judge Jeremy Carey ruled halfway through his trial that there was insufficient evidence to convict him and ordered the jury to return a not guilty verdict.

The teenager, now 18, claimed he punched Mr Payne in self-defence as he was being throttled by the 6ft 4in businessman.

He told the court he was scared and lashed out simply to make Mr Payne release his grip around his neck.

Giving evidence in the trial, Herridge accepted he had killed Mr Payne but said he liked his stepfather and they got on well.

He denied using excessive force when he lashed out at him and said he only acted in self-defence.

He told the jury: 'I remember Colin's arms being around my neck. They were around my neck tight, two hands. I just remember it being tight around my neck.'

The court heard he threw two punches but the first missed.

'I remember throwing two punches, the first one missing and the second one connecting with the side of his face,' continued the teen.

'He had hold of me around the neck and all I wanted to do was get him off me. I was scared. I didn't know what was going to happen but I had to defend myself.'

Herridge (centre left), declined to comment on the case as he left court today. He is pictured with what are believed to be his members of his extended family

Asked by his barrister Judith Khan QC whether he would have hit Mr Payne if he was not being choked as he said, Herridge replied: 'No, never, no.'

Prosecutor Richard Hearnden told the court Herridge had sworn at his mother, calling her a 'c**t'.

Mr Payne, who ran three successful bathroom showrooms in Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had decided to stay at home on his busiest business day because he wanted to support his partner.

Mr Payne was a successful businessman and squash player, the court heard

Herridge called him 'a pussy' when he intervened, the court heard.

Mrs Herridge, who originally from Finland, told the jury: 'I saw one punch. Douglas punched Colin. It landed on his face on the side of his head. Douglas left the room and Colin had his hands at the side of his head.'

The jury returned its manslaughter verdict after six hours and 44 minutes deliberation.

The judge said Mr Payne was 'a fine man', distinguished at amateur sports, a good father and 'responsible and decent' member of society.

'The word 'tragic' is probably overused, not least in these courts, but this case can only be described as tragic,' he added.

'He came to an untimely death in circumstances which really were absolutely devastating.'
Paige Wren Tasker, 27, is accused of raping the boy in 2015 at another suspect pedophile's trailer

A woman has become the sixth person to be arrested for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy who police say was raped by a gang of pedophiles at furry costume parties.

Paige Wren Tasker, 27, from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, was arrested on Sunday for having sex with the boy at suspected pedophile David Parker's trailer over Christmas in 2015.

She is accused of having sex with him three times and performing oral sex on him while the pair shared a bed in Parker's trailer.

Tasker is facing charges of statutory sexual assault, corruption of minors, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and indecent assault. She will appear in court on May 22 and is being held in the Monroe County Prison until then on $250,000 bond.

In documents obtained by DailyMail.com, authorities revealed how during interviews, the boy said having to share a bed with her 'ruined Christmas'.

He identified her after police showed them a photograph of her dressed up wearing cat ears.

Parker, 38, was arrested in November on suspicion of routinely abusing the boy at fetish pedophile parties in 2009 where they dressed up in furry costumes to assault him.

Tasker was staying at the trailer home of David Parker, 38, (left) when she allegedly raped the boy. Parker and Kenneth Fenske, 57, (right) were previously arrested for raping him for years at depraved pedophile fetish parties where theyallegedly dressed up as furry animals

Craig Knox, 35, (left) and Jeffrey Harvey, 40, are also accused of participating in the vile network

Kenneth Fenske, 57, Jeffrey Harvey, 40, Craig Knox, 35, and Stephen Taylor, 27, have also been arrested since.

Prosecutors said the men formed a vile pedophile ring which targeted the children to satisfy their outlandish and deviant sexual desires.

Fenske, who denies sexual abuse charges, dressed up as a red fox and called himself Lupine at the parties, they said. None of the other suspects have yet entered pleas.

According Tasker's arrest affidavit, the party abuse took place years before she became assaulted the boy.

The boy told police how Tasker 'liked cats' and that being forced to sleep with her 'ruined Christmas'

She was in a tawdry relationship with Parker and his girlfriend when she went to stay with him in late 2015.

She sometimes slept with the couple but often shared a bed with the teenager.

'He stated that one night while Tasker was lying next to him in his bed, she began to 'feel me up and then she gave me a b*****b'.

'He stated this happened more than once, that Tasker was in her mid-20s and that she likes cats. Tasker slept in his room for several days before and after Christmas of 2015 and he stated that he hated sharing a bed with her.

'He stated "having to share my bed with her ruined Christmas."'

When approached by police this month, the affidavit said she told them she knew it was wrong to sexually assault the underage boy because he was so young.

Tasker was arrested after police swooped in on Parker and the other suspected pedophiles last year.

Knox, one of those arrested, is accused of dressing up as a rottweiler for the depraved rape parties.

Pennsylvania's Attorney General Josh Shapiro said he was dedicated to bringing the suspects to justice

They allegedly made the boy dress up as Tony the Tiger, the cartoon animal used to advertise Kelloggs' frosted flakes cereal.

The alleged ring unraveled when Jeffrey Harvey, one of the suspects was lured to meet an undercover police officer who was posing online as an underage child.

At their meeting, he told police about Parker and the other names emerged.

Speaking after Tasker's arrest on Sunday, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said: 'In January, we made a promise when we first filed charges against predators that this investigation would continue as long as it takes.

'The hard work of the agents and attorneys in our Child Predator Section, working closely with other law enforcement partners, led to this latest arrest.

'This is a deeply disturbing case, and we care about this victim and every victim of sexual abuse.'
A group of protesters were forcibly removed during audience question time on ABC's Q&A after a student asked the Education Minister about the controversial university fee hikes.

Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, was asked a particularly vexing question by audience member Molly James about university fee increases during a Budget discussion on Monday night.

The young student's question was met with a roar of applause and before Mr Birmingham could answer his voice was drowned out by several angry protesters screaming at the stage on the Gold Coast.

Audience member Molly James (pictured) asked the Education Minister a difficult question during the show

Queensland Greens Senator Larissa Waters (left) and Simon Birmingham (right) were panelists on the show Monday night

Security can be seen forcibly removing the protesters who disrupted question time

'While you were at university you were an active politician who campaigned for fair treatment from government, you were adamant about stopping fee increases and not allowing cutbacks be made to university funding,' Molly's question began.

'So what is it now, 20 years on, that your view has completely changed? Please justify to me why you think that the proposed changes to increase fees and lower the HECS repayment threshold is fair for university students across the country?'

The audience erupted into loud cheers of approval before host Tony Jones quickly interjected and said: 'Okay, you want to hear the answer I think.'

'A lot has changed in the last 20 or 30 years,' a bemused-looking Mr Birmingham replied, before furious protesters began yelling out from the audience.

A woman was heard screaming: 'You're making students pay...' as Mr Jones attempted to shut down the protests.

'I'll happily answer that question as well,' Mr Birmingham said, seemingly rattled by the disruption.

'A lot has changed in the last 20 or 30 years,' a bemused-looking Mr Birmingham (pictured) replied, before furious protesters began yelling out from the audience

The angry protesters were forcibly removed from the audience as they shrieked at the stage

Host Tony Jones (pictured) attempted to diffuse the situation as the protesters grew louder

Fellow guest host Queensland Greens Senator Larissa Waters appeared concerned for the protester and said: 'Be gentle with her, don't drag her out.'

A male voice continued to shriek inaudibly as security was seen forcibly removing several audience members out the side door.

'I think you can see, it's a university town... there is a good deal of passion here,' Mr Jones said after the protesters were removed.

'Students have been protesting for generations,' Mr Birmingham responded.

But Ms Waters quickly fired back: 'It's a shame they're not being listened to.'

The protests come after 2017 Federal Budget revealed university students would be hit with a fee hike and the minimum salary threshold to pay back HECS debt was lowered to only $42,000.

Other panelists at the desk included Chris Bowen, Shadow Treasurer, Innes Willox, CEO of Australian Industry Group and Miranda Stewart, Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute ANU.
A deputy police and crime commissioner has been forced to quit over allegations he groomed a teenage animal rights activist while working undercover.

Andy Coles, Cambridgeshire's deputy police and crime commissioner, tendered his resignation earlier today.

He is alleged to have deceived a 19-year-old woman into forming a sexual relationship while working as an undercover officer in the 1990s.

Andy Coles, the deputy police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, is accused of grooming and manipulating a 19-year-old while undercover

In a statement, Mr Coles said: 'There have been news reports over the weekend about which I am unable to comment.

'This coverage is significantly impacting on my ability to carry out my duties as Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner.

'I have therefore today tendered my resignation with immediate effect, which Police and Crime Commissioner, Jason Ablewhite, has accepted.

'I am aware that the allegations have been referred directly to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).'

Cambridgeshire Police and Crime Commissioner Jason Ablewhite and a spokesman for the Cambridgeshire Police and Crime Panel said they would make no further comment as the matter had been referred to the IPCC.

Mr Coles' secret past as a spy who targeted political groups was only revealed when his brother - former pop star and broadcaster Reverend Richard Coles - revealed his double life as an undercover police officer in an autobiography published in 2014.

The former Communards member who later became a priest, wrote in his autobiography that his older brother's secret life involved infiltrating 'some sinister organisation while his wife and baby daughter made do with unpredictable visits  He looked like he had just walked out of the woods, his hair long and shaggy, with a straggly beard, his ears rattling with piercings.'

Andy Coles' secret past as a spy who targeted political groups was only revealed when his brother - former pop star and broadcaster Reverend Richard Coles (pictured) - revealed his brother's double life as an undercover police officer in an autobiography published in 2014

Somebody who read the book contacted campaigners at the Undercover Research Group, a network of activists examining the work of police spies, and investigations by campaigners and The Guardian deducted that Andy Coles spent four years infiltrating animal rights groups.

'Jessica' - the woman who who has taken the case against the police - wants to remain anonymous.

'He is a disgrace to the police. He is contemptible. I think that ordinary police officers would be disgusted by him,' she said.

Jessica said she met Mr Coles in 1992 when she was 'naive, idealistic, unsophisticated and a very young 19'.

The pair met after she left home for the first time and moved into a shared house with other activists and that Mr Coles regularly called to the house.

She claimed that one day he unexpectedly kissed her when they were watching a film alone.

Jessica said: 'I did not know how to react when he made advances towards me. I was embarrassed, awkward and what truly makes me feel sick now, is that I did not want to hurt his feelings.'

She said she would not have consented to the relationship which later developed if she had known that he was really a police officer.

Mr Coles, was married at the time of the alleged affair and Jessica claimed he concealed his marriage and his real job as an undercover officer from her. She also said that she also believed he was about 24 rather than his real age of 32.

The ex-detective posed as an animal rights activist, seen here in Cambridgeshire

Activists claim that Mr Coles worked undercover between 1991 and 1995, claiming a false identity as 'Andy Davey' a removal van driver and living in a bedsit while spying on animal rights groups.

Coles even adopted a rescue dog as part of his new fake identity.

Campaigners say that they nicknamed him 'Andy Van' because he often drove them to demonstrations.

They say that they were unaware that he was a member of the Metropolitan police's undercover unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, and that he was gathering information on them.

Jessica said that although she was not legally underage, she felt that her youth and vulnerability were used to target her.

'I was groomed by someone much older, and far more experienced, and I was manipulated into having a sexual relationship with him. I didn't even know his real name.'

According to her legal claim, their relationship lasted more than a year. For nine months of that time, she maintained a long-distance relationship with him as she was working abroad.

Jessica's legal action against the police - alleging that Coles groomed and manipulated her - follows a series of lawsuits launched against the police by women who have discovered that they had relationships, often lasting many years, with undercover officers.

Police have been forced to apologise and pay compensation to at least eight women for the abuse and deception they experienced.

In 1995, Mr Coles told activists that he was moving to eastern Europe to teach English and disappeared from the animal rights movement. The next year, he sent a letter from Hungary to campaigners implying that the police were investigating him.

Andy Coles (left) was personally selected by Jason Ablewhite (right) as his Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner, and he praised his 'wealth of experience in policing and public service'

Mr Coles had actually returned to Scotland Yard where he worked until he retired from the police in 2012.

He was elected a Conservative councillor in Peterborough in 2015 and last July, he was appointed to the paid post of the deputy police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

He was personally selected by Jason Ablewhite, the commissioner, who praised his 'wealth of experience both in policing and public service'.

Jessica said she has suffered 'severe shock and distress' after discovering earlier this year from other activists that he was a police spy.

She has asked for a public inquiry into the undercover infiltration of hundreds of political groups since 1968 to examine his conduct.

The public inquiry was set up by Theresa May when she was home secretary following a series of revelations about undercover police officers.

The inquiry  led by Lord Justice Pitchford  is scrutinising the activities of other undercover officers who formed intimate relationships with women they were spying on.

'This has been one of the most stressful times I have ever known, my life as I knew it was a lie.

'One of the people I trusted most never existed. I can't look back at those times in the same way now. I can't trust my judgment because I got things so wrong,' Jessica said.




A group of Iranians who were granted protection visas in Australia after claiming they would be killed or persecuted if they returned have been caught holidaying in their homeland.

The Immigration Department recently discovered the six refugees had lied on their visa applications after they visited Iran voluntarily and returned to Australia, according to The Herald Sun.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton cancelled their visas, but the Administrative Appeals Tribunal overturned his decision and ruled that the group could stay in the country.

A group of six Iranian refugees who were granted protection visas in Australia after claiming they could be killed if they returned have been caught holidaying in their homeland (stock image)

Each of the Iranians paid smugglers to help them reach Australia and told authorities they would be in danger if deported home.

One of the refugees was granted a protection visa after arriving in Australia by an illegal boat in 2009, the Herald Sun reported.

They claimed to be on an Iranian wanted list and to have used a fake passport to flee the country.

It was later discovered the person had received a new Iranian passport after received a protection visa and travelled back and forth between the countries.

Another person who was granted a visa in 2012 after claiming they would be executed in Iran has returned to their homeland three times since, including to get married under Islamic law, the Herald Sun said.

The Immigration Department (stock image) recently discovered the refugees, who arrived by boat, had lied on their visa applications after they visited Iran voluntarily and returned to Australia

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton (pictured) called for their visas to be cancelled, but the Administrative Appeals Tribunal overturned his decision and ruled that the group could stay in the country

A couple who received visas in 2011 told authorities they could not go home because they would be killed.

The pair said had no identification but it was later discovered they had valid Iranian passports and had returned for a period of time.

The AAT also overturned the Immigration Department's decision to cancel the visas of two family members who said they were being discriminated against in Iran and were stateless.

They claimed they didn't have any identification but their story was thwarted when a third member applied to come to Australia as well.

The third person provided documents that proved all three were Iranian citizens and it was found they were not in danger of being persecuted, the Herald Sun said.
A panel of doctors is meeting to decide whether a 10-year-old who was raped by her stepfather should be allowed to have an abortion.

The girl, from Rohtak in northern India, is due to give birth in four months and was repeatedly raped by the man while her mother was out of the house.

Indian law does not allow terminations after 20 weeks unless doctors certify that the pregnant woman's life is in danger.

India's Supreme Court in New Delhi has recieved everal petitions from rape victims in recent months requesting terminations and each case has been referred to a panel of medical experts

The stepfather has been arrested and detained pending a full police investigation after the girl's mother reported him to police, Rohtak police official Pankaj Nain told the BBC.

The child's family are demanding that doctors from the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences allow the girl to undergo an abortion.

The girl's mother suspected her daughter might be pregnant only last week and took her to a doctor.

Reports said the girl was often left at home when her mother went to work.

She told her mother that she had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather, who had warned her not to say anything.

India has a gruesome record on rape, with New Delhi alone registering 2,199 rape cases in 2015 -- an average of six a day

It has been established that India's Supreme Court has received several petitions from rape victims in recent months requesting terminations and each case has been referred to a panel of medical experts.

India has a gruesome record on rape, with close by New Delhi alone registering 2,199 rape cases in 2015, an average of six a day.

Nearly 40,000 rape cases are reported every year but the real number is thought to be much higher, with victims wary of how their complaints will be dealt with or the social stigma attached to sex crimes.
Italian mobsters made millions from running one of the largest migrant reception centres in Europe, police have revealed.

Nearly 70 people, including a priest, were arrested in dawn raids this morning, amid allegations the 'Ndrangheta mafia infiltrated the centre in the south of the country.

It is claimed they used a Roman Catholic charity as a cover to cream off millions of euros in state funds.

The early morning raids saw 68 people arrested and more than 84 million euros worth of property seized by investigators

A priest and the head of the local Misericordia association, which runs the centre, were among those arrested this morning

The centre is one of the largest immigration facilities in Europe, but prosecutors claim it was infiltrated by the Mafia

Police seized goods and property worth 84 million euros (71.4million) in the early morning sweep.

Among those arrested were the head of the local Misericordia association, Leonardo Sacco. The association manages the Sant'Anna Cara immigrant centre in the town of Isola Capo Rizzuto.

Also arrested was priest Edoardo Scordio, according to reports in Italy.

The fenced-in centre can house up to 1,200 migrants, and prosecutors claim managed to infiltrate the operation at least eight years ago, taking charge of key services such as catering and laundry.

The Florence-based national Misericordia association said in a statement it had full faith in the judiciary and was placing the southern migrant centre under special administration

The government has set up reception centres across the country to take care of the new arrivals, which are run by private entities and charities

Italy has been a destination for seaborne migration for years. More than half a million have reached Italy in the latest wave since 2014, mostly by boat from neighbouring Libya

Prosecutor Nocola Gatteri told a news conference: 'If 500 migrants had to have lunch, just 250 meals would arrive at the centre. The other 250 would either have to eat in the evening, or else the next day.

'In the meantime the head of the Misericordia, the priest and their friends grew fat, bought luxury cars, flats and boats.'

The Florence-based national Misericordia association said in a statement it had full faith in the judiciary and was placing the southern migrant centre under special administration.

Around 200,000 euros (170,000) was found at the house of one man who had declared annual earnings of just 800 euros to the tax man, Gratteri said.

The head of parliament's anti-mafia commission hailed the operation.

'The Cara of Isola Capo Rizzuto had become a money printing operation for organised crime thanks to the complicity of those who ran the centre,' Rosy Bindi said.

The state spends some 16 million euros a year to house and feed the migrants at Isola Capo Rizzuto

Police said many of those arrested belonged to the Arena clan of the 'Ndrangheta mafia - Italy's largest organised crime group which is based in the region of Calabria and is one of Europe's biggest cocaine importers

'This operation shows the ability of the mafia to take advantage of the weaknesses and fragility of our times with its predatory and parasitic approach,' she added.

Police said many of those arrested belonged to the Arena clan of the 'Ndrangheta mafia - Italy's largest organised crime group which is based in the region of Calabria and is one of Europe's biggest cocaine importers.

The police statement said the Arena clan was also suspected of muscling in on the running of a migrant centre on the southern island of Lampedusa, which is on the front line of Italy's ongoing migrant crisis.

Italy has been a destination for seaborne migration for years. More than half a million have reached Italy in the latest wave since 2014, mostly by boat from neighbouring Libya.

The government has set up reception centres across the country to take care of the new arrivals, which are run by private entities and charities.

The state spends some 16 million euros a year to house and feed the migrants at Isola Capo Rizzuto.

Last month Italy's justice minister said it was 'a lie' to paint humanitarian ships saving migrants in the Mediterranean as criminals, responding to a Sicilian prosecutor who has repeatedly suggested some are colluding with Libyan smugglers.

Prosecutor Nocola Gatteri told a news conference: 'If 500 migrants had to have lunch, just 250 meals would arrive at the centre. The other 250 would either have to eat in the evening, or else the next day'

The police statement said the Arena clan was also suspected of muscling in on the running of a migrant centre on the southern island of Lampedusa, which is on the front line of Italy's ongoing migrant crisis

Carmelo Zuccaro, the chief prosecutor of the Sicilian port city of Catania, has said he has evidence of phone calls between people smugglers and aid groups, but he has not opened a criminal investigation or presented his evidence.

The Catania court opened a fact-finding probe in February, saying traffickers may be funding non-governmental organizations involved in rescuing migrants who attempt the dangerous crossing from North Africa to Europe.

NGOs have forcefully denied any wrongdoing and said their only objective is to save lives.

Justice Minister Andrea Orlando told la Repubblica: 'In general, it's not right to make the story of the NGOs working in the Mediterranean as a tale of collusion with people smugglers because it's a lie.'
Kristi Goll, mother of a Janesville, Wisconsin boy who she had known would need a kidney transplant since birth, had spent years testing family and friends for a donor match to no avail when she finally turned to social media, seeking anyone's help.

Milton police officer Lindsey Bittorf was so moved when she saw Goll's post in December that she decided to get tested and found out she was a match for 8-year-old Jackson Arneson, according to ABC's WISN.

Now, she'll be going above and beyond the call of duty in donating her kidney to Arneson, who she had never met before, and saving life in a whole new way.

Police officer Lindsey Bittorf will donate her kidney to Jackson Arneson, 8, of Janesville, Wisconsin, all because of a Facebook post; Bittorf had never met Arneson before last week.

'I took an oath to serve and protect our community and now my kidney is going to serve and protect you,' Bittorf told Arneson when she showed up at his door last week.

Arneson suffers from a condition called Posterior Urethral Valves, which leads to reverse flow of urine from the urethra back into the urinary tract organs, like the kidneys, according to Stanford Children's Health.

'Virtually, his kidney function has always been below 30 percent,' Goll said.

Bittorfg but got tested as a possible donor match after seeing Kristi Goll's plea for help on social media; Arneson (left) is seen here with his mother, Goll (right)

Bittorf surprised the family at home with the news that she had decided to donate her kidney

Seemingly out of options, Goll posted on Facebook on December 7 seeking the help of her Rock County community.

'Jackson went in for a routine kidney appointment the end of November. At this appointment, his labs showed that his kidney function is still decreasing and the doctors are in talks of activating him on the deceased donor list for a kidney transplant. The doctors still explained the very best situation would be finding a living donor for Jackson. I always knew these days would come, it's just so hard when they are here. I have reached out before, I am just trying again to see if we can find anyone out there that would be interested in being tested.

'Social media has the ability to go a long ways, and Jackson's transplant social worker reassured me of this. A donor for him would have to be an O+ blood type. Please help me get the word out and please contact me if you would be interested in being a living kidney donor. This would be the very best gift we could receive,' she wrote.

Seemingly out of options, Goll posted this plea on Facebook on December 7 seeking the help of her Rock County community

Social media worked its wonders, and the original post was shared almost 1500 times. She had re-shared the post as recently as February 2, writing the following:

'I know so many of you shared this previously, and I cannot express how much I greatly appreciate everyone's help, but we are continuing to search for a kidney match for Jackson. We know of some people that have been tested, and unfortunately have not been a good match for him. And to those people, I know I have told you this time and time again, you hold such a special place in my heart and I sincerely thank you for trying to be a kidney donor for Jackson. It means so much to my family and I, way more then I can put into words.

'Jordan and I went in for Jackson's kidney appointment on Tuesday and his doctor does not believe he has the capability to remain healthy with his failing kidney for another winter. They are going to activate him on a deceased donor list and see if he can find a good match this way. They are hoping Jackson will have his transplant this spring or summer as he is at a less risk of being sick during warmer months.

'However, the doctor did encourage me to continue to find a living donor as that would be the best scenario and almost always has the best results. So, again, I ask for your help. Please contact me if you have any questions or know someone who may be willing to give us this amazing gift.'

Bittorf had never met Arneson or Goll before coming to their home with her big news

'I ripped [a package] open and I saw the word "kidney" and I didnt even read the rest of it,' Goll said of the moment she realized what was happening

Bittorf saw the post and made her mind to get tested. It turned out she and Arneson both had blood type O+, Bittorf was within the age range, in general good health, and the two of them matched three antigens, which was more than enough for her to move forward as his organ donor.

Bittorf said the doctors were shocked for a person who wasn't related to the boy to be such a good match.

That's when Bittorf knew it was meant to be and she was going to be the one to provide Arneson his new kidney.

Bittorf said the doctors were shocked for a person who wasn't related to the boy to be such a good match

The officer showed up on their doorstep unannounced, and surprised Arneson and his family with a framed note that read, 'The search is over! I am Jackson's Kidney donor!'

Leading up to the procedure, Arneson has been showing his appreciation for the incredibly generous gift by sending drawings to his hero

With her mind made up, the officer showed up on their doorstep unannounced, and surprised Arneson and his family with a framed note that read, 'The search is over! I am Jackson's Kidney donor!'

'We went to the door and this police officer walks in,' Goll said, describing the moments before she learned her son's life would be saved.

'I ripped [a package] open and I saw the word "kidney" and I didnt even read the rest of it. I just saw "kidney" and I looked over, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, its you!"'

Arneson calls Bittorf the 'best police officer in the whole entire world'

Now Bittorf, who was previously a complete stranger, will share a bond with Arneson for life.

Leading up to the procedure, Arneson has been showing his appreciation for the incredibly generous gift by sending drawings to his hero, who he calls the 'best police officer in the whole entire world.'

With his arms spread as wide as they could go, Arneson told WISN that he loves Bittorf, 'this much.'

Bittorf and Arneson are scheduled to go in for the transplant surgery on June 22.
We had a fabulous time last night at Portland's Powell's City of Books and now I'm on the runway to fly up to Seattle for tonight's event at the Neptune Theater with Neal Stephenson (it's not too late to get tickets!)  then tomorrow I'll be at Bellingham's Village Books before heading to the Vancouver Writers' Festival.



After that, there's only one more stop on this leg of the US/Canadian tour: an afternoon appearance at Burbank's Dark Delicacies on Saturday before I fly to the UK for the UK Walkaway Tour, which includes events in Oxford, London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Hay-on-Wye!

Can't wait to see you there!


Top US and EU officials will meet on Wednesday to discuss a controversial plan to outlaw carry-on laptops and other large electronics in planes flying from Europe to America.

The scheme, proposed by the US Department of Homeland Security, would extend the existing ban placed on eight Muslim countries to a string of EU nations, including Britain.

But while the existing ban only affects 50 flights a day, the Europe-US air corridor is the busiest in the world, with around 65 million flights a year.

That has led to concerns about chaos, thousands of flights being canceled and even fires in luggage holds - concerns that now appear to be one step closer to reality.

Ban: Laptops may soon be banned from cabins on EU-US flights. This would extend the ban placed by the US on airports in several Muslim-majority countries (right: a passenger in a Tunisian airport that is subject to a similar ban made by the UK)

Chaos: The US-EU air corridor is the most heavily trafficked in the world, and there are fears of chaos as a result of the ban, as well as canceled flights and frustrated customers

European Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas confirmed in a press conference on Monday that the commission would 'high-level talks at the political and technical level with the US authorities this Wednesday afternoon'.

She confirmed that the EU's home affairs and transport commissioners took part in a conference call Friday with homeland security secretary John Kelly to discuss the possible laptop ban.

But he could not say whether Kelly would attend the talks Wednesday.

She added that the commission - which proposes and implements legislation and decisions made in the EU - would 'assess any new threats' with the US and 'work toward a common approach to address them.'

That sterile language hides the very real threat of havoc for airline companies, who have scheduled more than 3,250 flights a week from EU airports to the US this summer.

Twitter users have already said that a ban on the laptops - which would interfere with work for traveling businessmen - would lead to them canceling trips.terroris

Meanwhile, parents have expressed horror at the thought of not being able to distract their children with tablets and e-readers, which would also be banned.

And many insurance companies do not cover damage inflicted on electronic items while they are in an airplane's hold.

Some experts also believe that forcing people to place their electronic items in the luggage hold could lead to disaster.

Fire hazard: Some experts say putting the devices in the luggage hold creates a higher risk of fire, since lithium-ion batteries can burst into flames - and there are no staff to put them out

Cancellations: Some have tweeted that they will cancel their flights if they cannot work during flights between Europe and America (pictured: a sign to London's Heathrow airport)

They run on lithium-ion batteries, which have been known to burst into flames in mid-air - and without staff around to put them out before they spread, such fires could prove deadly.

On Friday it was confirmed that Kelly had spoken to 'key European partners' - France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy - about the proposed ban.

He told the ministers on the call that the department does not plan to institute any new measures immediately, and agreed to discuss the matters this week.

In March, Washington banned passengers from ten airports in eight countries in North Africa and the Middle East from electronic devices larger than cellphones as carry-on items.

Britain followed shortly afterwards with a similar ban applying to incoming flights from six Middle-East and North African countries.

Those moves came amid concerns that Islamic terrorists might use the items to disguise bombs, although the US said it was due to 'long-standing concerns,' not a specific threat.

A hole was blown in the fuselage of a Somali airliner in February 2016 by a bomb believed to have been built into a laptop and carried into the passenger cabin.

However, the plane was at a low-enough altitude that the pilot was able to land the plane safely. Only one person was killed.

Explosion: In February 2016 this plane was damaged when a bomb believed to have been disguised as a laptop detonated on a Somali flight. Only one person was killed in the blast
Seven people - including five children - died early Monday morning in a house fire in Akron, Ohio.

Akron Fire Chief Clarence Tucker said his investigators are still working to determine what caused the fire, which broke out shortly before 3am on Monday.

The victims have been identified as father Dennis Huggins and mother Angela Boggs and children Cameron Huggins, age one; Alivia Huggins, three; Kylle Huggins, five; Daisia Huggins, six; and Jered Boggs, 14.

Seven people died early Monday morning in a house fire in Akron, Ohio

Five of the victims were children, ranging in age from one to 14

All of the victims were found in an upstairs bedroom of the three bedroom home

Fire officials are still investigating the cause of the blaze. ABove, a police officer at the scene on Monday

The bodies still need to be officially identified through dental records.

All seven of the victims were found in an upstairs bedroom of the three-bedroom house.

It's unclear if there were working smoke detectors in the home.

Firefighters were on the scene within five minutes of receiving a call early Monday morning.

By the time they arrived on the scene, the home was completely engulfed in flames.

Above, witness video of the home when it was still on fire early Monday morning

The bodies still need to be officially identified through dental records

'My deepest sympathies and prayers are with the family and loved ones of those who perished, and we pray for strength and healing in the difficult days to come,' Mayor Dan Horrigan said of the fire.

The fire occurred just a block from a home where a man and a woman died in an April 2016 fire investigated as a possible arson

'My deepest sympathies and prayers are with the family and loved ones of those who perished, and we pray for strength and healing in the difficult days to come,' Mayor Dan Horrigan said of the fire. 'We will see to it that the victims families are supported in this time of great sorrow and need.'

According to Ohio.com, two women who appeared to be family members showed up at the scene Monday afternoon and began sobbing.

After talking with a fire investigator the women started callying family memebers to tell them the news.

The fire occurred just a block from a home where a man and a woman died in an April 2016 fire investigated as a possible arson.
The only person arrested after a horrific 70-man brawl at a wedding that left a man in a coma has insisted he was just defending himself as he appeared in court.

Amritpal Singh, 23, was a wedding guest at the ceremony in Fremont last Sunday where an argument inside the Royal Banquet Hall sparked the 20-minute fight which spilled out into the parking lot.

The bride said it was caused by drunken gatecrashers being asked to leave and it ended in punches and kicks being exchanged and video footage captured brawlers being stomped on when they were on the ground.

There were also reports of metal objects being used, and Mr Singh's lawyer said the fight was so out of control that his client's life was in danger and therefore his actions were justified.

Horrifying footage showed one man being repeatedly kicked and punched by three men as he lay helpless on the pavement

Seth Morris, the defendant's attorney, told the East Bay Times: 'This fight that took place at the wedding was completely out of control.

'It involved lots of people fighting, throwing things, kicking.

'My client, Mr Singh, was beaten badly and he was in danger for life and his personal safety.

'His actions were 100 percent within the law.'

His client has been charged with battery causing great bodily injury to Daljit Gill, who was one of two men taken to hospital after the fight.

Mr Gill is in a coma but is showing signs of improvement, authorities said, and the second man has been discharged.

A dozen supporters accompanied Mr Singh - who was an invited guest at the wedding - at his second court appearance ahead of his plea hearing on June 5.

He is said to have told police he was drunk and although he remembered getting punched in the back of the head, he said he could not remember hitting Mr Gill.

Talking to the paper, Mr Morris added: 'The case is a tragedy, theres no doubt about that.

'No one goes to a wedding with the intent that someone gets hurt and Mr Singh and his family and all of his friends give their heartfelt hopes that Mr Gill has a full and speedy recovery.'

Two men were left in a critical condition after the brawl outside the wedding venue

Manjeet Kaur, 25, the bride, said the fight started when a group of 'drunk' outsiders gatecrashed the wedding and were furious when asked to leave.

Ms Kaur, who lives in Fremont, California, told the East Bay Times: 'They were outsiders, a bunch of boys my husband and I did not know, who found out about the party and were harassing the girls, so somebody kicked them out.

'They were really p****d off for being asked to leave, so when the party was over, they jumped some of the guests outside and started fighting.'

Raj Singh, who was the wedding photographer, said the fight lasted for at least 20 minutes before police arrived.

He said he believed the fight started after a row on the dance floor.

Mr Singh said he arrived at the Royal Palace around 4pm on Saturday afternoon and set up his equipment as guests started to arrive.

The wedding photographer said he saw 30 or 40 people fighting outside the venue

Some of the men reportedly had metal objects in their hands and were hitting people with them

He said that shortly after midnight, when around 200 guests were still at the event, the fight broke out.

'There was some kind of commotion inside the hall, some loud argument, and then people went outside and I saw 30 or 40 people fighting, beating each other up,' he recalled.

'They were mostly using their hands and feet, but some of them had metal objects in their hands and were hitting people with them.'

When police arrived most people fled, the photographer said.

Mr Singh identified the groom as Sukhchain Gill and said his family own a trucking company in Fremont.

It is not known whether the victim and the groom are related.

The fight took place outside the Royal Palace hotel (pictured) in Fremont near San Francisco

Security guards had tried to break up the fighting but were overwhelmed, police said.

About 20 officers from Fremont and Newark eventually brought the situation under control.

The owner and manager of the Royal Palace told KPIX 5 a number of security guards who were supposed to be working that night had pulled out at the last minute.

However he said that even the standard contingent of six or seven security guards would have struggled to control the brawling group.

Investigators said two men remain in hospital in a critical condition with serious head injuries after the attack.

Amritpal Singh, 25, was charged with felony battery, accused of causing great bodily injury to Daljit Gill.

Gurpreet Singh, 25, was initially arrested but was released Tuesday after the District Attorney's Office requested further investigation as to his role in the fight.

Both men had fled the scene in a white Maserati, police said.
Police in Massachusetts are searching for a missing Duke University student who has not been seen or heard from since early Sunday morning.

According to a press release from the Franklin Police Department, 20-year-old Michael Doherty was last spotted in the Phyllis Lane area at 1.30am Sunday after attending a house party with some friends.

Doherty, a graduate of Xavier High School, is a rising junior in the Pratt School of Engineering and a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at Duke.

Have you seen Michael? Police in Franklin, Massachusetts, are searching for 20-year-old Duke student Michael Doherty, pictured above on the day of his graduation from Xavier High School

Last sighting: Doherty was last spotted in the Phyllis Lane area of Franklin at 1.30am Sunday after attending a house party with some friends

Officers spent the day Sunday scouring the area for Doherty and employing K-9 dogs and a canoe to explore a swampy are

His family, who live in Franklin, say Doherty was home for the summer and went out with friends Saturday night.

Doherty is a rising junior in the Pratt School of Engineering and a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at Duke

Dohertys parents reported their son missing when he failed to come home from the party, according to the station WCVB.

Police officers spent the day Sunday scouring the area for Doherty and employing K-9 dogs and a canoe to explore a swampy area near Phyllis Lane, reported CBS Boston.

The operation was hampered by inclement weather, which made it impossible to deploy a helicopter to search for the missing man from the air.

The search resumed Monday morning, with Environmental Police joining in to comb through wooded and marshy areas in town.

Police are urging local residents to check outside their homes for Doherty, including sheds or detached buildings on their property.

Doherty is described as a white male, 5 feet 10 inches tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing a blue t-shirt with a Nike symbol, black pants and sneakers.
Jessica Alba's the Honest Company is voluntarily recalling baby wipes due to the possible presence of mold.

The company says the recall was issued 'out of abundance of caution' and that the mold is unlikely to be dangerous.

In a video announcing the recall on their website, co-founder Christopher Gavigan said that certain lots of Honest Wipes 'have a spotted discoloration and the aesthetics are unacceptable.'

Scroll down for video

Jessica Alba's the Honest Company is voluntarily recalling baby wipes due to the possibility of mold being present. She is pictured above promoting products in 2016

The company says the recall was issued 'out of abundance of caution' and that the mold is unlikely to be dangerous. The mold on the wipes is pictured above

Consumers are being advised to check if the packages of Honest Wipes are affected in the recall, by locating the lot number (circled in red) on the back of the wipes' package

Consumers are being advised to check if they own packages of Honest Wipes affected in the recall by locating the lot number on the back of the package.

WHICH HONEST BABY WIPES ARE BEING RECALLED? The Honest Wipes that are being voluntarily recalled by the company include the following lots: 10 count packages, UPC 0817810011276, 0816645024079, 0817810011276

72 count packages, UPC 0817810011863, 7000000011863, 0816645023584, 0816645023591

288 count packages, UPC 0817810014680

576 count packages, UPC 0817810028540 Honest Wipes that are affected by the mold may be returned to their point of purchase for a full refund. Advertisement

Honest Wipes that are affected by the mold may be returned to their point of purchase for a full refund.

The company noted that wipes are also included in Honest Diaper Cakes, Baby Basics Gift Set and Baby Arrival Gift Set.

The Santa Monica, California-based company said that no other products were impacted by the recall.

Back in January, the Honest Company recalled all bottles of its organic baby powder in the United States due to concerns of eye and skin infections.

That recall came after tests on the product revealed possible contaminants that could cause irritation in young children.

Alba co-founded the company in 2011 after the birth of her first child in 2008.

'When I became a mom, I finally became the person I am, that I always should have been,' she has previously said.

In the past, the actress said shew as inspired to start the company after the birth of her first child in 2008. On Sunday, she spent Mother's Day with her children and extended family (above)

'It's the most satisfying job in the world. But, it can also be overwhelming and confusing.

'I created The Honest Company to help moms and to give all children a better, safer start.'

On Sunday, the actress shared a photo to Instagram posing with her children and extended family for Mother's Day.
Jeremy Corbyn hijacked Theresa May's first ever appearance on Facebook Live to demand a TV debate.

But Mrs May dismissed his call, saying that it was more important for her to take questions directly from voters.

Among the scores of questions, Mrs May was asked to discuss her experience of type one diabetes.

The Tory leader revealed that she injects herself with insulin four or five times a day but urged fellow sufferers not to allow the illness to hold them back from doing what they want in life.

Jeremy Corbyn hijacked Theresa May's first ever appearance on Facebook Live to demand a TV debate

Theresa May was bombarded with 'angry' emojis at one point in the interview when she discussed giving Parliament a free vote on fox hunting

But Mrs May dismissed Mr Corbyn's call, saying that it was more important for her to take questions directly from voters.

Mrs May will hope the unorthodox appearance will improve her standing among young voters - the only group generally polling in favour of Mr Corbyn.

But the interview was bombarded by almost 10,000 people smashing the 'angry' button - far outweighing 'likes' and 'loves', which while the interview was taking place added up to about 5,000.

Asked by a fellow diabetes patient about her own experience of the condition, Mrs May said: 'I am a type one diabetic. That means when I eat, I have to inject insulin, which I do.

'I will be injecting myself four or five times a day... You just get into a routine. You depend on that insulin and you just build that routine into your daily life.

What is diabetes? Diabetes is a lifelong condition that causes a person's blood sugar level to become too high. It can lead to heart disease, stroke, vision loss and kidney problems unless managed properly. There are two types of diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is where the body's immune system attacks and destroys the cells that produce insulin. Type 2 diabetes is where the body doesn't produce enough insulin, or the body's cells don't react to insulin. Source: NHS Direct Advertisement

'The crucial thing to me is being a diabetic doesn't stop you from doing anything.'

At one point in the 45-minute clash, ITV political editor Robert Peston paused to tell her he had received a query from 'Jeremy Corbyn of Islington'.

He read out: 'Hello Theresa May, as Prime Minister you've served your elite friends by giving them tax cuts when wages have stagnated, house-building is at its lowest since the 1920s, there are 20,000 fewer police on our streets since 2010 and the NHS is in crisis.

'Do you not think the British people deserve to see me and you debate live and on television?'

Mrs May responded: 'What I think is more important is actually that I and he take questions directly from the voters.

'I don't think people get much out of seeing politicians having a go at each other, I think people want to hear directly.'

Jeremy Corbyn sent out a tweet thanking ITV Political Editor Robert Peston for selecting his question from the thousands submitted during the unprecedented Q&A

ITV will on Thursday host a live televised election debate in Salford, and has said that an invitation to the leaders of the seven biggest parties will remain open until the broadcast starts.

But Mrs May has insisted she will not take part in any televised head-to-head clashes with her rivals, and Mr Corbyn has indicated he will not take part if the Prime Minister is absent.

Six highlights from the PM's ITV Facebook Live interview On Fox Hunting: Theresa May: I have always supported fox hunting, but crucially I am not saying that I am going to bring it back, what Im saying is we are going to have a free vote in parliament so MPs are going to be able to make up their own mind on this issue. But look, this isnt the most important issue facing people at this election. I think the most important issue is about who is going to provide the leadership for the future to take us through Brexit and beyond. On Brexit and the rights of EU citizens living in the UK: Theresa May: I think its important that we are able to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living here. But I also want to see the rights of UK citizens living in the remaining 27 EU countries being guaranteed as well. Thats why I say it is a reciprocal arrangement I am looking for and I want to see that done at an early stage. It can be quite complex, but I want to see it done at an early stage. On another Scottish independence referendum: Theresa May: The SNP at the time of the 2014 referendum not only said actually that it was a once in a generation referendum vote, but they said it was a once in a lifetime vote. I dont think its right to talk about a second independence referendum, particularly now when we are facing the Brexit negotiations. This is the time when the UK should be working together and not pulling apart. And I think the SNP has had a tunnel vision about this issue and what we need to be doing is making sure we are getting the right deal out of Brexit. On PIP payments to those with an illness, disability or mental health issue: Theresa May: Its right that the Department for Work and Pensions has been and continues to look at that assessment process. Some people say dont have an assessment process, abolish it, but I dont think thats right. I think that we need to make sure that we are seeing the money go to those people who need it, but of course we need to certainly be looking at how that process is undertaken so we make sure it is a system that is genuinely identifying those that are in need. On legalising cannabis: Theresa May: There have obviously been some studies into the use of cannabis, or derivatives in relation to the medical use. The reason I dont believe in legislating making cannabis use legal is because of the impact that I see it having on too many people in terms of the drug use OI think what we have seen is stronger forms now being used, I think it can have a real impact in terms of mental health. But it can also lead to people going on to harder drugs, and there is a wonderful woman in my constituency, a woman called Elizabeth Burton Phillips who runs something called DrugFAM which supports families. One of her twin sons. They both started on cannabis when they were at school and went on to heroin and one of her twin sons committed suicide. This has a huge impact on families. On school funding: Theresa May: First of all, record levels of funding are going into our schools. There are two things happening  one is a question about the level of funding thats going into schools now, and its around 40 billion. And the other question is about a new formula for distributing the money between schools, and we consulted on that formula. Across the political spectrum people recognise that the current way of distributing funds among schools is not fair. Advertisement

More than 40,000 questions were submitted during the 40 minute broadcast and Mrs May answered dozens of queries on food banks, fox hunting, the armed forces, benefits, tax avoiders and cannabis legalisation.

And she discussed her taste in fashion, saying that her message to other women wondering what to wear in the workplace was: 'Don't be afraid to be yourself.'

On fake news videos about her during the Tory leadership campaign Mrs May said: 'During the Conservative Party leadership campaign we started to see nasty videos sent around about me.

Mrs May revealed her experience of suffering diabetes during the Facebook Live event, revealing she injected insulin four or five times a day

More than 40,000 questions were submitted during the 40 minute broadcast and Mrs May answered dozens of queries on food banks, fox hunting, the armed forces, benefits, tax avoiders and cannabis legalisation

'I didn't see any of them, I'm told it's in the realms of claims that weren't accurate.'

The PM added: 'Social media does bring huge benefits.

'One of the things I want is for people to be able to ask social media companies to remove their record sup to the age of 18.'

One Twitter user poked fun at the PM during her Facebook Live interview when so many viewers posted 'angry' emojis it obscured her face

Another Twitter user was also quick to point out the flood of emoji faces

Asked if she will she see Brexit to its close, Mrs May said: 'If elected I will certainly serve my full term.

'I want to make sure Brexit happens and it's a good deal for the UK'.

She adds: 'I think we can do it in two years.'

The appearance on Facebook Live came after the Prime Minister was confronted by Cathy Mohan, who has learning difficulties, during her visit to Abingdon today

Mrs May faced several questions about fox hunting and said: 'Fox hunting is something which you either believe in and you support it or you don't.

'No I've never been fox hunting.'

PM IS PUT IN HER PLACE WITH 'BEST OF BAD BUNCH' JIBE Theresa May is riding high in the polls and on track for a whopping majority on June 8. But she was brought down to earth today by a voter who told her she was the 'best of a bad bunch. The jibe came as the PM toured the market in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Mrs May insisted she was 'flattered' by the grudging acceptance that she was better than Jeremy Corbyn. 'I'll take that as flattering,' she said. Advertisement

She added: 'If you look at the research that has been done, there is an issue around how you cull the fox population

'I believe it should be a free vote for Parliament. I think people do feel strongly about it but there are many other issues people will be looking.'

Mrs May was also confronted by a questioner demanding to know why former Ukip leader Nigel Farage had not been given a knighthood. The PM laughed but did not reply.

The Prime Minister's Facebook appearance came hours after she was confronted during a walkabout in Oxfordshire by a woman with learning disabilities who complained that cuts in her benefits had left her without enough money to live on.

Cathy Mohan told the PM that she had only 100 a month in Personal Independence Payments to live on and pleaded for the return of the Disability Living Allowance, which was replaced by PIP under Government reforms.

Mrs May told Peston the PIP reforms were 'part of trying to ensure that we focus payments on those who most need it, those who are most vulnerable'.

Mrs May has spent the entire election campaign around 20 points ahead of Labour - figures which suggest a Conservative majority of around 150 on June 8

She added: 'There are a number of issue people raise around PIPs. One is about the assessment process and we have been making changes in that to make that a better process for people. We want to try to help those disabled people able to get into the workplace to do so.'

Mrs May stopped short of recommitting to the long standing policy of free bus passes for pensioners.

She said: 'Id rather wait until we publish that package in the manifesto for people to see what were going to do.'

Mrs May said that she did not mind comments about her fashion sense, repeating a story she has told before about a woman who told her that her distinctive shoes had inspired her to go into politics.

'What I would hope for women out there, be it getting into politics or in business or the workplace generally, is be yourself,' she said.

'Obviously there is some employment where you have to wear a particular uniform, but generally don't be afraid to be yourself.'
President Trump's Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert called last week's WannaCry cyber attack 'an urgent call for collective action' and said the U.S. government has yet to finger the culprits.

Bossert spoke Monday morning with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos who asked the White House aide if the attack, which struck more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries, could be the work of a foreign government.

'We have not ruled that out,' Bossert replied. 'But attribution is always a little difficult here.'

He reiterated that state Monday afternoon during the White House press briefing, briefly taking over the podium from Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

'We're bringing all the capabilities of the U.S. government to bear on this issue and are working side by side with our partners in the private sector and our international partners,' Bossert said.

As for who's responsible he said, 'I feel like the best and brightest are working on that.'

Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert said Monday at the White House that the 'best and brightest' are looking into who might be behind last week's massive cyber attack

President Trump's Homeland Security Advisor Thomas Bossert called last week's WannaCry cyber attack 'an urgent call for collective action'

Tom Bossert (right) spoke with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos (left) from the White House on Monday morning about the threat, saying computer users 'are not yet out of the woods'

The national security adviser explained to Stephanopoulos that 'criminality,' or rather a criminal enterprise, looked to be responsible as the malware locks up data and then demands money.

'For right now we've got it under control, but as an attack that represents an extremely serious threat,' Bossert also said. 'Not just criminal threat, but as this criminal threat has turned into something that has affected hospitals in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.'

Last week, the WannaCry malware attack affected the U.K. National Health Service and computers in Russia's foreign ministry.

It also impacted companies including FedEx and Nissan.

However, while the program's aim is to get computer users to pay money, Bossert said only $70,000 was paid in ransom worldwide.

He also noted that the ransom payments did not mean parties got their data back.

Spicer, when asked about the administration's stance on ransom, highlighted prevention over payouts.

'Prevention right now is the key that we're stressing,' the press secretary said.

Microsoft's President Brad Smith was extremely critical of the National Security Agency for weaponizing a weakness it found in Windows, which most computers operate on

On Friday night, President Trump tasked Bossert with holding an emergency meeting on the cyber attack, while administration officials and some cabinet secretaries gathered Saturday, too, to discuss the ongoing threat.

The FBI and National Security Agency are trying to identify who's responsible.

This attack was made worse because it utilized a tool, called Eternal Blue, which was stolen from the NSA.

Eternal Blue made the malware more easily passable between computers.

'This was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data, this was a tool developed by culpable parties, potentially criminals of foreign nation states,' Bossert explained at the press briefing, articulating the difference.

A top Microsoft executive blasted the government for weaponizing a weakness the NSA found in Windows.

'The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call,' advised Microsoft's President Brad Smith. 'We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on Wikileaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world.'

Press Secretary Sean Spicer (right) briefly handed over his podium to Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert, so the aide could discuss the recent 'WannaCry' cyber attack

On ABC Bossert deflected any blame aimed at the U.S. government.

'What's culpable and who's culpable is the criminals who distribute it and the criminals who weaponize it, added additional details to it, turned it into something that is holding ransom data, but also putting at risks lives at hospitals,' Bossert responded.

Bossert warned that computer users in the U.S. and around the world 'are not yet out of the woods,' as copycats could spring up and give new life to the malware.

He recommended that users install patches for their systems as they become available and make sure that those patches automatically update.

'Ultimately the U.S. infection rate is lower than many parts or the world, but we may still see significant impacts on additional networks as these malware attacks and change,' he said Monday afternoon in the briefing room.
The Immigration Department has granted permanent residency to over 3,000 foreign brides in the past five years who have accused their Australian husbands of domestic violence.

Visas were given to 3,083 women from countries across Asia, Europe and the Middle East who were attempting to escape relationships that threatened their safety.

Despite the large number who have won the right to remain in Australia, the Daily Telegraph reports a quarter of applicants were rejected, with a further 977 women denied for turning in fabricated files.

Over 3,000 foreign bridges have been given permanent residency in Australia over the past five years by the Immigration Department

3,083 women from countries across Asia, Europe and the Middle East won the right to remain in Australia after proving they had been in relationships that threatened their safety

A spokeswoman for the department said visas had been revoked as applicants gave 'false or misleading information' or failed to meet criteria for character and health.

Non-Australians must be in a marriage of de facto relationship for two years to apply for permanent residency, but a law change in 2012 has made it easier for foreigners to remain in Australia should the relationship end.

'Family violence provisions exist to allow eligible partner visa applicants to leave a violent relationship without the risk of losing their right of residence in Australia,' the spokeswoman said.

Violence could consist of psychical psychological abuse or harm, forced sex, forced isolation or economic deprivation

A law change in 2012 made it easier for foreign-born spouses to remain in Australia under 'family violence provisions'

The person must prove to the Immigration Department they or their family have suffered 'physical or psychological abuse or harm, forced sex, forced isolation or economic deprivation'.

China had the largest number of successful applications, with 389, with India, Vietnam and the Philippines close behind with 363, 323 and 321 respectively.

The United Kingdom and Thailand both had over 200 granted residency, Lebanon 130 and both Fiji and Korea having less than 100 applicants.

Immigration Department spokeswoman said applications should be able to leave a violent relationship without 'fear of losing their right of residence in Australia'
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President Donald Trump gave his full-throated support to the men and women in blue on Monday at a ceremony where he defended police officers from 'unfair defamation and vilification.'

Trump came down on the side of cops in the politically tricky topic that he accused other politicians of shying away from for fear they would upset the electorate.

'You are the thin blue line between civilization and chaos,' he told law enforcement officers gathered outside the US Capitol for a memorial service.

Thanking them, Trump, who noted in his remarks that he was in New York on 9/11, said: 'I will make it the personal priority of my administration to ensure that our police are finally treated fairly, with honor and the respect that they deserve.'

'Every drop of blood spilled by our heroes in blue is a wound inflicted upon the whole country. And every hear ache known by your families in law enforcement is a sorrow shared by the entire family of the American nation.'

President Donald Trump gave his full-throated support to the men and women in blue on Monday at a ceremony where he defended police officers from 'unfair defamation and vilification'

Trump came down on the side of cops in the politically tricky topic that he accused other politicians of shying away from for fear they would lose votes

Trump is seen arriving at the ceremony Monday at the US Capitol

Trump asked Americans around the country to tell a police officer 'thank you' next time they come across one and promised to declare his support proudly for law enforcement throughout his administration

Police officers salute during 36th annual National Peace Officers' Memorial Service at the U.S. Capitol on May 15, 2017 in Washington, DC. The service is part of National Police Week and honors police officers across the country

Trump saluted cops at the 36th annual National Peace Officers's Memorial Service on the West Front of the US Capitol building.

'Please know that you do not grieve alone,' he told the survivors of fallen officers.

The New York born and bred president said the people of his native city 'would be gone' had it not been for police officers' heroism on Sept. 11, 2001.

'Now, as president, my highest duty is to keep America safe,' he said. 'We will keep America safe,' he promised.

Trump asked Americans around the country to tell a police officer 'thank you' next time they come across one and promised to declare his support proudly for law enforcement throughout his administration.

He tossed a '45' hat midway through his remarks to a young boy he identified as 'Micah,' whose father had died in the line of duty.

'And just to show you, by the way, how much I love our police, I said, "Oh, I'm going to need a hat because it's so windy today,' Trump said at the outdoor event. 'I said, "When I got out of here, there's no way I'm going to put on this hat." So we'll leave off the hat. And this is for you, Micah. That's for our beautiful Micah down there.'

President Donald Trump waves as he leaves after speaking at the 36th Annual National Peace Officers' memorial service

The New York born and bred president said the people of his native city 'would be gone' had it not been for police officers' heroism on Sept. 11, 2001

Decrying violent attacks on law enforcement, Trump said, 'We will protect you, that I can tell you, and we will say enough is a enough...the attacks on our police must end, and they must end right now.'

He did not directly bring up the police brutality allegations that swept the nation when Barack Obama was president, most visibly in places like Ferguson, Missouri.

Trump broached the topic by arguing instead that Americans 'truly support and love' the nation's officers - even though they don't always show it.

'And a very sad thing is that many of today's politicians don't want to say that, don't want to talk about that, because it's not politically correct, or they think it might hurt them with the voters,' Trump said.

'I will say it, and I will talk about it proudly,' he said to applause.

Trump denounced 'reckless words of incitement' that he said are leading to more assaults on police officers.

'It is time to work with our cops, not against them,' he said.

Police supported him 'big league' in his election, Trump said, and he intends to repay them.

Trump signed a proclamation this morning honoring 118 officers who died in the line of duty last year - 66 of whom the president says were 'victims of malicious attacks'

President Donald Trump claps in the Oval Office after signing a law enforcement executive order this morning

Trump directed his Department of Justice earlier this this year to develop a strategy to better prevent violence against law enforcement officers

'President Trump's highest priority is the safety and security of the American people,' Vice President Mike Pence said in remarks before the president.

'This president knows in his heart that to make America safe again, we must also restore the tradition of respect and honor that is owed to every member of the law enforcement community in America,' the VP said.

Trump is lighting the White House blue tonight in honor of officers who have fallen.

He signed a proclamation this morning honoring 118 officers who died in the line of duty last year - 66 of whom the president says were 'victims of malicious attacks.'

'They've had it with what's going on, and we're going to get it taken care of. We're going to get it taken care of quickly,' Trump said Monday.

Trump directed his Department of Justice earlier this this year to develop a strategy to better prevent violence against law enforcement officers.

The document he signed today further directs DOJ to establish an initiative to 'improve the lives of law enforcement officers and their families.'

It establishes May 15 as a day honoring fallen officers and dedicates the entire week to police officers.

The Peace Officers Memorial Day and Police Week proclamations began with John F. Kennedy in 1962. The ceremony outside the Capitol began in 1982.
A barman has appeared in court today accused of murdering his girlfriend after her body was found near her home.

Anthony Bird, 48, from Kinmel Bay in North Wales, was arrested in connection with disappearance of Tracy Kearns, 43 - who went missing on May 7.

A huge police search was launched near Tir Prince amusement park and last night the mother-of-two's body was discovered near her home.

Anthony Bird, 48, from Kinmel Bay in North Wales, was arrested in connection with disappearance of Tracy Kearns, 43 - who went missing on May 7

Forensics experts take away bags of items from the house of Tracy Kearns in North Wales

Bird was charged with her murder last night and appeared at Llandudno Magistrates' Court today where he spoke only to confirm his name.

Bird, also from Kinmel Bay, will now appear at Mold Crown Court tomorrow.

Forensic detectives were pictured examining the the scene and collecting evidence at the site where Ms Kearns' body was found.

Items from her home were taken out of the house and put into police vans for closer inspection.

Her car was also seized from outside her property to be examined by officers.

Detective Chief Inspector Neil Harrison from North Wales Police said: 'I can confirm that the body found yesterday has sadly been identified as that of Tracy Kearns who had previously been reported missing.

'I am conscious of the impact the incident has had locally, and I would like to thank the community of Kinmel Bay for all their patience and support over the past five days.'

Bird was charged with her murder last night and appeared at Llandudno Magistrates' Court today where he spoke only to confirm his name

Forensic detectives were pictured examining the the scene and collecting evidence at the site where Ms Kearns' body was found
Osama bin Laden was micro-managing al Qaeda's brand until the day he was captured and not hiding in a cave as has been the assumption, it has been claimed.

Former FBI investigator Ali Soufan has lifted the lid on the terrorist who once topped the world's most wanted list.

While people thought he was lying low in an attempt to avoid US detection, it has transpired he was still leading the terror group from afar after 9/11.

It's transpired Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden did not live out his days hiding in a cave (pictured)

In the interview, Soufan said: 'Osama bin Laden was not just, you know, sitting in his house to avoid being captured or killed.

'He was in, some instances, micro-managing al Qaeda and its affiliates,' according to the New York Post.

As well as telling militants not to behead people to protect the terror group's image, he is said to have given advice on what crops to plant and grow.

Over the weekend, it was revealed bin Laden's son Hamza is poised to lead al Qaeda years after his father's death, personal letters seized in the raid that killed bin Laden have revealed.

Now, Hamza is about 28 years old, but he wrote one of the letters to his father when he was 22.

A former FBI agent who has read the documents, which are now declassified, said that Hamza seems motivated and prepared to avenge his father.

Ali Soufan was an agent who also served as the bureau's lead investigator of al Qaeda after 9/11.

Osama bin Laden's son Hamza (pictured right as a young boy) could be the next face of al Qaeda, according to letters found after the 2011 raid that killed bin Laden

He said bin Laden's son was seen as the next possible leader of the terrorist organization when he was just a child, CBS News reported.

Principal among Hamza's messages is his desire for revenge.

'He's basically saying, "American people, we're coming and you're going to feel it. And we're going to take revenge for what you did to my fatherIraqAfghanistan"the whole thing was about vengeance,' Soufan said.

For a new episode of 60 Minutes, Soufan explained the importance of the personal letter, despite the fact that when Hamza wrote it he had not seen his father for years.

'He tells him thathe remembers "every lookevery smile you gave me, every word you told me. I consider myself to be forged in steel. The path of jihad for the sake of God is what we live,"' Soufan said about Hamza.

Hamza has been a prominent figure in several propaganda videos for al Qaeda, even as a young boy. He was filmed calling for terrorist attacks on London, Washington and Paris in an audio message released by the organization in 2015.

He has recorded four of theses types of messages in the last two years.

This January, Hamza was placed on a State Department terror watch list and named a 'specially designated global terrorist' - the same classification Osama had.

Hamza, now believed to be 28 years old, has been a prominent figure in several propaganda videos

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, described that part of what Hamza said in the letter to his father was: 'The path of jihad for the sake of God is what we live'

Experts have tried to imagine what Hamza might look like now with the help of age progression technology

'He was a poster kid for the al Qaedaand for members of al Qaeda, who were indoctrinated with these propaganda videos, he means a lot to them,' Soufan said.

Soufan said Hamza also uses the same terminology and sentences that his father once used.

Osama was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2, 2011, by US Navy SEAL Team Six.

Following his death, dozens of letters written by him to his family and senior members of al Qaeda were released.

Senior intelligence officials claimed that some revealed he had been grooming his son to take over the terror group. In one letter, Hamza's mother even implored her son to follow in his 'father's footsteps.'
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, an ambitious Republican who surprised Washington when he announced he will retire at the end of his term, is reportedly telling colleagues he has landed a gig at Fox News.

Chaffetz had anticipated spending his tenure ramping up investigations of Democrat Hillary Clinton, pointing to the 'target-rich environment.' Instead, he heads a panel with vast oversight over the Trump administration.

After announcing in April that he would not seek reelection in 2018, Chaffetz he will take on a role at Fox News.

'According to two GOP lawmakers who have spoken to Chaffetz directly and four senior House Republican aides, Chaffetz has been telling people he'll take on what one source calls a 'substantial role' in on-air talent at Fox News Channel, possibly as early as July, amplifying whispers that Chaffetz will not finish out his current term, Washingtonian magazine reported.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz has announced his retirement, and is reportedly telling colleagues he has landed an on-air assignment on Fox News

Chaffetz, 50, who is considered one of the more telegenic House Republicans, wrote on Facebook that he made a personal decision to return to the private sector.

His announcement of his future plans came on the same day host Bill O-Reilly announced he was stepping down after a series of reports about alleged sexual harassment.

Chaffetz announced he would join the private sector the day it was revealed Fox News host Bill O'Reilly was leaving the network

Chaffetz also left work for foot surgery, returning in early may using a scooter to vote for the GOP's plan to repeal Obamacare.

He had said a week earlier: 'My recovery is expected to take three to four weeks. I'm sorry to miss the important work we are doing in Washington. This is not an opportune time to be away but medical emergencies are never convenient. I appreciate my constituent's patience and understanding as I take time to recover.'

Chaffetz left work for foot surgery, returning in early may using a scooter to vote for the GOP's plan to repeal Obamacare

As oversight chair, Chaffetz had jurisdiction over a vast array of the government that could have put him in constant tension with President Trump. Committee Democrats have continued to dog the administration with requests for information about the president's business income and have tried to force the release of his taxes.

Chaffetz has joined in questioning the strain the president's travels to his personal properties have placed on Secret Service agents. ''They are flat-out worn out,' he told the New York Times in an article about the strain.

If he were to join Fox, Chaffetz would be traveling ground covered by a number of prominent Republicans  including some with national ambitions.

Others have included former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Chaffetz, 50, is considering a run for governor of Utah in 2020.

Chaffetz got booed by constituents during a February town hall. At one point he told them: ''You're not going to like this part: the president, under the law, is exempt from conflict of interest laws,' Politico reported.
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The Syrian government has been accused of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners by the US government - which released satellite images to prove it.

The Trump administration claims the bodies of those killed were burned in a large crematorium attached to the Saydnaya prison complex outside the Syrian capital of Damascus.

The allegation matches an Amnesty International report released in February which claimed up to 13,000 people - mostly civilians opposed to the government - have been hanged in secret at the prison.

Stuart Jones, the acting US assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, said Syrian President Bashar Assad's government 'has sunk to a new level of depravity' as he revealed the photographs.

This satellite image, taken Jan. 15 and provided by the State Department and DigitalGlobe, shows what the State Department describes as a building in a prison complex in Syria that was modified to support a crematorium used to burn dead prisoners

These photos, taken on Aug. 27, 2013 and Apr. 15, 2016, show how Saydnaya prison has been modified with what are believed to crematorium fixtures. The State Dept claims the Syrian government is executing 50 prisoners a day

The final photo, taken on Apr. 18 this year and released by the State Department show the short distance between the main prison and the crematorium is. The Trump administration says there have been mass executions of prisoners

President Bashar al-Assad (pictured) has been accused of sinking to a 'new level of depravity' by the State Department, which has accused him of executing thousands, mostly civilians opposed to his regime, in the prison

Assad has been accused of other atrocities during the six-year-long civil war, including this bombing of a residential district in the Syrian capital of Damascus in February of this year. Assad has used punishing attacks to try to quell his opposition

Assad's government was also accused of the gas attack on Idlib in April that left this young boy dead. A judge who worked in the prison outside Damascus said some of those who died there were also 'young' - but did not go into detail

The State Department says about 50 detainees a day are being hanged at the military prison, which is located about 45 minutes from Damascus.

'Credible sources have believed that many of the bodies have been disposed in mass graves,' Jones told reporters as he showed them aerial photos of the alleged building.

'We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Sednaya prison complex which could dispose of detainees' remains with little evidence.'

He added that the crematorium - construction on which began in 2013 -esd 'an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya.'

THE JAIL WHERE PRISONERS ARE BEATEN AND HANGED Hangings at Saydnaya are carried out once or twice a week, usually on Monday and Wednesday, in the middle of the night, according to insiders. Those whose names are called out were told they would be transferred to civilian prisons in Syria. Instead, they are moved to a cell in the basement of the prison and beaten severely. They are then transported to another prison building on the grounds of Saydnaya, where they are hanged. Throughout this process, they remain blindfolded. They do not know when or how they will die until the noose was placed around their necks. 'They kept them [hanging] there for 10 to 15 minutes. Some didn't die because they are light. For the young ones, their weight wouldn't kill them,' said a former judge who witnessed the hangings. 'The officers' assistants would pull them down and break their necks.' Detainees held in the building in the floors above the 'execution room' reported that they sometimes heard the sounds of these hangings. (Source: Amnesty International) Advertisement

One of the satellite images, provided by the State Department and taken from commercial satellites in January 2015, shows the building that the US says was modified to support a crematorium.

The snow on one section of the roof is melted in the photo, showing that it was taken in the winter.

Three other photos were also released, with two - taken in August 2013 and April 2016 - showing a side-by-side comparison of the building believed to house the crematorium, before and after it was altered.

The latter of those two images shows what are believed to be air intake vents, air conditioning units and a 'discharge stack' that could be used to expel the smoke created by thousands of burning bodies.

Those photos do not definitely prove the building is a crematorium, but they show construction consistent with such use.

It's not clear why the US has waited until now to release this information, but Jones told reporters: 'I would say that this information has been developing.'

The final photograph, taken in April 2017, shows how close the alleged crematorium building is to the prison - easily just a few minutes' walk for a condemned man, and moments for a vehicle.

Jones cited US intelligence agencies and 'credible' humanitarian organizations as sources for the claims about the crematorium.

He added that 'The regime holds as many as 70 prisoners in Saydnaya in cells that have a five-person capacity.'

It's not yet clear exactly where the prisoners are killed, but a judge who witnessed the executions told Amnesty International that they are taken in the night to another building.

There they are beaten before being hanged to death.

Some - described as 'the young ones' - are too light for the rope, and so officers' assistants will pull down on their feet to break their necks.

Others are left hanging for 10-15 minutes.

Amnesty International released the shocking claims in February, along with statistics about the secret hangings, saying up to 13,000 people had been executed there.

It said the executions have happened at a rate of around 50 a day between 2011 and 2015 - the first five years of the country's ongoing civil war.

Assad's regime detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same period, Jones said.

This map shows the relation to the prison of the crematorium, and their proximity to the Syrian capital of Damascus. It's believed that the execution orders came from top officials

Civil war has raged across Syria for six years now, destroying homes and lives. Throughout that period, thousands of prisoners have been held in, and executed at, the prison, the US claims

There is no escape from the war that ravages the country; this child was injured in the April 4 bombing of Damascus. It was initially believed that Assad had been disposing of his opponents in mass graves; now the US believes he has cremated them

Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International's regional office in Beirut, said: 'The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population.

'We demand that the Syrian authorities immediately cease extrajudicial executions and torture and inhuman treatment at Saydnaya Prison and in all other government prisons across Syria.

'Russia and Iran, the government's closest allies, must press for an end to these murderous detention policies.'

Jones echoed those thoughts, saying: 'The United States is on record, has stated many times, that we are appalled by the atrocities that have been carried out by the Syrian regime.

'And these atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran.'

He clarified that Washington is not specifically accusing Moscow or Tehran of complicity in the alleged Saydnaya killings, but said Russia is aware of and has supported other abuses.

He also gave a warning to President Vladimir Putin's government: 'Russia must now, with great urgency, exercise its influence over the Syrian regime to guarantee that horrific violations stop now.'

He said he had not yet presented the evidence of the crematorium to Russian officials.

But he said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had raised concerns about Assad's brutality with Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrovm during the latter's visit to Washington last week.

State department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Tillerson had been 'firm and clear' in a meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov last week that 'Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad.'

A main point of that meeting 'was telling Russia to use its power to rein in the regime,' she said.

The sarin gas attack that claimed this child's life in April is believed to be the work of Assad, who continues to receive backing from Russia and Iran. US officials said they hoped the news of the crematorium may sway them against the embattled ruler

Rescuers search for survivors of an airstrike on a residential area of Saqba Town in the Eastern Ghouta Region of Damascus. Assad continues to bomb civilians in his country, while 65,000-117,000 people were also detained by his regime from 2011-15

Jones also said on Monday that the United States should not wholeheartedly believe a deal to set up 'de-escalation zones' brokered by Russia during ceasefire talks in the Kazakh capital Astana last week.

The deal was reached with support from Iran and Turkey during ceasefire talks in the Kazakh capital of Astana earlier this month. Jones attended the talks.

'In light of the failures of the past ceasefire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical,' he said.

Jones said Assad's government had carried out air strikes, chemical attacks, extrajudicial killings, starvation, and other measures to target civilians and its opponents.

He criticized Russia and Iran for maintaining their support for Assad despite those tactics.

'These atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran,' Jones said.

'The [Assad] regime must stop all attacks on civilian and opposition forces. And Russia must bear responsibility to ensure regime compliance.'

He did not say what measures America might take if Russia does not change its stance.

Tensions between the US and Russia heightened after President Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in April against a Syrian air base that the US said had been used to launch a poison gas attack on civilians.

When Trump took up office he vowed to focus the US's Syrian efforts on defeating ISIS, which has used the chaos created by the civil war to seize land in the area.

He said at the time that he hoped to work with Putin, whose forces are in Syria to protect Assad's regime, to achieve that goal.

But relations with Moscow, already dire under Barack Obama, have not improved and Assad has continued to bombard civilian areas in his battle with opposition rebels.

And last month, when Assad was again accused of using the banned nerve agent sarin in a strike on his own people, Trump ordered a retaliatory US cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base.
Barron Trump probably scored even more cool points with his friends after reportedly taking his entire fifth-grade class to tour the White House and meet his father during a secret trip.

The 11-year-old student at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School went to Washington, D.C. last Wednesday on a bus with roughly 80 classmates accompanied by their teachers and Secret Service agents, the New York Post reported.

'All the kids got dressed up: The girls were in dresses and the boys wore khaki pants and button-downs. It was so cute,' a source told the Post.

'They had a buffet lunch and a tour of the White House and met the president and the first lady, Melania Trump.

Barron Trump probably scored even more cool points with his friends after reportedly taking his entire fifth-grade class to tour the White House and meet his father during a secret trip. Barron is pictured with his father in March

The 11-year-old student at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School (file above) went to Washington, D.C. last Wednesday on a bus with roughly 80 classmates accompanied by their teachers and Secret Service agents

'President Trump gave them all a rousing speech about living up to your potential and being the best you could be for your country.

'Barron was really sweet. He was so excited to show his classmates around the White House.'

The large group of students also toured the nation's capital and stayed overnight at a hotel before traveling back to New York City on Thursday.

Barron's class field trip to DC comes after critics have accused the Trump family of nepotism thanks to his older sister, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, both having jobs in their father's administration.

During a candid interview with Forbes, Eric Trump said he wholeheartedly agreed with those who believe he and his siblings only got their jobs because of nepotism.

'Nepotism is kind of a factor of life,' said Eric in an interview with Forbes.

'We might be here because of nepotism, but were not still here because of nepotism. You know, if we didnt do a good job, if we werent competent, believe me, we wouldnt be in this spot.'

The president also spoke to his son's class, telling them to live up to their potential. Barron is pictured behind is father as his mother speaks to him during inauguration day in January

After Donald Trump's shock election victory and his inauguration as president, Barron stayed behind with his mother at Trump Tower so that he could finish up his studies at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, which is located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

It was announced this week that the youngest member of the Trump family will attend the prestigious St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland beginning in the fall.

Barron and his mother will relocate from New York City to DC, joining his father who has lived in the White House since his inauguration.

Of the decision, the first lady said in a statement: 'We are very excited for our son to attend St. Andrew's Episcopal School.

'It is known for its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence.

'The mission of St. Andrew's is 'to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning, and service,' all of which appealed to our family. We look forward to the coming school years at St. Andrew's.'

There was speculation as to which school Barron would attend, but the decision to send the boy to the Potomac, Maryland, institution was announced by the White House on Monday.

The tuition costs over $38,000 per year, and he will be the first presidential child to attend the coeducational college preparatory school founded in 1978.
Four New York frat boys have pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter over the brutal hazing death of a pledge at a Poconos lodge.

Chun 'Michael' Deng, 19, died of sustaining fatal brain injuries in December 2013 during a Pi Delta Psi pledging ritual known as the 'glass ceiling' at a Poconos lodge.

Baruch College fraternity brothers Kenny Kwan, 27, Charles Lai, 25, Raymond Lam, 23, and Sheldon Wong, 24, were initially charged with third-degree murder over his death.

But on Monday, each pleaded guilty to a charge of voluntary manslaughter.

Sheldon Wong, right, leaves the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania after he and three other frat brothers pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter

Kenny Kwan, center leaving court on Monday, was among the four who admitted voluntary manslaughter in the death of Chun 'Michael' Deng

The four defendants also pleaded guilty to hindering apprehension. Wong did not participate in the assault but helped organize the hazing.

The typical sentence range for voluntary manslaughter is 22 to 36 months.

Defense attorneys have called Deng's death a tragedy but said their clients didn't intend to kill him. They characterized it as a fraternity prank gone horribly awry.

The incident occurred on December 8, 2013, when more than 30 fraternity brothers from the Baruch College chapter - one of ten senior colleges of The City University of New York - were in a rented lodge near Poconos, Pennsylvania, around 100 miles from their college in New York.

Chun 'Michael' Deng, 19, (pictured) died of sustaining fatal brain injuries in December 2013 during a Pi Delta Psi pledging ritual known as the 'glass ceiling'

During a hazing ceremony for five new pledges, the brothers subjected them to three trials, with each progressively more difficult than the last.

It was during the final challenge, known as the glass ceiling, that Deng suffered his fatal injuries.

Blindfolded and wearing a 30-pound backpack full of sand, Deng was tackled repeatedly and slammed to the ground as he attempted to walk over a yard of ice, prosecutors said.

The back pack was supposed to represent the weight of Pi Delta Psi, which describes itself as an Asian-American cultural fraternity.

The 'glass ceiling' gauntlet is intended to symbolize the difficulties Asian-Americans experience in battling prejudice.

According to Poconos Police Chief Chris Wagner, Deng was the last to complete the task, and had been singled out for harsher treatment than the other pledges.

Daniel Li, who was also charged with third-degree murder over Deng's death, was brought out as a surprise witness against his fellow frat brothers during the preliminary trial.

Li, who witnessed the final moments of Deng's hazing, said the victim staggered to his feet after being tackled by Lai. Shortly afterward, Kwan crashed into him with a 15-20 foot running start.

Raymond Lam, center, as he left the Monroe County Courthouse on Monday, also pleaded guilty to hindering apprehension along with his fraternity brothers

Like his three frat bros, Charles Lai was initially charged with third degree murder but today pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter

'His back hit the ground. He did not get up,' Li said. 'He was making slight, groaning sounds.'

Li told defense lawyers that he did not have authority to stop the 'glass ceiling' ritual but Wong did.

It is not clear whether Li testified as part of a plea deal, or if the charges against him have been dropped.

Frat brothers took Deng inside where they called Andy Meng, the then-head of Pi Delta Psi nationwide and the brother of Queens congresswoman Grace Meng.

He is accused of trying to cover up the incident, allegedly telling them to hide fraternity items in the house in an attempt to distance the organization from what had happened.

The brothers are then accused of changing Deng's clothes and googling his symptoms before deciding to take him to an emergency room.

By the time Deng arrived, an hour after he fell unconscious, medics declared him brain dead.

Deng was taking part in a hazing ritual at this house in Pennsylvania (above) when he was knocked unconscious. Frat brothers waited an hour before taking him to the emergency room, by which time he was brain dead, according to police

Daniel Li, 24, who was previously charged with third-degree murder over the frat pledge death, testified against his brothers

Following Deng's death, the courts recommended that 37 members of the fraternity be charged, including the four accused of third-degree murder.

Cops previously said that they broke the charges down into batches to stop the courts being overwhelmed.

Some of those charged were accused of hindering apprehension, hazing and criminal conspiracy, though their names have not been released.

Pi Delta Psi, an Asian American fraternity set up in 1994, at first suspended and then later discontinued its association with the Baruch College chapter.

Baruch College officials denied knowing that the event was taking place, and subsequently banned the fraternity from its campus.



However, L i, testified in December 2015 that the national office of his former fraternity publicly pretended to condemn hazing by its members.

'In actuality, the national fraternity knew very well (that hazing went on),' Li said.

Defense attorneys have called Deng's death a tragedy but said their clients (Kwan left, and Lai, right) didn't intend to kill him

Baruch College fraternity brothers Lam (left, arriving at court in Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania, for his arraignment in October 2015) and Wong (right, on the same day, at the same court) pleaded guilty to manslaughter today

Deng, a nationally competitive handball player, was the only child of his China-born parents.

His family has also filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Pi Delta Psi, Inc., the national body that represents the local fraternity chapters.

'Michael was a wonderful, beloved young man, and, in his honor, the family will also continue pursuing its wrongful-death case against the fraternity to cause it and other fraternities to change so that other parents will be spared the loss of a precious child,' his family said in a statement at the time, seen by New York Daily News.

In November, suspect Wong reached a $300,000 settlement in a civil suit brought by the victim's parents, Mary Liu Deng and Qing Yuan Deng.

He was the first of is the first of eight people sued by Deng's family to settle. Douglas Fierberg, the lawyer in Washington who is handling the civil suits, said no other settlements have been reached.
Party leaders may be touring the country in their battle buses, but one Tory grandee has found a more creative mode of transport while out canvassing - a horse.

Sir Nicholas Soames has been trotting around his constituency of Mid Sussex to drum up support for his re-election campaign.

Sir Nicholas, who is the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, said taking to horseback is a good way to talk to local voters in the rural parts of his area.

Sir Nicholas Soames has hit the campaign trail on horseback as he fights to be re-elected as the Conservative MP for Mid Sussex in the General Election on June 8

He told the Mail Online: Ive got a large rural area and a lot of people who live and work in the country, and farmers and people involved in the countryside and I think its a very good way of getting to people.

A lot of people ride around me, and its a lovely way to do it.

I cant do it in the town, obviously, but Ive got a bicycle for that. I have a magnificent bicycle.

Sir Nicholas, a former defence minister, said voters sometimes find it a little unusual that he goes out canvassing on horseback, but it is a good way to strike up conversation.

He said: I think they find it unusual. It is difficult to find a good way to talk to people and its unusual.

Tory former minister Sir Desmond Swayne has taken to the streets in his class Morris Minor, and brought along a cardboard cut-out of Margaret thatcher to help him drum up support

Im very luck to live in a very beautiful part of the United Kingdom and it combines my duty to canvass and get about the place and taking advantage of Sussex, I know that Im very lucky.

He is a beautiful grey horse.

Sir Nicholas is not the only politician standing for re-election who is hitting the campaign trail in unusual transport.

The PM has hit the road in her battle bus, dubbed the Maymobile. The coach makes only the smallest reference to the Conservatives - on its door

Jeremy Corbyn, pictured last week in Sheffield, has been touring the country in his battle bus

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron briefly abandoned his battle bus to travel by hovercraft during a visit to a rescue team in Burnham-On-Sea in Somerset

Tory former minister Sir Desmond Swayne last week hit the road in a classic Morris Minor decked out in union jack flags with a life-size cardboard cut-out of Margaret thatcher in the front seat.

Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May are both touring the country in their respective battle buses.

And Lib Dem leader Tim Farron last week took a break from his bus to take a trip in a hovercraft.
The fiance of Cassie Sainsbury has arrived at her Colombian jail to be reunited with her for the first time since being arrested in possesion of 5.8kg of cocaine at El Dorado Airport on April 11.

Scott Broadbridge arrived in Bogota on Thursday night but paperwork issues meant he had been unable to see a 'devastated' Ms Sainsbury until Monday.

Mr Broadbridge arrived in a white van accompanied by a crew from Seven's Sunday Night after signing an exclusive deal with the show to explain her side of the story.

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Scott Broadbridge (pictured) has arrived at Cassie Sainsbury's Colombian prison

Mr Broadbridge (pictured) arrived in Bogota on Thursday but had unable to see his fiancee until Monday because of issues with paperwork

Cassie Sainsbury (pictured) may block her mother and sister from seeing her in a Colombian jail cell, admitting to 'family dramas' in the wake of their $1 million 60 Minutes deal

Scott Broadbridge (left, with Sainsbury) hoped to step foot inside El Buen Pastor jail, Bogota, on Sunday, but his paperwork couldn't be completed inside the six-hour visiting window

This comes after reports Ms Sainsbury may block her mother and sister from seeing her in a Colombian jail cell, admitting to 'family dramas' in the wake of their $1 million 60 Minutes deal.

The accused drug smuggler's mother Lisa Evans and her sister Khala arrived at the El Buen Pastor jail late last week, hoping to see the 22-year-old for the first time since she was arrested.

Ms Sainsbury is believed to be upset they agreed to the deal without speaking with her, further complicated by her fiance agreeing a deal with rival network Seven.

Mr Broadbridge signed an exclusive deal with Channel Seven to speak on Sunday Night about Ms Sainsbury's ordeal and her side of the story

Ms Sainsbury's mother and sister signed a reported $1 million deal with Seven's rival network Channel 9 after giving her blessing to her fiance to agree a deal with Sunday Night

Despite being set to step into the prison for the first time on Monday, its believed Sainsbury could be set block their visit, saying she's having 'family dramas' with her mother Lisa Evans (left) and sister

Ms Sainsbury was anticipating her first visits from family this week in jail, where she has been since being found with 5.8kg of cocaine at El Dorado Airport on April 11.

But it's believed that although her mother and sister may be allowed into the prison on Monday, the accused drug smuggler could boycott their visit.

It comes after a guard inside the El Buen Pastor prison labelled the accused drug smuggler a liar, bully and attention seeker.

The female prison guard working at El Buen Pastor prison said Ms Sainsbury has been feeding 'bad information' to the media since being arrested last month.

'Cassie likes attention and she knows how to get it,' the guard, who wished to remain anonymous, told 9 News.

A Colombian prison guard has labelled accused drug smuggler Cassandra Sainsbury as a liar, bully and attention seeker

The female prison guard - who wished to remain anonymous - said Sainsbury has been feeding 'bad information' to the media since being arrested last month

'She's not my most difficult prisoner, but I don't like her lies,' the female prison guard said

'She's not my most difficult prisoner, but I don't like her lies.'

The guard also claimed the 22-year-old has been bullying a fellow inmate who she was pictured smiling with.

Ms Sainsbury previously told News Corp in a phone interview that she didn't give permission for the photo to be released, however the guard believes she was happy to have the photo taken.

'She is bullying another prisoner for taking a picture with her,' the guard said.

'But we believe Cassie wanted to take the picture.'

She also accused Ms Sainsbury of lying about not being able to access medical facilities or enough food.

'That's a lie. Every prisoner gets checked out for their health. She has access to private doctors too if she wants,' she told 9 News.

The accusations come after Sainsbury hit out at the two separate television deals struck by members of her family and her fiance.

Ms Sainsbury's mother and sister have negotiated a $1 million interview deal with Channel Nine's 60 Minutes program, reportedly without her knowledge, but her fiance Scott Broadbridge has signed on with Channel Seven's Sunday Night.

The guard also claimed that Sainsbury (right) has been bullying a fellow inmate who she was pictured smiling with (pictured)

She has also been accused of lying about not being able to access medical facilities or enough food inside the prison

The 22-year-old said she would be discussing 'whatever's been going on with the two stories' when she gets a chance to be reunited withthem.

'It's just typical family drama,' Ms Sainsbury said.

Sainsbury's mother and sister made a desperate attempt on Saturday to communicate with the accused drug smuggler, as her fiance was turned away from the prison gates.

Shouting 'Cassie, its mumma' across the embankment to El Buen Pastor Women's prison, Bogota, the 22-year-old's mother Lisa Evans and sister Khala Sainsbury tried desperately to see her following her arrest.

Mother Lisa Evans and sister Khala Sainsbury shouted 'Cassie, its mumma' across the embankment to El Buen Pastor Women's prison, Bogota when they attempted to see her

Cassie's fiance Scott Broadbridge (pictured) was turned away from the prison gates when he went to see her

'I think it's nothing to do with me. I think it's something to do with the prison and the way they want to set up the visitation,' she said.

Colombian police have alleged Ms Sainsbury was lured into becoming a drug mule because she was in debt and told it would be easy money.

Colonel Rodrigo Soler, anti-narcotics chief at Bogota's El Dorado International Airport, said Ms Sainsbury was a perfect mark for drug smugglers.

He alleged she was likely told the job was pre-arranged and airport staff and police were paid off on both sides of the journey to let her through with the 5.8 kilograms of cocaine she carried in her luggage.

'The owner of the drug who convinces the people to smuggle the drugs, he says everything is fixed up. Everything in the airport is fixed. Everything is easy,' he told News Corp.

Colonel Soler said drug traffickers often took advantage of young people like Sainsbury who were facing economic hardship and needed fast cash.

Police said Sainsbury was likely told the job was pre-arranged and airport staff and police were paid off on both sides of the journey to let her through

Ms Sainsbury was thousands of dollars in debt after her failed Yorke's Fitness, in her hometown on SA's Yorke Peninsula failed and she abruptly skipped town.

The Adelaide woman claimed she was set up by a man named 'Angelo' who arranged to buy her headphones at a cheap price as gifts for her wedding party.

She claimed the 18 packages wrapped in black plastic containing the cocaine were given to her the morning of her flight and she didn't know they were drugs.

Colombian police seized CCTV footage of Angelo at the hotel where she stayed for eight nights before her flight, and she hoped it would help prove her innocence.

But Colonel Soler and his colleagues said since the beginning of the investigation that they did not believe her story and that she knew what she was doing.

Lt Colonel Jorge Triana told Daily Mail Australia soon after news of Ms Sainsbury's arrest broke that drug mules often feigned ignorance when they were caught.

She claimed the 18 packages wrapped in black plastic containing the cocaine were given to her the morning of her flight and she didn't know they were drugs

'It's a commonplace strategy that narco traffickers use to take drugs out of the country,' he said.

'Her explanation is not credible. Everyone we catch says they didn't know it was in their luggage, but they know what they were doing.'

Colonel Soler also said '90 per cent' of people in her situation said they were trapped and cheated and didn't know they were carrying drugs.

'They majority also end up accepting responsibility (for the crime) because they say they have economic problems, family problems, they have no job,' he said.

He said all drug mules progress through a familiar three stages after they arrested, starting with denial where Ms Sainsbury is still sitting.

The young woman maintained her innocence to police and media, and through her family, and even when she was filmed waving at TV crews behind bars.

An inmate friend even held out a sign reading: 'Cassandra Pide Libertad Immediata', which translates in English to: 'Cassandra asks for freedom immediately'.
Mark Zuckerberg, 38, apologised for 'getting it wrong' after employees were informed about the cuts in a company-wide email at 11am on Wednesday. In a message to Meta employees, Zuckerberg said that he had decided to reduce the size of the team by about 13 per cent, which could mean there will be 650 job losses in the UK. Facebook's UK employee headcount swelled from 3,745 in 2020 to 5,148 in 2021, with the vast majority based in London. Meta said it would pay 16 weeks of base pay to those affected in the US plus two additional weeks for every year of service as a part of the severance package and all remaining paid time off. The company said that the arrangements would be similar elsewhere, though it was unclear how many UK jobs would be affected. In Ireland, where Meta has its European HQ, the company has already begun restructuring its content moderation team. The Irish Times reported that the company could be seeking to shed up to 1,000 roles from its Irish operations. It employs more than 3,000 people directly in Ireland, with an additional 6,000 people employed at operations across multiple sites including Meta's international headquarters in Dublin, Clonee data centre in Co Meath and Reality Labs in Cork.
Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk today faced claims he raped a woman in Westminster offices

Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk today faced claims he raped a woman in Westminster offices.

The politician, 50, who quit the Labour party last week after he was banned from standing in the election, is alleged to have assaulted a young woman last year.

Today, the father-of-four was pictured arriving at Holborn Police Station in London, where he was quizzed for the first time since the allegations were made.

It's understood that Danczuk went to the police station voluntarily this morning.

He told MailOnline: 'I completely refute these allegations. They are wholly untrue.

'I'm extremely suspicious of the timing when these were made. I am concerned these could be politically motivated.'

Danczuk was not arrested or charged and the police confirmed that their investigations are ongoing.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: 'On Monday, 8 May 2017, officers from Greater Manchester Police (GMP) referred an allegation of rape to the Metropolitan Police.

'A woman has alleged that she was raped by a man in his 50s.

'The incident is alleged to have occurred in June 2016 at a location in Westminster.

'Detectives from the Sexual Offences, Exploitation and Child Abuse Command are investigating.

'A 50-year-old man voluntarily attended a central London police station on Monday, 15 May where he was interviewed under caution.

'No arrests have been made and inquires continue.'

The politician, 50, who quit the Labour party last week after he was banned from standing in the election, is alleged to have assaulted a young woman last year

Today, the father-of-four was pictured arriving at Holborn Police Station in London, where he was quizzed for the first time since the allegations were made

It's understood that Danczuk went to the police station voluntarily this morning

Danczuk was reported to police on Monday, but he has slammed the allegations as 'totally false'.

The former Rochdale MP, who plans to stand as an independent in the June 8 election, said that officers had not been in contact with him over the alleged incident.

He told the Daily Mail last week: 'These allegations are totally false.

At a time when Im being aggressively leant upon not to stand as an independent, so as to give the Labour Party an easy ride, I cant help but find the timing of these allegations deeply suspicious.

There is only a day to go before candidates have to submit nomination papers and some people desperately want to stop me.

Ex-MP Simon Danczuk faces police rape quiz after woman told police he attacked her in Westminster

Mr Danczuk confirmed his resignation in a letter to Labour general secretary Iain McNicol and chopped up his membership card

Mr Danczuk quit Labour after saying the party leadership was 'obsessed' with Karl Marx and communism and had 'totally lost touch' with 21st Century Britain.

He confirmed his resignation in a letter to Labour's general secretary Iain McNicol and included his chopped up membership card.

In a statement, released on Monday, he made no direct reference to his continuing suspension from the party over allegations he sent sex texts to a teenager who had applied to work for him.

Mr Danczuk has been suspended since December 2015 over the scandal.

His exit from the party came as his estranged wife Karen failed in her bid to be selected as a Labour candidate for a constituency in Greater Manchester.

In March, Danczuk was spotted with his new fiancee, Charlene Meade, who he hoped to marry in Parliament

The self-styled 'Selfie Queen' had hoped to be chosen to stand for the party in Bury North.

The Danczuks divorced in 2015. Since then, Mr Danczuk has been linked to a string of women.

He was suspended over allegations he sent sext texts to then-17-year-old

Last year it was reported Mr Danczuk had sex with a 22-year-old woman on his desk in his constituency office after meeting just days earlier on Twitter.

However, the father of four now appears to have settled again with his new glamourous fiancee Charlene Meade, 31, who is almost 20 years his junior.
A woman was able to listen to her son's heartbeat on Mother's Day, three years after he died when she met the man who received his heart.

Anna Hutt's son Payton Casteel was 16-year-old when he died three years ago in a dirt bike crash in Coin, Iowa. Payton was an organ donor and his heart was transplanted to 64-year-old Gary Flint.

Hutt and Flint met for the first time in person at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Using a stethoscope, Hutt listened to Payton's heartbeat in Flint's chest.

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Anna Hutt, right, was able to hear her son's heart three years after it was transplanted to Gary Flint, center. The two met in person for the first time on Mother's Day

Hutt's son, Payton Casteel, 16, pictured, died in a dirt bike accident in Coin, Iowa, not far from his home. He collided with a van on May 21, 2014 and suffered severe head trauma because he wasn't wearing a helmet

Payton was an organ donor, and his organs saved seven lives, including Flint's. Only 4% of Flint's heart was working before he received Payton's on May 23, 2014

Flint had been diagnosed with nonischemic cardiomyopathy, an enlargement of the heart, in 2007, but continued to work and exercise.

His condition deteriorated by May 2014 and his doctor told him he wasn't sure he'd get a heart in time. By then only 4% of his own heart was still working.

On May 21, Payton crashed with a van while he was riding his dirt bike near his home in Coin, Iowa. The teen suffered severe head trauma because he wasn't wearing a helmet.

His organs saved seven lives, including Flint who only had a few months to live.

Flint said he had made peace with dying, according to KMTV.

But two days after Payton's accident and six days after Flint went on the transplant waiting list, he got his new heart and a new life.

'I have two birthdays now. I always tell people that I'm 64 going on 18. My first birthday is Feb. 27  the day I was actually born. The other birthday is May 23  the day I received Payton's heart. That birthday means much more to me,' Flint said, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

Flint and Hutt, pictured, started writing letters and talking on the phone one year after Flint received Payton's heart

Hutt, right, said about Flint: 'I couldn't think of a better man for the heart. I want him to live. I want him to smile, and I want him to be happy'

When Payton first checked on his learner's permit that he wanted to be an organ donor, Hutt wasn't thrilled, but she said Payton wanted to help people.

'[He] taught me that the gift of life is very special,' she said.

Flint and Hutt met for the first time on Sunday, though they had written letters and spoken over the phone since 2015.

Hutt was able to listen to her son's heartbeat Sunday, but she also received a recording of it inside a stuffed bear.

Flint said he wants to keep in touch with Hutt and that he could never thank her enough for his 'second chance at life'.

'I couldn't think of a better man for the heart,' Hutt said. 'I want him to live. I want him to smile, and I want him to be happy.'
Eerie images have emerged of the upmarket Brisbane flat where a gigolo brutally murdered his transsexual prostitute wife and boiled her remains.

In October 2014 Marcus Volke, 27, murdered, disfigured and began cooking the body parts of Indonesian woman Mayang Prasetyo at his Teneriffe apartment.

A chef by trade, Volke chopped her lifeless body into pieces before boiling them on the electric stove.

With a timber-framed ventilation system, the stove can be seen in the kitchen where he used a huge pot in an attempt to conceal his murder.

Eerie images have emerged of the upmarket Brisbane flat where a gigolo brutally murdered his transsexual prostitute wife and boiled her remains. Pictured, the stove in the kitchen

In October 2014 Marcus Volke, 27, murdered, disfigured and began cooking the body parts of Indonesian woman Mayang Prasetyo (pictured) at his Teneriffe apartment

A chef by trade, Volke chopped her lifeless body into pieces before boiling them on the electric stove

The apartment complex in the riverside enclave was virtually brand new at the time of the murder, and the pair were among the first to move in.

Fresh details have now emerged on how the pair came to be living together.

'Marcus had accrued a debt of approximately $9,000 in credit cards, with no means of repaying it,' Detective Sergeant Joshua Walsh told court on Monday.

Volke decided to become a male escort in Melbourne clubs as a way of repaying the debt - and it was there he met Ms Prasetyo.

The apartment complex in the riverside enclave was virtually brand new at the time of the murder, and the pair were among the first to move in

An image of the sun-drenched living room in the apartment where Ms Prasetyo was murdered

Fresh details have now emerged on how the pair (pictured) came to be living together

'They came up with an agreement between the two parties that he would assist with her getting a permanent partner visa for Australia and she would assist him within transgender clubs within Melbourne and overseas, in Europe and Asia.'

The pair had travelled through Asia and Europe together, working as escorts in transgender clubs, the court heard.

In 2013, the couple married in Copenhagen without the knowledge of Volke's parents, but with the blessing of his future mother-in-law, according to news.com.au.

Around a year later, Volke and his partner moved into a ground floor apartment with their three dogs at the Teneriffe complex in Brisbane.

They lived there for just a couple of months before Ms Prasetyo was killed, according to The Queensland Times.

The pair had travelled through Asia and Europe together, working as escorts in transgender clubs, the court heard. Pictured, an outdoor area at the Brisbane apartment

Volke decided to become a male escort in Melbourne clubs as a way of repaying the debt - and it was there he met Ms Prasetyo

Volke and his partner moved into a ground floor apartment with their three dogs at the Teneriffe complex in Brisbane

Volke's heinous crime was only uncovered when the huge pot he used to dispose of the remains boiled over and short-circuited his apartment's power.

A contractor was later confronted by a putrid smell, which the killer tried to explain away.

'You'll have to mind the smell, I'm cooking pig's broth,' Volke said.

It was the electrician who later raised the alarm.

The death of Ms Prasetyo, who worked as a high-class escort to support her family in Indonesia and put her two sisters through school, sent shockwaves across Australia

Volke's heinous crime was only uncovered when the huge pot he used to dispose of the remains boiled over and short-circuited his apartment's power

Volke attempted to dispose of the 27-year-old victim's remains by boiling them on the stove in their upmarket Teneriffe unit, police said at the time

When Constable Liam McWhinney and his partner Senior Constable Bryan Reid asked to search the apartment, Volke locked the door and fled.

Volke sought refuge inside the industrial bin but was soon surrounded by 15 officers with no escape.

When police opened the bin they found he had slit his own throat with the knife he grabbed on his way out of his flat.

An examination of their deaths and the response from police continues on Tuesday.
Police have launched an urgent hunt for a mother and her 12-year-old son who have been missing for a week.

Sandra Element, 54, and Aiden Hoggard were last seen at around 8.15am on Monday May 8 in Balintore in Easter Ross, Scotland.

They were reported missing to police at 2pm on Friday May 12.

Police have launched an urgent search for Sandra Element, left, and Aiden Hoggard, right

Police are appealing for information from anyone who may have seen them.

Inspector Jamie Wilson said: 'As time goes by we are naturally increasingly concerned for Sandra and Aiden and we would ask that anyone who may have information as to where they are, get in touch with us as soon as possible.

'We believe they may have connections in England and may have travelled using public transport.

'We want to ensure they are safe and well and ask anyone with information to contact police on 101.'

Ms Element is described as around 5ft 5in, of a slim build, with brown hair.

The mother and son were last seen in the Scottish village of Balintore at around 8.15am

When she was last seen she was wearing black clothing.

Her son is described as being 4ft, of slim build with brown hair and a pale complexion.

He was wearing a knitted jumper and carrying a black rucksack when last seen.
Megyn Kelly made her first major appearance since joining NBC at the network's upfront presentation on Monday.

The former Fox News anchor appeared onstage alongside Lester Holt, Chuck Todd, Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie at the event in New York City, where she shared details about her two new shows with the network.

Her morning program, as was previously revealed, will premiere in the fall during the 9am time slot currently occupied by 'Today's Take.'

And her news magazine will be premiering in June she announced at the upfront.

It will air on Sunday night's at 7pm, opposite CBS' hugely popular news magazine '60 Minutes.'

Team: Megyn Kelly appeared at the NBC upfront on Monday alongside (l to r) Chuck Todd, Matt Lauer, Savannah Guthrie and Later Holt

Making her mark: The 46-year-old announced that her news magazine show will be premiering in June

The NBC News portion of the upfront was moderated by Holt, and Kelly told the crowd when she came out: 'What a great time to be at NBC. Im here! Im psyched!'

She was also heralded by her new co-workers, including Matt Lauer.

Lauer introduced NBC's latest hire by saying that Kelly was someone who 'shares our values.'

Kelly is hitting the ground running at NBC, with the popular host already getting one big interview in the can, which may be her debut with the network.

The former Fox News host was spotted in Los Angeles two weeks ago heading in and out of the same studio where the Kardashian and Jenner women were taping a 10th anniversary special for Today.

She was snapped as she and her two person squad made their way through the studio lot, and her masterful makeup and perfectly tousled blonde waves along with her ruffled crimson baby doll dress seemed like just the look for a day of keeping and catching up with the fashion-forward ladies.

She was then photographed just last week in what looked to be an interview with Erin Andrews.

It has also been announced that Kelly will be heading to Russia and speaking with President Vladmir Putin next month.

'Megyn Kelly of NBC News will moderate the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on stage with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin,' revealed a NBC spokesperson last week.

'The conversation will cover a wide range of global political and economic topics, including international trade agreements, cyber-security and the impact of rising military tensions.'
On Monday President Trump's administration expanded the anti-abortion 'Mexico City Policy' that it reinstated at the beginning of the Republican president's tenure.

CBN News' David Brody first reported that the Mexico City Policy will be expanded by drastically increasing the amount of global health funds that have to abide by it.

The Mexico City Policy requires that non-governmental organizations taking government money have to promise not to 'perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.'

The Trump administration expanded its 'Mexico City Policy' Monday to apply to certain funds under the Department of Defense as well

President Trump is receiving high marks from anti-abortion activists and evangelicals for expanding the Mexico City Policy to apply to $8.8 billion in funds

The Trump administration's new 'Protecting Life in Global Assistance' policy makes not only State Department funds fall under the Mexico City, but some Department of Defense money too, to a new total of $8.8 billion that can't be used to promote abortions overseas.

Previously the policy only applied to family planning assistance provided by the State Department and USAID.

A senior administration official also made clear in a call with reporters Monday that the funding ban only applies to organizations that promote abortion as a means for family planning.

'Referrals for the termination of a pregnancy in cases or rape, incest or endangerment of the life of the woman are not prohibited under this policy,' the official said.

The implementation, officials said, would be gradual and take place over the next few months.

Brody, on his Brody File blog, pointed out that 'President Trump is taking the pro-life policy to a whole different level,' calling it 'yet another evangelical victory under this administration.'

'On a myriad of issues, Donald Trump hasn't disappointed evangelicals since he's taken office,' Brody added.

A White House official also told the CBN reporter that, 'The pro-life policy will apply to global health assistance funding for international health programs, such as those for HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, malaria, global health security, and family planning and reproductive health.'

However it won't apply to all overseas funding, with exclusions for refugee assistance, along with disaster and humanitarian relief activities provided through USAID and the Department of Defense.

On Monday opponents suggested Trump was making the move to hold onto his base of conservative voters on the heels of his controversial firing of FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Russian election meddling and whether there was any collusion with the Trump campaign.

'President Trump is treating women's lives like political bargaining chips, trading them away to shore up his flagging support,' said Sasha Bruce, the senior vice president of campaigns and strategy for NARAL Pro-Choice America.

'Barely more than 100 days into his presidency, this pattern of behavior is an ominous portent of things to come for women and our families,' Bruce continued.

'A man who was best known during the campaign for disrespecting and objectifying women clearly hasn't changed his behavior despite wielding even more power,' Bruce added.

New polling from Morning Consult shows that enthusiasm for Trump among his voters is waning, though the firing of Comey hasn't had a profound impact.

Initially, 56 percent of Trump voters said they strongly approved of the job he's done, though that bottomed out in April at 46 percent.

It ticked up again to 49 percent more recently after the House's passage of the American Health Care Act and the president's decision to fire his FBI director.

Pro-life groups are already applauding the action.

'Votes in America have international consequences,' said Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement, pointing out that this is one of the reasons pro-life voters supported Trump in last year's November election.

Implementation of the new policy means 'we have officially ceased exporting abortion to foreign nations,' Dannenfelser said.

She added that by expanding the Mexico City Policy President Trump was 'continuing Ronald Reagan's pro-life legacy.'

'Abortion is not health care,' she said.
President Obama described his own decision not to bomb Syria following a chemical weapons attack as the issue that required 'the most political courage' during his tenure.

The president brought up the vexing Syria conflict, which many observers consider one of the top foreign policy failures of his administration, in an interview connected to his receipt of the John F. Kennedy 'Profile in Courage' award.

His comments drew a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump, who weeks ago ordered a cruise missile strike in retaliation what the U.S. says was Syrian government forces' use of chemical weapons.

Obama brought up Syria in an interview with Jack Schlossberg, grandson of President Kennedy and son of Caroline Kennedy, who Obama nominated as U.S. ambassador to Japan.

President Obama described his own decision not to bomb Syria following a chemical weapons attack as the issue that required 'the most political courage' during his tenure, in an interview connected to his receipt of the John F. Kennedy 'Profile in Courage' award

'But I actually think that the issue that required the most political courage was the decision not to bomb Syria after the chemical weapons use had been publicized and rather to negotiate them removing chemical weapons from Syria,' Obama said, after initially discussing his decision to boost and lower U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Obama was facing pressure from both sides after forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are thought to have used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians in 2013.

The president had issued his famous 'red line' statement warning Assad against the use of chemical weapons in 2012.

'We have been very clear to the Assad regime  but also to other players on the ground  that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus; that would change my equation,' the president warned in 2012.

He told Schossberg: 'Now, we know subsequently that some [chemical weapons] remained, so it was an imperfect solution. But what we also know is that 99 percent of huge chemical weapons stockpiled were removed without us having to fire a shot.

Former President Barack Obama speaks after receiving the 2017 John F. Kennedy Profile In Courage Award from Caroline Kennedy at the John F. Kennedy Library May 7, 2017 in Boston

President Obama addressed the nation in 2013 following a chemical weapons attack in Syria

Obama was presented the award by Caroline Kennedy, President Kennedy's daughter and the former U.S. ambassador to Japan

Syrians walk amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following reported air strikes by regime forces in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of the capital Damascus, on August 30, 2015

'The reason it was hard was because, as president, what you discover is that you generally get praised for taking military action, and you're often criticized for not doing so,' Obama said, according to a transcript posted on medium.

He continued: 'And it wasn't a slam dunk, but I thought that it made sense for a variety of reasons for us to see if we could actually try to eliminate the prospect of large-scale chemical weapons use rather than the political expedience of a one-time shot.'

His remarks only glancingly referenced the latest chemical weapons attack.

Obama also mentioned the decision to send military SEALs on a dangerous mission against Osasma bin Laden. Although he has talked up the stakes in the past  Obama was living in a compound inside Pakistan, which didn't get a warning of the raid, and a failure could have been a fiasco  the president minimized the decision.

'The Bin Laden decision was difficult as well, but that one was one where I felt enough confidence in our men and women in uniform and our Navy Seals that once I knew that I could get them back out, I felt like it was worth a shot,' Obama said.

Obama's statement about faith in his Syria policy came on a day when yet another grim report came out of the war-ravaged country.

The State Department said it believes Syria's government is carrying out mass killings and burning the bodies of its victims in a large crematorium, the Associated Press reported.

State said about 50 detainees each day are being hanged at the Saydnaya military prison, with many bodies burned afterward.

'We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison,' said Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomatic for the Middle East.

In a 2013 speech on Syria, Obama deployed some of the same charged emotional rhetoric that Trump used when descrying the victims of a government-backed gas attack.

when Assads government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children.

'The images from this massacre are sickening: Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas. Others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. A father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk,' Obama said.

But amid flagging domestic support for action, and opposition from many congressional Republicans, Trump 'asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path.'
Marcus Hutchins, pictured, prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected with ransomware

The hero British computer expert who stopped the cyber attack wreaking havoc across the globe has revealed he was suspended from school after being accused of hacking - and failed his GCSE in IT.

Marcus Hutchins, who prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected with ransomware, was hauled into the head teacher's office at Ilfracombe Academy in Devon and ordered to explain why the network was down.

But he claims it was nothing to do with him and that he had merely been using 'proxy' servers to bypass the school's internet controls.

Marcus, 22, told MailOnline: 'It was like being picked up for a crime, but I had no idea why I was being picked up.

'The school server had been attacked and the network was down.

'I was actually online at the time and I saw the network slowing down.

'They handed me some papers which showed I was online at the time and chatting with my friends on the school network.

'Then that was it, I was suspended for something I never did.

He was ordered to leave school for a week in early spring 2010 and despite fighting the suspension, teachers refused to budge.

After that Marcus was banned from using internet-connected computers meaning he had to complete his GCSE in IT on paper - before ultimately failing the course.

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Marcus, pictured, was ordered to leave school for a week in early spring 2010 and despite fighting the suspension, teachers refused to budge

Marcus, 22, pictured, told MailOnline: 'It was like being picked up for a crime, but I had no idea why I was being picked up'

After being accused of hacking Marcus was banned from using internet-connected computers meaning he had to complete his GCSE in IT on paper - before ultimately failing the course

He continued: 'They said they had more proof but on request they never produced anything and I never got to the bottom of it.

'Half the teachers were saying 'there was no way you could have done this' and half were sayng 'we've seen the proof, it must have been you'.

'That was a large reason why I took the non-academic route. I became very sick with school after that.'

'I was not allowed to touch a computer with any internet access.

'I failed IT after that - they were trying to give me these IT assignments in paper format. It was ridiculous.

'IT was one of the only GCSEs I actually failed despite being a cyber security expert.

The keen surfer shot to fame over the weekend after accidentally registering a website domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the ransomware.

Marcus, pictured, accidentally registered a website domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the ransomware

The 22-year-old computer security expert (known online as Malware Tech, pictured with a friend) has predicted 'another attack'

He purchased it, knowing this was a regular way to track a computer infection, but had not expected it to actually halt the spread of the ransomware.

The whizz-kid - who goes by the name MalwareTech online - has now spent the last 72 hours battling the virus while watching his Twitter followers climb by 30,000 and thousands of emails landing in his inbox.

He is now working with the government's National Cyber Security Centre to prevent a new strain of the malicious software from emerging on Monday - but says he has no plans to leave his current job at US-based 'private intel threat firm' Kryptos Logic.

Although his bosses have rewarded him with an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles for his valiant efforts, Hutchins fears he could face future revenge from the hackers he has exposed after his name was posted on the internet.

The virus quickly spread around the world causing chaos in more than 100 countries

The cyber expert, who lives at home in England with his parents and younger brother, told MailOnline: 'In future someone might want to retaliate - they could find my identity within seconds.

'If they know where I live, they could really do anything.

'A security blogger had people send heroin to his house and try to frame him after his identity was leaked and he even had death threats.'

There are fears the next strike could be a 'zombie' attack, which sees malware that has infected a computer coming back to life in systems that have already been fixed.

The cyber expert lives at home in England with his parents and younger brother. His room is filled with computer monitors

Marcus' bosses have rewarded him with an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles for his valiant efforts battling the malicious software

An 'emergency stop' was found after Hutchins searched for a weakness in the hack software and found a reference to a website address that nobody owned.

Last night, Sharon Marshall, Marcus's former headmistress at Ilfracombe Academy, said she remembered him very clearly.

She said: 'He was a lad who had and still has two great passions in life - computers and surfing.

'Clearly he has demonstrated his ability in computing through his conduct over the NHS cyber attack and of that I think we can be all very proud.

'He was brilliant with computers and capable of taking a machine apart and putting them back together with breathtaking speed and precision.

'He is a lucky young man to have been able to make a career out of something about which he is so passionate and to put his skills to such good use.'

Mrs Marshall said she could not discuss his academic career or any other personal aspects of his schooling without his or his parents' permission.

Yesterday his mother Janet Hutchins said she was ''very proud'' of her son - but wished he had been able to remain anonymous for his part in bringing down the ransomware attack.

The ransomware hit computers around the globe including in Germany where the rail network was infected

Speaking at the family home in Ilfracombe, Devon, she said the 22-year-old was today away at a meeting in London.

Mrs Hutchins, who is originally from Scotland, said she was 'very proud' but declined to comment further at her semi-detached home.

A neighbour, who wished to remain anonymous, said: 'I don't know him very well but it is impressive.'

Marcus was known to go for drinks at the weekend in an old-fashioned pub near the harbour, The Ship and Pilot.

He had apparently been in the weekend before the catastrophe hack but people there today said they did not know him.

He was not well-known in the sleepy Devon seaside town where his family moved about six years ago after living at a farm further inland.

Cyber security worker Marcus Hutchins exploited a loophole by spending 8 to register the domain name the virus tries to connect to when infecting a new computer, causing a 'kill switch' to activate

He confirmed the block on the virus was an accident because he did not realise registering the website would work

Yesterday, a former neighbour of the Hutchins said: 'They were a very pleasant family and their boys were very lively.

'Cameron was a more outdoor lad who used to play with one of the boys on the farm where they used to live.

'But Marcus used to spend more time indoors and we knew him as what I would call a computer geek.

'He was incredibly bright, perhaps too bright for his own good, and it made him a bit arrogant and a bit of a rebel in my eyes.'

The family were living in a pretty cottage in the picturesque North Devon coastal village of Lee, near Ilfracombe.

They had moved there from a remote farm nearby at West Down but moved back into Ilfracombe when their landlady at Lee decided not to renew any of her tenants' leases.
A hero British pilot has revealed how he pulled his friend from a helicopter after it plunged into a Norwegian fjord while trying to land on a 25million superyacht.

Quentin Smith, 52, a Guinness World Record holder pilot, described how he twice went back into the helicopter after it crashed into the water near Bergen to try and save his two friends.

One passenger, named as lawyer and father-of-six David Tang, 57, managed to get out on his own. He is still in a critical condition in hospital.

However Mr Smith then dragged his other friend, namely only as Charles, out of the helicopter. He has since been discharged from hospital.

Quentin Smith, 52, a Guinness World Record holder pilot, described how he twice went back into the helicopter after it crashed into the water near Bergen

Speaking at a press conference today, Mr Smith said: 'We're only getting our lives together again. The main focus for us must be on the outcome of our friend.'

The helicopter, which had travelled from Scotland to Bergen, crashed on May 10 when a loose tarpaulin swirled up in the wind and tangled with the rotor blades.

It spun around in the air for a few seconds before flipping upside down and crashing into the water.

Mr Smith - who has circumnavigated the world twice - activated the helicopter's emergency floating pontoons, which prevented it from sinking.

Following that, lifeboats rushed to the scene, CPR was administered and the three men were rushed to hospital.

The helicopter spun round in the air for a few seconds before flipping upside down and crashing into the water near Bergen

Describing the dramatic incident today, Mr Smith said: 'The first objective was to not crash with the boat, the consequences of which could have been very severe.

'The second was to land the helicopter which was barely controllable in a non-fatal manner. This was achieved. The final part of the crash sequence was to evacuate the helicopter and this was also a challenge.

'The helicopter was in the water, with the belly over the water.

'So I just respond, I open the door and I'm out of the helicopter and it's relatively easy for me and then I realise my friends are not out and I have a terrible dilemma because with the helicopter on its side, maybe 120 degrees, it's relatively easy to get out.

'But they're not out and I can't afford any more time for them to get out and I can feel the helicopter sinking and I don't want it to sink with them in it.'

Footage shows the moment the helicopter crashed down in to the sea on May 10

This was the scene as the helicopter was being hoisted out of the water following the crash

He then explained how he made the split second decision to go back into the helicopter and activate the floats which stopped it sinking.

Mr Smith said: 'One of the things they teach you is that you should not go back in, it's one of the firm pieces of advice, but personally I've never really believed that part

'So I went back down again and I was pretty ineffective, I don't know what I did, I don't think I achieved anything, you couldn't really see much and then David come up and he spoke and he appeared OK and I went down to try again because Charles hadn't come up and all I found in the murk was an arm, so I pulled it, pulled it really hard, and Charles came out.'

The helicopter crashed on May 10 when a loose tarpaulin swirled up in the wind and tangled with the rotor blades

Mr Smith added: 'It's been a stressful experience and we've been dealing with various degrees of shock.'

He added: 'This was an accident, not more. We have no one to blame.

'David is in a critical condition but stable (at Haukeland University Hospital) - he has a huge family, wife, brother and sisters who have come from all over the world to give him the love and support he needs to recover.'

Mr Smith was trying to land on the 196ft Bacarella (file picture of the vessel) superyacht when a tarpaulin became entangled in the rotors and it spun out of control, flipping upside down into the water

Pilot Mr Smith, who is nicknamed Captain Q, started flying with his father aged five and is listed by Guinness World Records as the first person to fly to both the North and South Poles by helicopter.

He also is a two-time Helicopter Aerobatics World Champion and he has circumnavigated the world twice.

At the press conference, he revealed he also had a crash in the sea south of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

Pictures of the helicopter being fished out of the water in Norway showed it to be severely damaged with parts of windows destroyed and the rotor and tail flawed.

The 196ft luxury yacht Bacarella is registered on Cayman Island, was sold in a sealed bid auction in 2014.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman said: 'We can confirm that three British people were injured in an incident in Bergen, Norway on May 10.

'We are offering assistance to them and remain in close contact with Norwegian authorities.'

Norwegian police said they had no evidence of human or technical failure in connection with the incident.
The decades-long rivalry between media titans Anna Wintour and Tina Brown is the topic of a new scripted series to be aired by Bravo.

All That Glitters will tell the story of each woman's meteoric rise to power in the world of women's magazines.

Wintour, the iconically frosty editor-in-chief of American Vogue, has been at the magazine's helm since 1988.

Brown successfully revamped the prestigious British magazine Tatler before overhauling Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

Bravo announced All That Glitters on Monday, its first scripted series which will tell the story of the rivalry between legendary magazine editors Anna Wintour, 67, and Tina Brown, 63

Most recently she was the editor of The Daily Beast and Newsweek and she now runs Tina Brown Media Live, a media-focused business which orchestrates debates, summits and forums around the world.

She is also the founder of Women in the World, a New York Times affiliate which campaigns for women and children.

In an announcement about the show on Monday, Bravo said: 'All That Glitters presents the true story of the behind the scenes rivalry, relationship and remarkable ascent of pop-culture icons Tina Brown and Anna Wintour.

'As both bold and driven women fight their way to the top of a male-dominated industry driven by greed and betrayal, they each find new paths to change the world around them - Tina, through the intersection of high-culture and celebrity, and Anna with an instinct for high fashion and emerging talent.'

Neither Brown nor her aloof nemesis have ever commented on record about their rumored feud.

Both Wintour and Brown (above in 1989) are British born journalists

Both women rose through the ranks of Conde Nast at meteoric pace. Wintour is pictured (left) in 1988,the year she was appointed Vogue editor and Brown is seen (right) in 1989 while she was editor of Vanity Fair

Wintour and Brown are pictured above in 1991. Neither has ever spoken on the record about their mirroring careers

Wintour (left in the 1980s) remained at Vogue, propelling it to the fashion bible it now is, while Brown hopped between publications. In 1992 (right) she moved from Vanity Fair to The New Yorker, another Conde Nast magazine

The former heaped praise on Wintour over thinly-veiled jabs in a 2011 Daily Beast article titled 'How Anna Turned It Around' which included coldly selected quotes about the Vogue editor including one from a fan she'd ignored who said: 'Everyone loves a b****'.

Eleven years earlier, rumours put the pair on the brink of war.

Brown, at the time working for Talk, commissioned a hard-hittng piece on Wintour's then-boyfriend and now husband, Shelby Bryan.

Bryan had recently been ousted as the chief of internet firm ICG Communications and Brown wanted her newest recruit, New York Time investigative journalist Timothy O'Brien, to examine his fall from grace.

Wintour was rumored to have been furious with Brown in 2000 when she planned a hit piece on her then boyfriend and now husband, Shelby Ryan (above together at Wimbledon in 2015)

Wintour, now 67, was appointed Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE) at Buckingham Palace on May 5. Brown, 63, was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2000. She now runs the New York Times affiliate Women In The World

Wintour, according to friends who informed The New York Post, was furious and tried to stop her to no avail.

The piece ran the following year. Friends of Wintours slammed it as a 'nasty little piece of work involving someones personal life.'

Brown's defenders said it was a fair and hard-hitting piece of journalism by a credible reporter.

'This was not a personal attack. It is a legitimate story by a serious investigative journalist. Its not just some long, rambling gossip piece,' one said.

For years beforehand, the pair co-existed as darlings of the Conde Nast brand and won the generous praise of its scion, Si Newhouse.

All That Glitters will be based on Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, and Glory of America's Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It.

No one has been cast for the series. It is written and produced by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal.
Jennifer LaPlante (pictured) allegedly contaminated baby formula for cash over a two month period. She was arrested Thursday

An Arizona mom has been accused of replacing cans of infant formula with flour and returning them to get cash.

A two-month-old baby was rushed to hospital after consuming contaminated formula, police say.

Jennifer LaPlante, 30, was arrested Thursday under suspicion of fraudulent schemes and child endangerment.

Police Chief Chris Magnus held an emergency news conference, Thursday, to get out the warning, according to FoxNews.com

'We're concerned about this and wanted to get the information out as quickly as possible to avoid any other children from becoming sick,' Magnus said.

Police became suspicious after a Tucson police's Child Physical Abuse Unit received reports about a baby that possibly consumed contaminated formula.

LaPlante typically stole or bought Gerber Good Start Soy formula (pictured) and replaced the contents with sugars, rice cereal and flour. She then used a strong adhesive tore-seal the products

The report said a two-month-old was transported to the Tucson Medical Center after being given formula with a strong chemical smell and appearing lethargic.

Police traced the formula back to a Fry's Food and Drugs in Tuscon and noticed LaPlante had recently returned the contaminated formula.

The child has been released from the hospital and is in good condition.

Emily Wolverton, a Tuscan mother told ABC 15.com, that it's 'ingenious how evil it is,' to involve children to make fast cash.

'To knowingly risk the health of other babies to do that...that just adds a whole new level,' Wolverton said.

At least one baby had to be hospitalized after drinking formula contaminated by LaPlante (pictured). The baby has since been released from the hospital and is in good health.

According to police, LaPlante had the scheme going for up to two months. They say she mostly tampered with Gerber Good Start Soy products after buying or stealing them.

Laplante has admitted to mixing in flour, sugars and rice cereal into the formula before returning it to the stores, according to the complaint.

She used a strong smelling adhesive to re-seal the opened products.

Two Fry's Food and Drug stores, as well as two Wal-Marts, have been flagged as stores where tampered formula have been returned to.

Police say there may be other products that LaPlante tampered with but those brands are unknown at this time.
A white Oklahoma police officer who shot dead an unarmed black man testified that her police training was running through her mind as she pulled the trigger.

Officer Betty Jo Shelby is accused of killing 40-year-old Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma on September 16 after she came across his broken down SUV blocking a road.

Prosecutors say the 42-year-old cop 'reacted unreasonably' when she opened fire on Crutcher, who was unarmed, obeying commands and hand his hands in the air.

But Shelby, who is facing a manslaughter charge, told the court that she had been recalling the lessons taught during her police training when she shot the suspect.

'If you hesitate and delay, then you die,' she said when she took the stand on Monday, according to Tulsa World.

Officer Betty Jo Shelby (pictured in court on Monday) is accused of killing 40-year-old Terence Crutcher

Shelby (left, in uniform) told the court that she had been recalling the lessons taught during her police training when she shot the Terence Crutcher (right)

She told prosecutors that police training videos showed her that if suspects are allowed to reach back into their vehicle, they 'can pull out guns and kill you.'

' I'm told in my training that you don't let them pull their arm back out,' Shelby added, referring to the open window of a vehicle.

Shelby, who had never fired her weapon on duty before shooting Crutcher dead, says she does not regret what she did, as that's what she was trained to do.

Shelby's attorneys say she shot Crutcher because she feared for her life, believing Crutcher was reaching into his vehicle for a gun.

Shelby, who joined the Tulsa Police Department in December 2011, claims he did not respond to her questions and did not respond to her commands to stop as he walked to his vehicle with his hands in the air before she shot him.

Crutcher's family immediately discounted that claim, saying the father of four posed no threat to the officers, and police said Crutcher did not have gun on him or in his vehicle.

Police found no evidence Crutcher had a weapon on his person or in his car.

Helicopter video and a dashboard camera showed Crutcher walking away from Shelby on the street with his arms in the air.

Prosecutors say the 42-year-old officer 'reacted unreasonably' and was 'emotionally involved to the point that she overreacted' when she shot Crutcher on a Tulsa road in September

It doesn't offer a clear view of when Shelby fired the single shot.

Radio chatter that captured moments before the shooting included an officer saying Crutcher looked 'like a bad dude' who 'could be on something.'

The statements outraged Crutcher's family, who said the statements indicated a racial bias.

Shelby also told police investigators that she believed Crutcher was high on PCP, a powerful hallucinogenic that can make users combative and unpredictable.

An autopsy found the drug in his system, and police said they recovered a vial of it in Crutcher's SUV.

An Oklahoma State University officer, Jack Robison, was also called to testify for the defense on Monday.

Robison, who is assigned to the Tulsa campus, said he had arrested Crutcher for public intoxication and obstruction in 2012, describing him as 'noncompliant' and 'very defiant' toward police.

The officer testified he had used his taser on Crutcher, who appeared to be under the influence, twice to get him to comply.

Betty Shelby, leaving the courtroom following testimony in her trial on Friday says she had never fired her weapon on duty before the September 2016 interaction with Crutcher but does not regret what she did, claiming that's what she was trained to do

However, Assistant District Attorney Kevin Gray pointed out that during cross-examination that Robison chose to use less-lethal force against Crutcher 'despite him doing all of those behaviors.'

During a TV interview in April, Shelby told correspondent Bill Whitaker she had been 'feeling that (Crutcher's) intent is to do me harm and I keep thinking, 'Don't do this. Please don't do this. Don't make this happen.'

Shelby told Whitaker that she remembers pulling the trigger.

'It's like slow motion of me bringing my gun up, my finger coming in and then letting off. And he stopped and then he just slowly fell to the ground,' she said.

The officer revealed that her husband had watched her open fire on Crutcher, as he was working as a spotter on board the police helicopter.

Prosecutors contend that Shelby overreacted because Crutcher wasn't armed or combative when she approached him on a north Tulsa street after his SUV broke down. They say he obeyed orders to raise his hands. After the shooting, investigators determined that Crutcher didn't have a weapon on him or in his SUV.

She said she first noticed the large 240lb black man standing in the middle of the road as she made her way to a different response call, ten minutes before the incident.

Tiffany Crutcher, left, the sister of Terence Crutcher, in the courtroom in the trial of Tulsa police officer Betty Jo Shelby in Tulsa, Friday

Rev. Joey Crutcher, left, the father of Terence Crutcher, talked with Damario Solomon-Simmons, right, the Crutcher family attorney, during a recess in the trial on Friday

She said of Crutcher: 'His hands are just dropped beside him. His chin is resting on his chest. And he's standing there motionless. And I thought, 'Hmmm. I wonder if he's on PCP.''

Shelby drove on until she came across an abandoned vehicle in the middle of the road, and after she got out to investigate, Crutcher had made his way over.

The officer noted that her training taught her people on PCP have the tendency to turn violent and that the 40-year-old kept reaching his hands in his pocket, which led her to be wary.

Only two minutes after her initial encounter with Crutcher, Shelby fatally shot the man, right in front of the eyes of her husband, David Shelby.

Oklahoma's medical examiner determined that the father-of-four did have the hallucinogenic drug PCP in his system when he died.

The police helicopter pilot remarked that Crutcher looked like 'a bad dude' and David Shelby, who was with the pilot commented to CBS: 'What I saw was, an individual that was being noncompliant and apparently and obviously refusing to obey the commands of the officer.'

Shelby added in her interview: 'What I based everything on was his actions, his behaviors. Race had nothing to do with my decision making.'

Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany Crutcher, said that after viewing the footage herself, she's certain her brother was wrongfully killed.

'What we saw on that video is what my dad always taught my brothers, taught us to do if we were pulled over by a police officer,' Tiffany Crutcher said. 'Put your hands in the air and put your hands on the car. And my brother did what my father taught us.'

While the video shows Crutcher with his hands up for a significant portion of the encounter, Shelby said she shot him when he reached into his vehicle.

The footage isn't very clear, and there are times when Shelby and her partner that day blocked the video by standing in front of the dash cam. Helicopter footage is also difficult to evaluate, as it's from far away.

'I say with a louder, more intense voice, Stop! Stop! Stop!' Shelby added, further describing her recollection from that day. 'And he didn't and that's when I took aim.'

When asked if she thought the Tulsa district attorney's decision to charge her with manslaughter six days after the shooting and before the police department's investigation was concluded was made to prevent civil unrest, Shelby said, 'I believe that's what they thought.'

Tiffany Crutcher believes Shelby is only saying what she needs to say to get away with killing her brother. 'Of course, she's saying everything that she's supposed to say to defend herself,' she said.

'We need our men and women in blue. But at the end of the day, they're not warriors. They're supposed to be our guardians,' Crutcher told the CBS host.
A care home has been reprimanded after it was found to be employing nurses who could not speak English - with one having to use Google Translate to get her through shifts.

The Penrhos nursing home, in the seaside resort of Pwllheli, Gwynedd, has been issued with a warning from the Care and Social Services Inspectorat for Wales over the language problems.

Its lack of English-speaking staff was revealed in a probe at the home where an inspection revealed the language headache caused problems when emergency and out-of-hours doctors were needed.

Inspectors revealed two out of 11 nurses working at the home, which houses 44 residents, struggled to speak English.

The Penrhos nursing home, in the seaside resort of Pwllheli, Gwynedd, has been issued with a warning from the Care and Social Services Inspectorat for Wale

Their report said: 'Two of the nurses employed have very poor English language skills of which one nurse has very little understanding of speaking, understanding and written English.

'Two care staff we spoke with told us that this caused difficulty as they did not always understand what the nurse were saying and vice versa.

'We were told by two care staff one nurse has very little understanding of English and no Welsh language skills. The nurse uses Google Translate to get by on their shift.

'They informed us this has caused difficulties especially when there have been times where there is a need to call emergency services or out-of-hours doctors.'

The home is registered to care for 44 pensioners along with two younger adults and an older person needing dementia care.

It has been issued with a non-compliance notice highlighting its failure to meet regulations.

The report adds that the home's deputy manager confirmed one nurse's command of English language both spoken and written is poor and confirmed this nurse uses Google Translate during the shift.

The inspectors said: 'The impact of this is that people cannot be assured that they are being cared for by staff who are competent in English or Welsh or have effective communication skills in order to deliver safe effect care.

'This places people who use the service at risk of harm as people do not always receive the appropriate care.'

Many people at the home were also dehydrated with some so thirsty their lips were cracked, inspectors said.

Drinks were left out of reach and there was inadequate record of what fluids they had been given.

Among other issues raised in the report was lack of drinks provided to residents.

'Fluids recorded were inadequate and indicated dehydration for many people in the home.

'There was no evidence of nursing intervention to ensure people were receiving adequate fluids.

'We saw one person's mid-morning cup of tea was left on their locker at 12.20 hours. The person required assistance but, staff had not helped this person.'

The report went on: 'We saw that some people had fluids positioned out of their reach, resulting in them being unable to take a drink as needed. We saw that two people had dry mouths and cracked lips.'

The home is run by a charitable foundation founded in 1949 to provide accommodation for polish ex-servicemen and women in Britain after World War Two. The nurse who used Google Translate is no longer working there.

The inspectors said: 'People cannot always be assured that they will be protected from harm.'
Fred Talbot, 67, pictured, is on trial accused of indecently assaulting several teenage boys on school trips to Scotland

A man who claims to have been indecently assaulted by TV weatherman Fred Talbot says he felt 'shocked' and 'repulsed' after the alleged attack in his tent on a school camping trip.

The witness told a jury he 'froze' after Talbot, then a teacher at his school, carried out the night time assault during an excursion to the south of Scotland in 1979.

'I thought this a betrayal of trust by somebody I regarded as a friend,' the man told Lanark Sheriff Court.

Talbot, 67, is on trial accused of indecently assaulting several teenage boys on school trips to Scotland.

He is also accused of lewd, indecent and libidinous practices and behaviour towards a boy aged 12 on a trip.

Talbot denies the charges against him.

The witness, the first to be called at the trial, told the court he was a pupil at a grammar school in Cheshire in the 1970s, where Talbot was a teacher.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, described how he went on a weekend camping excursion led by Talbot to Grey Mare's Tail, near Moffat in Dumfries and Galloway, in the spring or summer of 1979.

The witness, now 54, said the group of boys on the trip had been allowed to buy alcohol and the atmosphere was initially 'happy' and almost 'joyful'.

Talbot was more informal than some other teachers and would talk about subjects such as sex, the court heard.

The witness told jurors that, at bedtime on the second night of the trip, Talbot asked if he could join him in the tent he was sharing with a friend because it had more room.

The man said he had 'slight reservations' at the time but agreed because 'I thought he was my friend, I thought nothing would happen'.

Fred Talbot, pictured, was more informal than some other teachers and would talk about subjects such as sex, the court heard

Talbot then brought his sleeping bag into the tent and laid down between the boys, the court was told.

The witness said he then remembered the accused putting his hand into the opening of his pyjama bottoms.

'I was shocked at the time so I just froze for a moment,' he said, before describing how he moved the accused's arm away.

Asked by prosecutor Imran Bashir how he felt, the witness replied: 'Shocked, repulsed. I also felt foolish to let myself get into this position.'

He went on: 'I thought this a betrayal of trust by somebody I regarded as a friend. I felt upset about it.'

The man said Talbot later tried to apologise to him, but he told jurors: 'I thought 'this isn't an accident, this is something you've deliberately done'.'

The case is being heard at Lanark Sheriff Court, pictured, in Scotland. Talbot denies all the charges against him

He told Mr Bashir: 'It was an assault in my mind,' and he agreed that it had been of a sexual nature.

Alan Grevelle, defending, suggested to the witness that he had reacted to the alleged incident in a 'measured' way at the time. The man rejected the suggestion and said he had been 'too frightened' to do anything else.

The lawyer put it to the witness he had 'jumped on the bandwagon' after seeing a media report about Talbot.

'I'm really sorry you had to say that,' the witness replied.

Talbot is accused of carrying out the offences involving pupils aged 15-17 on trips in Scotland while he was employed as a school teacher.

He faces eight charges of indecent assault between January 1978 and November 1981 and one of lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour in February 1978.

Six of the incidents are alleged to have happened on camping trips in Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway, and three on boating trips on the Caledonian Canal in Inverness.

The trial, before Sheriff Nikola Stewart, continues on Tuesday.
The White House would not say Monday whether the president taped conversations with his FBI director that he would be providing to Congress.

Trump's spokesman said he had nothing else to say about the tweet that insinuated the president had recorded his talks with James Comey.

'I think I made it clear last week that the president has nothing further on that,' Sean Spicer curtly told a reporter during his daily briefing. 'I said, I was very clear, the president will have nothing further on that,' Spicer said.

Lawmakers said Sunday that Trump could count on a subpoena if the suggestion that he had tapes of their talks turned out to be true.

The White House would not say Monday whether the president taped conversations with his FBI director and had copies he would be providing to Congress

Trump's spokesman said he had nothing else to say about the tweet that insinuated the president had recorded his talks with James Comey in a briefing Monday where the 'tapes' came up repeatedly

On three separate occasions, Trump says Comey (right) told him he was not being investigated - and he may have tapes of the confirmations, he's said

The White House refused to say definitively on Friday, and again on Monday, that Trump did - or did not - record the discussions.

The president had said in a Friday tweet that Comey 'better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!'

The tweet added an entirely new dimension to the shock firing that the White House had already been struggling to explain.

Trump said the firing had nothing to do with the FBI's Russia investigation in a letter he sent Comey informing him that he'd been canned. On three separate occasions, Trump says the FBI official told him he was not being investigated.

Comey and Trump had dinner once, and talked on the phone twice, before the law enforcement official was fired, the White House has said.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Sunday he would be surprised if Comey had actually told Trump that he was not being probed, even if he wasn't.

Clapper also claimed that Comey told him the dinner was Trump initiated, and that he felt uncomfortable attending, given his bureau's supposed independence.

Spicer was unable to say Friday whether Comey or Trump asked for the dinner the president previously described as a favor to his flailing FBI director.

'He wanted to have dinner because he wanted to stay on,' Trump has said.

Monday, Spicer told reporters he had not spoke to the president about it yet, even though he had three days to follow up on their questions.

The president's spokesman wouldn't entertain inquiries on the 'tapes,' and shut down a reporter asking whether Trump would comply with a subpoena.

'I made it clear what the president's position was on that issue,' he hollered during the back and forth.

Trump said Friday during a taping of Justice with Judge Jeanine Pirro the tapes are something he 'can't talk about.'

'I won't talk about that. All I want is for Comey to be honest and I hope he will be and I'm sure he will be, I hope,' the president added.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who's heading a Judiciary subcommittee investigation into election meddling, said Sunday on the Meet the Press that Trump shouldn't be 'cute' about the tapes and the possibility that they exist.

'If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over,' Graham said.

The White House repeatedly refused to say definitively on Friday, and again on Monday, that Trump did or did not record the discussions Trump alluded to in this tweet

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who's heading a Judiciary subcommittee investigation into election meddling, said Sunday that Trump shouldn't be 'cute' about the tapes. Mark Warner, right, said he would 'absolutely' subpoena them

Mark Warner said he would 'absolutely' subpoena the tapes during a Sunday appearance on ABC News' This Week program.

'Ive asked, others have asked, to make sure the tapes are preserved, if they exist,' a Democratic senator who's helping lead an investigation in the Intelligence Committee.

The senators did not say whether they had formally requested the materials from the White House through a records or document preservation request. A subpoena would typically come after that, and only if the initial request was rejected.

Democratic lawmakers renewed their calls last week for a special prosecutor to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election and alleged Trump campaign collusion.

Sen. John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, revived his call for an independent commission.

Spicer reiterated the White House's stance Monday that a special prosecutor is not needed.

'Theres, frankly, no need for a special prosecutor,' he said. 'You have two Senate committees that are looking into this. The FBI is conducting their own review. And I think if you even look at what Acting Director [Andrew] McCabe said last week, he made it very clear that they had the resources that they need and that the work continues.'

DOJ is currently interviewing replacements for the FBI director position, and the White House has been tight-lipped about the president's preferences.

Spicer said Monday that Trump was waiting to see who they recommended in response to requests from Graham and other lawmakers that the new FBI director be non-partisan.

Trump suggested Saturday that he could send a nomination to the Senate before he leaves Friday on his first foreign trip.

He told reporters Monday that the search is 'moving rapidly' but that was it.
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Emmanuel Macron's plans for swift EU reforms were knocked back today as he met Angela Merkel for the first time since becoming president.

The two met in Berlin on Macron's first full day in office signaling his intentions to move rapidly on campaign promises to revive support for the bloc by reforming and strengthening it.

But while both leaders said they were prepared to change European treaties if needed, Merkel insisted that such measures were not immediately on the table.

French President Emmanuel Macron, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel shake hands after a press conference in Berlin

The relationship between the two countries has become increasingly lopsided over recent years as France struggled economically

Germany is looking to Macron to revitalize France as an economic power and political heavyweight in the EU, which is facing complex divorce proceedings with its current No. 2 economy, Britain

Ahead of his visit on Monday, the 39-year-old indicated that he wanted a joint budget, parliament and finance minister for the eurozone.

The chancellor's coalition has been at odds over how to respond to his plans, with some conservatives fearful the monetary union could develop into a 'transfer union' in which Germany is asked to pay for spendthrift states.

In a nod to German concerns, Macron said during a news conference with Merkel that he had never pushed for jointly issued eurobonds and does not favor European countries taking joint responsibility for old debts.

He added, however, that 'what I know is that we have investments to make (in Europe), and so we have to work on investment mechanisms for the future'.

Macron said that he would work with Merkel on a 'road map' for the EU, and that they needed to work on 'deep reforms that are necessary and need common work'.

Macron said at the news conference with Merkel that he had never pushed for jointly issued eurobonds and added he does not favor European countries taking joint responsibility for old debts

Macron said: 'We have investments to make (in Europe), and so we have to work on investment mechanisms for the future'

Germany and France have traditionally been the motor of European integration

Macron's trip to Berlin highlighted his pro-European politics and desire to work with Merkel on what he says must become 'a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe'

Merkel said she hoped for a 'new dynamism' in German-French relations, adding that 'Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that'

But Merkel said: 'First we need to work on what we want to change, and then if it turns out it needs a treaty change, then we're prepared to do that.'

The visit to Berlin continued a tradition of French presidents making their first foreign trip to Germany.

A large group of onlookers, some carrying European flags, stood outside the chancellery as Macron arrived.

Germany and France have traditionally been the motor of European integration, but the relationship has become increasingly lopsided over recent years as France struggled economically.

Merkel called Macron's visit an honour and a sign of the deep friendship between the two European powerhouses.

'We each represent the interests of our own countries, but the interests of Germany are naturally closely tied to the interests of France,' Merkel said.

She added that she hoped for a 'new dynamism' in German-French relations, saying that 'Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that.'

Following the press conference the leaders pictured drinking wine together on the balcony of the Chancellery.

Macron's trip to Berlin highlighted his pro-European politics and desire to work with Merkel on what he says must become 'a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe.' Macron previously met Merkel when he visited Berlin in March as a candidate.

Germany is looking to Macron to revitalize France as an economic power and political heavyweight in the EU, which is facing complex divorce proceedings with its current No. 2 economy, Britain.

A large group of onlookers, some carrying European flags, stood outside the chancellery as Macron arrived

After the press conference Macron and Merkel were pictured drinking wine together on the balcony of the Chancellery

Merkel called Macron's visit an honor and a sign of the deep friendship between the two European powerhouses

As a candidate, Macron called for a 'new Franco-German deal' that would involve 'much more structured cooperation' on investment, on European border security, and on defence

When Britain leaves the bloc in 2019, France will be the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

As a candidate, Macron called for a 'new Franco-German deal' that would involve 'much more structured cooperation' on investment, on European border security, and on defence.

Macron is the conservative Merkel's fourth French president in nearly 12 years as chancellor. She built a solid relationship with Macron's predecessor, Socialist Francois Hollande, despite their political differences - notably with their joint effort to secure an accord to calm the fighting in eastern Ukraine in tense talks in Minsk, Belarus in 2015.

Germany is keen to continue the Franco-German diplomatic drive to keep a lid on the situation in Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists are battling the government.

Merkel has praised Macron's embrace of European unity but has offered few concrete details about the way forward for German-French relations.
An elderly couple have died after what authorities say was a murder-suicide in an independent living retirement community.

Officials say an 83-year-old man shot his 80-year-old wife and then shot himself to death in the Cumberland Woods Village in McCandless Township, Pennsylvania.

Police were called to the scene just after 6.30am Monday and found the couple with gunshot wounds. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

Police say an 83-year-old man shot his 80-year-old wife and then shot himself in a murder-suicide in the Cumberland Woods Village, pictured, early Monday morning

Officers confirmed the couple was married, according to CBS Pittsburgh, though their identities have not been released.

'I'm shocked. I mean, nothing like that ever happens,' one resident told WTAE.

Another said residents see the apartment complex as a place where neighbors care for each other.

'You do become a family and you become concerned about somebody if they are having troubles, and everybody has troubles at this age,' she told CBS Pittsburgh.

Allegheny County Police Lt Andrew Schurman said officers were in the process of notifying their family members, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The couple were pronounced dead at the scene. Though their identities have not been released by police, officers confirmed the two were married. Cumberland Woods Village, where the couple died, is pictured

Police found no evidence of foul play and no one else was in danger, according to WTAE.

Allegheny County homicide detectives will be helping McCandless police in the investigation, according to TribLive.com.

Cumberland Woods Village is a retirement community apartment complex just north of Pittsburgh. The community is run by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

A UPMC spokeswoman called it a 'tragic incident' in a statement.

Police say there is no evidence of foul play and no one else was in danger during the shooting, but Allegheny County homicide detectives will be helping McCandless police in the investigation

One resident of the community, pictured, said: 'I'm shocked. I mean, nothing like that ever happens'
A Mississippi gang member has been sentenced to 49 years in prison for the first-ever federal hate crime conviction stemming from the killing of a transgender person.

Joshua Vallum, a member of the Latin Kings gang, was sentenced by a federal judge in Gulfport, Mississippi, on Monday after pleading guilty to hate crime charges in the death of 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson.

Vallum dated Williamson on and off before he shot her with a stun gun, stabbed her repeatedly and beat her to death with a hammer, he told the Sun Herald. She was found dead and partially buried in a field on June 3, 2015.

Vallum later said he was motivated by the fear that his fellow gang members would find out about his sexual relationship with a transgender woman. The gang prohibits homosexual activity and declared it punishable by death, prosecutors said.

Joshua Vallum, a member of the Latin Kings gang, was sentenced to 49 years by a federal judge in Gulfport, Mississippi, on Monday after pleading guilty to federal hate crime charges

Vallum (left) dated 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson (right0 on and off before he shot her with a stun gun, stabbed her repeatedly and beat her to death with a hammer

Vallum could have faced life in federal prison, but U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola stuck to a lighter sentence suggested in a plea deal that cited Vallum's neglected childhood.

Despite the 49-year sentence, it's unlikely Vallum will ever leave prison. He also pleaded guilty to a state murder charge, which landed Vallum a separate sentence of life without parole.

The case has been closely watched by LGBT advocates nationwide, who applaud the first use of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act to prosecute an offense against a transgender person.

'The taking of a human life because a person has a particular gender identity is particularly heinous and cannot be tolerated in an enlightened society,' Guirola said.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a statement saying the Justice Department under his leadership will continue efforts to 'vindicate the rights of those individuals who are affected by bias motivated crimes.'

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued statement saying the Justice Department would 'vindicate' those affected by bias motivated crimes

In federal court on Monday, Vallum begged forgiveness from Williamson's family and friends, even though none of them were present to hear his words.

'Every day, I live with the guilt and regret of my actions.' Vallum said. 'If I could bring back Mercedes by giving up my life, I would gladly do so.'

Federal prosecutor Julia Gegenheimer said during Vallum's plea hearing in December that he began planning to kill Williamson after a friend called him May 28, 2015, to say he'd discovered her identity.

Vallum lured Williamson into a car in Alabama and drove her 50 miles to his family home near Lucedale, Mississippi, prosecutors have said.

He shocked her with a stun gun and stabbed her in the body and head with a pocketknife, they added.

Prosecutors also said that when Williamson tried to run into the woods, Vallum chased her down and bashed her in the head with a hammer.

At Monday's hearing, public defenders submitted a sealed brief to Guirola outlining Vallum's troubles.

'Mr. Vallum lived through a childhood that was characterized by abandonment and neglect,' said public defender Ellen Allred. 'It's difficult to image how a mother could lock a two- or three-year-old child in a room for house on end while adults did drugs.'

Allred said Vallum first tried to kill himself when he was age 7 or 8.

'We can't go back and change Mr. Vallum's childhood, just like Mr. Vallum can't go back and undo what he did to Mercedes,' Allred said.

Vallum initially told sheriff's deputies and later told The Sun Herald newspaper that he found out that Williamson had a penis on May 30, 2015  moments before he killed her.

He said he 'blacked out' and doesn't remember the crime, a variation of what's known as a 'gay panic' or 'trans panic' defense, which the American Bar Association has called an 'excuse'.

Vallum later said he was motivated by the fear that his fellow gang members would find out about his sexual relationship with a transgender woman (pictured, Williamson)

But Jeanie Miller, who shared a trailer with Williamson and often spoke to the teen about her relationship, testified in court, saying Vallum was well aware that Williamson was transgender.

According to the Sun Herald, Miller testified that Williamson and Vallum frequently spent time together and had an active sex life.

She also told the court the two were openly affectionate, calling one another 'baby' and expressing their love for one another.

Vallum also once took Williamson to a Latin Kings beach party according to Miller, and the teenager had spoken in the past about how both she and Vallum would be killed if any member of the gang learned that she was transgender.

A photo from that beach party, with Williamson and Vallum affectionately wrapping their arms around one another, was actually posted by Vallum on Facebook, with the gang member writing: 'Great night with the fam Saturday.'

Miller said that despite the alleged threat of death at the hands of her boyfriend's fellow gang members Williamson told her at one point during her relationship with Vallum that 'she didn't have anything to worry about.'

Vallum's lawyers have never contested evidence that Vallum had long known Williamson was transgender.

Williamson had transitioned from male to female before dropping out of high school in Alabama, distancing herself from her parents while drifting from place to place.
Career criminal Rimone Edwards-Armstrong, 26, was employed as an accounts payable clerk at the NHS's Medical & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) as part of a rehabilitation scheme

Health bosses knowingly gave a convicted fraudster a job in an accounts department  where he promptly stole almost 9,000.

Career criminal Rimone Edwards-Armstrong, 26, was employed as an accounts payable clerk at the NHS's Medical & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) as part of a rehabilitation scheme.

From there, he and an accomplice launched a 'sophisticated and serious' scam to fleece one of its suppliers and pocket taxpayers' money.

The decision to give Edwards-Armstrong the position emerged at London's Blackfriars Crown Court earlier this week where he was jailed for ten months.

Last night one NHS fraud investigator told the Daily Mail: 'It simply beggars belief that Edwards-Armstrong  who everyone knew had a string of fraud convictions  was put in a position of trust and then stole from his employer.

'Whoever made the decision to put him in an accounts department should today be hanging their head in shame.

'It is like giving an arsonist not only a box of matches but also a lighter too  just to make sure he does the job. When he was employed it was clearly known he was a previous fraud offender and it was known what type of fraud he had committed.'

The Daily Mail has learned Edwards-Armstrong committed fraud before, during and after his 12-month contract with the MHRA. He had 11 convictions for credit card fraud prior to joining the agency  including buying 1,500 worth of vouchers in a store using a stolen credit card.

Edwards-Armstrong was hired by the MHRA in 2014 under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. He committed the fraud with co-conspirator Aran Joseph-Dawkins, leaving the agency last summer with his crime undetected.

Shortly before his contract was due to end Edwards-Armstrong contacted a new MHRA supplier called Image Display.

Edwards-Armstrong was employed as an accounts payable clerk at the NHS's Medical & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) as part of a rehabilitation scheme

Edwards-Armstrong was hired by the MHRA in 2014 under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act

He asked for written confirmation of Image Display's banking details and the supplier gave him the information on letter-headed paper electronically.

Within days payments for 6,397.20 and then 2,292, which were due to be sent to Image Display, were redirected to Joseph-Dawkins, who then began moving cash through other bank accounts to launder it.

When the missing money was noticed by Image Display, a Department of Health investigation began which led to both men being arrested in April last year.

They were questioned by NHS investigators but gave 'no comment' answers.

When they appeared for sentencing at Blackfriars Crown Court, Edwards-Armstrong claimed the fraud was Joseph-Dawkins' idea and that he had never received any of the stolen money.

Joseph-Dawkins, who claimed to be a gambling addict, turned on Edwards-Armstrong saying it was all his idea.

Joseph-Dawkins, 27, from Hackney, was given a six-month sentence suspended for 18 months, told to do 200 hours of community service and ordered to pay back 4,000

Sentencing them, Judge John Hillen gave both credit for early guilty pleas but highlighted the 'sophistication and seriousness' of the offences and the loss of taxpayers' money. He said Edwards-Armstrong had a position of trust and for that reason he would receive a custodial sentence.

After leaving the job, Edwards-Armstrong committed two more card frauds including one which took place when he used a 'cloned' credit card at the Westfield Shopping centre in Stratford, east London. It is unclear who authorised Edwards-Armstrong to work in the finance office but an NHS spokesman said: 'We welcome the outcome of this case involving a former employee of MHRA.'

Edwards-Armstrong of Hackney, north-east London, pleaded guilty to fraud by abuse of his position at an earlier hearing. Joseph-Dawkins, 27, also from Hackney, was given a six-month sentence suspended for 18 months, told to do 200 hours of community service and ordered to pay back 4,000.

He admitted three fraud charges relating to proceeds of crime, converting criminal property and money laundering.
Marvel has cancelled its Black Lives Matter-themed comic book due to poor sales.

Black Panther & The Crew, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and poet Yona Harvey, is just two issues into its run.

In an interview with The Verge, Coates said that the comic book had been cut because it wasn't selling well but that he would get the chance to wrap up the current story. The sixth issue will be the final installment.

Coates also writes for the main Black Panther comic, which will continue to publish.

Black Panther's character was debuted in Captain America: Civil War, and first had a spin-off with The Crew in 2003.

Black Panther & The Crew (left) will cease publication after six issues. The comic was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates (right), who has often written on the issue of race

But that comic book was also cancelled after just seven issues.

This iteration of the comic book saw Black Panther and other black superheroes in the Marvel universe such as Luke Cage, Misty Knight, Storm and the former Avenger Manifold, trying to solve the death of a black woman named Ezra Keith who dies in police custody.

Keith's death is reminiscent of the real life death of Sandra Bland.

The comic book takes place in near-future New York, where Harlem is placed under martial law.

Robot cops controlled by a private security contractor police the neighborhood.

While solving the mystery they all learn about Civil Rights figures.

At the end of March, David Gabriel, Marvel's senior vice president of sales and marketing, told icv2.com that the publisher's core fan base didn't seem interested in the new comics aimed at diversity.

'What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversitythat's what we saw in sales,' Gabriel said. 'We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against.'
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Horrifying footage has captured the moment at least two people were killed when their private jet crashed in New Jersey on Monday afternoon.

The Learjet 35 went down Monday afternoon near Teterboro Airport, killing both crew members. No one else was onboard the aircraft, which was coming from Philadelphia.

Surveillance video from a nearby business shows the moment of impact and then a huge fireball.

The plane comes into shot very quickly and slams into the ground at a nearly 90-degree angle.

Scroll down for video

Security footage shows the moment the private plane crashed into a concrete parking lot in New Jersey on Monday afternoon

The plane disappeared as a fireball erupted where the private aircraft crashed into the ground on Monday afternoon in New Jersey

A huge fireball erupts at the crash site, and seconds later clouds of thick black smoke spewed into the air.

A man can be seen running across the parking lot toward the crash site.

The video was released after it was revealed the plane was registered to a company called A&C Big Sky Aviation, which has a residential address in Montana.

The owners of the residence are Daniel and Julane Wells. They could not be reached on Monday night.

The FAA confirmed the plane came down a quarter-mile from the airport in an industrial area in Carlstadt, a few miles from MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands.

There were no passengers on board, authorities said, and no casualties have yet been reported on the ground.

This map shows where the deadly crash took place in New Jersey on Monday afternoon

A plane crashed in a parking lot in an industrial area (pictured) in New Jersey on Monday, killing at least two crew members. No injuries have yet been reported on the ground (photo obtained by NBC4)

Fire crews sprayed nearby buildings and cars with water to douse the flames. One person who works nearby said that his colleagues would have been hurt had it crashed minutes later (photo obtained by NBC4)

FAA investigators quickly raced to the scene so they could be on the ground and attempt to determine what caused the deadly crash.

Emergency responders reached the scene a short time later and worked for more than an hour to extinguish the blaze.

The plane landed in the parking lot of Manhattan Door Corporation on Kero Road, destroying multiple cars and damaging buildings.

Joe Orlando, a spokesman for the town, confirmed no one inside the building was harmed. He said pieces of melted engine could be seen in the charred wreckage, along with wheels and part of the fuselage.

One witness told NBC 4 the plane 'flipped over completely' before it crashed in a parking lot near a group of warehouses.

Another witness, who works nearby, explained how the death toll from the crash could have been so much worse.

The worker told NBC 4 the plane plummeted from the sky just minutes before employees at the warehouses would have gone out to their cars.

Firefighters are seen at the building where a jet crashed near Teterboro Airport in Carlstadt, New Jersey, on Monday

A firefighter stands looks over the scene where pieces of the crashed plane can be seen on Monday

Burnt wreckage is seen at the site where a Learjet 35 crashed in Carlstadt, New Jersey

This picture shows some of the smoldering wreckage left behind after a deadly plane crash in New Jersey

Firefighters work at the site where a Learjet 35 crashed in Carlstadt, New Jersey

Two crew members were aboard the plane when it crashed about 3:30pm on Monday. Pictured are emergency workers at the site

Steve Case, an entrepreneur and co-founder of AOL, wrote in an Instagram post that the plane appeared to have missed a turn. He was aboard another plane at the airport at the time

Firefighters work at the site where a Learjet 35 crashed in Carlstadt, New Jersey, on Monday afternoon - killing two people

Emergency workers were pictured at the scene of the crash throughout the afternoon on Monday after the shocking accident

Early estimates suggested about a dozen cars were consumed in the fire, which was largely contained within a parking lot, a third witness claimed.

Video shot from the ground by showed a column of black smoke rising from the crash site, with fire engines spraying buildings and cars as the fire continued to rage.

An hour after the crash, most of the fires had been doused and brought under control, but photos showed some cars melted and buildings damaged by debris.

Authorities also said that there were melted power lines due to the fire, some of which had potentially electrified fences.

Locals were told to leave the scene during the fire, due to dangerous smoke from the jet fuel.

This file photograph shows a military version of the private jet that crashed. It was a Learjet 35. Teterboro Airport is a destination for many private jets flown by celebrities and businesses

The burned out wreckage of a car in the parking lot where the plane crashed on Monday afternoon near New Jersey's Meadowlands is seen

A firefighter is pictured working at the site where a Learjet 35 crashed in New Jersey on Monday

Some of the damage caused by the plane crash, in which two people died, is seen in this photograph

Wreckage is seen at the site of where a Learjet 35 crashed in New Jersey just miles away from an airport on Monday afternoon

A firefighter walk past wreckage at the site where a private plane crashed on Monday afternoon in New Jersey, killing two crew members who were on board

The National Weather Service warned of strong winds of 15-25mph with gusts up to 45mph just before the crash Monday at 3:30pm.

But commercial and jet pilots are both used to gusty conditions, NBC 4 said, and if a safe glide is not possible they are trained to head back up until it's safe to land, they said.

The exact cause of the crash will not be confirmed until after the police investigation, they said.

Steve Case, an entrepreneur and co-founder of AOL, wrote in an Instagram post that the plane appeared to have missed a turn. He was aboard another plane at the airport at the time.

Prior to making the journey from Philadelphia, the jet had flown from Teterboro to Bedford, Massachusetts, early Monday morning.

Teterboro Airport has been shut down after the accident. It is commonly used to land private jets belonging to celebrities and local businesses.

Teterboro, which is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the oldest operating airport in the New York City area. The busy site is the scene of dozens of takeoffs and landings each day and is a favorite landing spot for corporate and other luxury jets.

The airport was the scene of a midair crash that killed nine people in 2009, when a single-engine plane and a sightseeing helicopter collided over the Hudson River.

Twenty people were injured there in 2005 when a corporate jet aborted its takeoff and crashed into a nearby warehouse.

Some of the damage from the crash is pictured on Monday afternoon near a series of warehouses in New Jersey

Firefighters are pictured working at the crash site near New Jersey's Teterboro Airport on Monday afternoon following the deadly crash

A firefighter walking at the scene of the private plane crash looks at the wreckage of two burned cars in the New Jersey parking lot
A couple and their two house guests are recovering in hospital after masked intruders stormed their Melbourne home this morning - shooting a man in the back.

Police were called to a home in Tarneit in the city's west on Tuesday where they found a 31-year-old man, who lives in the newly-built home, with a gunshot wound.

The man is in a serious condition at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, with surgery still an option, police said.

A 34-year-old man, 23-year-old woman and a 32-year-old woman were then found injured in the home after being assaulted, Victoria Police allege.

Between two and four intruders were armed with a baseball bat and firearm when they entered the home with their faces covered, waking the sleeping victims.

Scroll down for video

Broken glass is pictured at the home in Tarneit, western Sydney

A police officer is pictured at the scene of the shooting where four people were injured

Police have cordoned off a crime scene at the street in Tarneit, western Melbourne

Pictures from the scene show a smashed window at the front of the house.

Neighbours told Daily Mail Australia the streets around the home were usually quiet however 'small gangs of young people' often hang around after school.

'The teens show no respect to others around them, but other than that it's (the area) not as bad as some people make it out to be,' the neighbour said.

7News reports the 31 year old also suffered a blow to the head.

The other three victims were taken to the Alfred Hospital in a stable condition, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed.

The 34-year-old man and 32-year-old woman allegedly assaulted had head injuries, while the 23-year-old has suffered an arm injury, according to 7News.

The man shot and one of the injured women live at the home, while the other man and other woman were visitors, an officer told a press conference on Tuesday.

Police were called to the home in Tarneit in the city's west just after 4am on Tuesday and found a 31-year-old man with a gunshot wound to the back

He said the victims appear to have been woken by the intruders.

The officer said the victims were co-operating but had limited information.

Police have reportedly been reviewing security cameras from a neighbour's property.

The exact circumstances surrounding the incident are being investigated. No arrests have been made.

The area is a new estate in Melbourne with new homes still being built across the road from the incident. Construction workers arrived at work this morning to find the crime scene.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or make a confidential report at www.crimestoppersvic.com.au

A police officer walks past the home where a man was shot and three people were allegedly assaulted about 4am on Tuesday
A security guard at a Maryland middle school has been arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student, police say.

Mike Anthony Lievano, 21, was arrested on Sunday night when he turned himself in to Montgomery County police on charges of sexual abuse of a minor, a third-degree sex offense and a fourth-degree sex offense. He is being held on $10,000 bond.

Police say an eighth grade student at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School told detectives on May 4 that she gave Lievano her phone number and started to exchange text messages with him, NBC Washington reported.

Mike Anthony Lievano (above in booking photo), 21, was arrested on Sunday night when he turned himself in to Montgomery County police on charges of sexual abuse of a minor, a third-degree sex offense and a fourth-degree sex offense. He is being held on $10,000 bond.

She said they started dating on March 29, and that they had sex at least four times at her home and once at his home, police say.

The girl told authorities that she would sneak the security guard into her apartment at night.

Lievano confessed to detectives who interviewed him on May 5 that he had sex with the teen twice, and that the last time her mother caught him inside the girl's bedroom, NBC Washington reported.

After school officials learned about the alleged inappropriate relationship, Lievano was immediately placed on leave.

Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Jack R. Smith released the following statement about the case:

Police say Lievano worked as a security guard at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School (above) and allegedly started the sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student in March after they exchanged phone numbers

'I am angered and deeply troubled by the allegations against Mr. Lievano,' the statement reads.

'As Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School Principal Kimberly Hayden Williams noted in her letter to the school community, (included below) the charges are a violation of the core values of our school system.

'We hold our staff to the highest standards and we will not tolerate this type of behavior. MCPS remains committed to the safety of our students.

'We have developed and implemented staff training on preventing, recognizing and reporting child abuse as well as a curriculum on personal body safety for students at all grade levels.

'We will continue to take every appropriate measure to ensure our schools are safe and welcoming places to learn for students.'

Prior to this position at the middle school, Lievano previously worked at Rockville High School from September 2015 to February 2016 as a part-time security guard.

Anyone who believes that their child may have been victimized by Lievano is asked to call the Montgomery County Police Department at (240) 773-5400.
They infuriate Anglophiles and grammar pedants.

But Americanisms have been defended by Countdown's Susie Dent  who claims British phrases such as 'stiff upper lip' came from US shores.

The 52-year-old presenter, who has manned Countdown's dictionary corner for 25 years, said these expressions are often seen as 'unwanted gifts from our American cousins'.

Countdown's dictionary corner expert Susie Dent, pictured, claimed that even William Shakespeare used the American spelling of 'honor' 100 times more than the correct 'honour'

According to Ms Dent, many words have been absorbed into English from America without causing much of a controversy, although phrases such as 'reaching out' can cause annoyance

The lexicographer and etymologist is often inundated with angry emails from viewers who lament the use of Americanisms but she said such complaints leave her 'baffled'.

'I love American English,' she said. 'The voices thundering across the Atlantic at the moment are not to everyone's taste. But it's time to let our stiff upper lip relax a little, and revel in the capacity of our language to embrace new influences and emerge triumphant. 'Stiff upper lip', as it happens, that quintessentially British phrase, was another gift to our language from American shores.'

'Perhaps it's time to give up the fight,' she added.

Miss Dent fell in love with words as a child when she started reading labels on shampoo bottles. She studied modern languages at Oxford and completed a masters in German at Princeton University in the US.

The mother-of-two explains that Shakespeare often used words with what we regard as American spellings, writing 'honor' 100 times more than 'honour' in the First Folio of his plays.

She argues he would have likely welcomed 'can I get'  a phrase reviled by grammarians who prefer 'may I have'  because he used the verb 'gotten' in his works.

Miss Dent added that the Bard also used the term 'friended' more than 400 years before Facebook existed and said other American words such as 'blizzard' and 'skedaddle' were absorbed into British English without any fuss.

Writing in the Radio Times, she says: 'When so much of English orthography has been formed by serendipity it seems churlish to argue that the British way is better.'

Speaking last year, Miss Dent said the frustration some Brits feel when people use American English stems from 'xenophobia' and 'a huge amount of misunderstanding'.

British words have slowly been replaced by Americanisms over the last 20 years. In 2014 a project by Cambridge University and Lancaster University found that the word 'awesome', which is popular in the US, appears 72 times per million words in the UK compared to 'marvellous', which fell from 155 times per million more than 20 years ago to only two times per million.
A nationwide paedophile ring with high-profile members including Catholic primary school teachers allegedly led police to arrest A Current Affair reporter Ben McCormack.

McCormack, 42, was arrested in April and faces 15 years behind bars after being charged with two counts of using a carriage service to transmit child pornography material.

After a two-month investigation into a paedophile ring, police gained access to phone records an alleged child rapist used to speak with other members.

Other members allegedly included McCormack and a Western Australian Catholic primary school teacher, The West Australian reported.

McCormack, 42, was arrested in April and faces 15 years behind bars after being charged with two counts of using a carriage service to transmit child pornography

A nationwide paedophile ring with high-profile members including Catholic primary school teachers allegedly led police to arrest McCormack

The alleged offender who revealed the paedophile ring is facing 35 charges, including child rape.

Police across Australia also allegedly arrested two teachers, one in Western Australia and one in Queensland.

McCormack remains in a mental health facility weeks after he was charged with using a carriage service to send child pornography material.

McCormack remains in a mental health facility weeks after he was charged with using a carriage service to send child pornography material

The Grindr profile of A Current Affair reporter Ben McCormack is pictured above

At the Downing Centre Local Court last Tuesday, police upgraded his charges and he now faces two counts of using a carriage service to transmit, publish or promote child pornography.

The court was told the A Current Affair senior reporter could face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty.

McCormack is yet to enter a plea and is expected to face court on June 20.

He was arrested after as many as eight police raided the Channel Nine offices in Willoughby last month.

Bags of evidence and electrical storage devices were seen in NSW Police video after they executed a search warrant on his home
A couple out for a pleasant day's fishing in Florida reeled in something they probably wish they hadn't when they were accosted by a 'drunk' woman who blasted them with racist remarks.

Alexander Diaz, who is Latino, recorded the woman racially abusing him and his girlfriend for two minutes in a shocking tirade.

As the woman went on her verbal rampage, Diaz - who is bilingual - quietly trolled her by speaking only in Spanish, while recording the entire exchange on his phone.

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Shocking: Alexander Diaz (left) recorded the shocking moment he and his girlfriend were blasted with racist remarks by a Florida woman (right) and uploaded it at the weekend

The video starts with the woman telling Diaz's girlfriend to give up her address, saying 'If you don't live here you should't be fishing here.'

But as she follows them down the street she escalates her language, saying 'Get the f**k out! Do you know what that means?'

Diaz then talks to his camera in Spanish, to which the woman responds 'You speak English you stupid--- you stupid f**king Cuban.'

She then confronts the girlfriend furiously, saying 'Look at you laughing, you stupid f**king whore. What are you, black or white?'

'What does it matter?' the girlfriend laughs.

'It f**king matters,' she replies.

Harassment: The woman follows the couple, saying that 'Cubans are nothing but pieces of s**t,' calling Diaz's girlfriend (right) a 'whore' and asking if she is black

'Cubans are nothing but pieces of s**t to Americans,' the woman adds, before she spins around and gets right up in in Diaz's face, telling him 'Get out of here.'

'Oh my god!' he exclaims. 'The alcohol on this b***h's breath!'

Diaz uploaded the video to YouTube on Saturday, with the comment: 'Never in a million years did I as a pure 100% American would be treated like this, just to to think what people go thru everyday cuz of there color or language.

'Wow MIAMI SUNNY PLACE SHADY PEOPLE!'

It's not clear exactly where in Miami the video was shot.
A neurosurgeon and his nurse have been arrested on charges of child sexual abuse, including one victim under the age of 10.

Dr. James Joel Kohut, 57, was arrested on Sunday in Santa Cruz County, California on charges of oral copulation with a child under 10, lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14, and lewd acts with a child under 14 by use of force.

Kohut's nurse, Rashel Melina Brandon, 42, was arrested on Tuesday on six child molestation charges, including sodomy and oral copulation with a child under 10, sexual penetration by force, and sending harmful material to seduce a minor.

The shock charges have hit the respected neurosurgeon and nurse, who are both affiliated with Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. Kohut is also affiliated with the Sutter Maternity and Surgery Center.

Dr. James Joel Kohut, 57, and nurse Rashel Melina Brandon, 42, have been arrested on shocking child molestation charges in Santa Cruz County, California

State records show that Kohut was licensed as a surgeon in California in 1998. The state medical board sanctioned him in 2006 for allegedly viewing porn at work

Brandon is a mother of two and works as an ICU staff nurse at Dominican Hospital, according to information on her Facebook page.

In a statement, Dominican Hospital said it was aware of the allegations and had taken the appropriate steps. Kohut's profile has been recently removed from the Sutter Maternity and Surgery Center website.

Police have not yet disclosed whether the alleged abuse took place in the hospital, but Watsonville, California police said that the charges relate to actions both within their jurisdiction and beyond state lines, ABC7 reported.

State records show that Kohut was licensed as a surgeon in California in 1998, and the ABC affiliate reported that he had recently accepted a job in Arkansas and was in the process of moving.

Kohut was previously sanctioned by California's state medical board for allegedly watching porn at work and performing surgery on the wrong side of someone's head, according to state records reviewed by DailyMail.com.

The 2006 sanction alleged that Kohut 'viewed adult pornographic web sites and downloaded pornography during work hours on UMC computers during the the period of 2002 through February 2003,' while working at University Medical Center.

Bail has not yet been set for Kohut (left) in the child molestation charges. Brandon (right) is being held on $1.5million bail

The complaint further alleged that in May of 2002, Kohut attempted to surgically remove an aneurysm from the right side of a 36-year-old male patient, 'when the x-rays clearly showed that the aneurysm was located on the left side of the patient's head.'

Bail has not yet been set for Kohut in the child molestation charges. Brandon is being held on $1.5million bail.

A third person has been arrested in the case but has not yet been named, police said.

A press conference is scheduled for Thursday, at which police are expected to reveal more about the case.
Hillary Clinton officially dipped a toe back into politics Monday, announcing her new advocacy group 'Onward Together' on Twitter.

Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, said the aim of the organization will be to help liberal and progressive groups find candidates to take on Trump's party of Republicans in the midterms in 2018 and beyond.

The name of the Clinton-backed group is reminiscent of her presidential campaign slogan, 'Stonger Together,' and even uses the same logo.

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Former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton dipped a toe back into the political world Monday, by announcing the creation of a new group, 'Onward Together'

Hillary Clinton used Twitter to make the announcement. The new group's name and logo are reminiscent of her campaign's motto 'Stronger Together'

Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton (right) did a Q&A with CNN's Christiane Amanpour (left) in New York City and talked about being a 'private citizen' and part of 'the resistance'

Hillary Clinton revealed that one of her group's top allies will be former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who formerly ran the Democratic National Committee

The former Democratic nominee alluded to her election loss to now-President Donald Trump, but said she hoped to re-route the ship using her new group

Clinton, in a sit-down with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, had hinted earlier this month that she was about to get more involved.

'I'm now back to being an activist citizen and part of the resistance,' she said in New York City in early May.

But besides promoting a forthcoming book, out this fall, she didn't say what would be her next step.

On Monday she used Twitter to make the announcement, saying she had been spending the last few months 'reflecting, spending time with familyand, yes, taking walks in the woods.'

But now she was ready for action.

Hillary Clinton said her group would work alongside other liberal and progressive groups to find candidates to take on Republicans in 2018 and beyond

As she announced her new group, Hillary Clinton talked about how she's spent the months following her devastating election loss to Donald Trump

'We're launching Onward Together to encourage people to get involved, organize, and even run for office,' Clinton wrote.

The slogan of the new group is 'resist, insist, persist enlist,' according to the website.

In a follow-up series of tweets, Clinton pointed to a number of groups her new organization would back including Indivisible, Swing Left, Emerge America, Run for Something and Color of Change.

'Those are just a few of the groups Onward Together will support, working with Gov. Howard Dean and othersstay tuned for more to come,' she said, referencing the former Vermont governor and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who supported her in last year's presidential campaign.

'This year hasn't been what I envisioned, but I know what I'm still fighting for: a kinder, big-hearted, inclusive America. Onward!' she said.
President Trump's National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster pushed back on a report that said his boss had shared 'highly classified' information with top Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting last week.

'The story that came out tonight is false,' McMaster told a pack of reporters gathered outside the West Wing.

Trump passed on the highly restricted 'code word' information during an Oval Office meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, the Washington Post reported Monday afternoon.

'This is code-word information,' a U.S. official told the paper, referring to the top classification level. The president 'revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.'

McMaster forcefully disputed the report  although his denial stated the thrust of the Post story to be different than the story that the paper published.

National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster called a Washington Post story 'false,' which said President Trump leaked 'highly classified' information to the Russians during an Oval Office meeting last week

'The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time  at no time  were intelligence sources or methods discussed,' McMaster said.

The Post story didn't say Trump revealed sources and methods  but rather that he passed on to the Russians highly classified information obtained from an ally.

'The president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known,' McMaster added, something the Post story never contended occurred.

'Two other senior officials who were present, including the secretary of state, remember the meeting the same way and have said so. Their on-the-record accounts should outweigh those of anonymous sources,' McMaster said in closely-watched remarks outside the White House, as reaction and concern rolled in from Capitol Hill.

'I was in the room  it didnt happen,' he said, before abruptly ending his statement without taking questions.

The information pertained to a terror threat to aviation using bombs contained in electronic devices like laptops.

Paul Ryan also spoke out on Monday night about the reports, calling for Trump and his office to provide a full account of the meeting in which he is being accused of sharing secrets with Russia.

We have no way of knowing what was said, but protecting our nations secrets is paramount, the statement from Ryan's spokesman, Doug Andres, read.

The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration.'

The flurry of reports and counter-spin prompted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, to warn of a 'downward spiral.'

'The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order,' Corker said, Bloomberg reported. Its got to happen, he said.

Obviously theyre in a downward spiral right now and theyve got to figure out a way to come to grips [with] all thats happening," Corker added.

Trump revealed the information to Lavrov while boasting about his own sources of knowledge, according to an official familiar with it.

'I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,' Trump reportedly said.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, US President Donald Trump, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak (L-R) talking during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House

ALL SMILES: Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, US President Donald Trump, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak (L-R) talking during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House. Alexander Shcherbak/TASS

The Russian embassy in Washington released this photo of President Trump warmly shaking hands with ambassador Sergey Kislyak

Images of President Donald Trump meeting with Russia's Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office were issued by the Russian state news agency TASS, and subsequently published by much of the global media

The report comes after a flap over release of photos from the meeting, which occurred just after it was revealed Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, amid tumult over the FBI's Russia investigation.

As the latest sensational story to come out of Russia broke, White House press secretary Sean Spicer huddled with his communications team in the White House.

A series of press aides declined to comment to a group of reporters, including DailyMail.com, looking for confirmation or a denial that the president had passed on the information to the nation's longtime adversary.

McMaster commented only as he ran into a pack of reporters in the White House.

'This is the last place I wanted to be. I'm leaving,' he said as a joke.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), vice chair of the House Intelligence Committee, called the report 'deeply disturbing.'

'At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly,' said national security advisor H.R. McMaster

McMaster soon confronted the White House press corps en masse, giving a brief statement on the matter outside the West Wing.

'There's nothing that the president takes more seriously than the safety of the American people,' McMaster said. Later, he appeared outside the White House to give his more elaborate statement.

Nancy Pelosi, speaking at a CNN town hall on Monday night, said if the reports are true it would be 'very, very damaging.'

'It undermines the trust that we would have with our allies,' she told the network.

Adam Schiff of California called the story 'deeply disturbing' and said if it's true, the disclosure could jeopardize sources of very sensitive intelligence and relationships with key allies.

The national security adviser explained that the president and the Russian foreign minister 'reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries including threats to civil aviation.'

'At no time, were intelligence sources or methods discussed,' he added. 'And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known.'

McMaster said that 'two other senior officials that were present, including the secretary of state, remembered the meeting the same way and have said so.'

'They're on-the-record accounts should outweight those of anonymous sources. I was in the room,' he said. 'It didn't happen.'

McMaster then left the bouquet of microphones without answering any questions.

His statement followed a number of written statements, including one Secretary of State Rex Tillerson released to CNN, which didn't deny the president passed on secret information.

'During President Trumps meeting with Foreign Minister Lavrov, a broad range of subjects were discussed, among which were common efforts and threats regarding counter-terrorism. During that exchange, the nature of specific threats were discussed, but they did not discuss sources, methods, or military operations,' Tillerson said.

In the same statement, which was released by the White House, Deputy National Security Advisor Dina Powell said: 'This story is false. The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced.'

The president has broad authority to declassify information unilaterally, which would insulate him from having done anything illegal.

President Trump blasted his 2016 presidential election opponent, whom he called 'crooked' Hillary Clinton, as 'not fit' for office because of her 'careless' handling of classified information

Lower-level government officials who disclose highly-classified information, even without ill intent, can get prosecuted.

Trump ran, in part, by campaigning that Hillary Clinton had put the nation's security at risk through her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

'Crooked Hillary Clinton and her team 'were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,' Trump tweeted in July after Comey called her out in a press conference where he nevertheless didn't reccommend prosecution. 'Not fit!'

According to the report, Trump discussed aspects of the threat learned through the unspecified espionage capabilities of a 'key partner.'

He didn't reveal the specific sources and methods, but nevertheless described how ISIS was seeking to carry out a plot.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer didn't even get asked about about the Russia meetings at Monday's White House press briefing

An official said Trump revealed the city within ISIS territory where a U.S. ally detected the threat, according to unnamed officials.

That could run the risk of compromising the source, since the Russians are engaged in a military campaign in Syria, where they are propping up dictator Bashar al-Assad.

McMaster is quoted in the article saying no sources or methods were disclosed, without denying Trump leaked classified information.

'The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation,' said McMaster, who participated int he meeting. 'At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly,' he said.

Looming behind Russia's meeting are congressional investigations and an FBI investigation into alleged Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.

Trump fired James Comey, who was atop the investigation, last week, drawing howls of protest from Democrats and some Republicans. Trump first attributed the firing to Comey's handling of Hillary Clinton's email scandal, but later told NBC Russia was on his mind when he made the decision.

'Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive, and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,' a former U.S. counterterrorism official told the Post.

Trump's meeting with the Russians came during a week when he sacked his FBI Director, James Comey, who was overseeing an investigation of alleged Russian election interference

The timing of Trump's Russia meetings were noteworthy given the intense focus on all things Russia.

Moscow also put out images of Trump greeting a smiling Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the U.S. They got released by the TASS news agency, the Russian embassy, and the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The White House kept U.S. photographers out, and didn't put any photo record out until a day after the fact.

The White House flickr account did not post a Kislyak photo with the president.

The official White House readout of Trump's meeting didn't mention that Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak was there.

Trump trolled his critics late Thursday by tweeting out a photo of him and Lavrov  as well as an image of himself meeting with Ukraine's foreign minister.

'Yesterday, on the same day- I had meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the FM of Ukraine, Pavlo Klimkin. #LETSMAKEPEACE!' Trump wrote.

Trump's frank comments at a meeting that included Kislyak are all the more noteworthy because Kislyak is at the center of a burgeoning investigation into his presidential campaign's Russia contacts.

Trump fired former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn after Flynn was revealed to have met with Kislyak during the transition and then failing to tell Vice President Mike Pence about it.

'We have no way to know what was said, but protecting our nation's secrets is paramount. The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration,' said Doug Andres, a spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan in early reaction Monday evening.
A registered nurse lifted his patients' bras and touched their breasts while they were under anesthesia, according to police.

Michael Morgan, 33, from Adairsville, Georgia, was arrested after two pastors told police that several women claimed Morgan had sexually assaulted them while he was working at the Northern Crescent Endoscopy,the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

The alleged assaults occurred at the medical center - where medical examiners perform procedures to analyse patients' digestive tracts - between February and April. The pastors, Mark Bauer, 59, and Karl Thoreen, 64, spoke to the police on behalf of the women and they issued a warrant for Morgan's arrest a week ago. He turned himself in on Friday and has been charged with two counts of sexual battery and two counts of custodial sexual assault.

Morgan has been jailed without bond, jail records show.

Michael Morgan, 33, from Adairsville, Georgia allegedly lifted his patients' bras and touched their breasts while they were sedated
As children, Jacqueline Dacey and her sister Dawn spent most of their time outside. Summers involved playing in the fields around their home in West Sussex, jumping in and out of the familys swimming pool and riding horses.

It was idyllic  but there was one problem. No one thought to protect their delicate skin from the British sun.

We never, ever wore sunscreen, says Jacqs, as she calls herself. If we got burnt we might put on a bit of after-sun, then go back out again.

This was in the Sixties and Seventies and, like many people, the family didnt realise the risks. But the sisters have paid the most terrible price.

In 2008, when she was 47, Dawn, a mother of three, had what appeared to be a crusty brown mole, the size of a pencil eraser, removed from her back.

Tests revealed it was malignant melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, recalls Jacqs, 57.

Delicate skin: Jacqs, left, and Dawn had an outdoor childhood but never used sunscreen

While sporty as an adult  she had done several triathlons  Dawn was not a sunbather as such, so she thought once it had been removed, that was that.

But in November 2013 Dawn became seriously unwell. Almost out of the blue she started complaining of bad headaches and felt very dizzy, recalls Jacqs, a farm administrative assistant who lives in West Sussex.

Dawns GP referred her for an MRI and a brain scan. The cancer had returned  she now had two tumours in her brain and another on a kidney.

Within two weeks, Dawn  who was about as fit as it is possible to be, says her sister proudly  had become so weak she couldnt move from her bed and was told she might have only weeks to live.

Watching Dawn fading in front of their eyes plunged the family into shock. Weeks after Dawns terminal diagnosis, Jacqss half-sister Sami suggested that Jacqs, too, should have her skin checked.

So, in May 2014, Jacqs visited a mole clinic, hoping for peace of mind. The results were anything but: she had a malignant melanoma on her chest. She needed to have it surgically removed within a fortnight.

Dawn Dacey lost her battle with skin cancer in 2015

Id noticed a new flat brown cluster just above my bra some months before, she says. I thought: Thats weird, but didnt do anything about it.

It was a different shade of brown from the others. It was only 0.33 mm across but the doctor said it was removed just in time.

It was frightening to think that if I hadnt got checked when I did, I could so easily have been in the same situation as Dawn.

Doctors could not see an immediate genetic link that might explain the sisters cancer  but listening to the account of their sun exposure left them pretty sure about the cause: their summers in the UK without sun protection.

Malignant melanoma occurs in the melanocytes  the pigment-containing cells of the skin. The cancer causes these cells to proliferate and spread through the skin.

It is the most serious form of skin cancer because it can quickly travel to other parts of the body and can kill. There are now 15,000 cases a year in this country, and the number of cases has doubled since 1995.

According to the latest statistics from Cancer Research UK, skin cancer causes more than 2,400 deaths a year nationwide.

Part of the reason is peoples refusal to accept that sun in this country can still be dangerous.

Dr Justine Hextall, a consultant dermatologist at Western Sussex Hospitals, feels frustrated that there is still a perception of malignant melanoma as a disease that afflicts only devoted sunbathers who travel abroad.

There are still people who think that the sun isnt hot enough to cause skin cancer in this country, she says. But sun exposure here is enough to cause skin cancer  I have patients with malignant melanoma who have never been abroad.

Cases are especially high by the coast, where people might be outside more or spend time by the water, which reflects the sun.

Yet surveys show many people continue not to wear sunscreen when the suns shines in the UK.

In May 2014 Jacqs was told she had a malignant melanoma on her chest

Most cases occur in over-65s but malignant melanoma is th most common cancer among those aged 15-35. It is rare in children but I have seen a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old with a melanoma, says Dr Hextall.

Some people  those with red hair and pale skin, for example  are more at risk than others, but having dark or olive skin is no guarantee that you wont get it.

Last year, a study published in Nature Publications found that having a single copy of the ginger gene MRC1 may increase the risk of skin cancer, even among people who dont have red hair, and there is no way to know if you have it.

Having darker skin is like having an SPF on your skin  it means you are less likely to get malignant melanoma but it doesnt mean you can do without sunscreen, says Dr Hextall. Bob Marley died from skin cancer.

Your chance of getting skin cancer depends on several factors. Some are genetically more prone to the disease, but behavioural influences, such as whether you had a lot of sun exposure as a child, can also have an impact. According to Cancer Research UK, 86 per cent of cases are preventable.

Jacqs now has checks every three months

There are different types of melanoma, and while some are directly linked to sunburn and occur in areas that are exposed to the sun, others may occur in areas which arent, says Dr Hextall.

Aside from surgery, melanoma is sometimes treated with either immunotherapy or antibody treatment  both of which harness the bodys own immune system  or, less often, with chemotherapy.

Being aware of the symptoms and reacting to them is vital, as early diagnosis makes melanoma much easier to treat.

I wish every case I saw was at an early stage, but it isnt. And men are especially slow at going to the doctor, says Dr Hextall.

That is why men make up a disproportionate percentage of the deaths from melanoma  58 per cent, compared with 42 per cent for women, even though the cancer is slightly more common among women.

Dawn defied doctors expectations and survived for 22 months before dying in 2015, aged 54, at home surrounded by her family: husband Johnny, children Kerry, 26, Esme, 24, and Guy, 18, and the family dog Dizzy.

For Jacqs, the memory is still raw. She was so full of life and yet so kind  there simply arent enough people like her in this world.

It was also heartbreaking for her parents, in their 80s, to lose one daughter to skin cancer and have another develop it.

Jacqs is grateful that her malignant melanoma was caught when it was. She now has checks every three months.

She also worries about her grown-up son, a pilot, although he is careful in the sun.

The awful truth is that if it wasnt for what happened to Dawn, I would never have thought to get my moles checked and there is every chance that I would now be dead, too, she says.

I want to tell people, dont get sunburnt, do use sunscreen and protect your children, too. The alternative is terrifying.
A man accused of murdering his own mother is alleged to have spent Mother's Day with her before killing her with a pitchfork and fleeing the scene in her car.

After hours of interrogation, police charged Nathan White, 28, on Monday night with the murder of his 55-year-old mother Lynda Connors.

His older brother Simon, 31, was the one who found her bloodied body lying in a bed inside their family home in Sylvania, in Sydney's south, after finishing a night shift.

It's believed he found her lifeless and wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries just before 7am.

A few hours later police pulled over Mr White after detecting the number plate of his dead mother's car and dramatically arrested him at St Peters, in the city's inner-west.

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Police have charged Nathan White, 28, over the murder of his mother Lynda Connors, 55. Pictured are for forensics experts examining her home in Sylvania, in Sydney's south

Mr White (pictured) was arrested by police a few hours after his mother was discovered dead

Ms Connors was found by her eldest son, 31, lying in her bed covered in blood just before 7am

Mr White (pictured) is alleged to have spent all of Mother's Day with her before killing her with a pitchfork and fleeing the scene in her car

Police will allege the murder weapon and a crossbow were both found in the back of the car. Mr White was refused bail and will appear in Newtown Court on Tuesday.

Neighbours told the Daily Telegraph that Mr White had spent Sunday with his mother and was seen talking at the letterbox at 8.30pm on Monday.

A close family friend also claimed Mr White had been struck over the head with a pool cue at a local pub roughly five years ago and hadn't been the same since.

A woman who said she had known Mr White since he was a child told the Sydney Morning Herald that he had recently started hearing voices.

'Over the past 12 months he had just fully isolated himself,' she told the publication.

'Before that he was fine, he had normal conversations and everything.

'He had always been a pretty good kid growing up. He has had a hard life, he only had his mum. It was only mum and the two boys.'

Miranda commander Superintendent Michael O'Toole said police were appealing for witnesses that may have seen something suspicious on Sunday night.

'The (older son) is very disturbed by what has happened. He is the one who came across the incident and called police to attend it,' he said.

A police source said Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog (pictured) before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway in St Peters, in the city's inner west

It's believed Ms Connors eldest son found her wrapped in a blanket with severe head injuries. Police are pictured outside the house early on in the morning before Mr White's arrest

He confirmed a crossbow had been found but would not be drawn on whether it had any connection to Ms Connors' death.

'There was a crossbow taken out of the vehicle, but there are other items (that have) also been taken out of the vehicle that the older son was in,' he said.

He refused to rule out the possibility she may died on Mother's Day, saying it was too early in the investigation to determine an exact timeline of events.

Ms Connors' death is being treated as suspicious by police.

A police source told the Daily Telegraph that Mr White had taken his mother's car and their pet dog before he was pulled over by police on the Princes Highway.

Police will allege Ms Connors was killed with a pitchfork found in the back of Mr White's car

Police taped off the townhouse complex on Florida Street, in the Sydney suburb of Sylvania

Neighbours claim Ms Connors and her two adult children had lived at the home for 20 years

Homicide detectives and local police officers canvassed the neighbourhood after the death

Superintendent O'Toole said Ms Connors eldest son was not in custody but was at Miranda Police Station assisting police with their inquiries.

A neighbour told Daily Mail Australia she didn't hear the disturbance next door and was woken by police.

The neighbour said the mother lived there with her two sons  and had done for 'about 20 years'.

NSW Homicide Squad detectives have taped off the townhouse complex and are speaking to family and friends of Ms Connors.

Police have refused to rule out whether Ms Connors died on Mother's Day or early on Monday
News / Education

by Agencies

The American Heart Association has accredited the CEARS Training Academy in Harare's Milton Park suburb as one of its training providers, enabling the academy to offer internationally recognised basic life support training and certificates.An independent certification body conducted an American Heart Association certification audit on May 3, which confirmed that the CEARS Training Academy meets all the training and quality system management requirements of the American Heart Association.This resulted in its accreditation as an American Heart Association training provider and an affiliate of the Resuscitation Council of Southern Africa.The academy, which was established by Cimas Emergency Air Rescue Service (CEARS), offers a Basic Life Support for Healthcare Providers course for healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses and nonmedical hospital staff, a cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) course that anyone can take advantage of and First Aid courses.CPR is a lifesaving technique that is useful in many emergencies, including a heart attack or near drowning, in which someone's breathing or heartbeat has stopped. It involves chest compressions often combined with artificial ventilation, such as mouth to mouth resuscitation."The academy's objective is to deliver lifesaving skills to the community and local businesses. Its accreditation as an American Heart Association training provider enables it to provide internationally accredited lifesaving courses, as well as high quality First Aid courses to the public, medical professionals, businesses and schools," commented CEARS business development manager Ancha Chimbghandah."Its instructors are well qualified and experienced in training both medical and non-medical course participants. They undergo in-process assessments in order to remain up to date with the latest lifesaving developments," she said.The academy offers four First Aid courses. These are Basic First Aid, Industrial First Aid, First Aid for Family and Friends, and First Aid Essentials for Children.Group training for all courses is available on site or off site, meaning, for instance, that a company can arrange for a course to be conducted at the workplace.
Thick fog is delaying flights in and out of Melbourne Airport for the second day in a row.

An airport spokesman confirmed that the weather is only affecting domestic flights on Tuesday morning, but could not confirm how many.

She said travellers should visit the Melbourne Airport website and contact their airlines to check amended flight times.

'We are experiencing some delays to domestic flights inbound and outbound at Melbourne Airport,' the spokesman told Daily Mail Australia.

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Thick fog is delaying flights in and out of Melbourne Airport for the second day in a row. Above, fog over the city on Tuesday

'It's only affecting domestic flights at this stage. We are encouraging people to check with their airlines before flying.'

It comes a day after fog over Melbourne and Brisbane airports delayed flights along the east coast.

Two international and three domestic incoming flights to Brisbane were diverted to the Gold Coast on Monday morning with the blanket of fog causing havoc in the sky.

Travellers should visit the Melbourne Airport website and contact airlines for flight times

An airport spokesman confirmed that the weather is only affecting domestic flights

Two international and three domestic incoming flights to Brisbane were diverted to the Gold Coast on Monday morning

It comes a day after heavy fog over Brisbane (pictured yesterday) and Melbourne delayed flights along the east coast of Australia

Several flights were cancelled and mass delays continued at least until mid-morning in Brisbane, while several flights at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport were also delayed.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Meteorology said Melbourne would see areas of morning fog before becoming sunny and temperatures reaching a high of 17C.
Qantas has banned a pensioner for life from flying with the airline for slamming a lemon meringue pie into the face of the airline's chief executive Alan Joyce.

Tony Overheu has been charged with common assault for hiding behind the stage and ambushing Mr Joyce at a business breakfast in Perth last week.

A week after that incident, Daily Mail Australia understands the 67-year-old pensioner has been banned for life from flying with the airline.

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Tony Overheu ambushed Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce at a Perth business breakfast

Pensioner Tony Overheu has been slapped with a lifetime ban from flying with Qantas

It's a common procedure for Qantas to ban people from travelling with the airline if they assault an employee in their workplace or at a function where they are representing the company.

Mr Overheu is opposed to gay marriage and wanted to make a statement about Mr Joyce using his position as CEO to campaign for a change to the Marriage Act.

On Tuesday last week, Mr Overheu left a room of 500 people in shock when he walked up to Mr Joyce and shoved a $25.95 lemon meringue cake in his face during his address at Perth's upmarket Hyatt Regency hotel.

He later told Daily Mail Australia his actions were a stand against 'corporate bullying' and said he had carefully selected the cake as it was soft and unlikely to do any injury to his target.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce told reporters he pressed charges to send a message about the man's behaviour

Mr Joyce last week said he pressed for charges to send a message 'this type of behaviour isn't acceptable'.

Former Labor leader and media commentator Mark Latham has criticised Mr Joyce for pressing charges against Mr Overheu.

'Once you start campaigning like a politician, you've got to expect the odd form of protest,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'If I was ever hit in the face by a soft pie, a cream pie, you wouldn't think for a minute about trying to get this guy locked up.

'Alan Joyce should be big enough to say, 'I'm out there campaigning politically. The guy hasn't tried to harm me physically.

''I wasn't hurt physically. I'm not going to press charges against a 67-year-old pensioner'.'
A unique example of medieval printed text by pioneer William Caxton, which had once been used to reinforce the spine of a book, has been hailed as a 'thrilling' find.

The two pages from a priest handbook dating back to late 1476 or early 1477 was found buried in a box at Reading University's archives by librarian Erika Delbecque as she catalogued thousands of items about the history of printing and graphic design.

The treasure was among the first books printed in England by Caxton's press and could fetch 100,000 ($129,000) if it went to market, experts suggest.

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One of two pages of a 15th century printed text by English printer William Caxton which was found buried in a box at Reading University's archives

FORGOTTEN TEXT The text is written in medieval Latin and features blackletter typeface, layout and red paragraph that marks it out as an example of very early western European printing. No other copies of the pages, printed either side of a single leaf of paper, are known to have survived. The only one other surviving fragment of the book is held at the British Library in London. The new find will go on display at Reading University's Merl museum on London Road from May 9 to May 30. The treasure was among the first books printed in England by Caxton's press and could fetch 100,000 ($129,000) if it went to market, experts suggest. Advertisement

Ms Delbecque, who said she suspected it was 'special as soon as I saw it', said it was 'incredibly rare to find an unknown Caxton leaf and astonishing that it has been under our noses for so long'.

'This well-preserved item is the only one of its kind, and one of just two surviving fragments from this medieval Caxton book in existence', she said.

'The leaf had previously been pasted into another book for the undignified purpose of reinforcing its spine.

'We understand it was rescued by a librarian at the University of Cambridge in 1820, who had no idea that it was an original Caxton leaf.'

It is written in medieval Latin and features blackletter typeface, layout and red paragraph that marks it out as an example of very early western European printing.

No other copies of the pages, printed either side of a single leaf of paper, are known to have survived.

Early printing specialist Andrew Hunter, of Blackwells Books, who carried out the valuation, said 'the discovery of even a fragment from among Caxton's earliest printing in England is thrilling to bibliophiles, and of great interest to scholars.

'If this were ever to come on the market, there would definitely be competition for it. It would be a great prize for a private collector, and a feather in the cap of any institution.'

Erika Delbecque holding one of two pages of a 15th century printed text by English printer William Caxton. The text is written in medieval Latin and features blackletter typeface, layout and red paragraph that marks it out as an example of very early western European printing

The medieval printed text was found buried in a box at Reading University's archives. No other copies of the pages, printed either side of a single leaf of paper, are known to have survived

CAXTON PRESS William Caxton was both the first to print a book in English and the first English printer, according to the British Library. He realised the commercial potential of the new technology while working as a merchant in the Low Countries and Germany. Caxton set up his own printing press in London in late in 1475 or early in 1476. Advertisement

Caxton was both the first to print a book in English and the first English printer, according to the British Library.

He realised the commercial potential of the new technology while working as a merchant in the Low Countries and Germany. Caxton set up his own printing press in London in late in 1475 or early in 1476.

The find is from a book called the Sarum Ordinal or Sarum Pye which helped priests to prioritise religious feast days for English saints.

It was part of a collection that previously belonged to late typographer John Lewis and his wife Griselda, a writer and book designer. It was bought by the university for 70,000 ($90,500) at auction in 1997 with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The new find will go on display at Reading University's Merl museum on London Road from May 9 to May 30. The treasure was among the first books printed in England by Caxton's press and could fetch 100,000 ($129,000) if it went to market, experts suggest

The leaf then lay among many thousands of other items in the archives before being identified, according to Reading University.

The only one other surviving fragment of the book is held at the British Library in London.

The new find will go on display at Reading University's Merl museum on London Road from May 9 to May 30.
While the Campi Flegrei volcano hasn't erupted since 1538, experts have warned that it could be building up to another devastating eruption.

By studying patterns of unrest over the last 500 years, the researchers have predicted that we are reaching a 'critical stage' where further unrest will lead to an eruption.

They hope their findings will urge local authorities to prepare for an eruption, which they say would affect the 360,000 people living across the caldera and Naples' population of nearly one million.

While the Campi Flegrei volcano hasn't erupted since 1538, experts have warned that it could be building up to another devastating eruption

THE 'CRITICAL STAGE' Unrest since the 1950s has been causing a build-up of energy in the crust and making the volcano more vulnerable to eruption. Until now, scientists had thought that the energy needed to stretch the crust was lost after each period of unrest. The episodes of unrest are caused by the movement of magma around three kilometres below the volcano. An eruption becomes more likely when the ground has been stretched to its breaking point. This is because the molten rock can escape to the surface when the ground splits apart. But it is difficult to pinpoint when an eruption will occur, because even if the ground breaks, it is possible for the magma to stall before reaching the surface. Advertisement

If the volcano was to erupt, it could cause havoc for those trying to fly in the area.

Dr Christopher Kilburn, who led the study, told MailOnline: 'An eruption might disrupt air traffic, if only for precautionary measures and the immediate effect would be in Campi Flegrei and Naples.'

Experts from UCL and the Vesuvius Observatory in Naples have been studying the patterns of unrest since Campi Flegrei's last eruption 500 years ago.

The volcano has been restless for 67 years, with two-year periods of unrest in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s causing small, local earthquakes and ground uplift.

Similar unrest occurred over 500 years ago, when it took a century to build up to an eruption in 1538.

Using a new model, the researchers investigated whether Campi Flegrei may again be preparing to erupt.

They found that the unrest since the 1950s has been causing a build-up of energy in the crust and making the volcano more vulnerable to eruption.

Until now, scientists had thought that the energy needed to stretch the crust was lost after each period of unrest.

Dr Kilburn said: 'By studying how the ground is cracking and moving at Campi Flegrei, we think it may be approaching a critical stage where further unrest will increase the possibility of an eruption, and it's imperative that the authorities are prepared for this.

'We don't know when or if this long-term unrest will lead to an eruption, but Campi Flegrei is following a trend we've seen when testing our model on other volcanoes, including Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, El Hierro in the Canary Islands, and Soufriere Hills on Montserrat in the Caribbean.

'We are getting closer to forecasting eruptions at volcanoes that have been quiet for generations by using detailed physical models to understand how the preceding unrest develops.'

The unrest since the 1950s has been causing a build-up of energy in the crust and making the volcano more vulnerable to eruption

CAMPI FLEGREI The Campi Flegrei crater was formed 39,000 years ago in a blast that threw hundreds of cubic kilometres of lava, rock and debris into the air. It was the largest eruption in Europe in the past 200,000 years, according to scientists. Campi Flegrei last erupted in 1538, though on a much smaller scale. Nearby Mount Vesuvius, whose massive eruption just over 2,000 years ago buried several Roman settlements in the area, including Pompeii, is also classified as an active volcano. Advertisement

The episodes of unrest are caused by the movement of magma around three kilometres below the volcano.

An eruption becomes more likely when the ground has been stretched to its breaking point.

This is because the molten rock can escape to the surface when the ground splits apart.

But it is difficult to pinpoint when an eruption will occur, because even if the ground breaks, it is possible for the magma to stall before reaching the surface.

Although it hasn't erupted, unrest at the volcano has alredy caused severe social disturbanced in Campi Flegrei.

Campi Flegrei covers more than 100 square kilometres (38.6 square miles) outside the western suburbs of Naples

Together, the three episodes of uplift have pushed the port of Pozzuoli more than three metres out of the sea.

Dr Stefano Calino, who also worked on the study, said: 'The unrest in 1970 and 1983 caused tens of thousands of people to be evacuated from Pozzuoli itself.'

Campi Flegrei covers more than 100 square kilometres (38.6 square miles) outside the western suburbs of Naples.

The researchers predict that an eruption today would affect the 360,000 people living across the caldera (pictured) and Naples' population of nearly one million

An eruption of the Camp Flegrei supervolcano would dwarf the devastation caused by Mount Vesuvius on the otherside of Naples (illustrated)

The researchers predict that an eruption today would affect the 360,000 people living across the caldera and Naples' population of nearly one million.

Professor Giuseppe De Natale, who also worked on the study, said: 'Most damage in previous crises was caused by the seismic shaking of buildings.

'Our findings show that we must be ready for a greater amount of local seismicity during another uplift and that we must adapt our preparations for another emergency, whether or not it leads to an eruption.'
Officials across the globe scrambled over the weekend to catch the culprits behind a massive ransomware attack.

The cyber chaos disrupted operations at car factories, hospitals, shops and schools, as hackers held entire computer systems ransom.

And Microsoft on Sunday pinned blame on the US government for not disclosing more software vulnerabilities, likening them to 'Tomahawk missiles'.

In a blog post, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to tacitly acknowledge what researchers had already widely concluded: The ransomware attack leveraged a hacking tool, built by the US National Security Agency, that leaked online in April.

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In a blog post, Microsoft President Brad Smith (pictured) appeared to tacitly acknowledge what researchers had already widely concluded: The ransomware attack leveraged a hacking tool, built by the US National Security Agency, that leaked online in April

HOW TO PROTECT AGAINST WANNACRY Microsoft released an emergency security update to protect against the WannaCry virus on Friday. In March, the company released a security update which addresses the vulnerability that the attacks exploit. Those who have Windows Update enabled are protected against attacks. For those who have not yet applied the security update, Microsoft recommends you immediately deploy Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010. For those using Windows Defender, Microsoft released an update on Friday which detects the threat as Ransom:Win32/WannaCrypt. As an additional 'defense-in-depth' measure, keep up-to-date anti-malware software installed on your computer. Advertisement

'This is an emerging pattern in 2017,' Smith wrote. 'We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world.'

'Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage.

'An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.'

He also poured fuel on a long-running debate over how government intelligence services should balance their desire to keep software flaws secret - in order to conduct espionage and cyber warfare - against sharing those flaws with technology companies to better secure the internet.

'This attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem,' Mr Smith wrote.

He added that governments around the world should 'treat this attack as a wake-up call' and 'consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits.'

The NSA and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the Microsoft statement.

Cyber security experts said the spread of the worm, dubbed 'WannaCry' - 'ransomware' that locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries - had slowed but that the respite might only be brief amid fears new versions of the worm will strike.

Economic experts offered differing views on how much the attack, and associated computer outages, would cost businesses and governments.

Last Friday the NHS was hit by a major cyber attack affecting computers, phones and emergency bleepers in hospitals and GP surgeries - pop-ups like the one pictured appeared demanding a ransom of $300 (230)

THE WANNACRY HACK: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS - The attack continued to spread this morning as workers booted up computers - The extortion scheme has hit 150 countries including the US, Britain, Russia, China, Germany and France - The initial attack, known as WannaCry, paralysed NHS computers, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies - British IT expert Marcus Hutchins, 22, discovered a 'kill switch' for the cyber attack over the weekend - This prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected - But despite slowing the spread of WannaCry, he fears that the ransomeware could have a 'backdoor' - Microsoft has pinned partial blame on the NSA for the cyber attacks, which were spread using hacking tools created by the agency - The tools were leaked online by a hacking group last month after they accessed NSA cyberware files - Microsoft says that spy agencies should disclose more of their powerful exploits to developers to prevent future malicious attacks - And the company has reiterated calls for an international 'digital Geneva Convention' to assess the risk and impact of cyber weapons Advertisement

This graphic shows how ransomware can quickly infect an entire computer system. Friday's virus utilised powerful cyber tools developed by the US National Security Agency that were leaked online in April

The non-profit U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit research institute estimated that total losses would range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but not exceed $1 billion (775 million).

Most victims were quickly able to recover infected systems with backups, said the group's chief economist, Scott Borg.

California-based cyber risk modeling firm Cyence put the total economic damage at $4 billion (310 million), citing costs associated with businesses interruption.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday night ordered his homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, to convene an 'emergency meeting' to assess the threat posed by the global attack, a senior administration official told Reuters.

Microsoft on Sunday pinned blame on the U.S. government for not disclosing more software vulnerabilities, likening them to 'Tomahawk missiles'. This map shows the impact of the ransomware around the world - with affected countries shown in orange and red

Senior U.S. security officials held another meeting in the White House Situation Room on Saturday, and the FBI and the NSA were working to help mitigate damage and identify the perpetrators of the massive cyber attack, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The investigations into the attack were in the early stages, however, and attribution for cyber attacks is notoriously difficult.

The original attack lost momentum late on Friday after a security researcher took control of a server connected to the outbreak, which crippled a feature that caused the malware to rapidly spread across infected networks.

Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organisations deemed not worth the price of upgrading or, in some cases, machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions that proved too difficult to patch without possibly disrupting crucial operations, security experts said.

Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks, a rare and powerful feature that caused infections to surge on Friday.

Code for exploiting that bug, which is known as 'Eternal Blue,' was released on the internet last month by a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers.

The head of the European Union police agency said on Sunday the cyber assault hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries and that number would grow when people return to work on Monday.
Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, has reached an agreement with ridesharer Lyft to test self-driving car technology, the companies said.

Waymo and Lyft are joining forces against ridesharing giant Uber, which is racing to develop its own self-driving vehicles.

Many other companies such as German carmaker Daimler and California-based Tesla have been stepping up efforts in autonomous driving in recent years.

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Ridesharer Lyft is joining forces with Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, to test self-driving car technology in Phoenix

WAYMO AND LYFT Waymo and Lyft are joining forces against ridesharing giant Uber, which is racing to develop its own self-driving vehicles. 'Waymo holds today's best self-driving technology, and collaborating with them will accelerate our shared vision of improving lives with the worlds best transportation,' the Lyft statement read. Waymo and Uber are currently engaged in a bitter legal dispute. In February Waymo filed a lawsuit claiming that a former manager took technical data when he left to launch a competing venture that was later acquired by Uber. Advertisement

'We're looking forward to working with Lyft to explore new self-driving products that will make our roads safer and transportation more accessible,' a Waymo spokesman told AFP.

'Lyft's vision and commitment to improving the way cities move will help Waymo's self-driving technology reach more people, in more places.'

A Lyft spokeswoman confirmed the partnership to The New York Times, which broke the story and said tests of the self-driving car service would start in Phoenix, Arizona.

A date is yet to be revealed.

'Waymo holds today's best self-driving technology, and collaborating with them will accelerate our shared vision of improving lives with the worlds best transportation,' the Lyft statement read.

Waymo and Uber are currently engaged in a bitter legal dispute.

In February Waymo filed a lawsuit claiming that a former manager took technical data when he left to launch a competing venture that was later acquired by Uber.

Self-driving car technology is developing rapidly and many companies are already testing their models.

Waymo has undergone 200 hours of extreme-weather testing and plans to have the vehicles on public roads in 2017, according to Waymo's CEO Jon Krafcik

For example, Waymo has undergone 200 hours of extreme-weather testing and plans to have the vehicles on public roads in 2017, according to Waymo's CEO Jon Krafcik.

Tesla's Model S and Model X vehicles with new autonomous capability hardware are already in production.

Many other companies have been working on self-driving technology in recent years, contending that these systems will eliminate the vast majority of road accidents.

In February Waymo filed a lawsuit claiming that a former manager took technical data when he left to launch a competing venture that was later acquired by Uber

ELECTRIC FLEETS Ninety-five per cent of miles travelled will happen in autonomous electric vehicles which are owned by fleets rather than individuals in little more than a decade, found RethinkX, an independent research group based in California. The report found Autonomous Electric Vehicles (A-EVs) will be owned by companies providing Transport as a Service (TaaS) by 2030 which will make up 60 per cent of vehicles on US roads. Electric vehicles will be cheaper because they will be used ten times more than cars people use at the moment. They will also have a vehicle lifetime of more than 500,000 miles and far lower maintenance, energy, finance and insurance costs, researchers say. Advertisement

Apple is the latest to have obtained a testing permit in California.

German luxury carmaker Daimler and auto parts supplier Bosch announced plans this month to work together to create completely driverless cars in the next few years.

US-based Tesla is also stepping up efforts, as are several Chinese technology firms and the major US, Asian and European manufacturers.

The average car-buyer would be willing to pay $4,900 (3,791) more for a car that had self-driving technology, and $3,500 (2,707) more for crash avoidance, a study revealed last week.

It also found that there's a big difference in what people would be willing to pay: Some would pay more than $10,000 (7,738) for automation, while other wouldn't pay anything for the rapidly developing technology.
Cars will die out by 2030 as electric self-driving car shares take over our roads, according to a new report.

Ninety-five per cent of miles travelled in the US will happen in autonomous vehicles owned by fleets rather than individuals in just over a decade, researchers found.

This new technology will be up to ten times cheaper than buying a new car and will bring an end to more than 100 years of individual vehicle ownership.

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Ninety-five per cent of miles travelled will happen in autonomous electric vehicles which are owned by fleets rather than individuals in little more than a decade, according to a new report

ELECTRIC FLEETS Ninety-five per cent of miles travelled will happen in autonomous electric vehicles which are owned by fleets rather than individuals in little more than a decade, report suggests. The report found Autonomous Electric Vehicles (A-EVs) will be owned by companies providing Transport as a Service (TaaS) by 2030 which will make up 60 per cent of vehicles on US roads. Electric vehicles will be cheaper because they will be used ten times more than cars people use at the moment. They will also have a vehicle lifetime of more than 500,000 miles and far lower maintenance, energy, finance and insurance costs, researchers say. Advertisement

'We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history,' said Tony Seba, co-author of the report, produced by RethinkX, an independent research group based in California.

The report found Autonomous Electric Vehicles (A-EVs) will be owned by companies providing Transport as a Service (TaaS) by 2030 which will make up 60 per cent of vehicles on US roads.

As fewer cars travel more miles, the number of passenger vehicles on American roads will drop from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030, the report said.

Authors of the study claim this move is driven by economics and users will abandon their personal cars because it no longer makes sense financially.

They predict using electric vehicles will be between two to four times cheaper than operating existing vehicles by 2021.

They will also have a vehicle lifetime of more than 500,000 miles and far lower maintenance, energy, finance and insurance costs, researchers say.

The average American household will save $5,600 (4,333) per year by giving up its gas-powered car and travelling by autonomous vehicles, authors say.

'While these projections may seem radical because they differ from mainstream and incumbent industry projections, they are really quite conservative because they are based on assumptions that in some cases have already been bested by new technologies and plummeting prices,' said Bryan Hansel, CEO of Chanje Energy.

As demand for new vehicles plummets, 70 per cent fewer passenger cars and trucks will be manufactured each year.

Most major automakers and several other technology firms have been stepping up efforts on autonomous driving in recent years including Waymo and Lyft (pictured) who are joining forces against ridesharing giant Uber, which is racing to develop its own self-driving vehicles

SELF-DRIVING CARS Most major automakers and several other technology firms have been stepping up efforts on autonomous driving in recent years, contending these systems will eliminate the vast majority of road accidents. Apple is the latest to have obtained a testing permit in California. German luxury car maker Daimler and auto parts supplier Bosch announced plans this month to work together to create completely driverless cars in the next few years. US-based Tesla is also stepping up efforts, as are several Chinese technology firms and the major US, Asian and European manufacturers. Advertisement

This could result in total disruption of the car value chain, with car dealers, maintenance and insurance companies suffering almost complete destruction.

For the oil industry, the widespread shift away from individual gas-powered vehicles and toward electric, shared autonomous vehicles will be catastrophic.

Global oil demand will peak at 100 million barrels per day by 2020, dropping to 70 million barrels per day by 2030, authors predict.

Individual ownership of gas-powered vehicle will enter a vicious cycle of increasing costs, and diminishing quality of service and convenience, researchers found.

Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, has reached an agreement with ridesharer Lyft to test self-driving car technology, the companies said.

Waymo and Lyft are joining forces against ridesharing giant Uber, which is racing to develop its own self-driving vehicles.

'We're looking forward to working with Lyft to explore new self-driving products that will make our roads safer and transportation more accessible,' a Waymo spokesman told AFP.

'Lyft's vision and commitment to improving the way cities move will help Waymo's self-driving technology reach more people, in more places.'

Most major automakers and several other technology firms have been stepping up efforts on autonomous driving in recent years, contending these systems will eliminate the vast majority of road accidents. Apple is the latest to have obtained a testing permit in California.

German luxury car maker Daimler and auto parts supplier Bosch announced plans this month to work together to create completely driverless cars in the next few years.

Tesla is also stepping up efforts, as are several Chinese technology firms and the major US, Asian and European manufacturers.
At first, you might mistake this song as an experimental orchestral work, full of clashing harmonies and syncopation.

But what you're hearing isn't a performance in a concert hall  it's the movement of a solar system.

Researchers have translated the movement of planets in the recently-discovered Trappist 1 solar system into an animation and accompanying song, which they hope will help in the search for alien life in the system.

TRAPPIST-1 SOLAR SYSTEM, AT A GLANCE The newly discovered star system is just 39 light years from Earth. Seven Earth-sized worlds are orbiting a dwarf star known as Trappist-1

Six inner planets lie in a temperate zone where surface temperatures range from 0-100C (32-212F)

Of these, at least three are thought to be capable of having oceans, increasing the likelihood of life

-Scientists say life may have already evolved on at least three of the planets

No other star system known contains such a large number of Earth-sized and probably rocky planets

They were found using the 'transit' method that looks for tiny amounts of dimming caused by a world blocking light from its star Advertisement

The Trappist-1 solar system was discovered by Nasa in February, and has been shown to have conditions suitable for life.

But one of the major puzzles from the original research, was that simulations suggested the solar system was unstable.

Dr Dan Tamayo, from the University of Toronto, Scarborough said: 'If you simulate the system, the planets start crashing into one another in less than a million years.'

In the hope of understanding how the planets in Trappist-1 avoid crashing into each other, the researchers created an animation where the planets play a piano note every time they pass in front of their host star, and a drum beat every time a planet overtakes its nearest neighbour.

The resulting song suggests that the system is in a 'resonant chain' that stabilises the system.

Dr Matt Russo, co-author of the study, said: 'There's a rhythmic repeating pattern that ensures the system remains stable over a long period of time.'

Researchers have translated the movement of planets in the recently-discovered Trappist 1 solar system into an animation and accompanying song, which they hope will help in the search for alien life in the system

While you might expect the song to be a jumbled mess, it actually features a steady repeating pattern that is similar to how we play music.

Dr Russo said: 'Most planetary systems are like bands of amateur musicians playing their parts at different speeds.

'Trappist-1 is different; it's a super-group with all seven members synchronising their parts in nearly perfect time.'

The Trappist-1 solar system was discovered by Nasa in February, and has been shown to have conditions suitable for life

The song indicates that the planets form a chain to remain stable, but the researchers have warned that even a synchronised orbit won't necessarily survive very long.

Dr Russo said: 'It's not that the system is doomed, it's that stable configurations are very exact.

'We can't measure all the orbital parameters well enough at the moment, so the simulated systems kept resulting in collisions because the setups weren't precise.'

THE SEVEN NEW PLANETS IN THE TRAPPIST-1 SYSTEM Name Orbit (days) Mass (where 1.0 = mass of Earth) Distance to star (millions of miles) Distance to star (millions of km) Possibility of hosting alien life 1b 1.5 0.85 1.02 1.64 Less likely - too hot 1c 2.4 1.38 1.39 2.24 Less likely - too hot 1d 4 0.41 1.95 3.14 Less likely - too hot 1e 6 0.62 2.6 4.19 Most likely 1f 9.2 0.68 3.44 5.53 Most likely 1g 12.3 1.34 4.18 6.73 Most likely 1h 20 unknown 5.58 8.97 Less likely - too cold

To overcome this issue, the researchers looked at the system not as it is today, but how it may have originally formed.

When the system was being born out of a disk of gas, the planets should have migrated relative to one another, allowing the system to naturally settle into a stable resonant configuration.

Dr Russo said: 'This means that early on, each planet's orbit was tuned to make it harmonious with its neighbours, in the same way that instruments are tuned by a band before it begins to play.

Dr Russo said: 'Most planetary systems are like bands of amateur musicians playing their parts at different speeds. Trappist-1 is different; it's a super-group with all seven members synchronising their parts in nearly perfect time'

'That's why the animation produces such beautiful music.'

The team tested the simulations, and found that the majority they generated remained stable for as long as they could possibly run it.

This was about 100 times longer than it took for the simulations in the original research paper describing Trappist-1 to start to fall apart.

Dr Tamayo added: 'It seems somehow poetic that this special configuration that can generate such remarkable music can also be responsible for the system surviving to the present day.'
The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century.

In 2014, the proportion of the US who didn't believe in God was 33 per cent while in the UK it was 39 per cent.

Despite this growing disbelief in a higher being, in a new article for The Conversation, Robert Nelson, a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland explores why he believes that God exists.

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The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. In 2014, the proportion of the UK who said they didn't believe in God was 39 per cent, while it was 33 per cent of people in the US (stock image)

Laws of math

In 1960 the Princeton physicist  and subsequent Nobel Prize winner  Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always  so far as we know  obey laws of mathematics?

As argued by scholars such as Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, mathematics exists independent of physical reality.

It is the job of mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical laws and concepts.

Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.

But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made, and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues.

Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity, for example, was based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great German mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any known practical applications at the time of its intellectual creation.

ARE ATHEISTS DYING OUT? A controversial new study has claimed that atheism is on the verge of dying out. Researchers from from the US and Malaysia found that since religious groups preach against contraception, they tend to have more children than those who label themselves as atheists. The team sampled more than 4,000 students attending different colleges in both the US and Malaysia, who were asked about their beliefs and number of siblings. In Malaysia, Muslim families had an average of 5.89 children and 4.29 in the US. The second most fertile parents in Malaysia were Hindus with 4.01 children  but this was a small sample of only five students. Atheists living in Malaysia had an average of 3.67 children and parents of US students that were also not part of a religious group had 3.04. Christians living in the US had 3.11 children and Catholics had 3.42. Advertisement

In some cases the physicist also discovers the mathematics. Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century.

Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system.

He found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.

At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newton's conclusions because they seemed to be 'occult.'

Modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made, and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues

CAN BRAIN INJURIES MAKE YOU RELIGIOUS? Researchers looked at the brains of 119 people who suffered brain injury in the Vietnam war and 30 veterans who did not suffer any injuries. They were asked to respond to statements such as 'To lead the best, most meaningful life, one must belong to the one, true religion.' They found veterans with lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex had higher levels of religious fundamentalism than those without. Damage to this part of the brain means people are less able to critically evaluate their religious beliefs against those of other people. Advertisement

How could two distant objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical law?

Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation, but in the end he could say only that it is the will of God.

Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard.

As Wigner wrote, 'the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.'

In other words, as I argue in my book, it takes the existence of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.

Maths and other worlds

In 2004 the great British physicist Roger Penrose put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds  mathematics, the material world and human consciousness.

As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him how the three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model.

How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence: human consciousness?

It is a mystery that lies beyond science.

This mystery is the same one that existed in the Greek worldview of Plato, who believed that abstract ideas (above all mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality.

The material world that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect reflection of these prior formal ideals.

As the scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, Ian Mueller, writes in 'Mathematics And The Divine,' the realm of such ideals is that of God.

Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Max Tegmark argues in 'Our Mathematical Universe' that mathematics is the fundamental world reality that drives the universe.

As I would say, mathematics is operating in a god-like fashion.

In the article, Professor Nelson questions how physical atoms and molecules can create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence

THE FEAR OF DYING A new study conducted by Oxford University has found that those whose religious behavior was driven by 'true belief' enjoyed lower levels of death anxiety. Those who were motivated to believe by pragmatic conditions such as social or emotional benefits reported higher levels of death anxiety. However, researchers also discovered that 18 percent of people who deem themselves religious were more afraid of 'the end' than non-religious people. Experts said these findings complicate the old view, that religious people are less afraid of death than nonreligious people. They have suggested that atheists may find comfort and death or people who are just not afraid of death aren't compelled to seek religion. Advertisement

The mystery of human consciousness

The workings of human consciousness are similarly miraculous.

Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions.

Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies.

This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.

Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject.

Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.

Recognising that he could not reconcile his own scientific materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a leading atheist, Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists.

Finding this altogether implausible, as most people do, another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel, wrote in 2012 that, given the scientifically inexplicable  the 'intractable'  character of human consciousness, 'we will have to leave [scientific] materialism behind' as a complete basis for understanding the world of human existence.

As an atheist, Nagel does not offer religious belief as an alternative, but I would argue that the supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness adds grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural god.

Evolution and faith

Evolution is a contentious subject in American public life.

According to Pew, 98 per cent of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science 'believe humans evolved over time' while only a minority of Americans 'fully accept evolution through natural selection.'

As I say in my book, I should emphasise that I am not questioning the reality of natural biological evolution.

What is interesting to me, however, are the fierce arguments that have taken place between professional evolutionary biologists.

Professor Nelson believes that the most recent developments in evolutionary biology have increased the probability of a god

A number of developments in evolutionary theory have challenged traditional Darwinist  and later neo-Darwinist  views that emphasize random genetic mutations and gradual evolutionary selection by the process of survival of the fittest.

From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould created controversy by positing a different view, 'punctuated equilibrium,' to the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.

In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro argued that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful 'sentience' of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves.

'The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable,' he wrote. 'Our current ideas about evolution have to incorporate this basic fact of life.'

A number of scientists, such as Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, 'see no conflict between believing in God and accepting the contemporary theory of evolution,' as the American Association for the Advancement of Science points out.

For my part, the most recent developments in evolutionary biology have increased the probability of a god.

HOW BELIEF IN GOD AFFECTS THE WAY YOU THINK A recent study from the University of Helsinki has suggested that religious people are more likely to have a poor understanding of the world. It claims that those with a belief in God are more likely to think that inanimate objects, such as metal and oil can think and feel. Researchers say that the findings suggest people's lack of understanding about the physical world means they apply their own rules, 'resulting in belief in demons, gods, and other supernatural phenomena'. Participants were asked how much they agreed with the statement 'there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God' and if they believed in paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and psychic visions. They were also tested on a range of other topics, including intuitive physics skills and understanding of basic biology. The results showed that religious people tend to base their actions on instinct, rather than analytical thinking. Advertisement

Miraculous ideas at the same time?

For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas.

In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East, groups having little interaction with one

The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences.

There have been many historical theories, but none capable, I would argue, of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world.

It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.

That all these astonishing things happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence, in my view, for the conclusion that human beings may well be made 'in the image of [a] God.'

Different forms of worship

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said that: 'Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.'

Professor Nelson believes that the fact that several different forms of worship arose at the same time, suggests that God does exist

Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of religion, his followers, ironically, worshiped Marxism.

The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century, Marxism was the 'historical successor of Christianity,' claiming to show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.

In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and other such 'economic religions' were characteristic of much of the modern age.

So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of 'secular religion.'

That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is another reason I offer for thinking that the existence of a god is very probable.
It has long been associated with romance, but new research may pour cold water on the idea that the colour red can inflame passion.

A number of studies have in the past claimed a link between between shades of red and how desirable you appear to the opposite sex.

But having replicated these studies, researchers found there was no correlation between wearing red and attractiveness.

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Psychologists are calling into question previous research that suggested wearing red can make you more attractive to the opposite sex. Red dresses, like the one worn by Jennifer Aniston (pictured) are common sight at red carpet events (stock image)

THE STUDY IN BRIEF Psychologists from Dominican University in Illinois have been trying to recreate the findings of previous research which has suggested a link between the colour red and increased attraction to the opposite sex. They asked university students and online participants to rate the same photos as those shown to participants a 2008 study which found men rated women wearing red as more attractive. But the researchers could not find little to no evidence of the effect in action. One reasons for this could be that findings from a specific small group may not be representative of preferences within society as a whole. They also suggest that researchers may withhold findings that go against their expectations. Advertisement

Psychologists from Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, have been trying to recreate the findings of previous research which has suggested the link.

Among them was a paper from 2010 that reported red enhanced attraction for women rating men.

And a 2008 study found the same to be true for men rating women.

Robert Calin-Jageman and Gabrielle Lehmann from the university's neuroscience department replicated the studies, both online and in-person.

But the researchers could find little to no evidence of the effect in action, according to reports in Slate.

Speaking to the website, lead author Dr Calin-Jageman said: 'Either the big effects are a fluke, or there is something specific needed to be done when studying red that not all labs are doing.'

To ensure that the tests were as faithful as possible to the previous studies, the researchers used the same materials as the originals.

They asked university students and online participants to rate the same photos as those shown to participants in the 2008 study.

And they also employed a number of quality control measures to ensure the accuracy of their results.

For men, they found a very weak effect in heightening desire for the colour red.

But for women, they found the opposite to be true, with a slight aversion to red.

For men, they found red had a very weak effect in heightening desire. Scarlett Johansson (left) and Kim Kardashian (right) wear eye-catching red dresses on the red carpet (stock images)

The scientists were unable to offer a definitive explanation for the variation in their findings, but they did suggest a number of possible causes.

One is that findings taken from a specific small group may not be representative of patterns of behaviour in larger groups, or society as a whole.

They also suggested that researchers may withhold findings that go against their expectations.

Women who took part in the study showed a slight aversion to red. David Beckham (left) and Justin Bieber (right) are among male celebrities frequently pictured in red clothing (stock images)

'What is published is just the tip of the iceberg, it's not the whole story,' Dr Calin-Jageman added.

'It seems clear that we're burying negative evidence. We should all work to stop doing that.

'We should all work to stop doing that.'

The full findings were published in the journal Social Psychology.
News / Local

by Stephen Jakes

A political commentator Vince Musewe has told former Industry Minister Nkosana Moyo who declared his interests to stand as an independent candidate in the 2018 presidential race that Zimbabwe needs to focus on removing President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF so that democracy should prevail in the country.Moyo recently said he is considering contesting as an independent in the presidential race next year."Dr Nkosana Moyo is allegedly still pondering on whether to run in 2018 Presidential elections as an independent. I do get his point that political parties promote patronage in government and this leads to incompetents being appointed more for loyalty to the party than based on their abilities and competence to deliver," said Musewe."This remains Africa's curse and I just don't know what we have to do to get rid of this culture. We certainly need a President who puts country and not party first. Whether this is a good enough reason to split the vote I don't know. I still think that 2018 to 2023 must be a transformational period where we transform our government it's institutions and it's culture before we can have new criteria. We must focus on voting Zanu PF and Mugabe out. That is so critical."
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An uninhabited Pacific island thousands of miles away from civilisation has become the most polluted place on Earth as thousands of bits plastic rubbish wash up on its shores.

Henderson Island, a coral atoll in the south Pacific, is just 14.5 square miles (37.5 square km), and the nearest cities are some 3,000 miles (4,800 km) away.

The island, a territory of the UK, is a sanctuary to a host of threatened species including the Henderson Petrel and Henderson Crake, and its beaches are a nesting site for the endangered green turtle.

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One researcher claims that a hermit crab that has made its home in a blue Avon cosmetics pot is a 'common sight' on the island. The plastic is very old and toxic, and is damaging to much of the island's diverse wildlife

PLASTIC IN THE OCEANS Experts estimate there are five trillion pieces of plastic litter floating on the world's oceans, discarded by a throw-away society and killing countless animals a year. It has been estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. Plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Plastic and other litter can become concentrated in areas called gyres as a result of marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents. Advertisement

But human activity has turned what should be a pristine island paradise into a rubbish tip.

More than 37 million bits of plastic junk  weighing some 17 tons - have washed up on its shores, threatening the island's wildlife.

In all, every square metre of beach has hundreds of bits of plastic  including toothbrushes, buoys, old fishing nets, plastic bags and cosmetic pots mostly produced in the last few decades and dropped by people thousands of miles away.

While the surface is cluttered with plastic junk, it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Sixty-eight per cent of the plastic was buried under 10cm (4 inches) of sand.

Jennifer Lavers of the University of Tasmania and Alexander Bond of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds carried out the landmark research project.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they said: 'Here we document the amount of debris and rate of accumulation on Henderson Island, a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific.

'The density of debris was the highest reported anywhere in the world, up to 671.6 items per meter squared on the surface of the beaches.'

The remote islands have never had a 'clean up' operation, so the levels of plastic are an indication of how plastic is piling up worldwide, carried by ocean currents to land on Henderson's shores.

Human activity has turned what should be a pristine island paradise into a rubbish tip. More than 37 million bits of plastic junk  weighing some 17 tons - have washed up on its shores, threatening the island's wildlife

Henderson island (pictured) is a territory of the UK and a sanctuary to a host of threatened species including the Henderson Petrel and Henderson Crake, and its beaches are a nesting site for the endangered green turtle

Dr Lavers told the Daily Mail that she had studied marine plastics on remote islands for the best part of a decade.

'I've seen a lot of plastics on my travels  some of the most remote places  but Henderson Island tops the cake.

'The quantity of plastic on Henderson Island is truly alarming and takes your breath away.'

A study in 1991 of plastic pollution on two other remote atolls, Ducie and Aeno in the area was described as 'frighteningly large'  but is likely to represent how much plastic pollution existed nearly three decades ago.

But this was less than 1 piece of plastic per square metre  vastly outstripped by Henderson Island now.

The researchers estimate that - given the islands experience similar conditions - since 1991, plastic levels have increase each year by between 7 and 80 per cent.

In all, every square metre of beach has hundreds of bits of plastic  including toothbrushes, buoys, old fishing nets, plastic bags and cosmetic pots mostly produced in the last few decades and dropped by people thousands of miles away

The island is 'extremely difficult' for humans to set foot on: Dr Lavers had to take five flights from Tasmania and travel for three days on a chartered ship from French Polynesia to reach it.

The nearest inhabited island 60 miles (100 km) away  Pitcairn  has around 30 people on it. The big population centres of Japan, The USA, Korea and Chile are thousands of miles away.

No public access is allowed, and only researchers are allowed on its shores.

Dr Lavers said: 'It's well off the tourist track, it's not on any shipping or transport routes and there are no commercial fishing operations in the area.

Henderson Island is uninhabited and thousands of miles away from civilisation. A new study has found it to be the most polluted place on Earth as thousands of bits plastic rubbish wash up on its shores

Now researchers have documented the terrifying extent of the island's plastic pollution for the first time. While the surface is cluttered with plastic junk, it is just the tip of the iceberg. Sixty-eight per cent of the plastic was buried under 10cm (4 inches) of sand

'It's almost off the map, it's like it doesn't exist.' She said the last visit by researchers was in 2011 who were investigating a failed attempt to kill rats on the island by dropping poisoned bait by air.

The researchers were shocked by the amount of plastic they saw.

Dr Lavers said: 'We could not go all that way and not do something about it.'

And every day that passes more plastic piles up  with hundreds of more items washing up every week.

Speaking of the 'common sight' on the island of a hermit crab that has made its home in a blue Avon cosmetics pot, she said: 'At first sight it looks really cute.

'The plastic is very old and brittle and toxic. To have wildlife living inside our waste, that's not something we want to continue.'

The remote islands have never had a 'clean up' operation, so the levels of plastic are an indication of how plastic is piling up worldwide, carried by ocean currents to land on Henderson's shores

The island is 'extremely difficult' for humans to set foot on: Researchers had to take five flights from Tasmania and travel for three days on a chartered ship from French Polynesia to reach it

Dr Lavers said that plastic pollution on beaches is likely to affect rare green turtle nesting sites on the beach as plastic litter on beaches deters pregnant females from laying their eggs.

She added: 'We don't want our beaches covered in plastic for turtles and so many other reasons.'

As well as surface plastic, she said 'here are enormous quantities of plastic buried on the beach.

'If you look at the beach and know it's dirty you have to know you're looking at the tip of the iceberg.'

Asked what the individual could do, Dr Lavers said: 'Once plastic is in the ocean, it's virtually impossible with current technology to get it out.

'The focus needs to be on preventing it from getting it there in the first place.'

Henderson Island, a coral atoll in the south Pacific, is just 14.5 square miles (37.5 square km), and the nearest cities are some 3,000 miles (4,800 km) away

Education to stop people littering on beaches was one thing. Another would be for individuals to use less plastic  and switch to less harmful alternatives.

She said: 'You need to bring it down to a realistic level with realistic, manageable targets or people get overwhelmed and shut off.

For example, Dr Lavers saw large numbers of plastic toothbrushes washed up on the island.

Toothbrushes made from bamboo and wood fibre are available for the same price as plastic ones  but will not pollute the earth for hundreds of years once we have finished with them.

Another example was taking mesh bags  available from a company called Onya  that we could use instead of the flimsy plastic bags provided in supermarkets for loose fruit and vegetables.

In conclusion, Dr Lavers and her colleague Alexander Bond said: 'Rarely visited by humans, Henderson Island and other remote islands may be sinks for some of the world's increasing volume of waste.'
Uber's self driving car plans have been thrown into chaos after a federal judge ordered Uber to stop using technology that a key executive downloaded before he left Waymo, the Alphabet Inc. autonomous car arm that was spun off from Google.

The order filed Monday in a trade secrets theft lawsuit also forces Uber to return all downloaded materials.

Judge William Alsup in San Francisco says in the ruling that Waymo has shown compelling evidence that a former star engineer named Anthony Levandowski downloaded confidential files before leaving Waymo.

High-profile: Levandowski, a 'swaggering' six-foot-seven tech leader, is one of Silicon Valley's most significant figures in the development of self-driving cars

WHAT IS LiDAR? In lidar  or light detection and ranging  scanning, one or more lasers sends out short pulses, which bounce back when they hit an obstacle, whether clouds, leaves or rocks. In self-driving cars, the sensors constantly scan the surrounding areas looking for information and acting as the 'eyes' of the car. Advertisement

And, Judge Alsup says Levandowski must remain quarantined from Uber's work on lidar until the lawsuit is resolved,Bloomberg reports.

The Judge also says evidence shows that before he left Waymo, Levandowski and Uber planned for Uber to acquire a company formed by Levandowski.

The ruling prevents Uber from using the technology on a navigational tool called Lidar that robotic cars need to see what's around them.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco, made public on Monday, said Uber 'likely knew' or should have known that the engineer, who now works at Uber, took Waymo materials while Uber was contemplating buying the engineer's company.

However, the judge also said few of Waymo's alleged trade secrets have been traced to Uber's self-driving car technology, and that Waymo's patent claims against Uber have proved 'meritless.'

As of now, Uber has not been issued an order to halt its program altogether as the court battle wages on.

But, Waymo was granted a bid for 'expedited discovery,' with the trial now set for October, according to Bloomberg.

According to Bloomberg, both companies hailed the ruling a success, as Waymo claimed the expedited trial would 'hold Uber fully responsible for its misconduct,' and Uber said Judge Alsup's decision would allow it to 'continue building and utilizing all of its self-driving technology.'

Uber also said the trial will 'demonstrate that our technology has been built independently.'

The case is being heard by Judge Alsup, who says in the ruling that Waymo has shown compelling evidence that Levandowski downloaded confidential files before leaving

But, the ruling by District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco Monday was mainly a victory for Waymo, the autonomous car unit spun off from Google, even though the judge refused to order a halt to Uber's autonomous car research as Waymo had requested, the experts said.

Waymo showed 'compelling evidence' that a former Waymo engineer named Anthony Levandowski downloaded thousands of confidential files before leaving the company, the order said.

Levandowski set up his own firms, which then were sold to Uber for $680 million. Evidence showed that Levandowski and Uber planned the acquisitions before Levandowski left Waymo, Alsup's order said.

'He clearly believes that Levandowski is guilty as sin and that Uber hired him, knowing this full well,' said John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in white-collar crime and corporate governance.

'He is ruling that some of this information is stolen (or 'misappropriated') and in the long run that will likely have a devastating impact on Uber.'

Waymo sued Uber in February alleging that the ride-hailing company is using stolen self-driving technology to build its own autonomous cars.

Monday's ruling prevents Uber from using the technology on a laser navigational tool called Lidar that robotic cars use to see what's around them.

'The bottom line is the evidence indicates that Uber hired Levandowski even though it knew or should have known that he possessed over 14,000 confidential Waymo files,' Alsup wrote.

'At least some information from those files, if not the files themselves, has seeped into Uber's own Lidar development efforts.'

Uber was ordered to return all downloaded materials to Waymo by noon on May 31.

In an earlier hearing, Alsup expressed skepticism over whether Uber actually used any Waymo trade secrets.

'I've given you lots of discovery, and so far you don't have any smoking gun' showing that Uber knew Levandowski possessed any Waymo trade secrets, Alsup said.

Waymo attorney Charles Verhoeven said the company suspects such evidence exists.

Levandowski declined to answer questions during a deposition, citing his constitutional rights against self incrimination.

Verhoeven also said Uber was improperly withholding thousands of documents on the grounds that they are confidential legal documents.

The judge did not make a ruling from the bench during the May 3rd hearing.

The hearing is the latest phase in a courtroom battle over trade secrets that threatens to topple a central pillar of Uber's growth strategy.

Autonomous cars promise to change the economics of the ride-hailing business.

Among Uber's biggest expenses is the cost of attracting drivers, who have a high turnover rate.

And Uber's ability to expand into suburban and rural markets, and areas with low vehicle ownership, and continue to offer a ride within three minutes, largely hinges on the availability of a network of self-driving vehicles.
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Roughly 100 days from now, a total solar eclipse will pass from coast-to-coast through the continental United States for the first time in nearly a century.

The August 21 event will be visible to millions of people as it crosses through 14 states, with the path of totality stretching from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina.

During this time, the sun will be completely blocked by the moon, leaving only the pearly white rays of its elusive corona visible to the naked eye  but, even in areas set to experience the longest duration of totality, the sun will only be fully covered for less than three minutes.

To be sure you dont miss out on the rare event, scientists have revealed many ways to prepare ahead, from what time the eclipse will pass through your city, to when you should put on your safety glasses.

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Roughly 100 days from now, a total solar eclipse will pass from coast-to-coast through the continental United States for the first time in nearly a century. The August 21 event will be visible to millions of people as it crosses through 14 states, with the path of totality stretching from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina

WHERE TO SEE IT The path of totality will stretch from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston South Carolina. To find out exactly when and where it will be visible, visit NASA's interactive map, and click on a city along the path. Totality will cross the US from west to east, beginning at Lincoln Beach, Oregon, where totality will occur at 10:16 a.m. (PDT). It will the US over roughly an hour and a half, passing through Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and North and South Carolina. It will end near Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:48 p.m. (EDT), according to NASA. Advertisement

While entirety of the event will only be seen along the 70-mile-wide path of totality, even viewers outside the range will be able to see a partial solar eclipse.

The latter will be visible all across North America, and even in parts of South America, Africa, and Europe, according to NASA.

Totality will cross the US from west to east, beginning at Lincoln Beach, Oregon.

There, the total solar eclipse will begin at 10:16 a.m. (PDT).

The phenomenon will then cross through the US over the course of roughly an hour and a half, passing through Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and North and South Carolina.

It will end near Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:48 p.m. (EDT), according to NASA.

While the totality itself will last just a few minutes, the eclipse  from start to finish  will span more than an hour as the moon moves in and out of the suns path, giving rise to a series of crescents along the way.

The August 21 event will be visible to millions of people as it crosses through 14 states, with the path of totality stretching from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina. A view of the Western and central US is shown. The best views of totality will be along the red line, though it will be visible in areas within the purple as well

During this time, the sun will be completely blocked by the moon, leaving only the pearly white rays of its elusive corona visible to the naked eye  but, even in areas set to experience the longest duration of totality, the sun will only be fully covered for less than three minutes. A view of central and Eastern US is shown

Its not enough just to know where to see it, though.

Viewers must also be prepared with the proper gear to protect their eyes during the event.

Otherwise, NASA warns, you could severely hurt your eyes.

The space agency says viewers should be equipped with special specs such as Rainbow Symphony, American Paper Optics, Thousand Oaks Optical, and TSE 17.

These are just four that meet the ISO 12312-2 international standard.

The glasses should be put on when the partial eclipse begins, meaning when the sun becomes partially covered by the moon.

Scientists have long been preparing for the August 2017 event, which will offer a rare glimpse at the suns outer atmosphere, known as the corona. This feature is invisible to the naked eye except during a total solar eclipse. To view it otherwise, scientists must use a telescope known as a coronagraph

PROTECTING YOUR EYES Viewers must also be prepared with the proper gear to protect their eyes during the event. Otherwise, NASA warns, you could severely hurt your eyes The space agency says viewers should be equipped with special specs such as Rainbow Symphony, American Paper Optics, Thousand Oaks Optical, and TSE 17. These are just four that meet the ISO 12312-2 international standard. And, they warn that you should never look at the sun through an unfiltered camera, telescope, binoculars. According to NASA, eclipse glasses should be put on when the partial eclipse begins, meaning when the sun becomes partially covered by the moon. And, they should remain on for the entirety of the phases leading up to totality. Once the moon has completely blocked out the sun, causing it to suddenly become dark, viewers can then remove the glasses for a short amount of time. This may last just a minute, though, and the glasses will need to be put back on for the final stages of the eclipse. Advertisement

And, they should remain on for the entirety of the phases leading up to totality.

Once the moon has completely blocked out the sun, causing it to suddenly become dark, viewers can then remove the glasses for a short amount of time.

This may last just a minute, though, and the glasses will need to be put back on for the final stages of the eclipse.

Still, no matter how much you prepare, the ability to see the eclipse will all boil down to the weather conditions that day.

In the event that clouds or storms do pass through, obscuring the phenomenon, NASA will be hosting an Eclipse Megacast for four hours.

While entirety of the event will only be seen along the 70-mile-wide path of totality, even viewers outside the range will be able to see a partial solar eclipse. The latter will be visible all across North America, and even in parts of South America, Africa, and Europe, according to NASA. This is illustrated above, with the path of totality shown in red

While the totality itself will last just a few minutes, the eclipse  from start to finish  will span more than an hour as the moon moves in and out of the suns path, giving rise to a series of crescents along the way

A HISTORIC ECLIPSE The total solar eclipse on Monday, Aug. 21, 2017 will cross the continental United States beginning in Oregon and ending in South Carolina. While a total solar eclipse occurred over the continental US in 1979, the last time one such event spanned the country coast to coast was in 1918. In that event, the the path of totality entered through the southwest corner of Washington and passed over Denver, Colorado, Jackson, Mississippi, and Orlando, Florida before exiting the country at the Atlantic coast of Florida. This year, the path of totality will cross through 14 states, with the path of totality stretching from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina. Advertisement

This will be live-streamed on NASA TV, along with local and national TV stations, ensuring that even viewers who cannot make it a location on the path of totality or are experiencing poor sky conditions can see the rare eclipse.

Scientists have long been preparing for the August 2017 event, which will offer a rare glimpse at the suns outer atmosphere, known as the corona.

This feature is invisible to the naked eye except during a total solar eclipse. To view it otherwise, scientists must use a telescope known as a coronagraph.

In the brief window when the sun is blocked out by the moon, scientists will take measurements from both the ground and the sky, the LA Times reports.

Some will even fly specialized planes upwards of 49,000 feet, using custom-built instruments to analyze the corona in infrared.

Previous eclipses have revealed a bizarre phenomenon in which the suns outer atmosphere is far hotter than the surface, at an average of 1 million degrees Kelvin, compared to about 6,000 degrees Kelvin, respectively.

The fundamental question we are asking is, what is causing the atmosphere to heat up like that? Shadia Habbal, a solar wind at the University of Hawaiis Institute for Astronomy who has led 14 eclipse expeditions, told the LA Times.

This is one of the scientific mysteries regarding the sun that remains unanswered.
The Pentagon has revealed a new AI system designed to lead the hunt for Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

Codenamed Project Maven, it will analyse aerial surveillance video to look for patterns that can help operators.

It comes as military bosses say the thousands of military and civilian intelligence analysts are 'overwhelmed' by the amount of video being recorded over the battlefield by drones with high resolution cameras.

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A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle: Military bosses say intelligence analysts are 'overwhelmed' by the amount of video being recorded over the battlefield by drones with high resolution cameras.

'We have to tackle the problem a different way,' Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T.'Jack' Shanahan, director for defense intelligence for warfighter support, and the man tasked with finding the new technology, told Defense One.

'We're not going to solve it by throwing more people at the problem

'That's the last thing that we actually want to do.

'We want to be smarter about what we're doing.'

The new project will be part of Project Maven, a fast-moving effort launched last month by Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work to use machine learning techniques officially known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team.

The group will look to integrate big data and machine learning across the military.

HOW IT WILL WORK Codenamed Project Maven, it will analyse aerial surveillance video to look for patterns that can help operators. It comes as military bosses say the thousands of military and civilian intelligence analysts are 'overwhelmed' by the amount of video being recorded over the battlefield by drones with high resolution cameras. 'There's some hard work behind the scenes that has to be done to first of all get that cleaned up,' Shanahan said. About 60 percent of the full-motion video gathered over the battlefield is benign while the drone or aircraft flies to and from a point of interest. Then there could be bad weather where the camera cannot see through the clouds. The goal is to find technology that can clean up that video, 'finding the juicy parts where there's activity and then labeling the data,' Shanahan said. That work today is done by three-man teams of analysts. Advertisement

It is working hand in hand with the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, a group modify existing weapons and technology to make them more versatile and lethal.

'There are a thousand things we want to do with artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, but everybody has cautioned us, don't take on too much the first time you do this,' Shanahan said.

The team is also scouring silicon valley for technology and people to help it meets its ambitious timesline.

'We want to deliver  in this calendar year  some capabilities out to the warfighters that make a difference,' Shanahan tolde Defense One.

Shanahan  whom Work put in charge of the team  has nearly 33 years in uniform. He spent most of his first 15 years of his career as a weapons systems officer in the backseats of F-4 and F-15E combat jets. Since then, he's been deeply rooted in intelligence roles in the Air Force and joint positions.

The Algorithmic Warfare team is working hand in hand with the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, a group modify existing weapons and technology to make them more versatile and lethal.

'The integration between our respective initiatives and organizations will be immensely beneficial in moving the ball forward,' Shanahan said.

Officials see the effort to automate intelligence processing as the starting point for using new technology in other military functions.

'You have to go after a manageable problem, solve it, show early wins and then start to open Pandora's box and go after all of these other challenges across the department.'

Right now, there are fragmented, one-off efforts across the military services to use this type of technology.
In the course of just one year, a spacecraft observing Earth spotted hundreds of mysterious flashes reflecting off the surface of our planet.

The bizarre phenomenon can be traced all the way back to the 1990s, when astronomer Carl Sagan made note of similar strange glints in images from the Galileo spacecraft.

While it was first thought that these strange flashes of light only appeared over oceans, possibly simplifying their origin, scientists have now discovered that they can be seen over land as well.

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In the course of just one year, a spacecraft observing Earth spotted hundreds of mysterious flashes reflecting off the surface of our planet. One such flash can be seen over South America, above

WHAT ARE THEY? Researchers with the NOAAs Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spotted hundreds of mysterious flashes of light in images captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). Further investigation revealed a similar phenomenon had been spotted in 1993 by astronomer Carl Sagan, in data from the Galileo spacecraft. While those seen by Sagan appeared over the oceans, researchers looked back at the Galileo data and found that there were flashes over land as well. And, in the EPIC images, researchers discovered 866 bursts over land between june 2015 and August 2016. The study determined the presence of high cirrus clouds, 3 to 5 miles (5 to 8 kilometers) where these mysterious flashes were seen. And, the angles suggest they are positioned horizontally. As a result, the researchers concluded that these flashes are caused by tiny, horizontal ice crystals floating high in the sky. Advertisement

In a new investigation, researchers found that these bursts likely have a surprisingly small source  tiny, horizontal ice crystals floating high in the sky.

NASAs Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) aboard the NOAAs Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spotted 866 bursts of light over land between the observatorys launch in 2015 and August 2016.

The flashes seen over the ocean may simply be the reflection of sunlight off a smooth part of an ocean or lake, Alexander Marshak, DSCOVR deputy project scientist, explains.

But, the same couldnt be said for the flashes seen over land.

We found quite a few very bright flashes over land as well, said Marshak.

When I first saw it I thought maybe there was some water there, or a lake the sun reflects off of.

But the glint is pretty big, so it wasnt that.

EPIC captures red, green, and blue images several images apart, causing the flashes to appear as tri-coloured specks.

If these strange phenomena were caused by reflected sunlight, the researchers suspected they would be concentrated to distinct locations on Earth, where the angle between the sun and Earth is the same as that between the spacecraft and Earth.

And, plotting this revealed the two matched.

According to the researchers, this also helped to weed out lightning as a possible cause.

Lightning doesnt care about the sun and EPICs location, Marshak said.

In the study, the researchers hypothesized that the bursts of light may be caused by water high up in the atmosphere, in the form of ice particles.

To find out, they plotted the angles of the reflections, and tapped into two channels on EPIC that allowed them to measure the height of clouds.

EPIC captures red, green, and blue images several images apart, causing the flashes to appear as tri-coloured specks, as seen in the image above

The bizarre phenomenon can be traced all the way back to the 1990s, when astronomer Carl Sagan made note of similar strange glints in images from the Galileo spacecraft

The analysis revealed the presence of high cirrus clouds, 3 to 5 miles (5 to 8 kilometers) where these mysterious flashes were seen.

And, the angles suggest they are positioned horizontally.

The source of the flashes is definitely not on the ground, said Marshak.

Its definitely ice, and most likely solar reflection off of horizontally oriented particles.

The researchers are using this information to help determine whether or not they have an impact on the amount of sunlight that passes through the atmosphere.

In addition to the implications for Earth, scientists say glints such as those spotted by DSCOVR could even be used to study exoplanets.
As the car pulls up outside Malachite Manor, owner Carrin Pieterse suggests why were better off taking an organised tour to the Sani Pass than attempting to drive ourselves.

The number of people who have stayed here, tried it themselves, then chickened out halfway through is immense, she chuckles.

Some have even asked for help turning the car around.

The Sani Pass (pictured) connects the towns of Underberg and Himeville in South Africa to Lesotho in a very vertical fashion

Its fair to say that the Sani Pass is no ordinary road. It connects the towns of Underberg and Himeville in South Africa to Lesotho. And it does so mainly travelling in one direction  up.

Sandile Mzolo, from Roof Of Africa tours, reckons hes driven the road nearly 10,000 times in the past seven years, but he still ends up wrestling with the four-wheel-drive vehicle over the muddy, squelchy first section.

Heavy rains the previous day have turned the dirt track into a glorified bog. The bits that arent heavily corrugated are slippery, and we havent even got to the South African border post yet.

Thats at an elevation of 6,450ft, and what follows is a death-defying climb up through no-mans-land to the Lesotho border at Sani Top.

Reaching the summit at 9,425ft requires nerves of steel. Precipitous switchbacks and tight bends hang over the gorge.

Sandile calls the journey an African massage, and while the car suspension certainly gets a good workout, the clattering, juddering ascent is hardly conducive to relaxation.

This was David's chariot as he made his way up the steep incline to the summit at 9,425ft

The pseudo-road was first carved along the Drakensberg mountain ridges in 1958. It follows a crude donkey track that wool traders from Lesotho would brave in order to sell goods across the border.

Now the traffic coming down from Lesotho is in the shape of minibus taxis, colloquially known as two-mores  because the drivers will always find a way to cram in two more people despite being full.

In the less hairy moments during the struggle to Sani Top, theres a chance to take in the wildlife. Troops of baboons scurry along the rock faces, guinea pig-esque dassies look mightily cute next to waterfalls, and majestic antelopes roam the hillsides opposite.

But theyre not what the Sani Pass is about. Its about wincing at tight turns on sections with names such as Haemorrhoid Hill and Suicide Bend.

Its about hoping that distant claps of thunder dont mean we will later face a significantly more scary descent. And its about emerging in Lesothos mountain kingdom amid a thick blanket of cloud.

At the top is the Sani Mountain Lodge, which boasts of being the highest pub in Africa. And after that journey, a glass of Maluti beer is certainly required to calm the nerves. The driver had better abstain, though  hes got to get us back down safely
Looking for a deal on a summer holiday but worried it's too late?

Or wondering which UK airport is the cheapest to fly from?

Mail on Sunday's Travel Editor Frank Barrett answers your questions this week.

Flying to Las Vegas, Orlando, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok from Edinburgh or Glasgow is currently cheaper than flying from London

QUESTION: We put off booking a summer holiday and now were worried we wont be able to afford one at all. Prices are going up by the minute. Can you recommend any good offers for a UK break for two adults, two children and a dog. Michael, Reading

ANSWER: It is peak booking time for summer holidays so a lot of companies may well be increasing prices if demand exceeds supply. However, some firms put on last-minute sales, so stay alert (there are lots of good offers on our classified ad pages).

UK and Ireland cottage specialist Sykes Cottages has just launched its biggest sale yet, slashing the prices of more than 8,000 breaks  it is rare for July and August dates to be so heavily discounted at this time of year. In July, seaside cottages in Cornwall are available from around 700 for seven nights. See sykescottages.co.uk.

QUESTION: We live in Scotland and I am looking for a long-haul destination that is affordable to fly to from a local airport, to save the hassle of having to travel to London. Harriet, by email

There are deals to be had, too, on family camping holidays in France (stock image)

ANSWER: Website cheapflights.co.uk reckons that flying to Las Vegas, Orlando, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok from Edinburgh or Glasgow is cheaper than flying from London. It also highlights new routes from Edinburgh and Glasgow as alternative destinations you can consider. Alternatively, an expert travel agency such as Trailfinders (trailfinders.com) can answer your questions directly.

QUESTION: Our children have persuaded us to try a camping holiday in France. Are there any attractive offers at the moment? Lisa, by email

ANSWER: Next month, France Break (francebreak.co.uk) is offering seven nights self-catering in the Loire Valley from 114 per person (based on six people), excluding the cost of the ferry crossing. The campsite  Les Alicourts Resort in Pierrefitte  features plenty of outdoor sporting facilities, a playground, kids clubs and a water park. Accommodation is in a new three-bedroom, two-bathroom Key West mobile home with air-conditioning.
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You certainly wouldn't be able to spot them from afar, or at a quick glance.

For these creatures are the masters of disguise having evolved over millions of years to blend into their surroundings and evade predators.

And even when you can identify them, it's hard not to marvel at how intricate their camouflage is.

Some, like the small-toothed flounder of Australia, mimic the sand on the ocean floor and are nigh impossible to make out when standing still.

Others, like the orange-barred sulphur butterfly, have markings that help them look indistinguishable from leaves.

But they all have one thing in common, and that's the ability to beat almost any opponent at a game of hide and seek.

A small red patch on this tuva toad-head agama lizard's flank is all that identifies it from the scattered stones of the Gobi desert in southern Mongolia

This small-toothed flounder lies half submerged under the dappled sand, captured here in the ocean of southern Australia

The horned lizard, top right, performs an excellent impression of a rock as it hides among wildflowers in Tucson, Arizona

The aptly-named leaf insect is a slow moving creature, widespread in Southeast Asia, which relies on blending in to avoid predators

Their little eyes give them away but still these pygmy seahorses, seen here in Indonesia, still do an impressive job at mimicking their coral habitat

The intricate pattern of this glaucous cracker butterfly's wings and its muted grey hues help blur its outline against the tree, pictured here in the Dominican Republic

Equally, the orange-barred sulphur butterfly, seen here in Texas, has wings which match the foliage all the way down to the texture and blemishes

The almost comical-looking bush thick-knee bird protects its ground nest using a 'stick posture' to blend in against the ground in Australia

A great potoo, seen here perched in a tree in Brazil, looks somewhat akin to a lizard but is actually an unusual species of bird

But for its fluttery skirt, the Red Sea Moses sole would be very hard to spot amid the fine, pale Egyptian sand

Until the Pac-Man frog pops its eyes out above the surface, it blends in seamlessly with the leafy water of Indonesia
Imagine having Dame Edna Everage as your mother- in-law.

Blonde art lover Sophie Oakley has bravely accepted a proposal from Oscar Humphries, whose comic father Barry created the outrageous lilac-haired Australian.

Happiness is hearing Yes from your best friend, said Oscar yesterday, posting online this picture of the couple as he broke the news of his engagement to Sophie, daughter of the explorer Tim Oakley.

Fine art dealer and journalist Oscar, 36, split from his previous fiancee, model Sara Philippidis, in 2010.

Blonde art lover Sophie Oakley, pictured left, has bravely accepted a proposal from Oscar Humphries, pictured second left, whose comic father Barry created the outrageous lilac-haired Australian Dame Edna Everage, pictured right

Now M&S man takes charge of Queen's art

This isnt just any art, this is royal art . . . Marc Bolland  who over- saw those seductive food porn adverts while the boss of Marks & Spencer  has been recruited to look after the Queens million precious artworks.

The Dutchman, 58, will be a director of the Royal Collection Trust.

The appointment comes after I disclosed last year that Buckingham Palace had taken the step of courting some of the worlds richest tycoons to plug a shortfall in the trusts finances.

Undeterred by criticism of Prince Charless love of ghastly billionaires, the trust announced plans to hire a team of fundraisers to tap up the super-rich for donations of up to seven figures to hit ambitious financial targets.

Paul Hollywood was happy to follow the money to Channel 4 with The Great British Bake Off, but MasterChef: The Professionals judge Marcus Wareing would never leave the Beeb.

Im BBC through and through, so my loyalty lies with them, he tells me.

I could never be tempted to move like Paul did. Even if Channel 4 offered me 10 million, its not about the money. Im not driven by that  unlike some people.

When Nick Clegg set up the company Open Reason to promote himself, he said it would support his role as a former deputy prime minister.

Its certainly not supporting the Treasury. I can reveal Open Reason paid just 355 in corporation tax, despite accumulating assets of almost 79,000 in its first year.

Friends insist Open Reason is a not-for-profit business, from which Clegg does not receive an income.
Her battle with cancer has captured hearts nationwide.

And Connie Johnson has opened up about what role her devoted brother, actor Samuel Johnson, will play in the lives of her sons when her battle comes to an end.

The 40-year-old, who is dying of late-stage breast cancer, spoke with TV Week alongside her brother, 39, of their future plans for her family.

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Touching: Connie Johnson has opened up about what role her devoted brother, actor Sam Johnson, will play in the lives of her sons when she passes away

The mother of Willoughby, 10, and Hamilton, nine, revealed her and Sam have talked 'at length' about his contribution to raising the boys.

'When the time is right, we do have these discussions,' she said. 'He knows what I want, and as an uncle he will know what they need.'

Her Gold Logie winner sibling, who gave up his acting career to focus on raising funds for cancer research with the Love Your Sister project, is committed to the task.

'When the time is right, we do have these discussions,' she said. 'He knows what I want, and as an uncle he will know what they need'

He says he is dedicated to being the children's 'touchstone for their mum'.

'They need to have someone outside their very direct, core family who they can come to,' he continued. 'I feel I'm the best person for that.'

Connie explained how although her husband Mike has 'deliberately chosen' to remain out of the public eye, he has supported their advocacy 'wholeheartedly'.

Stoic: Connie explained how although her husband Mike has 'deliberately chosen' to remain out of the public eye, he has supported their advocacy 'wholeheartedly'

She proudly described how Willoughby joined volunteers for Love Your Sister's The Big Heart project, where thousands of silver coins were donated to make a heart.

The 10-year-old, who worked 'both days' and helped prepare lunch for the team, told his mother he didn't want her retiring from her cancer awareness work after the task.

'He said, "You're the one who comes up with all the ideas. You've got to keep finding ideas, to keep the money going to researchers",' Connie recalled.

'He said, "You're the one who comes up with all the ideas. You've got to keep finding ideas, to keep the money going to researchers",' Connie recalled
News / National

by Stsff Reporter

The trial of Regis Mungwari (29) a driver of Transmech Logistics a South Africa-registered haulage truck, which on 05 April 2017 sideswiped a Johannesburg-bound Proliner bus, killing 21 people on the spot and leaving 40 others injured near Mvuma along the Harare-Masvingo Highway, at Nyamatikiti River near Chaka Business Centre in Chirumanzu has been set for May 18.The South Africa-bound bus had over 60 passengers on board, while the truck was laden with tyres.According to the State, preliminary investigations at the accident scene indicated that Mungwari was speeding on a winding road and lost control of his tyre-laden truck on approaching the 218km peg, and encroached the path of the oncoming bus.The vehicles sideswiped and both burst into flames because of the impact. State Prosecutor said Mungwari acted negligently resulting in the loss of life.Regis Mungwari of no fixed abode in Zimbabwe is facing 21 counts of culpable homicide and will be tried at Mvuma Magistrates Courts by resident Magistrate Mr Tayengwa Chibanda.The death toll rose by 10 from the previously announced 21 following DNA tests.The charge of vehicular manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison.Regis Mungwari refused to disclose his contact details and residential address to police. He is lunguishing in custody at Whawha Remand Prison.Whawha prison is the infamous penitentiary which housed President Robert Mugabe during the Ian Smith regime era. Mugabe spent 10 years at Hwahwa prison from 1964 to 1974.
Alec and Hilaria Baldwin didn't look like they were having their best day as they stepped out on Mother's Day in New York City Sunday.

The couple were their three young children.

The 59-year-old actor and his Yogi wife, 33, walked with three-year-old daughter Carmen and the family nanny as they used strollers to push the family's young sons, one-year-old Rafael and nine-month-old Leonardo.

Family outing: Hilaria Baldwin, 33, seemed to be aggravated by something off-camera on her walk in Manhattan with husband Alec Baldwin, 59, and their three children on Sunday

Hilaria kept warm in a beige sweater coat over a button-up blue shirt with denim cutoff shots and beige patterned heels.

Despite the day's celebratory nature, Hilaria seemed upset by something off-camera based on her body language and facial expressions.

The actor was outfitted in a black Ralph Lauren jacket with black pants and black loafers.

Baldwin is coming off another memorable Saturday Night Live appearance in his regular role as President Donald Trump, as he performed in a number of skits as the current commander-in-chief parodying a spat of recent events.

Look over there! The beautiful mom-of-three pointed toward something off camera while her husband, who's past been prone to public outbursts, calmly collected his thoughts

In the opening sequence, Baldwin's Trump chatted with NBC News' Lester Holt (played by Michael Che) over this week's firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Asked about the controversial termination, Baldwin as Trump said ,'I fired him because of Russia, he's investigating that.

'I don't like that - I should fire him.'

Upset? Hilaria seemed upset while holding her daughter Carmen's hand as the two crossed the street

Out and about: The family sipped on coffee and juice beverages during their walk in the Big Apple

On the move: The group outing came on the heels of another memorable performance from Alec on Saturday Night Live

The character appeared in a subsequent skit alongside Melissa McCarthy, who hosted the show and reprised her role as White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

Baldwin, speaking with Australia's The Today Show on 9Now last week, said that playing the 70-year-old politician has made him a popular man in the Big Apple, where both he and Trump have residences.

Fashionista: While she wasn't flashing her pretty smile, Hilaria was outfitted nicely in a light ensemble on the day out

'In New York, people don't stop complimenting me and slapping me on the back,' he told the chat show as he promoted his animated film Boss Baby.

'They say, "Thank you" all the time.'

Baldwin said that he channels his inner misery to play Trump, adding, 'Whether he wins or loses, he's miserable.'

Baldwin, who's experienced in movies, TV, podcasts and political broadcasts, said of the recurring sketch: 'It's probably the most craziest thing I've ever done in my life.'
It was recently revealed he would be paid $100k to walk one show at Mercedes-Benz Australian Fashion Week.

And Jordan Barrett touched down in Sydney on Monday for the glamourous annual event.

The 20-year-old's face looked taut and tanned as he strolled through the airport ahead of his star turn at the anticipated Justin Cassin menswear show.

Man of the moment! Jordan Barrett touched down in Sydney on Monday for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, where he is one of the biggest drawcards

The statuesque model, whose features appeared remarkably smooth, wore a casual T-shirt teamed with trousers from New York skate brand Ethik, as well as Converse sneakers.

He had his signature blonde locks back in a low ponytail and amber-coloured designer shades atop his head.

The Byron Bay-born son of convicted Gold Coast cannabis kingpin Adrian Barrett was spotted with Andy Warhol's 1975 book, The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol, in hand.

Model behaviour: The 20-year-old's face looked taut and tanned as he strolled through the airport ahead of his star turn at the anticipated Justin Cassin menswear show on Monday

It was revealed by The Daily Telegraph on Friday the model will receive a whopping $100k paycheck to walk the runway for Justin Cassin's debut Fashion Week outing.

Said to be flying business class and obtaining the ultimate in VIP treatment, Jordan will also reportedly find the time for a shoot with GQ Australia.

Also making an appearance for the emergent Sydney-based menswear line is Richard Wilkins' son Christian and Sydney Swans star turned model Tom Derickx.

In demand: It was recently revealed he would be paid $100k to walk one show at Mercedes-Benz Australian Fashion Week

Bookworm: The Byron Bay-born son of convicted Gold Coast cannabis kingpin Adrian Barrett was spotted with Andy Warhol's 1975 book, The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol, in hand

Later in the day, he strutted his stuff at the show in a black shirt and jacket combination with denim jeans, and boots.

For his second look he rocked another all black shirt and pants ensemble with a bomber jacket.

Jordan was 13 when he was discovered at a neighbourhood grocery store by Kirk Blake from What Model Management in 2011.

Strutting his stuff: Jordan oozed confidence in a black shirt and jacket combination with denim jeans, and boots at the show

Looking cool: He rocked another all black shirt and pants ensemble with a bomber jacket

'I was scouted in my local grocery store on the Gold Coast by a man named Kirk Blake, who has been in the industry for years,' he described in a 2013 interview.

He was stealing matches for cigarettes at the time, he later told New York magazine.

'I wanted to have a cigarette, but I couldn't get a lighter because apparently you have to be over 18, so I decided I was gonna take matches from the counter,' he said.

Top notch: It was revealed on Friday the model will receive a whopping $100k paycheck to walk the runway for Justin Cassin's debut Fashion Week outing

He captured worldwide attention at this year's Met Gala in New York City, where he was accompanied by music legend Lionel Richie's model daughter Sofia, 18.

The US-based model has been linked with numerous socialites including Paris Hilton, Hailey Baldwin, Sofia Richie, Megan Blake Irwin, Lara Stone and Sahara Ray.
She won Best Actress for her role as Sergeant Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley.

But Sarah Lancashire dedicated a moment in her speech to give a glowing tribute to The Crown beauty Claire Foy who was also up for the award at The Royal Festival Hall, in London on Sunday.

The actress, 52, headed to the stage to collect her prestigious prize in a flattering unbuttoned white shirt, teamed with an eye-catching black skirt.

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Winner: Happy Valley's Sarah Lancashire scooped Leading Actress at BAFTAs 2017 at The Royal Festival Hall, in London on Sunday

Overwhelmed with emotion, the winner began her speech by admitting 'I can't breathe'.

While the popular Netflix series The Crown was snubbed at the award ceremony, the Leading Actress winner took a moment to reach out to her rival nominee Claire, 33.

She said: 'And Claire, you have given me the best ten hours under a duvet that I've ever had. Thank you.'

'Claire, you have given me the best 10 hours I've ever had': The actress, 52, paid a glowing tribute to rival nominee Foy, 33, on her role in The Crown (pictured)

Star-struck! The Crown leading actress beamed with delight at the sparkling mention during the winner's speech

Clearly moved by Sarah's spotlight speech, The Crown leading actress beamed with delight at the sparkling mention.

Thirteen's Jodie Corner and NW's Nikki Amuka-Bird also lost out to the Happy Valley screen personality.

Sarah added it was a 'privilege to work alongside such a wonderful group of actors' and thanked her directors for their input.

What a star! She won Best Actress for her role as Sergeant Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley

Revealed: Thirteen's Jodie Corner and NW's Nikki Amuka-Bird also lost out to the Happy Valley screen personality

Crowd pleaser: The audience clapped as the Happy Valley beauty headed to the stage to collect her award

As she took the stand to accept the trophy, the crowd continued to cheer and clap pleased as punch she scooped the award.

Twitter was awash with outrage at the fact The Crown didn't win a single award on the star-studded evening on the biggest night for showbiz TV of the year.

They speculated whether the result would have been different if the series was not aired on the streaming site Netflix.

Tribute: Sarah also explained it had been a 'privilege to work alongside such a wonderful group of actors' and thanked her directors for their input

One disgruntled fan wrote: 'Shameful that #TheCrown didn't win a single tonight but let's face it, it was far too British to stand a chance this year.'

While another questioned: 'How did #TheCrown win zero #BAFTAs tonight? Delighted for Sarah Lancashire and Phoebe Waller-Bridge anyway?'

Others chimed in: '#BAFTAS you're nuts this year! No #WarAndPeace and no #TheCrown awards. WTH' and 'I am stunned #TheCrown didn't get anything though. Superb television', as another wrote in outrage: 'Claire Foy was robbed #TheCrown'
She wrote and starred in the hilariously crude sitcom Fleabag, which told the story of a young woman living in London.

And Phoebe Waller-Bridge cracked a very rude joke when she joined Cuba Gooding Jr on stage to accept her TV BAFTA for Female Comedy Performance.

The comedian, 31, was met with raucous laughter from the audience as she compared collecting the gong to a sexual experience.

On the nose: Phoebe Waller-Bridge cracked a very rude joke when she joined Cuba Gooding Jr on stage to accept her TV BAFTA for Female Comedy Performance

She delightedly told the crowds: 'I have been wet dreaming about receiving a BAFTA my whole life!'

Letting laughter from the audience ring out, the brunette then went on to thank her nearest and dearest - most notably her mother - in her excitable speech.

Owing her eye-catching style to her parent, she said with the award clasped in hand: 'Most of all, I want to thank my mother, who told me I could be whoever I wanted to be, as long as I was outrageous!'

After she accepted her award, Phoebe denied rumours that she will become the first ever female Doctor Who, taking over from Peter Capaldi.

Funnywoman: Phoebe, 31, delightedly told the crowds: 'I have been wet dreaming about receiving a BAFTA my whole life'

With Peter Capaldi stepping down at Christmas, an insider told The Sunday People last week: 'Beeb bosses love Phoebe. They thought she did an amazing job with Fleabag and is certainly one of the rising stars in TV and film.'

'They see her as the perfect fit as a Time Lord and the first female Doctor Who.'

But Phoebe denied the rumours at the awards ceremony on Sunday, telling Metro.co.uk: I am not going to be the first female Doctor.

Playing down rumours: After she accepted her award, Phoebe denied rumours that she will become the first ever female Doctor Who, taking over from Peter Capaldi

No Doctor Who for Phoebe: She told Metro.co.uk, I am not going to be the first female Doctor, despite speculation she would be handed the keys to the Tardis

Cuba Gooding Jr presented Phoebe's award and mocked the Oscars mix-up when he jokingly announced Moonlight had won her award.

Walking to the podium, he said: 'I got my glasses on cos I'm blind.'

Cuba pretended to have difficulty reading the auto cue and quipped: 'I cant do a transvestite joke Im a BAFTA winner, keep going.'

'That's a bad joke': Cuba Gooding Jr presented Phoebe's award and mocked the Oscars mix-up when he jokingly announced Moonlight had won her award

He opened the envelope and announced: 'And the BAFTA award goes to Moonlight! No, thats a bad joke, I'm sorry.

'They're like "that's the last time that Negro will come to present an award."'

Fleabag received critical acclaim when it was broadcast in August 2016 and a second series will air next year.

Awards show gaffe: He opened the envelope and announced: 'And the BAFTA award goes to Moonlight! No, thats a bad joke, I'm sorry'
Former Big Brother winner and legally blind Reggie Sorensen is losing her sight, but her biggest fear is not being able to save her son from a debilitating disease.

The 43-year-old's son Lucas suffers from Cystic Fibrosis, and with her degenerative eye disease rapidly sending her completely blind, she's turned her focus to curing her son before her own struggle becomes too restrictive.

'I'm afraid my little boy will die before a cure is found for cystic fibrosis,' the single mother-of-two told Woman's Day.

Struggle! Legally blind Former Big Brother winner Reggie Sorensen has revealed she's desperate to find a cure for her son's cystic fibrosis before she loses eyesight entirely

The 2003 Big Brother winner opened up about pushing her own daunting vision impairment aside to focus on Lucas, 7, while she still can.

She revealed her primary school-aged son had recently asked her if she'd rather have her vision back, or for him to get better.

'I've already seen everything, but you my lovely, you need to know and feel what it's like to be healthy,' she said 'so of course I'd want you better!'

Struggling financially, and unable to work many shifts at her call centre job, life for the little battler, and his big sister Mia, 10, isn't easy.

Afraid: 'I'm afraid my little boy will die before a cure is found for cystic fibrosis,' the single mother-of-two said recently (pictured here on Big Brother 2003)

'He's [Lucas] been rushed to hospital every two weeks this year with major complications after he was fitted with a feeding tube...he's always nauseous but her never complains,' Reggie said.

It's complications like this, that have the reality star tragically counting down the days until her dwindling vision strips her of the ability to see her adorable kids.

'I wake up every day and pray this isn't the last day I'll actually be able to see my kids...Imagine the fear, closing your eyes to darkness then waking up wondering if it will be dark forever.'

Her condition isn't what scares the struggling mother the most, rather, it's the very likely possibility that she won't be able to see her children when they grow older that weighs heavy on her mind.

Tough questions: Fighting back tears, the 43-year-old revealed her son recently asked her if she'd rather be able to see again, or for him to get better

Seen it all: 'I've already seen everything, but you my lovely, you need to know and feel what it's like to be healthy,' she said 'so of course I'd want you better!'

Reality: 'He's [Lucas] been rushed to hospital every two weeks this year with major complications after he was fitted with a feeding tube,' the reality star revealed

At the grocery store she can't see above or below eye-level and Reggie even says picking up a pencil from across the room is comparable to tripping over 20-elephants along the way.

But that's nothing compared to the fear that when daughter Mia learns to drive - as her mother legally cannot - or graduates high school, or gets married, the important moments may only be able to exist as a made-up vision in Reggie's mind.

Fear: 'I wake up every day and pray this isn't the last day I'll actually be able to see my kids,' she said of her biggest fear, pushing aside her own deteriorating vision

And that's nothing on the heartbreaking dread that Lucas may die before a cure is found, a thought that haunts her every day.

Reggie spoke to the publication as part of cystic fibrosis awareness month, with more information available about the '65 roses' challenge available on the foundation's website.

Her wish Financially struggling Reggie spoke out to raise awareness as part of cystic fibrosis month, desperately wishing for a cure for the illness
Lauren Brant and Barry Hall welcomed their little bundle of joy Miller Hall into the world just one week ago.

And on Monday the former Hi-5 star flaunted her amazing postpartum physique in a skimpy black bikini clutching her newborn son with a huge grin across her face.

Clearly proud of her svelte form, Lauren wrote on the image shared through Instagram stories 'Exactly 1 WEEK POST' alongside three baby emojis.

How does she do it? On Monday the former Hi-5 star flaunted her amazing postpartum physique in a skimpy black bikini clutching her newborn son with a huge grin across her face

Happy news: Lauren Brant and Barry Hall have welcomed a baby boy into the world last week

Just last week Lauren announced the birth of her son via Instagram.

'Our world is now perfect! Welcome to the world our little man Miller Hall,' Lauren wrote alongside her sweet post about Miller's arrival.

The black and white photo showed Barry and Lauren holding hands with their young child, Lauren accessorising with a $250 Tiffany & Co. bracelet.

Woman's Day reported that the brunette gave birth to the couple's child last Sunday evening at a Gold Coast hospital.

Announcement: The Hi-5 star announced the exciting news on her Instagram page on Tuesday afternoon, posting a picture of the couple holding the tiny bub's hand

Baby Miller arrived early, with the former children's entertainer expected to give birth the following week.

Lauren and Barry revealed they were expecting a child last December, enjoying a whirlwind romance after reconnecting in mid-2016.

The couple first met while appearing on I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! in 2015.

Early bird: Baby Miller arrived early, with the former children's entertainment expected to give birth in a week

Lauren was last seen out and about with beau Barry in late April, with the pair photographed at Swedish furniture retailer Ikea picking up some last minute nursery supplies.

Just last month Barry told Daily Mail Australia he and Lauren couldn't wait to welcome their bundle of joy, saying: 'We just want it to come out now!'

Lauren recently took to Instagram to reveal some rather intimate details about her recent pregnancy struggles.

Whirlwind: The couple revealed they were expecting a child last December, enjoying a whirlwind romance after reconnecting in mid-2016

'I've had these pains in my back and my stomach and my groin': Lauren recently took to Instagram to reveal her brand new look as well as to reveal intimate details about her recent pregnancy struggles

Taking to her Instagram story last month, she uploaded before and after snaps of her newly-cropped haircut while telling fans: 'I feel like a bit of a stranger on here because I haven't posted anything in a while.'

'And that's because I've been struggling a bit with my pregnancy,' she confessed.

'I've had these pains in my back and my stomach and my groin so I've been trying to figure out what's going on.'

Last trimester struggles: Lauren said she had sought advice from doctors and massage therapists but to no avail

Lauren said she had sought advice from doctors and massage therapists but to no avail, with only after listening to her body better has she been able to manage the discomfort.

Lauren and Barry's bundle of joy comes following controversy surrounding the TV star's alleged affair with The Footy Show's Beau Ryan in 2015.

In August 2015, Lauren's then-fiance Warren Riley told Woman's Day Lauren had slept with Beau twice while the two were performing in a Sydney production of Aladdin And His Wondrous Lamp in July.

Impatient: Just last month Barry told Daily Mail Australia he and Lauren couldn't wait to welcome their bundle of joy, saying: 'We just want it to come out now!'

While neither addressed the accusations publicly, Beau later issued a public statement on The Footy Show to his wife Kara and family, saying he wanted to 'apologise to all of the people who have been hurt recently'.

Meanwhile, Barry split from his wife of three-and-a-half-years Sophie Raadschelder in early 2015.

Before Sophie, Barry dated long term partner Kylie for 11 years until 2008.

The couple split and Kylie married Shannan in 2010.

In February, Beau and wife Kara revealed they were expecting their second child together.
They were the Hollywood 'it' couple who called it a day after 11 years of marriage.

And there could be an awkward 'reunion' on the cards for Tom Cruise, 54, and Nicole Kidman, 49, with the estranged pair expected to both be in Australia at the same time for promotional and filming commitments this month.

Tom is currently Down Under promoting his soon-to-be-released blockbuster The Mummy, while Nicole is due to start work on the DC Comics movie Aquaman, which is currently shooting on the Gold Coast.

Awkward: There could be a 'reunion' on the cards for Tom Cruise, 54, and Nicole Kidman, 49, with the estranged pair expected to both be in Australia for promotional and filming commitments this month.

New Idea reported that the Nicole and Tom's Australian visits are 'causing a whirlwind of controversy for their PR Departments.

Quoting an unnamed source, the publication claimed that both stars' 'people' are working furiously behind the scenes to ensure an awkward reunion won't happen.

'There's still a lot of bad blood between Tom and Nicole, and no-one wants them crossing paths at all,' the source said.

Keep them separated: New Idea reported that the Nicole and Tom's Australian visits are 'causing a whirlwind of controversy for their PR Departments

'Their teams are in negotiations to make sure there are no messy run-ins.'

It was also reported that this will be the first time the pair have been in Australia at the same time since their divorce.

Tom, previously married to actress Mimi Rogers, met Nicole on the set of the 1990 film Days Of Thunder and were married on Christmas Eve that year.

Whirlwind: Tom, previously married to actress Mimi Rogers, met Nicole on the set of the 1990 film Days Of Thunder and were married on Christmas Eve that year

The pair adopted two children, Isabella and Connor Anthony before Tom filed for divorce in 2001.

Opening up to The Evening Standard in 2015, Nicole, who married Australian-bred country rocker Kieth Urban in 2006, admitted that she harboured no regrets over the 11-year union.

I was a baby when I married Tom, but I dont regret any of it,' she said.
For most busy professionals, their smartphone is their entire life.

So activewear queen Pip Edwards' heart was understandably upset when her iPhone shattered right before her eyes while seated in the front row of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week on Sunday.

Documented by pal Lindy Klim on Instagram, Pip could at least breathe a sigh of relief knowing that her while exorbitant $1,250 Louis Vuitton case didn't protect the phone, it came out unscathed.

Broken dreams club: Pip Edward's heart broke as her phone shattered at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week on Sunday, with unsympathetic pal Lindy Klim documenting the drama

But retailing for almost exactly the same price as the Iphone 7 plus it failed to save, it was still a tough day at the office for the fashionista.

The Ex-wife of Olympian Michael didn't seem to be phased by her friends mishap however, sharing a close-up video of the devices devastating state of disrepair.

Seconds later, Lindy panned the video up, and the real face of tragedy was captured in detail, with Pip's face bearing a mix of sadness, and deep thought.

Relief! Pip could at least breathe a sigh of relief knowing that her while exorbitant $1,250 Louis Vuitton case didn't protect the phone, it came out unscathed

Millions of things could have been running through the General Pants Design Director's mind, but smart money suggests she was likely desperately trying to remember her password to rescue precious information on the new device.

Admirably pushing aside the heartbreaking prospect of having to re-play all 3,175 levels of Candy Crush Saga, Pip burst into laughter over her friend's persistence.

'How's the phone case?' Lindy asked, with her friend quickly spinning around the $1,250 Louis Vuitton Eye-Trunk case in reverse monogram canvas.

Tough day! The Ex-wife of Olympian Michael didn't seem to be phased by her friends mishap however, sharing a close-up video of the devices devastating state of disrepair

Tragedy! Seconds later, Lindy panned the video up, and the real face of tragedy was captured in detail, with Pip's face bearing a mix of sadness, and deep thought

Laugh it off! Admirably pushing aside the heartbreaking prospect of having to re-play all 3,175 levels of Candy Crush Saga, Pip burst into laughter over her friend's persistence

All good! 'How's the phone case?' Lindy asked, with her friend quickly spinning around the $1,250 Louis Vuitton Eye-Trunk case in reverse monogram canvas, revealing it was unscathed

Shockingly, the premium product seemed more content with protecting itself than the phone, with footage showing there wasn't a single scratch on the bulky leather casing.

Later, the P.E. Nation founder tried her very best to put on a brave face in a group shot with Lindy, wearing one of her activewear brands hoodies over the top of her sparkly black dress.

Sadly, her expression couldn't hide the fact that she may now be facing the infuriating prospect of having duplicate contact cards once her new phone syncs from the cloud.

Brave face! Later, the P.E. Nation founder tried her very best to put on a brave face in a group shot with Lindy

On the bright side, she was clearly having a better day in the fashion department than Lindy, who had a rare fashion faux pas in a bizarre beige dress.

It appears Pip was quick to act following Sunday's devastating demise of a close virtual friend, sharing an mirror selfie on Instagram Monday.

Her trusty Louis Vuitton case was clearly snapped picking up from where it had left off, clinging onto her new phone, given one more chance to do the job it was made for.

How much? Pip's Iphone 7plus case currently retails for a whopping $1,250 on Louis Vuitton's website
He played Ashley Thomas who died in a recent heartbreaking scene after his character suffered from dementia.

John Middleton stepped up to accept the award after Emmerdale scooped the Best Soap award for the TV BAFTAs at The Royal Festival Hall, in London on Sunday.

Backstage, the actor, 63, discussed how not enough is done to raise awareness about the heart-wrenching disease which affects thousands of people.

Scroll down for video

'It is woeful politicians aren't addressing dementia enough': John Middleton called for action as he collects Best Soap award for Emmerdale at The Royal Festival Hall, in London on Sunday

John explained not a day goes by where he isn't approached by fans of the show who thank him for his portrayal of the illness.

Speaking at the ceremony, he said: 'It's extraordinary how not a day goes by that I don't get stopped in the street by somebody saying "thank you very much for doing this story".

'Because it has affected them because of a relative who has had the disease.'

Pictured: He played Ashley Thomas who died in a recent heartbreaking scene after his character suffered from dementia

The soap star highlighted he thought it was 'woeful' politicians have ignored the brain disease.

He hailed David Cameron's 300 million pledge to researching dementia, claiming it had not received enough attention.

The actor added: 'That's hardly surprising because the Alzheimer's Society, who have been immensely helpful, told us currently there are 850,000 people diagnosed with this disease in the UK alone, and that figure is likely to rise to about two million.

Winner: The actor, 62, stepped up to accept the award after Emmerdale scooped the Best Soap award for the TV BAFTAs

'It is the biggest health problem that we have in the western world and I don't think we are addressing it enough.

'I know we are not supposed to say anything politically, but David Cameron did commit 300 million to research for dementia and that has never been mentioned by any of the political parties in the current election campaign, and I think that's woeful.

'We are living in a democracy and as such we are all politicians, and we've all got to do our best to help people with this condition and ultimately combat it and if we've raised awareness around that then I am very very proud of what we have done.'
Ashley Graham, Terrence 'J' Jenkins, and Julianne Hough teamed up to co-host Sunday night's Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas.

The beauty competition - which aired live on Fox - crowned Italian-born 25-year-old Kara McCullough representing the District of Columbia.

29-year-old Ashley showcased her size 14, 5ft9in curvaceous figure in a plunging emerald gown and gold stilettos selected by her stylist Oscar Montes de Oca.

Scroll down for video

It takes three: Ashley Graham, Terrence 'J' Jenkins, and Julianne Hough teamed up to co-host Sunday night's Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas

Congrats! The beauty competition - which aired live on Fox - crowned Italian-born 25-year-old Kara McCullough representing the District of Columbia.

It was the first time the Nebraska-born IMG Model - who's a prominent body activist - hosted the popular pageant.

President Donald Trump owned Miss USA from 1996-2015 where five former contestants told Buzzfeed News he'd make inappropriate visits to the dressing room.

Graham first showed a little leg in a single-strapped b&w belted dress during the pre-show festivities.

Evergreen: 29-year-old Ashley showcased her size 14, 5ft9in curvaceous figure in a plunging emerald gown and gold stilettos selected by her stylist Oscar Montes de Oca

Don't call her 'plus sized': It was the first time the Nebraska-born IMG Model - who's a prominent body activist - hosted the popular pageant

Controversy: President Donald Trump owned Miss USA from 1996-2015 where five former contestants told Buzzfeed News he'd make inappropriate visits to the dressing room

Presenting: Graham first showed a little leg in a single-strapped b&w belted dress during the pre-show festivities

She's the cutest and I love her @kinglimaa A post shared by A S H L E Y G R A H A M (@theashleygraham) on May 12, 2017 at 12:33pm PDT

The groundbreaking 2016 SI cover girl will next sign copies of her 224-page tome A New Model this Monday at the Barnes & Noble inside The Grove in Los Angeles.

Ashley confirmed to People on Wednesday that she'll return as judge on cycle 24 of America's Next Top Model on VH1 alongside original host Tyra Banks.

The Toothbrush video vixen has also been married to LA-based cinematographer Justin Ervin for seven years after meeting in church back in 2009.

Hit shelves on Tuesday! The groundbreaking 2016 SI cover girl will next sign copies of her 224-page tome A New Model this Monday at the Barnes & Noble in Los Angeles (pictured Thursday)

'I'm back!' Ashley confirmed to People on Wednesday that she'll return as judge on cycle 24 of America's Next Top Model on VH1 alongside original host Tyra Banks (M)

'We are going to totally have kids!' The Toothbrush video vixen has also been married to LA-based cinematographer Justin Ervin for seven years after meeting in church back in 2009

Meanwhile, 28-year-old Julianne dazzled the Mandalay Bay red carpet in a white single-strapped Monique Lhuillier jumpsuit featuring a chiffon train.

The Emmy-winning choreographer had full make-up applied by Spencer Barnes and sported a braided hairdo by Jill Buck.

The Utah-born Mormon gushed on Instagram: 'I'm so excited to be executive producing and hosting @MissUSA again with @IamTerrenceJ!'

Blonde ambition: Meanwhile, 28-year-old Julianne dazzled the Mandalay Bay red carpet in a white single-strapped Monique Lhuillier jumpsuit featuring a chiffon train

Glam: The Emmy-winning choreographer had full make-up applied by Spencer Barnes and sported a braided hairdo by Jill Buck

The Utah-born Mormon gushed: 'I'm so excited to be executive producing and hosting @MissUSA again with @IamTerrenceJ!'

Fab! Hough - who relies on stylist Anita Patrickson - later changed into a maroon sequinned Thai Nguyen Atelier gown, Schutz heels, and Neil Lane jewelry

Hough - who relies on stylist Anita Patrickson - later changed into a maroon sequinned Thai Nguyen Atelier gown, Schutz heels, and Neil Lane jewelry.

The Grease: Live starlet continues judging the 24th season of Dancing with the Stars, which airs Mondays on ABC.

However, it's unclear when Julianne will finally walk down the aisle with Toronto Maple Leafs centre Brooks Laich, who popped the question way back in August 2015.

Semifinals! The Grease: Live starlet continues judging the 24th season of Dancing with the Stars, which airs Mondays on ABC
News / National

by Hansard

HON. MISIHAIRABWI-MUSHONGA:

HON. MLISWA:

THE TEMPORARAY SPEAKER (MS. DZIVA):

HON. MISIHAIRABWI-MUSHONGA:

MaZezuru ambotongawo, tavekuda kuti maKaranga ambotonga

THE TEMPORARY SPEAKER:

HON. MISIHAIRABWI-MUSHONGA:

Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga, the outspoken Matebeleland South proportional representation MP, has warned of a bloodbath in Zimbabwe if the Mugabe led government continues to ignore the concerns of survivors of Gukurahundi and other past atrocities.She further warned the fresh conflict will also be fuelled by alleged deprivation of national assets on some tribes in the country by the Zanu PF led government.The MDC legislator was debating the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission Bill in parliament this past week.She insisted the draft law contained none of the major concerns raised by "angry" citizens who attended the outreach process by MPs who were gathering citizens' input into the envisaged law.Below is Misihairabwi-Mushonga's contribution to the debate.Thank you very much Madam Speaker. Let me start by saying, I am hoping that as we get into this debate we can be as frank and perhaps as brutally frank as we can. If we do not, we will not be able to get to the bottom of what this is all about.I want to join my colleagues and chairperson in saying the general view that we got was not that people did not want the Bill; the general thing that we got was that people wanted the Bill but they wanted a Bill that made sense and this particular Bill was not making sense both in the way it was drafted and the manner in which the contents and the issues therein where expressed.Before I get into why I am saying so Madam Speaker, let me just say to you that the anger that we faced when we went for this public hearing is amazing. It is unfortunate that we are unable to bring the audio tapes or the electronic tapsOn a point of order! Madam Speaker, this debate is very serious, I saw Members of Parliament from the other side, especially women, going out, what for, I do not know. The Masvingo election is done. So, what are they going to talk about - I do not know [Laughter.]-I think there is no point of order.Madam Speaker, I was speaking to the anger that we found and to some extent, just this last comment by the colleague is relevant because I think if the people that we met actually had a way of sitting and watching the way we are debating this, they would be very disappointed. For many of them, it speaks of their lived realities, their day to day lived realities. It is unfortunate that as a nation we have gotten to a point where issues of conflict, healing, issues that should be bringing us together, we do not care much about them, we are so used to just living life as life without necessarily understanding where people are coming from.Madam Speaker, for me the debate and the public hearing showed me a divided nation, an extremely dived nation - divided in a number of ways. Firstly, divided in the appreciation and understanding of the issues that happened in the pre-colonial era, divided in the issues about what happened in the post colonial era and divided around the issues that happened just after independence and what is currently happening today. I think that is the unfortunate part about this particular Bill, whoever is drafting the Bill has just thought it is mechanical, business as usual without dealing with what exactly we want to address and you are not finding what exactly we want to address. Are we trying to do a truth and reconciliation commission, we are trying to just create a certain institution that is going to be dealing with issues generally about healing. So unlike my other colleagues, I actually think the disappointment is in that after the first time where we took this particular Bill for people to speak, those issues have not been brought in because the basic thing that people said is that do not give us something that is not talking about truth. Our concern is somebody who comes back and said this is the truth about what happened during Gukurahundi, this is the truth about what happened during the liberation struggle.The unfortunate thing that has happened with this Bill is that the moment people hear about National Peace and Reconciliation, the first thing that comes to their mind is Gukurahundi. Unfortunately it stops you from thinking. If you go step by step, you should be saying to yourself why is it today we are still talking about war veterans not getting anything and not being supported. It is because we never dealt with the issue around reconciliation, we would have said, what is it that we are going to do about those that participated in the struggle and the pains that they experienced during the liberation struggle - nothing like that happened, so we have not debated that, we have not debated what happened immediately after independence. I am prepared Madam Speaker because these are some of the very uncomfortable conversation that we started facing. I remember and I hope some of my colleagues who were at the hearing also remember this, a very young woman standing up in Bulawayo, saying this war between amaShona lamaNdebele can only be described in this manner yikulwa kukaSatan loJehovah  it can never finish. This is a young person who was not there during the Gukurahundi era but the pain is about what she is dealing with in terms of the marginalisation that she lives with on a daily basis.So, until you address the problems and issues that people are facing, you will not deal with this. To play around and pretend that you have a national peace and reconciliation when you are not dealing with the issues of transitional justice which are issues of who has gotten land, jobs and resources in this country, it is why you could clearly separate the issues that were being raised in Matabeleland and Mashonaland regions.For example, I remember when we went to Mashonaland West and somebody in the group was standing up and saying, Stop talking about Gukurahundi, after all the maNdebele people took inkomo zethu and our wives.' At a very basic level, it is a very upsetting statement for some of us but it is a real statement. I am saying if that is the reason why the people of Matabeleland today continue to suffer marginalisation because there were cattle and women that were taken  then let us talk about it. And if there is supposed to be reparation of the cattle coming back to Mashonaland, let those cattle come back then we can go back to the issues that we are talking about. I do not know what we are going to do with the women that were supposedly taken. We cannot have them and take them back.In reality, we cannot pretend that certain things are being said and we ignore them. If it is a general feeling that somebody thinks it is justified to continue to oppress and subject a particular tribe on the basis that you believe that there were cattle and women that were taken away  then let us deal with it. Unfortunately, this Bill does not deal with that. So, it is a useless Bill as far as we are concerned because that Bill is supposed to be talking about why when you go into Matabeleland you necessarily find people who are angry? They are angry because of certain things that are being done systematically.Madam Speaker, if you look at Section 18 of our Constitution, as we drafted that Constitution, we put in a provision around equality of regions because there was an understanding and appreciation that the issue around inequality was important. Inequality comes from the fact that historically, people believe and live through the realities that they are not being treated fairly. If you go to an interpretation stage and do not find a definition of why there is a need for reconciliation, then we are talking nonsense.I have said in this House, and I am glad the Hon. Vice President Mnangagwa is here - when I raised the issue around the reburials of people who were killed during the Gukurahundi era, the Vice President, at that stage said to the House, we will facilitate for those that want to do the burials. As I speak to you right now, if anybody is trying to have a memorial service, not a reburial  to basically just get people in a community to talk about what happened and how they think, they are arrested and stopped from having those conversations taking place yet those people watch day in and day out here in Mashonaland, people sitting down and saying we are doing reburials. How do you think those people feel?For me, these are the issues that we are supposed to deal with. If we pretend that there are no ethnic issues, we are joking and not being serious. When we are here, let us not talk about Matabeleland and Mashonaland  let us talk about here in Mashonaland. The Zezuru and Karanga divide  completely there and we live with it in this very House. We have those major differences about whether you are Karanga or Zezuru and who is in control of what resources at this particular point in time and what it means. Let us not pretend that those are not realities that we are talking about. If we do not include the issues around ethnic conversations and how we are going to deal with it, day in and day out, we are going to be dealing with them. We are going to be saying to ourselves, .' That is the debate that is there and if we continue to pretend that the debate is not there, we are lying to each other.I think it is important that in terms of a way forward, we do not play around with this if we really intend to do a proper truth and reconciliation process. Let us go back and look at what happened in Rwanda, like Hon. Gonese was saying. They said to themselves, We are going to do a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and it will mean that truth is about dealing with the things that we are unhappy and uncomfortable about. We will have to deal with issues of will there be arrests or amnesty? We cannot have situations were amnesty is given; part of the problems that we have right now is, if we go to post 2000, there are people who murdered people during the general elections, arrested, convicted yet they were given an amnesty. Every other day, when you declare some of them heroes, people are upset. They are hurt because they know that these people have a particular history that they have had before.Trust me, people may get away with it now in the current context but the generations that are going to be coming tomorrow and in the future  this thing will come back.  [HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear.]- The children of those who were murdered will also come back to murder because you are not going to be in power in perpetuity. There will be a time that you will be out of power and when you are out of power, that person who comes in and is in control is going to come back and deal with you.  [HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear.]- We need to be able to understand and appreciate that particular aspect.Madam Speaker, as a Committee, which is one of the things that was missing in our report, had an opportunity to visit South Africa and Kenya and do an analysis around what happened. In both areas, we found that whilst South Africa had done a good job around truth and reconciliation, they had not dealt with some of the fundamental issues around transitional justice which is why in South Africa today they are beginning to have serious divisions and contradictions around policy issues, issues of land and the redistribution of land and resources  -[HON. MEMBERS: Inaudible interjections. ]-Order, order Hon. Members, may Hon. Misihairabwi-Mushonga be heard in silence. I think those who wish to engage in private conversations can do so outside the House.I am just giving you an example of South Africa that whilst South Africa dealt with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one of the lessons that we learnt from there is that it was too limited because it just dealt with the things that had happened during the apartheid era. It did not deal with the fundamental issues around transitional justice, resource allocation - who is getting what and if something does not happen well, there is going to be a disaster in South Africa. I think we should learn from that particular aspect and not allow things to continue to fester and hope that they will go away. They will not go away Madam Speaker, as at one stage those things will come back to bite us.We went to Kenya, for example, Kenya did the same. They had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) but they failed to organise it in a way that they would then say we have done a TRC but how are we going to implement the issues that are coming out of the TRC and up till now, they are grappling with those issues. So in Kenya, things may seem to be working well but the issues around ethnic problems are still there. The fortunate thing about some of these countries is an acknowledgement that they have a problem. The sad thing about Zimbabwe is the denialism that we have, a pretence that we have no problems. So you will have somebody sitting here and saying, but in our country we have not had conflict; in our country we do not have ethnic problems yet we know that if we are organising our factions, we are doing so on the basis of ethnicity. Why are we pretending that it is not a problem that we are having? Let us deal with it and deal with it once and for all.I gave an example, which is on my favourite subject, around the issues of war veterans and gender. Madam Speaker, when I went back to look at, for example, those who were at the Lancaster House Constitution, I found out that there was a woman called Kadungure. She was the only woman who was there and it was noted. I do not know whether that woman is there right now and I do not know whether she died. I do not know what her circumstances were but I am giving that example in that it is clear because we never had a conversation about what happened during the liberation struggle that perhaps those that really participated, worked and suffered are the ones that are not being acknowledged today.It is because we never really did a truth and reconciliation process. I am saying what we noticed during the hearings is that we have a bigger problem than what we are talking about here. We have an angry society and in fact, most of us were being abused. They said, you are wasting money and they were right - you came here last year and you said to us let us talk about this Bill; now you are coming back again with this Bill and for us it has not changed anything fundamentally in terms of what we have done.So, if we do not want to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, let us just come back here and be honest that we do not want to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We will have it when every one of us who are leaders today and who are governing have gone and we forget about it. Let us not pretend that we want to have a National Peace and Reconciliation Commission.In conclusion Madam Speaker, let me give you this warning. We are going to have a huge uprising in this country and that uprising is going to come from the generality of the people who are not beneficiaries of the assets that people are using every other day. We will have people in the streets burning homes and burning everything else because the language of speaking will not have worked. We are going to have an uprising in the area around issues of ethnicity. We will pretend to talk about it right now but I can tell you as somebody who comes from that region that one day you will have a situation where people will stand up and they will say anyone who is not coming from here, we will hack to death and we will beat up.You will not have an excuse for it because they keep giving you warnings and warnings and you are refusing to deal with issues that they are raising. I thank you Madam Speaker.
She launched an infamous Twitter rant against a hapless restaurant earlier this year.

But Cat Deeley seemed a little more chuffed after she went for lunch with husband Patrick Kielty and their son Milo as they celebrated American Mother's Day in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The SMTV Live legend seemed full of joy as she cooed over her little boy, who was being held by her manly partner.

Yummy mummy: Cat Deeley went for a Mother's Day meal with her husband and toddler son in LA on Sunday

The 40-year-old English presenter was looking great for her age in a flattering striped maxi dress, gladiator sandals and fancy fedora hat.

Her 46-year-old man, who recently joked he 'broke the rule of don't get your money where you get your honey' when he began dating his now-wife, meanwhile had opted for a pullover, jeans and casual shoes.

Back in March Cat warned her fans to stay away from Italian restaurant Tom George after her 'disgusting' experience in a slew of damning tweets.

The Brummie beauty wrote: 'The worst featuring! Worst food! As for the manager?????? Moron!!!!!'

Before adding: 'The most disgusting restaurant, terribly run, by a manager  who can only be described as an amateur. Avoid at all costs. #tomgeorge.'

Putting a smile on her face: Self-styled funnyman Patrick Kielty seemed to have done it again

Hard to please: Cat caused a stir when she warned fans on Twitter to stay away from an Italian eatery after her 'disgusting' experience

The LA restaurant branded 'terrible' hit back by claiming the star simply 'did not like the food' - and insisting that her response was 'inappropriate'.

On its Facebook page, the restaurant claimed it tried to 'ease her pain' by giving her free food, and said even halving her bill did not work.

The expat and her ruggedly handsome other half expanded their family to three after she gave birth to their first child in January 2016.

Months after the birth the smitten So You Think You Can Dance star said: 'I'm besotted with the baby and really enjoying motherhood.

Hatagirl: The trendy So You Think You Can Dance favourite wore a fancy fedora

And she claimed breast is best when it comes to getting back in pre-baby shape.

Cat said: 'People keep asking me if I've been hitting the gym, but I haven't I think breastfeeding is key and it's worked well for me. Add to that running around after a new baby and you don't need to work out.'

Just before their happy news emerged, her self-styled funnyman husband displayed his usual level of comedic acumen.

The jolly Northern Irishman said: 'I hope any child we might have has Cat's looks and my accent. With our two strong accents, we basically needed subtitles or a UN translator.'

And off she goes: No doubt her other half had plenty of tricks up his sleeve to keep her happy
They've spent weeks apart in a bid to rescue their relationship on Seven Year Switch.

But according to Felicity, her relationship with fiance Michael is officially 'over'.

Felicity confronted Michael's experimental partner Kaitlyn on Monday's show, taking off her engagement ring and telling Kaitlyn to give it back to Michael.

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'You pretty much broke up a family!' Seven Year Switch's Felicity (pictured) confronted Kaitlyn over sharing a bed with her fiance Michael

'You pretty much broke up a family,' Felicity said, after being outraged that Kaitlyn and Michael had shared a bed.

Kaitlyn told Felicity that it was not fair to blame just her for the indiscretion.

'It was not just me,' Kaitlyn wept.

Ouch: Felicity took off her engagement ring and told Kaitlyn to hand it back to Michael

The evidence: Kaitlyn and Micahel were pictured sharing a bed, prompting Felicity's fury

'I'm not saying you, I'm saying you guys,' Felicity clarified.

Felicity and Michael share two young children and have been together for five years.

'He's disappointed me again, which I'm so used to Michael doing that,' she said.

'So where I'm at today, after seeing those photos, that's pretty much the end point for me.'

It's over? Felicity and Michael share two young children and have been together for five years

She continued: 'How can I be with someone who has slept in the same bed as another girl? It's f**king disgusting.

'It is over, to the point that you can actually, give that back to Michael,' she said, before tearing off her diamond ring.

'That's Michael putting sleep before his relationship. And him putting a ring on his finger before he's put a ring on his finger with me,' she added, referencing Michael's decision to wear a fake 'wedding ring' with Kaitlyn.

Kaitlyn previously explained that she and Michael only slept in the same bed because he couldn't sleep on the lounge.

Felicity responded that he was being selfish by putting his needs above their relationship.

Earlier in the series, Felicity said she didn't want Michael to sleep in the same bed as his 'partner,' and she wouldn't be doing so either.

Fuming: Felicity explained that Mark (right) has 'struggled' during the experiment and 'lost his s**t' after seeing the photos of Kaitlyn and Michael in bed togther

Felicity was also annoyed that Michael had lost his temper with Kaitlyn, saying he has 'anger issues'.

She also claimed Mark has 'struggled' during the experiment and 'lost his s**t' after seeing the photos of Kaitlyn and Michael in bed.

'He's at a point where he thinks that... I think you could of just wrecked your relationship,' Felicity told Kaitlyn.

Kaitlyn took off the ring she wore on her wedding finger while with Michael, telling his fiancee: 'I'm really sorry.'

Chaing her ways? Kaitlyn said she will be sleeping in the lounge for now on because she doesn't want to 'hurt' boyfriend Mark

Kaitlyn said they saw sleeping in the same bed as better for their health, but she will be sleeping in the lounge for now on because she doesn't want to 'hurt' Mark.

Felicity mentioned how Mark is saying how he thinks Kaitlyn needs to change before taking the next step in their relationship.

Kaitlyn exploded, saying: 'I came in this experiment for him to accept me!'

At the start of the episode, the couples saw photos of their partner's behaviour during the experiment.

Sarge isn't happy! At the start of the episode, the couples saw photos of their partner's behaviour during the experiment

Sarge couldn't believe how many bikinis his girlfriend Stacey Louise was wearing while spending time with Johnny, saying he's only ever seen her in two bikinis during their relationship.

Stacey Louise also appeared to get jealous of the way Sarge appeared to be enjoying his time with Tracey.

When Mark and Felicity saw the pictures of Kaitlyn and Michael sharing the same bed, Mark stormed off in jealous rage.

'It shows what kind of girl she is,' Felicity said about Kaitlyn, prompting the walk-off.

Getting along well? Sarge couldn't believe how many bikinis his girlfriend Stacey Louise was wearing while spending time with Johnny

Mark was also annoyed that Felicity didn't have the same shocked reaction to the photos as him.

Meanwhile Kaitlyn confessed she was feeling worried about Mark's reaction to the 'R-rated photos.'

She also expressed concern about what Mark would be doing with Felicity, admitting she was worried he would 'cheat'.
She's the former reality star who never fails to make a stylish entrance at red carpet events.

And Anna Heinrich, 30, was on her sartorial A-game this Monday as she attended Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sydney in a chic navy pants-suit by Australian designer Bianca Spender.

The blonde socialite accessorised her look with a blue handbag, Stuart Weitzman stiletto heels and a pair of statement hoop earrings by Pierre Winter.

Suits her! Anna Heinrich, 30, was on her sartorial A-game this Monday as she attended Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sydney in a chic navy pants-suit by Australian designer Bianca Spender

Her glossy mane was parted in the centre and fell neatly behind her shoulders, while her makeup look was kept minimal with an elegant winged eyeliner and subtle blush.

Despite not being joined by her Bachelor star boyfriend Tim Robards, Anna appeared to be in good spirits as she posed up a storm among her fellow fashion lovers.

Outside the venue, Anna was spotted in the midst of a live interview with E! host Ksenija Lukich.

Primped: Her glossy mane was parted in the centre and fell neatly behind her shoulders, while her makeup look was kept minimal with an elegant winged eyeliner and subtle blush

Designer lover: The blonde socialite accessorised her look with a blue handbag, Stuart Weitzman stiletto heels and a pair of statement hoop earrings by Pierre Winter

Fashion chat: Outside the venue, Anna was spotted in the midst of a live interview with E! host Ksenija Lukich

Making sure to take a style risk, Ksenja donned an unusual striped shirt-dress which featured lace-up detailing at the front.

She added height to her frame with a pair of pointy-toed black pumps, while accessorising her look with a pair of sunglasses which hung from her collar.

Anna appeared to be having a ball chatting to the model-turned-presenter, and was spotted gesturing with elation.

Quirky: Making sure to take a style risk, Ksenja donned an unusual striped shirt-dress which featured lace-up detailing at the front

It comes days after Anna's beau Tim hinted to TV Week at the Logie Awards that the couple could be getting married soon.

'Let's just say 2017 is going to be a good year,' he said.

Anna replied: 'That's the first I've heard of it! But obviously it would be great'
Ariel Winter took to Instagram on Sunday to wish a happy Mother's Day to her sister Shanelle Gray.

'I was lucky enough to have an unbelievable sister who raised me to be the woman I am today,' the 19-year-old actress told more than 3.2 million Instagram followers.

The 5ft1 actress said she 'wouldn't be anywhere without her [sister's] love and guidance,' calling her 38-year-old sibling 'my rock and my best friend in the entire world.'

Lots of love: Ariel Winter, 19, took to Instagram on Sunday and wished her sister Shanelle Gray, 38, a happy Mother's Day, calling her 'my rock and my best friend in the entire world'

Winter, who plays Alex Dunphy on ABC's Modern Family, had an infamous falling-out with her mother Chrisoula Workman that wound up in a years-long guardianship battle in the court system between Gray and Workman, amid allegations of abuse toward the latter.

After a Los Angeles court in 2014 granted guardianship to Gray, who had taken her younger sister in two years earlier.

No sibling rivalry here: Winter (L) kissing Gray at an event in San Diego event 2014

Bonded: Gray (L) was involved in a yearslong guardianship legal battle with their mother Chrisoula Workman over a then-minor Ariel (R)

The SAG award-winner was granted a legal emancipation from Workman in 2015, and last year said in an Ellen appearance that 'neither' she nor Gray have a relationship with Workman.

Earlier this weekend, Ariel took to the social media site to share a fetching image of herself this time in a strapless black dress.

The brunette beauty stood by a white wall and captioned the shot 'Saturyay.' The TV darling added a gold choker and over-the-knee boots for a fun night-on-the-town look.

Beauty: Winter has perfected the art of alluring Instagram posts. And on Saturday the 19-year-old Modern Family star shared another fetching image, this time in a strapless black dress

Seriously in love: This comes after the Sofia The First star revealed she is living with her beau Levi Meaden

The Sofia The First star earlier this week revealed she is living with her beau Levi Meaden, an actor on Aftermath.

On Wednesday's episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Winter said: 'I do have my own house - last year I bought my first house. My boyfriend and I live together.'

The couple might be on the move, as they were seen checking out an open house in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Confession: On Wednesday's episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Winter said: 'I do have my own house - last year I bought my first house. My boyfriend and I live together'

'Im the worst wifely person,' Winter said of her skills in the kitchen, insisting that Levi does all of the handy stuff around the house.

In the Instagram post celebrating six months together, Ariel wrote, 'Happy six month anniversary to my horrendous human being/cheese to my peanut butter.

'I love you baby. Thank you for being so amazing. Here's to many, many more,' she wrote in the gushing message.

Nice digs: This is reportedly where the beauty resides with her handsome beau

The pair were set up by her friend Sterling Beaumon, who co-starred in The Killing with Levi.

It has just been announced that Ariel's show Modern Family has been renewed for seasons nine and 10.

Ariel has been transitioning from child star to young adulthood. Of her co-stars, she says, 'They definitely treat me like an adult. Its weird for them because we were 10- and 11-years-old when we started, and now that were all semi-adults, its different.'
Katy Perry celebrated Mother's Day by treating her mother Mary Hudson to LA's Museum of Ice Cream on Sunday.

The Pentecostal pastor - sporting a pink floral kimono jacket over a raspberry blouse - has penned two books Joyful Parent (2015) and Smart Bombs (2013).

'Happy momma's day to the strongest woman I know!' the 32-year-old pop diva - who boasts 228.7M followers - gushed on Instagram.

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'The strongest woman I know!' Katy Perry celebrated Mother's Day by treating her mother Mary Hudson to LA's Museum of Ice Cream on Sunday

'Thank you for all of your steadfast prayers for over 32 years, thank you for your sacrifice, thank you for your intelligence, thank you for wit, thank you for your undeniable positivity and keen intuition.'

Katy continued: 'Thank you for raising 3 fantastic children that really love you (tbh I'm the black sheep and most annoying one) I know I can always call on you and you will be right there even if I just need a pet and a spoon. I am so blessed. Love, your feather/turtle/bird.'

For the last 35 years, Hudson (born Perry) has been ministering with her husband Maurice and the former Christian crooner sang in their church from ages 9-17.

'Thank you for all of your steadfast prayers!' The Pentecostal pastor - sporting a pink floral kimono jacket over a raspberry blouse - has penned two books Joyful Parent and Smart Bombs

The 32- year-old pop diva gushed on Instagram: 'Thank you for raising 3 fantastic children that really love you (tbh I'm the black sheep and most annoying one) I know I can always call on you and you will be right there'

Born-again: For the last 35 years, Hudson (born Perry) has been ministering with her husband Maurice and the former Christian crooner sang in their church from ages 9-17

The 13-time Grammy nominee wore a baby-pink maxi-skirt with a matching cropped hoodie, and plastic striped slides selected by stylist Jamie Mizrahi.

Perry also rocked her new buzzcut blonde locks with a nose ring, red lips, and matching cat-eye mirrored shades.

Joining the mother-daughter outing was one of Katy's nieces, who coordinated with her famous aunt in a pink ensemble.

Girly shade: The 13-time Grammy nominee wore a baby-pink maxi-skirt with a matching cropped hoodie, and plastic striped slides selected by stylist Jamie Mizrahi

Waiting at the valet: Perry also rocked her new buzzcut blonde locks with a nose ring, red lips, and matching cat-eye mirrored shades

Cradled in her arms: Joining the mother-daughter outing was one of Katy's nieces, who coordinated with her famous aunt in a pink ensemble

Quality family time: The Women's Marcher - who completed her GED at age 15 - has been sober since her split from Pirates of the Caribbean heartthrob Orlando Bloom last month

Handsy: The Bon Appetit belter later gave a big bear hug to a mystery gentleman, whose hand rested right on her rear

The Women's Marcher - who completed her GED at age 15 - has been sober since her split from Pirates of the Caribbean heartthrob Orlando Bloom last month.

The Bon Appetit belter later gave a big bear hug to a mystery gentleman, whose hand rested right on her rear.

That same day, Katy (born Katheryn) teased a 17-second snippet of her new witness-themed single - dropping this Monday - from her upcoming fourth studio album.

Dopping this Monday! That same day, Katy (born Katheryn) teased a 17-second snippet of her new witness-themed single from her upcoming fourth studio album

Headed across the pond: The Zoolander 2 stunner will next perform at the Capital Breakfast Show happening May 25 at London pub The Water Rats (pictured Saturday)

The Zoolander 2 stunner will next perform at the Capital Breakfast Show happening May 25 at London pub The Water Rats before headlining BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend.

The Chained to the Rhythm songstress is also 'in negotiations' to join the revamped ABC version of American Idol premiering in March 2018 - according to TMZ.

Perry previously served guest-judging duties on an episode of the Fox singing competition's ninth season back in 2009.

'Coming to ABC!' The Chained to the Rhythm songstress is also 'in negotiations' to join the American Idol revival premiering in March 2018 - according to TMZ
She's been a busy bee since touching down in Sydney earlier this month from her home base New York.

And Lara Worthington (nee Bingle) was once again juggling work and motherhood duties on Friday.

The mother-of-two looked flawless as she cradled her son Racer following a meeting with her agent in Double Bay.

Blue jean baby! Lara Bingle looked flawless in all-denim ensemble as she cradled her baby boy Racer during a meeting in Sydney last Friday

The mother-of-two pulled off a double denim look, wearing a pair of light blue jeans and an almost matching blue chambray shirt.

She teamed the look with a pair of simple black ankle boots and no other accessories.

The 29-year-old beauty entrepreneur showed off her flawless and line-free visage by wearing very minimal makeup during a business meeting at popular Indigo Double Bay cafe.

She can pull it off! The mother-of-two donned a pair of light blue jeans and an almost matching blue chambray shirt

So cute: Little Rocket appeared to be having a great old time in his stroller, kicking his legs about as his mother pushed him along the sidewalk

Flawless: The skincare entrepreneur's skin looked flawless and she appeared to be mostly makeup free

Getting stuff done: The blonde beauty went about her day in Sydney running errands and meeting with her associates

Meanwhile, little Racer looked as cute as a button in a blue and white striped long sleeve top, tiny white leggings and a pair of grey socks.

Last week Lara confessed to Today Extra that she and husband Sam 'don't ever talk about work at home.'

Lara secretly married the actor in December 2014, and the pair have two sons together, two-year-old Rocket and Racer, six months.

Busy mum on the go: She was all smiles as she toted her a baby bag to and from meetings

Simple yet chic: Lara paired her all blue ensemble with a pair of leather ankle boots

Balancing act: Lara was once again juggling work and motherhood duties, attending a meeting at Indigo Double Bay cafe

Catching up: Lara has been busy catching up with friends and business assocaiates while she's been in town

All smiles: She appeared to have an animated conversation with her gal pal as they walked down the street

The blonde beauty said the key to making her and Sam's marriage work along with their busy careers is a rule to not spend more than a fortnight apart from one another.

'We never do more than two weeks apart, two weeks apart is kind of our rule,' she said.

'And I don't think it is good for our family to be apart for any longer - nothing is that important.'

Sweet: Lara shared a sweet cuddle with agent Annie Kelly's son

Happy to be home: Lara has had a busy time Down Under and will head back to her husband Sam Worthington soon

Effortlessly cool: The 29-year-old mother of two said matched her denim blue outfit with a pair black combat boots

While claiming that working on her skincare line The Base made her a better parent, Lara revealed that her and Sam 'don't ever talk about work at home.'

'For me personally, I am a happier and better mum when I am working and juggling,' she said.

'I have the most amazing and supportive husband who allows me to achieve my goals.'

Motherhood chic: She appeared to be happy to be surrounded with her friends and associates before heading into the Sydney establishment

Out with friends: In a recent episode, she gushed over her baby son Racer saying,' He is a good baby, I think with your second one you're a bit more calm you're a bit less routine, I'm very much a woman to go with the flow'

Lara also gushed about her second son Racer, revealing he had slept for 12 out of the 17 hour long flight from New York City to Sydney.

'He is a good baby, I think with your second one you're a bit more calm you're a bit less routine, I'm very much a woman to go with the flow,' she said.

Staying connected: Lara had a quick look at her phone, likely checking up on messages, as she appeared to wait on the side of the road
She disrupted Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week's opening gala in a guerrilla style takeover on Sunday, with a crew of models promoting her new brand PSEUDO.

And Imogen Anthony was back in the spotlight on Monday, spotted at the annual event's Carriageworks venue dressed in her signature quirky style.

The 26-year-old posed for cameras in a new look that captured her individuality and rebellious approach to fashion.

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Look at ME! Imogen Anthony was back in the spotlight on Monday, spotted at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week dressed in her signature quirky style

The blonde wore an off-shoulder business shirt with sleeves that extended past her hands and was cinched at her waist with a red leather corset.

She matched that with over-the-knee patent leather boots and a Gucci purse with attached fur bauble.

Her long blonde hair was worn in a wet look underneath a metallic snakeskin wide-brim hat and her makeup featured a winged eyeliner and bright red lip.

Bold: The 26-year-old posed for cameras in a new look that captured her individuality and rebellious approach to fashion

Coquettish: The controversial blonde wore an off-shoulder business shirt with sleeves that extended past her hands and was cinched at her waist with a red leather corset

The longtime girlfriend of radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands staged a guerrilla catwalk of her own in front of the Dion Lee show during Fashion Week's opening day on Sunday.

Alongside fashion designer Joshua Mullane and a group of friends, she paraded Joshua's new brand PSEUDO on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

The diverse squad appeared to encounter a run-in with security guards and police, who kept a close eye on the spectacle.

Standout: Her long blonde hair was worn in a wet look underneath a metallic snakeskin wide-brim hat and her makeup featured a winged eyeliner and bright red lip

Coordinated: She matched that with over-the-knee patent leather boots and a Gucci purse with red accents and attached fur bauble

The outspoken model appeared to argue with a guard at one point as she strutted her stuff at the foot of the iconic Sydney landmark.

She celebrated the rebellious launch of PSEUDO on her Instagram account that evening, offering 'fashion is a form of expression'.

'Today we celebrated the launch of #MBFWA in our own way by launching @joshumullane's new #PSEUDO collection out the front of the Opera House,' she wrote.

Pals: The blonde lapped up the attention as she posed with her fashionista pals

Rebellious: The longtime girlfriend of radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands staged a guerrilla catwalk of her own in front of the Dion Lee show during Fashion Week's opening day
She's the Australian model and Instagram sensation known for her quirky style.

And Mimi Elashiry did not disappoint when she attended the Alice McCall show at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week on Monday.

The blogger turned heads with a pair of $1500 thigh-high boots which offered a glimpse of her toned thighs.

Wow: Mimi Elashiry turned heads with a pair of dramatic over-the-knee boots at Alice McCall's show for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week on Monday

Mimi also wore a black playsuit with brass buttons over a billowing white shirt.

Mimi accessorised with a pair of statement silver earrings and a matching necklace from designer Vanessa Mooney.

She finished off her unique look with a faux fur coat which she slung over her shoulders upon arrival.

Mimi was pictured inside the fashion show with her sisters Inas and Farrah.

Quirky: Mimi also wore a black playsuit with brass buttons over a billowing white shirt, and finished off her unique look with a faux fur coat

Bling! Mimi accessorised with a pair of statement silver earrings and a matching necklace from designer Vanessa Mooney
Her fiance Sam Wood announced that they were expecting their first child together on Sunday night.

And shortly after, pregnant Snezana Markoski shared her very first pregnancy shoot with her fans.

In the stunning image, the brunette beauty is absolutely glowing as she shows off her baby bump in a plunging gold gown while her daughter Eve cradles her tummy.

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Stunning: Pregnant Snezana Markoski shows off her baby bump in stunning shoot with her daughter Eve after announcing she's expecting her first child with The Bachelor's Sam Wood

Photographer Vicky Papas-Vergara captured the beautiful image and revealed that the that it was all done at the very last minute on Friday.

She said that the gown and jewels for Snezana and Evie's shoot was created ahead of the mother's day announcement.

Sam broke the news that the pair were expecting Instagram on Sunday night.

They are the first couple from the TV dating series to announce a pregnancy.

In Sam's Instagram post, a smiling Snezana is dressed in a white T-shirt with a bowl of pasta in her lap.

Happy news! Sam broke the news that the pair were expecting Instagram on Sunday night

Cute: He wrote in the caption: 'Snez... a) has just eaten a bowl of pasta bigger than her head, b) can't do up her pants, c) is having a BABY!!! d) all of the above'

With a excited expression on his face, Sam points to her baby bump.

He wrote in the caption: 'Snez... a) has just eaten a bowl of pasta bigger than her head, b) can't do up her pants, c) is having a BABY!!! d) all of the above'.

Later, Sam revealed on Facebook the couple were expecting a baby girl.

Happily ever after! The couple met on the third season of The Bachelor Australia

Loved up! Three months after the show's finale, Sam and Snezana got engaged

The couple met on the third season of The Bachelor and got engaged three months after the show's finale.

Fans reacted with overwhelming joy, taking to Instagram to congratulate the pair.

A fan wrote: 'Congratulations to all three of you, this is freakin' awesome. Next year Sam you will be running at the Mother's Day Classic with a pram.'

Another commented: 'Yay you guys! Little 28er - time for 28 onesies xxx'

The first Bachelor baby! Fans took to Instagram to congratulate the reality TV couple

Happy family: In the past two years, Sam has taken on a stepfather role to Snezana's 11-year-old daughter Eve (pictured)

Family: Snezana and Eve moved from Perth to Melbourne to live with Sam in July 2016

In July 2016, Snezana and her 11-year-old daughter Eve moved from Perth to Melbourne to live with personal trainer Sam.

Over the past two years, Sam has taken on a stepfather role to Eve and the couple have previously talked about having children together.

In a previous interview with OK! Magazine, Snezana confessed she 'welcomed the idea of having children' with Sam.

'I did have a feeling whoever was going to be the Bachelor would be keen to start a family,' she said.

Clucky: Snezana previously said she 'welcomed the idea of having children' with Sam

Bonding: Snezana also revealed she was hoping to give her daughter a little brother one day

All smiles: 'I did have a feeling whoever was going to be the Bachelor would be keen to start a family,' Snezana said in a previous interview

Snezana also told Who magazine she was hoping to give her daughter a little brother one day.

'(Eve) kept saying, "Oh mummy, you might meet somebody and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And even if you don't, at least you tried",' she said.

Earlier in the year, Sam told KIIS FM's The Kyle And Jackie O Show they were planning to get married in Europe next year.

'Snez is in full swing getting things organised,' he said. 'We're going to get married overseas. We just want our immediate family and closest friends.
It was recently reported that Kourtney Kardashian is determined to move on from her ex-partner.

And in Sunday's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, she tells the father of her three children Scott Disick, 33, that they will 'never get back together', after slamming his womanising antics.

The reality star branded Scott 'disrespectful' as he confessed to Kourtney, 38, and her family that he is a 'horrible sex addict'.

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'I'm a f**ked up horrible sex addict': Scott Disick acknowledge he has an addiction to sex in a heated exchange with ex Kourtney Kardashian during Sunday night's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians

In a candid chat with his ex, her mother Kris Jenner and sisters Khloe Kardashian and Kim Kardashian-West, Scott acknowledge his issues and admitted he is addicted to sex.

The group had been discussing Scott's decision to bring another woman with him on a family holiday they had taken to Costa Rica at the beginning of the year.

At the time, rumours had been doing the rounds that he and Kourtney were rekindling their romance - they had initially split in 2015.

Viewers have since seen Scott confessing that Kourtney is the 'love of his life' on the family's E! reality show before jetting off, but he later sparked tensions between himself and his ex after bringing another woman back to his hotel room.

Hurt: Kourtney Kardashian, 38, slammed her ex-partner for his 'disrespectful' behaviour after he brought another woman to his hotel on a family trip to Costa Rica

Confession: Trying to explain his actions, Scott revealed he is suffering from a 'sex addiction'

Following an argument with Kourtney's family on the trip, Scott left early and headed to Miami instead where he was pictured surrounded by more women.

Kourtney had confronted Scott on Sunday's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians over his sordid behaviour and branded it 'disrespectful'.

She said: 'On a family vacation, don't you think it's inappropriate and disrespectful? To me, to your kids and to all my family?

'There's a level of respect and appropriateness that should just be known, but apparently it's not.'

Happier times: Kourtney and Scott are parents to three children - Mason, seven, Penelope, four, and Reign, two - they had initially split in 2015 before briefly rekindling their romance last year

Scott then reasoned that he is suffering with an addiction to sex and revealed: 'I'm a sex addict. I'm a f**ked up, horrible sex addict.'

Kourtney, however, rubbished his explanation and accused him of 'playing the victim'.

She hit back: 'You had your chance. I thought we were spending our whole lives together and I've done everything I can.'

Khloe took the same stance as her sister over Scott's confession and she threw a drink over him, as she slammed: 'If you need to get your d**k wet that badly, then get your f**king d**k wet.'

Confrontation: Scott was forced to explain his sordid antics to Kourtney and all her family over dinner in Sunday night's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians

'You had your chance': Kourtney, however, rubbished his explanation and accused him of 'playing the victim'

Tensions rising: Khloe Kardashian made sure to defend Kourtney and threw her drink over Scott telling him, 'If you need to get your d**k wet that badly, then get your f**king d**k wet'

Their conversation appeared to be the final straw for Kourtney who drew a line under her relationship with Scott once and for all.

She mused: 'I just feel like I need to have a conversation wit him just to finally say we will never be back together. It's probably better for both of us.'

Kourtney's defiant stance when it comes to her ex Scott - who she shares three children Mason, seven, Penelope, four, and Reign, two, with - comes after reports claimed the starlet is determined to move on.

According to TMZ, sources say the 38-year-old is 'done treating Scott like a baby' and 'worrying how he'll react to her every move'.

Moving on: Sources have claimed Kourtney is determined to draw a line under her relationship with her ex, after becoming 'sick of mothering him'

The insider also said that any chance of a romance between them is over and that Kourtney is determined to move on with her life on her 'own terms'.

She has now turned her attentions to her new romance with toyboy Younes Bendjima, 24, and the pair's relationship is said to have upset Scott.

Kourtney and Younes were first romantically linked in October following the model's split with ex Jourdan Dunn.

Scott, meanwhile, has reportedly sparked concern among friends about his heavy drinking, after reacting badly to Kourtney's new romance.

Toyboy: Kourtney is now dating 24-year-old model Younes Bendjima and their romance is said to have upset Scott

Troubled: Sources have told TMZ that the reality star has been hosting 'non-stop, alcohol-fueled party for weeks', after being left 'devastated' over his ex's new relationship and friends are calling for him to return to rehab

The 33-year-old, who is rumoured to be dating model Ella Ross, was spotted partying with a bevy of blonde beauties at Nobu in Malibu recently in his attempts to move on from his ex.

He had quit drinking in the hope of a reconciliation with Kourtney, but sources have told TMZ that the reality star has been hosting 'non-stop, alcohol-fueled party for weeks', after being left 'devastated' over his ex's new relationship.

Friends told the site that the only option they can see for Scott would be going back to rehab, two years after his last stint.

MailOnline have contacted representatives for Scott.

Avoiding the episode: Meanwhile as Keeping Up With The Kardashians aired, Scott appeared to avoid tuning in as he stepped out for dinner with two female companions

Meanwhile as the episode played out, Scott appeared to avoid tuning in as he stepped out for dinner with two female companions.

He was spotted leaving Nobu in Malibu in a plush car with the girls.

As he headed to his waiting car, Scott came over camera shy and hid his face from view with his hands.

He wore the hood from his sweatshirt - that he paired with a striped bomber jacket -up in attempts to conceal himself and cut a casual figure in jeans and trainers for his dinner.

Camera shy? He attempted to hide his face by pulling the hood to his sweatshirt over his head and shielding himself from view with his hands
News / National

by Garikai Mafirakureva

CHIREDZI - Zanu PF fights for what can be described as the hottest seat in the country's south eastern sugar farming town of Chiredzi, has reached high levels, with accusations and counter accusation being thrown at each other as members position themselves to represent the party in the forthcoming watershed 2018 elections.The fights has seen party members, who are believed to be aligned to the alleged Team Lacoste, at each other's throat accusing each other of fanning factionalism in the party by splashing money like confetti.Chiredzi Town Council chairperson, Francis Moyo, recently came out gun blazing, accusing his party colleague, former Tongaat Hulett agriculture director, Farai Musikavanhu, of jumping the gun and dividing the party in the process by campaigning in Chiredzi West before the party gives a green light to do so.Speaking during an interview Moyo, who is popularly known as Frango, said according to Zanu PF, Chiredzi West legislator is Darlington Chiwa, until such a time the party gives candidates a go ahead to campaign. He went on to say if Musikavanhu, is interested in any position he should campaign in Ward 1, which is according to Zanu PF, vacant because it is currently in the hands of the opposition."As far as Zanu PF is concerned, Darlington Chiwa, is still representing the party, unless Musikavanhu is trying to destabilize the party by campaigning against a sitting Member of Parliament."The party is still to announce that any interested member should submit his or her name for primaires before starting the campaign. If Musikavanhu is interested in any position he should campaign in ward 1 which is currently being held by the opposition," said Frango.In a written message to comment on the matter - Musikavanhu, only said; "My apologies my brother my phone was on silent. On the subject you raised I am not authorized to comment."The fall out between Frango and Musikavanhu began when the later called for a council audit before anyone can put resources in the town council.When contacted for comment the party spokesperson, Simon Khaya Moyo, said the party is yet to announce dates for primaries."As Zanu PF we haven't set any date or criteria for someone to be considered as eligible to represent the party. I don't see anything bad about someone making some developments in their constituencies but that doesn't mean it's automatic that you are the party candidate," said Moyo.However, Musikavanhu, is not the only one interested in Chiredzi West constituency, as other Zanu PF candidates have already shown interest, including former Masvingo governor, Titus Maluleke and Norman Sharara.
She's never been shy to share an insight into her glamorous life on social media.

And now Kate Beckinsale swapped her usual hilarious Instagrams for a gushing tribute to her 18-year-old daughter Lily as she attended her high school prom on Sunday.

The 43-year-old actress highlighted her darling offspring's likeness to her as she shared a sweet message alongside a stunning picture of the teen in a striking red dress.

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Proud: Kate Beckinsale swapped her usual hilarious Instagrams for a gushing tribute to her 18-year-old daughter Lily as she attended her High School prom on Sunday

Natural beauty: Wearing a strapless cherry red evening gown, the pretty teenager accentuated her striking bone structure by working her glossy brunette locks into a deep side parting

Wearing a strapless cherry red evening gown, the pretty teenager accentuated her striking bone structure by working her glossy brunette locks into a deep side parting.

She styled her mane into a soft old Hollywood wave while accessorising her red carpet-worthy ensemble with a simple diamond necklace.

In awe of her daughter, the Pearl Harbour star captioned the stunning snap: 'You take my breath away @lily_beckinsale #prom you're funny and clever and gorgeous and just enough crazy to be my favourite person in world.

Before hilariously ending her gushing message with: 'My Fallopian tube is like BITE ME I KILLED THIS'.

Striking: The 43-year-old actress highlighted her darling offspring's likeness to her as she shared a sweet message alongside a stunning picture of the teen in a striking red dress

In April, Kate admitted in an interview with TooFab that she got into a bit of trouble with Lily over an Instagram post about her.

The Underworld actress acknowledged that her daughter wasn't too happy about her parents' enthusiasm over her college acceptance.

She revealed: 'I got into a bit of trouble at home for that. She said, "I wish you'd said I got into the college of my choice, because it sounded like you had no hope of me getting into any college anywhere, made me sound like a loser!"'

Hot water: In April, Kate admitted in an interview with TooFab that she got into a bit of trouble with Lily over an Instagram post about her

Oh no: The Underworld actress acknowledged that her daughter wasn't too happy about her parents' enthusiasm over her college acceptance

Kate welcomed Lily with her former partner Michael Sheen and despite being together for eight years, the pair never married, splitting when their daughter was four.

However, she later married Underworld director Len Wiseman, 44, in Bel-Air on May 9, 2004 after meeting on set in 2003.

Despite their romance, they announced their separation 11 years later and Len filed for divorce in 2016.

Kate and Michael are very vocal advocates of their modern family life and have maintained a close bond ever since their split.

In the past: Kate later married Underworld director Len Wiseman, 44, in Bel-Air on May 9, 2004 after meeting on set in 2003. They announced their separation 11 years later and Len filed for divorce in 2016

The actress said in an interview with InStyle magazine in 2004: 'We were very lucky in that we didn't have an acrimonious split.

'We are still very close and [our daughter] sees us around each other. He's absolutely one of my most favourite people ever. I love him dearly - I would miss him dreadfully if he wasn't in my life.'

In 2011, Michael said of his ex: 'Kate will always be one of the most important people in my life. I have real love for her.'

Now in a relationship with Sarah Silverman, Kate has developed a close friendship over the past couple of years with the comedienne, and Michael admitted his relationship with his ex is 'better than ever'.

Close: Kate and Michael are very vocal advocates of their modern family life and have maintained a close bond ever since their split

Speaking to Chelsea Handler on her Netflix talk show Chelsea, he explained: 'Our relationship now is probably better than it ever was. And it helps that she [Kate] actually likes Sarah more than she likes me.

Michael added: 'The only way it doesn't work out is that now I have not only Sarah, but also Kate and my daughter Lily, who all just make fun of me and embarrass me at any given point.'

Speaking about the pair's friendship, Sarah said: 'He and Kate are like brother and sister. I love her, she's hilarious. She's really, really cool.'

Kate will next be seen in The Only Living Boy In New York, due out on August 11 alongside Jeff Bridges and Pierce Brosnan.
She confirmed her pregnancy by baring her bump on the beach in February.

And Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who is expecting her first child with fiance Jason Statham, looked incredible as she stepped out in Malibu on Sunday.

The 30-year-old model was nothing short of glowing in a chic midi-length dress which skimmed her blossoming bump as she was dropped off alongside Jason's dad Barry, while her actor other half, 49, went to find parking.

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Radiant: Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, 30, who is expecting her first child with fiance Jason Statham, looked nothing short of glowing as she stepped out in Malibu on Sunday

Rosie was absolutely radiant in the black number, which plunged down the middle and boasted cold-shouldered detailing.

The garment fell just past her knees and she kept herself comfortable by pairing the look with a pair of studded gladiator sandals.

Ever the photogenic beauty, Rosie piled her blonde locks into a chic chignon - putting prominence on her chiselled features and bee-stung lips.

Jason's dad Barry also hopped out of the car, looking super stylish in a brown jumper, jeans and straw hat.

Maternity chic: The garment fell just past her knees and she kept herself comfortable by pairing the look with a pair of studded gladiator sandals

Beauty: Ever the photogenic beauty, Rosie piled her blonde locks into a chic chignon - putting prominence on her chiselled features and bee-stung lips

Rosie first confirmed the news she and Jason are expecting in February earlier this year via Instagram.

She debuted her bare baby bump on the photo-sharing site in a snap that showed her sat smiling on a beach in her bikini.

Rosie revealed that Jason had been the one to take the picture in her caption, as she confirmed: 'Very happy to share that Jason and I are expecting. Lots of love Rosie x.'

Conpany: Jason's dad Barry also hopped out of the car, looking super stylish in a brown jumper, jeans and straw hat

Fun day out: The pair were getting dropped off by Jason, 49, as he went to find parking

Clearly excited for motherhood, prior to announcing her baby news the starlet had said in an interview with Elle UK back in 2012 that caring for her child would be her first priority when the time comes.

She said: 'I always see myself working, but definitely being a mum will be a big part of me. I think there is naturally a point where you think, "I don't care about myself as number one any more."

'I want to care about other things.'

'Very happy to share that Jason and I are expecting': Rosie confirmed her pregnancy via Instagram in February by baring her bump in a bikini

Her pregnancy news came a year after she and Jason - who is 20 years her senior - confirmed their engagement in January 2016.

Rosie had hinted that the pair are now set to wed by stepping out onto the red carpet with a diamond ring sat on her wedding finger.

A representative for Rosie later confirmed that she and her actor beau of seven years are engaged.
Napoleon Perdis is the cosmetics king with a very ambitious model daughter.

But on Monday, Napoleon let Lianna know that he still runs the show by outdoing her in the style stakes at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

They arrived at the Justin Cassin show with matching Hermes handbags - but the 47-year-old make-up maven's tote was DOUBLE the size of his 17-year-old daughter's.

Don't steal my thunder! Napoleon Perdis outshone his daughter Lianna by sporting a Hermes tote bag that was double the size of hers at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week on Monday

Napoleon brandished a gigantic black crocodile tote, while little Lianna sported a much smaller red handbag that failed to attract as much attention.

At one point, the pair posed with their bags on the front row, with Napoleon placing his tote in front of his daughter's as he flaunted it for the cameras.

Because of this, Lianna's bag was partly obscured, ensuring that all eyes would remain on her famous father.

Don't look at hers... look at mine! At one point, the pair posed with their bags on the front row, with Napoleon placing his tote in front of his daughter's as he flaunted it for the cameras

Flying solo: The 17-year-old broke free from her father for a fleeting moment in the spotlight

Napoleon also made sure that he would remain the belle of the ball by sporting a garish, attention-grabbing ensemble.

He took style tips from Ali G in a bright red tracksuit, Supreme T-shirt, red sunglasses, and leather shoes with a Union Jack motif.

He further accessorised with gaudy jewelry, leaving Lianna with little chance of stealing of the spotlight.

That's more like it! Lianna was able to stand out while posing the conservatively dressed Stenmark twins

A host of other stars have also made appearances at Fashion Week.

Karl Stefanovic made his public debut with girlfriend Jasmine Yarbrough at the event.

And the stylish Stenmark twins also showed up, even posing for photos with Lianna.
She left The Morning Show hosts Kylie Gillies and Larry Emdur in stitches during her trainwreck TV interview on Monday.

And Chloe Lattanzi defiantly responded to the backlash, telling fans she will focus on staying positive and use the publicity for 'her advantage'.

The troubled daughter of Olivia Newton-John took to her Instagram account to explain it was actually 'a great interview'.

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What trainwreck? Chloe Lattanzi defiantly responded to the backlash against her bizarre TV interview, saying she will focus on staying positive and use the publicity for 'her advantage'

Chloe, 31, also dismissed critics of her busty appearance, saying 'it's hilarious how women get so pissed at another woman who isn't modest'.

The plastic surgery enthusiast added: 'I am not ashamed of my body. But that's all people see when they look at me.'

Despite feeling the TV appearance went well, Chloe admitted she avoids Australian interviews because 'they are much more reserved'.

Later, Chloe shared another update with her Instagram followers, saying 'sorry for the boobs' and that she will 'try to remember they are offensive'.

If you say so! The troubled daughter of Olivia Newton-John took to her Instagram account to explain that Monday's The Morning Show segment was actually 'a great interview'

Chloe appeared on The Morning Show to promote her new clothing line Equestrian Designs earlier on Monday.

But the interview descended into chaos when Larry used the term 'doodah', and she mistakenly thought he was talking about smoking marijuana.

'What youre wearing right now is like youve ridden through the ranges all day and you get off and youre having a little "doodah" by the campfire,' Larry said.

'Wait, whats a doodah? Oh, a doodah?' Chloe said, before asking if they were talking about smoking a joint.

Oh dear! Chloe appeared on The Morning Show to promote her new clothing line, but the interview soon descended into chaos - and fans were distracted by her appearance

Oh, a doodah? The interview went off the rails when host Larry Emdur used the term 'doodah', and Chloe mistakenly thought he was talking about smoking marijuana

Chloe then clarified her response, saying: 'Oh, doodah sounds like doobee.'

Chloe was speaking from Oregon where she runs a marijuana farm with her fiance, James Driskill.

Meanwhile, fans took to Twitter after the interview to criticise her risque outfit, saying it made her 'look like a porn star'.

Another fan tweeted: 'Nice adult Chloe interview; but sack her stylist. Inappropriate makeup and dress. Why focus on hugely unnatural lips and breasts?'
She's best known for playing Sandy in the 1978 movie musical Grease.

But a recent serious health issue has forced Olivia Newton John's management to postpone her American concerts for the rest of May.

Alleged details of her battle with sciatica - a spinal and nerve condition that can render some sufferers unable to move - have surfaced in a report by New Idea.

Health issues: Alleged details of Olivia Newton-John's battle with sciatica - a spinal and nerve condition that can render some sufferers unable to move - have surfaced in New Idea

An insider reportedly told the publication that Olivia's condition has been debilitating.

'So to see her unable to walk or get out of bed because the pain is so severe is incredibly rattling. We are very worried,' the source claimed.

Olivia's management previously announced on her Facebook page that her scheduled performances were cancelled due to health problems.

Claims: An insider reportedly told the publication, 'To see her unable to walk or get out of bed because the pain is so severe is incredibly rattling. We are very worried'

More stress? In addition to her health battle, the source also alleged that Olivia worries about her 31-year-old daughter Chloe Lattanzi's 'wayward' behaviour

The post read: 'We are so sorry to announce that the Olivia concerts scheduled for May will be postponed due to a bad issue with Olivia's sciatica.'

'Once the dates are rescheduled we will post the new dates ASAP. Apologies for any inconvenience.'

The source reportedly said the tour cancellation was a big deal for the veteran entertainer, who is known for her professional attitude.

Tour cancellations: A recent serious health issue has forced Olivia's management to postpone her American concerts for the rest of May

Meanwhile, Olivia is also reportedly concerned for her 31-year-old daughter, Chloe Lattanzi, who has suffered from anorexia and drug addiction in the past.

The insider alleged that Chloe's recent bizarre Instagram posts - which saw her describe herself as a 'Red Bull drinking witch' - have upset her famous mother.

'Just when Olivia thinks she's on the straight and narrow, she starts up with this bizarre business,' they said. 'It's just adding to Olivia's stress and her health troubles.'

Family trouble? 'Just when Olivia thinks she's on the straight and narrow, (Chloe) starts up with this bizarre business,' the insider claimed

In a statement, Olivia said: 'I have had a long running issue with sciatica and I need to take this time to rest and deal with this very painful condition.

'My husband John is taking great care of me and I want to thank all my family, friends and fans for their concern, love, support and good wishes.

'I look forward to returning to performing soon!' she concluded.
She's currently filming the second installment of the critically-acclaimed series The Crown.

And Vanessa Kirby looked positively regal as she attended the TV BAFTAs on Sunday night dressed in a stunning Burberry evening gown fit for a princess.

The 26-year-old Netflix star - who was nominated for Supporting Actress for her turn as Princess Margaret in the much-loved show - dazzled in her designer floor-grazer which featured tiered ruffle detail down the ethereal skirt.

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Positively regal: Vanessa Kirby looked positively regal as she attended the TV BAFTAs on Sunday night dressed in a stunning Burberry evening gown fit for a princess

Her pleated tulle look highlighted her slender frame and pristine decolletage with its bardot silhouette that boasted eye-catching sheer sleeves.

Hugging her narrow waist, the Wimbledon native's show-stopping garment featured a bustier accent before falling exquisitely to the red carpet.

The blonde bombshell kept her accessorises to a minimum, sprinkling her hands with a number of sparkling rings and simple earrings.

Dazzling: Her pleated tulle look highlighted her slender frame and pristine decolletage with its bardot silhouette that boasted eye-catching sheer sleeves

In the blue: The 26-year-old Netflix star - who was nominated for Supporting Actress - dazzled in her designer floor-grazer which featured tiered ruffle detail down the ethereal skirt

Figure-flaunting: Hugging her narrow waist, the Wimbledon native's show-stopping garment featured a bustier accent before falling exquisitely to the red carpet

She worked her golden locks into messy chignon while loose strands fell stylishly around her face to frame her facial features.

Accentuating her alabaster skin, she kept her beauty look fresh while highlighted her English rose appeal with a dash of blush across her cheeks and sleek feline flick.

Despite her nomination at the event, Vanessa ultimately missed out on bringing home an honour with Damilola, Our Loved Boy's Wunmi Mosaku taking the gong in her Supporting Actress category.

Catching up! The blonde bombshell kept her accessorises to a minimum, sprinkling her hands with a number of sparkling rings and simple earrings as she greeted fellow actress and co-star Victoria Hamilton at the awards

Hugging it out: The pair appeared in jovial spirits as they hugged on the red carpet

Meanwhile, her dazzling powder blue display comes as Vanessa is set to play the female lead in the upcoming sixth installment of the Mission Impossible franchise alongside Tom Cruise, 54.

The actor cast the British beauty in the latest installment of the action films after seeing her play Princess Margaret in the acclaimed Netflix series The Crown, according to InTouch Weekly.

Filming in Paris, the pair are believed to have immediately hit it off on set, and Cruise is now said to be looking to the future.

Sources also say Cruise is ready again to settle down, just weeks after his beloved mother Mary Lee Pfeiffer died at the age of 80.

Party people: Later in the evening, Vanessa was spotted with a male companion as they attended the awards after-party

Missing out: Despite her nomination at the event, Vanessa ultimately missed out on bringing home an honour with Damilola, Our Loved Boy's Wunmi Mosaku taking the gong in her Supporting Actress category

An insider told the US magazine that he loved how Vanessa played Margaret in The Crown, with the source saying that 'Tom flipped for her work'.

'He told the other MI producers that he had to have Vanessa for a crucial role in the franchise's sixth installment,' they added. 'He's blown away by her endless charm and energy.'

Once Tom got her on set, they had 'instant chemistry,' it was later alleged, and it was that spark between the two that led to her getting the role right away.

And, according to the unnamed insider, Tom is already said to be considering a long future with the British beauty, with one source even suggesting that 'he wants to make her the next Mrs Tom Cruise'.

'Instant chemistry': Her display comes after she was linked with co-star Tom Cruise with the pair having 'instant chemistry,' and later alleged, and it was that spark between the two that led to her getting the role right away
They famously coined the phrase 'conscious uncoupling' when they announced the end of their 11-year marriage in 2014.

But even though they're no longer husband and wife, it seems friendly exes Gwyneth Paltrow, 44, and Chris Martin, 40, remain the best of friends.

Sharing a photo on her Instagram page, the actress and her former spouse joined forces for a day out with daughter Apple, 13, and son Moses, 11, at the Museum Of Ice Cream in Los Angeles on Sunday.

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Family affair: Friendly exes Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin enjoyed a day out with daughter Apple, 13, and son Moses, 11, at the Museum Of Ice Cream in Los Angeles on Sunday

Celebrating both Apple's birthday and Mother's Day, the family looked as though they were having a blast on their day out at the museum, billed as a 'place where flavours are mysteries and toppings are toys'.

The Coldplay frontman looked to be enjoying the company of daughter Apple and son Moses along with beaming ex-wife Gwyneth.

The youngster was bearing a remarkable similarity to her actress mother, proving the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.

Alongside the snap, Gwyneth wrote: 'Best Apple's birthday/Mother's Day EVER at the @museumoficecream @autumncomm SO FUN #goopgo #dtla.'

Mini me: The family were celebrating celebrating both Apple's birthday and Mother's Day as they enjoyed their day out at the museum

Apple was pictured in a pink hoodie with leopard print leggings and UGG boots.

Moses donned an equally sporty look with a darker pink hoodie with navy and black tracksuit bottoms and black Jeezy trainers.

Chris looked laid back in black skinny jeans and a vintage white t-shirt.

He rocked up the look with a blue G-Shock watch and blue and white Air Jordan trainers.

Fashionista Gwyneth looked chic in a floral maxi skirt and fitted black vest.

In 2014, Gwyneth told readers of her website of her impending divorce after 11 years of marriage.

Divorce: Gwyneth and Chris broke the news of their marital split in March 2014 writing 'it is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate'

Gwyneth and Chris broke the news of their marital split in March 2014, writing: 'It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate.'

They went on to explain that the split had been on the cards for 'well over a year' and that in many ways they were closer than ever.

She described the process as 'conscious uncoupling'.

'We have always conducted our relationship privately, and we hope that as we consciously uncouple and co-parent, we will be able to continue in the same manner,' the statement continued.

But since the couple's heartbreaking split it appears the family unit is stronger than ever.

Happy together: Since the couple's heartbreaking split in March 2014 after 11 years of marriage it appears the family unit is stronger than ever

According to the teachings of conscious uncoupling, humans simply aren't meant to stay married for so long.

They point toward the exponential increase in lifespan that humans have experienced in the last century or so: 'Were living three lifetimes compared to early humans, perhaps we need to redefine the construct.

'Social research suggests that because were living so long, most people will have two or three significant long-term relationships in their lifetime.

'Our biology and psychology arent set up to be with one person for four, five, or six decades.'

Gwyneth has since moved on with Glee co-creator Brad Falchuk, 46, who she's been dating since 2014.

Chris has been dating actress Annabelle Wallis, 32, for the past 18 months, and enjoyed a brief romance with Hollywood leading lady Jennifer Lawrence, 26, in the summer of 2015.
She's is a proud mother to two darling children with her rapper husband Kanye West.

Celebrating Mother's Day in the US, Kim Kardashian couldn't help but pay a gushing tribute to the other mums in her life that have shaped who she is and have inspired her in a number of sweet Instagram posts on Sunday.

The 36-year-old reality queen couldn't contain her pride for the important women in her life - who juggle both motherhood and careers - as she poured over their strength, generosity and unconditional love.

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Proud: Kim Kardashian couldn't help but pay a gushing tribute to the other mums in her life that have shaped who she is and have inspired her in a number of sweet Instagram posts on Sunday

Pouring over her mother and manager Kris Jenner, 61, Kim shared a throwback snap of her with her siblings Kourtney, 38, Khloe, 32, and Rob, 30, alongside their late father Robert when they were children.

Coordinating in all white, the matriarch looked stylish with her then on-trend perm while holding her only son on her knee as her entrepreneur offspring wrote alongside the candid pic how she is their family's 'strength'.

Captioning the darling photo, Kim wrote: 'I saved the Queen for last! Mom you have walked through the fire for us all and I know in my heart you would do it all over again to keep us safe.

'We've all been through so much together & you are always our strength when we need it. I love you so much!'

Love: Pouring over her mother and manager Kris Jenner, 61, Kim shared a throwback snap of her with her siblings Kourtney, Khloe and Rob alongside their late father Robert when they were children

Praise: In another shot, Kim posted a picture with her older sister Kourtney - who is mother to Mason, seven, Penelope, four, and Reign, two, with ex Scott Disick - as she praised her making motherhood appear so easy

In another shot, Kim posted a picture with her older sister Kourtney - who is mother to Mason, seven, Penelope, four, and Reign, two, with ex Scott Disick - as she praised her making motherhood appear so easy.

She captioned a snap of them looking impeccably glam together: 'Happy Mothers Day to my sister @kourtneykardash who makes it always look so easy! I love you'.

Kim also thanked her grandmother MJ - who sister Kylie, 19, named one of her famous lipkits Mary Jo after - for teaching her granddaughters to be strong and liberated women.

'To the woman who started it all, my grandma MJ,' the fashion darling wrote. 'You taught all of us girls to be strong independent women. I love you.'

Thankful: Kim also thanked her grandmother MJ - who sister Kylie named one of her famous lipkits after - for teaching her granddaughters to be strong and liberated women

Aside from gushing about her fellow mothers, Kim shared a sweet message along a photo with her two children North, three, and Saint, one, thanking them for picking her to be their mother.

'Thank you to my babies for choosing me and allowing me to be your mom,' she wrote. 'You've given me a deep love I can't explain. I'm always here to teach you and protect you! Thank you for making my Mothers Day so special!'

Kim's sentimental outpouring comes after she revealed on her E! reality show the anxiety she was feeling in the run up to identifying the men that robbed her in Paris.

Proud: Aside from gushing about her fellow mothers, Kim shared a sweet message along a photo with her two children North, three, and Saint, one, thanking them for picking her to be their mother

The beauty admitted on Sunday's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians to being 'super anxious' about testifying - which lasted eight hours in New York.

Kim learned after identifying the suspects that they had been 'following' her for a whole year, and had unsuccessfully tried to rob her previously when she was in Paris with Kanye West.

'One guy admitted to driving them and one inside admitted it,' she revealed. 'Just by their height and weight, I could tell who from this lineup was in the room with me. I was able to see who confessed'.

Reliving: Kim admitted to being 'super anxious' about testifying against her Paris robbers on Sunday's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians

Closed doors: A French judge flew to New York City and heard Kim's testimony

'There's a few things they're not saying, to get lesser charges,' she said, while noting that mostly the crooks were 'honest' and had a 'pretty similar' story to hers.

'They had been following me and they had attempted to rob me last time I was in Paris, but my husband was with me,' she said.

'They had been following me from the year beforeit's just so scary to know that this would have happened to me at some point.

Adding: 'I'm just really happy that I got it over with and I'm done. I can prepare and protect myself even more in the future.'
She's been spotted working the reality circuit lately.

And heading out for a raucous night out in Birmingham on Saturday, Peru Two drug mule Michaella McCollum, 24, found herself rubbing shoulders with the likes of Jordan Davies, Love Island star Josh Ritchie and Geordie Shore's Sarah Goodhart.

She was certainly dressed to impress in a skimpy crimson red dress - that made for a very leggy display - but appeared a little worse for wear as she stepped out onto the street clutching a glass of wine.

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Oops! Michaella McCollum, 24, appeared a little worse for wear as she stepped out in Birmingham on Sunday

Throwing caution to the wind when it comes to fashion's usual golden rules, Michaella chose to not only bare her pins, but teased a look at her cleavage too in the revealing number.

Her form-fitting frock perfectly showcased her slender frame and boasted a low-cut neckline, along with a daring thigh-high split on one side.

Despite the sultry cut of her dress, Michaella managed to keep her modesty covered, as she turned the Birmingham streets into her very own catwalk.

Although, she was forced to use her plush Yves Saint Laurent clutch as a prop to ensure she avoided a potential mishap as she exited a taxi.

Glamorous: She was certainly dressed to impress in a skimpy crimson red dress - that made for a very leggy display

Not the best look: Michaella couldn't help but fall victim to a wardrobe blunder, as she emerged with a wine-stain trailing down her dress

Sporting a bronzed glow, Michaella cut a glamorous appearance for her evening out in Birmingham.

She styled her blonde tresses into cascading curls and opted for a flirty make-up look that comprise a striking red lip.

And while she had avoided one potentially embarrassing moment, Michaella couldn't help but fall victim to another wardrobe blunder, as she emerged with a wine-stain trailing down her dress.

Holing onto an alcoholic beverage in one hand, she decided to work the faux pas to her will and made sure to flash a smile as she strutted past photographers.

Daring slit: Despite the sultry cut of her dress, Michaella managed to keep her modesty covered, as she turned the Birmingham streets into her very own catwalk

Close shave: Although she was forced to use her plush Yves Saint Laurent clutch as a prop to ensure she avoided a potential mishap as she exited a taxi

Nothing to see here: Michaella relied on her designer clutch bag to protect her modesty as she made her way around the town in her skimp number

She has been enjoying her freedom after being released on parole in March 2016 having served less than half of her sentence, following being jailed in 2013 for attempting to smuggle 1.5 million of cocaine out of Peru with her friend Melissa Reid.

Reid was released in June of the same year and flew back to Scotland shortly afterwards.

Following her experience, Michaella clearly saw the funny side of a cheeky Instagram quote that was posted online by fake tan brand UTan & Tone on Monday - just days after her booze-fuelled night out in Birmingham.

It read: 'If you're having a bad day, remember there's no champagne in prison.'

Playful: Following a big night out in Birmingham, Michaella was then spotted liking a meme posted to Instagram on Monday, which noted how there was no alcohol in prison

Michaella had been joined by a bevy of reality stars as she partied over the weekend, with Ex On The Beach star Jordan Davies among the group.

Jordan cut a dapper figure in a fitted black shirt which he unbuttoned to the middle to flash his chest underneath.

He teamed it with distressed jeans and a pair of black trainers and couldn't resist putting on an amorous display as he cuddled up to fellow MTV star James Bryce.

James starred alongside Gaz Beadle on Spring Break With Grandad, which saw a slew of young singletons whisk their grandparents away with them to Cancun, Mexico.

Lads' night out: Jordan Davies cut a dapper figure as he cuddled up to fellow MTV star James Bryce from Spring Break with Grandad

Cheeky: James and the Welsh star were seen puckering up for a kiss - with Jordan inevitably licking his pal's face

And clearly having developed a close bond with Jordan after meeting him on the reality circuit, James and the Welsh star were seen puckering up for a kiss - with Jordan inevitably licking his pal's face.

They hadn't been the only duo to pack on the PDA while out and about in Birmingham as Josh Ritchie and his fellow Ex On The Beach star David Hawley - who previously dated Jem Lucy and Charlotte Crosby - followed suit.

Clutching onto each other for support as they strolled past, Josh made sure to plant a kiss on Hawley's cheek.

Although he didn't look too impressed with his friend's affections and appeared to pull a grimace in response.

Amarous: They hadn't been the only duo to pack on the PDA while out and about in Birmingham as Josh Ritchie and his fellow Ex On The Beach star David Hawley - who previously dated Jem Lucy and Charlotte Crosby - followed suit

Affectionate: Clutching onto each other for support as they strolled past, Josh made sure to plant a kiss on Hawley's cheek - who didn't look too impressed

Meanwhile, Sarah Goodhart - of Geordie Shore fame - put on an eye-popping display in her partially sheer bodycon dress.

Making sure to ooze glamour while out with her MTV pals, Sarah left little to the imagination in her form-fitting design that featured an extremely plunging neckline.

As well as putting her more than ample assets on display, the brunette beauty paraded her lengthy pins in a pair of fluffy barely-there sandals and left her luscious long locks to tumble past her shoulders in cascading curls.

She sported flawless make-up and plenty of gloss across her lips and was joined by a female companion.

Busty: Sarah Goodhart - of Geordie Shore fame - put on an eye-popping display in her partially sheer bodycon dress

Leggy duo: As well as putting her more than ample assets on display, the brunette beauty paraded her lengthy pins in a pair of fluffy barely-there sandals and was joined by a female friend

Michaella's appearance in Birmingham, meanwhile, comes after she was seen supporting Sarah's co-star Aaron Chalmers at his MMA debut on Friday night.

While there, she was spotted chatting up a storm with Celebrity Big Brother star Jamie O'Hara.

The unlikely pals were seen deep in conversation at the BAMMA event, with Michaella possibly quizzing Jamie - who was previously married to Danielle Lloyd - about his time in the Elstree compound for the Channel 5 reality show.

The emerging star is now reportedly in talks to appear on Celebrity Big Brother, where she will most likely spill the beans on her time behind bars in Peru.

Fun night? Michaella was seen giggling away as she enjoyed the company of her new reality star pals including Ex On The Beach's Hawley who was seen close behind her

Emerging star? She is now reportedly in talks to appear on Celebrity Big Brother, where she will most likely spill the beans on her time behind bars in Peru

A source told The Sun last month: 'Michaella has made no secret of her dream to become a reality TV star. Big Brother producers have been chatting to her about getting her on the next series of the show'

A source told The Sun last month: 'Michaella has made no secret of her dream to become a reality TV star.

'Big Brother producers have been chatting to her about getting her on the next series of the show, which is a pairs theme.

'Channel 5 would have loved to sign up Melissa [Reid] as well, but she isnt interested in courting fame and just wants to get on with her life.'

Michaella returned home to Northern Ireland in August last year after reportedly doing a deal with Peruvian authorities.

The pair were found in possession of 11kg of cocaine hidden inside food packets in their luggage, as they tried to board their flight from Lima to Madrid.

First claiming they were forced into the job by an armed gang, the girls were later sentenced to six years and eight months in jail in August that year, after confessing to the crime.
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Jasmine Yarbrough made an appearance at the Misha x Myer Night Party on Monday night, just hours after her public debut with boyfriend Karl Stefanovic at Fashion Week.

The 33-year-old model and shoe designer looked stunning in a black lace dress which offered a tantalising glimpse of her toned legs and decolletage.

She also posed for photographs with her friend Christian 'Prince' Wilkins, the son of Channel Nine reporter Richard Wilkins, who made a bold fashion statement in VERY rude slogan T-shirt.

Social butterfly! Jasmine Yarbrough (left) made an appearance at the Misha x Myer Night Party on Monday, just hours after her public debut with Karl Stefanovic at Fashion Week, alongside Sam Frost (centre) and Jennifer Hawkins (right)

Also attending the exclusive Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week soiree was former Bachelorette star Sam Frost, who flashed plenty of flesh in a backless satin top.

The daring outfit also featured an exposed mid-section, and she finished off her risque evening look with a pair of sparkly high-waisted trousers.

They were joined by supermodel Jennifer Hawkins and The Bachelor 2013's Anna Heinrich, who both opted for shades of blue and purple among the sea of black ensembles.

Elegant: The 33-year-old model and shoe designer looked stunning in a black lace dress which offered a tantalising glimpse of her toned legs and decolletage

He said what? Jasmine also posed for photographs with her friend Christian 'Prince' Wilkins, the son of Channel Nine reporter Richard Wilkins, who made a bold fashion statement in VERY rude slogan T-shirt

Not a secret anymore! The party comes just hours after Jasmine made her public debut with boyfriend Karl Stefanovic (left)

Jennifer Hawkins, a former Miss Universe pageant winner, flaunted her trim pins and ample assets in a VERY plunging blue floral gown.

With long sleeves and a royal blue ribbons forming a corset-style embroidery on the hips, the revealing dress was truly one of a kind.

The thigh was the limit for Jennifer, quite literally, as the dress featured two high splits on either leg almost reaching her bikini line.

Dare to bare! Supermodel Jennifer Hawkins put on a leggy display with a thigh split on either side of her gown

Legs out! Jennifer's blue and grey floral gown turned heads with its corset style embellishment on on her waist

Back in black! The Bachelorette's Sam Frost also took the plunge in a cut-out black ensemble featuring a backless design

It's all in the details! Her blonde hair was curled and pulled back into a messy bun and she accessorised with a pair of silver drop earrings and a striking red lipstick

Reality TV veteran Sam Frost also took the plunge in a cut-out black ensemble featuring a backless design.

Her blonde hair was curled and pulled back into a messy bun and she accessorised with a pair of silver drop earrings and a striking red lipstick.

Joining the Bachelor stars at the party was Anna Heinrich who kept it simple in a short high-neck velvet dress.

The mini number had a tie around the waist and she accessorised with a pair of statement hoop earrings.

Girl power! Joining the Bachelor stars at the party was Anna Heinrich who kept it simple in a short high-neck velvet dress

Short and sweet! The mini number had a tie around the waist and she accessorised with a pair of statement hoop earrings

Black and gold! Singer and actress Samantha Jade wore a plunging black lace top with a slinky gold dress

Singer and actress Samantha Jade wore a plunging black lace silk top which perfectly matched her black pointed heels.

She paired this with a high-waisted gold crushed velvet skirt featuring a left thigh split.

Neighbours actress Jodi Anasta also flaunted her cleavage in plunging black blazer and BDSM-inspired choker necklace.

That's naughty! Jodi Anasta also flaunted her cleavage in plunging black blazer and BDSM-inspired choker necklace

Keeping casual!: Former X Factor winner Dami Im went down a more casual route with a simple denim shirt

Biker chic: She teamed this with a biker-style leather jacket and a pair of navy blue leather pants that cut off at the ankle

Former X Factor winner Dami Im went down a more casual route with a simple denim shirt.

She teamed this with a biker-style leather jacket and a pair of navy blue leather pants that cut off at the ankle.

Australian model Belle Lucia went for a more glamorous look with a plunging pink and white lace dress.

The deep V-neck dress showed off her ample assets while the cinched waist highlighted her hourglass figure.

She accessorised with a brown handbag and a pair of pointed toe heels that were embellished with silver studs.

Blonde bombshell: Australian model Belle Lucia went for a more glamorous look with a plunging pink and white lace dress

Dare to bare! The deep V-neck dress showed off her ample assets while the cinched waist highlighted her hourglass figure

Back in black! Instagram model Pia Muehlenbeck stunned in a midi-length black dress with cut outs around her waist

A vision in lace: Actress and model Laura Dundovic wore a high neck lace top with flared long sleeves with a pair of high-waisted cropped pants

Instagram model Pia Muehlenbeck stunned in a midi-length black dress with cut outs around her waist.

She accessorised with gold drop earrings, gold cuff bracelets and a striking red lipstick.

Model Laura Dundovic wore a high neck lace top with flared long sleeves and a pair of cropped trousers.

She accessorised with a pair of black pointed heels and a dark red lipstick.

Make an effort next time! Sam Frost's ex-boyfriend Sasha Mielczarek went casual for the party in a plaid button-up shirt

Sam Frost's ex-boyfriend Sasha Mielczarek went casual for the party in a plaid button-up shirt. He paired this with black trousers and dress shoes.

A source told Daily Mail Australia that Sam 'bolted the other way' when she saw her former flame at the party.

Sasha was joined by model Kris Smith who kept it simple in a T-shirt and ripped black skinny jeans.

The Myer ambassador finished off his look with a black coat and a matching fedora hat.

Bromance alert! Sasha was joined by model Kris Smith who kept it simple in a T-shirt and ripped black skinny jeans
News / National

by Staff reporter

The Commander Zimbabwe National Army, Lieutenant General Philip Valerio Sibanda regrets to announce the untimely death of a Senior Army Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Samson Mpabanga.He was 60.A veteran of the liberation struggle, Lieutenant Colonel Mpabanga passed on last night after a long illness at West End Hospital in Harare. Lt Col Mpabanga was at some point under US sanctions on allegations of being directly involved in the terror campaign waged in Mwenezi East before and during the elections.Mourners are gathered at House Number 153, Mahatshula South in Bulawayo.Funeral arrangements will be announced in due course.
She's was a vision in white at the Sass And Bide runway show.

But Jennifer Hawkins swapped her chic outfit for a VERY risque dress at the Misha x Myer after party in Sydney on Monday night.

After attending the fashion show at Carriageworks, the 33-year-old looked ready to let her hair down at the exclusive soiree.

Hello boys! Jennifer Hawkins looked ready to let her hair down at the Misha x Myer after party in Sydney on Monday night, as part of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week

The former Miss Universe was all smiles for the cameras as she showed off her statuesque frame.

The dress featured two thigh-high splits which highlighted her long, toned legs.

It also boasted a plunging neckline which put her ample assets on display.

Thigh's the limit! The former Miss Universe was all smiles for the cameras as she showed off her statuesque frame

Dressed to party: As she turned for the cameras, the former beauty queen revealed the dress had a ribbon corset detail on the side

As she turned for the cameras, the former beauty queen revealed the dress had a ribbon corset detail on the side.

She completed her glamorous look with a statement choker featuring silver beads and a matching velvet clutch.

Jennifer kept her make-up look simple yet elegant with a bright red lip, a light dusting of pink on her cheeks and a hint of a smokey eye.

The details: Jennifer completed her glamorous look with a statement choker featuring silver beads and a matching velvet clutch

The model-turned-entrepreneur was one of the many celebrities who attended the star studded event.

Big names at the party included Sam Frost, Anna Heinrich, Christian 'Prince' Wilkins, Samantha Jade, Jodi Gordon and Karl Stefanovic's girlfriend Jasmine Yarbrough.

Earlier, Jennifer stunned at the Sass And Bide runway show in an all-white ensemble by the Australian label.


She recently claimed to have 'lost it' because she was so excited at shooting a scene with her childhood hero, Johnny Depp.

So Kaya Scodelario, 25, was no doubt thrilled to join him at Disneyland Paris on Sunday to celebrate the fifth Pirates of the Caribbeans movie: Salazar's Revenge alongside co-stars Javier Bardem and Orlando Bloom.

The Anglo-Brazilian beauty, welcomed her first child with husband Benjamin Walker, 34, in December and showcased her trim figure in a semi-sheer technicolour dress.

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Sparkling: Kaya Scodelario wowed in a semi-sheer dress on Sunday when she attended a Pirates Of The Caribbean event at Disneyland Paris alongside her famous co-stars

The eye-catching item cut off at the knee to show her perfectly toned legs and a pair of tall killer heels.

She wore an emerald belt around her tummy and left her luxuriant brown locks untied to frame her face. The actress accessorised with 3,220 My Twin Earrings, a 2,700 Glam'Azone ring and a Daisy double ring worth 3,820, all by Messika.

Johnny, 53, who plays Jack Sparrow, stuck to his signature quirky style, layering a striped waistcoat over a black shirt pulled up at the sleeves to reveal his plentiful tattoos.

Co-stars: Kaya was at Disneyland Paris for an event to mark Pirates of the Caribbean's fifth movie: Salazar's Revenge with Jonny Depp, Javier Bardem and Orlando Bloom

Helping hand: The Anglo-Brazilian beauty, pictured with co-star Brenton Thwaites, showcased her trim post-baby in a tulle and sequin dress

Checking out her appearance: Kaya recently welcomed her first child with husband Benjamin Walker, 34. They announced the happy news in December last year

Selfie time: The eye-catching item cut off at the knee to show her perfectly toned legs and a pair of tall killer heels

Orlando, 40, who plays Will Turner, struck a more conservative look, opting for a dark lounge suit over a black t-shirt, while Javier went for a buttoned shirt open at the neck.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge follows Captain Jack Sparrow as he searches to find the Trident of Poseidon.

Bond baddie Javier, 48, stars as an equally terrifying foe for Captain Jack - Captain Salazar, who focuses on eliminating as many pirates as possible.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge follows Captain Jack Sparrow as he searches to find the Trident of Poseidon. Pictured right, director Espen Sandberg, 45

Build-up: During the 'Pirates' weekend to mark Disneyland's 25th anniversary, the actors were greeted by hundreds of screaming fans before a Q&A session

Drama: The Q&A followed a a spectacular show featuring 25 acrobats dressed as pirates and escorting a sinking ship

During the 'Pirates' weekend to mark Disneyland's 25th anniversary, the actors were greeted by hundreds of screaming fans who lined the vast red carpet, with the stars stopping to sign autographs and dish out hugs.

After a spectacular show featuring 25 acrobats dressed as pirates and escorting a sinking ship, the films cast and crew came onstage to answer audience questions.

They then made a surprise appearance at the film's European premiere at Gaumont Disney Village. The movie is called Dead Men Tell No Tales in the USA and Japan.

Nice suprise: The stars, including Geoffrey Rush, 65 - who plays Hector Barbarossa - then made an unexpected appearance at the film's European premiere at Gaumont Disney Village

Stand out: Johnny, aka Jack Sparrow- pictured here next to Javier - stuck to his signature quirky style

Kaya, who initially shot to fame in Skins, will appear in the film as Depp's sidekick - just as Keira Knightley, 32, did back in 2003.

Keira meanwhile confirmed she will be reprising her role as Elizabeth Swann, for the first time in ten years, in the new film by appearing in its international trailer.

In a very brief appearance, the actress is seen staring wistfully at the ocean as her character Elizabeth in the trailer - clad in a typical period floral gown and a smattering of jewellery.

Suave: Orlando, who plays Will Turner, struck a more conservative look, opting for a dark lounge suit over a black t-shirt, while Javier went for a buttoned shirt open at the neck

Friends: Orlando poses with the film's producer, American Jerry Bruckheimer, 73

Screen star: He layered a striped waistcoat over a black shirt pulled up at the sleeves to reveal his plentiful tattoos

Orlando is making his anticipated return to the franchise, for the first time since 2007, and he could be back for more, thanks to his young son.

Asked if audiences still want the films by Total Film magazine, he said recently: The first thing my son wanted when we went to the Lego store was not a spaceship but a pirate ship.'

I do think theyd like to do one more. It was alluded to me that there would be room for something else. But lets see.

Back again: Orlando is making his anticipated return to the franchise, for the first time since 2007, and he could be back for more, thanks to his young son

Inspiration: Asked if audiences still want the films by Total Film magazine, he said recently, The first thing my son wanted when we went to the Lego store was not a spaceship but a pirate ship'

Deadly foe: Bond baddie Javier stars as an equally terrifying foe for Captain Jack - Captain Salazar, who focuses on eliminating as many pirates as possible

He added that the new films directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg have captured the simplicity and charm that made the original movie such a hit.

He said: I feel like theyve landed en pointe. Theyve recaptured the simplicity and charm. Ive seen the film and its fantastic. Really entertaining.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge is in cinemas on May 26.

Teamwork: Orlando also said the new films directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg have captured the simplicity and charm that made the original movie such a hit
Jemma Lucy was stopped by airport security in fears she was being sex trafficked.

The Ex On The Beach star, who was returning from a Brazilian bum lift procedure in Turkey, was left 'shaken' after the incident unfolded at Manchester Airport - all because she was holding a cuddly toy.

The tattooed beauty, 28, documented her thoughts straight afterwards - where she initially thought she was 'getting nicked', before realising the horrible - and very serious - truth.

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Jemma Lucy was stopped by airport security in fears she was being sex trafficked

Taking to Snapchat with a Simba from The Lion King toy, Jemma explained that she initially thought she was being stopped for a criminal offence.

'The weirdest thing has just happened, Im literally still shaking the border security thing, they literally just stopped me and said, "Wait a minute Jemma."

'Asking me questions about where Ive been, who I am and all this s***, they wont let me go through.

She continued telling her social media fans how she felt: 'I was absolutely shaking, thinking that I was getting nicked, thinking what the f*** have I done that I cant remember and Im getting nicked for it.'

The Ex On The Beach star, who was returning from a Brazilian bum lift procedure in Turkey, was left 'shaken' after the incident unfolded at Manchester Airport - all because she was holding a cuddly toy

Taking to Snapchat with a Simba from The Lion King toy, Jemma explained that she initially thought she was being stopped for a criminal offence

She then spoke about the moment she realised why she was actually stopped: 'Turns out its all because Ive got a teddy they thought I was being trafficked

'Like I was being bought over and trafficked as a slut. Not a slut, a prostitute or whatever.

Holding onto the sweet toy, she continued: 'They thought I was being trafficked cause I had this. Why cant I have a teddy?

'So my heart is still racing. I cant believe its a sign of being trafficked.'

Finally at home, she attempted to joke about the situation on Snapchat: 'Who you gonna sell me to first? Someone fit? How about I give you a list of the people?'

Because of a toy: She then spoke about the moment she realised why she was actually stopped, 'Turns out its all because Ive got a teddy they thought I was being trafficked'

'Who you gonna sell me to first?' Finally at home, she attempted to joke about the situation on Snapchat: '

'Joke over': She quickly realised the matter was a serious subject, stating, 'Im not making fun of people being trafficked as obviously its horrible but its just a funny situation that occurred because of a teddy bear'

However, she quickly realised the matter was a serious subject, stating: 'Joke over, Im not making fun of people being trafficked as obviously its horrible but its just a funny situation that occurred because of a teddy bear.'

Despite her confusion over the events, Jemma, who recently boosted her G-cup cleavage to a larger size, looked fabulous following her trip to Turkey for her surgical procedures.

As well as the highly popular bum lift, the bold star also got a small amount of fat removed from her chin while under anaesthetic.

Ahead of her Turkey trip, Jemma blasted a friend who spilled the beans on the reason behind her trip.

She branded the insider who sold her story a 'c***', and disclosed that she had only spoke of her intentions to four people.
She's the Australian model who could be a long lost Kardashian sister.

And Belle Lucia certainly stole the show at the Misha x Myer after party in Sydney on Monday night.

The half-German, half-Portuguese beauty wore a pink and white lace dress that flaunted her incredible figure.

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Racy in lace! Kardashian lookalike model Belle Lucia stole the show at the Misha x Myer after party in Sydney on Monday night

Belle, who has also been compared to Baywatch star Carmen Electra, is busy making a tour of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

And at the exclusive soiree at Bondi Icebergs, she turned heads in her plunging frock which showed off her busty assets.

The dress was cinched at the waist and highlighted her perfectly hourglass figure.

Pretty in pink! The half-German, half-Portuguese beauty wore a plunging pink and white lace dress that flaunted her incredible figure

She paired the dress with pink pointed toe heels and accessorised with a brown leather handbag and silver drop earrings.

Belle's make-up complemented her exotic features, with a bronzed glow, soft brown smokey-eye and a nude lipstick.

Despite being a newcomer on Sydney's social scene, Belle already has over 475,000 Instagram followers.

Rising star: Despite being a newcomer on Sydney's social scene, Belle already has over 475,000 Instagram followers

Many talents! Now a registered nurse, Belle is making waves with TMZ calling her the 'new improved Carmen Electra'

Now a registered nurse, Belle is making waves with TMZ calling her the 'new improved Carmen Electra'.

Last year, GQ magazine voted the beauty as their Instagram Woman of the Week.

The accompanying write-up stated: 'Belle is know in the modelling scene for her sun-kissed and soft look, and her luscious lips.'

Her olive complexion and full lips also draws comparisons to 19-year-old reality TV star and beauty entrepreneur Kylie Jenner.

Belle's selfies on Instagram regularly attract over 10,000 'likes' with fans commenting on her radiant beauty.

Can you see the similarity? Belle's olive complexion and full lips also draws comparisons to reality TV star and beauty entrepreneur Kylie Jenner (left)
She recently stated that she finds it 'so old fashioned' to engage in the conventional practice of wearing matching earrings.

And Kate Moss will now get to share her own irreverent take on jewellery through her very first eponymous line, after teaming up with Brazilian designer Ara Vartanian.

The British beauty, 43, has chosen a most eye-popping way to unveil her designs - posing topless alongside a shirtless man as they sport bold gold jewellery items.

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Golden girl: Kate Moss has gone topless alongside a shirtless male model to promote items from her new jewellery line, Kate Moss Designs

Gem: Kate Moss Designs features includes 18-carat gold, diamond, red garnet and amethyst

The supermodel is seen looking away from the camera lens as she links fingers with her counterpart, with their strategically placed hands barely protecting her modesty.

Limited edition Kate Moss Designs - which includes 18-carat gold, diamond, red garnet and amethyst - is set to debut on Wednesday.

With prices staring at 700, the range will be available to buy from 17 May at Ara Vartanian store in London and luxurious department store Harvey Nichols.

Stunning: Kate proved her status as a supermodel as she smouldered for the camera in the shots - her striking natural beauty clear to see

Rising talent: The stunning images saw Kate star alongside four budding models from her own agency Kate Moss Agency - Elfie Reigate, Luka Isaac, Louis Baines and Anna Lea Gardner

Kate's foray into the jewellery market follows her successful fashion collaborations with the likes of Topshop and Equipment.

The stunning images were shot at Moss' Cotswolds home, and saw the blonde star alongside four budding models from her own agency Kate Moss Agency - Elfie Reigate, Luka Isaac, Louis Baines and Anna Lea Gardner.

The unveiling of the mother-of-one's line comes a day after the Croydon-born beauty spoke about her love of wearing mismatched earrings - a fad embraced by such stars as Gwyneth Paltrow and Ivanka Trump.

Picturesque: The images were shot at Moss' gorgeous Cotswold home

Gorgeous: The young models stunned in the boho-themed shoot, clad in an endless selection of rings and bracelets

Luxurious: With prices staring at 700, the range will be available to buy from 17 May at Ara Vartanian store in London and luxurious department store Harvey Nichols

Quirky: The shoot also saw a number of male models debuting items from the range against their bare chests

New venture: Kate's foray into the jewellery market follows her successful fashion collaborations with the likes of Topshop and Equipment

In an interview with The Telegraph Magazine, the model said: 'Nobody wears pairs of earrings any more; it's old-fashioned. I like to throw it on, mix and match earrings. It's cooler when it's not styled so much.'

She added that the unconventional style of the earrings in the new range reflect this element of her style, explaining: 'It's clever the way Ara does extravagant jewels but makes them look modern.

'He twists it up so you don't look like an old lady wearing big diamonds; you can actually wear big diamonds and look cool.'

Despite her remarks, Kate has recently been seen wearing matching earrings in public.

She's a fan: She recently praised the style of the designer she has collaborated with, stating: 'It's clever the way Ara does extravagant jewels but makes them look modern'

Debut: The line, a collaboration with Brazilian designer Ara Vartanian, will debut Wednesday

She was pictured last week wearing matching gold hoops for a walk in the park.

Asymmetrical earrings were seen on several spring catwalks this year, in shows by designers including Erdem and Sportmax.

Gwyneth Paltrow was early to the trend, wearing odd earrings in 2013 at the Iron Man 3 premiere in Hollywood.

Last month, Ivanka Trump wore eye-catching mismatched earrings on her first overseas trip as adviser to her father President Donald Trump.
He beat Asim Chaudhry, David Mitchell and Harry Enfield in the Male Performance in a Comedy Programme category at Sunday night's BAFTAs.

But Steve Coogan was no-where to be seen as the prestigious ceremony took place at London's Royal Festival Hall.

Instead, he was holed away with John C. Reilly in the Black Country on the set of their Laurel and Hardy biopic Stan & Ollie.

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That's commitment! Steve Coogan skips the BAFTAs and misses collecting his Male Comedy Performance gong to join John C. Reilly on set of Laurel and Hardy biopic

Filming outside what appeared to be a primary school, surrounded by child actors in period dress, the actors bowled onlookers over with how incredible they look as the iconic comedians.

The 51-year-olds looked the spitting image of the American legends as they pottered arounf the West Midlands location.

Steve didn't seem fussed that he wasn't able to collect his award for his role in Alan Partridge's Scissored Isle.

Historically accurate in their clothing, Steve channeled the 50s style of dress with a grey waistcoat, cream shirt and slicked back hair.

Double take: Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly, both 51, were virtually unrecognisable as they they transformed into Laurel and Hardy

He also appeared to be wearing a crisp white apron, channeling his character, Stan Laurel.

John wore a loud tie, with red wheat detailing on it, a blue shirt and braces.

He looked every inch the part of Oliver Hardy, and also sported an apron.

Legends: Stan Laurel (L) and Oliver Hardy (R) were Hollywood's most iconic double act

Spitting image! Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly shoot more scenes as Laurel and Hardy for upcoming biopic

It was announced at the beginning of 2017 that the funnymen were set to take on the feat of the historic comedy duo for the silver screen.

The film is titled Stan & Ollie and was written by Jeff Pope - who worked with Steve on Oscar-nominated Philomena.

The movie follows the story of their final tour in 1953, which saw them visit a number of music halls across the UK to entertain their fans one last time.

On location: Filming outside what appeared to be a primary school, surrounded by child actors in period dress, the actors bowled onlookers over with how incredible they look as the iconic comedians

Suited and booted: Historially accurate in their clothing, Steve channeled the 50s style of dress with a long belted grey coat whilst John also looked the part in a smart grey suit

Despite a low turnout at first, their stage farewell became a hit although Hardy was suffering with ill-health and they were coming to the end of their careers.

With Jon S Baird directing the anticipated film, Head of BBC Films Christine Langan previously said Steve and John were 'dream casting'.

Langan told BBC: 'John C Reilly and Steve Coogan are dream casting for Stan & Ollie, bringing to life with uncanny accuracy and irresistible gusto the genius creative marriage that Jeff Pope's script explores so lovingly.'

Taking it on: Steve will be playing Englishman Stan Laurel who was born in Ulverston but he flew further a field and set up home in the US in the hope to find fame

Englishman Stan Laurel was born in Ulverston - then in Lancashire, now in Cumbria - before he flew further a field and set up home in the US in the hope to find fame.

It was in 1927 that Laurel was teamed up with heavyset Georgia native Oliver Hardy for short film Putting Pants on Philip - despite both having had successful careers of on their own merit.

They became known for their signature tune The Dance of the Cuckoos which was played over the opening credits of their films.
He's been hard at work filming scenes for the upcoming Mission Impossible 6 movie.

But Tom Cruise, 54, still took time out of performing to acknowledge his fans in Paris, on Monday.

The Hollywood star's enviable looks were on full display as he grinned at crowds who were watching the stunning stunt set pieces from the docks.

Mission grin-possible: Tom Cruise, 54, took time out of performing to acknowledge his fans in Paris, on Monday. The film star was spotted rehearsing stunts in a speedboat when he waved over to onlookers

Tom was working hard on a speed boat rehearsing some of the high-octane scenes for the upcoming picture.

Dressed in all black, Tom wore a distressed-leather biker jacket with fitted black jeans and a muscles-hugging black t-shirt.

Returning as Ethan Hunt for the sixth installment of the espionage thriller, the film is set to involve some of the franchises most dangerous stunts yet - as shown by the risky water sequence.

Smile and wave: The Hollywood star's enviable looks were on full display as he grinned at crowds watching the stunning stunt set pieces

All action: Tom was working hard in a speed boat rehearsing some of the high-octane scenes for the upcoming picture

Though most of the details of the plot remain secret, Skydance Media CEO David Ellison revealed that Tom will be performing the biggest stunt sequence of his career.

Ellison told Collider: 'What Tom is doing in this movie I believe will top anything thats come before. It is absolutely unbelievablehes been training for a year.

'It is going to be, I believe, the most impressive and unbelievable thing that Tom Cruise has done in a movie, and he has been working on it since right after Rogue Nation came out [in 2015]. Its gonna be mind-blowing.'

Danger: Returning as Ethan Hunt for the sixth installment of the espionage thriller, the film is set to involve some of the franchises most dangerous stunts yet

Relaxed: Dressed in all black, Tom wore a distressed-leather biker jacket with fitted black jeans and a muscles-hugging black t-shirt

Tom looked in pristine physical condition as he waved to his fans.

Fitness has always been one of Cruise's assets. In fact for the last Mission Impossible film, he famously trained to be able to hold his breath for six minutes.

'Normally in underwater sequences, people hold their breath for 10 seconds, 15 seconds max,' Cruise explained in a behind-the-scenes video for Access Hollywood.

Speeding: The speedboat raced through the water while fans watched on from the banks

Tough guy: Fitness has always been one of Cruise's assets - he famously trained to be able to hold his breath for six minutes for the previous Mission Impossible film

'So I had to prove to everyone that it was actually safe and spend time with the safety guys and the safety officers to show them not only is it safe, it's better that I know how to hold my breath because I'm going to be very relaxed.

'No-one's going to have to rush in. No-one has to panic.'

Meanwhile, fans of Hollywood hunk Henry Cavill were delighted to see the star on set last Saturday.

Henry has notably grown a mustache for the role, and it's not yet certain which character he is playing.

Knees up: Original cast member Ving Rhames was also seen filming on location

He was seen on the set looking his normal brooding self, mostly waiting around and getting make-up applied.

It was announced earlier in the year that the Man Of Steel actor Henry had officially been cast in Paramounts upcoming sequel.

The show's director Christopher McQuarrie announced it on Instagram.

He posted: 'Say, @henrycavill. Had a thought. Curious if youre interested in a role in the 6th installment of Mission: Impossible. No pressure.'

Henry responded: 'How can I say no to a man with such perfect hair..'



New blood: It was announced earlier in the year that the Man Of Steel actor Henry had officially been cast in the film

The filmmaker replied back: 'Excellent. Just a few caveats: must enjoy extreme heights, high speeds, motor vehicles of all varieties (especially aircraft), practical stunts, firearms, and sporadic exposition. All good?'

'@christophermcquarrie only if I get to fly for real,' Henry quipped back, referring to his other famous role as Superman.

'@henrycavill I do believe I specified practical stunts. You in?' came the reply.

To which Henry posted: 'Oh ok..Im in!'

The director ended things with: '@henrycavill Outstanding. Welcome aboard. Your social media account will self destruct in 5 seconds.'

The director wrote the screenplay for the movie, and other cast members include Rebecca Ferguson and Jeremy Renner.

Set for a July 27, 2018 release, Tom is also a producer on the project; he has played secret agent Ethan Hunt since 1996.
Dakota Johnson made a special stop to collect three gorgeous bunches of flowers on Mother's Day.

The 27-year-old daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson was spotted collecting the blooms at an LA grocery store on Sunday.

Chic shopper: Dakota Johnson, 27, covered up in a casual ensemble for a shopping trip in Los Angeles on Sunday

The beauty rocked a dark multi-colored cardigan that fell long to her thighs.

She sported a cute pink top and dark denim pants that hid her svelte physique.

The bombshell kept her brunette tresses long and loose while she kept a pair of retro shades on her head.

Flower power: The actress was seen in a woven cardigan and dark denim as she carried a bundle of bouquets

Dakota's next project is a remake of Dario Argento's horror classic Suspiria, originally shot in 1977.

'It feels like we're not making this for anyone but ourselves, which is how I would like to feel all the time when I make films,' she said of the film in the February edition of Vogue.

'I know that's not going to happen, but the thing about Fifty Shades is that even if it's commercial and mainstream, the subject matter isn't. In that way I can do something mass but stay true to my weird interests.'

In the revival, the rising star plays the innocent American ballerina Susie Bannion alongside actresses Chloe Grace Moretz and Mia Goth, who all play students at a mysterious dance academy.

Tilda Swinton - who's collaborated with the film's director Luca Guadagnino several times before - takes on the role of Madame Blanc, the school's stern headmistress.

Suspiria wrapped up principal shooting in Berlin in March and is set for a late 2017 release.
She is a Victoria's Secret Angel who won Model of the Year in 2016.

But Bella Hadid has revealed she has sleepless nights worrying about when her modelling career will end.

The fashionista, 20, told Compelo she finds it frightening that she can influence so many young people.

Career worries: Bella Hadid has revealed she has sleepless nights worrying about when her modelling career will end

She said: 'I want to enjoy the ride because you never know where the end is.

'Thats what really freaks me out and worries me at night when Im going to sleep.'

The model, who has walked down the catwalk for Givenchy, Chanel and Ralph Lauren, said she rarely gets time off.

She said: 'When Im really intense I will honestly work for four months straight and then Ill have one weekend off and then Ill go straight back to work.

Eye on the future: In an interview with Compelo, she said: 'I want to enjoy the ride because you never know where the end is.'

'People think that in between I have so much time off but I only ever take two days off every two weeks, at the maximum.'

Bella told the site how she could never have imagined how successful would be three years ago.

The model, who started studying photography at the Parsons School of Design in New York City in 2014, said she would love to be a designer one day.

Young star: The fashionista, 20, was signed to IMG in 2014 and has walked the runway for Victoria's Secret, Chanel and Givenchy

The exclusive interview comes after Bella confessed that she has been put off romance and is no longer on the lookout for a boyfriend.

She insisted she is happy flying solo and wants to be as 'independent as possible.'

In an interview with Grazia magazine, Bella explained: 'I'm focused on myself.

Fashion forward: Bella moved to New York to study photography at the Parsons School of Design in 2014 but had to put her studies on hold when she became a successful model

'It's like I'm finally getting to the point where I can just think about what I want to do and the places I want to go.'

She was signed to IMG models when she moved to New York and stopped her studies when her career took off.

Bella started working as a model the year after her sister Gigi, 22, moved to the Big Apple and singed with IMG.

Sibling support: A year before Bella moved to the Big Apple, big sister Gigi, 22, was signed to IMG and was named model of the year in 2015

Gigi was also named Model of the Year in 2015 and has walked in runway shows for Chanel, Versace and Marc Jacobs.

Bella shot her first Vogue cover in May 2016, when she appeared in the Turkish edition.

She has also graced the cover of the glossy magazine in Italy, China, France and Japan.
With her bleached blonde hair, skinny frame and tanned skin, Donatella Versace is an icon of the fashion world.

And all it took was a brassy wig - and plenty of make-up, to transform Penelope Cruz into the Italian fashion designer.

Cruz was seen for the first time in character as she filmed on location in Miami on Monday.

First look: Penelope Cruz transformed into Donatella with a blonde wig and plenty of make-up on set of Gianni Versace biopic in Miami on Monday

Spot the difference: All it took was a brassy wig - and plenty of make-up, to transform Cruz, right, into the Italian fashion designer, seen in 2007, left

After arriving at her trailer looking like her usual brunette self, the actress soon after emerged with perfectly sculpted eyebrows and a face full of make-up, wearing Donatella's trademark blonde wig.

The film crew tried to keep Cruz hidden, leading to an undignified entrance through the dumpsters at the service entrance to the legendary Versace mansion, where filming of the Gianni Versace biopic is taking place.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is based on Maureen Orth's 1999 book Vulgar Favors. The 10-episode series is set to air next year.

The fashion world was stunned when Versace was gunned down aged 50 in front of his opulent beachside estate in July 1997.

The death was on the front pages constantly until it was eclipsed by the death of Versace's friend and muse Princess Diana just a few weeks later.

Versace's right hand woman: Donatella always worked closely with her brother - he even named a perfume, Blonde, in her honour

Donatella had always worked closely with her brother - he even named a perfume, Blonde, in her honour.

After his death she stepped into his role at the label he founded, of which she owns 20per cent.

Filming for the biopic has taken place at the scene over the last few days, with actor Darren Criss spotted wielding a gun in character as spree killer Andrew Cunanan.

Quick change: Penelope arrived at her trailer looking like her usual brunette self

Edgar Ramirez, who plays Versace himself, was pictured face down on the marble stairs in front of a black gate featuring the icon's gold Medusa logo.

At the time of Versace's murder, Cunanan was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives after killing five men in just three months.

He used the gun with which he killed Versace to kill himself eight days later, while hiding out in a house boat in the area.

Fabulous Versace: Edgar Ramirez, who plays Gianni himself, was on set last week

Dramatic: Ramirez was seen filming Versace's last moments with Ricky Martin, who play his long-term lover Antonio DAmico

Executive producer and director Ryan Murphy's first American Crime Story aired in 2016 and the anthology series took home several awards including Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made For Television and a Best Actress win for Sarah Paulson at the Golden Globes.

Other notable names in the project include Ricky Martin as Versace's long-time lover Antonio DAmico.
Opinion / Columnist

"At a time that long-suffering Zimbabweans are struggling to make ends meet, President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF is splurging up to $60 million on a new fleet of cars, trucks and buses, ahead of next year's eagerly-awaited national election," reported the Daily News."This also comes as the country's stone-broke government is planning to splash millions more on brand new cars for traditional leaders, in a move that has been roundly condemned as "sickening vote buying" by Zanu PF ahead of the watershed polls - and not withstanding other more urgent needs."Bad news is like a migraine headache, it does not matter how often, for how long and never mind that this has been going on for years; each attack is as painful as ever. You never ever get used to the pain you not to feel it! Zimbabweans are the poorest in Africa, according to AfrAsia Bank report, how can the ruling party be squandering millions on new party cars and buying votes when even the most basic services such as health and education are all but collapsed. This does not make any sense!"As the MDC and also as the country's largest and most popular political party, this is why we are strenuously pushing for electoral reforms in order to make the playing field even," was the response from Obert Gutu, MDC-T spokesman.It should be the smoothing forlorn crying of titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. But, knowing it was Tsvangirai and his MDC friends' selfish betrayal that has landing us all in this hell-on-earth; Gutu's voice is the raucous protest of a crow. Not a sound someone nursing a headache would want to hear!The people of Zimbabwe must never forget that the nation would have finally rid itself of Mugabe's corrupt and tyrannical regime in 2013 if only Tsvangirai and company had implemented the democratic reforms and thus stopped the vote rigging. SADC leaders warned MDC not to contest the July 2013 elections with no reforms in place but were ignored.Since the rigged elections, MDC leaders vowed not to contest any more future elections until all the reforms are implemented. Yes, is was going to be a much tougher challenge to get the reforms implemented post the GNU but it is not an impossible task.To date, MDC has failed to get even one reform implement and it is clear they have given up. The party has certainly not "strenuously pushing for electoral reforms"; Gutu is lying.MDC leaders are not supposed to contest the next elections according to SADC's advice and the party's own "No reform, no election!" resolution. And yet Tsvangirai and company are preparing to contest the elections regardless of there being no reforms in place and the certainty the elections will be rigged."How are we supposed to compete with a mafia organisation that has looted, ransacked and grabbed the country's natural resources to push its wicked and nefarious political agenda?" came the hypocritical raucous cries of Obert Gutu.MDC contested the flawed 2013 elections, against SADC advice, because they were after the few gravy train seats Zanu PF gives away as bait. By contesting the elections the opposition are giving the process the modicum of democratic legitimacy, the political oxygen Zanu PF needs to avoid the fiasco of the 2008 elections resulting in the GNU.MDC are, once again, ignoring SADC advice and their own party resolution to contest the 2018 elections with not one reform in place for the same gravy train seats. But to listen to the hypocrites, they want to make it appear as if they are contesting the flawed elections against their better judgement and they are doing us all a great favour  that is what makes their treacherous betrayal so, so patronising and irritating!Zimbabwe's economic meltdown is so serious and the suffering it has brought so bad, the country cannot afford another rigged election. It is now incumbent on the people to stop the opposition selling-out on implementing the reforms by once again contesting the flawed elections. Tsvangirai & co. must be pressured to honour their own "No reform, no election!" resolution. They have sold-out in the past, they must not be allowed to do so this time!
They tied the knot in a romantic ceremony two years ago.

And Geri Horner shared a sweet throwback snap from her and husband Christian's wedding day on Instagram on Monday to mark the anniversary.

The former Spice Girl, 44, looks every inch the beautiful bride in the black and white picture, as her beaming Formula One boss husband sits in the car next to her.

Clutching her wedding bouquet, Geri is seen in her stunning lace gown, flashing a broad smile.

The mother-of-two captioned the snap with the words: 'Time flies ! We've been married two years today. Happy anniversary @christianhornerofficial '

Her husband Christian, 43, also posted a throwback snap on their second anniversary, writing on his Instagram page: '2 years ago today this happened!!! Happy anniversary @therealgerihalliwell xx'

Loved-up: Geri Horner shared a sweet throwback snap on Instagram on Monday to mark her and husband Christian's second wedding anniversary

The couple tied the knot at St Mary's Church in Woburn, Bedfordshire, in May 2015, after announcing their engagement six months earlier.

Geri and Christian announced the birth of their baby son Monty on social media in January.

They revealed the news in a cute Instagram snap, writing beside a snap of the tot's feet: 'Montague George Hector Horner arrived this morning, a beautiful little brother for Bluebell and Olivia.'

Happy couple: The couple - pictured with their baby son Monty - tied the knot in May 2015, after announcing their engagement six months earlier

Speaking to The Times recently, Geri revealed that she considered Monty to be a 'miracle'. She explained: 'I feel incredibly lucky to have conceived naturally at my age, 44. I see it as a miracle.

'Trust me, I can still moan like the rest of them but, equally, I remind myself every day that this is an absolute gift.

'This time I gained more weight physically, but this time the baby was bigger, I think. During pregnancy you never know if its cake or baby!'

Geri shares Bluebell Madonna, ten, with screenwriter Sacha Gervasi, while Christian, the Principal of the Red Bull Formula One racing team, shares a daughter Olivia, with his ex-wife Beverley Allen.
With a new film to promote, Brad Pitt is emerging from the self-imposed exile to which he retreated following his split from Angelina Jolie.

And in doing so, the slimmed down, newly sober actor is opening up about his new life as a single man.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press to promote War Machine, the 53-year-old said he was spending his time 'keeping the ship afloat' and 'figuring out the new configuration of our family.'

'I'm not suicidal': Brad Pitt opens up about moving on from Angelina Jolie... and 'figuring out' his new family life

'Kids are everything,' Pitt said, of his six children with Angelina. 'Kids are your life. They're taking all the focus, as they should anyway.'

And he directly addressed his own mental health, stating: 'I'm not suicidal or something.'

Adding: 'There's still much beauty in the world and a lot of love. And a lot of love to be given. It's all right. It's just life.'

In his first post-separation interview last month, to GQ , Pitt was unusually candid, speaking frankly about his struggles with alcohol and the pains of dividing their family.

He continued this when talking to AP, explaining: 'I've got no secrets. I've got nothing to hide. We're human and I find the human condition very interesting. If we're not talking about it, then we're not getting better.'

Moving on: Brad kept out of the limelight as he reassessed his life following his split from Angelina Jolie in September

However he was keen to steer the focus from himself to his new film - Pitt plays a four-star Afghanistan commander in the upcoming Netflix war satire War Machine.

And he joked that he found a surprising connection with his character: a swollen ego, and the damage done.

'Hubris is a trap and it's the trap of every great nation that has been number one for too long. You start believing your own stink,' Pitt says. 'Anytime I've gotten in trouble, it's because of my own hubris.'

Pitt's new film, written and directed by the Australian filmmaker David Michod (Animal Kingdom), is based on Michael Hastings' 2012 book The Operators, which chronicled Gen McChrystal's tumultuous and short-lived stewardship of the war in Afghanistan.

As they were: Brad is pictured with his wife Angelina Jolie and their oldest children Zahara Pax and maddox (just out of shot) during their long relationship

Single mother: Angelina with the couple's three youngest children, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne, on Sunday

War Machine, which debuts on Netflix May 26, takes a slightly fictionalized approach. Pitt's character is named Gen Glen McMahon, but the events and personalities covered correspond accurately with Gen McChrystal's downfall.

The switch, made after the project was announced, saved the film from some potentially thorny legal issues.

'We had no interest in impugning General McChrystal or any of his guys,' said Pitt. 'For me, the problem is more systematic.'

'The impetus for me was a visit to Walter Reed,' added Pitt, who visited the military medical center in 2014 .

'Those young men and women - who are absolutely heroic in a very harrowing situation - their lives are forever changed and so are their families. It just really made me question who is spending this currency of dedication. Who's writing the check? Who's making the order?'

Particularly galling to Pitt was the request last week by advisers to President Donald Trump and military officials for several thousand more American troops in Afghanistan, a war that has already spanned more than 15 years.

It's time to rethink what 'winning' means, he says.

'Nothing that we've ever done has said that more troops are going to do anything but cause any more damage, more loss of life and limb,' said Pitt.

'We talk a lot about supporting our troops but I think supporting our troops is much more than giving them money and a pat on the back. I think it's being responsible to how we use that ultimate dedication.'

Inspiration: In War Machine Pitt's character is named Gen Glen McMahon, but the events and personalities covered correspond accurately with Gen Stanley McChrystal's downfall (McChrystal is seen in March 2010)

Trump's top advisers have said the president has not made any final decision about adding more troops in Afghanistan.

In War Machine, Michod summons some of the spirit of war comedies like Catch 22 andM-A-S-H." The film captures an American military driven by politics, illusions and personal aspirations.

Pitt's general, with a deeper, gruffer voice than McChrystal's, comes charging into Afghanistan with outlandish delusions of grandeur and departs amid self-inflicted scandal.

Single man: Brad steps out in Los Angeles this spring; following the breakdown of his marriage he slimmed down and quit drinking

'We were tapping into a melding of war and comedy - two things that used to co-exist quite conformably, but in this day and age don't,' said Michod.

Pitt said he discussed the film with McChrystal.

'I feel for him,' said the actor. 'He's a product of us. He's us. McChrystal, who retired from the Army shortly after resigning command, has since launched a management consulting firm and penned a memoir. He declined to comment when approached by AP.

Little about War Machine is typical for a Hollywood production. It would have never gotten made, Pitt said, without Netflix. The streaming service bankrolled the film for $60 million, making it one of Netflix's most ambitious projects yet.

'The degree of difficulty on this one was ten, said Pitt, 'Which is what makes it worth it for me to go get in front of the camera now.'

Through his production company Plan B, Pitt has become a remarkably successful producer.

He was behind two of the last three best-picture winners (Moonlight, '12 Years a Slave) as well as other acclaimed releases like James Gray's The Lost City of Z. At times, Pitt - though he's prepping numerous projects, including a possible World War Z sequel - sounded almost as though his movie star days are behind him.

'I feel myself as I'm older gravitating more to the producing side than being in front of the camera,' said Pitt. 'It's a big commitment, a film, and it does take you away from your family.

'I just have to balance that. It's not less important, itself, it's just not as important as family. War Machine I loved because it's after something and we don't know where we're going to end up. It's a delicate tightrope to walk.'
She stars as the mother of Amy Schumer in rude and crude comedy Snatched.

But Goldie Hawn revealed how she feels women today act differently to what she was like as a young actress in Hollywood, and in particular when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex.

Speaking to the Radio Times, the actress, 71, said she likes to be romanced traditionally, but has learned to accept the overattentive efforts of men throughout her career.

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Generational difference: Goldie Hawn revealed she feels women today act differently than she did when she was a young actress

She said: 'I'm not a prude. I know what's out there and it seems to be the way that things might be moving, but women today aren't how I was.

'I liked to be pursued and I liked a male-female dance. I still do.

Revealing that she's had to navigate her way through male attention over the years, Goldie explained that she thinks most men cannot change their biology:

'Men are men. Its how we handle it. I wouldnt want testosterone running through my veins, I really wouldnt. Women are not built the way men are. Men are designed to spread their seed, that's how they propagated the world. So forgiveness is important'

The actress also said women had to be firm if men try to take advantage of them.

'Women today aren't how I was': She told the Radio Times: 'I liked to be pursued and I liked a male-female dance. I still do'

Acting family: Goldie has been in a relationship with Kurt Russell since 1983 and the pair have a son, Wyatt, 30, who is also an actor

She said: 'I would look the man in the eye and say, 'Don't ever do that again.'

'I used my words. But I'm not talking about the really heavyweight stuff.

'If you start getting groped then absolutely you fight back. You do not allow that to happen.'

Snatched is Goldie's first film since 2002 but the Hollywood legend said the gap didn't phase her.

New role: Goldie stars alongside Amy Schumer in the rude and crude comedy Snatched, where she plays the comedian's mother

Hollywood legend: Goldie shot to fame in 1969 when she won an Academy Award for her role in Cactus Flower

Dynasty: Her children Oliver and Kate Hudson, 40 and 38, are both successful actors in their own right

Read the full interview in this week's Radio Times

She said: 'It wasn't a problem for me on any level. I just go on set and do it. You don't forget that stuff.'

Goldie shot to fame in 1969 when she won an Academy Award for her role in Cactus Flower.

She starred in a string of hits in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, including Private Benjamin, Death Becomes Her and The First Wives Club.

Her children Oliver and Kate Hudson, 40 and 38, are both successful actors in their own right.

The actress has been in a relationship with Kurt Russell since 1983 and the pair have a son, Wyatt, 30, who is also an actor.
Her character Bethany Platt is currently in the midst of a traumatic ordeal, in one of Coronation Street's most shocking storylines of late.

But actress Lucy Fallon enjoyed a well-deserved day off on Monday, visiting a beauty clinic in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire.

The 21-year-old looked stylish in clashing prints during the break from filming, teaming a leopard print mini skirt with a patterned burgundy blouse.

Day off: Coronation Street's Lucy Fallon enjoyed a well-deserved day off on Monday, visiting a beauty clinic in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire

Layering a khaki suede jacket over the top, she pulled together the ensemble with a pair of maroon slippers and leather bag, adding a touch of edge with a pair of fishnet tights.

Wearing her blonde locks down in loose curls, she opted for a minimal make-up look, accentuating her eyes with a light coating of mascara.

Lucy later covered her tresses in a plastic cap as she received a exfoliating treatment at beauty clinic Therapy House.

Treatment: Lucy covered her tresses in a plastic cap as she received a exfoliating treatment at beauty clinic Therapy House

Her character Bethany has been subjected to a horrific ordeal in Coronation Street, with viewers left shocked by the soap's disturbing grooming plot.

The 16-year-old has been subject to persistent abuse by her older boyfriend Nathan Curtis, played by Christopher Harper, as well as being raped by his friend Neil.

In recent episodes, Bethany was forced to dress in a sexy outfit by Nathan for the benefit of some of his sick pals.

She is also set to stab her mother's boyfriend Gary Windass in dramatic upcoming scenes, flying at him in a drunken rage after she is forbidden to leave the house for boyfriend Nathan's seedy party.

Stylish: The 21-year-old looked stylish in clashing prints during the break from filming, teaming a leopard print mini skirt with a patterned burgundy blouse

Revealing a glimpse of the plot Tina told the Radio Times that Bethany passes out on the sofa in a drunken rage.

She said: 'Sarah and Gary manage to get her home and she wakes up on the sofa and panics when she realises where she is and that she doesn't have her phone.

'She tries to make a run for it but Gary blocks her way, she starts throwing things and stabs Gary in the arm.'

In further upcoming scenes, Bethany looks set to attempting to report the the policeman who raped her for the second time.

Harrowing plot: Her character Bethany has been subjected to a horrific ordeal in Coronation Street, with viewers left shocked by the soap's disturbing grooming plot

Dramatic: She is also set to stab her mother's boyfriend Gary Windass in upcoming scenes, flying at him in a drunken rage after she is forbidden to leave the house for Nathan's party
Zoe Ball has been seen for the first time since her boyfriend Billy Yates was tragically found dead at his home.

The TV presenter, 45, kept comfortable in a casual hoodie and jeans as she picked up a coffee at her local supermarket in Brighton on Monday.

It is the first time the Strictly spin-off host has been seen in public, following the death of her cameraman boyfriend, who was found hanged at his flat in Putney, south west London on May 4, aged 40.

Pictured: Zoe Ball has stepped out for the first time since her boyfriend Billy Yates was tragically found dead at his home

Low-key: The TV presenter, 45, kept comfortable in a casual hoody and jeans as she picked up a coffee at her local supermarket on Monday

Devastated: It is the first time Zoe has been seen in public, following the death of her boyfriend Billy Yates (above), who was found hanged at his flat in Putney on May 4, aged 40

The blonde stepped out in low-key skinny jeans and a hooded jumper with a skull on the back, as she embarked on a food shop at her local Waitrose.

Adding pink trainers and leaving her hair in its every day style, Zoe kept things comfortable and casual as she emerged from her car with a coffee in hand.

The former Live and Kicking host maintained a low profile as she collected her trolley and headed inside to stock up on food for the week.

Simple: The blonde stepped out in low-key skinny jeans and a hooded jumper with a skull on the back, as she embarked on a food shop at her local Waitrose

Hydrating: Adding pink trainers and leaving her hair in its every day style, Zoe kept things comfortable and casual as she emerged from her car with a coffee in hand

Running errands: The former Live and Kicking host maintained a low profile as she collected her trolley and headed inside to stock up on food for the week

Zoe was then seen returning to her car soon after - flashing a small smile to cameras as she headed back to her home in Hove.

It is the first time Zoe has been seen in public, since her boyfriend Billy Yates was found hanged at his home in Putney, south west London earlier this month.

The cameraman, 40, was tragically pronounced dead after paramedics were unable to revive him, having arrived minutes after he was discovered in his flat.

Grieving: It is the first time Zoe has been seen in public, since her boyfriend Billy Yates was found hanged at his home in Putney, south west London earlier this month

Homeward bound: Zoe was then seen returning to her car soon after - flashing a small smile to cameras as she headed back to her home in Hove

It has been reported that Zoe had asked a friend to check on her boyfriend because he stopped answering his phone, hours before he was found dead at his home.

The BBC radio DJ became anxious when Billy's phone kept ringing out almost a fortnight ago - so raised the alarm to a friend, who then found him dead at his flat in Putney.

A source told The Sunday Mirror: 'Zoe had been trying to contact Billy. They were very close and it wasn't like him to not take her calls.

Devastated: Her cameraman boyfriend, 40, was tragically pronounced dead after paramedics were unable to revive him, having arrived minutes after he was discovered in his flat

Raising the alarm: It has been reported that Zoe had asked a friend to check on her boyfriend because he stopped answering his phone, hours before he was found dead at his home

'That's when she raised the alarm to his friend who went round to check  and found him. She and all of his friends are devastated.'

Zoe has since pulled out of filming for the final of the BBC's new baking show Big Family Cooking Showdown with Nadiya Hussain, in the wake of the tragedy.

The Strictly: It Takes Two presenter has remained silent in person over the heartbreaking event - but took to social media last week to thank her fans for their continued support, by re-tweeting a message from her management company.

The post read: 'On behalf of Zoe Ball, we would like to thank everyone for the kind messages and support during a very difficult time.'

Taking time: Zoe has since pulled out of filming for the final of the BBC's new baking show Big Family Cooking Showdown with Nadiya Hussain, in the wake of the tragedy

Grateful: The Strictly: It Takes Two presenter has remained silent in person over the heartbreaking event - but took to social media last week to thank her fans for their support

Difficult time: Zoe received an influx of kind messages from followers after re-tweeting a message from her management team (above)

Raising awareness: She also re-tweeted a message from food blogger Jack Monroe about suicide prevention, after Billy was claimed to have suffered a number of mental health issues

The presenter also re-tweeted a message from food blogger Jack Monroe about mental health and suicide prevention.

It read: 'You don't have to 'man up' - the biggest killer of men under 45 is suicide. The strongest thing to do is talk. #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek'.

Television presenter and DJ Kate Thornton also stood in on The Zoe Ball Show on BBC Radio 2 last week - and delivered her heartfelt condolences to the presenter live on-air.

At the start of the show she said: 'Sadly our lovely Zoe Ball can't be here today.

Space: Television presenter Kate Thornton also stood in on The Zoe Ball Show on BBC Radio 2 last week - and delivered her heartfelt condolences to the presenter live on-air

Heartfelt: She said of Zoe (pictured in 2005): 'Can I just say from everyone on the show and here at Radio 2 our thoughts are with Billy, his family, and friends and of course with you Zoe'

'Before we get started can I just say from everyone on the show and here at Radio 2 our thoughts are with Billy, his family, and friends and of course with you Zoe.'

It has been reported that Zoe's tragic boyfriend fell victim to a jailed accountant who left his clients with huge tax bills.

Billy is said to have hired Christopher Lunn, who was jailed for five years in 2016 and had stars such as Sadie Frost and Fiona Bruce among his clientele.

Lunn filled out inflated fees and expenses on tax returns in order to reduce taxable profits, but often left his customers with huge bills to front.

Tense: It has been reported that Zoe's tragic boyfriend fell victim to a jailed accountant who left his clients with huge tax bills

A source told the Sun: 'Billy suffered from depression but the strain of being left with an unexpected tax bill hit him hard.

'These sorts of things are a considerable concern for anyone  but it's particularly tough when someone already has mental health issues to overcome.'

It is not yet clear what forced him to commit suicide - but sources say he suffered both his financial problems and mental health difficulties, as Zoe followed Depression Awareness and Anxiety UK on Twitter.

In a final tragic tweet, Billy had confessed on the site that a book about depression titled How To Save Time had given him 'reasons to stay alive.'

Scammer: Billy is said to have hired Christopher Lunn, who filled out inflated fees and expenses on tax returns to reduce taxable profits, but often customers with huge bills to front

Speaking out: It is not yet clear what forced him to commit suicide - but sources say he suffered financial problems and mental health difficulties, as Zoe followed Depression Awareness, Samaritans and Anxiety UK on Twitter (above)

Since the event, it has been claimed Zoe is yet to contact his grieving parents to pay her condolences - preferring to wait for the opportune moment.

The presenter reportedly wants to tell Mr Yates' mother and father how much she loved their son 'when the time is right'.

Billy was said to have given Zoe a new lease of life following her split from husband of 18 years DJ Fatboy Slim in September, and she had only recently expressed her love for him.

She had met the 40-year-old Antiques Roadshow cameraman through mutual friends at the BBC, and the pair appeared to confirm their romance when they were seen kissing in London in January.
Her Norfolk terrier D'Artagnan is one of the best-travelled pets in the world and has visited Los Angeles, Germany and Austria.

So Lady Victoria Hervey couldn't leave her dog behind when she jetted off to Nice in time for the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.

The socialite, 40, arrived in France in a military-inspired ensemble and smiled as she pushed her teetering trolley through the terminal.

Laden with luggage: Lady Victoria Hervey arrived in Nice with five bags and her Norfolk terrier D'Artagnan in tow in time for the Cannes Film Festival

Lady Victoria shaded her eyes with tinted glasses and placed a camouflage cap with an applique butterfly on top of her golden hair.

She paired the hat with an edgy olive jacket, which was covered in military badges and medals.

The personality wore the coat with the collar up, showing off the metallic threading over the epaulettes and sleeves.

Lady Victoria matched her outerwear with a pair of grey skinny jeans and olive green trainers.

Military-inspired: Lady Victoria shaded her eyes with tinted glasses and placed a camouflage cap with an applique butterfly on top of her golden hair

Edgy: The personality wore the coat with the collar up, showing off the metallic threading over the epaulettes and sleeves

Jet-setter: In 2015, it was reported that her beloved terrier D'Artagnan had travelled 17,500 miles across continents

Her terrier D'Artagnan was lead down the corridor on a blue lead.

The socialite wheeled a trolley piled high with luggage as she left the airport.

She carried a Louis Vuitton Damier Ebene bag and one of her suitcases had a luggage tag with the letter H embroidered on it.

Designer labels: She carried a Louis Vuitton Damier Ebene bag and one of her suitcases had a luggage tag with the letter H embroidered on it

Famous: Lady Victoria signed a picture for a fan at the airport ahead of the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday

On trend: The socialite paired her green jacket with a black top and two strings of sparkling black beads, which hung underneath her coat

She has arrived in Nice in time for the start of the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.

Following the Oscars and the Met Gala, the star-studded event is host to one of the most anticipated red carpets of the year.

When Lady Victoria attended last year's festival, she made three wardrobe changes in one day.

Co-ordinating look: Lady Victoria matched her outerwear with a pair of grey skinny jeans and olive green trainers

Colourful luggage: On top of Lady Victoria's trolley was a black quilted rucksack with a white and black spotty bow attached

Frocks away: When Lady Victoria attended last year's festival, she made three wardrobe changes in one day

Laden: D'Artagnan looked up quizically at Lady Victoria as she made her way through the airport lugging her many bags

The socialite became an 'It Girl' in the 1990s and modelled for Christian Dior.

Lady Victoria appeared on Love Island in 2006 and made a small cameo in the fourth series of Absolutely Fabulous.

She was a contestant of The Jump in 2015, but she said she would only accept if D'Artagnan could come to Austria too.

TV personality: Lady Victoria appeared on Love Island in 2006 and made a small cameo in the fourth series of Absolutely Fabulous.

Reality star: The socialite was a contestant of The Jump in 2015, but she said she would only accept if D'Artagnan could come to Austria too
She welcomed her second son Racer in late October last year.

And Lara Worthington (nee) Bingle, showed off her stunning post-baby body in a snap shared to Instagram on Tuesday, while she vacations in France.

The 29-year-old looked sensational in a high-cut black swimsuit, that revealed her lean legs and offered a hint of cleavage.

One hot mama! Lara Worthington (nee) Bingle, 29, flaunted her slender post-baby body in a high-cut swimsuit just six months after giving birth to son Racer

'Morning,' Lara captioned the photo alongside the hash-tag #edenroc.

Standing outside of the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Atibes, France, the model highlighted her stunning frame in a black high-cut swimsuit.

The design showed off her bronzed and lean legs, while the strapless design offered just a hint of cleavage.

Raising her lithe arms, Lara concealed her face as she blocked out the sun.

Jetsetter: The stunning snap follows Lara's whirlwind Sydney trip, where the entrepreneur promoted tanning and beauty line, The Base

The image follows Lara's whirlwind Sydney trip, where the entrepreneur promoted her tanning and beauty line, The Base.

While actor husband Sam Worthington, 40, was presumably back at the couple's home base of New York with their son Rocket, two, Lara brought along her precious little boy Racer, six months.

The blonde beauty secretly married Sam in December 2014, welcoming Rocket in March 2015, and Racer in October last year.

Lara told Today Extra just recently, her secret to juggling work with family life is not 'talk about work at home.'

Bundle of joy: The blonde beauty secretly married Sam in December 2014, welcoming Rocket (pictured) in March 2015, and Racer in October last year

Balancing act: Lara told Today Extra just recently, her secret to juggling work with family life is not 'talk about work at home'

The former reality star said the key to making her and Sam's marriage work along with their busy careers, is a rule to not spend more than a fortnight apart from one another.

'We never do more than two weeks apart, two weeks apart is kind of our rule,' she said.

'And I don't think it is good for our family to be apart for any longer - nothing is that important.'

Loved-up: 'We never do more than two weeks apart, two weeks apart is kind of our rule,' she said

While claiming that working on her skincare line The Base made her a better parent, Lara revealed that her and Sam 'don't ever talk about work at home.'

'For me personally, I am a happier and better mum when I am working and juggling,' she said.

'I have the most amazing and supportive husband who allows me to achieve my goals,' Lara gushed.
Romance is dead they say.

It certainly appeared to be on Made In Chelsea.

You knew the whole concept of romance was in trouble when the closest it could come to a happy couple was Louise Thompson and Ryan Libbey.

Julius and Ella were back together despite Ellas participation in a triple kiss with the shows new sex-crazed characters Mimi The Easy Canadian and dashing, dastardly, dick Harry Baron.

MIC lovebirds: You knew the whole concept of romance was in trouble when the closest it could come to a happy couple was Louise Thompson and Ryan Libbey

We got belligerent! Mimi laughed, suggesting either this was West London slang for something kinky or (more likely) she didnt know what actually belligerent meant.

As for Jamie Laing and Frankie Gaff, Harry revealed he had also spent the night in Jamie Laings bed. No, not with Jamie - or with Frankie (they claimed)...

So to be fair, the news that Ryan was moving in to Louises did qualify as them getting serious. Or at least as serious as anything can be where Louise and Ryan are concerned.

This is a huuuuuuge commitment for arse bee-cause we will prob-ab-lair be tog-eth-air for-ev-air, Louise said, trying to sound as posh as the other gals and persuade them it was remotely true.

Big step: So to be fair, the news that Ryan was moving in to Louises did qualify as them getting serious.Or at least as serious as anything can be where Louise and Ryan are concerned

For a start nothing that Louise could be described as huge while the idea that they would be togeth-air for-evair was just sill-air.

After all only a week had passed since Louise admitted she had been expecting Ryan to go down on one knee and put a ring on it (her finger that is)  a notion that caused him to squeal not with delight but in horror.

As for moving in to her flat it would have been more of a deeply romantic statement of commitment to one another if her brother Little Sammy T hadnt been living there too.

Still, on this show an arranged marriage is better than none. Not to mention more appropriate.

Future plans: Only a week had passed since Louise admitted she had been expecting Ryan to go down on one knee and put a ring on it

Has he got his own key? Lucy Watsons Sister asked, confirming that after two years waiting for Sam to Do The Right Thing the concept of having her own key was a fantasy that filled her with wonderment.

Ryan did have a key and had moved in.

I cant beeee-leeeeeve its come to this ! Louise gushed, summing up our feelings nicely. We-hee-hee har so grown hup. You hac-tu-al-air look rilly rilly happ-air ! Wart are you most hex-sided about?

Waking up next to your pretty little face every day ! Ryan grinned charmlessly, knowing full well this was a blatant lie. If he had been honest he would have at least said: waking up next to your little orange face...

Jealous? Has he got his own key? Lucy Watsons Sister asked, confirming that after two years waiting for Sam to Do The Right Thing the concept of having her own key was a fantasy that filled her with wonderment

Ryans twisted humour didnt exactly bode well for their chances of living happily ever after.

Louise immediately expressed her surprise that he had brought so much stuff into what she pointedly reminded him was my flat.

Hi have nev-air see-hee-heeen so man-air bawx-airs in hall mair life! she proclaimed regal-air.

Uh oh: Louise immediately expressed her surprise that he had brought so much stuff into what she pointedly reminded him was my flat'

Presumably they were for storing all his proteins, muscle supplements, hair products, moisturisers, and Botox.

Ryan was what many mothers would politely call a strange boy  someone so pumped up and overly coiffeured he looked like a human cartoon of a superhero from an advert for kitchen cleaner. In Ryans mind he was obviously a living, breathing, Mr. Incredible rather than the reality (Mr. Inflatable). Or a giant, repulsive, giggling, human sex doll with hair that appeared to be made of Quavers.

Louises rebuke only provoked the usual response from a domestic bully: a show of strength.

Already having words: Hi have nev-air see-hee-heeen so man-air bawx-airs in hall mair life! she proclaimed regal-air

The TV remote will be in my hands, he made clear.

Feebly, Louise said this might be difficult given her brothers adolescent obsession with playing computer games every evening.

What am I going to do? Arm-wrestle him for it ! scoffed Ryan nastily, snapping his enormous bicep in the air to demonstrate how that would end.

(Ryans arms had so many muscles they looked like several balloons tied together to make a snake.)

Theres only one Alpha Male in this house now ! he squealed triumphantly, as if he were Russell Crowe in Gladiator rather than someone who spent more time in the gym than, um, Sam Thompson.

Rivals: Theres only one Alpha Male in this house now ! he squealed triumphantly, as if he were Russell Crowe in Gladiator rather than someone who spent more time in the gym than, um, Sam Thompson

Again to her credit, Louise tried to protest.

OK yah but you cant be like that around Sam - cos thats rilly rilly mean, she said, finally getting the picture.

Of course it didnt work.

Is this prime gaming time then hee-hee?! Ryan teased when Sam had the audacity to suggest he might sit on his sofa to use his own television. So when does The Ry-Man get his turn?

Let's celebrate: Ryan retaliated during the episodes obligatory party - which Louise claimed was a moving in celebration

It said everything we needed to know about Ryan that his idea of cool was naming himself after a high street stationary chain.

Even Louise thought referring to himself in the third person was naff.

Ryan retaliated during the episodes obligatory party - which Louise claimed was a moving in celebration.

As is her wont but strictly against his wishes, Louise was decidedly the worse for wear.

Do-hoo you-hoo mind harsking the wait-airs hif there his hany more-haw-whore wine? she slurred.

Enjoying a tipple: As is her wont but strictly against his wishes, Louise was decidedly the worse for wear

Youve finished that already have you?! Ryan spat. Good God ! Anything else?!

She was clearly sloshed and proved it when she cooed to her brother: he makes me so happ-air !

I think he might be The One ! Sam agreed, without quite going so far as to say he preferred Ryan to her previous boyfriend, Sams hero, Alik Alfus.

Poor Sammy T confessed Ryans arrival meant he had started feeling like a bit of a third wheel and feared he had been usurped as the most important man in Louises life.

Getting emotional: She was clearly sloshed and proved it when she cooed to her brother: he makes me so happ-air !

I dont want us to move apart ! Louise wailed, filling up with tears as if she was bidding Sam farewell before he went off to fight in Iraq. We have had some good times!

Youre like my best mate ! Sam declared, joining with the sobbing. Ill always be there. Ill always love you !

Its ho-vair-whelm-airng ! Louise cried, still crying. Cant we just live tog-eth-air for-ev-air ?!

Such a display of love should have been touching but could best be described as #awkward/weird  considering they were brother and sister.

Even then it didnt seem quite as disturbing as the idea of Louise being with Ryan.
It was recently revealed he made in the region of $100k to walk just one show at Mercedes-Benz Australian Fashion Week on Monday - akin to supermodels such as Linda Evangelista.

But Jordan Barrett seems to be nonchalant at the thought of being dubbed a male supermodel.

'It is just a term, it is what it is,' Jordan told the Daily Telegraph.

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Model behaviour: Jordan Barrett seems to be nonchalant at the thought of being dubbed a male supermodel. 'It is just a term, it is what it is,' Jordan told the Daily Telegraph

For the 20-year-old, he's just enjoying having fun.

'I am having amazing fun, the travel is one of the best parts. I like working with the photographers and all of the creative people that I get to see on set every day,' Jordan added.

From Sydney, Jordan will reportedly fly to France to walk for Naomi Campbell's Fashion For Relief show, as well as the celebrity-studded AMFAR event.

'I am just happy everyone is so nice that I've met along the way,' Jordan said.

But Jordan also mentioned he doesn't just want to stick to modelling and revealed his plans to explore photography and acting as alternate careers.

Jet setter: From Sydney, Jordan will reportedly fly to France to walk for Naomi Campbell's Fashion For Relief show, as well as the celebrity-studded AMFAR event

On Monday, the statuesque model was spotted touching down in Sydney and wore a casual T-shirt teamed with trousers from New York skate brand Ethik, as well as Converse sneakers.

He had his signature blonde locks back in a low ponytail and amber-coloured designer shades atop his head.

The Byron Bay-born son of convicted Gold Coast cannabis kingpin Adrian Barrett was spotted with Andy Warhol's 1975 book, The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol, in hand.

It was revealed by The Daily Telegraph on Friday the model received a whopping $100k paycheck to walk the runway for Justin Cassin's debut Fashion Week outing.

Looking cool: He rocked another all black shirt and pants ensemble with a bomber jacket

Said to be flying business class and obtaining the ultimate in VIP treatment, Jordan will also reportedly find the time for a shoot with GQ Australia.

Also making an appearance for the emergent Sydney-based menswear line was Richard Wilkins' son Christian and Sydney Swans star turned model Tom Derickx.

Later in the day, he strutted his stuff at the show in a black shirt and jacket combination with denim jeans, and boots.

For his second look he rocked another all black shirt and pants ensemble with a bomber jacket.

Discovered shopping: Jordan was 13 when he was discovered at a grocery store by Kirk Blake from What Model Management in 2011

Jordan was 13 when he was discovered at a grocery store by Kirk Blake from What Model Management in 2011.

'I was scouted in my local grocery store on the Gold Coast by a man named Kirk Blake, who has been in the industry for years,' he described in a 2013 interview.

He was stealing matches for cigarettes at the time, he later told New York magazine.

'I wanted to have a cigarette, but I couldn't get a lighter because apparently you have to be over 18, so I decided I was gonna take matches from the counter,' he said.

He captured worldwide attention at this year's Met Gala in New York City, where he was accompanied by music legend Lionel Richie's model daughter Sofia, 18.

The US-based model has been linked with numerous socialites including Paris Hilton, Hailey Baldwin, Sofia Richie, Megan Blake Irwin, Lara Stone and Sahara Ray.
Richard Marcus Taylor, who played Suge Knight in the 2015 hit movie Straight Outta Compton, was arrested Monday in connection with misdemeanor battery, as he's accused of assaulting a security guard in South Florida.

The 6ft3 Taylor, 40, was in custody at a Miami-Dade jail after an Sunday night incident in which authorities said the actor refused the guard's request to take his foot off a table as he lounged in a lobby at the Marenas Beach Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.

Taylor, a fitness buff who weighs 265 pounds, told the guard 'to leave him alone,' according to police reports, the Miami Herald reported.

Busted: Actor Richard Marcus Taylor was arrested in South Florida Sunday in connection with battery in a skirmish with a resort security guard

The guard retreated to the front desk area and prompted hotel staff to call the police. The actor, a New Jersey native, then confronted the guard, leading to a 'full physical fight,' officials said.

Police said when they showed up, they saw Taylor lift the guard up and 'slam him to the ground.'

Having his day in court: The actor received a $750 bond in his court appearance Monday

Intense: Taylor, a veteran stuntman, played rap mogul Suge Knight in 2015's Straight Outta Compton

Calm before the storm? Taylor posted a series of selfies from his vacation over the weekend

Relaxed: Taylor earlier Sunday said he was having a nice time in an Instagram clip he posted while resting on the beach

The actor said in a series of Instagram posts over the weekend that he was 'on vacation,' sharing videos of himself relaxing on the beach.

Taylor has also worked as a stuntman on productions including Luke Cage, Hostages and the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. His iMDb bio indicated he has '30 years of experience in martial arts' and has competed in tournaments before.

Taylor made a court appearance Monday where he identified himself to the judge as an actor. He was given a bond of $750.
US Treasury Department said it would work to develop and spread best practices based on the "highest" cybersecurity standards

The US Treasury Department said Saturday it will play a "leading role" in protecting the global financial system's IT infrastructure.

The statement came as a massive wave of weekend ransomware attacks struck banks, hospitals and government agencies in dozens of countries around the world.

"These global cyberattacks highlight the real world consequences of technological vulnerabilities," a senior US Treasury Department officials told reporters on the return flight from the G7 gathering of financial chiefs in Bari, Italy.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin "has made protecting America's financial infrastructure from cyberattacks a top priority."

The Treasury Department "will continue to work across agency and with international partners to develop and spread best practices based on the highest established cybersecurity standards."

President Donald Trump's administration "is committed to protecting Americans and the global financial system from the constantly evolving threat of cyberattack ... and Treasury will play a leading role in this critical national security effort."

Mnuchin said earlier Saturday that he had productive meetings with his counterparts at Bari on the need to protect the financial IT infrastructure.

G7 finance chiefs vowed Saturday to unite against cyber crime, stating that cyber incidents represent a growing threat to their economies and that tackling them should be a priority.
Microsoft is calling for a "Digital Geneva Convention" that would require governments to report computer vulnerabilities to vendors rather than store, sell or exploit them

Microsoft warned governments Sunday against storing computer vulnerabilities like the leaked one at the heart of the cyberattack that has crippled computers in more than 150 countries.

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake up call," Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post about what is being called the largest ransomware attack ever.

He warned of the danger of exploits developed by governments -- this time the NSA in America -- falling into the hands of hackers and causing widespread damage as is the case with the current attack which has crippled more than 200,000 computers around the world.

"An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen," Smith wrote.

Computers around the globe were hacked beginning on Friday using a security flaw in Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, an older version that was no longer given mainstream tech support by the US giant.

The virus spread quickly because the culprits used a digital code believed to have been developed by the US National Security Agency -- and subsequently leaked as part of a document dump, according to the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Smith argued that in cyberspace, governments should apply rules like those regarding weapons in the physical world.

He noted that Microsoft is calling for a "Digital Geneva Convention" that would require governments to report computer vulnerabilities to vendors rather than store, sell or exploit them.

"We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits," Smith wrote.
A book by investigative journalist Louise Milligan, "Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell", now includes fresh details on allegations against him, and new information claiming a cover-up within the Catholic Church

Vatican finance chief George Pell accused sections of the Australian media of interfering in the course of justice Monday as he denied new child sex abuse allegations.

Pell, Australia's most senior Catholic cleric, was interviewed in Rome by Australian police last October over historical sex assault claims against him. No charges have yet been laid.

It coincided with the final stages of a long-running national inquiry into institutional responses to child sex abuse. Pell has appeared before the royal commission three times, once in person and twice via video-link.

During his evidence, he admitted he "mucked up" in dealing with paedophile priests in Victoria state in the 1970s.

A book by investigative journalist Louise Milligan, "Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell", now includes fresh details on allegations against him, and new information claiming a cover-up within the Catholic Church.

The Rome-based Pell, who has previously denied all the accusations and suggested there was a conspiracy against him, hit out at the book's publisher and other media for detailing the claims.

"It seems that Melbourne University Publishing and some media organisations ... are interfering with the course of justice," a statement from his Rome office said.

"Cardinal Pell will not seek to interfere in the course of justice by responding to the allegations made by MUP and media outlets today, other than to restate that any allegations of child abuse made against him are completely false.

"He repeats his vehement and consistent denials of any and all such accusations, and stands by all the evidence he has given to the Royal Commission."

The statement added that Pell had received no update from the Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions or Victoria Police on the status of their investigations into him, which have been underway since February last year.

Pell was ordained in Rome in 1966 before returning to Australia in 1971 and rising to become the nation's top Catholic official.

He left for the Vatican in 2014 after being hand-picked by Pope Francis to make the church's finances more transparent, although his powers have since been reined in.
Syria's conflict has killed more than 320,000 people and displaced millions

A new round of Syrian peace talks opens in Geneva on Tuesday, overshadowed by a competing process in Astana and with rebels reeling from a major setback in Damascus.

Since it broke out in March 2011, Syria's conflict has killed more than 320,000 people, displaced millions and ravaged the country's economy and infrastructure.

Efforts to end the war are now proceeding along two rival tracks: the formal political peace process hosted at the United Nations offices in Geneva and, since January, parallel talks in Kazakhstan brokered by Russia, Iran and Turkey.

Observers say the UN appears to be scrambling to match Astana's momentum after a landmark deal signed in Kazakhstan on May 4 to create four "de-escalation" zones across some of Syria's bloodiest battlegrounds.

UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura told reporters on Monday that the Geneva talks were working "in tandem" with the Astana process.

Since the Astana deal came into effect a week ago, fighting has slowed across swathes of the country.

But in Damascus, which is not included in the deal, the government has secured the evacuation of three rebel-held districts, bringing it closer to exerting full control over the capital for the first time since 2012.

Numerous rounds of UN-backed talks have not produced concrete results, although during the last round in March the sides finally began discussing four separate "baskets" of issues: governance, a new constitution, elections and combating "terrorism" in the war-ravaged country.

Aron Lund, a fellow at The Century Foundation, said that despite Geneva's important "symbolic value, it isn't moving forward in any visible way".

"In practice, the Geneva track has largely been sidelined by the Astana track, at least for now," Lund said.

- 'Dead-end demand' -

Delegations began arriving in Geneva on Monday.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura

The Syrian government team will be headed once again by its UN ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari. The opposition will be represented by the Riyadh-based High Negotiations Committee and led again by Nasr al-Hariri and Mohammad Sabra.

"The key to success in this process is a transition to a free Syria, with no role for Bashar al-Assad or for terrorism," Hariri told reporters in Geneva.

He also welcomed a statement from the US State Department accusing Damascus of destroying the remains of thousands of murdered detainees in a crematorium.

"This is but a drop in the ocean..." Hariri said.

The HNC's continued call for Assad's ouster is seen as a non-starter by the Syrian regime.

"By design, the Geneva process revolves around this dead-end demand for a negotiated transition," Lund told AFP.

"In terms of actually trying to stabilise Syria, the main effect of pegging peace to transition has been to marginalise the UN in Geneva and shift attention to Astana instead," he said.

Rebel backer Turkey and government allies Russia and Iran sponsored the first talks in Astana in late January to reinforce a faltering ceasefire.

They have since returned for several meetings, culminating in the safe zones deal.

Assad has brushed off the upcoming Geneva negotiations as "merely a meeting for the media".

"There is nothing substantial in all the Geneva meetings. Not even one per million. It is null," Assad said in a recent interview with Belarus's ONT channel.

"As to Astana, the situation is different... This started to produce results," Assad said.

De Mistura on Monday downplayed Assad's comments, pointing out that the Syrian president had sent a large, high-level delegation to Geneva, and "they are empowered to serious discussions and they are here to work".

Syrian peace efforts have also been marked in recent months by Washington's all-but withdrawal from the process under President Donald Trump.

But de Mistura said Monday he was "encouraged by the increasing engagement, the increasing interest, by the US administration in finding a de-escalation".
Miss USA is Kara McCullough, a chemist with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

The Miss USA pageant touted American diversity, and chose an African-American chemist with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to wear the crown.

Kara McCullough from the US capital will go on to represent the United States at the Miss Universe contest.

"We regulate nuclear power plants. And I have a personal community outreach program called science exploration for kids," said McCullough, 25.

McCullough was born in Italy and also lived in Japan, South Korea, Hawaii. She was raised in the southern US state of Virginia.

As Miss USA "my plan is to inspire and encourage so many children and women (to enter) the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields," she said.

The pageant included a field of five new immigrants who spoke on air about the importance of diversity -- as if to refute US President Donald Trump's less than welcoming stand toward some immigrants and refugees.

Indeed, the runner up was Chhavi Verg, Miss New Jersey, who was born in India and speaks Hindi and Spanish.

The 2016 Miss USA, Deshauna Barber, also represented the US capital, formally known as the District of Columbia.

The pageant decides who will be the US representative in the Miss Universe contest.

The Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants for years were co-owned by billionaire Trump.

However in June 2015 the NBC network severed its ties with the now president after his offensive comments on Mexican immigrants. Following legal action Trump sold his stake in the pageants to a talent management group.
Indonesia has the fifth greatest number of premature births of any nation in the world, at 675,700 a year, according to the World Health Organization.

Tiny Indonesian baby Maryamah stared around from inside an incubator, her bright eyes swivelling left and right from under a woollen hat that was far too big for her.

When she was born prematurely, Maryamah was just 1.2 kilograms (2.6 pounds), less than half the usual weight of a newborn in Indonesia.

Now safely back at home, she is still diminutive but nestles comfortably in a small incubator lent to family, who live in a poor neighbourhood in the city of Bogor on Java island.

She is one of hundreds of premature babies born in Indonesia benefiting from the work of an engineering professor who is building incubators and lending them for free to low-income families in a bid to fill a gap in the healthcare system.

"The government has a program of public health insurance, but it cannot cover all the people," Raldi Artono Koestoer, who established the initiative, told AFP.

Hundreds of premature babies born in Indonesia are benefiting from the work of an engineering professor who is building incubators and lending them for free to low-income families in a bid to fill a gap in the healthcare system

Indonesia has the fifth greatest number of premature births of any nation in the world, at 675,700 a year, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO says that pre-term birth complications are the leading cause of death among children under five.

Babies born early can need specialist care. Incubators keep them warm and can help prevent infections.

But getting access to the live-saving devices is a huge challenge for the millions living in poverty in Indonesia.

The public insurance scheme -- introduced in 2014 -- has helped as it sometimes covers the cost of incubators for a while.

But families unable to afford the high cost of continued care are often forced to take their newborns home early.

- 'Complete success' -

Koestoer, who works at the University of Indonesia just outside Jakarta, started his lending scheme back in 2012, using his technical expertise to design and build ultra-light, portable incubators.

His interest in incubators began when he fixed one of the devices for his elder brother, a paediatrician, and then learnt how to construct them himself.

To fund the scheme, he sought individuals willing to donate 3.5 million rupiah ($260) each -- the cost of making one incubator -- and also to transport the devices to the homes of selected families. People who have signed up are generally middle-class professionals and include many in the healthcare sector.

Getting access to the live-saving devices is a huge challenge for the millions living in poverty in Indonesia.

People requiring an incubator send a text message to a special number, and if they are deemed in need, a volunteer brings one round for them.

The service began in the capital Jakarta, and has now expanded to an additional 48 cities, from the island of Sumatra in the west to the mountainous Papua region in the east.

As the service has grown, the professor has recruited two of his students to work with him, and he hopes to extend the initiative to 300 cities.

Koestoer, 62, says he has so far built 180 incubators that have helped about 1,500 babies, including twins and triplets.

"Our success ratio is 100 percent," he said. "1,500 babies -- 100 percent alive, healthy."

- 'Happiest man in world' -

The scheme has proved invaluable for Maryamah and her parents, Yulia Herawati and Prayogi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

Herawati underwent a caesarean section in February when she was almost eight months pregnant due to high blood pressure. Her baby was at first allowed to stay in a hospital incubator with the help of government insurance.

But after seven weeks, when the baby was still only 1.5 kilos, doctors said Maryamah could no longer stay in the hospital as her condition had stabilised, prompting her parents to launch a desperate search for help.

"We were slowly recovering from the shock of having a premature baby, but then we had another problem -- how were we going to take care of her at home?" said Prayogi.

After asking around, he found out about the incubator lending service from a friend.

"I sent a text message and the response was very fast. After a few minutes the operator got in touch with me, and said that the incubator can be picked up as soon as the baby is at home," he said.

Maryamah now weighs 2.4 kilograms and although she still spends a lot of time in the incubator, her parents now feel safe taking her out and playing with her.

While running the scheme is a big task, Koestoer says it all seems worth it when he meets the children he has helped.

"When a mother comes here with her baby and it is in good health, I'm the happiest man in the world," he said, speaking from his university office.
Stuffed Sumatran tigers, ivory and other wildlife trophies seized during raids are set on fire by Indonesian officials in Banda Aceh on May 23, 2016

Indonesian authorities have arrested two men on suspicion of poaching Sumatran tigers and seized a skin and bones taken from one of the rare animals, a national park official said Monday.

Awaludin and Sabian, who like many Indonesians go by one name, were detained Saturday by police and forest rangers in a village in North Bengkulu district on western Sumatra island.

Authorities acted on a tip-off from villagers who said the men often hunted for protected species in the enormous Kerinci Seblat national park, believed to be home to some 150 Sumatran tigers.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the Sumatran tiger as critically endangered and estimates as few as 440 remain in the wild.

"We tailed the men all day after being tipped off and arrested them late Saturday," national park chief Arief Tongkagie told AFP.

"They were carrying a preserved tiger skin and its bones."

The men, in their 40s, are still being questioned by police. They could face up to five years in jail if found guilty of breaking Indonesian laws that protect endangered animals.

Police are also investigating whether they were part of a larger wildlife poaching syndicate.

Poaching is a major cause of the rapid decline of Sumatran tiger populations. The creature's body parts are used in traditional Asian medicine and fetch a high price on the black market.

Apart from being hunted, the animals are also under threat from the destruction of their rainforest habitat to make way for palm oil and paper plantations.

The Sumatran tiger is the smallest of the tiger species and is distinguished by thick black stripes on its orange coat.
The 330 ploughshare and radiated tortoises seized at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Sunday were worth $276,784, an official told AFP

Malaysian customs foiled an attempt to smuggle hundreds of the world's most endangered tortoises into the country from Madagascar, a senior official said Monday.

The 330 ploughshare and radiated tortoises seized at Kuala Lumpur International Airport Sunday were worth $276,784, Abdul Wahid Sulong, deputy director of the customs department told AFP.

All of the reptiles were found alive, he added.

"It is a big haul. It could be for the local market or for re-export. We are investigating," the enforcement agency said in a statement.

Malaysian Airports Customs Deputy Director Abdul Wahid Sulong poses with seized endangered ploughshare and radiated tortoises

"Based on public tip-off, customs officials raided the cargo area of the airport and found five suspicious crates," the statement added.

"It had arrived at KLIA on an Etihad Airways flight from Antananarivo airport in Madagascar."

The golden-domed ploughshare tortoise is native to Madagascar and due to poaching is the most endangered tortoise on the planet.

Madagascar's radiated tortoise -- considered one of the most beautiful species of the animal -- is also rapidly nearing extinction due to rampant hunting for its meat and the illegal pet trade.

Abdul Wahid said the contents of the crates were labelled as stones and the address of the recipient was found to be false.

Malaysia bans the import of critically endangered animals. Anyone found guilty of the offence can be jailed for up to three years and fined.

Elizabeth John, senior communications officer of the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network (Traffic), said the tortoise haul followed on the heels of other busts of animal products originating from Africa, including rhino horn and pangolin scales.

"With the string of recent seizures of wildlife from Africa, Malaysian enforcement agencies are sending a strong warning to smugglers that they mean business," she told AFP.

John said the routes used by traffickers in recent cases point to a need for greater scrutiny of airports in the Middle East.
Dominik Stillhart, ICRC Director of Operations, says a cholera outbreak in Yemen has killed 115 people and left 8,500 ill between April 27 and Saturday

Authorities in Sanaa, which is controlled by Shiite rebels, have declared a state of emergency in the Yemeni capital, where a deadly outbreak of cholera has spread rapidly.

The Huthi-run health ministry said it was "unable to contain this disaster" and appealed for international humanitarian assistance to deal with the crisis, in a statement released overnight.

Yemen is witnessing a devastating war between the Iranian-backed Huthis and the Saudi-supported government, and less than half of the country's health facilities are functioning two years into the conflict.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday the cholera outbreak has killed 115 people and left 8,500 ill between April 27 and Saturday.

This is the second outbreak of cholera in less than a year in Yemen, the Arab world's poorest country.

The World Health Organization now classifies Yemen as one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the world alongside Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and Iraq.
Opinion / Columnist

vana vembwa havasvunuri musi umwe chete.

The Shona people have an edifying truism in their rich language that goes - '' The literal translation being that, puppies, which are born functionally blind and deaf, do not open up their eyes on the same day.Several years after most of the erstwhile benefactors of the regime changers stopped bankrolling the project due to accountability issues, Sweden has just realised now that it has been pouring tax payer's money into some bottomless pits. The Scandinavian country has finally opened up its eyelid, belatedly though.While addressing a gathering that witnessed the $1.35 million donation to the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe on Tuesday last week, Sweden's head of development cooperation, Maria Selin said they would put some stringent monitoring mechanisms to make sure that their fund was not diverted elsewhere. According to Selin, they will want to see where and how their money is used. Of course, it is known that one who pays the piper calls the tune."We do not want to see the results and we want to be able to track our investment and we need to know where the money is going. We do not accept that our money that comes from the tax payer way back in Sweden is diverted to anywhere, where it is not supposed to be," said Selin.Agreed, they are supposed to know how their grant donations are used. The only unfortunate thing is that they have realised a bit too late that their investment has been diverted elsewhere ever since they decided to directly deal with civic society and opposition political parties. Sweden has poured a substantial amount of donor funds in Zimbabwe, ostensibly for development purposes. However, the actual development on the ground is not commensurate with the funds invested. As a result, the people of Zimbabwe do not have much to thank Sweden for. Their donations have largely benefitted a few cunning individuals, mostly founders of the dubious civic society organisations.There has been incessant infighting over donor funds in most of the prominent civic society organisations in Zimbabwe. In the recent past, the United States based Kellog Foundation which used to bankroll projects in Southern Africa amounting to $350 million since 1986, withheld funding after uncovering irregularities on some of its projects. Global Fund to Fight AIDS at one time also demanded $7.3 million out of the $12. 3 million it had donated. This is just a microcosm of the grand abuse of donor funds entrusted in the hands of NGOs.It is not only in CSOs where people were on each other's throat over donor funds. The biggest beneficiary of donor funds, the MDC-T nearly collapsed after its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai abused the money in his jaunt to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for sex. It was donor funds that he used to pay $36 000 lobola for a wife he divorced 11 days later. As if that was not enough, he made a cash payment of $300 000 as an out of court settlement with his estranged wife, Locadia Karimatsenga.Basing on the cited two scenarios of donor fund misappropriation, the safest hands for same is Government.While the assistance is welcome and appreciated, Sweden and other benefactors in the West have a warped conception of development. They believe, wrongly so, that development in African context primarily entails human rights issues, gender equality, democracy and other concepts coined in the western capitals. As a result, their donations have been channelled towards this secondary class of development. Zimbabwe and Africa at large, indeed uphold these rights and they do not need any monetary incentives to espouse them. However, there are more important development areas where donor fund can be channelled to and produce lasting and solid results. Most countries in Africa including Zimbabwe have been grappling with drought induced by natural disasters. Strangely, these drought stricken Africans are expected to forget about their hunger and prioritise these funny rights that even include the devilish homosexual rights.Donors should just end at donating and not prescribe how that money must be used. All donor funds must come through the central government which is at a better position to know the developmental needs of the people. In Zimbabwe for instance, Government is currently seized with the command agriculture to ensure food security. Sweden and other donors would do well if they could focus on this area. Their donation can be felt if they fund the production of food crops in Zimbabwe and Africa in general.The donations can add value to Zimbabweans if they fund Zimbabwe's economic blue print, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-Asset). It is a brilliant blue print whose only foreseeable challenge is lack of funding. With enough funding, the blue print can see a massive socio-economic transformation for the people of Zimbabwe.Investing over a million dollars towards culture in a country whose top priority is the revival of the economy is a case of absolute misplaced priority. Sofia Calltorp, Sweden's Ambassador to Zimbabwe, said culture is "a very powerful tool in our box to promote development." It is hoped that such programmes will not be used to advance political agendas. There is an intention to sponsor certain artists so that they enhance awareness of various social issues. Hopefully those artists are not in the mould of Silvanos Mudzvowa, a political activist veiled in artist's robe.
Police who found a dismembered body being cooked on a stovetop in a Brisbane apartment in Australia thought they had stumbled on a Halloween prank, they told an inquest on May 15, 2017

Police who found a dismembered body being cooked on a stovetop in an Australian apartment thought they had stumbled on a Halloween prank, they told an inquest on Monday.

Australian chef Marcus Volke is alleged to have murdered his Indonesian transgender wife Mayang Prasetyo in 2014 and attempted to cover it up by cutting up her body and cooking it.

Police were alerted to the gruesome discovery when the building's management reported a rank smell coming from the couple's Brisbane home.

When officers arrived Volke told them he needed to lock up his dogs but instead he bolted the door and fled, hiding in an industrial bin where he killed himself.

Constable Liam McWhinney told a coroner's inquest in Brisbane that when he and his partner Senior Constable Bryan Reid got into the apartment they discovered bloodstained floors and human feet being cooked in a pot.

"Originally I thought it was some sort of sick prank... Halloween or something. When I put two and two together, I realised it wasn't a prank," McWhinney told the inquest, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Reid recalled a foul odour in the apartment.

"It was a bad smell, it was something I hadn't smelt before -- I can't really describe it," he told the Queensland coroner. "I'm thinking it could well be a murder that's happened."

Volke, who met his wife while they both worked as escorts, was seeking treatment for mental health problems in the weeks leading up to the death, the three-day inquest, which began Monday, was told.
Pakistan says Kulbhushan Sudhir Jadhav has confessed to working for Indian intelligence services but India denies he was a spy

India on Monday urged the UN's top court to stop Pakistan executing an Indian national convicted of spying, as Islamabad hit back accusing its rival of "time-wasting and political grandstanding".

In an emergency hearing called only days after India lodged its case, lawyers and officials for New Delhi urged the International Court of Justice to halt the death sentence imposed on Kulbhushan Sudhir Jadhav saying his rights had been violated by Islamabad.

Jadhav was arrested in the restive southwestern province of Balochistan in March 2016, where a separatist insurgency has raged for years.

He was "an innocent Indian national, who, incarcerated in Pakistan for more than a year on concocted charges, (has been) deprived of his rights and protection accorded under the Vienna Convention," Deepak Mittal, an official with India's ministry of external affairs, told the court in The Hague.

Mittal insisted Pakistan has failed to respond to all Indian demands for information about the case, snubbing requests for documents including the charge sheet, and has failed to provide Jadhav with consular access.

Islamabad has also not responded to a visa application by Jadhav's parents seeking to travel to Pakistan to visit their son.

- 'Miscarriage of justice' -

Jadhav "has been denied the right to be defended by a legal counsel of his choice," Mittal said at the start of day-long hearing, adding that a confession was forced out of him.

"All that we know is what we have seen in the media in Pakistan," he added.

But Pakistani representatives told the court Jadhav "has confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan".

Mohammad Faisal, from the Pakistani foreign affairs ministry, said the tribunal had been shown a video of the confession which was available on-line "for viewers to decide for themselves whether commander Jadhav is confessing voluntarily".

Faisal also showed the court a picture of a passport which he said was found in Jadhav's possession bearing a completely different "and Muslim" name.

"India has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to provide an explanation for this passport which is the most obvious indication of covert and illegal activity," added Faisal.

India has denied however he was a spy, and last week lodged a rare protest at the ICJ accusing Pakistan of "egregious violations of the Vienna convention".

The case has highlighted the recent sharp uptick in tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals, with the two sides outlining starkly different accounts.

"India believes that the farcical nature of the proceedings and unjust trial by a Pakistan military court... has led to a serious miscarriage of justice," said Mittal.

India is seeking the immediate suspension of the death sentence against Jadhav who it claims was kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring.

- 'Far-fetched' story -

But lawyer Khawar Qureshi, appearing for Pakistan, shot back that Jadhav "is a terrorist" and New Delhi's story was "far-fetched at best."

"India invoked the jurisdiction of this court improperly," he said. "This court exists to ensure that states engage in peaceful resolution of disputes. This court does not exist for time-wasting and political grandstanding."

The court's president Ronny Abraham said the tribunal would publicly deliver its decision on whether to grant an emergency stay of execution "as soon as possible."

New Delhi ultimately wants the tribunal to order Islamabad to annul the sentence.

It also wants the ICJ, set up in 1945 to rule on disputes between nations in accordance with international law, to declare that the Pakistani military court violated the Vienna Convention by imposing a death sentence on Jadhav and broke human rights laws.

India and Pakistan routinely accuse one another of sending spies into their countries, and it is not uncommon for either nation to expel diplomats accused of espionage, particularly at times of high tension. But death sentences have rarely been issued in recent years.

The case comes as relations have plummeted since a deadly attack on an Indian army base in the disputed region of Kashmir in September, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Rodrigo Duterte became Philippine president last year after promising to launch an unprecedented crackdown on crime

Philippine lawmakers on Monday rejected an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte that accused him of a crime against humanity over the deaths of thousands of people killed in his war on drugs.

The complaint alleged Duterte had adopted a state policy of extrajudicial killings that led to more than 8,000 deaths in his first eight months as president, and was involved in mass murder as well as widespread corruption in his previous stint as a mayor of a southern city.

The congressional justice committee quickly dismissed the complaint in its first day of hearings on the issue, overwhelmingly voting that it was "insufficient in substance".

"The complaint filed was frivolous. How can you proceed if the complaint has no basis," committee chairman Reynaldo Umali, who is a member of Duterte's ruling party, told reporters afterwards.

The committee vote effectively ends the impeachment case, which even Duterte's opponents conceded had little chance of prospering with the president enjoying a commanding majority in the lower house of congress.

A plenary of the lower house still needs to endorse the committee's decision, although political observers and lawmakers said there was zero chance of Monday's vote being overturned.

"We have nowhere to go (but) we will find a way to get justice," opposition lawmaker Gary Alejano, who filed the impeachment case, told reporters.

Duterte, 72, won presidential elections last year after promising to launch an unprecedented crackdown on crime in which tens of thousands of people would die.

Police have reported killing about 2,700 people since Duterte took office at the end of June and immediately launched his war on drugs.

Unknown assailants have killed more than 1,800 others, while about 5,700 other violent deaths are under investigation, according to police data.

Duterte has called for addicts to be slaughtered and repeatedly promised to pardon police if they are found guilty of murder while prosecuting his drug war.

But Duterte also insists that he is not breaking any laws with his rhetoric, and that police are only allowed to kill in self-defence. He has said he does not encourage or endorse extrajudicial killings.

The United Nations, the European Union and the US government have criticised the drug war, while rights groups have warned Duterte may be orchestrating a crime against humanity.

However surveys show Duterte remains a popular president at home and that many Filipinos support the drug war, believing tough tactics are needed to tackle crime.

Duterte has also won some support internationally, including from China.

- 'Trumped-up charges' -

Duterte's spokesman Ernesto Abella welcomed Monday's rejection of the impeachment complaint.

"We maintained that it was from rehashed, trumped-up charges aimed at undermining the duly constituted government," Abella said.

Monday's vote showed that Duterte still enjoyed the overwhelming backing of lawmakers, according to Gladstone Cuarteros, a political analyst at Manila's De La Salle University.

"They are sending the message that from the first instance they will dismiss it and they are showing the president has large support. 'We are the super-majority,'," Cuarteros told AFP.

A Filipino lawyer last month filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Duterte of mass murder in relation to the drug war.

However many observers saw that complaint as premature, arguing all legal remedies had yet to be exhausted in the Philippines, which is an ICC requirement.

The ICC has not given any indication as to whether it will pursue that complaint.

Alejano said Monday he was also considering filing a case with the ICC.

Cuarteros said Alejano's failed impeachment effort could have been part of a strategy to pave the way for an ICC probe.

"He wants to show people that (Philippine) institutions are compromised because of strong support for Duterte and by extension perhaps external institutions, international organisations can step in," Cuarteros said.
South Korea's President Moon Jae-In speaks at the presidential Blue House in Seoul

A North Korean diplomat said Monday the election victory by left-leaning South Korean President Moon Jae-In reflected the people's "longing" for change.

The comments by ambassador to Beijing Ji Jae-Ryong were the first official response by the North to Moon's triumph last week, except for a four-paragraph dispatch by the official Korean Central News Agency two days after the vote.

Moon -- who favours engagement with Pyongyang to curb its nuclear ambitions -- won overwhelmingly after his conservative predecessor Park Geun-Hye was ousted over a massive corruption scandal.

"The South Korean people are longing for new politics, new society and new life and the election was a reflection of this popular sentiment," Ji told reporters in Beijing.

Park, who advocated a hard line with the North, was arrested in March and is in jail awaiting trial on multiple charges.

"Anyone who pursues selfish interests by following a foreign power and keeping their distance from their compatriots cannot avoid the stern judgement of the people," Ji said.

It was important for Seoul's leadership to "faithfully abide" by previous North-South agreements, he added,

Moon was part of the South's last liberal government nearly a decade ago, which pursued a "Sunshine policy" of reconciliation and dialogue with the North.

He is widely expected to shift away from Park's approach, and declared at his swearing-in that he would go to Pyongyang "in the right circumstances".

But its latest missile launch came only four days into Moon's tenure and he slammed it as a "reckless provocation", saying dialogue would be possible "only if Pyongyang changes its behaviour".
South African President Jacob Zuma has survived similar no confidence votes in the past

South Africa's highest court was to decide Monday whether lawmakers can cast secret ballots in a no-confidence vote in President Jacob Zuma who is facing growing criticism within the ruling ANC.

Several hundred protesters marched to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg in the latest demonstrations against Zuma, who has been implicated in a series of corruption scandals.

Opposition parties have lobbied for a secret ballot and called for African National Congress (ANC) lawmakers to "vote with their conscience".

The ANC holds a large majority in parliament and Zuma has survived similar votes in the past, which have not been secret.

"ANC members of parliament will have to choose between what is best for themselves and what is best for South Africa," Mmusi Maimane, leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance party, told protesters.

Zuma's sacking of respected finance minister Pravin Gordhan in March has fanned years of public anger over government corruption scandals, record unemployment and slowing economic growth.

"Zuma's time is up," 22-year-old marcher Tsido Molefe told AFP.

"We are going to march until he leaves, and today we are here to support the court case," she said.

The president has recently faced unprecedented criticism from senior ANC figures, including from Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Zuma, who came to office in 2009, is due to step down as head of the ANC in December, and as national president ahead of the 2019 general election.

He is seen as favouring his ex-wife, former African Union chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to succeed him -- rather than Ramaphosa.

Zuma has been accused of being in the sway of the wealthy Gupta business family, allegedly granting them influence over government appointments, contracts and state-owned businesses.

The dismissal of Gordhan saw the Fitch ratings agency as well as Standard and Poor's cut South Africa's sovereign credit rating to junk status due to fears of political instability and growing corruption.

The ANC -- which Nelson Mandela led to power in the 1994 post-apartheid elections -- has lost popularity in recent years, taking just 55 percent of the vote in last year's local elections, its worst ever result.
OPEC members agreed in November to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day in a bid to reduce the glut of oil supplies

The world's biggest oil producers Russia and Saudi Arabia on Monday called for extending an output reduction deal ahead of an OPEC meeting later this month.

"To underscore the determination of oil producers to ensure market stability, predictability and sustainable development -- the joint actions of the participating producers should be extended by 9 months, through March 31, 2018," the countries said in a joint statement published Monday by Russia's energy ministry.

The statement added that Russian energy minister Alexander Novak and his Saudi counterpart Khalid Al-Falih, who met in Beijing on Monday, had "agreed to do whatever it takes to achieve the desired goal of stabilising the market and reducing commercial oil inventories to their 5-year average level."

The ministers will consult with other oil-producing countries with "the goal of reaching full consensus on the 9-month extension" they are seeking, the statement said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday in Beijing he was optimistic about the prospect of measures to maintain "stable and fair oil prices."

"I recently met with the executives of all our largest oil companies and the energy minister behind closed doors," Putin told reporters. "We discussed this topic and we support this kind of proposal."

OPEC members agreed in November to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day for six months beginning from the start of the year in a bid to reduce the glut of oil supplies and shore up prices.

The move was partly matched by non-cartel producers led by Russia.

OPEC is set to convene on May 25 in a meeting where its members and Russia are expected to roll over an agreement to cut production.
Germany has more than 200 troops stationed at the Incirlik airbase in Turkey, flying Tornado surveillance missions over Syria and refuelling flights for partner nations battling IS jihadists

Germany on Monday slammed Turkey's refusal to allow its lawmakers to visit a NATO base near Syria and warned it could move its troops elsewhere.

Berlin described as "unacceptable" Ankara's latest ban on a visit to the Incirlik base in southern Turkey, used by international coalition fighting the Islamic State group.

Germany has more than 200 troops stationed there, flying Tornado surveillance missions over Syria and refuelling flights for partner nations battling IS jihadists.

Germany will now "look into alternative locations" for its military personnel, said Chancellor Angela Merkel's top spokesman Steffen Seibert.

Jordan offered "the best conditions", a defence ministry spokesman added, saying it had also looked at Kuwait and Cyprus since Turkey first denied such visits to German MPs for several months last year.

The defence ministry spokesman cautioned however that any move would involve shifting hundreds of containers of materiel and would take several months.

Turkey rejected the latest lawmakers' visit because of anger over Germany granting political asylum to some of its military officials since last year's failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer suggested.

He said Ankara's reason may be "individual decisions of independent German authorities in connection with military members".

- Hundreds have sought asylum -

German media have reported that over 400 Turkish military personnel, diplomats, judges and other officials and their relatives had sought political asylum in Germany.

They fear being caught up in Turkey's crackdown against those Erdogan blames for the coup -- supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive US-based Islamic preacher who has denied the charges against him.

The vast crackdown has heightened tensions between Turkey and Germany, which is home to a three-million-strong ethnic Turkish population, the legacy of a massive "guest worker" programme in the 1960s and 1970s.

Both countries have sparred over a range of issues, including civil rights in Turkey, press freedom and the military campaign against Turkey's Kurdish minority.

Relations were strained further during the referendum campaign in April to boost Erdogan's powers, and since the arrest of Turkish-German journalist Deniz Yucel on terror-related charges in February this year.

Another row last year, centred on a sensitive historical question, had led Turkey to deny German lawmakers the right to visit Incirlik for several months.

The German parliament had voted in June to recognise the Ottoman Empire's World War I-era massacre of Armenians as a genocide.

After the vote, a furious Erdogan accused German lawmakers of Turkish origin of having "tainted blood".

Armenians say up to 1.5 million people were killed between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.

Turkey rejects the claims, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

That row was only resolved after Merkel made clear the Armenia resolution was a political statement and not legally binding.
At least 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.6 million made homeless in northeast Nigeria since the start of Boko Haram's Islamist insurgency in 2009

Boko Haram jihadists have killed six farmers who were working on their land near the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, civilian militia members and locals told AFP on Monday.

Gunmen on motorcycles attacked a group preparing fields for the rainy season outside the village of Amrawa, 16 kilometres (10 miles) from the Borno State capital, on Saturday.

"The gunmen attacked the farmers with machetes as they were clearing their farms that have been taken over by weeds in preparation for the rains which start in a few days," said Ibrahim Liman, a civilian militia member.

"They seized six farmers and slaughtered them while the rest fled."

Liman's account was supported by Masida Bunu and Rahis Musa, who live in the village. Some residents raised the alarm and the militia pursued the attackers to the nearby village of Sojori.

"The vigilantes fought the terrorists and killed four while the rest fled," Liman said.

At least 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.6 million made homeless in northeast Nigeria since the start of Boko Haram's Islamist insurgency in 2009.

Nigeria's government and military maintain that the jihadists are a spent force but sporadic attacks and suicide bombings pose a constant threat, particularly in remote areas.

Saturday's attack underscored the vulnerability of rural communities even as the authorities are encouraging displaced people to return home and rebuild their lives.

Northeast Nigeria is in the grip of severe food shortages after farmers missed three rainy seasons in a row because of the conflict.

Crops have been destroyed and food stores looted, while farmers have been either killed or forced to flee to safety in vast camps for the displaced.

Most of the remote region relies on subsistence agriculture, but domestic and international aid agencies are now having to provide food, shelter and healthcare.

- 'Ill-prepared' -

The Nigerian authorities mooted a deadline of May 29 to close the camps for the displaced in Maiduguri, though few humanitarian organisations working there believed the date was feasible.

In March last year, Borno's governor, Kashim Shettima, said about 950,000 of the 3.2 million private homes in the state had been destroyed or damaged by years of fighting.

Schools, municipal buildings, electricity and water infrastructure and health care facilities have also been affected.

Those who have returned to their hometowns have found themselves forced into makeshift camps, with water shortages and lack of sanitation increasing the risk of disease.

The insecurity has also affected food distribution, with about 5.1 million people in Borno and the neighbouring states of Yobe and Adamawa said to be "severely food insecure".

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said Monday that more than one million displaced people or refugees had returned to the region from within Nigeria and outside the country since October.

But the NRC director in Nigeria, Cheick Ba, said the region was "ill prepared" to cope given the level of destruction, echoing widespread concern from international aid agencies.

In Damasak, in the far north of Borno near the border with Niger, 180,000 people had returned since December but they lacked the resources to resume farming, the agency said.

The United Nations has said about $1 billion is required for the Nigerian states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa this year but funding so far is well short of that goal, despite warnings of famine-like conditions in parts of the region.
Opinion / Columnist

As the 2018 watershed elections loom in the country, public broadcaster Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) which enjoys a monopoly on the local airwaves has come under the spotlight as opposition political parties fight for the space currently dominated by the ruling Zanu-PF.Media practitioners, election and political observers interviewed by the Daily News are adamant that the ZBC's television and radio stations - like they did in previous elections - will not cover opposition political parties' campaign activities.They don't foresee ZBC changing its biased editorial stance in support of the Zanu-PF government.But could it be possible that ZBC might reform ahead of the 2018 elections?Misa-Zimbabwe national director Nhlanhla Ngwenya said his answer is that it can only be possible if Zimbabweans take ownership of the broadcaster by demanding its freedom from Zanu-PF."But there seems to be fatigue if not acceptance of the abnormal as normal, just like Zimbabweans do as a copying mechanism."Demands for the broadcaster to be independent from the political clutches are in line with the country's Constitution and regional protocols on freedom of expression. Even the Sadc guidelines on elections place obligations on the public media to act as such."In short, I am saying there is enough legislative backup for Zimbabweans to reclaim ZBC and make it a true public broadcaster."Ngwenya said Zimbabweans needed to attach a cost to ZBC's continued violation of its public service mandate and break the culture of impunity where public institutions completely disregard their public service mandate knowing fully well their actions will not attract any consequences."This therefore means Zimbabweans should ensure relevant oversight bodies and authorities such as human rights, and elections commissions act on ZBC and its handlers' abdication of duty."Sadly, the opposition that tends to mourn their exclusion during elections has not and is not doing enough to ensure the situation is addressed. Their lackadaisical approach on this matter reflects their insipid media policy agenda."Voluntary Media council of Zimbabwe director Loughty Dube said: "The framework to reform ZBC lies with the broad framework to transform all media, the first start will be for reforms to start at re-constituting the Zimbabwe Mass Media Trust (ZMMT) and allow the trust to appoint ZBC boards so that they are not directly under a minister who is a political party functionary."ZMMT as representing the public should be accountable to Parliament and not an individual politician. Continued political interference with the editorial independence of the State-controlled ZBC, is largely due to the influence of the minister."The next process will be to totally transform ZBC from being a State broadcaster into a truly public broadcaster," said Dube.Election Resource Centre director Tawanda Chimhini said the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) has a role to play in ensuring that the state/public media provides balanced reporting of all contesting political parties simply on the basis of the Constitution which says Zec must conduct free and fair elections."In fulfilment of this constitutional obligation, Zec must take all necessary measures to ensure fairness, including compelling the public media to operate professionally."Not doing so and proceeding with an election where the public broadcaster conducts itself in a clearly biased and partisan manner would be facilitating a potentially unconstitutional election."Chimhini said regulatory measures can be used compel the media to report in a balanced, ethical manner and it is within Zec's mandate to draft such regulations and include penalties in the event of non-compliance."All media, public and private, must never operate beyond the limitations of ethics and principles. As such, Zimbabwe is now in the pre-election phase of the electoral cycle."The conduct of the media must already be under scrutiny by the election management body. Waiting to conduct such scrutiny and to regulate the media when an election date has been announced falls short of what is expected to influence a credible electoral process. Emphasis to regulate the media in elections must include balance, editorial independence, provision of information and accuracy," said Chimhini.Media practitioner Koliwe Nyoni said demanding reforms at ZBC means a number of things."Firstly, we need to secure the editorial independence of the public broadcaster. This is not easily achievable given that the current government seems to have a grip' on State media and this is even more visible now with the infighting within the ruling party."It is not a secret that there is political interference that has in the past seen the public broadcaster blacking out on critical coverage such as that of opposition parties during elections. In July, ZBC blacked out on the nationwide stay away and it emerged that the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe had allegedly issued a warning to all broadcasters on its coverage."Nyoni said there is need for the law to define the editorial independence of ZBC which is guaranteed in terms of Section 61 of the Constitution."Secondly, and very critical at this moment, is that following the 2015 KPMG audit report we have not seen much movement on the recommendations on corporate, functional and operational levels at the public broadcaster."The audit was clear that restructuring was necessary in view of the migration from analogue to digital television broadcasting in the country. Despite the fact that there has been near silence on recommendations and little improvement on the quality of productions, government wants to award the broadcaster five more television channels."Reforming within this context involves increasing the capacity of ZBC by dealing with accountability by an independent board with a public interest, avoiding reporting and programming in regard to religion, political belief, culture and race."Veteran broadcaster John Masuku said: "Chances of the ZBC radio and television giving more positive coverage to opposition parties are very slim. Nothing indicates that such will happen."Political parties should fully utilise alternative platforms like ChannelZim which carry programmes from VOA Studio 7, Radio VOP, Radio Dialogue and CORAH among others."They should also continue to demand to be heard on public radio and cite relevant broadcast legislation regarding why ZBC should not be a State controlled broadcaster but a public entity that benefits all tax payers."Masuku added that the media should also expose private stations that are not impartial as well. "Media advocacy groups like Misa and VMCZ should issue widely circulated alerts about any flouting of best broadcasting practice."Southern Africa director at Human Rights Watch Dewa Mavhinga said: "There are very slim chances for ZBC to reform ahead of 2018 elections because they follow directives from an extremely partisan Zanu-PF government that actively promotes biased coverage which favours them. Reform is likely under a new administration."Media practitioner Rashweat Mukundu said: "I don't foresee ZBC changing its biased editorial stance in support of the Zanu-PF government. If anything at all we will see a continuation of the denigration, hate messaging of opposition parties reminiscence of the past."Zec could work with media to develop a code of conduct that enhances professionalism in coverage of elections and that media should adhere to. Otherwise outside this there is no way that ZBC can be forced to be professional."Mukundu said past court challenges on ZBC bias have failed, and this calls for a review of laws governing the ZBC to make it a public broadcaster."The editorial policies are not the making of staff at ZBC but political directives from Munhumutapa building and the staff either has to comply or be fired. It is the political interference that needs redress."Media practitioner Faith Ndlovu said elections are the centrepiece of democracy and political party campaign coverage is crucial because of its power to empower the electorate."The media therefore, particularly the public media, indeed have a duty to report on elections and contesting parties in a fair, balanced, accurate, transparent and equitable manner as reflected in the media code of conduct and guidelines such as the Sadc Guidelines Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections."While past performance by the ZBC in covering previous elections has been a cause for concern, I hope that the relevant authorities recognise and respect local and regional instruments that Zimbabwe is signatory to on credible and professional media election coverage."Ndlovu added that it is therefore imperative for political parties alongside relevant media professional bodies and even regional bodies to continue calling for, and putting pressure on the relevant authorities for the non-partisan coverage of electoral processes.Information for Development Trust national cordinator Tawanda Majoni said there is no chance that ZBC will shift away from its traditional pro-Zanu-PF, anti-opposition stance without being forced."As part of the official media, it will always structure its content and approaches to favour the sitting government. That has always been the case, even prior to independence. Attempts have been made by the political opposition and civil society since 2000 to compel the broadcaster to be non-partisan, balanced and objective, but that has been falling flat.Majoni said the Sadc guidelines on elections prohibit partisanship, and so do global best practices on elections. "Strong advocacy must be built around this and a non-partisan ZBC must be among the key demands for free and fair elections, outside which the opposition must just boycott the polls.
A mutinous soldier holds an RPG rocket launcher inside a military camp in Ivory Coast's second city Bouake, where the rebellion first erupted in January

Ivory Coast, which is recovering from more than a decade of conflict, has since January been in the grip of a series of revolts by disgruntled solders and paramilitary gendarmes.

Here is an outline of the main developments:

- Rebellion erupts in Bouake -

On January 6, 2017, former rebels integrated into the army's ranks seize control of Ivory Coast's second city Bouake, terrifying residents by firing in the air with rifles and rocket launchers.

Defence Minister Alain-Richard Donwahi urges troops "to remain calm and return to their barracks" saying the soldiers are demanding salary hikes, bonuses and faster promotion.

A day later, troops fire Kalashnikov rifles and heavy weapons outside the local government offices in Bouake, with the unrest spreading to Abidjan, the economic capital, and several other towns.

Shots ring out at a military base in Abidjan as soldiers put up barricades in the city.

President Alassane Ouattara says the government and the mutineers have reached an arrangement, confirming his "agreement to take into account the (soldiers') demands relating to bonuses and improving the living conditions."

A day later, the soldiers end their mutiny, with Ouattara quickly firing the military chief of staff, the senior commander of the national gendarmerie and the director-general of the police.

On January 13, they reach a final deal at talks in Bouake, on a tense day involving outbreaks of gunfire at barracks across the country.

- Bloodshed in the capital -

On January 17, four soldiers are killed in the administrative capital Yamoussoukro as new protests erupt, led by troops and paramilitary gendarmes who were not part of the deal.

The unrest sees them firing shots in the air in six towns and cities, with the protest continuing into the next day and drawing in prison guards and customs officers.

- Elite unit mutiny -

On February 7, elite troops responsible for Ouattara's security also stage armed protests demanding bonuses and firing into the air in their barracks town of Adiake, 90 kilometres (56 miles) east of Abidjan. They end their protests two days later.

- Apology sparks fresh protests -

On May 11, a spokesman allegedly representing the 8,400 troops who mutinied in January apologises to Ouattara in an orchestrated ceremony aired on national television.

But within hours fresh protests erupt with troops demanding the balance of payment for bonuses which were partially paid in January. Demonstrators fire in the air in the streets of Abidjan, Bouake and Korogho.

Two days later, one person is killed in Bouake after being hit by warning shots which were supposed to keep residents inside their homes.

Further gunfire erupts in Abidjan on May 15, including at two military camps in Akouedo in the city's east as well as in Bouake.
Rapper Travis Scott, seen her performin in Quebec, is arrested in Arkansas after fired-up concert-goers rushed the stage

Rapper Travis Scott was arrested after a concert in Arkansas with police accusing him of "inciting a riot" as the crowd rushed to the stage, injuring several people.

In the latest such incident for the 25-year-old, an enthusiastic crowd pushed through barricades to move closer to him at the arena concert Saturday night.

Video footage posted online shows Scott energetically dancing and revving up the crowd but later asking fans to step back and politely thanking the fire marshals after completing his hit "Goosebumps."

Police in northwestern Arkansas, best known as the corporate hub of retail behemoth Walmart, said that several people were injured including two involved in security.

"During the concert Webster encouraged people to rush the stage and bypass the security protocols to ensure concert-goer safety," the police department in the town of Rogers said, referring to the rapper by his real name of Jacques Webster.

"Webster was charged with inciting a riot, disorderly conduct and endangering the welfare of a minor," it said in a statement.

Scott was released without bail, meaning he will need to return to Arkansas to hear the charges.

The incident had echoes of Scott's 2015 performance at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago where dozens of fans jumped barricades and onto the stage, ending his set within minutes. He was also arrested for disorderly conduct and ordered to remain under court supervision.

Scott has been under an increasing spotlight as he has been romantically linked to Kylie Jenner, a member of the Kardashian celebrity clan.
Coastal communities in Vietnam are angry about mass fish deaths caused by pollution

Vietnam arrested another activist on Monday for organising protests over mass fish deaths caused by pollution from a steel plant, the same day a lawmaker resigned over the environmental scandal.

Taiwanese steel firm Formosa was blamed for pollution last year which killed tonnes of fish, including rare species, and decimated livelihoods in coastal fishing communities in central Vietnam.

The firm, which was in the process of building the plant, was fined $500 million over the disaster.

But anger still seeths in coastal communities and regular protests have continued since the fish kill in April last year.

Vietnam -- an authoritarian one-party communist state -- has cracked down on the protests and arrested leaders.

Police in the central province of Nghe An on Monday detained activist Hoang Duc Binh on charges of "causing public disorder and abusing his democratic freedom to infringe upon the state's interests".

Binh, 34, was accused of organising fishing communities, provoking local fishermen and Catholics to stage regular protests including a recent demonstration outside a police station.

His detention sparked hundreds of local residents in Nghe An province to gather and demand his release with images on social media showing hundreds of police being deployed to the scene.

State controlled Vietnam Television said three policemen briefly taken hostage by the crowds were later released.

Around the same time Vietnam's rubber-stamp National Assembly accepted the resignation of lawmaker Vo Kim Cu over the fish deaths, part of a carefully choreographed punishment that has been laid on for a number of officials implicated in the disaster.

Last month Cu and three other officials were stripped of their party positions over the Formosa scandal.

The Party Secretariat said Cu made multiple violations including failing to adequately monitor the implementation of the steel plant.

While Formosa has been fined, it has been given a green light to restart operations.

Last month Vietnam said it could test the plant's first blast furnace for a six month trial period.

Formosa completed 17 environmental protection checks and had adequately addressed most of the violations required to operate after the disaster, according to Vietnam Television.
Ugandan troops have been operating in strife-torn eastern Central African Republic since 2009 searching for Lord's Resistance Army fighters terrorising the area

Ugandan troops deployed in eastern Central African Republic to fight Ugandan rebels have sexually abused local women and girls, Human Rights Watch reported Monday.

"Ugandan soldiers ... have sexually exploited at least 13 women and (three) girls since 2015, including at least one rape, and threatened some victims to remain silent," the rights watchdog said in its report.

HRW workers interviewed all 16 earlier this year in the southeastern town of Obo, which has since 2009 served as a base for Ugandan forces in an African Union Regional Task Force set up to destroy the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

One 15-year-old, given the name "Marie" to protect her identity, gave birth six months ago after being raped by a Ugandan soldier in fields near Obo airstrip, HRW said.

"Fifteen of the women and girls interviewed said they became pregnant, but in each case, the soldier who fathered the child left the country and has not provided any support," the report stated.

US special forces were fighting alongside the Ugandan troops until last month when a planned withdrawal began.

"Ugandan and African Union authorities should conduct proper investigations, punish those responsible, and make sure that the women and girls who were sexually abused or exploited get the services they need," said Lewis Mudge, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The report said more cases of sexual violence had been documented by the United Nations, whose investigators spoke to Obo women afraid to give details, and the BBC, whose report included a 12-year-old girl who gave birth.

The defence ministry in Kampala did not respond to the allegations, according to HRW.

The US command did not acknowledge the charges against Ugandan soldiers, Mudge said in an email. "They say the Ugandans are not engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse."

Ugandan soldiers may join the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSCA operating in CAR but HRW said the allegations of sexual abuse should be investigated first.

Some MINUSCA soldiers and French troops who were deployed in the strife-torn country between 2013 and 2016 have also been accused of exploiting women and children.

However, a Paris prosecutor in March called for the case against soldiers accused of raping children to be dropped.
David Friedman, the new American ambassador to Israel, kisses the Western Wall in Jerusalem on May 15, 2017

Controversial new US ambassador to Israel David Friedman arrived in the country on Monday to take up his post, days ahead of a visit by US President Donald Trump.

Friedman, due to present his credentials to President Reuven Rivlin on Tuesday, has been a strong supporter of Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

After his arrival in Tel Aviv, Friedman visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, praying there and kissing the sacred site, the holiest location where Jews are allowed to pray.

New US ambassador to Israel David Friedman with Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch during a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem on May 15, 2017

"I prayed for the president and I wished him success, especially on his upcoming trip," Friedman said in a video posted on the US embassy's Twitter feed.

"I know its going to be an amazing trip," he said.

Friedman, a frequent visitor to Jerusalem, also exchanged words near the wall with Steven Tyler of American rock band Aerosmith, in town for a concert.

Jewish-American bankruptcy lawyer Friedman has expressed scepticism over the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the basis of years of US peace efforts.

He has also advocated breaking with decades of precedent by moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed city of Jerusalem, a prospect deeply alarming to Palestinians.

Trump vowed to move the embassy to Jerusalem during his campaign, but has since backed away, saying the move was still being looked at.

He will have to decide by the beginning of June whether to continue with the policy of his predecessors and again block the embassy's transfer.

Trump is expected to visit Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories on May 22 and 23.

- 'Worse than kapos' -

Speaking at a pre-election rally in October in support of Trump on Jerusalem's Mount Zion, Friedman said the now US president would fire US State Department "lifers" who refused to move the embassy.

He has also clashed with American Jewish progressive groups, notably dubbing liberals "worse than kapos", a reference to Jewish collaborators who worked as guards in Nazi concentration camps.

His appointment comes as Trump seeks ways to restart moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, and questions have been raised over whether Friedman will be able to put his personal views aside.

Trump himself has sent mixed signals over how he will approach the decades-old conflict.

He cast uncertainty over years of international efforts to foster a two-state solution when he met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in February.

At that meeting, he said he would support a single state if it led to peace, delighting Israeli right-wingers who want to see their country annex most of the occupied West Bank.

At the same time, he urged Israel to hold back on settlement building in the West Bank, a longstanding concern of Palestinians and much of the world.

He also held face-to-face talks in Washington with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas earlier this month, confidently predicting that a peace agreement was within grasp, brushing aside the complexities of a conflict that has bedevilled successive US leaders.

- Deal-maker optimistic -

"We will get it done," Trump said, flaunting what he has described as his deal-making prowess.

"It is something that I think is, frankly, maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years."

Friedman's support for settlements has drawn particular attention.

Trump, the parents of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Friedman have all reportedly contributed financially to Beit El settlement, near the Palestinian political capital Ramallah.

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Friedman has been president of a group called American Friends of Beit El Institutions.

It said the group raises about $2 million a year for Beit El.

Israeli settlements are viewed as illegal under international law and major stumbling blocks to peace as they are built on land the Palestinians see as part of their future state.

Israel occupied the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 1967 in moves never recognised by the international community.

It later annexed east Jerusalem and claims the entire city as its undivided capital. The Palestinians see east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday that Trump was still assessing whether relocating the embassy would help or harm chances for peace.

Netanyahu responded by saying on Monday that "not only would moving the embassy not harm the peace process, but to the contrary.

"It would advance it by fixing a historic wrong and shatter the Palestinian illusion that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."
Rabbi Bakshi Doron, pictured in 2005, approved certificates for some 1,500 policemen and military servicemen, despite being aware the recipients did not meet the rabbinate's criteria, the Jerusalem court ruling read

An Israel court on Monday found the country's former chief rabbi, Eliyahu Bakshi Doron, guilty of a series of felonies including fraud over supplying false rabbinical ordination certificates.

Bakshi Doron, who served as chief Sephardi between 1993-2003, approved certificates for some 1,500 policemen and military servicemen, despite being aware the recipients did not meet the rabbinate's criteria, the Jerusalem court ruling read.

The former chief rabbi, who was born in 1941, did not receive any goods or benefits due to his actions, but the security establishment members saw significant salary raises once they held the certificates, which were equivalent to academic degrees in that respect.

Bakshi Doron's conviction for felonies, including fraud and breach of trust, comes just weeks after another former Israeli chief rabbi began a jail term.

Yona Metzger, who was chief Ashkenazi rabbi between 2003-2013, began a three-and-a-half year prison term on May 1 for taking more than $1.9 million in bribes, fraud and obstructing justice.

Israel has two chief rabbis, one Ashkenazi and the other Sephardi, whose responsibilities include running rabbinical courts for matters of Jewish personal law, and regulating the food supervision industry.
The 'Wannacry' ransomware attack

Questions are swirling over who is responsible for the security flaws exploited by hackers in the world's biggest ransomware attack to date, which crippled thousands of businesses and public organizations around the world. Here are some answers:

- Who bears the blame? -

Because hackers exploited a security hole in some Windows versions discovered by the National Security Agency, Microsoft says the intelligence agency bears some responsibility.

"This attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem," Microsoft president and general counsel Brad Smith said in a weekend blog post.

Steven Weber, faculty director at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, said "the fault is pretty distributed -- there are plenty of people to blame."

Weber said the NSA's primary mission is intelligence: "If I were sitting at the NSA I would push that argument right back to Microsoft," he argued. "They would say, 'It's our job to stockpile those weapons and use them against our adversaries.'"

Other factors were the large number of old, outdated software programs in use and often ineffective security systems.

Cornell University computer scientist Stephen Wicker blamed "profound ethical lapses" both on the part of the US government and the computing public.

The flaws "were known to the NSA and CIA, but were kept secret by those organizations to be exploited for their own data collection purposes," Wicker said.

But he added that a large number of businesses and other users failed to install a patch issued by Microsoft in March, and also share the blame for spreading the malware.

President Donald Trump's homeland security advisor Tom Bossert dismissed the idea that the US is to blame.

"This was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data," Bossert told reporters.

"This was a vulnerability exploit as one part of a much larger tool that was put together by the culpable parties and not by the US government."

- How did hackers get this tool? -

Microsoft effectively confirmed analysts' diagnosis that the ransomware known as "WannaCry" was designed to exploit NSA software that was leaked earlier this year by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers.

President Vladimir Putin has said Russia -- which has been accused of cyber meddling in several countries -- had nothing to do with the massive cyberattack, and criticized the US intelligence community for creating the original software.

But Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer for IBM Resilient Systems, has suggested that a state-sponsored actor, most likely Russia, was probably responsible for the initial hack of the NSA.

"Whoever got this information years before and is leaking it now has to be capable of hacking the NSA and/or the CIA, and willing to publish it all," Schneier said in a recent blog post.

"The list of countries who fit both criteria is small: Russia, China, and... and... and I'm out of ideas."

James Lewis, a cybersecurity specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he believes the exposure of the flaw likely "leads back to Moscow" -- but that the hackers who designed the malware are probably not Russian.

"One of the rules in Russia is that Russian criminals are not allowed to hack Russian targets," Lewis said. "This does not fit the pattern of Russian-sponsored activity."

"The cybercrime market is really innovative," he added, "and they are quick to take advantage of vulnerabilities."

- What about computer security at large? -

The attacks came a day after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for improved cybersecurity in the federal government and better cooperation with the private sector.

But few see this or any single initiative as a silver bullet.

Weber said the attacks show the risks of an overreliance on computerized systems that are not fully secure.

"We have built an increasingly digital society on a very insecure foundation and we are starting to see the consequences of that," he said.

Weber warned there is no single entity capable of fixing this problem in the near future, since security depends on so many factors.

"If you want to look for an upside, it would be this would be a wakeup call," to improve computer security, he said.

At the same time, Weber noted that the attack could prompt more people to shun digital technology and turn back to analog systems that can't be hacked.

Weber said there are already some signs that the public is losing confidence in the digital world as a result of security problems.

"For Silicon Valley and technology companies, their future depends on these underlying systems working," he said.
A satellite image dated April 18, 2017 courtesy of DigitalGlobe and released May 15, 2017 by the US Department of State shows the Saydnaya prison, one of Syria's largest detention centres, located 30 kilometres (18 miles) north of Damascus

The United States on Monday accused Syria of building a prison crematorium to destroy the remains of thousands of murdered detainees, putting pressure on Russia to rein in its ally.

Warning Moscow it should not turn a blind eye to Bashar al-Assad's crimes, the State Department released satellite images that it said backed up reports of mass killings at a Syrian jail.

"The United States is on record, has stated many times, that we are appalled by the atrocities that have been carried out by the Syrian regime," said Stuart Jones, the top US diplomat for the Middle East.

"And these atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran."

And he added a message to President Vladimir Putin's government: "Russia must now, with great urgency, exercise its influence over the Syrian regime to guarantee that horrific violations stop now."

Jones' warning came as UN-mediated peace talks between Damascus and the Syrian opposition were about to resume in Geneva, and appeared aimed at maintaining pressure on Assad's backers.

The head of the opposition delegation to the talks welcomed the US statement, but complained it had come too late.

"This is but a drop in the ocean. What happens in the regime's prisons is much uglier than this," Nasr al-Hariri said.

"The time has come for the world -- chiefly the US -- to act to halt these human rights violations."

- 'Cover up' -

One newly released image, a commercial satellite photograph dating back to January 2015, shows snow melting on the roof of a building attached to the Saydnaya military complex north of Damascus.

This, along with an earlier picture allegedly showing heavy-duty ventilation systems on the structure, appears to support earlier claims by rights groups that Saydnaya is an execution center.

Syrian regime believed to be using crematorium

"Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium" built in "an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya," said Jones.

Jones, an acting assistant secretary of state, said Washington's information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US "intelligence community" -- implying that classified evidence beyond the commercial pictures exists.

At Saydnaya, Syria holds up to 70 prisoners in cells that are meant for five, Jones alleged.

"And according to multiple sources, the regime is responsible for killing as many as 50 detainees per day at Saydnaya."

He did not give an official estimate for the total number killed, but cited an Amnesty International report that between 5,000 and 11,000 had died in the prison between 2011 and 2015.

Assad's regime, he alleged, has detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same period -- the first five years of a civil war that has left hundreds of thousands dead.

It was not immediately clear why the United States waited more than two years to present its evidence.

Jones said: "I would say that this information has been developing."

He also said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had raised concerns about Assad's brutality with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during his visit to Washington last week.

- Sarin attack -

Moscow, along with Iran, is Syria's main foreign backer and Washington believes Russian pressure is the only thing that will compel Assad to negotiate a peace deal.

President Donald Trump came to office vowing to focus US efforts in Syria on defeating the Islamic State group, a jihadist force that exploited the civil war to seize the east of the country.

He also said he hoped to work with Putin towards this goal.

But relations with Moscow, already dire under Trump's predecessor Barack Obama, have not improved and Assad has continued to bombard civilian areas in his battle with opposition rebels.

Last month, when Assad was again accused of using the banned nerve agent sarin in a strike on his own people, Trump ordered a retaliatory US cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base.

When asked whether the Saydnaya deaths could trigger action, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump would never "telegraph the actions he takes."

"When he's ready to act, he will let everyone know," he said.
The Proud Lebanon group had planned to host journalists, artists and doctors at a hotel in Beirut at an event to focus on discrimination against the LGBT community

A weekend seminar in Beirut to promote LGBT rights has been cancelled after "threats" from religious figures, its organisers said on Monday.

The Proud Lebanon group had planned to host journalists, artists and doctors at a hotel in Beirut at an event to focus on discrimination against the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community.

"The Association of Muslim Scholars threatened to hold protests in front of the hotel, which finally cancelled the event," Proud Lebanon director Bertho Makso told AFP.

The conservative group had on Sunday posted what it called "the last warning" on its Facebook page, demanding that the interior ministry ban the conference which it labelled a "crime against virtue".

"If the authorities do not live up to their role, they will have to face the consequences," it said, warning of a "mobilisation of all those who care about virtue and honour... to forbid this seminar".

Makso said the hotel took the decision to cancel for security reasons.

"There were real threats," he said. "We then thought of holding the event in a public place, but who could guarantee the safety of the participants?"

The theologians welcomed the cancellation.

The conference, entitled "No matter who they love, they remain my children" was to have focused on the importance of family support for LGBT children.

Planned ahead of the May 17 International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), it was to have included the screening of a documentary collecting the testimonies of LGBT victims of discrimination in Lebanon.

- 'Persecutions need to stop' -

It was the second year in a row that Proud Lebanon has cancelled a pro-tolerance event.

In 2016, it abandoned plans for an LGBT rights meeting with artists and journalists after coming under pressure from Christian religious authorities.

"The persecutions need to stop. Sexual tendencies are a private matter," said Makso.

While Lebanon is considered more tolerant of sexual diversity than other Arab countries, the police regularly raid gay bars and other LGBT-friendly spaces.

Homosexuals are often the target of jokes, including on television.

LGBT activists are pushing for changes to the Lebanese Penal Code, which currently allows courts to punish "unnatural" sexual relations with up to one year in prison.

Reports of policemen carrying out so-called "anal tests" to determine whether or not a man is gay have provoked outrage in the press and on social media.

Activists protest outside a police station in Beirut in 2016, calling for the abolishment of article 534 of the Lebanese Penal code, which prohibits having sexual relations that "contradict the laws of nature"

In recent years, small progress has been made in the fight against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender thanks to civil society initiatives but also to several judges taking a stand.

Some judges have decided to acquit defendants on the basis that homosexuality was not "unnatural".

To mark IDAHO, a platform of human rights defenders and LGBT activists are holding a series of events in Beirut from Wednesday to Sunday to include film screenings, debates and testimonies.

"It's an unprecedented event in the Arab world," said Hadi Damien, founder of the Beirut Pride platform launched in August last year.

"We don't want to go down into the streets to provoke anyone. Our message is a peaceful message that denounces all discrimination," he told AFP.

"We have to rise above labels. It's not because someone is different that it's OK to beat or humiliate them."
Violence in Kasai was sparked by the killing of tribal chief Kamwina Nsapu

Spiralling violence in DR Congo's central Kasai region has killed 390 tribal militia fighters and 124 government troops since the end of March, the army said Monday.

"DRC's armed forces have been waging operations to back up the police since end March in Kasai," the army's (FARDC) Brigadier General Leon-Richard Kasonga told a news conference.

The death toll from the fighting has amounted to 390 militia fighters, 39 FARDC troops and 85 police officers, according to Kasonga.

Violence in Kasai was sparked by the killing of tribal chief Kamwina Nsapu last August and has killed hundreds of people and displaced 1.27 million more.

The UN has accused the Kamwina Nsapu rebels of recruiting child soldiers while also criticising the country's government of using excessive force against the insurgents.

"Our troops respect international humanitarian law and human rights... we have acted professionally," said Kasonga on Monday, although he did not provide a civilian death toll.

In March, UN experts Michael Sharp, an American, and Zaida Catalan, a dual Swedish-Chilean national were abducted and shot dead while investigating reports of more than 40 mass graves in the region.

The UN security council last week called on Kinshasa to cooperate with the investigation on the deaths of the UN workers and step up efforts to implement a New Year's Eve agreement aimed at paving the way to elections.
South African President Jacob Zuma has survived similar no confidence votes in the past

South Africa's highest court weighed Monday whether lawmakers can cast secret ballots in a no-confidence vote in President Jacob Zuma, who faces growing criticism within the ruling ANC.

Several hundred protesters marched to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg in the latest demonstrations against Zuma, who has been implicated in a series of corruption scandals.

Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng adjourned the hearing after legal arguments ran into the evening. He gave no date for the court to announce its decision.

Opposition parties have lobbied for a secret ballot and called for African National Congress (ANC) lawmakers to "vote with their conscience".

The ANC holds a large majority in parliament and Zuma has survived similar votes in the past, which have not been secret.

"ANC members of parliament will have to choose between what is best for themselves and what is best for South Africa," Mmusi Maimane, leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance party, told protesters.

"They did not swear (their oath of office) to be faithful to Jacob Zuma, or to the ANC... They promised to be faithful to South Africa."

The case united DA protesters with marchers from the radical leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party.

"If parliament fails to remove Zuma, then the people in the 2019 election will make sure that the ANC is voted out," said EFF supporter Daniel Mninele, who travelled from Pretoria to rally outside the court.

The scheduled no-confidence debate has been postponed by parliamentary Speaker Baleka Mbete, who has said she has no powers to agree to a secret ballot.

Zuma's sacking of respected finance minister Pravin Gordhan in March fuelled public anger over years of government corruption scandals, record unemployment and slowing economic growth.

- Legal battles -

The president has recently faced unprecedented criticism from senior ANC figures, including Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Zuma, who came to office in 2009, is due to step down as head of the ANC in December, and as national president ahead of the 2019 general election.

He is seen as favouring his ex-wife, former African Union chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to succeed him -- rather than Ramaphosa.

"Zuma's time is up," 22-year-old marcher Tsido Molefe told AFP. "We are going to march until he leaves, and today we are here to support the court case," she said.

The Constitutional Court last year found Zuma guilty of violating the constitution after he refused to repay taxpayers' money used to refurbish his private rural house.

Zuma has been accused of being in the sway of the wealthy Gupta business family, allegedly granting them influence over government appointments, contracts and state-owned businesses.

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.

The dismissal of Gordhan saw the Fitch ratings agency as well as Standard and Poor's cut South Africa's sovereign credit rating to junk status due to fears of political instability and growing corruption.

The ANC -- which Nelson Mandela led to power in the 1994 post-apartheid elections -- has lost popularity in recent years, taking just 55 percent of the vote in last year's local elections, its worst ever result.

Zuma retains widespread support from ANC members in some rural areas and has been able to rely on lawmakers to survive previous votes of no confidence.
Two of the four Libyan Coast Guard ships are docked in the harbour of the capital Tripoli, following their return after undergoing maintenance in Italy on May 15, 2017

Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti on Monday handed over to the Libyan coastguard four patrol boats repaired in Italy as part of cooperation in the fight against illegal immigration.

The crews were trained in Italy "to monitor Libyan territorial waters... and contribute, together with Italy and Europe, to security in the Mediterranean", Minniti said in remarks translated into Arabic.

A Libyan naval officer told AFP the vessels had been due for delivery in 2014, but this date was pushed back because of violence and instability in the North African country.

Libya has long been a stepping stone for migrants seeking a better life in Europe. People smugglers have stepped up their lucrative business in the chaos which has engulfed the country since its 2011 revolution.

Minniti said on Monday another six patrol boats would be handed over to Libya soon after the training of the crews.

Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti (C) and Libyan Defence Minister of the UN-backed Government of National Accord, Al-Mahdi Al-Barghathi (C-R), speak to the press in the capital Tripoli on May 15, 2017

Libya's authorities have complained about lacking the means to deal with the floods of migrants who try crossing the Mediterranean in makeshift boats.

Italy registered nearly 42,500 migrant arrivals by sea by mid-April, 97 percent of them from Libya, Minniti said in a joint letter written with his German counterpart to the European Commission.

In the letter dated May 11, which AFP obtained a copy of on Sunday, Minniti and Thomas de Maiziere said they "are convinced that we all must do more" to "prevent that hundreds of thousands of people once again risk their lives in Libya and on the Mediterranean Sea in the hands of smugglers."

Last year, a record 181,000 migrants reached Italy, 90 percent of them from Libya.

During his brief visit on Monday to Tripoli, Minniti also held talks with Government of National Unity head Fayez al-Sarraj on fighting illegal immigration.
Barron Trump will attend a private school in Maryland just outside Washington after moving into the White House with his mother Melania this summer

Donald Trump's youngest son Barron will attend a private school in Maryland after he and his mother move into the White House this summer, the first lady announced Monday.

The announcement will likely save New York tens of thousands of dollars a day in police costs incurred by 11-year-old Barron and his mother Melania remaining in Manhattan while he finishes the semester at his current school.

While it was still not immediately clear when the president's wife and youngest son would relocate to Washington, the school year at St Andrew's starts September 5. The current school term is due to end next month.

In making the announcement, the first lady said St Andrew's Episcopal School, 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the White House, was noted for "its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence."

"The mission of St Andrew's is 'to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning and service,' all of which appealed to our family," she said.

Barron Trump is the first presidential child to attend the school, where fees start at $23,490 for pre-Kindergarten through $40,650 for grades nine to 12.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the two previous US presidents with school-age children in the White House, instead chose the private Sidwell Friends School in Washington.

St Andrew's has 580 students, with an average student-teacher ratio of seven to one, according to its website.

The costs of protecting the first lady and her son have been hugely unpopular in New York, a largely Democratic-voting city.

Officials estimate it costs $127,000 to $146,000 a day to protect Trump's family, which includes his eldest sons Donald Jr and Eric, who run the family business.

More than half a million people signed a petition demanding the first lady move into the White House or foot the expense of living in New York herself.
Protesters rallied outside the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals as it prepared to hear arguments on President Donald Trump's revised travel ban

A US government attorney insisted Monday that President Donald Trump's revised travel ban did not unfairly target Muslims, in the latest twist in a monthslong legal battle that has dogged the new US administration.

A crowd rallied in protest outside an appeals court in the western city of Seattle, where a panel of federal judges was weighing the legality of the contested immigration order -- which has twice been blocked by the courts since January.

The Trump administration says the temporary ban on refugees and travelers from six Muslim-majority countries -- Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen -- is motivated by national security concerns, an area where US presidents have wide powers.

But a Hawaii-based judge in March issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the order on grounds it was unconstitutional and motivated by anti-Muslim bias.

Now, three judges from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals are considering Trump's challenge of that injunction.

The government's lawyer Jeffrey Wall reiterated on Monday that Trump's campaign trail rhetoric against Muslims should not be taken into account by the judges, who appeared skeptical, pressing him with pointed questions.

"The executive order sets out national security justifications," Judge Ronald Gould told Wall. "How is a court to know if in fact it's a Muslim ban in the guise of national security justifications?"

Monday's hearing came a week after a federal court in Maryland heard arguments on whether to uphold a separate judge's decision blocking the ban.

In both cases, debate hinged on the question of Trump's intent since the US Constitution forbids religious discrimination.

- 'Dangerous precedent' -

Wall told the Seattle judges that Trump made it clear over time that "what he was talking about was Islamic terrorist groups and the countries that sponsor or shelter them."

He also argued that the ban was not based on religion and that those challenging it -- the state of Hawaii and an imam -- have no standing in the case.

Neal Katyal, the attorney representing Hawaii, countered those arguments, saying Trump had clearly singled out Muslims and that his campaign rhetoric remained relevant today, as did new comments made since his election.

"We have not seen anything like this in our lifetime in which a president is establishing a disfavored religion," Katyal said.

Trump's revised travel ban

"The government has not engaged in mass, dragnet exclusions in the past 50 years," he added.

"This is something new and unusual in which you're saying this whole class of people, some of whom are dangerous, we can ban them all."

Katyal said that Congress had set rules on vetting foreigners before they enter the United States and that Trump could not claim sweeping powers and take a "magic eraser" to long-standing policies.

The scope of Trump's revamped ban, signed in early March, was toned down from its original version in January, which blocked travelers from seven-majority Muslim countries, including Iraq, as well as all refugees.

The first decree -- which prompted mass protests and sowed chaos at US airports -- was blocked on grounds it violated the constitutional ban on religious discrimination, a ruling upheld on appeal.

The modified version removed Iraq from the ban, but ran into the same objections.

The latest ban closes US borders to citizens from six countries for 90 days. It also suspends the nation's refugee program for 120 days.

The judges on Monday did not indicate when they would issue their ruling in the case, which is expected to reach the Supreme Court.

More than a dozen states have joined Hawaii in challenging the ban, as have a number of companies and advocacy groups.

In issuing his injunction in the case in March, Hawaii-based US District Judge Derrick Watson referred to repeated comments Trump had made about a "Muslim ban" during the presidential campaign.

He said the rhetoric showed "significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus."

"The court will not crawl into a corner, pull the shutters closed, and pretend it has not seen what it has," Watson wrote.
A photo made available by the Russian Foreign Ministry on May 10, 2017 shows US President Donald Trump (C) speaking with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak at the White House

The White House threw cold water Monday on a report that US President Donald Trump revealed classified information to Russian officials last week, saying no specific intelligence "sources or methods" were discussed.

The Washington Post said Trump had given Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Moscow's envoy to the US Sergey Kislyak details about a specific terror threat posed by the Islamic State group during Oval Office talks last week.

The bombshell report comes as Moscow's alleged interference in last year's US presidential election is back in the spotlight following Trump's shock firing of FBI chief James Comey, whose agency was investigating Russia's possible collusion with aides to the Republican billionaire.

"The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation," National Security Advisor HR McMaster, who participated in the meeting, told reporters.

"At no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not discuss any military operations that were not already publicly known," he added.

"There's nothing that the president takes more seriously than the security of the American people. The story that came out tonight as reported is false."

The information disclosed by the US leader had been provided by a partner of the United States that had not given Washington authorization to share it with Moscow, the Post said.

Trump "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies," the Post quoted a US official as saying on condition of anonymity.

According to the official, the information Trump shared with the Russian officials carried one of the highest levels of classification used by US intelligence agencies.

The Post reported, citing unnamed officials, that "Trump went off script and began describing details about an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft."

The paper said it was withholding details of the plot at the urging of US officials who are concerned it could jeopardize key intelligence capabilities.

The US Department of Homeland Security has said it is mulling the expansion of a ban on laptop computers in passenger cabins on jets originating in Europe.

A US ban is already in place for several countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

- Ryan wants 'full explanation' -

Trump's closed-door meeting with the Russian officials came a day after his surprise firing of Comey.

US National Security Advisor HR McMaster issues a statement outside the White House on May 15, 2017, denying the Washington Post report that US President Donald Trump spoke about classified information with Russian officials in the Oval Office

The information at issue was not even widely shared within the US government, and Trump's decision to share it with Moscow could endanger Washington's partnership with the source.

Trump reportedly even revealed the city in which the intelligence was gathered -- something seen as problematic, as it could allow Moscow to identify the partner nation.

Officials cited by the Post said the partner country had "access to the inner workings of the Islamic State."

Reaction on Capitol Hill was swift.

"We have no way to know what was said, but protecting our nation's secrets is paramount," said Doug Andres, a spokesman for Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. "The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration."

Senior Republican Senator John McCain told CNN that "if it's true, it's obviously disturbing." But he cautioned: "Let's wait and see what this was all about first."

Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Twitter: "If true, this is a slap in the face to the intel community. Risking sources & methods is inexcusable, particularly with the Russians."
Google researcher Neel Mehta posted computer code that showed similarities between the "WannaCry" malware and a vast hacking effort widely attributed to Pyongyang

Security researchers reported Monday signs of a potential North Korean link to global cyberattacks that have wreaked havoc on computer networks.

In the first clues of the origin of the massive ransomware attacks, Google researcher Neel Mehta posted computer code that showed similarities between the "WannaCry" malware and a vast hacking effort widely attributed to Pyongyang.

Other experts quickly jumped on this as sign -- although not conclusive -- that North Korea may have been behind the outbreak.

Researchers at Russia-based security firm Kaspersky said this was an important clue.

"For now, more research is required into older versions of Wannacry," Kaspersky researchers said.

"We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack. One thing is for sure -- Neel Mehta's discovery is the most significant clue to date regarding the origins of Wannacry."

According to Kaspersky, the similarities in code point to a hacker group given the code-name Lazarus, believed to be behind the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures and also suspected in hacks against the central bank of Bangladesh and others in the global financial system.

"The scale of the Lazarus operations is shocking," Kaspersky researchers said.

"The group has been very active since 2011... Lazarus is operating a malware factory that produces new samples via multiple independent conveyors."

Israeli-based security firm Intezer Labs said it agreed with the North Korea attribution.

The group's chief executive Itai Tevet said in a tweet: "@IntezerLabs confirms attribution to North Korea for #WannaCry, not only because of the function from Lazarus. More info to come."
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (3rd R) inspects a ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12 at an undisclosed location

The UN Security Council on Monday strongly condemned North Korea's latest ballistic missile test and vowed to take further measures including sanctions in response to Pyongyang's "highly destabilizing behavior."

In a unanimous statement backed by China, the council stressed the importance of North Korea "immediately showing sincere commitment to denuclearization through concrete action."

Council members demanded that North Korea "conduct no further nuclear and ballistic missiles tests," in what appeared to be a final warning to North Korea before a new wave of sanctions could be adopted.

The adoption of the US-drafted statement came ahead of an emergency closed-door session of the council Tuesday called by the United States and Japan to discuss the missile launch.

North Korea on Sunday tested what appears to be its longest-range ballistic missile to date, saying it was capable of carrying a "heavy nuclear warhead."

Pyongyang has carried out two atomic tests and dozens of missile launches since the beginning of last year in its quest to develop a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States.

The Security Council adopted two sanctions resolutions last year to ramp up pressure on Pyongyang and deny leader Kim Jong-Un the hard currency needed to fund his military programs.

In all, six sets of sanctions have been imposed on North Korea since it first tested an atomic device in 2006.

- All sanctions to be applied -

In the statement, all members including China, North Korea's main ally and trading partner, "vowed to fully implement all measures imposed" on North Korea and to "strongly urge" other countries to follow suit.

That signaled a new phase in applying sanctions that curb exports of coal from North Korea, impose severe restrictions on banking and ban sales of luxury goods and equipment that could be of use to the military.

The council expressed its "utmost concern" over North Korea's "highly destabilizing behavior and flagrant and provocative defiance of the Security Council."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned Pyongyang over the missile launch and urged it return to denuclearization.

"This action is in violation of Security Council resolutions and a threat to peace and security in the region," Guterres said in a statement issued by his spokesman.

Under UN resolutions, North Korea is barred from developing nuclear and missile technology.

The United States is also in talks with China on a possible new sanctions resolution that would ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang.

"There's a lot of sanctions left that we can start to do, whether it's with oil, whether it's with energy, whether it's with their maritime ships, exports," US Ambassador Nikki Haley told ABC television's "This Week."

"We can do a lot of different things that we haven't done yet. So our options are there."

The council is expected to discuss the next steps during its meeting starting around 2000 GMT Tuesday.
NEW YORK (AP) - Derek Jeter held a microphone and spoke without notes to the crowd that filled sold-out Yankee Stadium. His No. 2, the last of the single digit pinstripes, had been retired and a plaque in his honor dedicated that will be placed in Monument Park alongside tributes to Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Berra and the rest of the team's greats.

"There isn't a person or player I would trade places with that's playing now or ever," he told the fans.

Three years removed from a big league career that spanned 1995-2014, Jeter personally picked Mother's Day for his tribute. His grandmother, parents, sister, nephew and pregnant wife joined him for the ceremony, and he laughed when he saw the plaque , which reads "DEREK SANDERSON JETER/'THE CAPTAIN'/"MR. NOVEMBER'" and goes on to call him "THE CORNERSTONE OF FIVE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP TEAMS" AND "A LEADER ON THE FIELD AND IN THE CLUBHOUSE, SETTING AN EXAMPLE FOR HIS TEAMMATES WITH HIS UNCOMPROMISING DESIRE FOR TEAM SUCCESS."

Retired New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, right, looks around during a pregame ceremony after his No. 2 was retired in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium in New York, Sunday, May 14, 2017. The plaque is a replica of the one in Monument Park. (AP Photo/Pool, Kathy Willens)

Jeter recalled flashing back to the plaques of teammates Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada and Andy Pettitte unveiled in recent years.

"When Bernie had his, he had the big mole. When Jorge had his, he had the big ears. Andy had the big nose. So I was happy with mine," Jeter said.

Now 42, Jeter captained the Yankees during his final 12 seasons, capping a career that included five World Series titles, a .310 batting average and a New York-record 3,465 hits. He is the 22nd player to have his number retired by the Yankees, by far the most among major league teams.

"I want to thank my family for their love, support, honesty and more importantly their presence at everything I did both on and off the field," he said during a three-minute speech that ended the 40-minute ceremony. "And the fans - wow - I want to thank you guys for pushing me, for challenging me, making me accountable, more importantly for embracing me since day one."

Jeter decided not to use notes as he addressed the crowd of 47,883.

"When I prepare speeches if I forget part of it, none of it makes sense," he said later.

New York appropriately played two on Derek Jeter Night, a doubleheader against Houston caused by a rainout Saturday, and the festivities took place between an 11-6 win and a 10-7 defeat.

Former teammates Mariano Rivera, Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, David Cone and Hideki Matsui also were on hand. Alex Rodriguez was not - spokesman Ron Berkowitz said A-Rod was in Miami, spending time with his mother and daughters.

Several of the players whose numbers had been retired previously wore a new Monument Park navy blazer, and one also was given to Jeter by Houston's Carlos Beltran, a former Yankees teammate who suggested the idea last year to equipment manager Rob Cucuzza. Reggie Jackson was on the field in shirt sleeves.

Yankees co-owner Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal presented the 14-time All-Star with a 14-karat white gold ring with "2" in diamonds, surrounded by diamonds.

Introduced by a recording of late Yankee Stadium public address announcer Bob Sheppard - it was played before Jeter's at-bats following Sheppard's death in 2010 - Jeter wore a blue three-piece peak-lapel suit, white collared shirt and no tie.

Highlights of his most famous moments were shown on the video board, including his homer and over-the-shoulder catch on his first opening day in 1996; backhanded flip to the plate against Oakland in the 2001 playoffs and Mr. November home run just after midnight a few weeks later that won World Series Game 4; and his face-first dive into the seats for a popup against Boston in 2004.

Jeter began the ceremony with his family in Monument Park and didn't see the clips.

"I might have gotten emotional, but we were back there joking and having a good time with my family," he said.

He rode to the infield in a golf cart as Frank Sinatra's version of "My Way" was played.

"Everything happened so quickly," Jeter said.

Jeter didn't have No. 2 in his mind before reaching the Yankees. Jeter was a No. 13 much of the time in the minor leagues.

"My dad wore number 13 when he was playing at Fisk University in Tennessee, so at any point throughout my sports career I always tried to get the number 13," Jeter said. "When I came here, Jim Leyritz had it, and you don't come up requesting numbers when you're 20 years old, so I took what they gave me."

At his first big league camp in 1994, he was given No. 74. In the spring of 1995 or 1996, he recalled being assigned No. 17 by equipment manager Nick Priore, who then switched it to No. 2 - which Jeter wore for his big league debut on May 29, 1995. Then-Yankees manager Buck Showalter is said to have behind the switch.

"There's been rumors out there that Buck had suggested I be a No. 2," Jeter said. "He's never told me that personally, but I've heard that he said it and I appreciate it if he thought that much of me back then to give me number 2."

Jeter sidestepped a pair of questions about his role in a group headed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that is trying to buy the Miami Marlins.

"There's nothing to report on that. Absolutely nothing," he said. "I think sometimes stories - people get ahead of themselves, and there was a story that got - people got way ahead of themselves a few weeks back."

Among players on the most recent Yankees dynasty, Posada (20), Rivera (42), Pettitte (46) and Williams (51) also had their numbers retired.

"Having five people from that group is kind of hard to believe," Jeter said. "When we were in it, we used to constantly have conversations about it: We never looked back at anything that we had accomplished, it was always, OK, what's next, what's next, what's next? Eventually nothing is next because you retire, but we all had those same mindsets and that's why I think we had success is we went out there day in and day out trying to win, trying to do anything we could to help the team and more importantly we tried to keep our jobs."

Retired New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter poses with a plaque bearing his number 2 and Yankees team owner Hal Steinbrenner, and Steinbrenner's wife Christina during a pregame ceremony retiring his number 2 in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium in New York, Sunday, May 14, 2017. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, Pool)

CORRECTS TO STATE IT ISN'T A REPLICA- Retired New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter poses with the plaque that will be installed in Monument Park during a pregame ceremony retiring his number 2 at Yankee Stadium in New York, Sunday, May 14, 2017. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, Pool)

Retired New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter third from right, poses with members of his family during a pregame ceremony retiring his number 2 in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium in New York, Sunday, May 14, 2017. The plaque is a replica of the one installed Monument Park. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, Pool)

Former New York Yankees' Derek Jeter waves to the crowd during a ceremony retiring his number at Yankee Stadium, Sunday, May 14, 2017, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Former New York Yankee Derek Jeter and his wife Hannah Jeter leave the field after a ceremony retiring Jeter's number at Yankee Stadium, Sunday, May 14, 2017, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
JONESBORO, Ark. (AP) - Police say one man was killed and six people were wounded in a shooting in northeast Arkansas and one man has been arrested while a second man is being sought.

Police said in a news release that 18-year-old Monterio Barnes was dead at the scene of the shooting shortly before 12:30 a.m. Sunday in Jonesboro.

The conditions of the six wounded taken to hospital have not been disclosed.

Police say one suspect was arrested after surrendering to police and an arrest warrant was issued for a second man in connection with the shooting.

Police say the shooting occurred after a fight broke out during a private party in the basement of a building in downtown Jonesboro.
LAS VEGAS (AP) - The Latest on the 2017 edition of the Miss USA pageant taking place in Las Vegas (all times local):

7 p.m.

The District of Columbia has won back-to-back Miss USA titles.

Miss District of Columbia USA Kara McCullough, center, reacts with fellow contestants after she was crowned the new Miss USA during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Kara McCullough, a chemist working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was crowned Sunday during the event that took place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on the Las Vegas Strip. She will go on to compete on the Miss Universe contest.

The runner-up was Miss New Jersey Chhavi Verg. The second runner-up was Miss Minnesota Meridith Gould. Fifty-one women representing each state and the nation's capital participating in the decades-old competition.

McCullough was born in Naples, Italy, but she was raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Last year, District of Columbia resident Deshauna Barber became the first-ever military member to win Miss USA.

___

6:45 p.m.

The list has been narrowed down to three.

The finalists for the Miss USA contest in Las Vegas include the women representing Minnesota, the District of Columbia and New Jersey.

Miss Minnesota Meridith Gould is studying apparel retail merchandising at the University of Minnesota, while Miss District of Columbia Kara McCullough is a chemist working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Miss New Jersey Chhavi Verg is a student at Rutgers University studying marketing and Spanish.

They were all asked to explain what they consider feminism to be and whether they consider themselves feminists.

They modeled their final look of the night during a performance of Pitbull's "Options" featuring Stephen Marley.

The winner of Sunday's pageant will compete in the Miss Universe contest.

___

6:20 p.m.

And then there were five.

The finalists for the Miss USA contest in Las Vegas include women representing Minnesota, Illinois, South Carolina, the District of Columbia and New Jersey.

They include college students, a chemist, a dancer and a nurse.

The women will continue on in Sunday's beauty pageant, with the winner set to compete in the Miss Universe contest. Next, they will face questions.

The finalists modeled their evening gowns as CMA Award-winner Brett Eldredge performed his new single "The Long Way."

This year, the women were allowed to choose their swimsuits from a selection of 20. The finalists walked on the stage sporting one- and two-piece swimsuits in an array of colors.

___

5:40 p.m.

The top 10 finalists have been named at the Miss USA contest in Las Vegas.

Contestants from Minnesota, New Jersey, Missouri, Tennessee, California, District of Columbia, South Carolina, New York, Illinois and Alaska will continue on in the beauty pageant.

The event is airing live on the Fox network from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on the Las Vegas Strip.

Miss District of Columbia Kara McCullough works for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She says she wants to inspire children to pursue careers on the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Next, the contestants will model wearing swimsuits.

The winner of Sunday's pageant will compete in the Miss Universe contest.

___

5:10 p.m.

The 2017 edition of the Miss USA pageant has begun in Las Vegas with a performance from a Cirque du Soleil show based on Michael Jackson songs.

Fifty-one women are participating in the decades-old competition airing live on Fox from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Julianne Hough, Ashley Graham and Terrence J are hosting the show.

Grammy Award-winner Pitbull and CMA Award-winner Brett Eldredge will perform during the two-hour event.

Ahead of the competition, members of the audience gathered in the venue's lobby and took pictures while holding signs in the shape of the state their favorite contestant is representing.

The beauty pageant this year includes five women who immigrated to the U.S. at a young age and now as citizens hope to represent the nation on a global stage.

___

7:34 a.m.

Contestants are preparing to take the stage in the Miss USA pageant.

A new Miss USA will be crowned Sunday, when the contest that features women from each state and the nation's capital returns to Las Vegas.

Fifty-one women will participate in the decades-old competition airing live at 8 p.m. EDT on Fox from Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

The two-hour event will feature hosts Julianne Hough, Ashley Graham and Terrence J.

Grammy Award-winner Pitbull and CMA Award-winner Brett Eldredge will perform. The broadcast will also include a performance from a Cirque du Soleil show based on Michael Jackson songs.

Last year, District of Columbia resident Deshauna Barber became the first-ever military member to win Miss USA.

The winner of Sunday's pageant will compete in the Miss Universe contest.

Miss District of Columbia USA Kara McCullough reacts after she was crowned the new Miss USA during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss California USA India Williams, left, and Miss Tennessee USA Allee-Sutton Hethcoat embrace after making the top 10 during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Contestants who made it in the top ten celebrate during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss Minnesota USA Meridith Gould celebrates making the top five during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Contestants stand on stage during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss District of Columbia Kara McCullough competes during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss Vermont USA Madison Cota, center, walks on stage with other contestants during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss New Jersey USA Chhavi Verg walks up the stage during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss District of Columbia USA Kara McCullough reacts after she was crowned the new Miss USA during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss District of Columbia USA Kara McCullough, center, reacts with fellow contestants after she was crowned the new Miss USA during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Miss District of Columbia USA and new Miss USA Kara McCullough, right, embraces first runner up Miss New Jersey USA Chhavi Verg during the Miss USA contest Sunday, May 14, 2017, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)
PASSAIC (AP) - A falling tree limb has killed a man and injured several other people during a Mother's Day barbecue in New Jersey.

Police say lightning struck a tree Sunday evening in Passaic (puh-SAY'-ihk), causing a large tree limb to come crashing down.

Police say a 28-year-old man was killed and at least five other people were injured during the backyard barbecue. The extent of their injuries was not immediately known. Police have not released the name of the man who was killed, pending notification of his family.

A fast-moving storm with strong winds and heavy rains was pounding the area at the time.
A timeline of court rulings and evolving regulations that have affected how schools respond to student sex assault allegations:

- 1967: The Office for Civil Rights is created as a federal agency to enforce school desegregation, three years after passage of the Civil Rights Act. OCR eventually assumes responsibility for a half-dozen civil rights laws at educational institutions receiving federal funding.

- 1972: Congress passes Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs or activities.

- 1980: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Alexander v. Yale University, recognizes sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX.

- 1981: The OCR issues a policy memo that, for the first time, lists sexual harassment as a form of discrimination under Title IX.

- 1992: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, says a student subjected to "coercive intercourse" is a victim of sex discrimination, eligible for monetary damages under Title IX.

- 1997: OCR issues sexual harassment guidance for schools on how to deal with victims and suspects, detailing grievance procedures, response, prevention and First Amendment rights.

- 1998: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Gebser v. Lago Independent School District, establishes a three-prong liability standard for schools: The sexual harassment must be severe enough to undercut educational opportunities, someone in authority must have "actual knowledge" of the harassment and be "deliberately indifferent" in responding.

- 1999: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, affirms that schools must address student-on-student sex harassment, including sexual assault, under Title IX.

- 2001: OCR updates its 1997 guidance on Title IX, saying schools risk losing federal funding if they don't follow the guidelines for investigating student sexual harassment complaints.

- 2006: In a letter to more than 20,000 school districts, colleges and universities, OCR reiterates their Title IX responsibilities to stop student sexual harassment, prevent its recurrence and remedy its effects.

- 2008: OCR publishes a pamphlet noting that sexual harassment includes "criminal" conduct and that schools are not relieved of Title IX obligations simply by notifying police.

- 2009: The White House Council on Women and Girls is created by executive order to focus on issues ranging from equal pay to violence. OCR begins tracking sexual violence complaints as a distinct form of harassment.

- 2011: OCR issues another letter , focusing on student-on-student sexual violence. It recommends schools use a civil litigation standard of proof in investigating cases and warns of lost federal funding if they fail to prevent and address such abuse.

- 2014: The Council on Women and Girls creates a task force to protect students from sexual assault and a website of resources. OCR issues further guidance on the Title IX responsibilities of all schools, elementary to university level.

- 2016: The task force launches an online toolkit for elementary and secondary school districts that helps create policies that distinguish "sexual misconduct" from bullying and harassment.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump is decidedly premature in claiming everyone's convinced his presidential campaign and Russia did not collude before the election. Investigations into contacts between Russians and people with the Trump campaign are still going on, so there's no exoneration to be found.

Over the past week, Trump stretched a variety of facts on trade, taxes and economic theory. But his firing of FBI Director James Comey was far and away the source of the most tumult. Contradictions cascaded from the White House.

Here are some statements by the president and his spokespeople on the FBI, Russia, economics and more:

FILE - In this May 10, 2017 file photo, President Donald Trump talks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Trump, in an apparent warning to his fired FBI director, said Friday, May 12, 2017, that James Comey had better hope there are no "tapes" of their conversations. Trump's tweet came the morning after he asserted Comey had told him three times that he wasn't under FBI investigation. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

JUMPING TO CONCLUSION

TRUMP, on whether people in his campaign and Russian officials were in any way in cahoots: "Clapper is convinced, other people are convinced ... Everybody's convinced. ... They're all saying, there's no collusion. There is no collusion." - Fox interview broadcast Friday

THE FACTS: That's untrue both generally and with respect to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence until Trump took office Jan. 20. Clapper has not said he's satisfied there was no wrongdoing. In a report published at the end of the Obama administration, Clapper said no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia had been established from a review of evidence available to him by that point. But his report focused on what was known by then about Russia's cyber actions and propaganda against Hillary Clinton, not about contacts between Trump associates and Russia.

Clapper expanded on that point Sunday, saying he did not know at the time that the FBI was digging deeply into "potential political collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians," and he was unaware of what the bureau might have found.

"There was no evidence of any collusion included in that report," he told ABC's "This Week," meaning his report. "That's not to say there wasn't evidence."

More broadly, it's obvious on its face that not everyone is convinced that Trump and his people are vindicated in the matter. Senate and House investigations continue, as does the FBI's, which Comey wanted to intensify before his dismissal last week. Acting FBI chief Andrew McCabe said the probe remains a high priority for the agency.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not convinced of anything in his panel's inquiry, except that "boy, oh, boy, there's an awful lot of smoke. I'm not saying there's fire at this point, but we're going to follow the facts wherever they lead."

___

WHY FIRE COMEY?

KELLYANNE CONWAY, White House counselor, on the reason for firing Comey: "This has nothing to do with Russia." - Tuesday on CNN

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, White House spokeswoman, on the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government: "We want this to come to its conclusion, we want it to come to its conclusion with integrity ... and we think that we've actually, by removing Director Comey, taken steps to make that happen." - Thursday White House briefing

THE FACTS: The initial White House explanation for the firing, that Comey had bungled the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices, persuaded no one. Trump was delighted with Comey's disclosures about the Clinton investigation during the campaign and praised him.

Sanders, though, acknowledged in general terms what was obvious - that by firing Comey, the White House hoped to hasten the conclusion of an aggressive FBI investigation.

___

WHO INITIATED THE DISMISSAL?

TRUMP, in letter firing the FBI chief Tuesday: "I ... concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau."

WHITE HOUSE statement Tuesday: "President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions."

SEAN SPICER, White House spokesman, laying the impetus for the firing on Rosenstein and his memo building the case against Comey: "It was all him. No one from the White House. That was a DOJ decision." - Tuesday

SANDERS, Wednesday: "People in the Justice Department made a very strong recommendation, the president followed it and he made a quick and decisive action to fire James Comey." - MSNBC interview

TRUMP, Thursday: "Oh, I was going fire regardless of recommendation." - NBC interview

THE FACTS: The early attempts to deflect responsibility on to others were a diversion; Rosenstein had been asked by the White House to put the memo together. Trump's unvarnished assertion that he wanted Comey gone has the ring of truth, even without the whole story known.

He appeared to consider himself his own best spokesman in a tweet Friday that raised the prospect of discontinuing the long White House tradition of daily press briefings.

"As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!" Trump tweeted. "Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future 'press briefings' and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???"

___

TRUMP UNDER FBI INVESTIGATION?

TRUMP: "First of all, when you're under investigation you're giving all sorts of documents and everything. I knew I wasn't under and I heard it was stated at the committee, at some committee level, that I wasn't." - NBC interview

THE FACTS: An absence of document requests can't be read as an indication that he isn't under investigation, as Trump suggests. Investigations begin with interviews and document searches that are steps removed from the subject of the probe. Direct contact with the subject wouldn't become known to that person until late in the process.

___

TRUMP's letter to Comey: "I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation." In an NBC interview Thursday the president elaborated, saying Comey had told him this at a dinner and in two separate phone calls. "I said, if it's possible would you let me know, 'Am I under investigation?' He said, 'You are not under investigation'."

THE FACTS: Comey hasn't responded publicly to Trump's claims. But even if he did make such assurances, those answers months or weeks ago would be ephemeral because the investigation into Russia's meddling in U.S. presidential election continues and hasn't reached conclusions.

That's why investigators make it a practice not to circumscribe a probe in that fashion. It would also breach protocol for an FBI chief and president to discuss an investigation bearing on the president. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told senators Thursday it's not standard practice for the FBI to tell people they're excluded from an investigation.

In congressional testimony March 20, Comey refused to say whether Trump himself was under investigation when asked directly. "I'm not gonna answer that," he told the House Intelligence Committee. "I'm not gonna answer about anybody, in this forum." He added that he had privately briefed the top Republican and Democrat on the committee "in great detail on the subjects of the investigation and what we're doing."

Publicly, he said, he would not identify those being investigated "so we don't end up smearing people" who may end up not being prosecuted. But he described casting a wide net, "investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts."

___

COLLEGE DAZE

TRUMP: "The Electoral College is almost impossible for a Republican to win. Very hard." - NBC interview

THE FACTS: History disagrees. Over the past century, the party victory split is dead even: 13 for Democrats, 13 for Republicans. If you add the total electoral votes amassed by the candidates of each party over that time, Republicans actually come out ahead - 7,159 to 6,607.

___

TAX TALK

TRUMP: "We're the highest-taxed nation in the world." - interview with The Economist magazine

THE FACTS: Trump has repeatedly made variations on this false claim. The overall U.S. tax burden is actually one of the lowest among the 32 developed and large emerging-market economies tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Taxes made up 26.4 percent of the total U.S. economy in 2015, according to the OECD. That's far below Denmark's tax burden of 46.6 percent, Britain's 32.5 percent or Germany's 36.9 percent. Just four OECD countries had a lower tax bite than the U.S.: South Korea, Ireland, Chile and Mexico.

Trump qualified his claim later in the interview by saying the top marginal corporate tax rate, specifically, is higher than in similar industrialized countries. That's more or less true, although the higher rate is moderated by tax breaks not available in some of those other countries.

___

TRADING PLACES

TRUMP: "Right now the United States has ... about a $15 billion trade deficit with Canada." - Economist interiew

THE FACTS: His numbers are upside down. The United States actually ran an $8.1 billion trade surplus with Canada last year, according to the latest numbers available from the Census Bureau. A $24.6 billion U.S. surplus with Canada in the trade of services, including tourism and software, outweighed a $16.5 billion deficit in the trade of goods, including autos and oil.

Trump, who regularly decries the loss of American manufacturing jobs, tends to emphasize trade in goods and ignore trade in services. His comment about Canada came as his administration seeks a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

The U.S. last year ran a deficit of $750 billion in goods with the rest of the world but recorded a $249 billion surplus in services.

___

ECON LINGO

TRUMP: "You understand the expression 'prime the pump'? ... I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It's what you have to do. We have to prime the pump." - Economist interview

THE FACTS: He didn't coin that phrase. It's a well-worn metaphor for generating faster growth, first made popular as an economic analogy more than 80 years ago during the Great Depression.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary people quickly tweeted that the phrase "priming the pump" has been around since the early 1800s. Literally, it's about pouring water into a pump to allow it to create suction. The phrase was commonly used by mining publications during the 1920s, but it took on new significance after the economy cratered during the Depression.

By 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promoted the idea of flushing money into the economy to stimulate stronger growth with his New Deal policies. Such policies rankled Roosevelt's predecessor, Herbert Hoover. "One of the ideas in these spendings is to prime the economic pump," Hoover said in a 1935 post-presidential speech. "We might abandon this idea also, for it dries up the well of enterprise."

___

WEEKENDS AWAY

TRUMP tweets, concerning his May 5-7 weekend: "Rather than causing a big disruption in N.Y.C., I will be working out of my home in Bedminster, N.J. this weekend. Also saves country money!" ''The reason I am staying in Bedminster, N.J., a beautiful community, is that staying in NYC is much more expensive and disruptive. Meetings!"

THE FACTS: True, less disruption in the New Jersey countryside than in the metropolis and almost certainly less cost to taxpayers.

But his weekends away, whether at his Florida resort or in New Jersey, are much more expensive than weekends at the White House, where security is already in place.

The White House doesn't make it easy for taxpayers to know anything about these costs. The administration is mum when asked for an accounting, and past attempts by government auditors to gauge the costs of presidential travel are sketchy, fragmentary or outdated.

A law Trump signed provides nearly $120 million to reimburse law enforcement agencies for their costs of protecting his homes outside Washington and to house Secret Service agents in New York and Florida through September.

Bedminster town officials estimate local costs of $12,000 a day for heightened security when Trump stays there. Palm Beach County, Florida, spends more than $60,000 a day when the president visits, mostly for law enforcement overtime. The New York City Police Department has said it spends up to $146,000 a day to protect first lady Melania Trump and son, Barron, living at Trump Tower until the school year ends. That cost at least doubles when the president is there.

Those comparisons are inexact but they suggest a Manhattan weekend would be pricier to taxpayers.

Local enforcement is only one segment of costs, though. It costs roughly $200,000 an hour to fly Air Force One, the president's armored limousine is flown separately to his destinations, and the Secret Service faces multiple other expenses associated with his travel. Trump has spent about half his weekends away since becoming president.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Paul Wiseman, Josh Boak, Jill Colvin and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

___

Find all AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd
SEATTLE (AP) - Federal judges on Monday peppered a lawyer for President Donald Trump with questions about whether the administration's travel ban discriminates against Muslims and zeroed in on the president's campaign statements, the second time in a week the rhetoric has faced judicial scrutiny.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, defending the travel ban, told the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the executive order should be reinstated because it falls well within the president's authority.

"No one has ever attempted to set aside a law that is neutral on its face and neutral in its operation on the basis of largely campaign trail comments made by a private citizen running for office," he said.

Protesters wave signs and chant during a demonstration against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Further, Wall said the president had backed off the comments he made during the campaign, clarifying that "what he was talking about was Islamic terrorist groups and the countries that sponsor or shelter them."

Neal Katyal, who represented Hawaii, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, expressed disbelief at that argument and said Trump had repeatedly spoken of a Muslim ban during the presidential campaign and after.

"This is a repeated pattern of the president," Katyal said.

The 9th Circuit panel was hearing arguments over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The judges will decide whether to uphold a Hawaii judge's decision in March that blocked the ban.

Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judge's decision putting the ban on ice. They also questioned whether they could consider Trump's campaign statements, with one judge asking if there was anything other than "willful blindness" that would prevent them from doing so.

Dozens of advocates for refugees and immigrants rallied outside the federal courthouse in Seattle, some carrying "No Ban, No Wall" signs.

Wall's insistence that the travel ban should be upheld because it is "neutral," without reference to Islam, drew pointed questions from Judge Richard Paez. An executive order issued by President Franklin Roosevelt that led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II similarly was couched as a necessity for national security and made no reference to residents of Japanese heritage, Paez noted.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that executive order in a challenge brought by California resident Fred Korematsu. The ruling is now widely considered regrettable.

"Would the Korematsu executive order pass muster under your test today?" Paez grilled Wall.

"No, Judge Paez," he answered

"Why not? 'Facially legitimate' - that's all you say!" Paez said. "You emphasize 'facially legitimate.'"

"I want to be very clear about this," Wall said solemnly. "This case is not Korematsu, and if it were I wouldn't be standing here and the United States would not be defending it."

Wall went on to argue that unlike the Korematsu case, Trump's executive order probably wouldn't be questioned but for the statements he made as a candidate.

Paez also questioned Katyal about Trump's statements, calling them "profound." But the judge wondered whether Trump is forever forbidden from adopting an executive order along the lines of his travel ban.

Katyal said no, and suggested the president could begin by repudiating his earlier statements or by working with Congress.

"If you rule for him, you defer to the president in a way that history teaches us is very dangerous," Katyal said.

Monday's arguments marked the second time Trump's efforts to restrict immigration from certain Muslim-majority nations have reached the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.

After Trump issued his initial travel ban on a Friday in late January, bringing chaos and protests to airports around the country, a Seattle judge blocked its enforcement nationwide - a decision that was unanimously upheld by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel.

The president then rewrote his executive order, rather than appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in March, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu blocked the new version from taking effect, citing what he called "significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus" in Trump's campaign statements.

"Again, in this court, the President claims a nearly limitless power to make immigration policy that is all but immune from judicial review," Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin wrote to the 9th Circuit. "Again, he must be checked."

At his daily briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer expressed confidence that the executive order will be upheld by the appeals court.

"The executive order is fully lawful and will be upheld. We fully believe that," Spicer said.

The travel ban cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court, but that would likely be cemented if the 4th and 9th Circuits reach differing conclusions about its legality. Because of how the courts chose to proceed, a full slate of 13 judges heard the 4th Circuit arguments last week, while just three, all appointees of President Bill Clinton, will consider the case in Seattle.

With the possibility for myriad concurring or dissenting opinions, it could take the 4th Circuit longer to rule, noted Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond law school in Virginia.

__

Associated Press reporter Martha Bellisle contributed to this report.

Isra Ayesh, right, of Seattle, who is the organizing director of Americans for Refugees and Immigrants, leads a chant during a demonstration against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Miles Treakle, left, of Seattle, holds a sign that reads "Refugees Welcome Ban Trump," as he protests against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

A protester holds a poster with the social media hashtag "#refugeesWelcome," during a demonstration against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Protesters wave signs and chant during a demonstration against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Law enforcement officials stand outside a federal courthouse in Seattle, Monday, May 15, 2017, as a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hears arguments inside over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's revised travel ban. Trump's executive would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
BERLIN (AP) - A notorious German neo-Nazi was arrested Monday in Hungary, where he had been seeking asylum after fleeing to avoid serving a prison sentence for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic incitement, officials said.

Hungarian police said Horst Mahler was taken into custody in the northwestern city of Sopron in the early afternoon.

Ken Heidenreich, a spokesman for prosecutors in Munich where the European arrest warrant for Mahler was issued, confirmed that they had been informed by phone that Mahler was in custody.

FILE - In this Jan 12, 2009 file photo Horst Mahler waits prior to the lawsuit in a court room of the higher regional court in Munich, southern Germany. (AP Photo/Christof Stache, file)

Mahler, 81, was a founding member of the left-wing Red Army Faction militant group who later turned to the far-right and has had numerous neo-Nazi-related convictions.

In addition, a court in Mainz in 2003 found Mahler guilty of condoning a crime for saying that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States were justified, and fined him several thousand euros (dollars).

He was also convicted in the mid-1970s for Red Army Faction-related activities - including several bank robberies and for helping notorious terrorist Andreas Baader, another founding member of the group, to escape from jail.

He was serving a 10-year sentence for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic incitement when a court ruled two years ago that he could leave prison due to serious illness. He was ordered to return to prison late last year, but he refused and fled the country.

The Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Monday published a letter from Mahler saying he was asking "the leader of the Hungarian nation, Viktor Orban, to grant me asylum as someone who is being politically persecuted."

Heidenreich said it was not yet clear when Mahler would be extradited back to Germany to complete his sentence.

The Budapest Regional Court is expected to set a hearing date on Tuesday.

_____

Pablo Gorondi contributed to this report from Budapest.
TOKYO (AP) - Western Digital is seeking arbitration in a dispute with its joint venture partner Toshiba Corp. over the sale of the Japanese electronics giant's computer-chip business.

Toshiba wants to sell the lucrative chips unit to shore up its finances, but Western Digital is demanding Toshiba first obtain its consent.

Tokyo-based Toshiba forecast Monday a 950 billion yen ($8.4 billion) loss for the fiscal year that ended in March. That report was issued without the endorsement of Toshiba's auditors.

A man walks in front of an advertisement of Toshiba in Tokyo, Monday, May 15, 2017. Toshiba, whose U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse has filed for bankruptcy protection, is reporting a 950 billion yen ($8.4 billion) net loss for the fiscal year ended March. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Western Digital said in a statement that several of its SanDisk subsidiaries have filed a request for arbitration with the ICC International Court of Arbitration over plans to sell its NAND flash-memory joint ventures with Toshiba. The request seeks to block the sale, arguing it would be violation of their joint venture agreement. The arbitration will take place in San Francisco, it said.

"Seeking relief through mandatory arbitration was not our first choice in trying to resolve this matter. However, all of our other efforts to achieve a resolution to date have been unsuccessful, and so we believe legal action is now a necessary next step," said Western Digital Chief Executive Steve Milligan.

Toshiba President, Satoshi Tsunakawa, who has acknowledged that the company's strategy based on Westinghouse was a mistake, said he doesn't think Western Digital can block Toshiba.

"With regards to your first question as to whether this may delay bidding procedures, we will try to dispel such concerns by explaining to all potential bidders the validity of Toshiba's position," he told reporters.

Toshiba described the financial results it released Monday as "projections," rather than results. The dismal figures were in line with earlier estimates.

Toshiba's U.S. nuclear business Westinghouse has filed for bankruptcy protection. Its losses, and a years' long accounting scandal are imperiling the company's future. Toshiba's earnings reports, meanwhile, have been delayed by questions over its acquisition of U.S. nuclear construction company CB&I Stone and Webster.

Toshiba said it expects to post a profit of 50 billion yen ($442 million) for the fiscal year through March 2018.

Costs in the nuclear industry have ballooned since the March 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan, when three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant sank into meltdowns, and stricter safeguards are required to operate and build reactors.

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Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

Her work can be found at https://www.apnews.com/search/yuri%20kageyama
PRAGUE (AP) - The Czech Republic's political crisis is nowhere near an end after Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka rejected a proposal for a new finance minister.

Sobotka asked President Milos Zeman to fire Finance Minister Andrej Babis, one of the country's richest people, over unexplained business dealings. Babis has denied wrongdoing, saying he won't resign.

Zeman has so far refused to fire his ally and says he considers Babis a successful minister.

Czech President Milos Zeman delivers a speech on Plenary Session of High-Level Dialogue, at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Sunday, May 14, 2017. (Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Pool Photo via AP)

In an effort to resolve the crisis, Babis proposed his deputy, Alena Schillerova, who isn't affiliated with any political party, as a replacement Friday. ANO is favored to win October's parliamentary election well ahead of Sobotka's leftist Social Democrats.

But Sobotka said Monday that Schillerova is too close to Babis and he had no guarantees she would act independently.
MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Philippine lawmakers on Monday killed an impeachment complaint accusing President Rodrigo Duterte of crimes against humanity for the thousands of people who have died in his anti-drug crackdown.

The Justice Committee of the House of Representatives, which is dominated by Duterte allies, declared during the first hearing on the matter that while the complaint was sufficient in form, there was insufficient substance to proceed.

The decision to stop the impeachment complaint, which also accused Duterte of murder, corruption and unexplained wealth, was expected. But the president's critics hope the procedure could bolster a lawsuit against him before the International Criminal Court for alleged extrajudicial killings by showing that domestic efforts to stop Duterte have failed.

The dismissal of the complaint, filed in March, bars any new impeachment case against Duterte until next March.

Since taking office in June, Duterte's war on drugs has killed 7,000-9,000 suspected drug dealers and addicts, according to human rights groups. The government refutes that, releasing data on May 2 showing nearly 4,600 people have been killed in police anti-drug operations and homicides found to be drug-related.

During Monday's hearing, Rep. Rodolfo Farinas, the majority floor leader, questioned Rep. Gary Alejano on whether he had personal knowledge of allegations he made in his complaint, including the more than 8,000 people killed in the anti-drug war and the billions of pesos supposedly in Duterte's bank accounts.

Alejano said he had no personal knowledge as a witness, but that he had personal knowledge as a complainant based on official records, affidavits of witnesses and Duterte's public pronouncements. His appeals to be allowed to explain were rejected.

Opposition Rep. Edcel Lagman urged the committee to allow Alejano to be heard, saying to determine substance, there only needs to be a recital of facts on offenses charged and determination that they are under the committee's jurisdiction.

"While it is true that an impeachment proceeding is a political exercise, it is not a partisan enterprise," Lagman said.

After an executive session, several lawmakers pointed to Alejano's lack of personal knowledge about the alleged crimes, calling his allegations hearsay. Forty-two of 49 committee members then voted to declare the complaint sufficient in form but insufficient in substance.

A frustrated Alejano told reporters that he'll discuss with his colleagues from the Magdalo party whether they should file their own complaint before the ICC.

He said it was clear that the procedure "was railroaded" and that the House "is not independent."

"Now that they have killed the impeachment, which is the only way for the people to hold the president accountable, where will we exact justice from him, he is immune to suits," Alejano said.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said that Alejano's complaint "was from rehashed, trumped-up charges aimed at undermining the duly constituted government."
BEIJING (AP) - A look at recent developments in the South China Sea, where China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons in waters crucial for global commerce and rich in fish and potential oil and gas reserves:

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a weekly look at the latest developments in the South China Sea, the location of several territorial conflicts that have raised tensions in the region.

FILE - In this May 13, 2017 file photo, Japanese soldiers use rubber rafts as part of an amphibious drill during joint military exercises between the U.S., Japan, France and U.K. on Naval Base Guam. U.S. marines joined with forces from Japan, France and Britain for live-firing exercises on the American territory of Guam that are intended to show support for the free passage of vessels in international waters amid concerns China may restrict access to the South China Sea. (AP Photo/Haven Daley, File)

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GUAM HOSTS JOINT EXERCISES BETWEEN FORCES OF JAPAN, FRANCE, BRITAIN, US

U.S. marines joined with forces from Japan, France and Britain for live-firing exercises on the American territory of Guam that are intended to show support for the free passage of vessels in international waters amid concerns China may restrict access to the South China Sea.

The drills are being held around Guam and Tinian islands about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) south of Tokyo and east of Manila, Philippines.

The exercises feature two French ships currently on a four-month deployment to the Indian and Pacific oceans. Some 50 Japanese soldiers and 160 Japanese sailors were due to participate, along with U.K. helicopters and 70 U.K. troops deployed with one of the French ships.

The drills had been halted temporarily Friday after a French landing craft ran aground. U.S. officials said they stopped the drills so they could assess the situation. They moved ahead as scheduled on Saturday.

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SHIPS FROM THAILAND, SINGAPORE, JOIN US NAVY IN SOUTH CHINA SEA DRILLS

Ships from the navies of Thailand and Singapore completed a three-day exercise with the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea last week aimed at boosting their ability to work together on a broad range of maritime tasks.

The exercises, termed Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) have been held since 1995 with Thailand and Singapore as original participants.

"Our Sailors certainly are learning extensively from this tremendous experience," Cmdr. Doug Meagher, who commands the littoral combat ship USS Coronado, was quoted as saying by the website navy.mil.

Singapore and Thailand sent frigates to take part in the drills, which also included the U.S. Navy's Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Sterett.

Along with operating together at sea, the exercises included boarding, search and seizure, joint flight operations and communications drills.

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PHILIPPINES BEGINS MOVING TROOPS AND SUPPLIES TO REINFORCE ISLAND HOLDING

The Philippines has started transporting troops and supplies to a disputed island in the South China Sea in preparation for construction work that includes reinforcing and lengthening an airstrip and building a dock.

Pag-asa has been home to Filipino soldiers and fishermen for decades, but is also claimed by Beijing.

Lt. Gen. Raul del Rosario, head of the Philippine military's Western Command, said last week that troops and initial supplies had arrived on the island. About 1.6 billion pesos ($32 million) has been earmarked for the construction that will also include a fishing port, solar power generators, a water desalination plant, the refurbishment of housing for soldiers and the construction of facilities for marine research and tourists.

China's construction of seven islands nearby in the Spratly archipelago has dwarfed similar activities by rival claimants, including the Philippines, whose frosty relations with Beijing have improved significantly under President Rodrigo Duterte.

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JAPAN, INDIA AFFIRM PLANS TO STRENGTHEN MILITARY COOPERATION

Japan and India affirmed plans last week to strengthen their military cooperation amid rising tensions in the South China Sea and elsewhere in Asia.

Indian Defense Minister Arun Jaitley told his Japanese counterpart, Tomomi Inada, in Tokyo that his country hopes to pursue a strategic partnership with Japan for regional peace and stability.

Jaitley welcomed a planned trilateral naval exercise among the U.S., India and Japan in July as a way of strengthening cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.

Japan and India have been stepping up defense cooperation amid China's increased assertiveness in the South China Sea and moves to establish a more permanent presence in the Indian Ocean. China regards Japan as a historical rival for dominance in northeast Asia and is embroiled in longstanding border disputes with India, with which it fought a brief but bloody frontier war in 1962.
BERLIN (AP) - French President Emmanuel Macron hit the ground running Monday on his first full day in office by naming a prime minister from the center-right and then flying to Germany, where he and Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to work together to undertake European reforms.

At home, Macron started to shape his government by appointing relatively little-known lawmaker Edouard Philippe, 46, as his prime minister. That made good on a promise to repopulate French politics with new faces and reinforced the generational shift under Macron, who at 39 is France's youngest president.

Then, a large crowd outside the chancellery welcomed Macron to Berlin, with some waving European Union flags. Macron and Merkel were all smiles inside, and the German leader declared that "Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that."

New French President Emmanuel Macron, left, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel wave to journalists at the chancellery in Berlin Monday, May 15, 2017, during the first foreign trip of Macron after his inauguration the day before. (Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa via AP)

Germany and France have traditionally been the motor of European integration, but the relationship has become increasingly lopsided in recent years as France struggled economically.

German leaders were hugely relieved by the independent centrist's rout of far-right rival Marine Le Pen in the May 7 presidential runoff, and now they hope that Macron can deliver the economic upturn that his predecessors couldn't.

Macron is the conservative Merkel's fourth French president in nearly 12 years as chancellor. Some media have dubbed the pair "Merkron" - a reference to the "Merkozy" moniker used for Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, France's conservative leader from 2007-12.

Merkel called for "new dynamism" in the countries' relationship. She said she was "aware of the responsibility, at a very critical moment for the European Union, to take the right decisions together."

The 28-nation EU faces complex divorce proceedings with Britain, its current No. 2 economy. When Britain leaves the bloc in 2019, France will be the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Macron made clear his determination to tackle his country's problems.

"The French agenda will be an agenda of reform in the coming months, in economic, social and educational terms," he said. "Not because Europe requests it, but because France needs it."

France, he said, "is today the only big country in the European Union that, for more than 30 years, has not succeeded in beating the problem of mass unemployment."

Macron also declared there needs to be "a Europe that protects our citizens better." Together with Germany, he said, he wants to work on "a common road map for the European Union and the eurozone."

Macron faces his first big test next month in legislative elections that will determine how far he is able to advance his reform agenda. He is the first president of modern France to come neither from the mainstream left nor the right parties.

Philippe, the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, is a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers. He is a member of the Republicans, a mainstream-right party whose candidate Macron beat in the first round of the election.

Philippe could possibly attract other Republicans to Macron's cause. Alain Juppe, a former prime minister, called Philippe "a man of great talent" with "all the qualities to handle the difficult job."

Macron also is siphoning off support from lawmakers on the left. At least 24 Socialists are now campaigning for re-election under the banner of Macron's Republic on the Move party.

Merkel wished Macron luck in the legislative elections.

She held out the possibility of deep reform to the 19-nation eurozone if it is deemed necessary, saying she's prepared to talk about changes to the EU treaties - a cumbersome and politically risky process.

"First we need to work on what we want to do, and then if it turns out it needs treaty changes, then we - or at least I - will be prepared to do that," she said. European countries must not dig in their heels and say changes can never be made, she added, as "a European Union that behaves this way would be vulnerable from every corner of the world."

Macron, for his part, reassured Germany that he wouldn't revive the idea of jointly issued eurobonds, which divided Europe at the height of the eurozone debt crisis.

"I have never ... advocated what people call eurobonds," the former investment banker and finance minister said. "I am not a promoter of mutualizing past debts."

But he added: "what I know is that we have investments to make (in Europe), and so we have to work on investment mechanisms for the future." He said that the eurozone to find ways to "inject new money" via public and private investment.

"I will always be a frank, direct and constructive partner, because I think the success of our two countries is deeply linked, and that the whole success of Europe depends on that," Macron said.

Merkel, quoting German writer Hermann Hesse, said that "a magic dwells in each beginning."

"Of course, this magic only remains if there are results," she added. "We both know that."

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Associated Press writers John Leicester in Paris and David Rising in Berlin contributed.

New French President Emmanuel Macron, left, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel listen to the national anthems during a military ceremony in Berlin Monday, May 15, 2017, during Macron's first foreign trip after his inauguration the day before. (AP Photo/Ferdinand Ostrop)

New French President Emmanuel Macron is welcomed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin Monday, May 15, 2017, during his first foreign trip after his inauguration the day before. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe poses at the Prime Minister residence in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, center right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, center right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (Thomas Samson, Pool via AP)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (Thomas Samson, Pool via AP)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe gets out of his car prior to his meeting with outgoing Prime Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, in Paris, France, Monday, May 15, 2017. On his first full day in office, French President Emmanuel Macron moved quickly Monday on fronts both foreign and domestic, naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister before flying off to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, right, is greeted by outgoing Prime Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, prior to their meeting in Paris, France, Monday, May 15, 2017. On his first full day in office, French President Emmanuel Macron moved quickly Monday on fronts both foreign and domestic, naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister before flying off to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe poses at the Prime Minister residence in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, right, is greeted by outgoing Prime Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, prior to their meeting in Paris, France, Monday, May 15, 2017. On his first full day in office, French President Emmanuel Macron moved quickly Monday on fronts both foreign and domestic, naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister before flying off to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, center right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, center, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Newly appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, right, shakes hands with outgoing Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris, Monday, May, 15, 2017. French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old lawmaker, as prime minister, making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

This undated handout picture provided Monday, May, 15, 2017, by Le Havre city hall shows Le Havre mayor, Edouard Phillippe. On his first full day in office, French President Emmanuel Macron moved quickly Monday on fronts both foreign and domestic, naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister before flying off to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel. (Eric Houri/Le Have city hall via AP)

In this photo dated Sunday, May 14, 2017, a horse from the horse-riding Republican Guard rears up as new French President Emmanuel Macron waves from a military vehicle while riding on the Champs Elysees avenue towards the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, POOL)
North Korea: New long-range missile can carry heavy nuke

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea on Monday boasted of a successful weekend launch of a new type of "medium long-range" ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead. Outsiders also saw a significant technological jump, with the test-fire apparently flying higher and for a longer time period than any other such previous missile.

Amid condemnation in Seoul, Tokyo and Washington, a jubilant North Korean leader Kim Jong Un promised more nuclear and missile tests and warned that his country's weapons could strike the U.S. mainland and Pacific holdings.

North Korean propaganda must be considered with wariness - Pyongyang has threatened for decades to reduce Seoul to a "sea of fire," for instance - but Monday's claim, if confirmed, would mark another big advance toward the North's goal of fielding a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Some experts, including officials in Tokyo, estimate that Sunday's launch successfully tested a new type of missile, potentially the longest in North Korea's arsenal.

The test is also an immediate challenge to South Korea's new president, Moon Jae-in, a liberal elected last week who expressed a desire to reach out to North Korea. Pyongyang's aggressive push to boost its weapons program also makes it one of the Trump administration's most urgent foreign policy worries, though Washington has struggled to settle on a policy.

North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket," and said the "Hwasong-12" was "capable of carrying a large, heavy nuclear warhead."

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Monday morning blues as 'WannaCry' hits at workweek's start

TOKYO (AP) - The worldwide "ransomware" cyberattack wreaked havoc in hospitals, schools and offices across the globe on Monday. Asia reported thousands of new cases but no large-scale breakdowns as workers started the week by booting up their computers.

The full extent of the damage from the cyberattack felt in 150 countries was unclear and could worsen if more malicious variations of the online extortion scheme appear.

The initial attack, known as "WannaCry," paralyzed computers running Britain's hospital network, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies around the world.

As a loose global network of cybersecurity experts fought the ransomware, the attack was disrupting computers that run factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems in scores of countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Spain, India and Japan, among others. Among those hit were Russia's Interior Ministry and companies including Spain's Telefonica and FedEx Corp. in the U.S.

Chinese state media said 29,372 institutions there had been infected along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

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Experts try to figure out who's behind global cyberattack

HONG KONG (AP) - Experts are trying to figure out who's behind a global "ransomware" software cyberattack that shut down hundreds of thousands of computers around the world by exploiting a software vulnerability.

Some details about the "WannaCry" attack, which emerged late Friday, and what you can do to stay safe:

HOW THE VIRUS WORKS

Cybersecurity experts say the worm affects computers using Microsoft operating systems and takes advantage of a vulnerability in the software to spread the infection. "WannaCry" is particularly malicious because it takes just one person to click on an infected link or email attachment to cause the virus to spread to other machines on the same network.

Infected computers are frozen and display a big message in red informing users, "Oops, your files have been encrypted!" and demanding about $300 in online bitcoin payment. Victims have only hours to pay the ransom, which rises to $600 before the files are destroyed.

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Lawmakers urge Trump to avoid picking a partisan for FBI job

WASHINGTON (AP) - As President Donald Trump considers a replacement for fired FBI Director James Comey, lawmakers are urging the president to steer clear of appointing any politicians.

The advice came Sunday amid more criticism over Trump's dismissal of Comey during an FBI probe of Russia's meddling with last year's election and any ties to the Trump campaign. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said the Founding Fathers created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding."

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally - and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," Clapper said "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper responded, "Exactly."

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. "The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said.

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Another appeals court to weigh Trump's revised travel ban

SEATTLE (AP) - For the second time in a week, government lawyers will try to persuade a federal appeals court to reinstate President Donald Trump's revised travel ban - and once again, they can expect plenty of questions Monday about whether the ban was designed to discriminate against Muslims.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled arguments in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judge's decision putting the ban on ice. They peppered Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall with questions about whether they could consider Trump's campaign statements calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., with one judge asking if there was anything other than "willful blindness" that would prevent them from doing so.

Monday's arguments mark the second time Trump's efforts to restrict immigration from certain Muslim-majority nations have reached the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.

After Trump issued his initial travel ban on a Friday in late January, bringing chaos and protests to airports around the country, a Seattle judge blocked its enforcement nationwide - a decision that was unanimously upheld by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel.

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Schools face vexing test: Which kids will sexually attack?

The children who sexually assault other children may be the popular jocks, the loners or anyone in between. There is no typical attacker, no way for schools to predict who might inflict that kind of torment on a classmate.

Thousands of school-age offenders are treated annually for sexual aggression in the United States, yet experts see no standard profile of personality, background or motivation.

They say that while anti-social behavior can suggest a greater risk of offending, the cool kid may attack and the rebel may reform. The reasons are rarely as straightforward as physical gratification and range from a sense of entitlement to desperation to fit in.

Though many sexual assaults aren't reported to authorities, research shows that about 95 percent of juvenile offenders who enter the justice system won't be arrested for another sex crime. Experts say the ordeal of facing police and parents - along with public condemnation for such taboo acts - scares many straight.

An ongoing Associated Press investigation has documented how K-12 schools in the United States can fail to protect students in their care from sexual assault, sometimes minimizing or even covering up incidents. Schools also struggle to help sexually aggressive students, both before and after they do lasting harm.

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School sex complaints to federal agency rise _ and languish

HOUSTON (AP) - Hector and Itza Ayala sat in a conference room at Houston's prestigious high school for the performing arts, clutching a document they hoped would force administrators to investigate their 15-year-old daughter's claim of a classroom sex assault.

It had been four months since the girl reported being attacked by another student. School district police had been notified, but administrators said they could do nothing else to protect her from the boy, who was still in school. Frustrated, Itza, a teacher in the district, scoured the internet for help.

A Google search led her to the website of the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights.

"As I read more and more," she said, "I thought, 'This is exactly what happened, this is exactly what they're not doing. Somebody can help me!'"

Three years earlier, the office had issued detailed guidance on what schools must do upon receiving reports of student sexual violence in K-12 schools. An elaboration on years of legal and regulatory precedents, the guidance specified that a police investigation did not absolve a school from conducting its own review of whether a student's right to an education free of sex discrimination had been violated.

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Erdogan visits Trump, amid much friction between US, Turkey

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Islamic State militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to U.S. interests in the volatile Middle East.

The Turks are fiercely opposed to the U.S. plans, seeing the Kurdish fighters as terrorists. And when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visits the White House this week, the most he and President Donald Trump may be able to do is agree to disagree, and move on.

"The Turks see this as a crisis in the relationship," said Jonathan Schanzer at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The challenge is hardly new. Long before Trump took office, U.S. presidents have grappled with the fragility of partnering with Turkey's government and the Kurds to carry out a Middle East agenda.

Past administrations have sought a delicate balance. Too exuberant in its support for the Kurds, and the U.S. risks pushing ally Turkey toward U.S. geopolitical rivals like Russia or emboldening the Kurds to try to create an independent state - a scenario that would destabilize multiple countries in the region. Too little cooperation with the Kurds risks squandering a battlefield ally with proven effectiveness against extremist threats and who has staunchly supported Washington.

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With Merkel and PM, France's new president wastes no time

PARIS (AP) - On his first full day in office, France's freshly inaugurated President Emmanuel Macron was moving quickly Monday on fronts foreign and domestic, with a scheduled first presidential trip to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel and the expected unveiling of his choice for prime minister.

Among names being bandied around for the top job in Macron's first government, speculation mostly centered on Edouard Philippe. The 46-year-old lawmaker, largely unknown to voters, is a member of the mainstream-right Republicans party that was badly battered by Macron's victory in the presidential campaign.

Appointing Philippe could tick several boxes for 39-year-old Macron, France's youngest president, who took power on Sunday. Philippe's age would reinforce the generational shift in France's corridors of power and the image of youthful vigor that Macron is cultivating. It would also make good on Macron's campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces.

Philippe could also attract other Republicans to Macron's cause as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass promised economic reforms.

Macron's planned afternoon trip to Berlin, his first as president, signals his intent to also move rapidly on campaign promises to revive support for the European Union by reforming and strengthening it.

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Miss District of Columbia wins 2017 edition of Miss USA

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The District of Columbia has won back-to-back Miss USA titles.

Kara McCullough, a 25-year-old chemist working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was crowned Sunday at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on the Las Vegas Strip. She will go on to compete on the Miss Universe contest.

The runner-up was Miss New Jersey Chhavi Verg, a student at Rutgers University studying marketing and Spanish. The second runner-up was Miss Minnesota Meridith Gould, who is studying apparel retail merchandising at the University of Minnesota.

Fifty-one women representing each state and the nation's capital participated in the decades-old competition.

McCullough was born in Naples, Italy, and raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She said she wants to inspire children to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
PRAGUE (AP) - The Czech presidential office said President Milos Zeman's latest shot at the media was a joke. Politicians and journalists just don't seem to get it.

Before meeting Russia's president Sunday in China, Zeman commented on the presence of journalists, telling Vladimir Putin that they were too numerous and they should be "liquidated." Putin countered that it could be enough to "reduce" them.

Their conversation was captured by a television microphone and posted on social media.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, shakes hands with Czech Republic's President Milos Zeman during a meeting on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Sunday, May 14, 2017. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said he "strongly" disliked discussion of such an inappropriate topic.

Culture Minister Daniel Herman called Zeman's remarks "unacceptable." Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka simply re-tweeted a message about the number of journalists who were killed or attacked in Russia in recent years.

European Parliament lawmaker Pavel Telicka said the incident was evidence that Zeman doesn't deserve to win another term in the election early next year.

Zeman's sparring with the country's press goes back to his time as prime minister from 1998 to 2002. In 2001, he threatened to destroy a weekly publication that accused his government of non-transparent policies supporting corruption, triggering protests by journalists at home and abroad.

When he was sworn in in 2013, he attacked the country's media on his first day in office, saying some of them "brainwash" and "manipulate public opinion," and has continued to make critical remarks.

Zeman, who opposes Western sanctions against Russia, met Putin on the sidelines of a conference in Beijing centered on President Xi Jinping's "One Belt, One Road" initiative
WARSAW, Poland (AP) - In most nations, having a billionaire financier and philanthropist would be a source of great pride, a person many elected officials would want to cozy up to.

Not for George Soros.

The demonization of the American-Hungarian billionaire and Holocaust survivor has spread across Central Europe, with the 86-year-old increasingly accused by nationalists of using his money to force his liberal values, including support for refugees, on their societies.

FILE - In this file photo dated Saturday, Sept. 24, 2011, chairman, Soros Fund Management, George Soros speaks during a forum at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings in Washington. The billionaire financier and philanthropist Soros says his fight against intolerance is rooted in his own experience of living through the Nazi occupation of Hungary, but some officials in Central Europe have accused him of using his money to force his liberal values on their nascent democratic societies. (AP Photo Manuel Balce Ceneta, FILE)

And it's not just those on the fringes, but elected officials who are attributing all manner of sins to Soros, a political strategy that seems aimed at de-legitimizing projects that Soros has supported in Central and Eastern Europe's transition to democracy.

This groundswell began in late 2015, as large numbers of migrants and refugees were arriving in Europe. A far-right nationalist at an anti-refugee rally in Poland set fire to an effigy of an Orthodox Jew as a crowd chanted slogans against Islam and the European Union. The man said the Jewish figure represented Soros.

It wasn't always this way. In 2012, Poland's then-president, Bronislaw Komorowski, bestowed one of the country's highest orders on Soros, thanking him for his contributions to a nascent democratic civil society after communism.

Soros' donations have advanced human rights, the rule of law, public health, LGBT and Roma rights, education and even improved transportation. Many of the leaders turning against him now - including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban - got scholarships from Soros in the 1990s to study in the West or received research grants.

Officials today are much more likely to accuse Soros destroying their countries.

Liviu Dragnea, chairman of Romania's ruling Social Democratic Party, says Soros and his work "have fed evil in Romania."

Krystyna Pawlowicz, a lawmaker with the ruling conservatives in Poland, called him the "most dangerous man in the world" on Radio Maryja, a Catholic broadcaster. She said his foundations "finance anti-Christian and anti-national activities."

Sociologists see such rhetoric, which gives Soros almost supernatural abilities to destroy traditional societies, as a modern manifestation of old anti-Semitic conspiracies amid new populist rage against elites and the European Union.

"This narrative about Soros as an evil presence started with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is spreading," said Jacek Kucharczyk, a sociologist and director of the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw. "It is a witch hunt that is being promoted by authoritarian right-wing populists."

"And there is an undertone of anti-Semitism behind it. Because he promotes liberal values, has a Jewish background and is a billionaire, he is the perfect figure for explaining to hard-core voters why the world is the way it is," he said.

Kucharczyk, whose institute receives some Soros funding, said in places like Russia and Poland, where anti-Semitism has deep roots, Soros is "a very useful enemy to have."

Soros says his fight against intolerance is rooted in his own experience of living through the Nazi occupation of Hungary - which his family survived by hiding their Jewish identities. He has given away $12 billion to date, according to his Open Society Foundations.

Of that, $400 million has gone to Hungary, where Orban, the prime minister, has taken steps that could force the closure in Budapest of the acclaimed Central European University, which Soros founded in 1991 to help support the region's emerging democracies.

Orban has described Soros as an "American financial speculator attacking Hungary" who has "destroyed the lives of millions of Europeans."

Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the European Commission, said he found that language anti-Semitic - prompting an angry reaction from the Hungarian government, with Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto saying Budapest's disputes with Soros have "absolutely nothing to do" with his Jewish origins.

Laura Silber, a spokeswoman at Soros' Open Society Foundations, said Orban's attacks on Soros are an attempt to distract Hungarians from the country's real problems.

"Orban is using George Soros as a scapegoat in an effort to deflect attention from issues of real importance to the Hungarian people, such as the country's deteriorating health care and education," Silber said.

The Associated Press requested an interview with Soros, but Silber said that he wasn't giving any interviews.

Rafal Pankowski, head of Never Again, an anti-racism organization in Warsaw, says the "current tendency to see Soros as a central figure in an alleged global Jewish conspiracy" is growing along with a rise in xenophobia and hate speech.

"Soros is a convenient target for those who reject liberal values and the vision of an open, pluralist society," said Pankowski, who gets no Soros funding. "Anti-Semitism is a core element of nationalist identity across Eastern and Central Europe."

The anti-Soros mood is particularly strong in Macedonia, where many right-wingers blame him for a political crisis that has dragged on for two years over a massive illegal wiretapping operation of top leaders that has revealed wrongdoing. A group called Stop Operation Soros, or SOS, emerged in January.

Poland's ruling party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accuses Soros of trying to destroy traditional societies by forcing multiculturalism on them.

"The ideas of Mr. Soros, ideas of societies that have no identity, are convenient ideas for those who have billions, because such a society is extremely easy to manipulate," Kaczynski said.

Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, sees the rhetoric as "reminiscent of previous anti-Semitic patterns."

"This is not to say that Soros should be above criticism. But there are certainly other elements involved that go beyond legitimate and specific criticism and focus on his Jewish roots," Weitzman said. There's a need by some "to create a global manipulative Jewish monster which can be blamed for all the evils and problems."
MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) - Pakistani police killed four Islamic militants in a shootout in a central district on Monday, according to an official with the country's counterterrorism department.

The militants were killed when the police returned fire in a raid in the Khanewal district, said Chaudhry Mohammad Saleem, the official. He said the militants were from Jamat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban.

The faction has also expressed support for the Islamic State group but has not pledged allegiance to it.

Supporters of Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, a Pakistani religious group, chant slogans during a demonstration to condemn the Friday's suicide bombing, in Lahore, Pakistan, Sunday, May 14, 2017. The Islamic State group says it orchestrated a suicide attack on Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, a Pakistani lawmaker, in the country's southwest, which killed 25 people but only slightly wounded the Parliamentarian. The banner in Urdu reads "'we condemn the assassination attempt on Abdul Ghafoor Haideri." (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)

Hand grenades, assault rifles and a cache of explosives were seized in the raid, Saleem said, adding that three other suspects managed to escape from the scene.

The raid was part of an intelligence operation launched jointly by the police and military in urban areas in Pakistan, targeting militants who had fled military offensives in lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border that have long served as safe havens for local militants and foreign fighters.

Earlier in the day, a roadside bombing wounded four Pakistani paramilitary troops in the southwestern district of Mastung, which was the site of a deadly IS attack last week.

In Monday's attack, a roadside bomb struck the troops' vehicle, police official Abdul Nabi said.

Sunni extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the attack. Lashker-e-Jhangvi claimed a similar attack on Sunday that wounded two paramilitary troops.

A suicide attack by the Islamic State group in Mastung on Friday killed 28 people. IS had said it targeted a lawmaker seen as close to the Taliban.
BEIRUT (AP) - The Latest on Syria (all times local):

11:55 p.m.

A Syrian monitoring group says twin explosions have gone off in a makeshift camp near Syria's the border with Jordan, killing at least 10 people and wounding seven, including rebel fighters.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura informs the media one day before the resumption of the negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, May 15, 2017. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the explosions happened Monday night near the market area of the Rukban camp that houses about 80,000 displaced Syrians.

The nature of the blasts is not immediately clear.

A news website linked to Jordan's military says the explosion took place at a sheep market in the western area of the Rukban camp. The Hala Akhbar site's report has not reported on the number of killed or injured.

Rukban has been the scene of several explosions and attacks in the past, some of them claimed by the Islamic State group.

___

6:05 p.m.

A Syrian official says that a northeastern neighborhood of the capital Damascus is now completely under government control after carrying out the second and last phase of a truce agreement in the area.

Hundreds of rebels and their families left Qaboun on Sunday and Monday, headed toward rebel-held areas, bringing all parts of the capital under the control of President Bashar Assad's forces for the first time since 2012.

The evacuations came a day after government forces and their allies captured most of the area from insurgents who had maintained a presence in the northeastern neighborhood for four years.

State-run news agency SANA quoted Damascus governor Beshr al-Sabban saying Monday that military units were combing the neighborhood to dismantle explosives and mines.

___

3:15 p.m.

Syrian activists say airstrikes on a town held by the Islamic State group near the Iraqi border have killed at least 20 civilians.

It isn't clear who is behind the raid on Boukamal but various activist groups blame the U.S.-led coalition, which is waging war on IS. The claims could not be independently verified.

Omar Abo Laila of the activist-run Deir Ezzor 24 says 15 homes in the town were destroyed in the raid on Monday. He says the victims were displaced civilians from Iraq and Syria.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says the civilian death toll is at 23 at the moment but that it is likely to rise.

Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman says IS fighters were also killed.

___

2:45 p.m.

The U.N. envoy for Syria says a government delegation attending peace talks in Geneva is "here to work," sidestepping comments by President Bashar Assad that the U.N.-mediated peace talks are just for show.

Staffan de Mistura spoke to reporters a day before Tuesday's start to what's expected to be about four days of indirect talks between government and opposition envoys, marking the sixth round that he has mediated since early last year.

The envoy said he wouldn't comment on Assad's remarks, aired by Belarus ONT television on Thursday. The Syrian leader said "nothing substantial" would come from the talks and that they were "merely a meeting for the media."

The delegations aren't expected to meet face-to-face, and de Mistura has called for reduced media involvement to foster a more "businesslike" atmosphere.

___

2 p.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says Moscow is not planning to arm Syrian Kurds fighting the Islamic State group.

Russia has been waging an air campaign to support President Bashar Assad's forces against both IS and Syrian rebels since 2015. The United States has been providing air cover for Syrian Kurdish forces, which have driven IS from much of northern Syria.

Putin on Monday lauded the Kurdish fighters as "one of the most efficient units" against IS and said Russia has "working contacts" with them.

Turkey views the main Syrian Kurdish militia as a terrorist group because of its links to Kurdish rebels who have waged a decades-old insurgency against Ankara. A recent U.S. decision to provide heavier arms to the Kurds has angered Turkey, a NATO ally.

Putin insisted in televised comments that Moscow would not arm the Kurds because "they have other sources of obtaining the weapons."

___

12:45 p.m.

Syrian activists say an airstrike on a village held by the Islamic State group in northern Syria has killed several civilians.

It isn't clear who is behind the airstrike but various activists groups reported different casualty tolls, saying the U.S.-led coalition, which is waging war on IS, was likely behind the attacks.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says the strike hit the village of Akayrshi on Sunday night and that 12 women were killed. The activist-run Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently says the strike hit a convoy of farm workers and that 22 died.

The village is about 16 kilometers, or 10 miles, from Raqqa, IS's de facto capital.

U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian forces are advancing toward Raqqa after capturing several nearby towns and villages recently.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura informs the media one day before the resumption of the negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, May 15, 2017. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura informs the media one day before the resumption of the negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, May 15, 2017. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking to the media after the Belt and Road Forum at the China National Convention Center at the Yanqi Lake venue outskirt of Beijing in China, Monday, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, pool)

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking to the media after the Belt and Road Forum at the China National Convention Center at the Yanqi Lake venue outskirt of Beijing in China, Monday, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, pool)
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - Thousands of Palestinians have marked the anniversary of their uprooting almost seven decades ago with sirens and low-key marches.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out in the Mideast war over Israel's 1948 creation. Their descendants now number several million and most still live in the region.

Sirens wailed Monday in the West Bank to mark the passing of 69 years since what Palestinians call their "nakba," or catastrophe. Cars stopped and pedestrians stood still in commemoration.

Marchers waved flags and used keys and other props to symbolize their demand to return to what is now Israel.

Israel says it will never accept a "right of return," arguing it would threaten the state by diluting its Jewish majority.
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - Some 20,000 finance workers from Romania's public sector went on strike Monday to protest a move to cut their salaries, a trade union leader said.

Finance ministry employees who staged a walkout are opposed to a draft law that a trade union says will lead to salaries being slashed by 10 to 35 percent.

Vasile Marica who heads the Sed Lex trade union told The Associated Press: "The strike is continuing," and may run into Tuesday, adding "These wage cuts are not all right." He said union leaders had unsuccessfully tried to resolve the issue for two weeks with government officials.

The National Federation of Finance Trade Unions wants the government to maintain current bonuses that reflect "the complexity and importance" of work performed by finance ministry employees and agencies subordinated to the ministry.

Bogdan Stan, who heads the government agency responsible for tax collection and tax law enforcement, urged employees on Monday to give up their strike, saying he had made a proposal for employees to retain a 15 percent bonus they currently receive.

Marica said union leaders will meet with Finance Minister Viorel Stefan on Wednesday.
LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) - Olympic timekeeper Omega has extended its IOC sponsorship deal for three more Summer Games through to 2032.

The 12-year extension, signed Monday, will complete a centenary since Omega first timed Olympic events at the 1932 Los Angeles Games.

The value of the deal, which includes the IOC selling marketing rights and paying for timing services, was not disclosed. In its most recent financial report, the IOC's top-tier sponsorship program was said to earn more than $1 billion for the 2013-16 commercial cycle.

Omega is the first of the IOC's 13 current top-tier sponsors to commit through 2032.

IOC President Thomas Bach said "for us, it was always about Omega," and so interest from commercial rivals was resisted.

"We know what we have with Omega and it's the best we could get," Bach said at the signing event.

Switzerland-based Swatch Group, which includes the Omega brand, has been a top-tier IOC sponsor since 2004.

Omega is also a longtime backer of Michael Phelps, the winner of a record 23 Olympic gold medals and 28 medals in total.

The 31-year-old American swimmer is retired but told The Associated Press last month he could ask himself, "Do I have that itch again?"

Describing the American as a "charismatic champion," Omega president and CEO Raynald Aeschlimann said the firm would not try to influence Phelps toward competing at a sixth Olympics in Tokyo in 2020.

"It is his decision," Aeschlimann said, noting that "we should never forget" it was only in the year before the 2016 Olympics that Phelps confirmed he would compete in Rio de Janeiro.

The firm also will not publicly support Sion's planned bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics - potentially the first Olympics hosted in Switzerland in 78 years, since the 1948 Winter Games in St. Moritz.

"We can't participate in the election process," said Nick Hayek, CEO of Swatch Group.

Still, he noted his home country had "problems with tourism" because of the strong Swiss franc and could benefit from a tourism boost.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The Supreme Court shut the door Monday on North Carolina Republicans' effort to revive a state law that mandated voter identification and scaled back early voting, provisions that a lower court said improperly targeted minority voters.

The justices left in place last summer's ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals striking down the law's photo ID requirement to vote in person, which the court said targeted African-Americans "with almost surgical precision."

The measure, approved in 2013 by the state's Republican-dominated legislature, also reduced the number of early voting days from 17 to 10 and prohibited same-day registration during the early voting period. Supporters said the measure was necessary to crack down on voter fraud, but opponents said the changes discourage voting by black and Hispanic residents, who use early voting or same-day registration more than white voters and are more likely to lack photo ID.

FILE - In this April 7, 2017 file photo, visitors arrive at the Supreme Court in Washington. The Supreme Court on Monday, May 15, 2017, rejected an appeal to reinstate North Carolina's voter identification law that a lower court said targeted African-Americans "with almost surgical precision." (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

The North Carolina dispute is similar to a court fight over Texas' voter ID law, which also was struck down as racially discriminatory. The Texas case is making its way through the lower courts and could be the high court's next opportunity to weigh in.

Chief Justice John Roberts cautioned Monday in the two-page order that the rejection of the appeal is not a comment on the court's view about the substance of the law. Thirty-two states already have some kind of voter ID law in force, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

That word of caution seemed to hearten North Carolina's Republican leaders, who pledged to take another crack at passing a voter ID requirement.

State House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger said in a statement that "Republican legislators will continue fighting to protect the integrity of our elections by implementing the commonsense requirement to show a photo ID when we vote."

Roberts wrote the political situation created uncertainty over who is authorized to seek review of the lower court ruling. The appeal was first filed when Republican Pat McCrory was governor; Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein then tried to withdraw it.

The high court decision drew praise from Democrats and plaintiffs in the case.

Cooper said in a statement that Monday's "announcement is good news for North Carolina voters. We need to be making it easier to vote, not harder."

The Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, said it's time for Republicans to stop proposing new restrictions.

"We urge the General Assembly to finally accept that racially discriminatory laws have no place in our democracy, and certainly not when it comes to the sacred right to vote," Barber said.

Republicans in North Carolina and Texas moved to enact new voting measures after the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a provision of the federal Voting Rights Act that had required them to get advance approval before changing laws dealing with elections. Voters, civil rights groups and the Obama administration quickly filed lawsuits challenging the new laws.

Shortly before President Donald Trump took office in January, the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reject the North Carolina appeal.

When the law passed in July 2013, North Carolina Republicans said that requiring voter ID will increase the integrity of elections. But the 4th U.S. Circuit said last July that the state provided no evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud the ID mandate would address.

The Richmond, Virginia-based court said the law was enacted with intentional bias against black voters. The law had been amended in 2015 to include a method for people unable to get a photo ID to still vote.

Following the appellate ruling, the state asked the high court to allow the challenged provisions to remain in effect in November's election. The justices rejected the request by virtue of a 4-4 tie on most of the challenged provisions, with the four more conservative justices supporting the state's bid.

The State Board of Elections reported last month that about 500 ineligible voters cast ballots out of the 4.8 million recorded in North Carolina during the November election. Most of the number involved felons unable to vote because they had not completed their sentences.

___

Sherman reported from Washington.

North Carolina NAACP president Rev. William J. Barber II reacts to an announcement Monday, May 15, 2017, by attorney Caitlin Swain, that the US Supreme Court declined to consider reinstating North Carolina's 2013 elections law that included voter ID and other restrictions on voting during a gathering at Davie Street Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, N.C., where Barber announced he is stepping down as NAACP president. (Robert Willett /The News & Observer via AP)

Those gathered for North Carolina NAACP president Rev. William J. Barber's announcement that he is stepping down as president of the civil right organization, break into celebration after learning that the US Supreme Court declined to consider reinstating North Carolina's 2013 elections law that included voter ID and other restrictions on voting at Davie Street Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, N.C. on Monday, May 15, 2017. (Robert Willett /The News & Observer via AP)
PARIS (AP) - Mending Europe's frayed unity is such a high priority for new French President Emmanuel Macron that he's visiting neighboring Germany and its Chancellor Angela Merkel on his first day in office.

That should give a welcome burst of energy to the much-maligned European Union and efforts to fix it, even if Macron and Merkel won't necessarily agree on how. Here's a look at five key Macron ideas for Europe:

___

French President Emmanuel Macron arrives to lay a wreath of flower on the Unknown Soldier's tomb at the Arc of Triomphe monument after his formal inauguration ceremony as French President, Sunday, May 14, 2017 in Paris. Macron was inaugurated as France's new president at the Elysee Palace in Paris, and immediately launched into his mission to shake up French politics, world economics and the European Union. (Alain Jocard/Pool Photo via AP)

JOINT DEFENSE

The EU's precursor was created to bolster trade among European countries and help ensure they never go to war with each other again. Macron wants to go a step further and create new joint European military structures.

European countries already cooperate in some foreign operations and through NATO. But Macron notably wants more support from other EU countries for French military operations against Islamic extremists in Syria, Iraq and Africa's Sahel region.

Germany, too, has supported greater defense cooperation, but not all European countries are on board - and it is not clear how such a new structure would work alongside U.S.-dominated NATO.

___

NO MORE BREXITS

Macron will push a firm EU line with Britain in its negotiations to leave the bloc, in part to deter other members from trying to leave. Germany is likely to support that stance, having made clear that London can't expect a better deal outside the EU than it had as a member of the bloc.

The new French leader recognizes that many Europeans see the EU as a distant, uncaring bureaucracy and wants to remedy that through vast consultations with citizens across Europe.

He says it's unfair for people like the Brexit campaigners to place blanket blame on the EU for job losses, terrorist attacks and other ills without acknowledging its benefits - and without recognizing that all major EU decisions are approved by national leaders or the democratically elected European Parliament.

___

SHARED BUDGET

One of Macron's most controversial ideas is a shared budget for the countries that use the euro currency.

Macron says such a budget would allow for joint investments, provide emergency financial help, and help the eurozone better react to a financial crisis. It would be managed by a newly created joint finance minister for the eurozone.

Germany, which as Europe's strongest economy has borne the brunt of bailouts for weaker eurozone members, is not thrilled by this idea. The German Finance Ministry, however, is trying to be pragmatic and "focus on what's quickly possible."

___

MATCHING TAXES

Macron wants the 19 nations that use the euro to harmonize their tax policies to allow for fairer economic competition between companies that want to work in other countries.

The new eurozone finance minister would also oversee this, which Macron calls an effort to fight "social dumping," when companies move work or workers to countries with lower taxes.

However for this to work, Macron would have to make domestically difficult changes to France's labor costs and taxes, currently among the highest in Europe. Germany, which instituted a painful process of economic reform more than a decade ago, would welcome its western neighbor following suit.

___

TOUGHER BORDERS

To deal with waves of migration and the threat of foreign extremists, Macron wants 5,000 new guards deployed on the outer borders of Europe's Schengen passport-free travel zone. He also wants common standards for dealing with refugees and migrants through a European asylum agency.

To stem the refugee flow, he argues for a political solution to the Syrian crisis and more efforts to stabilize Libya and other countries in the region over the long term.

Merkel's government has been grateful for Macron's support for her open-armed approach to refugees, which Macron said "rescued Europe's honor" - rare clear backing on that front from a senior European official.
HOUSTON (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to review an appeal from a Mexican national sentenced to death for the sledgehammer killings of his wife and two children, who were found buried under the bathroom floor in their Texas home.

The high court didn't include an explanation of its decision not to review the capital murder conviction of 62-year-old Robert Moreno Ramos. His attorneys have argued that Ramos wasn't told when he was arrested for the 1992 killings that he could get legal help from the Mexican government and that he had deficient legal help at his trial and in earlier appeals. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their arguments last year.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, found that Ramos, from Aguascalientes, Mexico, and more than four dozen other Mexican citizens awaiting execution in the U.S. weren't advised of their consular rights under the Vienna Convention when they were arrested. It recommended that they be tried again to determine if consular access would have affected their cases. President President George W. Bush agreed and directed states to reopen the cases.

This undated photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows inmate Robert Moreno Ramos. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review an appeal from Ramos, on Texas death row for the slayings of his wife and two children at their Rio Grande Valley home more than 25 years ago. The high court issued no comment Monday, May 15, 2017, in the case of 62-year-old Ramos. (Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP)

The Supreme Court overruled that directive, saying that only Congress can require states to follow the international court's ruling. That has not happened and several Texas inmates named in the international court ruling have since been executed.

Ramos, who also is identified in some court documents as Roberto Moreno Ramos, does not have an execution date.

Evidence at his 1993 trial in Hidalgo County showed he used a sledge hammer to kill his 42-year-old wife, Leticia, their 7-year-old daughter, Abigail, and their 3-year-old son, Jonathan, at their home in Progreso, which is along the Mexico border about 20 miles (32.19 kilometers) southeast of McAllen.

According to court records, Ramos told a cousin they were killed in a car wreck and their bodies were cremated. After providing other conflicting explanations, though, another relative went to police to report the woman and children missing. Their bodies were found buried under a freshly tiled floor in the home's bathroom.

Evidence also showed Ramos remarried three days after they were killed, telling his new wife that the woman who had been living in his house was a widow and that he'd been providing shelter for her and her two children.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration has approached the wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, days before President Donald Trump embarks on his first foreign trip.

Trump will nominate Callista Gingrich for the post, two people with direct knowledge of the discussions said Monday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly before an official announcement.

Trump's foreign trip this month includes a stop at the Vatican.

FILE - In this July 20, 2016 file photo, Callista Gingrich is seen during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The Trump administration has tapped Callista Gingrich, the wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Callista Gingrich is president of Gingrich Productions and has produced a number of documentaries, including one about Pope John Paul II.

She worked for the House Committee on Agriculture as chief clerk until 2007. She was a key figure in her husband's 2012 bid for the Republican nomination.

She was a congressional aide when she began a six-year affair with Newt Gingrich, then a married Republican congressman.

In 2012, Gingrich's second wife, Marianne Gingrich, told ABC News that he had proposed an "open marriage" so he could continue to see Callista Gingrich without divorcing.

The former House speaker denied the charge.

He converted to Catholicism in 2009, after years of attending mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., where Callista Gingrich has performed in the choir.

Trump's vision for foreign relations and diplomacy has been starkly different to that promoted by the vastly popular Pope Francis. Francis has spoken of the need for bridges between nations, while Trump has advocated for walls and travel restrictions as a means of national security.

Francis has previously remarked that anyone who wants to build walls to keep migrants out is "not Christian."

Francis also has called for an end to the use of fossil fuels, while Trump has pledged to cancel payments to U.N. climate change programs and pull out of the Paris climate accord.

But both share a populist appeal and speak with a down-to-earth simplicity that has endeared them to their bases of supporters. And both share a common concern about the plight of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Islamic militants.

Speaking to reporters while traveling home Saturday from a trip to Portugal, Francis said he would listen respectfully to what Trump has to say when the two meet. Trump will call on Francis mid-way through his first foreign trip, after visiting Saudi Arabia and Israel and before attending a NATO summit in Brussels and a G-7 summit in Italy.

"I never make a judgment about a person without hearing him out," the pope said.
NEW YORK (AP) - Anheuser-Busch is upgrading its U.S. breweries and plans to build two new distribution centers as it adapts to an increasingly fragmented beer market.

The maker of Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois says the upgrades and new distribution centers in Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio will allow it to store a greater variety of products and get them to customers faster. The measures are part of the $500 million that the company said Monday it will invest in its U.S. operations this year, marking an increase compared with recent years. It's a portion of the $3.7 billion in global capital expenditures that the Belgian company had already budgeted for 2017.

Anheuser-Busch has struggled to boost sales volumes as craft beers grow increasingly popular in an already crowded marketplace. In 2016, total volume at Anheuser-Busch declined 2 percent, including a 1.6 percent volume decline in North America.

The same thing is happening with non-alcoholic drinks. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi has said the industry is becoming more "niche," and that PepsiCo needs to learn how to thrive amid that growing complexity.

The investment announced by Anheuser-Busch Monday includes upgrades to breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado and St. Louis, Missouri. The company did not say how many new jobs it expects this year's U.S. investments to create. It has added around 2,500 jobs since 2013, the company said. Anheuser-Busch employs more than 17,000 people in the U.S.

In 2015, Anheuser-Busch had said it expects to invest $1.5 billion from that year to 2018. The Monday announcement was an update, with the company saying it is spending $2 billion from this year through 2020.
Erasure, "World Be Gone" (Mute)

Erasure barely acknowledge the dancefloor on "World Be Gone," instead filling their 17th album with topical, poignant tunes worried about the state of the world but hopeful love can still make a difference.

Vince Clarke continues to command the synthesizers as well as ever while Andy Bell's voice has acquired an expressive, pliant huskiness which lies comfortably on the luxurious beds of backing vocals.

This cover image released by Mute Records shows, "World Be Gone," the latest release by Erasure. (Mute via AP)

The sunniest, most buoyant tracks are used as bookends - yearning first single and opener "Love You to the Sky" and "Just a Little Love," which could be early Erasure (or late Yazoo).

The other eight tracks are more reflective, some touching on issues of the heart but also concerned with the way our lives are affected by factors beyond our control and our lack of attentiveness to what we could possibly change.

The dark, robotic "Oh What a World" sees the globe as "sheer madness" where admission into a witness protection program is an effective, if extreme, attempt at escapism. "Still It's Not Over" recounts how much has been gained in gay rights - and at what costs - but knows much remains to be achieved.

"Lousy Sum of Nothing" laments insensitivity, how switching channels is practically all the response we can muster to tragedies.

"Sweet Summer Love" is a new relationship that has both passion and commitment, helping Bell find fulfillment again after the death of his partner.

Over their 32-year-career, Erasure have asked for and earned more than a little respect. On "World Be Gone," they're still hopeful a little love can save us.
An 18-year-old western Pennsylvania man who authorities said shot a friend and then posed for a selfie with the dying teen has been sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison.

Maxwell Morton of Jeannette, who turns 19 this week, told a Westmoreland County judge on Monday that he didn't want to be remembered as a 'savage' and conceded that the February 2015 death of 16-year-old Ryan Mangan was 'messed up,' the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported.

'Sometimes sorry isn't enough for people, but that's all I have to give,' Morton said.

Morton was convicted in February of third-degree murder, WPXI reported.

He testified that the teens were playing with a handgun and he thought it wasn't loaded when he pointed it at Mangan and pulled the trigger.

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Maxwell Morton, an 18-year-old ho authorities said shot Ryan Mangan, and then posed for a selfie with the dying teen has been sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison

Morton (left) told a Westmoreland County judge on Monday that he didn't want to be remembered as a 'savage' and conceded that the February 2015 death of Mangan (right), 16, was 'messed up,' the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported.

He said he took the selfie to document what happened and said he planned to kill himself.

A Springville, Wisconsin, teenager testified that Morton bragged about the killing as they played an online video game that evening, saying he 'got his first body.'

The teen said he thought it was a prank until Morton texted a link of a news item about the death and sent the selfie via Snapchat.

Assistant District Attorney Tom Grace sought a maximum term of up to 40 years, citing two prior convictions for assault as a juvenile and another violent incident that occurred after he was jailed in Mangan's shooting.

Defense attorney Pat Thomassey argued at trial that the shooting was an accident.

During court, Morton said: 'Sometimes sorry isn't enough for people, but that's all I have to give.' He was convicted in February of third-degree murder related to Mangan's shooting

The teen was discovered by his mother in her home (above) in February 2015

He argued Monday that the weapon was one of several in Mangan's possession, which his parents didn't know about, and that was a factor in the shooting.

'What this is is two kids fooling around with guns,' he said.

Morton was identified by police after he sent a selfie on Snapchat of himself posing with Mangan's (above) body

'If Maxwell didn't panic and didn't do the stupid things he did, called 911, he probably doesn't even get charged.'

Common Pleas Court Judge Meagan Bilik-DeFazio noted his age and indicated that his actions in taking a selfie rather than calling for help substantially altered the case.

A forensic pathologist testified during trial that Mangan didn't die immediately and would have survived with appropriate medical care.

'You look like a little boy to me, and now I am faced with sentencing you,' Bilik-DeFazio said.

'The reality is this case would be very different but not for that photograph. No one will understand the thought process of taking that photo.'
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump is meeting with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi at the White House.

The president welcomed Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates on Monday for their first face-to-face meeting since Trump took office.

Sitting alongside one another in the Oval Office, Trump called Sheikh Mohammed a "very special person" who loves his country and loves the U.S.

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media while meeting with Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Monday, May 15, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.

Sheikh Mohammed's visit comes days before Trump travels to fellow Arab Gulf nation, Saudi Arabia, in the first leg of his four-country foreign trip.

The two leaders are expected to discuss the civil war in Syria, Iran and other topics.
JERUSALEM (AP) - A diplomatic spat on Monday erupted between U.S. and Israeli officials, just days before a planned visit by President Donald Trump, after an American representative questioned Israel's claim to one of the holiest sites in Judaism.

Israel angrily demanded an explanation from the White House, casting a cloud over the highly anticipated visit by the new president, which is being greeted with a mixture of excitement and nervousness by Israeli officials.

The spat reportedly erupted during preparations for Trump's visit, during which he is planning a stop at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City.

FILE - In this Sunday, May 7, 2017 file photo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs a weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem. The Israeli prime minister's office says it is seeking clarifications from President Donald Trump after an American official said the Western Wall is part of the West Bank. The spat reportedly erupted during preparations for Trump's visit to the region next week. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty, Pool)

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

The Western Wall is revered as the holiest site where Jews can pray, and according to Channel 2 TV, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked to join Trump. The report said the Americans rebuffed the request, with one official telling the Israelis the site is "not your territory." It said the comment prompted shouting from the Israeli preparatory team.

Israel captured the Old City, along with the rest of east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. It considers the entire city to be its eternal capital and next week is set to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of what it calls the unification of Jerusalem.

However, the international community does not recognize Israel's annexation of east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians seek as the capital of a future independent state. The Old City is also home to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

The rival claims to east Jerusalem lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and often boil over into violence.

An official in Netanyahu's office said the U.S. comment was "received with astonishment" and that Israel had asked the White House for an explanation.

"We are convinced that this remark is in contradiction to the policy of President Trump," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Israeli officials appear to be growing increasingly nervous over Trump's visit, when he is expected to make an attempt at relaunching long-stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.

On the campaign trail, Trump voiced solidly pro-Israel positions. His campaign platform made no mention of an independent Palestinian state. He showed little concern about Israeli settlement construction on occupied lands claimed by the Palestinians, expressed support for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

He also surrounded himself with a core of advisers with strong ties to the West Bank settlement movement, including his ambassador, David Friedman.

Friedman, a fundraiser for settlement causes and vocal critic of liberal Jewish groups, has backtracked from some of his controversial positions.

On Monday, Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, arrived in Israel to take up his new post and traveled straight to the Western Wall to pray. In an apparent coincidence, Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith, was visiting at the same time and briefly spoke to Friedman. Aerosmith is set to perform in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

"We wanted to come straight to the holiest place in the entire Jewish world, the 'Kotel HaMaaravi', the Western Wall, straight from the airport," Friedman told reporters. "I prayed for the president, I wished him success especially on his upcoming trip."

But since taking office, Trump has called for restraint in settlement construction and signaled he is no hurry to move the embassy. Earlier this month, he held a warm meeting with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, at the White House.

Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, a senior member of Netanyahu's coalition government, voiced concern Monday that "there has been a kind of change in the spirit" of Trump's statements since he was elected.

Bennett said he was not sure why Trump has changed his rhetoric.

Bennett said he welcomed Trump's arrival next week, but said Israel also has to stick to its positions. He said Israel must oppose attempts to establish a Palestinian state and insist on Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem "forever."

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, center, visits the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray in Jerusalem's Old City, Monday, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler speaks at the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray in Jerusalem's Old City, Monday, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, right, speaks with Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler at the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray in Jerusalem's Old City, Monday, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman kneels in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray in Jerusalem's Old City, Monday, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)
"Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy" (Alfred A. Knopf), by Sheryl Sandberg

On their last day together, the Silicon Valley elite couple Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg were sunbathing and playing the popular strategy board game The Settlers of Catan on the iPad.

It was May 2015, and they were vacationing at a $12,750-a-night Four Seasons resort in a secluded part of Mexico with close friends. All seemed right in their world. But soon an abrupt and devastating event punctuated their love story and 11-year marriage. Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, went to the hotel gym and never returned. After a few hours, Sandberg, who is second in command at Facebook and wrote the wildly successful business book "Lean In," set out to look for her husband and found him lying next to an exercise machine with a pool of blood around his head. At age 47, Goldberg's heart had stopped.

This cover image released by Alfred A. Knopf shows "Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy," by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. (Alfred A. Knopf via AP)

Goldberg's death made headlines around the globe, and Sandberg was left to pick up the pieces for their two young children. Despite being one of the most famous women in the world, Sandberg found herself isolated after her husband's death. Friends avoided the subject or asked superficial questions like, "How are you?"

"I felt invisible, as if I was standing in front of them but they couldn't see me," Sandberg writes. Goldberg's death was now the elephant in the room.

Two years later, Sandberg has teamed up with Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, to write "Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy."

With "Option B," Sandberg wants to change the conversation about death.

The book is part memoir, rehashing Sandberg's painful and raw account of losing her husband, and part research. Anyone who has experienced a loss of similar magnitude will recognize their own emotions when Sandberg recounts what happens after Goldberg's death - surprise, anger, pain, isolation and loneliness.

"Option B" is a call to have forthright conversations in these hard times instead of the pleasantries exchanged after a tragedy occurs. What's the point of asking a grieving person "How are you?" anyway?

Early in the book, Sandberg quotes Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in saying, "Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward." ''Option B" is about living forward but looking backward when necessary.
A seven-year-old boy is in critical condition after his fellow student accidentally shot him in the stomach with a loaded gun which fell out of a backpack.

The handgun went off unexpectedly when a first grader from Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana picked it up.

The injured student was rushed to surgery at Lafayette General Hospital, then moved to a pediatric ICU, where his condition is being monitored.

A seven-year-old boy is in critical condition after his fellow student accidentally shot him in the stomach at Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana

Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Tony Mancuso told 7News the victim was not the boy who brought the gun to school and no one else was injured.

He went on to say that both children were too young to be held responsible but the district attorney's office may to charge the gun owner.

'I believe in the 2nd amendment that allows us to possess and carry firearms however, I also believe that it is our responsibility as gun owners to keep our guns locked and out of the reach of children,' said pro-gun advocate Mancuso.

He went on: 'In addition, talking to our children about the dangers of guns can help them know how to react if they encounter a gun at school or even at a friend's house.'

School superintendent Karl Bruchhaus says Moss Bluff Elementary School was holding a field day, and few students were aware of the shooting.

Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Tony Mancuso said both children were too young to be held responsible but the district attorney's office may to charge the gun owner (file photo of a handgun)

The Calcasieu Parish School Board immediately assured other parents there was no danger to their children.

Calcasieu Parish Superintendent Karl Bruchhaus said a scheduled field day would continue as planned. 'because those children need to get back to a regular school environment'.

Many of the young students were not aware of what had happened when parents lined up to pick them up early at 10.30am.
STROUDSBURG, Pa. (AP) - Four men facing the most serious charges in a brutal fraternity hazing ritual that resulted in the 2013 death of a New York City college student pleaded guilty Monday to voluntary manslaughter.

Fraternity members at Pi Delta Psi admitted they physically abused Chun "Michael" Deng, a Baruch College student, then tried to cover it up as the 19-year-old lay dying in their rented house in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, about 100 miles west of New York.

Defense attorneys had called Deng's death a fraternity prank gone horribly awry.

Kenny Kwan, center, leaves the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg, Pa., Monday May 15, 2017. Kwan pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Chun "Michael" Deng, a fraternity pledge at Baruch College in New York. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz)

The four defendants, Kenny Kwan, Charles Lai, Raymond Lam and Sheldon Wong, had been charged with third-degree murder, but pleaded guilty to felony manslaughter and hindering apprehension charges. They face 22 to 36 months in prison when they are sentenced in December.

The former fraternity brothers, now in their mid- to late 20s, were stoic in court and said nothing to reporters. Their lawyers didn't comment.

Police have said fraternity members blindfolded Deng, forced him to wear a heavy backpack and then repeatedly tackled him during the hazing ritual, known as glass ceiling.

Deng cursed and hit Lam at one point during the ritual, Monroe County Assistant District Attorney Kim Metzger told the judge.

She said Kwan was the last brother to tackle Deng.

"Mr. Deng did not stand up after that moment," Metzger said.

Deng fell unconscious and was carried inside the house while fraternity members changed his clothes and searched online for information about his symptoms, waiting an hour before taking him to the hospital, according to court documents. Deng, who suffered a brain injury, died a day later.

Wong did not participate in the hazing but helped organize it as "pledge educator," Metzger said.

Deng was the last of several pledges to be hazed that weekend.

Another suspect has pleaded guilty to hindering apprehension and was sentenced to probation.

The fraternity itself was charged with murder, and dozens of other suspects face less serious charges.

Sheldon Wong, right, leaves the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg, Pa., Monday May 15, 2017. Wong pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Chun "Michael" Deng, a fraternity pledge at Baruch College in New York. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz)

Raymond Lam, center, leaves the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg, Pa., Monday May 15, 2017. Lam pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Chun "Michael" Deng, a fraternity pledge at Baruch College in New York. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz)

Charles Lai leaves the Monroe County Courthouse in Stroudsburg, Pa., Monday, May 15, 2017. Lai pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Chun "Michael" Deng, a fraternity pledge at Baruch College in New York. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz)
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a move aimed at ratcheting up pressure on Russia to push the Syrian government into peace talks with rebels, the United States has accused Syria of executing thousands of imprisoned political opponents and burning their bodies in a crematorium to hide the evidence.

But the decision to release newly declassified information supporting the allegation may also test the Trump administration's own willingness to respond to atrocities in Syria, , other than chemical weapons attacks, which it blames on President Bashar Assad's government.

The accusation of mass killings and efforts to cover them up came as President Donald Trump weighs options in Syria, where the U.S. launched cruise missiles on a government air base last month after accusing Assad's military of killing scores of civilians with a sarin-like nerve agent. Trump on Monday kicked off a week of meetings with Middle East leaders, sitting down with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi a day before he hosts Turkey's president. Trump flies to Saudi Arabia later this week.

This image provided by the State Department and DigitalGlobe, taken April 18, 2017, a satellite image of what the State Department described as a building in a prison complex in Syria that was modified to support a crematorium. The Trump administration accused the Syrian government of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the dead bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital. It also stepped up criticism of Iran and Russia for supporting the Syrian government. (State Department/DigitalGlobe via AP)

All are governments that have pressed the United States over six years of civil war in Syria to intervene more forcefully. Trump had backed away from President Barack Obama's calls for regime change in the Arab country, with the new president's officials pointedly saying leadership questions should be left to Syria's citizens, until his intervention last month. His administration now says Assad cannot bring long-term stability to Syria.

In its latest accusations of Syrian abuses, the State Department said it believed about 50 detainees each day are being hanged at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes north of Damascus. Many of the bodies are then burned in the crematorium "to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place," said Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, accusing Assad's government of sinking "to a new level of depravity" with the active support of Russia and Iran.

The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not prove the building is a crematorium, but show a facility consistent with such use, Jones said.

The revelations echoed a February report by Amnesty International that said Syria's military police hanged as many as 13,000 people in four years before carting out bodies by the truckload for burial in mass graves.

Although the State Department cast its unusual news conference as an effort to press Assad's key backers, Russia and Iran, it also underscored Trump's lack of a strategy for stopping Syria's violence. The war has killed as many as 400,000 people since 2011, contributed to Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II and enabled the Islamic State group to emerge as a global terrorism threat.

Trump had been highly critical of Obama for failing to respond to earlier chemical weapons attacks in 2013 after setting a "red line" against such usage. After last month's attack in northern Syria, Trump said the Syrians crossed "a lot of lines" for his administration. Beyond authorizing cruise missiles in response, however, he didn't outline a strategy to eliminate the threat.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer on Monday reiterated the administration's line that Syria's future "should be decided by Syrians in a free credibly and transparent process." But he called such a future "unimaginable" if Assad is propped up with help from the "seemingly unconditional support from Russia and Iran." He didn't outline how such a future might become imaginable.

Russia has shown no inclination to drop its support for Assad. It is now pushing the idea of "de-escalation zones" that would be designed to reduce violence, while not challenging Assad's authority over almost all of Syria's major cities.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had been "firm and clear" in a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last week that "Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad."

A main point of that meeting "was telling Russia to use its power to rein in the regime," she said. "Simply put, the killing, the devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria."

Syrian human rights groups and opposition activists have long reported on mass killings inside Syrian prisons, though not on bodies being burned to cover up evidence.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights corroborated the U.S. accounts of mass killings but said it lacked sufficient information about the crematorium.

___

Associated Press writer Zeina Karam in Beirut contributed to this report.

This image provided by the State Department and DigitalGlobe, taken Jan. 15, 2015, a satellite image of what the State Department described as a building in a prison complex in Syria that was modified to support a crematorium. The Trump administration accused the Syrian government of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the dead bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital. It also stepped up criticism of Iran and Russia for supporting the Syrian government. (State Department/DigitalGlobe via AP)

This image provided by the State Department and DigitalGlobe, taken Aug. 27, 2013, left, and April 16, 2015, satellite images of what the State Department described as a building in a prison complex in Syria that was modified to support a crematorium. The Trump administration accused the Syrian government of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the dead bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital. It also stepped up criticism of Iran and Russia for supporting the Syrian government. (State Department/DigitalGlobe via AP)
NEWARK, Ohio (AP) - The police chief slain by a gunman who killed two others in a nursing home last week died from a single shotgun wound as he got out of his car, a coroner said Monday.

Steven Eric Disario, chief of the Kirkersville police department, was killed in an alley outside the Pine Kirk Care Center, according to the Licking County coroner.

Disario, 38, had only been on the job about three weeks when he went to the nursing home investigating a report of a man with a gun.

An impromptu memorial of flowers and flags appeared outside the Kirkersville Police Department, on Friday, May, 12, 2017, in Kirkersville, Ohio, after its new chief was shot by an armed gunman. Two workers at nearby Pine Kirk Care Center also were killed. The gunman was found dead inside the center. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)

The coroner said that inside the nursing home, 46-year-old nurse Marlina Medrano was killed at the nursing station and died of multiple gunshots from both a handgun and shotgun. She had a relationship with the gunman, Thomas Hartless, authorities said.

Also killed inside the nursing home was 48-year-old nurse's aide Cindy Krantz, who died in a hallway from a shotgun wound, the coroner said.

Hartless, 43, killed himself by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun, the coroner said.

Some of the nursing home's 23 residents barricaded themselves during the shooting, but none of them was injured.

Investigators say the gunman briefly held two passers-by hostage before the police chief arrived. Those individuals ran off when the chief was shot and weren't injured.

The killings happened Friday in Kirkersville, about 25 miles (39 kilometers) east of Columbus.

Police outside the Pine Kirk Care Center in Kirkersville, Ohio, where an armed man gunned down a new village police chief and two employees on Friday, May 12, 2017, then was found dead. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)

Mourners stand outside the Pine Kirk Care Center in Kirkersville, Ohio, on Friday, May 12, 2017, as the bodies of two employees shot down by an armed man are removed. The village's new police chief was also killed and the suspected shooter was found dead. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)

Law enforcement officials, including Licking County Sheriff Randy Thorp, center, walk toward a news conference regarding a shooting at a nursing home in Kirkersville, Ohio on Friday, May 12, 2017. Authorities say Steven Eric Disario, who headed the Kirkersville Police Department, and two nursing home employees have been killed by a gunman who was later found dead inside the care facility. (Tom Dodge/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)

Law enforcement officials gather outside the scene of a shooting outside the Pine Kirk nursing home in Kirkersville, Ohio on Friday, May 12, 2017. Authorities say Steven Eric Disario, who headed the Kirkersville Police Department, and two nursing home employees have been killed by a gunman who was later found dead inside the care facility. (Tom Dodge/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)

Emergency personnel arrive to the scene of a shooting outside Pine Kirk nursing home in Kirkersville, Ohio on Friday, May 12, 2017. Authorities say Steven Eric Disario, who headed the Kirkersville Police Department, and two nursing home employees have been killed by a gunman who was later found dead inside the care facility. (Doral Chenoweth III/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)

Emergency personnel arrive to the scene of a shooting outside Pine Kirk nursing home in Kirkersville, Ohio on Friday, May 12, 2017. Authorities say Steven Eric Disario, who headed the Kirkersville Police Department, and two nursing home employees have been killed by a gunman who was later found dead inside the care facility. (Tom Dodge/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)

People hug as emergency personnel arrive to the scene of a shooting outside Pine Kirk nursing home in Kirkersville, Ohio on Friday, May 12, 2017. Authorities say Steven Eric Disario, who headed the Kirkersville Police Department, and two nursing home employees have been killed by a gunman who was later found dead inside the care facility. (Tom Dodge/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)
SEATTLE (AP) - Does federal law give President Donald Trump broad legal authority to freeze immigration by refugees and citizens of some predominantly Muslim nations?

That's the question before two federal appellate courts that have now heard arguments over Trump's revised travel ban and are being asked by Trump's opponents to use the president's own anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric against him. Federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland earlier this year blocked Trump's revised travel ban from taking effect. Trump wants those decisions reversed.

On Monday a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle heard Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

In this image made from a C-SPAN video, participants and members in the gallery stand as three judges for the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals enter the room in Seattle, Monday, May 15, 2017. The panel is hearing arguments over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (CSPAN via AP, Pool)

Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judge's decision putting the ban on ice.

WHAT DOES THE GOVERNMENT SAY?

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall told the appellate court judges the president's directive falls squarely within his duty to secure the nation's borders and that it does not discriminate against Muslims in its language or in its operation.

Previous presidents have blocked certain foreign nationals: Jimmy Carter used his authority to deny some Iranians entry to the U.S. during the hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan to bar Cubans who didn't already have relatives here; and President Barack Obama to keep out North Korean officials. On Monday Wall said the order doesn't say anything about religion. "This order is aimed at aliens abroad, who themselves don't have constitutional rights," Wall said.

WHAT DO STATES AND CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS CHALLENGING THE BAN SAY?

They argue it violates the Constitution by disfavoring Islam and point to statements Trump made repeatedly as a candidate in which he said he would ban Muslims from entering the country. In issuing his decision blocking the ban in March, Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu cited what he called "significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus" in Trump's campaign statements. Speaking before the 9th Circuit judges on Monday, Neal Katyal, who represented Hawaii, also said Trump had repeatedly spoken of a Muslim ban during the campaign and after. "This is a repeated pattern of the president," Katyal said.

They also argue that the while the president has broad authority over immigration, that power extends only as far as Congress has granted it. Because Congress has already adopted a scheme regarding when people may be excluded from the country for terror-related activities, the president cannot override that with his travel ban, they argue.

WHAT POWER DOES THE PRESIDENT HAVE?

In 1952, with the nation fearful of communist infiltration, Congress gave the president the authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to take action: "Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may ... suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate," the law says. But a law subsequently passed by Congress bans discrimination on the basis of nationality when it comes to issuing immigrant visas. How those laws might authorize or constrain Trump's actions is a key aspect of the travel ban cases.

WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW WITH IMMIGRATION?

Trump's attempted travel bans have caused the number of refugees coming into the U.S. to plummet in the last two months, despite his executive orders largely being blocked in the courts. The number of refugees arriving in the U.S. dipped to 2,070 in March, which was a six-year low except for a period in 2013 when the federal government was shut down. The figure was slightly higher in April, at 3,200, but it was still much lower than the months preceding Trump's order. An executive order signed by Trump in January decreased the refugee limit from 110,000 to 50,000 this fiscal year, but the cap was not blocked in court until mid-March. That caused the State Department to tightly rein in monthly arrivals when the cap was in effect.

Earlier this month, the State Department announced it wants to review social media, email addresses and phone numbers from some foreigners seeking U.S. visas, as part of the Trump administration's enhanced screening of potential immigrants and visitors.

WHAT DID THE JUDGES IN HAWAII AND MARYLAND SAY?

The federal appellate judges are considering rulings by two federal judges against the travel ban. Neither U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland nor Watson in Hawaii bought the administration's reasoning that the ban is about national security. Watson criticized what he called the "illogic" of the government's arguments and cited "significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus" behind the travel ban. He also noted that while courts should not examine the "veiled psyche" and "secret motives" of government decision-makers, "the remarkable facts at issue here require no such impermissible inquiry." But the scope of the rulings differed. In a challenge brought by Hawaii, Watson blocked the federal government from enforcing its ban on travel from six mostly Muslim countries and its suspension of the nation's refugee program. Chuang only blocked the six-nation travel ban, saying it wasn't clear that the suspension of the refugee program was similarly motivated by religious bias.

WHAT'S NEXT?

The appellate courts in Washington state and Virginia will issue their decisions, though exactly when they'll rule is uncertain. The travel ban cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court at any rate, but that would likely be cemented if the 4th and 9th Circuits reach differing conclusions about its legality.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in the nation's capital said she's "inclined to agree" that the travel ban is unlawful, but held off on a request to block it because of the pending appeals court cases. Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin said Monday that means even if the 4th and 9th Circuits side with the administration, the travel ban could be put on hold yet again.

____

Associated Press reporter Meredith Hoffman in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

In this image made from a C-SPAN video, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, standing at left, presents his arguments during a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Seattle, Monday, May 15, 2017. A three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing arguments over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (CSPAN via AP, Pool)

Protesters wave signs and chant during a demonstration against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Miles Treakle, left, of Seattle, holds a sign that reads "Refugees Welcome Ban Trump," as he protests against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Protesters wave signs and chant during a demonstration against President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, Monday, May 15, 2017, outside a federal courthouse in Seattle. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - An unusual lawsuit accusing Conan O'Brien of stealing jokes is moving forward.

A federal judge in San Diego refused last week to toss the lawsuit that alleges O'Brien lifted punchlines about Caitlyn Jenner, Tom Brady and the Washington Monument.

Writer Robert Alexander Kaseberg accused the late-night comedian of copyright infringement for stealing jokes he posted online.

Kaseberg has written for various publications and had more than 1,000 of his jokes told by O'Brien's rival Jay Leno.

O'Brien, his company and Turner Broadcasting System deny the allegations and claim the material was original.

Judge Janis Sammartino says three jokes by Kaseberg are entitled to "thin copyright protection."

But it will be up to judge or jury at trial to determine if O'Brien did rip off the jokes.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on the report that President Donald Trump shared classified information with Russian officials (all times EDT):

10:30 p.m.

The Trump White House has returned to crisis mode as it reacts to yet another bombshell.

President Donald Trump awaits the arrival of Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the White House in Washington, Monday, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

The feeding frenzy Monday was brought on by a Washington Post report that President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian officials in a meeting last week.

That led to closed-door emergency meetings, hallways packed with reporters, statements rushed out, but few questions answered. White House officials denied the story but refused to answer specific questions.

It's become a familiar scenario in the crisis-prone Trump White House, where big news breaks fast and the aides paid to respond seem perpetually caught off-guard.

The bizarre scenes Monday night included a surprise encounter between reporters and Trump's top national security adviser and an attempt to drown out possible conversations with a blaring television.

___

7:55 p.m.

The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee says a report that President Donald Trump shared intelligence about the Islamic State group with Russian officials is "deeply disturbing."

Rep. Adam Schiff of California said in a statement Monday that "this disclosure could jeopardize sources of very sensitive intelligence and relationships we have with key partners."

The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump revealed highly classified information about Islamic State militants to Russian officials during a meeting last week.

The White House has rebutted the story, saying no intelligence sources or methods were discussed.

Schiff says it is particularly "problematic" that Russian interests, in Syria and elsewhere, are "deeply antithetical to our own."

___

7:15 p.m.

President Donald Trump's national security adviser is denying a report that claims Trump shared highly classified intelligence about Islamic State militants with a top Russian diplomat.

H.R. McMaster told reporters in a brief statement that The Washington Post report published Monday "is false" and "at no time" were intelligence sources or methods discussed during Trump's meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The Post report says Trump revealed highly classified information about Islamic State militants to Lavrov and Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, during a meeting at the White House last week.

McMaster says: "I was in the room. it didn't happen."

McMaster says the president did not discuss details that were not already known publicly.

___

6:50 p.m.

Top administration officials are denying a report that President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian officials during a meeting at the White House last week.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says Trump discussed "the nature of specific threats" during the meeting, "but they did not discuss sources, methods or military operations."

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster says, "At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed."

And Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell says flatly, "This story is false" and says the president "only discussed the common threats that both countries faced."

The Washington Post cited current and former U.S. officials who said Trump shared details about an Islamic State terror threat with the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador.

___

6:45 p.m.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says the Trump White House "has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and order."

Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee was responding to The Washington Post report that President Donald Trump disclosed classified information to the Russians in an Oval Office meeting last week.

Corker said Monday of the administration, "Obviously they're in a downward spiral right now and they've got to figure out a way to come to grips with all that's happening."

Corker says the national security team is solid and doing good work, but "the chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline - it's creating an environment that I think makes - it creates a worrisome environment."

___

6 p.m.

The Washington Post is reporting that President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information about Islamic State militants to Russian officials during a meeting at the White House last week.

The newspaper cites current and former U.S. officials who say Trump jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on IS in his conversations with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador to the U.S. They say Trump offered details about an IS terror threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

The newspaper says the information was very sensitive and had been provided by a U.S. partner.

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster says no intelligence sources or methods were discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.

The CIA is declining to comment.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information about Islamic State militants to Russian officials during a meeting last week, The Washington Post reported Monday, prompting strong condemnation from both Democrats and Republicans.

Three White House officials who were in the May 10 meeting strongly denounced the story, saying no intelligence sources and methods were discussed - but they didn't deny that classified information was disclosed.

Citing current and former U.S. officials, the Post said Trump shared details about an Islamic State terror threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.

This handout photo released by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shows President Donald Trump meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 10, 2017. The Washington Post is reporting that Trump revealed highly classified information about Islamic State militants to Russian officials during a meeting at the White House last week. The newspaper cites current and former U.S. officials who say Trump jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on IS in his conversations with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador to the U.S. They say Trump offered details about an IS terror threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.(Russian Foreign Ministry via AP)

The anonymous officials told the Post that the information Trump relayed during the Oval Office meeting had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement. They said it was considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government.

"I was in the room, it didn't happen," H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser, told reporters outside the White House late Monday.

"The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries including threats to civil aviation," McMaster said. "At no time, at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed and the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known."

He said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Dina Powell, deputy national security adviser for strategy, remember the meeting the same way. "Their on-the-record accounts should outweigh those of anonymous sources" in the news report, he said.

Tillerson said Trump discussed a range of subjects, including "common efforts and threats regarding counter-terrorism." He said that during that exchange the nature of specific threats were discussed, but they did not discuss sources, methods or military operations.

Powell said: "This story is false. The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced."

The Post story - which was later confirmed by The New York Times and BuzzFeed News - does not claim that Trump revealed any specific information about how the intelligence was gathered. Still, it will only heighten Trump's strained relations with intelligence workers and former officials, who view Russia as an adversary.

Even before he was inaugurated, intelligence professionals worried about sharing classified information with Trump, who often shoots from the hip.

If true, the breach was ill-timed, coming a day after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election. Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was fired after he misled Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with Kisylak.

It's unlikely that Trump has broken any law. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets.

The Post said the intelligence partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russian officials. By doing so, Trump would have jeopardized cooperation from an ally familiar with the inner workings of the Islamic State group, and make other allies - or even U.S. intelligence officials - wary about sharing future top secret details with the president.

Afterward, White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency, the newspaper said.

The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment Monday evening.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats expressed concern about the report.

GOP Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters the Trump White House "has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and order."

"The shame of it is there's a really good national security team in place and there are good, productive things that are under way through them and through others," Corker said. "But the chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline - it's creating an environment that I think makes - it creates a worrisome environment."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that if the story is true it would be "deeply disturbing."

Reaction from Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees was full-throated.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California called the story "deeply disturbing" and said if it's true, the disclosure could jeopardize sources of very sensitive intelligence and relationships with key allies.

"That the Russians would be the potential recipients of this intelligence and may be able to determine its source is all the more problematic, since the Russian interest in Syria and elsewhere is, in many respects, deeply antithetical to our own," Schiff said. He added that he wants the House intelligence committee fully briefed on what, if anything, was shared with the Russian officials.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., tweeted: "If true, this is a slap in the face to the intel community. Risking sources & methods is inexcusable, particularly with the Russians."

The story prompted Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., to tweet: "Protip: Don't give the Russians classified information. #Classified101."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. - who had just had a root canal - read reporters a statement he scrawled out in the dentist's chair after learning about the story.

"These reports, if true, are of the gravest possible concern. It could harm our national security by cutting off important sources of intelligence that protect Americans against terrorist acts," Wyden said.

The controversy engulfed the White House. Reporters spent much of the evening camped out outside of Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office, hoping for answers. At one point, an eagle-eyed reporter spotted a handful of staffers, including Spicer and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, walking toward the Cabinet Room.

Muffled yelling was heard coming from the area near the room, but after a reporter tweeted about the noise, press staffers quickly turned up their television volume, blasting the sound to drown out everything else.

__

Associated Press writers Vivian Salama, Catherine Lucey, Jill Colvin, Ken Thomas, Richard Lardner and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster walks back to the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Monday, May 15, 2017, after speaking to the media. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Labour is pledging to impose a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions, raising billions for public services, if it gains power in the General Election on June 8.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the levy would bring in up to 26 billion over the course of the next parliament, while eliminating the most destabilising forms of speculation on the financial markets.

However, the move is likely to cause an outcry in the City amid fears it will undermine the competitiveness of the financial sector at a time of uncertainty in the wake of the vote for Brexit.

The London skyline as seen from Tower 42 with the 'Gherkin' (foreground), 30 St Mary Axe and Canary Wharf (background) prominent.

It comes as Labour has been under pressure to explain how it will pay for its ambitious programme of re-nationalisations and expanding public services, set out in a leaked draft of the partys election manifesto.

Under the Labour plan, the party said it would revise the 322-year-old stamp duty regime on share-trading, closing down an existing loop hole for banks and hedge funds, and extending it to cover financial derivatives and other highly-traded assets.

At the current rate of 0.5% per transaction, the party said the move would raise 4.7 billion in 2016/17, rising to 5.6 billion in 2021/22  the final year of the next parliament.

It said the plan mirrored the financial transactions tax currently being prepared for introduction in 10 European countries.

Fifty and twenty pound notes

At the same time, the party said it would carry out the biggest crackdown in this countrys history on tax avoidance, with a comprehensive programme of tax reform.

Following the disclosures in the leaked Panama papers in 2015, it said a Labour government would close the loopholes and clamp down on the network of secretive shell companies and offshore tax havens used by the super rich to shield their wealth.

Mr McDonnell said the changes would restore fairness to the system after the bail-out of the banks following the financial crash of 2008.

John McDonnell

The next Labour government will introduce a Robin Hood Tax to make the financial sector pay its fair share after it received huge public bailouts in the crash, he said.

Ordinary people are still being made to pay by the Tories for a crisis they didnt cause through the worst spending cuts for generations.

All were asking for is fairness in our tax system. By making those who trade in financial derivatives pay a small fraction of their profits, we can help properly fund our public services.

Jeremy Corbyn: higher taxes, more debt, economic #chaos. Dont risk the economic security of your family. pic.twitter.com/8c8ZnEbzef  Conservatives (@Conservatives) May 13, 2017

For the Conservatives, Treasury Minister Jane Ellison dismissed the plans as a total shambles from the Labour leadership.

The transaction tax has been described as madness by his own mayor of London because it risks economic growth and jobs, and just weeks ago in Parliament Labour blocked measures to stop almost 9 billion worth of tax avoidance, she said.

Since 2010, we have recouped an extra 140 billion in tax that would have otherwise been avoided or evaded. We will relentlessly go after those who do not pay their fair share.
Rafael Nadal was made to work hard before claiming his fifth Mutua Madrid Open title with victory over Austrias Dominic Thiem in Sundays final.

Nadal extended his record on clay to 15-0 this season with a 7-6 (10/8) 6-4 win in La Caja Magica, securing a 30th ATP World Tour Masters 1000 crown to equal the record held by world number two Novak Djokovic.

After beating Djokovic in the semi-finals, Nadal could have been forgiven for expecting a somewhat easier contest against Thiem, who was playing in his first Masters 1000 final.

Spain's Rafael Nadal bites the trophy as poses for photographers after winning the final of the Madrid Open tennis tournament (Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP)

However, the 23-year-old claimed the first break of serve for a 2-1 lead in the opening set before Nadal got back on terms in the sixth game, with Thiem then saving three set points at 5-4 down on his way to forcing a tie-break.

Thiem saved two more set points in the breaker before sending a forehand over the baseline to give Nadal the upper hand, which the 30-year-old consolidated with a break of serve in the first game of the second set.

After saving two match points on his own serve in the ninth game, Thiem had four chances to break back as Nadal served for the title, but the left-hander would not be denied and eventually sealed victory after two hours and 18 minutes.
North Korea has said the missile it launched over the weekend was a new type of long-range ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead.

Pyongyangs propaganda must be considered with caution, but if confirmed, the claim marks another big step forward in the countrys escalating efforts to field a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the US mainland.

Outside experts do not believe the North can do that yet, but each new test pushes the country closer to the goal.

Kim Jong Un at what was said to be a missile test site (AP)

The launch on Sunday is an immediate challenge to South Koreas new leader, a liberal elected just five days earlier who expressed a desire to reach out to North Korea. North Koreas push to boost its weapons programme also makes it one of the Trump administrations most urgent foreign policy worries.

The missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and US militaries said. Tokyo said the flight pattern could indicate a new type of missile.

North Koreas official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12  capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead.

People in Seoul watch a news programme showing images of the missile launch

Leader Kim Jong Un was said to have witnessed the test and hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing, according to KCNA.

The launch jeopardises new South Korean president Moon Jae-ins willingness to talk to the North, and came as US, Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.

The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation  occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea, senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan said. The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating.

South Korean president Moon Jae-in talks on the phone

Mr Moon, South Koreas first liberal leader in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office last week that he would be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right.

The UN Security Council will hold closed consultations about the launch on Tuesday afternoon. The Security Council has adopted six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions against North Korea.

President Donald Trumps administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable, but it has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters the launch was absolutely unacceptable and that Japan would respond resolutely.

The White House took note of the missile landing close to Russias Pacific coast and said that North Korea has been a flagrant menace for far too long.
Arsene Wenger has called on Arsenal fans to attend Tuesdays game against Sunderland rather than participate in a boycott aimed at removing him as manager.

The 67-year-old has still yet to announce whether he will sign a new contract at the Emirates Stadium to stay beyond the end of the current campaign.

Arsenal have just three games remaining before that point  two home Premier League clashes against the Black Cats and Everton, before an FA Cup final date with newly-crowned champions Chelsea.

Arsene Wenger looks on from the touchline

After Liverpools 4-0 win at West Ham on Sunday a place in the Premier League top four, and qualification for next seasons Champions League, is now out of Arsenals hands. They need the Reds to fail to beat relegated Middlesbrough at Anfield on Sunday to realistically stand any chance of maintaining Wengers record of never finishing outside of the top four in a full season at the helm.

But even if the Gunners do upset the odds by reaching the Champions League, a number of fan groups are still calling for Wengers near 21-year reign to come to an end. Following recent measures such as protest marches, staying away from the Emirates before kick-off and flying planes carrying anti-Wenger slogans over stadiums, those groups now want to stage a mass boycott of the Sunderland fixture.

In a statement released on onlinegooner.com, the group listed the likes of Atletico Madrid boss Diego Simeone and Max Allegri of Juventus as preferred alternatives to Wenger - before asking for fans to stay away on Tuesday night.

Boycott Sunderland Game If You Want A New Manager. Mark Halfpenny

on how fans can send board a message tmw evening - https://t.co/MnnG86GZ4H pic.twitter.com/O5s5lMCmNZ  The Gooner (@GoonerFanzine) May 15, 2017

We are calling on fans that feel the same way to boycott tomorrow evenings match against Sunderland, the statement read. Please consider joining us in this boycott. Dont sell your seat to a tourist or give it to a mate. Let yours be one of the many gaps in the stands that send a direct and unarguable message to the directors. You do not want to watch any more of the same old same old.

If you are in any doubt, look at our season and compare that to Chelsea, Juventus and Atletico Madrid. We are a bigger club than all three of them but we are being held back by a greedy owner and a past it manager. By doing this, we can send a message to Stan Kroenke and Arsene Wenger that Arsenal should be doing so much better.

A number of empty seats have been visible at Arsenals recent home wins over Leicester and Manchester United, with some supporters already opting to steer clear. But Wenger, who again dodged the question over his own future, wants to see Arsenal fans back his side.

My message is always the same, it is to support the team, he said.

Wengers side have enjoyed a resurgence of late and have won six of their last seven games - including an extra-time victory over Manchester City in their FA Cup semi-final meeting. The only defeat came to north London rivals Tottenham, who on Sunday beat Manchester United in the last match at White Hart Lane to secure a second-placed finish.

Arsenal were runners-up to surprise champions Leicester last season but could end this campaign outside the top four despite the prospect of collecting more points than 12 months ago.
Government cuts are to blame for exposing NHS services to the cyber-attack which hit computers around the world on Friday, Jeremy Corbyn has said.

The Labour leader was speaking as he set out a promise to provide an extra 37 billion for the NHS, with measures aimed at improving A&E performance and taking one million patients off waiting lists.

Mr Corbyn told the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) conference in Liverpool that he understood the anger of nurses who made clear in a poll this weekend they are ready to stage a summer of protests across the UK over pay.

Delighted to speak @theRCN on the day Labour announces plans to give #OurNHS the funding it needs to continue to deliver #ForTheMany. #RCN17 pic.twitter.com/cmoAlbIPGm  Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) May 15, 2017

Nurses had suffered cuts in the value of their pay over recent years, said Mr Corbyn, adding: We will not put you in that position.

We will lift the public-sector pay cap and hand back decisions on pay to an independent review body.

Jeremy Corbyn with Janet Davies, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing

Mr Corbyn said Labour would deliver an additional 7.4 billion a year for the NHS over the course of the next five-year parliament, including a total of 10 billion in capital funding to modernise buildings and IT systems.

This would cut waiting lists by one million by 2022 and allow accident-and-emergency departments to hit their four-hour target for waits, he said.

He also said he would restore training bursaries for nurses.

We are ready to step in and save the NHS from the cuts and privatisation that have happened over the last seven years, said Mr Corbyn.

Our health service is being dismantled by stealth. Over the last seven years, our NHS has been driven into crisis after crisis.

A&E departments struggling to cope. Waiting lists soaring. And  as we saw last week  the Tory cuts have exposed patient services to cyber-attack.

Conservatives have put tax giveaways for the rich & big business before funding for NHS.



Agree with @jeremycorbyn? RT  #RCN17 #ForTheMany pic.twitter.com/UtiG6VpcjS  The Labour Party (@UKLabour) May 15, 2017

Mr Corbyn described the malware attack on NHS computer systems as highway robbery against all of us, adding: We have to have investment in the NHS to protect all the systems so we are not held to ransom by criminals.

Labours plans involve a target to tackle bed-blocking and a new guarantee that patients with the most urgent needs are seen within an hour at A&E departments.

The measures, being set out by Mr Corbyn and shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth, will see Labour commit to meeting the existing 18-week waiting list target and the four-hour A&E goal.

Today I'm announcing a New Deal for Patients. A million off waiting lists and new standards of care in return for investment @BBCBreakfast pic.twitter.com/vCehaIPG1J  Jonathan Ashworth (@JonAshworth) May 15, 2017

A new 500 million fund will help ensure the NHS avoids a winter crisis and 2.5 million cancer patients will be helped by delivering in full the cancer strategy for England.

To tackle bed-blocking, Labour will develop a new target for delayed discharge of patients, ensuring 80% of patients are released from hospital with an appropriate care package within a week of being deemed ready to go home.

Funding for Labours New Deal For NHS Patients will be met from tax rises for the top 5% of earners, with additional money from increases to corporation tax and a higher-rate insurance premium tax on private medical insurance.
Adam Lallana feels Liverpool passed a major test of character in the race for a Champions League spot by thrashing West Ham on Sunday.

The Reds ensured their destiny remains in their own hands in the fight for a top-four finish with a 4-0 victory at the London Stadium.

Liverpool travelled to the capital knowing any slip-up could hand the initiative to Arsenal but a double from Philippe Coutinho and strikes from Daniel Sturridge and Divock Origi means victory over relegated Middlesbrough on the final day will take them back to Europes elite next season.

Liverpool's Philippe Coutinho celebrates with Adam Lallana

 Mental strength

 Character



Adam Lallana praises his #LFC teammates after Sunday's vital victory at West Ham: https://t.co/3Thptd047t pic.twitter.com/bGs2mNiPV2  Liverpool FC (@LFC) May 15, 2017

Midfielder Lallana told the clubs website: People were talking about the pressure with the results on Saturday, but I felt very calm even in the warm-up and the dressing room. I felt the balance was right and we didnt have to put too much pressure on ourselves.

You only have to look at the teamsheet and it had goals, creative players, it had everything really, and I felt we trusted that, we trusted our ability. Credit to the lads. It was a big pressure game but the way we dealt with it was superb.

It was not the way the Hammers wanted to end what has been a turbulent first season as tenants of the former Olympic Stadium. As well as the drubbing by Liverpool, they have conceded five at home to Arsenal and Manchester City, four to Watford and City (again), and three to Southampton and Leicester.

Defender Winston Reid said: In the last few weeks weve been doing well. We tried our best and went out there to try and put on a performance.

But sometimes you have days like that and unfortunately weve had a few of them this season. But well move on to next season and learn from this season, especially at home.
Aljaz Bedene will face Novak Djokovic in the second round of the Internazionali BNL dItalia in Rome after his Italian opponent Gianluca Mager retired in the third set of their first-round encounter.

British number three Bedene was leading 6-7 (3/7) 6-4 3-0 when Mager was forced to retire through injury.

Bedene had a great chance to clinch the first set when he broke Magers serve to go 6-5 ahead, but his opponent hit back to take it to a tie-break before going on to win the set.

Aljaz Bedene hits a backhand

The 27-year-old won the second set to level things up and raced into a 3-0 lead in the third before Mager withdrew.

British number two Kyle Edmund made short work of his first-round opponent Joao Sousa.

The 22-year-old Yorkshireman needed just an hour and nine minutes to bank a 6-3 6-4 victory over an opponent ranked two places above him in 51st.

Edmund did things efficiently, breaking once in each set while successfully defending three break points on his own serve.

Having suffered a surprise defeat by Joao Domingues in the first round in Estoril earlier this month this was a much tighter performance against another Portuguese opponent, with Edmund reeling off 12 aces and controlling matters throughout with his forehand.
Theresa May has sought to broaden the Conservative Partys appeal to workers by pledging a new deal if she continues as Prime Minister.

Theresa May meets staff at haulage company

A combination of measures including the 7.50 national living wage for workers aged 25 and over rising in line with average earnings until 2022, and allowing workers the right to leave to care for a family member or after the death of a child.

The policies are considered part of a bid by the Tories to win votes in Labour heartlands and swing marginal seats. Securing a big majority would make life easier for Mrs May to implement her wider agenda.

REVEALED: Working people 2,300 worse off under Theresa Mays watered down National Living Wage https://t.co/X6Y1DZCi9z pic.twitter.com/EpXptBxuNB  Labour Press (@labourpress) May 15, 2017

Labour said the PM was taking working people for fools while the Liberal Democrats highlighted previous moves by the Tories to ban workers from striking. The British Chambers of Commerce warned of potential extra costs associated with the new obligations.

Labour has been traditionally associated with being the party of the workers. Tory opposition to the creation of the minimum wage in 1999 is among the historic policies the modern party has sought to move away from  albeit while seeking to curb the influence of trade unions.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks

A leaked draft of the Labour Party manifesto outlined a 20-point plan for security and equality at work  including banning zero-hours contracts, raising the minimum wage to the level of the living wage and ending a cap on public sector wages.

The Conservatives in government published proposals which seek to transfer the whole of EU law on to the statute book before Brexit occurs. But Brexit Secretary David Davis has also been urged by Labour to face down Tory colleagues who want to use Brexit to water down peoples rights. It is feared changes to workers rights will be implemented later, with Brexit enabling this.
Bastian Schweinsteiger has suggested his unhappy spell at Manchester United may not have all been down to boss Jose Mourinho.

The 32-year-old was largely frozen out under Mourinho at Old Trafford and left to join MLS side Chicago Fire in March.

But while he described the situation at United as unfortunate, Schweinsteiger told ESPN he did not believe Mourinho was solely responsible.

Thanks to all fans, the whole staff and my teammates of @ManUtd! I will never forget my time with the club, but now its time for a change! pic.twitter.com/zYn2o5Cjsk  Bastian Schweinsteiger (@BSchweinsteiger) March 21, 2017

Schweinsteiger said: I had a talk with him and he had an opinion, maybe it was not made by himself.

(The decision not to play me) was maybe made by someone else without him so I think after I trained and I played and you could see me and how I behave as a professional and he has a different opinion, so it was a little bit unfortunate. I think (it would be different) if we would have met in a different situation.

The German international was signed by Mourinhos predecessor Louis van Gaal in the summer of 2015, but under Mourinho he was forced to train on his own for three months.

Bastian Schweinsteiger trained alone (Peter Byrne/PA)

Schweinsteiger added: In my eyes it was not the right decision, but in life sometimes you have this kind of situation where something is not correct and right in your way, but you have to accept it, and I accepted it.

I said okay I accept it, but still want to stay here and want to train. I want to show I am a player you can trust. And thats what I was doing at Manchester. I was then training with the first team and playing with the first team. I mean it was not easy when I was training by my own for three months.
A hand-painted, glacier-themed plane is making its first visit to the UK after joining the Icelandair fleet.

The airline commissioned the Vatnajokull glacier-themed aircraft as part of celebrations to mark its 80th anniversary this year.

The plane has been spray-painted by hand by a team of artists who took 24 days and used 195 litres of paint to create the image of the glacier on the exterior of the aircraft.

Icelandair plane (Icelandair/AP/PA)

All Icelandair planes are named after volcanoes and the Vatnajokull follows on from the Hekla Aurora, created in 2015 and inspired by the Northern Lights, as the second hand-crafted piece of artwork to adorn one of its aircraft.

The interior of the plane is also designed to suggest the glacier experience, with LED blue lighting in the main cabin and ice white and turquoise headrests.

The drinks trolley has been transformed into a mini ice cave, while cups, napkins and even sick bags are decorated with glacier prints.

Birkir Holm Guonason, chief executive of Icelandair, said: We cant wait to share the Vatnajokull with our passengers.

icelandair plane (Keith Whitmore/AP/PA)

Icelandair believe that travelling is one of lifes great pleasures and a trip on this plane will ensure customers experience time well-travelled, as they sit back and experience Icelands most extreme elements from the comfort of their own seats.

The plane arrives in Glasgow from Reykjavik at 10.40am on Tuesday and will return to Iceland later the same day.

It will be part of the transatlantic schedule and will fly to cities including Manchester, London and Birmingham.

The Vatnajokull glacier is the most active in Iceland with around 60 eruptions over the last 800 years, and has several active volcanoes beneath its surface.
Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson has said she cannot blame voters for feeling bullied and hectored into backing the SNP.

She used a lecture in London to highlight the differences between patriotism and nationalism  going on to brand the latter a form of identity politics.

While she conceded various political parties have been at fault over time in claiming to have a monopoly on the national mood, Ms Davidson insisted it is the modern SNP that has made this technique its own.

On the stage to define the difference between nationalism and patriotism, Ruth Davidson. pic.twitter.com/XbSXvY65Vq  Federica De Caria (@federicadecaria) May 15, 2017

She claimed that north of the border, issues of identity and nationalism have dominated the agenda not just for my time in politics, but actually for pretty much my entire adult life.

Speaking in a lecture to the Orwell Foundation as she became the first Conservative to address the organisation, she said: The truth is that the nationalist politics identified by Orwell  the attempt to classify and label human beings into groups marked good and bad  has become a key part of our political practice in Scotland.

And it has to be said that this has been pursued quite deliberately, so that many people who do not subscribe to the loudly advanced, so-called good side of the argument feel voiceless and helpless.

"When it comes to nationalism Orwell has all of us skwered, even myself" - Davidson #OrwellDavidson  The Orwell Prizes (@TheOrwellPrize) May 15, 2017

Because in Scotland, political nationalism has introduced the idea that only one side of the constitutional divide can be the authentic voice of the people of Scotland.

That only it has the right to be heard. That other voices are, by their nature, illegitimate and phoney.

She quoted the comedian Billy Connolly, who said: I love Scotland. But I hate the way nationalists think they own the place.

As a result of such politics, she said the implication hangs in the air  those who are not orthodox, or do not follow the right way, are foreign, we are alien, we are other.

Ruth Davidson (Yui Mok/PA)

She added: This technique has, for a long time, been effective. If people feel bullied and hectored into supporting SNP, I dont blame them.

She described nationalism as a state of mind which, by definition, cannot tolerate plurality.

Ms Davidson went on: It is a state of mind where one ideology, one myth, must take precedence over all else and which demands people support one camp or another.

She said nationalism is a part of the Scottish psyche  and it would only be hypocritical to deny it.

She went on to state that the challenge is how to react to this, asking: Do we submit before this nationalist instinct and the either/or dichotomy which it demands of us? Or do we follow the path of patriotism?

Patriotism doesn't set barriers, it celebrates our place in the world, says Davidson.  Federica De Caria (@federicadecaria) May 15, 2017

She argued patriotism doesnt impose itself, it doesnt take itself too seriously, and stressed that unlike nationalism, patriotism celebrates plurality.

Ms Davidson said: To be patriotically British does not mean that we must oppose others.

Indeed, patriotism celebrates difference and messiness. We can be proudly Scottish, Welsh, Bajan or Pakistani, at the same time as enjoying our Britishness. Patriotism does not force us to rank these identities in order, as if one or other has a higher claim.
By Benjamin Weir

SYDNEY, May 15 (Reuters) - Prison officers in Papua New Guinea shot and killed 17 inmates involved in a mass prison break, local media reported on Monday, sparking calls for an investigation into overcrowded jails in the South Pacific nation where Australia detains asylum seekers.

Fifty escapees were still on the run from the Buimo prison in the city of Lae on Papua New Guinea's north coast, police said on their official Facebook page, warning the public that an increase in car jackings and armed robberies was likely.

"These are dangerous individuals," Lae Metropolitan Police Command said. "Police anticipate an increase in serious crimes in the city."

Local media reported than more than 70 prisoners attempted to escape from the Buimo prison, nearly 320 km (200 miles) north of the capital Port Moresby, on Friday. The Post Courier and The National newspapers reported that 17 prisoners were shot dead, three captured, and 57 were still at large.

It was the third mass breakout from Buimo in three years.

International human rights groups have repeatedly called for an inquiry into PNG jails, citing concerns about overcrowding, limited access to medical treatment and delays in court proceedings.

"Unfortunately these incidents, tragic as they are, happen all too frequently in Papua New Guinea as there is poor accountability with police and security officers," Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International's Pacific Researcher, told Reuters by telephone.

In February last year, 11 prisoners were killed in an attempted breakout at Buimo after 30 prisoners attacked guards. Fifty-five men escaped from the prison in a breakout in 2015 and two years earlier one detainee was shot dead when 44 fled the same facility in another mass escape.

Australia maintains an asylum-seeker detention centre on PNG's Manus Island, in accordance with its policy of not allowing people who attempt to reach Australia by boat to settle in the country.

The Manus camp, one of two South Pacific island asylum seeker detention centres funded by Australia, has been criticised by human right groups and the United Nations for cramp conditions, inadequate medical facilities and violence.

The PNG Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the camp was illegal and should close, forcing Australia to confirm it would shut down the camp by the end of 2017.

Australia struck a deal with former U.S. President Barack Obama to take some detainees who were deemed refugees, an agreement criticised by President Donald Trump as a "dumb deal" when he took office earlier this year. (Reporting by Benjamin Weir; Editing by Jane Wardell and Michael Perry)
By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

LONDON, May 15 (Reuters) - Iranian opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi, under house arrest since 2011, will back President Hassan Rouhani's bid for a second term in Friday's election, his family told Reuters.

Rouhani, a pragmatist who has eased Iran's international isolation and now faces mostly hardline conservative challengers for the presidency, told supporters he needed a stronger mandate to liberalise Iranian society and get opposition leaders freed.

Karroubi, 80, and fellow reformist Mirhossein Mousavi ran for election in June 2009 and became figureheads for Iranians who staged mass protests after the vote they believed was rigged to bring back hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"My father believes in reform through the ballot box," Karroubi's son, Mohammad Taghi Karroubi, said in a telephone interview. "He believes people should take part in elections to fight against those who want to turn the Islamic Republic into an Islamic state."

Karroubi, Mousavi and Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard were confined to their homes in February 2011 after the opposition leaders called supporters to rally in solidarity with pro-democracy uprisings in Arab countries.

"This election is a sharp confrontation between a real Islamic Republic and a ceremonial one," Karroubi was quoted as saying on Monday by Saham News, the official website of his political party.

Karroubi asked all Iranians to take part in the election and to protect the democratic process by choosing their preferred candidate, but said: "I will vote for Rouhani of course."

In a blistering televised election debate on Friday, Rouhani cast his hardline clerical foes as power-hungry pawns of Iran's security forces, seeking to energise voters disillusioned by a sluggish economy and the slow pace of social reform. "Please don't abuse religion for power," said Rouhani.

KARROUBI HASN'T VOTED SINCE HOUSE ARREST

This would be the first time Karroubi votes in any election since his arrest. In the parliamentary election in 2016, he said he would have voted but his family said the ballot box reached his home too late.

Mohammad Taghi Karroubi said the family was confident that the interior ministry would let his father vote on Friday.

Rouhani, a mid-ranking Muslim cleric and longtime establishment figure, was elected in 2013 by a 51 percent margin on promises of detente with major powers and an end to house arrests of opposition leaders.

He struck a deal with world powers in 2015 that lifted most international sanctions on Iran, reconnecting it with the global financial system and opening new avenues for foreign investment, in return for curbs to Iran's disputed nuclear programme.

"But there are issues that my legal government was not able to resolve," Rouhani said on Monday, referring to his failure to end house arrests - in part due to his lack of authority over hardline security forces answerable only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei under Iran's complex system of dual theocratic and republican government.

"Some issues cannot be resolved if the government has only 51 percent of votes," Rouhani said.

If no candidate win more than 50 percent of the votes in the election on May 19, a run-off will be held a week later. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; editing by Mark Heinrich)
By Ron Bousso and Sanjeeban Sarkar

May 15 (Reuters) - North Sea focused Premier Oil expects to slash its $2.8 billion debt pile significantly in 2018 by exceeding its 2017 production target and lowering spending, it said on Monday.

The oil and natural gas producer's shares rose 3.4 percent by 0925 GMT after it also formally kicked off a debt refinancing deal and set a date for a shareholders meeting for its approval. It did not say by how much it would reduce the debt, which it has struggled to contain.

"A positive statement from Premier demonstrating good momentum in the business now that the refinancing looks out of the way," BMO Capital Markets analyst David Round said.

Premier maintained its production guidance of 75,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) for 2017. However, it expects to beat its target due to a near tripling of production in the North Sea ahead of the start-up of its Catcher field in December.

"We will look again at guidance either for our July trading update or August interim results but our internal projections are certainly to beat guidance for the full year," Chief Executive Officer Tony Durrant told Reuters.

The company reported a 44 percent rise in its production to 82,600 boepd for the four months ended April 30.

Premier lowered its 2017 capital expenditure forecast to $350 million from $390 million.

It plans to generate profits this year at oil prices of $50 a barrel and is slightly ahead of the target thanks to higher oil prices and production, asset sales and lower spending, Durrant said.

A stronger British pound however offset many of those gains, leading to net debt to remain little changed.

(Reporting by Sanjeeban Sarkar in Bengaluru and Ron Bousso in London; Editing by Amrutha Gayathri and Susan Thomas)
ANKARA/BERLIN, May 15 (Reuters) - A group of German lawmakers has been blocked from visiting troops stationed at Turkey's Incirlik air base, officials said on Monday, a move that could reignite a row between the NATO allies over Berlin's access to the base.

The lawmakers were denied a visit to the base as it was not deemed appropriate at this time, sources in Turkey's foreign ministry told Reuters, without elaborating. Some 250 German troops are stationed at Incirlik as part of the fight against Islamic State in neighbouring Syria, according to the German armed forces.

A spokesman for the German foreign minister said it was "completely unacceptable" for Turkey to keep German lawmakers from visiting their own soldiers.

"A visit by lawmakers must be made possible," Martin Schaefer said, adding that Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel would raise the issue with colleagues from other NATO governments in Washington on Tuesday.

German government spokesman Stefan Seibert said Berlin would consider alternative places to station the soldiers.

Relations between the NATO allies were strained in the run-up to Turkey's April 16 referendum, when Germany banned Turkish politicians from addressing rallies of expatriate Turks, citing public safety concerns.

President Tayyip Erdogan accused Berlin of "Nazi-like" tactics. A narrow majority of Turks backed the referendum to change the constitution and grant Erdogan sweeping executive powers. Germany and other Western allies have voiced concern about what they fear is growing authoritarianism in Turkey.

Last year Turkey banned German lawmakers from visiting the base for months in response to a resolution in the General parliament declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide, a term Ankara rejects. (Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz and Thomas Escritt; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Daren Butler)
SYDNEY, May 15 (Reuters) - Papua New Guinea will close some parts of an Australian-run detention centre within weeks, refugees said on Monday, stepping up pressure on asylum seekers hoping to start a new life.

Human rights groups and the United Nations have criticised the Manus Island detention complex, one of two South Pacific island asylum-seeker centres funded by Australia, for cramped conditions, inadequate medical facilities and violence.

At a meeting, Papua New Guinea immigration officials told refugees that an area of the Manus camp would close on May 28, with the rest of the compound to shut on June 30.

An unspecified number of asylum-seekers will be relocated to a transit centre, one refugee quoted the officials as having said.

"Immigration is telling people that their plan is to remove those people who were interviewed for America to East Lorengau camp, which is close to Lorengau town," said Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish Iranian detained on Manus for nearly four years, referring to the island's major town.

Papua New Guinea officials could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters.

The move to close the centre also increases pressure on those whose applications for asylum have been rejected.

Asylum seekers said the move was creating panic and signalled Papua New Guinea's readiness to deport those who had so far rejected Australia's financial offer to return home voluntarily.

Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the camp was illegal and should close, forcing Australia to confirm it would shut the facility by the end of 2017.

Australia struck a deal with former U.S. President Barack Obama to take some detainees who were deemed refugees, a pact President Donald Trump characterised as a "dumb deal" when he took office in January. (Reporting by Colin Packham; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
BEIJING, May 15 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Russia saw no need to arm the Syrian Kurds, but said Moscow would maintain working contacts with them.

"Unlike other countries we are not announcing any arms deliveries to Kurdish formations," said Putin, who was speaking in Beijing. "We don't believe we need to start such work."

Putin said the fact that the Kurds were engaged in the fight against Islamic State militants meant it made sense to maintain working contacts with them however "even if it's only to avoid (accidental) clashes." (Reporting by Denis Dyomkin/Andrey Ostroukh/Christian Lowe; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
May 15 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories from selected Canadian newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

** A South African court decision, allowing the seizure of a cargo ship with 50,000 tonnes of phosphate, could open the door to renewed challenges of Canadian imports from a disputed territory in the deserts of North Africa. (https://tgam.ca/2qIG62s)

** The federal government will unveil a carbon-tax plan this week that would provide breaks for major industrial emitters, while ensuring most Canadian families get rebates to offset higher energy bills. (https://tgam.ca/2rhX5pb)

** The board of directors at Liquor Stores NA Ltd is preparing for a showdown with activist investor PointNorth Capital Inc, in what is expected to determine control of North America's largest publicly traded booze retailer. (https://tgam.ca/2qIMp5U)

NATIONAL POST

** Ontario's transit agency Metrolinx, a major customer of Bombardier Inc's light rail vehicles, said it has turned to a competitor of the Montreal-based company over "serious concerns" quality vehicles won't be delivered on time. (http://bit.ly/2qmNn4V)

** American liquefied natural gas exporters have been courting Canadian producers of the commodity, and analysts expect more domestic gas will move south in the absence of Canadian LNG projects. Advantage Oil & Gas Ltd Chief Executive Andy Mah said there have been conversations between Canadian gas producers and U.S. LNG proponents about shipping more Canadian gas to American export facilities. (http://bit.ly/2qaFLUY) (Compiled by Bengaluru newsroom)
May 15 (Reuters) - Slovenia's largest bank Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB) said on Monday it plans to list on the Ljubljana Stock Exchange by mid-June and issue global deposit receipts in London, as part of the government's privatisation programme.

The European Commission last week approved the proposal to list NLB and the International Monetary Fund in March urged the euro zone country to speed up privatisations, especially of state-owned banks, saying that would improve productivity and increase potential economic growth.

The government has said it will sell at least 50 percent of its shares in NLB in the IPO, through its holding company Slovenski Drzavni Holding (SDH), and sell another 25 percent stake in a second IPO by the end of 2018.

NLB said about 10 percent of the shares on offer this time will go to retail investors in Slovenia, and 90 percent will go to institutional investors.

NLB had total assets of 12.1 billion euros ($13 billion) as of March 31. According to local media reports the government expects to get at least 1 billion euros from selling 75 percent of the bank.

It had originally planned to sell the 75 percent stake in one go but then decided on two sales in order to get a better price.

Slovenia has been reluctant to sell its major banks so the government still controls about 40 percent of the banking sector. However, it sold the country's third largest lender NKBM to U.S. investment firm Apollo in 2015 and sold several smaller banks before that.

NLB said on Monday that proceeds from the IPO would be used to shore up the country's budget.

Deutsche Bank AG is acting as sole global coordinator, as well as joint bookrunner together with J.P. Morgan Securities Plc and UBS Ltd. ($1 = 0.9131 euros) (Reporting by Esha Vaish in Bengaluru and Marja Novak in Ljubljana; Editing by Susan Fenton)
BERLIN, May 15 (Reuters) - After Emmanuel Macron's victory in France's presidential election, Germany must decide whether it wants to continue its single-minded focus on budget rigour or work with him to ensure the future of the European project, a German diplomat said.

In an interview with Reuters hours before the new French president travels to Berlin to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel, Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, pushed back against German politicians who have picked holes in Macron's ideas for Europe since his election win.

Among those are Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who has come to personify Berlin's focus on the "Schwarze Null", or balanced budget. He has suggested Macron's plans to create a budget and finance minister for the euro zone are unrealistic.

"My wish is that this issue is not used in the (German) election campaign, but that we have a serious discussion over the question: 'What is more important to us? The Schwarze Null as a categoric imperative or the future of Europe?'" Ischinger said.

"If compromises are necessary and make sense, then I would support compromise rather than categorical imperatives."

Mainstream parties in Germany applauded Macron's victory over far-right leader Marine Le Pen earlier this month.

But since then, conservative politicians and media have criticised his plans, suggesting they would lead to a "transfer union" in which German money would be used to pay for uncompetitive member states that are reluctant to reform.

Schaeuble has suggested some of Macron's more ambitious plans would require politically thorny changes to the EU treaty.

But Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Britain and the United States, said much could be done on an intergovernmental basis.

"People have been talking for quite some time about the idea of a euro zone or EU finance minister," Ischinger said.

"This could be the subject of a German-French initiative that incorporates the idea of an emergency rescue fund for struggling euro zone member states," he said.

Ischinger also urged France and Germany to press ahead with closer military cooperation, saying Germany and France could agree to joint defence procurement from a certain date in the future. This would save billions of euros annually, he said.

"It can't happen immediately, it is difficult, it might be painful because of the different industrial interests. But it has to happen," he said. (Reporting by Noah Barkin and Andreas Rinke; editing by Mark Heinrich)
By Isabel Coles

MOSUL, Iraq, May 15 (Reuters) - U.S.-backed Iraqi forces pressed an advance on neighbourhoods under Islamic State control in Mosul on Monday as they seek to dislodge fighters entrenched in a central mosque before the holy month of Ramadan.

Seven months into the campaign to recapture Mosul, militants are besieged in its northwestern corner, home to the historic Old City centre and the medieval Grand al-Nuri Mosque, where their black flag has been flying since June 2014.

"If we advance this quickly we can finish it in days," First Lieutenant Nawfal al-Dhari told Reuters at a house turned into a temporary base in the western Islah al-Ziraie district, retaken by Iraqi forces three days ago.

"These are the dying breaths. They are completely surrounded." He said the momentum was with Iraq's elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) despite continued resistance from Islamic State fighters in the group's last bastion in Iraq.

"If you trap a cat in a room, it will scratch," he said.

Military commanders and intelligence officials say they aim to take control of the mosque before Ramadan starts at the end of this month even if there are still pockets under militant control.

'STUNNED'

"Our advance on a vast front has stunned the enemy and, God willing, we will achieve victory before Ramadan and announce the liberation of Mosul and people of Mosul from dirtiness of Daesh (Islamic State)," Lieutenant General Othman al-Ghanmi, chief of staff, said in a video distributed by the Defence Ministry.

He was speaking on a visit to the frontlines in western Mosul. Ramadan is expected to start on May 27.

The mosque, where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a "caliphate" spanning swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, has symbolic and strategic value for Islamic State, officials say.

They hope its capture will deal a painful blow to fighter morale and bring an end to resistance in the city.

"The more they are besieged the harder they fight. They have nowhere to go," soldier Faris Sallal said at another house in the Islah al-Ziraie district, where intermittent gunfire and the occasional boom of artillery echoed.

Flies swarmed over the charred remains of an Islamic State militant lying near a motorbike on a street in the district. Parked in the garage of another house on the same street was an armor-plated car which had been rigged with a suicide bomb.

In the nearby Ureibi district, which is partially controlled by Iraqi forces, a Reuters reporter saw the bloodied corpse of an Islamic State sniper in a children's room on the upper floor of a house. Iraqi forces, now using the house as an outpost, said the sniper had been targeting advancing Iraqi troops.

The militants, outnumbered by Iraqi forces, have retaliated with suicide car bombs and snipers embedded among hundreds of thousands of civilians. Many local people have been killed under heavy bombardment and vital supplies are scarce, with some civilians being forced to eat weeds in order to survive.

The Iraqi government said last week the number of people fleeing Mosul had more than doubled to about 10,000 a day. (Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
MADRID, May 15 (Reuters) - Spanish police seized more than two tons of cocaine from a ship with a Venezuelan flag in the Atlantic Ocean and arrested the seven crew members, Spain's interior ministry said on Monday.

The operation, carried out alongside the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the UK's National Crime Agency and Portuguese police, took place earlier this month, on May 4.

The seven people on board were Venezuelan nationals, the ministry said, adding that a gun had also been seized alongside 2400 kg of cocaine. The vessel, a small, rusted fishing boat according to images distributed by police, has since been towed to Spain's Canary Islands.

Separately, a shipment of 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for Spain was intercepted off the coast of Ecuador, and 24 people were arrested in that operation, the interior ministry also said on Monday.

The shipment was being organized by a drugs ring based in Galicia, in northern Spain, and two people were arrested in Madrid and another two in Vigo by Spanish police.

The other 20, including one Spaniard, were arrested on board the cargo ship by Ecuadorian police, who intercepted it before its planned passage through the Panama Canal on its way to Spain, the interior ministry said. (Reporting by Sarah White, editing by Larry King)
ANKARA/BERLIN, May 15 (Reuters) - Germany could move troops now based in Turkey to another country if Ankara persists in denying German lawmakers permission to visit them, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday, highlighting renewed strains between the NATO allies.

Some 250 German troops are stationed at Incirlik air force base, contributing to NATO's mission targeting Islamist State militants in neighbouring Syria. Turkish foreign ministry sources told Reuters a visit by German parliamentarians would not be appropriate at this time, without elaborating.

Turkey similarly refused access to German parliamentarians late last year, though that visit eventually went ahead.

"We will continue to talk with Turkey, but in parallel we will have to explore other ways of fulfilling our mandate," Merkel told reporters on Monday.

"That means looking at alternatives to Incirlik, and one alternative among others is Jordan," she said.

A German military survey team will visit Jordan in coming days to look at potential bases there, government sources said. Jordan is the preferred site, although facilities in Cyprus and Kuwait are also possible, they said.

For historic reasons and to prevent abuse of power, the Bundeswehr army is controlled by the German parliament, not the government, meaning that lawmakers have the right to inspect its activities, including outside the country.

"COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE"

A spokesman for the German foreign minister said it was "completely unacceptable" for Turkey to keep members of the parliamentary defence committee from visiting their own soldiers.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel will raise the issue with colleagues from other NATO governments in Washington on Tuesday, the spokesman added.

German and NATO military officials still hope to avert a wider rift with Turkey given the importance of NATO facilities there, including a powerful radar that supports the Aegis Ashore missile defence site in Romania.

Moving the German troops from Incirlik could also result in a two-month interruption in the surveillance flights they are now conducting from the Turkish base, a government source said.

The German militry has long planned to invest over 60 million euros to expand housing and equipment at Incirlik, but Turkey has not yet approved the plans.

Relations between Ankara and Berlin deteriorated sharply in the run-up to an April 16 referendum in Turkey on expanding President Tayyip Erdogan's powers.

Citing public safety concerns, Germany banned Turkish politicians from addressing rallies of expatriate Turks, prompting Erdogan to accuse Berlin of "Nazi-like" tactics. A narrow majority of Turks in the referendum backed changing the constitution to grant Erdogan sweeping executive powers.

Germany and other Western allies have voiced concern about what they fear is a drift towards authoritarian rule in Turkey.

Last year Turkey banned German lawmakers from visiting the base for months in response to a resolution in the German parliament declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide, a term Ankara rejects. (Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara; Thomas Escritt and Andrea Shalal in Berlin; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Gareth Jones)
By Anastasia Moloney

BOGOTA, May 15 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Nearly two hundred people have fled their homes in the last month from one neighbourhood alone in Honduras' second city of San Pedro Sula in fear for their lives as gang violence intensifies, the Norwegian Refugee Council said on Monday.

With one of the world's highest murder rates, Honduras is struggling to contain drug-fuelled gang violence and organised crime.

The refugee rights group said turf wars between two powerful gangs - Barrio 18 and its rival Mara Salvatrucha - in the Los Bordos neighbourhood, a slum area on the outskirts of the industrial city of San Pedro Sula, has worsened in recent weeks.

In the past month, around 54 families - nearly 200 people - including the elderly, single mothers and children, have been forced to leave their homes in Los Bordos to escape gang warfare, NRC told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"Our reading of the situation is that one mara (gang) are taking over the area from the other group," said Christian Visnes, the NRC's Latin America director.

"This has symptoms of an armed conflict," he said, adding that residents reported a 30-minute shootout between rival gangs on May 7.

The city has one of the world's highest murder rates outside a war zone. Gang members force children to join their ranks, often to be watchmen, messengers, and drugs and arms couriers.

"In the neighbourhood, a local leader was killed because his daughter resisted becoming part of this mara and that was one of the reasons for the first displacement," Visnes told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

If clashes between gangs continue, a further thousand families living in Los Bordos could be forced to leave their homes, Visnes said.

One resident, 21-year-old Alfonso Garcia, who grew up in the neighbourhood said he fled the area last week after being caught in the middle of fighting between gangs.

"They are fighting over territory. One group wants to take over and govern," said Garcia, who declined to give his real name for security reasons.

"We can't live there. We're afraid. It's too dangerous. There are shootouts night and day. People can't resist anymore."

The Honduran government has said gang violence, along with poverty and a lack of jobs, are reasons why Hondurans are leaving their homes to seek refuge in other parts of the Central American nation and abroad, mainly in the United States.

In an attempt to curb the killings, extortion, and drug deals imprisoned gang members often coordinate from behind bars, Honduras has been transferring inmates to higher-security prisons.

Over the weekend, some 22 gang members escaped from a prison ahead of a transfer to a higher-security facility, defying the military guards tasked with bringing order to the prison system.

"The government recognises the problem, which is a step forward, but the response is next to nothing," Visnes said.

According to the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, gang violence in Honduras, along with El Salvador and Guatemala, is driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes every year - a situation it has described as a "refugee crisis."

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney @anastasiabogota, Editing by Ros Russell.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)
Chinas foreign ministry opposed North Koreas ballistic missile test and called on all sides to avoid escalating tensions ahead of an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting.



We will take a constructive and responsible part in the relevant discussion, China foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters in Beijing on Monday. Every party should exercise restraint and jointly safeguard the regional peace and stability.



Earlier in the day, Japan urged China to take action against North Korea after the missile test, the first provocation from Kim Jong Uns regime since U.S. President Donald Trump took office. The emergency UN meeting will take place Monday night in New York, Japans Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters in Tokyo.



Prior to taking office, Trump vowed to stop North Korea from acquiring the capability to strike the U.S. with a ballistic missile carrying a nuclear weapon.



In a joint briefing with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Florida after the latest test, Trump said the U.S. stands by Japan 100 percent. North Koreas ability to put a miniaturized nuclear weapon on a missile has risen after the test on Sunday, Japans Suga said.



-BEIJING (Bloomberg), February 13, 2017,
The official website of the Galle District Secretariat (http://www.galle.dist.gov.lk/) is reported to have been hacked by an alleged group identifying itself as the Pakistani Cyber Team Experts.

The attackers had however entered the official website and posted a message hailing their success saying Pakistan Zindabad, Islam Zindabad, Muslims Zindabad ,Pakistan Army Zindabad, Pakistan ISI Zindabad and #Free Kashmir #Free Syria #Free Palestine.

When contacting the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) Chief Information Security Engineer Roshan Chandragupta said, this website attack was not reported to them and however this was not related to the ransomware virus threat which is widespread across at least 99 countries in the world.

This type of incidents could happen when people try to do experimental things on website hacking using various hackings tools. They try it while seeking the weak Security Vulnerabilities of the websites, he said.

The website is now being restored, according to sources. (Chaturanga Pradeep)
Higher Education and Highways Minister Lakshman Kiriella said the government had requested the South Asia Institute of Technology and Medicine (SAITM) to stop the admissions of fresh batches of students until the policy decisions regarding it and private medical education were implemented

He said the request was made by the Ministry through the University Grants Commission (UGC).We hope SAITM will respond to positively to this, he said.

The government has decided to list SAITM and any other private organization involved in medical education on Colombo Stock Exchange. Additionally, it has been decided to appoint an administration board to maintain standards in medical education. The government had also taken a decision to take over the Neville Fernando Hospital, and to increase scholarship slots at these institutions.

He said the government should speed up work with regards to the takeover of this hospital. He said this should take place within the next couple of months.
People comfort each other after funeral prayers of a victim of Fridays suicide attack in southwest Baluchistan in Pakistan, Saturday, (Washington Post/Anjum Naveed/Associated Press)

QUETTA AFP May13, 2017 - Gunmen on motorbikes opened fire on construction workers, killing 10 in Pakistans restive southwestern province of Balochistan, officials said Saturday.



Mineral-rich Balochistan has been plagued for decades by a separatist insurgency and sectarian killings and gunmen have previously targeted labourers seen as outsiders in the region.
Home Lands Group, being the leading skyline changer in Colombo sky, joined hands with the Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development, and UN Committee in lighting up the Diyatha area and Diyawannawa Vesak zone, in this Vesak season.

This year, celebrating Vesak Festival, Diyawanna Vesak zone has turned into the 14th United Nations International Vesak commemoration zone. The theme of this year event is Buddhist teachings for social justice and sustainable world peace.

Vesak Poya day commemorates the birth, the enlightenment and the demise of the Lord Buddha. In remembrance of this important day, people re-embrace and pay tribute to the lord Buddha who taught the world of humanity, compassion, kindness, wisdom, peace and so many other virtues, not only through teaching but also being an extraordinary human being.

Revealing the world the truth of his teaching, the celebration of Vesak Poya Day, not only gathers Buddhists around the world, but also anyone who would like to experience this religious and cultural Festival.

It was in 1950, at the World Buddhist Forum, a proposal was made by G.P. Malalasekera to recognize the Vesak Poya as a holiday. In 1999, former Foreign Minister late Lakshman Kadirgamar again made a request and as a result the UN General Assembly in 1999 declared an International Day of Observance for Vesak.

Since then, every year, Buddhist countries are given the opportunity to host the celebrations of United Nations Day of Vesak and this is the first time Sri Lanka has been given the opportunity to host this festival. Including Sri Lanka, 10 other Asian countries were showcasing the influence of Buddhism in their social and cultural frameworks.

The event was celebrated this year with the participation of Buddhists and Buddhists leaders from around the world. The three day celebration was started on May 12.

The UN Vesak zone was held around Diyatha Uyana, the area surrounding the Parliamentary Complex, Japan-Sri Lanka Friendship Road and Diyawanna oya. Giving a modern touch to the traditional Vesak decorations, Diyawanna oya and its surrounded area was a city of lights, with thousands of Vesak decorations illustrating the beauty of cultural richness of the country.

It has been an honor for Home Lands, for partnering with the celebration of United Nation Vesak Day, by being a humble contributor to exhibits the official Logo of the UN day of Vesak at Parliament Junction and by placing 400 lotus shaped lanterns along the Parliament road Junction and Diyatha Uyana to light up the environment creating illuminated displays. It has also been a privileged to the company, to add a cultural value to the neighborhood city of which the foundation of the Home Lands was initially built on.

The company with its heartfelt willingness, decided to collaborate withthe Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development, Sri Lanka Land Reclamation & Development Corporation (SLLR&DC) and UN Committee to stand beside the entire nation to unveil the generations of Sri Lankan art and crafts blend with Vesak decorations in front of the whole world. As the real estate giant in the industry it has been a great platform in which the company could work together for a common purpose with the Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development, the main body of re-defining the landscape of the country.

Being a partner of the event, Home Lands Group heartily wishes for the whole nation and beyond, a compassionate world where everyone could live with peace and harmony.
In Beijing on Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted a global summit on his Belt and Road Initiative under the aegis of the National Development Reform Commissions (NDRC) China Centre for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE), NDRCs top think tank. This is part of a massive exercise in international diplomatic communication.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is Chinas boldest attempt yet to spell out the way it might engage with the world, seeking more certainty in its relations with neighbours across Asia and countries around the world.

The genesis of the idea is important. It derives from Chinas ancient links with its trans-Asian neighbours. They are the countries on which the impact of Chinas rise will be most immediately and keenly felt.

The BRI is a major Chinese strategy for achieving sustainable development through strengthening connectivity with partner countries and realising mutually beneficial economic relations. As David Vines says, though there are risks in its delivery, the BRI presents a huge opportunity. It offers a framework for deepening international economic cooperation through a platform of open regionalism that promotes economic integration through deepening five types of links, namely: policy, infrastructure, trade and investment, financial and people-to-people exchanges.

Of these five types of links, a priority is put on infrastructure connectivity. This type of connectivity is about the building and financing of roads, rail, gas pipelines, oil pipelines, electricity and telecommunications connectivity between the participating countries.

It also includes building of major economic corridors and ports that facilitate the flows of goods, capital, technology, people and information. Infrastructure connectivity is an important part of economic development, the deepening of which should significantly ease bottlenecks on growth and help deepen trade, investment and financial integration.

The BRI has two defining characteristics: it is a framework for spelling out the connectedness between Chinas domestic development and external challenges and it is a framework for inviting partners around the world to join with China in defining the arrangements through which mutual benefits in the relationships with China can best be realised.

What are the principles and platforms that the BRI promotes for the building of these different types of connectivity?

Importantly the BRI adopts the principles of open regionalism that welcome the participation of countries around the world. Partners can take part in the cooperation at any level and in whatever the area best suits their needs and priorities, domestic conditions and readiness for international cooperation. Through an open and inclusive platform, free trade and investment and financial integration can be promoted, consult, jointly build and share principles can be put into practice, mutual learning and mutual benefit can be pursued and joint development can be realised.

Upholding free trade principles and deepening economic integration are what the world now needs in the context of slow global growth and a rising tide of anti-globalisation, given its latest kick-along by Trumps elevation to the White House in Washington.

The world can welcome commitment to these principles. It can recognise the upholding of these principles through the BRI as the demonstration of Chinese support for, and contribution to, the international public goods and economic leadership that the region and the world needs for achieving more sustainable growth and development. Based on close consultation and cooperation, the initiative can be seen as an important opportunity for diversifying and strengthening Chinas bilateral, regional and global cooperation in a multitude of institutional arrangements that promote both economic and political security.

There are two main risks. The first relates to Chinas own policy in developing the BRI. Although China has described the initiative as inclusive and designed to create mutual benefit, this will not be easy and will require a huge effort in international cooperation. The second interdependent risk relates to the policies that other countries adopt towards China and the extent to which the principles of engagement take multilateral interests into account.

BRIs economic rationale

In this weeks lead, James Laurenceson observes that Australias reluctance to participate in Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) harks back to its slow entry into the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).  The economic case for supporting the AIIB proposal was always overwhelming. But under pressure from the United States, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott initially rejected Chinas invitation. In explaining his stance, the former prime minister echoed US claims that the AIIB wasnt a truly multilateral institution and that its governance standards would be lacking.

The logical approach was of course not to stay out but to join, guaranteeing a more multilateral approach. When the United Kingdom and other European countries signed on, Australia did too.

Like the AIIB, the BRI also has a clear economic rationale, driven as it is by Chinas economic leadership team. But it is also of considerable and positive strategic importance, committing China to cooperative endeavours at a time when the old industrial world is in retreat on global engagement. These are essential ingredients to success.

China is in the process of defining an external economic engagement strategy for exporting its goods, capital, know-how, standards and influence. It has opened the door for other countries to help define how that might be shaped and ultimately received. In a world without the Belt and Road strategy the world (and China) would be much less clear on how Chinas engagement with other countries will play out as its economic interests, influence and weight all grow.

The idea that the BRI is prescriptive in nature misunderstands totally what it offers. In fact, as the summit in Beijing again makes clear, it sets out an opportunity and poses a question about what other countries want from China and how they would like to engage with it. It provides a slate on which to draw out how the relationship with China needs to be shaped.

Theres no doubt that there is much at stake in the BRI for China, beyond the narrow benefits of international economic integration substantial though they may be. In constructing this network of cooperation with its partners, the perception of China as part of the positive development strategies for neighbouring countries is enhanced. Apart from stimulating domestic growth and international progress that will eventually attract powerful diplomatic and political capital.

Even the most negative will be encouraged to concede that China cannot be so easily cast as a belligerent, assertive and self-interested actor. Its useful both to China in seeking a more understanding hearing in the world and its useful to Chinas partners, who have so far lacked a proper framework for their relations with China, to have more optimal engagement in this

multilateral setting.

A USChina joint statement released a day before the summit has said that the United States recognizes the importance of Chinas One Belt and One Road Initiative and in a promising sign the US government sent a delegation to the summit. The United States might seek to capitalise on Chinas initiative in the context of the progress being made on bilateral trade issues, which could be a game changer for broader membership of the BRI, USChina cooperation and elevating while putting disciplines

on the BRI.

The success or failure of the BRI, not only for Chinas economic diplomacy but also for outcomes in the global economic regime, will depend on whether countries like Australia and the European powers make the choice to sign on in the spirit of multilateral engagement as they have with AIIB. The alternative is a world of transactional bilateral deals that threaten to corrode the openness of the global economic regime, already at serious risk.

(Courtesy East Asia Forum)

(The EAF Editorial Group is comprised of Peter Drysdale, Shiro Armstrong, Ben Ascione, Amy King and Jillian Mowbray-Tsutsumi and is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific)
The Government yesterday Gazetted the new income tax structure, introduced in the budget 2017, while introducing an investor incentive scheme, which provides new concessions to investors.

Minister of Finance Ravi Karunanayake said the new tax structure would come into effect, when the Gazette notification was approved by Parliament.

The corporate tax system will be simplified to 3 tier rate structures under which Small and Medium Enterprises, export of goods and service, local IT industry, manufacturing furniture, education, tourism, fisheries, renewable energy, freight forwarding, EPF, ETF, Pension Funds and Charitable institutions, will be subjected to a concessionary rate of 14 percent.

Banking, finance, insurance, manufacturers and traders will be subjected to standard Corporate Tax rate of 28 percent and liquor, tobacco, betting/gambling will be subjected to a higher Corporate Tax rate of 40 percent.

According to the Gazette Notice several areas of businesses such as hub activities (Entire Port, international logistics) export of IT, export of gem and jewellery, solid-waste management, agriculture, poultry, dairy and middle-income housing will be exempted from the Corporate Tax.

As per the Gazette a person will not be levied income tax if his or her annual earnings were up to Rs. 1.2 million per year and will not be liable to Pay As You Earn (PAYE) if the monthly salary was less than Rs. 100,000.

However, it was announced by the Minister that the Government had come up with an investor incentive scheme, which was formulated with an enhanced depreciation allowance for a person who incurs expenses in respect of depreciation of assets other than intangible assets.

Accordingly investments in the Northern Province less than US $ 3 million will be entitled to a depreciation allowance of 200 percent, while investments made in other areas will be subjected to a depreciation allowance of 100 percent.

However, the investments will have to be carried out within three years in order to qualify for the scheme.(Yohan Perera)

Investments between US $ 3 to 5 million and provides employment to not less than 250 persons will be entitled to 200 percent depreciation allowance, while the investments between $ 3 to 5 million in other provinces will be subjected to 100 percent depreciation allowance provided they generate 250 employment opportunities

For investments between $ 50 to 100 million there will be a deprecation allowance of 100 percent while unrelieved losses can be claimed in 10 years, while for investments between $ 100 million to 2 billion will be subjected a depreciation allowance of 150 percent while the unrelieved losses can be claimed in 10 years.

Investments over $ 2 billion will be subjected to a depreciation allowance of 150 percent while unrelieved losses could be claimed in 25 years.

Depreciation allowance of 100 percent has been given to investments more than $ 2 billion on ports developments, while unrelieved losses can be claimed in 25 years these kinds of investments will exempted from Corporate Tax up to the period, which the investment allowance is fully absorbed. The Corporate Tax would be 7 percent for the ensuing 15 years.

Video by Buddhi

Pics by Nisal Baduge
TEHRAN AFP May13, 2017 - -A leading figure of Irans minority Sunnis endorsed moderate President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday ahead of this weeks election, despite the governments shortcomings.



Sunnis make up around five to 10 percent of Irans 80 million population, which is overwhelmingly from the Shiite sect of Islam.



Religious leader Molavi Abdol Hamid said the atmosphere for Sunnis has been a little more relaxed since Rouhani took power in 2013, and that most would support him in Fridays election.
The Kalutara Prison Commissioner has been transferred with immediate effect by the Prison Reforms, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Minister D.M. Swaminathan in connection with the Kalutara prison bus shooting.

The Minister had instructed ministry secretary to conduct an independent inquiry regarding the incident.

Ministry sources said according to the investigation carried out by the Three Member Committee, it had been revealed that Samayan had not been hand cuffed while he was being taken to Courts.

It was also found Samayan was wearing jewellery including rings and chains. The prison bus usually takes 5 to 10 minutes to reach the destination of Ethanapitiya. However, on the day of the shooting, it had taken about an hour for the bus to pass this stretch, sources said.

A mobile phone had also been recovered in the Kalutara Prison kitchen. The decision to transfer the Commissioner was taken after taking into consideration all these facts, sources said.

The Minister earlier stated, if the prison officers were found guilty to these incidents, they will be punished without considering their status.

Seven people including notorious underworld figure Aruna Damith Udayanga Pathirana alias Samayan and two prison guards were killed, when gunmen opened fire at the Black Maria when they were being transported from the Malwatte Prison in Kalutara on February 27. (Darshana Sanjeewa)
A top Ministry mandarin, on being requested to approve the release of funds to replace two damaged tyres of the Ministers official vehicle has asked his subordinates to claim the cost from the insurance company concerned.



The two tyres got badly damaged when the Ministers official car bound for Hambantota was speeding on the Southern highway and the driver had skillfully averted a possible accident that could have caused fatalities and readed the vehicle a complrete wreck.



When a responsible officer submitted the file on the subject to the high-up seeking his approval to purchase two new tyres, the latter sent back the file with a minute instructing that an insurance claim be made to replace the damaged tyres.



Ministry employees have expressed surprise that this high-up despite his 25-year experience as a CAS officer is unaware that insurance cover is not available for vehicle tyres.
REUTERS, 14th MAY, 2017- North Korea, defying calls to rein in its weapons programme, fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday, days after a new leader in South Korea came to power pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.



The U.S. militarys Pacific Command said it was assessing the type of missile that was fired but it was not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile. The U.S. threat assessment has not changed from a national security standpoint, a U.S. official said.



Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada said the missile could be a new type. It flew for 30 minutes before dropping into the sea between North Koreas east coast and Japan. North Korea has consistently test-fired missiles in that direction.
Secretary to the Public Representation Committee on Constitutional Reforms, Winston Pathiraja, in an interview with the Daily Mirror, says a new Constitution is the need of the hour. He feels power should be shared between the centre and the periphery. Excerpts of the interview:

As the Secretary to the Public Representation Committee that deliberated with the general public on Constitution-making, how do you see the importance of peoples views?

As the coordinator of the outreach programme of constitutional reforms and constitution-making, I must start by saying as to why a new Constitution is required to be drafted at this juncture. There are so many concerns to be addressed when a Constitution is being drafted. We have had three Constitutions in the country; in 1947, 1972 and 1978. The Soulbury Constitution was introduced by the British. For its legitimacy, it was under the British Parliament. The 1972 Constitution was drafted by a constitutional assembly under an SLFP government. Its legitimacy depended on its own people, completely disassociating with the British Parliament. The 1978 Constitution was drafted and adopted through a parliamentary select committee under a UNP government. The main feature of these three constitutions is that the people were never consulted. Therefore, they cannot be called peoples constitutions. Also, the participation of Tamil people was hardly witnessed.

While there are other vital factors that warrant a new constitution, the bitter experience endured by people since Independence is one. There were two insurgencies and an armed struggle for 30 consecutive years. They caused the destruction of properties, loss of innocent lives and grave damage. There were detrimental effects arising from the powerful executive presidency. There are shortcomings in the electoral system based on preferential voting. It triggered corruption and misappropriation of public funds.

There emerged the urgent need for greater empowerment of people at grassroots level through power-sharing. Power-sharing is the most important thing people want. That is more so, for people in the North and the East. Power has not been devolved substantially to them. A new constitution is needed because of these. We tell people about it. It is the need of the hour.



In working out this report, you interacted only with 2000-2500 people. Sri Lanka has a population of 20 million. How scientific is the sampling process to get a clear view?

In the past, people have never been consulted in making constitutions. At least, in making the Soulbury Constitution, people were given a questionnaire and guided to answer. In the current process, the Public Representation Committee was appointed. The intellectuals were appointed to tour the country and study the views and aspirations of the people. We were asked to see how their views could be incorporated in the new constitution. We prepared a document outlining our approach. We spent two days in each district. We wanted the people to visit us. We requested the District Secretaries to instruct Grama Niladharis to give wide publicity for this endeavour.

In Colombo, we stayed eight days because the demand was high. Then, 2000 involved were not mere single individuals. There were groups. For example, Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya (JSS), a trade union, showed up. There were five people representing the whole movement. There were various civil society organisations, trade unions and religious dignitaries. When you take all that into account, the sample is not that bad. It means this sample consisted of 10,000-15,000 people. The participation of people, at each Divisional Secretariat, was very high. We also got submissions in writing and via emails.



I mean to say that the common man did not come forward as such. It was mere NGOs with interests in the subject that showed up. What have you got to say about it?

There is a point in what you say. The NGOs might have closely observed the advertisements we made in all three languages. They might have had ulterior motives. However, we did not stop at that. We covered all 25 districts in the country. There, we never allowed organisations to come.

"There emerged the urgent need for greater empowerment of people at grassroots level through power-sharing. Power-sharing is the most important thing people want. That is more so, for people in the North and the East"



According to your interactions with people in this process, what sort of a Constitution do you think the ordinary man prefers?

Not a single individual, right down from Point Pedro to Hambantota, sought the division of the country. Separation was not an issue. What they sought was power devolution. They wanted to play a part in governance and development efforts. The provincial council system that runs the country is not functioning properly. In fact, provincial councils were needed for the North and the East. Invariably, the North and the East were not functioning properly. The government keeps a string on the provincial councils by having appointed the governors with executive powers. In the North, the governor, at that time, appointed the provincial secretary, whereas the Chief Minister was not in a position to even appoint his secretary.



When you say power devolution, it looks more like a demand coming from people in the North and the East. What is your view?

Power devolution is anathema to the South. When you say Federal, it is not to their liking. However, the people of Jaffna favour power devolution. Although Federalism is not a novel concept, people do not fathom what it really means. It is terminology. We talk about power-sharing now. Power should be shared between the centre and the periphery. We suggest that power should be shared within the centre itself, by creating a second chamber and senate. The Parliament can pass legislation, but the second chamber can resist it. They can defer it. Then, it has to be referred back to Parliament. Parliament should provide valid reasons as to why it is passed.

The actual reason is that people in the North and East have not felt that there is a government looking into them.



Actually, the same structure of governance has been in the South. Why should there be a special situation in the North and the East?

The issue is people here consider power-sharing as Federalism. Fearing that this might lead to separatism, they insist on unitary status. However, TNA leader R. Sampanthan, even recently, said maximum power-sharing should prevail under an undivided country. Today, it has come to a diluted situation. Had the Banda-Chelvanayagam Pact been implemented at that time, this problem would not have cropped up. Some leaders, in order to gain political mileage, expressed many things such as making Sinhala language official within 48 hours. Those things were wrong. Now, the politicians have to realise that such ideas are not acceptable. That is why the President was overwhelmingly supported by the Tamils and Muslims.



In this report, there are recommendations to make Sri Lanka a secular state, to do away the foremost status accorded to Buddhism and for the recognition of rights of people with different sexual orientations. How big were demands in proportion to the number of people who participated in the deliberations of the committee?

This is another important point. I am happy that you asked it. The committee has 20 members, and 19 of them are working. On crucial issues like religion, they all had contrasting views. We call those options. Options are given. The report contains public representation in this regard. Even the names and other details are given.

"Power devolution is anathema to the South. When you say Federal, it is not to their liking. However, the people of Jaffna favour power devolution. Although Federalism is not a novel concept, people do not fathom what it really means"



As a percentage of the number of persons whom you interacted with, what is the proportion advocating such demands?

There are no such things. Some people make representation to say it should be a secular state. They aver all sorts of things. For the last 39 or 40 years, the current constitution carried the provision that Buddhism should be accorded the foremost place and the state must protect the Buddha Sasana.

For the past four decades, Article 9 of the current Constitution has assured the foremost place to Buddhism and the State to protect and foster the Buddha Sasana whilst Article 10 and 14 (1) (e) declare equality to all religions and the significance of assuring non-discrimination, honour and dignity. No one spoke about this as an issue for the last 40 years though it has already been enshrined in the current Constitution. My personal view is that if one reads Article 9 along with Article 10 and Article 14 (1) (e), then there cannot be any issue or controversy. Of course the PRC Report has given a number of options on the basis of views expressed by its members on the representations made by the general public and it does not mean that the PRC has recommended anything controversial.

As the President said, we should not touch the areas where issues have not been raised.



How valid is the power-sharing concept in Sri Lanka under Federalism?

Actually, Federalism is meant to unite all groups by giving equal powers. People should feel that power is actually shared. There is a demand from the North and East that power should be devolved to the grassroots level.

According to the PRC Report, the views of the general public are that power is not shared properly and sufficiently in the provinces/periphery by the Centre. Hence, the Provincial Councils, Pradeshiya Sabhas and other local bodies were introduced. People still want power-sharing at the rural level. They prefer the Grama Rajya concept through which they feel power could be shared at the grassroots, thereby participating in government development activities and the governing process.

It is proposed that power-sharing should be practiced between Centre and the periphery and also at the Centre itself by way of establishing the Second Chamber of Parliament, members of which will be provincial representatives (Chief Ministers). In order to make the Provincial Councils more effective, PRC has proposed even diminishing of the powers of the Governors of the Provinces.



How optimistic are you about the ongoing constitution-making process in the context of the political parties having contrasting views?

In the political history of Sri Lanka, this is the first time where two parties engaged in hostile politics joined hands. The two major parties have formed a government. The TNA is also for an undivided country. Yet, devolution is advocated. He says the proposed constitution should be referred to the approval of people by referendum. Everybody wants a referendum.



Do you also advocate it?

Yes, it should be a referendum. If you take the process of constitution-making, it is transparent. The Prime Minister moved the framework resolution. It was adopted unanimously. It is to draft a new constitution. All the MPs supported it. It says Parliament should be converted to a constitutional assembly. The draft is not yet ready.

The Public Representation Committee was appointed by the Cabinet to go before the people.

"People still want power-sharing at the rural level. They prefer the Grama Rajya concept through which they feel power could be shared at the grassroots, thereby participating in government development activities and the governing process"
The Government Medical Officers Association (GMOA) has requested President Maithripala Sirisena to inform the Attorney General or the High Court, the government's stance on the South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine (SAITM).

GMOA Secretary Naveen De Zoysa told a news briefing that the government had changed its stance on the SAITM from time to time.

The governments stance keep changing. Nothing has been finalised yet and we cannot depend on the government's statements, he said.

Dr. De Zoysa said Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne had informed the Appeal Court that SAITM students received a quality education, but the government issued a statement on April 7 admitting that these students should receive better clinical training.

He warned the government that its final decision on the SAITM issue should be revealed by May 29.

The subject minister should brief the court about the governments final decision on SAITM by May 29 and only then we can accept it as the governments stance on this matter, he said. (Thilanka Kanakarathna)

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State leader of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi has called for Sri Lankas support to strengthen her country's Parliament and ensure democracy there.

Suu Kyi made this request when she met Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in China yesterday.

The Sri Lankan Premier had assured her of Sri Lanka's support and had invited the state leader to visit Sri Lanka soon.

Ms Suu Kyi had expressed a desire to visit the city of Kandy. The talks between the two leaders had focused mostly on enhancing diplomatic ties between the two countries.
A man and a woman of Sri Lankan nationality were arrested from a brothel in Khaitan area.

According to security sources, when Farwaniya securitymen received a tipoff about a Sri Lankan expatriate who turned his apartment into a brothel, they monitored his movements.

After confirming the information, they raided the apartment and arrested him and a woman with him.

During interrogations, the suspect confessed that he brings clients to his apartment and offers them with sex services at a cost of KD 5 per person. He also revealed that he has been involved in this business for three months. The two suspects were referred to the concerned authorities for necessary measures. (arabtimesonline)
China is hosting a massive two-day international event between May 14 and 15 in Beijing to formally launch its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative, which plans to connect Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe. More than 65 countries are participating in the summit and nearly half of them are represented by their heads of state and government.

World powers such as the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia and even Japan too are in Beijing. Apart from Bhutan, which does not have any diplomatic ties with China, all other South Asian countries are taking part.

However, the Narendra Modi-led Indian government has decided to give it a miss in spite of China's repeated overtures. Nothing can explain this self-inflicted isolation of India except PM Modi's foreign policy or the lack of it.

But does the Modi government have any foreign policy?

Even if there is one, no one knows what that stands for, and who is responsible for it, especially when the foreign minister's job is restricted to only Twitter diplomacy.

Surprisingly, it's the national security advisor and a particular BJP general secretary who seem to be dictating India's foreign policy. Both of them, however, neither have the institutional mandate nor the competence to do it.

China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

Modi admirers miss no opportunity to highlight how the PM has undertaken nearly 50 foreign trips in the past three years and has developed "strong personal bonds" with several world leaders. Indian missions abroad have also been working overtime to mostly organise "cultural" events on yoga and ayurveda.

The critical module describing India's "foreign policy success" has been mostly limited to Modi's "overbearing speech" to the "drooling diaspora" during his frequent foreign visits.

Contrary to all the tall claims, the OBOR international forum in Beijing has clearly exposed the fact that India's foreign policy in the past three years has gone into a tailspin. The China-Pakistan axis has isolated India in South Asia besides rendering it lonely in the world.

Not only Russian President Vladimir Putin is attending the OBOR international forum in Beijing, he will also speak at the opening ceremony. What's more, despite increasing bilateral tensions with China, Japan has sent a delegation to Beijing.

The Trump administration, though objected to North Korea's participation, finally decided to join as well since the US does not want to be left behind. It clearly shows the growing international clout of China, and exposes the lack of careful thought and foreign policy on part of India.

Not only globally, but also within the region, India has isolated itself from others with its foreign policy. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is not only attending the OBOR international forum, he has also taken a high-level official delegation with him including four provincial chief ministers.

Adding to the $46 billion investment for China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, China also seems to have promised Pakistan $50 billion investment for the Indus River Cascade.

It is not surprising considering the fact that Sino-Pakistan relation has been historically strong. However, other critical neighbours such as Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have also refused to side with India on the OBOR issue.

Once an Indian diplomat had told me that we occasionally push smaller countries in our neighborhood to take a position to see where we stand vis-a-vis China. In that case, India should not have any doubt over its power equation with China in the South Asian region. Even Bangladesh, which had sided strongly with India to boycott the SAARC Summit in November 2016 at Islamabad, has sent a high-level delegation to participate in the international forum in Beijing.

Bangladesh has not only received $24 billion investment from China, it has also imported 80 per cent of its arms from China in the past decade. In this context, it is foolhardy for Modi regime to force Bangladesh to side with it in opposing China's ambitious OBOR initiative.

PM Modi just returned from Sri Lanka after a high-profile two-day visit. While the Indian media has highlighted Sri Lanka's refusal to let a Chinese submarine dock in Colombo, it totally avoided mentioning that immediately after Modi's trip, the Sri Lankan prime minister flew to Beijing to take part in the OBOR meeting.

In spite of all sorts of pressure, India failed to keep even Nepal with it. On May 12, Nepal signed an MoU with China to be part of its plan to revive the ancient Silk Road trade routes. Nepal's deputy prime minister and finance minister have travelled to Beijing to take part in the OBOR forum, and it clearly exposes the fact that India has lost out to China to continue to keep Nepal under its sphere of influence.

On the OBOR issue, the open siding with China by Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka clearly shows the abject failure of India's whimsical foreign policy under Narendra Modi. It was absolutely unnecessary for India to boycott OBOR, while the rest of the world has joined it.

A sensible thing could have been to take part in it and work with Beijing to get an acceptable deal for it in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project.

Moreover, the Modi government's adamant opposition to the OBOR has forced India's friendly neighbors to take a position against it.

It was absolutely self-defeating for the Modi regime to force the usually considered pro-India regimes in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka to make this uncomfortable choice.

There was no reason to put them in such a situation where they will have no option, but to come out of strategic ambiguity and take a position on making individual choices.

Modi's foreign policy seems to be less worried about India's long-term and larger interest. Rather, it is obsessed with keeping its hardcore nationalist constituency happy. It is important for a government to stand firm on country's core interests and basic principles, but at the same time it is critical to be flexible and bend them to accommodate reality.

The oft-repeating claim about Modi's foreign policy success by his admirers is nothing but misleading. The "Modi fan club" coined the term "Modi Doctrine" to define the present Indian foreign policy and has even written a few books and articles to glorify it.

The Modi marketing machine has been repeatedly propagating that with Modi, India has moved to global high table taking a position on a par with China and has isolated Pakistan in the region. Nothing can be far from the truth than this.
A Mr Robot-like situation has gripped the world.

A ransomware  a type of malicious software designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid  dubbed WannaCry attacked hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.

This ransomware that spreads as a worm needs only one computer on a given network to be infected. Following that, it automatically spreads to all linked computers. Once the malware gets installed on a system, the user is locked out and the hacker (who sent the ransomware) demands money (in this case it varies between $300 and $600 in BitCoins) to unlock the system.

According to Microsoft, the cyber attack that has hit as many as 200,000 victims in over 150 countries should be treated by governments around the world as a "wake-up call.

Photo: Lifewire

The attack encrypted has the contents of thousands of computers and demanded a ransom for recovering the files. The first instance of this series of attacks was reported in England, where the National Healthcare System (NHS) was frozen by the program, causing disruption services to such a degree that several hospitals had to refuse patients.

According to a report in The Intercept, ShadowBrokers, an entity that had previously authentic malware used by the NSA to attack computers around the world, released this ransomware, capable of breaking into systems running Windows.

According to reports, the virus exploits a flaw in a version of Microsoft Windows. The attacks exploited the computers that were running outdated versions of Microsoft's Windows. The flaw was first identified by US intelligence. Reportedly, the National Security Agency (NSA) alerted Microsoft about the issue three months ago and Microsoft released an upgrade that patched the flaw, but many users were yet to run it.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's president said yesterday in a blog post, that the company, its customers and the government all share the blame.

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call," Smith wrote, adding that "cyber security has become a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers."

But is India safe?

A New York Times report shows a map, that illustrates the locations of the malware attack across the globe. While the map does not reflect the condition of every computer that was infected by the ransomware, it does provide a fair representation of the scope of the attack across the world, thanks to data collected by MalwareTech.

India's cyber security unit CERT-In says it has not received any formal report of #cyberattack on India's vital networks by #WannaCry.  Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) May 15, 2017

India, too, is represented on this map and, though there has not been any major news of the attack in our country as of yet. According to an NDTV report, however, over 100 systems of the Andhra Pradesh police have been affected by the ransomware.

Gulshan Rai, director general of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), said "We held an assessment meeting today and have found that 102 systems of Andhra Police have been infected with ransomware, particularly those using the Windows operating system."

While our experts are trying to debug the hacked systems, we will only know the real magnitude of the damage once offices re-open on Monday and systems are turned on," Rai added.

Photo: MalwareLess

According to another report, enterprises in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai have also been affected.

Following this, CERT-In, in a critical alert asked the central bank, stock exchanges, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and other vital institutions to safeguard their systems against the ransomware.

But even as the government continues to play this cool, it is no secret that India is vulnerable at this moment. According to a report in the Times of India, the outdated version of Windows XP, that the ransomware managed to exploit, is used by almost 70 per cent of Indian ATMs.

The report adds that Microsoft stopped providing support  security patches and other tools  for Windows XP in 2014. And it was only post the attacks on Saturday that Microsoft released updates for older systems.

These updates need to be taken seriously. Cyber Peace Foundation (CPF), a Ranchi-based NGO that runs a research project monitoring cyber attacks, saw a 56-fold increase in breach attempts at sensors installed across eight states in the country.

According to CERT-In, nearly 11,000 networks in India have been victims of probing-scanning, in the past 14 months. Scanning and probing is the first step used by hackers, where they monitor the systems. This is generally followed by insertion of malware or ransomware.

According to Burgess Cooper, partner at consultancy Ernst & Young, India, Because it happened on a Friday afternoon (UK time), by the time it spread in India, most Indian companies were closed for the weekend... Monday morning is a story to be watched and we expect more systems would have been infected.

Losses will not only be financial. The damage could be much more than financial in sectors such as manufacture, traditional health care and power generation which have not patched their systems to ensure security for long, he added.

Who all have been affected so far?

Around 1,000 computers at the Russian Interior Ministry have been affected by the cyber attack. The attack also affected Telefonica, and several other large companies in Spain, as well as parts of Britain's National Health Service, FedEx, Deutsche Bahn and LATAM Airlines.

Other targets in at least 99 countries were also reported to have been attacked around the same time. Almost 30,000 Chinese companies and institutions, including several major firms in Hong Kong, have been crippled by the global cyber attack.

How to save yourself from the attack?

The first thing that anyone should do is to make sure that their computers operating system is up-to-date. If you are currently a user of Windows XP, you need to upgrade it as soon as possible. You should also make sure that your anti-virus software is up-to-date and that scans your computer for any malicious programs, regularly. Large companies, that have computers connected in local area networks, should ensure all outgoing and incoming emails are scanned for malicious attachments.

Just in case, your computer does get affected, it is always advisable that you keep all your data backed up. Additionally, it has been advised that hacked computers should be reported to the authorities immediately, and users should not pay the ransom, as there is absolutely no guarantee that your system will be unlocked once you do pay up.
Aviation Cop Who Infamously Dragged Passenger Off United Flight Had Just Returned From Suspension: Report

By Rachel Cromidas in News on May 15, 2017 9:37PM



The Chicago Department of Aviation cop who dragged a passenger off a United Airlines flight last month, sparking national outrage, had apparently just finished serving a five-day suspension before the incident, according to the Sun-Times.

The officer, James Long, dragged Dr. David Dao from his United Airlines seat at O'Hare International Airport after Dao, a ticket-holder refused to get off the overbooked flight, shortly after airline officials attempted to incentivize a passenger to give up their seat for extra must-fly crew members. In the process, caught on video by several passengers that later went viral on the Internet, Long can be seen grabbing Dao before Dao hits his head on an armrest, bloodying his face.

Long was just back from a suspension for violating department rules, the Sun-Times learned through a Freedom of Information Act request. Long reportedly violated department rules on Jan. 29 for "failing to take action as needed to complete an assignment or perform a task safely," "inattention to duty," "incompetence or inefficiency," "violating any departmental regulations, rules or procedures," and "conduct unbecoming an officer or public employee." He returned from suspension March 31, and the incident with Dao took place on April 9.

Long was among four officers put on paid leave after the dragging incident while city officials investigate it. Dao, who suffered a concussion, a broken nose and other injuries, recently settled with United Airlines.
BT Group plc provides communications services worldwide. Its Consumer segment sells telephones, baby monitors, and Wi-Fi extenders through high street retailers, online BT Shop, and Website BT.com; and offers home phone, copper and fiber broadband, TV, and mobile services in various packages. The company's EE segment offers 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile network services; broadband, fixed-voice, and TV services; and postpaid and prepaid plans, and emergency services network. This segment also sells 4G mobile phones, tablets, connected devices, and mobile broadband devices from various manufacturers. Its Business and Public Sector segment provides fixed voice, mobility, fiber and connectivity, and networked IT services to retailers, utilities, public sector, healthcare, sports, construction, finance, and educational sectors. The company's Global Services segment offers business communications and ICT services comprising BT Connect, BT Security, BT One, BT Contact, BT Compute, BT Advise, and BT for financial markets. This segment serves approximately 5,500 customers in 180 countries. Its Wholesale and Ventures segment enables communications providers and other organizations to provide fixed or mobile phone services. Its ventures provide mass-market services, such as directory enquiries and payphones; and enterprise services comprising BT Fleet and BT Redcare. This segment also provides broadband and Ethernet, voice, hosted communication, mobile virtual network operator, managed solutions, machine-to-machine, roaming, and media services. The company's Openreach segment engages in the provision of services over the local access network; and installation and maintenance of fiber and copper communications networks that connect homes and businesses. The company was formerly known as Newgate Telecommunications Limited and changed its name to BT Group plc in September 2001. BT Group plc was incorporated in 2001 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, a pharmaceutical company, develops, manufactures, markets, and distributes generic medicines, specialty medicines, and biopharmaceutical products in North America, Europe, and internationally. The company offers sterile products, hormones, high-potency drugs, and cytotoxic substances in various dosage forms, including tablets, capsules, injectables, inhalants, liquids, transdermal patches, ointments, and creams. It also develops, manufactures, and sells active pharmaceutical ingredients. In addition, it focuses on the central nervous system, pain, respiratory, and oncology areas. Its products in the central nervous system include Copaxone for the treatment of relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis; AJOVY for the preventive treatment of migraine; and AUSTEDO for the treatment of tardive dyskinesia and chorea associated with Huntington disease. The company's products in the respiratory market comprise ProAir, QVAR, ProAir Digihaler, AirDuo Digihaler, and ArmonAir Digihaler, BRALTUS, CINQAIR/CINQAERO, DuoResp Spiromax, and AirDuo RespiClick/ArmonAir RespiClick for the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Its products in the oncology market include Bendeka, Treanda, Granix, Trisenox, Lonquex, and Tevagrastim/Ratiograstim. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited has a collaboration MedinCell for the development and commercialization of multiple long-acting injectable products, a risperidone suspension for the treatment of patients with schizophrenia. The company was founded in 1901 and is headquartered in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.
The Tribune's Publisher Is Poised To Buy The Sun-Times, & People Are Worried

By Stephen Gossett in News on May 15, 2017 10:30PM



Getty Images / Photo: Scott Olson

The insatiable ouroboros that is the contemporary media landscape just delivered one of the all-time tail bites: the publisher of the Chicago Tribune is poised to buy the publisher of the Sun-Times.

tronc, Inc.the owners of the Tribuneannounced on Monday that the company has submitted a non-binding letter of intent to purchase Wrapports Holdings, LLC. The deal would also include the alt-weekly Chicago Reader, which Wrapports publishes.

Neither Wrapports nor troncthey of the laughable name and no-laughing-matter acquisitive tendenciesdisclosed financial terms of the deal, which are apparently not yet finalized.

According to a release from Wrapports, both sides have notified and are working the Department of Justice's antitrust division. A letter will be published Tuesday by Wrapports of its intent to sell the Sun-Times. "If no other bidder comes forward, tronc will be that buyer and the acquisition will close as early as June 1," according to a release. tronc would then publish the Sun-Times. The announcement states that the Chicago Sun-Times will continue to run its independent newsroomthereby assuaging all fears that the acquisition will be anything but business as usual.

The consolidation-of-a-lifetime was met with immediate gritted-teeth apprehension, no surprise. Under CEO Michael Ferro and investor Sam Zell, tronc.the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing Companyhave not been bashful about their quasi-Orwellian visions of ultra-optimized, self-generating content (we exaggerate only the teensiest). It was there again, between the lines, even in the official line.

tronc CEO and director Justin Dearborn said in a statement:



"If we successfully close, we will be pleased to have the Chicago Sun-Times join our existing family of strong brands and help it maintain its independent voice. tronc will benefit from increased unique visitors, better engagement with Sun-Times consumers and more data for future troncX initiatives." (Emphasis ours.)

Ferro was actually one of the principals who launched Wrapports, back in 2011, so his and tronc's interest has long been the subject of speculation. Still, no one who closely watches Chicago media was enthused by tronc's seemingly imminent purchase of the Sun-Timeswhich the Tribune very shade-ily described as a "scrappy but struggling tabloid" on Monday.

Surprised it took this long.



Also, this is bad. https://t.co/iHpFZmEd23  Scott Smith (@ourmaninchicago) May 15, 2017 This is a bad idea. https://t.co/njtjL2ZKOM  Sara Amato (@saamato) May 15, 2017 Tronc acquiring the Sun-Times is such an incredibly toxic move for the Chicago media scene  Brandon Wall (@Walldo) May 15, 2017 This legitimately sucks. Chicago needs prominent newspapers that arent owned by a conglomerate nightmare like tronc and Michael Ferro  Brandon Wall (@Walldo) May 15, 2017

The news arrives just one week after another merger that portends seismic implications for Chicago and beyond: the multi-billion dollar purchase of Tribune Mediawhich holds 42 television stations in 33 markets, including WGN in Chicagoby the Trump-cozy Sinclair Group.

For perspective on how all-encompassing tronc's grip just on the local media landscape is, just consider the list below of its Chicago-area properties even before news of this likely sale. And this is to say nothing of the LA Timesand its own suburban satellitesthe Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and numerous other major assets.

-Chicago Tribune

-SouthtownStar (Chicago)

-Post-Tribune (Merrillville, Indiana)

-Naperville Sun (Naperville)

-Elgin Courier-News (Elgin)

-Aurora Beacon (Aurora)

-Lake County News-Sun (Gurnee)

-Pioneer Press

-Chicago Magazine

-Naperville Magazine

-Hoy (also in Los Angeles)

-Chicago Now

-RedEye Chicago

So, unless something unexpected develops, the Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader will be the next in line. Speaking of the Reader, it was just three days ago that unionized staff at the venerable alt-weekly voted to authorize a strike, primarily over a lack of significant increase in wages and benefits. A spokesperson for unionized staff declined to comment about tronc's intent to acquire Wrapports.

The deal does still need to be approved by the feds, who officially announced an investigation on Monday. But if recent history is any indicator, there hasn't been much appetite against news/media consolidation from the Trump administration. You'll be able to catch up in one of two distinctly owned papers soonperhaps for the last time.
Devil Horns Up: New Kuma's Corner To Open In West Loop Next Wednesday

By Stephen Gossett in Food on May 15, 2017 6:35PM



The grills are primed to be lined with those massive patties, and the figurative back door is ready begrudgingly allow for wayward hippies: the West Loop location of Kuma's Corner, Chicago's very own iconic metal burger bar, will officially open its doors next week, on Wednesday, May 24.

The latest outpost of the beloved burger joint announced the news on Facebook on Monday.



The location at 852 W. Fulton Market, in the West Loop (which we are legally mandated to describe as "red hot"), will be the third in Chicago. The original Avondale location became a destination for locals and Not For Tourist-minded tourists quickly after establishing itself in 2005, famous for its up-to-11 metal soundtrack; intimidatingly thick and delicious metal-themed burgers and (if you didn't time it right) scary-long lines. The burgers routinely find themselves on any list of Chicago's best or most distinct worth its juice, including our own.

The slightly less-loud and beef-smell-saturated Kumas Too arrived in Lincoln Park in 2013. Kuma's confirmed plans for the new West Loop location in August of last year.

[H/T Eater Chicago]
Woman Charged With Murder For Ramming Cop's Daughter Into Tree With SUV: Police

By Stephen Gossett in News on May 15, 2017 4:00PM



Chynna Stapleton / Chicago Police Department

Authorities arrested Chynna Stapleton, 24, on Friday night, shortly after she allegedly rammed an 18-year-old woman to death while driving a Jeep.

Stapleton climbed behind the wheel of a 2002 Jeep Liberty after she and a woman got into a verbal fight at around 11:10 p.m. on Friday in the 11400 block of South May Street, in Morgan Park, according to police. Stapleton then chased the woman on the sidewalk, pinned her against a tree, then repeatedly rammed into her against the tree, according to police. Stapleton fled the scene, but was arrested just a few minutes later, at 11:35 p.m. in the 100 block of West 115th Street, police said. She also hit several vehicles after she sped from away from the scene, according to police.

The victim, identified in reports as Tatyanna Lewis, the daughter of a Chicago police officer, died on the scene, police said.

The Sun-Times reports that activist Andrew Holmes, who is helping the Lewis family, said that a child was in the back seat of the SUV used in the murder. He told the paper the fight started over a conflict on social media. Stapleton was angry after hearing rumors online that Lewis and the father of Stapleton's child were getting close, sources told ABC7.

Stapleton is scheduled to appear in bond court on Monday.
"Before Chinese companies came, we had to pay over $50 each month to watch TV, but now we are paying just $3. Just like people in Beijing we can enjoy the best TV programs for only few bucks," said Hilder Edmund Malecela in Beijing on May 14.

Hilder Edmund Malecela was invited to take part and shared her stories in the thematic session of people-to-people connectivity at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on May in Beijing. [Photo by Zhang Xingjian/China Daily]

Born in a small village of Dar es Salaam, capital city of Tanzania, Malecela never thought of coming to China and working as a professional voice character for Chinese TV dramas.

"Kung fu is my first impression of China as I have watched several interesting films starring Chinese martial artist Jackie Chan," Malecela said.

In 2011, a Chinese family TV series A Beautiful Daughter-in-law Era, a 36-episode light comedy about a modern Chinese couple, was introduced to African countries and gained huge popularity overseas.

The TV series was first aired on Shanghai TV channel on November 26, 2009, and was dubbed in Swahili and broadcast through the Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation in 2011.

"After watching the show, I developed a deep understanding of modern China due to the emotional entanglement and personal relationships depicted in the show. In addition to kung fu, Chinese traditional culture and modernization drive also resonated with me," she said.

"Meanwhile, I learned that Kenyan actress Josephine Moeni Waweru and actor Khamis Juma Swaleh were chosen to do voice dubbing for the two leading roles in the African version of the series. Their jobs were amazing and I longed to be a voice character since then," she added.

In 2013, Malecela got the support of Star Times Group, a technology provider, network operator, and content provider in China's television broadcasting industry, and finally came to China.

Because of her enthusiasm for Chinese culture and fondness of dubbing, she got the chance to work as a voice character for four months and participated in several TV dramas, including Jin Tailang's Happy Life and The Desire of the Old Daddy.

After going back to Tanzania, she shared what she had learned in China, dubbing in particular, among her colleagues and tried her best to integrate the skills with her own work, waiting for the next chance to learn more about dubbing.

In 2016, the Star Times Group held the first Star TV Drama Dubbing Contest in Tanzania and chose potential contestants to work in China. Malecela won the first prize.

At the beginning of 2017, she came to the headquarters of Star Times Group and worked in Beijing. So far, she has done the dubbing in Swahili for more than 20 Chinese TV dramas.

"I am so happy to realize my dream and work on such a good platform. Now, in addition to dubbing, I have learned other skills in the TV field such as editing and recording," she said.

"Dar es Salaam is 1,979 kilometers from Beijing, but Chinese TV dramas bridge us together. In the future, I want to be a cultural ambassador to promote Sino-Tanzania relationship," she added.
RICHMOND  Virginia State Police said two people were killed Monday morning in a head-on collision in Buckingham County.

Police said Deborah A. Stearnes, 49, of Dillwyn, and Thomas C. Mason Jr., 61, of Disputanta, died in the crash, which happened at approximately 9:45 a.m. on U.S.15 near Willis Mountain Plant Lane in Dillwyn.

Police said a 2005 Pontiac Grand Am driven by Stearnes was heading south on U.S.15 when it crossed the center line and struck a dump truck driven by Mason head on. Mason tried to avoid the Pontiac, but was unable to do so, authorities said. After the vehicles collided, the truck ran off the left side of the highway, crashed through a guardrail, overturned and hit a tree.

Alcohol was not a factor in the crash, which state police are still investigating. Police said Stearnes was not wearing a seat belt, but Mason was. Both died at the scene.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Sunday the country is capable of maintaining financial market stability and warding off regional and systemic financial risks.

Premier Li Keqiang meets with Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sunday. [Photo/CHINA NEWS SERVICE]

China will strike a balance between financial stability, gradual deleveraging and stable economic growth, Li said while meeting with Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde, who is in Beijing to attend the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

Li said the country will continue to implement a prudent monetary policy and put the prevention of financial risks at a prominent position.

The government will also continue with a market-based, managed floating exchange rate regime to keep basic stability of the yuan at a reasonable and balanced level, he said.

China is willing to enhance policy communication and coordination with the IMF, and promote economic globalization, trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, as well as multilateral cooperation, to keep the global economy on track of stable development, Li said.

Lagarde said China's growth momentum is encouraging. She praised China's strong support for global economic cooperation and multilateral trade system.

The IMF is glad to see that China's financial system remains on a solid foundation with effective and proper prudential regulation, she said.

In a separate meeting with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim on Sunday, Li said China's economy is in the process of transformation and upgrading, which requires traditional industrial capacity to be overhauled and new growth momentum to be fostered as well.

China is ready to strengthen cooperation with the World Bank and conduct joint research on such subjects as nurturing new growth impetus to help accelerate the country's economic upgrading, Li said.

As the world's largest developing country, China is willing to fulfill its duty as a responsible major country and engage more in cooperation on reducing poverty and promoting development, he noted.

China hopes the World Bank can lead the international community to jointly push forward economic globalization and work together for common prosperity, Li told Kim.

Kim said the World Bank is confident in the prospects of China's drive to deepen reforms, boost innovation and create new growth drivers, and is ready to strengthen cooperation with China.

He also spoke highly of China's efforts to reform its health care system, saying they will provide useful experience for other countries.
The Mutianyu section of the Great Wall in Huairou, a mountainous district in the north of Beijing, capital of China. [Photo by Cui Can/China.org.cn]



Reporters from home and abroad were invited to visit the International Culture Village of the Great Wall at Mutianyu ahead of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on May 13, as part of Beijing's efforts to better demonstrate the capital's achievements on protecting cultural relics and building beautiful villages.

Attracted by the charm of the Mutianyu Great Wall, lots of foreigners have settled in nearby villages. Located at the foot of the Great Wall, the International Culture Village covers an area of 17.8 square kilometers and consists of four villagesMutianyu, Beigou, Tianxianyu and Xinying.

The culture village has attracted 30 foreign entrepreneurs to settle down and establish businesses since 2005.

Jim Spear and his Chinese wife Tang Liang run a hotel named "The Brickyard" at the village. Spear gave an introduction to their design ideas -- "enjoy the luxury of simple comfort," which means getting close to nature and using existing buildings to realize sustainable development.

He also stressed the importance of respecting ancient culture in building new villages. With Spear's help, local villagers have re-decorated their own houses reflecting a mixture of old and the new, and also East and West. They then rent the houses to foreigners. A unique town with international characteristics has gradually taken shape here.

The Mutianyu Great Wall was built on the ruins of a previous structure from the Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577), becoming a quintessence of the Great Wall developing during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). As one of the best-preserved parts of the Great Wall, the Mutianyu section draws masses of tourists attracted by its beautiful scenery and traditional culture. Over 70 percent of visitors come from overseas.

Wang Zhigang, deputy manager of Financial Street Holdings Co.Ltd., delivered a welcome address to visiting reporters, pointing out the importance of the Mutianyu Great Wall in promoting international cultural exchanges, as well as describing efforts to protect ancient cultural relics.

"Under the background of the Belt and Road Initiative, we are going to deepen the historical relic's development, and to provide a better travel experience for visitors," he said.
Li Yihai, a suspected "tomb raider" is caught after 23 years on the run. [Photo/thepaper.cn]

A suspected "tomb raider" has been caught after 23 years on the run, police in central China's Hubei Province said Sunday.

Li Yihai was apprehended Wednesday in south China's Hainan Province, police confirmed.

In March 1994, one of more than 300 ancient tombs in Hubei's Jishan Township was raided by thieves who stole a female corpse, as well as other valuable artifacts. The corpse, believed to be more than 2,400 years old, was recovered 39 days later.

Some 23 suspects were detained and more than 20 stolen artifacts retrieved, but Li got away. Police continued to search for Li for more than two decades, before locating him this month.
LONDON - England - Supreme Comrade and Soviet Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to "overturn the rigged system" by putting power and wealth back in the hands of "the people".

In his first major general election speech, he said 8 Junes poll was not a foregone conclusion and Labour could defy the Establishment experts.

A Soviet Labour government would not play by their rules, he added.

No more elections once Labour in power

We would also change election rules once Labour is back in power. Once we win, there will be no more need for elections in Soviet Britain ever again. This election could therefore be the last ever election you see in your lifetime, Corbyn stressed.

The biased leftist BBC is fully behind Corbyns bid to thwart Theresa Mays hope to convert the Tories double digit poll lead into a bigger Commons majority.

Corbyns Labour government would halt Brexit and stop Theresa May strengthening her hand in Brexit negotiations providing the strong and stable leadership the country needs.

Instead, the majority Labour Remoaners would seek to fully reverse any notions of leaving the European Union and renegotiate with Brussels on full implementation into stronger EU union.

Bolshevik Revolution

The Labour leader looks set to run an anti-bourgeoisie campaign, presenting himself as a champion of the powerless proletariat against political and business culture.

He attacked the morally bankrupt Conservatives who he said would not stand up to those who seek wealth from hard work and other members of a gilded elite, who were extracting wealth from the unfortunate circumstances of ordinary unemployed and unemployable people who are the root of Labours voting underclass.

Labour would end this racket and overturn the rigged system, he told an audience of Labour supporters in London.

Once were in power, everyone will be equal in poverty and suffering. There will be no more aspirations or silly things like that, Comrade Corbyn added.

Marxist paradise

He also said Labour was the only party that would focus on the kind of country we want to have  dismissing Mrs Mays election campaign as an ego trip about her own failing leadership.

Let us look at the other socialist utopia  Venezuela. We want our nation to resemble that South American dream of extreme poverty, anarchy and chaos.

And he insisted all of Labours policies, including an increase in corporation tax for big business and more money for carers and a 10 an hour minimum wage, were fully costed.

If you own a property today, once we win you will not own that property any more. The owning of all private property is theft from the poorest of our society. For too long, wealth has been allowed to accumulate in private housing. Our collectivist Soviet system will free up wealth from private citizens and all property ownership will transfer to the state, to be redistributed to the populace as needed.

Corbyn the Bolshevik survivor

Addressing Labours poor opinion poll ratings, he said he was given a 200/1 chance of becoming Labour leader in 2015 and he defied those odds.

They have tried to oust me many times, but I as supreme Comrade to the Soviet Labour Marxist social-democratic party have endured and survived many attempts to remove me. They shall not prevail, as they have failed in the past, so today I survive and will survive to lead our great Soviet nation onwards.

His message was uncompromising. Jeremy Corbyn attacked targets from what he called the ruling bourgeois elite. In doing so, he was trying to recapture the energy and rhetoric which enabled him to win not one, but two, Labour leadership contests.

He said a future Labour government wouldnt play by the rules and denounced his Conservative opponents as morally bankrupt. Corbyn vowed to end the scourge of capitalism once and for all by ousting all bankers from the City, the media and business people were also in his sights  it created dividing lines not just with his current political opponents but with his partys New Labour past.

I will throw these financiers, capitalist scum, business profiteers into the back streets where they will be beaten, stripped of all wealth and seen off.

Corbyns speech received a standing ovation from the invited audience of Labour members and was designed, in part, to motivate newer recruits in particular to campaign over the next seven weeks. It could also shore up the partys core support.

There were spontaneous shouts of Hail! Comrade Corbyn and Bravo! Our Supreme white socked Soviet Comrade!
More than seven percent of university students surveyed said that they have experienced harassment from unidentified people on their college campuses.

The survey, which polled 601 students from over 100 Chinese universities, revealed that 7.58 percent of the respondents had experienced harassment, according to an article in Monday's edition of China Youth Daily.

Moreover, about 65.24 percent said they had heard of similar situations experienced by their classmates.

However, the article quoted some students as saying that in many cases victims dare not to directly confront their harassers and many felt ashamed to tell their families or teachers.

Students surveyed also said that enhanced security is required on university campuses. A total of 58.81 percent of the students said their campuses allow members of the public to enter freely, while 81.38 percent said universities should take measures to control entry.
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China's cyberspace authority Monday warned computer users to install and upgrade security software to avoid being hit by the global ransomware attack.

A statement issued by the cybersecurity coordination bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China said the "WannaCry" ransomware attack, which began to spread worldwide Friday, has affected some enterprises and government offices in China.

Police, authorities in the industry, information technology, education, banking and cyberspace sectors as well as some computer security companies have taken response measures, the statement said.

Media reports have also helped increase public awareness of the virus and contain the spread of the attack, it added.

The authority said this global cyberattack has once again shown the unprecedented internet security challenges, calling on all sectors to address to cybersecurity issues.
New Delhi: Country's largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) has earmarked Rs 140 crore for various CSR activities, including road safety initiatives, for the current financial year.

As part of various activities planned during the fiscal, the company is looking to explore innovative technology in the area of road safety for traffic management and control as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. It has also included healthcare as a focus area under community development.

"Through CSR projects, we aim to create positive impact. The quality of life in the adopted villages has improved, over 90 per cent of the individual household toilets constructed are used regularly," MSI Head of CSR Ranjit Singh told PTI.

There is an increase in the pass percentage of students in the supported schools, he added. MSI has adopted 14 new villages in last three years. The company's board has already approved Rs 140 crore for CSR activities in 2017-18. The carmaker had invested Rs 89.45 crore in 2016-17, 140 per cent more than 2014-15 and 14 per cent more than 2015-16 on CSR activities.

Last fiscal, it trained 2.95 lakh drivers in safe driving while adding 40 new driving training schools making it 400 across 190 cities. It also released a comprehensive pan-India road safety index. Besides, it doubled recruitment of ITI students across its dealer service network. Over, 2,200 students were placed during the last fiscal as against 1,100 in 2015-16.

The company said it upgraded 25 new ITIs in last three years under skill development programme. MSI has earmarked a total of Rs 4,500 crore capex for the current financial year.

The amount would be spent on various activities including replacement of machinery, R&D and marketing initiatives. On R&D alone, the company plans to invest in the range of Rs 700-1,000 crore during the year. MSI had earmarked Rs 3,500 crore capex last fiscal.
New Delhi: Higher demand in the Middle-East and South-East Asia could help India's gems and jewellery export grow this fiscal to about USD 42 billion, an export promotion body said today.

In 2016-17, the export totalled at around USD 36 billion. According to Anil Sankhwal, Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) northern region chairman, Europe poses a challenge to exporters.

"But in the US, Middle-East nations and South-East Asia, demand is growing. We are expecting that our exports will reach about USD 41-42 billion this fiscal," Sankhwal told reporters here.

He also expressed concern over imposition of 5 per cent import duty by Dubai on gold and diamond jewellery. "The move would impact India's exports. We are discussing measures to deal with the situation as Dubai is an important market," Sankhwal said.

About steps to boost export, he said GJEPC is organizing a buyer-seller meet in the national capital. A three-day event -- India SAARC-Middle East Buyer Seller Meet -- started yesterday.

"In this meet, 38 domestic manufacturers and 70 international buyers from South Asia, the Middle-East, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Qatar are participating," he said.

On display is a wide range of jewellery products by exhibitors. "There is a huge potential in these markets. The event provides a platform to bring traders together and explore business opportunities," he said.
Mumbai: Betting big on the premium sportsbike segment, Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India (HMSI) today announced the price for its soon-to-be launched 1000-cc superbike Africa Twin at Rs 12.90 lakh, ex-showroom Delhi, and also opened limited bookings.

The company is planning to roll out its first 1000-cc superbike in July which will be assembled locally. HMSI said the pre-launch bookings for this adventure motorcycle is open only to first 50 orders, and a few lucky customers will get a chance to attend the grand outdoor 'True Adventure' Africa Twin India.

The popular Africa Twin will be known as Honda CRF 1000L Africa Twin in the local market and will be assembled in India. These bikes will be sold through its Wing World outlets which are available in 22 cities.

YS Guleria, SVP for sales and marketing, said the Africa Twin is inseparable from the world's toughest motor rally raids in the world--the Dakar Rally.
New Delhi: RBI has asked banks to follow the instructions of government organisation CERT-In to prevent the attack by ransomware, 'WannaCry', which has impacted various IT networks in over 150 countries.

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has come out with list of dos and don'ts and webcast on how to protect networks from the global ransomware attack. It has been reported that a new ransomware 'WannaCry' is spreading widely, RBI advisory to the banks said.

Wannacry encrypts the files on infected Windows system and spreads by exploiting vulnerabilities, it said. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) also asked all banks to put in place a software update at ATMs to prevent their systems from a malware that has attacked payment systems across the world.

In a separate malware attack last year, 3.2 lakh debit card were compromised in the country. Data of the users who transacted from ATM machines of Hitachi were compromised during three months of May, June and July last year. The

Hitachi ATMs deployed by many White Label ATM players and Yes Bank were impacted by the malware.

According to reports Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) are highly vulnerable to such malware attacks as they presently run on old version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, making a software security patch update a necessary exercise.

There are a total of 2.2 lakh ATMs in India, of which many old ones run on Windows XP. Over the weekend, the ransomware has hit systems in more

than 150 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history. It infected computers running on older versions of Microsoft operating systems like XP, locking access to files on the computer.

The cyber criminals have demanded a fee of about USD 300 in crypto-currencies like Bitcoin for unlocking the device. Microsoft has introduced a security patch to tackle the situation, and consumers across the globe have been advised to download the solution at the earliest.

CERT-In today said it has not received any formal report of cyber attack on India's vital networks by the crippling global ransomware, 'WannaCry'. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had said yesterday that a few systems of the Police Department in Andhra Pradesh were impacted and that the state government has been informed to follow the advisory by the CERT-In.

Besides, the Maharashtra Police department said it was partially hit by the ransomware. Following the alert, the Gujarat government began equipping its state computer systems with anti-virus softwares and upgrading its Microsoft operating systems.

As per the advisory issued by CERT-In, the ransomware infects other computers on the same network and is also spreading through malicious attachments to e-mails. Security firms have suggested that users immediately disconnect the

infected device from the local network to contain the spread of infection.

In Spain, major companies including telecommunications firm Telefonica have been infected. The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to

computers.
New Delhi: In the next two years, the government today said it will focus on nutritional security of the country's two-third poor population registered with the

public distribution system (PDS) under the food law.

The food law aims to provide legal entitlement of 5 kg subsidised foodgrains per person every month at Rs 1-3/kg to 23.3 crore registered members. The law was passed by Parliament in September 2013, during the previous UPA regime.

"The food law was implemented in 2013, then only 11 states had rolled it out. It was done in hurry. In last three years, we have strengthened and implemented it in all states," Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said on the occasion of the NDA

government's completion of three years in office.

Going forward, he said the government's focus would be on ensuring "nutritional security" of the poor people registered with PDS.

The ministry has chalked out plans for supplying fortified wheat and rice flour via PDS, and seriously deliberating with stakeholders on supplying nutritious food in a cost effective manner.

"I have asked the department to look into the matter. We will work on this proactively next two years," he added. Stating that PDS reforms are still underway, Paswan said efforts are being made to plug loopholes in the system. Point of sale (PoS) machines are being installed and ration cards have been linked with Aadhaar number, which has helped to eliminate 2.33 crore duplicate ration cards so far.

PoS machines have been installed in 2.4 lakh PDS shops out of 5.45 lakh shops. Doorstep delivery of foodgrains to PDS outlets are being done in some places, and on pilot, cash instead of grain is being transferred directly into the bank accounts of beneficiaries in Chandigarh, Puducherry and Dadra and Nagar

Haveli, he said, adding that such efforts would be scaled up going forward depending on the states' preparedness.

Wastage of foodgrains in government godowns is coming down and there is abundant stocks to meet the PDS demand for this year, he added.
Mumbai: For banking customers, post office savings bank accounts could offer some relief as public and private sector banks have increased transaction charges both at ATMs and bank counters.

Opening a Post Office Savings Bank Account is much easier that requires a prospective customer to spend a paltry Rs 50 and sets a minimum balance requirement at Rs 500 per month, according to a report in The New Indian Express.

The report adds that post offices in Karnataka have distributed as many as 1 lakh India Post ATM cards in the backdrop of banks hiking their cash withdrawal fees and also increasing amount of minimum balance required to keep an account active.

The post office account comes with an India Posts ATM card with extra charges for customers. At present, the department has 76 ATM counters across the state of which 14 are in capital city Bengaluru alone, the report said.

These accounts guarantee unlimited transactions at India Posts branches, a chequebook that comes for a deposit price of Rs 500 and a daily cash withdrawal limit of Rs 25,000.

In contrast to this, both public and private sector banks have started levying transaction and cash withdrawal charges through ATMs. Apart from this, some banks have increased their minimum balance maintenance limit for savings bank accounts.

We are getting an overwhelming response for POSB especially after banks, including SBI, recently hiked transaction fees and other charges. We have distributed more than 50,000 ATM cards in the state over the last five months. Our account holders can also withdraw money from any bank ATMs, The New Indian Express quoted a senior official of India Post (Karnataka Circle) as saying.

Besides all these facilities, India Posts is also working on plans to introduce mobile banking and internet banking facilities at its all branches across the country. The department has 32,292 post office branches that have already adopted core banking solution system. Apart from that as many as 970 India Posts ATMs are operational in country, the report said.
Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India has asked all banks to put in place a software update at ATMs to protect their systems from a malware that has attacked payment systems across the world.

The RBI's instructions follow malware incidents across the world that have attacked computer systems and blocked crucial data, according to a report in The Times of India.

"RBI has asked banks to update specific Windows patches on ATMs urgently and not to operate ATM machines unless updates are in place," TOI quoted an official with a public sector bank as saying.

The report adds that automated teller machines are highly vulnerable to such malware attacks as they presently run on old version of Windows operating system thus making a software update a necessary exercise.

There are a total of 2.25 lakh ATMs in country of which 60 per cent run on the outdated Windows XP, the report said. Microsoft, maker of Windows software, has said that it has released a special update of the software.

However, ATM operators have denied that there was any threat to customer information and that could lead to theft of money from ATMs. They say that the principal motive of these ransomware was only to lock important information in networks and stop customer access to them.
To this extent a byproduct of the new IIP figures was that maybe the Manmohan Singh government didnt do so badly after all.

Mumbai: There is much interest over the new method in which the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) has been arrived at specially since it has revealed that contrary to the general belief, manufacturing output was not affected by the demonetisation exercise that had created chaos due to the cash crunch.

This may or may not be the case as balance sheets of several companies did show profits and did not seem to be affected by the cash crunch. But it does indicate that there has been more production than was generally thought.

To this extent a byproduct of the new IIP figures was that maybe the Manmohan Singh government didnt do so badly after all. His government was accused of dithering on decision making among other things and that there was hardly any growth during his regime. The new IIP indicate there was growth.

The government also introduced the seventh revision in the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) with base year 2011-12 so the new WPI series is now comparable with gross domestic product, consumer price index and the new IIP that includes items of daily consumption apart from paan masala and gutka, which shows that households are eating better and a wider range of food and fruits and vegetables. like radish, carrot, cucumber, bitter gourd, mosambi, pear, pomegranate, jackfruit, etc., have been included. Natural gas has also been added and this is timely as the government has promised that every household below the poverty line will get LPG connections.

It was time for this change as society and peoples habits and possessions have transformed over the years and items like videos and CDs are passe.

Whilst all this is welcome the disturbing aspect of the new IIP is that it shows that growth in capital goods is still sluggish. Capital goods production indicate factories humming with activity which in turn reflects the presence of demand and investment. And this investment has not happened and has not been happening for the last several quarters.

Earlier, it was thought that the private sector was not investing as several companies were highly leveraged with debt and that there was a huge idle capacity. What is more disconcerting is that nothing is being done or is seen to be done about encouraging private investment which could generate jobs. There is no serious concern about this. Normally government investment is followed by private investment. The economy is dependent more on government investment in infrastructure and other sectors.

Investment creates jobs. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his election speeches had promised millions of jobs and this was a big attraction for the youth who voted for him enthusiastically. But two and a half years later there are no signs of these millions of jobs. The last count indicated that about 10 lakh jobs had been created mostly by public sector enterprises like the railways.

This has also been borne out by the new IIP figures which are more pervasive and yet reveal very little on job creation. It is only the manufacturing and services sectors that can provide the jobs required for the millions of students leaving schools and colleges each year.
Mumbai: Sonam Kapoor says she appreciates the fact that Akshay Kumar is touching upon socially-relevant subjects through his films.

After their first outing in Anees Bazmee's 2011 film 'Thank You', Akshay and Sonam have now collaborated in 'Padman'.

"This the second time I am working with Akshay and it was a completely different experience. I respect Akshay for doing relevant and content-driven films. As an actor, he is honest to his work and as a person he is very disciplined," Sonam told PTI.

Filmmaker R Balki is directing 'Padman,' based on the life of Tamil Nadu-based social activist Arunachalam Muruganantham, who revolutionised the concept of menstrual hygiene in rural India by creating a low-cost sanitary napkin machine.

Sonam says she feels fortunate to be working with Balki. "I feel blessed to be working Balki sir. I am going to miss him after the shoot, he is a positive and crazy person. He doesn't yell at anybody."

The 31-year-old actress has also collaborated with Rajkumar Hirani for the Sanjay Dutt biopic. Without sharing details about her role, Sonam says she gets inspired by working with such eminent filmmakers.

"The kind of films they (Balki and Hirani) have made are amazing. Their passion, honesty and integrity inspire me. I have worked with the best of directors and they have got the best out of me," she says.
Priyanka Chopra in a bikini in Miami. (Pics: Instagram/pcourheartbeat)

Mumbai: Priyanka Chopra is soaring high with her Hollywood release Baywatch and is busy promoting the film in Miami.

However, the actress bought some time for herself despite her tedious schedule and indulged into some fun with surfs, sand and sun.

Dressed in a strapless blue bikini top and a low-slung bottom, the actress has soared the temperatures extremely high.

However, it was her pierced belly button which raised the oomph quotient in her.

After enjoying a great time on the beach, Priyanka wore a khaaki coloured jacket over the bikini.

With her reflectors on, PeeCee flaunted her toned bikini body as she splashes around in the water.

Her bikini pictures are already breaking the Internet.

Check out for the pictures below:

Priyanka at the beach today #priyankachopra A post shared by Priyanka Chopra Network (@priyankanetwork) on May 14, 2017 at 6:54pm PDT

#priyankachopra #baywatch #miami #repost A post shared by Parineeti And Priyanka (@chopraobsessed) on May 15, 2017 at 1:09am PDT

The sexy siren was seen having a gala time with actress Adriana Lima. Don't they appear to be the new BFF's in town?

I love how they turned this to a photoshoot  #priyankachopra #adrianalima #miami #baywatch A post shared by Priyanka Chopra Fan Page (@pcourheartbeat) on May 12, 2017 at 5:15pm PDT

Priyanka and 's ! (She was obviously trying to hide but it looks funny) :P #priyankachopra #adrianalima #baywatch #miami A post shared by Priyanka Chopra Fan Page (@pcourheartbeat) on May 13, 2017 at 1:45am PDT

Relaxing on the beach  #priyankachopra A post shared by Priyanka Chopra Network (@priyankanetwork) on May 14, 2017 at 8:49pm PDT

More pictures  @priyankachopra #miami #priyankachopra #baywatch A post shared by Parineeti And Priyanka (@chopraobsessed) on May 15, 2017 at 2:14am PDT

Aren't the pictures looking smokin' hot?!
Mumbai: Salman Khan will be launching the first song of Tubelight- The Radio' song in Dubai on May 16, amidst much fanfare!

With just one day to go, Dubai is prepping themselves to be lit up with the actors charm!

Director Kabir Khan went the extra mile to shoot The Radio' song.

After shooting amid beautiful natural locations in North India, Kabir wanted to shoot Radio in a town square typical to those in the 1960s.

The team went on a recce in and around to find a town, which was untouched by modernisation.

Since they were unable to find an apt location, he decided to construct it in Mumbai itself.

Kabir was adamant that the set should look authentic right to the minutest of it details, hence the team converted three acres of Film City into the fictional town Jagatpura.

The Radio' song was shot there with over 1000 dancers. The track, which is a celebratory song in the film, had been shot on a very large scale. It has the touch of the 1960s and required a huge crowd to be dancing on it.

Kabir had organised for 200 dancers and about 800 juniors to be part of the song along with Salman Khan.

First a fan screening in India, now a mega gala in Dubai, Salman Khan truly knows how to gratify his fans all across the world!

The film is set for an Eid 2017 release.
Mumbai: Kangana Ranaut didnt have a single release in 2016 but the actress is making up for that with two releases this year, Rangoon, which released in February and now Simran.

After the motion poster of Simran was unveiled on Sunday, the teaser is also out now.

The first thought that might come to your mind after watching it might be of her character of Rani in Queen. Simran, just like Rani, appears to be extremely simple, goofy and innocent, with her expressions doing all the talking as she gets excited about trying different wigs in a store, laughs uncontrollably, enjoys the softness of the bed like a kid and gives several other interesting expressions throughout.

You also might be reminded of her Tanu Weds Manu character when you see her dancing energetically in a saree.

Kangana had stated that the film was earlier a thriller, which she later transformed into a comedy and hence will also be credited as a writer.

Looking at this teaser, it seems the writer in her has definitely done a commendable job.

Simran, directed by Hansal Mehta, hits the theatres on September 15.

Watch the teaser here:
Bengaluru: A recent National Mental Health survey, rolled out by Nimhans, reported that 1 in 20 people suffer from depression. Despite these big numbers, the "low" feeling is most often misunderstood and passed off as just a phase. Despite an increase in the number of counselling centres, mental health clinics at hospitals and psychiatrists, the stigma attached to depression stops many from reaching out for help. The city-based not-for-profit organisation, The Live Love Laugh Foundation (TLLLF), has been working relentlessly to help ward off the stigma and to make more people aware of the disorder. Set up in 2015 as a charitable trust, it has been championing the cause of mental health and focuses on depression in particular.

We do not provide any psychiatric help or counselling services to the depressed population. Our goal is to create awareness and sensitise the public, teachers and families to remove the stigma associated with depression. We want to target schoolchildren and the adolescent population to make an impact. Sensitising teachers is crucial as picking up the behavioural changes associated with depression is extremely important, said Ms Anna Chandy, Chairperson, Board of Trustees, TLLLF.

Just over a year since its inception, the Foundation's You Are Not Alone programme has already covered 34,023 students and 6,480 teachers across 276 schools in six states Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Delhi. We are not looking at just English medium schools and have reached out to over 100 non-English medium schools. We want to help as many schools and students, irrespective of their medium of instruction, she said.

In Bengaluru, 19 schools, 3,808 students and 1,310 teachers have been sensitised. Bengaluru is a little better off than other cities as people here are more aware in picking up the signs. But that is not enough, considering the numbers," she said. The Foundation has also launched a mental health awareness programme for general physicians (GPs).

Official statistics state that there are some 3,500-4,000 psychiatrists in the country, which is very low. The World Health Organisation recommends that GPs need to be sensitised about picking up the key symptoms or signals, as they are the first point of contact for anyone who is not well. They need to be trained," she asserted.

The programme aims to train and advise some 5,000 GPs across the country in a year. They will be advised on a range of issues related to depression and its incidence, screening and treatment. We have partnered with the Indian Medical Association and the Indian Psychiatric Association to train GPs," she said.

On the future of the foundation, she said, Currently, we want to focus on bringing down the number of students and adolescents suffering from depression. Once we feel that we have created enough awareness and we are satisfied with our endeavour, we will focus on research work. We are also doing some sample surveys which would be completed in a year." The foundation is now being funded by volunteers who believe in the cause.

With the massive incidence of mental health issues among the youth in our country, You Are Not Alone as well as other interventions for this age group are the need of the hour to help students and their teachers gain a better understanding of issues related to stress, anxiety and depression Deepika Padukone, Founder and Brand ambassador of The Live Love Laugh Foundation

Partnership with government

Having battled depression at an early stage in her career, actor Deepika Padukone, who is the face of TLLLF, has been working on creating awareness, destigmatising depression and encouraging those afflicted with mental health issues to seek help.

As a part of the initiative, the foundation joined hands with the Karnataka government on the World Health Day (April 7, 2017).

The government will use the creatives developed for #Dobara Poocho in an outdoor campaign across the state.
Gurgaon: A 22-year-old woman from Sikkim was allegedly raped by three men in a moving car here and thrown out on a road in Delhi in yet another chilling rape incident in Haryana days after the Nirbhaya-like case in Sonipat.

The woman was attacked at around 2 AM when she was returning from Delhi to her residence in Sector-17 here.

As she reached near her house, she was dragged by three men into their Swift car. They then took turns to rape her in the moving vehicle while heading to Najafgarh in the national capital, 20 kms from here, a senior police officer said quoting the victim's statement.

The woman had gone to visit Connaught Place with her friend on Saturday night.

The accused then threw her out in Najafgarh area and sped away, the officer said.

The woman later approached some passersby and informed the Delhi Police which alerted the Gurgaon police.

A case of rape has been registered against three persons. One of the accused was addressed as Deepak by the others, police said.

"We have identified a few vehicles on the basis of her statement and CCTV footage and raids are being conducted at various locations to nab the accused," the officer said.

The incident comes days the gruesome gangrape and murder of a 23-year-old woman came to light after her decomposed and mutilated body was found near the Industrial Model Township in Urban Estate, Rohtak. The woman had gone missing from Sonipat on May 9. Stray dogs had bitten off the face and lower portion of her body.

Women's safety remains an issue of concern despite a slew of steps taken by the government after the December 16, 2012 gang-rape and murder of a paramedic student in Delhi sparked nationwide outrage. She later came to be known as 'Nirbhaya' (the fearless).
Meerut: A class XI girl student, who was allegedly abducted, was today rescued from a farmhouse here after which she complained of being raped by three youths during her captivity, police said on Sunday.

The girl, a resident of Modinagar area in neighbouring Ghaziabad, had gone to her institute on April 28 to collect her marksheet but did not return home.

Following this, her relatives filed a police complaint on May 1 against one Ashu and two others, accusing them of abducting her, a police official said.

"The girl was rescued from a farmhouse in Kankarkhera here last night," said Modinagar police station SHO Dhruv Bhushan Dubey.

"She had jumped to the roof of an adjoining building. On hearing her cries, the owner of this building informed police following which she was rescued," Dubey said.

The official said the girl will be sent for medical examination to confirm rape.
The car parked on a roadside is suspected to have been abandoned by the killers, fearing the presence of police.

Kannur: The police on Sunday seized the car the killers of RSS worker Biju used to travel on the day of the attack. The Innova was taken into custody from Mavichery, near Payyannur.

The car parked on a roadside is suspected to have been abandoned by the killers, fearing the presence of police.

C. Biju, 12th accused in the murder of a CPM worker C.V. Dhanaraj in July, was hacked to death on Friday evening.

While returning from Mangalore, Biju, a painting worker, was picked by his friend Rajesh Pandara Valappil, the seventh accused in the same case, from Pazhayangadi railway station. When the duo reached near Palakkode bridge in Ramanthali, they were hit by the silver colour Innova car. Rajesh gave his statement to the police that they first thought it was an accident and had a verbal clash with the driver.

While Rajesh moved to the driver, others in the car got out and hacked Biju, and upon sensing danger, Rajesh fled the scene, noticing a sticker on the back side glass of the car - GIRL.

He also said that there were seven people in the car. The police identified all of them. The police could track down the owner of the car - Binoy from Ramanthali who gives cars on rent, as per the statements of Rajesh.

Taliparamba DySP KV Venugopal confirmed that Binoy had given it on rent for a month for Rs 30,000. However, the police did not reveal the name of people taken into custody.

According to sources, Binoy rented the vehicle to Nidhin, from Ramanthali, who handed it over to Jijesh, also from Ramanthali. The details regarding the accused were received based on their statements. Forensic team that inspected the vehicles confirmed that the Kasargod registration vehicle's (KL 60 L 7633) paint was received from Rajeshs bike. The seized car had chilly powder inside and outside, probably to divert the sniffers.

Mr Biju was released on bail after he was remanded in connection with the murder of Dhanaraj. Hours after Dhanarajs murder, a BMS leader C.K. Ramachandran was killed in the same area in retaliation.

However, the friends of Dhanaraj were reportedly not happy with the retaliation, and Bijus killing was known to be locally motivated, though the suspected people have links with DYFI. Mr Dhanarajs killing was a shocker to the CPM in their stronghold, and the police is also trying to avert any more attacks in the same direction.
Bengaluru: Less than a week after a highly decomposed body of 69-year-old Shanthakumari was found stuffed inside a cupboard at a rented house in Gandhinagar in Kengeri Satellite Town, the police have named her daughter and grandson as the prime accused.

Based on the information provided by Nandeesh (21), one of the accused in the murder of Shanthakumari, who was earlier arrested, Kengeri police said that Shantakumari was killed by her daughter Shashikala (42) in the third week of August last year, when she refused to eat the food which Shashikala's son Sanjay (21) had brought from a hotel.

Police said on the day of the incident, when Shashikala gave the food to her mother, she refused and reportedly spilled it on the floor. An infuriated Shashikala hit her mother on the head multiple times with a rolling pin.

She collapsed due to head injuries and began bleeding profusely. Fearing police investigation, the duo did not treat her and kept her at house. She died the following day, the police said.

Nandeesh

Sanjay

Shashikala

The mother-son then planned to dispose the body at the house itself and Sanjay took the help of his friend Nandeesh. The trio then stuffed the body inside a cupboard and plastered it with cement and painted the wall red. In order to help decompose the body at the earliest and to eliminate any foul smell, the trio had put charcoal and soil on the body and permanently shut the windows of the room.

"The accused had planned that once the body is completely decomposed and turns into the skeleton, they could easily dispose it off and thus stayed at the house for six months. In February 2017 when the foul smell from the cupboard became unbearable, they thought people will come to know about the crime and left the house," the police said.

On May 7 this year, the house owner Naveen who had rented the ground floor of the building to the accused, went to check the house as the rental agreement ended in April. Moreover the tenants were not to be seen since February and had not paid the rent. They had in fact taken Rs 50,000 loan from him.

Naveen found the plastered cupboard and felt something amiss as there was foul smell. He alerted the police who broke open the cupboard to find the body.

Shashikala and Sanjay, who hail from Shivamogga are yet to be arrested. Police have formed teams to nab them.
Visakhapatnam: The Vizag money laundering case has taken a new turn with officials from the Income Tax Department uncovering evidence of over Rs 800 crore being funnelled out of the country from a single account in a public sector bank located in Kolkata, in 2016. IT officials and the police suspect the involvement of bankers, as records indicate that Rs 90 crore was deposited to the account, in cash, on a single day.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that few businessmen in north India supplied money for the scam. The city police produced the main accused, Vaddi Mahesh, before the court on Monday.

City police chief T. Yoganand spoke to reporters and said that the case had been handed over to the CID for further investigation, as the city police did not have an economic offence wing or personnel trained to handle such a big case. Based on the amount of money and the number of foreign transactions involved, investigation of the case will require coordination with investigative agencies abroad, including the CBI, ED and Interpol.

The city police have arrested Mahesh, and have launched a manhunt for eight others named in the FIR, based on the IT Departments report. The scam was unearthed by the IT Department led by M.V.N. Seshu Bhavanarayana, the Income Tax Joint Director (Investi-gations). Two months into the preliminary enquiry, the Department named Vaddi Mahesh, his father Vaddi Srinivasa Rao, his cousins Achanta Harish and Achanta Rajesh, and five others as the accused.

The Police Commissioner said that Harish and Rajesh had been questioned, and the hunt was on for Srinivasa Rao and five others. During our interrogation Mahesh claimed that they were under-invoicing imported alcohol, cigarettes, and rice-cookers, to evade custom duty. However, IT officials have dismissed Maheshs claims, he said.

Mahesh and his team opened 12 fake companies, and operated 30 fictitious accounts, through which they laundered about Rs 1,600 crore. They fraudulently remitted amounts to five foreign companies  three in Singapore, and one each in China and Hong Kong towards the purchase of customised software, using forged documents. A senior police officer suspects that the people who deposited crores of rupees must have fled the country.
Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday said a case would be registered against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state chief Kummanom Rajasekharan, if necessary, for allegedly "spreading false reports" related to the killing of an RSS worker in Kannur.

Vijayan was replying to a notice for an adjournment motion moved by the Congress-led UDF opposition on the alleged breakdown of law and order in Kannur following the killing of Choorakad Biju, allegedly by CPI(M) workers, on May 12.

Referring to a video in a Facebook post of BJP state President Kummanom Rajasekharan that showed "celebrations by CPI(M) workers over the killing of Biju," Vijayan said the BJP leader should explain where the celebration took place.

"It is incorrect and illegal. Case would be registered if necessary after examining all aspects", Vijayan said.

He maintained that police acted swiftly to prevent occurrence of violence in the area. Two persons have also been taken into custody in connection with the incident, he added.

Vijayan said no one should spread false reports and priority should be given to strengthen peace efforts in the area.

The chief minister said the murder of Biju should be seen as an isolated incident which should not come in the way of the peace process and sought the cooperation of all parties concerned.

The House also saw the coming together of ruling LDF and UDF members in opposing state BJP's demand for clamping of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in Kannur district.

Both LDF and UDF also denounced the outburst of BJP state leader Shoba Surendran against Governor P Sathasivam.

She had recently said that the governor should quit if he is "afraid" of Pinarayi Vijayan. She also said if the Governor had "some respect" for the post he holds, he should take action against the government.

Slamming the BJP for criticising Sathasivam, Vijayan said the saffron party was trying to ensure the Centre's intervention by threatening the governor.

"Some BJP leaders in Delhi had also stated that they will not allow CPI(M) leaders to enter New Delhi. All these show the fascist character of the saffron party", he said.

Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala wanted the BJP to withdraw its statement against Sathasivam and said the "saffron party should not think that the governor is a tool in their hands".

Chennithala also said the UDF does not agree with the demand for imposition of AFSPA in Kannur.

Lone BJP member and former Union Minister O Rajagopal played down the remark against the governor by Surendran, saying it was not the view of the party.

"It was only an emotional outburst of a young leader", he said.

On the demand for AFSPA, Vijayan made it clear that there was no situation in the state that warranted the imposition of the act, which he said had only attracted widespread criticism from all sections of society.

Vijayan also brought up the alleged "excesses of the army under the cover of AFSPA, where the act was in force."

Later, UDF and BJP members staged a walkout when speaker P Sreeramakrishnan refused leave for a debate on the issue.

The RSS worker was hacked to death at Payyanur town in Kannur district, that has witnessed a series of clashes between ruling CPI(M) and RSS for the past one year.

Biju was an accused in a case relating to the killing of CPI(M) activist C V Dhanraj in 2016.
Chennai: Hours after an 8-year-old girl died in a private swimming pool on Saturday morning, a 24-year-old man drowned in YMCA pool in Nandanam on Saturday night. Police identified the deceased as Balasubramanian, a bank employee from Neelankarai.

He was working in an backoffice of an international bank in Porur and had gone to the YMCA Nandanam facility for swimming along with his friends on Saturday evening.

Police said the youth was not very familiar with swimming and was advised to stay the in shallow side of the pool. The water level there was around four feet. He was trying to be familiar with water when he reportedly drifted into the deeper end. His friend, who was swimming on the other side, suddenly noticed that Bala was missing, police said.

Friends and trainers together took Bala out of the water and to the nearest hospital after fist aid. Though the Saidapet hospital gave treatment, the medical team suggested taking him to Royapettah hospital where he was declared dead.

Saidapet police said that they were looking into the incident. We have to see if he was under supervision of any staff or not. We will have to check if he had any health problems, the police said.

Only on Saturday morning, 8-year-old girl PB Andrea, a class III student, had died in a private swimming pool in J.J. Nagar. She was attending a swimming class when the fatal incident took place.
Kulbhushan Jadhav, the 46-year-old former naval officer, has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court for alleged espionage and subversive activities. (Photo: AP)

New Delhi: With the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing the case of former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of being a spy, his friends continued to pray for him.

"The stay on execution has given us a ray of hope. But now everything depends on today's hearing. We are continuously praying that the judgement should be in Kulbhushan's favour. He is an ordinary and innocent man, he must be released," said Vandana Panwar, Kulbhushan Jadhav's friend.

"We gave a free trial to a terrorist like Kasab and Pakistan hasn't even revealed in what condition Kulbhushan is in. We hope we will get justice from the International Court of Justice and bring him back to India," Jadhav's friend Vijay Kanojiya said.

Kanojiya said there are almost 70,000 signatories that there should be a discussion at the White House regarding this case.

Praveen Bhoj another friend, said, "India has international support in this case. We hope that Kulbhushan gets justice. We thank the present government for pursuing this case so well."

The ICJ on May 9 had put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.

The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.
The ransomware has been identified a new variant of "WannaCry" that had the ability to automatically spread across large networks by exploiting a known bug in Microsoft's Windows operating system. (Photo: @fendifille/Twitter)

Thiruvananthapuram: Computers in two panchayat offices in Kerala were today disabled by the global ransomware cyber attack but no major damage was caused, the police said.

Four computers at Thariyathodu panchayat in Wayanad and two computers at Aruvappulam panchayat in Pathanamthitta district were hit by the cyber attack, Manoj Abraham, IG, Cyberdome told PTI here.

However, no major damage was caused or critical data lost. The computers got "locked", he said.

The Cyberdome, a technological research and development centre of Kerala Police, has issued an advisory on preventive steps to be taken to avert such attacks.

The official said the Cyberdome had anticipated such an attack and had taken various precautionary steps. A ransomware school and a special team were set up to monitor the situation, he said.

The Cyberdome has also alerted individuals and organisations about the crippling global ransomware 'WannaCry'.

The agency also issued certain guidelines for computer and internet users to prevent the cyberattack.

The Cyberdome experts have directed users to maintain updated antivirus software on all systems and check regularly for the integrity of the information stored in databases.

Over the weekend, the ransomware has hit systems in over 100 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyberattacks in history.
Activists of Joint Movement Committee protest on the issue of triple talaq at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. (Photo: PTI/File)

New Delhi: The government on Monday told the Supreme Court that it will come out with a law to regulate marriage and divorce among Muslims if triple talaq is held invalid and unconstitutional by the court.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar "If the practice of instant divorce (triple talaq) is struck down by the court, then Centre will bring a law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community."

Rohatgi's submission came when the court asked him what would be the remedies for a Muslim man to come out of a marriage if such practices are struck down.

Earlier in the day, the apex court bench also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, said it was keeping open the issues of practice of polygamy and 'nikah halala' among Muslims for adjudication in future, as the Centre insisted on judicial deliberations on these aspects as well.

"It may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future," the bench said.

The significant observation was made when Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' were also part of the order of a two-judge bench, which had referred to the Constitution bench the three issues including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.

"The scope of referring had all the three issues that was divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the two-judge bench," Rohatgi said.

When the AG asked the bench to make it clear that the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' are still open and would be dealt by other bench in future, the court clarified "it will be dealt in future."

Today was the third day of the hearing on a clutch of petitions challenging triple talaq, polygamy and 'nikah halala' which is going on before a bench comprising members of different religious communities including Sikh, Christian, Parsee, Hindu and Muslim.

During the last hearing, the apex court had observed that triple talaq is the "worst" and "not a desirable" form of dissolution of marriage among the Muslims, even though there were schools of thought which called it "legal".

The remark was made by the bench when senior lawyer Salman Khurshid referred to the various schools of thought and the stand of All India Muslim Personal Law Board that triple talaq was "abhorrent", yet valid.

The hearing last Friday also saw two veterans, jurist Ram Jethmalani and former Union Minister and Islamic scholar Arif Mohammad Khan, coming out all guns blazing against the practice of triple talaq.

Advocate Farha Faiz, a petitioner in the case who is opposing the practice, had also alleged that Muslim clerics were running a parallel judicial system like the trial courts and the high courts and the clerics were forcing Muslims not to go to the courts.

"Point taken, you have raised a very valid and good point," the bench had said.

The apex court has fixed a six-day schedule for hearing, in which three days are available for those challenging triple talaq and three days for those defending it.
Customers view prayer rugs at one of the carpet shops in the city. With Ramzan a fortnight away, carpet shops in the city have unveiled prayer rugs, known as Musalla. Majority of carpets on display in the city are imported from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Belgium and Kashmir. (Photo: DC)

Hyderabad: With Ramzan round the corner, the demand for imported kaleens (carpet) has increased. This year, whats trending is the chinar (Kashmiri leaf) design carpet. The carpets for flooring of mosques and also the one-metre-long Musallas for individual use are available in plenty.

Chinar is an exquisite collection of plush and profusely designed carpets that are available in textured patterns. The hand-woven designs to modern weaves in silk, nylon or polyster combined with wool reflect the elegance, skilled craft, and meticulous workmanship, said Md. Idrees Ahmed, a store owner.

Most of the carpets are imported from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Belgium and Kashmir. We are happy that the Kashmiri design carpets are being appreciated by many this year, as it has a complete feel-good factor. The design is simple and the chinar leaf drawn on the carpet is attracting many, he said.

Highlighting the importance of handmade carpets, Md. Idrees noted, These are always in demand. During the time of the Nizams, the prisoners in Warangal jail used to weave the carpets especially for Ramzan and they were in high demand. However, the demand reduced for handmade products because it took time for manufacture, and the payment by way of wages was huge.

The demand for skull caps too has grown this year as the Old City market has accommodated various caps such as Omani caps, Turkey caps, Ajmeri caps, Rizvi caps, Haqqani caps etc.

These caps range from Rs 100 to Rs 500; and they are being preferred by many youths. Apart from following tradition, these caps are also a style statement, said a cap store owner.
President Pranab Mukherjee delivers the first Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Memorial Lecture in Jaipur on Monday. (Photo: PTI)

Jaipur: President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday asked lawmakers to improve the quality of debates in legislatures, saying India cannot remain a role model to the world simply because of the size of its electorate.

Delivering the first Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Memorial Lecture in Jaipur, President Mukherjee lauded the parliamentary democracy in India and said Parliament's functioning is based on 3D's -- Debate, Dissension and Decision.

He said once a decision is taken by majority in the House, it becomes the decision of India.

"You cannot remain the role model to the world simply because of the size of your electorate," he said.

The president asked lawmakers of Parliament and state Assemblies to improve the quality of deliberation, discussion and debate in the House, saying people have vested power and privileges in them.

"...What is applicable to Parliament is applicable to Legislative Assemblies in all 29 states," he said.

"There is a huge power and responsibilities vested in MPs and MLAs of all 29 states by 800 million people. If we do not use these power and privileges we have to blame ourselves and not anybody else," said Mukherjee, who has over four decades of experience as a lawmaker.

The president recalled prominent political personalities in the early days of Indian politics and asked the lawmakers to continue the tradition established by them.

Earlier, Sikkim Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling was conferred with the first Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Life Time Achievement Honour in Public Service by President Mukherjee.

The president lauded Chamling's contribution to his small state and said it's emerging as a role model for other states.

Those present on the occasion included Rajasthan's Governor Kalyan Singh, his counterpart in Punjab VP Singh Badnore, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and former chief minister Ashok Gehlot.

The programme began with the opening address of Gehlot who said Shekhawat, who was the vice-president between 2002 and 2007, was a warmhearted and fearless political leader who took birth in a very simple family and was elevated to the post of vice president of the country.
The Hague (Netherlands): Pakistan on Monday, while presenting its argument in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the Kulbhushan Jadhav death sentence case, said that the Indian Naval officer has 150 days to appeal for clemency. Jadhav, the alleged Indian spy, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court earlier this month.

We are committed to the path of peaceful resolution despite provocation. Despite being ambushed in appearing before the court within a few days, we are here. We will not let anyone malign our position. Unfortunately, India has seen it fit to appeal to the ICJ for political theatre. We are disappointed that India did not take the opportunity to be transparent. India has been given a copy of Jadhavs passport with a Muslim name which was seized with him. India could have denied that the passport is genuine, said Dr Muhammad Faizal, representing Pakistans case at the ICJ.

We fully understand that the court at this stage is not expected to understand the merits of the case. However, it is important to hear the extracts of confessions of Jadhav. Around 6 minutes of the video were public. While the court has preferred to not show the video here, the video is available on public domain. We have left to viewers to decide if the confession was extracted, he added.

A period of 150 days is available for the petitioner to appeal for clemency. An expedited hearing is the approach Pakistan would like the court to adopt. We would not like the court to waste its resources in scoring political points, the representative said.

India did not provide any substantial material to the court, given to it by us. It has just given our cover letter which sought Indias assistance to provide bank account details, while the names provided by Jadhav to Pakistani authorities were not given, Pakistan counsel QC Qureshi said.

What Indias application has sought to do is to introduce a newspaper article which is not on record in Pakistan, which is a plain misrepresentation, Qureshi said, referring to an article quoted by India in a Pakistani newspaper which stated that there was 'irrefutable' evidence against Jadhav, and that it would not be overturned.

Qureshi claimed that India's silence on the accusations Pakistan has made against Jadhav is 'deafening'.

What has India done to establish that Jadhav is an Indian national? He is in possession of a palpably false passport, the Pakistani consul said.

Refuting Indias claims that the death sentence to Jadhav was a violation of Article 36, Pakistan said the Article could have not be applicable when the so mentioned national is a spy sent by the other state.

"India could have provided his passport with his original name, or provided his birth certificate; both of which India did not," he argued.

While seriously allegations have been made against a member state of UN, not one bit of evidence has been provided by India against our allegations that Jadhav is a terrorist. The theory that Jadhav was kidnapped to extract a confession is at best far fetched, Qureshi said to the bench.

The Pakistan counsel said that the country had said that consular access would be given to India based on a 2008 agreement. However, India wants it under the provisions of the Vienna Convention. Pakistan said Jadhav is ineligible for consular access under the 2008 agreement.

There is no real risk of irreparable damage in a day or two as suggested by India. I would still suggest an expedited hearing, Qureshi said to the bench.

Signing off on a sarcastic note, he added, I am honoured to represent Pakistan in a hearing that was unnecessary.

Earlier on Monday, India had presented its case in the matter, urging the ICJ to suspend the death sentence awarded to Jadhav. It had also raised its fear that Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before the trial ends.

Arguing against the death penalty, Indian counsel Harish Salve had said that Jadhav was framed on the basis of confessional statements obtained forcefully from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody.

We want appropriate legal representation for Jadhav, India told the UN's main judicial body which has stayed his death sentence. India also accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna Convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

Pakistan had on March 3, 2016, arrested Jadhav and its military court sentenced him to death on May 8 on allegations of espionage and subversive activities.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. India acknowledges that Jadhav had served with the Navy but denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

The ICJ was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.
An image of Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav is shown during a press conference by Pakistan's army spokesman and the Information Minister. (Photo: AP/File)

New Delhi: As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday is set to hear the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of espionage, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi has expressed optimism saying that India has the upper hand in the matter.

"I think India has a very good case on violation of all international norms and treaties," Rohatgi told ANI.

He further reiterated that Pakistan's trial of Jadhav had rejected all international laws as well as human rights, as he was tried in a military court without the presence of an attorney.

The ICJ on May 9 put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.

The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.

India earlier contended that it was not informed of Jadhav's detention until long after his arrest and that Pakistan failed to inform the accused of his rights, an official release from the ICJ said.

India further said that, in violation of the Vienna Convention, the authorities of Pakistan were denying it its right of consular access to Jadhav, despite its repeated requests. It's also pointed out that India learned about the "death sentence against Jadhav from a press release."

India submitted that it had information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy, and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan" on March 3, 2016, and that the Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on March 25, 2016.

India also asked the ICJ to declare the decision illegal being violative of international law and treaty rights and restrain Pakistan from acting in violation of the Vienna Convention and international law by giving effect to the sentence or the conviction in any manner, and directing it to release the convicted Indian National forthwith, if Pakistan is unable to annul the decision.

Pakistan had claimed that Jadhav was arrested from the Baluchistan province last year. A military court sentenced him to death, alleging he was involved in espionage and anti-national activities. Pakistan also claimed that he was "a serving officer in the Indian Navy."

India out rightly denied the claims, saying Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was running a business, and adding he was a retired Navy officer.

Pakistan has turned down 16 requests from India for consular access to Jadhav.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) last month for his alleged involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan.
New Delhi: Till Sunday evening, Pakistan was yet to take a clear stand on its participation in the crucial International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing on Kulbhushan Jadhav that will take place on Monday at The Hague.

Mr Jadhav, a former Indian naval officer, had been sentenced to death about a month ago by a Pakistani military court on grounds of espionage and sabotage. India has contested the move and dragged Pakistan to the ICJ on May 8 for refusing consular access to Mr Jadhav and for violating the Vienna Convention on consular relations.

Both countries had last clashed at the ICJ 18 years ago, with the previous instance relating to shooting down of Pakistans maritime reconnaissance aircraft Atlantique by the IAF in the Kutch region on August 10, 1999, killing 16 people on board shortly after the Kargil conflict.

Pakistan claimed the plane was brought down in its air space and sought $60 million in damages but the court dismissed the claim. On March 29, Pakistan recognised ICJs jurisdiction but specified this would not apply to national security.

Pakistan may not accept ICJ jurisdiction

Pakistan treats the Kulbhushan Jadhav case as a matter of national security and this has triggered speculation that it may refuse to accept the ICJs jurisdiction in this case.

Senior lawyer Harish Salve will represent the government of India at the ICJ on Monday. The ICJ had last week stated that India seeks the following reliefs: relief by way of immediate suspension of the sentence of death awarded to the accused, relief by way of restitution in interregnum by declaring that the sentence of the military court arrived at, in brazen defiance of the Vienna Convention rights, restraining Pakistan from giving effect to the sentence awarded by the military court, and directing it to take steps to annul the decision of the military court as may be available to it under the law in Pakistan...
Patna: RJD Chief Lalu Yadav has planned to hold a rally in August to expose BJPs failure. Mr Yadav also urged all non-NDA parties to form an alliance at the national level to stop BJP from coming to power in 2019.

Mr Yadav further said that the rally will be attended by most of the non-NDA parties including Congress President Sonia Gandhi, Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, West Bengal and Osidha Chief Ministers and former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda.

BJP has failed on all fronts and through this rally, we will expose their entire lie, RJD chief Lalu Yadav said in Patna on Sunday.

However, the JD(U) which is running the grand secular alliance government in Bihar with RJD and Congress has not yet confirmed their plans regarding attending the public meeting. Speaking on the issue JD(U) state president Basisth Narayan Singh said that the party will decide about attending the political event at the right time.

Sources said the JD(U) has been trying to maintain a safe distance from the RJD ever since BJP presented documents regarding Mr Yadavs involvement in the land scam.
The man challenged the trial court order, saying it had not considered the fact that his marriage with the woman was null and void from the beginning (Representational India)

New Delhi: A married woman is entitled to benefits and protection under the domestic violence law until her husband gets a decree of nullity of their marriage, a Delhi court has said.

The sessions court made the law clear to a man, who had challenged a magisterial court's order directing him to pay an interim maintenance of Rs 5,000 to his estranged wife on the grounds that the woman was already married before marrying him.

"I am of the view that until and unless the man did not get decree of nullity of marriage with the woman, as divorce petition under the Hindu Marriage Act has already been filed, she is entitled for benefits and protection under Domestic Violence Act as the Act is benevolent in favour of a woman," Additional Sessions Judge Jagdish Kumar said.

The court dismissed the man's appeal, saying there was no illegality, infirmity or impropriety in the order of trial court and it was an interim order of maintenance which could be modified at the time of final disposal of main petition.

The man challenged the trial court order, saying it had not considered the fact that his marriage with the woman was null and void from the beginning as she was already married to some other person.

To this, the sessions court said even if this fact was accepted for the sake of an argument, the marriage of the woman with the other person "may be nullity ab-initio" under the provisions of the Hindu Marriage Act as she asserted that he was her cousin brother.

"Then the marriage between the appellant man and the woman may subsist. Though, it is not within the jurisdiction of this court to give any opinion regarding the nullity or subsisting of marriage between the man and the woman but I am giving the observation only on the basis of averment in pleading, if same is admitted to be correct and same are only for the sake of argument," the judge said.

The woman, in her petition seeking maintenance from her husband, had said that she got married to him in March 2013 and alleged that the man and his parents started harassing her just after few days of marriage.

She also alleged that her husband and in-laws started demanding dowry and she was thrown out of her matrimonial house two months after marriage, i.e. in May 2013 after which she approached the court.

The man, in his appeal, also placed on record a marriage certificate of the woman with the other person purportedly issued by the registrar of Hindu marriages in Ghaziabad.

The court, however, said mere production of a marriage certificate issued under the Special Marriage Act in support of her claimed first marriage was not sufficient.
Amritsar: An intruder from Pakistan was shot dead by the Border Security Force early today in Bariyala in Gurdaspur Sector.

BSF personnel spotted some suspicious movement near the fence along the Indo-Pak border, a BSF official said.

He said despite repeated warning by the BSF personnel the intruder kept on marching towards the Indian side after which the troops opened fire at him.

The official said that the area where the incident took place is surrounded by the Ravi River from three sides.

Asked if any recovery has been made from the spot where the intruder was shot dead, he said the search operation in the area was under progress.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday turned down urgent hearing of Calcutta High Court judge Justice CS Karnans plea to recall his arrest order in contempt of court case.

SC slammed Karnan for repeatedly filing plea seeking quashing of the apex court order. You are wasting court's time, will hear plea on the assigned date, said the Supreme Court.

On Friday, Karnans lawyer had requested the apex court bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Jagdish Singh Khehar, to stay the arrest order.

Justice Karnan's lawyer told the top court that he wanted to tender an unconditional apology, but the apex court registry was not accepting his application.

Last week, SC had sentenced Justice Karnan to six months in jail while holding him guilty of contempt of court. It was a landmark ruling, as it is for the first time ever that a sitting High Court judge has been sentenced. The apex court had ordered the immediate arrest of Karnan.

Justice Karnan has been accused of circulation of disparaging letters against sitting High Court judges of the Madras High Court. He also allegedly wrote about Supreme Court judges in his letters to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).
In a major injustice, the state transport corporation had not settled the PF and pension to the drivers who retired in the past three years.

Chennai: More than 70 per cent of the buses went off the roads in the state on Sunday after the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation (TNSTC) unions advanced their indefinite strike that was to commence from Monday.

The union had called for the strike after talks with the government had failed. Around 51,800 buses of the total 74,000 in the state have stopped functioning now. The rest of the buses will reach the depots by tonight, said M Chandran, CITU vice president at 7 pm on Sunday.

Transport Minister M.R. Vijayabhaskar assured us that the problem will be solved in three months. However, he is not willing to accept our demand of a written assurance, he added.

Their demands are multiple  settling provident fund, issuing monthly pensions and paying insurance in post offices. Narrating their ordeals, an MTC bus driver told DC, Our provident fund cut from the salaries remains unpaid to the banks. It is the same with the insurance at the post offices.

In a major injustice, the state transport corporation had not settled the PF and pension to the drivers who retired in the past three years. None of the 10,000 odd drivers who retired in past three years were settled their financial dues. How can they feed their families? Many have even died, Chandran said.
Lucknow: The maiden session of the newly elected UP Assembly began on a stormy note on Monday with opposition members throwing paper balls at Governor Ram Naik during his address and marshals trying to dodge them with files.

The customary address of the governor to the joint sitting of the two Houses of the state legislature was drowned in the uproar created by the opposition.

Throughout the governor's 35-minute address, SP legislator Rajesh Yadav blew a whistle to ensure that his address is not heard. All the while, others threw paper balls, some of which hit the governor despite marshals trying their best to shield him.

#WATCH: Opposition creates ruckus on first day of assembly session over law and order,blow whistles & throw paper balls at Governor Ram Naik pic.twitter.com/UQuq5dyJK2  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 15, 2017

Slogan-shouting opposition members trooped into the Well with banners, placards, donning caps and raising anti-government slogans.

When the governor started reading out his address, the entire opposition comprising members of Samajwadi Party, Congress and BSP started slogan shouting against the government over the issue of law and order.

A BSP placard read "police pit rahi thano me, Yogi tere zamane me" (police getting beaten up in Yogi's regime), "goraksha ke naam par gundai band karo" (stop hooliganism in the name of cow protection)".

SP legislators also sought to corner the government on law and order issues.

Congress too joined the opposition with slogans like - "Kanoon Vyastha Dhwasth Hai, Sarkar Bucharkhane, teen talaq me vyast hai" (law and order is in a shambles, government is busy in issues like slaughter house and triple talaq).

The governor was flanked by Dixit and Chairman of the Legislative Council Ramesh Yadav.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was present when the governor read the 84-page address despite the bedlam.

The address is a note prepared by the government highlighting its achievements.

For the first time, the proceedings were telecast live by Doordarshan.

After the BJP came to power in the state, a decision was taken to telecast live the proceedings of the House so that people could benefit.

"Sara Uttar Pradesh dekh raha hai aap ko (the entire Uttar Pradesh is watching you)," a visibly annoyed governor told the shouting members, who kept throwing papers at the podium and creating din.

"Sadan ki garima banaye rakhiye" (Maintain dignity of the House," the governor appealed to the agitated members, but it went unheeded.

The opposition SP and BSP have decided to take on the Yogi Adityanath government over the issue of law and order.

Later talking to reporters, SP Legislature Party leader Ram Govind Chowdhury said law and order has collapsed in the BJP regime.

"Rape and murders have increased. Even incidents of rape with children have gone up...This government is a failure," Chowdhury charged.

Congress Legislature Party leader Ajay Pratap Lallu also tried to put the state government on the dock over the issue of law and order.

"Crime in the state has increased and state government has failed to take any concrete action against law breakers," he charged.
Hyderabad: The State Human Rights Commission on Monday ordered the Commissioner of Police in Vijayawada to submit a detailed report on the death of a girl, Saisri, who died of bone marrow cancer. The girls mother Sumasri alleged that her husband Shiva Kumar, with the help of MLA Bonda Uma, encroached on their house. Child Rights Activist Achyuta Rao filed a petition on this matter with the commission.

Achyuta Rao of Balala Hakkula Sangham NGO stated in his petition to the commission that Saisris father Maram Shiva Kumar, though he was rich, allegedly did not spend money for the girls treatment. The child had pleaded with him to help her with the treatment, and her mother Sumasri tried to sell the house which was registered in the childs name, to find money for the treatment.

But, Shiva Kumar, with the assistance of his brothers and support of MLA Vijayawada Central Bonda Uma, allegedly stopped her from selling the house. The MLAs men later encroached into her house, due to which she could not sell the house and bear the childs treatment. This led to the childs death on Sunday, the rights commission has been told.

The act of the girls father Shiva Kumar, his brothers, Bonda Uma and his associates is a severe violation of the rights of a child, Achyuta Rao said in his petition. He appealed to the commission to direct the Vijayawada police commissioner to probe the matter and book a criminal cases against the accused.
Chennai: Commuters' loss is the gain of auto rickshaw drivers and cab aggregators. On Monday, when majority of the MTC buses, the lifeline of the people of Chennai, were off the roads, auto rickshaw and cab drivers made most of people's agony by fleecing them.

Regular commuters complained that auto rickshaws and cabs charged more than 50 per cent of the regular fare from them, cashing in on the situation.

Though cab aggregators like Ola and Uber claimed they pressed in more vehicles into service, the peak pricing was applied to most customers who booked vehicles during morning and evening peak hours.

For instance, Vishal C, who works in T Nagar, spent nearly `200 to reach his work place from Guindy on Monday against the regular fare of `70. And Vishal was not alone. Several regulars said they paid more than 100 per cent and in some cases even 200 per cent more for travel on cabs.

Since there was persistent demand for cabs, a ride from Guindy to T Nagar cost me `195, which would otherwise be just `70, he said. And Monday was the day for auto drivers who made business through commuters' need. The fares from Tambaram to Vandalur Zoo, which is a 6.5 km distance is generally Rs 150.

However, the autos today charged `400 today, said C Santhosh, who works at Vandalur. Share autos also had their share of profit, as they too overcharged the commuters who rued that the price was two times more than usual. Private buses that were roped in large numbers at major bus depots became the only option to the people, who cannot afford the application-based cabs. And the case of those who travelled from Central and Southern districts to Chennai was even worse. Firoz Khan, who travelled from Tiruchy to Chennai on Sunday night, had to shell out Rs 2,000 to travel in a private Volvo bus.
Hyderabad: TPCC chief N. Uttam Kumar Reddy on Monday promised that the Congress, if voted to power in 2019 elections, would ensure procurement of agriculture produce at higher rates.

Addressing a farmers meeting at Nagarkurnool, Mr Reddy said that the procurement of agriculture products would be given the highest priority by the future Congress government.

He accused the NDA government at the Centre and the TRS government in the state of neglecting the agriculture sector.

He reminded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his speeches before the 2014 elections, had promised to implement the M.S. Swaminathan Committee report that recommended that agriculture products be procured at remunerative prices.

The formula adopted by the Swaminathan Committee was cost of cultivation plus 50 per cent profit margin. However, the recommendations were not implemented which has pushed farmers into a major crisis, Mr Reddy said.
Naga Shiromani, who lives close to the Dharna Chowk, gives drinking water to thirsty activists demanding revival of the Chowk at Indira Park in Hyderabad on Monday. Ms Shiromani said that she never had a problem with the protests at the Dharna Chowk. (Photo: S. Surender Reddy)

Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Monday met Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan at Raj Bhavan, and briefed him about the violent incidents that took place earlier in the day.

According to CMO sources, Mr Rao told the Governor that the state government has not yet taken a final decision on shifting Dharna Chowk but some parties and individuals, with vested interests, were trying to create law and problems in Hyderabad in the guise of agitations against shifting of the Chowk.

Mr Rao told the Governor that locals near Indira Park had moved the High Court seeking relocation of the Chowk and the court had asked the police to consider their request and suggest alternative locations.

For this reason, the police is not permitting agitations at Dharna Chowk for the last two months. The police has suggested four new locations for the Dharna Chowk on four sides on the outskirts of the city so that they would not be any traffic or other problems for the citizens. However, some parties and individuals are adamant that Dharna Chowk remains at Indira Park. This shows they want to create trouble and violate court orders, Mr Rao is learnt to have told the Governor.

Mr Rao also urged the Governor to expedite the process of resolving pending bifurcation-related issues between TS and AP since the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014, will complete three years in 15 days on June 2.

As per the Act, the Centre will intervene to resolve the pending issues only for three years and after that period, the responsibility of resolving pending issues through negotiations lies with both the states.

Since Mr Narasimhan is the Governor for both the states, Mr Rao urged him to ask AP government to come for talks.

Violence instigated on TRS orders: Opposition

The entire Opposition, in one voice, condemned the police department as well as the ruling party, accusing them of instigating the violence at Indira Park against the activists demanding revival of the Dharna Chowk.

TJAC chairman M. Kodandaram said such blatant misuse of official machinery against the activists was never seen earlier.

He said that the police permitted some persons who claimed to be locals to stage a dharna against them.

Prof. Kodandaram also condemned the police for the lathicharge. How can police, in civil clothes, sit in the opposite camp and attack us? We squarely blame the city police for this, the TJAC chairman said.

He said the Opposition unity will continue and they will plan more such agitations against governments anti-people policies in the future too.

TPCC president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy, who led a team of Congress workers from Gandhi Bhavan to Indira Park accused the Chief Minister of suppressing democratic dissent by the Opposition and denying their right to protest at the Dharna Chowk.

Mr Uttam Kumar Reddy said: How can the government organise a counter protest by the so-called locals and instigate attack on the protesters?

Former MP V. Hanumantha Rao said he knew the locals for the last few decades; they had never raised any objection to dharnas. They suddenly coming out openly and attacking protesters points it to be the handiwork of the ruling TRS, he said.

CPM leader Tammineni Veerabhadram said that the police and government had at the last minute permitted protesters at the Dharna Chowk but played foul by encouraging locals in order to incite trouble.

CPI leader Chada Venkata Reddy said though the government had put a number of obstacles right from denying permission and later allowing it, the Opposition had successfully voiced its protest.

At the end of the day, it was proven that the agitation by the so-called locals was orchestrated by the police and the ruling TRS, Mr Venkata Reddy said.
New Delhi: Centre said on Monday that there has been no report of major breach in security due to ransomware WannaCry except some isolated incidents. This even as there were reports that 'WannaCry' spread globally was slowing down.

However, experts were are on high alert fearing second round of ransomware cyber attacks. There is no major impact in India unlike other countries. We are keeping a close watch. As per the information received so far, there have been isolated incidents in limited areas in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, said IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. He said the systems run by the National Informatics Centre were secured and running smoothly and a cyber coordination centre will start operating from next month to take precautions against such attacks.

On reports of networks of a few banks being compromised, the minister said he had no such information.

Separately some reports said that ransomware had infected 10 standalone computers of West Bengal state electricity distribution company. Computers in two panchayat offices in Kerala were disabled by the ransomware but no major damage was caused. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, secretary Aruna Sundararajan told a news agency the government was constantly monitoring the situation and that a few stand-alone computers of a police department were back in action after being infected over the weekend. Indias National Informatics Centre, which builds and manages almost all government websites, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, a premier research institute that has built supercomputers, have actively installed patches to immunise their Windows systems, she said.
Throughout the state, about 80 to 90 per cent of the buses did not run, causing immense hardships to the people.

Chennai: The state government claimed operating 75 per cent of buses were operated on Monday, but public transport was heavily hit as most of the workers took part in the strike. Throughout the state, about 80 to 90 per cent of the buses did not run, causing immense hardships to the people.

Services in suburbs from Tambaram and Avadi were severely hit as the addition of three train services did not help to carry the heavy load of commuters who used the government buses. The strike hit normal life throughout the state, but private buses helped commuters in cities like Tiruchy. At places like Chennai and its suburbs where there are no regular private buses, people had to rely on heavily packed electric trains, autos, share autos and call taxis which charged double or triple than the normal rates.

Train passengers from various parts of the state who got down at Tambaram were stranded since there were no buses towards Guduvanchery or Chengalpattu. The few private buses that were operated from Tambaram stopped their services from 8 pm and people had to rely on autos and share autos paying double or triple than normal. Some of the train passengers from the delta districts who were waiting for a long time at Tambaram wondered why private companies are not allowed to operate in Chennai and its suburbs.
Marshals protect UP Governor Ram Naik from paper balls thrown by agitating MLAs during the first sitting of the 17th UP Assembly on Monday. (Photo: PTI)

Lucknow: The first session of the state legislature of the Yogi Adityanath government began on a stormy note with several firsts.

Samajwadi members, whose numbers had been enhanced because of the joint session of the state legislative, threw paper balls at Governor Ram Naik, all throughout his 35-minute address to the state legislature.

The Marshals had to create a human wall in front of the Governor to prevent the paper balls from reaching him.

The SP members, donning red caps, blew whistles throughout and shouted slogans against the Yogi government due to which the entire speech of the Governor was drowned in uproar and nothing could be heard.

The Governor even deviated from his written speech and said, Sara Uttar Pradesh dekh raha hai aap ko (the entire UP is watching you now) as the proceedings of the State Assembly were telecast for the first time on Doordarshan on Monday.

However, the SP members remained unfazed and most of the young MLAs and MLCs continued to stand on the benches and shout slogans like Rajyapal aankhen kholo, apradh badha hai, kuchh to bolo.

BJP MLAs  most of them first timers  did not react to the Opposition ruckus and remained quietly seated. None of the ministers protested at the noisy scenes either.

The BSP and Congress MLAs, on the other hand, did not join the slogan-shouting but held forth banners decrying the Yogi government.

The Vidhan Parishad also witnessed stormy scenes and the upper house was adjourned within six minutes.

Mr Yadav did not greet the Chief Minister or other opposition leaders. He sat with the MLAs even though he is an MLC.

His estranged uncle Shivpal Yadav came alone and occupied the seat behind Akhilesh but the two did not even acknowledge each other. Outside the state assembly, there was more drama when one MLA arrived in a bullock cart while another opted for an e-rickshaw.

Assembly clock turns saffron

Time has changed and the clock installed in the Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha reflected this on Monday. The rim of the clock is now saffron.

It is common knowledge that UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who wears saffron robes, prefers saffron in his surroundings too. The towels kept on his chairs are saffron and even the upholstery in his home and office are taking on shades of saffron.

Though none of the Vidhan Sabha officials were willing to comment on the orange clock, one official said, We simply got the rim changed and painted it saffron. We hope the ruling party likes it.

Saffron was also the colour that most members wore in the House. The women MLAs in the BJP came in orange and yellow saris while the men wore kurtas in various hues of saffron and yellow.

The overbearing presence of saffron, with the BJP at 325 members in the House of 403, did not deter the Samajwadi members who all wore red caps.
Hyderabad: The Unicef and the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS) will jointly take up a baseline survey across the state ahead of launching the Mission Bhagiratha project.

Chief secretary S.P. Singh on Monday said that the survey is to assess the prevailing drinking water situation in villages and how the Mission Bhagiratha would transform this situation after it comes into operation.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has set a deadline of December this year to complete the project.
A view of garabage, pastic waste and other wastes strewn across the pushkara ghat at Basar on the banks of river Godavari. (Photo: DC)

Hyderabad: Ghats constructed at considerable expense by the state government for the convenience of pilgrims for the Godavari and Krishna Pushkaralus lie in utter neglect across the state, just a year after some of the ghats were constructed.

These public areas for ritual baths and other observances are not regularly cleaned by the irrigation department or local bodies, which has led to accumulation of plastic and other waste, making it not only a health problem, but an eyesore for pilgrims visiting the ghats.

It is the same situation in all the pushkara ghats - especially the one at the famed Gnana Saraswathi Devi temple at Basar in Nirmal district on the banks of the Godavari, and the ghat on the banks of the Krishna River near the Jogulamba temple in Jogulamba district constructed for the Krishna Puskaralu.

Not just the old ghat but even the newly constructed one at Basar is littered with plastic and other waste and piles of garbage.

Complaints are coming in from pilgrims. Municipal Administration Minister K T Rama Rao received a complaint about the garbage strewn all over the ghat in Basar from a resident of Uppal. The minister immediately told the Nirmal district collector to clean up the place. Kindly visit and address the issue the minister tweeted.

Endowments Minister A Indrakaran Reddy, who also received a similar complaint, informed the Collector who in turn faxed a letter to the executive engineer, irrigation, Nirmal, to remove the garbage at Basar.

Following the complaint, the government has alerted all district collectors to ensure that the ghats are clean. Problem is, everyone has forgotten about the ghats after the two pushkaralu. Its a fact that they are not cleaned, a senior official said.

Claiming that the festivals had been ignored in undivided Andhra Pradesh, the Telangana government had spent `600 crore for the Godavari pushkaralu in 2015 and `825.16 crore for the Krishna Pushkaralu in 2016, which occurs once in 12 years.

The state government constructed or renovated 106 pushkara ghats for the Godavari Pushkaralu held from July 14 to 25 in 2015 in undivided districts including Basar, Dharmapuri (Karimnagar), Kandakurthi (Nizamabad), Kaleswaram (Karimnagar) Mallakatta, Ramannagudem, Mangapet (Warangal) and Bhadrachallam (Khammam), for three crore pilgrims.

Ninety-four ghats were built and toilets and new roads constructed for the Krishna Pushkaralu, at Jurala, Beechpalli, Rangapur, Alampur, Nadi Agraharam, Chintarevula, Nandimalla, Jataprole, Somasila, Lingala in undivided Mahabubngar and Nagarjunasagar, Wadapally and other places in Nalgonda districts.

The government garnered much good will for its efforts which allowed smooth conduct of the rituals and bathing by lakhs of men, women and children. But there has been no maintenance of the ghats built with taxpayers money, as the local bodies responsible for the upkeep have neglected to do so.

Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao inaugurated the puskaralu in 2015 with a holy dip in Dharmapuri with his family. He also led the 12-day Krishna Pushkaralu on August 12, 2016, at Gondimalla pushakara ghat in undivided Mahabubnagar district.
Hyderabad: Telangana State has been ranked third in the country in receiving industrial investment proposals in March 2017 (worth Rs 7,268 crore from 43 industrial undertakings), according to data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

The data for March covers industrial entrepre-neurs memorandum (IEM) filed and letters of intent (LoI)/ direct industrial licenses (DILs) issued by the government.

While Gujarat topped the list at Rs 31,367 crore from 98 units, neighbouring AP stood sixth with Rs 2,223 crore from 33 units.

The Centre's Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) noted that both Telugu states have been performing better in attracting investments. AP was bifurcated in June 2014, and the department compiled the data from January 2015 to March 2017. AP dominated Telangana in overall investments in a calendar year in 2015 and 2016.

The data revealed that in calendar year 2015, TS got Rs 10,209 crore investments from 145 units while AP got Rs 21,300 crore from 135 units.

In 2016, TS attracted Rs 22,146 crore investments from 139 units, while AP got Rs 34,464 crore investments from 164 units.

However, in March 2017, TS surpassed AP. TS industry officials opined that AP held global investors meet in Vizag twice in which several MoUs were inked due to which it could attract higher investments than TS in a calendar year while TS is yet to hold such a meeting.

K.T. Rama Rao, Minister for Industries, said: The investments in Telangana have increased after the launch of TS-iPASS in June 2015, the online approval policy without any grills, wherein approvals are accorded within 15 days from the date of submission of application in a graft-free manner. Investment proposals more than doubled from Rs 10,209 crore in 2015 to Rs 22,146 crore in 2016. In March this year, we received thrice as many investments as of AP. We hope more investments flow in remaining months of 2017 as there are no power or infrastructure issues in Telangana now.

Mr Rao said the state government is planning to hold the first global investors meet in Hyderabad in November or December this year.

We aim for Rs 10 lakh crore investments at the global investors meet," Mr. Rao added.
TJAC chief Prof. Kodandaram shows a protester injured in the lathi-charge during the Chalo Indira Park protest march in Hyderabad on Monday. (Photo: DC)

Hyderabad: The TRS has blamed the Communists, the TJAC and its affiliates for Mondays violence at Dharna Chowk near Indira Park and demanded stringent action against the culprits.

Home minister Nayani Narasimha Reddy, IT minister K.T. Rama Rao and TRS MLC Karne Prabhakar flayed the Opposition for the violence, alleging that the parties were trying their best to save their base.

CPI and CPM activists attacked the locals. Opposition is scared that people, including farmers who are getting quality power, fertilisers etc., are not with them. Communists have lost base and they are struggling to hook on to some party, Mr Narasimha Reddy alleged.

The home minister said locals have been demanding shifting of Dharna Chowk in view of the problems faced by them. The police had given permission to hold a peaceful dharna, he said.

Elsewhere, Mr Rama Rao tweeted, There is a dearth of issues for the Opposition in Telangana. Try as they might to manufacture artificial dissent, it wont work in democracy.

The violence was deliberate and aimed at creating anarchy in the city, browbeat morning walkers and local residents opposing continuation of Dharna Chowk as it was causing huge inconvenience, said Mr Prabhakar, the TRS spokesperson.

He demanded TPCC chief N. Uttam Kumar Reddy, TD working president A. Revanth Reddy and CPM leader Tammineni Veerabhadram apologise to the people for the violence, saying that goons of their parties were behind it.

The issue is pending in the High Court. The court has to take a final decision. The government hasnt taken any decision, to either allow protests or not at this venue, Mr Prabhakar said.

He requested police to book cases against those who indulged in violence including attacks on morning walkers and local residents demanding Dharna Chowk.

The TRS MLC said locals around Indira Park have been opposing Dharna Chowk since the past 10 years and finally moved court. They have been pleading that it has become a big nuisance, causing traffic jam and disturbing peace in the locality. They want it to be shifted to another place. Why not wait till the court takes a decision? he asked.

Nod not given, protests only allowed, says cops

Hyderabad police officials said that they had officially not given permission to either group of protesters to gather at Dharna Chowk on Monday.

However, since there was an oral assurance from the protesters of peace being kept, the police allowed them to gather at the spot.

The Dharna Chowk Parirakshana Committee had not officially submitted any application seeking permission, hence we did not give any. However, they orally they assured us that everything would be peaceful. They said they wanted to express their opinion. So we allowed them to gather there. Normally, if they gather there without permission, we make arrests. This time we did not take anybody into preventive custody on the assurance that peace will be kept, said Central Zone deputy commissioner of police D. Joel Davis.

Senior officials said that they did not stop the counter protesters also. They were in small numbers and they told us that they wanted to express their grievances as well. Hence we did not stop them too, said police commissioner Mahender Reddy.

The agitators alleged that the decision of the police to allow both parties at the same place paved the way for the violence.
Chennai: Union Urban Development, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu has asked the TN government to opt for GIS mapping of properties to improve the revenue from out of property tax.

The GIS (Geographic Information System), he contended will help to check on the extent of properties including houses or hotels, malls or other commercial structures and evaluate the exact property tax due for the civic bodies.

The civic bodies may not hike the property tax rates but they can realise the sum due for them by adopting GIS, which is being followed in cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru to assess the property tax, Venkaiah advised.

Chennai, according to him, is facing huge problem in realising property tax and the GIS would help the civic authorities to improve their revenue without hiking the tax rates, he said while briefing the media here on Sunday.

He also advised real estate developers to fulfill their assurances while placing advertisements in newspapers and said, I am not asking builders to do anything out of the way. What you have promised, fulfill it. What you promised through prospectus, what you have promised through big, big colourful advertisements in newspapers, fulfill it, Mr. Venkaiah said.

I am not going to ask you what you (real estate developers) have not promised. What you promised like carpet area, show that. Whatever time you promised (for completion of project) stick to that, he said and remarked and warned builders that they would be fined or even prosecuted if they did not follow the rules.

Tamil Nadu would sanction three lakh houses in 2017-18 under the Central's Housing for All scheme. "Tamil Nadu Government today assured me that it will sanction three lakh houses during 2017-18. Because after 2017-18, I am not going to sanction... 2019-20 are election years and there will not be any time," the Minister who earlier presented a certificate to

Karaikudi Municipal Commissioner K. Rangaraj, for the civic body achieving open defecation free status.

Want stable govt in TN, says Venkaiah

BJP senior and Union Information and Broadcasting Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu said his party desired a stable government in Tamil Nadu and that it has not interfered in the internal affairs of the ruling AIADMK.

As far as the BJP is concerned, let me make it very clear that it will not interfere in the internal affairs of AIADMK. I did not hold any political discussion with the Chief Minister. Our stand is very clear. We want a stable government in TN. And the Centre is willing to support the state irrespective of which party is in power, he told.

He would be happy if the AIADMK factions come together and work for the welfare of the people. The Minister came down heavily on the DMK for its remarks.
India acted in an appropriately correct manner in boycotting the two-day Belt Road Forum conference in Beijing, attended by 29 nations, including the United States and Russia, that began on Sunday. Chinas awkwardly-named One Belt One Road policy for making deep inroads in the economic and political sphere in Africa, large swathes of Asia and Europe, is its most ambitious foreign policy initiative since the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949.

The policy is helmed personally by President Xi Jinping, who in Chinese iconography has officially passed into the realm of the greats, alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. As such, and given the scale and scope of OBOR  Beijing has pledged $100 billion to it over an undefined timespan  it was expected China would take on board the sovereignty and key political concerns of its neighbours in conceiving and executing the But this was not the case.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the high-profile segment of OBOR from Kashgar in Chinas Xinjiang province to Gwadar port in Balochistan, passes through Pakistan-occuped Kashmir, which is Indian territory captured by Pakistan in 1947. Indias objections relating to sovereignty concerns has simply been glossed over by China. There is poetic justice in the fact that the day the Beijing conference opened, public protests erupted in PoKs Gilgit-Baltistan region. Demonstrators called the highway being built under CPEC the road to ghulami (road to slavery). Also, in funding the Daimer-Bhasha dam, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Aga Khan Foundation had insisted a no-objection certificate be got from India, but China has had no such compunctions and its National Energy Administration has come forward with the financing.

It is a pity that the government has not brought the above facts to the public domain. New Delhi should have campaigned on these and other aspects that have a bearing on sovereignty. But all it did was to keep on hold until the last minute its decision on whether to participate in the OBOR conference or not.

It would have been appropriate for the government to explain to the public and all concerned that Indias reservations to OBOR arent linked to matters connected with transportation and infrastructure connectivity in the region and beyond, but to sensitive political and sovereignty concerns. It is for India to ponder how its claim on PoK will fare once the Chinese are ensconced in PoK with their road, dams and power projects, as well as military forces that would necessarily be present to guard the newly-created assets. The implications of this close cooperation between China and Pakistan against Indian interests are yet to be properly understood here.
The issue of triple talaq (divorce), a practice resorted to by some Muslim men to revoke their marriage, is currently engaging national attention. A Constitution bench of the Supreme Court has taken up the issue to judge its legal validity. Its scriptural roots are getting scrutinized and underlying ethical basis being debated.

Islamic law was the first to recognize the necessity of legally invalidating marriages that werent working. Much against the norms prevailing in medieval times where women were considered property of men and marriage a sacrament, Islamic Sharia recognized the man and woman as equal partners. The marriage itself was declared a contract. Islam invested the marriage with firm underpinnings in order to ensure stability of the relationship. Couples were advised to have mutual love (mawada) and kindness (rahmah) as two pillars of a durable partnership. Women were given right to Mahr (dower) and men were held the custodians of children. These were intended to keep the marriage going. Yet possibility of its revocation in the wake of maladjustment or incompatibility was not overlooked. Hence, divorce or talaq was provided as an instrument to end an inharmonious marriage even while clarifying that talaq was the most despicable among the permissible actions in the sight of God.

The Quran, the principal source of Islamic law and guidance, sets out an elaborate procedure for annulment of a marriage. It enjoins the couples locked in a defunct marriage to sort out differences with mutual consultation. Further on, it directs them to bring in elders to arbitrate affairs if the husband and the wife fail to resolve it among themselves. It then allows the husband to pronounce talaq twice with an intervening period of three tuhr (menstrual cycle). These are revocable. This was advised in order to provide the contending couples time to cool off and try for rapprochement. The third talaq was allowed after yet another period of tuhr which was irrevocable. The elaborate process was laid down in order to ensure continuity of a relationship that comes with a lot of emotional, biological, social and financial baggage.

But as conquests brought a variety of people, lands, cultures and social customs under the wide swath of an Islamic empire, jurists began to give out rulings as per exigencies of the time and society. Customs and laws mingled and merged. Practices did not always follow the legal theory. Battles and trade enhanced the mobility of the people. Under constant pressure, jurists began to validate three talaq as a firm annulment of the marriage. What was designated as a process, got reduced to an event.

Theological history testifies to the fact that a number of Muslim jurists have though dubbed the three talaq sinful, and despicable, consider it valid resulting in final repudiation of marriage. Some sources even attribute its irrevocable nature to a ruling from the second caliph Hazrath Umar. Yet another set of theologians doubt the veracity of the claims that it has found favour from founders of all the four major jurisprudential schools ie, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali. However, the sects like the Shias and the Ahle Hadith reject the practice and do not consider the three talaq uttered in a single sitting to be valid ground for repealing of marriage. They insist upon utterances to be spaced out by around 40 days. They argue that the concept of invalidation of the marriage with three rapidfire talaq does not conform to the Quranic term for Nikah (marriage) which has been described by the Holy Quran as Misaqan ghaliza or firm bond. Curiously, Muslim men among followers of Hanafi schooloverwhelming majority of Muslims in India being sowho regret their use of three talaq, approach the Ahle Hadith mosques or family court to rejoin their wives.

All that the debate and discourse over the issue has done till now is to convince the general Muslim masses of three talaq having no Quranic sanction and there being no legitimacy for unilateral and arbitrary wielding of the tool. If the Quran is to be any guide, a reconciliation attempt must precede talaq. Similarly, the women too could initiate proceeding for annulment of the marriage through another instrument called Khulaa.

The dawn of colonialism and advent of liberal thought ensured that the controversial nature of the issue would pop up every time the life of a woman was rendered miserable either due to whimsical use of the instrument or a ruling by a community court or panchayat where womans side was insufficiently heard. There have been instances wherein talaq was conveyed by telephone, sms, Whatsapp or ordinary letter and were considered sufficient for invalidation of the marriage. Often the men were in an inebriated state or did so in a fit of anger. Media has been selective in highlighting them. Liberals and feminist groups have found this to be utter mockery of the shariat and dubbed it antithetical to the Quranic principle of fairness and justice. Pleading against continuance of this practice inter alia and legitimacy it has come to acquire among clerics, Shayera Banu from Uttarakhand who is one such divorcee, has taken the matter to the Supreme Court.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board, founded in 1972 amid stirring over Uniform Civil Code, has been leading the opposition against any kind of interference in the Muslim Personal Law. The Board, an NGO, shot into prominence over Shah Bano case (during 1984-86) when the Rajiv Gandhi Government brought in a legislation to undo a ruling by the apex court over the issue of alimony to a Muslim divorcee. But it is criticized for doing little to bring about awareness against the abhorrent practice within the community. Leading jurists, be they Muslims or otherwise, argue that any judicial ban is not the way to any meaningful reform and cite the cases of bigamy still being practiced among Hindus despite a legal ban. For reforms to be popular, it is argued, they must come from within, not without.

But the majority of Muslim countries have brought in reforms. Legislation has aligned the procedure of talaq along the Quranic principles of divorce where it can only be a negotiated dissolution, not a unilateral and arbitrary one.
Just over a week ago we learned that liberal-centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron had been elected President of France. He had overwhelmingly won the second round run-off against nationalist Marine Le Pen, with some 65 per cent of the vote. Let's be clear, this is unequivocally good news for Europe and for France  or at least for the time being.

First Europe: Mr Macron fought his campaign on an unashamedly pro-European platform. When he gave speeches, behind him on the platform were the French tricolour and the European Union's golden stars. At his victory parade the European anthem was proudly played. This was in stark contrast to Ms Le Pen.

Ms Le Pen chose to play on people's fears of economic and social change. She presented a false prospectus, claiming that security could only be assured by the destruction of Europe's single market and single social space. Her programme of economic protectionism and narrow nationalism was profoundly defeatist, as well as profoundly wrong. If each nation retreats into its own silo, looking only to its own interests, all nations will be worse off; politically, culturally and economically.

Mr Macron understands that in today's globalised world the European model  the tripartite combination of political liberty, social solidarity and economic prosperity  can only be preserved and pursued if Europe coheres. He has proposed a much closer European economic cooperation  a common European fiscal policy. He has mentioned a Buy European policy in public procurement. He favours greater integration of environmental and social regulation. The point is not whether these policies may be right or wrong  they are largely right  but rather that Mr Macron sees Europe as part of the solution, not part of the problem. We can look forward then to a renewed emphasis on European unity from France, one of the most important players in the European Union.

It may be added that Mr Macron considers Britains decision to quit the EU as certainly harmful to the UK and potentially to the EU as well. Entirely justifiably, he will therefore be firm in ensuring that the benefits of EU membership are not extended to a state that leaves. European cohesion requires nothing less.

Although Mr Macron was generally supportive of British economic liberalism, the UK can expect no special favours from Mr Macron during the Brexit negotiations.

Then consider France: The opinion polls had predicted a higher vote for Ms Le Pen, somewhere in the region of 40 per cent. In the event she achieved barely a third. The fact only two regions voted by a majority for Ms Le Pen, and then only by the smallest of margins, was a deep disappointment for her and her entourage. One of the partys stars, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, Ms Le Pen's niece, has now decided to leave politics. Ms Le Pens failure to fulfil expectations is also leading to ructions inside the Front National. There are proposals for a profound transformation of the party, though these are likely to meet stiff resistance. For the far-right to be in deep disarray, after having set the tone of political discourse in France for some time, can only be good for French democracy.

But Mr Macrons victory may also lead to ructions elsewhere. Mr Macron was elected without the backing of a major political party. Although he had been the minister of the economy and finance in the socialist government, he resigned from his post and party affiliation in 2015. He founded his own loose party En Marche! (Moving Forward), but it does not have either the well-established structures or deep roots of the traditional parties. For the first time since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, there was no candidate in the second round from either the moderate-left or the moderate-right. In fact, the combined vote of Benoit Hamon, the candidate of the moderate-left Socialist Party, and Francois Fillon, the candidate of the conservative-right Republicans, in the first round amounted to only just over 25 per cent. It seems that the liberal-centre, a major force in French politics from the 1870s to the 1950s, has been resurrected.

Or has it? Although Mr Macron won convincingly, more than half his vote came from supporters who would have preferred another candidate. Their prime motivation for supporting him was to prevent a victory for Ms Le Pen. This could be a problem for Mr Macron. On June 11, the first round of elections to the National Assembly, the French Parliament, will take place. The second round run-off takes place a week later. Enthusiastic and optimistic as the En Marche! candidates are, they lack experience. Around 95 per cent of them are not deputies (National Assembly members). More than half of them have never stood for election to the National Assembly before. For the most part they do not have experienced party machines behind them. Will their enthusiasm and optimism be sufficient to attract support from electors whose support for Mr Macron is only lukewarm?

If it is not, then Mr Macron's presidency could end in tears. Although the French economy is highly advanced  its workers are some of the most productive in the world  it suffers from high unemployment. Mr Macron's solution is essentially economic liberalism. He wants to lower corporate tax rates, which he considers are holding back investment and growth. Rather than impose uniform employment conditions, he would leave it to firms and employees to negotiate specific deals on working hours and pay. He would seek to lower employers' compulsory contributions to social funds to lower the cost of taking on workers.

Whatever the merits of these policies, they are likely to lead to a confrontation. The French left, particularly the hard-left, is not shy of taking to the streets to defend what it considers to be inalienable rights to social protections; and it has already done so. The day after Mr Macron's victory there were demonstrations organised by the hard-left in several of France's major cities against Mr Macron's economic policies. Mr Macron will need the support of the National Assembly to get his domestic reforms through. If it is dominated by deputies from parties jealous of his victory, he is unlikely to get it. If Mr Macron cannot implement his reforms, disillusion in France with democracy and Europe may soon become poisonous.
Project Treble will make it easier for Google to roll out Android updates to a Samsung phone on TouchWiz UI and a Huawei phone on EMUI within days of releasing them on its Pixel phones.

One of the biggest issues with Googles Android platform is the delay in the roll-out of the latest updates. Despite the latest developer previews rolled out earlier in the year, the base structure of Android requires the manufacturers to work with the Android team for making the source code compatible with their own devices. Upon that, a custom launcher or skin like Samsungs Touchwiz or Xiaomis MIUI requires more time for the manufacturers to develop and implement them with the latest Android software. However, all of those delays in getting the latest software on your phone is about to be reduced in the upcoming days with Googles Project Treble.

A post on the Android Developers Blog has detailed Project Treble, a utility that Google wants to implement in the Android ecosystem to roll out the latest updates to the end user, regardless of the devices make. Project Treble will make it easier for Google to roll out Android updates to a Samsung phone on TouchWiz UI and a Huawei phone on EMUI within days of releasing them on its Pixel phones. "With Project Treble, we're re-architecting Android to make it easier, faster and less costly for manufacturers to update devices to a new version of Android," said Iliyan Malchev, Project Treble team lead.

Under the new software code guidelines, OEMs can deliver the next Android update to their users by simply updating the Android OS framework, without working with chipset manufacturers again for driver compatibility and other complex coding frameworks. Initially, manufacturers had to rework on the standard Android Open Source Project (AOSP) ROM (Googles standard Android software) after the chipset manufacturers, like Qualcomm and Mediatek, modified the source code according to existing hardware compatibility. In certain countries like the US, the OEMs also had to accommodate the code changes for carrier regulations in the Android software, i.e. specific changes for AT&T or Verizon-based Android smartphones. The additional modification made the rollout of the latest Android reach the user by the time Google readies the next Android update.

This is how updates are delivered now

However, you should still keep in mind that the Android update rollout wont be as fast as iOS devices on custom Android devices. The primary reason for that is the development and implementation of a new OEM-custom UI for every new Android release. For example, if Project Treble was available before the release of Android Nougat, the Samsung Galaxy S7 would still have taken months to get it because of a new version of TouchWiz UI specific to the Nougat release. Xiaomi, on the other hand, managed to release the Nougat update to its existing MIUI 8 on their flagship MI 5, albeit after three months. Therefore, it seems that Project Treble will benefit manufacturers like Xiaomi immediately who prefer to roll out the latest Android first, followed by a UI change later in mid-life of the latest Androids lifecycle.

One major issue with Project Treble is its availability on the existing Android ecosystem. Google clearly states that this new feature will be implemented on devices launched with Android O and beyond. This could mean that either the benefits of Project Treble will be only available to the devices coming pre-loaded with Android O or all devices getting the Android O update in the next year. The possibility of latter could be true as Google states that the current Developer Preview for Android O on the Pixel phones is already having support for Project Treble. It remains to be seen whether or not custom Android manufacturers will implement this on their existing lineup of smartphones destined to get the Android O update.

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But the hackers do not appear so far to have been well rewarded: only about $50,000 has been transferred to their online wallets so far.

The WannaCry "ransomware" cyber attack hobbled Chinese traffic police and schools on Monday as it rolled into Asia for the new work week, while authorities in Europe said they were trying to prevent hackers from spreading new versions of the virus.

In Britain, where the virus first raised global alarm when it caused hospitals to divert ambulances on Friday, it gained traction as a political issue just weeks before a general election. The opposition Labour Party accused the Conservative government of leaving the National Health Service vulnerable.

Shares in firms that provide cyber security services rose with the prospect that companies and governments would have to spend more money on defences.

Some victims were ignoring official advice and paying the $300 ransom demanded by the cyber criminals to unlock their computers, which was due to double to $600 on Monday for computers hit by Friday's first wave.

Brian Lord, managing director of cyber and technology at cyber security firm PGI, said victims had told him the hackers offered good service, with helpful advice on how to pay: "One customer said they actually forgot they were being robbed."

But the hackers do not appear so far to have been well rewarded: only about $50,000 has been transferred to their online wallets so far, according to Elliptic Labs which tracks transactions using the internet currency bitcoin.

Although the virus's spread was curbed over the weekend in most of the world, France, where carmaker Renault was among the world's highest profile victims, said more attacks were likely.

"We should expect similar attacks regularly in the coming days and weeks," said Giullaume Poupard, head of French government cyber security agency ANSSI. "Attackers update their software ... other attackers will learn from the method and will carry out attacks."

Companies and governments spent the weekend upgrading software to limit the spread of the virus. Monday was the first big test for Asia, where offices had already mostly been closed for the weekend before the attack first arrived.

British media were hailing as a hero a 22-year-old computer security whiz who appeared to have helped stop the attack from spreading by discovering a "kill switch" - an internet address which halted the virus when activated.

SPREAD SLOWING

China appeared over the weekend to have been particularly vulnerable, raising worries about how well the world's second largest economy would cope when it opened for business on Monday. However, officials and security firms said the spread was starting to slow.

"The growth rate of infected institutions on Monday has slowed significantly compared to the previous two days," said Chinese Internet security company Qihoo 360. "Previous concerns of a wide-scale infection of domestic institutions did not eventuate."

Qihoo had previously said the attack had infected close to 30,000 organisations by Saturday evening, more than 4,000 of which were educational institutions.

Yang Lin, a journalism student at China's Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, told Reuters she had lost her work from four years of study. She had just finished revising her thesis late on Friday when her screen went black and the hackers' message appeared.

"I was connected to the university network. I didn't open any link," she said. "I just cried. I was afraid to believe it, but had to accept it."

The virus hit computers running older versions of Microsoft software that had not been recently updated. Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to tacitly acknowledge what researchers had already widely concluded: the attack made use of a hacking tool built by the U.S. National Security Agency and leaked online.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, noting the technology's link to the U.S. spy service, said it should be "discussed immediately on a serious political level".

"Once they're let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators," he said.

Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organisations deemed not worth the price of upgrading. Some have also been machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions, difficult to patch without disrupting operations.

"The government's response has been chaotic, to be frank," the British Labour Party's health spokesman Jon Ashworth said. "They've complacently dismissed warnings which experts, we now understand, have made in recent weeks."

"The truth is, if you're going to cut infrastructure budgets and if you're not going to allow the NHS to invest in upgrading its IT, then you are going to leave hospitals wide open to this sort of attack."

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is the world's fifth largest employer after the U.S. and Chinese militaries, Walmart and McDonald's. The government says that under a previous Labour administration the trusts that run local hospitals were given responsibility to manage their own computer systems.

WARNINGS GIVEN

Asked if the government had ignored warnings over the NHS being at risk from cyber attack, Prime Minister Theresa May told Sky News: "No. It was clear [that] warnings were given to hospital trusts."

An official from Cybersecurity Administration China (CAC) told local media on Monday that while the ransomware was still spreading and had affected industry and government computer systems, the spread was slowing.

Chinese government bodies from transport, social security, industry watchdogs and immigration said they had suspended services ranging from processing applications to traffic crime enforcement.

It was not immediately clear whether those services were suspended due to attacks, or for emergency patching to prevent infection.

"If a system supports some kind of critical processes those systems typically are very hard to patch ... We don't have a precedent for something of this scale (in China)," said Marin Ivezic, a cybersecurity expert at PwC in Hong Kong.

Affected bodies included a social security department in the city of Changsha, the exit-entry bureau in Dalian, a housing fund in Zhuhai and an industry watchdog in Xuzhou.

Energy giant PetroChina said payment systems at some of its petrol stations were hit, although it had been able to restore most of the systems.

Elsewhere in Asia, the impact seems to have been more limited. Japan's National Police Agency reported two breaches of computers in the country on Sunday - one at a hospital and the other case involving a private person - but no loss of funds.

Industrial conglomerate Hitachi Ltd. said the attack had affected its systems at some point over the weekend, leaving them unable to receive and send e-mails or open attachments in some cases.

In India, the government said it had only received a few reports of attacks on systems and urged those hit not to pay attackers any ransom. No major Indian corporations reported disruptions to operations.

At Indonesias biggest cancer hospital, Dharmais Hospital in Jakarta, around 100-200 people packed waiting rooms after the institution was hit by cyber attacks affecting scores of computers. By late morning, some people were still filling out forms manually, but the hospital said 70 percent of systems were back online.

South Korea's presidential Blue House office said nine cases of ransomware were found in the country, but did not provide details on where the cyber attacks were discovered. A coal port in New Zealand shut temporarily to upgrade its systems.

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President Vladimir Putin denied Russia, which has been accused of cyber meddling in several countries around the world in recent years, had anything to do with an attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers.

The world's biggest ransomware attack levelled off in Europe on Monday thanks to a pushback by cyber security officials after causing havoc in 150 countries, as Microsoft urged governments to heed the "wake-up call".

President Vladimir Putin denied Russia, which has been accused of cyber meddling in several countries around the world in recent years, had anything to do with an attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers.

"Microsoft's leadership stated this directly, they said the source of the virus was the special services of the United States," Putin said on the sidelines of a summit in Beijing.

Putin said the incident was "worrisome" but had done "no significant damage" in Russia and called for urgent international talks on countering the hackers.

"A protection system... needs to be worked out," he said.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, earlier said the code used in the attack was originally developed by the US National Security Agency.

He warned governments against stockpiling such code and said instead they should vulnerabilities to manufacturers -- not sell, store or exploit them, lest they fall into the wrong hands.

"An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen," Smith wrote.

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake up call."

But global fears eased on Monday as the number of incidents reported levelled off. The cross-border police agency Europol said the situation was now "stable", defusing concerns that attacks that struck computers in British hospital wards, European car factories and Russian banks would spread further at the start of the working week.

"The number of victims appears not to have gone up and so far the situation seems stable in Europe, which is a success," senior spokesman for Europol, Jan Op Gen Oorth, told AFP.

"It seems that a lot of internet security guys over the weekend did their homework and ran the security software updates," he said.

Like stealing missiles

The indiscriminate attack was unleashed Friday, striking hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide by exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

US package delivery giant FedEx, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network were among those hit in the attacks, which demanded money to allow users to unblock their computers.

In China, "hundreds of thousands" of computers were affected, including petrol stations, cash machines and universities, according to Qihoo 360, one of China's largest providers of antivirus software.

French carmaker Renault said its Douai plant, one of its biggest sites in France employing 5,500 people, would be shut on Monday as systems were upgraded.

Europol executive director Rob Wainwright told Britain's ITV television on Sunday that the attack had been "unprecedented".

"We've never seen anything like this," he said.

'Ooops' message, $300 ransom

The attack blocks computers and puts up images on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the locked files will be deleted, according to the screen message.

Bitcoin, the world's most-used virtual currency, allows anonymous transactions via heavily encrypted codes. Experts and governments alike warn against ceding to the demands and Wainwright said few victims so far had been paying up. Security firm Digital Shadows said on Sunday that transactions totalling $32,000 had taken place through Bitcoin addresses used by the ransomware.

The culprits used a digital code believed to have been developed by the US NSA -- and subsequently leaked as part of a document dump, according to researchers at the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.

A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April, claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, Kaspersky said. The attack is unique, according to Europol, because it combines ransomware with a worm function, meaning once one machine is infected, the entire internal network is scanned and other vulnerable machines are infected. The attack therefore spread faster than previous, smaller-scale ransomware attacks.

Banks, trains and automobiles

Anti-virus experts Symantec said the majority of organisations affected were in Europe. Europol said few banks in Europe had been affected, having learned through the "painful experience of being the number one target of cyber crime" the value of having the latest cyber security in place.

Russia said its banking system was among the victims of the attacks, along with the railway system, although it added that no problems were detected. French carmaker Renault was forced to stop production at sites in France, Slovenia and Romania, while FedEx said it was "implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible".

A fifth of regional hospital associations in Britain's National Health Service were affected and several still had to cancel appointments on Monday, as doctors warned of delays as they cannot access medical records.

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The cyber security advised users and organisations to apply patches to their Microsoft operating system Windows to prevent getting infected by the attack.

New Delhi: Indias cyber security agency Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) has asked users in the country not to pay ransom if hit by ransomware WannaCry which has impacted 2 lakh people in over 150 countries.

The countries, including India, were hit by what is believed to be the biggest-ever recorded cyberattack on Friday with investigators looking for those behind the hack that affected systems at banks, hospitals and government agencies globally, media reports said

Individuals or organisations are not encouraged to pay the ransom, as this does not guarantee files will be released. Report such instances of fraud to CERT-In and law enforcement agencies, said CERT-In in a red-coloured critical alert.

It has advised users and organisations to apply patches to their Microsoft operating system Windows to prevent getting infected by the attack.

The threat was escalating as cyber experts warned that another attack was imminent by Monday.

The hackers are believed to have used cyber weapons stolen from the US National Security Agency to lock up computers and hold users files for ransom

CERT-In warned that Wannacry is spreading widely. Wannacry encrypts the files on infected Windows systems, said the CERT-In alert.

WannaCry or WannaCrypt encrypts the computers hard disk drive and then spreads laterally between computers on the same LAN, it said. It also spreads through malicious attachments to e-mails.

The virus displays messages demanding a payment of 300 dollars in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock files and return them to the user.

CERT-In has advised users to maintain updated antivirus software on all systems and check regularly for the integrity of the information stored in the databases.

Regularly check the contents of backup files of databases for any unauthorised encrypted contents of data records or external elements, (backdoors /malicious scripts), it said.

CERT-In advised users to keep the operating system third-party applications (MS office, browsers, browser Plugins) up to date with the latest patches.

Perform regular backups of all critical information to limit the impact of data or system loss and to help expedite the recovery process. Ideally, this data should be kept on a separate device, and backups should be stored offline, it said.

It asked users not to open attachments in unsolicited e-mails, even if they come from people in your contact list, and never click on a URL contained in an unsolicited e-mail, even if the link seems benign.

In cases of genuine URLs close out the e-mail and go to the organisations website directly through browser, it said.

CERT-In asked users to follow safe practices when browsing the web and ensure the web browsers are secured enough with appropriate content controls. Restrict users abilities (permissions) to install and run unwanted software applications. Enable personal firewalls on workstations. It advised organisations to implement strict External Device (USB drive) usage policy.

An Indian-origin doctor based in London had warned against the cyber-hack of the NHS just days before it crippled the countrys network.

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The attacks used ransomware that apparently exploited a security flaw in Microsoft operating systems, locking users' files unless they pay the attackers a designated sum in the virtual currency Bitcoin.

International investigators are hunting for those behind an unprecedented cyber-attack that affected systems in dozens of countries, including at banks, hospitals and government agencies, as security experts sought to contain the fallout.

The assault, which began Friday and was being described as the biggest-ever cyber ransom attack, struck state agencies and major companies around the world -- from Russian banks and British hospitals to FedEx and European car factories.

"The recent attack is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits," said Europol, Europe's police agency.

Europol said a special task force at its European Cybercrime Centre was "specially designed to assist in such investigations and will play an important role in supporting the investigation".

The attacks used ransomware that apparently exploited a security flaw in Microsoft operating systems, locking users' files unless they pay the attackers a designated sum in the virtual currency Bitcoin.

Images appeared on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the files will be deleted, according to the screen message.

But experts and government alike warn against ceding to the hackers' demands.

"Paying the ransom does not guarantee the encrypted files will be released," the US Department of Homeland Security's computer emergency response team said.

"It only guarantees that the malicious actors receive the victim's money, and in some cases, their banking information."

'Painful'

Experts and officials offered differing estimates of the scope of the attacks, but all agreed it was huge.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Helsinki-based cyber security company F-Secure, told AFP it was the biggest ransomware outbreak in history, saying that 130,000 systems in more than 100 countries had been affected.

He said Russia and India were hit particularly hard, largely because Microsoft's Windows XP -- one of the operating systems most at risk -- was still widely used there.

French police said there were "more than 75,000 victims" around the globe, but cautioned that the number could increase "significantly".

The virus spread quickly because the culprits used a digital code believed to have been developed by the US National Security Agency -- and subsequently leaked as part of a document dump, according to researchers at the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Microsoft said the situation was "painful" and that it was taking "all possible actions to protect our customers".

It issued guidance for people to protect their systems, while taking the highly unusual step of reissuing security patches first made available in March for Windows XP and other older versions of its operating system.

Europe worst hit

US software firm Symantec said the majority of organisations affected were in Europe, and the attack was believed to be indiscriminate.

The companies and government agencies targeted were diverse.

In the United States, package delivery group FedEx said it was "implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible," while French carmaker Renault was forced to stop production at sites in France, Slovenia and Romania.

Russia's interior ministry said some of its computers had been hit by a "virus attack" and that efforts were underway to destroy it. The country's banking system was also attacked, although no problems were detected, as was the railway system.

Germany's rail operator Deutsche Bahn said its station display panels were affected. Universities in Greece and Italy also were hit.

China's network information safety working group sent a warning to universities about the cyber-attack and the National Internet Emergency Center suggested that users update Windows security patches.

Shanghai's Fudan University received reports that a large number of school computers were infected with the virus.

Accidental 'kill switch'

Kaspersky said it was "trying to determine whether it is possible to decrypt data locked in the attack -- with the aim of developing a decryption tool as soon as possible."

On Saturday, a cyber security researcher told AFP he had accidentally discovered a "kill switch" that could prevent the spread of the ransomware.

The researcher, tweeting as @MalwareTechBlog, said registering a domain name used by the malware stops it from spreading, though it cannot help computers already affected.

"If you have anything to patch, patch it," the researcher said in a blog post. "Now I should probably sleep."

A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, Kaspersky said.

"Unlike most other attacks, this malware is spreading primarily by direct infection from machine to machine on local networks, rather than purely by email," said Lance Cottrell, chief scientist at the US technology group Ntrepid.

G7 finance ministers meeting in Italy vowed to unite against cyber crime, as it represented a growing threat to their economies and should be tackled as a priority. The danger will be discussed at the G7 leaders' summit next month.

In Britain, the attack disrupted care at National Health Service facilities, forcing ambulances to divert and hospitals to postpone operations.

"There will be lessons to learn from what appears to be the biggest criminal cyber-attack in history," Interior minister Amber Rudd said.

"But our immediate priority as a government is to disrupt the attack, restore affected services as soon as possible, and establish who was behind it so we can bring them to justice."

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Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, has reached an agreement with ridesharer Lyft to test self-driving car technology, the companies said late Sunday.

Waymo and Lyft are joining forces against ridesharing giant Uber, which is racing to develop its own self-driving vehicles.

"We're looking forward to working with Lyft to explore new self-driving products that will make our roads safer and transportation more accessible," a Waymo spokesman told AFP.

"Lyft's vision and commitment to improving the way cities move will help Waymo's self-driving technology reach more people, in more places."

A Lyft spokeswoman confirmed the partnership to The New York Times, which broke the story.

"Waymo holds today's best self-driving technology, and collaborating with them will accelerate our shared vision of improving lives with the world's best transportation," the Lyft statement read.

Waymo and Uber are currently engaged in a bitter legal dispute.

In February Waymo filed a lawsuit claiming that a former manager took technical data when he left to launch a competing venture that was later acquired by Uber.

Most major automakers and several other technology firms have been stepping up efforts on autonomous driving in recent years, contending these systems will eliminate the vast majority of road accidents. Apple is the latest to have obtained a testing permit in California.

German luxury carmaker Daimler and auto parts supplier Bosch announced plans this month to work together to create completely driverless cars in the next few years.

US-based Tesla is also stepping up efforts, as are several Chinese technology firms and the major US, Asian and European manufacturers.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
Lenovos entire Moto line-up for this year has reportedly leaked. Well-known tipster Evan Blass took to Twitter to post alleged images of the nine smartphones that the company is expected to launch this year. As per the leaked image, the company will be launching the following given smartphones: Moto Z, Moto X, Moto G, Moto E and Moto C-series. These smartphones will be varied in terms of specifications and prices targeting at different users.

The company earlier this year, launched the Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus smartphones and now it appears like the Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus smartphone will be added to the family. The former is expected to pack a 5.2-inch full-HD display and full metal body; the latter is expected to pack a 5.5-inch full-HD display and a dual rear camera-set up.

The Moto C series, on the other hand, has been leaked several times in the past. Described as Unlimited Essentials, there will be two variants of this model namely Moto C and Moto C Plus. While, the former is expected to feature a 5.-inch FWGA (480 x 854 pixels) display, the Moto C Plus will pack a 5-inch HD (720 x 1280 pixels) display and will house a 4,000mAh battery.

The Moto E series is described as offering Unlimited Value, and will also be coming in two variants. While the Moto E smartphone will pack a 5-inch HD display with 2.5D curved glass along with a fingerprint sensor; the Moto E Plus will come with a 5.5-inch display and will house a 5,000mAh battery.

The Moto X-series  described as offering Unlimited Perfection  is expected to be called Moto X4 and is suggested to come packed with a 5.2-inch full-HD display and a SmartCam as well. It is interesting to note how Chinese website Baidu in a video suggested that the Moto X4 smartphone is expected to be powered by Qualcomms Snapdragon 660 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage and 3,800mAh battery.

Lastly, the Moto Z series  described to offer Unlimited Capabilities  is expected to come in two variants namely Moto Z Play and Moto Z Force. While the former will pack a 5.5-inch full HD (1080 x 1920 pixels) display along with support for Moto Mods; the latter will pack a Shatter Shield screen and support for gigabit LTE and Moto Mods. It is also widely rumoured that the Moto Z Force will feature Qualcomms latest Snapdragon 835 SoC as well.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
Donald Trump's temporary travel ban on people entering the United States from six Muslim-majority countries. (Photo: AP)

Washington: A federal appeals court is set to hear arguments on Monday over President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban on people entering the United States from six Muslim-majority countries, the second such court to review Trump's directive over the past week.

A three-judge 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals panel, made up entirely of judges appointed by Democratic former President Bill Clinton, will review a Hawaii judge's ruling that blocked parts of the Republican president's revised executive order on travel.

The March order was Trump's second effort to craft travel restrictions. The first, issued on January 27, led to chaos and protests at airports before being blocked by courts.

The second order was intended to overcome the legal problems posed by the original ban but was also suspended by judges before it could go into effect on March 16.

US District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii blocked 90-day entry restrictions on people from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, as well as part of the order that suspended entry of refugee applicants for 120 days.

Last week the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia reviewed a Maryland judge's ruling that blocked the 90-day entry restrictions.

That court is largely made up of Democrats, and the judges' questioning appeared to break along partisan lines. A ruling has not yet been released.

Arguing that the United States needed to tighten national security measures, Trump's attempt to limit travel was one of his first major acts in office.

The fate of the ban is one indication of whether the Republican can carry out his promises to be tough on immigration and national security.

Opponents including the state of Hawaii and civil rights groups say that both the first ban and the revised ban discriminate against Muslims.

The government argues the text of the order does not mention any specific religion and is needed to protect the country against attacks.

The 9th Circuit hearing on Monday will take place in Seattle. The US Supreme Court is likely to be the ultimate decider, but the high court is not expected to take up the issue for several months.
Washington: President Donald Trump is set to nominate Callista Gingrich, wife of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, to be the next US ambassador to the Vatican, CNN and The New York Times reported.

The nomination is expected to be formalised before Trump meets with Pope Francis on May 24 in Rome, and once the Office of Government Ethics gives its approval, CNN reported Sunday.

A self-described devout Catholic, Gingrich, 51, currently heads Gingrich Productions, a multimedia company.

Newt Gingrich, 73, was one of the few big-name Republicans to support Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

He was speaker of the House of Representatives second in line in the US presidential succession chart from 1995 to 1999, and was notably vociferous in his calls to impeach president Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

The potential nomination carries some controversy Callista Gingrich is the former speaker's third wife, and had a multiyear sexual relationship with him when she was a young congressional aide named Callista Bisek and he was still married to his second wife.

After a messy divorce from his second wife in 1999, he married Callista the following year. He credits Callista with his conversion to Catholicism.

Trump mentioned the possibility of the ambassadorship in January, but the Gingrichs have been so frustrated with the slow vetting process that they have threatened to withdraw Callista's name, The New York Times reported.
Win-Win Cooperation. [Zhai Haijun/China.org.cn]

Less than four years after the official launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is adding flesh and impetus to this policy. With the organization of a major Belt and Road International Forum in Beijing it gives an opportunity to high-level participants to discuss future steps. President Xi Jinping set the tone with his welcoming speech in this "gathering of great minds."

To start with, China is expected to invest more in countries along the BRI routes. Approximately $14.5 billion will be given to the Silk Road Fund complementing the initial $40 billion. Chinese banks as well as new financial instruments  namely the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank  are preparing to grant loans at favorable rates. And Chinese companies are encouraged to get even more involved in infrastructure projects.

"Openness" is another term deserving particular attention. President Xi referred to the need of a transparent process, sending a clear message against bribery and fraud opportunism.

If his pledge to fight corruption domestically also inspires the future realization of clean BRI programs internationally, the results could be impressive. That is because, as President Xi asserted, "ethical standards" will be the norm.

However, "openness" can also be linked to what Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli said. In particular, China's determination to absorb $600 billion of foreign investment in the coming years demonstrates the country is prepared to welcome the establishment of consortia and joint ventures that will bring in fresh money from abroad.

This commitment should ease the concerns of Western companies complaining of limited opportunities. And it will contribute to inclusiveness both in China and along the new Silk Road geographical region.

Moreover, the so-called "win-win" perspectives for cooperation were stressed by President Xi. This means that it is not only China but other countries that will benefit from increasing connectivity. The latter have already enjoyed growth and prosperity through infrastructure works linked to several sectors. The Chinese president gave many examples drawn from Asia, Africa and Europe in his speech and promised a harmonious continuation to bring even better development and progress.

However, foreign countries collaborating with China are realizing another potential benefit. Beijing announced plans to import $8 trillion worth of goods. Hence, China's partners should grasp the chance to increase the quality of their products and seek to access a huge market.

There is no better way for a company to increase its profits than to employ an efficient export-oriented philosophy and find clients abroad. A few years ago China was principally interested in exporting. However, in changing its growth model, there's now more emphasis on imports.

As far as the main presupposition of success in the BRI zone is concerned, this is related to the continuous advancement of research and development. China's recent technological achievements  such as the maiden flight of the C-919 jetliner  demonstrate the country's priorities.

In his speech, President Xi again focused on the importance of innovation, for instance, on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and digitalization. An additional characteristic example is the creation of smart-cities where sustainable development, green energy, e-government and e-health are basic pillars for better living conditions.

Last but not least, the geographical area of the maritime and land routes of the new Silk Road will combine different cultures and peoples from different backgrounds. The Chinese president acknowledged the significance of ancient civilizations as well as the need for the establishment of human networks respecting the past while looking towards the future.

People-to-people exchanges will lead to the mobilization of societies. Moreover, educational initiatives will contribute towards better mutual understanding. Xi was specific as he proposed partnerships between think tanks and universities. He also talked about his plan for China to become a training center for foreign scientists and managers, especially of younger age.

The president presented the BRI as "the project of the century." That could well be right. His insistence on peace, friendship, dialogue, respect and non-confrontation should pave the way towards stability and harmony in a region often traumatized by conflicts and terrorism. More cooperation and integration will be constructive, while "isolation results in backwardness," as he said.

And China never forgets its commitment to eliminate social problems. Xi could not share his vision about the world without reiterating his pledge to support developing countries, especially the ones in need of food. A leading international power never ignore the difficulties facing others.

George N. Tzogopoulos is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/GeorgeNTzogopoulos.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
Turkey has been pressuring the US to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesn't want them spearheading the Raqqa effort. (Photo: AFP)

Washington: The United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Islamic State militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to US interests in the volatile Middle East.

The Turks are fiercely opposed to the US plans, seeing the Kurdish fighters as terrorists. And when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visits the White House this week, the most he and President Donald Trump may be able to do is agree to disagree, and move on.

"The Turks see this as a crisis in the relationship," said Jonathan Schanzer at the Washington-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

The challenge is hardly new. Long before Trump took office, US presidents have grappled with the fragility of partnering with Turkey's government and the Kurds to carry out a Middle East agenda.

Past administrations have sought a delicate balance. Too exuberant in its support for the Kurds, and the US risks pushing ally Turkey toward US geopolitical rivals like Russia or emboldening the Kurds to try to create an independent state - a scenario that would destabilise multiple countries in the region. Too little cooperation with the Kurds risks squandering a battlefield ally with proven effectiveness against extremist threats and who has staunchly supported Washington.

Trump has made his priorities clear. His administration is arming Syrian Kurdish fighters as part of an effort to recapture the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State group's self-declared capital. Coupled with the US-backed fight in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Raqqa is seen as a key step toward liberating the remaining territory the militants hold.

Turkey has been pressuring the US to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesn't want them spearheading the Raqqa effort. Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish group, known as the YPG, a terrorist group because of its ties to the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party inside Turkey. The United States, the European Union and Turkey all agree the YPG is a terrorist organisation.

The Turks fear any weapons the US provides the Syrian Kurds could well end up with their ethnic brethren in Turkey, who've fought violently as part of a separatist insurgency for more than three decades.

As a nod to Turkey's concerns, the Pentagon has promised tight monitoring of all weapons and greater intelligence sharing to help the Turks better watch over their frontiers. Kurds are an ethnic group predominantly concentrated along the borders of four countries - Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

But a face-to-face confrontation on the matter between Trump and Erdogan seems inevitable. Erdogan and other top Turkish officials have pressed for the US to reverse its strategy, however, low the prospects of Trump changing his mind.

As a result, experts see Erdogan using the meeting to confront Trump on a host of other Turkish grievances. Those include extraditing the Pennsylvania-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blames for fomenting a failed coup last summer and dropping US charges against Reza Zarrab, a Turkish businessman accused of money laundering and violating US sanctions in Iran.

"I see this trip as a new milestone in Turkey-US relations," Erdogan said, as he prepared to fly to Washington.

The US, too, has a wish list for Turkey. Washington is concerned about rising anti-Americanism in Turkey that Erdogan's government has tolerated since the July coup attempt. The US also has pressed unsuccessfully for the release of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor, and other detained US citizens.

Trump also has much at stake. His willingness to partner with authoritarian rulers and overlook their shortcomings on democracy and human rights have alarmed US lawmakers of both parties. Trump's premise has been that he is focusing on deal-making. That puts added pressure on him to get results.

Trump has gone out of his way to foster a good relationship with Erdogan. After a national referendum last month that strengthened Erdogan's presidential powers, European leaders and rights advocates criticised Turkey for moving closer toward autocratic rule. Trump congratulated Erdogan.

Now, the American leader may try to cash in. "Trump has prioritised protecting US national security interests over lecturing allies on democratic values or human rights," said James Phillips, a senior research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Heritage Foundation. "I don't think the president will lose any sleep if he is criticised for meeting with President Erdogan, as long as it pays dividends for advancing his foreign policy agenda."

But Erdogan may not be amenable to accepting the US military support for the Kurds in a quid pro quo. Last month, the Turkish military bombed Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, in one case with American forces only about six miles (10 kilometres) away.

His government has insisted it may attack Syrian Kurdish fighters again. The US, whose forces are sometimes embedded with the Kurds, has much to fear.

Barack Aydin of the Washington-based Kurdish Policy Research Center, said the key ought to be a broader peace process between Erdogan's government and Kurdish opponents in Turkey, which would eliminate these problems. "That would be a very good start," Aydin said.
Dr Deepak Mittal, joint secretary of India's Ministry of External Affairs, front row right, and his delegation wait for judges to enter the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands, Monday. (Photo: PTI)

The Hague: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on Monday began hearing the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, the alleged Indian spy sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court. Both sides are given 90 minutes each to present their arguments.

The ICJ is holding public hearings in the case at the Great Hall of Justice in Peace Palace at The Hague in Netherlands. India will present its case from 1:30 to 3:00 pm (IST) and Pakistan from 6:30 to 8:00 pm.

Jadhav, a former Indian naval officer, had been sentenced to death about a month ago by a Pakistani military court on grounds of espionage and sabotage. India contested the move and dragged Pakistan to the ICJ on May 8 for refusing consular access to Jadhav and for violating the Vienna Convention on consular relations.

Both countries had last clashed at the ICJ 18 years ago, with the previous instance relating to shooting down of Pakistans maritime reconnaissance aircraft Atlantique by the IAF in the Kutch region on August 10, 1999, killing 16 people on board shortly after the Kargil conflict.

Indian lawyer Harish Salve

Pakistan has refused consular access and also failed to provide evidence and documentation from the so called trial which has made India unable to represent jadhav legally, senior lawyer and counsel Harish Salve presented India's argument in the top UN court.

In an earlier case, the court has said that provisional measures would be granted by the court if the rights claims of the party are at least plausible. There have been three instances -- Paraguay vs US; Germany vs US (The LeGrand case); Mexico vs US (Avena case) -- where the court has entertained cases pertaining to the violation of Vienna convention, he added.

The court used the phrase coming month in Avena case which I felt, the court felt that any risk in the next six months could be considered as urgent and therefore actionable.

There is no assurance that until this court is in session, Jadhav would not be executed, Salve said. Thus, there is need for intervention, he added.

India refutes all allegations made by Pakistan and maintains its stand that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran and the case against him was based on a confession obtained by force.

India has enclosed an article where Pakistan has said the verdict was based on irrefutable evidence and the verdict would not be overturned and that it would stand by the order, he told the top UN court.

The appeal filed by Jadhavs parents was in desperation, without knowing the charges or the evidence against him. It is unknown in case of Jadhav as to who will appeal for clemency.

Even if Jadhav does agree to appeal for clemency, there is also no guarantee that he will wait until the last of the period to do so.

Requisites for ICJs jurisprudence: Disputes arising out of interpretation or application of the convention and the party that brings the dispute to the court should be a party in the case.

The need for consular access to a person charged for terrorism is all the more important, based on the courts previous observations and judgements.

The law provides for all disputes arising out of the Vienna Convention is mandated to be heard by the ICJ. Thus the court would have jurisdiction, prima facie, in listening to the case.

The trial was conducted without informing the individual his rights and also without consular access to India, which is again in violation of the Vienna Convention.

The greater the charges are, the more the need for punctilious adherence to the conventions is. Violation of the rights of individual under Article 36 is a violation of the rights of the sending state.

Even the existence of any other remedy in the domestic law of Pakistan does not bar this courts jurisprudence in this case.

Salve urged the court to rule that Pakistan should take all necessary measures to ensure Jadhav is not executed; it should report to the ICJ about its action in pursuance of first point and it should not take any action that would prejudice Jadhavs and Indias rights.

Dr Deepak Mittal, joint secretary of India's Ministry of External Affairs

Deepak Mittal, who is representing India in the ICJ, said the trial of Kulbhushan Jadhav by Pakistan military court was farcical and urged for provisional measures.

The fact that hearing is taking place within seven days of request acknowledges the urgency of the issue. By its timely action, the court has given hope to the entire country and the innocent family of the soldier, Mittal said.

We hope that the court will provide provisional measures stopping the decision taken by after a farcical trial in Pak in violation of the rights given to Jadhav and to India, he added.

Co-agent Vijay Sharma

Article 36 of the Vienna Convention, recognised as the acknowledgment of rights of individuals from another state and the state itself, its provisions are sacrosanct, Pakistan has violated all provisions of Article 36, Vijay Sharma, co-agent, said.

India was repeatedly denied consular access. Under para 1 of Article 36, the court has jurisdiction to rule on all cases pertaining to the article. Thus India is relying on the court for a decision, he added.
Washington: As President Donald Trump considers a replacement for fired FBI Director James Comey, lawmakers are urging the president to steer clear of appointing any politicians.

The advice came Sunday amid more criticism over Trump's dismissal of Comey during an FBI probe of Russia's meddling with last year's election and any ties to the Trump campaign.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said the Founding Fathers created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding."

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," Clapper said "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When asked, "Internally, from the president" Clapper responded, "Exactly."

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. "The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump for his actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because Trump may have "tapes" of their conversations.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset." He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration, ex FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

"It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1," said Graham, R-S.C.

"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," Graham said, adding "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all but we don't know all the evidence yet."

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland, the federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court last year by President Barack Obama but who was denied a hearing by Republicans.

A former top aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, said that McConnell is interested in the suggestion.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone "not of partisan background" with "great experience" and "courage." Declining to comment on a Garland nomination, Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor for the Russia probe.

Under Senate rules, Republicans could confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats' 48.

Calling Trump's remarks about possible taped conversations "outrageous," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would "absolutely" subpoena such tapes.

"We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear," Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee.

The blow back against the firing of Comey angered the increasingly frustrated president, who made the decision after consulting only a small group of advisers, worried the news would leak out.

Trump has openly vented his frustration with the media and Democrats on Twitter, musing about canceling press briefings and arguing that it's difficult for aides to know his thinking.

The administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to replace Comey, just over half of the 14 being considered. Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday for the Mideast and Europe, his first overseas trip as president.

He was also set to welcome foreign leaders to the White House, with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday and President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia on Thursday. A leader of the United Arab Emirates was scheduled to visit Monday.

Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNN's "State of the Union"; Graham spoke on NBC's "Meet the Press"; Haley and Warner appeared on ABC's "This Week"; and Warner spoke on "Fox News Sunday" along with Lee and Holmes.
US National Security Adviser General HR McMaster has said the Trump administration is working on a policy that would apply to both Pakistan and Afghanistan. (Photo: File)

Washington: With the aim of not allowing extremists to use Afghanistan to launch terror attacks in any part of the world, US National Security Adviser General HR McMaster has said the Trump administration is working on a policy that would apply to both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

General HR McMaster further revealed that there is a need for a more effective strategy to prevent the problem of terrorism from settling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region broadly, reports the Dawn.

Media covering the White House were told by the US National Security Adviser that America was considering a proposal to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

A decision is likely to be made after President Trump returns from his foreign trips later this month, he said.

General John Nicholson, commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, has made a request for a "few thousand" more American troops during recently held congressional hearings earlier.

Currently, there are about 8,400 US troops in Afghanistan, along with about 4,500 from NATO and other allied nations.
Washington: President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron are to hold a "lengthy lunch" in Brussels this month a bonding exercise for two men the White House believes have much in common.

Senior US administration officials said that Trump will break bread with Macron on May 25 in Brussels and "compare perspectives."

The White House believes the 39-year-old French centrist who took office on Sunday and the 70-year-old US leader are not as uncomfortable allies as it first may seem.

This despite suspicions that Trump would have preferred far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to win the recent French election. For one, both Macron and Trump are presidential neophytes.

"They are two of the newest leaders to the stage," said a senior Trump administration official, adding that a recent phone call between the two leaders very well. Trump "was very impressed with Mr Macron," said the official, who had direct knowledge of the call.

Trump who regularly gripes about getting insufficient credit for his November 2016 election victory was impressed that Macron won almost 50 percent more votes than Le Pen.

"It was clearly a very strong electoral win," said the official, who asked not to be named in order to discuss sensitive issues.

While their ideology may differ, both Trump and Macron "come from outside traditional political lines."

Macron was the first candidate from outside the traditional political parties to win the French presidency in decades. Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, but has often shattered party orthodoxy.

The White House also believes that the impression that Trump supported Le Pen is exaggerated, based only on "one tweet about borders" and Le Pen's visit to Trump Tower in January, before the US billionaire took office.

Trump aides stress that Le Pen had no meeting with the campaign when she visited Trump Tower, much less with the now president.

In April Trump tweeted in the wake of a deadly shooting on the Champs Elysees "Another terrorist attack in Paris. The people of France will not take much more of this. Will have a big effect on presidential election!"

Trump also once remarked that Le Pen had been the "strongest on borders and she's the strongest on what's been going on in France."

When Macron and Trump do sit down the agenda is likely to be dominated by counter-terrorism cooperation, which the White House describes as "excellent."

But there may also be some common ground on the economy.

"Macron has a lot of reforms in mind" one senior administration official said, and both leaders could help "jump start Europe." Since becoming president Trump appears to be torn between pro-business instincts and a verve for protectionism.

In his more populist moments, Trump has suggested he would not consider trade agreements with the European Union, looking for bilateral agreements instead.

Many European capitals see that as the economic equivalent of divide and conquer, with potentially damaging consequences for their economies and the cohesion of the European Union.

There may, however, be a point of contention on NATO spending.

Trump has been browbeating European governments to spend a higher portion of their GDP on collective defence. "As far as the president is concerned, he wants to see the two percent target met right now," a second US official said.

That is "not practical" the source admitted, but as long as Europe is moving strongly in that direction common ground may be found. "It's all about burden sharing," the US official said.

Both Trump and Macron will be in the Belgian capital for a meeting of NATO leaders before travelling to the G7 summit in Sicily. While in Brussels, Trump will also meet the King and prime minister of Belgium.
In a highly unusual move, Trump last week appeared to suggest on Twitter that he might have tapes of conversations with Comey. (Photo: AP)

Washington: US lawmakers on Sunday called on President Donald Trump to turn over any tapes of conversations with fired FBI chief James Comey, potentially setting up a showdown with the White House as Democrats considered a boycott of the vote on Comey's replacement.

In a highly unusual move, Trump last week appeared to suggest on Twitter that he might have tapes of conversations with Comey and warned the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation against talking to the media. Trump and a White House spokesman declined to confirm or deny whether such tapes exist.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the White House must "clear the air" about whether there are any taped conversations.

"You can't be cute about tapes. If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over," Graham told NBC's "Meet the Press" program.

Trump sparked a political firestorm when he abruptly fired Comey last week. The FBI has been investigating alleged Russian meddling in the US election and possible ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

Democrats have accused Trump of attempting to thwart the FBI's probe and have called for some type of independent inquiry into the matter.

Trump has said he removed Comey because he was not doing a good job and that Comey had lost the support of FBI employees.

Trump tweeted on Friday that "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

If there are recordings, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah told the "Fox News Sunday" program it was "inevitable" that they would be subpoenaed and the White House would have to release them.

Lee, who was on Trump's list of potential replacements for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, also said recording conversations in the White House is "not necessarily the best idea."

Trump's threat about tapes has intensified calls from Democrats for an independent probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump must immediately provide Congress with any tapes and warned that destroying existing tapes would violate the law.

Schumer also said Senate Democrats are weighing whether to refuse to vote on a new FBI director until a special prosecutor is named to investigate Trump's potential ties to Russia.

Russia has denied the claims and the White House says there was no collusion.

"To have that special prosecutor, people would breathe a sigh of relief because then there would be a real independent person overlooking the FBI director," Schumer told CNN's "State of the Union" program.

Trump, who has sought better relations with Russia, has continued to question whether it was behind the hacking of email accounts belonging to Democrats involved in Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

But Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told NBC's "Meet the Press" program there is no question that "the Russians were playing around in our electoral processes."

He defended Trump's decision to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office last week.

"It's in the interest of the American people, it's in the interest of Russia and the rest of the world that we do something to see if we cannot improve the relationship between the two greatest nuclear powers in the world," Tillerson said.

The Justice Department began interviewing candidates for the FBI director job on Saturday. Some people under consideration include acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, New York Appeals Court Judge Michael Garcia and former Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher, according to a White House official.

Meanwhile, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday found that 29 percent of Americans approve of Trump's decision to fire Comey, while 38 percent disapprove.

If a Senate vote on a new FBI director breaks down along party lines, Democrats would not have the votes to block a nominee because Republicans hold a majority in the chamber.

"The key is getting some of our Republican colleagues to join us," Schumer said.

Republican leaders in the Senate have rebuffed calls for a special prosecutor, saying it would interfere with ongoing congressional probes.

Graham said there may come a time when a special prosecutor is needed but not now.

"Right now, it is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. So you don't need a special prosecutor," Graham said on "Meet the Press."
PBSO K9 Kasper took a bullet that was meant for his K9 Partner. (Photo: Twitter)

Houston: A bomb-sniffing dog is being hailed as a hero after he took a bullet meant for his handler during a shootout.

K9 Kasper, who has protected President Donald Trump in the past, is recovering after being shot in the side when deputies with the Palm Beach Sheriffs Office (PBSO) exchanged gunfire with a wanted man who was killed.

Phillip Oshea was accused of a shooting and robbery on Friday in Jupiter, Florida. Later that day, deputies came to apprehend him, and he fired shots at them, Fox 13 News reported.

During the gunfire, PBSO K9 Kasper was shot while protecting his handler, the sheriffs office said in a Facebook post that included a photo of the wounded dog on a veterinarians operating table.

Deputies had pursued OShea to Jupiter following a shootout off Okeechobee Boulevard in which a police officer was injured while diving for cover.

Details of the final shootout were scant, but police said it took place in a parking lot.

During the encounter, Kasper was struck in the left hip by gunfire. The bullet missed his vital organs, and it was removed with surgery at Palm Beach Veterinary Specialists, according to a video posted on Twitter by the sheriffs office.

The bullet was out and Kasper had recovered from anesthesia. The video showed him walking out of the clinic with relative ease.

Hes on antibiotics and is walking fairly well, all things considered, said Michele Tucker, the veterinary centers managing director of patient services, on the video.

Kasper, a bomb-sniffing, patrol and street crimes dog, has protected Trump during his visits to Florida.
Bharara said any interaction between him and Trump could have raised doubts in people's minds over any future investigation his office would have undertaken. (Photo: AP)

New York: India-born former top federal prosecutor Preet Bharara, who received a phone call from US President Donald Trump just two days before he was fired, said he "was done with" the American leader and did him a favour by not returning his call.

"I was doing everyone a favour by not returning the call. I was doing the President a favour by not returning the call," Manhattan's former prosecutor said during a conversation last week with New York University's School of Law Dean Trevor Morrison here.

Two days before he was fired, 48-year-old Bharara had got a phone call from Trump's office asking him to call the President back. Bharara did not return the call. Asked if he had considered returning that call, Bharara said there are lots of regulations regarding how contacts should be made between the White House and the Justice Department.

"This is a man who campaigned day after day after day on the argument that (former President) Bill Clinton met with the sitting Attorney General during the pendency of an investigation," Bharara said, referring to the controversial meeting in Phoenix between Clinton and Loretta Lynch.

Trump had repeatedly said during the campaign trail that he did not believe that talks about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server had not come up during that meeting between her husband and Lynch and that the two had just talked about their grandchildren and other frivolous things.

Bharara said any interaction between him and Trump could have raised doubts in people's minds over any future investigation his office would have undertaken. "Who on earth was going to believe that the President of the US in a remarkable and unprecedented fashion is cultivating a relationship with the US Attorney in Manhattan, whose jurisdiction includes various things, only to shoot the breeze? Who is going to believe that," said Bharara.

"I saved a lot of people a lot of grief (by not returning the call). At that point, I was kind of done with him (Trump) so I didn't return the call," Bharara said.

Referring to him being unceremoniously fired, Bharara recalled the meeting held with much "fanfare" between him and then president-elect Trump in Trump Towers in Manhattan shortly after the presidential elections. He said Trump had then explicitly asked him to stay on for another term.

Bharara also stressed the independence of the US Attorneys Offices. "The mass of what goes on in any US Attorney's Office is not political and doesn't become political, no matter who the president is," Bharara said.

"My job was not to serve the president, whether thats Barack Obama or Donald Trump or anyone else. It was to serve the public, and to serve the interests of justice," he added.
Microsofts top lawyer is laying some of the blame for Fridays massive cyber attack at the feet of the US government. Microsofts president and chief legal officer Brad Smith criticised US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), for stockpiling software code that can be used by hackers.

Cybersecurity experts say the unknown hackers who launched this weekends ransomware attacks used a vulnerability that was exposed in NSA documents leaked online.

In a post on Microsofts blog, Mr Smith said: An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.

He said governments should report vulnerabilities that they discover to software companies, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.The ransomware attack has hit as many as 200,000 victims in over 150 countries.
Indonesia has the fifth greatest number of premature births of any nation in the world, at 675,700 a year, according to the World Health Organization. (Photo: AFP)

Bogor (Indonesia): Tiny Indonesian baby Maryamah stared around from inside an incubator, her bright eyes swivelling left and right from under a woollen hat that was far too big for her.

When she was born prematurely, Maryamah was just 1.2 kilograms (2.6 pounds), less than half the usual weight of a newborn in Indonesia.

Now safely back at home, she is still diminutive but nestles comfortably in a small incubator lent to family, who live in a poor neighbourhood in the city of Bogor on Java island.

She is one of hundreds of premature babies born in Indonesia benefiting from the work of an engineering professor who is building incubators and lending them for free to low-income families in a bid to fill a gap in the healthcare system.

"The government has a program of public health insurance, but it cannot cover all the people," Raldi Artono Koestoer, who established the initiative, said.

Indonesia has the fifth greatest number of premature births of any nation in the world, at 675,700 a year, according to the World Health Organization.

The WHO says that pre-term birth complications are the leading cause of death among children under five.

Babies born early can need specialist care. Incubators keep them warm and can help prevent infections.

But getting access to the live-saving devices is a huge challenge for the millions living in poverty in Indonesia.

The public insurance scheme introduced in 2014 has helped as it sometimes covers the cost of incubators for a while.

But families unable to afford the high cost of continued care are often forced to take their newborns home early.

'Complete success'

Koestoer, who works at the University of Indonesia just outside Jakarta, started his lending scheme back in 2012, using his technical expertise to design and build ultra-light, portable incubators.

His interest in incubators began when he fixed one of the devices for his elder brother, a paediatrician, and then learnt how to construct them himself.

To fund the scheme, he sought individuals willing to donate 3.5 million rupiah ($260) each the cost of making one incubator and also to transport the devices to the homes of selected families. People who have signed up are generally middle-class professionals and include many in the healthcare sector.

People requiring an incubator send a text message to a special number, and if they are deemed in need, a volunteer brings one round for them.

The service began in the capital Jakarta, and has now expanded to an additional 48 cities, from the island of Sumatra in the west to the mountainous Papua region in the east.

As the service has grown, the professor has recruited two of his students to work with him, and he hopes to extend the initiative to 300 cities.

Koestoer, 62, says he has so far built 180 incubators that have helped about 1,500 babies, including twins and triplets.

"Our success ratio is 100 percent," he said. "1,500 babies 100 percent alive, healthy."

'Happiest man in world'

The scheme has proved invaluable for Maryamah and her parents, Yulia Herawati and Prayogi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

Herawati underwent a caesarean section in February when she was almost eight months pregnant due to high blood pressure. Her baby was at first allowed to stay in a hospital incubator with the help of government insurance.

But after seven weeks, when the baby was still only 1.5 kilos, doctors said Maryamah could no longer stay in the hospital as her condition had stabilised, prompting her parents to launch a desperate search for help.

"We were slowly recovering from the shock of having a premature baby, but then we had another problem how were we going to take care of her at home" said Prayogi.

After asking around, he found out about the incubator lending service from a friend.

"I sent a text message and the response was very fast. After a few minutes the operator got in touch with me, and said that the incubator can be picked up as soon as the baby is at home," he said.

Maryamah now weighs 2.4 kilograms and although she still spends a lot of time in the incubator, her parents now feel safe taking her out and playing with her.

While running the scheme is a big task, Koestoer says it all seems worth it when he meets the children he has helped.

"When a mother comes here with her baby and it is in good health, I'm the happiest man in the world," he said, speaking from his university office.
 Flash

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday urged the United States to move its embassy to Jerusalem, responding to an earlier statement by U.S. State Secretary Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson suggested on Sunday that moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem might not impact the Trump administration's efforts to reach a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

He told NBC that President Donald Trump "I think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region, and understanding, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have."

In the evening, Netanyahu released a statement, charging that the move "won't harm the peace process."

According to Netanyahu, transferring the embassy will "advance peace" by "shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

Israel occupied East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Shortly later, it annexed the territory, in a move condemned internationally.

The Palestinians want to establish a state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
It is understood that the two men were in their seats and preparing for take-off when two women chose to complain to Thomas Cook cabin crew about them. (Photo: AP/Representational)

London: Two Muslim men were forced to get off a plane in Turkey and made to go through security checks again after passengers on a flight operated by a British airline complained that they were "making gestures" to each other and "going to the toilet to use their phones".

They were asked to retrace their steps through security at Izmir airport in Turkey for extra checks sparked by claims made by fellow passengers on the Thomas Cook airline's Manchester-bound plane last week, the Manchester Evening News reported.

Thomas Cook airline apologised to the passengers who came under suspicion after two female passengers told cabin crew that they had witnessed the men "skipping security scanners" and signalling to each other while aboard the plane.

It meant the men had to get off the flight, which had been about to take-off before the passengers spoke up. They returned to the terminal to re-do security checks and were eventually given the all clear to travel. But the incident that took place on Wednesday meant the flight was delayed by nearly 90 minutes.

When the men were finally allowed to re-board, their accusers -- who also alleged they were "making phone calls" -- refused to travel with them, instead choosing to return to the terminal.

As the drama unfolded just before take-off, fellow passengers said they were shocked. One passenger described the scenes as "an embarrassment". "Two innocent Muslim men were marched off the plane and searched as two English ladies refused to fly with them on the plane. The result was a delay for everyone and the men flew, while the women were left behind," the passenger was quoted as saying.

It is understood that the two men were in their seats and preparing for take-off when two women chose to complain to Thomas Cook cabin crew about them, the report said. They complained about the men "making gestures to each other" and "going to the toilet to use their phones", it said.

The women were also said to have alleged the men had "missed the security scanners", leading cabin crew to ask them if they could retrace their steps through the terminal.

The men, who were said to remain calm throughout despite the accusations, were then given the all-clear. A spokesman for the Thomas Cook Airlines, was quoted as saying, "Two customers on this flight were asked to go through security a second time as a precaution after unverified concerns were raised that the initial airport security check had missed them out."

"We'd like to thank these two customers for their patience and apologise for any inconvenience," he said.
Paris: New French President Emmanuel Macron is set to name a prime minister and visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel on his first full day in office on Monday.

The 39-year-old centrist leader laid out his ambitious plans for France as he took power on Sunday, promising to restore France's shattered self-confidence and help rebuild the flagging European Union.

His choice of prime minister will be crucial for the first task, with the 46-year-old centre-right Edouard Philippe from the Republicans party seen as the favourite for the job.

Picking him would send a clear signal that Macron hopes to attract other young modernisers from the Republicans to his new centrist party, Republic on the Move (REM), which will contest parliamentary elections in June.

"If the prime minister comes from the right, Emmanuel Macron will be able to attack the parliamentary elections by dynamiting the right, in the same way he has done to the left," political expert Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet told AFP.

Macron, who was economy minister under outgoing Socialist president Francois Hollande, has already attracted dozens of centre-left MPs to his movement as he reshapes French political life.

Without his own parliamentary majority, the former investment banker will find it hard to push through his planned reforms of the labour market, pensions, unemployment benefits and education.

"I will not reverse course on any of the commitments taken in front of the French people," Macron said on Sunday as he took power from Hollande, his former mentor, adding that "France is strong only if she is prosperous".

Philippe is the mayor of the gritty northern port of Le Havre and an MP for the region since 2012 who studied at the same universities as Macron and shares many of his views on the economy and social issues.

Winning over sceptics

Later on Monday afternoon, Macron will travel to Berlin to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel, maintaining a French presidential tradition of making the first European trip to the other half of the EU's power couple.

The fervently pro-European Macron wants to push for deeper ties in the 28-member EU to help the bloc overcome the imminent departure of Britain which voted to leave last year.

France's place is in the European Union "which protects us and enables us to project our values in the world", Macron said on Sunday, but the club needed to be "reformed and relaunched".

He intends to press for the creation of a parliament and budget for the eurozone which would see Germany, the zone's richest member, contribute funds to support economic growth in weaker nations.

German media, including influential tabloid Bild and news magazine Der Spiegel, have recently drawn attention to the danger of Macron's presidency costing Germany more money.

"Very German obsession," Macron's chief policy advisor Jean Pisani-Ferry wrote on Twitter on Saturday. "And strange disconnect from reality."

Olivier Ihl, an academic from the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies, said that the visit was "an important moment because he wants to relaunch Franco-German cooperation in a Europe that is on its knees".

Merkel welcomed Macron's victory over Le Pen, saying he carried "the hopes of millions of French people and also many in Germany and across Europe".

Symbolic day

Macron, France's youngest ever president, took the reins of power from Hollande at the Elysee Palace a week after his resounding victory over far-right leader Marine Le Pen in an election that was watched worldwide.

After a private meeting with Hollande and his first speech as president, Macron headed up the rainy Champs Elysees on Sunday in an army vehicle, waving to small crowds of wellwishers who gathered along the famed avenue.

His wife Brigitte, a 64-year-old who was his high school drama teacher, attended the ceremony and a later meeting at the Paris town hall wearing a light blue Louis Vuitton outfit.

Her three children from her previous marriage were also present at Sunday's inauguration along with VIPs from France's political scene and the young team of advisors behind Macron's sensational rise.

The new president faces a host of daunting challenges including tackling stubbornly high unemployment, fighting Islamist-inspired violence and healing divisions exposed by an often vicious election campaign.

Hollande's five years in power were plagued by a sluggish economy and bloody terror attacks that killed more than 230 people. He leaves office after a single term.
Paris: France's new President Emmanuel Macron named Edouard Philippe, a little-known centre-right mayor, as prime minister on Monday, in his first major decision since taking power on a promise to lead a French "renaissance".

Philippe, a 46-year-old MP and mayor of the northern port of Le Havre, comes from the moderate wing of the rightwing Republicans party and is seen as a pragmatist.

His appointment was seen as a strategic move by 39-year-old Macron, a former minister in the outgoing Socialist government who is trying to woo modernisers of all stripes to his new centrist party, La Republique en Marche (Republic on the Move, REM).

France's youngest ever president has already attracted dozens of Socialist MPs to his side, triggering a major realignment in French politics that has left the traditional parties floundering.

Like Macron, Philippe is a product of France's elite ENA college for senior public servants and worked for a while in the private sector.

Relatively unknown outside his Le Havre fiefdom, he has already crossed the floor once in his career, defecting from the Socialists to the Republicans as a young politician.

One of Macron's aides welcomed his appointment as "a good move", telling AFP it would help him "break the right".

Taking office Sunday, the former investment banker who trounced far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the May 7 presidential run-off, said he aimed to restore France's shattered self-confidence.

The fervently pro-European Macron also said he would help rebuild the flagging European Union.

He heads to Berlin later Monday for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on how Europe's power couple can drive reforms of the bloc.

Like Macron, France's new prime minister has little truck with the entrenched left-right divide.

After campaigning for Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard as a youth, he switched to the right, becoming a close ally of centre-right former prime minister Alain Juppe.

Mayor of Le Havre, his hometown, since 2010, the German-speaking father of three, who writes crime novels in his spare time, was elected to parliament in 2012.

His first task will be to help Macron finalise his cabinet choices, to be announced on Tuesday.

France's new president has said he wants a mix of experience and new blood -- a balance he has attempted to achieve in his slate of candidates for the June 11-18 election.

Macron needs a parliamentary majority to push through his ambitious plans to loosen France's strict labour laws, boost entrepreneurship and reduce class sizes in tough neighbourhoods.

But his year-old party faces a strong challenge from the losers of the presidential election, with the Republicans, Le Pen's National Front, the hard-left France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and centre-left Socialists all plotting revenge.

In his first speech as president on Sunday, Macron promised to restore France's shattered self-confidence and help rebuild the flagging European Union.

He said he wanted to convince people that France was "at the dawn of an extraordinary renaissance" and that the world and Europe "need France now more than ever".

His visit to Merkel is in keeping with France's presidential tradition of making Berlin the first foreign port of call.

Later this month Macron will hold talks with Donald Trump, when the US president -- believed to have preferred Le Pen over Macron -- visits Brussels for a NATO summit.

In Berlin, Macron will push for deeper ties in the 28-member EU to help it overcome the imminent departure of Britain.

Merkel has hailed Macron's election win, saying he carries "the hopes of millions of French people and also many in Germany and across Europe".

But the Frenchman's calls for the eurozone to have its own budget have received a cool response from Germany, which fears it would be forced to pay the lion's share.

"Many countries including France would need to organise a referendum. It's not realistic," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told Le Figaro newspaper.

French MEP Sylvie Goulard, an ally of Macron who also has close ties to Berlin, predicted he would avoid causing any tensions with Germany.

"There will be no arm-wrestling," she said. Breathing new life into the EU is just one of a host of challenges Macron faces.

On the home front, he will have to work quickly to tackle stubbornly high unemployment, combat the jihadist threat and heal divisions exposed by an often vicious election campaign.

Hollande's five years in power were plagued by a sluggish economy and a string of terror attacks that killed more than 230 people.
India is taking Pakistan to the United Nations' highest court in an attempt to save the life of an Indian naval officer sentenced to death last month by a Pakistani military court after being convicted of espionage. (Photos: PTI)

The Hague: India fears that Kulbhushan Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before its arguments are heard, India's attorney Harish Salve said at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday. India also called for immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence.

The Indian national, who had been arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death on allegations of espionage and subversive activities, had been framed on the basis of confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody, Salve added.

As the ICJ began hearing Jadhav's case, India argued that human rights, treated as "basics" all across the world, had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan. It also accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

We want appropriate legal representation for Jadhav, India told the UN's main judicial body which has stayed his death sentence.

New Delhi has called for immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

All requests for consular access to 46-year-old Jadhav had fallen on "deaf ears", it said.

The present situation, Salve said before the court, was grave and that is why India had sought its indulgence. He described Jadhav's trial process as "farcical" and stressed that Pakistan did not respond to Jadhav's mother's plea to see her son.

India is presenting its case first, followed by Pakistan later in the day. Both sides will get 90 minutes each to argue their case before the UN's principal judicial body.

India may avail a "short extension" beyond 90 minutes to present its case, the judge had said in his opening remarks.

India had appealed against the death sentence on May 8, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan. On May 9, ICJ gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. India acknowledges that Jadhav had served with the Navy but denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

The ICJ was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.
Paris: On his first full day in office, France's freshly inaugurated President Emmanuel Macron was moving quickly Monday on fronts foreign and domestic, with a scheduled first presidential trip to Berlin for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel and the expected unveiling of his choice for prime minister.

Among names being bandied around for the top job in Macron's first government, speculation mostly centered on Edouard Philippe.

The 46-year-old lawmaker, largely unknown to voters, is a member of the mainstream right Republicans party that was badly battered by Macron's victory in the presidential campaign.

Appointing Philippe could tick several boxes for 39-year-old Macron, France's youngest president, who took power on Sunday.

Philippe's age would reinforce the generational shift in France's corridors of power and the image of youthful vigor that Macron is cultivating. It would also make good on Macron's campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces.

Philippe could also attract other Republicans to Macron's cause as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass promised economic reforms.

Macron's planned afternoon trip to Berlin, his first as president, signals his intent to also move rapidly on campaign promises to revive support for the European Union by reforming and strengthening it.

On Sunday, Macron said "We will need a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe because it's the instrument of our power and our sovereignty, I will work on that."

Germany is looking to Macron to revitalize France as an economic power and political heavyweight in an EU facing complex divorce proceedings with Britain.

When Britain leaves the bloc in 2019, France will be the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

As a presidential candidate, Macron called for a "new Franco-German deal" that would involve "much more structured cooperation" on investment, on European border security, and on defense.

Macron is the conservative Merkel's fourth French president in nearly 12 years as chancellor. She built a solid relationship with Macron's predecessor, Socialist Francois Hollande, despite their political differences notably with their joint effort to secure an accord to calm the crisis in Ukraine in tense overnight talks in Minsk, Belarus in 2015.

Germany is keen to continue with the Franco-German diplomatic drive to keep a lid on the situation in Ukraine.

Merkel has praised Macron's embrace of European unity but has offered few concrete details of the way forward for German-French relations.
The new infections were largely in Asia, which had been closed for business when the malware first struck.

The worldwide ransomware cyber attack spread to thousands more computers on Monday as people across Asia logged in at work, disrupting businesses, schools, hospitals and daily life. But no new large-scale outbreaks were reported, and British officials said a feared second wave of infections had not materialised.

The new infections were largely in Asia, which had been closed for business when the malware first struck. In Britain, whose health service was among the first high-profile targets of the online extortion scheme, health secretary Jeremy Hunt said we have not seen a second wave of attacks.

He said the level of criminal activity is at the lower end of the range that we had anticipated.The malware, known as WannaCry, paralysed computers running factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems, hitting 2,00,000 victims in more than 150 countries.

Though the spread of the ransomware slowed on Monday, many companies and government agencies were still struggling to recover from the first attack.

In Asia, where Fridays attack occurred after business hours, thousands of new cases were reported on Monday as people came back to work.The Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, a non-profit group, said 2,000 computers at 600 locations in Japan were affected. Companies, including Hitachi and Nissan Motor Co., reported problems but said they had not seriously affected their operations.

Chinese state media said 29,372 institutions there had been infected along with hundreds of thousands of devices.Universities and other educational institutions in China were among the hardest hit, possibly because schools tend to have old computers and be slow to update operating systems and security, said Fang Xingdong, founder of ChinaLabs, an internet strategy think tank.

As cybersecurity firms worked around the clock to monitor the situation and install a software patch, new variants of the rapidly replicating malware were discovered Sunday. One did not include the so-called kill switch that allowed researchers to interrupt the malwares spread.

Ryan Kalember, senior vice-president at Proofpoint, which helped stop its spread, said the version without a kill switch could spread.

Malware spreads

The global ransomware cyber attack ebbed in intensity but experts warned new versions could emerge.

U.S.- Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, said the recent global cyber attack is something that for right now, weve got under control in the United States.

UK- Britains health service said most hospitals hit by the global attack are back up and running, but seven are still experiencing IT disruption and canceling appointments.

Indonesia- The Indonesian government urged businesses to update computer security after two hospitals were hit by the ransomware. Patient files on computers were locked at the affected hospitals.

29,000 institutions across China were infected by the global ransomware cyber attack, Chinese state media reported.
Over a million Rohingya who live in the coastal western state are treated as interlopers from neighbouring Bangladesh. (Photo: AP)

Yangon: A senior European Union official has urged Myanmar to allow full aid access to the north of Rakhine state, where thousands have fled their homes after a months-long army crackdown on Rohingya Muslims.

The area along the country's northwestern border has been under lock down since October, when the military launched a campaign to hunt down Rohingya militants who staged deadly attacks on police posts.

Some 100,000 people from the Muslim minority were displaced by the violence, most of them fleeing to Bangladesh and bringing with them harrowing stories of rape, torture and mass killings by soldiers.

Myanmar has rebuffed UN claims that its security forces may have committed crimes against humanity and has refused to allow international observers into the area.

De facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi this month publicly rejected a UN mission to probe the violence after meeting the EU's diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini.

European Union commissioner for aid Christos Stylianides said he pushed for unrestricted humanitarian access during a three-day visit to Myanmar, which included a tour of northern Rakhine.

"A lot of problems remain in order to see what we want about humanitarian access," he said. "I raised this issue a lot in my meetings, not only with ministers but also with the district commissioner of Maungdaw," he added, referring to one of the locked-down areas.

The EU has pledged to give Myanmar some 800 million euros ($875 million) of development aid between 2014-20, making it the second-largest recipient in Asia after Afghanistan.

Stylianides is the highest profile foreign official to visit northern Rakhine since UN rights envoy Yanghee Lee and former UN chief Kofi Annan, who leads a commission tasked with healing deep divisions between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine.

Over a million Rohingya who live in the coastal western state are treated as interlopers from neighbouring Bangladesh and denied citizenship, basic education and healthcare. Their movements are severely restricted.

Stylianides said some foreign aid workers had been granted access to northern Rakhine, but more must be done to help 16,000 people who are still displaced before the imminent onset of the monsoon.

The commissioner also raised concerns about a push to forcibly rehouse Rohingya in state-built "model villages" in areas where troops are accused of burning hundreds of houses to the ground.

"It's completely unacceptable to proceed on this project without the (voluntary) decision of the inhabitants," he said.
Quetta (Pakistan): A Pakistani police official says four paramilitary troops were wounded when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle in the country's south-western Mastung district, the site of a deadly ISIS attack last week.

Abdul Nabi says the Frontier Corps' vehicle was on a routine patrol in the Esplenji area when the bomb went off, apparently detonated by remote control.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but in the past Baluch separatist groups that have waged a low-level insurgency for a decade have claimed such assaults. Also, the banned extremist Lashker-e-Jhangvi claimed a similar attack on Sunday that wounded two paramilitary troops.

A suicide attack by the Islamic State group in Mastung on Friday killed 28 police. ISIS had said it targeted a lawmaker seen as close to the Taliban.
Putin said Russia had last year sought an agreement with the previous US administration on cooperation in the field of cyber security, but that Washington had dragged its feet and no deal was concluded. (Photo: AP)

Beijing: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that intelligence services should beware of creating software that can later be used for malicious means - a reference to global ransomware attacks that researchers say exploited a hacking tool built by the US National Security Agency.

Speaking to reporters in Beijing, where he is taking part in a conference, Putin said that there was no significant damage to Russian institutions, including its banking and healthcare systems, from the computer worm known as WannaCry.

But as a whole, it is worrying, theres nothing good about it, it is a source of concern. As regards the source of these threats, I believe that the leadership of Microsoft have announced this plainly, that the initial source of the virus is the intelligence services of the United States, Putin said.

Once theyre let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators, he added.

So this question should be discussed immediately on a serious political level and a defence needs to be worked out from such phenomena.

Putin said that Russia was not behind the attack.

Around 1,000 computers at the Russian interior ministry have been affected, a spokeswoman for the ministry told Interfax news agency. A source familiar with the matter said the ministry did not lose any information in the attacks.

Putin said Russia had last year sought an agreement with the previous US administration on cooperation in the field of cyber security, but that Washington had dragged its feet and no deal was concluded.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to acknowledge what security experts had already widely concluded: the ransomware attack that hit computers around the world on Friday leveraged a hacking tool, built by the NSA, that leaked online in April.
Beijing: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Moscow was opposed to any new countries acquiring nuclear weapons, but that the world should talk to North Korea rather than threaten it.

Putin, speaking in Beijing, said nuclear tests of the type that Pyongyang had been carrying out in recent weeks were unacceptable, but that a peaceful solution to rising tensions on the Korean peninsula was needed. I want to confirm that we are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers, including with the Korean Peninsula and North Korea, said Putin, who said any such move would be harmful and dangerous.

But at the same time, we understand that what we have observed in the world recently, and specifically flagrant violations of international law and incursions into the territory of foreign states, changes in regime, lead to such kinds of arms races, he added.

Putin did not specify what countries he had in mind, but he has in the past repeatedly criticised the United States for military operations in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and accused it of trying to oust legitimate governments.

In this connection, we need to act in a joined-up way, (and) strengthen the system of international guarantees with the help of international law and with the help of the UN Charter, said Putin. We need to return to dialogue with North Korea and stop scaring it and find ways to resolve these problems peacefully.

The Russian leader said he thought such an approach was possible because of what he called the positive experience of holding talks with Pyongyang in the past. If you recall, there was a time when North Korea announced it was suspending this kind of (nuclear) programme, but unfortunately certain participants in the negotiations process did not have enough patience. I think we need to return to this.

Putin said he was briefed by his defence minister after North Koreas latest missile test. This missile launch presented no threat to us, but it of course escalates this conflict and there is nothing good about that.

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday that a ballistic missile fired by North Korea had crashed into the Sea of Japan around 500 kilometres (310.69 miles) off the Russian coast.
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A total of 27 Islamic State (IS) militants were killed in airstrikes by international coalition against IS posts in IS-held areas in Iraq's western province of Anbar on Sunday, an Iraqi army source said.

According to intelligence reports, the U.S.-led coalition aircraft conducted an airstrike on an internet cafe used by IS militants as a headquarters in the town of al-Qaim near the border with Syria, leaving some 20 of them killed, Nouman al-Zoubaie, commander of the army's 7th Division, told Xinhua.

Another airstrike destroyed an IS post in the city of Aana, some 180 km northwest of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, killing six militants, Zoubaie said.

In addition, an international airstrike bombed a booby-trapped vehicle and killed its driver, he added.

In a separate incident, a booby-trapped car detonated at a busy intersection in Karrada district in central Baghdad, leaving a civilian killed and five others wounded, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The airstrikes in western Iraq and Baghdad car bombing came as the Iraqi security forces, backed by anti-IS international coalition, are carrying out a major offensive to drive out IS militants from their major stronghold in the western side of Mosul in northern Iraq.
A Joint Investigation Team (JIT) formed by the Pakistan Supreme Court to probe much-hyped Panama leaks case on Monday decided to seek record of the Sharif familys tax returns from the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).

Officials said the six-member team headed by Federal Investigation Agencys (FIA) additional director-general Wajid Zia is considering to write a letter to FBR asking them to provide complete information of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his sons financial statements from 1985 to 2016.

Earlier, the JIT was informed by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) that Mr Sharif had no property abroad but he took Rs 20 crore from Hussain Nawaz in 2015 in the form of dollars and euros.
Although no major deals were signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit, it was successful in building bridges and underscoring cultural commonalities between India and Sri Lanka. Modi was in Sri Lanka as chief guest at an international conference and celebration marking UN Vesak Day or Buddha Purnima. In the past decade, India has dipped into its vast soft power resources to reach out to countries. Its diplomacy towards several Asian countries that have Buddhist populations has seen it project itself as the cradle of Buddhism. Although Gautama Buddha was born in Lumbini in present day Nepal, all the other important milestones in his life, including his enlightenment, first sermon, establishment of the first Buddhist Sangha and his death, were in India. It was from India to Sri Lanka that Buddhas teachings travelled first. Thus, Buddhism provides a strong link between the two countries.



Indias adoption of cultural diplomacy in its outreach to Sri Lanka therefore makes eminent sense. The Buddhist diplomacy is driven partly with an eye on China, which has drawn on its own centuries-old Buddhist links to strike a chord with Sri Lanka. It has financed and built, for instance, a $100 million telecommunication tower in the heart of Colombo that has been named the Lotus Tower after the Buddhas Lotus Sutra.India has been apprehensive of Chinese port projects in Sri Lanka that have implications for Indias security. Since Maithripala Sirisena took over the presidency, Sri Lanka appears to be somewhat more mindful of Indias security concerns. Unlike in 2014, when the Mahinda Rajapaksa government allowed Chinese submarines to dock at Colombo harbour, the Sirisena government turned down such a request recently. But is this just a one-off rejection aimed at trying to avoid riling India during Modis visit? India will be hoping that not hosting Chinese naval vessels has become Colombos policy.



During his visit, Modi met leaders from across political parties. What transpired in his meeting with former president Mahinda was not made public. It is likely that the Indian prime minister was seeking to rustle up support in Sri Lanka for the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed during Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghes visit to India last month. The MoU identified Indian investment in major infrastructure projects relating to ports and the energy and transportation sectors. It has triggered protests in Sri Lanka. Many fear that Sri Lankan assets are being handed over to India under the deal. While Modis interaction with leaders across the board should have brought clarity to issues, his cultural diplomacy would help dispel suspicions of Indian intentions in the Sri Lankan public mind.
An intruder from Pakistan was shot dead by the Border Security Force early today in Bariyala in Gurdaspur Sector.



BSF personnel spotted some suspicious movement near the fence along the Indo-Pak border, a BSF official said.



He said despite repeated warning by the BSF personnel the intruder kept on marching towards the Indian side after which the troops opened fire at him.



The official said that the area where the incident took place is surrounded by the Ravi River from three sides.



Asked if any recovery has been made from the spot where the intruder was shot dead, he said the search operation in the area was under progress.
The government today told the Supreme Court that it will come out with a law to regulate marriage and divorce among Muslims if triple talaq is held invalid and unconstitutional by the court.



Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar "If the practice of instant divorce (triple talaq) is struck down by the court, then Centre will bring a law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community."



Rohatgi's submission came when the court asked him what are the remedies for a Muslim man to come out of a marriage if such practices are struck down.



Earlier in the day, the apex court bench also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, said it was keeping open the issues of practice of polygamy and 'nikah halala' among Muslims for adjudication in future, as the Centre insisted on judicial deliberations on these aspects as well.



"It may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future," the bench said.



The significant observation was made when Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' were also part of the order of a two-judge bench, which had referred to the Constitution bench the three issues including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.



"The scope of referring had all the three issues that was divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the two- judge bench," Rohatgi said.



When the AG asked the bench to make it clear that the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' are still open and would be dealt by other bench in future, the court clarified "it will be dealt in future."



Today was the third day of the hearing on a clutch of petitions challenging triple talaq, polygamy and 'nikah halala' which is going on before a bench comprising members of different religious communities including Sikh, Christian, Parsee, Hindu and Muslim.



During the last hearing, the apex court had observed that triple talaq is the "worst" and "not a desirable" form of dissolution of marriage among the Muslims, even though there were schools of thought which called it "legal".



The remark was made by the bench when senior lawyer Salman Khurshid referred to the various schools of thought and the stand of All India Muslim Personal Law Board that triple talaq was "abhorrent", yet valid.



The hearing last Friday also saw two veterans, jurist Ram Jethmalani and former Union Minister and Islamic scholar Arif Mohammad Khan, coming out all guns blazing against the practice of triple talaq.



Advocate Farha Faiz, a petitioner in the case who is opposing the practice, had also alleged that Muslim clerics were running a parallel judicial system like the trial courts and the high courts and the clerics were forcing Muslims not to go to the courts.



"Point taken, you have raised a very valid and good point," the bench had said.



The apex court has fixed a six-day schedule for hearing, in which three days are available for those challenging triple talaq and three days for those defending it.
The 'ransomware' cyberattack that has hit as many as 200,000 victims in over 150 countries should be treated by governments around the world as a "wake- up call", IT giant Microsoft has said.



The virus exploits a flaw in a version of Microsoft Windows first identified by US intelligence.

The attacks exploited the computers because they were running outdated versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system.



The National Security Agency (NSA) alerted Microsoft about the issue three months ago and Microsoft released an upgrade that patched the flaw, but many users were yet to run it, CNN reported.



Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said yesterday in a blog post that his company, its customers and the government all share the blame, the report said.



"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call," Smith wrote while also noting how "cybersecurity has become a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers."



But he also blamed the governments. The security flaw that hackers used to launch the attacks on Friday was made public after information was stolen from the NSA, which routinely searches for flaws in software and builds tools to exploit them, the report said.



The government is not legally bound to notify at-risk companies. That's wrong, says Smith.



He argued there should be "a new requirement for governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them."



He said tech companies, customers and the government need to "work together" to protect against attacks.



"More action is needed, and it's needed now," he said.



The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.



The ransomware is a type of malicious software that infects a computer and restricts users' access to it until a ransom is paid to unlock it.



It demands users pay USD 300 worth of cryptocurrency Bitcoin to retrieve their files, though it warns that the payment will be raised after a certain amount of time.

The malware spreads through e-mail.
The army officer, who had tied a Kashmir youth to a jeep as human shield against stone pelters, has been given a clean chit by the Court of Inquiry (CoI), sources told Deccan Herald.



They said no action was recommended against the major from 53-Rashtriya Rifles battalion by the CoI and he was given a clean chit. Not disciplinary action was recommended against the officer and he was congratulated for his acumen and presence of mind to avoid civilian casualties, sources revealed.



The army had ordered a CoI on April 20 against the Major who tied Farooq Ahmad Dar of Chill Bras area in Khansahib segment of Budgam district in front of his jeep to safeguard paramilitary forces and polling staff from stone-pelters. The CoI had been given one month's time to complete the probe.



Earlier, the police had registered an FIR against unnamed army personnel on April 17 for tying Dar with a jeep on April 13, the day re-poll was held in 38-polling booths of Srinagar Lok Sabha seat. According to the police investigation, Dar was used as a human shield under threat and was kept under wrongful confinement by the Army.



A video of the incident was uploaded by former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on his Twitter profile, generating massive outrage and condemnation from all quarters including some senior army officers.



Lt General (Rtd) Harcharanjit Singh Panag, former General Officer Commanding-in-chief, Northern Command had said the image of tying a youth to an Army jeep would haunt his force and the nation for a long time. Image of a stone pelter tied in front of a jeep as a human shield, will 4 (for) ever haunt the Indian Army & the nation, Lt Gen H S Panag wrote on the twitter. When the state starts looking like a mirror image of the terrorists, it spells ominous portents!


There is a need to preserve Indian culture in the UK and make it more inclusive to have a "tolerant" society, experts at a panel discussion here have said.



The discussion was held at the Indian Gymkhana yesterday as part of the India and the UK year of culture 2017.



Participating in the discussion, Nanda Kumara, Executive Director of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, the largest cultural institute outside India, said the Bhavan is committed to spread the Indian art and culture and make "life more meaningful."



"We teach 23 subjects including dance, drama, music and yoga under one roof. I consider myself lucky to be part of the organisation which helps Indian art and culture flourish in the UK," he said.



Noting that the Bhavan was open for everyone, he said 70 per cent of the students are girls and said Indian culture is "very special".



"We follow the motto - the whole world is a family and we should imbibe from others everything that is good," he said.



Trupti Patel, President of the Hindu Forum of Britain, described British society as "very tolerant" and said "because of us Britain has got a special identity." "We should not lose our identity while we should respect others' culture as well," she said.



Mayura Patel, Chairperson, Croydon Hindu Council, said "let us try to be inclusive and engrave our values among children. We want our children to mix well with other children here. Unless we love our own culture how will others love it," she asked.



Lakshmi Kaul, Founder and Executive Member of the Kashmiri Pandits in the UK, said "it is fairly easy to celebrate one's ethnicity here as you have the opportunity to interact with the best in the world."Prabhakar Kaza, Director of Kaza Business Consultants Ltd., said "there is racism here but we should not be too sensitive about it. It is part of the social fabric."



His advise to youngsters is to "bring to the fore" whatever skills they have.



Earlier, Virendra Sharma, Labour MP, formally inaugurated an exhibition containing Indian craft work, embroidery, pottery, designing and handloom products along with handmade jewellery organised by a women's organisation 'Inspiring Indian Women'.



Rashmi Mishra, Founder of the Inspiring Indian Women said, "the exhibition was organised to give a platform to Indian artists to display their products and make them famous internationally."



In his brief address, Virendra Sharma said, "We have a moral responsibility to support all initiatives taken by women, particularly rural women who have special talent in their craftsmanship."



Mahendra Jadeja, President of the Retailers Association of Britain and Saleha, former Mayor of Lambeth also spoke on the occasion.
US President Donald Trump is "CEO of the country, he can fire anyone he wants", America's envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said, while defending him for firing former FBI director James Comey.



Haley said she believed that the criticism of Trump stems from discomfort with his propensity to act on his decisions.



"The president is the CEO of the country," Indian-origin Haley told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" yesterday. "He can hire and fire anyone he wants."



She was responding to a question if she found herself having to explain to foreign diplomats Trump's domestic policy decisions.



"I think what you can see is that this is a president of action," she said of Trump. "The reason people are uncomfortable is because he acts."



Asked whether the president sought a pledge of loyalty from her, Haley replied, "No".



At the same time, she said that during her tenure as South Carolina's governor demonstrations of "loyalty and trust" were important to her.



Regarding the president's tweet this week warning the fired FBI director that he better hope there are no "tapes" of their private conversations, Haley seemed unconcerned by the possibility that the president was taping conversations.



"I assume I'm being taped everywhere," she said.



Haley also addressed a range of other topics, including North Korea's latest missile launch Saturday night.She said there is a growing international consensus to impose further sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear programme and that the US will "tighten the screws" on North Korean President Kim Jong Un's government.



Trump has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Kim Jong Un, but Haley said such a meeting would only happen if North Korea meets certain conditions.



"A missile test is not the way to sit down with the president," Haley said.



On May 10, Trump fired 56-year-old Comey, abruptly removing the top sleuth overseeing a criminal probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.




Singh said the National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction has been set up by the government to finalise a national strategy to deal with all kinds of disasters in coordination with state governments and other stakeholders.





"India is one of the most disaster-prone nations in the world. More than 50 per cent population in the country lives in areas which are prone to earthquakes, floods, cyclones, droughts and tsunami," he said while inaugurating a meeting organised by the National Disaster Management Authority.





The meeting was attended by ministers from state governments, officials of the state disaster management authorities, top civil and police officials dealing with various disasters and representatives of non-government organisations.





Singh said the national platform was set up so that it can work effectively for disaster risk mitigation along with various stakeholders.





The home minister said India has learnt lessons from the 1999 super cyclone in Odisha where 10,000 people had lost their lives, the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat and the 2004 tsunami and brought a paradigm change in its approach towards disaster risk mitigation.





"We have been working in a planned manner for disaster risk mitigation that include adopting the Disaster Management Act in 2005, disaster management policy in 2009, raising national disaster response force besides others," he said.





Singh highlighted the government's efforts in setting up the early warning system for disasters, cyclone shelters, saline embankments, disaster response force in central and state levels, community preparedness and capacity building.





The home minister said India has become the first country to prepare a livestock disaster management plan for the safety of livestock during a disaster.





Singh also said India has taken a number of steps for enhancing cooperation with South Asian countries in disaster risk mitigation besides improving ties with BRICS, BIMSTEC and East Asian nations.





He also asked the participants to prepare a special action plan for vulnerable communities.





In his address, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said India could not afford to ignore preparing for disasters as it was one of the most disaster-prone nations.





"We are bound to face disasters, not only natural but man-made too. If we can prepare for the disasters properly, we can have a safe and secured society," he said.





Rijiju also said India has been taking the lead role in the entire efforts of disaster risk mitigation, especially in South Asia.





In the meeting, the NDMA released the main features of the national database for emergency management. They are disaster dashboard, incident reporting, data visualisation, decision support tools, interaction tools, resource management, India disaster resource network database, mobile apps and data inventory.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh today described India as one of the most disaster-prone nations, saying more than 50 per cent population of the country lives in areas that are vulnerable to calamities.
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Armin Laschet (C), Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader in North Rhine-Westphalia, celebrates their victory in Dusseldorf, Germany, on May 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Joachim Bywaletz)

Exit polls showed on Sunday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Chrisitian Democratic Union (CDU) won North Rhine-Westphalia state election.

According to initial projections made by German local media ZDF and ARD, CDU secures 34.3 to 34.4 percent of the votes while the Social Democratic Party(SPD) lag behind, getting 30.6 percent of the votes.

Free Democratic Party (FDP) gets 11.9 to 12.2 percent and the right-wing Alternative for Germany(AFD) receives 7.6 to 7.7 percent. The Greens follows with 6.0 percent and the Left Party with 5.0 percent.

Sunday's vote was the last state election before the federal election set for Sept. 24, and was widely seen as a vital pre-duel between Merkel's CDU and ex-President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz's SPD.

The result could greatly boost the morale of CDU in the national election, since it has scored success in three state elections this year, Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia.

In the past several months, some opinion polls have constantly showed Schulz will have the edge over his major competitor Merkel in the coming federal election. Some local media even dubbed it as "Shulz effect," and speculated Schulz might substitute Merkel since she lost momentum due to the migrant crisis.

But the recent setbacks dimmed the halo of Schulz since he failed to transform his popularity into votes.

SPD leader Schulz admitted a "crashing defeat" for his party, since his party lost 8.2 percent of the ballots compared to the 2012 election. German local media also called the result as "political earthquake."

North Rhine-Westphalia has been governed by a center-left coalition of the SPD and the Greens since 2010, with the Social Democrat Hannelore Kraft serving as state premier.

Kraft retreated from all her functions in SPD after the election. She said it's sad the party lost so many districts and she "takes personal responsibility for this defeat."

North Rhine-Westphalia is the most populous among the German states with nearly 18 million residents accounting for 20 percent of Germany's population.
Fresh clashes broke out between student protesters and security forces near a college campus here in the heart of the summer capital today.



According to police, the students of S P College took out a protest rally from the college against the "highhandedness" of security forces in the April 17 incident at Degree College Pulwama.



The students tried to march towards M A Road but were stopped by the police, ensuing clashes between both the sides, a police official said.



The students threw stones at the forces who fired a few tear smoke shells to contain them, the official said.He said the clashes were going on when the last reports came in.



The S P college runs two more educational institutions  S P Higher Secondary School and Women's College.



The authorities ordered suspension of classes at S P Higher Secondary School as a precautionary measure. The students of the school had clashed with the security forces last week.



The police raid on the state-run college in Pulwama had triggered widespread protests by students across Kashmir on April 17. The clashes have been going on intermittently since then, prompting authorities to suspend classes in the higher educational institutions for over a week last month.
As the issue of triple talaq is being debated in the Supreme Court, a city court has ruled that the marriage performed by a Muslim woman during the 'iddat' (waiting) period is not void.





The Delhi court dismissed the claim of a man, accused of domestic violence by his wife, that their wedding was invalid as the per Islamic law, as she had not completed 'iddat' after getting a divorce from her first husband.



In Islamic law, a divorced woman has to wait during the 'iddat' period for about three months before she can remarry.



"Any marriage performed by a Muslim woman during the iddat period is an irregular marriage and not a void (batil) marriage. Hence, the contention of the man on this aspect is found to be without any merits," Special Judge Bhupesh Kumar said while relying on a Supreme Court observation.



The court said there was "sufficient evidence" to issue notice to the Muslim man, who worked with the Coal India Ltd in Chhattisgarh, under the domestic violence act, saying "even depriving aggrieved person economically or financially amounts to domestic violence."



In her complaint seeking Rs 10 lakh compensation and monthly maintenance from the accused man, her second husband, the woman had said that he had concealed his first wedlock from her and when she found out about it, he started avoiding her and stopped sending her money.



She said she had married the accused after obtaining divorce from her first husband.



The man, on the other hand, denied that he had married the complainant, saying she was in the 'iddat' period and any wedding during this period is invalid.





"As per Islamic law, the female cannot remarry during 'iddat' period and any marriage taking place during 'Iddat' period cannot be termed as valid marriage," he said, adding that the woman got divorced from her first husband on October 4, 2012 and the second nikah was performed two days later.





The court also rejected the man's contention that the provisions of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence (PWDV) Act are not attracted as there are no allegations of physical, sexual or verbal abuse in the application.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday ruled himself out as the prime ministerial candidate of the non-BJP parties during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.



I am not a contender for the PMs post for 2019 polls. In fact, I dont harbour such aspirations. I am a leader of a small party and I know my limitations well, said Nitish, who is also the national president of the Janata Dal (United).



Refusing to be drawn into any such controversy, he hastened to add, Does anyone know what will happen in future? Five years back, how many people knew that Modi ji will become PM? But the voters in 2014 decided he had all the requisite qualities to don the mantle of Prime Minister.... But I have no such quality. Nor any such aspirations. In 2019, people will decide who is the best alternative.



Breaking his silence on the issue of land deals carried out by his ruling alliance partner Lalu Prasad, Nitish said, One person (Sushil Modi) is making allegations about land deals. While Lalu ji is responding to the charge. Who am I to react to all these issues?



Nitish was responding on the sidelines of the Lok Samvad (also known as Public Interface) programme here in the State Capital.



When a journo asked why he has so far refrained from ordering a probe into Lalus assets, Nitish said, The Company Law comes under Centres jurisdiction. If the BJP leader (Sushil Modi) genuinely has some substantial evidence against Lalu Prasad, he should move the appropriate authority so that a thorough inquiry could unravel the truth. After all, there is a BJP-led Government at the Centre under which the ED, CBI and Income Tax department function.



He lamented that the charges levelled by Modi against the RJD president were for dual purpose. First, he (SuMo) wants to remain in the news every now and then. And secondly, a sincere attempt is being made how to drive a wedge between the ruling alliance partners in Bihar so that the Grand Alliance regime could be destabilised, he argued.



On the ensuing presidential election, Nitish, who last month met Congress president Sonia Gandhi for a joint Opposition candidate, said, The ruling party at the Centre should first try to build a consensus over the presidential candidate by taking everyone, including all the Opposition parties, into confidence.If that does not happen, we will field a joint Opposition nominee for the top post, averred Nitish.
Several European countries are refusing to sign a trade statement at China's Silk Road summit, a diplomat said today, dealing a setback to Beijing's efforts to gain full support for its initiative.



France, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Portugal and Britain are among the European Union countries spurning the document, the diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.



Nearly 30 world leaders are taking part in the global summit on China's Silk Road plan, a huge infrastructure project which Beijing hopes will revive ancient trade routes from Asia to Europe and Africa.



The forum was to culminate today evening in a final communique from heads of state, with statements on topics spanning finance and relations between peoples.



The diplomat said all the European nations taking part in the summit's trade panel collectively decided to rebuff the text because they believe it does not sufficiently address European concerns surrounding transparency of public procurement and social and environmental standards.



China only presented the document to negotiators last week, telling them it could no longer be reworked, according to the official.



Beijing is seeking to cement its trade relations in Asia, Africa, and Europe through the summit, but some fear that these new Silk Roads serve the interests of Chinese exporters above all.



"It's very important for us and our companies that the calls for our projects under the Belt and Road initiative are transparent, that they are non-discriminatory, and that they comply with international standards," German Economic Minister Brigitte Zypries said at the trade panel yesterday.



"I think there is still room for improvement in this area."




India wants the ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav. Jadhav, the latest flash point in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.



India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government. Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.









Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a "spy" involved in terror activities, Pakistan today told the International Court of Justice while accusing India of using the world body as a stage for "political theatre" in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case.India's application on Jadhav, who was arrested in March last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities, was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed, Pakistan told the UN's highest judicial body.India had been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name, Mohammed Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office said in his opening remarks in response to India's submissions earlier in the day."India has been unable or perhaps more accurately unwilling to provide an explanation for this passport which is the most obvious indication of covert and illegal activity," he said. "We wish to make it absolutely clear that we remain committed to the path of peaceful resolution of all disputes. Whatever the provocation. Pakistan will not be cowed by terrorism, nor will it allow any attempt to malign or misrepresent its position or legal processes to go unchecked," Faisal said.India has seen it fit to use the International Court of Justice as a stage for "political theatre" but "we will not respond in kind", Faisal told the ICJ which held day-long proceedings to decide the fate of the former Indian Navy officer."He will touch upon the reasons what the court should not otherwise exercise any jurisdiction or entertain any aspects of India's engagement of its jurisdiction. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic but perhaps consistent that India complains that it has not been given access to commander Jadhav who has confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan," Faisal said.There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistan's accusations on Jadhav, Pakistan's lawyer Khawar Qureshi said. He urged the court to dismiss India's application on three accounts - that there was "no urgency", the relief sought was "manifestly unavailable" and the jurisdiction under the Vienna Convention was not "as unchallenged" as India has suggested."It (jurisdiction of the court) is limited and indeed it is further limited at qualified rules supplemented by the 2008 agreement" on Consular access," Qureshi said. On India invoking the Vienna Convention, Qureshi said, "The Vienna convention article 36 which adopted to set up standards of conduct particularly concerning communications and contact with nationals of the sending state which would contribute to the development of the friendly relations among nations...the observation we made immediately is this is unlikely to apply in the context of a spy, terrorist send by a state to engage in acts of terror.""Indeed, with clear from the Vienna conventions itself that there are provisions beyond article 36 that need to be considered before coming to the court with the bold assertion that the Vienna is interrelated regime," Qureshi said. Expressing fear that Jadhav, 46, might be executed before the hearing was over, India accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, India's lead attorney Harish Salve said. The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhav's execution. While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), took less than an hour.
A desire on the part of a BJP legislator to steal the limelight in the media left a pair of bulls and its owner, a poor and rustic person, high and dry in the state capital.



Jawahar Lal Rajput, the BJP MLA from Garuatha assembly constituency in Jhansi district, turned the centre of attraction, when he reached the assembly building to attend the inaugural session of the house on Monday riding a bullock cart.



As Rajput entered the vidhan bhavan, the photo journalists and camera persons of the TV channel rushed to shoot the MLA sitting on the bullock cart.



The MLA, after the photo shoot, went inside the building to attend the session. Rajput's supporters also vanished from the spot shortly thereafter.



A perplexed Ram Lakhan, who had traveled all the way from Jhansi, around 300 kilometres away, in his bullock cart, and was expecting to be paid by the MLA or his supporters, was escorted out of the building by the security personnel.



''I was told to bring the bullock cart here for some vidhayakji (MLA)...I do not know him....nor do I have his contact number...I have not been paid anything,'' Ram Lakhan, who parked his bullock cart near the state BJP headquarters situated in front of the vidhan bhavan building, said.



He said that he did not have any money to either feed his two bulls or have food himself. ''I had brought raw food items from my village which I cooked and ate during the trip to the state capital...now I have nothing,'' he added.



It later turned out that Rajput had embarked on the bullock cart barely a few metres away from the assembly building. Till that point he had traveled by an SUV. ''I wanted to highlight the problems of the farmers...and so I came here on bullock cart,'' he told the reporters.




During our childhood, trees were one of the few things that always held a special place in our hearts. They came alive as characters in many bedtime stories  benevolent and gracious. The urge to carefully preserve every fallen leaf between the pages of books seemed unstoppable  no matter what. Their serene shade invited us to play through the endless day, until our legs were too tired to stand on their own. Each tree had a story to share.



Enter urbanisation, the gentle giants made way to flyovers, roads and grand buildings, snatching away those precious memories in the process. While most of us acknowledge that we have recklessly cut down the trees around us, none of us may have an accurate answer to questions like how much of the green cover did we lose in the past decade or how many trees were cut in the last year in a city like Bengaluru. Pinning numbers to these questions instantly become a challenge!



But why is such trivial information so hard to find? Blame it on the data, say experts. For one to precisely answer these questions, adequate data about the number of trees that existed in the past and that exist today, along with their location, needs to be recorded. Unfortunately, not many thought this data to be an important one to maintain. Until now that is. Thanks to some forms of tree census across the country, the gap is slowly closing.



Today, there are a few organisations and institutes that conduct regular tree censuses to monitor trees around them. But who accounts for those that line the roads or the one in your backyard? This is where a widespread participation from not just researchers and nature enthusiasts, but also from common citizens becomes necessary  to count every tree and tell their story! The Neighbourhood Tree Campaign (NTC) is one such opportunity that helps everyone to track trees around and connect with them. Started by the India Biodiversity Portal (IBP), this citizen-science initiative aims at mapping trees across the country with the help of common people. The whole idea is to sensitise communities about the plants and trees in their surroundings, says Dr R Ganesan, fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE).





The beginning



Started in 2014, NTC is an annual event that sees enthusiastic participation from people in all walks of life, mapping trees in their neighbourhood. The procedure is similar to uploading your favourite photo on social media. Using a simple smartphone application, users click a few pictures of a tree, its leaves, flowers, fruits and other details, and record its location on the map in the app. This information is then sent to IBP and ecology experts take a look at the images to identify the tree, its species and the family it belongs to. In addition, interested researchers and public can use this data to learn more about the biodiversity around them.



In its first edition, the campaign registered a total observation of over 3,000 trees from 584 participants resulting in the identification of 680 species of trees  both native and exotic. In addition to tree mapping, a few partner organisations conducted tree walks to help communities appreciate the biodiversity around them. Subsequent campaigns have seen a steady growth in the number of participants and observations coming from across the country. In 2015, the campaign started to collect additional data on phenology, uses and folklore associated with the tree observations.



By 2016, the campaign had successfully identified a total of 2,623 species, with most of them having a dedicated page on IBP. This growth signifies that the campaign might soon reach its objective of documenting all tree species in India, with at least one image and one location associated with it.



For 2017, the Neighbourhood Tree Campaign started on April 22 and ended on April 30, 2017. According to the data available on www.bit.ly/2q2jxo3, there were close to 16,000 observations by about 1,300 users! The participants definitely seem to be gathering all the steam to contribute towards mapping trees, sharing a story close to their heart, and helping researchers and conservationists with the much needed data. Whats more, you could also win a prize by contributing the most number of observations or the best story!



A tree census, unlike peoples census, is a low-key affair. In spite of the limited resources, campaigns like NTC have shed light on the numbers of many tree species endemic to India. Each year, trees like neem, areca palm, sacred fig, copperpod, gulmohar, mango, jackfruit, Indian banyan, African tulip, cluster fig and silver oak figure in the top observations.





The power of numbers



The success of all citizen-science initiatives, like NTC, rests on common people who come together to make a difference  either by collecting data or by analysing them. Driven by large populations spread across the length and breadth of the country, these initiatives leverage the power of people, rather than depend on a few individuals and organisations to catalyse a change  be it monitoring trees or watching frogs. In the recent past, India has seen a wide range of citizen-science initiatives gaining momentum due to a mix of global and local activism, and the awareness about environment among the general public. Season Watch and Sparrow Watch are some other initiatives that have used the eagerness of citizens to contribute towards conservation, help collect valuable data and monitor a wide variety of biodiversity. Apart from IBP, other organisations like Gubbi Labs and Wildlife Conservation Foundation offer similar opportunities for everyone to contribute to this growing knowledge base.



There is a strong perception about science being the realm of scientists and researchers, usually off-the-limit for general public. But, with active participation from citizens in such initiatives that are open to all, this perception is slowly changing. In fact, involving the public has resulted in tremendous results like the recent discovery of Karaavali Skittering Frog in the Western Ghats are all testimony to this. It is now time to use this power, not only to innovate and discover but also to preserve and protect. In the face of a warming planet and looming climate change, it is perhaps time to step up our efforts to save the last green corners of the Earth.
After revolting against Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, militant commander Zakir Musa on Monday praised international terror organisation Al-Qaeeda saying that his struggle will continue for the establishment of the Shariah (Islamic rule) in Kashmir.



In a new over seven minute audio clip Musa, who quit Hizbul on Saturday after the outfit asked him not to make threatening statements against the sepratists leaders, thanked Al-Qaeda who have in their Navae Afghan Jihad (Al-Qaeda magazine) concurred with our slogan: Shariah or martyrdom.



"Our struggle will continue for the establishment of the Shariah in Kashmir, the militant commander said.

The separatist leaders Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik had last week in a statement said that the ongoing freedom movement in Kashmir had nothing to do with ISIS and Al-Qaeeda-like organisations.



Musa, who joined militancy after leaving his BTech course in Chandigarh in 2013, however, said that there was no disagreement between different militant factions in Kashmir and they will continue to work in tandem.



Reacting to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and lesser known Kashmiri Taliban offer to join their organisations, he said, I want to tell them that I wont be taking orders from people sitting on carpets in Pakistan and working for Taghoot-i-Nizam. Allah is enough for me. I am always against the accession to Taghoot-i-nizam (a reference to Pakistan).



Musa, in his early 20s, reiterated the threat he issued on Friday to secular separatist leaders who are fighting for a political cause, not Islamic cause." "We are not fighting for nationalism Our only slogan is Shariah or martyrdom."



Musa, who had taken over as Hizbul chief after its previous commander, Burhan Wani, was killed by security forces in an encounter on July 8, 2016, had stirred up a hornets nest on Friday when he threatened to chop off heads of those separatist leaders who claim the Kashmir struggle as political and not Islamic.



Consequently, Hizbul commanders based in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir termed his statement as unacceptable and termed it as his personal opinion.



Following the snub, Musa posted another audio clip where he announced his disassociation from the militant outfit. If Hizbul Mujahideen doesnt represent me, then I also dont represent them. From today onwards, I have no association with Hizbul Mujahideen, he said in an audio message circulated on social media.


 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. [Xinhua]

Chinese leaders are prioritizing a green path in promoting the Belt and Road Initiative along and beyond the ancient Silk Road route, and are asking all the parties involved to engage in extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits.

"We should pursue a new vision of green development and a way of life and work that is green, low-carbon, circular and sustainable," said President Xi Jinping during his opening remarks at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing on Sunday.

He also underscored the need to strengthen cooperation in ecological and environmental protection and build a sound ecosystem so as to realize the goals set by the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Echoing the need for a green footprint, Macro Lambertini, the director-general of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), said all countries should discard the old model of development pursued at the expense of the environment, and proceed down a new path of development in harmony with the environment and advocate a green infrastructure to avoid any detrimental impact on the natural system.

"We're not going to develop a prosperous society in a degraded planet," asserted Lambertini. He suggested countries along the Belt and Road should think of the environmental dimension at the beginning when engaging in various projects. This would help avoid damage of the environment or a waste of money and efforts on projects that could not be delivered ultimately out of ecological concerns.

The Chinese government has ordered enterprises and institutions involved in the initiative to practice environmental protection in foreign countries to ensure an eco-friendly and green Belt and Road.

Four ministries -- including the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Ministry of Foreign Affairs -- have jointly released a document entitled "Guidance to Promote the Construction of a Green Belt and Road," according to the State Council website.

"Economic prosperity and environmental well-being can be achieved at the same time," declared Erik Solheim, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and he urged all countries to show a compassionate spirit towards nature.

He said that many existing techniques can help strike a balance between ecological well-being and economic development, citing the example of the China-promoted Mombasa-Nairobi Railway that has created a number of bypasses to ensure a good habitat for wildlife in the Nairobi National Park.

Global commitment

The UNEP chief agreed with President Xi's call for a global coalition for a green Belt and Road and hoped to work with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, as well as businesses and the civil society along the routes in extensive consultation and joint contribution for a shared future of green energy, green transport, green finance, green compassion for nature as well as green ideas for mutual learning.

"Blue rivers and green forest are the new gold," Solheim said, quoting the earlier words of President Xi.

"As the benefits of conserving nature and wildlife are increasingly evident, the WWF will continue to advise the government, contractors and companies on how to build (especially infrastructure) in a way that means we do not harm the natural system that we want to maintain and preserve," said Lambertini.

He pledged to work across the full program with its wide network of local organizations along the routes and support local governments to consider the environmental dimension.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) today denied permission to Pakistan to play a purported "confessional" video of retired Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav at a public hearing here. To support its allegations that Jadhav was sent by India to carry out spying and espionage activities in Pakistan and was arrested from the restive Balochistan province, Pakistan delegation at the ICJ sought permission to play the purported video showing the Indian national admitting that he was a "spy".



However, the ICJ denied permission to the Pakistani side to play the video at the hearing, Indian officials in New Delhi said. The ICJ denying permission to Pakistan to play the "confessional" video of Jadhav during the public hearing was a setback for Islamabad, India's lead attorney Harish Salve said. Asked whether it was a setback for Pak, Salve said, "Obviously."



"If you want to show something and it helps your case if you are denied that right, it's a setback. So, in that sense, yeah! They wanted to show it and that opportunity was taken away," he told a news channel. "They did not allow it. We objected and the court felt it was not appropriate," Salve said.



Earlier, India demanded the immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at ICJ. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty handed down to Jadhav by a Pakistan military court, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.



On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life. India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. India has denied that he has any connection with the government.
A group of farmers from Karnataka staged a protest at Jantar Mantar on Monday demanding early implementation of the Mahadayi project, waiving of farmers loans and fixing a market rate for all agriculture products.



The farmers, who came from different parts of the state, also demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chair a meeting of chief ministers of Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra to resolve the Mahadayi water dispute. The state Raitha Sangha had organised the protest.




Faced with stiff opposition from environmentalists and Opposition parties, the state government on Monday decided not to go ahead with the implementation of the Pathala Gange project until all doubts are clarified.



Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR) Minister H K Patil told reporters that he will soon place the project proposal along with concerns expressed by various sections of society, including experts, before the state Cabinet. The government will share the information with the Centre and Niti Aayog on the issue, he added.



Besides, the government will hold a consultation with noted geologist Dr Raghunath Mashelkar in this regard before taking the final decision, he said. He was speaking after holding a meeting with environmentalists and representatives of non-government organisations on the issue. The RDPR officials gave a power-point presentation on the project with all the technical specifications. But, a majority of the environmentalists and representatives of NGOs are said to have opposed the project.



The minister further said many experts expressed concern about the project, while others expressed doubts on the technology proposed to be used. The project proposes to locate underground hydrological resources using deep-drilling expertise to extract water. It is proposed to set up two such units at different locations in the state, each costing Rs 12.48 crore, he added.



The project has met with opposition from various sections of society, including Opposition parties. BJPs S Suresh Kumar had demanded that the government immediately drop the proposal. He had said that the project will disturb the ecological balance and goes against nature. Several geology experts and environmentalists had corroborated this view.
Ambassador of France to India, Alexandre Ziegler, inaugurated the new France visa application centre in Bengaluru on Monday to facilitate easy availability of visa to tourists and professionals to visit the European country.



Noting that Bengaluru accounted for 16% of the 1.5 lakh Indians who visited France in 2016, the ambassador said the French administration was committed to issuing a visa in 48 hours after receiving verified applications. The number of Indians visiting France has gone up by 45% in 2015. In 2016, the growth rate was 25%. We expect the total number of visitors from India to reach two lakh this year,



he said.

To a query on the impact of repeated terror attacks on French tourism, the ambassador evaded a direct reply. He, however, sought to underscore that terrorism was a global menace and that the world should unite to face the challenge. We are grateful to Indians for not stopping visits to France. This is just like French tourists did not stop visiting India after the Mumbai terror attacks, he said. The new centre is located at VFS Global in Langford Town.




The residents of Yeshwantpur Assembly constituency will get an opportunity to air their civic woes at Deccan Herald and Prajavanis Janaspandana  Citizens for Change on May 20.



The event will be held at the Swami Vivekananda Yoga Kendra, I Stage, BEL Layout, Herohalli at 10 am. MLA S T Somashekhar and corporators of Doddabidarakallu, Herohalli, Ullal, Kengeri and Hemmigepura along with various government agencies like Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), Bescom, BMTC and police will listen to citizens civic woes and help them address them instantly.



The programme is part of Deccan Herald and Prajavanis initiative to connect with citizens of Bengaluru to solve their civic problems ranging from waste disposal, streetlights, stray dog menace, roads, drains, water and sewerage, electricity, health, public transport, footpaths, parks, playgrounds, traffic and law and order. The publications had organised many such events in the past at different locations of the city, which helped resolve most of the civic-related issues.



People willing to air their grievances can reach the venue by 9 am and register at the temporary reception counter. They can also send their grievances through email: janaspandana@printersmysore.co.in or can call 9448914995 between 9 am and 5 pm.
With just a few days left for the expiry of the deadline set by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to clean Bellandur lake, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah visited the citys largest waterbody on Monday. Speaking to journalists during the visit, he said he had ordered the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) to clean up the lake on a war footing.



He sought to dispel the perception that the government paid attention to the polluted lake only after the NGTs stern order. He said the government had formed the lake expert committee which got to work much before the NGT ruling.



According to the chief minister, measures have been put in place to start treatment of sewage water entering the lake. That apart, two weed harvesters and earthmovers are removing wild plants from the lake. More machines will be used if required, he added.



On April 19, the NGT had ordered government agencies to oversee cleaning of the lake, including de-silting, weeding and surface cleaning, within a month. Bengaluru Development Minister K J George, Mahadevapura MLA Aravind Limbavali, Shanthinagar MLA N A Haris and BBMP, BDA and BWSSB officials were present during the visit.



An official said it was the first time that the chief minister and George had visited the lake. They didnt come here when the lake had caught fire and when the NGT pulled up the government over the pathetic condition of the waterbody, the official said on condition of anonymity.



P N Nayak, Engineer Member, BDA, said three more weed harvesters were arriving from Maharashtra, Goa and Hyderabad to speed up weeding. On average, around 200 tonnes of weeds are being cleared from the lake every day. The lake can be fully weeded before the NGTs next hearing if more machines are pressed into service, he said.


After revolting against the Hizbul Mujahideen, militant commander Zakir Musa on Monday praised al-Qaeda, saying his struggle will continue for the establishment of the Shariah (Islamic rule) in Kashmir. Musa quit Hizbul on Saturday after the outfit asked him not to make threatening statements against separatists leaders.



In a new seven-minute audio clip, Musa thanked al Qaeda which has in their Navae Afghan Jihad (al-Qaeda magazine) concurred with our slogan: Shariah or martyrdom. Our struggle will continue for the establishment of the Shariah in Kashmir, the militant commander is heard saying.



Separatist leaders Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik had in a statement last week said the ongoing freedom movement in Kashmir had nothing to do with IS and al-Qaeda-like organisations. Musa, who joined militancy after discontinuing his BTech course in Chandigarh in 2013, however, said that there was no disagreement between different militant factions in Kashmir and they will continue to work in tandem.



Reacting to offers from the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and lesser-known Kashmiri Taliban to join their organisations, Musa said, I want to tell them that I wont be taking orders from people sitting on carpets in Pakistan and working for Taghoot-i-Nizam (a reference to Pakistan). Allah is enough for me. I am always against the accession to Taghoot-i-Nizam.



Musa, who is in his early 20s, reiterated the threat he issued on Friday to secular separatist leaders who are fighting for a political cause, and not an Islamic cause.




The Uttar Pradesh Assembly session was off to a stormy start on Monday, with the Opposition disrupting the governors address to the joint session of the two Houses. The Opposition members, armed with posters, banners and placards, were up on their feet as soon as Governor Ram Naik started his speech, and began shouting anti-government slogans. Naik, however, continued speaking amid the ruckus.



The SP, the BSP and the Congress members trooped into the Well and threw paper balls at the governor. The marshals, who had made a protective wall around Naik, were seen trying to dodge the attack.



The posters and banners slammed the Yogi Adityanath government for its failure on the law and order front. We will continue to attack the government on this issue, SP leader Ram Gobind Chaudhary said outside the House.



A visibly annoyed Naik decried the behaviour of the Opposition and said the entire state was watching them. The House was later adjourned for the day.
 Flash

President Xi Jinping on Monday called on China and the Philippines to align their development strategies in order to benefit people from both countries.

In his meeting with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Xi said he and the Chinese government attach great importance to China-Philippines ties and are willing to work together to dovetail the two countries' development strategies.

Duterte also highlighted the need to strengthen bilateral ties between the Philippines and China.

Noting that the two countries have resumed regular dialogues as well as consultations between foreign ministries, Duterte said the two countries should make full use of such consultation mechanisms.

He expressed the hope that the maritime consultation and dialogue mechanism between the Philippines and China could generate positive outcomes.
The army on Monday termed speculative the media reports which stated that the Court of Inquiry (CoI) had given a clean chit to the officer, who tied a Kashmiri youth to a jeep as human shield against stone pelters.



The CoI concerned with the incident is still incomplete. Reports in some sections of the media that the army Major was given a clean chit are speculative, defence spokesman Rajesh Kalia said. However, sources maintained that no action has been recommended against the Major from the 53-Rashtriya Rifles battalion and he would be soon given a clean chit.



No disciplinary action has been recommended against the officer... He has been congratulated for his acumen and presence of mind to avoid civilian casualties, a source said.



Report to be out soon

The CoI report will be made public in the coming days, according to the sources. Soon after the media reports were out, the National Conference (NC) said, The verdict of the military investigation goes against not only the military code and the very premise of the Geneva Convention but also violates the fundamental rights provided by the Constitution of India to all its citizens.



In a statement, NC spokesperson Junaid Mattu said it was tragic that the army, rather than initiating swift and strict disciplinary action against the major, has ended up commending him and condoning his act.



The army had ordered a CoI on April 20 against the major who tied Farooq Ahmad Dar of Chill Bras area of Budgam district to its jeep to safeguard paramilitary forces and polling staff from stone pelters. The CoI had been given a month to complete the probe.



On April 17, the police had registered an FIR against unnamed army personnel. According to the police investigation, the army used Dar as a human shield and kept him under wrongful confinement. A video of the incident was uploaded by former chief minister Omar Abdullah on Twitter, generating massive outrage and condemnation from all quarters, including some senior army officers.




During his visits to Mozambique and Tanzania, Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked of enhanced exports and explored possibility of contract farming to meet the growing domestic demand for lentils.



The biggest problem at present is procuring pulses grown domestically. We can think about import later, Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Ramvilas Paswan told reporters here when asked about the status of the international cooperation in pulses sector.



India had reached out to countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania, Myanmar and Malawi to explore long-term contracts for supply of pulses last year when the prices had touched Rs 200 per kg.



But with the bumper production this year, the government has gone slow over imports and appears to be grappling with the glut in the market. It has already extended the last date for procurement of pulses by state-run agencies several times.



We had decided to build 20 lakh tonnes of buffer stock of pulses  10 lakh tonnes from domestic producers and 10 lakh tonnes through imports. Now, we have cut imports to three to four lakh tonnes, Paswan said.



Pulses production is estimated to be 22.40 million tonnes in the 2016-17 crop year, as against 16.35 million tonnes last year. This would reduce the dependence on imports to some extent as demand-supply gap is approximately three million tonnes.



Another challenge before the government is disposal of the buffer stock as pulses have a relatively short shelf life of about two years.



The Centre is planning to sell some quantities of pulses from the buffer stock to the Defence and para-military forces as also to give it to the states.



Import of pulses has taken a back seat after bumper production of lentils this year. Around this time last year, the Modi government was scurrying for cover as prices of pulses, a key protein source, were on a steady rise.
India and Pakistan on Monday crossed swords at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Kulbhushan Jadhavs case with New Delhi demanding the immediate suspension of his death sentence. Islamabad, however, accused New Delhi of using the world body as a stage for political theatre through a misconceived plea.



India took the case to the world court, accusing Pakistan of violating the Vienna Convention and conducting a farcical trial for convicting Jadhav without a shred of evidence. After hearing the arguments of the two sides, the court said it will issue its order on Indias request for provisional measures as soon as possible.



The date on which this order will be delivered will be duly communicated to the parties, the court said. India demanded the immediate suspension of Jadhavs death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the ICJ was over.



However, Pakistan asserted that Jadhavs execution was not imminent, and that 150 days were provided for seeking clemency and in the case, even if it started on April 10, 2017, the date of his conviction, the period could extend to well beyond August, 2017.



India made a forceful submission as the ICJ began hearing the case of the 46-year-old former navy officer who was arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.



Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed, joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs Deepak Mittal told the court in his opening remarks.



Representing India, lead attorney Harish Salve said, The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Otherwise, it will be considered a violation of the Vienna Convention.



Following Indias arguments, Pakistan, in its submission before the UNs highest judicial body, said Indias application on Jadhav was unnecessary and misconceived and must be dismissed.



India has seen it fit to use the International Court of Justice as a stage for political theatre, but we will not respond in kind, Mohammad Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office said in his opening remarks in response to Indias submissions earlier in the day.



Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a spy involved in terror activities, Pakistan asserted.



The ICJ also denied permission to Pakistan to play a purported confessional video of Jadhav at the public hearing here.



Later, after the hearings, Salve told a TV channel that the ICJ denying permission to Pakistan to play the confessional video was a setback to it.



Representing Pakistan, lawyer Khawar Qureshi said India has sought to persuade this court that Pakistan intends to execute Jadhav within days.



Earlier, Salve said Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access. The two neighbours last faced off at the ICJ 18 years ago when Islamabad sought the courts intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.


Throughout last week, a memorial grew in the parking lot in front of Torrey Pines High School, where in the early hours of Saturday, May 6, a 15-year-old Torrey Pines student was fatally shot by police officers after brandishing a BB gun. The student had a suicide note in his pocket. Coming together for the first time since the tragedy, San Dieguito Union School District (SDUHSD) board members offered their condolences at the May 10 board meeting.

Its been a really hard week, said Torrey Pines student board representative Isaac Gelman. Were thankful for all of the support and all the love that we feel coming from the whole community around us.

Meredith Wadley, the districts director of school and student services, began work early on Saturday, May 6, to bolster mental health support on campus at Torrey Pines that Monday, May 8, bringing in additional counselors, psychologists and social workers to help students cope.

People wouldnt have had the help they needed without Meredith, SDUHSD Superintendent Eric Dill said.

Wadley provided a report on student wellness at the May 11 meeting, speaking about how the district works to promote social and emotional well-being on campus and create a sense of connectedness and safety for students.

It takes a village to provide support and services to our students, Wadley said. Working together, our counselors, school social workers and school nurses provide interventions to all students.

Interventions include social personal counseling, group counseling, parent conferences with community resource agencies, classroom support, lots of positive reinforcement, threat assessment of students in crisis and a lot of collaboration with each sites Associated Student Body leadership and Peer Assisted Listeners to develop school-wide activities.

As part of her report, Wadley said the national recommendation for school counselors is 491 students to one counselor and the state of California averages 822 to one. The San Dieguito districts counselor ratio is 430 to one, putting us below national and statewide averages, Wadley said.

Counselors help students on a variety of issues, including personal, social and emotional challenges, as well as college and career counseling.

Theyre really looking to empower our students to take control of whats happening of their lives and be the drivers of whats going on, Wadley said. The goal of our counselors is to assist students to develop the ability to monitor and direct their own learning in addition to their personal and social growthWe really want to develop resilient individuals.

The district also employs 12 school psychologists. The recommended ratio for students to school psychologists is 1,450 to one  SDUHSD is just under that recommendation at 1,076 to one.

For the 2016-17 school year, the district also added a new level of support with school social workers.

The districts four social workers are on the high school campuses two to three days a week and on the middle school campuses one to two days a week. Wadley said the social workers keep a flexible schedule based on the needs of campuses.

School social workers have initiated over 3,000 contracts to date. Wadley said that number doesnt include any follow-up and many times a social worker has continued to work with that student or family through as many as three to seven follow-ups.

The district this year has also expanded health services and wellness services by adding a second school nurse. The district has two nurses  the states recommended average is 6,000 to one so SDUHSD is just above that ratio at 6,400 to one.

SDUHSD board member John Salazar was surprised at the low number but SDUHSD Superintendent Eric Dill pointed out that for many years the district only had one nurse so it has, in fact, doubled its numbers this year. Salazar said it might be time to double it again. In addition to nurses, there are also 10 health technicians across the district.

Wadley said that the continued focus for her department is on developing that multi-tiered support system for students  with counselors, school psychologists, nurses and social workers.

We will continue to focus on maintaining and increasing services for all students, parents and staff, Wadley said, thanking the board and the superintendent for the support to allow them to do the work they do. We want to ensure that strong support instructions are in place at all school sites to offer school connectedness and a sense of community for all of our students. I think more than ever, we realize how important that is.
A telephone conference about the lawsuit over the estate of a woman who was shot to death in a Lake Hallie Walmart last year has been scheduled for 8:30 a.m. June 16.

The estate of Melisa Abbott is suing the village of Lake Hallie, Officer Adam Meyers, officials from the Northern Wisconsin Center for the Developmentally Disabled and Walmart.

Police were called to Walmart when two chaperones from the Northern Center for the Developmentally Disabled said a woman they had taken shopping had became disorderly. Lake Hallie Police Chief Cal Smokowicz said at the time that Melissa Abbott, a resident at the center, had armed herself with a hatchet in the sporting goods department at the store and struck items with it.

He said Abbott refused to follow several verbal commands given by Meyers to drop the hatchet. Abbott was shot once in the leg and a second time in the right upper abdomen.

The Chippewa County District Attorneys office declined to prosecute Meyers, saying Meyers was acting in self-defense.

Attorney Jeffrey Muszynski, representing Abbotts estate, said the mediation process in the lawsuit has not been exhuasted. Lawyers from Walmart and the center officials being sued, including center director Jacqueline Neurohr, both said they intend to file motions to have their clients excused from the lawsuit.
A brand new medical research centre has opened in Newcastle that plans to find a cure for type 1 diabetes.

The Newcastle Isolation and Innovation Hub, located at Newcastle University, is focusing on developing pioneering cell transplantation techniques. The team hopes their research could eventually lead to insulin not being required in the treatment of diabetes.

James Shaw, professor of regenerative medicine for diabetes at Newcastle University said: Our first goal is to pioneer islet cell transplant therapy for diabetes, delivering long-term freedom from insulin injections without the need for toxic anti-rejection drugs.

In parallel, the Hub will provide scientists with human islet cells to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of diabetes on the pancreas with the aim of finding curative new drug treatments.

A core intention of the researchers is to make islet cell transplantation safer for people with type 1 diabetes at the highest risk of complications.

A small team will be designing new state-of-the-art equipment for islet cell transplantatio, while the researchers plan to build a unique bank of pancreas tissue and cells obtained from people with diabetes.

The researchers also hope to develop a diabetes treatment in tablet form, which will kick-start the pancreas again to start making insulin again.

Shaw added: Our research and clinical practice has been building towards this service for the last 15 years which will benefit scientists working towards a cure throughout the UK and the rest of the world.

Research technician Helen Gavillet said: We will now have access to the highest quality human cells and will be able to put these to excellent use to help push research into type 1 diabetes forwards.
Apple's new $1 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund is aimed at fostering innovation among American manufacturers

Apple has announced that Corning will be the first beneficiary of its new advanced manufacturing fund. Apple CEO, Tim Cook announced a new $1 billion fund aimed at fostering innovation among American manufacturers. The move was likely influenced by President Trump's call for creating more jobs in the United States.

Corning will receive $200 million and Apple says the investment "will support Corning's R&D, capital equipment needs and state-of-the-art glass processing." Corning is the company behind popular Gorilla Glass displays, which are being used for display protection on many devices incuding iPhones.

"Corning is a great example of a supplier that has continued to innovate and they are one of Apple's long-standing suppliers," said Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer.

Apple says it now supports 2 million jobs in the United States, including the 4,50,000 jobs attributable with its US-based suppliers. The company claims to have spent over $50 billion with more than 9,000 domestic suppliers and manufacturers. Corning says its 10-year long partnership with Apple has helped create nearly 1,000 US jobs across Corning's R&D and manufacturing facilities. Apple has already started local manufacturing of its Mac Pro lineup and is reportedly considering further expanding its local operations. Foxconn, Apple's contract manufacturer for iPhone, is also said to be exploring the possibility of bringing iPhone manufacturing to the United States.
WannaCry, the ransomware that affected nearly 200,000 computer systems across the world over the weekend may have been slowed down thanks to a lucky break, but the attack leaves a lot of questions unanswered. We know WannaCry spread because it acted like a worm to replicate itself. How exactly did that happen and could the worm have also modified affected files? We approached Saket Modi, CEO of Lucideus Tech, the cyber security startup behind the Indian governments ambitious UPI and BHIM projects, to understand just how WannaCry spread across 99 countries in a matter of a few days.

Digit: What is your threat assessment of the WannaCry Malware? Is it just beginning its destructive streak?

Saket Modi: Majority of the hacks are happening in Russia. In India, on the other side, weve seen certain instances of ransomware, and it is not a new thing. On an average, we get three to four queries about ransomware from individuals, not companies, on a weekly basis. Most queries are from people whose personal laptops or PCs have been encrypted by ransomware. Ransomware is pretty common in India now. 3-4 a week might not be a big number for now, but it is just starting now. There have been companies that have reported instances of WannaCry or a similar ransomware, but I would say its not as bad as it happened to Russia or the UK.

Digit: Yes, even CERT believes India is not badly hit by WannaCry, but there are conflicting reports that India is one of the worst affected. Are those baseless?

Saket Modi: Just think of it like this - any critical company in India, or any govt entity in India, when they get affected, it is a mandate from the laws side to make a public announcement. For example, the RBI mandates every bank, if it gets breached, to be reported in six hours. So, not reporting in India is not an option. Now, when the government body, which is the apex body for anything to do with cyber security in India, is saying its not that bad, then its not being reported correctly. There are also companies like ours who actually do the security for multiple corporates in India. We are the people who would actually get calls about these things. Even we are saying it is not a big deal in India. If you want to make an epidemic seem bigger that it is, that story definitely sells much more. But, it should not be about selling a story, it should be about facts.

Digit: So, why was India not badly hit by WannaCry?

Saket Modi: I would say that probably we were not at that level of connectivity and digitisation has still not taken us to a point like the UK has been. So it is a parallel right? When the global recession happened, India was not so adversely affected, not because there werent any problems here, but most money was black money, in terms of cash, thats one of the reasons why the recession didnt take a toll on us.

Digit: We understand that maybe we are not so connected, but since you deal in the security of large organisations, and one of the reasons why WannaCry spread was because systems did not install the March security patch provided by Microsoft or they were running older versions of Windows, do you think systems are updated regularly in Indian organisations, which is why the spread in India is contained?

Saket Modi: Firstly, simply updating a patch for a person like you or me, who deal with technology on a daily basis, looks like a very easy thing to do, and it is something that we understand the importance of. The other side of the story is that when you talk about a large company in India, it typically would have tens of thousands of employees. When you talk about that many computers, for security reasons, most companies disable the auto update as a patch, because it can be a potential vulnerability. That patch has to be pushed by the IT teams of these companies. When you tell ten thousand people in a company that they have to update their OS, for which a computer is busy for a few hours, it is a big problem. 99% of people in a company are not tech savvy, it is a huge hurdle. And, this is not just an India problem, it is a global problem. Pushing an update is far more difficult than what generally people perceive it to be.

Digit: Moving to WannaCry and how it spread, can you elaborate on how a worm actually works?

Saket Modi: The way a worm works is that you definitely need to execute a particular worm, either on a standalone computer, or one that is connected to a network. Till that point, a virus and a worm are pretty much the same. The only difference is that a worm automatically knows how to spread itself. Suppose you are in your corporate network, now if you click on an executable, not only does that malware get installed on your computer. You see, every computer has an IP address, this IP address is a part of something called a subnet. Subnet, simply, is an array of IP addresses pre allocated to a range of computers in an organisation, so that they can communicate with each other. What a worm does is it simply goes ahead and scans the range of an IP address from the computer in which it belongs to the subnet of. When it scans the range of IP addresses that are there, the next step is that it simply tries to ping it and take certain specific values. When that happens, one can actually fingerprint the operating system of the remote IP that is being pinged. When that happens, the range of IPs which are switched on are further probed and the ones running a Windows OS can be found out remotely, without alerting anyone. Once those machines are identified, the exploit (in this case, EternalBlue) penetrates the operating system, from the attacked IP to the range of computers in that subnet. All of this happens in a manner of minutes and in an automated fashion. This is why worms are so deadly, once inside a machine, its literally there anywhere and everywhere.

Digit: Can a worm also modify files as it spreads? Does WannaCry have the ability to modify files, rather than just encrypting them?

Saket Modi: Once it takes over the computer, you can execute whatever you want in that computer with certain special privileges that are there. Thats a good point you are making, you need to know about something called Doxware, an evolved ransomware which not only allows for modification, and hackers can actually go to a point where they not only hold you on ransom, they threaten you to make you information public, along with inserting some embarrassing pictures of yours, which will convince people that it is your data. So absolutely, there is something which can be done, but from what I understand, WannaCry is not doing that.
Xiaomi had announced Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S in August last year and the company had earlier claimed that that it sold 3 million Redmi 3S units in just under six months

Xiaomi claims to have sold over 4 million units of its Redmi 3S smartphone in India. Xiaomi's announcement comes just a day ahead of the official introduction of the successor to Redmi 3S, the Redmi 4. The company had announced Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime in August last year and then followed up with offline only Redmi 3S Plus in October. It should be noted that the sales figure is inclusive of all the variants launched in the country.

Xiaomi had launched Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime exclusively on Flipkart at Rs 6,999 and Rs 8,999. In February, Xiaomi announced that the sales of Redmi 3S surpassed 3 million units in less than six months after its launch.

According to Canalys, Xiaomi is the second largest smartphone brand in India with a market share of 14 percent. The research firm says the Chinese smartphone maker shipped nearly 4 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2017. Xiaomi India claims its smartphone business has grown four times in the past year alone. Manu Jain, Xiaomi India MD adds the Redmi 3S is now the highest selling smartphone in the online retail segment. At the launch of Redmi 4A in March, the company had confirmed its plans to launch the Redmi 3S successor soon. The Redmi 4 is expected to arrive in two variants varying in terms of display resolution, processor and storage capacity.

The Redmi 4 was launched in China a while back and standard variant of the Redmi 4 features a 5-inch 720p display, Snapdragon 430, 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. The Redmi 4 Pro variant offers a 5-inch 1080p display, Snapdragon 625, 3GB RAM and 32GB storage. Both the devices sport a 13MP rear camera, 5MP front camera and a 4100mAh battery. The handsets run MIUI 8, which is based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and are likely to debut at around Rs 9,000.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is positioning himself as the chief advocate for free trade, on Sunday pledged to pump billions of dollars into what he calls the One Belt One Road project that would link the whole world into a seamless market. Xi and his ally, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, also snubbed India for its non-participation, stating that the belt and road initiative respected ''territorial integrity''. Xi described his signature foreign policy push as inclusive, one that should not be held hostage to old rivalries and power games. India has opted to keep out of the two-day `Belt and Road' summit in Beijing, in which about 23 heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz, Sharif are participating. All of India's neighbours, except Bhutan, have sent high-level delegations to the conference, with Sri Lanka represented by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. In his policy push, Xi pledged an extra 100 billion yuan ($14.50 billion) into the existing Silk Road Fund, 380 billion yuan in loans from two infrastructure banks and 60 billion yuan in aid to developing countries and international bodies in countries along the new trade routes. Xi said China would encourage financial institutions to expand their overseas yuan fund businesses to the tune of 300 billion yuan. He, however, did not give a time frame for the new loans, aid and funding pledged on Sunday. ''We should build an open platform of cooperation and uphold and grow an open world economy,'' Xi said in his inaugural address to the Belt and Road Forum (BRF), even as he highlighted the importance of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). In a snub to India's concerns, the Chinese President said the belt and road initiative respected ''territorial integrity''. ''All countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major concerns,'' Xi told the gathering at the sprawling China Convention Centre. The CPEC, a cluster of road, rail and energy projects, that connects Kashgar in China's far-western western Xinjiang province with Pakistan's southern Gwadar port city on the Arabian Sea, however, passes through Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir, which challenges New Delhi's sovereignty by lending legitimacy to Pakistan's claim over the territory. ''...No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity,'' ministry of external affairs spokesperson Gopal Baglay said on Saturday night. But, for China, the CPEC is at the core of its One Belt, One Road plan, or Belt Road Initiative (BRI). ''The corridor (CPEC) is a flagship programme of the BRI. The governments of both China and Pakistan attach great importance to it and have actively started preparation for long-term plans,'' the document titled 'Building the Belt and Road: Concept, Practice and China's contribution' said with a rare mention of ''flagship'' in a Chinese official document. ''What we hope to create is a big family of harmonious co-existence,'' he said. ''In advancing the Belt and Road, we will not retread the old path of games between foes. Instead we will create a new model of cooperation and mutual benefit.'' In his speech at the inaugural BRF session, Pakistan Prime Minister Sharif said the CPEC was a ''core'' project of the BRI. ''In fact, it has been rightly called its flagship because it aims to connect the neighbourhoods of East and West Asia. CPEC makes Pakistan both a conduit and destination for cross-regional investment and trade,'' Sharif said. He indicated what the Chinese have been saying  India is welcome to join the CPEC.



''Let me make it very clear that CPEC is an economic undertaking open to all countries in the region. It has no geographical boundaries,'' he said. ''It must not be politicised. In implementing this Corridor, we are not striving to merely leverage geography for economic prosperity, we are also trying to build a peaceful, connected and caring neighbourhood. It is time we transcend our differences, resolve conflicts through dialogue and diplomacy, and leave a legacy of peace for future generations,'' Sharif said.



Under the BRI, China plans to revive ancient trade routes from Asia to Europe and Africa involves a network of rail, road and sea links. The initiative is also said to have won the support of more than 100 countries and international organisations, of which at least 40 have signed cooperation agreements with China. Nepal is the latest country to jump on to the bandwagon. It signed a deal with China on Friday. However, the summit document does not attach much importance to the other BRI projects.










Workaholic Japan names and shames firms overworking their staff

Japan has long been known as a nation of workaholics  indeed, much of its post-World War II rise has been attributed to this culture of hard work. But now, it has officially recognised that it may have gone too far in this direction.

The country's labour ministry has released its first nationwide employer blacklist, naming and shaming more than 300 companies for breaching labour laws, as it tries to tackle notoriously long work hours blamed for "karoshi", or death from overwork.

Among the firms in the list, which was released late last week, are advertising giant Dentsu and a subsidiary of Panasonic, named for illegal overtime and other workplace violations.

The top executive at Dentsu quit late last year in the wake of the suicide of a young employee who regularly logged more than 100 hours of overtime a month.

The death of Matsuri Takahashi generated nationwide headlines, prompting the government to come up with a solution to punishing work hours blamed for hundreds of deaths due to strokes, heart attacks and suicides every year.

Many on the labour ministry list  compiled from publicly available data -are construction firms accused of safety infractions, such as having employees work without proper protection or letting them operate heavy machinery without being certified to do so.

It was unclear what impact the tactic would have on firms' behaviour, according to an AFP report. And the list named fewer than a dozen companies in the capital Tokyo for breaching labour laws between October and April.

This year, a panel headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came up with a plan calling on employers to limit overtime to a maximum of 100 hours per month, which critics slammed as still too high.

Currently, Japanese firms can make full-time employees work far beyond the usual 40 hours a week during busy periods.

Overtime is viewed as a sign of dedication at many firms, even if Japanese workers' productivity lags behind that of their US and European counterparts.

And more than one in five Japanese companies have employees whose tendency to overwork puts them at serious risk of dying, according to a government survey published in October.
The exhibition features only one aspect of these territorial transformations: the construction of militarily controlled camps dubbed the centres de regroupement in Algerias rural areas. These spaces resulted from the creation of the forbidden zones  free fire zones  and engendered massive forced relocations of the Algerian population. Special military units called the Sections administratives specialisees supervised the evacuation of the forbidden zones, the regrouping of the Algerian population, the construction of temporary and permanent camps, the conversion of a number of permanent camps to villages, and monitored the daily life of Algerian civilians. The aim of this regrouping was to isolate the Algerian population from the influence of national liberation fighters and to impede possible psychological and material support.
WASHINGTON  It had the makings of a Cold War whodunit: The attorney general tells the White House that the Russians have kompromat on the presidents national security adviser  but the president, for reasons unclear, stands by the compromised official.

On the morning of Jan. 26, acting Attorney General Sally Yates called White House counsel Don McGahn with a matter so sensitive it couldnt be discussed by phone. They met that afternoon at the White House, and Yates, accompanied by the top career official in the Justice Departments national security division, dropped a bomb: President Trumps national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had lied to Vice President Pence about Flynns contacts with Russia. This had left Flynn vulnerable to Russian blackmail, the Justice Department officials said  and Yates, an Obama administration holdover, said she was sharing the information so the White House could take action.

But McGahn had an odd response. He called the DOJ officials back to the White House the next day and asked them a perplexing question, Yates recounted to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Monday afternoon: Why does it matter to DOJ if one White House official lies to another White House official?

Yates explained what should have been self-evident: Not only were Pence and the American public entitled to know the truth, but the Russians also knew that Flynn had lied to the vice president  so the Russians had the goods on him. To state the obvious, you dont want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians, Yates testified.

But Trump didnt move to fire Flynn. He fired Yates instead.

At the White House counsels request, Yates had arranged for him to see the evidence against Flynn on Monday, Jan. 30. But he didnt come that day, and that night Yates was sacked for refusing to implement Trumps order banning travelers from several majority-Muslim nations.

Flynn remained on the job, sitting in on highly classified sessions including a phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Had The Washington Post not broken the story on Feb. 9 about Flynns contacts with Russia, he might still be on the job today. Trump reluctantly pushed out Flynn on Feb. 13 while insisting hed done nothing wrong.

Three months later, Trump is still blaming Yates, not his mendacious former aide. Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Council, he tweeted Monday, before correcting the spelling of counsel. (Republicans on the panel dutifully asked her, and former national intelligence director James Clapper, whether they had anything to do with such leaks; they said they did not.)

Where there is smoke there is not necessarily fire. But there is so much smoke from the Trump-Russia probe that you cant get near it without a respirator. Mondays hearing further pumped the bellows.

Clapper qualified his earlier statement that he knew of no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia  a point House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has used to exculpate Trump. Clapper acknowledged Monday that he was not aware of the counterintelligence investigation the FBI was conducting on the matter.

Clapper rebutted the Trump argument that Obama officials (particularly Susan Rice, who declined to appear Monday) had improperly unmasked Flynn or others. Clapper said he was not aware of any instance of unmasking being used for political purposes.

Clapper confirmed, as well, that British intelligence and other European allies passed information to the United States in late 2015 and early 2016 about Trump campaign ties to Russia.

Whats known publicly about those ties is damning enough that the Trump response has been less a head-on refutation than complaints about the way the information came out  through unmasking, leaking or imagined wiretapping of the Trump campaign.

Though some Republicans on the panel engaged in such diversions, the subcommittee chairman, Lindsey Graham, rose above partisanship. When a foreign power interferes in our election, it doesnt matter who they targeted, he said. Were all in the same boat.

The Trump White House, alas, takes a different view.

Yates, a career prosecutor until Barack Obama tapped her to be the No. 2 at the Justice Department, recalled the questions the White House counsel had about Flynn: Why did DOJ care? Would DOJ pursue a criminal case? Wouldnt taking action against Flynn interfere with an investigation? And could he see the evidence?

After those skeptical questions, Trump took no visible action against Flynn until a public outcry forced him to. You dont have to be Tom Clancy to wonder why.
The Donegal Democrat has been informed of the following deaths:

- Paddy McCafferty, OCleirigh Avenue, Donegal Town

- Hugh Kelly Hudie, Drumochail, Termon

- Jackie Meehan, the Glebe, Roshine Road, Killybegs

- Eileen Doran, Manorcunningham

- Felicity Fox, Merrion, Dublin/Bundoran



Paddy McCafferty, OCleirigh Avenue, Donegal Town

The deaths has occurred in Letterkenny University Hospital of Paddy Mc Cafferty, lato of 5 OCleirigh Avenue, Donegal Town.

His remains will be reposing at his late residence from 4pm until 10pm on Monday, May 15, and from 11am until 10pm on Tuesday.

Remains leaving his residence at 10:30am on Wednesday for funeral mass at 11am in St Marys Church, Killymard, with burial immediately afterwards in adjoining cemetery.

House private at all other times please.



Hugh Kelly Hudie, Drumochail, Termon

The death has taken place of Hugh Kelly Hudie, late of Drumochail, Termon.

His remains are reposing at his late residence.

Funeral on Monday, May 15th, going to St Columba's Church, Termon for Requiem Mass at 12 midday.

Burial afterwards in the adjoining cemetery.

House private please on morning of funeral.

Family flowers only please. Donations in lieu if desired to the Donegal Hospice c/o any family member.



Jackie Meehan, the Glebe, Roshine Road, Killybegs

The death has taken place of Jackie Meehan, the Glebe, Roshine Road, Killybegs.

Remains reposing at his residence from 12noon on Monday to 11pm.

Removal from his home on Tuesday morning at 10.30 am. to St. Mary's Church, Killybegs for 11am funeral Mass. Burial afterwards in the local cemetery.

Eileen Doran, Manorcunningham

The death has taken place at Letterkenny University Hospital of Eileen Doran, Manorcunningham.

Reposing at her late residence until removal at 10.15am Monday, May 15th, to St. Columbas Church, Dromoghil, for funeral Mass at 11am, followed by burial in the adjoining cemetery.

Family time please from 11pm. Family flowers only. Donations in lieu, if desired, to Medical 3 Ward, Letterkenny University Hospital.

Felicity Fox, Merrion, Dublin/Bundoran

The death has taken place at St. Vincents Private Hospital of Felicity Fox, Merrion, Dublin/Bundoran.

House and funeral home private. Removal on Tuesday, May 16th, to arrive at the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace, Merrion Road, Dublin 4, at 11.50am for funeral Mass at 12 noon. Cremation afterwards in Mount Jerome Crematorium, Harolds Cross, D6.

There will be a Mass for Felicity in the Star of the Sea Church, Bundoran, at 12 noon on Saturday, May 20th.

Family flowers only please. Donations, if desired, to Cancer Clinical Research Trust  Department of Medical Oncology, St. Vincents, Dublin 4.

If you wish to have a death notice included here, email us at editorial@donegaldemocrat.com and include a phone number for verification purposes only.
Today marks the opening of Pieta House in Donegal and one of their chief local fundraisers says it a credit to the people of the North West who helped raised the money for the service.

Retired Garda Sergeant Danny Devlin, who is the chairman of the Action For Hope group that helped fundraise to have the service rolled out in the region says it is now there for everyone who needs it, adding there are no borders when it comes to people in crisis.

While an official opening is planned for later in the year, today sees the suicide and self-harm crisis centre up and running in the top floor of the Grand Central building on Canal Road.

The charity offers free-of-charge and freely accessible therapy to those experiencing suicidal ideation, those who have been bereaved by suicide and people who are engaging in self-harm.

Danny stated: Now that Pieta House North West is opening, we would appeal to everyone, young and old, to use the service if you are in crisis or need support in dealing with a family member or a loved one who has died by suicide.

Staff at Pieta House North West in Letterkenny will include a centre manager, who is Dominick Gallagher, from Inishowen, three clinical support staff, a team of sessional therapists and a Suicide Bereavement Liaison Officer, Marian McNulty.

In 2015, the Action for Hope group was set up to coordinate and promote awareness of the services and to coordinate fundraising events for Pieta House in the northwest.

The service is free of charge to anyone using the service and a doctors referral is not required.

Danny said now the centre is opened it will still need contined fundraising support.

Up to 85% of the funds needed to run the service come from fundraising events.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported us in any way whatsoever in making the commencement of this service a reality. In order to now sustain this vital service into the future, your continued support will be greatly appreciated, he added.

Pieta House North West will also offer family support to those bereaved by suicide .

Just over a week ago saw approximately 7,000 people across Donegal taking part in Darkness Into Light.

A 24 hour phone line is available on 1800 247247 .

See peitahouse.com for more information.
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Kia Australia is looking forward to getting its version of the forthcoming Hyundai Kona, the South Korean brand's smallest SUV.

How much?

"When it comes, we'll probably be giving it a hug and kissing it on the bonnet," joked Kia Australia chief operating officer, Damien Meredith.

But the new, yet-to-be-named model, which will share its underpinnings with the Kona, is still 18 months away from hitting Australian showrooms. That's a long wait for Kia as the city-sized SUV category continues to grow, but Meredith said the brand won't relax while it waits.

"We're looking forward to that but in the meantime we've got to grow the business with the product we've got," he said. "We can't just sit back and rely on new product to do the job the brand has to do in Australia."

The decision to wait for the Kona-based version makes it less likely Kia Australia will change its position on the European Niro compact SUV. It has been ruled out previously as it has a plug-in hybrid powertrain that would hurt its value against the Sportage.

Meredith is looking for updated models or new variants to expand the brand's appeal. One of those is the Rio (pictured below) powered by a 1.0-litre three-cylinder turbocharged engine to give the brand some sporty appeal.

"If that's available we'd look very seriously at it," Meredith said.
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A Dundalk based band has won the inaugural Firestone Vantastival Battle of the Bands contest held in Droghedas Odd Mollies music venue on Thursday 11 May.

Nix Moon, who describe themselves as a progressive folk act that dabbles with multiple genres topped the competition, closely finishing above four other bands competing on the night. The winner was chosen by a panel of judges consisting of music journalist Tony Clayton Lee, sound engineer Gavan Blake, Vantastival organiser Benny Taffe and Firestone marketing manager, Colm Conyngham.

The hotly contested competition gained entries from all across the north east of Ireland which was cut down to five finalists - Grand from Drogheda, Makings from Killanny, Co. Louth, Lowlight Gathering from Monaghan, and Accidents in the Workplace, Dundalk as well as winners Nix Moon.

By winning the competition, the five-piece will headline the Firestone Music Station Stage at Vantastival Music Festival to be held on June 3rd and 4th.

In addition to their headline slot at the annual festival, Nix Moon have scooped three days of recording at well-known Grouse Lodge Recording Studios in Co. West Meath and an 1,800 voucher for Dublins Musicmaker musical equipment store to ensure they are never without instruments as they begin their journey with Firestone.

The Dundalk act has featured at Irish festivals including Electric Picnic, Knockanstockan and Vantastival over the last three years, while regularly selling out their local venue, the Spirit Store in Dundalk. Their debut ep, 'Soul Traffic', was released last summer and the band won 'best performers' at the Busker Fleadh in Dublin in September 2016.

Colm Conyngham, Marketing Manager for Firestone said: We are delighted with the response to our first Battle of the Bands competition in conjunction with Vantastival and I would like to congratulate Nix Moon as winners

The voting and engagement from music fans online, and quality and performance of the acts at the final, demonstrates a very vibrant music scene in the North East of Ireland.

We hope Firestones support for emerging talent and our involvement with Vantastival will help to further stimulate and encourage new music in the area.

Vantastival is a key event within the Firestone Music Tour, an original sponsorship programme for music festivals across Europe in Spain, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, UK, Denmark and Ireland. Vantastival takes place in Beaulieu House, Drogheda June 3 and 4 and for more information, visit www.vantastival.com
As a small business, your hiring budget certainly places you at a disadvantage compared to larger companies. However, there are ways to make yourself more attractive to the right candidates. People do care about the kind of work they do, not just the money, and many will go to places that pay less if they offer other kinds of reward. If youve been struggling to hire the best for your small business, here are tips.

Institute policies sensitive to the needs of women

The vast majority of businesses value a competitive work culture over sensitivity. Uber got into trouble recently for being slow to act on harassment complaints by women workers, for example.

You could be an exception. Top talent will beat a path to your door when word gets out that your business rolls out the red carpet for women workers. As long as you make sure to deliver on your promises with maternity and paternity leave, and strong policies against harassment, your company should easily attract the best.

Get the word out

Businesses do recognise the need to engage their customer base on social media; it isnt often that they realize that they need to get the word out about their human resources policies, as well. Its a good idea to put as much information as possible about your companys women-friendly policies, on the company website, the Facebook page (both the companys own and the pages of current employees), blogs and Twitter. Its even a good idea to make it a policy to accept every speaking engagement possible where you can plug your companys record with fair treatment of employees. All of this can generate valuable word-of-mouth that is likely to bring good applicants in.

Put as much value online as possible

Your experience running a business gives you valuable niche knowledge that others less experienced than yourself would like to learn about. It can help to document as much of your experience as possible, on a blog, on your Facebook page or on your website. While there are hundreds of websites offering business advice out there, there arent many that offer readers blow-by-blow accounts from the trenches, complete with real-life illustrations and examples. If you can find the time to pull out every scrap of practical business knowledge that you learn, you will begin to find a large, interested audience. Many of these people will admire your work enough to want to work for you.

Delegate authority

Good workers will give up money and much more to be able to work on projects where they are placed in charge, or ones where their decisions clearly matter. It can have an almost magical effect on your success finding employees to simply put out the word that you are a great delegator. You will find talent approaching you that you would never have otherwise seen, even with more pay.

Use a competent talent recruiting firm

According to The Birmingham Group (see thebirmgroup.com), one of the top advantages of going through a recruiting firm is that you get to pick out of a talent pool put together by someone whos been at the talent game for very long. When a recruiting firm brings a list of possible hires to you, the names on the list are likely to be candidates, not just applicants.

Hire fresh, inexperienced people

Its easy to see that hiring experienced hands puts your company at an advantage. Not many entrepreneurs, however, realize that with a little work, hiring inexperienced people can work very well, too. Hiring straight out of college gives you access to workers who still remember their lessons, and who are enthusiastic about making a great impression. More importantly, they are likely to be so enthusiastic about the opportunity, theyd be glad to work on spec. Keep them if you like them, or send them away with a handshake if you dont.

Finally, count your blessings

You dont want to be so focused on finding new talent that you end up neglecting to see what you already have. If you can look closely at employees that you currently have and find untapped talent in there somewhere, you should consider an internal promotion to see if it helps. Not only can promoting internally be a tremendous morale booster for everyone else, its bound to make your business particularly attractive to future hires. Nothing pleases workers as much as encouraging possibilities for the future.

About the author

Lola Fletcher shares her business management tips and tricks with an online audience through her articles. She started her own business 8 years ago and loves sharing her knowledge with other business owners.
Happy Skin is the only homegrown makeup brand in the country that I know so far uses very cute makeup packaging and very punny makeup product names.

Proving that is yet again the launch of their Eye Woke Up Like This makeup collection composing of 6 new eye makeup product to achieve that I woke up like this look  a look people on socia media post showing how good looking they are effortlessly with the focus on the eyes that fresh and bright.

1. Happy Skin At Long Lash Supercurl Waterproof Mascara (Php999)  The product that made us all surprised, curious and excited was the bristles free mascara wand. Tge wand is rod type and promises to coqt each lash from base to tip without clumping. The formula is smudge-proof, sweat proof, sebum resistant and tears resistant!!! made with Japanese nylon fiber to curl and lenghten lashes without drooping. I shall show a review of this product separately since like you I am curious how effecient and effective this product is. Although you can see a short clip of the after when I tried using this product on the event vlog I made posted above ?. Skip video until 7:30 to see the unique wand!

2. Happy Skin Say Eye Do Easy Eyeshadow Cushion Duo (Php699) A double ended eyeshadow pen to dress up your eyes on the go. No brush needed. Comea in two blendable shades, champagne and espresso, which can transworm your look from day to night in an instant. What makes it different is it is infused eith Argan Oil to nourish the lids and allow the product tp glide on smoothly.

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5. Happy Skin Eye Love View Too Microtip Eyebrow Pencil & Spoolie Duo (Php699) Comes in two shades Natural Brown and Taupe. Yes, kilay is life and this mkcrotip pencil makes you draw feathery strokes to.mimic real brow strands. With Vitami E and Argan Oil of course to help nourish the skin.

6. Happy Skin Maximeyes Perfect Lash Curler (Php499). Made wider to be able to capture lashes from.end to end corners of the eye for every eye size, clump free and tug free design with two extra silicone pads as a treat!

Now the truth is out, nobody ever woke up like this:

We all need a little help from.our makeup and skin care products.

If you were able to catch my video channel upload or my Instagram post as I have announced the exclusive Mothers day sale of these 6 New Happy Skin Eye Makeup Products at Beauty MNL. If you didnt catch that no worries they will be in-stores by May 22,2017 and online at happyskincosmetics.com.

Stay gorgeous everyone!
Could Australias new budget already be solving its housing market issues?

When the Federal Government announced its budget for 2017-18 fiscal year, it included measures to tackle its hot housing market situation. At the time, some economists and first-time buyers expressed mixed feeling about its impact. However, latest reports show that it may be making a positive turn for the industry.

The CEO of Mortgage Choice -an Australian mortgage broker network- John Flavell, said in an interview with CNBCs Squawk Box, Of the nine budget measures targeted at addressing the affordability issues in housing, three will drive up buyer demand.

The housing measures in the federal budget included raising capital gains tax discount for affordable-housing investment, providing lower-tax alternatives for first-time house buyers trying to save for a mortgage deposit, and moves aimed at encouraging seniors to downscale their homes.

The past state of the Australian housing market

In the past year, home prices in the Australian property market have been up, causing monetary legislators to take immediate action towards cooling the market and driving up a stagnant economy.

The demographic data for Q3 2016 revealed that the average price of housing in Sydney was 12.2 times higher than the average household income. In Melbourne, the average home price was 9  times more. As a comparative measure, the most expensive market, Hong Kong is 18.1 times more than the average income.

A lot of this was chalked down to the state of the economy and the effect of foreign buyers.

Signs of improvement in the housing market

But in the past few weeks ahead of the budgets release, things have started looking up for home buyers and investors. According to treasurer Scott Morrison, a new report shows that the price of housing in Melbourne and Sydney are cooling. A clear sign that regulatory measures which were adopted recently have already begun to work.

He announced that first-time home buyers would get the assistance they needed to buy a home. In his statement, he also mentioned that the government will expect better value from the university sector from its assisted funding.

A report by CoreLogic, an Australian property researcher showed that Sydneys house prices dropped by 0.04% in April while Melbourne increased by 0.5% (half of its usual rate).

Overall, this is the lowest national month-on-month price increase for capital city homes since December 2015.

According to Time Lawless, the Head of CoreLogic Research, the two hottest housing markets in the country showed signs of cooling down in April. However, he also stated the need for caution in rejoicing after just a month of soft results.

James Bridgestone, a real estate consultant with Somerfield, a family neighbourhood estate in Melbourne said the news was a welcome one for home buyers in the area.

Hopefully, people will have a more optimistic outlook towards acquiring their own homes this year, he said.

In his announcement last week, the treasurer, Mr. Morrison said the government had taken a particular interest in the apartment market which had started to turn. He added that the federal institution was being careful with its regulatory methods by using a scalpel instead of a chainsaw.

This is because we know that using a chainsaw approach poses a bigger risk of causing a housing shockwave that would impact the economy negatively for many Australian households, he said.

More government measures for first-home buyers

The government is known to be preparing a number of measures geared at improving the affordability of housing through financial corporations. It is also putting in place, a system that would allow first-time home buyers to transfer some pre-tax income into superannuation-type deposit saver account. These accounts will be taxed lightly or provided with government assistance.

Mr Morrison also stated that the new budget would drive up revenue by creating economic growth which would result in increased wages and more work hours for Australians. The government reiterated that the economy was healthy and it would boost budget outlook for the 2018-2019 fiscal year.

In the scheme proposed for first time home buyers, one of the features was that they would be allowed to withdraw money from their superannuation savings for home deposits, as long as they could be returned after the homeowners financial situations improved.

The property industry backs the new housing initiatives

More good news for first time home buyers. The property industry has agreed to work with the Federal Government to support its affordability housing measures.

In addition to the superannuation-type deposit account, retiring downsizers will be able to add as high as $300,000 into the superannuation if the sell their house before they reach 65 years.

The new budget is a strong attempt at solving Australias affordability issues and it looks like the effects are already turning up. The property market should cool off, allowing potential buyers to build confidence and acquire their own homes.

Australia isnt the only country to be faced a property market resolution problem. Last year, the government of British Columbia to drastic measures to contain its heated Vancouver and Toronto property markets.
Welcome aboard for our first weekly email where we humbly present three actions you can take this week, usually while wearing your underwear.

TrumpCare Still Cometh

Contact your Senators about ACKaH NOW

History is about to repeat itself

Let your Senators know that they must do everything they can to slow down TrumpCare so it cant pass the way it did in the House.

Find your Senators digits here.

If you can, contact both their DC and local offices.

How do you uninsure 24 million people, gut Medicaid, rob Medicare and threaten to destabilize the entire health insurance market all to give the rich and their corporations a giant tax break?Very, very quickly. That was the lesson the GOP learned from the House TrumpCare debacle. The Senate has planned to do a better job but if you listen closely, they seem closer to the House bill than they once pretended and it seems this flaming landfill of cruelty and deceit could pass with the same 50 votes Betsy DeVos got.

Receipts:

Hope You Dont Expect The Senate GOP To Be Transparent About Obamacare Repeal

by Jonathan Cohn

How Trumps madness and corruption will help him take 24 million Americans insurance

by LOLGOP

Find a Floridian!

Voter suppression is the real fraud

The voting rights of 700,000 citizens in Florida could be restored. Thats a larger number than the margin of victory in the state for the last 7 presidential elections.

Get this petition in the hands of some trustworthy Floridian.

Heres why:



If you love your mom, set one free



What wouldnt Jeff Sessions do?

Consider giving to the Chicago Community Bond Fund

The Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF) pays bond for people charged with crimes in Cook County, Illinois. Through a revolving fund, CCBF supports individuals whose communities cannot afford to pay the bonds themselves and who have been impacted by structural violence. Inability to pay bond results in higher rates of conviction, longer sentences, loss of housing and jobs, separation of families, and lost custody of children.
Greenpeace Philippines sent a strong message about plastic pollution with a giant Dead Whale art exhibit this month in Naic, Cavite. The 50-foot long whale replica, which was created from plastic waste, was positioned on the beach near the shoreline in Manila Bay.

Listen to the dead whales wake-up call, look closer and see what plastic pollution does to the ocean, Greenpeace Philippines wrote on Facebook about the campaign. We hope that this installation encourages the public to take action and #RefusePlastic.

Biboy Royong, creative director of the Dead Whale project, said the art exhibit was inspired by a 38-foot juvenile sperm whale that died in December 2016 on Samal Island in Davao del Norte. It was reported that the whale died after ingesting plastic, fish net, hook, rope and steel wire.

We based its shape, color, texture, size and proportion on pictures of real beached whales, he added. We even chose to show a decomposing whale so we played more with the textures on its skin using plastic trash we have collected. We wanted to surprise the community in the area. For it to work, we had to carefully craft a realistic dead whale.

Vince Cinches

Many who saw the whale on the beach did believe it was real, and the reaction has been similar to photos posted online. Most disturbing thing that I have seen in my life! wrote one person on Greenpeace Philippines Facebook page.

That is so outrageous and horrible, that it almost looks fake, wrote Keven on this post on the 5Gyres Facebook page.

There was an environmental projection that by 2050, if we dont stop polluting our waters, there could be more ocean wastes than marine life, Royong told Spot.

[facebook https://facebook.com/EcoWatch/videos/10154921759153300/ expand=1]

In addition to the art exhibit, an online petition was launched calling on the ASEAN member states to take concrete measures against plastics pollution in the high seas.
More than 50 agricultural workers southwest of Bakersfield, California in Kern County were inadvertently exposed to pesticide drift from a nearby field earlier this month. According to local reports, 12 farmworkers reported symptoms of vomiting, nausea and one person fainted due to exposure to Vulcan, an organophosphate-based chemical.

Notably, the active ingredient in the insecticide is chlorpyrifos, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Trump administration decided not to ban in March.

Anybody that was exposed, that was here today, we encourage them to seek medical attention immediately. Dont wait. Particularly if youre suffering from any symptoms. Whether its nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, seek medical attention immediately, Michelle Corson, public relations officer for Kern County Public Health, said.

As the Environmental Working Group detailed, research shows that even small amounts of chlorpyrifos can damage parts of the brain that control language, memory, behavior and emotion. Multiple independent studies have documented that exposure to chlorpyrifos impairs childrens IQs and EPA scientists assessments of those studies concluded that levels of the pesticide found on food and in drinking water are unsafe.

But on March 29, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt sided with the pesticide lobby over scientists in his decision to nix an Obama-era proposal to ban chlorpyrifos from use on food crops.

Continued chlorpyrifos use on crops puts our children's health at risk. https://t.co/5tPw9uEDrJ via @EcoWatch  Yvette & Lena at NRDC (@NRDCYvetteLena) May 9, 2017

We need to provide regulatory certainty to the thousands of American farms that rely on chlorpyrifos, while still protecting human health and the environment, Pruitt said after signing the order. By reversing the previous Administrations steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world, we are returning to using sound science in decision-makingrather than predetermined results.

Chlorpyrifos originates from a nerve gas developed by Nazi Germany. Chemical maker Dow Chemical sells about 5 million pounds of it in the U.S. each year.

Notably, Dow donated $1 million to the presidential inauguration and the companys CEO, Andrew Liveris, leads Trumps advisory council on manufacturing. In February, Liveris received the signing pen after the president signed the Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda, an executive order aimed at eliminating regulations that Trump claims are damaging to the U.S. economy, but some worry that the measure will roll back critical environmental protections.

The Associated Press reported in April that Dow is pressuring the Trump administration to throw out a 10,000-page government risk study on three pesticides under review, including chlorpyrifos. The government scientists found that chlorpyrifos is likely to adversely affect 1,778 of the 1,835 animals and plants in its study.
By Whitney Webb

Last week, mainstream media outlets gave minimal attention to the news that the U.S. Naval station in Virginia Beach had spilled an estimated 94,000 gallons of jet fuel into a nearby waterway, less than a mile from the Atlantic Ocean.

While the incident was by no means as catastrophic as some other pipeline spills, it underscores an important yet little-known factthat the U.S. Department of Defense is both the nations and the worlds, largest polluter.

Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, the U.S. Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others.

In 2014, the former head of the Pentagons environmental program told Newsweek that her office has to contend with 39,000 contaminated areas spread across 19 million acres just in the U.S. alone.

U.S. military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world, as perchlorate and other components of jet and rocket fuel contaminate sources of drinking water, aquifers and soil. Hundreds of military bases can be found on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys (EPA) list of Superfund sites, which qualify for clean-up grants from the government.

Almost 900 of the nearly 1,200 Superfund sites in the U.S. are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs, not counting the military bases themselves.

Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated, John D. Dingell, a retired Michigan congressman and war veteran, told Newsweek in 2014. Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina is one such base. Lejeunes contamination became widespread and even deadly after its groundwater was polluted with a sizable amount of carcinogens from 1953 to 1987.

However, it was not until this February that the government allowed those exposed to chemicals at Lejeune to make official compensation claims. Numerous bases abroad have also contaminated local drinking water supplies, most famously the Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa.

Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. tested 66 nuclear weapons near Bikini atoll. Populations living nearby in the Marshall Islands were exposed to measurable levels of radioactive fallout from these tests. National Cancer Institute

In addition, the U.S., which has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined, is also responsible for the massive amount of radiation that continues to contaminate many islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Marshall Islands, where the U.S. dropped more than sixty nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958, are a particularly notable example. Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and nearby Guam continue to experience an exceedingly high rate of cancer.

The American Southwest was also the site of numerous nuclear weapons tests that contaminated large swaths of land. Navajo Indian reservations have been polluted by long-abandoned uranium mines where nuclear material was obtained by U.S. military contractors.

One of the most recent testaments to the U.S. militarys horrendous environmental record is Iraq. U.S. military action there has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, crippling the countrys agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food. The U.S. use of depleted uranium in Iraq during the Gulf War also caused a massive environmental burden for Iraqis. In addition, the U.S. militarys policy of using open-air burn pits to dispose of waste from the 2003 invasion has caused a surge in cancer among U.S. servicemen and Iraqi civilians alike.

While the U.S. militarys past environmental record suggests that its current policies are not sustainable, this has by no means dissuaded the U.S. military from openly planning future contamination of the environment through misguided waste disposal efforts. Last November, the U.S. Navy announced its plan to release 20,000 tons of environmental stressors, including heavy metals and explosives, into the coastal waters of the U.S. Pacific Northwest over the course of this year.

The plan, laid out in the Navys Northwest Training and Testing Environmental Impact Statement, fails to mention that these stressors are described by the EPA as known hazards, many of which are highly toxic at both acute and chronic levels.

The 20,000 tons of stressors mentioned in the Environmental Impact Statement do not account for the additional 4.7 to 14 tons of metals with potential toxicity that the Navy plans to release annually, from now on, into inland waters along the Puget Sound in Washington state.

In response to concerns about these plans, a Navy spokeswoman said that heavy metals and even depleted uranium are no more dangerous than any other metal, a statement that represents a clear rejection of scientific fact. It seems that the very U.S. military operations meant to keep Americans safe come at a higher cost than most people realizea cost that will be felt for generations to come both within the U.S. and abroad.

Reposted with permission from our media associate MintPress News.
U.S. Bank has become the first major bank in the U.S. to formally exclude gas and oil pipelines from their project financing. This groundbreaking change to their Environmental Responsibility Policy was publicly announced at the annual shareholders meeting in Nashville in April.

In addition to no longer providing project financing for the construction of oil or natural gas pipelines, the bank has stated that relationships with their clients in the oil and gas industries will be subject to enhanced due diligence processes.

As recently as March 2017, U.S. Bank has renewed commitments with Energy Transfer Partners, the company constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline, and with Enbridge Energy, whose pipelines operate within Minnesota. However, advocates are hopeful that the banks newly released policy will limit other kinds of financing relationships with these industries.

U.S. Banks new policy is an important step in protecting the environment and moving towards a fossil free future, said Wichahpi Otto, a volunteer with the climate justice group MN350, who travelled to Nashville for the shareholders meeting. We applaud them for responding to the community and contributing to worldwide efforts to address climate change.

This move comes after ongoing pressure on U.S. Bank locally from MN350 and from the Minnesotans for a Fair Economy coalition, and on banks nationally from indigenous groups including Honor the Earth, the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Dakota Access resistance movement.

Beginning in 2015, a regional partnership of climate, labor and indigenous rights advocates has urged that U.S. Bank divest from fossil fuels, in particular from Enbridge Energy, and move its financing into the clean energy economy. Local actions have included letter-writing, account closures and social media campaigns. In response, in May 2016 the bank made changes to their Environmental Policy restricting lending to coal.

We applaud this progressive decision from U.S. Bank, said Tara Houska, national campaigns director of Honor the Earth. A strong message is being sent to the fossil fuel industry: We are consumers, we have agency and the right to know how our money is being invested. Move to a green economy and a future that does not profit off the destruction of Mother Earth and our communities.

A national and international campaign pressuring banks to divest has been highly successful, pulling nearly $4.5 billion from financiers, and a newly launched coalition effort called Mazaska Talks has expanded this effort.

Organizations and community members say they are eager to see how U.S. Banks unprecedented stance can encourage movement in financing from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy.

Confronting the climate crisis requires boldness, urgency and innovation, said Dr. Emily Swanson, a member of MN350. While there is more to be done, we are hopeful U.S. Bank can continue to act as an industry leader and as an ally for creating a more sustainable economy.
The Center for Biological Diversity is contributing $5,000 toward a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for illegally shooting and killing a famous wolf in Yellowstone National Park.

The 12-year-old wolfone of only three known white wolves in Yellowstonewas the alpha female of the canyon pack.

The Center for Biological Diversitys pledge, along with the $5,000 offered by the National Park Service, $5,000 from the Wolves of the Rockies and the Go Fund Me campaign launched by the Heart of the Wild Yellowstone with the goal of raising an additional $15,000, comes as National Park Service officials are seeking leads in their criminal investigation of the incident. The wolf, mortally wounded from a gunshot, was found by hikers on April 11 in Yellowstone National Park near Gardiner, Montana.

We sure hope they catch the despicable killer of this wolf, said Andrea Santarsiere, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Shooting this wolf in Yellowstone National Park, an area that should be a safe haven for wildlife, is not only illegal but repulsive.

National Park Service officials believe the wolf was shot sometime between 1 a.m. on April 10 and 2 p.m. on April 11, somewhere on the north side of the parkeither near Gardiner or near the Old Yellowstone Trail located within the parks northern boundary. The wolf was not immediately killed, but instead was left severely injured. Park staff had to euthanize her.

As of April 24, it is legal to kill wolves in much of Wyoming, as it is in Montana and Idaho. However, it remains illegal to kill wolves in Yellowstone, Grand Teton or other national parks.

Sadly, this poaching incident reflects what a growing body of research is making more and more clearallowing extensive hunting of wolves has not increased social tolerance for them, as states have predicted, said Santarsiere. Instead were seeing evidence that state-supported hunts of big carnivores actually devalue them among a certain segment of the population, and in fact likely trigger an increase in illegal killings.

The National Park Service is asking anyone with information about the incident to call the ISB tip line, (888) 653-0009. Callers may remain anonymous.
(Photo:  Peter Kenny)Namibian President Hage Geingob (L) and the Lutheran World Federation President Bishop Dr Munib A. Younan share words during a function hosted by the Namibian president on 11 May, 2017.

Thousands of Lutherans and other Christians from around the world have gathered in Namibia to remember the 500th anniversary of the Reformation with the Namibian president and a representative of Pope Francis in the colorful crowd.

The commemoration service included seven testimonies from around the world, one for each LWF region describing how faith has spread, taken root, and how it has broken down walls and Hage Geingob, the President of Namibia attended the service.

"What we need now is not the justification of the wrongs of the past, but that God in his grace, blot out all our iniquity, and create in our world pure hearts of love, justice and peace," said Namibian bishop emeritus Zephania Kameeta in his sermon.

The Reformation anniverary this year is special in that Lutherans and Roman Catholics are jointly celebrating the event triggered by Catholic priest Martin Luther nailing 95 these to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

He was protesting corruption in the church at the time and a massive schism in Christianity took place then.

The Reformation was followed by centuries of bloodletting among Christians, mainly in Europe and involved wars between different nations.

Cardinal Kurt Koch president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Pope Francis point man on ecumenical relations and the general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit also attended the service and the assembly.

Several Namibian choirs and a brass band participated in the service with music pieces especially composed for the LWF assembly and the Reformation commemoration as well as hymns from various parts of the world.

Namibia's President Hage Geingob delighted participants at the Lutheran assembly when he exclaimed on May 10, "I am a Lutheran!"

"I am Lutheran. Therefore, I am honored today to welcome my fellow Lutherans to Namibia on this very special occasion of the five hundredth Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation," he said on 10 May in Windhoek, Namibia.

INVITED BY THE PRESIDENT OF NAMIBIA

The Namibian president invited the participants at the Twelfth LWF Assembly to a dinner and cultural evening he hosted at the Windhoek Country Club in the Namibian capital.

More than 800 people listened to his speech after opening remarks by Bishop Ernst //Gamxamub, chairperson of the United Church Council of the Namibia Evangelical Lutheran Churches in Namibia.

"The Lutheran church has a long and illustriious history in Namibia. It is therefore appropriate for me to reflect on the fact that Martin Luther who was an Augustinian friar, led his rebellion against corruption and injustices," said Geingob.

During the cultural evening the guests listened to the Orchestra of the Martin Luther University Halle Wittenberg and two local choirs.

Geingob said Martin Luther was a great thinker and prolific writer, adding that the work of the reformer was "an inspiration to us during our country's liberation struggle against the injustices of apartheid and occupation.

"We are grateful to the Lutheran church not only for its moral support but also material support during our struggle against oppression. So, you can see why we have a special affinity with the Lutheran World Federation. We have 775,000 Lutherans in Namibia," said Geingob.

He cited church leaders such as Bishop Shekutaamba V.V. Nambala, Bishop Zephania Kameeta (a former LWF Council member  now government cabinet minister), Bishop Leonard Auala, "just to mention a few," and noted, "the Lutheran church has continued to guide Namibians to stand for justice, integrity and honesty anchored in faith."

The outgoing LWF President, Younan, Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land thanked Geigob and the Namibian people and said the member churches of the LWF had "long been committed to accompanying Namibia in the cause of justice, confronting every kind of racism and apartheid."

Younan said many people asked us why the LWF was holding its assembly in Namibia? "My answer is that Namibia represents an important reality for Christianity today. The density of Christians in the world is no longer in Europe, is no longer in the transatlantic global North but in the global South!"

"The continent of Africa is where the Gospel of Jesus Christ is flourishing. This continent is where the freshness of the Gospel can be found. We honor the three Lutheran churches of Namibia, and the seriousness with which they are committed to mission work and prophetic diakonia," Younan said.

"I see the spirit of the Reformation alive and well in Namibia today; the spirit of unity among the churches in Namibia is flourishing and interfaith dialogue is successful."

The three Namibian Lutheran churches have a combined membership of almost 1.2 million, which is around half of the approximately 2.4 million who make up the total population of Namibia.

Namibia was first a German colony, 1884  1917, and was conquered by South Africa during World War I and then administered by then apartheid South Africa until its United Nations guided independence in 1990.

LWF supported the churches in seeking freedom for Namibia's people.

On May 14 - Rev. Musa Panti Filibus, Archbishop of the Lutheran Church of Christ in Nigeria was elected president of the Lutheran World Federation to replace Palestinian Bishop Munib A. Younan, who has served his full term. Filibus is the second African to hold this position as a voice for the 74-million strong LWF.
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Alert: IGNOU extends July 2022 registration deadline, know details here Interested candidates can apply at the official IGNOU website

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George W. Bush said it as he warned us about the soft bigotry of low expectations. Barack Obama said it. So did Mitt Romney, Arne Duncan, and John McCain.

And now Donald Trump is saying it, too. In his first joint-session address to Congress, President Trump promised that our children will grow up in a nation of miracles and added the familiar kicker: Education is the civil rights issue of our time. He said it right before he announced his plan to ask Congress to pass new legislation supporting school choice. His idea of a school reform miracle, apparently, is to convince America to accept choice, rather than equity, as the controlling idea in public education.

All of which raises the question: Is education the civil rights issue of our time?

Im going to cut right to the chase: The answer is no. Or, at least, not really. If you ask me, civil rights is the civil rights issue of our time. While there is no doubt in my mind that education is a civil right, we shouldnt narrow the scope of civil rights to begin and end with education.

Im positive that making our schools better could do much to address the racial, social, and economic barriers to justice that many Americans face. Im also certain that if we did more to address the larger social issues we facesuch as continued racial discrimination, a fraying social safety net, the role of money in politicsour schools would improve immediately. This is, of course, because the relationship between public schools and society is a symbiotic one. Schools both reflect and shape the societies in which they exist, meaning that healthy schools make healthy societies, and vice versa. We should recognize the role public education can play in addressing social problems.

But what we need now, more than ever, is a comprehensive approach to solving these social problems that acknowledges that schools can only do so much, especially after having served as political punching bags for so long.

Instead, were being offered a false choice between a public education system that is truly accessible and accountable to the American public and a system that shares nothing in common with the one that Adlai Stevenson once described as the most American thing about America.

When President Trump invokes the language of civil rights, he is hoping to convince us that we need to be liberated from an oppressive system. Really, though, the promise of unfettered school choice threatens to push us all further apart, creating the kinds of divisions that truly make oppression real.

Trump's brand of school reform is not about protecting the rights of underserved students at all."

The truth is that Trumps brand of school reform is not about protecting the rights of underserved students at all. Its about giving parents, many of them wealthy, white, and well-connected, the option of taking their tax moneyour tax moneyand withdrawing it from the public space. In a democracy, people have to be able to come together in public spaces to share their concerns, and they have to be willing to hear each other out. For that to happen, we all have to put ourselves occasionally in the place of others and see things from someone elses perspective. Thats exceptionally hard to do when everybody you go to school with looks and thinks exactly the way you do.

How did it come to this? The language of civil rights has certainly been part of the conversation in education for as long as most of us can rememberand rightfully so. The brave efforts of the young people at the forefront of school desegregationlike Linda Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, and Ruby Bridgeshelped transform public schools into places where our most difficult social issues were untangled in classrooms, lunchrooms, and locker rooms. Our society has been made better for it.

These are the true heroes of civil rightsnot Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, or others who invoke the language of civil rights but do little else to advance the cause. We once saw freedom as the ability to go to school and learn; now its being defined as the ability to choose a different school, much like you might choose a plumber or an electrician, or to choose not to attend school altogether.

They want us to believe that we do whats best for society when we first do whats best for ourselves, but this gets it exactly backward. The truth is that society is improved not when we think first of ourselves, but rather when we put others first. The children who integrated segregated schools in the 1950s and 1960s were not just enduring violence and vitriol for their own advancement, but for everyone who came after them. They were faced with formidable risks, and they took them anyway. Secretary DeVos was not taking a risk when she wrote checks from her bottomless bank account to Republican candidates and causes, and President Trumps not risking anything by cynically co-opting the language of civil rights to push the idea that true freedom is not the freedom to be educated but the freedom to choose not to be educated. We all pay a price for it, though.

In the end, motives matter. People who are serious about protecting, preserving, and extending civil rights are the ones working to strengthen public schools, not weaken them. Theyre the ones fighting every day for equal access and enhanced resources and for a strong curriculum that engages students in the study of social problems and encourages them to try to solve them. Theyre the ones who remind us that education is a fundamental right for all, not a privilege to be reserved for a few. Those people are the true heroes of civil rights. Wed do well to follow their lead before its too late.
Kansas state lab recommends diagnostic testing to prevent Trichomoniasis spread



The Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory recently reported an outbreak of Trichomoniasis (Trich) in beef cattle herds with five new cases reported in three counties - leading the state lab to recommend diagnostic testing to help keep the disease at bay.

"Over the last six weeks, five herds across three counties in Kansas have been reported positive for Trichomoniasis, a highly contagious, sexually transmitted disease caused by Tritrichomonas foetus (T. foetus)," said Gregg Hanzlicek, DVM, Ph.D., at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. "This is compared to one herd diagnosed in 2016, but this is fairly typical. Just when you think you have Trich contained, it'll flare up."

The Kansas herds were found Trich-positive for several reasons. One had a high open rate (non-pregnant) of cows, indicating they had a reproductive issue. Diagnostic testing on the bulls confirmed they had Trich. The second affected herd was a result of cows purchased with pre-existing infection and later failed to become pregnant after more than 120 days or spontaneously aborted their calves. Testing confirmed they had Trich.

"We believe the three Trich cases in one county were caused by a positive bull that co-mingled with several herds through grazing association," Hanzlicek said. "Producers need to use caution when purchasing new bulls or cows. Since Trich-positive animals show no symptoms, routine testing should be conducted on all bulls more than 18 months old."

Bulls are the carriers of T. foetus. Cows become infected when they are naturally bred with an infected bull. The primary symptom in cows is infertility caused by embryonic death, which contributes to repeat breeding and scenarios where cows are in heat when they should be pregnant.

Recent wildfires should also cause concern for the spread of Trich, Hanzlicek said. More than one million acres have been scorched along with thousands of miles of fencing, increasing the likelihood of co-mingling among grazing herds in Kansas, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. This underscores the need to test every bull before moving them into a co-mingled environment, Hanzlicek said. Samples are taken by a certified veterinarian non-invasively before they are sent to a diagnostic laboratory.

"Once the sample arrives at the lab, we run a USDA-licensed PCR test on it, which is extremely sensitive and specific," said Hanzlicek. "There can be significant economic consequences for herds with a positive bull, but we are very confident in Thermo Fisher Scientific's PCR. It's the best test available. I recommend every bull go through a breeding soundness examination once a year before they're put into pasture with cows and heifers. It's the perfect time to collect the Trich sample so producers don't need to run the bull through the chute twice.

"Diagnostics are the key. The herds that were just diagnosed could have had any number of different reproductive diseases," he said. "Without a PCR test, we wouldn't have any way to identify the disease or the carriers in a herd."

For more information about the Applied Biosystems line of diagnostics products, please visit www.thermofisher.com/animalhealth
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Manx patients urged not to order unnecessary meds

Those with prescriptions on the Isle of Man are being urged not to order medicines they don't need.

The Department of Health and Social Care spent 16m filling prescriptions last year, but estimates around 300,000 worth of medication is wasted each year.

Unused drugs can be returned to pharmacies for disposal, and the Department says many of these are unopened but cannot be recycled.

The DHSC wants public to think about what medications they need, and not order those they don't need, or stockpile medication.

Leaflets, posters and stickers promoting the campaign are being placed at pharmacies around the Island.
L.A. Reid has parted ways with 'Epic Records' after sexual harassment allegations against him have surfaced. Reid was the head of the record company, which was managed by Sony Music.

The New York Post is reporting that Reid made inappropriate comments to an unnamed female staffer. In addition to asking inappropriate requests of her while on business trips, Reid allegedly would also make inappropriate remarks about her attire. The staffer threatened legal action if Reid was not disciplined for his actions against her. After an investigation, the decision to let go of Reid was reached.

In a simple statement released two days after his exit, Sony Music announced on Saturday that "L.A. Reid will be leaving the company." No further explanation or remarks were given, and Sony Music did not release any further comments. Rumors are circulating that Reid will be taking up a job at Warner Music Group's Warner Brothers record label.

In addition to serving as a judge on The X Factor, Reid is well known for his signed artists success. Reid started out as a drummer and rose to become a dominating figure in the music industry with his track record of success. Under his label, Reid propelled to fame Fifth Harmony, Meghan Trainor, Future, and DJ Khaled. Khaled currently holds the number one song in the US, I'm The One. In the past, Reid has won three Grammys for his work. Sony has yet to announce Reid's replacement.

What do you think about this situation? Are you surprised by these allegations? Let us know in the comments below.
Land, energy and mineral lockdowns By Paul Driessen

President Trump has directed Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review recent land withdrawals under the 1906 Antiquities Act, to determine whether some should be reversed or reduced in size. The review is long overdue. The act was intended to protect areas of historic, prehistoric or scientific value, with areas designated as monuments to be the smallest size compatible with the proper care and management of objects or sites to be protected. The first designation, the 1,347-acre Devils Tower National Monument (NM) respected that intent, as have most designations since then. However, some were enormous withdrawals; several were made with poor public outreach or inadequate consultation with people who would be most directly and severely affected; 26 of the 27 monuments to be reviewed are over 100,000 acres in size; and the final one involves deficient consultation. Arguably the two greatest Antiquities Act abuses affected Utah. The 1,880,461-acre Grand Staircase Escalante NM was designated by President Clinton in large part to make billion-dollar coal deposits off limits. Even Utah Governor Michael Levitt did not learn of it until it was a done deal (Chapter Twelve). President Obama designated the 1,351,849-acre Bear Ears monument three weeks before leaving office, many Utahans say to make still more energy resources off limits to exploration and development. Grand Staircase alone is equal to Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It and Great Bears together are larger than Connecticut. They are far larger than any of the national parks in Utah. And they are in addition to Utahs five other national monuments, five national parks, four national recreation and conservation areas, thousands of miles of national trails, six national forests, 31 national wilderness areas, and millions of acres in other restrictive land use categories. Some of these areas truly are unique, beautiful, spectacular. Ive visited and hiked in many of them in Utah, other western states and Alaska. Our national parks in particular should be protected. But we have gone overboard, and far too many areas have been put in lockdown specifically to block energy and mineral development. Forest Service officials and Sierra Club officers have said so right to my face. Eastern and Midwestern residents cannot imagine the extent or impact of Federal Government ownership, management and control of lands in the eleven westernmost states and Alaska. While federal agencies own just 0.3% of Connecticut and Iowa, and 0.6% of New York, they own, manage and control 63% of all land in Utah; 61% in Alaska and Idaho; 80% in Nevada; 29% to 53% in the other western states. That means virtually every revenue-producing, recreational and other activity is regulated, restricted, prohibited or under attack in courts and other venues. No timber cutting in national forests, fostering massive wildfires. No vehicles, wheelchairs, energy or mineral exploration in wilderness and many other areas. Even grazing and watershed management are under assault throughout the West. All of these restrictive designations should be reviewed by Congress and Executive Branch agencies. As of 1994, when consulting geologist Courtland Lee and I prepared a detailed analysis, over 410 million acres were effectively off limits to mineral exploration and development. Thats 66% of the nations public lands  an area equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. The situation is far worse today  posing a critical public policy problem. Because of processes unleashed by plate tectonics and other geologic forces, these mountain, desert and other lands contain some of the most highly mineralized rock formations in North America. They almost certainly contain numerous world-class deposits of oil, gas, gold, silver, platinum, molybdenum and rare-earth metals  essential for modern civilization. They wait for us to find them, using modern prospecting technologies that can be carried in airplanes and backpacks, leaving barely a trace  but letting us know what is there, so that we can make informed land management decisions. Environmentalists claim that even a single mine or oil well in these areas would destroy their wilderness character and ecological value. That is absurd, considering that many of these areas are the size of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont or even West Virginia. Moreover, unlike wind turbine and solar panel installations across thousands or tens of thousands of acres in perpetuity, modern mines and drill pads are comparatively small  and are restored back to natural conditions when the operations have concluded. Equally important, wind and solar generate minuscule amounts of electricity, unreliably, at unpredictable times  and require far more land and workers per unit of output  than coal or natural gas. In fact, Coal generated an incredible 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per worker; natural gas 3,812 MWH per worker; wind a measly 836 MWH for every employee; and solar an abysmal 98 MWH per worker. Thats part of the reason why oil, gas and coal still provide 80% of Americas and the worlds energy. Americas national security situation was affected when we depended on often unfriendly foreign sources for oil  before hydraulic fracturing unleashed record production from state and private lands. Now we are dependent on different, still often unfriendly foreign suppliers for rare earth metals and other raw materials that are essential for smart phones and smart bombs, stealth fighters, digital cameras, computer hard drives, wind turbine magnets, photovoltaic solar panels, hybrid and electric car batteries, compact fluorescent light bulbs, catalytic converters, and countless other modern and future technologies. China produces 97% of the worlds rare-earth oxides, largely controls world markets, and increasingly uses rare earths in-house, to manufacture products for sale overseas. That means most jobs stay in China, even though the rare earths are mined, processed and turned into finished products under environmental and worker health and safety standards that would get operations shut down instantly in the USA. However, Chinas estimated reserves are only one-third of known global reserves, and much less than that of potential economically producible rare earth resources  many of which could be in the United States. In fact, one of the largest known rare earth deposits is near Californias Mojave Desert. It had been in production, but legal actions, excessive regulations and low foreign prices forced a long suspension of operations, and Molycorp filed for bankruptcy in 2015, citing a heavy debt load and other problems. That deposit underscores the enormous potential for finding billion-dollar deposits of numerous vital minerals right here in the USA  if we are permitted to look for them. President Trumps decisions to review Antiquities Act land closures, ease restrictions on onshore and offshore oil and gas drilling, and end stalemates over the Dakota and Keystone Pipelines are excellent steps in implementing his vision for American job creation and economic revitalization. The President and Congress could also explore ways to get more oil flowing to the Trans Alaska Pipeline, which needs certain minimal amounts in the pipe for the oil to move during frigid weather. Recent discoveries along the North Slope have helped, and perhaps Prudhoe Bays declining oil production can be spurred some more by fracking. Ultimately, though, more Alaskan areas must be opened for drilling, and that will require White House, federal agency and congressional action. Congress should also take a leadership role, by launching discussions about how much western state land really needs to remain under federal control, and how many of our best energy and mineral prospects really need to be kept off limits. Those land use policies severely affect job creation and economic opportunities for states, communities, families and our nation as a whole, for little environmental benefit. Modern industrialized civilizations cannot long exist without the vital resources that come out of holes in the ground. Even wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars and internet services require a plethora of metals and other minerals  plus fossil fuel energy to extract those resources and convert them into usable products. Its time to have a civil conversation about all of this. Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.Cfact.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death. He has degrees in geology, ecology and environmental law. Home
Brian Mulroney and the failure of Canadian conservatism in the 1980s (Part One) By Mark Wegierski

Brian Mulroney may be one of the most disappointing Prime Ministers Canada has ever had. As leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party, Mulroney at that time ostensibly represented the main focus of what could be called the Centre-Right Opposition in Canada. The use of the term Centre-Right Opposition is meant to suggest the perennial underdog status of that option in Canadian politics, especially after the federal election of 1963, when Liberal Lester B. Pearson defeated the staunch Tory, John Diefenbaker. As each successive decade rolled by, it could be argued that the social and cultural hold of left-liberalism on the populace has increased exponentially. Although Mulroney was able to win huge majorities in the federal Parliament in 1984 and 1988, he was unable to make any significant changes in this ever-accelerating velocity and trajectory. Indeed, one of the consequences of Brian Mulroneys Prime Ministership, may be that Canada has reached the situation today where winning a Conservative majority in the federal Parliament is nearly impossible, for even the most adept and skilful politician. During his tenure in Ottawa between 1984 and 1993, it appeared that Brian Mulroney lacked any clear understanding of the over-all social environment or context in which he operated, or even of the real nature of power, which he was said to be so avidly seeking. It has long ago become accepted that "the permanent government" of high-ranking civil servants (such as the unelected Deputy Ministers), often wields greater power than almost any elected government. One could compare, for example, the power and influence of a backbench Member of Parliament to that of a middle-level bureaucrat in a politically-sensitive post. By the 1980s, the rule of the Liberal Party in Canada had been virtually uninterrupted for decades, and in fact had carried on, with only a few Conservative interludes, since 1896, at the end of the nineteenth century. This meant that the federal civil service was filled with Liberal Party and liberal-oriented appointees and supporters, who did their best to undermine the Mulroney government, and its more right-leaning initiatives, from within. Since Brian Mulroney had in fact won the second-largest majority in Canadian history, it could be argued that it was implicit in his mandate to initiate a general housecleaning and turn-over of staff, certainly in the higher echelons of the civil service. This would be what the media refers to as a "purge". But this never happened -- and, in fact, an opposite trend emerged. A former leader of the New Democratic Party, Stephen Lewis, was appointed as Canada's Ambassador to the UN. NDP MP Ian Deans was given the chairmanship of the Public Service Relations Board, after his early and unexpected retirement from Parliament. Gerry Caplan, one of the NDP's leading theoreticians, headed up a Task Force investigating the role of the media in Canadian society. Pierre Juneau, once a high-ranking Liberal Party member, and Trudeau associate and appointee, remained at the head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and that vital media instrument remained as pro-Liberal (small and big l) as ever. Other sectors of the administrative apparatus, most notably the Department of External Affairs, remained equally untouched by the change in the elected government. It could be argued that the Mulroney government's inability to bring the CBC, the civil service apparatus, and other government agencies and boards under closer control and scrutiny, resulted in an inability to carry out any policies significantly different from the Liberal ones, even if it had the desire to do so. Given the apparent strength of his 211-seat majority, Mulroney was in a position to launch serious initiatives in many directions, to try and challenge the policies of previous Liberal governments. That he did not do so stemmed also from the fact that he himself was viscerally, to a large extent, a "small-l liberal". To be continued. Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher. Home
Torpedoes sink ships By Dr. Robert Owens

Ships of State that is. Once wars made presidents popular. Think of Washington and the Revolution, Lincoln and the Civil War, McKinley and the Spanish American War, FDR and WW II. Maybe that was because we used to win wars. Korea ran Truman out of office. Vietnam made LBJ decide not to run. Before the Silent Coup, Nixon (who ended the war) was tarred with the Vietnam brush. With America winning once again, George the First got a bump from the 100 day Gulf One before we all read his lips. Then rounding out the results of quagmire wars George the Second after soaring in the aftermath of 9-11 ran aground on the sand bars of Iraq. I am a non-interventionist. I believe in America First. I support the foreign policy of Thomas Jefferson, Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none. We dont need to intervene in the wars of others. We dont need to fight proxy wars in foreign lands. We dont need to crusade our way into a religious war with over a billion people. We have a war right here, the Culture War long ago defined by the prescient ideological father of the Trump Revolution, Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention when he said, There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. The Progressives of the Obamanation, their Clintonian allies in New Yorks Sixth Crime Family, and the Sandersnista Antifa Black Shirts have been stalled in their Long March to a socialist America by the Trump phenomenon. Daily the ABCCBSNBCCNNMSNBCPBS Cartel hammers away in their effort to de-legitimize President Trump. The low information voters who get their personal opinions from the Democrat stenographers in the Cartel repeat the talking points released by Schumer, Pelosi, and the Deep State. The RINOs following McCain are yearning to stretch their hands across the aisles doing anything they can to embarrass or undermine President Trump. The neo-con dream weavers are working day and night to lure Mr. Trump into a foreign adventure. If they can somehow get a war started that they can hang around his neck the miracle election may fizzle into the counter-revolution of a midterm election debacle and the inevitable impeachment hearings that would bring. Instead of following the McCain/Krauthammer/Crystal wing to war somewhere for something lets quit subsidizing the economies of over a hundred countries with our bases. Bring our troops home let them build the wall and secure our own borders. Build the most sophisticated and powerful defenses imagined and defend America First. An American hero once said, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" The torpedoes of war often sink the ship of state. Even the victorious often fall victim to the terminal bleeding of a Pyrrhic victory. Look at Britain. They lost two generations to win two world wars and the empire they fought to save died from the wounds. Mr. President I know the pressure to go to war is mounting. To take a battle cry from the dis-loyal opposition, Resist! Defend us if we are attacked. Build the Wall. Secure the border. Win the war at home dont be sidetracked into the abyss that has swallowed other presidencies. We won the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and then the protracted nation-building melted the consensus of world support we received after 9-11. To many around the world and here at home we have become the aggressors. Look what it did to the approval rating for George the Second. War always leads to destruction. Its supposed to. Since Truman invented the idea of limited war even the victories have felt more like defeats. Look at Vietnam. Mr. President you were elected by people who want secure borders, a rebirth of American industry, and a return to the fundamentals of the American Experiment; limited government, personal liberty, and economic opportunity. Dont fall into the trap of a foreign war. Win the war at home instead. Dr. Robert Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com  2017 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens Home
Emmanuel Macron has decisively won the French presidential elections with 66.06% votes. His opponent, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, was defeated with 33.94% of the votes. Mr. Macron will become the youngest president in French history (he is 39, one year younger than Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon Bonapartes nephew, who was elected in 1848) and also the first head of France who does not belong to a major political party.

In his speech, Mr. Macron said that he hoped to be a page of hope and renewed trust, adding that he had heard the rage, anxiety and doubt that a lot of you have expressed and vowed to spend his five years in office fighting the forces of division that undermine France. He also added that he would guarantee the unity of the nation and  defend and protect Europe. He urged the French to embrace, rather than reject, globalization and promised to work with Germany to revamp the European Union. Mr. Macrons supporters gathered in thousands in front of the Louvre museum in Paris where he addressed the crowds with a powerful message: Tonight you won, France won. Everyone told us it was impossible, but they dont know France.

European leaders hurried to congratulate Mr. Macron on his victory. Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, tweeted: Congratulations @EmmanuelMacron. Congratulations to French people for choosing Liberty, Equality and Fraternity over tyranny of fake news. Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, also expressed his congratulations and said he was very happy that the French people had chosen a European future. Together for a stronger and fairer Europe, he said. Mr. Macrons victory has generally been hailed as a sigh of relief for Europe and the liberal democratic values for which the European Union has stood for more than 50 years.
The latest ballistic missile launch by the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) seriously violates a number of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, the European Union said in a statement. According to Brussels, the most recent launch as well as previous ones pose a threat to international peace and security and further aggravate tensions in the region at a time when de-escalation is needed. The EU urged the DPRK to comply with its international obligations: stop the launches and abandon ballistic missiles programs as well as its nuclear weapons program in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner.

Brussels has also called on the DPRK to engage in an open, meaningful, and credible conversation with the international community. The EU said that it would support such process and dialogue. The High Representative/Vice-President, Federica Mogherini, will remain in close contact in the coming days with all of the EUs international partners, following her address to the UN Security Council earlier this week and her visits to Beijing, New Delhi and Moscow in April this year.

The European Union currently has in place a policy of critical engagement towards the DPRK. The main goals are to support a lasting diminution of tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the region, to uphold the international non-proliferation regime and to improve the situation of human rights in the country. The DPRK and the EU established diplomatic relations in 2001 but first political contact had started already in 1998. The most recent dialogue between the two parties was held in June 2015 in Pyongyang.
USD/CAD trading in range as Oil Price hangs in the balance.

Canadian Dollar worst performer among the G10 currency group.

Lloyds see firmer Oil price supporting CAD.

US trade relationship with Canada potential threat to CAD moving forward.

USD/CAD fell again last week, but its notable collapse over the last few weeks seems to have slowed down a little. Trading in a range on the daily charts as it bounces between 1.37 and 1.365, all eyes are on which direction the pair moves next, as it is likely the next move will carry some momentum. As is ever the case with the Canadian Dollar, the Oil price and its recent struggles remain front and center.

Lloyds released its International Outlook for May recently and in it included a detailed analysis of the USD/CAD currency pair moving forward. It is notable that of the G10 currency forecasts, this is the only pair that they declined to include an actual forecast price. This in itself suggests they see considerable uncertainty in the pair moving forward.

The UK bank notes that the Canadian Dollar has been been the weakest of all the major currencies over this last month as it has been hit by the surprising decision by the Trump administration to impose a tax on Canadian lumber exports to the United States. This decision has promptly raised fears that Trump will make good on his protectionist election claims and pursue a harder line with Canada worsening the trading relationship between the two countries. The knock on-effect of this is seen as increasing speculation in regards to the prospect of a US withdrawal from NAFTA, alongside a possible US corporation tax cut. The result of such actions by the US would likely create further economic uncertainty around the Canadian Dollar.

In addition to the pressure imposed by Trump, Lloyds note the falling oil price as placing considerable downward pressure on the CAD. Brent Crude falling almost 20% from its recents has almost certainly harmed sentiment around Canada's economy, but despite this Lloyds note how resilient the Canadian economic data has been, noting the marked upward revision by the BoC (Bank of Canada) in its growth expectations from 2.1% to 2.6%.

The forecast sees potential for a rally in the CAD, but believes any confidence in that view could be affected by the prospect of further worsening in the relationship between the two nations,

From an interest-rate differential perspective, we see Canadian rates on hold and two 25bp hikes in the US, with the market broadly priced for this scenario. With oil prices expected to firm, we believe there is scope for the Canadian dollar to rally. However, the uncertainty related to the US-Canada trading relationship leaves this pair vulnerable to continued bouts of volatility.

Given the tremendous uncertainty there seems to be around the future of this pair, it is likely this will be a great market to focus on. If Lloyds are correct in their call, then there could well be some fireworks to profit from in the upcoming year, as volatility in the pair runs riot.
AUD/USD to hit 0.80 by end of 2017.

Aussie falls against US Dollar for 4th straight week.

Lloyds see Aussie rising against USD despite chance of Fed. rate hike in June.

Benign risk sentiment seemingly at odds with global uncertainty over Trump/North Korea standoff.

The Australian Dollar fell for the 4th straight week against the US Dollar last week, as the currency pair hit new lows just beneath 0.7350 and demonstrated a clear downward trend line on the weekly charts.

Troubles in Chinese stocks and the resulting wobbles in global commodity prices have hit the Aussie hard as the recent risk on rally in Europe has failed to give any boost to the pair.

In the past the higher yield provided by holding the AUD often found it a good deal of buyers in times of risk-on but it seems its current rate, and the economic situation in Asia are limiting its appeal to carry traders.

Lloyds recently released their International Outlook for May and in it included a bullish call for AUD/USD.

Lloyds note that since the climbing to a recent high of 0.7750 in the month of March, the AUD has faced some serious selling pressure, down over 5% against its US counterpart.

The fall is attributed to a notable drop in commodity prices, specifically Copper and Iron ore (both of which represent vital exports at the core of the Australian economy) and are both downtrending strongly.

The monetary policy of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is also attributed by the UK bank as contributing to the move downwards. Keeping interests rates at historically low levels (1.5%) at the May meeting, Governor Lowe of the RBA maintained a dovish tone as he identified weakness in wage growth and elevated levels of household debt as threats to the Australian economy. Lloyds, in contrast, see the US Federal Reserve looking through any weakness in recent US data, thus leaving a considerable amount of room for a rate hike at their June meeting.

Despite this Lloyds still see the Australian Dollar outperforming the USD through to years end,

We expect a tightening in June to be followed by a further hike later this year. Despite all of this, we remain relatively constructive on the Australian dollar. External dynamics, including the benign risk environment and stability in China, should be supportive. In addition, Australias trade surplus for March was a healthy A$3.1bn and the labour market continues to tighten. As such, after a period of consolidation, we see AUD/USD appreciating to 0.80 by the end of this year.

If AUD/USD is to hit the heights, Lloyds are suggesting it would seem that the benign risk sentiment needs to continue. A reemergence of risk-off, brought on by any further developments on the Korean Peninsula and China continuing to wobble, and things could go from bad to worse for the Aussie.


Students from the European Union will still be eligible for financial support if they are applying for a university course beginning in the 2018/2019 academic year even although it finishes after Brexit.The British Government has confirmed that EU students will continue to remain eligible for undergraduate, masters, postgraduate and advanced learner financial support.Under current student finance rules, EU students are eligible to receive undergraduate tuition fee loans and masters loans if they have resided in the European Economic Area for at least three years prior to study. EU nationals who have resided in the UK for over five years are also able to apply for undergraduate maintenance support.The confirmation means that EU students applying for an undergraduate or masters course at an English university or further education institution in the 2018 to 2019 academic year will continue to have access to student loans and grants, even if the course concludes after the UKs exit from the EU.EU students are eligible for home fee status, which means they are charged the same tuition fees as UK students. Other international students do not have their tuition fees capped in this way.EU nationals will also remain eligible to apply for Research Council PhD studentships at UK institutions for 2018 to 2019 to help cover costs for the duration of their study.We have been clear about our commitment to the UKs world class higher education sector. Through our modern industrial strategy and the additional 4.7 billion committed for research and innovation over the next five years, we are ensuring the UK has the skills and environment it needs to continue leading the way in academia and research, said Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson.A key part of our success is attracting talent from across the globe. This will provide reassurance to the brightest minds from across Europe to continue applying to study in the UK, safe in the knowledge financial assistance is available if needed, he added.The decision has been welcomed by Universities UK, which represents universities, saying it provides much needed clarity for EU students applying to start courses as universities have already begun to receive enquiries from prospective students for the 2018/2019 intake.It is good to see that the government has recognised the value of EU students and guaranteed their access to financial support and home fee status across undergraduate and postgraduate levels, said Alistair Jarvis, Universities UK deputy chief executive.Students from EU countries can now apply for places on undergraduate courses starting in autumn 2018 with the confidence that they will not have to pay upfront tuition fees and will remain eligible to receive Government backed loans to cover their tuition fee for the duration of their courses, he pointed out.This announcement also means that EU students commencing courses in autumn 2018 will continue to pay the same tuition fees as UK students for the full duration of their courses, even those years past the point the UK exits the EU, he added.Looking ahead, Jarvis said that students from Europe will need to be encouraged to continue to see the UK as a place to study. We need to see a new post-Brexit immigration policy that encourages all international students to choose to study in the UK coupled with welcoming messages from Government, recognising their hugely positive social and economic impact on the UK, he concluded.
Before Netflix was available in the PIs I used a VPN to access it. Now that they are here, they keep trying to block VPN access. Which is a bummer because the PI Netflix sucks... Now it is a dance the VPN and Netflix play trying to trick each other...



I used to send myself money using Western Union and had to use a VPN. They would not allow me to log in from the PIs and send money to the PIs. Using the VPN to say I was in Texas, I could send money to myself here.



I think they can always tell if you are using one, but a lot of sites just don't care enough to monitor for it. The VPN is very useful for banking and other business that wants you to be at "home".
Details Wednesday, 10 November 2021 02:04 Written by RAIC Press Release

STATEMENT: The leadership and staff of the Right to Access Information Commission (RAIC) wish to extend their heartfelt condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the Wellington fire disaster on Friday 5th November 2021 and pray for the speedy recovery of all those admitted in various hospitals as a result of injuries sustained during this fire incident.

Read more ...
More than 500 students graduated from Our Lady of the Lake University this Sunday, making it the largest graduating class in the universitys 121-year history.

Im sure that the graduates know exactly how I feel when I say I wouldnt be standing where I am without my mother, said Julian Castro, the graduation commencement speaker, former Housing and Urban Development secretary and former San Antonio mayor.

As the ceremony landed on the same day as Mothers Day, it was only fitting that his mother, Rosie Castro, receive an honorary doctoral degree during OLLUs commencement. She is leading the effort to host a symposium next year honoring the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearings that took place on OLLUs campus.

Rosie Castro is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant whose education never passed the fourth grade. She attended OLLU and received a bachelors degree in Spanish in 1970, and five years later, another in sociology. She was chair of the political party La Raza Unida for Bexar County and was highly involved in social justice causes, particularly those that advocated for Mexican-Americans. She raised her twins, Julian and Joaquin Castro, now a U.S. congressman, as a single mother on the West Side.

Julian Castro spoke of these experiences growing up to the rows of students in graduation caps, many personalized with a range of messages, from the poetic The best is yet to come to the spirited GO SPURS GO.

I know that if we went around this room and each of you told your story, wed hear amazing, amazing testimony about obstacles that youve already overcome to get to where you are today, Julian Castro said.

More than 50 percent of the undergraduates walking the stage Sunday were first-generation college grads.

Dan Yoxall, vice president of institutional advancement at the university, said the growing number of programs there  including an online masters in social work program that has more than 900 students across 45 states enrolled  likely led to the 100-plus increase in student graduates this commencement compared to previous years. He also said OLLUs retention rate for students is continuing to increase.

Yoxall said officials picked Julian Castro to be the speaker because he could be a role model for the students.

He has a lot in common with our students  that was the No. 1 factor why he was selected, Yoxall said. We try to find speakers whose lives resonate with the lives of our students.

Jordan Thomas, 23, a McNair Scholars Program student, graduated Sunday with a bachelors of science degree in biology. Waiting in line to receive his diploma, he said he was a little nervous but looking forward to the emotional high hed feel with his degree in hand, knowing he was done  he did it.

It took Thomas, whos a first-generation student, five years to get his bachelors degree. Now hes looking to get his masters and, eventually, a Ph.D.

It was a journey, it was hard, Thomas said. But I know Ill have more tough times ahead. This is just the beginning.
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SEGUIN  The grooms jangling spurs announced his arrival even before he started down the aisle scattered with flower petals at the historic Magnolia Hotel here Saturday afternoon.

He was soon followed by the bride, wearing an 1800s-style wedding dress and white hat as she was escorted to the altar by her John Wayne-lookalike father, Gary Glaeser, wearing similar garb to what the movie legend wore in the movie Big Jake.

The 21 guests, some dressed in 1800s period outfits, smiled as they watched Kevin Spross and Sherry Lynn Jeffers pledge their love to each other in the glow of sunlight coming through the window.

The hotel owners, Erin and Jim Ghedi, presided over the wedding. Erin Ghedi, who became an ordained minister for the occasion, wed the couple as her husband watched from the corner of the wedding chapel. Its the same room in which the third owner of the hotel, Jeremiah Strother Calvert, presided over the marriage of Texas Ranger Capt. John Jack Coffee Hays to Calverts daughter, Susan Sophia Calvert, 170 years ago.

In my heart, I believe that they are standing in this room, right beside me, watching history repeat itself as the owners of the Magnolia Hotel once again marry a young couple in love, Erin Ghedi said. It has been our dream to conduct a wedding performed by us here at the hotel.

The Spross-Jeffers union was a full-circle affair at the property the Ghedis purchased in 2013 to restore to its 19th-century glory. Its now an events center featuring tours and could become a museum.

Erin Ghedi, an author of two books, discovered the old building while researching material for her next book. Located at 203 S. Crockett St., the once-prosperous hotel dating back to 1840 had been abandoned since the 1990s, becoming a rattrap, the a site of drug use and vandalism. In 2012, it was placed on the Texas Most Endangered List of Historic Places.

These days, the word haunted has been added to the hotels title. Some say that buried deep in the inns boards and beams are spirits of long-departed occupants who are linked to murder, misery and vice. In recent years, their stories have resulted in the hotel sponsoring Halloween tours and being featured on television shows that include the Travel Channels Ghost Adventures and Destination Americas Ghost Brothers.

Before Saturdays wedding, Jim Ghedi showed visitors the room where William Faust stayed in 1874, before he was charged with murdering 13-year-old Emma Voelcker with an ax in nearby New Braunfels. Down the hall is another room where Pink Rosebud, a local prostitute, conducted business. And theres the pink bathroom where Ghedi said a mother died in childbirth.

The tales didnt deter Jeffers, a docent and actor in skits at the hotel, who suggested the site for her wedding. Spross knelt and proposed to her in the same room where they were married.

We tried to be respectful to the history here, Spross said, standing beside his beaming bride. This has been a special place to me and her both.

Well-wishers congratulated the couple as they posed for photos in the parlor among weathered artifacts with stoic Texas Ranger William Big Foot Wallace gazing down from a framed photograph.

Outside, Justyn Gray of the Bluebonnet Carriage Co. sat at the reins of a horse-drawn white buggy, waiting to take the couple to the Olivia Mansion, on North Austin Street. As the newlyweds boarded the carriage, Gray lightly flicked the reins attached to Ginger, an 8-year-old Percheron, who had silver glitter sprinkled through her mane and on her hoofs for the occasion.

As the buggy pulled away, the couple waved to the Ghedis and their guests, who snapped photos with raised cell phones. Soon, the only reminder of the happy event was a pattern of ghostly silver hoof prints dotting the hot black-top road.

vtdavis@express-news.net
When Gov. Greg Abbott this month signed a bill banning so-called sanctuary cities in Texas, he said the key policies in the bill have already been tested at the United States Supreme Court, and approved there.

Abbott was referring to a similar Arizona law that requires police to ask about immigration status under certain circumstances. According to the governors office, the fact that the Arizona law survived a constitutional challenge in 2012 and remains on the books is evidence that Texas law, which is already facing a legal challenge, will be found constitutional.

The Arizona law, Senate Bill 1070, passed in 2010, was considered one of the most restrictive in the country at the time and created criminal penalties for being in the country without permission, which is not a federal crime. The Supreme Court struck down most of its provisions, ruling that they were pre-empted by federal law. However, the court ruled that the Justice Department hadnt shown that the provision addressing police stops was unconstitutional.

The Arizona law carries civil penalties for government officials and agencies who dont comply with the provision that survived the Supreme Court.

Texas SB 4 comes at the issue of police inquiries about immigration status from a different direction. The new law creates a $25,000 daily fine for repeat offenders and allows the attorney general to remove officials who enact policies preventing police from inquiring about immigration status.

The governors office has said that because the Texas law carries no requirement to ask about immigration status  it simply punishes officials who prevent police from asking about immigration status  its squarely within what the Supreme Court has defined as constitutional.

The Texas law does not require mandatory immigration checks, it simply prohibits local sheriffs from banning law enforcement officials from inquiry into the immigration status of persons already lawfully detained, Abbott spokesman John Wittman wrote in an email.

To say that the Arizona provision on investigating immigration status was declared constitutional is stretching what the Supreme Court ruled, said Nina Perales, the vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

What the Supreme Court said  was that at the time the case came to the Supreme Court, it could not make a decision about pre-emption because it wasnt sure how to read the statute, Perales said. So the court said it wasnt going to strike down that provision, but that it would sort of leave it for another day. If anybody wanted to bring a future claim after the law went into effect, the court left that door open. The court left the door open to a future lawsuit.

MALDEF reached a settlement in which the Arizona attorney general clarified that officers cannot extend traffic stops or detentions to investigate immigration status and may choose not to investigate immigration status in certain circumstances.

I know from reading SB 4 that its some kind of attempt to avoid the constitutional problems of SB 1070, although I dont think they did avoid them, Perales said. It is obvious that SB 4 does not require immigration inquiries. It frames the discussion of immigration inquiries in terms of local jurisdictions not being able to prevent officers from making those inquiries. So SB 4 is approaching the issue from a different angle.

The Arizona laws requirement to ask about immigration status is not as expansive as the governors office is portraying it, said Michael A. Olivas, the William B. Bates Distinguished Chair of Law at the University of Houston Law Center. The Arizona law required officers to ask about immigration status where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present.

Even the part that survived the Supreme Court would not have allowed any police officer who saw a Mexican on the street to detain them and ask for papers. There had to be reasonable suspicion, it had to be during a lawful stop, during arrest or detention, Olivas said. There was always an assumption that if a police officer arrested you and had probable cause, they could investigate further, including determining your immigration status.

Not every state wants to do that because so many of them understand that its a fools errand for doing so because  it drives crime deeper and cordons off entire communities, he added. So I think the question isnt whether or not this is constitutional. That will have to be tested in the courts. I think the question is whether this adds anything useful to the arsenal of the state.

jbuch@express-news.net

Twitter: @jlbuch
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On Dec. 8, 2013, San Antonio Police Officer Robert Deckard was shot in the forehead during a highway chase of armed-robbery suspects on Interstate 37 that took him into Atascosa County.

A seven-year veteran of the Police Department, Deckard spent 13 days in intensive care at San Antonio Military Medical Center before he died. He was 31 and a father of two. Shawn Ruiz Puente, then 32, and Jenevieve Ramos, 28, were charged with capital murder.

Puentes trial, the first in Atascosa County since 1996 to carry a possible death penalty, is set for August in the stately 1912 courthouse in Jourdanton.

Texas counties are largely responsible for the defense of indigent people accused of crimes, and the expense of a death penalty trial can be devastating. But Atascosa County, with 48,000 people and dwindling revenues from a waning regional oil and gas boom, has dodged that budget nightmare.

It is among 178 Texas counties that pay annual premiums for a sort of murder insurance offered by a quasi-public organization of experienced, well-paid defense lawyers that sends an entire legal team to the covered counties to represent defendants who face possible execution.

The alternative can be financially crippling. Jasper County, near the Louisiana border, paid out more than $1.1 million to defend three white supremacists who in 1998 chained a black man, James Byrd, to the back of a pickup and dragged him 3 miles before dumping his headless body. Property taxes were raised 6.7 percent over two years to cover the trials costs.

In 2009, Gray County, in the Panhandle, spent nearly $750,000  a tenth of its entire annual budget  for the death penalty trial of a man already serving two consecutive life sentences in Missouri. The county had to raise taxes and withhold employee raises. A defense attorney remarked that if prosecutors had sought only life without parole, it would have cost the county about $10,000.

About five years ago, Atascosa County signed on with the Lubbock-based Regional Public Defenders Office, said DeAnn Belicek, the countys indigent defense coordinator. She said that after Officer Deckard was killed, she immediately thought of the RPDO contract.

Literally, the second we hear of any capital murder, we call the Lubbock office and within an hour or two they send one or both of their attorneys from the San Antonio field office, Belicek said. A case like that can bankrupt a county.

She said the San Antonio-based RPDO lawyers, Anna Jimenez and Lisa Jarrett, have gotten along well with Atascosa County judges and the district attorneys staff.

Theres never any behind-the-back antics, Belicek said. Theyre always prepared, always file the right motions, and I would even say that by coming so quickly it might help the district attorney decide whether to seek the death penalty.

If prosecutors decide to seek life without parole rather than the death penalty, the defense team might stay on the case anyway, a decision made case by case.

The RPDO has one of the most peculiar pedigrees of any Texas state agency  quasi or not.

Texas is in the minority of states that dont provide counties full or at least 50 percent funding for their indigent capital murder cases. Famous for sending more defendants to death than any other state  having executed 538 people since 1982, more than a third of all U.S. executions in that time  Texas has also historically underfunded indigent legal defense and court-appointed lawyers at the county level.

A study called the Fair Defense Report by the Austin-based, nonpartisan Texas Appleseed group stated in 2000 that Texas was the only state in which capital cases are defended almost exclusively by members of the private bar rather than by public defender programs and that Texas more skilled capital murder lawyers could barely be found in some parts of the state.

Enter the Lubbock County Commissioners Court, which got a state grant in 2008 to provide attorneys in capital cases for about 85 West Texas counties.

While it may not seem like a natural fit because Lubbock County is very red and Republican, they had a lot of foresight, took the risk and deserve some praise, said Ray Keith, RPDOs current director. A lot of farmers and ranchers are very aware of risk and reward.

The murder insurance idea proved so successful that regional public defender offices soon opened in Midland and Amarillo, then Uvalde, Kingsville, Corpus Christi (the office there later moved to San Antonio), Clute, Burnet, Wichita Falls and Terrell. The counties pay an annual premium based on their population and history of capital murder cases. Only those with fewer than 300,000 residents can participate.

RPDO has 43 employees, including five investigators, 15 attorneys (making $104,000 annually) and 12 specialists who can develop evidence of mitigating circumstances that might convince juries to impose life without parole rather than the death penalty. It gets about half its funding from participating counties and half from a true state agency, the Texas Indigent Defense Commission.

It doesnt raise money on its own. And its not an advocacy organization. It takes no official position on the death penalty.

A TIDC-funded study of the Regional Public Defenders Office by two national authorities on state indigent defense systems said the Texas group had made a huge difference in the delivery of capital defense representation in rural Texas, closing some 112 cases in its first eight years, only six resulting in the death penalty. The audit mainly suggested staffing changes and increased state funding and pointedly said, Burnout is becoming a problem in RPDO.

In 2014, total indigent defense costs across Texas came to about $230 million, of which counties contributed about $186.7 million.

Most attorneys would agree that an entirely state-funded indigent defense system is the best way to go, TIDC director Jim Bethke said. But the RPDO is a great alternative because it forces the state and the counties to collaborate.

A fully state-funded agency that might aggressively represent cop killers would not be politically palatable to a Republican-controlled Legislature. But counties that offer only underpaid, indifferent legal assistance have a good chance of getting their case overturned on appeal, and counties often must pay for a retrial.

Bethke says he encourages counties to join RPDO but has found that dozens of smaller ones still think the program is unneeded.

They say, Well never file a death penalty case, but if they have a sheriff or judge killed, theyll insist on using the death penalty. But then its too late to call RPDO, he said.

When Anderson County in East Texas had a mass killing in 2015, its officials belatedly inquired about joining RPDO, but were told, much like an uninsured driver after a crash, that insurance doesnt work that way.

Atascosa has joined the four other counties in its judicial district  Frio, Karnes, La Salle and Wilson  in paying $60,000 annually for RPDO assistance. Some larger counties pay upward of $150,000 a year, and some pay just $1,200, such as tiny McMullen County, population 707 in 2010. That county hasnt had a capital murder case in at least 60 years.

I thought it was something that would protect the taxpayers of our county, McMullen County Judge James Teal said. La Salle had two or three murders in the past several years, and with the Eagle Ford (oil and gas boom) we had changing demographics.

There was no opposition among the commissioners, Teal added. It was a no-brainer.

bselcraig@express-news.net
It all came down to lemon zest for Jason Dady, the San Antonio chef and restaurant empire-builder who made it to Sundays final three of the Food Network competition series Iron Chef Gauntlet.

But in the world of Iron Chef, sometimes lemon zest is all it takes to get sent home, and Dadys citrusy shortcomings on an otherwise elegant smoked salmon and egg dish ended his five-week journey toward one singular goal: I wanted to be the first Iron Chef from Texas.

His reaction, edited into a few lines on the show, came to this: Extremely disappointing. I hate losing. I hate it. Its the worst.

The series started April 16 with seven of the nations best young chefs, and the shows melodramatic challenges whittled the field by one each week until only three were left standing Sunday: Dady  whose San Antonio restaurants include Tre Trattoria, Shuck Shack and the upcoming Range steakhouse  and Chicago chefs Sarah Grueneberg and Stephanie Izard.

The episode opened with host and mad food scientist Alton Brown revealing a Chairmans Challenge altar with three empty baskets and the command to fill them with five ingredients, from which the chefs had just 30 minutes to compose a dish.

Dady lasered in on salmon, salmon roe, eggs, asparagus and lemon. With a confident stride and steady hands, he built an impromptu smoker for the fish, then improvised a blender full of scrambled eggs on the way to an egg salad, confessing to Brown that he had no idea where he was heading.

No clue! I love it, Brown said. Youre out on the jagged edge.

When the dish came together, with lightly smoked fish, soft-boiled eggs with an aioli sauce and colorful touches of orange salmon roe and bright green asparagus, Brown praised its beauty but called it for one thing: zest.

More zest could have helped you here, he said. Overall, I think these components should have been wed with something more acidic.

Judged against Izards Japanese custard and Gruenebergs Parmigiano ravioli, Dadys salmon came in third, and Brown lent his condolences: There are some flavor issues that just didnt get you to Iron Chef level today. But youre a fantastic chef.

Izard went on to beat Grueneberg, a Houston native who had visited Dady in San Antonio early in the shows run. Izard heads into next Sundays finale against Iron Chef all-stars Bobby Flay, Masaharu Morimoto and Michael Symon  the shows namesake gauntlet  for a chance to become the newest Iron Chef.

Throughout the competition, Dady has championed the cause of San Antonio as a restaurant destination. Let's go, this is our time to shine. This is our time to really showcase San Antonio, Dady told the San Antonio Express-News before the premiere.

The show premiered April 16 as a reboot of the networks Iron Chef franchise, with seven contestants: Dady, Grueneberg, Izard, Nyesha Arrington of Leona in Los Angeles, Michael Gulotta of Mopho in New Orleans, Shota Nakajima of Adana in Seattle and Jonathan Sawyer of the Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland.

The series started on a low-key note for Dady, who weathered Episode 1s opening challenge of taming wild game by turning out porcini-crusted elk loin, a dish that Brown summarized without enthusiasm: I like the looks. The sauces work. Los Angeles chef Arrington went home that night.

Episode 2 found Dady and the gang going whole hog, and Dady called on his extensive Italian repertoire for pork shoulder ragu and celery root ravioli with pasta he made on the fly.

Again, Dady was somewhere in the middle. Cleveland chef Sawyer was sent packing after losing to Nakajima of Seattle in the first of three successive elimination battles for the young chef, whom Dady hosted at Tre in San Antonio for a one-night guest spot the same week. The two have become fast kitchen friends  Dady flew to Seattle last week to guest-chef at Nakajimas Adana restaurant.

Dady held steady again in Episode 3, but it was Nakajima and New Orleans chef Gulotta in the elimination cookoff, and Gulotta took the long walk.

By last Sundays Episode 4, it was an open question whether Dady had the chops to win an opening challenge  and by extension the juice to stand up to a real Iron Chef battle. With only four chefs left, Dady stepped up to win his first Chairmans Challenge, pulling off a last-minute liquid nitrogen coconut ice to energize a Thai curry that led the normally reticent host to declare, Your curry kung fu is strong.

Nakajima entered the elimination kitchen again, this time losing to Izard. That left her, Dady and Grueneberg to fight for the last remaining spot Sunday.

Its fair to say that for five weeks, Dady and San Antonio held the same spotlight as some of the countrys hottest restaurant cities. Iron Chef or not, thats a heavy-metal accomplishment.

mikesutter@fedmanwalking.com
FINDLAY, Ohio  When you consider the biggest issues facing farmers the past few years, one that comes up repeatedly is water quality.

Specific events, including the record algal bloom in Lake Erie in 2011 and 2015, and the 2014 Toledo water treatment plant shutdown, made water quality in Ohio a national issue.

But the efforts to correct the issue have been underway much longer, according to Joe Cornely, senior director of communications for Ohio Farm Bureau.

During a tour for media May 11, the Farm Bureau invited reporters to see the three demonstration farms that Farm Bureau and the Natural Resources Conservation Service are using to test and demonstrate conservation practices.

If you think were here because of the Toledo incident, were not, Cornely said. Were here because of a history of changes in the expectations for farmers and how they work with the environment.

Demonstration farms

The farms include three privately owned farms: Stateler Farms, a 600-acre grain farm in Hancock County, with a 7,200-head wean-to-finish swine operation; Kurt Farms, a 470-acre grain farm in Hardin County; and Kellogg Farms, a 5,000-acre grain farm, also in Hardin County.

The three farms are collectively known as the Blanchard River Demonstration Farms, and are part of a five-year on-farm research project that includes researchers from USDA and Ohio State University.

Aaron Heilers, project manager, said the farms were chosen to ensure a sampling of Ohio agriculture, with results that would be relevant for all of the state. The Farm Bureau gave $1 million toward the project, and the project also received funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

The farmers are compensated $20 for each acre enrolled in the program, with the expectation that they will participate in educational and outreach events, and give researchers access the farms as needed. Heilers said there are usually two or more events held at the demonstration farms each month.

Finding solutions

At the Kellogg grain farm, Bill Kellogg, and his son, Shane, have allotted 305 acres for demonstrations that include reduced tillage, grassed waterways, pollinator habitat and subsurface nutrient placement.

Bill Kellogg said the goal is for agriculture to be proactive and find solutions on its own  without being mandated.

We dont want other people coming in and telling us what we can and cant do, he said. Were trying to be proactive and do the right things.

One of the things the Kelloggs are working on is subsurface fertilizer application.

They recently invested in a $170,000 implement that combines strip tillage with subsurface placement of fertilizer, reducing the number of passes across the field, while placing the nutrients where theyre most needed, and least likely to wash away.

Its definitely not cheap, what were doing, but it makes sense, said Shane Kellogg.

Shane said the new applicator has already helped the farm reduce fertilizer use by about a third, and in the long run, the technology should more than pay for itself.

Farmers have been cutting back on total fertilizer use for years, with more efficient equipment and better ways of mapping fields and determining the exact nutrient needs of each part of the field. But extreme weather events the past few years, including heavy rains, have made nutrient management more challenging.

Controlling the weather

Bill Kellogg showed reporters pictures of flooding and washouts that occurred on his farm this spring, following 7.4 inches of rain since late April. He said farmers could solve the water quality issue instantly if they could control the weather.

There is a magic switch we can turn off: Give us control of the weather and thats all it would take, he said.

Although he was partly joking, the evidence backs him up. Last year, when much of the state was under drought conditions, nutrient runoff and algal blooms were significantly reduced, compared to wet years like 2011, when records were set.

Researchers and farmers are trying to find ways to slow the water down, and remove nutrients before the water leaves the field.

Filtering nutrients

At Kurt Farms, owner Chris Kurt has worked with the Nature Conservancy to construct a two-stage ditch, and also phosphorus removal beds, which filter and collect phosphorus before it enters the ditch.

His two-stage ditch was installed in 2014, and works by creating a wider ditch, or benches above the narrower ditch, helping to slow the flow of water and expose the water to more vegetation, thereby filtering out nutrients.

Kurt Farms also filters out nutrients through use of phosphorus removal beds, which are located near the ditch, and require the water to go through a filtration material that includes small stones, and slag material.

And the farm uses filter strips around vulnerable fields, or strips of alfalfa and grass that are used to filter additional nutrients.

The water that leaves the field at Kurt Farms is currently being tested by USDA as part of the edge-of-field study program. Samples are collected every 10 minutes, and analyzed by USDA researcher Kevin King.

Managing manure

At the Stateler Farms, Duane and Anthony Stateler are finding new ways to manage swine manure and mortality. The Statelers have committed 243 of their 600 acres to the demonstration farms, and are pursuing projects that include variable rate manure application, an animal mortality composting facility, edge-of-field monitoring and drainage water management.

One of their biggest projects is upgrading their manure applicator equipment for subsurface application. The Statelers apply about 2.3 million gallons of swine manure a year, on their own farm and on other farms.

When the new technology is installed, theyll be able to inject manure an inch or two below the surface. With the variable rate technology, the Statelers will be able to apply manure more precisely, according to each fields needs.

Finding answers

Adam Sharp, executive vice president of Ohio Farm Bureau, said the demonstration farms have become a way of sharing proven practices, and testing those that need more work.

He said farmers have shown an interest in the demonstrations, but they also want to know how much it cost, the kind of equipment, time it took, the paperwork, and how the practice might work on their own farm.

They want to see whats happening in the field, and they also want to understand how did you get there, Sharp said.

To learn more about the Blanchard River Demonstration Farms, visit https://blancharddemofarms.org.
Proposals have been put to me, which I am considering, about whether or not there is a place for us to investigate what might be the future of the industry if we did, ironically, expand so that we had a critical mass to enable us to do something more than just produce fresh milk.
Prior to this solution we had a limit of six gigabytes of data for $250 a month and now we have two terabytes of data or 2000GB for $150, he said.
Warrenton, VA (20186)

Today

Clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low near 40F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low near 40F. Winds light and variable.
London-based Petrofac is under investigation for suspected bribery, corruption and money laundering, the UK Serious Fraud Office said Friday.

The probe is related to the ongoing investigation into the activities of Unaoil, the SFO said.

Petrofac, an oil and gas services firm, has about 13,500 employees. Revenues last year were $7.8 billion.

The SFO confirms that it is investigating the activities of Petrofac PLC, its subsidiaries, and their officers, employees and agents, the agency said in a statement.

In July last year, the SFO opened a criminal investigation of Monaco-based Unaoil for suspected bribery.

A report in March 2016 by Fairfax Media and the Huffington Post said Unaoil paid bribes on behalf of large companies in the oil and gas sector.

HuffPo said its story was based on leaked internal Unaoil documents.

The SFO said last year it had been approached by a number of sources who may have information relevant to this investigation.

Unaoil has denied the allegations of corruption.

Petrofac said in a statement released Friday that the Serious Fraud Office has notified the company about the investigation.

The Company believes that this is in connection with the investigation into Unaoil, Petrofac said.

The statement also said,

As previously disclosed, Petrofac engaged Unaoil, a Monaco based company, for the provision of local consultancy services primarily in Kazakhstan between 2002 and 2009. The Company is cooperating with the authorities. Ayman Asfari, Chief Executive Officer, and Marwan Chedid, Chief Operating Officer, have been questioned under caution by the SFO.

According to FCPA Tracker, other companies that have disclosed Unaoil-related investigations are ABB Ltd, Core Laboratories N.V., FMC Technologies, Inc., KBR, Inc., SBM Offshore N.V., and TechnipFMC plc.

______

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog.
With Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 still missing without trace, Damien Lewis reveals how shockingly easy it is to make an aircraft disappear 

Damien Lewis

The C47 Skytrain - the classic, twin-engine WWII-era transport aircraft, called the Dakota in RAF service - had lain in the elephant grass for almost two decades. It had been abandoned by the T'chadian Air force, in N'Djamena, T'chad, in north-eastern Africa, having been judged beyond repair or fit for any further useful service.

The Tchadian Air Force Colonel smiled when Mike Snow, veteran British bush-pilot and former SAS man, paid for the aircraft. Vous etes un peu derange Mark, he remarked. He always made Mike sound like Mark.

Oui, mon colonel, il est a prevoir, car j'ai ete eleve a Shelfield. Snows private joke: he was predestined to be crazy, having grown up in Sheffield.

Snow had flown in his trusty mechanics, Kema and Zorro, from the Congo, and together they set about getting the C47 flying again. They labored for months to make right the years of neglect. It was summer and temperatures topped a blistering 40c most days. On others, tropical downpours soaked them to the skin and prevented work on the aircraft.

There were three other derelict C47s lying on the airstrip. Snow had purchased them all as a job lot. The three were cannibalized for parts: a wing from one; a rudder from another; precious instruments taken from all. Magnetos were refurbished on a makeshift table set under the shadow of the fuselage, as were so many other components that had lain idle for decades.

Every cylinder from each of the two engines was removed with infinite care - so thats twenty-eight in all - and soaked in a 19:1 molasses and water mixture to remove corrosion. The bores were honed to give a working surface, and pistons were treated in the same manner. Luckily the Tchadian Air Force still had a few batches of C47 piston rings in stock, ones that had been lying around for an age and were still usable.

Many times Snow offered thanks to Mr. Donald Douglas, and Messrs Pratt & Whitney for designing such durable machinery. They replaced the diaphragms in the carburetors from Air Force stock that was out of date, but still pliable. Snow altered the latch plates by opening up the orifices, to give a richer fuel-air mixture, as there was no Avgas (aviation fuel) available, only car fuel, and that was of dubious quality. The main orifice was opened up by a few thousands of an inch, to allow more fuel to pass into the engine, keeping it cooler on the lower octane car fuel.

They drained the engine oil from all the other C47s, heating and filtering it many times over to remove any contaminates, using a makeshift rig cobbled together from salvaged parts. While they slept, it warmed and filtered the oil repeatedly. In the end they had 150lts of clean oil to which they added some new oil purchased from the local market.

They replaced the aircraft's - long-dead - batteries with truck batteries bought at the local market, and for a tenth of the price of genuine items shipped in from the USA. The batteries were bolted into the aircrafts cockpit, so that Snow and crew could keep a close eye on them during flight.

The day of the first start-up of the engines drew a large crowd of Tchadian Air Force personnel, but they kept a wary distance. According to Kema and Zorro they were convinced there was going be a large explosion, which would consume aircraft and crew. They were to be disappointed when both engines ran like sewing machines.

Many engine-runs and small adjustments later Snow was satisfied with their performance: the Pratt & Whitneys at least were ready for flight. The radios and avionics were shot completely, so those would need to be sent to South Africa to be fixed. Each time Snow spotted a South African aircraft arriving at the airport, hed ask the captain to take an item for delivery to his radio specialist in Johannesburg, who would arrange delivery back again.

To avoid problems with the local Civil Aviation Authorities regarding the fuel, he was careful to purchase it from the local gas station using Avgas drums -ones that hed created with a few cans of spray paint and some lettering stencils. For all who were observing, everything looked as though it was above board and for real.

The C47s registration documents were apparently from Burundi as was the insurance certificate. It truth, they were courtesy of the wonders of Microsoft Publisher. Snow would have to carry out a test flight prior to departure, so he arranged it for a Friday afternoon when most would be at the Mosque, and only skeleton staff at the airport. He had no First Officer, as his funds didnt stretch to that, so Kema magicked up a Congolese License de Co-pilote with a DC-3 endorsement, again thanks to Microsoft Publisher.

Snow knew the aircraft well enough to handle it alone, but having Kema in the right-hand seat took a little pressure off  and pressure there was aplenty. He did not sleep at all well on the Thursday night, tossing and turning and waking and dozing off to a world of system failures and single-engine-flying over crowded streets.

Midday Friday saw the C4 lined up ready for its test flight. It was 42 degrees and all were all drenched with sweat. It ran off Snows hand in rivulets, as he advanced the throttles to take-off power and released the brakes. Kema and Zorro had been briefed to be alert to even the minutest fluctuations of the engine gauges during the take off run, and to warn Snow instantly. The time to have engine problems was while still on the ground.

The noise was at crescendo level as the C47 lurched ahead and gathered pace.

Kema called out the speed indicators: Fifty knots and rising  Fifty-five knots  Sixty knots  V One! Sixty-five knots - rotate!

V One signifies the speed at which take-off can no longer be aborted; suddenly, like or not, they were airborne. Snow lifted the undercarriage, went to climb power and the C4 clawed into the skies. He ran his eye across the instrument panels: thankfully, the engines were operating well within their safe limits. They pulled away from the town with the hot and humid air still muggy in the cockpit, and despite the windows being fully open.

Saturday they took the first day off in a long time. They drank beers for the first time during daylight, talking of nothing but the test flight and the excitement it had given. They slept like the dead all afternoon. Monday they were back checking for problems that may have manifested during the test flight, but found little to worry about or adjust

Snow feared the test flight would cause an adverse reaction from the very people who had sold him the aircraft as junk and scrap. Jealousy and face saving would be at the fore of their thoughts now. He reckoned they should leave as quickly and quietly as possible, and before someone came up with an excuse to block them, or worse still t confiscate the aircraft. Such things happened all the time in Africa.

The spares were loaded pre-dawn Tuesday morning. In full view of everyone that was awake at that time, Snow taxied out, lined up and took off without filing any flight plan or making radio contact at all. Frantic calls from the control tower went unanswered, as he set a course southeast. After ten minutes the calls stopped and Snow was left in peace to charter a route home. No one had noticed that the C47s tail number had been changed to a Congolese one: 9Q-CTS.

Each plane has its aircraft registration stamped onto the rear half of the fuselage, made up of a series of letters and numbers. The first two figures denote the country of registration of the aircraft, while the last three are its unique registration number - similar to a license plate for a vehicle. ICAO - the International Civil Aviation Organisation - allocates every country a unique prefix: so C is for Canada, N for North America, G for Great Britain, B for Burundi, and 9Q for the Congo - as in Snows 9Q-CTS.

In theory, anyone seeing the tail number would be able to trace the owner-operator, plus its country of registration.

Snows born-again aircraft also now sported a data plate - courtesy of the Njamena airport workshops - which corresponded with the tail number. Every aircraft comes complete with a VIN number - a unique serial number - stamped onto the data plate, which is displayed near the door. Snow and crew had cobbled one together and bolted it to the doorframe.

So 9Q-CTS was born again.

From here on in this aircraft would be invisible whenever and wherever required. The original 9Q-CTS had died in a cataclysmic crash in the Congo jungle, one that Snow and crew had been lucky to walk away from. It was a total write-off, and recorded as such on all airfreighter registries. Only now the seemingly impossible had happened, and 9Q-CTS had taken to the skies once more.

Snow had the perfect ghost aircraft with which to fly ghost missions - and sanctions-busting ghost cargoes - across Africas warn-torn skies.

The full story of Mike Snows bush-flight adventures, and his role in an explosive DEA operation to hunt for the worlds most wanted arms dealer, is told in Damien Lewiss new book: Operation Relentless, Quercus, 18th May.
Actor Powers Boothe has died of natural causes aged 68.

Powers Boothe

The American TV and film star - who appeared in 'Sin City' and 'The Avengers' - passed away in his sleep on Sunday morning (14.05.17) at his home in Los Angeles.

A representative of the actor has confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that a private service will be held in Boothe's home state of Texas, while plans for a memorial celebration are currently being considered.

Boothe started his acting career on the stage, starring in a number of Shakespearean productions including 'Henry IV', before he made his way to Broadway in the late 70s, when he appeared in 'Lone Star & Pvt. Wars'.

Subsequently, he moved into TV acting, winning an Emmy for his role in the CBS show 'Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones'.

Boothe's award win arrived in the midst of an actors strike and he chose to cross the picket line to accept his award.

Reflecting on his triumph and the unusual circumstances surrounding it, he said at the time: "This may be either the bravest moment of my career or the dumbest."

Boothe - who married his college sweetheart Pam in 1969 and had two children, Parisse and Preston, with her - also received nominations for two ensemble SAG Awards, in 1996 for 'Nixon' and again in 2007 for 'Deadwood'.

In recent years, he has perhaps become better known as Gideon Malick in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Powers debuted the role in 2012's 'The Avengers' and later reprised it to star in 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'.

He has also played the parts of former mayor Lamar Wyatt on 'Nashville', as well as Noah Daniels, the US President, on the hit TV series '24'.
Chloe Sevigny is set to launch a vintage collection with Vestiaire Collective.

Chloe Sevigny

The 42-year-old model has partnered with the luxury fashion house, and is set to unveil an exclusive capsule with the brand, which will see the blonde beauty handpick a variety of products to feature in the category.

The company are honoured to have joined forces with the American actress, who they have praised as a "vintage muse" because they believe she has successfully adorned second hand garments in a "wonderful, unexpected way".

Speaking about the collaboration, Vestiaire Collective's contributing Fashion Director, Kate Foley, said: "Chloe Sevigny is Vestiaire Collective's vintage muse because she has always been such a huge champion of vintage and has a wonderful, unexpected way of wearing vintage that can only come from deep understanding and love of fashion from past decades. She is the ultimate vintage icon."

And the 'American Horror Story' actress believes her style "hasn't really changed" as she's got older, as she has claimed she still likes to dress like she did when she was in her 20s.

Speaking previously, she said: "I don't know that I should wear super-high-cut denim shorts any more, but I do! My style hasn't really changed with age."

And Chloe can't imagine her wardrobe choices will ever change as she gets older.

Asked what she sees herself wearing when she's 80-years-old, she said: "I see myself with really long, white hair. Hopefully I won't be as body conscious, and be more kind of flowy, go back to the whole Yves Saint Laurent thing I did when I was younger, but still putting in a bit of effort."
Last night in Londons Royal Festival Hall, the BAFTA TV Awards took place, celebrating some of the most talented in the world of British television and beyond. Weve put together a list of all the winners from the night so you dont have to go searching to see who was commended, which you can check out below

BBC One's Happy Valley won big

Drama Series  Happy Valley, BBC One

Happy Valley, BBC One Reality and Constructed Factual  Muslims Like Us

 Muslims Like Us Scripted Comedy  People Just Do Nothing

 People Just Do Nothing Entertainment Programme  Ant & Decs Saturday Night Takeaway

 Ant & Decs Saturday Night Takeaway Comedy and Comedy Entertainment Programme  Charlie Brookers 2016 Wipe

 Charlie Brookers 2016 Wipe Female Performance in a Comedy Programme  Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, BBC Three

 Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, BBC Three Male Performance in a Comedy Programme  Steve Coogan, Alan Partridges Scissored Isle

 Steve Coogan, Alan Partridges Scissored Isle Supporting Actress  Wunmi Mosaku, Damilola, Our Loved Boy

 Wunmi Mosaku, Damilola, Our Loved Boy Supporting Actor  Tom Hollander, The Night Manager

 Tom Hollander, The Night Manager Leading Actress - Sarah Lancashire, Happy Valley

- Sarah Lancashire, Happy Valley Leading Actor  Adeel Akhtar, Murdered by My Father

 Adeel Akhtar, Murdered by My Father Features  Who Do You Think You Are?

 Who Do You Think You Are? Mini Series  National Treasure, Channel 4

 National Treasure, Channel 4 Entertainment Performance  Michael McIntyre, Michael McIntyres Big Show

 Michael McIntyre, Michael McIntyres Big Show Single Documentary  Hillsborough, BBC Two

 Hillsborough, BBC Two Single Drama  Damilola, Our Loved Boy, BBC One

 Damilola, Our Loved Boy, BBC One International  The People V OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, BBC Two

 The People V OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, BBC Two Current Affairs  Prison Abuse Exposed (Panorama), BBC One

 Prison Abuse Exposed (Panorama), BBC One Factual Series  Exodus: Our Journey To Europe, BBC Two

 Exodus: Our Journey To Europe, BBC Two Specialist Factual  Planet Earth II, BBC One

 Planet Earth II, BBC One News Coverage  Victoria Derbyshire, Footballers Abuse, BBC News

 Victoria Derbyshire, Footballers Abuse, BBC News Live Event  The Queens 90th Birthday Celebration, ITV

 The Queens 90th Birthday Celebration, ITV Soap and Continuing Drama  Emmerdale, ITV

 Emmerdale, ITV Sport  The Open

 The Open BAFTA Special Award  Nick Fraser

 Nick Fraser Virgin TVs Must-See Moment  Planet Earth II: Snakes vs Iguana Chase

 Planet Earth II: Snakes vs Iguana Chase BAFTA Fellowship  Joanna Lumley

-

What do you think of the winner's from this year's BAFTA TV Awards? Let us know in the comments below!

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Spiritual objects, normally associated with healing through the mind and soul, crystals have recently found their way into skincare products as well. From the time of the ancient Egyptians, various kinds of crystal have been used in skincare  for instance, malachite was used to produce makeup that was also good for the skin and had healing properties.Recently, the world has woken up to the fact that crystals can work wonders for the skin naturally, and are including it in beauty therapies and skincare products. Not only does all that positive energy radiate off you, crystals are predominantly made up of minerals, which the usual daily skincare regime doesnt really provide for.So the age-old malachite is now packed in anti-ageing and hydrating creams, because of its antioxidant and moisturising benefits. So is sapphire, which has similar properties to fight fine lines, crows feet and what not! Rose quartz is another popular skincare ingredient which improves blood circulation and is apt for balancing skin. Regular use even harmonises your mind and can cure migraines. Black tourmaline, found in facial mists and serums, is good for hyper-reactive skins and those prone to pigmentation and inflammation.When ground finely, garnets are an excellent exfoliant. Found in face and body scrubs, they remove the dead cells while leaving behind crystal-energised and nourished skin. Amethyst is a detox ingredient  for the body and mind. Use it in bath salts to soak in and let your skin reap the benefits. Citrine is another crystal found in many facial products, which has brightening and anti-pigmentation benefits.Most luxury global brands are jumping onto the bandwagon, and their products are available in India at their stores or shop-in-shop outlets.
Amazon, leading online shopping channel, has the potential to become a window for Vietnamese textile and garment products to gain access to European Union market. This was stated in Hanoi at a seminar, organised by Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association. Vietnamese businesses got advice on e-commerce by experts from Germanys Vorwarts company at the event.Vorwarts CEO Andre M. Aslund said the quality of Vietnams garment products satisfied EU consumers. Many enterprises in Vietnam and Asia were selling their products to the EU via intermediaries or outlets. However, if products are sold on Amazon, intermediaries will not be needed, leading to reduction in cost and improvement in Vietnamese apparels competitiveness in EU markets, according to Vietnamese media reports.

Amazon, leading online shopping channel, has the potential to become a window for Vietnamese textile and garment products to gain access to European Union market. This was stated in Hanoi at a seminar, organised by Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association. Vietnamese businesses got advice on e-commerce by experts from Germany's Vorwarts company at the event.#

Up to 76 per cent of consumers use mobile phones to shop online, and 50 per cent of mobile phone users shop via Amazon, Aslund said.Noting that consumers behaviours were changing, he said instead of solely depending on products prestige, their interest and trust were now also framed by other factors such as product review and description, and other consumers assessment, the reports said.Therefore, businesses should pay more attention to quality information provision and product quality to get good assessments. Those evaluations will encourage EU consumers to buy Vietnamese products, Aslund said.However, businesses must comply with regulations of EU markets and improve product design to meet consumers taste. Once consumers are satisfied, they will introduce products to others, he said. (SV)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Shahrukh With Suhana

Shahrukh Khan was spotted with his daughter, Suhana Khan at the airport.

Suhana Leaves For London

Suhana, who is currently studying at London University, returned to London after a short break.

SRK, A Doting Daddy

It was indeed an adorable sight to see Shahrukh Khan, dropping off his daughter at the airport.

Deepika Was Spotted Too!

Apart from SRK-Suhana, Deepika Padukone was also spotted at the Mumbai airport.

All Set For Cannes

The actress was seen leaving for the Cannes Film Festival and we're super excited for her!

Dippy Flashes Her Killer Smile!

Don't you simply love these pictures of Deepika Padukone? Needless to say that the actress was looking helluva stylish!

Gauri Khan With A Fan

Seen here is Gauri Khan posing for a selfie with a fan at the Mumbai airport.
What's In A Name?

Malaika Arora took offence to the name tag which mentioned her as 'Malaika Arora Khan' during an event in Vadodara.

Name Issues

Malaika asked the organisers to remove the name 'Khan' from the name tag and only keep it as Malaika Arora.

Swift Action

The event organisers acted swiftly and removed the name 'Khan' from the name tag.

Not Together

Malaika Arora and Arbaaz Khan parted ways, so Malaika feels it's no use to keep her ex-husband's surname.

Chief Guest

Malaika Arora was invited to Vadodara as chief guest for an event.

Marriage

Malaika and Arbaaz parted ways after being married for 18 years.

No One Knows Why!

The surprising part between Malaika-Arbaaz parting is that no one really knows the exact reason for their split.

Good Presence

Malaika Arora has got good presence both on the television and on the silver screen.

No Success?

It is reported that Malaika left Arbaaz because he had an unsuccessful career! However, none of it has been confirmed.

Peppy Numbers

Malaika Arora has been getting a lot of peppy item numbers in Bollywood and she's done well in all of them.

Angel Malaika

No matter how old she is, Malaika Arora has always been an angel and will always look like one all throughout her life.
President Evelyn Sharma

Evelyn Sharma can never run for President of the United States as she's not a citizen of that country.

Not Born In The USA

Evelyn Sharma is an Indo-German girl and she was not born in the USA to run for Presidency in 2020.

Politics

Evelyn Sharma is quite neutral about Trump's Presidency and she doesn't criticise or praise him.

Blue Hai Paani

It's best if Evelyn Sharma sticks to movies and if she runs for elections, who'll sizzle the silver screen folks? None!

Evelyn

Evelyn Sharma will next be seen in Imtiaz Ali's 'The Ring' and the film also stars SRK and Anushka Sharma.

Euro Shoot

Imtiaz Ali's next was shot in Europe and the second leg will be shot in Punjab.

One Of A Kind!

Evelyn Sharma is surely a one of a kind actress in Bollywood.

National Prayer Breakfast

Evelyn Sharma also gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington which was hosted by President Trump.

Faith

Evelyn Sharma represented her Christian faith at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C.

Jolly Girl

Evelyn Sharma is one happy girl and she always has a radiant glow on her face.

Hot

Evelyn oozes with hotness from all corners and she has the ability to set the screen on fire.

Gorgeous

Evelyn Sharma is a model turned actor and she's here to stay in Bollywood!
The Munna Michael actress Nidhhi Agerwal was forced to move out of her rented house in Mumbai as the owner did not like the fact that she's a single woman and an actress. The disgusting act has enraged a lot of people and Bollywoodlife quoted Nidhhi Agerwal lashing out at the injustice. She said,

"I feel it is not right to do this just because I am single and an actress. Mumbai is a city of dreams and everyone comes here with a lot of hopes and to make it big. I feel this reason is not justified and I wish we all could be on the same page and fix this."

She further commented, "I am currently looking for a house on rent and am facing issues because I am a single girl and an actress. I am still living with my friend and looking for houses so that I can shift as soon as possible."
The month of May is in its second half and the Malayalam film industry has some more big releases to offer and one among thos is the multi-starrer movie Achayans, directed by Kannan Thamarakkulam.

It was reported that Achayans is all set to hit the theatres in May but no official announcement was made regarding the exact release date of the movie. Now, the makers of Achayas have decided to release the film on May 19, 2017.

Achayans will fight it out with Tovino thomas starrer Godha, which is also gearing up to release on the same day. It would be a real exciting contest to watch out for.

Featuring actors like Jayaram, Unni Mukundan, Prakash Raj, Sanju Sivaram, Adil Ibrahin, Amala Paul, Sshivada, Anu Sithara etc., in the lead role, Achayans comes with a label of being a complete entertainer. Jayaram is also expected to get back to winning ways with this upcoming film.

The trailer and teaser of Achayans have raised the expectations bestowed on this film. Scriptwriter Sethu has penned the script for this film, which is the third directorial venture of Kannan Thamarakkulam.
In 1991, India started a campaign to sell government stakes in state-owned enterprises, part of its effort to liberalise the economy. These divestments have since become a significant source of income for the government and a core part of the budget every year.

But they have never quite met the high targets the government has set.

India has had ambitious divestment targets in recent years, seeing these sales as an important way to improve the operational efficiency of public sector companies.

Some state-owned companies put a huge burden on government expenditure, driven to inefficiencies by their monopoly power. It made sense to reduce Indias exposure to these bloated corporations.

Click the graphics below for a full view.

But the Indian government of Prime Minister Nardedra Modi appears to have gone too far  setting unrealistic divestment goals year after year. The country failed to meet the annual target for the seventh consecutive year in the 2016-17 fiscal year, which ended on March 31, 2017.

The government has put the blame on market volatility and fluctuations in oil and commodity prices. But it does not have appeared to have learned its lesson  the governments divestment target for the new fiscal year is Rp725 billion ($11.2 billion), a new record.
LONDON, 2017-05-15 01:01 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The share of CEOs forced out of office for ethical lapses has been on the rise, according to the 2016 CEO Success study released today by Strategy&, PwC's strategy consulting business. The study, which analyzed CEO successions at the world's largest 2,500 public companies over the past 10 years, reports that forced turnovers due to ethical lapses rose from 3.9 percent of all successions in 2007-11 to 5.3 percent in 2012-16 - a 36 percent increase, due in large part to increased public scrutiny and accountability of executives.



The increase was more dramatic at companies in the U.S. and Canada. Forced turnovers for ethical lapses at these companies increased from 1.6 percent of all successions in 2007-11 to 3.3 percent in 2012-16 - a 102 percent increase. In Western Europe, the share of CEOs forced out for ethical lapses increased to 5.9 percent from 4.2 percent, and in the BRIC countries, to 8.8 percent from 3.6 percent.



"Our data cannot show - and perhaps no data could - whether there's more wrongdoing at large corporations today than in the past. However, we doubt that's the case, based on our own experience working with hundreds of companies over many years," says Per-Ola Karlsson, partner and leader of Strategy&'s organization and leadership practice for PwC Middle East. "Over the last 15 years, five trends have resulted in boards of directors, investors, governments, customers, and the media holding CEOs to a far higher level of accountability for ethical lapses than in the past."



The Five Trends Shaping CEO Accountability



-- Public opinion: Since the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the Great Recession that it ignited, confidence and trust in large corporations and CEOs has been declining; the public has become more suspicious, more critical, and less forgiving of corporate misbehavior. -- Governance and regulation: The rise of public criticism of executives and corporations has translated directly into regulatory and legislative action, and companies in the U.S. and many other countries have moved to a zero-tolerance approach toward bad behavior in the C-suite. -- Business operating environment: Companies increasingly are (1) pursuing growth in emerging markets where ethical risks, such as the possibility of bribery and corruption, are heightened, and (2) relying on extended global supply chains that increase counterparty risks. -- Digital communications: The use of email, text messaging, and social media has created new risks for ethical lapses. A company's digital communications can provide irrefutable evidence of misconduct, and their existence increases the likelihood that a CEO will be held accountable. -- The 24/7 news cycle: Unlike in the mid- to late 20th century, when most executives and companies could maintain a low public profile, today the lightning-fast flow of Web-based financial news and data ensures that negative information travels quickly and widely.



Despite the global increase in forced turnovers for ethical lapses, companies in the U.S. and Canada have the lowest incidence of such dismissals - 3.3 percent in 2012-16 compared to 5.9 percent in Western Europe and 8.8 percent in the BRIC countries. More stringent governance regulation is one likely reason. Both the legislative requirements for codes of conduct and anti-bribery statutes have been tightened significantly in the United States.



Bigger Company, Bigger Target



The study also found that at the largest companies (those in the top quartile by market capitalization) in the U.S. and Canada and Western Europe, the overall share of CEOs forced out of office was significantly greater than the share forced out in the other market-cap quartiles.



"The fact that forced turnovers for ethical lapses were even higher at companies in the top quartile by market capitalization in these regions supports our hypothesis, since the largest companies are the most affected by the five trends and are subject to the greatest scrutiny," says Kristin Rivera, partner and global forensics clients and markets leader with PwC US.



"The increasing incidence of CEOs being forced out of office for ethical lapses may have a positive effect on public opinion over time by demonstrating that bad behavior is in fact being detected and punished," says DeAnne Aguirre, global leader of Strategy&'s Katzenbach Center of Innovation for Culture and Leadership, principal with PwC US. "In the meantime, CEOs need to lead by example on a personal and organizational level and strive to build and maintain a true culture of integrity."



More Facts from the 2016 CEO Success study



-- CEO turnover: CEO turnover at the world's largest 2,500 companies decreased from its record high of 16.6 percent in 2015 to 14.9 percent in 2016, due largely to the drop in merger and acquisition activity. CEO turnover was highest in Brazil, Russia, and India, at 17.2 percent, followed by Japan (15.5 percent) and Western Europe (15.3 percent) and China (15.2 percent). CEO turnover fell in every region we studied except for the U.S. and Canada. -- Women CEOs: There were 12 women globally appointed to the role of CEOs in 2016 - 3.6 percent of the incoming class. This marks a return of the slow trend toward greater diversity that had been in place over the last several years, and a recovery from the previous year's low point of 2.8 percent. The share of incoming female CEOs was highest in the U.S. and Canada, rebounding to 5.7 percent after falling for the previous three years. Five industries - healthcare, industrials, information technology, consumer staples, and telecom services - did not have a single incoming female CEO in 2016.



About the 2016 CEO Success Study Over the course of the past 17 years, Strategy& has been tracking continuous data on CEO successions. The 2016 study analyzed CEO successions at the world's 2,500 largest (by market capitalization) public companies over the last 10 years. For the purposes of this study, we define an ethical lapse as a scandal or improper conduct by the CEO or other employees; examples include fraud, bribery, insider trading, environmental disasters, inflated resumes, and sexual indiscretions.



Ends To learn more about the 2016 CEO Success study, visit www.strategyand.pwc.com/ceosuccess. A copy of the global study, including findings by geography and industry, is available from the media contact. Multimedia content, including infographics and video, is also available.



About Strategy& Strategy& is a global team of practical strategists committed to helping you seize essential advantage. We do that by working alongside you to solve your toughest problems and helping you capture your greatest opportunities. We bring 100 years of strategy consulting experience and the unrivaled industry and functional capabilities of the PwC network to the task. We are part of the PwC network of firms in 157 countries, with more than 223,000 people committed to delivering quality in assurance, tax, and advisory services.



Notes



1. For more information, visit www.strategyand.pwc.com/ceosuccess. 2.  2017 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details.



Contact: Kiran Chauhan Global Public Relations Strategy&, part of the PwC network T: +1 416 890 8695 kiran.chauhan@pwc.com

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FORT WORTH, TX -- (Marketwired) -- 05/15/17 -- UMED Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: UMED), through its wholly-owned subsidiary Greenway Innovative Energy, Inc. (GIE), using its patented and proprietary technological advancements, announces that it has successfully installed the proprietary GIE G-Reformer unit. This unit performs the initial natural gas to syngas conversion in the new lab at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) for producing pure high cetane synfuel.

Greenway and UTA are excited about this installation as it is the result of more than seven years of technology development in association with UTA. The entire GTL unit at the UTA Lab will demonstrate the most unique and economically efficient way to convert natural gas into pure synthetic fuel.

A special ribbon cutting ceremony is scheduled for June 26th with a follow up investor day scheduled for June 27th for all interested parties.

An Investor Call has been scheduled for 3pm CDT on June 29, 2017 to discuss the status of the G-Reformer and potential next steps for Greenway. The details of the call are below and will be open for any who would like to learn more of Greenways near term plans to commercialize this unique technology.

Call Details: 319-527-2480

Date: Thursday June 29, 2017

Time: 3pm CDT

Speakers: Pat Six, Chairman and President of UMED, Ray Wright, President of GIE

About Greenway Innovative Energy, Inc.

Greenway Innovative Energy, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of UMED Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: UMED), located in Fort Worth, TX is comprised of oil and gas professionals developing small and full scale Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) conversion units intended to take advantage of the abundant supply of natural gas resources throughout the world by way of improved and environmentally conscious technology. The advancement of this technology will enable natural gas producers to achieve stronger financial performance through conversion of natural gas to clean synthetic fuels. The conversion unit will be particularly useful in its application to stranded gas fields or stored gas facilities.

About UMED Holdings, Inc.

UMED Holdings, Inc., is a Fort Worth, Texas-based diversified holding company that owns and operates businesses in a variety of industries including energy and mining. Visit http://umedholdings.com to learn more.

Forward Looking Statements

This document contains forward-looking statements and information as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and, therefore, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that the actual results, business conditions, business developments, losses and contingencies and local and foreign factors will not differ materially from those suggested in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including market conditions, competition, advances in technology and other factors.

Investor Relations

Telephone: (817) 346-6900

Email: ir@umedholdings.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 05/15/17 -- Coro Mining Corp, ("Coro or the Company") (TSX: COP) is pleased to provide an update on the development of its 65% owned SCM Berta operations, located in the III Region of Chile. The production capacity of the Nora solvent extraction-electrowinning ("SXEW") plant has been expanded from 3,000 tonnes per year of copper cathode (6.6 million lbs) to 4,800 tonnes per year (10.6 million lbs). The installation of the crusher, agglomerator and heap leach pads at the Berta mine site has been completed and site ancillary works are nearing completion. Commissioning of the plant is expected to take place shortly and the operation will then commence ramping up to production of 400 tonnes per month of copper cathode (880,000 lbs).

Alan Stephens, President and CEO commented, "We are pleased to have completed the expansion of the Nora plant and look forward to commencing full scale leaching at the Berta site shortly. Achieving commercial production at SCM Berta will be a major milestone in the evolution of Coro and we look forward to building on this success with our Marimaca project."

About Coro Mining Corp.:

Coro's strategy is to grow a mining business through the discovery, development and operation of "Coro type" deposits. These are defined as projects at any stage of development, which are well located with respect to infrastructure and water, have low permitting risk, and have the potential to achieve a short and cost effective timeline to production. The Company's preference is for open pit heap leach copper projects, where minimizing capital investment takes priority over maximizing NPV, where profitability is prioritized over production rate, and finally, where the likely capital cost is financeable relative to the Company's market capitalization. The Company's assets include the Marimaca development project; its 65% interest in the SCM Berta company, which includes the Berta and Nora operations; the Planta Prat project; the Llancahue prospect; and a royalty on the San Jorge copper-gold project located in Argentina.

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Such forward-looking statements or information, include but are not limited to production estiamtes. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which are beyond Coro's ability to predict or control and may cause Coro's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any of its future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but are not limited to, the operation of the Nora Plant, copper price volatility, and changes in debt and equity markets. Such forward-looking statements are also based on a number of assumptions which may prove to be incorrect, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be evaluated, as well as those factors disclosed in the Company's documents filed from time to time with the securities regulators in the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Coro undertakes no obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements contained herein whether as a result of new information or future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law.

Contacts:

Coro Mining Corp.

Naomi Nemeth

VP Communications/IR

+1 (647) 556 1023 or +1 (604) 682 5546

Toll free +1 877 702 2676

nnemeth@coromining.com



Visit our website site at www.coromining.com

Email us at investor.info@coromining.com

Follow us on Twitter @coromining1




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 05/15/17 -- Forsys Metals Corp. (TSX: FSY)(FRANKFURT: F2T)(NAMIBIAN: FSY) ("Forsys" or the "Company") wishes to advise that it has appointed Dale Hanna as Chief Financial Officer ("CFO"), following the resignation of Rowen Colman.

Mr. Hanna is a qualified Chartered Accountant with 14 years' experience working with Australian-listed mining and resource companies, including senior roles with Helix Resources Limited, Lemur Resources Limited and Dominion Mining Limited.

Forsys Chief Executive Marcel Hilmer said, "I am delighted to have someone of Dale's experience and expertise join the Forsys team. He has a depth of knowledge working with junior resource companies that will assist us in achieving our goals. I would also like to thank Rowen for his valuable contribution over many years and wish him well in his future endeavours."

About Forsys Metals Corp.

Forsys Metals Corp. is an emerging uranium producer with 100% ownership of the Norasa project that comprises the fully permitted Valencia uranium project and the Namibplaas uranium project in Namibia, Africa a politically stable and mining friendly jurisdiction. Information regarding current National Instrument 43-101 compliant Resource and Reserves at Valencia and Namibplaas are available on the Company website. Shares outstanding: 145.9m

On behalf of the Board of Directors of Forsys Metals Corp.

Marcel Hilmer, Chief Executive Officer.

Sedar Profile #00008536

Contacts:

Forsys Metals Corp.

Marcel Hilmer

Chief Executive Officer

+61 8 9426 6400

mhilmer@forsysmetals.com

www.forsysmetals.com




The Annual General Meeting of shareholders of Skano Group AS (registry code 11421437, address 48 Suur-Joe, Parnu 80042) was held in Skano Group AS head office at 48 Suur-Joe, Parnu, Estonia, on 15 May 2017.



The general meeting started at 11.00 and ended at 12.15. The shares of the shareholders who attended the general meeting represented 3 015 396 votes, constituting 67,02 % of the share capital. Therefore, the general meeting was competent to pass resolutions regarding the items on the agenda.



Resolutions of general meeting:



1. Approval of the Annual Report 2016



To approve the Annual Report of the Company for 2016 prepared by the Management, which exposes the consolidated balance sheet value of 11,964 thousand euros as at 31.12.2016 and the net loss in the amount of 1,045 thousand in 2016.



2. Covering the loss from 2016



To transfer the loss in the amount of 1,045 thousand euros to the retained earnings.



3. Appointment and remuneration principles of auditor



To appoint AS PricewaterhouseCoopers (registry code: 10142876, address: Parnu mnt 15, 10141 Tallinn) as the auditor of the Company for the financial years 2017-2019. Public accounting services will be paid for in accordance with the contract to be drawn up with the auditor.



4. Approval of conditions of share options



Pursuant to  298 (2) and  345 (1) of the Commercial Code to approve the conditions of share options to the members of the management board of Skano Group AS as follows:



4.1. Skano Group AS shall be entitled to issue up to 300 000 (three hundred thousand) share options until 31.12.2017. Every share option grants the entitled subject the right to buy 1 (one) share of Skano Group AS.



4.2. The Chairman of the management board of Skano Group AS shall be the entitled subject of the option.



4.3. If the entitled subject wishes to acquire the share options appointed thereto, he shall enter into a written option agreement with Skano Group AS no later than on 31.12.2017. If the entitled subject does not enter into the option agreement within the specified term, he loses the right to acquire the share options appointed thereto.



4.4. Application of the conditions of the share option programme and the procedure for the sale of share options shall be provided for in the option agreement entered into between Skano Group AS and the entitled subject. The representative of Skano Group AS upon signing the option agreement shall be the member of the supervisory board Joakim Johan Helenius.



4.5. The entitled subject of a share option shall be entitled to use the issued option starting from the 37th (thirty-seventh) calendar month after issue of the option. The entitled subject shall lose the right to use the share option if he leaves from the management board of Skano Group AS upon own initiative prior to the thirty-seventh calendar month after the issue of the option or if his board member contract is terminated upon the initiative of the supervisory board within 12 months after the issue of the option. The entitled subject shall have the right to use the share option to the extent of 1/3 if his board member contract is terminated within 13-24 months after the issue of the option and to the extent of 2/3 if his or her board member contract is terminated within 25-36 months after the issue of the option.



4.6. The entitled subject of a share option shall not have the right to transfer the share options issued thereto.



4.7. Up to 300 000 (three hundred thousand) shares of Skano Group AS shall be emitted to fulfil the conditions of the share option.



4.8. The price of one share option is 0.506 EUR (calculated as the average closing price of the Skano Group shares for the last 60 trading days before the announcement of given AGM, i.e. average closing shares prices from 19.01.2017 to 12.04.2017).



4.9. The final term of the share programme is 31.12.2020. The specific schedule of the share programme and the procedure for sale shall be determined by the supervisory board.



4.10. The pre-emptive right of shareholders to subscribe to new shares emitted to fulfil the conditions of the share option shall be precluded.



Torfinn Losvik



CEO & Chairman of the Management Board



Phone: + 372 56 99 09 88



E-mail: torfinn.losvik@skanogroup.com



www.skano.com

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BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - Royal Mail Plc (RMG.L) announced Stuart Simpson, Director of Group Finance, will be appointed CFO and join the Royal Mail Board. Stuart's appointment follows a comprehensive search that included both internal and external candidates. Stuart will take up his new post at the conclusion of the AGM. Stuart joined Royal Mail in 2009. He was appointed as Director of Group Finance in July 2015. Prior to this, he was Deputy Chief Operations Officer and has been a member of the Chief Executive's Committee since 2014. He has also held senior operational and finance positions within the Royal Mail's core UK business. In December 2016, Matthew Lester, the current CFO, informed the Board of his intention to step down from the Board following the 2017 AGM. 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.
CALGARY, Alberta, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Apabetalone expands to a second major clinical indication in kidney dialysis patients

Resverlogix Corp. ("Resverlogix" or the "Company") (TSX:RVX) is pleased to announce the acceptance, by the Cardiovascular and Renal Products Division of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), of the Company's Investigational New Drug (IND) application to commence a Phase 2a kidney dialysis trial. The primary objective of the study will be to evaluate if treatment with apabetalone in addition to standard of care (SoC) decreases alkaline phosphatase in comparison to placebo and SoC.

"We are thrilled to have received approval to investigate a second major indication along with FDA regulatory advancement for apabetalone at the same time. This is a very exciting prospect for Resverlogix's overall advancement. This progress is very encouraging and further validates our previously released data that confirmed apabetalone's ability to differentially affect genes and proteins between advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients and normal subjects," stated Donald McCaffrey, President and CEO.

"Apabetalone and BET inhibition represent a truly novel approach to potentially impacting the extreme high risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) events in this important patient population," stated Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, Chairman of Resverlogix's Renal Clinical Advisory Board. "We are excited to test apabetalone and the new science of epigenetics and BET inhibition on advanced CKD patients. These patients are in great need of novel approaches to reduce CVD risk," Dr. Kalantar-Zadeh further commented.

In light of guidance received from the FDA, the Phase 2a study design will be separated in two parts. Part A will involve a single-dose pharmacokinetic (PK) study in eight patients receiving hemodialysis. The PK results from Part A will influence the dose selection for Part B. Part B will be a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, sequential cross-over study with apabetalone, and is designed to evaluate biomarker changes and safety parameters with apabetalone in up to 30 patients with end-stage renal disease treated with hemodialysis.

About Advanced CKD & Dialysis

Advanced CKD encompasses CKD stages 4 & 5, and it can be alternatively defined as an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) of <30 ml/min/1.73m2. Reported in the 2016 United States Renal Data System (USRDS) Annual Report, approximately 1.4 million patients in the US have advanced CKD, 474,000 of which are on dialysis treatment. According to the USRDS, advanced CKD cost the US healthcare system approximately US$17 billion in 2014, with an average cost exceeding US$28,000 per patient. Additionally, dialysis treatment costs the US Medicare system approximately US$28 billion with an average cost exceeding US$80,000 per year. Currently, there are no known agents that improve major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in CKD or dialysis patients.

About Resverlogix

Resverlogix is developing apabetalone (RVX-208), a first-in-class, small molecule that is a selective BET (bromodomain and extra-terminal) inhibitor. BET bromodomain inhibition is an epigenetic mechanism that can regulate disease-causing genes. Apabetalone is the first and only BET inhibitor selective for the second bromodomain (BD2) within the BET protein called BRD4. This selective inhibition of apabetalone on BD2 produces a specific set of biological effects with potentially important benefits for patients with high-risk cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes mellitus (DM), chronic kidney disease, dialysis, Alzheimer's disease, Orphan diseases, and peripheral artery disease, while maintaining a well described safety profile. Apabetalone is the only selective BET bromodomain inhibitor in human clinical trials, currently in a Phase 3 trial BETonMACE in high-risk CVD patients with type 2 DM and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL).

Resverlogix common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX:RVX).

Follow us on Twitter: @Resverlogix_RVX(https://twitter.com/resverlogix_rvx), or on our blog athttp://www.resverlogix.com/blog

For further information please contact:

Investor Relations

Email: ir@resverlogix.com

Phone: +1-403-254-9252

Or visit our website: http://www.resverlogix.com
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 05/15/17 -- Northern Empire Resources Corp. (TSX VENTURE: NM) (the "Company" or "Northern Empire") announces that the Company intends to complete a brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") of subscription receipts at a price of C$0.25 per subscription receipt to raise gross proceeds of up to C$20,000,000. The Private Placement is being conducted by a syndicate of agents led by Cormark Securities Inc. ("Cormark") and will include GMP Securities L.P., Haywood Securities Inc., and PI Financial Corp.

The proceeds of the Private Placement will be used in part by the Company to acquire the Sterling Property from Imperial Metals Corp. ("Imperial"). As previously announced in the Company's February 15 and April 3, 2017 news releases, total cash compensation payable to Imperial for the acquisition is US$10,100,000 of which US$1,500,000 has been paid.

Proceeds of the Private Placement will be placed in escrow pending completion of the Sterling Gold Project acquisition. Each subscription receipt will entitle the holder thereof to receive, without any further action and without payment of additional consideration, one common share of the Company upon the occurrence of certain conditions. As soon as practicable following the closing of the Private Placement, the Company will use its commercially reasonable best efforts to obtain a receipt for a (final) short-form prospectus qualifying the common shares underlying the subscription receipts from the applicable principal regulator. In the event the Company does not receive a receipt for the final prospectus within 60 days of the closing of the Private Placement, each subscription receipt will entitle the holder thereof to receive 1.1 common shares in lieu of one common share.

Prior to completing the acquisition of the Sterling Property, the Company anticipates completing a consolidation of its outstanding common shares on a 3(old) for 1(new) basis. The Private Placement is subject to TSXV approval and is expected to close on or before May 30, 2017.

Sterling Property Highlights

-- High Grade Gold in Nevada. Northern Empire filed an NI 43-101 compliant resource estimate on the Sterling Property on May 2, 2017. Total inferred resources on the Sterling Property were estimated at 709,000 oz Au (In Place) with an average grade of 2.23 g/t Au. Included in this estimate is the Sterling Deposit where a pit constrained resource of 231,000 oz Au (In Place) in 1,958,000 tonnes with an average grade of 3.67 g/t Au was determined. Further information on the Sterling Project Resources, please refer to the Company's news releases dated April 3 and May 2, 2017, and the and the Technical Report titled "Sterling Property, Nye County, Nevada, USA: A Property Under Option to Purchase by Northern Empire" that was posted May 2 on SEDAR. -- Permitted to begin operations. The Bureau of Land Management has issued a Finding of No Significant Impact ("FONSI") and approved the next phase of mining at Sterling. This permit was issued on May 12, 2016 and has an indefinite term. Northern Empire will immediately undertake a resource estimate, on all deposits on the properties; -- Location. The Sterling Property is located approximately 100 miles NW of Las Vegas on the eastern flank of the Bare Mountains. The property is accessed via highway I-95 and gravel roads; -- Significant Engineering Completed by Imperial Metals. To achieve the FONSI, Imperial Metals created designs for the new pits and heap leach facilities that Northern Empire will be able to use as a basis for developement going forward; -- Significant infrastructure in place. Imperial Metals ceased underground mining in 2015. Processing facilities, mine offices and generators are on site and are currently being used to rinse heaps from prior operations.

About Northern Empire

Northern Empire is an aggressive, Vancouver based, gold explorer working to take advantage of the current improving market conditions by assembling a value driven portfolio of properties.

Qualified Persons

The 2017 resource estimate was prepared by Norwest Corporation in accordance with requirements of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101). Technical work, analysis and findings were completed by Derek Loveday, P.Geo., Allan Turner, P.Geol., and Sean Ennis, P.Eng. Each person is an independent "Qualified Person" as defined by NI 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the information in this news release.

Michael G. Allen, P. Geo., President of Northern Empire, and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101, has reviewed the technical information contained in this news release. He is the non-independent qualified person for this new release and has verified the data.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF NORTHERN EMPIRE RESOURCES CORP.

Michael G. Allen, President, 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 NEWS RELEASE.

Certain information set forth in this news release contains "forward-looking statement", and "forward-looking information" under applicable securities laws. Except for statements of historical fact, certain information contained herein constitutes forward-looking statements, which include the Company's expectations about the completion of the proposed private placement future performance based on current results and expected cash costs and are based on the Company's current internal expectations, estimates, projections, assumptions and beliefs, which may prove to be incorrect. Some of the forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as "will", "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "projects", "plans", and similar expressions. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which, may cause the Company's actual performance and financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projects of future performance or results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statement. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: ability to raise sufficient funds for the acquisition; liabilities inherent in mine development and production; geological risks, the financial markets generally, the results of the due diligence investigations to be conducted by the Company, the ability of the Company to complete the Private Placement or obtain requisite TSX Venture Exchange acceptance. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statement will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipate in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Contacts:

Northern Empire Resources Corp.

Michael G. Allen

President, CEO and Director

604 646 4524



Northern Empire Resources Corp.

Jeff Sundar

Director

604 646 8356




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 05/15/17 -- Alset Minerals Corp. (TSX VENTURE: ION) ("Alset" or "the Company") is pleased to provide an update on the progress of the drilling at La Salada salar in Zacatecas, Mexico. La Salada is the first of seven salars to be drilled. All of these salars are currently under license to Alset. These salars are covered by 11 mineral concessions in which Alset owns a 100% interest (see Company news release dated 12th April 2017). In total the seven salars cover an area of approximately 3480 hectares (8600 acres).

As of May 12, 2017, one diamond drill hole and five auger holes were completed. Soil and brine samples were recovered from these holes and were delivered to independent lab personnel on May 12, 2017. These samples have been submitted for geochemical analysis, mineralogical studies and leach testing of the soils. The drilling program is ongoing and the Company will provide updates on drilling progress and on lab results as soon as they are available.

Allan Barry Laboucan, President and CEO of Alset said: "We are making good progress towards an assessment of the potential of our salars in Mexico. Historic data indicates the presence of lithium and potassium (amongst others) in soils. The current drilling program will generate our own data regarding the composition of both brines and soils that exist in the salar and the potential to recover lithium (and potentially by-products such as potassium). Whilst the demand for lithium is well documented, the Company is very aware of the importance of fertilizer to Mexico, a country with a large farming industry comprised of mostly small farmers who cannot afford imported fertilizers. We are therefore very excited about the potential that a by-product from our lithium focus may become a domestic source of fertilizer chemicals. We are continuing to drill and will submit more samples for testing and look forward to reporting these results as we receive them."

About the Drilling

Two diamond drill holes were intended to determine depth to bedrock and to evaluate the geology of the salar infill material. However, due to slow drilling and poor recovery the first hole ended at a depth of 53.15 metres (m) in limestone. The second diamond drill hole has been postponed until more productive and efficient drilling equipment is available. Upon completion of drilling, a perforated PVC casing was placed throughout the entire length of the hole in order to monitor and sample brine horizons intersected during drilling. This hole will be purged and sampled to determine the brine composition at depth.

Forty auger holes are planned to evaluate the subsurface materials and potential brines at La Salada. To date, 91m of auger drilling over 5 holes with an average hole depth of 18.2m have been completed. Drilling is ongoing. Brines were intersected at each of the 5 holes and perforated PVC casings were installed throughout the entire length of these holes for monitoring and sampling purposes.

The first auger hole, LS17-AG005 was drilled to a depth of 15.6m, 3 days later it had filled 12.1m and a brine sample was retrieved. Auger hole LS17-AG006 was drilled to a depth of 18m, 1 day later it had filled 11.5m and a brine sample was retrieved. Auger hole LS17-AG007 was drilled to a depth of 15.4m, 1 day later it had filled 9.2m and a brine sample was retrieved. Auger hole LS17-AG012 was drilled to a depth of 21m, it was the wettest of the samples and filled 15.8m within one day when a brine sample was retrieved. Auger hole LS17-AG013 was drilled to a depth of 21m, 1 day later it filled 16.6m and a brine sample was retrieved. Soil samples were collected from all auger holes at 1.5m intervals.

Analytical Work

The drilling program and associated analytical work was designed to better understand the geochemistry and deportment of lithium and other minerals in subsurface soils and the depth and chemistry of potential brine in the La Salada salar. With the new brine discovery, La Salada has the potential to become both a brine and soils resource. Results from this program will allow the Company to determine the best way to move forward in evaluating the potential of this salar.

The soils collected during the auger program will be used for scoping metallurgical testing, including geochemistry, mineralogy and leach testing. The first stage of analytical work includes head grade geochemical analysis of soils from selected auger holes. Composite samples will then be generated based on geochemical results and lithology, and used for mineralogical characterization and leaching tests. The first phase of analytical work will add confidence to previous leaching tests that demonstrated 86% recovery of lithium from La Salada soils using a weak acid leach (see Company new release dated 3rd March 2017); and allow the Company to move forward with more detailed metallurgical testing on the remaining soils recovered from the auger program.

All brine samples collected will be analyzed for its composition. These are the first known brine samples to be collected and evaluated from the La Salada salar.

18 soil samples and 4 rock samples from the diamond drill hole, 25 soil samples from two of the auger holes, and 5 brine samples, 1 from each auger hole, have been submitted for analysis.

Emily Hanson, PGeo, Vice-President of exploration for Alset Energy, is the qualified person responsible for this release and has prepared, supervised and approved the preparation of the scientific and technical disclosure contained within the release.

About Alset Minerals (ION.V)

Alset Minerals Corp. is a TSX-V listed junior exploration company focused on exploring and development of a group of high-grade lithium and potassium projects in the Central Mexican Plateau. The Company is actively exploring in Mexico and Canada.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of Alset Minerals Corp.,

Allan Barry Laboucan, President and CEO

THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections.

Contacts:

Allan Barry Laboucan

Phone: (604) 505-4753

www.alsetenergy.ca




THUNDER BAY, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 05/15/17 -- Mexican Gold Corp. ("Mexican Gold " or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: MEX) is pleased to announce that step-out drilling at the Cinco Senores zone has indicated a potential parallel mineralized zone at the Las Minas property. Step-out diamond drill hole LM-17-CS-04 was drilled at the end of the 2017 Phase 1 drilling program to test the geological concept that the Cinco Senores historic mining area represents a further lobe of the El Dorado mineralized skarn system.

The hole intersected a high- grade 2.0 metre interval with massive chalcopyrite grading 10.8 g/t gold, 41.7 g/t silver and 2.8% copper or 15.98 g/t gold equivalent. The strong presence of chalcopyrite-mineralized magnetite at the targeted skarn elevation in the step-out hole, when combined with earlier drilling and sampling results - see press releases dated February 2, 2011 and August 8, 2011 - is believed to be indicative of a potential El Dorado/Juan Bran type zone at the Cinco Senores mineralized zone

Selected drill results for hole LM-17-CS-04 are detailed below:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CINCO SENORES ZONE DRILL RESULTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hole ID (Az./Dip) From To Intercept Au Ag Cu Au Eq(1) (degrees) (m) (m) (m) (g/t) (g/t) % (g/t) Comments ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- LM-17-CS-04 31.3 33.2 2.0 10.80 41.7 2.8 15.98 Step-out (330/ -55) hole ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 2011, four short holes were drilled at Cinco Senores in a fan pattern from a single set-up located approximately 100 metres to the east of step-out hole LM-17-CS-04. The holes intersected an erosional remnant with up to 22 metres of mineralized skarn and an Au-Cu bearing pyritic, retrograde breccia zone - see news release dated August 8, 2011.

To view image of Cinco Senores Target please click on the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/MEX0515a.jpg

CINCO SENORES - EL DORADO JUAN BRAN & SANTA CRUZ ZONES

Key Geological Similarities to El Dorado Mineralized Zone

The Cinco Senores zone, which is located 670 metres to the west of the El Dorado/Juan Bran zone, has several compelling similarities to the El Dorado mineralized zone including the following:

-- Numerous historic mines at the level of the exposed contact between a regional dioritic sill and the overlying carbonate rocks. -- An analogous 'erosional horseshoe' magnetic signature.

A magnetic survey map showing the analogous magnetic signature follows: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/MEX0515b.jpg

-- A regional scale fault intersecting the sill contact providing structural control for skarn formation - see magnetic survey map. -- A topographic profile which puts the sill contact below the surface and out of the reach of historic operations.

Brian Robertson, P. Eng., Chairman, President & CEO stated, "We are excited about these recent additional drill results at the Cinco Senores target. The results combined with previous drilling and sampling as well as the presence of extensive historical mine workings at the site, are indicative of a potential parallel zone at Cinco Senores."

All reported intervals referred to in this news release are core lengths and additional information is required to determine true widths. Assays are uncut, length - weighted average values.

1. Gold equivalent (Au Eq) calculations use metal prices of US $1250/oz. for gold, US $18.00/oz. for silver and US $3.00 /lb. for copper. No adjustments have been made for potential relative differences in metal recoveries. Au Eq g/t = Au g/t + ((Ag g/t x 0.014) + (Cu% x1.64))

About Las Minas

The Las Minas Project hosts near-surface gold - silver and copper skarn mineralization and high-grade gold - silver epithermal vein deposits. The project is comprised of six mineral concessions covering approximately 1,616 hectares (3,995 acres), with several small scale, past-producing mines and a number of untested targets.

The district is host to one of the largest under explored gold - silver copper skarn systems known in Mexico, and has a production history that extends back to the Aztec era. The Las Minas granodiorite intrusive measures approximately 10 kilometres in diameter and underlies the Las Minas concessions. The mineralization controls and association with magnetite appear to be similar to the Guerrero Gold belt, which is the site of the Los Filos and Morelos gold deposits.

Las Minas is an early-stage exploration project and does not contain any mineral resource estimates as defined by National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). The potential quantities and grades disclosed herein are conceptual in nature and there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource for the targets discussed herein. It is uncertain if further exploration will result in these targets being delineated as a mineral resource.

Quality Assurance/Quality Control

The technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Sonny Bernales, P. Geo., a registered Professional Geoscientist in the Province of British Columbia and a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101. Mr. Bernales is responsible for logistics and supervision of all exploration activity conducted by Mexican Gold on the property.

The Company has implemented and adheres to a strict Quality Assurance/Quality Control program which includes inserting mineralized standards and blanks into the sample stream, about 1 for every 10 samples. The standards and blanks were obtained from CDN Resource Laboratories Ltd. of Langley, BC, Canada. Each sample bag is properly sealed and kept in a secured, restricted storage place prior to shipping to the lab. Samples are shipped directly by Mexican Gold with chain of custody/sample submittal signed and dated. The Company sends it samples to SGS Mineral Services (ISO/IEC 17025) at Durango, Mexico, an accredited and independent laboratory.

About Mexican Gold Corp.

Mexican Gold Corp. is a Canadian based mineral exploration company committed to building long-term value through ongoing discoveries and strategic acquisitions of prospective precious metals deposits in Mexico. Mexican Gold is exploring the Las Minas Project, which is located in the core of the Las Minas district in the Veracruz State, Mexico. The district is host to one of the largest under-explored skarn systems known in Mexico and has a strong production history that dates back to the Aztec era.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release includes certain information that may constitute "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements about the magnitude or quality of mineral deposits, anticipated advancement of mineral properties or programs, future operations, results of exploration, prospects, commodity and precious metals prices, future work programs, anticipated financial and operational results, capital expenditures and objectives and the completion and timing of mineral resource estimates. Forward-looking information is necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including the risks identified in the Company's disclosure documents available at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. All forward-looking information contained in this press release is given as of the date hereof and is based upon the opinions and estimates of management and information available to management as at the date hereof. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

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.

Contacts:

Brian Robertson

Chairman, President & CEO

807-474-4270 or 807-251-1816

807-474-4272 (FAX)

info@mexicangold.ca

www.mexicangold.ca




GRAND CAYMAN, CAYMAN ISLANDS -- (Marketwired) -- 05/15/17 -- Tethys Petroleum Limited (TSX: TPL) ("Tethys" or "the Company") today announced its Results for the quarter ended March 31, 2017.

Q1 Financial Highlights

(all figures reported in USD unless stated otherwise. 2016 amounts are for the quarter ended March 31, 2016)

-- Oil and gas sales and other revenues decreased by 86% in the first quarter of 2017 to 0.5 million from 3.5 million in Q1 2016 mainly because there were no gas sales in the quarter due to the placing of production in storage whilst seeking to attain better pricing. Gas production continued throughout the quarter and was sold in May 2017; -- The small decrease in oil revenue was due to the natural decline in production volumes partially offset by a price increase in USD terms due to a strengthening of the Kazakh currency, the Tenge against the USD; -- The loss of 4.4 million in Q1 2017 was lower than the loss of 5.7 million in Q1 2016 due to lower costs which more than offset the reduction in revenue; -- Adjusted EBITDA decreased to negative 1.4 million from negative USD0.9 million in Q1 2016 as a result of the reduction in oil and gas revenues of 3.0 million exceeding the reduction in costs (excluding finance costs and DD&A costs); and -- Net debt increased as a result of working capital loans received from Olisol during 2016 which were expected to be converted into ordinary shares of the Company or repaid from the proceeds of the legally binding transactions which Olisol failed to complete.

Q1 Operational Highlights

Oil

-- First quarter oil production averaged 682 bopd compared with 861 bopd in Q1 2016, reflecting a natural decline in overall production; -- Oil production cost per barrel in the first quarter increased to 9.46 compared with 8.37 in Q1 2016 mainly due to a decrease in oil production and non-variable costs of production; -- Oil prices averaged 8.67 bbl in the quarter compared with 7.47 bbl in Q1 2016, an increase of 16%, reflecting a higher average price per barrel in Q1, 2017 and a stronger Kazakhstan currency, the Tenge against the US Dollar in the current quarter.

Gas

-- First quarter gross gas production averaged 2,094 boe/d compared with 2,442 boe/d in Q1 2016, reflecting a natural decline in overall production; -- Gas production cost per Mcm in the first quarter increased to 14.49 compared with 13.27 in Q1 2016 mainly due to a decrease in gas production and non-variable costs of production and a stronger Kazakhstan currency, the Tenge against the US Dollar in the current quarter;

Q1 Corporate Highlights

-- Georgia work programme commitments for 2017 reduced avoiding potential penalties of up to USD2.0 million; -- Tethys Kazakhstan to relocate its main administrative office from Almaty to Aktobe City during the first half of 2017 where it already has an office; -- Medgat Kumar appointed to the Board of Directors of the Company following the equity placement announced in November 2016; -- Rig loan maturing in February 2017 extended by 18 months whilst the Company markets rigs for lease or sale; -- EGG, the Company's former oil buyer, continues legal actions against the Company in Kazakhstan resulting in ongoing restrictions over Tethys Aral Gas bank accounts; -- Tethys and each of its Kazakhstan subsidiaries commences legal action against Olisol, EGG and certain of their respective principals in Canada; -- Announcement of intention to cancel London Stock Exchange listing with effect from May 2, 2017 to reduce costs of dual-listing but Tethys will remain listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange; -- Tethys announces a ten well shallow gas well drilling program which is expected to cost approximately 6 million and which the Company expects to be able to pay for from increased production; and -- Lease contract signed with MSI to build and install a mini-compressor in Kazakhstan to enhance production from existing wells and extend their life.

The full Q1 Results together with Management's Discussion and Analysis have been filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities. Copies of the filed documents may be obtained via SEDAR at www.sedar.com or on the Tethys website at www.tethyspetroleum.com. The summary financial statements are attached to this press release.

The Company's Q1 2017 financial statements are prepared under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

A barrel of oil equivalent ("boe") conversion ratio of 6,000 cubic feet (169.9 cubic metres) of natural gas = 1 barrel of oil has been used and is based on the standard energy equivalency conversion method primarily applicable at the burner tip and does not represent a value equivalency at the wellhead.

Information for Shareholders

An annual general meeting of the holders of ordinary shares of the Company will be held at Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Schiphol Boulevard 701, Schiphol, 1118 BN, Netherlands on June 23, 2017 at 10:00 a.m. (Central European Summer Time - local time in Amsterdam, Netherlands).

The Company has previously announced that, in order to further reduce costs following the decision to cancel the Company's London Stock Exchange listing (which became effective May 2, 2017), it intends to transfer the share register maintained in by Capita Asset Services in the UK to TSX Trust Company in Canada which also maintains a register. The Company is planning for this transfer to take place in the week following the annual general meeting. Thereafter, it is expected that those shareholders formerly on the Capita Asset Services register should be able to access pricing and trading facilities from brokers and intermediaries which allow for trading in TSX listed companies.

Disclaimer

Some of the statements in this document are forward-looking. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding the intent, belief and current expectations of the Company or its officers with respect to the potential that exists in both exploration and in discovered deposits in Central Asia and the Caspian Region, relocation of its Kazakhstan office to Aktobe City, the proposed shallow gas well drilling program, the installation of the mini-compressor and access to pricing and trading facilities from brokers and intermediaries which allow for trading in TSX listed companies. When used in this document, the words "expects," "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "may," "will," "should" and similar expressions, and the negatives thereof, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements are not promises or guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes to differ materially from those suggested by any such statements including risks and uncertainties with respect to the potential that exists in both exploration and in discovered deposits in Central Asia and the Caspian Region, relocation of its Kazakhstan office to Aktobe City, the proposed shallow gas well drilling program, the installation of the mini-compressor and access to pricing and trading facilities from brokers and intermediaries which allow for trading in TSX listed companies.

No part of this announcement constitutes, or shall be taken to constitute, an invitation or inducement to invest in the Company or any other entity, and shareholders of the Company are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements. Save as required by the Listing Rules and applicable law, the Company does not undertake to update or change any forward-looking statements to reflect events occurring after the date of this announcement.

See our Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2016 for a description of risks and uncertainties relevant to our business, including our exploration activities.

About Tethys

Tethys is focused on oil and gas exploration and production activities in Central Asia and the Caspian Region. This highly prolific oil and gas area is rapidly developing and Tethys believes that significant potential exists in both exploration and in discovered deposits.

Tethys Petroleum Limited

Consolidated Statement of Financial Position

(in thousands of US dollars)

As at March 31, 2017 December 31, 2016 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Non-current assets Intangible assets 42,785 42,732 Property, plant and equipment 101,513 103,115 Restricted cash 2,249 2,238 Investment in joint arrangements 4 4 Trade and other receivables 1,645 1,237 Deferred tax 205 208 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 148,401 149,534 Current assets Cash and cash equivalents 69 449 Trade and other receivables 6,717 6,532 Inventories 1,089 676 Restricted cash 22 2,713 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7,897 10,370 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total assets 156,298 159,904 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Non-current liabilities Trade and other payables 23 44 Financial liabilities - borrowings 6,980 - Deferred tax 11,123 11,913 Provisions 927 910 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19,053 12,867 Current liabilities Financial liabilities - borrowings 26,480 33,249 Current taxation 540 522 Trade and other payables 21,133 19,838 Provisions 198 200 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 48,351 53,809 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total liabilities 67,404 66,676 Equity Share capital 5,081 5,081 Share premium 358,444 358,444 Other reserves 43,704 43,648 Accumulated deficit (324,431) (320,041) Non-controlling interest 6,096 6,096 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total equity 88,894 93,228 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total equity and liabilities 156,298 159,904 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tethys Petroleum Limited

Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income (Loss)

(in thousands of US dollars except per share information)

Three months ended March 31 2016 2016 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sales and other revenues 480 3,455 Sales expenses - (734) Production expenses (595) (1,196) Depreciation, depletion and amortisation (2,567) (2,856) Administrative expenses (1,174) (1,787) Restructuring costs (118) (755) Share based payments (56) (82) Profit on sale of fixed assets - 10 Foreign exchange (loss)/gain (18) 73 Fair value gain on derivative financial instrument - 204 Finance costs (1,103) (1,930) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (5,631) (9,053) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Loss before tax from continuing operations (5,151) (5,598) Taxation 761 (79) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Loss from continuing operations and total comprehensive income (4,390) (5,677) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Loss and total comprehensive income attributable to: Shareholders (4,390) (5,677) Non-controlling interest - - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Loss and total comprehensive income for the year (4,390) (5,677) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Loss per share attributable to shareholders: Basic and diluted - from continuing operations (USD) (0.01) (0.02) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tethys Petroleum Limited

Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows

(in thousands of US dollars)

Three months ended March 31 2017 2016 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash flow from operating activities Loss before tax from continuing operations (5,151) (5,598) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adjustments for: Share based payments 56 82 Net finance cost 1,103 1,930 Depreciation, depletion and amortisation 2,567 2,856 Fair value gain on derivative financial instruments - (203) Net unrealised foreign exchange gain 16 (64) Movement in provisions (120) (791) Net change in working capital 189 (137) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash used in operating activities (1,340) (1,925) Corporation tax paid (8) - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net cash used in operating activities (1,348) (1,925) Cash flow from investing activities Expenditure on exploration and evaluation assets (53) (278) Expenditure on property, plant and equipment (946) (116) Movement in restricted cash 2,680 151 Movement in advances to construction contractors (14) 4 Movement in value added tax receivable 301 222 Net change in working capital (14) (22) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net cash generated from/(used in) investing activities 1,954 (39) Cash flow from financing activities Proceeds from issuance of borrowings, net of issue costs - 2,000 Repayment of borrowings (242) (340) Interest paid on borrowings (620) (1,169) Movement in other non-current liabilities (21) (47) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net cash (used in)/generated from financing activities (883) 444 Effects of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents (103) (619) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net decrease in cash and cash equivalents (380) (2,139) Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of the year 449 3,272 Cash and cash equivalents at end of the year 69 1,133 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contacts:

Tethys Petroleum

info@tethyspetroleum.com

http://www.tethyspetroleum.com




Technavio's latest report on the global VR in the education marketprovides an analysis of the most important trends expected to impact the market outlook from 2017-2021. Technavio defines an emerging trend as a factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515006621/en/

Technavio has published a new report on the global VR in the education sector market from 2017-2021. (Graphic: Business Wire)

Jhansi Mary, a lead analyst from Technavio, specializing in research oneducation technology sector, says, "Within the K-12 segment, the appropriate application of VR will take time as educators have just realized the benefits of VR from a technical and immersive learning perspective. It is extremely important for educators to understand that K-12 students are young and in their formative years, and the use of VR at this stage can strongly influence their overall personality

The global VR in the education market is expected to reach USD 1,700.66 million in 2021, growing at a CAGR of more than 55%. Regionally, North America is expected to dominate the market due to the growing investment and higher adoption of technology in the education sector. Based on the product segment, the VR content segment is expected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period, owing to its inherent requirements and the high demand in the learning environment.

Looking for more information on this market? Request a free sample report

Technavio's sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report including the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more.

The top three emerging trends driving the global VR in the education market according to Technavio research analysts are:

Incorporation of SLAM technology

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a popular and important autonomous mapping and navigation technique in mobile robotics. This technology was mainly used in NASA robots for the creation of unknown environments maps. Also, given its high accuracy feature, it is used in their positioning devices.

"SLAM technology is expected to be used in smartphones integrated with VR headsets; wherein positioning can be enabled on the web using the smartphone's camera, which will allow a user to visualize and interact in the VR environment," according to Jhansi.

Increasing use of VR in medical training

The use of VR in medical schools has become popular for instructing and educating young students. The VR platform provides medical students an interactive method to learn and understand various aspects of medical education.

From the institution's perspective, the use of VR saves huge time and resources, as it does not have to go through the traditional training process in many aspects. Students will be more comfortable in dealing with virtual scenarios, as it allows the higher probability of trail and errors, due to which students can repeat the process as often as required.

VR facilitates collaborative learning

Virtual collaboration is already the norm in the current world, whether through email, basecamp, Google docs, or other virtual spaces. VR takes the collaboration further by providing a common space that looks and feels like a shared room, giving the feeling of sharing a physical space with other users.

A virtual space to collaborate in the education sector will allow students from different regions to interact and collaborate with each other. For example, a student studying fifth grade in India can share a space with a student of fifth grade in the US and can collaborate in real space, which surpasses email or video conferencing.

The key vendors are as follows:

Oculus VR

Google

Alchemy VR

Discovery Communications

Browse Related Reports:

Global Interactive White Board Market 2017-2021

Global Corporate Game-Based Learning Market 2017-2021

Global Digital Signage Market in Education Sector 2017-2021

Become a Technavio Insights member and access all three of these reports for a fraction of their original cost. As a Technavio Insights member, you will have immediate access to new reports as they're published in addition to all 6,000+ existing reports covering segments like in-vitro diagnostics, oncology, and vaccines. This subscription nets you thousands in savings, while staying connected to Technavio's constant transforming research library, helping you make informed business decisions more efficiently.

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515006621/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 630 333 9501

UK: +44 208 123 1770

www.technavio.com
New Delhi: The trustees of retirement fund body Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) are likely to raise the investment limit in exchange traded funds (ETFs) to 15 percent of the investible deposits, from 10 percent at present, in the current fiscal.

The higher limit would help the EPFO park around Rs15,000 crore in stock markets in 2017-18 as its investible deposits are close to Rs1 lakh crore annually.

The EPFOs apex decision making body, the Central Board of Trustees, headed by the labour minister, is likely to increase ETF investments to 15 percent for this fiscal, a person privy of the development said.

CBT had met on 12 April, where the proposal was discussed in the presence of labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya. It deferred the proposal as some of the employees representatives had pressed for vetting the move by EPFOs advisory body Finance Audit and Investment (FAIC) committee.

They had also raised the issue of having a definitive exit policy to liquidate investments in government securities, ETFs and state loans to maximise returns for its members. The person said that the FAIC meeting is being scheduled on 19 May where the EPFO would also be ready with the exit policy for its investments so that proportion of ETF investments can be raised smoothly in the CBT meeting on 27 May.

EPFO had entered the stock market by investing 5 percent in August 2015, which was raised to 10% last year. In 2015, the finance ministry had allowed private provident funds to invest 5-15 percent of its investible deposits in equity or equity-linked schemes.

In view of the volatile nature of stock markets, the EPFO had then decided to start with investing just 5 percent of its over Rs1 lakh crore investible amount in ETFs. The EPFO has invested Rs18,069 crore in ETFs till 18 February 2017 and yielded a return of 18.13 percent on these investments.

Earlier, Dattatreya had indicated that the EPFO will increase its investment in ETFs in view of good returns. The person said the CBT can also enhance the wage ceiling for coverage under the EPFO schemes to Rs25,000 per month from existing Rs15,000. It is estimated that this could bring in one crore more workers under the social security schemes run by the EPFO.
A quick glance through the full text of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Opening Ceremony of The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, shows how China has positioned the One Belt One Road (OBOR) as a project of immense economic sense to the world and a project of the century.

The OBOR plan revives an ancient trade route that once connected most of Asia to Europe and Africa - known as Silk Route. The idea of a new Silk Route, which was unveiled in 2013, seeks to revive this old channel and connect these countries with trade routes of both land and sea, with significant investments involved, mainly from China.

China alone has promised to fork out $124 billion for OBOR. In other words, this money will go to projects in different countries along the corridor as Chinese loans and will, in turn, boost trade and employment for them. There is a general agreement for the OBOR from most countries, including much of Indias neighbors. This backing was evident from the opening ceremony that was attended by heads of 29 states, including Russian President Vladmir Putin. Also, delegations from over 100 countries were present in the ceremony. Logically, most eastern countries are kicked by the prospects of the project and what it means for each one of them in future in terms of investments.

But for India, this isnt just a matter of economics alone but has serious ramifications on the issue of its territorial integrity and security. That is because an economic corridor in progress -- between two of its often hostile neighbors -- known as China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is central to the OBOR project. The CPEC involves construction of roads, railways and power plants. It will directly link China to the Gwadar port on the southwestern coast of Balochistan in Pakistan on the shores of Arabian ocean, something Pakistan built with significant Chinese assistance. The OBOR envisages significant additional investments in CPEC corridor. This offers India two major reasons to worry.

One, the CPEC project passes through the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, a geography India claims to be its part.

Two, such Chinese money flow to Pakistan will increase the Chinese economic and strategic influence on Indias hostile neighbour with which it has fought four wars since 1947. In fact, Pakistan economy's dependence on China to improve its fortunes is so high that a recent World Bank report (read a report on this here) warned that Pakistan's prospects of growing even at modest 5 percent a year are at risk due to delays in the implementation of the $46-billion CPEC projects.

China has, for long, expressed concern on the delay of implementation of CPEC project and has questioned Pakistans administrative efficiency in rolling out the project.

China has attempted to allay Indias concerns saying, All countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major concerns."

But, it is no secret that Chinese interest in the CPEC is not just economic interests but military presence in Pakistan too (read here and here). Remember, the distance between Gwadar and Gujarat coast is less than 1,000 kilometers.

According to a long-term plan on CPEC accessed by The Dawn, China plans to deeply influence the Pakistan region with its power and culture, establishing a full system of monitoring and surveillance ... built in cities from Peshawar to Karachi, with 24 hour video recordings on roads and busy marketplaces for law and order. A national fibreoptic backbone will be built for the country not only for internet traffic, but also terrestrial distribution of broadcast TV, which will cooperate with Chinese media in the dissemination of Chinese culture.

Also, the plan envisages a deep and broad based penetration of most sectors of Pakistans economy as well as its society by Chinese enterprises and culture, the Dawn report said.

Now, with OBOR taking off, China will have greater reasons to exert economic and military influence in the region. In his speech, Chinese President makes indirect mentions about India and makes attempts to nudge the country to join OBOR.

Some regions along the ancient Silk Road used to be a land of milk and honey, said Xi Jingping, adding, Yet today, these places are often associated with conflict, turbulence, crisis and challenge. Such state of affairs should not be allowed to continue.

We should foster the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, and create a security environment built and shared by all. We should work to resolve hotspot issues through political means, and promote mediation in the spirit of justice, said the 63-year old.

For the Narendra Modi government, these words might not appear as simple as it sounds and will ring warning bells on Chinese interference in Indias territorial disputes with Pakistan. Already, India doesnt have a friendly relationship with China, which came to fore with the recent visit of Tibetan leader, Dalai Lama to India and China subsequently renaming six places in Arunachal Pradesh (read here).

The Modi government has a highly difficult and diplomatically sensitive task in hand on how to approach OBOR. India cannot be seen as a villain in the path of development in the Asian region. In fact, it is the second largest shareholder/ investors in The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank after China, which seeks to promote infrastructure investments in the region. Also, India is seen as a leader in the development agenda of SAARC nations.

The last allegation the Modi government would want to face from the Asian community would be that it is a villain in the regions development story. On the other hand, India needs to protect its territorial interests. The CPEC gets more official backing from China with its promised investment and is a potential threat to India, not just in the PoK but also with respect to the increasing Chinese economic and military influence in an economically-weak, politically unstable Pakistani soil.

India giving a miss to OBOR opening ceremony makes it abundantly clear to the international community on Indias official stance on the project. This instantly puts Modi in international limelight on this issue. The prime minister will be closely watched for his next move. Clearly, none of his friendly visits to these two neighboring countries in the past three years have helped to turn things in favour of Indias interests. The new Chinese episode is a major foreign policy challenge for the Modi government, may be the toughest this government has faced so far.
Bengaluru - Executive search firm Head Hunters India today said the job cuts in IT sector will be between 1.75 lakh and 2 lakh annually for next three years due to under-preparedness in adapting to newer technologies.

"Contrary to media reports of 56,000 IT professionals to lose jobs this year, the actual job cuts will be between 1.75 lakh and 2 lakh per year in next three years, due to under-preparedness in adapting to newer technologies," Head Hunters India Founder-Chairman and MD K Lakshmikanth told PTI, analysing a report submitted by McKinsey & Company at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on February 17.

McKinsey & Company report had said nearly half of the workforce in the IT services firms will be "irrelevant" over the next 3-4 years.

McKinsey India Managing Director Noshir Kaka had also said the bigger challenge ahead for the industry will be to retrain 50-60 percent of the workforce as there will be a significant shift in technologies. The industry employs 3.9 million people and the majority of them have to be retrained.

"So, when we analyse these figures, it is clear that 30 to 40 percent of the workforce cannot be retrained or re-skilled. So, assume that half of this workforce can continue to work on old skills, then balance will become redundant.

"So, the number of people who will become redundant in the next three years will be about five to six lakhs. This will workout to, on an average, between 1.75 lakh to 2 lakh per year for next three years," Lakshmikanth explained.

However, he said job cuts will not take place in major cities like Mumbai or Bengaluru, but cities like Coimbatore or a few remote places, he said.

Lakshmikanth further said the IT services industry is passing through an uncertain time as the growth in digital technologies like cloud-based services is happening at a much faster pace and the companies are combining learning of some of the new technologies and re-skilling.

"Because of the changing technology, the most affected will be the professionals aged 35 and above, for it would be very difficult for them to get jobs," Lakhsmikanth said.

Asked if it is fair to blame US President Donald Trump's policy for job cuts, Lakshmikanth said it is not fair because he has fulfilled the promise after winning the elections.

"How can we blame Trump, for he has fulfilled the election promise of giving jobs to local people including IT professionals by tightening H1-B visa norms, which were being misused by companies by paying less to foreign professionals working in US. It is for companies to tackle the situation, and such situation they have undergone in previous years. It is not new for them. They know to tide over it," he said.

Lakhsmikanth also said it is not fair even to target the Indian government as the IT industry grew on its own in India, but at later stages respective state governments and central governments provided them facilities like land or creating special economic zones, among others.
As digitisation and automation become the new normal, IT biggies like Infosys, Cognizant and Tech Mahindra are seeing a spate of layoffs and this trend may continue for the next 1-2 years, say experts.

Indian software exporters in particular are facing headwinds in the business environment and stricter work permit regime in countries like the US, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Moreover, with newer technologies in artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation and cloud computing, which help complete the job with less manpower, software companies are now having to reconsider their strategies.

"It's a situation wherein the available talent haven't kept up with the pace at which the industry was evolving and hence, many of them find themselves redundant," said Rituparna Chakraborty, TeamLease Services Executive Vice-President and co-founder.

Executive search organisation GlobalHunt MD Sunil Goel said: "This rationalisation does happen in every 3-5 years in the industry through new-age technologies, but this has impacted it more this time as the US also has changed policies for foreign IT workers."

Goel further noted that "the consolidated trend may continue for next 1-2 years", but sees it as an opportunity for IT professionals to upgrade themselves and get into the new age technologies where demand is going to be huge.

Pink slips are likely for jobs in manual testing, technology support and system administration since these are increasingly going to be managed by AI and robotics process automation based systems.

However, there is surge in demand for latest and innovative technologies like data science, artificial intelligence and digital domain specific skills.

"It is a painful transitory phase. However, things would look up in the next two quarters as each of the IT services company successful steers towards a stable growth phase," Chakraborty said.

Talent management solutions provider KellyOCG India Country Director Francis Padamadan said, "We will continue to see some amount of rationalisation happening among IT companies though it is difficult to put a number."

Japanese brokerage firm Nomura, in a research note, said that the job cuts of 2-3 per cent of the overall headcount of nearly 7,60,000 by Infosys, Cognizant, Tech Mahindra and Wipro are not material. However, this kind of rationalisation is likely to be a continuing phenomenon until the workforce realignment towards digital skills is complete.
New Delhi - Critical infrastructure agencies including banks, airports, telecom networks and stock markets have been asked to take precautions to shield themselves against the crippling global ransomware attack 'WannaCry'.

Over the weekend, the ransomware hit systems in over 100 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history.

In India too, there have been reports of some systems of Andhra Pradesh Police being affected.

While India's cyber security unit CERT-In is yet to receive a formal intimation of any major attacks, it has reached out to all government agencies and public utilities to stay alert.

The IT Ministry said it has initiated contact with relevant stakeholders in public and private sector to advise them to patch their systems as per CERT-In's advisory.

"The stakeholders' organisations include NIC for all government and state government systems, RBI, NPCI and UIDAI for protection of digital payment ecosystem, DoT to alert the ISPs for security of telecommunication network, Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and CDAC," it added.

It is also keeping a close watch on the developments on the ransomware and is working in close coordination with all relevant agencies, it said.

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) Director General Sanjay Bahl said that advisories have already been issued to all Central and state government agencies.

Additionally, a list of do's and don'ts have been shared with all vital installations and networks, including banks, stock markets, airports, defence, power and public utilities.

"If people have already taken action and applied the software patch (issued by Microsoft), they need not worry... If they haven't, they should apply it immediately," he told PTI.

The malware infected computers running on older versions of Microsoft operating systems like XP, locking access to files on the computer. The cyber criminals have demanded a fee of about $300 in crypto-currencies like Bitcoin for unlocking the device.

Microsoft has introduced a security patch to tackle the situation. Consumers across the globe have been advised to download the solution at the earliest.

The US-based software giant has also released updates for Windows XP, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2003.

Bahl maintained that no "major" incidents have been brought to CERT-Ins notice yet, but was quick to add that a full assessment of the impact on ground can be made only on Monday when people return to work after the weekend.

The Andhra Pradesh systems were isolated PCs and not connected to larger networks, he said.

In Spain, major companies including telecommunications firm Telefonica have been infected. The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.

Reports suggest that over two lakh systems globally could have been infected by the malicious software.

Experts fear the situation could further aggravate as a number of computers in India run on the older operating systems and have not been updated yet.

EY Partner Cyber Security Burgess Cooper said Indian hospitals could be quite vulnerable to critical infrastructure attacks as they rely on industrial systems that run on old outdated hardware.

Also, the traditional manufacturing sector relies on outdated IT systems that are run by unsupported operating systems and therefore, the risk of creating havoc to public is higher, he said.
(Editors note: This story has been corrected)

Singapore Airlines (SIA) has invested more than SGD 100 million in Indian carrier Vistara, twice the amount initially planned, a daily reported.

The airline is encouraged by Vistaras performance so far but an SIA spokesman declined to confirm funding details, citing commercial confidentiality, according to The Straits Times.

Profits are not expected until 2020 at the earliest but the New Delhi-based carrier, which has been flying domestically for more than two years, is growing nicely, the Singapore daily cited analysts as saying.

In June next year, the 49 percent SIA owned Vistara will collect its 20th aircraft, a significant milestone which will pave the way for the airline to operate international flights.

Tata Group owns the rest 51 percent stake in joint venture airline.

Under Indian civil aviation rules, Vistara must have at least 20 planes before it can fly outside the country.

The launch of international flights is a key part of SIAs strategy to expand its own reach and reduce the dominance of Middle Eastern carriers which have a strong hold on the growing India-Europe and India-United States markets.

When SIA and Tata first announced in 2013 the intention to launch Vistara, the plan was for a joint US $100 million investment.

The financing has since more than doubled on the back of high operating costs in India, stiff competition from other Indian carriers that has prompted steep fare cuts, and costs associated with plans to go international, reports out of India have suggested.

Industry think-tank Centre for Aviation, said in a recent report that Vistara is expected to order 100 planes - including 50 wide bodies - before next month.

The airline currently has 13 aircrafts serving 45 domestic routes, a Vistara spokesman said.

No new plane order has been made, she said, adding that the airline is still evaluating its options.

Vistara has not ruled out leasing planes from SIA, she said.

While the aviation landscape in India is very challenging and competitive, the opportunity is also massive and there is a great potential for growth, The Straits Times quoted the spokesman as saying.

According to the International Air Transport Association, India has replaced Japan as the third-largest domestic aviation market in the world.

SIA has said repeatedly that it is in the Indian market to stay, despite the tough operating environment.

To create more value for consumers, SIA and its regional arm SilkAir recently struck a codeshare partnership with Vistara.

This means that an SIA customer can book a single ticket to fly from Singapore to New Delhi, and, from there, transfer to a Vistara flight to any of 10 domestic destinations.

The Vistara spokesman said such agreements play a very important role for us in spreading greater awareness about our brand in international markets, and, for us, these partnerships are assets that were building to support our international aspirations.
New Delhi: Sale of a company often leaves employees high and dry, but not in the case of Snapdeal that may offer a Rs 193 crore bonanza to its staff if the homegrown e-commerce firm is taken over by larger rival Flipkart.

According to sources, if the deal goes through, the founders will give half of their payout (USD 30 million) for the proposed scheme which would cover all current employees of Snapdeal.

Snapdeal has about 1,500-2,000 staffers. "The founders have asked the Board to carve out USD 30 million (about Rs 193 crore) from their settlement for payouts to the Snapdeal team. They want to ensure that the team does not get sidelined in any manner," they added.

Some former senior executives of Snapdeal, who have left the firm in the last 12 months, could also benefit from the process. E-mails sent to Snapdeal did not elicit any response.

The intent is also to compensate for the ESOPs that were issued to senior employees. The value of their shares and options have eroded and would be worthless once the deal is signed, one of them said. Interestingly, the deal-linked payment would also be extended to employees who do not own ESOPs to reward those staying on with Snapdeal till the proposed transaction with Flipkart is complete.

If the deal goes through, Snapdeal founders will get USD 60 million (cumulative), of which half will be given to employees. Japanese conglomerate and Snapdeal's largest investor SoftBank has initiated the process to sell the beleaguered online marketplace to bigger rival Flipkart.

It has managed to get Board members, which also includes the founders (Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal) and early investors Kalaari and Nexus Venture Partners, to agree to the potential deal.

Nexus Venture Partners could get close to USD 80 million and a stake in the merged/new entity, while Kalaari could get about USD 70-80 million.

As per regulatory filings, SoftBank currently owns over 30 per cent in Snapdeal, while Nexus has roughly a 10 percent stake and Kalaari holds 8 per cent share in the firm.

A non-binding term sheet to start the due diligence by Flipkart for Snapdeal is expected to be signed soon between the two parties.

In the past few months, Snapdeal has seen a number of voluntary and involuntary exits. While the company has hiked salaries by up to 15 per cent, employees are concerned about their future as the impending takeover looms head.

One of the leading contenders in the Indian e-commerce space, Snapdeal has seen its fortunes failing amid strong competition from US-based Amazon and Flipkart.

Compared to a valuation of about USD 6.5 billion in February 2016, the sale to Flipkart could see Snapdeal being valued at about USD 1 billion.

SoftBank had recently said it suffered a loss of USD 1 billion (Rs 6,500 crore) on its investment in Snapdeal during 2016-17, almost matching the money it put in the home-grown marketplace.

The deal between Snapdeal and Flipkart, if completed, would mark the biggest acquisition in the Indian e-commerce space and change the landscape of the sector that is witnessing intense competition among players
New Delhi - The IT ministry has reached out to key stakeholders like RBI, National Payments Corporation of India, NIC and UIDAI (Aadhaar) to advise them to protect their systems against 'Wanna Cry' ransomware to ensure that the digital payments ecosystem in the country is protected.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has also instructed cyber security unit CERT-In to gather information of 'Wanna Cry' ransomware that has wrecked havoc across sectors like healthcare and telecommunications in more than 100 countries.

Over the weekend, the ransomware hit systems in over 100 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history. It infected computers running on older versions of Microsoft operating systems like XP, locking access to files on the computer.

The cyber criminals have demanded a fee of about $300 in crypto-currencies like Bitcoin for unlocking the device.

Microsoft has introduced a security patch to tackle the situation, and consumers across the globe have been advised to download the solution at the earliest.

Noting that no reports have been formally received so far related to the ransomware attack, MeitY said a few systems of the Police Department in Andhra Pradesh were impacted and that the state government has been informed to follow the advisory by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

"MeitY is keeping a close watch on the developments on the ransomware and is working in close coordination with all relevant agencies," it said in a statement.

The ministry has also reached out to the Department of Telecom (DoT) to alert Internet service providers (ISPs) to secure their networks as well as the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and CDAC to ensure that users across the country, especially those in the private sector, are cautioned about the ransomware.

Besides, it has also requested Microsoft India to inform all its partners and customers to apply the relevant patches.

As per the advisory issued by CERT-In, the ransomware infects other computers on the same network and is also spreading through malicious attachments to e-mails. Security firms have suggested that users immediately disconnect the infected device from the local network to contain the spread of infection.

In Spain, major companies including telecommunications firm Telefonica have been infected. The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.

Reports suggest that over two lakh systems globally could have been infected by the malicious software.

Experts fear the situation could further aggravate as a number of computers in India run on the older operating systems and have not been updated yet.

"The impact has been somewhat contained in India because of the weekend. However, one will have to watch the situation as people return to work tomorrow and access their computers," Kaspersky Lab Head for South Asia Region Altaf Halde told PTI.

A report by the security solutions firm claims that India is among the countries worst affected by the Wanna Cry outbreak, accounting for about five per cent of the attacks.

"This attack is perhaps the largest, most widespread and contiguous malware attack in history as the attackers have used a flaw in Microsoft software to infiltrate unguarded systems. It is important that users keep their systems updated and take a proactive approach to security rather than a reactive one," said Pradipto Chakrabarty, Regional Director at CompTIA India.

Saket Modi, CEO and co-founder of Lucideus said, ransomware, as a mode of attack, seems to be gaining traction as it now gets 4-5 requests from a week from enterprises across the country for providing support from such attacks.
Tamil superstar Rajinikanth has not completely ruled out politics. On Wednesday 17 May, when TV journalists caught the superstar in his car and asked him to comment on the same, he said, "No comments. I have said what I have to. The decision to join politics will happen at right time."

Inspite of claiming to lean more towards his acting career during his recent speech, he has dropped a huge hint that he has not completely ruled out the option of joining politics.

Rajinikanth addressed his fans on Monday morning on 15 May, 2017 to clear the air around his political amibitions and his next few films. The last time he held a meeting with fans was eight years ago, reports News 18. This meeting was held in Chennai at Raghavendra Mandapam, Kodambakkam, and along with the superstar veteran filmmaker Sp Muthuraman was spotted.

At the meeting and amid cheering fans, Rajinikanth said, "I am not bothered by criticism. Today I need your support. Kochadaiyan and Lingaa did not do well but Kabali and Enthiran did. A film will work only if is good content."

He further added about the various rumour surrounding him entering politics, "My accidental brush with politics happened 20 years ago. Since then many people have been using my name to gain in their political career. People have been speculating for years about me joining politics. But I had made it cleat back then only. I have never made any such announcement since then about joining politics. Nobody has my backing and I don't support anyone. I am not joining an political party"

"Some people have wanted to become MLAs and politicans and have been using me to make money. God willing, if I ever decide to join politics I will do it for the welfare of people and not to make money. As of now, god wants me to become an actor, and I am happy with that," said Rajinikanth.

The superstar also asks the youth to refrain from smoking and drinking, and said that alcohol affects your decision making abilities.

Meanwhile, Rajinikanth's next film was rumoured to be based on gangster Haji Mastan, but the makers have since clarified that this news is not true.

In a statement, the makers said: "The film is not based on the life of Haji Mastan. It's not even a biopic. It's just a fictional story set in Mumbai."

The film marks the reunion of Kabali director Pa. Ranjith with Rajinikanth.

It was widely reported that the 66-year-old star will play the don, who lived in Mumbai between 1926 and 1994, in the film which will roll from next week.

On Saturday, Sundar Shaekhar, who claims to be the son of Haji Mastan, sent a legal notice to Rajinikanth, requesting him to not portray his father as a "smuggler and don".

"You are depicting my godfather and a well-known national political leader as a 'smuggler and underworld don', which are highly unacceptable and I strongly oppose such misrepresentation of my godfather," Sundar said in the notice.

To be produced by Dhanush, the film will have music by Santhosh Narayanan.

The makers are currently recreating the popular Dharavi slum in the city.
By Alexander Hubner and Pamela Barbaglia

| FRANKFURT/LONDON

FRANKFURT/LONDON German drug company Stada Arzneimittel AG (STAGn.DE) has not been approached by Advent International or Shanghai Pharmaceuticals Holding (601607.SS) with a counter offer, two sources close to the matter told Reuters on Monday. Rival buyout firms Bain and Cinven had offered to buy Stada in April, which seemed to end the contest to acquire the generic drug maker, but Bloomberg reported on Monday that Advent and Shanghai Pharmaceuticals are considering making an offer. (bloom.bg/2pPpTni). Bain and Cinven's offer of 65.28 euros per share and a dividend of 0.72 euros per Stada share was a surprisingly large increase on a previous bid and valued the company at about 5.3 billion euros ($5.81 billion).

Bloomberg reported that Advent and Shanghai Pharmaceuticals are discussing a potential bid of about 70 euros a share, citing people familiar with the matter.However, Reuters' sources said a fresh bid from the duo is unlikely.

"Shanghai Pharmaceuticals is expected to struggle to secure the financing for a possible counterbid," the sources said. "They dont have much time left to challenge Bain and Cinven."

Advent and Stada declined to comment and Reuters was unable to contact Shanghai Pharmaceuticals outside business hours.($1 = 0.9120 euros) (Additional reporting by Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru; Editing by David Goodman)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Thanjavur: Train services were affected in parts of Thanjavur district on Monday as members of Cauvery Rights Retrieval Committee (CRRC), an umbrella organisation of political parties and farmers associations, blocked trains at Ayanapuram, Alangudi and Papanasam among others.

The Mayiladuthurai-Tiruchi passenger train was delayed as the protesters squatted on the track, sources said.

President of the coordination committee of CRRC P Maniarasan, film director Gautaman and Tamils National Front general secretary Murugesan were among those who took part in the protest.

In Tiruvarur, more than 50 farmers were arrested for blocking road traffic.

The farmers were demanding constitution of Cauvery Water Management Board and declaring Cauvery delta as an agricultural zone.

The agitation would continue till May 21, said Maniarasan.
Amid the growing tensions along the Line of Control (LoC), the media wing of the ISI, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) on Saturday released a statement warning India to not "cross the LoC", in an apparent sign of growing nervousness post the 1 May beheading of two jawans in the Krishna Ghati Sector of Jammu and Kashmir, The Indian Express reported.

The press release posted on the official website of the ISPR reads as following: Indian Army has been targeting innocent civilians on both sides of Line of Control in recent past. Any misadventure by Indian Army across Line of Control will be a miscalculation, shall be responded with full force and could lead to unintended consequences.

The statement came just hours after Pakistan army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa visited troops along the Nikial Sector in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). During his visit, Bajwa is said to have appreciated the military's preparation and "operational readiness".

The Indian Express report added that army sources in the troubled Valley had intercepted Pakistani radio conversations, which showed their heightened sense of readiness across the LoC.

The report quoted several military sources as saying that ISPR's Saturday statement is a sign of the nervousness of the Pakistan Army to a possible retaliation by the Indian security forces to the 1 May beheadings.

Notably, Indian Army's special forces had conducted cross border "surgical strike" across the PoK on 29 September 2016, destroying several militant launchpads along the border and killing dozens of militants and two Pakistan Army soldiers.

According to the report, the Indian Army has adopted a tougher stance along the LoC in the last two weeks, using heavy weaponry and direct firing to target Pakistani posts. In response, Pakistan too has been utilising the same tactics.

1 May beheading

On 1 May, the attack was carried out by the Border Action Team (BAT), which comprises the special forces, under the cover of shelling by Pakistani troops in Krishna Ghati Sector in Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir, officials said.

The army issued a statement saying that the bodies of an army soldier and a BSF head constable were mutilated but a senior army officer told PTI that they were beheaded.

The soldiers killed were Naib Subedar Paramjeet Singh of 22 Sikh Infantry and Head Constable Prem Sagar of 200th Battalion of the BSF.

Recent tensions on the border

Pakistani troops heavily shelled areas along the LoC in Rajouri district for the second consecutive day on Sunday, causing heavy damage to buildings and forcing evacuation of 1000 border dwellers. The Indian Army effectively retaliated.

Pakistan Army had on Saturday pounded civilian areas and forward posts along the LoC in Nowshera area with mortars, killing two civilians and injuring three.

Even prior to the 1 May beheading, Pakistan was involved several ceasefire.

Pakistan had violated the ceasefire seven times in April. Pakistani troops had violated the ceasefire in Poonch sector on 19 April and shelled mortars on forward posts in Noushera sector on 17 April.

Pakistani troops violated the ceasefire along the Line of Control (LoC) in Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir by resorting to firing on forward posts on 8 April, drawing retaliation from Indian Army.

"Pakistani Army fired indiscriminately from small arms and automatic weapons from 1545 hours today on Indian Army posts along the LoC in Noushera belt of Rajouri district," a defence spokesman had said.

On 5 April, Pakistani troops violated the ceasefire along the LoC in Poonch district by shelling forward posts with mortar bombs. On 4 April, Pakistani Army fired mortar shells on Indian Army posts along the LoC in Bhimbher Gali sector of Rajouri district. On 3 April, Pakistani troops had shelled mortar bombs on forward posts in Balakote sector of Rajouri district.

In the second ceasefire violation on 3 April, Pakistani troops had shelled Indian posts along the LoC in Digwar area in Poonch sector.

As per the reports, heavy mortar shelling in Digwar area had created a fear psychosis among the locals. In the same area, a Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO), Naib Subedar S Sanayaima Som, was killed by an improvise explosive device (IED) blast along the LoC in Poonch sector on 1 April.

In 2016, 228 instances of ceasefire violations along the LoC were reported while there were 221 instances of ceasefire violations along International Border (IB).

With inputs from PTI
Editor's note: This is the sixth piece in a multi-part series on the nature of human excesses that have imperilled the fragile ecosystem of the Western Ghats, home to at least 325 globally threatened species of flora and fauna, by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's reckoning

Barely a kilometre from the Adyar river lives S Soundararajan, a 48-year-old resident of an apartment in Ashok Nagar. Soundararajan's worst nightmare is that he could soon be faced with a situation where there is no water at all.

He has not received "corporation water", he says, for about two months now  he is referring to the metro water supply that has been halved due to drought in Chennai in the last two months. "We are using only the borewell water now," he said. "We run the motor for about four hours every day. And even this is not enough, despite all the families living here consuming as little water as they can."

Soundararajan is only a tiny fraction of the state's 80 percent population that uses ground water for their daily needs. Even worse is that 90 percent of the water requirement of industries in the state comes from ground water. Farmers too contribute in large measure  70 percent of the gross irrigated area, totalling 63 lakh hectare, in the state runs on borewells, dug deep and pumping out water in alarming quantities.

The state is already starved of water. It is peculiar in that it has very few perennial rivers; it's mostly seasonal rivers, fed by rainfall, that irrigate large swathes of Tamil Nadu. Without its ground water, the state cannot survive.

And the situation is particularly bad this year. The ground water table has further fallen by 5-10 metres this year. The average storage in the state's reservoirs is around 10 percent and falling rapidly. A number of large reservoirs, like Chembarambakkam (which supplies water to Chennai city), are at dead storage and pumpsets have been deployed by the state government to remove water from the dried beds.

Depletion of ground water this year has set alarm bells ringing among water resources experts in the state. Monsoon deficiency of over 60 percent in 2016 is not the only reason for the drought, they say; a whole set of factors have played a role in making Tamil Nadu's residents parched. And it all leads back to urbanisation and deforestation of the Western Ghats.

"The state's ground water economy is in very bad shape," said S Janakarajan, a Chennai-based water resources expert. "Year by year, we are extracting much more than we are recharging. The gap between existing ground water and recharge is widening. That is why we can see steep depletion, especially in districts near the ghats."

The Domino Effect

As the green cover of the ghats is aggressively removed to help real estate and tourism thrive, as is evident in the Niligiris' biosphere, or to cultivate plantation crops such as tea and coffee, a domino effect begins, according to scientists.

What happens when forest land in cleared for agriculture and cultivation of plantation crops is that the soil allows more rain water to run off into streams and rivulets, instead of percolating into the ground, since it isn't drawn by the roots of the trees in the natural forests.

The increased run-off of rain water then goes into streams which join rivers. This though is not necessarily a bad thing, unless the catchment areas of these rivers are shrunk. Take for instance, the Cauvery basin  the catchment of the Cauvery river, which supplies water to Karnataka and Tamil Nadu  that lies in and around Kodagu. This has been promoted aggressively as a tourist destination, and the amount of water that the catchment area can now hold has reduced considerably. This has meant that the increased flow of the river, due to deforestation, leads to flash floods in the now urbanised catchment areas.

"In the particular context of Cauvery, the water available in the basin is 740 tmcft. It has been about 30 years since this estimate was made. Since then a lot of deforestation has taken place, and the catchment region has developed; the Western Ghats, where the Cauvery originates, has changed. Regions upstream are choked and the water is stuck there. This can be extrapolated to all other river basins as well, because the problems are the same," Janakarajan explained.

But the problem does not end with just a flash flood. As more and more of the ghats get converted into agricultural land, real estate properties and human habitations, the need for water has gone up exponentially. This has resulted in pumping of water from the ground for the daily needs of the human population and for agriculture.

"There is some consensus on the fact that it is raining less in the Western Ghats, possibly, theoretically due to deforestation," said Veena Srinivasan, researcher with ATree. "But regardless of what happened in the Western Ghats, there is no doubt that we are pumping too much water from the ground. Groundwater levels are declining all over," she said.

Janakarajan added that the Tamil Nadu portion of the ghats is possibly facing more trouble as compared to other states, simply due to its higher extent of urbanisation. "Tamil Nadu's portion is worse off, due to deforestation, construction activities, crops' cultivation, roads construction  all this would mean loss of green cover," he said.

Attack and defence

Experts like Janakarajan warn that many parts of Tamil Nadu, especially in the districts lining the Western Ghats  Coimbatore, Tirupur and surrounds  are already moving towards depletion of groundwater. This is a situation where there is large scale extraction of groundwater but no recharging. "The next stage after depletion is desertification," he warned.

With water scarcity becoming a political talking point as well, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) working president MK Stalin, also leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, released a video, exhorting party cadre to desilt lakes and tanks in their areas.

As per the Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board's (TWAD) policy note of 2016-17, "During the years 2011-12, 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15, 3,348 recharge structures have been constructed at a cost of Rs 228.24 crore." These structures include check dams, recharge shafts and percolation ponds.

But this may not be enough. Experts agree that a multi-pronged approach, starting from conserving the Ghats to maintaining the small lakes and local ponds, is the only way forward, if ground water needs to be replenished. "The government is doing absolutely nothing. The only way to recharge is to replenish small water bodies. All the tanks and water bodies in Kancheepuram are dry. The water table is going down. It only leaves desalination as a solution, and even that is not ecologically sustainable," he added.

And if the rain gods do not smile upon Tamil Nadu in 2017, Soundararajan's nightmare might just become reality.

Part 1:Urbanisation demands see hills sacrificed to whims of mining, industry lobbies

Part 2:How deforestation saved ecologically-sensitive hills in Kerala

Part 3: Ambulance service supplies water to 700 families in Kerala's Kottayam

Part 4: In Kerala's Wayanad, acute water scarcity leading to man-animal conflict

Part 5: Cauvery suffers a slow death as tourism and urbanisation flourish
Vadodara: Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has emphasised on the need of providing quality education to all across the country to build a strong future for its citizens.

"After providing access to education for all, now the focus is to ensure quality education to students across the country. The government is working actively on it as it believes that only quality education has the potential of developing a good citizen with a strong character. Quality education is a must for all-round development of the country," he said.

Javadekar was here to attend an international youth convention at Sokhada village last night. The minister also hinted on formulating a law on regulating fee structure of private schools in the country. The Gujarat government has already framed a law on regulating fees charged by private schools in the state. We will discuss its provisions while formulating a law at the national level, he said.

Schools affiliated to CBSE have already been directed not to indulge in commercial activities like sale of books and uniforms because rules do not permit them do so, Javadekar said.

"We want healthy competition between private and public schools for providing quality education to students," he added. The HRD Ministry has invited feedback and suggestions from teachers, parents and stakeholders to make suitable changes in the curriculum as well, he said.

"Education is not something only between students and teachers. Parents, communities, society and o ther stakeholders should be involved in the process. This will bring productivity and improvement in education," the minister felt.

Speaking on the occasion, Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani said youth need to be provided with quality education and skill development for making India a powerful nation. Gujarat Education minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama, Jitendra Vaghani, President of the Gujarat unit of BJP; Rajendra Trivedi, Gujarat MoS for Sports; BJP MP Ranjanben Bhatt and city mayor Bharat Dangar city attended the convention.
The rising cases of anti-cow slaughter vigilantism, which was hitherto being seen as a phenomenon impacting only the members of minority communities, seems to have transcended religious boundaries and even Hindu men are now being targeted on suspicion of cow slaughter. In Madhya Pradesh's Ujjain town, four persons allegedly beat up a man after accusing him of slaughtering a cow.

According to a report in The Indian Express, the victim, Appu Malviya, has expressed his innocence while four persons have been arrested. A video of the incident that was widely shared on social media shows the four men beating Malviya with belts and repeatedly kicking and slapping him. "Gai katwate ho (you get cows killed)," he is told repeatedly, as his assaulters rained blows on his back.

"Its a shame that despite being a Hindu you are involved in cow slaughter," another man told him in the video.

The police have slapped several charges of criminal intimidation and causing hurt to another person against the arrested accused.

However, Ujjain superintendent of police Manohar Singh Varma told the publication that the dispute actually arose from a money-related tiff, and the attackers deliberately branded Malviya a "cow slaughterer" in order to mislead people and to get Malviya beaten up.

If the charges are indeed proven, this would be the first time a Hindu man is being targeted on suspicion of cow slaughter. In the past, Muslim and Dalit men have been at the receiving end of ire from the cow vigilantes. The waves of crimes being committed by the gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) started with the Dadri lynching in September 2015, where 60-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq was beaten to death in Uttar Pradesh.

Since then, as this report shows, there have been 13 more incidents, spreading across the country.
The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) will be declaring the results of the ICSE matriculation exam (Class X) on 15 May. Students who appeared for their ICSE exam this year may check their grades on the official website, cisce.org, at 10.30 am.

Students have been advised to log on to the website at the appropriate time, and keep their candidate information, like roll numbers etc, handy in order to avoid delays. The ICSE exams started on 10 March and concluded on 21 April this year.

According to a report on NDTV, the exams had to be delayed after the Election Commission of India announced Assembly polls in five states  Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur  and said it will take place in the months of February and March.

In all, 2,50,871 students registered for the examinations this year, the report mentioned, with 1,76,327 candidates for the ICSE exam and a further 74,544 for ISC (Class XII) exams. In all, there are 2,015 schools in India and abroad which offer students the ICSE course.

In 2016, the CISCE had declared results to both ICSE and ISC on the same date. As per a report on India Today, the total pass percentage for ICSE was 98.54 percent last year, while the pass percentage for ISC was 96.56 percent. Girls had outshone boys in both exams.

Moreover, last year, through Live Ink Character Recognition (LICR) technology, the board had declared the results two weeks earlier as compared to previous years, the report further added.
The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) has announced that it will not be declaring results to the ICSE Class X matriculation exam on Monday, as originally scheduled.

The results were supposed to be declared at 10.30 am on Monday morning, and students were asked to log on to the ICSE official website with their candidate information and login credentials well in time. Such was the load that the official website went down in the morning. However, the results were still not put up.

A report on NDTV confirmed that there will be a delay in announcing grades. CISCE officials said upcoming details would be put up on the website in the days to come. "It will be notified one week ahead on the website and in all leading newspapers," said the official.

The exams this year were delayed after the Election Commission of India announced Assembly polls to take place in five states across the country: Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur.

Accordingly, the board exams, which was supposed to begin on 27 February, was rescheduled for 10 March, and it also concluded later, on 21 April.

It is this delay in conducting the exams that could be the reason behind the delay in announcing the results as well.

Hindustan Times spoke to CISCE chief executive and secretary, Gerry Arathoon, who also confirmed this was the case. "The results are not going to be announced today. The evaluation work is still very much on. We will announce the exact date of results on the council's website much in advance. We cannot give you the dates as of now. We are working on it. And once the evaluation work ends we will announce the result dates," he said.
Beijing: India boycotted China's high-profile Belt and Road Forum, taking its protest over a controversial economic corridor traversing through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) to a new level despite Beijing's overtures to ensure New Delhi's participation.

Following India's boycott, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, taking a veiled swipe at New Delhi's move, said the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Cpec was an economic project open to all the nations in the region and it "must not be politicised". No Indian official of any level was present at the elaborate opening ceremony attended by 29 heads of state and

government along with top officials of the world bodies like the UN, the World Bank and the IMF.

India skipped the meeting due to its sovereignty concerns over the $50 billion Cpec, which passes through PoK. Sharif, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinge, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were among the world leaders who attended the meeting inaugurated by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The US sent a delegation led by Matt Pottinger, special assistant to the President and senior director for Asia at the National Security Council. China apparently saw India's boycott coming as no seat was allotted to it at the high-tech Convention Centre during the opening ceremony telecast live.

The event, however, was attended by a few Indian scholars representing think tanks, which took part in the group discussions. Skirting any references to India's absence at the meeting, Xi, in his address after inaugurating the Summit, said all countries should respect sovereignty.

"All countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major concerns," the 63-year-old leader said.

Xi said the Belt and Road initiative is "a project of the century" that will benefit people across the world. Dismissing assertions that the initiative was aimed at forming a "small group" of nations taking part in the One Belt and One Road (Obor) venture, Xi said China plans to build it as a road to peace and link his country to much of Asia, Europe and Africa.

"Pursuing the Belt and Road initiative, China has no intention to form a small group detrimental to stability," as the pursuit of the initiative requires a peaceful and stable environment, Xi said.

Xi, in his address, pledged to pump in a whopping USD 124 billion for projects that are part of the ambitious venture. In the run-up to the forum, China had sought to allay India's concerns over the CPEC, saying that the project has no bearing on its stand on the Kashmir issue which should be resolved between India and Pakistan through dialogue.

In another bid to allay India's concerns, Chinese ambassador to New Delhi Luo Zhaohui, during an address at a think tank in New Delhi, had offered to rename the Cpec, insisting that it was an economic cooperation and connectivity enhancement project devoid of "sovereignty issues".

However, China had later removed the remarks of its envoy from the transcript of his speech posted on the Chinese Embassy website. While the absence of India was a talking point among the 4,000 Chinese and foreign media registered to cover the event, there was no official comment from China on New Delhi giving the forum a miss.

Sharif, at the Summit, also avoided direct references to India's boycott and its objections to the CPEC but said the initiative should not be politicised. He asserted that the project is open for the regional countries to join.

"Let me make it very clear that Cpec is an economic undertaking open to all countries in the region. It has no geographical boundaries. It must not be politicised," Sharif said in his speech at the inaugural session.

"It is time we transcend our differences, resolve conflicts through diplomacy and leave legacy of peace for future generations," Sharif said, without directly referring to India.

Stating that the CPEC has emerged as the core and flagship project of China's Obor, he said, "Obor signifies that geo-economics must take precedence over geo-politics and that the centre of gravity should shift from conflict to cooperation. We see it as a path for overcoming terrorism and extremism."

The conference will end Mondaywith a joint declaration. The Belt and Road initiative includes a maze of roads and port projects. While Cpec is highlighted as "flagship project", the Belt and Roads includes the Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor, New Eurasian Land Bridge, China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor, China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor and 21st century Maritime Silk Road.
Dibrugarh: India's longest river bridge, capable of withstanding the weight of a 60-tonne battle tank, will be inaugurated in Assam close to the border with China on 26 May by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

With the inauguration of the 9.15-km-long Dhola-Sadiya bridge over the Brahmaputra river, the prime minister will kick off the celebrations of the NDA government's three years in office from Assam's eastern-most part.

The construction of the bridge is seen as an attempt by India to shore up its defence infrastructure along the Sino-Indian border. It is also part of the Centre's endeavour to improve connectivity in the region. It is 3.55 km longer than the Bandra-Worli sea-link in Mumbai, making it the longest bridge in India.

"The prime minister will dedicate the strategically important bridge to the nation on 26 May. It will bolster road connectivity in the Northeast as the bridge will be used by people of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh besides defence forces extensively," Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal told PTI.

The construction of the bridge began in 2011 at a cost of Rs 950 crore. Its has been designed to withstand the movement of military tanks. "Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have huge strategic value to the country. Since the bridge is located close to our border with China, it will help quick movement of military troops and artillery in times of conflict," Sonowal said.

The bridge is located 540 km from Assam capital Dispur and 300 km from Arunachal Pradesh capital Itanagar. The aerial distance to the Chinese border is less than 100 km.

After Kaliabhomora bridge near Tezpur, there is no bridge over the Brahmaputra for the next 375 km upstream till Dhola, where the new one has been constructed. Currently, all transportion between the two banks of the river is through water.

The bridge, when opened to public, will cut down the travel time between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh by as much as four hours.

As there is no civilian airport in Arunachal Pradesh and this bridge will help people of the state reach the nearest rail head in Tinsukia and the airport in Dibrugarh easily. Sonowal said the construction of the bridge was expedited after Modi assumed the charge in 2014. The bridge was originally scheduled to open in 2015.

The BJP government in Assam will complete one year in office on 24 May. The bridge is one of the key projects of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways in the northeast and has been built in public-private partnership.
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Over 40 local and regional politicians from EU member states will meet in Sofia on Friday 19 May to discuss the role of culture as a driver for social inclusion, social innovation and intercultural dialogue in Europe's cities and regions. The event is organised by the SEDEC commission of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR).

The seminar will be opened by the President of the European Committee of the Regions Markku Markkula, Mayor of Sofia Yordanka Fandakova and CoR member Malina Edreva (BG/EPP), who is the chair of the Committee on Education and Culture in the Sofia Municipal Council. Representatives of the European Commission will present the ongoing preparations for the European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018, which coincides with the Bulgarian presidency of the Council of the EU.

"Sofia has become a city of cultural and creative industries. We have invested in cultural infrastructure and the city has benefitted from the creation of new museums. We have had the first long-term municipal strategy for culture, even before the state, and it was made together with the artists and the people who are involved in cultural activities", Mayor Fandakova said.

Local and regional leaders from other EU countries will learn from Sofias experience in the field of management of cultural processes, funding culture via innovative public-private partnerships and regenerating spaces for cultural production. Member of European Parliament Eva (Paunova) Maydell will participate in a debate on the potential of culture in digital society and the role of technologies for cultural and social inclusion, with particular focus on creating employment opportunities. It is estimated that cultural and creative sectors provide over 80 000 jobs in Bulgaria.

Culture can be a key factor to the social inclusion of migrants, Roma community and people with disabilities. The Sofia city administration is addressing the challenges faced by the Roma via an innovative model which includes professional orientation and entrepreneurship training for young people. Much of the work at grassroots level is done by civil society organisations such as MultiKulti Collective , which is helping migrants to integrate in the Bulgarian society and educating local people through immersion in the customs, food and traditions of others. This and other similar cases will be presented to the participants.

The CoR's commission for Social Policy, Education, Employment, Research and Culture (SEDEC) is organising the seminar in partnership with the city of Sofia.
An Indian Army court on Monday exonerated Major Nitin Gogoi over the issue of tying a youth, Farooq Ahmad Dar, to the bonnet of a moving jeep in Jammu and Kashmir's Budgam on 9 April, which he said was done to "avoid" stone pelting on the armed forces.

The Army Court of Inquiry (COI) had ordered a probe after the police registered an FIR regarding the incident.

Army sources said Gogoi was praised by the Court of Inquiry for "presence of mind" to avoid casualties or injuries.

A video of Dar tied to the front of a moving army jeep to serve as a human shield against stone pelters had evoked anger and shock in Kashmir.

The army had said it is investigating the video. "In reference to the video showing a young man tied to an army jeep, the contents of the video are being verified and investigated," a defence spokesman had said in Srinagar.

Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah had expressed shock, posting on Twitter, "This young man was tied to the front of an army jeep to make sure no stones were thrown at the jeep? This is just so shocking!"

He had called for an inquiry: "A warning can be heard (in the video) saying stone pelters will meet this fate. This requires an urgent inquiry and follow up now."

The video had reportedly been shot in the Beerwah area of Budgam district, where miscreants disrupted polling during Sunday's bypoll to the Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency by pelting stones. It is being widely shared on social media in Kashmir and is drawing condemnation.

In the clip, an army soldier could be heard saying, "Those who throw stones will meet the same fate."

The video showed the army jeep moving ahead of an army patrol, while some villagers could be overheard that the youth had been picked by the army.

The Jammu and Kashmir police later filed an FIR against the army. The police registered the FIR against the army's 53 Rashtriya Rifles unit in the Beerwah police station in Budgam district.

According to the report, the investigation into the matter had been ordered by chief minister Mehbooba Mufti after the video went viral online. The army, meanwhile, conducted its own internal probe into the matter.

The Centre also decided to back Gogol, after an army probe concluded that the officer was forced to to take the decision as a last-minute resort to stop rampaging stone-pelters.

With inputs from agencies
Jammu: Invoking Atal Bihari Vajpayee, National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah on Sunday appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to declare a "unilateral truce" along the Indo-Pak border during the holy month of Ramzan. The "bold" move will show that India wants to have peace and is ready to sit together to resolve the issue, the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister told reporters.

"I will appeal (to Prime Minister Narendra Modi). Ramzan is approaching. It is just a few days away. It will better if they announce a unilateral truce," Abdullah said here, a day after two persons were killed in heavy shelling by Pakistan along the Line of Control (LoC) in Rajouri district. The NC leader's statement drew a sharp reaction from the BJP with Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh asking why he was not giving similar advice to Pakistan, which has frequently violated the 2003 Indo-Pak ceasefire along the border and targeted civilian settlements.

Asked about the ceasefire violations by Pakistan, Abdullah said that despite the hostile situation in Jammu and Kashmir and on the borders, former prime minister Vajpayee had announced a unilateral ceasefire against anti-terror operations in the year 2000. "It has become a serious problem. To resolve this, we have to take decisions. There was a very serious problem...when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister and he took a bold decision, went to Lahore and announced unilateral ceasefire during the month of Ramdan," he said.

Announcing a unilateral truce against terror operations, Vajpayee had on November 19, 2000 said in a statement, "I hope that our gesture will be fully appreciated and all violence in the State and infiltration across the Line of Control and the International Border will cease and peace will prevail". Later in 2003, the Indo-Pak ceasefire came into force. The government had last month said that Pakistani security forces had violated the ceasefire 268 times in the last one year.

Between April 2016 and March 2017, the maximum of 88 violations were witnessed in November 2016 followed by 78 in October 2016 and 22 in March this year. "Time has come when both countries should move forward towards it. Four wars have been fought and except death and destruction, we have got nothing," Abdullah said. The holy month of 'Ramadan' will begin towards May-end.

The NC leader said that he had impressed on the Prime Minister during their recent meeting that there was an immediate need to take a political initiative on Kashmir issue and the situation in the valley should not be looked as a law and order problem. "We shared our viewpoint on Kashmir situation. I told him that it is very important to take a political initiative. It is not a mere law and order problem. We have to think beyond the law and order angle.

"A Parliament delegation came (to Kashmir). They gave a report on the situation but nothing was done. The interlocutor's report has not been implemented. I told him you need to work fast on it and take an urgent initiative," he said. Abdullah said the situation in Kashmir "is getting bad" and tension is increasing on the borders. "A situation should not be allowed which will result in a war. It is not good for us. It will only cause destruction.So there is need to have talks," he said.

Asked about Hizb commander Zakir Moosa's statement that militants are fighting for Islam in Kashmir, Abdullah said, "Where in Islam is it written that we have to wage a war and kill innocents. Please show me the book in which it is written. "It is a state of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists. Does Islam say kill innocents? If you kill one innocent person, you will go to hell.

"It (Kashmir) is political issue. It cannot be resolved through a war. It will be resolved through talks. You have to keep the door open for the commencement of talks," he said.
New Delhi: India is giving a befitting reply to ceasefire violations by Pakistan, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on Monday. He said people living in the border areas of Jammu and Kashmir are giving positive feedback about the Indian defence forces' response to the ceasefire violation by the neighbouring nation. "India is giving a befitting reply to ceasefire violations.The effective retaliatory action by India is also having a deterrent effect," said Singh, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

He said people living in the border areas said they have not seen such a good reply from India on incidents of cross-border firing during the past years. "I have met people living in that (border) area. They said there were incidents of ceasefire violations in past also but the kind of response being given now from the Indian side is encouraging.

"The kind of retaliatory action being seen now was never witnessed before," Singh, a Lok Sabha MP from Jammu and Kashmir's Udhampur constituency, told reporters. Pakistani troops had heavily shelled areas along the LoC in Rajouri district for the second consecutive day on Sunday, causing heavy damage to buildings and forcing an evacuation of a large number of border dwellers.
The split between Hurriyat and militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen has emerged on account of the formers viewpoint on the Kashmir issue being "political" rather than "religious". This accords scrutiny to the substantial standpoint that the Kashmir unrest is not just a law and order problem.

In a video released few days ago, Zakir Musa, former militant commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, threatened Kashmirs separatist leadership in these unequivocal and categorical words: "We warn these Hurriyat people not to interfere in our matters and stick to their dirty politics, otherwise we will cut their heads and hang them in Lal Chowk."

This accords scrutiny to what the close observers and researchers of the Valleys state of affairs have proved in their writings and objective research findings. Kashmir is in a "battle over souls" which cannot be fought on television screens or in political galleries.

The most staggering development in the ongoing Kashmir unrest is that radical Islamism has backfired in the valley. Kashmiri journalist Sameer Yasir has candidly exposed the latest episode of the break-up between the Hurriyat separatists and the Hizbul Mujahidin religionists on purely hardcore religious lines in an article on Firstpost. Yasirs first-hand account depicts how the Hurriyats separatist leadership which has been "invoking Islam" to lend moral legitimacy to the armed insurgency against New Delhi is "changing for good".

A day after Zakir Musa, who took over the reins of Hizbul Mujahideen from Burhan Wani, called for establishing Islamic caliphate in Kashmir, stating that militants were not fighting for 'freedom', the unified Hurriyat Conference, in a strong and indirect rebuttal, said those fighting for the imposition of Islamic rule have nothing to do with the 'freedom movement'" the Kashmir-based journalist reported.

But there is no need to be optimistic about how radical Islamism has backfired in the valley. It will only fuel the religious passions in Kashmiri youths, who are misguided by the preachers of Salafiyah al-Jihadiyah. Salafist jihadism is very active in the valley. Firstpost editors have rightly noted that the radicalisation that was spawned by Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosques mushrooming in the Valley, only aided the process.

Clearly, there is no need for the Indian establishment to be optimistic about the fresh split between the Hurriyat and Hizbul Mujahidin either. It is not going to augur well by any stretch of political imagination. The gigantic task at hand is to rethink the modalities about countering and dismantling the Salafist-Jihadist influence in the Valley.

This writer has visited Jammu and Kashmir almost seven times studying how the extremist religious rhetoric is catching the imagination of the new Kashmiri generation. During most of these visits, the author encountered the Salafi-occupied madrasas and mosques which were earlier in the hands of Sufi-minded Muslims of Kashmir.

The most virulent texts of extremist literature being taught in the Valleys Salafi seminaries are part of these books: Ibn Taimiyas Majmua Fatawa (compilation of his fatwas), Ibn Abdul Wahhabs Kitab al-Tawheed (book of monotheism), Ismail Shaheeds Taqwiyatul Iman (Strengthening of the Religion) and Syed Ahmad Shaheeds Sirat-e-Mustaqeem (The Straight Path). These textbooks are full of exclusivist, Islam-supremacist and extremist thoughts and lacks anything that can help the age-old syncretic Kashmiri tradition to survive in the Valley.

It is not difficult to find how separatism and radicalism are being fed through Salafism into the minds of the misguided Kashmiri youth. Separatists and jihadists, both, are "first and foremost" enemies of the Valleys age-old Sufi tradition or Kashmiriyat (the philosophy of coexistence), as noted in this Firstpost article.

When the author asked the Salafi trustees of a few mosques as to why a sizeable number of books and daily sermons (khutbah) which castigates the Rishi-Sufi tradition of the valley, are preached after the prayers, especially the afternoon daily prayer (Asr), they bluntly replied: "because it is contaminated with the Mushrikana (polytheistic) and Mubtadiana (deviant) culture and customs (tahzib-o-rusoom)".

In the age-old Kashmir, both Sunni and Shia Muslims showed a wide embrace for the valleys syncretic cultural practices, even though they were originally part of Vaishnavism or Shaivism. Subsequently, their Sufi narrative is marked as Rishi-Sufism in the Indian history. Thus, the evident reason why both separatists groups  Hizbul Mujahideen and Hurriyat  abhor Sufism is its call for religious pluralism and peaceful coexistence in place of a religio-fascism and Islam supremacism in the valley.

Not many know that the Kashmiri dargahs like the Sufi mosques and madarasas are now in the acute grip of the well-funded Salafi masters. An ignorance or oblivion to this fact creates a grave misconception about the entire historical role of Rishi-Sufism in the Valley.

Today, both the hardcore philosophers and apologists of radical Islamism in the guise of "liberal thinkers" accuse Sufism, as part of Islam, of playing a "sinister role" in helping the peaceful Kashmiris turn into angry stone pelters. They cite instances of stone pelting which were seen outside a few Sufi shrines in the Valley. But they conveniently hide the fact that the most leading dargahs like the Dargah of Hazratbal in Srinagar are no longer running under the patronage or guidance of the Sufi ideologues.

The Wahhabis have catapulted many Kashmiri dargahs from being the bastion of religious syncretism into a ground of creeping radicalism. This phenomenon is exponentially arising now. A top army official in Kashmir has also authenticated the fact that radicalisation of the Kashmiri youth is rampant on all societal levels. He recently stated: "Public support to terrorists, their glorification and increased radicalisation are issues of concern, as reported in The Indian Express.

While the Salafi-jihadist ideologues have penetrated even in the syncretic places of worship and have worked out a completely misguiding theology of religious extremism and exclusivism in Kashmir, the author proposes these five action points, as urgent and long-lasting tasks. They offer a practical and result-oriented solution to the growing radicalisation in the valley:

First, after an ethnographic study and survey of the Kashmiri people and their changing religious ethos and cultural practices, an outreach to the people should be initiated with an all-round campaign to restore the declining Rishi-Sufism.

Second, dargahs and khanqahs (Sufi shrines) in the Valley as well as the mosques should be handed over to Sufi practitioners and spiritual Islams followers. It should be ensured that Salafi-oriented imams in the mosques and khadims (servants) in the shrines are replaced by the communitys caretakers with the help of the state. Also, they ought to be well-trained to tackle the onslaught of the Wahhabi trail of Islamism.

Third, Sufi study centres should be established in the Islamic and Arabic departments or as independent study centres in the Kashmiri universities and colleges. Regrettably, even the University of Kashmir in Srinagar, which is a premier university in Jammu and Kashmir, is bereft of the Sufi discourses with its Islamic studies department repleted with Wahhabi literature and influence. Even the Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah University, named after an eminent Kashmiri Muslim mystic, is lost to the ideological rivals of Sufi Islam.

Fourth, Kashmiri students largely enrolled in the Indian universities and madarasas should be prepared to de-radicalise the militants and the separatists. An instance can be seen in the largest Sunni-Sufi Islamic seminary in Keralas Markaz Saqafa Sunniya (Sunni Cultural Centre). It imparts an Islamic curriculum of peace and counter-radicalism to thousands of Kashmiri students of varied ages and has allocated a large separate study centre "Kashmiri Home" or "Emirate House". Starting from Class V to Class XII, scores of Kashmiri students are enrolled at the Calicut-based Sunni Cultural Centre, which runs various institutions, including the Markaz English Medium School at Karanthur. Most of the students come from a destitute and orphaned background following the Kashmir unrest, according to a report in The Hindu.

Fifth, there's a need for increased vigilance about the literature being propagated in the vulnerable Kashmiri society. Youths continue to fall prey to the twisted interpretations of Islamic texts, mostly available in the extremist Urdu and Arabic magazines  monthly, weekly and fortnightly  such as Sada-e-Mujahid (Voice of the Jihadists), Zarb-e-Momin (Fight of the Believers), Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of the Prophet), Rah-e-Wafa (Path of Loyalty), Hateen, Murabetoon, Al-Qalam and several online magazines like Islamic State English magazine Dabiq, Al-Qaedas magazine Inspire and Talibans Urdu magazine Nawa-e-Afghan Jihad. The government should set up tech-savvy centres to regularly monitor extremist news feeds and the jihadist rhetoric of these Urdu and Arabic media outlets.

These five action points will greatly help to brainstorm on how Kashmiriat can be restored to the Kashmiris.

The author is a scholar of classical Islamic studies, cultural analyst and researcher in media and communication studies. He tweets as @grdehlvi and can be contacted at grdehlavi@gmail.com
Srinagar: Fresh clashes broke out between student protesters and security forces near a college campus in the heart of the summer capital on Monday.

According to police, the students of S P College took out a protest rally from the college against the "highhandedness" of security forces in the 17 April incident at Degree College Pulwama.

The students tried to march towards M A Road but were stopped by the police, ensuing clashes between both the sides, a police official said.

The students threw stones at the forces who fired a few tear smoke shells to contain them, the official said.

He said the clashes were going on when the last reports came in.

The S P college runs two more educational institutions S P Higher Secondary School and Women's College.

The authorities ordered a suspension of classes at S P Higher Secondary School as a precautionary measure. The students of the school had clashed with the security forces last week.

The police raid on the state-run college in Pulwama had triggered widespread protests by students across Kashmir on 17 April. The clashes have been going on intermittently since then, prompting authorities to suspend classes in the higher educational institutions for over a week in April.
Zakir Rashid Bhat alias Musa, the former engineering student and successor to Burhan Wani, has dissociated himself from Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, his parent organisation, over ideological issues, saying if the organisation "does not represent me, I also do not represent Hizb". The war of words erupted after Musa, 34, threatened to behead the Hurriyat leaders for calling Kashmirs ongoing struggle "political" rather than "Islamic", and vowed to hang those advocating a secular State at Lal Chowk in Srinagar.

The threat was, according to some commentators, aimed at the moderate faction of Hurriyat Conference and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front; both have been maintaining that political aspirations of people have to be respected and distinguished from religion. The truth may be hard to swallow, but Musa is saying exactly what the separatist leaders in Kashmir have been propagating to mobilise their cadre since the beginning of the armed insurgency that broke out in the region in 1989 after decades of political discontent.

At the heart of this 'secular versus Islamic' State debate are the events of 1989 when the majority of militant groups and parties used to mobilise people on the rallying cry of Islamic slogans that were anything but secular in nature.

"Hum kya chahte? Azaadi (What do we want? Freedom)," the crowds would chant and still do. Then it would be followed quickly by another slogan, "Azadi ka matlab kya? La Ilah Ha Illallah (What is the meaning of Azadi? There is no God but Allah)" and "Yahan kya chalega? Nizame-i-Mustafa. (What will be implemented here? The order of the Prophet Mohammad)".

"The undercurrent, tone and tenure of these slogans, leave aside the movement, was Islamic, but one cant say with assurance that people, who raised these slogans, had any idea of what they were chanting. But Islam was a rallying cry," said historian Fida Hussain.

However, many disagree, including Shakeel Bakshi, separatist leader and Islamic Students League patron. "Even at that time, people had their own ideology and different view points."

Gowhar Geelani, a political commentator based in Srinagar, says Kashmirs struggle has drawn strength from multiple identities that include, Kashmiri identity, Muslim identity and religious identity.

"The more there has been religious ascendency in India, whether it's Narendra Modi becoming the prime minister or Yogi Adityanath becoming chief minister  although through a democratic process. There has been counter-radicalisation in the Valley in a certain section of the population. But the majority would like to separate religion from politics," Geelani told Firstpost.

In early nineties, faith was utilized for political mobilization including by groups like Jamaat-e-Islami and many others who sought refuge in religion to address the political problem.

In an audio message, Musa said on Saturday: "Geelani is saying azaadi for Islam and I do not have differences with him. We want imposition of Shariat."

But the militant commander seems to have little idea that the real reason for the friction between Jamaat-e-Islami, a constituent of the erstwhile Hurriyat Conference and later Hurriyat led by Geelani, was that the Jamaat wanted to take religion and politics together but Geelani wanted to focus only on the political part (the Kashmir issue) and overlook religion for the time being.

"The basic problem is that there is no Islamic Shariat being followed and there is no Islamic rule. In a secular State, we cant implement Islam properly," Muhammad Abdullah Wani, the former chairman of the Jama'at-e-Islami, said in an interview. "Today, Jama'at-e-Islami is not associated with any of the political or religious organisation for the very same reason and we are more into social activities," he added.

Jama'at is known for its role in the separatist movement in the 1990s, when its cadres were part and parcel of almost every activity. "The slogans that reverberated were never like, say, 'What do we want? A secular State'," a senior police officer, who has been at the forefront of fighting insurgency in the Valley, said, "One day, the monster was going to come home to roost."

For example, the Jama'at-e-Islami, the political formation that gave birth to the Hizbul-Mujahideen, used Islam for political mobilisation in the Valley. It bore the brunt of the turmoil. Its cadre was murdered in broad daylight, almost on a daily basis, before it choose another path of organising rallies against moral corruption and western cultural influences.

Jama'at was founded by Pakistan's Abul Ala Mawdudi, a renowned theologian and ideologue of 'Political Islam', way back in 1941. Its basic objective was to promote moral values and Islamic practices. In Jammu and Kashmir, its central concern was freeing Islam of the syncretic folk practices he believed had corrupted the essence of the faith.

The Hizbul Mujahideen, of which Musa was a part until Saturday, was one of the organisations that started the insurgency in the Valley and it was dependent on Jamaat-e-Islami for religious motivation, having grown out of the movement. "Religion has and always will be used to draw inspiration for the affairs of the State but not for running the State," Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the head priest of Kashmir and Hurriyat leader, said, "The State has to have secular credentials where minorities are protected and rights of dispossessed assured."

If one goes by the social media feeds in Kashmir, a majority of the people have disapproved of Musa's statement, but invoking Islam was the foundation on which the political struggle in Kashmir was built. Now, Frankenstein's monster seems to have come back to hunt its creators.
The Hague: India and Pakistan on Monday crossed swords at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Kulbhushan Jadhav's case with New Delhi demanding the immediate suspension of his death sentence and Islamabad accusing it of using the world body as a stage for "political theatre" through a "misconceived" plea.

The two neighbours last faced off at the ICJ 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft. India took the Jadhav case to the world court, accusing Pakistan of violating the Vienna Convention and conducting a "farcical trial" for convicting Jadhav without a "shred of evidence".

After hearing the arguments of the two sides, the court said it will issue its order on India's request for provisional measures "as soon as possible".

"The date on which this order will be delivered at a public sitting will be duly communicated to the parties," the court said.

India demanded the immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the ICJ was over.

India made a forceful submission as the ICJ began hearing the case of the 46-year-old former Navy officer who was arrested on 3 March 2016 and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

"Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed," joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs Deepak Mittal told the court in his opening remarks.

Representing India, lead attorney Harish Salve said, "The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention."

Following India's arguments, Pakistan, in its submission before the UN's highest judicial body, said India's application on Jadhav, was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed.

India has seen it fit to use the International Court of Justice as a stage for "political theatre" but "we will not respond in kind", Mohammad Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office said in his opening remarks in response to India's submissions earlier on Monday.

The ICJ also denied permission to Pakistan to play a purported "confessional" video of Jadhav at the public hearing.

Representing Pakistan, lawyer Khawar Qureshi said India has sought to persuade this court that Pakistan intends to execute Jadhav within days.

"Simply by referring to the clemency process available as a right to commander Jadhav. A period of 150 days is provided for in this regard which even if started on 10 April 2017, which is the date of conviction at first instance, could extend to well beyond August 2017.

"There is also, of course, the potential for the writ petition of the High Court to be invoked as we believe India must be well aware," he said.

Earlier, Salve said Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access.

"The graver the charges, the greater the need for continued adherence of the Vienna Convention. Jadhav has been in judicial custody without any communication with his family," he said.

The rights of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are sacrosanct, Salve said, citing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that recognises that no one can be arbitrarily deprived of their lives.

India had not been given the copy of the charges filed against Jadhav, Salve said.

"The need for a wholesome compliance is greater when charges are serious. We want appropriate legal representation for Kulbhushan Jadhav," he said.

Not just had all requests for consular access fallen on "deaf ears", the trial was conducted without providing Jadhav his rights. Pakistan did not even respond to Jadhav's mother's pleas to see her son.

Human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan and the trial had been vitiated, India argued.

Though Pakistan says Jadhav has the right to appeal, two-star generals will hear his mercy plea, Salve stressed, questioning the impartiality of the process.

India asserted that it wants the ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

On India invoking the Vienna Convention, Qureshi said, "The Vienna convention article 36 which adopted to set up standards of conduct particularly concerning communications and contact with nationals of the sending state which would contribute to the development of the friendly relations among nations...the observation we made immediately is this is unlikely to apply in the context of a spy, terrorist send by a state to engage in acts of terror."

Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On 8 May, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On 9 May, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will hold public hearings on Monday in the case of retired Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court. The announcement was made by ICJ on 10 May, a day after it stayed Jadhav's execution following India's initiation of proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations". According to the ICJ statement, an oral observation by India will begin at 10 am (1.30 pm IST) and go on till 11.30 am, following which oral observation by Pakistan will begin at 3 pm and is expected to go on till 4.30 pm.

The ICJ will have an open hearing on the Jadhav execution case involving India and Pakistan at The Hague. With the court involved, it is no longer a battle of bilateral wills. Also, the case has strong ramifications for India which has never allowed to make the bilateral issue with Pakistan multi-lateral. The last time it did so was in 1971. Of late, several countries seem to have taken up the cry to "interfere" in resolving the Kashmir dispute.

"The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, will hold public hearings on Monday, May 15, 2017...in the proceedings instituted by India on May 8, 2017 against Pakistan. The hearings will be devoted to the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by India," the ICJ said in a release.

India had told ICJ that Jadhav "will be subjected to execution unless the court indicates provisional measures directing the government of Pakistan to take all measures necessary to ensure that he is not executed until th(e) Court's decision on the merits" of the case.

India pointed out that Jadhav's execution "would cause irreparable prejudice to the rights claimed by India".

Noting that India has been informed by the ICJ that an action has been initiated on "provisional measures" sought by New Delhi, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay in New Delhi said there is "legal juridical procedure" that will be followed.

Earlier, the ICJ president wrote to the Pakistani prime minister, saying, "In my capacity as president of the court,.. I call upon your excellency's government, pending the court's decision on the request for the indication of provisional measures to act in such a way as will enable any order the Court may make on this request to have its appropriate effects."

On whether the "provisional measures" granted by the ICJ including a halt to Jadhav's execution was binding on Pakistan, Baglay referred to the clauses in ICJ rules which said "a request for the indication of provisional measures shall have priority over all other cases".

India had submitted that it has information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan" on 3 March, 2016, and that Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on 25 March, 2016, a ICJ press release had said on Sunday.

Jadhav, 46, was given the death sentence by the Field General Court Martial in Pakistan last month, evoking a sharp reaction in India, which warned Pakistan of consequences and damage to bilateral ties if the "pre-meditated murder" was carried out. Jadhav was sentenced to death for "espionage and subversive activities".

India acknowledged that Jadhav had served with the navy, but denied that he has any connection with the government. India has also handed over to Pakistan an appeal by Jadhav's mother, initiating a process to get his conviction overturned.

Pakistan may not accept ICJ's jurisdiction

Pakistan may not accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ, which has stayed Jadhav's execution, a media report said.

According to Dunya News, the attorney general of Pakistan was briefed on Jadhav's case after the ICJ stayed his execution of the 46-year-old Indian, who has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of "spying".

In the briefing, it was stated that Pakistan does not accept the international courts jurisdiction to order the state of Pakistan on issues that involve its national stability, the channel said.

Pakistan will pursue case forcefully, despite 'clear disadvantage'

A set of recommendations were send to the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Office, strategising how to plead Pakistan's point of view before the ICJ on Jadhav's conviction.

"We have sent our recommendations to the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Office," attorney general Ashtar Ausaf told The Dawn on Friday.

Ausaf said a robust reply would be advanced by Pakistan in a forceful manner, refuting all allegations levelled against it and also pointing out atrocities India was committing in Kashmir, the report said.

He said it was necessary to keep all measures and options confidential, so that the "other side might not know the strategy being devised".

Ausaf is expected to lead the Pakistan side before the ICJ. But he did not rule out the possibility of engaging someone from abroad, saying the endeavour would be to hire the best minds on international law to advance Pakistan's standpoint. However, he acknowledged that time was short since the hearing would begin on 15 May.

However, speaking to The Express Tribune, a senior Pakistani government official said that that Islamabad also feels it's "clearly at a disadvantage" in the case because the ICJ has scheduled hearings in the case as early as Monday.

Pakistan is "clearly at a disadvantage because of the paucity of time, logistical support and finding legal expertise", a senior government official told The Express Tribune.

India, Pakistan return to ICJ after 18 years

The previous case related to shooting down of Pakistan's maritime reconnaissance aircraft Atlantique by the Indian Air Force (IAF) in the Kutch region on 10 August 1999, killing all 16 naval personnel on board. Pakistan claimed the plane was brought down in its airspacee and sought $60 million in damages from India for the incident. A 16-judge bench of the court on 21 June, 2000 voted 14-2 to dismiss Pakistan's claim. The decision was announced by bench president Gilbert Guillaume of France at a public sitting. The verdict was final and there was no appeal.

The ICJ found that it has no jurisdiction to entertain the application filed by Pakistan on 21 September, 1999.

Public hearings in the case titled 'Aerial incident of 10 August, 1999 (Pakistan vs India)' lasted four days ending 6 April, 2000. Arguments centred on the court's jurisdiction in the case which had to be determined before its merits could be considered by the 16 judges.

The Atlantique case was ousted by the ICJ on the issue of jurisdiction and not on merits. Both parties had agreed that the question of jurisdiction would be decided first and only then would the issue of merits be taken up.

Guillaume said the court would first have to decide whether it had the jurisdiction to go into the case as contended by New Delhi after the Indian delegation led by the then Attorney General Soli Sorabjee, raised preliminary objections to its jurisdiction.

Pakistan opened the first round of oral arguments, India replying them, and then Pakistan following with its second round, with India making its response thereto.

India argued that the court did not have jurisdiction in the matter, citing an exemption it had filed way back in 1974 to exclude disputes between India and other Commonwealth states, and disputes covered by multilateral treaties. Sorabjee told the court that Pakistan was "solely responsible" for the incident and Islamabad must "bear the consequences of its own acts."

Pakistan's Attorney General Aziz Munshi had sought a speedy resolution, saying its application had to be concluded quickly so that it did not remain an irritant in Indo-Pak relations.

Pakistan had also sought to politicise the case by referring to the Kashmir issue, the Kargil conflict, Indo-Pak relations and alleged motives for the shooting. Pakistan wanted the court to intervene while India was opposed to its assumption of jurisdiction on the basis of Islamabad's application. It urged the court to "dismiss the objections raised by India and accept its jurisdiction." India maintained that none of Pakistan's arguments is 'sound' and does not provide a basis for invoking the court's jurisdiction.

Sorabjee expressed happiness with the court's verdict. "We are very happy. The court has accepted all our contentions," he had said. Former supreme court judge B P Jeevan Reddy and Pakistan's former Attorney General Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada were co-opted into the bench as ad-hoc judges.

As per ICJ rules, when it does not include a judge possessing the nationality of the state party to a case, the state may appoint a person to sit as a judge ad-hoc for the purpose of the case.

The court also recalled that its lack of jurisdiction does not relieve States of their obligation to settle their disputes by peaceful means.

The choice of those means admittedly rests with the parties under Article 33 of the UN Charter, it said, adding, they are nonetheless under an obligation to seek such a settlement, and to do so in good faith in accordance with the Charter.

As regards India and Pakistan, that obligation was restated more particularly in the Simla Accord of 2 July 1972. Moreover, the Lahore Declaration of 21 February 1999 reiterated "the determination of both countries to implementing the Simla Agreement," it said.

Accordingly, the court reminded the parties of their obligation to settle their disputes by peaceful means, and in particular, the dispute arising out of the Atlantique incident in conformity with the obligations which they have undertaken.

With inputs from agencies
On Monday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began its hearing on Indias plea for suspension of retired naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhavs death penalty at The Hague. A Pakistan military court had sentenced the Indian national to death on charges of "espionage and subversive activities" on 10 April, this year.

After India concluded its oral observation at 3 pm, it's now Pakistan's turn to present its side of the story. Pakistan's oral representation began at 6.30 pm and is likely to continue till 8 pm. Pakistan is being represented by Khawar Qureshi at the ICJ.

You can watch the live proceedings here:



On 8 May, India had moved a petition before the ICJ to seek justice for Jadhav, 46, alleging a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan after 16 requests for consular access to the former naval officer were consistently denied.

A Pakistani military court gave Jadhav the death sentence for alleged espionage and subversive activities. Pakistan has also not responded to the request for visas applied by Jadhav's family.

Jadhav was arrested on 3 March, 2017.
The first round in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) saw India's representatives point out that not only was Jadhav 'kidnapped' and his confession extracted in military captivity, but his chargesheet wasn't even provided to New Delhi, which consequently has no idea of what the charges filed against him actually are. Perhaps most striking was eminent lawyer Harish Salve's statement that if Jadhav was to be executed, it would constitute no less than a 'war crime.

Let's recap.

On Monday, the ICJ began proceedings in the case of India versus Pakistan relating to the death sentence handed by a Pakistani military court to former Indian naval officer Jadhav. In India's corner at the Hague were Joint Secretary (Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran) Deepak Mittal (principal agent), Joint Secretary VD Sharma (co-agent), Salve (counsel), Kajal Bhat, first secretary, Embassy of India in the Netherlands (advisor) and Chetna N Rai (junior counsel).

Both sides have been given 90 minutes to make their observations, and the 11-judge bench heard India's observations first  at 10 am local time (1.30 pm IST), with Mittal delivering opening remarks.

Noting that "(an) execution will cause irreparable damage to rights of India and Jadhav", Mittal told the court that New Delhi only found out about the Jadhav being sentenced to death from news reports, and that the basis for this was an alleged confession. "Pakistan has not provided the chargesheet or any documents on the case despite repeated requests," Mittal said, adding, "It is clear that Jadhav has been denied of his right to seek legal counsel. Jadhav's parents have applied for a visa to travel to Pakistan, which has fallen on deaf ears."

Co-agent Sharma told the court that Pakistan had failed to comply with all its legal obligations by denying consular access to Jadhav ever since he was arrested in March 2016. India, he stated, is seeking relief in the form of immediate suspension of the death sentence. Sharma added that the ICJ must restrain Pakistan from "giving effect to the sentence awarded by the military court" and to direct it to annul its decision.

Noting that Pakistan cannot deny consular access to Jadhav, Salve began his observations with a set of precedents to this case:

- Plausibility context in Costa Rica versus Nicaragua case.

- In Paraguay versus USA, the court decided that government of US was asked to take steps to give rights of access of Paraguan national.

- In Germany versus USA, court held that execution of the German national was an irreparable damage to justice.

Demanding legal representation for Jadhav in this 'grave and urgent' case, Salve pointed out "India will always maintain that (Jadhav) has been kidnapped from Iran. Jadhav has been denied the right to defend himself. The 'confession' was extracted in military custody. No indications were given about whether Jadhav can seek or receive clemency."

As if to articulate the concerns of a nation, Salve pronounced, "We fear that Jadhav will be executed before this trial ends."

Pakistan will begin its oral observations at 3 pm local time (6.30 pm IST).

Click here for live updates on the proceedings at the International Court of Justice
Amarkantaka, Madhya Pradesh: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Amarkantaka in Madhya Pradesh on Monday to pay obeisance to River Narmada on the occasion of the concluding ceremony of the 148-day 'Namami Devi Narmada Sewa Yatra'. The prime minsiter will also release a blueprint on conservation of the river that originates in Amarkantaka, which lies on the bed of Vindhyachal range of mountains and development of the area as a major tourism hub.

The Namami Devi Narmada Sewa Yatra was launched on 11 December, 2016 by Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan  that involved people walking along the river from its origin to its point of meeting the Gulf of Khambhat in the Arabian Sea, and back to its point of origin in Amarkantak. The major objectives of the yatra were to increase awareness about the need for conservation of the river and the sustainable use of its resources, to promote plantation along its banks to protect the riparian zone, to promote sustainable agricultural practises and to identify sources of its pollution and to eliminate those. The 148-day yatra covered 1,100 villages and a distance of 3,350 kilometres.

A drive from Jabalpur  one of the important cities of the state that is situated quite close to the Narmada and famous for marble rock formations of Bhedaghat along the banks of the river  to Amarkantak is an introduction to the rich natural wealth of the state. Long stretches of forests are interspersed with lush, green farms, providing a perfect relief to eyes used to only concrete jungles with noise and pollution. This, indeed, is the land of Narmada as the river is never too far away from anywhere in this part of the state. The eastern part of the state, in fact, is bound by the civilisation that Narmada has nurtured.

When Modi finally pays his homage to the river as part of the function curated to mark the end of Narmada Sewa Yatra and to take a pledge for a clean Narmada, it will be a historic as well as politically-beneficial moment for Chouhan. Madhya Pradesh will be going to the polls at the end of the year. This Narmada Sewa Yatra has been a big people's outreach programme for Chouhan who has been at the helm of this central Indian state for three consecutive terms. This has also provided him an emotional connect with the public of the state for whom the Narmada is as significant as the River Ganga, or even perhaps more at times, as it is worshipped as a 'mother'.

Narmada, the virgin river

The river Narmada, geographically, is the only major river in the country that drains in the Arabian Sea after flowing from east to west, unlike all other rivers of the peninsula that flow from west to east and drain into the Bay of Bengal. Flowing across the breadth of Madhya Pradesh (crossing 16 districts and covering 1,077 kilometres), the river is rightfully known as the lifeline of the state. It's worshipped throughout the year through various festivals, which is not a surprise considering the waters of the river quench the thirst of 40 million people and irrigate 1.7 million hectares of land.

Anybody familiar with the day-to-day happenings in Madhya Pradesh would be well aware of the huge emotional connect the Narmada Yatra has generated with the people of the state. The people of the state take pride in Madhya Pradesh remaining one of the 'least touched-by-tourism' states of the country, which has helped in preserving major parts of its rich natural resources as they were.

Importance of Amarkantaka

Amarkantaka, situated on the Vindhyachal mountain range (Vindhya Parbat) at Anuppur district in Madhya Pradesh. Also known as the 'Vindhyan Supergroup' is one of the largest and thickest sedimentary successions in the world. This small place, yet one of the holiest in India, has ecological, religious, spiritual and tourism importance. Besides the Narmada, another important river, Sone originates from Amarkantaka and passes through Uttar Pradesh and Odisha on its way to Bihar.

Dehri city in Rohtas district in Bihar also known as Dehri-on-Sone lies on the bank of the Sone. The longest railway bridge in India, measuring over three kilometres in length, goes across the Sone and links Sone Nagar and Dehri.

In Hindu mythology, Amarkantaka finds mention in the Skand Purana where it is referred to as Reva Khand. The Ramayan and the Mahabharata mention the river as Reva. Religiously, its significance is underscored by the fact that it is a virgin river  Narmada, unlike the other rivers such as Ganga, who never married. According to mythology and folklore, the marriage between Narmada and Sone ultimately didnt happen and Narmada remained virgin; while Sone got married to another small river Juela  a companion of Narmada.

"Amarkantaka has great spiritual importance and value. It is said that one lakh chants elsewhere equal to 10,000 chants at Amarkantaka. A person can gain spiritual benefits by only paying a visit to Narmada which is equivalent to taking dips in river Ganga for three days and in Yamuna for seven days. It is also known as a seat of shakti (spiritual power) and has a strong astrological and ritual importance," says Professor Shiv Prasad Pathak, a Sanskrit scholar and noted astrologer from Bhopal.

According to one legend, the Vindhya mountain once competed with the Mount Meru (Himalayas), growing so high that it obstructed the sun. The sage Agastya asked Vindhya to lower itself, in order to facilitate his passage across to the south. In reverence for Agastya, the Vindhya lowered its height and promised not to grow until Agastya returned to the north. Agastya settled in the south, and the Vindhya mountain, true to its word, never grew further. Geographically, its height is lower than the Himalayas.

Amarkantaka on Maikal range of Vindhyachal is also known for its rich flora and fauna, and herbal plants, with medicinal importance.
Amarkantak: Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a new blueprint to clean and conserve river Narmada at Amarkanta in Madhya Pradesh on Monday. The prime minister, who was in the state to attend the culmination of a 148-day long mass awareness programme also stressed the importance to save other rivers in India.

There are large numbers of rivers in India which have now remained (only) on the map of India and have gotten lost. Had we not exploited, polluted and destroyed our rivers for our selfish requirements, the need to save and conserve them wouldnt have arisen, like in the case of river Narmada," Modi said while addressing a gathering at Amarkanta, the origin site of river Narmada.

"In 2022, India shall celebrate its 75 years of Independence. We need to join all the 125 crore Indians together to create a new India, he added.

Modi, who also paid obeisance to river Narmada as part of the "Namami Devi Narmada Sewa Yatra" programme, praised the public for their support. "A river conservation programme of this scale would not have been possible without public participation and efforts of the 25,000 people of Madhya Pradesh. The people and the government of Madhya Pradesh have made this first-of-its-kind initiative possible with an unprecedented success, he said.

The programme saw more than 25,000 people from all walks of life cover 1,100 villages and a distance of 3,050 kilometres in the form of a "Sewa Yatra", and has been claimed as the worlds largest river conservation initiative.

The programme was launched on 11 December 2016 with an aim to create awareness amongst the masses for making river Narmada clean, pollution-free and promote conservation.

Amarkantak is situated on the Vindhyachal mountain range (Vindhya Parbat) in the Anuppur district of Madhya Pradesh. Also known as the "Vindhyan Supergroup", it is one of the largest and thickest sedimentary successions in the world.

This small yet one of the holiest places in Indias pilgrimage map has ecological, religious, spiritual and tourism importance.

Apart from river Narmada, another important river Sone originates from Amarkantak and passes through Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and takes a massive shape in Bihar.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said, Let us take a pledge that all of us will protect and conserve not only river Narmada but also others like Betwa, Pench, Chambal etc. Well make river Narmada the cleanest river in the world and for this, the participation of all the people in the state is needed.

Key highlights of river Narmada conservation and development programme
New Delhi: NGT asks AIIMS panel to submit report on Tughlaqabad depot chemical spill It also asked the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to state whether such containers carrying toxic material should be permitted in Tughlaqabad which is located in the heart of the city.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar directed the panel of experts led by Dr Y K Gupta, the head of pharmacology department at AIIMS, to mention as to who all were affected by the leakage and whether any person was suffering from any serious illness after the spill. The ministry "shall also clearly state whether any vehicle should be permitted in the area which is surrounded by residential population and offices and why the location of the depot will not be changed to any other appropriate place...," the bench said.

"We direct all the parties in the case to specifically state whether the leaked substance was covered under environmental laws and Hazardous Chemical Rules, 1989 or not," it said. The expert panel of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) had earlier said that the residents of the Tughlaqabad area were "sitting on a (ticking) bomb" and opined that the inland container depot should be relocated.

The green panel also impleaded Customs and Excise department as a party in the case and directed them to file their reply on the issue before 29 May. It also directed officials from MoEF, Central Pollution Control Board, department of industries in Haryana and the state pollution control board to conduct a joint inspection of the Sonepat-based agro-chemical company Crystal Crop Protection Pvt Ltd which was the consignee of the leaked 2-chloromethyl- 5(chloromethyl) in the case. During the hearing, advocate I G Kapila, who has been appointed as amicus curiae to assist the tribunal, said that there is total lack of coordination among the authorities with regard to cargo handling at the container depot.

Advocates Sanjay Upadhyay and Salik Shafique, who have filed a plea seeking shifting of the container depot, referred to the AIIMS report and said that the tribunal should proceed on its basis as it has very categorical observations on the whole incident. On 8 May, the NGT had issued notices to the MoEF, Delhi government, Railway Board, Container Corporation of India and Delhi Pollution Control Committee and asked them to file their replies within a week after taking note of the incident on its own.

At least 450 girl students of the Rani Jhansi School and Government Girls Senior Secondary School, run by the city administration, had to be hospitalised on 6 May after toxic fumes spread due to the chemical leakage. Most of the students, who complained of irritation in the eyes and breathlessness, were discharged after a few hours but a few had to be kept under observation.
After a strong oral observation from India in round one of the verbal discourse at the International Court of Justice, Pakistan reiterated its old stand on Kulbhushan Jadav case on Monday, stating that India's application was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed.

India using ICJ as 'stage for political theatre': Pak Read @ANI_news story | https://t.co/TCc3PfnH1z pic.twitter.com/HzrbWNSVPi  ANI Digital (@ani_digital) May 15, 2017

Mohammed Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office, who opened Pakistan's observation, in his opening statement, remarked that India had been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name. "India has been unable or perhaps more accurately unwilling to provide an explanation for this passport which is the most obvious indication of covert and illegal activity," he said.

Faisal labelled India's attempts to draw international attention towards the death sentence awarded by a Pakistani military court as mere drama and alleged India of using the ICJ as a stage for "political theatre". "Pakistan will not be cowed by terrorism, nor will it allow any attempt to malign or misrepresent its position or legal processes to go unchecked," Faisal said, adding that Pakistan "will not respond in kind".

There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistan's accusations on Jadhav, Pakistan's lawyer Khawar Qureshi told ICJ. He urged the court to dismiss India's application on three accounts: first, there was "no urgency"; second, the relief sought was "manifestly unavailable"; and third, the jurisdiction under the Vienna Convention was not "as unchallenged" as India has suggested.

In his 45-minute reply to Indian counsel Harish Salve's observations at the ICJ, Qureshi said that Indias plea for invoking provisions of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention is not relevant in this case because the issue was not urgent and claimed that Jadhav faced "no real harm".

Qureshi said that Indias plea for invoking provisions of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention is not relevant in this case. "The Vienna convention article 36 which adopted to set up standards of conduct particularly concerning communications and contact with nationals of the sending state which would contribute to the development of friendly relations among nations...the observation we made immediately is this is unlikely to apply in the context of a spy send by a state to engage in acts of terror."

"Indeed, it is clear from the Vienna conventions that there are provisions beyond article 36 that need to be considered before coming to the court with the bold assertion that the Vienna is interrelated regime," Qureshi said.

In its oral observation, Pakistan defended not providing counsular access to Jadhav stating that Pakistan was under the threat of spying, espionage and possible acts of terror being planted by India. In that sense giving consular access to the officials of that state itself is a grave violation of Article 36 (1) (c) of the Vienna convention, it said, according to News18.

Pakistan also quoted Article 55 of the convention which states that there should be no interference in the internal affairs of state when it's a victim of spying and possible acts of terror.

According to the report, Pakistan also quoted the Avenna case stating that a state which wishes to be granted consular access has the onus upon them to prove that the person whose right is being violated is a national of the applicant state. "But in this case, India did not even provide a birth certificate to prove Jadhav's nationality and did not even come forward to explain his passport. This is a clear violation of a proposition laid down by an ICJ case," it added.

Qureshi also claimed that Jadhav was given 150 days to clarify himself and argued that the ICJ must not give relief to the alleged Indian spy.

As Firstpost had reported earlier, Pakistan's argument rested on the merit of the case rather than the technicality that India raised while seeking relief for Kulbhushan Jadhav.

Click here to read more about what Indian counsels Harish Salve and Deepak Mittal told ICJ, and to read live updates, click here.

With agency inputs
New Delhi: Union minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy said the "murder" of 14 BJP supporters in Kerala in recent months was extremely disturbing and accused Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan of failing to maintain law and order.

The minister, who will travel to Kerala this week to meet the family of an RSS activist killed in Kannur, said that it was a "clear case of institutional negligence".

RSS worker Choorakad Biju was hacked to death allegedly by CPM activists at Payyanur town in Kannur that witnessed a series of clashes between the ruling CPM and the RSS over the last one year.

"Strangely, these killings have been on since the time the CPM formed its government in Kerala, and it is extremely disturbing to know that 14 BJP supporters have been murdered in the recent past," Rudy said in a statement.

"Biju had police protection till about two weeks back and then it was suddenly taken away for reasons not known to us. I fear that this could be a planned murder but there is no doubt that this is a clear case of institutional negligence," he said.

The minister said it was shocking and alarming to know about the brutal "murder case of one of our supporters Biju", who was the RSS unit chief of Kakkampara in Kanoor district.

"It is more disconcerting to know that this has happened in the city from where the chief minister hails. If he doesn't take care of the law and order situation in his own city, there is little that we can expect for the state at large," Rudy said.

The minister said the state was answerable for the incident. "Everything permissible under constitutional norms should be undertaken and adhered to, to take action on this case," the Skill Development & Entrepreneurship minister said.
Chandigarh: The hearing of the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old Dalit woman in Sonipat will be conducted in a fast-track court, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Monday. "Such kind of heinous crimes would not be tolerated at any cost in a civilised society and the guilty would be punished," he said.

The decomposed and mutilated body of the woman, who went missing from Sonipat on 9 May and was gang-raped and brutally murdered, was found near the Industrial Model Township in Urban Estate, Rohtak, on 11 May. Stray dogs had bitten off the face and lower portion of her body.

The sheer brutality of the crime, reminiscent of the 'Nirbhaya' incident in Delhi which triggered nation-wide outrage, occurred barely a month after the BJP-led Haryana government launched 'Operation Durga' to stop harassment of women.

An autopsy of the victim had stated that the bones of the womans skull were shattered into pieces and "some sharp-edged objects may have been inserted in her private parts".

"The findings suggest that it was a brutal rape and murder," said SK Dhatterwal, head of the department of forensic medicine at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak, who conducted the post-mortem examination.

Two persons, including the main accused Sumit, who is also a Dalit, have been arrested by the Haryana Police which has formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the case.

Police said the family of the victim have suspected the involvement of six more persons, out of whom five are related to the main accused.

The kin of the victim have also alleged that they had approached the Sonipat police about a month back with a complaint that Sumit was harassing their daughter, but there was no action.

The chief minister also promised strict action against those involved in the alleged rape of a 22-year-old woman at Gurugram in the state.

The woman from Sikkim was allegedly raped by three men in a moving car and thrown out on a road in Delhi on Saturday night.
Of all the people arguing before the Supreme Court's five-judge constitution bench that is hearing the validity of triple talaq, former Union minister Arif Mohammad Khan is the most knowledgeable, and the one person who carries personal integrity as a reformer as well. However, the line of argument he took before the apex court on 12 May seems to be steering the constitution bench away from constitutional principles, especially from the fundamental rights guaranteed to all citizens, including Muslim women opposing triple talaq.

So let me talk about what Khan did not argue before I discuss what he actually posited before the bench. Over the last few centuries, there has been a worldwide movement to separate religion from the State and the law. However, in his arguments, Khan was opposing the separation of religion from State, by advocating a role for religion in the Constitution.

Considering Khan had quit as Union minister after the Congress government enacted a law that quashed a Supreme Court order granting alimony to Shah Bano in 1986, his personal commitment to Muslim women's equality cannot be questioned.

However, it remains beyond my comprehension as to how and why Khan, arguing before the constitution bench in the triple talaq hearing, shunned arguments that could go in favour of articles 14, 15(1) and article 21 of the Constitution, all of which are fundamental rights available to every citizen, especially Muslim women insofar as triple talaq cases are concerned. He also did not mention Article 44, which directs the State to enact a Uniform Civil Code and which, though not legally enforceable, still carries the moral weight of the Constitution.

Granted, that the SC's constitution bench is examining if triple talaq is essential to religion and therefore if it can be protected by Article 25 on fundamental right to religion. But, of all the fundamental rights, Article 25 is the most inferior. It is subject to other fundamental rights via its own two sub-clauses  clause 25(1) notes that the freedom of religion is "subject to public order, morality and health"; and clause 25(2) clarifies that the right to religion does not "prevent the State from making any law" regarding the welfare of people.

So, even if triple talaq came under Article 25, it will still be necessarily subject to other fundamental rights. In the triple talaq cases, Article 25 will be subject to Article 14 on right to equality, Article 15(1) on the right to non-discrimination, and Article 21 on the right to life and dignity. Article 14 says, "The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws..."

Because divorce by a Muslim husband is unilateral, even if approved by the Quran, it still violates a Muslim woman's right to equality under Article 14.

Article 15(1) states: "The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them."

A Muslim woman's fundamental right to non-discrimination on the basis of sex under Article 15(1) is violated because the Muslim husband can divorce unilaterally, whether through single or triple talaq, and even if it is carried out through Quranic procedure. The violation of this fundamental right cannot be accepted.

Article 21 says, "No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty, except according to procedure established by law." The right to personal liberty under this right also includes human dignity, a key reason Muslim women have approached the Supreme Court against triple talaq.

Let's assume for a moment that triple talaq is essential to the practice of religion. But Article 25, being the weakest among all fundamental rights, will still be subject to articles 14, 15(1) and 21. It must be stressed that a Muslim husband's right to a life of dignity available under Article 21 and to obtain a divorce with dignity is also violated, because he is not permitted to go to a court to seek divorce.

The most unfortunate point is that no Muslim intellectual defends Muslim women's rights on the touchstone of the Constitution. It is understandable that former minister Salman Khurshid did not defend these fundamental rights before the SC bench since he comes from the Congress party which has supported Islamism from the Khilafat Movement to the Shah Bano case in 1986. What is not comprehensible is that Khan, who sacrificed his own political career on the issue of Muslim women's equality, also did not defend these fundamental rights.

These rights are non-negotiable. Advocate Farah Faiz, who usually defends constitutional principles, was only slightly ahead of Khurshid and Khan, by demanding that the Sharia courts be outlawed by the apex court.

It is pertinent to mention that there is no specific Muslim personal law. The expression "personal law" exists for a number of laws that govern Muslim issues like marriage, inheritance, Wakf and so on. Within the context of triple talaq, two laws must be mentioned. The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, governs Muslim marriage and other issues, but leaves the door open for Muslim men to divorce under religious rules outside court. No law exists under which a Muslim man seek divorce in a court. The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939, allows Muslim women to seek, not give, divorce through a court or outside the court.

Currently, a Muslim husband must divorce through either of the two forms of triple talaq: Triple talaq given in one sitting, or three talaqs given one every month over three months.

So what did Khan argue? Satya Prakash, a legal journalist who has been watching the submissions made before the constitution bench hearing the triple talaq, said, "The aggrieved Muslim women have invoked their fundamental rights to get rid of the discriminatory practice of triple talaq. And that is why this issue is being examined by a constitution bench. To me, it was shocking to see one advocate after another, including Arif Mohammad Khan, avoiding the constitutional principles of equality and non-discrimination, to instead focus on the Quran and Sharia alone. The only exceptions were senior advocates Ram Jethmalani and Indira Jaising, who put forth constitutional propositions to assert the Muslim women's fundamental rights."

It is unfortunate that the Muslim mind is unwilling to think outside the framework of religion. In his submissions before the bench, Khan limited his arguments to religion. As per media reports, Khan said, "In pre-Islamic Arab society, infant girls were buried alive. The practice was abolished after the advent of Islam Triple talaq is the modern version of the pre-Islamic practice."

This effectively means that Khan is opposing triple talaq. However, he is failing, probably intentionally, to distinguish between the instant triple talaq and the triple talaq delivered under the procedure laid down in the Quran over the course of three menstrual periods.

Khan said, "The Quran advises the husband to settle differences through a mutual conversation as the first step. This step is known as the 'Faizu Hunna'. Then there is a step of physical separation, known as the 'Wahjuru Hunna'. And if that fails, then the husband must attempt to talk to the wife, make peace with her and talk about the gravity of the situation. This third step is known as the 'Wazribu Hunna'. If the third step fails, the fourth step of 'arbitration' must be followed. In this step, there is arbitration by members from families of both parties. It is only after all four steps have failed that a husband pronounces the first talaq. The husband has to compulsorily wait for a wife's iddah (three menstrual cycles) to complete before pronouncing another talaq."

The first four steps mentioned by Khan here are irrelevant to the legal issue being discussed.

It is possible that journalists may not have picked up Khan's arguments correctly, since they involve minute points within Islam. However, one understands that Khan is opposed to instant triple talaq, but he approves the Quranic procedure of triple talaq which is given unilaterally by men.

In this sense, both Salman Khurshid, who urged the court to declare triple talaq given in one sitting as a single talaq, and Khan, who approves the Quranic procedure of triple talaq, are essentially telling the court to retain the unilateral practice of divorce given by men, even when given in the presence of two witnesses. Arguments by both Khurshid and Khan leave a Muslim wife at the mercy of unilateral divorce. Importantly, Khurshid and Khan have both not asked the constitution court to declare divorces effected outside courts as illegal.

As per a media report, Khan stressed that the Quran alone must be the source of Islamic law, and Hadiths (traditions of Prophet Muhammad) should be taken into account only if the Quran was silent on a particular issue. This position is nearer to the one taken by members of the Ahle Hadith sect who do not follow the principle of 'Taqleed', which requires every Muslim to follow one of the four schools of 'fiqh' (Islamic jurisprudence)  led by noted jurists Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Shafi'i, Imam Malik and Imam Hanbal. Barelvi and Deobandi Muslims follow Imam Abu Hanifa. Ahle Hadith sect is the only one which does not follow 'Taqleed', while the bulk of Muslims across South Asia follow the Hanafi school of Abu Hanifa. Even though Khan thinks that Quran alone must be the source of law, the Hanafi school does not agree with his position.

So, it can be argued that the positions taken by Khurshid and Khan necessarily militate the principle of separation of religion from the State and the law, thereby seeking to overturn several centuries of jurisprudence on this subject across the world. Elsewhere, Khan has argued that the Supreme Court should treat the practice of triple talaq as a contempt of court, which is basically arguing that whatever you do, don't remove religion from the Constitution. It is worrying that both Khurshid and Khan have argued against Muslim divorce taking place in a court of law. This position leaves room for the existence of a number of Sharia courts in India. And if the Supreme Court does not require a Muslim husband to effect his divorce in a courtroom, this will allow Islamic clerics to operate Sharia courts across the country.

This is a position also taken by the Islamic Sharia group Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Aandolan, whose advocate asked the apex court for "minimum interference". The so-called Aandolan (revolution), which trains female judges and runs Sharia courts, fears that if the apex court ruled that the Muslim husband must effect divorce inside a courtroom, its own Sharia shops will close.

Be it triple or quadruple talaq, it must happen inside a courtroom. The issue of talaq must come within the mainstream judicial framework and cannot be left to be determined by extra-judicial courts. Otherwise, not only would the Muslim wife be left at the mercy of unilateral divorce, the husband would also be left with the humiliating experience of effecting divorce on his own or through clerics.

The fallacy in Khan's argument, therefore, is that he wants the rights of women under Quran where the practice is essentially discriminatory. So long as the law does not give equal rights to Muslim woman and the Muslim husband can pronounce his own judgement, the issue cannot be resolved. One hopes that the Supreme Court addresses this aspect of the problem.

Currently, semi-literate Muslim women are defying Islamic clergy by knocking on the doors of the Supreme Court, by offering prayers at Hindu temples and by beseeching Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to deliver them justice in the cases of triple talaq. The Supreme Court must send out hope to them. If women like them are turned down at the door of the constitution bench too, it would cause a long-term threat to India's flourishing democracy.
New Delhi: In a major announcement on the ongoing case over the validity of triple talaq, the Centre on Monday said that court it will come out with legislation to regulate marriage and divorce among Muslims if the Supreme Court court holds triple talaq as invalid and unconstitutional.

Earlier, the apex court said it was keeping open for adjudication in the future the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' among Muslims as the Centre insisted deliberations on these aspects as well.

The observation was made when Attorney General (A-G) Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' were also part of the order of a two-judge bench which had referred to the Constitutional bench the three issues, including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.

"The scope of referring had all the three issues that was divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the two- judge bench," Rohatgi said.

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar said, "It may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future."

The Centre's assertion assumes significance in the backdrop of the remarks of the apex court that it will only deal with the issue of triple talaq that too if it was fundamental to Islam.

The A-G asked the bench also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, RF Nariman, UU Lalit and Abdul Nazeer to make it clear that the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' are still open and would be dealt by other bench in future.

"It will be dealt in future," the bench clarified. The bench is hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the practice of triple talaq among Muslims. The Centre has resumed its arguments in the case on Monday.

During the last hearing, the apex court had observed that triple talaq is the "worst" and "not a desirable" form of dissolution of marriage among the Muslims, even though there were schools of thought which called it "legal".

The remark was made by the bench when senior lawyer Salman Khurshid referred to the various schools of thought and the stand of All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) that triple talaq was "abhorrent", yet valid.

The day-long hearing on the matter last Friday also saw two veterans, jurist Ram Jethmalani and former Union Minister and Islamic scholar Arif Mohammad Khan, coming out all guns blazing against the practice of triple talaq.

While Jethmalani attacked the practice on various constitutional grounds including the right to equality and termed it "abhorrent", Khan said it was akin to the pre- Islamic era practice of burying a female child alive in the Arabian region.

Khan had said the whole Shariat law has been distorted as "Shariat is the Holy Quran and not the opinion of these people (clerics). The Holy Quran considers the importance of family and it provides four steps before pronouncement of divorce."

"Triple talaq is far from being fundamental and very far from being sacramental to Islam. It violates every good thing which Islam prescribes. What we are seeing in the form of triple talaq is similar to the pre-Islamic era practice where female infants were buried alive," he had said. Jethmalani had said "the right of triple talaq is available only to the husband and not to the wife and it breaches Article 14(Right to Equality) of the Constitution."

He had said triple talaq was a discrimination on the ground of sex and this practice was abhorrent to the tenets of holy Quran and no amount of advocacy can save this "sinful" practice which is contrary to constitutional tenets. How can a woman be allowed to become ex-wife only because her husband wants and this is "the highest kind of unconstitutional behaviour", the noted jurist had said.

Khurshid, who is assisting the court in personal capacity, had said he himself found triple talaq "sinful" and anything which is sinful could not have been ordained by Islam. He also reiterated that triple talaq was a "non-issue" which does not require judicial scrutiny. He had said the irrevocable nature of triple talaq can be negated if the three-time pronouncement of talaq in one go is considered one leaving the scope for reconciliation and re-union during the 'iddat' (waiting) period.

Referring to the prevalent practice in Islamic nations, he had said even if one says talaq thrice in a go, it was considered as one, thus negating irrevocability of divorce.

The bench had asked Khurshid if triple talaq was India-specific and what had led to its repeal in other countries. Khurshid said whatever was happening in India now, might have happened in other countries, leading to the ban.

To this, the bench had said, "it is like death penalty which is abhorrent but permissible in the law of many countries and many have repealed it," adding whether anything which is sinful be taken as prescribed by God and made a law by man.

When advocate Farha Faiz, a petitioner in the case, had started her arguments, the bench had said it was not concerned with personal facts.

She had said what Imams and clerics say is not important, the only thing is that the holy Quran says everything.

"The Holy Quran is in mandatory language. It is not an advise. If we are adopting one procedure for marriage, why can't we have one procedure for talaq also?" she had said. To this, the bench had said, "we cannot do that. We cannot wipe out (the difference between) Shias or Shunnis". Faiz also alleged that the Muslim clerics were running a parallel judicial system like the trial courts and the high courts and the clerics were forcing Muslims not to go to the courts.

"Point taken, you have raised a very valid and good point," the bench had said.

The apex court has fixed a six-day schedule for hearing in which three days would be available for those challenging triple talaq and three days for those defending it.
New Delhi: As the issue of triple talaq is being debated in the Supreme Court, a city court has ruled that the marriage performed by a Muslim woman during the iddat (waiting) period is not void.

The Delhi court dismissed the claim of a man, accused of domestic violence by his wife, that their wedding was invalid as the per the Islamic law, as she had not completed iddat after getting a divorce from her first husband.

In Islamic law, a divorced woman has to wait for about three months referred to as iddat before she can remarry.

"Any marriage performed by a Muslim woman during the iddat period is an irregular marriage and not a void (batil) marriage. Hence, the contention of the man on this aspect is found to be without any merits," Special Judge Bhupesh Kumar said while relying on a Supreme Court observation.

The court said there was "sufficient evidence" to issue a notice to the Muslim man, who worked with Coal India Ltd in Chhattisgarh, under the domestic violence act, saying "even depriving aggrieved person economically or financially amounts to domestic violence."

In her complaint seeking Rs 10 lakh compensation and monthly maintenance from the accused man, her second husband, the woman had said that he had concealed his first wedlock from her and when she found out about it, he started avoiding her and stopped sending her money.

She said she had married the accused after obtaining a divorce from her first husband.

The man, on the other hand, denied that he had married the complainant, saying she was in the iddat period and any wedding during this period is invalid.

"As per Islamic law, the women cannot remarry during iddat period and any marriage taking place during iddat period cannot be termed as a valid marriage," he said, adding that the woman got divorced from her first husband on 4 October 2012 and the second nikah was performed two days later.

The court also rejected the man's contention that the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence (PWDV) Act is not attracted as there are no allegations of physical, sexual or verbal abuse in the application.
New Delhi: Indian computer systems largely escaped a global ransomware attack as the government and companies installed security patches to gain an upper hand against the first wave of an unrivalled global cyber attack.

Over two lakh computers in at least 150 countries are said to have been infected, according to Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency. In India, only a few isolated incidents in West Bengal, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu were reported.

National Informatics Centre, which manages government websites, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing installed security patches issued by Microsoft to immunise their Windows systems.

Also, guidelines were issued to enable large IT networks to tackle the threat.

"There is no major impact in India unlike other countries. We are keeping a close watch. As per the information received so far, there have been isolated incidents in limited areas in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh," Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters here.

He said a cyber coordination centre will start operating from next month to take precautions against such attacks.

India's cyber security unit CERT-In said it has received formal reports of just five "incidents" across locations like Delhi and Tamil Nadu.

"It is nothing major, but we are still watching. The next couple of days, we will be on alert on this," Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), director general, Sanjay Bahl said.

India is on high alert, monitoring critical networks across sectors like banking, telecom, power and aviation to ensure that systems are protected against the attack that has claimed victims in more than 150 countries over the weekend.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asked banks to follow the instructions issued by CERT-In to prevent the attack. A few ATMs running on old Microsoft Operating System remained non-operational as part of precautionary measures.

CERT-In has issued a list of dos and don'ts and webcast on how to protect networks from the global ransomware attack.

India Inc has also been on the vigil against 'WannaCry', which has claimed victims in over 150 countries like Spanish telecom firm Telefonica, US' logistics major FedEx and Russia's interior ministry.

Automaker Nissan, which saw its systems being impacted globally, said the Renault-Nissan alliance plant in Chennai came under attack but its India team has responded and there is no major impact on business.

"Normal production operations are underway at our RNAIPL plant in Chennai," Nissan India said in an emailed statement.

Indian IT companies like Infosys and Wipro are also monitoring their systems and taking necessary precautions to ensure business continuity for their clients.

"The Indian IT industry should be better placed than others (in handling the situation). We have not come across any significant impact yet," Nasscom President, R Chandrasekhar said.

Hackers possibly used techniques stolen from the US National Security Agency to encrypt files within affected computers, making them inaccessible, and demanded USD 300 ransom.

"WannaCry is just the tip of the iceberg and organisations need to re-assess the security programme and strengthen detection, prevention and response capabilities to counter such attacks," Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Partner Shree Parthasarathy said.

GSTN, the company set up to provide the IT infrastructure for GST rollout, will not be impacted by the WannaCry ransomware attack as its systems do not run on Microsoft software, its CEO Prakash Kumar said.

Meanwhile, IT Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said the IT Ministry along with CERT-In is closely monitoring the situation and reiterated that no large scale incidents were reported in public and private sectors.

Report by various security solutions firms over the weekend had claimed that India is amongst the countries worst affected by the 'WannaCry' outbreak, accounting for about five percent of the attacks.
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Also, the case has strong ramifications for India which has never allowed to make the bilateral issue with Pakistan multi-lateral.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will have an open hearing on the Kulbhushan Jadhav execution case involving India and Pakistan at The Hague. With the court involved, it is no longer a battle of bilateral wills.

Meanwhile, speaking to CNN-News18, Sarabjit's lawyer Awais Shaikh said, "This is an excellent move by India. Kulbhushan Jadhav's case is being tried by military court. Pakistan cannot make undue decision. Pakistan cannot influence any judge in ICJ. It doesnt matter if ex-ambassador of Pakistan is friends with any judge in ICJ."

The ICJ today will hear India's plea for suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhav's death penalty. A Pakistan military court had sentenced the Indian national to death on charges of "espionage and subversive activities" on April 10, this year.

Jadhav was handed a death sentence by Pakistan's military court on 10th April, 2016. He was arrested in March last year on charges of espionage India has already filed an appeal on behalf of Jadhav's mother in Pakistan.

It's a crucial day in India's bid to save Jadhav from the gallows in Pakistan. For the first time in over four decades, India has knocked the doors of the ICJ. The public hearing will start at The Hague, Netherlands, from 1.30pm IST. India will be represented by senior counsel Harish Salve. Both sides have been given one and a half hour each to make their case.

News18 further reported that Pakistan sent emissary from UAE who is close friend of ICJ judge to put stay on proceedings. Emissary has been asked to convince judge that there are still three important steps to go before hanging. The source also confirmed to the channel that meeting with Jindal and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was part of backchannels efforts by Pakistan government to ease out current situation.

Speaking to CNN-News18 , top Pakistan government sources said that Jadhav is alive and hanging will happen only after all judicial and appeal process over. The source also told the channel that Pakistan 'desperately' wants a stay on proceedings. "Pakistan authorities have opened all backchannels to put stay on proceedings."

Immediate suspension of the death sentence awarded to the accused Declaring the sentence of the military court brazen defiance of the Vienna Convention Restraining Pakistan from giving effect to the sentence awarded & directing it to take steps to annul the decision If Pakistan is unable to annul the decision, then ICJ should declare the decision illegal

The International Court of Justice is the judicial organ of the United Nations that settles legal disputes submitted to it by states. Here is India's plea to The Hague:

-Pakistan will insist this case will follow its domestic laws not Vienna Convention will be followed in Jadhav case -Consular access can be denied in cases related to national security -Jadhav was tried in a military court as he was a former naval officer -It may also say that all legal remedies have not been exhausted yet in Pakistan and so it is not the right time for ICJ to intervene

The court is expected to take some provisional steps till the case is finally decided. The 15-judge ICJ is not in session. Court president judge Ronny Abraham of France is expected to meet the agents or legal representatives of the two countries and decide on the procedural issues such as the time-frame of the case. Senior lawyer Harish Salve is representing India.

The Netherlands-based ICJ takes up Jadhav's case in the Great Hall of Justice housed in the Peace Palace in the city of The Hague. Both sides will get 90 minutes each to make their arguments, with India getting the first say.

This indicates that Pakistan, which has announced it will not abide by ICJ verdict, fears it may go against it.

News18 reports that Pakistan has opened backchannel manoevres to influence the hearing by dispatching quietly its ambassador to UAE Moazzam Ahmad Khan, who was earlier posted in The Netherlands. Ahmad's brief, according to the channel, is to "impress upon" a judge on the ICJ panel "friendly" to him to get across a message that India has prematurely approached the ICJ because Jadhav has not yet exhausted all his judicial options in Pakistan.

Pakistan's moves since India's petition at the International Court of Justice betrays a nervousness about the impending verdict. The steps that the Nawaz Sharif government has taken so far to counter India's aggressive pitch at the judicial arm of the United Nations indicate that its case is weak and it is therefore desperately trying to stall today's proceedings at The Hague.

The Pakistani team will be led by Attorney-General Ashtar Ausaf, assisted by senior lawyer Asad Rahim. Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua, who has prior experience at the UN, is also expected to fly to The Hague, where Pakistan will be presenting its case using past precedent where India has refused the ICJ jurisdiction, including in the 1999 Atlantique case of a plane that was shot down by India.

c) Pakistan should ensure that no action should be taken while proceedings in the court are taking place

India has also accused Pakistan of "egregious violations" of New Delhi's rights under the Vienna convention on consular relations when it sought ICJ's intervention on 8 May.

The imminent danger to the life of Jadhav, who was given the death sentence by a Pakistani military court on 10 April, is Indias reason for moving the ICJ. India says Pakistan accelerated the situation by ignoring 16 requests for consular access to Jadhav. His trial in the military court was a sham and didn't follow international norms even though Jadhav is a foreign national.

11-judge bench is hearing the Kulbhushan Jadhav case in ICJ. India may avail a "short extension" beyond 90 minutes to present its case, says ICJ judge. Mittal argues, "India has demanded several consular access but there has been no response from Pakistan. This reflects farcical nature of hearing in Pakistan. Pakistan has not provided any chargesheet, evidence. No response from Pakistan on visa for family members of Jadhav. This is serious miscarriage of justice."

"India has made several requests for consular access but Pakistan has not provided it, Article 36 of Vienna Convention has been violated. Pakistan did not inform India at the time of his arrest. I express on behalf of my country gratitude for fixing hearing in short notice. Situation we find is grave and urgent," India's counsel Harish Salve tells the 11-judge bench.

India puts Jadhav case strictly within the ambit of international law India, as expected, kept the focus strictly on Pakistan's violation of international convention as hearing began in Kulbhushan Jadhav's case at the ICJ headquarters in The Hague on Monday. In taking its case to the ICJ, India is aware that Pakistan's petition was struck down by the ICJ in 1999 when India took a stance that the shooting down of the Atlantique aircraft was a security issue and would be dealt with strictly in accord with bilateral treaties. India has therefore sought to differentiate this appeal with firm focus on Pakistan's violation of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963 and Article 1 of the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations Concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes. India's agent Deepak Mittals opening remarks made it clear that India is setting the Jadhav case within the ambit of Vienna convention on consular relations (VCCR) which Pakistan has flagrantly violated by not allowing consular access to Jadhav despite 16 formal requests

We may have to prepare for the possibility that Pakistan will ignore the International Court of Justice since it has already violated diplomatic rights and breached international law.

"Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed" by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Deepak Mittal, Indian official, told the court in his opening remarks. Mittal termed the military court trial of Jadhav as "farcical".

India on Monday sought an immediate suspension of the death sentence awarded to alleged spy Kulbushan Jadhav in Pakistan saying there was a fear that he may be executed even before the decision of the international court.

"It is clear that Jadhav has been denied of his right to seek legal counsel. Jadhav's parents have applied for visa to travel to Pakistan which has fallen on deaf ears."

Deepak Mittal told ICJ President Ronny Abraham, who presided over the proceedings, that India's repeated requests to Pakistan on consular access to Jadhav were denied. "India learnt from press reports that the death sentence was awarded to Jadhav on the basis of an alleged confession. Pakistan has not provided the chargesheet, any documents on the case despite repeated requests," Mittal told the court.

Sharma also urged the court to restrain Pakistan from "giving effect to the sentence awarded by the military court" and to direct it to annul its decision. The day-long hearing, which began on Monday morning, would involve two sessions of an hour-and-a-half each to India and Pakistan to make their cases. Pakistan's session will begin in the afternoon.

VD Sharma, a joint secretary in the external affairs ministry and co-agent, said Pakistan had failed to comply with all its legal obligations by denying consular access to Jadhav ever since he was arrested in March 2016. India is seeking relief in the form of immediate suspension of the death sentence. Jadhav has been accused of espionage by Pakistan.

"Jadhav's mother has filed for an appeal which was transmitted to Pakistan via diplomatic paths. The communication of 12 May does not clarify on what his charges are or any clarity on the request for clemency. Pakistan said that Jadhav's sentence is based on credible evidence in espionage against Pakistan."

Salve referred to precedent of past cases including LaGrand case between Germany and US in 1982. The case referred to the hearing before the ICJ which concerned the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

"I am grateful to the ICJ for taking up the case at such short notice. India has moved ICJ under Article 14 seeking suspension of the sentence awarded to Jadhav. The case is grave and urgent."

This is also facetious position, held Salve in his argument. He pointed out that despite Pakistan's promises, Jadhav may have far lesser time than the 90 days even if he chooses to take the clemency route.

In his argument, Harish Salve exposed the hypocrisy of Pakistan's stance on Jadhav by pointing out that on one hand Pakistan accuses the Indian National of being involved in "serious offences that harm the security of the country" and on the the hand, holding that Jadhav has still not exhausted his clemency options.

Jadhav has much less time than Pakistan would have us believe, India's lead lawyer presented before the International Court of Justice at The Hague on Monday.

Although Jadhav is unlikely to be executed while the case is being heard in the ICJ, there is still a fear that he will be 'murdered' by Pakistan.

Pakistan will argue that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has no jurisdiction to adjudicate over bilateral issues. To bolster their argument, they will bring up the fact that India has, in the past, questioned the court's power to intervene. I hope India is ready with a response.

In the three instances where Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations were breached  Paraguay vs USA, Germany versus USA, and Mexico vs USA  the court made a strong argument for protecting the rights of the accused. However, it makes no difference if Pakistan refuses to heed the court's call.

As far as India is concerned, no evidence against Jadhav has been presented. However, as honourable as our efforts have been, we are not going to be able to get Jadhav's death sentence annulled.

Pakistan wants Jadhav to beg for his life. In public. And through him, India, to beg for his life. They want us to humiliate us and mark that as a confession of our guilt. They want us to plead with them  with the Pakistan army chief and the president  Pakistan has also 'linked' the execution to India's 'adventurism' and warned India against taking any action in case Jadhav is executed.

"Pakistan has refused to communicate to consular services; India has not been given the copy of the charges filed against Jadhav. The need for a wholesome compliance is greater when charges are serious. We want appropriate legal representation for Kulbhushan Jadhav," Harish Salve tells ICJ.

"India will always maintain that Kulbhushan Jadhav has been kidnapped from Iran. Jadhav has been denied the right to defend himself. The 'confession' was extracted in military custody. No indications whether Jadhav can seek or receive clemency. We fear that Jadhav will be executed before this trail ends. The present situation is grave and that is why India has sought the indulgence of ICJ. Pakistan has violated the Vienna Convention," says Harish Salve.

"India relies on the Vienna Convention. The agreement between India and Pakistan on consular access is relevant. India does not rely and does not need to rely on this greement. It bases its case solely on the Vienna Convention."

"India asserts in the application that Pakistan denied consular access to Jadhav. The reasons for the said denial was also not given to India. India has not been given a copy of the charges or the verdict and hence has been unable to check the charges. The Vienna Convention offers no exception. India asserts that the breach of the Vienna Convention is fatal. Under Article 36, jurisdiction exists in respect of all cases that parties refer to and in respect of all matters specially provided for in treaties and conventions."

"In its letter of 21 March, Pakistan said to India that the request of consular access can be entertained if India assists in the investigation. The more serious the charge the greater the need to ensure procedural safeguards to ensure that the accused gets a fair trial. The confession played a significant part in the case. The allegations were made even as Jadhav's basic rights were denied."

The better part of the argument by Harish Salve, India's counsel at ICJ, was aimed at establishing that ICJ's powers have enforceability. He cited a lot of past cases and was at pains to point out that Pakistan's bilateral agreement with India, which it has repeatedly cited while denying consular access, does not have enforceability vis-a-vis ICJ's powers to interpret and apply the provisions of Vienna Convention.

It must be noted that basing an argument on the Optional Protocol may be a problem in establishing claims of violation of any the other treaty such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as has been requested by India in its application .

India also clarified that the basis of jurisdiction is de hors the Agreement on Consular Access between India and Pakistan. Pakistan may, however, argue that this Agreement is "special law" overriding the "general law"; and does not provide a basis for approaching the ICJ.

However, this does not imply that the ICJ may indicate provisional measures unless the provisions invoked by the Applicant country appear, based on first impressions, to afford a basis on which the jurisdiction of the ICJ might be founded. For instance, if the court finds that it has a prima facie jurisdiction in this case, Pakistan will have an option to challenge the same; and the decision on jurisdiction at this stage is without prejudice to Pakistans right to contest the jurisdiction of the ICJ at a later stage in the proceedings.

In other words, in a request for the indication of provisional measures, the ICJ does not have to finally satisfy itself before deciding whether to indicate provisional measures that it has jurisdiction on the subject matter of the case.

At this stage, it must also be clarified in all cases where there is a request by one of the parties to indicate provisional measures, a country has to only establish a prima facie case of jurisdiction.

Islamabad has gone on the record, saying it reworked its rules to keep the ICJ out of these affairs, especially bilateral issues.

The defendants in three previous casesParaguay vs USA, Germany versus USA, and Mexico vs USAignored the ICJ, so there is a precedent.

Even if it is indicted by the ICJ, a nation that harbours terrorists won't lose any sleep over it.

If it feels it can get away with executing Jadhav and that the furore will only last a couple of days, it will.

The fact remains: It doesnt matter what we think or how strong India's case might be. Pakistan has Jadhav in custody.

In June 2016, the ICJ expressed concern that Pakistans military justice system was unjust and ineffective. Since then, the ICJ hasnt changed its stance.

Since March, there has been no information on Jadhav's condition. Is he being tortured? Is he dead?

Regardless of what Pakistan puts up as its defence, India needs to ask for proof that Kulbhushan Jadhav is still alive. Else, this entire exercise becomes moot.

Mohammad Faisal, Director General, South Asia and SAARC, says Pakistan will not be cowed by terrorism and that India has used the court as a stage for theatre.

Presenting Pakistan's case, Mohammad Faisal, DG, South Asia & SAARC sought to harp on the terrorism trope while making the case why the ICJ has no jurisdiction over an issue that concerns Pakistan's internal security and hence should be governed by Pakistan's local laws within the bilateral framework. Pakistan agent Faisal called upon the ICJ to dismiss India's petition.

"India claims Jadhav's trial was rushed and that he could be executed summarily. None of that is true," Qureshi says.

QC Khawar Qureshi, speaking for Pakistan, says there is no urgency and that India's plea must be dismissed. He claims that India was given detailed copy of FIR and that Jadhav was arrested in Balochistan after crossing in from Iran.

His rhetoric attempted to confuse the fact that Jadhav was railroaded. However, he refused to go anywhere near the violation of human rights or the absence of hard evidence against the prisoner and also failed to deny that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran.

The opening statement had no depth and was a shrill diatribe against India. It only wished to underscore the innocence of the Pakistani government. The cloak of injury and hurt sentiment will not wash as a defence. Pakistani counsel also continued his tone of aggrieved innocence and asked the court to dismiss India's plea.

Interestingly, having made his point, Qureshi leapt to suggesting it is outside the court's jurisdiction to provide relief to India because it has no power to annul Pakistan military court's verdict. It is telling that the Pakistani counsel seemed to be relying more on veiled threats rather than countering India's charge that Pakistan is in flagrant violation of 1963 Vienna Convention.

Pakistan's counsel Khawar Qureshi, while putting forth his argument at the Peace Palace in The Hague, labeled India's petition as "time-wasting tactics" and "political grandstanding" and called upon the International Court of Justice to dismiss the petition.

Pakistan stresses India's application should be canceled on three grounds. "There is no urgency. The relief sought by India is manifestly unavailable, and the jurisdiction is limited."

Pakistan arrogantly told the ICJ they had bigger fish to fry and would not waste time on political grandstanding. Surely, many of the statements had seeds of contempt of the court.

Smooth talk, shallow substance and finally running away to Paraguay and other cases shows there was no fresh or tangible evidence against Jadhav and this will largely delay the proceedings.

There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistan's accusations on Jadhav, says Qureshi.

Responding to India's contention that Jadhav's trial was in gross violation of Vienna Convention, Pakistan says that provisions not intended to apply to a 'spy' involved in terror activities.

Court will render its order as soon as possible, says judge. Date on which order will be delivered will be duly communicated to the parties, he adds.

The rest of its argument does not conceal the Pakistani stance: It will not listen if the ICJ calls for a stay. Pakistan then used Article 5 to defend its refusal to grant consular access. The military court decided it wasn't called for, so consular access wasn't granted.

The Pakistan defence was that the ICJ has no power to adjudicate a criminal offence and there should be no provisional measures if there no relief is possible. Reading between the lines, Pakistan indicated its intent to go ahead with the execution and practically said it would not accept a stay order.

Finally, Pakistan fell back on some convoluted rendition of Jadhav being kidnapped as far-fetched. No answers here to be found here. Only a torrent of words.

Now they now want to know why India could not or did not prove he was an Indian national. Now it is our fault that we did not deny his nationality. This arrow completely missed the mark.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will pronounce its verdict on the Kulbhushan Jadhav case on Thursday, just 10 days after India approached it demanding immediate suspension of the death sentence given to its former Navy officer by a Pakistan military court.

India is represented by its agent Deepak Mittal, who is the head of the Pakistan division in the external affairs ministry. The case is argued by its lead attorney Harish Salve. The Indian team is expected to be present at the time of the verdict.

India had approached the ICJ on 8 May, accusing Pakistan of violating the Vienna Convention and conducting a "farcical trial" for convicting Jadhav, which was in "egregious violations" of the Vienna Convention.

India enumerated four provisional measures in its appeal to the ICJ: declare the death sentence awarded to Jadhav illegal; being violative of international law and treaty rights; restrain Pakistan from acting in violation of the Vienna Convention and international law by giving effect to the sentence or the conviction in any manner; and if Pakistan is unable to annul the decision, direct it to release the convicted Indian national forthwith.

In India's submission to the ICJ on 15 May at a public hearing, India had demanded the immediate annulment of Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the ICJ was over.

Judge Ronny Abraham, president of the court, will read the decision, it said. The decision comes after India sought the court's intervention on Monday for an immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence, fearing that the Indian national may be executed even before the ICJ decided the case.

In a statement, the ICJ announced that it will "deliver its order on the request for the indication of provisional measures made by India in the Jadhav Case (India versus Pakistan), on Thursday" at noon (3.30 pm IST) in a public sitting.

Abraham became the member of ICJ on 15 February 2005. He was elected as the president of the UN court on 6 February 2015. Before the ICJ appointment, from 1998 to 2005, as head of the Legal Affairs Directorate at the French ministry of foreign affairs, he was in charge of advising the government on legal matters in the fields of general international public law, European Union law, international human rights law, the law of the sea and the Antarctic.

As the world court prepares to read out the judgment in this highly-awaited case, here's what we know about the president of ICJ  Ronny Abraham.

"A public sitting will take place at 12 noon at the Peace Palace in The Hague, during which Judge Ronny Abraham, President of the Court, will read the court's decision," the international court said in a release on Wednesday.

President of the Court Ronny Abraham, will read out the decision at midday local time (3.30 pm IST). The case  a rare foray for the two nations into the international courts after 18 years  has highlighted the recent sharp uptick in tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals.

Pakistan had rebutted India's allegation that Islamabad violated Vienna Convention by saying that India had no right to invoke the jurisdiction of the UN's highest court because the Vienna Convention does not provide for matters relating to spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.

India further charged that Jadhav had no access to legal counsel in Pakistan, had been denied consular access and that his confession admitting his crimes had been extracted forcefully when he was in military custody.

In terms of precedents in the history of the ICJ, there are three previous death penalty/Vienna Convention-related cases wherein the timelines and results are instructive. It remains to be seen whether there will be any major deviation from these decisions. Click here for the detailed report on the previous cases.

Jadhav was awarded the death sentence by a Pakistani military court last month, a year after he was arrested on charges of espionage and subversive activities. While India stated that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy, Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

Jadhav's arrest and conviction created a diplomatic maelstrom between the two countries, with India requesting consular access to the imprisoned man 16 times, only to be repeatedly turned down by Pakistan.

Asserting that Jadhav's execution was not imminent, Pakistan said he had 150 days to plead clemency. However, the ICJ denied permission to Pakistan to play the purported "confessional" video of Jadhav at the public hearing.

Going by the way the ICJ has, within 48 hours of the oral hearing, decided to pronounce its verdict, it is very likely that the court will accede to India's request for "provisional measures". This should, in the near term, appear as relief to India because Pakistan will find it difficult to send Jadhav to the gallows before a full trial at the ICJ is conducted.

India's argument, put forward by senior counsel Harish Salve last Monday, was that the State of Pakistan appears to be in collusion and there can be no real relief possible for Jadhav. In fact, India fears that the execution might take place before the trial is over.

Hegde and Kishore argued that the ICJ proceedings are a legal forum for declarations of legitimacy, adding that international law is still largely "a law without sanctions". In fact, according to them, an order on provisional measures will only be the beginning of a longer journey which will entail long drawn proceedings on the merits of the case.

Even if the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are in India's favour on Thursday, Pakistan could still go ahead with the execution of Kulbhushan Jadhav, wrote Supreme Court lawyers Sanjay Hegde and Pranjal Kishore in this Business Standard article.

By refusing to acknowledge the 2008 Agreement, India could have well just terminated that agreement. The agreement is critical for the fate of many Indian fishermen who end up straying into Pakistani waters year after year as it called for the exchange of prisoner lists and consular access. Read the full report here

The legal issues stem from the fact that there was a 2008 bilateral agreement on consular access. An agreement that India sought not to rely on at the Hague on Monday and merely restricted itself to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In doing so, India made the point that the agreement had not been registered with the United Nations and therefore, India would have to restrict the argument to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations alone.

Monday's hearing before the International Court of Justice at the Hague may appear to be a victory for India in terms of political points scored back home, but there were some key legal issues that Pakistan did point out that require our consideration.

It is to be noted that at no stage of the hearing did Pakistan give any assurance that the 150-day deadline is sacrosanct. This is expected to strengthen India's case and the court's limited verdict today. Read the full report here

When President of the Court Ronny Abraham sits down to read the ICJ's decision at the Hague-based Peace Palace on Thursday, he will essentially rule on whether prima facie India has a case at all before the court. In ICJ's words, according to the media statement uploaded on its website it is going to pronounce its "Order on the request for the indication of provisional measures made by India in the Jadhav Case".

In the past, cases for a breach of Article 36 have all been brought against the United States and the US has generally refused to act on provisional measures ordered by the Court. Though the ICJ does often grant provisional measures, it will be interesting to see how these provisional measures are worded and on what basis they are granted.

"We all are praying that he is delivered justice. Almost everybody here is praying for him. We have been campaigning on various fronts for his safe return. We are very hopeful that the verdict is going to be in our favour. The way Salve ji has put his point, we are very hopeful," he told ANI.

Judge Ronny Abraham is reading out the verdict in Kulbhushan Jadhav case. The 11-judge bench will pronounce the verdict shortly. Court has jurisdiction in the case because of Vienna Convention, Abraham noted. The judge dismisses Pakistan reservations on this issue.

"It appears that under Pakistan law Kulbhushan Jadhav would have 40 days to appeal but it is not known whether he has done so. India said Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother has filed an appeal and petition to Pakistan government both handed over to Indian High Commission:" ICJ president Ronny Abraham

"Vienna convention does not exclude those found guilty under terror and espionage... Court considers that it has prima facie jurisdiction under Article 36 to entertain dispute of the parties," says ICJ president Ronny Abraham.

ICJ rejects Pakistan's argument that it has no jurisdiction to rule in Jadhav case. Reserves the right to adjudicate on interpretation of Article 36 of Vienna Convention under Article 1 of ICJ statute. This means that court judgement is favourable to India.

- ICJ accepts india's demand for consular access for Jadhav - It appears that the rights invoked by India in the present case are plausible, says Judge Abraham - All parties under Vienna Convention have rights to provide consular assistance to their nationals, says ICJ - ICJ rules it has prima facie jurisdiction to take up the case of Jadhav

Pakistan is required to tell the court what steps it has taken in compliance. It is also important to note here that our High Commissioner in Islamabad still doesn't have access to Jhadav, as we haven't asked the Court for that in our Request For Provisional Measures.

The Court has said that there is a case under the Vienna Convention and since Pakistan cannot guarantee that he won't be executed till the proceedings are over, it is important to ask Pakistan to not execute Jadhav.

It is important to note that the ICJ has not examined India's claim on merits or it's claim on final relief.

Pakistan is required to tell the court what steps it has taken in compliance

Judge Ronny Abraham asks Pakistan not to execute Jadhav, asks it to keep the court informed of all measures taken and orders Pakistan to keep the court seized of all steps. This was a unanimous verdict.

"It's a convincing win for India. The order needs to be studied, we need to see Pakistan's reaction. I hope consular access should be given. Because that was one of the main points. I hope Pakistan sees sense, behave like a responsible nation. Not just consular access even the family should be given access to Kulbhushan Jadhav," Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told CNN-News18.

The unanimous verdict, said ICJ president Ronny Abraham, shall be binding on Pakistan and if the country is found guilty of violating it, it shall draw international censure.

The order has put Kulbhushan Jadhav's execution on hold till the international court completes its full hearing and gives a final judgment on the case. While accepting India's request for "provisional measures", the court ordered Pakistan to ensure that:

The ICJ court on Thursday threw out Pakistan's arguments and accepted India's argument thus established the primacy of 1963 Vienna Convention over the 2008 Bilateral Agreement between India and Paksitan.

The sequence of events, following India's application seeking provisional measures to stop the Indian national from being sent to the gallows before a full hearing at the ICJ, will force the hand of Pakistan in following international laws and guidelines which it may otherwise have flouted with impunity. It may still do so but any brazening out on the ICJ interim order would carry a steep diplomatic price.

Through the ICJ appeal and verdict in its favour, India has managed to bring an international spotlight on the Jadhav case which will prevent Pakistan from carrying out any execution in darkness or under the cloak of silence.

Apart from the fact that the ICJ on Thursday made it binding on Pakistan to abide by the interim order and stay the execution of Kulbhushan Jadhav till the final verdict is delivered on this case  which may extend well beyond the August 2017 deadline proposed by Pakistan, there are other pressing reasons why Pakistan will find it very difficult now to disregard all orders and send Jadhav to the gallows.

In the LaGrand case, the court called on the US to "take all measures at its disposal" to ensure that Walter LaGrand (on death row at the time) was not executed pending a final decision of the court in the proceedings instituted by Germany and inform it of all the measures taken in implementation of the order. Nevertheless, Walter was executed shortly after the Court had issued the provisional measures order.

In the Breard case, the court called on the US to "take all measures at its disposal" to prevent the execution of Breard, pending a final decision of the court in the proceedings instituted by Paraguay. The court also requested the US to inform it of all the measures taken in implementation of its order. However, Breard was executed on schedule on 14 April. Paraguay later withdrew the case.

Former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Yadav is still not safe from the gallows as there are instances where an interim order by the International Court of justice has failed to save an accused from being executed. Two such examples are:

The court then examines whether there is a risk of irreparable prejudice and urgency. It considers that the mere fact that Jadhav is under a death sentence and might, therefore, be executed is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a risk of irreparable prejudice to the rights claimed by India. The court further observes that Pakistan has indicated that any execution of Jadhav would probably not take place before the month of August 2017. This means that there is a risk that an execution could take place at any moment thereafter before the court has given its final decision in the case. The court also notes that Pakistan has given no assurance that Jadhav will not be executed before the court has rendered its final decision. In those circumstances, the court is satisfied that there is urgency in the present case.

"The court then focuses on the issue of the link between the rights claimed and the provisional measures requested. It considers that the measures requested are aimed at ensuring that the rights contained in Article 36, paragraph 1, of the Vienna Convention, are preserved. Therefore, a link exists between the rights claimed by India and the provisional measures being sought. IV. On Jadhav's executive risk

"In the view of the court, this is sufficient to establish that it has prima facie jurisdiction under Article I of - 2 - the Optional Protocol. The court further observes that the existence of a 2008 bilateral Agreement between the Parties on consular relations does not change its conclusion on jurisdiction. II. On consular access It observes that the rights to consular notification and access between a State and its nationals, as well as the obligations of the detaining State to inform the person concerned without delay of his rights with regard to consular assistance and to allow their exercise, are recognized in Article 36, paragraph 1, of the Vienna Convention, and that India has alleged violations of this provision. In the view of the court, therefore, it appears that the rights alleged by India are plausible III. On Validity of measures India sought

"The ICJ notes that the acts alleged by India, i.e., the alleged failure by Pakistan to provide the requisite consular notifications with regard to the arrest and detention of Jadhav, as well as the alleged failure to allow communication and provide access to him, appear to be capable of falling within the scope of the Convention.

The ICJ gave an interim order in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case on Thursday in India's favour, thus telling Pakistan to put on hold the planned execution of Jadhav. Here are some key points from the interim order.

"The ICJ order," she also said, "has come as a great relief to the familly of Kulbhushan Jadhav and people of India."

Swaraj also said that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India will leave no stone unturned to save Kulbhushan Jadhav.

" We are grateful to Mr.Harish Salve for presenting India's case so effectively before ICJ," Swaraj tweeted on Thursday, adding, "I compliment my team of officers in the MEA for their tireless efforts and hard work."

Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj on Thursday thanked her staff and the Indian lawyer Harish Salve for the combine effort to present Kulbhushan Jadhav's case at the ICJ and for the interim order that told Pakistan to put on hold Jadhav's execution.

The Prime Minister's reaction came after the 11-judge bench of the ICJ unanimously stayed the execution of Jadhav who has been sentenced to death by a Pakistan military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

He spoke to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to thank her and appreciated the efforts of advocate Harish Salve who represented India in the case, official sources said.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday expressed satisfaction at the order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which stayed the execution of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav who is on death row in Pakistan.

It was evident from Zakaria's statements that Pakistan is not happy with the the interim order. Zakaria also said that Pakistan will present solid evidence against Jadhav in the international court.

The Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson also accused India of violating several sections in the bilateral agreement signed between the two countries.

akistan on Thursday accused India of "hiding its real face" in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case. Addressing a gathering of mediapesons, Zakria accused India of "trying to defend a person whose actions have led to the killing of Pakistani citizens".

The move to take the Jadhav case to the ICJ, therefore, may be read as a turning point in India's foreign policy.

The interim ICJ order in India's favour should instil confidence in us. That India isn't a rogue state like Pakistan and a rule-based state that respects international laws are more likely to benefit it from moving disputes from a bilateral to multilateral framework especially when it concerns irresponsible, revisionist states like Pakistan.

It was argued that India has nothing to gain and everything to lose from highlighting the Jadhav case because it opens us to international scrutiny. India has long remained a victim of defeatism on foreign policy and it required a bold step from the Narendra Modi government to remove the mental cobwebs.

India's decision to move International Court of Justice on Kulbhushan Jadhav drew many sceptics to conclude that this move turns a bilateral issue into a multilateral one and Pakistan will seize this chance to highlight the trouble in Kashmir.

The Prime Minister's reaction came after the 11-judge bench of the ICJ unanimously stayed the execution of Jadhav who has been sentenced to death by a Pakistan military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

He spoke to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to thank her and appreciated the efforts of advocate Harish Salve who represented India in the case, official sources said.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday expressed satisfaction at the order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which stayed the execution of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav who is on death row in Pakistan.

It was evident from Zakaria's statements that Pakistan is not happy with the the interim order. Zakaria also said that Pakistan will present solid evidence against Jadhav in the international court.

The Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson also accused India of violating several sections in the bilateral agreement signed between the two countries.

akistan on Thursday accused India of "hiding its real face" in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case. Addressing a gathering of mediapesons, Zakria accused India of "trying to defend a person whose actions have led to the killing of Pakistani citizens".

The move to take the Jadhav case to the ICJ, therefore, may be read as a turning point in India's foreign policy.

The interim ICJ order in India's favour should instil confidence in us. That India isn't a rogue state like Pakistan and a rule-based state that respects international laws are more likely to benefit it from moving disputes from a bilateral to multilateral framework especially when it concerns irresponsible, revisionist states like Pakistan.

It was argued that India has nothing to gain and everything to lose from highlighting the Jadhav case because it opens us to international scrutiny. India has long remained a victim of defeatism on foreign policy and it required a bold step from the Narendra Modi government to remove the mental cobwebs.

India's decision to move International Court of Justice on Kulbhushan Jadhav drew many sceptics to conclude that this move turns a bilateral issue into a multilateral one and Pakistan will seize this chance to highlight the trouble in Kashmir.

Nation is very happy. There is no evidence against #KulbhushanJadhav , trail against him is illegal. void & abusive: PP Chaudhary, MoS Law pic.twitter.com/6zytyMQhla

Commenting on Pakistan's reaction to the case where it downplayed the interim order, Baglay said that reiterated that the order is "binding" on Pakistan.

"The provisional release which has been guaranteed an essential first step in saving Jadhav's life and the rights that Pakistan violated in the process. We welcome the decision." Gopal said.

"This is a matter of great relief and I am sure every Indian is equally relieved. Kulbhushan Jadhav can not be executed by Pakistan. The MEA had assured the Parliament that the govt will do everything to ensure Jadhav is not executed in Pakistan. And this interim order ensures that commitment," he added.

The Ministry of External Affairs expressed its relief on the interim order that the International Court of Justice passed on Thursday. Gopal Baglay, spokesperson, MEA said, "The ICJ at Hague a unanimous, favourable and ambiguous order on India's request for provisional measures on the Kulbhushan Jadhav case. It has told Pakistan to ensure Jadhav is not executed until the court completes the hearing,"

Baglay also said that there's no clarity as to whether or not Jadhav has filed an appeal, the date for which expires on 19 May. "Even the ICJ is not aware of it. We do not have any information and no official information has been given to us. What we know is that Jadhav's mother has sent an application to Pakistan."

The MEA also expressed the ministry's willingness to talk parallelly with Pakistan on the case. "We have already demanded consular access. Our case is that according to Vienna convention, Pakistan should allow consular access to Jadhav. Even the ICJ president said that there's a dispute between the two parties," he said.

Baglay, however, refused to comment on the future course of action if Pakistan refuses to follow the ICJ order. "This matter is subjudice. As to what course the matter will take, it's best not to go into it at the moment. The court has clearly said that till a final decision comes in the matter, it has told Pakistan what it needs to do and what not do," he added.

When asked about the visas for Jadhav's parents, the ministry said that it has not received any updates on the same from Pakistan.

"The ICJ order clearly says that is binding internationally and legally. India is a law abiding country, we follow international law. We believe that an internationally binding law will be followed. At this point, we can't speculate.

I

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will hold public hearings on Monday in the case of retired Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court. The announcement was made by ICJ on 10 May, a day after it stayed Jadhav's execution following India's initiation of proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations". According to the ICJ statement, an oral observation by India will begin at 10 am (1.30 pm IST) and go on till 11.30 am, following which oral observation by Pakistan will begin at 3 pm and is expected to go on till 4.30 pm.

The ICJ will have an open hearing on the Jadhav execution case involving India and Pakistan at The Hague. With the court involved, it is no longer a battle of bilateral wills. Also, the case has strong ramifications for India which has never allowed to make the bilateral issue with Pakistan multi-lateral. The last time it did so was in 1971. Of late, several countries seem to have taken up the cry to "interfere" in resolving the Kashmir dispute.

"The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, will hold public hearings on Monday, May 15, 2017...in the proceedings instituted by India on May 8, 2017 against Pakistan. The hearings will be devoted to the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by India," the ICJ said in a release.

India had told ICJ that Jadhav "will be subjected to execution unless the court indicates provisional measures directing the government of Pakistan to take all measures necessary to ensure that he is not executed until th(e) Court's decision on the merits" of the case.

India pointed out that Jadhav's execution "would cause irreparable prejudice to the rights claimed by India".

Noting that India has been informed by the ICJ that an action has been initiated on "provisional measures" sought by New Delhi, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay in New Delhi said there is "legal juridical procedure" that will be followed.

Earlier, the ICJ president wrote to the Pakistani prime minister, saying, "In my capacity as president of the court,.. I call upon your excellency's government, pending the court's decision on the request for the indication of provisional measures to act in such a way as will enable any order the Court may make on this request to have its appropriate effects."

On whether the "provisional measures" granted by the ICJ including a halt to Jadhav's execution was binding on Pakistan, Baglay referred to the clauses in ICJ rules which said "a request for the indication of provisional measures shall have priority over all other cases".

India had submitted that it has information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan" on 3 March, 2016, and that Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on 25 March, 2016, a ICJ press release had said on Sunday.

Jadhav, 46, was given the death sentence by the Field General Court Martial in Pakistan last month, evoking a sharp reaction in India, which warned Pakistan of consequences and damage to bilateral ties if the "pre-meditated murder" was carried out. Jadhav was sentenced to death for "espionage and subversive activities".

India acknowledged that Jadhav had served with the navy, but denied that he has any connection with the government. India has also handed over to Pakistan an appeal by Jadhav's mother, initiating a process to get his conviction overturned.

With inputs from agencies
The family members of BSF head constable Prem Sagar, who was killed in Jammu and Kashmir and his body mutilated by Pakistani troops earlier this month, were deeply disturbed when at his hometown Deoria, the district administration first installed an airconditioner and put up a sofa and carpet and then removed the same soon after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath paid his visit at Sagar's residence to extend his condolences to the bereaved family.

The soldier's kin said they were taken aback when authorities removed the window air conditioner, sofa and carpet soon after the chief minister left their place, reported NDTV.

"Officials took away the carpet, sofa and AC soon after Adityanath left our residence. Within 15 to 30 minutes of his departure, everything was gone," Dayasagar, brother of the fallen BSF trooper, said. However, there was no official word on it.

The Deoria administration had installed an air-conditioner, and put up a sofa and a carpet in the room where the chief minister was to meet the family. A day before the chief minister's visit, dusty roads in the village were cleaned and drains which always used to remain open were covered as well.

The 50-year-old BSF head constable was on patrol duty between two forward posts along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as part of a 10-member team of BSF and army soldiers when Pakistani troops opened unprovoked fire, using rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.

Pakistan's Border Action Team (BAT) allegedly crossed the LoC and ambushed the patrol team. Sagar and Naik Subedar Paramjeet Singh of the Indian Army died in the ambush and their bodies were mutilated.

Head Constable Sagar was on patrol duty on 1 May along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch when Pakistan's Border Action Team (BAT) crossed the LoC and ambushed the patrol team. While taking cover, Sagar and Naik Subedar Paramjeet Singh of the Army were left behind.They were killed and their bodies mutilated.

Sagar's family had refused to perform his last rites, insisting that the chief minister visit them. They agreed to cremate his body only after the chief minister spoke to them.

During the meeting with the family of Prem Sagar, the Chief Minister handed over a cheque of Rs four lakh and a fixed deposit of Rs two lakh to the widow of the deceased soldier. Earlier, Agriculture Minister Surya Pratap Shahi had extended a financial assistance of Rs 20 lakh to the family.

The chief minister had also announced that a girls inter college would be constructed on a stretch of 1.5 acres of government land and a memorial in the memory of the slain soldier would also be made. On the remaining land, a park would be constructed and beautified.He also reportedly promised employment to Sagar's children after they completed their studies.

With regard to a demand for a gas agency for the family, he had said a recommendation would be sent to the Central government.

With inputs from IANS
The call by Zakir Musa, who quit the Hizbul Mujahideen militant outfit, to fight for the creation of the Islamic State of Jammu and Kashmir, has triggered an ideological split among the militant outfits. Zakir drew the support of two other militant outfits  Harkatul Mujahideeen (HuM) and Kashmir Taliban  and the ideological rift has come years after the militants had sorted out their divergent views over the resolution of the Kashmir issue.

After the rift between Kashmirs two main militant organisations  Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and Hizbul Mujahideen  in the early 1990s was sorted out, Kashmir had witnessed a lull in skirmishes between the militants. However in 2015, chief of the United Jehad Council (UJC), an amalgam of different militant outfits, and Hizbul Mujahideen's top commander, Syed Salahuddin, announced the decision to expel one of its commanders, Abdul Qayoom Najar, after he was blamed for series of attacks on mobile tower owners.

Security forces said that Najar was leading a breakaway group of Lashkar-i-Islam (LeI) and Salahuddin had made a statement that he was expelled for defaming and weakening Kashmirs 'freedom struggle'. However, Superintendent of Police, Sopore, Harmeet Singh, said that Najar was now in Pakistan and the LeI was not very active in north Kashmir.

However, while the mode of operations had triggered the conflict in 2015  as the Hizbul Mujahideen stated it was against the killing of civilians with Salahuddin recently even denying that the militants were responsible for the killing of Lieutenant Ummer Fayaz, it is the first time that the ideological division in the militancy has been so deep. When the militancy began in the 1990s and it seemed as though a political settlement of the Kashmir issue was on the cards, there were wide differences between the different militant organisations on the future of Kashmir.

In the latest video released by Zakir, he emphasised that thought it should be the "priority of militants to fight Indian forces", but "once Kashmir gets freedom" there would be a fight on the shape of the State that would exist. In the 1990s, while the JKLF was pitching for the freedom of Kashmir from both India and Pakistan, the Hizbul Mujahideen was seeking the merger of this part of Kashmir with Pakistan. It was in 1994 that the JKLF announced a unilateral ceasefire and its chairman, Yasin Malik, ran it as a political organisation.

Although both the Hurriyat Conference led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq have often been fighting it out openly, Syed Salahudin has thrown his weight behind both factions. While Geelani has earlier been advocating the tripartite resolution of the Kashmir problem, some leaders within the Hurriyat(M) have also been stating that the resolution of Kashmir issue has to be found outside the purview of UN Resolutions.

But Saifullah Saif, the spokesperson of militant organisation Kashmiri Taliban, told a local news agency that Zakir is on the 'right track' and that the Kashmiri Taliban's chief commander, Muhammad Bin Qasim, supports him. "Our organisation is a constituent of United Jehad Council and we want to make it clear that people working for India will not be spared, even if they are part of the Hurriyat Conference," he said and added that the outfit has decided to target 'anti-freedom struggle forces' without delay. The spokesperson of the HuM Hasan Askari has said, "Zakir has spoken the truth. We stand by him. He has spoken about Islam. He has spoken against those who work in connivance with India. Our support is always with him."

Former UJC chief and member of Quami Mahazi Azadi (QMA), Azam Inquilabi, said that despite the early differences towards the resolution of Kashmir problem could be started with both India and Pakistan starting the demilitarisation of Jammu and Kashmir and after a Parliament is set up. He added that the people of Kashmir can be given the choice of deciding on their future. Inquilabli, who was the head of militant outfit, Operation Balakote, had dissociated from the UJC in 1991, to launch a "political movement for the resolution of the Kashmir issue".

Although Islam had been a pull for many youths joining the militancy in the 1990s, it is after the 11 September, 2001 attacks in US that Kashmiri militants have chosen to refrain from affiliating with any global terror organisations. Salahuddin made it clear in his latest statement that Kashmiri militants were not linked with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. While denying the involvement of Hizbul Mujahideen in Fayazs killing, its spokesman has said that "India was trying to create groups like Islamic State to defame militants. There is no role of Al-Qaeda, Islamic State and Taliban in Kashmirs freedom struggle."
Its difficult to tell whether tragedy follows farce or farce follows tragedy. In the case of the Aam Aadmi Party, non-stop farce carries the hint of the tragic.

Two weeks ago, the Kumar Vishwas episode had the party in turbulence, last week it was Kapil Mishra who caused a stir by directly accusing Arvind Kejriwal of taking bribe; and this week it seems party legislator Sanjeev Jha, who tried to stage a tit-for-tat fast to take on Mishra, is out to grab some media attention. One should now expect someone else from the party to steal the limelight with fresh antics.

With every unsavoury episode hitting the headlines, the party sinks a notch deeper into the morass it finds itself in. With no credible answers to the questions on corruption being raised frequently, its credibility dips quicker. The response to all the charges from the party has been awkward and unconvincing to say the least.

"It is not that all the charges have substance and will end up in the conviction of one or a few people," said a former senior leader of the party, adding, "But the response reveals that the leaders are confused and nervous." He said Mishras allegation that Kejriwal received a Rs two-crore bribe is difficult to prove given it's a 'my word against your word' situation. The government may have some explaining to do in the tanker probe, but the real test will be the PWD scam involving Arvind Kejriwals late brother-in-law Surendra Kumar Bansal. "I have had access to the bills produced in the case and most of them are clearly fake," he asserted.

Asked whether the party would survive even if the government and Kejriwal emerged unscathed in the corruption cases, he replied that the chances are bleak. "Kejriwal may not be corrupt, at least not as yet in the absence of proof, but this cannot be said about people around him. They are out to make quick gains. Again, it is his trait to use people and dump them that will keep the party unstable."

This is what many once close to the AAP leadership will concede. The result is factionalism and intense competition among leaders with little consequence to be close to him. Instability is thus built into the partys structure. It means there will be more Kapil Mishras speaking out from time-to-time. They say the BJP has a vested interest in trying to cause trouble in the party and harassing it otherwise, but why do you blame them when you cannot hold your own flock together?

It is not the Opposition's job to see you comfortable in power.

Most of the issues raised by Mishra have been in the public domain. So what could be the new allegation against it? Mishra has hinted at a scandal in the mohalla health clinics, details of which he will reveal in a few days. There could be some other issue to which nobody is privy so far. Ironically, it is the AAPs shoot-and-scoot tactic that has back to haunt it. There may not be any substance to the allegations, but the allegations in themselves are enough to demoralise the partys cadre and hurt the confidence of the leadership.

Worse is the impact of the damage to the public perception of the party. The results of the civic body elections have already exposed how sharp the slide has been in less than three years. The more farces that surface, the more the AAP looks headed for a tragedy. With no visible signs of the party or Kejriwal making efforts at course-correction, the inevitable is quite predictable.

Perhaps it is no more a question of if, it is a question of when.
Payannur/Kannur: The revenge political killings of the BJP and CPM workers, which has taken nearly 200 lives over the last two decades in Kannur, the home district of Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, have spread into more areas now, forcing Governor P Sathasivam to intervene for the second time in six months and ask the Kerala chief minister to act against it.

The killing of Biju, 34, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief (Karyavahak) in Ramanthali village, barely three months since Vijayan chaired an all-party meeting that resolved to restore peace after a series of murders, has also triggered widespread violence and a shutdown in Payannur.

The revenge killings were earlier limited to party villages like Pinarayi, the hometown of Kerala chief minister, CPM state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnans Kodiyeri and Kadirur of P Jayarajan, the party satrap in the region. Jayarajan himself is a victim of an attempt on his life by alleged RSS assassins.

The murder, according to the police was meticulously planned and executed by a killer squad, similar to the one led five years ago by TP Chandrasekharan, a "renegade" who floated his Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) posing a threat to the parent party in Onchiyam in the nearby Kozhikode district.

They hired an Innova two weeks ago, which they used to knock down Bijus bike and hack him to death in broad daylight. Though the police had identified all the seven assailants, they could arrest only the owner of the vehicle and the go-between so far.

It was a sequel to two earlier killings. Biju, a painting worker living near the Indian Naval Academy, was one of the accused in the murder of CPM worker CV Dhanaraj at his house in Ramanthali on 11 July last year.

The CPM retaliated within hours  they hacked a BJP worker to death. Fourty-year-old CK Ramachandran was an auto-rickshaw driver in the nearby Annur village. The BJP accuses the rivals of triggering violence to prevent the migration of its cadres into its fold.

"Both Ramachandran and Biju come from traditional CPM families, and these villages were considered unassailable Communist forts, BJP district president P Sathyaprakash told Firstpost.

"We have been making inroads into all their strongholds in the region like Kayyur and Karivellur (fabled for Communist-inspired peasant uprising), and almost all those who joined us recently were from the CPM."

The BJP, which could corner only 5,019 votes (3.84 percent) in Payyanur Assembly constituency in 2011, polled 15,341 votes (10.77 percent) in 2016, a three-fold jump. It had garnered 12,878 votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from this segment, showing a steady upward trend.

The Kerala chief minister had won Payyanur in 1996 when he last contested an election before taking over the reins of the party in the state, which he continued for more than 16 years and kept off from elections.

BJPs vote share was 3.84 percent then as well, which remained static or even dwindled during elections that followed till 2014.

"We haven't provoked them since the peace meet where we assured the chief minister of our full cooperation, said Sathyaprakash. "The only thing that we demanded from him was freedom to propagate our political ideology like anyone else. We believed him. We thought he would act like the states chief minister, not an apparatchik."

Sathyaprakash asserted that his party would abide by the assurance it made at the peace meeting and hoped the other side reciprocated.

He hastened to add: We had informed the police and the district administration of suspected movements of the vehicle near his house. But they did nothing to prevent the killing and the killers are still at large.

Gandhian activist PV Rajagopal, who visited the home of the victim on Sunday on a peace mission, said he had got an assurance from RSS leader Govindacharya that there would be no retaliation. "It was a body blow to our efforts to bring peace in the district, said the founder of Ekta Parishad.

I am also in talks with the chief minister (Vijayan) and CPM leader Brinda Karat and others. I hope all are not lost.

But writer CV Balakrishnan, who belongs to the Annur village where the second killing in the present bout of violence happened, does not share that optimism.

"There are trained assassins of political parties with an instinct to kill, and they have arrived here," he said. "Its a ticking time bomb, and they would continue to kill as long as they get protection from their political masters. The peace meetings and condemnation by leaders follow every killing as a ritual."

Vengeance does not stop with the retaliatory killing. On the night when Dhanaraj and Ramachandran were killed in a gap of a few hours, violence erupted in 30 places during which 19 houses, a school, three shops and 35 vehicles were torched.

Following the arrests, CPM men led by Jayarajan laid a siege to the police station and got the officer transferred and the cases were allegedly diluted.

Inaugurating the protest, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, also a former home minister, warned that his party would become a fireball if his cadres were touched. In the Assembly, the chief minister described it as a retaliatory killing.

The cadres receive such rhetorics as a licence to kill, said Balakrishnan. "Those in power have more responsibility to call it a day." On 13 May, the Governor, a former chief justice of India, forwarded a BJP petition to the chief minister demanding Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) clamped on the district.

A Raj Bhavan communique quoted the petition as saying ever since the present government came to power, the Sangh Parivar has lost 14 of its core workers in nearly 500 attacks.

He asked the chief minister to take immediate necessary action to put a curb on such disturbing incidents so as to send a positive signal to peace-loving citizens of the State.

In October, the governor had summoned top officials after another brutal killing of a 25-year-old BJP worker near the chief ministers house in Pinarayi.

Additional chief secretary (home) Nalini Netto, now the states chief secretary, and state police chief Loknath Behera then met him and assured earnest efforts to apprehend the culprits irrespective of their party affiliation.

At the peace meeting held after a series of killings, the chief minister offered extensive raids on the armouries of the parties where they stockpile swords and crude bombs and tighten security in vulnerable areas.

Observers believe Vijayan was forced to swing into action to end the political blood feud after he started facing protests outside the state.

He had to cancel his scheduled meetings in the national capital in January after a massive demonstration by BJP alleging their workers were selectively targeted.

He witnessed similar protests in Bhopal in December.

Back in Kerala, he started confabulations with senior BJP leaders who offered to extend their cooperation if he allowed the police to function impartially and ensure the rule of law.

While the two sides were waiting for the final meeting, keeping their communication channels open, another local BJP leader, in Vijayans Dharmadam constituency, fell to the knife of the killers at night.

Soon, perhaps for the first time in the districts gory past, CPM leaders visited the victims home and consoled his wife and his school going child, where the lady disarmed its senior leader P Jayarajan asking what wrong did her husband do to him.

But Vijayan prevailed upon the rivals. On the eve of the all-party meeting, he held another meeting with them, in a hotel in the state capital, which was also attended by top CPM leaders, including Balakrishnan, and fine-tuned the agenda.

It ensured there's no retaliatory killing. Though there had been such meetings convened by chief ministers even in the past, violence resumes after a lull. But analysts thought the two sides were serious this time.

This fragile peace brokered at the top level, reportedly at the instance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, was broken Friday evening.

"I have only one prayer," says Purushothaman, father of Biju, also an RSS man who works as a mason. "Let this not happen to anyone else." The assassins usually attack the victim at their homes, usually in front of their family. A school teacher was killed while teaching in front of primary schoolchildren.

"Vijayan has now lost control over his party," said O Rajagopal, the BJPs lone legislator in the state. "This is not an isolated incident. Of the 14 political murders under his rule, 13 victims were our workers. People are living in fear there."

The BJP also released a video claimed to be of CPM workers celebrating after the killing. The video shot at night shows people difficult to figure out beating drums and dancing. However, the CPM dismissed it as an old one and instead released a CCTV footage of the RSS workers ransacking the party-controlled Pariyaram Cooperative Medical College and Hospital.

None else than CPM can put an end to the violence here since they are in power, said Vijayan's Congress predecessor Oommen Chandy. Unfortunately, they are on either side of all the violence and killings here.
Patna: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has ruled out any possibility of heading the grand coalition against BJP as a prime ministerial candidate in the General Elections to Lok Sabha in 2019.

While addressing a press conference in Patna on Monday, Kumar also praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying, Three years ago, who was aware that Modiji would be the Prime Minister of India. But it happened because he was capable of that, and the people of our country voted him to power. I know, I do not have that capacity. I am a leader of a small party and I have no national ambitions.

Sharad Yadav served our party as president for three consecutive terms and then the party workers decided to give this responsibility to me. But the media tried to link that with me having national ambitions. As a party president I will try to expand JD(U) in other states, but it does not mean that I will dream of the prime ministers post, he said.

Kumar very candidly admitted that JD(U) was a small party and he would only concentrate on serving the people of Bihar.

He also distanced himself from the allegations of corruption against Lalu Yadav whose Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is a partner in the ruling coalition in Bihar.

Its on Laluji to reply to the allegations levelled by the BJP. I have nothing to say. If anyone has the proof, they should go to the court," the Bihar chief minister said.

Kumar also asserted that unlike RJD his party was in favour of using electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the elections. "We have seen how elections were conducted earlier. I do not wish that time to come again. We are running a coalition government but it does not mean JD(U) ideology would be the same as that of the RJD, he said.

Kumar urged the media not to play much in his "silence" and that he was very much busy in doing routine works.

When asked about his party's stand in the upcoming Presidential election, which is scheduled to take place in June, Kumar refused to indicate whether there were attempts by opposition parties to put up a combined candidate. "First of all the ruling party should try to form a consensus. It would be the best possible option. If it does not happen then the opposition parties should come up with a candidate."

The author is a senior editor with News18 Bihar.
Joining in the discussions over the election of the next President of India, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar indicated his support in favour of Pranab Mukherjee if he secures a second term as the President.

Will be good if he (Pranab Mukherjee) becomes the President again, but it is for the ruling party to take initiative: Bihar CM on Pres polls pic.twitter.com/6R6yGboi35  ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

Kumar says, " It will be good if he (Pranab Mukherjee) becomes the President again, but it is for the ruling party to take initiative."

As President Pranab Mukherjee's term is drawing to a close, the presidential elections are scheduled to be held before 25 July 2017. Political bigwigs are seen to be in talks, deliberating over their "choice" to preside as the head of the nation.

The opposition's endeavour to pitch for a joint candidate for the presidential elections seeks to culminate in the coming few days as Congress president Sonia Gandhi anticipates meeting Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's (DMK) working president MK Stalin.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said deliberations in this regard are underway "without any fear, favour or ego". "The widest spectrum of opposition is committed to ensuring the most credible and winning face to fight and win against the government NDA nominee. I can tell you with assurance that every possible effort in that direction is underway without fear or favour or restriction or ego, and all synergies of the wider opposition are being constructively polled for that endeavour and for that result," he told reporters.

"Sonia Gandhi is trying to build a consensus on the presidential election over the phone and even by meeting leaders of the opposition parties. But we are waiting for the BJP to announce their candidate. Let them first declare their candidate," JD(U) leader KC Tyagi told IANS.

When asked about the names of probable candidates doing the rounds, Tyagi said: "Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a good name, but no consensus has been reached on that. Meira Kumar is also a good name, Sharad Yadav is also a good name."

"No consultations have taken place formally on the names together. Till the BJP announces its candidate or till the election date is announced, all this is just preliminary talk," Tyagi added.

A senior Left leader told IANS that the united opposition will wait for the BJP to announce their candidate. He also said that they will announce the name at the end.

On the other end of the paradigm, the Shiv Sena, an ally of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra as well as at the Centre, had proposed Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supremo Mohan Bhagwat's candidature from the National Democratic Alliance for the country's top constitutional post.

The Shiv Sena had said that the RSS headquarters has become the "second seat of power" in the country and it does not deem anybody fit for the president's post except RSS chief Bhagwat, as per reports.

Uddhav Thackeray, had earlier in April recommended Bhagwat for the post of President of India.

"Suggested Mohan Bhagwat's name, haven't discussed Sharad Pawar. Pawar is Modi's guru, can't say what's in one's heart," Thackeray said.

Congress on Friday made it clear that a united opposition is committed to win the presidential election by putting up a joint candidate against the NDA nominee and all synergies are being constructively pooled for that endeavour.

(With agency inputs)
Kolkata: Exuding confidence that the opposition parties would be able to put up a common candidate in the coming presidential polls, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury on Sunday said the effort was to zero in on a person capable of preserving the secular democratic fabric of the constitution.

"The secular democratic fabric of the constitution has to be preserved from the Rashtrapati Bhavan. We have to find out such a common candidate," he told media persons on the sidelines of a programme at Khardah of West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district.

Yechury said talks were on among the opposition parties to firm up a consensus candidate.

"Talks are on among opposition parties. You will get to know at the right time who we are speaking to. And then you will see a common candidate," he said.

But Yechury declined to name any individual who was being considered for the top post.

"How can I name? The moment we name somebody, the CBI will be used against him. LK Advani's name had cropped up. Now there is a CBI probe against him. Wait, and you will know the name at the right time."

Replying to a query about Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's scheduled meeting with Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday, the CPM chief said it was a matter between the two leaders.

"In a democracy, everybody has the right to talk to anybody," he said.

Asked whether the CPM would speak to the Trinamool Congress on the issue, Yechury said: "There was a discussion among likeminded parties. The responsibility of who will talk to whom was finalised in that meeting.

"I was given some responsibility which I carried out. Others also have been given some specific responsibility, which they will fulfill", he said.
Jammu: Appealing to the youth of Kashmir to question those who instigate them to join the "so-called freedom struggle", Union minister Jitendra Singh on Sunday hit out at the separatists, saying if stone-pelting is a "holy task" then they should make their own children pelt stones and risk their lives.

Singh rejected separatists as being stakeholders in Kashmir and said that real stakeholders are the state's youth below the age of 40 who constitute 65 percent of its population.

"I have made this appeal to youth of Kashmir that time has come for you (youth of valley) to raise this question-mark on those (separatists), who instigate you to join this so- called freedom struggle," Singh told reporters.

The minister said, "If they (separatists and others) feel that this struggle of stone-pelting is so holy and a holy task, they should set an example of sparing one child from their own family to become a stone-pelter or lay down his life. This duplicity is not going to work now".

"Kashmiri youth has rejected this duplicity. That is why, 66,000 youth came out for seeking government jobs yesterday despite hostile circumstances. Hurriyat today stand exposed," he said.

"We have 65 percent of youth below the age of 40 years. So the real stakeholders of Kashmir are the youth. Those who keep complaining that government is not holding talks, have got their minds fixed on two or three names and those names have already lost their relevance," he said in an apparent reference to Hurriyat leaders.

Singh said, "Many of the separatist leaders are now losing their credibility for the fact that they stand totally exposed. You cannot have your children lodged in safe havens of Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi or abroad. You cannot go after government jobs for your children and then ask your neighbour's children to become stone pelters".

"Regardless of all that is happening, I have confidence that things are going to turn for the better sooner rather than later," he said to a question on the situation in Kashmir.

"The evidence of this is in the fact that inspite of such hostile circumstances, yesterday itself, youth in a huge number of more than 65,000 came out to try their luck for the post of police sub-inspector when the number of posts were just 700," he said.

Singh said the youth of Kashmir want to be part of the development journey of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"So this itself is an indication and evidence of the fact that the youth of Kashmir want to be part of mainstream India and all want to be part of the development journey led by Prime Minister Modi".

"Youth of Kashmir also realise their stake of being part of Modi's development agenda. They are also conscious of the fact when youth in other states are taking benefit of schemes initiated by Modi, the youth of Kashmir must not be left out. They are serious and conscious about it," he said.

Asked about militant leader Zakir Musa's recent comment on "Islamisation" of Kashmir, he said that as far as Islamisation is concerned, it is a universal phenomenon.

"Kashmir being vulnerable territory and having majority population of Islam, is sought to be used by certain elements to carry forward this agenda. But the saving grace is that Kashmir has been traditionally known for a composite culture. It is this tradition that is resisting any such attempt of Islamisation," he said.

On the government holding talks with stakeholders, Singh said talks and engagement with stakeholders are already on.
Lucknow: The maiden session of the newly elected UP Assembly began on a stormy note on Monday, with opposition members throwing paper balls at the podium and the marshals trying to dodge them with files.

The customary address of governor Ram Naik to the joint sitting of the two Houses of the state legislature was drowned in the uproar created by the opposition.

Slogan-shouting opposition members trooped into the well despite speaker Hridaya Narain Dixit's appeal at an all-party meeting to ensure smooth proceedings.

The governor was flanked by Dixit and chairman of the Legislative Council, Ramesh Yadav.

Chief minister Yogi Adityanath was present when the governor read the address despite the bedlam. The address is a note prepared by the government highlighting its achievements.

For the first time, the proceedings were telecast live by Doordarshan.

After the BJP came to power in the state, a decision was taken to telecast live the proceedings of the House so that people could benefit.

"Sara Uttar Pradesh dekh raha hai aap ko (the entire Uttar Pradesh is watching you)," a visibly annoyed governor told the shouting members, who kept throwing papers at the podium and creating din.

The opposition SP and BSP have decided to take on the Yogi Adityanath government on the law and order front.
Bhadohi: Senior Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia has said that only when the word "secular" is removed from the Constitution will India become a "Hindu nation".

"This will ensure that only Hindus become prime ministers, chief ministers, judges and police chiefs," he said, on Sunday night at a Bajrang Dal programme in the Uttar Pradesh town.

Known for his controversial remarks, Togadia added that the stone pelters of Kashmir were "Pakistanis who just live in India".

"Pelting security forces with stones is an act of war," he said.

The VHP leader also suggested that just as Muslims pray at mosques on Fridays and Christians in churches on Sundays, Hindus should have a day for gathering.
A lot of airtime, digital space and newsprint has of late been spent discussing subversion of democracy by "tampering" with EVMs. Electoral drubbing has led to some parties floating elaborate theories on how these machines could be hacked and made to show fake results. This is a serious charge but parties levelling these allegations have, so far, failed to back it with any solid evidence.

The Aam Admi Party, in particular, has upped the ante and had staged a pantomime right inside the Delhi Assembly to 'prove' their point. Yet, it doesn't need a dubious drama with fake EVMs to show that electoral procedures can be tampered with. The institutions of Indian democracy are still not stable enough to withstand the pulls and pressures of coercion.

In reality, elections can be subverted in ways other than "changing the motherboard" of an EVM or punching "secret security codes" in it. One only needs to take a look at West Bengal to see how there are cruder and simpler ways of unleashing electoral frauds.

Keeping up its long "tradition", three out of seven civic bodies across five districts in the state that went to elections on Sunday, witnessed widespread violence, charges of booth capture and rigging. Nearly all the allegations  spraying bullets, lobbing bombs, destroying EVMs, beating up members of the media and interfering with their work  were leveled against goons apparently owing allegiance to the ruling Trinamool Congress.

While the Hill municipalities  Darjeeling, Kurseong, Mirik and Kalimpong  were quiet, the plains were not so. Raiganj in North Dinajpur district, Pujali in South 24 Parganas and Domkal, the freshly created municipality in Murshidabad district were the epicenters as armed goons took centrestage from the morning. Local TV channels were awash with reports of crude bombs being hurled, country-made pistols pressed into service and polling booths being jammed by "outsiders".

These three municipalities captured in a nutshell the changing scenario of Bengal's political map. The Left and Congress entered into an unofficial seat-sharing arrangement to protect one of the last few bastions from TMC's dominance. Just ahead of the elections, the TMC had engineered a large-scale split within Congress by managing to wean away five of their declared candidates. Completing the three-way arc is BJP, the rising force in Bengal politics. During the campaigning stage, the BJP focused on tapping into Hindu resentment against Mamata Banerjee's identity politics  a tactic that has brought it political space and rich dividends during the just concluded Kanthi Dakshin bypoll.

With politics of polarisation gaining prominence, TMC has of late been extremely wary of a larger Hindu consolidation in BJP's favour. The party seems to have stumbled onto a late realisation that the politics of minority appeasement that it has been indulging for so long to lock the nearly 30 percent Muslim votes in this border state is working beautifully to BJP's advantage.

By the turn of the New Year, there has been a volley of activity from TMC to show that they are not an 'anti-Hindu party'. To counter BJP's Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti processions that have drawn rapid eyeballs and support, the TMC has unleashed its own version of 'puja politics'. While the chief minister  who has taken some controversial, unprecedented decisions such as allotting stipends to imams and muezzins  suddenly shifted gear to focus on the state's cultural identity ahead of the religious identity, her generals have been holding competitive Hanuman pujas and processions. Amid this cauldron, every election at every level is an inevitable march towards an inflection point in Bengal politics that may arrive sooner rather than later.

With the stakes being this high, Raiganj, Domkal and Pujali was sucked into a vortex of violence on Sunday with a united Opposition at the end of the day demanding a repoll in all three seats and blasting the State Election Commissioner for 'failing' to conduct free and fair polls. The Left, Congress and even the BJP announced withdrawal of their candidates from the three troubled civic bodies and described Sunday's proceedings as a 'farce'.

"Today the election turned into a farce after the way Trinamool Congress goons terrorised the Raiganj, Domkol and Pujali municipality areas. Three of our workers sustained bullet injuries. Moreover, the State Election Commission (SEC) failed to control the violence and turned into mute spectators along with the police. The poll panel should countermand the election in Raiganj, Domkol and Pujali municipalities and order a repoll", said CPMs state secretary Surjya kanta Mishra was quoted, as saying on Sunday by The Indian Express.

BJP state president Dilip Ghosh and state Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury echoed Mishra's allegations. TMC has dismissed all charges with its spokespersons claiming that the Opposition allegations are a result of frustration. Yet even a cursory look at history suggests a close link between violence and polls in Bengal with the ruling party traditionally using it as a tool to stop democracy in its tracks.

Nobody has forgotten what happened in 2015 when TMC was accused of perpetrating mindless violence during civic body polls in Bidhan Nagar and Asansol. Mamata Banerjee, incidentally, has lent her voice to allegations of EVM tampering. Yet another example of some of the most enduring ironies of Indian politics.
By Shadia Nasralla

| VIENNA

VIENNA Sebastian Kurz, the new leader of Austria's conservative party, may only be 30 but he's calling the shots in Austrian politics, forcing a snap election in which he plans to take the fight to the far-right Freedom Party on its own turf.For Kurz, Europe's youngest foreign minister, it is far from his first political tussle, or his most formidable opponent.An early critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-border policy as Europe's migration crisis bit, he infuriated Berlin when he brokered the closure of the Balkan route into Europe. But today he can claim the plaudits for a move few now question, even in Germany. Kurz took charge of Austria's foreign ministry in 2013 aged 27 and on Sunday became leader of the centre-right People's Party (OVP) - a meteoric rise for a politician who never finished his law degree. His tough line on immigration and a debonair manner have been cornerstones of his success. Kurz is everywhere in the media, relentlessly on-message and often in his uniform of a slim-fitted suit, open-collared shirt and slicked-back hair. But beneath the boyish looks lies a conservative Roman Catholic whose views often overlap with those of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), which accuses him of stealing its ideas.OVP elders laud him as an "exceptional political talent". Coalition colleagues in Chancellor Christian Kern's Social Democrats (SPO) describe him as a scheming media hog.

"He has done what no one from the OVP has ever done before, namely steal the FPO's thunder," one senior OVP politician said of Kurz, who earned government colleagues' grudging respect as a junior minister in charge of integrating immigrants.On Kurz's shoulders now fall his party's hopes of defeating the far right in the election. Opinion polls show the OVP trailing in third place behind the Freedom Party and SPO, with about 20 percent support. Some surveys, however, show Kurz can catapult them into first place and erode FPO backing.He frequently reminds his audience that he denounced the open-border policy, or "welcoming culture", of Merkel and Werner Faymann, who was Austrian chancellor in 2015. He says migrants rescued in the Mediterranean should be returned to Africa to discourage them from attempting the perilous sea crossing.

"We could save ourselves these in-between phases if there were not an automatic reflex to say 'no' to each of my proposals for purely emotional reasons," he told newspaper Die Presse this month. AUSTRIA'S MACRON?

Polls show he is the most popular choice for chancellor. In a Unique survey for Profil magazine last month, 50 percent of respondents said they would prefer him to Kern, the incumbent, in a head-to-head contest. Kern, who is far more popular than FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache, scored 37 percent.

Although he rose through his party's ranks, Kurz seems to have drawn some inspiration from France's newly-elected President Emmanuel Macron, who built his campaign on being a political outsider.Kurz on Sunday announced plans to launch a "movement" that will include political newcomers on the OVP's list of candidates, and will carry his name and that of the "New People's Party". Kern has accused Kurz of failing to honour commitments made by the coalition. Kurz has before angered his party's coalition partners by announcing initiatives to the media before informing them. Politically active from the age of 10, Kurz joined the OVP's youth wing in Vienna in 2003. After a year of military service, he became its national head in 2009, pushing local issues such as a round-the-clock subway service.His criticism of Merkel and his defence of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's border fences have shown he is not afraid to go it alone. But he is untested at the highest level on a wide range of issues, not least the economy."Kurz is a product of fair weather," veteran Greens lawmaker Peter Pilz said. "For the first time Kurz now has to leave the shelter of his office for a place where two seasoned competitors are waiting for him in Kern and Strache." (Additional reporting by Michael Shields in Zurich and Kirsti Knolle and Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich in Vienna; editing by Francois Murphy and Richard Lough)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Dhaka: Bangladesh's apex court upheld the life sentence given to a Islamist preacher for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 Liberation War by

siding with Pakistani troops.

The Supreme Court dismissed both the pleas filed by the state and defence and stood by its earlier judgement to jail war criminal and Jamaat-e-Islami leader Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, 77, until his death, bdnews24.com reported.

A five-member bench led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha delivered the verdict today after a two-day hearing, the report said. Both the state and the defence had filed petitions seeking a review of the Supreme Court's verdict in 2014.

The state wanted a death sentence while the defence pushed for an acquittal.

The trial of Sayedee began at the International Crimes Tribunal-1 in 2011 and a verdict was pronounced in 2013. Of the 20 charges against him, Sayedee was given the death sentence for murders of Ibrahim Kutti and Bisabali, and for setting fire to Hindu households in Pirojpur in 1971.

The Supreme Court verdict, delivered in 2014, sentenced Sayedee on five charges of the 20 that were framed against him. The verdict reduced Sayedee's death sentence for Ibrahim Kutti's murder to imprisonment for 12 years.

In its second appeal verdict in a war crimes case, the apex court sentenced Sayedee to prison until death for three charges which include the murder of Bisabali and arson in a Hindu neighbourhood, abduction and rape of three sisters of Gauranga Saha.

Saha was a prosecution witness and identified Sayedee as the man who had handed over his sisters to the Pakistani army to be taken away as sex slaves. They were returned after three days. Sayedee was also sentenced to prison until death on charges of forcible conversions of 100-150 Hindus.

Six other charges were also proven beyond doubt but no sentencing followed as he had already been given the death penalty. Fifteen months after the verdict, the Supreme Court published the full verdict in December, 2015, paving the way for reviews.

It was the first case of a war crimes trial in which the state sought review to maintain the tribunal's verdict. Sayedee is the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist

party that sided with the Pakistan Army during the 1971 Liberation War and committed war crimes.

He was arrested from his house in Dhaka in June, 2010 in a case filed for hurting religious sentiments.
AMMAN Two car bombs killed at least six people and wounded several others in Syria's sprawling Rukban refugee camp near the border with Jordan late on Monday, a rebel official and a resident said.One explosion was near a restaurant and the second targeted the camp's market nearby, they said.

"There are at least six civilians dead and the number is expected to rise," said Mohammad Adnan, a rebel official from Jaish Ahrar al-Ashair who runs the policing of the camp.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

In January, a car bomb killed a number of people in the camp, and Islamic State militants have since launched attacks on Syrian rebels in the area.Rukban, near the joint Syria-Iraq-Jordan border, is home to refugees and also to rebel groups, including the Jaish Ahrar al-Ashair, which fight both President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State movement. It was also hit by bomb attacks last year. (Reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi; Writing by John Davison in Beirut; Editing by Louise Ireland)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
In what is being called a major geostrategic initiative, China on Sunday inaugurated the two-day Belt and Road summit in Beijing.

The meeting called the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) is being attended by 29 heads of state and governments including Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif and his Sri Lankan counterpart Ranil Wickremesinghe, besides official delegations from other South Asian countries.

Leaders and officials from various countries including Russia, US, Japan, UK, Germany and France are attending the meeting.

India, on the other hand, has decided to boycott the multi-nation economic project, which is pegged at $1 trillion. New Delhi is protesting the controversial economic corridor's transversing through the disputed territory of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

With the economic corridor creating a flutter across the world media, here is what different world leaders had to say about it.

Nawaz Sharif



Sharif said that the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was an economic project open to all nations in the region and it "must not be politicised", in an apparent reference to India.

As CPEC is closely linked to OBOR, Sharif also spoke on the larger economic corridor.

"The fact is that OBOR belongs to all of us, those who are participating in it and those who are not as yet. Obor has truly become a global community. As Obor unfolds across continents we see it fostering inclusion, creating tolerance and promoting acceptance of cultural diversity," he said.

Prakash Sharan Mahat

Nepal's deputy prime minister Prakash Sharan Mahat hailed the OBOR initiative of the Chinese government.

"The Chinese president's announcement to contribute an additional 100 billion yuan (around $14.5 billion) to the Silk Road Fund is a piece of good news for neighboring countries like Nepal that have recently joined the Belt and Road Initiative," Mahat said.

The foreign minister added that Nepal wishes to receive more investments from China to develop inter-connectivity and infrastructure projects within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan met his Chinese counterpart in Beijing on Sunday and reportedly extended his support to the initiative.

"It will be an initiative that would put an end to terrorism. This cooperation model would be beneficial for everyone," Erdogan said at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation earlier in the day," Erdogan was quoted by Sputnik News as saying.

Vladimir Putin



Russian president Vladimir Putin praised the initiative while addressing the gathering at the summit.

"We welcome Chinas One Belt, One Road initiative. By proposing this initiative, President Xi Jinping has demonstrated an example of a creative approach toward fostering integration in energy, infrastructure, transport, industry and humanitarian collaboration, about which I have just talked at length," Putin said.

Alexis Tsiparis



Greek prime minister Alexis Tsiparis is one of the few western leaders to grace the occasion. He said, "In these times, when the temptation is great to respond to the crisis of globalisation by increasing isolation, and by raising walls, this initiative highlights a vision of connectivity, cooperation and dialogue across Europe and Asia but also other parts of the world."

Ranil Wickremesinghe

President Maithripala Sirisena as well as his prime minister Wickremesinghe have been vocal supporters of the deal.

In April 2016, Wickramasinghe had said, "Both Sri Lanka and China are deepening reforms, in the process of which we see huge potential for cooperation. "Sri Lanka is ready to seek more economic cooperation opportunities with China."

Sirisena in February 2017 had assured full support to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on his maritime silk route which is an intrinsic part of the OBOR.

Other reactions on OBOR

British finance minister Philip Hammond said London was "ready to work with all Belt and Road partner countries to make a success of this initiative".

But some officials expressed caution.

German Economy Minister Brigitte Zypries called for transparency to ensure that the calls for investment bids are "non-discriminatory".

With inputs from agencies
New York: US president Donald Trump is "CEO of the country, he can fire anyone he wants", America's envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said, while defending him for firing former FBI director James Comey.

Haley said she believed that the criticism of Trump stems from discomfort with his propensity to act on his decisions. "The president is the CEO of the country," Indian-origin Haley told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" Sunday. "He can hire and fire anyone he wants."

She was responding to a question if she found herself having to explain to foreign diplomats Trump's domestic policy decisions.

"I think what you can see is that this is a president of action," she said of Trump. "The reason people are uncomfortable is because he acts." Asked whether the president sought a pledge of loyalty from her, Haley replied, "No".

At the same time, she said that during her tenure as South Carolina's governor demonstrations of "loyalty and trust" were important to her.

Regarding the president's tweet this week warning the fired FBI director that he better hope there are no "tapes" of their private conversations, Haley seemed unconcerned by the possibility that the president was taping conversations. "I assume I'm being taped everywhere," she said.

Haley also addressed a range of other topics, including North Korea's latest missile launch Saturday night. She said there is a growing international consensus to impose further sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear programme and that the US will "tighten the screws" on North Korean president Kim Jong-un's government.

Trump has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Kim Jong-un, but Haley said such a meeting would only happen if North Korea meets certain conditions. "A missile test is not the way to sit down with the president," Haley said.

On 10 May, Trump fired 56-year-old Comey, abruptly removing the top sleuth overseeing a criminal probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Paris: New French president Emmanuel Macron is set to name a prime minister and visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel on his first full day in office on Monday.

The 39-year-old centrist leader laid out his ambitious plans for France as he took power on Sunday, promising to restore France's shattered self-confidence and help rebuild the flagging European Union.

His choice of prime minister will be crucial for the first task, with the 46-year-old centre-right Edouard Philippe from the Republicans party seen as the favourite for the job.

Picking him would send a clear signal that Macron hopes to attract other young modernisers from the Republicans to his new centrist party, Republic on the Move (REM), which will contest parliamentary elections in June.

"If the prime minister comes from the right, Emmanuel Macron will be able to attack the parliamentary elections by dynamiting the right, in the same way he has done to the left," political expert Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet told AFP.

Macron, who was economy minister under outgoing Socialist president Francois Hollande, has already attracted dozens of centre-left MPs to his movement as he reshapes French political life.

Without his own parliamentary majority, the former investment banker will find it hard to push through his planned reforms of the labour market, pensions, unemployment benefits and education.

"I will not reverse course on any of the commitments taken in front of the French people," Macron said on Sunday as he took power from Hollande, his former mentor, adding that "France is strong only if she is prosperous".

Philippe is the mayor of the gritty northern port of Le Havre and an MP for the region since 2012 who studied at the same universities as Macron and shares many of his views on the economy and social issues.

Winning over sceptics

Later on Monday afternoon, Macron will travel to Berlin to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel, maintaining a French presidential tradition of making the first European trip to the other half of the EU's power couple.

The fervently pro-European Macron wants to push for deeper ties in the 28-member EU to help the bloc overcome the imminent departure of Britain which voted to leave last year.

France's place is in the European Union "which protects us and enables us to project our values in the world", Macron said on Sunday, but the club needed to be "reformed and relaunched".

He intends to press for the creation of a parliament and budget for the eurozone which would see Germany, the zone's richest member, contribute funds to support economic growth in weaker nations.

German media, including influential tabloid Bild and news magazine Der Spiegel, have recently drawn attention to the danger of Macron's presidency costing Germany more money.

"Very German obsession," Macron's chief policy advisor Jean Pisani-Ferry wrote on Twitter on Saturday. "And strange disconnect from reality."

Olivier Ihl, an academic from the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies, said that the visit was "an important moment because he wants to relaunch Franco-German cooperation in a Europe that is on its knees".

Merkel welcomed Macron's victory over Le Pen, saying he carried "the hopes of millions of French people and also many in Germany and across Europe".

Symbolic day

Macron, France's youngest ever president, took the reins of power from Hollande at the Elysee Palace a week after his resounding victory over far-right leader Marine Le Pen in an election that was watched worldwide.

After a private meeting with Hollande and his first speech as president, Macron headed up the rainy Champs Elysees on Sunday in an army vehicle, waving to small crowds of wellwishers who gathered along the famed avenue.

His wife Brigitte, a 64-year-old who was his high school drama teacher, attended the ceremony and a later meeting at the Paris town hall wearing a light blue Louis Vuitton outfit.

Her three children from her previous marriage were also present at Sunday's inauguration along with VIPs from France's political scene and the young team of advisors behind Macron's sensational rise.

The new president faces a host of daunting challenges including tackling stubbornly high unemployment, fighting Islamist-inspired violence and healing divisions exposed by an often vicious election campaign.

Hollande's five years in power were plagued by a sluggish economy and bloody terror attacks that killed more than 230 people. He leaves office after a single term.
Has India harmed itself by not participating in the Chinese One Belt One Road (OBOR) event, a two-day global meet on which began in Beijing on 14 May?

There are many in India who will answer "yes". Veteran journalist Prem Shankar Jha, perhaps, represents this school of thought best when he argues that Prime Minister Narendra Modis Beijing Policy is like cutting off Indias nose to spite Chinas face.

However, these enthusiasts for OBOR should perhaps reconsider their stance, because even many Chinese experts are unsure how OBOR will proceed.

Essentially the brainchild of the Chinese president Xi Jinping, OBOR is a collection of interlinking trade deals and infrastructure projects throughout Eurasia and the Pacific, spanning more than 68 countries, encompassing 4.4 billion people and up to 40% of the global GDP.

But, nobody has exact clarity on what projects will constitute parts of the idea. As Christopher Balding, professor of economics at Peking University, says, It means everything and nothing at the same time."

Chenggang Xu, professor of economics at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, told CNN that it helps to think of OBOR as a "philosophy" or "party line," rather than anything concrete.

According to CNN, Jorg Wuttke of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China has warned that the initiative has increasingly "been hijacked by Chinese companies, which have used it as an excuse to evade capital controls, and smuggle money out of the country by disguising it as international investments and partnerships."

All the hype over the Beijing meeting notwithstanding, the fact remains that only 29 heads of the government or states attended the meet, even though OBOR is supposed involve 68 countries.

Indias principled position for skipping the meet is this: OBOR includes the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which is part of India, and hence a challenge to India's sovereignty.

That there are strong merits in this position has been admitted by Xi himself. It may sound ironic, but Xi said in his inaugural speech on Sunday that all countries should respect each others sovereignty, dignity, and territorial integrity and each others core interests and major concerns.

China always makes its international dealings dependent on respecting its core interests. The same logic should apply to India in the case of CPEC. It is a question of principle, which cannot be quantified in terms of economic gains and losses.

Even economically speaking, there are more questions than answers that emanate from the OBOR initiative. As it is, Xi has promised to invest $124 billion in the project in the first stage. In subsequent stages, trillions of dollars will be added to the project. But what exactly are going to be the returns?

Remember, the idea of OBOR arose following the global financial meltdown about a decade ago, which badly affected the export-centric Chinese economy. However, to sustain the worlds highest rate of economic growth, the Chinese government thought of outpouring capital, enterprises, and projects to foreign lands so as to create demands for Chinese products.

In the process, the Chinese overproduced many items: Iron, cement, aluminum, glass, coal, shipbuilding and solar panels. OBOR, thus, was, seen as a quick solution to the problem so that excess products could be absorbed in OBOR infrastructure building.

But then things are easier said than done. OBOR, when implemented, will go through politically volatile and economically vulnerable regions of the world. Look at the way CPEC is being attacked in Baluchistan and Gilgit and Baltistan. There is no guarantee that the partner countries are capable of ensuring the project's safety.

China employs Chinese labour in almost all overseas ventures, as seen in Africa and China, which the locals find distasteful. In many developing countries, Chinese products are a source of disgruntlement and resentment, inviting regulatory issues and legal problems.

There are many questions that come to mind about the efficacy of OBOR. Is it commercially viable? Will Chinese companies be able to recoup their money? Are these projects going to be fully funded by Chinese companies or will participating countries fund OBOR? Will international lenders fund the projects? These are all difficult questions. There are no clear answers.

If recent history is any indication, whenever China has made foreign investments through state channels and state-owned enterprises, the results are poor. Returns on investment have been low, which has been the case with about 80 percent of Chinas mining ventures overseas.

With regard to the support from international institutions such as Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the newly created Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), there could be serious questions while disbursing loans to the projects that involve disputed territories and sovereignty.

Traditionally, China has always opposed ADB-assistance to projects in Indias North East. The same way India, which has the second largest voting shares in the AIIB after China, could complicate funds to the CPEC project, an important component of OBOR.

As Ravish Bhatia, a Yenching scholar at Peking University rightly points out, The report on the Articles of Agreement of the AIIB clearly states, A policy on operations in disputed areas would provide that, for financing in a disputed area, member consent is obtained in accordance with paragraph 3, and the Bank does not take a position on territorial claims. This is echoed in section IV of the banks Operational Policy on International Relations.

All this reminds one of Chinese expeditions between 1405 and 1435, which touched almost all the significant ports in Southeast Asia: The Bay of Bengal, Sri Lanka, India, Arabia, East Africa, Malindi in northern Kenya.

The Chinese may feel proud of their maritime history, but these voyages were more political than economic in nature. Their main objective was to impress the small and trade-dependent partners through the Chinese concept of Middle Kingdom, which espouses that China is chosen by God and is the greatest and most benevolent of countries and others must pay their respects to her.

But as seasoned commentator Philip Bowring rightly says, these voyages were abandoned because of their extraordinarily high cost. Their trade benefits and their contribution to state security were modest.

In many ways, OBOR resembles those 15th century voyages. China wants to be the worlds most preeminent power. But does it have the wherewithal?
India's decision to give China's Belt and Road Forum meeting  dubbed in some quarters as the diplomatic event of the year  a miss is not a huge surprise. And while the prospect of top-level representation was a non-starter, there was still only a tiny possibility that India would have been present in a ministerial or secretary-level capacity. On Saturday  the eve of the Belt and Road Forum, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Gopal Baglay told media persons, "Connectivity projects must be pursued in a manner that respects sovereignty and territorial integrity... No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity."

In the form of an aside, while Baglay's almost-350-word-long statement laid out India's understanding of the importance of connectivity, its own connectivity projects and the fact that China had been urged to participate 'in a meaningful dialogue on its connectivity initiative', there was no reply in the affirmative or negative about whether New Delhi would send a representative. So it's possible that a concrete decision on whether or not to send someone had not been taken by then.

As it turned out, however, India remained absent.

So just what are India's major reasons for staying away from Beijing and what message does this send out to the rest of the world?

China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

As articulated by Baglay himself, "Regarding the so-called 'China-Pakistan Economic Corridor', which is being projected as the flagship project of the BRI (Belt Road Initiative), the international community is well aware of Indias position." Almost since the inception of the project to link China's Xinjiang region with Gwadar Port in Pakistan, India has opposed the CPEC on the grounds that it passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

It was as far back as December 2014 that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in the Lok Sabha, noted,"Government has seen reports with regard to China and Pakistan being involved in infrastructure building activities in PoK, including construction of CPEC. Government has conveyed its concerns to China about their activities in PoK, and asked them to cease such activities." And then in May 2015, Swaraj assured the Indian media that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had taken up the issue of CPEC with President Xi Jinping and told him it was 'unacceptable' to New Delhi.

And despite Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif's somewhat hollow insistence on Sunday that the CPEC must not be politicised, India continues to see it as an infraction of its own territorial integrity and indeed, sovereignty. After all, allowing a Chinese venture  that is arguably as strategic as it is economic  to pass through territory occupied by Pakistan will mean that India now has to face opposition from two parties (instead of just Islamabad) to its claims on Kashmir. Let's not forget that Beijing has invested/is investing a mammoth sum of $46 billion in the project, and so, has a great deal of interest in its development and survival.

With all that in mind, attending the Belt and Road Forum would seem like a tacit acceptance, if not an endorsement, of the flagship CPEC project.

The Maritime Silk Road

The 'R' in OBOR stands for the Maritime Silk Road  the naval trade route that forms the second half of China's BRI and connects Chinese ports to European ones, and passes along the coast of the Indian peninsula. India sees this as the manifestation of China's 'String of Pearls' initiative that gives it some amount of control or leverage in key Indian Ocean ports. This, according to New Delhi, would allow China to encircle India, potentially giving it a strategic upper hand in the Indian Ocean.

Considering China's superior naval capabilities, this is a major concern for India. Attending the Belt and Road Forum meeting would once again amount to an acceptance, if not an endorsement, of China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean.

Muddled policy

So, just what message is India sending the world? Far from a forthright articulation of disagreement, disapproval or condemnation, what India is actually sending out is a muddled and mixed message. Here's why:

First, India's decision to skip (or 'boycott', as some have interpreted) the Belt Road Initiative is at odds with the eagerness it demonstrated in signing up as one of the founder members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank  an entity conceived by Beijing to finance infrastructure projects. In June 2015, India pledged over $8 billion to the bank, making it the second largest shareholder and bestowing it with the second largest share of votes.

It's unfathomable that New Delhi would have missed the twin facts that China (the primary shareholder by a long way) would drive AIIB funds towards OBOR projects and that one of the biggest OBOR projects is CPEC. However, in what can feasibly described as a diplomatic equivalent of FOMO or 'Fear of Missing Out', India quickly climbed aboard. And now, India is left looking rather strange being the second-largest contributor to an initiative that it is apparently boycotting.

Second, it's worth revisiting Baglay's statement delivered on the eve of the Belt Road Forum meeting. He had stated, "India shares international communitys desire for enhancing physical connectivity... Expansion and strengthening of connectivity is an integral part of Indias economic and diplomatic initiatives". Unfortunately, action hasn't really followed words in this regard, leaving New Delhi's actual approach to connectivity a bit of a mystery. In the wake of China's grand unveiling of its OBOR plans, India popped up with a few connectivity schemes of its own.

Project Mausam: "A multi-disciplinary project that rekindles long-lost ties across nations of the Indian Ocean 'world' and forges new avenues of cooperation and exchange" is off the radar.

Spice Route: An endeavour to revive "old links between 31 countries in Asia and Europe with India, particularly spice-rich Kerala" appears to be no more than a concept note.

Cotton Route: An effort to connect India with Central Asian cotton-manufacturing countries has made almost no progress since its announcement.

If it appears harsh to be judgmental of these relatively nascent projects, then look at the much-touted Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement (BBIN MVA) that was last month shot down by New Delhi's best friend in the region, Thimphu. And while the Government of Bhutan is in the process of trying to salvage the agreement, the overall message being sent out isn't very positive, at least from India's standpoint.

Aside from grumbling and complaining about China's connectivity projects, India has thus far shown little ability or will to develop connectivity projects of its own. If it is indeed serious about international connectivity, it needs to either revive these projects that are gathering dust and try and get like-minded coutnries onboard, or get on with the Chinese programme.
Islamabad: The Islamabad High Court on Monday adjourned the hearing of a petition by a Pakistani man seeking an order barring his Indian wife from leaving the country before the settlement of their legal issues. Tahir Ali had moved the court last week against 20-year-old Uzma, an Indian national who had travelled to Pakistan earlier in May. Tahir filed a petition on Friday, asking the court to arrange a meeting with Uzma and also stop her from going back to India.

The court accepted the petition and set the hearing date on Monday.

"Nothing happened on Monday and the court set the new date for hearing," Tahir said, adding that the court fixed the hearing on 22 May. The court will also hear the petition of Uzma, who moved it a day after her husband. Uzma, who ho has sought refuge at the Indian mission in Islamabad, petitioned the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on 12 May to provide security for her journey back to Delhi and to issue duplicate travel documents which were allegedly stolen by her Tahir.

Uzma's lawyer, Malik Shah Nawaz Noon and First Secretary to the Indian High Commission Piyush Singh filed the petition on her behalf in the IHC stating that her husband had deceived her as he was already married, and that he stole her passport and other travel documents. She also asked the court to exempt her from police reporting. She has alleged that she was sexually abused after her forced marriage to the Pakistani man at gunpoint.

In her statement, recorded before a magistrate, Uzma has said that she came to Pakistan to see her relatives and not to marry Tahir. She has said she did not know Ali was already married and had four children. However, Tahir said she knew about his marriage and children. He said he had told her about his family and that he lived in mountains away from the main cities. Uzma had reached Pakistan on 1 May and travelled to Buner district in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to marry Ali on 3 May. The couple reportedly met in Malaysia,

where Tahir worked as a taxi-driver.

The case has attracted attention on both sides of the border.
The Hague: India fears that Kulbhushan Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before its arguments are heard, India's attorney Harish Salve said at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday.

The Indian national, who had been arrested on 3 March last year and sentenced to death on allegations of espionage and subversive activities, had been framed on the basis of confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody, Salve added.

As the ICJ began hearing Jadhav's case, India argued that human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan.

We want appropriate legal representation for Jadhav, India told the UN's main judicial body which has stayed his death sentence.

New Delhi has called for immediate suspension of Jadhav's death sentence and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

All requests for consular access to 46-year-old Jadhav had fallen on "deaf ears", it said.

The present situation, Salve said before the court, was grave and that is why India had sought its indulgence. He described Jadhav's trial process as "farcical" and stressed that Pakistan did not respond to Jadhav's mother's plea to see her son.

Earlier at ICJ, Deepak Mittal, Indian official, said: "Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ),"

"India learnt from press reports that the death sentence was awarded to Jadhav on the basis of an alleged confession. Pakistan has not provided the chargesheet, any documents on the case despite repeated requests," Mittal told the court.

"It is clear that Jadhav has been denied his right to seek legal counsel. Jadhav's parents have applied for a visa to travel to Pakistan which has fallen on deaf ears."

VD Sharma, a Joint Secretary in the External Affairs Ministry and co-agent, said Pakistan had failed to comply with all its legal obligations by denying consular access to Jadhav ever since he was arrested in March 2016.

India is presenting its case first, followed by Pakistan later in the day. Both sides will get 90 minutes each to argue their case. Pakistan's session will begin in the evening.

India had appealed against the death sentence on 8 May alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan. On May 9, ICJ gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

The ICJ was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.

Follow the live updates here.

(With agency inputs)
Seoul: North Korea's latest missile launch was a successful test of a new type of rocket, Pyongyang's state media reported.

Sunday's launch was of a "newly-developed mid/long-range strategic ballistic rocket, Hwasong-12", the official KCNA news agency said, adding that leader Kim Jong-Un "personally oversaw the test-launch of the new type of rocket".

The isolated North is under multiple sets of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, which have set alarm bells ringing around the region and in Washington.

The North says it needs atomic weapons to defend itself against the threat of invasion and is widely believed to be making progress in its quest to develop a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States  something President Donald Trump has vowed "won't happen".

Tensions between the two reached new heights in recent weeks, with Washington saying military action was an option being considered and Pyongyang issuing threats of its own, sending fears of conflict spirallin

Trump later appeared to hold open the door to negotiations, saying he would be "honoured" to meet Kim and called him a "smart cookie".

Last week the South also elected a new president, Moon Jae-In, who advocates reconciliation with Pyongyang and said at his inauguration that he was willing "in the right circumstances" to visit the North to ease tensions.

But he slammed the missile test as a "reckless provocation" after holding an emergency meeting with national security advisers.

Dialogue would be possible "only if the North changes its attitude", he said according to his spokesman.

KCNA said Sunday's test was intended to examine the "technical details and characteristics" of a new type of rocket "capable of carrying a powerful and big nuclear warhead", and also confirmed "the reliability of the newly-developed rocket engine".

The missile followed its preset flight path to reach an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometres and travelled 787 kilometres, coming down at the "precise location intended", it added.

Since the beginning of last year the North has carried out two atomic tests and dozens of missile launches as it seeks to refine its weapons.
By Jack Kim and Ju-min Park

| SEOUL

SEOUL North Korea's successful missile test-launch signals major advances in developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, such as mastery of re-entry technology and better engine performance key to targeting the United States, experts say.The isolated country has been developing a long-range missile capable of striking the mainland United States mounted with a nuclear warhead. That would require a flight of 8,000 km (4,800 miles) or more and technology to ensure a warhead's stable re-entry into the atmosphere.The North's official KCNA news agency said the new strategic ballistic missile named Hwasong-12, fired on Sunday at the highest angle to avoid affecting neighbouring countries' security, flew 787 km (489 miles) on a trajectory reaching an altitude of 2,111.5 km (1,312 miles).The details reported by KCNA were largely consistent with South Korean and Japanese assessments that it flew further and higher than an intermediate-range missile (IRBM) tested in February from the same region, northwest of Pyongyang.Such an altitude meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance travelled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000 km (2,500 miles), experts said.The test "represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile", John Schilling, an aerospace expert, said in an analysis on the U.S.-based 38 North website. "It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the U.S. base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)."KCNA said the test launch verified the homing feature of the warhead that allowed it to survive "under the worst re-entry situation" and accurately detonate.The claim, if true, could mark an advancement in the North's ICBM programme exceeding most expectations, said Kim Dong-yub, a professor at Kyungnam University's Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.

Kim, a former South Korean navy officer, added the trajectory showed the North was clearly testing the re-entry technology under flight environments consistent for a ICBM.The North has successfully launched long-range rockets twice to put objects into space. But many had believed it was some years away from mastering re-entry expertise for perfecting an ICBM, which uses similar engineering in early flight stages. Sunday's missile launch also tested the North's capability to carry a "large-size heavy nuclear warhead", the state news agency said."The test-fire proved to the full all the technical specifications of the rocket ... like guidance and stabilization systems ... and reconfirmed the reliability of new rocket engine under the practical flight circumstances," KCNA said.On Monday, South Korea's military played down the North's claim of technical progress on atmospheric re-entry, saying the possibility was low.

"HELL OF A RIDE"

North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper devoted half of its six-page Monday edition to coverage of the missile test, with vivid colour photographs of the launch and jubilant leader Kim celebrating with military officers.The pictures featured a long nose-coned projectile that appeared to be similar to missiles displayed during an April 15 military parade for the birth anniversary of state founder Kim Il Sung, the current leader's grandfather.The nose cone resembles that of the KN-08 ICBM the North is believed to be developing, and the lofted trajectory tests re-entry by putting the missile through extra stress, said Joshua Pollack of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review. "This is an advanced missile, if their claims are true," he said.

KCNA said Kim accused the United States of "browbeating" countries that "have no nukes", warning Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland was in the North's "sighting range for strike".North Korea, which is banned by UN resolutions from engaging in nuclear and missile developments, has accused the United States of a hostile policy to crush its regime, calling its nuclear weapons a "sacred sword" to protect itself.The North's leader, Kim, has said it was in final stages of developing an ICBM.It was difficult to say when the North will have a reliably tested ICBM ready to deploy, said Lee Choon-geun, a senior research fellow at South Korea's state-run Science and Technology Policy Institute. "When it comes to actual deployment, developed countries have tested at least 20 ICBMs and their success rate should be around 90 percent. It is not there yet," he said.But the new engine used for Sunday's test signalled a major step forward in the intermediate-range missile development, one that can be modified for an ICBM flight, Lee added.The lofted trajectory that would have result in more than 40 times the gravitational force at re-entry also raises questions about the stability of the payload and how much stress it can withstand, said Munich-based aerospace engineer Markus Schiller."We do not know if the re-entry vehicle survived this hell of a ride, and even if it did, we do not know if North Korea can build a payload that will also survive this ride." (Additional reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Clarence Fernandez)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Multan: Pakistani police killed four Islamic militants in a shootout in a central district on Monday, according to an official with the country's counter-terrorism department. The militants were killed when the police returned fire in a raid in the Khanewal district, said Chaudhry Mohammad Saleem, the official.

He said the militants were from Jamat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban. The faction has also expressed support for the Islamic State group but has not pledged allegiance to it. Hand grenades, assault rifles and a cache of explosives were seized in the raid, Saleem said, adding that three other suspects managed to escape from the scene.

The raid was part of an intelligence operation launched jointly by the police and military in urban areas in Pakistan, targeting militants who had fled military offensives in lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border that have long served as safe havens for local militants and foreign fighters.

Earlier in the day, a roadside bombing wounded four Pakistani paramilitary troops in the southwestern district of Mastung, which was the site of a deadly Islamic State attack last week.

In Monday's attack, a roadside bomb struck the troops' vehicle, police official Abdul Nabi said. Sunni extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the attack. Lashker-e-Jhangvi claimed a similar attack on Sunday that wounded two paramilitary troops.

A suicide attack by the Islamic State group in Mastung on Friday killed 28 people. Islamic State had said it targeted a lawmaker seen as close to the Taliban.
Sydney: Seventeen prisoners have been shot dead after a mass breakout at a jail in Papua New Guinea, reports said on Monday, with 57 still on the run.

Inmates from the Buimo jail in the Pacific nation's second largest city Lae made a dash for freedom after breaking out of their compound on Friday, with prison warders opening fire.

The PNG Post-Courier and The National newspapers both cited local police as confirming 17 were killed, three were caught and 57 were still at large.

"These are undesirable people and will be a threat to the community," Lae police metropolitan commander chief superintendent Anthony Wagambie Jr said of the escapees, warning the public to be vigilant.

"The majority of those who escaped were arrested for serious crimes and were in custody awaiting trial. A good number were arrested by police last year for mainly armed robberies, car thefts, break and enter and stealing," he said.

It is the same prison where police shot dead 12 inmates during a jailbreak last year. Crime and lawlessness in Papua New Guinea, a sprawling nation where many still live traditional and subsistence lives in remote areas, are rampant.

Wagambie urged family members and associates of the escapees not to harbour them. "I am warning them that they will be caught. They must do what is good for them and surrender," he said.
Washington: The United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Islamic State militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to US interests in the volatile Middle East.

The Turks are fiercely opposed to the US plans, seeing the Kurdish fighters as terrorists. And when Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan visits the White House this week, the most he and President Donald Trump may be able to do is agree to disagree, and move on.

"The Turks see this as a crisis in the relationship," said Jonathan Schanzer at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The challenge is hardly new. Long before Trump took office, US presidents have grappled with the fragility of partnering with Turkey's government and the Kurds to carry out a West Asia agenda.

Past administrations have sought a delicate balance. Too exuberant in its support for the Kurds, and the US risks pushing ally Turkey toward US geopolitical rivals like Russia or emboldening the Kurds to try to create an independent state a scenario that would destabilize multiple countries in the region.

Too little cooperation with the Kurds risks squandering a battlefield ally with proven effectiveness against extremist threats and who has staunchly supported Washington. Trump has made his priorities clear.

His administration is arming Syrian Kurdish fighters as part of an effort to recapture the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State group's self-declared capital.

Coupled with the US-backed fight in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Raqqa is seen as a key step toward liberating the remaining territory the militants hold.

Turkey has been pressuring the US to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesn't want them spearheading the Raqqa effort.

Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish group, known as the YPG, a terrorist group because of its ties to the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party inside Turkey. The United States, the European Union and Turkey all agree the YPG is a terrorist organisation.

The Turks fear any weapons the US provides the Syrian Kurds could well end up with their ethnic brethren in Turkey, who've fought violently as part of a separatist insurgency for more than three decades.

As a nod to Turkey's concerns, the Pentagon has promised tight monitoring of all weapons and greater intelligence sharing to help the Turks better watch over their frontiers.

Kurds are an ethnic group predominantly concentrated along the borders of four countries Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

But a face-to-face confrontation on the matter between Trump and Erdogan seems inevitable. Erdogan and other top Turkish officials have pressed for the US to reverse its strategy, however low the prospects of Trump changing his mind.

As a result, experts see Erdogan using the meeting to confront Trump on a host of other Turkish grievances. Those include extraditing the Pennsylvania-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blames for fomenting a failed coup last summer, and dropping US charges against Reza Zarrab, a Turkish businessman accused of money-laundering and violating US sanctions in Iran.

"I see this trip as a new milestone in Turkey-US relations," Erdogan said, as he prepared to fly to Washington. The US, too, has a wish list for Turkey. Washington is concerned by rising anti-Americanism in Turkey that Erdogan's government has tolerated since the July coup attempt. The US also has pressed unsuccessfully for the release of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor, and other detained US citizens.

Trump also has much at stake. His willingness to partner with authoritarian rulers and overlook their shortcomings on democracy and human rights have alarmed US lawmakers of both parties. Trump's premise has been that he is focusing on deal-making. That puts added pressure on him to get results.

Trump has gone out of his way to foster a good relationship with Erdogan. After a national referendum last month that strengthened Erdogan's presidential powers, European leaders and rights advocates criticized Turkey for moving closer toward autocratic rule. Trump congratulated Erdogan. Now, the American leader may try to cash in.
While the Triple Crown races are approaching beginning with the Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (G1) in Louisville, Ky., the National Thoroughbred Racing Association continues a busy stretch in Washington putting the industry's message forward on immigration and tax issues.

The political mood on immigration issues may be too steep a challenge for horse racing and other industries that want additional seasonal workers through the H-2B visa program. Supporters of the H-2B program hope a potential provision to the federal budget will allow workers who previously worked in the program to return to the U.S. and not be counted against a 66,000 yearly cap.

A short-term spending bill was reached April 28 that effectively delays the final budget to May 5. Still that added time may not improve the chances of the H-2B exemption for returning workers. Earlier this month NTRA president Alex Waldrop noted it appears to be an uphill battle.

"The reality is that these legislative fixes are very difficult to pass because of the environment in Washington, D.C., today," Waldrop said. "There is a great deal of pushback against anything perceived as a loophole to allow foreign workers into the U.S. We make the case that many of these jobs go unfilled because U.S. workers don't want them, but that has not won the day so far."

In 2016 Congress failed to renew the "returning worker exemption" that permits workers from the previous three years with clean records to enter the country again without counting against the 66,000 cap. That exemption effectively raised the number of workers under H-2B from 66,000 to approximately 190,000. The most recent cap was reached in just 10 days this year, with 33,000 visas granted out of some 90,000 applications.

On another front, efforts are ongoing to have the Department of Treasury change its rules on pari-mutuel winnings in order to acknowledge the 300-1 threshold should be based on total ticket cost before reporting and withholding requirements kick in. Waldrop said the NTRA is awaiting the change to take effect and hopes to have the industry ready to quickly adjust. The NTRA has not seen any change in opinion on the proposal, but believes personnel changes and unfilled positions in the Treasury have slowed the process.

On Dec. 29 the Department of Treasury and Internal Revenue Service issued the proposed regulation changes on reporting and withholding, beginning a 90-day comment period that ended in late March. On April 17, 12 members of Congress from a number of key racing states signed a letter delivered to the Department of Treasury requesting that recently proposed IRS regulations relating to the way pari-mutuel winnings are calculated for tax withholding and reporting purposes be finalized as soon as possible.

And on one other topic, President Donald Trump's tax reform proposal that would eliminate most itemized deductions, including gambling losses, certainly would impact the industry. Of course President Trump's proposal is just the beginning of a long process, but the NTRA is monitoring.

Considering President Trump's proposal was about a page long and some considered it a "wish list," many changes will be on the horizon. Still, if Trump's "wish" were to come true, it certainly would impact an industry that counts on core players for much of its handle.

Currently bettors are allowed to claim gambling losses against their winnings. A player who reports $12,000 in winnings, can also claim his losses up to that amount in deductions. If the ability to claim losses were eliminated, that full $12,000 in winnings would become taxable income. There also has been some talk of allowing a certain amount of winnings to not have to be counted, but even with that, eliminating the deduction would still impact big bettors.

"We're on top of it, but we don't think there's a realistic concern at this point," Waldrop said.
Syria's regime is close to cementing its control over the entire capital under local deals with rebels after a six-year war that has ravaged suburbs of Damascus and caused population displacements.

Rebels have evacuated some of the last Damascus districts under their control, shattering their dream of one day seizing the capital and toppling a five-decade-old regime.

Over 2,000 civilians and rebels evacuated the Qabun district on Sunday, after similar departures from the Barzeh and Tishrin neighbourhoods earlier last week.

"With the seizure of these three neighbourhoods, the regime now controls almost all the capital," said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

In the east of the capital, "The rebels now only hold a part of the Jobar district, most of which is destroyed," he said.

In the south, the Tadamun and Hajar al-Aswad neighbourhoods, as well as the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk, are now mostly controlled by jihadists including the Islamic State group, he said.

The so-called reconciliation deals that led to the latest evacuations from the capital have dealt a heavy blow to the armed opposition, following their defeat in the northern city of Aleppo in December.

"With Aleppo retaken and Damascus about to be, the rebels no longer present a political or military alternative," said Syria expert Fabrice Balanche.

"The regime is therefore not under any threat and doesn't need to make any concessions," added Balanche, a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute think-tank.

For President Bashar al-Assad, regaining control of the capital was vital to retain power after anti-government protests that began in 2011 before spiralling into civil war.

His fortunes have sharply reversed since July 2012, when thousands of rebels seized several of the capital's neighbourhoods before a two-week counter-offensive by elite regime troops repelled them.

More recently, in March, rebel groups and jihadists from former Al-Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham Front briefly entered Abbassid Square near the city centre in a surprise assault from Jobar, before being pushed back days later.

But the capital, with its approximately 1.6 million inhabitants, has largely been insulated from the civil war and has endured far less destruction than other major hubs such as Aleppo and the city of Homs in northern Syria.

"The regime was reinforced by Russian and Iranian foreign troops at the expense of defenceless people," said Mohammed Alloush, head of Jaish al-Islam, the most powerful rebel faction in the opposition-held Eastern Ghouta area outside Damascus.

He said the population displacements caused by the local reconciliation deals amounted to "crimes against humanity".

"The regime now plans to swallow up Jobar in the next phase before setting its sights on Eastern Ghouta," Alloush said.

He said the evacuations were a "betrayal" after backers of the regime and rebels signed a deal in the Kazakh capital earlier this month aimed at paving the way towards a lasting ceasefire in Syria.

On 4 May, regime allies Russia, Iran and rebel backer Turkey inked a deal to introduce so-called "de-escalation zones" in the country.

Under the deal, four zones are to be created in the northwestern province of Idlib, parts of the central province of Homs, the south, and the opposition enclave of Eastern Ghouta near Damascus.

The capital is not included in the plan.

The regime has long touted "reconciliation deals" as the best way to end the conflict and view the latest evacuations as a success.

"It's a turning point in the conflict," said government advisor on national reconciliation Ahmad Munir Mohammed.

"It's a victory for the Syrian state," he added. "Reconciliation is a defeat for those waging war against Syria."

He denied that the deals were changing the country's demographics.

"Those who wanted to regularise their status (with the regime) stayed, and those who left did so at their request," he said.

Syria analyst Joshua Landis said the evacuations underlined that "the suburbs of Damascus cannot hold out against the regime".

He said the intervention of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah in support of the Assad regime in 2013 "doomed the Damascus rebel offensive" by severing supply routes from neighbouring Lebanon.

"The regime and its allies cut the legs out from underneath the Damascene rebels," said Landis, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Aron Lund, a fellow at The Century Foundation, said the army taking control of the three Damascus districts would weaken the armed opposition in Eastern Ghouta.

"The long-term situation of the rebels there looks very bleak," he said.

"Qabun, Barzeh and Tishrin, which are now being retaken by the army, have contained smuggling tunnels that supplied Eastern Ghouta," he said.

"Without those tunnels, the Ghouta rebels will be weakened and the government will have more leverage over them."
Beijing: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that North Korea's latest missile test was "dangerous", but he warned that Pyongyang was being intimidated and called for a peaceful solution to regional tensions.

"We are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers," Putin told reporters after an international forum in Beijing.

"We consider (the missile test) counter-productive, harmful and dangerous," Putin said.

But, he added: "We must stop intimidating North Korea and find a peaceful solution to this problem."

North Korea celebrated Sunday's launch of what appeared to be its longest-range ballistic missile yet tested in a bid to bring the US mainland within reach, saying it was capable of carrying a "heavy nuclear warhead".

The missile was launched on an unusually high trajectory, with KCNA saying it flew to an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometres and travelled 787 kilometres before coming down in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).

That suggests a range of 4,500 kilometres or more if flown for maximum distance, analysts said.

The White House said on Sunday that the missile came down "so close to Russian soil... the president (Donald Trump) cannot imagine that Russia is pleased".

But Russia's defence ministry later said the missile landed about 500 kilometres from its territory and posed no threat.
Washington: Governments and computer experts girded on Monday for a possible worsening of the global cyberattack that has hit more than 150 countries, as Microsoft warned against stockpiling vulnerabilities like the one at the heart of the crisis.

European policing and security agencies said the fallout from a ransomware attack that has already crippled more than 200,000 computers around the world could deepen as people return for another work week.

The indiscriminate attack began Friday and struck banks, hospitals and government agencies, exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

US package delivery giant FedEx, European car factories, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, Britain's health service and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network were among those hit.

In China, hundreds of thousands of computers at nearly 30,000 institutions and organisations were infected by late Saturday, according to Qihoo 360, one of Chinas largest providers of antivirus software.

Government agencies and universities were among those hit as well as petrol stations, ATMs and hospitals, it said.

Europol executive director Rob Wainwright said the situation could worsen on Monday when workers return to their offices after the weekend and log on.

"We've never seen anything like this," the head of the European Union's policing agency told Britain's ITV television Sunday, calling its reach "unprecedented".

Wainwright described the cyberattack as an "escalating threat".

"I'm worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn on their machines on Monday," he said.

The warning was echoed by Britain's National Cyber Security Centre: "As a new working week begins it is likely, in the UK and elsewhere, that further cases of ransomware may come to light, possibly at a significant scale."

'Ooops' message, $300 ransom

The attack looks like this: images appear on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin, saying, "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the locked files will be deleted, according to the screen message.

Bitcoin, the world's most-used virtual currency, allows anonymous transactions via heavily encrypted codes.

Experts and governments alike warn against ceding to the demands and Wainwright said few victims so far had been paying up.

Security firm Digital Shadows said on Sunday that transactions totalling $32,000 had taken place through Bitcoin addresses used by the ransomware.

The culprits used a digital code believed to have been developed by the US National Security Agency  and subsequently leaked as part of a document dump, according to researchers at the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.

A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April, claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, Kaspersky said.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said in a blog post Sunday that it was in fact the NSA that developed the code being used in the attack.

He warned governments against stockpiling such vulnerabilities and said instead they should report them to manufacturers  not sell, store or exploit them, lest they fall into the wrong hands.

"An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen," Smith wrote.

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake up call."

The attack is unique, according to Europol, because it combines ransomware with a worm function, meaning once one machine is infected, the entire internal network is scanned and other vulnerable machines are infected.

The attack therefore spread faster than previous, smaller-scale ransomware attacks.

Banks, trains and automobiles

Symantec said the majority of organisations affected were in Europe.

Europol's Wainwright said few banks in Europe had been affected, having learned through the "painful experience of being the number one target of cyber crime" the value of having the latest cyber security in place.

Russia's interior ministry said some of its computers had been hit, while the country's banking system was also attacked, although no problems were detected, as was the railway system.

French carmaker Renault was forced to stop production at sites in France, Slovenia and Romania, while FedEx said it was "implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible".

England's National Health Service said 47 organisations providing care had been hit and on Sunday afternoon seven hospitals were continuing to divert patients from the emergency room.
Over the weekend a massive ransomware cyber attack WannaCry hit over 150 countries affecting healthcare, public transport, law enforcement, businesses, and individuals globally. Microsofts President and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith has slammed governments for not disclosing more software vulnerabilities.

Smith criticized the government on the WannaCry ransomware attack which affected more than 200,000 computers, as it is seemingly based on leaked NSA hacking tools. The NSA is widely believed to have developed the hacking tool that was leaked online in April and used as a catalyst for the ransomware attack.

Microsofts Brad Smith wrote in a blog post,

The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up. We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world. Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage.

Smith also said it has more than 3,500 security engineers at the company, are working comprehensively to address cybersecurity threats. The company is assessing this attack by working through Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Digital Crimes Unit.

Source
Earlier in January this year US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm for anti-competitive practices. Now, Intel and Samsung have filed amicus briefs with the court supporting the FTCs lawsuit and opposing Qualcomms request to dismiss the case. Both the companies claim that Qualcomm uses its dominant position in the mobile processor industry to keep other players out.

Intel said in a blog post,

Intel is ready, willing, and able to compete on the merits in this market that Qualcomm has dominated for years. But Qualcomm has maintained an interlocking web of abusive patent and commercial practices that subverts competition on the merits. These practices have illegally coerced mobile phone manufacturers into purchasing the chipsets they need from Qualcomm and Qualcomm alone.

Meanwhile, Samsung claims its in-house chip unit is artificially held back by Qualcomms unwillingness to license its technology, added the report. The FTC trial is scheduled to begin on June 15th.

Source: 1, 2
We kind of just went all in, says Justin Matt Sapolsky co-owner of Matt and Maries Modern Italian Sandwich Restaurants in Philadelphia. Its kind of what you do.

Teaming up with fellow University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School graduate Nicole Marie Capp, the duo shared their love for food and desire to start a business at an alumni event.

Both of us have no restaurant experience, says Capp. I found the best part of my day was lunch so I figured it was about time to make that my career, jokes Sapolsky

After researching the Philadelphia market, hitting the streets and scoping out the competition, they settled on hand-crafted, high-quality Italian sandwiches. Capp and Sapolsky rented out a test kitchen to make sandwiches and handle catering orders. They hired renowned Chef Ryan Smith to help develop their Italian-themed menu. In 2014, Sapolsky and Capp opened the doors to their first restaurant in Logan Square.

Opening the first store was totally bootstrapped. Making a few thousand dollars off the catering we kind of just went all in, says Sapolsky. We were absolutely full time 24 hours a day to open the first store, adds Capp.

A smashing success, Matt and Maries made a splash for with fellow lunch-goers. However, it was keeping the momentum that was difficult.

Opening day one, you are always busy when you first start. You have a line out the door and everyone is excited to support you. Keeping that momentum though is difficult, says Capp. A bad day is that both Matt and I had to go outside and start flyering and grabbing person by person though an interaction to get them in the store.

Quickly shifting gears, yet never swaying from their concept, Sapolsky and Capp started to change their thinking. They sent out customer surveys, changed price-points and added different items to the menu.

You have to teach people that you are here, its a lot of guerrilla marketing outreach, phone calls, emails, standing on the corner with menus and samples just to let people know that you are there and it made all of the difference, says Sapolsky.

It worked. Fast forward to 2017 and Sapolsky and Capp opened an additional three restaurants including a salad-concept lunch spot, Kayu.

When you write the first check, that is a scary moment but youre not really in it yet you realize I have to pay my rent, I have to pay my people I have to pay my suppliers and I am always the last person, says Sapolsky

Letting go and believing in your staff and the company culture you created and the product and knowing that you have the best suppliers that for me is each day was, and is the toughest part of running your own business, says Capp.

Be sure to watch Sapolsky and Capps full interview above.

This is part of FOXBusiness.coms The Emotional Side of Small Business series that taps into the human side of building a business  the part that doubts, questions, regrets, and celebrates.
Businesses around the world are still dealing with the massive fallout from one of the biggest global ransomware attacks ever recorded. At least 200,000 organizations in 150 countries had their information tampered with or were completely locked out of their own files in an attempt to seek ransom payments.

However according to BBC analysis, only $38,000 has been paid to hackers as of Monday. But many cyber experts warn that while big businesses reap the biggest cash payment for hackers, a majority of them will go after small businesses first.

They are easy targets. Employees have less training, especially in IT. Small business owners tend to cut corners in regards to having backup systems in place. They are actually the most exposed to get hacked, Gene Marks, a small business expert and founder of The Marks Group, a Pennsylvania-based consulting firm, tells FOX Business.

Marks says the number one piece of advice that he tells his clients is that they should immediately subscribed to an online backup service, no matter how small their business is.

Carbonite, Mozy are the two biggest ones. I know Carbonite is 60 bucks a year and it will back up your files during the day as well as your databases. So, if you get hitwhich you probably willall you have to do is restore your last backup, Marks adds.

Marks say the worst thing that will happen is that you might lose a few hours or days worth of work but the good thing is that you wouldnt have to pay a ransom and hackers will eventually move on. Businesses who end up caving and paying a ransom, he says, will mostly make them more susceptible to attacks in the future.

However Charles Tendell, ethical hacker and founder of Hackers List tells FOX Business that while small businesses should prepare themselves for an inevitable attack, there is still very little they can do to actually avoid it.

But patching their systems immediately and ensuring that they have a solid back up plan will give them an extra layer of protection, Tendell says.

Additionally he says small businesses should restrict all external media sources like USB drives from being connected, test their existing backups to ensure they are in fact usable, and switch to a cloud solution for storage.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said Monday that the Trump administration's infrastructure plan will be out in a few weeks and will call for $200 billion in taxpayer money to generate $1 trillion in private investment.

"These funds will be used to leverage $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years," Chao told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She said the federal investment in rebuilding America's roads and bridges, as well as water, pipelines and other projects, will be offset by unspecified savings "in order to avoid saddling future generations with more debt."

President Donald Trump's pledge to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure over 10 years was a top campaign promise, but it has received little attention because health care and tax reform have been the big legislative priorities. Trump's struggles to implement his immigration agenda have also been a distraction, as have the investigations into Russian meddling in the presidential election.

Infrastructure is a rare policy area that appears ripe for bipartisan agreement. Large numbers of voters for Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton agreed that America's roads and bridges are a big problem, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted just after the November election. But how to pay for these reforms has vexed policymakers. Unions and industries that would contribute to the rebuilding have been waiting for details.

It's far from clear that Trump can rely on private investments for most of his $1 trillion plan. Such public-private partnerships have never been done on infrastructure of that scale.

Some Democrats say they worry that Trump's plan will try to spur private investment by reducing regulations, such as environmental reviews and community consultations on projects, rather than providing more government money.
Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed ambitious hopes for Asian and European governments to work more closely on finance, law enforcement and a broad range of other issues as leaders from 30 nations issued a joint endorsement Monday of a Beijing-led trade initiative.

The "Belt and Road" project is China's biggest foreign initiative to date as Beijing looks for global stature to match its economic success. It calls for expanding trade across Asia, Africa and Europe with multibillion-dollar investments in ports, railways and other facilities, but governments including Russia, Washington and India are uneasy Beijing also is using it to gain political influence.

Xi said the project has "no political agenda." But he expressed hope governments taking part in the initiative will coordinate policy in finance, law enforcement, technology and education  areas where China's status as the biggest Asian economy would allow Beijing to dominate.

"It is our hope that through the 'Belt and Road' development, we will unleash new forces for global economic growth," Xi told reporters at a conference center in the hills north of the Chinese capital.

The two-day meeting included Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and presidents or prime ministers from Italy, Hungary, Greece, Kenya and most of China's Asian neighbors but no major Western leaders.

Britain, France and Germany were represented by finance or trade officials. The United States sent a delegation led by the Asia director of President Donald Trump's National Security Council.

A joint statement by the leaders appeared to be crafted to defuse fears Beijing is trying to create a China-dominated bloc and rewrite global trade rules.

It endorsed a "rules-based" system, a possible attempt to reassure Western governments that worry Beijing might try to erode the World Trade Organization system under which all competitors are treated equally.

"We endeavor to promote a universal, rules-based, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system with WTO at its core," the statement said.

Xi acknowledged the initiative is in its early stages and faces daunting obstacles.

"One single feather does not make a bird fly high," he said.

Dozens of "Belt and Road" projects including railways and power plants have been launched since Xi unveiled the initiative in 2013. Most are financed by loans from Chinese state-owned banks but officials have expressed hope projects can attract private investors.

At the start of the gathering Sunday, Xi pledged additional financing for the initiative totaling 780 billion yuan ($113 billion).

The Chinese leader's declaration of plans to pursue cooperation in areas well beyond trade could increase potential obstacles.

Chinese officials insist the initiative is purely commercial, but foreign diplomats and political analysts also see an effort by Beijing to promote its own vision of trade and security arrangements and reduce the U.S. presence in Asia.

Trump's plan to focus on domestic issues and downplay foreign affairs has given Beijing an opening to try to play a bigger leadership role in trade, climate and other global issues.

China is the biggest trading partner for all of its Asian neighbors and a growing investor. But other Asian governments are uneasy about Beijing's strategic ambitions, especially after it built artificial islands and military bases in the South China Sea to enforce its claim to most of the region.

Asian governments that want to use ties with Washington to offset China's growing dominance have been thrown off balance by Trump's decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed regional trade pact.

Xi said Beijing wants "Belt and Road" to improve cooperation in making industrial and financial policy, speed up development of infrastructure, make trade and investment flow more easily and improve interaction on education and other "people-to-people ties."

Other governments welcome Chinese investment in a region the Asian Development Bank says needs to spend $7 trillion this decade on ports, railways and other facilities to keep economies growing. But officials have expressed concern Beijing might use "Belt and Road" to promote exports by encouraging its neighbors to adopt China's industrial standards for railways and other goods.

Xi tried to mollify concern about a potential Chinese-dominated bloc by saying "Belt and Road" is meant to be an "open and inclusive platform for development."

Earlier Monday, the Chinese leader appealed in a speech to the visiting foreign leaders to pursue "greater openness and cooperation" and to "reject protectionism."

Beijing has promoted itself as a champion of free trade in response to pressure in the United States and Europe for restrictions on imports, despite complaints by its trading partners that China is the most-closed major economy.

Also Monday, the Philippine defense minister, who attended the Beijing meeting, said he signed a letter of intent with a Chinese military contractor to purchase weapons for Manila's army, navy and air force.

The minister, Delfin Lorenzana, said the Chinese government was offering a loan "at the tune of about $500 million" to finance the purchases. Lorenzana said no decisions had been made about what arms might be bought or how much.
Cybersecurity stocks and tracker products rose at the European open on Monday after a global "ransomware" attack disrupted car factories, hospitals, shops and schools around the world.

A London-listed cybersecurity exchange-traded fund ISE whose holdings include software provider Cisco Systems and cybersecurity firms Fireeye and Symantec rose 0.9 percent at the open.

London-listed shares in cloud network security firm Sophos <SOPH.L>, which also saw an upbeat target price raise at Deutsche Bank, jumped as much as 3.6 percent to a record high.

A cyber-attack in at least 150 countries spread across the globe on Friday, disrupting operations at firms including French carmaker Renault.

Europe's police agency Europol said on Monday the attack had hit 200,000 in at least 150 countries.

French government cyber security agency ANSSI said Renault was not alone to be hit, and warned of other possible attacks soon.

(Reporting by Helen Reid and Danilo Masoni, Editing by Vikram Subhedar)
American International Group Inc's priorities will include a commitment to technology as well as a focus on growth and underwriting, the insurance giant's new chief executive officer, Brian Duperreault told investors on Monday.

"I didn't come here to break the company up. I came here to grow it," said the newly appointed Duperreault, in his first remarks as AIG CEO.

(Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn Editing by W Simon)

Below is an earlier reporter version from Reuters:

American International Group named Brian Duperreault as its new chief executive officer on Monday, selecting a protege of former CEO Hank Greenberg and an industry veteran known for his turnaround expertise.

Duperreault, age 70, is the founder and chief executive officer of Hamilton Insurance Group in Bermuda, and is seen as a short-to-medium term replacement for outgoing CEO Peter Hancock, who announced plans to depart in March after the insurer's fourth-quarter loss stunned investors and AIG's board.

He may only stay at AIG for 3 to 5 years to finish an ongoing turnaround effort and groom a successor, several recruiters said in interviews.

"Brian is uniquely qualified to lead AIG at this important time," Douglas Steenland, chairman of AIG's board said in a statement.

"He is a hands-on leader who has consistently delivered strong bottom-line results," Steenland said.

The company's shares were up 1.7 percent at $62.01 in premarket trading on Monday.

AIG is nearly three-quarters of the way through a turnaround plan developed by Hancock, who intended to slim the New York-based insurer through divestitures, improve its financial performance and return $25 billion worth of capital to shareholders.

Although AIG's poor fourth-quarter performance was a tipping point for many investors, including billionaire activist Carl Icahn, the company has since bounced back. Its first-quarter operating profit beat expectations, helped by investment returns and cost cuts.

AIG's board has also authorized an additional $2.5 billion in share repurchases, putting the company closer to its capital return target. Since announcing the goal, AIG has spent more than $18 billion on stock buybacks and dividends.

Duperreault is described by many in the insurance business as the industry's "elder statesman." After moving up the ranks at AIG early in his career, he left in 1994 to build ACE Group Inc from a small outfit to a global operation.

Duperreault, who took charge of Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc in 2008, launched a successful turnaround effort at the company, which had been struggling with reputational issues and lost business after then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer alleged that it had rigged bids for insurance contracts. Marsh paid an $850 million civil penalty in 2005 to settle the claims.

However, Duperreault's appointment as AIG's head could test whether those seen as possible internal candidates for the CEO job will stay on board to help achieve Duperreault's goals.

The most prominent was Rob Schimek, CEO of AIG's commercial insurance unit, who joined the company in 2005 as its chief financial officer.

Industry sources describe Schimek, age 52, as capable and accomplished, though he lacks Duperreault's turnaround experience. During his time at AIG, he has been credited with helping ink reinsurance pacts with Swiss Re AG and Berkshire Hathaway Inc to offset long-term risks on U.S. commercial insurance policies.

(Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra and Chris Reese)
A federal appeals court is set to hear arguments on Monday over President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban on people entering the United States from six Muslim-majority countries, the second such court to review Trump's directive over the past week.

A three-judge 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel, made up entirely of judges appointed by Democratic former President Bill Clinton, will review a Hawaii judge's ruling that blocked parts of the Republican president's revised executive order on travel.

The March order was Trump's second effort to craft travel restrictions. The first, issued on Jan. 27, led to chaos and protests at airports before being blocked by courts. The second order was intended to overcome the legal problems posed by the original ban, but was also suspended by judges before it could go into effect on March 16.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii blocked 90-day entry restrictions on people from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, as well as part of the order that suspended entry of refugee applicants for 120 days.

Last week the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia reviewed a Maryland judge's ruling that blocked the 90-day entry restrictions. That court is largely made up of Democrats, and the judges' questioning appeared to break along partisan lines. A ruling has not yet been released.

Arguing that the United States needed to tighten national security measures, Trump's attempt to limit travel was one of his first major acts in office. The fate of the ban is one indication of whether the Republican can carry out his promises to be tough on immigration and national security.

Opponents - including the state of Hawaii and civil rights groups - say that both the first ban and the revised ban discriminate against Muslims. The government argues the text of the order does not mention any specific religion and is needed to protect the country against attacks.

The 9th Circuit hearing on Monday will take place in Seattle. The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to be the ultimate decider, but the high court is not expected to take up the issue for several months.

(Writing by Dan Levine; Editing by Mary Milliken)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has warned a Pittsburgh restaurant to not serve horse meat again.

KDKA-TV first reported that Cure Restaurant hosted a special dinner with Canadian chefs on May 8 that included horse tartare.

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service says Cure chef and co-owner Justin Severino received a warning letter for illegally bringing horse meat into the country. An inspection determined there were no other horse products brought in by the restaurant or on its menu.

Severino says the meat came from a sustainable farm in Canada and isn't part of the regular menu.

The warning letter carries no penalties, but means the restaurant could criminally prosecuted if it serves horse again. Congress has banned the inspection of horse meat for human consumption.
A former tech worker who says he was replaced and forced to train an H-1B Visa recipient, is now running for Congress.

Craig Diangelo was an IT worker at Northeast Utilities, now called Eversource, in Connecticut, until he lost his job after two India-based IT outsourcing firms took over, he told the FOX Business Network.

In the very beginning we did not know that we would be training our replacements the CIO came down from Boston, said that she would hold a town hall meeting to discuss the future of our IT at our particular company," Diangelo said. "We all got into the room, 220 of us, she proceeded to tell us that what we are going to do is outsource IT infrastructure and IT development."

Diangelo said company employees at the time were told it was because global employees can adjust to change a lot faster than the American worker. He questioned why American workers werent classified equally.

When you take a look at this, isnt the American worker also a global worker, dont we have some input into whats said, or what we say or what gets said in regards to a global economy? After all we are a very large market, he said.

He also described the terminology used for employees to train their replacements.

As they were bringing over 220 employees, we were told that we would do knowledge transfer to these individuals coming over here, he said, adding many of the people brought over didnt have the necessary job skills to take their positions.

However, he still lost his job.

They sweetened the pot to us individuals who were still there that if we stayed on an additional ten weeks, we would get an additional ten weeks of severance pay, he said.

Diangelo is now running for Congress in Connecticut as a Republican.
A fraternity pledge who was ordered to guzzle alcohol during a hazing ritual and twice fell down a flight of stairs before his death was treated like roadkill, his father said Monday after criminal charges were filed against 18 of his sons Penn State fraternity brothers.

Jim Piazza, the father of 19-year-old engineering student Timothy Piazza, said the Beta Theta Pi fraternity members were to blame for his sons February death.

They planned this night out, Piazza said. They had all the intent to feed these young men lethal doses of alcohol  to bring them to alcohol poisoning levels. This was premeditated. They killed our son.

The family of the college sophomore from Lebanon, New Jersey, told The Associated Press that they are considering a lawsuit but are focused now on the criminal case against their sons fraternity brothers.

Eight face the most serious charge of aggravated assault, a felony that carries a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison. Timothy Piazza consumed what prosecutors said was a life-threatening amount of alcohol  at one point reaching nearly .40 percent, doctors estimate  during a hazing ritual on Feb. 2 in State College, Pennsylvania, and he died two days later.

Piazzas parents said they would likely attend the court proceedings for the accused. A preliminary hearing that had been scheduled for this week has been pushed back to June.

Piazzas mother, Evelyn, said her grief has worsened the more shes learned about what happened to her son.

My mind used to go to dark places before, now Im imagining more horrors so its really hard to fall asleep, she said.

Jim Piazza said the fraternity brothers tortured their son.

They held him captive and tortured him. They treated him like roadkill, he said. Knowing that your son suffered the way he did over such a long period of time, and died a very slow and very painful death, frankly, its haunting.

A grand jury said security camera footage captured events inside the house that night, including pledges being ordered to guzzle alcohol quickly after the ceremony. Piazza appeared to become inebriated and fell face-first down a flight of basement steps before midnight.

Fraternity members made half-hearted and even counterproductive efforts to help him, and when one member strongly advocated for summoning help, he was shoved into a wall and told to leave, the report said.

Piazza apparently fell down the steps again early the next morning but was not discovered until about 10 a.m. Someone called 911 some 40 minutes later. Piazza later died as a result of severe head injuries and suffered other injuries that included internal bleeding from a shattered spleen.

The Piazzas said no one representing the university attended their sons wake or funeral services. Jim Piazza called their absence shameful. He also noted that none of the students involved has been expelled.

I am glad they have taken action so far on some things, but they have a long way to go, he said of the school.

The university had no immediate response.

The Piazzas hope to push Penn State and universities across the nation to adopt changes  and improve enforcement of existing policies  to prevent future deaths. Among them, they suggested a ban on alcohol at fraternity events and a strict ban on hazing.

This cant happen to anyone else, Jim Pizza said. Tim Piazza is our son, but he represents so much more than that now. He represents everybodys son and daughter that is thinking about going to college, thinking about participating in Greek life.

Neither parent would say whether the fraternity members involved should have to serve jail time.

Thats for a jury to decide, Jim Piazza said. He added, What is a life worth? Our son lost the rest of his life. He lost the ability to graduate, to get married, to have kids, to be his brothers best man.

Evelyn Piazza continued: He gets to sit in a mausoleum. Everybody else gets to continue living their lives. The world goes on for everybody else.
President Donald Trump is hosting the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Monday ahead of a key meeting with Saudi Arabia that will essentially reset U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Relations with the long-time U.S. ally were strained under the Obama administration as the decision to not follow through with the red-line in Syria, and the lifting of the Iranian sanctions, have caused major concerns of stability in the region.

These meetings come at a critical time as the war on terror is heating up and the rise of the U.S. shale oil producer is changing the traditional relationship dynamic we have had with these OPEC members. Historically, it was thought that our relationship with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia was one based on oil. We would offer them protection in return for a reliable supply of oil. Yet, now with the resurgence of the U.S. oil producer, our relationship is shifting to more of alliance in the war on terror.

Iran is a big threat to the United Arab Emirates and the region. Irans dreams of regional domination, along with the rise of ISIS, is making our mutual relationship more critical than ever. Iran is fighting a proxy war in Yemen that the UAE and the Saudis are on the opposite side of. The UAE has been a strong ally in the war on terror and under President Obama the federation felt like it was thrown under the bus.

The Obama administration had the UAE ready for action in Syria before the president changed his mind, even when that red line was crossed. That fateful reversal of fortunes led to more pain for the Syrian people and put countries like the UAE in a much more vulnerable position. It led to the proliferation of more terrorists and emboldened Iran. This was strange because during the Obama years the UAE was viewed as the most important Arab partner because of its military capabilities and opposition to religious extremism.

This reversal on Syria strained U.S. relations and was one of the reasons the UAE helped lead an oil production war that was designed to take out U.S. energy producers including the shale industry. In fact, the UAE made it very clear that U.S. shale was their target and they were out for themselves. They were seemingly suggesting that the U.S. and our foreign policy had hung them out to dry and they were none too happy about it. This was tough talk from a U.S. ally that was usually quiet and left it to the Saudis to do their bidding.

Yet things are changing quickly under the Trump administration; President Trumps approval ratings might not be tremendously high here in the U.S., but in the UEA, they are soaring. The United Arab Emirates has applauded Trumps tougher line on its foe Iran and cheered his decision for the U.S. tomahawk strike against Syrian government forces that had crossed more than one red line. The Trump doctrine of taking quick, decisive action against terrorists or foes that cross red lines is much more welcome in a region like the UAE where it seems there are enemies surrounding them.

Ahead of the meeting with President Trump, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of 60 Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) PAC-3 and 100 Raytheon (NYSE:RTN) GEM-T missiles for the UAE Patriot air defense system worth $2 billion. The UAE may be looking for even more purchases in the future.

President Trumps pro U.S. energy agenda may increase tensions with the UAE at some point because about 40% of the countrys gross domestic product is directly based on oil and gas output, but for now standing up to Iran and ISIS is of more importance to the Emirates. The UAE appears to be on board with the extension of OPEC production cuts. Instead of a relationship of dependence, our relationship is being reset as two strong partners defeating terror in the world. Tension over rising U.S. oil output is for another day as these two allies work together to fight against extremism and terror.

Phil Flynn is senior energy analyst at The PRICE Futures Group and a Fox Business Network contributor. He is one of the world's leading market analysts, providing individual investors, professional traders, and institutions with up-to-the-minute investment and risk management insight into global petroleum, gasoline, and energy markets. His precise and timely forecasts have come to be in great demand by industry and media worldwide and his impressive career goes back almost three decades, gaining attention with his market calls and energetic personality as writer of The Energy Report Opens a New Window..
The Trump administration appeared to be fast-tracking its $1 trillion infrastructure plan Monday, as Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said Americans can expect President Donald Trump to release details in just a few weeks.

While Chao previously said the plan would be publicly fleshed out by the end of the year, that timetable has been shifted forward amid an ongoing battle in Congress over the GOPs plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare and implement Trumps tax plan, which is likely to cause just as much, if not more, controversy. Infrastructure, on the other hand, is widely believed to be a subject that transcends partisan politics on Capitol Hill.

Chao told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Monday the plan will call for $200 billion worth of taxpayer input toward the $1 trillion goal, which will be supplemented through a private-public collaboration. The plan is expected to roll out over a 10-year period.

At the end of March, the transportation secretary said the infrastructure revamp will go beyond just roads and bridges, and could include the electrical grid, veterans hospitals and water systems. On Monday, Chao said specifics of the plan have been hashed out with participation from experts across 16 federal agencies.

The administrations legislative agenda initially involved repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act first, then reforming the tax code and finally hitting Americas infrastructure system. National Economic Director Gary Cohn reiterated the administrations intent of sticking with that timeframe in late-April, however Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said tax reform would get done regardless of what happened with health care, indicating some flexibility on behalf of the White House. Many experts believe the president shouldve led with infrastructure in order to get a bipartisan win and foster cooperation before moving on to some of the more divisive topics.

The GOPs plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare passed the House of Representatives earlier this month, however the bill is now in the hands of the Senate where it could face a much tougher approval process. Cohn and Mnuchin unveiled the administrations tax blueprint last month, which differs slightly from the House GOP plan and dramatically from Democratic priorities.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. 2022 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Legal Statement. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper.
Billy Ray Cyrus says he owes his success to a Vietnam veteran.

Cyrus will perform on May 28 in Washington D.C. during the Rolling Thunder Ride for Freedom, which is an annual motorcycle rally that ends at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and honors fallen servicemen and women.

He will perform the tune Some Gave All, which is about serving in the military.

"This is a full-circle moment, because a week after Some Gave All came out, I stood at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall during Rolling Thunder with Don Von Tress, who is not only the writer of Achy Breaky Heart, but also a Vietnam veteran. That man and that song changed my life, Cyrus said in a press release.

Achy Breaky Heart made Cyrus a household name.

He added, And now 25 years later, I'll return to the Wall and perform Some Gave All and Achy Breaky Heart and honor those veterans who gave all to their country.

Cyrus recently dedicated a performance of Some Gave All at the Grand Ole Opry to Weston C. Lee, who was killed while fighting ISIS in Iraq on April 29.

"Weston Lee died serving our country and we should all be forever grateful for his service. I dedicated Some Gave All on the Opry for Lee and all those who haven't returned home," Cyrus stated in the press release Monday.

Some Gave All, which Cyrus released in 1992, includes the lyrics: All Gave Some, Some Gave All / Some stood through for the red, white and blue/ And some had to fall / And if you ever think of me/ Think of all your liberties and recall/ Some Gave All.
Brad Pitt recently gave a very open interview to GQ, in which he opened up about his past substance abuse issues and said he is living a clean life post-split from Angelina Jolie.

"I've got no secrets. I've got nothing to hide," Pitt told the Associated Press. "We're human and I find the human condition very interesting. If we're not talking about it, then we're not getting better."

Since his split from Jolie, Pitt said he has been working with his ex and "figuring out the new configuration of our family."

''Kids are everything," he said, of their six children. "Kids are your life. They're taking all the focus, as they should anyway."

He said he is spending his time "keeping the ship afloat" in terms of his family. And he joked that his situation isnt so dire.

"I'm not suicidal or something," Pitt said, laughing. "There's still much beauty in the world and a lot of love. And a lot of love to be given. It's all right. It's just life."

Pitt was most keen to discuss "War Machine" and the strong passions behind it. The film, written and directed by the Australian filmmaker David Michod ("Animal Kingdom"), is based on Michael Hastings' 2012 book "The Operators," which chronicled McChrystal's tumultuous and short-lived stewardship of the war in Afghanistan.

"War Machine," which debuts on Netflix May 26, takes a slightly fictionalized approach. Pitt's character is named Gen. Glen McMahon, but the events and personalities covered correspond accurately with McChrystal's downfall.

The film has Pitt thinking about the situation in Afghanistan, and he is particularly upset by a request last week by advisers to President Donald Trump and military officials for several thousand more American troops in Afghanistan.

"Nothing that we've ever done has said that more troops are going to do anything but cause any more damage, more loss of life and limb," said Pitt. "We talk a lot about supporting our troops but I think supporting our troops is much more than giving them money and a pat on the back. I think it's being responsible to how we use that ultimate dedication."

Trump's top advisers have said the president has not made any final decision about adding more troops in Afghanistan.

Pitt said War Machine excited him enough to come out from behind the lens.

"The degree of difficulty on this one was ten," said Pitt, "which is what makes it worth it for me to go get in front of the camera now."

He hinted that his movie days may be nearly behind him.

"I feel myself as I'm older gravitating more to the producing side than being in front of the camera," said Pitt. "It's a big commitment, a film, and it does take you away from your family. I just have to balance that. It's not less important, itself, it's just not as important as family. ('War Machine') I loved because it's after something and we don't know where we're going to end up. It's a delicate tightrope to walk."

He credited Netflix for its role in the production.

It wouldn't have gotten made without Netflix. The reality for the studios is it just doesn't make sense for them on paper. They can take the gamble up to $35 million on a risky film. And then otherwise they focus on big tent-poles which seem to be safer and make the big payoffs. It's not their fault in any way. The numbers just don't run for them. Now with Netflix and other entities like Netflix, it becomes a whole new delivery system for these kinds of films I prefer to gamble on. For us, it's opened up a whole new world of possibilities. I'll stick work with studios, I'll always do that, at least I think so, as long as they're around. Because they are still films that deserve to have the big-screen, cultural experience.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.




Since their all-day breakfast doesnt seem to be pushing as many sales as it used to, McDonalds is now trying to win customers back with something new it's calling the Experience of the Future.

The Wall Street Journal reports that McDonalds is getting ready to pour a significant amount of money into upgrading and renovating its franchisees restaurants. Its all part of the companys new Experience of the Future initiative, which will offer patrons a different-- i.e. more modern-- dining experience than what's currently available.

For starters, the upgraded McDonalds locations will be utilizing table-location technology which will allow employees to deliver food directly to customers tables. Two of the other biggest changes, aside from restaurant aesthetics, will be the installation of self-service kiosks and dessert counters.

Along with these renovations, McDonalds employees will be given new muted grey uniforms to wear.

MCDONALD'S MANAGER ARRESTED FOR $3800 REFUND SCAM

This particular renovation initiative is unprecedented for McDonalds, and not merely because of the scale or individual upgrades, but because the company has promised franchisees that they wont have to pay for the whole thing  an olive branch it has never before extended.

Historically, when going through a rebrand, McDonalds has burdened its franchisees with the entire cost of renovations. And, as AOL points out, previous renovations have actually bankrupted some McDonalds franchisees, especially since the company often introduces new menu items or promotional deals several times per year.

But while franchisees arent on the hook for the entirety of bill, the upgrades McDonalds is rolling out are still expected to cost between $150,000 to $700,000 per restaurant, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Once complete, McDonalds is hoping to take back the customers it has been losing to other fast-food franchises. In a meeting with investors, the company recently estimated that it lost half a billion transactions to competitors over the last five years.

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The companys decision to introduce digital kiosks also mirrors one of its competitors, as Wendys announced in February their intentions to install 1,000 digital kiosks by the end of 2017.

McDonalds Experience of the Future is the latest in a string of company efforts to retain customers. The fast food chains all-day breakfast promotion, introduced in 2015, was initially regarded as a hit, although current reports indicate that the initiative is quickly losing steam.

The fast food chain's recent Create Your Own Taste initiative, which allows customers to customize their burgers via touch-screens, was also scrapped in favor of their new line of Signature Crafted Recipes sandwiches-- marketed with a french fry-fork hybrid dubbed the "Frork."
A California family was expecting their newest addition to be big, but nobody predicted that Raymond Reyes would making his debut on April 30 weighing a whopping 13.5 pounds.

Nothing fits him, Jenna Reyes, Raymonds mother, told ABC 7. Reyes explained her new bundle of joy uses size 2 Pampers and wears clothes typically made for 3- to 6-month-old babies.

EX-ESPNER HAD MISCARRIAGE DURING LIVE BROADCAST

A nurse who works in labor and delivery at Mercy Medical Center, in Merced, California, told the news outlet hes the biggest baby shes seen in her seven years at the hospital.

Reyes said her older children were big babies, but not close to 13 pounds. She had been expecting Raymond to weigh around 10 or 11 pounds, and opted for a Caesarian-section delivery. Raymond spent about a week in the hospitals neonatal intensive care unit to treat jaundice and low calcium and sodium levels, ABC 7 reported.

MOM DIES DAY AFTER GIVING BIRTH TO HEALTHY SON

The family is thrilled to have Raymond home. and Reyes said he would be her last baby.
Feeding donkeys is more hazardous than it might seem, according to a former Georgia resident's lawsuit. Anna Maria Giacomi sued a commercial farm in the state after she was attacked by the animal while feeding it two years ago and ended up losing an arm and a leg, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

"The donkey grabbed my wrist and started biting, chewing, crunching going up my arm," Giacomi tells Channel 2. She was hospitalized and ended up contracting the flesh-eating bacteria necrotizing fasciitis, which led to the double-amputation.

"I woke up with no arm and no leg. It was hideous," she says. Giacomiwho says she knew the donkey and had been feeding it for more than five yearsunderwent 11 surgeries in under two months.

She settled the lawsuit with the unnamed farm for an undisclosed amount. Her lawyer says she also plans to sue the hospital for medical malpractice, alleging doctors belatedly realized she had contracted the bacteria.

Giacomi says before the attack, she was a "productive, independent woman taking care of myself and my animals," but she has since had to move to Florida to live with her son, People reports.

Her lawyer says he doesn't know what happened to the donkey, but it is no longer at the farm. (This woman is suing over a fall from a fake donkey.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: Woman Who Lost Limbs After Donkey Attack Settles Lawsuit
The First Korean Warlargely forgotten by the American public and the planettragically took the lives of 2.5 million people. A potential Second Korean War, with both sides armed with nuclear weapons, could turn cities like Seoul, Tokyo and soon Los Angeles into atomic ash heapswith countless dead and large sections of such metropolises uninhabitable for generations.

These are the stakes when it comes to the nightmare that is today North Koreanot in some far away future, but in the here and now. Therefore, every time the portly pariah of Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un, tests a new missile or detonates a nuclear weapon we should pause and reflect on the dire situation we find ourselves in.

So let there be no doubt, Saturdays missile test wont be the last. To build a viable nuclear weapons arsenal and missiles to carry them to a target Kim must test them repeatedly. Even in failure North Korea gains valuable data for the next test, and eventually, a weapon that can lay waste to our homeland.

And despite decades of dramatic ups and downs, patience has paid off for Pyongyang. Even with an economy smaller than Ethiopia, the Kim regime possesses around 12-20 nuclear weapons and can add to that stockpile every six or seven weeks. But from there it gets worse.

A dictator like Kim Jong Un is not crazyjust crazy like a fox about ensuring his own survival. He already murders his own people daily with 200,000 of them in what can only be described as Nazi-style death camps.

Pyongyang has amassed as much as 5,000 tons of chemical weapons and the means to sling them all over Asia. Combined with an army of over 1 million men, 4,300 tanks and thousands of pieces of artillery and rocket launchers that could lob shells into Seoula metro area of 25 million people, the most densely populated on the planetNorth Korea has all the awful ingredients to start a conflict not seen since the end of World War II.

But for such weapons to be a threat they need to move from stats on a page to missiles in the air. The question we need to ask ourselves is obvious: Would Kim really use such weapons? The answer is a resounding yes.

You see, a dictator like Kim Jong Un is not crazyjust crazy like a fox about ensuring his own survival.

He already murders his own people daily with 200,000 of them in what can only be described as Nazi-style death camps. He has killed any rival that stands in his way, doing whatever it takes to survive.

Kim even killed his own half-brother, using chemical weapons in a crowded airport, sending the most sinister of messages to any potential foe. If Kim wont bat an eye to kill his own countrymen or even his own family, then launching strikes against South Korea, Japan or even America if he feels threatened is not a stretch.

Considering multiple administrationsboth Democrat and Republicanhave been ineffective in halting the growth of North Koreas weapons programs it is time for President Trump to move as aggressively as possible to confront this challenge. There are three immediate steps the Trump administration can take to contain North Koreas atomic aspirations.

First, the U.S. must do all it can to ensure that Pyongyang receives no outside help for its missile or nuclear weapons programs. Tough secondary sanctions should be applied to any country, corporation, bank or person that considers it acceptable to help North Korea build such worrisome weapons. A precedent must be set: if you wish to help the roguest of rogue states build weapons of mass destruction you will pay the highest of prices.

Second, America, along with its allies, must do everything they can to setback the North Korean nuclear and missile programs as much possible while also increasing the costs to develop more advanced technologies. The Trump administration must use cyber technologymalware, viruses etc. just as the Bush and Obama administrations did in the case of Iran's nuclear program, to frustrate North Koreas scientists at every turn. With various outlets reporting such efforts are likely underway, a top-down review should be conducted to ensure we are fully utilizing cyber against North Korea as much as possible.

Third, and most important, the Trump administration must build up regional and homeland missile defenses to nullify Pyongyangs growing arsenal. THAAD not only must remain in South Korea but also be deployed to Japan. U.S. missile defense systems in Alaska must also be expanded dramaticallya recent plan by Senator Dan Sullivan calling for a 30 percent increase in interceptors there should be implemented.

Clearly there are no easy solutions for a problem that is decades in the making. However, the Trump administration must press forward to ensure the North Korea threat does not get any worse or gains the capability to hold America hostage by atomic means.
Theres really not a polite way to say this but the folks over at "Saturday Night Live" are a bunch of pompous, low-rent, intergluteal clefts.

I came to that conclusion after watching actress Aidy Bryants absurd parody of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, President Trumps deputy press secretary.

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My father is Mike Huckabee, Bryants character said. My mother is a big Southern hamburger.

Throughout the sketch, Ms. Bryant devoured an apple.

Ms. Sanders, the daughter of former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, was fat-shamed.

It was ugly  even by NBCs low standards.

You guys were mean about Huckabee Sanders, CNNs Chris Cuomo said. You were fat-shaming her. You were talking about how she looks and what she wears. I thought that it was mean, not funny.

I never thought Id see the day when CNN defended any member of the Trump administration.

They had her eating, Cuomo said. I thought it was in poor taste.

"I've known Sarah for years. She's a cute curvy girl who is beautiful and really smart and is killing it every time she gets into the podium in the White House briefing room.

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Let me see if I can illustrate the distastefulness of SNLs sketch.

Imagine SNL performing a sketch about former First Lady Michelle Obamas initiatives to encourage kids to eat healthier food.

Imagine Tyler Perry portraying Mrs. Obama as she scarfed down a cheeseburger and French fries during the parody press conference.

I have no doubt had that happened, NBC would have been forced to cancel SNL and the actors would have been blacklisted.

Penny Young Nance, the chief executive officer of Concerned Women for America, told me NBC crossed a line.

I was so offended by that portrayal, she said. NBC treated her so much more irreverently than they ever would have treated a female leader from the left.

Nance said its one thing to poke fun at a persons accent, but its out of bounds to go after their appearance.

"I know Sarah. I've known Sarah for years. She's a cute curvy girl who is beautiful and really smart and is killing it every time she gets into the podium in the White House briefing room, Nance said.

Nance said she doesnt understand why SNL is talking about weight.

No one talked about Hillary Clintons weight and I dont think we should have, she said.

Now, that's true. I don't seem to recall SNL broadcasting any sketches on the weight of Secretary Clinton.

Punchlines about her waistline were verboten.

But Hollywood and the Mainstream Media believe Conservative women are fair game. So dont be too surprised if Ms. Bryants character is conducting an SNL parody presser while gnawing on a meat loaf.
Fact Box: Public Affairs Index 2017 (PAI-2017)

Published: May 15, 2017

Kerala and Tamil Nadu have secured first and second rankings for the second consecutive year in public affairs index (PAI) released by the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), Bengaluru. Gujarat has been ranked third followed by Karnataka and Maharashtra at the fourth and fifth position respectively in governance indicators.

The last four positions among the large states has been occupied by Bihar (18th), Jharkhand (17th), Odisha (16th) and Assam (15th).

Among the 12 small states which have been categorised as small as they have population less than two crore, Himachal Pradesh has been ranked first followed by Goa and Mizoram. Delhi which occupied third position in 2016 index has slipped to ninth position in 2017. The last four positions among small states have been occupied Meghalaya (12th), Arunachal Pradesh (11th) and Jammu and Kashmir (10th).

Contents Themes

PAC

Themes

The survey was carried out based on 10 themes, 26 focus subjects and 82 indicators. The report was based on the following themes: essential infrastructure, support to human development, social protection, women and children, crime, law and order, delivery of justice, environment, transparency and accountability, fiscal management and economic freedom.

In the category of essential infrastructure, Punjab has been adjudged as the best performer among all States followed by Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.

In the category of human development, Kerala, Maharshtra, and Punjab are the best performers while Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Assam are the worst performers.

In implementation of social protection policies, Kerala, Assam and Madhya Pradesh are the best performers while Telangana, Haryana and Punjab are the worst performers as they lagged behind other states in executing various State and Central government schemes.

In the category of women and children, Kerala has been adjudged as the best performer while Jharkhand, Haryana and Maharashtra are poor performers.

In the category of fiscal management, Telangana has been adjudged as the best performer while Andhra Pradesh has been labelled as the poor performer.

In maintaining law and order, delivery of justice and environment categories, Tamil Nadu has been adjudged as the best performer but the state has been ranked last in the parameter of transparency and accountability in the administration.

In the category of economic freedom, Gujarat has secured top rank while Bihar has secured the last rank.

PAC

Public Affairs Centre (PAC), Bengaluru had come up with a Public Affairs Index (PAI) to rank governance inter-state by using data available in the public domain in key areas of governance. Public Affairs Centre (PAC) is a not for profit think tank, established in 1994 with a mandate to improve the quality of governance in India. The genesis of PAC is attributed to Dr. Samuel Paul in the early nineties.

The objective of Public Affairs Index (PAI) is an attempt to bring together the states of the country which are culturally, economically and socially diverse, into a common data-driven framework in order to facilitate an interstate comparison. A well-framed methodology backed by statistical data from government sources, has been included in the study to provide insights into the subject of good governance.

Month: Current Affairs - May, 2017

Category: Reports & Indexes Current Affairs

Topics: Insights  National  Odisha  Public Affairs Index 2017  TNPSC

Latest E-Books
A controversial mining project in Alaskas Bristol Bay soon could receive a green light after the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday reached a settlement agreement with a small Canadian company that has been seeking to apply for permission to build what could be the worlds largest gold and copper mine.

The settlement between the agency and a unit of Northern Dynasty Minerals restarts the permitting process to construct the so-called Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay watershed of southern Alaska  a project that was put on ice following an Obama-era decision by the EPA that blocked the company from applying for a permit.

We are committed to due process and the rule of law, and regulations that are 'regular,' EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said in a statement. We understand how much the community cares about this issue, with passionate advocates on all sides. The agreement will not guarantee or prejudge a particular outcome, but will provide Pebble a fair process for their permit application and help steer EPA away from costly and time-consuming litigation.

The project has been stuck in legal limbo since the EPA decision to block the mine, even before the company had submitted its permit applications. The EPA ruling came on the heels of a study that concluded that large-scale mining in the Bristol Bay watershed posed significant risk to salmon and adversely could affect Alaska Natives in the region whose culture is built around salmon.

The study provided the basis for the EPA to invoke a little-known part of the Clean Water Act called Section 404(c) that allows the EPA to restrict, prohibit, deny or withdraw the use of an area as a disposal site for dredged or fill material if the discharge will have unacceptable adverse effects on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas, wildlife or recreational areas.

Supporters of the proposed Pebble Mine feared that the use of Section 404(c) could result in the project's veto before it goes through the permitting process.

The settlement on Friday now allows Pebble Limited Partnership, a subsidiary of Northern Dynasty Minerals, to apply for a Clean Water Act permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before the EPA moves forward with its own review process.

The EPA will not finalize a mine permit until 48 months from the settlement or until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issues its final environmental impact statement, whichever comes first.

Northern Dynasty Minerals argued that the EPA previously had taken preemptive regulatory action against the project and said that all the company hoped for was a fair assessment from the federal agency.

"From the outset of this unfortunate saga, we've asked for nothing more than fairness and due process under the law  the right to propose a development plan for Pebble and have it assessed against the robust environmental regulations and rigorous permitting requirements enforced in Alaska and the United States," Northern Dynastys President Ron Thiessen said in a press release. "Today's settlement gives us precisely that, the same treatment every developer and investor in a stable, first world country should expect."

Northern Dynasty Minerals accused EPA of being in cahoots with mine opponents with a predetermined goal of blocking the project, while the EPA, in court documents, argued those claims were just an effort to undermine its plan to protect parts of the Bristol Bay region from development.

The inspector general for the EPA, which last year conducted an investigation following requests by the state, Northern Dynasty, and others, found no evidence of bias in how the EPA conducted the study on potential mine impacts. It also concluded that the agency did not predetermine the study's outcome.

Fridays announcement by Pruitt is another signal that the mining industry will enjoy better relations under President Trump than it did with the previous administration, but the Pebble Mine project still faces widespread opposition from environmentalists, Alaskas indigenous communities, and the states large-scale salmon fishing industry.

The project has been hampered for decades over concerns that toxic residue from the mine could harm the worlds largest population of sockeye salmon and endanger the 14,000 jobs and $252 million-a-year generated by the local fishing industry.

My family has been here for generations and we rely on the salmon to feed our families and to have a livelihood, Kimberly Williams, the executive director of the Bristol Bay nonprofit Nunamta Aulukestai, told Fox News. Salmon fishing is not just part of my culture and history, but it provides jobs for everyone in the community and helps send people to college. The mine puts all that at risk.

While Northern Dynasty shares surged Friday morning  at one point in premarket action soaring more than 18 percent  some investors still say any excitement over Pebble Mine ignores the likelihood that the company will not attract big budget investors.

The New York-based investment firm Kerrisdale Capital released a damning report about Northern Dynasty in February, predicting that while the Trump administrations mining-friendly policies would benefit the company, the lack of big budget investors will continue to haunt the project.

A number of the worlds largest mining corporations have pulled out of the project, including Mitsubishi, Rio Tinto, and Anglo American  the last of which had about $500 million in the project.

The Kerrisdale Capital report added: With no economic value and huge political risks, Northern Dynasty is a zero.



The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Former President Bill Clinton used a college commencement address Sunday to attack President Trumps immigration and diversity policies.

While his address did not mention Trump directly, Clinton was highly critical of the presidents approach to immigration reform and his policies aimed toward Muslims.

Tough talking realism is all about this groups a threat, that groups a threat, and another groups a threat, Clinton said to graduating students from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

He went on to talk about gun violence statistics in the United States and how America has unfairly isolated groups like Muslims.

Does it mean we shouldn't be tough on terrorism committed by Islamic radicals? Clinton asked. Of course not, but it means we shouldn't go around in blind stupor mixing apples and oranges, and terrifying some of the most talented and devoted people in this country who want to make their contribution and who help make us better.

Trump has made two unsuccessful attempts to ban travelers coming into the U.S. from mostly Muslim nations. In addition, he also intends to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to crack down on illegal immigrants and deport those with felony charges.

Clinton also used his platform to criticize the presidents immigration reform policies and advised against divisive tactics.

You have to decide and your generation will decide if diversity is strength or problem. Clinton said in a roughly 40-minute speech.

The former president referenced the story of decorated war veteran Miguel Perez Jr.

A guy does two combat duties, risks his life for rest of us  . He did things that most Americans dont do and he got taken of the street and sent home the other day. Two combat tours. Kind of embarrassing that we let people risk life for us and then we kick him out. Clinton said without mentioning the veterans crime record.

Perez is a Mexican-born legal permanent resident of the U.S. He served two terms in Afghanistan and now faces deportation over a felony drug conviction.
Members of the alt-left with a history of participating in violent protests are targeting the neighborhood of the Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai.

The organizers, connected to DisruptJ20 and Code Pink, said they are "taking the fight to Pai's front door," leaving leaflets on the doors in Pai's neighborhood last weekend to protest changes to the Obama administration net neutrality policy.

On Sunday, the activists will again target Pai's neighborhood, this time with a "vigil to save the Internet."

"Join us this Sunday for a #SaveTheInternet #NetNeutrality vigil outside of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's house," a Facebook event organized by "Protect Our Internet" reads.

"THIS IS A COMPLETELY LEGAL ACTION. PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT," the invitation notes.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described Sunday a U.S. government under assault after President Trumps decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally -- and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," Clapper said in a televised interview with CNN. "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When he was asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper said, "Exactly."

Clappers comments came after Trumps sudden firing of Comey last week, which drew sharp criticism because it came amid the FBIs probe into Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible ties between Russia and Trumps presidential campaign.

Clapper said America's founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "under assault and is eroding."

Trump abruptly fired Comey on Tuesday and later said Comey was a showboat and a grandstander who was not doing a good job. Trump said in an interview with NBC that the investigation factored into his decision to fire Comey. The changing rationales the White House offered added an element of chaos to the president's action.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a televised interview on NBC that Trump should hire an FBI agent who would allow the nation to reset. He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration by Trump, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, explaining that "these are not normal circumstances."

"It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or is of such a reputation who has no political background at all who can go into the job from Day 1," Graham said. Asked whether Rogers or Cornyn would be good choices, Graham flatly said, "no."

"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," Graham said, adding, "I have no evidence the president colluded with the Russians at all, but we don't know all the evidence yet."

The administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to be FBI director, and Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday on his first overseas trip as president.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will brief all members of the Senate on Thursday about President Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey.

That's the word from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office on Monday.

Last week, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he made a request for Rosenstein to answer lawmakers' questions about his memo on Comey and the circumstances surrounding his dismissal.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., announced Monday that he had removed himself as a candidate to replace fired FBI Director James Comey.

Gowdy, a former state and federal prosecutor, had been mentioned as a possible successor to Comey, who was dismissed last week by President Trump.

In a statement, Gowdy said he spoke to Attorney General Jeff Sessions Monday and shared "my firm conviction that I would not be the right person" for the job.

Gowdy added that the FBI deserves a director "with not only impeccable credentials but also one who can unite the country as we strive for justice and truth," adding that he was confident such a person will emerge.



Gowdy, who was elected to Congress in 2010, also chaired the House Select Committee that investigated the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya.

Over the weekend, Justice Department officials interviewed several candidates to replace Comey as director, including former Rep. Mike Rogers; Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas; U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson; and Fran Townsend, a former homeland security adviser to former President George W. Bush.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Hillary Clinton officially jumped back into politics Monday by launching her new PAC, Onward Together.

The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and former secretary of state announced the news on Twitter and in a blast email to supporters pushing people to sign up.

Resist, insist, persist, enlist, says a message on the organization's homepage.

Onward Together is dedicated to advancing the vision that earned nearly 66 million votes in the last election, the PACs mission statement says. By encouraging people to organize, get involved, and run for office, Onward Together will advance progressive values and work to build a brighter future for generations to come.

The Republican National Committee fired back at Clinton with a statement of its own.

"The American people rejected Hillary Clinton six months ago because she's completely out-of-touch, untrustworthy, and embraced the failed policies of the past," RNC spokesman Michael Ahrens said. "If Democrats were smart, theyd realize its time to move onward from Hillary Clinton altogether.

In her email, Clinton framed the group as a vehicle to "resist" unspecified opponents -- she did not name the Trump administration, but referenced protests against its policies.

In recent months, weve seen whats possible when people come together to resist bullying, hate, falsehoods, and divisiveness, and stand up for a fairer, more inclusive America, Clinton emailed. From the Womens March to airports where communities are welcoming immigrants and refugees to town hall meetings in every community, Americans are speaking up and speaking out like never before.

Clinton specifically said the PAC would back groups like Swing Left, Color of Change, and Emerge America, and tweeted, stay tuned for more to come.

This year hasnt been what I envisioned, but I know what Im still fighting for: a kinder, big-hearted, inclusive America. Onward! Clinton tweeted.

Clinton has spoken out repeatedly about her defeat by Donald Trump in last year's election. At a women's conference earlier this month, she blamed former FBI Director James Comey and Russian interference for the loss, while also saying she took "absolute personal responsibility" for her defeat.

"If the election were on October 27," she said. "I'd be your president."
U.S. officials are closely monitoring the aftermath of the latest North Korean missile test after the rogue regime claimed that its newest rocket was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead  and that its arsenal could reach American shores.

One day after Kim Jong Uns dictatorship reported a successful test flight of its KN-17 missile, state-run news agency KCNA reported the U.S. mainland and Pacific operations were in range of North Korean weapons. The agency also claimed its missile was meant to verify the specifications of a new ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead.

We are monitoring, a National Security Council spokeswoman told Fox News.

HALEY: US WILL 'TIGHTEN THE SCREWS' ON NORTH KOREA

The U.S. has long been skeptical that Pyongyang has the technology to mount a nuclear warhead.

A senior administration official said the White House was warily assessing the latest news out of North Korea, given the countrys propensity to push misleading and exaggerated propaganda; however, the official said if the latest claim is true, it would be a cause for great concern.

Underscoring the gravity of the situation, one U.S. official told Fox News that Pyongyang took a step forward with its Sunday launch.

The missile flew four minutes longer than any previous ballistic missile test in the history of the communist regime, U.S. officials told Fox News, though North Korea had conducted space launches in the past that have flown longer than KN-17  including a mission in February 2016 that sent a satellite into orbit on Super Bowl Sunday.

After three failures last month, Sundays liftoff was the first successful test of the liquid-fueled KN-17, which some experts see as North Koreas best chance to develop a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile.

Aerospace expert John Schilling told Reuters the test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile.

It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile that might enable them to reliably strike the U.S. base at Guam, Schilling said, but more important, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned Sunday that the international community will continue to tighten the screws around the North Korean regime. She told ABCs This Week that Kim is in a state of paranoia.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials are looking at taking precautions. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, is planning to introduce a measure this week to add another 28 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California and authorize additional missile-defense testing, Fox News is told.

Fox News John Roberts, Lucas Tomlinson and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report.
When Democrats launched into a spontaneous chorus of "Na na na na, hey hey, goodbye" on the House floor after the passage of the American Health Care Act last month, it may have marked a modern-day low mark in open hostility on the House floor.

It and numerous other cultural barometers  from cable news contributors losing their cool, to contentious town halls, to street fights  are signaling tectonic rumblings in America's political health.

In 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton settled their bitter political feud with a pistol duel that took Hamiltons life, but Article Five of the Constitution offers a more civilized resolution  a Convention of the States.

STATES' RIGHTS ADVOCATES EYE CONVENTION TO BYPASS CONGRESS, AMEND CONSTITUTION

It is an option not exercised since before the signing of the Constitution. But it's gaining new strength and new adherents.

"It is the only process that is available to address what Washington is doing. Washington is not going to fix itself," said radio talk show host and author, Mark Levin.

In his book, The Liberty Amendments, Levin dissects the remedy of a Convention of the States. With 9 million listeners a day on radio and a devoted following that shows up by the thousands for his book signings, Levin has helped increase its popularity, and lent grass-roots energy to the Convention of States Project. It claims 2.8 million volunteers, and is expected to grow to 10 million by the end of this year, with district directors in every congressional district.

While 12 state legislatures, most recently Missouri, have already supported a convention of the states, that number is far short of the 34 states the Constitution requires before a convention can be called.

GEORGIA GOVERNOR APPROVES CARRYING CONCEALED GUNS ON CAMPUS

"If people who believe in liberty get behind this, I think we'll get our 34 states," says Levin. "If we get 15, 18, 20, 22 states, I think Washington is going to begin to shake. And Washington is going to understand that this process in the Constitution, it actually bypasses Washington, bypasses federal government." he says.

With Republicans in full control of 32 state houses, supporters believe a convention is within reach. They say its agenda would form around a set of core principles. Among them:

*requiring a balanced budget

*reducing the federal regulatory burden on the states

*restoring state sovereignty by eliminating federal mandates and grants

*and allowing a two-thirds majority of the states to override Supreme Court decisions, federal laws and regulations.

"I said on the Senate floor in 2006, theres a rumble in our country. You just saw part of that rumble in the last election," says former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, R-OK, a supporter of a Convention of the States, whose book on the subject is set to be released soon. "The Founders added this to the Constitution because they recognized that never in history has a central government ceded power back to its people. So this is a safety check."

Coburn bluntly told a Congressional panel last year after his retirement: "America doesnt trust you anymore. Thats the truth."

He told Fox News this week that Congress's inability to balance its checkbook is his single greatest concern.

"We have $144 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities. For every taxpayer that is a million bucks," he said. "But for the millennials, it's $1.7 million each that they're going to have to come up with over the next 50 years."

Opponents fear that given the lack of overseeing authority, and the dearth of specificity in Article 5 about how such a convention would be governed, could lend itself to abuse by special interests, and the potential evisceration of hard-won legislative and court victories.

"Any Constitutional right could be up for grabs from freedom of speech, the 2nd amendment, the right to privacy to overturning Supreme Court cases around marriage equality and healthcare and abortion," Jay Riestenberg of Common Cause told Fox News.

They also fear a convention would be tilted heavily toward a conservative agenda, given how Congressional and state legislative districts have been carved in red states to heavily favor GOP incumbency.

But the Founders provided yet another safeguard against such overreach. They required 3/4's of the states, or 38, to ratify any Constitutional amendment passed in a convention of the states.
North Carolina's tough voter identification law was dealt what could be a fatal blow on Monday, as the Supreme Court rejected an appeal to reinstate the policy.

Advocates of the law said it was meant to preserve the integrity of elections and counter voter fraud. But critics said it unfairly singled out black voters.

The justices on Monday left in place a lower court ruling citing such alleged discrimination. That ruling struck down the law's photo ID requirement and reduction in early voting.

The decision comes just days after President Trump ordered a a review of voter fraud allegations.

In the North Carolina case, the situation was complicated when Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein tried to withdraw the appeal, which was first filed when Republican Pat McCrory was governor.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the political situation created uncertainty over who is authorized to seek review of the lower court ruling.

The dispute is similar to the court fight over Texas' voter ID law, also struck down as racially discriminatory.

Republicans in both states moved to enact new voting measures after the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a provision of the federal Voting Rights Act that had required them to get advance approval before changing laws dealing with elections.

Voters, civil rights groups and the Obama administration quickly filed lawsuits challenging the new laws. The Trump administration already has dropped its objections to the Texas law.

Shortly before Trump took office in January, the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reject the North Carolina appeal.

When the law passed, North Carolina Republicans said voter ID is a sound requirement to increase the integrity of elections. But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the state provided no evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud the ID mandate would address. The Richmond, Virginia-based court said the law was enacted with intentional bias against black voters. The law was amended in 2015 to include a method for people unable to get a photo ID to still vote.

Following the appellate ruling, the state asked the high court to allow the challenged provisions to remain in effect in November's election. The justices rejected the request by virtue of a 4-4 tie on most of the challenged provisions, with the four more conservative justices supporting the state's bid.

Roberts cautioned Monday that the rejection of the appeal is not a comment on the court's view about the substance of the law.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
  , 14    :     40     ; 3      
The Syrian regime is using a site outside Damascus to cremate the bodies of thousands of prisoners it has abducted, jailed and murdered during the countrys long-running civil war, the U.S. State Department alleged Monday.

Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones showed surveillance photos that -- combined with intelligence assessments and other reports -- officials believe show Bashar Assads government is complicit in covering up evidence of mass killings at the Sednaya Prison. Located near Damascus, the prison previously has been called a "human slaughterhouse" by Amnesty International.

Although the regime's many atrocities are well-documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison, Jones said Monday.

REPORT ACCUSES SYRIAN REGIME OF CARRYING OUT MASS HANGINGS

Jones also charged that the atrocities were carried out with unconditional support from Russia and Iran.

The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it said is a building in the prison complex that has been modified to support the crematorium. The photographs taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not definitely prove the building is a crematorium, but they show construction consistent with such use.

The U.S. conclusion is based in part on photos that show snow melting near the building believed to be the crematorium. But, when pressed, the State Department wouldnt say for certain that the melting was caused by a crematorium.

The conditions at Sednaya  known to hold many of Assads political opponents, as well as violent Syrian rebels  are thought to be horrific, with 70 prisoners kept in cells designed for five people and up to 50 executions per day.

Amnesty International has previously called Sednaya a human slaughterhouse, estimating 13,000 people were killed there from 2011-2015. It is believed Assad's regime kidnapped more than 100,000 people during that time.

In presenting the photographs, Jones said Syrian President Assad's government "has sunk to a new level of depravity" with the support of Russia and Iran and called on both countries to use its influence with Syria to establish a credible ceasefire and begin political talks.

Fox News Rich Edson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Virginia could play host to a de facto referendum on President Trump in November, when it holds one of just two gubernatorial races this year  but before that, an upcoming June primary will give a glimpse into what kind of candidate each party intends to bring to the fight.

Going into the June 13 vote, a classic establishment vs. anti-establishment battle is being waged in both parties, complete with a Trump-style candidate on the GOP side and a Bernie Sanders-style contender on the other.

On the Democratic side, things got ugly last week in Richmond when Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, backed by most state Democratic officials, debated former U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello, the candidate boasting endorsements from Sens. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and some Obama administration alumni.

Northam said Virginia is a fiscally responsible state, and talked about bringing together both sides. Perriello invoked emotional anecdotes about single mothers and attacked his opponent for supporting trickle-down economics and for voting for George W. Bush twice. Northam fired back that Perriello was a former self-described libertarian.

Yet for all the barbs, both support policies like hiking the minimum wage to $15 per hour, subsidizing green energy, and supporting free pre-school and college.

It hasnt been tame on the Republican side, either.

After frontrunner Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, released a plan last week to cut $200 million in state spending, his opponent Corey Stewart blasted him for being a career lobbyist who wants to reinvent himself as a conservative.

Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, made a name for himself a decade ago tackling illegal immigration. He was an early Trump supporter and chairman of Trumps Virginia campaign before he was fired for participating in a protest at the RNC headquarters, claiming the RNC provided insufficient support for the nominee.

A third GOP candidate is state Sen. Frank Wagner, who is campaigning as an experienced problem solver.

A Quinnipiac University poll in April found Perriello had 25 percent of Democratic support to Northams 20 percent, but a majority of Democrats are still undecided. The same poll found Gillespiewho narrowly lost a 2014 Senate race to unseat Mark Warnerwith a double-digit lead over both Stewart and Wagner.

In a worrisome note for Republicans, the Quinnipiac poll found either Perriello or Northam beating Gillespie by more than 10 points.

Primaries are difficult to poll, noted Geoff Skelley, political analyst with the University of Virginias Center for Politics. But Republicans likely prefer to run against Perriello, for a race they could characterize as a moderate Republican vs. a Bernie Sanders Democrat.

If it is Gillespie vs. Perriello, there is a chance that a lot of main street business people that might well have voted for Northam would be inclined to vote for Gillespie, Skelley told Fox News.

Former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, as well as Obama administration heavyweights like David Plouffe and Dan Pfeiffer, support Perriello, who was elected to Congress in 2008 but lost in the 2010 Republican wave. After that, Obama named him to a State Department job. Meanwhile, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and Sens. Warner and Tim Kaine and virtually every elected Democrat in the state are backing Northam for the nomination.

So, in some ways, the contest is more about national Democrats vs. state Democrats, Skelley said.

Northam and Perriello really have more stylistic differences, just different shades of blue, Skelley said.

It wont be easy for Republicans in the fall, given Trumps troubles at the national level.

The national Democratic Party will throw everything into this race since it will probably be the only competitive governors race and try to tie Trump around Gillespies neck, said Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University.

The other 2017 governors race is in New Jersey, but Kidd said he doesnt anticipate a very competitive race there.

Gillespie will earn every vote he gets and the people who work for Gillespie will earn every cent they make, Kidd said.

Stewart has gone all-in with Trump, opposing political correctness by advocating for the Confederate flag and preservation of Confederate monuments.

Gillespie avoids mentioning Trump or his opponents, talking about the states anemic economic growth and touting a 10 percent across-the-board tax cut.

In an interview with Fox 5 in Washington, when asked about Trump, Gillespie answered, We need to be less reliant on federal policies and federal programs and spending and for me the way that were going to do that is to foster more start-ups and scale-ups in Virginia.
President Trump is weighing a huge reboot in his White House staff after becoming disappointed with several aides, according to a report on Sunday.

The shake-up could include White House press secretary Sean Spicer, top strategist Steve Bannon and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Axios reported.

Hes frustrated, and angry at everyone, Axios quoted an unidentified confidant in the White House. The advice hes getting is to go big  that he has nothing to lose. The question now is how big and how bold. Im not sure he knows the answer to that yet.

Trump has complained about some Cabinet members touting their own accomplishments and or not praising him enough, the website reported, citing sources.

Hes frustrated and angry at everyone, one of the sources said.

Click for more from the New York Post.
President Trump reportedly ordered an emergency meeting over the weekend after an unprecedented cyberattack hit at least 100,000 organizations in 150 countries.

Senior security staffers with Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Security Agency met on Friday and Saturday in the White House to assess the threat from the ransomware attack, Reuters reported.

Trump ordered Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert to hold the meeting, CBS News reported. Details of the meeting were not immediately disclosed.

The attack that began Friday is believed to be the biggest online extortion attack ever recorded, spreading chaos by locking computers that run Britains hospital network, Germanys national railway and scores of other companies, factories and government agencies worldwide.

Steven Wilson, Head of Europols European Cybercrime Centre, told Sky News on Sunday that it was now important that IT departments checked their systems on Monday morning to ensure they had not been compromised.

Security experts warned that further cyberattacks are likely.

The global reach is unprecedented and beyond what we have seen before," Rob Wainwright, director of the Netherlands-based Europol said Sunday "The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations.

At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up," he added. "I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn on their machines on Monday morning."

The Europol spokesman said it was too early to say who is behind the onslaught and what their motivation was. The main challenge for investigators was the fast-spreading capabilities of the malware, he said, adding that so far not many people have paid the ransoms that the virus demands.

Had it not been for a young cybersecurity researcher's accidental discovery of a so-called "kill switch," the malicious software likely would have spread much farther and faster. Security experts say this attack should wake up every corporate board room and legislative chamber around the globe.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Trump may be the only one who truly knows if he has tapes of his conversations with former FBI Director James Comey  but if he does, it's more of a congressional problem than a legal one.

The president raised the possibility of secret tapes in a tweet Friday. Amid a slew of media leaks about Comey's controversial firing, Trump warned that Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

Asked Friday if the tweet meant Trump indeed had taped discussions between himself and the ex-top cop, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer demurred: The president has nothing further to add on that.

But if Trump did in fact surreptitiously record his talks with Comey, the act wouldnt violate Washington, D.C., law or federal law. Both permit one-party consent recording, that is, recordings made when only one party to the conversation okays it  which in this hypothetical case would be Trump.

About a century of legal precedent codifying the informant doctrine also buttresses Trumps case.

TRUMP WARNS COMEY ON LEAKS

The idea is that, even inside your own home, when you divulge information to other individuals, you lose privacy, Georgetown Law Professor Laura Donohue told Fox News. And its not a violation of your privacy. So that information, for instance, could be used in court.

But the president is on far shakier ground when it comes to the probable probing of lawmakers  even those from his own party  who appear eager to subpoena such tapes should they exist.

If, in fact, there are such recordings, I think those recordings will be subpoenaed and I think they will probably have to turn them over, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said on Fox News Sunday.

Lee added: You know, we know that there have been instances in the past in which other presidents have made recordings of conversations that have taken place at the White House. And as was made clear earlier in the show, it doesn't always turn out well. It's not necessarily the best idea.

The Trump tapes-gate has  to the dismay of Republicans  harkened back to a scandal involving another president to whom Trump is often compared by his detractors: Richard Nixon.

Nixon secretly taped thousands of hours of phone calls and conversations, a portion of which were subpoenaed during the Watergate hearings and helped to sink Nixons presidency by, in the opinion of the special prosecutor, showing Nixon conspired to obstruct justice. Nixon was not the first  or last president  to employ taping, but it appears he was the most extensive practitioner, and, indeed, his recordings have had the most historical impact.

Also important is that Trump quoted the word tapes in his tweet. The president and his staff have argued on multiple occasions that the use of quotes can signal a different meaning of the quoted word than its literal connotation.

For instance, after Trump sparked a fire storm by claiming former President Barack Obama had his wires tapped, Spicer explained: The President used the word 'wiretaps' in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities.
The legal hold on President Trumps so-called travel ban seems unlikely to be lifted anytime soon, based on the tenor of oral arguments before a federal appellate court in Seattle on Monday.

The Trump administrations top courtroom lawyer faced a trio of judges who expressed varying degrees of skepticism about the presidential decree that critics argue violates the Constitutions religious protections.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall was repeatedly asked to explain how controversial statements made by Trump and administration officials can allow a reasonable observer to conclude the purpose of the executive order was something other than prejudice against Muslims.

"How is a court to know if [the executive order] is a Muslim ban in the guise of national security justification?" Judge Ronald Gould asked.

Soon after, Judge Michael Hawkins asked if Trump had ever disavowed controversial campaign rhetoric likening the policy to a ban on Muslims from entering the country.

"Has he ever stood up and said, 'I said before I wanted to ban all members of the Islamic faith from entering the United States of America. I was wrong. I've consulted with lawyers. I'm now addressing it simply to security needs.' Has he ever said anything approaching that?" Hawkins asked.

Yes, Judge Hawkins, he has said several things approaching that," Wall replied. "I think thats detailed in various amicus briefs.

Plaintiffs' lawyer Neal Katyal attacked that response. "I thought his answer was surprising because he couldnt actually point to any disavowal. He just cited en masse amicus briefs because the truth is there is no such statement, he said.

Judge Richard Paez called the president's pre-inaugurations comments "profound" though necessary to view through the perspective of heated campaign rhetoric.

Katyal conceded the point about campaign hyperbole, and then drew attention to comments Trump made since taking office.

The presidents order, revised from its original text, would suspend travel and immigration from six mostly Muslim countries.

In March, a federal judge in Hawaii enjoined the order from taking effect, not based on the language of the directive, but rather the religious animus of comments Trump and his advocates made about the policy.

Wall, however, argues the presidents policy is not a Muslim ban, but rather Trumps good faith effort to protect rights while securing the homeland from foreign terrorists.

The order would temporarily halt refugees from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the country. It also freezes refugee admissions so intelligence and security officials can review existing admission procedures.

Mondays hearing marked the second time the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has heard a government appeal on the matter. Earlier this year, a different panel of judges affirmed a lower court injunction against the presidents initial travel ban order, which he revoked in issuing his second version.

Several weeks ago Trump blasted the 9th Circuit, saying his opponents are judge shopping in the court that covers the western United States.

The three judges hearing Mondays case were randomly chosen from the circuits members--all three were appointed by former President Bill Clinton. While some other 9th Circuit judges have said the presidents order is on sound legal ground, they were not impaneled on either case.

Last week in Richmond, Virginia, another federal appellate court heard similar arguments over the presidents order. Either case  or both  could end up before the Supreme Court.
The latest legal showdown over President Trumps revised executive order targeting refugees and nationals from six predominately Muslim countries hits a Seattle appellate courtroom Monday morning.

The key issue before a three-judge panel is whether the presidents comments before he took office  suggesting he would ban Muslims from entering the country -- provides sufficient legal grounds to rule his order unconstitutional.

In March, a federal judge in Hawaii enjoined the order from taking effect, not based on the language of the directive, but rather the religious animus of comments Trump and his advocates made about the policy.

The [lower] courts reliance on such statements in the face of a religion-neutral order is fundamentally wrong, acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall wrote to the court defending the order.

Wall argues the presidents policy is not a Muslim ban, but rather Mr. Trumps good faith effort to protect rights while securing the homeland from foreign terrorists. And that the presidents executive authority in protecting the country and enforcing immigration laws in this matter is beyond judicial review.

The order would temporarily halt refugees from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the country. It also freezes refugee admissions so intelligence and security officials can review existing admission procedures.

This will be the second time the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has heard a government appeal on this matter. Earlier this year a different panel of judges affirmed a lower court injunction against the presidents similar first travel ban order, which he revoked in issuing his second version.

Several weeks ago Trump blasted the Ninth Circuit saying his opponents are judge shopping in the court that covers the western United States.

The three judges hearing Mondays case were randomly chosen from the Ninth Circuits members--all three were appointed by President Clinton. While some other Ninth Circuit judges have said the presidents order is on sound legal ground  they were not impaneled on either case.

The president seeks to enact a thinly veiled Muslim ban, shorn of procedural protections and premised on the belief that those who practice Islam are a danger to our country, says plaintiffs lawyer Neal Katyal who represents the state of Hawaii and an Imam who lives in the islands.

They argue the travel ban is unconstitutional because it disfavors Muslims. The ban also, allegedly, harms Hawaiis economy and university community by cutting off potential tourists and student applicants from overseas. The order is the embodiment of a policy of religious animus, Katyal argues. The governments only real response is to ask the court to close its eyes to abundant evidence of discrimination.

Both sides will get 30 minutes to present their arguments. A live camera feed will also originate from inside the courtroom.

Last week in Richmond, Virginia, another federal appellate court heard similar arguments over the presidents order. Either case  or both  could end up before the Supreme Court.
The rotting corpse of a 50-foot-long dead sea creature washed up on a beach in Indonesia last week  while locals took photographs with their smartphones that went around the world of the unidentifiable corpse, according to The Washington Post.

George Leonard, the chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, told The Huffington Post that the corpse probably was a baleen whale  based on its skeleton and the presence of baleen, a

filter-feeder mouth system.

Decomposition gases bloated the whale, and some of the noxious gases were seeping out. Seram, the largest island in the Maluku Island group, is near the migration routes for baleen whales. Locals have asked the government to help remove the carcass, The Huffington Post reported.

Dead whales usually sink to the bottom of the ocean  providing food for years for the creatures that live at sea depths, according to Live Science. The publication theorized the whale had a bacterial infection that produced more gases or that it possibly died in warm waters, allowing bacteria to accumulate and gases to expand its body. It also could have died an unnatural death after being clipped by a ship.
An unprecedented global ransomware attack that hit at least 100,000 organizations in 150 countries spread to thousands more computers Monday as people returned to work and logged in for the first time since the massive online assault began.

The attack that began Friday is believed to be the biggest online extortion attack ever recorded, spreading chaos by locking computers that run Britains hospital network, Germanys national railway and scores of other companies, factories and government agencies worldwide.

A BBC analysis determined about $38,000 had already been paid to those behind the attacks, however, that figure could climb exponentially as users log on Monday and those already infected give in to rising demands.

Steven Wilson, Head of Europols European Cybercrime Centre, told Sky News that it was now important that IT departments checked their systems on Monday morning to ensure they had not been compromised.

He added: Its not a massively sophisticated attack. What is new is the use of a worm to propagate through systems.

It is beyond anything we have seen before.

NATIONS BATTLE CYBERATTACK DAMAGES; UK FOCUSES ON HOSPITALS

Wilson spoke as hospitals in the United Kingdom were beginning to get back to normal, although some were still experiencing problems after the global attack which hit 48 National Health Service trusts in England and 13 Scottish health boards, according to Sky News.

President Donald Trump ordered his homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, to hold an emergency meeting Friday night to assess the threat posed by the cyberattack, senior administration official told Reuters.

Senior security staff held another meeting in the White House Situation Room on Saturday, and the FBI and National Security Agency were trying to identify the perpetrators of the massive cyber attack, said the official, who spoke on condition on anonymity to the news agency to discuss internal deliberations.

Security experts warned that further cyberattacks are likely.

RANSOMWARE: WHAT IS IT?

The global reach is unprecedented and beyond what we have seen before," Rob Wainwright, director of the Netherlands-based Europol said Sunday "The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations.

At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up," he added. "I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn on their machines on Monday morning."

Jan Op Gen Oorth, spokesman for Europol, said the number of individuals who have fallen victim to the cyberextortion attack could be much higher.

Wainwright said the attack was indiscriminate, fast-spreading and unique, because the ransomware was being used in combination with a worm, which means the infection of one computer automatically could spread it through a whole network.

22-YEAR-OLD CYBERSECURITY RESEARCHER HELPED THWART UNPRECEDENTED CYBERATTACK

The Europol spokesman said it was too early to say who is behind the onslaught and what their motivation was. The main challenge for investigators was the fast-spreading capabilities of the malware, he said, adding that so far not many people have paid the ransoms that the virus demands.

The effects were felt across the globe, with Russia's Interior Ministry and companies including Spain's Telefonica, FedEx Corp. in the U.S. and French carmaker Renault all reporting disruptions.

Had it not been for a young cybersecurity researcher's accidental discovery of a so-called "kill switch," the malicious software likely would have spread much farther and faster. Security experts say this attack should wake up every corporate board room and legislative chamber around the globe.

Nonetheless, the experts say such widespread attacks are

tough to pull off.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more from SkyNews.
A massive worldwide cyberattack over the weekend crippled government and infrastructure in more than 150 countries  including Britains hospital system and Germanys railways  in what is expected to be the largest online extortion attack ever recorded.

Rob Wainright, director of the Netherlands-based Europol, called the global reach of the attack unprecedented and beyond what we have seen before.

At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up, Wainright said. I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn on their machines on Monday morning.

Hundreds of thousands of computers were infected by the ransomware cyberattack  in which hackers extorted users for currency to unencrypt their data  in more than 150 countries, according to the BBC.

While this weekends attack could be the largest to date, cyber crime has been on the rise in recent years, according to a 2016 report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, a global professional services organization that deals in cybersecurity and privacy, among other issues.

PwCs study found that the number of cyber security incidents across all industries increased by 38 percent in 2015  the biggest increase in 12 years.

MORE VICTIMS EXPECTED MONDAY IN MASSIVE 'WANNACRY' CYBERATTACK

Cyber criminals are becoming more industrialized and more organized, Derk Fischer, a partner with PwC in Germany who deals in the delivery of cyber security assessment and consulting services, said in a statement. What were seeing is the emergence of a new kind of industry sector that thrives on the complex connectivity that characterizes the Internet.

And a 2016 report from Verizon and security company McAfee found that cyberattacks involving ransomware increased 50 percent. Among those targeted by ransomware attacks, government organizations are the most frequent, the report found, followed by health care businesses and financial services.

Elections

A 2016 White House audit found that the U.S. government was hit with more than 77,000 cyber incidents in the fiscal year 2015  a 10 percent increase from the previous year.

And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said last year that the number of cyberattacks targeting industrial control systems for automated industrial machines is on the rise, Business Insider reported.

But it was the hacking of the Democratic National Committees emails that is perhaps now one of the most infamous and disputed cyberattacks in recent U.S. history. U.S. intelligence officials have accused the Russian government as the catalyst behind the hackers in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election.

There shouldnt be any doubt in anybodys mind. This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, said at a postelection conference, according to The New York Times. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.

WHAT IS WANNACRY RANSOMWARE

Russian officials have denied involvement.

While one type of cyberattack isn't necessarily more dangerous than another, what seperates the DNC hack from WannaCry ransomware attack over the weekend is the scale of the more recent hack, renowned cybersecurity expert and George Washington University professor Dr. Diana Burley told Fox News.

"The attack on the DNC was specifically to get information," Burley said. "This particular attack, at least what we've seen so far, is not related to stealing information per se, but rather gaining control over people's systems so that they could then ransom back access to them."

"It's all dangerous  whether we're talking about stealing information or locking people out of systems and computers. It's all a problem," she continued.

Cybersecurity experts also linked Russia to the hack into the campaign of French President Emmanuel Macron. Just as the midnight deadline that halts campaigning in the French election passed, tens of thousands of internal documents and emails from Macrons campaign were released, including some from personal Gmail accounts, according to The Guardian.

Experts believe the hackers behind the cyber breach are linked to those behind the DNC leaks, the Guardian reported.

Blackouts

Russia, too, was blamed for darkening the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in December 2016  though through a different type of cyberattack.

Power supplier Ukrenergo said at the time that an analysis indicated a premeditated and multi-level invasion, according to Reuters.

Marina Krotofil, a lead cybersecurity researcher who assisted in the investigation into the power outage, said the incident was intentional but not meant to be on a large scale.

WHAT IS RANSOMWARE?

They actually attacked more but couldnt achieve all their goals, Krotofil said.

The 2016 blackout that lasted for more than an hour was harkened to another attack in 2015 that left 225,000 people in the dark in western Ukraine. Then, in what Reuters called the first-of-its-kind cyberattack, hackers were also able to damage power distribution equipment which complicated power restoration efforts.

That attack was widely blamed on Russia by Ukrainian security services.

Ukranian President Petro Poroshenko also blamed the 2016 outage on Russia and alleged that the neighboring country was waging a cyber-war, the BBC reported. Aside from the blackout, Poroshenko alleged hackers had targeted state institutions about 6,500 times at the end of 2016.

Acts of terrorism and sabotage on critical infrastructure facilities remain possibly today, he said.

GLOBAL RANSOMWARE ATTACK HITS 'LIMITED NUMBER' OF US COMPANIES, DHS SAYS

However, in the global WannaCry attack over the weekend, Russia was one of the countries that fell victim. Kaspersky Lab, a Russian antivirus company, reported that Russia was the hardest hit in the first wave of attacks as it infected more computers there than anywhere else, according to The New York Times.

Infrastructure

For nearly a decade, a hacking group in Shanghai reportedly breached more than 100 U.S. companies and stole valuable data, according to a 2013 report.

The hacking  which was billed as one of the largest hacks at the time  was conducted by a group called the Comment Crew and ATP1 linked to the Chinas Peoples Liberation Army who stole data from 2006 to 2014, Wired reported.

Comment Crew focused on companies that are instrumental to American infrastructure, including information regarding the U.S. power grid, gas lines and waterworks, the New York Times reported, citing a detailed study of the hacking group by Mandiant, a U.S.-based computer security firm that directly implicated China in the cyber breach.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM RANSOMWARE

According to Wired, the hackers used tried-and true methods to obtain access to victims information, including spear phishing emails and custom digital weapons.

They employ good English  with acceptable slang  in their socially engineered emails, Mandiant said in the report. They have evolved their digital weapons for more than seven years, resulting in continual upgrades as part of their own software release cycle. Their ability to adapt to their environment and spread across systems makes them effective in enterprise environments with trust relationships.

Chinese officials denied involvement in hacking, the New York Times reported.
Department of Homeland Security officials told Fox News on Monday that a "limited number" of U.S. companies were hit by the "WannaCry" malicious software over the weekend.

"We're talking about a small number of companies," a senior DHS official said. "But the companies affected do represent many different sectors" of the U.S. economy.

CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) worked with the affected U.S. companies and their European partners over the weekend to get a patch to parties affected by the ransomware infection.

The officials would not name the companies involved, but stressed that the money paid out worldwide so far since the attacks surfaced on Friday is a relatively small number.

Reports suggest the total ransom paid out is less than $50,000.

WHAT IS WANNACRY RANSOMWARE?

The ransomware attack has hit at least 100,000 organizations in 150 countries, spreading to thousands more computers Monday as people returned to work and logged in for the first time since the massive online assault began.

The attack is believed to be the biggest online extortion attack ever recorded, spreading chaos by locking computers that run Britains hospital network, Germanys national railway and scores of other companies, factories and government agencies worldwide.

Steven Wilson, Head of Europols European Cybercrime Center, told Sky News that it was now important that IT departments checked their systems on Monday morning to ensure they had not been compromised.

He added: Its not a massively sophisticated attack. What is new is the use of a worm to propagate through systems.

It is beyond anything we have seen before.

RANSOMWARE: HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF

Wilson spoke as hospitals in the United Kingdom were beginning to get back to normal, although some were still experiencing problems after the global attack which hit 48 National Health Service trusts in England and 13 Scottish health boards, according to Sky News.

President Donald Trump ordered his homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, to hold an emergency meeting Friday night to assess the threat posed by the cyberattack, senior administration official told Reuters.

Senior security staff held another meeting in the White House Situation Room on Saturday, and the FBI and National Security Agency were trying to identify the perpetrators of the massive cyber attack, said the official, who spoke on condition on anonymity to the news agency to discuss internal deliberations.

Security experts warned that further cyberattacks are likely.

RANSOMWARE: WHAT IS IT?

The global reach is unprecedented and beyond what we have seen before," Rob Wainwright, director of the Netherlands-based Europol said Sunday "The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries, and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations.

At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up," he added. "I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn on their machines on Monday morning."

Jan Op Gen Oorth, spokesman for Europol, said the number of individuals who have fallen victim to the cyberextortion attack could be much higher.

Wainwright said the attack was indiscriminate, fast-spreading and unique, because the ransomware was being used in combination with a worm, which means the infection of one computer automatically could spread it through a whole network.

22-YEAR-OLD CYBERSECURITY RESEARCHER HELPED THWART UNPRECEDENTED CYBERATTACK

The Europol spokesman said it was too early to say who is behind the onslaught and what their motivation was. The main challenge for investigators was the fast-spreading capabilities of the malware, he said, adding that so far not many people have paid the ransoms that the virus demands.

The effects were felt across the globe, with Russia's Interior Ministry and companies including Spain's Telefonica, FedEx Corp. in the U.S. and French carmaker Renault all reporting disruptions.

Had it not been for a young cybersecurity researcher's accidental discovery of a so-called "kill switch," the malicious software likely would have spread much farther and faster. Security experts say this attack should wake up every corporate board room and legislative chamber around the globe.

Nonetheless, the experts say such widespread attacks are

tough to pull off.

Fox News' Jake Gibson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more from SkyNews.
An American Airlines passenger has accused the carrier of racism after relocating her to the back of the plane  and allowing her traveling companion, a white woman, to remain in first-class.

But the legacy carrier tells Fox News that race had nothing to do with it, and chalked up the incident to agent error.

On May 2, Rane Baldwin and her friend, Janet Novack, were planning to fly first-class from Louisville, Ky., to Charlotte, N.C., after upgrading their tickets at an earlier date. However, upon arriving at the terminal, Baldwin says a ticketing agent scanned her boarding pass and handed her a ticket with a different seating assignment than she expected  one much further to the rear of the plane.

AA ACTS QUICKLY AFTER WORKER'S CONFRONTATION WITH MOTHER

According to Baldwin, who spoke with The Root, the agent initially made no mention of the switch. It was only after she spoke up, Baldwin alleges, that the agent explained the first-class section was smaller than anticipated, and there wasnt room for her up front.

After boarding the plane, Baldwin continued to push for answers from the flight attendants, but claims she was ignored.

When I went back to the front to ask what was happening, she [a flight attendant] said that the first-class cabin was full and that there was nothing she could do, said Baldwin.

Meanwhile, Novack, Baldwin's white flying companion, claimed on Twitter that she asked for the exact same information, but got more thorough answers from the flight attendants.

Eventually, the two friends settled into a row of empty seats near the front of the plane  though not in first-class  before takeoff.

KOREAN PASSENGER FILES DISCRIMINATION SUIT AGAINST AMERICAN AIRLINES

But according to Baldwin and Novack, the harassment didnt end there. A flight attendant soon came around to check their seatbelts, and told Novack that since there were so many open seats, she could spread out if she wanted more space.

He did not say this to anyone else, Baldwin said.

Following the incident, Baldwin and Novack aired their grievances with the airline individually  Baldwin in a formal complaint letter, and Novack on Twitter.

Ive never felt so unimportant my entire life, Baldwin told The Root. This flight was the most blatantly racist thing thats ever happened to me. It was baffling and hurtful that the crew seemed completely aware of what they were doing and just didnt care.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

A spokesman for American Airlines tells Fox News that the company has reached out to apologize. He also said the entire ordeal was due to an agent error, and that the airline is working with this person to prevent further incidents.

American Airlines further explained that the women were never charged for their upgrade in the first place, and were booked in first-class as a courtesy after their earlier flight had been canceled. The reason Baldwin was downgraded, according to the spokesperson, is simply because Novacks upgrade was processed into the computer first. Had it been the other way around, Baldwins seat would have remained in first-class.
Think cruising is just for grandparents who like to play shuffleboard in between endless buffet meals?

A new luxury river cruise line, U by Uniworld, is looking to attract younger passengers with amenities geared toward millennial travelers. And they're also imposing an age restriction.

To sail on a U cruise, you have to be between the ages of 21 to 45, which is younger than Uniworlds existing cruise passenger demographic, whose average age is 50, according to Conde Nast Traveler.

WHY LIVING ON A CRUISE SHIP IS CHEAPER THAN YOU THINK

U offers four eight-day voyages, including a Paris roundtrip on the Seine and an Eastern European trip from Regensburg to Budapest down the Danube, Main, and Rhine. In addition, during the winter holidays, it will add two five-day festive-themed trips, says Uniworld President and CEO Ellen Bettridge, who explains the shorter trips are aimed toward working professionals with limited time off.

In contrast to traditional cruises, U offers as many as five overnights in port compared with one on most Uniworld cruises, according to the CEO, which may appeal to those looking for a quick getaway.

Once in port, passengers have the option to explore on their own, partake in an included hands-on excursion, or for an additional cost, participate in a different experience called U Time, could include a wine-tasting at a 12th century monastery where Game of Thrones filmed.

Accomodations on board are also geared toward the younger set with three-person rooms with a bunk bed and single bed, or in one of the more affordable open-plan public spaces with hammocks (think of a hostel at sea), beanbags and sunbeds.

Onboard activities include yoga, cooking and cocktail making classes plus top-deck silent dance parties featuring DJs from the different ports-of-call.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

With two meals a day included in the ticket price, passengers can dine on a frequently changing menu designed to reflect each port, with an emphasis on local street food.

Ready to cruise with the younger set? Travelers can now book one of the first voyages, which set sail April 2018 with the launch of two new boats designed to feel like a boutique hotel.

Tickets for U cruises start at $1,699 per person.
Chelsea Manning will remain on active duty following her release from military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on May 17, the U.S. Army said Sunday.

Manning will be an unpaid soldier and will be eligible for health care and other benefits, USA Today reported. She will remain a private, Army spokesman Dave Foster told the paper.

Pvt. Manning is statutorily entitled to medical care while on excess leave in an active duty status, pending final appellate review, Foster said.

Manning was granted clemency in the final days of the Obama administration. She thanked former President Obama last Tuesday in her first statement since being granted clemency.

"For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea," she said in the statement. "I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world. Freedom used to be something that I dreamed of but never allowed myself to fully imagine."

CHELSEA MANNING RELEASES 1ST STATEMENT SINCE CLEMENCY WIN

Last year, Army officials told her she was eligible for sex reassignment surgery -- and the government would pay for it, attorney Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union told reporters.

Manning, a former intelligence analyst in Iraq, was convicted in 2013 of leaking more than 700,000 secret military and State Department documents and battlefield video to WikiLeaks. She served nearly seven years of her 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth. She was known as Bradley Manning before transitioning in prison.

Manning, a native of Crescent, Oklahoma, was convicted in a military court martial of 20 counts, including six Espionage Act violations, theft and computer fraud. Manning was acquitted of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy.

MACRON'S TEAM HIT BY HACK AS FRENCH ELECTION DREW TO A CLOSE

Manning acknowledged leaking the materials, saying she wanted to expose the U.S. military's disregard about the effects of war on civilians. She also said she released information that she didn't believe would harm the U.S.

Manning was arrested in 2010 and came out as transgender after being sentenced. She filed a transgender rights lawsuit and attempted suicide twice last year, according to her lawyers.

Her attorneys said Manning was subjected to violence in prison and argued the military mistreated her by requiring her to serve her sentence in an all-male prison, restricting her physical and mental health care, and not allowing her to wear a feminine-style haircut.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The GPS has increasingly become a drug dealers new partner in crime.

Drug-smuggling groups are relying on the device to keep tabs on drug packages as they wind their way through Central America to the United States, according to published reports.

The criminals attach the drug shipments to buoys, send them off in the Pacific Ocean, and use signals they give off to track a packages location by using special codes, InSight Crimes reports.

The GPS gives dealers the advantage of having drug shipments picked up by others monitoring their movements without being detected by authorities.

GPS devices are also allowing drug cartels to keep track of lower-level smugglers to ensure they are doing what they were told, say U.S. officials.

Barbara L. Carreno, public affairs officer for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said drug dealers have been using the tracking device for years. But recently, as the once bulky devices have become smaller and cheaper, their use has increased, she said.

Traffickers need to know that their mules are doing what they are supposed to do and delivering their very valuable shipments where they are supposed to go, Carreno said. We often find GPS devices in shipments we seize.

Traffickers won't use a computerized system that would lead law enforcement back to them or create records that would implicate them.  Barbara L. Carreno, spokeswoman, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

The GPS is simple enough, the DEA says, that it actually eludes more sophisticated tools used for drug interdictions by government agencies of various countries.

Traffickers wouldnt use a computerized system that would lead law enforcement back to them or create records that would implicate them, Carreno said. They want something cheap, unsophisticated and untraceable.

Salvadoran officials say that Ecuadorean boatmen have become a core part of the criminal activity. They move the shipments to places off coasts of El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica.

Once the shipments are left at certain locations in the Pacific, traffickers use the GPS to alert those waiting for them by sending information to mobile telephones and computers, the website said, citing the Salvadoran national polices anti-narcotics division.

One of the most notorious drug kingpins, Ecuadors Washington Prado Alava, was said by Colombian authorities to have run a highly sophisticated trafficking operation. But his operation, which moved 250 metric tons of cocaine to the United States over a four-year span, was dependent on GPS locators, Insight Crime reported.

All told, routine technology such as GPS devices still manage to outrun national state-of-the-art gadgets and assume a key role in the trafficking of drugs from Latin America to the United States.

In one case, the U.S. Coast Guard came across a GPS tracking device that was hidden in a condom in a bale of cocaine, according to the Associated Press. InSight Crime said in some cases, a GPS tracker is affixed to the bottom of a boat and if that vessel is stopped by authorities, it sets loose the container with the drugs. Another boat later retrieves it.

Nearly three-quarters of the cocaine that ends up in the United States arrives through the Pacific Ocean. But U.S. manpower falls short of keeping up with the flow. At most, five Coast Guard vessels cover an area of about six million square miles from the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico to the eastern Pacific.

Last year, the amount of land devoted to coca cultivation in Colombia climbed 18 percent to an estimated 188,000 hectares (465,000 acres), according to a White House report. That is more coca production than at any time since the U.S. in 1999 began investing billions in an anti-narcotics strategy known as Plan Colombia.

Such dynamics help explain why, despite the Coast Guards technological superiority, four drug-running boats are thought to get through for every one caught.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A 78-year-old fugitive who escaped into a vast New York forest after allegedly murdering his daughter-in-law nearly five years ago is believed to be alive and living under an alias, police sources told Fox News.

Eugene Palmer, of Stony Point, N.Y., is wanted in the Sept. 24, 2012, shooting death of his daughter-in-law, Tammy Palmer, in what authorities described as a "cold-blooded" and "premeditated" murder.

While Palmer's sons claim their father -- a severe diabetic -- died in the woods of Harriman State Park, which is in southeast New York State, authorities said they suspect he is living in another state based on a fresh tip.

"We have recently received new information that has led our investigation out of state," Detective Sgt. George Lutz of the Haverstraw Police Department told Fox News on Monday.

"With the assistance of federal and local authorities we are investigating this new information," Lutz said.

"We have no evidence whatsoever that would lead us to believe that Eugene Palmer is not alive," he said, noting, "I can't imagine him using his real name."

On an early September morning, Palmer waited for his 39-year-old daughter-in-law to place her two children on a school bus before shooting her three times with a bolt action shotgun as she walked up the driveway toward her home, police said.

Palmer, a retired part-time park ranger, then fled into Harriman State Park -- a 46,000-acre stretch of woodland filled with caves, root cellars and abandoned mine shafts that bordered the man's home, according to police.

Lutz said Palmer drove to his niece's home shortly after the alleged killing and confessed to the crime. He also left money with his sister to pay his taxes and told the woman to give him an hour before contacting authorities, according to Lutz.

Hours after the shooting, police found Palmer's abandoned pickup truck on an old fire road about a quarter mile into the park. An extensive manhunt ensued, using air and foot patrols as well as bloodhounds. A "hit" was detected by one of the dogs, leading police to a campsite within the park, but it remains unclear whether the scent belonged to Palmer.

The Haverstraw Police Department also requested assistance from state and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. They found no conclusive evidence of Palmer in the park, other than his truck parked deep into the woods. "He knows this park like the back of his hand," Lutz said of Palmer, known to locals as a so-called "Mountain Man," well-versed in the many trails and caves inside the park.

A law enforcement source previously told Fox News the U.S. Marshals service was assisting police in the investigation, which has taken authorities to areas across the country, including Florida and Arizona. A local news report claimed Palmer might be in Mexico, but the source said it's believed he's currently hiding out in another state.

Police say Palmer became increasingly enraged over "domestic issues" between Tammy and her estranged husband, Palmers son John. Tammy Palmer had reportedly filed an order of protection against her husband, meaning John could not step foot on the 3 1/2 acres of land where both Tammy and Eugene lived in homes close to each another.

Palmer's two sons, John and Clarence, could not be reached for interviews.

The family previously told the Journal News that Palmer acted out of character and snapped that morning, suggesting the alleged murder was not planned in advance. They told the newspaper Palmer fled the scene in his slippers, leaving his breakfast uneaten on his kitchen table.

"If the police didn't botch the hunt in the beginning, my father's remains would be where they belong," Clarence Palmer told the newspaper in 2013. "They were afraid of going into the woods; afraid of a man with a shotgun, supposedly. If he wanted to be found, he would have finished himself off here. He went into the woods. I think he fell into a diabetic coma."

Lutz and his team have always been dubious of such a claim.

"I don't know how you'd know what somebody was wearing unless you were actually looking at them," Lutz said. "He waited for his grandchildren to get on the bus before executing their mother. That's pretty cold-blooded."

Cristina Corbin is a Fox News reporter based in New York. Follow her on Twitter @CristinaCorbin.
A federal appellate panel has dismissed an Ohio man's bid to appeal his 30-year prison sentence for plotting to attack the U.S. Capitol.

The three Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled recently that 22-year-old Christopher Cornell had waived his broad appeal rights when he pleaded guilty last year to three charges including attempted murder of U.S. officials and employees in support of the Islamic State group.

Court documents state Cornell had reserved the right to appeal for ineffective counsel or prosecutorial misconduct, but then contended that U.S. District Judge Sandra Beckwith had created ambiguity in court about the scope of his appeal waiver. The panel found no evidence Cornell had misunderstood when he pleaded guilty.

He was arrested in January 2015 after buying guns and ammunition.
Authorities say a jail guard in South Carolina fired his gun at an escaping inmate who was trying to steal a car in a hospital parking lot.

Darlington County Sheriff's Lt. Robert Kilgo said the inmate was being taken back to the jail Saturday night from Carolina Pines Hospital in Hartsville when he ran.

Kilgo says no one was hit when the guard fired at the inmate as he tried to steal the car from a driver. The inmate was taken back into custody an hour later.

State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry said the guard is white and the inmate is black. Their names have not been released.

Authorities also haven't said why the inmate was at the hospital.
Boise police and Idaho officials have activated an Amber Alert for two children who were last seen in Eureka County, Nevada.

Madison Ann Dundon, 7, and Jaylynn Dawn Dundon, 6, are believed to have been abducted by their father, 29-year-old Joshua Dundon.

No information about a vehicle was provided.

According to Boise police, Joshua Dundon checked Madison and Jaylynn out of their elementary school on Wednesday, May 10. Joshua told witnesses he planned to take the girls camping near Arrow Rock Reservoir in Idaho, but the group failed to return, police said.

An investigation revealed the girls lives are in danger, according to Boise police.

IHOP SHOOTING: AIR FORCE VETERAN KILLED TRYING TO DEFEND WOMAN

Investigators found Dundons truck Thursday in a remote area of Eureka County, Nev., but the conditions of the truck caused a delay in positive identification.

On May 11, witnesses saw a male walk from the scene of the truck and observed as the male spoke to a female who was not visible but could be heard by the witnesses. The male walked away from the scene of the truck, a statement from Boise police said.

POLICE OFFICER ACCIDENTALLY OVERDOSES ON FENTANYL DURING TRAFFIC STOP

Boise police said the truck had been burned intentionally and several expired ammunition casings were found at the scene. Witnesses heard a gunshot at the time they approached the burning truck, police said.

Joshua Dundon has been known to use illicit drugs and make suicidal statements and threatening statements to himself, the statement said. Police said he has been identified to have firearms in his possession.

Click for more from Fox 13.
The Latest on the stabbing at Oregon grocery store by a man apparently carrying a human head (all times local):

6:30 p.m.

Police have confirmed that the severed head of a woman brought into an Oregon grocery store before a stabbing belonged to the mother of the suspect.

Sandy police said in a news release Monday evening that responding officers in the Mother's Day incident determined that the woman's head belonged to 59-year-old Tina Marie Webb, whose body was found at her home in Colton, Oregon.

Joshua Webb has been booked on charges of murder and attempted murder in Clackamas County, Oregon.

Authorities say he killed his mother then traveled to nearby Estacada, Oregon, and entered a Thriftway store carrying a human head.

Webb is then accused of stabbing a checkout clerk before being subdued and arrested.

Sandy police identified the man stabbed as 66-year-old Estacada resident Michael Wagner. He is expected to survive.

___ 4:15 p.m.

The father of a man suspected of killing his mother and then carrying a severed head into an Oregon grocery store and stabbing a checkout clerk says his son "seemed normal."

David Webb, the father of 36-year-old Joshua Lee Webb, said Monday that his son had vision problems and lived at home.

Joshua Webb has been booked on charges of murder and attempted murder in Clackamas County, Oregon.

Authorities say he killed his mother, 59-year-old Tina Marie Webb, then traveled to nearby Estacada, Oregon, and entered a Thriftway store carrying what appeared to be a human head.

Webb is then accused of stabbing a checkout clerk before being subdued and arrested.

___

2:45 p.m.

The man suspected of killing a woman and then carrying a severed head into an Oregon grocery store and stabbing a checkout clerk has been identified as 36-year-old Joshua Lee Webb.

The Clackamas County Sheriff's Office says the victim in the Mother's Day homicide was Webb's mother  59-year-old Tina Marie Webb. The two lived together at a home in Colton, Oregon.

Joshua Webb was booked into jail Monday on charges of murder and attempted murder.

___

12:55 p.m.

Police say a man suspected of stabbing an Oregon grocery employee while carrying what appeared to be a human head was in a "catatonic state" after he was subdued by other workers at the store.

Sandy Police Chief Ernie Roberts says the suspect had no physical injuries and was taken to a Portland hospital for an evaluation because he wasn't speaking.

Police have said the stabbing at the market is connected to the death of a woman found at a home in nearby Colton. Police have yet to say if the woman had been decapitated.

Roberts says the victim in the stabbing at the grocery store is expected to make a full recovery.

Roberts says the suspect told someone at the market before the stabbing that he was thirsty.

__

9 a.m.

Police say a man carrying what appeared to be a human head stabbed an employee at a grocery store in Oregon, and authorities later found a woman's body at a home.

The Clackamas County Sheriff's Office says the incidents east of Portland are connected.

Sgt. Nate Thompson says the stabbing suspect was arrested Sunday afternoon after he was subdued by other employees at the grocery store in Estacada.

The victim and the suspect were both taken to a hospital.

Soon after the attack, someone called 9-1-1 to report that a woman's body was found at a home in Colton, a short drive south of Estacada. Her name has not been released.

Police did not say whether the body was headless. An autopsy is scheduled for Monday.
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The Latest on the appeal of President Donald Trump's revised travel ban (all times local):

1:05 p.m.

At his daily briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to address questions on why President Donald Trump hasn't disavowed his revised travel ban targeting some Muslim nations.

A three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle on Monday heard arguments in a lawsuit filed over the ban by Hawaii. The judges are being asked to overturn an order blocking Trump's directive.

Spicer expressed confidence that the executive order will be upheld by the appeals court.

"The executive order is fully lawful and will be upheld. We fully believe that," Spicer said.

___

10:52 a.m.

Arguments have wrapped up in a federal appeals court in Seattle over President Donald Trump's travel ban.

The three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had tough questions for each side.

They asked an administration lawyer about what one judge called Trump's "profound" campaign statements calling for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

They asked a lawyer for the state of Hawaii challenging the ban about whether the national security rationale spelled out in the president's executive order neutralized any claim that the travel ban was motivated by discrimination.

The judges gave no indication of when they might rule.

___

10:26 a.m.

A federal appeals court judge is questioning a lawyer for Hawaii about past cases in which he argued that the president has broad authority over immigration matters.

Judge Michael Hawkins pointed to arguments that former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal made in previous cases.

Katyal said he stands by those arguments, but that doesn't mean the president's authority is unbounded.

The judges in Seattle are hearing arguments over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

___

10:12 a.m.

An attorney for the state of Hawaii says President Donald Trump has never repudiated his campaigns statements calling for a ban on Muslims from entering the U.S.

During arguments in Seattle, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Paez questioned attorney Neal Katyal about Trump's statements, calling them "profound."

But the judge wondered whether Trump is forever forbidden from adopting an executive order along the lines of his travel ban.

Katyal said no, and suggested the president could work with Congress on legitimate measures.

___

10:06 a.m.

A Trump administration lawyer says the president's travel ban is nothing like the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.

Judge Richard Paez questioned Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall on whether the case wasn't like one  now largely reviled  in which the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion of Japanese Americans.

Wall responded that Trump's order is nothing like that, and if it were, he wouldn't be defending it before the court.

The judges in Seattle are hearing arguments over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

___

10:01 a.m.

A lawyer for President Donald Trump says he has clarified campaign rhetoric in which he called for a ban on Muslims.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall told a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle that, in enacting his revised travel ban targeting mostly Muslim nations, that "over time, the president clarified that what he was talking about was Islamic terrorist groups and the countries that sponsor or shelter them."

The judges in Seattle are hearing arguments over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

___

9:49 a.m.

A federal appeals court is peppering a lawyer for President Donald Trump about whether his travel ban discriminates against Muslims.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall says the executive order halting travel from six majority Muslim nations doesn't say anything about religion, and neither the state of Hawaii nor an imam from that state who wants his mother-in-law to visit has standing to sue.

Judge Richard Paez asked Wall how Trump's order can be squared with a federal law banning discrimination based on nationality in immigration.

Arguments are underway in Seattle over whether to reinstate the travel ban.

The hearings are being broadcast live on C-SPAN and other cable news stations.

___

9:38 a.m.

Arguments are underway in Seattle over whether to reinstate President Donald Trump's travel ban.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall is telling a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that the president has broad authority over immigration.

Judge Ronald Gould says each side has been allotted 30 minutes but will be granted more if necessary, given the significance of the case.

___

8:45 a.m.

Advocates for refugees and immigrants are rallying outside a federal courthouse in Seattle where judges are scheduled to hear arguments over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's revised travel ban

Dozens of activists gathered Monday morning, some carrying "No Ban, No Wall" signs.

The protesters were on hand about an hour before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the case. The judges will decide whether to uphold a Hawaii judge's decision in March that blocked the ban.

Trump's new travel ban would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

___

8:20 a.m.

A courtroom at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle is starting to fill up in advance of arguments over President Donald Trump's travel ban while protests were expected outside the building.

Three judges appointed by former President Bill Clinton  Michael Hawkins, Ronald Gould and Richard Paez  are due to hear arguments over whether to uphold a Hawaii judge's decision to block the ban in March.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall will argue for the administration, while Neal Katyal, a former acting attorney general, will represent the state of Hawaii, which sued to block the ban.

___

1:09 a.m.

For the second time in a week, government lawyers will try to persuade a federal appeals court to reinstate President Donald Trump's revised travel ban  and once again, they can expect plenty of questions about whether the ban was designed to discriminate against Muslims.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled arguments Monday in Seattle over Hawaii's lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nation's refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judge's decision putting the ban on ice. They peppered Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall with questions about whether they could consider Trump's campaign statements calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
At least 30 people were hurt, two critically, after a charter bus filled with children overturned in Havre de Grace, Md., on Monday, emergency workers said.

Some 26 of the injured were eighth-graders on a field trip to Washington, D.C.; the others were chaperones and the driver. The bus was heading south on I-95 near exit 89 before it crashed, Fox 45 reported.

Paramedics flew the two critical patients, one child and one adult, to nearby hospitals, and transported the others via ambulance. Afterwards, crews collected the children's backpacks and other personal items to return to their families.

A car that tried to pass wound up clipping the bus, forcing it to overturn, police said.

Photos and aerial video from the scene showed the bus on its side, on top of a guardrail, with debris scattered across the road. Crews worked to pull passengers from the back door of the bus, WJZ added.

FIRE DESTROYS HOME IN AKRON, OHIO

Most of the injuries were cuts, bruises and scrapes, with some possible broken bones, medics said.

State troopers rushed to the scene joining fire and medical workers. In addition, Philadelphia police officers taking buses to Washington spotted the crash and stopped to help, Fox 45 added.

ATLANTA SEES FIRST RUSH HOUR SINCE I-85 OVERPASS REPAIRED

The crash forced crews to close southbound lanes while northbound traffic experienced significant delays.

Havre de Grace is about 40 miles northeast of Baltimore, along the Susquehanna River.

Click for more from Fox 45.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Police in Franklin will resume their search for a 20-year-old man reported missing after he failed to return home following a house party early Sunday morning.

Michael Doherty was last seen at a party on Phyllis Lane.

Police said they received a call from his parents around 1:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon, saying their son never returned home from the previous night. Investigators began a search and asked residents in the area to check their backyards, sheds and other detached buildings.

Doherty is described as a white male who is 5 feet 10 inches tall with brown hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing a blue T-shirt with a Nike symbol, black pants and sneakers.

Police said they found an article of clothing, possibly belonging to Doherty, near the marsh. A section of Oak Street was shut down Sunday as crews began to search the water around Mine Brook.

Doherty is a graduate of Xaverian High School and is now a student at Duke University. A college friend told Boston 25 News that the president of the fraternity Doherty is a member of will be heading to Franklin.

Read more from FOX 25 Boston.
A young father and Air Force veteran was the man shot and killed outside an IHOP restaurant Sunday morning. Police said he was murdered while breaking up a domestic violence incident.

Family confirmed that 27-year old Devin Wilson was killed.

Devin Wilson died while defending a woman who was a complete stranger. She was allegedly being choked and beaten by her ex-boyfriend.

Wilson stopped that attack, but he was shot by the ex-boyfriend.

EUGENE PALMER CASE: MURDER FUGITIVE HIDING UNDER ALIAS, POLICE SAY

The Air Force veteran died a hero.

"He had a big heart, and it was his big heart that unfortunately led him to his death bed," Katina Rounds, Devin's mother, said. "I wasn't surprised when they said just trying to help somebody. A woman being attacked."

Click for more from Fox 13.
A California sting operation helped recover most of the stolen hives that belonged to a Montana beekeeper.

Lloyd Cunniff of Choteau, Mont., reported 488 hives stolen in January, after he transported them to a property in Yuba City, Calif., for the almond population season.

Cunniff did not expect to see the hives again, but after communicating with the California beekeeping community, he suspected that Ukrainian-Russians may have been part of the theft, according to the Great Falls Tribune.

FIRST ENDANGERED BEE IN THE UNITED STATES NAMED

The Fresno County Agricultural Task Forces investigation into the theft picked up after they received a tip from a Missouri beekeeper.

An employee at a Ukrainian-Russian-operated bee farm noticed a hive that looked similar to a picture of a hive his friend in Missouri reported stolen. The employee contacted the Missouri beekeeper who went to California and provided law enforcement with pictures of the hives.

The tip led Fresno County authorities to find $170,000 worth of stolen hives in a rented bee nursery space, a cow pasture and hidden in a drainage along the freeway.

Fresno County Detective Anders Solis, a member of the countys agriculture crimes task force, said there were 10 victims in seven California counties in all. Two men have been arrested and charged with possession of stolen property. There may be more arrests as the investigation unfolds, Solis said.

1 MILLION BEES STOLEN IN AUSTRIA

Law enforcement suspects that Ukrainian-Russians are stealing bee hives to finance organized crime rings.

This has been going on for about three years, Solis said.

Cunniff received most of the equipment back last Sunday. The beekeeper said he is keeping the hives in a separate field as a precaution because they may be infected with disease or mites.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.


Manufacturing in New York state shrank for the first time in seven months in May, as new orders fell and shipments grew more slowly.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Monday that its Empire State manufacturing index dropped last month to minus 1, from 5.2 in April. Any reading below zero signals contraction.

The index measures sentiment in New York, but is followed by economists because it provides an early read on factory output nationwide. U.S. factories have been expanding since the fall, after an 18-month slump caused by low oil prices, which lowered demand for drilling equipment.

The figures suggest that factory activity could be leveling off, though economists weren't overly worried. Americans pulled back on their car purchases in April. And the dollar is still elevated against most other developed world currencies, compared with a year ago, which limits exports.

Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the index's decline was "disappointing, but not disastrous."

"The big picture in the industrial economy remains one of gradual recovery in the wake of the gentle upturn in capital spending in the oil sector," he said. Drillers have begun ordering more equipment to set up new rigs as oil prices have leveled off.

The new orders index tumbled to minus 4.4 from 7, while the shipments index declined to 10.6 from 13.7. A gauge of hiring slipped to 11.9, still a solid reading, from 13.9.

A broader measure of manufacturing nationwide showed that U.S. factories grew in April for the eighth straight month. The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing managers, said its manufacturing index declined to 54.8 from 57.2. But any reading above 50 points to growth. Factory production  which is one part of the index  actually accelerated.
A pleasant Mothers Day for one New York family was turned upside down after a mother died moments after pushing her daughter out of the way of an out-of-control vehicle.

Police on Long Island said that Diane Aluska, 55, was walking next to her daughter, Jenna, in Lindenhurst when the driver of a 2005 Toyota Corolla lost control of her car, according to the New York Daily News.

The 80-year-old driver, Ann Riolo, did not put her car in drive as the car jumped a curb at around 9:10 a.m., Suffolk County Detective Sgt. James Murphy told the newspaper. Murphy said Aluska saved her daughters life.

Her mom sees the car jump the curb, she actually grabs her by her shoulder and pushes her, Murphy said. She saved her life, without a doubt.

Police said Riolo struck the mother and daughter then crashed into the Lindenhurst Fire Department. Aluska died at a West Islip hospital, while Jenna and Riolo were treated for minor injuries, police said.

According to Newsday, Aluska was pinned under the car and that bystanders came by to lift the car off her.

Murphy said he does not anticipate charges for Riolo.

It appears to be non-criminal, just a terrible accident, he said
An Ohio police officer overdosed on fentanyl Friday after accidentally getting the deadly drug on his uniform during a traffic stop.

An East Liverpool Police Department document states the officers stopped a car they believed to be associated with drug activity. Officers found the suspects trying to destroy the drug evidence.

I approached from the passenger side of the vehicle in time to see [one of the suspects] using his foot to rub an unknown substance into the carpeting on the floor of the vehicle, the report states.

BOY SHOT AT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AFTER GUN FALLS FROM BACKPACK

East Liverpool Police Chief John Lane told Fox News that Officer Chris Green had arrived at the police station after the stop and everything seemed to be fine.

One of the other officers mentioned he had something on his shirt, and Green brushed it off with his hand, according to Lane.

Moments later, Green wasnt feeling well.

OREGON MAN APPARENTLY CARRIED SEVERED HEAD INTO STORE BEFORE STABBING

"Luckily one of the officersgrabbed him as he collapsed, Lane told Fox News.

Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic painkiller that is sometimes mixed with heroin in powder form. Experts warn it could kill.

Officials initially thought the powder from the traffic stop was crack cocaine, the police document states, but further investigation showed the drug was actually fentanyl.

Green was revived with Narcan.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
An Oregon man accused of stabbing a worker inside a grocery store on Sunday is believed to be linked to a woman's murder nearby, officials said.

The man entered the Estacada store Sunday afternoon drenched in blood while holding what appeared to be a human head and a knife, witnesses said. He then proceeded to stab a store employee before other workers joined together to pin him down until authorities could take him into custody, Fox 12 reported.

Around 2:35 p.m., approximately 20 minutes after the stabbing at the store, a 911 caller reported the discovery of a woman who appeared to be dead inside the Colton home. Deputies now say that the incident was linked to the stabbing.

OREGON TOWN FOR SALE

The suspect was taken into custody at the store and was brought to a hospital for evaluation.

We saw panicking people rushing for their vehicles, vehicles trying to get out all at one time, one witness at the store told KOIN.

Even after being arrested, the suspects car remained running with its windshield wipers still on.

The employee who was stabbed was airlifted to a hospital in critical condition, the Estacada Fire Department said. Despite the connection in incidents, deputies said that there is no outstanding threat to the public.

Click for more from Fox 12.
Despite sunny and dry weather conditions throughout the region, the Missouri State Highway Patrol responded to a number of injury accidents that occurred on area roads over the weekend.

A Pilot Knob woman was killed Saturday in an accident that took place at 6:20 p.m. on Highway 221, south of Vance Road in Iron County.

The patrol reports the crash occurred when a southbound 2012 Dodge Ram pickup driven by Angela D. Sousa, 42, of Pilot Knob, ran off the left side of the roadway and struck a tree.

Sousa was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:34 p.m. by Iron County Coroner Tim Harbison. She was reportedly not wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident. It was the 18th fatality so far this year in Troop E.

In another crash, James E. Goodson, 72, of Mineral Point, received moderate injuries that took place at 4:10 p.m. Friday on Highway 8 at Hopewell Road in Washington County.

The patrol reports the accident occurred when a westbound 1995 Ford Ranger driven by Goodson was waiting for the vehicle in front of him to turn left when a westbound 2001 Jeep Cherokee driven by Dylan G. Jarvis, 19, of Cadet, struck the rear of the pickup.

Goodson, who was reportedly wearing a seat belt at the time of the collision, was transported to Washington County Memorial Hospital in Potosi by Washington County Ambulance.

Brian G. Miller, 34, of Bonne Terre, was seriously injured in a motorcycle wreck that took place at 2:09 p.m. Saturday on Highway 47, south of Airport Road in St. Francois County.

According to the patrol, a southbound 1998 Harley Davidson motorcycle driven by Miller failed to negotiate a curve to the left in the road, causing it to slide out and off the right off the roadway where it struck a ditch and tree.

Miller, who was reportedly wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, was transported by St. Francois County Ambulance to St. Anthony's Medical Center in St. Louis where he was treated for serious injuries.

A second motorcycle accident that occurred at 2:30 p.m. on southbound Highway 21, north of Highway 47 in Washington County, resulted in a Farmington woman being injured.

The patrol reports that the crash took place when a southbound 2012 Harley Davidson driven by Powell Meister, 49, of Farmington, was struck by a deer that entered the roadway.

Faith N. Farris, 40, of Farmington  a passenger on the bike  was transported by Washington County Ambulance to Mercy Hospital Jefferson in Festus where she was treated for moderate injuries.

Meister, who along with Farris were reportedly wearing helmets at the time of the accident  received only minor injuries in the collision and was not transported by ambulance.

Christopher V. Hammack, 19, of Bonne Terre was seriously injured when the southbound 2002 Chevrolet Trailblazer he was driving traveled off the left side of U.S. 67 south of Parkway Drive and overturned about 12:57 p.m. Sunday.

Reportedly not wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident, Hammack was transported by Air Evac to Mercy Hospital St. Louis.

A passenger in the vehicle, Adrian N. Willhelm, 18, also of Bonne Terre, was taken by St. Francois County Ambulance to Parkland Health Center in Farmington where he was treated for moderate injuries.

Willhelm was reportedly wearing a seat belt when the accident took place.
The Second Amendment is only 27 words, but Americans have used millions of words arguing over what it means. It guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms. But which people, what arms, and under what circumstances?

Two milestone cases involving the Second Amendment that reached the Supreme Court are District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), declaring an individual has a right to own a firearm, and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), affirming the Second Amendment applies to state law.

WHY JUSTICE GORSUCH WILL HAVE AN IMMEDIATE (AND BIG) IMPACT ON THE SUPREME COURT

Now, if the Supreme Court decides to hear it, there may be a third major case in a decade: Peruta v. California.

At issue is the right to keep and bear arms outside the home. The Heller case specifically applies to situations within the home. Those who have petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case are hoping the justices will see it as a logical extension of their earlier opinions.

The case arose when Edward Peruta and other gun owners who lived in or near San Diego, Calif., couldnt get concealed-carry permits in their county. The Sheriffs Department handles permit requests and requires good cause to carry a gun outside of the home. This does not mean a generalized concern for safety, but something specific, such as fear of domestic violence or a regular need to move large amounts of money.

There were two separate lawsuits challenging the interpretation of good cause, but the district courts found no violation of the Second Amendment.

CALIFORNIA CONCEALED WEAPON LAW TOSSED BY FED APPEALS COURT

Then, in 2014, a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the policy did indeed violate the right to bear arms for self-defense. The state, however, got a new hearing in front of 11 9th Circuit judges, who decided 7-4, the restrictions for concealed-carry permits were allowable.

The case has now been appealed to the Supreme Court and though the Justices have rescheduled its consideration several times, some experts feel the court is finally ready to hear Peruta.

I suspect theyre going to grant it, said John Eastman, former law dean at Chapman University and the director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

Eastman told Fox News, its percolating all across the country.

He also feels the justices may have put it off while waiting for a full complement on the court, which they got when Neil Gorsuch was confirmed last month. Gorsuch, in fact, may be the justice to tip the opinion in one direction or the other, as previous Second Amendment cases were determined in a 5-4 ruling.

According to Eugene Volokh, professor of law at University of California at Los Angeles, this case is primed for the Supreme Court, as it deals with a basic constitutional right and the lower courts are split on the issue.

It would be a good time for the highest court to step in and settle the controversy. He also feels that while no one is sure how Gorsuch will vote, there is a sense that hes sympathetic to a broader view of the Second Amendment.

The case may turn on how the court frames the issue. To Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Irvine School of Law, the legal question to be settled is whether a state like California may determine its own rules on concealed-carry permits.

The Second Amendment isnt an absolute right, Chemerinsky notes. Throughout British and American history, theres never been a right to have concealed weapons.

But Eugene Volokh believes theres a bigger issue at stake. If the state of California, which essentially bans open carry of a gun, makes it next to impossible for a typical citizen to get a concealed-carry permit, this is tantamount to banning the right to bear arms except for a few favored people.

Experts agree on one point. As Chemerinsky puts it, if Peruta is taken up, no matter what the Supreme Court says, it will be a landmark decision.
An Arkansas sheriff's deputy killed in the line of duty last week was remembered by fellow law enforcement officers for his service and dedication at his funeral Monday, as his alleged killer was behind bars facing capital murder charges.

Yell County Sheriff's Deputy Lt. Kevin Mainhart, 46, was killed during a Thursday traffic stop, according to Arkansas State Police. Fellow cops rallied behind his memory at a service Sunday and Monday's burial.

"He left behind a family. He left behind a much larger family, those that wear the uniform," family friend and former Pope County deputy Rex Surrette told Fox 16.

Law enforcement from across the state attended the visitation in Dardanelle.

"We're a family," said Sgt. Alan Bradley, of the Russellville Police Department. "It's different than any other brotherhood, because we depend on each other for our lives."

"Lieutenant Kevin Mainhart, Yell County Sheriff's Office, was laid to rest today," the FBI Little Rock office tweeted Monday, posting a photograph. "Family and friends, you are in our thoughts and prayers."

Taps was played after the funeral, KATV reporter Elicia Dover tweeted.

James Arthur Bowden, 42, is accused of killing Mainhart and two others, 61-year-old Rita Miller and 17-year-old Ciera Miller. Family members have said the Millers were relatives of Bowden's girlfriend.

ARKANSAS POLICE SHOOTING: SUSPECT IN CUSTODY AFTER 3 DEAD, INCLUDING OFFICER

Bowden was ordered jailed without bond Monday after entering a not-guilty plea on three charges of capital murder.

At a brief arraignment Monday, a judge issued a gag order that bars prosecutors, defense attorneys and police from speaking publicly about the case. Bowden is next due in court in July.

According to an arrest affidavit, authorities accused Bowden of shooting Mainhart during a traffic stop, then killing Rita Miller and Ciera Miller at a nearby home about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Little Rock.

The affidavit also said that Mainhart's pistol was missing. Police have also said that Bowden held his girlfriend hostage for five hours before surrendering.

SUSPECT IDENTIFIED IN OHIO SHOOTING THAT KILLED POLICE CHIEF, TWO NURSING HOME EMPLOYEES

"Lt. Mainhart's 25-year career in law enforcement in West Memphis and Yell County made Arkansas a safer place," Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in a Thursday statement. "Our thoughts, prayers and gratitude are with the Mainhart family and all those who put their own lives in danger to serve and protect."

Bowden's sister, Julie Inmon, said last week that her brother was mentally ill.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Trump administration has approached the wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, days before President Donald Trump embarks on his first foreign trip.

Trump will nominate Callista Gingrich for the post, two people with direct knowledge of the discussions said Monday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly before an official announcement.

Trump's foreign trip this month includes a stop at the Vatican.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Callista Gingrich is president of Gingrich Productions and has produced a number of documentaries, including one about Pope John Paul II.

She worked for the House Committee on Agriculture as chief clerk until 2007. She was a key figure in her husband's 2012 bid for the Republican nomination.

She was a congressional aide when she began a six-year affair with Newt Gingrich, then a married Republican congressman.

In 2012, Gingrich's second wife, Marianne Gingrich, told ABC News that he had proposed an "open marriage" so he could continue to see Callista Gingrich without divorcing.

The former House speaker denied the charge.

He converted to Catholicism in 2009, after years of attending mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., where Callista Gingrich has performed in the choir.

Trump's vision for foreign relations and diplomacy has been starkly different to that promoted by the vastly popular Pope Francis. Francis has spoken of the need for bridges between nations, while Trump has advocated for walls and travel restrictions as a means of national security.

Francis has previously remarked that anyone who wants to build walls to keep migrants out is "not Christian."

Francis also has called for an end to the use of fossil fuels, while Trump has pledged to cancel payments to U.N. climate change programs and pull out of the Paris climate accord.

But both share a populist appeal and speak with a down-to-earth simplicity that has endeared them to their bases of supporters. And both share a common concern about the plight of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Islamic militants.

Speaking to reporters while traveling home Saturday from a trip to Portugal, Francis said he would listen respectfully to what Trump has to say when the two meet. Trump will call on Francis mid-way through his first foreign trip, after visiting Saudi Arabia and Israel and before attending a NATO summit in Brussels and a G-7 summit in Italy.

"I never make a judgment about a person without hearing him out," the pope said.
Los Angeles police say two stolen-car suspects were killed when their vehicle hit a tree and burst into flames during a high speed chase along Hollywood Boulevard.

Officials say the 1993 Honda weaved erratically in and out of traffic before the crash early Sunday not far from a nightclub where revelers were gathered on a sidewalk. No pedestrians or motorists were hurt.

Officer Mike Lopez says the two people in the car were burned beyond recognition of age, race or gender. Coroner's officials will attempt to identify them.

Police used a white sheet to cover the car, which was burned down to its frame.

Several streets were closed as police investigate.
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Thousands of members of the Lutheran church have gathered at a stadium in Namibia to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

The commemoration occurred Sunday during an assembly of the Lutheran World Federation, which represents tens of millions of people around the world.

The stadium where the commemoration happened is in Katutura, an area of the Namibian capital of Windhoek where blacks were forced to relocate during white minority rule. Namibia became independent in 1990.

A sermon about hope and liberation was delivered at the stadium by Lutheran Zephania Kameeta, Namibia's minister of poverty eradication and social welfare.

On Saturday a Nigerian, Archbishop Musa Panti Filibus, was elected head of the Lutheran World Federation at an assembly held in Windhoek, Namibia's capital.

Filibus, 57, is the second church leader from Africa to lead the Lutheran federation since it was founded in 1947. He comes from the northeast region of Nigeria, which has endured attacks by the Boko Haram Islamic extremist group. The Lutheran federation says many churches in the area had to suspend activities two years ago to avoid militant assaults during worship services. Filibus replaces Bishop Munib Younan, who had served as president since 2010.

The Protestant Reformation was initiated in 1517 by Martin Luther in response to what he said were excesses and abuses within the Catholic Church.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives won a state election Sunday in their center-left rivals' traditional heartland, a stinging blow to the challenger in September's national vote.

The western state of North Rhine-Westphalia is Germany's most populous and has been led by the center-left Social Democrats for all but five years since 1966.

It is also the home state of Martin Schulz, the Social Democrat seeking to deny Merkel a fourth term in the Sept. 24 election. Schulz was hoping for a boost after two previous state election defeats sapped his party's momentum.

Instead, Merkel's Christian Democratic Union won 33 percent of the vote in the election for the state legislature, with the Social Democrats trailing on 31.2 percent.

Social Democrat governor Hannelore Kraft's coalition lost its majority as her junior governing partners, the Greens, took only 6.4 percent. Conservative challenger Armin Laschet, a deputy leader of Merkel's party, was set to replace Kraft.

"The CDU has won the heartland of the Social Democrats," said the conservatives' general secretary, Peter Tauber.

"This is a difficult day for the Social Democrats, a difficult day for me personally as well," Schulz, who wasn't on the ballot Sunday, told supporters in Berlin. "I come from the state in which we took a really stinging defeat today."

But he urged the party to concentrate now on the national election. He said that "we will sharpen our profile further  we have to as well."

"We will continue fighting; the result will come on Sept. 24," Schulz said.

The Social Democrats' national ratings soared after Schulz, a former European Parliament president, was nominated in January as Merkel's challenger. But defeats in two other state elections since late March punctured the party's euphoria over Schulz's nomination.

The Social Democrats' result in Sunday's election, the last before the national vote, was their worst in North Rhine-Westphalia since World War II. In the state's last election in 2012, the Social Democrats beat the CDU by 39.1 percent to 26.3 percent.

The pro-business Free Democrats won a strong 12.6 percent of the vote Sunday after a campaign headed by their national leader, Christian Lindner. That gave the party, with which Merkel governed Germany from 2009 to 2013, a strong base for its drive to return to the national parliament in September after it was ejected four years ago.

The nationalist Alternative for Germany won 7.4 percent, giving it seats in its 13th state legislature. The opposition Left Party fell just short of the 5 percent needed to win seats.

The result gives the CDU and Free Democrats a very slim majority. If they can't agree on a governing alliance, Laschet could opt for a "grand coalition" of the biggest parties with the Social Democrats.

A "grand coalition" would mirror Merkel's national government, in which the Social Democrats are the junior partners.

After a blaze of publicity earlier this year, Schulz  who chose not to join the government when he returned to Germany in January  has struggled to maintain a high profile. He has focused on addressing perceived economic injustices, but critics have accused him of providing too little detail of his aims.

Kraft told ARD television she had "asked Martin Schulz to let national politics wait until the election was over."

Asked whether that was smart, she replied: "I said I would take responsibility for that, and I'm doing that this evening." She resigned as her party's regional leader.

Merkel's conservatives sought to portray Kraft's government as slack on security, and also assailed what they said is regional authorities' poor handling of education and infrastructure projects. The region of 17.9 million, nearly a quarter of Germany's population, includes Cologne, Duesseldorf and the Ruhr industrial area.

Merkel's party seemed keen not to appear too euphoric, insisting that regional issues played the key role.

Asked about Germany's government after September her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, said that "we always have to keep a cool head ... we shouldn't talk about coalitions before the harvest is in."

National polls show the Social Democrats trailing Merkel's conservatives by up to 10 points after drawing level earlier this year.
North Korea said Monday that the medium-range strategic missile it tested over the weekend was "capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead."

Dictator Kim Jong Un was said to have witnessed the test early Sunday and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," according to the communist dictatorship's official Korean Central News Agency.



The claim, if confirmed, would mark another big step forward in the country's escalating efforts to field a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Outside experts have said they do not believe the rogue nation can do that yet, but each new test may push them closer to that goal.

The missile flew 1,245 miles above the surface of the Earth this weekend according to U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials. For context, the International Space Station orbits at roughly 240 miles above the Earth. If launched on a normal trajectory, officials estimate the KN-17 missile would be able to hit targets 2,800 miles away, including Guam, where U.S. troops and Air Force bombers are stationed.

North Korea may have pioneered a new engine for its ballistic missiles -- an engine the rogue nation first displayed in March, according to Jeffrey Lewis, a missile proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey, Calif.

"North Korea showed off a new engine we had never seen," Lewis said. "In other words, this is a big breakthrough for the North Koreans."

Earlier Sunday, officials told Fox News that the U.S. military believes Pyongyang launched a KN-17 medium-range ballistic missile  the first successful test in four attempts for the Pyongyang regime. The missile flew for four minutes longer than any previous ballistic missile test in the history of the communist regime, U.S. officials said.

The KN-17 is a single-stage, liquid-fueled missile -- not the three stage, solid-fuel missile that North Korea successfully tested back in February, which caused more concern among Pentagon officials.

UNITED STATES MONITORING CLAIM MISSILE COULD CARRY NUCLEAR WARHEAD



North Korea made three attempts last month to launch the KN-17, but failed each time. Officials have said they believe North Korea aims to use the missile to target ships.

The missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and U.S. militaries said.

The latest test came a few days after the CIA opened a new "mission center" to study the nuclear and missile threat from North Korea.

Missile experts initially thought the rogue communist regime had tested a new type of intermediate-range ballistic missile, but U.S. officials told Fox News that is not the assessment from the U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. Strategic Command. A U.S. official told Fox News the missile splashed down about 60 miles south of Russias Vladivostok region and approximately 250 miles from Japanese shores.

UNITED STATES WILL 'TIGHTEN THE SCREWS' ON NORTH KOREA, HALEY SAYS

Japanese officials said the missile flew for about 30 minutes, traveling about 500 miles and reaching an unusually high altitude of 1,240 miles. The South Korean military said the missile traveled about 430 miles.

On February 12, North Korea successfully tested a KN-15 from a mobile launcher using a solid-fuel engine, causing concern among Pentagon officials. The KN-15 can be launched with five minutes' notice from a concealed location  a concerning advancement by the communist regime for senior Pentagon officials.

According to the South Korean military, the launch site used Sunday was the same one used on February 12  the first North Korean ballistic missile test during the Trump administration, launched while President Trump hosted Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.

The launch jeopardizes new South Korean President Moon Jae-in's willingness for dialogue with the North, and came as U.S., Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific. Moon convened an emergency session of his national security council Sunday, shortly after the missile test.



"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan said. "The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."



Moon, South Korea's first liberal leader in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office last week that he'd be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right.



The U.N. Security Council said Sunday it will hold urgent consultations on North Korea's latest ballistic missile test at the request of the United States, Japan and South Korea. Uruguay holds the council presidency this month and its U.N. Mission announced the closed consultations will be held on Tuesday afternoon.

The Security Council has adopted six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions against North Korea



Trump's administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable, but he has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

On Saturday, a top North Korean diplomat in charge of U.S. relations, Choe Son Hui, told reporters in Beijing that Pyongyang would be willing to meet with the Trump administration for negotiations "if the conditions are set." She did not elaborate.

The launch came as troops from the U.S., Japan and two European nations gather near Guam for drills that are partly a message to North Korea. The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korean navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula, according to Seoul's Defense Ministry.

Fox News Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Anti-drug forces from several European and American countries intercepted a total of eight tons of cocaine in a double bust that is being dubbed as one of the largest in history.

In the larger one, Spanish authorities cooperated with Ecuadorean police to intercept a ship off that Latin American country bringing more than 5.5 metric tons of cocaine to Spain.

The ship was loaded with Colombian cocaine in the Pacific and planned to travel through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic to Europe, officials said in a statement.

In a separate drug seizure, Spanish police stopped a Venezuela-flagged fishing vessel carrying 2.5 metric tons of cocaine near Martinica.

The ship was intercepted on May 4 and was towed to Las Palmas in Spain's Canary Islands.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Britain's National Crime Agency also took part in the joint operation.

The cargo seized off the coast of Ecuador has an estimated value of $250 million. Ecuadorean agents boarded it when it was almost three nautical miles off Santa Elena province.

Spains Interior Minister Juan Ignocio Zoido said to El Pais that the first operation resulted in the capture of 24 suspected drug traffickers.

"It is one of the largest cocaine seizures in history and it takes apart a large drug-trafficking organization between South America and Spain," he said.

The massive operation began after Spain found out in January that a South American ring with links in Spain was organizing a large shipment.

That information was corroborated by intelligence also gathered by the U.S., Britain and Portugal, the statement said.

Since the beginning of 2017, Ecuador has confiscated about 30 tons of cocaine.

Large seizures of cocaine and cannabis aren't uncommon in the Iberian Peninsula, which is seen as a drug gateway to Europe.

Spanish police captured almost eight metric tons of cocaine from four vessels in 2015 and 2016 and arrested 80 people, the police statement said.

The AP contributed to this report.
He is known simply as the "Butcher of Kabul" and, after 20 years in self-imposed exile, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar returned last week to the Afghan capitol he once mercilessly massacred. President Ghani and members of his national unity government warmly welcomed the warlord.

After fighting the Soviet Union and the Afghan communist government during the 1980s with his Hezb-e-Islami militia, Hekmatyar, 69, and other warlords eventually sparked civil war within Afghanistan. To assuage his radicalism, he was elevated to prime minister in 1993. But that was not enough; shortly after that he was accused of orchestrating the destruction of Kabul and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and coalition government soldiers.

"He is not a peaceful man. Giving him power will only increase the number of extremists around him," Mullah Paiman Pirzadeh, a Kunduz member of Parliament who is a former confidante and supporter of Hekmatyar, told Fox News. "When I was with him, I was stupid and he was stupid. Luckily I found myself and changed my mind."

Yet following months of negotiations between the Afghan Peace Council and the Hezb-e-Islami delegation last year, Hekmatyar in September signed a peace deal with the government allowing him to emerge a few weeks ago from the mountains of neighboring countries, have his name wiped from the United Nation's sanctions list and take a legitimate place in the government as leader of the Hezb-e-Islami political party. But the most significant of Hekmatyar's conditions in signing was that the 3,000-plus Hezb-e-Islami members in prison be released immediately.

Hekmatyar has publicly claimed that his main goal now is to "end this war and rescue the country from crisis," and he has pledged that his people will eschew violence.

But for the millions who lost loved ones, his words are empty and his flamboyant return adds to the already volatile security situation.

The immunity awarded to Hekmatyar -- without any accountability for his many terrorist attacks and war crimes, which are believed to be more numerous than those of any other faction leader -- has left many Afghans feeling angry and betrayed. Driving through the streets of Kabul, posters of him put up by supporters have been defaced and families who lost loved ones to his warfare have launched public protests.

Locals told Fox News of their haunting memories of him planting land mines on the outskirts of the city and the constant shelling. In one day alone he ordered the indiscriminate launching of 1,600 rockets to destroy the city and those rallying against him.

His followers have been accused of mass torture of intellectuals, throwing acid on outspoken women and operating extreme torture cells in Pakistan.

Despite the opposition, over the past week the process of releasing Hezb-e-Islami prisoners, mostly held in the infamous Pul-e-Charki and Bagram jails began, according to terms of the deal. The first batch of prisoners to be released includes more than 70 inmates. Hezb-e-Islami leadership also has mandated that its members will not hand in their weapons, saying they must be armed for their own security.

The problem, locals said, is that there are no mechanisms to track inmates after they are released to determine if they are returning to terrorist activity and gauge how radicalized they may have become behind bars. Those jailed are said not to be political prisoners, but were captured while waging direct acts of war.

"The prisoners are associated with crimes; they were either arrested in the battlefield or while committing other crimes such as planting mines and improvised explosive devices, suicide attacks and regular assaults on Afghan and international forces," noted Hashim Watdatyar, a former Afghan spokesperson for the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime. "Once they are released, they will not be tracked and, like other warlords, criminals and Mafia within the system, they also will either work with government or will be associated with the politicians as their militias, bodyguards or parliamentarians."

Aziz Amin Ahmadzai, a prominent Afghan political analyst, concurred that "the prisoners were involved in various crimes, especially insurgency," and captured on the battlefield within the past 15 years. He remains confident that the government "will keep an eye on the prisoners," but emphasized that it as important for Hezb-e-Islami to ensure its members don't pose a danger to society.

And given Hekmatyar's deeply controversial nature, any travel he makes involves hundreds of his own armed militia -- paid for by the government  and that too is causing concern. It is also unknown how many and what kind of weapons the group still has in its arsenal.

"He committed immense terror activity in Kabul, and he even took responsibility for that," former Afghan Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud said. "Now he has hundreds of bodyguards, and we don't know who these people are. Furthermore, many of the groups aligned with him are the ones fighting our troops. How is that peace?"

Throughout Operation Enduring Freedom, Americans, too, came under Hezb-e-Islami attacks. In 2013, 15 people -- including six Americans -- were killed by a Hezb-orchestrated suicide attack. Following the death of Usama bin Laden in 2011, Hekmatyar called the Americans "barbarians" and praised the former Al Qaeda leader as a "role model for sacrifice and freedom." He issued a direct threat against U.S. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the commander of the Combined Forces Command in Afghanistan, saying, "I would like to kill you myself."

Two Hezb-e-Islami commanders remain wanted on the U.S Rewards for Justice program. Washington is offering $2 million for explosives expert Abdullah Nowbahar for a 2012 suicide attack on a Kabul bus carrying foreign airport staff, which killed more than a dozen. They are also offering $3 million for Abdul Saboor, who is said to have orchestrated the 2013 attack that killed American soldiers.

However, the U.S. has thrown its full support behind the Afghan government's quest to integrate Hekmatyar and his team, signaling that diplomatic agreements are a fundamental way forward in the conflict-ravaged country.

"The United States welcomes the Government of National Unitys steps to fulfill its obligations in implementing the peace agreement it signed with the representatives of Hizb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG)," the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said in a written statement. "We consider this step clear evidence of the Afghan governments commitment to restoring peace and stability in Afghanistan, which will ultimately benefit the Afghan people. It is evident that Afghans overwhelmingly yearn for peace, and this agreement will provide an opportunity to bring Afghans together and ensure the safety and security of all sides."

Indeed, over the past month Hekmatyar has called on his Taliban "brothers" to also lay down their arms. But Pirzadeh, the member of Parliament, stressed that such statements are merely tactical endeavors to "make the Americans happy" and create a sense that he is on the side of the good.

Pentagon officials are currently examining plans to bring several thousand more troops to Afghanistan, not simply to assist the struggling Afghan forces but seemingly to pressure the Taliban to enter into a peace agreement.

Yet Taliban leaders have pledged that they will not take part in peace talks unless the Afghan government removes all foreign troops and releases all of its many thousands of prisoners as well.

Nonetheless, Hamid Azizi -- a spokesperson for Hekmatyar who previously worked at the Afghanistan Embassy in Tehran -- insisted that two decades later, his party and its leader have turned over a new leaf and he is certain Hekmatyar will pave the way for other groups to follow suit.

"We are not seeing non-Muslims as our enemies. We respect humanity and human rights," he said. "The conflict of the past destroyed Afghanistan and all parties in the conflict are guilty. We have taken responsibility for our part. But it is time for a new chapter; we should forget the past."

Others, too, see it as a step in the right direction and that all terror groups -- irrespective of name -- should be negotiated with and folded legitimately into the government.

"We have to make it work," former President Hamid Karzai told Fox News. "Any group that renounces violence should be brought into a deal."
German Chancellor Angela Merkels conservative party narrowly won a state election Sunday in the region their center-left rivals have led for years.

The western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germanys most populous state, has been governed by the center-left Social Democrats for all but five years since 1966.

GERMANY'S MERKEL REJECTS CALL TO REINTRODUCE CONSCRIPTION

Merkel's Christian Democratic Union won 33 percent of the vote for the state legislature, while the Social Democrats received 31.2 percent.

The results dealt a blow to Martin Schulz, the Social Democrats leader. Schulz, a North Rhine-Westphalia native, is challenging Merkel, who is seeking a fourth term as chancellor, in the upcoming September national parliamentary election.

Schulz, a former European Parliament president, was hoping to get a win after two previous state election defeats since late March gradually weakened his partys momentum.

This is a difficult day for the Social Democrats, a difficult day for me personally as well, Schulz said. I come from the state in which we took a really stinging defeat today.

FRANCES NEW PRESIDENT TO MEET MERKEL NEXT WEEK

Social Democrat governor Hannelore Krafts coalition lost its majority as her junior governing partner, the Greens, received just 6.4 percent. Kraft immediately resigned as her partys regional leader. Conservative challenger Armin Laschet, a deputy leader of Merkels party, was set to replace Kraft.

The Social Democrats results in North Rhine-Westphalia was their worst since World War II. In the states last election in 2012, the Social Democrats comfortably defeated the Christian Democratic Union by 39.1 percent to 26.3 percent.

GERMANYS MERKEL BLASTS PROTECTIONISM AHEAD OF G-20 SUMMIT

The result gives the Christian Democratic Union and Free Democrats a slim majority in the region home to 17.9 million and one in five voters. The territory includes the cities of Cologne, Duesseldorf and Ruhr industrial area.

Merkel said the election in North Rhine-Westphalia is no easy terrain for us, and criticized the Social Democrats for letting the infrastructure decline and being careless with the regions security, according to the New York Times.

The Social Democrats and Greens have also been criticized for the lack of security during mass sexual assaults on women in Cologne on New Years Eve and state authorities negligence of arresting a Tunisian man who plowed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market last December, killing 12 people.

National polls show the Social Democrats trailing Merkels conservatives by up to 10 points after drawing level earlier this year.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Central Board of Education will meet tonight at 6 p.m. for a regular session in the Central High School auditorium located at 116 Rebel Dr. in Park Hills.

First up on the agenda will be approval of routine consent agenda items, including the payment of bills, approval of a financial report and adoption of a special education local compliance plan.

Also on the agenda is a recognition ceremony for Special Olympics athletes along with middle and high school students.

In other business, the board will hear a food service report, reports on summer facility projects and programs, teacher leaders and a report from Tammy Wadlow on the American Disabilities Act, Early Childhood Special Education and other related programs.

New business items will include consideration of handbooks for the next school year, bread and milk bids and a Chromebook handbook for the upcoming school year.

The meeting is open to the public.
The fight to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State is nearing its "final stages," a senior U.S. official said Monday.

Iraqi forces are "completely defeating" ISIS in one of the most difficult urban battles since World War II, said Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS at the U.S. State Department.

McGurk spoke from a water treatment plant south of Mosul where Iraqi forces closely backed by the U.S.-led coalition are slowly closing in on the remaining cluster of ISIS-held neighborhoods in the city's west.

ISIS DOWNS IRAQI HELICOPTER WEST OF MOSUL

His visit comes a week-and-a-half after U.S.-backed Iraqi forces launched a renewed push on the northwestern edge of Mosul in an effort to encircle the old city where ISIS fighters are believed to be holding more than 200,000 civilians hostage as shields.

The military said that video revealed the ISIS attempting to bait the U.S. into killing civilians, Fox News reported in late March.

"ISIS is smuggling civilians into buildings so we won't see them, and trying to bait the coalition to attack," Col. Joseph Scrocca said at the time.

The operation to retake Mosul from the ISIS was formally launched in October and in January, the city's eastern half was declared "fully liberated."

The fight for the city's west has devastated infrastructure there and inflicted high civilian casualties. In March, the U.S. acknowledged its forces launched an airstrike in western Mosul earlier that month that witnesses tell the AP killed more than 100 people. The U.S. has not confirmed that the strike resulted in civilian casualties and the Pentagon is investigating the incident.

IRAQI FORCES MOVE TO SURROUND MOSUL'S OLD CITY, HELD BY ISIS

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Is he draining le swamp?

New French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed a relatively unknown lawmaker to serve as the prime minister of France.

Macron's appointment of Edouard Philippe, 46, is making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces.

The announcement was made on Monday by Alexis Kohler, Macron's new general secretary at the presidential Elysee Palace.

Philippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers. He's also a member of the mainstream-right Republicans party that was badly battered by Macron's victory in the presidential campaign.

FRANCE INAUGURATES EMMANUEL MACRON AS NEW PRESIDENT

Philippe's appointment ticks several boxes for the 39-year-old Macron, France's youngest president, who took power on Sunday.

The prime minister's age reinforces the generational shift in France's corridors of power and the image of youthful vigor that Macron is cultivating.

Philippe may also attract other Republicans to Macron's cause as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass his promised economic reforms.

MACRON'S PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES GATHER IN PARIS

Philippe is close to former Prime Minister Alain Juppe. Reacting to Philippe's appointment, Juppe called the new prime minister "a man of great talent" with "all the qualities to handle the difficult job."

Philippe served as Juppe's campaign spokesman during the Republicans party primary. When Juppe was beaten, Philippe switched his support to Francois Fillon for the French presidency but then quit the campaign when prosecutors started investigating allegations that Fillon's family benefited illegally from cushy taxpayer-funded jobs.

Philippe previously worked as a director of public affairs for French nuclear group Areva and as a lawyer with New York City-based international law firm Debevoise and Plimpton LLP, The New York Times reported.

The National Front party of Marine Le Pen, who was beaten handily by Macron in the French presidential election, has joined the criticism of Macron's appointment of Edouard Philippe as prime minister.

Nicolas Bay, the party's secretary general, said Macron's government is becoming "a synthesis of the worst of the right and the worst of the left."

On Monday, Macron met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He traveled to Berlin a day after being sworn in, continuing a tradition of French presidents making their first foreign trip to Germany.

"Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that," Merkel told Macron during his first foreign visit as president.

She said it was an honor that Macron chose to visit Berlin during his first full day in office, and said the countries' ministers would meet after an upcoming French legislative vote.

The two talked about the European asylum system, trade relations and other issues, according to Merkel.

"We each represent the interests of our own countries, but the interests of Germany are naturally closely tied to the interests of France," she said.

Macron said Monday that he will work closely with Merkel on a "road

map" of reforms for the European Union and the eurozone.

Speaking at the side of the German leader, Macron said that they need to work on "deep reforms that are necessary and need common work."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Hong Kong authorities have rejected asylum requests from refugees who harbored whistleblower and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

Applications from four adults and three children from Sri Lanka and the Philippines were denied by immigration officials in the southern Chinese city, attorney Robert Tibbo said Monday.

Snowden spent two weeks hiding in Hong Kong in June 2013 after he leaked documents revealing extensive U.S. government surveillance information.

The refugees include former Sri Lankan soldier Ajith Pushpakumara; Vanessa Mae Rodel, who is from the Philippines and has a 5-year-old daughter; and a Sri Lankan couple, Supun Thilina Kellapatha and Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis, and their two children.

"I'm an army deserter person," Pushpakumara said, adding that if he returned to Sri Lanka, "I will be tortured again. I don't want to be tortured."

Tibbo said his clients will appeal the ruling, which leaves them at risk of being detained or deported to their home countries. They have two weeks to appeal, BBC reported on Monday. They have also applied for refugee status in Canada.

CHELSEA MANNING TO REMAIN IN ARMY, RECEIVE HEALTH CARE BENEFITS AFTER PRISON RELEASE

Tibbo represents 50 to 60 other clients who are applying for asylum in Hong Kong, where cases typically take years to be processed, he said. So far only these cases have received a speedy decision from immigration officials -- issued last Thursday -- in a sign they have been targeted by authorities, he claimed.

The Hong Kong government "has repeatedly tried to question the four adults about their involvement with Mr. Snowden," Tibbo said. He claimed that when the refugees refused to answer, their social assistance payments for rent and food were cut off.

SENATORS SEEK DATA ON AMERICANS CAUGHT UP IN SURVEILLANCE

The Hong Kong government said in a statement that asylum claims are handled in a "fair, impartial and efficient manner," and that it found "no substantial grounds for believing that the claimants, if returned to their country of origin, will be subject to real and substantial risk of danger."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
"The regime has been given enough chance to come clean. It hasn't, for good reason. Therefore, I say forget about the regime, think about the people."

He is the oldest son of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Now Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi says he is fighting for the soul of his nation.

During his father's time, Tehran was a reliable ally and America was not the Great Satan as the U.S. has been so often called in Iran today. That ended when Pahlavi's family was overthrown by the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iran's long-exiled prince wants a revolution in age of Trump

Now Pahlavi wants the Iranian people to rise up against the regime and establish a Parliamentary democracy based on democratic values, freedom and human rights.

"What I am calling upon is a process of civil disobedience, which is a method of change. How? By bringing domestic pressure on the system. If enough people refused to cooperate, like Indians in India during British time, when they can paralyze the system by massive sustained labor strikes across the nation, that is not shooting bullets in the streets," he said.

He added that the method of change can be by non-violence, civil disobedience provided that it is nurtured and cared for." He noted that such mass movements have upended power structures from the collapse of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the end of apartheid in South Africa. Pahlavi said there is no reason that a wave of popular support cannot topple the theocratic regime in Tehran, in a similar manner.

"History is full of such examples," Pahlavi notes.

"If change during the cold war was not ultimately, how do we defeat the Soviet system? How do we assist the dissidents? How do we empower or encourage the people who are trapped behind the Iron Curtain? None of these people would ever be heartened enough to ultimately roll of their sleeves and say: Hey you know what? We are not abandoned anymore. From Sakharov to Solzhenitsyn all the way to the others, they said hey, you know what? The world is not going to put up with it."

Reza Pahlavi on Growing Showdown With Iran

"Nelson Mandela was rotting in his cell in South Africa while half the world was doing business with the apartheid regime, until a point that the people in the world said, Basta!, enough, it is no longer acceptable."

Pahlavi said just like opposing past repressive regimes, Americans can take the lead in pressuring Tehran. He sent a letter to then President-elect Trump, hoping that his administration will bear in mind the aspiration of the Iranian people and engage the secular democratic forces, providing support for the struggle of my fellow compatriots for peace, freedom, and democracy.

"The more they hear about what the Iranian people demand, not what the regime wants, but what the Iranian people demand, they will in turn tell their congressmen, senators, and decision makers, What are you waiting for? These people are like us! They don't want to come here and destroy us, or blow us to pieces or wipe a country from the map, they want to be like us!"

Pahlavi also said that more should have been done to encourage the resistance during the so-called Green Revolution in 2009, when Iranians massed the streets demanding a free and fair election.

"If the people on the streets are holding up slogans, in English or in French, they are not practicing their linguistic skills, they are sending you a clear message. They were chanting on the streets, Obama Obama... in Farsi, (which) means either you are with them or you are with us. Make a choice. I think the choice was not to heed the call of the people."

Pahlavi said that he always has hope for a change in his country, because "it is in the nature of human beings."

He said people everywhere yearn for the same thing.

"It is three obvious factors. One is freedom and the ability to speak your mind and believe in what you want. The other one is an opportunity to participate in whatever system that is governing your country and the last but certainly not the least, dignity, human dignity, and when they deprive you as a human being for any of these, will you give up and not stand up and fight, and say if I have to sacrifice myself I am doing it so my children will not have to see this, that is the history of our world. From the days of Moses to today, it was always to be freed from bondage...and Iranians are not expectations to that."

Some fault the Shah's rule, and U.S. policy at the time, for setting the stage that enabled to Islamic revolution to succeed. But Pahlavi said that today, "there is no question" that the regime will eventually fall.

"People are not giving up, they know it's tough, they know it's a high price," he said. "Change will occur. Whether we like it or not, it is a historical conclusion that this type of regime simply cannot survive, it's is just a matter of time. The only question is when, and at what cost."

Follow Eric Shawn on Twitter: EricShawnTV

Ben Evansky contributed to this report.
An Iraqi man who was detained in Poland last summer on terrorism suspicions was freed from prison on Monday but was immediately taken into custody by border guards, meaning his deportation is likely, according to his lawyer.

Sinan Al-Haboubi, a 48-year-old Iraqi national who had asylum in Switzerland, was arrested last July for possessing trace amounts of explosives, found on the outside of his luggage. The arrest came ahead of a visit to Poland by Pope Francis amid heightened security concerns.

Al-Haboubi's lawyer and family say that he was in Poland because he was considering opening a pizzeria and was traveling the country to scope out good locations for the business. They said he had no extremist ties and is the victim of a misunderstanding.

He was arrested on July 21 in Lodz, a city in the central part of the country, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Krakow, where Pope Francis arrived six days later.

Lawyer Lukasz Banatkiewicz said Al-Haboubi was freed Monday without being charged, but that border guards immediately detained him. He said he had no contact with his client.

It was not clear where Al-Haboubi would be sent. His lawyer said Al-Haboubi has now lost his right to asylum in Switzerland because he has been outside of that country for more than six months and would likely be unable to return there.

Iraq, the country where he was born but which his family fled in the 1970s for political reasons  his father's opposition to Saddam Hussein  seemed a likely place where Poland might send him. His close family members are scattered across the Middle East and Europe, living in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Germany.

Ewa Bialik, a spokeswoman for prosecutors, confirmed that he was released on Monday. She said there was "no doubt" that Al-Haboubi had possessed dangerous substances but that investigators discontinued the probe due to a lack of further evidence.
A major mafia clan in Italy skimmed millions in public funds intended for one of the biggest migrant welcome centers in the European country, authorities said Monday.

Italian police arrested 68 people, including a priest and the head of a Catholic volunteer group called "Mercy," face a variety of charges, including extortion and fraud, for allegedly aiding the organized crime group, Arena, in their scheme.

"Mercy" subcontracted catering services to companies run by the Arena clan, investigators said. The Arena clan allegedly skimmed some 36 million euros ($39.5 million) of the 103 million in public funds meant to go toward migrant care between 2006-2015.

"The welcome center and 'Mercy' were the ATMs of the mafia," an incredulous Carabinieri Gen. Giuseppe Governale said Monday.

ITALIAN PRIEST DENOUNCES MAFIA THREATS AS COWARDLY

Rev. Edoardo Scordio, a parish priest affiliated with "Mercy," was the "organizer of a true system of exploitation of public funds destined for the migrant emergency," according to police. In 2007 he pocketed 132,000 euros (almost $145,000) for spiritual services that he offered the refugees, police said in a statement.

The Arena clan of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta mob secured a lock on servicing the Isola di Capo Rizzuto migrant center in Crotone for the past 10 years, investigators said, thanks in part to its ties to "Mercy" and its head, Leonardo Sacco.



Sacco's arrest took on political implications given the number of politicians -- even Pope Francis -- who have been photographed with him, including former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Newsweek reported.

"Mercy" subcontracted catering services to companies run by the Arena clan, investigators said. The Arena clan allegedly skimmed some 36 million euros ($39.5 million) of the 103 million in public funds meant to go towards migrant care between 2006-2015.

GODFATHER CRACKDOWN: SICILIAN BISHOP BARS MAFIA IN BAPTISMS

Part of the scam involved putting in for more meals than were actually provided, and then using the money to buy real estate, fancy cars and luxury boats, a prosecutor said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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The latest on North Korea's missile launch (all times local):

7:55 a.m.

The U.N. Security Council is strongly condemning North Korea's latest ballistic missile test and vowing to impose new sanctions in response to its "flagrant and provocative defiance" of council demands to halt all nuclear-related tests.

A press statement issued by the council late Monday expresses "utmost concern" at what it calls North Korea's "highly destabilizing behavior" and demands that Pyongyang conduct no further nuclear or ballistic missile tests.

The U.N.'s most powerful body says that North Korea is "greatly increasing tension in the region and beyond" and that it is vitally important the country immediately show "sincere commitment to denuclearization through concrete action."

The statement stresses the importance of working to reduce tensions and maintain peace and stability on the Korean peninsula.

The Security Council also calls on all countries to implement the six North Korea sanctions resolutions it already has adopted "in an expeditious and serious manner."

Council diplomats say the U.S. and China, the North's closest ally, have been working on a new sanctions resolution.

___

2:20 a.m.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is condemning the latest North Korean ballistic missile test as a violation of Security Council resolutions and a threat to peace and security in the region.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Monday that Guterres had called on North Korea to fully comply with its international obligations "and return to the path of denuclearization."

The Security Council has approved six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions following its nuclear and missile tests. The United States and China are reportedly working on a new even tougher resolution.

___

1 a.m.

France's U.N. ambassador says Security Council members are working on a resolution that would impose new sanctions against North Korea and strengthen enforcement of existing sanctions.

Francois Delattre told reporters Monday that France favors "a strong, swift and firm reaction of the council" to North Korea's test on Sunday of a new longer-range ballistic missile, which he called "a serious threat to peace and security both in the region and the world."

The Security Council is scheduled to hold closed-door consultations on the missile test on Tuesday.

British U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft also called the test a threat to international peace and security and said "the U.K. favors tougher sanctions."

Swedish U.N. Ambassador Olof Skoog said the council needs a firm, united response but "we also feel there needs to be openness for a conversation for dialogue."

___

8 p.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned North Korea's latest test-firing of a ballistic missile.

North Korea on Sunday launched what it said was a new type of "medium long-range" ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead.

Speaking to reporters during his visit to China, Putin said Monday that "there's nothing good about" the launch.

The Russian defense ministry said the missile landed several hundred kilometers away from the city of Vladivostok in Russia's Far East, but Putin said the missile "didn't present a threat" to his country.

In comments carried by Russian news agencies, Putin said Russia considers North Korea's missile launches and nuclear tests to be "unacceptable," adding that "we need to return to a dialogue with North Korea, stop intimidating it and find peaceful solutions."

___

6:10 p.m.

North Korea's ambassador to China says that Pyongyang's test-firing of a ballistic missile over the weekend is part of the country's efforts to develop ways to defend itself against hostile aggression abroad.

Ji Jae Ryong told reporters Monday at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing that Pyongyang would continue to conduct launches in the future, as long as the country's supreme leader deemed necessary.

North Korea says Sunday's launch was of a new type of "medium long-range" ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead.

Ji also repeated an assertion by North Korean officials that Pyongyang has successfully foiled a CIA-backed plot to kill leader Kim Jong Un last month with a biochemical poison.

___

12:30 p.m.

Australia's prime minister has called on China to use its leverage over North Korea to end the regime's missile testing.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told reporters in Sydney on Monday that North Korea's conduct was "reckless," ''provocative" and "unlawful." Australia will work with the United States and other countries to impose sanctions on Pyongyang.

"The greatest responsibility for bringing North Korea to its senses ... lies with China," Turnbull says.

"They have the overwhelming dominant economic relationship with North Korea and because they have the greatest leverage, they have the greatest responsibility," he added.

___

9:10 a.m.

North Korea says the medium long-range strategic missile it tested over the weekend can carry a nuclear warhead.

The country's official Korean Central News Agency says the missile fired Sunday Korea time was a Hwasong-12 "capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead."

The South Korean, Japanese and U.S. militaries say the missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan. Tokyo says the flight pattern could indicate a new type of missile.

Japanese officials say the missile flew for about 30 minutes, traveling about 800 kilometers (500 miles) and reaching an altitude of 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles).
Another journalist was slain in Mexico on Monday, a government official has confirmed.

The government official in the northern state of Sinaloa says veteran reporter and writer Javier Valdez was killed near the offices of his newspaper, Rio Doce, in the state capital of Culiacan.

Rio Doce confirmed the news of Valdez's killing on its webpage.

Valdez, 54, also worked as a correspondent for the national newspaper La Jornada. He specialized in covering drug trafficking and published several books on the topic.

"The better you do journalism and the more passionate you get, the lonelier you get. One of your contacts [for example], someone who used to be be sympathetic to your work, gets damaged by one of your stories and he withdraws," Valdez said to La Jornada recently.

Valdez's most recent book, "Narcoperiodismo" (Narco-journalism), addresses the challenges of practicing journalism in a region ruled by drug-traffickers. It was publsihed in October.

So far this year five journalists have been murdered in Mexico, one of the world's most dangerous countries for media workers.

Last month, a newspaper in the border city of Juarez closed due to the climate of insecurity and impunity for killings of journalists.

The AP contributed to this report.
The United States asked Russia to be a part of an international effort to address North Koreas nuclear threat, according to a State Department official. Now, reports from South Korea claim Russian President Vladimir Putin told recently inaugurated South Korean President Moon Jae-in that he is ready to play a constructive role in addressing the North Korean threat.

It is unclear what Putin considers constructive and whether that involves coordinating with the United States.

There are a lot of very significant security problems set across the world, all of them would get easier, right, if Russia were to come to the conclusion that it would best advance its interests through cooperating with the United States and others to resolve those conflicts rather than perpetuate them, said H.R. McMaster, the White House national security adviser.

NORTH KOREA THREAT: US MONITORING CLAIM MISSILE COULD CARRY NUCLEAR WARHEAD

Rhetoric between the U.S. and Russia has recently calmed. One month ago, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.

Many of you heard from my trip to Moscow, characterized to President Putin that the relationship between our two nations was the lowest its been since the Cold War, Tillerson said during a May 3 address to State Department employees. He did not disagree. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded in agreement.

State Department officials said Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov now speak about every other week. Last week, Lavrov met President Trump in the Oval office. Presidents Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet this summer at the G-20 Summit in Germany.

Regardless of the more frequent conversations, the U.S. and Russia remain sharply divided on major issues.

Tillerson then said almost no trust exists between the two countries.

Just this past weekend, Putin responded when a North Korea missile landed near Russia. But he was careful not to take sides. He called the missile launch damaging and dangerous, but then said intimidating [North Korea] is unacceptable.

The White House seemed surprised the missile landed so close to Russia. A statement from press secretary Sean Spicer said the president "cannot imagine that Russia is pleased."

WHITE HOUSE: NORTH KOREA HAS BEEN 'FLAGRANT MENACE FOR FAR TOO LONG'

That dialogue was there under the previous administration, said Alina Polyakova, the director of research for Europe and Eurasia at the Atlantic Council, of the Obama administration. I think it failed by all counts to achieve what the administration wanted to achieve at the time: a peaceful settlement in Syria, some progress in the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia is still backing the Assad regime in Syria and denying election meddling in the U.S. and Europe. It also occupies Crimea and continues its presence in Ukraine.

The U.S. positions on these issues also remain unchanged, according to State Department officials. They said they have relayed that to the Russian government. The U.S., meanwhile, has also been more assertive in Syria.

Showing the Russians the respect that they really crave while still implementing what is within U.S. national security policy interests at the end of the day, that might actually lead to a productive outcome at the end that would be better than what weve seen from multiple previous administrations, said Polyakova.
The former Syrian ambassador to the United Kingdom said he has a proposal for how the country could form a stable government after the war ends.

While the country remains at war, some are already trying to figure out what an effective, inclusive and lasting government in Syria would look like. Many more moderate Syrians have said they felt left behind in the peace process and have argued that only extremists have had a place at the negotiating table.

But a political roadmap proposed by Sami Khiyami, the former Syrian ambassador to Britain, aims to address those issues.

SYRIAN REGIME USING CREMATORIUM TO 'COVER UP' MASS MURDERS, STATE DEPARTMENT SAYS

"We wish to have a parliament composed of the best people in this country, distinguished in their career, active and efficient in their work, dignified in their management, generous in their kindness, esteemed among their entourage and patriotic in their aspirations," he told Fox News.

That can only be achieved, Khiyami said, if its a layered process overseen only initially by foreigners  with a push from the United Nations and a UN-sponsored commission.

The UN would nominate 1,000 people who would select a 50-person council, a so-called "Council of the Wise." That council, he said, that would then choose 200 people for a Constituent Assembly. This final group would put in place then a blueprint for free and fair elections for Parliament.

In the period before those elections happen, the Constituent Assembly would designate a Supreme Judicial Council and form a Constitutional High Court.

"In this proposal, we hope to achieve nomination (with legitimation) of the best available persons to represent the nation, he said. By 'best,' we do not mean the richest or the most prominent. We merely intend to look for the most competent, the most respected and the non-corrupt.

KURDISH FORCES IN SYRIA TO BATTLE ISIS IN RAQQA THIS SUMMER, COMMANDER SAYS

The original 1,000, chosen by the UN commission, should include delegates from all regions of Syria who are intellectual, reputable and have experience in social and humanitarian work.

The conclusion to this multi-layered process, again, he said, is that it removes the Constituent Assembly and, ultimately, the Parliament from foreign influence because it sets in place a mechanism for Syrians themselves to choose those most qualified to run their country.

The nomination, followed by the legitimation, through a national referendum, of a Constituent Assembly, will enable the majority of Syrians to design themselves their future, away from pretentious usurpers who claim to represent the people under the labels regime, opposition, and various regional and international parties, Khiyami said.
EXCLUSIVE: For more than a year, a United Nations agency in Geneva has been helping North Korea prepare an international patent application for production of sodium cyanide -- a chemical used to make the nerve gas Tabun -- which has been on a list of materials banned from shipment to that country by the U.N. Security Council since 2006.

The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, has made no mention of the application to the Security Council committee monitoring North Korea sanctions, nor to the U.N. Panel of Experts that reports sanctions violations to the committee, even while concerns about North Korean weapons of mass destruction, and the willingness to use them, have been on a steep upward spiral.

Fox News told both U.N. bodies of the patent application for the first time late last week, after examining the application file on a publicly available WIPO internal website.

Information on the website indicates that North Korea started the international patent process on Nov. 1, 2015 -- about two months before its fourth illegal nuclear test. The most recent document on the website is a status report, dated May 14, 2017 (and replacing a previous status report of May 8), declaring the North Korean applicants fitness to apply for and be granted a patent.

CLICK HERE FOR THE STATUS REPORT

During all that time, however, the U.N.s Panel of Experts on North Korea has no record of any communication from WIPO to the Committee or the Panel regarding such a serious patent application," said Hugh Griffiths, coordinator of the international U.N. expert team, in response to a Fox News question.

The Panel of Experts has now officially opened an investigation into this matter, he said.

This is a disturbing development that should be of great concern to the U.S. administration and to Congress, as well as the U.S. Representative to the U.N., William Newcomb, a member of the U.N. Panel of Experts for nearly three years ending in 2014, told Fox News.

Said an expert familiar with the sanctions regime: It undermines sanctions to have this going on. The U.N. agencies involved should have been much more alert to checking these programs out.

Questions sent last week to the U.S. State Department about WIPOs patent dealings with North Korea had not been answered before this story was published.

For its part, a WIPO spokesperson told Fox News by email, in response to the question of whether it had reported the patent application to the U.N. sanctions committee, only that the organization has strict procedures in place to ensure that it fully complies with all requirements in relation to U.N. Security Council sanction regimes.

The spokesperson added that we communicate with the relevant U.N. oversight committees as necessary.

But apparently, help with preparing international patent applications for a sanctioned nerve gas chemical precursor does not necessarily count as grounds for such communication, if the Panel of Experts records are correct.

This is by no means the first time that WIPO, led by its controversial director general, Francis Gurry, has flabbergasted other parts of the U.N. and most Western nations with its casual and undeclared assistance, with potential WMD implications, to the bellicose and unstable North Korean regime.

And, as before, how the action is judged may depend upon razor-thin, legalistic interpretations of U.N. sanctions law on the one side vs. staggering violations of, at a minimum, common sense in dealing with the unstable North Korean regime, which among other things has never signed the international convention banning the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

While the patent process went on at WIPO, that regime has conducted five illegal nuclear tests -- two in the past year, while the patent process was under way -- and at least ten illegal ballistic missile launches since 2016, while issuing countless threats of mass destruction against its neighbors and the U.S.

In 2012, Fox News reported that WIPO had shipped U.S.-made computers and sophisticated computer servers to North Korea, and also to Iran, without informing sanctions committee officials.

The shipments were ostensibly part of a routine technology upgrade. Neither country could obtain the equipment on the open market, and much of it would have required special export licenses if shipped from the U.S.

The report kicked off an uproar, but after a lengthy investigation, the U.N. sanctions committee decided that the world organizations porous restrictions had not been violated, while also noting WIPOs defense that as an international organization, it was not subject to the rules aimed at its own member states.

Nonetheless, the investigators declared that we simply cannot fathom how WIPO could have convinced itself that most Member States would support the delivery of equipment to countries whose behavior was so egregious it forced the international community to impose embargoes.

The investigators also declared that WIPO, as a U.N. agency, shares the obligation to support the work of other U.N. bodies, including the Sanctions Committees, and that in response to the furor, WIPO had implemented new requirements to check on sanctions compliance in advance of program implementation.

There is no doubt about the banned nature of sodium cyanide -- which can also be used to produce deadly cyanide gas, another weapon of mass destruction.

The chemical appears on a Security Council list of items, materials, equipment, goods and technology related to North Koreas other weapons of mass destruction programs beyond nuclear weapons, which first appeared after U.N. Security Council resolution 1718 was approved in 2006.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LIST

That resolution, voted after North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, ordained that member states prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to the regime known as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, or DPRK, of the listed items which could contribute to DPRKs nuclear-related, ballistic missile-related or other weapons of mass destruction-related programs.

It also declared that all member states shall prevent any transfers to the DPRK by their nationals or from their territories, or from the DPRK by its nationals or from its territory, of technical training, advice, services or assistance related to the provision, manufacture, maintenance or use of the items listed.

Additionally, it demanded a freeze by U.N. member states or all funds, other financial assets and economic resources that could be used in the mass destruction-related programs.

CLICK HERE FOR RESOLUTION 1718

A subsequent Security Council resolution, 2270, in 2016 broadened things by declaring that economic resources referred to in Resolution 1718 includes assets of every kind, whether tangible or intangible, movable or immovable, accrual or potential, which potentially may be used to obtain funds, goods or services by DPRK.

This may open up another controversial aspect of the cyanide patent application, since, along with its mass-destructive uses, the chemical is considered the most common agent in the extraction of gold from ores and concentrates.

Further, according to the North Korean application to WIPO, the new process it wants to make ready for international patenting is a lower-cost process that produces ultra-high-grade product.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PROCESS APPLICATION DESCRIPTION

In WIPOs response to Fox News, the agencys spokesperson emphasized that WIPO is not a patent-granting authority. Its role in handling these applications is to ensure that they conform to the procedural requirements of the 152-member Patent Cooperation Treaty, or PCT, and to publish them in accordance with the provisions of the treaty. North Korea is a PCT signatory.

Translation: WIPO is merely a neutral, technical pass-through mechanism. As the spokesperson put it: The decisions concerning whether or not to ultimately grant the patent are the sole purview of each jurisdiction where protection is being sought, in accordance with national law.

While that may be true, it is also true, according to the WIPO website, that the U.N. agency gives those who use its services a lot of financially meaningful help.

That starts with the fact that by filing an international filing application with the agency, you have to pay only one fee rather than more than 150 to get an application acceptable in all PCT countries (which include the U.S. as one of the treatys biggest users).

WIPO also provides one-stop research on whether a patent overlaps with those elsewhere, and offers the possibility of widespread dissemination and publicity -- i.e., stimulating demand, and thus at least the potential for sanctions-breaking in any subsequent licensing the North Korean patent.

Igniting controversy has been a characteristic of Director General Gurrys reign -- indeed, even before he first took WIPOs top executive office in 2008.

In 2015, the U.N.s watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) was asked by WIPOs own General Assembly chair to investigate Gurry for allegedly ordering, in 2008, break-ins of the offices of staffers to seek DNA evidence that they wrote anonymous letters against him. Gurry was WIPOs No. 2 at the time.

A year later, after much byzantine maneuvering, a heavily redacted version of the report declared that while there were indications that Mr. Gurry had a direct interest in the outcome of the DNA analysis, there is no evidence that he was involved in the taking of DNA samples.

But the same document also found that Gurry had bent the organizations rules and steered a sensitive cyber-security contract to a business acquaintance, , something alleged by one of Gurrys former top deputies, James Pooley.

Under Gurry, WIPO also has been the only U.N. agency ever sanctioned by the U.S. State Department, on the grounds that it failed to adopt best practices in ethics and whistle-blower standards -- a punishment first meted out by the pro-U.N. Obama administration in September 2015.

Among the whistle-blowers who say they were forced to leave WIPO during Gurrys tenure for drawing attention to the agencys previous computer shipments to North Korea is Miranda Brown, formerly Gurrys senior strategic advisor.

Brown has repeatedly asked for her reinstatement at the WIPO, and just as often has been turned down by Gurrys office.

George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter: @GeorgeRussell or on Facebook.com/GeorgeRussell
Hilldrup announced that Robert J. McKillips has been hired as vice president of global business development. McKillips is a 25-year veteran of the relocation and moving & storage industry.

Wegmans will highlight some of its summer recipes and recognize its scholarship winners with a cake celebration from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

The Virginia Trucking Association presented its 2017 Safety Awards on April 25 during its Annual VTA Safety and Human Resources Conference. Hilldrup of Stafford County won an award for the lowest 2016 Virginia accident frequency rate in their class. An award for percentage improvement in accident frequency over the previous contest year also went to Hilldrup. Awards for improved safety record over the previous year were presented to Hilldrup and Interstate Van Lines, Inc. of Gordonsville.

eXp Realty, a national, agent-owned, cloud-based brokerage, has chosen Stafford realtor Rebecca Straley to sit on the companys new National Agent Advisory Council.

A workshop called How to Get Started on Social Media Marketing Strategy will be held Tuesday, May 30 from 9 to 11:30 a.m. by the University of Mary Washington Center for Economic Development. The workshop is designed for small business owners who are not using social media to market their businesses and those who are not using social media effectively. Fee is $30. Call 540/654-1383 to register and for more information.

The Thrasher Group Inc., of Fredericksburg, was ranked No. 361 on the Engineering News-Record Top 500 Design Firm list. This is the fifth consecutive year that Thrasher has made the cut.

Neibauer Dental CareFalmouth provided free dental services to 74 Fredericksburg-area residents on May 6 as part of Free Dentistry Day. The practice provided over $27,400 worth of dentistry, including cleanings, fillings and extractions.

A Women in Business Leadership networking luncheon will be held June 13 at 11:30 a.m. at Fujiya House. Contact Shambi McGill at smcgill@fandr.com for registration details. This month, the topic is The New Age of Learning, about ways to access continuing education for free.

An event called Its About Your Image will be held May 24 from 2 to 7 p.m. at Catalyst Media Center, 3451 Jefferson Davis Highway, to offer updated head shots, which are often costly, for professionals. Scott Livingston of Movement Mortgage has partnered with Lynn DeSena of STA Title & Escrow; Pam Kuper, Realtor at Century 21 New Millennium; Cheryl Yancey, owner of Beauty & Logic Designs; Bryce Kinsey, owner of Catalyst Media Center; and Tiffany Baird, of Images by Tiffany for the second annual event. To reserve your spot, email Lynn DeSena at LdeSena@statitle.com.

Lindley Estes
The League of Women Voters of the Fredericksburg Area will hold its annual meeting at 7 p.m. Monday at Fredericksburg Baptist Church, 1019 Princess Anne St.

Brian Cannon, executive director of OneVirginia2021, a nonpartisan group working to end gerrymandering of lawmakers districts, will speak. The state nonprofit aims to curtail the practice of deliberately manipulating legislative district boundaries.

A short film, gerry-RIGGED, will be shown; it illustrates how state legislators draw lines to protect their own seats and reduce competition in elections.

The public is invited to attend, and learn about other issues of concern to the league. See lwvfra.org.
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Morrisons has agreed a new three-year contract starting in March 2018 that will mean all its own-brand liquid milk is provided by Arla Foods.

In a statement, Morrisons said it was looking forward to working more closely with their farmers on a range of sustainability and animal welfare measures.

As part of this deal, Morrisons said it would be committing to further enhance its regional and local milk offering.

See also: Model dairy finds outlook better but cashflow a challenge

Steve Newbould, Morrisons head of trading  dairy, said: We believe this agreement will be simpler for our business and will help to develop a sustainable dairy sector.

An Arla spokesman said: This is very welcome news and we are delighted by Morrisons continued support for Arla and our farmer owners.

We look forward to an exciting long-term relationship with Morrisons collaborating further on a number of initiatives that will further champion British dairy.

Arthur Fearnall, Arla farmer owner and chair of the Arla/Morrisons Farmer Group, added: I believe that our farmer-owned principles played a crucial role in the outcome of this decision.

Im looking forward to representing our owners in what I believe will be a significant partnership going forward.

Currently, both Arla and Muller Wiseman Dairies supply Morrisons with its own brand milk. Arla supplies the majority of Morrisons own brand milk.

Muller loses contract

However, the announcement means Muller Wiseman will lose its contract to supply own brand milk to Morrisons.

A spokesman for Muller Wiseman said: Morrisons remains an important and valued customer for whom we continue to provide a range of Muller branded and private label dairy products including Frijj flavoured milk and our range of yogurts and chilled desserts, to support their dairy category offering to consumers.

A spokesman for Morrisons said he could not release details of the volume or value of the deal with Arla because of commercial sensitivities.
Grass silage is one of the most valuable resources in dairy and livestock systems but mistakes commonly made at each stage can result in spoilage and poor intakes.

Debbie James met David Nelson and Peter Smith of Volac on a dairy farm in Wales to discuss eight pitfalls and how to avoid them.

1. Cutting the grass too low

There is a temptation to adjust the mower to its lowest setting to harvest the maximum possible crop but do this and you risk making silage unpalatable.

See also: 10 ways to avoid injury when filling silage clamps

Cut too low, particularly in reseeds, and there is the danger of soil contamination and this will have a detrimental impact on fermentation in the clamp.

Introduce soil into the clamp and you will bring in clostridia. This will produce butric acid and silage will be unpalatable, says Mr Nelson.

Everyone is keen to cut low because it gives more tonnes of silage but in fact the lowest part of the plant has the least nutrient value.

He recommends a cutting height no lower than 4-5cm (1.5-2 inches) from the base of the plant and cutting higher when conditions are wetter than ideal.

Leaving one tiller will accelerate photosynthesis and lead to quicker regrowth.

2. Mowing with blunt blades

Mow with blunt blades and you will not only bruise the plant but machines will be fuel inefficient.

Keep blades sharp or they wont cut cleanly and the cut will be longer, says Mr Nelson.

He recommends a chop length of 100mm for grass with a dry matter of 20%, 25-50mm at 20-30% DM and 15-25mm at a DM above 30%.

3. Leaving grass to wilt for too long

Grass will start to spoil within three hours of being cut.

Conversely, when it is not spread quickly enough, the wilting process will be slower.

On a good sunny day, moisture loss will be about 1% an hour but that will be higher if the grass is tedded. The longer grass is left to wilt, the more sugar and protein will be lost from the crop.

The faster we can wilt silage, the more nutrients it will retain because we are preventing enzymes that break down protein and we are also stopping the plant from respiring and using its sugars, says Mr Smith.

Grass needs to be spread around to help with wilting and spreading it around quickly will accelerate that process. Mr Nelson recommends cutting, tedding, rowing and clamping grass within a 24-hour period and targeting a DM of 38-32%.

Cutting in smaller blocks makes these targets easier to achieve.

If you cut 200 acres [80ha] of silage in one go the logistics of spreading that grass once or twice is a challenge. A 100-acre block [40ha] is manageable, you can get that mown, tedded and clamped within 24 hours, says Mr Smith.

4. Overfilling trailers

Grass that spills from the trailer is wasted feed.

Small spillages may not seem relevant when there are many tonnes of silage being harvested but it is grass that neednt be wasted.

The grass that falls on to the floor is tonnage you have paid for, says Mr Nelson.

Dont try to squeeze every blade of grass into the trailer, pay attention to the levels as the trailer reaches capacity.

5. Skimping on side sheets

Cost, time and effort are reasons why some farmers dont line the sides of clamps but this is false economy.

This investment in plastic and labour will be repaid several times over because it will stop air ingress.

By using side sheets you will stop air getting into the silage from the sides or shoulders of the clamp, says Mr Smith.

Side sheets should be at least 1.5 metres higher than the height of the clamp walls so that they can be pulled over the top of the pit to give a good seal.

6. Layering silage too quickly in the clamp

The pressure on the person operating the buckrake can be intense when there is little or no gap between trailers tipping their load.

This leaves little time to consolidate the layers of grass but this impacts on clamp density and trapped air will spoil the silage.

Slow the process down, after all you are paying the bill and the aim of every contractor should be to make the best possible silage for their customers, says Mr Nelson.

Thin layers, no deeper than 15cm, will achieve a target density of 250kg/cu m of DM.

If you can push your finger into the face of the silage it isnt sufficiently compacted.

It doesnt matter how heavy the machine is, you cant consolidate more than 15cm, insists Mr Nelson.

If there is air in the clamp, fermentation will be slower and you will create the ideal environment for yeast and mould to grow. This will mean a loss of nutrients and make silage less palatable so intakes will be lower.

7. Overfilling the clamp

A bumper harvest is welcome but attempt to squeeze all that grass into one clamp and you will reduce density by 10%.

If the clamp is too full to seal properly, air will get in and that means more wastage.

Creating a separate heap of excess for the first few feeds is a measure that some farmers use.

If a clamp is too steep it wont pack down. Gravity is your friend, says Mr Nelson. Keep the clamp as flat as possible.

8. Incorrectly calibrating the additive applicator

An applicator set at the wrong calibration will either use too much product and waste money or too little and silage wont reap the full benefits of the additive.

The applicator should be in good working order, clean and correctly calibrated so that the additive is applied in the correct volume recommended for that applicator.

Use a proven product for optimum fermentation, advises Mr Nelson.

Use a product that has been selected to provide homofermentative lactic acid bacteria to reduce dry matter loss and improve animal performance.
Story Highlights 64% of Americans say same-sex marriage should be legal

For the first time, majority of Protestants support gay marriage

Support for same-sex relations has also climbed, now at 72%

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults say same-sex marriages should be recognized by the law as valid. Although not meaningfully different from the 61% last year, this is the highest percentage to date and continues the generally steady rise since Gallup's trend began in 1996.

The latest update, from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll conducted May 3-7, comes nearly two years after the Supreme Court ruled that states could not prohibit same-sex marriage.

Since then, debates about same-sex marriage have faded somewhat from public discourse as LGBT rights advocates have focused on other issues, such as transgender bathroom access. But despite the 2015 ruling from the nation's highest court, legal and legislative attempts to protect or challenge same-sex marriage rights continue to bubble up in some states.

Americans' support for same-sex marriage has more than doubled since Gallup first polled on the issue in 1996, when 27% said it should be recognized as valid by the law. In 2004 -- weeks before gay weddings took place in Massachusetts after it became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage -- less than half of Americans (42%) felt such unions should be legally valid. Majority support for gay marriage would not come until May 2011, about a month before New York became the sixth state to legalize it. Since then, support for legal same-sex marriage has steadily climbed, with consistent majorities in favor of it since late 2012.

Support for Gay Marriage Grows Among Independents, Republicans

Over the past two decades, Democrats have almost always been the political group most likely to say gay marriages should be legally recognized. Among Americans who identify as Democrats, support first reached the majority level in 2004, as the issue was heavily politicized in that year's presidential election.

Majority support for gay marriage among political independents followed a few years later, in 2007. The latest poll finds that more than seven in 10 independents (71%) and Democrats (74%) support same-sex marriage.

In recent decades, many GOP leaders adamantly opposed gay marriage, but rank-and-file Republicans' support has nearly tripled since 1996. The current 47% of Republicans favoring it, although not at the majority level, is the highest for this group in the more than two-decade trend.

Majority of Protestants Support Gay Marriage for the First Time in Trend

U.S. Protestants, including all non-Catholic Christians, are now about twice as likely to support gay marriage as they were in 1996 (55% vs. 27%). In recent years, some Protestant churches have moved toward supporting same-sex unions; however, this year's poll is the first time Protestant support has reached the majority level.

Meanwhile, a majority of U.S. Catholics have consistently supported same-sex marriage since 2011, which is at odds with the Roman Catholic Church's official position opposing same-sex marriage.

Nearly Three in Four Say Same-Sex Relations Should Be Legal

Americans have consistently been more likely to say that same-sex relations should be legal than to say that gay marriage should be legally valid, suggesting that the marriage question pushes a moral, religious or cultural boundary for some people that gay relationships do not.

When Gallup first polled on the legality of same-sex relations in 1977, 43% said they should be legal. Majority support for legal same-sex relations was first recorded in 2001, at 54% -- two years before the Supreme Court would strike down state laws that banned same-sex sexual activity. Since then, support for same-sex relations has grown, with 72% currently saying they should be legal.

Bottom Line

Though the Supreme Court has settled the legality of same-sex marriage, a third of Americans are opposed to it.

But support for gay marriage has gradually increased over the past two decades, reaching majority support with new groups, as it did with senior citizens in 2016 and Protestants this year. Republicans' support for gay marriage is also at a new high and could trend toward majority support in the near future.

Historical data are available in Gallup Analytics.
Story Highlights 24% believe Bible is literal word of God, the lowest in Gallup's 40-year trend

View of Bible as secular stories and history at 26%, up from 21% in 2014

The largest segment, 47%, still think Bible is inspired word of God

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fewer than one in four Americans (24%) now believe the Bible is "the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word," similar to the 26% who view it as "a book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man." This is the first time in Gallup's four-decade trend that biblical literalism has not surpassed biblical skepticism. Meanwhile, about half of Americans -- a proportion largely unchanged over the years -- fall in the middle, saying the Bible is the inspired word of God but that not all of it should be taken literally.

From the mid-1970s through 1984, close to 40% of Americans considered the Bible the literal word of God, but this has been declining ever since, along with a shrinking percentage of self-identified Christians in the U.S. Meanwhile, the percentage defining the Bible as mere stories has doubled, with much of that change occurring in the past three years.

Still, while biblical literalism has waned, the vast majority of Americans -- 71% -- continue to view the Bible as a holy document, believing it is at least God-inspired if not God's own words.

The latest results are based on Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 3-7.

Literalists Still Outnumber Skeptics Among Certain Groups

Although biblical literalism now ties with biblical skepticism nationally, these views vary somewhat across different segments of the U.S. population.

Nonwhites, adults aged 50 and older, and adults with no college education all lean toward believing the Bible is the actual word of God rather than stories and history recorded by man.

Men, whites, adults aged 18 to 29 as well as those aged 30 to 49, and college graduates lean in the other direction, with more being skeptics than literalists. Still, in all of these groups, the largest segment takes the middle position, believing the Bible reflects the inspired word of God.

Naturally, there are also strong differences in Americans' perspectives on the Bible by religious preference. As a whole, more Christians take the Bible literally than say it is a book of stories and history recorded by man. However, within the broad group of Christians, Protestants (including those who generically refer to themselves as "Christian") lean toward the literalist view, while Catholics divide evenly between seeing the Bible as the literal word of God and saying it is a book of stories. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those with no religious affiliation fall into the skeptics' camp.

Americans' Views of the Bible -- 2017 Views by Key Subgroups Which of the following statements comes closest to describing your views about the Bible -- the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word, the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, or the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man? Actual word of God Inspired word of God Ancient book of fables % % % U.S. adults 24 47 26 Men 23 46 30 Women 26 48 24 Whites 22 48 28 Nonwhites 29 46 23 18 to 29 12 54 30 30 to 49 24 40 33 50 to 64 31 49 19 65+ 27 49 22 College graduate 13 50 36 Some college 27 44 26 No college 31 47 19 Total Christian 30 54 14 Protestant/Other Christian 35 51 12 Catholic 21 58 19 No religion 7 21 68 Religion very important 41 50 7 Religion fairly important 13 66 17 Religion not important 2 20 76 Gallup, May 3-7, 2017

Notably, in 1976, some of the same groups -- older Americans and Protestants, along with women, were more inclined than their counterparts toward biblical literalism. Since then, this belief has fallen by double digits among every group, but it is down the most on a proportional basis among young adults -- falling by more than half, from 32% to 12%.

Americans' Belief in Biblical Literalism % The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word 1976 2017 % % U.S. adults 38 24 Men 33 23 Women 41 26 18 to 29 32 12 30 to 49 34 24 50+ 45 29 Protestant/Other Christian 46 35 Catholic 31 21 None n/a 7 Gallup

Bottom Line

Over the past three decades, Americans' view of the Bible as the literal word of God has been declining, while their view that the Bible is a collection of fables, myths and history recorded by man has been increasing. The shift is most pronounced among young adults, indicating the trend is likely to accelerate in the years ahead.

Americans in all age groups still largely accept the Bible as a holy document, but most of these downplay God's direct role in it. That could mean people are more willing than in the past to believe it is open to interpretation -- if man, not God, wrote the Bible, more can be questioned. And that, in turn, may have consequences for where Americans come down on a number of morally tinged issues. The country may already be seeing this in growing public acceptance of a variety of behaviors that were once largely frowned on from a Christian perspective -- ranging from gay marriage and premarital sex to out-of-wedlock births and physician-assisted suicide.

Historical data are available in Gallup Analytics.
You can bet online at Xpressbet.com from Oregon and Washington but must provide your social security number and pay taxes on winnings over $600. International online racebooks also accept customers from both states without the need to provide a social security number. They also will not provide yearly winning documentation to the US Government but instead leave that up to the individual customers. Some international websites do restrict Washington State residents from gambling on their respective websites due to more aggressive state laws targeting actual gamblers. SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE

Licensed horse racing and mutuel wagering is legal in Oregon as is off-track mutuel wagering.

There are two horse racing tracks in Oregon: Portland Meadows and Grants Pass Downs.

Emeralds Downs in Washington will be hosting a Preakness Stakes viewing party.

GATES OPEN: 30 minutes prior to first simulcast race | FIRST RACE: 2:00 PM

The second leg of the Triple Crown will be played out from Pimlico Racecourse.

Preakness Pancakes will be served on track level in the morning hours.

The afternoons feature race is the 6-furlong $50,000 Hastings Stakes for fillies and mares, 3-year-olds and up.

Americas Bookie Racebook vs. TwinSpires

AMERICAS BOOKIE TWINSPIRES.COM Up to $1000 Signup Bonus $100 Signup Bonus Does Not Require Social Security # Must Provide Social Security # Does Not Report to the IRS Reports Tax Info to Government Offers Betting on Hundreds More Events Limited to Horse Betting Betting on Over 50 Race Tracks Betting on Over 50 Race Tracks 50 Percent Online Casino Cash Back No Online Casino

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- Ean Lamb, Gambling911.com
Google I/O 2017 When And What Stuff To Look Forward To

The three-day affair known as Google I/O is the biggest event held by the search engine company annually. The entire duration of the event is full of developer workshops, keynote presentations, and product announcements. Google I/O 2017 will be held at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California and will start on May 17 at 10 a.m. PT. For those who won't be able to attend, several sources have compiled tips on how to watch and what to expect from the event.

How and where to watch Google I/O

According to Digital Trends, there will be several tech websites that will have updated coverage on the important presentations during the Google I/O 2017. For those who prefer to stream live video from the show floor, users can visit the event's official website. Others can also turn to YouTube and catch the live-stream from Google's Developers channel.

Android O

Smartphone consumers already expect Google I/O 2017 to be the venue where the company will showcase their latest Android OS. Last March, Google already shared a developer preview of Android O. Some of the notable features expected from the latest OS is its revamped notification system, Bluetooth audio capabilities, and improved battery life management.

A successor to Google Home

Several speculations have noted that consumers might see a new version of the Google Home unveiled during Google I/O 2017. Rumors have suggested that the company might introduce something to rival Amazon's Echo Show the might include mesh Wi-Fi networking.

Google Assistant

Launched back in 2016, the company's virtual assistant is expected to showcase new features this year. Some reports claim the Google I/O 2017 event might flaunt new service integrations with the system. Last April, an update was pushed that allowed Google Assistant to control smart home devices.

Android TV

Android Headlines also reports that consumers might have little to expect from Google I/O 2017 for the Android TV. The platform was initially introduced during one of the Google's events but it seems that there is not much to expect in terms of innovation for this year.

These are just a few of the notable topics that might get the spotlight during the Google I/O 2017 event but expect more surprises from Google. Stuff like Project Tango and Daydream will most likely be highlighted and an update to Android Auto might also be available.
Physician

joins Samaritan

Samaritan Infectious Disease recently welcomed Adam Brady to its staff.

Brady earned a bachelors degree in microbiology at Oregon State University and a medical degree at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He completed residency training and an internship at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a fellowship in infectious disease at Oregon Health & Science University.

Brady specialized in infectious disease because he is interested in the interactions between microorganisms and people.

In his practice, he values spending time with his patients.

Further information is available at 541-768-5810.

Corvallis artist

receives grant

In the first two of three rounds of Fiscal Year 2017 Career Opportunity Grants, the Oregon Arts Commission, The Ford Family Foundation and The Oregon Community Foundation collectively awarded $111,146 to 44 artists for career development projects.

The awards, made in February, include $52,496 from the Oregon Arts Commission; $40,300 in supplemental funding for seven artists through a partnership with The Ford Family Foundation; and $18,350 from The Oregon Community Foundation. Individual grants range from $535 to $9,000.

An FY17 Round Two Career Opportunity Grant of $1,015 was awarded to Ken Eklund of Corvallis by the Arts Commission. The grant will support Eklunds one-month arts and science residency at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California, to collaboratively work on a game to make climate change and the Anthropocene visible and touchable.

Pacific Power

names manager

Celeste Krueger is the new Pacific Power Regional business manager for Corvallis, Albany and several other communities in Linn and Benton counties.

Kruegers most recent position was with Portland State University as the director of undergraduate recruitment and communications. She advocated for higher education and concentrated on improving community relationships.

She will leverage her experiences in communications, project management and community development as she maintains the companys relationships in the communities and manages the accounts of Pacific Powers commercial and industrial customers.

Besides Corvallis and Albany, she also will work with the communities of Coburg, Dallas, Eugene, Falls City, Grand Ronde, Halsey, Harrisburg, Independence, Millersburg, Monmouth, Monroe, Philomath, Rickreall, Shedd and Tangent.

Alan Meyer, a regional business manager based in Stayton, will now work with some additional communities in Linn, Benton and Marion counties: Brownsville, Cascadia, Crabtree, Crawfordsville, Foster, Gates, Jefferson, Lebanon, Lyons, Marion, Mehama, Mill City, Salem, Scio, Stayton, Sublimity, Sweet Home, Turner and Waterloo.

Originally from Lodi, California, she graduated from Concordia University with a bachelors degree in education and a masters degree in business administration.

Math professor

earns award

Mary Beisiegel, an assistant professor of mathematics at Oregon State University, has received the 2017 Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College or University Mathematics Faculty Member from the Mathematical Association of America.

The award recognizes her excellence in teaching mathematics, which is shown to have influence beyond her own classroom. The Alder Award recognizes Beisiegels contributions that characterize her as a superb teacher of mathematics who seamlessly blends small group work, short lectures, large group discussions, Socratic lectures and student work at the board to convey as much mathematics as she can to as many students as possible.

Beisiegel is an affiliated faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a Research Fellow (2010-12) at Harvard, she assisted in a national study of elementary mathematics teaching with 300 teachers, and explored methods to improve teachers mathematical quality of instruction. Last year she was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to work on curriculum renewal in lower-division mathematics courses.

Insurance

group recognized

Western National Insurance Group recently announced that Corvallis-based Hanson Insurance Group has been named one of Western Nationals Circle of Excellence Agencies for 2017.

The recognition is annually announced to spotlight partners who have excelled based on performance and growth over the previous six years. An agency also must demonstrate that it meets high standards of professional excellence and integrity. The recognition places Hanson Insurance Group in the 95th percentile of all Western National partners for overall performance, growth and partnership over the past six years.
Fire department frees trapped boy : 11-year-old run over by car

Bad Godesberg In an accident on Saturday, a motorist failed to see a child riding his bicycle, running him over. Fire department workers had to free the trapped boy and he was taken to hospital with serious injuries.

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A child was seriously injured on Saturday afternoon in an accident on the B9 at Koblenzer Strae in Bad Godesberg. According to police, the victim was an eleven-year-old boy who had been riding a bicycle on Koblenzer Strae towards Bad Godesberg.

A 57-year-old driver had tried to make a turn from a private property on the opposite side of the road onto the B9 at around 2:30 pm, and did not see the child. The accident happened near the area where a fast food restaurant is located.

The child was trapped under the vehicle of the 57-year-old and had to be freed by the Bonn Fire Department. Police reported that the boy was wearing a helmet and he was able to communicate with them. An ambulance rushed him to a hospital after he was freed. According to initial reports, his condition was not life-threatening.

Because of the rescue operation and subsequent police investigative procedures, the B9 was closed off completely in the direction towards Mehlem. Traffic backed up in the Bad Godesberg tunnel as a result. At around 3:20 pm, traffic conditions returned to normal. Collateral damages were estimated at 600 euros.
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.
A blog about life under, and resisting, a dictatorship
Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, has described President Muhammadu Buhari as the only medicine the country needs to overcome challenges precipitated by corruption.

Ortom, who stated this while speaking to senior journalists in Abuja, said that the president is the only one who has courageously confronted corruption while past leaders merely celebrated graft as part of governance.

Quote

"Buhari remains the medicine for Nigeria. Despite his age, he is willing to add value, instil discipline and wipe away corruption in Nigeria. Before him, nobody was bold enough to confront corruption. It is good for Nigerians to pray for him. For us in Benue we have declared three days fast for Buhari for his quick recovery so that he can come back to work for us. We have no business with poverty in Nigeria but indiscipline and corruption have combined to keep us down. We need Buhari to take us to the Promised Land," Ortom said.

Commenting on the anti-grazing bill, which the Benue State House of Assembly recently passed into law, the governor explained that it was meant to end the incessant violent confrontations between farmers and herdsmen in the state and create wealth for all.

Quote

"We in Benue State have a job to do and we will certainly do it. The anti-grazing bill does not say herdsmen should use gun and kill people. We are not sending any herdsmen away from Benue but they must ranch their cattle under the law.

Quote

The ranching bill is meant to protect both the farmer and the herdsman. I challenge anyone against the bill to give me a better alternative to the current challenge we have on our hands. I like superior arguments and if there is any on the matter, I would quickly adjust, he said. The governor accused the most wanted militia in the state, Terwase Akwaza, aka Gana, as an agent of the Boko Haram terrorists working to bring down the state, after killing his Special Adviser on Security, Denen Igbana. Ortom said, Gana is linked with Boko Haram terrorists to destroy and maim people in Benue. He initially accepted our amnesty and pleaded with us to allow him to bring in other members of his deadly gang under his control.

Quote

He surrendered 87 guns that day and extended his amnesty for another one month. To rehabilitate the boys, we gave him contract to do for the state. But he wasnt sincere as he went back into crimes.



He killed my SA in charge of Security and since having been fingered for heinous crimes and being declared wanted by the Police headquarters in Abuja, he has been fighting us using his large followership. Only a God is helping us. If we had not identified this man as a terrorist, he would have overrun us.
Vodafone's M-Pesa partners UHBVN News oi -Priyanka M-Pesa is Vodafone's mobile wallet service launched in 2007 which facilitates money transfer service.

Vodafone's M- Pesa wallet has signed a partnership agreement with the Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam(UHBVN).

Through this partnership, customers can access Vodafone M-Pesa platform to pay their electricity bills.

Inviting the residents of Haryana to reap the benefit of instant electricity bill payment on the go through Vodafone M-Pesa, Mohit Narru, Business Head - Haryana Circle, Vodafone India said: "It has been our constant endeavor to deliver and bring innovative and simplified service offerings relevant to the needs of our customers."

He said, "Vodafone M-Pesa partnership with the UHBVN, is one such initiative that bridges the need for a simple, timely and cashless payment solution for consumers through their mobile phones."

"Customers can access M-Pesa on either a smartphone by downloading the M-Pesa App or by dialing a USSD short-code (*400#) from any phone including any feature phone," the company said in the statement, Adding that with this tie up, over 21.27 lakh millions of electrified households will benefit from this facility.

BSNL launches new plan "Ananya"

M-Pesa is Vodafone's mobile wallet service launched in 2007 which facilitates money transfer service.

The company says that it has more than 5000+ outlets (or Cashin Points) including Vodafone Company owned stores, franchisees, and multi-brand outlet and these Cashin Points provides convenience and ease to customers to convert cash into digital money facilitating digital payment of Bills and e-commerce /m-Commerce.

To recall the company has recently Home Credit India and through this partnership, the customers of Home Credit will now be able to pay their monthly EMI through Vodafone M-Pesa

Home Credit customers will also get access to simple, easy-to-use and safe option for cashless loan repayments on Vodafone M-Pesa.

Best Mobiles in India

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5G may soon take over 4G technology; Kathrein opens RCE centre in India News oi -Shilpa 5G may soon wipe off the history created by 4G.

A leading international specialist for reliable, high-quality communication technologies, Kathrein is now expanding their activity in the Asia-Pacific region by opening a new regional customer experience centre in Bengaluru.

Regarding their new location setup, Anton Kathrein, CEO of the Kathrein Group says, "The location in Bengaluru is very important for our future growth in the significant APAC region. At the new premises, we are showcasing our unique technology competence and our full range of specialist solutions and services."

This new centre also offers the opportunity to talk about the trends and future topics such as 5G and autonomous driving with customers. When Gizbot asked about upcoming 5G technologies, Ashwini Bakshi, who steers Kathrein's regional business from Singapore says, "Indeed we are already prepared. We are working on field proven operation tested 5G technologies."

He adds,"Once the standardization is complete, once the spectrum is available, the deployments can begin. So, it may take just two to three years for this technology to come into limelight."

Also Read: 5G Networks Explained: How is it better than 4G



But they say to deploy this technology, they may have to face some challenges which are largely concentrated around the spectrum. Other than spectrum, the challenge to be addressed is site availability such as where to deploy it since it requires new and more infrastructure.

Other problem is power and also the quality of the power availability. Man power being the another issue to be faced, but the company says Gizbot that they don't have to face such problems in the Indian market. According to the company, 'Affordability, availability, accessibility' are the three important equations for technology adoptions in India.

Also Read: ZTE brings its 5G innovations to Indian telecom partners



The company says that the Indian government is encouraging mobility, faster networks, and the next generation infrastructure which help the country in economic growth. Now, it is our turn to wait and see how this new technology will wipe off the history created by its predecessor 4G.

Best Mobiles in India
Upcoming Samsung smartphones to be launch in 2017 Features oi -Harish Kumar We can expect these Samsung smartphones to be launched soon in India.

Smartphones are undoubtedly the most widely selling technological products in the Indian market. And after the Reliance Jio 4G invasion, the 4G VoLTE handsets are selling like hot cakes.

That said, India has recorded huge shipments from smartphone manufacturers around the globe to meet the demands of consumers.

While Chinese brands are selling Android devices in every price category, the well-known names in the Industry, such as Sony, HTC, Motorola, etc. are also known for offering quality smartphones at pocket friendly prices in offline and online markets.

SEE ALSO: Best, recently launched budget smartphones under Rs 10,000

That said, one such brand is Samsung, which needs no introduction when it comes to smartphones. The Korean tech giant has been selling smartphones for more than a decade in India and is now a household name.

Today we are going to give you all the information about the Samsung's upcoming smartphones to buy in India. Check out the list below.

Samsung Galaxy J7 (2017) Rumoured Key Specs 5.5-inch (1280 720 pixels) HD 2.5D curved glass display

1.6GHz Octa-Core Exynos 7870 processor with Mali T830 GPU

1.4GHz Quad-Core Snapdragon 425 processor with Adreno 308 GPU

2GB RAM

16GB Internal Storage

expandable memory via micro SD card

Android 7.0 (Nougat)

Dual SIM

8MP rear camera with LED flash

5MP front camera

Fingerprint sensor

4G LTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS Samsung Galaxy Note7R Rumoured Key Specs

5.7 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with Corning Gorilla Glass 5

Android 7.1.1 (Nougat)

12 MP Rear Camera

5 MP Front Camera

Octa-core (4x2.3 GHz Mongoose & 4x1.6 GHz Cortex-A53)

64 GB internal memory

4 GB RAM

Non-removable Li-Ion 3200 mAh battery Samsung Galaxy S8 Active Rumoured Key Specs 5.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen

Android 7.0 (Nougat)

Qualcomm MSM8998 Snapdragon 835

Octa-core CPU

64 GB internal Memory

4 GB RAM

12 MP Primary Camera

Non-removable Li-Ion 4000 mAh battery Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro Rumoured Key Specs 5.7 inches Capacitive touchscreen

Android 7.0 (Nougat)

Octa-core (4x2.3 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4x1.7 GHz Cortex-A53)

13 MP rear Camera

13 MP of Front Camera

Non-removable Li-Ion battery Samsung Galaxy J3 (2017) Rumoured Key Specs 5.0 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen

Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow)

Qualcomm MSM8937 Snapdragon 430

Octa-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53

8 MP Rear Camera

5 MP of Front Camera

Removable Li-Ion battery Samsung Galaxy Note8 Rumoured Key Specs a 6.4 inches Super AMOLED 4K 3840 x 2160 pixels display

Android,7.1 Nougat and features

Octa Core 2.9 GHz Cortex-A53 and Quad Core 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57

6/8 GB RAM Snapdragon Qualcomm processor paired

64 GB / 128 GB native storage capacity

a 16MP main snapper

13MP front-facing selfie shooter

Non-removable Li-Ion 4000 mAh Battery Samsung Galaxy J8 Rumoured Key Specs Dual SIM Support(4G+4G) with Dual Standby

NETWORK 4G LTE/3G/2G

Display 5.5 -inch Full HD(19201080) Display with Gorilla Glass 4

Google's Android Nougat 7.0 OS

Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor

3GB RAM

ROM 16GB/32GB

Micro SD card slot up to 128GB

13-MP Rear Camera with Dual- LED flash

5-MP front selfie camera

3500mAh battery Samsung Galaxy S9 Rumoured Key Specs

5.7 inches Super AMOLED (Corning Gorilla Glass 5) 2160 x 3840 pixels display

runs Android,7.1 Nougat

a Octa Core Processor 6GB RAM Qualcomm Snapdragon processor

64 GB / 128 GB native storage capacity

a 16MP main snapper at its rear

8MP front-facing selfie shooter

Non-removable Li-Ion 4200 mAh battery powering Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus Rumoured Key Specs

5.8-inches Screen

Android 7.0. Nougat

4.5GHz Octa-Core

6GB/8GB RAM

31 MP of Rear Camera

12 MP of front Camera

6500mAh Battery

Best Mobiles in India
Apple to invest $200 million in Corning Incorporated News oi -Priyanka Corning's 65-year-old Harrodsburg facility has been integral to the 10-year collaboration between these two innovative companies and will be the focus of Apples investment.

The Cupertino based tech giant Apple has recently announced its plans to invest $200 million in Corning Incorporated as a part of the company's commitment to foster innovation among American manufacturers.

Apple says that "the investment will support Corning's R&D, capital equipment needs and state-of-the-art glass processing. Corning's 65-year-old Harrodsburg facility has been integral to the 10-year collaboration between these two innovative companies and will be the focus of Apple's investment."

Corning is a great example of a supplier that has continued to innovate and they are one of Apple's long-standing suppliers," said Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer.

Williams added that "this partnership started 10 years ago with the very first iPhone, and today every customer that buys an iPhone or iPad anywhere in the world touches glass that was developed in America. We're extremely proud of our collaboration over the years and we are investing further with Corning who has such a rich legacy of innovative manufacturing practices."

Micromax becomes the most used Indian mobile brand: CMR

Apple committed to investing at least $1 billion with the US-based companies as part of the fund, which is designed to foster innovative production and highly skilled jobs that will help lay the foundation for a new era of technology-driven manufacturing in the US.

"Corning's longstanding relationship with Apple has not only led to significant glass innovations that have enabled new capabilities for consumers, it has also helped create nearly 1,000 American jobs and allowed us to continue growing and expanding in the US," said Wendell P. Weeks, Corning's chairman, chief executive officer and president. "This investment will ensure our plant in Harrodsburg remains a global center of excellence for glass technology."

"Since the inception of Gorilla Glass in 2007, the partnership between Apple and Corning has created and sustained nearly 1,000 US jobs across Corning's R&D, manufacturing, and commercial functions, including over 400 in Harrodsburg. Corning has procured enough renewable energy to cover all of its Apple manufacturing in the US," Apple said in a statement.

Best Mobiles in India

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Before and after Lenovos acquisition

Notably, before being acquired by Lenovo, Motorola released the Moto X flagship smartphones, Moto G mid-range smartphones and Moto E budget devices with decent specs. After the acquisition by Lenovo, the company released the Moto Z flagship for modular accessories and skipped the Moto X lineup in 2016. Though the Moto Z was believed to replace Moto X, now the company is prepping to launch the Moto X this year as well.

High-end phones on the cards

This year, it looks like Motorola is all set to launch the Moto Z Play and Moto Z Force with support for modular accessories. While the Z Play is said to arrive with a 5.5-inch display with FHD resolution, the Moto Z Force is said to offer 1GB LTE speed and feature a ShatterShield display. Besides this, the Moto X series will also fall in the high-end market segment with a 5.2-inch FHD 1080p display with 3D glass and a dual-lens rear camera setup termed SmartCam.

Also read: Moto C, Moto C Plus, Moto E4, Moto E4 Power, Moto Z2, Moto Z2 Force specs roundup

More Moto G offerings on the cards

While the Moto G5 and G5 Plus are already released, the company seems to be prepping more mid-range offerings. We say this as the Moto gS and gS+ are also seen in the leaked shot of upcoming smartphones from the manufacturer. The Moto gS is said to arrive with a 5.2-inch FHD display and full metallic chassis while the gS+ is listed to come with a 5.5-inch FHD display and dual-lens rear camera. We can expect these smartphones to be launched in 2018 by Lenovo.

Budget Moto E lineup

Coming to the budget smartphone lineup, the Moto E series is also circulating in the rumors and speculations for the constant leaks about the Moto E and Moto E Plus. The Moto E is believed to have a 5-inch display with 2.5D protection and a fingerprint scanner while the Plus variant might have a 5.5-inch HD display with an enormous 5000mAh battery.

Not to mention the Moto C

The entry-level smartphones are not limited to Moto E alone as the company is rumored to be working on the Moto C and C Plus smartphones as well. The Moto C is said to feature a 5-inch HD display and 4G support while the Plus variant comes with a 5-inch HD display and a 4000mAh battery.
CCI approves Dish TV and d2h merger News oi -Priyanka Dish TV, as per directions of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), has convened shareholders' meeting on May 12 to secure their approval.

The fair trade regulator Competition Commission Of India (CCI) has finally approved the proposed merger of Zee Group's direct direct-to-home (DTH)service arm Dish TV with Videocon Group's DTH arm Videocon d2h.

"DishTV India Limited is pleased to announce receipt of approval of the CCI for the proposed Scheme of Arrangement for amalgamation of Videocon D2h into DishTV

inconsideration for new stock issuance by DishTV to the shareholders of Videocon D2h," DishTV said statement.

The company said the company has already received approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India(SEBI), National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE) and BSE Limited (BSE) for the proposed Scheme of Arrangement.

Dish TV, as per directions of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), has convened shareholders' meeting on May 12 to secure their approval, it added.

Micromax Canvas 2 to get 1 year free 4G service: Bharti Airtel

It has an active subscriber base of 15.5 million while that of Videocon d2h stands at around 12.2 million. The DTH industry as a whole has around 62 million active subscribers.

The merged entity will be renamed as Dish TV Videocon Ltd.

In November, the boards of Dish TV and Videocon d2h had approved the scheme of amalgamation in consideration for new stock issuance by Dish TV to the shareholders of Videocon d2h.

Best Mobiles in India
Micromax becomes the most used Indian mobile brand: CMR News oi -Priyanka The report says that MILK (Micromax-Intex-Lava-Karbonn) brands are the four big Indian brands with their dominance in most of the states.

According to a new report by CMR, homegrown phone brand Micromax becomes most used Indian mobile brand, followed by Lava, Intex.

The data was collected by the cumulative installed base as of March 2017.

The report says that MILK (Micromax-Intex-Lava-Karbonn) brands are the four big Indian brands with their dominance in most of the states.

It added that there are also some traces of localized brands like Celkon and Spice which are strong in states like Andhra Pradesh-Telangana and Rajasthan.

CMR pointed that an in-depth look hints towards consolidation in the handset market. In this scenario, regionally strong brands like Spice and Celkon would be worth evaluation for takeovers.

Rankings have a highly positive correlation with the years of operation. This clearly hints that market development is a function of time and interim measures like online only, etc. don't yield results in the long term, said Faisal Kawoosa, Principal Analyst and GM at CMR.

"The Indian brands must pace to regain, as new entrants are picking up the order fast," he further said.

Idea witnesses a decline of 6.4mn mobile data customers in Q4

Meanwhile, CMR has recently said that Apple iPhone 5S is the No 1 premium Smartphone in India across all the states on the cumulative installations basis as of March 2017 and iPhone 7 is ranked at No 4 in some of the states.

CMR noted that various versions of iPhone fill up the top 5 Premium category Smartphones in the states of Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab, indicating that iPhone is not a metro affair only in India.

From Android stack, Samsung and OnePlus are the only brands that made it to the list of top 5.

It further added that there has been growth in numbers from Oppo and Vivo as well. However, models from these brands are yet to appear in the top 5 on a cumulative basis.

Best Mobiles in India
Hwasong 12 IRBM

On 29 August 2017 the DPRK fired a missile from an area near the capital Pyongyang, passed over the Japanese territory and landed in the Pacific Ocean, after a flight of about 2,500-2,735 km (over 1,700 miles). It was lofted as high as 548-550 km (340 miles). It later broke into three pieces before falling into the Pacific Ocean, according to Japanese media. According to South Korean media reports, South Korea's military saw the missile as the DPRK's newly developed Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, which Pyongyang said in May had been successfully test-fired.

North Korea conducted a successful test of a new two-stage liquid fueled rocket on Sunday 14 May 2017. The missile was said to be capable of flying 4,000, and up to 4,500 kilometers. The North Korean state news agency KCNA said the test was to verify the capability to carry a "large scale heavy nuclear warhead," and the missile flew 787 kilometers, reaching an altitude of 2,111 kilometers. Preliminary assessment by US authorities indicated that North Korea launched a liquid-fuel single-stage KN-17 missile, NBC News reported citing two military officials. But this nomenclature was previously associated with a much smaller shorter range missile.

This was the seventh missile provocation by Pyongyang this year alone, and comes just two weeks after a missile test that South Korean and US officials said failed. South Korea's military confirmed that the North launched a ballistic missile Sunday morning, around 5:30 a.m. Seoul time, from an area near the city of Kusong, about 120 kilometers northwest of the regime's capital. According to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the missile flew some 700 kilometers, and judging by the flight distance, military experts are looking at the launch as a successful one.

Some experts added to the doubts on the effectiveness and development of the Hwaseong-12, as they have pointed to video footage showing how the missile was launched from a stationary system instead of the preferred and more difficult to counter mobile system.

Japanese government officials said that the North launched a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan from near Kusong in the northwestern province of Pyongan-pukdo. They said it is the first time a North Korean missile has reached an altitude of over 2,000 kilometers. According to Japan, the missile reached an altitude of more than 2,000 kilometers in a matter of about 30 minutes before falling into the East Sea in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone, suggesting it was launched at a steep, or "lofted," angle.

The altitude reached by the missile meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it travelled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it could have easily reached a distance of 4,500 kilometers. Guam is 3,400 km from North Korea. The missile could not have reached Alaska, at about 5,700 kilometers, or Hawaii at about 7,000 kilometers. An ICBM has a minimum range of about 5,000 or 6,000 kilometers. The US military's Pacific Command said the type of missile that was fired was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile."

"North Korea's latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile," Washington-based monitoring project, 38 North, said in an analysis. "It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the US base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)," it said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was said to have been at the launch site to oversee the test. He was cited as saying that nuclear weapons capabilities shall not be monopolized by the US and he is sure the day will come for his regime to be able to take corresponding retaliatory measures against the US. The young North Korean leader said the US' mainland and its Pacific theater of command is within its striking range.

Monday's edition of the North's communist party Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried 36 photos of a missile climbing upward and Kim watching the launch. The state-run media outlets quoted Kim Jong Un as saying that the US mainland and Pacific operation region are now within North Korea's striking range.

"The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly-developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead," the North's official KCNA news agency said. "If the US awkwardly attempts to provoke the DPRK, it will not escape from the biggest disaster in history," KCNA quoted Kim as saying. The DPRK leader accused the US of "browbeating" countries that "have no nukes" and warned Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland is in the North's "sighting range for a strike," KCNA reported.

Just days after being elected, South Korean President Moon Jae-in faced his first North Korean provocation, putting an early test to his stated policy to pursue peaceful dialogue with his defiant nuclear neighbor. The South Korean leader expressed solidarity with the United States and Japan. Within an hour from North Korea's missile test, South Korea's new President Moon Jae-in ordered an urgent meeting of top security officials condemning the move and calling it "deeply regrettable" as the provocation came only days after Moon took office calling for dialogue with the North.

The President said the missile launch was a clear violation of the UN Security Council's resolutions and a grave threat to the peace and safety of the international community, let alone the Korean peninsula. President Moon reconfirmed that the new administration has its door open for dialogue with North Korea, but dialogue is possible only when the North changes its attitude. South Korea's commander-in-chief said Seoul must act decisively against Pyongyang's provocations so that it will not miscalculate and make a wrong move calling on his military to be fully prepared for any future provocation by North Korea.

North Korean missile are very un-American. Much as Carl Sagan spoke of UFO sightings as "brief occasions of amazement", the DPRK presents a bewildering richness of design variants that challenge taxanomic simplification. The Western mindset is seeking a small number of discrete prototypes that presage large scale production. This "big iron" archetype is best set aside in favor of a Burt Rutan / Skunk Works metaphor, in which each DRPK rocket is hand made with specifications responding to unique requirements.

North Korea fired at least one projectile off its east coast on 05 January 2022, South Korea's military said. The projectile was fired into the sea east of the Korean peninsula, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. They later added that it was suspected to be a Hwasong-12 variant ballistic missile. Japanese media reported that the suspected ballistic missile landed in the Sea of Japan, outside of Japanese territorial waters. Japan's defense minister, Nobuo Kishi, told reporters that the projectile flew about 500 kilometres (300 miles).

The North Korean state news agency said the missile fired into the sea off the east of the Korean Peninsula was a hypersonic weapon. It's Pyongyang's second reported test of a hypersonic gliding missile to date  after one it claimed in September 2021  and is the first missile launch from North Korea since October 2021. The shape of the Hwasong-8 hypersonic glider launched in September appeared wedge-shaped, different than the conical-shaped glider launched this week. The arrowhead-shaped vehicle with stubby wings resembling a hypersonic glide vehicle" was atop an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) resembling a substantially shortened version of a Hwasong-12 ballistic missile.

State news agency KCNA said the missile carried a "hypersonic gliding warhead" that "precisely hit a target 700 kilometers away", , including a lateral maneuver that took it some 120 kilometers. The test "reconfirmed the flight control and stability of the missile in the active-flight stage and assessed the performance of the new lateral movement technique applied to the detached hypersonic gliding warhead," the agency said.

The test also was said to have verified the reliability of fuel ampoule system under the winter weather conditions. North Korea announced The successive successes in the test launches in the hypersonic missile sector have strategic significance in that they hasten a task for modernizing strategic armed force of the state and help fulfill the most important core task out of the five top priority tasks for the strategic arms sector in the five-year plan.

The South Korean defense ministry played down Pyongyang's claim that it successfully tested a hypersonic missile on Jan. 5, saying that North Korea had instead launched a Maneuverable Reentry Vehicle.

North Korea claimed 11 January 2022 that it had successfully conducted another 'hypersonic missile' test, under the watch of its leader Kim Jong-un. The regime's state-run media KCNA said the missile "precisely hit" a target some one-thousand kilometers away. It said the missile released its rocket booster after 600 kilometers of "glide jump flight" followed by 240 kilometers of "corkscrew maneuvering. It also referred to the latest test-fire as the "ultimate test launch", and said that it confirmed the weapon's outstanding maneuverability.

This shows signs that such missiles could soon be ready to be deployed. Kim Jong-un stressed the regime should further accelerate efforts to steadily build up the country's strategic military power. Kim Jong-un's sister Kim Yo-jong hasn't been reportedly promoted, but she was also seen at the test site.

Unlike ballistic missiles that gain altitude before returning on steep trajectories, hypersonic weapons travel at lower altitudes. Also, hypersonic missiles are seen as a game changer, because they are harder to track and intercept, as they are easier to maneuver and can dodge interceptors. The North did indeed make a so-called "corkscrew maneuver", aimed at evading interception. "Maneuverability is very important for hypersonic missiles. Given the flight trajectory that North Korea reported and the one that the Japanese defense ministry released on Tuesday, we can tell that it did make a spiral maneuver."

The latest launch marks the third reported test of a hypersonic missile, two of which were conducted within a week. The launch was the only test launch that Kim Jong-un attended. The North had first test-fired a hypersonic missile named 'Hwasung-8' in September 2021. It traveled 200 kilometers at around three times the speed of sound.

Following the North's latest launch, South Korea's military had said that according to their initial assessment, the latest missile flew more than 700 kilometers, and its maximum altitude reached up to 60 kilometers. It also said it traveled at a speed of up to ten times the speed of sound, or more than 12-thousand kilometers per hour. At this speed, Seoul can be reached in just one minute, and anywhere in the Korean Peninsula in less than two minutes.

After its release from the missile, the hypersonic glide vehicle made glide jump flight from 600 kilometer before making a 240 kilometer corkscrew maneuver from the initial launch azimuth to the target azimuth, and hit the set target in waters 1,000 kilometers away, the KCNA report said. The test showed the missile's hypersonic speed and high maneuverability it needs to penetrate hostile defenses. But convincing evidence needs to be shown in order for the public to know if the missile can hit its target accurately.

The ROK's JCS referred to the missile tested on 11 January as an "improvement" over the 5 January projectile. South Korean defense officials have compared the two launches. They said the missile that went up last week only reached hypersonic speeds for a portion of the flight. They said the latest one flew further and traveled twice as fast.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson told RFAs Korean Service the test was a violation of multiple U.N. Security Council Resolutions and poses a threat to [North Koreas] neighbors and the international community. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement that although the launch did not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies, the missile launch highlights the destabilizing impact of the DPRKs illicit weapons program.

A UN spokesperson said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was "very concerned" by the North's missile launch, urging the regime to comply with all relevant Security Council resolutions. "As we've said again, we are convinced and believe that diplomatic engagement is the only way to reach a sustainable peace and a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Japan also shared their regret. "North Korea had just recently launched a ballistic missile, and the United Nations Security Council had just held discussions on how to respond to it. Under these circumstances, it is very regrettable that North Korea continues to launch missiles."

Japan's Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo said he is committed to protecting people's lives and maintaining peace while working closely with the relevant countries. He said he will consider all options for Japan, including possessing the ability to strike enemy bases and drastically boosting the nation's defense capabilities.

The reason why North Korea conducts these tests every few days is to complete the development of strategic weapons and nuclear weapons to an irreversible level, Hong Min, director of the North Korea Research Division at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification, told RFA. It seems to be a series of actions in the beginning of the process to make sure that it is a matter of sovereignty at the level of self-defense as the international community continues to raise issues, Hong said.

North Korea conducted its largest missile test since 2017 on 30 January 2022, sending a suspected intermediate-range ballistic missile soaring into space, seen as taking the nuclear-armed country a step closer to resuming long-range testing. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that a projectile believed to be a single ballistic missile was launched about 7:52 a.m. (2252 GMT) toward the ocean off its east coast. It was launched from Mupyong-ri, Jagang province, flew a distance of 800km, and reached a maximum altitude of 2000km in a lofted, high-angle trajectory. The maximum speed was estimated a around Mach 16 (after boost phase), and generally seemed to have specifications analogous to the Hwasong-12.

The inspection firing test was conducted for the purpose of selectively inspecting the ground-to-ground mid-range long-range ballistic missile Hwasong-12 and verifying the overall accuracy of this weapon system, KCNA said. KCNA said the missile launch was conducted in a way to ensure the safety of neighboring countries, and that the test warhead was fitted with a camera that took photos while it was in space.

South Korea's National Security Council (NSC), which convened a rare emergency meeting presided over by President Moon Jae-in, said the test appeared to involve an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which North Korea has not tested since 2017. The launch takes North Korea a step closer to fully scrapping a self-imposed moratorium on testing its longest-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), Moon said. He noted that this month's flurry of missile tests was reminiscent of the heightened tensions in 2017, when North Korea conducted multiple nuclear tests and launched its largest missiles, including some that flew over Japan.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said he is no longer bound by that moratorium, which included a stop to nuclear weapons tests and was announced in 2018 amid a flurry of diplomacy and summits with then-U.S. President Donald Trump. North Korea's rulers suggested they could restart those testing activities because the United States and its allies had shown no sign of dropping their "hostile policies."

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said the launch demonstrated the threat posed by North Korea's unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes, and called on Pyongyang to engage in "sustained and substantive" dialogue. Indo-Pacific Command [USINDOPACOM] Public Affairs stated "We are aware of the DPRKs ballistic missile launch today and are consulting closely with the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Japan, as well as other regional allies and partners. The United States condemns these actions and calls on the DPRK to refrain from further destabilizing acts. While we have assessed that this event does not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel, territory, or that of our allies, we will continue to monitor the situation. The U.S. commitment to the defense of the ROK and Japan, remains ironclad."

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VANCOUVER, May 15, 2017 - Eldorado Gold Corp. (the "Company" or "Eldorado") (TSX: ELD NYSE: EGO) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Integra Gold Corp. ("Integra") (TSXV:ICG) (the "Arrangement Agreement"), pursuant to which Eldorado has agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Integra that it does not currently own, by way of a plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement") under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia).

Under the Arrangement, shareholders of Integra will be entitled to receive, at their option, for each Integra share they own either (i) 0.24250 Eldorado shares, (ii) C$1.21250 in cash, in both (i) and (ii) subject to pro ration, or (iii) 0.18188 of an Eldorado share and C$0.30313 in cash. The maximum number of shares issuable by Eldorado under the Arrangement will be approximately 77 million (based on the number of Integra shares outstanding less Integra shares currently owned by Eldorado). The maximum amount of cash payable by Eldorado under the Arrangement will be approximately C$129 million equal to 25% of the total consideration. The total transaction value is approximately C$590 million, inclusive of Integra shares held by Eldorado.

Eldorado's offer represents:

A value of C$1.21250 for each Integra common share based on the May 12, 2017 closing price of Eldorado common shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange

A premium of approximately 52% to Integra's May 12, 2017 closing price and a premium of 46% based on the volume weighted average prices ("VWAP") of both companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange for the 20 day period ending May 12, 2017

Upon completion of the transaction and based on the maximum number of shares issuable under the Arrangement, current Eldorado and Integra shareholders would hold approximately 90% and 10% of the combined Company, respectively.

Integra's principal asset is the Lamaque project near Val-d'Or, Quebec. Lamaque hosts an NI 43-101 indicated resource of 5.1 million tonnes at a grade of 9.13 g/t gold and an inferred resource of 3.5 million tonnes at a grade of 7.94 g/t gold (5.0 g/t gold cut-off)1. A preliminary economic assessment was completed in February 2017 that envisions a high-grade underground operation producing 123,000 ounces of gold per year at all-in sustaining costs of US$634 per ounce over 10 years2. Integra is currently in the process of advancing underground ramp development to facilitate underground exploration and completion of a bulk sample.

George Burns, President and Chief Executive Officer of Eldorado Gold, stated, "The Company has been following Integra's progress at Lamaque over the last 18 months and commend their team for the accomplishments to date. From previous experience of building and operating gold mines in Canada, I am excited about Eldorado's entry into the Eastern Abitibi region of Canada. With our current balance sheet strength post the sale of our Chinese assets, this acquisition represents a use of the proceeds complementing our existing portfolio of high quality, low cost assets."

Benefits to Eldorado's Shareholders

Adds a high quality development project that has the potential to add meaningful near-term production and cash flow with modest upfront capital

Establishes an operating presence in Canada and diversifies the operating portfolio into one of the most productive mining camps in the world

Maintains the flexibility to fund its development pipeline

Income tax and G&A synergies with the addition of a future mining operation in Canada

Benefits to Integra's Shareholders

Immediate and attractive premium of approximately 52% to spot and 46% based on the 20-day VWAPs of both companies

Exposure to Eldorado's portfolio of high quality mines and development projects, in addition to ongoing participation in value creation at Lamaque

Access to Eldorado's technical, project development and operating capabilities as well as financial resources

Potential for value accretion through a re-valuation in Eldorado's share price as the Company continues to deliver and de-risk its combined asset portfolio

Participation in Eldorado's dividend program

Transaction Summary

The transaction will be carried out by way of a court-approved plan of arrangement and will require approval by Integra shareholders at a special meeting of Integra shareholders by:

at least 66?% of the votes cast by all the shareholders of Integra; and

a simple majority of the votes cast by the shareholders of Integra, excluding votes from certain shareholders, including Eldorado, as required under Multilateral Instrument 61-101  Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions.

In addition to shareholder approval by Integra shareholders, the Arrangement is also subject to the receipt of certain regulatory, court and stock exchange approvals, and other closing conditions customary in transactions of this nature. It is anticipated that the special meeting of Integra shareholders will be held in July 2017.

The Arrangement Agreement includes customary provisions, including non-solicitation of alternative transactions, a right to match superior proposals in favor of Eldorado and fiduciary-out provisions. Integra has agreed to pay a termination fee of approximately C$18 million to Eldorado upon the occurrence of certain termination events.

Both companies' Boards of Directors have determined that the proposed transaction is fair to their respective shareholders and in the best interests of their respective companies based on a number of factors, including fairness opinions received from their respective financial advisors. Each company's Board of Directors approved the terms of the proposed Arrangement and the Integra Board of Directors unanimously recommends that its shareholders vote in favour of the transaction. GMP Securities L.P. has provided a fairness opinion to the Board of Directors of Eldorado, Raymond James Ltd. has provided a fairness opinion to the Board of Directors of Integra and BMO Nesbitt Burns has provided a fairness opinion to the Special Committee of Integra. Each of the directors and senior officers of Integra have agreed to vote in favour of the transaction.

Full details of the proposed transaction will be included in the management information circular to be mailed to Integra shareholders in June 2017.

Eldorado owns 62,170,095 common shares in the capital of Integra, constituting 13% of the outstanding common shares of Integra on an undiluted basis. Following completion of the transaction, Eldorado will own 100% of the issued and outstanding common shares of Integra. To obtain a copy of the Early Warning Report to be filed by Eldorado in connection with the transactions contemplated by the Arrangement Agreement, please contact Krista Muhr at 1188 - 550 Burrard Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6C 2B5, (tel: 604 687 4018).

Advisors and Counsel

Eldorado has retained GMP Securities L.P. to act as financial advisor and Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP to act as legal advisor.

Integra shareholders and other interested parties are advised to read the materials relating to the proposed transaction that will be filed by Integra with securities regulatory authorities in Canada when they become available as they will contain important information. Anyone may obtain copies of these documents when available, free of charge at www.sedar.com. This announcement is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to purchase, a solicitation of an offer to sell the shares or solicitation of a proxy.

Scientific and Technical Disclosure

The scientific and technical information contained in this news release specific to the Lamaque Project has been reviewed and approved by Herve Thiboutot, Eng., Senior Vice-President of Integra Gold Corp., who is an independent qualified person under National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101").

1) Readers should refer to Integra's press release and Technical Report entitled "NI 43-101 Technical Report on the Spring 2017 Mineral Resource Estimate Update for the Lamaque Project" dated May 5, 2017 for further information on the gold mineral resource estimates contained in this press release, with an effective date of March 22, 2017, and to Integra's press release dated April 13, 2017 and Technical Report entitled "NI 43-101 Preliminary Economic Assessment Update for the Lamaque Project" with an effective date of February 27, 2017 for further information on Integra's preliminary economic assessment.



2) Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. Integra's preliminary economic assessment is preliminary in nature, and includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized.

About Eldorado

Eldorado is a leading low cost gold producer with mining, development and exploration operations in Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania and Brazil. The Company's success to date is based on a low cost strategy, a highly skilled and dedicated workforce, safe and responsible operations, and long-term partnerships with the communities where it operates. Eldorado's common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: ELD) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: EGO).

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements

Certain of the statements made herein may contain forward-looking statements or information within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements and forward-looking information can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or the negatives thereof or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements or information herein include, but are not limited, to statements or information with respect to the Company's proposed acquisition of all the shares that it does not already own of Integra Gold Corp. (ICG).

Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information by their nature are based on assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. We have made certain assumptions about the forward-looking statements and information, including the ability to acquire the shares that it does not already own in ICG, the political and economic environment that we operate in, the future price of commodities, anticipated costs and expenses and the impact of the disposition on the Company's business. Although our management believes that the assumptions made and the expectations represented by such statements or information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate. Furthermore, should one or more of the risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements or information. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, among others, the following: the ability to acquire the ICG shares that it does not already own, political, economic, environmental and permitting risks, regulatory restrictions, gold price volatility, discrepancies between actual and estimated production, estimated mineral reserves and resources and metallurgical recoveries; mining operational and development risks, litigation risks, regulatory restrictions, including environmental and permitting regulatory restrictions and liabilities, internal and external approval risks, risks of sovereign investment, and impact on the Company of the completion of the sale of our Chinese interests; changes in the use of proceeds; currency fluctuations; speculative nature of gold exploration, global economic climate; dilution, share price volatility; competition, loss of key employees, additional funding requirements, and defective title to mineral claims or property, as well as those factors discussed in the sections entitled "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form & Form 40-F dated March 30, 2016.

There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements or information contained herein. Except as required by law, we do not expect to update forward-looking statements and information continually as conditions change and you are referred to the full discussion of the Company's business contained in the Company's reports filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and the U.S.

All forward looking statements and information contained in this News Release are qualified by this cautionary statement.

Cautionary Note to US Investors Concerning Estimates of Measured, Indicated and Inferred Resources

The terms "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource", "inferred mineral resource" used herein are Canadian mining terms used in accordance with National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") under the guidelines set out in the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and Petroleum (the "CIM") Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, adopted by the CIM Council, as may be amended from time to time. These definitions differ from the definitions in the United States Securities & Exchange Commission ("SEC") Industry Guide 7. In the United States, a mineral reserve is defined as a part of a mineral deposit which could be economically and legally extracted or produced at the time the mineral reserve determination is made.

While the terms "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource," "indicated mineral resource", and "inferred mineral resource" are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, they are not defined terms under standards in the United States and normally are not permitted to be used in reports and registration statements filed with the SEC. As such, information contained herein concerning descriptions of mineralization and resources under Canadian standards may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S. companies in SEC filings.

Mineral resources which are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. With respect to "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource", there is a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and a great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of a "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource" or "inferred mineral resource" will ever be upgraded to a higher category.

Accordingly, information herein containing descriptions of our mineral deposits may not be comparable to similar information made public by US companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements under US federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder.







Contact



Krista Muhr, Vice President Investor Relations & Corporate Communications, Eldorado Gold Corp., 604 551 3250 or 1 888 353 8166, kristam@eldoradogold.com, www.eldoradogold.com; Media: Louise Burgess, Director, Communications & Government Relations, Eldorado Gold Corp., 604 616 2296 or 1 888 353 8166, louiseb@eldoradogold.com


White Rock, British Columbia (FSCwire) - Renaissance Gold Inc. (TSX.V: REN) (RenGold or the Company) is pleased to announce that they have signed definitive agreements with Kinross Gold U.S.A, Inc. (Kinross USA) granting Kinross USA the option to acquire a 70% interest in the Spruce East, Diamond Point and Buffalo Canyon exploration projects located in Nevada within 10 years (the Option Agreement). The Spruce East and Diamond Point projects in Elko County were recently acquired by RenGold (see press release NR2017-1, January 11, 2017) and Buffalo Canyon in Nye County is drill permit ready. Each project will be subject to a separate exploration earn-in agreement. Upon signing the definitive agreement Kinross USA will advance RenGold US$500,000 to carry out and conduct exploration for the first agreement year among the three projects as directed by Kinross USA. Subsequent years will have increasing minimum expenditures for each project of US$200,000, then US$300,000 and finally US$500,000 per year through year 10 totaling US$4,000,000 to vest an undivided 70% interest in each project. Kinross USA may accelerate vesting by spending US$5,000,000 before the end of the seventh year. In addition, RenGold will grant to Kinross USA, for a period of not more than three years, a right of first refusal (ROFR) to acquire new projects developed by RenGold under arms-length terms in a defined area of Nevada. The ROFR can be used a maximum of three times within the three years of the agreement.

In addition, Kinross Gold Corp. (Kinross Gold) has been issued 3,833,333 common shares at a purchase price of C$0.33 per share for gross proceeds of C$1,265,000 (the Private Placement). The proceeds from the Private Placement will be used by RenGold for general corporate purposes. Kinross Gold will have certain rights to participate in future financings to maintain their interest. All securities issued are subject to a hold period in Canada expiring on September 16, 2017. RenGold had 36,854,577 shares outstanding before the Private Placement closed and will have 47,520,843 shares outstanding after the Private Placement closes, and after closing the acquisition of Kinetic Gold Corp., announced on May 11, 2017.

Field work has already started at Spruce East with 262 new soil and 14 new rock chip samples submitted for analysis and field work is ongoing. Drilling is planned for mid-July. At Diamond Point a notice of intent has been filed at the BLM for 23 drill sites with approval expected later in May. A drill permit has been obtained at Buffalo Canyon and drilling is scheduled to start in early early October.

Ronald Parratt, President & CEO states Execution of these agreements provides an excellent opportunity to accelerate the exploration of three properties in the RenGold portfolio. The extra funding into the corporation will allow us to continue an aggressive exploration program in specific areas with a partner anxious to pick up projects. We are pleased with the confidence placed in Renaissance by Kinross and it is a pleasure to add a company such as Kinross to our shareholder list.

About Renaissance Gold Inc.

Renaissance Gold Inc. is a gold/silver exploration company that has a large portfolio of exploration projects in Nevada and Utah. RenGolds objective is to place the projects in exploration earn-in agreements with industry partners who provide exploration funding. RenGold applies the extensive exploration experience and high-end technical skills of its founders and team members to search for and acquire new precious metal exploration projects that are then offered for joint venture.

This news release is intended for distribution in Canada only and is not intended for distribution to United States newswire services or dissemination in the United States. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the Units, Shares or Warrants (the Securities) in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, any U.S. person. The Securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the U.S. Securities Act), or any securities laws of any state of the United States and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, any U.S. person unless an exemption from such registration requirements is available. United States and U.S. person are as defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act.

By: Ronald Parratt, President and CEO

For further information, contact:

Ronald Parratt, 775-337-1545 or rparratt@rengold.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed forward-looking statements. Forward looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words expects, plans, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates, projects, potential and similar expressions, or that events or conditions will, would, may, could or should occur. Although Renaissance Gold Inc. believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward looking statements. Forward looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of Renaissance Gold Inc.s management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by law, Renaissance Gold Inc. undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that managements beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.

To view this press release as a PDF file, click onto the following link:public://news_release_pdf/Rennaissance05152017.pdfSource: Renaissance Gold Inc. (TSX Venture:REN)

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Copyright  2017 Filing Services Canada Inc.
Buildings, roads and bridges: These are the Legos that, when snapped together, create the communities we all call home. President Donald Trump has promised to make improving our infrastructure a centerpiece of his administration, and we are eager to work with him to promote infrastructure investment, job growth and community prosperity. This includes defending a key financing tool that for the past several years has faced growing uncertainty.For more than a century, tax-exempt municipal bonds have been the single most important means for financing new roads, bridges, schools and hospitals. These are a lifeline without which state and local municipalities would find it far more expensive to finance capital improvements and other infrastructure that benefit everyone.In Maryland's Baltimore County, for example, municipal bonds have financed capital projects ranging from the restoration of a library after a fire to the expansion of several public parks. In Illinois' Will County, the future of a new courthouse and law-enforcement complex hinges on the bonds' tax-exempt status. Nationwide, the National League of Cities estimates that municipal bonds have financed more than four million miles of roads, 500,000 bridges, 16,000 airports and 900,000 miles of water pipes. In all, municipal bonds support more than 1.5 million civic projects.But in recent years this bipartisan tool has been under attack, with proposals being floated in Washington to cap the bonds' tax deductibility or eliminate it entirely. Then-President Barack Obama's fiscal 2017 budget proposal would have capped the tax deduction at 28 percent. We believe this would devastate municipalities that rely on the tax exemption, especially amid uncertain state budgeting. Reducing the tax benefits of these bonds would be bad for jobs and for taxpayers; higher project costs would shift to taxpayers through increased property taxes, fees and other means.The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that state and local governments have about $3.6 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs through the year 2020. In Illinois, a cap like the one proposed by Obama would have cost the state $6.2 billion if it had been implemented in 2012; for Maryland, the figure would have been $2 billion. For states facing steep budget deficits and rising costs, we can't afford to let precious funding go to waste.The city of St. Charles, Ill., is a prime example. St. Charles' annual interest payment for its debt currently exceeds $3 million, but it could be far more without the tax exemption for municipal bonds, which has saved the city 25 percent, including $619,000 in interest costs when it built the Red Gate Bridge over the Fox River in 2011. This is real money that makes a real difference to local taxpayers -- money that could be used to maintain basic services and programs otherwise on the verge of shuttering.With tax reform and infrastructure legislation now on the table in Washington, the debate over how to best restore our country's aging infrastructure is in full swing. State and local governments' ability to issue tax-exempt debt is now more important than ever. That is why we have sent a letter to the House leadership asking them to reject any proposal to cap or eliminate the deduction on tax-exempt municipal bonds. More than 150 of our colleagues from both sides of the aisle have joined us. We urge President Trump to similarly reject any such proposal.We have also launched the bipartisan Municipal Finance Caucus to continue promoting the importance of this tax exemption with our colleagues in Congress. The caucus is a valuable platform that ensures any discussion of comprehensive tax reform includes the needs of municipalities throughout this nation. Answering the call for reliable, proven infrastructure financing means we must protect this vital tool for job growth and economic development in our communities.
A group of white nationalists carried torches Saturday night in Charlottesville, Virginia while protesting the planned removal of Confederate statues in the city -- an incident that has provoked anger and frustration from politicians and activists.The torch wielders -- reported to be several dozen by local paper Daily Progress -- were reacting to a November 28 city council vote to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Charlottesvilles Lee Park, the public space where the protest took place Saturday.A court injunction has halted the removal of the statue for six months, but that didn't stop the protesters, led by avowed white nationalist Richard Spencer, from reportedly chanting slogans like "we will not be replaced," Russia is our friend and blood and soil  at the site of the statue.Mike Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, expressed his disgust with Saturday's protest in an interview with ABC News."I think it's horrific," he said of the protests. "We're a city that proudly values our diversity."
Scared for their neighbors

'In a bad spot'

99 percent

EL CENIZO -- Leo Ayala parked his white pickup on the Texas banks of the Rio Grande and cast fishing lures toward Mexico into the muddy waters of the Rio Grande on a warm, still Wednesday afternoon.He comes here a few times a week to fish after working in the oilfields near Laredo. It's usually quiet here, but sometimes, he sees people trying to cross illegally."The other day, by Rio Bravo, we saw someone," he said.A few blocks away, the small town's crest -- half Mexican tricolor, half American stars and stripes with a river down the center -- welcomes visitors to this tiny outpost on the edge of Texas.On dusty streets a stone's throw from the river, residents who sell food out of their homes flip on their neon "Abierto" signs. Most people here speak Spanish, and it's almost impossible to know who's a U.S. citizen and who might not be.Even city council meetings are sometimes held in the language."It's really wonderful to live on the border," said Mayor Raul Reyes, who last week plunged his sleepy town's 3,800 residents, many of them unauthorized immigrants, into a national debate over immigration and border security.El Cenizo became the first city to sue Texas over its new "sanctuary cities" ban. The law will punish local governments that prevent police from enforcing immigration laws and will allow officers to ask people about their immigration status during any legal detention.The town has a nearly two-decade-old ordinance that Reyes says protects all of his city's residents, legal and otherwise, from discrimination. The ordinance puts El Cenizo squarely in violation of the law Gov. Greg Abbott signed last week, but Reyes said he's not about to repeal the city's protections. Even if that means bankrupting the city and losing his job."These are our own people," Reyes said. "This is really about doing the right thing, and doing the right thing sometimes means standing up for everyone."Not everyone in this 99 percent Hispanic outpost, including the local police chief, agrees with the mayor's stance, a reflection of the complex challenges that hundreds of Texas border towns face as they grapple with impending immigration regulations from the state and federal governments.El Cenizo Police Chief Edgar Garcia, who worked for the Dallas Police Department for four years, refused to join the lawsuit. He said the same sense of bicultural pride and compassion for the city's residents -- regardless of immigration status -- led him to that decision."If this is something that has to be implemented in this police department and I have to follow it, I will," he said. "I'm here for the community at the end of the day."About half an hour south of Laredo, El Cenizo began as a colonia and didn't become an independent city until 1989. It was first thrust into the national spotlight in 1999 when the city council adopted two ordinances: one that required the city to hold meetings in the predominant language of the town's residents -- Spanish -- and one that prohibited city officials from asking about or helping any agency investigate a person's immigration status.Rafael Rodriguez was the mayor back then and is still on the council. He said immigration authorities had beefed up enforcement and some city officials were threatening to turn unauthorized immigrants who disagreed with them or complained about city services in to immigration authorities."There was lots of controversy when we did that and also lots of people in favor. I even received death threats," Rodriguez said. "[But] what they were doing was harassment and discrimination."Just five years later, at the tender age of 21, Reyes was elected mayor. Those ordinances, he said, represent the proud bicultural history of his town.But for him, it's also personal. His grandmother came to the country illegally before gaining her citizenship and starting a life on this side of the river."We often forget where we come from," said Reyes, who, after suing the state last week, juggled nearly 40 interviews with studying for final exams for his master's degree in public administration and running his two businesses. "This whole notion that we're in America and we should not care about immigrants? Some of us come from a line of immigrants."The energetic, brown-skinned mayor, whose hairline has receded since he took the helm of the small town 13 years ago, said he will continue fighting."That is what the history of El Cenizo has always been about," he said.In the lawsuit, Reyes and the Maverick County sheriff, among others, contend that provisions in the sanctuary cities ban that would depose public officials who support sanctuary policies and fine cities that violate the ban are unconstitutional. They also argue that the ban would force police to violate the due process rights of those they detain by requiring them to hold unauthorized immigrants even after their criminal charges are resolved. They want the court to prevent the law from taking effect Sept. 1.It's also an issue of local control, Reyes said. The city makes ends meet with a budget of just $250,000 a year. The sanctuary cities ban threatens fines of up to $25,000 a day. The city's entire budget would be decimated in less than two weeks.Unauthorized immigrants have contributed more to their small community than the state government ever has, Reyes said. With their help, El Cenizo over the last decade built its first park and library, created volunteer fire and police departments and paved all the city's roads."Just like the state of Texas doesn't like the federal government telling them what to do, municipalities don't like when the state tells them what to do," he said.Chief Garcia has mixed feelings about the new ban. But he also has problems with the city's sanctuary ordinance, because it takes away his five volunteer police officers' discretion to ask about immigration status.With both in place, he said, he and his tiny department are in a sticky spot.If he continues to enforce the city's ordinance after Sept. 1, he could be removed from office and jailed for violating the state ban."These past couple of days, I'm losing sleep over it," Garcia said.Garcia is upbeat, particularly for a stressed police chief. He's short and stocky and runs a trucking business in Laredo, where he lives. Being police chief is his part-time gig to give back to El Cenizo. He's been volunteering here since he was in high school.He started with the department in January and was promoted to chief in February. The department's budget is so tiny that the mayor pays officers in a monthly stipend and a gym membership. Officers wear donated, second-hand bulletproof vests.Garcia quietly contemplates before giving long, thoughtful answers about the sanctuary cities ban. He and his officers are just trying to do good for the community, he said. They won't risk violating the new law and facing jail time.Plus, the law might do some good. If one of his officers detains a person with a violent-crime record, they can ask about their immigration status and report them to immigration authorities.He's staying out of the lawsuit, because he wants to protect his community against criminal unauthorized immigrants he knows terrorize some residents."That person doesn't need to be in the U.S., especially representing me as a Hispanic or a Mexican-American," Garcia said.But he also recognizes the potential pitfalls. He'd hate to see families torn apart for something as minor as a traffic stop.If the law goes into effect, he said, he'll ask his officers to use discretion when asking people about their immigration status."At the end of the day, I'm a human," he said. "I got a heart and I have feelings and a family. ... So I will feel bad getting that [person] deported."Garcia also worries that immigrants might stop reporting crimes because they'd be afraid to be deported. He's trying to reassure the city's immigrant population that they will not be asked for papers if they are reporting crimes.As the mayor fights it out with the state, residents of El Cenizo fearfully watch the state and national debate over immigration and border security.The state sanctuary cities law is just the most recent controversy about an issue they live every day as they travel back and forth across the Rio Grande to visit family and friends. President Donald Trump has vowed to build a wall that would literally cross their backyards. Like Abbott, he also has promised to penalize cities like theirs that protect unauthorized immigrants -- their friends, neighbors, co-workers and family members.This scrappy little border town is no stranger to tough times, though. More than 75 percent of people here live under the poverty level, the mayor said. Paint peels off homes that line the city's roughly paved streets. Dilapidated shacks sit on vacant lots scattered throughout the town.Many residents are immigrants and though they've been living here for years, some of them don't speak English -- even those here legally. That puts them at higher risk for racial profiling.Maria Vasquez lives in neighboring Rio Bravo but visits El Cenizo every day to play "loteria," a Mexican bingo-like game, at the community center. There, she shares meals with many of the town's elders, some of whom arrived here as unauthorized immigrants.She has felt a new fear in her neighbors who are in the country illegally. Most people who live in El Cenizo commute to Laredo for work. Under the new law, they could be asked about their immigration status and deported simply for a traffic infraction during their drive, she said."It's a bad law," said Margarita Vela, who has lived in the city for 19 years. "There's lots of people who are here illegally but they've built their families here."Some residents are concerned that the law will hit close to home."I don't like it one bit," said Maria Perez, a legal resident who speaks only Spanish. "Not just because it affects my relatives [who are here illegally], but for other people who live here who would be affected."But opinions about immigration and border security here aren't homogenous. Reyes, the mayor, said people have sent him messages on social media saying he ought to be jailed for declaring he'd violate the new law.And Reyes' own feelings on immigration aren't clear-cut. He agrees with the police chief that unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crimes should be deported. He just wants to protect people who are living peacefully in his community. That's why he also supports building a border wall."I think it would block everything that goes through here -- guns, armors, drugs," he said. "This is pretty much an open border."He said people try to "box in" the opinions of people in small border towns. But because of their life experiences, their views on issues like sanctuary cities are much more complicated."This is not about protecting our own," he said. "This is about protecting civil rights and human rights for everyone."
Description

GIS  15 May, 2017: A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the National Productivity and Competitiveness Council (NPCC) and the Association of Mauritian Manufacturers (AMM) was signed last week. This makes provision for the NPCC to help local manufacturers abide by the highest manufacturing norms while assisting them at the same time in uplifting their operations through the NPCCs Enterprise Transformation Programme.

The Enterprise Transformation Programme of the NPCC is an in-plant consultancy solution with practical training to continuously improve the effectiveness in both the private and public sectors. Under this initiative, the NPCC works with the company to improve the performance of its staff and processes. The NPCC also assesses the business needs and assists the company in aligning the staff and processes so that in turn the business can deliver results and secure significant gains.

The NPCC and the AMM have worked on a partnership convention during the period 2017/2018. Under this convention, businesses that do not succeed in obtaining the Made in Moris label will be proposed by the AMM to work with the NPCC. The NPCC will then help the enterprises in areas where improvements are needed, after which they will be able to make a fresh application for the Made in Moris label.

The AMM has launched the Made in Moris initiative so as to promote locally manufactured products and to encourage Mauritians to consume products manufactured by local companies. Companies which apply for the Made in Moris label undergo an audit by inspection, verification, testing and certification company, SGS. If the company is not able to meet requirements, it is then referred by the AMM to the NPCC for an intervention.
Description

GIS  15 May 2017: A hands-on workshop focusing on Big Data for Big Impact, will be held on 17 May 2017 at Cyber Tower 1, Ebene, in the context of activities marking World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) 2017 .

O rganised by the National Computer Board in collaboration with IBM and Oracle, the workshop will address the following themes: Big Data technology, market trends, benefits to business/citizens and the application of Cognitive/Data Application Programming Interface (API) in the Tourism, Health and Education sectors. It will also provide useful guidelines on how to use API followed by a hands-on session for participants who would like to test the IBM Blue mix platform.

Resource persons from the Ministry of Technology, Communication and Innovation, IBM Middle East & Africa, Business Objectifs Ltd, and Oracle will conduct the workshop. IT Professionals, Start-ups and students are expected to attend.

WTISD

World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) was established in November 2006 by the International Telecommunication Union to help raise awareness on the possibilities that the use of ICT can bring to socio-economic development as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide.

World Telecommunication Day has been observed annually on 17 May since 1969 , marking the founding of ITU and the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention in 1865. It was instituted by the Plenipotentiary Conference in Malaga-Torremolinos in 1973.

In November 2005 , the World Summit on the Information Society called upon the UN General Assembly to declare 17 May as World Information Society Day to focus on the importance of ICT and the wide range of issues related to the Information Society. The General Assembly adopted a resolution in March 2006 stipulating that World Information Society Day shall be celebrated every year on 17 May.
Description

GIS - 15 May, 2017: Parents duty to educate and support their children, protect their wards from scourges such as drugs as well as prevent them from developing bad habits like drinking and smoking were the main highlights of the message of the Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit, and Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr. Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, in the context of the International Day of Families, celebrated annually on 15 May.

At the launching of the Family Weekend on Friday 12 May 2017 at Gymkhana Grounds in Vacoas, the Prime Minister appealed to parents to inculcate in their children moral values. Speaking on the importance of a balanced family life, Mr Jugnauth underlined the necessity to maintain a positive spirit and thinking within the family, and to persevere despite difficulties. He urged parents to encourage children to not only perform well academically but also develop a healthy lifestyle.

The Prime Minister pointed out that the role of Government is to act as facilitator for families to ensure that the livelihood of people improves and the quality of life of families is enhanced. He listed out the various measures being implemented by Government in sectors such as social housing for the vulnerable groups, reforms in education with the introduction of the Nine-Year Schooling geared at the holistic development of the Mauritian child, the Marshall Plan against Poverty and the adequate minimum income for families to lead a decent life.

With regards to Government vision to make of Mauritius a digital economy, the Prime Minister invited the population to avail of the Online Citizen Support Portal which aims at handling online complaints and queries in a timely manner. He recalled that while technology simplifies life in so many ways, it also affects family relations with less sharing and communication among members.

According to Mr Jugnauth, Mauritian families and society are considered a model with strong family ties, and multicultural and inter-generational solidarity. He called on families, non-governmental organisations, public and private institutions, to work hand in hand with Government to uphold Mauritius as a country model.

For her part, the Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs Fazila Jeewa-Daureeawoo, reiterated the need for families to develop, uphold and share values such as respect for self and others, tolerance, discipline and hard work. She made an appeal to parents to effectively play their role for the holistic development of children. Governments commitment to reinforce the institution of the family through initiatives such as Inter-Generation Relationship Programme and Marriage Enrichment Programmes was also put forward by Mrs Fazila Jeewa-Daureeawoo.

Family Weekend

The Family Weekend, held on 13 and 14 May 2017 at Gymkhana Grounds in Vacoas, comprised a series of activities that provided the opportunity to Mauritian families to celebrate the International Day of Families and spend leisure activities together with a view to consolidate family ties.
Description

GIS - 15 May 2017: Mauritius and Reunion Island are renewing their actions of collaboration and aspire to become the driving force of development in the Indian Ocean. Mauritius and Reunion Island are renewing their actions of collaboration and aspire to become the driving force of development in the Indian Ocean.

This statement was made this afternoon by the President of the Regional Council of Reunion Island, M. Didier Robert, during a courtesy call on the Prime Minister, Mr Pravind Jugnauth, at the Treasury Building in Port Louis.

He said that discussions between the Prime Minister and himself were rich and constructive and focused on several issues namely renewable energy, tourism, and food security.

As regards food security, Mr Robert highlighted the need for the pooling of know-how between Mauritius and Reunion Island. Furthermore, the President of the Regional Council of Reunion Island reiterated the need to use renewable energy. He added that Reunion Island has already attained 38% of renewable energy while pointing out that the Island will continue to share its expertise with Mauritius on the issue of clean energy.

Discussions also focused on tourism and on ways to give a boost to the sector in the future. Mr Robert recalled that the Vanilla Islands concept has helped Mauritius to diversify and enrich its tourism portfolio and that cruises have also multiplied.
Establish a state broadband office to coordinate expansion.

Adopt a dig once policy that would integrate broadband facilities into major construction projects.

Strengthen public-private partnerships so public infrastructure can be used to expand broadband access without leading to an anti-competitive climate.

Establish a broadband investment fund to finance infrastructure to reach unserved areas.

Promote development of local government policies that ease the last mile of broadband provision, traditionally one of the costliest parts of a project.

A recent study by Ohio State University (OSU) researchers found broadband access severely lacking in the states rural areas, a deficit they reported could yield significant economic growth if corrected  but if resolved could also lead to other, unintended consequences. Connecting the Dots of Ohios Broadband Policy found that 76 percent of Ohio households had broadband subscriptions in 2015, a share that led neighboring states and lagged just 1 percent behind the national average of 77 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureaus annual American Community Survey.More troublingly, the report from OSUs Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics highlighted a disparity between urban Ohio areas, where fixed broadband access is near universal and adoption in metro areas ranges from less than 60 percent to more than 90 percent; and rural communities where 31 percent of the population lacks access to fixed broadband  and lives in areas where extending service is prohibitively expensive.Overall, the report found more than 1 million Ohioans still lack access to fixed broadband service.It is widely agreed upon that having high-speed Internet access is becoming an essential utility for almost all households and businesses to participate in our economic, cultural and public institutions, the authors wrote.The issue is one that a variety of public agencies nationwide are confronting; Riverside County in inland California is currently seeking providers to build a county-wide gigabit fiber-optic network with access for every home and business.OSUs study found Ohio to be well positioned among other states as a regional leader in broadband, with 92 percent of its overall population having access to fixed broadband  slightly higher than the national average of 90 percent and only 2 percent behind neighboring Pennsylvania.In rural areas, however, that gap widened with 69 percent of Ohioans having access to broadband compared to 80 percent in Pennsylvania. In urban areas, 98 percent of Ohioans had broadband access.A key reason for high levels of urban broadband access, the authors wrote, is OARnet, an Ohio Department of Education initiative from the 1990s designed to link state colleges and libraries to the Internet  but which has subsequently enjoyed state investment and come to provide services to local governments, hospitals and public schools.In terms of rural broadband access, Ohio really lagged Pennsylvania and looked like a state with more rural population density than it has. I think that suggests there are still gains to be made for Ohio, study author Mark Rembert, a doctoral student and graduate research associate for the Swank Program in Rural-Urban Policy at OSU, toldI think it all really comes down to costs," he added. "The telecommunication companies are going to be sort of evaluating expansion on a cost-benefit analysis."Stu Johnson, executive director of Connect Ohio , which advances and advocates for broadband access, adoption and use, pointed to the authors statement calling high-speed Internet an essential utility as more proof that its necessity is harder and harder to debate.He praised the report for considering the economic aspects to expanding broadband instead of merely focusing on quality-of-life issues  and agreed with its assertions that adoption matters more than availability, and that access alone may not boost employment numbers.The real interesting equation will be, what will be the cost if you do nothing? Because if you overlay where broadband access is not available and adoption is below standard  you see higher unemployment, stagnant or decreasing household incomes and population migration, Johnson said, agreeing providers may not achieve a return on investment if they extend broadband into areas with low adoption rates.The OSU authors recommended the state consider five policies to accelerate broadband expansion while minimizing cost to the public:State Rep. Ryan Smith, R-Bidwell, said he represents a southeastern area of the state that includes hilly Appalachian areas where high-speed Internet is nonexistent. Smith estimated his districts percentage of residents with broadband access would be lower than 69 percent  likely somewhere around 50 percent.I think adoptions pretty high where its offered, but its just not offered that many places. In todays day and age, what I would say is broadband has become basic infrastructure, Smith told, comparing the situation to that once faced in eastern states before groups like the Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity to rural areas.If you dont have high-speed wireless broadband, if you cant check that box, youre not going to get that business and youre not going to keep the 20-somethings, said Smith, who found some validity in each of the studys five recommendations  especially the ideas of a state broadband office and investment fund. Balancing broadbands cost-prohibitive nature, he said, could attract larger providers.The authors of the study conservatively estimated that if Ohio reached full broadband coverage today, doing so would generate between $1 billion and $2 billion in economic benefits over the next 15 years.But they also found that broadbands contribution to economic development in rural regions is often overstated  offset by the fact that high-speed Internet can foster competition with local businesses and fuel outsourcing of jobs.If rural workers do not have the necessary skills to enhance their productivity using information technology, then broadband is less likely to generate the same level of economic benefits as in urban areas, they wrote.Its hard to say empirically whether the household gains exceed the job loss costs, but my guess is they probably do, Rembert said, emphasizing that the findings shouldnt deter an expansion but rather motivate lawmakers to work at offsetting these issues.Smith said he could see how technology-driven efficiencies could outsource existing jobs, but pointed out the spread of the Internet has created new opportunities as well. Connect Ohios Digital Works program, he said, has retrained residents with felony opiate convictions  finding those with broadband access remote work in virtual call centers.For so long nobody wanted to locate business in rural areas, Smith said, but the Internet flattens that issue.
Former F1 driver Jos Verstappen could be set to take on a role with Red Bull.

The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reports that Red Bull star Max Verstappen's 45-year-old father is to attend the forthcoming European F3 race at Pau in France.

The report claims Verstappen, who earlier groomed his teenage son for F1 stardom, will be on hand as a Red Bull talent scout and consultant.

It is believed a formal deal between the former Minardi driver and Red Bull is not yet done, as the parties discuss the scope of Verstappen's eventual role.

Verstappen confirmed: "Helmut (Marko) would like me to and I am open to it."

(GMM)
The research, led by the International Council on Clean Transportation and Environmental Health Analytics, LLC., in collaboration with scientists at the University of Yorks Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI); University of Colorado; and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, assessed 30 studies of vehicle emissions under real-world driving conditions in 11 major vehicle markets representing 80% of new diesel vehicle sales in 2015. Those markets include Australia; Brazil; Canada; China; the European Union; India; Japan; Mexico; Russia; South Korea; and the United States.

A new international study has found that laboratory tests of nitrogen oxide emissions from diesel vehicles significantly underestimate the real-world emissions by as much as 50%. A paper on the work is published in the journal Nature .

Of these markets, they found vehicles emitted 13.2 million tons of NO x under real-world driving conditions4.6 million tons more than the 8.6 million tons expected from vehicles performance under official laboratory tests.



Real-world NO x emission factors by vehicle emissions standard in key regions. a, Passenger cars; b, heavy heavy-duty trucks; and c, buses. Error bars indicate high and low estimates. Anenberg et al. Click to enlarge.

Heavy-duty vehicles, such as commercial trucks and buses, were by far the largest contributor worldwide, accounting for 76% of the total excess gas emissions. Five of the 11 markets that we looked at, Brazil, China, the EU, India, and the US, produced 90% of that. For light-duty vehicles, such as passenger cars, trucks, and vans, the European Union produced nearly 70% of the excess diesel nitrogen oxide emissions. Josh Miller, researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT)

Daven Henze, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at CU Boulder, used computer modeling and NASA satellite data to simulate how particulate matter and ozone levels are, and will be, impacted by excess NOx levels in specific locations. The team then computed the impacts on health, crops and climate.

Chris Malley, from the SEI, University of York, said that the study showed that excess diesel nitrogen oxide emissions effect crop yields and a variety of human health issues.

We estimate that implementing Next Generation standards could reduce crop production loss by 1-2% for Chinese wheat, Chinese maize, and Brazilian soy, and result in an additional four million tonnes of crop production globally. Chris Malley

The study also estimates that excess diesel vehicle nitrogen oxide emissions in 2015 were also linked to approximately 38,000 premature deaths worldwidemostly in the European Union, China, and India.

China suffers the greatest health impact with 31,400 deaths annually attributed to diesel NO x pollution, with 10,700 of those deaths linked to excess NOx emissions beyond certification limits. In Europe, where diesel-passenger cars are common, 28,500 deaths annually are attributed to diesel NO x pollution, with 11,500 of those deaths linked to excess emissions.

The consequences of excess diesel NO x emissions for public health are striking. In Europe, the ozone mortality burden each year would be 10% lower if diesel vehicle nitrogen oxide emissions were in line with certification limits. Susan Anenberg, co-Founder of Environmental Health Analytics, LLC

At a global level, the study estimates that the impact of all real-world diesel nitrogen oxide emissions will grow to 183,600 early deaths in 2040, unless something is done to reduce it. In some countries, implementing the most stringent standardsalready in place elsewherecould substantially improve the situation, according to the researchers.

The authors say emission certification tests, both prior to sale and by vehicle owners, could be more accurate if they were to simulate a broader variety of speeds, driving styles and ambient temperatures. Some European countries now use portable testing devices that track emissions of a car in motion.

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Dressed in caps and gowns, Bradley Singleton and Branden Cook milled about outside Hearn Plaza this morning, ready to join the procession of 1,900 graduates at the Wake Forest University commencement ceremony.

In separate interviews, they each summed up their first year at Wake Forest with the same three words: It was rough.

Im not going to lie, said Singleton, of Sumter, S.C.

He missed home; he missed his family. He wasnt sure he belonged on campus.

He dug in, worked through loneliness and discovered that the staff and faculty at the school would guide him through tough times.

They want to see you succeed, Singleton said. Its like a family environment.

A crew of friends and family from as far away as Chicago made the trip to Wake to watch him graduate.

His plans after the ceremony included eating out and posting his accomplishment on social media.

Singletons long-term plans include working at Wake Forest in campus life and eventually finding a job in New York City or Los Angeles where he can put to use his communications major.

Cook had a similar story. The first in his family to graduate from college in four years, the Charlotte native wasnt sure he belonged at Wake Forest.

Four years later, Cook raves about his experience at Wake, particularly the closeness he feels toward the faculty in the theater department, his area of study.

Cook will soon be heading to London to study acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.

This is a big thing for my family, he said.

Under a brilliant blue sky and with the quad decked out with all the trimmings, the graduates received lots of advice from President Nathan Hatch and historian and journalist Jon Meacham, the keynote speaker.

Hatch urged the graduates to look up from their screens and embrace eye contact.

I challenge you to lift your eyes and dont take for granted the power of deep, human conversation, Hatch said.

Despite all the methods of communication these days, people seem to have lost their ability to connect, leading to a decline in empathy, he said.

Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has written books on Andrew Jackson and George H.W. Bush, encouraged the graduates to take naps outside in the summer, go to movies, subscribe to newspapers and magazines and look up from those screens.

In an often-humorous 15-minute speech, Meacham noted the hyper-partisanship that has taken root among Americans.

The great fact of America today is pervasive partisanship, he said. The point of America is not to always agree.

The beliefs of people are reflexive rather than reflective, he said.

Be open to the very real possibility that you might be wrong from time to time, he said. Theres no shame in this.

Among the graduates was Cameron Silverglate of Miami, Fla., who leaves Wake Forest with a degree in philosophy.

He arrived at Wake thinking he would go into politics and economics, but changed his mind after a class with Charles Lewis, now retired.

His four years at Wake included a stint studying at Oxford University in England.

He will be working with Michael Lamb, a scholar in residence at Wake Forest, assisting with his research on virtue, leadership and character.

Its been a transformative journey, Silverglate said. Im a better person going out then I was coming in.

Also in attendance was the family of Jordan Bayer, a Wake Forest student who died in a car crash in 2015.

A native of Brookline, Mass., Bayer was returning to campus from an interview in New York City when he collided with a truck in Charlotte and died.

Wake Forests School of Business invited Bayers family to attend the commencement ceremony, said Bayers mother, Elizabeth Foley.

He would have graduated this year.

Family members came from Los Angeles, New York and Boston to attend the ceremony.

Bayer was awarded a posthumous bachelor of science degree in business

We wouldnt have missed it, Foley said.
The current war on terror started with 9/11. We retaliated one month after by bombing northern Afghanistan, killing 5,000 innocent people, exceeding the number killed here. This vengeful act was equally criminal because none of the hijackers or planners were Afghans.

What motivated the 19 hijackers has never been openly discussed by our politicians. My guess is that they were retaliating against our governments military, political and economic policies in the Middle East, since the buildings targeted were symbolic.

Those policies continue, though now American deaths and casualties have been reduced by arming and training surrogates to support or overthrow regimes our president approves or disapproves of. However, the number of people we kill each day with drones, bombs and cruise missiles has increased.

These tactics violate international law and have not made us safer. In fact, they have helped terrorist groups recruit more followers.

It is time for us to stop retaliating against the retaliators and address their complaints. It is time to allow the U.N. and international courts to resolve all grievances and administer impartial justice. This must be done soon, before there is a nuclear exchange!

George Haeseler

Greensboro
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STAMFORD  The citys largest corporate arrival this year is planning to make its move within the next few weeks.

In June, Henkel Corp. will open its North American consumer-goods headquarters at 200 Elm St., according to a billboard advertisement posted a block away on South State Street. The company is relocating its laundry, beauty and home-care divisions from Scottsdale, Ariz., a transfer announced last October.

Henkel knows innovation, reads the message inside the silhouette of a detergent bottle in the ad. Join us, says another line in the ad, which contains a link to listings for Henkel jobs in Connecticut.

A similar billboard ad is posted on Greenwich Avenue, a few hundred yards from the downtown Metro-North train station.

Its great news for Stamford, Catherine Smith, the states economic and community development commissioner, said Monday. Its great for the state to have these well-paid and good jobs landing in Stamford. Theyre a very classy company.

Messages left for Henkel were not immediately returned. Building and Land Technology, the landlord of 200 Elm St., did not respond to a request for comment.

Henkel will occupy 155,000 square feet at 200 Elm St., which comprises part of the BLT Financial Centre complex. The company will use all of the sixth floor and most of the fifth floor. The company plans to start with 266 Stamford-based employees and expand to about 500 by 2018.

In addition to offices, Henkels space will include a laboratory for the development and testing of its beauty products. The laboratory will include a center focused on product formulations and packaging, a clinical testing facility and a hair learning salon, according to the company.

As research activities are conducted in partnership with business functions like marketing and supply chain, we feel it is ideal to have our beauty care research and development in the same site, Henkel officials said in a statement in January. This enables close collaboration and exchange of ideas with colleagues.

The companys roster of consumer-goods brands includes Persil, all, Purex, Schwarzkopf, Snuggle, Dial, got2b, Renuzit and Loctite.

In addition to the transfer of its Arizona operations, the company is also moving Wilton-based Sun Products, which was acquired in September, to Stamford.

Up to $25 million in state loans and tax credits and a $30 million investment from Henkel are funding the creation of the Stamford hub. Henkels global headquarters are in Dusseldorf, Germany.

The signing of Henkel marked the second recruit for the BLT Financial Centre, a property that covers some 590,000 square feet, since it was acquired in 2012 by BLT. In November 2014, professional-services giant Deloitte moved into about 120,000 square feet in the clock-tower building at the adjoining 695 E. Main St.

Audit, tax and consulting firm RSM also plans to move to 200 Elm St. later this year. It will lease 27,800 square feet on the second floor.

When BLT purchased the Financial Centre, the property stood vacant following the departure of Gen Re a couple years earlier for a new home on Long Ridge Road. BLT then embarked on a major renovation that included splitting the structure into two connected buildings and creating a large atrium and separate entrances.

BLTs other Stamford holdings include most of the Harbor Point mixed-use development and the Silicon Harbor office complex in the South End and the Long Ridge Health and Science center on Long Ridge Road.

pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; Twitter: @paulschott
GREENWICH  Three police officers and an alleged perpetrator of robbery and vandalism were injured when police struggled with the suspect Sunday afternoon, according to authorities.

Police said Robert Moran, 33, of the Glendale section of Queens, N.Y., attempted to run from police, and he then fought with officers attempting to subdue him.

Moran was admitted for treatment Sunday at Greenwich Hospital, with injuries which were not disclosed. The three officers were treated and released from Greenwich Hospital. The nature of the injuries sustained were described as minor in a police report.

According to the arrest report, officers were called to a residence in Cos Cob where the suspect was alleged to have damaged property and forcibly removed a cell phone from a juveniles hand while the victim attempted to call 911.

When officers arrived, according to the arrest report, he refused to comply with officers on scene and physically resisted arrest.

Police said Moran was injured, and he injured three officers during the apprehension. Police spokesman Lt. David Nemecek said, If he had complied, he would have been arrested, not hurt.

He decided to bring a fight, said Nemecek, Three of our officers got nicked up. None of this had to happen.

In addition, according to the arrest report, Moran threatened to kill the police officers and made verbal threats against their families.

Police said juveniles were on the scene throughout the confrontation.

Moran is due to be charged with robbery, criminal mischief, assault on a police officer, threatening, risk of injury to a minor, disorderly conduct and interfering with a police officer.

Nemecek said Moran took some personal items from people at the residence, leading to the robbery charge.

Bail was set at $100,000.
Pascal's wager: An argument to believe in God. Basically it says you should believe in God because if God is real and you believe the reward is enormous (eternal life in paradise) while if you believe and God is not real the downside is negligible (you die and that's it)



It is a poor argument for belief in a god.



Applied to man made global warming I assume it goes something like, "You should believe in man made global warming. If it's true and enough people believe we have a chance to minimize or reduce the harmful effects. If it's true and we don't believe it could lead to environmental collapse and the end of civilization as we know it.
Super Powers Painkiller. Photo: Melissa Hom

Frozen drinks are, more than anything, fun. But that doesnt mean they have to be cloyingly sweet and super strong. Like all good cocktails, the best are well-balanced and made with fresh juices and good booze. The best also come from proper slushie machines, instead of blenders. Even when a bar has a fancy, Vitamix-style blender, the drinks dont tend to be as smooth or well-mixed. Also: Were not sure why bars offer frozens from a blender, if the bartender is salty every time about making them. (New York has fewer offenders about this than you might think, really, but the grumps are out there.) Frozens may take a lot of time to batch initially, but pouring them from a slushie machine takes about ten seconds, so nobodys upset when you order these cool cocktails. Here, the absolute best frozen drinks in New York.

The Absolute Best 1. Super Powers Painkiller

722 Nostrand Ave., nr. Prospect Pl., Crown Heights; 718-484-0020 The team at Super Power tells us that this drink, their version of a tiki classic, was developed in the lab at sister bar Bearded Lady. (The original, itself a riff on a pina colada, is said to have been invented in the 70s in the British Virgin Islands.) At this newer bar, though, its especially festive: The staff blends a giant batch each morning, mixing pot-still rums from St. Croix and Jamaica with pineapple, orange juices, and coconut. Thats all topped with aged Trinidadian and Jamaican rums, and the whole thing is served inside a coconut shell with an orange-slice garnish and a nice grating of nutmeg ($10). A thoughtful, terrific frozen cocktail. Drink it in the backyard.

2. Sally Roots Sundowner

195 Wyckoff Ave., nr. Harman St., Bushwick; 347-425-0888

Frozen drinks feel perfect for Sally Roots  they complement the restaurants joyful spirit. (Youd be hard-pressed to find a more fun restaurant in New York right now. When we walked in recently, we were greeted with a baby shot of rum; the staff was dancing to the Ludacris and Missy Elliott songs that played over the speakers, while serving up plates of Caribbean food; and bartenders were handing out logoed casino visors.) There are two great options, poured from an Omega Freeze machine into Hurricane glasses. Our favorite was the Sundowner, which uses coconut cream, lime, a blend of rums, and pineapple, orange, and guava. Its creamy; its smooth; its juicy; its especially, and delightfully, coconutty. You can easily drink  a lot, since its not too sweet or expensive ($9), and you will want to.

3. Bed Vynes Good Boy

305 Halsey St., nr. Throop Ave., Bedford-Stuyvesant; 347-787-4860

The drink poured from the slushie machine here changes often, but its usually great. A recent one we loved was the Good Boy, which used rum and rosebud syrup  making it sweet and gentle, less acidic-tasting than frozens filled with fruit juice. Order some ribs next door, then grab this cocktail at the bar and head to the backyard. Bonus: Its only $8.

4. Fukus Lychee Soju Slushie

163 First Ave., nr. 10th St.; no phone

Virtues of this drink: The great, tangy-floral lychee flavor, which is something you dont see a lot in frozen drinks, is super prominent; its smoother than any other frozen we tasted; it comes in a little tumbler with a domed lid thats small enough to be cheap ($6.50) and totally manageable, refreshing without being overwhelming. Also, another rarity in New York, Fuku has a booze-free option, a strawberry-lemonade slushie.

5. Suffolk Arms Grasshopper

269 E. Houston St., at Suffolk St.; 212-475-0400

A frozen cocktail that tastes like a Thin Mint. As the menu will tell you, its the invention of Jeffrey Morgenthaler (the bar manager at Portlands Clyde Common). It uses vanilla ice cream as its base  plus mint, chocolate, and Fernet  and its blended to order. Its delicious, and  controversial opinion  its one of very few cocktails weve ever tried whose taste was improved by a metal straw (this one is extra-wide). More bars should serve their frozens with them, because the drink runs smoothly, never getting stuck as you suck it up, and theres never the problem of a tiny hole or break in the straw that makes the cocktail impossible to drink. $15.

Honorable Mentions

Bungalow Bars Frozens

377 Beach 92nd St., Rockaway Beach; 718-945-2100

The slushies change, but the frozen lemonade ($7) from the bar on the deck, which overlooks Jamaica Bay, is usually available: Its sweet and tangy, and coupled with post-sunbathing dehydration, it will have you buzzed and A-train ready after just one or two.

Donnas Brancolada

27 Broadway, at Dunham Pl., Williamsburg; 646-568-6622

The idea is a sort of pina colada with Branca Menta, so youve got lots of the ingredients youd expect to see in frozens  Appleton rum, pineapple, coconut cream  and then that minty digestif, which is less expected, but makes this drink ($12) unmissable in the citys slushie-scape.

Skinny Denniss Willies Frozen Coffee

152 Metropolitan Ave., at Berry St., Williamsburg; 212-555-1212

Skinny Dennis calls its popular coffee-liqueur-and-bourbon frozen that coffee thing, and serves it in an old-school diner coffee cup ($7). So: This bar doesnt take itself too seriously. But the drink is seriously good! (Sorry.) Its creamy from dairy, and sweet but not syrupy  about two sugars level, maybe. The coffee flavor is excellent, doubled down with a sprinkle of grounds on top. It tastes a lot like the most famous version of this drink, the one on offer at Erin Rose in New Orleans.
The crowd-pleasing shishito pepper. Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine

One recent evening, as we sat in the Tapas Bar at La Sirena, we pondered the surprising journey of the shishito pepper in New York  from somewhat obscure Japanese bar snack first cited in the Times in the 1990s, to tapas-bar sensation in the aughts, to, just this past December, Bon Appetits list of Food Trends We Hope Disappear in 2017. We did this, it should be said, as we nibbled our way through a plate of shishitos sauced with Huancaina, Parmesan, and walnuts  an ingredient combo more often applied to cold Peruvian potatoes than hot Japanese peppers.

But shishitos have largely outgrown their cultural origins, becoming variably spiced fodder for inventive chefs everywhere. (See also Paowallas shishito pakoras, Empellon Cocinas shishito tacos, Cannibal Liquor Houses shishito-topped patty melt, and Lalitos shishitos en nogada, a play on stuffed poblanos.) This is all a far cry from the classic preparation of skewer-grilling or oil-blistering, the method Alex Raij used in 2004 to catapult the skinny, wrinkled chile to local fame. Familiar with a similar variety from trips to the Basque Country, she pounced on a small stash she found at Greenmarket farmer Nevia Nos stand. (For her part, No started out selling them under their Korean name, with little success, until a customer asked if they were shishitos. I changed the sign right after she left, says No.)

Raij, who went on to open three Spanish restaurants, became the peppers foremost ambassador. My bike broke under the weight of shishito peppers, says the chef, who lugged home 40 pounds every three days. Inevitably, competition for the limited supply grew so heated, according to Raij, I was showing up at the market at, like, five in the morning to make sure I got them. Appetite for the chiles, which are known for their arbitrary, one-in-ten-peppers spiciness, has only increased with the rise of small plates and vegetable mania, and they can now be purchased at Whole Foods, Costco, and FreshDirect, largely through the efforts of savvy specialists like Ark Foods, a four-year-old commercial grower. The shishito is such a crowd-pleaser its easy to understand why some have come to consider it a cliche. But despite its adaptability, Raij eschews overly creative interpretations. Thats when it becomes about you and not the pepper.

*A version of this article appears in the May 15, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
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North Koreas latest successful missile test represents a new level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile. Launched at an angle of 85 degrees, the missile reached an altitude of 2,111 km before fuel burnout. Turned earthward, the reentry vehicle turned earthward, accelerating to very high velocity to hit a designated target area in the sea of Japan, about 787 km from the launch point. The flight crossed the Korean peninsula and spanned over 26 minutes from ignition to impact.

Theoretically, if used in a Minimum Energy Trajectory (MET) such a missile would enable North Korean to strike targets as far as 4,500 km away  all the U.S. military base in Guam, Micronesia or the Russian Kuril islands near Alaska, but far from Hawaii or Alaska  the nearest US territories.

Due to the long range demonstrated in this test, the Hwaosng 12 missile (also known as KN-17) does not put South Korea or Japan at risk, but appears to have demonstrated an extended strategic reach, with an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the US base at Guam (3,500 km away).

As a single stage liquid propulsion system, Hwasong 12 may represent a substantial advance to developing an indigenous North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This thrust is part of a comprehensive, strategic missile development effort that has spun over the past decade and included the development and testing of several platforms, propulsion systems, reentry vehicles and warheads, including nuclear ones.

In dozens of flight tests performed in recent years North Korean missile scientists demonstrated high level of skills, proficiency and persistence, despite major challenges they faced in obtaining key materials, engineering solutions, initially through reverse engineering and them, through continuous improvement in step-by-step trial and error, conducted under the watching eye of supreme ruler Kim Jong Un.

Pyongyang has successfully demonstrated the capability to launch different missiles, designed for deployment from fixed land based, relocatable and mobile wheeled and tracked launchers, as well as submarine-launched missiles. Different propulsion systems were also demonstrated successfully, including multi-stage liquid and solid propulsions.

The new IRBM was unveiled during last months parade. It looks very much like a small, two-stage version of the three-stage KN-08 ICBM prototype displayed in public in 2012. The KN-17 was displayed on a mobile launcher previously used for the Hwasong 10 Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile.

While this new missile appears to share a common heritage with the KN-08 ICBM, it isnt simply a KN-08 with the third stage removed. The first two stages also appear to be reduced in scale. Unfortunately, we have little detail about the missiles design. We do not, for example, know if it uses the same twin-engine propulsion system as the first stage of the KN-08. But the more important question is, what is the new missile for?

One possibility is that it is meant to replace the Musudan IRBM which. represents an attempt to stretch a Cold War vintage Russian missile to reach the US base at Guam, some 3,500 km from North Korean launch sites. But the Musudan has proven unreliable in testing, with only one success in at least six attempts, and its performance is marginal for reaching Guam. The Musudan may have been the best North Korea could manage ten years ago, but that level of performance really calls for a two-stage missile. Now, it appears that they have one. But existing North Korean missiles are already capable of reaching targets anywhere in South Korea or Japan, and extending that reach to perhaps 4,500 kilometers wont greatly change the strategic balance  aside from Guam, there arent really any interesting targets in that range.
Nougat for Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) started rolling out earlier this month. Russia was the first market to get it and now the update has started hitting units in India. The update weighs in at around 985MB (985.58MB to be precise).

Given the fact that it's an OTA roll out, it might take time for the update to hit your device. You can manually check for the update by heading to your handset's Settings menu.

Via
Published on 2017/05/14

Variety reviews Moon Hyeon-seong's period comedy "The King's Case Note", hear from Pierce Conran about Korea's top composers, Darcy Paquet weighs in on "Fabricated City", and KoBiz's latest infographic puts K-kings in the spotlight.

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"Film Review: "The King"s Case Note'"

Richard Kuipers reviews Moon Hyeon-seong's period comedy "The King's Case Note" (starring Lee Sun-kyun and Ahn Jae-hong) for Variety. "Based on a comic strip by Heo Yoon-mi that ran in South Korea's popular Wink magazine in 2012 and 2013, "The King's Case Note" quickly establishes a winning odd-couple dynamic", writes Richard. The film, Moon's second after his 2012 drama "As One", was released in Korea just ahead of three recent public holidays (including election day) and is currently approaching 2 million admissions.

...READ ON VARIETY

"The Varied Sounds of Korean Cinema"

Pierce Conran (film critic, journalist, producer, and owner of Modern Korean Cinema) puts some of Korean cinema's top composers in the spotlight in this sound feature on KoBiz. "Many a ballad and radio pop song can be found in the cinema of the country that is also responsible for the global wave of K-pop", says Pierce, "but Korean films feature a breadth of musical styles that have developed in conjunction with the industry and society as a whole, which has been quick to embrace foreign influences and experimentation in its modern and globalized age".

...READ ON KOBIZ

[REVIEW] "Fabricated City"

Korean Film's 2017 review page is live. The website itself is owned and run by film critic/journalist Darcy Paquet and features industry news, insightful reviews, useful links to related sites and sources, as well as in-depth analysis of Korea's fascinating cinema scene, past and present. In this entry, Darcy himself reviews Bae Jong's action outing "Fabricated City" (starring Ji Chang-wook, Shim Eun-kyung, Ahn Jae-hong, Oh Jung-se and Kim Sang-ho). The film was released in Korea back in February where it ended its theatrical run with 2.5 million admissions. "'Fabricated City' is perhaps an unexpected comeback for the director, with a very different tone than we've seen in his previous work", says Darcy.

...READ ON KOREAN FILM

"Kings Are Tired: Kings in Korean Films"

KoBiz's latest infographic looks at a number of films that have put Korea's past kings in the cinematic limelight, including the recently released "The King's Case Note" by Moon Hyeon-seong. "All kings of the Joseon Dynasty belong to the same family tree", says Kim Hyun-jung, "However, each of them has different personality, qualification and achievement".

...READ ON KOBIZ
Published on 2017/05/14

The latest episode of time travel crime show, "Tunnel - Drama" brought in an average rating of 6.3%, making it the highest rated show to air on cable network OCN.

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Choi Jin-hyuk must be congratulating himself on his choice of comeback project, given that "Tunnel - Drama" has displaced "Squad 38" as OCN's biggest hit ever. Whether it's the break of one week, or the fact that the writer has been keeping viewers on the edge of their seats with cliffhangers, episode 14 of "Tunnel - Drama" averaged between 5.7% and 6.8%.

"Tunnel - Drama" tells the story of Park Gwang-ho (Choi Jin-hyuk), a detective from the 1980s who time travels 30 years to the present day to catch a serial killer, and encounters a modern detective (Yoon Hyun-min) and a profiler (Lee Yoo-young) who share a connection to himself and the killer he's chasing. There are only two episodes to go in the series, so fingers crossed that "Tunnel - Drama" breaks its own record next week.

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Only of Noonas Over Forks
Published on 2017/05/14 | Source

Actor Joo Won is having a fan meeting and drama premiere before he leaves for National Service.

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He will be joining the military on the 16th of May. He is going to meet as many fans as possible before he leaves. He had a fan meeting in Seoul on the 13th for about 3 hours. He hosted his own fan meeting and sang 10 songs live.

Joo Won is starring in his last drama "My Sassy Girl - Drama" and he said, "I am very excited, but I won't be able to see how it turns out. I hope someone writes me letters about the results".

He chose Han-gil, a character from the drama "7th Grade Civil Servant" as his best character yet and other characters from "Catch Me", "Bridal Mask", "Bread, Love and Dreams" and "Fashion King - Movie".

During Q&A, he encouraged fans who want to be actors, who want support and who are going through examinations with all his heart.

Joo Won concluded the fan meeting by saying in tears, "I will do my best to return as a better person so I hope you wait for me. Thank you for coming with me to where I am today".

He is going to appear in the premier of "My Sassy Girl - Drama" on the 15th which is the day before he joins the army.

Meanwhile, will be receiving 5 weeks of basic military training in training camp before being dispatched to his base.
U.S. SUPREME COURT TURNS DOWN FURTHER REVIEW OF HAWAIIS OPEN PRIMARY ELECTIONS

News Release from Hawaii Attorney General, May 18, 2017

On Monday, May 15, 2017, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the Democratic Party of Hawaiis challenge to the States open primary elections. This leaves in place the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision from last year upholding the constitutionality of Hawaiis open primary elections. The Supreme Court also turned down a similar case in litigation against the state of Montana.

In August 2016, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Democratic Party did not show that the open primary system burdens its associational rights. The Party offered no evidence that the open primary impacted its candidates or messages. The Ninth Circuit noted that Hawaiis voters may vote in only one partys primary election.

After nearly four years of litigation, Mondays order means that this challenge to Hawaiis open primary system has been brought to an entirely successful conclusion, said Attorney General Doug Chin.

The case, Democratic Party of Hawaii v. Nago, was originally filed in the federal district court in Hawaii. In November 2013, Judge J. Michael Seabright ruled in the States favor, upholding the open primary. The Democratic Party of Hawaii appealed. The Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments in May 2016.

* * * * *

Supreme Court rejects challenge to Hawaii, Montana open primaries

AP: The Supreme Court has turned away challenges to open primaries in Hawaii and Montana that allow voters to take part in party primary elections regardless of their political affiliations.

The justices did not comment Monday in leaving in place rulings by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the states open primaries.

IVN: SCOTUS Rejects Major Party Challenges to Open Primaries



read  Supreme Court rejects challenge to Hawaii, Montana open primaries

* * * * *

Are Open Primaries Unconstitutional? SCOTUS May Decide

by Shawn M. Griffiths, IVN, May 11, 2017

The justices on the Supreme Court will consider taking up two cases challenging open primaries in Montana and Hawaii Thursday. The lawsuits were brought by the majority parties in each state (Democratic Party in Hawaii; Republican committees in Montana), both asserting that the open primary system severely burdens their First Amendment right to association.

Up to this point, lower courts in both cases have ruled that neither the Democratic Party in Hawaii nor the Republican Party in Montana presented sufficient evidence to make their case. Will the Supreme Court find differently?

READ MORE: SCOTUS Sets Conference Date for Hawaii, Montana Open Primary Cases

ALSO READ: SCOTUS Hints Partisan Open Primaries May Be Unconstitutional
The Jones Act is an anchor on the U.S. economy

by Michael Hansen, Hawaii Shippers Council, May 12, 2017

The Washington Examiner published on May 12, 2017, an opinion-editorial, The Jones Act: An out of date anchor on the American economy, describing the adverse effects of Jones Act cabotage on the national economy and its especially pernicious effects on the noncontiguous jurisdictions of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

The author is Martin Rodriguez a policy analyst with the Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group based in Arlington, Virginia.

Key excerpts:
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An employee who works three night shifts a week at a Brisbane Coles store has won a legal battle in an underpayment case against the supermarket chain.



Penny Vickers, who was representing herself, successfully argued it was in the public interest for a Fair Work Commission full bench to hear her bid to terminate the 2011 agreement covering 74,000 Coles workers.



Vickers was opposed by the company's industrial lawyers and the Shop, Distributive & Allied Employees union.



Coles reverted to the 2011 deal after the FWC found the 2014 agreement left some employees worse off than the award.



Union officials agreed that the 2014 Coles deal potentially disadvantaged more than 11,000 of the company's 77,000 workers, even though 90% of employees voted to support it.



Vickers is seeking the retrospective termination of the 2011 agreement arguing workers were still underpaid compared with the award.



The FWC vice-president Adam Hatcher agreed it was in the public interest to have her application heard by a full bench.



I consider that the number of employees to which the 2011 agreement applies is so large as to make the question of the termination of the 2011 agreement a matter of public significance because of its potentially broad economic and commercial effects, he said.



The full bench hearing is the highest level of adjudication at the FWC. The result could potentially reshape the pay and conditions of nearly 80,000 workers.



The case was lodged almost a year ago at the FWC, however there has been legal struggles over the release of information on the pay details of workers.



Vickers wants a random sample of retail workers' pay details to have them analysed by her father, an actuary, to figure out how many staff are underpaid, according to Fairfax Media.



She also claims a bid by Coles and the union to have their own selection of workers give evidence to the tribunal would hide the true extent of underpayments.



Commissioner Harcher said applications under the Fair Work Act to terminate enterprise agreements with retrospective effect are not common.



There has not been any authoritative pronouncement or consideration of the principles to be taken into account in deciding such a significant matter, he said.


The US Coast Guard is set to order a minimum of two heavy and two medium icebreakers in an attempt to beef up its presence in the increasingly contested waters around the north and south poles.

Finland could account for at least 30 per cent of the work involved in building new icebreakers for the United States, Ulla Lainio, the director of the maritime and offshore programme at Finpro, estimates in an interview with Kauppalehti .

The order could ultimately be for as many as six icebreakers, Lainio adds to the commerce-oriented newspaper.

[Rauma Marine Constructions] shipyard has offered to build the hulls of the vessels in Finland. The Americans wouldnt be able to build the icebreakers without assistance from Finns, she reveals, adding that the shipyard could account for at least 30 per cent of the work involved in building each of the icebreakers.

Finpro has sought to promote co-operation between Finnish and American shipyards and to establish ties with the US Navy and US Coast Guard. A delegation consisting of its experts and representatives of domestic shipyards recently visited each of the five American shipyards that have been awarded a contract to conduct design studies and analyses pertaining to the upcoming acquisition, according to Kauppalehti.

Satu Taavitsainen (SDP) has similarly hinted at the possibility of Finland contributing to the shipbuilding project.

During our visit [to Washington DC] we encouraged the United States to buy the best icebreakers in the world  icebreakers made in Finland, she wrote in a blog entry after her recent visit to the United States as a representative of the Parliaments Defence Committee.

They dont have the expertise to manufacture [icebreakers]. Finland has, wrote Taavitsainen.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Arctia Shipping Oy / Handout

Source: Uusi Suomi
I take it that we can all agree that Europe is not as stable and secure as we would like it to be. We are forced to admit that the post-Cold War promise of [a] stable and prosperous Europe without dividing lines has not been achieved, he said in his speech at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn on Saturday.

President Sauli Niinisto has expressed his concerns about the security-related uncertainties lingering in Europe.

Increased tensions, arms races and rise of terrorism show no signs of abating, he added.

The Lennart Meri Conference is an annual high-level forum for foreign and security policy discussions named after Lennart Meri, the President of Estonia in 19922001.

Niinisto also echoed the concerns of many about the apparent re-emergence of geopolitics by calling attention to the growing tendency to back hard words with hard actions.

Military activities and build-up are increasing, and military operations and exercises are conducted in previously unseen ways. Threat perceptions also include asymmetric threats, such as hybrid and cyber [threats]. Even the very foundations of our democracy, elections, have been targeted with malign intents.

There is no denying that European security is riven by deep mistrust. Our joint co-operation platform, the OSCE, struggles as key commitments have been breached: the annexation of Crimea by Russia was a heavy blow, he said.

Finland, he assured, remains resolute in its defence of the fundamental principles and structures of stability in Europe: We want to send a strong signal that we take security seriously. We work closely with our partners in Nato and our bilateral defence co-operation with Sweden is progressing rapidly.

The European Union is of particular importance for the country, reminded Niinisto. The union, however, is hardly a true union if it fails to contribute to the security of its citizens.

Niinisto also pointed out that although Nato is the primary forum of defence co-operation for many other EU member states, the union as a whole has a number of measures at its disposal to protect Europe.

I am happy to note that at last discussions concerning defence co-operation are bearing fruit. We are close to agreeing on activating the [protocol on] permanent structured co-operation [PESCO] in defence, he stated.

Finland, he added, fully supports and will contribute to the development process, which must be both ambitious and inclusive.

We are a union and this should be reflected also in the field of security. We must ensure that the arrangements are and will remain inclusive while bringing concrete steps forward and real added value to the security of ordinary Europeans. Developing key capabilities, enhancing our operational readiness, but importantly also our willingness, are important.

Niinisto also estimated that two of the most pressing concerns are presently the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the lack of progress in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation  also in North Korea.

We must strictly enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention. These weapons should never be used. It is also important that the nuclear weapon states, in particular the United States and Russia, get back on track in their strategic talks and seek to reduce all types of nuclear weapons.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Raul Mee  STR/Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi Suomi
THE owner of a garage in Sonning Common fears he will be forced to look for new premises and make way for housing.

Gary Catt has owned the Mike Farina Garage in Sedgewell Road for five years since he bought it off the founder and wants to stay put but says the landowner is planning to sell the site for redevelopment.

His lease runs out in December, so he is appealing for help in trying to find new premises in the village in case.

The garage has been in Sedgewell Road since 1981 and 40-year-old Mr Catt has worked there since he was 16 and living at home with his parents, Lionel and Ronnie, in Orchard Avenue.

He said his father, a builder, encouraged him to ask Mr Farina for work experience at the garage.

I did my youth training schemes here and never left, said Mr Catt. When Mike decided he was going to retire he wanted me to take it on because Im from the village and was well known as his mechanic.

Mike also wanted the garage to carry on serving the village. I kept the name because it was a well-established business.

It has always been used for the motor industry and there used to be petrol pumps on the site.

The house next door used to be a pub and this building was used to repair carriages. Its been here for a very, very long time.

Mr Catt would like to buy the site and rebuild the garage rather than relocate.

He said: The garage has been here for so many years and it is my belief that it needs to stay here. Its a village garage and needs to be here to serve the public.

Im not going to give up without a fight because weve worked far too hard on the business.

We have the backing of the people here and they seem to want to help.

The building is in a poor state of repair and we have proposed building a new garage. We need more space because in the last few years we have starting doing a lot more things, such as tyres and minor brake work.

This would be expanding the business with a new building and using some of the land at the back of the site. Everyone knows our location but we have to keep up with the times.

Mr Catt, a former pupil of Chiltern Edge School, said there should be a balance between village amenities and new housing.

People want to live here as its a nice village but without a garage it would be lacking an amenity, he said. The village cant cope with more people unless you offer amenities.

I understand some people might not want to see a garage like this in their neighbourhood because they think its a bit old school but recently people have moved into this road despite having a garage next door so theyre clearly comfortable with it.

The feeling were getting from customers and neighbours is that it would be horrific for an established business being lost to more housing.

Mr Catt said he had spoken with parish councillors about space for businesses in the village but was told there was none available. They told me there are plans for housing in the village but nothing set aside for something like this, he said.

They said if we found somewhere they would support us.

I think the village needs to keep amenities like this. Not everyone wants or can afford to go to a main dealer.

Mr Catt said he had customers from Emmer Green, Caversham, Nettlebed and Henley as well as Sonning Common.

There are garages in those areas but once you get on first name terms with people they know who you are, he said.

Its a trust system where people are handing over their pride and joy in some cases. They trust you to look after it.

It would be fantastic if anyone with appropriate land could get in touch. We looked at Manor Farm in Peppard but there are already three garages there.

We need to be in the village like we have been since 1981. We want to offer more to the village.

If you can help, call Mr Catt on 0118 972 4036.
A GROWING litter problem in Goring is not being tackled, say residents.

A number of bins has been allowed to overflow and large amounts of rubbish have been discarded in green spaces around the village.

The kerbside gutters in High Street have not been swept since the autumn and have accumulated so much dirt that weeds are beginning to grow in them.

Residents have asked Goring Parish Council and South Oxfordshire District Council to take action. They say the village now looks less attractive and this could jeopardise its efforts to win a fifth Britain in Bloom regional award this summer.

Maureen Whicher, of Gatehampton Road, said the dog waste bin at Sheepcot Field was overflowing with bags of animal waste over Easter and the following weekend. The area was also strewn with empty drinks cans and sweet wrappers.

A container of blue paint had been discarded in a hedge and her dogs legs were stained when it walked through it.

Mrs Whicher said: I actually smiled when my dog suddenly appeared with four blue legs but if a child walks in it their parents will definitely not be happy.

Ned Worsley, of Millers Close, said foxes ripped open an overflowing litter bin on Gardiner recreation ground, off Upper Red Cross Road, and spread its contents over the field last month.

Gill Haigh said that boats which moor by Ferry Lane dumped their waste in regular bins, contributing to the overflowing problem, instead of using the special bins under Goring bridge.

She said more signage was needed to inform boat owners.

Complaints about rats being attracted by overflowing bins were made by Pauline Knollys, of Howgate Drive, Kerry Harding, of Nuns Acre, and Ron and Stephanie Bridle, of Cleeve Road. They said the bins at the Wheel Orchard car park, off Station Road, were particularly bad.

Mrs Bridle, who organises the Bloom bid with her husband, complained at a meeting of the parish council on Monday.

She said: Im concerned because the village has never looked so bad and the judges will count it against us if they see it.

Council chairman Kevin Bulmer said the district council was responsible for street cleaning and emptying the bins at the car park, Sheepcot field and throughout the village centre.

He said he had passed on the complaints and had been promised that Biffa, the councils contractor, would take action.

Councillor Bulmer said: I agree that its grim but Ive been assured by the relevant cabinet member that they are on the case. Im not convinced that the gutters have been swept for months.

The bins at Gardiner recreation ground are the parish councils responsibility.

It says its contractor BGG failed to empty them last month, for which it apologised.

Parish clerk Colin Ratcliff said: It is unfortunate that the bins did not get emptied in the week leading up to Easter but, to put this in perspective, it is the first occasion being a long bank holiday weekend meant it took a while to resolve.

He pointed out that BGG conducted a weekly litter pick at all of the villages open spaces while the parish councils own cleaner spent an hour a week clearing Sheepcot field and the village centre.

A South Oxfordshire District Council spokesman said: We received a report of an overflowing bin in April which our waste crew dealt with. However, this is the only incident reported to us recently and we are not aware of a wider problem.

Public litter bins are emptied on a weekly basis in Goring and our road sweeper will also be visiting the area this week.
A bungling Kinahan cartel hitman linked to the gun murders of two innocent men was also chief suspect for the 2013 killing of another man shot in a case of mistaken identity.

Suspected hitman Glen Clarke was found with a fatal gunshot wound to his right eye on the Riverdale Estate in Leixlip, Co Kildare, on December 2 last. Gardai believe he was either murdered or his death was accidental.

It previously emerged that he was suspect for the feud murders of innocent men Trevor O'Neill (40) in Majorca last August and Martin O' Rourke (24) who was shot dead in Sheriff Street in April of last year.

Both men were victims of mistaken identity but the Herald can reveal gardai had also identified Clarke as the gunman in the case of Dean Johnson who was shot dead in the early hours of August 24, 2013 at Harelawn Green in Clondalkin as part of a separate feud.

Mr Johnson (21) was not involved in crime and it quickly emerged that the intended target was the now jailed Clondalkin hood James 'Nellie' Walsh (30) who escaped unharmed in the shocking incident.

Despite Clarke's death last December, the investigation into Mr Johnson's murder is ongoing with gardai having arrested more than 12 people in connection with the crime.

The latest revelation means Clarke has now been identified as a suspect for three botched murders of innocent men.

"Clarke must be considered the most incompetent hitman in the history of organised crime in Ireland," a source said. "The tragic thing about this is that all the men he shot dead were innocent people."

There is major speculation that dad-of-two Clarke was in fact murdered last December for "making a balls" of so many hits and he may have been set-up by one of his closest associates in the Kinahan cartel.

Probe

Gardai however are not yet officially treating his death as murder even though it is the subject of a huge probe involving specialist officers.

Gardai in Co Kildare initially believed Clarke had committed suicide after discovering a handgun in the footwell of the stolen silver Vauxhall Zafira that his body was found in.

The car, with false number plates, had been stolen in Blanchardstown last October.

After a review of the case over the Christmas period, gardai concluded the death was "most likely" an accident. It has also been reported that Clarke was wearing a boiler suit when his body was found. One theory is whether Clarke was in Leixlip in relation to an attempted hit on cartel target Noel Kirwan (62).

Kirwan was shot dead at his Ronanstown home three weeks after Clarke's body was found in the stolen car.

Clarke's mother has repeatedly denied her son was involved with the Kinahan cartel and believes he was murdered.

"He didn't shoot himself. I believe my son was murdered," she reportedly said this year. "Glen didn't work for the Kinahans. He was on social welfare."

Last week, mum-of-five Carol Clarke (57) admitted at Dublin Circuit Court to taking more than 100k in cash in her sister's name from the Department of Social Welfare between 1994 and 2011. She is due to be sentenced in July.
A report that gardai tapped the telephone of a political party activist working for the rival of a Government minister was "profoundly worrying", said Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin.

He was concerned the alleged "rogue actions" by gardai could have been "politically motivated", he said.

He spoke following revelations in the Sunday Independent about the phone-tapping by garda intelligence of a political party worker.

The report stated that the phone-tapping had stopped after a garda raised concerns it was for "political purposes".

"I'm obviously worried myself and I think it adds to the whole broad list of issues that shows that, if it's true as I'm reading the papers like everybody else, shows an element of rogue actions being taken and if they were politically motivated," he said.

"If people could utilise An Garda Siochana for political ends, it is profoundly worrying," he added.

He posed the question: "Is there more to come?"

"We need to have clarity in relation to that. Even in terms of who can investigate these matters now," he said.

He expressed his concerns prior to addressing the Labour Party's annual James Connolly commemoration at Arbour Hill in Dublin.

Mr Howlin said there was growing concern about a number of serious issues concerning the management of the force and the leadership of Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan.

Shocking

"I think most people are numbed now by the series of shocking revelations, one after another, some now going back years," he said.

"There comes a time when doing what is right is much more important than any political consequence and it is quite clear to me that a new leadership is required in An Garda Siochana.

"Public confidence has been seriously eroded by all that is going on."

Mr Howlin said he could not imagine how a police commissioner would not take responsibility that a reported one million driver breath tests did not take place.

"Whatever culpability is involved, responsibility is something different and normally the head of a State agency, where those manifestly improper things happened, would take responsibility," he said.
Tom Farnan was shot dead on his doorstep in April last year

The sister of a Dublin man gunned down on his doorstep last year has said he was on the phone to his mother when the assassin struck.

'Gentle Giant' Tom Farnan (37) was fatally shot after he answered his front door in Kilcronan Close, Clondalkin, West Dublin, in April 2016.

Speaking yesterday, his younger sister Jenny Farnan said the family is living in constant pain not knowing who killed Mr Farnan.

Devastated

"Our family has been left devastated for the past year. Nothing has changed. We're still living the nightmare as badly as the day it happened."

Earlier this week, gardai renewed an appeal asking anyone with any information about the shooting to come forward.

The father-of-one had a number of convictions for minor offences but his heartbroken family has insisted he was not involved in organised crime or gangland feuding.

"I don't know why anyone would do this to Tom. He had turned his life around and was trying to build a relationship with his son," Ms Farnan said.

She added that her mum is living in fear not knowing who killed him.

"My mum can't go to the shop because she's afraid the person who did this to her will be standing next to her.

"She hasn't slept properly one night since. Her health is deteriorating every day."

She said her brother was on the phone to their mother when he was gunned down.

"He was talking to her on the phone and he said 'hold on ma, there's someone at the door' and that was the least thing she heard from him. She could hear him being shot on the other end of the phone."

The first anniversary of Mr Farnan's death recently passed, and the family is calling for justice.

"We want justice for Tom. We want someone brought to justice for this senseless murder.

"Tom wasn't an angel, but he was turning his life around. He didn't deserve this."

She also said that Mr Farnan's 17-year-old son is not coping very well.

Justice

"The whole year has gone by and nothing has changed. None of us are coping. Tom is never coming back."

The bereaved sister said Mr Farnan was always smiling.

"Tom always looked out for me. He always had a smile for everyone and would do anything for anyone," she said.

"I appeal to anyone who has information to please come forward.

"We feel like Tom can't rest peacefully and we can't move on until justice is served."
PULASKI, Va. -- A man is dead after police say he fired a weapon at officers responding to a domestic dispute call Sunday evening, according to the Virginia State Police.

The Town of Pulaski Police responded to the call at a residence in the 100 block of 4th Street SE in the town limits just before 7 p.m. The caller said someone in the residence had a gun.

Further investigation resulted in an arrest warrant for James A. Burton Sr., 48, of Pulaski.

Officers posted outside the residence and requested that Burton exit. He eventually came out onto the front porch and fired at the officers and Pulaski County Sheriffs deputies, according to the VSP.

Sheriff's deputies returned fire and Burton retreated inside the residence.

A perimeter was set up and law enforcement officials made multiple attempts over the next few hours to establish contact with Burton.

During that time, at least one shot was heard coming from inside the residence.

The VSP Bureau of Criminal Investigations Wytheville Field Office also responded. The State Police robot was dispatched inside the residence, where it located Burton and confirmed he was dead.

Burtons body has been transported to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Roanoke for autopsy and examination.

The shooting incident remains under investigation at this time.

This article has been updated to reflect more specific information from the VSP about when police say Burton first fired upon officers.
The Bristol Tennessee City Council will remain the same next year while the Bristol Tennessee Board of Education gets two new members in 2023,
BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. -- Sullivan County will receive more than $200 million in state funding over 15 years to fix its roads and bridges.

The funding is a result of Gov. Bill Haslam's Improve Act which creates a long-term funding source to fix outdated transportation infrastructure. The act increases state road and bridge user fees to generate the funds while also cutting grocery, business and Hall income taxes. The goal in doing that is to ease the burden on Sullivan County residents since tourists and truckers will also contribute to the funding.

Over 15 years revenues from Sullivan County and its municipalities as a result of the increased taxes will generate more than $34.4 million for road projects.

Former Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey spoke at a news conference today in Blountville on behalf of the Transportation Coalition of Tennessee to announce how much money Sullivan County will receive.

Return to HeraldCourier.com and read Tuesday's edition of the Bristol Herald Courier for more.
Students at Bristol Tennessee elementary and middle schools gathered in the halls to cheer on Tennessee Highs 2017 graduating class Monday.

About 50 of the graduating class meet in the Library at Haynesfield Elementary and talked about when they first came to the school.

Rebecca Moore said the experience was a bit surreal.

The room looks so small, she said. Its hard to believe that when I was in school here the bookshelves were taller than me.

District Data and Assessment Coordinator George Laoo agreed.

I taught most of these kids, Laoo said as he looked around the room. They were all smaller than me then.
Maryland election 2022: Dan Cox concedes governor race to Wes Moore

Republican Dan Cox conceded the election, calling Governor-elect Wes Moore. But throws jabs at Hogan, more.
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In a book stall near the centre of New Yorks Times Square, that neon-drenched temple of commerce, there is a box full of puffy, rubber hands, each no larger than a matchbox. Trumps hand, full size, says a sign on the box, a mocking reference to a national joke about small hands and  you get the drift. Up the road, inside a darkened theatre, the dialogues and lyrics of a high-energy Broadway musical are peppered with a line that urges defiance of the president, Stick it to the man! On the news stands, the New York Times lists how Donald Trump has lied every day during his first 100 days. Even as the president bashes what he calls a failing and dishonest paper, he provides unhindered accesson and off recordto NYT reporter Maggie Haberman.

Respect for a free press, rule of law, unwavering faith in the constitution, alert citizens and unhindered freedom of expression make the US an outlier among democracies now run by populists who pander to majoritarian impulses and destablise institutions and democracy. Remember the thousands on the streets who raged against Trumps assaults on migrants, lined up at airports to welcome Muslim refugees and how American lawyers provided free legal aid. Contrast this empowered, concerned citizenry with popular indifference in India when police and politicians routinely play down the actions of lynch mobs. There are no protest marches, no lawyers rushing to help.

In faltering democracies, the institutions slowly cave. In Turkey, the election commission, once an institution of respect, is purged before a critical referendum, the new judges passing a last-minute decree to accept unstamped ballots. The constitution is changed by a wafer-thin margin, and Recep Erdogan is set to be remake his country in his image, while the jails fill with purged bureaucrats, soldiers, journalists and cartoonists.

At the annual White House correspondents dinner, comedian Hasan Minhaj calls Trump the liar in chief but notes, Only in America, can an Indian-American Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the President. In India, where you can be arrested for a Facebook post about a chief minister, political satire is not something a cable network would risk. In the US, a new show will make fun of the presidents relationship with his mother. I put her in one of my great apartment complexes, says a make-believe Trump, who appears as the host of his own talk show. I call it my mother complex, and it still exists to this day.

Trumps election may have echoed the resentment and frustrations of the white majority, but the majoritarian thought he claims to echo is not allowed to become policy. Judges strike down presidential decisions  which he can disobey only at his peril  that they deem to be against the countrys laws and constitution. The latest, a ruling that stops Trumps from cutting federal funds to so-called sanctuary cities, areas that defy his crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Rational thought and intellectual heft are still well regarded, infused as they are into the bedrock on which the countrys institutions rest. Even the paranoia of the Trump era brings no threat of censorship, an enduring fear in India.

Audrey Truschke, a US historian who wrote a biography of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, confessed earlier this month to deleting references in the Indian edition to the Maratha warrior-king Shivajis low-caste background. What am I afraid of? she tweeted. A lawsuit, a book ban, attacks on scholars and institutions that helped me, eg, Laine, Doniger.

Back on Broadway, next to the guitar-strumming naked cowboy (well, he does have underwear and boots), a man in a diaper parades the strip with a sign that says, Trumps my daddy. Two grim-faced police officers move in. See that line, one says, pointing to the designated busking zone. Stay within it. And they break into a smile.

Samar Halarnkar is editor, Indiaspend.org, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit

The views expressed are personal

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I love my country, right or wrong, is an attribute of nationalism. But is it patriotism to stand up and be counted when my country led by the government navigates a path which is inconsistent with our constitutional values. Was it unpatriotic to be a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War? Was the Arab Spring at Tahrir Square unpatriotic? Was it patriotic for the RSS to have attempted to disrupt the national movement and support a colonial power? Was it patriotic for the Sangh not to have participated in the Satyagraha?

We must not confuse our love for the country in protecting her identity with our right to dissent. It is not unpatriotic to oppose the government when it is behaving dishonestly, foolishly or viciously.

Patriotism is an emotive response, which manifests itself in action to protect an identity of which we are an integral part. That identity is the result of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic affinity shared historically over a period of time. Within the contours of territory, shared experiences of people identifying with each other become the foundation of nationalism. The symbol of that identity, and every nation has one, is its national flag. When unfurled, people identify themselves with it. Their patriotism does not depend on externalities. People should not be forced to demonstrate that they love their country and respect their flag. I do not wear my patriotism on my sleeve. Others should also not be required to do so.

I am a patriot as long as I respect the rights and sensibilities of others, pay my taxes, inculcate the right values in my kids. I should not have to carry my mothers photograph in my wallet to prove to her that I love her. Today, the flag has been made a logo  the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. I do not doubt the patriotism of those in government; I only question their policies. Those who pin the national flag on their lapels are no greater patriots than those who dont.

Now, our patriotism may be questioned if we do not stand up in a cinema hall when the national anthem is played. I wonder how many of us stand up in our homes watching the national anthem on television. If we dont, are we to be regarded as unpatriotic?

My problem with this mandating prescription is that it is fundamentally wrong for people to have to demonstrate that they are patriotic. The act of standing up in a cinema hall is not an act of volition. Patriotism reflects in my response to protect the identity of not just myself but of millions of which I am a part. Only in situations which should evoke such a response is true patriotism tested. Patriotism and nationalism are two different concepts. We must not confuse the two.

Is it then patriotic for vigilantes who in a show of patriotism for the sacred cow, insult, beleaguer and not hesitate to kill ordinary folk? Vigilantes do it to protect their misplaced cultural identity. Their response is not emotive for the sacred animal. It is in fact motivated to demonstrate and propagate that identity with which the victims of violence have no emotive affinity. The victims may be dealing with the sacred animal to trade or nourish it for their livelihood. Yet to do such acts under the present dispensation is considered patriotic and thus justified.

Instead such acts of violence create fissures in an identity which is historically shared by people, who together have fought wars and shed their blood to assert their identity. They together challenged the supremacy of the white man and humbled a colonial empire. They together forged a permanent identity based on cultural, linguistic, religious diversity coalescing because of shared values and a shared history. That is what we need to protect. True patriots are those who protect diversity  linguistic, cultural and ethnic. Patriotism is not paying lip service to a perceived identity.

The State and Institutions including courts should not test patriotism. Our patriotism is tested on a daily basis by our activities in the way we live and the way we deal with each other. A soldiers patriotism is tested when he is confronted with the enemy and is willing to risk his life to save the identity of which he is an integral part. The patriotism of a lawyer is tested when he is, despite opposition, prepared to protect the victims of injustice. A doctor will emotively demonstrate his patriotism when he goes out of the way to save lives though in the process he might endanger his own. A patriotic businessman will not participate in transactions that are dishonest and adversely impact the economic interests of his country. Smugglers, terrorists and perpetrators of violence who kill for partisan ends cannot be patriots.

It is possible that courts wish to instil a sense of patriotism by having audiences stand up in a cinema hall. We cannot doubt the intention of the court. But standing up in a movie hall for the National Anthem is not necessarily an emotive response. The audience must stand up because otherwise under the law, they will be prosecuted for insulting the flag. The mandate of the law does not make true patriots.

Kapil Sibal is a former human resource development minister

The views expressed are personal
Bengaluru Police have said the 69-year-old woman, whose decomposed body was found earlier this month stuffed inside a closet in a rented house, was killed by her daughter in August last year after she threw away a plate of food.

Police said 42-year-old Shashikala allegedly hit her mother Shantakumari on her head thrice with a rolling pin in a fit of anger.

Shantakumaris body was discovered on May 7 after the landlord of the house went to check on his tenants as they had not been seen in a while and the rental agreement was coming to an end. He saw three large plastic drums and that the cupboard in one of the rooms had been sealed with cement and painted red .

The landlord immediately contacted the police, who found the decomposed body stuffed inside the closet and buried in sand and charcoal. The forensic analysis of Shantakumaris body has revealed she bled to death and was killed long before the body was discovered.

We were immediately suspicious about Shashikala and her son Sanjay (21) as they were missing, deputy commissioner of police MN Anucheth said.

Police said neighbours noticed the stench but thought it could be from a dead dog in the sewage drain.

Police started questioning all those who knew the mother and the son, which led them to the engineering college where Sanjay is a student of aeronautical engineering.

They said their phones, which they found in the house, led them to a breakthrough when call records from Sanjays mobile revealed he was in constant touch with Nandeesh (21), who is also a student of aeronautical engineering.

... Sanjay is a very smart boy and he made sure to leave his phone behind so that we would not be able to trace him. We are hoping that he will come back to save his friend, who is in our custody, Anucheth said.

When we interrogated Nandeesh with this evidence, he confessed that he had helped the mother and son to dispose of the body, he said.

From L-R: Nandeesh, Shashikala and Sanjay. (HT Photos)

According to Nandeeshs statement to the police, Shashikala lost her temper on August 17, 2016, after Shantakumari threw away a plate of food.

The family was in trouble financially as there was no income and the money from the two plots that belonged to Shantakumari, which were sold about 5 years ago, had also been exhausted. This could explain Shashikalas anger at her mother for throwing food, police said.

Shashikala allegedly called Sanjay immediately after the incident, who was not at home, and by the time he got back, Shantakumari was believed to have died. Sanjay then called Nandeesh who he thought could help them.

They said after the family was kicked out of another house last year because they were unable to pay rent, it was Nandeesh who helped them. They were forced to take shelter in the Kempegowda Bus Stand in the city. And all the while, it was Nandeesh bringing them food every day, Anucheth said.

After Nandeesh arrived at the house they planned to hire a cab and go to Shivamogga to dump the body. However, the driver, a friend of Nandeesh, got held up and could not go to the house that day, police said.

Sanjay and Nandeesh then decided to buy large plastic drums, steal sand from nearby construction sites and buy charcoal, supposed to be a natural deodorant, from a local store and dispose of the body in the nearby lake.

When we went through his phone, we saw he had been very interested in deodorants, police said.

Sanjay also got samples of industrial deodorants from a private company.

However, they feared that moving a large drum could make neighbours suspicious and decided to stuff the body in a closet and seal it with cement and paint it red in its the original colour.

Shashikala and Sanjay lived in that house with a skeleton in the closet until February, when they decided to leave unable to control the stench anymore, Anucheth said.

Sanjay and Nandeesh, both facing financial troubles, were also been involved in petty loan fraud, he added.

They would con people on websites by promising loans on the payment of a small processing fee. The fee never exceeded Rs 5,000 because they feared larger amounts would land them in trouble with the police, Anucheth said.

The duo is believed to have conned about 5 to 6 people every month in this manner. They used to con only till they had enough money to manage for the month, Anucheth said.

The family had moved to Bengaluru in 1997 from Shivamogga after Shashikala and her husband were divorced. The family kept to themselves and didnt have many friends.

Sanjay was a very brilliant student and we have found that he was a topper in the Class 10 exams, a senior police official said.

Police are now on the lookout for Shashikala and Sanjay.

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Bollywood superstar Aamir Khans Dangal has crossed the Rs 300-crore-mark in China within two weeks of its release, becoming the first Indian film to achieve the feat in the neighbouring country.

Trade analyst Taran Adarsh tweeted on Monday, #Dangal collects an EARTH-SHATTERING $ 32.60 mn /  208.84 cr in *Weekend 2* in China... UNPRECEDENTED... Weekend 2 data follows...#Dangal - CHINA - Week 2 [updated]...Fri: $ 6.21 mn, Sat: $ 13.86 mn, Sun: $ 12.53 mn, 10-day total: $ 59.74 million [ 382.69 cr] STUPENDOUS!

#Dangal collects an EARTH-SHATTERING $ 32.60 mn /  208.84 cr in *Weekend 2* in China... UNPRECEDENTED... Weekend 2 data follows...  taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) May 15, 2017

#Dangal - CHINA - Week 2 [updated]...

Fri: $ 6.21 mn

Sat: $ 13.86 mn

Sun: $ 12.53 mn

10-day total: $ 59.74 million [ 382.69 cr]

STUPENDOUS!  taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) May 15, 2017

The movie, released in around 7,000 screens in China as Shuai Jiao Baba (Lets Wrestle, Dad).

Dangal, which is about a gritty wrestler from small town training his daughters to become world-class wrestlers, has already broken the record of PK which earned Rs 100 crore in China.

China is still viewed to be a patriarchal society but the masses have connected with Dangal.

Aamir is among the most popular Indian actors for the Chinese who also are fans of South Koreans artistes. All those issues touched on in his works also exist in China, but no Chinese has ever made that type of film, Wu Qian (pseudonym), a 29-year-old fan of Aamir, was quoted as saying by Global Times.

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The buzz around Deepika Padukones RK tattoo doesnt seem to die down. The recent Bangladeshi ad for a popular soap brand has caught everyones attention. The ad shows Deepika flaunting a sari and interestingly, her infamous RK tattoothat she got inked on the nape of her neckis nowhere to be seen. This led to speculations whether the actor has finally removed the tattoo, which she got done while dating actor Ranbir Kapoor.

However, Deepikas recent Met Gala appearance proves that the tattoo is very much thereat the same place. She even shared a photo on her Instagram page and wrote, #metgala2017. This means that the tattoo, which is invisible in the ad must have been camouflaged using makeup. Interestingly, the tattoo was also not visible in a soft drink ad the Piku actor did opposite Farhan Akhtar.

#DeepikaPadukone @deepikapadukone in a #Sabyasachi #Sari for her new Bangladesh #Lux television commercial. Styled by @shaleenanathani #HandCraftedInIndia #TheWorldOfSabyasachi A post shared by Sabyasachi Mukherjee (@sabyasachiofficial) on May 9, 2017 at 11:49am PDT

Deepikas RK tattoo was the hottest talk of the town during her relationship with Ranbir. But for reasons best known to know, the two drifted apart and parted ways sometime back, and are now just friends. While Ranbir started dating Katrina Kaif, Deepika, too, found love in Ranveer Singh. Though Ranbir broke up with Katrina a while ago, Deepika and Ranveer still seem to be going strong.

#metgala2017 A post shared by Deepika Padukone (@deepikapadukone) on May 3, 2017 at 3:47am PDT

Meanwhile, the 31-year-old, who is currently shooting for with Sanjay Leela Bhansalis Padmavati, will be making an appearance in Cannes Film Festival, starting May 17. The actor was clicked at the Mumbai airport on Sunday evening just before she took a flight to attend the festival. Not just the fans, even fashion critics are excited to see Deepikas red carpet look, as she makes her debut appearance at the Cannes.

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As actor Madhuri Dixit-Nene celebrates her 50th birthday today on May 15, here are 15 facts about her that you probably didnt know. From not having Bollywood as her first choice of career to being paid more than Salman Khan for Hum Aapke Hain Koun, we have compiled a list of interesting trivia about her.

1. She has a degree in microbiology. Initially, Madhuri had no interest in pursuing a career in Bollywood. Her first film was Abodh (1984), but she came into the limelight with Tezaab (1988).

Loving u guys as Twitter just crossed 3 million and FB crossed 15.1 m. Let's get this party started on Instagram too!! A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Sep 16, 2014 at 6:42pm PDT

2. Madhuri is the only female actor to be nominated for Filmfare awards 14 times. Out of this, she has received the iconic Black Lady trophy four times in the Best Actress category and twice in other categories.

Good old days...Team DTPH! A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Feb 13, 2017 at 3:06am PST

3. A trained Kathak dancer, Madhuri is the only female actor of her times to have been choreographed by Kathak exponent Pandit Birju Maharaj. He even went on to say that she is the best dancer in Bollywood.

Behind the scenes with the eminent Birju Maharaji at today's shoot for Dance with Madhuri! A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Oct 28, 2014 at 3:45am PDT

4. The actor had to wear a costume that weighed 30kg for a song in Devdas. It was conceptualised and designed by designer Neeta Lulla.

Maar Dala! Love can be overwhelming...#devdas #thursdaythrowback A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Mar 2, 2017 at 4:30am PST

5. Acclaimed artist late MF Husain was besotted by her beauty and claimed to have watched her film, Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) 67 times. She became his muse, inspiring a string of paintings and even a movie, by the name of Gaja Gamini (2000) with Shah Rukh Khan.

Here's wishing @iamsrk a very #HappyBirthday. Have a fab day and fantastic year! A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Nov 2, 2015 at 7:57am PST

6. A fan of hers from Jamshedpur once appealed to the government to declare her birthday as a National Holiday. He even created a calendar where the new year began with her birthday.

This one is for you. A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Jul 25, 2015 at 10:52am PDT

7. She is the recipient of the Padma Shri award (2008), Indias fourth-highest civilian award.

Thanks again to all my fans at the Marrakesh Film Festival. A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Dec 5, 2015 at 6:42pm PST

8. She was the highest paid female actor of her time. It is rumoured that she received a sum of INR 2.7 crore for Hum Aapke Hain Koun, which was more than what her co-actor, Salman Khan was paid.

Happy Birthday Salman! Have a smashing year ahead..Stay blessed! A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Dec 26, 2016 at 9:34pm PST

9. She married Los Angeles based Dr Shriram Madhav Nene on October 17, 1999 and took a sabbatical from films. She settled in the US where she raised her two sons, Raayan and Arin.

Paani Puri moment  #fun A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Apr 13, 2015 at 9:45pm PDT

Our journeys in life start early... A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Mar 4, 2017 at 9:35pm PST

10. She is involved in many humanitarian and animal welfare causes. She was appointed the Goodwill Ambassador Advocate for Child and Equal Womans Rights in 2014.

Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine. A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Mar 3, 2017 at 4:15am PST

11. She has a star named after her in the Orion constellation. A group of her fans made this possible. The certificate from the Star Foundation reads: A celestial body in the sky above has been named in honour of Madhuri Dixit-Nene and is officially located in the constellation Orion.

Dreams don't work unless you do. Don't let the weekend be an excuse to take you off from your goals. A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Feb 17, 2017 at 9:35pm PST

12. She starred alongside Mithun Chakraborthy, Aditya Pancholi, Sadashiv Amrapurkar,Shakti Kapoor, Paresh Rawal in a film called Maha Paap(1990) which was later shelved.

Tea break at my office :) A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on May 26, 2015 at 5:11am PDT

13. Madhuri signed Vijay Anand s film Jana Na Dil Se Door that co-starred Dev Anand and Inder Kumar (who was replaced by Rajeshwar). She left the film before shoot commenced.

Elegance is when the inside, is as beautiful as outside. A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Mar 13, 2017 at 10:33pm PDT

14. Her debut film was a flop, followed by a slew of flops. She had nine back-to-back flops between 1984 and 1988, but that didnt deter her from following her dreams.

What? It's just tuesday? A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Mar 6, 2017 at 9:30pm PST

15. She launched her own virtual dance academy where users can login to upload their dance videos, learn different dance forms and also participate in contests.

Sneak peek from Golden Petal Awards... for those who have missed. A post shared by Madhuri Dixit (@madhuridixitnene) on Sep 26, 2016 at 2:36am PDT

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Manoj Bajpayee is known for his critical acclaimed films, and makes it to the list of commercially bankable actors too, which many Bollywood filmmakers will vouch for. However, the 48-year-old actor feels an actor can either aim to earn big, or just act for the love of it.

I dont generalise actors. People have all kinds of ambitions. If people dream of making it big commercially, then kudos to them. But if somebody really wants to continue in theatre, then you should support them too. Some choose to come to Mumbai, some choose to stay in Delhi and others go back to their home town and start their theatre activity and serve the theatre scene there, says Bajpayee, who studied in National School of Drama, before joining the Bollywood industry.

About why he took up acting in the first place, Bajpayee, who originally hails from Bihar, adds, I went to Delhi to get formal training in theatre. I wanted to be better prepared before going to Mumbai. Then I got immersed in theatre in Delhi, and stopped looking ahead. It was Shekhar Kapur who convinced me that we should go to Mumbai and earn money because theatre never had any money, which could help us support our families. And thats how I moved to Mumbai and got into films.

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Nawazuddin Siddiqui will soon be accompanying his latest projects director Nandita Das to the Cannes Film Festival to promote their upcoming movie. The movie, called Manto, is based on writer-playwright Saadat Hasan Mantos life and will see the Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) actor playing Manto in the film.

Nawazuddin, who is currently shooting in Croatia for his international TV series, says he is pretty excited to join the films team at Cannes. He says, I leave for Cannes on May 18, and the promo of Manto will be screened around May 20. Im excited about going to Cannes, and it is a special moment for me. Its a great festival, and some of the worlds best movies are screened there every year.

Nawazuddin has been to Cannes several times for different projects, so he isnt nervous about attending it again. The actor says he loves the atmosphere at the festival, as he gets to meet people from around the world and see a wide variety of films.

A post shared by Nawazuddin Siddiqui (@nawazuddin._siddiqui) on Feb 2, 2017 at 3:31am PST

Its special every time. Every actor, big or small, is respected there. Its an experience that every actor needs to be a part of at least once in their lives. The last time, there was too much attention on my clothes (chuckles). But this time, Im there for a brief period, so I am yet to decide what to wear, he says.

#SixteenPointSixSix A post shared by Nawazuddin Siddiqui (@nawazuddin._siddiqui) on Apr 24, 2017 at 1:49am PDT

Critics have often described Nawazuddin as versatile, and that reflects in his choice of films as well. However, the actor is quick to point out that his directors also deserve equal credit. It is a good time to experiment, and, of course, I dont want to get stuck doing the same roles. If I wont experiment, then who will? But I also have to say that I am a directors actor. I will do all it takes to get into character. I always tell Nandita (Das) that she is Lady Manto, because if it werent for me, she could have easily played this part. The amount of research she has done for this project is commendable. Im looking forward to the Cannes experience and how people are going to react to it.

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The government today said there was no serious impact in the country due to a global ransomware cyber attack, except for a few isolated incidents in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.

IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the systems run by the National Informatics Centre were secured and running smoothly.

There is no major impact in India unlike other countries. We are keeping a close watch. As per the information received so far, there have been isolated incidents in limited areas in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, Prasad told reporters here.

India is on high alert, monitoring critical networks across sectors like banking, telecom, power and aviation to ensure that systems are protected in the wake of reports of possible cyber attack by ransomware WannaCry on the countrys vital networks.

WannaCry has disrupted networks in over 150 countries, including Russia and the UK, and is being termed as one of the most widespread cyber attacks in the history.

Reports suggest that over two lakh systems globally could have been infected by the malicious software.

Indias cyber security unit CERT-In earlier said it has not received any formal report of cyber attack on Indias vital networks.

Everything seems to be normal, so far. No reports have come to Cert-In. We have been in touch with Microsoft and others...even they have not got any reports, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) director general Sanjay Bahl told PTI.

Ransomware is a malicious software that blocks access to data unless a ransom is paid.
Life Insurance Corp of India (LIC) will clear Rosneft PJSCs $12.9-billion acquisition of Essar Oil only after the Essar group pays a part of its dues to the insurer, four people with direct knowledge of the matter, including an LIC official, said.

An approval from Essar Oils lenders, including LIC, is a pre-requisite for the transaction to go through, according to Indian rules.

Essar, through two of its group companies, owes at least Rs 2,300 crore to LIC. The state-owned insurer wants Essar to repay its loans or at least pay part of loan so that LIC can classify this debt as a standard asset in its books, said one of the four people cited earlier on the condition of anonymity.

We wish to make it clear that LIC is in favour of the deal, however, there are concerns to be addressed, a spokesperson for LIC said in a emailed statement. LIC has conveyed the concerns to Essar group and Roseneft in a joint meeting. LIC has been following with them through letters but we are yet to get response addressing our concerns.

The Essar group signed a deal with Rosneft, United Capital Partners and Trafigura Group Pte. in October to sell 98% in Essar Oil. The deal was signed at the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in Goa in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The proceeds from this sale were expected to help the group reduce its debt, which director Prashant Ruia had put at around $13.5 billion (Rs 86,400 crore).

The deal which was to be completed by March has been delayed because some lenders are yet to approve the acquisition. Reuters reported on Thursday that apart from LIC, five other institutions - IDBI Bank, Punjab National Bank, Syndicate Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, IFCI Ltd  have held up the deal. Reuters also said that Syndicate Bank and Indian Overseas Bank were close to approving the deal, citing people it didnt identify.

LICs key worry stems from the non-Essar Oil part of debt owed to it.

After the deal is closed, some part of the liability will go to Rosneft and Transfigura since they will become the owners. There is no guarantee from Essar how it will repay the other parts of its debt, the second of the four people cited earlier said, declining to be identified.

Thats the key reason why other lenders are taking a long time to give approvals. Debt talks were complicated by the fact that some lenders were also owed money by other Essar group firms, Reuters reported. Essar Steel, for instance is negotiating with lenders to restructure debt.

Essar had first offered to pay LIC immediately after the deal closure. Now it is prepared to pre-pay LIC if required to move forward the deal, said two other people (different from the four cited in the first instance) aware of the matter on condition of anonymity. Informally, other lenders, are saying that Essar pay them money in advance. In a couple of cases, Essar will pay them before the deal is completed, said one of the two people.

However, the first person cited in the story, who is directly involved in negotiations, said a written offer conveying Essars willingness to pre-pay has not been made to LIC.

The completion of the transaction was conditional upon receiving requisite approvals and satisfaction of customary conditions. The parties are working towards obtaining the requisite approvals to complete the transaction. We are hopeful that the deal will be completed in the upcoming few weeks, an Essar group spokesperson said in an emailed response.

Rosneft didnt reply to an email seeking comments.
Malika Sadani returned from the UK when she was pregnant with her second child. Soon after the baby was born Sadani realised that the diapers were giving the newly born some rashes and causing dryness.

I started importing the products... But there is a problem. A lot of the importend products come in big bottle... And in India there are no pregnancy safe products, she said.

That made her wonder if there was a business case for similar products, to be manufactured in India for the domestic market. After more than a years research, meeting people in this space, which involved doctors, and going for conference on pregnancy and mothercare, Sadani decided to take a plunge.

She named her firm The Moms Co., which would sell products for pregnant women and newly born children. Sadanis husband joined her, after quitting Snapdeal, where Mohit was the head of growth.

To start with, the company has launched with four stock-keeping-units (SKUs) -- a body butter cream, stretch oils to reduce stretch marks, a foot cream for swollen feet, and a body wash. We have started with products for pregnant women, and will get into babycare, Sadani said.

The products are being manufactured in Noida. The couple, however, said that to develop each of these products and test it can take more than a year.

We want to be in categories where after buying those products mothers think that they and the child are safe, Sadani said.

The Moms Co will be up against companies such as Johnson and Johnson, which has been in this space for more than a century. Johnsons Baby powder was first introduced in the market in 1893.

In the years to come as the Sadanis increase the portfolio the competition will also increase. Sadani has plans to enter the organic food business, and special food for pregnant women and babies.

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Consumers might soon get home care products such as shampoo and soaps at foreign retail stores.

After approving 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) in food processing, the Centre is preparing to further relax rules to allow foreign retailers and e-commerce companies to sell consumer products made in India.

Union minister of food processing industries Harsimrat Kaur Badal told Hindustan Times in an interview that she expects the change in the FDI rules to attract more funds into the country, encourage the Make in India initiative and increase farmers income.

Global retailers, including Amazon, Wal-Mart and Metro AG, are keen to increase their footprint in India to cash in on the consumption growth story of the worlds second populous nation.

Last year, India allowed 100% FDI both in food processing and trading, including through e-commerce, for products manufactured in India.

However, retailers complain of wafer-thin margins in selling just fruits and vegetables.

Global food retailers also sell some consumer goods to cover the loss on food items  a model called Food Plus.

The viability comes from other products, Badal said, referring to the sale of soaps, shampoos and other consumer goods along with farm products.

I have written to the Prime Minister (for relaxing the FDI rules). Today our farmers need infrastructure at the farm gate level, which is missing, she said.

The Union minister said that in the current set up, the farmers were selling their produce at a low price.

When his produce comes, a farmer has to sell at whatever price he gets. After some months, the same product is sold four times the cost. Farmers are now selling their produce at a very low price. We need infrastructure as fast as possible at the farm gate level.

So why not put a clause (in FDI rules) that whoever invests at the farm gate level, 20-25% of that amount can be invested in selling soaps, shampoo and other FMCG (fast moving consumer goods). Many retailers will be interested to expand their operations. What I am saying is videshi paiso se swadeshi kisano ka bhala, she said.

Higher FDI will improve the $22-billion food processing sector as there is a dearth of infrastructure and high scale wastage.

While India is a leading producer of vegetables, fruits and milk, Badal said a survey of 26 commodities in 150 districts show wastage up to 15%.

The minister also pointed out the food processing industry was handicapped by decades-old rules of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI). States have to implement the new rules and end inspector raj, she added.

Without mentioning the ban on Nestles Maggi, Badal said the food processing industry was hurt by the delay in product clearance for items with minor variance.

While big companies got caught in the web of regulation, the unregulated sectors could churn up unhealthy products and grab a bigger share of the market, she said.

As against tests for just 375 product ingredients approved earlier, she said the rules have been streamlined to global standards and 1,200 products can be tested now. With that, the investment flow has also smoothened, she added.

The minister said the government was also coming up with a state-of-the-art testing facility at Sonepat which will be the final authority for food safety.

In order to arrest post-harvest losses of horticulture and non-horticulture produce, the ministry has accorded approval to 42 Mega Food Parks and 236 Integrated Cold Chains for creation of modern infrastructure for food processing along the value chain from the farm to the market. Out of 42 Mega Food Parks, eight are operational. Of these, six Mega Food Parks have been made operational during the past three years.

Another four Mega Food Parks are targeted to be made operational in next three months. Similarly, out of 236 Cold Chains, 101 Cold Chains have been sanctioned recently in March, 2017. Hundred Cold Chains have become operational, with 63 of them being made operational during the last three years.
The IT ministry has reached out to key stakeholders like RBI, National Payments Corporation of India, NIC and UIDAI (Aadhaar) to advise them to protect their systems against Wanna Cry ransomware to ensure that the digital payments ecosystem in the country is protected.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has also instructed cyber security unit CERT-In to gather information of Wanna Cry ransomware that has wrecked havoc across sectors like healthcare and telecommunications in more than 100 countries.

Over the weekend, the ransomware hit systems in over 100 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history. It infected computers running on older versions of Microsoft operating systems like XP, locking access to files on the computer.

The cyber criminals have demanded a fee of about USD 300 in crypto-currencies like Bitcoin for unlocking the device.

Microsoft has introduced a security patch to tackle the situation, and consumers across the globe have been advised to download the solution at the earliest.

Noting that no reports have been formally received so far related to the ransomware attack, MeitY said a few systems of the Police Department in Andhra Pradesh were impacted and that the state government has been informed to follow the advisory by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

MeitY is keeping a close watch on the developments on the ransomware and is working in close coordination with all relevant agencies, it said in a statement.

The ministry has also reached out to the Department of Telecom (DoT) to alert Internet service providers (ISPs) to secure their networks as well as the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and CDAC to ensure that users across the country, especially those in the private sector, are cautioned about the ransomware.

Besides, it has also requested Microsoft India to inform all its partners and customers to apply the relevant patches.

As per the advisory issued by CERT-In, the ransomware infects other computers on the same network and is also spreading through malicious attachments to e-mails. Security firms have suggested that users immediately disconnect the infected device from the local network to contain the spread of infection.

In Spain, major companies including telecommunications firm Telefonica have been infected. The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.

Reports suggest that over two lakh systems globally could have been infected by the malicious software.

Experts fear the situation could further aggravate as a number of computers in India run on the older operating systems and have not been updated yet.

The impact has been somewhat contained in India because of the weekend. However, one will have to watch the situation as people return to work tomorrow and access their computers, Kaspersky Lab Head for South Asia Region Altaf Halde told PTI.

A report by the security solutions firm claims that India is among the countries worst affected by the Wanna Cry outbreak, accounting for about five per cent of the attacks.

This attack is perhaps the largest, most widespread and contiguous malware attack in history as the attackers have used a flaw in Microsoft software to infiltrate unguarded systems. It is important that users keep their systems updated and take a proactive approach to security rather than a reactive one, Pradipto Chakrabarty, Regional Director at CompTIA India said.

Saket Modi, CEO and co-founder of Lucideus said, ransomware, as a mode of attack, seems to be gaining traction as it now gets 4-5 requests from a week from enterprises across the country for providing support from such attacks.
South Korean engineer Kim Gwang-ho flew 11,000 km to Washington last year to do something he never dreamed he would: he reported alleged safety lapses at Hyundai Motor Co - his employer of 26 years - to US regulators.

Citing an internal report from Hyundais quality strategy team to management, Kim told the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) the company was not taking enough action to address an engine fault that increased the risk of crashes.

Hyundai denies the allegations. The company promotes openness and transparency in all safety-related operations, and its decisions on recalls comply with both global regulators and stringent internal processes, Hyundai told Reuters in an emailed statement.

Reuters was unable to review the internal report cited by Kim due to a court injunction filed by Hyundai.

In a culture which values corporate loyalty, Kim was moving against the tide when he handed the NHTSA 250 pages of internal documents on the alleged defect and nine other faults.

South Korea has been buffeted by corporate scandals, many within its family-run conglomerates or chaebol, but has seen few whistleblowers. A high proportion are sacked or ostracised, despite legislation to protect them, according to advocacy groups.

Kim, fired in November for allegedly leaking trade secrets about the companys technology and sales to media, has since been reinstated by Hyundai after a ruling by a South Korean government body under whistleblower protection laws.

Hyundai has filed a complaint disputing the decision.

I will be the first and last whistleblower in South Koreas auto industry. There are just too many things to lose, Kim said in an interview at a bakery cafe run by his eldest daughter.

I had a normal life and was better off, but now Im fighting against a big conglomerate.

Corruption at chaebols is at the forefront of the political agenda for newly elected president Moon Jae-in, voted in after a bribery scandal involving Samsung chief Jay Y. Lee and former President Park Geun-hye.

Kim Gwang-ho checks his Hyundai Motor's car during an interview with Reuters in Yongin, South Korea, April 19, 2017. Picture taken on April 19, 2017. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji (Reuters)

Loyal salary man

On Friday, Hyundai and associate Kia Motors Corp said they would recall a further 240,000 vehicles in South Korea after the transport ministry issued a rare compulsory recall order over defects flagged by Kim.

Kim, now 55, says he did not start off intending to blow the whistle.

A loyal salary man, he studied precision mechanics and joined Hyundai in 1991, working on engine testing and planning.

In 2015, Kim transferred to the quality strategy team, which decides recall issues.

That same year, Hyundai announced a US recall of half a million Sonata sedans due to manufacturing flaws that could result in engine stalling.

Citing the report by the quality strategy team, Kim argues Hyundai knew the issue was more serious and widespread, affecting more models and the South Korean market. The problem was not just with the manufacturing process but also engine design, meaning Hyundai would need to fix engine in all the affected cars, at a steep cost, he said.

Hyundai rejected those claims, saying it was closely monitoring the issues brought up by Kim both before and after he raised them.

Hyundai has taken appropriate steps to ensure safety, quality and compliance with applicable regulations in our markets, including all recalls Hyundai has conducted to date, Hyundai said.

In this December 6, 2016 file photo, (from left), CJ Group Chairman Sohn Kyung-shik, LG Group Chairman Koo Bon-moo, Hanhwa Group Chairman Kim Seung-youn, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-Won, Samsung Electronics Co. Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin, Hanjin Group Chairman Cho Yang-ho and Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Mong-koo take an oath during a parliamentary probe into a scandal engulfing President Park Geun-hye at the National Assembly in Seoul. South Koreas newly elected president, Moon Jae-in says jobs top his agenda for Asias fourth largest economy, but a larger challenge awaits him in reforming the powerful family conglomerates, called chaebol, that dominate the economy. (AP file photo)

Family support

Kim shared his misgivings with some local media and South Korean regulators after his tip-off to the NHTSA. One transport ministry official said that led Hyundai to investigate and recall vehicles in South Korea.

Last month, Hyundai and Kia announced a recall of 1.5 million cars in the United States, Canada and Korea due to the engine stalling risk, at a cost of 360 billion won ($318 million). NHTSA declined to comment on whether Kims complaints led to the US recall.

NHTSA said it is reviewing Kims materials and will take appropriate action as warranted. It did not elaborate on the actions, which could include imposing penalties on Hyundai.

Kim has also paid a price. His house was raided by police investigators in February who seized documents and his hard disk, he said.

Police said a probe into Hyundais complaint against Kim was ongoing.

Before being reinstated to his job, Kim was relying on savings and loans to support his family.

At first my wife asked me not to do it. She was worried about living costs if Im fired. But Im stubborn, and persuaded her that the problems will be buried forever without my confession, Kim said.
InterGlobe Aviation Ltd, which runs Indias largest airline IndiGo, is likely to hire some of its founding employees to set up its regional operations, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

Shakti Lumba, who helped set up the airlines operations in 2005, is among the first few employees to be brought back to set up the regional division, the person said. Lumba quit Indigo in 2009 as its vice-president of operations. Before joining IndiGo, he was with Air India where he led the national carriers regional airline arm Alliance Air.

IndiGo is also likely to rehire Sunita Srivastava, who was till recently vice-president-flight operations control centre and dispatch at the airline and was also part of the founding team. She has also worked with Air India and Alliance Air. Srivastava is likely to be part of Lumbas team, according to the person cited above.

Lumba declined to comment.

IndiGo declined to comment on the matter.

The airline, on Tuesday, announced it has signed a term sheet with French aircraft maker Avions de Transport Regional GIE for the purchase of 50 ATR 72-600 aircraft. A term sheet becomes a firm order after both sides sign off on the deal.

IndiGo plans to launch its turboprop operation by the end of 2017 and expects to induct as many as 20 aircraft by December 2018.

Unlike the narrow-body aircraft like Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, procuring pilots is the most critical resource for an ATR operation. Most graduate to bigger jets after putting in enough hours on log book.

Only Air India, Jet Airways and SpiceJet use turboprop planes in India.

We pay Rs 7 lakh (per month) to out ATR captains. This will lead to a war for talent. Fares will also come under pressure, said an Air India official who did not wish to be named.

Air India is also adding over half a dozen ATR planes and it too will need more trained captains and co-pilots.

Lumba, a former pilot, is likely to help bring in pilots.

IndiGos regional foray will create more jobs across other areas also. The airline on Tuesday said it would start hiring soon.

The new regional foray will be run as a separate division under IndiGo. Its core operations will be carried out by the existing team and the new one will benefit from a common human resource and legal department among other departments.

IndiGos foray into regional operations could be because of multiple reasons, said an analyst who did not wish to be named. For one, there was a clear government policy in place in the form of Udan, which provides subsidy to airlines to fly new or under-served routes.

Second, it will now be able to fly to 20 more airports, to which it could not have flown with its bigger A320s. This means wider market penetration, the analyst said.

Third, it will be able to complement its existing network by selling routes like Delhi-Bengaluru-Mysuru where passengers would otherwise have flown the Bengaluru-Mysuru leg on another airline, the analyst added.

Fourth, it could start its ATRs in the South first. The South has always had a higher number of short-haul flights and is not slot-constrained like Mumbai and Delhi airports.
European governments and companies appeared early Monday to have avoided further fallout from a crippling global cyberattack, the police agency Europol said.

The number of victims appears not to have gone up and so far the situation seems stable in Europe, which is a success, senior spokesman for Europol, Jan Op Gen Oorth told AFP.

It seems that a lot of internet security guys over the weekend did their homework and ran the security software updates.

Europol said more than 200,000 computers around the world had been affected over the weekend in what it said was an unprecedented attack.

The indiscriminate attack began Friday and struck banks, hospitals and government agencies, exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

Europol executive director Rob Wainwright had warned on Sunday the situation could worsen when workers return to their offices on Monday after the weekend and logged on.

Weve never seen anything like this, the head of the European Unions policing agency told Britains ITV television Sunday.

Op Gen Oorth said Monday it was still a bit early too say who is behind it, but we are working on a decrypting tool.

Called WannaCry, the fast-spreading malware is the first ever detected to combine both a worm -- which enables it to burrow into an entire network from a single infected computer -- and a ransomware, demanding $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock systems.
The ransomware cyberattack that has hit as many as 200,000 victims in over 150 countries should be treated by governments around the world as a wake- up call, IT giant Microsoft has said.

The virus exploits a flaw in a version of Microsoft Windows first identified by US intelligence.

The attacks exploited the computers because they were running outdated versions of Microsofts Windows operating system.

The National Security Agency (NSA) alerted Microsoft about the issue three months ago and Microsoft released an upgrade that patched the flaw, but many users were yet to run it, CNN reported.

Brad Smith, Microsofts president and chief legal officer, said yesterday in a blog post that his company, its customers and the government all share the blame, the report said.

The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call, Smith wrote while also noting how cybersecurity has become a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers.

But he also blamed the governments. The security flaw that hackers used to launch the attacks on Friday was made public after information was stolen from the NSA, which routinely searches for flaws in software and builds tools to exploit them, the report said.

The government is not legally bound to notify at-risk companies. Thats wrong, says Smith.

He argued there should be a new requirement for governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.

He said tech companies, customers and the government need to work together to protect against attacks.

More action is needed, and its needed now, he said.

The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.

The ransomware is a type of malicious software that infects a computer and restricts users access to it until a ransom is paid to unlock it. It demands users pay $ 300 worth of cryptocurrency Bitcoin to retrieve their files, though it warns that the payment will be raised after a certain amount of time. The malware spreads through e-mail.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese computers at nearly 30,000 institutions including government agencies have been hit by the global ransomware attack, a leading Chinese security-software provider has said, though the Asian impact has otherwise been relatively muted.

The enterprise-security division of Qihoo 360, one of the countrys leading suppliers of anti-virus software, said 29,372 institutions ranging from government offices to universities, ATMs and hospitals had been infected by the outbreak as of late Saturday.

Governments, companies and computer experts around the world braced on Monday for a possible worsening of the global cyberattack that has hit more than 150 countries as people return for another work week.

The indiscriminate attack began Friday and struck banks, hospitals and government agencies, exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

In a statement dated Sunday, Qihoo 360 said the ransomware had spread particularly quickly through higher education, affecting more than 4,000 Chinese universities and research institutions.

It gave few details on the extent of any damage, however, and Chinas government has said little about the situation.

Chinese state media on Monday quoted national cyberspace authorities as saying the attack is still spreading in the country, but had slowed significantly.

State-owned oil giant PetroChina said in a statement that it had to disconnect the networks linking its petrol stations nationwide for 12 hours on Saturday after the companys internet payment functions were disabled.

Customers were forced to use cash during the shutdown. By late Sunday, around 80 percent of its network was back online, PetroChina said.

In Japan, a spokesman for conglomerate Hitachi said on Monday that the companys computer networks were unstable, crippling its email systems.

We found the problems this morning. We assume that the problems are due to the weekends global cyberattacks. We have not received any reports of damage to our production. We dont know when the problem can be solved, said the spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Authorities across the world have issued public alerts warning computer users to beware of suspicious emails and beef up their computer security measures.

Please beware and take preventive steps against the malware attack, said Indonesias information minister Rudiantara who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.

Rudiantara was speaking to reporters following reports that records and billing systems in at least one hospital in the country had been crippled.

Dozens of Chinese universities have issued alerts about the attack and advised students to disable their internet connections before turning on their computers.

The southern city of Zhuhai on Monday suspended all activities in its housing pension system, which mainly offers loans to homebuyers, while it protectively upgraded its internet security, according to a statement by the citys Housing Provident Fund Management Center.

The attack sent the stock prices of Chinese internet security firms soaring in the Shenzhen market.
A 27-year-old man was robbed of Rs 1.2 lakh cash by robbers on motorcycle in Nandgram, Ghaziabad. The incident took place around 12.30pm when the victim had gone to his house for lunch and was cornered barely 25 metres from his house when he was returning for duty.

According to police, David Kumar works as a cash collection agent with a cellular company distributor in Navyug Market and had gone to the field for cash collection on Monday morning.

Around 12 noon, he went home for lunch in Nandgram. Half an hour later, when he was returning for duty, he was cornered by two armed men on a Pulsar bike, barely 25 metres from his house. They inflicted injuries on the victim with a sharp-edged weapon and snatched his cash bag, said Manish Mishra, circle officer (city).

We have launched a search for the bikers. We also tried to get the CCTV footage from a nearby school but the cameras there were not functional. We will rope in local intelligence and also use electronic surveillance to trace the accused. An FIR for robbery has been lodged, he said.

My brother suffered a deep cut on his forearm, seemingly inflicted by a knife. The locals also told us that the robbers fired two shots in the air to scare people and fled on the bike. My brother is under treatment, said Rohit Kumar, victims brother.

This is the second back-to-back incident in Ghaziabad in which robbers have escaped with cash from residents. On Sunday morning, a 48-year-old man suffered severe injuries to his head after he and his brother were cornered by three armed robbers near NH-24.

The robbers escaped with nearly Rs 53,000 and also beat up Shahabuddin, who is a cattle trader. The two men were headed for Naifal from Dasna when the incident took place, police said.

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The Ghaziabad police on Monday lodged an FIR after a low intensity explosion injured seven persons in the weekly market in Vaishali late Sunday night. The investigators have so far failed to make any headway in the case.

The police on Monday registered the FIR at Indirapuram police station against unidentified persons under the provisions of the Explosives Act.

According to the FIR, the seven sustained injuries, mostly in their legs. Those injured were identified as Mahesh Chandra, Urmila Yadav, Gita Negi, Bina Rawat, Sahil Rawat and Shivani Rawat. All the six injured are from Sector 2 in Vaishali while the seventh person was identified as Kumari Urmila Yadav from Sector 5.

Following the incident, the forensic and field unit teams also rushed to the spot to collect evidence but they could not find any remains of the substance that triggered the blast. However, sources said the clothes of the injured persons are under the possession of the police for further forensic investigation.

I had come to the market to buy some vegetables and I heard an explosion. I could not sense anything for 1-2 minutes. There was no smell of any substance. Then I felt something in my legs and it was blood, said one of the injured.

The victims suffered injuries due to fly-away splinters from the blast.

To ascertain the material used, we have collected samples from the blast site. The samples have been sent for testing to Agra forensic laboratory and reports are awaited. Those injured were rushed to a hospital and were given medical aid. We are also keeping a watch on suspicious elements and trying to trace the origin of the explosive substance, said Akash Tomar, superintendent of police (city).

At the time of the incident, hundreds of residents were present in the market and panicked shoppers rushed to their homes soon after the explosion.

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DEHRADUN: Congress state president Pritam Singh is willing to revoke the expulsion of party leaders who were expelled by his predecessor Kishore Upadhyay but they will have to wait for at least three months.

Sources close to Singh said although the new Pradesh Congress Committee president wants a majority of expelled Congress workers to return to the party, he will initiate the process after the organisational elections in August.

Singh is of the opinion that the organisation needs service of these expelled party workers at a time when it is going through difficult times. The BJP won 57 of the total 70 assembly seats, reducing the Congress to 11 seats in Uttarakhand.

However, Singhas claimed by his aideswants to initiate the process after he assumes office as elected PCC chief. He is likely to be pronounced formally as the elected party chief after July-August.

Around 100 party leaders and workers were expelled by Upadhyay for anti-party activities, mostly because for contesting elections as Independents against the partys official candidates. Former state cabinet minister and four-time MLA Shurbir Singh Sajwan was among the expelled party workers. Sajwan contested elections against Congress candidates. Several Congress leaders were also expelled from Udham Singh Nagar district for working against Congress nominee Ranjit Rawat.

Talks of their return to the parent party began after Singhs nomination in the wake of the difficult phase which the Congress is passing through.

Singh is likely to make major changes in the partys working committee with new office bearers taking over the charge of the party. Our primary focus is the membership drive and to ensure that the organisational elections are completed smoothly at every level starting from block Congress committees to state president. The revocation of expulsions will be considered after that. It will be done only on the AICCs recommendation keeping in mind the extent of contribution these expelled leaders can make to strengthen the party, the Congress state chief told Hindustan Times.
The Uttarakhand forest department has asked the central government to allow hunting of wild boars in the state till 2020, so crops in agricultural lands adjoining forested areas can be safeguarded.

Although the ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEFCC) had previously permitted this by relegating wild beasts to the vermin status, the deadline expired in February. It is necessary to shift the species from Schedule III to Schedule V of the Wildlife Protection Act-1972 for the required permission to be granted. This was last done on February 3, 2016.

According to the forest department, the wild boar population increased from 32,613 in 2005 to 34,914 in 2008. Although no census was carried out after that, it is estimated that the number of wild boars has now risen to over 50,000.

The forest department had submitted a proposal for extension of the hunting permission in January, a month before the expiry date, but they received no response from the MoEFCC. However, state officials continue to push the matter, this time demanding that hunting of wild boars be permitted for three years instead of just one.

We have sought permission for at least three years, so the nuisance can be eliminated, chief wildlife warden Digvijay Singh Khati told Hindustan Times.

Officials said farmers are forced to watch helplessly as packs of wild boars run amok in their fields. The animals damage over 200 sq km of farmland annually, causing an average revenue loss of Rs 1 crore.

Only somebody proficient in hunting can take down a wild boar. The animal is too quick to catch, said wildlife expert Abhishekh Kumar.

Vidyadutt Sharma, a resident of Sangura village in Pauri district, said wild boars have turned out to be a major menace in his area. The beasts damage what little we manage to cultivate. The issue is  who will hunt down the animal even if they grant the required permission? We only have elderly men and women here, he added.

Last July, animal rights activist Gauri Maulekhi filed a petition in the Nainital high court against the state government declaring the wild boar as vermin without conducting a census. The court then asked both the central and state governments to clarify their stand on the matter.

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Manipur human rights activist Irom Sharmila joined African students in Delhi on Monday to raise their voices against increasing instances of racial discrimination in India.

The world is a circle, we all are connected in some way or the other. We cannot live individually, so these differentiations, on grounds of race, shape, colour, language, et cetera, is wrong and pointless, said Sharmila at a press conference organised by the Association of African Students in India (AASI) here on Monday.

The press meet comes following a series of racial attacks against African students in India, specifically keeping in mind the mob attacks against African nationals in Greater Noida on March 27.

Samuel Jack, president of AASI, said that following the attack in Greater Noida, international passports of five African nationals -- Said Kabir Abdullahi, Said Abubakar Abdullahi, Adamu Usman, Mohammad Amir Zakari Yau and Abdulkadir Usman -- remain withheld by police.

Taking cognizance of the matter, Suniti, superintendent of Police (rural), Greater Noida, said: We are aware about the case of Manish Kharis death and the subsequent violence that followed in Greater Noida. We will soon inquire about the status of passports that have been allegedly seized from the African students.

The conference, aimed at building solidarity and spreading awareness about racial discrimination in Indian society, identified a series of cases of attacks against Africans from across India, which they wish to put forth to the government and appeal for constructive measures.

Claiming that injustice is in fact one and that the root of racism same, the association stated its extended alliance and solidarity with individuals from the Northeast and Dalit and Bahujan backgrounds.

Even if our origins and struggles to assert our rights have their own unique histories, the antipathy meted out to different communities in India seems to have been emerging from the same source, added Samuel.

Irom Sharmila was present with partner Desmond Coutanho in solidarity with the cause.

.
In a gesture that showed tremendous humanity in the midst of a tragedy, the families of the two college students killed in a car accident in Punjabi Bagh on Monday, decided to donate the eyes of the victims.

Sanchit Chhabra and Ritu Singh, both 19 year olds, were killed when a Honda City they were travelling to attend an exam flew off a flyover on the Outer Ring Road in Delhi around 8.30 am.

Sanchits father, Raj Kumar Chhabra, said he would have donated all the organs of his dead son had the thought struck him on time.

By the time an NGO approached us with request for donation, only eyes of my son were usable. We agreed to donate his eyes without a second thought. My son was a helpful and friendly boy. Even in his death, he will be helping people, said Raj Kumar.

My son is gone, but at least two other people will be able to see the world through his eyes. Just thinking of this possibility makes me feel better, said Raj Kumar.

Raj Kumar Chhabra, father of Sanchit, who died in the car accident at Punjabi Bagh. (Ravi Choudhary / HT Photo)

Ritus father, Malkhan Singh, too agreed to donate her daughters eyes without a second thought. The NGO has invited me to meet the two persons who will receive Ritus eyes. My daughter will live in those two persons forever. I will meet them and stay in touch with them my entire life, said her father amidst tears.

Fighting off their tears, the two fathers put up a brave front while speaking to the media and exhorted others to follow their footsteps.

Most people are unaware of the contribution they can make to the world even after the loss of their dear ones. My heart feels lighter on thinking about the contribution my daughter has made even in her death, said Malkhan Singh.

People should be made aware about organ donation. My only regret is that her other organs were not usable, he added.
The toll in Mondays Honda City accident rose to three after a teenager succumbed to his injuries. Four other students are still in ICU. In all, seven students were injured after a Honda City car skid and fell off a flyover in Punjabi Bagh area of west Delhi.

According to the police, the students, including two girls, from Delhi Institute of Professional studies  were on their way to take an exam at a college in Narela, when the incident occurred around 8am. The car, police said, was moving at high speed and toppled after the driver lost control. The tyres skid and the car crashed against the divider. It was thrown in the air on impact, fell off the flyover and landed upside down on the ground.

Rajkumar Chhabra, father of Sanchit, who died in the car accident at Punjabi Bagh. (Ravi Choudhary / HT Photo)

According to the police, a student named Rajat (22) was driving the car and his friends  Pranav, Grima, Rishab, Raja, Ritu and Sanchit  were with him.

The police received a PCR call from a passerby who was on his way to office from the route. The police team rushed to the spot, pulled the students out and took them to the hospital. Sanchit (18) and Ritu (18), were declared dead on arrival at the hospital, a senior police officer said. The surviving students are battling for life in ICU. Rajat was declared dead at Ganga Ram Hospital

While eyewitnesses alleged that it took the police and the ambulance over half-an-hour to reach the spot after the call, police claimed that they reached within minutes. Police, however, admitted that it took them over 15 minutes to pull the students out as the car was completely damaged. We even called the fire department to help us pull out the occupants as the cars doors and roof were completely crushed. Preliminary examination suggests that the two students who died on the spot had suffered excessive blood loss and severe head injuries. Their bodies have been sent for post mortem and their families have been informed, a senior police officer said.

Speaking to HT, Nizammudin, an eyewitness said, I was on my way to office when I heard the crash and rushed to help. There were six people inside the car, one got stuck on the flyover itself. While a few of them fell outside, some got stuck inside. Locals gathered to help the occupants. We also informed the police, but help came very late.

The police have recovered some books and identity cards from the car. The students were pursuing BBA and were on their way for an exam for which they were carrying admit cards and books. All the seven were first year students and were to appear for their second semester exam.

The students first assembled at Rajats residence in East Punjabi Bagh, Delhi, and then left together. It is still unclear how they lost control of the wheel. We have accessed footage from CCTV cameras installed in the area to see if their were speeding. It appears that the car was being driven at least at the speed of 100km per hour, a police officer said.

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Sacked Delhi water minister, Kapil Mishra, ended his six-day-long hunger strike demanding details of the foreign trips of five Aam Aadmi Party leaders.

The suspended AAP leader was admitted to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital on Sunday after he dramatically fainted during a press conference. Mishra said that he was ending his strike as the doctors wont discharge him till he starts taking liquids.

Doctors won't discharge until i start taking liquids. I hv to go to CBI and CBDT. starting on liquids now  Kapil Mishra (@KapilMishraAAP) May 15, 2017

He began the strike demanding to know the details of foreign travel by AAP leaders Sanjay Singh, Ashish Khetan, Satyendar Jain, Raghav Chaddha and Durgesh Pathak. Mishra had alleged that while he was in the party, he was told that there was not enough money for party campaigns. He asked the AAP to explain how the cash-strapped party arranged money to send its leaders on foreign tours.

Kapil Mishra shows cheques allegedly received by the Aam Aadmi Party through shell companies. (Sonu Mehta/HT Photo)

Mishra had on Sunday accused the AAP of being involved in financial irregularities and routing funds through shell companies  things he claimed AAP convener and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had knowledge of.

He sought Kejriwals resignation and threatened to drag the chief minister to Tihar.

Yeh ab spasht hai ki Kejriwal bhrasht hai (Its clear that Kejriwal is corrupt)... either he should resign, or I will drag him by his collar to Tihar jail, Mishra said before dramatically fainting at the press conference.

Dr AK Gadpayle, medical superintendent of Dr RML hospital, told the media on Sunday: He was basically suffering from starvation syndrome, the symptoms shown by the body when deprived of food. The hot sunny weather caused dehydration as well.
Forklifts, which are used for moving and stacking materials in warehouses and shipping depots, might be the reason behind the chemical spill in southeast Delhis Tughlaqabad, a government report has stated.

Over 475 schoolchildren were hospitalised on May 6 after inhaling poisonous fumes that spread due to a chemical leak at the container depot near two schools in the area. The students complained of irritation in eyes, breathlessness, nausea and severe headache.

The spill started inside the container at the Tughlaqabad depot and probably because of mishandling of the forklift used for transporting the containers, a senior Delhi government official said.

A joint team of Delhi Pollution Control Committee and Central Pollution Control Board visited the leak site on May 11 (Thursday) and prepared the report on the incident. The report will be submitted to the National Green Tribunal.

The report also mentions how there are little precautions at the container depot to handle such toxic chemicals. They are not prepared for a chemical disaster, if and when it happens, he said.

The liquid chemical, which has been identified as chloromethylpyridine, is believed to have leaked from a couple of broken barrels inside an iron container, which was kept in the depot overnight before being transported to Sonepat in Haryana early on May 6. This chemical is used in fertilizers, insecticides and certain drugs, and is a known eye and respiratory irritant.

The spill, which was contained with salt and sand, was disposed of on Saturday (May 6) itself.

On Monday, the National Green Tribunal directed an AIIMS panel, formed by the Centre, to submit its report on the impact of the incident.

A bench headed by NGT chairperson justice Swatanter Kumar asked the panel of experts led by Dr YK Gupta, the head of pharmacology department at AIIMS, to make a detailed submission on who all were affected because of the leakage and whether any person was suffering from any serious illness after the spill.

The green court also asked the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to submit whether such containers carrying toxic material should be permitted in Tughlaqabad located in the heart of the city. The ministry has been asked to  clearly state whether any vehicle should be permitted in the area which is surrounded by residential population and offices and why location of the depot not be changed to any other appropriate place..., the bench said.

We direct all the parties in the case to specifically state whether the leaked substance was covered under environmental laws and Hazardous Chemical Rules, 1989 or not, it said.

The green court also included customs and excise department as party in the case and directed them to file their reply on the issue before May 29.

It also asked officials from MoEF, Central Pollution Control Board, department of industries in Haryana and the state pollution control board to conduct a joint inspection of the Sonepat-based agro-chemical company Crystal Crop Protection Private Limited, which was the consignee in the case.

During the hearing, on Monday, advocate IG Kapila, who has been appointed as amicus curiae to assist the tribunal, said that there is total lack of coordination among the authorities with regard to cargo handling at the container depot.

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Sacked Delhi water minister Kapil Mishra said on Monday he will approach the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to file complaints on money laundering and black money, indicating that he will continue with his fight against Delhis ruling Aam Aadmi Party.

Mishra, who was sacked as the water and tourism minister on May 6, has been demanding details on foreign trips of five AAP leaders. He has also said he saw CM Arvind Kejriwal take money from cabinet colleague Satyendra Jain, a remark that triggered a flutter in the AAP that has been reeling due a string of election losses and infighting.

Whenever I would be discharged from the hospital, I will make a written complaint to the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Central Board of Direct Taxes under black money, hawala and money laundering cases (against Kejriwal and the AAP), Mishra, who has been suspended from the AAPs primary membership, tweeted.

      ,    ,        CBI  CBDT  FIR   Kapil Mishra (@KapilMishraAAP) May 15, 2017

Mishra, who has launched a hunger strike, was rushed to hospital on Sunday after he fainted at a press conference where he alleged that the AAP lied about its donation figures to the Election Commission (EC).

Mishra also alleged that the AAP had over Rs 45 crore in its bank account during the financial year of 2013-2014 whereas the party in its declaration to the EC had showed an income of around Rs 9 crore. He also said the party has accumulated the money through shell companies and by converting black money into white through hawala transactions.

The party, however, dismissed Mishras allegations, claiming he was parroting what the BJP said just before the 2015 assembly polls.

This is the BJPs ploy to finish AAP. It should stop questioning the credentials of AAP and Arvind Kejriwal as we have ensured all transparency while accepting funds, senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh said.
A 32-year-old car driver who was fired from his job over alleged behavioural issues allegedly stabbed his former employee in the neck in south Delhis Malviya Nagar on Sunday afternoon.

Anil, the driver, went to meet his former employer Kaveri, 27, armed with a knife and allegedly laid a trap to get his former employer out of her house.

Kaveri lives on the second floor. Anil rang the bell from the first floor and went straight up. Kaveris mother Rakhi opened the door. When she asked him what he was doing there, he told her that he had got a job with their neighbour as a driver. He told Rakhi aunty that their car was parked in the wrong carriage and was obstructing traffic. He requested them to move it, Harsh, Kaveris friend told HT.

Kaveri then stepped out of the house to park the car properly. As soon as she got inside the car, Anil took out his knife and stabbed her in the neck. He tried to stab her again but the knife fell and he fled. Kaveri raised an alarm and two youths, who were returning from tuitions, helped her. One of them called Rakhi aunty from Kaveris phone and the other called police, he added.

The police rushed the victim to Max Saket hospital where she underwent a surgery on Sunday night and was said to be critical.

At present, she is unfit to give a statement but is out of danger. We registered a case of attempt to murder and sent teams to apprehend the accused. Investigation is on, Chinmoy Biswal, additional DCP, south, said.

The police accessed CCTV footage and will scan it for videographic evidence. We recorded the statement of Kaveris mother and sought details of the driver. We contacted neighbours and will trace his location, an investigator said.

Kaveri is a fashion designer. Her father died two months ago and she lives in a flat in Shivalik with her mother. Two of her sisters live abroad.
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislator Sanjeev Jha continued his fast at Jantar Mantar even as sacked minister Kapil Mishra gave up his hunger strike on Monday.

Jha, who is the partys MLA from Burari, said that he will not end his hunger strike until Mishra proves his allegation that chief minister Arvind Kejriwal took R 2 crore cash from transport minister Satyendar Jain. I got to know Kapil has ended his fast, but I will not, he told Hindustan Times.

My hunger strike will continue until he (Mishra) reveals the time when he went to Kejriwals house on May 5. He alleged Mishra of doing fake daily exposes to hide baselessness of the allegation that Kejriwal is corrupt.

When asked if the party leadership has shown support for his protest, Jha, whose fast has entered the fourth day, said that a number of legislators have come to see him, but not Kejriwal or deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia.

I have not spoken to Kejriwal ji or Sisodia ji in the past three days. They have not called or met me yet, but around 25 MLAs have come here (Jantar Mantar) to show solidarity, he said.

Jha added that he had last spoken to Kejriwal before he began his hunger strike on May 13. That time I had called him to inform about my decision (of starting a hunger strike), he said.

He added that the counter hunger strike was necessary to prove Kejriwals innocence and also wished that the AAPs Political Affairs Committee had expelled Mishra instead of suspending him.

On Saturday, Jha and 27 AAP volunteers were detained by the Delhi Police after he tried to stage a sit-in protest outside Mishras residence at Civil Lines. One cannot be allowed to sit on a protest outside somebodys house. Jha can sit on a hunger strike at his own house, like Mishra is doing, the police had said after his detention.

After being released later that day, he shifted his protest to Jantar Mantar.

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I would ask everyone to not give birth to daughters to avoid seeing this day that Im seeing every woman fears this day for their daughters since these goons are alive. This is what the mother of the 20-year-old girl who was gang raped and murdered in Rohtak, Haryana, said while demanding capital punishment for the accused. Her heartbreaking statement not only captures her trauma and helplessness at what happened to her daughter, but shows how little she thinks of the elaborate law and order mechanism India has in place to ensure the safety of women. After the December 16, 2012, gang rape and murder of young paramedic Jyoti Singh, the rape laws were strengthened. But they dont seem to be a deterrent at all: Days after the Rohtak incident, another woman was dragged inside a moving car in Gurugram and gang raped by three men.

While the brutality of the Jyoti Singh rape case forced people to come out and protest in huge numbers, there seems to be a lull in such activism. Is India getting inured to brutal rape incidents, giving politicians the leeway to make all kinds of insensitive comments? Heres a case in point: According to a news website, Kerala minister for public works G Sudhakaran in announced that the number of rape cases would come down if women were not obsessed with their mobile phones (and therefore unaware of their surroundings), and if more men were to engage in farming. The logic: Busy farmers have no time to rape women. After the chowmein-rape theory of another lawmaker, Mr Sudhakarans comment will top the most insensitive comment list.

As Hindustan Times recent series --- Lets Talk About Rape --- underlined strongly we need to start a conversation about sexual violence. In one of the pieces, a Delhi policeman writes that it is up to the police to impress upon a rape survivor that the police are on her side. We must extend this argument: As citizens, it is our duty to impress upon a rape survivor and her family that we are on her/their side. When it comes to gender violence, silence is not an option.
The results for ICSE or Class 10 and ISC or Class 12 board examination will not be announced on Monday and may take another 10 days for the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations to declare them as the evaluation of answer sheets is yet to be completed, a top official said.

A number of Indian Certificate of Secondary Education and Indian School Certificate exam were rescheduled due to the assembly elections that were held in 5 states early this year resulting in the delay of the announcement of results.

The evaluation work is still very much on even today, Gerry Arathoon, CISCE chief executive and secretary, told Hindustan Times over the phone from Sri Lanka.

We will announce the exact date of results on the councils website a much in advance. We cannot give you the dates as of now. We are working on it. And once the evaluation work ends we will announce the result dates, Arathoon added.

Last year, it was announced on May 6 and the year before that they were declared on May 18.

Nearly 2,50,871 candidates - 1,76,327 for the ICSE and 74,544 for ISC - registered for the exams this year.

There were at least 8 papers that clashed with election dates in the 5 states and were conducted on a later date. The ISC examination was advanced by a week while ICSE exams were delayed by 10 days.

As per the revised timetable, the ICSE exams began from March 10 and ended on April 21 and the ISC exams were held from January 30 to April 26.

The ISC exams were to begin on February 6 and the ICSE were to start from February 27, as per the initial schedule announced in December 2016.

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The performance of students in Kerala saw a major dip in the higher secondary or Class 12 board examination, results of which were announced on Monday by the directorate of higher secondary education.

Nearly 3,66,139 regular students appeared in the exam out of which 3,05,262 passed accounting for a pass percentage of 83.37 compared to last years 94.05, one of the best in the country.

Of the 4,60,743 students, 125 scored 100% and 9870 students scored A+ in all subjects in 2016.

In the open school category, 69,600 appeared out of which 31.89% cleared the exam. The pass percentage for vocational higher secondary education students was 85.5.

The state education minister C Raveendranath announced the results of exams that were held in March.

Kannur district registered the maximum pass percentage and Ernakulam district the most number of students who got A+ grade. Across the state, 83 schools got 100% and out of which 8 are government run.

Mark sheets will be distributed from June 2 onwards.

Candidates can check their results here or click here to go directly to the result page. To check vocational higher secondary education exam results click here.

Students need to key in their roll number, date of birth and click on submit. The results will be displayed on the screen.

Students can also check results on these websites - www.kerala.gov.in, www.results.itschool.gov.in, www.cdit.org, www.examresults.kerala.gov.in, www.prd.kerala.gov.in, www.results.nic.in, www.educationkerala.gov.in.

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Tai chi, the traditional Chinese exercise which focuses on posture, breathing and meditation, could be beneficial in helping relieve insomnia in breast cancer survivors.

Thats according to a new study from American university UCLA that adds to previous research which has already found tai chi to beneficial in a range of other health conditions, including alleviating neck pain, boosting cognitive function as we age, reducing the risk of falls in seniors, and lowering the risk of stroke and heart disease.

For the new study the team recruited 90 breast cancer survivors age 42 to 83.

All participants had trouble sleeping three or more times per week and also reported feeling depressed and fatigue during the daytime, common problems for the 30% of breast cancer survivors who have insomnia. A lack of sleep can also lead to an increased risk of disease.

Participants were randomly assigned to either weekly tai chi sessions (of a westernized form called tai chi chih) or weekly cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) sessions, which involves identifying and changing negative thoughts and behaviors that are affecting sleep.

All participants took part in the classes for three months. They were then evaluated over 12 months, with researchers assessing symptoms of insomnia as well as symptoms of fatigue and depression.

The team found that at the end of the study, tai chi appeared to be just as effective as CBT, which has so far been considered the gold standard treatment, and in both groups nearly half of participants (46.7% in the tai chi group; 43.7% in the CBT group) continued to show strong, clinically significant improvement in insomnia symptoms.

There were also improvements in symptoms of depression and fatigue.

Although the American Academy of Sleep Medicine considers CBT the best treatment for insomnia, Dr. Michael Irwin, the studys lead author, pointed out that its too expensive for most.

Tai Chi can help fight against depression and fatigue in breast cancer survivors. (iStock)

Free or low-cost tai chi classes however, are often offered at locations such as libraries, community centers or outdoors in parks, with videos also available on YouTube and smartphone apps to learn and practice at home.

Irwin and colleagues also found in their previous research that tai chi could help reduce inflammation in breast cancer survivors and may have potential to help lower the risk of breast cancer and its recurrence, good news for the many participants who continued to practice on their own after the study had concluded.

They often are seeking health-promoting activities because they recognize that the mindfulness approach, or health-based lifestyle interventions, may actually protect them, said Irwin.

The results can be found online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Follow @htlifeandstyle for more
Gurgaon police on Monday constituted a special investigation team (SIT) to probe the alleged gang rape of a woman in a moving car on Friday night.

The woman was abducted by three men from near her residence in Sukhrali village in Gurgaon and dumped in Delhi on Saturday morning.

Police released the sketch of one of the suspects prepared from details provided by the victim. Attempts were being made to find out the exact route taken by the Swift Dzire vehicle in which the alleged rape took place.

Gurgaon police commissioner Sandeep Khirwar said the police were working on some clues but did not share details.Investigation is on. Things will become clearer soon, he said.

Police questioned the survivors male friend, who was with her on Friday night, to reconstruct the sequence of events before the crime. They said the man was asked to join investigation but as he failed to appear, they had to detained him for questioning. He is still in police custody.

An FIR was lodged at the sector 18 police station under section 376-D (gang rape), 365 (kidnapping), and 506 (criminal intimidation) of Indian Penal Code (IPC).

The man, who lives in Delhis Shahdara, had watched a movie with the 26-year old victim at Connaught Place on Friday night after which they had taken a cab around 2 am to go home.

The victim said she was abducted and raped by three men shortly after she got down near her home in Sukhrali.

The police commissioner said the abduction took place between 2.40 and 2.45 am. She was later dumped near Najafgarh but found by Delhi Police near Chawla at 6.45 am.

The victim said in her complaint that a Delhi police official, whom she met on Saturday morning at Sirhaul border, helped her reach the police station.

Gurgaon police said they were scanning CCTV footage from different sources to identify the car used in the crime. Sumit Kuhar, deputy commissioner of police (crime), said different teams are working to crack the case.

The Gurgaon police SIT will be led by Sumit Kuhar, DCP (crime). Other members include ACP Dharna Yadav, ACP Jai Singh, inspector Narender Chauhan (crime branch), SHO sector 17/18 police station inspector Ram Kumar.

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The world premiere of Priyanka Chopras debut Hollywood movie Baywatch took place on Saturday in Miami and the actor made sure that she rocked her red-carpet look.

The 34-year-old star took to Instagram and shared a photo of her with the remaining cast of the movie.

She captioned the snap, Congratulations! Thank you to a wonderful cast. #may25th #BeBaywatch @baywatchmovie #12daystogo.

Congratulations! Thank you to a wonderful cast. #may25th #BeBaywatch @baywatchmovie #12daystogo A post shared by Priyanka Chopra (@priyankachopra) on May 13, 2017 at 8:44pm PDT

Thank you for the love Miami! @baywatchmovie premiering on May 25th in a theater near you! #BeBaywatch A post shared by Priyanka Chopra (@priyankachopra) on May 13, 2017 at 8:40pm PDT

Truly one of the nicest guys I know.. @therock keep charming the world #baywatch #may25th A post shared by Priyanka Chopra (@priyankachopra) on May 14, 2017 at 1:57pm PDT

The wind in my hair #lookoftheday @lelarose @cristinaehrlich @patidubroff @lacyredway A post shared by Priyanka Chopra (@priyankachopra) on May 14, 2017 at 2:33pm PDT

Priyanka looked stunning in a shimmery dark blue gown which had a plunging neckline and a thigh slit and completed the look with strappy black heels.

Thank u for the love at the premiere of @baywatchmovie in #Miami A post shared by Priyanka Chopra (@priyankachopra) on May 14, 2017 at 2:41pm PDT

That is a lot of love from south beach! Thank u for the loud cheers and love! Always love me Some #Miami #may25th #baywatch @baywatchmovie A post shared by Priyanka Chopra (@priyankachopra) on May 14, 2017 at 2:43pm PDT

In the photo, the entire cast of Baywatch, including Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron and Alexandra Daddario, posed together for the shutterbugs.

Helmed by Seth Gordon, Baywatch is all set to release in India on June 2.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Comfortable sofas, new curtains, carpets and an air-conditioner were placed in a freshly painted room of a slain soldiers humble home when Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath called on the family to offer his condolences.

When Adityanath left, so did the accessories.

The AC, sofas and carpet were removed immediately after the CMs visit. The walls of the room were painted hurriedly a night before his visit (on May 12), said Daya Shankar, younger brother of BSF soldier Prem Sagar Prasad.

Local officials had installed the AC, changed the curtains, and placed sofas and carpets in the room before the chief ministers visit to Prem Sagars native Tikampur in Deoria district.

An official justified the move saying the sofa, AC and carpet were the part of protocol and there was nothing wrong in removing them later.

The 45-year-old BSF head constable was killed and mutilated along with Paramjit Singh, an army officer, when rogue Pakistani soldiers and militants ambushed an Indian border patrol on May 1. Their decapitated bodies were found later.

The beheadings triggered nationwide outrage and the BSF mans family initially refused to cremate him unless Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the chief minister were present.

The villagers were pacified after Adityanath promised he will meet the family on or before the terahwi, the 13th day after someones death when rituals are performed.

He came and handed a cheque of Rs 4 lakh to the family, announced a memorial and a college for girls to be named after the Prem Sagar at his village.

But he left with a trail of criticism. Pictures of the chief minister sitting on a sofa and another showing the room without the stage-managed frills went viral on Facebook and WhatsApp.

The Congress and Samajwadi Party condemned the incident.

This is disrespect to a slain soldier. What the administration has done is not right. We believe the chief minister will take some steps, Congress leader Dwijendra Tripathi said.

(With agency inputs)
An impoverished alcoholic couple in Jharkhands Bokaro district sold its one-and-a-half-month-old baby boy to a quack for Rs 45,000 for buying their daily dose of liquor, police and Child Welfare Committee (CWC) members told Hindustan Times on Monday.

The couple later pleaded innocence to the police claiming outrageously that they sold the infant unknowingly. The father of the infant, Rajesh Hembrom who works as a washer man in Bokaro is 30 years old while his wife is 28.The couple already has five children, all under the age of ten.

Police swung into action after the couples neighbours tipped them off on Sunday about the deal with the quack.

Policemen in mufti met the couple and traced the quack who had already handed over the baby to a 50-year-old man Meghu Mahato, a resident of the same district. Mahato is childless.

The agent Santosh Sahish, who is a quack, took away the baby after paying Rs 45,000 in cash to the couple. He handed over the infant to an old man who lives in Chakradharpur, said Dhirendra Kumar, an assistant sub-inspector who is probing the case.

Santosh and Mahato were sent to the Bokaro Jail on Monday on charges of trading an infant, he said. The baby was reunited with its parents.

Read more: Woman, agent sell 6-month-old infant under registered deed

The Bokaro CWC which intervened in the matter and found that the couple was addicted to alcohol and needed the money to buy their daily dose of liquor.

They have confessed that they were addicted to alcohol and needed money to buy liquor every day. They were probably inebriated during the deal as well and the quack had persuaded them to go ahead with it to have sufficient liquor, said CWC member Prabhakar Kumar.

He added that the CWC has taken it in writing from the couple that they should be held responsible if the baby goes missing again. The CWC will also visit the couples place every fortnight to check on the infant.

Baby trade has been a growing concern in poverty-stricken rural Jharkhand. Cases of poor couples selling off their babies for money have come to light even in the past, say anti-child trafficking activists.

A six-month-old baby girl was allegedly sold for Rs 15,000 under a registered deed on a Rs 20 stamp paper in Ranchi in July 2015.

Jharkhand is blighted by large-scale child trafficking and forced surrogacy rackets, primarily exploiting the tribal community. The state accounts for at least 10,000 trafficked children as bonded labourers across the country every year, civil society organisations say.

Though the police did not find any evidence proving involvement of the Bokaro quack in any such racket, CWC members said that he was allegedly involved trafficking minor girls on pretext of medical treatment.

There were rumours that he (Santosh) had taken Rs1.5 lakh from Mahato for the deal, but Mahato is yet to confess any monetary exchange with him, said investigating officer Kumar.

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A special task force (STF) jawan, who was critically injured late Sunday evening in an encounter with Maoists in Chhattisgarhs Bijapur district, died on Monday, the police said.

Constable Salabh Upadhyay died in the wee hours while he was being airlifted from Basaguda for treatment, deputy inspector general of police (Dantewada region) Sundarraj P told PTI.

Upadhyay had sustained bullet injuries on his head in the gunbattle between a joint team of security forces and ultras that took place in a restive forest pocket of Bijapurs Basaguda police station area late Sunday evening, he said.

The chopper was sent in the wee hours and while the jawan was being retrieved, he succumbed to his injuries, he added. The deceased was a native of Bhadohi district in Uttar Pradesh.

Joint teams of special task force (STF), district reserve guard (DRG), CoBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) and district police were out on an operation based on inputs about the location of Maoist hideouts in Basaguda and Awapalli police area of Bijapur since Saturday (May 13).

The counterinsurgency operations are still underway in the region, the DIG added.

On Sunday, two policemen were injured in a gun battle with Maoists in the same Basaguda area. They were airlifted to Raipur where they have been admitted in a private hospital.
India has fitted a small backpack with radio-tags on two Great Indian Bustards (GIBs) with an aim to track their flight to Pakistan, where according to wildlife experts they are being hunted down.

In a first of its kind move, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) fitted the tracking machines on two birds - which could soon be migrating to Pakistan - last week. The WII wants to track their flight and plan a strategy based on the evidence, a scientist at the institute said. The institute intends to tag 15 GIBs.

The bustard is an endangered bird which is mostly found along the India-Pakistan border in Rajasthan and Gujarat. In 2013, their population was found to be below 200 while a few decades ago their numbers used to be in thousands. Scientists feared that the GIBs are killed in Pakistan for consumption because of which their population was declining.

The GIBs, not bred in Pakistan, migrate to neighbouring Sindh area from Kutch in Gujarat and Jaisalmer in Rajasthan. There is no estimate of the GIB population in Pakistan.

The evidence from the radio-tags will be collected through mobile based GPS chips  similar to the ones used to track tigers  which transmit information through a mobile network and a satellite. The devices are kept in a backpack tied to the birds.

With scientific evidence in hand, we may need to open diplomatic channels or talk to local NGOs to save the bird in Pakistan, said senior WII scientist YV Jhala, who will oversee Indias first monitoring of the cross-border movement of birds.

Through the radio-tags the WII also wants to find out whether windmills and transmission lines in Rajasthan and Gujarat are also responsible for the GIBs declining numbers.

In Rajasthan, apart from the risk of them flying across the border, theres a risk of them hitting electricity lines near windmills in the desert national park where they are found in large number, Jhala said.

Conservationists have demanded that the power lines in the Desert National Park (DNP) area should be installed underground to prevent deaths of GIBs. On Wednesday, a GIB was electrocuted in Kanoi village area of Jaisalmer after it came in contact with a power line.

Jhala said after monitoring the birds through satellite telemetry, they would install bird diverters on power lines. The bird cannot see the power lines and runs a risk of hitting them, he said.

The GIB population has seen a rapid decline due to a loss of habitat and frequent poaching as game bird in states such as Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan.

The environment ministry has started habitat improvement programme in all states where GIBs are found and the first breeding centre is coming up at the park in Jaisalmer.

WII has partnered with Rajasthan forest department and UAEs International Bustard Breeding Agency , for the conservation breeding centre, Jhala said, adding that the centre would take around two years to build.

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Three days after report surfaced that Bihar MP Ranjeet Ranjan, wife of Pappu Yadav, was allegedly forced to change her seat by Air Vistaras staff, the air hostess in question has come out in the open about her side of the story.

The air hostess, Aisarya Sattar, has written a Facebook post to give her version of the incident.

The MP had claimed that the chief air hostess told her she had the authority to shift her. The MP shifted to another seat but later complained to the Lok Sabha speaker and ministry of civil aviation about the air hostess rude behaviour. The incident took place on a Bagdogra-Delhi flight.

She threatened me saying mein dekh lungi tumhe. And I guess it came true. If this is not VIP culture then what is, she told HT over the phone.

Sattar, who is working with Vistara for the past two years, said she is from the family of freedom fighter and her husband is in the Indian Army, so she will fight against the wrong.

I was never rude to her. It was she who was rude. But as it goes with VIP culture, I dont know whether it can be put to an end. I have been terminated because I refused to apologise to her as I clearly said it is no fault of mine, my dignity is more important, she said.

Ranjan, however, refused to comment on the allegations made by the air-hostess.

During the course of our investigation, we found that the crew in question violated certain policies and provided misleading, incorrect and inconsistent information. We have not concluded our probe yet. She has tendered her resignation entirely of her own accord, which is pending approval, said a spokesperson of the airlines.

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PATNA The arrest of a minor remand home inmate, in connection with the sensational murder of jailed gangster Bablu Dubey, during an appearance in the Bettiah (West Champaran) civil court, on May 11, has given an unprecedented twist to the widely-reported case.

Police investigations have revealed that the murder was committed by two inmates of a remand home at East Champaran district headquarters town of Motihari, about 145 km north-west of state capital, Patna. Officials said this was the first incident of its kind, in the annals of crime in Bihar.

The two boys sneaked out of the Motihari remand home, travelled to the Bettiah civil court, about 45 km away and shot Dubey dead, before returning to their lodging, said an official familiar with the ongoing police probe into the case.

.However, fearing threat to their lives from their fellow inmates, the young killers again left the remand home. It was while they were on the run that one of the two alleged killers was arrested by the police and their role in the murder was revealed.

Officials claimed the two remand home inmates were hired for the job by by Bablus rivals, namely, Rahul Singh, Vikash Singh and Chhotai Singh, all currently lodged in the Motihari central jail.

Apart from the remand home inmate, who is shown in the official records as a minor, the police have so far arrested Vijay Yadav and Niraj Yadav, residents of Parvatia Tola at the Muffasil police station, in connection with the May 11 incident.

Those on the run, include the second remand home inmate and others wanted in connection with the case, namely, Kunal Singh, Manish Singh, Sanjay Singh and Cigrate Ripusudan.

How and with whose help the minor boys managed to sneak out of the remand home is a matter of further investigation, said West Champaran superintendent of police (SP) Vinay Kumar.

The SP said the arrested boy himself confessed to his role in the crime during interrogation. We are also ascertaining whether he is really a minor who can be put in a remand home. For this, his medical examination is being conducted, he added.

The SP told HT the criminals earlier planned to target Dubey on May 5 but things did not work out as planned. Finally, on May 11, they reached Bettiah around 6 am and waited at a lodge owned by Bhikhari Yadav, relative of Vijay and Niraj, before striking at Dubey.

The SP further stated that the police had recovered a smart phone from the spot at which they had found one of the inmates. The remand home inmates involvement in the murder of Bablu Dubey was also confirmed by CCTV footage of the incident, he stated.

Bablu was named accused in more than 24 cases of murder, kidnapping and loot under different police stations in West Champaran, East Champaran and Gopalganj districts, all in north Bihar. He was also said to be involved in the infamous kidnapping case of a prominent Nepalese businessman, Suresh Kedia, in May 2016.

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Villagers along India-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir are suffering the brunt of cross-border firing with the neighbouring countries continuing to violate ceasefire agreement.

Intense shelling by the Pakistani army has forced several families from Jhangar and Bhawani areas to move to temporary shelters set up at a government higher secondary school in Rajouri district and other safer places on their own.

A lady points at smoke caused by firing of mortar shells from the Pakistan side of the border, at Jhangar village, in Nowshera. (Nitin Kantora/HT Photo)

On the Line of Control towards Jhangar, smoke billowed out of a thick jungle on a mountain and a further few hundred metres into the serpentine stretch, there were fires on the slopes.

A woman sit on the rooftop of a house damaged by mortar shells fired by the Pakistani army at Jhanghar village, in Nowshera. (Nitin Kanotra/HT Photo)

Neelam Devi of Bhawani village pointed towards the hill and said mortars fired by Pakistan had set ablaze the jungle.

They rained bombs on us....we are living in utter fear, she said, adding that she and her family had no option than to stay back.

House of a man has been damaged by mortar shells fired from the Pakistan side of the border, at Jhanghar village, in Nowshera. (Nitin Kanotra /HT Photo)

Krishan Lal, Neelam Devis husband, said that on Sunday morning, when there was no fire, he moved his three children to a safer place in Nowshera.

Death stalks us all the time. We are just sitting ducks for the enemy. We can put our life at stake, but not our childrens. Life has become very cruel here on the border, he said.

Firing by Pakistini army has damaged houses along the border villages in Nowshera. (Nitin Kantora/HT Photo)

Jhangar Khamba village, where Pakistani shelling snuffed out two lives, reflected a grim picture of death and destruction. The village is barely 2.5 km from the LoC.

Following death of 51-year old Tufail Hussain and his 13 year old granddaughter Asiya Bi on Saturday, almost entire village has been vacated and those who are left are getting ready to leave it before the dusk, said Baldev Raj, 55.

Jhangar villagers take their belongings with them while moving to safer places following cross-border firing in Nowshera. (Nitin Kanotra/HT Photo)

Sanjeev Choudhary, an army man on leave to his house here from Abohar in Punjab, said most families had left.

I have been brought up here by my father, who is an ex-serviceman. I never saw such intense shelling. It is a war zone now. Please, be careful, he added.

Villagers move to safer shelters following cross-border shelling in Nowshera. (Nitin Kanotra/HT photo)
India can play a very important role in resolving the dispute between Palestine and Israel, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday, on the eve of his talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi here.

Abbas, who is being hosted by India ahead of Modis first ever visit to Israel, said New Delhis role will have significance as it had good relations with both the countries.

There should be a role for India in making peace in our region. India has played this role (by supporting the Palestinian cause) and we are looking forward that India continues to play the same role, he said while delivering a lecture in New Delhi.

He said he will ask Modi on Tuesday to use Indias good offices in bringing in peace between Israel and Palestine.

Palestine is against any kind of military intervention to resolve the dispute, said Abbas who will also be meeting his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday.

Abbas comments assume significance as Modi is slated to visit Israel in a couple of months, which will be the first by an Indian Prime Minister.

India has been a vociferous supporter of the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinian president said during his meeting with Modi and Mukherjee, he will also apprise them of the ongoing political developments in Palestine and the Middle East.

Condemning terrorism by ISIS, Abbas said ending the Israeli occupation will greatly help in countering terrorism in the region.

So, achieving this justice is the basis for success in fighting terrorism being practised by terrorist groups such as ISIS in the region. We condemn all their barbaric activities, he said.

The Middle East region, Abbas said, was living in a state of instability and conflict, especially after the Arab Spring, which is castastrophic for the region and its people. It has inflicted severest damage to the stability and integrity of the social fabric, he added.

Abbas also pitched for an agreement with India on religious tourism as Palestine has several religious shrines.

The Palestinian president is on a four day visit to India from May 14 to 17.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a concerted push to conserve and rejuvenate Indias rivers, saying the country has many but not all have water in them.

He said he would ask the states to follow Madhya Pradeshs action plan for the Narmada as a role model for the protection of rivers across the country.

The country has many rivers on the map but dont have any water in them, Modi said at an event to mark the conclusion of the Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra in Madhya Pradeshs Annooppur district.

He praised the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government for its work to conserve one of the countrys major rivers and said the Narmada roadmap is a perfect document for other states to follow.

We have almost lost many rivers in the country. There is a river in Kerala, Bharathapuzha. I dont know whether it will be saved or lost.

The Prime Minister requested Madhya Pradesh to share the document with other states.

He said river protection and water conservation are vital for growth, especially farm economy that is the mainstay of millions of people living in rural areas.

We thought we have right over it (Narmada), so we can go on exploiting it. We have looted the Narmadas resources. It is unfortunate that the Narmada, which has bestowed life to our forefathers, saved our ancestors, today needs to be saved, he said.

The Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra, which was launched on December 11, 2016 from Amarkantak, concluded on Monday after covering a distance of 3,344km, traversing over 1,100 villages and towns.

I was born in Gujarat. I know the value of each drop of the Narmada, he said.

The 1,312km river starts at Narmada Kund in Amarkantak, flows westward through Madhya Pradesh Gujarat and drains into the Arabian Sea.

Modi congratulated Madhya Pradesh for its performance in the Swachhta survey in which Indore and Bhopal were adjudged the countrys number one and two cleanest cities among 434 urban centres.

Chief minister Chouhan listed his governments initiatives such as sewerage treatment plants along riverbanks to protect the Narmada.

(With agency inputs)

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The army has denied news reports suggesting that it has given a clean chit to the officer who tied a Kashmiri man to the bonnet of a jeep as a human shield.

The said news has triggered outrage in Kashmir with separatists saying it was on expected lines from an oppressor.

The Court of Inquiry (CoI) concerned with the incident wherein a civilian was tied to an army jeep is still incomplete. Reports in some sections of the media suggesting that army Major has being given a clean chit are speculative, said armys Srinagar-based spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia.

On April 14, a video had surfaced on the social media wherein a young Kashmiri man was seen tied to an army jeep, allegedly as a human shield against stonepelters. In the said video, announcements of people being warned that this will be the fate of stonepelters can also be heard in the background.

The incident had prompted widespread anger in the Valley and had elicited condemnations from the world over. Meanwhile, there were also those who defended the officer.

Following the outrage, the army had ordered a Court of Inquiry after an FIR was filed by the J&K Police.

On Monday, a media publication, quoting sources, reported that the inquiry has given a clean chit to the officer in question. It said that contrary to the hue and cry generated by the video on social media, senior army officers had appreciated the presence of mind of the officer to avoid casualties or injuries.

Moderate Hurriyat Conference led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq promptly reacted to the development. The All Party Hurriyat Conference in a statement said, The result of the so-called inquiry comes as no surprise to the people of Kashmir as it was well along the expected lines from the oppressors.

What gives (the Kashmiri) people the strength and resilience to stand up against all forms of repressions, is their firm belief in the justness of their aspirations and the faith in the fairness of their struggle. Ultimately truth and justice always prevail, the organisations spokesman said.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) , which passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), is not aimed at third parties and doesnt affect Beijings position on the Kashmir issue, the foreign ministry said on Monday.

President Xi Jinping initiated the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a roadmap for peace and he has said countries should respect each others sovereignty and territorial integrity, the foreign ministry added.

Referring to Indias decision to skip the two-day Belt and Road Forum (BRF) in Beijing, the ministry said in a statement: Regarding the issue of Kashmir which the Indian side is concerned about, we have been stressing that the issue was left over from history between India and Pakistan, and should be properly addressed by the two sides through consultation and negotiation.

The CPEC is an initiative on economic cooperation. It is not directed at any third parties, not relevant to disputes over territorial sovereignty and does not affect Chinas position on the Kashmir issue.

Quoting Xis key note speech in Beijing on Sunday, the statement noted the president had said the Belt and Road initiative should be built into a road for peace. It added, All countries should respect each others sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each others development paths and social systems, and each others cores interests and major concerns.

India did not attend the high-profile Belt and Road Forum held on Sunday and Monday because of its concerns over the CPEC passing through PoK.

On the second day, Xi inaugurated the forums roundtable summit with around 29 heads of states at the Yanqi Lake International Convention Centre, 70 km from the centre of Beijing, amid low-lying hills and a lake.

At the roundtable, he spoke about hastening the process of connecting regions around the world through infrastructure projects. He announced China will host the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in 2019.

The two-day summit, he said, had reached broad consensus and achieved positive outcomes. The Belt and Road Initiative, he told a gathering of select journalists, will not base cooperation on ideological grounds but will be open and inclusive.

Xi said the initiative will work to ensure an open world economy, rebalance globalisation, and work toward trade liberalisation. It will also boost support for green and low-carbon development.

On Sunday, Xi pledged $124 billion to the plan, and called for abandoning old models based on rivalry and diplomatic power games.

New Delhi officially had ruled out sending a delegation to the forum on Saturday.

"No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity," external affairs ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay said on Saturday, referring to the CPEC. Connectivity initiatives must follow principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities.

Baglay was talking about the danger of debt for host countries, especially smaller economies, which may struggle to pay back loans for infrastructure projects funded by China.

We are of the firm belief that connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality, Baglay said.

The foreign ministrys statement, issued in response to Indias decision to stay away from the forum, attempted to explain the principles behind the BRI and to allay Indias fears.

The BRI was proposed in 2013, and four years on, over 100 countries around the world and international organisations have supported and got involved in this initiative. Important resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly and Security Council contain reference to it, the foreign ministry said.

In the speech made by President Xi Jinping on the morning of May 14 at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, he elaborated on the progress and achievements of the initiative over these years in terms of policy, infrastructure, trade, financial and people-to- people connectivity.

The statement added: All these show that the BRI responds to the trend of the times, conforms to the law of development, and meets the peoples interests. It surely has broad prospects. The international communitys warm response to the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation also speaks volumes for that.

China hosted at least 29 heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz, Sharif, for the conference.

All of Indias neighbours, except Bhutan, sent high-level delegations and Sri Lanka was represented by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The country fears that Kulbhushan Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before its arguments are heard, Indias attorney Harish Salve said at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday.

The Indian national, who had been arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death on allegations of espionage and subversive activities, had been framed on the basis of confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistans military custody, Salve added.

As the ICJ began hearing Jadhavs case, India argued that human rights treated as basics all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan.

We want appropriate legal representation for Jadhav, India told the UNs main judicial body which has stayed his death sentence.

New Delhi has called for immediate suspension of Jadhavs death sentence and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

All requests for consular access to 46-year-old Jadhav had fallen on deaf ears, it said.

The present situation, Salve said before the court, was grave and that is why India had sought its indulgence. He described Jadhavs trial process as farcical and stressed that Pakistan did not respond to Jadhavs mothers plea to see her son.

India is presenting its case first, followed by Pakistan later in the day. Both sides will get 90 minutes each to argue their case.

Read | Kulbhushan Jadhavs ICJ hearing: Top 10 arguments made by India

India might avail a short extension to present its case, the judge said in his opening remarks.

India had appealed against the death sentence on May 8 alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan. On May 9, ICJ gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

The ICJ was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.
The fate of Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Indian Navy officer sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court for alleged espionage, remained uncertain as the International Court of Justice on Monday deferred its ruling on Indias petition to stop his execution.

The United Nations highest court in The Hague heard arguments by both sides and its president Ronny Abraham said the 12-judge tribunal would deliver its decision on whether to grant an emergency stay of execution as soon as possible on a date that would be communicated to the two parties.

Pakistan says Jadhav, 46, was arrested in March last year in the restive Balochistan province. In April, a military court sentenced him to death for alleged involvement in spying and subversive activities. India contended he was kidnapped from the Iranian port of Chabahar and his trial was a farce.

India argued during the hearing in the Dutch capital that Pakistan had violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by not granting consular access to Jadhav even after 16 requests were made.

Pakistan said in its presentation that consular access could not be granted as Jadhav was a terrorist and that India had invoked the jurisdiction of this court improperly. UK-based lawyer Khawar Qureshi, who appeared for Pakistan, said a 2008 bilateral agreement allows both countries to decide on consular access in matters involving political or security issues.

Qureshi also argued that there was no urgency in the matter while countering Indias contention that it feared Jadhav could be executed even before the hearing at the ICJ is completed.

The Pakistani side suffered a setback when the ICJ turned down its request to play the purported confessional video of Jadhav at the hearing. A video wall was set up by the Pakistani side but the court upheld the Indian teams objection to any playback.

Former solicitor general Harish Salve, Indias lead attorney, told a TV news channel: If you want to show something and it helps your case if you are denied that right, its a setback. So, in that sense, yeah. They wanted to show it and that opportunity was taken away.

They did not allow it. We objected and the court felt it was not appropriate, he added.

After India approached the ICJ earlier this month, the World Courts president wrote to Pakistan urging it to take no action that could affect the hearing - effectively a move to prevent the death sentence being carried out.

Leading the charge for India, Deepak Mittal, joint secretary on the Pakistan desk of the external affairs ministry, said that Pakistan had deliberately denied consular access despite being under an international obligation to do so. This was a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

India believes that the farcical nature of proceedings and unjust trial by a Pakistani military court in egregious violation of the rights of consular access... has led to (a) serious miscarriage of justice, Mittal said.

Salve made out a case that the World Court has jurisdiction to adjudicate in the case. Salve focused on precedents of the World Court and cited cases of Germany versus the US and Mexico versus the US wherein the ICJ had intervened and passed provisional orders restraining governments from executing convicts.

The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention, Salve said.

I urge the ICJ to ensure that Jadhav is not executed, Pakistan reports to this court that the action (of not executing him) is taken and that no action is taken that might prejudice the rights of India in the matter of Jadhav, he added.

Pakistani representative Mohammad Faisal accused India of using the ICJ as a stage for political theater. He showed the tribunal a copy of an Indian passport he alleged Jadhav was carrying at the time of his arrest, which bore the name Hussein Mubarak Patel.

This, Faisal claimed, was an obvious indication of covert and illegal activity. He added Jadhav has confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan.

India invoked the jurisdiction of this court improperly, said Pakistans lawyer Khawar Qureshi. This court exists to ensure that states engage in peaceful resolution of disputes. This court does not exist for time-wasting and political grandstanding.

The ICJ resolves disputes between nations and its decisions are final and binding. But it has no means to enforce its rulings and they have sometimes been ignored.

In a similar dispute involving the Vienna Convention in 1999, the ICJ ordered the US not to execute a German national who did not get consular access but the man was executed.
India and Pakistan concluded their arguments before the International Court of Justice at The Hague on Monday after New Delhi filed an appeal seeking the suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhavs death sentence.

Jadhav was convicted by a Pakistan military court in April for espionage and subversive activities against the state

As the ICJ began hearing Jadhavs case, India argued that human rights treated as basics all over the world had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan. New Delhi has called for immediate suspension of Jadhavs death sentence and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna Convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access.

Pakistan, in its submission in response to Indias presentation, said New Delhi was using the court as a scene of political theatre and the world court did not have the jurisdiction to provide the relief sought by its neighbour.

Both sides had 90 minutes each to argue their case.

Here are the arguments made at The Hague:

Indias submission

 Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran in 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and a confession was extracted in military custody.

 India made innumerable requests to Pakistan for consular access which were denied.

 Pakistan has not provided India any charge sheet, copy of the verdict and other documents.

 The trial was conducted without informing Jadhav.

 Graver the charges, greater the need for continued adherence to the Vienna Convention.

Pakistans submission

 Wholly inappropriate for India to seek provisional measures from this court.

 Pakistan invites ICJ to dismiss Indias application as there is no urgency in this plea and the courts jurisdiction is limited. The Indian national has 150 days to seek clemency.

 India unwilling to explain the false passport, which bore a Muslim name and was found in Jadhavs possession.

 Pakistan not violating Vienna Convention as Article 55 gives protection in matters of internal affairs and its provisions on consular access are not intended for a spy involved in terror activities.

 Delhis application to ICJ misconceived and unnecessary. The court is being used as political theatre but Pakistan wont be cowed down by terrorism.
India and Pakistan ended their submissions before the International Court of Justice at The Hague on Monday over the Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhavs death sentence.

India took up the issue of consular rights to its national and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a farcical trial without a shred of evidence.

New Delhi also demanded the immediate suspension of Jadhavs death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the ICJ hearing was over. Pakistan argued that the world court has no jurisdiction in this case as it pertains to national security.

It is after 18 years that an India-Pakistan dispute is playing out in the world court.

Here are the live updates:

7:25 pm: The ICJ chair addresses the court and says ICJ will render its order as soon as possible. The date will be duly communicated to the parties. The sitting is closed.

7:20 pm: Indian counsels claim that Delhi wasnt provided consular access to Jadhav is far removed from the truth.

It was wholly inappropriate for India to seek provisional measures from this court: Pakistan

Qureshi ends his arguments.

7:18 pm: Earlier in the afternoon, ICJ declined Pakistans plea to play a video of Jadhavs confession, reports news agency IANS.

7:15pm: To kidnap a man in Iran and get him for the purpose of confession is far-fetched, says Pakistan.

7:10pm: Point by point, Pakistani delegation gives reasons for why Islamabad is not violating Vienna Convention, as claimed by the Indian side. The focus then shifts on the passport controversy as Pakistan claims Jadhav carried a false document.

Article 55 (of Vienna Convention) says there must be no inference in the internal affairs of the receiving state. Espionage, terrorism are clearly internal affairs of the country: Pakistan argues before the ICJ about the jurisdiction of the court in this case

Not one jot of evidence has been advanced by India.

7 pm: Pakistan questions the objective of this case as it disseminates the case examples presented by the Indian side before the ICJ.

If the only relief India is seeking is not available, what is the objective.

The court should exercise considerable caution in matters where the court cant provide relief, says Qureshi.

6:55 pm: Pakistan harps on the urgency of Indias plea, tells ICJ the matter is not urgent. This court does not exist for time wasting.

At the very least what is required is annulment and release of Jadhav. There is no realistic, plausible relief in this case... These relief are aspirational.

6:50 pm: Indias position advanced towards this court is a sham, says Pakistans counsel... India invoked the court with respect to urgency, not Pakistan.

6:40 pm: Pakistans counsel QC Khawar Qureshi now addresses the ICJ bench.

I will invite this court to dismiss this application, says Qureshi, listing out reasons for the claim. There is no urgency and the jurisdiction in this case is limited and unqualified.

6:37 pm: After saying that Jadhav has confessed to being an Indian spy, Md faisal -- agent of Pakistan government addresses the ICJ -- says the video (of Jadhavs confession) is publically available for everyone to see.

6:35 pm: India has been provided with the copy of the passport that was in possession of Commander Jadhav. The passport bears a Muslim name, which clearly isnt his name. India is unwilling to provide the explanation for his passport... We submit that Indias silence is telling: Pakistani delegation

Instead, India appears to be on a hyperdrive to brief its press on Commander Jadhav.

Faisal says Indias urgency claim, saying that the Indian national may be executed soon, is not accurate as a period of 150 days is provided for Jadhav to seek clemency.

There is a no need for provisional measure: Pakistan

6:31pm: Moazzam Ahmad Khan (agent), Mohammad Faisal (agent), QC Khawar Qureshi (Counsel) to argue in ICJ for Pakistan in #KulbhushanJadhav case.

Pakistan says Indias application is misconceived and unnecessary, and New Delhi is using ICJ as a political theatre. India has used this court as the scene of political theatre. We will not respond in kind.

Despite being ambushed for appearing before the court, we will present the case today.

We will not be cowed by terrorism.

6:30 pm: ICJ hearing on Kulbhushan Jadhavs death sentence begins again. Pakistani delegation will present its case.

3.10pm: India concludes its arguments at the International Court of Justice.

3pm: Graver the charges, greater the need for continued adherence of Vienna Convention: Harish Salve.

2.40pm: The trial was conducted without informing Jadhav: Harish Salve tells ICJ.

2.26pm: India tells ICJ it fears Kulbhushan Jadhav will be executed before its arguments are heard in the case, reports PTI.

2.21pm: India refutes Pakistans claims against Kulbhushan Jadhav, says he was kidnapped from Iran.

2.15pm: The ICJ appeal has been filed as a measure of desperation, Harish Salve tells the court.

2.12pm: India calls for immediate suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhavs sentence, accusing Pakistan of violating Vienna Convention of consular access.

2.08pm: India seeks interim relief for Kulbhshan Jadhav. He should not be executed till the final disposal of the case is done.

2.07pm:

The present situation is grave and that is why #India has sought the indulgence of ICJ: India's attorney #HarishSalve.  Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) May 15, 2017

2.05pm: India made innumerable requests to Pakistan for consular access which were denied: Harish Salve.

2pm:

Harish Salve will address ICJ on these four issues Jurisprudence of the court

Prima facie case  Jurisdiction

Prima facie violation of Vienna convention

Nature of provisional measures that India seeks

1.57pm: Pakistan has violated rules of International law, India says, citing La Guard and Avena cases on Consular access.

1.55pm: Kulbhushan Jadhavs parents have filed an appeal against death penalty with Pakistan.

1.50pm: Pakistan has not provided India any chargesheet, copy of the verdict and other documents, says Deepak Mittal.

1.47pm:Jadhav was framed on confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistans military custody: Harish Salve.

1.44pm: Indias plea at ICJ: Pakistan should take all measure that Kulbhushan Jadhav is not executed.

Indias plea at ICJ: Pakistan should report to court what it has done to follow ICJs order  Hindustan Times (@htTweets) May 15, 2017

1.42pm: The execution will cause irreparable damage to rights of India and Jadhav: Deepak Mittal.

1.40pm:

Indias demands at ICJ # immediate suspension of death penalty

#Declare sentence of military court  violatice of Vienna convention

#Restrains Pak to give effect to death penalty and annul the Pak courts order

#Declare the decision of pak court illegal

1.40pm: Dr Deepak Mittal (joint secretary), GOI and agent for India begins his statements.

1.30pm:

India has a very good case.It is clear Pak violated all rules,both in trial & human rights:AG Mukul Rohatgi on ICJ hearing #KulbhushanJadhav pic.twitter.com/oxY3SN9Gzx  ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

1.20pm: Both sides will get 90 minutes each to make their arguments, with India getting the first say.

1pm: India accused Pakistan of egregious violations of New Delhis rights under the Vienna convention on consular relations (VCCR) when it sought ICJs intervention on May 8.

12.45pm: India is scheduled to first argue its case. This would be followed by arguments from the Pakistan team led by Attorney General Ashtar Ausaf.

12.30pm: Pakistan has said the Indian move to approach ICJ was an attempt to divert attention from state-sponsored terrorism in Pakistan and that it was analysing the ICJs authority in the matter.

12.15pm: India delegation leaves for International Court of Justice (ICJ). The public hearing will start at The Hague, Netherlands, from 1.30pm IST.

11.55pm: People held prayers for release of Kulbhushan Jadhav in Kanpur, ahead of Indias arguments before International Court of Justice.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will set out on Monday the modalities to hear Indias challenge to a Pakistan military courts decision to hang a former Indian naval officer on charges of spying.

It will be after 18 years that an India-Pakistan dispute will play out in the world court. India has stayed away from the ICJ and it is only the second time after 1971 that New Delhi has sought the intervention of the judicial arm of the United Nations against Pakistan.

What to expect on Monday

The Netherlands-based ICJ will likely take up Jadhavs case at around 1pm India time in the Great Hall of Justice housed in the Peace Palace in the city of The Hague.

Both sides will get 90 minutes each to make their arguments, with India getting the first say.

The court is expected to take some provisional steps till the case is finally decided.

The 15-judge ICJ is not in session. Court president judge Ronny Abraham of France is expected to meet the agents or legal representatives of the two countries and decide on the procedural issues such as the time-frame of the case. Senior lawyer Harish Salve is representing India.

India says Jadhav, a former naval officer, is innocent. He was kidnapped and framed by Pakistan in total disregard of international laws.

The 46-year-old is a spy involved in terrorism and deserves capital punishment, says Pakistan.

Why India moved ICJ after 46 years

The imminent danger to the life of Jadhav, who was given the death sentence by a Pakistani military court on April 10, is Indias reason for moving the ICJ.

India says Pakistan precipitated the situation by ignoring 16 requests for consular access to Jadhav. His trial in the military court was a sham and didnt follow international norms even though Jadhav is a foreign national.

India accused Pakistan of egregious violations of New Delhis rights under the Vienna convention on consular relations (VCCR) when it sought ICJs intervention on May 8.

The convention allows diplomatic representatives to visit their nationals held prisoner by the host country. India also argued that Pakistan had ignored a bilateral treaty on consular access. India has sought annulment of the death sentence. For the duration of the trial, it wants Pakistan to ensure that Jadhav is not executed.

Why India is cagey about ICJ

There is a reason why India hasnt moved the ICJ in all these years. In September 1974, India spelt out the matters over which it would accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ, replacing a similar declaration made in 1959.

Among the no-go matters are disputes with the government of any state which is or has been a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Pakistan, like India, is a member of the Commonwealth, a grouping of 53 countries most of which are former British colonies.

Also, moving the ICJ amounts to taking disputes with Pakistan to a multilateral forum, which New Delhi tends to avoid.

Experts see the latest move as a sign of Indias growing confidence in getting itself heard on international forums.

What has happened so far

After India proceeded against Pakistan, the court president, exercising his powers under the Rules of the Court, urged the Nawaz Sharif government not to take any action that would prejudice the ability of the court to award relief further, which has been interpreted as a stay on the execution.

It is hoped that the death sentence will not be carried out till the ICJ gives its final verdict.

Will Pakistan accept ICJs jurisdiction in this case?

New Delhi thinks it will.

Both India and Pakistan are signatories to the optional protocol to the VCCR concerning the compulsory settlement of disputes. Pakistan acceded to the protocol in 1976 and India a year later.

According to this protocol, ICJ is the dispute settlement mechanism. Simply put, the court has compulsory jurisdiction in disputes arising out of the interpretation or applicability of the protocol.

Even if Pakistan questions the courts jurisdiction, it will not have a bearing on the case because India moved the ICJ under Article 36(1) of the courts statute. This provision is independent of the compulsory jurisdiction norm and relies on treaties in which both countries accept the courts jurisdiction. Jadhavs case falls under the optional protocol to the VCCR.

Bickering over consular access

Pakistan says the bilateral pact on consular access is not applicable in matters of national security such as Jadhavs case. But Indian position is that since the pact is not registered with the UN, it cant be brought before the ICJ, which is the judicial arm of the world body. Article 102 of the UN Charter says a treaty that has not been registered with the UN secretariat by a signing party cannot be invoked before any organ of the United Nations.

Can Pakistan derail Mondays hearing?

Pakistan could certainly challenge the courts jurisdiction but the grounds for a jurisdictional challenge would appear to be rather limited in this case, says Shashank Kumar, a Geneva-based lawyer who served as a law clerk at the ICJ. To come up with provisional measures, which is what will happen on Monday, the court does not need to give a final decision on jurisdiction, he say .

Instead, the court can grant provisional measures as long as the provisions invoked by India (the VCCR optional protocol) appear, prima facie, to afford a basis on which the jurisdiction of the court might be founded, he says.

The court could review the issue of jurisdiction even after granting provisional measures.

Pakistans possible defence

a) It can argue that an international treaty is only effective at home after it is codified as a domestic law through an enabling legislation. Consular access is not a right explicitly guaranteed under Pakistans diplomatic and consular privileges act, 1972.

b) It can also cite the principle of reciprocity -- that is, Pakistan can also exercise the same caveat that India used with regard to the compulsory jurisdiction. India says the court will have no say on actions taken in self-defence or in resistance to aggression. India successfully fought off a Pakistan challenge on these grounds in 1999.

c) Pakistan can even argue that its violation of VCCR cannot mitigate the seriousness of charges against Jadhav.

(With inputs from Rezaul Laskar)

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India on Monday urged the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to immediately suspend the death sentence handed out to Kulbhushan Jadhav by Pakistan, saying the former Indian naval officer could be executed even before the case was decided by ICJ.

The world court had on May 10 stayed the execution of the Indian national a month after a Pakistani military court found him guilty of spying and terrorism, sentencing him to death.

Former solicitor general Harish Salve, who is leading the Indian legal team at The Hague-based ICJ, said the matter was urgent and hence India approached this court that took up the case at such a short notice.

Deepak Mittal, a joint secretary, told the court in his opening remarks that India feared that Jadhav could be executed even before the ICJ pronounced its decision.

Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed, the officer said.

Read: Kulbhushan Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before arguments are heard: India tells ICJ

Pakistan will present its case in the evening.

Here are the Top 10 quotes from Indias submission at the ICJ:

1) Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran in 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and confession was extracted in a military custody.

2) The trial was conducted without informing Jadhav.

3) The ICJ appeal has been filed as a measure of desperation.

4) India made innumerable requests to Pakistan for consular access which were denied.

5) Pakistan has not provided India any charge sheet, copy of the verdict and other documents.

6) Kulbhushan Jadhav has neither consular access nor legal representation even at this stage.

7) Graver the charges, greater the need for continued adherence to the Vienna Convention

8) Pakistan did not inform India of his arrest.

9) India has taken measures to ensure appropriate legal representation for Jadhav. It is not known whether Jadhav will seek clemency in the present circumstances.

10) India seeks annulment of Pakistans verdict on Kulbhushan Jadhav case.

For Live updates, click here

(with agency inputs)
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) questioned former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Monday in connection with an alleged land deal scam in Haryanas Manesar area.

Hooda was questioned at the Chandigarh office of the agency, where he arrived at noon.

The former chief minister was quizzed earlier this month too by CBI officials in a case of alleged irregularities in allotment of industrial plots in Panchkula.

Mondays questioning was related to a September 2015 case in which it was alleged that private builders, in conspiracy with unknown public servants of the Haryana government, purchased around 400 acres of land from farmers and land owners of villages Manesar, Naurangpur and Gurgaon at throwaway prices.

The CBI has alleged that the land was purchased from the farmers between August 27, 2004, and August 24, 2007, by threatening them that the state government would soon acquire it.

It is alleged that in this process, initially, the Haryana government issued a notification under the Land Acquisition Act for acquisition of land measuring about 912 acres to set up an industrial model township at villages in Manesar, Naurangpur and Lakhnoula in Gurgaon. After that, all the land was allegedly grabbed from land owners by private builders under the threat of acquisition at meagre rates, the agency officials said.

A loss of 1,500 crore was caused to the land owners of the villages, the agency said.
The police have arrested accused Anil Prasad of Kolhuara village under Imamganj police station of south Bihars Gaya district in connection with last Fridays killing of Vikas Singh of Pipra village, under Dumaria PS, which had led to widespread violence and arson in and around Mander village of Imamganj sub-division.

The violence has its genesis in a land dispute between Pipras Vikas and Mahabir Prasad of Mandar, which has acquired the overtones of an upper caste-versus-other backward classes (OBCs) conflict. While Pipra has mainly upper caste residents, Mander is inhabited mainly by OBCs.

While confirming the arrest of Anil Prasad, Imamganj SDO NK Razak said, The remaining accused persons have fled after the incident but raids are still underway to arrest them. Prasad, the accused arrested, had been sent to jail, he said.

The cycle of violence began when Vikas went to Mandar village bazaar to attend the Devchandi Yajya, around midnight on May 12. Reports have it that having spotted his rival Mahabir Prasad and his son, Vikas fired shots at them from his rifle.

One of the bullets hit Gudia, granddaughter of Mahabir Prasad, following which a mob lynched Vikas and took away his rifle. An hour later, villagers of Pipra and supporters of Vikas torched more than a dozen houses and shops at Mandar and the village bazaar.

The police have registered four FIRs, since the cycle of violence began late night on Friday.

One FIR has been registered in connection of Vikas Singhs killing, a second one on the firing at BA part two student Gudia Kumari, a third in connection with vandalism and arson at Mandar village and a fourth FIR has been registered against supporters of Vikas Singh for obstructing the police, after his murder.

Gaya SSP Garima Malik has constituted a police special investigation team (SIT), with the city SP and the Imamganj SDPO and SHOs, to investigate the sensational lynching of Vikas, even as tension is still running high across both the villages.

While villagers have deserted Mandar, fearing further backlash from Vikas supporters, the district administration and the police, also sensing further trouble, have deployed CRPF jawans at the affected villages, as part of their precautionary measures.

The police have issued notices to all the arms license-holders of Pipra village for verification of their papers and documents pertaining to their respective licenses.

Tension had been brewing between the two villages, for quite some time, over a five-bigha tract of land, which Vikas Singh reportedly wanted to have his control over but Mahabir Prasad and his family had been staking their claim over it.

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In a startling disclosure, an arrested member of CPI (Maoist) said apart from industrialists, contractors and traders, some legislators who had business interests in north Bihar were also paying levy to the banned outfit.

Spilling the beans during his interrogation at Muzaffarpur, 71 km from state capital Patna, Musafir Sahni, a self-styled zonal commander of the Left wing extremist organisation, said at least 25 elected people representatives, including three legislators, had been paying levy to Maoists operating in north Bihar.

All the three legislators named by Sahni are from south-western diara (sandbar) areas of Muzaffarpur district. One of the MLAs, Sahni claimed, had recently paid Rs 5 lakh as levy. The MLA runs a construction company which has been carrying out many railway projects, including doubling of Muzaffarpur-Kurhani railway track and lying of new rail line between Sahebganj and Vaishali on the proposed Sagauli-Hajipur route, said a police officer, on term of anonymity.

Sahni was arrested along with two other CPI (Maoist) members from Ramnagar village in Sakra police station area of the district on May 11 night.

The police officer, who is part of the interrogating team, said Sahni was in-charge of entire north Bihar, apart from some areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Sahni has confessed to have been involved, along with his son Rohit, in many incidents of violence since joining Maoists in 1991. Rohit, is at present lodged in divisional jail at Hajipur, in neighbouring Vaishali district. Sahni also claimed that he has invested more than Rs 10 crore in real estate business in Vaishali district and many other places in India, the officer added.

Muzaffarpur senior superintendent of police Vivek Kumar refused to comment on Sahnis disclosures. He, however, said Sahni had disclosed names of some big personalities. We are verifying his statement, Kumar added.

If Sahni is to be believed, the CPI (Maoist) has more than 25 sophisticated weapons, like AK-47. These weapons are used in major operations. When not in use, they are kept under the supervisions of few reliable members of the organisation, the SSP said.
I came to India three years ago. When the plane that brought me from Nigeria finally touched down in Delhi, I felt exhilarated. I was ready to embrace a new culture and its people. This, after all, was the land of Mahatma Gandhi.

Then 21 years old, I was almost childlike about wanting to discover India  its history; its vast and varied territory; its diverse people; its food; its languages; its music and its movies. I had enrolled for a course at the Delhi Paramedical & Management Institute, and I walked into class with a broad smile on my face.

I was unprepared for the racist onslaught. It has hit me with unforgiving consistency, every single day, for the last three years that I have been here. The racist slurs, the frightened looks, the deep and long stares are a part of my everyday life. I am not alone. Every African in India has the same experience.

The first Hindi word I learned was kallu. I continue to hear it everywhere I go. In the classroom; on the street; at the vegetable vendors stall; in the neighbourhood where I live in South Delhi  I am constantly reminded that I am black, and that I am judged by the colour of my skin.

Fear is a constant companion. I am acutely conscious of being different. I dont know when Ill be told Im a cannibal, or when the police will knock on my door and allege that Im a drug peddler. There is a disastrous pornographic image of Africans that Indians carry in their heads in which I am some kind of pimp. I cannot even think of approaching a pretty lady in a restaurant to say hi because I have already been typecast.

Im tired of being a black man in India. Our landlords rent their homes to us only because they can extract extra bucks: we pay more than you ordinary Indians would ever pay. We have roofs over our heads because you have greed for money. When we pay the monthly rent, the landlord meets us at the door or at some distance from his home. He never says, Please come in and have a cup of tea and meet my family. I have heard of Indian hospitality but have never experienced it. If, sometimes, they show up at our door to collect the monthly rent, they never want to come in, as if it were a crime to enter a black mans house.

Your police have failed us. We are routinely attacked, even killed, like a Congolese student was last year. I have learned the art of retreating for fear of being hit, and that takes a psychological toll. I continuously ask myself questions of why I cant lead a normal life in India and the answer is traumatic: its because you see me as a black.

Your government has failed us. I am the university coordinator for the Association of African Students in India. We decided to protest at Delhis Jantar Mantar last year after the Congolese student was bludgeoned to death. The Association soon started getting calls from the ministry of external affairs, who appealed to us to call off the protest. The ministry wanted a closed-door meeting and said a dialogue was more important than a protest. We agreed, and urged the ministry to undertake a campaign to actively fight against the prevailing stereotypes.

The hatred for our skin colour is part of the Indian subconscious. We need a sustained campaign. Yet, in the year since we met with external affairs ministry officials, I havent seen billboards saying, Africans are our brothers. I havent seen any advertisements on television telling the Indian people that we are not cannibals. Indians have been known to perform human sacrifices, but we dont call you cannibals. Why are crimes against us not given due consideration under the law? It is surprising  and saddening  that so many of Indias educated elite dont even know that Africa is a continent.

Its because Indians see me as black that I live a traumatic life here, says Lawrence. (Illustration: Malay Karmakar)

In universities, we are told not to fight with Indians. They laugh at us and gang up against us, but it is always presumed that we are in the wrong. It seems never to have occurred to the colleges to tell Indian students not to provoke or taunt us. African women are constantly asked what their price is, but theyre forced to keep quiet, just like I hold my tongue each time Im called a kallu. It hurts like hell but I have to learn to live with it.

The Association has chapters across states and I get constant calls. One state is not more racist than any other. The bias runs deep. It takes discipline and strength to survive here. Ive often felt like leaving, but Ive always told myself not to judge an entire society. The painful truth, however, is that I have not been able to make friends in India. The male students mock us and the women are afraid of speaking to us. I have been living a monks life for three years. No girl is willing to date me.

I avoid going out because I dont want to be stared at. I dont want people turning their faces away with unmasked disgust. Im always thinking about not offending others and about staying safe. Each time I hear of an attack on an African, I think, Tomorrow it may be my turn. I even dress in Indian clothes to let people know that Im trying to imbibe the local culture, but all they see is a kallu. Till the government steps forward to destroy stereotypes, we will continue to be soft targets.

I would not advise Nigerian students to come to India. What memories will I carry back home? I can only say Ill be relieved. I hope I can erase some of the pain.

(Lawrence is in the final year of his course and is interning as a laboratory scientist, specialising in microbiology)

This is the first part of #LetsTalkAboutRacism, a new HT campaign that addresses deep-rooted prejudices and discrimination in India. If you have faced racism, tweet using #LetsTalkAboutRacism or write to talktous@hindustantimes.com. HTs earlier series, LetsTalk About Rape and Lets Talk About Trolls, focused attention on crucial issues.
The Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) is hearing the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, the alleged Indian spy sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court.

An Indian legal team led by former Solicitor General Harish Salve is arguing the case.

It will be after 18 years that an India-Pakistan dispute will play out in the world court. India has stayed away from the ICJ and it is only the second time after 1971 that New Delhi has sought the intervention of the judicial arm of the United Nations against Pakistan.

Watch live streaming below:
Indias Metro man E Sreedharan has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make Metro a complete Make in India project to bring down costs and benefit commuters, who got a jolt when fares were hiked steeply in Delhi recently.

The Prime Ministers Office (PMO) has now sought views from the Union urban development (UD) ministry on Sreedharans letter, which calls for complete indigenisation of Metro projects across the country.

It was under Sreedharans leadership that Metro became a reality in Delhi. Besides running its rail network in the Capital, currently Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) is also involved in implementing and preparing project reports for several ongoing Metro projects, including Kochi, Jaipur and Greater Noida.

In his letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UD minister M Venkaiah Naidu, the DMRC principal advisor has called for setting up of a special mission mode team under DMRC to master specific technology for which Metro is now dependent on foreign suppliers.

According to Sreedharan, the average cost of an elevated metro comes to Rs 250 crore per kilometre while that of underground metro is Rs 400 crore/km.

Unless indigenisation is taken up seriously and vigorously it will not be possible to reduce cost of Metro projects, he said.

While DMRC is self-sufficient in almost all aspects of Metro construction, be it civil works, power supply and traction, there are two vital safety areas where it is still dependent on foreign manufacturerssignalling and telecommunications and automatic fare collection.

Sreedharan said that with our talent pool of hardware and software engineers, India can easily master the technology. This will bring down the cost by 50%.

 If we are able to assemble a team of experts with a leader to inspire, enthuse and guide them, I am sure the country can crack the technology and master them, he said.

Sreedharan has requested the Centre to make available funds for this purpose. Knowing the dedication and calibre of DMRC engineers, I can assure you that the investment made will come back to the country ten times in the very first two years of completion of this project, he said in the letter.

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A few days after breaking away from the Hizbul Mujahideen, radical militant leader Zakir Musa declared on Monday that he has put his differences with other separatists on the backburner for the cause of Kashmirs liberation.

A fresh audio clip released by Musa alias Zakir Rashid Bhat has called for unity among all ranks of Kashmiri militants until Indias hold over the land is negated. However, that did not prevent him from reiterating his call for Islamic rule, and stating that he will always prefer fighting beside militants who believe in sharia or sahadat (establishing Islamic rule or attaining martyrdom). The former Hizbul commander even thanked the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan for using his slogan in their magazine, the Navae Afghan Jihad.

In the seven-minute clip released on Monday, Musa said nobody will be allowed to take advantage of the existing ideological differences between Kashmiri separatists. Let us first fight the Indian occupation, and then take care of other problems, he added.

Musa denied reports that he had formed a separate group or joined another organisation after quitting the Hizbul Mujahideen. We are fighting under the banner of tawhid (oneness of God), he said.

The militant leader then waxed eloquent against the taghoot-e-nizam (evil state), referring to Pakistan, and said he does not believe in the concept of nations or organisations. Referring to the support extended by lesser known militant groups Kashmiri Taliban and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, he said: I want to tell them that I wont be taking orders from people sitting on carpets in Pakistan. Allah is enough for me.

Quoting Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru, Musa said those looking at Pakistan, America and the United Nations for support were not true jihadists.

Musa reportedly took over the reins of the Hizbul Mujahideen in Kashmir after the encounter killing of Burhan Wani by security forces last year. The incident sparked violence in the Valley for months afterwards.

Musa, who is in his early twenties, studied engineering at a college in Chandigarh before taking up arms against the Indian administration. His brother is an orthopaedic surgeon at a Srinagar hospital.

Immediately after taking over the reins of the Hizbul Mujahideen, the militant issued threats against police informers and law-enforcement personnel from the Valley. He also warned the police of dire consequences if they harassed the families of militants.

Musa severed ties with the Hizbul Mujahideen last week, hours after the outfit denounced his statement that separatist leaders from the Hurriyat Conference would be beheaded if they became a hurdle in Kashmirs road to becoming an Islamic state. The militant was apparently ticked off by a May 8 statement by the separatists that the freedom struggle in Kashmir has nothing to do with ISIS and al-Qaeda.

The separatist leader also warned Kashmiris against donating money in his name. Those who demand money are not my men, he said.

The spectre of the previous threat issued by Musa, however, wasnt completely dispelled. Even if we do kill a hypocrite, we will release a video owning up to it. This way, no confusion will be created, Musa said in the new clip.

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ELKO  A program that readies at-risk high school students for graduation and potential college and career opportunities was asked to present the keys to their success at the 2017 Mega Conference in Lake Tahoe.

Educational Leadership in Training Environment, or ELITE, was selected as one of Nevadas highlighted schools by the Department of Education and invited to give a presentation to other school districts over the weekend.

They are very impressed with our graduation rates, said teacher Sandi Moon, who has been with the program since it was implemented six years ago. These are kids that normally would have been dropouts.

After the presentation, titled Breaking Down Walls  Learn to Remove Barriers to Graduation, school districts from North Las Vegas picked our brain of what we do to have success, said Moon, adding that Jackpot and Wendover have shown interest.

The alternative school program only accepts about a dozen seventh to 12th grade students out of 60 applicants who have few or no credits toward graduation, working with the teens in a smaller classroom environment to catch them up.

Teens also gain leadership skills as part of the Leader in Me program and participate in community service projects such as teaching reading to children at Southside Elementary School, said Moon.

Acting Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Randy Shelley works as an unofficial vice principal with Moon to develop policies for ELITE and has seen how the program took teens at a low point in their life and motivated them to graduate and contribute to the community.

Its hard to explain where these kids were at one point in time, said Shelley. They were in a place in their life where they werent making progress.

Students who seemed like they would not graduate needed a different way of getting through school, explained Shelley.

One reason for the success of the students and the program is the involvement and support of many people within the Elko County School District, the Elko County Juvenile Probation office, and the community, said Moon, who attended the conference with Shelley and wanted to make sure the others involved were recognized for their efforts this week.

Theres a whole team that makes this a success, said Moon, crediting Superintendent Jeff Zander; Secondary Curriculum Director Jack French; Elko High School counselor Shelley Canepa; EHS Vice Principal T.W. Cunningham; probation officers Sheri Espinoza, Juan Garcia, Robin Place and Dana Kincade; and probation office staff Sheila Ruiz and Shirley Sullivan.

Jeff Watson, owner of Empower Fitness, allows ELITE students to use his facility for their P.E. credit, has seen improvement in the teens that come in for class.

I see their attitudes improve; they have to respect our facilities, said Watson. They clean some machines one day and then that allows them to work out the next day.

Many pointed to Moon as another reason for the programs graduation rate including helping students to pass their proficiency exams that earned them their diploma, according to Canepa.

Sandi works her miracles to get those kids to perform at a higher level than they ever did, Shelley added.

Graduates from ELITE have earned degrees at Great Basin College and the University of Nevada Las Vegas, with current students planning on careers in pediatric nursing, education, and mining by entering the MTC program at GBC, said Moon.

The programs recognition is a huge honor, said Shelley, however it comes down to the people involved who have helped ELITE change many lives, starting with the students and rippling out into the community.

They make true, lifelong changes that will not only help them, but their siblings, their future families, said Shelley. If youve helped one, youve really helped the community when youre changing others lives.
Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar said on Monday Narendra Modi was holding the post of Prime Minister of India because the people of country found him capable of holding the top position.

Kumars decision to back the Modi government on issues such as demonetisation and GST was perceived in some circles as evidence of dilution of his opposition to the Prime Minister, a political rival he did not see eye to eye with for many years. But his observation on Modi was seen more as a statement of fact, rather than expression of his own opinion.

Kumar also reiterated he was not in the race to be a prime ministerial candidate in the next general elections, due in 2019.

He said he wanted to work for the development of Bihar, for which he had the popular mandate. It pains me when people wrongly project me as a claimant for the PMs post, he said.

I am not that stupid. I have a small political party (JDU has just two Lok sabha MPs), which I happen to head after the term of Sharad Yadav as president expired. As the party head, I want to expand the JD(U) at the national level. But that does not mean that I am aspiring for the PMs post, he clarified.

Kumars name gained currency as a possible PM candidate against Modi in 2019, when NCP chief Sharad Pawar described him to be PM material and RJD president Lalu Prasad sounded as if he had endorsed this view, several months ago.

Soon after Kumars elevation as the party president, in April last year, several senior leaders of his party had also projected him as the PM material and wanted him to mobilise support of regional parties to nurture the JD(U)s national aspirations for him.

To a query whether people saw him as a leader with potential to counter Narendra Modi at the national level, Kumar said he was thankful to all those who thought so. But I do not have any national aspiration. Its early to say who will emerge to counter PM Modi, he said.

Nitish Kumar, who is also the Janata Dal (United) national president, said he would be happy if Pranab Mukherjee was re-elected as President of India for what would be his second consecutive term in office.

The Bihar CM also said he expected the ruling alliance at the Centre to initiate a dialogue with the opposition parties and strive for a consensus on the Presidents post.

That would be setting a healthy tradition. But if this does not happen, it becomes obligatory for the opposition parties to field their own candidate, he said.

The Bihar CM was talking to mediapersons on the sidelines of his weekly Lok Samwad programme, organised to solicit peoples ideas about improving governance.

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The Supreme Court on Monday again refused an urgent hearing on Calcutta high court justice CS Karnans plea to recall an arrest order issued against him for contempt of court..

Justice Karnan, whose whereabouts are not known, had on May 12 sought a review of his conviction and six-month jail sentence.

His counsel Mathews Nedumpara had told the court that Karnan was in Chennai but police teams have been unable to trace the judge who is locked in an unprecedented showdown with the countrys top judges.

I have sought a recall of the seven-judge benchs order since no charges were framed against justice Karnan, Nedumpara had said. He also furnished a signed document authorising him to appear on behalf of the controversial judge.

Karnan was convicted of contempt by the top court on May 9. It came a day after the judge sentenced Chief Justice of India JS Khehar and six other SC judges to five years in jail under the SC/ST act.

The controversy began in January when Karnan wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order a corruption probe against judges of the Madras high court and the apex court.

Karnan also accused these judges of caste bias, saying he was being singled out for being a Dalit.

What followed was a string or orders the two sides issued against each other, causing embarrassment for the judiciary which is locked in a tussle with the government over the procedure of appointment of judges.

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The relief camps set up in Rajouri district are swelling with people, who are forced to leave their homes in border villages due to heavy shelling from the Pakistani Army.

Although Pakistani guns have been silent since Sunday morning, a palpable tension coupled with an uneasy calm continued to prevail in the camps.

There has been no fresh fire along the LoC since Sunday morning but the number of villagers in various camps has swelled to 1,537, Rajouri deputy commissioner Shahid Iqbal Choudhary told Hindustan Times.

The repeated ceasefire violations from Pakistan have forced authorities to evacuate people living in forward villages. So far, two people have died in the firing from across the border and 10 have been injured.

Farmers have suffered damage to their crops while 45 houses have also been harmed in the heavy shelling.

Our cattle are lying unattended back home. Wheat crop has been badly affected and we have been reduced to refugees again. For those, who advocate war to settle scores with Pakistan, tell them to spend a day at the LoC, said Kalsian village resident Banarasi Lal, who is now forced to stay at a relief camp .

Local BJP MLA Ravinder Raina likened the prevailing circumstances to a war-like situation.

Pakistan is targeting our civilians but we must appreciate our army which has been giving a befitting reply to the enemy, he said and added that India could not afford to remain a mute spectator to Pakistans ceasefire violations.
Border Security Force (BSF) troops gunned down a woman, suspected to be a Pakistani national, early on Monday in Punjabs frontier district of Gurdaspur.

The incident took place when the troops spotted a movement across the fence near the Barial post.

The intrusion was detected around 3am and the standard challenging procedure was followed. The intruder was shot dead when she kept walking into Indian territory even after the BSF personnel challenged her. It was later that we learnt that the intruder was a woman, said a BSF spokesperson.

The spokesperson added that no major recovery was made from the 60-year-old, declining to divulge more details.

The BSF held a flag meeting with Pakistani Rangers and handed over photos of the woman after the incident.

A response was awaited from Pakistan to ascertain the identity of the woman, said the spokesperson.
The state government cracked the whip on Monday removing all 30 policemen from Jakkanpur police station in south-western Patna for their alleged complicity with bootleggers after four men were caught drinking at a private nursing home under the stations jurisdiction.

The entire team, from station house officer (SHO) to constables of Jakkanpur, was asked to report at the Patna police lines after preliminary investigation revealed their links with illegal liquor traders. The order means that the punished personnel were unlikely to get active policing duty in the near future.

The move is seen as part of the Nitish Kumar governments crackdown on police personnel who are suspected either to be complicit with liquor traders or not enforcing total prohibition, imposed on the state since April 5, 2016.

The Bihar police have been under fire for tardy implementation of the prohibition law following regular seizures of truckloads of alcohol coming from other states and allegations of its easy availability in the black market in many parts of the state.

During a review meeting last week, chief minister Nitish Kumar had referred to reports of police officials involvement in illegal liquor trade. He had warned that no one defying the anti-liquor law in the state would be spared.

Patna senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manu Maharaaj said there were frequent complaints of liquor being sold illegally in Jakkanpur police station area.

Investigations showed SHO AK Jha had reported on duty in an inebriated condition on many occasions, the SSP told HT. The SHO was suspended late Sunday night, he added.

A thorough inquiry was being conducted by SP (east) Dhurat Shayli Savlaram, the SSP said. Departmental proceedings will begin against policemen found guilty and they would be barred from any police station duty, he said.

Anupam Yadav, director of Sai Emergency Trauma Hospital, where four people were found drinking, was arrested and the district administration would soon initiate process for sealing of the private medical centre, the SSP said.

A police team had raided the centre on Sunday and caught four men drinking in the operation theatre, Maharaaj said. Empty alcohol bottles were also recovered from the nursing home, he said, adding this showed not only lapses by the police station, but also its complicity in the illegal activity.

Maharaaj said a liquor seller, arrested earlier, had alleged involvement of some policemen posted at Jakkanpur police station in the illegal liquor trade.

This is the second time after enforcement of the new prohibition law in Bihar when an entire police station staff has been transferred

On February 3, all cops at Beur police station were transferred following complaints they were shielding bootleggers.

The police headquarters had also suspended 11 SHOs in Bihar, including those of Phulwarisharif and Masaurhi police stations in Patna district, for failure to enforce prohibition.

Drinking, keeping or dealing in alcohol is an offence under Bihars prohibition law, which provides for imprisonment up to 10 years in such cases.

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HT photo

Empty bottles of liquor were also recovered from the nursing home.

BLURB

The entire team, from station house officer (SHO) to constables of Jakkanpur, was asked to report at the Patna police lines after preliminary investigation revealed their links with illegal liquor traders

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The computers of two village panchayats in Kerala were found to be hacked into on Monday with messages demanding $300 in virtual currency to unlock the files even as thousands of companies and institutions around the globe were grappling with disruptions from the WannaCry ransomware.

Officials who opened the office computer at the Thariyode panchayat office in the hilly district of Wayanad found that four of their computers have been hacked.

The four computers were switched on as usual and they were unable to open the any document files as the virus displayed messages demanding a payment of $300 in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock files and return them to the user. We have informed the district authorities about this, said Santhosh, a panchayat official.

Likewise another village panchayat at Aruvapulam near Konni in Pathanamthitta district on Monday morning got a similar virus message when their computer was switched on.

Officials attached to the two offices said the computers that have been affected did not have any major documents as they continue to rely on paper files.

IT experts are working on these systems on how best to come out of this cyber attack.
Shrinking avenues for employment, no job and social security for contractual employees and declining domestic production are some of the issues that the labour arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will raise with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the upcoming Indian Labour Conference (ILC) in June.

In the backdrop of reported job cuts by IT industry majors and a sluggish economy, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), claiming to have a membership of almost 1 crore across states and more than 5,000 affiliate unions-- wants the BJP-led NDA government to revisit its economic policies so that more jobs are added and entrepreneurship gets a fillip.

The ILC is a tripartite consultative committee in the ministry of labour and employment to advise the government on issues related to the working class. Twelve central trade unions, central organisations of employers, all state governments and central ministries concerned with the agenda items are its members.

The Sangh offshoot, which has in the past criticised demonetisation for the adverse impact it had on small and medium scale sectors and praised the Centre for opening crucial sectors such as defence, civil aviation and food processing to foreign direct investment, wants the government to focus more on agro-based economy rather than make industrialisation the axis of its economic agenda.

We have been moving in the wrong direction, which is why we can see jobs cuts and negative growth in the economic sector. We need to focus on agro-based economy, on self-employment, on handholding the traditional sectors that add jobs, Vrijesh Upadhyay, general secretary of the BMS told HT.

Social security for contractual workers, job security for women, especially after the passage of the new maternity bill and the proposed labour law reforms will be on the BMS agenda for the ILC.

It wants the government to comply with its own directives on fixing minimum wages and employment rules. Forget the private sector, even government departments and public sector units employ contractual workers. The minimum wage formula that was passed at the 15th ILC and upheld by the Supreme Court is being selectively used, Upadhyay said.

The BMS also wants the government to ensure that the new maternity law that allows women to take paid leave for 26 weeks does not become a deterrent for companies to hire women.

Only seven percent of the total workforce has some kind of social security, the trend is to hire contractual workers who left to fend for themselves. And the proposed reforms in the labour laws will make it harder for the workers to form unions or demand protection of their rights, he said.

BMS has objections to the proposed amendments that fix a time frame for workers to report cases of industrial disputes and the new rules for formation on unions.

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The International Court of Justice (ICJ), which a week ago stayed the execution of former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav convicted of spying by a Pakistani military court, will on Monday afternoon begin hearing the case in the Dutch city of The Hague.

India will have 90 minutes to address the 15-judge world court. Led by former solicitor general of India Harish Salve, the Indian team will primarily make out a case of violation of the Vienna treaty on consular relations by Pakistan, Indias plea, a copy of which is available with HT, shows.

India would also seek an extension of the stay on the death sentence.

Pakistan, too, will get 90 minutes to have its say in the matter, the latest flashpoint in the already fraught ties between the two neighbours. Pakistani side is expected to be led by the countrys top law officer, the attorney general.

Here a few points from Indias petition to the ICJ:

1 Pakistan allegedly arrested Jadhav from Balochistan on March 3, 2016.

2 Since then, Pakistan has denied Jadhav or Indian embassy officials access to each other.

3 Pakistan has violated the Vienna convention on consular Relations, 1963, which gives an arrested person the right that his/ her arrest or detention be notified to the embassy of his country.

4 Pakistan, despite repeated requests by India beginning March 2016, has not granted consular access to Jadhav.

5 By the way of farcical court martial proceedings, Jadhav was sentenced to death on April 10, 2017.

6 Jadhavs family has filed an appeal and a petition to the Pakistan government against the death penalty. As Pakistan refuses to share information, there is no clarity whether the appeal filed by Jadhavs parents has been heard.

7 Appeal available to Jadhav is an illusory and worthless remedy. India has argued that the appeal, too, would be heard by an army officer, which defeats the purpose of a review.

8 India fears that the court of appeal will not act independently and fairly.

9 India asks the world court to direct Pakistan to set aside Jadhavs conviction.

10 India wants a fresh investigation after consular access is provided. The trial should be held in a criminal and not a military court.
Chinese state media called India skeptical, nervous and anxious on Monday, taunting New Delhi for not joining Beijings Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) over sovereignty concerns and worries about the debt burden of other countries.

A state media article questioned why an onlooker was more anxious than the participants about taking part in the trans-continental connectivity project.

It warned that if India decided to join the initiative in the future, it might just have a small role to play.

India skipped the high-profile Belt and Road Forum (BRF) held in Beijing on Sunday and Monday over concerns about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK).

The Global Times article was published even as President Xi Jinping inaugurated the BRF round-table summit with around 29 heads of states taking part in it on Monday morning at the Yanqi Lake International Convention Centre, some 70km from the centre of Beijing amid low-lying hills and a lake.

At the round-table, Xi spoke about hastening the process connecting regions in the world through infrastructure projects.

On Sunday, he pledged $124 billion to the plan, and called for the abandonment of old models based on rivalry and diplomatic power games.

But New Delhi officially ruled out sending a delegation on Saturday.

No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity, Gopal Baglay, ministry of external affairs spokesperson said, referring to the CPEC.

Connectivity initiatives must follow principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities, Baglay added, talking about the danger of debt for host countries, especially smaller economies that may struggle to pay back loans for infrastructure projects funded by China.

We are of firm belief that connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality, Baglay said.

The Global Times, a nationalistic tabloid, found Baglays mention of the debt burden worthy of some sarcasm.

It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbors debt burden, the neighbors appear willing to take on more, the article said.

It then cited deals that China had inked with Pakistan and Nepal to dismiss Indias assertions.

Pakistan and China inked new deals worth nearly $500 million, covering airport, port and highway construction. As regards the potential debt burden, Pakistans repayments will peak at around $5 billion in 2022, but this will be offset by transit fees charged in the CPEC, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing the governments chief economist, the article added.

Last week, Nepal officially signed a deal with China to join the B&R, and the country is also reportedly in talks with China to build a cross-border rail link that may cost up to $8 billion, it said.

On Indias concerns over the CPEC, it said China has said projects passing through PoK will not affect Beijings stand on Kashmir --- which on paper is that India and Pakistan should resolve the dispute through dialogue and negotiations.

China would never force any country to participate in the B&R if it was too skeptical and nervous to do so. It is regrettable but not a problem that India still maintains its strong opposition to the B&R, even though China has repeatedly said its position on the Kashmir dispute would not change because of the CPEC, the article said.

China has formally invited India to join the B&R. If India doesnt want to take a part on the stage, then it should just be a good member of the audience. The role is still available if India changes its mind, but it may only be a small role if it is left too late, the article said.
The BJP will sell what sells the most  Narendra Modi.

A fest named after the Prime Minister is planned across the country to showcase his achievements of the past three years. Modi completes three years in power on May 26 and the fest will be launched on the same day. It will continue till June 15.

Modi fest will be organised in 120-odd cities, a BJP leader said. The event will highlight how he changed India and brought it out from a state of despair.

Surgical strikes in PoK, demonetisation and other such decisions of the government are likely to figure prominently in the programme.

The celebration will not only mark the third anniversary, but also start preparation for the 2019 general election. Sources said Modi will use social media and other communication methods to connect with the electorate and thank them for their unflinching support.

His ministerial colleagues, MPs and party leaders will be deployed to make the celebration a success. BJP leaders plan to establish contact with voters in over 300 of 707 districts.

The PM will address a rally at Guwahati in Assam on May 26. The BJP government in Assam also completes its first year on May 24. Meanwhile, BJP chief Amit Shah will start his three-day tour to Lakshadweep from Tuesday to reach out to voters.

With less than 50,000 voters, Lakshadweep is the smallest parliamentary constituency in terms of electorate.

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Next to a garbage dump on one side of a tented wedding reception venue in central Patna last Thursday sat a dishevelled man, waiting patiently for the food leftovers to be dumped there.

No sooner had the first lot of used, disposable plates arrived, he rushed in to grab every morsel of food he could lay his hands on. Then, he ate as if he had forgotten when he had taken his last meal!

How many times have we seen this gut-wrenching scene, felt ashamed and then gone about our business after throwing up our hands in a gesture of resignation? Not any more, a young band of do-gooders has declared.

Just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about Roti Banks and how this concept could mitigate or at least contribute in mitigating hunger from the country, the first such bank is all set to roll out in Patna.

Rishikesh Narayan, a research scholar at Patna think tank AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies, is ready to float the bank which will work on the principle of collecting food from well-meaning citizens and distributing it among the destitute.

Narayan, who runs the Bihar Youth Force (BYF), a community that works for the welfare of the society, is all set to start the bank on June 15, with 50 active members and volunteers ready to set it rolling.

READ:Lions to set up food bank for poor in Patna

We hope to tap food from people who are willing to contribute a minimum of two chapatis and some vegetables to the bank every day, which will be distributed among the needy people, especially at the railway station, hospitals and footpaths of the city, he explained.

Narayan said BYF volunteers would go door-to-door to collect food from people, who could become members free of cost by joining a WhatsApp group and filling up a simple form. More than 50 people have already joined the group, he said.

READ:Eat what you order: Modi government to fix portions of food served in hotels

The BYF will accept the donated food, only vegetarian, in tiffin boxes. We will allot two tiffin boxes to each member in which he/she will collect the food, said Narayan.

The Patna Roti Bank campaign call. (Courtesy: BYF)

Each volunteers and members will also get an I-Card and a unique code of identification. Collection centres will also be opened in many areas of the city for good Samaritans to donate food whenever they wanted, even without being a daily member.

In the 31st edition of Mann Ki Baat last month, the PM had praised the youth taking part in the Roti Bank initiative, which first came up in 2015 and later spread to several cities of the country.

READ:No Food Waste: When leftovers reach the hungry through a mobile app

Narayan said, We will ensure that the food quality is very good. We will fix a time for distribution of food. We will begin by distributing food at the Patna medical college hospital, Patna junction railway station and footpaths of Patna, between 8 am and 9 pm.

Nobody would go with an empty stomach, he promised.

Narayan said BYF volunteers had spoken to the managements of some popular hotels of the city to contribute to the campaign by donating food cooked over and above the actual demand, on a particular day.

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Even as the Centre on Monday maintained that there was no serious impact from a global ransomware cyber attack, there were isolated reports of some public utilities being affected in West Bengal and Kerala.

At least six offices of West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (WBSEDCL) that cater to around 8 lakh households were affected by the crippling global ransomware, WannaCry, designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid.

Officials said employees at the billing offices at these six locations found that they were unable to access the contents of their internet-linked computers.

When the employees tried to access the data stored in the computers, a note flashed on the screen that access will only be available after a ransom of $300 is paid, a WBSEDCL official said.

The bill payment process in all these offices remained affected till 4pm.

This is a matter of serious concern. Work was disrupted today, but we are fortunate that the same set of data was stored separately in the central server of the utility in Kolkata, state power minister Sovandeb Chatterjee told HT on Monday.

In Kerala, computers of two village panchayats in Wayanad district were hit, with messages demanding $300 in virtual currency to unlock the files.

India is on high alert, monitoring critical networks across sectors like banking, telecom, power and aviation to ensure that systems are protected against the malware that has hit more than 150 countries over the weekend.

Surprisingly, Indias IT hub Bengaluru did not report any such breach till Monday evening.

While Tamil Nadu was trying to figure out the potential impact of the ransomware, French auto major Renault temporarily shut its operations outside Chennai as a precautionary measure after its European units were hit by the computer virus.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity experts have reported a spike in enquiries from clients and potential clients.

Yes, our business is booming, said S Surya, who runs a Cybersecurity firm that caters to clients across the globe. I used to get six to seven enquiries a day and today alone I had 30. And many from even small and medium clients who use one computer to four or five computer networks in their offices, he said.

In Mumbai, a senior official from university computerisation centre (UCC) at the University of Mumbai (MU) said they had not received any complaints so far. A few colleges HT spoke to were not even familiar with the computer virus.

However, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) has started taking pre-emptive measures to avoid any attack at the premier institute.

No specific complaints of the malware spread were reported from the cyber cells of Punjab and Haryana.

In view of the critical alert, companies, government and law enforcement agencies across Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh updated and upgraded their anti-virus protocols to protect data.

(With inputs from Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, Bengaluru and Chandigarh)
1) Ransomware attack: India issues red alert, cyber experts warn of more trouble today

The countrys cyber security agency Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) has issued a red-coloured critical alert in connection with the WannaCry attack, and warned users to not pay the ransom. The ransomware worm that stopped car factories, hospitals, shops and schools over the weekend worldwide, with Asia having escaped the worst so far, could wreak fresh havoc on Monday when employees log back on, cyber security experts warned.

Read the story here.

2) Xi Jinping pledges billions of dollars for new Silk Road

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday pledged to pump billions of dollars into the new Silk Road initiative as he described his signature foreign policy push as inclusive, one that should not be held hostage to old rivalries and power games. China is hosting at least 29 heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan prime minister Nawaz, Sharif, for a two-day Belt and Road conference which India has chosen to give a miss. All of Indias neighbours, except Bhutan, sent high-level delegations to the event, with Sri Lanka represented by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Read the story here.

3) Kulbhushan Jadhav death sentence: India, Pakistan to face-off at ICJ hearing

India hopes for a positive outcome but braces for a complex legal tussle with Pakistan at the International Court of Justice on Monday to save the life of an Indian national accused of spying. Senior lawyer Harish Salve will argue for India at The Hague-based court, which last week stayed the execution of Jadhav on Indias appeal. India argued that it approached the international court to save the life of an innocent man, who was not given consular access even after 16 requests.

Read the story here.

4) Pakistan says JuD chief Hafiz Saeed spreading terrorism in name of jihad

Mumbai terror attack mastermind and Jamat-ud Dawah (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed and his four aides have been detained for spreading terrorism in the name of jihad, Pakistans interior ministry has told a judicial review board. Saeed appeared before the board on Saturday and told it that he had been detained by the Pakistani government in order to stop him for raising voice for Kashmiris.

Read the story here.

5) Govt ministries not been able to meet the standards for skills development: Panel

Government ministries have not been able to meet the standards for skills development, the Sharda Prasad committee said, highlighting drawbacks in the scheme to train youth for jobs and entrepreneurship. The government-appointed panel led by Prasad, a former director general of employment and training, recommended that nine ministries that dont have domain expertise or training infrastructure of their own should discontinue their programme to meet the parameters.

Read the story here.

6) Gurgaon: 26-year-old woman gang-raped in moving car, dumped in Delhi

A 26-year-old woman was gang-raped by three men in a moving car after she was kidnapped near Sukhrali village in Gurgaon on Saturday. The victim, who lives as a paying guest in sector 17, told the police that she went to Connaught Place in New Delhi to watch a movie on Friday night with her male friend after which they went to a bar and then returned to Gurgaon in a cab at around 2am on Saturday.

Read the story here.

7) Gruesome details emerge about Rohtak gang rape and murder

The controversy surrounding the gang rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Rohtak has intensified, with more gory details of the crime emerging on Sunday. The Haryana police also came under a cloud, with relatives of the victim alleging that they had ignored a complaint lodged against the main suspect about three months ago. An autopsy of the victim showed that the womans skull had been shattered, and sharp objects may have been inserted into her private parts.

Read the story here.

8) Human mortgage: Mother tries to raise Rs 2000 to free 7-yr-old from moneylender

A young mother of three travelled all the way from Nagalands Dimapur to Agra with her children to earn Rs 2,000  the sum she needed to free her son from a moneylender who had kept her older son as mortgage for a loan for her husbands funeral. Rita didnt land a job in Agra and had to rummage through garbage for discarded food and drank water from even drains, to quench her thirst in the searing May heat.

Read the story here.

9) Mehbooba Mufti asks J&K students to focus on studies, leave bigger issues to elders

The people of Jammu and Kashmir have to choose between peace and violence, chief minister Mehbooba Mufti said on Sunday as she asked students to focus on their education by letting the elders address bigger issues. The people here need to decide...they need to think what they want and how they want it. (Whether) by pelting stones, by killing bright children like (young army officer) Ummer Fayaz or a bank employee or a youth working in police (who work hard for earning their livelihood) or by resorting to looting banks and weapons?

Read the story here.

10) IPL: Mumbai Indians vs Rising Pune Supergiant, Sunrisers Hyderabad vs Kolkata Knight Riders in playoffs

Mumbai Indians, Rising Pune Supergiant, Sunrisers Hyderabad and Kolkata Knight Riders have emerged as the top four teams. MI and RPS will face each other in the Qualifier 1 on May 16 at the Wankhede Stadium. On May 17, SRH and KKR will play the eliminator at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore.

Read the story here.
The government will write a new matrimony law for Muslims to fill a legal vacuum should the Supreme Court strike down triple talaq, the countrys top law officer said on Monday.

Triple talaq is the lone controversial way Muslim men in India can get a divorce. It allows a man to end a marriage by uttering the word talaq thrice in quick succession.

The top court is hearing a bunch of petitions challenging triple talaq. The government too wants to scrap the practice which it calls unconstitutional and one that is against women.

Should the court strike down triple talaq and the government bring in a new law then it could mean the start of a process to overhaul Muslim personal laws in India that are now guided by a 1937 Sharia code. India has separate sets of personal laws for each religion governing marriage, divorce, succession, adoption and maintenance.

Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi told a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar that it wasnt the courts job to interpret the Quran and that it should consider the constitutional validity of triple talaq and not just restrict itself to examining whether the custom was fundamental to practicing the faith.

Rohatgi disagreed with the court that the government should first address whether triple talaq is essential to religion or not, saying the Supreme Court was not an ecclesiastical court.

If the practice of instant divorce (triple talaq) is struck down by the court then the Centre will bring a law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community, he said.

His remarks were in response to Justice Uday U Lalits query: where will Muslim men go for divorce if the court strikes down triple talaq?

While the Hindu law overhaul began in the 1950s and continues, activists have long argued that Muslim personal law has remained mostly unchanged.

Triple talaq, practised by Sunni Muslims, is biased in favour of men and against gender justice, several Muslim women petitioners have told the court.

India has the worlds third largest Muslim population and woman from the community face the threat of a sudden, oral, and out-of-court divorce.

But a Muslim woman seeking divorce has go to court for a legal separation under the Sharia law.

The top court sought to know if any order banning triple talaq will involve tinkering with religion.

The attorney general argued that triple talaq cannot enjoy protection under Article 25 of the Constitution that allows people to practice his faith.

He tried to bolster his point citing the banned Hindu tradition of sati in which a widow is burned alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.

What would you do if someone came saying sati was essential part of the Hindu religion. Women lived in fear of sati until the law declared it illegal. Muslim women want their dignity, freedom to live without fear of triple talaq, he said.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board opposed the petitions and requested the court not to interfere with personal laws of a community.

The court denied the governments request to club the triple talaq trial with two other controversial practices  nikah halala and polygamy that allows a Muslim man to have four wives.

Nikah halala lets a divorced Muslim woman to remarry her husband but after marrying another man and then divorcing the latter. The court said it will hear arguments on these two practices later.

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Tamil actor and superstar Rajinikanth said on Monday he hasnt completely ruled out a career in politics and will take the path if god is willing after evading questions about his political aspirations.

The Kabali actor, who prefers to stay away from the spotlight, is meeting his die-hard fans in batches between Monday and Friday after a gap of 8 years.

God decides what we have to do in life at every phase. Right now, he wants me to be an actor and Im fulfilling my responsibility. If god willing, I will enter politics tomorrow. If I enter, I will be very truthful and will not entertain people who are in this to make money. I wont work with such people, the 66-year-old actor said while addressing a large gathering of his fans.

Rajinikanth also talked about his brief stint in politics when he supported Karunanidhi-led Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in the 1996 Tamil Nadu assembly elections, saying it was a political accident.

Supporting a political alliance 21 years ago was a mistake on my part. My name was misused by a lot of politicians and some of them even earned money using my name. My support is for no party, he added.

Earlier this month, Rajinikanths meeting with actor-politician Nagma triggered another round of speculation that the megastar may join politics. Nagma is a member of the Congress party.

Rajinikanth shares a personal camaraderie with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In April 2014 just before the general election, Modi called on Rajinikanth in Chennai while on a campaign trail. Though both Modi and Rajinikanth called it a courtesy call, many saw political undertones to it.

Rajinikanth said for the moment he will concentrate on acting.

Rajinikanth also advised his fans to stay away from drinking and smoking and said these habits not only affect peoples health but also their decision-making ability.

I always used to wonder how people can lose their whole wealth because of drinking. It took me a while to realise that drinking leads to bad decision making and a few bad decisions and end someones life. I have been personally affected by drinking and smoking, please dont fall prey to it, he said.

The actor starred in Kabali in 2016, and will next appear opposite Akshay Kumar in 2.0.

He also confirmed that he will commence shooting for his next project with director Pa Ranjith from May 28.
When Mumbai Indians host Rising Pune Supergiant in Qualifier 1 of IPL 2017, it will be a shootout between the formers bowling against the latters batting. (IPL 2017 FULL COVERAGE)

While Mumbai Indians boast of one of the best bowling units in this edition, Rising Pune Supergiant have some experienced batsmen in their line-up.

It will be a third encounter between both teams this season with Pune emerging victorious in the last two meetings. (RESULTS)

Heres a look at some of the key clashes ahead of Tuesdays high-voltage clash at the Wankhede Stadium:

Jasprit Bumrah vs Ajinkya Rahane

More often than not, Bumrah has delivered whenever Rohit Sharma has thrown the ball to him. The right-arm pacers task will be to stop Rahane, who hasnt fired in the tournament so far but is due a big one. It will be an interesting tussle as Bumrah doesnt give away too many runs in the initial overs while Rahane likes to have a go at the bowlers in the powerplays.

Rohit Sharma vs Adam Zampa

Rohit Sharma (L) has been dismissed by leg-spinners on five occasions this season. (HT Photo/Agencies)

Mumbai Indians skipper Rohit has been already been dismissed by leg-spinners on five occasions this season and he will have to be extra cautious when he lines up to hit the Australian leggie. While the advantage will be with Zampa, who was brought in after Imran Tahirs departure, he will have to be cautious about not erring in line and length as Rohit is well capable of dispatching him into the stands.

Harbhajan Singh vs Steve Smith

Harbhajan Singh (R) has been economical with the ball this season. (HT Photo/Agencies)

Harbhajan bowled economically throughout this edition of the IPL till the last match, when Kings XI Punjab skipper Glenn Maxwell tore into him. This time the turbanators task will be to keep Rising Pune Supergiant captain Smith quiet. While Smith isnt in the same attacking mould as Maxwell, he can pack a punch when required.

Krunal Pandya vs MS Dhoni

Krunal Pandya will face a big challenge when he bowls to former India captain MS Dhoni. (HT Photo/Agencies)

Pandya has not only done a good containing job in the middle overs for Mumbai Indians, but has also stopped partnerships blossoming. The Baroda left-arm spinner will face the biggest challenge of his IPL career when he comes up against Dhoni. The former India skipper has an immaculate record in big matches which Pandya lacks.

Parthiv Patel vs Jaydev Unadkat

Jaydev Unadkats (L) battle with Parthiv Patel will be one to watch out for. (HT Photo/Agencies)

Parthiv has been instrumental in laying the foundation for Mumbai Indians charge this season. While the wicketkeeper-batsman will look to get the ball rolling from the first ball, Unadkat will have to be smart to keep out of his range. The Saurashtra left-arm pacer has given Rising Pune Supergiant crucial breakthroughs and they will hope for an encore in Qualifier 1.

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Pushing her rivalry with the Union government to a new height, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has decided to bar IAS and IPS officers from her state from sharing classified information about the state with the Centre government even when they are central deputation.

Bengal bureaucrats are comparing this move somewhat on the lines of Bihar chief minister, Nitish Kumars initiative to prevent IAS and IPS officers of Bihar cadre from consuming alcohol even outside the state when they are on central deputation.

Read: Mamata and Kejriwal skip Niti Aayog Governing Council meet with PM Modi

Sources from the state personnel & administrative reforms department said that this will be an extension of the earlier instruction from the chief minister for the IAS and IPS officers under state government jurisdiction to refrain from sharing any information with the Union government.

BJP president Amit Shah visiting a slum in the chief ministers constituency of Bhawanipore on August 26. Mamata Banerjee regularly alleges in public meetings that the ruling establishment at the Centre has let loose agencies such as CBI and ED on Trinamool Congress leaders. (Samir Jana)

Accordingly, an official said, the state government will have to bring an amendment in the West Bengal Government Servant Conduct Rules, 1959, under which all IAS and IPS officers of the state cadre will have to give an undertaking in this regard.

In order to extend the prohibition in the state, the Bihar government, too, amended Bihar Government Servant Conduct Rules, 1976, under which IAS and IPS officers of the state cadre gave an undertaking.

Read: Mamata accuses Modi of removing crucial files on notes ban

Only in December last year when the BJP-Trinamool Congress tussle was at its peak, Mamata Banerjee instructed the IAS and IPS officers of state cadre to skip every meeting with the Union government and central agencies. She has maintained that the Centre is constantly unduly interfering in the matters of the state.

A senior member of the state cabinet said on condition of anonymity that the chief minister doubts that a number of central agencies have become unnecessarily active in the state. Her impression is based on classified information passed down by certain bureaucrats of the state cadre who are currently on central deputation.

Hence, she wants to enforce restrictions on officers on central deputation so that the interest of the state is not hampered, the member of the state cabinet said.

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Health minister Siddharth Nath Singh on Sunday said people should speak up about child sexual abuse in order to check the menace.

He also said the perpetrators should be publicly shamed, adding, then half the problem will be controlled.

Singh was speaking at the HT Woman 2017-Award Ceremony here.

Quoting National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) statistics, he said 85 % of the victims were abused by family members and close relatives.

Merely 25% of the cases were reported, he said. In only 3% of the cases, FIR was registered against the accused, he observed.

The NCRB study found that the victims were too terrified to speak up. Fearing stigma and humiliation, the mothers too tried to suppress such incidents, he said.

Health minister Siddharth Nath Singh along with Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari taking questions on the issue during an interactive session. (HT Photo)

The time has come that the mother should instill in each child the mindset that they should speak up, resist and expose the culprits, he said.

Read more| Remove social stigma attached with child sexual abuse: Manoj Tewari

Lauding Hindustan Times for organising a programme on Child Sexual Abuse, Singh said, more such functions should be held on the sensitive issue.

The voice should reach the masses, he said.

To check child abuse, the government drafted the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POSCO) in 2012. Under the Act, the culprits get minimum three years jail and maximum life imprisonment. Still, the culprits went scot-free as no complaint was registered against them, he said.

Mother is the first friend, best friend and forever the friend of the child. She should educate her on child abuse and encourage her to speak up about sexual abuse. If the victims expose the culprit, who might be enjoying respect and glamour in the society, the cases of child abuse will be definitely checked. The action of the victim will act as a deterrent, he said.

Singh said the state health department will provide free and best treatment to child abuse victims who undergo mental torture.

The state government will also launch an awareness campaign on the issue, he said.

I urge Hindustan Times to assist me in taking the issue among public. If there is any list of the child abuse victims, kindly hand over it to me. I will not only raise the child abuse issue on a public platform across the state, but also ensure that the victims accompany me on the public dais. It will motivate other people to speak up about the issue, give them strength and a platform to raise their voice, he said.

The campaign will create awareness and make the fight against child abuse successful, he said.

Read more| HT Woman Awards: Pride, pain and a promise
Chief minister Yogi Adityanath said on Sunday there was a need to expose those who distorted history and that his government would include great personalities like Raja Suheldev, Lakhan Pasi and Rani Jhalkari Bai in syllabus so that students could draw inspiration from them.

We would seek suggestions and include forgotten personalities in textbooks, Adityanath said at a function organised by RSS affiliate Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) in memory of Raja Suheldev, a Pasi and the king of Bahraich. Some historians believe that the Pasi king stopped Muslim invaders from carrying out loot and plunder, reason why the VHP organised the function to mark the victory of Suheldev over Ghazi Saiyyad Salar Masood, the invader and the nephew of Mahmood Ghazni.

Ghazi and Masood demolished temples and tried to divide the country but Raja Suheldev understood and defeated their game plan, Yogi said adding that heroes like Suheldev had not got their due in history.

At the function, the CM agreed to VHPs demand to construct a Surya Temple at Balaar in Bahraich. The VHP has also demanded naming Lucknows Sainik School in the name of Raja Suheldev in whose name a memorial too has been demanded. Adityanath said he had agreed to VHPs demands.

Indicating that his government was working on a new education policy, Yogi said, Leaders like Ashfaqullah Khan, Abdul Hameed and APJ Abdul Kalaam are respected by one and all but we should consider if we would like to associate ourselves with Allauddin Khilji, Mahmood Ghazni, Ghauri, Babur or Aurangzeb?
After a low turnout at last months protest against fee hike, Mumbai parents have started a missed call and WhatsApp campaign to garner support for their agitation on May 21.

The Forum for Fairness in Education, a parents and teachers body, plans to send bulk messages to 22 lakh parents across the city.

Friends, we are fighting for your rights so that your children can get better education at reasonable fees. Dont you think your participation will make huge difference, read the messages being circulated.

A missed call campaign started on Monday.

Parents can give a missed call on 02230256822 to show their solidarity to the cause. A report on the number of calls received will be sent to the education department.

By Monday evening, the number reportedly received around 502 missed calls

Read more: Mumbai school fee hike: Parents protest, but management gets away with it, we tell you why

Parents are hoping that they will be able to put pressure on the government to take action against fee hikes.

These steps are being taken to ensure more people come for the protest, said Jayant Jain, president of the Forum for Fairness.

Jain said that the protest on April 20 had failed to create an impact  it had watered down to parents shouting slogans for a few hours at Azad Maidan  as they didnt get the permission to observe an indefinite hunger strike.

Parents have sent letters to chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and education minister Vinod Tawde to ensure the Maharashtra Educational Institutions Collection of Fee Regulation Act, 2011 is enforced strictly.

Last week, the government appointed an expert committee to review the existing fee regulation act and suggest amendments to.it. But parents feel this is a delaying tactic.  Amending the Act will take few years. There will be indiscriminate fee hikes if the government allows the present act to be enforced, said Jain.

Read more: Mumbai parents go on hunger strike to protest govt failure to curb hike in school fees

Schools should disclose expenditures While Maharashtras schools and parents are locked in fee-hike disputes, an education think tank has asked the government to make it mandatory for schools to disclose all their expenses to justify the fee structure. The hike should not be more than 13% based on the expenses, and schools which cannot afford this, should be taken over by other organisations or the government, the group has recommended. On Monday, Pune-based SYSCOM, an NGO which moved the Bombay high court against flaws in the online admission process last year, submitted a 55-page report to the state school education department on suggestions to bring in transparency to the fee structure at educational institutes. One of the suggestions is that schools increasing their fees should show their balance sheets, reveal expenses to parents teachers associations (PTA) and also make them available online so that parents can see it. Personal account numbers (PAN) and the organisations registration numbers should be printed on fee-receipts, it recommends. This is similar to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE)s order last year, asking schools to disclose the fee structures on their website. Schools are registered as charitable institutions and should not indulge in profiteering, said Vaishali Bafna, member of SYSCOM. She added that merely putting up the fee-structure will not help parents. Schools must be asked to prove to parents that the hike is necessary and what the money will be used for, she said. Another recommendation is to form state and district-level panels that will verify the schools claims. These panels can be asked to pay surprise visits to schools to check if their infrastructure and facilities indeed match the fees charged. Someone needs to check the veracity of the institutes claims. Schools often charge high fees, but it doesnt reflect on the quality of education offered, said Bafna. Their demands Stop selling books, uniforms, stationery & other school essentials in school or through an agent A CAG audit of all schools, no fee hike till then Prescribe limit for all fees such as security deposit, admission fee, activities fee, laboratory & library fee, among others Bring transparency in PTA elections.

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Gov. Brian Sandoval signed Assembly Bills 1, 17, 85, and 451 on Monday. All of these measures passed with bipartisan, bicameral, unanimous support. Each new law becomes effective July 1.

Protecting our state employees from harms way and ensuring families who are devastated by tragedy are offered benefits to help them through difficult times are critical to building safe and livable communities, said Sandoval. I was proud to join Assembly Leadership today and sign these bipartisan, thoughtful bills into law. Each one will improve the lives of our fellow Nevadans.

Assembly Bill 1 was sponsored by Assemblywoman Maggie Carlton and requires the Board of Regents to pay undergraduate tuition fees and expenses for a child of any public employee who was killed while on duty. This is a policy expansion from the current benefits offered to public safety officials who are killed on duty. The bill was amended to ensure that the law would apply to NDOT employee Ron Raiche Jr. of Battle Mountain, who was killed in March of 2015, as well as the family of Sparks Middle School teacher Michael Landsberry, who was killed in 2013.

Assembly Bill 17 is was sponsored by the Nevada Department of Transportation in response to the tragic death of NDOT employee Ron Raiche Jr. This law requires motorists to safely change lanes when any NDOT vehicle is on the shoulder of a road or highway and flashing amber warning lights.

Assembly Bill 85 sponsored by Assemblyman Mike Sprinkle eliminates a provision currently in state law that limits high school instruction in CPR and artificial defibrillator usage and mandates that both CPR and AED instruction be offered in all private, charter and public schools. AB 85 will ensure that more high school students are provided the opportunity to learn potentially life-saving techniques. This measure was supported by the American Heart and American Stroke Associations, schools districts, fire and rescue representatives and citizens.

Assembly Bill 451 was sponsored by Speaker Jason Frierson and Assembly Majority Leader Teresa Benitez-Thompson and requires members of the Board of Trustees of a school district to complete at least four hours of training in both the first and third years of their four-year terms. Training must include instruction in laws related to public records, Nevada Open Meeting Law, local government employee-management relations, local government ethics, identifying and preventing violence in schools, financial management and official duties.
The Bombay high court allowed a 17-year-old boy caught in a custody battle to pursue his dream of moving to America and attending Yale, Harvard or Princeton  all Ivy League colleges. The boy recently secured admission to one Americas top 10 schools. He requested that the name of this school be kept a secret, however, the court revealed that it is a highly competitive institution, which admits only 16% of applicants.

The boys father had filed an appeal in the high court, challenging an April 2016 order of the Bandra family court, which rejected his plea to allow his son to move to America and study there.

We do not need to over-emphasise how the boy will get a huge exposure if he studies in America. The move will also help him develop his personality, said justice Rajesh Ketkar.

The judge cited section 26 of the Family Court Act, 1984, which empowers judges to take into consideration the wishes of the child, while passing orders regarding his or her custody. The judge said he questioned the boy, who said he was keen on studying in the USA.

Justice Ketkar called the boy extremely bright and intelligent. He said the boy was also a talented sportsman. While the boys mother said she does not want him to move away from her, the judge said he decided to ignore her protests in favour of the fact that they boy is a US citizen, and under US laws, he is entitled to get a driving licence, vote and make his own decisions.

The boy told the court that the school he was accepted into counts Olympians and Noble Prize winners among its alumni. The school, which has a 800-acre campus, prepares students for admission to Yale University. In 2013-14, 33 of the schools students got into Yale, 19 got into Harvard and 16 secured seats at Princeton.
A powerful photo of Versova autorickshaw driver Mohammad Saeed, 26, who lets his two-year-old son sleep on his lap while he works, recently went viral, resulting in donations pouring in for the family.

Two weeks ago, Saeeds wife, Yasmin, 24, suffered a stroke, which left her paralysed. Working around the clock, Saeed now takes care of his wife and children, along with trying to make ends meet. He usually takes his son to work, while his three-month-old daughter is taken care of by a neighbour.

This has been a difficult phase for us. Several times, potential customers have taken another autorickshaw after seeing my son on my lap. We have slept with our stomachs empty because I have either come home empty-handed or did not have enough money to sustain my family, he said.

Saeeds hardships were highlighted by a film director, who tweeted a photo of him and urged citizens to help.

Ths is heartbreaking.met Md.Saeed(9702098346) 2day in mumbai.Wife paralysed.Nobody to take care of his son.still fighting & driving auto. pic.twitter.com/2XIJ4uces4  Vinod Kapri (@vinodkapri) May 14, 2017

If you want to help him,,

Bank:Bank Of India

Account holder name : Rehana Mohd Raees Shaikh

Acc # : 010510410000136

IFSC Code : BKID0000105 https://t.co/LWDkYRsgdZ  Vinod Kapri (@vinodkapri) May 14, 2017

Since then, Saeed has received countless calls  some from NGOs and some from people wanting to help him out financially. On Monday morning, officials from his bank called, saying that some money had deposited in his account.

I received some money. I dont know how much it is; I will go to the bank and check. I also received countless calls from people who want to donate and help.Doctors have said they will treat my wife for free, he said.

I have faith in Mumbai and myself. I have always done the right work and never cheated anyone. I thank everyone who offered to help me, he added.
Maharashtra government offices in a few places were affected by the WannaCry ransomware, which has infected hundreds of thousands of computers in about 150 countries since Friday. The ransomware infected a few computers, including those in the Nagpur police department and a few other district-level field offices, officials said. They added that said no sensitive data was compromised and that the malware did not breach the governments cyber defences as the infected computers were standalone machines.

Meanwhile, the government announced it would prepare a cyber-security policy in three months to avert any such future attacks.

Officials said the government reacted swiftly to the ransomware attack, issuing several of advisories to field offices across the state. The information technology department held several meetings over past three days and systems were being monitored closely, officials said.

Despite this, computers in the police department at Nagpur and few other field offices were infected with WannaCry, a type of malicious software (malware) that blocks access to a computer system until money is paid. Officials said the infected computers were standalone systems, not connected to the internet or the governments intranet (internal network).

Read: WannaCry ransomware attack: Some ATMs in India remain shut on precautionary ground

There are reports that some computers in Nagpur were infected. We have asked the offices for details. Computers outside the governments intranet are not monitored by the information technology department and are always at risk of such an attack. The system that controls 5,280 computers in Mantralaya is safe, said Vijay Kumar Gautam, principal secretary, information technology department.

Gautam said last years Locky ransomeware attack helped the government avert an attack this time. After that attack we found that at least 2,000 computers in Mantralaya had no antivirus. We blocked all private email providers to prevent further attacks. We monitor our employees compliance with protocol closely and take action against those who try to access blocked sites using dongles, he added.

The government said its new cyber security policy would be introduced in August and would, among other things, bring all computers in state government offices under the statewide area network (SWAN) the governments internal network.

Read: WannaCry ransomware attack hits computers in West Bengal and Kerala

The policy will cover security at the data level, network level and storage level; issues related to last-mile deskstop security; and the role of people who host data centres. It will also cover legal issues related to IT protocols that are currently dealt with under the Information Technology Act. It will also allow us to bring all computers in government offices under the state-wide network, Gautam said.
The Mumbai police have found the severed head of Priyanka Gurav, 23, who was allegedly murdered by her husband and in-laws four days after her marriage in Shahpur on the outskirts of Mumbai .

The police had earlier arrested Priyankas husband, Siddhesh, 25, his parents -- Manohar, 50 and Madhuri, 48 --- and a friend Durgesh Patwa, 31, in connection with the murder.

Pradeep Jain, 34, who allegedly helped Siddhesh dispose of the body, which was chopped into pieces, was arrested on Sunday.

Priyanka went missing on April 5. Her husband approached the Worli police and registered a missing persons case on the same day.

The Rabale police found her beheaded body in a nullah in the industrial area last week. They, however, could not identify it as her head was severed.

Priyankas siblings identified the body from her clothes and a Ganpati tattoo on her body.

C Katkar, senior police inspector, Rabale MIDC police station, said, The accused killed the victim on April 4 by smothering her with a pillow. They then cut her body into pieces and dumped it at different spots in the city. We recovered her leg from Badlapur on Saturday. More people are likely to be arrested.

Read more: Husband, in-laws arrested for murder of Worli woman

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A citizens group has taken a huge step towards reviving one of Mumbais rivers  Poisar. River March, a group comprising more than 150 people, started a clean-up drive to free the riverbed of the filth Mumbaiites have dumped into it for years through sewage disposal.

What are the groups demands? Stop concretisation of the river bed as it kills aquatic life. Build a sewer line connected to all the toilets on the riverbanks. Divert the sewage to treatment plants so it is not discharged into water bodies. Clean the river regularly and clear the garbage around it. Make provisions for waste disposal near the river.

Over five Sundays  from April 9 to April 30  River March removed 1.47 lakh kg of garbage from a stretch of the river at Kranti Nagar in Kandivli. They used machines and also handpicked trash from areas that were out of the machines reach. The citizens also received help from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on the first two Sundays. During one of our surveys, we saw that Poisar was choking with plastic and we estimated that the garbage in it could be weigh up to thousands of tonnes. We saw people living close to such filth, defecating in the open and decided to do something about it, said Tejas Shah, a member of River March. We used all our resources to gather like-minded people and started cleaning it.

Poisar originates in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), passes through Kandivli and empties into the Marve creek. HT had reported last year that a study by the Environmental Policy and Research India (EPRI) had found that pollution in the river is more than 100 times the safe limit. The Nallah Restoration Report by EPRI found that levels of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD)  the level of oxygen needed to sustain aquatic life  was 414.73 mg per litre at certain locations along the 7-km river. A BOD reading of more than 3mg per litre is unfit for human consumption, above 6 mg per litre is unsuitable for fish, according to Central Pollution Control Board.

The volunteers said the stretch, which they cleaned is in the periphery of the reserved forest and has over 14,000 illegal slum structures. BMC or forest departments inaction have let these slums come up. Now, they are dumping domestic waste right into Poisar as they do not have a sewage line, said Shah.

The volunteers said they were shocked by the amount of trash in the river. It seemed like a daunting task. But after chalking out a plan, we managed to succeed, said Sagar Vira, a resident of Kandivli. Once we cleaned the surface, we realised the trash was stuck even in the deeper ends of the river. We gave it our all when by putting our hands deep into the dirty water to take out every piece of plastic that choked it.

He added that the fear of contracting diseases haunted them throughout the process. We had to overcome the unbearable stench but since we had gloves and masks, not one person in the group contracted any disease, said Vira.

Borivli resident Gopal Jhaveri said the BMC sent five workers to help us on the first and second Sunday of the drive and a dredging machine was sent on one Sunday. The BMC contractor, workers or machines, were not there to support them in their endeavours. It is sad that while the Prime Minister elaborates on his ambition of Swacch Bharat, the civic body fails to implement it on ground, he said while adding that the group wrote to the PM highlighting the issue.

Our drive has just begun and we will continue organising awareness programmes and clean-up drives until all four water bodies in Mumbai regain the status of rivers from nullahs, he said.

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Planning on taking a road-trip to Gujarat anytime soon? You will have to wait for four days, as the 47-year-old Versova bridge on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad National Highway will officially open on May 20.

The bridge, which links Mumbai to Gujarat, New Delhi and other major cities, is currently undergoing repairs, for which it was shut from May 14, said an official of the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI).

Repairs being carried out on the bridge. (Prashant Waydande /HT)

Acting on the traffic polices orders, heavy vehicles are currently using Ghodbunder Road to enter and exit Mumbai to ease the load on the bridge.

The bridge will undergo tests to ascertain how much load it can bear. Its cement structure will be cured and a report will then be submitted to the state government. After we get clearances from the state and the traffic department, the Thane rural police will open the bridge for normal traffic, said the official.

The bridge was constructed by IRB on a build, operate and transfer basis. The firm is set to pay for the repairs and will submit its bill to the NHAI later, said an official. IRB has not yet estimated how much the repair work will cost.

According to NHAI figures, around 50,000 vehicles use the 49-metre bridge built over the Versova creek daily.

Around 50,000 vehicles use the 49-metre bridge daily. (Prashant Waydande/HT)

The bridge closed for heavy traffic on September 15, 2016 after horizontal cracks developed on a girder. Since then, repair work has been going on at a snails pace, said sources. Acting on a public interest litigation filed by two activists from Vasai, the Bombay high court rapped the state government. Following this, repair work picked up pace.

Motorists currently use the two-lane south-bound part of the bridge. A motorist has to wait for about 35 minutes in each direction to cross the bridge owing to traffic and a speed limit of 20 kmph.
Four days after a 28-year-old woman was killed at her Colaba apartment, the Mumbai police arrested her brother-in-laws friend. The man, Hitesh Kartakpandi, 23, slit the womans throat with a knife after she rejected his sexual advances, said police. They will charge Kartakpandi with attempt to rape.

Kartakpandi lives on the second floor of a ground-plus-two structure in Colaba, where the woman, Shweta Tandel, lived with her husband Mahendra on the first floor. Kartakpandi shared a room with Mahendras brother. They worked at a fashion accessory showroom in south Mumbai.

On May 10, when Mahendra and his brother left for work, Kartakpandi went to Tandels house for breakfast. Police said he would often eat at the couples house.

On finding Tandel alone, Kartakpandi made sexual advances towards her. She told him to behave himself. However, he allegedly tried to force himself upon her. Tandel tried to defend herself, said police. She pushed Kartakpandi, which agitated him. He pushed her on to the ground. Injured and bleeding, she started calling for help.

Kartakpandi panicked when the woman raised an alarm. Fearing that he would be caught, he grabbed a kitchen knife and slit her throat, said Manoj Kumar Sharma, deputy commissioner of police, zone I.

Kartakpandi latched the womans door from the outside and went back to his room. He had a bath and then went to work. The incident came to light later that day when Tandels husband called her and she did not pick up the phone. He asked a woman on the ground floor to check whether his wife was alright.

When he returned home for lunch at 12.30pm, he found his wife lying in a pool of blood with her throat slit. He took her to St George Hospital. However, she was declared dead before admission.

Kartakpandi, who is from Palghar, moved to south Mumbai in search of a job. Officials said he does not have any prior cases of harassment lodged against him.

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Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief and former union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar recently convened a meeting of representatives from the districts through which Maharashtras Rs31, 427-crore Mumbai-Nagpur prosperity corridor is expected to pass. Pawar assured the farmers that he will fight for the rights of those in danger of losing their land. The move comes after farmers opposing land acquisition approached Pawar, asking him to intervene.

Farmers from almost all the 10 districts the 710-km corridor is slated to pass through do not want to give up their land. They have formed district and taluka level action committees to oppose the acquisition.

We met Pawar on May 10. He told us he will meet with farmers on May 29. He will announce his partys stand on the corridor and decide on a course of action to safeguard the interests of the farmers, said Baban Harne, conveyor of Maharashtra Shetkari Sangharsh Samiti.

The government has started acquiring land arbitrarily without following legal procedures under the land acquisition laws. It has been using the police force to suppress the voice of the farmers. We will step up protests after meeting Pawar again, he added.

The expressway needs about 20,820 hectares of land of which 84.13% is agriculture land. In most districts, farmers have opposed the land pooling scheme, which offers Rs30,000 to Rs60,000 an acre a year as compensation for 10 years, with an annual increase of 10% every year. The farmers will also be entitled to 25 to 30% of the developed land along the corridor. The government has now offered the famers four times the market rate of the land. However, they are still unimpressed.

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While the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government in the state is finding ways to deal with the Opposition Congress-NCP and ally Shiv Senas attempts to mobilise farmers over the issue of farm loan waiver, it may have to handle another problem  protests against land acquisition for its ambitious infrastructure projects.

For the past few weeks, farmers in Nashik and some other parts are staging agitation against the proposed Mumbai-Nagpur highway.

Titled as Maharashtra Prosperity Corridor, the Mumbai-Nagpur expressway is chief minister Devendra Fadnavis dream project. His close aides say Fadnavis sees this project as his contribution to Maharashtra. The Rs46,000-crore project will link Mumbai with states second capital Nagpur with an eight-lane access controlled road like Mumbai-Pune Expressway. It will not only cut the travel time between the two cities drastically but will also turn out to be a game-changer, feels Fadnavis. The project that will be built through a dozen districts will include 24 development nodes based on various industries from agro-processing to information technology and also a dry port linked to the JNPT port in Raigad district. According to the state government, this project will change the face of a large part of Maharashtra, especially backward Marathwada and Vidarbha. For acquiring over 20,000 hectare land needed for the project, the government came up with the idea of making farmers/landowners partners in the plan. They are being promised developed plots in the development nodes. However, not all farmers are impressed, it seems. There are many who do not want to give their land for the project and are now resorting to agitations.

Two districts neighbouring Mumbai, Palghar and Raigad are also witnessing protests. Last week, Palghar farmers staged protest against land acquisition for Mumbai-Vadodara expressway. Farmers in this district are also wary of the plans for proposed Wadhavan port and Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project as they think the government will take their land for these projects as well.

Raigad district which has a long history of opposition to land acquisition by the government for projects ranging from Navi Mumbai city to special economic zones, is now witnessing agitations against land acquisition for the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor. The farmers in areas like Roha and Mangaon are refusing to give their land.

The government has not yet started acquisition of land in Raigad, Thane and Palghar districts for its another ambitious project Virar-Alibaug multi-modal corridor which it says is crucial for future development of MMR.

In Pune district, farmers are not willing to part with their land for the proposed new international airport near Chakan. So why is it that farmers dont want to give their land even when the state promises that these projects will transform their lives?

The answer is simple. The farmers and small land owners dont trust the government. They get impressed when Fadnavis speaks about the enormous development that would happen with the completion of infrastructure projects but they may not trust the local government officers, local politicians and local land mafia whom they see in action when such projects are announced. They have not forgotten how land was taken for special economic zones (SEZ) but most of it was not used for industrial purpose. In fact, the government allowed the buyers to use the same land for non-industrial purpose.

In several cases in areas like Raigad, the land prices in the market are much more than what the government or its agencies are giving them in exchange of their only property. In fact, activists are pointing out that the government is not acquiring land as per the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act 2013 under which the compensation package for taking land has to be based on market prices. The government is acquiring the same under MIDC Act or National Highway Act or through special packages.

Unless the central and state governments convince the farmers that they will be adequately compensated and unscrupulous elements wont be benefitted at their cost, acquiring land for their ambitious project will remain a messy affair.

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Would it not be easier if you could look at your childs teacher, your buildings security guard or the school bus driver and know your child is safe around them? A registry of sexual offenders could help you do just that.

Tracking offenders in other countries USA: The National Sex Offender Registry is available only to law enforcement and is maintained by FBIs Criminal Justice Information Services Division. The National Sex Offender Public Website, which was started in 2005, is maintained with the help of the Department of Justice. UK: Started in 2008, under the child sex offender disclosure scheme. According to an official announcement on UKs government website, child sex offender disclosure scheme allows parents and guardians to formally ask the police to tell them if someone has a record of child sexual offences. Australia: The government maintains a database for sex offenders, including people convicted of child abuse. Various organisations use this database to create awareness about convicts, including their last known location.

Its not a new idea. In 2014, Madonna Jansen, a 26-year-old project manager with a private firm, started an online petition to set up a national sex offenders registry. But the petition started getting attention only a couple of months ago, after Kerala governor P Sathasivam detailed a plan during a legislative Assembly session in Thiruvananthapuram in February.

The registry  a first for the country  would be maintained in a public database and include details of sex offenders, the governor said in the Assembly.

Soon after, the petition got 17,500 supporters, a number that is steadily rising. Till date, the petition has garnered 87,780 signatures.

Jansen said, The goal is to reach 1.5 lakh signatures. It takes a lot of persuasion to get people to sign such petitions. Most of us waste time watching cat videos online. I am happy it has got this support, but we still need more before we take the petition offline.

For more than a decade, USA has been using a national sex offender registry. The United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa also have similar systems in place.

Here, we hire teachers without a second thought. What if the teacher turns out to be a paedophile? The registry could help you check if anyone employed in your childs school has a history of sexual offences. Right now, the absence of a filter allows offenders to work with children, Jansen added.

However, Jansens crusade was not a simple one. She still faces backlash from some, who feel the such a registry can be misused. Responding to such detractors, Jansen said, The offenders are listed by authorised investigating officials. It would not include just any man or woman.

Authors Preeti Shenoy and Kiran Manral and actor Shama Sikander, recently signed the petition to join the cause. Every week , I talk to children who have been rescued from sexual offences. I strongly recommend that India get a national registry, Sheela Khare, Child Welfare Committee chairperson, Mysore, Karnataka, said while signing the petition.

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One of every five children raped in India was from Maharashtra. At least two of all reported child molestations in the country took place in this state. Girls and boys are kidnapped from right outside their homes and raped; they are attacked by men they trust  uncles, older cousins, teachers, and even fathers. Offenders lurk around schools, playgrounds and are inside school buses.

And, these stark numbers are only of those cases where the crime was reported. In several thousands of other cases, the child suffers constant assault and violation day after day, in silence, either because they are not taken seriously or because of the taboo around the issue.

Numbers tell a tale

According to the latest available statistics with the National Crime Records Bureau, 2,267 children were raped in 2015 in Maharashtra. The records show 10,934 children reported rape across the country. Of 8,452 children who reported being molested across the country, 2,494 were from Maharashtra.

Maharashtra topped the list of child rapes, followed by Madhya Pradesh that year. Delhi, often called the rape capital, reported far fewer cases, at 928.

Another nationwide survey by the Women and Child Development Ministry in 2007  the first such survey and the only one since  found that children aged five to 12 were most at risk of abuse and exploitation. It also found that 53.22% of the children surveyed reported having faced one or more forms of sexual abuse; 21.90% of the child respondents reported facing severe forms of sexual abuse.

The report also highlighted that 50% of the abusers were known to the child or were in a position of trust and responsibility.

The difficulties of reporting rape

17-year-old Esha had stepped forward last year to complain about her father raping her on multiple occasions. After weeks of trying, the girl alleged the Bangur Nagar police was suppressing the matter and no one had been arrested. It was only after she took the complaint to the police commissioner did the case get transferred to a different police station, which began a probe.

In several cases HT came across, children already struggling to cope with being attacked and assaulted had to go on to face intimidating policemen who often did not take them seriously.

Most children decide to talk about the abuse because they want it to stop. But they have to go through a legal system, and they are not ready for it. We should strive to minimise the trauma because the child is already reliving it at every step, said Priti Patkar, the co-founder of Prerana, an NGO that rescues sexually abused children.

Living after abuse

A social worker with Prerana said children find it difficult to rebuild their lives after they are violated and abused. Its a disruption in their child-like behaviour, the worker said, adding the effects are long-lasting, and in some cases even crippling.

Harish Iyer, a survivor of child sexual abuse and an active voice in raising awareness on the issue, recalls how he survived the abuse. It used to be difficult to remember the abuse. It was like parts of a cryptic puzzle, a maze in your head. I would remember bits, but I would have headaches until I could remember the complete picture.

Getting rid of the taboos

Many NGOs working in the sector said they are often left fighting with the childs family to report a case of abuse.

Most offenders turn out to be someone known to the child. For instance, if a stepfather assaults a girl child, the mother may ask the daughter if she provoked him, said Jalpa Bhuta, a city-based child psychiatrist.

The taboo also stops parents from teaching their children basics, like the concept of bad touch and good touch.

Parents should be able to talk to their child. Use a doll to teach the child what is good touch and bad touch. If a child builds up the courage to talk to a parent about something, listen to them and approach the situation in a non-judgmental way, said Bhuta.

While there is a strong law in place  the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act  it is yet to grow into a strong enough deterrent, experts said. Until then, a good support system at home will help make children more aware, and help survivors cope with the attack better, social workers said.

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The Mumbai police recovered all the body parts of a woman who was allegedly murdered by her husband and in-laws four days after her marriage in Shahpur on the outskirts of Mumbai. The accused had chopped the body into pieces and dumped them in different places across the state.

The police also arrested a fifth suspect, 34-year-old Vishal Soni, who helped the accused dispose the body parts.

On Sunday the police found Priyanka Guravs severed head from Shahapur in Thane district and on Saturday they recovered a limb from Badlapur.

Priyanka was allegedly killed by her husband Siddhesh Gurav, 25, his parents Manohar, 50, Madhuri, 48, on May 4.The couple had gotten married on April 30. According to the police, Siddesh and his parents were unhappy with the marriage as Priyanka would often quarrel with them. So, they decided to get rid of her.

One of Siddeshs friends, 31-year-old Durgesh Patwa, helped them chop the body into pieces. The police recovered Priyankas torso from a nullah at Mahape MIDC on May 6 and arrested Siddhesh, his parents and Patwa on May 10.

C Katkar, senior inspector of Rabale MIDC police station said, During interrogation, the accused told us where they had dumped the other parts of Priyankas body. They were later sent with our teams to the sites to recover the rest of the parts.

The victims head was dumped in a Shahapur jungle. It was wrapped in several plastic bags and a bed sheet. We have recovered all the body parts and they will be sent for a DNA test this week, added Katkar.

The police are now trying to trace the car which was used to dispose the body. The car belonged to Soni and he drove the other accused across the state to dump the body parts, another police officer said.

He added that the accused are being interrogated and more people are likely to be arrested.

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A few unidentified people broke into a jewellery store at Nerul on Sunday night and stole gold and silver jewellery worth Rs50 lakh. The theft was discovered on Monday at 10.30am by shop owner Gopal Singh Sadana. The Nerul police said the thieves also stole Rs50,000.

There were CCTV cameras installed inside the store. But the thieves broke them and took away the DVD in which the recordings were stored, said sub-inspector P Sonkamble from Nerul police station.

Read: Summer vacation? Dont forget to inform your hsg society, cops. Theyll keep your valuables safe

The stolen items include one-and-a-half kg of gold jewellery and about five kg of silver jewellery. Though the police are questioning a few suspects, no one has been arrested so far.

We suspect that someone from the area, where the shop is located, is involved in the crime. We are following certain leads and will to solve the case at the earliest soon, said another police officer.

Read: 121 crore stolen in 2016, Mumbai cops recovered just 23 crore

A case has been registered under sections 454 (house-breaking in order to commit offence), 457 (house-breaking by night), 380 (theft in dwelling house) and 34 (common of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against the unidentified accused.

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A seven-year-old male leopard at Sanjay Gandhi National Parks (SGNP) leopard rescue centre was adopted by Union minister Ramdas Athawale on Monday, SGNP officials said.

This is the second time that political leaders in the state have adopted an animal from the national park. Yuva Sena chief Aditya Thackeray and his younger brother Tejas adopted a five-year-old tiger and two rusty spotted cats in May 2014.

SGNP officials said the 57-year-old MP deposited Rs 1,20,000 for Bhimas (the leopard) upkeep and maintenance of his cage. The minister had to choose between Arjun, another male leopard at the rescue centre, and Bhima. Bhima is one of our strongest leopards, said Anwar Ahmed, director and chief conservator of forest, SGNP.

He added that the ministers name will be displayed on Bhimas cage and he could visit the animal every week without a ticket.

Because of the rising maintenance costs of animals at the 103 sq km park, the state forest department had issued a resolution approving the adoption scheme at SGNP in 2014, making it possible for Mumbaiites and companies in the city to adopt lions, tigers, white tigers, leopards, spotted deer and others for a year after paying a fee .

According to SGNP officials, nine animals were adopted in 2014. However, because of deaths at the national park, not a single animal was adopted in 2015 or 2016.

The office of the Republican Party of India (A) chief issued a statement confirming the adoption.

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A New Delhi lawyer has filed a petition in the Supreme Court against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) seeking a ban on the custom that is common in some African and Middle Eastern countries but practised only by the Dawoodi Bohras in India. International agencies have described the practice as child abuse and a violation of human rights.

Last week, the apex court issued notices to the central government and the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan  that have large Dawoodi Bohra population  and Delhi seeking their response to the petition.

The custom, which largely went unquestioned, was brought into the public eye after a group of Bohri women filed an online petition that was signed by over 50,000 people. The petition, which seeks a ban on the practice, also called Female Genital Cutting and female circumcision, has been sent to the central government. The women also wrote to the clergy which first ignored them, but later said the custom is a religious obligation. The leader of a breakaway Bohra faction has more liberal views on the issue.

Sunita Tiwari, the lawyer who filed the petition in the Supreme Court, had put her signature on the online campaign. She said that before filing the petition she contacted the anti-FGM campaigners asking them to join her as fellow litigants but there was no response. I was surprised, said Tiwari. So far they have been filing online petitions; what is the point? I told them I will fight the case pro bono (free of cost). I wrote to them and one of them called me on the day the matter was scheduled to be heard. She said she will call back but did not.

Read: SC seeks govt response to plea seeking ban on female genital mutilation

Masooma Ranalvi, convener of Speak Out On FGM, which started the online petition, said the Supreme Court case is a surprise. I did not know Sunita Tiwari till May 4 (when it was reported that a petition was filed). It is incredible. This was thrown in our face, said Ranalvi.

Why are the Bohra campaigners reluctant to go court against the custom? There are fiercely opposing views on the custom within the Bohras and this could explain why they do not want to approach the countrys courts. In March, when the reformists  who broke away in the 1970s after they refused to heed the clergy  held their annual meeting in Udaipur, they invited Ranalvi to speak. Her speech was uploaded on a popular video streaming site. The video has since been pulled out, said a member of the reformist group.

Ranalvi said that she has been asked: why not file a petition? We do not have the legal means to go into litigation. We are activists; we feel a better solution is to work with the community and approach the government, said Ranalvi. We decided not to go the PIL (public interest litigation) route.

The western countries, some of which have outlawed the practice, have cracked down on perpetrators. In April, three people, including a 44-year-old Dawoodi Bohra doctor was arrested in Detroit, USA, for performing genital mutilation on two minor girls, probably the first case under an American law that criminalises FGM. In November 2015, a Bohri mother and two other people were prosecuted in New South Wales, Australia, for subjecting two children to the custom. There are reports of a similar criminal case in the United Kingdom. The government pressure in these countries makes it difficult for the custom to be followed, said Saifuddin Insaf, a member of the reformist group. But it is in the psychology and people will believe that it is in our religion and we have to follow it.

For a group that has a large international diaspora, the convictions have been a matter of embarrassment. Surveys suggest that many Bohri women want this to change. A survey  the group called it exploratory  by Sahiyo, another group campaigning against the custom, said that over 80% of the respondents had reservations on the existence of the practice and refused to carry out the procedure on their own girl child.

The campaigners said that they will now join the legal fight. Now that it (petition) has been filed, we will intervene in the matter, said Ranalvi.

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The Ghaziabad police on Monday recovered a nine-month-old boy, Golu, who was allegedly kidnapped from Raj Nagar Extension (RNE) by his neighbour on May 2. The alleged abductor has no children and had kidnapped Golu to bring him up as his own.

The police on Monday arrested the man, Shyam Lal Burman (35), who is from Raiganj in West Bengal, and used to stay in the servant quarters of a highrise at RNE. Burman allegedly took away his neighbour Ravi Kumars infant son on May 2 and fled to various places in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

He used to take care of the child and even play with him. On the day of the incident, he told me that he is taking him to the market and will return soon. When he did not return, we launched a search and informed the police, Ravi said.

Golus parents also lodged an FIR against the suspect and police teams were sent to search in different locations in MP, UP and Delhi. During investigation, it came to light that Burman had got an Aadhaar card issued for an address in south-west Delhi.

Teams were sent to West Bengal, Delhi and also within UP. Then, we got information that he had kept the child in Lucknow and was heading to Ghaziabad to meet his sister who is from Delhi. He was arrested from the railway station, said Akash Tomar, superintendent of police (city).

The man wanted a son and picked up Golu as he had decided to raise him like his own child, he added.

Golu was handed over to his parents on Monday and Burman was booked under Section 363 (kidnapping) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) at Sihani Gate police station.

I have been married for 12 years and had a three-year-old daughter who died from an illness. Thereafter, we had a son who died within a year. Since then, we have been unsuccessfully trying to have a child. Both my wife and I got treatment from Delhi but we couldnt have a child. I even tried going to priests and performed pujas, but the rituals did not prove successful, he said.

As I worked in Lucknow earlier, I took my wife to start a new life there with Golu, he added.
The demand for inclusion of parents in the committee constituted by chief minister Yogi Adityanath for rationalisation of fee hike by schools has been gaining momentum. After parents from Ghaziabad expressed their reservation on the constitution of the committee, the All Noida School Parents Association (ANSPA) has questioned the appointment of some of the members in the state level committee.

There is no representation of parents in the committee and a few people with vested interests have also been appointed in the nine-member team. How can parents then get assurance that their interests wont be sidelined? We demand equal representation in the committee as the issue affects us, said K Arunachalam, general secretary, ANSPA.

On May 9, the secondary education department of UP formed a nine-member committee under the proposed UP Schools (Regularisation of Fee Collection) Ordinance, 2007. The committee will be headed by Jitendra Kumar, principal secretary of secondary education, and will probe the allegations of unjustified fee hike against private schools and also suggest ways to curb commercialisation of education in the state.

The committee comes in the wake of two months of continued protest by parents against alleged arbitrary hike by private schools. Parents have accused schools of hiking fees by 30-40% within three to four years without taking them into confidence and have also alleged that the schools have been putting pressure on students so that the protesting parents succumb.

Read I Fee hike: Strike called, 128 private schools in Ghaziabad shut today

In Noida and Ghaziabad as well, hundreds of parents have been protesting against several private schools, demanding for the introduction of a fee regulatory body to control the fee hike. The parents have approached the CM, the respective district and city magistrates, district inspector of schools, Noida MLA Pankaj Singh and BJP president Amit Shah, demanding intervention in the matter.

We demand that besides a representative of parents, a retired high court judge must also be in the probe panel to ensure fairness, said Arunchalam.

The parents body has also demanded that the government not limit its probe to a single committee.

A single committee cannot probe the workings of schools in an entire state. Many schools charge Rs8,000- Rs10,000 per month in Noida whereas their ancillary branches in Ghaziabad charge Rs3,000-Rs4,000. There should be separate probe committee at district level, said Yatendra Singh, president, All Noida School Parents Association.

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In the ongoing probe into the murder of army school teacher, the Panchkula police are on the hunt of a male friend of the victim, who they say, has been missing since her murder on Thursday. Sources said that the person in question was in continuous touch with deceased Reena Devi.

He too is said to have called her number several times before her murder and his interrogation could give an important lead to the probe in solving the murder mystery, said a senior official.

39-year-old Reena Devi was found dead in her car with at least 25 stab wounds on her body hours after she had gone to buy pizza with her 15-year-old son in Panchkulas Sector 20 market on Thursday night.

The police, sources said, was working on multiple theories, one which points a finger at the victims husband. He was not living with her family and rather putting up in Baddi where he was employed in a private factory. He retired from army as Subedar last year.

Mohit Handa, SHO of Chandimandir police station, where this case is registered, said that they were not discounting anyone at this stage. We have already spoken to nearly 150 people during the interrogation and will soon crack this case, he added

What has been perplexing the police is why the womans younger son did not immediately raise the alarm after she went missing with her car from the market on Thursday night only to be found brutally murdered later inside her vehicle. Police, it is learnt, have questioned the son, but there is no any headway so far.

The boys father claimed before the police that his son slept after coming back alone from the market, thinking that his mother will also return home.

Three teams working on the case

As many as three teams, including one of Chandimandir police station, and the other two of crime branch are involved in the cases investigation.

Sources said that the police have recovered the knife used to commit the crime from the victims car

The weapon has been sent to the government lab in Madhuban, Karnal, to identify the finger prints. So far, the police suspect it a spontaneous crime in which someone known to the victim might be involved in killing her.
The recent murder of 30-year-old bouncer, Amit Sharma alias Meet, outside a temple in Saketri in broad daylight brings to the fore the internecine rivalries that have begun to take a toll on youngsters in this business.

Meet was himself involved in a firing between two groups of bouncers, one his and the other of Sonu Shah, in which more than 70 rounds were fired near the Phase 8 Dussehra ground in SAS Nagar last November. He was facing an attempt-to-murder charge, and was on bail when his rivals shot him.

A resident of Manimajra, Meet was supplying bouncers to 12 night clubs in the tricity. Nearly 70 rounds of bullets were fired with a .32 bore and a .12-bore double-barrel gun when the two groups had an altercation over supplying bouncers to commercial establishments in the tricity on November 6. Earlier too, members of these groups had fired at each other. The police had claimed that the November 6 firing was the fallout of an argument between their members at a discotheque on the Zirakpur-Pinjore road on the previous day.

Meet, who was associated with the Youth Akali Dal, had supported SOI in the recent PU student elections. In the business of supplying bouncers for the last 12 years, he and Sonu Shah were fighting over the control of bouncers in the city.

The gang war between the two started in July 2016, when three men shot at Meets friend, bouncer-cum-gym trainer, Akhil, at a gym in Sector 26, Chandigarh. Crime Investigating Agency (CIA) of SAS Nagar police had cracked the case with the arrest of three persons, namely, Gagandeep Singh alias Gagan (22) of Nayagoan, Manish Kumar alias Manni (23) of Teur village in Kharar and Gurpreet Singh alias Guggi (23) from Moga.

Akhil and Meet had verbally abused Manish Kumar, employed as a bouncer, who had been nursing a grudge against them, the police had claimed at the time of arrest. The police had seized a Lancer car and two country-made .32 bore pistols with four live cartridges from the group.

Business and muscle

Rich businessmen often hire bouncers to flex their muscles. In April last year, 23-year-old son of a Delhi-based liquor baron and his nine friends, landed in jail during the IPL match in PCA stadium, when their bouncer was booked under the Arms Act for carrying a weapon without a valid licence. In order to avoid security check, the group, which arrived in a fleet comprising a Porsche, Gypsy and Tata Safari, had claimed that the SSP was sitting in their car and they should be allowed to pass through without any checks. The police, however, conducted a check and found an unlicensed .32 bore revolver on Jatinder, the bouncer.

At the receiving end

Bouncers often have to face the ire of drunken revellers when they try to rein them in. On January 19, bouncer Rahul Sharma, was injured in a firing incident outside the Buzz Lounge discotheque. The incident took place when Sharma tried to stop three Ludhiana residents from creating a ruckus over the music being played at the club. The youths, who were in an inebriated condition, fired at him when Sharma asked them to leave.

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Often called the Father of Wheat Revolution, agriculture scientist Dilbagh Singh Athwal has passed away in the US, a Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) official said on Monday. He was 89.

Vice-chancellor BS Dhillon, officers and scientists of the university paid tributes to Athwal, who died on Sunday, at a condolence meeting held at the PAU campus here.

Dhillon said the outstanding contributions made by Athwal in the field of agriculture remain unsurpassable till date. Dr Athwal was one of the stalwarts who played a pivotal role in initiating Green Revolution in the country. He was a well-known geneticist, plant breeder and agricultural scientist of international repute, Dhillon said.

Athwal developed worlds first grain pearl millet hybrid Hybrid Bajra 1 in 1965 that heralded a new era in cultivation of this important crop, he said.

Athwal was instrumental in developing PV 18 in 1966 and the most popular amber-grained wheat variety Kalyansona in 1967, named after the village Kalyanpur in Punjab where Athwal was born in 1928.

Punjab had heralded Indias campaign to ensure foodgrain security for the country in the 1960s.

Athwal served as founder head of department of plant breeding in PAU, and made contributions to the genetics and breeding of pearl millet, wheat, gram and tobacco.

A large number of genetic stocks developed by him made a significant contribution to future research on bajra breeding and genetics.

In 1967, he joined the management of International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and eventually served as the institutes first deputy director general. At IRRI, he introduced many innovations in rice breeding.

The University of Sydney bestowed the degree of doctor of philosophy on him in 1955.

In 1964, he was conferred with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which is the highest Indian award in the science category.

He was also decorated with Padma Bhushan in 1975 by the government for his contributions to biological science. After his retirement, he settled in New Jersey, US, where he breathed his last.

The university has named its new guest house after his name as Dr DS Athwal International Guest House.

As a mark of respect to Athwal, the PAU remained closed for half a day.
City-based education expert has written again to the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) to look into the issue of defunct panel in Punjab since 2010 on regulating fee across private unaided medical colleges.

After the health ministry finalised the state wise single window counselling for all the medical colleges and deemed universities, the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) has now directed the ministry to look into the committees to regulate the fees of the private unaided medical colleges.

This came after the city-based NEET trainer, Dr Arvind Goyal, wrote to the PMO once again seeking directions to regulate the fee structure in private colleges.

The reply received by Dr Arvind Goyal from the health ministry on March 22 had stated that in case of government medical colleges, the respective state governments are responsible for fixation of fees. However, in case of private unaided colleges, the fee structure is decided by the committee set up by the respective state government, under the chairmanship of retired high court judge, in pursuance of the directions of the Supreme Court of India. It is up to the committee to decide whether the fee proposed by an institute is justified and the fee fixed by the committee is binding on the institute.

Dr Goyal said, The health ministry has mentioned that fee structure of private colleges is to be regulated by the state governments but such committees are not functional in many states. We have again written to the PMO intimating them about the defunct committees and to take action in this regard so that the exploitation of medical aspirants can be stopped.

In the letter to PMO, Dr Goyal has mentioned that after the term of Punjab medical panel was over in 2010, there was no fresh appointment and the panel has been lying defunct for the past six years.

Dr Goyal has also highlighted that how a private college in Haryana had hiked its fee of MD/MS course to an exorbitant amount of Rs 99 lakh.

Some of the colleges and deemed universities ask for such exorbitant amounts that majority of the aspirants who are high on merit are not able to afford it and eventually the seat is taken by the candidates who have the money even if they didnt have higher marks.

Dr Goyal has sought fresh directives to all the state governments to make these panels and committees functional so that exploitation of medical aspirants by these private medical institutes can be prevented. If the fee structure is not regulated then the whole purpose of conducting NEET and holding common counselling will be defeated, he added.

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The Haryana government on Monday told the Punjab and Haryana high court that it wants to help the cash-strapped Panjab University in its hour of crisis.

The Haryana counsel made the submission during resumed hearing on a suo motu petition initiated by the court in view of the universitys financial crisis.

The court asked the university authorities to meet Haryana government officials in this regard.

The Haryana government also admitted that disaffiliating colleges from Panjab University in 1974 was a mistake.

The case was adjourned since the matter is pending before the Supreme Court.

The Punjab government sought more time to file its reply on the issue.

The Centre told the high court that it is considering increasing the annual grant to the university that is fixed at Rs 176 crore by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
It is 10pm on Friday evening in Chandigarhs Elante Mall. As the crowd warms up to a fun weekend, Danish, a bouncer stationed at the entry of a night club, is at his vigilant best, closely scrutinising the guests before allowing them entry. Stags are almost always turned back.

Sometime I do allow single men but only after making sure they dont ruin the party atmosphere, says Danish. A bouncers duty is to provide security, check the legal age of guests, refuse entry to intoxicated persons, and deal with the aggressive behaviour of guests.

Its hard to get guests to leave a party when they really want to stay... The key is to stay calm and use managerial skills along with muscle.

With weekend parties becoming a way of life in the tricity, bouncers have become a ubiquitous part of clubs and other watering holes, preventing violent arguments, fights, and rowdy scenes in the middle of revelry.

But the murder of a bouncer, Amit Sharma aka Meet, reveals the irony of their profession. The so-called doormen often turn victims of their own muscle power and drift to the wrong side of law.

Brawn over brain

In bouncer Suresh Kumars view, their biggest challenge is to maintain a peaceful atmosphere and control the overcharged crowd inside bars and nightclubs.

But bouncers are not always as composed as their job demands. In 2015, a group of bouncers deputed at a private club in Chandigarh entered into a scuffle with rowdy guests over smoking inside the bar, which resulted in guests opening fire on them.

Insiders say petty fights often occur in such places.

Sarbjot Singh aka Honey, who supplies bouncers to several clubs, says such incidents can be avoided with the right application of mind. But those in this industry tend to control the crowds through their brawn than brains, which alone is seldom adequate to cool down tempers powered by an overdose of liquor.

Its hard to get guests to leave a party when they really want to stay. And when they have too much to drink, they get aggressive as well. The key is to stay calm and use managerial skills along with muscle, says Sarbjot.

KNOW BOUNCER BUSINESS In many countries, governments have taken steps to professionalise the industry by requiring bouncers to get training and licensing, besides subjecting them to criminal records background check. But no such initiatives have been taken here. Most of the groups that supply bouncers in the tricity are informal setups by people within the industry. They have close connections with politicians and other influential businessmen. The number of bouncers in circulation on weekends is around 200. Most of them are picked up from health clubs and gyms. The deployment has lately suffered due to the Supreme Court ban on serving liquor in bars operating within 500 metres of a national highway.

Fragmented industry

But recruitment of quality bouncers is a problem in the industry. It is largely because it is not a full-time job and firms that supply these bouncers are informal groups formed by bouncers themselves with no regulatory body to oversee them.

The bouncers are recruited mostly from health clubs and sent on duty as door supervisors at clubs.

Though initially driven by the glamour quotient and easy pocket money, they tend to drift towards the other side of law due to the nature of their business.

A bouncer, seeking anonymity, said the one quality they possess in abundance is muscle power.

Many a time, wealthy businessmen and politicians also employ them for flexing their muscles, and this muddies their professional life.

They are just trying to get through the night and should not be portrayed negatively.

But Gurpreet Singh, a bouncer for last many years and currently deployed at Elante Mall, is quick to add that not all bouncers stray. I know many who earn a clean livelihood and know their job well. They are just trying to get through the night and should not be portrayed negatively, he asserts.

Internal conflicts

The internal conflicts between various bouncers are the bane of this industry. As Jitender, a long-time bouncer, explains, There are business rivalries in every profession, but we often fall prey to ego tussles because we tend to get a kick out of our muscle power. These ego tussles plague the entire industry.

Amit Sharma, who was shot dead last week, had a running feud with Surjeet Singh, the alleged accused in his murder. Both had an equal number of bouncers in their firms but could not stand each other.

Meets murder, said bouncer Danish, is a setback for the entire industry. The other day, when I tried to politely ask a rowdy guest to leave the premises, he threatened to kill me like Meet, he recounts.

Regulate the regulators

Pali Sharma, party manager of a club in Sector 17, says there is a need of regulating the firms supplying bouncers in light of their growing internecine conflicts.

He says the police and local administration must ensure proper registration of the firms providing bouncers to clubs along with regular police verification.

With club culture a permanent part of city life, there is no alternative to bouncers to control crowds both inside and outside the parties.

There is also a demand that the bouncers be imparted professional training by the police and agencies in the business of crowd control to avoid any major law and order problem.

With club culture a permanent part of city life, there is no alternative to bouncers to control crowds both inside and outside the parties. This make it vital to have a proper party manual for all stakeholders, including bouncers, organisers, party-goers and even police to ensure that people enjoy their evening outings in a

safe environment, said another club manager, who requested anonymity.

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A woman from Nurmahal subdivision in this district, who had gone to Saudi Arabia on a three-month tourist visa in January this year, was sold and tortured there, her husband alleged on Monday.

My wife Sukhwant Kaur is in trouble. She wants to come back home but her passport is with a travel agent who has disappeared now, Kulwant Singh told Hindustan Times.

In January, Sukhwant, 55, a resident of Ajtani village of Nurmahal, was taken to Saudi Arabia on a three-month visa by a Delhi-based agent.

Kulwant said his wife was in contact with him over phone for a week after she landed in Dubai. But a few days later, her phone got switched off and the agent also did not attend his calls.

Sukhwant Kaur (Photo: Family)

On May 7, my wife called me up from a hospital in Hail City of Saudi Arabia. She said the travel agent had sold her to a local resident and she was forced to work as a slave in his house and was being badly treated and even tortured, he said.

He said Sukhwant has been in the hospital for the past four days and under trauma due to mental and physical torture suffered by her.

The lady got admitted to the hospital with several internal and external injuries, a Kerala-based nurse attending on her, who sought anonymity, told HT over phone.

Meanwhile, the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia has assured all possible help to the family after Kulwant made an appeal to external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj on Twitter.

Besides Sushma Swaraj, I have requested the state government to extend its help in bringing my wife back to India safely, Kulwant said.

He said he has also submitted a complaint to the district senior superintendent of police (SSP) against the travel agent.
Students of at least 76 government primary schools in East Singbhum have been facing acute water crisis and most of them compelled to bring water from home for midday meal during the scorching summer.

Nearly 300 students of upgraded primary school in Siddhu Kanhu Basti have been facing the problem for several years. Besides bringing water for MDM, the students are also forced to rush home to attend natures call. New building for the school was inaugurated on April 14 and students hoped that the water woes would end. However, the new building too remained parched this summer.

The situation is poor in primary schools of Jamshedpur slums including New Kapali Basti, Bhatia Basti, Balaram Basti and Beldih Gram.

Sources said that the education department had provided green toilets to a couple of primary schools in slum areas, but students avoid using it due to water crisis.

Sarswati Kumari, a student of upgraded primary school, Sidhhu Kanhu said, We bring water from home to drink during class hours and have Mid Day Meal. We have to go home to use the toilet. Students, who come from far distance, go to their friends residence in the nearby area to attend natures call.

Senior most teacher of the school, Laxmi Sahoo said that students face water crisis and departmental officials have assured that the problem would be solved soon.

Sources said that cabinet minister cum local member of legislative assembly (MLA) Saryu Rai had suggested education department for taking help of MLA development fund scheme for basic infrastructure improvement in government schools, but the department did not pay heed to it.

District superintendent of education, Banke Bihari said that he did not have information if students brought water from home for having Mid-Day Meal or ran home for toilet due to water crisis.

The department is committed to providing due water facility in each of its schools, said the DSE.
A 13-year-old tribal girl from Jharkhands Gumla district was allegedly abducted and gang raped by six village youths after she came out of her house to attend natures call on Saturday night, police said on Monday.

Both her parents are daily wage labourers who work in a brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh, are on their way back. She lives with her two younger brothers in their home in Gumlas Lada village.

On Saturday night, the six youths allegedly abducted her from her neighbourhood and took her four kilometers away from the village. They allegedly took turns to rape her the entire night and hit her with a stick when she resisted. On Sunday morning, they dumped her in an unconscious state outside her house, she has said in her complaint to the police.

The girl told the police on Monday that the youths had also threatened her to keep quiet or face dire consequences.

We have lodged an FIR against six villagers and a manhunt is on to nab the accused, said Ajay Thakur, officer in-charge of the Sisai Police Station.

The minor has accused Manoj Oraon, Vikas Oraon, Baleshwar Oraon, Bablu Oraon, Letia Oraon and Jeetram Oraon in her complaint to the police. The six men are absconding.

Police sources said that the petrified minor refused to go home fearing that her rapists would return. She remained under police protection on Monday as well.

The teenager has studied till class 6, but stopped going to school after her parents moved out of Jharkhand for work.

Crime against women is on the rise in Jharkhand. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data reveals that crime against women has been increasing in Jharkhand. The NCRB had recorded altogether 5,972 cases of crime against women in 2014, which increased to 6,518 in 2015.

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SS Rajamoulis magnum opus Baahubali 2: The Conclusion has officially joined the Rs 100-crore club in Tamil Nadu. It is the second film after superstar Rajinikanths Tamil science-fiction actioner Enthiran to achieve the rare feat.

It took 16 days for the film to officially cross Rs 100 crore in Tamil Nadu. Rajinikanths Enthiran was the first film to gross over Rs 100 crore in Tamil Nadu and after seven years, Baahubali 2 has repeated the feat, said trade analyst Trinath.

Having already amassed over Rs 1,400 crore worldwide and counting, Baahubali 2 is the biggest Indian grossing film.

Trade analyst Sreedhar Pillai tweeted on Sunday: Baahubali 2 crosses magic Rs 100-crore mark in Tamil Nadu. Gross Rs 100.55 crore (approximately) in 16 days. Net Rs 81.50 crore. Likely share Rs 52 crore. Wow.

#Baahubali2 crosses magic Rs 100 Cr mark in Tamil Nadu. Gross Rs 100.55 Cr (approx) in 16 days. Net Rs 81.50 Cr. Likely Share Rs 52 Cr. WOW! pic.twitter.com/dFtAiMLQ0T  Sreedhar Pillai (@sri50) May 14, 2017

Starring Prabhas and Rana Daggubati as the male protagonists, the film is about the warring battle between them for the ownership of an ancient kingdom.

Anushka Shetty, Tamannaah Bhatia, Ramya Krishnan and Sathyaraj played pivotal roles.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

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It might come as a surprise to many that superstar Rajinikanth has become very interactive in the last one year. Known to be someone who preferred staying away from the spotlight and making it to news headlines, the 66-year-old has become very participative. So much so that, he has even decided to meet his fans after a hiatus of eight years.

The Kochadaiiyaan star met his die-hard fans in in front of the press on May 15.

#WATCH Actor Rajinikanth addresses his fans in Chennai https://t.co/r4XwzLP5kM  ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

The invitation has been sent to his fan clubs. It will be a photo opportunity with Thalaivar, and contrary to reports he wont be addressing his fans. Since he has met them in a long time, he has finally decided to spend a few hours with them. He will meet his fans in small groups over a period of four days, a source close to the actor had previously said.

The actor starred in Kabali in 2016, and will next appear opposite Akshay Kumar in 2.0.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

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Dawn air strikes on a Syrian border town in the Islamic State-held eastern province of Deir al-Zor killed 23 people, most of them civilians, a war monitoring group said on Monday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said jets thought to belong to the US-led coalition hit the town of Al-Bukamal near the border with Iraq.

The warplanes struck near a residential area and a mosque, wounding dozens more, the Britain-based monitor said.

The Islamic State-linked media outlet Amaq said coalition strikes killed 15 people and wounded 35 others in Al-Bukamal.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition against Islamic State could not immediately be reached for comment.

Islamic State holds most of Deir al-Zor province, apart from an enclave at the centre and a nearby air base that Syrian government forces control. The province links territory Islamic State militants control in Syria and Iraq.

The United States military has said it makes extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian deaths in its air strikes in Syria and Iraq.
As the Donald Trump administration began interviewing candidates for a new FBI director over the past weekend, it came under mounting bipartisan pressure to release tapes of the presidents conversations with James Comey, if they existed.

Democrats have threatened to block the confirmation of the nominee, when there is one, if the justice department did not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of Russian meddling in polls and collusion by Trump campaign aides.

The president set off a firestorm last week, bringing back memories of the Watergate scandal, when he sought to prevent Comey, whom he fired in a move few saw coming, from leaking information by threatening him via a tweet with tapes of their conversations.

The White House has repeatedly refused to either confirm or deny the existence of the tapes Trump was referring to, but there have been reports since that the president, as a businessman, routinely recorded conversations on phone or in his office.

Lawmakers from both parties are demanding the release of the Comey tapes. If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over, senior Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on a Sunday news show on NBC, adding, You cant be cute about tapes.

Two leading Democratic members of the House of Representatives, Elijah Cummins and John Conyers, demanded the same in a letter to the White House last week: Under normal circumstances, we would not consider credible any claims that the White House may have taped conversations of meetings with the president. However, because of the many false statements made by White House officials this week, we are compelled to ask whether any such recordings do in fact exist  If so, we request copies of all recordings in possession of the White House regarding this matter.

Democrats demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to lead the Russia probe, threatening to block the confirmation of whosever is nominated. We will have to discuss it as a caucus, but I would support that move, Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic party in the Senate, told CNN in an interview on Sunday.

The justice department held what they are calling substantive discussions with eight candidates for FBI director this past weekend and the president indicated he could finalise a name before he leaves for his first foreign trip as president this Friday, who will have to be confirmed by the senate.

Democrats cant block the nominee as threatened because Republicans have 52 members in the Senate  one more than the simple majority needed to clear the nomination. And no Republican senator is expected to break with the party on this, though some of them appear to be keen to distance themselves from Trump, given the tumultuous events of the past week.

Trump stunned Democrats and Republicans alike by firing Comey and the White House completely muddled the rollout of the decision, fixing responsibility first on an official of the justice department directing overseeing the FBI.

The president finally took full responsibility for it. It was his decision to fire Comey, he said, adding the director had been showboating and grandstanding.

While the FBI director serves at the pleasure of the president and Trump was within his rights to sack him, the timing of the dismissal, coming as it did in the middle of the FBIs probe of the Russia meddling and Trump campaign collusion, raised many questions about the decision.

But, as Nikki Haley, Trumps ambassador to the UN and someone who has not always agreed with the president on important foreign policy issues, said on ABC on Sunday, The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire anyone he wants.
Asian governments and businesses reported some disruptions from the WannaCry ransomware worm on Monday but cybersecurity experts warned of a wider impact as more employees turned on their computers and checked e-mails.

The ransomware that has locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries has been mainly spread by e-mail, hitting factories, hospitals, shops and schools worldwide.

Most of the attacks are arriving via e-mail, so there are many landmines waiting in peoples in-boxes, said Michael Gazeley, managing director of Network Box, a Hong Kong-based cybersecurity company.

In China, the worlds second-largest economy, energy giant PetroChina said payment systems at some of its petrol stations were hit, although it had been able to restore most of the systems. Several Chinese government bodies, including police and traffic authorities, reported they had been impacted by the hack, according to posts on official microblogs.

The official China Daily newspaper, citing Chinese tech firm Qihoo 360, said that at least 200,000 computers had been affected in China, with schools and colleges particularly hard-hit.

A spokesperson for the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, one of the regions biggest bourses, said all systems were so far working normally. We remain highly vigilant, he said.

Companies have warned users and staff not to click on attachments or links. One school in South Korea barred its pupils from using the internet. Taiwans government appeared to have escaped major infection, possibly because regulations there require all departments to install software updates as soon as they are available.

South Koreas presidential Blue House office said nine cases of ransomware were found in the country, but did not provide details on where the cyber attacks were discovered.

In Australia, Dan Tehan, the government minister responsible for cybersecurity, said just three businesses had been hit by the bug, despite worries of widespread infection. There were no reported cases in New Zealand.

Brief respite

Cyber security experts said the spread of the ransomware had slowed since its appearance on Friday but that the respite might only be brief.

For one thing, the attackers or copycat attackers may have developed new versions of the worm, although a British-based security researcher who thwarted an earlier version of the worm told Reuters most of these reports had been proven false.

In Hong Kong, Gazeley said his team had found a new version of the worm that didnt use e-mail to lure victims.

Instead, it loaded scripts onto hacked websites where users who clicked on a malicious link would be infected directly. He said it was too early to tell how many websites had been affected.

Gazeley added that several major companies in Asia had been hit by the ransomware, but the last thing they want to do is come out in public and admit it. He declined to elaborate.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to tacitly acknowledge what researchers had already widely concluded: The ransomware attack leveraged a hacking tool built by the US National Security Agency, that leaked online in April.

The non-profit US Cyber Consequences Unit research institute estimated that total losses would range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but not exceed $1 billion.

Most victims were quickly able to recover infected systems with backups, said the groups chief economist, Scott Borg.

Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organizations deemed not worth the price of upgrading or, in some cases, machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions that proved too difficult to patch without possibly disrupting crucial operations, security experts said.

Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks, a rare and powerful feature that caused infections to surge on Friday.
Malaysian customs foiled an attempt to smuggle hundreds of the worlds most endangered tortoises into the country from Madagascar, a senior official said Monday.

The 330 ploughshare and radiated tortoises seized at Kuala Lumpur International Airport Sunday were worth $276,784, Abdul Wahid Sulong, deputy director of the customs department told AFP.

All of the reptiles were found alive, he added.

It is a big haul. It could be for the local market or for re-export. We are investigating, the enforcement agency said in a statement.

Based on public tip-off, customs officials raided the cargo area of the airport and found five suspicious crates, the statement added.

It had arrived at KLIA on an Etihad Airways flight from Antananarivo airport in Madagascar.

A Malaysian Customs official holds seized tortoise after a press conference at Customs office in Sepang, Malaysia on Monday. (AP Photo)

The golden-domed ploughshare tortoise is native to Madagascar and due to poaching is the most endangered tortoise on the planet.

Madagascars radiated tortoise -- considered one of the most beautiful species of the animal -- is also rapidly nearing extinction due to rampant hunting for its meat and the illegal pet trade.

Abdul Wahid said the contents of the crates were labelled as stones and the address of the recipient was found to be false.

Malaysia bans the import of critically endangered animals. Anyone found guilty of the offence can be jailed for up to three years and fined.

Elizabeth John, senior communications officer of the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network (Traffic), said the tortoise haul followed on the heels of other busts of animal products originating from Africa, including rhino horn and pangolin scales.

With the string of recent seizures of wildlife from Africa, Malaysian enforcement agencies are sending a strong warning to smugglers that they mean business, she told AFP.

John said the routes used by traffickers in recent cases point to a need for greater scrutiny of airports in the Middle East.
North Korea on Sunday test-launched a ballistic missile that flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and US militaries said. The launch, which Tokyo said could be of a new type of missile, is a direct challenge to the new South Korean president elected four days ago and comes as US, Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.

It wasnt immediately clear what type of ballistic missile was launched, the seventh such firing this year, although the US Pacific Command said that the flight is not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Japanese officials, however, said the missile flew for about 30 minutes, traveling about 800 kilometers (500 miles) and reaching an altitude of 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles)  a flight pattern that could indicate a new type of missile.

David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the missile could have a range of 4,500 kilometers (about 2,800 miles) if flown on a standard, instead of a lofted, trajectory  considerably longer than Pyongyangs current missiles. He said Sundays launch may have been of a new mobile, two-stage liquid-fueled missile North Korea displayed in a huge April 15 military parade.

The estimated range of the Norths Musudan missile is about 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles), Wright said. Thats a little less than the distance between North Korea and the US Pacific island of Guam. A North Korean missile would need to travel more than 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles) to reach the US West Coast.

Outside militaries and experts will closely analyse what the North fired. While Pyongyang regularly tests shorter-range missiles, it is also working to master the technology needed to field nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach the US mainland. Past North Korean missiles have flown farther than Sundays test, landing closer to Japan, but this launch follows a series of high-profile failures.

The White House said in a statement that North Korea has been a flagrant menace for far too long, and that South Korea and Japan have been watching the situation closely with the United States.

The statement says Washington maintains its ironclad commitment to stand with its allies in the face of the serious threat posed by North Korea. The latest provocation should serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against the North, it said.

Whatever the type of missile, the launch forces the new South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, to put dealing with Pyongyang, at least for now, above the domestic economic agenda hed made a priority during his early days in office.

Moon, who favors a softer approach to the North than his conservative predecessors, strongly condemned the launch during an emergency national security meeting, calling it a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions and a serious challenge to international peace and security, according to senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan.

The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea, Yoon told a televised conference. The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating.

South Koreas military warned that North Korea will face an unspecified strong punishment by Seoul and Washington if it continues provocations.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters that the launch was absolutely unacceptable and that Japan will respond resolutely. Defense Minister Tomomi Inada said North Korea might have launched a new type of missile, given the altitude and duration of its flight. But she said more analysis was needed.

Inadas remarks suggest the missile might have been on a lofted trajectory, meaning it could have a far longer range than it actually flew. Japans Kyodo News said the missile may be capable of covering a range as far as 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) if launched at a normal trajectory, citing unidentified sources.

South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the missile was fired early Sunday morning from near Kusong, in North Phyongan province.

North Koreas past satellite rocket launches have been called clandestine tests of ICBM technology, but it is not believed to have tested a true intercontinental ballistic missile yet. The Trump administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable and has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

The Norths state media said Saturday the nation will bolster its nuclear capability unless the United States abandons its hostile policy.

The United States should never expect us to give up our nuclear capability, the main Rodong newspaper said in a commentary carried by the Korean Central News Agency. It said President Donald Trumps maximum pressure and engagement policy is only aimed at stifling us and will compel the North to strengthen our nuclear deterrent at the maximum speed.

The launch also comes as troops from the US, Japan and two European nations gather near Guam for drills that are partly a message to North Korea. The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korean navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula, according to Seouls Defense Ministry.

Moon, the first liberal leader in Seoul in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office that hed be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right. Trump has also said hed be honoured to talk with leader Kim Jong Un under favourable conditions.

On Saturday, a top North Korean diplomat in charge of US relations, Choe Son Hui, told reporters in Beijing that Pyongyang would be willing to meet with the Trump administration for negotiations if the conditions are set. She did not elaborate.
Calling President Donald Trump a bullying chief executive who forgets the equal status of the legislative and judicial branches of government, Preet Bharara has demanded a truly bipartisan Congressional probe into alleged Russian meddling in US elections.

To restore faith in the rule of law, three obvious things must happen, the Indian-origin former prosecutor said: A truly bipartisan investigation in US Congress on Russian interference in the elections, appointment of a new FBI director who is apolitical, and an independent and uncompromised special counsel to oversee the investigation into Trump campaigns Russia links.

A congressional probe means no partisan nonsense  just a commitment to finding the factsproving (or disproving) Russian interference in our election and anything related, Bharara, who was ousted by Trump as US attorney for the Southern District of New York in March, wrote in an Op-ed column in Washington Post on Sunday.

Congress is never more important than when a bullying chief executive used to his own way seems not to remember the co-equal status of the other two branches, wrote Bharara, who described the events of the past week in the wake of the abrupt firing of James Comey as FBI director as deja vu all over again.

The new FBI director must be apolitical and sensitive to the law-enforcement mission, not someone with a long record of reflexive partisanship or commentary on the very investigative issues that will come before the bureau. Unfortunately, some of the candidates paraded by cameras this past weekend reality-show style fall into that category, said Bharara, who is currently a scholar in residence at New York University Law School.

More than ever the FBI needs a strong and stabilising hand, which means somebody who has not spent most of his or her career pandering for votes, groveling for cash or putting party over principle.

Given the manner of Comeys firing and the pretextual reasons proffered for it, he said, there is no other way but to have an independent and uncompromised special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

Bharara said Deputy Attorney General Rod J Rosenstein has mostly deserved the doubts he generated with his peculiar press-release-style memo purporting to explain Comeys sudden sacking.

He can still fix it. The move would not only ensure the independence of the investigation, but also provide evidence of Rosensteins own independence.

To make his point on the political independence of the judicial branch, Bharara recalled a couple of incidents. One, in 2004, when Comey threatened to resign, as deputy attorney general in the George W Bush administration, to defend his legal objection to a secret terrorist surveillance programme. Comey, and then FBI Director Robert Mueller, prevailed at the time.

Jim Comey was once my boss and remains my friendI am proud to know a man who had the courage to say no to a president In the tumult of this time, the question whose answer we should perhaps fear the most is Are there still public servants who are prepared to say no to the president?, Bharara asked.

He also recalled the inexplicable 2007 firing by the Bush administration of more than eight of its own US attorneys.

The Senate held a bipartisan investigation into those firings and the politicisation of the Justice Department.

We learned that Justice Department officials in Washington had improperly applied a conservative ideological litmus test to attorneys seeking career positions, to immigration judges and even to the hiring of interns. Amid the drumbeat of revelations, every top leader of the department stepped down under a cloud. Finally, (White House Counsel Alberto) Gonzales himself resigned, Bharara recalled.

Strict protocols were put in place severely limiting White House contacts with Justice officials on criminal matters. The blow to the morale and reputation of the department was incalculable.

Bhararas scathing article came days after he explained why he did not return a call from Trump two days before being fired.

I was doing everyone a favour by not returning the call. I was doing the President a favour by not returning the call, he told New York Universitys School of Law Dean Trevor Morrison last week.

Who on earth was going to believe that the President of the US in a remarkable and unprecedented fashion is cultivating a relationship with the US Attorney in Manhattan, whose jurisdiction includes various things, only to shoot the breeze... Who is going to believe that? I saved a lot of people a lot of grief (by not returning the call). At that point I was kind of done with him (Trump) so I didnt return the call, he said.

(with inputs from agencies)

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Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that intelligence services should beware of creating software that can later be used for malicious means - a reference to global ransomware attacks that researchers say exploited a hacking tool built by the US National Security Agency.

Speaking to reporters in Beijing, where he is taking part in a conference, Putin said that there was no significant damage to Russian institutions, including its banking and healthcare systems, from the computer worm known as WannaCry.

But as a whole it is worrying, theres nothing good about it, it is a source of concern. As regards the source of these threats, I believe that the leadership of Microsoft have announced this plainly, that the initial source of the virus is the intelligence services of the United States, Putin said.

Once theyre let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators, he added.

So this question should be discussed immediately on a serious political level and a defence needs to be worked out from such phenomena.

Putin said that Russia was not behind the attack.

Around 1,000 computers at the Russian interior ministry have been affected, a spokeswoman for the ministry told Interfax news agency. A source familiar with the matter said the ministry did not lose any information in the attacks.

Putin said Russia had last year sought an agreement with the previous US administration on cooperation in the field of cyber security, but that Washington had dragged its feet and no deal was concluded.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared to acknowledge what security experts had already widely concluded: the ransomware attack that hit computers around the world on Friday leveraged a hacking tool, built by the NSA, that leaked online in April.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who whiled away the time playing the piano while waiting on Sunday for the Chinese leader, says he has not decided yet what he would play when he meets US President Donald Trump.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met Putin with in April, followed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs meeting with Trump at the White House several weeks later.

The date for the much-anticipated meeting between Trump and Putin has not been set but its likely that they would meet at the G-20 summit in July in Germany.

Asked on Monday by reporters which song he would play when he meets with Trump, Putin said they need to meet first, talk and then choose the tune to match.

Putin said the impromptu piano rendition he gave on the sidelines of a meeting in Beijing on Sunday had been hampered by an out-of-tune instrument.

Putin was captured on camera on Sunday sitting down at a grand piano and performing a few slightly hesitant chords of two popular Soviet-era compositions, Moscow Windows and Evening Song.

Putin said he had just been idly toying around with the keys while he waited for his meeting to start with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Its a pity that the piano was out of tune, Putin said. It was quite hard to play, even for me, someone who plays with two fingers. I cannot say I played, I was just pressing the keys with two or three fingers.

I thought that if Mr Peskov is filming, its probably for personal use, for the archive, Putin said, referring to his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. But they decided to post it. But never mind. I think I didnt let you down.

Putin, a 64-year-old former KGB spy has demonstrated his skills on the piano in the past, although he has mostly cultivated a more macho image.

That has included riding a horse in Siberia, piloting a firefighting plane and diving in submersibles into the depths of Lake Baikal and the Black Sea off the Crimean coast.
The United States on Monday said the Syrian government had constructed a crematorium at one of its military prison complexes to dispose of bodies of detainees that are being killed there allegedly at an alarmingly high rate of 50 a day.

We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison," Stuart Jones, the top US diplomat for West Asia, told reporters.

They were being killed in mass hangings.

Jones said the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad had sunk to a new level of depravity with the support of Russia and Iran but he denied Russia or Iran had any role in these killings or the disposal of bodies.

Jones refused to say these allegations could lead to further US military action, saying the US will not telegraph its intentions. The US bombed a Syrian airfield last month that had been used to drop chemical bombs on a rebel-held region.

The information for these allegations came from human rights and other such bodies and intelligence assessment. The official released overhead pictures of the Saydnaya military prison, said to be one of the most notorious in the country.

An estimated 5,000 to 13,000 prisoners were killed at the prison from March 2011 to December 2015, said a report called "Human Slaughterhouse" issued in February by the Amnesty International human rights organisation.

The official said 400,000 people, mostly civilians, had died in the Syrian civil war so far.
A 22-year-old cyber expert who accidentally stopped the ransomware breach at the British National Health Service (NHS) has now been hired by the British National Cyber Security Centre to prevent further damage.

Marcus Hutchins, also known as Malware Tech, accidentally triggered a kill switch that helped in stopping the WannaCry ransomware attack from spreading further, telegraph.co.uk reported on Monday.

It took Hutchins just a few hours to stop the breach but by then, the virus had spread and crippled the NHS.

Hutchins was in his bedroom when he accidentally stopped the attack.

I will confess that I was unaware registering the domain would stop the malware until after I registered it, so initially it was accidental, @MalwareTechBlog tweeted.

I will confess that I was unaware registering the domain would stop the malware until after i registered it, so initially it was accidental.  MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) May 13, 2017

The self-taught tech savy is believed to be living in south-west England.

Hutchins joined a Los Angeles-based private intel threat firm a year ago.

He said in a blog that he purchased a web domain for 8 and redirected it elsewhere to stop the ransomware attack.

My job is to look for ways we can track and potentially stop botnets (and other kinds of malware), so Im always on the lookout to pick up unregistered malware control server (C2) domains, Hutchins noted on his blog.

He has also told how he shunned university and instead self taught himself sophisticated hacking techniques.

I had planned to go to university but ended up getting offered a job in security a year prior, so I took it. Im completely self-taught so in hindsight university would probably not have been worth the time or money, The Guardian quoted Hutchins as saying.
US President Donald Trump is CEO of the country, he can fire anyone he wants, Americas envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said, while defending him for firing former FBI director James Comey.

Haley said she believed that the criticism of Trump stems from discomfort with his propensity to act on his decisions.

The president is the CEO of the country, Indian-origin Haley told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on This Week on Sunday. He can hire and fire anyone he wants.

She was responding to a question if she found herself having to explain to foreign diplomats Trumps domestic policy decisions.

I think what you can see is that this is a president of action, she said of Trump. The reason people are uncomfortable is because he acts.

Asked whether the president sought a pledge of loyalty from her, Haley replied, No.

At the same time, she said that during her tenure as South Carolinas governor demonstrations of loyalty and trust were important to her.

Regarding the presidents tweet this week warning the fired FBI director that he better hope there are no tapes of their private conversations, Haley seemed unconcerned by the possibility that the president was taping conversations.

I assume Im being taped everywhere, she said.

Haley also addressed a range of other topics, including North Koreas latest missile launch.

She said there is a growing international consensus to impose further sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear programme and that the US will tighten the screws on North Korean President Kim Jong Uns government.

Trump has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Kim Jong Un, but Haley said such a meeting would only happen if North Korea meets certain conditions.

A missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, Haley said.

On May 10, Trump fired 56-year-old Comey, abruptly removing the top sleuth overseeing a criminal probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.
A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear case on Monday against US President Donald Trumps travel ban.

The US Courts for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, Northern California, ruled on February 9 against reinstating a travel ban signed on January 27 by Trump as part of an executive order.

The president subsequently issued a revised order on March 6, taking Iraq off the list of countries whose citizens are blocked from entering the United States for 90 days but keeping six other Muslim-majority countries on the list.

The travel ban in the second order was blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii, thus throwing the case again into the 9th circuit court.

In initiating the legal challenge on March 9, Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin noted that the new order, compared with the initial ban, nothing of substance has changed: there is the same blanket ban on entry from Muslim-majority countries.
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A New Hampshire man who was injured in a house explosion is thanking Siri for saving his life.

Christopher Beaucher says he was checking on his mothers vacant cottage in Wilmot on May 1 when he saw something suspicious and went inside.

He tells WMUR-TV (http://bit.ly/2pNoixW ) when he switched on a light, the house exploded.

The whole place caught fire, Beaucher said. Part of it collapsed while I was in it during the initial explosion, so I couldnt really tell where I was.

Beauchers face and hands were badly burned. He grabbed his cellphone but was unable to dial because of his injuries. He says he somehow asked his iPhones voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri to call 911, believing he was going into shock.

Beaucher is undergoing treatment for his injuries but says he hopes to return to his job as a cook and tend to his farm.

Im very, very, extremely lucky to be alive, he said.

The New Hampshire state fire marshals office is investigating the explosion.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has made his latest bid for global leadership urging world leaders to reject protectionism, embrace globalisation and pull together like an airborne skein of long-necked geese.

Speaking on the final day of a forum promoting the Belt and Road initiative - a potentially historic Chinese infrastructure campaign that could transform swathes of the developing world  Xi said cooperation was the only way to confront the profound changes sweeping the globe.

Economic growth is not on solid ground ... Economic globalisation is encountering some headwinds. Development has become more uneven  not to mention the other challenges that overshadow the world economy such as wars, conflicts, terrorism and a massive flow of refugees and migrants, Xi told a meeting of leaders including Russias Vladimir Putin and Turkeys Recep Erdogan.

Confronted by these challenges many countries are pondering the way forwards ... [but] in a world of growing interdependence and challenges ... no country can tackle all the challenges or solve the worlds problems on its own, Xi added.

In a clear attempt to contrast himself with the US president Donald Trump, who has vowed to devote his presidency to putting America First, Xi urged his audience to reject protectionism and shun exclusive arrangements.

 Swan geese are able to fly far and safely through winds and storms because they move in flocks and help each other as a team, the Communist party chief said. The message is: the best way to meet challenges and achieve better development is through cooperation.

For China, the two-day summit represents the latest chance to promote its authoritarian president, who completes five years in power this autumn, as a strong and stable world leader. China has also sought to soothe widespread misgivings in the west about the motives driving Xis $900bn development plan.

Speaking at Beijings Mao-era Great Hall of the People on Sunday night Xi claimed his project of the century would add splendour to human civilisation and help build a new era of harmony and trade.

However, some sceptics see the plan as largely a ruse to boost Chinas own economy by shifting excess industrial capacity to less developed nations and draw poorer countries tighter into Beijings economic grip.

As Xis conference entered its final day those concerns burst out into the open with Germanys representative warning her country would refuse to sign a communique marking the end of the summit unless it contained guarantees about allowing free tenders for Belt and Road projects. If these demands are not met, then we cannot sign, Brigitte Zypries, the minister for economics and energy, told reporters .

Most western leaders, including Trump, Angela Merkel and Theresa May, have skipped Xis conference while India has gone public with its opposition to what one newspaper called little more than a colonial enterprise.

Chinese state media hit back at critics on Monday. Some countries seem obsessed with the idea of containment or game-playing, and seem unable to see the truth in the mist of history, an editorial in the Beijing Youth Daily said.

Speaking to the state-controlled China Daily , one Chinese academic rejected the idea Beijing was guilty of practising neo-colonialism ... exploiting energy resources ... [and] supporting authoritarian regimes. I think none of this holds water. If you look at history, tell me when has China been a colonial power? If it hasnt been in the past, why should it be now?

Xi claimed his plan was open to all like-minded friends ... It does not exclude or target any party.
source: Nelson World Media

On 4/27/17 Paul Nelson who is the CEO of NelsonWorldMedia a successful Media company and owner of several other companies across the United States based in Las Vegas spoke to Las Vegas area youth about the importance of taking advantage of opportunities. Below is few highlights from the event, it is noted that Paul Nelson is a Pennsylvania State University Graduate who rose thru the ranks in the business world rapidly and he credits his mother for teaching him early about business and his driving desire to succeed, Paul is a noted philanthropist and respected business man in the Philadelphia and Las Vegas community and he is working on his first book titled "Your on the clock" and he will be doing more public speaking engagements across the country in the future.Please follow Paul Nelson on instagram under @mediamogulp for all booking information please contact Mr.Nelson at pdnelson.13@gmail.comWritten By Associated Press of Las Vegas
R adio London's handsome former headquarters in Marylebone is being transformed into boutique housing. Called The W1 London, the project is the property debut of insurance tycoon Peter Wood, who made Direct Line's red telephone brand a household name.

Wood commissioned Dixon Jones, the architects responsible for the Royal Opera House revamp, to transform the Thirties building in Marylebone High Street into 19 smart apartments plus five townhouses tucked away in a quiet rear mews.

The broadcasting mecca, where Tony Blackburn and Chris Evans were among the famous DJs, was secured by Wood in the face of fierce competition. He says he is planning to buy more central London buildings and aims to sell to people who want to live in their homes, rather than to absentee overseas investors.

The launch comes as Marylebone is expanding at the edges and becoming an even more coveted address. Buyers are pushing west past Baker Street and east of Great Portland Street, blurring the border with Fitzrovia. Prices at The W1 London start from 4.1 million so expect super-deluxe interiors, underground parking and 24-hour concierge services. Call 020 3740 0350.

The Chilterns, another local luxury new build, has apartments from 3.5 million. Call Galliard on 020 8418 1070.
A planned pedestrian and cycle drawbridge across the Thames to Canary Wharf is another reason to put down roots in Rotherhithe, SE16, where a second wave of regeneration is creating a sparkling new town centre around Canada Water Tube station.

Yet the area's best address is likely to remain the historic patch by St Marychurch Street, a cobbled conservation area of protected wharves and warehouses converted into loft flats.

Here you will also find Sands Film studios and The Brunel Museum in the former Brunel Engine House built by the great engineers Sir Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel as part of their Thames Tunnel, the world's first tunnel beneath a river, which opened in 1843 and connected Rotherhithe to Wapping.

Dockside Terrace in Rotherhithe Street, moments from where the new footbridge, the Brunel Bridge, is due to open in 2020, is a new infill scheme of seven modern-looking townhouses set over three floors and including a roof terrace with views across the water to the Docklands skyscrapers. Prices from 1,295,000. Call JLL on 020 8712 6596.
With mobile now the preferred medium for visitors interacting with travel websites or booking hotels, it's no longer a question of "mobile vs. desktop".

In the midst of the mobile takeover, instead we see marketers and industry experts debate whether hotels, tour operators and attractions should develop their own apps, or focus on mobile responsive websites.

While apps definitely have their place, we don't think it should be a question of one versus the other. For smaller travel brands and independents who are still building and nurturing an online presence, your first priority is making sure your website is mobile-friendly. In fact, any brand within the hospitality industry that does not yet have a mobile responsive website must make that their first order of business.

Here's why 

First, let's look at some stats

Last year, marketing expert and consultant Frederic Gonzalo attended EyeForTravel's annual Social Media and Mobile Strategies in Travel summit in San Francisco, gaining some important insight into the world of travel apps and mobile development.

Presentations from Google, Facebook, LeanPlum, TripAdvisor and more revealed the following:

65% of mobile users in the US had never downloaded a single app

80% of time spent on mobile apps is done on the top five most popular mobile apps, and Facebook owns two of these

90% of all mobile apps downloaded don't even get opened in the first 30 days

It's estimated that 76% of mobile apps don't get used again after 24 hours

Looking at information sources used by US travellers when planning a trip, hotel websites topped the list at 40%, with OTAs close behind at 38%

"The 'mobile app vs mobile web' was perhaps the most interesting debate," says Gonzalo. "Must you really have a mobile app in order to be pertinent and cater to on-the-go travellers? No, obviously.

"A mobile app is a great tool, but you can simply read any of the [stats presented] to quickly realise that it's a heavily saturated environment where it's becoming increasingly difficult to stand out and stay relevant.

"What you do need, however, is a strategy to provide a quality experience for travellers on the mobile web, where consumers don't always want to have to download an app in order to engage with the brand," he explains.

As a smaller hotel or travel brand, it would make more sense for you to create a presence within existing, well-built apps that thousands of people are already using. Sure this means paying a premium (nothing compared to developing your own app), but listing your business on these OTAs gives you direct access to a massive captive audience.

According to a 2015-2016 study by Statista, the top three travel apps used by UK travellers are maps (55%), weather reports (51%), and social networking (47%). It's simple and very often free to list your business on platforms like these.

The power of a mobile friendly website

A mobile-friendly website is essentially a site that's been designed to display correctly (or optimally) on hand-held devices. They should load quickly, be easy to read and navigate, and include minimal scrolling or flash plugins.

A 2014 study conducted by Akamai's Guy Podjarny found that only 18.7% of 10,000 top-tier websites and only 11.8% of the top 100 websites are mobile-friendly. While the figures have surely changed since, it just goes to show how many websites are not catering for mobile growth  even the large ones!

Today, Google rewards responsive websites with higher search rankings, and earlier this year warned that inaccessible mobile content would be penalised.

Developing a mobile-friendly website is inexpensive (relative to building an app), and once done, is much easier for visitors to navigate. Remember, 40% of travellers in the UK would rather use a hotel's website to gather more information before booking a stay. If they arrive to a dog's breakfast on a mobile device, the odds of them sticking around diminish.

This enhanced user experience means a much greater conversion rate and greater loyalty.

Mobile-first vs responsive

There are two main types of mobile friendly designs  mobile-first and responsive. Which one you choose depends entirely on your individual situation and user statistics.

As its name clearly suggests, mobile-first design deems that the mobile version of the website should be at the core of its design, with the desktop version then adapting from there. This method prioritises how content is presented over everything else, optimising the user experience as soon as the visitor hits the homepage on a mobile device. Additional content can then be added to display on bigger screens as necessary.

A responsive design goes in the opposite direction  it is designed with desktop computers or larger screen sizes in mind, but adapts to a smaller screen size if a mobile device is being used.

By looking at the amount of monthly mobile hits your website gets with Google Analytics, you can easily justify what type of upgrade you should consider.

When to develop a mobile app?

Although they can be expensive to develop, well-designed apps provide numerous benefits for your business and brand. They're accessible offline, can make use of unique graphics and effects, and you'll be able to send push notifications to a captive audience whenever you need to.

But if you're thinking about developing an app, it should ideally offer something that people can't get elsewhere.

People are becoming increasingly resistant to apps that take up space on their phones; in fact, Google found that only 23% of travellers have downloaded the apps for the travel brands they use the most.

So, unless your app is something they can envisage themselves using regularly (for example, every time they travel, or every time they book a stay with you  think controlling smart room features) travellers probably won't download it, and your time, effort and investment will be much better off spent creating a well-built site that is optimised for mobile use.

Ultimately, a mobile-friendly website will encourage traffic and grow your online reach until the time is right to invest in developing an app as needed, which should drive engagement from loyal customers. If done right, both options provide exceptional value to your brand. Just ask yourself which approach will yield better results for your guests 

GuestRevu helps hoteliers worldwide to listen to, learn and earn from their guests by enabling them to leverage the power of guest intelligence to build lasting loyalty and drive revenue. GuestRevu's mission is to give hoteliers tools they can use every day to develop a guest-centric culture in their hotels, enhance guest experience, optimise operations, and ultimately, to drive revenue using online surveys and reputation management. With their headquarters in the UK, GuestRevu is a TripAdvisor Platinum Review Collection Partner. For more information please visit www.guestrevu.com

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A Madrid court hearing in 2011. Luis Sevillano

More information Un Casanova de pesadilla

In 2011, 68-year-old Robyn A. M. from Australia believed she had found the love of her life. Her Facebook friendship with Nicaraguan student Bismarck A.L., 36, had developed into so much more than she could have hoped for.

After three years of virtual intimacy, Robyn traveled from Singleton, New South Wales, to Madrid to meet her suitor. The encounter was a success and Bismarck, ever the perfect gentleman, continued to woo her. So in love were they that it didnt seem at all odd when he suggested she sell her home in Australia and buy a flat in Madrid where they could live together.

When you transferred me the money, you were under my control, Bismarck told her

Robyn agreed and, in February 2015, she transferred 136,347 from Wetpack Banking Corporation to Bismarcks account in the Spanish capital. Bismarck bought a flat in the commuter town of Alcala de Henares on the outskirts of Madrid and told Robyn she wouldnt be able to put her name on the property deed as she lacked the required Identification Number for Foreigners (NIE), a document which costs 9.45 and can be obtained from embassies in just five days.

In June 2015, Robyn received some unexpected news: Bismarck told her he was already married to a Spanish woman and had a four-year-old daughter. They would all be living together in the flat he had just bought with her money, he said. Understandably, Robyn flew into a rage and told Bismarck in no uncertain terms that she wanted to sell the property and for him to return her money.

Bismarck went onto the attack and wrote a stream of messages on Facebook, including one that called her  an arrogant old woman.

The property is in my name, not yours, you idiot. Ill throw you out, he said in a mail. Theres nothing to say the house is yours. Ill sell it if and when I want, said another. And I will treat you well when you deserve it. Starting from tomorrow, Im going to watch you in the house. In more sinister vein, he said: The first thing Im going to do is be your enemy, adding in another, As soon as you transferred me the money, you were in my power and under my control.

To all of this, the beleaguered Robyn replied: Youre not my employer, youre my lover.

The property is in my name, not yours, you idiot. Ill throw you out

This week, Bismarck found himself on the bench of Madrids Provincial Court as the prosecutor demanded seven-and-a-half years behind bars for severe threats and fraud. He also demanded a three-year restraining order and, of course, the return of the 136,347 that paid for the supposed love nest in Alcala de Henares.

English version by Heather Galloway.
Malaysia  Country Overview

Located in Southeast Asia, Malaysia comprises 13 states and three federal territories covering a total area of 329,847 square kilometres across Peninsula Malaysia and East Malaysia.

Malaysia's population is approximately 31.7 million (2016 government estimate) with 60% being of Malay heritage. The country's diversity is reflected in the share of different ethnic groups, such as Chinese, Indians and Indigenous, in its total population.

Kuala Lumpur, the administrative and commercial capital of Malaysia, is rapidly developing its service sector (banking and finance), IT and high-tech manufacturing industry to diversify from its historically strong oil and gas industry.

With significant efforts made to attract multinational companies to Kuala Lumpur resulting in newly generated job opportunities, Greater Kuala Lumpur's (or Klang Valley's) population is expected to grow from 7.2 million in 2016 to 10 million in 2020.

In Focus: Malaysia  A Rising Opportunity | By Stephanie Bernhard, Hatta Teo and Hok Yean CHEE Photo by HVS

Economy Highlights

From 2012 to 2016, Malaysia recorded a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 5% in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth.

The expansion of the service sector, construction and manufacturing have strongly contributed to Malaysia's GDP growth in 2014.

Since 2015, Malaysia's economy has suffered from the decline in gas prices, being one of the biggest producers of liquified gas worldwide.

2016 was overall a difficult year for the world, as well as for Malaysia, which was impacted by weaker exports of electronic and electrical goods. Real GDP growth declined to 4.2% from the 5.0% previously achieved in 2015.

Employment

Impacted by the stalling economic growth, unemployment rose from 2.9% in 2014 to 3.5% in 2016.

Malaysia's implementation of the new minimum wage (+11% for workers in Peninsula Malaysia and +15% in Sabah, Sarawak and Labuan) from July 2016 onwards has raised some profitability concerns among various businesses as it could trigger less employment creation in the future.

International Relations

Malaysia's international relations are expected to strengthen in 2017 to 2021.

With joint infrastructure projects between Malaysia and Singapore and 14 Memorandums of Understanding signed between China and Malaysia with investments worth MYR144 billion, Malaysia's construction, agriculture, education and finance sectors are expected to grow rapidly.

Figure 1: Malaysia GDP Performance (2012-2020F) Photo by HVS

Outlook

Due to weak world trade growth and the country's dependence on exports to the USA and China, Malaysia's economy is expected to grow its real GDP by 4.4% in 2017, a minor improvement compared to 2016 supported by its agriculture and service sector.

Adaptive monetary and fiscal policies during the period from 2017 to 2021 could strengthen private consumption, which will be the key force for GDP growth.

Infrastructure

Upcoming Developments

Malaysia has extensive plans to improve its accessibility. The proposed infrastructure projects highlighted below will not only improve the country's accessibility but will also strengthen Malaysia's economy.

Figure 2: Infrastructure developments Photo by HVS

In Focus: Malaysia  A Rising Opportunity | By Stephanie Bernhard, Hatta Teo and Hok Yean CHEE Photo by HVS

Tourism Market Overview

Today, Malaysia is the 12th most-visited country in the world and the third most-visited country in Asia after China and Thailand. The Malaysian government has made great efforts to ensure that tourism plays an important role in the country's economy. In 2016, travel and tourism directly contributed MYR58 billion to the country's GDP equaling 4.7% of total GDP, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council's economic forecast.

International Arrivals

Tourism Malaysia's extensively promoted campaign 'Visit Malaysia' positively contributed to the country's 2014 international arrival numbers, which touched a record at 21.7 million. Impacted by the repercussions of two Malaysia Airlines incidents as well as severe haze observed towards the end of 2014, a 6% decrease was recorded in international tourist arrivals in 2015.

In 2016, however, foreign arrivals recorded an upward trend and a healthy rebound for the overall Malaysian market was observed as figures for international arrivals closed at 26.7 million, a 4% increase from 2015.

Tourist Receipts

In line with a decrease in total tourist arrivals, tourist expenditure dropped by 4% in 2015 to reach MYR69 billion.

Despite the decrease in total tourist receipts in 2015, average per capita expenditure increased by 2.4% to reach MYR2,687.While the average length of stay decreased significantly by 16.7% from 6.6 nights (2014) to 5.5 nights (2015), average spent per diem increased by 26% to reach MYR489 in 2015.

For the future, Tourism Malaysia has ambitious plans with a target of MYR114 billion in tourist receipts for 2017 and MYR168 billion for 2020. A total growth in tourist receipts of 143% from 2015 to 2020 is being aimed for.

Figure 3: Total International Tourist Arrivals and Tourist Receipts Photo by HVS

Figure 4: Top Five Feeder Markets in 2016 (% share) Photo by HVS

Asian countries account for 92% of international arrivals

Strongest CAGR from 2009-2016: China with 10%, reaching 2 million arrivals in 2016

Changes to Top 10 international arrivals:

Highest 2016 Y-o-Y increase: Thailand with 26.4%

Highest 2016 Y-o-Y decrease: Philippines with 18.6%, decrease for the second consecutive year

UK is the strongest European country with 415,000 arrivals

Saudi Arabia is the strongest Middle Eastern country with 0.5% share and 22.8% increase from 2015 to 2016

2020 Tourism Target

Welcoming 36 million international passengers (expected 35% increase from 2016)

Increasing arrivals from China to 8 million, a 300% increase from 2016, with support from Alibaba's Fliggy OTA, which has recently integrated Malaysian travel and tourism products to its e-commerce platform

Domestic Arrivals and Tourism Promotion

Domestic tourism dominates Malaysia's hotel market with 63.2% of total arrivals to hotels in Malaysia in 2015.

Five new domestic tourist information offices will replace the 14 recently closed Tourism Malaysia offices to better promote Malaysia amongst domestic tourists as well as to avoid job replication with state owned agencies.

Also, following the discontinuation of Malaysian Airline flights to Perth, New York, Stockholm and Johannesburg, Tourism Malaysia will shut-down these offices in 2017. However, plans to open new offices in stronger source markets such as China, India and European key cities are under review.

Figure 5: Top Five Destinations  Percentage Domestic Hotel Guests by State (2015) Photo by HVS

Hotel Performance

From 2011 to 2013, demand for Malaysian hotels remained stable despite the continued increase in tourism accommodation*. In 2014, however, the additional supply (+978 hotels) with 52,500 rooms (25% growth) could not be absorbed by the rising number of incoming tourists leading to a simultaneous drop in hotel occupancy and average rate.

The repercussions of the significant addition to supply combined with the Malaysian Airlines incidents impacted Malaysia's hotel performances even further in 2015 leading to a RevPAR decrease of 6%. While rate continued to decrease for the third consecutive year in 2016, occupancy gained 2 percentage points.

Malaysia's hotel performances had a solid start into the new year. With occupancy increasing by 2 points and ADR recording 4.8% increase, RevPAR in Malaysia was up 7% as of March 2017.

Figure 6: Malaysia Overall Hotel Performance (2011-2016) Photo by HVS

Hotel Supply

From 2015 to 2016, hotel supply in Malaysia increased by 18 classified hotels to reach 4,817 hotels and 309,369 rooms.

To accommodate the estimated growth in tourist demand projected for the upcoming years (as highlighted in Figure 3), a significant number of hotel projects is expected to enter the market.

As of April 2017, an addition of 98 hotels, with 25,537 classified rooms have been publicly announced for the period of 2017-2021.

Figure 7: Existing tourism accommodation and future classified** hotel supply in Malaysia * * classified hotels refers to budget, midscale, upper midscale, upscale, upper upscale and luxury hotels Photo by HVS

Classified Hotel Supply by Segment

Malaysia's upcoming hotel supply will re-shape the country's tourism accommodation.

Upscale and Upper Upscale hotels entering from 2017-2021 will account for 46% of total room supply, while this segment will dominate the new room supply with 53%.

While luxury supply shows an equal distribution amongst total hotels and rooms entering, we noted that the classified budget and economy segments are basically non-existent in Malaysia's hotel pipeline from 2017 to 2021.

Figure 8: Future classified Hotel Supply by segment (2017-2021) Photo by HVS

Setting the focus on hotel openings by location, Malaysia's key business and leisure cities, as highlighted below, account for 55% of total future hotel supply and 54% of new room supply.

Figure 9: Future classified Hotel Openings by City (2017-2021) Photo by HVS

Lifestyle hotels and the need to adapt to the Millennial's travel behavior

The young hotel guest wants to enjoy local culture, design and stay connected  with high expectations on service quality.

The millennial generation's travel behavior and how hotel chains need to adapt to the new trends has been discussed at every major hotel conference.

The population of Millennials is surpassing that of the Baby Boomers. It has been estimated that by 2020 Millennials will comprise half of the global work force.

When it comes to choosing hotels, an underlying difference between the age groups is their spending power. While Baby Boomers allocate a higher share of their travel budget to the hotel, Millennials tend to spend less and look for accommodation offering great value for money.

With Millennials' increasing curiosity and enthusiasm for overseas travel despite their limited spending power, hotels face a new task to attract young travellers.

Millennials are greatly drawn to the idea of a unique and distinctive experience. For this young generation, travel implies the possibility to engage with local culture, learn about the history of a place and sample local food and drink.

Convenience and the ease of booking is a top priority for this segment of travellers. The rising number of mobile applications available to manage hotel reservations or to proceed with online check-in has changed the hospitality tech-world in the past three years. Applications centralising hotel bookings and transportation have especially gained in popularity.

Figure 10: Millennials priorities when choosing a hotel Photo by HVS

Adapting to Millennials' expectations and today's world

Over the past 20 years, lifestyle brands such as W, Edition, Autograph and Indigo were created to cater to the rapid-changing travel behavior and guest demands.

These hotel brands have seen great success and solid growth rates across the globe. Their success, together with the need to adapt to a changing consumer economy, travellers' behavior and the trend towards personalised as well as sustainable travel, led to the launch of several new lifestyle brands in 2016.

In Focus: Malaysia  A Rising Opportunity | By Stephanie Bernhard, Hatta Teo and Hok Yean CHEE Photo by HVS

Figure 11: Lifestyle hotel room supply Photo by HVS

Important trends when developing hotels in Malaysia

Adjustment to country: To cater to both domestic and international markets, international chains adapt hotel facilities to the local culture of the country to generate better results.

Choice of hotel brand:

With Malaysia's dense existing supply and upcoming projects, the affiliation, the classification and the design of the hotel need to be carefully selected to cater to the right customer.

Value for Money: Limited spending power does not necessarily mean lower expectations. Millennials in particular look for good quality hotels at a low cost.

Lifestyle brands: International operators feel that lifestyle-branded products will perform better in locations such as Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Malacca.

Quality of service: While high-tech lobbies and automated check-in counters are decorating hotel entrances, the presence of staff overseeing the check-in process and assisting when needed is still highly appreciated.

Experience: It is not only about a good night's sleep. Millennials are looking for a memorable experience influenced by decoration, architecture and photogenic views or objects.

Moreover, other generations, too, are placing increasing value on distinct experiences and actively seek them when travelling.

Investment

Between the period of 2012 and 2016, hotel investment in Malaysia (publicly available) peaked in 2014 recording a transaction volume of more than MYR1,300 million. Over the analysed period, the majority of hotel investments was transacted by foreign buyers, with the majority of sales occurring in the capital Kuala Lumpur.

The most recent noteworthy transaction:

The Renaissance Kuala Lumpur

Transaction price of MYR765 million

MYR840,660 per key

Sold to Canali Logistics Pte Ltd.

Aloft Kuala Lumpur Sentral

Transaction price of MYR419 million

MYR868,670 per key

Sold to Sino Prosper Group Holdings

Figure 10: Publicly available hotel transactions 2012-YTD April 2017  Photo by HVS

Outlook

Malaysia's tourism target for 2020 is ambitious with the goal of welcoming 36 million international arrivals and generating MYR168 billion in tourist receipts, considering a recorded CAGR of 1.6% of international tourist arrivals from 2012 to 2016.

With the younger generation seeking cultural happenings and unique adventures, Malaysia can offer a unique experience from eco-tourism in rainforest reserves to heritage sites and upcoming theme parks such as the 20th Century Fox Park in Genting or the Ubisoft in Kuala Lumpur.

While Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding Klang Valley, Kota Kinabalu, Penang and Malacca are expected to mature with numerous hotels currently in the pipeline, Ipoh should not be overlooked.

Despite low rates and sporadic hotel development to date, Ipoh shows potential for Millennials travelling from Penang to Kuala Lumpur. With its revamped shophouses, new cafes and heritage buildings, Ipoh seems to be a city that millennial travellers are looking for: a cultural experience, unique architecture and good value for money.

Going forth, we expect the tourism industry in Malaysia to grow albeit at a slower pace. Existing hotels will feel the pressure from incoming supply in the next three years; however, we believe Malaysia has great potential to further develop its tourism industry, especially amongst millennials looking for new, more affordable lifestyle concepts.

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Velaa Private Island welcomes Michal Smejc as the new General Manager. Having witnessed the development and growth of the resort from the beginning, Smejcs objective is to ensure that Velaa continues to be positioned as one of the top five hotels of the world. Michal will now be responsible for the overall resort operation and strategic leadership of the onsite and international team. Due to his extensive experience in sales and marketing gained during his time at Home Credit, Michal will also oversee PR & marketing strategies. Smejc studied Economics in Pilsen, graduating in 2006. Since then he has enjoyed much success within the financial industry, moving from a role as Financial Analyst at PPF (privately owned international financial group) and Asset Management at Generali to Home Credit, an international non-bank financial institution where he worked for the past six years. During that time, Smejc travelled frequently throughout Asia, expanding the Home Credit business to India and Indonesia, as well as working as Head of Product, Marketing and Business Development at Home Credit Philippines. From the very beginning, Michal witnessed the property evolve from a construction site into one of the top tropical private islands in the world. His passion for the culinary, knowledge of luxury travel, and his love for nature, diving and Southeast Asian culture, were key factors in the decision to choose Michel for the General Manager role when it became available earlier this spring.
The American ambient pop group will play The Limelight 2 in Belfast on November 16 and Whelans in Dublin on November 17 as part of their world tour.

The tour kicks off in Japan today May 15 and finishes in Poland on December 7.

The band have been working on their debut self-titled album, due to be released on June 9 with Partisan Records. Their new single Each Time You Fall In Love also debuted today. Check it out here:

Advertisement

Tickets for the Whelans gig are priced at 20.90 while tickets for the Belfast show are priced at 19. Tickets for both shows go on sale on Wednesday May 17 at 9am from Ticketmaster and all usual outlets nationwide.
George Clinton has spent the past year working through the many stages of grief. He was devestated when Prince, his friend and protege, passed away unexpectedly in April 2016. But time has brought closure and several weeks ago he made a symbolic pilgrimage to the late icons Paisley Park complex in Minneapolis.

I couldnt deal with it when it first happened, says Clinton, 75 year-old once and future godfather of funk-pop. So it was good to go up there and perform. It felt important. I did a concert with [Prince drummer and vocalist] Sheila E. It was fantastic.

He first crossed paths with Prince in the mid 70s and was struck by the younger mans savant-like talents. You could tell he could play  that he was going to do the business. His whole crew came from our band when he started out. They all worked with us before working with Prince. We used to take his records to all the DJs  so that they would know about this new talent. If you support the up-and-coming artist at the start, later it works to your benefit.
Jane Howze founded an executive search company, the Alexander Group, in 1984, and works to create more diversity in C-suite roles.

She recently sat down with the Chronicle to discuss her mostly Houston-based company's unique role in corporate recruitment.

Q: How big of a role does C-suite level diversity play when trying to diversify a company's workforce overall?

A: Diversity is a really complex issue and I tell clients you can't achieve diversity by hiring one board member. You can't achieve diversity by hiring one C-suite executive. It's got to be part of a strategy that starts at the top but also starts at the bottom as well. Are you funding scholarships for diversity candidates? Are you having internships for diversity candidates? It also starts in the middle. Do you have mentorship programs for everybody, but especially your high potential performers? What are you doing to keep them? What are you doing for women who work and have child-care issues? Is there a career path for them until they come back to the workforce?

You also have to go back and look in the past, say our turnover is 15 percent a year. If our turnover with diversity executives is 40 percent a year, either we have a small number of diversity executives or we aren't doing something right.

Q: How do you ensure diversity in hiring at the C-suite level?

A: I think about diversity a lot because the executive search industry, while it is much more diverse now, it still represents many corporations where it's not diverse. Every search, whether we're asked to or not, I feel like the client needs to see candidates who are a broad swath. All who are technically qualified but people who they might not be able to find on their own.

In the early '90s, we did work for Wells Fargo and at that point their legal department was 40 people, and I think there were two women. We did probably 20 searches just for attorneys and we would call minority bar associations. Sometimes, if you run in certain circles you hear about jobs and we were like, well we want to go outside the traditional circles. Maybe we don't just search in San Francisco but search in the suburbs outside of the city and out of state.

Q: What are the unique challenges in hiring for C-suite level jobs and even board of director positions as opposed to general employee hiring?

A: The lower you go on the totem pole, the more your technical skills are important. When you get to the president or CEO of a company, most of them, I think there was study last year that said companies who hire from the outside, nearly 50 percent did not make it after two years. Why is that? I think it's a culture fit. As you get to the higher level, I think chemistry fit is what separates a good hire from a bad hire.

Q: How much turnover per year is there at the C-suite and board level and how quickly does the search typically take?

A: The turnover at the executive level depends on what type of company it is. I have a client that I've done work for for 24 years and I do a search for them maybe every two years. The board positions don't turn over as much as the C-suite positions. Now there are some companies where maybe they're going through a tremendous amount of change. The executive talent they have may not be right for a different thing. Say a company is an early stage life science company. They go public and they form international alliances. They may need a different kind of management team, somebody who's taken a company public. Somebody who knows how to work with changing a life science company from research to selling, marketing. Sometimes you need turnover because the companies change. Sometimes the culture is not geared toward long-term employees. I've had clients where the turnover is 25 percent a year across the board. And it's kind of just part of that industry and its changes.

Q: How often are searches for the executive level done internally as opposed to externally? Pros and cons to either?

A: Ideally, the larger the company is, the more training they have in place, the more career development they have in place. I know when General Electric did their CEO search 15 years ago, they had three candidates who had been groomed for it. A lot of larger companies have in-house staffing functions.

If you can promote from within, what a great recruiting tool. But when they go outside, I think somebody who's not part of the company has more time to devote to one search and they can look for both the obvious candidates and not-so-obvious candidates.

Q: What have been some of your more memorable searches?

A: I remember way back in the early days, I was doing a vice president of clinical trials search for a life science company. And this was in the days when AIDS drugs were just coming to the forefront. There were only six people in the country that did what my client wanted done, so I called all six. No, no, no, no, no, no. Tried again and one woman said I'm not interested but if you're ever in San Francisco, I'll have a cup of coffee. She was the only person that even talked to me. She said, 'I'm going to be on vacation so you'll have to come to my house.' I said OK. I was desperate. I go to her house, walk in the door and a huge German shepherd comes running out and plows me. I'm lying on the ground almost dazed. I look up at her and she says 'I guess I'm going to have to go meet your client, aren't I?' And I said yes, I think you should. She took the job. The German shepherd saved the day.
Among the best known of the Obama-era financial regulations is the so-called "Fiduciary Duty Rule" for investment advisers of retirement accounts.

It declared that financial advisers who give retirement investment advice act as "fiduciaries" and therefore must offer conflict-free advice, avoid misleading statements, receive no more than reasonable compensation and always act with the client's best interest at heart.

While it didn't tackle the industry's biggest problem - high investment management fees - it did make it easier to sue advisers if they gave you bad advice. The regulation allows for some flexibility and discretion when determining compliance with the rule - both a strength and possible weakness.

President DonaldTrump, however, ordered the Department of Labor in February to review the rule, which was supposed to take effect April 10. He directed the labor secretary to repeal or blunt its effects if the agency finds that the rule reduces the availability of advice, disrupts the investment industry, raises the cost of financial advice or increases the likelihood of litigation.

I suspect the rule, if and when it's implemented, does all of those things.

The fiduciary rule forces advisers to consider look at any possible conflicts of interest, their fee structure and the appropriateness of any investment from their client's perspective. That's a good thing. We hope that advisers would do these things without a rule in place, but we're not all angels and the rule should prompt better behavior.

The problem with the fiduciary rule is what may happen if someone loses money.

With investing, which always involves risk, things can and will go badly. And when they go badly, litigious Americans want someone besides themselves to blame. Lawyers stand ready to help investors find the organizations and individuals to blame.

I worry specifically about two problems with President Barack Obama's original fiduciary rule.

First, when an investment goes wrong, however appropriate it may have seemed at the beginning, I fear the tendency to look back and find fault with the advice, high fees, or potential conflict of interest that may be found, after the fact.

"What were you thinking advising your client to invest in Pets.com in February 2000?" was easy to say after the tech bubble burst that March, even though it may have seemed like a great idea at the time. On the flip side, investing in the Facebook IPO always seemed like madness to me, but now who has had the last laugh?

The point is that terrible advice is often determined only after the fact, and by investment results, rather than by an objective process. Is the fiduciary rule an invitation to lawsuits when the next crash happens? Is it a risk-quashing rule that will make investment advisers only advocate moderate risk-taking for fear of future litigation? I don't know.

The second problem has to do with proportionality. Meaning, does the fiduciary rule take into account the difference between a small risk and a large risk in your portfolio?

If I manage $100,000 of yours, and you invest following my advice in an expensive, high-risk, high-return venture capital fund, that might be bad. In fact, it might get me sued under the fiduciary rule if most of the $100,000 is eventually lost.

But if you are worth $10 million, and you've only allocated 1 percent of your net worth to my risky fund, doesn't that change the equation? I mean it should, but I don't know what a court will decide when you get a good lawyer to go after me and my firm regarding that $100,000 loss.

Ed Hart, managing director at Sendero Wealth Management, a San Antonio-based investment advisory firm serving high net worth families and institutions, acknowledges his own mixed feelings about the fiduciary rule.

"There's an element of this rule which is positive," he told me. "You want to protect people from the groups that are just trying to meet a sales goal. This is going to provide some protection to people who have been victimized."

But Hart worries that clients, and their lawyers, will be unhappy with short-term results when retirement investing is a long game.

"Generally where we're helping people is with the discipline of investing," Hart said. "If you introduce an opportunity to think more short-term, and have recourse to potentially sue, because you're not happy with 6 months, or 2 years, of performance, then (the rule) has the chance to unravel that."

Investments advisors all over the country may struggle with that new, heightened risk to their business.

It's also logical to assume that this regulation, like most regulation, will favor big legacy providers over small businesses. The big firms can adjust more easily to the higher cost of compliance and litigation, while the small firm might not be able to do so.

Look, my own personal advice about retirement investing is super simple: Just buy a diversified, low-cost (probably indexed) 100 percent stock mutual fund, and never sell. Do that with 95 percent of your retirement funds and you'll be fine.

If I were acting as your fiduciary (important notes: never take advice from a finance columnist you've never met, and also I'm not your fiduciary), that kind of advice would probably be fine. And yet, I think the world should allow for a greater range of retirement investing - if only so I can completely lap the competition with my passive stock-index investing approach.

What is my preferred solution, instead of the fiduciary rule?

So glad you asked.

Fee disclosures, in both percentages and total dollars should be in 36-POINT FONT on every document, so that clients cannot fail to see how much they're paying for financial advice, much of it not worth the cost. By comparison, this column is printed in 9.5 font.

Outright fraud is rare in the industry, whereas overcharging for mediocrity is the absolute everyday rule. I fear this regulation will increase costs and litigation without directly addressing the most pressing problem of investment advising: high fees.
Spain is proposing a complete overhaul of the euro zone. The government has handed Brussels proposals calling for an anti-crisis budget, a common unemployment insurance system, euro-bonds and the completion of the banking union, which would include the pooling of risks. Building on French President Emmanuel Macron s own wish list of reforms to the EU economic system, Spain is now asking for a real economic government, according to a document that EL PAIS has seen.

Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy with EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker. Uly Martin (EL PAIS)

The seven-page text says the euro is an unfinished project and that full fiscal union is still pending. To achieve that, Madrid wants to set out convergence criteria that member states will have to meet, relating to fiscal issues and foreign trade.

Europes recent recession revealed critical errors in the design of the euro and Europe came up with solutions for short-term needs instead of reacting with a well-structured plan, says a text drafted in one of the countries that has suffered most from the economic crisis.

Spain also requests greater democratic control over institutions such as the Eurogroup

Madrid and Paris are on the same page on these issues. But Germany and several other countries have already expressed reticence. Berlin is in a privileged situation right now  full employment, growth, balanced accounts, negative yield on its bonds and a massive trade surplus that violates European regulations  and it is disinclined to make any changes. I dont see the need to change policies, said Chancellor Angela Merkel in response to Macrons demands.

Spain, on the contrary, wants deep reforms that will lead to more than just a shared currency: in this future scenario, member states will share an anti-crisis budget, unemployment insurance, a treasury, euro-bonds and a true banking union. Madrid wants a joint fiscal policy for the euro, and even a redefinition of the Stability Pact, the mechanism that controls the public accounts, in order to prevent cases in which adjustments make recessions even worse.

The shortcomings in the euros architecture explain the differential impact of the last crisis, complains Spain in its report. The euro does not just need firefighters, it also needs architects.

Emmanuel Macron's proposals for EU reform have met with sympathy in Madrid. Pierre Suu (Getty Images)

Then it goes on to warn that the European project can only endure if its citizens see that it provides sustainable and inclusive prosperity levels. That is not happening right now: the current eurozone has opened up a yawning gap between the north and south of Europe.

The European Commission will release its own, long-awaited report on the future of the euro at the end of this month. But Macrons victory has been a wake-up call: France has made clear it wants to redefine the Paris-Berlin axis and make headway on economic and security issues. Little will happen until after Germany holds its own election in September. Meanwhile, Spain  adrift for years in a crippling crisis  now wishes to regain some relevance in the hallways of power, even if it means distancing itself from its main ally, Germany.

Spain also requests greater democratic control over institutions such as the Eurogroup, a gathering of EU finance ministers that makes key decisions without being accountable to anybody. We cannot transfer responsibility for decisions that are very important to citizens without the democratic legitimacy to do so, says the document.

English version by Susana Urra.
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The next technological evolution of plastics into lighter, stronger materials will soon call Houston home, thanks to expansions from petrochemical giants such as LyondellBasell and other companies.

LyondellBasell, headquartered in Houston, is starting construction Monday on its $700 million plant in La Porte to churn out thinner, more durable and less environmentally harmful versions of the world's most common plastic, polyethylene. The facility should come online in 2019.

Similarly, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips Chemical and Dow Chemical are building modern plastics expansions near Houston in Mont Belvieu, Old Ocean and Freeport, respectively, although their technologies and types of polyethylene vary.

They're all capitalizing on Texas' cheap and abundant shale natural gas, which contains ethane, the natural gas liquid that provides the feedstock for the chemical ethylene. Ethylene, the primary building block of most plastics, is converted into pellet form and either consumed domestically or exported to demand in Asia and Europe.

LyondellBasell's chief executive, Bob Patel, said its upcoming "Hyperzone" polyethylene is intended to stand out from the pack of commodity plastics, which are all essentially the same and compete on price alone. LyondellBasell is betting that customers will pay a little more and save money in the long run by buying and using less of it because it's lighter and stronger.

The added bonus is that using less plastic is better for the environment, he noted.

"It's unique because it's new technology," Patel said. "It'll really change the landscape in polyethylene."

But competitors such as Exxon Mobil are making similar promises for their versions of lighter, stronger plastics. So it's yet to be determined who will win in the marketplace.

LyondellBasell developed its latest plastics technology over seven or eight years in Italy and then pilot-tested it in Germany. Additional product testing was conducted in Cincinnati before the company started construction on the La Porte manufacturing plant. La Porte offers easy access to LyondellBasell's recent ethylene expansions in La Porte, Channelview and Corpus Christi as well as proximity to the Houston Ship Channel, railroads and highways.

LyondellBasell will churn out a type of high-density polyethylene for products that can't crack easily. The include piping, industrial bulk containers, fuel tanks, and packaging for household cleaning agents such as bleach and detergents. The plastic is also used to package agricultural fertilizers, as well as food and drink packaging such as milk jugs.

The company's strategy is to offer better materials that its customers can use with their existing manufacturing technology. Patel calls it the "best of both worlds" - the customers get a very durable product without having to upgrade their facilities.

The La Porte plastics plant will employ 75 people once completed - not counting 1,000 temporary construction jobs - and churn out 1.1 billion pounds of polyethylene a year.

This project comes as part of LyondellBasell's estimated $4 billion investment in the Texas Gulf Coast in the last few years.

The next big step will come by the end of September, Patel said, when LyondellBasell makes a final decision on building its biggest project ever - a proposed plant in Channelview that would produce 900 million pounds of propylene oxide, as well as 2 billion pounds of tertiary butyl alcohol and its derivatives annually.

Propylene oxide is a chemical used to make everything from antifreeze to cosmetics.

Tertiary butyl alcohol is a byproduct used as a solvent to make chemicals and gasoline additives.
The information in this column is intended to provide a general understanding of the law, not as legal advice. Readers with legal problems, including those whose questions are addressed here, should consult attorneys for advice on their particular circumstances.

Q: My wife died without a will, and I inherited a one-third life estate in her homestead. I understand the concept of a life estate but what exactly constitutes a one-third life estate? What are my obligations, rights and responsibilities and what must her children do?

A: As the surviving spouse, you already have the right to live in the home for the rest of your life (assuming you and your wife never signed a marital agreement to the contrary). Your wife's children cannot make you move out.

You are responsible for upkeep, property taxes and mortgage interest. The children must pay mortgage principal and property insurance premiums.

The one-third life estate applies to all land your wife owned, and if she had owned a working ranch, for instance, you would be entitled to one-third of the income it generates. But a home typically earns no income.

Q: I have a Statutory Durable Power of Attorney that I signed in June 2004. My attorney is now telling me I should redo this document because the form has changed, and the old one is obsolete. Is it true that my original form is now invalid?

A: Your attorney is correct that the form has changed, but each time the form changes, the legislation specifically states that a power of attorney signed before the law change is still valid.

However, it is not a bad idea to update your power of attorney. Banks, brokerage firms and other businesses often refuse to accept older powers of attorney. Therefore, if you sign a new one, it will have a greater chance of being honored.

If you are back in your attorney's office to make a change to your will or another estate planning document, then it can't hurt to sign a new Statutory Durable Power of Attorney.

Q: Is there a simple last will and testament template or form for the State of Texas that you could share with me? Kind of a "Form for Dummies" for me to use?

A: There are hundreds of will forms at the Harris County Law Library. You can also find free forms, and inexpensive ones as well, on the internet.

The problem is finding (or purchasing) the form most appropriate for your situation and then crafting an estate plan that best disposes of your estate.

Q: Does it matter where I get a Texas Transfer on Death Deed form? It appears they are everywhere. I thought it would be available through a government website.

A: As long as you are using the statutory form contained in Section 114.001 of the Texas Estates Code, you should be all right.

Here is the government website where you can access the form: www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/ES/htm/ES.114.htm.
NEW YORK - Brad Pitt and Gen. Stanley McChrystal - the inspiration to Pitt's four-star Afghanistan commander in the upcoming Netflix war satire "War Machine" - would seem to be worlds apart.

One, is an affable member of Hollywood's elite; the other a hard-charging lifetime military man. But Pitt found one connection with his character: a swollen ego, and the damage done. "Hubris is a trap, and it's the trap of every great nation that has been No. 1 for too long. You start believing your own stink," Pitt says. "Anytime I've gotten in trouble, it's because of my own hubris."

Pitt, at the moment, may be particularly empathetic to such a drastic swing as the one that sank McChrystal via an infamous Rolling Stone profile. Pitt is now, for the first time since Angelina Jolie Pitt filed for divorce from him last September, stepping back into the limelight. He hasn't been timid. In his first post-separation interview, to GQ, Pitt was unusually candid, speaking frankly about his struggles with alcohol and the pains of dividing their family.

Pitt was similarly forthright in a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press. He called directly - "Hey man, it's Brad" - and over the course of half an hour, discussed his present state of mind, his current attitude about acting and his alarm at the possibility of expanding the war in Afghanistan. Why the openness?

"I've got no secrets. I've got nothing to hide," Pitt said. "We're human, and I find the human condition very interesting. If we're not talking about it, then we're not getting better."

It's undoubtedly a fraught period of transition for the 53-year-old actor. He said he's spending his time now "keeping the ship afloat" and "figuring out the new configuration of our family." "Kids are everything," he said, of their six children. "Kids are your life. They're taking all the focus, as they should anyway."

He's getting through it, he assured. "I'm not suicidal or something," Pitt said, laughing. "There's still much beauty in the world and a lot of love. And a lot of love to be given. It's all right. It's just life."

Pitt was most keen to discuss "War Machine" and the strong passions behind it. The film, written and directed by the Australian filmmaker David Michod ("Animal Kingdom"), is based on Michael Hastings' 2012 book "The Operators," which chronicled McChrystal's tumultuous and short-lived stewardship of the war in Afghanistan.

"War Machine," which debuts on Netflix May 26, takes a slightly fictionalized approach. Pitt's character is named Gen. Glen McMahon, but the events and personalities covered correspond accurately with McChrystal's downfall. The switch, made after the project was announced, saved the film from some potentially thorny legal issues.

"We had no interest in impugning General McChrystal or any of his guys," Pitt said. "For me, the problem is more systematic.

"The impetus for me was a visit to Walter Reed," added Pitt, who visited the military medical center in 2014 "Those young men and women - who are absolutely heroic in a very harrowing situation - their lives are forever changed and so are their families. It just really made me question who is spending this currency of dedication. Who's writing the check? Who's making the order?"

In "War Machine," Michod summons some of the spirit of war comedies like "Catch 22" and "M*A*S*H." The film captures an American military driven by politics, illusions and personal aspirations. Pitt's general, with a deeper, gruffer voice than McChrystal's, comes charging into Afghanistan with outlandish delusions of grandeur and departs amid self-inflicted scandal.

"We were tapping into a melding of war and comedy - two things that used to co-exist quite conformably, but in this day and age don't," Michod said. "It's very interesting to see how the two coexist in the public sphere, given how strangely earnest all conversation about war has gotten in a possibly warped way. But there's something almost truer in that kind of great comedy treatment of decades past than the nature of the discussion that goes on today."

Michod grants it's an approach that makes for some wild swings of tone in "War Machine," but he says a mix of absurdity and tragedy is ultimately more realistic.

"At core, the thing to me that's most powerful about 'War Machine' and what made it feel important to me was that it was about the way personalities can have an incredibly powerful and often a powerfully damaged ripple effect across the world," Michod said. "The movie is called 'War Machine,' but that machine is made up of individuals, individuals with their own strengths and ambitions."

Pitt said he discussed the film with McChrystal. "I feel for him," said the actor. "He's a product of us. He's us." McChrystal, who retired from the Army shortly after resigning command, has since launched a management consulting firm and penned a memoir. He declined to comment for this article.

Little about "War Machine" is typical for a Hollywood production. It would have never gotten made, Pitt said, without Netflix. The streaming service bankrolled the film for $60 million, making it one of Netflix's most ambitious projects yet.

"The degree of difficulty on this one was 10," said Pitt, "which is what makes it worth it for me to go get in front of the camera now."
The latest edition of an ongoing survey of the attitudes of Houston-area residents painted us as an optimistic bunch, generally appreciative of the benefits immigrants bring to the community and upbeat about our economic prospects.

The survey released last week by the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs suggested a different picture  slightly more than half of respondents favored banning sanctuary cities, for example, suggesting a tougher stance on illegal immigration.

What changed? Our survey targeted registered voters, while the 2017 Houston Area Survey produced by Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research questioned residents, not all of whom are registered to vote.

That helps to explain why, despite the city's progressive reputation  that's Houston-style progressive, not Hollywood progressive  voters here support some of the most contentious issues taken up by the Texas Legislature this spring.

1) 52 percent oppose sanctuary cities, in which local police and city employees do not automatically turn someone in the country illegally over to federal immigration officers. Support for policies giving cities more discretion was highest among Hispanics, at 55 percent; African-Americans, 50 percent; and Asians, 53 percent. Just 30 percent of Anglo voters support sanctuary cities.

2) 50 percent said transgender people should have access to public restrooms based on birth gender, while 31 percent said it should be based on gender identity.

LONG-AWAITED LAWSUITS: 'Sanctuary cities' law foes still planning legal challenges

It turns out there are significant differences in the opinions of the general population and those of people registered to vote. There are differences between those living within and outside the city limits. And there are even differences among people who vote only in presidential elections and those who also vote in state and local elections.

Consequently, we often get policies that don't seem to match the general population's preferences. Why? Because our elected representatives are more responsive to those who vote than those who do not vote. That's simple logic for any politician who wants to win the next election.

Harris County voters  including those inside the city limits  are older, more likely to be Anglo and decidedly more conservative than non-voters.

So maybe it's not a surprise that a plurality of voters  47 percent  oppose using the state's Rainy Day Fund to ease this year's budget shortfall. Or that 83 percent of voters within Houston proper say it is important for the legislature to lower their property taxes.

But we also found more moderate views  52 percent disapprove of the legislature overriding local government decisions, from reining in payday lenders to setting rules for Uber and other ride-hailing services. Almost 63 percent oppose using state revenues to provide vouchers for private and parochial schools, originally a top priority for many Republican leaders.

Mark Mulligan/Staff

We are most supportive of things we can see and touch  80 percent of Houston voters who say they have seen flood control efforts in their own neighborhoods approve of the city's drainage fee. That falls to 60 percent for voters who feel their neighborhoods are less prepared for future flooding.

DISASTER BY DESIGN: To avoid flooding, Houston can't keep developing this way

Even among people who haven't seen the benefits personally, support for flood control remains substantially above 50 percent. Perhaps that's a reflection of the Houston reality  we live in a city that floods. Often. We know something must be done.

Attitudes toward the city's pension debt are equally pragmatic. Houston voters by a 17 point margin support using $1 billion in general obligation bonds to pay down the city's debt to pension funds for police, firefighters and other public employees. That should be good news for Mayor Sylvester Turner, although city voters also support moving public employees to a retirement plan based on investment returns from employee and city contributions, rather than promising a set benefit payment.

That could complicate things, but it is also the human condition  people are more willing to pay for things that affect them and the people they love. If they don't work for the city, it is easier to support capping pension costs. But we would like to think it also is evidence of the city's get-it-done mentality, the recognition that Houstonians are all in this standing water together.

Houston isn't liberal or conservative. It's pragmatic. The Houston Way is real. And the Hobby School survey is more than just a chance for policymakers to benchmark their actions against the attitudes of those who elected them.

It's also a reminder to all of us, voter and nonvoter, to look around and see who we are, with all of our complex opinions.

Renee Cross is associate director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

Jim Granato is executive director of the Hobby School.

Bob Stein is a research associate at the Hobby School and political science professor at Rice University.

Bookmark Gray Matters. We are all in this standing water together.
A few months ago, UT System Chancellor William McRaven found himself in front of the state senate's finance and higher education committees. A key objective that day was to defend the System's purchase of 330 acres of land in Houston for a new campus. It wasn't going well.

Upon being asked by members to justify the act, McRaven repeatedly implored them not to be scared, to "be bold." After numerous similar incantations, one member finally retorted, "No one here is scared." An awkward moment followed.

The acrimony that the chancellor faced that day wasn't a product of fear. It was, rather, the reaction of sheer incredulity at a breathtakingly imprudent act made without any warning, much less a request for advice and consent, to the legislature or Higher Education Coordinating Board.

After the spectacle ended, one editorial mourned that Houston had lost its ability to pioneer grand projects and dream big. Nonsense. The scuttling of the deal isn't an obituary recording the death of bold ventures in Houston. It is, rather, a memorial to the perils of entitlement, wealth without accountability, and egregious overreach.

Recently a surprisingly large parade of apologists for the failed land grab has appeared in the Chronicle, proclaiming this as a missed opportunity for innovation. They lament the "loss" of a data science center that could have been built in UT-Landia. Newly invigorated by an idea made public after the project had been canceled, these writers worry that the deal was a victim of bad politics. Some of the commentary sought to gloss over the purchase as a botched rollout, or contended the deal was merely a victim of poor timing.

Poppycock. These are excuses that diminish the actual magnitude of the issue. They nonchalantly dismiss valid concerns held by a variety of stakeholders about the deal in the same way a delusional father cavalierly calculates the odds when planning to fund his child's college education with lotto winnings.

Similarly, reality played little part in a tirade by Chronicle columnist and UT-Austin graduate Chris Tomlinson. Tomlinson insisted that UH "get over its inferiority complex," and "call off the attack dogs" and help revive the project. Some might find it pompous to direct scorn at critics of a $215 million expenditure made without anyone having a vague inkling of why it was bought. As funding for higher education dwindles, many legitimate needs in the state remain unmet. That sentiment, nevertheless, is rampant in the Chronicle.

Tomlinson's article also complained that UH's refusal to join a task force, established to formulate the elusive plan, was based on a fear of competition. That's utterly ridiculous, but I'll point out that it's easy to speak about competition when your side has all the resources and power, while the other is scraping just to get by. Having most of the money and all the best property makes Monopoly a fun game. But not for the other players.

The truth is that McRaven's Folly was such a boondoggle that UH was far from alone in its opposition. Detractors of UT's expansion included unaligned members of the Texas Legislature, the governor (a UT alumnus), and even members of UT's own system. Their concerns included the method by which the deal was accomplished, the lack of any plan at the time the purchase was made, and the effect on other UT System Institutions. Furthermore, it probably isn't the best idea to have one system attempt to unilaterally impose policy for the entire state.

Immediately after UT announced the purchase, articles appeared stating that the "initiative" would "drastically expand the system's presence in [Houston]" and that "it [wasn't]...clear whether the land will be used for a branch campus for a particular school or a hub for all the UT System's existing institutions." UH leaders' concerns over a new facility less than ten miles from their own campus were legitimate, especially in the absence of information to dispel the idea that this was UT's idea of an H-Town takeover.

Mark Mulligan/Staff

After calling the purchase an "illegal land grab," UH Law Center Professor Michael Olivas argued that state colleges and universities should "never undertake major extra-territorial site extensions" before requesting approval by the coordinating board.

UH Regent Welcome Wilson, Jr., called the move a "Trojan horse."

The failure to present a vision for the site frustrated state lawmakers as well. It also served to reinforce the idea that UT was simply spending money without a purpose. Senate Higher Education Committee Chairman Kel Seliger (R-Amarillo) remarked that UT "looks to me like an entity that has a lot more money than they know what to do with."

Of note, at least two UT regents recently urged the system to be more "conservative" about spending.

Houston Developer David Wolff lamented the "botched rollout," but claimed that "no one says we don't need UT here."

No one? Maybe this is the real problem.

IF A data science center in Houston would be transformative for the local economy (and it certainly could be), why not let the state fully fund it under the banner of the University of Houston, with other institutions participating as "collaborators?"

If you chuckled in disbelief at the suggestion, that Houston's Tier One University should lead this project in its home city, then you've just illustrated the problem created by the unfair and unbalanced way that Texas funds higher education.

Texas' system allows for healthy (and occasionally, it must be noted, unhealthy) competition between schools and systems. This competition must be managed, however, and the state has an interest in ensuring that redundancy in services is sufficiently limited, in order to facilitate some semblance of fair funding. It does the state little good to constantly bid against itself.

The downside to this competition can be observed by comparing Texas with California. While schools such as Texas Tech and the University of Houston have accomplished much, they often operate in the headwinds stirred by the resistance (or "competition") of their more generously funded brethren, UT and Texas A&M. Despite this, both Houston and Lubbock now have fine academic institutions, but they could be even better.

Texas has three members of the American Association of Universities (AAU), a membership that brings with it great prestige, two of whom are state schools. UT-Austin, Texas A&M, and Rice are members. California, by comparison, has nine. Nine! Six are public. Want to talk about opportunities? Let's raise two or three more Texas schools to AAU status.

UH needs to be in that group because, as Chancellor McRaven observed, while making his case for UT expansion, Houston is the largest city in the state, holding approximately 30 percent of the Texas' population. It's the fourth largest city in the nation, and has an international footprint.

Not surprisingly, that spirit of collaboration for which writers so vigorously call is often absent at other times. When the topic switches to granting UH a medical school in its own city, a branch campus in The Woodlands, or a share of revenue under Texas' Permanent University Fund, would-be collaborators are hard to find.

Recently, when a bill was submitted in the Legislature seeking to allocate additional funding for UH, Texas Tech and others, leaders from UT and Texas A&M mobilized their alumni and supporters to oppose the proposal. Representatives from the better-funded systems claimed that elevating UH and others would "destroy" their own institutions.

One wonders how California has done it.

Perhaps the Chronicle has taken up UH's case in these areas, but if so, certainly not with the same enthusiasm we now see for a revival of UT's ill-considered scheme. Even if this deal was initially drawn up on the back of a napkin over drinks and lunch, a data science center could be an important element in Houston's future.

UH operates a 75-acre research park adjacent to its campus. Perhaps that location will serve. Or maybe UH can take charge at the current site under a new structure, as has been suggested by Mayor Sylvester Turner and UH's board of regents chairman, Tilman Fertitta.

If brought to fruition, the project should be properly funded by the state, with UH leading the charge. But the real opportunity here is to build a 21st-century system of higher education, with a fairer funding scheme that gives more Texans access to an elite education.

Roland Bernier (@Rolandb3) is an alumnus of the University of Houston Law Center.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It's like planning to fund your child's college education with lotto winnings.
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A daycare van and a Harris County Precinct 5 deputy constable were involved in a crash in west Houston Monday morning.

The vehicles collided around 6 a.m. on Memorial Drive at Dairy Ashford Road, said Brian Harris, chief deputy in the Precinct 5 Constable's Office.

A deputy with the constable's office was headed to help another officer at Highway 6 and Memorial.

She was traveling westbound on Memorial with her lights flashing and sirens blaring when the daycare van, which was traveling northbound on Dairy Ashford, hit her patrol car, Harris said.

There were no children in the daycare van at the time of the crash, according to a news release from the Precinct 5 Constable's Office. Neither the deputy nor the driver of the van was seriously injured.

The collision left both cars mangled.

"If you look at the damage to the vehicles, it's an absolute miracle that nobody is seriously hurt as a result of this accident," Harris said.

The Houston Fire Department had to pry the patrol vehicle's doors open to get to the deputy, Harris said. The deputy was conscious and able to speak with authorities the entire time. The deputy was transported to an area hospital.

The driver of the van was taken to West Houston Medical Center with minor injuries, Harris said.

The Precinct 5 Constable's Office did not release Monday morning the deputy's name. She has been with the constable's office for two and a half years and works a night shift, Harris said.

Houston police closed the intersection 7 a.m. Monday.

Check back for updates on this developing story.
RICHMOND, Virginia - Self-proclaimed white nationalist Richard Spencer led a large group of demonstrators carrying torches and chanting "You will not replace us" Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting plans to remove a Confederate monument that has played an outsize role in this year's race for Virginia governor.

"What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced," Spencer said at an afternoon protest, the first of two rallies he led in the college town where he once attended the University of Virginia.

At the second rally, dozens of torch-bearing protesters gathered in a city park Saturday evening and chanted "You will not replace us" and "Russia is our friend," local television footage shows. Spencer was not shown addressing that gathering, but he tweeted a photo of himself standing in the crowd carrying what appeared to be a bamboo tiki torch.

The evening protest was short-lived. About 10 minutes in, an altercation between Spencer's group and counterprotesters drew police to the scene, and the crowd quickly dispersed, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported.

Once an obscure Internet figure promoting white identity, Spencer coined the term "alt-right" - referring to a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state - and rose to prominence during Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Although Trump denounced the alt-right, Spencer's followers counted his victory as a win for the movement as Trump espoused hard-right stances on undocumented immigrants, Muslims and political correctness.

"You will not replace us. You will not destroy us," Spencer said at the earlier rally, which he broadcast via Periscope video. "You cannot destroy us. We have awoken. We are here. We are never going away."

Spencer was in Charlottesville to protest a City Council vote to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. A court injunction has halted the removal for six months.

The statue has become a rallying cry for Corey Stewart, a Republican gubernatorial candidate. Stewart, who is chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, was chairman of Trump's Virginia campaign until he was fired.

There was no indication that Stewart, who has alienated some supporters with his focus on Confederate symbols, attended either rally. In defending the Confederate battle flag and monuments, Stewart has said that he is not promoting symbols of hate but battling "political correctness" and "historical vandalism."

Stewart did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. He kept a relatively low-profile on Twitter.

"I want to wish all the mothers a very special Mother's Day today!" he said in one of his few tweets of the day.

The rallies drew condemnation from the other four contenders for governor: former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, state Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach, and Democrats Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam and former congressman Tom Perriello.

All are vying to succeed term-limited Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D.

"The ugly display of divisive rhetoric and intimidation tactics in Charlottesville yesterday . . . does not reflect the thoughtfulness and tolerance I see in my fellow Virginians everywhere I go," Gillespie tweeted.

Wagner, who faces Stewart and Gillespie in the June 13 GOP primary, said via email: "These actions are totally unacceptable. These people are racists. They don't represent Virginia values. I condemn their actions and beliefs. I call on all Virginians who are involved in efforts to advocate for or against Virginia's history to act responsibly and honorably."

Said Northam, "There is no place for hate, fear, or intimidation in Virginia. The display in Charlottesville is the last gasp of a disgusting ideology. In this commonwealth, our doors are open, our lights are on, and we are welcome to everyone who shares a love for it, no matter who you are or where you're from."

Perriello, who grew up in Charlottesville, tweeted derisively at Spencer after the alt-right leader posted video of the first protest.

"Get your white supremacist hate out of my hometown," Perriello wrote on Twitter.

Spencer replied: "We won, you lost, little Tommy."

"Actually, you lost," Perriello shot back. "In 1865. 150 years later, you're still not over it."
A Conroe ISD student arrested at The Woodlands College Park High School in late April is the latest case of young people allegedly sharing nude photos of their peers  without the individual's consent.

The female student, who is 17, faces a Class B misdemeanor charge. Conroe police say she was in possession of a nude photo of a fellow female student and sent a text message of the photo to two male students at the school in November 2016. The defendant allegedly threatened to disseminate the photos of the other girl prior to texting them, court documents show.

Prosecutors with the Montgomery County Attorney's Office, which is tasked with prosecuting those 16 and under, said they get calls from school districts or police departments at least once a week about this type of behavior.

RESORT MURDER: Man indicted in shooting death of Willis High School graduate

"(The calls usually say) somebody at a school has sent around pictures of somebody else at school," Chief Juvenile Prosecutor Marc Brumberger said. "Oftentimes, it's multiple kids."

The mere act of the Cavalier student possessing the nude photos of her 17-year-old peer could land the defendant with a serious felony charge for possession of child pornography, state law dictates. But because of the growing trend of young people in Texas taking and sharing nude photos  sometimes without the consent of the person depicted in the photo  state lawmakers in 2011 created a misdemeanor charge called "electronic transmission of certain visual material depicting minor," or "sexting," Brumberger said.

The statute gives prosecutors the tools to use their discretion about which is the proper charge in cases like this.

The 2011 statute essentially criminalizes any minor for electronically sending nude photos or videos of minors, regardless of the photo's origin and regardless of consent. The charge is normally a Class C misdemeanor, unless the circumstances of the crime elevate it to a Class B misdemeanor  opening up the possibility for jail time.

One of those circumstances is if the photo is sent to "harass, annoy, alarm, abuse, torment, embarrass or offend" a victim, such as the case of the Cavalier student, prosecutors said.

In this instance, the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office is handling the case because the student is considered an adult for prosecuting purposes. However, Brumberger said it is the County Attorney's Office that sees the brunt of these sexting cases because most are juveniles committing the offense.

In Texas, a person is considered a juvenile for prosecuting purposes if he or she is 16 years old or younger. On the other hand, in most cases, a person is considered a minor as a victim if he or she is 17 or younger, like with sexual assault or child pornography cases.

"Taking these kinds of photos is inappropriate in and of itself," Brumberger said. "On top of that, they can face legal repercussions. Parents need to know that this is much, much more common among preteens and teenagers than most parents think."

Brumberger waged that any given cross section of junior high students in Montgomery County would have some sort of nude photo of their classmates on their phones at any given time, simply by judging how much his office comes across these cases.

"It doesn't mean your child is taking these pictures or soliciting these pictures," Brumberger said. "But their friends might send them around, and then they get a picture of some naked classmate and they hang on to it."

Conroe ISD police officers, catching onto the growing number of sexting cases, started partnering with the Montgomery County Internet Crimes Against Children Task force (ICAC) to go into schools and talk to students about what is and is not considered appropriate under the law.

They also talk to parents about how to safely monitor their children's social media and cell phone habits.

"A lot of parents don't really realize what their children are doing with their cell phones," Conroe ISD Police Sgt. Julie Thompson said. "It's an eye-opening program."

As for the student's criminal case, she is facing up to six months in jail and a possible $2,000 fine if convicted. She will be in Judge Dennis Watson's County Court-at-Law 1 for an arraignment May 31.
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Simone Manuel glided through the water as a line of young children attempted a one-armed freestyle drill she had done hundreds of times before.

The 20-year-old Olympic gold medalist watched as they passed, offering tips and encouragement when they stopped to breathe or rest.

"Try rotating your hips a little more," she said gently to a young girl who had turned to her for advice.

The champion freestyler, a Sugar Land native, volunteered for the first time with the USA Swimming Foundation's "Make a Splash" program, a multi-city effort to teach children basic swimming and water safety skills. About 150 students received lessons Saturday at the Dad's Club swimming complex near Spring Branch as part of the initiative, which included three other Houston-area pools as well as Olympic gold medalists Cullen Jones and Rowdy Gaines.

Through the program, which started in 2007, the foundation has provided about $4.5 million in grants to provide lessons for children at swim clubs nationwide. This year Houston-area pools received $100,000.

Access to swim lessons is limited among lower-income families. The foundation recently conducted a study with the University of Memphis that found nearly 80 percent of children in households with income less than $50,000 have little or no knowledge of how to swim.

Efforts commended

Lack of knowledge creates a risk of accidental drowning, the second leading cause of unintentional death among children younger than 14. The danger is higher for African-American and Latino children, who are less likely to learn to swim than other demographic groups.

Whether a child learns to swim often depends on whether his or her parents know how, said Debbie Hesse, the foundation's executive director. A lack of knowledge can create fear of enrolling a child in lessons.

"It's a cultural issue in this country," Hesse said.

At a press conference Friday, Mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis commended the program's efforts to expand access to swim lessons among lower-income families. Neither learned how to swim during childhood, and both pledged to learn.

"We can't tell kids to do something and then not do it ourselves," Turner said.

Golden message

Last year, Manuel became the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in an individual swimming event, the 100-meter freestyle. Hesse said she hoped Manuel's appearance at the pool would demonstrate the importance of lessons, as well as the opportunities available to those who ultimately adopt swimming as a hobby or a sport.

"When you hear the message from an Olympian, it seems to resonate more," she said.

Nira Proto, who lives in the Heights, watched as her three-year-old twins, Seth and Sasha, worked with another instructor in a shallower part of the pool. She first enrolled them in lessons two years ago for greater peace of mind around the family pool, and she hopes they'll stick with it as a sport.

"It was of the utmost importance to me that they learn to swim as early as possible," she said.

Started at 4

Manuel's mother, Sharron, recalled her daughter's insistence on joining a local swim team at age 4, before she had taken a swim lesson. She put Manuel in the pool with an instructor, thinking she would need several sessions to learn the basics, and watched in awe as she completed a full lap on her second lesson.

"Boy, was I wrong," she said. "She did not have any fear at all."

On Saturday, Manuel tried her hand at instructing for the first time. She found it challenging to offer critiques, she said, but words of encouragement came easily.

"That's what keeps you in this sport," she said.
Details are emerging of long-standing sex abuse at a school for deaf children run by the Roman Catholic Church in the Argentinean city of Mendoza. The revelations come after the arrest on May 5 of a nun at the school, Kumiko Kosaka, on suspicion of helping priests sexually abuse children at the Antonio Provolo Institute, authorities said. She was also charged with physically abusing the students to identify the most submissive ones.

Kumiko Kosaka was arrested on May 5.

Kosakas arrest stems from a sex abuse scandal that has roiled the Catholic Church from Argentina to Rome, and has resulted in Vatican probes and the arrests of two priests and three other men following the closure of the center in December.

In the wake of the arrests, which include the 82-year-old director of the center, Nicolas Corradi, around 20 people have come forward to report abuse they suffered at the school. The case has been widely reported on Argentinean television. One teenage girl was reportedly chained up in a small room known as Gods little house and abused by up to four people at a time. When police searched the school they found chains and pornographic material.

Kumiko Kosaka would beat the children to test them. The submissive ones would be abused Sergio Salinas, victims lawyer

The prosecutor overseeing the case, Gustavo Stroppiana, told journalists: Going up the stairs on an inspection, a victim pointed to an image of the Virgin Mary and told us: Whenever we passed by here, the bad nun crossed herself. How could she be so hypocritical?

Several witnesses stories match up. First, Kumiko Kosaka would beat the children to test them. Those who resisted would be saved. The submissive ones would end up being abused, explains Sergio Salinas, a lawyer representing several victims and who has been the driving force behind the investigation.

One girl, then five years of age, was repeatedly raped by Horacio Corbacho, one of the arrested priests. The nun took her to the priests room, knowing what she was doing, and one day put a nappy on the girl to hide her bleeding, so that she could eat in the dining room. She was hurting so much she couldnt sit down. She made them watch pornography, made the girls touch themselves. They were children from very poor families who hardly saw their parents because they were boarders. Also, those who were selected had the greatest difficulty in communicating with their parents, they didnt know sign language, says Salinas.

The authorities back up the victims allegations. They were threatened with being thrown out if they talked. You must remember that many of these children came from the poorest slums of the city, the center was like a five-star hotel to them. They were told that their families would have problems if they talked. After leaving, they lived in fear and shame. Some have children of their own today, and still cant talk about what was done to them, says Salinas, adding that many of the victims have become self-harmers.

Children as young as five were allegedly raped by priests

Cintia Martinez, the mother of a boy who was abused at the Provolo center by his carer, who in turn had been raped by one of the priests, says that her son, now 20, is still afraid to speak about what happened to him. My son saw how they abused [his carer], who then raped him. It was a chain. Even today he is still terrified of Corradi. His story stops with him. He says he is very afraid of him.

Martinez says she tried to report the abuse she suspected was taking place in the school as early as 2008, when she realized her son was traumatized: He slept with the lights on, he began to feel bad about himself. He cut his own arms, his legs, he told me he didnt want to go back in there. One day he showed me a pornographic drawing of an adult having oral sex with another. He had drawn eyes as though others were watching. He told me that they were forced to have oral sex with other students.

She reported the matter to the school and was told not to pursue the matter further and that the person responsible would be dealt with. She took her son out of the school and contacted the authorities, but no action was taken.

Not even the other mothers believed me. They said I was a troublemaker and that so was my son. We could have stopped it, but instead it went on until 2016. That is what hurts me.

Some 62 priests have been reported for sexual abuse in Argentina since 2002. Only three have been expelled from the Roman Catholic Church. The rest retain their status as clergy, even in jail.

English version by Nick Lyne.
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WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump's disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump's decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump's meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

"This is code-word information," said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies."

The revelation comes as the president faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI Director James Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump's subsequent admission that his decision was driven by "this Russia thing" was seen by critics as attempted obstruction of justice.

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak - a key figure in earlier Russia controversies - into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

For almost anyone in government, discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.

White House officials involved in the meeting said Trump discussed only shared concerns about terrorism.

"The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation," said H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, who participated in the meeting. "At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly."

McMaster reiterated his statement in a subsequent appearance at the White House on Monday and described the Washington Post story as "false," but did not take any questions.

In their statements, White House officials emphasized that Trump had not discussed specific intelligence sources and methods, rather than addressing whether he had disclosed information drawn from sensitive sources.

The CIA declined to comment, and the NSA did not respond to requests for comment.

But officials expressed concern about Trump's handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into the Islamic State, they said, could hinder the United States' and its allies' ability to detect future threats.

"It is all kind of shocking," said a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials. "Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn't grasp the gravity of the things he's dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it's all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia."

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. "I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day," the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State's territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

"Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive, and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling," said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia's presence in Syria. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and perhaps disrupting it.

Russia and the United States both regard the Islamic State as an enemy and share limited information about terrorist threats. But the two nations have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support President Bashar al-Assad.

"Russia could identify our sources or techniques," the senior U.S. official said.

A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, "I don't think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out."

At a more fundamental level, the information wasn't the United States' to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments - and even individual agencies - are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated, even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.

The officials declined to identify the ally but said it has previously voiced frustration with Washington's inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.

"If that partner learned we'd given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first, that is a blow to that relationship," the U.S. official said.

Trump also described measures the United States has taken or is contemplating to counter the threat, including military operations in Iraq and Syria, as well as other steps to tighten security, officials said.

The officials would not discuss details of those measures, but the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed that it is considering banning laptops and other large electronic devices from carry-on bags on flights between Europe and the United States. The United States and Britain imposed a similar ban in March affecting travelers passing through airports in 10 Muslim-majority countries.

Trump cast the countermeasures in wistful terms. "Can you believe the world we live in today?" he said, according to one official. "Isn't it crazy?"

Lavrov and Kislyak were also accompanied by aides.

A Russian photographer took photos of part of the session that were released by the Russian state-owned Tass news agency. No U.S. news organization was allowed to attend any part of the meeting.

Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout. Thomas Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, the services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.

One of Bossert's subordinates also called for the problematic portion of Trump's discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients, efforts to prevent sensitive details from being disseminated further or leaked.

White House officials defended Trump. "This story is false," said Dina Powell, deputy national security adviser for strategy. "The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced."

But officials could not explain why staff members nevertheless felt it necessary to alert the CIA and the NSA.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he would rather comment on the revelations in the Post story after "I know a little bit more about it," but added: "Obviously, they are in a downward spiral right now and have got to figure out a way to come to grips with all that's happening. And the shame of it is, there's a really good national security team in place."

Corker also said, "The chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline is creating an environment that I think makes - it's creates a worrisome environment."

Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian prime minister earlier this year. He has also faced criticism for seemingly lax attention to security at his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders, but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points - and often ignores those.

"He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it, and that has big downsides," the second former official said. "Does he understand what's classified and what's not? That's what worries me."

Lavrov's reaction to the Trump disclosures was muted, officials said, calling for the United States to work more closely with Moscow on fighting terrorism.

Kislyak has figured prominently in damaging stories about the Trump administration's ties to Russia. Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign just 24 days into the job over his contacts with Kislyak and his misleading statements about them. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from matters related to the FBI's Russia investigation after it was revealed that he had met and spoke with Kislyak, despite denying any contact with Russian officials during his confirmation hearing.

"I'm sure Kislyak was able to fire off a good cable back to the Kremlin with all the details" he gleaned from Trump, said the former U.S. official who handled intelligence on Russia.

The White House readout of the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak made no mention of the discussion of a terrorist threat.

"Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria," the summary said. The president also "raised Ukraine" and "emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia."

- - -

The Washington Post's Julie Tate and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON  Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn remained tight-lipped Monday about his position on the short-list to replace sacked FBI director James Comey, who was leading the bureau's investigation into possible ties between associates of President Donald Trump and the Russian government.

Cornyn declined to give a public account of his interview Saturday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, which came a day after he released a statement saying that his "focus remains" on representing Texas in the Senate.

Cornyn was one of eight candidates interviewed over the weekend, and arguably the most prominent. Of the 14 people who have emerged as potential candidates, three, including Cornyn, are serving or have served in Congress.

In Austin, the Texas Capitol was abuzz Monday about possible replacements for Cornyn, should he become FBI director - though several key lawmakers rated his chances as a long-shot.

Gov. Greg Abbott's name started making the rounds within hours after Cornyn was reported to be on the list to replace James Comey.

While John Wittman, Abbott's press secretary, did not respond , others close to the governor said he had no interest in appointing himself senator on an interim basis until a special election would be called. "Not going to happen," said a Capitol aide who said he has spoken with him.

The last time a Texas governor made that move was in 1941, when then-Gov. W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel won a special election to a vacant U.S. Senate seat. O'Daniel served in Washington until 1949.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has been mentioned as a possible candidate for Cornyn's seat, nixed the suggestions, as well.

"I announced months ago, that I am running for re-election and that is what I am going to do," he said in a statement dismissing the speculation. "My only focus now is getting the conservative priorities we passed out of the Senate to the House to the Governor's desk for his signature."

Senators who are close to him said they would be surprised if he sought the job, partly because has repeatedly said he already has the "best job in the world" as the state's No. 2 elected official and presiding officer in the Senate.

"The lieutenant governor has made it abundantly clear that he is not a candidate for that office and will not accept an appointment," said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and key Patrick lieutenant who is the Senate's majority leader.

Political observers say Cornyn is an intriguing prospect -- both for what he represents and what he doesn't. A genial presence in Washington with a law enforcement background as a former state judge and prosecutor, Cornyn could be just what the White House needs if it is seeking quick confirmation of a trusted senator with friends on both sides of the aisle.

On the other hand, his position as the Republican Whip, or second-in-command to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, adds little to the much-needed aura of impartiality the administration needs to maintain the FBI's jealously-guarded image of independence, particularly in light of the partisan furor over Comey's firing.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told CNN Sunday that the FBI director "should not be a partisan politician, not part of either party."

That view was seconded by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said on NBC's Meet the Press that Trump should "pick someone who comes from within the ranks or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on day one."

Cornyn, 65, also has left open the question of whether he would be willing to give up his relatively safe position as the senior GOP senator from deep red Texas to become an essentially at-will employee for a president whose most famous contribution to popular culture is the phrase, "You're Fired."

A spokeswoman in Cornyn's Senate office referred questions about the Sessions interview to the senator's previous statement on Friday, which appeared to downplay his interest in the FBI job.

But the meeting with Sessions, at least his second in a week, suggests that the former Texas attorney general and state supreme court justice is keeping his options open. Though Cornyn is in his third term in the Senate, GOP term limit rules will force him to relinquish his whip post at the end of 2018. He will then have to choose between challenging McConnell, whose leadership position is not term-limited, or accept some lesser position.

As McConnell's No. 2, Cornyn has not had the same national profile in the GOP battles with the Obama administration. But he has been a reliable champion of his party's agenda, while working with Democrats on criminal justice and sentencing reform.

Most importantly, he never publicly opposed Trump's improbable march to the GOP presidential nomination, even when the last Republican standing in Trump's way was fellow Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who would become the state's senior senator if Cornyn goes to the FBI.

"Cornyn's been a low-key guy, so he doesn't have any kind of baggage associated with him, like many in the conservative movement do," said Craig Goodman, a political scientist at the University of Houston at Victoria.

While some observers believe Trump must pick an FBI director outside of the political maelstrom, Goodman notes that Trump has a track record of rewarding loyalty over independence.

"If you look at the various rationales for why James Comey was fired, it becomes pretty clear that independence is not something that President Trump values in his appointees," Goodman said.

Those who know Cornyn well say that with his background as a judge and prosecutor  and student journalist  they could not imagine him agreeing to the sort of loyalty pledge that Trump reportedly demanded of Comey.

Trump, for his part, denied those reports in a Fox News interview Saturday. "I want loyalty to the country. I mean, I want loyalty to the United States of America," Trump said. "I want him to do a good job  or her  to do a great job."

Partisan sparring over Comey's dismissal and the future of the FBI's Russia probe prompted McConnell to announce Monday that Rosenstein will lead an all-Senator briefing Thursday on Capitol Hill.

It remains unclear when Trump will announce a successor. Also among those in the running are Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina congressman and former prosecutor who led the House investigation into the terrorist attack on the American diplomatic base in Benghazi, Lybia; and former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, a former FBI agent.

Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist in Austin who has worked for Cornyn, said if Cornyn remains in the mix, he likely will have some questions of his own. "He may have questions about what the president is looking for in an FBI director," he said. "Obviously, whoever takes this job is going to be under a microscope."

Steinhauser said that since Cornyn's name has come up he has little choice but to consider it seriously, whatever the political considerations. "This is a case where the senator is very happy where he is. He's the second-most powerful senator in the country. He isn't necessarily going looking for another job," he said. "But if there's an offer you have to consider that and serve your country in the best way possible. I really think that's the analysis he's going through."

Cornyn's selection would create an immediate scramble for an open senate seat from Texas, sparking a special election that could be enticing to any number of Republicans in Austin or in Congress. Among those who have shown interest in a Senate seat is Texas U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul. Whoever might succeed Cornyn, Republicans say his departure would leave a gaping hole in the state's influence in the Senate, where he has served since 2002.

"John Cornyn is one of the most capable United States senators we've had in a long, long time," said former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was visiting Houston Monday as U.S. Energy Secretary. "I hate to lose a senior United States senator, but what would be Texas' loss would be America's gain."

As a veteran politician at the state and federal level, Cornyn has been able to devote time and attention to party-building in Texas, including helping the Texas GOP reach out to minority voters and candidates. He next faces reelection in 2020. While not universally revered among grassroots activist who don't consider him sufficiently hard-right, "Big John" Cornyn has navigated decades of rough-and-tumble of national and Texas politics with a record of spotless probity.

"A high wire act for that long is pretty hard to do," said Austin GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak.

In the end, Trump will likely have a free hand in picking a new FBI director. Republicans have 52 seats in the Senate, and the position no longer subject to Democratic filibuster.

"Ultimately, it's a question of what Trump wants," Mackowiack said. "And Cornyn is serious and credible. He checks a lot of boxes."

Todd Ackerman and Mike Ward contributed to this report
The following are excerpts from reports generated by the Texas County Sheriffs Department:

A deputy was dispatched at about 7:45 p.m. May 13 regarding a report of peace disturbance at a Mineral Drive residence at Houston.

The officer made contact with a man who lives there who said neighbors were shooting guns which was making it hard for him to hear his television. The man also said he was concerned that the neighbors might not be shooting in a safe direction.

The deputy went to a neighbor man who showed the officer that the direction they were shooting in was safe. He also said they wouldnt be shooting after dark.

A deputy was dispatched at about 7:30 p.m. May 1 regarding a report of an assault at a Highway MM residence at Mountain Grove.

The officer made contact with a 47-year-old woman who lives there who stated she had been attacked by two women  ages 51 and 25  who had hit her, bitten her and thrown her to the ground. A report about the incident was sent to the county prosecutor.

A deputy investigated a report of a burglary May 8 at a U.S. 60 residence at Cabool.

A 58-year-old man who lives there told the officer numerous items with a total value of $8,701 were missing. The man named another man as a suspect. Investigation continues.

A 58-year-old Houston man reported on May 12 that a chainsaw, lawn mower battery and the key to an ATV had been swiped from his Brown Hill Road residence. There are no suspects.

A private probation services representative reported on May 9 that a 32-year-old Licking man had cut a GPS tracking unit off of his ankle, claiming it had caught fire and burned him. The probation officer stated the unit (valued at $1,860) had been intentionally set on fire, according to the company it was manufactured by (a representative confirmed that the fire started on the outside of the unit).

A probable cause statement was sent to the county prosecutor seeking a felony property damage charge.

Katie M. Blanco, 24, of 819 Broadway St. at Cabool, was issued a citation on May 8 for failing to stop for a school bus displaying a stop sign.

Texas County Jail admissions

May 8

Marcia A. Bailey  4-day commitment

Dale E. Cates  24-hour commitment

May 9

Metrina A. Barton  Dent County hold

Ryan M. Wagner  Pulaski County hold

Justin D. Jarrett  3-day commitment

George E. Cochran  non-support

Kenneth J. Manion  writ

Adam T. Reams  writ

May 10

Christopher L. Dann  Elkhart County, Ind., hold

Earl D. Sawyer  possession of child pornography

Ronald R. Windle  possession of controlled substance

Tony E. Lane  possession of controlled substance

Triscia A. Emerick  passing bad checks

May 11

Missie J. Collins  24-hour commitment

Amanda S. Wade  DWI

May 12

Ryan L. Dennis  48-hour commitment

William A. Cooper  48-hour commitment

Cody L. Worley  48-hour commitment

Christopher M. Emerick  passing bad checks

Robert J. Corley  24-hour shock

Malcolm L. Briscoe  endangering corrections officer

May 13

Jarrett A. Horne  48-hour commitment

Justin D. Dake  non-support

May 14

Shelly L. Cichon  driving while revoked

May 15

Adam E. Smith  parole violation
A Houston-founded firm was recognized last week at a Springfield Business Journal event as the No. 1 fastest-growing company in the Ozarks.

Sun Solar LLC and its founder, Houston High School graduate Caleb Arthur, posted 2016 revenue of $23.8 million, an 888 percent increase over $2.4 million in 2014.

There is a lot of solar coming forward right now. When we came to this area, the people graciously adopted us, said Arthur, speaking from the stage of downtowns Old Glass Place. A lot of our clients are here tonight. Even this building has solar panels.

Arthur spoke to a crowd of more than 200 gathered for the event, which honors the 12 fastest-growing companies in southwest Missouri. Companies were chosen through a numbers-based formula awarding points for both revenue and percentage growth. Eligible companies must have at least $500,000 in revenue, be located within a 50-mile radius of Springfield and be in business for at least three years.
The following are excerpts from reports generated by the Houston Police Department:

Steven R. Caraveo, 23, of 733 W. Chestnut St. in Houston, was issued a citation for stealing under $750 on May 11 for allegedly using a womans credit card without permission.

Shelly L. Cichon, 42, of 8378 Fisher Drive in Houston, was cited for driving with a suspended license and failure to show proof of insurance after a traffic stop on U.S. 63 at about 9:30 p.m. May 6.

Scott M. Logan, 21, of 13231 German Road at Bucyrus, was issued a citation for operating a motorcycle while not motorcycle qualified after a traffic stop on U.S. 63 at about 6:45 p.m. May 6.

Ashely D. Bolden, 28, of 15314 Piney Drive in Bucyrus, and Amanda M. Houston, 28, of 319 W. Chestnut Street in Houston, were each issued citations for stealing under $750 after allegedly shoplifting party supplies and other items from Dollar General on May 2.
A Plato teenager was cited after a Houston Police Department investigation of a car crashing into the west wall of Houston House Nursing Center in the early hours of Sunday, May 7.

According to a police report, Rylan J. Parrish, 18, of 12412 Goldenrod Drive in Plato, was issued citations for driving while intoxicated and careless and imprudent driving after an officer investigated a single-vehicle accident on North Industrial Drive.

The officer had responded to a report about the crash from an off-duty policeman. The vehicle involved  a gray 2002 Dodge Stratus  reportedly traveled off the right side of the roadway, went through a heavy cable barrier and crashed into Houston Houses brick structure.

Parrish complained of injuries and was taken by ambulance to Texas County Memorial Hospital. A 15-year-old boy who was also in the car was not injured.

The building sustained minor damage and nobody inside was hurt.
Gov. Eric Greitens announced Wednesday that teams of local, state and federal disaster specialists are jointly assessing flooding and severe storm damage to homes, personal property and public infrastructure, including schools, roads and bridges, to determine the size and scope of the disaster for the application Missouri will make to have this declared as a federal disaster.

Texas County is among the counties that will be surveyed.

Our first responders and Missouri citizens responded swiftly and bravely to the devastating and historic flooding, Greitens said. Their actions saved lives and protected property. Now we must act just as swiftly to clear debris, assess damage, and help Missourians rebuild and recover.

There will be two types of teams, known as Preliminary Damage Assessment teams, surveying damage: Individual Assistance (IA) teams and Public Assistance (PA) teams. Team members will carry official identification. Residents should not hesitate to request that they show their ID.

Individual Assistance teams assess damage to homes and personal property. Teams will not visit every house; the assessments are meant to get a broad overview of damage.

If a federal major disaster declaration is declared, Individual Assistance can help eligible individuals and families with temporary rental assistance, basic home repairs and other essential disaster-related needs not covered by insurance or other means.

Public Assistance teams assess disaster damage to public infrastructure like roads, bridges and schools as well as to certain nonprofit entities.

Participating jointly in the teams will be local emergency managers and officials, SEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and, for Individual Assistance, the U.S. Small Business Administration.

In Texas County, that will occur Monday, May 14. To learn more, contact the Texas County Emergency Management Office.

Those affected by the flooding and severe storms are encouraged to report damage to their local emergency management officials and to document losses, including photographing damage and retaining receipts.

Individuals and business owners should notify their insurance companies of damage and not wait for damage assessments.

For information about Missouri flooding recovery and resources, visitMo.gov/flood. The site is regularly updated with new information.
Services for Dr. I.C. Keeney, 90, of Houston, are 3 p.m. Wednesday, May 17, at First Baptist Church, Houston.

Visitation is 5 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 16, at the church.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials to: Missouri Veterinary Medical Association, 2500 Country Club Drive, Jefferson City, Mo., 65109.

Send an online condolence.
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Tomorrow, Upston is set to host an event in Canterbury, outlining how employers can change the lives of offenders and their families while also improving the communities in which they live.

The event  which is just the second in a series of planned gatherings  will also showcase how Corrections is working towards better outcomes for prisoners.

Last year, around 9,000 offenders were involved in employment-related activities and more than 4,600 achieved qualifications  a 25 per cent increase on the year before.

Some prisoners have never held down a job, yet we know that people who find stable employment on leaving prison are less likely to end up back in the justice system, she explains. Having a job is crucial to reducing reoffending.

Employers that get involved in the scheme can also expect support from corrections including job placement and up to six months in-work support to help former prisoners succeed in the long run.
When model Georgia Gibbs shared a photo of herself on Instagram with curvy bestie Kate Wasley in late January, she had no idea what kind of effect it would have.

Love you unconditionally @katewas_  #SunburnIsReal A post shared by GEORGIA MAE (@georgiagibbs_) on Jan 21, 2017 at 6:53pm PST

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But the comments were immediate.

"I'm not trying to hate at all, it's obvious you and your friend are completely different sizes and there's nothing wrong with that, there's also nothing wrong with being next to each other in a photo," one person wrote. "I don't think that's what people's issue is at all; this photo in particular DOES look photoshopped."

"It looks like you've dragged your stomach inwards slightly pulling your friend's stomach outwards. It could just be the angle you're at, but I can see why people think it's photoshopped 100%. Sorry but I'm not sorry."

After seeing the note, Gibbs told Perth Now that the pair was "shocked."

"People calling Kate overweight, and me too skinny," the former Australia's Next Top Model contestant said. "We realized people arent used to seeing two different sized women standing next to each other."

"We realized people arent used to seeing two different sized women standing next to each other."

Wasley also chimed in, opening up to People on the ordeal.

"After reading comments and questions from people I know, one of the most common was 'Dont you ever feel self-conscious being the bigger one?'" she explained. "We want to change societys beauty standards that smaller is better, when in reality neither is better than the other. We think your health and well-being should be the priority."

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So in an effort to change these ideals, the duo created @any.body_co, a body positive Instagram account to promote the notion that "there's no size standard for today's woman," according the page's bio.

When you shop with your best friend and you like the same thing "okay get it too but call me before you put it on"  A brand that loves AnyBODY @showpo sizes restocked really soon! #LoveAnyBODY #AnyBODYarmy #Showpo A post shared by Any BODY (@any.body_co) on May 9, 2017 at 12:08pm PDT

And it seems as though it's a hit.

Since starting the initiative in early March, the page has gained over 160K followers.

Similarly, Instagrammer Megan Jayne Crabbe, otherwise known by her username bodyposipanda, posted a photo of herself in a bikini in early May to celebrate her stomach rolls.

Bikini no. 2, feelin' like a queen despite the fact that the 30C chub rub has seriously kicked in  sending heaps of love and full belly happiness to you all  Bikini was from Debenhams like 4 years ago  A post shared by Megan Jayne Crabbe  (@bodyposipanda) on May 6, 2017 at 12:18pm PDT

"Just a little reminder with summer around the corner: people of all shapes and sizes belong on the beach," Crabbe wrote on Instagram, quoting Tumblr account Just-A-Little-Bit-Of-Meghan. "They all belong there enjoying the sun and playing in the waves and they all deserve to feel comfortable and safe. So please, dont stare at or make comments about those whos appearance is a bit different than what youre used to."

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As for the Wasley and Gibbs, they too just want women of all sizes to feel comfortable in their skin.

"Our whole thing now is to be who you are," Wasley told the Daily Mail back in April. "Our intention is to encourage all women to quit the comparison. Individuality is something that should be celebrated, healthy bodies come in different shapes and sizes."

We couldn't agree more!

Also on HuffPost
They say money can't buy everything, but if you're travelling out of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) any time soon, forking over extra dough definitely has its advantages.

The world's richest can now pay their way to a better airport experience by using The Private Suite, an ultra-VIP airport terminal for commercial flights.

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The US$22 million terminal, which opens today, offers private TSA screening, esthetician services for hair, makeup and nails, and a luxury car that will take you directly to the doors of the plane on the tarmac.

There's also a selection of clothing available to anyone who feels they might need a fresh shirt or warmer jacket, and customers can peruse and buy art from rotating installations, with all the proceeds going to charity, reports The Guardian.

You'll have to fork over $7,500 in yearly membership fees to use the terminal, however, and cough up an additional $2,700 to $3,000 each time you visit the terminal for individual flights. The cost covers a group of up to four people.

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For non-members, it's $3,500 for a domestic flight and $4,000 for international flight for a group of up to three people.

"I love it," movie producer Charles Wessler told the Los Angeles Times. Hes one of the 1,200 or so people who have signed up for The Private Suites services.

"I walked out the door of the plane and there was a guy standing there with a little sign, come with me," Wessler told the newspaper. I go out the door, down the steps, right past the wing... We get into a car and drive on the taxiway, go out a gate and about three minutes later or less, Im at the suites. I walked in and a woman at the desk said, 'We have your rental car, its right here.' I signed a piece of paper and I drove away.'"

The terminal's operator, Gavin de Becker, told The Guardian he expects about 10 per cent of the users to be celebrities who are fed-up with dealing with paparazzi inside the airport's main terminals. The rest will likely be CEOs and other corporate big wigs.

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His company also promises a stress-free experience.

It typically takes 2,200 footsteps from car seat to plane seat. For members of The Private Suite, its 70 footsteps. And they are all peaceful footsteps, the website reads.

And while us common folk may scoff at such extravagant luxuries, The Economist argues that keeping the well-heeled hidden from sight of the average traveller will likely cut down on conflict in the lower class.

The magazine points to a 2016 study that found air rage among economy-class flyers goes up when they are witness to the higher-class receiving better service.

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"Even if the idea of such segregation fills people with ire, as long as they are not forced to witness how the other half lives, that anger will remain abstract."

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has nominated a former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister as the next official languages commissioner, despite objections from Conservatives and New Democrats.

Trudeau announced in a media release Monday that he has chosen Madeleine Meilleur for the watchdog role. Meilleur served 13 years as an Ottawa MPP and held different cabinet roles under former premier Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne, including attorney general and minister responsible for francophone affairs.

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Trudeau said in his statement that Meilleur was an outstanding choice and said she will be a tenacious advocate for francophone and anglophone minority communities.

She will bring a deep understanding and enormous dedication to this position, and will hold our government to account for the full implementation of the Official Languages Act, Trudeau said.

The news was made official shortly after a question period in which Tory MPs urged Liberals to find someone else for the role. The Canadian Press reported last week that Trudeau was poised to select Meilleur, who retired from provincial politics in 2016.

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Whats next, Mr. Speaker? Maybe Dalton McGuinty as the ethics commissioner? Or Kathleen Wynne as the lobbying commissioner? I mean, what could possibly go wrong? asked Conservative ethics critic Blaine Calkins in the House of Commons.

Calkins suggested the selection flew in the face of the Liberals new merit-based appointment process and was merely about patronage.

Heritage Minister Melanie Joly responded the government is committed to a rigorous, open and merit-based process for public appointments.

'Liberal party cronyism'

The official languages commissioner is a very important role, one, of course, that we value, and we want to ensure that the recommended person is highly qualified, Joly said.

Ontario MP John Brassard, who frequently bashes the Wynne government in the Commons, said the "Liberal party human resources office" has moved from Queen's Park to Parliament Hill.

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Brassard charged Liberal party cronyism continues to be business as usual.

Whose name will be called next from the Liberal donor Rolodex and whats the going rate these days for a plum Liberal appointment? he asked.

Government House Leader Bardish Chagger shot back that the government has made 122 different appointments since coming to power, of which 60 per cent are women, 13 per cent are visible minorities and 10 per cent are indigenous.

"Whats next, Mr. Speaker? Maybe Dalton McGuinty as the ethics commissioner? Or Kathleen Wynne as the lobbying commissioner?"

All positions to apply are available online. We committed to a new, open, transparent, merit-based process where our boards, our commissions, our corporations can actually look like the diversity of our country, Chagger said.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair also challenged Trudeau about the issue in question period last week, saying that, as an officer of Parliament, the next commissioner must be free of partisan baggage.

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Mulcair also noted how Trudeau sparked complaints to the language commissioner in January after he insisted on speaking French at an event in Sherbrooke, Que., even when asked questions in English.

The NDP leader said it was a clear conflict of interest for Trudeau to name someone from his inner circle, and said it would undermine the credibility of the commissioner as an institution.

Will the prime minister withdraw this appointment, which makes no sense? Mulcair asked.

7-year term

Trudeau did not let on then that his mind was made up, saying only that the government was still consulting opposition MPs.

When it comes to protecting official languages, it is important to select someone of the highest calibre, he said at the time.

The commissioner, who ensures the application of language laws, is named to a seven-year term. Both the House of Commons and Senate will vote on the appointment before the parliamentary session ends in June.

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Meilleur is set to replace Graham Fraser, whose mandate ended in December.

With files from The Canadian Press

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Nikol Pashinyan to withdraw his candidacy (video)

Edmon Marukyan, member of Yelk (Way out) political bloc, recorded during todays press conference that the results of the elections were formed as a result of citizens vote, and Yelk bloc was able to keep each persons vote. Nikol Pashinyan, candidate for Mayor from Yelk block at Yerevan Council of Elders Elections, announced that he will withdraw his candidacy and will work at the National Assembly. The bloc hasnt discussed yet who the head of the faction and secretary will be. At Yerevan Council of Elders elections Yelk bloc received 1000 votes more from Yerevan than during the parliamentary elections, We have sustainable confidence in Yerevan and in general in Armenia, we aim at increasing the number of our supporters. Our political activities will be directed to that goal, said Nikol Pashinyan. Yelk bloc may turn to the CEC for recount at some polling stations, In reality it will not affect the election results, but we promised that we will be responsible for each vote and we will do like that, stated Edmon Marukyan. While touching upon failures, Nikol Pashinyan noted, There are still lots of people, who go to vote for electoral bribe, we werent able to convince those people not to do so and hereafter we will aim at solving this issue. Yelk bloc states that they will be the political trend during the upcoming years, and they hope that by increasing their influence, in the future they will come to power.
Scientists in Nova Scotia are undergoing the messy and slow work of opening up a blue whale's carcass to discover how it died.

On May 2, the juvenile blue whale washed up on shore in East Berlin, not far from Liverpool, N.S. Scientists have been hard at work since Friday collecting samples and skeletal remains to determine the 20-metre-long mammal's cause of death.

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Tonya Wimmer, the director of the Marine Animal Response Society, told CBC News the investigation into the whale's death could hold important answers.

"It's only been because people have looked at animals that have died that we've really even started to identify how often they're threatened by different things  whether it's shipping, whether it's fishing, pollutants, whatever," Wimmer said.

The Queens County Advance reported that researchers and students from a nearby veterinary college were covered in blubber as they methodically worked away at the necropsy, with one student even asking a journalist to put up her hair as her hands were drenched in blood.

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Its always a pretty gruelling, exhausting task ... but were hoping to learn as much as we can, Andrew Reid, with the Marine Animal Response Society, told the paper.

The Government of Canada estimates there are less than 250 adult blue whales in the northwest Atlantic. Blue whales can live to be 80-years-old, and after they reach sexual maturity they reproduce every two to three years.

Wimmer says the whale was just one of a few calves in the region, and as a female she could have gone on to mother even more members of the endangered species.

When you lose a female, youre not just losing her, Wimmer told The Chronicle Herald. Youre losing every possible baby she could have had in her lifetime.

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Humpback Whale Visits Mill Bay, B.C. See Gallery
Too much of anything isn't a good thing, but if you're a guy who likes to watch porn, it can actually be a very bad thing.

New research from the Naval Medical Center of San Diego suggests porn can cause erectile dysfunction in men, while having little to no effect on women.

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"Internet pornography, specifically, has been shown to be a supernormal stimulus of [the brain's reward system] circuitry, which may be due to the ability to continuously and instantaneously self-select novel and more sexually arousing images," Dr. Matthew Christman, lead author of the study said.

According to Christman, online porn is as addictive as cocaine, similarly activating the brain's reward system and spurring a recurrent behaviour.

Like drug users, porn watchers may build a "tolerance" for the content they consume, leaving them unsatisfied with real-life (and less, shall we say, dramatic) sexual activity.

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"Tolerance could explain the sexual dysfunction, and can explain our finding that associated preferences for pornography over partnered sex with statistically significantly higher sexual dysfunction in men," Christman said.

The idea that porn creates dissatisfaction in real-life sexual relationships isn't a new one. A study from last summer found couples who watched porn were more likely to divorce, as pornography became an easier route to sexual satisfaction than intimacy between partners.

The San Diego study, which surveyed 312 men between the ages of 20 and 40, found pornography use varied widely.

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Twenty-six per cent claimed to watch porn less than once a week, while 25 per cent said they watched it one to two times a week and 21 per cent said they watched porn three to five times weekly. Only five per cent revealed they use pornography six to 10 times a week, and only four per cent claimed more than that.
In most industries, it doesn't pay to be a girl  but if you're a princess in the British Monarchy, it most certainly does.

The Brand Finance Group, a London-based business valuation and strategy consultancy, estimates 2-year-old Princess Charlotte has a net worth of 3 billion ($5.2 billion CAD), Marie Claire U.K. reports.

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The littlest royal is reportedly worth more than her older brother (who's third in line to the throne), Prince George, who at 3 has an estimated net worth of 2.4 billion ($4.2 billion CAD).

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are delighted to share a new photograph of Princess Charlotte to mark her second birthday tomorrow.  The photograph was taken in April by The Duchess at their home in Norfolk. The Duke and Duchess are very pleased to share this photograph as they celebrate Princess Charlotte's second birthday. Their Royal Highnesses would like to thank everyone for all of the lovely messages they have received, and hope that everyone enjoys this photograph of Princess Charlotte as much as they do. A post shared by Kensington Palace (@kensingtonroyal) on May 1, 2017 at 2:02am PDT

Proving the princess takes after her mum, the Duchess of Cambridge, the reason for Charlotte's incredibly high value is in large part due to her fashion influence. Like the Duchess' "Kate effect" circa 2010, the princess is now responsible for the "Charlotte effect," which became even more apparent earlier this month when a yellow pastel patterned cardigan worn by the princess from a popular British department store sold out in 24 hours.

"This is actually as simple as the relative size of the mens and womens fashion markets, by which I mean that Charlottes endorsement effect will likely be felt across a much broader range of products and brands or types of clothing than will Georges, allowing a greater scope for the monetization of her brand and hence a higher value," Robert Haigh, marketing and communications director of Brand Finance told Marie Claire.

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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte have arrived in Canada for #royalvisitcanada A post shared by Kensington Palace (@kensingtonroyal) on Sep 24, 2016 at 4:19pm PDT

That's not to say George isn't a trendsetter in his own right. Prince William and Kate Middleton's firstborn landed himself on GQ's best-dressed men of 2015 list, and has also had many of his outfits sell out online and in-store moments after he is spotted wearing them.

Still, both young royals have a long way to go before they bring in the dough their mom is estimated to command. According to Brand Finance, thanks to her fashion influence, the Duchess is worth a whopping 4.7 billion ($8.2 billion CAD).

Also on HuffPost
Its been more than a few years since Greater Torontos real estate professionals have felt disappointed with a spring selling season; in recent years the reaction has been closer to astonishment as the region hit one new record after another.

But this spring is shaping up differently. Chalk it up to an unusually rainy season; or concerns about the provincial Liberals new housing rules; or the federal Liberals' new mortgage rules last fall; or maybe just plain old buyer exhaustion  but things are changing in Torontos (formerly?) red-hot housing market.

And while there's little chance of the region's housing market suddenly becoming affordable overnight, there is reason to believe that in the months to come, it may be a little easier to buy a house in Greater Toronto, and a little harder to sell one.

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Here are four signs that Torontos housing bubble is beginning to deflate.

1. Sales are down

Home sales fell 6.7 per cent from March to April in Greater Toronto, and for the first time since 2013, they are down from the same month a year earlier, according to data released Monday by the Canadian Real Estate Association.

2. New home listings have soared

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There has been a sudden, sharp spike in the number of homes available for sale in Greater Toronto. It appears homeowners are taking advantage of rapid house price growth to cash out of the Toronto market.

There were 21,630 newly listed homes this April in the region, compared to 16,252 in April of last year  up more than 33 per cent in a year.

Its particularly pronounced in single-family homes. The number of those on sale soared by 50 per cent this April to its highest in at least five years, according to an analysis by Better Dwelling.

TD Bank economist Diana Petramala says that spike in listings has brought Toronto's market "well within balanced territory"  that's a big change from just a few months ago, when most market observers agreed Toronto was a "seller's market."

3. Buyers are hesitating

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After years of a growing frenzy in the housing market, Greater Toronto realtors say they're seeing signs of buyers pulling back from the market.

Sometimes properties are not selling right away, Royal LePage realtor Elli Davis told The Globe and Mail. Some are still a week. But some of them now I am seeing over 14 days, 20 days.

I would not say this market has fallen apart or anything like that, she added. I think it is just normalizing and levelling off.

Thats a fairly different tone from the one seen in previous spring selling seasons, when realtors were declaring a housing shortage as properties were snapped up amid panic buying.

4. Theres been a spike in searches for housing bubble

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According to Google Trends, searches for housing bubble have spiked in Canada in recent months to their highest level ever.

That might be a sign people are losing faith in house price growth. A similar jump in searches was seen in the U.S. prior to the burst of its housing bubble.

"Housing bubble" searches spiked in the U.S. in mid-2005, as house prices were growing at a fever pitch. Within 18 months, the U.S. market was seeing falling house prices, and search interest in the term housing bubble was on the decline.

Coming Soon: The Home Stretch Our weekly newsletter delivers the news and analysis you need on Canada's housing market. Sign up below and don't miss the first issue.

Also on HuffPost

What Toronto's Average House Price Will Buy You (April 2017) See Gallery
Heres something a little different: A home in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam is on sale on Craigslist. The asking price? A measly-sounding 2,099 bitcoin.

But thats not chump change  its C$4.85 million at current exchange rates, pricey even by Vancouver standards. The house is described as new in the ad and looks unlived-in in the pictures provided.

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The ad appears on the Vancouver and Hong Kong real estate pages of Craigslist. It doesnt list the number of bedrooms or bathrooms, or the square footage. Just that the owner will sell for bitcoin or Ethereum, another cryptocurrency.

The ad mentions that the house is in one of the hottest markets on the planet, voted #1 place to live in the world.

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That claim might be a little outdated at this point. Vancouvers housing market has seen considerable cooling over the past year.

In the wake of a provincial foreign buyer tax and Chinas crackdown on cash outflows, buyer interest has slowed. Home sales have fallen for much of the past year; nearly half the money flowing through the market has vanished; and price growth has stalled.

But if this ad is an indicator of anything, its that foreign buyers are still playing in Vancouvers housing market -- theyre just doing it more on the sly now.

China has been cracking down on cash outflows from its economy. The countrys investors, who are allowed to take no more than US$50,000 out of the country, are now required to sign a letter saying they will not use their money to buy residential real estate abroad, among other things.

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The crackdown has left many Chinese investors looking for new ways to get their money out of the country. Increasingly, it looks like the Bitcoin cryptocurrency  which has neither the transparency nor the regulation of regular currencies  is the way many are choosing to do it.

The Chinese government earlier this year started tightening its oversight of bitcoin, having noticed that the decline in Chinas renminbi coincided with a rise in the value of bitcoin. Some 98 per cent of bitcoin transactions had taken place in China recently, the Financial Times reported.

So a Vancouver house with an unidentified seller, seemingly unoccupied, posted for sale in Hong Kong and asking for payment in cryptocurrency  you put the pieces together.

And if youre planning to buy a house in Vancouver, you may want to stock up on some bitcoin first.

Coming Soon: The Home Stretch Our weekly newsletter delivers the news and analysis you need on Canada's housing market. Sign up below and don't miss the first issue.

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AlixKreil via Getty Images Summertime cityscape image of downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

It was during the early part of the new millennium when I joined a new creative organization in Manhattan to develop a client database. It was essentially pro bono work while I transitioned between jobs during the dot com market crash but the creative vibe, young energy, loft style office, and paid parking in Manhattan was all that a 20-something liberal arts graduate needed to be drawn in to do this gig.

The organization was pioneering something back then that was going to change the landscape of the entrenched fashion industry in the United States. It started out as a showcase for indie fashion designers and artists. It was the organization that placed a then unknown designer named Zac Posen in to the realm of top designers within a matter of months through the showcase at NY Fashion Fest, something unthinkable for any rookie fashion institute graduate.

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While the fashion powerhouses and traditional media continue to exert dominance over the industry, advents in social media, fashion bloggers and film have allowed the pervasiveness of fashion from confines of Bryant Park to a global audience that prefers to consume fashion in various ways that traditional incumbent players are not able to achieve.

Fashion film festivals began over a decade ago with most sources suggesting that the Fashion In Film Festival in London was the inaugural launch of this platform that has grown at a staggering pace since and created new fashion film festivals around the world, some of the prominent ones being the ones from Berlin, La Jolla, New York, Milan and London. It is considered to be one of the fastest growing segments in fashion and film.

Fashion in film is not a new concept. In fact, some film historians espouse the notion that it was fashion that allowed for the rise of the film industry to begin with. Product placements through film have also existed from its early days. Traditional film festivals around the world have become less about the films being showcased and more about red carpet fashion parade, at least in the perception of the purveyor and consumer.

What makes a Fashion Film Festival stand apart though is its ability to marry three elements - accessibility, affordability, artistic capability. Accessibility is delivered through social media to a global audience who may not always be willing or capable of attending traditional fashion festivals. Creating a short film, usually by a recent film institute graduate or upcoming filmmaker, makes for a symbiotic relationship between the fashion designer and the filmmaker at a very affordable cost. Artistic innovation through film and fashion brings forth the core elements of what defines film and fashion pursuits in the first place, something that otherwise tends to get washed out or sanitized through corporate interpretation of power players and mass scale producers.

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In essence, fashion film festivals became a much loved and desired for silent rebellion in the industry by the industry players and upcoming artists. In as much as the platform allows for a more democratized outreach, which benefits the independent or upcoming designer, the power players stand to benefit as well since it allows them to take a break from its corporate directive to pursuit artistic experiments that it perhaps could not even at the most avant garde fashion festival line up. It is the Off-Off-Broadway show to the traditional fashion festival line up. It is the conceptual car booth of a major automaker at the auto show. It is the place where the aspirant and the incumbent can wade in a pool of fun like a kids play zone to create something fantastic. The Berlin Fashion Film Festival describes the art of the fashion filmmaking well.

"They are using a short amount of time to build up a story, present and explore a thought and of course creating atmospheres - that stick in our minds and trigger our sensitivity for style, design and beyond that: our way of life!"

The Canadian International Fashion Film (CANIFFF) Festival debuted in Calgary in 2016. It was the first ever fashion film festival held in Canada and still remains the only platform in Canada. The choice of Calgary commonly referred to as Cowtown in local parlance, as the birthplace of Canada's fashion film festival, as opposed to the fashion power regions of Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, is both deliberate and accidental. The latter case being so because the founders happen to be from Calgary. The former because it was inevitable that a city emerging from its roots as an agricultural and energy powerhouse would eventually find ways to diversify and showcase both established and emerging creative talent of international stature. It would be an interesting mention here that another bovine inspired enclave turned in to one of the hippest and trendiest neighborhoods for the fashion crowd in New York City. From the Meatpacking District to Cowtown and across the globe, fashion is being consumed in different ways to suit the needs of the next generation. CANIFFF is part of this new wave in Canada. Perhaps Canada's Zac Posen moment is waiting to happen.

CANIFFF takes place in downtown Calgary on May 27th and 28th. For more information, visit http://www.canifff.com
When Canadians think of LGBTQ rights, a few things may come to mind: same-sex marriage being legalized in 2005, the annual Pride parades across the country, and discrimination protections enacted to protect the human rights of LGBTQ citizens. They might even think of openly gay political leaders, such as Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne or long-time Edmonton City councillor Michael Phair.

Recent events have acted as a reminder that Canada's tolerance should not be taken for granted. Around the world, LGBTQ citizens are suffering through horrific acts of abuse, being criminalized and jailed, and in Chechnya, even being sent to concentration camps.

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Chechnya has made headlines around the world for their recent wave of violence toward LGBTQ citizens. The Independent has reported on LGBTQ Chechens being subjected to beatings and electroshock torture inside these camps, which Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta claims are detaining more than 100 gay men.

But, while these reports are atrocious, it is important to remember they are not uncommon. Chechnya's violence does not occur in solitude, but operates within a state-sponsored homophobic framework still upheld by 74 states around the world. Anti-LGBTQ laws vary in severity from jail time for distributing LGBTQ "propaganda" to the death penalty for participating in LGBTQ relationships, and are especially prevalent across Africa, where homosexuality is outlawed in 34 countries. Across Africa particularly, it's easy to see the ripple effects of anti-LGBTQ legislation on society as a whole -- first and foremost, in the health of their population.

With LGBTQ relations being outlawed or heavily stigmatized across the continent, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has continued to thrive. Limited resources are poured into responses to human rights abuses, leaving critical HIV/AIDS services for vulnerable populations severely under-resourced. According to UNAIDS, sub-Saharan Africa maintains the highest HIV-positive population at approximately 24.7 million citizens. Due to stigma and harsh LGBTQ legal restrictions, those who may be HIV-positive live in fear of judgment and jail time, making it highly dangerous to disclose their status, or to get tested at all. As a result, this region also sees some of the lowest rates of treatment.

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However, as more progress has been made in Canada for both LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS-positive citizens, more support has reached communities who have been crippled by HIV/AIDS. While state-sponsored homophobia still runs rampant in Africa, many communities are slowly receiving more access to life-saving programs battling the disease on both a physical and mental level.

Without eradicating the stigma surrounding LGBTQ citizens, the world's most vulnerable populations will have little hope.

Programs have included anti-stigma work, which is key in battling homophobia, and by extension, HIV and AIDS. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, negative beliefs and actions towards gay men can affect both their physical and mental health; not only are rejected gay men less likely to be tested, but they are three times more likely to both use illegal drugs and have risky sex than those who are accepted by their communities. Both behaviours put LGBTQ citizens at an increased risk of contracting HIV.

Access to testing and antiretroviral therapy is also slowly improving as higher-quality healthcare works its way around the globe. According to WHO, antiretroviral therapy increased over 1,600 per cent between 2005 and 2015, bringing the total treated population to 12.1 million. Unfortunately, antiretroviral therapy rates are still lowest amongst concentrated populations of sex workers, injecting drug users, and gay men.

This discrepancy between HIV/AIDS treatment and LGBTQ rights is a continued battle, and hope lies in education and acceptance. Without eradicating the stigma surrounding LGBTQ citizens, the world's most vulnerable populations will have little hope of eradicating HIV/AIDS on a global scale.

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The Stephen Lewis Foundation recently launched the LGBTQ Initiative on May 12 at the sixth annual Dare to Wear Love fashion show and gala. The initiative aims to donate $1 million over two years to 25 LGBTQ communities across sub-Saharan Africa.

To learn more, visit www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/lgbtq-initiative.

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British Columbia just finished a provincial election and one of the big issues was the Site C dam. During the election, a lot of myths were spread about the project. In this post, I'd like to dispel some of the most egregious of these myths.

Myth #1: We won't need the electricity

When Canada agreed to the Paris Agreement on climate change, we committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. To achieve that goal, we will need to electrify everything we can, while simultaneously ensuring that the electricity used is low-carbon or carbon-free.

Canada generates almost 80 per cent of our electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. This means that even if we eliminated all our remaining electricity emissions we would only achieve 37 per cent of our goal. One of the biggest potential sources of greenhouse gas cuts is our transportation sector which represented 23 per cent Canada's emissions in 2014. As I have described, electrifying our transportation system will require a massive upgrade of our electricity generation capacity. By my calculations British Columbia will require the equivalent to the output of six Site C Dams just to electrify our transportation system. That doesn't even start to consider what we will need to reduce our reliance on natural gas.

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Don't trust my numbers? Well Environment and Climate Change Canada assessed our energy needs if we are to effectively fight climate change. Their report agreed that we will need to massively upgrade our electricity capacity to meet our Paris Agreement climate change goals. If we are to fight climate change, we will need the electricity produced by Site C.

Myth #2: We can just upgrade existing dams

In a recent report on the Site C Dam it was suggested that we use upgrades at existing facilities to cover our anticipated electricity demand. The reality is that existing systems are pretty much at capacity. For most of our dams it is not the number of generators that limit yearly generation but the size of the reservoirs behind the dams (the amount of water that can be converted into electricity). The whole reason Site C is being added to the existing Peace dam network is to increase the reservoir volume behind dams in B.C.

Note I say dam network, we are not talking about a single dam on a pristine river. We are talking about a dam just downriver from two additional dams (and thus the name Site C). That is one of the reasons the dam is being placed where it is; because it takes advantage of the storage capacity of the two upriver dams to reduce the size of its reservoir.

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Myth #3: Site C will put our food security at risk

One of strangest arguments against Site C is that it will put our food security at risk. In 2011, there were approximately 4.6 million hectares in British Columbia's agricultural land reserve (ALR) and 27 per cent of B.C.'s ALR was in the Peace Regional District. Of that 4.6 million hectares, approximately 2.6 million hectares was being farmed with 825,000 hectares of that farmed land being in the Peace District. According to the official numbers that means the Site C dam will flood approximately 0.4 per cent of the agricultural land in the Peace District or 0.2 per cent of the agricultural land in B.C.

Doesn't this put these food security arguments into perspective? We currently have almost 2 million hectares of ALR that we aren't even bothering to farm (including 426,000 in the Peace District). We aren't going to go hungry if we flood 5,000 - 10,000 hectares of land in the Peace.

As for the claim that the land to be flooded could feed 1 over million people? Well that claim simply holds no water as I detail at my blog. Moreover, if the area being flooded could feed one million, then the existing 825,000 hectares of ALR land in the Peace should be able to feed almost 140 million Canadians, which makes that food security argument moot anyways.

Myth #4 Lots of scientists are against the project

Another trope I've seen is that a group of "concerned scholars" have signed a letter condemning the project. The problem is that the list is made up mostly of scholars with no expertise in energy policy. If I was looking for comments on themes of embodiment and liminality or wanted an Australian view on gender and cultural studies then this would be the group I would talk to; but only a handful of the signees actually work in the fields covered by the statement. Appeals to authority only work if the people being cited are actually authorities in that field.

To conclude, there are reasonable arguments why we shouldn't build the Site C dam. Unfortunately, the activists keep concentrating on these ridiculous topics that are probably wrong instead. As a pragmatic environmentalist concerned about climate change, the project, with all its warts, looks like the best way to add a significant amount of low-carbon electricity to our grid, just as we will start needing it to continue our fight against climate change.

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By Craig and Marc Kielburger

Amid the constant crackle of radios and chatter of inmates, surprising sounds linger in the prison halls.

A baby's coo. A mother's gentle soothing. The creak of a rocking chair, rhymes recited from a children's book, scratches of a crayon.

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Behind the barbed wire fence at Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, 50 kilometres east of Vancouver, is a state of the art nursery. It's one of the only mother-child units in a Canadian prison system that leaves many children without mothers.

In fact, Alouette is the only mother-child unit in a provincial-level institution, where 6,000 women serve time in 18 facilities across the country (there are others in federal prisons, but the vast majority of women are sentenced provincially). Experts estimate 20,000 Canadian children are separated from their mothers because of incarceration every year.

"We judge these women. We say, you're a bad woman, you must be a bad mother, so we punish the child as well," says Dr. Ruth Elwood Martin, director of the Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education at the University of British Columbia and a former prison physician.

Time with their children is incentive for women to turn their lives around.

Children behind bars may sound like fodder for a juicy story or a bad comedy. But over 90 countries around the world -- including Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany -- have laws allowing prison child care in some form. Eligible women undergo rigorous screening to ensure their children aren't at risk, and the programs have proven benefits.

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At Alouette, inmate mothers raise their children under supervision, receive parenting and first aid classes, as well as babysitting support. At age four, children transition to living there part time as they begin school.

Medical studies show that keeping newborns with their incarcerated mothers is the best thing for the baby's health. Time together leads to improved social and emotional growth, limits anxiety and depression, and boosts immune system development.

It's also good for the mother's well-being and rehabilitation. Time with their children is incentive for women to turn their lives around and leads to lower recidivism rates.

Bonding time can also heal societal trauma and familial wounds, says Martin, but for most inmate mothers without access to facilities, that opportunity is lost.

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Critics say prisons are the new residential schools, contributing to the breakup of indigenous families as the number of indigenous women in Canadian prisons has grown over 100 per cent since 2001.

"We have an opportunity to break that cycle." -- Dr. Ruth Elwood Martin

Healing family ties is a major part of reconciliation, and prisons offer a unique opportunity to address some of the residual trauma by supporting family bonds.

"We're dealing with tragically high numbers of indigenous women, many who experienced trauma or substance abuse themselves," says Martin. "We have an opportunity to break that cycle."

For two decades, Martin has been advocating for mothers and babies behind bars, calling for mother-child units in all Canadian correctional facilities.

We're echoing her call. Our prison system is meant for rehabilitation, not punishing Canada's most vulnerable families.

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The damaging effects of separation can be permanent, Martin says. "Once you take a baby away from its mother, there's no going back."

Craig and Marc Kielburger are the co-founders of the WE movement, which includes WE Charity, ME to WE Social Enterprise and WE Day.

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Violence, guiding, forgery: observers assessment is strict (video)

The quality of holding Yerevan Council of Elders elections was lower compared with that of the parliamentary elections. Observer organizations record, in the polling stations and their neighborhood there was violent atmosphere, observers work was hindered. Daniel Ioannisyan, member of Independent observer initiative says, For example in 6/09, 8/19 polling stations violence was used against our observers, in a number of other polling stations, 3/11, 3/19, 9/03, the observers were threatened. There were false observers in the polling stations, who werent supposed to follow the work of the committee, but guide the voting process of citizens. Such a case was revealed in 8/36 polling station. Yelk alliance member Anahit Bakhshyan revealed it, These women have no right to participate as observers, as their names arent included in the organizations. False observers, according to the trustee of Yelk alliance Tatev Khachatryan, were involved in vote rigging, Two observers in many cases guided the people, and they did it together with the members of the committee and trustees. False observers, who had been revealed, hurried to leave 8/36 polling station. Observer organizations also witnessed such cases. According to the words of human rights activist Arthur Sakunts, free will of voters was widely suppressed. During Yerevan Council of Elders elections, the voters werent free to make their choice not only in the polling booth, but also in terms of coming to voting. Violence was used also against journalists. Alarms on vote rigging, as well as violent atmosphere arent paid appropriate attention by the law enforcement bodies. Tigran Yegoryan, project coordinator of Europe in Law Association, is sure, The state displays intolerance towards the people, who struggle for protection of rights, and they are persecuted. Observer organizations are displeased with the inactivity of the CEC, which didnt react to the facts on vote rigging in an appropriate way. For example, false observers were allowed to enter the polling stations. Human rights activist Arthur Sakunts notes, The Central Electoral Commission is a tool for the Republican Party of Armenia. It must make decisions and act according to the interests of the HHK. Tigran Yegoryan agrees to that viewpoint, It is complete usurpation of power by one party in all the levels of the authority. The observer organizations are sure that the registered vote rigging cases essentially affected the results of Yerevan Council of Elders elections.
America is facing a growing threat to the health of its citizens. Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass the American Health Care Act (AHCA). If the bill becomes law, it could leave millions in the U.S. without health care. And it could have an impact in Canada, too -- but not for the reasons you might expect.

The confusion around health care in America is palpable. Just over a month ago, efforts to pass the AHCA imploded before the bill could even be brought to a vote. Now there is a real chance that it could come to fruition, transforming the landscape of American health care for the second time in a decade.

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Why is the issue of health care in the U.S. so fraught? And is Canada immune to the social whiplash underway just south of us? As physicians observing from both sides of the border, we see two key reasons why this issue continues to polarize opinion in the U.S. -- but it is ultimately trade policy, not health policy, that will put Canadian medicare in the crosshairs.

First, unlike Canadians, Americans have not yet come to view health care as an expression of core national values, deserving of protection as a fundamental right of citizenship. In Canada, there is no serious doubt about whether or not the country should continue to have universal health coverage. Rather, the debate is mostly centered around how to expand public financing to broaden coverage (for example, to include prescription medicines and home care on a universal basis) and how improve systems of delivery to make care better and reduce wait times.

This is because the choice to offer universal health coverage is central to the Canadian identity. For Canadians, health care arose from a national determination to take care of each other during times of need. But the U.S. is still actively wrestling with the question of what it means to offer health care to citizens and where health care fits in the country's values system.

But Canadians should not feel smug.

Second, the U.S. lacks a structural component that has been at the core of Canadian health care for decades -- the federal requirement to provide insurance for all necessary doctor and hospital services, sustained through a single payer that guarantees coverage for essential services. In the U.S., there has been no such federal legislative push, and little talk of bringing health care under the umbrella of a single, accountable and democratically supported vision.

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The existing health-care law in the U.S., the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is a patchwork of legislative compromises and deals struck between interest groups, administered by many different stakeholders. While the legislative architecture of Canadian health care has unified the system under the Canada Health Act and buffered it from multiple challenges, the more ad hoc nature of the ACA has left it vulnerable to the type of existential threat it now faces from the Republican Congress.

Until Americans decide that health care is a right that should be supported by the federal government as an extension of national values, and resolve to create a legislative structure with teeth to support that vision, the health-care debate cannot be resolved because it is not grounded in any public consensus.

But Canadians should not feel smug.

Not only are internal challenges an ongoing threat to Canadian medicare, the ripples of the Trump administration are soon to be felt north of the border and will test the resolve of Canadian governments.

What does Trump's agenda mean for Canadian health care?

Other than driving doctors to activism that might even send them north across the border, threats to the Canadian system as a result of the Trump agenda relate less to the repeal of Obamacare and more to his intention to renegotiate NAFTA.

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Not far from here, health-care insurance is a good that is sold in the marketplace like softwood lumber.

Canadian health care has explicitly been protected under NAFTA, shielding the system from American industry that would otherwise bring not just "American style" health care, but actual American health care across the border. If strong provisions that exclude health care from free trade are not maintained, and in fact strengthened, in any renegotiated trade agreement, American insurance companies and health care delivery organizations could claim the right to a Canadian private health care "market."

As private insurers stand poised to lose market share in the U.S. with the "repeal and replace" gambit, hunger for access to a new market is sure to grow.

Canadian governments and citizens need to remember that not far from here, health-care insurance is a good that is sold in the marketplace like softwood lumber. If the health-care battle and the free trade battle intersect at the Canada-U.S. border, Canadians may become more than interested observers of the Trump presidency.

Danielle Martin, MD, is Vice President Medical Affairs and Health System Solutions at Women's College Hospital in Toronto and an expert with EvidenceNetwork.ca. Her book, Better Now: Six big ideas to improve health care for all Canadians, was published in January.

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Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, is the Robert A Knox professor and Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. His book, Healthier: Fifty thoughts on the foundations of population health, will be published in June.

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In order to get pregnant, it is critical that the egg and sperm meet at exactly the right time. Ovulation tracking can help a couple plan intercourse around her most fertile time of the month. It has become big business and there are many different options out there to choose from. As a fertility doctor, I have some patients who tell me they are using multiple different test methods simultaneously! I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the most fundamental part of a woman's fertility: ovulation.

Men don't have to worry much about timing. Sperm can live in a woman's body for at least three days, sometimes up to five days. This is partly because a normal sperm sample contains more than 15 million sperm, leaving lots of spares if some start to die. Eggs are much more fragile. First, because there is typically only one egg released from the ovary (ovulated) each month. Second, eggs do not last long. After the egg is released, it is ready for fertilization in about 20 minutes and it remains useable for the next 12 to 24 hours.

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Here are the best ways to tell if you're ovulating:

Cycle tracking

Cycle tracking, otherwise known as the "calendar method," is one of the oldest means of timing ovulation. It is based on the principle that after an egg is released, the sac that it came from is transformed into a temporary type of cyst called a corpus luteum (CL). The CL makes a hormone called progesterone, which is responsible for keeping the uterine lining healthy to allow a pregnancy to implant and grow. The CL only lasts for 12 to 14 days. Therefore, if you count backwards 14 days from the first day of your period, you can estimate when you would have ovulated. For example, if your period comes every 30 days, then you likely ovulate around day 16 to 18. This method only works for women who have regular periods that are 21 to 35 days apart. If your cycles are outside of this range, then a fertility doctor can help figure out how to get you to ovulate more regularly.

Fertility Apps

There are countless apps available for iPhone and Android that allow a woman to enter information about her cycles. These are handy because they often allow you to set reminders about upcoming events, such as fertile days and periods. Apps are basically the high-tech version of the calendar method described above. Basic cycle-tracking apps are not personalized, meaning that they assume you have a 28-day cycle with ovulation on day 14. More sophisticated apps can take into account varying cycle lengths and try to estimate your fertile days based on your past history.

A fertility doctor can help find an alternative method.

Ovulation predictor kits

Ovulation predictor kits (OPKs) are available online and in drugstores. They use urine samples to detect the hormones associated with ovulation. (The first pee in the morning is usually optimal because it is the most concentrated). In my opinion, the simplest OPKs are the best. These are the strips that contain two lines aimed at detecting the luteinizing hormone (LH) surge. The LH surge is the hormone signal from the brain that tells the ovary to release an egg. From the start of the surge until ovulation is typically 34 to 36 hours. In total, LH is detectable for no more than 48 hours in most women. So, if you detect ovulation with an OPK, then intercourse is best timed that day or the next day. The sperm should be waiting for the egg!

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Digital ovulation kits look for two hormones: estrogen (E3G) and LH. They are designed to indicate when an egg is making a high amount of estrogen as it nears ovulation. This can span several days over a woman's "fertile window," culminating in the detection of the LH surge. Both types of OPKs are accurate, but they don't work for every woman. About 10 to 15 per cent of women experience difficulty with these kits. A fertility doctor can help find an alternative method.

Basal Body Temperature

Basal body temperature (BBT) charting involves using a sensitive thermometer (one that can measure 0.1 degree Celsius increments) to chart your temperature daily. The temperature reading should be taken orally, first thing in the morning before any activity or food. BBT graphs are available online and through apps to help you record the results. After ovulation, progesterone causes a slight increase in temperature of about 0.5 degrees Celcius. Therefore, once your temperature has risen you may have passed the most fertile days. BBT charting is best used to understand your cycles and plan for future months. It can be recorded in conjunction with cervical mucous, which is normally slippery like egg-whites around ovulation and becomes thicker once progesterone is made. "Mittelschmerz" is the medical name for the pain some women can feel during ovulation.

Blood tests

Your doctor can order blood tests to detect ovulation. The most common blood test is progesterone level. It is typically ordered in the third week of the cycle around day 21 to 23. A level above 10 nmol/L (Canadian units) is evidence of ovulation. Don't read too much into your absolute level! Progesterone is released in pulses after ovulation, so even numbers that seem 'low' might be perfectly normal.

Luteinizing hormone (LH) can also be detected at high levels in the blood for the 48 hours around ovulation. This test is not commonly performed however, because it requires frequent trips to the laboratory for blood testing, and interpretation by a doctor.

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In summary, ovulation testing can be very helpful for couples that want to take a proactive approach to their fertility. They do not have to be performed every month. Once you understand the pattern of your ovulation then you may want to stop testing. Some of my patients find ovulation testing frustrating, costly and stressful. If this is the case for you, then ask for help from your doctor.

Also, keep in mind that these tests are meant to be a general guide about ovulation timing only. There are other factors that are important for fertility such as egg quality and sperm count. If you are under 35 then it is reasonable to try on your own for at least a year before seeking help from a fertility doctor. If you are over 35 then we suggest six months and women over 40 should seek advice right away. Every woman is unique! See your doctor to help personalize your fertility plan.
Kesu01 via Getty Images Modern wireless technology and social media illustration

My strongest community exists on Whatsapp, the platform of choice for my closest, yet geographically distant, friends to discuss their daily successes and struggles. Social media is revolutionizing our relationships, from how we form personal networks to global campaigns.

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Global networks formed through technology are powerful tools for girls and women to make their voices heard. In this era of connectivity, young women are using social media to step to the forefront of important societal moments, support one another and capture the attention of global leaders.

Perhaps no recent movement offers young women a more relevant blueprint for action than the Women's March. What started as a march became a global phenomenon that used social media to bring people together in the real world while also sharing the experience online. While the turnout, estimated at around five million globally, was impressive, the social community that it helped create is even more remarkable. The global online threads encouraged discussions about inclusion and guided women to continue their advocacy work far beyond the initial event.

As the Women's March showed, people no longer need live in a major city in order to mobilize for a cause. Gone are the days of needing to picket the White House or bus to protests like those in Springfield or Washington to make a point. Now, even the 35 Marchers that rallied in Zebulon, Georgia could tag photos of their demonstration to Twitter and join the global conversation as easily as my friends and I did when marching with the heaving patchwork of protestors moving towards London's Trafalgar Square.

Technology is bridging not only geographical gaps, but cultural ones, as communities open new spaces for inclusive conversations. Young people have the opportunity to harness social media and enhance their communities through the discussion and celebration of differences. When the Women's March was denounced in threads online for excluding women of color, LGBTQ+ people and even conservatives, organizers made an active effort to address their mistakes and recruit a more diverse group of people.

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Online communities are extending more than a warm welcome to members - they're also able to extend the lifespan of social movements. Months after the Women's March, online communities like the Facebook group Pantsuit Nation continue to issue calls to action and act as support networks. March organizers provided their followers with tips to help make their voices heard, such as writing elected officials and taking advantage of their rights to vote. These communities are now ready to mobilize for a cause they find important, whether political, social or economic.

See the need for a conversation? Start it with a hashtag. Looking for a community? Discover one online, or start it yourself. So, fire up your phone, open Twitter, send a message, take a Snap - and ignite a social movement! Technology is a powerful tool for you to find - and empower - your community, wherever it may be. Use it with purpose.

By Kate Cyr, G(irls)20 Delegate, USA
When a master craftsman refinishes wood furniture, he'll clean it up, strip off the gunk, and, with care and attention, bring out the detail and grain until it glows. You'd never know it had been sitting around for a quarter century, neglected.

That is exactly what Noah Mintz at Lacquer Channel has done to Art Bergmann's eponymous 1991 album. Re-titled Remember Her Name, the re-mastered recording glows. There's even a new, old song: Wide On/Hard Body. It has been treated to a proper cleanup and polish. Each track sparkles. Everything seems tighter, punchier, more in your face. There's a clarity to the instrumentation which makes the album sonically fresh. It sounds brand new.

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Just like that furniture, there must be quality underneath, and this is one of the best showcases of Art's ability. Excepting references to Knowlton Nash and East Germany, the album isn't dated at all, neither musically nor lyrically. Remember Her Name is a great opportunity to discover - and re-discover -this master work by one of Canada's greatest talents.

Remember Her Name is available on iTunes and others. And, for the first time on vinyl, from Paper Bag Records.

I spoke with Art from his home in Airdrie, Alberta:

JRM: What made you decide to re-release the album?

ART: That was Phil's idea and I just went along with it. We're trying to build up whatever catalogue we can grab to (weewerk) and then shop through the incredible Mr. Phil [Klygo]. Get some cash-flow happening maybe, through ownership of my damn legacy. We were trying to figure out how to get some of my old records back, and that one we figured would be the easiest to grab. Polygram doesn't exist anymore. But the original guys from Duke Street [records] insist on hanging on to my Sexual Roulette and Crawl with Me.

JRM: Most people don't realize that record companies hold the rights, and artists don't own their own work.

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ART: Yeah. That one just seemed like the easiest one to grab and put it out, and then Paper Bag Records out of Toronto came on board, so that helped. I suppose I could re-record all of them, but there's kind of a magic to that at the time, with the machinery available at the time, that makes it kinda inimitable.

JRM: What has been the response?

ART: I'm getting a lot more press for this than The Apostate, which I'm really quite pissed off about. It's getting more attention than my last, really great record got.

JRM: I was listening to the political songs on the album yesterday. Twenty six years ago yet it seems like it could be about yesterday's news.

ART: Yeah, you can fit it in with Trump being Putin's... "cock-holster", was it? (Laughs)

JRM: I looked up events of 1991: the first Gulf War was underway, Yugoslavia was about to break up, Rodney King had just been beaten by the cops, and a U.S. Supreme Court judge was in a sexual harassment scandal. Now, there's a war in the Middle East, there's threats of war in Eastern Europe, police brutality and racism are all over the news, and the US president has admitted to sexual harassment. Basically nothing's changed.

ART: Correct-o! Correctamundo! I don't know how to process it all. There's my initial scream, but on the whole, everything just makes me nauseous. The whole... everything. Just the fact that that man has taken over every news feed, and you don't even hear about 3 million starving in South Sudan, Somalia, probably half due to climate change, civil wars, and proxy wars, Congo exploding... you don't hear about any of that.

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JRM: In 1994, no one heard about Rwanda until it was over...

ART: Yeah. Somebody better write a song for Mr. Dallaire. He's one of our few heroes, I think.

JRM: The relationship songs for this album: When you wrote these songs you and Sherri were fresh, were new, right? [Sherri Decembrini is Art's wife.]

ART: Brand-spanking-new, yep.

JRM: Twenty-six years later, do these songs still hold true?

ART: Yeah, they're still true. I still love her like crazy.

JRM: And did she turn out to ruin your life?

ART: Not quite in that positive/negative aspect, no. We went here and there together. We both had our own previous lives and amalgamated them. I don't want to get too intimate about it. We went down several dark hallways and came out the other side. Some people wake up and split up at the age of 70, 80... and, ummm, I think we'll do it before then! [laughs] No, I think we're in it until we die.

JRM: Are you gaining new fans or is this for the same long-time fans that have been following you forever?

ART: All thirty of them? Yeah! [laughs] New fans? Yeah, they pop up here and there. And there's the old ones that pop out of the woodwork that I haven't heard from in years and years and years. My biggest mistake was probably giving up for ten years or so. In spite of my other issues, I should have kept going, but things just got extremely frustrating.

JRM: Any new material on the horizon?

ART: Oh sure. Who can ignore the mess that is providing great material? Yeah, I got a bunch of new songs.

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JRM: Looking back at the Art Bergmann you were when this album came out, does this senior Art Bergmann have anything to say to that guy?

ART: Ummm, not really. To be that kind of person, you have to be narcissistic for a couple hours a night. And I lost that desire. So I would say: keep at it until a trusted person tells you you're being an asshole, and then stop it! So now I'm becoming a shoe-gazing folkie.

JRM: Can you change the world, Art?

ART: NOPE!

(weewerk) is booking Art for concerts and festivals. Check here for dates.
Dr. Amina Wadud critiqued that my recent blog only contained male voices. This is a legitimate criticism. I had the title changed to include the word "male."

My choice was intentional to showcase support for a minority view from traditionally trained male scholars, in order to reach out to orthodox Muslim men.

However, according to Dr. Mohamamd Akram Nadwi, Muslim women scholars are an integral part of the Islamic tradition. He notes that famous male scholars would consult and study from them without hesitation.

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Women voices have also brought temperance as in the case of Amrah bint Abdur Rahman, who issued her scholarly opinion to save a Christian man from getting his hand severed.

In a similar vein, I'd like to highlight ten Muslim women, who face huge resistance for pushing boundaries.

1)Amina Wadud

Dr. Wadud has inspired a whole generation of Muslim scholars, both male and female. She can be rightfully called the mother of progressive Muslim thinkers and activists. However, leading prayers, pushing boundaries with reformist views and affirming LGBTQ Muslims has earned her threats and scorn by Muslim men. She remains undaunted.

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In a recent a YouTube video, Dr. Samar Habib, noted for her seminal scholarship on homosexuality and Islam, captured her thoughts as follows.

"God in a sense is queer ... not defined or confined to masculine or feminine, ... through transgender we can ... come closer to understanding the nature of God ... it's through those very marginalized people that in society we traditionally repress or deny or negate, those are the very people through whom one can begin to understand ... the transcendent, transgender nature of God."

2)Kecia Ali

Amongst other academic endeavours, Dr. Ali has expanded our understanding of the Muslim marriage contract and on the reasoning of the jurist Imam Shafi.

Like Dr. Behnam Sadeghi, who showed how Hanafi jurists went against clear texts to forbid women from going out to pray, she has shown how Shafi went against the plain text. She writes:

"in Shafii's choice to interpret the Messenger's declaration that virgins must be consulted as saying something other than what seems obvious, he sidesteps rejection, instead shifting the meaning in such a way that the original sense is resisted."

3)Laury Silvers

Dr. Silvers work has focused on feminism and Sufi women, a glimpse of which is found in her blog. She helped co-found the religiously plural, gender equal and LGBTQ affirming el-Tawhid Juma Circle in Toronto.

Having written a classic paper on women leading prayers, she empathetically depicts the mainstream Muslim orthodoxy as those who "what to provide certainty and protect the community from doubts that they fear will ultimately cause chaos."

4)Hina Azam

Dr. Azam has enriched our understanding of Islamic jurisprudence especially as it addresses sexual violence. This is significant, as sometimes women who are raped have been persecuted under laws where they are punished for adultery.

5)Nevin Reda

Nevin Reda is part of an inclusive mosque in Toronto. Her academic research on the Qur'an is enriched with biblical studies. Her article on affirming women Imams was met with resistance. Indeed, she reminds us that, "we need to stay away from ancestor veneration and scholar veneration and remain faithful to the one true God."

6)Ayesha Chaudhry

Dr. Chaudhry has advanced scholarship on Islamic law and domestic violence especially as it relates to verse 4:34. She is active beyond academia in civil society, which allows us to question her exclusion in all Muslim male panels.

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7)Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Dr. Hosseini is a prolific academic and founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. I drew upon her article where she captures a Hojjat el-Islam (authority on Islam), who offered ten arguments supporting the optionality of the headscarf.

8)Rana Dajani

Dr. Dajani mentions that she wears a hijab as a practicing Muslim and teaches evolution to University students in Jordan. This is significant given many conservative Muslim youth reject evolution. She has detailed discussions with students telling them when Darwin's ideas became synonymous with Western encroachment and how many Muslim scholars supported evolution.

9)Sa'diyya Shaikh

Dr. Shaikh focuses on Qur'anic exegesis and Sufi texts. She has emphasized "Tafsir of Praxis," which includes experiential and everyday modes of understanding Quranic teachings. This allows for the contribution of both women and LGBTQ Muslims.

10)Orbala

A Muslim feminist blogger and doctoral student, she is a staunch supporter of LGBTQ Muslims. Post Orlando, she strongly asserted that "the mainstream religious opinion on homosexuality" is responsible for "violence against the Muslim and non-Muslim LGBTQ community."

She rejects the "permanent celibacy test" argument as harmful and asserts:

"You simply can't condemn an essential, integral part of a person's identity, of their being, and say nonsense that begins with "but." I get that you're trying really hard not to be called out on your homophobia ..."

This is only a snapshot of a huge list of Muslim women scholars, who are often sidelined in all male Muslim panels.

In essence, when we are unable to locate female voices, it necessitates that we acknowledge that significant voices are missing. This is important because often their contributions are sidelined and worse, appropriated as normative positions without acknowledgment.

Additionally, male scholars like Habib Jifri have asked women to become jurists to assert their rights but when senior scholars like Dr. Wadud do so, they are harangued by barely pubescent men.

This must change for how can we ever have ijma (consensus) when we ignore the voices of women scholars.

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A second-grader is inspired after attending a school day demonstration from an astronaut who just came back from space. A six-year-old is fascinated with the migration of monarch butterflies, and wants to know more. A high school student has just learned to code, and looks into college programs that will align with her newfound passion.

This next generation will go on to make incredible and essential breakthroughs in technology, medicine, engineering, mathematics, and more. Their innovations will change the course of history, making our lives better by discovering the next big things, the improved medicines, the automatic machines, and the solutions to challenges we face. These modern creations will help to make our economies richer and more prosperous.

Innovation itself is a main driver of sustained economic growth. It leads to new markets, new possibilities, new technologies, and new health practices. But innovation does not occur in a vacuum, it emerges from a base of knowledge and ideas. This ground-level understanding of how things work comes from science and the people who do it.

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This is why we are celebrating Science Odyssey 2017, a ten-day celebration of science in Canada. It was created to engage Canadians, notably young people, and to foster what I like to call a "culture of curiosity" across the country.

As Science Minister, I cannot stress how important it is to encourage this thirst for knowledge in Canada's young population. All young Canadians should be able to see themselves taking part in the wonderful world of science. We need to create and maintain this culture of curiosity so that our population can be inspired to ask bold questions, and seek new knowledge.

In addition to Science Odyssey 2017, we have launched a social media campaign to raise awareness about all the ways youth can engage in science to make Canada more prosperous. We want young boys, young girls, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and all Canadians to #ChooseScience by discovering all the ways research improves our daily lives.

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Throughout my own academic career, I have always advocated for diversity in science, and have tried to foster young people's interests as early on as possible. I firmly believe that the key to early engagement is being able to speak the audience's language. That's why our government is investing to teach students from kindergarten to Grade 12 to code. In the world of tomorrow, this skill will be as essential as reading and writing.

We have also provided close to $11 million for the PromoScience program which encourages young Canadians interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to excel in their field. This funding is intended to support increasing the diversity of youth engaged in STEM. We are also supporting up to 10,000 new international work-integrated learning and co-op opportunities per year.

We want to see more young Canadians getting the well-rounded education they need to start a good job after they graduate. Through initiatives like these and more, the Government of Canada is investing to create a scientifically-engaged workforce that will place Canada front and centre on the international stage.

I encourage all Canadians to participate in the fun science-based activities and events planned for Science Odyssey 2017. I hope the next ten days will be packed full of wide eyes and stimulating moments. Together, we are inspiring Canada's next generation of leaders. It is our responsibility to encourage them to dream their greatest dream, to take every opportunity they are offered, and to remind them that "impossible" is just a dare to make it happen.

The Honourable Kirsty Duncan PC, MP

Minister of Science

Science Odyssey takes place from May 12-21, 2017. For more information, go to www.science.gc.ca

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Symantec's 2016 Internet Security Threat Report shows that almost half of all cyber security attacks target small businesses with less than 250 employees. According to the U.S. National Cyber Security Alliance, 60 percent of small businesses cannot sustain their businesses beyond six months after a cyber-attack.

Even big companies can experience a long-term hit to their brand and revenue after an attack. Target's massive breach in 2013 affected the personal information of 60 million and the credit-card details for 42 million customers. Four years after the Target attack, Rippleshot estimated total losses had reached $2.5 billion.

Criminals take the path of least resistance. The weakest link is the employee. Data breaches are mostly the result of employee error or an inside job, according to the ACC Foundation: State of Cybersecurity Report. The best way for organizations to protect themselves is to create and foster a culture of cyber security awareness.

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An organization's security culture always exists and is either weak or strong, according to Ira Winker, author of Advanced Persistent Security. He defines security culture as the result of consistent behaviours by individuals within an organization. To create consistent behaviours, the organization must create awareness of the desired behaviours by having a good security awareness program.

Here are 6 strategies to build an organization's cyber security culture

1. Embrace organizational security top down

Executive management and business owners must go beyond funding a security awareness program. Instead, they need to be visible on screen and in-person promoting the same key messages to employees during training and at other company events. Executives must also communicate and set priorities with middle management and everyone on the board to encourage employees to integrate security practices every day.

2. Establish security policies, standards, and procedures

Everyone in an organization including employees, contractors, management and the board should have acceptable behaviours that are defined and written down. There should be little confusion about what behaviour is appropriate and consistent for the organization's security culture.

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For example, at the National Security Council, all employees wear badges. Anyone not wearing a badge will be reminded by coworkers or flagged by security to put it on immediately. Employees are not to talk about work related topics outside work. Work related documents do not leave the building and every bag is searched as employees leave the building. This set of consistent behaviours is documented and practiced by all employees that became the NSA security culture.

3. Create ongoing security awareness programs that are fun and engaging

Many organizations have a once a year training period about security awareness. To keep employees motivated, training should be delivered throughout the year in small groups covering simple and easy to understand topics. Gamification reinforces learning and encourages desired behaviours in fun simple ways.

Examples of gamification include introducing contests, points, funny newsletters and other activities that motivate and encourage employee participation. The goal is make security awareness an ongoing reminder that rewards people for taking certain actions in the same way people use frequently flier miles or grocery rewards points at retailers. Many organizations have a once a year training period about security awareness. To keep employees motivated, training should be delivered throughout the year in small groups covering simple and easy to understand topics.

Gamification reinforces learning and encourages desired behaviours in fun simple ways. Examples of gamification include introducing contests, points, funny newsletters and other activities that motivate and encourage employee participation. The goal is make security awareness an ongoing reminder that rewards people for taking certain actions in the same way people use frequently flier miles or grocery rewards points at retailers.

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4. Focus on security basics

Organizations often forget to train employees on basic security hygiene. According to a study by CompTIA, "nearly 50 percent of surveyed employees never received training from their employers."

The most common cyber attacks and data breaches can be prevented by simple security measures like the following.

a) Strong password policy: Employees need to be told why having a complex password makes it much harder for a cyber criminal to break in.

b) Patches: Organizations need to set up a patch program where all software and systems are updated regularly including emergency fixes.

c) Enable 2FA (two-factor authentication): This added layer of security requires the person to type their regular password followed by a one-time code when logging into an account or service. Many employees do not know how to set 2FA up or find it inconvenient. Additional training will show employees the negative consequences of not using 2FA.

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d) Monitor and enforce access: Limiting access to certain software and systems limits risk. Rules must be put into place to restrict employee access to only what they need and use. At the same time, access must be either terminated or disabled when an employee or contractor leaves or goes on vacation, based on the company policy. Log and flag a user's behaviour for unusual login times in the day or evening. Having a series of checks and balances lays the groundwork for a good security culture.

5. View security as an enabler

Employees often associate IT Security departments and personnel with doing something wrong or as the "department of no". This negative image of security does not encourage employees to ask questions around security awareness or report unusual emails or activity. Employees need to be allowed to challenge a colleague when they see examples of poor security in the organization. They must also have the trust of management and security in that they will not be punished for doing something wrong. Instead, they should be allowed to get clarification, asking for further training and be allowed to learn from mistakes rather than be reprimanded.

6. Assist telecommuting employees to work safely

The changing workplace allows employees to work from coffee shops, automobiles, hotels and home offices. Employees need an open and trusting line of communication with security staff and management to minimize taking short cuts with customer data or work files. For example, virtual private networks are relatively simple and easy to use. Employees must be educated that a remote workforce requires additional steps that reduce the potential for a cyber attack and data loss.

Creating a cyber security culture is the responsibility of every employee, manager, and contractor to prevent against a cyber breach or cyber attack. Engaged employees who receive ongoing awareness training and communication fosters a strong cyber security culture.
Canada prides itself on being a country that espouses the values of fairness and equality. We must recognize, however, that Canada's history is one of settler colonialism, a violent process by which settlers from foreign lands dispossessed the indigenous inhabitants of this land, and established a society against the interests and consent of the people who were already living here.

While Canada is beginning to come to terms with this reprehensible past through acknowledging these truths, and is beginning the long and difficult journey of reconciliation, the same cannot be said for Canada's close friend and ally, Israel, with whom Canada asserts it has "shared values."

Israel, too, prides itself on being a country that it claims is a beacon of fairness and equality. However, Israel was established as a state -- similarly to Canada -- through the violent dispossession of the people who were already there, and who already had a society rooted deeply in that land for generations. This violent process of dispossession is referred to by the people who were already living there--the Palestinians--as "the catastrophe," or in Arabic, the Nakba.

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Annually, on May 15, Palestinians in countries all over the world commemorate the Nakba, including in Canada. This national day of commemoration is known as "Nakba Day." Israel, sadly, refuses to come to terms with its violent history of dispossession of those who were already living there. Rather than embrace difficult yet morally essential conversations about what took place, Israel chooses to vilify those who even speak about the Nakba, and alongside its unconditional supporters abroad, seeks to silence any commemoration of it.

The Nakba often refers to events occurring between 1947-1949, in which the Palestinians were violently displaced from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed. Many are beginning to see the Nakba as an ongoing process of dispossession, though, which continues to this day.

Palestinians attribute this process of dispossession to the ideology of political Zionism, which asserts that Jewish communities of diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds form a single nation that belongs in historic Palestine, and which has rights to the land of historic Palestine that must take priority over the rights of the Palestinians who were already living there.

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Political Zionism is responsible for the violent dispossession of the Palestinian people, millions of whom have been barred from returning to their ancestral homeland for nearly seventy years. This ideology justifies the Palestinians' continued oppression under a far-right Israeli regime, and has been opposed by a growing number of Jews since its inception.

Israel's state-building project has meant the demolition of over five hundred Palestinian towns and villages, literally wiping them off the map. The once-thriving country of Palestine is now concealed by greenwashing parks and forests, or replaced by newcomers to the land. This process is continuing in the Occupied Palestinian Territory through Israel's ongoing project of dispossession.

Nakba Day, therefore, is a sorrowful yet crucial day for the Palestinian people in order to keep alive the memory of what happened between 1947-1949, and to repeat their demands for basic human dignity and a modicum of justice.

This day happens to fall around the same time each year as Israel's birthday, known as Yom Ha'atzmaut, the day in which Israel unilaterally declared its independence as a state.

For the fifth consecutive year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released a statement in celebration of Yom Ha'aztmaut, affirming: "On this Independence Day, I am proud to renew Canada's commitment to a safe and secure homeland for the Jewish people, and to a lasting peace between all peoples in the Middle East."

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Trudeau included in this statement Canada's intention to "fight" anti-Zionism. This would appear to be a pronouncement against Palestinians--including many thousands of Palestinian Canadians--who have suffered immensely as a result of the Zionist project.

The release of this statement also happens to be the sixth consecutive year in which a Canadian Prime Minister has issued an official statement in commemoration of Israel's unilateral declaration of independence. Not once has a Canadian Prime Minister commemorated, let alone acknowledged, Nakba Day.

Efforts were made last year by Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) to have our Prime Minster commemorate Nakba Day alongside Yom Ha'aztmaut. Such efforts did not succeed, despite over six hundred people sending a letter to the Prime Minister echoing this fair-minded appeal. IJV never received a response from Trudeau to our letter.

The Palestinian Canadian Congress (PCC) is now calling on Canadians to take up this issue. The PCC sent a letter to Trudeau referencing Canada's alleged commitment to playing the role of "honest broker" in the region. In the letter they state: "Celebrating Israel's narrative while ignoring that of the Palestinians' is not the impartial position one would expect from an honest broker, and is insulting and insensitive to thousands of Palestinians who now call Canada home."

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As the results of a recent EKOS survey suggest, the majority of Canadians are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. I believe most Canadians would also support such a reasonable request to our Prime Minister.

It's time for our Prime Minister to take the principled stand of commemorating Nakba Day.
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Theresa May's approach towards asylum seekers and refugees has been of concern since she was Home Secretary. She presided over 'Go Home' vans which were a throwback to the racism of a bygone era that should have no place in the 21st century. Her cutting of the search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean have literally denied a lifeline to refugees who are drowning as a matter of course on the edge of fortress Europe. This year, the government stopped taking the small numbers of refugee children that it had previously conceded to, thanks to Lord Alf Dubs, himself one of the Kinder transport children who fled the Nazis. It is said that a civilisation should be judged by how it treats its strangers. We clearly have a lot to learn about how to be a civilisation.

Kelechi Chioba is an asylum seeker pleading to remain in the UK, for fear for her life if deported to Nigeria. She is an openly queer, disabled, woman suffering from mental health issues, yet the home office state her reasons are 'insufficient'.

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Kelechi, who is keen volunteer for the National Union of Students (NUS) Disabled Students' Campaign and Black Students' Campaign (LGBT+ representative), suffers from polio, is wheelchair user and suffers from mental health problems. In Nigeria, she is regarded as a curse and a source of shame upon her family, due to her disability. She has suffered severe abuse at the hands of her family, including verbal abuse, beatings and attempts to end her life. Kelechi, who had secretly enjoyed relationships with women in Nigeria, found she was able to come out openly in the UK and embrace her bisexuality. Kelechi found support in the Black Students' campaign in particular, where she was elected, along with her job share, another Nigerian, to represent LGBT+ students of African, Arab, Asian and Caribbean descent across the country.

Kelechi is a prominent queer activist and is well known, in particular by the Nigerian communities in the UK. She is afraid of what this means should she be forced to go back to Nigeria, a country where it is unsafe to be openly queer. With laws preventing individuals from even joining a gay organisation (there is a 10 year prison sentence), and stories of individuals being killed for being queer, Kelechi, who is vulnerable, as someone who is completely reliant on a wheelchair, is understandably terrified of what might happen to her if she is forcibly returned. With stories of physical and sexual abuse in Yarls Wood coming to the fore, it is essential now more than ever that we protect vulnerable members of our community. We must not forget the death of Jimmy Mubenga who died following restraint in the midst of a deportation flight.

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We should not have an immigration system that devalues the lives of those facing oppression such as Kelechi. We have an urgent responsibility, as one of the world's richest nations, to ensure that those fleeing oppression and discrimination wherever they come from, get the same right to a quality of life in the UK as any UK citizen. Whilst in the UK, despite disability and difficulty, Kelechi has worked and volunteered to better the lives of others and it is shameful that the UK government refuses to protect her from the oppression she unfairly receives because of how and where she was born. It is not for us to condemn others to persecution, hate and death as part of our immigration process.

Kelechi could be deported any day, and we need to do everything we can to put pressure on the government and keep her story in the media and people's minds. A fundraising campaign has been launched to pay for living and legal costs so Kelechi can get support in fighting her case.

Whilst Theresa May is shamefully engaged in building a wall to stop refugees in Calais, 'Im proud of the NUS Black Students Campaign, rallying around this valued member of our community, and building a campaign to stand up for justice and humanity.
Teachers of special school demand a new contest: they applied to the Administrative Court (video)

The pedagogical staff of No 17 special school demands to appoint a director in compliance with the law. Contest was announced on January 4, but it wasnt held; either the representative of the Ministry of Science and Education was unwell, or three out of 8 members of the council were absent. As a result, Minister of Science and Education Levon Mkrtchyan, made a solely decision on the appointment of a new director. The new director, according to the news, is the wife of Bagrat Yesayan, adviser to the RA Minister of Education and Science. During the first contest she didnt have a certificate, and received it only on March 30. They postponed these contests so that she be able to obtain a certificate, participate and without taking into account the votes of the members of the council, make a solely decision, Noyem Khachatryan, teacher at No 17 special school, told A1+. We, maintaining the human norms and norms of ethics, every time patiently waited for the next session, which were cancelled, noted head teacher of the school Marieta Avetisyan. Vergine Yesayan, who was appointed a director, worked as a deputy director at Yerevan Medical-Psychological-Pedagogical Assessment Center for 9 years. Teachers at No17 special school do not underestimate her skills, but they have their candidate. We have three candidates and one of them is our preferred candidate, Hayarpi Minasyan, who is a member of our staff, she has worked 15 and more years and she is very close to pedagogy. If one of those three candidates is elected by fair voting, we will admit it, states Marieta Avetisyan. In the afternoon the Ministry must have introduced the new director to the personnel of the school, but it didnt happen. According to the words of the Head of the Department of the General Education of the Ministry of Science and Education, the reason is that the acting director is at hospital. It isnt nice to introduce the candidate for a director when the acting director is at hospital, Ashot Arshakyan, Head of the Department of the General Education of the Ministry of Science and Education, told A1+. Ashot Arshakyan doesnt agree with the assessments that the contest wasnt held in an appropriate way, There are clear rules on the election and appointment of a director, and the process was held according to that rules; in case of lack of quorum twice, the Minister himself appoint a director. Representative of the Ministry can see some intention in the protest action of the pedagogues, We can assume that there is some intention. I think it is connected with one of the candidates, Hayarpi Minasyan, who is a daughter of the former director. At the instruction of the Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan, kinship, sponsorship and clash of interests must be excluded while electing directors at schools. The pedagogical staff of No 17 special school submitted their demand to the Administrative Court.
Healthy mind, healthy body. It's a common phrase, yet it makes health - both mental and physical - seem very clear cut. There's only healthy or unhealthy. Or is there?

We know this isn't true when it comes to physical health. We're in an age where we recognise that healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes, but we're yet to recognise the same for mental wellbeing. I often feel like I'm expected to be in a 'fit' state-of-mind no matter what, whether it's fit for work, fit to drive, even fit for everyday interactions. And when I do recognise a fluctuation in my mental wellbeing, I often assigned to some passive, unknown reason: I "got out of bed on the wrong side today", or I'm just "having a bad day".

Like most people, I go through periods of stress, anxiety, even general grouchiness, and sometimes would rather dive back under the covers in the morning than face the world. However, there will be days even during my most stressful times where I wake up happy, jump out of bed and sing in the shower. I'll smile at the bus driver on my way to work, sit down at my desk and think "Bring on that difficult client, bring on the list of 1001 things to do! These are opportunities, not burdens!"

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Is it possible to always have a positive attitude no matter the negative things going on around me?

Over this year's Mental Health Awareness Week, I read a lot about dealing with some of the most stressful occasions in a person's life: depression; bereavement; hard times in relationships. But what about everyday stresses and strains? Between 2015-2016, stress accounted for 45% of all sick days taken in the UK. As the Mental Health Foundation puts it, good mental health is more than the absence of a mental health problem.

On that note, I decided to compile a list of ways to alleviate daily stress. Often I need reminding of these - and thought they may help you too!

1. Creative (stress) outlets

Is your job your creative calling? If so, you can probably skip this step! Last year, a study published in Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association found that spending 45 minutes on a creative activity significantly lessens stress levels, no matter what your level of artistry is. From pottery making to paper crafts, it could really work for you. And if freehand isn't your thing, perhaps try mindful colouring book.

2. Me time

Along with creativity, try to create time for yourself. When I'm feeling particularly stressed out, I like to take the night off, get into my pyjamas, and relax. I've never been good at meditation, but I do know that when I need the time, I'll use the Headspace app for guidance.

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3. Healthy food, healthy mind

Certain foods can fuel your body better than others, and the same is true for your mind. While high-sugar, high-fat foods may make you feel better in the short-run (who doesn't treat themselves when they feel rough?) it may be worth upping your wholefood consumption when feeling stressed. For example, a handful of walnuts a day can improve your memory, wholegrains can give you sustained energy throughout the day, and chocaholics rejoice, cocoa could improve blood flow to the brain.

4. Night night

Are you sleeping enough? The British Sleep Council recommends between 7-9 hours sleep per night, but reports that one third of Britons sleep for just 5-6 hours per night. If I'm struggling to sleep, I'll try wearing layers (I love being toasty and warm) or a cup of bedtime tea with valerian root, a herbal remedy to help induce sleep.

5. Exercise (your mind)

Regular exercise does more than look after the body, it also improves mental wellbeing. The Mental Health Foundation recommends finding exercise you enjoy rather than have to do too, as this will improve your willingness to do it often.

6. Cosy up

My favourite place in the world is my bed - you can tell because I've already mentioned it in this article. Twice. Feeling cosy can improve your overall happiness, and is the basis of the Danish buzzword hygge. Considering Nordic countries are routinely named the happiest countries in the world, it may be worth adopting more hygge in your life, perhaps by luxuriating in a hot bath, reading by candlelight, or even baking a cake!

7. Contentedness, not happiness
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At first glance Tarek* doesn't stand out. He is among a group of over 300 refugees and migrants that have just been helped aboard Save the Children's rescue ship after fraught, life threatening days at sea.

But Tarek is the only one with white patches in his hair. He says he is just 15 years old. On one so young, these are often signs of traumatic experiences.

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15-year-old Tarek's family were killed in Libya. Photo: Save the Children/Hanna Adcock

Once Tarek and everyone else on board has slept, rested and eaten, we talk. He says he is from Libya, where violent turmoil has engulfed the country and taken everything from him. His family was killed. He was forced to watch as his brother was murdered in front of him. There is no-one and nothing left for him at home. There is no 'home'. He begged on the streets for a year until he could afford what he said was the only way out. And early one morning he was herded onto a rickety wooden boat alongside hundreds of others, each with their own reasons to make this desperate, last ditch bid for a safe future.

For 48 hours, bad weather in the Mediterranean has been making rescue operations incredibly difficult. It's the night before, and waves lash against the port holes. The ship rolls from side to side sending anything not tied down or put away scuttling across the room. Somewhere, something smashes. There are a lot of sleepless nights on board the Vos Hestia, and some green faces the following morning as seasickness takes hold.

The news comes early in the morning. The Italian coastguard, which co-ordinates our rescues, has called on us to relieve another rescue ship. The Iuventa, operated by German group Jugend Rettet, is overwhelmed after performing multiple rescues. Just about every rescue ship in the Mediterranean is either disembarking people or tied up elsewhere. More than 8,000 refugees and migrants have been pulled from unseaworthy boats in three days that has pushed search-and-rescue capacity in the Mediterranean to breaking point. For miles around, there is nothing but open sea, which has already claimed the lives of more than 870 people this year. European states must support Italy with search-and-rescue operations. Saving lives - not border control - should be the over-riding priority.

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Ships like the Iuventa perform a vital role by getting to the flimsy, overcrowded boats fast and stabilising them, then taking on board as many people as they can. But they don't have room for the food and water needed for hundreds of refugees and migrants on the 36-hour journey to the safety of dry land. So they need to transfer them to another ship like ours.

The Iuventa and those it has rescued have just spent the night withstanding the same conditions we have. Though by now, a large commercial tanker has stopped and positioned itself to shield them from the worst of the high winds.

Our ship, the Vos Hestia, is en route to the rescue zone but we're still hours away. "Can we go any faster?" No. We're already at full speed.

We receive word that there are a number of pregnant women on board, two in a condition described as 'critical'. "Get the extra beds in the overflow clinic ready," instructs our doctor.

First in view is the huge commercial tanker. Then, from our vantage point on the bridge the outline of the Iuventa gradually forms on the horizon - followed by the sight of hundreds of people crammed onto every inch of the deck.

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A technically difficult manoeuvre - the view from Save the Children's rescue ship the Vos Hestia as the three ships draw closer to make the transfer. Photo: Save the Children/Hanna Adcock

Usually people would be transferred between the two vessels by smaller, fast rescue boats lowered from our ship. But today conditions are too dangerous for that. The Iuventa and the Vos Hestia will have to pull side by side so people can step across. It's a technically difficult manoeuvre and the atmosphere is tense. Both ships need to stay sheltered by the commercial tanker as we edge closer. All the while the tanker is moving too, because due to its size it will start to roll if it stops. The Iuventa rocks as it's buffeted by the waves but eventually we are in position - within touching distance.

One by one refugees and migrants come aboard. A number of pregnant women are too weak to stand, suffering from exhaustion and dehydration. Some attempt a couple of steps before giving out. The strain of their ordeal has been too much. We immediately stretcher them to the onboard clinic for treatment from our medical team.

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A number of pregnant women were too weak to stand. Photo: Save the Children/Hanna Adcock

More than 300 people are now on our deck, including around twenty thought to be unaccompanied children, Tarek among them.

The Iuventa was already full when they found Tarek's boat, and was forced to pull away as they got perilously close. Panic took hold and Tarek was among those who leapt into the sea and swam towards the Iuventa before being pulled in to safety.

Now he is in the care of our specialist child protection team who are providing support and activities to help him recover from the traumatic experiences he has been through. And our team on shore in Italy will be there to help Tarek understand and navigate his new surroundings.

But until the EU provides safe and legal routes for those seeking safer futures, people - including children like Tarek - will continue to risk their lives to reach the sanctuary of Europe. The 300 people on board the Vos Hestia will be far from the last, and the Mediterranean will continue to be a mass unmarked grave for children.

This transfer took place on 17th April 2017. Support Save the Children's search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean.

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Since his inauguration in November last year, Donald Trump's attack on the environment has been relentless. He's approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, he's put more than 2.7 million acres of iconic US landscape at risk from fossil fuel exploration and he's proposing a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, effectively eliminating its climate change programs.

Now, Trump is threatening to pull out of the Paris Agreement, a landmark commitment struck by nearly 200 nations aimed at limiting global warming to well below 2C. As the world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the U.S. plays a massive role in achieving this. It's hard to imagine how we'll do it without them.

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But there's hope. Here's 5 reasons why Trump can't tear up the Paris Agreement, even if he tries to.

1. U.S. momentum is bigger than Trump

71% of American people support the Paris Agreement. That's seven in ten people. Not only that but there's resounding support for renewable energy, with a whopping 89% of Americans supporting solar farm expansion and 83% supporting wind.

This passion for renewables is reflected in state governments, too. Last year, mayors from 71 U.S. cities (representing over 38 million people!) urged Trump to retain his Paris commitments and 15 U.S. states threatened Trump with legal action should he try to leave.

If the worst happens, 34 of 50 U.S. states already have climate action plans and are prepared to forge ahead with the terms of the agreement, with or without federal support. 27 U.S. cities have even gone so far as to commit to using 100% renewable energy by 2035. When it comes to tackling climate change, the U.S. isn't waiting for Trump to catch up.

2. Businesses around the world are pledging their support

Perhaps most persuasive of all for a businessman like Trump is the resounding economic support for the Paris Agreement.

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Last week, more than a thousand U.S. companies, including Google, Microsoft and Walmart, signed the 'Business Backs Low-Carbon USA' statement, urging Trump to stay in the agreement. If Trump does the opposite, the companies have pledged to 'do our part, in our own operations and beyond, to realize the Paris Agreement's commitment of a global economy that limits global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius.'

Major stock market investors are echoing these sentiments, too. This week, a group of investors from all over the world, managing more than $15 trillion in assets, sent a letter to Trump imploring him to fight climate change by keeping his commitments.

Astoundingly, even oil companies like Shell and Exxon are on board, a sure fire sign that the renewable age has arrived and Trump's dated ideology is bad for business.

3. World leaders are overwhelmingly in favour of the agreement

In the face of Trump's threats, world leaders are speaking out. The prime minister of Fiji told Trump: "Climate change is not a hoax... don't let the whole side down." Chinese President Xi Jinping reminded him that "There is only one earth in the universe and we mankind have only one homeland." And on Monday, French President-elect Emmanuel Macron used his first phone call with Trump to vow that he and the people of France will defend the agreement at all costs.

So, far from destabilising the commitments of other countries, Trump's threats to abandon the agreement are only strengthening the world's resolve to tackle climate change. That means that even without U.S. participation, 196 countries are committed to a sustainable future. Countries that account for 87% of global emissions.

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4. Even Trump can't stop the renewable energy boom

Whether Donald Trump likes it or not, renewable energy is taking over. Both the solar and wind industries are creating jobs 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy and energy capacity for these two sources has increased almost fivefold since 2008. This is in tandem with renewable energy success stories the world over.

Last year, China added more than 34 gigawatts of solar capacity--nearly 1.5 times the amount the U.S. has installed in its history--and Portugal ran entirely on renewable energy for four days straight. At one point in 2015, Denmark generated a whopping 140% of their electricity demand from renewables, enough to share with Germany, Norway and Sweden.

Renewable energy is not only working, it's thriving, and there's nothing Trump can do about it.

5. We won't let him get away with it

Right now, Theresa May is one of the few world leaders Trump will actually listen to. Their relationship is so special that they're coordinating their outfits and holding hands. So a clear signal from our PM that the UK's commitment to the Paris deal is non-negotiable could give Trump pause.

After all, the UK played a key role in securing the Paris Agreement and May herself said that the Conservative government is determined to "play our part in the international effort against climate change." Now it's time to put those words into action.

Greenpeace UK has joined forces with Oxfam, the RSPB, WWF, Christian Aid, Cafod and others urging the PM to defend the agreement. Greenpeace offices around the world are mobilising their supporters to speak out and Greenpeace USA is coordinating the resistance movement on the ground.

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Here in the UK, almost 150,000 of us have signed a petition asking Theresa May to pick up the phone and tell Trump to stay in the Paris Agreement.
Europe has once again been thrown headfirst into election season. This month alone revealed the fault lines in French society as disaffected voters rejected established parties, preceding the UK's all-important snap election in June. And toward the end of the year in September, Germany will hold its own elections as Angela Merkel seeks another term in office.

In the past 12 months we have seen electorates turn away from experienced political leaders, seeking change in answer to personal frustration, alienation or marginalisation. We have seen extreme groups ready to exploit feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, economic and social insecurity, driving a new populism. Such extreme groups and their leaders often don't have the interests of the most marginalised at heart, but without a clear and convincing alternative, I can only imagine insidious elements like this further increasing in popularity - the thought of which is very worrying.

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It's made me think about leadership, specifically what makes a great leader, whichever community that leader aims to represent. It's always struck me that some of the best leadership comes from those who were most marginalised - in Africa, the majority being women and girls. Overcoming difficult life circumstances builds in people a resilience, willingness to stand up for oneself, and moreover an empathy and a readiness to stand up for others. Just think of Nelson Mandela and Graca Machel.

But for this kind of leadership to be activated, it must first be enabled. Camfed supports girls to succeed and take on leadership by focussing on education as the key to systemic change.

One of my colleagues, Deborah Brown, recently took our experience from rural Africa to a workshop at a leadership camp organised by London's Mulberry School, which aimed to inspire girls - many from marginalised communities - to see themselves as leaders of the future. The girls shared a list of their female role models and the leadership qualities they find important. Figures as diverse as Emma Watson, Michelle Obama, Shami Chakrabarti and the school's own headteacher were classed as equally inspiring for their qualities - which included trustworthiness, determination, confidence, compassion and an open-mindedness.

Ultimately, leaders should of course set the example for future generations.

When I think about this, I think of Afishetu, one of our great leaders in Camfed's CAMA alumnae movement. Afishetu, from the rural Karaga District in Ghana, started primary school late at the age of 15 and had to borrow shoes from a friend simply to walk to school. Despite the overwhelming adversity, her determination was clear and fierce and she pursued her education through to graduation.

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From 2004 to 2009, Camfed supported Afishetu to gain a teaching diploma. She joined CAMA and became Headmistress of a local kindergarten. Respected for her determination and leadership, Afishetu was elected as her district's assemblyperson - the first CAMA member to hold elected office.

She explained, "When I became the assemblywoman, I [wanted] to show people that women can also do something to make change. And we can even do it better. My first project was to build a school for my community. I established Karaga Girls Model School, where I am currently serving as Acting Headmistress. Since then, I have also lobbied for funding, which the community used to buy bulls and a grinding mill, as a step towards reducing the poverty level in my district. If you are not educated, you don't have a source of income. So girls' education is very important. There is the saying that if you educate a man, you educate only one person, but with a woman, you educate a whole nation."

Hawa, one of Afishetu's mentees, is another great example of this.

Hawa, the only girl in her community to attend school when she received a Camfed bursary, shared what little she had with 15 other girls, and lobbied for a secondary school to be built in her community. An active CAMA member, Hawa regularly visits her old school to speak to girls about the importance of education, encouraging them to stay focused, study hard and pursue their dreams. Together with her CAMA sisters she meets with young women and their families to talk about the harmful effects of teen pregnancy, early marriage, and other issues which prevent young people from fulfilling their potential.

Two years ago, Hawa stood for election as an assembly person in her district in order to serve her community and promote girls' education. She received strong support and today is a hardworking and much respected representative, of whom the traditional Chief said, "We have always heard of women's empowerment and women in leadership. We never thought a young lady from our community could demonstrate this potential very early. Honorable Hawa showed everyone in the electoral area her abilities and confidence." She is a role model to so many in her district - showing what's possible when girls get the education they need.
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With the snap general election only weeks away, this is a chance for all political parties to lay out their vision for our country, and the role Britain can play in the world. Our shared values of equality, compassion and fair play demand that we aim for a world without poverty and injustice. And with global progress on women's rights in real danger of being rolled back, it is vital the UK keeps championing the rights of women and girls internationally.

The past year has seen some huge political shifts - here in the UK with Brexit, in the US with the election of President Trump, and around the globe. In a world that feels increasingly unpredictable we need our political leaders to stand up and show that some things are non-negotiable - the human values of equality, fairness and compassion that define Britain as a country.

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Yet we're seeing a lot of warning signs that global progress on women's rights is in real danger of being thrown into reverse. Whether that's new legal loopholes allowing child marriage in Bangladesh, where ActionAid works, or President Trump reinstating the 'Global Gag Rule', restricting access to abortion for some of the most vulnerable women in the world. There is a global urgency to make sure women's rights are protected and advanced, not eroded.

One in three women and girls will experience violence in their lifetimes. Women are still earning on average 23% less than men, in more insecure, part-time, low-paid jobs. They also bear the brunt of unpaid care work, doing nearly 2.5 times more than men. ActionAid's research has shown that the barriers women in developing countries face to accessing job opportunities and fair pay mean they lose out on a staggering $9 trillion every year.

There is so much more to do, and it is essential that Britain keeps up its role as a champion for women's and girls' rights internationally.

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ActionAid supporters stand up for women's rights at January's Women's March on London.

Protecting progress on women's rights

For the world's most marginalised women, it is vital that the UK stick to our promise of spending 0.7% of our national income on ending extreme poverty and giving life-saving help in humanitarian crises. And for the long run, rather than relying on foreign aid, we need to campaign with developing countries to raise their own taxes, so they can pay for essential public services like hospitals and schools.

British aid has played a leading role in halving the number of people living in extreme poverty. We have helped to immunise 67 million children against preventable diseases, sent 2.5 million girls to school in Afghanistan and made huge progress on issues like ending female genital mutilation (FGM).

More Teaching Materials - Schoolgirls in Moyamba District, Sierra Leone, were given learning materials to help with their education.

The global humanitarian system is also being stretched by more natural disasters, greater unpredictability as a result of climate change, and conflict. Women and girls face particular challenges - we know that domestic violence goes up during humanitarian crises, and many women are forced into marriage to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Too often women's and girls' voices are not heard and they are excluded from peace building processes.

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But local women's rights organisations often have invaluable cultural knowledge, skills and experience to bring - they should be leading response work. The UK, with its strong record of stepping up with humanitarian aid for those who need it, is well-placed to lead on tackling these challenges. This includes championing new approaches to emergencies and conflict which promote the role of women.

Women leaders from an ActionAid partner organisation in Haiti distribute emergency kits after Hurricane Matthew.

Using your voice for women and girls

Our shared values mean looking outwards. They mean committing to using our voice and influence to help achieve a world without poverty and injustice - as we have done in the past.

Over the past few months we have seen ordinary people take to the streets in demonstrations for many different issues - for refugees and migrant rights, against rising racism and xenophobic rhetoric, and of course those up and down the country who joined the global women's march.

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At the heart of this is a demand that we keep to our values of equality, compassion and fair play. Regardless of which party each of us votes for on June 8th, those of us who share these values do not want to see the world's most marginalised people lose out.

As we head towards the election, all parties have an opportunity to show that they are willing to help take on the world's biggest challenges. This is why, as an international charity, we are speaking out. Not to promote one party or candidate over another, but because the stakes for the women and girls we work with around the world couldn't be higher.
Broken promises, and unfulfilled manifestos. That's what we have been offered by this Tory government, and the sham coalition that preceded it.

Year after year, Theresa May's Tory party has pledged to rebalance the economy, clamp down on aggressive tax evasion, invest in education and public services such as the NHS, as well as ensure workers' rights for all citizens.

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In truth, what have they actually delivered?

Well, when it comes to rebalancing the economy, the Tory party has overseen spiralling government debt. Public sector net debt as a percentage of GDP rose to 86.6 percent in March 2017 - a staggering 33 percent higher than when Labour left government in 2010. In a desperate effort to reduce that, the Tories continue to resort to draconian austerity measures across the country. The kind of measures that hit working people - and local services - the most.

They also promised the government deficit would be wiped out by 2015 - a promise that has since been pushed back to 2020, and now the early 2020s. The Tories like going back on their word, you see. I doubt they will even come close to hitting the new target too. It will be impossible. This is a political party that is obviously averse to collecting tax receipts off their wealthy donors, and to confronting their tax avoiding multinational chums in the city. To meet their deficit target - they would need to do both things.

Looking for an example of this double standard approach, one doesn't need to look further than the next door McDonald's restaurant.

Back in December, the world's largest fast-food chain announced its decision to move its non-US tax base to the UK. With corporate tax scheduled to fall to 17 percent by 2020 under the Tory government, the tainted golden arches had sensed an opportunity to save some more money. And that's the kind of opportunity McDonald's never misses.

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Indeed, this is a company with a flagrant disregard for corporate ethics, its workers and consumers. To such an extent, that it is currently facing an ongoing HMRC investigation into its tax dealings, a European Commission investigation into its tax schemes in Europe as well as a series of Anti-Trust cases in various European countries. Against this background, you must seriously question why this Tory government is allowing - and in fact, actively encouraging - companies like McDonald's to come to the UK.

The whole thing stinks more than a rotten burger.

We - at the BFAWU - are doing our level best to fight back, one step at a time, wherever we can. McDonald's have for too long endorsed the use of zero-hours contracts. There not the only one. Across the country, zero-hour contracts are abused - with over a million people facing uncertainty over how many hours they will work and how much they will earn.

Last month, the efforts of thousands of workers and unionists - with the support of the BFAWU - brought this abusive practice to an end, as McDonald's agreed to drop zero hour contracts. It is this change that we want to see across the entire country.

And we are not alone. In Jeremy Corbyn, we have a leader on our side. The Labour Party are fighting for those ordinary working class citizens, whose voices have been drowned out by Tory greed and promises. And they have the support of the BFAWU too, who are campaigning alongside the Labour party to improve workers' rights, ban zero hour contracts and raise the minimum wage to 10. We've seen how collective action and union pressure - such as the Fight For $15 campaign in the US - can change the lives of millions of hard working citizens for the better. That's exactly the change which the Labour Party, and the BFAWU, want to see in the UK, too.

These policies not only make sense for millions of working people, but they are for many necessary for survival. It's no wonder this country's leader refuses to debate her party's policies in front of the electorate and opposition - she would have no leg to stand on!

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Election fever has begun. Well, less of a fever and more of a virus at the moment. The manifesto writers are busy locked in darkened rooms trying to shape their political parties' ideas and offers. According to the media and political pundits the main subject of the election is Brexit but a general election needs to address domestic bread and butter policy as well.

The challenge of all manifesto promises is that they are great big statements with little attention to the detail. More often than not, the translation of the manifesto promises is delegated to the local authorities. These, much maligned councils, very often find themselves having to interpret these promises into pragmatic solutions without the necessary resources. This is a concern for all local authorities given they are under huge financial pressure, not least in the area of social care and community support.

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Some local authorities are still trying to deliver big manifesto promises from the last parliament such as Universal Credit which are still not implemented and emerging information shows that the promise is benefiting fewer than the anticipated headline numbers leading to greater complexity. In fact, in the case of Universal Credit the very recent DWP figures confirmed that the number of people caught in the cross fire of a manifesto promise has increased from 8000 to 15000. The result is more working people now live in poverty and around 2.3 million children in the UK are living below the Child Poverty Act 2010 relative poverty threshold, representing one-fifth of all children. By the same measure, eight million working age adults and, overall, over one-fifth of the UK population live in poverty. For those families stuck in a cycle of poverty the escape routes are limited. Routes out of poverty include cheaper housing, affordable childcare and flexible employment. These options are currently not freely available.

The issue of childcare is of great interest to me. As a social entrepreneur I lead the design and development of the largest community childcare social business, the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF). It was created to reduce poverty by providing all families but especially poor families access to affordable childcare. However, despite successive Governments recognising the benefits to parents and children of good quality affordable childcare, we have yet to see a fully funded robust coherent anti child poverty childcare system implemented. Every Government has done something but never enough given the raft of national and international research which confirms the long-term benefit of high quality childcare and education for children, families and societies.

John Adams the second American president from ( 1797 to 1801) noted back then that :

Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education...to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher.

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A more recent advocate of this approach is Nobel prize winning economist Professor James Heckman who shows how childcare can reduce poverty and improve the educational achievement gap found in disadvantaged children. This gap opens up between them and their more affluent peers at 22 months and is very hard to close. He argued that Governments should invest in early years not least because of the rate of return which he calculated as a 7 to 10% return per annum through better outcomes in education, health, sociability, economic productivity and reduced crime. So, the argument for early intervention is strong, and quality childcare plays a significant part in this.

For example our Prime Minister Theresa May recently challenged us as a society for failing to tackle the issue of mental ill health which as she said goes right to the heart of our humanity. She cited government statistics that show one in four people has a mental disorder at some point in their life, with young people affected disproportionately as half of mental health problems start by the age of 14 and 75% by 18 at an annual cost of 105bn. Half of this would fund a world leading, life changing, society improving early interventionist childcare strategy.

There are many other benefits to taking an early interventionist route; employment that balances work and family enhances well bring, reduces poverty and sets a positive example to children. Lone parents who have flexible work and accessible childcare step out of poverty more quickly and the cost benefit of enabling professional educated women to work while their children are young has innumerable benefits for employers and the country's economy. The challenge is therefore building and funding an early interventionist strategy that recognises how childcare can be key to our social and economic infrastructure.

The impending new government therefore has the chance to pull together all the positive elements of previous governments policy initiatives and create the most effective and powerful early interventionist childcare in the world beginning with these six steps:

1.`Raise the profile and long term impact of good quality childcare and how it benefits all children and society by leading a strong public front facing awareness campaign

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2. Boost the involvement of employers in the awareness campaign so that they invest in better childcare and family friendly activates to attract and retain staff

3. Strengthen quality by investing in an Early Years work strategy that sets out and funds a national properly paid, attractive career pathway from apprentice to Masters degrees.

4. Develop a national housing policy which includes an explicit keyworker building programme especially for those low paid nursery staff.

5. Better fund the public childcare offer so that its fair and accessible to all parents not just those who can make up the shortfall through parental contributions.

6. Amplify and foster the important role of social businesses in the childcare market as sustainable means of providing high quality childcare within poor and diverse communities.

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June O Sullivan
I've been contacted by a couple of bloggers over the last few days who were looking for hints and tips for potty training, not sure why they contacted me but they did and I think they were shocked by my replies! So, I thought I'd lay it out on the line for everyone to read because, personally I think it's time the world knew that there are children living that society is preventing from being 'potty trained'.

My son William is eight years old. He isn't potty trained. He wears nappies every day, and uses up to seven nappies a day.

Now, William is disabled but that isn't the only reason he isn't toilet trained. In fact, he does use the toilet at home and at school and we rarely have to change a 'dirty' nappy because he knows the toilet is where he should do his business. I'm sure he would love nothing more than to wear normal, so called big-boy pants, instead of having to wear a bulky uncomfortable nappy all the time.

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I'd love nothing more too!

In fact, I spoke to some of my friends about this and between us we could think of 24 other children who are also in this situation and who could be toilet trained if society allowed it. 24 doesn't seem like a big number but this wasn't a scientific study, this was just us having a quick think of people we knew in our little town in West Sussex!

It's highly likely that all of them will have to wear a nappy every single day for the rest of their lives unless society makes some radical changes that allow them to be able to be 'potty trained'.

I mentioned earlier that William is disabled, he has quadriplegic cerebral palsy which means that he doesn't have much control of his body. He can't sit or stand up unaided and hasn't got much control over his limbs. But, considering the severity of his disability, he does have quite good understanding and many of his friends are not affected cognitively at all so they have the capacity to learn, they understand a lot of things and they know that other children and young people their age don't have to wear nappies and sit in their own urine.

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William, aged 8

Imagine how they must feel to know that their brothers and sisters don't have to wear a nappy, or that their friends know they are wearing one. Imagine their embarrassment when they have to relieve themselves in a nappy, it must be so degrading.

I'm sure you are wondering why can't they just use a toilet like everyone else? I mean, there are disabled toilets everywhere right?

Well yes there are, but as I mentioned earlier, William and many others can't sit or stand unaided, so that means they can't stand up to get out of their wheelchair and get onto the toilet. They can't stand up to be cleaned after they've been to the toilet and they can't use their arms to support themselves or clean themselves because of their disabilities.

They need a little more help. Help in the form of a parent or carer to assist them but also in the form of 2 vital pieces of equipment. A large changing table for them to lay on (baby changing tables are too small for children over approx. 3yrs old) and a hoist to lift them from their wheelchair and onto the toilet/changing table because they are too heavy for their parents/carers to manage safely.

We have this at home so William can use the toilet there, and at school, but have you ever seen a, so called, accessible toilet with any of this equipment in it? Probably not. If you have then you have been lucky enough to see one of only 976 facilities in the UK which provide this vital amenity, which is known as a 'changing places toilet'.

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Adult sized changing table & hoist

This equipment is not required under any current laws, changing places toilets are not compulsory under any building regulations. Businesses are not under any obligation to provide them for their customers, despite them providing toilets for other customers, including a standard disabled toilet (which by the way is usually just a slightly larger room with a handrail added by the loo!)

Because there are no requirements to provide changing places toilets, our children, and many other young people and adults throughout the UK, have no option than to use a nappy if they wish to leave the house.

Imagine that, the choice between wearing a nappy or being housebound.

And even if you opt for the nappy, you have to be willing to sit in it until you can get home to have it changed once you've relieved yourself in it. That's a pretty grim choice isn't it? But it's one I have to make for my son every day, and there are other mums throughout the country who have faced this for years and years before me.

It is important to point out that this issue isn't just reserved for disabled children of course, disabled children grow up and become disabled adults. But disability can affect anyone at any time in their life and this issue could affect anyone suffering from a stroke, being involved in an accident or being diagnosed with a condition such as MND or MS.

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If you cannot sit or stand unaided, or if you need help to use a toilet then this is currently your only option unless you are lucky enough to be somewhere near one of the 976 changing places toilets there are currently available in the UK.

It is estimated that 1 in 260 people in the UK needs a changing places toilet, I never thought I would need one but without one my son cannot use the toilet when we are not at home and therefore he cannot ever be fully toilet trained.

I'm sure readers will be thinking that it isn't up to large businesses or councils to provide this 'expensive' facility, but ask yourself this...

If those same businesses are providing you with a toilet, why isn't it up to them? They know that by providing one for you, you'll spend more time there and inevitably more money - disabled people have money to spend too!

If it isn't up to a business to provide this type of toilet, then is it really up to them to provide a toilet at all? How would you feel if they did away with toilets altogether? Would you be happy to resort to wearing a nappy? Or would you stay at home?

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Now you know about this issue, are you happy to sit back and do nothing? How will you feel next time you pass a severely disabled person, knowing they are probably sitting in a nappy because it's the only thing they can do to be able to leave the house? Are you comfortable knowing that if something was to happen to you or your loved ones, there might not be a toilet they could use in your town centre, shopping mall, supermarket, cinema etc.?

Society needs to change, we need to work together to make some big changes so that the most vulnerable members of our community are having their most basic needs catered for. It is up to us all to make this happen and we can do that by telling people about this issue, asking large businesses and councils to make some changes and to demand a change in the law so that all of the UK's children stand a chance of being able to be 'potty trained' in the future.
Prior to Erasmus year, preparations centred around the financing of it, grants, part time jobs, au pairing etc.

It isn't long before the penny drops, the realisation that the primary currency of worth is that of language. Singular words become coins of different values at various times. Legal jargon, pithy one cents in everyday exchanges but worth euros in lectures (except for the natives who are perpetually abundantly wealthy). Notes acting as conversations, phrases, our purses need to be stocked to thrive. Every transaction, a laboured effort. Erasmus; living in a country with a proficient level of the language, because of a healthy savings account from years of learning German, sounds reasonable... right?

Landing in Deutschland, equipped with a willingness to work, cash in hand of the everyday vernacular, a secondary school level of German savings account and of course, the emergency credit card of "I'm not a native speaker", that can be drawn on at any time. Supernormal profits in secondary education lull you into a false sense of security, not fearing or anticipating a deficit.

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Surviving is easy, living is difficult; college no longer a platform to share ideas, but a challenge of basic understanding. The savings account of success in exams is not as much as you remembered. The Leaving Cert may turn a profit, and college may allow you to breakeven but studying abroad is initially a deficit.

Speaking another language is expensive when scarce on resources, worse still if a college degree depends on turning a profit. Invited into the parlance of German legal students by the Erasmus course requirements is no mean feat, and you learn to rejoice in little victories, with the constant, over looming threat of losing big. (But what's life without a little risk?) Comforted by the thought that every venture experiences stumbling blocks and that all investments, worth undertaking require some level of risk.

To survive and then succeed in this new Heimat, a part time job of studying should be undertaken. Similar to most typical student jobs, it comes in at less than minimum wage, with long, inconvenient hours, spending a painstakingly lengthy time doing a minute task. Coins trickle in hour by hour as understanding is an intricate process, first the word, then the sentence, then the legal connotation and then wonder if it's relevant for the exam? And if the exam is oral, how is the word/phrase/sentence pronounced?

Irregular legal jargon and vocabulary from reading comprehensions are figurative coins, small and not worth much alone, but make up something substantial on being counted together. Becoming both an early bird and a morning owl, just to make ends meet. Every hour of work does not guarantee financial success but merely adds to overall returns on this year long project ( or so you hope!).

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Conversations can be expensive; ruling out petty change, a hefty stockpile of notes needed, whether they be with landlords, bank clerks or native speakers. The basic law of economics says that an exorbitant supply of a good, drives demand down. At home, an excessive supply of small talk renders it worthless. Here, the rarity of casual, throwaway conversation ensures that it is priced at a high value for foreign investors/consumers such as myself. Impulsive spending is a sign of success, can afford to spend for the sake of it.

Firm believers in the phrase "cash is king", Germans deal primarily in bargeld, rarely cards. A test: show up with something tangible or you'll be left with nothing. And although sometimes that means you stand there stuttering, figuratively fumbling for change at the depths of your bag, it also on occasion means that you can be surprised, finding a ten euro note you don't remember stashing away.

Only in the supermarket or on being introduced to people are we saved from the harshness of scarcity. There, using a card, a number you alone know gains access to your whole supply. Cashless transactions then becomes the easiest thing, a simple execution of something irrefutably correct, and, whether that be your pin number, or the off by heart introduction "I'm Louise Lawless, here for a year studying Law and German, from Ireland, 21 years old etc etc etc. ". Like a loan, knowing you're on borrowed time, with interest. Answers to questions we were expecting feel great, but aware that you'll be paying for it later,mindful that it'll cost you as the conversation develops and they ask more questions, leaving me again at a loss for words, but in the short term, it's enough.

Luckily, Investments occur everywhere, but chiefly in pubs, bars and beer halls. It's astounding how rich you become almost immediately, once alcohol is invited. Oktoberfest invited a period to make friends with German natives, and an inebriated refusal for the English speakers to converse in their mother tongues. Paying the price for judgement to be alcohol fuelled rather than incompetence.

Lectures also become investment hubs, everything that is said is useful, ubiquitous words that don't require extensive learning because of their repetition. The luxury of vocab tests a distant memory, in favour of European Law essays. Throwing out money for the foreign investors who must work harder to make the same amount as the natives. The chance to win big is there if you have the mental grasp to listen for the duration of a lecture.

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An unexpected element is thrown into the mix; regional monopolies dominate the linguistic market. The provincial vernaculars, a familial inheritance, are untouchable in their wealth, holding a monopoly on grammar changes, spelling, pronunciation, even vocab, boasting entirely different words for the same product. Almost a birth right, not for anyone born outside the family. Can be gained through direct beneficiaries of the inheritance. Causing you to doubt both the money earned and saved, before being relieved that this is one thing you can't overcome. The sole liability/issue/fault is not being born and raised in a certain region of this new market place.

Investments, cash in hand and the initial experience of deficit have expended all my savings for this project but thankfully further investments have been wisely made in subjects like Human Rights Law, International Public Law and Constitutional. The back-up "I'm not fluent" credit card is always there but you'd prefer to not use it, relying on cash alone, progress implied in the fact you've more cash to spend day to day.

And abroad as at home, student life is composed of a sufficient amount of time, energy and a constant shortage of finances. And just like at home, having the craic isn't about how much is spent, especially if you're all broke together.

Making money doesn't guarantee rewards or success. It's not easy. There is no promises that it'll be worth it and you have to give it 110%. Similar to learning a language, there is no distinguishable finish line, that tells you you've made it. There's just having more to spend, or succeeding in exams that once seemed impossible.
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The release of the KidsRights Index 2017 comes at a pivotal moment. As the UK gears up for June's general election, the news that Britain has plummeted from 11th to 156th place in the global children's rights rankings raises questions about the adequacy of British legislation and implementation on the rights of the child.

The data behind the Kids Rights Index has been pooled from two reputable sources: UNICEF and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The former provides regularly updated quantitative data, while the latter is founded upon detailed individual country reports for all states that are party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In Britain's case, it was information collected by the CRC specifically that highlighted the country's shortcomings. Whilst the country scored highly in the following domains; Right to Life, Right to Health, Right to Education and Right to Protection, it fell short in the "enabling environment" category. In short, this means that whilst the UK possesses the means to engender positive change, it needs to do more to enforce and provide the necessary conditions to realize children's rights.

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The Kids Rights Index provides concrete recommendations on what States should do to improve the children's rights situation in their country. It was noted, for example, that Muslim children in the UK face increased discrimination following recent anti-terrorism measures. Accordingly, the Index advises that counter-extremism measures such as the Prevent Strategy be re-assessed to ensure that they do not have a discriminatory or stigmatizing impact on any group of children. Similarly, it calls for awareness-raising around discrimination of Roma / gypsy and refugee children, which has been showing a concerning upward trend in recent years.

The United Kingdom's record in the CRC's 2016 Concluding Observations shows that the country achieved the lowest possible score on six out of seven indicators, namely: non-discrimination; best interests of the child; respect for the views of the child; enabling legislation; budget and data. The UK's score contrasts sharply with that of Portugal, this year's global frontrunner, whose strong performance across the board meant that it nudged Norway out of pole position.

I would urge the UK to treat non-discrimination as a policy priority in 2017, as discrimination against vulnerable groups of children is severely hampering the opportunities for future generations to reach their full potential. The Index's findings are a call to action for underperforming developed countries such as the UK and New Zealand which have been found wanting in the children's rights arena, while many of the world's poorest nations are leading the way. That the UK has been toppled from its 11th place by far poorer countries such as Thailand and Tunisia should ring some alarm bells.

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At a time of enormous political flux, Manchester is emerging as the most important city in the country. A series of devolution deals, ambitious plans and a fierce determination to make the city region work better is leading to the creation of self-government in a unique city-state.

It was no coincidence that George Osborne first launched the Northern Powerhouse in the engine hall of Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry. It was also significant that Greater Manchester was the first "metro" region to negotiate a series of audacious deals with the government over devolving further powers including transport, the economy, and policing. But most remarkable of all was the opportunity in 2015 to begin the "experiment" to integrate health and social care.

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It's rare that central government politicians hand over power unless it's to people they trust will do well with that responsibility, and in turn will reflect some glory.

For the great devolution project was less of a case of dumping the power, but of putting a coherent wrapper around a series of quiet successes that were well underway. And why was Manchester first? Frankly, because it works. The gradual coming together of the combined authority of 10 Greater Manchester boroughs has represented a collective way of working that has proved beyond their equivalents in other city regions. Some of this can be explained because most of them have traditionally been Labour council leaders, the exceptions being Conservative-controlled Trafford and, until May 2016, Liberal Democrat Stockport. But in doing so they have all done what many in local government lack the vision to do - to look beyond their own electorate and think bigger.

To the outside world the mechanics of local government attract little interest or scrutiny. Few people would know that each council leader effectively sits as a member of the Greater Manchester cabinet, holding a portfolio and working with deputies, drawn from the pool of councillors across the city region. But it is this arrangement that has got us this far.

At the centre of the remarkable devolution big bang has been Sir Howard Bernstein, the chief executive of Manchester City Council, who formally stepped down in March 2017. As the capacity of the workload grew, he was also entrusted as the most capable and hard-working of their 10 chief executives, to take on the additional role of boss of the Combined Authority too, making him by default and by design the most senior official across the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester, overseeing and driving this perpetual transformation. Such has been his power and breadth, he has been replaced by two senior figures to do the two jobs - running the City of Manchester, and heading the "paid service".

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The retirement of Sir Howard, the appointment of Joanne Roney (from Wakefield Council) as his replacement in the Town Hall, and of Eamonn Boylan (from Stockport) to the head of paid service at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, creates that unique flux of activity. The election of Andy Burnham as the first new Mayor puts Manchester at an even more acute inflection point.

Burnham will have two key challenges, slotting in to the system as it is, and making that work. And secondly, negotiating new powers from central government that can improve the lives of Greater Manchester's people.

To do both of those, he needs to be taken seriously. A higher than feared turnout and a thumping victory helps him get off to a flying start. The former minister and MP for Leigh won over 60% of the 359,352 votes, beating Tory candidate Sean Anstee in second place, with 128,752 votes. At a time of dreadful polling and performance for his party, Burnham's name recognition and charisma counted more in his favour than his party's toxic brand harmed him.

There was also a fear that Theresa May wasn't keen on Mayors. After taking office (and taking stock) she was lukewarm on the very idea of the Northern Powerhouse and this needless lifeline for Labour.

The election of Conservative candidates in other cities changes all of that. Andy Street in the West Midlands, Tim Bowles in the West of England and Ben Houchen in the Tees Valley shifts the risk calculus. Suddenly a civic Conservatism, so beloved of Theresa May's senior advisor Nick Timothy, has been revived. So too, it's fair to say, is a metropolitan version of New Labour, pragmatic, reforming and inclusive.

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At the core of a successful devolution strategy, both is the knotty problem of breaching Greater Manchester's own deficit, creating more value, more tax revenue and more wealth than it currently spends on public services. Never has it seemed more pressing to work in partnership with central government to be tough on the tests of Brexit and tougher still on the causes of Brexit. Like most places in the North of England, the majority of Greater Manchester voted to leave the European Union, with only the city of Manchester, Trafford and Stockport preferring to remain. It is the city region's very own North-South divide.

Into this melting pot of frustration and government distraction lies an opportunity. How do you make government and politics exciting and relevant to people's lives?

Burnham should be well placed to negotiate the power needed in Greater Manchester's interests. Both the direct power that comes from his own personal electoral mandate and the soft power created through leadership and the hustling for new powers and the ability to make deals.

There will also be inevitable comparisons with London and with the West Midlands. But while both roles are directly elected, the London Mayor is accountable to an Assembly and appoints a core team of deputy Mayors to deliver policy and new actions. It's an additional tier of government, with little connection to the London boroughs. In contrast, the Greater Manchester Mayor is a more integrated model, albeit with appointed deputies, scrutiny from leading local councillors and a ready made civil service, in the form of the Combined Authority, the Growth Company and a pool of very smart people working hard at solving wicked problems.
Danny Lawson/PA Wire

It's nine years now since the financial crisis with wages and productivity barely recovered - and the deficit stretching further in to the future. Although now we talk about the post-Brexit recovery and what that will look like, I think we still desperately need to reflect on the post financial crisis economy and whether we have learned the lessons and better protected ourselves from such shocks in the future. Excessive risk taking in the financial sector - in many cases with a naive ignorance of those risks - was the cause of the crisis. But the crisis also had a devastating effect on the public finances - here and abroad, as governments had to step in as businesses and consumers stopped spending, and as tax revenue fell off a cliff.

I worked at the Bank of England and in financial services before I was elected as an MP and began to see some of the build up of debt by households and the risk taking behaviour of businesses ahead of the crisis. Today I fear that those same behaviours are happening again - with household debt rising and bank bonuses on the increase too.

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That's why I have consistently supported a new tax on financial transactions. One of the first television interviews I did after being elected as the MP for Leeds West in 2010 was on Newsnight about the feasibility of a so-called Financial Transactions Tax (sometimes known as the Tobin or Robin Hood Tax). The tax is a small charge on all financial transactions - like stamp duty on the sale of shares but extended to corporate bonds and derivatives. It's now being pursued in most of the EU and the US Democrats have advocated for one.

Yesterday the Labour Party said that such a tax would be in our manifesto. This is a welcome move and will both raise much needed revenue to fund the commitments in the manifesto, but it will also hopefully reduce the speculative transactions on companies that result in financial instability and add no value to the economy. Labour supports business and that means supporting investment, creating value and adding to our individual and shared prosperity. The Financial Transaction Tax encourages long term value creation at the expense of short term bets on businesses. That is pro business and pro financial and economic stability.

Essentially, the Financial Transactions Tax takes the UK's existing stamp duty on shares that currently raises 3.3 billion a year and brings it into the 21st century by expanding it to cover the greater array of financial products that are now traded. This means closing loopholes that currently allow 1 billion to be avoided and extending the tax to capture revenue from trades in corporate bonds and certain derivatives bringing in a further 3.7bn. This extra 4.7bn a year, according to recent research by Stamp Out Poverty - one of the founder organisations of the Robin Hood Tax campaign - could plug last year's NHS funding gap, fix the social care crisis and hire 20,000 new teachers with money left over to build more than 70,000 affordable homes.

What Labour proposes is consistent with moves in other countries, who have quite properly concluded that it is a sensible reaction to the financial crisis to tax and regulate the banking sector more. In Europe Germany, France, Italy and Spain along with six other countries are currently finalising a regional Financial Transactions Tax zone, whilst in the US the FTT was adopted as official Democratic Party policy at their Convention last Autumn.

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Beyond the revenue it will raise, the FTT is favoured by many economists as it discourages the worst forms of casino trading, which helped cause the financial collapse in the first place. Most specifically it will reduce the amount algorithmic high-frequency trading, which at very high volumes and very low margins, serves no economic benefit in the real world of goods and services and is recognised as the cause of recent flash crashes. The FTT, even at very low rates, would disincentivise this type of behaviour thereby improving the stability of the financial system. As well, by giving financial authorities greater oversight of a broader set of transactions, it will serve as a useful weapon in the fight against tax dodging.
I recently visited the Salone di Mobile exhibition in Milan and was full of excitement for the beautiful furniture, fittings and fabrics I engaged. Interior design is an important aspect of the work we do as architects, and has its own department in our business. The reasons why is because interior design, in our opinion, is an extension of its architecture. The architectural proposition sets a tone for space, style, and manifests itself as a still image in time, which could represent our current philosophies and the spirit of the project. The interiors are then set within this space through time, reflecting a characteristic of its inhabitants. Who stays here, works here, lives here? What do they do with their time, what activities, and comforts, embody this architectural connotation of expression?

My visit to the show provided a wide range of new products, and opened my awareness to international artisans and suppliers. I am so excited to have discovered them, as we can now get their products into our projects, and ensure our client is at the forefront of industry.

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My best pick from the show is the Provasi furniture exhibit - A family run business which was set up over 40 years ago, providing a most gorgeous furniture and fabric. The company is based in Seregno, Italy, and proclaim their, "high quality materials and exquisite fabrics, seal the union of noble hardwoods". I found their exhibit intriguing, as the style had a foundation of hardwood sculpturing and traditional heritage design, which is elegantly and creatively articulated through an intricate detailing of finest veneers, finishes, and marbles in a contemporary fashion, combining innovative materials, art deco styled geometric patterns, and an infusion of colour palette to delight the observer.

I found out their furniture has been made for presidential palaces across the world, including the White House in Washington, Abu Dhabi, and Thailand. They have a low profile in the UK, but a small outfit in the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, displays a few of their items, and each is made to order.

The Letto KS Con Baldacc bedImage Courtesy Provasi

The 'Letto KS Con Baldacc' bed is a divine extrusion of skill and beauty. The headboard is elegantly constructed, informing a classical style with a clean modern expression. The frame is firm and contemporary in its appearance, the gold leaf can be changed for another finish, meaning the bed could suit a variety of properties and interior styles.

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The Isabel ArmchairImage Courtesy Provasi

The 'Isabel' armchair, a true beauty. Heritage design to the carcass of the chair, the wide seat and height of the back rest provides a modern take on traditional fundamentals and works well. This specific fabric, not to my taking, but then, I could select any fabric I wanted, and have the seat made to suit my project.

The Como Milano sideboardImage Courtesy Provasi

The 'Como Milano' sideboard, with its beautiful detailing of Zebrawood veneer geometric patterns, integrated with a traditional swirl decoration, exudes luxury, etiquette and fanciful indulgence. One of my favourites.
JUSTIN TALLIS via Getty Images

There is a maxim in international politics: "There are no good options, just bad ones. The trick is to pick the best of the bad." The electorate is faced with the same question, who is the best of the bad? While I am not advocating for any candidate, I feel a great sense of unease at the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. How can a leader whose rhetoric is reminiscent of bygone era lead a country during one of the most complex international security environments in a generation? Russia, Syria, North Korea, Turkey, Iraq, America and beyond - the challenges are enormous and could get more complex with bad and ineffective leadership.

What we know about Jeremy Corbyn's political activism record is troubling, he has hosted speakers who have ties to terrorist organisations like Hezbollah, even describing the likes of Hezbollah as 'friends'. Although he has since apologised for calling Hezbollah his friends, there are many other groups who he has associated with that he has not apologised for. This is not the only troubling thing about Corbyn's foreign policy.

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Syria

While Corbyn's position on Syria seems clear enough, he told the press at Chatham House: "Regime change wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria- and western interventions in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen- have failed in their own terms, and made the world a more dangerous place." The trouble with this statement is that it echoes the alternative truth and counterfactual nature of Corbyn's foreign politics. There was no western attempt at regime change in Syria.

In 2011, the Arab Spring struck Syria following Tunisia, Bahrain and Libya, popular anger against ageing authoritarian orders and violent police states, led millions onto the streets to demand reforms or the regime leave power. The Syrian regime responded to these peaceful protests with excessive brute and bloody force, this went on for months, the Syrian regime even began releasing Islamists extremists from prison in the hope they would start a violent insurgency. While this might sound counter-intuitive to non-Syrians, the Assad regime was facing unprecedented uprising with Syria's different minorities coming together to oppose the regime, an Islamist insurgency was the only way to divide the movement and enable the regime to survive despite the fact it triggered the civil war. In terms of the US and UK's foreign policy, the most that these governments have ever called for is President Assad personally step down and the regime comes together with the opposition and forms a transitional government- a far cry from regime change.

Corbyn ignores this reality, it is true that he has called for a 'political solution to the Syrian crisis' and he has voted against British military action inside Syria, but despite being chairperson for the Stop The War Coalition for much of his political activist career, calling Corbyn 'anti-war' is misleading and inaccurate. Corbyn opposes British bombs landing on Syria, but he was in favour of Russia's intervention into Syria in 2015. Between 2015-2017 Russian airstrikes are estimated to have killed as many as 11, 282 civilians according to AirWars. Corbyn has refused to condemn Russian actions citing fears about spreading, "Russophobia," which will likely lead to confrontation with Russia according to Mr Corbyn.

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However, his non-condemnation takes on a sinister twist when you consider what Labour's shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, said to Channel 4 News in October 2016 shortly after taking over the position. "At a time when people are very angry with the Russians and Syrians," she tells Jon Snow, "it is very easy at this time to ratchet up the rhetoric and to pour oil onto the flames." She goes onto to say the UN special envoy has an initiative to escort all 900 Jihadis out of Eastern Aleppo, which is much like what happened in Homs. To a non-specialist audience this statement sounds harmless - except calling for the Homs solution had nothing to do with escorting Jihadis away and everything to do with wholesale expulsion of civilians from the city.

In effect, through coded language, Thornberry was calling for the forced displacement of civilians from Eastern Aleppo, which did happen in December 2016. Legally speaking forced displacement of a civilian population is a war crime and Thornberry has never qualified her position on this. While Corbyn might have a pro-refugee stand, he doesn't seem too keen on preventing Syrians from becoming refugees in the first instance.

Russia

Unquestionably the greatest international security challenge to Western Europe comes from the Kremlin. Meddling in elections, challenging the territorial integrity of the Ukraine and the Baltic states, destabilising the European Union through aggressive actions in both the Ukraine and Syria, there is a long list of charges. Much of Putin's actions have been out of weakness, both his weakness and the weakness of western powers. Putin has responded to his weakness with a show of strength, at a time when European states seem incapable of formulating a coherent response, this makes the Kremlin particularly deadly. The United States under Trump is volatile and unpredictable, to deal with these uncertainties, Britain needs good strong leadership.

The trouble with Corbyn is how weak he has been on these issues. A PM who will not condemn Russian actions due to fears over 'Russophobia' - at a time when Russian actions pose such a serious threat - is not a PM who Britain can look to in times of international crisis. The bottom line is the Kremlin will only take the West seriously if it believes the West will get tough with Russia and possibly backup their words with actions. It's only then that serious negotiations can take place, agreements reached, and international security and peace upheld. Corbyn has thus far refused to back Nato's deployment to the Baltic States, at the invitation of these governments, to help curtail possible Russian aggressive actions against them. When the Ukrainian Revolution happened and the Russian military responded by illegally invading Eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea, Corbyn responded by blaming Nato and claiming Russia had been 'provoked'. This despite the fact western nations had nothing to do with the Ukrainian revolution and that Russian meddling in the country caused the backlash. In 2014, Corbyn went further and responded to the Russian invasion by saying, "Ukraine's national borders have ebbed and flowed with the tides of history," an odd statement for someone who allegedly cares about international law, of which state sovereignty is a cornerstone.

Conclusion
Ava Jones signing highlights NSD for Iowa women's basketball

Ava Jones' inspirational story added another chapter Wednesday when she officially signed with the Hawkeyes.
Lawsuit That Claims Fyre Festival Sent Cease And Desist Letters To Online Critics Doesnt Show Actual Proof

Although plenty of lawsuits have come out of the luxury music festival turned disaster that was Fyre Festival 2017, one recent such suite is alleging that Fyre Festival threatened social media posters with cease-and-desist letters for negative posts regarding the festival, although the evidence behind it seems fairly flimsy.

______________________________

Guest post by Mike Masnick on Techdirt

If, somehow, you've avoided all the news about the Fyre Festival from the past few weeks well you've been missing out. There's a ton of coverage basically everywhere, but what was promoted as an upscale music festival on a private island in the Bahamas, complete with private flights, luxury lodging, and fine dining turned out to be nothing. Despite having lots of rich and famous folks (especially Instagram stars) promoting the festival for months, it eventually appears that promoting and hyping was about all that was done for the festival, rather than actually organizing stuff. The festival was "canceled" but not before a bunch of people made their way to a not-so-private island in the Bahamas (Great Exumas) and discovered that there was effectively nothing there. There was no music festival. The "lodging" was emergency relief structures. The "fine dining" was slices of bread and cheese with some lettuce. It's been quite a story.

As you can imagine there have been lawsuits filed. Oh so many lawsuits. The sixth of these lawsuits, filed by Kenneth and Emily Reel, is getting a bunch of attention, in part because it includes the festival's PR agency, 42West, rather than just the "startup" behind the festival, Fyre Media (it was supposed to offer some sort of app), its founder Billy McFarland, and the musician Ja Rule, who was supposedly also a creator of the festival. But, even more interesting for those of us here at Techdirt is that he latest filing also claims that Fyre Festival has been threatening social media posters with cease-and-desist letters for posting negative things about the festival. That's what puts this squarely into Techdirt/Streisand Effect territory.

You can read the full filing here or below. Admittedly, the filing is kinda weak. There seem to be many claims that are little more than cut-and-pasted from media reports (without citation or credit). For example, the social media cease-and-desist threats are not shown with much detail (and don't appear to be included as an exhibit). Here's what the lawsuit says:

As for those individuals who elected to speak negatively about the Defendants on social media, they are now being threatened with legal action via cease and desist letters. Specifically, if the social media comments were not taken down, the Defendants claim they could incite violence, rioting, or civil unrest, with the caveat that if someone innocent does get hurt as a result  Fyre Festival will hold you accountable and responsible.

It is a little unclear from the filing if the lawyers have actually even seen this cease and desist letter. It would appear to be almost word for word identical to a TMZ post from a week ago, which doesn't present any actual evidence of the cease and desist letter  and doesn't name the lawyers or even the recipient of the letter. The lawsuit doesn't cite the TMZ article, but also doesn't present any additional evidence of actual letters being sent (normally, you'd think it would be included as an exhibit if they had such a letter). Still, if such letters were actually sent, I imagine it won't be long until they're public.

It's also odd, because this bit about the cease-and-desist letters comes in the same section as the discussion concerning the "application" that Fyre Festival has set up for people to ask for their money back. If you haven't heard, rather than just refunding the money, the Festival has asked people to "apply" for a possible "refund" providing little to no info on whether or not they're likely to get it. The lawsuit points out, reasonably, that while the festival promised refunds, asking people to apply and then providing no details or process is not quite the same thing as actually giving the refunds. And, most amusingly, the "application" has been mocked for encouraging people to accept passes to next year's Fyre Festival (which they insist will be a real thing) in lieu of a refund. Really:

If, somehow, you can't see that image, it shows one of the questions from the application (question 13  which raises a separate issue of just how many questions should you have to answer to get a freaking refund for a festival that didn't happen?!?) saying:

Would you prefer to exchange your 2017 ticket(s) for additional 2018 VIP passes, as opposed to receiving a refund (Ex: If you purchased 3 passes for 2017 you would receive 6 total 2018 VIP passes). As you likely know, we've been through the ringer on social media and this has been a challenging week for us as we were unable to realize our dream on the first try. We are now one of the world's most famous festivals, for all the wrong reasons. We want to reverse that sentiment by producing something amazing. We are fully committed to this event next year, and to producing it in the most professional way, with experienced professionals. We have received support and commitments from several musicians to perform at next year's event. We would be so thankful to have your support as well.

And then, the kicker: it provides two "options" for the recipient to choose from:

Yes, let it ride. I'd love to support you all in creating something amazing!

No, I'm not down for the adventure

I have so many questions just about this question. Like, how they'll be producing an event when they're buried under at least 6 lawsuits and possibly more. Or how they can promise it will be professionally run by like, real professionals, when it appears that none of that happened this time around. Or how they can promise that "several musicians" have "committed" to performing when all the musicians who similarly "committed" to perform at this year's event didn't. The main guy behind all of this, McFarland, has claimed publicly that "currently 81% of guests who have filled out the refund application have said they would like to attend Fyre Festival 2018", which I think people should view with the level of credibility of the guy who promised a music festival on a private island with luxury lodging and fine dining, and left a bunch of wealthy people on a non-private island in relief tents with bread and cheese and no electricity.

Either way, it's a little unclear if Fyre Festival is actually sending cease-and-desist letters, or if it's maybe a part of this crazy long refund application that suggests that Fyre Festival "will hold you accountable and responsible" for negative postings. But whatever it is threatening people for saying bad things about your non-existent and massively overhyped festival seems unwise.

And, reading through the various lawsuits and news reporting over this, it certainly seems that the number of "unwise" moves by the organizers of this event began long ago and kept piling up at a fairly astounding rate. The lawsuit includes a bunch of claims that appear to have originated in a NY Mag article by Chloe Gordon, who wrote that she was hired by Fyre Festival to help out, and that it was clear things would be a disaster months ago. Oddly (again), the lawsuit doesn't note that many of the claims in the lawsuit came from that article, but they do including this astounding claim about a meeting six weeks before the event was supposed to take place:

Meanwhile the event planners were holed up indoors putting together a game plan and a budget. With so little having been prepared ahead of time, the official verdict was that it would take $50 million to pull off. Planners also warned that it would be not be up to the standard they had advertised. The best idea, they said, would be to roll everyones tickets over to 2018 and start planning for the next year immediately. They had a meeting with the Fyre execs to deliver the news. A guy from the marketing team said, Lets just do it and be legends, man.

Yeah, so sending out threatening cease-and-desist letters as mentioned in the lawsuit is certainly within the realm of possibility.

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Williams College professor Jim Shepard reads from his novel, 'The Book of Aron,' at last year's Holocuast exhibit. This year's will feature Auschwitz survivor Magda Brown.

Clarksburg Elementary Holocaust Exhibit Set Monday

CLARKSBURG, Mass.  Clarksburg Elementary eighth-graders will host the school's 13th annual Holocaust Exhibit featuring Auschwitz survivor Magda Brown on Monday night.

English teacher and exhibit organizer Michael Little said the exhibit this year will focus on anti-Jewish legislation in Nazi Germany.

"This exhibit features 18 different [display] boards of Nazi laws from from 1933 to 1939, and the purpose was to show what happened through the legal system, the coming of the Holocaust and the routes of it," Little said. "The boards accumulate on your consciousness and some stuff is unbelievable that was passed."

Little said the students read "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-194" by Victor Klemperer and quotes from the book are dispersed throughout the exhibit to show how the laws effected actual people.

"We have taken an individual consciousness and we have infused it throughout the entire exhibit," Little said. "There is a central idea and then we put a human voice in that gives some context to what you read or see in the pictures."

Clarksburg is the only school in the Berkshires that has a Holocaust studies program. Each year, the eighth grade has selected an element of the Holocaust, ranging from the roots of discrimination and prejudice to genocide and concentration camps. Little invites a survivor or someone with a connection to the Holocaust to speak to the students and to the public after the class's work is exhibited. The course is topped off with a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Little said he guides the students though the process because of the heaviness of the topic and the denseness of the reading material. He said it was difficult to find information on some of the laws even though there are so many.

"When we were doing these, we found that it was sometimes very hard to get information on the law other than what it was so we did two per board," Little said. "We didnt do all of them but we did a lot of them."

Brown spoke at the event two years ago.

"She has a tremendous story and she is looking forward to coming back. She is 90 years old but she is tireless," Little said. "She is such a positive person even with all she has gone through. In light of the world today and the negativity that swirls around every day, Madga has no hate in her and just wants to teach people."

He added that it is important for the kids to meet a survivor because it puts a face on everything they have studied.

Little added that the time to meet a survivor will soon come to an end.

"It is very hard to find survivors now and I think the contents of this exhibit and how we do things will shift real soon," he said. "In the past year, I have talked to eight survivors and a lot of them can't travel or do the presentation because they are simply getting old."

Little said Rabbi Robert Sternberg, professor of Holocaust history at Westfield State College and American International College, will also speak Monday night.

Little said he hopes the students take away more than just the educational aspects of the project.

"I want them to understand the world that we live in. They are going to have a say in it and you have to be awake and you have to be alert," Little said. "You have to pay attention because you will either help shape the world or someone is going to shape it for you."

Little thanked the many sponsors who make the event possible. The event is free but donations are appreciated.

The event starts at 6 p.m. at the school and runs until 9.
Developer David Moresi, center, with assistant project manager Hannah Klammer and project manager Robert Scerbo on the clear-span fourth floor. Moresi plans to develop suites to size for small manufacturers and businesses with the potential for them to grow in place. PreviousNext

North Adams Developer Sees Historic Mill as Thriving Business Hub



The mill dates to 1863 and once manufactured woolen items. NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  Local developer David Moresi envisions filling the former Excelsior Mill on Roberts Drive with a thriving community of entrepreneurs, businesses and artisans.

"This is about job growth, job development, job creation and working with businesses to make this a sucessful venture for them," he said on Friday inside the nearly 100,000 square foot building. "We've got some great things in the works and we're going to get this to 100 percent occupancy."

He expects to make announcements in the coming weeks about new tenants that are already in the works and will begin aggressively marketing the complex. The building has two tenants now  Overland and Excelsior, both mainly using storage space.

But along with the new multi-use purpose will be the resurrection of an old name  the Norad Mill  first used when the mill was built in 1863.

Moresi closed on the property on Thursday for $47,500, a figure he and project manager Robert Scerbo knew would raise eyebrows.

But they said, the price offsets two components: the carrying costs and modernization necessary for the massive five-story mill and the flexibility to work with incoming tenants on pricing and buildouts that might otherwise be obstacles.

"We have the unique ability to come in and remove some of those barriers," Moresi said. He stresses it's all local, private investment in building the local economy.

"It really lends itself well to manufacturing, industrial warehousing, the real meat and potatoes that people think of with manufacturing," Scerbo said. "There's nine loading docks, there's elevator access to all five levels in the building ... We have the opportunity to really compartmentalize and make space available to someone whether they're a startup or an existing manufacturer or from people from out of state."

In particular, new businesses will have the ability to expand within the building as they grow, a flexibility not always available elsewhere.

Built by Sanford Blackinton to house the North Adams Woolen Co., and later North Adams Manufacturing Co., producing textiles in the 1940s. Excelsior Printing Co. bought it in 1954 and additions were made in the 1980s. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The mill was placed on the market by Crane & Co. market nearly two years ago after Excelsior Printing, which leased the building, was acquired by a Connecticut company.

Timothy Golden, corporate risk manager for Crane Currency, said the company had had some inquiries but wanted to make sure whoever bought it was the right fit.

"Crane feels a strong commitment to aid the community and protect the interests of Western Massachusetts," he said. "One goal was to make sure whoever we sold it to would enhance the community ... to make sure it was a good fit prove a benefit to the community."

Moresi & Associates came in with an offer and an idea that clicked with senior management.

"We knew when we met with them in person that they had best interests for the and the community at large," Golden said. "It's exciting to see thise older buildings being revitalized ... It has been a pleasure to work with Dave and Bob and we wish them all the best."

Scerbo said Crane, and the prior Roberts family, had been an exemplary custodian of the mill during its ownership and it was clear they wanted that stewardship to continue.

"They realized it wasn't just someone looking to buy the building at a cut rate," Scerbo said. "They felt it was for the legacy of the building and a legacy of themselves."

Moresi's excitement over the possibilities was clear as he walked through the structure, pointing out the historic details, 150-year-old beams, and enthusing over the massive clear-span fourth-floor in the original structure.

"I drove by this place for a year ... I thought, well it wouldn't hurt just to look at it," he said.

Moresi's been developing residential and commercial properties since, he said, the dotcom boom first hit the city. Just in the last half-dozen years, he's redeveloped the Wall-Street mill, the Mulcare Block with the Mohawk Tavern and Grazie Ristorante, and the company's offices on Massachusetts Avenue.

He's followed the area's up and down economy and is sure it's on the upswing, especially along the Route 2 corridor where a couple of other major projects are in the works.

It's all about job creation, Moresi said. "With this project, we'll be creating jobs for our company and people will be bringing jobs here."

Just in the last year, his own company has added at least a half-dozen new jobs that expands its ability to provide construction and maintenance service to his tenants. About 9,000 square feet on the bottom floor will house the company's workshop, bringing together equipment scattered at various sites for lack of room.

What the building won't have is residential units.

"There was a very conscious decision not to do that here," Scerbo said. "What David's vision was how do we support the residential market here in North Adams? It's not by suckng it away and creating more residential here. ... It's about doing something here that's going to create activity, create jobs ... make the jobs for people who need to live in North Adams."
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Jason Blum has made a name for himself as one of Hollywoods most prolific horror producers, having recently worked on Get Out, Split, and The Purge.

Speaking to The New York Times, the 48-year-old  who heads Blumhouse Productions  revealed one of his many upcoming projects; a horror, directed by Mudbounds Dee Rees, about two black lesbians haunted by some unfamiliar force.

The duo apparently met at the Sundance Institute while giving speeches, Rees approaching Blum and offering a movie pitch: Youve got me and my wife, two black lesbians, and when we first moved in, we fought every day over all these little things: Why is this over there? Did you move that? 

Maybe it was a ghost. Or maybe it was some other force  like us not wanting to be there or fitting in. Anyway, thats my horror-movie pitch.

Films to get excited about in 2017 Show all 13 1 /13 Films to get excited about in 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Star Wars: The Last Jedi Director: Rian Johnson Rian Johnson Cast: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, and Lupita Nyong'o Plot: No details yet, but it will continue directly on from Rey coming face-to-face with Luke at the end of The Force Awakens. Release Date: 15 December 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Thor: Ragnarok Director: Taika Waititi Taika Waititi Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Tessa Thompson, Jeff Goldblum, Karl Urban, and Mark Ruffalo Plot: Story details are minimal as of now, but Thor's third return to screen has already been teased to feature a loose adaptation of the famous 'Planet Hulk' storyline. Release Date: 27 October 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 You Were Never Really Here Director: Lynne Ramsay Lynne Ramsay Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Alessandro Nivola Plot: A war veteran's attempt to save a young girl from a sex trafficking ring goes horribly wrong. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Annihilation Director: Alex Garland Alex Garland Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, and Oscar Isaac Plot: A biologist's husband disappears. She thus puts her name forward for an expedition into an environmental disaster zone, but does not quite find what she's expecting. The expedition team is made up of the biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Wonderstruck (image from Far From Heaven) Director: Todd Haynes Cast: Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, and Amy Hargreaves Plot: The story of a young boy in the Midwest is told simultaneously with a tale about a young girl in New York from fifty years ago as they both seek the same mysterious connection. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Mother (image of Darren Aronofsky) Director: Darren Aronofsky Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson, and Ed Harris Plot: A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 The Killing of a Sacred Deer (image from The Lobster) Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Cast: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and Alicia Silverstone Plot: A surgeon forms a familial bond with a sinister teenage boy, with disastrous results. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Blade Runner 2049 Director: Denis Villeneuve Denis Villeneuve Cast: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, and Jared Leto Plot: Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what's left of society into chaos. K's discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years. Release Date: 6 October 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Lady Bird (image of director Greta Gerwig) Director: Greta Gerwig Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and Lucas Hedges Plot: The adventures of a young woman living in Northern California for a year. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (image of director Steven Spielberg and star Mark Rylance) Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Mark Rylance, Oscar Isaac Plot: The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara recounts the story of a young Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy in 1858 who, having been secretly baptized, is forcibly taken from his family to be raised as a Christian. His parents' struggle to free their son becomes part of a larger political battle that pits the Papacy against forces of democracy and Italian unification. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 How to Talk to Girls at Parties Director: John Cameron Mitchell John Cameron Mitchell Cast: Elle Fanning, Ruth Wilson, and Nicole Kidman Plot: An alien touring the galaxy breaks away from her group and meets two young inhabitants of the most dangerous place in the universe: the London suburb of Croydon. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 The Dark Tower Director: Nikolaj Arcel Nikolaj Arcel Cast: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, and Tom Taylor Plot: Gunslinger Roland Deschain roams an Old West-like landscape in search of the dark tower, in the hopes that reaching it will preserve his dying world. Release Date: 28 July 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Suburbicon Director: George Clooney George Clooney Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Josh Brolin, and Oscar Isaac Plot: A crime mystery set in the quiet family town of Suburbicon during the 1950s, where the best and worst of humanity is hilariously reflected through the deeds of seemingly ordinary people. When a home invasion turns deadly, a picture-perfect family turns to blackmail, revenge and betrayal. Release Date: 24 November

Blum immediately replied the two should work together, with The Tracking Board confirming they had indeed signed a deal soon after the initial meeting.

I cant tell you how rare it is that people mean what they say in this business, Rees said. Hes just letting me make the best possible version of what I want to make.

The directors Sundance flick Mudbound  starring Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, and Mary J. Blige  was recently bought by Netflix for $12.5 million. The film, based on Hillary Jordans book of the same name, centres on a family, relocated to Mississippi, who find themselves struggling with racism and family members return from World War II.

The Independent recently caught up with Blum, who spoke about how financing horrors offers opportunities to work on Oscar-winning dramas, such as Whiplash.
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Natalie Portman gets almost zero justice when it comes to franchise Hollywood: whether it be Star Wars' Padme or Thor's Jane Foster, she's pretty consistently cast aside and under-used.

In Revenge of the Sith, Padme had the great pleasure of dying because she, as a medical droid puts it, "lost the will to live", a grandiose way of stating that she essentially couldn't be bothered anymore.

You'd think George Lucas could summon up something a little more fitting for the woman who had proved herself a fierce, capable leader to her people from a young age.

In fact, Digital Spy uncovered an alternate ending for the film that actually did her character justice, tucked within a presentation given by concept artist Ian McCaig given at the Academy of Art university in 2016.

McCaig revealed that the original plot saw Padme actively turn against her husband Anakin (Hayden Christensen) after discovering he'd been consumed by the Dark Side, taking the first steps in founding what would eventually become the Rebel Alliance.

 Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Teaser Trailer

The film saw her still travel to Mustafar to confront Anakin, but instead of begging and pleading to whatever goodness was left in him, only to be choked and left unconscious, Padme actually attempted to kill him.

With her knife pressed against his neck, she realises she still loves him to much to do the deed, with McCaig stating the rest of the film pretty much followed the same trajectory, presumably meaning she still died in childbirth.



Sure, it wouldn't have miraculously fixed the Star Wars prequels, but it certainly would have made much more sense for Padme to end her story this way.
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Grime artist Jme has met up with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to discuss the forthcoming general election.

The Boy Better Know co-founder took over Corbyn's Snapchat account where he urged young people to register.

On Snapchat he said: "Hi, it's JME, Boy Better Know. I'm on Jeremy's Snapchat to make sure you register to vote."

The pair then spoke about "music, education and art", and Jme gave Corbyn his views on why "bare of us don't vote".

Jme has been vocal in encouraging people to think about who they will vote for in the election, which takes place on 8 June.

Corbyn previously thanked Jme after he informed his 688,000 followers how to vote on Twitter.

Jme has also been sharing posts by fellow artists including Novelist, Akala and AJ Tracey, who have all spoken out in support of Corbyn's voting history.

Akala wrote: "Homie @jeremycorbyn was anti-apartheid back when the Tories had Mandela down as a terrorist. Safe."
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The father of schoolboy Damilola Taylor begged young people to stop the string of killings on the streets of London as he collected a Bafta for a drama about the death of his 10-year-old son.

Damilola, Our Loved Boy was awarded the prize for best single drama at the British Academy Television Awards where Richard Taylor made an emotional speech hours after an 18-year-old man died in Enfield, north London, after suffering stab wounds.

Scotland Yard said he was the 10th teenager to have been killed in the capital in 2017.

Mr Taylor was joined by Damilola's brother Tunde and the production team as he said: I want to dedicate this to the memory of Damilola Taylor and Gloria, my late wife, and first and foremost send a strong appeal to young people on the street killing themselves.

Parents are crying, others are crying, the surge of killing has gone up in the city of London, I beg you all to stop this unnecessary killing of innocent people.

Young people, spread the message.

His impassioned plea came shortly after the teenager was killed and two others injured in the latest in a surge of knife attacks in the capital.

The 18-year-old was found suffering with stab wounds after police were called to reports of a mass brawl in Hertford Road, Enfield, north London at around 10.30pm on Saturday.

BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Show all 14 1 /14 BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Joanna Lumley with the Fellowship award at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 Rex BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures David Haye presents the award for Best Sport for The Open in the press room at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 Ian West/PA Wire BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Wunmi Mosaku with the Supporting Actress award for 'Damilola, Our Loved Boy' at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 Rex BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Actor Adeel Akhtar poses with his Bafta for Best Leading Actor at the British Academy Television Awards 2017 Joel Ryan/Invision/AP BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Sarah Lancashire with the award for Best Actress in the press room at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 PA BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Phoebe Waller-Bridge with the award for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme in the press room at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 Ian West/PA Wire BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Tom Hollander winner of Best Supporting Actor award for the 'Night Manager' at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 Rex BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Presented by Katie Piper and Stacey Dooley, Winners of the Single documentary award, 'Teenage Prison Abuse Exposed' with the PANORAMA Production Team at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards Rex BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Andy Worboys, Nicholas Bennett, Daniel Gordon, Andy Boag, Phil Scraton, Tim Atack and John Battsek, winners of the Single Documentary award for 'Hillsborough', pose in the Winner's room at the Virgin TV BAFTA Television Awards Dave Benett/Getty Images BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Charlie Brooker with the award for Best Comedy and Comedy Entertainment Programme in the press room at the Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 Ian West/PA Wire BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Victoria Derbyshire with her News Coverage award at theVirgin TV British Academy Television Awards 2017 Rex BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures TV presenters Ant and Dec pose with their Bafta for Best Live Event at the British Academy Television Awards at the Royal Festival Hall Joel Ryan/Invision/AP BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Comedian Michael McIntyre poses with his Bafta for Best Entertainment Performance at the British Academy Television Awards Joel Ryan/Invision/AP BAFTAs 2017 winners - in pictures Nicola Shindler, Siobhan Finneran, Sarah Lancashire and Con O'Neill - Best Drama - Happy Valley Rex

A 19-year-old man and 17-year-old boy were also found with knife injuries in nearby Palmers Lane.

All three victims were taken to hospital and the 18-year-old was pronounced dead at 11.41pm.

He is yet to be formally identified and a post-mortem examination will take place in due course.



Press Association
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After a week of unbelievable news becoming reality, late night hosts across the political spectrum criticised Donald Trump over the firing of James Comey.

President Trump. Two words that continue to sound revolting together, like Viscous Discharge or Moist Stockings, John Oliver said, opening Last Week Tonight. The ex- actor then lambasted the Republican for dismissing the person investigating the Russia scandal.

Surprise, everyone! Oliver said. Do you remember normal weeks? Because I dont! Everything about Comeys firing was unusual. From the fact he himself found out about the news on TV to the termination letter which was genuinely weird.

After reading out Trumps letter  while I greatly appreciate your informing me on three separate occasions I am not under investigation  Oliver commented on how suspicious the President seemed attempting to put words into Comeys mouth.

That is the equivalent of a breakup text that says While I greatly appreciate you informing me on three separate occasions that I was the most enthusiastic, dextrous, and intuitive lover you have ever had, I must terminate your position as my girlfriend.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

Oliver then listed off numerous ways the Trump administration has attempted to dismiss any accusations; until the President admitted on Television he was going to fire Comey without talking to his team.

Trump is so desperate to appear dominant, he will rush to take the credit for anything, no matter how bad it is, Oliver said. If you wanted him to confess to murder all a lawyer would have to say is, your honour, the killer could not possibly have been Donald Trump, it must have been someone much stronger, and smarter, with a much hotter daughter. And before they finished that sentence, Trump would be yelling I did it, it was me.

In the same interview, Trump also admitted that the Russia investigation was part of the decision, Oliver commenting: What are you doing? I was thinking of the Russia investigation when I fired Comey is the one thing that you are not supposed to say out loud!

After quickly going through other Trump/Comey news from the week, including a threatening Tweet about revealing tapes, Oliver called on Congress to do something.

Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up

The Founding Fathers created a system of checks and balances to limit the power of the President, but it only works if someone f**king checks, or balances. And if you dont, its no longer on Trump. Its on you. Watch below.

Last week, Oliver called out Republicans for repealing ObamaCare. Watch here.
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Netflix is testing price increases for customers in Australia.

The company raised prices by as much as $3 AUD for a number of users, as part of a trial.

Netflix has confirmed that the test is limited to Australia, but hasnt yet revealed any of its findings.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Initial reports from The Australian and News.au claimed that the prices rise only applied to users looking to sign up to the service on weekends, but Netflix has denied this in a statement sent to the The Independent.

We continuously test new things at Netflix and these tests typically vary in length of time, said the company.

In this case, we are testing slightly different price points to better understand how consumers value Netflix. Not everyone will see this test and we may not ever offer it generally.

Reports that we are testing 'weekend-only' pricing are inaccurate and entirely false. As our statement clearly states, this testing varies in length and time and the fact that some members saw this test on a weekend is completely unrelated. This test is limited to Australia only.

According to News.au, prices for some customers in Australia rose from $8.99 to $9.99 per month for the Basic plan, $11.99 to $13.99 for the Standard plan and $14.99 to $17.99 for the Premium plan.

Hackers recently leaked unreleased episodes of Orange is the New Black, which appeared to have been stolen from Hollywood-based audio post-production company Larson Studios.

Its also threatening to leak hundreds of GBs of unreleased media from a number of shows including It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and New Girl.
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The youth tribunal in Reggio Calabria, in the Southern Italian region of Calabria, is pioneering a new form of intervention, aimed at breaking the family bonds between children and their parents who are under investigation, charged or convicted for mafia-related crimes. As the procedure falls under family law, the tribunal can intervene even in the absence of a charge or a conviction of the parents. Once anti-mafia authorities start an investigation, children of suspects can be removed from their parents.

Since 2012, around 40 proceedings have successfully limited or removed paternity rights within mafia families, almost exclusively aimed at fathers. The children affected receive support from social services, including inclusion in the foster system, and they are often sent outside the region as part of special education programmes.

There was a peak in removals after a partnership agreement in 2013 with district prosecutors. Then in mid-2016, the president of the youth tribunal, Roberto Di Bella, published a decree to codify the procedure, explaining how to justify the removals under Italian law. This now means that the procedure is applicable to the whole of Italy, although so far it has only been applied in Calabria.

Ndrangheta family model

The reasons why the authorities have turned to this extreme policy is closely linked to the situation in Calabria. The families involved are members of the Ndrangheta, the most globalised, powerful and wealthiest part of the Italian mafia. While the Ndrangheta clans are deeply rooted in Calabria, investigations over the last 30 years have shown the spread of their presence to the rest of the country, especially in the north of Italy.

The term Ndrangheta also refers to a set of behaviours. These are characterised by the use of intimidation, disregard for authority and the law, involvement in criminal activities and preoccupation with personal gain. All of this is imbued in the cultural and social codes of the Calabrian region. The most traditional manifestations of Calabrian culture, from religion to community organisation, are linked to the centrality of families. Marriage is used between families to preserve reputation and social prestige.

This explains why the youth tribunal argued that the Ndrangheta clans grip on the territory should be understood as a socially inherited phenomenon, where family relationships play a crucial role. Mafia culture is based on the centrality of the father figure: at the same time both boss and pater familias. Mothers instil the mafia culture and transmit values such as omerta (the behaviour of keeping silent when things do not relate to you directly), honour and respect. Sons are expected to step into their fathers shoes and daughters are crucial for strategies of marriage and alliances.

Breaking up the bonds between parents and their children in areas such as Reggio Calabria is therefore an effective way to stop criminal traditions being passed from generation to generation. The Ndrangheta  the most international of the various branches of the Italian mafia  needs to keep its local roots intact and strong to be able to move criminals and criminal activities abroad.

Justice versus protection

Palazzo San Giorgio, the town hall of Reggio Calabria (Olivier Duquesne/Flickr)

The removal policy has not been without controversy, particularly regarding the welfare of the children removed from their families. Critics have questioned the legitimacy and impact of relying on judicial intervention as a form of child saving.

More widely, removing children from home has been criticised as a punishment to the children rather than a mechanism to protect them. Some have also argued that policies in which children are removed from their parents can eventually lead to children being used as objects through which to accuse and punish parents even more. However, a small study has also shown improvement in the quality of life of children who are removed from negligent homes. As my research has also highlighted, programmes of child protection as part of policies to tackle organised crime are also present in other countries under the auspices of crime prevention.

In the fight against the Ndrangheta so far, child protection can be justified on the basis of the pervasiveness of the mafia subculture within the home. But it may take generations to tell whether the policy will have a long-term impact on the culture of these mafia families.

Anna Sergi is a lecturer in criminology at the University of Essex. This article was originally published on The Conversation (www.conversation.com)
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Internet porn might be more widespread than ever but a growing a number of scientists are becoming concerned about its toxic effect on real relationships.

Excessive pornography viewing could be affecting mens libidos and putting them at risk of sexual dysfunction, according to new research.

A panel discussion held at the 112th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association has highlighted results from a recent survey which found that mens obsession with porn could be ruinous to their psychosexual health, News Week reports.

The researchers, led by Dr Matthew Christman, a staff urologist and program director for pediatric urology at the Naval Medcical Center of San Diego, reported that the more time men spend on free sites like PornHub, the less likely they are to be able to connect with a real-life partner in the bedroom.

As a result, intimacy can become extremely challenging and romantic or sexual relationships can be severely damaged.

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By studying 312 male participants aged between 20 and 40, the researchers found a close correlation between excessive pornography use and sexual dysfunction.

It revealed that around 20 per cent of men reported using porn three to five times a week.

 We need to talk about porn

Recommended This is what the amount of porn you watch says about you

And, that nearly 4 per cent of men preferred masturbating to pornography, over having sexual intercourse with a partner.

The data also showed that men who used porn more frequently, reported a lack of sexual desire and suffered from erectile dysfunction.
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He might have only been in power for five days, but newly elected South Korean president Moon Jae-in is already delivering on his promise to shake things up. Albeit not quite in the way he expected.

No sooner had he taken office than a new furore erupted online, but this time, it was all down his stunningly handsome bodyguard.

Photos of 36-year-old Choi Young Jae were reportedly first posted on Korean web portal Daum where they received tens of thousands of views.

But since appearing on Twitter, his square-jaw, coiffed hair and sultry gaze has really sent fans into a frenzy with the #bodyguardbae.

After re-posting photos to her profile, one Twitter user wrote, Excuse me, this is the new Korean presidents bodyguard. It has since received more than 24,000 re-tweets and 55,000 likes.

But, admiration for the special warfare command officer doesnt stop there. Other netizens have been dreaming up ways of meeting him and even calling for Choi-inspired fanfiction.

 If I charge for the South Korean president, will his bodyguard tackle me? said one fan.

While another posted, he looks like the square-jawed serious romantic lead. Who's going to be his plucky heroine who accidentally captures his heart?

One person simply put, My body needs guarding.

Regrettably though, the presidents campaign office have confirmed that Choi is unfortunately married and has two daughters.

Part of a wider appreciation, the South Korean media has lauded the bodyguard as a leading member of what they have dubbed the handsome brigade of officials.

Surprisingly, this even includes president Moon himself who, after images during his younger years surfaced during the election campaign, sent fans hearts a-flutter.
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An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.

So said Microsofts Brad Smith of the WannaCry malware that demands a ransom for freeing locked up computers and has spread chaos around the globe.

Mr Smith, the IT giants President and Chief Legal Counsel, was concerned about the fact that it appears that the offending code was stolen from Amercas National Security Agency.

His clever analogy spread around the worlds news organisations just as quickly as WannaCry spread through computers used by organisations ranging from businesses, to schools, to Russian railways, to Britains NHS.

If youre currently doing a masters in corporate communications or PR, congratulations, you have a subject for your thesis.

The way Mr Smith grabbed control of the news agenda at the start of the working week was textbook.

Attacking shadowy American government agencies, while likening their stockpiling of malware to the stockpiling of ballistic missiles? Cleverly done, Mr Smith, cleverly done.

You should be congratulated. I salute you. We all should. With raised middle fingers.

Mr Smith wasnt wrong. If you stockpile dangerous code like WannaCry and then allow it to be stolen, youre asking for trouble.

But lets remember the key point about all this: The criminals behind the WannaCry attack were able to wreak havoc by exploiting flaws in Microsoft products.

Those flaws will be exploited again in the expected second wave of attacks this week and then again during the future outbreaks that will doubtless follow.

Now, if you read Mr Smiths blogpost (it's on Microsoft's website) he does actually acknowledge that his employer has some thinking to do.

Under a headline calling for urgent collective to keep people safe online - and how could you argue with that - he says this: As a technology company, we at Microsoft have the first responsibility to address these issues.

Yes, you do Mr Smith. But that hasn't been at the centre of people's minds because of the Tomahawk Missile analogy, used later on in your blog, as I suspect you knew would be the case. As I suspect Microsoft knew would be the case.

There are those will argue that if organisations hit by WannaCarry had just upgraded their software they wouldnt have had to worry.

But the thing is, upgrading software across big organisations like the NHS isnt as simple as you or I simply upgrading our computers and having to wait awhile to use Amazon. Its time consuming, complicated and costly. Especially costly.

You want our new system? Pay up then. Dont want to do that? Well, were not going to support the old one so tough luck if something goes wrong.

Doesnt that look rather like a ransom demand if you think about it?

It's not as if upgrading is risk free. Just upgrading a personal computer or a Mac can create problems, as I learned to my cost at the weekend. Five hours on Sunday afternoon speaking to Apple's help staff and still my newly updated Mac refuses to access the internet.

Imagine if that were to happen at the NHS, or another big and important organisation where web access is vital. Its not as if they could do what I did and simply use an iPad while waiting for the engineers to report back on what went wrong.

Is it any wonder, then, that sometimes organisations stick with the tried and tested and clunky, even if the makers withdraw their support?

Yes, Mr Smith, this should serve as a wake up call and you are not wrong about security agencies' cavalier hoarding of nasty computer bugs, or that it is scandalous that they so often seem to get out.

Firms and other big IT users also need to think hard about their IT strategies, and the training they provide.

We need to have a conversation, and urgently.

But right at the centre of that conversation should be the IT companies themselves, and the responsibilities they have towards those people they sell their hugely profitable products to.

Business news: In pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Business news: In pictures Business news: In pictures Flybe collapses Airline Flybe has collapsed. All future flights on the Exeter-based airline have been cancelled  leaving more than 2,300 staff facing an uncertain future, and wrecking the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. The chief executive, Mark Anderson, said: Europes largest independent regional airline has been unable to overcome significant funding challenges to its business. AFP via Getty Business news: In pictures Future product placement will be 'tailored to individual viewers' Marketing executives say that product placement in films and televison shows on streaming services such as Netflix may be tailored to individuals in future. For instance, if data shows that a viewer is a fan of pepsi, a billboard in the background of a shot would host an advert for pepsi, while for a viewer known to have different tastes it could be for Coca-Cola Paramount Business news: In pictures Corbyn wishes Amazon a happy birthday In a card sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the company's 25th birthday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes: "You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share" Business news: In pictures No deal, no tariffs The government has announced that it would slash almost all tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Notable exceptions include cars and meat, which will see tariffs in place to protect British farmers Getty Business news: In pictures Fingerprint payment NatWest is trialling a new bank card that will allow people to touch their hand to the card when paying rather than typing in a PIN number. The card will work by recognising the user's fingerprint NatWest/PA Wire Business news: In pictures Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis Business news: In pictures Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid 3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA Business news: In pictures RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA Business news: In pictures Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty Business news: In pictures Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rues contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. Business news: In pictures Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped 4m off of Flybes revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airlines estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year.

Mr Smith seems to like analogies, so heres one to think about.

Set aside the NSA for a moment. Lets imagine a car company like, I don't know, Ford for the sake of argument, decided to behave like Microsoft and other IT companies do.

Now, imagine if the brakes started to fail on an earlier version of, say, its Ford Focus. Do you think the company would be allowed to get away with saying that that model is unsupported and that customers should upgrade to a newer model if they want cars with working brakes? I dont.


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JPMorgan has agreed to buy a Dublin building with room for 1,000 staff in the first sign of a financial services company expanding significantly in Ireland since the Irish government began a major campaign to attract firms in the wake of Brexit.

The US investment bank will acquire a 130,000 sq ft building at the Capital Dock development in Dublins docklands, the building's developer Kennedy Wilson said in a statement.

The bank, which currently employs around 500 people in Dublin, did not say how many jobs would be created or whether any positions would be moved from the UK.

Recommended JPMorgan confirms hundreds of UK jobs to move to EU because of Brexit

JPMorgan plans to hire a significant number of people in Dublin in its expanding custody and funds services businesses over the next three years, JPMorgans head of investor services James Kenny told the Financial Times at the weekend.

The bank has indicated it will use its existing European Union banks, in Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg to anchor its EU operations after Brexit.

This new building gives us room to grow and some flexibility within the European Union, senior country officer for JPMorgan in Ireland Carin Bryans said in the statement.

Ireland has engaged in a major lobbying campaign during the past year to try to convince companies with large bases in the United Kingdom to consider moving some of their staff to Ireland to maintain access to the European Union's single market.

Hubertus Vaeth, the head of Frankfurt's campaign to promote the city to banks since Britain voted to leave the EU, told Reuters earlier this month he expected the five largest US investment banks to move staff to more than one EU location with around 1,000 going to Frankfurt and possibly more to Dublin.

Business news: In pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Business news: In pictures Business news: In pictures Flybe collapses Airline Flybe has collapsed. All future flights on the Exeter-based airline have been cancelled  leaving more than 2,300 staff facing an uncertain future, and wrecking the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. The chief executive, Mark Anderson, said: Europes largest independent regional airline has been unable to overcome significant funding challenges to its business. AFP via Getty Business news: In pictures Future product placement will be 'tailored to individual viewers' Marketing executives say that product placement in films and televison shows on streaming services such as Netflix may be tailored to individuals in future. For instance, if data shows that a viewer is a fan of pepsi, a billboard in the background of a shot would host an advert for pepsi, while for a viewer known to have different tastes it could be for Coca-Cola Paramount Business news: In pictures Corbyn wishes Amazon a happy birthday In a card sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the company's 25th birthday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes: "You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share" Business news: In pictures No deal, no tariffs The government has announced that it would slash almost all tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Notable exceptions include cars and meat, which will see tariffs in place to protect British farmers Getty Business news: In pictures Fingerprint payment NatWest is trialling a new bank card that will allow people to touch their hand to the card when paying rather than typing in a PIN number. The card will work by recognising the user's fingerprint NatWest/PA Wire Business news: In pictures Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis Business news: In pictures Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid 3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA Business news: In pictures RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA Business news: In pictures Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty Business news: In pictures Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rues contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. Business news: In pictures Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped 4m off of Flybes revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airlines estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year.

Rivalry between the different EU cities has become acrimonious at times, with Ireland complaining to the European Commission that it is being undercut by predatory behavior by other centres.

Ireland's financial services minister, Eoghan Murphy, said in a statement on Monday that JPMorgan's announcement was a welcome vote of confidence in the strength of Ireland's offering and Dublin's status as a major financial center.

Reuters
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For many, a traditional after-work drink presents the challenge of tiptoeing a fine line between remaining professional and letting your hair down.

But in Japan, it appears that one does not necessarily preclude the other.

Drinking in the country  known for its particularly industrious workforce  is an essential part of professional networking, much more so that we know it to be in the UK.

Recommended Japan names firms where employees risk death by overwork

Thats according to Erin Meyer, senior affiliate professor in the organisational behaviour Department at business school INSEAD and the author of a 2014 bestseller on the matter.

In her book, Ms Meyer states that Japanese people are among the least explicit communicators in the world, meaning that a lot might not be said during official work hours.

But over drinks  frequently more than just a few  it becomes a lot easier to build relationships and win a colleague, business partner or clients trust.

Writing for Business Insider, Ms Meyer said: In Japanese culture, where group-harmony and avoiding open conflict are overriding goals, drinking provides an opportunity to let down your hair and express your real thoughts.

[] Drinking alcohol is therefore an important Japanese bonding ritual not only with clients, but also within one's own team.

In fact, Ms Meyer claims that in Japan, the more you drink the more trustworthy you are considered.

She writes: When they drink until they fall down with you, they show you that they are willing to let their guard down completely.

The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week Show all 13 1 /13 The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 13. Postal service clerks Average hours typically worked a week: 39.32 Median earned income: $51,000 What they do: Perform any combination of tasks in a post office like receive letters and parcels; sell postage and revenue stamps, postal cards, and stamped envelopes; fill out and sell money orders; place mail in pigeon holes of mail racks or in bags; and examine mail for correct postage. Getty The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 12. Speech-language pathologists Average hours typically worked a week: 36.17 Median earned income: $54,000 What they do: Assess and treat persons with speech, language, voice, and fluency disorders. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 11. Registered nurses Average hours typically worked a week: 37.59 Median earned income: $56,000 What they do: Assess patient health problems and needs, develop and implement nursing-care plans, and maintain medical records. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 10. Psychologists Average hours typically worked a week: 36.75 Median earned income: $56,000 What they do: Diagnose or evaluate mental and emotional disorders of individuals through observations, interviews, and psychological tests and formulate and administer programs of treatment. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 9. Chiropractors Average hours typically worked a week: 39.75 Median earned income: $60,000 What they do: Assess, treat, and care for patients by manipulation of spine and musculoskeletal system. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 8. Occupational therapists Average hours typically worked a week: 36.02 Median earned income: $60,000 What they do: Provide rehabilitative treatments and procedures that help build or restore vocational, homemaking, and daily living skills. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 7. Technical writers Average hours typically worked a week: 39.61 Median earned income: $62,000 What they do: Write technical materials, such as equipment manuals, appendices, or operating and maintenance instructions. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 6. Physical therapists Average hours typically worked a week: 37.43 Median earned income: $63,000 What they do: Assess, plan, organise, and participate in rehabilitative programs that improve mobility, relieve pain, increase strength, and improve or correct disabling conditions resulting from disease or injury. Rex Features The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 5. Audiologists Average hours typically worked a week: 37.77 Median earned income: $64,000 What they do: Assess and treat people with hearing and related disorders. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 4. Radiation therapists Average hours typically worked a week: 38.40 Median earned income: $70,000 What they do: Provide radiation therapy to patients as prescribed by a radiologist according to established practices and standards. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 3. Optometrists Average hours typically worked a week: 39.03 Median earned income: $100,000 What they do: Diagnose, manage, and treat conditions and diseases of the human eye and visual system. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 2. Pharmacists Average hours typically worked a week: 38.38 Median earned income: $102,000 What they do: Dispense drugs prescribed by physicians and other health practitioners and provide information to patients about medications and their use. The 13 highest-paying jobs with less than 40 hours per week 1. Dentists Average hours typically worked a week: 37.83 Median earned income: $130,000 What they do: Examine, diagnose, and treat diseases, injuries, and malformations of teeth and gums.

The excessive post-work drinking habit present a sharp contrast to the culture of overworking which Japan has become famous for.

Earlier this month, Japans government released a list of more than 300 companies that have breached labour laws, in a move designed to crack down on firms that are putting employees at risk of literally working themselves to death.

In February, the countrys government also launched a campaign urging employees to leave the office at 3pm  so much earlier than usual - on every last Friday of the month.
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US ride services company Lyft and Google parent Alphabet's self-driving car unit Waymo have launched a self-driving vehicle partnership, bringing together two rivals to dominant ride-sharing service Uber.

Lyft, the No. 2 US ride service by ride volume, in a statement said a deal to launch self-driving pilots would accelerate its vision for transportation and Waymo, which is beginning tests of a self-driving car service in Phoenix, said the partnership would let its technology reach more people, in more places.

Neither offered many details of the agreement, which was reported earlier by The New York Times.

The car industry and technology companies are racing to develop self-driving technology, which they expect in a number of years will transform transportation, cutting costs of ride services and changing the way people buy and use cars.

Uber is the biggest US ride service by volume and has been developing self-driving technology, which it sees as a key to its future, as it expands its ride service with human drivers.

Waymo has some of the most advanced self-driving vehicle technology and has been looking for partners, while Lyft offers ride services in about 300 U.S. cities.

Still, Lyft said the deal is non-exclusive and will allow it to continue a self-driving partnership with General Motors, which is a Lyft investor.

GM plans to deploy thousands of self-driving electric cars in test fleets partnering with Lyft beginning 2018, sources told Reuters in February.

Lyft is extremely early in its autonomous efforts. It has relied heavily on General Motors for any testing and doesn't have a programmme that rivals Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, a department in Uber dedicated to building self-driving technology.

Business news: In pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Business news: In pictures Business news: In pictures Flybe collapses Airline Flybe has collapsed. All future flights on the Exeter-based airline have been cancelled  leaving more than 2,300 staff facing an uncertain future, and wrecking the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. The chief executive, Mark Anderson, said: Europes largest independent regional airline has been unable to overcome significant funding challenges to its business. AFP via Getty Business news: In pictures Future product placement will be 'tailored to individual viewers' Marketing executives say that product placement in films and televison shows on streaming services such as Netflix may be tailored to individuals in future. For instance, if data shows that a viewer is a fan of pepsi, a billboard in the background of a shot would host an advert for pepsi, while for a viewer known to have different tastes it could be for Coca-Cola Paramount Business news: In pictures Corbyn wishes Amazon a happy birthday In a card sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the company's 25th birthday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes: "You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share" Business news: In pictures No deal, no tariffs The government has announced that it would slash almost all tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Notable exceptions include cars and meat, which will see tariffs in place to protect British farmers Getty Business news: In pictures Fingerprint payment NatWest is trialling a new bank card that will allow people to touch their hand to the card when paying rather than typing in a PIN number. The card will work by recognising the user's fingerprint NatWest/PA Wire Business news: In pictures Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis Business news: In pictures Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid 3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA Business news: In pictures RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA Business news: In pictures Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty Business news: In pictures Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rues contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. Business news: In pictures Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped 4m off of Flybes revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airlines estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year.

Waymo and Uber are fighting in court over self-driving technology that Waymo says was stolen by a former employee who founded another company that Uber later acquired. Uber says it did not steal or use Waymo secrets.

Talks on the Waymo and Lyft collaboration between began last summer, a person familiar with the situation said.

Lyft raised $600m at a $7.5bn valuation last month.

Reuters
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Political parties need to do more to engage with young people and encourage them to vote, or risk losing a generation of supporters, campaigners have urged, as the time left for voter registration narrows.

According to the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), young people in the UK face a voter registration time bomb, with the number of school leavers registered to vote dropping by more than a quarter over the past three years.

The figures cover the time from when Individual Electoral Registration (IER) was introduced in 2014  which saw a shift from a single person, usually a parent or lead tenant, registering everyone in the household on their behalf, to each voter having to register individually.

Universities are also no longer able to register student residents automatically  a factor believed to have contributed to the loss of thousands of voters.

The ERS, which campaigns on access to democracy, said while the move to IER had improved the accuracy of the register, it has also led to a significant fall in the number of young people on the electoral roll.

Of the nations which introduced IER in 2014, Scotland has seen the biggest drop in the number of attainers (16 and 17 year olds on the register), at 35 per cent, followed by Wales (27 per cent) and England (25 per cent).

In Northern Ireland, where the IER system has been in place since 2002, the number of those signed up to vote has fallen by half.

Latest analysis shows the number of attainers registered in Westmorland and Lonsdale, the constituency held by the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, to have dropped by three quarters (75 per cent) over three years.

Other areas to experience a dramatic fall in numbers included Hackney South and Shoreditch, held by Labour MP Meg Hillier, and Conservative MP Anne-Marie Trevelyans Berwick-upon-Tweed constituency.

UK General Election 2017 Show all 47 1 /47 UK General Election 2017 UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the 1922 committee on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 DUP leader Arlene Foster stands alongside deputy leader Nigel Dodds as they hold a press conference at Stormont Castle as the Stormont assembly power sharing negotiations reconvene following the general election on June 12, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussions between the DUP and the Conservative party are also continuing in the wake of the UK general election as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist parties ten Westminster seats. Stormont and the political situation in Northern Ireland has been in limbo following the collapse of the power sharing executive due to the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme scandal which implicated the DUP Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Priti Patel, International Development Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Larry the Downing Street cat runs ahead of Michael Fallon Britain's Secretary of State for Defence as he arrives for a cabinet meeting at Downing Street in London, Britain, June 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth REUTERS UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Michael Gove, Environment Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Scottish National Party Leader Nicola Sturgeon (C) leaves after speaking to the media in Parliament Square. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May (C, L) holds the first Cabinet meeting of her new team. Getty UK General Election 2017 11 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May attends church in her constituency with her husband Philip May, a few days after disappointing results in a general election. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Party HQ this morning, following a general election yesterday. Parliament is hung, with no individual party gaining an overall majority. Post general election reaction. Rex UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JUNE 09: DUP leader and Northern Ireland former First Minister Arlene Foster (C) holds a brief press conference with the DUP's newly elected Westminster candidates who stood in the general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A " Get May Out" demo took place opposite the gates of Downing Street, calling for May to resign, after the shock election results and Mays coalition with the DUP. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A demonstrator wears a mask depicting Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May, poses with a mock gravestone bearing the words "Hard Brexit, RIP", during a protest photocall near the entrance 10 Downing Street in central London AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters in London Reuters UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May flanked by her husband Philip delivers a statement outside 10 Downing Street in central Londo Getty UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May leaves Buckingham Palace in London the day after a general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A TV cameraman watches the door of 10 Downing Street in London Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by his Office Director Karie Murphy as he arrives at Labour Party HQ in Westminster, London, after he called on the Prime Minister to resign, saying she should 'go and make way for a government that is truly representative of this country' Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters with her husband Philip in London REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ukip leader Paul Nuttall speaks during a press conference at Boston West Golf Club where he announced that he is standing down as party leader Joe Giddens/PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, leaves the counting centre for Britain's general election with her partner Jen Wilson in Edinburgh, Scotland REUTERS/Russell Cheyne UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale celebrates with candidate for Edinburgh South Ian Murray as he retains his seat at the Meadowbank Sports Centre counting centre in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, as counting is under way for the General Election Andrew Milligan/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, as counting is under way for the General Election PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland EPA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, arrives at the Labour Party's Headquarters in London REUTERS/Marko Djurica UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall leaves in a car following the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness in Boston, England Anthony Devlin/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May speaks at the declaration at the election count at the Magnet Leisure Centre in Maidenhead, England. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A policer officer enters a polling station in London AP UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A woman leaves after casting her vote at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery near Brighton, in southern England Getty UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A polling station sign is seen on a telephone box outside the polling station at Rotherwick Hall, west of London Getty UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 A woman walks past a general election display in the window of a betting shop in Camden on June 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, Getty Images UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May visits Atherley Bowling Club during an election campaign visit on June 7, 2017 in Southampton, England. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow June 8 to vote in a general election. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A supporter wears a pair of Jeremy Corbyn decorated tights at a general election campaign event in Birmingham, central England, on June 6, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another deadly terror attack in the nation's captial. AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A picture taken in London, shows election leaflets from various parties displayed ahead of the United Kingdom's general elections. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 Election workers, George Gaunt and Luca Tragid deliver the first ballot boxes, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh AFP UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Conservative party supporters during an election campaign visit to a bakery during an election campaign visit on June 6, 2017 in Fleetwood, north-west England. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital Getty Images UK General Election 2017 5 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a general election campaign visit to a removals depot in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the upcoming general election in Beeston, Nottinghamshire AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts to supporters after a rally at Beeston Youth and Community Centre as he visits the East Midlands during the final weekend of the General Election campaign on June 3, 2017 in Nottingham, England. If elected in next week's general election Mr Corbyn is pledging to create a million new jobs and to scrap zero-hours contracts Getty Images UK General Election 2017 1 June 2017 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party leader Ruth Davidson joins a selection of Scottish Conservative election candidates and activists during campaigning on May 1, 2017 in South Queensferry, Scotland. With only seven days to go until the general election on June 8th, polls are showing the SNP out in front and the Conservatives set to close in on Labour. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 29 May 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May canvasses in Richmond with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith on May 29, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. After suffering defeat in the London Mayoral election Zac Goldsmith resigned over the Government's position on Heathrow expansion. He stood as an Independent but lost in a by-election to the Liberal Democrats. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron poses for a selfie taken by carer April Preston during a General Election campaign visit to the Barlow Medical Centre, in Didsbury, Manchester Yui Mok/PA UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at an election campaign event in Wrexham, Wales Reuters UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour's former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, exit the party's general election campaign 'battle' bus as they arrive at an event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn walks with supporters between venues, before speaking again at another general election campaign event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 An anti-fox hunting protester is taken away and arrested by police outside the venue where Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May was due to launch the Welsh Conservative general election manifesto at Gresford Memorial Hall in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham, North Wales, on May 22, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election AFP/Getty Images

Many of the areas that have seen the biggest drop have large black and minority ethnic communities, such as the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in London.

This suggests school leavers from already marginalised groups have not re-registered since their parents or guardians stopped signing them up on their behalf, the ERS warned, and many of those people will have turned 18 by 8 June.

Katie Ghose, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, said: These findings should sound the alarm to young people across the country that they need to register to vote if they want to have their say on 8 June.

There is a real risk that this election could be one where the registration time bomb goes off  leaving hundreds of thousands without a voice. The collapse in the number of 16 and 17 year olds on the register in 2016 is a warning sign to anyone who cares about political engagement and young peoples stake in our democracy.

With just one week left for individuals to register in time for the upcoming General Election, campaign groups have called for MPs to take responsibility in what they hope to be the biggest ever push to register young people who may have fallen off the electoral role.

All the evidence shows that voting is habitual, said Ms Ghose, if you start young, youll vote for life. Todays findings suggest not enough is being done to ensure Britains young people are on the electoral roll.

Nearly seven million people are either not on the electoral roll or are incorrectly registered, the group leader said. The ERS has called for universities powers to sign up their students to be reinstated, as well as moves towards an automatic registration system.

Whether its improving citizenship education, or trialling same-day registration, there is plenty that can be done to revitalise our democratic processes, said Ms Ghose.

Whatever the case, we need action  or we risk losing a whole generation of voters.
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A giant sea creature, possibly with tusks, washed up on a beach in Indonesia last week, freaking out people on the island of Seram and launching a global guessing game to determine what, exactly, it used to be.

As images of the floating carcass rocketed around the internet, the scientific community asked itself: What is it? How did it get to an Indonesian island? And what does its presence say about climate change and whale migration habits?

The people of Seram have a more pressing query: How do we get rid of it?

Asrul Tuanakota, a 37-year-old fisherman, initially thought he had discovered a boat stranded in shallow water, according to the Jakarta Globe. On closer inspection, he determined that it was the rotting corpse of a 50-foot-long dead sea creature - possibly a giant squid because the remains looked like tentacles.

Blood seeping from the dead sea beast had turned the water near the coastline a bright red, which didn't stop locals from wading in for a closer look and snapping pictures.

George Leonard, the chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, told the Huffington Post that the rotting carcass was probably a baleen whale, judging by parts of a protruding skeleton and what appear to be baleen plates used to filter out food.

Decomposition gases bloated the whale into a very un-whale-like shape, and some of the noxious gases were seeping out.

Seram, the largest island in the Maluku Island group, is near the migration routes for baleen whales, so it makes sense that one would be nearby. Locals have asked the government to help remove the carcass, the Huffington Post reported.

But dead whales usually sink to the bottom of the ocean, providing a years-long buffet for the creatures that dwell there, according to Live Science. The publication theorised that the whale had a bacterial infection that produced more gases or that it possibly died in warm waters, allowing bacteria to accumulate and gases to expand its body. It also could have died an unnatural death after being clipped by a ship.

Of course, things die in the ocean all the time producing all kinds of weird phenomena. But now fishermen and villages and tourists - and their smartphones - are coming into contact with dead sea things as they go through the circle of life.

For example, fishermen off the western coast of Australia found a humongous, floating balloon of flesh that looked as if it was the first sign of an alien invasion. At first, the father and son thought they had encountered a hot-air balloon.

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

When we got closer we realised it had to be a dead whale because of the smell, Mark Watkins told the West Australian.

They snapped photos of the whale balloon, then headed to shore. By then, they said, circling sharks had taken bites of the dead creature, causing it to deflate.

And earlier this year, a giant, hairy sea creature washed up on a beach in the Philippines, according to the Daily Mail. Locals believe the unusual occurrence was brought on by a recent earthquake.

Pictures showed people climbing on top of the carcass to take selfies.

Washington Post
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A lethal batch of super-strength cocaine is being sold on British streets, according to police in Sussex, where officers have seized packets of the drug that are almost 100 per cent pure.

The force issued a warning came after two deaths were linked to extra-strong cocaine and heroin in Eastbourne.

Since April there have been a number of drug overdoses in the town, and two drug-related deaths," Detective Inspector Neil Ralph told the Eastbourne Herald:

He added: "Taking drugs in any form is dangerous, particularly when the user does not know the purity of the drug.

A total of 3,674 people died of drugs poisoning in 2015, the highest number since records began.

Deaths from heroin and morphine have doubled to 1,200 since 2012, while deaths from cocaine have jumped from 112 to 320, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics.

The majority of cocaine sold on Britain's streets has been cut with bulking products such as glucose or a dental anaesthetic called benzocaine.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 A villager cooks roti bread at the site of the annual Camel Fair in Pushkar, in India's desert state of Rajasthan AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters 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

A report by Vice magazine in 2015 found that cocaine sold in London was only between 25 and 40 per cent pure.

But drugs bought on the streets are becoming purer, with higher-grade cocaine entering the UK through dealers on the dark web, the Global Drug Survey found in 2016.

It said there had been an increase in use of both MDMA and cocaine over the previous three years.

Cocaine was the third most popular drug globally, the study found.
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An 83-year-old grandmother worried her family and was alerted to police after she mistakenly drove for 300 miles to Scotland instead of six miles to her local hospital appointment.

Valerie Johnson was driving to Peopletons Royal Hospital in Worcester, just six miles from her home, when roadworks diverted her and she drove for eight hours.

She ended up in Larkhall, Scotland, when she ran out of fuel.

By that point her daughter, 49-year-old Karen Maskell, had called police, worried by her mothers absence, and had to get a flight to Scotland to pick her up.

Recommended Grandmother awarded PTSD damages after watching daughter give birth

Ms Johnson had missed a turn-off near Worcester and had continued north on the M5 and M6 until she had crossed the border.

Her family reported her as missing on 5 May.

The Scottish Daily Record reported that a couple looked after her while they waited for her daughter.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 8 November 2022 A migrant attempting to communicate with journalists is pinned against a fence by members of staff, before being taken out of view, at the Manston immigration short-term holding facility, located at the former Defence Fire Training and Development Centre in Thanet, Kent PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2022 Handout photo issued by Just Stop Oil of a protester who has climbed a gantry on the M25 between junctions six and seven in Surrey, leading to the closure of the motorway PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2022 A grey seal with its pup, at the Donna Nook National Nature Reserve in north Lincolnshire, where they come every year in late October, November and December to give birth to their pups near the sand dunes, the wildlife spectacle attracts visitors from across the UK PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2022 Demonstrators with placards calling for a General Election march near the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 4 November 2022 A peacock is seen in the early winter sunshine in the Dutch Gardens in Holland Park AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 A villager cooks roti bread at the site of the annual Camel Fair in Pushkar, in India's desert state of Rajasthan AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters 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

"Mum's next-door neighbour called me to say she hadn't come back and he was worried. I thought she must have had an accident," said Ms Maskell.

"We called the police and by the time I got to her house, they said they had spotted her car on a traffic camera at Preston at 11pm.

"I said it couldn't be my mum because she hates driving, she doesn't usually drive more than three miles.

"But it was her and she was still heading north and we had to get the Scottish police involved."

 Grandmother fights off four thieves at cash machine

Police in Larkhall said the couple who looked after Ms Johnson had noticed that her car had stopped in the middle of the road outside their house.

She told them she was lost, so they phoned the police who coordinated with West Mercia Police to inform Ms Johnson's family.

An ambulance was called to check she did not need any medical attention.

"The local couple very kindly looked after the woman, ensuring that she was comfortable until her relatives arrived from England to collect her," said Sergeant John McLeish.
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Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, has died aged 79, an NHS spokesman has confirmed.

The serial killer was being held at Ashworth Hospital, at a high security psychiatric unit, and receiving palliative care.

He had reportedly been ill for some time and had been on successive hunger strikes since 1999 arguing that he should be allowed to die.

At a court hearing in February lawyers said he had been bedridden for the last couple of years and it was "fair to say" he was terminally ill, with emphysema among his ailments.

Following his hunger strikes, Brady demanded a judicial review of the legality of being force-fed - but was refused permission.

He was jailed for sexually torturing and murdering five children and teenagers aged between ten and 17 in the 1960s.

Brady was sentenced to life in prison in 1966 after being convicted of murdering John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17.

Together with Hindley he also confessed to the murders of Keith Bennett, 12, and Pauline Reade, 16.

The Glasgow-born killer died without revealing the location of where his last child victim was buried, despite multiple attempts from the family.

Terry Kilbride, whose brother John, 12, was also murdered by Brady, begged him to tell police where he dumped the body of Keith Bennett, who went missing aged 12 in 1964.

He told The Sun: "I would beg him to do the right thing on his deathbed and tell us where Keith is.

"Now is the time for him to stop playing tricks and come clean.

"If he takes it to the grave, I will feel so sorry for Keith's family.

"There will only ever be another search if there's fresh evidence. That has to come from him."

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. 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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

Mr Kilbride said he hopes the killer "rots in hell".

"We'll certainly celebrate his death when it comes. Good riddance," he said.

Brady's partner and accomplice, Myra Hindley, died in prison in 2002 aged 60.
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A woman is taking a GP to court after he circumcised her baby son without her consent in the first case of its kind.

Campaigners against circumcision on young boys believe this could open the floodgates for waves of complaints about male genital mutilation from men who say they were too young to consent to the procedure.

Dr Balvinder Mehat of the Bakersfield Medical Centre in Nottingham carried out the procedure on the baby boy while he was in the care of his father, who is separated from the mother.

Recommended Norwegian ruling party votes to ban circumcision

The 26-year-old woman said in legal documents that the child was in obvious pain when he was returned to her.

He was screaming and crying, but trying to comfort him just disturbed the wound and made it worse," she said. "I could not believe what they had done to him. He has been mutilated and suffered permanent damage.

Although she complained to Nottinghamshire Police, the force concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring a criminal prosecution.

The mother also complained to doctors watchdog, the General Medical Council (GMC), which is carrying out an investigation.

Supported by legal aid, the mother is now bringing a private prosecution against Dr Mehat for damages.

She is being represented by human rights lawyer Saimo Chahal QC, who defended Michael Sandford, the Autistic Briton who was recently released from jail after he tried to grab a policemans gun at a Donald Trump rally.

Ms Chahal said: This mother did not consent to her son undergoing the circumcision procedure, which could constitute a criminal offence. While some people with religious beliefs see circumcision as normal, there are others who see it as an unnecessary assault which can be physically and psychologically harmful.

The religion of the boy and the family is unknown in this case, but circumcision is widely practised in both the Jewish and Muslim faiths.

FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Show all 12 1 /12 FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM A Pokot girl cries after being circumcised REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM The traditional practice of circumcision within the Pokot tribe is a rite of passage that marks the transition to womanhood and is a requirement for all girls before they marry Reuters FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM Pokot girls are encouraged to leave their hut and make their way to a place where they will take off their clothes and wash during their circumcision ceremony REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM A Pokot girl, covered in animal skins, walks to a place where she will rest after being circumcised in a tribal ritual in a village about 80 kilometres from the town of Marigat in Baringo County REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM Pokot girls, draped in animal skins, sit on rocks during their circumcision ceremony REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM A Pokot woman performs a circumcision on a girl REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM A Pokot woman holds a razor blade after performing a circumcision on four girls REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM A Pokot girl bleeds onto a rock after being circumcised REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM A Pokot girl is smeared with a white paint after being circumcised REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM More than a quarter of girls and women in Kenya have undergone genital cutting, according to United Nations data REUTERS FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM A Pokot girl, covered in animal skins, walks to a place where she will rest after being circumcised Reuters FGM tribal circumcision ceremony in Baringo County Kenya FGM Pokot girls covered with animal skins squat on rocks after being stripped naked and washed during their circumcision rite in a village about 80 kilometres from the town of Marigat in Baringo County REUTERS

The British Medical Association is revising its ethical guidelines on circumcision, which currently state: "It is for society to decide what limits should be imposed on parental choice."

A new document is expected to be published sometime in the next year, with a growing clamour from campaigners for stricter controls or a ban on the procedure altogether.

The womans case is supported by the pressure group, Men Do Complain. Spokesman Tim Alford said there is growing awareness that the procedure amounts to male genital mutilation.

David Smith of pressure group Genital Autonomy said: Were hoping the case will open the floodgates for other complaints and a clarification that circumcision of non-consenting children is a human rights abuse.

In the US, a group of 104 middle-aged men launched an ongoing $50m (38m) class-action lawsuit against their parents and the American Medical Association over their circumcisions.

Dr Balvinder Mehat has been contacted by The Independent for comment, but none had arrived at the time of publication.
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Vladimir Putin has suggested that the US is to blame for the cyber attack that cause chaos in the NHS and across the world.

Cautioning of the dangers of intelligence agencies creating malware that can later be used by hackers, he suggested that the American NSA were partly responsible for aiding the recent attack by creating the hacking tool used.

Speaking to reporters in Beijing during a conference, the Russian president said that there had been little damage done to institutions in his country.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

"But as a whole it is worrying, there's nothing good about it, it is a source of concern. As regards the source of these threats, I believe that the leadership of Microsoft have announced this plainly, that the initial source of the virus is the intelligence services of the United States," Putin said.

"Once they're let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators," he added.

"So this question should be discussed immediately on a serious political level and a defence needs to be worked out from such phenomena."

He denied that Russia had anything to do with the attack.
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The Russian military has been given free rein to perform several observation flights over the UK this week.

Instead of scrambling RAF Typhoon fighter jets to intercept the Russian plane, it will be welcomed under the international Treaty on Open Skies.

From Monday to Friday this week, the Antonov An-30B will fly from RAF Brize Norton in Oxford with RAF personnel on board.

It will follow a flight plan pre-approved by the Ministry of Defence and Royal Air Force.

 Russia shows off military might in Victory Day parade

"The observation flight will be performed in a period from May 15 to 19, 2017 from the Open Skies airdrome Brize Norton," Sergei Rhzhkov, head of Russia's Nuclear Risk Reduction Center announced, according to the TASS news agency.

"The maximum range of the flight will be 2,400km," he added.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence told The Independent UK military personnel will be "on board the Russian aircraft throughout the flight, ensuring compliance with treaty conditions.

He said: This is a completely routine visit which follows a UK over flight of Russia earlier this month."

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 Treaty on Open Skies was signed in March 1992 and came into force in 2002 with 34 signatory states.

It is designed to promote mutual understanding and confidence by giving participants the ability to gather information about military forces and activities of concern to them.

It comes as more Nato fighter jets are being scrambled to intercept and monitor Russian planes than at any since since the end of the Cold War.

Around 780 deployments were made from European military bases last year compared to just 410 in 2015.

Fighter jets are typically launched to visually identify foreign aircraft and ascertain whether they are a threat, as when Russian Blackjack bombers spent more than five hours skirting British airspace earlier this year.
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Election rules are failing to keep pace with rapid changes in technology, allowing political parties to spend millions of pounds on locally targeted Facebook adverts with national campaign funds, experts have warned.

The outdated rules mean parties can tailor hyper-local adverts on Facebook as part of a spending arms race in marginal seats, despite rules that are supposed to limit spending in individual constituencies. Regulators do not know what adverts are being seen, creating the potential for abuse on an unprecedented scale, according to campaigners.

The Electoral Commission is under fire for not clamping down on the use of social media during elections, despite the widespread use of Facebook by the Conservatives in the 2015 general election. Both the Tories and Labour are believed to be investing heavily in Facebook adverts this time round.

The public perception is that big money can buy elections, said campaign group Unlock Democracy. Until urgent reforms to electoral law are undertaken they will probably be right.

The Electoral Reform Society has also called for rules to be updated, warning the system has not caught up with the digital age. This is a real issue, given that its predicted well see the highest spend ever for the general election on targeted Facebook ads by major parties, it said.

The warnings come after the Electoral Commission fined the Tories 70,000 for significant failures in their campaign spending returns  related to the split between local and national spending. The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to bring any criminal charges over the issue, however, because there was no evidence of any criminal conspiracy taking place.

The rules governing social media let parties intensively target local areas over social media without registering the spending to local candidates.

The Conservatives spent 10 times as much as every other party put together on Facebook adverts at the 2015 election, allowing them to target specific types of voters in individual constituencies using data harvested from social media profiles.

Electoral Commission guidance says spending needs to be registered to local candidates only if it mentions candidates specifically or discusses local issues in the constituency. A spokesperson said candidates should make an honest and reasonable assessment as to whether spending is related to their election or for promoting the national party. The commission has hinted that it will bring forward a reform package after Junes general election.

The Conservative Party website, displayed on a laptop. The use of digital marketing and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are likely to play and important role in the forthcoming general election (Getty) (Getty Images)

Katie Ghose, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, said: The regulations just havent caught up with the digital age  partly because of the distinction between local and national spending being hard to define when it comes to social media. Ads can be hyper-local, but also nationally funded.

Digital is more slippery and harder to capture than traditional activities. This is a real issue given that its predict well see the highest spend ever for the general election on targeted Facebook ads by major parties.

Political parties have for a long time harvested data and targeted individual voters. This is now being supplemented by on-line data gathering: email and social media. And parties are also increasingly buying in data, especially on demographics of voters to assist with targeting.

The issue is how the sheer quantities of information are used  for example, to target messages at very select groups with potentially contradictory information. We just dont know what the campaigns are telling these groups. Thats a transparency issue.

Ms Ghose said that spending controls were there to stop the arms race going too far and elections being bought and called for a lower cap but also better rules to ensure more clarity between local and national spending. She also argued that ruled needed to be under constant review as the digital age changes how politics is done.

Alexandra Runswick, director of Unlock Democracy, said: The majority of the UKs electoral laws are antiquated and fail to reflect the nature of political campaigning in modern society.

They are riddled with loopholes which parties can exploit to get around spending limits and gain financial advantage over their opponents.

The tactical misallocation of candidate spending as national spending is no new trick, but the growth of targeted social media campaigns presents the potential for abuse on an unprecedented scale.

What makes this issue particularly concerning is the fact that these ads will only be visible to targeted individuals making it difficult for the public and even the Electoral Commission to scrutinise where the spending should be properly allocated."

 Woman confronts Theresa May over disability payment cuts

At general elections local candidates can spend only 8,700 plus either 6p or 9p per registered parliamentary voter in their seat, depending on the type of constituency. Nationally, limits are far more relaxed, with parties allowed to spend 30,000 per seat, usually a total of around 19m for nationwide parties.

Senior figures in the Tories 2015 election campaign have confirmed that the party used the Facebook adverts to heavily target voters in specific areas. Information such as postcodes and voter profiles harvested from websites connected to the Facebook adverts is also understood to have been used for local canvassing purposes and leaflet delivering  traditionally regarded as local activity.

Damian Collins, the Conservative MP who chaired the Culture, Media and Sport Committee during the most recent Parliament, warned on the BBCs Panorama programme this month that Facebook was the most valuable media that campaigns invest in during the election period, which is totally unregulated.

Craig Elder, the Conservative Partys head of new media for the 2015 election, is on the record as saying the Facebook adverts were specifically targeted to marginal constituencies.

We were able to work with Facebook using constituency targeting to focus just on the constituencies that were going to decide the election, he previously told journalist Tim Ross for his book Why The Tories Won.

And then based on what we already know about the demographics of the people who are going to decide this election, we could do demographic targeting, and interest targeting, to focus on people and present different content to a young mum in Derby North to maybe a slightly older gentleman living in Rochester.

More than a third of the 100 richest people on the Sunday Times Rich List have donated to the Conservatives, while Labour has seen an exodus of wealthy backers in recent years and relies on trade unions and smaller donations to fund its campaigns. In the last quarter of 2016 the Lib Dems raised more money in donations than Labour for the first time in a decade.

Electoral Commission figures show that in total, in the 12 months to the 2015 general election, the Conservatives spent 1.2m on Facebook adverts, while Labour returns show they spent 16,454, Ukip 91,322, the Lib Dems 22,245 and the SNP 5,466.

The Electoral Commission acknowledged that social media has increased the scale and reduced the cost of local targeting by national parties. A spokesperson said the regulator was continually developing its understanding of the area and would recommend changes to the regime after the general election.

UK General Election 2017 Show all 47 1 /47 UK General Election 2017 UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the 1922 committee on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 DUP leader Arlene Foster stands alongside deputy leader Nigel Dodds as they hold a press conference at Stormont Castle as the Stormont assembly power sharing negotiations reconvene following the general election on June 12, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussions between the DUP and the Conservative party are also continuing in the wake of the UK general election as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist parties ten Westminster seats. Stormont and the political situation in Northern Ireland has been in limbo following the collapse of the power sharing executive due to the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme scandal which implicated the DUP Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Priti Patel, International Development Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Larry the Downing Street cat runs ahead of Michael Fallon Britain's Secretary of State for Defence as he arrives for a cabinet meeting at Downing Street in London, Britain, June 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth REUTERS UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Michael Gove, Environment Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Scottish National Party Leader Nicola Sturgeon (C) leaves after speaking to the media in Parliament Square. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May (C, L) holds the first Cabinet meeting of her new team. Getty UK General Election 2017 11 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May attends church in her constituency with her husband Philip May, a few days after disappointing results in a general election. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Party HQ this morning, following a general election yesterday. Parliament is hung, with no individual party gaining an overall majority. Post general election reaction. Rex UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JUNE 09: DUP leader and Northern Ireland former First Minister Arlene Foster (C) holds a brief press conference with the DUP's newly elected Westminster candidates who stood in the general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A " Get May Out" demo took place opposite the gates of Downing Street, calling for May to resign, after the shock election results and Mays coalition with the DUP. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A demonstrator wears a mask depicting Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May, poses with a mock gravestone bearing the words "Hard Brexit, RIP", during a protest photocall near the entrance 10 Downing Street in central London AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters in London Reuters UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May flanked by her husband Philip delivers a statement outside 10 Downing Street in central Londo Getty UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May leaves Buckingham Palace in London the day after a general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A TV cameraman watches the door of 10 Downing Street in London Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by his Office Director Karie Murphy as he arrives at Labour Party HQ in Westminster, London, after he called on the Prime Minister to resign, saying she should 'go and make way for a government that is truly representative of this country' Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters with her husband Philip in London REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ukip leader Paul Nuttall speaks during a press conference at Boston West Golf Club where he announced that he is standing down as party leader Joe Giddens/PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, leaves the counting centre for Britain's general election with her partner Jen Wilson in Edinburgh, Scotland REUTERS/Russell Cheyne UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale celebrates with candidate for Edinburgh South Ian Murray as he retains his seat at the Meadowbank Sports Centre counting centre in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, as counting is under way for the General Election Andrew Milligan/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, as counting is under way for the General Election PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland EPA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, arrives at the Labour Party's Headquarters in London REUTERS/Marko Djurica UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall leaves in a car following the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness in Boston, England Anthony Devlin/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May speaks at the declaration at the election count at the Magnet Leisure Centre in Maidenhead, England. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A policer officer enters a polling station in London AP UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A woman leaves after casting her vote at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery near Brighton, in southern England Getty UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A polling station sign is seen on a telephone box outside the polling station at Rotherwick Hall, west of London Getty UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 A woman walks past a general election display in the window of a betting shop in Camden on June 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, Getty Images UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May visits Atherley Bowling Club during an election campaign visit on June 7, 2017 in Southampton, England. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow June 8 to vote in a general election. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A supporter wears a pair of Jeremy Corbyn decorated tights at a general election campaign event in Birmingham, central England, on June 6, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another deadly terror attack in the nation's captial. AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A picture taken in London, shows election leaflets from various parties displayed ahead of the United Kingdom's general elections. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 Election workers, George Gaunt and Luca Tragid deliver the first ballot boxes, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh AFP UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Conservative party supporters during an election campaign visit to a bakery during an election campaign visit on June 6, 2017 in Fleetwood, north-west England. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital Getty Images UK General Election 2017 5 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a general election campaign visit to a removals depot in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the upcoming general election in Beeston, Nottinghamshire AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts to supporters after a rally at Beeston Youth and Community Centre as he visits the East Midlands during the final weekend of the General Election campaign on June 3, 2017 in Nottingham, England. If elected in next week's general election Mr Corbyn is pledging to create a million new jobs and to scrap zero-hours contracts Getty Images UK General Election 2017 1 June 2017 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party leader Ruth Davidson joins a selection of Scottish Conservative election candidates and activists during campaigning on May 1, 2017 in South Queensferry, Scotland. With only seven days to go until the general election on June 8th, polls are showing the SNP out in front and the Conservatives set to close in on Labour. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 29 May 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May canvasses in Richmond with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith on May 29, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. After suffering defeat in the London Mayoral election Zac Goldsmith resigned over the Government's position on Heathrow expansion. He stood as an Independent but lost in a by-election to the Liberal Democrats. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron poses for a selfie taken by carer April Preston during a General Election campaign visit to the Barlow Medical Centre, in Didsbury, Manchester Yui Mok/PA UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at an election campaign event in Wrexham, Wales Reuters UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour's former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, exit the party's general election campaign 'battle' bus as they arrive at an event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn walks with supporters between venues, before speaking again at another general election campaign event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 An anti-fox hunting protester is taken away and arrested by police outside the venue where Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May was due to launch the Welsh Conservative general election manifesto at Gresford Memorial Hall in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham, North Wales, on May 22, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election AFP/Getty Images

Whether a cost should be accounted for at a local or national level is dependent on who the particular activity is seeking to promote. Our guidance explains that candidates need to make an honest and reasonable assessment as to whether the costs of campaign activity was for their election or whether it was for promoting the national party, the spokesperson said.

Targeting is not new for political campaigning; social media is just a different medium, though one which enables quick and low cost communications at scale. We are continually developing our understanding in this area, including through live monitoring of activity.

We will report after the election on campaign spending, and on what changes to the regulatory regime may need to be made for future polls.

A Conservative Party spokesman said: The Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which was passed by a Labour Government, provides a distinction between candidate-focused spending and party-focused spending.

"It would simply not be practical to put constituency limits on national party-based campaigning, as many forms of campaigning simply cross geographical boundaries, particularly in an internet age.
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Jeremy Corbyn has defended the appointment of a former Communist Party member who once expressed "solidarity" with North Korea to his election campaign team.

The Labour leader said he did not believe Andrew Murray was a Stalinist and stressed his "special skills" were being used to "temporarily" help the campaign.

Mr Murray, an aide to Unite leader Len McCluskey, only quit the Communists in December to join Labour and is now "supporting" rather than heading up Mr Corbyn's campaign, a senior Labour source said.

Recommended Communist party will not field candidates in order to support Corbyn

Mr Corbyn defended Mr Murray, who in a 2003 Morning Star article expressed "solidarity with Peoples Korea (North Korea)" amid supposed US desires to oust the secretive and authoritarian regime.

Speaking to reporters after addressing the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool, Mr Corbyn said: "Andrew Murray is a member of the Labour Party and he is an official at Unite, and he is temporarily helping us with the campaign.

"He is a person of enormous abilities and professionalism, and is the head of staff of Unite the union.

"To manage a very large union and a large number of staff takes special skills, and Andrew has them."

The Labour leader was then asked if he was worried about the allegedly "Stalinist" views of Mr Murray, who was his predecessor as chairman of the Stop the War coalition.

UK General Election 2017 Show all 47 1 /47 UK General Election 2017 UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the 1922 committee on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 DUP leader Arlene Foster stands alongside deputy leader Nigel Dodds as they hold a press conference at Stormont Castle as the Stormont assembly power sharing negotiations reconvene following the general election on June 12, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussions between the DUP and the Conservative party are also continuing in the wake of the UK general election as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist parties ten Westminster seats. Stormont and the political situation in Northern Ireland has been in limbo following the collapse of the power sharing executive due to the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme scandal which implicated the DUP Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Priti Patel, International Development Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Larry the Downing Street cat runs ahead of Michael Fallon Britain's Secretary of State for Defence as he arrives for a cabinet meeting at Downing Street in London, Britain, June 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth REUTERS UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Michael Gove, Environment Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Scottish National Party Leader Nicola Sturgeon (C) leaves after speaking to the media in Parliament Square. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May (C, L) holds the first Cabinet meeting of her new team. Getty UK General Election 2017 11 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May attends church in her constituency with her husband Philip May, a few days after disappointing results in a general election. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Party HQ this morning, following a general election yesterday. Parliament is hung, with no individual party gaining an overall majority. Post general election reaction. Rex UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JUNE 09: DUP leader and Northern Ireland former First Minister Arlene Foster (C) holds a brief press conference with the DUP's newly elected Westminster candidates who stood in the general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A " Get May Out" demo took place opposite the gates of Downing Street, calling for May to resign, after the shock election results and Mays coalition with the DUP. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A demonstrator wears a mask depicting Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May, poses with a mock gravestone bearing the words "Hard Brexit, RIP", during a protest photocall near the entrance 10 Downing Street in central London AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters in London Reuters UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May flanked by her husband Philip delivers a statement outside 10 Downing Street in central Londo Getty UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May leaves Buckingham Palace in London the day after a general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A TV cameraman watches the door of 10 Downing Street in London Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by his Office Director Karie Murphy as he arrives at Labour Party HQ in Westminster, London, after he called on the Prime Minister to resign, saying she should 'go and make way for a government that is truly representative of this country' Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters with her husband Philip in London REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ukip leader Paul Nuttall speaks during a press conference at Boston West Golf Club where he announced that he is standing down as party leader Joe Giddens/PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, leaves the counting centre for Britain's general election with her partner Jen Wilson in Edinburgh, Scotland REUTERS/Russell Cheyne UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale celebrates with candidate for Edinburgh South Ian Murray as he retains his seat at the Meadowbank Sports Centre counting centre in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, as counting is under way for the General Election Andrew Milligan/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, as counting is under way for the General Election PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland EPA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, arrives at the Labour Party's Headquarters in London REUTERS/Marko Djurica UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall leaves in a car following the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness in Boston, England Anthony Devlin/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May speaks at the declaration at the election count at the Magnet Leisure Centre in Maidenhead, England. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A policer officer enters a polling station in London AP UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A woman leaves after casting her vote at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery near Brighton, in southern England Getty UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A polling station sign is seen on a telephone box outside the polling station at Rotherwick Hall, west of London Getty UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 A woman walks past a general election display in the window of a betting shop in Camden on June 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, Getty Images UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May visits Atherley Bowling Club during an election campaign visit on June 7, 2017 in Southampton, England. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow June 8 to vote in a general election. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A supporter wears a pair of Jeremy Corbyn decorated tights at a general election campaign event in Birmingham, central England, on June 6, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another deadly terror attack in the nation's captial. AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A picture taken in London, shows election leaflets from various parties displayed ahead of the United Kingdom's general elections. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 Election workers, George Gaunt and Luca Tragid deliver the first ballot boxes, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh AFP UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Conservative party supporters during an election campaign visit to a bakery during an election campaign visit on June 6, 2017 in Fleetwood, north-west England. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital Getty Images UK General Election 2017 5 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a general election campaign visit to a removals depot in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the upcoming general election in Beeston, Nottinghamshire AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts to supporters after a rally at Beeston Youth and Community Centre as he visits the East Midlands during the final weekend of the General Election campaign on June 3, 2017 in Nottingham, England. If elected in next week's general election Mr Corbyn is pledging to create a million new jobs and to scrap zero-hours contracts Getty Images UK General Election 2017 1 June 2017 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party leader Ruth Davidson joins a selection of Scottish Conservative election candidates and activists during campaigning on May 1, 2017 in South Queensferry, Scotland. With only seven days to go until the general election on June 8th, polls are showing the SNP out in front and the Conservatives set to close in on Labour. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 29 May 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May canvasses in Richmond with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith on May 29, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. After suffering defeat in the London Mayoral election Zac Goldsmith resigned over the Government's position on Heathrow expansion. He stood as an Independent but lost in a by-election to the Liberal Democrats. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron poses for a selfie taken by carer April Preston during a General Election campaign visit to the Barlow Medical Centre, in Didsbury, Manchester Yui Mok/PA UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at an election campaign event in Wrexham, Wales Reuters UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour's former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, exit the party's general election campaign 'battle' bus as they arrive at an event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn walks with supporters between venues, before speaking again at another general election campaign event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 An anti-fox hunting protester is taken away and arrested by police outside the venue where Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May was due to launch the Welsh Conservative general election manifesto at Gresford Memorial Hall in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham, North Wales, on May 22, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election AFP/Getty Images

Mr Corbyn replied: "I don't believe that Andrew is anything other than a democratic socialist and member of the Labour Party like me."

A spokesman for Mr Corbyn said: "We don't comment on staffing matters."

Mr Corbyn stood down as chairman of Stop The War shortly after becoming Labour leader in September 2015.
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Jeremy Corbyn ambushed Theresa May as she appeared on Facebook Live, issuing a direct challenge to the Prime Minister to take part in televised debates before the general election.

Ms May, however, dismissed the Labour leaders question that he left on the livestream, claiming it would be more important during the next four weeks before polling day to take questions directly from voters.

It came as the Prime Minister took part in the first of ITVs Facebook Live events, in which political leaders will answer questions sent in by users of the social media website over the next few weeks.

During the live event, Ms May was also asked by one Facebook user why Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, had not received a knighthood  a contentious issue within the right-wing party. The Prime Minister laughed but failed to reply.

But as the stream came to a close, around 10,000 users had responded with an angry emoji while another 4,400 gave the Prime Minister the thumbs up.

Presenter Robert Peston then told Ms May he had received a query from Jeremy Corbyn of Islington, who said: Hello Theresa May, as Prime Minister youve served your elite friends by giving them tax cuts when wages have stagnated, house building is at its lowest since the 1920s, there are 20,000 fewer police on our streets since 2010 and the NHS is in crisis.

Recommended Theresa May confronted by disabled woman angry over government cuts

Do you not think the British people deserve to see me and you debate live and on television?

Ms May responded: What I think is more important is actually that I and he take questions directly from the voters. I dont think people get much out of seeing politicians having a go at each other, I think people want to hear directly.

The Prime Ministers appearance also came after she was confronted by a voter protesting about cuts to her disability benefits in one of her toughest moments on the campaign trail. A woman called Cathy Mohan, who said she had learning difficulties, tore into the Prime Minister on a walkabout in a market in Oxfordshire.
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Free movement of people will end after Britain leaves the European Union, Jeremy Corbyn has said, as he vowed a Labour government would implement a managed and fair migration system if elected in four weeks time.

It comes after the party leader risked confusion over Labours immigration policy earlier this year after apparently backing free movement  one of the EUs four freedoms  just hours before giving a speech in which he was due to say his party was not wedded to the principle.

But when asked by ITVs Julie Etchingham what controls a Labour government would implement on immigration, Mr Corbyn said there would fair immigration but refused to be drawn on specific numbers.

Im not going to put any figures on it, he added. Theresa May has done that for, this is now the third general election she has promised figures none of which shes come anywhere near achieving.

Pressed further as to whether there would be controls on migration, Mr Corbyn added: Clearly the free movement ends when we leave the European Union but there will be managed migration and it will be fair.

In Labours draft manifesto, which was leaked to journalists on Thursday, it appears the party believes it can retain the benefits of the single market and the customs union while ending free movement. They are essential for maintaining industries, jobs and businesses in Britain the partys policy document states.

But the stance seems incompatible with the insistence from EU leaders that access to the tariff-free market requires a member state to honour the EUs four freedoms  labour, capital, services and goods. These are non-negotiable, the leaders have said.

While Theresa May has made clear her priority in the Brexit negotiations is to regain control of immigration and borders, recommitting to the pledge of bringing down numbers to the tens of thousands, Mr Corbyn has repeatedly said Labours priority is access to the blocs single market.

UK General Election 2017 Show all 47 1 /47 UK General Election 2017 UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the 1922 committee on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 DUP leader Arlene Foster stands alongside deputy leader Nigel Dodds as they hold a press conference at Stormont Castle as the Stormont assembly power sharing negotiations reconvene following the general election on June 12, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussions between the DUP and the Conservative party are also continuing in the wake of the UK general election as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist parties ten Westminster seats. Stormont and the political situation in Northern Ireland has been in limbo following the collapse of the power sharing executive due to the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme scandal which implicated the DUP Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Priti Patel, International Development Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Larry the Downing Street cat runs ahead of Michael Fallon Britain's Secretary of State for Defence as he arrives for a cabinet meeting at Downing Street in London, Britain, June 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth REUTERS UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Michael Gove, Environment Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Scottish National Party Leader Nicola Sturgeon (C) leaves after speaking to the media in Parliament Square. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May (C, L) holds the first Cabinet meeting of her new team. Getty UK General Election 2017 11 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May attends church in her constituency with her husband Philip May, a few days after disappointing results in a general election. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Party HQ this morning, following a general election yesterday. Parliament is hung, with no individual party gaining an overall majority. Post general election reaction. Rex UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JUNE 09: DUP leader and Northern Ireland former First Minister Arlene Foster (C) holds a brief press conference with the DUP's newly elected Westminster candidates who stood in the general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A " Get May Out" demo took place opposite the gates of Downing Street, calling for May to resign, after the shock election results and Mays coalition with the DUP. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A demonstrator wears a mask depicting Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May, poses with a mock gravestone bearing the words "Hard Brexit, RIP", during a protest photocall near the entrance 10 Downing Street in central London AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters in London Reuters UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May flanked by her husband Philip delivers a statement outside 10 Downing Street in central Londo Getty UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May leaves Buckingham Palace in London the day after a general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A TV cameraman watches the door of 10 Downing Street in London Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by his Office Director Karie Murphy as he arrives at Labour Party HQ in Westminster, London, after he called on the Prime Minister to resign, saying she should 'go and make way for a government that is truly representative of this country' Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters with her husband Philip in London REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ukip leader Paul Nuttall speaks during a press conference at Boston West Golf Club where he announced that he is standing down as party leader Joe Giddens/PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, leaves the counting centre for Britain's general election with her partner Jen Wilson in Edinburgh, Scotland REUTERS/Russell Cheyne UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale celebrates with candidate for Edinburgh South Ian Murray as he retains his seat at the Meadowbank Sports Centre counting centre in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, as counting is under way for the General Election Andrew Milligan/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, as counting is under way for the General Election PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland EPA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, arrives at the Labour Party's Headquarters in London REUTERS/Marko Djurica UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall leaves in a car following the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness in Boston, England Anthony Devlin/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May speaks at the declaration at the election count at the Magnet Leisure Centre in Maidenhead, England. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A policer officer enters a polling station in London AP UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A woman leaves after casting her vote at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery near Brighton, in southern England Getty UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A polling station sign is seen on a telephone box outside the polling station at Rotherwick Hall, west of London Getty UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 A woman walks past a general election display in the window of a betting shop in Camden on June 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, Getty Images UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May visits Atherley Bowling Club during an election campaign visit on June 7, 2017 in Southampton, England. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow June 8 to vote in a general election. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A supporter wears a pair of Jeremy Corbyn decorated tights at a general election campaign event in Birmingham, central England, on June 6, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another deadly terror attack in the nation's captial. AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A picture taken in London, shows election leaflets from various parties displayed ahead of the United Kingdom's general elections. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 Election workers, George Gaunt and Luca Tragid deliver the first ballot boxes, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh AFP UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Conservative party supporters during an election campaign visit to a bakery during an election campaign visit on June 6, 2017 in Fleetwood, north-west England. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital Getty Images UK General Election 2017 5 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a general election campaign visit to a removals depot in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the upcoming general election in Beeston, Nottinghamshire AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts to supporters after a rally at Beeston Youth and Community Centre as he visits the East Midlands during the final weekend of the General Election campaign on June 3, 2017 in Nottingham, England. If elected in next week's general election Mr Corbyn is pledging to create a million new jobs and to scrap zero-hours contracts Getty Images UK General Election 2017 1 June 2017 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party leader Ruth Davidson joins a selection of Scottish Conservative election candidates and activists during campaigning on May 1, 2017 in South Queensferry, Scotland. With only seven days to go until the general election on June 8th, polls are showing the SNP out in front and the Conservatives set to close in on Labour. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 29 May 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May canvasses in Richmond with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith on May 29, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. After suffering defeat in the London Mayoral election Zac Goldsmith resigned over the Government's position on Heathrow expansion. He stood as an Independent but lost in a by-election to the Liberal Democrats. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron poses for a selfie taken by carer April Preston during a General Election campaign visit to the Barlow Medical Centre, in Didsbury, Manchester Yui Mok/PA UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at an election campaign event in Wrexham, Wales Reuters UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour's former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, exit the party's general election campaign 'battle' bus as they arrive at an event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn walks with supporters between venues, before speaking again at another general election campaign event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 An anti-fox hunting protester is taken away and arrested by police outside the venue where Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May was due to launch the Welsh Conservative general election manifesto at Gresford Memorial Hall in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham, North Wales, on May 22, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election AFP/Getty Images

In the first of ITVs 30-minute interviews with the leaders of major political parties, due to be aired on Monday evening, Mr Corbyn was also asked whether the general election could be the death of the Labour party.

The Labour party has its largest membership ever since I became the leader of this party, he replied. Its active in every single part of the country. Weve had the most unbelievable torrents of media attacks on individuals and a failure to engage in the policy debate.

This country cannot go on with its levels of inequality, you have to challenge the austerity programme. That is exactly what we are doing.
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Labour is expected to propose a 45p income tax rate on salaries above 80,000, to fund its rescue plan for the NHS.

The party has revealed that most of the funding for its promised 7.4bn a year cash injection for the health service will come from hiking income tax on high-earners.

Official data appears to rule out bringing in that sum  up to 4.5bn  from merely restoring a 50p rate on the biggest salaries, people earning more than 150,000.

But lowering the threshold for the existing 45p rate from 150,000 to 80,000 risks a backlash from many more workers, who may not consider themselves rich.

In interviews today, John Ashworth, Labours health spokesman, appeared to confirm the return of the 50p rate for the highest earners.

Asked, on ITV's Good Morning Britain: How much are you going to tax the wealthy? I mean, are you going to go to a 50 per cent income tax, Mr Ashworth replied: Yes.

But, speaking on Radio Fours Today programme, he also said: As I understand it, we will raise something in the region of 4bn to 4.5bn from the income tax changes.

At the moment, those earning between 45,001 and 150,000 pay income tax at 40 per cent. Those earning more than that are taxed at 45 per cent.

When George Osborne axed the 50p rate, Labour claimed it cost around 3bn a year, but the figure was fiercely disputed.

The new income tax rates will form a central plank of Labour's election manifesto, which is being unveiled in the North of England tomorrow morning.

I think what youll see tomorrow is that when Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell outline the manifesto youll see them explain how the individual tax bands will work, Mr Ashworth said.

In last weeks leaked manifesto, Labour simply refused to rule out income tax rises on salaries above 80,000  while guaranteeing the 95 per cent of taxpayers earning below that would be protected.

Mr McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, has insisted all of Labours spending pledges will be fully costed and the funding source will be identified, in the manifesto.

There is currently only one party which is committing not to raise taxes on middle and low earners and that is the Labour Party, he said.

Today, Jeremy Corbyn pledged that Labour would spend an extra 37bn on the NHS, over the five-year parliament, partly funded by the income tax rise.

It would include 10bn of capital funding to make sure that NHS buildings and IT systems are fit for the modern day, amid concern over last weeks cyber-attack.

Labour says the cash would pay to take one million people off NHS waiting lists, guarantee access to treatment within 18 weeks and guarantee patients can be seen in A&E within four hours.

The party would also create a new 500m winter pressures fund and help 2.5m people living with cancer.

A Labour spokesman told The Independent: "We will lay out our plans in full in the manifesto on Tuesday.
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One million hours of police time are being wasted each year on policing the ban on smoking cannabis, the Liberal Democrats say.

Research by the party drawn from official figures shows a total of 87,247 police caseloads relating to the drug were opened in 2015, with the average cost to the taxpayer per case estimated at 2,256.

The estimate says that in total 31m was spent on 1,044,180 police hours.

Recommended Cannabis compound THC found to improve memory in older mice

The party says the drug is already freely available and widely used and that regulation rather than prohibition makes sense.

The Lib Dems announced on Friday that their manifesto would include a pledge to legalise cannabis and create a regulated market in the drug  a policy similar to those implemented in some US states.

Cannabis is currently a Class B drug, meaning that in theory anyone who possesses it can be given five years in prison and any dealer can be given 14 years. In practice, the upper penalty for possession is rarely enforced, however.

Home Affairs Select Committee member Julian Huppert said: Cannabis is freely available and widely used. It generates significant health problems and vast profits for organised crime.

Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron with former Lib Dem MP Dr Julian Huppert (Getty Images)

The current approach is a disaster for young people, whose mental and physical health is being harmed by an increasingly potent product. There are no age checks, and no controls on quality or strength. Skunk is widespread and the only ID you need to buy it is a 20 note.

Successive governments have ceded total control of a significant public health problem to organised crime.

UK General Election 2017 Show all 47 1 /47 UK General Election 2017 UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the 1922 committee on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 DUP leader Arlene Foster stands alongside deputy leader Nigel Dodds as they hold a press conference at Stormont Castle as the Stormont assembly power sharing negotiations reconvene following the general election on June 12, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussions between the DUP and the Conservative party are also continuing in the wake of the UK general election as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist parties ten Westminster seats. Stormont and the political situation in Northern Ireland has been in limbo following the collapse of the power sharing executive due to the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme scandal which implicated the DUP Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Priti Patel, International Development Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Larry the Downing Street cat runs ahead of Michael Fallon Britain's Secretary of State for Defence as he arrives for a cabinet meeting at Downing Street in London, Britain, June 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth REUTERS UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Michael Gove, Environment Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Scottish National Party Leader Nicola Sturgeon (C) leaves after speaking to the media in Parliament Square. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May (C, L) holds the first Cabinet meeting of her new team. Getty UK General Election 2017 11 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May attends church in her constituency with her husband Philip May, a few days after disappointing results in a general election. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Party HQ this morning, following a general election yesterday. Parliament is hung, with no individual party gaining an overall majority. Post general election reaction. Rex UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JUNE 09: DUP leader and Northern Ireland former First Minister Arlene Foster (C) holds a brief press conference with the DUP's newly elected Westminster candidates who stood in the general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A " Get May Out" demo took place opposite the gates of Downing Street, calling for May to resign, after the shock election results and Mays coalition with the DUP. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A demonstrator wears a mask depicting Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May, poses with a mock gravestone bearing the words "Hard Brexit, RIP", during a protest photocall near the entrance 10 Downing Street in central London AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters in London Reuters UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May flanked by her husband Philip delivers a statement outside 10 Downing Street in central Londo Getty UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May leaves Buckingham Palace in London the day after a general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A TV cameraman watches the door of 10 Downing Street in London Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by his Office Director Karie Murphy as he arrives at Labour Party HQ in Westminster, London, after he called on the Prime Minister to resign, saying she should 'go and make way for a government that is truly representative of this country' Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters with her husband Philip in London REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ukip leader Paul Nuttall speaks during a press conference at Boston West Golf Club where he announced that he is standing down as party leader Joe Giddens/PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, leaves the counting centre for Britain's general election with her partner Jen Wilson in Edinburgh, Scotland REUTERS/Russell Cheyne UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale celebrates with candidate for Edinburgh South Ian Murray as he retains his seat at the Meadowbank Sports Centre counting centre in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, as counting is under way for the General Election Andrew Milligan/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, as counting is under way for the General Election PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland EPA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, arrives at the Labour Party's Headquarters in London REUTERS/Marko Djurica UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall leaves in a car following the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness in Boston, England Anthony Devlin/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May speaks at the declaration at the election count at the Magnet Leisure Centre in Maidenhead, England. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A policer officer enters a polling station in London AP UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A woman leaves after casting her vote at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery near Brighton, in southern England Getty UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A polling station sign is seen on a telephone box outside the polling station at Rotherwick Hall, west of London Getty UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 A woman walks past a general election display in the window of a betting shop in Camden on June 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, Getty Images UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May visits Atherley Bowling Club during an election campaign visit on June 7, 2017 in Southampton, England. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow June 8 to vote in a general election. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A supporter wears a pair of Jeremy Corbyn decorated tights at a general election campaign event in Birmingham, central England, on June 6, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another deadly terror attack in the nation's captial. AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A picture taken in London, shows election leaflets from various parties displayed ahead of the United Kingdom's general elections. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 Election workers, George Gaunt and Luca Tragid deliver the first ballot boxes, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh AFP UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Conservative party supporters during an election campaign visit to a bakery during an election campaign visit on June 6, 2017 in Fleetwood, north-west England. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital Getty Images UK General Election 2017 5 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a general election campaign visit to a removals depot in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the upcoming general election in Beeston, Nottinghamshire AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts to supporters after a rally at Beeston Youth and Community Centre as he visits the East Midlands during the final weekend of the General Election campaign on June 3, 2017 in Nottingham, England. If elected in next week's general election Mr Corbyn is pledging to create a million new jobs and to scrap zero-hours contracts Getty Images UK General Election 2017 1 June 2017 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party leader Ruth Davidson joins a selection of Scottish Conservative election candidates and activists during campaigning on May 1, 2017 in South Queensferry, Scotland. With only seven days to go until the general election on June 8th, polls are showing the SNP out in front and the Conservatives set to close in on Labour. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 29 May 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May canvasses in Richmond with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith on May 29, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. After suffering defeat in the London Mayoral election Zac Goldsmith resigned over the Government's position on Heathrow expansion. He stood as an Independent but lost in a by-election to the Liberal Democrats. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron poses for a selfie taken by carer April Preston during a General Election campaign visit to the Barlow Medical Centre, in Didsbury, Manchester Yui Mok/PA UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at an election campaign event in Wrexham, Wales Reuters UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour's former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, exit the party's general election campaign 'battle' bus as they arrive at an event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn walks with supporters between venues, before speaking again at another general election campaign event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 An anti-fox hunting protester is taken away and arrested by police outside the venue where Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May was due to launch the Welsh Conservative general election manifesto at Gresford Memorial Hall in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham, North Wales, on May 22, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election AFP/Getty Images

The honest and pragmatic response is to take responsibility for this situation and regulate the market.

Liberal Democrats will take back control from the criminal gangs and protect young people by introducing a legal, regulated market for cannabis.

 Global commission call for legalisation of drugs

We will restrict the market to over-18s. We will make cannabis safer by limiting THC content and requiring all products to contain CBD, which has been bred out of skunk and counteracts the harmful effects of THC. And we will invest tax revenues of up to 1bn in education and treatment.
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The Health Secretary has been accused of hiding from the public during the NHS cybersecurity crisis after days of radio silence on the issue.

Jeremy Hunt has made no public statement on the cyber attack which has caused disruption across the systems of 47 trusts in England 13 NHS organisations in Scotland since it hit on Friday.

Labour said the public had heard not a dickie-bird from the Tory MP while the Liberal Democrats said the Government had been treating the NHS and its staff like dirt.

Recommended Jeremy Hunt confronted over why nurses are using food banks

"The Cyberattack that affected many NHS trusts over the weekend saw hospitals forced to cancel appointments, and our already overburdened nurses and doctors under even more stress," Andrew Gwynne, Labours National Campaign Co-ordinator, said.

"Jon Ashworth, our Shadow Health Secretary, wrote to Jeremy Hunt on Saturday to ask what the government was doing to support our hard working NHS staff and limit disruption for patients during the crisis, and ask why the Conservatives ignored several warning signs that systems containing sensitive patient data may be vulnerable to attack.

"Despite the serious public concern, Jeremy Hunt has failed to respond and has seems to have been in hiding since the attack, failing to answer any of the public's questions.

 Cyber-attack: MalwareTech on how he "accidentally" halted the spread of the ransomware

Lib Dem leader Tim Farron added: Im on my way to speak at the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool. It seems like Jeremy Hunt is hiding.

He should come and speak to the delegates and explain the Governments policies! The Government have spent years treating the NHS and its staff like dirt

Im going there to talk about investing 6bn a year in the NHS and to give trainee nurses the bursaries they need to access to access higher education and further their careers.

Asked where Mr Hunt was, Labours shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth told the Good Morning Britain programme: Ive got no idea. Youre more likely to see Shergar than to see Jeremy Hunt at the moment, arent you?

Ive not tried to get in touch with him, maybe I should. I will get in touch with him and ask him where he is.

Mr Hunt was approached by BBC reporters on Monday morning but refused to answer questions on the crisis outside his London home. Asked why he didnt take action to shore up the NHSs cyberdefences Mr Hunt said: Sorry, excuse me and cycled away on his bike.

The so-called Ransomware attack has led to the cancellation of some doctors appointments, with patients also told to stay away from badly affected A&E units unless they had serious ailments.

UK General Election 2017 Show all 47 1 /47 UK General Election 2017 UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the 1922 committee on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 DUP leader Arlene Foster stands alongside deputy leader Nigel Dodds as they hold a press conference at Stormont Castle as the Stormont assembly power sharing negotiations reconvene following the general election on June 12, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussions between the DUP and the Conservative party are also continuing in the wake of the UK general election as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist parties ten Westminster seats. Stormont and the political situation in Northern Ireland has been in limbo following the collapse of the power sharing executive due to the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme scandal which implicated the DUP Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Priti Patel, International Development Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Larry the Downing Street cat runs ahead of Michael Fallon Britain's Secretary of State for Defence as he arrives for a cabinet meeting at Downing Street in London, Britain, June 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth REUTERS UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Michael Gove, Environment Secretary leaves 10 Downing Street on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 Scottish National Party Leader Nicola Sturgeon (C) leaves after speaking to the media in Parliament Square. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May (C, L) holds the first Cabinet meeting of her new team. Getty UK General Election 2017 11 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May attends church in her constituency with her husband Philip May, a few days after disappointing results in a general election. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Party HQ this morning, following a general election yesterday. Parliament is hung, with no individual party gaining an overall majority. Post general election reaction. Rex UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JUNE 09: DUP leader and Northern Ireland former First Minister Arlene Foster (C) holds a brief press conference with the DUP's newly elected Westminster candidates who stood in the general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A " Get May Out" demo took place opposite the gates of Downing Street, calling for May to resign, after the shock election results and Mays coalition with the DUP. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A demonstrator wears a mask depicting Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May, poses with a mock gravestone bearing the words "Hard Brexit, RIP", during a protest photocall near the entrance 10 Downing Street in central London AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters in London Reuters UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May flanked by her husband Philip delivers a statement outside 10 Downing Street in central Londo Getty UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May leaves Buckingham Palace in London the day after a general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A TV cameraman watches the door of 10 Downing Street in London Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by his Office Director Karie Murphy as he arrives at Labour Party HQ in Westminster, London, after he called on the Prime Minister to resign, saying she should 'go and make way for a government that is truly representative of this country' Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters with her husband Philip in London REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ukip leader Paul Nuttall speaks during a press conference at Boston West Golf Club where he announced that he is standing down as party leader Joe Giddens/PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, leaves the counting centre for Britain's general election with her partner Jen Wilson in Edinburgh, Scotland REUTERS/Russell Cheyne UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale celebrates with candidate for Edinburgh South Ian Murray as he retains his seat at the Meadowbank Sports Centre counting centre in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, as counting is under way for the General Election Andrew Milligan/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, as counting is under way for the General Election PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland EPA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, arrives at the Labour Party's Headquarters in London REUTERS/Marko Djurica UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall leaves in a car following the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness in Boston, England Anthony Devlin/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May speaks at the declaration at the election count at the Magnet Leisure Centre in Maidenhead, England. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A policer officer enters a polling station in London AP UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A woman leaves after casting her vote at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery near Brighton, in southern England Getty UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A polling station sign is seen on a telephone box outside the polling station at Rotherwick Hall, west of London Getty UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 A woman walks past a general election display in the window of a betting shop in Camden on June 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, Getty Images UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May visits Atherley Bowling Club during an election campaign visit on June 7, 2017 in Southampton, England. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow June 8 to vote in a general election. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A supporter wears a pair of Jeremy Corbyn decorated tights at a general election campaign event in Birmingham, central England, on June 6, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another deadly terror attack in the nation's captial. AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A picture taken in London, shows election leaflets from various parties displayed ahead of the United Kingdom's general elections. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 Election workers, George Gaunt and Luca Tragid deliver the first ballot boxes, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh AFP UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Conservative party supporters during an election campaign visit to a bakery during an election campaign visit on June 6, 2017 in Fleetwood, north-west England. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital Getty Images UK General Election 2017 5 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a general election campaign visit to a removals depot in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the upcoming general election in Beeston, Nottinghamshire AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts to supporters after a rally at Beeston Youth and Community Centre as he visits the East Midlands during the final weekend of the General Election campaign on June 3, 2017 in Nottingham, England. If elected in next week's general election Mr Corbyn is pledging to create a million new jobs and to scrap zero-hours contracts Getty Images UK General Election 2017 1 June 2017 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party leader Ruth Davidson joins a selection of Scottish Conservative election candidates and activists during campaigning on May 1, 2017 in South Queensferry, Scotland. With only seven days to go until the general election on June 8th, polls are showing the SNP out in front and the Conservatives set to close in on Labour. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 29 May 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May canvasses in Richmond with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith on May 29, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. After suffering defeat in the London Mayoral election Zac Goldsmith resigned over the Government's position on Heathrow expansion. He stood as an Independent but lost in a by-election to the Liberal Democrats. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron poses for a selfie taken by carer April Preston during a General Election campaign visit to the Barlow Medical Centre, in Didsbury, Manchester Yui Mok/PA UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at an election campaign event in Wrexham, Wales Reuters UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour's former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, exit the party's general election campaign 'battle' bus as they arrive at an event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn walks with supporters between venues, before speaking again at another general election campaign event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 An anti-fox hunting protester is taken away and arrested by police outside the venue where Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May was due to launch the Welsh Conservative general election manifesto at Gresford Memorial Hall in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham, North Wales, on May 22, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election AFP/Getty Images

In January Mr Hunt was also accused of hiding after the British Red Cross declared a winter humanitarian emergency in NHS hospitals due to a lack of resource.

The Independent has contacted the Conservatives for comment on this story.
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Theresa May has been accused of mixing up learning disabilities with mental health.

On the campaign trail in Oxfordshire, the prime minister was confronted by a woman with learning disabilities called Cathy, who passionately told her about the effect of losing her disability benefits

I cant live on 100 a month. The fat cats keep the money and us lot get nothing! Cathy said.

Ms May answered that the Conservatives had a lot of plans for people with mental health.

Mental health and learning disability organisations have now criticised the PM for conflating the two.

Ismail Kaji, Mencaps Parliamentary Affairs Support Officer, said: I was really worried to hear Theresa May keep talking about mental health, when Cathy said she has a learning disability, which is not anything to do with mental health. That makes me think that Theresa May is unclear on the difference, and that is very worrying."

Mr Kaji who has a learning disability himself, pointed out that mental health problems can affect anyone at any time, and may be overcome with treatment. A learning disability is a lifelong condition.

He said: "Like Cathy, many people with a learning disability are scared of changes to their disability benefits and are understandably angry.

Disability benefit cuts are a really big issue for everyone with a disability. I hope that whichever party wins this election, listens to people like Cathy and makes sure that people with a learning disability are able to have the support they need.

Christine Burke, lead for people with learning disabilities at the Mental Health Foundation said :People with learning disabilities are at increased risk of developing mental health problems, but the two are very different and distinct.

Mental health problems cover a range of emotional, psychological and psychiatric conditions, and two in three people will face a mental health problem at some point in their lifetime.

Having a learning disability means that people find it harder to learn certain life skills, such as learning new things, communication, managing money, reading, writing, or personal care.

Learning Disability England said conflating learning disability and mental health was a common problem, which has had tangible impacts on welfare policy, affecting people like Cathy.

Alicia Wood, the organisations's co-founder, said: We have experienced senior ministers responsible for welfare reform making the same mistake. The belief that a learning disability is a health problem that can be cured or improved is not the way forward when planning policy and investing in social care and welfare.

"It has meant that people with learning disabilities have not had the investment in the support and income they need to live equal lives."
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Three in four people believe the NHS is in a bad condition, including two-thirds of Conservative voters, according to an exclusive poll for The Independent.

ORB International found that only 23 per cent of the public think the health service is in a good state. Among this group, a tiny 1 per cent described the NHSs condition as very good.

The survey of 2,057 people suggests that health remains the Conservatives potential Achilles heel, and might yet pay dividends for rival parties if they could push the issue to the top of the election agenda.

Labour, which is promising 6bn a year for the NHS in England and a further 8bn over five years for social care, will try to raise the issues profile over the next few days. It will warn that, without a funding boost in the Tory manifesto, the health budget will face a cut in real terms next year.

The cyber-attack that afflicted the NHS on Friday has raised the profile of health in the election campaign. Labour has accused the Government of complacency over the threat, and blamed 1bn of cuts in the NHS infrastructure budget to plug gaps elsewhere. It has pledged an extra 10bn for such spending, with priority given to cyber-security and upgrading IT systems.

Senior Labour figures believe health could be a more potent issue for the party than at the 2015 election. However, the spotlight has rarely fallen on public services in what the Tories want to make a Brexit election and a choice between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. The Liberal Democrats have pledged an extra 6bn for health and social care, funded by a 1p rise in income tax rates.

 Jeremy Hunt on 350 million Brexit NHS pledge 'We're not going to promise something we can't deliver'

According to ORB, only three in 10 people (31 per cent) who voted Tory at the 2015 general election say the NHS is in a good condition, while 66 per cent describe it as bad. Only 18 per cent of Labours 2015 voters believe the service is in a good state, and 79 per cent regard it as bad.

Overall, 74 per cent of people describe the condition of the NHS as bad. Women (77 per cent) are more likely to hold this view than men (71 per cent). The regions where the service gets its worst ratings are in the North-west, North-east and Yorkshire and Humberside, where the Tories hope to gain seats next month.

A majority (51 per cent) of people think the Tories bear the most responsibility for the current problems facing the NHS. One in five people (20 per cent) blames Labour, even though the party has been out of office for seven years, while 13 per cent blame NHS staff.

One in four Tory voters (24 per cent) at the last election say the party is most responsible for the problems, while three in four (76 per cent) Labour voters blame the Tories. Public sector workers (59 per cent) are more likely than those in the private sector (50 per cent) to hold the Tories most responsible. The 18 to 24-year-old age group (59 per cent) is much more likely to blame the Tories than the over-65s (40 per cent).

Responding to the poll, Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow Health Secretary, said: With waiting lists spiralling, overcrowded hospitals and more and more patients languishing on trolleys in corridors, the scale of the crisis in the NHS is clear to everyone. People know it is a direct result of this Conservative Government. The choice facing us is investment in our NHS or further cuts under the Tories.

Last week, Labour and the Lib Dems seized on figures for NHS England showing that 195,626 people waited over four hours to be seen in major accident and emergency departments in March as the key waiting time target was missed for the 20th month in a row. Some 362,687 people have been waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment, with 3.7 million on the waiting list, compared with 2.4 million in 2010.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 3 November 2022 A villager cooks roti bread at the site of the annual Camel Fair in Pushkar, in India's desert state of Rajasthan AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 2 November 2022 A red squirrel gathers nuts in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters 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 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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. 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But ministers argue that A&E performance got better in the past year, waiting times for an operation got shorter in March and patient outcomes continued to improve, with breast cancer survival at its highest ever level. They insist that cyber-security has been taken seriously.

A Conservative spokesman said: Public satisfaction in the NHS is now the highest in all but three of the last 20 years. Under Theresa Mays leadership, the NHS has more doctors, more nurses and record funding  Jeremy Corbyns nonsensical economic policies would wreck the economy and mean less money for the NHS.

ORB interviewed 2,057 people across the UK on Wednesday and Thursday.
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A Tory councillor has been suspended after posting an offensive tweet about Irish people and gypsies during the Eurovision Song Contest.

Nick Harrington, from Warwick District Council, took to social media after none of the Irish judges appeared to vote for the British song to win.

Although Mr Harringtons account has now been deleted, the tweet was screengrabbed and shared widely across the social media site.

#Eurovision2017. Thanks Ireland. You can keep your f****** gypsies, Mr Harrington said in the tweet.

Councillor Andrew Mobbs, leader of Warwick District Council, said the comments were completely unacceptable.

I have had a number of people contact me by telephone and e mail this morning with concerns and I have suspended councillor Harrington from the Conservative group on Warwick District Council for six months. There will be in investigation, Mr Mobbs told the Coventry Telegraph.

Warwick District Council has "apologised unreservedly" for the outburst from Mr Harrington, the Daily Mail reported.

A Conservative spokesperson said: "Mr Harrington has been suspended by the party pending an investigation."

The Irish jury did not award Lucie Jones, the UK's entry to the contest, any points, but televoters awarded her four points, according to Eurovision World.

The UK came in 15th place with 111 points in total  99 from the jury and 12 from televoting.
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Conservative supporters believe their party is now more right-wing than Ukip, a new survey has found.

Researchers asked party supporters to rate all the main political parties depending on how right wing and left wing they think they are, with one being the most left wing and ten being the most right wing.

Conservative supporters gave their party an average rating of 7.82  further to the right than the 7.52 they gave Ukip.

Recommended Theresa May appears to confuse learning disability with mental health

Labour and SNP supporters also thought the Tories were might right wing than Ukip but Lib Dem and Green backers disagreed, as did Ukip supporters themselves.

It comes as Theresa May is accused of copying Ukips rhetoric and policies, including a hard Brexit and a clampdown on immigration.

The Tories released a new campaign video promising they would be tougher than Labour on immigration. Critics accused them of practising dog whistle politics and perpetuating the toxic, anti-immigrant rhetoric of Nigel Farages Ukip.

The findings that Tories believe their party is to the right of Ukip is backed up by another part of the study that tested participants actual political views by asking their opinions on a series of issues.

It found that Conservative supporters were indeed more right wing than Ukips.

UK General Election 2017 Show all 47 1 /47 UK General Election 2017 UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the 1922 committee on June 12, 2017 in London, England. British Prime Minister Theresa May held her first cabinet meeting with her re-shuffled team today Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 DUP leader Arlene Foster stands alongside deputy leader Nigel Dodds as they hold a press conference at Stormont Castle as the Stormont assembly power sharing negotiations reconvene following the general election on June 12, 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Discussions between the DUP and the Conservative party are also continuing in the wake of the UK general election as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist parties ten Westminster seats. 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Getty Images UK General Election 2017 12 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May (C, L) holds the first Cabinet meeting of her new team. Getty UK General Election 2017 11 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May attends church in her constituency with her husband Philip May, a few days after disappointing results in a general election. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Party HQ this morning, following a general election yesterday. Parliament is hung, with no individual party gaining an overall majority. Post general election reaction. Rex UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - JUNE 09: DUP leader and Northern Ireland former First Minister Arlene Foster (C) holds a brief press conference with the DUP's newly elected Westminster candidates who stood in the general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A " Get May Out" demo took place opposite the gates of Downing Street, calling for May to resign, after the shock election results and Mays coalition with the DUP. Rex Features UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A demonstrator wears a mask depicting Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May, poses with a mock gravestone bearing the words "Hard Brexit, RIP", during a protest photocall near the entrance 10 Downing Street in central London AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters in London Reuters UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May flanked by her husband Philip delivers a statement outside 10 Downing Street in central Londo Getty UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May leaves Buckingham Palace in London the day after a general election in which the Conservatives lost their majority Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 A TV cameraman watches the door of 10 Downing Street in London Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by his Office Director Karie Murphy as he arrives at Labour Party HQ in Westminster, London, after he called on the Prime Minister to resign, saying she should 'go and make way for a government that is truly representative of this country' Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the Conservative Party's headquarters with her husband Philip in London REUTERS/Peter Nicholls UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ukip leader Paul Nuttall speaks during a press conference at Boston West Golf Club where he announced that he is standing down as party leader Joe Giddens/PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, leaves the counting centre for Britain's general election with her partner Jen Wilson in Edinburgh, Scotland REUTERS/Russell Cheyne UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale celebrates with candidate for Edinburgh South Ian Murray as he retains his seat at the Meadowbank Sports Centre counting centre in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, as counting is under way for the General Election Andrew Milligan/PA Wire UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, as counting is under way for the General Election PA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland EPA UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, arrives at the Labour Party's Headquarters in London REUTERS/Marko Djurica UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall leaves in a car following the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness in Boston, England Anthony Devlin/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 9 June 2017 British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May speaks at the declaration at the election count at the Magnet Leisure Centre in Maidenhead, England. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A policer officer enters a polling station in London AP UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A woman leaves after casting her vote at the Hove Museum and Art Gallery near Brighton, in southern England Getty UK General Election 2017 8 June 2017 A polling station sign is seen on a telephone box outside the polling station at Rotherwick Hall, west of London Getty UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 A woman walks past a general election display in the window of a betting shop in Camden on June 7, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, Getty Images UK General Election 2017 7 June 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May visits Atherley Bowling Club during an election campaign visit on June 7, 2017 in Southampton, England. Britain goes to the polls tomorrow June 8 to vote in a general election. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A supporter wears a pair of Jeremy Corbyn decorated tights at a general election campaign event in Birmingham, central England, on June 6, 2017. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another deadly terror attack in the nation's captial. AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 A picture taken in London, shows election leaflets from various parties displayed ahead of the United Kingdom's general elections. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 Election workers, George Gaunt and Luca Tragid deliver the first ballot boxes, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh AFP UK General Election 2017 6 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Conservative party supporters during an election campaign visit to a bakery during an election campaign visit on June 6, 2017 in Fleetwood, north-west England. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to vote in a general election only days after another terrorist attack on the nation's capital Getty Images UK General Election 2017 5 June 2017 British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a general election campaign visit to a removals depot in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the upcoming general election in Beeston, Nottinghamshire AFP/Getty Images UK General Election 2017 3 June 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reacts to supporters after a rally at Beeston Youth and Community Centre as he visits the East Midlands during the final weekend of the General Election campaign on June 3, 2017 in Nottingham, England. If elected in next week's general election Mr Corbyn is pledging to create a million new jobs and to scrap zero-hours contracts Getty Images UK General Election 2017 1 June 2017 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party leader Ruth Davidson joins a selection of Scottish Conservative election candidates and activists during campaigning on May 1, 2017 in South Queensferry, Scotland. With only seven days to go until the general election on June 8th, polls are showing the SNP out in front and the Conservatives set to close in on Labour. Getty Images UK General Election 2017 29 May 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May canvasses in Richmond with Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith on May 29, 2017 in London, United Kingdom. After suffering defeat in the London Mayoral election Zac Goldsmith resigned over the Government's position on Heathrow expansion. He stood as an Independent but lost in a by-election to the Liberal Democrats. Britain goes to the polls on June 8 to elect a new parliament in a general election Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron poses for a selfie taken by carer April Preston during a General Election campaign visit to the Barlow Medical Centre, in Didsbury, Manchester Yui Mok/PA UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks at an election campaign event in Wrexham, Wales Reuters UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour's former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, exit the party's general election campaign 'battle' bus as they arrive at an event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn walks with supporters between venues, before speaking again at another general election campaign event in Kingston upon Hull, northern England Getty Images UK General Election 2017 22 May 2017 An anti-fox hunting protester is taken away and arrested by police outside the venue where Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May was due to launch the Welsh Conservative general election manifesto at Gresford Memorial Hall in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham, North Wales, on May 22, 2017. 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On the one to 10 scale, Tory backers had an average score of 5.08, compared to just 2.62 for Ukip supporters. The latter is even to the left of Liberal Democrats, who had an average rating of 2.88.

Researchers said the surprise finding could be because they mostly tested voters opinions on economic issues, whereas Ukip supporters tend to be more right-wing on social matters.

Keen Tory supporters.think UKIP is less right-wing than they are  possibly because they realise many devotees of the Peoples Army are actually quite ambivalent about business and shrinking the state, the researchers said.

Enthusiastic UKIP supporters might see themselves as pretty right-wing when asked to place themselves on a left-right scale 6.77), but their underlying attitudes  the ones we tap into with our more detailed questions  suggest they actually sit to the left of centre (at 2.62).

Opponents said the finding was evidence of Theresa May's rightward shift.

Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat's foreign affairs spokesperson and candidate for Carshalton and Wallington, said: "Theresa May has shown no shame and seems happy to parrot Farage's lines in a desperate bid to gain more votes.

"Whilst UKIP might think this is just pragmatism, many people will find it disgusting. The referendum result has left a deeply divided Britain, but instead of trying to bring people together Theresa May seems intent on widening the divide."
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Final score: Republicans 14, Barack Obama's last-minute regulations, one.

Congressional Republicans anxious to show voters they can get something done are hailing their reversal of more than a dozen Obama-era regulations on guns, the internet and the environment.

Over a few months, lawmakers used an obscure legislative rule to ram through changes that will have far-reaching implications for the coal industry, broadband customers, hunters and women seeking healthcare at Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

The deadline for scuttling the rules that Democrat Obama imposed during his final months in office was last Thursday. The 1996 Congressional Review Act had given Republicans the power to make the changes with a simple majority, within a set time.

While the rest of Washington focused on the furore over President Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, Republicans were celebrating their effort to reverse the rules, arguing that it would boost the economy and make it easier for businesses to operate.

I am almost speechless when I think about the success, said Senator Jim Inhofe, Republican-Oklahoma.

Senators pointed out that Congress had only once before used the legislative tools stemming from the Congressional Review Act to quash a regulation  until this year. In all, the GOP was able to reverse 14 regulations that had or will get Trump's signature.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, argued that overturning rules passed at the end of the Obama administration hardly constituted an agenda.

The fact that they are bragging about these highlights how little else they have accomplished legislatively, Schumer said.

Republicans have a long way to go in their efforts to repeal and replace the health care law, cut taxes and boost infrastructure spending, all Trump priorities. Still, the GOP made clear soon after election victories in November that one of the first orders of business would be to go after Obama administration rules.

The effort has had strong backing from business groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association and prominent anti-abortion groups  all key constituencies that generally back Republican candidates. The Chamber endorsed eight of the 14 repeal resolutions that Congress passed. One still awaits the president's signature before it can become law.

Republicans reversed Obama rules that enhanced protections for waterways near coal mines, required contractors to disclose violation of 14 federal labour laws for the previous three years when bidding on contracts and imposed tight restrictions on what broadband companies such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast could do with their customers' personal data.

Neil Bradley, a senior vice president at the Chamber, said that when it comes to slow economic growth, it's difficult to say, This regulation is the culprit, but collectively, that's what happens.

Together, they affected a pretty broad base of the business community, Bradley said.

Democrats overwhelmingly voted against most of the regulatory repeals. Republicans generally supported them, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote to allow states to deny federal family planning money to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. That reversed a rule Obama issued in his last weeks in office.

While many of the actions were designed to help businesses, others addressed social issues, including the repeal of a regulation designed to keep guns out of the hands of certain mentally disabled people. The NRA as well as advocacy groups for the disabled and the ACLU weighed in. They said it was discriminatory for the Social Security Administration to forward the names of certain beneficiaries to the instant background check system based on a mental disability and having a third party manage their benefits.

Democrats and environmentalists scored one victory last week.

Senate Republicans failed to overturn a rule that would have forced energy companies to capture more of the methane that's burned off or flared at drilling sites. Senator John McCain, Republican-Arizona, said he considered the rule onerous but undoing it would have prevented the Bureau of Land Management from issuing a similar rule in the future.

McCain, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Senator Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats on the vote.

GOP leaders opted not to bring a couple dozen other repeal resolutions up for a vote, including one that would have blocked a rule designed to protect funds on prepaid debit cards in case of fraud and unauthorised use.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

Still, the 14 victories gave Republicans a chance to crow.

In just a few short months, we have turned a significant corner from how things operated under the Obama administration, said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican-Kentucky. Instead of going around Congress to push through regulations, the President is working with us to ease the burden.

Copyright Associated Press
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Donald Trumps lawyer has hit out at critics after he tweeted an image of his daughter, Samantha Blake, dressed in lingerie.

Michael Cohen posted the black and white photograph to his more than 215,000 followers with the caption: So proud of my Ivy League daughter brains and beauty channelling her Edie Sedwick.

He later explained that the image was a "modelling shot" remaking a famous sixties photograph of American socialite, actress and model Edie Sedgwick, a friend and muse of Andy Warhol.

But the post has been widely pilloried on social media, with some users dubbing creepy and bizarre.

Others drew links between Mr Cohen's comments and those of President Trump about his own daughter, Ivanka. Thousands shared user Bonnie Bratnobers tweet: POTUS wants to date his daughter, the VP calls his wife mother, and DJTs attorney posts spank-bank material of his daughter. Bratnober unapologetically admitted in a later tweet that the post was "vulgar"

Recommended Bill Maher made a joke about Ivanka and Trump no one dares to

Mr Cohen responded directly to a number of users. To Ms Bratnober, he asked simply: "Jealous?"

Another person pointed out the strangeness of a father posting a photograph of his daughter dressed in underwear, to which the lawyer replied: Beauty and brains you a-hole!"

He proceeded to brand his critics generally as hater[s].

Mr Cohen is no stranger to courting controversy in his own right. In a 2015 interview with the Daily Beast about rape allegations against Mr Trump  which have since been retracted  he said that sexual intercourse with a spouse can never legally be considered rape.

He later apologised for the comment.

The US President has at times delighted in causes outrage with comments he has made about his daughter Ivanka, who now serves as an adviser with her own White House office. .

Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Show all 33 1 /33 Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first 100 days in office were marred by a string of scandals, many of which caught the eye of the Independent's cartoonists Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Trump's first 100 days have seen him aggressively ramp up tensions with his nuclear rivals in North Korea Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has warned of a "major, major conflict" with the pariah nation lead by Kim Jong Un Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump dropped the "mother of all bombs" on alleged ISIS-linked militants in Afghanistan, amid an escalation of US military intervention around the globe Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has been accused of falling short of the standards set by his predecessors in the Oval Office, including Franklin D Roosevelt Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The tycoon's ascension to the White House came at a time when the balance of power is shifting away from Western nations like those in the G7 group Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Western politicians, including the British Conservative party, have been accused of falling in line behind Mr Trump's proposals Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Brexit is seen to have weakened Britain, reducing still further any political will to resist American leadership Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump's leadership has been marked by sudden and unexpected shifts in global policy Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Trump's controversial missile strike on Syria, which killed several citizens, was seen by some analysts as an attempt to distract from his policy elsewhere Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The President has also spent a large majority of his weekends golfing, rather than attending to matters of state Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Though free of gaffes, a visit from Chinese president Xi Jinping spotlighted trade tensions between the two states Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons One major and unexpected setback came when Mr Trump's Healthcare Bill was struck down by members of his own party Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has been a figure of fun in the media, with his approval at record lows Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons A string of revelations about Mr Trump's financial indiscretions did not mar his surge to the White House Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Outgoing President Barack Obama was accused of wiretapping Trump Tower by his successor in America's highest office Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The alleged involvement of Russian intelligence operatives in securing Mr Trump the presidency prompted harsh criticism Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The explosive resignation of Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who lied about his links to the Russian ambassador, was just one scandal to hit the President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Many scandals, such as the accusation Barack Obama was implicated in phone-hacking, first broke on Mr Trump's Twitter feed Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's election provoked mass protests in the UK, with millions signing a petition to ban him from the country Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump cited a non-existent terror attack in Sweden during a campaign rally Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump stands accused of stoking regional tensions in Eastern Asia Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons North Korea has launched a number of failed nuclear tests since Mr Trump took power Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Theresa May formally rejected the petition calling for Mr Trump to be banned from the UK Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons When Mr Trump's initial so-called Muslim ban was struck down by a federal justice, the President mocked the 69-year-old as a "ridiculous", "so-called judge" Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons A week after his inauguration, Theresa May met with Mr Trump at the White House Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first days in office were marked by a hasty attempt to follow through on many of his campaign promises, including the so-called Muslim ban Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's decision to ban citizens of many majority-Muslim countries from the US sparked mass protests Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Revelations about Donald Trump's sexual improprieties were not enough to keep him from being elected President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons British PM Theresa May was criticised by many in the press for cosying up to the new President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons One of Mr Trump's top aides, Kelly Anne Conway, was mocked for describing mistruths as "alternative facts" Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons British PM Theresa May was quick to demonstrate that her political aims did not hugely differ from Mr Trump's Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's inauguration, on 20 January 2017, sparked protests both at home and abroad

According to the then-Miss Universe, Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, Mr Trump turned to her during a Miss Teen US pageant Ivanka was hosting at the age of 16 and asked: Dont you think my daughters hot? Shes hot, right?

And in a now infamous 2006 interview in front of a live studio audience for The View, Mr Trump told the hosts: If Ivanka werent my daughter, perhaps Id be dating her.
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Donald Trump is mulling a massive shake-up of his closest advisers at the White House after the firing of former FBI director James Comey.

Mr Trump is reportedly considering what has been described as a huge reboot, anonymous sources told Axios, which could see advisers such as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, Counsel Don McGahn and Press Secretary Sean Spicer heading for the exit.

The advice he's getting is to go big  that he has nothing to lose, the source said.

Recommended John Oliver demands Congress intervene after Trump fires James Comey

The question now is how big and how bold. I'm not sure he knows the answer to that yet.

The news follows several reports about his advisers, including that Mr Spicer spent more energy correcting his location in a Washington Post story  changed to "among the bushes, rather than in the bushes  than he spent on the negative reports around Mr Trump firing Mr Comey.

After Mr Comey was dismissed via a signed letter, handed over by Mr Trumps body guard, the White House reportedly descended into chaos.

Advisers said the President has been "screaming at the television" when journalists covered his potential ties to Russia and advisers did not know how to work with him.

He has also made an unprecedented threat to cancel press briefings and hand out written statements for the purpose of "accuracy", and there have been reports that he would replace his communications team with Fox News producers.

 John Oliver demands Congress impeach Trump after Comey firing

Mr Bannon recently aggravated his boss when several headlines appeared describing Mr Bannon as the real leader behind the scenes and stealing the limelight.

If the shake-up goes ahead, Mr Trumps circle of confidantes would become a very small one, including his daughter, Ivanka Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and those who have limited if any experience in government.

While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has taken to defending his boss in a recent NBC News interview and won praise from Mr Trump, other cabinet members could be more likely on the chopping block.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price has not taken sole responsibility for the slow moving progress on health care reform, and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross took credit for a recent announcement on trade with China. Mr Trump tweeted about the deal, which would include China importing US beef.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions also announced he would increase prison sentences while Mr Kushner was working on criminal justice reform.

Sources told Axios that Mr Trump might simply exclude certain people from the loop rather than firing them as he is about to head on his first international trip since his Inauguration.
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A musician has died after setting himself on fire while live streaming his suicide on Facebook.

Jared McLemore was rushed to hospital in Memphis, Tennessee but died from severe burns soon after.

The 33-year-old doused himself in kerosene before turning a lighter on himself outside a crowded bar where his ex-girlfriend worked.

Frantic screams could be heard during the video and a man is seen trying to help Mr McLemore, the New York Daily News reported.

Reports have suggested McLemore mumbled goodbye to his ex-girlfriend, Alyssa Moore, who was a couple of feet away.

Court records show that Mr McLemore was arrested after strangling his Ms Moore and threatening to kill her, WREG reported.

Mr McLemore had written on Facebook in January: Please educate yourself on mental health. Please love each other through sickness.

Ms Moore did not wish to comment, but her sister Sara Moore said Mr McLemore had terrorised Alyssa.

"We want to make clear that this happened because of a perfect storm of domestic abuse, the stigma around it, and the visceral reality of mental illness," she told BuzzFeed.

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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

Facebook has removed the video off the site and is not clear how long it had been online or how many times it had been viewed.

We are deeply saddened by the loss of Jared McLemore," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

"We dont allow the promotion of self-injury or suicide on Facebook. We want people to have a safe experience on Facebook and we work with organizations around the world to provide assistance for people in distress."
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A man covered in blood and reportedly carrying what appeared to be a severed human head, has been arrested after allegedly walking into an Oregon grocery store and stabbing an employee.

Other employees in the store quickly responded and tackled the the attacker. Those employees held down the suspect until police were able to respond and bring him into custody, the local fire department in Estacada, Oregon, said.

The attacker has not yet been identified by police.

The stabbed employee was flown to a hospital, but their condition was not immediately known, according to NBC.

Twenty minutes after the stabbing in the market, a 911 caller notified authorities that they had found a woman who appeared to be dead inside of a home about 10 miles away from the store. Police arrived there and found the body, and police indicated that the death was likely connected to the attacker at the store. It wasnt immediately clear in news reports whether the head had been severed from that body.

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

An investigation into the matter was ongoing and police said that there wasnt any further threat to public health following the death and stabbing. An official Twitter account for the area fire department said that anybody involved in the stabbing could speak to a chaplain by reaching out to the fire station.
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A woman died on Mothers Day after saving her daughters life by pushing her out of path of an oncoming car.

Diane Aluska, a mother of three, saw a car reversing fast towards them and managed to get her 16-year-old daughter Jenna out of the way.

There is no doubt she saved her daughters life, Suffolk County police Detective Sergeant James Murphy told the New York Post.

The pair had attended Mass and were walking out of a bakery in Lindenhurst, Long Island, when 80-year-old driver Ann Riolo mistakenly reversed her car towards them.

She had thought that she had put it in drive, Mr James Murphy told reporters.

She left it in reverse, hit the gas, started speeding backwards, lost control, and jumped the sidewalk.

Diane and Jenna Aluska (Facebook)

Aluska put her hand on her daughters shoulder to try and get her out of the way, and Jenna avoided the worst impact of the crash.

The car clipped the 16-year-old, but killed her mother.

After hitting the women, Riolo then crashed the car into the local fire department building.

At the last second you could see the mother kind of throw the daughter out of the way and sacrifice herself to try and save her own daughter so that was pretty heartfelt, witness Joe Biggs told CBS.

Both women were taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital where Aluska died. Jenna was reported as being in a stable condition, according to police.

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

Jennas father, Kenneth Aluska, told The Post that he and his son would have to inform Jenna during a hospital visit that her mother had died.

Ms Riolo was treated for minor injuries at the same hospital. It is not clear whether criminal charges will be brought.

Her car, a Toyota Corolla, has been impounded to carry out a safety test.

This appears to be non-criminal, a tragic accident, Mr Murphy said.

We are taking the car in to investigate, but it appears to be non-criminal.
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The parents of US college student who died after fraternity hazing event have accused fellow members of treating him "as roadkill and a rag doll".

After joining the Beta Theta Pi (Beta) fraternity at Pennsylvania State University in February, Timothy Piazza, 19, took part in a hazing ritual called the gauntlet.

The obstacle course requires contestants to drink approximately five alcoholic drinks in two minutes.

After completing his run, security footage captured Mr Piazza staggering around the fraternity's after party. At one point, he can be seen staggering toward the basement stairs. Out of sight of the cameras, he allegedly fell approximately 15 feet  head first  to the bottom of the flight.

Recommended Chicago University apologies for racist emails from student fraternity

After finding him face-down at the bottom of the steps, his fraternity brothers carried him upstairs to a couch, where they attempted to rouse him.

Despite his non-responsiveness and a large bruise growing across his abdomen, the brothers allegedly refused to call the emergency services. One young man who suggested calling 911 appeared to have been thrown against a wall by his brothers.

"Everybody was surrounding him, basically laughing and pointing, one brother, Kordel Davis, told ABC News, adding: They thought calling for help was just unnecessary."

Left largely unattended, Piazza proceeded to fall several more times throughout the night  once striking his head on an iron railing. One brother can be seen on surveillance footage stepping over Piazzas unconscious body on his way to get water.

Members of the fraternity did not call 911 until after 10 the next morning - around 15 hours after his first fall - when they found Piazza unresponsive, rigid, and cold to the touch.

When surgeons began operating, they found his spleen shattered and brain swollen. Doctors said 80 per cent of the student athlete's total blood supply had bled into his abdomen.

He died in the surgical intensive care unit on 4 February. Coroners later testified he had consumed a life-threatening amount of alcohol.

"It was horrific,'' Jim Piazza said of his sons death. "This wasn't boys being boys  They basically treated our son as roadkill and a rag doll."

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

"Nobody should consume that much alcohol,'' his mother, Evelyn, said. "That's torture."

Eighteen members of the fraternity are now facing charges ranging from involuntary manslaughter to tampering with evidence in the death of 19-year-old .

The Centre County District Attorney said more than 850 charges had been filed.

Text messages from older fraternity members about the new initiates broadcast their desire to fuck with them and get them fucked up, they said.

Penn State has since banned Beta Theta Pi from campus, announced a strongly enforced prohibition on underage drinking, and cancelled rush week for Autumn 2017. Officially known as recruitment week, rush week is the period of time when fraternities and sororities recruit students to their respective Greek letter organisations.

But court documents suggest hazing and underage drinking at Penn State wont be easy to combat.

Beta publicly represents themselves as a dry fraternity, but reports show the Penn State chapter provided alcohol for at least three of their rush week events. Receipts from that time period reveal Beta members spent at least $1,179 (917) on alcohol in an eight-day span. Party attendees attest the alcohol was readily available to minors.

Despite publicly condemning hazing, Beta members from multiple years told law enforcement their brothers repeatedly hazed them during initiation  including forcing them to run the gauntlet. At least one other member was hospitalised as a result of the initiation process in recent years.

Nationwide, more than half of all college students involved in clubs, teams, or other organisations have been hazed. At least one student has died in a hazing-related accident every year since 1970, according to journalist and hazing expert Hank Nuwer. The vast majority of these deaths involve alcohol.

In a statement following Piazzas death, Penn State called binge drinking on college campuses a national problem that has been worsening.

"Penn State initiated aggressive enforcement, education and monitoring measures to address these issues well before the tragic death of Timothy Piazza, and announced additional measures following, the school said. Our actions will continue, and represent our ongoing commitment to drive change in tackling binge drinking at universities."
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Self-proclaimed white nationalist Richard Spencer led a large group of demonstrators carrying torches and chanting You will not replace us Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting plans to remove a Confederate monument that has played an outsize role in this year's race for Virginia governor.

What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced, Spencer said at an afternoon protest, the first of two rallies he led in the college town where he once attended the University of Virginia.

At the second rally, dozens of torch-bearing protesters gathered in a city park Saturday evening and chanted You will not replace us and Russia is our friend, local television footage shows. Spencer was not shown addressing that gathering, but he tweeted a photo of himself standing in the crowd carrying what appeared to be a bamboo tiki torch.

The evening protest was short-lived. About 10 minutes in, an altercation between Spencer's group and counter-protesters drew police to the scene, and the crowd quickly dispersed, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported.

Once an obscure Internet figure promoting white identity, Spencer coined the term alt-right - referring to a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state - and rose to prominence during Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Although Trump denounced the alt-right, Spencer's followers counted his victory as a win for the movement as Trump espoused hard-right stances on undocumented immigrants, Muslims and political correctness.

You will not replace us. You will not destroy us, Spencer said at the earlier rally, which he broadcast via Periscope video. You cannot destroy us. We have awoken. We are here. We are never going away.

Spencer was in Charlottesville to protest a City Council vote to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. A court injunction has halted the removal for six months.

The statue has become a rallying cry for Corey Stewart, a Republican gubernatorial candidate. Stewart, who is chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, was chairman of Trump's Virginia campaign until he was fired.

There was no indication that Stewart, who has alienated some supporters with his focus on Confederate symbols, attended either rally. In defending the Confederate battle flag and monuments, Stewart has said that he is not promoting symbols of hate but battling political correctness and historical vandalism.

Stewart did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. He kept a relatively low-profile on Twitter.

I want to wish all the mothers a very special Mother's Day today! he said in one of his few tweets of the day.

The rallies drew condemnation from the other four contenders for governor: former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, state Senator Frank Wagner, Republican-Virginia Beach, and Democrats Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam and former congressman Tom Perriello.

All are vying to succeed term-limited Governor Terry McAuliffe, Democrat.

The ugly display of divisive rhetoric and intimidation tactics in Charlottesville yesterday... does not reflect the thoughtfulness and tolerance I see in my fellow Virginians everywhere I go, Gillespie tweeted.

Wagner, who faces Stewart and Gillespie in the 13 June GOP primary, said via email: These actions are totally unacceptable. These people are racists. They don't represent Virginia values. I condemn their actions and beliefs. I call on all Virginians who are involved in efforts to advocate for or against Virginia's history to act responsibly and honorably.

Said Northam, There is no place for hate, fear, or intimidation in Virginia. The display in Charlottesville is the last gasp of a disgusting ideology. In this commonwealth, our doors are open, our lights are on, and we are welcome to everyone who shares a love for it, no matter who you are or where you're from.

Perriello, who grew up in Charlottesville, tweeted derisively at Spencer after the alt-right leader posted video of the first protest.

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

Get your white supremacist hate out of my hometown, Perriello wrote on Twitter.

Spencer replied: We won, you lost, little Tommy.

Actually, you lost, Perriello shot back. In 1865. 150 years later, you're still not over it.

Copyright The Washington Post
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Russia has yet to collect much of what it hoped for from the Trump administration, including the lifting of US sanctions and recognition of its annexation of Crimea.

But the Kremlin has gotten a different return on its effort to help elect Trump in last year's election: chaos in Washington, DC.

The President's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey was the latest destabilising jolt to a core institution of the US government. The nation's top law enforcement agency joined a list of entities that Trump has targeted, including federal judges, US spy services, news organisations and military alliances.

The instability, although driven by Donald Trump, has in some ways extended and amplified the effect Russia sought to achieve with its unprecedented campaign to undermine the 2016 presidential race.

In a declassified report released this year, US spy agencies described destabilisation as one of the Russian President Vladimir Putin's objectives. The Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, it said.

Russia's active measures campaign ended with the election last year. But Comey's firing on Monday triggered a new wave of Russia-related turbulence.

His removal was perceived as a blow to the independence of the bureau's ongoing investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Even if that probe remains on track, current and former US officials said that Comey's ouster serves broader Russian interests.

They feel pretty good overall because that's a further sign that our political system is in a real crisis, said Eugene Rumer, a former State Department official who served as the top intelligence officer on Russia issues from 2010 to 2014. The firing of Comey only aggravates this crisis. It's now certain to be more protracted and more painful and that's okay with them.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, offered a similar assessment in Senate testimony last week, even before Comey was dismissed, saying that Moscow must look on the election and its aftermath with a great deal of satisfaction.

The Russians have to be celebrating the success of... what they set out do with rather minimal resource expenditure, Clapper said. The first objective was to sow discord and dissension, which they certainly did.

Clapper went further in interviews on Sunday, saying US institutions are under assault from Trump, and that Russia must see the firing of Comey as another victory on the scoreboard for them.

Even Trump alluded to Russia's presumed glee at the post-Comey turmoil, although he blamed Democrats. Russia must be laughing up their sleeves watching as the US tears itself apart over a Democrat EXCUSE for losing the election, Trump said in a posting on Twitter on Thursday.

If Russia's most specific priorities have proved elusive, it may be partly because Moscow overachieved in its effort to cultivate ties to Trump.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who shared many of Trump's pro-Russia positions, was forced to resign in February after it was revealed that he had misled other White House officials about his post-election conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

In a late December phone call that was intercepted by US intelligence, Flynn assured Kislyak that Trump planned to revisit the sanctions issue shortly after taking office. Trump has so far not followed through on that front, largely because the Flynn controversy and multiple Russia probes have made it politically unfeasible.

Trump's policies toward Russia have also taken a harder line in part because of the rising influence of senior members of his administration, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who are critics of Moscow.

Even so, Trump himself continues to send pro-Russia signals, sometimes at the expense of agencies that report to him. Trump recently signalled, again, that he remains unconvinced that Russia was behind the hack of the 2016 election and release of tens of thousands of emails that damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign. His position is a rejection of the consensus view of US intelligence agencies.

Trump has provided a steady stream of material for Russian propaganda platforms.

One day after firing Comey, Trump welcomed Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to the White House. American news agencies were barred from attending but a photographer for Russia's state-run Tass news agency was granted access to the Oval Office.

Photos released later that day showed Trump warmly welcoming his guests, including a shot that showed Trump smiling and shaking hands with Kislyak, the ambassador embroiled in the controversy with Flynn.

Russian officials have denied the country meddled in the US election. In brief public appearances last week, Lavrov joked about Comey's dismissal - Was he fired? You're kidding! - and mocked claims of Moscow interference.

We are monitoring what is going on here concerning Russia and its alleged 'decisive role' in your domestic policy, Lavrov said in a quote reported in Tass.

Trump's defenders acknowledge that he seeks improved relations with Moscow, but insist that his goals are designed entirely to advance American interests.

They point to sharp criticism of Moscow by senior administration officials, strained diplomatic relations on key issues and Trump's decision to order a missile strike on an air base in Syria where Russian military operatives were based as part of Moscow's support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The assertion that the Trump administration has been advantageous to Moscow is laughable, said James Carafano, the vice president of foreign and defence policy at the Heritage Foundation, who served as an adviser to the Trump transition team. The president has actually stiff-armed them on a number of occasions.

But critics argue that many of Trump's foreign policy positions undercut US influence overseas and, as a result, strengthen Moscow - his effective endorsement of nationalist candidates including Marine Le Pen in France; his effort to impose an immigration ban on Muslim-majority countries; and his threats, since softened, to restructure Nato.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed allegations of ties between his campaign and Russia as fake news. The White House insisted that Comey's firing was based solely on his handling of the investigation of Clinton's emails.

But Trump's own later statements made clear the decision was linked to his frustration that the Russia inquiry was expanding under Comey, a director whom Trump viewed as disloyal.

Trump had telegraphed the move a day earlier on Twitter, saying: The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?

The implication that the FBI would perpetuate an unwarranted investigation out of political animus echoes other instances in which Trump has disparaged American institutions or principles.

US intelligence officials said such comments bolster the case that Putin makes against Western democracies.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

It plays into the idea that we are as corrupt as anybody else, that what the United States is exporting isn't something you want, said a former senior US intelligence official involved in tracking the Russian election hack and its aftermath. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

With sanctions still in place, Russia may think that the election interference didn't pan out the way they expected, the official said. But what they're getting now is more positive than what they had under [President Barack] Obama and what they feared under Clinton. It's not pro-Russia, but it's certainly not anti-Russia. It's more a kind of chaos. And that does benefit them.

Copyright The Washington Post
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The US has claimed Syrias Bashar al-Assad has constructed a large crematorium and is using it to dispose of the bodies of up to 50 political prisoners it is said to be executing every week.

Amnesty International reported in February that an average of 20 to 50 people were hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison north of Damascus. Between 5,000 and 13,000 people had been executed there in the years since since a popular uprising descended into a bitter civil war, it said. The group said the process being carried out to crush any dissent against the Assad government and that the majority of those being killed in mass hangings, were civilians opposed to the government.

Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, said the US believed a crematorium had been built at the jail, though he did not provide evidence to prove the claim.

Credible sources have believed that many of the bodies have been disposed in mass graves, Mr Jones told reporters. We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Sednaya prison complex which could dispose of detainees remains with little evidence.

Reuters said during the briefing, he showed aerial images of what he said was a crematorium. He also claimed that Russia had either aided in or passively looked away as the regime has engaged in mass murders and other atrocities.

Some will be disinclined to believe the allegations from the State Department and dismiss them as little more than the latest instance of propaganda from Washington. The US, UK and other nations have repeatedly accused Syria of various humans rights abuses during the six year conflict.

 Chemical attack '100 per cent fabrication', Assad says

Earlier this year, Syria and Russia denied Western claims that chemical weapons had been used against Syrian civilians.

During a meeting in Washington with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Mr Jones said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Russia must now, with great urgency, exercise its great influence over the Syrian regime.

Mr Jones also said he was not optimistic about a Russia-brokered deal to set up de-escalation zones inside Syria.

The deal was reached with support from Iran and Turkey during ceasefire talks in the Kazakh capital of Astana earlier this month.

In light of the failures of the past ceasefire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical, said Mr Jones.

Mr Jones said Assads government had carried out air strikes, chemical attacks, extrajudicial killings, starvation, and other measures to target civilians and its opponents. He criticised Russia and Iran for maintaining their support for Assad despite those tactics.

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

These atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran, Mr Jones said. The [Assad] regime must stop all attacks on civilian and opposition forces. And Russia must bear responsibility to ensure regime compliance.

The State Department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not definitely prove the building is a crematorium, but they show construction consistent with such use, said the Associated Press.

Earlier this year, Amnesty called the prison a slaughterhouse.

The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population, said Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty Internationals regional office in Beirut.

We demand that the Syrian authorities immediately cease extrajudicial executions and torture and inhuman treatment at Sednaya prison and in all other government prisons across Syria. Russia and Iran, the governments closest allies, must press for an end to these murderous detention policies.
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A high profile prosecutor fired by Donald Trump, has defended his former colleague James Comey and called on more public officials to stand up to the power of the White House.

Preet Bharara, who was one of 46 United States attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama ordered to resign by Mr Trump, said the firing of Mr Comey had impacted morale at the agency.

Jim Comey was once my boss and remains my friend. I know that many people are mad at him. He has at different times become a cause for peoples frustration and anger on both sides of the aisle, he said.

Some of those people may have a point. But...I am proud to know a man who had the courage to say no to a president.

He added: And in the tumult of this time, the question whose answer we should perhaps fear the most is the one evoked by that showdown: are there still public servants who are prepared to say no to the president?

 Donald Trump says James Comey told him multiple times he was not under investigation

Mr Bharara, who was fired at the United States attorney in Manhattan in March after he refused the order to stand down, recalled in an piece for the Washington Post, how Mr Comey and then FBI Director Robert Mueller intervened in 2004 when the White House tried to overrule their objection to a secret terrorist surveillance programme.

He said that when the administration of George W Bush sought to push ahead, Mr Comey threatened to resign. Mr Comey and Mr Mueller won the day.

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

For me, the past week has been deja vu all over again. To restore faith in the rule of law, three obvious things must happen: First, we need a truly bipartisan investigation in Congress, he said.

That means no partisan nonsense - just a commitment to finding the facts, whatever they may be, proving (or disproving) Russian interference in our election and anything related.

Mr Bharara also said the new FBI director must be apolitical and sensitive to the law-enforcement mission. Finally, he said, there should be a special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

Given the manner of Comeys firing and the pretextual reasons proffered for it, there is no other way, he said.

History will judge this moment. Its not too late to get it right, and justice demands it.
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Former Secretary of State John Kerry and other top national security experts are backing an organisation aimed at defending the Iran nuclear deal, as Donald Trump determines for the first time whether to temporarily alleviate some restrictions on the country.

The deadline for Mr Trump to make his decision is on Thursday, the day before he is set to depart for his first trip abroad as president. During his presidential campaign, the US leader repeatedly called the accord with Iran the worst deal ever, and Vice President Mike Pence threatened to rip it up.

On his overseas trip, Mr Trump is likely to discuss issues involving Iran in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged members of Congress two years ago to reject the Iran deal, saying it would only feed an Iranian terror machine.

Recommended Trump administration orders review on lifting Iran sanctions deal

Under the 2015 agreement, Iran agreed to roll back its nuclear programme in exchange for the removal of certain restrictions. Roughly every 120 days following the implementation of the deal in January 2016, the US president must determine whether to issue waivers temporarily suspending some sanctions.

Those sanctions can be reimplemented if Tehran does not honour the agreement.

Last month in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Iran had complied with its commitments through 18 April, but noted that the country continued to be a leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Mr Tillerson notified Mr Ryan that the president has directed a National Security Council-led interagency review to evaluate whether suspension of sanctions related to Iran pursuant to the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] is vital to the national security interests of the United States.

Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Show all 33 1 /33 Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first 100 days in office were marred by a string of scandals, many of which caught the eye of the Independent's cartoonists Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Trump's first 100 days have seen him aggressively ramp up tensions with his nuclear rivals in North Korea Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has warned of a "major, major conflict" with the pariah nation lead by Kim Jong Un Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump dropped the "mother of all bombs" on alleged ISIS-linked militants in Afghanistan, amid an escalation of US military intervention around the globe Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has been accused of falling short of the standards set by his predecessors in the Oval Office, including Franklin D Roosevelt Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The tycoon's ascension to the White House came at a time when the balance of power is shifting away from Western nations like those in the G7 group Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Western politicians, including the British Conservative party, have been accused of falling in line behind Mr Trump's proposals Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Brexit is seen to have weakened Britain, reducing still further any political will to resist American leadership Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump's leadership has been marked by sudden and unexpected shifts in global policy Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Trump's controversial missile strike on Syria, which killed several citizens, was seen by some analysts as an attempt to distract from his policy elsewhere Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The President has also spent a large majority of his weekends golfing, rather than attending to matters of state Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Though free of gaffes, a visit from Chinese president Xi Jinping spotlighted trade tensions between the two states Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons One major and unexpected setback came when Mr Trump's Healthcare Bill was struck down by members of his own party Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has been a figure of fun in the media, with his approval at record lows Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons A string of revelations about Mr Trump's financial indiscretions did not mar his surge to the White House Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Outgoing President Barack Obama was accused of wiretapping Trump Tower by his successor in America's highest office Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The alleged involvement of Russian intelligence operatives in securing Mr Trump the presidency prompted harsh criticism Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The explosive resignation of Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who lied about his links to the Russian ambassador, was just one scandal to hit the President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Many scandals, such as the accusation Barack Obama was implicated in phone-hacking, first broke on Mr Trump's Twitter feed Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's election provoked mass protests in the UK, with millions signing a petition to ban him from the country Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump cited a non-existent terror attack in Sweden during a campaign rally Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump stands accused of stoking regional tensions in Eastern Asia Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons North Korea has launched a number of failed nuclear tests since Mr Trump took power Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Theresa May formally rejected the petition calling for Mr Trump to be banned from the UK Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons When Mr Trump's initial so-called Muslim ban was struck down by a federal justice, the President mocked the 69-year-old as a "ridiculous", "so-called judge" Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons A week after his inauguration, Theresa May met with Mr Trump at the White House Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first days in office were marked by a hasty attempt to follow through on many of his campaign promises, including the so-called Muslim ban Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's decision to ban citizens of many majority-Muslim countries from the US sparked mass protests Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Revelations about Donald Trump's sexual improprieties were not enough to keep him from being elected President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons British PM Theresa May was criticised by many in the press for cosying up to the new President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons One of Mr Trump's top aides, Kelly Anne Conway, was mocked for describing mistruths as "alternative facts" Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons British PM Theresa May was quick to demonstrate that her political aims did not hugely differ from Mr Trump's Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's inauguration, on 20 January 2017, sparked protests both at home and abroad

Meanwhile, several national security experts that served under President Barack Obama are fighting to protect the accord through the newly formed organisation Diplomacy Works.

There are few better examples of the value of diplomacy than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA): it has blocked Irans pathways to a nuclear weapon and has made the United States and our allies safer, the group said in its mission statement.

Jon Finer, former Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, told The Independent one of the goals of Diplomacy Works is to bring accurate, nonpartisan information about the deal at a time when the focus on Iran policy is increasing and there is widespread disinformation about what is in it and how it is working.

Mr Finer is on the groups Council of Advisors, which also includes Mr Kerry, one of the chief negotiators of the Iran deal; Antony Blinken, former Deputy Secretary of State; Nick Burns, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; Puneet Talwar, former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs; Robert Malley, former Senior Adviser to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign; Jen Psaki, former White House Communications Director; and Jeff Prescott, former National Security Council Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Gulf.

While most were part of the Obama administration, Mr Burns served under President George W Bush.

The same day that Mr Trump heads abroad, Iran is holding its first presidential election since the completion of the nuclear agreement. While the Iranian economy has somewhat stabilised under the accord and incumbent candidate Hassan Rouhani, unemployment remains high.
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American democracy is "under assault" by Donald Trump, the former director of national intelligence has warned.

James Clapper also said the sacking of FBI director James Comey was "another victory" for Russia.

Mr Clapper expressed dismay over the abrupt sacking of Mr Comey amid a probe into Moscow's meddling in the US election and its possible ties with members of the Trump campaign, which historians said was an "unprecedented act of presidential imperialism".

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," Mr Clapper said.

"I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

 'He's a showboat, he's a grandstander': Trump lays into Comey during NBC interview

When he was asked, "Internally, from the president?" Mr Clapper said: "Exactly."

He said America's founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but that was now "eroding" with Mr Trump as President.

In a later interview with ABC News, Mr Clapper said "the Russians have to consider this [Mr Comey's sacking] as another victory on the scoreboard for them".

No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Mr Trump.

"The President is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

Democrats and Republicans reprimanded Mr Trump for his actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Mr Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet warning Mr Comey against leaks to the press because he may have "tapes" of their conversations.

They called for a new FBI director without any political background and said Mr Trump would need to hand over to Congress any taped conversations with Mr Comey, if they exist.

Few FBI directors have served their full 10-year term, as this chart by Statista shows

Less than a week after the President fired Mr Comey, the administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to be FBI director, and Mr Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves on Friday on his first overseas trip as president.

He abruptly fired Comey on Tuesday and later said Mr Comey was a "showboat" and "grandstander" who was not doing a good job.

Mr Trump said in an interview with NBC the Russia investigation factored into his decision.

Additional reporting by Associated Press
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The United States Supreme Court has quelled an attempt by Republicans in North Carolina to reinstate a controversial voter-identification law that a lower court said targeted African American voters with an almost surgical precision.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal following the ruling last year by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, but did not indicate that it had done so based on the merits of the case.

The voter identification law, championed by state Republicans, required people to show photo ID at the polls, reduced the number of early voting days, eliminated same-day registration, and got rid of out-of-precinct voting.

Recommended Feds say Texas voter ID purposely discriminated against voters

Chief Justice John Roberts, in a statement that accompanied the courts ruling to not reinstate the law, said that uncertainty around who was actually able to file an appeal on behalf of the state led the court to its decision. Lower courts had agreed with the administration of former President Barack Obama and civil rights groups who argued that the law violated the Constitutions equal protection clause and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

Although the law was stopped last year, it preceded a decline in early voter turnout by African Americans in the 2016 election. Black early voter turnout dropped by 8.7 per cent compared to 2012 rates, or about 66,000 votes. It wasnt clear if a lack of enthusiasm may have led to that decline, but other data from southern states with racial voting data did not show a similar decline during that time.

Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Show all 33 1 /33 Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first 100 days in office were marred by a string of scandals, many of which caught the eye of the Independent's cartoonists Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Trump's first 100 days have seen him aggressively ramp up tensions with his nuclear rivals in North Korea Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has warned of a "major, major conflict" with the pariah nation lead by Kim Jong Un Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump dropped the "mother of all bombs" on alleged ISIS-linked militants in Afghanistan, amid an escalation of US military intervention around the globe Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has been accused of falling short of the standards set by his predecessors in the Oval Office, including Franklin D Roosevelt Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The tycoon's ascension to the White House came at a time when the balance of power is shifting away from Western nations like those in the G7 group Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Western politicians, including the British Conservative party, have been accused of falling in line behind Mr Trump's proposals Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Brexit is seen to have weakened Britain, reducing still further any political will to resist American leadership Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump's leadership has been marked by sudden and unexpected shifts in global policy Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Trump's controversial missile strike on Syria, which killed several citizens, was seen by some analysts as an attempt to distract from his policy elsewhere Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The President has also spent a large majority of his weekends golfing, rather than attending to matters of state Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Though free of gaffes, a visit from Chinese president Xi Jinping spotlighted trade tensions between the two states Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons One major and unexpected setback came when Mr Trump's Healthcare Bill was struck down by members of his own party Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Mr Trump has been a figure of fun in the media, with his approval at record lows Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons A string of revelations about Mr Trump's financial indiscretions did not mar his surge to the White House Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Outgoing President Barack Obama was accused of wiretapping Trump Tower by his successor in America's highest office Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The alleged involvement of Russian intelligence operatives in securing Mr Trump the presidency prompted harsh criticism Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons The explosive resignation of Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who lied about his links to the Russian ambassador, was just one scandal to hit the President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Many scandals, such as the accusation Barack Obama was implicated in phone-hacking, first broke on Mr Trump's Twitter feed Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's election provoked mass protests in the UK, with millions signing a petition to ban him from the country Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump cited a non-existent terror attack in Sweden during a campaign rally Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump stands accused of stoking regional tensions in Eastern Asia Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons North Korea has launched a number of failed nuclear tests since Mr Trump took power Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Theresa May formally rejected the petition calling for Mr Trump to be banned from the UK Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons When Mr Trump's initial so-called Muslim ban was struck down by a federal justice, the President mocked the 69-year-old as a "ridiculous", "so-called judge" Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons A week after his inauguration, Theresa May met with Mr Trump at the White House Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's first days in office were marked by a hasty attempt to follow through on many of his campaign promises, including the so-called Muslim ban Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's decision to ban citizens of many majority-Muslim countries from the US sparked mass protests Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Revelations about Donald Trump's sexual improprieties were not enough to keep him from being elected President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons British PM Theresa May was criticised by many in the press for cosying up to the new President Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons One of Mr Trump's top aides, Kelly Anne Conway, was mocked for describing mistruths as "alternative facts" Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons British PM Theresa May was quick to demonstrate that her political aims did not hugely differ from Mr Trump's Donald Trump's first 100 days: in cartoons Donald Trump's inauguration, on 20 January 2017, sparked protests both at home and abroad

The North Carolina law was enacted in 2013 following a Supreme Court decision that eliminated the Voting Rights Act requirement that states in the South with histories of voter discrimination  including North Carolina  receive approval from the federal government before changing voting rules.
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Donald Trump is dramatically expanding the federal governments support for healthcare organisations that agree to not provide abortion services.

The State Department has announced a programme, called Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, which will get $8.8bn (6.8bn) to fund non-governmental organisations around the world that comply with the global gag rule.

It that states that no organisation receiving US money can promote or discuss abortion services, even if they are using foreign funds to do so.

The rule is also known as the Mexico City policy, named for the location of a 1984 United Nations conference where President Ronald Reagan announced the measure.

The money will come from the US State Department, the US Agency for International Development (Usaid), and the Defence Department, according to CBN News.

Mr Trump reinstated the rule from the George W Bush administration, which prevents any foreign organisation receiving US funds from providing or even discussing abortion services with women.

The rule also prevents any foreign organisation receiving US funds to work with any abortion service providers.

Mr Bush excluded programmes that involved HIV/Aids prevention from the rule; Mr Trump, however, did not. Instead he expanded global gag to apply to all global health assistance funds, not just money allocated towards family planning accounts as Mr Bush had ruled.

This means that an organisation - even a foreign one that gets a funding sub-award from a US NGO that has received federal money - in a developing country that provides anti-malaria medication or other preventable disease care with US money could be excluded from receiving any global health assistance funds if they offer or even speak to patients about any type of abortion services.

Mr Trumps version of the global gag rule left what many experts estimated was a $600m gap in abortion and family planning services that other countries aid agencies and private donors would need to fill.

This latest announcement will increase that gap by millions, if not more, depending on what organisations the order will apply to according to Akila Radhakrishnan, vice president and legal director of the Global Justice Centre.

She told The Independent this was not new federal money but an allocation of the budget for all global health assistance, which is about $10bn.

The Department of Defence seems like a curious addition to Mr Trumps instructions, but the agency does receive funds for global health assistance, said Ms Radhakrishnan.

However, a White House official told CBN News that humanitarian, disaster, and refugee assistance from Usaid and Defence will not be affected.

Organisations that do not comply with the provisions laid out by Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance programme will not receive funds. That money will now go to organisations that do agree to comply, according to the State Department.

The agency also said in its statement that "the policy will apply to all new funding agreements...and to existing agreements when amended to add funding," however the total amount of existing funding for global health assistance will not be cut nor will existing contracts be broken.

Ms Radhakrishnan explained that "if a foreign NGO already has a three year contract for HIV/Aids related programming, they will not have to certify [compliance with global gag] in order to complete that contract. However, if that same contract is extended with additional money, then the Gag language will be added in."

Global health experts have widely criticised Mr Trump's expansion of the policy to include all health-related funding. Shannon Kowalski, Director of Advocacy and Policy of the International Women's Health Coalition, told the The Independent that it "will be devastating. Instead of protecting life, it will increase maternal deaths by putting essential sexual and reproductive health care out of reach for far too many women. It is cruel and unusual punishment.
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Donald Trump reportedly revealed highly classified information about Isis to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week.

The information revealed by the President while in the Oval Office, was said to have been provided to the US by an American ally through a sensitive intelligence sharing arrangement.

In a scoop that threatened still further to weaken the President's credibility and sent shock waves through the political universe, The Washington Post said the partner had not given permission for the information to be shared with Russia. After the meeting, White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency. It has not been reported which third country was involved. The British Embassy in Washington declined to comment when contacted by The Independent.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

This is code-word information, one US official told the newspaper, a reference to one of the highest classification levels used by the American intelligence agencies. [Trump] revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.

After the Post detailed Mr Trumps alleged actions, reaction was swift and harsh.

Democratic senator Chris Murphy called it another in a very disturbing trend of careless behaviour by this administration.

If this story is true, its another brick in the wall of a really, really troubling connection between Trump and the Russian government, he said.

The development was the latest incident to shake Washington, still stunned by the firing of FBI Director James Comey. The White House has been scrambling to project a sense of order, after Mr Trump himself created mayhem by contradicting his own officials explanation for the firing.

The report on Monday evening said one the most concerning aspects of the slip, was that Mr Trump revealed the city in Isis territory where the US intelligence partner detected the threat. There were claims that Russia could use the information to undermine the US, or its ally.

 Russian foreign minister Lavrov uses live TV appearance with Tillerson to joke about Comey firing

Mr Trumps national security advisor, HR McMaster, told the newspaper: The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organisations to include threats to aviation.

He added: At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.

Later, Mr McMaster told reporters in a brief statement delivered outside the White House, that the Post report was wrong and that at at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed.

I was in the room. It didn't happen, he said.

During the election campaign, Mr Trump had often talked of the possibility of working with Russia to confront Isis. He frequently defended Russias military actions in Syria, disagreeing with many Western analysts to say Moscows role was crucial to stopping the spread of the Islamists.

The meeting in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, took place one day after the firing of Mr Comey, something Mr Lavrov had joked about.

The Post said during that meeting, Mr Trump went off script and began describing details about an Isis threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

It said that for anyone in government discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal. As president, Mr Trump has authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.

In his meeting with Mr Lavrov, Mr Trump was said to have boasted about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day, Mr Trump reportedly said.

Mr Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States only learned from a key US partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence gathering method, but described how Isis was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances.

Mr Trump's identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic as Russia could use that detail to help identify the US ally, the newspaper said.

The Post said it was withholding most details of the plot. It quoted one former US intelligence counterterrorism official as saying: Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling.

Senior Republican senator John McCain called the allegations disturbing, if true. We certainly don't want any president to leak classified information but the president does have the right to do that, he added.

Another senior Republican with large experience in foreign and intelligence affairs, Senator Lindsey Graham, said: I have no idea if its true. If it is, it would be very troubling. I'm not going to comment any further.

Repubican Senator Bob Corker, a staunch supporter of Mr Trump, warned that the White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order.

Speculation about which intelligence partner of the United States provided the information shared by the president immediately focussed to the so-called Five Eye group. This is the vital alliance which has linked Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand with the US in an iron-solid intelligence-sharing arrangement since the end of World War II.

Mr Trump has frequently railed against people who leak information. He said in February: "The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by "intelligence" like candy. Very un-American."

A Russian photographer took photos of part of the meeting in the Oval Office that were then released by the Russian state-owned Tass news agency. No US news media was permitted to attend any part of the meeting.
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Osama bin Laden's son has vowed revenge on the west for killing his father and is set to become the next leader of al-Qaeda, a former FBI agent has warned.

Ali Soufan, who was the FBI's lead investigator of al-Qaeda after the 9/11 terror attacks, examined documents seized from bin Laden's Pakistan compound when he was killed by US Navy Seals in 2011.

"I consider myself... to be forged in steel," Hamza bin Laden, now thought to be around 28 wrote. "The path of jihad for the sake of God is what we live."

Bin Laden hoped his son Hamza would eventually succeed him

Mr Soufan told CBS News about a letter Hamza wrote his father, who he had not seen in several years.

He said: "He tells him that 'I remember every look every smile you gave me, every word you told me.'"

Hamza was 22-years-old when the letter was written and his leadership potential had been recognised when he was a boy.

 The Bin Laden Tapes

When he was still a child, he used to appear in propaganda videos holding a gun, the former FBI agent said.

"He was that kid that exhibited leadership skills early on. He was a poster kid for the al Qaeda and for members of al Qaeda, who were indoctrinated with these propaganda videos, he means a lot to them," Mr Soufan said.

Hamza also sounds like his father, Mr Soufan said.

"His recent message that came out, he delivered the speech as if it's his father delivering the speech, using sentences, terminology that was used by Osama bin Laden."

Hamza has recorded four audio messages in the last two years calling for attacks on the west.

"He's basically saying, 'American people, we're coming and you're going to feel it. And we're going to take revenge for what you did to my fatherIraqAfghanistan'the whole thing was about vengeance."

UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Show all 14 1 /14 UK terror plots that were foiled by security services UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Oxford Street terror plot Lewis Ludlow was jailed for life in March 2019 for planning a 'spectacular multi-victim attack' on Oxford Street in London. He pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey last year to plotting an attack in the UK and funding Isis abroad EPA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Rosie Cooper MP plot Jack Renshaw admitted plotting to kill his local Labour MP with a machete in June 2018. Renshaw bought a 19in machete intending to use it to kill Rosie Cooper, MP for West Lancashire. His plan was foiled by whistleblower Robbie Mullen, who heard of the plot in a meeting of alleged and convicted National Action members in the Friar Penketh pub in Warrington Hope Not Hate UK terror plots that were foiled by security services 'Poppy terror plot' Nadir Ali Sayed, his cousin Yousaf Shah Syed, and Haseeb Hamayoon, were charged with terrorism offences over an alleged plot to behead a member of public. The trio were arrested in London and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire on 6 November - three days before Remembrance Sunday in 2014 PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services National Action arrests Following the arrest of six men in 2018 on suspicion that they were members of the banned far-right terror group National Action, two were jailed. Christopher Lythgoe was found to be leader of the banned group and jailed for eight years, while Matthew Hankinson was jailed for six years. While it was found that Lythgoe did not encourage Jack Renshaw's plot to kill a Labour MP, the judge noted that he "did nothing to stop or discourage" the attack PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Shane Fletcher A self-described 'loner', Fletcher planned to kill members of the public at a football match in his home town of Workington. He had been referred to the government's Prevent programme nine moths prior to his arrest after stating that he dreamed about "shooting up a mosque" PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Heathrow airport arrests A 19-year-old from Coventry man was arrested at London's Heathrow airport on suspicion of preparing for acts of terrorism in November 2014 UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Extradition of Abu Hamza Radical muslim cleric Abu Hamza was extradited to the US in 2014 after having been jailed in the UK for 7 years for 11 offences under the Terrorism Act Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services South East Counter Terrorism Unit arrests Six people were arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences after a series of dawn raids in the south of England in October 2014. Three men and three women were detained separately in two properties in Portsmouth, one in Farnborough and one in Greenwich following an operation by the South East Counter Terrorism Unit. Counter-terror officers said they had disrupted what was believed to be the early stages of what could have turned into a significant plot PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services October 2014 arrests Three men were arrested in central London on 13 October as part of an investigation into Islamist-related terrorism. The arrests come nearly a week after five men were arrested in dawn raids that Whitehall officials said may have foiled the early stages of a plan to attack the UK Peter Macdiarmid/Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Anjem Choudary arrest Anjem Choudary, the radical activist and co-founder of the banned al-Muhajiroun group, was arrested in September 2014 as efforts intensify to disrupt the ideological backers of young British Muslims travelling to fight in foreign conflicts. Mr Choudary was among nine men held on suspicion of supporting a banned terrorist group and encouraging terrorism. The arrests came shortly after Mr Choudary fired off a series of angry tweets after David Cameron called on MPs to back air strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria Oli Scarff/Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services North West Counter Terrorism Unit funds seizing Police seize 250,000 of cash intended to fund Isis at Manchester Airport and north-west ports. Using powers under the Terrorism Act, the money was confiscated by officers from the North West Counter Terrorism Unit in Ocotber 2014 Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Tarik Hassane arrest A medical student who was offered a place at a London university has been named among four men who are being questioned by counter-terror police after a series of raids across the capital. Tarik Hassane, 21, is believed to have been Tasered when he was arrested on suspicion of being involved in a "significant" Islamist terror plot on 7 October 2015 UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Abu Qatada removed from UK Radical preacher Abu Qatada will not be returning to the UK after being cleared of terror charges in Jordan in 2013 Reuters UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Haider Ahmed knife plot Teenage Isis supporter Haider Ahmed purchased a 15ins hunting knife and threatened to launch a stabbing attack on the Tube. Prosecutors said he may alternatively have been planning to rob someone with the weapon to fund his travel to fight for Isis in Syria He was jailed for preparing an act of terrorism in June 2019 Counter Terrorism Policing South East

In January, Hamza was designated a global terrorist and added to the US counter-terrorism blacklist.

He has threatened revenge on the US for assassinating his father, and promised to continue the global militant group's fight in a 21-minute speech entitled "We Are All Osama".

Six years after Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces, Mr Soufan said al-Qaeda is "stronger than ever".

"I don't believe even bin Laden in his wildest dreams thought that he will have followers who command armies, troopslands"
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Philippine lawmakers started hearing an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday, which alleges he betrayed the public trust over his defeatist approach to China and had abused his power during a bloody anti-drugs campaign.

The complaint by Gary Alejano, a member of a minority block, accuses Duterte of a litany of high crimes, including hiding wealth, ordering police to murder criminals, and of making clear his intention not to protect Philippine maritime sovereignty.

The house committee must decide whether the complaint has sufficient weight for it to be taken to a plenary vote of the house, then ultimately a trial at the Senate.

Politicians and even Alejano himself say it is likely the complaint will be thrown out given the huge support Duterte enjoys in the house and among the public. Duterte's office dismisses it as black propaganda.

Alejano wants the impeachment proceeding to embolden the public to speak up over a war on drugs that has killed thousands of Filipinos, and over Duterte's failure to pressure China to abide by an international arbitration decision last year that ruled some of Beijing's activities in the South China Sea were illegal.

Within the first 90 minutes of Monday's hearing, several panel members said Alejano's complaint was flawed and should be thrown out right away.

Representative Harry Roque said at best it's a misrepresentation, at worst it's a falsity, while deputy house speaker Fredenil Castro said Alejano was trying to oust a president with hearsay and proceedings should be terminated.

Let it be an example to all concerned, especially members of the house, that you cannot make a joke of this proceeding, said Castro.

Some political commentators say Alejano's complaint has an ulterior motive: to strengthen a complaint filed last month with the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Duterte of crimes against humanity for his drugs crackdown.

Among the ICC's jurisdictional requirements is that domestic legal avenues to try an individual are first exhausted.

Alejano's impeachment effort alleges Duterte ran a death squad during the 22 years he was mayor of Davao City, and that he did nothing to oppose the months-long presence without permission of a Chinese survey ship in the Philippines' exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off its Pacific coast.

The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte Show all 9 1 /9 The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte On killing drug addicts These sons of whores are destroying our children. I warn you, dont go into that, even if youre a policeman, because I will really kill you. If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte Message to China I will go there on my own with a Jet Ski, bringing along with me a [Phillipino] flag and a pole, and once I disembark, I will plant the flag on the runway and tell the Chinese authorities, Kill me  AP The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte Christmas message to law-breakers If you do not want to stop, and just continue committing crimes, then this would be your last Merry Christmas AP The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte On sex life I was separated from my wife. Im not impotent. What am I supposed to do? Let this hang forever? When I take Viagra, it stands up AFP/Getty Images The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte On the drugs trade None of my children are into illegal drugs. But my order is, even if it is a member of my family, kill him'" AP The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte Insulting the Pope We were affected by the traffic. It took us five hours. I asked why, they said it was closed. I asked who is coming. They answered, the pope. I wanted to call him: Pope, son of a wh**e, go home. Do not visit us again AFP/Getty Images The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte Joke about rape I saw her face and I thought, 'What a pity... they raped her, they all lined up. I was mad she was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first AFP/Getty The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte Insulting Barack Obama "Mr Obama should be respectful and refrain from throwing questions at me about the killings, or son of a bitch, I will swear at you in that forum" REUTERS The most controversial quotes from Rodrigo Duterte On Abu Sayyaf Islamic militants "If I have to face them, you know I can eat humans. I will really open up your body. Just give me vinegar and salt, and I will eat you. If you annoy me to the fullest... I will eat you alive. Raw" EPA

Opposition committee members argued Alejano should be heard, even if it had little chance of success.

My personal opinion is this impeachment will not fly, minority leader Danilo Suarez told the hearing.

Copyright Reuters
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The daughter of Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto condemned a "ridiculous law" banning people from eating publicly during Ramadan by declaring: "This is not Islam." Bakhtawar Bhutto, 27, warned that people may die from dehydration as a result of the ban, which has effect during daylight hours throughout the fasting month.

The law has existed in Pakistan since 1981, but a new amendment has introduced stricter penalties that could see people jailed for up to three months for a violation.

Broadcasters or cinemas that breach the rules could be fined more than 3,700 after Pakistan's Senate Standing Committee on Religious Affairs unanimously approved the bill on Wednesday.Hotel owners will also face increased fines of up to 185 for an offence, according to Pakistani news outlet Dawn.

Reacting to the news on Twitter, Ms Bhutto said: "People are going to die from heat stroke and dehydration with this ridiculous law. Not everyone is able. This is not Islam.

"Not everyone in Pakistan will be fasting  children in school, the elderly, people with medical issues  Should we arrest them for drinking water?"

The campaigner is the eldest daughter of former President Asif Ali Zardari and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in Rawalpindi in Punjab, Pakistan, in December 2007.
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Frances newly-appointed President Emmanuel Macron has named Edouard Philippe as Prime Minister, according to a statement from the Elysee Palace.

The Les Republicains (LR) politician and mayor of Le Havre had been tipped as the favourite for the role as Mr Macron attempts to gain support from the right ahead of Junes parliamentary elections.

It came as Marine Le Pen, who lost out to Mr Macron in the second round of presidential voting, resumed her role as National Front leader - a role she stepped down from during the election campaign.

France's presidential race represented a seismic shift in the political landscape, with both candidates in the second round coming from outside of the two main left-wing and right-wing parties.

Mr Macron, who became Frances youngest leader after the vote, has pledged to shake up the political status quo by disintegrating the traditional left-right divide, a claim that looks to be taking shape in his appointment of the conservative Prime Minister.

So who is Edouard Philippe?

Mr Philippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre. A relatively unknown politician, he is also a member of the mainstream-right LR party, whose candidate Francois Fillon was badly beaten in the first round of voting.

The 46-year-old trained as a lawyer before working as public affairs director for the state nuclear group Areva between 2007 and 2010. He subsequently embarked on a political career, becoming an MP in 2012 and Le Havre's Mayor in 2014.

He was educated at Sciences Po - the prestigious Parisian university also attended by Mr Macron - where he briefly joined the left-wing socialist party, before progressively moving further to the right. He later attended Ecole nationale d'administration - also attended by Mr Macron - cementing his place among the upper echelons of Frances political elite.

French Presidential Election Show all 20 1 /20 French Presidential Election French Presidential Election Voters line up to cast their ballots REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election Police patrol polling stations in France REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron and wife Brigitte Trogneux REUTERS French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron casts his ballot REUTERS French Presidential Election SAA/ French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election Front National leader Marine Le Pen casts her ballot REUTERS French Presidential Election Early ballots are read as results continue to come in Reuters French Presidential Election Macron supporters react as results come in early in the evening AP French Presidential Election Supporters of Front National leader Marine Le Pen cheer as early results come in Reuters French Presidential Election Alamy French Presidential Election Front National leader Marine Le Pen takes to the stage to address her supporters as fans cheer Reuters French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron greets supporters on Sunday night AP French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron and wife Brigitte Trogneux celebrate the incoming results EPA

Mr Philippe is a longtime supporter and ally of Alain Juppe, and worked on his bid for the LR presidential nomination.

While Mr Macron has been successful in winning over many of Mr Juppes supporters, he has struggled to garner the support of his closest allies - something Mr Philippes appointment could help facilitate. Mr Macron will be hoping to gain as much support from the moderate LR base in order to gain a majority in June's legislative elections, which will determine how strong a leader he will be able to be.

It is the first time in modern French political history that a president has appointed a prime minister from outside his camp without being forced to by a defeat in parliamentary elections.

Despite both Mr Macron and Mr Philippe attesting to their compatibility, the Prime Ministers views are undoubtedly more conservative than Mr Macrons. He has abstained 10 times on votes relating to equal marriage rights for gay couples.

However, Mr Philippe's appointment is in keeping with Mr Macron's vision to rejuvenate Frances political traditions. At just seven years his senior, Mr Philippe will be a young Prime Minister, while having the necessary experience to make him a viable appointment.

Mr Philippe is also known to be a keen amateur boxer and is a published author of two political fiction novels. He has been married to his wife Edith Chabre for 12 years and the couple have three children.
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Halim Abdelmalek did not vote in the elections which have just been held in France. As a suspected terrorist he is disenfranchised, and would have needed special permission to do so. In any event, he feels he has lost faith in the political system of the country he used to be proud to call his home.

Mr Abdelmalek is officially a suspect despite the fact that he has never been tried for, let alone convicted of, any terrorist offences. Indeed, he is the first and so far only person to have an order of indefinite house arrest overturned by a court.

The 35-year-old mechanic got back his freedom after a lengthy and mentally taxing legal struggle. Hundreds remain prisoners in their own home, also without trial, following the sweeping arrests which followed the murderous attacks by Islamist extremists in the past few years.

How can I believe in a state which almost destroyed my life, my familys lives? Which ruined my business? No, I did not vote in this election, I do not feel part of it, Mr Abdelmalek tells The Independent.

The victory of Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen was the subject of intense international focus but, says Mr Abdelmalek, it will have little effect on his lives or those of other Muslims who are considered to be enemies of the state.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomes Emmanuel Macron for talks on strengthening the EU, one day after the new French President took office (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

Mr Abdelmalek wanted to stress that he does not believe, like some fundamentalist Muslims, that Islam does not allow temporal power to govern and thus taking part in elections is wrong. If he had voted, it would have been for Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left candidate. He was the best of those standing, he wanted to defend the interests of ordinary, working-class people, Christians, Muslims or whatever. But politics mean little to me now.

I think not much is going to change now. There will be people accused of terrorism because of religion, made to feel unwelcome in what we thought was our country.

One could argue that France had taken a firm step away from xenophobia and bigotry. Ms Le Pen and her party, the Front National, had believed that playing the race and religion card, playing up the "Muslim threat" amid the repeated terrorist attacks the country had suffered, would give them the long-sought after breakthrough. That did not happen, with the centrist Macron winning comprehensively.

But the feeling of alienation and anger in a worryingly fractured society remains, with the relentless series of Islamist atrocities raising fear and suspicion, and reinforcing the search for the threat within.

One of the most high-profile of the atrocities was the murder of 12 people at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015. Four months later, Mr Abdelmalek was seen in an area where one of surviving members of the magazine staff lived, on a scooter, talking on his mobile phone. The authorities claimed that he was carrying out reconnaissance, taking photographs and relaying information on his mobile phone, possibly with the aim of carrying out an attack.

Mr Abdelmalek vehemently denies this. He took no photographs; the telephone call, he insists, was to his wife; he was in that particular area because it was on the way to his mothers house nearby; and he had no idea that any member of the Charlie Hebdo staff was living there.

I would also like to say that I completely condemn the killings at Charlie Hebdo, I feel very sad for the people who died and their families. I feel the same way about this as other French people, I understand the pain of what had happened," he says. I am not an extremist and I would not support this kind of violence in any way.

Mr Abdelmalek found a message asking him to report to a police station the next morning. There he was questioned and his phone was confiscated and analysed. No searches were made of his home, however; his computers were not examined. No charges were brought against him and he was not detained.

He continued with his life, which was going well. His business  recovering and repairing broken down motorcycles  was prospering, with four people working for him and fifth about to be hired. He could afford to send his two young sons to a private school partly to ensure good educational standards and also so that they mixed with children from a wider social background and learned languages, including English.

There the matter appeared to rest. Islamist terrorism in France, meanwhile, continued. In November 2015 there were the multiple coordinated assaults in Paris killing 130 people, 89 of them in the Bataclan theatre. Three days later Mr Abdelmalek received a letter asking him to report to a police station.

I thought it may have been something to do with one of my employees. I went along, the receptionist at the police station was friendly and chatty at first, but her expression suddenly changed when she checked my name, he recalls.

She made a call and next thing I know is that five police officers came bursting in to the reception area and grabbed me. I tried to say to them that I would hardly have come to the police station if I had planned to run away. But I was dragged away for interrogation and then told that I was being put under house arrest under the state of emergency rules.

French Presidential Election Show all 20 1 /20 French Presidential Election French Presidential Election Voters line up to cast their ballots REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election Police patrol polling stations in France REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron and wife Brigitte Trogneux REUTERS French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron casts his ballot REUTERS French Presidential Election SAA/ French Presidential Election REUTERS French Presidential Election Front National leader Marine Le Pen casts her ballot REUTERS French Presidential Election Early ballots are read as results continue to come in Reuters French Presidential Election Macron supporters react as results come in early in the evening AP French Presidential Election Supporters of Front National leader Marine Le Pen cheer as early results come in Reuters French Presidential Election Alamy French Presidential Election Front National leader Marine Le Pen takes to the stage to address her supporters as fans cheer Reuters French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron greets supporters on Sunday night AP French Presidential Election Emmanuel Macron and wife Brigitte Trogneux celebrate the incoming results EPA

The prosecution service did not accuse Abdulmalek of any involvement in the November attacks. His incarceration, they said, was in connection with the alleged spying on the Charlie Hebdo journalist from the previous year and an alleged smuggling of a stolen car, eight years ago, to raise money for Islamist rebels in Yemen. He was also accused of frequenting a Salafist mosque where extremist preaching had taken place.

Mr Abdelmalek had already been questioned about the car smuggling in the past  as he had been about the supposed Charlie Hebdo surveillance  without any charges being brought. His house arrest, and those of many others, he believes, was a result of Francois Hollandes government needing to show an alarmed public that it was taking stern action over terrorism.

A burly, bearded man, softly-spoken and jovial, Mr Abdelmalek insists that he that was against violence and an advocate for peaceful dialogue. He had, he acknowledges, attended a hardline Islamist mosque in the past, but claimed that he no longer did so.

Some people have a curiosity about their religion, especially when they are young, and that was the way with me. I dont see why that should be used against someone for the rest of their lives, he argues. At the end of the day they would have charged me if they had proof of what they were accusing me of. They did not, and a court has said there is no proof.

The regime of what comes under the broad term of house arrest varies between individuals. For Mr Abdelmalek it meant being confined to his home in the evening and night and reporting to a police station three times a day. He was also barred from stepping outside his neighbourhood of Vitry.

This had a drastic impact was on his business. He was forced to make three of his employees redundant. Home life came under great strain, his income was cut; his two sons, four-year-old Mohammed and Ayoub, six, had to study for a while from home because his wife, Malika, who does not have a driving licence, could not drive them to school.

 Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte walk through Elysee palace after inauguration

The worst thing is the uncertainty, not knowing what was going to happen, how long this really bad dream was going to continue. My children were very upset; they did not know what was going on. My wife was very strong, but obviously she was very worried. I felt bitter, angry about what had happened. he recalls.

It became impossible to keep working with all the restrictions I had. Just when the business was growing, we lost 60 per cent of the business and I had to sack three of my people. I felt really bad about that, but there was no choice. My reputation really suffered, I was someone to be suspected, to avoid.

Mr Abdulmalek was determined to clear his name, but he found it difficult to find lawyers to represent him. People were reluctant to defend someone detained over terrorism, that was the mood at the time," he says. But, at the end, I managed to get lawyers and they were very good, they worked very hard to get me free.

A problem with mounting a defence in such cases is that a lot of the prosecution case is intelligence based and sources are kept secret in order, say the prosecution, not to compromise them and put them in danger.

It is what they call white notes, they say this is confidential evidence, but, to me, they were anonymous gossip or just things which were manufactured. They had those and they had a photograph of me in the area where the Charlie Hebdo gentleman lived which was very nearby.

My lawyers asked why someones life should be destroyed on the basis of something like this? We had two appearances before the Council of State. The arguments were very forceful from both sides, but the court found in my favour. I was very, very relieved.

The Ministry of the Interior decided not to lodge an appeal against the verdict. But, under the penal system as an official suspect he could be detained again.

We are looking at what else can be done. We are adjusting back to life, my sons are back at school now which is very good. But it is going to be very hard to get my business back to working again, he reflects.

The situation is not good here, there is so much uncertainty and suspicion. I would really like to live in a place where people werent judged by their religion, the way they looked. I wish I could say the election would make it happen here, but I dont think that will be the case, sadly.
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Berlin will consider removing its soldiers from Turkey after Ankara refused to grant Germany's parliament permission to visit staff serving on a Turkish air base, Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

Turkey blocked German lawmakers from visiting the soldiers at Incirlik air base, who are serving in a NATO mission targeting Isis in Syria.

However Ms Merkel said it was essential that Germanys defence committee is able to visit the near 270 troops stationed at the base.

"We will continue to talk with Turkey, but in parallel we will have to explore other ways of fulfilling our mandate," she said.

"That means looking at alternatives to Incirlik, and one alternative among others is Jordan."

Turkey issued the refusal over the weekend and suggested the reason was linked to Germany's decision to grant asylum to Turkish soldiers accused by Ankara of participating in last year's failed coup.

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

"This is unfortunate, and we have made this clear through various channels," Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

Defence Ministry spokesman Jens Flosdorff said the military is examining moving Germany's Tornado reconnaissance jets and a refueling plane from Incirlik to another country.

The Incirlik refusal, which follows a similar standoff last year, is the latest in a long line of irritants in Turkish-German relations.

Recommended We need to stop being hysterical about Erdogan

Last summer, Turkey refused to allow German lawmakers to visit personnel stationed at Incirlik after a German parliament vote to label the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago as genocide.

At the beginning on May, Germany said it would block Turkish citizens in the country from voting in an upcoming referendum on reinstating capital punishment.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to reinstate capital punishment during his victorious campaign ahead of last months vote to vastly expand his powers using constitutional amendments.

It is politically inconceivable that we would agree to such a vote in Germany on a measure that clearly contradicts our constitution and European values, government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference.
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Italy is set to ban non-vaccinated children from starting state schools "by the end of next week", according to the country's health minister.

Beatrice Lorenzin said on Friday she had presented a white paper on the issue to the cabinet and that it would be passed by decree in the next week.

Revealing the plan, Ms Lorenzin said the fall in vaccinations across Italy was "an emergency generated by fake news".

Cases of measles rose more than fivefold across Italy in April compared to the same month last year, according to National Health Institute figures.

Health authorities issued repeated warnings over a rise of infectious diseases in the country, as a movement against vaccinations grew.

Yet education minister Valeria Fedeli said she was "astonished" at the way Ms Lorenzin was pushing the legislation against non-vaccination through.

She said: "We will work together to create a concrete way of making vaccines obligatory without infringing upon the right to education".

Italy's anti-establishment Five Star Movement has been criticised for its anti-vaccine rhetoric.

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

Claims of a link between the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which have proved to be false, took deep root in Italy.

In 2012, a court in Rimini awarded damages to the family of a boy with autism, who claimed his condition had been caused by the vaccine. Three years later, the decision was overturned on appeal.
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France's newly-elected President Emmanuel Macron has named Edouard Philippe as Prime Minister, according to a statement from the Elysee Palace.

The 46-year-old lawmaker and mayor of Le Havre is from the conservative Les Republicains party. He had been tipped as a favourite for the role as Mr Macron attempts to gain support from both the left and right ahead of June's Parliamentary elections.

The move by centrist Mr Macron will be seen as a strategic one as France's youngest leader tries to broaden his appeal. It is the first time in modern French political history that a president has appointed a prime minister from outside his camp without being forced to by a defeat in parliamentary elections.

The former banker's presidential win itself represented a seismic shift in a political landscape dominated for decades by the two main left-wing and right-wing parties.

One of his key campaign pledges was to dismantle the political divide between left and right.

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

French presidents are able to appoint their own choice for prime minister, but only if they hold a majority in the National Assembly. The outcome of next month's legislative elections will determine whether he will be forced to replace Mr Philippe.

Mr Macron is expected to move quickly on both domestic and foreign issues, just a day into his presidency. He will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday in a bid to affirm his commitment to the European project, one of his aides said.

He is also expected to announce his cabinet appointments on Tuesday.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a warning against intimidating North Korea after its dangerous missile test.

Mr Putin called for a peaceful solution to ongoing tensions after he disputed US claims that the previous missile test landed dangerously close to the Russian city of Vladivostok.

The US claimed the missile crashed just 60 miles off Russias coast line, but this was disputed by Russias ministry of defence who said the figure was more than 300 miles.

Mr Putin, speaking at an international forum in Beijing, was adamant that we must stop intimidating North Korea.

"I would like to confirm that we are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear states, including through the Korean Peninsula," Mr Putin said, CNN reported.

"We are against it and consider it counterproductive, damaging, dangerous.

His comments come after White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested the missile test could provoke a forceful response from the Russians.

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

North Korea tested a Hwasong-12 missile which flew 489 miles and reached an altitude of 1,312 miles, according to state news agency KCNA.

Analysts estimated the missile put the US territory of Guam, which is home to the Andersen Air Force Base, within its reach.
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Hotels and restaurants in the Gaza Strip recently took everything off the menu except salt water in solidarity with the estimated 1,600 Palestinian prisoners currently on hunger strike to protest conditions in Israeli jails.

Staff at fifty establishments wore uniforms reading salt and water and honour for dessert during a day long stunt earlier this month, Salah Abu Hassireh, head of the Palestinian Committee for Restaurants, Hotels, and Tourist Services told local media.

Online, a social media campaign called the salt water challenge has attracted the attention of millions after Palestinian pop star Mohammed Assaf downed a glass in a YouTube video, spurring on thousands more to take part.

Issa Qaraqe, head of detainees' affairs for the Palestinian Authority (PA), estimates that 1,600 are currently taking part in the strike, which began 17 April - Palestinian Prisoners Day.

The Freedom and Dignity strike is over several issues ranging from access to telephones and lawyers, to better medical care, to ending solitary detention.

Around 6,500 Palestinians are currently detained in Israeli prisons, most for terrorism convictions, although Palestinian leaders and prisoners groups maintain that many have been unfairly tried or are political prisoners.

A further 500 are detained under what is known as Administrative Detention, which allows suspects to be held without charge for six month intervals.

Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541126.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541129.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541124.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541123.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541130.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541125.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541121.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541128.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541127.bin  Bruno Stevens Ground: Ten years of the Palestinian conflict in pictures 541122.bin  Bruno Stevens

The issue strikes a sympathetic chord across all sections of Palestinian society; according to Palestinian estimates, disputed by Israel, 750,000 people have at one point or another in the last 50 years been imprisoned by the Israeli state, affecting seven out of ten families.

There have been several hunger strikes mounted in the past, but never on so large a scale.

The Israeli authorities have condemned the protest. Shortly after the strike began Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told Army Radio that the striking inmates were terrorists and incarcerated murderers who are getting what they deserve.

The current initiative is being led by Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader jailed by Israel for life for five murders.

Barghouti, who is popular in both Gaza and the West Bank and is sometimes touted as a future successor to incumbent Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas despite his multiple sentences, has been placed in solitary confinement for his role in the strike.

Last week Israels prison service released surveillance video footage from 27 April and 5 May in which Barghouti was shown moving around inside his cell before allegedly eating cookies from an envelope, and a snack bar.

This hunger strike was never about the conditions of the convicted terrorists, which meet international standards, Mr Erdan said in a statement.

Barghouti is a murderer and hypocrite who urged his fellow prisoners to strike and suffer while he ate behind their back.

Israeli right-wing activists hold a barbecue outside Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank, where a number of Palestinian prisoners are on a hunger strike (MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images)

Fadwa Barghouti, the leaders wife, as well as the Palestinian Prisoners Club, have denounced the footage as doctored.

Barghouti's lawyer said on Sunday that his client denied the authenticity of the video, pointing out the cell shown was cleaner and bigger than the one he resides in.

A representative for the hunger strikers said last week that at least one faction is considering refusing water if their demands continued to go unmet.

Israels prison service has said it will set up a field hospital to treat hunger strikes if necessary.

A 2015 law made it legal for civilian hospitals to force-feed protesters, but they have to date refused to do so.
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At least two people have died in the Saudi Arabian town of Awamiyah after six days of fierce clashes between the security forces and Shia militants.

Roadblocks were put in place on roads leading into the town on Saturday, the fifth day of siege like conditions in the ancient neighbourhood of Almosara, and sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard, local media and AFP news agency reported.

Saudi Arabias eastern province has a large Shia population and since 2011s Arab Spring calls for equality between Sunni and Shia citizens there have been several episodes of violence between protesters and the state.

Awamiyah was also the home of Nimr al-Nimr, an influential Shia cleric who was executed on terrorism charges last year. His death led to demonstrations worldwide and attacks on the Saudi embassy in Iran.

The Kingdoms authorities said on Friday that workers on a controversial redevelopment project in the 400-year-old Almosara neighbourhood came under fire and their vehicles were targeted by explosives by terrorists.

The militants were trying to jeopardise the project and protect their terrorist activities that they launch from the abandoned houses in the neighbourhood, a statement said.

The dead were a two-year-old Saudi boy and Pakistani national caught in the crossfire, the interior ministry continued.

In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Show all 7 1 /7 In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Iranian and Turkish demonstrators hold pictures of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr as they protest outside the Saudi Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Kashmiri Shiite Muslims, carrying a placard with the portrait of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, shout slogans during a protest in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world at Saudi executions Indian police used tear smoke and rubber bullets to disperse Shiite Muslims who were protesting after Saudi Arabia announced the execution of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday along with 46 others, including three other Shiite dissidents and a number of al-Qaida militants. In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Shane Enright, Global Trade Union Advisor for Amnesty International, addresses demonstrators as they protest outside the Saudi Embassy in London, following Saudi Arabia's execution of 47 prisoners in one day, including a top Shiite cleric In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Iranian protestor burn pictures of a member of the Saudi royal family in front of the Saudi Arabia embassy in Tehran, Iran, 02 January 2016. Protesters have stormed the Saudi embassy building in the Iranian capital of Tehran early Sunday amid backlash over the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric. Flammable substance was seen thrown at the building as protests gained steam over the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Reports states, protesters taking down a Saudi flag and burned the building. In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Shiite Muslims hold placards with pictures of Saudi Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, whose execution in Saudi Arabia was announced Saturday, during a demonstration to condemn his execution, Sunday, Jan. 3, 2016 in Peshawar, Pakistan In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions A Kashmir Shiite Muslim shouts slogan from Indian police vehicle after he was detained during a protest in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir,

Three more deaths were reported by Saudi media, but have not yet been confirmed by the government. At least 14 people have been wounded, including four foreign nationals and four police officers.

The neighbourhood has been sealed off because of the fighting. Residents inside say that they are relying on private generators for electricity and in some cases the water mains supply has been switched off.

Pictures widely circulated on social media show special forces trying to evacuate residents to elsewhere in the town as well as abandoned bulldozers and other construction equipment.

Cars, fire engines and ambulances were not being allowed in or out of the area, Ameen Nemer, an activist originally from Awamiyah, told Middle East Eye.

It's really hard for people and you can imagine these army vehicles, they would open fire like 24 hours. People can't sleep. You have these vehicles going back to where they come and then you have new ones come to replace these soldiers, he said.

Last month the UN accused Saudi Arabia of attempting to forcibly remove residents from Almosara without offering adequate resettlement options. The planned renovations threatened the historical and cultural heritage of the town with irreparable harm, the office of the UNs high commissioner for human rights said.
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Swedens Asylum Agency has been criticised for testing converted Christian asylum seekers about their knowledge of the religion.

Along with technical questions about their faith, they are tested on the difference between Orthodox and Protestant Churches and how many parts there are to the New Testament, according to news website, The Local. They are also quizzed on details about the sacrament.

Immigration lawyer Serpil Gungor said he often had to interrupt administrators to ask if the questions were relevant, given their complexity.

He told Swedish public service broadcaster SVT, that he thought the questions were  terrible, adding that he advised his clients to study the bible before their interviews.

Some Swedish parishes have also created handbooks of facts, aimed at helping asylum seekers with potential questions.

Carl Bexelius, the Deputy Director of Legal Affairs at the Swedish Migration Board, told The Independent that similar procedures were applied by other European migration agencies.

There is no set list of questions, and the "burden of proof is on the applicant", he said, adding that the agency had a duty to investigate if someone converted "genuinely".

Denying the accusation that the faith based questions were too technical, he said: "Quite often the issue of religion is linked to your personality. It can be difficult to articulate that belief."

He added that they tried to asked questions about how the applicants looked at religion.

"What is the meaning of religion to you," he said. "What is the nexus of your previous faith [for example] Islamic faith compared to Christianity? What in the Christian faith is important to you?"

Migrants ride railroads to seek better future Show all 10 1 /10 Migrants ride railroads to seek better future Migrants ride railroads to seek better future Habib, 22, from Algeria with his friends on an abandoned railway wagon. They boarded a freight train in an effort to cross the Greek-Macedonian border without documents. They were arrested in Macedonia and returned back to Greece Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future A migrant jumps on a freight train in an effort to cross the Greek-Macedonian border in the northern city of Thessaloniki, Greece Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future An Algerian migrant has a picture of fellow migrants in Macedonia. According to the migrant, his mobile phone was broken by Macedonian police when he was arrested and returned to Greece Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future Algerian migrants are seen on a freight train before its departure in the northern city of Thessaloniki Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future Anise, 21, an English teacher from Algeria, rests in an abandoned railway wagon used as a shelter by stranded migrants in Thessaloniki Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future Algerian migrants lay on the railway tracks as they wait for a freight train to depart Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future An Algerian holds up his injured hand. He was injured in his effort to jump on a freight train Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future Migrants walk between railway wagons in the northern city of Thessaloniki Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future An Algerian smoking inside an abandoned railway wagon used as a shelter by stranded migrants Reuters Migrants ride railroads to seek better future A migrant with his belongings waiting for a freight train to depart Reuters

Asked if this was a useful way of assessing faith, he said that the questions can be "relevant for some individuals".

He also insisted that the agency followed guidelines set forth by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Last year Sweden saw a record number of 4,542 asylum seekers withdraw applications and leave the country.

A combination of long processing times, strict rules on family reunion, difficulty in procuring secure employment and pay-outs to migrants caused the exodus.
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Cruises arent typically known for their youth appeal  the average age is usually 49 and over. But cruise company Uniworld is aiming to shake up the status quo with the launch of a whole new breed of trip aimed at the millennial market.

U by Uniworld is tailored to tempt a currently untapped demographic  those aged between 21 and 45. Older than that, and the two new ships launching in 2018, A and B, will be strictly off limits. We're guessing well end up with people between 27 and 35, Uniworld president and CEO Ellen Bettridge told Conde Nast Traveler. You need enough money to go on vacation, and to want nice things.

The average age of Uniworlds usual cruisers is 50, so the U trips are already a departure from the norm. Additionally, everything about the new itineraries is designed with a younger passenger in mind.

For a start, the A and B ships, although fashioned like floating upmarket boutique hotels, include studio rooms with a bunk bed and single bed, sleeping three, to help millennials keep costs down. Solo travellers can also avoid paying a singles supplement by requesting a roommate when booking.

Instead of being herded around like cattle and kept to a strict timetable of activities, U cruisers will have the freedom to choose between an included hands-on excursion or a different experience, called U Time, for which theres an extra charge. Sample days out include doing a street art walking tour in Paris, visiting Ars Electronica Museum in Linz and indulging in a Dutch cheese tasting in Amsterdam. Alternatively passengers are completely free to miss the organised fun and explore on their own.

On board, activities are a far cry from the usual musical theatre offerings and dressed-up dinners. Instead, silent discos, painting sessions with wine, yoga, and cocktail making classes take centre stage.

Evening meals reflect each destination, with frequently changing menus influenced by local flavours and street food. The cruise price includes breakfast and dinner, but not lunch  If lunch is included, you feel the obligation to come back, said Bettridge. We set up every aspect of this for guests to be out doing things.

Painting classes are offered on board U cruises (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

U features four different eight-day itineraries, all based in western and central Europe. Unlike cruises aimed at older people, which often run for longer, Us itineraries are kept to a shorter length in acknowledgment of the fact that young professionals cant take a fortnight or more off work. Itinerary options include a trip along the Seine to Paris, Amsterdam to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Regensburg and Regensburg to Budapest. Prices start from 1,499 per person for an eight-day river cruise, including 14 meals, 11 excursions, on board classes and a DJ party.

Will all this be enough to convince millennials that cruising is cool? Only time will tell.
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What does it take to get kicked off a plane? For one American family, it seems, the answer is a birthday cake.

Minta Burke, from New Jersey, was due to fly from New York to Las Vegas to celebrate her 40th birthday on 3 May, when she  along with her husband and two children  was kicked off the flight from JFK before departure.

The family  seated at the very back of the plane  had brought a birthday cake with them, and told the New York Daily News that cabin crew gave them conflicting advice about where to store it.

Cameron Burke, Mintas husband, told the NYDN that they put the cake in the overhead locker above their seats, but then they were asked to move it: A flight attendant nicely asked me to remove the cake from that compartment, so I moved it to another one.

She then asked me to move it to underneath the seat in front of me, I did.

But Burke says that then another flight attendant arrived to tick off her colleague and accuse the Burkes of being non-compliant.

I said, Miss, have you been drinking? Because her behaviour was irrational, Burke says. The next thing he knew, another crew member was asking the family to leave the plane. When they refused, crew called the police.

In a video recorded by Cameron Burke, a police officer from the Port Authority is heard telling cabin crew I dont see any wrongdoing here.

The five-minute video shows the cake at Burkes feet as his son cries that the family hasnt done anything wrong and Minta Burke is on the phone, looking shocked but calm, beside her daughter.

Having told the flight attendant that the family hasnt done anything wrong, the policeman returns to the Burkes, tells them no ones in any trouble and asks for their ID because unfortunately it got reported to us.

He continues: No one did anything wrong, everything is going to be ok, and unfortunately they're going to have to rebook everyone. Were trying to avoid that but this is JetBlue.

He then tells the little boy: Dont cry, its alright dont worry, youll be alright.

When Burke calmly asks whether the family will be refunded for their tickets, the police officer says he doesn't know, as its up to the airline. He adds: I wish everyone could just go on their way to Vegas and enjoy but unfortunately thats their policy. JetBlue has said it was the captains decision to eject the family.

Other passengers on the piane are studiously ignoring the incident at the back during the video. No one comes to the familys defence.

Perhaps keen to avoid any more awkward videos in the same week that United Airlines told crew to assume they are on camera at all times, the JetBlue crew then asked all passengers to disembark the plane, in order to eject the Burkes. Their tickets were refunded, but their luggage remained on the flight, and was collected by Burkes mother in law, whod been waiting for their arrival. The family flew to Vegas with United Airlines the following day.

In a statement, JetBlue said that the family had initially stored the cake in an overhead compartment used for emergency equipment - the very first and last lockers in a plane are often reserved for this - and that they had refused several requests to move it.

A spokesperson said: The customers became agitated, cursed and yelled at the crew, and made false accusations about a crewmembers fitness to fly.

After the customers refused to speak to a team leader about the situation, the Port Authority Police Department was called and the entire aircraft deplaned.

In a month of unusually bad press for airlines and their customer service, Jetblue had come out relatively unscathed before this incident. In fact, last week The Independent had named Jetblue one of the best airlines for customer service.

The Burkes say they intend to file a lawsuit.
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UK airline pilots have warned of the risk of a catastrophic on-board fire if a ban on laptops is introduced on transatlantic flights.

Most laptops, tablets and e-readers are powered by lithium batteries which, when faulty or short-circuited, can ignite.

Laurie Price, former Aviation Advisor to the Transport Select Committee and himself a private pilot, told The Independent: "We have had numerous incidents of devices with lithium batteries suddenly bursting into flames. If that is in the aircraft cabin, it can be dealt with. If in the aircraft hold, the fire-suppression systems are unlikely to be able to contain it and there is a lot of material to exacerbate such fires including other baggage, the aircraft structure, fuel and systems in an area which is inaccessible in flight.

"The consequences could be catastrophic."

The warning was echoed by the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA), which believes the danger of a blaze spreading in the aircraft hold could be greater than the security risk posed by electronic devices in the cabin.

BALPAs Flight Safety Specialist, Steve Landells, said: There have been two crashes where lithium batteries have been cited in the accident reports.

An incident in the cabin would be spotted earlier and this would enable the crew to react quickly before any fire becomes uncontainable."

The pilots warning comes as European and American officials prepare for a meeting to hammer out new security rules. The Trump administration was poised to extend its ban to all flights inbound to the US last week, until the European Commission objected.

In March the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) abruptly brought in a ban on laptops, tablets and e-readers on flights from eight Middle Eastern and North African nations to the US. The DHS cited intelligence reports that terrorist groups are aggressively pursuing innovative methods to attack passenger planes, including smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items.

Anything bigger than a smartphone must travel as checked baggage in the hold of the plane.

The UK Government quickly brought in a ban that emulated the US prohibition, though with a different list of countries. On flights to Britain from Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, passengers cannot take any large devices into the aircraft cabin. But none of the 27 other EU members has followed suit.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has warned that electronic devices containing lithium batteries are considered to be dangerous goods. The air safety regulator insists: They should preferably be carried in the passenger cabin.

When this practice is banned, says EASA, airlines must check that devices are completely switched off and effectively protected from accidental activation. It insists laptops should be dispersed in the cargo hold, avoiding consolidation in a single container

Patrick Ky, EASAs Executive Director, said: We must take all precautions to make sure that mitigating one risk does not lead to another risk.

 Donald Trump's in-flight electronics ban explained

The proposed extension of the ban has also angered US airlines. The present prohibition affects only non-American carriers, in particular the three big Gulf-based airlines: Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways. But an international ban would also affect American, Delta and United Airlines.

Delta has apologised for mistakenly posting a warning at Cincinnati airport that any electronic device bigger than a mobile phone would need to be checked in on the return journey to the US.

The error had echoes of the way that the original devices ban became public; the new rules were prematurely revealed by Royal Jordanian Airlines in a tweet.

Britains aviation industry is known to have serious concerns about an extension of the ban. Excluding laptops from aircraft cabins would deprive business travellers of their technological supports and the chance to work on board, potentially weakening demand among the premium passengers who bankroll transatlantic air travel.

Logistical issues at airports are also causing concern. A ban would necessitate additional security checks at the departure gate. The worst affected airport would be Heathrow, which has 24 daily flights to New York alone, and dozens more to other US destinations.

A spokesperson for the airport said: We are aware of media reports speculating on changes which may impact some passengers, but at this time, no changes have been announced by the authorities and there is no impact at Heathrow.
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In the wake of Venice announcing it will no longer tolerate any new kebab shops or fast food outlets in order to preserve decorum and traditions, here are six destinations where tourists wont always find a warm welcome.

Koh Khai Nok is among the islands banned for tourists (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Koh Khai islands, Thailand

Recommended The 59 most dangerous countries in the world for British tourists

The backbone of backpacker gap year travels, Thailand, is for the most part extremely tourist-friendly; but some places are now off limits because of environmental concerns. The islands of Koh Khai Nok, Koh Khai Nui and Koh Khai Nai, renowned for their colourful coral displays and previously popular with day-trippers from nearby Phuket, have been strictly prohibited since May 2016. The Department of Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR) said that up to 80 per cent of reefs have been degraded, and the decision was made to ban tourists as a result.

Rinpung Dzong in the Paro Valley Paro, Bhutan (Rex)

Bhutan

Tourism in Bhutan only kicked off in 1974, but since then the decision has been made to highly regulate it to preserve the country's unspoiled landscape and unique culture. The kingdom on the edge of the Himalayas has a policy of "high value, low impact tourism". The upshot is that the number of tourists is restricted and that most visitors have to pay a whopping 190 a day for visas and fees for the privilege of seeing Bhutan.

The mayor of Barcelona is not a fan of tourists (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Barcelona, Spain

When Ada Colau, Barcelona's first female mayor, took office in 2015, she wasn't one to mince her words about the scourge that is tourism on her beloved city. We dont want the city to become a cheap souvenir shop, said Colau, siting Venice as a cautionary tale. Since then she has frozen licences for all new hotels and holiday rental apartments and gone after short-term rental sites, slapping AirBnb with a 30,000 (24,000) fine. She has also proposed introducing a new tourist tax and limiting visitor numbers.

Tourism is "destroying" Amsterdam according to the marketing chief (AP)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Amsterdams head of marketing recently made it abundantly clear the city is a bit over tourists. Frans van der Avert, Amsterdam Marketing chief executive, said: Cities are dying from tourism. No one will be living in the historic centres any more. A lot of smaller historic cities in Europe are getting destroyed by visitors. While speaking at the World Tourism Forum in Lucerne, he added: We dont spend even 1 in marketing Amsterdam any more. We dont want to have more people. We want to increase the quality of visitors  we want people who are interested in the city, not who want it as a backdrop for a party. We see lots of visitors with no respect for the character of the city. Low cost carriers create a problem. Ryanair [passengers]  they are the loudest. Ouch.

Those with tattoos might not be welcome at Japan's hot springs (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Various onsen, Japan

Many tourists who travel to Japan do so to experience the glorious onsen  natural hot springs  and sento  community bathhouses. Most of these visitors are let in, no questions asked. However, if you happen to have a tattoo, its a different story. A survey released in 2015 by the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) found that well over half of all onsen banned tattooed guests, or required them to cover up their ink. Tattoos are still something of a taboo in Japan, inextricably linked in peoples minds with Yakuza mobsters. But with the influx of tourists in the last 10 years, many of whom are from cultures where skin art is embraced, this antiquated rule has become increasingly problematic.

Santorini has capped the number of cruisers (Getty Images/iStockphoto) (Getty)

Santorini, Greece

In 2016, the busiest port in Greece announced that enough was enough  the number of cruise ship visitors would have to be capped. The popular island of Santorini was getting overwhelmed by upwards of 10,000 tourists arriving simultaneously each day on cruises  that number is now capped at 8,000. The rule is expected to come into full force this summer.

Cinque Terre started ticketing tourists (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Cinque Terre, Italy

This beautiful coastal area and UNESCO World Heritage Site was something of a trendsetter when it comes to holding back the tide of tourists. Under increasing pressure from ever-growing visitor numbers, in February 2016 Cinque Terre announced plans to introduce a ticketing system. Once the number of people hit 1.5 million, the area was off limits. This figure might sound high, but the previous summer saw 2.5 million flood into the region to visit its clutch of five quaint fishing villages connected by narrow cliff-top paths.

Arlington doesn't like tourists, according to social media (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Arlington, Texas

In 2015, private air charter company Stratos Jets analysed over 37,000 geotagged tourist-related tweets from across the States to determine which places were most friendly  and most hostile  towards visitors. Of course, its far from scientific, but the results indicated that Arlington, Texas, was the least tourist-friendly destination in the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its stigma for rudeness, New York was the second least welcoming, with Las Vegas swinging into third position.
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When people behave as if they have something to hide, it is often because they do. For me, this is a basic law of human behaviour.

Thats why President Donald Trumps baffling, outrageous, unfathomable and just plain bizarre behaviour last week strengthened my already strong suspicions that there is something that Trump knows about the investigations into his campaigns contacts with Russia that he doesnt want us to know.

That is the only way that I can make sense of what happened: These are either the machinations of concealment, expressions of a burgeoning insanity, or both.

The details of the most recent episode in the Trump madness are now well known and yet every new detail that helps add texture to the story also renders it more horrifyingly egregious.

According to news reports (some of which the White House disputes, I hasten to add), after former FBI Director James Comey refused to pledge loyalty to Trump, publicly rebuked some of Trumps lies, and sought to intensify the bureaus investigation into the Russia connections, Trump unceremoniously dismissed him. He then let his surrogates go out  or possibly sent them out  to lie about why Comey was fired. And then Trump tweeted a threat at Comey that seemed like an attempt to bully him into remaining quiet.

Who does that?

Legal and ethical questions abound about the impropriety and even legality of attempting to strong-arm, and then dismissing and threatening, the law enforcement official leading an investigation into your circle of associates.

Many of those questions rise not from clandestine sources, but rather from Trump himself. He is talking and tweeting himself into legal jeopardy. He cant seem to help himself. Something in the man is broken.

He is insecure, paranoid and brittle, jostling between egomania and narcissism, intoxicated with a power beyond his meagre comprehension and indulging in it beyond the point of abuse.

Some people are ebulliently optimistic that the abomination is coming undone and may soon be at an end.

But I would caution that this is a moment pregnant with calamity.

The man we see unravelling before our eyes still retains the power of the presidency until such time as he doesnt, and that time of termination is by no means assured.

Trump is now a wounded animal, desperate and dangerous. Survival is an overwhelming, instinctual impulse, and one should put nothing beyond a being who is bent on ensuring it.

Banking on an easy impeachment or resignation or a shiny set of handcuffs is incredibly tempting for those drained and depressed by Trumps unabated absurdities, perversions of truth and facts and assaults on custom, normalcy and civility.

But banking on this is, at this point, premature. I share the yearning. A case for removal can most definitely be made and has merit. But there remain untold steps between plausibility and probability. Expectations must be managed so that hopes arent dashed if the mark isnt immediately met.

There are incredibly encouraging signs that the Comey debacle has crystallised sentiment about the severity of Trumps abnormality and the urgent need for an independent investigation into the Russia connection.

Last week after Comey was fired, 20 attorneys general sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging it to immediately appoint an independent special counsel to oversee the investigation. The letter read in part:

As the chief law enforcement officers of our respective states, we view the Presidents firing of FBI Director James Comey in the middle of his investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election as a violation of the public trust. As prosecutors committed to the rule of law, we urge you to consider the damage to our democratic system of any attempts by the administration to derail and delegitimise the investigation.

Furthermore, according to a poll released Thursday: A majority of Americans  54 percent  think that President Donald Trumps abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James Comey was not appropriate, while 46 percent think that Comey was fired due to the Russia investigation, according to results from a new NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll.

This followed a Quinnipiac Poll taken before the Comey firing that found: American voters, who gave President Donald Trump a slight approval bump after the missile strike in Syria, today give him a near-record negative 36-58 percent job approval rating.

The report continued: Critical are big losses among white voters with no college degree, white men and independent voters.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

The army of righteous truth-seekers is gathering; the hordes of sycophants are faltering. The challenge now is to keep the medias microscope trained on this issue and to keep applying sufficient pressure to elected officials.

We may have reached an inflection point at which even partisans grow weary of the barrage of lies and the indefensible behaviour, and Republican representatives finally realize that they are constitutional officers who must defend the country even if it damages their party.

Something is happening. Its in the air. It is an awakening, it is an adjustment, it is a growing up.

Copyright The New York Times
Chelsea Manning is due to leave a military jail on Wednesday, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified US Government documents (US Army via AP)

Chelsea Manning's Welsh mother has spoken of her pride for the Wikileaks whistleblower before her release from prison.

The former intelligence analyst is due to leave a military jail on Wednesday, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified US Government documents.

Susan Manning said she is "delighted" her daughter, 29, will eventually be free to fulfil her aspirations, although she has concerns over how she will fare outside prison.

Barack Obama commuted the transgender soldier's sentence in his final days in the White House, outraging Republicans including Donald Trump, who described her as an "ungrateful traitor".

Preparing for her release, Manning's Welsh-Irish family said the sentence had been a "travesty of justice".

Mrs Manning, said: "I am so proud of Chelsea and delighted she will finally be free again.

"It is going to be very hard for her to re-adjust after so long inside the prison's four walls and I'm happy she will be staying in Maryland where she has family to look out for her.

"Chelsea is so intelligent and talented, I hope she now has the chance to go to college to complete her studies, and to do and be whatever she wants. My message to Chelsea? Two words: 'Go, girl!'"

In her first statement since receiving clemency, Manning said on Tuesday that she hopes to use the lessons she received in prison to help others.

She added: "I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world.

"Freedom used to be something that I dreamed of but never allowed myself to fully imagine."

Manning was arrested in 2010 and convicted in 2013 of six violations of the US's espionage act for leaking 700,000 secret military and State Department document to WikiLeaks.

The trove, which included classified battlefield videos, was one of the biggest breaches of intelligence in US history.

She acknowledged leaking the files while working in Iraq, but protested that she had acted to raise awareness of the impact of US military action on innocent civilians.

Then known as Private Bradley Manning, she later underwent gender transition while in jail and in 2016 made two attempts to take her own life, citing ill-treatment behind bars.

She is currently being held at a correctional facility at Fort Leavenworth, a US Army disciplinary barracks in Kansas.

Manning, whose father is American, was born in Oklahoma in the US but moved to Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire just before she turned 14 in 2001 following her parents' divorce.

She attended Tasker Milward comprehensive school and still has family and friends in the area.

In a statement her Welsh-Irish relatives said Manning had endured "seven years loss of liberty for her whistleblowing actions while those whose wrongdoing she exposed have gone unpunished".

"The shocking and abusive ill-treatment Chelsea was subjected to in Kuwait and [US Marine base] Quantico before the trial should never have happened and the 35-year sentence handed down by the military court was a travesty of justice.

"We are naturally very relieved that this ordeal will soon be over for Chelsea and that she will be able to take up her place in society again.

"Whatever she decides to do, we are sure she will make a significant and positive contribution."
Irish export growth to the UK was down considerably in 2016, new figures from Enterprise Ireland show.

Export growth to the UK was 2pc in 2016, accounting for 7.5bn of exports. However the figure for export growth to the UK in 2015 was 12pc.

Speaking at the launch of the Enterprise Ireland Euro Zone Market Strategy 2017-2020, Julie Sinnamon, ceo of Enterprise Ireland warned that Irish companies cannot afford to be complacent in the face of Brexit.

"The fact that the growth of exports to the UK has slowed suggests that the impact of Brexit on Irish companies has already started. Companies cannot afford to wait until the Brexit negotiations conclude," Sinnamon said.

Overall export sales from Enterprise Ireland companies rose 6pc in 2016 to 21.6bn.

"Following the UK's decision to leave the EU the Government immediately acted to ensure our Enterprise agencies had additional resources in order to offer all available assistance to our exporters to prepare for the challenges posed by Brexit," An Taoiseach Enda Kenny said.
Britain has rejected a raft of key European Union Brexit demands as Prime Minister Theresa May's government steps up its fight with leaders in Brussels before negotiations begin.

UK Brexit Secretary David Davis said he would argue with the EU over how to guarantee the rights of European citizens living in Britain, and predicted a row on the timetable for settling the nation's exit bill and the Border with Ireland.

The UK would not agree to the EU's demand that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) played the key role in upholding the rights of around 3.2 million European citizens living in Britain after Brexit, he said.

"We will have an argument about that," Mr Davis told ITV's 'Peston on Sunday' yesterday.

Mr Davis's hard line on the ECJ reflects Mrs May's promise to voters that European judges will have no role in the UK after Brexit and reinforces her argument to voters ahead of the June 8 election.

Mrs May has talked up her battle with Brussels, saying only her Conservative Party is strong enough to lead Britain through negotiations with a hostile EU.

Mr Davis said he wanted a swift agreement on citizens that "effectively freezes" the existing rights enjoyed by EU nationals living in the UK. Britain also wants UK expatriates resident elsewhere in Europe to be protected.

"What we are after is a very generous outcome," Mr Davis said. So EU citizens "will have the rights to welfare, they will have the rights to healthcare, they will have the rights to pensions - as they would if they were a permanent resident here anyway. The only rights they wouldn't have are those citizenship rights and the right to vote in a general election".

The issue for the UK is that any delay in resolving rights, such as a disagreement over the ECJ, could prompt the EU to withhold the discussion Mrs May wants over a wide-ranging free-trade deal to cover all goods and services.

The EU's proposed schedule for the talks sets out citizens' rights; Britain's exit payment; and the future Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic as issues that must be dealt with before talks on future trade can begin.

Mr Davis flatly rejected this timetable.
Providence Resources, the Irish based oil & gas exploration company, has announced the appointment of Angus McCoss as a non-executive director with effect from June 1, 2017.

McCoss is the exploration director and main board director of Tullow Oil plc.

McCoss joined Tullow in 2006 following 21 years of wide-ranging exploration experience, working primarily with Shell in Africa, Europe, China, South America and the Middle East, where he held a number of senior positions at Shell, including regional vice president of exploration for the Americas and general manager of exploration in Nigeria.

Read more: Providence shares up on 'seminal' year's results

McCoss holds a PhD in Structural Geology and is a member of the advisory board of the industry-backed energy and geoscience institute of the University of Utah.

The Board is delighted that Angus has agreed to join us at a very exciting period in our corporate development. Angus brings extensive knowledge and relevant exploration experience which will assist us in further realising the very significant value in our portfolio, Pat Plunkett, chairman of Providence Resources said.
Tech platform LoopMe has launched a new tool which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to encourage customers to visit shops.

As retailers across the UK and Ireland report significant drops in footfall, PurchaseLoop Foot Traffic aims to target users more effectively.

The solution users AI to deliver mobile ads to customers at the moment they are most likely to enter a store.

Mobile video platform LoopMe - which reaches over two billion devices globally - employs algorithms that optimise ad placements in real-time.

The PurchaseLoop Foot Traffic then banks on that educated knowledge, assisting retailers with their advertising spend.

"We are helping to distinguish the consumers that best respond to this type of advertising model," CEO & Founder, Stephen Upstone told independent.ie.

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"Customers are asked if they are happy to answer surveys and those who are, are asked to answer certain questions about store locations and visits," he said.

"We also work with third party providers such as Adsquare, Unacast, Factual and Placed who collect anonymous location data; this all feeds into our AI to build a model for effective advertising."

This highly accurate predictive model - designed to encourage new audiences into stores - is seen as an essential measure for business owners, and rigorous testing has already proved its pulling power.

"A campaign run earlier this year with Placed saw a 16pc rise in foot traffic, and we expect to see even greater increases with AI driven foot traffic optimisation, resulting in re-gained revenues for local stores," said Mr Upstone.

LoopMe - which has offices across the world including in New York, Paris and Berlin - has partnered with a number of high-profile brand names.

These include Diageo (Guinness), Heineken, Paramount, Subway, Lidl, Kildare Village, Bank of Ireland, Samsung and Microsoft.

The company's PurchaseLoop product has already been recognised as 2017s best tech innovation at Digidays Video Awards.

The firm's vice president, Pete O'Mara Kane - who originally hails from Navan in Co Meath - reports that the partners for the Foot Traffic solution have not yet been announced but are "globally recognised".

"With the knowledge that AI-powered campaigns increase foot traffic to store, we forecast significant increases with AI driven foot traffic optimisation. This translates to revenue wins for local stores," he said.
Ransomware is displacing other cybercrime business models as criminals have realised that this is a lucrative business with low barriers to entry. Photo: REUTERS

Secure websites present one of the biggest headaches for Irish companies looking to protect themselves from potentially crippling online attacks, a cybersecurity expert has claimed.

"Most traditional firewalls allow all traffic coming from secure websites straight into your network, presenting a huge opportunity for cyber criminals," said James Canty, of Magnet Networks.

"Unfortunately, secure sites account for between 60-70pc of all internet traffic for Irish businesses today, leaving network access open to attack and making most firewalls unfit for purpose.

"Business owners need to ask the person responsible for their cybersecurity questions about how effective their firewall is, even if it was just recently installed, as the onset and adoption of cloud technologies has made most firewalls pretty worthless.

"Unfortunately, we are finding that just because you have a box in the corner that IT calls a firewall doesn't mean you are protected."

Ransomware is displacing other cybercrime business models as criminals have realised that this is a lucrative business with low barriers to entry.

Mr Canty said most attacks are triggered by unsuspecting individuals opening either exe files or documents, which can look quite convincing.

"There are certain stages malware must go through to be able to function, and businesses need to employ real-time protection that can identify, isolate and educate on each new piece of malware as it happens.

"Owners also need to ask if their IT departments can provide reports showing all the activity on the network... if you don't know what is coming in and out of the business, then how can you protect yourself?

"If needed, system administrators should be able to see a report detailing all activity on a per-user basis across the network."

Dublin Information Sec 2017, Irelands cyber security conference, addresses the critically important issues that threaten businesses in the information age. Tickets for the event at the RDS in Dublin can be booked here.
The threat from the cyber attack that crippled international services "will continue to grow" as people return to work, the head of Europol warned.

Since Friday's breach more than 200,000 victims - including the NHS in the UK - across 150 countries have been infected by the Wanna Decryptor ransomware, also known as WannaCry.

Speaking to ITV's 'Peston on Sunday', Europol director Rob Wainwright said the attack was indiscriminate across the private and public sectors.

"At the moment we are in the face of an escalating threat, the numbers are going up. I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn on their machines on Monday morning.

"The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries. Many of those will be businesses, including large corporations."

Meanwhile, HSE chief Tony O'Brien urged caution. He tweeted: "The cyber threat is not over. Maximum vigilance needed in days ahead."

Last night, the Government warned of possible disruption to IT services today.

"IT departments across Government and the private sector have been working over the weekend to upgrade IT equipment and to apply patches to deal with the vulnerability that this malware exploits," said a Government spokesman.

"Most of these works will be completed over the weekend, but in some cases there will be minor disruption to IT services as works are completed and systems are brought back online. The impact of this on Ireland has been limited thus far, but this may change as the situation evolves."

Meanwhile, staff at the HSE have been advised not to log in to HSE systems for two hours after they have physically switched their computers on.

"As staff go back to work tomorrow, the HSE is advising all of its staff to turn on their computers but do not log on for a full two hours," said the Government spokesman. "This will allow the anti-virus capability to become active while still allowing the network to remain protected. Each health building will have an IT representative to provide assistance in the morning."

The spokesman said that the National Cyber Security Centre in the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment is "monitoring the situation on an ongoing basis".

Organisations across the globe, including investigators from the UK's National Crime Agency, are now working non-stop to hunt down those responsible for the ransomware.

Meanwhile, health authorities are racing to upgrade security software amid fears hackers could exploit the same vulnerability with a new virus.

There have been calls in Britain for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Friday's major incident, with the UK government and NHS chiefs facing questions over their preparedness and the robustness of vital systems.

"We have been concerned for some time. The healthcare centres in many countries are particularly vulnerable. They are processing a lot of sensitive data," said Mr Wainwright.

Ciaran Martin, chief executive of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, warned there could be a fresh wave of victims today.

"We have not yet seen Friday's attack reoccur, there's been no new wave of attacks.

"On Monday morning at the start of the new working week, it's likely that successful attacks from Friday that haven't yet become apparent will become apparent," he said.

"And also existing known infections can spread."

A British cyber expert was hailed an 'accidental hero' after he registered a domain name that unexpectedly stopped the spread of the virus, which exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows software.

The anonymous specialist, known only as MalwareTech, prevented more than 100,000 computers across the globe from being infected.

Dublin Information Sec 2017, Irelands cyber security conference, addresses the critically important issues that threaten businesses in the information age. Tickets for the event at the RDS in Dublin can be booked here.
Is there a chance that hackers may have gotten access to my private medical information for future use?

No. A ransomware attack is very different to other forms of hacking. The whole point is that the computers and files become inaccessible to everyone, including the hackers. The financial motivation behind the attack is not to sell the personal data to scammers - but to make a quick profit from a ransom paid.

I run a business. Am I now at risk and, if so, what should do I do?

You are definitely at risk, according to Irish cybersecurity analysts.

"The big fear is that people will return to their offices on Monday morning, switch on the PCs and click on an infected email," said Conor Flynn, founder of IT security firm Isas and an expert on ransomware attacks. "It's like watching a car crash in two parts. It's very likely that there will be an increased number of incidents on Monday."

Mr Flynn said that some organisations have warned employees not to open unfamiliar emails. He said other companies are printing out warning posters for company lifts and entrances. "They're not sending emails because by the time the staff member gets it, they may already have opened an infected email," he said.

I have a hospital appointment scheduled this week. Is there any chance there could be a mix-up about it now?

It's unlikely. Within hours of the ransomware outbreak becoming known on Friday, the HSE effectively switched internet off in terms of access to its network. Over the weekend, it has been testing its systems to make sure that none is infected. IT security professionals also say that there are no indications yet of Irish hospitals being hit.

I have an appointment with my local doctor tomorrow. What about that being disrupted?

It's still unlikely but not impossible. IT security experts expect the ransomware outbreak to spread today as people return to work after the weekend.

I've just been hit and I can't get into any of my computer's files or programs. What should I do?

"Isolate the machine so that the malware can't move onwards," said Mr Flynn. "Power your machine off and disconnect it from the network. Generally, the best advice is not to pay the ransom. Recover your information from any backups you've made."

If you have not made backups, you may lose your data, which is why small firms are always advised to have backup systems in place as a matter of course.

If you decide that you must pay the ransom because of critical files locked up, you'll need to pay in Bitcoin, the virtual currency. This process has become bizarrely consumer-friendly in recent years. Some ransomware attacks have phone numbers you can call for advice on how to pay in Bitcoin, almost like a call centre.

Dublin Information Sec 2017, Irelands cyber security conference, addresses the critically important issues that threaten businesses in the information age. Tickets for the event at the RDS in Dublin can be booked here.
'Cybersecurity experts said the spread of the virus, dubbed WannaCry, had slowed, but the respite might only be brief'

Businesses in more than 150 countries are bracing themselves for further fallout from the unprecedented global ransonware attack that has locked up more than 200,000 computers.

Cybersecurity experts said the spread of the virus, dubbed WannaCry, had slowed, but the respite might only be brief.

Europol director Rob Wainwright said that victims of the attack would include many large corporations.

Closer to home, today the Central Bank will release its latest credit and debit card statistics and publish a markets update.

As Taoiseach Enda Kenny toys with a timeline for his departure, on Wednesday France's newly elected and youngest-ever president, Emmanuel Macron, holds his first cabinet meeting.

On Thursday, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Bill 2017 will move to the second stage in the Dail.

The Bill will approve the terms of agreement for Ireland's membership of the AIIB and payments due to the $100bn (91.5bn) fund.

C&C Group posts its final results on Wednesday and Deutsche Bank AG holds its AGM in Frankfurt on Thursday.

Dublin Information Sec 2017, Irelands cyber security conference, addresses the critically important issues that threaten businesses in the information age. Tickets for the event at the RDS in Dublin can be booked here.
Easyjet is likely to announce a decision during the summer on which European country it has secured an air operator's certificate (AOC) in that will enable it to continue flying between European Union member states once the UK leaves the trading bloc in 2019.

Cath Lynn, Easyjet's group director of strategy and network, declined to elaborate on the process, but told the Irish Independent that the carrier is likely to update investors in the coming months.

"We're progressing on track as we planned," she said, speaking at the CAPA aviation conference in Co Wicklow. "I'd imagine there'll be an update late summer."

It was expected that EasyJet would have revealed its decision last month, having spent nearly a year evaluating its options.

It's thought that EasyJet has short-listed three countries including Austria, Malta and Portugal as contenders for the new AOC. The company will continue to retain its operational base in Luton, where it employs about 1,000 staff.

Ryanair has warned that there could be no flights between the UK and European Union immediately following Brexit unless a new aviation accord is hammered out between the pair within the next year.

It has pointed out that summer schedules for 2019 need to be finalised by next year.
Four of the German company's offices, which manage around 200 shops, were taken over

Police in the Italian regions of Lombardy and Sicily arrested 15 people and put four management offices of supermarket chain Lidl under state control as part of a swoop on a mafia gang.

Four of the German company's offices, which manage around 200 shops, were taken over as investigators probed links with the Laudani crime family, police said in a statement.

Lidl Italia said it was completely innocent regarding the accusations, was not under investigation itself and had offered to help authorities.

Sicily's "Cosa Nostra" mafia has weakened in recent years but Monday's arrests unveil the latest example of criminal groups spreading their tentacles from traditional southern fiefdoms to infiltrate businesses in the wealthier north.

In the case of Lidl, the mobsters allegedly used their influence to obtain contracts for work like warehouse logistics or kitting out new shops, the arrest warrant issued by a Milan court showed.

"This was a case of managers at Lidl Italia who were in charge of contracting work being permanently subjugated, so as to ensure projects were assigned favourably to the companies controlled by the associates," the warrant read.

Contracts assigned this way did "serious damage to the assets of the contracting company", it continued. The court has taken over management of the four offices for six months.

Among those arrested were a woman who works for city hall and is suspected of corruption in relation to a public contract, and a man who previously worked for the provincial government and is suspected of influence peddling.

The court also placed under state control the private company responsible for security at the Milan law courts, due to suspected links to the Laudani clan.

When areas of a business are placed under the control of a court, judges take over management for a defined period of time. In such cases, the court often appoints temporary managers.

No details were released on how many Lidl employees work in the four management offices or if their day-to-day activities will be affected during the period of state control.
As a debut novel, this is one of the most gut-wrenching, shiver-inducing pieces of fiction I have ever read.

The word 'compelling' is too hackneyed when it comes to a novel such as this. Each line is gripping: mind and body are hooked into a world you don't want to know exists, but which thrives under our very noses.

Lisa Harding was motivated to write about the underworld of sex trafficking after reading firsthand accounts of trafficked girls at the launch of a campaign in 2012 to combat sex trafficking of minors, run by the Body Shop and the Children's Rights Alliance.

As an actress, Harding filters herself through her characters. As an author, she is so removed that her characters fully take over the narrative. The girls appear in alternate chapters, recounting the tragic journey that brings them together. Twelve-year-old Nico from Moldova is sold by her father, supposedly in marriage, to live in London - only to find herself on a treacherous journey to Ireland. Fifteen-year-old Sammy, from a comfortable south Dublin suburb, is cruelly self-destructive, an only child, who has been torn apart by the trauma of an alcoholic mother.

That the two girls have ended up in a brothel due to parental intervention - or the lack of it - is as troubling as the scores of men that have created the market for enslaving them in what is too benignly called the 'sex trade'. Such a term suggests there is voluntary supply and open demand, instead of it being abduction and drug-induced suffering.

While it sounds like a diatribe against male-dominated, perpetuated female suffering, this moving novel is anything but. The prose is electrifying; a vivid tone carries the reader from the chatter of pre-pubescent children playing in Moldovan woods to Irish schoolgirls downing a naggin of vodka on a riverbank. Wandering in a stupor, Sammy looks at the sky: "The moon is a tiny inverted C, peeking out from behind the clouds. It throws its meek shafts on the murky canal water, which appears lacquered black in this light."

This book will shock polite society - or maybe not. The girls are entrapped in a boring semi-detached house in a sleepy housing estate, tarted up for their evening work, they are taken by a taxi driver to Georgian townhouses, country mansions, conference centres, private members clubs. The customers are often married, bespoke-suited professionals, or rather vicious males that no 'free' woman would endure. The stomach wrenching starts when the girls wonder why these men don't think 'what if I was their daughter?'

In most Irish garda stations there is an A4 poster on the lobby wall about sex-trafficking. It is a poster I have noticed and thought 'how could that be happening in a fairly well-monitored democratic society'. This novel exposes the high and low members of society that help this horrific abuse flourish. The poster should be on bus shelters all over the country. The next time you find yourself in a nightclub or bar and hear someone say "this place is full of hookers", remember that those women need to escape the drug-fuelled entrapment that they have been sold into and it could be your neighbour, boyfriend, husband or father who is keeping the trade solvent.

Lisa Harding played Connie in RTE's Fair City and has performed at the Abbey, the Gate, the Lyric, and the Manchester Library, among others. She received an MPhil in creative writing from Trinity College Dublin in 2014. She is also a playwright and short story author. Her debut novel contributes to the brave clarion calls of writers, such as Louise O'Neill, who have used their unique and creative talents to reveal growing crimes against children and women.

The recently enacted Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, criminalises the purchase of sex, so it is particularly expedient that Harding has brought this toxic topic to public attention.
The Edge (L) performs with Bono during the opening concert of rock group U2's global The Joshua Tree Tour 2017 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada May 12, 2017. Picture taken May 12, 2017. REUTERS/Nick Didlick

The Gods long ago equipped Bono with the antennae of a wise man. So, he must have known that the future of U2 possibly rode on The Joshua Tree Tour 2017.

It is not about U2 holding market position or this tour being a commercial success  it is already a success with shows sold out all over America and Europe.

Ever restless as artists, U2 need to find themselves as a band again in a sense. Or fuck off.

And I mean that out of love as a fan

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Rammed down our iPhones throats, U2s The Songs Of Innocence was hardly a runaway success on many levels.

Bono will know  or at least he should know  that the next U2 record is critical if the band are to be taken seriously as anything other a touring band trying to revisit the glories from their past. (Gavin Friday - Bono"s friend from childhood and the artistic director on this tour - told me before the gig: "This tour has absolutely nothing to do with nostalgia. The songs are more relevant than they were 30 years ago.")

The stakes were high for U2 on the opening night of their American tour last night in Seattle. Fatefully, then, the news from America was very good. . .

_______

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8.40pm. 75,000 fans wait expectantly inside the Century Link Field stadium . (Mumford & Sons had been on earlier and were absolute crap.) Suddenly, the lone figure of Larry Mullen junior appears, walking out of the shadows down the ramp, which extends 100 feet into the crowd, to a smaller stage with The Pogues A Rainy Night In Soho playing in the background.

He sits down at the drum kick and starts up the famous military style beat to Sunday Bloody Sunday.

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Within 15 seconds, you can see and hear The Edge walking down the ramp playing the opening echo-y chords of Sunday too, quickly followed by Bono going Ohh ohh ohh wooah wooah with Adam Clayton on bass behind him.

The hairs on the back of the neck of 75,000 people rise as Bono sings, I can't believe the news today/Oh, I can't close my eyes/And make it go away.

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That momentum was kept up when they launch into another classic track from the War album, New Years Day, with The Edge somehow playing both keyboards and electric guitar. U2 then performed three tracks in a row from 1984 Unforgettable Fire album  A Sort of Homecoming, a storming Bad and a bewitching Pride (In the Name of Love).

The words to a Martin Luther King speech appeared on the giant screen as Bono he told the crowd, as only Bono can, "Awaken! Awaken ! Awaken within you the American tradition of compassion and justice and spirit. "

The crowd are going wild, everyone dancing and feeling uplifted by what the four fellas from Ireland are doing up on that tiny stage.

Then, the band relocate to the gargantuan main stage to kick off The Joshua Tree album in its entirety  U2s 1987 hymn to the States, their immigrants tale of how the American Dream went bad. The gospel of heaven and hell in the Mojave desert.

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They kick off this set with a rollicking Where The Streets Have No Name  with Anton Corbijn's new pictures of The Joshua Tree' area and the desert behind U2 on giant screens  before going into I Still Havent Found What Im Looking For and then, With Or Without You.

During the seismic spirituality of With Or Without  with a reddish sunset-covered mountains lighting up the massive stage  Bono, as he often is, was transformed for those moments. He sang with a passion that went beyond performing. Indeed U2 performed with a passion that went beyond, well beyond, mere performance.

With a huge silhouette of a single Joshua Tree shooting up into the sky behind them, this was something special on what Bono called a concrete temple.

Then its the ferocious Bullet In The Blue Sky  with Bono moving about the stage like an Bible Belt preacher on acid  followed by Running To Stand Still and, the live debut of Red Hill Mining Town.

Before U2 perform Exit, an original clip from American western TV series Trackdown is played on the screen  featuring a double-dealing snake oil salesman with a familiar name who is trying to con the townspeople with a crackpot idea.

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Trump: I am the only one. Trust me. I can build a wall around your homes that nothing will penetrate.

A cowboy: What do we do? How can we save ourselves?

Trump: You ask how do you build that wall. You ask, and Im here to tell you.

Another cowboy: Youre a liar, Trump.

Some Trump followers in the audience might have seen it as 'You're a liar, Bono', but there you go.

U2 then burst into a eardrum-bashing and intense version of Exit.

They went off for a well earned breather before returning with Beautiful Day. The reaction among the crowd was pure euphoria.

This was an unambiguously powerful concert by a band back to their visceral and epic best.

After Beautiful Day, there was even more euphoria, courtesy of Elevation, followed by Ultraviolet (Love My Way) dedicated to " the great women of the world who stood up or sat down for their rights, who insisted, who persisted." Images of Pussy Riot, Virginia Woolf, Patti Smith, Rosa Parks, Mary Robinson, Angela Merkel etc flashed up on the screens. Inspirational stuff.

"Government should fear its citizens - not the other way round," Bono said to the crowd before launching into One.

"It's too late to drag the past out into the night. " Indeed...

Some powerful images from the refugee camps of Syria were played on the giant screen as U2 performed an emotive Miss Sarajevo.

Like Bruce Springsteen helped heal the soul of America after the 9/11 attacks with The Rising album, U2 with the Joshua Tree Tour are helping treat America's psychic wound after the election of Donald Trump.

U2 finished their two hour show last night with The Little Things That Give You Away from the as yet unreleased Songs Of Experience album.

Then they actually played I Will Follow. And were gone. Walk away, walk away. A magical might.

JT2017 Set List - SEATTLE - 14 May

Sunday Bloody Sunday

New Years Day

A Sort of Homecoming

Bad

Pride

Where The Streets Have No Name

I Still Havent Found What Im Looking For

With or Without You

Bullet the Blue Sky

Running to Stand Still

Red Hill Mining Town

In Gods Country

Trip Through Your Wires

One Tree Hill

Exit

Mothers of the Disappeared

Beautiful Day

Elevation

Ultraviolet

One

Miss Sarajevo

The Little Things That Give You Away

I Will Follow
A priest who moved to Ireland from the US in the mid 1990s has been linked to the murder of a nun in Netflix's new documentary The Keepers.

The seven part series, which debuts on the streaming site on Friday, examines the unsolved murder of Catholic nun Sister Cathy Cesnik, in Baltimore in 1969.

Nobody has ever been charged despite a lead emerging in the 1990s when one of her former students at Keough High School came forward to claim she was sexually abused by the high school's chaplain Father Joseph Maskell.

She also revealed that she was taken to see Sister Cathy's undiscovered body and was told, 'See what happens when you say bad things about people.'

Police believe she was murdered to prevent her revealing abuse at the school.

In The Keepers director Ryan White goes beyond the murder and uncovers clergy abuse, repressed memories and government and religious institutions that he says at best, dropped the ball over the last 45 years  and, at worst, covered it up.

The Sunday Times reports that the late Fr Maskell fled to Ireland in 1994 after police arrived to arrest him but that in correspondence between Fr Maskell and the Bishop he claimed he had been given temporary leave in America.

He was employed by the health service as a psychologist. When the diocese contacted Baltimore they were told about the allegations against him and this information was given to the health service.

However, the priest continued to work as a psychologist in private practice in Wexford until 1998. He later returned to America and died in 2001.

Police investigating the murder in Baltimore exhumed his body earlier this year and DNA results are expected this summer.

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Kat and Alfie Moon have moved to Ireland. Yep, Redwater premiered on RTE One last night. And the heavily-plugged EastEnders spin-off, which sees one of British soaplands most annoying  sorry, iconic - couples, start a new life on the Emerald Isle, isnt exactly off to the best start.

For the uninitiated, Redwater is a fictional town in Waterford. Its also the place in which Kat (Jessie Wallace) from EastEnders, reckons her son grew up  the one that was taken away from her as a baby.

So, she and husband, Alfie (Shane Richie), have decided to seek out Kats long-lost child for themselves. Theyve left the twins back in London. Alfie is sick. Theyre loaded. Youll figure out the rest as we go along. Were not in Albert Square anymore, lads. Anyway, heres what we know after episode one. Spoilers ahead, obviously

Redwater doesnt seem to know what its called

The telly guide had it listed as Kat & Alfie: Redwater. RTE and BBC advertised it as such. But, then, according to the fancy title sequence, its just Redwater. You cant have it both ways, lads. Pick one.

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Redwaters title sequence is a hoot

Think Glenroe meets True Detective, and begorrah and bejaysus, its a sign of whats to come

Redwater is definitely not EastEnders

The only thing funnier than Kat and Alfie getting their own show, is Richie and Wallace telling members of the press that Redwater (or whatever the heck its called) isnt a spin-off, but instead, a standalone, six-part drama. The thing is - we can finally see what they mean. Sort of. With so many supporting players vying for the spotlight (including Maria Doyle Kennedy, Peter Campion and Fionnula Flanagan), and various sub plots emerging throughout, Redwater is looking a lot less Kat & Alfie Go on Holidays and more like Kat and Alfie have wandered on to the wrong bleedin set

There are no donkeys

The last time EastEnders came to Ireland, in 1997, they made a holy show of us. Twenty years on and Redwater kicks thing off with Kat and Alfie arriving at their new home in a broken-down taxi which poor Alfie has to push up a hill. Well call that progress.

But its really, really Oirish

To be sure, to be sure. Redwater is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone elses business and the, erm, local cowboy (Ian McElhinney, resplendent in hat and overcoat) rides his stallion to the beach every morning for a swim, before fixing everyones problems. Oh, and theres a lot of alcohol consumed in this here town. Obviously.

The writing is shockin, just shockin

Honestly, its like a bad play; a cold and tonally awkward mish-mash of hammy one-liners and things that no human being would ever say and/or do. Our favourite clanger, though? What made him go riding in the middle of the night? We think whoever said it was referring to the cowboy on his horse. Maybe. Plus, the acting is dire.

It is not the new Broadchurch

Nope. Definitely not. Killinaskully with notions, maybe, but definitely not Broadchurch. Or The Wicker Man

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Kat and Alfie have a new rainbow-coloured wardrobe

And Alfie only brought one outfit to Waterford, it seems. Youd miss his leather coat.

Redwater doesnt know what to do with poor Alfie

First they make him push a taxi up a hill. Next, they dress him up as a lollipop man in a community race. Then they try to make him walk off a cliff. Then he climbs up another cliff and has to be saved by a hipster priest. What next? Alfie drowns in a pint of Guinness?

Video of the Day

The whole thing is actually about a killer priest

Yep, and not just any killer priest, but one who develops a murderous streak because  wait for it  the milk man delivered orange juice to the church after he specifically asked them not to. And Father Trendy (Oisin Stack) hates orange juice. Well, whaddaya know? Its barmier than EastEnders. Thats quite an achievement.

Redwater continues on RTE One next Sunday at 9.30pm.

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Viewers were divided on the new series, with as many praising it as not:

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Over 60,000 in cash was seized and two men have been arrested at Dublin Airport.

The two Romanian men, both aged in their 30s, were separately boarding a flight to Budapest at 6am yesterday morning before being stopped and questioned by Revenue officers.

63,750 was found in two separate cases being carried by the men.

The cash was seized by Revenue suspected to be either the proceeds of, or intended for use in, criminal activity.

Judge Anthony Halpin ruled this morning to detain the two men for three months to allow Revenue to investigate further.
Cyber attacks are similar to biological warfare and how we tackle them needs to change, a security expert has warned.

Paul Dwyer, CEO of CyberRiskInternational.com, said that those behind the ransomware keep creating new versions of the virus and our Government needs to be better prepare for this.

Mr Dwyer was speaking on Newstalk Breakfast after the WannaCry virus hit computer systems around the world, it caused chaos across the NHS and ambulances had to be diverted and operations cancelled as experts struggled to contain the attack.

He said: "This was an exploit by the National Security Agency which was put out into the world and is now being used by malefactors to attack businesses.

"So this was effectively a weapon from someone's arsenal in the NSA that has boomeranged back to the rest of the world because they didn't notify Microsoft in time or the rest of the world to say, 'hey guys, this tool which is very powerful and can do this is now out there'.

"They're the same people that said we should share intelligence and collaborate, we should help each other out because this is a global thing, there's no borders of barriers in the cyber world.

"This can be acquainted to biological warfare because we've often told how we need to learn lessons from the Centre for Disease Control.

"This is like a biological virus and we need to put controls in place to stop it spreading and we need to able to detect where it is and assist people.

"We need to remember that most maleware like this is dealt with by amateurs, advice is given out to people to how to deal with this but a biological thing to hit a city is dealt with by professionals sow e really need a change here in how this is dealt with."

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He also said that our government must show leadership to protect Irish computer users.

He said: "Where's the Government advice and strategy in telling people with small businesses or home users ? This is part of the economy that keeps the whole country going and people need straightforward guidance in what to do on how to keep their systems going, from the guy with two PCs to those with up to 2000 PCs...

"Where the government strategy for what to do, people need guidance.

"This is basic cyber hygiene but I think the government need to go beyond gentle soft guidance a bit and mandate that people can't be running on systems that are over 17 years old and cannot be passed without a lot of effort."

Read More

He also spoke of the challenged posed by tackling hackers.

Mr Dwyer said: "It's like a game of cat and mouse or whack-a-mole, the bad guys simply create a new version and get around it, this is what happens.

"We need to be vigilant and watch out for this."

Speaking on the same programme Richard Corbridge, Chief Information Officer of the HSE, said that his team were able to act fast to try to protect our health system.

Mr Corbridge said: "The HSE leadership met at around 4 o'clock on Friday afternoon and took the decision to treat this as a major incident, mobilise a team and remove the external connectivity to the emails.

"We were able to quickly take some very decisive actions, our biggest risk now is this morning when larger volumes of people come in to work, maybe they hadn't heard about the issues, they turn on their machines and we're asking that everyone turns on their machine, nobody logs into their e-mails and we allow the solution to set in and we're pushing for this idea of think before you click all week.

"Everybody needs to be super vigilant all week."

Mr Dwyer advised that people can log onto www.cyberthreatsummit.com to check if their own e-mail account has been targeted.

Dublin Information Sec 2017, Irelands cyber security conference, addresses the critically important issues that threaten businesses in the information age. Tickets for the event at the RDS in Dublin can be booked here.
Dublin Fire Brigade are responding to a domestic fire in west Dublin this morning.

The alarm was raised this morning shortly after 6am.

There is currently a platform, three water tenders, an ambulance and a district officer on the scene a spokesman said.

Officers are now working to extinguish a fire in the roof area of the house.

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ESB networks have disconnected the power to the house.

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A turntable ladder from Tara Street station are now fighting the fire from above.

The detached house has been vacant for a long period of time. The fire appears to have started upstairs and took hold quickly, gutting the bedrooms and causing the roof to collapse.

The ceilings of the ground floor could be seen to be glowing with fire from above.

It was not safe for fire crews to enter the building so the fire had to be fought from outside and above.
Gardai at the scene of the car crash in Mullagh Co Cavan. Pic Steve Humphreys

Gardai at the scene of the car crash in Mullagh Co Cavan. Pic Steve Humphreys

Gardai at the scene of the car crash in Mullagh Co Cavan. Pic Steve Humphreys

Gardai at the scene of the car crash in Mullagh Co Cavan. Pic Steve Humphreys

Evan Brennan (17) was killed when the car in which he was driving hit a fence in Ballivor in Co Meath

Two people have been killed and six people hospitalised in a weekend of tragedy on Ireland's roads.

Tributes have poured in for Evan Brennan (17) who was killed when the car in which he was driving hit a fence in Ballivor in Co Meath.

The incident occurred on Friday evening.

Mr Brennan was from Summerhill, Co Meath and was an avid GAA player.

Local Fine Gael councillor, Joe Fox, said the community have been left devastated by the tragedy.

"He was a lovely person and was from a lovely family.

"He was very involved in the GAA and was a credit to his parents."

Cllr Fox said the whole community are reeling in shock.

"Everyone is shocked by this terrible tragedy. It's terrible and shocking.

"My condolences to the family."

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In Cork, a male cyclist in his thirties was killed in a collision with a 4X4 vehicle on Sunday morning.

The incident occurred on the Ballincollig bypass at approximately 12.25pm.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene.

Garda Forensic Collision Investigators examined the scene and the road is currently closed.

Diversions are in place.

Gardai are appealing for witnesses and asked that anyone with information contact Gurranabraher Garda Station 021-4946200, the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.

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Meanwhile, six people have been hospitalised following a single-car crash in Co Cavan earlier this morning.

The incident occurred at 5.30am in the area of Rantavan in Mullagh, Co Cavan, gardai confirmed to Independent.ie.

Six people were in the vehicle which crashed into a fence.

It is understood the occupants of the car were brought to Cavan Hospital, Mater Hospital in Dublin and Blanchardstown Hospital in Dublin.

The extent of their injuries is yet unknown and their ages have not yet been confirmed, but it is understood two occupants of the car may be in a serious condition.

The area is located in south Cavan, close to the Meath border.

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Earlier this week, a female cyclist aged in her forties was killed in a collision with a tractor.

The incident occurred on the main Cork to Tralee Road (N22) on Wednesday at approximately 7pm.

The tractor was towing agricultural equipment.

The cyclist was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the tractor was uninjured.
The system designed to safeguard citizens against phone tapping has been called into question as vague and failing to meet international standards.

Under the current arrangements, a lone High Court judge produces an annual report on the operation of Garda phone tapping, which is submitted to the Government.

Writing in this newspaper, legal expert Dr TJ McIntyre criticises the system - arguing that the reports tend to be brief, and offer little if any detail on the extent of phone tapping being carried out.

Dr McIntyre, who lectures in law in UCD and chairs independent civil liberties group Digital Rights Ireland, asked if the public should be reassured by "these bland annual reports".

He said it's also his view that the Irish law on phone tapping and how it's implemented "fail to meet international standards".

A Department of Justice spokesman last night defended the safeguards in place.

He insisted that the involvement of a High Court judge in monitoring the operation of the legislation on phone tapping is "of course, a very significant safeguard".

He said it would be "ill-founded" to "underestimate the importance of the Constitutional independence of the designated judges or, indeed, the considerable experience and abilities of the individuals who have served in that role with distinction".

The spokesman rejected Mr McIntyre's criticism of the length and content of the reports by the various judges that have serviced in the role.

"A report by the judge confirms whether or not the requirements of the legislation are being complied with and, however brief, could not be properly described as 'bland'," the spokesman said.

Dr McIntyre's criticisms of the safeguards come after the Irish Independent on Saturday revealed how gardai tapped the phones of innocent members of the public.

The investigation by this newspaper revealed that when the unorthodox activities of gardai were brought to the attention of police authorities, they were ignored.

Read more: Phone-tapping hits all private citizens

One decorated detective who raised concerns has told how he felt undermined and was offered a transfer out of Garda intelligence.

When he sued the authorities for his treatment, the case was settled by the State - only in the last few weeks.

However, the State signed off on a series of secret pay-offs for gardai and officials in a bid to keep a lid on yet another major scandal.

It is alleged:

Innocent members of the public have had their phone conversations listened to without their knowledge;

Garda management was also warned that warrants for phone taps were being put in place where officers provided little or no documentation to support their justification;

When concerns were raised by a detective, he felt he was sidelined and offered a transfer out of the Crime and Security Department.

In further revelations, the 'Sunday Independent' yesterday detailed how an election worker for a serving politician had his mobile phone tapped by gardai.

The wire tapping occurred on the phone of the political party activist who was working for a constituency rival of a powerful Government minister. The senior politician is not currently in Cabinet.

The detective who challenged the activity feared gardai were acting for the benefit of the minister with or without his knowledge.

He was transferred out of the force's intelligence department within two weeks of flagging his fears that the force was being used for "political purposes".

Senior officers cancelled the tap just two days after the detective raised these concerns.

While the justice minister of the day issues the warrant, he or she would not have sight of the documents submitted by gardai seeking to secure a phone tap.

In practise, applications were prepared by senior gardai and reviewed by the monitoring section.

The revelations surrounding the phone tapping scandal pre-date Noirin O'Sullivan's appointment as Garda Commissioner.

Nonetheless, Ms O'Sullivan and Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald are under major pressure to assure the public that such shoddy practices within the force's monitoring section have been ended.
Sean Canney has been something of a "lucky general" since he was appointed Junior Minister with Responsibility for Flood relief just over a year ago. But he wouldn't put it like that. Last winter was free of the major flood events that have blighted many parts of the country in recent years.

"I would say that the country was lucky," Mr Canney said, and warned against complacency.

"The reality is we will have floods. We may not have another flood for five or six years but that doesn't mean we shift our focus on what we're doing."

A first-time TD, it was a coin toss last year that saw him take on the Office of Public Works (OPW) brief rather that his Independent Alliance colleague Kevin 'Boxer' Moran. They switch places next month, a process he insists is happening smoothly.

Mr Canney lists a record 52m spend on flood defences, the signing of contracts for several flood relief schemes and the creation of a maintenance plan for the entire Shannon basin as his highlights of the year.

He said he has "no regrets" on his time at the OPW, a wide-brief which also included managing State lands and national heritage sites like the Skellig Islands - a 'Star Wars' filming location - and which Mr Canney announced the opening dates for last week.

The deal with 'Boxer' will see them swap back again this time next year, so the Galway East TD may well be around to set a few more of the 27 additional planned flood schemes in action, if the Government lasts that long.

Mr Canney was among a slew of rural Independents elected to the Dail last year amid dissatisfaction at the previous government's record in the regions.

Is he confident the current Government is doing enough to avoid claims that it isn't giving rural areas enough attention the next time the country goes to the polls?

"I think so... If this Government gets the time it deserves, it will deliver," he said, pointing to the Action Plan for Rural Ireland, broadband roll-out, plans for town and village renewal, and Clar funding for small-scale capital projects among other measures.

He said such schemes are important as they create an incentive for communities in rural Ireland.

"People don't want everything. They just want enough to make sure they can put more with it themselves... so the communities are getting a fair crack at the whip," he added.

He thinks the Government could last two or three more years as there's "no appetite" for an election.

Mr Canney said the Independent Alliance can avoid the fate of smaller groups who have been wiped out by the electorate after serving in a coalition by maintaining its integrity and delivering on what it has promised.

Mr Canney denied the ongoing saga of the Fine Gael leadership is distracting from the work of the Government.

He said he attended a Cabinet sub-committee on rural Ireland chaired by Taoiseach Enda Kenny last week and "everyone is totally focussed".

"We've a job to do. We're getting on with it. That's an internal matter for Fine Gael. They'll deal with it whenever they deal with it."

He said that in his view Mr Kenny's legacy will be "the resilience he's shown" in leading the country out of the economic crisis.

Asked if he was disappointed that it appears the next taoiseach won't be from the West, he said that it has been "a source of pride", but points out President Michael D Higgins also hails from the region.

Mr Canney will assume Mr Moran's role as assistant government whip next month. One aspect of the OPW brief he has enjoyed has been developing a plan to promote the various castles and Stately homes it owns.

Kilkenny Castle got a boost in that regard last week when it was visited by Prince Charles. Mr Canney was there to witness star hurler Henry Shefflin tutor the heir to the British throne in the art of the puck out.

"He put the ball in the net but as I said to him, I don't know if it's beginner's luck, but he needs to practise a bit more before he'll be able for the Kilkenny team."
The ransomware threat to the health service "is not over" according to HSE chief, Tony O'Brien, who has called for "maximum vigilance" from staff this week.

Despite concerted efforts by IT experts to fight the threat over the weekend, Mr O'Brien has admitted he still has concerns.

The HSE boss posted directives for staff online along with a stark warning of the potential dangers: "The cyber threat is not over. Maximum vigilance needed in days ahead."

Patients attending their GP surgeries may experience some delays this morning as health officials attempt to safeguard their computers against the potential of a cyber attack.

Doctors have been warned not to open their practice computers this morning until they are certain their anti-virus security systems are up to date.

The warning was issued by Dr Brian O' Mahony, the project manager of the GPIT Group with the Irish College of General Practitioners, which held its annual meeting in Wexford over the weekend.

Dr O'Mahony, who is an expert in health informatics, said: "Every GP needs to ensure that their IT systems are up to date, as this is a relatively new virus, which can infect their IT systems via email.

"I strongly advise doctors not to open their emails on Monday until they are certain their computers have the security patches made available by Windows last March. If those patches have not been uploaded, their systems are vulnerable."

Dr O'Mahony added: "Anyone with a Windows XP computer should not turn it on, as these older computers are not supported by the new security patches."

He said it should take no more than 20 minutes to download the anti-virus protections.

A spokesperson for the Department of Communications said the attack was "unprecedented".

The spokesperson added: "The major cyber attack that occurred globally in recent days is unprecedented in terms of scale and speed of onset.

"Whereas ransomware attacks via malicious email attachment have become commonplace, this newly discovered malware type, generally referred to as WannaCry2, is both "cryptor" and "worm" - it possesses the ability to replicate functional copies of itself to other networked hosts without the need for users to click on links or otherwise interact. As such, it can spread very rapidly from machine to machine."

A social media campaign has told healthcare staff they can turn on their computer this morning, but they should not log on.

The campaign, led by eHealth Ireland, has issued a number of steps to be taken by staff when they arrive to work.

It says that emails have been disabled on all machines.

Meanwhile, Health Minister Simon Harris said the protocols in place are "really important" in order to "prevent a cyber attack damaging the Irish health service".

A GP's computer holds vital records about their patient and while most would have modern technology, some would still have a Windows XP computer.

The ransomware virus primarily targets computers and laptops that are still operating on Windows XP.

It was launched in 2001 but in 2014 Microsoft stopped supporting the operating system.

It stopped releasing further upgrades for XP, so it is more prey to hacking.

GPs could face a substantial bill to replace a computer with Windows XP. This comes at a time when several GP practices are under financial pressure.

The GPs use an internal electronic system to refer patients to hospital and transfer information such as test results. Once their computer is safe, they can go ahead with and use this internal electronic system, which is completely safe from this virus attack.

Dublin Information Sec 2017, Irelands cyber security conference, addresses the critically important issues that threaten businesses in the information age. Tickets for the event at the RDS in Dublin can be booked here.
Imre Arakas, charged with conspiracy to commit murder, is in isolation at Mountjoy Prison with suspected tuberculosis

An Estonian man charged with conspiracy to commit the murder of Hutch gang associate James 'Mago' Gately has been rushed to an isolation unit in Mountjoy Prison with a suspected case of TB.

Imre Arakas (58) is accused of conspiring with others not before the courts to murder Gately in Northern Ireland between April 3 and 4.

Arakas was taken to the Challenging Behaviour Unit (CBU) late last week after medical staff in Mountjoy suspected he may be suffering from tuberculosis, a source confirmed to the Herald last night.

Infectious

The health of the prison staff and other inmates is at serious risk if it emerges that Arakas has the potentially fatal disease.

As a precaution, staff must wear masks, gloves and plastic aprons when feeding Arakas and he is also wearing a protective mask to prevent the spread of the highly infectious disease.

TB is a lung infection that if left untreated, kills about half of those affected.

It is spread through the air when people who have active TB in their lungs cough, spit, speak or sneeze.

Symptoms include a chronic cough with blood-containing sputum, fever, night sweats and weight loss.

TB is the most lethal infectious disease in the world killing more than 1.5-million people annually, approximating to 4,100 deaths a day worldwide.

Arakas was detained when gardai from the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau supported by members of the Special Crime Task Force, Emergency Response Unit and Armed Support Unit raided premises in west Dublin on the morning of April 4.

Arakas was charged on April 6 last and faced his fourth hearing on Wednesday last when he appeared at Cloverhill District Court.

Plead

Judge Victor Blake further remanded him in custody to appear again on May 24 next.

He has not yet indicated how he will plead to the charge.

At his first hearing, on April 6, a court was told "he made no reply to the charge" and due to the nature of the charge a bail application could only be made in the High Court.

Directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) have been sought.

Legal aid was allowed following submissions that he was unemployed and unable to pay a lawyer.

The other two men arrested in connection with this investigation have been released from garda custody without charge. A file is being prepared for the DPP.
The notices were issued on foot of a decision by An Bord Pleanala nearly two years ago that the fencing required planning permission. Photo: Domnick Walsh

Landowners on a scenic island have been ordered to remove fencing that had blocked public access to a popular walking route.

Kerry County Council has served enforcement notices on five landowners on Fenit Island, in Co Kerry.

The notices give them eight weeks to remove the fencing, which the council said was not exempt from planning and was put up without permission.

The local authority has also warned the landowners they will incur costs if it has to remove and dispose of the structures.

The landowners have also been given four weeks to pay an enforcement fine of 250 for expenses incurred by the council in dealing with the matter.

The notices were served on May 4 on John Murphy, of Fenit Island; Kathleen, Kit and Liam McCarthy, also of Fenit Island; and on Seamus O'Sullivan, with an address at Bindon Street, Ennis, Co Clare.

The notices were issued on foot of a decision by An Bord Pleanala nearly two years ago that the fencing required planning permission.

The issue had been referred to the planning authority by access campaign group, Keep Ireland Open, which has welcomed the issuing of the enforcement notices.

Local campaigners and sea anglers have also welcomed the decision.

The erection of the fencing angered local people and led to a number of protests on the island.

Fenit Island measures an area of approximately 440 acres.

It is owned by nine different landowners.

Matt Hopper, of Save Fenit Island Alliance, said that there was a sense of relief and real optimism among local people and campaigners that the "ugly, industrial-style fencing" that had "disfigured" the historic island for seven years would at last be removed.
Alcohol and cigarettes worth 3,800 were seized by Revenue officers in the early hours of Saturday morning.

During a routine check of a van at Dublin Port, officers discovered 355 litres of alcohol (wine and beer) and 3,200 cigarettes branded Winston, Ken and Pall Mall.

The vehicle had travelled from Romania via Holyhead and had arrived in Ireland just before midnight on Friday.

The male driver and his two passengers, who are all Romanian nationals aged in their 30s, were questioned about the discovery and investigations are ongoing.

Revenue reports that the smuggled goods have a retail value of over 3,800 and represent a potential loss to the Exchequer of around 2,800.

Anyone with any information about the smuggling or sale of illegal alcohol or tobacco are urged to contact Revenue in confidence on free phone number 1800 295 295.
A PATROL vessel disposed of by the Naval Service for 110,000 is now on sale in the Netherlands for almost seven times the price.

LE Aisling, one of the most famous ships in modern Naval Service history, was sold for 110,000 at public auction to a Dutch ship broker last March.

Now, the vessel is being offered for sale from a Rotterdam ship yard for 685,000 ($750,000) - with the new owners warning that, as improvements and upgrades are made to the vessel, the price will inevitably go up.

However, Naval Service sources warned that there is no guarantee the former Irish flagship will sell for the specified amount.

LE Aisling was decommissioned from fleet service last year after steaming 600,000 nautical miles over a 36 year service career.

The vessel was sold by public auction in Carrigaline, Co Cork.

Auctioneer Dominic Daly said LE Aisling represented an unique purchase despite the recent difficulties in the global shipping sector.

Netherlands ship broker, Dick van der Kamp, bought the ship for

110,000 with just the second bid at the auction.

Read More

There was only one other bidder.

The vessel sold for roughly one-third the 320,000 the LE Emer made at public auction almost four years ago.

LE Deirdre, which was auctioned off in 2001, made 240,000.

Mr van der Kamp acknowledged that the purchase was a gamble and that the market for specific types of ships was quite depressed.

"The offshore ship market has collapsed over the past few years. That is why this ship made much less than the previous ship auctioned off," he said.

"Sometimes you buy ships and it is a bargain. But it is also a gamble," he said.

"I don't know yet (what will happen with LE Aisling). It might be converted as a private yacht, it might be used as a guard ship."

The Dutch firm currently have 25 other vessels on their books and have supplied vessels for use as pilot boats and even ice-breakers.

While the global ship market has dramatically declined, places like Africa are still purchasing vessels.

The former Irish patrol vessel is now berthed in Rotterdam and is sold as being: "Just decommissioned from naval service and in very good condition. Price will go up as owners will spend money on further improvements. Better be quick!"

Mr Daly admitted last March it was "a little disappointing" there were only two bids at auction for the ship.

"It is part of a class built in Cork. The first was LE Deirdre and she was sold off a number of years ago and converted into a private yacht," he said.

"The second was LE Emer which was also sold and is now a training ship in the Nigerian Navy."

"The third, LE Aoife, was given to the Maltese Navy last year."

LE Aisling was built at Verolme Dockyard in Cork in 1979  the second last to be built at the Irish facility  and gave almost 36 years sterling service to the navy.

Some 65 metres long and displacing 1,020 tonnes, LE Aislings most famous mission was leading the successful interdiction of an IRA arms smuggling operation with the trawler Marita Ann off Kerry coast in 1984.

LE Aisling was part of a three vessel force with LE Emer and LE Deirdre which intercepted the Marita Ann and recovered seven tonnes of weapons and ammunition brought from the US on the larger vessel, Valhalla.

The ship was also involved in a highly-publicised attempt to intercept the Spanish trawler Sonia which had been illegally fishing in Irish waters in 1984.

It was also one of the first vessels to respond to the Air India tragedy off the Cork coast.

LE Aisling further became the first Naval Service vessel to have a female commander when Lt Cmdr Roberta OBrien took charge in 2008.

LE Aisling has since been replaced in the Naval Service fleet by LE William Butler Yeats.

A proposal to use LE Aisling as a floating museum came to nothing when experts ruled it was unsuitable for adaptation.

Five Irish ships  LE Niamh, LE Roisin, LE James Joyce, LE Samuel Beckett and LE William Butler Years  have been built to essentially the same offshore patrol vessel design since 1999 at a UK shipyard.

A sixth, LE George Bernard Shaw, will enter service in 2019.

The Government is examining the requirements of the new White Paper on Defence which commits Ireland to replacing the three oldest vessels LE Eithne, LE Orla and LE Ciara.

LE Eithne, the fleet flagship, is the oldest having been commissioned in 1984.

LE Orla and LE Ciara both date from 1988 but are less than one third the size of LE Eithne which displaces 1910 tonnes.

Ireland is now committed to operating seven offshore patrol vessels and one multi-role vessel (MRV) which, as well as being larger, will be able to co-ordinate helicopter, underwater and land operations.

However, to reduce costs, the proposed new MRV will not boast a helicopter landing facility.

It is expected to enter service in 2019/2020 though it is still are the design planning stage.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said he would like to see the new larger vessel have a medical centre capability to allow it deploy for major humanitarian missions.

The Naval Service aims to replace vessels once they approach a 35 year service life  though five of the eight vessels in service are now relatively new.

The three new ships are larger developments of the basic LE Roisin design.

However, they are 12m bigger at 90m in overall length and displace 433 tonnes more.

With a top speed of 23 knots, the new ships are also over 30pc faster than the ageing vessels they replaced.

They are vastly more advanced and are also capable of handling both drone aircraft and remotely controlled robotic subs.
Three Irish men have been acquitted in the Netherlands of killing fellow Irish criminal Keith Ennis.

However a Dutch court did convict them of dismembering Ennis body with a chainsaw and dumping the body parts in a lake in Amsterdam.

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Philip County (28), Barry McArdle (30) and Kenneth Brunell (29) were sentenced to two years in prison for hiding a dead body - a felony under Dutch law.

The judges said in their verdict that the outcome of the investigation into Ennis violent death is "highly unsatisfactory, especially for Ennis next of kin, who do not know who murdered him."

The court decided that there was insufficient evidence that the three men killed Ennis.

Ennis (29) was stabbed to death in February 2009 in an apartment in Rotterdam, the second biggest city of the Netherlands.

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He had been lying low in Holland, after he allegedly fell out with former criminal associates. Shortly before traveling to Amsterdam Ennis had been arrested by the Gardai, who subsequently raided a warehouse in Dublin where a large supply of drugs was found.

Shortly after Ennis arrived in Holland on Februray 24, his body was found dismembered in Het IJ, a lake in the heart of Amsterdam. Several body parts were found in plastic bags and although it was clear his death had been violent, the police had trouble identifying the body.

Only after his fingerprints were sent to gardai were the Dutch detectives able to identify Ennis.

According to court proceedings, the Dutch police found after a long investigation, that Ennis had been in touch with his fellow Irishman Philip County while he was in Holland, although the nature of their acquaintance remained somewhat vague.

County is the only suspect who has given a statement to police about the death of Ennis. He claims his fellow suspects Barry McArdle and Kenneth Brunell were responsible for the murder. County and McArdle, who have each been convicted in Ireland on drug related offences, had allegedly travelled to Holland to lie low as well.

The Dutch public prosecutor deemed Countys statement as trustworthy and asked the court in April for 11 years imprisonment for McArdle and Brunell. For County the public prosecutor demanded a year long prison sentence, for helping to hide the body.

According to County, Ennis was murdered in an apartment in Rotterdam, where he came to socialise with County, McArdle and Brunell. County told the police he stepped out to get liquor and when he came back, he found Ennis had been stabbed to death. According to County, a heated discussion while they played PlayStation had turned violent.

After that happened County, McArdle and Brunell worked together to dismember Ennis corpse and to dump him in the water.

But the Dutch court ruled that although some parts of Countys statement are clearly supported by other available evidence, County most likely did not tell the whole truth. Because of this, it can not be determined without doubt that it were McArdle and Brunell who killed Ennis.

Quite the opposite: the court thinks it is possible County himself played a bigger role in Ennis death than he claimed. Brunell and McArdle have denied any wrongdoing, saying County had dropped them off at a local stripclub, hours before the murder took place. They say they never even met Ennis.

Because murder could not be proven, the men were sentenced only because of their "gruesome and shameless treatment" of Ennis body. The Dutch judge ruled that "as long as there is a real possibility that a suspect is innocent, he needs to be acquitted, even if there are indications of wrongdoing."

Brunell has served his time while awaiting trial and is expected to return to Ireland shortly. McArdle is also expected to return to Ireland as he awaits his appeal.
Garda management were warned that warrants for phone taps were being put in place where officers provided little or no documentation to support their justification. Photo: Stock picture

Political pressure is growing for an inquiry into the extent of "rogue" Garda phone tapping of innocent people and a political activist.

Senior politicians from both Labour and Fianna Fail expressed deep concern about the revelations that followed a three-month investigation by this newspaper.

Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry said the revelations are a "matter of huge concern" and called for a "full and speedy" investigation.

He said the allegations are a "terrible indictment of practices and procedures" within certain elements of the force.

Mr MacSharry, a member of the Dail's powerful Public Accounts Committee (PAC), said: "Consecutive scandals have created a cumulative decline in confidence and it must be dealt with immediately."

Labour leader Brendan Howlin said the prospect of gardai being used for politically motivated "rogue actions" is "profoundly worrying".

Mr Howlin said there must be "clarity" on the truth of what occurred and who can investigate the matter.

He expressed particular concern that a political activist had their phone tapped.

"I think it adds to the whole broad list of issues that - if it's true as I'm reading the papers like everybody else - shows an element of rogue actions being taken and if they were politically motivated."

He said "if people could utilise An Garda Siochana for political ends, it is profoundly worrying". Mr Howlin noted the several different inquiries into the Garda on the "myriad of concerns that people have in relation to policing".

Read more - Revealed: Politician's election worker had phone bugged by gardai because 'he was a rival of a powerful Government minister'

"It's very hard to see how we are going to have the absolute truth on all these matters that the public demand," he said.

The remarks follow an Irish Independent investigation that revealed the phone tapping of innocent people. It highlighted how innocent members of the public had their phone conversations listened to without their knowledge. Garda management were warned that warrants for phone taps were being put in place where officers provided little or no documentation to support their justification.

When concerns were raised, the detective felt he was sidelined. He sued the authorities for his treatment and the case was settled out of court by the State in the last few weeks.

That was followed by further extraordinary details on how a political activist had their phone monitored.

The 'Sunday Independent' reported the bugging only stopped after a decorated detective raised concern that it may be serving "political purposes".

The wire tapping occurred on the phone of the political party activist who was working for a constituency rival of a powerful government minister.

The whistleblower was transferred to a different department within two weeks of flagging his fears the force was being used for "political purposes".

The issues pre-date Noirin O'Sullivan's appointment as Garda Commissioner.

Read more - 'Profoundly worrying that gardai could be used for politically motivated rogue actions' - Brendan Howlin

Prominent journalists Geraldine Kennedy and Bruce Arnold, both victims of a Garda phone tapping scandal in the 1980s, expressed surprise that similar concerns about the practice have arisen again decades later. Mr Arnold said that the latest revelations have "brought us back to an area that I thought we had finished with".

A Department of Justice spokesman insisted there are "very strong safeguards" to ensure the telecommunications interceptions system provided for by law is "operated properly". He said there are strict criteria about when tapping can be used and this occurs in "cases of serious crime or national security". Successive Designated Judges who oversee the system "have satisfied themselves that it is being operated in accordance with the strict legal requirements", he added.
The public have been warned of the spread of a large rodent which may have been first brought to Ireland for pet farms.

Native to South America, the coypu is one of the biggest rodents in the world, weighing between five and seven kg and measuring a metre long.

Also known as the river rat, it is often mistaken for an otter but can be identified by its long, round tail and orange or yellow teeth.

Colette OFlynn, Invasive Species Officer for the National Biodiversity Data centre told Independent.ie it is unusual to see a coypu in the wild in Ireland.

"It is known mainly for being a pet species. It is likely that someone brought one or more here for a pet famr and they escaped into the wild," Ms OFlynn said.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service say they have trapped 10 coypus in or around the Curraheen area in Cork since the original sighting of the creature in the River Curaheen two years ago.

Ms OFlynn said that the rodent can cause damage to the environment if it is not properly monitored or controlled.

"This is all about understanding what were dealing with here by finding out how many coypu there are in the area now. We need to ascertain how spread out they are from where the first one was seen," OFlynn said.

"The problem is coypus are herbivores. They only eat plants, which means they will eat a lot of the riverside vegetation which other wildlife in the area depend on.

"They are also known to burrow into riverbanks, which can cause banks to either destabilise or collapse completely."

The NPWS are now urging the public to inform them of any sightings of the creature in an attempt to monitor its spread.

The say they will use information compiled from the public to assist in baiting areas and setting traps.

The coypu was last spotted in the Lee Fields in Cork City a week ago, according to the Irish Examiner.

If someone sees a coypu, its fine if they get a photo. The main thing to let us know is the location, date and time, Danny OKeeffe, NWPS south-west region conservation ranger told the Irish Examiner.

It is hoped that keeping track of the spread of coypus will prevent longer-term costs with dealing with the species, with an estimated 2.5 million (2.95m) being spent by the UK towards eradicating the coypu.
The wreckage from the accident is removed from the scene in Mullagh, Co Cavan. Photo: Steve Humphreys

Two people have been killed and six more hospitalised following a tragic 48 hours on Irish roads.

Six friends were hospitalised after a serious road traffic accident in Co Cavan yesterday morning.

The crash came as 17-year-old Evan Brennan was killed in Meath on Friday, and a cyclist in his 40s died in Cork yesterday.

In the horror accident in Cavan, the injured are all aged between 19 and 21. The friends were travelling in a black Volkswagen saloon car along the Claddagh Road near Mullagh village when their vehicle hit a ditch at approximately 5.30am.

Last night, Pete Rogers, Mark O'Brien, Edward O'Brien and Cormac Murphy, from Moynalty, Co Meath, were being treated at hospitals in the capital. Mr Rogers is understood to be in a critical condition in the Mater Hospital after suffering serious neck injuries.

Their friends, Shauna Daly, from Kells, Co Meath, and Noel Lynch from Kingscourt, Co Cavan, were treated at Cavan General Hospital.

First cousins Edward and Mark O'Brien, and Cormac Murphy were transferred to Dublin's James Connolly Memorial Hospital where their conditions are described as serious but stable.

Three of the young men played for their local GAA team in Moynalty and were described by locals as being very close and popular young men.

Pete plays for the club's senior side while Mark is on the club's Under-19 panel.

Edward has togged out for Moynalty at under-age level while Cormac is a member of Cuchulainn's GAA club based in the Mullagh parish.

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One local, who asked not to be named, last night described the four young men as "extremely close" and said the accident had come as a massive shock to the local communities affected.

"They are all extremely close and are very popular in the local area. It's come as a huge shock to everyone. Our thoughts are now with them and hopefully they can all pull through OK," he said.

The scene of the serious accident remained sealed off throughout yesterday afternoon as Garda forensic collision investigators carried out examinations of the crash site.

The officers carried out a detailed inspection along the Claddagh Road, while a helicopter from the Garda Air Support Unit was used to carry out an aerial examination of the crash site.

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A recovery vehicle was used to lift the black saloon car from the roadside, and transported it from the scene shortly after 4pm. A local man who lives near the scene of the crash described how he saw emergency services attend the scene early yesterday morning.

"I was leaving my house at around 6.30am and I saw the ambulances flying up the road. There have been a number of accidents along the road in recent years, I just hope the young people who are injured will be OK," he said.

Tributes

Meanwhile, tributes have been paid to tragic Evan Brennan (17), who was killed when the car he was driving hit a fence in Ballivor in Co Meath.

Evan was from the Summerhill area of Co Meath, close to where the incident happened on Friday morning.

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Local Fine Gael councillor Joe Fox described how the community had been left devastated by the tragedy.

"He was a lovely person and was from a lovely family. He was very involved in the GAA and he was a credit to his parents."

Cllr Fox said the whole community was reeling in shock.

"Everyone is shocked by this terrible tragedy. It's terrible and shocking. My condolences to the family."

Yesterday afternoon, a male cyclist in his forties was killed after colliding with a 4X4 in Cork. The victim was named locally as Donal O'Brien.

The incident occurred on the Ballincollig bypass at approximately 12.25pm.

Emergency services quickly responded but Mr O'Brien was pronounced dead at the scene.

Garda investigators examined the scene and the road was closed for several hours.

The fatalities over the weekend bring to 57 the number of people who have lost their lives on Irish roads this year.

Last week, a female cyclist was killed in a collision with a tractor in Kerry.
A Galway woman living in Dublin has likened her rare condition during pregnancy to being the same as "having food poison for months at a time."

Mother of three Claire Mac Loughlin (36) has suffered from a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) during all three of her pregnancies.

The 36-year-old secondary school teacher, who is originally from Galway but now living in Artane in Dublin, said the condition impacted on her most during her third pregnancy with her son Arthur who is two-years-old.

HG is a condition experienced by 1pc to 2pc of pregnancies in Ireland and includes symptoms such as intense nausea and vomiting multiple times every day.

Dehydration and weight loss can develop rapidly and women are at risks of further complications such as malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.

A new charity called Hyperemsis Ireland set up by leading maternity experts including Caitlin Dean, Chairperson of the UK group Pregnancy Sickness Support, will offer peer to peer support to women who endure HG.

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Ms Mac Loughlin said it is a "chronic illness" and said she experienced vomiting blood and hair loss during her pregnancies.

"I suffered worse between eight and 16 weeks when I was sick up to 50 times per day.

While the sickness eased, I continued to suffer throughout. I couldnt work and had to start maternity leave at 24 weeks pregnant.

"HG severely impacted on my ability to lead a normal life during all my pregnancies," she said.

"It is often dismissed as at best morning sickness or at worst a total figment of the imagination. This needs to change and the charity will go a long way towards doing that," she said.

Ms Mac Loughlin said her three children Arthur (2), Henry (8) and Anna (5) are her entire existence.

"I am privileged to be their mother," she said.

She said the support she received from her husband, Phillip King, was invaluable and she "couldnt have done it without him."

However, she said the condition "affected him badly as it was hard for him to see his wife that way."

The illness continued after pregnancies but the worst case was after having her son Arthur when she said she was still nauseous "for several weeks."

It lasted only a few days in her other pregnancies but the teacher said "some women do not get better."

"I lost two stone in weight and it messes with your eating patterns meaning you do not have good stability," she said.

She said it is "socially very limiting" and can prove to be difficult for expectant mothers who have to take time off work and lose much needed money.

Ms Mac Loughlin said she is "really happy with the new charity."

"Peer to peer volunteers are urgently needed to help women deal with and discuss the physical, psychological and financial impact of the illness on their lives and their family's lives.

"There are a lot of very compassionate and competent Health Care Practitioners out there but education on the subject needs to be up to date and standardised," she said.
A group of protesters wielding torches took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, to voice their disapproval over plans to remove a Confederate monument.

Why were they protesting?

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The group  led by white nationalist Richard Spencer, a prominent figure in the so-called alt-right movement  say they were celebrating their heritage.

Im here to take part in this great celebration of our heritage and to say no to the city of Charlottesville. Youre not going to tear down our statue and youre not going to replace us, Spencer told NBC.

Chants heard included all white lives matter, you will not replace us, and Russia is our friend.

Whats the statue?

A monument to General Robert Edward Lee  the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American civil war  has stood in Charlottesville since 1924.

The city council voted for its removal earlier this year, citing residents who see it as a sign of white supremacy.

What is the connection between Confederates and white supremacy?

In 1860, 11 southern US states seceded from the Union to protect the institution of slavery, forming the Confederate States of America which led to the American civil war.

The Confederate flag has come to represent a symbol of hatred and racism for many people, including some of those who wave it proudly, although to others its a symbol of southern pride.

What was the reaction to the protest?

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Mayor Mike Signer called the protest either profoundly ignorant or aimed at instilling fear in minority populations in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK.

The Daily Progress reports that Charlottesville Republican Party chairman Erich Reimer said the groups promotion of intolerance and hatred is utterly disgusting and disturbing beyond words.

Hundreds of community members came out for a candle-lit counter protest, telling the Daily Progress: They will not come here to intimidate us unchallenged.
Jeremy Corbyn has called for Theresa May to debate with him live on TV  by leaving a comment on a Facebook Live interview between the Prime Minister and ITVs Robert Peston.

A comment from the Labour leaders Facebook page said critical issues with healthcare and the police and an elitist approach to taxes meant the British people deserve to see us debate  but May rejected the call.

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Hi Theresa May, as Prime Minister you have served your elite friends by giving them tax cuts while wages have stagnated, house-building is at its lowest since the 1920s, there are 20,000 fewer police on our streets since 2010 and the NHS is in crisis, the comment read. Do you not think the British people deserve to see us debate, live and on TV?

What I think is more important is actually that I and he take questions directly from the voters, answered the Prime Minister, when the question was posed by Peston. I dont think people get much out of seeing politicians having a go at each other, I think people want to hear directly.

The Facebook Live interview, which received around 400,000 views, was predominantly received quite negatively on the platform. Users sent 10,000 angry faces in comparison with just 1,200 hearts and 4,300 thumbs ups.

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It seems not everyone was satisfied with the Conservative leaders answer to Corbyns challenge either.

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Meanwhile, some threw their support behind Corbyn by claiming he would win if a live debate was aired.

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Others showed their support for May however, with Irene Barbara Johnstone commenting on the webcast: If this Prime Minister cant get the job done, seeing Brexit through in our (UK) favour nobody else can!

Aside from the topic of a live debate with her opposition, May discussed a variety of areas in the Q&A session. She told Peston she is a type one diabetic, and despite injecting herself with insulin four or five times a day she feels the condition doesnt stop you from doing anything.

May also said she didnt mind comments on her fashion sense, stating: What I would hope for women out there, be it getting into politics or in business or the workplace generally, is be yourself.

Peston told May almost 40,000 questions had been submitted during the 45-minute interview on ITV News Facebook page  and the outlet says similar online discussions will be held with the other party leaders in the coming weeks.
If youve been put off going on a cruise before because of the potential age range of your fellow passengers, maybe you should give these new ships a chance.

U by Uniworld is aimed at the millennial market  well, the itineraries are designed with people aged 21-45 in mind  and there are four different eight-day options starting from spring 2018.

Uniworld president and CEO Ellen Bettridge told Conde Naste Traveller that the average age of passengers is usually 50, so the intineraries planned for these new trips are a bit different to normal  were talking silent discos, painting sessions (with wine), plenty of yoga, and cocktail making classes.

The rooms on the two ships, which will be known as The A and The B (nice and easy to remember), will all have river views, and if you want to keep costs as low as possible, you can go for a studio room with bunk beds in.

There will also be plenty of hammocks and beanbags to hang out on around the ship. Then, on the top deck, the glass enclosed room disappears into the oor to create an open-air drinking spot.

Among the routes is one called Rolling On The Rhine, which goes from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, as well as the Danube Flow, which takes in cities such as Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest.

Theres also a cruise from Amsterdam to Frankfurt and a German route, which goes from Frankfurt to Regensburg.

When it comes to activities off of the boat, passengers will be able to choose between hands-on excursions which are included or so-called U Time. This costs more but includes edgier things like a street art walking tour in Paris.

Programmes can be tailored to individual travel personalities  other sorts of excursions include market shopping for foodies, guided bike tours of Second World War sites in Nuremberg for history buffs and kayaking through Unesco World Heritage Sites for adventurers. And at night, U Hosts will take you to hidden bars and nightclubs in party cities like Amsterdam, if its the beer youre most excited for.

Of course, you also dont have to follow a timetable at all  youre free to explore by yourself. And its worth bearing in mind that several of the cruises are based around cool events like festivals.

The meals are another reason why were tempted to choose a cruise next year  the price includes breakfast and dinners, and will feature delicious street food.

Itineraries on The A start at 899 per person and include sailings along the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers. Pricing for The B, which sails exclusively on the Seine River and throughout France, starts at 1,799 per person.
Armin Laschet, of the Christian Democratic Union, celebrates after the state election in the western German state of Northrhine-Westphalia (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party has won a state election in its centre-left rivals' traditional heartland, a stinging blow to the challenger in September's national vote.

The western state of North Rhine-Westphalia is Germany's most populous and has been led by the Social Democrats for all but five years since 1966.

It is also the home state of Martin Schulz, the Social Democrat seeking to deny Mrs Merkel a fourth term in the September election.

Mr Schulz had been hoping for a boost after two previous state election defeats sapped his party's momentum.

Instead, Mrs Merkel's Christian Democratic Union won 33% of the vote in the election for the state legislature, with the Social Democrats trailing on 31.2%.

Social Democrat governor Hannelore Kraft's coalition lost its majority as her junior governing partners, the Greens, took only 6.4%. Conservative challenger Armin Laschet, a deputy leader of Mrs Merkel's party, was set to replace Ms Kraft.

"The CDU has won the heartland of the Social Democrats," said the conservatives' general secretary, Peter Tauber.

"This is a difficult day for the Social Democrats, a difficult day for me personally as well," Mr Schulz, who was not on the ballot on Sunday, told supporters in Berlin.

"I come from the state in which we took a really stinging defeat today."

He urged the party to concentrate now on the national election, saying: "We will sharpen our profile further - we have to as well.

"We will continue fighting; the result will come on September 24."

The Social Democrats' national ratings soared after Mr Schulz, a former European Parliament president, was nominated in January as Mrs Merkel's challenger.

But defeats in two other state elections since late March punctured the party's euphoria over his nomination.

The Social Democrats' result in Sunday's election, the last before the national vote, was their worst in North Rhine-Westphalia since the Second World War.

In the state's last election in 2012, the Social Democrats beat the CDU by 39.1% to 26.3%.

The pro-business Free Democrats won a strong 12.6% of the vote on Sunday after a campaign headed by their national leader, Christian Lindner.

That gave the party, with which Mrs Merkel governed Germany from 2009 to 2013, a strong base for its drive to return to the national parliament in September after it was ejected four years ago.

The nationalist Alternative for Germany won 7.4%, giving it seats in its 13th state legislature. The opposition Left Party fell just short of the 5% needed to win seats.

The result gives the CDU and Free Democrats a very slim majority. If they cannot agree on a governing alliance, Mr Laschet could opt for a "grand coalition" of the biggest parties with the Social Democrats.

A "grand coalition" would mirror Mrs Merkel's national government, in which the Social Democrats are the junior partners.

Mrs Merkel's party seemed keen not to appear too euphoric, insisting that regional issues played the key role.

Asked about Germany's government after September her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, said: "We always have to keep a cool head ... we shouldn't talk about coalitions before the harvest is in."

National polls show the Social Democrats trailing Mrs Merkel's conservatives by up to 10 points after drawing level earlier this year.

AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin plays a piano before meeting Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the first day of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China, yesterday. Photo: Aleksey Nikolskyi. Photo: Reuters

North Korea, defying calls to rein in its weapons programme, fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia yesterday, days after a new leader came to power in South Korea pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.

The US military's Pacific Command said it was assessing the type of missile that was fired but it was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile". The US threat assessment has not changed from a national security standpoint, a US official said.

Japanese Defence Minister Tomomi Inada said the missile could be a new type. It flew for 30 minutes before dropping into the sea between North Korea's east coast and Japan. North Korea has consistently test-fired missiles in that direction.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the missile landed 97km south of Russia's Vladivostok region.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the launch a message by Pyongyang to South Korea after the election of President Moon Jae-in, who took office on Wednesday.

"You first have to get into Kim Jong-un's head - which is, he's in a state of paranoia, he's incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him," Ms Haley told ABC's 'This Week' programme, referring to North Korea's leader.

Ms Haley added that the United States will "continue to tighten the screws", referring to sanctions and working with the international community to put pressure on Pyongyang.

The missile flew 700km and reached an altitude of more than 2km, according to officials in South Korea and Japan, further and higher than an intermediate-range missile North Korea successfully tested in February from the same region of Kusong, north-west of its capital, Pyongyang. An intercontinental ballistic missile is considered to have a range of more than 6,000km.

North Korea is widely believed to be developing an intercontinental missile tipped with a nuclear weapon that is capable of reaching the US.

Speaking in Beijing, Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, told reporters Mr Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping had discussed the situation on the Korean peninsula, including the latest missile launch, and expressed "mutual concerns" about growing tensions.

Mr Putin is in Beijing for a conference on a plan for a new Silk Road. Delegations from the United States, South Korea and North Korea are also there.

The launch, at 5.27am Seoul time, came two weeks after North Korea fired a missile that disintegrated minutes into flight, marking its fourth consecutive failure since March.

South Korea's new president held his first National Security Council in response to the launch, which he called a "clear violation" of UN Security Council resolutions, his office said. "The president said while South Korea remains open to the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, it is only possible when the North shows a change in attitude," Yoon Young-chan, Mr Moon's press secretary, told a briefing.

Mr Moon won Tuesday's election on a platform of a moderate approach to North Korea and has said he would be willing to go to Pyongyang under the right circumstances.
Austrian Foreign Minister and new conservative leader Sebastian Kurz will meet Chancellor Christian Kern today and suggest they jointly propose a snap parliamentary election be held, Mr Kurz said yesterday.

"I will meet Chancellor Christian Kern and President [Alexander] Van der Bellen tomorrow and make a suggestion," he told a news conference. "From my point of view the first step must be that we reach a joint decision in favour of snap elections," he said, adding that he wanted the election to be held after the summer.

An election will give the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) a good chance of entering national government less than a year after its candidate lost a presidential run-off, as it currently leads in the polls.

But surveys suggest the conservative People's Party (OVP) would leap from third to first place, and support for the FPO and Kern's Social Democrats would fall, if Mr Kurz took over as OVP leader.
French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Edouard Philippe, a relatively unknown 46-year-old politician, as prime minister - making good on campaign promises to repopulate French politics with new faces.

Alexis Kohler, Mr Macron's new general secretary at the presidential Elysee Palace, made the announcement on Monday.

Mr Philippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers.

He is also a member of the mainstream-right Republicans party that was badly beaten by Mr Macron's victory in the presidential campaign.

Mr Philippe's appointment ticks several boxes for the 39-year-old Mr Macron, France's youngest president, who took power on Sunday.

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Mr Philippe's age reinforces the generational shift in France's corridors of power and the image of youthful vigour that Mr Macron is cultivating.

Mr Philippe could also attract other Republicans to Mr Macron's cause as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass his promised economic reforms.

Expand Close Alexis Kohler announces that conservative lawmaker Edouard Philippe will succeed Bernard Cazeneuve to become France's new prime minister / Facebook

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Whatsapp Alexis Kohler announces that conservative lawmaker Edouard Philippe will succeed Bernard Cazeneuve to become France's new prime minister

Mr Philippe is close to Alain Juppe, a former prime minister who campaigned for the French presidency, but was beaten in a primary.

Reacting to Mr Philippe's appointment, Mr Juppe called the new prime minister "a man of great talent" with "all the qualities to handle the difficult job".

Mr Philippe served as Mr Juppe's campaign spokesman during the Republicans party primary.

When Mr Juppe was beaten, Mr Philippe switched his support to Francois Fillon for the French presidency but then quit the campaign when prosecutors started investigating allegations that Mr Fillon's family benefited illegally from cushy taxpayer-funded jobs.

The mayor of Le Havre since 2010, Mr Philippe previously worked as a director of public affairs for French nuclear group Areva from 2007-2010 and as a lawyer from 2004-2007 with New York City-based international law firm Debevoise and Plimpton LLP.
Mr Macron lights the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Photos: REUTERS/Alain Jocard/Pool

Outgoing president Francois Hollande speaks to Emmanuel Macron after the handover at the Elysee Palace Photo: Reuters

Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte on the steps of the Elysee Palace Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

Emmanuel Macron will use his first international trip to try to persuade Germany today to build a common eurozone budget, a day after being sworn in as France's youngest ever president.

However, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has made it clear that the politician being hailed as the potential saviour of the European project can expect short shrift if he asks Germany to fork out national funds to boost a French recovery.

Mr Macron, a 39-year-old Europhile who used his inaugural address to promise to "reform and relaunch" Europe, was sworn in during a pomp-filled inauguration at the Elysee Palace, joined by his wife Brigitte, family and 300 dignitaries.

Promising to restore flagging French self-confidence, he repeatedly underlined the importance of France's place in the EU "which protects us and enables us to project our values in the world".

However, he added, the 28-member bloc needed to be "reformed and relaunched".

"We will need a more efficient, democratic and political Europe, because it is the instrument of our power and sovereignty," he insisted in a speech in the Elysee's gilded Salle des fetes.

The centrist ex-economy minister and investment banker swept to victory on May 7 promising to kick-start the European project while reforming France after beating the far-right's Marine Le Pen, who wanted to ditch the euro and threatened to pull France out of the EU.

Deeply relieved, as were her pro-EU colleagues, Mrs Merkel instantly hailed his election as "spectacular" and a "victory for a strong, united Europe".

However, beneath the smiles, experts have warned talks could swiftly founder between the leaders of Europe's two "motor" economies if Germany feels it is being asked to fork out for France, notably via eurozone bonds.

Last week Mrs Merkel appeared to rule this idea out, and also warned that Germany could do nothing about reducing its persistently high trade surplus, despite French calls to help Europe's economic laggards by importing more.

However, sources close to Mr Macron yesterday insisted he would not press for joint eurozone bonds to fund the budget. "Our priority is a budget for the eurozone, which can have different forms of financing," an unnamed source in the Macron camp told the 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung' newspaper.

Sylvie Goulard, a key Macron adviser who has been tipped to be prime minister, added: "One should not criticise Emmanuel Macron for points that are not in his programme. He never spoke out at any time in the election campaign for eurobonds.

"I consider eurobonds a possible tool to finance future EU joint projects on favourable terms. But they are not meant to shift a state's existing debts on to the shoulders of the other Europeans. This is rightly rejected in Germany," she added

Mrs Merkel is thought to be keen to forge a personal alliance with the new French president. But she is facing elections of her own in September which will limit what she can offer.

Mrs Merkel appeared on course for a historic fourth term as chancellor last night after winning a crushing victory in regional elections seen as a bellwether of the national mood.

In the last major vote before September's general election, Mrs Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) seized control of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state and a traditional stronghold for her main rival, Martin Schulz.

According to initial exit polls, the CDU won 34.5pc of the vote in elections to the state parliament, compared to 30.5pc for Mr Schulz's Social Democrats (SPD) - a swing of more than 8 points. "I've taken a real hit tonight," a visibly shaken Mr Schulz said. "I'm not a magician. We have to think what my share of the responsibility was."

The state is home to 18m people, almost a quarter of Germany's population.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
The asylum seekers pose outside the building of Hong Kong's immigration department. (AP/Vincent Yu)

A group of refugees who sheltered former NSA contractor Edward Snowden four years ago have seen their asylum requests rejected by Hong Kong, according to their lawyer.

Robert Tibbo said immigration officials denied the applications by the four adults and three children, in what he said is retaliation for helping Mr Snowden.

The applicants are from the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Mr Snowden hid out in Hong Kong for two weeks in June 2013 after he leaked documents revealing extensive US government surveillance.

His whereabouts were a mystery during that time.

It was not until last year that the role Mr Tibbo and his clients played in sheltering Mr Snowden was revealed.

Mr Tibbo said his clients will appeal against the ruling.

They have also applied for refugee status in Canada.

He said he represents 50 to 60 other clients who are applying for asylum in Hong Kong, where cases typically take years to be processed.

But so far, only these cases have received a decision from immigration officials - issued last Thursday - in a sign they have been targeted by authorities, Mr Tibbo said.

"The Hong Kong government "has repeatedly tried to question the four adults about their involvement with Mr Snowden.

"For example, about how long had Mr Snowden been staying with them, what was Mr Snowden's movement in the territory, which is irrelevant to the (asylum) claims," he said.

The group includes Ajith Pushpakumara, a former Sri Lankan soldier; Vanessa Mae Rodel, who is from the Philippines and has a five-year-old daughter; and a Sri Lankan couple, Supun Thilina Kellapatha and Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis, and their two children.

AP
New French President Emmanuel Macron is welcomed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. (AP/Michael Sohn)

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have pledged to work closely together to draw up a "road map" of reforms for the European Union.

The pair said they are both prepared even to implement treaty changes if needed.

The two met in Berlin on Mr Macron's first full day in office, which started with him naming 46-year-old Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister.

Mrs Merkel called Mr Macron's visit an honour and a sign of the deep friendship between the two European powerhouses.

"We each represent the interests of our own countries, but the interests of Germany are naturally closely tied to the interests of France," Mrs Merkel said.

She added that she hoped for a "new dynamism" in German-French relations, saying that "Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that".

Mr Macron said that he would work with Mrs Merkel on a "road map", and that they needed to work on "deep reforms that are necessary and need common work".

Both leaders suggested they were prepared to change European treaties if needed, but Mrs Merkel stressed that such measures were not immediately on the table.

"First we need to work on what we want to change, and then if it turns out it needs a treaty change, then we're prepared to do that," she said.

The visit to Berlin continued a tradition of French presidents making their first foreign trip to Germany.

A large group of onlookers, some carrying European flags, stood outside the chancellery as Mr Macron arrived.

Germany and France have traditionally been the motor of European integration, but the relationship has become increasingly lopsided over recent years as France struggled economically.

The visit signalled Mr Macron's intentions to move rapidly on campaign promises to revive support for the beleaguered European Union by reforming and strengthening it.

In a nod to German concerns, Mr Macron said at the news conference with Mrs Merkel that he had never pushed for jointly issued eurobonds and does not favour European countries taking joint responsibility for old debts.

Germany, which has Europe's biggest economy, has vehemently opposed taking direct responsibility for weaker eurozone countries' debts.

Mr Macron added, however, that "what I know is that we have investments to make (in Europe), and so we have to work on investment mechanisms for the future".

Earlier, the appointment of Mr Philippe to the top job in his government ticked several boxes for Mr Macron, at 39 France's youngest president, who took power on Sunday.

Mr Philippe's age reinforced the generational shift in France's corridors of power and the image of youthful vigour that Mr Macron is cultivating.

He is also relatively unknown to voters, fulfilling Mr Macron's campaign promise to repopulate French politics with new faces.

Mr Philippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers.

His appointment marks a milestone in the rebuilding of France's political landscape, which has been ignited by the election of Mr Macron - the first president of modern France not from the country's mainstream left or right parties.

Mr Philippe is a member of the mainstream-right Republicans party and could possibly attract other Republicans to Mr Macron's cause, as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in parliament to pass his promised economic reforms.

Alain Juppe, a former French prime minister, called Mr Philippe "a man of great talent" with "all the qualities to handle the difficult job".

In Berlin, Mr Macron declined to answer a question about his new prime minister, only saying the choice of Mr Philippe is part of the new political landscape he is promoting.

Speed is becoming one of Mr Macron's trademarks - t he announcement of Mr Philippe's appointment delivered by the presidency's new secretary general, including the "thank you" at the end, took just eight seconds.

As well as the political coup of poaching Mr Philippe from the right, Mr Macron is also siphoning off support from politicians on the left.

At least 24 Socialists are now campaigning for re-election under the banner of Mr Macron's Republic on the Move party.

But not everyone was pleased with the Philippe announcement.

For far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Mr Macron's rival for the presidency, the selection of Mr Philippe reflects a continuation of the system she hoped to break.

"This is the sacred alliance of the old right and left, united in their wish to remain in place at any price," Ms Le Pen said in a statement.

Defeated by a Macron landslide, she denounced what she predicted would be a continuation of old policies, including "austerity, submission to Brussels, massive immigration".

The populist Ms Le Pen said her National Front party is now the only "true opposition" for June legislative elections.

French far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who won nearly 20% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, also reacted with hostility.

Voters go to the polls again in June to elect 577 National Assembly politicians.

Mr Melenchon urged them not to give Mr Macron a parliamentary majority.

"The right has just been annexed, with a prime minister taken from its ranks, from the Republicans," Mr Melenchon said.

"Don't give full powers to Mr Macron and his prime minister."

Mr Macron's trip to Berlin highlighted his pro-European politics and desire to work with Mrs Merkel on what he says must become "a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe".

Mr Macron previously met Mrs Merkel when he visited Berlin in March as a candidate.

Germany is looking to Mr Macron to revitalise France as an economic power and political heavyweight in the EU, which is facing complex divorce proceedings with its current number two economy, Britain.

When Britain leaves the bloc in 2019, France will be the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

As a candidate, Mr Macron called for a "new Franco-German deal" that would involve "much more structured co-operation" on investment, on European border security and on defence.

Mr Macron is the conservative Mrs Merkel's fourth French president in nearly 12 years as chancellor.

She built a solid relationship with Mr Macron's predecessor, Socialist Francois Hollande, despite their political differences - notably with their joint effort to secure an accord to calm the fighting in eastern Ukraine in tense talks in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015.

Germany is keen to continue the Franco-German diplomatic drive to keep a lid on the situation in Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists are battling the government.

Mrs Merkel has praised Mr Macron's embrace of European unity but has offered few concrete details about the way forward for German-French relations.

AP
A still image taken from a video uploaded by the Syrian Army on May 13, 2017 shows smoke rising from Qaboun, on the edge of the capital Damascus

The Trump administration has accused the Syrian government of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital Damascus.

It also stepped up criticism of Iran and Russia for supporting the Syrian government.

The allegation came as President Donald Trump weighs options in Syria, where the US attacked a government air base last month in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians.

But Mr Trump has not outlined a larger strategy for ending the Arab country's civil war or ushering Syrian president Bashar Assad out of power.

The state department said it believed about 50 detainees a day are being hanged at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes north of Damascus.

Many of the bodies, it said, are then burned in the crematorium.

"We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place," said Stuart Jones, the top US diplomat for the Middle East.

He accused the Syrian government of sinking "to a new level of depravity".

The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium.

The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not definitely prove the building is a crematorium, but they show construction consistent with such use.

In presenting the photographs, Mr Jones called on Russia and Iran to press Assad's government to establish a credible ceasefire with Syrian rebel groups and begin negotiations on a political settlement.

"We are appalled by the atrocities that have been carried out by the Syrian regime and these atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran," Mr Jones said.

State department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said secretary of state Rex Tillerson had been "firm and clear" in a meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov last week that "Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad".

A main point of that meeting "was telling Russia to use its power to rein in the regime", she said.

"Simply put, the killing, the devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria."

The war has killed as many as 400,000 people since 2011.

It has contributed to Europe's worst refugee crisis since the Second World War and enabled Islamic State to emerge as a global terrorism threat.

Mr Trump travels to the Middle East later this week on his first official foreign trip.
Vice State President addresses the Global Summit of Women. (Photo: VNA)

She added that the summit had become an important forum in linking women in the world, contributing to the common efforts of ensuring gender equality and for womens progress.

The 3-day event gathered over 1,300 delegates from 62 countries to discuss solutions encouraging women to participate more actively in economic activities.

Accordingly, female politicians and entrepreneurs discussed the world economic situation, and the advantages and disadvantages of the 4th science and technology revolution towards the efforts to ensure gender equality in each country; sharing policies in support of women in balancing work and life; raising social awareness on the role and ability of women; encouraging men to join housework with women; increasing the participation of women in coping with ageing economies; and suggesting solutions to narrow the gender gap.

The summit also held discussions on womens leadership and management skills, the promotion of business leadership of women, the application of technology in businesses, and access to education and markets for women.

Actively attending the summit discussions, the Vietnamese delegation provided Vietnams experience in promoting the role of women in every area of life. Vietnams efforts in ensuring womens progress were appreciated by international friends, as it was ranked among the top five countries reporting the highest rate of women leaders and managers in businesses in the Asia - Pacific region./.
People watch a TV news program showing an image of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, published in the country's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, at Seoul Railway station in Seoul. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

North Korea has test-launched a ballistic missile that landed in the Sea of Japan.

The launch, which Tokyo said could be of a new type of missile, is a direct challenge to the new South Korean president and comes as US, Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.

It is the seventh such firing this year, although the US Pacific Command said that "the flight is not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile".

North Korea has said the strategic missile it tested over the weekend can carry a nuclear warhead.

Expand Close A woman walks by a TV news program showing images of North Korean missile launch, published in the country's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, at Seoul Railway station in Seoul (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man) / Facebook

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Whatsapp A woman walks by a TV news program showing images of North Korean missile launch, published in the country's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, at Seoul Railway station in Seoul (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

However, Japanese officials said the missile flew for about 30 minutes, travelling about 800 km (500 miles) and reaching an altitude of 2,000 km (1,240 miles) - a flight pattern that could indicate a new type of missile.

David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the missile could have a range of 4,500 km (about 2,800 miles) if flown on a standard, instead of a lofted, trajectory - considerably longer than Pyongyang's current missiles.

He said Sunday's launch may have been of a new mobile, two-stage liquid-fuelled missile North Korea displayed in a huge April 15 military parade.

South Korea, Japan and the US swiftly condemned the launch, which jeopardises new South Korean leader Moon Jae-in's willingness for dialogue with the rival North.

"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," said senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan.

"The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters that the launch was "absolutely unacceptable" and that Japan will respond resolutely.

The White House took note of the missile landing close to Russia's Pacific coast and said in a statement that North Korea has been "a flagrant menace for far too long".

The statement said Washington maintains its "ironclad commitment" to stand with its allies in the face of the serious threat posed by North Korea. The latest "provocation" should serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against the North, it said.

Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni said the G-7 summit his country is hosting later this month will discuss how to deal with the risk North Korea's missile launchings pose to global security.

He said in Beijing that "it's a serious problem for global stability and security, and I'm convinced that the upcoming G-7, in friendship, will contribute to resolving this issue."

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the missile was fired early Sunday morning from near Kusong, in North Phyongan province.

The Trump administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable and has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

The North's state media said on Saturday that the nation will bolster its nuclear capability unless the United States abandons its hostile policy.

"The United States should never expect us to give up our nuclear capability," the main Rodong newspaper said in a commentary carried by the Korean Central News Agency.

It said President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure and engagement" policy is only aimed at "stifling us" and will compel the North to "strengthen our nuclear deterrent at the maximum speed".

The launch also comes as troops from the US, Japan and two European nations gather near Guam for drills that are partly a message to North Korea.

The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korean navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula, according to Seoul's Defense Ministry.

Moon, the first liberal leader in Seoul in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office that he wouldd be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right. Mr Trump has also said he'd be "honoured" to talk with leader Kim Jong Un under favourable conditions.

On Saturday, a top North Korean diplomat in charge of US relations, Choe Son Hui, told reporters in Beijing that Pyongyang would be willing to meet with the Trump administration for negotiations "if the conditions are set". She did not elaborate.
North Korea's Hwasong-10 missile is paraded across Kim Il Sung Square during a military parade in Pyongyang last month (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

North Korea has said the missile it launched over the weekend was a new type of long-range ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead.

Pyongyang's propaganda must be considered with caution, but if confirmed, the claim marks another big step forward in the country's escalating efforts to field a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the US mainland.

Outside experts do not believe the North can do that yet, but each new test pushes the country closer to the goal.

The launch on Sunday is an immediate challenge to South Korea's new leader, a liberal elected just five days earlier who expressed a desire to reach out to North Korea.

North Korea's push to boost its weapons programme also makes it one of the Trump administration's most urgent foreign policy worries.

The missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and US militaries said. Tokyo said the flight pattern could indicate a new type of missile.

North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12 ... capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead".

Leader Kim Jong Un was said to have witnessed the test and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," according to KCNA.

The launch jeopardises new South Korean president Moon Jae-in's willingness to talk to the North, and came as US, Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.

"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan said.

"The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."

Mr Moon, South Korea's first liberal leader in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office last week that he would be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right.

The UN Security Council will hold closed consultations about the launch on Tuesday afternoon.

The Security Council has adopted six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions against North Korea.

President Donald Trump's administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable, but it has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

Japanese officials said the missile flew for about 30 minutes, travelling about 500 miles and reaching an unusually high altitude of 1,240 miles.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said it was launched from near Kusong, in North Phyongan province.

The US Pacific Command said "the flight is not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile," a technology the North is believed to have tested clandestinely by launching rockets to put satellites in orbit.

David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the missile could have a range of 2,800 miles if flown on a standard, instead of a lofted, trajectory - considerably longer than Pyongyang's current missiles.

He said Sunday's launch - the seventh such firing by North Korea this year - may have been of a new mobile, two-stage liquid-fuelled missile North Korea displayed in a huge April 15 military parade.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters the launch was "absolutely unacceptable" and that Japan would respond resolutely.

The White House took note of the missile landing close to Russia's Pacific coast and said that North Korea has been "a flagrant menace for far too long".

AP

Later, North Korea's ambassador to China said the missile test is part of the country's efforts to develop ways to defend itself against hostile aggression abroad.

Ji Jae Ryong told reporters at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing that Pyongyang would continue to conduct launches in the future, as long as the country's supreme leader deemed necessary.

Mr Ji also repeated an assertion by North Korean officials that Pyongyang has successfully foiled a CIA-backed plot to kill leader Kim Jong Un last month with a biochemical poison.
One of President Donald Trump's personal lawyers, who posted a picture of his daughter wearing lingerie from a modelling shoot, has hit back at critics on Twitter.

Michael Cohen posted the picture on Sunday night of daughter Samantha Blake Cohen wearing a black bra and tights.

He wrote: "So proud of my Ivy League daughter...brains and beauty channelling her Edie Sedgwick," a reference to the pioneering model and actress.

Some Twitter users responded to the post by calling it inappropriate.

Mr Cohen fired back by calling one user a "hater" and explaining that his daughter was recreating a famous Sedgwick pose.

He asked another critic if she was jealous.

Mr Cohen is a former Trump Organisation executive who served as a cable television surrogate for the Republican during the presidential campaign.

AP
American democracy is separately "under assault" from Donald Trump and Russia, the former US intelligence chief has warned.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, expressed his dismay over the sacking of FBI director James Comey amid a probe into Moscow's meddling in US elections and possible ties with the Trump campaign.

As Mr Trump works to fast-track Mr Comey's successor, lawmakers from both parties urged him to steer clear of any politicians for the job and say he must "clean up the mess that he mostly created".

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally - and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," said Mr Clapper. "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally." When he was asked, "Internally, from the president?" Mr Clapper said, "Exactly."

He spoke following Mr Trump's sudden firing of Mr Comey last week, which drew sharp criticism because it came amid the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

Mr Clapper said America's founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Mr Trump as president, that was now under assault and "eroding".

The White House had no immediate comment on Mr Clapper's remarks on a morning in which no White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows to discuss Mr Trump's firing.

Politicians from both parties reprimanded Mr Trump's actions last week, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Mr Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Mr Trump that warned Mr Comey against leaks to the press because he may have "tapes" of their conversations.

Mr Trump has been urged to select a new FBI director without any political background and that the president would need to hand over to Congress any taped conversations with Mr Comey, if they exist.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said promoting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset". He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration by Mr Trump, former House representative Mike Rogers of Michigan and senator John Cornyn of Texas, explaining that "these are not normal circumstances".

Mr Rogers, an ex-FBI agent and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has drawn the backing of the FBI Agents Association. "It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on day one," Mr Graham said. Asked whether it was the right time to have someone such as Mr Rogers or Mr Cornyn, the South Carolina Republican flatly said "no".

"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," Mr Graham said, adding: "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all... but we don't know all the evidence yet."
The new issue of India Briefing magazine, titled Payroll Processing and Compliance in India, is out now and available as a complimentary download in the Asia Briefing Publications Store.

In this issue:

Payroll Calculation, Processing, and Reporting in India

The Social Security System in India

The Applicability and Calculation of Gratuity in India

Outsource Payroll Processing and Optimize your Business Operations

Businesses in India have to contend with the dual challenge of employment laws and regulations derived from multiple sources. Some of these sources are the constitution, labor statutes, judicial precedents, and collective and individual agreements.

In addition, labor matters come under the concurrent list of subjects in the Indian constitution. This means that labor regulations are in the jurisdiction of both federal and state governments, which have respectively enacted numerous laws on labor relations and employment matters.

These directly impact payroll considerations in the country as they shape the provisions for holidays, leaves, minimum wages, social security, and penalties for non-compliance. Indias tax environment can also be complicated for small and medium sized enterprises as well as foreign managers. Companies in India need to stay alert to the latest regulatory changes when computing payroll tax and deductions. These include personal income tax for employees, social security costs, and withholding tax.

In this edition of India Briefing Magazine, we discuss payroll processing and reporting in India, and the various regulations and tax norms that impact salary and wage computation. Further, we explain Indias complex social security system and gratuity law, and how it applies to companies. Finally, we describe the importance of IT infrastructure, compliance, and confidentiality when processing payroll in India.

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 india@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.

Dezan Shira & Associates Brochure Dezan Shira & Associates is a pan-Asia, multi-disciplinary professional services firm, providing legal, tax and operational advisory to international corporate investors. Operational throughout China, ASEAN and India, our mission is to guide foreign companies through Asias complex regulatory environment and assist them with all aspects of establishing, maintaining and growing their business operations in the region. This brochure provides an overview of the services and expertise Dezan Shira & Associates can provide. An Introduction to Doing Business in India 2017 An Introduction to Doing Business in India 2017 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in India. As such, this comprehensive guide is ideal not only for businesses looking to enter the Indian market, but also for companies who already have a presence here and want to stay up-to-date with the most recent and relevant policy changes.

Working as an Expat in India

In this issue of India Briefing Magazine, we look at Indias living and working environment, HR and payroll laws, and the taxation norms as applicable to foreign nationals. India is the second most favored destination for expatriates that want to work in the emerging markets. Expatriates should take note of the basic social and welfare concerns as well as the regulatory and tax issues that apply to foreigners that work in the country.
Johnny Depp is all set to star in a dark comedy King of the Jungle` which chronicles the fast life of McAfee antivirus founder John McAfee in the jungles of Belize.

"King of the Jungle," directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa will have another big star in the role of an investigative journalist who tours McAfee`s jungle fortress for a routine interview but gets sucked into the tech magnate`s escalating paranoia , slippery reality and murder. John McAfee made fortunes after pioneering the antivirus software industry and then after cashing in his wealth settled in Belize where he lived in a fortress guarded by gunmen and indulged in bizarre experiments in biology, sex and excesses before returning to the US as a wanted man in that country.
Prevent Unauthorized Transactions in your demat / trading account Update your Mobile Number/ email Id with your stock broker / Depository Participant. Receive information of your transactions directly from Exchanges on your mobile / email at the end of day and alerts on your registered mobile for all debits and other important transactions in your demat account directly from NSDL/ CDSL on the same day." - Issued in the interest of investors.

KYC is one time exercise while dealing in securities markets - once KYC is done through a SEBI registered intermediary (broker, DP, Mutual Fund etc.), you need not undergo the same process again when you approach another intermediary.

No need to issue cheques by investors while subscribing to IPO. Just write the bank account number and sign in the application form to authorise your bank to make payment in case of allotment. No worries for refund as the money remains in investor's account."

www.indiainfoline.com is part of the IIFL Group, a leading financial services player and a diversified NBFC. The site provides comprehensive and real time information on Indian corporates, sectors, financial markets and economy. On the site we feature industry and political leaders, entrepreneurs, and trend setters. The research, personal finance and market tutorial sections are widely followed by students, academia, corporates and investors among others.
Have you watched Sarkar 3 as of yet? Did you notice that Manoj Bajpayees look in the movie had an uncanny resemblance with a real life politician? Well, the actor has himself admitted that his look in the third installment of the franchise was inspired by Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, but at the same time, he said that the character had no resemblance to him.

One of the best talents in the industry, Manoj Bajpayee, who is popular for playing unconventional roles, might not have won a National Award for his breathtaking performance in Aligarh, but he, for sure, won the hearts of the audiences.

(Also Read: Manoj Bajpayee Credits His Success To Flop Films, Says Rejections And Failures Made His Career)

DeccanChronical

Now, the actor is once again back with a bang on the silver screen with Ram Gopal Varmas Sarkar 3. But did you know that his look in the movie was inspired by Arvind Kejriwal? Heres what the actor said about the same:

Its just the look. We wanted to have the look of Kejriwal and thats about it. The character is completely different; he is a fiery young politician whose stance is completely opposite to that of Sarkar.

Furthermore, talking about his equation with RGV, who he is collaborating after 14 years post-1998 cult classic Satya, Manoj said:

My equation with him (Varma) is still of a newcomer. I still maintain that. I dont ask for a script (hard-copy), just listen to the script and trust him as I have always been doing. No questions asked, no ifs and buts. Its all about what he wants from me in terms of performance.

We wonder how the movie would have been if the character was also inspired from Kejriwal!
1. Twinkle Khanna Called 'Kattappa' Her Bae & Akshay Kumar Isn't Very Happy About It!

The 43-year-old author took to Twitter to share how much she loved Kattappa, her favourite most character from the franchise. In fact, she has been calling her daughter Kattapa which clearly is not being enjoyed by Akki who would refer to her as Rowdy any day.

2. Alia Bhatt Celebrates Mother's Day Differently, Releases 30 YO Dehydrated Turtle Into The Sea!

Twitter

Alia Bhatt recently spent an afternoon at with the NGO (Wildlife Conservation and Animal Welfare Association) workers and helped in the rescuing of a 30-year-old and 3.3 feet long Green Sea Turtle named Queen, who was dehydrated and infested with leeches after being washed ashore at Dahanu.

3. Rajinikanth Meets His Die-Hard Fans After A Gap Of 8 Long Years, Clicks Photos With Them

"God decides what we have to do in life. Right now, he wants me to be an actor and I'm fulfilling my responsibility. God willing, I will enter politics tomorrow. If I enter, I will be very truthful and will not entertain people who are in this to make money. I won't work with such people," Rajinikanth told his fans at a meet-and-greet in Chennai.

4. 'Simran' Teaser Is Out & Kangana Ranaut Is Back In A Quirky & Mischievous Avatar!

After playing a badass role in her last film Rangoon, for which she said that she was targeted for the failure of the movie, Kangana is back to entertain us with her quirky comic role in her next. Essaying the role of a Gujarati NRI and housekeeper Praful Patel, Kangana can be seen donning different looks in the teaser. But one thing is common in all of them  she is spunky and full of life!

5. Alia Bhatt Is Bowled Over By Rock-Buster Baahubali 2, Wants To Work With Prabhas 'For Sure'

While interacting with her fans on Twitter, Alia was asked about Baahubali 2 and Prabhas as well, and that is when she made the revelation.
A story that would melt many hearts, and inspire a thousand others to follow, this Mothers Day, a 90-year-old woman sold five of her goats to collect money for building a toilet for her 102-year-old mother-in-law in Kanpur's Anantapur village in UP.

ANI

But Chandana who is now an ambassador for the central governments campaign of Swachh Bharat, had to sell five of her goats as no government agency came forward to help her.

80-year-old woman gifts a toilet to her 102-year-old mother-in-law by selling six goats in Kanpur's Anantapur (Uttar Pradesh) pic.twitter.com/wSEgsAKAqu  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 14, 2017

According to ANI reports, Chandanas say that she thought of gifting a toilet to her mother-in-law ever since she walked out to defecate in open and fell and got her leg broken. The womans son, Ram Prakash, told ANI that the village sarpanch and Kanpur district authorities didnt do anything even when his mother tried to seek their help. Therefore, she decided to build the toilet by herself.

ANI

As her pleading fell on deaf ears, she summoned her lost courage and decided to sell her goats to give her mother-in-law this great gift. According to the ANI report, when contacted, the village sarpanch tried to shift the blame on the district authorities.

He said, We have time and again given the list to the district authorities but till now not even one toilet has been constructed.

My grandmother fell & fractured her leg. She was not able to move; then my mother sold goats to get a toilet constructed: Ramprakash pic.twitter.com/aaj0sq8dkN  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 14, 2017

The district officials appreciated Chandanas determination and they said that they will conduct an enquiry into the matter.
Daughter killed her 69-year-old mother for throwing away a plate of food. Bengaluru Police found the body decomposing in a closet.

They said Shashikala, 42, allegedly hit her mother Shantakumari, on the head with a rolling pin thrice in a state of rage.

HT

The mothers body was found by the flats landlord. He hadnt seen the tenants in a while and the rent was also due. When he entered the house he saw that the cupboard in one of the rooms had been sealed with cement and painted red. He contacted the police almost immediately after.

Deputy Commissioner of Police, MN Anucheth, said, We were immediately suspicious about Shashikala and her son Sanjay, 21, as they were missing.

Neighbours told the Police they noticed the stench but dismissed it as a dead dog in the sewage drain.

Polices investigation led them to the fact that Sanjay is a student of aeronautical engineering, which led them to one of his friends, Nandeesh, 21.

When we interrogated Nandeesh with this evidence, he confessed that he had helped the mother and son to dispose of the body, said Anucheth.

According to Nandeeshs statement to the police, the daughter lost her temper after her mother threw away a plate of food.

ABCD

The Police also said, The family was in trouble financially as there was no income and the money from the two plots that belonged to Shantakumari, which were sold about 5 years ago, had also been exhausted. This could explain Shashikalas anger at her mother for throwing food.

They are now looking for both the mother and son.
The reasons for giving instant divorce under the controversial Islamic law gets more and more trivial each time. More recently, a Muslim woman and mother of two has alleged that her husband gave her 'triple talaq' and threw her out of home, when she asked for Rs 20 for her daughters, yet again raising controversy over the (triple talaq) practice.

screen grab/toi

The incident took place in Rasulpur area of Firozabad in Uttar Pradesh.

Also Read: Hyderabad Man Gives Triple Talaq To Wife Because She Gave A Packet Of Namkeen To Her Parents

The woman identified as Shazia is currently living in the home of her husband's neighbours. Married five years ago, Shazia's husband is a craftsman at a glass bangle factory. Hailing from Etawah, the woman was the only child of her parents who died after her marriage.

According to Shazia, "For the last couple of years my husband had been harassing me in order to get rid of me as I gave birth to two daughters. Recently, I came to know that he was having illicit relationship with a woman whom he wanted marry. Unable to handle torture at my husband's hands, when I left home to commit suicide, policemen rescued me and took me back home."

bccl/representational image

"After returning home, my husband again started harassing me, but I tried to make myself strong for the sake of two daughters. On Saturday, when I asked him to give Rs 20 to buy some edible items for two girls, he got infuriated and slapped me. Later, when I confronted him, he gave me triple talaq and pushed me out of home," she said.

Also Read: Muslim Women In Varanasi Recite Hanuman Chalisa To Seek Divine Help Against Triple Talaq

Shazia further claimed, "I'm worried about my daughters. The younger one is eight months old, while the elder is four years old. My husband has threatened to make money by selling them."

bccl/representational image

After the incident, Shazia sought help from local police, but according to her, police did not listen to her plea.

Also Read: A Muslim Woman In Meerut Wants To Give Triple Talaq To Her Abusive Husband

When TOI contacted SSP Firozabad Ajay Kumar on the matter, he said, "We are yet to receive a written complaint in the matter. But it would be better for the woman if she approaches district magistrate office."
On Sunday, India skipped Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) summit in Beijing attended by as many as 120 countries, including 29 at the top leadership level. India is the only South Asian nation except for Bhutan, which doesnt have any diplomatic relation with China, who skipped the summit. All nations of the sub-continent attended Chinas so-called Project of the Century.

Reuters

Connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality" and "Avoid projects that would create an unsustainable debt burden for communities, said Indias MEA spokesperson in one of the toughest statements against China given by India recently.

But China again ridiculed Indias concern while citing the high level of participation by other countries in the summit. "The international community's warm response speaks volumes, said Chinese spokesperson in a statement.

Ever since China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), OBORs flagship initiative, came to fore, India is sceptical about Chinas ambitions in the region which arent purely economical. India had objected to CPEC passing though Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) as the territory belongs to India. But China didnt give much heed to Indian concerns and went ahead with the project.

AP

Now this One Belt One Road (OBOR) is Chinas ambitious plan to venture itself into the biggies of global politics which till date are dominated by the now more inward looking US, slightly assertive Russia and loosely bonded the European Union.

India has its concerns about OBOR, but most of have stemmed from CPEC and Chinas ultra inclination towards Pakistan.

Lets know more about OROB, and what are Indias concerns?

So what exactly is OBOR?

Seen by China as the project of the century, OBOR focuses on improving connectivity and cooperation among Asian countries, Africa, China and Europe.

AFP

Launched in 2013, OROB involves China underwriting billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in countries along the old Silk Road linking it with Europe.

Chinas ambition is immense as it will spending roughly $150billion a year in the 68 countries that have signed up to the scheme.

It lays emphasis on enhancing land as well as maritime routes in order to provide swiftness to the trade relations between different countries.

Basically, its enlarged version of its flagship programme CPEC which would connect different countries through different land and sea route in order to enhance trade. China is determined to keep its growth rate intact and thats why it seeks to enhance trade between countries which will keep its economy fuelling.

Why is India opposed to OBOR?

Despite diplomatic efforts by China, India didnt join the OBOR summit and OBORs flagship CPEC is the main reason behind Indias refusal to join the summit. The recent reports in Chinese media claim that following the launch of CPEC, China has received investment worth over $46 billion. But thats not Indias concern. India has sovereignty issues as the CPEC which passes through PoK.

Reuters We are all for promoting connectivity but on the OBOR, our position is that since the so-called CPEC forms a part of OBOR, and it passes through Indian territory, that is where our difficulty lies, External Affairs Ministry Spokesman Gopal Baglay had said earlier this week.

Chinese attempted to persuade India

China through the diplomatic channels had been trying to persuade India, not only to join CPEC, but also to attend the summit. But India didnt nudge. China had also offered to change the name of CPEC if India wishes to join.

AFP

Talking about the benefits India would get by joining OBOR, Chinese ambassador to New Delhi Luo Zhaohui days back had said New Delhi should grab economic opportunity offered by OBOR initiative. Now the GDP of India is roughly that of China in 2004, some 13 years ago. China leads India by 13 years mainly because we started reform and opening up 13 years earlier, he was quoted as saying by PTI.

India is the only South-Asian country left

In South-East Asia, India is the only country left which didnt join the party thrown by Chinese at BRI. Heads of state of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Myanmar and high-level delegations from Bangladesh and Nepal are attending the two-day summit in China.

Here are major routes under OBOR

Reuters

The OBOR initiative includes a number of projects including the flagship China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM), New Eurasian Land Bridge, China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor, China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.
reuters/representational image

On May 8, after 18 years, India approached the United Nations' International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, Netherlands, over the death sentence given by Pakistan to Indian national, Kulbhushan Jadhav. Read more

Here are more top news of the day:

1) After Drugging, Raping And Mutilating Rohtak Woman, Rapists Ran Over Her Dead Body With Their Car

PTI

Gory details continue to emerge in the gruesome rape and murder of a woman from Rohtak, Haryana. The post mortem report of the 23-year-old girl, who was drugged, gang-raped and murdered in Rohtak, revealed that the accused not only raped and mutilated her private parts, they distorted her face, tongue, eyes, ears and removed her oesophagus (food pipe). Read more

2) 23 Countries Legalise Gay Marriages, 43 Nations Ban Hate Crimes Yet Homophobic Violence Remains An Issue

Reuters

Life for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) seems to have got easier in last one decade as now fewer countries ban same-sex relations than a decade ago and more people from the community have legal protection from discrimination. Read more

3) Patna Social Activist Launches The State's First 'Roti Bank' To Feed The Poor And Needy

Reuters

'Roti bank' aims at eradicating the hunger woes of millions in the country. And a social active from Patna has taken up the initiative to start the state's very first 'Roti Bank'. Read more

4) Opposition Leaders Blow Whistles, Throw Paper Balls At Governor On Day 1 Of Uttar Pradesh Assembly Session

PTI

The Uttar Pradesh Assembly convened on a rough note today, as Opposition leaders were seen blowing whistles and throw paper balls at Governor Ram Naik in the House. Ironically, the Opposition was protesting against the law and order situation in the state. Read more

5) Dreaded Maoist Leader Kundan Pahan Surrenders In Ranchi, Says 'Wasted 20 Years'

BCCL

Dreaded Maoist leader Kundan Pahan has surrendered before the police in Ranchi on Sunday. Pahan is facing 128 cases including that of murder of senior police officers and carrying a reward of Rs 15 lakh on his head. Read more
A day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) stayed Kulbhushan Jadhav's execution, Pakistan's defence minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif said India approaching the ICJ is a diversionary tactic.

BCCL

Pakistan's defence minister tweeted today:

Indian letter to ICJ attempt to divert attention frm state sponsored terrorism in Pak.Kulbushan convicted of offences against Nat security  Khawaja M. Asif (@KhawajaMAsif) 10 May 2017

As well, a furious Pakistan is reported to have said the Hague-based tribunal "has crossed its limit", Times Now reported without citing sources.

The ICJ yesterday stayed the death sentence awarded to Jadhav by a Pakistan military court last month. The ICJ's stay came after India began proceedings against Pakistan at the court accusing Islamabad of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the detention and trial of Jadhav.

Mr.Harish Salve, Senior Advocate is representing India before International Court of Justice in the #KulbhushanJadhav case.  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) 9 May 2017

India had sought relief asking for a suspension of the sentence of death awarded to Jadhav, the ICJ said in a press statement. India had stated that the sentence of the military court was in "brazen defiance" of the Vienna Convention rights under Article 36 and elementary human rights of an accused.

It alleged Pakistan authorities are denying India its right of consular access to Jadhav despite its repeated requests.

BCCL

"The applicant also points out that it learned about the death sentence against Jadhav from a press release. India submits that it has information that Jadhav was `kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy, and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan' on 3 March 2016, and that the Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on 25 March 2016," said the ICJ in a press statement before it stayed the death sentence.
A pebble shot away from the Chinese border, India has built the country's longest river bridge, which will be inaugurated in Assam on May 26 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The bridge is capable of withstanding the weight of a 60-tonne battle tank.

Dhola-Sadiya Bridge wil b dedicated to the nation by PM @narendramodi @sarbanandsonwal pic.twitter.com/yODOcxqCZV  Dibya Bordoloi (@dibyabordoloi80) April 25, 2017

With the inauguration of the 9.15-km-long Dhola-Sadiya bridge over the Brahmaputra river, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will start the celebrations of the NDA government's three years in office from this eastern-most part of Assam.

It is 3.55 km longer than the Bandra-Worli sea link in Mumbai, making it the longest bridge in India.

India's Longest DHOLA-SADIYA bridge (9.15km) To be inaugurated on 24th May pic.twitter.com/4BcCtoy0yM  Rajnish Borah (@Rajnish_RBorah9) April 26, 2017

The bridge is seen as an attempt by India to shore up its defence requirements along the Sino-Indian border, particularly in the northeast, besides providing easy access to the people of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam with air and rail connectivity.

"The prime minister will dedicate the strategically important bridge to the nation on May 26. It will bolster the road connectivity in the Northeast as the bridge will be used by people of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh besides defence forces extensively," Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal told PTI.

The construction of the bridge began in 2011 at a project cost of Rs. 950 crore. The design is such that the bridge can withstand the movement of military tanks.

Dhola Sadiya Bridge will be inaugurated by PM Modi on 24th May,2017.#Assam #proudindian pic.twitter.com/Xpp48gb7hc  Vedika birmiwal (@vedika_birmiwal) April 29, 2017

"Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have huge strategic value to the country. Since the bridge is located close to our border with China, it will help the quick movement of military troops and artillery in times of conflict," Mr Sonowal said.

The bridge is located 540-km away from Assam's capital Dispur and 300 km away from Arunachal Pradesh's capital Itanagar. The aerial distance to the Chinese border is less than 100 km.

India's longes Bridge 9.15 kM Dhola Sadiya is Completed. inauguration of Bridge is on 26 May by PM @narendramodi #3SaalModiSarkar pic.twitter.com/h79acbdUDn  Rohit Rajput (@iamRSRajput) May 14, 2017

After Kaliabhomora bridge near Tezpur, there is no bridge over the Brahmaputra for the next 375 km upstream till Dhola, where the new bridge is constructed. Currently, all transportation between the river's two banks is carried out through water only.

Another pic (wikimedia) of India's longest Dhola Sadiya Bridge to be opened by PM on 26th. Its curved on both ends & looks like a S from top pic.twitter.com/NCgVjYXXOc  Raju Das |   (@rajudasonline) May 14, 2017

The bridge, when opened to the public, will cut down the travel time between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh by as much as four hours. As there is no civilian airport in Arunachal Pradesh, this bridge will help people of the state to reach the nearest rail head in Tinsukia and the airport in Dibrugarh easily.

Mr Sonowal said the delayed works of the bridge was expedited after PM Modi assumed the charge in 2014. The bridge was originally scheduled to open in 2015.

The BJP government in Assam will complete one year in office on May 24. The bridge is one of the key projects of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways in the Northeast and is built in public-private partnership with a construction company.
India took recourse to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case because an Indian citizen's life is in danger in Pakistan and because he was denied consular access as many as 16 times, which violates the Vienna convention, said external affairs (MEA) spokesman Gopal Baglay.

Twitter

"The decision (to approach ICJ) was taken by the Indian government in the interest of a citizen's illegal detention. It is a situation where the life of an Indian kidnapped and illegally detained in Pakistan is at stake," Baglay added.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a military court in Pakistan last month. Yesterday, the ICJ stayed that execution.

Since he was sentenced, Jadhav's mother had filed a petition and an appeal with the Pakistan embassy so she could meet her son whom they put on death row.

ALSO READ: AIFF Website Hacked By Pakistani Hackers Who Post Message Saying They Will Send Kulbhushan Jadhav's Dead Body To India

AP

"We don't know the status of the petition and appeal filed by his (Jadhav's) mother either," the MEA spokesperson said.

This, despite the fact that external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj wrote to the Pakistan PM's foreign affairs adviser Sartaj Aziz on April 27 asking him to facilitate visas for Jadhav's parents.

The ICJ's stay yesterday came after India began proceedings against Pakistan at the court accusing Islamabad of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the detention and trial of Jadhav.

ALSO READ: Major Diplomatic Victory For India As International Court Of Justice Stays Order To Execute Kulbhushan Jadhav

AP

"The provisional measure or relief we sought was under Article 74 sub para 4," Baglay said reiterating what minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted last night.

"In my capacity as President of the court, and exercising the powers conferred upon me under Article 74, paragraph 4 of the Rules of Court, I call upon your excellency's government, pending the court's decision on the request for the indication of provisional measures, to act in such a way as will enable any order the Court may make on this request to have its appropriate effects," wrote ICJ President Ronny Abraham to Pakistan.

BCCL

On a separate issue, Baglay denied that India has stopped issuing medical visas to Pakistan.

"The only change is that India has asked Pakistan to certify the medical visa applications," Baglay said.
China has quietly deleted the 'offer' to rename the ambitious China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) after there were reports that it had actually offered to do so in order to bring India on board. According to reports China's envoy to India, Luo Zhaohui, made this offer on Friday. However, the Chinese Embassy removed this offer from his speech which was shared online.

India from the very beginning was reluctant in accepting the Chinese offer which may be made formal in an upcoming event on May 14.

AFP

Through this project, China hopes to connect Asia, Central Asia, Europe and maritime routes to Africa and the Pacific. It has reached out to India to join this initiative, but India has maintained its reservations about it. India is not even sending a representative to the summit.

PTI

India's absence is a problem for China, because it's participation would be key to the success of the initiative. However, India has refused, given China's insistence on CPEC. In addition, India considers OBOR to be a unilateral enterprise for China to export its excess capacity.

AFP

Union Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, has expressed serious reservations about Chinas initiative and said there are a lot of sovereignty issues at stake.

Indian Express

He said, The idea is always there for the future that the expansion of connectivity takes place between countries.

But the particular suggestion that you have made, I have no hesitation in saying we have some serious reservations about it, because of sovereignty issues.

In response to sovereignty doubts, Chinas Ambassador to India, Luo Zhaohui, has said it can reconsider renaming the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) if it will allay Indias concerns over the One Belt One Road passing through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. He said this initiative has no connection to sovereignty disputes. However, that statement has since been retracted.
In the world of politics, Vladimir Putin, strikes the perfect balance between suave and crass.

Vladimir Putin rides a horse in southern Siberia

And now Mr. Putin is winning the Internet with his skills as a pianist. He broke into an impromptu piano recital while waiting at a state guesthouse for Chinas president, Xi Jinping.

According to TASS news agency and state Russian television, Putin played passages from Soviet-era songs about Moscow and St Petersburg.

Putin was visiting Beijing for the One Belt, One Road initiative, where heads of state and government from across the world are drawing the economic roadmap for 60 countries.

The video immediately went viral on the Russian state news media.

Russian leader has on various occasssions displayed his musical bent of mind. While serving as prime minister back in 2010, Putin took everyone by surprise when he performed Blueberry Hill.

Be it the warm and playful image or the one filled with machismo, Putin nails it both ways.
Cybersecurity professionals worked round the clock over the weekend, trying to protect corporate clients against what experts are calling the biggest ransomware attack ever, before they open for business Monday morning.

bccl/representational image

Cyber security firms told ET that though the impact on India from the Wanna-Cry onslaught has been relatively minimal so far, the real test will be on Monday when scores of professionals switch on their work systems.

Also Read: Symantec: CIA's Leaked Hacking Tools Were Used In 40 Cyber Attacks In 16 Different Countries

A malicious piece of software that blocks access to computers until money is paid, ransomware WannaCry is said to have swamped machines in over 150 countries, including India. The hackers, who go by the name Shadow Brokers, are demanding $300 in virtual currency Bitcoin to unblock access to a user's files and had reportedly received over $25,000 till Saturday morning.

India is among the most vulnerable because a large number of organisations and individuals still rely on older, outdated versions of the Windows operating system. The country also has the highest number of pirated software users.

bccl/representational image

So far, those impacted include systems of the Andhra Pradesh Police, four manufacturing companies, two retailers, the India operations of a multinational, two banks and the Chennai facility of an automaker, according to reports.

Also Read: India Fourth In List Of Countries That Faced Most Cyber Attacks, US And China On Top

Burgess Cooper, partner, cyber security, at audit and consultancy firm EY, told ET the real impact in India had not been felt yet. First intimations of the attack came in the UK at about afternoon local time on Friday, by when the weekend had begun in India. "On Monday morning you could see more activity when people come into work," he said.

Sivarama Krishnan, executive director at PwC, said his team had been working through the weekend alerting and assisting more than 2,000 clients in helping identify and block threats using firewalls. The root is said to be a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was exploited by the hackers.

bccl/representational image

Microsoft did release a patch to fix the issue in mid-March, so organisations and individuals who did not update their systems are at risk.

'Security hygiene'

Cooper said the worst hit are organisations that don't have security "hygiene" in place. "Manufacturing units, healthcare or pharma, energy and utility companies systems designed earlier not to connect to the Internet but are now connected will be highly impacted," he said. Equally vulnerable will be government establishments, he added.

Krishna said that while financial institutions, telcos and large corporates that have stringent security practices will be safe, their branch networks in far flung areas or small and medium businesses may be hit. "There is impact in India and it is not just a handful of organisations, it is much more than that," said Shree Parthasarathy, partner, Deloitte.

He said this was a wakeup call for organisations not investing enough in security since attacks will get more severe in the future. Experts did not divulge names of the organisations that have been hit.

reuters/representational image

Aruna Sundararajan, secretary, ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), said the government had initiated contact with relevant stakeholders in public and private sector to patch systems as prescribed in the advisory issued by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

These include the National Informatics Centre (NIC) for all central and state government systems; Reserve Bank of India, National Payments Corporation of India and Unique Identification Authority of India for protection of the digital payments ecosystem; the Department of Telecommunications to alert Internet service providers for security of the telecommunications network; and Data Security Council of India and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing to circulate advisories to their constituencies so as to cover the industry and users in India, primarily in private sector.

Advisory issued

CERT-In has informed all chief information security officers regarding the ransomware and an advisory has been issued. MeitY has also asked Microsoft India to inform all its partners and customers to apply the relevant patches.

Amit Nath, head of Asia Pacific corporate business at F-Secure Corporation, said it was the biggest ransomware outbreak in terms of infections.

"Russia and India were hit particularly hard, largely because Microsoft's Windows XP, one of the operating systems most at risk, is still widely used in the countries." Ankush Johar, director at Human-Firewall.io, a phishing protection company, added that India will be among the top three worst-hit countries. "Phishing is at the heart of this ransomware attack. Humans are the weakest link in cyber security, and this ransomware attack proves that yet again," he said.

reuters/representational image

The global ransomware attack has reportedly hit the UK's National Health Service (NHS), Spanish telecom company Telefonica and government departments in Russia, Turkey, Germany, Vietnam, Spain and the Philippines. Trishneet Arora, CEO, TAC Security, said manufacturing companies in Mumbai, Gujarat and even jewellery manufacturing companies have reached out to him to safeguard their systems.

Fearing large-scale disruption on Monday, professional cyber security firms such as Arora's have been updating firewalls and trying to clean any possible malware infection before the week opens. The impact is said to be bigger than the CoNFicker attack in 2008 that hit 190 countries.

Akshat Kumar Jain, cofounder of Cyware, also said the risk of infection was high in India given poor individual cyber hygiene.

The government is planning a technical webcast on Monday, said Sundararajan. Details will be announced on MyGov and Social Media.

reuters/representational image

"The global reach is unprecedented. The latest count is over 200,000 victims in more than 150 countries, and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations," European Union police agency Europol's director Rob Wainwright said in a TV interview.

"At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up; I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn (on) their machines on Monday morning."
Computers across the world were hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend, that left over 200,000 users locked out of their systems in over 150 countries. WannaCry, as its been dubbed, is one of the largest cyberattacks in recent history, one that largely targets Windows users. So heres everything you need to know about it.

What is WannaCry?

WannaCry is a ransomware module that uses a Windows leaked by the Shadow Brokers in April this year, purportedly as part of a set of tools used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on targets. Ransomware is a type of malware that infects a device and then encrypts the data. It then displays a message demanding the user pay a fee (or ransom) to an individual or group online before they can use the computer or even access their data again. Transactions are typically requested in Bitcoin, to remain untraceable, in this case approximately $300 worth of it.

How does it work?

Experts believe the initial infection might have been either been carried out by an advance phishing attack, using emails loaded with the ransomware. Once WannaCry worms its way into a system, it encrypts the data, and then exploits a vulnerability in Microsofts Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to spread the infection. While ransomware is usually considered a rudimentary attack tool, this particular version was supercharged by its creators using secrets leaked from the NSAs spy book. This is why it was so effective, shutting down hundreds of thousands of computers across the US, Europe, and even India, apart from others.

A little help, and a lot of luck

A month before WikiLeaks published its Vault 7 data of the spying tactics used by the NSA, Microsoft released an update in March with a critical advisory, to try and fix the security hole. This patch fixed several versions of Windows, including Vista and Windows 8.1, as well as server versions of the OS, though not WIndows XP. Windows 10 remained unaffected by the bug. However, when WannaCry began infecting computer across the globe, Microsoft released an emergency patch for Windows XP, an operating system is ceased update services for in 2014. The moved likely saved countless users from the malware attack, but there was another bit of good luck to help as well.

A security researcher going by the name MalwareTech was attempting to reverse-engineer WannaCry on Friday, in order to understand it, when he noticed a bit of code in the module that instructed it to check whether a bogus URL was live. Curious to find out why the ransomwares creators had put that in, he registered the domain name himself for about $10. What happened next astounded him, as he managed to singlehandedly shut down the spread of the malware.

It seems the website check was a form of kill switch built into the malware in case the attackers ever needed to quickly stop its spread. As long as the link led nowhere, WannaCry would continue to spread. But since it now led to a valid page, the malware stopped its epidemic-like spread. While that doesnt fix any systems already affected by the ransomware, it does buy security researchers time, as they at least managed to stop more people from being affected. Unfortunately, reports are now coming in that there are newer version of the malware, now completely lacking the original kill switch.

How do I stay safe?

Simple hygiene of taking regular backups and not opening unknown attachments will have saved users from being affected, says Kiran Deshpande, Co-founder & President of Mojo Networks and President of The Indus Entrepreneurs Association (TiE) Pune. However, this is like asking people to eat non-fatty food and do Yoga.

Most vulnerable will be the users in small to medium enterprises, startups and professionals like lawyers, doctors, architects who dont have the cushion of IT services. Nevertheless, one should never pay the ransom as it will encourage attackers.

Meanwhile, Kaspersky Labs has a few everyday practices that can help keep you safe from being locked out of your devices.

1. Install the official patch from Microsoft that closes the vulnerability used in the attack (there are also patches available for Windows XP, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2003

2. Ensure that security solutions are active on all nodes of the network i.e. endpoints and servers

3. Reboot the system after detecting MEM: Trojan.Win64.EquationDrug.gen or similar mlaware files.

4. WannaCry is also targeting embedded systems. Ensure that dedicated security solution for embedded systems are installed, and that it has Default Deny functionality enabled.

5. If youre using a Kaspersky Labs security solution is used,the company suggests you ensure that it includes the System Watcher, a behavioral proactive detection component, and that it is switched on. Run the Critical Area Scan task to detect a possible infection as soon as possible

"While this attack may have potential to grow bigger, a lot of work has already gone in to try and mitigate that possibility," says Mr. Srinivasan C.R.  Senior Vice President, Global Product Management & Data Centre Services at Tata Communications. He further says "It is always advisable to have a service provider, no matter the size of your business, because when such situations arise, businesses need expert skills and backing for immediate remediation."
As NASA prepares to make its first visit to Mars, other groups are instead looking to profit from more immediate sources of wealth up in space. Specifically, by mining materials from the surface of the Moon.

Florida-based Moon Express is scheduled to launch a lunar mission in the year 2020, when a small craft will land on the surface and become the first ever to mine and retrieve material from the Moon. Upon its return, the company will proceed to sell the gathered material to Earths highest bidders.

The private company aims to retrieve a single scoop of lunar dirt and rocks, using its own lunar landing craft, and then transport it back to Earth. The plan is to set aside a token amount of the sample for scientific research, while a major portion will be sold to business endeavours, as the company believes its Moon dust will become a prime commodity once it returns

"It will instantly become the most valuable and scarcest material on Earth," says Moon Express CEO Bob Richards. "Well make some of it available to scientific research. But we also plan to commoditize it ourselves."

And theyre probably right, the first publicly-available bit of lunar dirt will be a worth a fortune. Moon Express will be the first company to ever achieve the task of transporting a commercial asset to Earth from space. Not only will it be a one-of-a-kind shipment, but the sample itself could prove a monumental asset to major corporations looking to eventually get into lunar mining, as they conduct their own sampling tests to determine what resources could be obtained from the Moons surface.

Moon dust can meet Earth's energy requirements for the next 10,000 years!

China, for instance, sees the helium-3 isotope available on the Moon as a prized commodity, one thats incredibly rare on Earth yet common on the Moon. Its a near-perfect source of energy, and non-radioactive, with no dangerous byproducts. In fact, scientists claim the isotope could meet Earths energy requirements for the next 10,000 years.

Corporations are also eyeing the asteroids in our solar system as mining opportunities that could offer a fortune in raw materials, mostly in rare-Earth metals. In addition, a lot of them also have an abundant supply of water, useful both as it is and as oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuels.

And then there are those looking to colonise space by mining raw materials from the Moon and asteroids, a process that would be vastly cheaper than transporting the resources needed from Earth.

A record breaking journey

In order to make any of this possible, Moon Express has to first conduct three other lunar missions, the first of which will be one to win the Google Lunar XPrize, a $20 million grant to the first group able to land a rover on the Moon, travel at least 500m, and broadcast high-definition images back to Earth. Moon Express has already become the first private company in history to receive permission from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to journey outside of Earths orbit and land a craft on the surface of the Moon. Very soon, they could be setting an entirely new record, one that could change how we look at Moon and space exploration.
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We Have a Justice Department More Willing to Prosecute Laughter Than Murder



It's a bonkers moment in our Justice Department.



By Ebony Slaughter-Johnson

May 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - - Heard any good jokes lately? Desiree Fairooz did. But laughing at it got her thrown in jail.

Thats right: Fairooz was just convicted for laughing during the confirmation hearing of now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in January 2017. Shed attended the hearing, in her own words , to oppose his ascent to the most powerful law enforcement position in the country.

From his vote against the 2013 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act to his openly hostile rhetoric towards immigrants, Sessions record is spattered with examples of efforts to discriminate against marginalized groups.

So, when Senator Richard Shelby began his line of questioning by praising Sessions for his extensive record of treating all Americans equally under the law, Fairooz did what anyone whos just heard a joke would do: She laughed.

Fairooz was then ejected from the hearing room by Capitol Hill police, then jailed and processed. Stunningly, she was convicted of two counts of unlawful conduct on Capitol grounds. She faces a year in prison with the possibility of additional fines and community service as well.

Desiree Fairooz was right to laugh at the misplaced praise heaped upon Sessions. The former Alabama senators civil rights record is laughable.

For proof, look no further than the decision from the Sessions-directed Department of Justice to forgo prosecuting the two police officers responsible for the death of Alton Sterling , an unarmed black man in Baton Rouge whom the officers pinned to the ground and shot to death last year.

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In the entirely false dichotomy between defending police officers and pursuing justice for the victims of police violence, Sessions has maintained no illusions about which side he falls on.

As a senator, Sessions participated in a hearing provocatively titled  The War on Police , in which he chided the Obama administration for investigating police misconduct. Sessions disdained such investigations as indicative of an agenda thats been a troubling issue for a number of years.

As attorney general, Sessions announced in April that his Department of Justice would review all reform agreements the Obama administration made with local departments. Hed previously disparaged those civil rights reforms as  dangerous  for their tendency to  undermine respect for our police officers .

That decision signals that Sessions not only intends to undermine existing reforms, but that hes taken the first steps to make good on his professed interest in doing away with them altogether.

Now, it seems that the attorney generals conception of respect for law enforcement extends to empowering officers to commit violence with impunity as well. By not prosecuting the officers who killed Sterling, hes sending a powerful message: Victims of police violence have no advocate in the Department of Justice.

At best, the department now makes excuses for police misconduct. At worst, it seemingly encourages it.

Alton Sterling didnt end up pinned on his back of his own volition. Nor did he fire the stream of bullets that ultimately ended his life. Sterling was wrestled to the ground and shot to death by a police officer for being a black man at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Alton Sterling didnt deserve to die  and he didnt deserve to have his memory vandalized by this further injustice offered by the Department of Justice.

The American justice apparatus has revealed that its more willing to prosecute laughter than murder. So, the next time Sessions attempts to tout his civil rights record, do what Desiree Fairooz did: laugh and resist.

Ebony Slaughter-Johnson is a freelance writer whose work covers history, race, and the criminalization of poverty. Distributed by www.OtherWords.org.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

See also -

Jeff Sessions Re-Escalates the Drug War By Ordering Prosecutors to Seek Maximum Sentences: In 2013, former Attorney General Eric Holder ordered federal prosecutors to avoid charging certain low-level offenders with drug charges that triggered long mandatory sentences.
Knesset's Bill 'Portrays Racism as Entirely Normal'





Israel's Knesset has passed its first vote on a new bill defining Israel as 'a national home of the Jewish people'.



By Jonathan Cook

May 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - New legislation to cement the definition of Israel as a state belonging exclusively to Jews around the world is a "declaration of war" on Palestinian citizens of Israel, the minority's leaders warned this week.

The bill , which defines Israel as the "national home of the Jewish people", passed its first vote in the Israeli parliament on Wednesday, after it received unanimous backing from a government committee on Sunday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to get the measure on to the statute books within 60 days.

Among its provisions, the legislation - popularly known as the Jewish Nation-State Bill - revokes the status of Arabic as an official language, even though it is the mother tongue of one in five citizens.

Israel's population includes a large minority of 1.7 million Palestinians.

The legislation affirms that world Jewry has a "unique" right to national self-determination in Israel, and calls for the government to further strengthen ties to Jewish communities outside Israel.

It also increases the powers of so-called "admissions committees" that block Palestinian citizens from living in hundreds of communities that control most of Israel's land.

In addition, critics are concerned that the legislation is intended to stymie any prospects of reviving peace talks with the Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories. US President Donald Trump is due in the region later this month in what is widely assumed to be an attempt to kick-start a long-stalled peace process.

Netanyahu, however, has already indicated that he will insist on a precondition that Mahmoud Abbas, president of Palestine , recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The new bill effectively sets out the terms of the state Abbas is expected to recognise.

Netanyahu said this week that all Zionist parties in parliament would be expected to support the legislation. "The bill establishes the fact that the State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people in our historic homeland," he told supporters of his Likud party.

He added: "There is no contradiction at all between this bill and equal rights for all citizens of Israel."

However, leaders of Israel's large Palestinian minority strenuously disagreed.

Ayman Odeh , head of the Palestinian-dominated Joint List party in the Israeli parliament, warned that the legislation would ensure "the tyranny of the majority over the minority".

Under the bill, Hebrew alone will be an official language, with Arabic accorded only "special status". Palestinian citizens already complain that most public services and official documents are not provided in Arabic.

"The aim is to portray institutional racism in Israel as entirely normal, and make sure the apartheid reality here is irreversible," Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, told Al Jazeera.

Netanyahu's government no longer pays even lip service to the idea that it might agree to a Palestinian state. Most debates in the Israeli cabinet focus instead on intensifying settlement building and preparations for annexing areas of the West Bank.

"It is part of the right's magical thinking - they are in denial that there is an indigenous people here still living in their homeland. We are not about to disappear because of this law."

In strictly legal terms, the Jewish Nation-State Bill offers limited changes. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has defined itself as a state of the Jewish people rather than of all the country's citizens, including its Palestinian minority.

The Law of Return of 1950 allows only Jews to immigrate to Israel and receive citizenship. Adalah, a legal rights group, has documented dozens of laws that explicitly discriminate against Palestinian citizens.

But the new legislation is significant for reasons beyond its immediate legal implications.

Not least, it gives Israel's self-definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people something akin to constitutional standing, observed Ali Haider, a human rights lawyer and former co-director of Sikkuy, an organisation lobbying for equal citizenship rights.

The bill, if passed, will join a handful of Basic Laws intended to provide the foundation for any future constitution. Such laws take precedence over ordinary laws and are much harder to repeal.

"This is a very dangerous step because it makes explicit in a Basic Law that all Jews, even those who are not citizens, have superior rights in Israel to those citizens who are Palestinian," he told Al Jazeera.

An alternative draft of the new law that promised equal rights to all citizens was effectively blocked by the government in January when it came up for consideration.

Haider said the new version would provide the constitutional foundation to justify a tide of other laws intended to marginalise Palestinian citizens and erode their rights as citizens.

An Expulsion Law passed last year gives Israeli parliament the power to expel Palestinian MPs if they make political statements the Jewish majority disapprove of.

Another bill before the parliament, the Muezzin Law , silences the Muslim call to prayer.

Such laws are almost certain to be challenged in Israel's supreme court. "The judges will be much more reluctant to intervene if the Jewish Nation-State Bill is in force," Haider said. "They will feel under pressure to ignore basic democratic principles and give priority to Israel's Jewish character."

He added that there would be little opposition from the Jewish public. A survey by the Israel Democracy Institute last December found that more than half of Israeli Jews wanted any citizen who rejected Israel's definition as a Jewish state stripped of basic rights.

Another key goal of the bill for the Netanyahu government is its likely impact on any moves to revive peace talks with the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and US President Donald Trump met last week.

Netanyahu's government no longer pays even lip service to the idea that it might agree to a Palestinian state. Most debates in the Israeli cabinet focus instead on intensifying settlement building and preparations for annexing areas of the West Bank .

Zoabi noted that since Netanyahu came to power in 2009, he has worked tirelessly to persuade Washington to accept a new precondition for talks: that the Palestinian leadership must first recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

The new bill would place Abbas in a tricky position, allowing him to enter talks with Israel only if he first agrees to sacrifice the rights both of Israel's Palestinian citizens to equal citizenship and of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes.

"This law is aimed not only at Abbas but at Trump," said Zoabi. "It gives him a map instructing him exactly what can be negotiated over and what the terms of a solution must look like."

Avi Dichter, a member of Netanyahu's party who drafted the bill, indicated the diplomatic use it would be put to.

He told the Israeli website Ynet: "The Palestinian aspiration to eliminate the Jewish people's nation-state is no longer secret". He added that Israel must make "demands of its enemies to recognize it as the nation-state of the Jewish people".

Netanyahu echoed Dichter, saying this week that the bill was "the clearest answer to all those who are trying to deny the deep connection between the people of Israel and its land".

It is probably not coincidental that the Nation-State Bill is being fast-tracked as far-right ministers in Netanyahu's government have drafted separate legislation to apply Israeli laws in the West Bank. This is a key component of efforts by settlers and their supporters in government to annex the West Bank by stealth.

Marzuq al-Halabi, a Palestinian journalist writing for the Israeli website 972, warned this week that on the back of the Nation-State Bill the government would seek to redraw Israel's borders to include parts or all of the West Bank.

The resulting "apartheid regime" would then "create 'justified crimes' against the Palestinian people, such as population transfer or removal," he wrote.

A Haaretz editorial agreed that Netanyahu was laying the groundwork for annexing the West Bank without conferring rights on its Palestinian population.

The new law, it said, was intended as "the constitutional cornerstone for apartheid" in Israel and the occupied territories, allowing Israel to "maintain control over a Palestinian majority living under its rule".

This article was first published by

Al-Jazeera

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Will Trump and Netanyahu Continue to Misread Iran?





Iran will top the Trump-Netanyahu agenda in Israel. But it was Netanyahu's arrogance and ineptitude that midwifed the unlikely U.S.-Iran nuclear compromise



By Trita Parsi

May 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - -Iran will top the agenda when President Donald Trump visits Israel in a week.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely use it to celebrate Americas apparent shift against the Iran nuclear deal and further diplomacy with Iran. Yet the deal that the Israeli Prime Minister argues has bolstered Iran would not have been reached had it not been for Netanyahu himself. His mishandling of the Iranian issue is a major reason as to why the U.S. and Iran - against all odds - eventually reached a nuclear compromise.



Netanyahu committed three cardinal sins that ultimately worked in favor of the proponents of the nuclear agreement.



First and foremost, no Israeli leader pushed the idea that Iran was an existential threat more than Netanyahu. Twenty years ago, however, Netanyahu sang a different tune. During the early years of the Oslo agreement, it was Bibis Labor rivals that pushed the idea that Iran was behind the Palestinian violence facing Israel. Labor had a clear political incentive to blame Iran. How could it justify a peace deal with the Palestinians if they were so duplicitous that they were simultaneously negotiating with Israel and blowing up buses in Israel?



Netanyahu had the opposite political incentive. As an opponent of the Oslo Accords, it served his interest to blame the Palestinians and not Iran precisely because that would help reduce support for the land-for-peace agreement among the Israeli public.



But for the first nine months during his initial term as Prime Minister, Netanyahu was conspicuously silent on Iran. Rather than paint Iran as an existential threat, he used back channels to explore whether he could find common ground with Tehran. Netanyahu began echoing Labors language on Iran only after being rebuffed by Iran, which didn't take his outreach seriously, setting the Oslo talks on a course towards collapse. From this point on, he argued that Iran was a global threat, the center of Islamic radicalism and, of course, an existential threat to Israel.



Over the years, Netanyahu took this line further than any other Israeli leader and came to personify the argument that any compromise with Tehran would put Israels very survival in peril.



At first, the argument succeeded in convincing Washington to focus on Irans nuclear program and to further isolate Iran. Together with unending Israeli threats to take military action against Iran, it also compelled Washington and the EU to adopt increasingly harsh sanctions on Iran, and in the case of the U.S, consider the military option far more seriously.



The intention," former Prime Minister Ehud Barak admitted last week, "was both to make the Americans increase sanctions and to carry out the [military] operation.



But heres where it all went wrong for Bibi.



By defining the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel, Netanyahu hoped to force Obama to take military action against Iran. Instead, Netanyahus strategy eliminated the status quo option of containing the nuclear program while neither resolving the issue nor acquiescing to Irans nuclear demands.



Once the status quo option was rejected, Netanyahu thought he could force Obama to take military action. Instead, Obama did something Netanyahu had discountedhe doubled down on diplomacy.



Bibi thought he was forcing Obama to go to war. Instead, he forced Obama to go to peace. Had Netanyahu not exaggerated Iran as an existential threat and eliminated the status quo option, Obama would likely never have doubled down on talks in order to avoid war.



Bibis second cardinal sin was his provocative address to Congress. By taking the fight against a sitting U.S. president to Congress, without revealing anything new in his speech or providing a better alternative to the nuclear deal Obama was completing, he only achieved two things, both of which worked to his detriment.



First, he made the nuclear deal a partisan issue, where lawmakers would vote almost entirely along party lines. Second, he made it a choice between him - the Prime Minister of Israel - and Obama, the president of the United States.



Making the issue partisan locked in all Republican votes in his favor, but made it very difficult win over any Democrats. He needed at least eight Democrats to come to his side, since a resolution rejecting the deal needed to pass with 60 votes (the Republican majority in the Senate was razor thin, only 52 Senators). But winning eight democrats was no easy task, particularly since Bibi had made it a choice between him and Obama. For a lot of people, [choosing between Obama and Netanyahu] was actually pretty easy, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a leading Jewish supporter of the deal, told me.



The irony of it all is that there was a much easier way for Netanyahu to kill the deal he claimed would pave Irans path to a nuclear bomb. All he needed to do was to hug the agreement. Failing to see this was his third mistake.



The Iranians had no problem handling Netanyahus opposition to the nuclear talkson the contrary, they welcomed it. But it would have been very challenging for them politically if Netanyahu had gone on a victory lap and declared the deal a defeat for Iran. That would have been enough to kill the deal, Irans foreign minister, Javad Zarif, admitted to me last year.



Luckily for Obama, Netanyahus arrogance made him blind to his own ineptitude.

Trita Parsi is an award winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order . He is the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press 2007) , for which he conducted more than 130 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian and American decision-makers. He tweets at @tparsi.

This article was first published by Haaretz

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Propaganda Alert

Why Is North Korea the United States Problem?



The price of Americas reflexive defense of populous and prosperous allies is getting much higher.



By Doug Bandow

May 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREAJust 30 or so miles from the Demilitarized Zone, which separates South and North Korea, sits Seoul, the political, industrial, and population heart of the Republic of Korea. It remains vulnerable to North Korean attack, but is as chaotic as usual. Lately it has been convulsed by a domestic political crisis, leading to the election of a new left-wing president, Moon Jae-in, and foreign-policy challenges, including Chinas economic assault in retaliation for deployment of the THAAD missile defense system.

Even more threatening, however, may be the Trump administrations confrontational stance toward the North. So far most South Koreans assume President Donald Trump is bluffing with his threats of war. Even so, tensions between the South and U.S. are likely to rise, since President Moon advocates a much more conciliatory policy toward Pyongyang. Moreover, President Trump admits that he doesnt know much about foreign policyas Chinese President Xi Jinping learned when the latter patiently explained to his American counterpart Beijings limited influence over North Korea. Anything could happen.

Despite his ignorance, President Trump apparently is certain that Pyongyangs weapons programs are Washingtons problem. Why? No one outside the borders of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea wants Kim Jong-un to have nukes at his command. Washington officials are particularly insistent that the North should not possess nuclear weapons atop ICBMs capable of reaching the U.S. That prospect has pushed the Trump administration into frenetic if not necessarily productive activity.

Yet its worth considering why the Kim regime is working so hard to refine its nuclear technologies and expand its missile capabilities. Such weapons are expensive and result in widespread international opprobrium. But they offer important benefits as well.

Nukes would be useful in an offensive campaign against South Korea, though not so long as the latter is defended by America. Nuclear weapons offer prestige; otherwise no one else on earth would much care about the status of the poor, isolated state. Nukes also provide an opportunity for extortion. Although the message, Send money or else, hasnt been working well of late.

Finally, nuclear-tipped missiles provide a powerful deterrent. Which North Korea has good reason to believe it needs.

A quick glance at a map illustrates that the North does not threaten America. In fact, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea has never threatened America. The two nations do not share a land border, so Pyongyang could not easily send its vast legions to conquer the U.S., as in the last iteration of the movie Red Dawn. The DPRK does not have a Blue Water navy, so no armada could invest and invade Guam, let alone Hawaii. Since North Korea possesses no long-range bombers, Kims air force could not reduce U.S. cities to rubble. And even now the North does not have ICBMs capable of reaching, let alone accurately targeting, America.

In the normal course of events, the Kim dynasty wouldnt give the U.S. much thought. North Koreans certainly wouldnt be feverishly working on weapons designed to threaten the global superpower, which has the capability to incinerate Pyongyang many times over.

However, Washington has been threatening the North for 67 years.

Of course, U.S. officials believe they had good reason to do so. The inter-Korean struggle initially mattered to America because it was an important front in the Cold War. Without U.S. intervention the Republic of Korea would have been swallowed by Kim Il-sungs army, disappearing into a modern form of the Dark Ages. Even after formal hostilities ended, the U.S. presence was initially necessary to protect the ROK, a war-ravaged, impoverished, and unstable dictatorship.

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Washington placed infantry and armored units on the Norths border, capable of invading North Korea, as they did during the Korean War. Washington-based aircraft throughout the region capable of bombing North Korea, as they did during the Korean War. And Washington deployed naval vessels capable of conducting operations against North Korea, as they did during the Korean War. Indeed, the U.S. threatened to go to war against the DPRK whenever Washington deemed it necessary or appropriate.

In the post-Cold War world, the threat to Pyongyang only increased. North Korea essentially lost its allies. After the Soviet breakup, Moscow initiated a friendly relationship with South Korea. The Peoples Republic of China followed suit. Neither would likely go to war with America on the Norths behalf. The DPRK almost certainly would be alone in any crisis.

Moreover, Washington took on the role of global dominatrix, effectively dividing the world into two camps: countries which bomb other countries and countries which get bombed. And the latter group is mostly, though not entirely, made up of countries which get bombed by the U.S.

In recent decades Washington has imposed regime change on a succession of nations. Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Somalia (to the extent there was a regime to change), Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The U.S. became a de facto co-belligerent with Saudi Arabia attempting to do the same in Yemen. American officials used more limited force, mostly aid to insurgents, with less success to do the same in Nicaragua and Syria. The U.S. went to war to prevent ethnic Serbs from breaking up Bosnia and then intervened to break up the state of Serbia. Even now Washington routinely threatens war against Iran.

Then there is North Korea, enemy of an American treaty ally, international outcast, and member of the infamous Axis of Evil, with leaders loathed in Washington. Could there be a better candidate for regime change? It is a good example of the dictum that even paranoids have enemies.

All of which makes North Korean missile and nuclear programs a logical response to a dangerous security environment. And explains Pyongyangs current focus on America, punctuated by typically hyperbolic outbursts. (In contrast, the DPRK does not threaten to turn Moscow, Berlin, Bern, Abuja, Johannesburg, New Delhi, Brasilia, and most other national capitals into lakes of fire.) The Kims from DPRK founder Kim Il-sung down through grandson Kim Jong-un have given no indication of being suicidal. They almost certainly would prefer to stay out of Americas way. But if they cant, then they obviously see creating and flaunting a nuclear deterrent as the next best policy.

Put simply, Trump administration officials are running around Washington warning that missiles, if not the sky, may end up falling because the U.S. has chosen to intervene in the inter-Korean struggle. That involvement is a matter of choice. America actually does not have to police every region of the globe forever. Certainly Washington should take into account the cost in deciding on future policy.

And that price in Korea could soon include facing a nuclear power with a leadership that is to some degree impulsive, paranoid, and reckless. (Not so different, ironically, than Americas present administration.) While the DPRK would not likely attack the U.S. without provocation, what would count as the latter?

Any attempt to destroy the Norths WMDs or decapitate the regime would probably be reckless. Today military action would be a wild gamble because the North possesses the conventional capability to rain death and destruction down upon Seoul, South Koreas capital. If the Kim regime could do the same on American cities, preventative war would disappear as an option for U.S. administrations.

Pyongyang might also view a much-enhanced attempt to strangle the North economically as an existential threat. And what of conventional military involvement by the U.S. in a conflict on the Korean peninsula, however it began? Certainly there could be no drive to the Yalu, even after defeating another North Korean invasion.

Indeed, the U.S. would face many of the same limits that it did when confronting the Soviet Union. Any military action would become more dangerous, and thus less likely, if American cities could be annihilated.

Which suggests that the U.S. should consider a dual-track response to the Norths weapons development. First, continue discouraging North Korean acquisition of nukes and missiles.

But even greater reliance on Beijing remains a long-shot. Pyongyang might choose to go it alone, irrespective of the cost, and survive. Moreover, the Trump administration has yet to assuage Chinas understandable concerns over destabilizing the North as well as contributing to Beijings own containment by ultimately creating a united Korea allied with America.

Second, Washington should disengage militarily from the peninsula. South Korea has dramatically outpaced the North on every measure of national power other than military, and the latter remains a matter of choice. The Republic of Korea sees no reason to spend more if Washington is willing to do so. Thats a good deal for Seoul, but not America. At the very least the U.S. should devolve responsibility for the ROKs conventional defense onto the ROK. Doing so would eliminate an important scenario for confrontation with a nuclear-armed North and opportunity for tensions with different governments in the South.

Moreover, Washington should consider the heretofore unthinkable: a South Korean nuclear deterrent to the North. Certainly thats not a desirable outcome, but dealing with the DPRK yields only second-best solutions. For America, nothing at stake in the Korean peninsula is worth nuclear war. The U.S. should not consider sacrificing Los Angeles or Seattle for Seoulor Tokyo, for that matter. If such a trade becomes a real (though still, hopefully, unlikely) possibility, Washington policymakers have an obligation to the American people to rethink current policy.

A nuclear North Korea is bad news. One capable of striking America is even more dangerous. But by intervening in the Korean peninsula Washington helped create and sustain the DPRK nuclear threat. Instead of threatening war, the Trump administration should take a military step back. The price of Americas reflexive defense of populous and prosperous allies is getting much higher.
The Globalization of Misery





Mosul on My Mind - What It Really Means to Be on a Flattening Planet



By Tom Engelhardt

May 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - The closest I ever got to Mosul, Iraqs second largest city, was 1,720.7 miles away -- or so the Internet assures me. Although Ive had a lifelong interest in history, I know next to nothing about Mosuls, nor do I have more than a glancing sense of what it looks like, or more accurately what it looked like when all its buildings, including those in its Old City, were still standing. It has -- or at least in better times had -- a population of at least 1.8 million , not one of whom have I ever met and significant numbers of whom are now either dead, wounded, uprooted, or in desperate straits.

Consider what I never learned about Mosul my loss, a sign of my ignorance. Yet, in recent months, little as I know about the place, its been on my mind -- in part because whats now happening to that city will be the worlds loss as well as mine.

In mid-October 2016, the U.S.-backed Iraqi army first launched an offensive to retake Mosul from the militants of the Islamic State. Relatively small numbers of ISIS fighters had captured it in mid-2014 when the previous version of the Iraqi military (into which the U.S. had poured more than $25 billion ) collapsed ignominiously and fled, abandoning weaponry and even uniforms along the way. It was in Mosuls Great Mosque that the existence of the Islamic State was first triumphantly proclaimed by its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi.

On the initial day of the offensive to recapture the city, the Pentagon was already congratulating the Iraqi military for being ahead of schedule in a campaign that was expected to take weeks or even months. Little did its planners -- who had been announcing its prospective start for nearly a year -- know. A week later, everything was still proceeding according to our plan, claimed then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. By the end of January 2017, after 100 days of fierce fighting, the eastern part of that city, divided by the Tigris River, was more or less back in government hands and it had, according to New York Times reporters on the scene, been spared the wholesale destruction inflicted on other Iraqi cities like Ramadi and Fallujah, even though those residents who hadnt fled were reportedly scratching out a primitive existence, deprived of electricity, running water and other essential city services.

And that was the good news. More than 100 days later, Iraqi troops continue to edge their way through embattled western Mosul, with parts of it, including the treacherous warren of streets in its Old City, still in the hands of ISIS militants amid continuing bitter building-to-building fighting. The Iraqi government and its generals still insist, however, that everything will be over in mere weeks . An estimated thousand or so ISIS defenders (of the original 4,000-8,000 reportedly entrenched in the city) are still holding out and will assumedly fight to the death. U.S. air power has repeatedly been called in big time, with civilian deaths soaring , and hundreds of thousands of its increasingly desperate and hungry inhabitants still living in battle-scarred Mosul as Islamic State fighters employ countless bomb-laden suicide vehicles and even small drones .

After seven months of unending battle in that single city, perhaps it shouldnt be surprising that Mosul has receded from the news here, even as civilian casualties grow, at least half a million Iraqis have been displaced, and the Iraqi military has suffered grievous losses.

Though theres been remarkably little writing about it, heres what now seems obvious: when the fighting is finally over and the Islamic State defeated, the losses will be so much more widespread than that. Despite initial claims that the Iraqi military (and the U.S. Air Force) were taking great care to avoid as much destruction as possible in an urban landscape filled with civilians, the rules of engagement have since changed and its clear that, in the end, significant swathes of Iraqs second largest city will be left in ruins . In this, it will resemble so many other cities and towns in Iraq and Syria, from Fallujah to Ramadi , Homs to Aleppo .

The Disappearance of Mosul

At a moment when Donald Trump makes headlines daily with almost any random thing he says, the fate of Mosul doesn't even qualify as a major news story. What happens in that city, however, will be no minor thing. It will matter on this increasingly small planet of ours.

Whats to come is also, unfortunately, reasonably predictable. Eight, nine, or more months after this offensive was launched, the grim Islamic State in Mosul will undoubtedly be destroyed, but so will much of the city in a region that continues to be -- to invent a word -- rubblized.

When Mosul is officially retaken, if not ahead of schedule, then at least according to plan, the proud announcements of victory in the war against ISIS will make headlines. Soon after, however, Mosul will once again disappear from our American world and worries. Yet that will undoubtedly only be the beginning of the story in a world in crisis. Fourteen years have passed since the U.S. invaded Iraq and punched a hole in the oil heartlands of the Middle East. In the wake of that invasion, states have been crumbling or simply imploding and terror movements growing and spreading, while wars, ethnic slaughter, and all manner of atrocities have engulfed an ever-widening region. Millions of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, and others have been uprooted, sent into exile, or fled across borders to become refugees. In Mosul alone, untold numbers of people whose fathers, mothers, grandparents, children, friends, and relatives were slaughtered in the Iraqi Armys offensive or simply murdered by ISIS will be left homeless, often without possessions, jobs, or communities in the midst of once familiar places that have been transformed into rubble.

Mosul now lacks an airport, a railroad station, and a university -- all destroyed in the recent fighting. Initial estimates suggest that its rebuilding will cost billions of dollars over many years. And its just one of many cities in such a state. The question is: Where exactly will the money to rebuild come from? After all, the price of oil is at present below $50 a barrel, the Iraqi and Syrian governments lack resources of every sort, and who can imagine a new Marshall Plan for the region coming from Donald Trumps America or, for that matter, anywhere else?

In other words, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Libyans, the Afghans, and others are likely, in the end, to find themselves alone in the ruins of their worlds with remarkably little recourse. With that in mind and given the record of those last 14 years, how exactly do you imagine that things will turn out for the inhabitants of Mosul, or Ramadi, or Fallujah, or cities yet to be destroyed? What new movements, ethnic struggles, and terror outfits will emerge from such a nightmare?

To put it another way, if you think that such a disaster will remain the possession of the Iraqis (Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans, and Afghans), then you havent been paying much attention to the history of the twenty-first century. You evidently havent noticed that Donald J. Trump won the last presidential election in the United States, in part by playing on fears of a deluge of refugees from the Middle East and of Islamic terrorism; that the British voted to leave the European Union in part based on similar fears; and that across Europe pressures over refugees and terror attacks have helped to alter the political landscape.

Where Is Globalization Now That We Need It?

To frame things slightly differently, let me ask another question entirely: In these last years, havent you wondered what ever happened to globalization and the endless media attention that was once paid to it? Not so very long ago we were being assured that this planet was binding itself into a remarkably tight knot of interconnectedness that was going to amaze us all. As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times put it in 1996, we were seeing the integration of free markets, nation-states, and information technologies to a degree never before witnessed, in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and countries to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever. All of this was to be fed and led by the United States, the last superpower standing, and as a result, the global playing field would miraculously  be leveled  on a planet becoming a mosaic of Pizza Huts, iMacs , and Lexuses.

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Who of a certain age doesnt remember those years after the Soviet Union imploded when we all suddenly found ourselves in a single superpower world? It was a moment when, thanks to vaunted technological advances, it seemed blindingly clear to the cognoscenti that this was going to be a single-everything planet. We were all about to be absorbed into a single market for goods, capital, and commercial services from which, despite the worries of naysayers, almost everyone stood to gain. In a world not of multiple superpowers but of multiple supermarkets, we were likely to become both more democratic and more capitalistic by the year as an interlocking set of transnational corporate players, nations, and peoples, unified by a singularly interwoven set of communication systems (representing nothing short of an information revolution), triumphed, while poverty, that eternal plague of humanity, stood to lose out big time. Everything would be connected on what was, for the first time, to be a single, flattened planet.

It wont surprise you, Im sure, to be told that thats not exactly the planet were now on. Instead, whatever processes were at work, the result has been record numbers of billionaires, record levels of inequality, and refugees in numbers not seen since much of the world was in a state of collapse after World War II.

Still, dont you ever wonder where, conceptually speaking, globalization is now that we need it? I mean, did it really turn out that we werent living together on a single shrinking planet? Were the globalists of that moment inhabiting another planet entirely in another solar system? Or could it be that globalization is still the ruling paradigm here, but that whats globalizing isnt (or isnt just) Pizza Huts, iMacs, and Lexuses, but pressure points for the fracturing of our world?

The globalization of misery doesnt have the cachet of the globalization of plenty. It doesnt make for the same uplifting reading, nor does skyrocketing global economic inequality seem quite as thrilling as a leveling playing field (unless, of course, you happen to be a billionaire). And thanks significantly to the military efforts of the last superpower standing, the disintegration of significant regions of the planet doesnt quite add up to what the globalists had in mind for the twenty-first century. Failed states, spreading terror movements, all too many Mosuls, and the conditions for so much more of the same werent what globalization was supposed to be all about.

Perhaps, however, its time to begin reminding ourselves that we're still on a globalizing planet, even if one experiencing pressures of an unexpected sort, including from the disastrous never-ending American war on terror. Its so much more convenient, of course, to throw the idea of globalization overboard and imagine that Mosul is thousands of miles away in a universe that bears next to no relation to our own.

What It Really Means to Be on a Flattening Planet

Its true that in France last week extremist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was defeated by a young, little known former investment banker and government minister, Emmanuel Macron, and the European Union preserved. As with an earlier election in Holland in which a similar right-wing candidate lost, this is being presented as potentially the high-water mark of whats now commonly called populism in Europe (or the Brexit-style fragmentation of that continent). But Id take such reassurances with a grain of salt, given the pressures likely to come. After all, in both Holland and France, two extreme nationalist parties garnered record votes based on anti-Islamic, anti-refugee sentiment and will, after the coming parliamentary elections in France, both be represented, again in record numbers , in their legislatures.

The rise of such populism -- think of it as the authoritarian fragmentation of the planet -- is already a global trend . So just imagine the situation four or potentially even eight years from now after Donald Trumps generals, already in the saddle, do their damnedest in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Theres no reason to believe that, under their direction, the smashing of key regions of the planet wont continue. Theres no reason to doubt that, in an expanding world of Mosuls -- the Syrian capital of the Islamic State, Raqqa, is undoubtedly the next city in line for such treatment -- victories wont produce a planet of greater ethnic savagery, religious extremism, military destruction, and chaos. This, in turn, ensures a further spread of terror groups and an even more staggering uprooting of peoples. (Its worth noting, for instance, that since the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Special Operations forces, al-Qaeda has grown , not shrunk, gaining yet more traction across the Greater Middle East.) So far, Americas permanent war on terror has helped produce a planet of fear, refugees on an almost unimaginable scale, and ever more terror. What else would you imagine could arise from the rubble of so many Mosuls?

If you dont think that this is an ever-more connected planet still being flattened (even if in quite a different way than expected), and that sooner or later the destruction of Mosul will reverberate in our world, too, then you dont get our world. Its obvious, for instance, that future Mosuls will only produce more refugees, and you already know where thats led, from Brexit to Donald Trump. Destroy enough Mosuls and, even in the heartland of the planets sole superpower, the fears of those who already feel theyve been left in a ditch will only rise (and be fed further by demagogues ready to use that global flow of refugees for their own purposes).

Given the transformations of recent years, just think what it will mean to uproot ever vaster populations, to set the homeless, the desperate, the angry, the hurt, and the vengeful -- millions of adults and children whose lives have been devastated or destroyed -- in motion. Imagine, for instance, what those pressures will mean when it comes to Europe and its future politics.

Think about whats to come on this small planet of ours -- and thats without even mentioning the force that has yet to fully reveal itself in all its fragmenting and globalizing and leveling power. We now call it, mildly enough, climate change or global warming. Just wait until, in the decades to come, rising sea levels and extreme weather events put human beings in motion in startling ways (particularly given that the planets sole superpower is now run by men in violent denial of the very existence of such a force or the human sources of its power).

You want a shrinking planet? You want terror? You want globalization? Think about that. And do you wonder why, these days, I have Mosul on my mind?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture . He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com . His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World .

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook . Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II , as well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands , Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead , and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World .
A Russian Journalists Perspective



By David Swanson



May 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Dmitri Babich has worked as a journalist in Russia since 1989, for newspapers, news agencies, radio, and television. He says that he used to always interview people, while lately people interview him.



According to Babich, myths about Russian media, such as that one cannot criticize the president in Russia, can be dispelled simply by visiting Russian news websites and using Google Translator. More newspapers in Russia oppose Putin than support him, Babich says.



If Russian news is propaganda, Babich asks, why are people so afraid of it? Was anyone ever afraid of Brezhnevs propaganda? (One might reply that it wasnt available on the internet or television.) In Babichs view the threat of Russian news lies in its accuracy, not in its falsehood. In the 1930s, he says, French and British media, in good objective style, suggested that Hitler wasnt anything much to worry about. But the Soviet media had Hitler right. (On Stalin perhaps not so much.)



Today, Babich suggests, people are making the same mistake that the British and French media made back then, failing to appropriately stand up to a dangerous ideology. What ideology? That of neoliberal militarism. Babich points to the swift response of NATO and the Washington establishment to any proposals from Donald Trump to ease up on hostility toward Russia.



Babich is not naive about Trump. While he says that Barack Obama was decidedly the worst U.S. president ever, he does not predict great things from Trump. Obama, Babich explains, had incompetence to match his militarism. He imposed sanctions on Russia that hurt the most pro-Western organizations. He became a victim of his own propaganda.



I asked Babich why Id heard such positive comments on Trump from so many Russians. His answer: Unrequited love for the U.S., and hope, and the thought that because Trump won he must be smarter than he seems. People hate to wake up, Babich concluded. No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media Get Our Free Daily Newsletter

Pressed on how people could possibly place hope in Trump, Babich said that because Russia has never been colonized (despite Sweden and Napoleon and Hitler trying), Russians are only now learning what Africans colonized by the West understood about the colonizers.



Asked why Russia would make alliances with China and Iran, Babich replied that the U.S. and E.U. wouldnt have Russia, so it is taking its second choices.



Asked about Russian journalists who have been killed, Babich said that while more were killed in the time of Boris Yeltsin, he has two theories. One is that an opponent of Putins is responsible. Babich named a politician who died around the time of the last killing. The other theory is that people enraged by the media are responsible. Babich said he couldnt take seriously the idea that Putin would himself be responsible for killing someone right next to the Kremlin.

Asked about the approach of RT (Russia Today) television, Babich said that the approach of the news agency Ria Novosti of trying to imitate the New York Times gained no followers because people can already just read the New York Times. By opposing U.S. crimes and giving voice to alternative perspectives RT has found an audience. I think this interpretation is borne out by the CIA report earlier this year hyping the danger of RT. If the U.S. media were providing the news, Americans wouldnt look for news elsewhere.

Babich and I discussed these and other topics on the RT show Crosstalk on Sunday.

CrossTalk: Bullhorns on Hysteria
Nigerians have continued in their quest of Jungle justice since they do not have so much trust in the right authorities to handle criminal cases.

A suspected phone thief was apprehended and burnt to death by a mob at the Alaba Rago area along the Badagry expressway in Lagos this morning. See a graphic photo of the charred remains of the thief after the cut.

Source
The reason of making a decision by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) on April 24, 2017 to declare Diamantbank (Kyiv) insolvent is the fact that its Board Chairman Oleh Khodachuk has not met his liabilities to additionally capitalize the financial institution by UAH 750 million, Valeriya Gontareva has said.

"The deadline was April 21, Friday. Khodachuk wrote it by his own hand in the guarantee application. Khodachuk did not meet his liability on Friday. On Monday the bank was removed from the market," she said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

Gontareva said that as of April 1, 2017 Diamantbank, the bank from the top 20 Ukrainian banks in terms of assets, was to meet the requirement of regulatory capital adequacy for 5%, and the bank violated this liability.

She said that Khodachuk notified the NBU about his plans to become a shareholder in the bank and invest UAH 750 million to its capital. He brought documents, an extract from his account confirming that he has the money and wrote a personal guarantee when he is to bring the money.

"We never remove a bank if we do not allow shareholders or an investor to invest money in it," Gontareva said that the NBU demanded to confirm the origin of the funds by an auditor.

Commenting on a statement of Khodachuk that the main reason of the impossibility of capitalizing the bank in the required term was the detention of the holder of 2.5% of the shares in the bank former MP Mykola Martynenko by detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Gontareva said that if the main reason of not having the money is the detention of Martynenko, then one can ask him if he really imagined himself as an investor and why he was not allowed to send own money over the detention of Martynenko.

She said that Khodachuk told to the NBU that he is not affiliated with Martynenko.

As reported, the NBU on April 24 recognized Diamantbank insolvent, as by April 1 the bank failed to achieve the minimum level of regulatory capital adequacy at a ratio of 5% established by the central bank.

Diamantbank was registered by the NBU in November 1993. The bank ranked 24th among 93 operating banks as of January 1, 2017, in terms of total assets worth UAH 7.414 billion, according to the NBU.
Justice E. A. Obile of the Federal High Court sitting in Warri, Delta State, has convicted and sentenced two siblings, Chukwudi Ugwueke and Sophia Ugwueke, to two years imprisonment each. They were charged by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, on a single-count charge bordering on possession of fraudulent documents with intent to defraud one Lisa Marie Nors, an American citizen.EFCC spokesman, Wilson Uwujare, Justice Obile, after going through the evidences tendered by the prosecution counsel, M.T. Iko, found the duo guilty and accordingly convicted them.He, however, gave them an option of N400,000 fine each. The convicts were first arraigned on February 1, but pleaded not guilty to a 13-count. However, when the matter came up for hearing, the accused persons pleaded guilty to an amended one count charge and were accordingly convicted and sentenced. The convicts were arrested at their residence in Sapele, Delta State based on intelligence on their illegal activities that bordered on defrauding foreigners through internet scams.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) filed against the former first lady o Nigeria,Dame Patience Jonathan, has been adjourned to May 22, by a Federal High Court sitting in Lagos on Monday, EFCC are seeking final forfeiture to the Federal Government, of the sum of 5.8m dollars belonging to former First Lady.

Justice Mojisola Olatoregun granted the adjournment following an argument by counsel to Jonathan, Mr Ifedayo Adedipe (SAN), that the respondent was not given sufficient notice to file a response.

The court had on April 26, issued an interim order for forfeiture of the sum of 5.8m dollars belonging to Jonathan to the Federal Government.

The order followed an ex parte application by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), seeking a forfeiture of the sum to government, pending the determination of the motion on notice.

The court had granted the interim order and had further directed that same be advertised in a national daily, to enable any interested party to appear and show cause why the interim order should not be made final.

When the case was called on Monday, counsel to the respondent, Adedipe informed the court of a notice of Appeal he had filed against the courts ruling, as well as a motion for stay of further proceedings.

He argued that the EFCC ought to have waited to abide by the decision of the court of appeal in respect of the matter.

Adedipe also noted that the publication of the courts order in the national daily was only done on May 11, adding that such notice was too short to allow for the filing of any response.

Responding, lawyer to the EFCC, Mr Rotimi Oyedepo, stressed that the business of the day was for any interested party to appear and show cause.

He noted that the argument of the respondents counsel fell outside the purview of the courts business with respect to the matter at hand, and urged that progress be made.

In her observation, however, justice Olatoregun noted that the suit will only be adjourned on the ground that the time frame of the said publication was short.

She, therefore, adjourned the case to May 22, for the respondent or any interested party to appear and show cause why the interim forfeiture order should not be made absolute.

NAN also reports that Justice Olatoregun had sometime in November, 2016, granted a forfeiture order of the said sum following an application by the Commission.

The court, had however, in March this year vacated the earlier order, following an application by Jonathans counsel, Adedipe, who had challenged the propriety of the EFCCs action.

The EFCC had then filed a new motion seeking an order for interim forfeiture of the said 5.8m dollars lodged in the respondents Skye Bank account.

The Commission also sought an order directing the interim forfeiture of N2.4b discovered in an EcoBank account in the name of La Wari Furniture and Bath Ltd, suspected to be proceeds of crime.

It further sought for the publication in any national newspaper, of the said order, to enable any interested party to appear and show why the interim order should not be made final.

The commission averred in an affidavit that it received an intelligence report that funds suspected to be proceeds of crime were warehoused in a Skye Bank account belonging to Jonathan.

It said that the report was analysed and found worthy of investigation, adding that the ex- First Lady opened the account on Feb. 7, 2013.

According to the Commission, several cash deposits were made by the ex- First Lady in the United States Dollars, through Waripamo Dudafa, a former aide to ex- President Goodluck Jonathan.

The commission averred that another frequent depositor of funds into the said account was one Festus Iyoha, a steward in the State House, Abuja.

The EFCC said that between Feb. 8, 2013 and Jan. 30, 2015, about $6.7m suspected to be proceeds of crime were deposited into the account.

According to the Commission, Jonathan had dissipated the funds, leaving a balance of about $5.7m.

The Commission further averred that if the fund was not forfeited in the interim, it may be fully dissipated by Jonathan.

It added that N2.03b, suspected proceeds of crime, was currently on fixed deposit in the account of La Wari Furniture, in addition to a credit balance of about N389m.

The Commission therefore urged the court to grant the application in the interest of justice.

Granting the order, Justice Olatoregun adjourned the case till May 15, to enable any interested party to appear and show reason why the interim order should not be made final.

Source:( PM News )
Two men, identified as Caleb Olalekan, 47, and Joshua Zion, 22 have been arraigned before an Apapa Chief Magistrates Court in Lagos for allegedly assaulting a woman, identified as Amaka Emmanuel, by removing her front tooth with a punch.

Both the accused who are residents of Amuwo Odofin area of Lagos, pleaded not guilty to a two-count charge of conspiracy and grievous harm.

The Prosecutor, Insp. Tony Elibeh, told the court that the accused committed the offences on April 27 at 2nd Rainbow, Amuwo Odofin, Lagos.

Elibeh said that the accused assaulted the complainant by giving her a punch on the mouth and in the process, removed her front tooth.

He said the accused claimed that the woman was abusing them, and they decided to teach her a lesson by beating her up.

The prosecutor said that Emmanuel reported the case to the police and the accused were arrested.

The offences, Elibeh noted, contravened Sections 411 and 243 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015 (Revised).

Section 243 prescribes a seven- year jail term for grievous harm, if found guilty.

The Chief Magistrate, Mr Titus Abolarinwa, granted the accused bail in the sum of N100, 000 each and two sureties each, in like sum.

The case was adjourned until June 7, for mention.
Skye bank has secured an order of court forcing it to claim the five-star Lagos International Hotel over unpaid debts.

The Federal High Court in Lagos has ordered Skye Bank Plc to take over a five-star hotel, Intercontinental Hotel, located at Plot 244 and 245 (now 52) Kofo Abayomi Street, Victoria Island, Lagos.

According to Punch, this comes after the bank had dragged Milan Industries Limited, owner of the 361-room Intercontinental Hotel, to court over an alleged debt. Skye Bank claimed to have granted loan facilities of $29.8m and N3.8bn to Milan Industries Limited to construct the hotel.

It claimed to have also raised an overdraft facility of N500m in favour of Milan Industries Limited to urgently fund payments to contractors and importation of material required for completing the hotel project.

The banks lawyer, Mr. Kunle Ogunba (SAN), however, claimed that Milan Industries Limited defaulted in the repayment of the loan to his client, which, he said, necessitated the suit.

At the expiration of the tenure of the various facilities extended by the plaintiff, the defendant failed and/or neglected to liquidate the various facilities and same continues to accrue interest.

The facilities availed the defendant have since matured and/or expired and the defendant has failed to liquidate same and failed to comply with various repayment plans of the principal and interest despite several magnanimities extended to it by the plaintiff, the bank said.

Skye Bank said it was left with no choice but to appoint a receiver/manager in line with the registered deed of legal mortgage.

The balance of convenience in the instant suit is in favour of the plaintiff/applicant whose funds are taxpayers monies which ought to be accounted back to the Central Bank of Nigeria, the bank added.

Following an ex parte application, Justice Babs Kuewumi ordered Skye Bank to take over all assets of Milan Industries Limited including Intercontinental Hotel, which is covered by a deed of legal mortgage, pending the hearing and determination of substantive suit.

The judge granted the banks prayer to appoint Ogunba as the receiver-manager of the hotel in order to preserve its assets.

He directed the Assistant Inspector General of Police, Zone 2, the Commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and their agents to assist Ogunba in the performance of his duties as the receiver-manager.
A 39-year-old man, Sunday Ike, on Monday was arraigned before an Ikeja Magistrates Court in Lagos, charged with receiving N13, 500 from two boys who stole it from a woman.

Ike, whose address was not provided, is facing a two-count charge of receiving stolen property and conspiracy.

The defendant, however, entered a not guilty plea.

The Prosecutor, Inspector Victor Eruada, told the court that the accused and others still at large committed the offences on April 25, at Karaole Estate, Ogba, in Lagos.

According to him, the defendant received the stolen N13,500 knowing same to have been stolen.

Eruada said that Ike received the amount from two boys who stole it from the woman.

The offences, the prosecutor said, contravened Sections 285 and 409 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015 (Revised).

The Magistrate, Mrs G.O. Anifowoshe, admitted the defendant to bail in the sum of N10, 000, with one surety in like sum.

She said that the sureties must be relatives of the defendant, gainfully employed and should also show evidence of tax payment to the Lagos State Government.

The case have been adjourned until May 24, for mention.
As reports and insinuations continue to make rounds online alleging that Nnamdi Kanu is fighting to be president when the Republic of Biafra is eventually actualized, the IPOB leader has replied his critics.

The embattled leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, disclosed that contrary to insinuations in some quarters, he does not intend to be president when the Republic of Biafra was eventually actualized.

According to the Prince of Afaraukwu Kingdom in Umuahia, the Abia state capital, he always preferred to operate from the background, pointing out that if the pioneer leader of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Chief Ralph Uwazurike had remained consistent with the struggle, he would not be doing what he is doing with IPOB.

The IPOB leader insisted that the actualization of a Republic of Biafra was a foregone conclusion. He also sympathized with the South East governors and some other political office holders position on Biafra, attributing it to their fear of losing their positions and political relevance in Nigeria.

Nnamdi Kanu who said that the fear being entertained by such Igbo leaders was neither here nor there because the Biafra Republic would be founded on the principle of justice, equity and fairness, adding that he was also happy that some Igbo leaders were already identifying with the struggle and encouraged them to remain steadfast.

He said: I am into this struggle because of leadership vacuum. I am into this struggle because my people are suffering; they are being denied their rights and privileges and nothing will stop this fight. I want to assure our people that we are almost there.

The Biafra Republic is almost here with us. Even if one is from Sokoto, he can be a Biafran once he believes in our value system of equity, justice and fairness.

Biafra will be a home for all people who agree with our values, whether you are from Kano or Sokoto.It will be a place for good things for good people. Therefore, those who are distancing themselves from the Biafra struggle will regret it. If you dont join the struggle, you will be irrelevant in the end because Biafra Republic is sure.

Kanu described Afaraukwu -Umuahia where his father is the traditional ruler as being part of the headquarters of Biafra where the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu had the popular Ojukwu bunker and operated from till the end of the Biafra war, adding that there was therefore no way he would abandon his fathers land which served Biafra in time of need.
Leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu has said that contrary to insinuations in some quarters, he does not intend to be President when the Republic of Biafra was eventually actualized.

Kanu told Vanguard that he always preferred to operate from the background, pointing out that if the pioneer leader of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, Chief Ralph Uwazurike had remained consistent with the struggle, he would not be doing what he is doing with IPOB.

Insisting that the actualization of a Republic of Biafra was a foregone conclusion, the

IPOB leader said he also sympathized with the South East governors and some other political office holders position on Biafra, attributing it to their fear of losing their positions and political relevance in Nigeria.



He, however, said the fear being entertained by such Igbo leaders was neither here nor there because the Biafra Republic would be founded on the principle of justice, equity and fairness.

He was also happy that some Igbo leaders were already identifying with the struggle and encouraged them to remain steadfast.

He said: I am into this struggle because of leadership vacuum. I am into this struggle because my people are suffering; they are being denied their rights and privileges and nothing will stop this fight. I want to assure our people that we are almost there.

The Biafra Republic is almost here with us. Even if one is from Sokoto, he can be a Biafran once he believes in our value system of equity, justice and fairness.

Biafra will be a home for all people who agree with our values, whether you are from Kano or Sokoto.It will be a place for good things for good people. Therefore, those who are distancing themselves from the Biafra struggle will regret it. If you dont join the struggle, you will be irrelevant in the end because Biafra Republic is sure.

Kanu described Afaraukwu -Umuahia where his father is the traditional ruler as being part of the headquarters of Biafra where the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu had the popular Ojukwu bunker and operated from till the end of the Biafra war, adding that there was therefore no way he would abandon his fathers land which served Biafra in time of need.
Some consumers of Electricity in the country will be investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for allegedly working with some electricity consumers, power firms workers and meter manufacturers to steal electricity by by passing the meter.

According to the Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing, the investigation by the EFCC is part of efforts aimed at curbing the incidence of energy theft in the Nigerian electricity supply industry.

It specifically said the anti-graft agency was carrying out the investigation in some of the areas covered by the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company.

In a statement issued by the ministry on Sunday, it said, Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company noted that collusion by some of its employees, customers and meter manufacturers to bypass meters has been reported to the EFCC and is under investigation.

The ministry further observed that the Transmission Company of Nigeria had restored the Katampe 60MVA substation in Abuja and the 40 MVA mobile substation in Damboa, Borno State.

It said the Makeri to Pankshin 132kV line in Plateau and Okpella line in Edo State were both expected to be switched on in August 2017, adding that the installation of new circuit breaker in Egbin was scheduled for inauguration on May 19, 2017.
The former Aviation Minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, has been arraigned Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC ) before a Lagos Division of the Federal High Court.

Mr. Fani-Kayode, who was part of former President Goodluck Jonathans re-election campaign, was rearraigned alongside Nenadi Usman, a former minister of state for finance on a 17-count charge of money laundering and alleged diversion of N4.6 billion.

Others include one Danjuma Yusuf and a company, Joint Trust Dimension Nig. Ltd.

The defendants pleaded not guilty before Justice Rilwan Aikawa, a new judge.

The judge had taken over trial after Mr. Fani-Kayode applied for the previous one, Muslim Hassan, to recuse himself from the trial on the grounds that he was the EFCC officer who signed a criminal charge filed against him.

Mr. Hassan worked as an EFCC legal officer before his elevation to the bench
It is the end of the road for some alleged criminals after they were caught robbing at a market and beaten mercilessly before being left to work.

Luck has ran out on some suspected gang of robbers who were caught while robbing a market in Niger state.

After they were caught, the criminals were beaten mercilessly by an angry mob and left to die, after trying to steal in Tungan Malam Local Government.

See their graphic photos below:
The Ukrainian Sea Port Authority intends to sign a second contract with China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd. (CHEC) as the winter of a tender to implement the project entitled the project "The reconstruction of the maritime approach channel and inland water approaches to the deep-sea quays of Yuzhny seaport (construction and assembly work)," the press service of the authority reported last week.

"Today we are at the final stage of one of the large scale port tenders. We have passed a hard, but absolutely transparent way. Finally we have the best price and quality offers for two projects. As for the documents, the two projects fully meet legislation, and soon we will sign the signing of the contracts with the winner of the tender in public," Authority Head Raivis Veckagans said.

On April 28, 2017, the authority said that it is ready to sign a contract with China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd. to implement dredging works near three berths  Nos. 23, 24 and 25 of Yuzhny seaport.

As reported, Novadeal, the subsidiary of DEME Group (Belgium), was the winter of the tender offering UAH 586 million for the service with the expected price of UAH 839.606 million.

According to the results of the auction, the initial price of the company's offer was not minimal and stood at UAH 818.05 million, while its nearest competitor, China Harbor Engineering Company Ltd, offered services for UAH 747.25 million.

In the first round the Chinese company kept the price, while Novadeal Ltd reduced it to UAH 710.5 million. In the second round Novadeal Ltd set the price at UAH 671.5 million, and China Harbor Engineering Company at UAH 671.685 million. The Chinese company completed the third round with a price of UAH 586.045 million, and Novadeal Ltd with UAH 586 million. However, Novadeal dialed to confirm the price in the tender and CHEC was announced the winner of the tender.
A hairdresser, Yetunde Oladipupo, aka Iyabo, has committed suicide on Onabola Street, Owotutu, in the Somolu area of Lagos State., Punch reports.

It was learnt that Oladipupo took an insecticide, Sniper, on Friday shortly after seeing off some friends who had visited her.

Although the cause of the visit could not be ascertained by our correspondent, it was gathered that the mother of four went to a shop afterwards and bought the insecticide.



She was alleged to have taken it and was later rushed to the General Hospital, Gbagada, where she died.

It was also learnt that the Ijebu-Igbo, Ogun State indigene, had taken a loan of about N150,000 from a microfinance bank and the creditor had been pestering her to pay.

A resident, who did not want to be identified, said the victim was always depressed because she had no means of repaying the debt.

He said,

Iyabo (Oladipupo) has four children and her husband is based in Abuja. He comes home once in a while. She was a hairdresser and had a small shop where she sold some things.

She borrowed N150,000 from a microfinance bank. When the pressure became too much for her and she could not pay, she became desperate, drank the insecticide and died.

Another resident said two friends had visited her a few minutes before the incident, adding that it was after the visit that she decided to take her life.

She said,

Around 7pm, two friends visited her and she saw them off. As she was returning, she went to a shop opposite her house where they sell provisions.

After picking the insecticide, she asked the shopkeeper for a nylon wrapper, but the shopkeeper declined her request and said she should return the insecticide. She kept it somewhere around her dress and left.

As she was ascending the stairs to the first floor where she lived, she drank the insecticide. Within seconds, she started feeling uncomfortable and called her five-year-old child to go and get help. She was rolling on the floor and groaning with pain.

Everybody was alarmed upon seeing the empty container of the insecticide. She was taken to a private hospital on the street, but she was rejected. She was then rushed to the General Hospital, Gbagada, where about five doctors struggled to save her life. She, however, died.

A top official of the general hospital confirmed that the victim was brought to the hospital around 7pm, adding that she died in the early hours of Saturday.

He said,

The woman was brought to the hospital around 7pm on Friday and her people said she collected a loan which she could not repay. We dont know the details. Doctors tried to save her life, but she could not make it.

Source: Punch
A man identified as Ahmed Akanbi, has been arraigned at a Chief Magistrates Court, Badagry Lagos State, the accused was charged with defrauding his sister of N25,000 and stealing her phone valued N8,000.

The accused, a.k.a. Alfa, is facing a two-count charge of fraud and stealing.

The prosecutor, Inspector Akpan Ikem, told the court that the accused committed the offence at Market Road, Badagry.

He said the accused collected the money  to cure the complainant, Miss Yemi Akanbi, of marine spirit.

The accused collected the money to buy some things for the cleansing process. He also took her phone.

But he spent the money on clothes for himself and sold the phone, he said.

Ikem noted that the offence contravened sections 312 and 285 of the Criminal Code, Laws of Lagos State, Nigeria 2011.

The accused pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Counsel to the accused, Mr Koye Osuntuyi pleaded with the court to grant bail to the accused in liberal terms.

The Magistrate, Mr Jimoh Adefioye, granted the accused bail in the sum of N100,000 and two sureties in like sum.

The case was adjourned till June 7 for further hearing.

Source: ( PM Newspaper )
The troops of the Nigerian Army have arrested a suspected Boko Haram suspect, identified as Bala Ibrahim, has at Fika village in Yobe state, a statement from the directorate of army public relations said.

The spokesperson of the Nigerian Army, Sani Usman, a brigadier general, said the 30 years old Boko Haram suspect was nabbed while troops of the Forward Operation Base, Fika, were on routine patrol on Saturday.

He said preliminary investigation shows that the suspect is an indigene of Bulabulin village, Fika Local Government Area, Yobe State.

He said the suspect is being interrogated.

The statement did not explain from where the suspect was running.

Mr. Usman said another deployment of troops at the Forward Operation Base at Yuga had, while on blocking position on the same day, ambushed and arrested four suspected kidnappers. He said the troops responded to a tip off and made the arrest in Mundu village.

He named the suspects as Yahaya Auta, aged 25, Salisu Lawal, aged 20 years, Umar Mohammed, aged 18 years and Samaila Abubakar.

They were found to be in possession of 1 Locally made Six Loader Single Barrel Gun, 1 Empty Cartridge, 2 Machetes, a Knife, 2 Mobile Telephone Handsets, 2 Packets of Tramol Tablets and the sum of Three Hundred and Sixty Naira, while on their way to commit crime.

They also currently being further investigated, he said.
T he Federal Government has invited parents of the 82 Chibok school girls, who were released two weeks ago by Boko Haram, to Abuja where they will be re-united with their daughters.

The Chairman, Chibok Community in Abuja, Mr. Hosea Tsambido, said this in an interview with one of our correspondents on Sunday.

Some Chibok representatives, who met with the Federal Government last week, were given photographs of the girls while the representatives handed over the pictures of the released girls to the parents in Chibok for identification.

It was learnt that the concerned parents had been able to identify the girls and were therefore asked to come to Abuja to meet the girls on Friday.

Tsambido stated, Many of the parents have identified their children through the photos and I was told that they are coming on Friday.

When asked if the Federal Government would be sponsoring the trip, Tsambido said, I dont know. What the parents told me was that they were asked to come on Friday. I didnt ask if the government would sponsor the trip but usually, the government sponsors such trips.

One of the guardians of the rescued girls, Yahi Dwata, also confirmed to The PUNCH that the Federal Government had asked the parents to come on Friday,

Dwata, whose niece, Comfort Bulus, is among the rescued girls, said, It is true. I have received word from parents in Chibok that the government asked them to come on Friday. I will also be in Abuja on Friday.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has adviced President Donald Trump to stop tweeting about the Russia investigation.

He wants Trump to stop publicly commenting on the investigation, following the Presidents firing of former FBI Director James Comey, which he subsequently tweeted about throughout last week.



Graham in a recent interview with NBC said the President needs to back off here and let the investigation go forward. I would advise the President not to tweet or comment about the investigation as we go forward.



He added:  I have no evidence that the President colluded with the Russians at all. Nobody on the campaign that I know has collided with the Russians. But we dont know all the evidence yet.
A hairdresser popularly known in her area as Iyabo, has committed suicide on Onabola Street, Owotutu, in the Somolu area of Lagos State.

The residents of Onabola Street, Owotutu, in the Somolu area of Lagos State, have been left in total shock after a hairdresser, Yetunde Oladipupo, aka Iyabo, reportedly committed suicide by taking an insecticide, Sniper, on Friday shortly after seeing off some friends who had visited her.

According to a report by Punch Metro, the deceased who is a mother of four went to a shop afterward after seeing off the friends and bought the insecticide. She was alleged to have taken it and was later rushed to the General Hospital, Gbagada, where she died.

It was learnt that the Ijebu-Igbo, Ogun State indigene, had taken a loan of about N150,000 from a microfinance bank and the creditor had been pestering her to pay.

While speaking with a correspondent, a resident, who did not want to be identified, said the victim was always depressed because she had no means of repaying the debt.

He said, Iyabo (Oladipupo) has four children and her husband is based in Abuja. He comes home once in a while. She was a hairdresser and had a small shop where she sold some things.

She borrowed N150,000 from a microfinance bank. When the pressure became too much for her and she could not pay, she became desperate, drank the insecticide and died.

Another resident said two friends had visited her a few minutes before the incident, adding that it was after the visit that she decided to take her life.

She said, Around 7pm, two friends visited her and she saw them off. As she was returning, she went to a shop opposite her house where they sell provisions.

After picking the insecticide, she asked the shopkeeper for a nylon wrapper, but the shopkeeper declined her request and said she should return the insecticide. She kept it somewhere around her dress and left.

As she was ascending the stairs to the first floor where she lived, she drank the insecticide. Within seconds, she started feeling uncomfortable and called her five-year-old child to go and get help. She was rolling on the floor and groaning with pain.

Everybody was alarmed upon seeing the empty container of the insecticide. She was taken to a private hospital on the street, but she was rejected. She was then rushed to the General Hospital, Gbagada, where about five doctors struggled to save her life. She, however, died.

A top official of the general hospital confirmed that the victim was brought to the hospital around 7pm, adding that she died in the early hours of Saturday.

He said, The woman was brought to the hospital around 7pm on Friday and her people said she collected a loan which she could not repay. We dont know the details. Doctors tried to save her life, but she could not make it.
This details how Buhari met with the leadership of the National Assembly for a discreet meeting before he jetted out of the country.

The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, arranged the meeting between him, President Muhammadu Buhari and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara to douse tension in the country over the medical status of the president, an impeccable source said yesterday.

Daily Trust on Sunday reports that the President before embarking on his medical follow-up trip met with Saraki and Dogara in the company of the Chief Staff, Abba Kyari, last Sunday.

A source in National Assembly said the meeting was based on the suggestion of the Senate President. It was gathered that when Kyari contacted Saraki and informed him of the Presidents trip, he (Saraki) advised that a meeting should be organized.

The source who does not want to be named said: When Kyari called Saraki who just returned to Abuja from a weekend trip to Lagos that they are sending a letter as President would travel that night. Saraki told him that they had to manage the issue better and in a manner that will not fuel suspicion and unfounded speculations.

He suggested that he and Dogara should be allowed to come and see the President that evening with the opportunity to take photographs that can be sent out for public consumption. The photo would present them as wishing him well on his trip, he said.

Such photo shots, he said, would douse the speculations that Buhari was on sick bed taking intravenous fluid or that he was incapacitated or to be flown out secretly on an air ambulance.

He added that people need to be assured that the President was not down but just required more medical check-up as he had hinted when he returned to the country last March.

The source said, that was why when the Presidents letter was read on the floor of the Senate and Senator Mao Ohunabunwa raised a point of order on the use of Coordinator instead of acting President for the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, Saraki ruled him out of order after the Senate Leader, Senator Ahmad Lawan deflated the argument.

But when contacted, the Special Adviser Media and Publicity to Saraki, Alhaji Yusuph Olaniyonu, declined comments.
A security man has been mercilessly beaten and assaulted after he broke into his boss kitchen to steal food.

A security guard has regained his freedom after he was beaten mercilessly and locked up by the police for stealing food from his boss refrigerator.

The security man identified as Joseph Timothy was released and his case closed after the CEO of Behind Bars Initiative, Prince Gwamnishu Harrison decided to help him.

The security man had acted out of hunger and was being abused and treated less than a human by an inconsiderate and heartless boss who enjoyed tormenting him by refusing to pay him his salary.

Harrison wrote: Joseph like any other Gate man was been owned Salary by his Boss. The Boss traveled and Joseph was hungry. He then sort for alternative and broke his Boss Kitchen door and stole some food and ate. His Boss returned from travel discovered that his Kitchen door was damaged and the soup he kept in refrigerator stolen.

Joseph been the only Person at home was the first person to ask. Joseph didnt deny stealing food from his Boss. His Boss alerted his neighbors and Joseph was beaten and handed over to the Nigeria Police.

The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Dont wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope Barack Obama.

God bless Nigeria Police
It is a day of rest but it turned out to be a day of mourning in Benin City as three persons, including a retired policeman and his wife, were crushed to death on Sunday while on their way to churches in Makurdi, the Benue State capital.

According to an eyewitness report, he said the incident happened around 10.45am near Modern Market Junction, opposite Dunamis International Gospel Centre, Makurdi.

The third person was said to be a member of Dunamis church.

The man and his wife were said to be riding on a motorcycle and heading for the church when the truck ran into them, killing them and the passerby.

Our correspondent gathered that the driver of the truck with number plate, XB 969 GBK, loaded with sharp sand, lost control at the Modern Market Junction in an attempt to avoid hitting a car.

An eyewitness said, The truck then drifted to the other side of the road and hit the man and his wife, who were on a motorcycle going to Assemblies of God Church around the Wadata area of Makurdi.

The truck equally hit another lady, who attended Dunamis church, Makurdi.

The eyewitness said the driver of the truck escaped immediately after the accident occurred.

He said, The whole thing happened suddenly. Five persons were inside the car. Nothing happened to the driver. He later escaped from the scene of the accident.

The remains of the victims were removed by the police and taken to the morgue at the Federal Medical Centre, Makurdi.

When our correspondent visited the FMC mortuary, the elder brother of the late retired policeman, Edem Obaah, identified the couple.

He said, The deceased was my younger brother. He is Patrick Obaah; and his late wife is Janet Obaah. My name is Edem Obaah. Patrick retired from active service last month. I am also a police officer; I am still serving.

My family worships at the Methodist Church, Wurukum, while Patrick and his family worshiped at Assemblies of God Church.

I was inside church when his first daughter called to inform me that her parents were involved in an accident. On reaching there, I saw their bodies and I called the police. When the police came, I was able to identify my brother and his wife, but we have yet to trace the owner of the truck.

The Police Public Relations Officer, Benue State Command, ASP Moses Yamu, confirmed the accident.

Yamu said, There was a ghastly accident involving a motorcycle and a truck, during which a man and his wife died on the spot.
Two Nigerians nearly lost their lives over the weekend after they were nearly beaten to death in South Africa.

Two Nigerians were at the weekend nearly beaten to death by South Africans. The graphic photos were circulated online after the incident took place at Kuruman, Northern Cape.

Martin Ogbaje who shared the photos said that the guys were almost murdered if not for the help of police officers.

He said: May God save us in this country South Africa, two Nigeria guys almost murdered yesterday in Kuruman Northern Cape. If not because of Police help, their lives could have been a story by now.

It is not clear what the Nigerians were accused of doing, but the new xenophobic attack might targeted at Nigerians has raised concerns over the lives of Nigerians in foreign lands and what the government is doing to arrest the situation.

Punase Rachel Phete replying on the comment section wrote: Ugo Martin Ogbaje why dont you tell your country men the truth? You are busy destroying the lives of the youth and expect us to fold hands and watch.it wont happen. We are saying # to hell with drugs in SA #

I still believe that you stayed too long here.

Onyon Julius Odianosen Jnr replied: They dont hate Nigerians cuz of drugs, they hate Nigerians for always succeeding and also hate foreigners dat succeed. They dont want you to succeed cuz de cant succeed and are lazy to.

Eniade Adedeji added: Accusing people of drugs to cover their laziness. South Africans should try and be hardworking.
Ukraine intends to raise a $300 million loan from Export-Import Bank of China via China Road and Bridge Company (CRBC) to build a bridge in Kremenchuk.

The press service of Ukraine's Infrastructure Ministry reported that this was discussed during a visit of Deputy Minister for European Integration Viktor Dovhan to Beijing, China, on May 11 through May 13. He discussed three top priority infrastructure projects for Ukraine with the top managers of the Transport Ministry of China: the possible options for the implementation of the Air Express project, a bridge in Kremenchuk and concession of the railway ferry complex at the Chornomorsk seaport.

"The important infrastructure projects were presented to potential Chinese investors  state-owned China Railway Company, which is mulling investment in modernization and production of electric locomotives at production facilities of public joint-stock company Ukrzaliznytsia," the press service said.

Dovhan also discussed dredging works at the Yuzhny port with China Harbor Engineering Company and parent company China Communication Construction Company, which are interested in cooperation with Ukraine.

The press service of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry reported that Economic Development and Trade Minister Stepan Kubiv who was present at the meeting pointed out the good presentation of a project to build a bridge near Kremenchuk and a project to reconstruct the Shuliavka Bridge in Kyiv. He said that the total cost of the two projects is $400 million. Thus, the total cost of the project to reconstruct the Shuliavka Bridge is $100 million.

"I propose to you to finish preparatory works for the projects no later than September and eventually switch to the signing of loan agreements and an agreement to implement the works with the corporation. A working group will be created to analyze these investment projects. The group would include representatives of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, Infrastructure Ministry, Finance Ministry and Ukravtodor," Kubiv said.

He also recalled that under the One Belt, One Road initiative it is important to improve existing and develop new logistics opportunities.

"Aiming at improving the conditions, increasing the capacity and speed and boosting competitiveness of multimodal container transportation on the China-Western Europe-China route and transit across Ukraine, we are ready to make efforts to develop and modernize transport infrastructure on the basis of the public private partnership projects and other modern forms of cooperation," Kubiv said.

He said that the implementation of some logistics projects in Ukraine would create additional opportunities for transit flows under the One Belt, One Road initiative. This is construction of port terminals, elevators, rolling stock for transportation of agricultural products and storage facilities.
Earlier we shared the news of how Tonto Dikehs sons nanny was abandoned in a hospital in Abuja and was rendered help by Queen Ashley foundation in case you missed it

Well, the actress has now come out to say that she never abandoned her sons nanny  she has now revealed that she discharged the lady from her duties two months ago, after she realized she was no more fit for the job.

Tonto Dikeh accuses the foundation who helped the nanny of using her as a means of gaining cheap popularity and defrauding Nigerians.

Via her colleague, Halima Abubakars page on IG, Tonto says:

DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER!! DISCLAIMER!!! This is to inform the general public about the recently uploaded video about the nanny of my beloved dear son who in a video said I abandoned her at the hospital leaving her to fend for herself. It was so far-off from the truth.She was sadly discharged from her duties 2months ago, after the realization that she wasnt fit enough for the job as she was always suffering from one illness or another which I. Have spent Thousands treating. So I paid her off and she went back to her base, I suddenly saw her about a week ago believing she came to say hello and leave, but begged to be taken back instead. It was obvious that my son missed her, which led me to permit her to stay for a few days. To my suprise, she took ill again and I asked that she should be taken to the hospital, which I normally do whenever she fall sick and her on-Call Personal doctor provided By Me Isnt around. She was rushed to the hospital on Thursday 11th may 2017, and discharged on Friday 12th may 2017, telling me that she is better now. To my greatest surprise, I got a call from one of my domestic staff that she has gone to the hospital again.

Waking up today Saturday 13th may 2017, to see a video posted without due consultations by some foundation I wondered why people love cheap publicity. How can someone who left the hospital on Friday and return to the hospital be abandoned as she FALSELY claimed. Nevertheless, I have consulted and instructed my lawyer to serve them with immediate effect for defamation of character and other of charges associated to this act(etc. Using the name of a child for soliciting for money illegally) I am appealiing to the public and especially my fans to disregard the request of paying into the account published on the blog. Its a scam and a malicious act that should never be allowed or encouraged. The nanny is an ingrate for allowing her self to be used against me and my son.This is a woman who has visas to 15 different countries courtesy. Of me,Flies first class,eats 6times a day,has call card allowance, hair allowance,Has her nails taken care of by me,Gets freebies for her family and friends,takes lux

Watch the video which was also shared:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BUEs0uqjb1K/

Source: Yabaleftonline
A 19-year-old girl, Khushboo Khatun, was rescued by some villagers after she was buried alive by her uncle for 2 hours in Govindpur village, in Bihar, eastern India.

Khatun was on her way home from a market when three men reportedly pounced on her and threw her into a 3ft deep pit, filled it with earth and left her to die.

When Kushboo didnt make it home, her father Muhammad Ansari and mother, Sanjana began to look for her. Eventually Ansari noticed a nearby pit was randomly filled with earth and suspected foul play. He started digging and called on other villagers to help. They noticed part of her body after digging for a while.

Khutan was already semi-conscious after being buried for two full hours and was almost suffocating She was eventually dragged from the rubble and taken to a local government hospital.

The police are now searching for suspects, Amit Shah, who is a local businessman, and two accomplices.

Superintendent Nawal Kishore Singh said Amit Shah had wanted to use land owned by the girls father, Ansari for construction. The latter however did not co-operate and the property dispute had been going on for years, so Amit used his daughter as a threat.

Kushboo has since been discharged from the hospital and is now recovering at home.

More photos below..
The worm called WannaCry (aka WannaCrypt, WannaCry0r, WanaCry, and WCry) dominated tech headlines through the weekend. According to Europol, quoted in the New York Times, WannaCry infected 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries, tied the UK health service in knots, knocked out the Spanish phone company, troubled train travelers in Germany, and took big swipes out of FedEx, Renault, a reported 29,000 Chinese institutions, and networks all over Russiaincluding the Russian Interior Ministry.

I first saw reports of the new ransomware on Friday morning, although it looks like the worm started spreading on Thursday night (per Costin Raiu). By Friday evening, a security researcher who goes by the handle MalwareTech (and who wants to remain anonymous) became an accidental hero by activating a sinkhole that killed WannaCry.

Microsoft posted a description of the inner workings of WannaCry on Friday, the day it appeared. Amanda Rousseau at Endgame posted a more detailed technical analysis on Sunday. Theres an active GitHub Factsheet, and SANS Internet Storm Center has an excellent PowerPoint presentation suitable for management.

Im going to cut through the jargon and answer the questions that normal people have about the WannaCry ransomware, and what comes next.

Can I get infected by WannaCry?

No. MalwareTech defanged the malware. Although there are a few extraordinary situations where the threat persists (in particular if your network blocks access to one odd website), for most people, WannaCry has been out of commission since late Friday.

So I dont need to worry about it right now?

Wrong. Very wrong. This is one of those rare times when the Windows sky is falling. We already have reports from Matt Suiche of a new WannaCry variant thats been sinkholed with 10,000 infections logged. The clones are coming, and many of them wont be easy to stop. You have to get your Windows PC patched now.

Why didnt WannaCry infect Windows XP or 10 computers?

Because the responsible for Fridays attacks used code from several sources, and researchers have determined that the code used didn't include functions for Windows XP or Windows 10. (Britains National Health Service has said its WinXP PCs were not infected by WannaCry, despite initial reports that they were.)

However, that doesnt mean WinXP and Win10 are safe. If unpatched, both have the same vulnerability as other versions of Windows that different exploit code could take advantage of, which is why Microsoft issued an emergency patch for it.

Even though WannaCrys exploit code doesnt target WinXP or Win10, you can expect that other variants will, which is why every Windows PC should be patched immediately.

How do I patch my Windows computer?

If youre using Windows 7, 8.1, or 10, you can run Windows Update and install all important patches. If you dont feel comfortable installing all patches, or if Microsoft has blocked updating on your computer because its running a Kaby Lake processor, I have detailed instructions that will help you figure out if your systems already patched and, if not, how to minimally patch your system. Tip: Installing all important patches, if you can, is much easier.

If youre using Windows XP, 8, or Vista, special instructions apply. (See my detailed instructions.)

I installed the WinXP patch. Do I need to update Microsoft Security Essentials?

Theres no MSE patch available, according to Michael Horowitz at Computerworld.

Can I install the WinXP patch on pirated software?

Youre caught between a rock and a very hard place: You can install the patch and hope it doesnt brick your machine, or you can wait and see if a future piece of malware bricks your machine. My recommendation is to back up everything, install the patch, and be ready to install a genuine copy of Win7 if the PC goes belly-up.

Do I need to patch other computers?

It looks like MacOS, iOS, ChromeOS, Android, and Linux of all flavors got a free pass on this one.

How does the infection work?

WannaCry and its cohorts infect by looking on the network for other computers that are running an old communication program called SMBv1. The only way it can spread is if theres another machine attached to the network with an open port (called port 445) thats using the old version of SMBv1.

That explains how the infection spreads on a network. It doesnt explain how the first computer on a local network gets infected.

So how does the first computer on a local network get infected?

Nobody knows. There are lots of possibilities, but as of this writing we dont have an example of a smoking gun. Malware legend Vess Bontchev deduces that the first computer infected on a local network probably had port 445 open to the internet.

Can I get infected by opening an email attachment?

Noas far as we know, anyway. Nobodys found an infected email, and a lot of people have looked. Kevin Beaumont has a video showing how WannaCry replicates worm-style over a network, with no email required. It takes two minutes.

Can I get infected by surfing to a bad website or viewing compromised ads online?

No.

Whats a sinkhole?

WannaCry has an off switch. Before the infection mechanism runs, it tries to connect to a website with a very weird URL. If the website exists, WannaCry wont run. By registering a website with the correct name, MalwareTech defused the WannaCry infection function. Theres lots of speculation as to the reason for the off switch, but nobody has a clue what the author was thinking.

Why the worry about copycats?

WannaCry code is widely available. Anybody with a hex editor can changeor deletethe off switch. Making a clone is easy, although getting it started might not be.

Where did WannaCry come from?

Nobody knows who put it together, but the code is largely copy-and-pasted from the Shadow Brokers leaked codespecifically the part called EternalBlue, which Ive discussed. It seems likely (and Microsoft just confirmed) that the Shadow Brokers code was stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency.

So the NSA is to blame?

Its not that simple.

So Microsoft is to blame?

Its not that simple, either.

So WannaCry is based on the CIA code that was leaked by Wikileaks?

No. The CIA and the NSA are two entirely different organizations. Shadow Brokers is not Wikileaks. The leaked code is completely different, according to Grant Gross of the IDG News Service.

Can antivirus software stop WannaCry?

All of the AV vendors have been working overtime to get WannaCry detectors working, and many have created advanced defense systems. Even if your AV vendor says it covers WannaCry, you still have to get Windows patched. No exceptions.

If I get infected, what happens?

You get a big dialog box that tells you that your files have been encrypted. If you see this dialog, yep, your DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, JPG, and more than a hundred additional file types have all been encrypted. To date, nobody has been able to crack the encryption.

If my computer gets infected, will all of the drives get hit?

Yes. Even your file history drive, according to poster @b on AskWoody.

So I should pay the ransom?

No. The idiot(s) who wrote WannaCry are handling all the decryption activitythe order fulfillmentby hand, according to @hackerfantastic. Even if you pay them, and thus encourage them and others to do it again, theres a very good chance you wont receive a response.

They made a killing off this, right?

As of Monday morning, the three hard-coded bitcoin wallets have accumulated about $60,000. You can see the latest results for yourself: wallet 1, wallet 2 and wallet 3. No bitcoins have been pulled out of the wallets, as of this moment, so the author(s) hasnt spent any of it.

We were lucky it was just ransomware, yes?

No. We dont have the slightest idea if WannaCry installed backdoors, or if there is some other unforeseen consequence to all of this, according to Dan Goodin at Ars Technica.

Is this a good reason to get Windows 10?

No. This particular piece of malware didnt infect Windows 10, but thats because the underlying NSA code doesnt infect Windows 10. Someone considerably more adept than the WannaCry author(s) could find a way to infect SMBv1 in Win10. The only general solution is to get SMBv1 patched, on every version of Windows, using the techniques discussed earlier.

Surprisingly, WannaCry didnt infect WinXP computers either, although the underlying NSA code does.

Is this a good reason to turn on Automatic Updates?

No. Its a good reason to apply updates periodically. Microsoft released the SMBv1-correcting patch (MS17-010) 60 days before WannaCry appeared. If you applied patches at any point during those 60 days, you were covered.

Is the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments a problem?

Brad Smith, Microsofts head lawyer, thinks so. According to Smith:

We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world. Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage.  We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits.  We need the tech sector, customers, and governments to work together to protect against cybersecurity attacks.

You should read the rest of his call to arms. Hes right.

Questionsand answerscontinue on the AskWoody Lounge. Apologies if you have trouble getting throughthe sites been overwhelmed with WannaCry traffic.
Citigroup markets exec Suni Harford will take the top investments job at UBSs asset management arm following Fitzpatricks departure for Soros Fund Management in March.

Suni Harford, a 24-year veteran of Citigroup, will join UBS Asset Management in July, succeeding Dawn Fitzpatrick as head of investments.

Fitzpatrick left UBS to join Soros Fund Management as chief investment officer in late March. She started her career at OConnor & Associates, a hedge fund acquired by UBS, and then rose through the ranks at OConnor and UBS to become one of few women in leadership positions in the asset management industry.

For the last nine years, Harford was Citigroups regional head of markets for North America, a role that included sales, trading, origination, and research across all fixed income, currencies, commodities, equities, and municipal bond businesses. In a statement, Ulrich Koerner, president of UBS Asset Management, said, She brings strong leadership capabilities combined with a broad knowledge of the investment markets across multiple asset classes and deep understanding of macro-economics.

Fitzpatrick is not the only recent departure from UBSs asset management arm. The firm has lost a number of high-ranking executives as its Swiss bank parent continues to grapple with scrutiny from regulators and cost-cutting. Other departures include Blake Moore, head of UBS Asset Managements Americas business, as well as leaders in distribution, investment solutions, and human resources.
Bundesbank executive Andreas Dombret says more stringent regulation is needed in the Eurozone to avoid a solvency crisis at banks.

A German central banker is urging European banks and fund managers to hold cash in case their governments default.

In Europe, we have been witnessing debt haircuts and other symptoms of sovereign overburden, Andreas Dombret, an executive board member at Germanys Bundesbank, said Monday at the Annual Conference on the Banking Union in Frankfurt. Euro-area credit institutions do not need to hold any capital against the default risk of their member states. This is remarkable, since sovereign bonds account for a significant part of bank assets in the euro area.

Dombret warned that without more stringent regulation, a sovereign solvency crisis risks triggering a solvency crisis at banks. He made his comments the same day that the Hellenic Statistical Authority announced economic data showing Greece returned to a recession during the first quarter.

Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund noted some of its concerns relating to Greeces debt levels. The countrys 115 billion (about $126 billion) of tax and social security debt to the state is by far the highest in Europe, close to 70 percent of its gross domestic product, the IMF said in a February report.

This excessively large debt burden weighs on the balance sheets of companies and individuals, hindering investment, consumption, and the resumption of growth, the IMF said in the report.

In another sign of weakness in the Eurozone, Fitch Ratings last month lowered Italys sovereign credit rating to BBB from BBB+ rating. Fitch said in an April 21 report that the countrys track record of fiscal slippage and weak economic growth were partly to blame for its failure to bring down the very high level of general government debt. This has left Italy more exposed to potential adverse shocks, the credit rater said.

British investors remain cautious on the outlook for Eurozone sovereign debt.

Our long-term structural view on Europe is that it needs to adjust quite meaningfully if its going to survive in its current form, said James Vokins, a fixed-income portfolio manager at Aviva Investors.
There has been a significant shake-up in the underwriting operations of QBE Europe.The company announced earlier today that it was introducing a new underwriting structure that will see it combine its existing underwriting divisions into one business to form a single entity. This will be supported by a central market management proposition, which will focus on customer and broker engagement.The changes will see Sam Harrison, managing director, insurance, take the leadership role and attempt to bring a level of uniformity to how QBE deals with both consumers and brokers. The firm will also establish a global sales excellence practice, under David Hall, global director of sales excellence, which will aim to deliver multi-line programmes across the firms specialty and corporate lines. Hall will also lead a client advisory group that aims to shape risk transfer solutions.Speaking about the shake-up, Richard Pryce, CEO of QBE European Operations, outlined that the structure will be Brexit friendly  with an announcement about continuity of service in continental Europe to follow.We see these changes as a natural and positive evolution for our business, he said. We are harnessing our significant underwriting and product capabilities to enable us to offer enhanced experiences for all our customers and brokers.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UKs financial regulator, and Hong Kongs Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) have signed an agreement to promote collaboration in support of financial technology innovation in both territories.The agreement will allow the FCA and SFC to work together on information sharing and refer innovative companies that are seeking to enter one anothers markets.Christopher Woolard, executive director of strategy and competition at the FCA, said: Co-operation agreements are absolutely vital in fostering an environment of fintech innovation on a global scale. In the last few months alone weve signed agreements with colleagues in China, Japan, Canada and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. Working with other regulators internationally, we want to build a common understanding of the principles of good innovation and we look forward to working closely with the SFC.The FCA also entered a similar agreement with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority in December 2016. With this latest deal, the FCA will have contact with several key regulatory agencies in Hong Kong, which will prove helpful given the speed and impact of developments in the fintech industry.This agreement will help both regulators stay abreast of innovation in financial services while providing innovative fintech firms seeking to develop and grow their businesses internationally with enhanced channels for communicating with regulators, added Ashley Alder, SFC chief executive officer.
Electricity generation in Ukraine's integrated power grids in January-April 2017 grew by 2.1%, or 1.126 billion kWh, year-over-year, to 55.25 billion kWh, the Energy and Coal Industry Ministry has told Interfax-Ukraine.

Nuclear power plants NPPs) increased electricity output by 8.1%, to 31.456 billion kWh. In particular, power production at Zaporizhia NPP amounted to 11.965 billion kWh (a 5.3% rise year-over-year), Yuzhnoukrainsk NPP generated 6.158 billion kWh (an 18.1% rise), Rivne NPP 5.765 billion kWh (a 15.8% decline), Khmelnytsky NPP 7.568 billion kWh (a 33.4% rise).

Thermal power plants (TPP) and combined heat and power plants (CHPP) decreased production by 10.1%, to 18.548 billion kWh. In particular, TPP generating companies decreased production by 9.8%, to 13.815 billion kWh, CHPPs saw an 11% decrease in output, to 4.732 billion kWh.

Hydroelectric power plants in January-April 2017 increased production by 25.5%, to 4.2 billion kWh, municipal CHPPs decreased it by 7.3%, to 477.3million kWh.

Electricity production by non-conventional sources (wind farms, solar stations, biomass) increased by 6.4%, to 569.5 million kWh.

The share of NPPs in electricity generation was 56.9% (53.8% in January-April 2016), TPPs and CHPPs 33.6% (38.1%), hydroelectric power plants 7.6% (6.2%), municipal CHPPs and block stations 0.9% (1%), and alternative sources 1% (1%).

In April, electricity generation grew by 4.3%, to 12.34 billion kWh.
More insurance companies are expected to establish their post-Brexit hub in Luxembourg, a finance official from the country has revealed.The news follows Hiscoxs announcement last week that it will set up its new EU subsidiary in Luxembourg. Now, the head of the countrys trade promotion body is claiming that the specialist insurer wont be the last one.Nicolas Mackel, Luxembourg for Finance chief executive, is preparing for at least two or three more insurance companies to follow suit by the summer, the Telegraph reports.According to the report, Mackel has admitted to being surprised at the level of interest from insurance firms.However, Mackel also said that he has no plan to carry out gimmicks such as special roadshows or brochures to further improve Luxembourgs competitive stance, the report added. He said the competition for relocating UK firms is not like the video game Pokemon where you need to catch them all.Earlier this month, Luxembourg finance minister also denied offering special deals to undercut European rivals, saying it doesnt give the right signal.Apart from Hiscox, industry giant AIG and US commercial property insurer FM Mutual have also revealed plans to locate their new EU outposts in Luxembourg to maintain access to the single market.
First impressions last, so Farmers Insurance agents around the Miami Valley area have helped Ohio military veterans at their job interviews by passing on suits to them.Agents from the insurance firm handed over more than 500 suits to the non-profit Clothes That Work, which helps beneficiaries land jobs by helping them secure presentable interview clothes from donors.They have obviously partnered together to take care of people that need something like this and dont have the opportunity to do it on their own, retired soldier James Holliman said in a Fox 45 report, so I appreciate that very much.The suits that were not used by the veterans will go back to the charity to be handed over to other members of the community.Farmers Insurance agents told the local media outlet they hope to make the suit donation an annual event.
The building is hopefully insured.State Farm had to deal with a broken window over the weekend after an SUV accidentally rammed through its Miramar office in San Diego, California.A young man who had his family on board an SUV lost control of the car after he accidentally slammed on the accelerator instead of the brake and went straight through a glass window of the State Farm Insurance office along Black Mountain Road.Local news franchise NBC San Diego reported the vehicle was in a half in half out situation as emergency crew waded through debris and glass shards. No-one was reported injured, although one employee was brought to the emergency room of a local hospital after showing signs of anxiety.Some of the emergency crew stayed behind to clear up the debris. They were able to safely remove the vehicle from the building.State Farm also had to halt operations following the accident. An afternoon call was met with a recorded response saying the office was closed, the report added.Authorities did not release any further details about the incident.
A ransomware worm made its way to more than 200,000 computers in a number of countries over the weekend, and while one may dismiss its creators as petty criminalsasking for an average individual ransom cost of $300its economic implications are significant.The WannaCry ransomware worm inched its way through the systems of hospitals, car manufacturers, telcos, factories, schools and shops, leaving in its aftermath business interruption costs upwards of $4 billion, according to cyber risk modelling firm Cyence.A Reuters report said that firms in Europe and Asia are particularly vulnerable to another spate of attacks after the worm took a respite towards the tail of the weekend.If youre a hospital that turned away patients, if youre a global delivery company that cant send a package or a telecom company in Spain, Russia or China, the financial statement impact from the business interruption is much larger than the $300 (ransom), Kevin Kalinich, global head of Aon Plcs cyber risk practice, said in the report.Kalinich further said that US companies are most prepared for such events as nine out of 10 cyber policies across the globe were taken out in the country.Bob Parisi, US cyber product leader for insurance broker Marsh , explained that the market is more mature because regulations, specifically state breach notification laws, have been in place for the past 10 years.The weekend incident is expected to be another lesson learned for insurers as they study more carefully which risks to assume as well as the language they use to define coverage and exclusions, the report added.They will want to pick the companies that are most prepared, Kalinich observed. He further noted that other firms will be qualified for coverage but insurers will be more meticulous about exclusions moving forward.For instance, he said, insurers may require their policyholders to contact them before paying ransoms in the future.There are really important intricacies he concluded.
The speeding Amtrak engineer involved in a derailment that killed eight people and injured about 200 others in Philadelphia wont face criminal charges, the city district attorneys office said.

Prosecutors said they cant prove engineer Brandon Bostian acted with conscious disregard when he accelerated the train to 106 mph on a 50 mph curve.

Federal investigators concluded that Bostian lost track of his location, or situational awareness, before the May 12, 2015, crash after learning that a nearby commuter train had been struck with a rock. They found no evidence he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol or distracted by a cellphone.

Lawyers Thomas R. Kline and Robert Mongeluzzi, who represent more than 30 victims and their families, described their clients as bitterly disappointed and said many remain in constant pain two years later.

There is a longing for accountability when you are disabled and in excruciating pain every day, Mongeluzzi said. The person who was the primary and sole cause of this escaped punishment and you paid the price.

Kline believes that Bostian should at least face reckless endangerment charges, a misdemeanor, if not the more serious charges that require a finding of intent.

If he is allowed to escape responsibility, then it is an invitation for every culpable person who operates a vehicle  whether it be a train or a car or a bus or a boat  to say, `I forgot where I was, Kline said.

But the District Attorneys Office concluded there was not enough evidence to prove that he consciously disregarded any risks to his passengers. The train had left Philadelphia minutes before, heading toward New York.

We cannot conclude that the evidence rises to the high level necessary to charge the engineer or anyone else with a criminal offense, the office said in an unsigned statement.

The current district attorney, Seth Williams, remains in office although his law license has been suspended amid a federal bribery indictment set for trial May 31. A deputy is overseeing legal decisions, the office has said.

Amtrak has taken responsibility for the crash and agreed to pay $265 million to settle related claims.

Bostian has a personal injury suit pending against Amtrak, saying he was left disoriented or unconscious when something struck his train before the crash. His lawyer has rarely commented on the case and did not return a call for comment Tuesday.

The National Transportation Safety Board called Amtraks long failure to implement automatic speed control throughout the busy Northeast Corridor a contributing factor.

Friends describe Bostian as a conscientious train enthusiast who had worked his way up to his dream job. In the lawsuit, Bostian said the crash left him with physical and psychological injuries that now make it difficult for him to work.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Pennsylvania
Legislation creating rules for ridesharing services for the first time in Connecticut has cleared the House of Representatives.

The bill passed Thursday on a 103-99 vote. It now moves to the Senate.

Both Uber and Lyft, which now operate unregulated in Connecticut, praised the bill which requires criminal background checks for drivers and $1 million in liability insurance coverage once a passenger gets in the vehicle.

If the bill clears the Senate and ultimately becomes law, Lyft says Connecticut will be the 43rd state to enact ridesharing legislation.

Guilford Rep. Sean Scanlon, a Democrat, says the bill puts in place some consumer protections I believe will keep Connecticut residents safe.

New Fairfield Rep. Richard Smith, a Republican, opposed the bill because of a $50,000 state fee for ridehailing companies.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Connecticut
Governments and companies around the world began to gain the upper hand against the first wave of an unrivaled global cyber attack, even as the assault was poised to continue claiming victims this week.

More than 200,000 computers in at least 150 countries have so far been infected, according to Europol, the European Unions law enforcement agency. The U.K.s National Cyber Security Centre said new cases of so-called ransomware are possible at a significant scale.

For now, it does not look like the number of infected computers is increasing, said a Europol spokesman. We will get a decryption tool eventually, but for the moment, its still a live threat and were still in disaster recovery mode.

At Germanys national Deutsche Bahn railroad, workers were laboring under high pressure Monday to repair remaining glitches with train stations electronic departure boards, a spokesman said.

French car maker Renault SA, which halted production at some factories to stop the virus from spreading, said 90 percent of factories worldwide had now resumed operations, according to a spokesman Monday.

A new version of the ransomware may have also been spreading over the weekend. Matt Suiche, founder of United Arab Emirates-based cyber security firm Comae Technologies, said around 10,000 machines have been infected by the second variation of the malware.

The malware used a technique purportedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency. It affected the U.K.s National Health Service, Russias Ministry of Interior, China government agencies, Deutsche Bahn, automakers Nissan Motor Co. and Renault, PetroChina, logistics giant FedEx Corp., and other company and hospital computer systems in countries from Eastern Europe to the U.S. and Asia.

The hackers used the tool to encrypt files within affected computers, making them inaccessible, and demanded ransom  typically $300 in bitcoin. Russia and Ukraine had a heavy concentration of infections, according to Dutch security company Avast Software BV.

Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith, in a blog post Sunday, said the attack is a wake-up call for governments in the U.S. and elsewhere to stop stockpiling tools to exploit digital vulnerabilities. They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyber space to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world, he said.

Normal Operations

About 97 percent of U.K. facilities and doctors disabled by the attack were back to normal operation, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said Saturday after a government meeting. At the height of the attack Friday and early Saturday, 48 organizations in the NHS were affected, and hospitals in London, North West England and Central England urged people with non-emergency conditions to stay away as technicians tried to stop the spread of the malicious software.

The initial attack was stifled when a security researcher disabled a key mechanism used by the worm to spread, but experts said the hackers were likely to mount a second attack because so many users of personal computers with Microsoft operating systems couldnt or didnt download a security patch released in March that Microsoft had labeled critical.

Microsoft said in a blog post Saturday that it was taking the highly unusual step of providing the patch for older versions of Windows it was otherwise no longer supporting, including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

While the scale of the attack shows Microsoft needs to strengthen its own capabilities, there is simply no way for customers to protect themselves against threats unless they update their system, Smith said in his blog post. Otherwise theyre literally fighting the problems of the present with tools from the past.

This attack is a powerful reminder that information technology basics like keeping computers current and patched are a high responsibility for everyone, and its something every top executive should support.

Victims have paid about $50,000 in ransom so far, with the total expected to rise, said Tom Robinson, chief operating officer and co-founder of Elliptic Enterprises Ltd., a ransomware consultant that works with banks and companies in the U.K., U.S. and Europe. Robinson, in an interview by email, said he calculated the total based on payments tracked to bitcoin addresses specified in the ransom demands.

Last year an acute-care hospital in Hollywood paid $17,000 in bitcoin to an extortionist who hijacked its computer systems and forced doctors and staff to revert to pen and paper for record-keeping.

Business Targets

A spokesman for Spains Telefonica SA said the hack affected some employees at its headquarters, but the phone company is attacked frequently and the impact of Fridays incident wasnt major. FedEx said it was experiencing interference, the Associated Press reported.

Renault halted production at some factories to stop the virus from spreading, a spokesman said Saturday, while Nissans car plant in Sunderland, in northeast England, was affected without causing any major impact on business, an official said.

Russias Interior Ministry, with oversight of the police forces, said about 1,000 computers were infected, which it described as less than 1 percent of the total, according to its website.

In China, the malware affected computers at several unspecified government departments, the countrys Cyberspace Administration said on its WeChat blog Monday. Since that initial attack, agencies and companies from the police to banks and communications firms have put preventive measures in place, while Qihoo 360 Technology Co., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and other cyber security firms have begun making protection tools available, the internet overseer said.

China National Petroleum Corp., which owns PetroChina, reported that some of its 21,000 gas stations had seen their digital payment systems disabled by the attack and resorted to accepting cash. More than 80 percent of the stations had been reconnected to the network as of noon on May 14, the company said. Several Chinese universities had also been hit by the attacks, according to local media reports.

In Japan, Hitachi Ltd. said that some of its computers had been affected. In South Korea, CJ CGV Co., the countrys largest cinema chain, said advertising servers and displays at film theaters were hit by ransomware. Movie servers werent affected and are running as normal, it said in a text message Monday. Indonesias government reported two hospitals in Jakarta were affected.

While any size company could be vulnerable, many large organizations with robust security departments would have prioritized the update that Microsoft released in March and wouldnt be vulnerable to Fridays attack.

Users Tricked

Ransomware is a particularly stubborn problem because victims are often tricked into allowing the malicious software to run on their computers, and the encryption happens too fast for security software to catch it. Some security experts calculate that ransomware may bring in as much as $1 billion a year in revenue for the attackers.

The attack was apparently halted in the afternoon in the U.K. when a researcher took control of an Internet domain that acted as a kill switch for the worms propagation, according to Ars Technica.

I will confess that I was unaware registering the domain would stop the malware until after I registered it, so initially it was accidental, wrote the researcher, who uses the Twitter name @MalwareTechBlog. So long as the domain isnt revoked, this particular strain will no longer cause harm, but patch your systems ASAP as they will try again.

A second variant of the domain also became apparent. Suiche, founder of Comae Technologies, said on Sunday he registered another kill-switch for a different version of the ransomware. About 50% of machines that would have spread the infection by the second variation of the malware have Russian I.P. addresses, according to Suiche.

There is a high probability that Russian-language cyber criminals were behind the attack, said Aleks Gostev, chief cyber security expert for Kaspersky Lab.

Ransomware is traditionally their topic, he said. The geography of attacks that hit post-Soviet Union most also suggests that.

With assistance from Stepan Kravchenko, Ksenia Galouchko, Robert Hutton, Jack Sidders, Adam Satariano, Nour Al Ali, Aibing Guo, Penny Peng and Aaron Ricadela.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics USA Cyber Russia Europe China
Wind turbines were planted along a strip of Mexicos southern coast to make the countrys power industry cleaner. Now theyre spilling oil.

In the town of Juchitan last month, a clean-up was under way around a generator owned by Electricite de France. Workers wearing goggles and masks were scrubbing off a copper-colored lubricant that dripped down from the turbine. Theyd wrapped cloth around its base, to absorb further leakage, and stuffed contaminated soil and stones into plastic trash-bags.

Flor, who owns the land where the turbine is sited and rents it to EDF, said she arrived on the scene after being alerted by a neighbor. The stench was terrible, like a sort of burned fuel or ammonia, she said, asking not to be identified by her surname out of concern over reprisals. The trees were glistening with oil. Similar problems have been reported all along the Tehuantepec isthmus, one of the western hemispheres windiest places.

While the leaks are limited in scope and probably pose no immediate health risk, they look bad  and thats yet another headache for Mexicos energy reformers, who are seeking to make more use of renewable sources as state monopolies open up to private capital. The plan has succeeded in attracting global investment, and wind power is getting its share, with more than $6.9 billion already pledged. But its also stirring up all kinds of local opposition, which could soon rebound against President Enrique Pena Nietos governing party at the ballot-box.

Vicious Winds

Gas-price hikes in January sparked nationwide protests and looting. The Chiapas region, with a history of rebellion, is up in arms again over plans to sell oil-drilling licenses. And now in neighboring Oaxaca state  home to almost two-thirds of Mexicos wind-power capacity, including the Tehuantepec turbines  protesters are blockading local highways and calling for future development to be shelved. Locals often check the radio before their morning commute to find out which routes are blocked.

Electricite de France said in an e-mailed statement that its procedure in such cases would be to ascertain the leaks causes and assess any environmental damage. Then, the affected soil, vegetation, pasture and/or crops are removed and the landowner is monetarily compensated, it said. EDF didnt say which stage it had reached in the Mexican case. It said the lubricant in question was classified as not dangerous to the environment.

Spains Acciona SA, which encountered similar problems at its installations nearby, said the leaks are a consequence of the same extreme weather that attracted the industry to the isthmus.

Winds can be vicious for as much as half the year, said Miguel Angel Alonso Rubio, head of Accionas Mexican unit. The turbines use lubricating oil that can leak if upkeep is insufficient or gears malfunction. During those six months of intense winds, we are unable to clean the leaks, Alonso said. We prefer to have the machine dirty than an employee in an accident.

He said oil from Accionas turbines never reached the ground, and the company is working on a fix: a sheath for the gearbox which will prevent the lubricant from running down the mast or onto the blades.

Water and Food

Ramon Fiestas Hummler, chairman of the Latin America committee at the Global Wind Energy Council, said its unusual for such spills to actually contaminate surrounding soil, and when they do then the company has an obligation to clean the affected area. He said actual environmental damage would likely be limited. Still, black stains on white turbines provide local communities with a visible reason to point to when opposing wind projects.

Activists in south Mexico say theyre worried that more turbines are on the way, and that will mean more leaks.

Pena Nietos plan calls for 35 percent of Mexicos electricity to come from renewable sources by 2024. Companies including EDF last year won rights to build more generators in Tehuantepec, and therell be further auctions this year. Oaxaca state should be generating 5,000 megawatts by 2020, about twice its current capacity, according to the Mexico Wind Energy Association, known as Amdee.

You might not think its that big a deal for a little bit of oil to end up in the land, said Bettina Cruz, an activist, at her home in Juchitan. But there are nearly 2,000 turbines here now and hundreds more are planned in the next few years. The leaks will add up. Right into the land we use for water and food.

Populist Threat

Cruz is a Zapotec, one of the indigenous groups scattered across Mexico that often take the lead in local protests. Carlos Sanchez founded Radio Totopo and does a daily broadcast in the Zapotec dialect. The government seems to award projects to giant companies without considering that there are already people living on these lands, he said. And they are the people that have been here for centuries.

Dissatisfaction with the government isnt confined to outspoken activists. Pena Nietos nationwide approval rating slumped into the teens earlier this year.

The president cant stand for re-election in 2018. His PRI party  which has run Mexico for 76 of the past 88 years  faces a major challenge from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a populist whos vowed to put opposition to the energy reforms at the heart of his campaign. Local elections next month may offer an early indicator of his prospects.

Of course, there are plenty of people in Oaxaca who have no problem with its role as Mexicos reservoir of wind-power.

The majority of people in towns with wind parks are probably still in favor, said Marcelino Nolasco, coordinator of the Tepeyac Human Rights Center in Oaxaca. But over time, people have seen less benefits than originally promised.

Job opportunities, for example, have fallen short of expectations, locals say. And the touted improvements to roads or schools also havent materialized, on the whole. That kind of obligation shouldnt have been loaded on private companies in the first place, according to Leopoldo Rodriguez, Amdees president.

Investments cant be considered a substitute for the governments duties, he said. Social demands, specifically for indigenous areas, are making wind projects more expensive and less competitive.

Another grievance is emblematic of the wider difficulties that Pena Nietos reforms have encountered. Oil investment was supposed to lower costs; instead, gasoline prices rose. Similarly, for all the efforts to harness the winds of the Tehuantepec, people there complain that their electricity bills havent gotten any smaller.

Much of the power produced by the wind turbines is sent to Mexicos biggest companies, like Cemex SAB and Wal-Marts Mexico branch, known as Walmex, which get tax incentives in return for using renewable energy. Government energy policies have to take a longer view. Still, the fact that locals havent seen short-term results in the form of lower costs has added to their resentment, Nolasco said.

Support is waning, he said. And with every new turbine, it generates more tension.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Energy Oil Gas Mexico
Generali announced that Jean-Laurent Granier, 51, will join Generali Group as country manager for France and president directeur general (PDG) of Generali France with effect from June 1, 2017.

Granier also will join the group management committee of Assicurazioni Generali.

The current PDG of Generali France, Eric Lombard, will continue to assist the group CEO on strategic and institutional affairs and will maintain the current role of chairman of Europ Assistance until the end of the year, when he will leave the group. Lombard will leave the position of PDG of Generali France on May 31, 2017.

Granier graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique and Ensae and from the French Institute of Actuaries (Institut des Actuaires). He joined UAP in 1990 then AXA in 1997 and worked in various positions at AXA France. Since January 2010, Granier has been chief executive officer of the Mediterranean and Latin America Region, encompassing 23 countries, and a member of the AXA executive committee. From January 2012 to June 2016, Jean-Laurent Granier has been also chairman & CEO of AXA Global P&C and a member of the AXA management committee.

I am very glad to welcome Jean-Laurent Granier into the Generali Group. He brings extensive experience in the global insurance sector and a deep knowledge of the French market, which represents a key market for us, said Generali Group CEO Philippe Donnet.

Im convinced that Jean-Laurent is the right choice to lead the acceleration of the industrial turnaround of our business. I would like to thank Eric Lombard for his outstanding leadership and contribution to the financial turnaround in a very competitive and challenging market, Donnet added.

Source: Generali

Topics AXA XL Generali Life Assurance (Thailand) Plc. France
Doxa Insurance Holdings LLC, an Indiana-based private equity fund focused on purchasing managing general agents nationwide, has acquired Chicago-based Promont Advisors and ProPoint Claims Services.

Promont and Propoint specialize in providing insurance and claims administration for difficult classifications of business in the allied health space, along with hard-to-place religious institutions, hotels, motels, apartment complexes, and professional liability. Both organizations are recognized for their in-depth general liability and property underwriting expertise for the businesses they insure.

Promont has underwriting authority on behalf of several A rated or better insurance companies.

Promont will operate and market as Promont Insurance Advisors with its brand approach aligning with overall Doxa Insurance strategies.

Doxa Insurance Holdings is located in Fort Wayne, Ind.

Source: Doxa Insurance Holdings

Topics Claims
Ukraine and Israel have agreed to cooperate in healthcare, exchange of customs statistics and prevention of emergencies.

The press service of Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers has reported that the bilateral documents were signed during an official visit of Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman to Israel.

The sides signed a joint declaration of intent between the governments of the two countries to cooperate in emergencies prevention and liquidation of their aftermath. The document is to be a first step on the way of signing a full-featured agreement in the sphere. This would help to quickly provide mutual assistance, exchange information and modern technologies aiming at preventing emergencies. If emergencies appear, it would help to quickly and effectively solve the issues of liquidating their aftermath at the interstate level.

A cooperation plan in the healthcare sector was signed by the profile ministries for the period of 2017-2021.

The administrative order was signed by Ukraine's State Fiscal Service and the Customs Administration of the Tax Authority of Israel on mutual assistance in customs issues and exchange of statistics on bilateral trade that would allow the quick exchange of customs statistics data and analyzing trade turnover between the two countries.

The sides also signed the implementation protocol A to the agreement on temporarily employment of Ukrainian employees in some sectors on the Israeli labor market. The protocol determines the mechanism and specifies the conditions for temporary employment of Ukrainian employees in the construction sector in Israel.
The Sioux City (Iowa) Community School District has paid $160,000 to a woman injured when a school bus rear-ended her vehicle in 2013.

The Sioux City Journal reports that the school board approved the settlement last week with Jennifer Fitzpatrick. In exchange, her lawsuit was dismissed on May 11.

The settlement is covered by the districts insurance carrier. Each side will pay its own legal costs.

Fitzpatrick filed her suit against the district and bus driver Marsha Tucker in January 2015, seeking damages for past and future medical expenses.

Fitzpatrick was injured on April 4, 2013, when she was driving south on Floyd Boulevard and her Toyota Camry was rear-ended by a school bus driven by Tucker.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Education Iowa
A U.S. appeals court on Friday granted a 60-day pause in the long-running case in which the countrys largest life insurer, MetLife Inc, has challenged the federal governments labeling of it as too big to fail, as the Trump administration wrestles with reforms arising from the financial crisis.

More than a year ago, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer struck down the governments designation of MetLife as systemically important, which signifies it could devastate the financial system if it failed and triggers stricter oversight, saying the label was arbitrary and capricious. The administration of former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, immediately appealed.

In October the government and insurance company had a rematch before two judges appointed by Obama, Sri Srinivasan and Patricia Millett, and one by former President George H.W. Bush, a Republican. At the time most expected a ruling to soon follow, with the losing side possibly appealing to the Supreme Court.

Republican President Donald Trump, however, has expressed skepticism about the designation process and the council of regulatory heads that assign the labels, and has ordered the Treasury Department to review both. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also has said the councils work should be evaluated.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, intended to avoid a repeat of the 2007-09 crisis and recession, created the Financial Stability Oversight Council and empowered it to designate non-banks as systemically important.

Last week the council asked the court to put the appeal on hold for 60 days, saying it needed additional time for deliberation.

Previously MetLife had asked for a pause until Treasury completed its review. A spokesman for the company said it was pleased with the 60-day abeyance.

The company is not officially labeled too big to fail during the appeal. Currently, only two firms, both insurance companies, carry the label: American International Group , which received a $182 billion bailout during the crisis, and Prudential Insurance.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert and Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Bill Trott)
Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS) announced personnel appointments within the Cyber and Engineering lines of business.

Jenny Soubra has been appointed head of Cyber and Specialty Professional Indemnity (CPI) for the U.S. and Tim Cook is the new head of Engineering, North America. For his new role, Cook will relocate from London to New York while Soubra will be based in San Francisco.

Utilizing nearly 20 years of financial lines underwriting experience, Soubra will lead a team of U.S. underwriters focused on cyber and specialty errors and omissions risks. Most recently, Soubra was the national practice leader for the CPI team and prior to AGCS, she held a variety of senior underwriting positions with Zurich, CNA and ACE Group.

As head of Engineering, Cook will be responsible for partnering with brokers to achieve growth in this space. Cook joined Allianz over 17 years ago and has filled multiple roles within the organization. Prior to this appointment, he served as head of Engineering for regional unit London since 2012. Cook began his career as a claims broker for Sedgwick International and then gained further experience working for a variety of organizations, including Cigna and Assurance General de France in London.

Source: AGCS

Topics Cyber London Allianz
American International Group named Brian Duperreault as its new chief executive officer on Monday, selecting a protege of former CEO Hank Greenberg and an industry veteran known for his turnaround expertise.

Duperreault, age 70, is the founder and chief executive officer of Hamilton Insurance Group Ltd. in Bermuda, and is seen as a short-to-medium term replacement for outgoing CEO Peter Hancock, who announced plans to depart in March after the insurers fourth-quarter loss stunned investors and AIGs board.

He may only stay at AIG for 3 to 5 years to finish an ongoing turnaround effort and groom a successor, several recruiters said in interviews.

Brian is uniquely qualified to lead AIG at this important time, Douglas Steenland, chairman of AIGs board said in a statement.

He is a hands-on leader who has consistently delivered strong bottom-line results, Steenland said.

The companys shares were up 1.7 percent at $62.01 in premarket trading on Monday.

[Editors Note: In conjunction with the announcement on its new CEO, AIG announced it has agreed to acquire Hamilton USA for about $110 million as part of a memorandum of understanding with Hamilton Insurance Group and Two Sigma Insurance Quantified furthering their joint investment in the technology platform Attune and committing to advancing data-driven underwriting. Also, Hamilton Insurance Group has replaced Duperreault by naming William C. Freda as chairman and David A. Brown as interim CEO.]

AIG is nearly three-quarters of the way through a turnaround plan developed by Hancock, who intended to slim the New York-based insurer through divestitures, improve its financial performance and return $25 billion worth of capital to shareholders.

Although AIGs poor fourth-quarter performance was a tipping point for many investors, including billionaire activist Carl Icahn, the company has since bounced back. Its first-quarter operating profit beat expectations, helped by investment returns and cost cuts.

AIGs board has also authorized an additional $2.5 billion in share repurchases, putting the company closer to its capital return target. Since announcing the goal, AIG has spent more than $18 billion on stock buybacks and dividends.

Brian Duperreault: Career Highlights

Duperreault is described by many in the insurance business as the industrys elder statesman. After moving up the ranks at AIG early in his career, he left in 1994 to build ACE Group Inc. from a small outfit to a global operation.

Duperreault, who took charge of Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. in 2008, launched a successful turnaround effort at the company, which had been struggling with reputational issues and lost business after then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer alleged that it had rigged bids for insurance contracts. Marsh paid an $850 million civil penalty in 2005 to settle the claims.

However, Duperreaults appointment as AIGs head could test whether those seen as possible internal candidates for the CEO job will stay on board to help achieve Duperreaults goals.

The most prominent was Rob Schimek, CEO of AIGs commercial insurance unit, who joined the company in 2005 as its chief financial officer.

Industry sources describe Schimek, age 52, as capable and accomplished, though he lacks Duperreaults turnaround experience. During his time at AIG, he has been credited with helping ink reinsurance pacts with Swiss Re AG and Berkshire Hathaway Inc to offset long-term risks on U.S. commercial insurance policies.

(Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra and Chris Reese)
South Carolina Insurance Director Ray Farmer was elected to fill the position of secretary-treasurer of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners During a Plenary meeting by members, effective immediately.

Farmer is replacing former Texas Insurance Commissioner David Mattax, who passed away on April 13.

It is truly an honor to serve this great body. I believe my knowledge of the industry, and past and present regulatory experience in insurance regulation, will serve this organization well, Farmer said.

Farmer has over 40 years experience in the industry in various capacities, including: representing an insurance trade association, working as an insurance adjuster, serving as deputy commissioner with the Georgia Department of Insurance, and now as the Director of Insurance for the State of South Carolina.

I congratulate Director Farmer on his election as NAIC Secretary-Treasurer. He continues to do a tremendous job in South Carolina, and I know that his leadership will grow the business of insurance and provide efficient, effective regulation nationally  as it has here, said Gov. Henry McMaster.

Farmer joins other 2017 NAIC officers: President Ted Nickel, Wisconsin; President-Elect Julie Mix McPeak, Tennessee Insurance Commissioner; and Vice President Eric A. Cioppa, Maine Insurance Superintendent.

Raymond has been a long-time advocate for insurance consumers and state insurance regulation while bringing extensive experience and expertise that will strengthen our team of officers, said NAIC President and Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner Ted Nickel. I want to thank all the members who expressed an interest in elevating their service to the NAIC. We are fortunate to have a high level of dedication and willingness of those in our ranks to support the mission of our association.

Farmer was appointed by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to serve as director for the South Carolina Department of Insurance on November 13, 2012. With more than 40 years experience, Farmer earned his bachelors degree in insurance from the University of Southern Mississippi and earned his law degree from Atlantas John Marshall Law School.

Farmer served as the Deputy Insurance Commissioner of the Enforcement Division for the Georgia Department of Insurance and more recently as vice president for the American Insurance Association. As a part of his service, Farmer has served for more than 30 years on the board of directors of the Georgia Arson Control Program, an organization aiding firefighters and prosecutors combating arson. He is a member of the State Bar of Georgia and a member of the Tort and Insurance Practice section, as well as the Workers Compensation section.

Topics Legislation Agribusiness Georgia South Carolina
A rare order from a federal judge alerting prosecutors to possible criminal misconduct by Uber or a key executive deepens the turmoil swirling around the ridesharing company at a time when its grappling with other legal and image problems.

District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco referred a civil case filed against Uber by Waymo to the U.S. Attorneys Office for investigation of possible theft of trade secrets. It threatens to trigger a second U.S. government investigation of a company that has pushed the legal boundaries through most of its eight-year history.

At stake is Ubers estimated $68 billion valuation, a possible public stock offering and the future of its self-driving car program, which its CEO has said is the key to the companys future.

Waymo, a self-driving car company owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., sued Uber in February alleging that Uber is using stolen self-driving technology to build its own fleet of autonomous cars.

The U.S. Attorneys Office in San Francisco didnt respond to requests for comment.

Experts say prosecutors are likely to follow up on Alsups order and launch an investigation. The probe, combined with other legal and image woes, will reduce Ubers value and in the worst case could threaten the San Francisco companys existence if investors leave, criminal charges bring huge fines and legal action stalls autonomous car research, the experts say.

Uber wouldnt comment Friday on a possible criminal probe. Federal prosecutors already have requested information from at least two cities about use of phony software to thwart city officials looking at whether Uber was following local regulations.

Alsup wrote in his order that he wasnt taking a position on whether prosecution was warranted.

Alsup, 71, has gained a reputation as a no-nonsense judge since he was appointed to the bench in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. The Harvard Law graduate has experience in trials involving high-profile technology companies, including a 2012 patent and copyright infringement case pitting Oracle against Google.

For a judge to take such a public step, he must have more than just a whiff of criminal activity, legal experts say. Prosecutors get many tips, but rarely do they come from a judge who is familiar with evidence and the legal elements of what is a crime.

This is not some private informant that slipped an envelope under the door at midnight. This is public and its a judge, said Erik Gordon, a law and business professor at the University of Michigan.

An investigation would siphon executive resources at Uber just as CEO Travis Kalanick faces many other challenges, said John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in white-collar crime and corporate governance. The possibility that you could get criminally indicted would be exactly the wrong thing for Uber, Coffee said.

In addition to the apparent inquiry into the software called Greyball to impede city inspectors, Uber still has to deal with Waymos high-stakes espionage lawsuit. It alleges that Uber is using trade secrets stolen by a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, who formed his own company which was bought by Uber $680 million.

After that deal, Levandowski began to oversee Ubers self-driving car division.

Waymo contends that before leaving Google early last year, Levandowski downloaded 14,000 documents with details of a navigational tool called Lidar that robotic cars need to see whats around them.

Uber has vehemently denied using Waymos ideas, maintaining that its Lidar is radically different. Meanwhile, Levandowski has refused to answer most questions posed by Waymos lawyers while asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He recently agreed to step down as Ubers top self-driving car executive, though he still works at the company.

Beyond the possible criminal cases, Kalanick in February was forced to quit President Donald Trumps council of business leaders after Uber was boycotted by some customers. A female former engineer made a series of sexual harassment allegations about her boss, and a video of Kalanick berating an Uber driver went viral, forcing him to concede he needs leadership help.

Last week, Uber suffered a huge legal setback when a European Union judge ruled that it was a transport company and could be required to get licenses and permits in the 28 EU nations.

Uber had sought to persuade Alsup to send the dispute between Waymo and Levandowski to private arbitration hearings. But the judge rejected that request, meaning the case will play out in a public court, risking further image damage for Uber.

Just months ago Uber was discussing what could have been the largest public stock offering in history, but its troubles now make that all but impossible, Gordon said.

Uber can survive the troubles, but it has an uphill fight, said Gordon. If the court finds that Uber used Googles Lidar technology, that will slow Ubers autonomous car research, leaving it behind competitors. The company would either have to pay Alphabet to use it or buy it from a supplier, both expensive options, Gordon said.

The companys strategy of fostering rapid growth by flouting laws may wind up being its undoing, Gordon said. The empire is striking back.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics California USA Auto Google
Gov. C.L. Butch Otter says hes ready to offer assistance to flooding communities in central Idaho.

The Idaho Mountain Express reported that Otter visited with residents, emergency management officials and local government representatives Saturday in Hailey.

Otter says 31 out of Idahos 44 counties are under a disaster declaration after experiencing extreme snowfalls during the winter and resultant flooding over the past few weeks.

Lt. Gov. Brad Little added that lawmakers approved $50 million in emergency funds to help repair infrastructure from the winter flooding. Communities can apply for some of that money.

The Blaine County Sheriffs office and the city of Hailey have several mandatory evacuation orders in place through Hailey.

Brad Richy, deputy chief of the Idaho Office of Emergency Management, says it will likely take a month for the worst of the flooding to abate.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Flood
A homeowners association will pay $300,000 to a Keizer family as part of a settlement for banning a motor home from being parked in the familys driveway.

The Statesman Journal reported that Gary, Renee and Khrizma Kuhn agreed to dismiss their federal lawsuit against the McNary Estates Homeowners Association in exchange for the payment.

In 2015, Gary and Renee Kuhn bought a motor home for their daughter, Khrizma, who has Down syndrome and autism, to help her travel. However, the homeowners association denied their request to park the motor home in their driveway.

The Kuhns then sold their home and filed a lawsuit alleging the homeowners association violated fair housing laws. A judge later ruled in the Kuhns favor and the parties eventually chose to settle.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Homeowners Oregon
Utah State University has settled a wrongful-death lawsuit with the family of a college student who was killed in August 2013 when he hit a rope tied between two trees known as a slack line while riding his bike.

Ricky Shelton, attorney for the family of 24-year-old Eric Anderson, said Friday that terms of the settlement signed April 26 are confidential. The family was asking for $2 million in damages.

Carvel Anderson says he and his wife Gayle Anderson brought the lawsuit not for the money, but to ensure the university made changes to prevent future slack line accidents. He says the college has agreed to make policy changes to ensure slack lines are well marked.

Utah State University didnt immediately return request for comment.

The Herald Journal in Logan first reported the settlement.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Education Universities
All the prisoners, in respect of whom a verification with a view to the prisoner exchange in Donbas took place, have refused to go back to the territories currently not controlled by Kyiv in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said.

"I believe this information is important. One hundred percent of those regarding whom Ukraine has allowed the verification of the desire to return to occupied Donetsk and Luhansk, 100% have reiterated that they don't want to return," Poroshenko said at a news conference in Kyiv on Sunday.

Poroshenko went on to emphasize that those people had preferred staying in prisons in the Kyiv-controlled territory to "going to the occupied territory."

"They [the representatives of certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions] were confused. They were lost. And now we are anticipating the meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group [scheduled for May 15]," he said.

However, Poroshenko claimed that the Russian side's constantly modifying its stance evidences a reluctance to release 'Ukrainian hostages'.

As reported earlier, Ukraine's representative in the Trilateral Contact Group on the Donbas settlement, Leonid Kuchma, received over the week a preliminary report on the verification of the lists of those captured during the hostilities in Donbas.

"Leonid Kuchma has heard a preliminary report on completing the procedure to verify the convicts who have committed crimes but who could be pardoned if this helps release those Ukrainians being illegally held in the occupied territories. This concerns several hundred people who do not want to be transferred to certain districts in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Kuchma's spokesperson Darka Olifer wrote on Facebook.

The verification in relation to those who are procedurally restricted in their rights and being held at Ukrainian penitentiaries continued from April 28 until May 12, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada human rights ombudsman Valeria Lutkovska and the head of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' United Center for the Release of Hostages, Yuriy Kochanov, said. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) coordinated the efforts. The group, which has carried out the verification, comprised representatives of the Ukrainian ombudsman's office and the Ukrainian Armed Forces, alongside some OSCE representatives and several women, mothers of the convicts, who had committed crimes.

"Over this period of time the group conducted verification and travelled over 14,000 kilometers, visiting 19 Ukrainian regions and Kyiv, and 37 penitentiaries," they said in a statement.

Lutkovska said (and it had also been mentioned in previous OSCE reports) that the interrogation had been in compliance with international standards and that confidentiality rules and international humanitarian law had been observed.

The Ukrainian side expects that the report on the verification will be a key issue at the humanitarian subgroup's and the Contact Group's meetings in Minsk on May 15 and is making every effort to de-block the process of freeing hostages, Olifer said.
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Breaking AI Stock News: GBT's (OTCPK: GTCH) Facial and Body Recognition Patent Application Received a Notice of Allowance

San Diego, CA - November 9, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) GBT Technologies Inc. (OTC PINK: GTCH) with GBT Tokenize Corp. ("GBT/Tokenize") received a notice of allowance for its facial and body recognition non-provisional patent application.

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More than 2,000 fewer people were sent to prison last year compared to 2015, a drop of 12%.

The drop is partly down to a reduction in prison terms for those who fail to pay fines - that number is down by 50% so far this year.

Head of the Irish Prison Service Michael Donnellan also said: "If you compare the Census for 2016 to 2006, there's a 22% drop in males between the ages of 20 and 29. If age is a predictor of offending, that goes some way to understanding, maybe, some of the overall reducation," he said.

There has also been an increase of 5% in people being supervised in the comnmunity by the Probation Service.

Around six out of 10 people who engage with the Probation Service do not re-offend.

Conditions are also improving for the prison population who are 80% male and 20% female, the Prison Service's annual report which was published today, shows.

Meanwhile, Irish prisons have an effective policy for dealing with gang leaders, according to Michael Donnellan.

He made the remarks after the Prison Officers Association said gangs had too much influence inside prisons.

Michael Donnellan said they have "solid" plans in place for gang leaders.

We have a strategy of separating people who are gang leaders," he said. "Our strategy is also to disperse people, we dont at the moment put all our gang leaders in one area. Our policy is to keep people separated, break them up and break down the influence.

Business owners are also being urged to consider hiring ex-convicts, as it dramatically reduces their chance of re-offending.

The Tanaiste and Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald welcomed the publication of the report and launched the Joint Probation Service and Irish Prison Service Strategy for Development of Social Enterprise in the Irish Criminal Justice Sector 2017  2019.

The Tanaiste said: "During 2016, the number of Community Service Orders issued by the Courts and facilitated by the Probation Service increased to over 2,000.

"I am pleased to note the increase in the use of Community Service, as an alternative to prison. The use of prison as a sanction of last resort is a core principle of penal reform, and I applaud the Probation Service in their success in providing appropriate alternatives to custody."

She also welcomed the 12% reduction in prison committals highlighted in the report, saying: "We must continue to ensure that violent offenders and other serious offenders serve appropriate prison sentences while at the same time switching away from prison sentences and towards less costly non-custodial options for non-violent and less serious offenders."

The fundamental theme of the joint Strategy is that people with education and training, who are in employment, are less likely to offend. The aim of the social enterprise model is to prepare prisoners for the work environment while in prison and to facilitate them in gaining employment upon release.

Speaking at the launch of the Strategy the Tanaiste said: This innovative body of work will no doubt provide essential services and supports to ex-offenders as they begin the process of rebuilding their lives and reintegrating into our communities.
Details of a new bill to abolish the so-called baptism barrier in schools will be announced on Monday.

The Solidarity Equal Participation in Schools Bill would ensure that schools are not able to discriminate in admitting children on the grounds of religion.
The Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald has said she has no evidence that the Garda Commissioner has done anything wrong.

Minister Fitzgerald also hit out at opposition parties, saying many of the current garda controversies started when Fianna Fail were in power.

The Tanaiste may face a vote of no confidence brought by opposition parties if she refuses to sack Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan.

The Commissioner has faced calls to resign in the wake of a string of controversies from the alleged smearing of whistleblowers, to inflated breathalyser test results and a furore over financial irregularities in the garda training college at Templemore.

However, Frances Fitzgerald has again expressed her confidence in the Garda chief, saying: "I have no objective evidence that the Garda Commissioner has done anything wrong.

"Of course the opposition are going to ramp up the pressure and use the Commissioner to ramp up pressure on me.

"I would say politics and political expediency are not going to root out the very deep-seated issues in relation to An Garda Siochana."

Meanwhile, the Tanaiste said whistleblowers must be treated with respect, in the wake of revelations at the weekend about garda whistleblower Keith Harrison.

It is reported a profile report was prepared on garda Harrison, similar to what would be drawn up for criminals.

Minister Frances Fitzgerald said the Charleton Inquiry will be looking into whistleblowers cases, and said major changes were afoot in the Gardai.

"I want whistleblowers to be treated with respect," she said.

"Yes, there have been quite a number of issues in relation to policing in recent times, but I would say again (that) when you shine a light, you see issues that have been kept in the dark previously."
U.S. ready to pressure Russia into Donbas settlement, there are very interesting ideas to this end - Klimkin

The United States is ready to join the Donbas settlement process and to pressure Russia, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said.

"A keynote political message is the actual wish to join the pressure on Russia. There are very interesting ideas, but I can tell you about them later, upon coordination with every one of our partners. Any issues need to be coordinated with Germany and the new French president," Klimkin said in an interview aired by the TSN. Tyzhden television program after he met with U.S. President Donald Trump last week.

The United States has levers of influence, which should be used together with the EU and other G7 countries, the Ukrainian foreign minister said. "It could be real political messages. Of course, there are also economic levers of influence and sanctions, these are just one of the options," he said.

One may speak about the strengthening of the international component in Donbas and the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission, as well as the creation of another mission "that will actually control the occupied Donbas territory," Klimkin said.
A murder accused, who used a fake Facebook profile to meet his ex-girlfriend, told his psychiatrist that he had intended tying her to a chair and forcing her to listen to an account of his suffering, but didnt intend to kill her, writes Natasha Reid.

The psychiatrist, who testified at his trial today, said he believed him, diagnosed him with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, and gave his opinion that his mental state meant he had diminished responsibility for the killing.

Dr Sean O Domhnaill also told the Central Criminal Court that Eric Locke had developed a mistrust of females, after a number of them taunted him about a physical birth defect.

The Dublin man is charged with murdering 31-year-old Sonia Blount in a room at the Plaza Hotel in Tallaght on the 16th of February 2014.

The 35-year-old, with an address at St Johns Park East in Clondalkin, has pleaded not guilty, but admits causing the death of the mother-of-one, who was found strangled and suffocated.

The trial has heard that he used a fake Facebook profile to meet Ms Blount at the hotel, after she stopped contact with him. He said he brought a pellet gun, Stanley knife and cable ties to frighten her, but she screamed when she saw them and he strangled her.

The prosecution closed its case yesterday morning and Patrick Gageby SC, defending, called consultant psychiatrist Dr Sean O Domhnaill.

Dr O Domhnaill testified that he had interviewed Mr Locke and his family in November 2015 and that he found him to have signs of ADHD, autism and Aspergers Syndrome.

It became very obvious from the family that Eric, from a very early age, was displaying clear signs of autistic behaviour: the hand flapping, the screeching, high pitched shriek, he said, indicating that this would arise when children couldnt communicate their discomfort, usually their psychological discomfort.

He noted that Mr Locke had in excess of 20 jobs over a decade and that this was common with ADHD.

He mentioned an account of Mr Locke assigning human-like qualities to his action figures, telling his sister to be careful what she said about one of them. He explained that this was a feature seen in Aspergers Syndrome.

Dr O Domhnaill said that Mr Locke had been born with a common condition involving his urethra. He said there had been the usual surgical attempts at correcting this, but they hadnt worked. Instead, they had left him with both the deformity and scarring.

A number of females had taunted him about this over the years.

This made him distrust females, he said.

He concluded that he was suffering from a chronic pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified.

He was asked about his state of mind when he took Ms Blount's life, whether he was able to form the capacity to have intent and follow through on that.

My belief, having gone over this many times in my head, is that he didnt foresee what was going to happen, he said. In fact, he went up there and, lets face it, it was not a good intent of essentially tying her to a chair and forcing her to listen to an account of his suffering.

He said he believed that this was his intention.

I dont agree with the opinion that vengeance was a motive, as theres nowhere in his life history that suggests he was a vengeful person, he said.

He noted that Mr Locke had used items to kill her that he hadnt taken with him. The court had heard that these included a mobile phone cable to strangle her and her t-shirt, used to suffocate her by forcing it into the back of her mouth.

It seems to me that he panicked when she panicked. She panicked when she saw the contents of his bag fall out and started to scream, he said.

His description of those essential seconds and minutes was as if it was an out of body experience, almost as if he was watching somebody else doing it, he recalled.. That is certainly consistent with how people experience these types of incidents, when their anxiety and stress levels are just through the roof.

He addressed the question of whether there was a point at which he could have stopped, noting that it takes some time to kill somebody in this way.

I dont think, to be honest, that Mr Locke even knows what went through his mind at that time, he said. I dont believe that it was planned. I believe it was a very unfortunate tragic mess.

Mr Gageby asked him about the legal test for diminished responsibility, which can reduce murder to manslaughter.

We know that he was suffering from at least one mental disorder, if not two, he said. We know that the severity of them was quite extreme in the weeks, particularly the fortnight leading up to the offence, he continued.

We know that having been that mentally unwell, its highly unlikely he had the level of responsibility on this day that he didnt display in the previous two weeks. I believe that what occurred occurred as a reason of his inability to control the impulse, the panicked response of Ms Blount, he added.

My belief is therefore that, while he did commit the act, his mental state was such that he would be described as having diminished responsibility, he said It caused such an extreme level of anxiety and agitation that it rendered him incapable of being considered to have full responsibilities for his actions.

He confirmed to Mr Justice Michael Moriarty that Mr Locke had expressed remorse. He said he recalled him saying he couldnt believe he had done it and that it wasnt fair that her young son would have to grow up without a mother.

Under cross examination by Remy Farrell SC, prosecuting, he agreed that he was being paid privately by Mr Lockes family

He was asked if it was significant that the accused had told gardai that Ms Blount had inflicted the scratches on his face while he was strangling her.

It would suggest he had a clearer memory of events than having an out of body experience, he replied

Than he's letting on? asked Mr Farrell.

Yes, he responded.

Mr Farrell will continue his cross examination of Dr O Domhnaill Tuesday before a jury of eight men and four women.
A pensioner who had been jailed, and was subsequently released by the High Court, over a failure to pay court-ordered instalments on a 5,000 judgment debt has brought fresh proceedings seeking damages, writes Ann O'Loughlin.

The man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was arrested in March by order of the District Court and jailed for seven days over not meeting the repayment instalments.

He spent two nights in Mountjoy Prison before being freed on bail a few days later following an application by his lawyer Micheal P. O'Higgins SC to the High Court.

Described as having significant health issues, the man claims he was unable to meet the instalments of 500 monthly which he was previously ordered to pay to meet the judgment debt, obtained by a law firm arising from family law proceedings.

His only income was said to be his old age pension and the man is in dire financial straits.

After the man's release, the Free Legal Advice Centres, which took proceedings on his behalf, said his case underlined "major failings" in debt enforcement law here.

The case returned before the High Court today when Mr O'Higgins SC for the man secured permission to bring fresh proceedings arising out of his imprisonment.

In his action against the Governor of Mountjoy and the Minister for Justice and Equality the man seeks various orders and declarations from the courts including an order formally quashing the District Court order for his arrest and detention arising out of his failure to pay an instalment order.

He also seeks damages for the time he spent in prison.

Frances Fitzgerald

He further seeks a declaration that before a a debtor can be imprisoned for the non payment of an instalment order the Judge hearing the application must alert the debtor to the possibility of imprisonment and explain that the debtor has an entitlement to apply for legal aid.

The man claims the District Court judge who sentenced him to jail did not apply two safeguards required under legislation when a person faces jail for failure to meet the terms of an instalment order.

Those required legal aid must be offered to the debtor and no jailing order be made unless the court is satisfied the creditor has shown beyond reasonable doubt the debtor failed to pay due to their wilful refusal or culpable neglect.

Permission to bring the action was granted on an ex-parte basis by Mr Justice Seamus Noonan. The case will come before the court again in July.
Chelsea Manning's Welsh mother has spoken of her pride for the Wikileaks whistleblower before her release from prison.

The former intelligence analyst is due to leave a military jail on Wednesday, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified US Government documents.

Susan Manning said she is "delighted" her daughter, 29, will eventually be free to fulfil her aspirations, although she has concerns over how she will fare outside prison.

Barack Obama commuted the transgender soldier's sentence in his final days in the White House, outraging Republicans including Donald Trump, who described her as an "ungrateful traitor".

Preparing for her release, Manning's Welsh-Irish family said the sentence had been a "travesty of justice".

Mrs Manning, said: "I am so proud of Chelsea and delighted she will finally be free again.

"It is going to be very hard for her to re-adjust after so long inside the prison's four walls and I'm happy she will be staying in Maryland where she has family to look out for her.

"Chelsea is so intelligent and talented, I hope she now has the chance to go to college to complete her studies, and to do and be whatever she wants. My message to Chelsea? Two words: 'Go, girl!'"

In her first statement since receiving clemency, Manning said on Tuesday that she hopes to use the lessons she received in prison to help others.

She added: "I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world.

"Freedom used to be something that I dreamed of but never allowed myself to fully imagine."

Manning was arrested in 2010 and convicted in 2013 of six violations of the US's espionage act for leaking 700,000 secret military and State Department document to WikiLeaks.

The trove, which included classified battlefield videos, was one of the biggest breaches of intelligence in US history.

She acknowledged leaking the files while working in Iraq, but protested that she had acted to raise awareness of the impact of US military action on innocent civilians.

Then known as Private Bradley Manning, she later underwent gender transition while in jail and in 2016 made two attempts to take her own life, citing ill-treatment behind bars.

She is currently being held at a correctional facility at Fort Leavenworth, a US Army disciplinary barracks in Kansas.

Manning, whose father is American, was born in Oklahoma in the US but moved to Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire just before she turned 14 in 2001 following her parents' divorce.

She attended Tasker Milward comprehensive school and still has family and friends in the area.

In a statement her Welsh-Irish relatives said Manning had endured "seven years loss of liberty for her whistleblowing actions while those whose wrongdoing she exposed have gone unpunished".

"The shocking and abusive ill-treatment Chelsea was subjected to in Kuwait and [US Marine base] Quantico before the trial should never have happened and the 35-year sentence handed down by the military court was a travesty of justice.

"We are naturally very relieved that this ordeal will soon be over for Chelsea and that she will be able to take up her place in society again.

"Whatever she decides to do, we are sure she will make a significant and positive contribution."
The worldwide "ransomware" cyber attack has spread to thousands more computers as people across Asia logged in at work, disrupting businesses, schools, hospitals and daily life.

But no new large-scale outbreaks have been reported, and officials in Europe said a feared second wave of infections had not materialised.

The new infections were largely in Asia, which had been closed for business when the malware first struck.

In Britain, where the health service was among the first high-profile targets of the online extortion scheme, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said "we have not seen a second wave of attacksHe said "the level of criminal activity is at the lower end of the range that we had anticipated".

The malware, known as WannaCry, paralysed computers running factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems, hitting 200,000 victims in more than 150 countries.

Among those hit were Russia's Interior Ministry and companies including Spain's Telefonica and FedEx in the US.

Though the spread of the ransomware slowed on Monday, many companies and government agencies were still struggling to recover from the first attack.

Carmaker Renault said one of its French plants, which employs 3,500 people, was not reopening Monday as a "preventative step".

Britain's National Health Service said about a fifth of NHS trusts were hit by the attack on Friday, leading to thousands of cancelled appointments and operations. Seven of the 47 affected trusts were still having IT problems on Monday.

The British government denied allegations that lax cybersecurity in the financially stretched, state-funded health service had helped the attack spread.

Prime Minister Theresa May said "warnings were given to hospital trusts" about the Microsoft vulnerability exploited by the attackers.

NHS Digital, which oversees UK hospital cybersecurity, said it sent alerts about the problem - and a patch to fix it - to health service staff and IT professionals last month.

Tim Stevens, a lecturer in global security at King's College London, warned that the incident should be a wake-up call to both the public and private sectors to incorporate security into computer systems from the ground up, rather than as an afterthought.

"This thing cannot be brushed under the carpet," he said. "It is so visible and so global. There is going to have to be change at levels where change can be made."

In Asia, where Friday's attack occurred after business hours, thousands of new cases were reported on Monday as people came back to work.

The Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre, a non-profit group, said 2,000 computers at 600 locations in Japan were affected.

Companies including Hitachi and Nissan Motor Co reported problems but said they had not seriously affected their operations.

Chinese state media said 29,372 institutions there had been infected along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

Universities and other educational institutions in China were among the hardest hit, possibly because schools tend to have old computers and be slow to update operating systems and security, said Fang Xingdong, founder of ChinaLabs, an internet strategy think tank.

On social media, students complained about not being able to access their work, and people in various cities said they had not been able to take their driving tests over the weekend because some local traffic police systems were down.

Railway stations, mail delivery, petrol stations, hospitals, office buildings, shopping malls and government services also were affected, China's Xinhua News Agency said - citing the Threat Intelligence Centre of Qihoo 360, an internet security services company.

In Indonesia, the malware locked patient files on computers in two hospitals in the capital, Jakarta, causing delays.

Experts urged organisations and companies to immediately update older Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows XP, with a patch released by Microsoft to limit vulnerability to a more powerful version of the malware - or to future versions that cannot be stopped.

The attack held users hostage by freezing their computers, popping up a red screen with the words, "Oops, your files have been encrypted!" and demanding money through online bitcoin payment - 300 US dollars at first, rising to 600 US dollars before it destroys files hours later.

As cyber-security firms worked around the clock to monitor the situation and install a software patch, new variants of the rapidly replicating malware were discovered on Sunday.

One did not include the so-called kill switch that allowed researchers to interrupt the malware's spread on Friday by diverting it to a dead end on the internet.

Ryan Kalember, senior vice president at Proofpoint - which helped stop its spread, said the version without a kill switch could spread.

It was benign because it contained a flaw that prevented it from taking over computers and demanding ransom to unlock files but other more malicious ones will likely pop up.

"We haven't fully dodged this bullet at all until we're patched against the vulnerability itself," Mr Kalember said.

Microsoft distributed a patch two months ago that protected computers such an attack, but in many organisations it was likely lost among the blizzard of updates and patches that large corporations and governments strain to manage.

The president of Microsoft laid some of the blame at the feet of the US government.

Brad Smith criticised US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency, for "stockpiling" software code that can be used by hackers.

Cyber-security experts say the unknown hackers who launched the attacks used a vulnerability that was exposed in NSA documents leaked online.

Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, said "criminals" were responsible, not the US government.

Mr Bossert said the US has not ruled out involvement by a foreign government, but that the recent ransom demands suggest a criminal network.

Mr Bossert told ABC's "Good Morning America" that the attack is something that "for right now, we've got under control" in the United States.

So far, not many people have paid the ransom demanded by the malware, Europol spokesman Jan Op Gen Oorth said.

Eiichi Moriya, a cybersecurity expert and professor at Meiji University, warned that paying the ransom would not guarantee a fix.

"You are dealing with a criminal," he said. "It's like after a robber enters your home. You can change the locks but what has happened cannot be undone."

- AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin, known for his passion for the outdoors, showed off his softer side during a visit to China when he sat down to play the piano.

Mr Putin is in Beijing on a state visit to discuss a 1 trillion US dollar infrastructure plan that strives to revive the ancient Silk Road.
Data collected by the Irish Examiner under Freedom of Information shows 10,572 complaints were lodged with the 31 different local authorities in 2015 and 2016, although one council had incomplete records for last year, meaning the final figure might be higher.

The number of antisocial behaviour complaints received by Dublin City Council rose by almost one third last year, with the council getting 1,385 notifications.

There was also an increase in the number of complaints lodged with Fingal County Council, up to 653 last year compared with 610 in 2015. In South Dublin County Council, figures showed 725 complaints in 2015 and 710 up to the end of November 2016.

Outside the capital, the local authorities with the largest number of complaints lodged across both years included Wexford County Council (563 cases), Limerick (450), Louth (397), Wicklow (383), Sligo (311), Kilkenny (304), Tipperary (300), Cork City (300), Cork County Council (239), Kildare (240), Offaly (234), Waterford (222), Meath (198), and Carlow (183).

By contrast, Galway County Council said it had logged just five complaints across the two years. Galway City Council said more than 15 warning letters were issued across 2015 and 2016.

When it came to steps to remove problem tenants from council housing, just 12 evictions were actually carried out across the two years, with Dublin City Council having the most, with four.

Adding in other measures such as voluntary surrender, orders for possession and exclusion orders, at least 100 people were removed or moved from properties.

Limerick City and County Council repossessed 13 properties on foot of formal notices, and currently has 15 exclusion orders granted by the district court under section 3 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1997 barring them from particular housing estates within the city and county for up to three years.

A council spokesperson said: These orders have proven to be particularly effective, with jail sentences being imposed for breaches.

The council also co-operated with gardai to use powers granted under Section 20 of the same 1997 Act to have unauthorised occupiers suspected of antisocial behaviour removed from properties in five cases.

However, complainants or neighbours of those alleged to engage in antisocial behaviour are just as likely to move. The figures show that at least 108 people requested or were granted a transfer to another property as a result of the antisocial behaviour of others.

Issues with alleged anti-social behaviour and tenancies are not limited to social housing. Latest figures from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB), a statutory body which seeks resolution of disputes between tenants and landlords, among other responsibilities, said it received 279 complaints of antisocial behaviour last year, representing 6% of all contacts, and up from 163 notifications in 2015.

So far in 2017, the RTB has received another 96 complaints, representing 5% of complaints lodged with it.

An RTB spokesperson said it prioritised enforcement in cases where it has made an order, for example against a landlord for failing to prevent antisocial behaviour in a property, but which were not complied with.

The positive position is that these types of cases have reduced in numbers over the years, said the spokesperson. The number of requests to enforce for cases of anti-social behaviour is in single digits. The RTB has not had to pursue legal enforcement as parties have complied with the order [due the threat of proceedings if they dont].

At least 2,616 social housing units were vacant nationwide as per the most recent data provided, although many of those were in the process of being re-let, or were between tenancies.
Jason Corbett, aged 39, was found dead in the early hours of August 2, 2015, in the home he shared with his wife Molly Martens, aged 33, in Panther Creek, Wallburg, North Carolina.

Ms Martens father, Thomas Martens, 67, has also been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter.

The pair are due to stand trial in July. However documents filed with the Superior Court of Davidson County in North Carolina show that defence attorneys last week applied to have the case moved to another county.

The lawyers argued that the media both in North Carolina and in Ireland have published initial inaccurate and misleading allegations in police search warrants which were released by the court.

It was also claimed that the Clerk of Davidson County made improper contact with Mr Corbetts family in Ireland on the issue of his estate and the guardianship proceedings over Mr Corbetts two children.

They further alleged that Davidson Countys Sheriffs Office  which investigated Mr Corbetts death  have developed an inordinately close relationship to the family of Mr Corbett and the Irish media.

The documents allege that the family of Mr Corbett has undertaken an extensive social media campaign to sway public opinion against the defendant, which has included direct threats to the defendant and her family as well as Facebook and website postings critical of the defendant.

The Martens legal team also claimed that the pre-trial publicity, including the custody battle over Mr Corbetts children, among local media and word of mouth in Davidson County would prejudice the trial.

The State of North Carolina however, called on the court to deny the motion. In its response, the state described the arguments as irrelevant and unpersuasive. It was also argued that the Martens legal team engaged in the very pre-trial publicity that they criticise the state for generating.

Counsel for the defendants have participated in local, national and international interviews discussing the facts and circumstance of the killing of Jason Corbett, the state claimed.

The state further alleged that the defence team filed documents with the court in order to publicise allegations against Mr Corbett.

The defendants have used a pretrial motion filed months prior to any hearing as a strategic tool to transform potentially inadmissible evidence into public record, the state argued.

If the defendants are prejudiced by their own conduct, they cannot be heard to complain.

Pre-trial motions, including the request to change the venue of the trial, will take place on June 8.
The project is the latest addition to the ongoing digital collaboration on the Irish war of independence between University College Cork and the Irish Examiner which is centred on a co-hosted website at theirishrevolution.ie.

Corks War of Independence Fatality Register provides details for 528 civilians, policemen, British soldiers, and IRA Volunteers who died in the conflict during from the beginning of 1919 to the Truce of 1921. Visitors can search for individuals by name, place, and approximate date of death, and read about the circumstances of each episode.

The latest research project can be accessed here.

Corks War of Independence Fatality Register is a part of a multi-year research project by historians Dr Andy Bielenberg of UCC and Professor James Donnelly Jr of the University of Wisconsin.

This digital public engagement project hopes to act as a starting point for discussions about these episodes, many of which remain contested.

The authors welcome clarifications and corrections from readers, and seek new or previously undisclosed information about the entries or any deaths that may have been omitted.

Dr Andy Bielenberg will deliver a public talk entitled Corks War of Independence Dead at UCC on Wednesday, May 17, at which the Corks War of Independence Fatality Register will be officially launched.

Dr Bielenbergs talk will be held on the UCC main campus in Civil Engineering Building, G10, at 6 pm.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Commenting on the project irishexaminer.com digital editor, Dolan O'Hagan, congratulated all at UCC who have made this extremely useful historical resource possible.

"This new resource is the latest in an ever growing resource collection available at theirishrevolution.ie.

"UCC management and staff are to be warmly congratulated for delivering on the overall goal of this collaboration - to go beyond the 1916 commemorations and provide an open, free and unique public resource which aims to chart the entire war of independence period and the events that shaped it.

"We in the Irish Examiner are delighted to continue playing our part in ensuring that their work is seen by as wide an audience as possible."
Education Minister Richard Bruton will today outline proposed legislation covering the regulation of third-level and private international colleges.

Among them will be the creation of an offence of facilitating academic cheating by providing or advertising services such as writing college assignments, providing exam answers, or sitting an exam for a student.

The plan is being presented by Mr Bruton as getting tough on academic cheating, but his department is unclear on the extent to which such essay mill services are providing assignments, dissertations, and theses to order.

The offences would be prosecutable by Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI), the statutory body formed by the amalgamation in 2012 of four other bodies concerned with accrediting further education and third-level programmes. It has been hampered by internal difficulties, largely due to the diverse functions of the previous organisations and their staffs.

A consultants review for the Department of Education reported late last year that it has had a difficult industrial relations environment, and experienced a high degree of change, and some difficulties caused by changes to law. But significant challenges were also created by recruitment restrictions due to the economic climate.

Clarion Consulting was paid almost 25,000 by the department for the report, which said that the various structural, resourcing problems, leadership, and cultural issues were created over a number of years and they will not be solved in a short timeframe.

Asked by the Irish Examiner whether QQI is suitably positioned to implement the new powers and what additional resources would be provided to do so, the Department of Education said the issue of resources is being considered as part of the response to the Clarion report.

The department, in consultation with QQIs executive and board, is currently working towards implementation of the recommendations contained in the organisational review, said a department spokesperson.

Ms Bruton is publishing heads of the planned Qualifications and Quality Assurance (Amendment) Bill, but it will be at least 2018 before it becomes law.

The bill would give QQI power to provide an international education mark to give confidence to international students coming to private English language, business, and others colleges here that their provider is reputable.

A further element is to set up a Learner Protection Fund, into which such colleges would pay to create an academic bonding system. The idea is that students would be able to complete courses if their provider ceases operating.

An existing system is believed not to have been adequate after the closure of several such colleges in recent years left hundreds of students out of pocket and unable to get their qualifications.

Mr Brutons bill would strengthen QQIs powers to check the bona fides and ability of colleges to provide courses, before approving them. The body would also be required and authorised to share information with other State bodies in the regulation of the sector.

Institutes of technology would also become designated awarding bodies.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said that the legal proceedings in the case on high treason of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych should be transparent, but Ukrainian people and the president would not wait for it for three or ten years.

"I am sure that we should provide for absolutely transparent proceedings: society must know, defense must know and prove their arguments. Let them explain to the world and Ukrainian people what means the invitation of Russian troops to the sovereign and independent territory of Ukraine. There is no excuse for it. This must be not a simple political assessment but the absolutely legal conclusion made and directed by the prosecutor general," the president said at a press conference in Kyiv on Sunday.

Poroshenko also said that there should not be hurry in the case, but "neither Ukrainian people nor me as the president is not going to wait for it for three, five, seven or ten years."

As reported, Obolonsky district court of Kyiv on May 4, 2017 announced a break in the preparatory meeting on the case of high treason of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych until May 18. Such a decision was made by the court after partial satisfaction of Yanukovych's motion for organizing a videoconference with him.
One of the countrys foremost experts on hypertension said up to 30,000 people in Ireland are not aware they have high blood pressure.

Eoin OBrien, adjunct professor of Molecular Pharmacology at UCDs Conway Institute, said the International Society of Hypertension and the World Hypertension League were so concerned with the rate of increase in high blood pressure globally, that they decided to spend a month rather than a single day raising awareness and encouraging screening.

Traditionally, World Hypertension Day has taken place on May 17, but this year sees the introduction of May Measurement Month, with screening in about 100 countries in locations such as pharmacies, supermarkets, places of worship and clinics.

Prof OBrien said raising awareness was vital to stop stroke, heart attacks and dementia.

Research has shown that the direct consequences of raised blood pressure include stroke, coronary heart disease, heart failure, dementia, and renal failure. Moreover, it is the biggest contributor to cardiovascular disease, yet often remains undiagnosed.

An article published in The Lancet last month highlighting the importance of having blood pressure measured said while it could be done quickly, cheaply, and painlessly and can be treated cost-effectively it nevertheless receives insufficient attention from the general public, the medical profession, and health policy makers.

This was perhaps partly because hypertension usually has no related symptoms and is so common, affecting about 24% of men and 20% of women.

The article also said that only about half of those with hypertension were aware of it, while fewer than a third who are treated reach the recommended blood pressure targets.

Hypertension is defined as that level of raised blood pressure for which guidelines usually recommend drug treatment.

In Ireland, a number of pharmacies, including Lloyds and Boots, are participating in May Measurement Month, as well as hospitals and Irish Heart Foundation outlets.

Prof O Brien said the hope was that Ireland will be a major contributor to the project.

The anonymised blood pressure data will be stored in a database.

The hope is that screening data will be used in collaboration with policy makers in each country to enhance blood pressure screening and treatment facilities.
In the descent from 9,000m, the plane lowered as if in steps, bellying down from level to level and, after the hours aloft, we glimpsed land through wisps of cloud, pinpricks of light on the dark face of the earth below.

Next time we looked, the darkness had become a plain of light, a living thing through which corpuscles flowed, glittering and winking, clustering in places, amoeba seen through a microscope flaring for nano-seconds before dying, spread from horizon to the horizon with dark channels between them, fingers of the sea splitting the land.

Our son met us and 30 minutes later we were looking out on the rooftops of a shining city from an apartment on the 10th floor of a magnificent building where he and his wife are fortunate enough to rent an apartment, though not cheaply, with views of snow-capped mountains and a seawater channel where power boats and yachts worth a ransom reside.

The wilderness wed seen in the dusk as we took off from Toronto on the second leg of our journey from Dublin, the dark Canada of endless pines, lakes and mountains, was gone. Wed arrived in Vancouver, pearl of the western coast, City of Light on the Pacific Rim.

Later, deep in the night, my wife woke and heard geese flying overhead, calling and trumpeting. I wont ask my readers to guess the species, named for the land over which they fly.

In the morning, my son pointed out a pair on a rooftop below us. This city is full of wildlife, he said. Raccoons, skunks, squirrels and coyotes are resident; seals ply the channels of the watery arteries, beavers have dams.

Just after dark of our first day, five minutes from his flat in the heart of town, we walked along a wave-lapped seawall beside an inlet of the Pacific, and saw a small head splitting the calm water just beyond the seaweed and mussel-colonised rocks below us. An otter, we thought, a sighting on our first night.

However, as we paused to look, a man in a wheelchair, a flashy dude with a baseball jacket, baseball cap, a magnificent steel-grey Wyatt Earp moustache and rings on his fingers, told us that no, it was a beaver.

And not just any old beaver, but Justin Beaver, named after Justin Bieber, the famous Canadian purveyor of schmaltzy pop songs loved by millions, and the beaver was heading seaward from the land-locked end of the creek (its a dead end from which the tides come and go) where it has built a lodge in one of the most expensive residential areas on earth.

Good for the beaver. In beaver terms, his real estate must be as valuable as that of his human namesake. We watched as he swam parallel to us, 10m away, and then hauled himself ashore. It was too dark to see more than his profile but it was the first beaver Ive seen  and I didnt have to go to Northwest Territories or the Yukon River to see it.

Down this sea water channel  urban berth for yachts and powerboats and spacious enough to accommodate 40m long, iron barges  one can ride small ferries from landing stage to landing stage.

Round-prowed, and a little like floating bathtubs with roofs and all-round perspex windows, they accommodate 12 passengers and are a fine way to travel. While enjoying a maritime experience, visitors are probably less at sea in the city than when using dry-land maps.

Also, there are the sea birds to watch, the huge glaucous-winged gulls and the pelagic cormorants surfacing from their dives with beaks-full of seaweed for nest building.

A bathtub-ferry ride took us to a beach from which we walked to Stanley Park, pride of Vancouver, a 1,000-acre temperate rainforest home to 150,000 trees with a few old-growth giants, topping 50m, surviving.

Its lagoon is haunted by blue herons, wood ducks, bald eagles, yellowbelly-slider terrapins. Its wildlife is legendary and legion  but I must admit that, that day, it was the human nature of Vancouver that most bowled me over: Perhaps it was the country boy come to town syndrome. But, no; Ive been in skyscraper cities before.

We walked home via a city canyon. Fifty storeys and 150m above us, the skyscrapers caught the evening sun. Human nature rivalled, in form, the beauty of the wild. Cross streets opened to reveal below us a wooded harbour of yachts and power boats back-dropped by the snowcapped Rockies. Theres a spiritual song Oh, what a beautiful city... I couldnt help but hum it in my mind.
US PRESIDENT Donald Trumps firing of FBI director James Comey is unprecedented, as is much of what Trump has undertaken as president.

Despite similarities with then president Richard Nixons infamous Saturday Night Massacre 44 years ago, during the Watergate scandal, the political situations are utterly different.

In October 1973, Nixon, waiting until a weekend, ordered the dismissal of a newly appointed special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who had issued a subpoena demanding that Nixon hand over secretly recorded  and, as would become clear, highly damning  White House tapes.

Nixons defiance was direct, and the result was disastrous. US attorney general Elliot Richardson and deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus resigned in protest rather than carry out the presidents order.

A federal judge ruled the firing of Cox illegal. Public opinion polls showed, for the first time, a plurality of Americans favouring Nixons impeachment.

It was the beginning of the end. US congressmen introduced impeachment resolutions. Nixon was forced to appoint a new special prosecutor. The drama thickened for another 10 months, until the US Supreme Court unanimously ordered Nixon to surrender the tapes. A few days after that, Nixon resigned rather than face certain impeachment and removal from office.

By contrast, unless the stars realign, Trumps firing of Comey may mark the beginning of nothing, or at least of nothing bad for the president.

Trump, like Nixon, may well be guilty of grave impeachable offences  even graver offences than Nixons. Trump, like Nixon, may have feared that unless he fired the person in charge of investigating him, some terrible revelation would be forthcoming. But, even if all this is so, Trump, unlike Nixon, may very well get away with it.

The two events differ in many ways, including their timing. By the time Nixon fired Cox, the Watergate affair had been building for far longer than the allegations about Trump and Russia have, so nerves had been rubbed raw.

The main differences, though, are political. In Nixons time, there were solid adversarial Democratic majorities in both houses of US Congress, and there were also some Republicans, especially in the US Senate, who put concerns about the American constitution ahead of concerns for their party.

The US Senate appointed a special select committee, headed by Democrat Sam Ervin and Republican Howard Baker, which heard testimony and gathered official evidence that led to the indictment of 40 administration officials and the conviction of several top White House aides, as well as to Nixons resignation.

Todays Republican congressional majorities, however, have seemed singularly devoted to slowing and narrowing any serious inquiry into the thoroughly substantiated reports of Russian efforts to throw the 2016 election to Trump.

Although there has been talk, even from some Republicans, about appointing a select committee or a special prosecutor to look into the allegations about the Russians and the Trump campaign, the resistance has been extraordinary compared to 1973.

Based on the events of the last week, Republicans evidently would rather rail against insider leaks and, yes, Hillary Clintons email server than inquire into the White Houses insouciance about former national security adviser Michael Flynns alarming links to Russia and Turkey.

Without a significant shift, the congressional investigations will continue to remain confined to the standing House and Senate committees, where they will likely remain understaffed and under-motivated.

Then there is the press. In 1973, dogged reporting by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post kept the Watergate story alive, after most news outlets had dropped it.

Once their reporting gained traction, the rest of the press picked up the scandal and kept up the pressure on the Nixon White House. Today, Trump can count on the fervent support of propaganda operations that Nixon could only have prayed for, including Fox News and Breitbart News, as well as the countless bloggers (and, for that matter, Russian-controlled cyberbots) pumping out pro-Trump propaganda.

As I write this, one Fox commentator after another is parroting the White Houses absurd claim that Trump fired Comey because of the terrible things the FBI director did to Clinton during the campaign.

One almost expects the networks biggest star, Sean Hannity, to start leading on-air anti-Comey chants of lock him up. The effect on anyone who recalls Trumps cheerleading for Comey last October  followed by the red-hatted crowds ritualistic baying to jail crooked Hillary  is psychedelic. But fans of Fox News usually believe what the channel reports.

It is possible, of course, that Trumps firing of Comey will push some Republicans to decide that enough is enough and follow Bakers example. The early responses have been mixed: although Republican senators Jeff Flake, John McCain, and Ben Sasse have expressed varying degrees of disappointment, normally independent-minded senators Susan Collins and Lindsay Graham have backed Trumps decision. There is always a chance, in such a volatile climate, that deals will be broken, witnesses will flip, and facts will emerge that are every bit as incriminating as the evidence that felled Nixon.

International developments might also awaken some Republicans to the magnitude of the Russian offensive on Western democracies, an offensive which, in the wake of the French elections, feels like an undeclared war.

For the moment, though, there is no reason to see Trumps firing of Comey as a re-run of Nixons Saturday Night Massacre, or any other event in American political history.

The US president may be acting as if he has something terrible to hide, just as Nixon did, but that wont be enough under the circumstances to cause the exposure of whatever it may be.

Ironically, Trump, the self-declared outsider who lost the popular vote and squeaked into office by winning the Electoral College, finds himself, for the moment, in some ways more protected than the party man Nixon, who won the 1972 election by overwhelming popular as well as electoral margins.

It may be unsettling to acknowledge, but history is not repeating itself, no matter how tragic or farcical things might appear. Trump may yet fall, but a lot will have to change.
Did you hear the one about the Irishman (formally) complaining about the Englishman complaining about an imaginary being on national television?

You may have thought Irish jokes had been consigned to the unpleasant past, and yet here we are, our own legislation making us the butt of them.

When Nietzsche said that there was not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings, he might well have added a caveat about wasting police time investigating someones personal opinion about said being.

What a car crash. This is not, however, about the lone complainant who suggested to the Gardai that the actor Stephen Fry may have blasphemed when he said on telly that he wasnt overly impressed with what is known as God.

Lone complainants must remain forever free to complain about anything at all, no matter how daft, no matter how imaginary.

No, the joke is not the set up, but the response  an attempt to investigate and possibly prosecute an adult for having an opinion about a belief  because Ireland has a blasphemy law.

An actual blasphemy law. So instead of thanking the complainant before sending them smartly on their way, our law enforcement agents  paid for by actual Irish citizens  took the complaint seriously. Yes, they nodded.

Blasphemy, very possibly. Hang on there and well do an investigation, and make sure it gets into all the UK newspapers so that we look even more ridiculous.

Where are we, the 14th century? Up a Taliban mountain?

Come on, Ireland. Having a blasphemy law is like having stocks and a whipping post in the village square. Its like putting a religious order notorious for their abuse of mothers and babies in charge of a maternity hospital. Oh wait

And yet repressive regimes like the one in Pakistan are quoting the Irish blasphemy law to justify religious persecution. In the wake of the Stephen Fry cock-up, New Zealand realised they still had such a law, and quickly got rid of it.

Blasphemy is for the insecure. Its for people so worried about their belief system that they cannot bear to have it questioned, commented upon or insulted. Why? Is it because it might all blow away in a puff of smoke, fall down like a house of holy cards?

I would argue that blasphemy itself is actually blasphemous. People use words like the almighty and all powerful when describing what is called God.

But if such a being is so omniscient, so omnipotent, why would it need a bunch of crazed earthlings prosecuting and killing each other in its defence?

Isnt this rather undermining the power of said being to do its own dirty work?

Perhaps the most sensible reaction to Ireland having such legislation in the 21st century comes from online Waterford Whisperer , whose headline ran, Jesus F****ing Christ get rid of the blasphemy law, confirms nation. Quite.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko will visit Berlin late next week to discuss preparations for a meeting of the "Normandy group" (France, Germany, Ukraine, Russia), which negotiates a settlement for Donbas.

"At the end of next week, precisely in one week, I will have many hours of talks with the German chancellor in Berlin regarding preparations for a Normandy-format meeting," Poroshenko told a press conference in Kyiv on Sunday, responding to a question posed by Kyiv-based Interfax.
Monday, May 15th, 2017 (4:06 pm) - Score 7,358

The European Commission has published their annual 2017 European Digital Progress Report, which confirms that Ireland, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Greece all lag behind the rest of the 28 EU member countries when it comes to ultrafast full fibre (FTTH/P/B) broadband coverage.

The latest report is more of a complement to the 2017 Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), which covered a lot of the same information and was published in March (read our summary). Since then some extra data has been added (note: its mostly still data from June/July 2016) and the new report includes a useful country-by-country breakdown of progress towards the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE).

The 2020 DAE set several targets but the main one called for every home to gain access to a 30Mbps+ capable Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband connection by the year 2020 (plus 50% subscribed to a 100Mbps+ service). On this front the United Kingdom is actually doing very well (92.3% coverage vs 76% across the EU), which is largely thanks to strong availability via FTTC (VDSL2+) from Openreach (BT) and Cable DOCSIS from Virgin Media.

The UK also looks as if it might be able to achieve (or at least get fairly close) to the secondary target, which called for 50% of consumers to be subscribed to a 100Mbps+ service by 2020. Thanks to Virgin Medias ultrafast cable network the UK has already made reasonable progress on this front, which is likely to improve significantly given that Virgin has recently made 100Mbps their entry-level speed.

The future deployment of more G.fast and FTTP should also give this a boost but we doubt whether that will be enough to reach the 50% mark by 2020. Likewise not every UK consumer sees a need for 100Mbps+ and many will be happy to pay less for a slower speed connection. Getting the raw network coverage sorted remains more important but strong penetration also helps the economic model for ultrafast services, which can encourage more investment into related roll-outs.

Despite this progress the United Kingdom is clearly lagging behind when it comes to the coverage of ultrafast pure fibre optic (full fibre) broadband networks, such those supplied via Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) and Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB) technology. We know that there are around a million such lines in the UK today but other EU countries are clearly moving ahead.

In Portugal and Latvia more than 80% of homes can already subscribe to FTTP services, while in Greece, Belgium, UK, Ireland, Germany and Austria less than 10% can do so (c2% in the UK). FTTP increased the most in the Czech Republic last year (from 17% to 35%).

As usual FTTP services are available mainly in urban areas (its expensive + slow to deploy and so urban deployments often make the most economic sense) with the exception of Latvia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Romania and Netherlands, where more than 25% of rural homes also have access to it. Overall FTTP now covers 24% of EU premises, which is up from just 10% in 2011.

The above is particularly important because the European Commission recently proposed a new non-binding Gigabit Society target for all European households to get a minimum Internet download speed of 100Mbps+ by 2025, with businesses and the public sector being told to expect 1Gbps+ (here).

The new strategy focuses a lot of its energy on promoting FTTP/B, although the 100Mbps+ aspect doesnt strictly require such connectivity. For example, Virgin Medias Cable network can already do 350Mbps+ today and they expect to reach around 65% of UK premises by 2019.

Similarly Openreachs (BT) 160-300Mbps G.fast technology aims to reach 10 million premises by 2020 and 2 million more via FTTP, with most of the UK potentially being covered by 2025 (we still dont know precisely what most will mean). Last week BT hinted that under the right conditions they might even be able to push FTTP out to 10 million lines (here), although this could possibly involve some trade off with the G.fast roll-out.

On top of that the smaller alternative network (altnet) providers (e.g. Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, B4RN and Cityfibre) have indicated that over the coming years they could potentially add a few million FTTP lines (not forgetting KCOMs work in Hull), although this proposed aspiration has yet to be confirmed via concrete plans.

Finally, the progress report noted that the UK and two other member states (France and Romania) fall short of the original DAE 2020 goals because none have set a clear target for achieving 100% coverage of 30Mbps+ broadband.

The UK is officially only aiming for 95% coverage by the end of 2017 and thats for the lesser speed of 24Mbps+, although we expect fixed line cover to hit 97% by 2020 (a 10Mbps USO will tackle the final 3%). So todays progress might be good on the 30Mbps+ front but its disappointing that the UK Government still hasnt adopted a 100% target and its 7-8 years since the DAE goals were first set.

Hopefully the UK isnt this sluggish when it comes to considering the ECs new Gigabit Society goals for 2025. Strictly speaking the UK, given Brexit, might simply choose to ignore the new targets and be less ambitious (lest we forget that the ECs proposed goals are non-binding connectivity targets), but we hope that the Government will instead strive to keep us competitive and adapt their approach accordingly.

On the other hand at todays progress we cant see many EU member states achieving the new 2025 goals on time, but a lot can happen in 8 years.
Im going to say right up front that in my years of writing about cybersecurity, Ive never seen a reaction to an incident like I did to Fridays WannaCry ransomware attack. My inbox has been flooded with commentary and reactions, and they continue to pour in as I write this post over the weekend. Virtually every website I visit has at least one article about it. As a PR person said in an email, Friday was a dark day for cybersecurity. But as others warn, this wont be the last dark day.

First, about the attack. It was massive and global, and as Gerrit Lansing, chief architect at CyberArk, explained via email commentary:

What started out as a reported attack on the National Health Service has evolved into what appears to be one of the largest-scale instances of ransomware on record, with current reports saying there are victims in close to 100 countries.

Kaspersky Lab explained that WannaCry used an exploit named EternalBlue, which Microsoft patched back in March. Many organizations had not bothered to install the patch. (I guess this is as good an example as youll find for the importance of installing patches immediately.) There were more than 45,000 reported attacks, with Russia being the hardest hit. We may have seen a temporary halt to the spread of the malware, according to CNN:

The ransomwares progress has been halted by the accidental discovery late Friday of a kill switch hidden within the code by a security researcher, said cybersecurity consultant David Kennedy, formerly of the US National Security Agency. . . . However, a hacker could change the code to remove the domain and try the ransomware attack again. Also, the kill switch wont help anyone whose computer was already infected. Individuals and companies still have to decide if they want to pay the ransom or part with their data.

The sheer one-day volume of this singular attack is what grabbed the attention of, well, just about everyone, but dont get lulled into thinking that this is that much out of the ordinary. Government reports show that there were more than 4,000 ransomware attacks every day in 2016, and all reports are that ransomware is getting worse. Rick Orloff, CSO at Code42, told me in an email comment that what were seeing is the new normal for cyberattacks, adding:

Its monetarily motivated and looks to be global in reach. This is a sophisticated group that is pulling off a far-reaching, coordinated attack at an unparalleled scale. While enterprises operate in a global economy, so do the bad guys.

Phil Richards, CISO with Ivanti (formerly LANDESK), also made some very good points in an email to me. Not surprisingly, this ransomware attacks through socially engineered email attacks and we need to make sure that employees get better about not falling for these tricks, he said, but at the same time, he reiterated the need to make sure that not only are you patching your software, you need to keep your AV software updated:

If your virus definitions are one week out of date, it would not recognize this particular ransomware.

I suspect well be hearing more about WannaCry and its fallout for some time into the future. And now excuse me while I ensure everything on my system is patched, updated and backed up.

Sue Marquette Poremba has been writing about network security since 2008. In addition to her coverage of security issues for IT Business Edge, her security articles have been published at various sites such as Forbes, Midsize Insider and Toms Guide. You can reach Sue via Twitter: @sueporemba
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has said that he will address the Verkhovna Rada with the annual message in early autumn of this year.

"The society is interested in what our future trajectory will look like in the European Union. It is clear to all that the course towards European and Euro-Atlantic integration remains exactly unchanged. What the specifics and nuances of its implementation will be - I plan to justify detailed answers to these questions in early autumn in the president's annual address to the Verkhovna Rada on the internal and external situation," Poroshenko said in Kyiv on Sunday a press conference on the occasion of granting a visa-free regime to Ukraine with the European Union.

As reported, the previous message of Poroshenko to the Rada took place in September 2016.

The Verkhovna Rada's regulation provides that the parliament hears the president's annual messages about the internal and external situation of the country. In accordance with Article 167, the annual message of the Ukrainian president is announced before March 31.

On May 12, Poroshenko set up a working group that, within three months, should prepare a draft of his annual message to the Verkhovna Rada on Ukraine's internal and external situation, and approved its personnel.
No progress in releasing hostages is one more argument for continuing Russia sanctions

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said that there is no progress in the issue of releasing hostages, which is another argument for continuing sanctions against Russia.

"The Russian position on this issue demonstrates radical unwillingness to liberate Ukrainian prisoners despite its commitments under the Minsk agreements. This is another argument for our international partners from the United States and the EU as regards the necessity to continue sanctions against Russia," Poroshenko said at a press conference in Kyiv on Sunday.

The Ukrainian president said that there is also no progress in releasing hostages illegally kept in Russia.

"As for the Russian Federation the situation is more complicated. We are permanently raising the issue at all levels. Unfortunately, we do not have progress. This is overseen directly by Russian leaders and the positive decision depends only on them," he said.
Foreign missions and human rights organizations must raise, at the international level, the issue of attempts to physically eliminate the opposition in Ukraine, the Opposition Bloc Party says.

"During this night the Opposition Bloc offices in Kamyanske (Dniprodzerzhynsk) and Kryvy Rih were torched, earlier there was arson in Dnipro and an assault on the party's Chernivsti town leader. We consider this an attack on democracy with the total connivance of the authorities, and are calling on the missions of democratic countries and on international human rights organizations to use their influence on the Ukrainian government which encourages terror against the opposition," the Opposition Bloc said in a statement released on Saturday.

Radicals have launched the terror campaign against the Opposition Bloc as a revenge for its organizing of a Victory Day celebration on May 9, the party said. "This day demonstrated real support for our opposition force, having thus scared both the government and our other political opponents. Now the country has for days been watching attacks against our party activists. And the government has been encouraging these unlawful acts by giving latitude to the bandits attacking the real opposition," the statement says.

The Opposition Bloc is the only party that has consistently opposed the current Ukrainian government's policies aimed "at continuing the war, freezing salaries and pensions, increasing utility rates," the Opposition Bloc said. "This is precisely why they are encouraging attempts on the Opposition Bloc, thus trying to destroy the party physically," the statement says.

"The terror against the Opposition Bloc is an outright assault on democracy and the Ukrainians' right to defend their political position. It is an attack on the lives of people who have the audacity to speak the truth about government corruption and unprofessionalism, about the social genocide and about defending the values of millions of Ukrainians... We can see that in our country the government disregards the law by encouraging attacks on its political opponents. We are urging foreign missions and human rights organizations to raise at the international level the issue of attempts at physical elimination of the opposition with the connivance of the authorities in Ukraine," the Opposition Bloc said.
TEN years ago: It was a tall order but Ben Andrews achieved the near impossible the year earlier by completing the entire 26-and-a-half-mile Walk the Wight on stilts.

He was preparing to repeat the feat but this time with the aim of setting records.

Along with fellow Ryde Extreme performers, Matt Woods and Chris Harris, the trio were confident they could complete the walk in eight-and-a-half hours.



100 Years Ago

May 12, 1917



SPRING marked the first assault on Ottoman defences in the infamously disastrous Dardanelles campaign, spearheaded by Winston Churchill.

The County Press made special tribute to those who died fighting on the Helles front.

As at Gallipoli, so again at Gaza, the Islanders of the Hampshire Regiment have paid a terribly heavy toll of missing, wounded, and killed in their fighting with the Turks.

On behalf of the Island as a whole, we offer respectful homage of the deepest sympathy to all who mourn, in the hope they may find comfort in the knowledge that their dear dead have done their duty with a nobility, unselfishness and patriotism which has lifted them to the rank of natures nobility, and that they rest from the labours in sure and certain hope of a joyful meeting with all they ever hailed as beloved on Earth.



75 Years Ago

May 16, 1942



The mysterious death of a Wellow man remained unsolved after an inquest was unable to determine the cause of a gruesome accident.

The man was working alone in a field when he was knocked down and crushed by his tractor.

The coroner could not make out how the man came to be behind the tractor while it was reversing.



50 Years Ago

May 13, 1967



A feasibility report submitted by the county surveyor sparked the debate that would last for decades  will there ever be a Medina bridge?

The most suitable spot highlighted was half a mile upstream from the floating bridge. Projected costs for the Medina crossing lay between 930,000 and 610,000 (15.5 million and 10 million in todays money).



25 Years Ago

May 15, 1992



IW Radio, the Islands pioneering commercial radio station, was poised for a 250,000 (474,789 in todays money) takeover with a majority of its shareholders backing a bid from leading West Country group, GWR.

The move was seen by some as a lifeline to the long-term future of the station, but chairman Roger Peck said there was no question the station would not have survived without the GWR offer.



10 Years Ago

July 9, 2004



One of the worlds top aluminium super-yacht produces, Palmer Johnson, confirmed a move to East Cowes.

The move, which was part of the firms European expansion, would initially create 70 jobs.

A spokesman from Palmer Johnson said: Cowes Harbour is considered a prestigious location in the yachting world.


THE Isle of Wight Green Party launched its education policy this morning (Monday) outside the beleaguered Sandown Bay Academy

Vix Lowthion, a secondary school teacher and Green Party education spokesperson, pledged to scrap SATs in a bid to free teachers and pupils from "pointless, pressured testing."

The Greens also promised to ditch academies and plug the 7 billion funding gap in education.

Ms Lowthion said: "We want to create an inspiring education system that transforms lives and transforms Britain  but that can't happen without the very basic foundations being in place and this government has been removing them brick by brick.

"How are schools meant to prepare children for life when 99 per cent will suffer from funding cuts and children and teachers are subjected to pointless, pressurised testing?

"We need to make up for the enormous shortfall  the massive neglect  in our education system by plugging the 7 billion spending deficit.

"At the same time as schools are getting less resources, more is being asked of teachers and pupils.

"Getting rid of SATs tests would be one big step towards putting the fun, creativity, and inspiration can be put back into school and teachers are free to teach."

According to figures from schoolcuts.org.uk , 99 per cent of schools will have been hit by a funding cut by 2020  the average primary school will have lost 103,000, and the average secondary school will have lost 470,000.

Ms Lowthion added: "The academies programme has taken schools out of the hands of local authorities and parents and given them over to private businesses.

"That means that if a school isn't performing a commercial interest, it can be shut down at will by the owners, leaving pupils without a school to go to.

"We would bring existing academies back under local authority control so that our children's education is in the hands of teachers and parents, not businesses."
THE owner of a pet shop on the Isle of Wight has described the culprit who stole two purses while customers were being served as a low-life.

The theft happened at Pets With Hart, in Holyrood Street, Newport, yesterday (Sunday), between 10am, when the shop opened, and 3.30pm, when it was discovered.

The purses, which were in a handbag hanging in the shops back office, contained sums of cash, various credit and membership cards and animal licences.

The theft was discovered as co-owner, Sharon Groves, attempted to pay some bills.

On social media, Mrs Groves, said she was furious.

It was a really bad end to our 70-hour plus week in our lovely little shop, she said.

A total low life had been in and took both my purses from my handbag, which was hung up out of sight.

Mrs Groves also appealed to the thief to push the purses through the letter box of the shop.

I hope you had a good night out on my hard-earned money, which was for our lovely rare breed pigs that we care for in our spare time, she said.

Both purses have sentimental value. I would be very grateful for the return of the purses, but realise youll have already used the money.

One of the purses was later retrieved from the Cancer Research Shop in Newport, which contained cards, but no cash. The other purse, light blue in colour, is still missing, which contains cash and an important pig transportation licence.

Mrs Grovess husband and shop co-owner, David, said the theft had been an invasion of their private space and that they would have to tighten up on the shops security procedures.

If anyone has any information that could help the police, call 101, quoting the crime number 44170180848.
Japan has very stringent building codes and high taxes on land, which means that most of the homes, especially in cities like Tokyo, get built on oddly-shaped lots. These are usually the result of existing plots of land getting further subdivided to accommodate several generations of a family.

This peculiarity of Japanas housing market has also let to many unique and innovative architectural solutions. Such as this so-called Near House, which was designed by the local firm Mount Fuji Architects Studio for a middle-aged couple.

The home is comprised of two parts, and fits nicely into the interestingly shaped plot of land it stands on. The first part is a narrow gatehouse which is just 6.5 ft (2 m) wide at the entrance. Located behind it is the second part, namely the main house. The gatehouse portion serves as the entryway as well as a gallery and studio for the wife who is an artist. Above this, and accessible via a ladder, is the husbandas office and library. Everything within this space is in easy reach, or near, which is where the house got its name.

The gatehouse is separated from the main house by a small courtyard. The main part of the home is set partially into the ground, due to Japanas strict guidelines on building height. The bedroom and bathroom are located in this partial basement section of the home, and the architects planted plenty of greenery around the large windows here to give a sense of sleeping and bathing outdoors in nature.

The second level of the main home features a large kitchen and living area. The interesting fixture in this part of the home is an archway which ties these areas together, provides storage space, and also serves as a structural element by holding up the roof. They used affordable and lightweight materials to construct the home, such as medium-density fiberboard (MDF) paneling, and wood, which eliminated the need to use heavy machinery for the construction.

In Japan the land the house stands on is considered much more valuable than the home itself, which is why disposable and lightweight materials such as paper and wood are often used in construction. These can easily be recycled and scaled up or down.
U.S. special rep for coordinating actions with Ukraine to be appointed in near future  Poroshenko

A special representative of the United States of America will be chosen in the near future to coordinate actions with the Ukrainian state, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said.

"I can emphasize that in the near future it is planned to choose a special representative of the United States, which will be responsible for coordinating actions with Ukraine," Poroshenko said at a press conference in Kyiv on Sunday, responding to a question of the Interfax-Ukraine agency.

Poroshenko also said that Ukraine is cooperating well with the U.S. Congress.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko during a press conference on Sunday said that he had discussed the issue of releasing Ukrainian hostages jailed in the Russian Federation, including journalist Roman Sushchenko.

"My last telephone conversation with Putin was devoted only to hostages being held in Russia, including my request for the immediate release of Sushchenko from Russian prison," Poroshenko said in Kyiv during a press conference.

As earlier reported, Russian security agents arrested Sushchenko "for carrying out espionage activities" in Moscow on October 3, 2016. He has been charged pursuant to Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code (espionage). Sushchenko rejects the charges against him.
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GREENSBORO  A former Jamestown Middle School employee who was already facing peeping charges is now facing more charges.

According to a Guilford County Sheriff's Office news release, Christopher Allen Reeves, 47, of 6213 Creekbrooke Court in Browns Summit, has been charged with two counts of indecent liberties with a student as a result of identifying the victims.

In addition, a felony count of peeping using a photographic imaging device and a felony count of possessing a photographic image obtained in violation of the peeping statute were also obtained because of an additional image found.

Reeves' bail for these charges was set at $7,500.

Reeves, who had worked at the school as a media specialist since 2005, resigned May 1 after learning he was under investigation for allegedly taking photos of a female student in a changing room at the school.

Authorities first learned about the hidden camera on April 30 after a middle school employee raised concerns. Col. Randy Powers with the sheriff's office said Reeves had given a memory card to the co-worker. Images had been erased from the card, but something else on the device caught their attention. That prompted them to try and recover the deleted images.

Reeves' initial charges include two counts of felony peeping using a photographic imaging device, among other charges.

Between 2013-15, at least one camera was hidden in a back office, according to Powers. The school needed to use the room for female students to change out of leggings, which was a frequent violation of the dress code at the time.

Investigators believe Reeves was able to capture the images by hiding a camera underneath a desk in the changing room. Other images suggest that the camera was planted inside an object, like a book bag.
Updated at 12:32 p.m.

WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal to reinstate North Carolina's voter identification law, which a lower court said targeted African-Americans "with almost surgical precision."

The justices left in place the lower court ruling striking down the law's photo ID requirement and scaling back of early voting.

The situation was complicated when Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein tried to withdraw the appeal, which was first filed when Republican Pat McCrory was governor.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the political situation created uncertainty over who is authorized to seek review of the lower court ruling.

The dispute is similar to the court fight over Texas' voter ID law, also struck down as racially discriminatory.

Republicans in both states moved to enact new voting measures after the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a provision of the federal Voting Rights Act that had required them to get advance approval before changing laws dealing with elections.

Voters, civil rights groups and the Obama administration quickly filed lawsuits challenging the new laws. The Trump administration already has dropped its objections to the Texas law.

Shortly before Trump took office in January, the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reject the North Carolina appeal.

When the law passed in July 2013, North Carolina Republicans said voter ID is a sound requirement to increase the integrity of elections. But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said last July the state provided no evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud the ID mandate would address.

The Richmond, Virginia-based court said the law was enacted with intentional bias against black voters. The law has been amended in 2015 to include a method for people unable to get a photo ID to still vote.

Following the appellate ruling, the state asked the high court to allow the challenged provisions to remain in effect in November's election. The justices rejected the request by virtue of a 4-4 tie on most of the challenged provisions, with the four more conservative justices supporting the state's bid.

Cooper and other Democrats praised the decision as a victory for the rights of minority voters and against attempts at discrimination, particularly by the GOP. The North Carolina state NAACP, other interest groups, voters and President Barack Obama's Justice Department had sued to challenge the law.

"Thanks to the persistent efforts of civil rights activists and grassroots organizers, this law was exposed for exactly what it was: just another obvious solution in search of a problem," Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez said in a statement.

Roberts cautioned Monday that the rejection of the appeal is not a comment on the court's view about the substance of the law.

GOP leaders in North Carolina's legislature didn't immediately offer comment. But state GOP Chairman Robin Hayes cited Roberts' words while predicting in an email that Stein and Cooper ultimately would lose in their efforts to block voter ID.

"Republicans will continue to fight for common sense and constitutional voter ID measures, similar to what many other states already have," said Hayes, a former congressman.

Updated at 11:18 a.m.

WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal to reinstate North Carolina's voter identification law, which a lower court said targeted African-Americans "with almost surgical precision."

The justices left in place the lower court ruling striking down the law's photo ID requirement and reduction in early voting.

The situation was complicated when Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein tried to withdraw the appeal, which was first filed when Republican Pat McCrory was governor.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the political situation created uncertainty over who is authorized to seek review of the lower court ruling.

The dispute is similar to the court fight over Texas' voter ID law, also struck down as racially discriminatory.

Republicans in both states moved to enact new voting measures after the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a provision of the federal Voting Rights Act that had required them to get advance approval before changing laws dealing with elections.

Voters, civil rights groups and the Obama administration quickly filed lawsuits challenging the new laws. The Trump administration already has dropped its objections to the Texas law.

Shortly before Trump took office in January, the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reject the North Carolina appeal.

When the law passed, North Carolina Republicans said voter ID is a sound requirement to increase the integrity of elections. But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the state provided no evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud the ID mandate would address. The Richmond, Virginia-based court said the law was enacted with intentional bias against black voters. The law was amended in 2015 to include a method for people unable to get a photo ID to still vote.

Following the appellate ruling, the state asked the high court to allow the challenged provisions to remain in effect in November's election. The justices rejected the request by virtue of a 4-4 tie on most of the challenged provisions, with the four more conservative justices supporting the state's bid.

Roberts cautioned Monday that the rejection of the appeal is not a comment on the court's view about the substance of the law.

WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal to reinstate North Carolina's voter identification law that a lower court said targeted African Americans "with almost surgical precision."

The justices on Monday left in place the lower court ruling striking down the law's photo ID requirement and reduction in early voting.

The situation was complicated when Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein tried to withdraw the appeal, which was first filed when Republican Pat McCrory was governor.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the political situation created uncertainty over who is authorized to seek review of the lower court ruling.

The dispute is similar to the court fight over Texas' voter ID law, also struck down as racially discriminatory.
When Breanna Dixon needed to raise about $4,700 to travel to Portugal this summer for a medical trip, she turned to GoFundMe.

Dixon, a senior biology major at Winston-Salem State University, recently received a fellowship through Atlantis Project, a pre-med fellowship abroad program. By participating in an Atlantis Fellowship, students spend about 100 hours shadowing doctors in multiple specialties in hospitals abroad.

At first, Dixon, who is 23 and a native of Charlotte, wasnt so sure about starting a GoFundMe campaign.

I didnt want to make it seem like Im out here begging for money, Dixon said.

She thought about holding a raffle. She also considered working on weekends but knew that would be tough given the demands of her biology major.

Dixon is also the captain of the varsity cheerleading team at WSSU. She was awarded the 2016-2017 All CIAA Cheerleading Team Award.

She said she wanted to put all her efforts into her classes to graduate Friday.

Dixon also noticed that a lot of people had GoFundMe accounts, so on Feb. 14, she started her GoFundMe campaign.

I went ahead and did it and surprisingly within two weeks, I was up to, I think, $1,000, she said. I was really shocked.

For her trip, an initial payment of $800 was due on Feb. 25 to secure a spot, and a final payment of $3,899 was due last month.

Dixon managed to raise $1,100 of her $4,700 goal on GoFundMe prior to the April deadline. Donors included family, friends and professors.

With the help of her parents, she was able to pay the remaining $3,899 by using a credit card, she said.

Her plans are to continue raising money until her trip in June to help pay off that credit card debt.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding, a form of crowdsourcing, is defined as the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. It has become an option for students looking for alternative and creative ways to raise money for college and other educational needs.

GoFundMe is one of a number of popular crowdfunding platforms.

GoFundMe was created in 2010 and weve seen the vast majority of fundraising for college tuition in the last two and a half years, said Bart Jackson, a spokesman for GoFundMe. Campaigns related to education are one of the fastest growing categories on GoFundMe.

In North Carolina, there have been 5,162 GoFundMe campaigns aimed at helping students pay for tuition and other college expenses, according to a recent GoFundMe guidebook. The total money raised has been $1.93 million and the total donations have been 33,600 in the state.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said in an email there are a variety of reasons why crowdsourcing has become increasingly popular, not least of which is its effectiveness.

She said that often financial aid packages awarded to students do not come close to covering the full costs of college, especially for non-traditional aged students with families.

For instance, the 2017 report of the Wisconsin Hope Lab by Sarah Goldrick-Rab, Jed Richardson and Anthony Hernandez unveils growing rates of food insecurity among community college students, with two out of three experiencing this phenomenon, Pasquerella said. At the same time, half of students within this population are facing shelter insecurities and 13 to 14 percent identify as homeless.

Students know that alumni and other constituencies respond positively to personal narratives where they think they can make a real difference in transforming lives, she said. However, the success of these initiatives has frustrated many college advancement officers who are trying to raise funds for their colleges and universities from the same individuals who may not be fully informed regarding the constraints involving the distribution of federal and state financial aid.

Woman with a plan

Exazevia Logan, Dixons faculty adviser and an associate professor of neurophysiology in the Department of Biological Sciences at WSSU, said he thought Dixon came up with a brilliant idea to raise money for her trip.

Im guessing its the way of the future and it makes perfect sense, Logan said. Every little bit helps when youre trying to raise money, he said of crowdfunding.

Logan called Dixon a solid student, saying she was a cheerleader and student athlete.

She had to really balance the rigors of the biology department, which is one of the most difficult majors on campus, with her being a cheerleader for fall and spring sports. But she did a really good job of it. She came in with a plan.

He believes Dixons outgoing and diplomatic personality will serve her well as an Atlantis Fellowship.

I think shes going to do well with students from different areas of the country, Dixon said. Shes from Charlotte so shes been here in the South most of her life. I think it will be good to go out and expand and meet people from different parts of the U.S. and experience the culture in Portugal.

Dixon will leave for Portugal on June 10.

I really think that its going to open my eyes to the different specialties that they are willing to show us because Im not just going to be shadowing one doctor in one specialty, she said. Im going to be shadowing a variety of doctors.

When asked if shed been to Portugal before, she said: Ive never been on a plane before.

Dixon, who is interested in obstetrics and gynecology, found out that a WSSU alumnae, who gave her a donation for her trip, is a pediatrician in Charlotte.

She said that when I get back from Portugal, I could also shadow her, Dixon said.
WASHINGTON -- On Tuesday night, a few hours after President Trump's sudden announcement that he was firing FBI Director James Comey, a prominent Republican politician gave me this simple, blunt assessment of the Trump White House: "These guys scare me."

Trump's impulsive, vengeful decision to dump Comey has scared a lot of people. It suggests a pent-up anger and lack of judgment that would be worrisome in anyone, let alone the commander in chief. Worse, as has become too familiar with this White House, the decision to sack Comey was initially surrounded by a smokescreen of obfuscation that attributed the firing to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, rather than Trump himself.

The Washington Post and The New York Times captured the pique that underlay Trump's decision to purge the FBI chief, which had been building since before the inauguration. The Times described Trump as brooding over "festering grievances" and "obsessed with loyalty." The Post said he was "increasingly agitated," with a "brewing personal animus" toward Comey, and "infuriated" that the FBI kept investigating Russia rather than chasing leaks.

Normally, it's wise not to overstate the importance of particular events. They're rarely as earth-shaking as they initially seem. But this may be one of those moments when the worst-case situation is actually happening: The president really did just fire the person who was running an investigation in which he is a possible target. How should conscientious citizens respond to that?

An Arab friend told me years ago that for every question, there is a right answer and a real answer. The right answer here is to trust in the rule of law and the institutions that maintain it. The American Constitution was designed to withstand political stress, and it has worked pretty well.

The real answer is that we depend, ultimately, on the political leaders who have taken an oath to uphold that Constitution. Otherwise, the vaunted institutions are just pieces of paper. Do our politicians and government officials have the guts to make hard decisions? Will they say no to improper orders and resign rather than carry them out? Can they escape the straitjacket of party loyalty?

The real answer, alas, is that we don't know. The Trump presidency is a test. We'll find out how strong our institutions are and, even more, whether this generation of leaders is worthy of our Founders. So far, the evidence is mixed. Trump still fires off such tweets as "The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax," and many GOP officials give him a pass.

The first big test ahead is whether Rosenstein will call for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Russia matter. Given the way Rosenstein was used by Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions as cover for firing Comey, his credibility and reputation are at stake. Without a special prosecutor, much of the public will doubt that this is truly an independent investigation.

The White House should calm its jitters by remembering that this is a broad counterintelligence investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Any examination of possible collusion with the Trump campaign would be "folded in" to that larger probe, stresses John Carlin, who oversaw the investigation as head of the Justice Department's national security division until last October, when he left to join Morrison & Foerster, a private law firm.

The second big test is the nomination of a new FBI director. Trump is certainly capable of making good decisions in the public interest: Look at his national security team of Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. He needs a similar pick for FBI director.

"The FBI agents will be watching," Carlin told me. "They need to know that at the top of the chain, they're reporting to someone who shoots straight."

America has seen erratic presidential behavior before. Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing scheme was a reckless power grab. Harry Truman composed dark letters about his enemies, which he mostly didn't send, and ordered an illegal seizure of America's steel mills. Lyndon Johnson brooded obsessively about leaks and sometimes deceived and manipulated his friends and enemies alike. And of course, Richard Nixon bugged the Democratic National Committee and lied about it in the Watergate scandal.

Abuse of power isn't new. But America has survived intact because our institutions constrained presidential authority, and good men and women made sure the system worked. That's how we'll get out of this mess, too.

The Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- Possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign was once little more than a conspiracy theory, but not anymore. The only way to make sense of last week's stunning events is to conclude there is something that President Trump desperately wants to hide.

The party-line explanation of why Trump fired FBI Director James Comey -- that it was all about the way Comey handled the probe of Hillary Clinton's emails -- crumbled within hours. Press secretary Sean Spicer comically ducked behind shrubbery on the White House grounds, hiding from television cameras, to give reporters a confused and disjointed account of the dismissal. Efforts to blame the whole thing on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ceased after Rosenstein reportedly threatened to resign.

Well-sourced reports in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets agreed on a very different explanation: Trump had grown increasingly angry at the doggedness with which Comey's FBI was investigating how and why Russia meddled in the election. The president decided to fire Comey, then had Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein come up with a rationale.

If this were a criminal trial, prosecutors would allege that the president was displaying "consciousness of guilt" -- that he was acting in a way no innocent person would act. Indeed, the only other president to try to head off an investigation by firing the chief investigator was Richard Nixon.

Of course, Trump is not accused of anything at this point. And it may be just a coincidence that on Wednesday, a day after firing Comey, the president met in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Photographers from the White House press corps were barred from the meeting, but one who works for the Russian news agency Tass was allowed in. Perhaps Trump only thinks of U.S. journalists as "the enemy."

I do believe in coincidences, up to a point. And I know that conspiracy theories usually turn out to be wrong. But I can see no explanation for Trump's bizarre attitude toward the allegations of Russian meddling other than a desire to conceal something.

For months, Trump dismissed the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was ultimately responsible for hacking into computer systems and email accounts associated with the Democratic Party, then leaking information that was damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Trump named Michael Flynn -- a controversial figure, partly because of his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin -- as his national security adviser. And when Sally Yates, then serving as acting attorney general, told the White House that Flynn had lied when he denied discussing U.S. sanctions with Kislyak, and thus could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail, Trump waited 18 days to fire him. The president acted only after Flynn's deception became public knowledge.

And Flynn had been a prominent Trump adviser during the campaign. Experts say he may potentially be in legal jeopardy, which makes him someone an aggressive investigator such as Comey would likely squeeze for information about others.

During the campaign, Sessions, who was then a U.S. senator, and Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page also met with Kislyak -- as did Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. It is possible that these were nothing more than courtesy calls. But given the backdrop of a Russian effort to boost Trump's prospects of winning the election, all meetings between senior campaign figures and Russian officials deserve scrutiny.

In an interview Thursday with NBC's Lester Holt, Trump said that Comey told him once over dinner and twice in phone calls that he was not personally being investigated. Trump described one of the exchanges this way: "I said, 'If it's possible, would you let me know, am I under investigation?' He said, 'You are not under investigation.'"

Trump apparently thinks this means something, but of course it does not. Typical investigative procedure is to start at the bottom of an organization and work your way up. "You are not under investigation" does not mean "You will never be under investigation."

Trump claims to have no business ties with Russia. But in the past, his sons have reportedly bragged about a flood of Russian money boosting the Trump Organization's fortunes. Trump could settle the question by fully disclosing his finances, including his tax returns. Why the secrecy?

If Trump wanted to end this scrutiny by firing Comey, he may have had the opposite effect. Ask yourself one question: Have you ever seen a cover-up with no underlying crime? Neither have I.

The Washington Post
A possible witness in the assassination of Belarus born journalist Pavel Sheremet in Kyiv on July 20, 2016, Ihor Ustymenko, has been summoned for questioning by law-enforcement officials, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Sunday during a press conference in Kyiv.

"Our Criminal Procedural Code provides three-day notice for questioning, and Mr. Ustymenko has been summoned for an interview on Monday," Poroshenko said. The president thanked journalist for identifying Ustymenko as a possible witness in Sheremet's assassination.

According to the president, Ukraine's Security Services (SBU) chief Vasyl Hrytsak said Ustymenko, who was mentioned in a documentary film by Slidstvo.Info, left the SBU in April 2014 along with 2,000 other former SBU employees.

On February 8, 2017 police investigators said Sheremet was probably murdered because of his journalist activities in Ukraine and other countries.

Slidstvo.Info in its documentary film interviewed Ustymenko, whom they placed near Sheremet's residence the night before he was killed.
WASHINGTON  For those lately bereft of leadership, the past few days have provided both a respite and a reason for hope.

Make that two reasons  two women  Sally Yates and Condoleezza Rice.

Its likely that neither would prefer to be singled out as women who are brilliant but rather as brilliant people who happen to be women. Nevertheless, Im guessing that women (and enlightened men) who heard Yates and Rice had an extra spring in their steps. I admit, they made me proud.

Yates, as most know by now, is the former acting attorney general whom Donald Trump fired, perhaps confusing his current role with his previous gig on The Apprentice. The Donald dumped her because she refused to enforce his travel ban, which she found unlawful. She testified before a Senate committee Monday.

Rice, secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration, happened to be in town the same day to promote her new book, Democracy. Watching her on MSNBCs Morning Joe, one was reminded of her unique story growing up in the segregated South to become one of the most powerful individuals on the world stage. Responding to questions about current foreign affairs, she was characteristically reasonable and  that rarest of qualities these days  palpably sane.

As I watched both women, the word that kept coming to mind was competent. Oh, how once gone, we miss it. Other equally dusty adjectives include whip-smart, steady, unflappable, knowledgeable, focused, straightforward, correct.

Anyone watching Yates during her hearing would have been impressed with her calm, her clarity and, especially, her dominance under questioning. Notably, she schooled Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, when he tried to suggest that her legal reasoning was incorrect and that she was partisan in her decision not to enforce the travel ban.

It must have taken a supreme act of will for Yates to keep a straight face when countering his condescending reading of a statute pertaining to executive power in restricting immigrants entry into the country.

First, Cruz asked if she was familiar with statute blah, blah, blah, section blah blah blah. Not off the top of her head, she said. Upon Cruzs rendering of the statute in his best GreenEggsAndHam voice, Yates said that, yes, she was familiar with that and also with a subsequently promulgated statute that she felt overrode the previous. Namely, that immigration law cant be applied either preferentially or as discriminating on the basis of race, nationality or place of birth.

But, she said to constitutional-lawyer Cruz, she was mainly concerned with the constitutionality of the presidents ban. Brief pause for relishing the moment. It was riveting theater, made all the more enjoyable because Cruz comes off as persistently arrogant. His debating skills may have been superior to other Republican primary contenders, but debates are won with arguments, not confidence.

Yates also testified on the subject of Michael Flynn, whom Trump also fired, but only after The Washington Post revealed what Trump had known  that Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador during the transition and then lied about it. Yates said that she had warned Trump transition officials to beware of Flynn. And, apparently, President Obama personally warned Trump against hiring Flynn.

Meanwhile, Rice, who before becoming secretary of state was national security adviser to Bush leading up to the Iraq war, looked rested and radiant at the Morning Joe table and made one hope shes in close contact with the current administration. Her observations on Russia (Putin is an eye-for-an-eye guy) were especially illuminating. Validating what others had testified during the Senate hearings, she said Putin despised Hillary Clinton and leaked hacked emails from Democratic campaign computers in hopes of hurting her. It was payback, in other words, for when then-Secretary of State Clinton challenged the fairness of Russias elections in 2011.

But here Rice deviated from the popular narrative that Putin wanted Trump to win and warned against ascribing other motivations to him. Putin would have wanted anyone to win against Clinton, she said. Regarding Russias interference in the 2016 election, this has long been one of Russias goals, mainly to undermine Americans confidence in the democratic process. Hence, in part, Rices timely book.

Whatever ones political persuasion, I doubt Im alone in noting the too-rare character exhibited by Rice and Yates. Being reminded of what we once expected of leaders and leadership, maybe well insist upon better next time. As weve seen, there are other women besides Clinton who could be president.
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko is ready to propose changes to the Constitution of Ukraine concerning the granting of the Crimean Tatar autonomy status to Crimea.

"I am ready to introduce several amendments to the Constitution, including on the issues of the Crimean Tatar autonomy. The format of this autonomy should be proposed to me by the Constitutional Commission, in which representatives of the Crimean Tatar people take part," Poroshenko said at a press conference in Kyiv on Sunday.

Poroshenko said that this issue shouldn't be delayed.

"I think that this should be done in the near future. It is not necessary to delay this issue [...] the delay is not on the president's side. The president is ready to introduce the proposed version. It is extremely important to find 300 votes in the hall of the [Verkhovna Rada] to this end and we all need to work at this," the president said.
Jon Ola Sand, the European Broadcasting Union's (EBU) executive supervisor of the Eurovision Song Contest, praised Ukraine for the high level of organization of the 2017 contest held in Kyiv, the Ukrainian presidential website said on Monday.

During a meeting between the organizers and hosts of the song contest and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Jon Ola Sand said that, while the organizers have some issues or complaints every year relating to transport, logistics, or other aspects, the Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv was organized flawlessly. The organizers did not have any problems and Ukraine organized everything at the highest level, he said.

Pavlo Hrytsak, a member of the EBU administrative council, also thanked Poroshenko for the excellent organization of the contest, adding that wonderful work had been done for all journalists, contestants and fans to feel Kyiv's hospitality and feel comfortable.

Poroshenko, for his part, said: "Despite skeptics' concerns about possible threats, I am proud that we have made this wonderful event. No one could stop us."

The 2017 Eurovision Song Contest was held in Kyiv on May 9-13. Russia did not participate in it and did not broadcast it this year.
Egypts State Council General Assembly on Saturday nominated their own council head despite a recent amendment [JURIST report] reserving that right for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi . The nomination [Daily News Egypt report] follows a contentious debate over amending the judiciary laws to give the president more control over the judiciary to fight terrorism. The council nominated Judge Yehia Dakroury to be their council head. The new law gives the president the power to nominate the council head which means he may ignore the nomination [Egyptian Independent report].

Egypts attempt to provide security through increasingly strict laws has been the focus of recent scrutiny. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein said [JURIST report] last week that Egypts recent security measures have been encouraging the very radicalization they were trying to control. In April, JURIST Guest Columnist Mohamed Abdelaal discussed [JURIST report] how the revival of the Emergency Law No. 162 of 1958 had potential to negatively impact the rule of law in Egypt. Also in April an Egyptian criminal court in Cairo sentenced [JURIST report] Habib el-Adly, the former interior minister under former president Hosni Mubarak, to seven years in jail for embezzling more than $100m of public funds.
The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday declined to hear [order list, PDF] a lower courts rejection of a North Carolina Voter ID law [text, PDF]. The piece of legislation, which was originally enacted in 2013 has faced numerous legal challenges over the past years, including the Supreme Court previously declining to reinstate [JURIST report] the law before the 2016 election. The North Carolina General Assembly urged the Supreme Court to review the lower court decision, which had stated [CNN report] that the bill significantly disenfranchised minorities.

Voter ID laws have been a trend by many States within the recent years, which has led to a series of contested court cases. These laws are often thought to be discriminatory in nature, which has led to backlash in a variety of ways. In February rights groups announced a boycott [JURIST report] in North Carolina over the states voter ID law. February in Arkansas, the legislature decided that it would reinstate [JURIST report] a voter id law which had been struck down by the courts two years prior. The Supreme Court in January also declined [JURIST report] to hear an appeal on a Texas law regarding voter id laws.
The US Supreme Court issued an opinion [text, PDF] for Kindred Nursing Centers Limited Partnership v. Clark [SCOTUSBlog materials] on Monday holding that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) [LII materials] preempts a Kentucky state law that requires a power-of-attorney agreements to expressly grant authority to enter an arbitration agreement. The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] that arbitration agreements signed by legal representatives of nursing home residents were invalid, unless the ability to so sign is specified as a power of the representative, as being against the right to have a jury trial. The Supreme Court, however, found that the FAA preempts any state rule discriminating on its face against arbitration and that hostility to arbitration is what led Congress to enact the FAA. Justice Thomas dissented stating that the FAA does not apply to proceedings in state courts and does not displace a rule that requires express authorization from a principal before an agent may waive the principals right to a jury trial.

The Supreme Court has decided multiple cases in favor of arbitration agreements and the FAA in the recent past. In DIRECTV, Inc. v. Imburgia [JURIST report], the court held 6-3 that the FAA preempts a California courts refusal to enforce an arbitration clause in a contract. In Nitro-Lift Technologies v. Howard [JURIST op-ed], the court unanimously concluded that the FAA preempted an Oklahoma state court from determining whether an employment contract violated an Oklahoma law that limited the enforceability of non-competition agreements. Holding that only an arbitrator could determine whether the contract violated state law, the Supreme Court simply cited its prior precedent, which purported to rely on congressional intent in passing the FAA in 1925. In Marmet Health Care v. Brown [JURIST op-ed], the court repudiated West Virginias categorical bar invalidating arbitration agreements that involve personal injury or wrongful death in nursing homes.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has said that the heads of the Foreign Ministries of the EU member-stated during a meeting with him have declared their commitment to continue pressure on Russia and extend the sanctions.

"We had a very meaningful meeting with the foreign ministers of the European Union, which was very informative. We had time to discuss security issues with very powerful messages on Ukraine, on support and continued pressure on Russia. All those present at the meeting clearly support the need to continue consistent pressure and the continuation of sanctions," Klimkin told reporters in Brussels on Monday.

"We talked about how we should react to Russia's recent actions in the occupied Donbas, we talked about how we should react to the latest deterioration of the security situation, and the death of civilians," he added.

Klimkin noted that the EU's support "has been and remains fundamental for Ukraine so that the country could establish itself as a European and democratic state" and the EU's pressure on Russia through extending the sanctions is very important.
Thousands of Tunisians on Saturday protested [advocacy press release] a bill that would grant amnesty to officials facing corruption charges from a previous regime. Under the amnesty bill [HRW backgrounder] officials who had money seized from them following the overthrow of former president Ben Ali [BBC profile] would be pardoned and have their funds returned to them. Proponents of the bill say it would help reconcile political divisions in the country but it has been met with massive public disapproval [Al-Araby report].

Tunisia continues to face challenges after the Arab Spring uprising. A Tunisian court sentenced British DJ Dax Jto a year in prison in April for public indecency and offending public morality after the artist played a remix of the Muslim call to prayer in a nightclub. In March, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere confirmed [JURIST report] that a Tunisian man responsible for a deadly museum attack in Tunisia in 2015 will be deported. Tunisian security forces have committed human rights abuses following a series of armed attacks in the country, Amnesty International (AI) reported [JURIST report ] in February.
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Ukraine and Israel want to extend bilateral economic cooperation and are working on signing the Free Trade Area (FTA) Agreement by the end of this year, Ukrainian and Israeli prime ministers, Volodymyr Groysman and Benjamin Netanyahu, said.

"I am glad that the general trade in commodities has been growing over the past few months, we are working together to create a free trade area between the countries," the press service of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine quoted Groysman as saying after a meeting with the Israeli prime minister.

Groysman said he hoped the relevant negotiations will finish by the end of 2017.

In addition, the Ukrainian prime minister called on the Israeli counterpart to consider additionally the possibility of liberalizing access to the Israeli market for agricultural products, especially cereals, dairy products, fish, meat, honey, vegetable oil, vegetables and industrial products.

In turn, Netanyahu stressed that Israel is interested in speeding up the talks on the establishment of the FTA with Ukraine. "We want to speed up the negotiations on the signing of an agreement on a free trade area, develop commerce, trade, tourism, economic exchanges between our countries," the Cabinet's press service quoted Netanyahu as saying.

Groysman also reported on the steps taken by the government to improve the investment climate in Ukraine and urged Israeli companies to invest in Ukraine. He invited representatives of the Israeli business to take part in the privatization of state-owned companies in Ukraine.

Earlier, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in a telephone conversation with the prime minister of Israel also expressed the hope the negotiations on concluding the FTA agreement will be completed by end of 2017.
Keep the learning going: Educator offers parents tips for helping kids retain information over summer break



Monday, May 15, 2017

MANHATTAN  School may be just about out for the summer, but a Kansas State University education expert says it's important for children to retain what they've learned in the last school year.



"Many kids return to school in the fall with reductions in reading rates and fluency  and it affects kids in poverty at even higher rates than other students," said Laurie Curtis, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction. "However, there are important things parents can do to stop summer learning loss and even help their children improve over the summer."



Rather than instructing children to sit at a table and complete workbook exercises, Curtis advises parents to weave math, reading and oral language into activities that their children find meaningful and fun.



Math can tie into a trip to the grocery store, where younger children can point out shapes and older children can help determine which products are cheaper. Many card games and board games also provide opportunities to practice math skills, she said.



Parents can prioritize reading when cooking and baking with their children by having them read the recipe. When visiting museums, they can make sure to stop at signage and read placards that accompany exhibits. Reading also can be encouraged through summer reading programs, but Curtis said not all reading programs are created equal. She said the best programs allow children to choose what they read, rather than having them read a list of preselected materials.

"Choice is really important, because if students can pick out books they find interesting, they will be more likely to read them and engage in them," Curtis said. "Also, if they're interested in the topic, they will be able to read at a much higher level because of background knowledge and because their interest will help them persist through bigger words and longer sentences."

Oral language skills, which are built through conversation, are foundational to reading and almost every kind of learning, Curtis said. However, with busy lifestyles  including drive-through meals instead of dinner-table conversation  many of today's children may not be as exposed to rich conversation as previous generations. To help build oral language skills, Curtis advises doing fun activities, such as board games and outings across town, and talking afterward about what they experienced.



As the author of "Literacy on the Move: A Journal for the Journey," an article about how to soak up maximum learning from summer vacations, Curtis said reflective oral processing can transition into writing if children journal about their vacations or fun activities. Children also could write simple how-to documents, such as an explanation of how they built "that really cool block tower," she said.



She acknowledged that some smartphone apps and computer games provide learning opportunities as well, but cautioned that children who are permitted to have plenty of screen time may have less physical activity and less conversation. She also warned against allowing children to spend time online without adult supervision because of inappropriate content they can come across.



"If you're going to rely on an app or computer game, then play it along with your children, rather than using it as a babysitter to keep them busy," Curtis said.



If parents have time for nothing else, Curtis said the most important things they can do is read to their children, especially if the children are in grade school, and let their children see them read  which is helpful for children and teens.



"It doesn't matter what parents are reading  it could be a magazine, the Bible or a fiction book  but the fact that they're taking time out of a busy day to read models the value of reading for a child of any age," Curtis said.
Kyiv has reported 49 ceasefire breaches by militants on Sunday, six Ukrainian soldiers were wounded, the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) headquarters said.

Twenty shelling incidents were observed in the Mariupol sector; Vodiane came under attack of 82mm and 120mm mortars; small arms were fired in Shyrokyne, Hnutove and Novotroitske; grenade launchers and heavy machineguns were used in Pavlopil; and infantry fighting vehicle weapons were engaged in Talakivka, the headquarters said.

Nine truce breaches were seen in the Luhansk sector, the ATO headquarters said. Ukrainian government forces' positions were shelled by an 82mm mortar near Troyitske, and heavy machineguns were fired in the vicinity of Stanytsia Luhanska and Valuiske.

In the Donetsk sector, 82mm and 120mm mortars and lighter weapons were fired upon Avdiyivka and its suburbs. Luhanske came under attack of 82mm mortars, grenade launchers and small arms; and heavy machineguns and small arms were used in Novhorodske, the headquarters said.
Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman stands for deepening cooperation with Israel in the areas of IT, cyber security, science and education, agriculture and tourism.

According to the press service of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Groysman during his official visit to Israel on Monday held a meeting with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Israel and Ukraine are strategic partners, we have many areas in which we can cooperate in a qualitative way, particularly in agriculture, IT, science, education, healthcare - where we can get common experience and quality results," the prime minister said.

According to Groysman, in the field of IT and innovation Ukraine is interested in introducing digital services in the public sector, attracting technical and expert assistance in creating a state network for providing broadband Internet access. He underlined the countries' cooperation in countering cybercrime and cyber terrorism.
Ukraine's participation in EU strategy on cyber security could be agreed during year - Klimkin

Ukraine could take part in the strategy on cyber security the EU is currently developing, the relevant issue will be resolved during Estonia's presidency in the second half of 2017.

Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Pavlo Klimkin after a meeting with the foreign ministers of the EU member states said Ukraine's participation in the European strategy of cyber security was his initiative.

"We talked about security aspects. For example, I suggested that Ukraine become part of the future EU cyber security strategy. We have something to offer, our experience is highly appreciated," he told journalists in Brussels on Monday.

"And the next Estonian chairmanship will make efforts to coordinate such a strategy in the next six months," Klimkin added.

As reported, Estonia will succeed EU presidency from Malta in July 2017 for six months, after which it will transfer it to Bulgaria.
Ukraine insists on immediate approval of the lists of people who have committed crimes in Donbas, but who could be pardoned for the release of Ukrainian hostages, and also on the specification of the date of the people's release, Darka Olifer, press officer for Leonid Kuchma, former president of Ukraine, who represents Ukraine in the trilateral contact group, said.

"Ukraine said that the process of verification of persons whose rights have been procedurally limited has been completed. We also insist on the immediate approval of the lists and specification of the date of the people's release," she said on Facebook following the meeting of the contact group in Minsk on Monday.
GIBBON  Brightly colored popcorn lines the shelves of HR Poppin Snacks in Gibbon.

The popcorn business opened by Cheryl Hughes about 17 years ago in Shelton began with 25 flavors. Her experiments and creativity have allowed her business to continue growing, and she now offers more than 125 popcorn flavors at a downtown Gibbon storefront.

I just dabbled in it for a couple of years, and it grew enough that I had to decide if I wanted to do it as a hobby or get serious about it. Thats when I moved here, Hughes said.

In addition to being known for its numerous flavors, Hughes wholesale gourmet popcorn company tries to be an example of community involvement.

After she and her husband, Gary, bought a popper and a cooker from a popcorn company that went out of business, she decided to learn to make caramel corn. Hughes goal was to see if she could make it a wholesale business, primarily because there was no caramel corn popper or anything similar in the area.

I employ five different people, sometimes six. We dont have a lot of walk-in traffic, we manufacture and ship out for other people to sell, Hughes said.

A native of Grand Junction, Colo., Hughes has been a member of GROW Nebraska since 2000. GROW Nebraska works with businesses of all sizes across Nebraska and offers a variety of products and services.

I really enjoy being a member of the organization, Hughes said.

She sells her snacks at GROW retail stores at Conestoga Mall in Grand Island and Omahas Eppley Airfield. She also sells to Cash-Wa Distributing Co., which is her largest distributor. Using special pink popcorn, Hughes has also sold to toy producer Mattel for Barbies 53rd birthday in 2012.

Hughes helps small stores by not having a minimum order requirement. She allows them to mix the flavors and wants them to buy something in the quantity that they have a chance to sell.

We do a lot of work with organizations and schools for fundraising, Hughes said.

Ten percent of all proceeds go to local charities and fundraisers, including USMC Wounded Warrior Regiment and Melanoma Research Foundation.

In addition, sitting on one of the shelves is a custom-made popcorn bag titled Team Izzy. Every year HR Poppin Snacks has a fundraiser for a 10-year-old Izzy Warrington, who is battling kidney failure.

She is like my granddaughter, Hughes said.

Hughes popcorn is so popular it was awarded first in the Annual Best Nebraska Foods Contest for the Exclusive Cashew Almond Toffee popcorn.

HR Poppin Snacks offers popcorn for graduations, weddings, baby showers and other special occasions. Given a color swatch, Hughes can custom make popcorn to accompany any occasion.

HR Poppin Snacks is open 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, and 8 a.m.-noon Thursdays.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has signed a decree on the celebration of the 26th anniversary of Ukraine's independence, which, among other things, envisages a military parade in Kyiv.

According to the decree, the military parade will take place on August 24, on Hreschatik Street and the Independence Square.

An official ceremony for raising the state flag of Ukraine and other events will also be conducted in Kyiv, in other populated areas, and also in Ukrainian diplomatic establishments abroad on August 23, the Day of Ukraine's State Flag.

The decree also envisages celebrations on the Independence day in Kyiv and in other populated areas involving representatives of central government agencies, local self-government agencies, lawmakers, fighters for the independence of Ukraine in the 20th century, and participants in the anti-terrorist operation in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The Interior Ministry, the National Police, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the heads of administrations have been ordered to take measures to ensure public order and citizens' safety during the celebrations of the Day of Ukraine's State Flag and the 26th anniversary of the independence of Ukraine.
KEARNEY  Jeff Boston has been helping raise awareness and support for Special Olympics in Nebraska for years.

This spring, he added the international circuit to his contributions by participating in the International Law Enforcement Torch Run for Special Olympics in Austria.

It was amazing, it really was. Words cant describe it, said Boston, a Kearney-based trooper with the Nebraska State Patrol.

The 14-day March trip consisted of U.S. and international officers taking part in torch run events throughout the country. There were as many as five short runs each day leading up to the International World Winter Special Olympic games that are conducted every other year.

The International Torch Run is similar to torch runs in Nebraska. Members of law enforcement form teams and run short distances in their communities to raise awareness and funds for Special Olympics. Boston was selected to attend the international games by Special Olympics Nebraska officials.

The international run consisted of 10 running teams, each with a Special Olympian. In addition to officers from South Dakota, Oregon, Massachusetts, Delaware, Canada, Ireland and Greece, Bostons team included Special Olympian Andrew Negrelli, 35, from Australia.

In the small Austrian communities, Boston said, people would flood the streets to see what the torch run was about. In the larger cities, all 10 running teams would come together for an event involving more than 130 law enforcement officers.

That alone is going to raise a lot of awareness and bring a lot of people out to ask whats going on, Boston said. And thats what its about.

The last day in Austria, torch runners and participants took part in a polar plunge. Boston has participated in Kearneys Polar Plunge for 11 years.

Money raised from Special Olympics internationally and in the states goes to the purchase medals for athletes, uniforms and training facilities.

A trooper for 29 years, Boston has been active with Special Olympics Nebraska for 23 years. He started as a torch runner. His participation has increased to being the statewide program director today.

In 2010, Special Olympics Nebraska changed its format from being run from one end of the state to the other to individual community-oriented events during torch run week. This year, there are 16 events statewide that lead to opening ceremonies for the Special Olympic games Thursday at Creighton University.

In addition to the torch run, Special Olympics Nebraska also raises funds and awareness during the Polar Plunge, Cop on Top and Tip a Cop programs.

Its really all about raising awareness. Not only in Nebraska, but around the world, Boston said.

@HubChic
KEARNEY  One week from today  on Armed Forces Day  a flag will fly over the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and a veterans salute launched 17 years ago will be one step closer to completion.

After the flag has flown over the capitol, it will travel to Kearney where it will be hoisted to the top of a pole erected 17 years ago at Harmon Park by Korean War veterans. The group had gathered $2,000 during a reunion in Kearney in 2000 and wished to honor all men and women whove worn a uniform in the U.S. military, so they erected the flagpole at Harmon Park.

It was a generous, patriotic gesture, said U.S. Navy veteran Dennis Shultz, but the Korean War veterans were never able to mark their flagpole with a plaque to tell passers-by why it is there.

That situation came to light in a Kearney Hub article on Nov. 11, 2016  Veterans Day  when Shultz shared the story about the Korean War veterans.

It would be nice if we could get a plaque that says the pole was donated by the Korean veterans in recognition of all veterans and then dedicate the flag pole, Shultz said about the flag pole that stands near the Sonatorium and Activity Center at Harmon Park.

Shultz, the former Veterans of Foreign Wars Club manager from 1996-2001, noted that unlike many of the features at the park that have donor plaques or other permanent messages, there was nothing to tell park visitors about the flag pole the Korean War veterans had erected.

The Korean veterans were so honored and thrilled that the money they had raised at their reunion would be used for a flagpole to honor all veterans, Shultz said.

Fought from 1950-53, the Korean War is known as the Forgotten War because it came so soon after World War II. Americans who fought in Korea received only a fraction of the recognition and appreciation compared with veterans of World War II who were welcomed home as heroes for their decisive victory over the Axis nations of Germany, Italy and Japan.

Americans fought the spread of communism in Korea, but the war ended without a decisive victory for the U.S. and its allies. The Vietnam War ended similarly, and Vietnam veterans sometimes were shunned when they returned home.

Shultz said in November 2016 that U.S. veterans of all conflicts deserve appreciation and honor for sacrificing so much for Americans at home. He said only handfuls of World War II veterans are alive today, and the ranks of Korean War veterans also are thinning dramatically as they grow older.

One day after the Hub published the story about the Korean War veterans flagpole, Shultz said he received a phone call, and then the caller pledged $500. Next, Walmart Supercenter pitched in $200, and Shultz had enough for a plaque. It has been attached to the flagpole and reads: Dedicated to the Men and Women Who Served in the Armed Forces. Flagpole donated by Korean War Veterans Reunion, Kearney, NE 2000.

The plaque is attached about eye level, making it easy for passers-by to observe it, Shultz said. I wanted the plaque mounted right on the flagpole. As you walk by the Sonatorium you can see the plaque on the pole.

In 2000, when the Korean veterans at the Kearney VFW Club handed over $2,000 to honor all veterans, they were thrilled to learn Shultz was able to purchase a shiny aluminum pole and, through the help of U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel. A veteran of Vietnam, Hagel supplied the first flag, one that had flown over the U.S. Capitol.

The city of Kearney installed the pole near the Sonatorium and fitted lights to illuminate the flag at night. However, without a plaque people who passed the pole and admired the flag flying from it never knew the origins of the flagpole until now.

The new flag, which measures 5 feet by 8 feet, will be flown over the capitol at the request of U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, Nebraskas senior representative in the U.S. Senate.

Theres nothing like a rippling flag. I get goose bumps, Shultz said. Its a different thing when the flagpole is marked. Its a respectful thing, a prideful thing. Thats why the Korean War veterans did it.
KEARNEY  Brigit Baglien judged the success of the wine sampling at the Kearney Wine & Jazz Festival by how many patrons returned to buy a bottle.

People have really enjoyed our wines, she said Saturday as she poured a wine sample at the festival. And they have been very pleased by what we have here today. Weve sold several bottles.

Baglien, a volunteer with Prairie Creek Vineyards from Central City, greeted customers with Katie Benner, an employee of the vineyard.

Weve been in business for 10 years, Benner said. The vineyard owner, Nick Ryan, grows the grapes and makes all the wines.

For Baglien and Benner, traveling to Kearney to participate in the 10th-annual Wine & Jazz Festival gives them a chance to share this kind of information, one on one, with potential customers.

The two-day festival featured wines from Nebraska as well as wines from throughout the nation.

Judi Sickler, executive director of the Kearney Area Community Foundation, understands the value of highlighting wines from the area.

We brought back the top eight vineyards from the last couple of years, she said. On Friday, of the top 10 wines sold, seven out of 10 of them were Nebraska wines. Thats pretty cool.

KACF presents the annual event as a fundraiser.

Sickler noted that attendance on Saturday surpassed the numbers from last year. Laurel McKellips, outreach coordinator for KACF, credited the size of the crowd to the quality of the wines, the music and the foundations desire to keep the event fresh by adding new components.

On Saturday, country band Whiskey Bent performed during the after-hours portion of the festival from 9:30-11:30 p.m.

I think youre seeing a lot of country music fans here tonight, Sickler said. Thats always fun. And there are a lot of younger people here, as well as ones that might not come for the jazz during the first part of the night. So far, so good.

For Baglien and Benner, taking their wine to a festival allows them to meet customers face to face.

This is a great way to market our vineyards because a lot of people havent heard about us because were from Central City and thats a small town, Baglien said. So this is a great way for people to learn about our winery.

Education plays an important part of the process for Baglien. As a volunteer, she relies on Benner to explain the quality and characteristics of the wine.

She does a great job of explaining what the different notes of the wines that youre going to taste are  and how they compare in sweetness, dryness and the fruit flavors youre going to experience, Baglien said.
I close my eyes and I can see Nebraska. I see its cornfields, its cattle, its little canals and the rolling prairie. I remember the cries of cranes and the wails of trains. In seven days, I will return to Kearney. I will sit down at my desk at the Kearney Hub and resume writing. I cant wait.

A few weeks ago, the Hub job wafted over me here in Abiquiu, N.M. , and stopped. It whispered my name, stroking me and tempting me. How could I not reach up and grab it?

I love it here in rural New Mexico, where Ive lived for the last two years. I embrace all of it: the red cliffs, the junipers and pinon pines and the Rio Chama and the blue skies. That bare lightbulb of the sun shines so often that its as if someone forgot to turn it off. As for rain, well, it dribbled a bit the other day enough to moisten the cactus. Then it dried up.

Never mind, you say. What about Nebraska?

I suppose the seeds for my return were planted last fall when I returned to Kearney to see friends. I saw not only old friends, but Nebraska in autumns glory. I saw ripe cornstalks tickling the sky. I heard the distant hum of a combine and the chirping of little birds as they flitted among the corn, and the bawling of cattle. I sniffed the faint whiff of a nearby feed lot.

Then, as if God was tugging on my ear, I heard the wild cry of sandhill cranes. I raised my head to the sky and watched a flock of the birds flying south for the winter. I nearly wept.

As I drove back to New Mexico, my memories kept churning like a combine. I remembered the day I watched ranchers branding cattle as the prairie reached out around me like an open palm stretching for that yawning sky.

I remembered riding with a rancher in his bumpy ATV down to where 230 head of cattle were grazing. He turned off the engine, and in the dreamy quiet of that drowsy afternoon, he told me about being a rancher and how he knew each cow by name. His satisfaction shimmered like the sun.

I remembered the couple whod invited me for supper in Kearney and dished up the best fried chicken Id ever tasted. When I told them how good it was, they looked up, surprised. Of course its good, they said. We just killed it a few hours ago. When I said Id never seen that done, they invited me to come over and watch next time.

I remembered the trains. Oh, the trains. My father and my brothers and my uncles loved trains, and I do too. To live in a place where a train sped through the crossings every 12 minutes was paradise to me. Id wake up at night and hear those long UP freight trains rumbling through town, and Id drift off to sleep again, confident that all was right with the world.

Then there are the people.

I remembered being in Pilger in 2014, a few weeks after a deadly tornado roared in like a vacuum cleaner and practically sucked the town off the map. I watched volunteers from Kearney remove debris and help clean up and lay a hand on the shoulder of a man whose house was gone.

I remembered the HelpCare Clinic, launched by ordinary Kearney citizens because they worried about people who would fall between the cracks under the Affordable Care Act.

You Nebraskans have no idea how noteworthy you are. You are modest and selfless and humble. Such humility is rare. In the last two years, Ive traveled through the Southwest and flew to England and Scotland. Ive met people from all over the world, but I never met people as devoted to helping others as Nebraskans.

I dont know what awaits me in Kearney this time, but my first three years there were like a stalk of corn. I barely pulled off the tassels. This time, I hope, Ill pick an ear, shuck it, and start chomping. I feel like Im coming home.
Goodwill Omaha has begun taking steps to review and revise its policies and procedures as it seeks to restore community trust. It has been six months since the World-Herald exposed corporate-style executive pay for Goodwill Omahas leadership, a profit-driven internal culture and a number of questionable practices.

The scrutiny triggered a significant drop in donations to the charity. Goodwill CEO Frank McGree and at least three other executives resigned, lost their jobs or retired.

The charity has now begun a process that could help it to refocus on its basic mission and improve its governance.

Goodwill recently hired a Washington, D.C., consulting firm to review the agencys operations, including its board and senior leadership.

Interim CEO Pauli Bishop said the agency no longer pays some disabled workers less than minimum wage and previously discontinued a program in which Chinese-made hair rollers were repackaged and labeled Made in U.S.A.

The charity has begun holding ethics workshops for staff members. Last month it contracted with a firm to conduct a national search for a new CEO.

The co-founder of Quantum Governance, the Washington consulting firm, said agencies undergoing such controversies can emerge as stronger and better organizations. He said Goodwills effort will be about transparency and understanding what really were the issues here.

The agency has significant work ahead in its soul-searching  as well as its transparency.

Bishop acknowledged that changes have occurred on the board but declined to provide specifics about current board members.

The agency turned down an offer of free assistance from the local Nonprofit Association of the Midlands, choosing instead to spend an undisclosed sum on an outside consultant.

Goodwill is waiting for results of an operational review by the Nebraska Attorney Generals Office. And the external review will last several months.

Omaha World-Herald
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FILE - In this May 13, 2017 file photo, a screenshot of the warning screen from a purported ransomware attack, as captured by a computer user in Taiwan, is seen on laptop in Beijing. Global cyber chaos is spreading Monday, May 14, as companies boot up computers at work following the weekend's worldwide "ransomware" cyberattack. The extortion scheme has created chaos in 150 countries and could wreak even greater havoc as more malicious variations appear. The initial attack, known as "WannaCry," paralyzed computers running Britain's hospital network, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies around the world. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
During an upcoming meeting of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the two will discuss three main topics - pressure on Russia for the de-escalation of the situation in Donbas, Ukraine's European integration and Germany's assistance in carrying out reforms in Ukraine, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin has said.

"The first issue is how to work together to pressure Russia to do what it needs to do in Donbas," the minister said in an interview with journalists in Brussels on Monday, stressing that "this is necessary for the return of Donbas to normal life and the start of the transition process for the reintegration of Donbas."

"The chancellor will meet with the newly elected president of France. We need to agree on the next steps within the Normandy format, we need to coordinate them with our American friends and partners," he added.

"The second aspect is our European integration  both the visa-free regime, and the association, and the next steps... And the third issue is Germany's assistance to our reforms. There are several important projects, for instance the project on energy efficiency and on the creation of an energy efficiency fund where our German friends are helping us very much," the minister said.

"Negotiations will be held in the near future, the president of Ukraine is in constant contact with the chancellor of Germany," Klimkin said.

As reported, Poroshenko said on Sunday that he will visit Berlin at the end of next week to discuss the preparations for the meeting of the negotiating group on the settlement of the situation in Donbas in the Normandy format (France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia). "At the end of next week, exactly in a week, I will have many hours of negotiations in Berlin with the German chancellor to prepare the meeting in the Normandy format," he said.

The Ukrainian president also said that the United States has already been involved in the work of the Normandy format and will continue to work within its framework. The president also believes that the Normandy format will also be discussed during the first foreign visit of new French President Emmanuel Macron to Germany and the meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Initiated by Nobles Fortune General Partner  DTEK Official Partner  Donbasenergo General Information Partner  the Ukrainian Wind Energy Association Partner  the Ukrainian Energy Assembl Interfax-Ukraine - a general news partner of the event The most topical and influential event related to the matters of the Ukrainian market of conventional and renewable energy generation and energy efficiency. The leading platform arranging a dialog between the authorities and business and bringing together professionals from Ukraine and abroad. Representatives of the world and Ukrainian energy community, leading market experts, investors, representatives of the European Commission and relevant ministries will search for solutions of key issues of Ukraine's energy industry: -Ukraine's Energy Strategy 2035. Adoption and implementation -Opportunities for renewable energy. Green generation -Prospects for oil and natural gas. Investments in modernization. Corporate governance -Reform of the electricity market., Deputy Minister of Energy and Coal Industry for European Integration, President of the Association of Gas Companies, General Director of DTEK, Chairman UWEA, Vice President WWEA, Director, Wind Power, DTEK Renewables, the head of the subcommittee on the issues of electric power and energy transportation of the Committee for Fuel and Energy, Nuclear Policy and Nuclear Safety of the Verkhovna Rada, Deputy Head of the Committee on Fuel and Energy Complex, Nuclear Policy and Nuclear Safety, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy Saving and Energy Efficiency of the Fuel and Energy Complex, Nuclear Policy and Nuclear Safety Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Razumkov Centre, Director, Energy Programs, World Bank Project at the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry of Ukraine, Electricity Market Specialist-Open discussions and honest answers to difficult questions -Master-classes and cases from the largest market players -Energy Arena  exposition of innovative solutions -1-2-1 Contact meetings with potential partners upon prior request -Professional networkingOwners, CEO, CFO, Marketing Directors -Conventional energy producers -Producers of energy from renewable sources -Producers of energy efficient materials -Energy audit, energy advice, international law companies -International financial institutions and funds -Representatives of European Commission and government authorities of Ukraine Participation fee:(EUR210)Special Code for registration:For further information and registration: +38 044 221 5317 info@noblesfortune.com If you wish to place an exhibition booth or demo of your product in the area of the Congress, please contact Julia Ivanukha: +38 044 221 5317, jivanukha@noblesfortune.com Interfax-Ukraine is a general news partner of the event.
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I hope you read this letter. I doubt you will. I know youre busy rebuilding Washington, reshaping the international order and doing a lot of other weighty stuff. Full disclosure, I voted for you. Not because you promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or because you tweeted at me about it, but because our health care system is hopelessly broken and requires an overhaul that does not simply convert over to a single payer system.

Recently you were quoted in an interview with Reuters: I loved my previous life  I had so many things going this is more work than my previous life. I thought it would be easier.

Yes. I did too. Welcome to the frustrating world of shaping health care for a nation. It should be about making others lives better, but instead, it is about padding lobbyist pockets.

There are people who say youre the wrong man for this job. I think they have it exactly backwards. Youre famous for your hatred of complicated solutions. They annoy you. They annoy you because you know theyre a waste of time and energy. Time and energy that can be put into more important things.

Youre also well known for your distrust of experts, who youve learned to dislike after years of doing business and listening to boring presentations by people who dont know what theyre talking about. There are more experts in health care than any other area of the economy. Does that tell you something? I think it does.

If you want to be re-elected less than four years from now, we must get cracking on building the health care infrastructure from scratch. It is not going to be easy, but you already learned this lesson per your statement above. So how do we streamline health care reform and get it done?

There are two main problems: access (coverage) and runaway cost. The Affordable Care Act provided coverage to many and coupled it with cost control to no one. This made affordability unachievable for the long term, and things will continue to get worse. Congress is currently on the wrong track headed to an empty station. The general approach of the American Health Care Act is to decrease costs by cutting coverage to the people. Please go back to the drawing board and start again.

Throwing support behind the American Health Care Act is just flogging a dead horse. People in this country want affordable health care choices and freedom from fear of no access for chronic conditions and unforeseen catastrophic events. They no longer want to worry about health issues bankrupting them. Struggling families are one catastrophic illness away from losing their American dream, and that must change. Step back and take in the big picture.

Stop focusing on the minutiae. Instead, start small to overhaul health care one phase at a time. Develop a system which provides immunizations, annual screenings, and simple but necessary medical interventions to every person in the country. Call it basic care. You can expand the community health clinic model or utilize the existing public health system which is sorely underfunded and underutilized, yet remarkably cost-effective. Physicians are not required to administer immunizations, take blood pressure, and check cholesterol levels. Save money by putting mid-level providers in these roles.

Some basic specialty care could be provided at the public health facilities or community clinics, and mid-level specialty providers could fill these positions. If an individual becomes severely ill or injured and requires more specialized care, needs hospitalization, or surgical intervention, then their catastrophic insurance plan will kick in to cover these needs.

This is how insurance was created to work, by covering the expense of unanticipated events. Embrace the idea that health insurance should be for: cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, and other unexpected issues. The cost of health insurance would decrease considerably if it functioned more like actual insurance and less like a system to reimburse physicians for routine, expected health maintenance. Third party payers distance patients and physicians from being cognizant of the real cost.

Finally, allow the free market to play a role by giving people options. 80 percent of health care can be handled in a direct primary care practice, where patients pay the physician and enter into a more contractual relationship. This provides the options many physicians and patients are afraid of losing in a single-payer system, an idea that was extremely unpopular in the past. Health savings accounts could be set up to cover out-of-pocket costs for those who are interested in care outside of the public health system or name brand medications, which are more expensive than generics.

Last but not least, ignore the special interest groups for the time being. Let them wait. Keep em on their toes. No one else has tried to overhaul health care without kowtowing to them, and it is high time someone with big (ahem) aspirations just went for it. You are the right person for an unconventional approach.

The big four are: the AMA ($20 million on lobbying in 2016), the American Hospital Association ($20 million), the American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP, $7 million), and Pharmaceutical Research and & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA, $20 million but the industry total was $240 million altogether.) Special interests cannot help you cultivate the public health system or grow the network of community clinics. Leave them out of it.

I realize the longer this letter becomes, the less likely it will be read, so I will close by saying health care is the single most important task you must accomplish to have any hope of being re-elected. You have nothing to lose by giving something simple a chance. The AHCA is trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. Find the round peg and with it, the right solution.

Niran S. Al-Agba is a pediatrician who blogs at MommyDoc. This article originally appeared in the Health Care Blog.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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Nearly 30 years ago, I attended the labor of a Vietnamese woman on an island off the coast of Thailand. The woman had malaria. She died a few hours after giving birth to her stillborn child.

That experience has never left me. It has fueled in me a passion for global health, and especially for alleviating suffering and death from tropical diseases such as malaria.

It is also worth remembering, however, that malaria isnt just a disease that happens in faraway places. It happens here in the United States as well.

A new study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene finds that between 2000 and 2014, some 22,000 people were hospitalized in the U.S. for malaria, at a cost of more than $500 million. This is despite the fact that the U.S. eradicated malaria transmission more than 50 years ago.

More Americans are traveling to places where malaria is common, but they are not using preventive measures, such as anti-malaria medications and mosquito repellents, which are very effective. These travelers become infected, bring the disease home with them and get sick.

Travel-related malaria can also lead to outbreaks here in the U.S. if travelers returning with the infection are bitten by a mosquito. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. had 63 local malaria outbreaks between 1957 and 2015. (Its interesting to note that the CDC started as the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas during World War II after outbreaks in Texas.)

We live in an increasingly interconnected world  connected by travel, commerce, trade, communications and ideas  where disease can be transmitted as easily as hopping a plane. Theres no such thing as an American disease and a disease someplace else. Were all at risk and were all affected.

It is true that, compared with other parts of the world, the U.S. gets off lightly with respect to malaria, which globally sickens millions of people and kills hundreds of thousands a year.

But it is wrong to consider ourselves separate and apart from suffering caused by malaria and other tropical diseases. Global health concerns are important national concerns as well.

As health practitioners and policy experts, we must make a compassionate commitment to protecting the health of both the people of the United States and the world community at large. Instead of moving from crisis to crisis  focusing on Zika when thats a problem and West Nile when thats heating up  we need a strategic approach that includes increased investment in tropical disease research and efforts.

A strong U.S. investment in tropical medicine and global health is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. When we protect people in countries as far away as Thailand, we protect ourselves as well.

Patricia Walker is president, American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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Maintenance of certification (MOC) for something as significant as the practice of medicine seems like a harmless enough idea. But for physicians across the country who dedicate thousands of hours to study, earn licensure, achieve board certification, and practice medicine, MOC is not only unnecessary but also a resource-consuming mandate that does nothing to improve patient outcomes and quality of care.

According to the American Board of Medical Specialtys (ABMS) own website: Board certification is a voluntary process, and one that is very different from medical licensure  Board certification demonstrates a physicians exceptional expertise in a particular specialty and/or subspecialty of medical practice. In other words, physicians who pursue board certification self-identify as professionals committed to ongoing learning and subject-matter mastery. The vast majority of Texas physicians willingly pursue and obtain their initial certification for just that reason.

ABMS introduced MOC in the past 20 years, granting a lifetime certification to physicians board certified at the time of its creation. The rationale for the arbitrary grandfathering date is murky and ambiguous at best.

In the past 12 months, several states have passed laws specifically disallowing reliance on MOC for credentialing, payment, and contracting. More are considering legislation this year. Serendipitously, Oklahoma had success with Senate Bill 1148  the same bill number for legislation courageously authored by Texas State Sen. Dawn Buckingham, MD, a physician in the Austin area. Texas SB 1148 prohibits the state from using MOC as a requirement for state licensure or renewal. It prohibits hospitals and insurance companies from relying on MOC for credentialing or contracting. That bill is working its way through the Texas Legislature this week.

The Medical Credentialing System in 2014 reported revenues of more than $2.5 billion  $1 billion of which is attributed to ABMS entities alone. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is the largest of ABMS credentialing agencies and is responsible for credentialing one-quarter of all physicians.

Drilling down further into those numbers is eye-opening. ABIM reports $58 million in revenue for 2015, nearly $27 million of which came from MOC fees. With $30 million spent on salaries and benefits that year and only $6.3 million on actually administering the MOC, one could easily draw the conclusion that the push for MOC is nothing more than self-serving largesse. Well, that and the luxury three-bedroom condominium purchased in downtown Philadelphia in December 2007. The money these boards collect and spend  on expenses like first-class, cross-country airfare for their staff  just adds to physicians ire over MOC mandates.

In fact, some specialty boards have emerged as a direct result of the revenue-generating opportunities MOC offers. Forty-two medical specialty boards now exist to conduct MOC courses. Forty-two. Providing employment for test proctors does nothing to improve patient care and outcomes. Do no harm is not just an oath to be sworn by physicians. It is also a standard to which MOC should be held. If it truly is voluntary, as ABMS asserts, stop punishing physicians who elect not to pursue it.

From the extraordinary dedication physicians demonstrate by initially achieving board certification, to meeting and exceeding continuing medical education requirements, to continuously putting patient care first and foremost, mandating MOC to practice medicine is an appalling overstep of nonexistent authority. Not only that, it is driving experienced, caring physicians from practice.

Texas physicians are determined to end this over-testing tyranny and ensure Texas remains a right to care state.

Carlos J. Cardenas is president, Texas Medical Association.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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At the risk of vilification by my peers, Im going to say something extremely unpopular. We physicians have it pretty good financially. Our salaries are generous, and we have a much higher standard of living than most others in America. When I read online physician complaints about student loan debt, I cringe a bit. Because of all the people in debt, we are some of the most likely to be able to pay it down quickly.

Medical school and residency are emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausting. There is no doubt that we are severely cash-strapped during those years, and yearn for the day when we can go out to a nice restaurant and order anything we want from the menu. Most of us are eager to splurge on ourselves the minute we get our first job, and do not think about loan repayment. However, the truth is that if we gutted it out (living like a resident) for a mere two more years, most of us could pay off our student loans completely.

Lets say we have an annual salary of about $200K and a student loan debt of about the same. What is the average household income in America? About $51K? Maybe if we lived on that amount for 2 years, and put all the rest (after taxes) into our loans  wed be debt free.

I feel worried for young Americans who have a similar total student loan debt as physicians, but graduate with much lower earning potential. Students should soberly consider educational debt against their likely ability to repay it. We must all choose our education wisely, as it may have life-long consequences for our standard of living.

Physicians have many legitimate gripes, student loan debt (in my view) is not one of them.

Val Jones is physiatrist and founder and CEO, Better Health.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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When Lorie Duff was pregnant with her third child, she did what all good moms are supposed to do. She went to the OB/GYN clinic for prenatal care. But she fell behind on the clinic payments. She only made about $25,000 a year managing an auto parts store while her husband stayed home with their kids. The out-of-pocket expenses were outpacing her ability to pay.

Thats when she found herself on the phone with a debt collector, who demanded a minimum of $400 to help her out. She knew if she didnt do that, things would get even uglier. She was in a state of panic, with collectors calling almost every day to wrestle money from her. She was convinced the next caller would inform her she had lost her house.

Unknown to Duff, she was eligible for financial assistance from the hospital, which had turned her unpaid bills over to a collection agency. If she had expressed her financial concerns to the hospital earlier on, she never would have found herself in a position where every time she saw a stranger walking in her neighborhood, she worried it was a repo man.

In normal consumer markets, people owe what they owe. In fact, consumers often cant purchase goods or services until they pay for them in advance. But in health care, patients usually receive services before paying the bill, often (as weve seen) before even knowing the price of those services. In part, this backwards relationship between payment and receipt of services occurs because patients require urgent treatment, and providers dont want to take time collecting money before taking care of their illness. Other times it is backwards because providers send the initial bill to an insurance company, not knowing how much insurance will pay versus how much the patient will be responsible for.

Once stuck with these bills, American health care consumers often dont know how much they are required to pay. When Janice S. was on the wrong end of a $21,000 medical bill, she knew she would never be able to pay it off. Thats when, as Steve Brill writes in Americas Bitter Pill, she contacted Katalia Goencz from the Alliance of Claim Assistant Professionals. (You know a consumer market is screwed up when you need an alliance of claim assistance professionals!)

Goencz went to work negotiating Janices bill. As she told Brill: I can pretty much always get [the price] down 30 to 50 percent simply by saying the patient is ready to pay the bill but will not pay $300 for a blood test. She eventually knocked $10,000 of Janices bill.

Unfortunately, many Americans who face health care bills beyond their means dont know about the Alliance or its sister organizations. (Yes, there are numerous trade associations focused on helping Americans negotiate health care bills.) Most Americans dont know that, when they get charged outrageous sums of money for services not covered by health insurance, the price is just an opening bid in what, if they are savvy, will be a drawn out negotiation. And who can blame them for being in the dark? They sit in their living room, staring in slack-jawed awe at the enormous figure on the bottom of the page next to amount owed, wondering whether that living room will soon be taken away from them.

Here are a few things you can do if you get caught up in medical debt:

Dont assume that what you owe is what youre going to have to pay. When in debt, try to negotiate payment with the health care provider. If they dont knock off 30 percent, 40 percent or 50 percent from the bill, get help from someone who negotiates medical bills for a living.

Dont think of unpaid medical bills as fixed debts. Think of them as an invitation to negotiate.

Peter Ubel is a physician and behavioral scientist who blogs at his self-titled site, Peter Ubel and can be reached on Twitter @PeterUbel. He is the author of Critical Decisions: How You and Your Doctor Can Make the Right Medical Choices Together. This article originally appeared in Forbes.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
PARIS, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Centrist Emmanuel Macron was sworn in as the eighth president of the French Fifth Republic in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace here on Sunday.

After a warm welcome from outgoing President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace at around 10:00 a.m. local time (0800 GMT), Macron and Hollande held a closed-door meeting during which Macron was handed the codes to launch France's nuclear arsenal.

President of the Constitutional Council Laurent Fabius then announced the final results of presidential elections and Macron officially assumed the office.

In a speech to several hundred guests, Macron said, "The French have chosen hope and the spirit of conquest."

"I will not give up on the commitments made with regard to the French," said the new president.

"Nothing will make me renounce to defend the interests of France. From this evening I will be at work," he stressed.

During the coming five years of his governing term, Macron hopes to draw "one of the most beautiful images of our history," in which Europe must be more "efficient" and more "democratic."

Following the ceremony and a review of the guard of honor, the 39-year-old Macron will go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Elysees Avenue, a tradition followed by all his predecessors in France's modern history.

Macron won a runoff on May 7, beating far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen by a wide margin.

Macron, a pro-market advocate and ex-investment banker, offered a relief to the market and supporters for economic openness and closer European links.

In his first official visit abroad, Macron will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday in Berlin to forge closer links and seek ways to bolster integration in the European bloc.

Then, he will visit French army forces in the Sahel region, according to local media reports.
If you are looking for a job in education, here is your chance.

The United Independent School District will be hosting a Job Fair. They are offering open positions in teaching, transportation, food services and more.

For more information, you can watch the interview above.
While Senate Bill 4 continues to generate debate between both Democrats and Republicans, one Laredo high school student gives her opinion on the controversial bill.

United High School senior Salma Guzman spoke to Rotarians as part of a scholarship contest. The organization gives out scholarships to graduating students who write about their opinions on current events.

This year's topic is on the Department of Justice cracking down on sanctuary cities.

"As an immigrant to this country, I understand that many times it can be outraging to see how poorly immigrants are treated and how disrespected they are at some points," Guzman said. "But even in these cases, I understand and I support the idea that respecting the law that has been established by the government is much more important than rebelling against it."

Guzman will continue her studies at UT Austin, pursuing a career in Liberal Arts.
The Leaders' Roundtable Summit of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF) kicked off on Monday morning at Yanqi Lake International Convention Center in Beijing for world leaders to exchange views on Belt and Road cooperation.

A total of 29 heads of state and government are attending the forum, the highest-profile international meeting on the Belt and Road since Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the initiative in 2013.

One day earlier, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum.

He said China will contribute an additional 100 billion yuan (about 14.5 billion US dollars) in financial support for the Belt and Road Initiative. He also stressed the country "will not resort to outdated geopolitical maneuvering" in pursuing the initiative.
Gold prices edged up during the opening hours of the Asian session on Monday, as safe-haven demand saw a boost following North Koreas ballistic missile test a day earlier.

Spot gold on Kitco.com was up 0.15% in thin Asian trade, reaching $1,229.70 an ounce at the time of publication. June Comex gold was last up 0.16% at $1,229.70.

Renewed geopolitical tensions as well as disappointing U.S. macro data have boosted the demand for gold, according to analysts.

A return of weaker US data and a slight uptick in global uncertainties have seen a reduction in rates and the USD. As such, the resulting lower carry costs and uncertainties have likely persuaded investors to hold off on liquidating and prompted some additional short covering, Bart Melek, global head of Commodity Strategy at TD Securities, and Ryan McKay, the banks commodity strategist, said in a research note.

On Sunday, North Korea conducted a mid-to-long range missile test to assess the capability of carrying a large scale heavy nuclear warhead, according to the countrys official KCNA news agency.

The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead, KCNA reported.

The missile landed in the sea near Russia after flying 490 miles and hitting an altitude of 1,312 miles, KCNA said.

The U.S. military's Pacific Command issued a statement on Sunday, saying that the type of missile fired was not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile, Reuters reported.

The UN Security Council is scheduled to hold a meeting on Tuesday to discuss North Korea's missile launch, following a request from the U.S., South Korea and Japan.

Gold also received support from weaker-than-expected American retail sales and CPI reports released on Friday.

U.S. retails sales rose 0.4% in April, following a 0.1% revised increase in March, according to the American Commerce Department. The data disappointed, as economists were expecting to see a 0.6% rise in the headline number.

Also, consumer prices in the U.S. increased by a seasonally adjusted 0.2% during April, which was in line with expectations. But, the core index for CPI, excluding the volatile food and energy sectors, was up 0.1%, which was less than expectations.

This week, investors are keeping a close eye on the U.S. housing starts and building permits data for April as well as some regional manufacturing data.
BUCHAREST, May 15 (Reuters) - Romanian lawmakers approved on Monday the appointment of Eugen Nicolaescu to the central bank board, filling a deputy governor position vacated last year. The post was vacated in August 2016 when deputy governor Bogdan Olteanu resigned after anti-corruption prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into his time as speaker of parliament's lower house. The centre-right Liberal Party had nominated Olteanu to the nine-member central bank board in 2009. Nicolaescu, a senior Liberal Party politician, 61, is a member of the lower house and a former health minister.

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie; Editing by Radu Marinas)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.
KAMPALA, May 15 (Reuters) - The Ugandan shilling was steady on Monday amid slowing appetite for hard currency from key buyers like manufacturing firms, telecoms and energy importers. At 0945 GMT, commercial banks quoted the shilling at 3,635/3,645, the same as Friday's close. UGX Spot Rate..... Ugandan Shilling Money Guide.... Calculated Cross Rates.......... Deposits..................... Deposits & Forwards............. Uganda Equities Guide....... Uganda All Share Index........ Shilling background ..... Ugandan Debt Guide............ All Uganda Bonds............. Uganda T-Bills.............. Uganda Benchmark............. Central Bank ................ Ugandan Contributor Index.... Uganda Coffee Prices....... (Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by George Obulutsa)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.
(Adds details, shares)

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS, May 15 (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators will investigate whether Aspen Pharmacare is charging excessive prices for five key cancer drugs in a move which could lead to a hefty fine for Africa's largest generic drugmaker.

The European Commission said on Monday that it was looking into information that Aspen has imposed hefty and unjustified price increases of up to several hundred percent, and has withdrawn the drugs in some EU countries or threatened to do so in others.

Aspen acquired the medicines after their patent protection had expired. Its shares extended losses on news of the EU probe and were down 2.3 percent at 279.05 rand by 1020 GMT.

The EU competition enforcer said the probe will focus on niche medicines containing the active pharmaceutical ingredients chlorambucil, melphalan, mercaptopurine, tioguanine and busulfan for treating cancer such as hematologic tumours.

"Companies should be rewarded for producing these pharmaceuticals to ensure that they keep making them into the future. But when the price of a drug suddenly goes up by several hundred percent, this is something the Commission may look at," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

The investigation will cover all of Europe except Italy, which hit the company with a five-million-euro fine in October last year for price hikes up to 1,500 percent for some key drugs.

The EU enforcer can fine companies up to 10 percent of their global turnover for breaching the bloc's antitrust rules. It handed down multi-million euro penalties to a number of drugmakers in recent years for various offences.

Aspen, based in the South African city of Durban, has expanded overseas to benefit from the expiry of patents on best-selling drugs, fuelling a more than nine-fold increase in its share price since early 2008.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, editing by Louise Heavens)
* C.bank expects non-performing loans to "peak" this year

* Says loans may grow 4-6 pct this year vs 2 pct in 2016

(Adds details, banks' lending rate cuts)

By Kitiphong Thaichareon and Orathai Sriring

BANGKOK, May 15 (Reuters) - Large Thai banks announced lower loan rates for some customers on Monday, the same day the central bank said it hoped the pace of lending in 2017 will be significantly higher than it was in the first quarter.

Market leader Bangkok Bank , state-run Krung Thai Bank and number four Kasikornbank said they would cut their retail lending rates by 50 basis points from Tuesday to help smaller borrowers. Bangkok Bank will also trim its minimum overdraft rate by 25 basis points.

Third-ranked Siam Commercial Bank said it would cut all loan rates by 25 basis points, effective on Tuesday.

Thai lending increased 2 percent in 2016, the smallest rise in seven years.

The Bank of Thailand (BOT) said on Monday that loans rose 2.8 percent in the first quarter, kept down by uneven economic recovery and high household debt.

Daranee Saeju, senior director of the BOT's financial institutions strategy department, said bank lending may increase 4-6 percent in 2017 if production and investment pick up in the second half.

Earlier on Monday, Thailand reported January-March economic growth was the fastest for a quarter in four years. But growth in Southeast Asia's second-largest economy still lags regional peers. The economy faces risks, including U.S. trade policies and major economies' monetary policies, senior BOT director Don Nakornthab said.

The central bank has forecast growth of 3.4 percent this year, up from 3.2 percent in 2016.

Most major Thai banks reported weaker-than-expected quarterly earnings as they booked weak loans and high provisions for bad debt.

According to the central bank, NPLs rose to 2.94 percent of lending in the first quarter from 2.83 percent at the end of 2016, largely from small and medium businesses.

The BOT said it expected NPLs to "peak" later this year, but did not indicate what level it expects bad debts to reach.

(Writing by Orathai Sriring; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
Stuff reports:

The US is expected to broaden its ban on in-flight laptops and tablets to include planes from the European Union, a move that would create logistical chaos on the worlds busiest corridor of air travel.

Alarmed at the proposal, which airline officials say is merely a matter of timing, European governments held urgent talks on Friday with the US Department of Homeland Security.

The ban would affect trans-Atlantic routes that carry as many as 65 million people a year on over 400 daily flights, many of them business travellers who rely on their electronics to work during the flight.
The Guardian reports:

The Labour party has hinted that it will pledge to abolish university tuition fees, with Jeremy Corbyn saying he has some stuff in his pocket for higher education, but that it would not be revealed before the manifesto launch next week.

Speaking at Leeds community college on Wednesday, the Labour leader and the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, refused to rule out honouring a commitment made by Corbyn in his 2015 leadership race to scrap tuition fees.

Asked about the partys plans for university fees, the Labour leader said: Youll have to wait for the manifesto. I know youre desperate for it and Ive got some stuff in my pocket, but, sorry, Im not allowed to give it to you. Is that alright? Do you mind? Can you cope with the excitement?

His comments came as a recording emerged of the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, telling an audience in Mansfield that Labour would abolish university tuition fees. [We] want to introduce  just as the Attlee government with Nye Bevan introduced the National Health Service  we want to introduce a national education service, McDonnell said.

Free at the point of need throughout life. And that means ending the cuts in the schools at primary and secondary level. It means free childcare. It means free school training when you need it throughout life. And yes it means scrapping tuition fees once and for all so we dont burden our kids with debt for the future.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Becoming partly cloudy and windy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph..

Tonight

Becoming partly cloudy and windy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph.
Photo taken shows the logo of the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation opened in Beijing on May 14, 2017. Beijing Yanqi Lake International Convention & Exhibition Center, the main venue of the forum, as well as the service personnel of the meetings have been ready for the event. (Photo by Wang Haonan from Peoples Daily)

The ongoing Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will make future-oriented plans for cooperation and push forward the construction of the routes on a new starting point, said a commentary published by Peoples Daily on Sunday, the same day the two-day event opened in Beijing.

The following is an abstract translation of the article:

A total of 29 heads of state and governments, over 70 leaders of international organizations, and 1,500-plus representatives from worldwide attended the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation being held in Beijing.

As the highest-level Belt and Roadinternational meeting since the initiative was firstly put forward, the historical event will definitelyusher countries around the world into a newchapter to build it together.

Better than expected, progress and achievements have been scored by the efforts to construct Belt and Road. So far, more than 100 countries and international organizations have responded to the initiative, with 40 of them signing agreements of cooperation with China.

These accomplishments obtained in such a short period of time indeed indicated the initiatives conformity with the trend of international peaceful development and the demand of Eurasian countries for cooperation and development.

The Belt and Road initiative is for China, but more importantly, it is for the world.

Now the world economy is still in a gloom, with rising tide of protectionism and anti-globalization. The conflicts between openness and conservatism, reform and fogyismeconomic integration and fragmentation have emerged as well.

Amid such background, the Belt and Road developmentprovides a new engine to boost trade growth and accelerate the reform of global economic governance.

Fruitful harvests have been reaped from the endeavor to build the routes. The Belt and Road countries, for instance, have aligned their development strategies and construction plans, while investment and financing platforms such as Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund have been set up.

The infrastructure projects like Jakarta-Bandunghigh speed rail and Gwadar Port are underway as well.

These have not only accelerated Chinas process to open up in an all-round way, but also brought development opportunities and tangible benefits for the countries and regions along the routes. The contribution of all involved countries was rewarded.

Such common actions are pushing the world toward an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive economy.

Chinese President Xi Jinpingonce pointed out that the world will be a better place only when everyone is better off.

To put Xis words into practice, Chinese enterprises have established 56 economic cooperation zones in Belt and Road countries during the last 3 years, creating nearly $1.1 billiontax revenue and 180,000 jobs. In addition, Chinas direct investment in these countries reached $14.5 billion in merely 2016.

China is implementing the initiative and devoting to economic globalizationwith maximum sincerity and firm actions.

Xi stressed that the Silk Road is a common treasure for people all over the world. The continuous promotion of the initiative will not only effectively deepen the cooperation between China and the Belt and Road countries, but also deliver them and the world at large the conception to build a community of shared interests and future for the mankind.

The achievements in the past 3 years have made the Belt and Road initiative important international public product goods. The forum will determine the key cooperation areas for the next phase through consultation, make future-oriented plans for cooperation, and promote the construction of the Belt and Road on a new starting point, in a bid to further build consensus, set direction and plan visions.

The forum is not about empty talks. It will make itself into a highly-efficient global cooperation platform to encourage connectivity.

Closer alignment, effective implementation and other concrete actions will be taken to convert consensus into development engines and welfare for the public, so that the Belt and Road initiative will be strong enough to carry the hope and dream of the people from en-route countries.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (File photo/Xinhua)

1. Xian Xinghai Boulevard in Almaty

The ancient city of Almaty is also on the ancient Silk Road. In Almaty, there is a Xian Xinghai Boulevard, which got its name from a true story. At the outset of the Great Patriotic War in 1941, Xian, a renowned Chinese composer, arrived in Almaty after much travail. By then, he was worn down by poverty and illness and had no one to turn to. Fortunately, the Kazakh composer Bakhitzhan Baykadamov took care of Xian and provided him with the comfort of a home.

It was in Almaty that Xian composed his famous works Liberation of the Nation, Sacred War and Red All over the River. He also wrote a symphony Amangeldy based on the exploits of the Kazakh national hero. These pieces served as a rallying call to fight Fascists and proved immensely popular with the local people.

-- Quoted from Xis speech at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan on Sept. 7, 2013

2.Song Hening (Silence) composed by former Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

In this connection, I recall the song Hening (Silence) composed by President Yudhoyono. In October 2006, he came to Guangxi, China for the commemorative summit marking the 15th anniversary of China-ASEAN dialogue relations. On the Lijiang River, President Yudhoyono was overwhelmed by inspiration and wrote down these beautiful lyrics. The beautiful days I spend with my friends have kept recurring in my life. The mountains and rivers in China deeply touched President Susilo and reminded him of his childhood and hometown. This shows just how strong the bond and affinity are between our two peoples.

-- Quoted from Xis speech to Indonesian Parliament on Oct. 3, 2013

3. Silk Road connects culture of China and Western world

In the 2nd century B.C., China began working on the Silk Road leading to the Western Regions. In 138 B.C. and 119 B.C., Envoy Zhang Qian of the Han Dynasty made two trips to those regions, spreading the Chinese culture there and bringing into China grape, alfalfa, pomegranate, flax, sesame and other products. In the Western Han Dynasty, China's merchant fleets sailed as far as India and Sri Lanka where they traded China's silk for colored glaze, pearls and other products. The Tang Dynasty saw dynamic interactions between China and other countries. According to historical documents, the dynasty exchanged envoys with over 70 countries, and Chang'an, the capital of Tang, bustled with envoys, merchants and students from other countries. Exchanges of such a magnitude helped the spread of the Chinese culture to the rest of the world and the introduction into China of the cultures and products from other countries. In the early 15th century, Zheng He, the famous navigator of China's Ming Dynasty, made seven expeditions to the Western Seas, reaching many Southeast Asian countries and even Kenya on the east coast of Africa. These trips left behind many good stories of friendly exchanges between the people of China and countries along the route. In late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty, the Chinese people began to learn modern science and technology with great zeal, as the European knowledge of astronomy, medicine, mathematics, geometry and geography were being introduced into China, which helped broaden the horizon of the Chinese people. Thereafter, exchanges and mutual learning between the Chinese civilization and other civilizations became more frequent. There were indeed conflicts, frictions, bewilderment and denial in this process. But the more dominant features of the period were learning, digestion, integration and innovation.

--Quoted from Xis speech at UNESCO headquarters on March 27, 2014

4. Arab restaurant in Yiwu

The fast growth of China-Arab relations has also brought closer the destinies of ordinary people from both sides. Here, I can give you such an example from the Chinese province of Zhejiang where I once worked. In the city of Yiwu where you can find many Arab businessmen, a Jordanian businessman named Mohanad opened an Arab restaurant. He introduced authentic Arab cuisine to Yiwu, and he has achieved great success in this prosperous city. He married a Chinese girl and settled down in China. This young Arab has woven his life dream into the Chinese peoples dream of a happy life. He has worked hard to live his life to the full and demonstrated a perfect fusion of the Chinese dream and Arab dream.

--Quoted from Xis speech at the opening ceremony of the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum on June 5, 2014

5.China, second hometown of Tagore

Ninety years ago, Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian poet admired by the Chinese people, visited China and was warmly received there. Upon setting foot on Chinas soil, Tagore said, I dont know why, but coming to China is like coming home. Upon leaving China, he said quite sadly, My heart stays.

--Quoted from Xis speech at the Indian Council of World Affairs on Sept. 18,2014
A visitor watches the on-display porcelains introduced from China by Topkapi Palace, where a total of 10,385 Chinese porcelains tracing back to 13th century to the 20th century were collected. The ancient Silk Road has connected Istanbul, the most populous city in Turkey, with China over centuries. Those collected in the eight centuries are precious for academic studies since they reflect the historic changes of China-made porcelains. (Photo by Wang Yunsong from Peoples Daily)

Turkey will render great support to the Belt and Road initiative put forward by China, its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged in a signed article, adding that his country is ready to pursue better future together with China.

The article was published on Global Times, a newspaper under Peoples Daily upon the arrival of the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation kicked off on Sunday.

The Belt and Road initiative refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt that links China with Europe through Central and Western Asia by inland routes, and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road connecting China with Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe by sea.

The following is an abstract translation of the article written by him:

The Silk Road, over the past centuries, has been a bridge connecting the East and West world. With its unique location in the juncture of the Eurasian continent, Turkey was among the earliest en-route countries in history.

Chinese President Xi Jinpings proposal to build the Belt and Road, coming as the Asian and European continents are deepening their trade ties in an accelerated pace, is of great significance for China-Turkey strategic cooperation.

Turkeys Middle Corridor plan is the most important part of the blueprint to revive the ancient Silk Road. Starting from Turkey, it will reach China after passing through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is proven that Chinas suggestion to build the Silk Road Economic Belt can perfectly complement with Turkeys Middle Corridor plan. We expect a closer collaboration with China in these programs since it will also point out a way for the trade in next century.

Given such backdrop, we signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on the harmonization of the Belt and Road with the Middle Corridor on the sidelines of the G20 Summit held in Antalya on November 14, 2015, bringing bilateral cooperation a key step forward.

As an effort to better supplement the Belt and Road development with the Middle Corridor plan, Turkey launched a series of projects including the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway link. After the line puts into operation in the coming months, the key component of the corridor will be concluded.

Turkey initiated an infrastructure construction spree nationwide at the same time. Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, the third bridge for rail and motor vehicle transit over the Bosphorus strait has been completed. The Marmaray tunnel and Eurasia Tunnel crossing the Bosphorus strait undersea have been open to traffic as well.

The Canakkale 1915 bridge hanging on the Dardanelles Strait west of Turkey is now under construction. These roads, rail lines, logistics parks, telecommunication equipment are all part of the Middle Corridor plan.

As a saying goes, All the flowers are gown up from the seeds we sow today. The seeds our two governments are sowing now will lay a foundation for our later generations. Our new cooperation will generate more and more fruits from now on to 2021, when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties.

Photo taken shows the shadow puppet play demonstrated by a shop in Istanbul, the most populous city in Turkey. Sharing similarities in performance style and techniques with Chinese ones, Turkish shadow play also absorbs local cultural elements. Local public often choose it as a pastime during the holy month of Ramadan. (Photo by Wang Yunsong from Peoples Daily)
Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho talks during the press conference for his new film "Okja" at Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, Monday. / Yonhap



Bong's Okja' to premiere on and offline June 29



By Kim Jae-heun

Korean director Bong Joon-ho's first project film with Netflix, "Okja" (2017), will premiere both online and in theaters worldwide on June 29 (KST).

"Okja" became Netflix's first original content to join the competition category for the Palme d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, along with "The Meyerowitz Stories" (2017) by Noah Baumbach.

Controversy broke out earlier when National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF), declared its position against inviting Netflix productions to Cannes.

Cannes's organizing committee later confirmed it will maintain the two Netflix productions in the competition program for this year, but the festival will only invite films screening in French theaters starting next year.

Bong and Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix, said Cannes should understand the new global ecosystem of the film industry and that online streaming services will not discourage moviegoers from going to theaters.

"In the end, I believe people will watch a movie both in the theater and online by a streaming service. It is only that Netflix has a short history, but I believe Ted is going to the theater with his family and officials of FNCF watch movies on Netflix," Bong said during a press conference for "Okja" at the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, Monday.

"We are only privileged to have more convenient ways of watching movies and it is no serious concern. I watched an old French film from the 1960s recently, and one of the lines in the scene said theaters are dead that we have TV now. But we still have theaters."

Ted agreed Netflix is not competing with movie theaters and he would love to have all Netflix content simultaneously screened in theaters.

Netflix has been providing original content through its streaming service only and collected over 98 million subscribers worldwide, including more than 50 million in the United States.

Actor Ahn Seo-hyun plays Mija in "Okja" / Courtesy of Netflix



However, Netflix has agreed to release "Okja" in theaters in the U.S., U.K. and Korea and also stream it worldwide. In Korea, the movie will face no restrictions in screening time at theaters and it will be available as long as audiences are paying.

It is the first time for Bong to work with Netflix and the filmmaker said he had no reason not to work with the U.S. media giant as it invested 60 billion won ($53.4 million) in his film and gave him full control over content creation.

"Okja" is Bong's first film in four years since 2010's "Snowpiercer," and he has once against cast Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal.

The story depicts Mija, played by Ahn Seo-hyun, travelling to New York, in search of her lost pet Okja. Mija grew up with Okja for 10 years in the countryside of Gangwon Province in Korea and one day, Lucy Mirando, played by Swinton, brings Okja to the U.S. to pursue a secretive project.





Cannes' midnight screening of film Villainess' depicts rare deadly female killer





Another Korean movie director Jung Byung-gil's "The Villainess" is also joining the Cannes film festival next month to highlight the midnight screening category.

"The Villainess" is an action film starring Kim Ok-bin as the murderous Sook-hee, who seeks revenge while facing secrets revolving around her after she joins the national secret agency.

This is Kim's second time visiting Cannes since she last walked on the red carpet at the French film festival with esteemed Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook's "Thirst" in 2009.





Actress Kim Ok-bin, left, plays Sook-hee and actor Shin Ha-kyun plays Joong-sang in the film "Villainess" / Courtesy of NEW



Kim, who is a black belt holder in taekwondo and hapkido, suffered great physical pain while shooting the film as she had to deal with various deadly weapons like swords, pistols, axes and machine guns. She also hung onto a fast-moving car during an action scene and did her own stunts.

"Action in film and martial arts in real life are very different and I had to go to action school for three months, training to become a deadly killer," Kim said during the press conference for the film at CGV Apgujeong in Seoul, last Thursday. "It was a strenuous job. There is a scene in the rain and it was during the winter. I thought I could die of hypothermia.

"But a week after we wrapped, I wanted to go back to shooting action. I had so much fun."

The actress also emphasizes that the female killer is the main character of the story. There have not been many female killers in Korean films and Kim said her role was important in paving the way for future Korean movies for more female antagonist roles.

"I thought I had to do a really good job so more Korean action films could be based on female characters. I felt that burden and responsibility," Kim said.

Actor Shin Ha-kyun, who appears as Joong-sang raising Sook-hee as a killer in the movie, said he knew instantly that no other actress could play the killer better than Kim when he saw the scenario.

Shin added that "The Villainess" could be a refreshing film for audiences who are fed up with action movies starring male actors and they can look forward to Kim's delicate but aggressive acting.

"The Villainess" is set for release on June 8.
Candidates pose ahead of their last presidential debate. From left are: Moon Jae-in of the Democratic Party of Korea, Hong Joon-pyo of the Liberty Korea Party, Yoo Seong-min of the Bareun Party, Sim Sang-jung of the Justice Party and Ahn Cheol-soo of the People's Party. / Joint press corps





By Park Hyong-ki







In times of deep internal division and economic turmoil in the United States, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th president in 1861.



What was more surprising than his victory was his appointment of his political rivals to key Cabinet positions, people who ran against him and had different ideas.



Lincoln, a former lawyer, did so to hold the country together by using his rivals' strengths and potential, even if he had to sacrifice his political career in the short run.



To this day, Lincoln's unconventional methods in human capital are looked upon for guidance.



Former U.S. President Barack Obama followed Lincoln's example when he was elected.



He said he did not want to be surrounded by people who would always agree with him, but wanted people who could "challenge and push me out of my comfort zone."



President Moon Jae-in faces a similar situation as Lincoln.



The country's growth is losing luster. It is deeply divided, with conflicts between the elderly and young, rich and poor and conservatives and liberals running high.



Also, since South Korea is technically still at war with North Korea, Moon will face diplomatic challenges from the U.S., China, Japan and Russia over the nation's division with the North as Koreans continue to ask whether Pyongyang is Seoul's friend or enemy.



President Moon would need to look at Lincoln's example in this crucial time, which calls for desperate yet unconventional measures.



He would need his own team of rivals who can draw a bipartisan agreement with the opposition, while challenging the president when they strongly feel he is on the wrong track for the people of this country.













Korea has so far seen the mistakes and wrong turns the former governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye made surrounded by their yes-men and cronies.



It seems the Moon administration is reaching out to his rivals, asking Yoo Seong-min of the Bareun Party to take the helm as finance minster and Sim Sang-jung of the Justice Party to serve as labor minister.



Yoo's and Sim's hopes of becoming head of state may have been dashed, but there are other ways to serve the country and its people.



Furthermore, Moon should ask Ahn Cheol-soo to be the education minister.



Koreans have seen their strengths and passions during televised debates.



Yoo may be a conservative, but when it comes to economics, he seems to be a conscious liberal. Some go as far as calling him "Robin Hood" because of his support for taxing the rich to help the poor. What is wrong with that? No one has framed Robin Hood as a bad thief; he is painted as a righteous and honorable man.



Sim is eager to improve laborers' welfare and reduce inequality.



And no one showed more passion than Ahn to fix the outdated and broken education system here. Ahn is even fit to be the science and technology minister.



If Moon makes a formal request, the three should bury the hatchet, set aside their political differences and take the jobs not for the president but for his boss  the people, and the middle and lower classes they said they sincerely wanted to serve.



This team of rivals is worth betting for in this time of uncertainty and volatility, and they can lead the changes they promised.



Koreans want to see change happening in their aging system and culture.



They need a fighter, a hero who can make that happen, not a hotshot celebrity politician.



In the words of Joseph Campbell, a scholar of mythology, the big difference between the two is "a celebrity lives only for self, while a hero acts to redeem society."



Be their hero.
North Korea's new type of ballistic missile, called the Hwasong-12, is launched Sunday in Kusong, North Pyongan Province, in this photo released by the North's Rodong Sinmun, Monday. / Yonhap



Kim Jong-un says US mainland is within striking range

By Jun Ji-hye

North Korea announced Monday that it successfully test-fired a "new surface-to-surface medium to long-range" ballistic missile "capable of carrying a large-size nuclear warhead" and reaching the U.S. mainland.

Calling the new missile "Hwasong-12," the North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the missile fell precisely onto a designated target 787 kilometers away in the sea after reaching a maximum altitude of 2,111 kilometers.

Military analysts say if the North's claim is confirmed to be true, the move marks a considerable technical advance in its development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), believed to have a range of more than 10,000 kilometers.

The announcement came after the military authorities of South Korea, the United States and Japan detected the missile launch that took place in the vicinity of Kusong, North Pyongyan Province, at 5:27 a.m., Sunday.

The latest provocation came four days after liberal President Moon Jae-in took office.





North Korean leader Kim Jong-un smiles with aides after confirming the successful missile launch in this photo released by the North's Rodong Sinmun, Monday. Kim said the U.S. mainland is now within the regime's strike range, according to its state media. / Yonhap

The KCNA said the test, observed by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was conducted "at the highest angle in consideration of the security of neighboring countries."

It noted the launch was aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly-developed ballistic missile.
By Park Si-soo



North Korea said Monday its latest ballistic missile test proved the missile could carry a "large-size heavy nuclear warhead" over long distances, as far as the U.S. mainland, state news agency KCNA reported.

The long-range missile, Hwasong-12, was fired Sunday morning from a site near the North's border with China, flew eastward nearly 700 kilometers for 30 minutes, and landed in the East Sea, according to South Korea and the U.S. military. The distance suggests the test was a success.



North Korean leader Kim Jong-un witnessed the launch of "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12," the news official news agency said.

The missile was fired at a steep trajectory "in consideration of the security of neighboring countries," reaching an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers before hitting open waters 787 kilometers away, KCNA said.
White House officials handling Korea affairs are to visit South Korea later Monday to make preparations for a summit between new President Moon Jae-in and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump, government sources said Monday.

The delegation led by Matt Pottinger, senior director for East Asia at the National Security Council (NSC), will arrive in Seoul in the evening for a two-day stay. Allison Hooker, director for Korea at the NSC, will accompany him, according to the sources.

This will mark the first time for high-ranking White House officials to travel to South Korea after Moon was sworn in as president last Wednesday.

The U.S. officials are expected to meet with senior South Korean officials from the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae and the foreign ministry to apparently discuss the timetable and other necessary issues related to summit talks that Moon and Trump are seeking to hold.

Observers say that the summit will likely take place as early as June. Some expect their first talks could be delayed until the Group of 20 summit to be held in Germany during July 7-8 or even after.












By Yi Whan-woo



Immediately after North Korea conducted its latest missile test, Sunday, President Moon Jae-in convened a National Security Council (NSC) meeting.



Awkwardly, however, the meeting included many security officials appointed by the ousted President Park Geun-hye.



These officials are likely to retain their jobs for the time being because Moon will be "prudent" in revamping the lineup regardless of North Korea's provocations, according to Cheong Wa Dae.



Of the six key NSC members who were at the meeting, Presidential Chief of Staff Im Jong-seok was the only official tapped by Moon. The five other Park appointees were National Security Office chief Kim Kwan-jin, Defense Minister Han Min-koo, Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo and National Intelligence Service (NIS) Director Lee Byung-ho.



Moon is yet to find replacements for Kim, Han, Yun and Hong.



Moon nominated Suh Hoon, a former NIS deputy director, to succeed Lee.



But to get the job, Suh will need to undergo a National Assembly confirmation hearing the same as ministerial nominees.



This means the Moon administration could take at least a month to confirm its security and foreign policy lineup, according to analysts.



As presidential staff, Im and Kim's possible successors are not subject to the Assembly's approval.



"The Moon administration will need to put up with the possible discomfort of living with Park's aides as roommates," a political source said.



The source said that Moon's progressive diplomatic and security policies are different from those of Park.



Moon is expected to implement a "Sunshine Policy" as embraced by earlier liberal presidents  Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun  to resume dialogue with North Korea, while Park maintained a hard-line policy on Pyongyang.



Despite this, the presidential office said it will not hurry but will thoroughly screen the candidates for the defense, foreign and unification ministers.



"The security and foreign policy lineup is very important and we are being extremely prudent choosing the nominees accordingly," a Cheong Wa Dae official said. "Some may disagree with our working style but we are working as fast as we can to fill in the posts."



A different official echoed the view, saying, "Security and diplomacy are more than an ideological division and that is why President Moon had Park's aides join the NSC meeting."



The Moon administration is debating whether to have a retired diplomat or a former military officer serve as the National Security Office chief.



Among the possible candidates are former Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva Chung Ui-yong and former Ambassador to Russia Wi Sung-rak who also served as Seoul's top envoy in multilateral talks on Pyongyang's denuclearization.



From the military are retired Army general and former lawmaker Baek Gun-ki, former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Hwang Ki-chul and former Army Chief of Staff Jeong Seung-jo.




By Yi Whan-woo





Matt Pottinger Allison Hooker

A White House delegation arrived in Seoul, Monday, to fine-tune the schedule for a summit between President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump and also their agenda, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

The delegation is led by Matt Pottinger, the senior director for East Asia at the National Security Council (NSC) and Allison Hooker, director for Korea at the NSC. They will leave the country, Tuesday.

The possible topics to be included at the summit are North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile threats, the ongoing deployment of a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery here and China's retaliatory measures, defense-cost sharing and a possible renegotiation of the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement.

Cheong Wa Dae said it has not been decided whether Moon will meet with the White House delegates.

"It is yet to be confirmed whether President Moon will greet the U.S. delegates in person, and we can't tell you about relevant details," a presidential official said.

Sources said the delegation may also meet Cheong Wa Dae' security task force led by former permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva Chung Uiyong.

Chung is a possible candidate for national security office chief.

The White House officials are scheduled to meet Deputy Minister for Political Affairs Lee Jeong-kyu at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well during their stay here.

Meanwhile, June is seen as the optimal time for the two leaders to meet ahead of the G20 Hamburg Summit in July.

This will be the first time that Moon and Trump meet after they were sworn in as president on May 10 and Jan. 20, respectively.

Moon is expected to push for dialogue with North Korea based on close consultations with the U.S.

However, concerns remain that his progressive inter-Korean policy will collide with Trump's "maximum pressure and engagement" strategy aimed at bolstering sanctions on Pyongyang before seeking a possible dialogue.
Attendees of Shinil Educational Foundation's 14th teachers' award ceremony pose at Seoul Cyber University's campus in eastern Seoul, Saturday. From second row left are Shinil Junior High School Principal Choi Kyung-ho, Shinil Educational Foundation Board Chairman Lee Sang-kyun, Former Education Minister Cho Wan-kyu, former Prime Minister Chung Won-sik, Seoul Cyber University Honorary President Kim Cheong-ha, Shinil High School Principal Shin Byung-chul and Seoul Cyber University President Lee Eun-joo. / Courtesy of Seoul Cyber University



By Kim Bo-eun





Shinil Educational Foundation awarded six teachers for their efforts to promote education to celebrate Teachers' Day, Monday.

The Shinil Teachers' Award, which is in its 14th year, is presented to teachers with over 10 years of experience, based on recommendations from school principals.

The teachers are evaluated on their contributions to education, the influence of their teaching and their research achievements. They are also evaluated on their performance at school.

The ceremony took place at Seoul Cyber University's campus in northeastern Seoul, Saturday.

The awardees were Ma Byeong-shik from Seoul Insu Elementary School, Yoon Hwa-seon from Incheon Jiseok Elementary School, Lim Kang-on from Donggu Girls' Middle School in Seoul, Kim Ki-ock from Daebu Middle School on Daebu Island, Kim Tae-kwon from Sorabol High School in Ansan, Kwoun Ki-bok from Youngbuk High School in Pocheon, and Wi Young-soon from Seoul Dongchun School.

They each received a plaque and a cash prize of 10 million won.

Kwoun was recognized for his contributions in providing career guidance for students at Youngbuk.

"Because our school is located in a rural area in northern Gyeonggi Province, we have many students who are not so well-off," he said.

"We thought of how we could assist them with their future careers, and considering the school is located near the DMZ, it occurred to us that we could encourage the students to become military officers."

The school became the first in the province to be designated as a school specializing in cultivating non-commissioned officers. Its most recent graduating class produced 29 in February.
A man who threatened to attack President Moon Jae-in has been caught. / Courtesy of Flickr



By Eom Da-sol

Police have caught a man who threatened online to attack President Moon Jae-in.

Identified by his surname Lee, 20, the man  who lives in a South Jeolla Province city  last Saturday threatened on online community website DC Inside to "attack the President."

Three photos showed a butane gas bottle and presidential residence Cheong Wa Dae.

The post went viral in only a few hours, scaring Lee enough to delete the post. But police tracked down the IP address of his computer and found him on Monday.

"I feel sorry. The post was nothing more than a joke. I did not expect the situation to become this serious," Lee reportedly told police.

Police will decide whether to arrest him.

On May 5, another man in 20s posted on the same website a plan to assassinate Moon. The man turned himself in to Goseong-gun police in South Gyeongsang Province after the post went viral.
Foreigners enjoy the Incheon Korean Music Wave at Incheon Munhak Stadium. / Korea Times file



By Eom Da-sol

Incheon has enhanced its support for foreigners by introducing an administrative service assistance team and new festive events for an annual holiday celebrating foreign residents.

The city has prepared new events to celebrate this year's "Together Day"  established in 2007  on May 21 at Soraepogu Subyeon Stadium in Namdong-gu.

Events include foreigners' dancing and singing performances, the city orchestra's magic performance, a bibimbap mixing event and an onsite photography contest.

In March the city also launched a civic watchdog team consisting of foreign residents.

Twenty-five members including workers, students and marriage migrants participated in providing feedback on the city's administrative policies.

With 89,000 registered foreign residents, Incheon has the fourth-biggest foreign population by province/metropolitan city in Korea, following Gyeonggi Province, Seoul City and South Gyeongsang Province.

Chinese residents make up the most (44,000), followed by Vietnamese (9,700) and Filipinos (4,400).

"Together with the Incheon Help Center for Foreigners and nine Multicultural Family Support Center branches across the city, Incheon will continue to increase its supports for foreigners," a city official said.
In July 2016, Qingfeng Town in Chongqing city began to implement the sustainable development Project financed by the World Bank. The project funds were more than 12 million yuans, including institution construction, material, infrastructure and farmers technical training. After its completion, it will help more than 1000 villagers. (Photo from People.cn)

The Belt and Road initiative put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping is of great significance since the highly-collaborative proposal will boost the development of the en-route countries and even the whole world, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim stressed on Thursday, pledging all forms of support to propel the initiative.

He said so in an interview with the Peoples Daily before he headed to Beijing for the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation kicked off on Sunday.

We are eager to and ready to provide support of all forms to Belt and Roaddevelopment,Kim vowed, adding that the World Bank, together with the developing countries, has accumulated quite a number of experience in trade facilitation, road infrastructure, institutionalized investment and construction of infrastructure.

It is a remarkable achievement for China to lift millions of people out of poverty, the president hailed.

Chinas experience in market economy, trade facilitation, pursuit of innovation and introduction of more state-owned enterprises into competing ground can be sum up as reference for other countries, he pointed out, adding that its undergoing reform of medical insurance system is also an important contribution to the international community.

Chinas development also offers enlightenment for the World Bank, Kim stressed, elaborating that the organization is trying to incorporate more developing economies, including the poorest ones into the world market system, so that both involved nations and the investors will be benefited.

He added that as some developing nations need more investment to improve their infrastructure, the World Bank will, as always, support the cooperation and development of the developing countries including those along the Belt and Road.

The World Bank, according to the chief, has maintained close collaboration with Chinese departments like National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Finance, and launched unprecedented cooperation in mechanism reforms.

We made some inputs, but learned a lot as well, said the president who has paid several visits to China during his tenure.

Appreciating the development process of Shenzhen, a major city in Guangdong Province, Kim praised that it is a city that combines technologies, investment and economic growth perfectly.

Impressed a lot by Chinas persistence to learning from the rest of world, the president said that China, with a strong learning ability, is good at applying the experience it borrowed to its own progress.
Former President Roh Moo-hyun, left, talks with current President Moon Jae-in at Cheong Wa Dae in May 2007 when the latter was the former's chief of staff. / Yonhap



New government expected to improve upon predecessor's weak points

By Kim Rahn

When talking about Moon Jae-in, the new president of Korea, many people automatically associate him with former President Roh Moo-hyun, for whom Moon was the presidential secretary and chief of staff.

The two had been close since 1982, when they worked as human rights lawyers. When Roh became the president, Moon came to Cheong Wa Dae to assist the longtime friend.

This is why many expect that Moon will inherit Roh's state management style and policy.

Roh was unconventional in many ways. In diplomacy and security, for example, he strongly called for diplomatic independence from the United States and took soft stance toward North Korea. While former Roh supporters say Moon should take similar stance, conservatives see this as cause of concern, fearing such stance would estrange allies and threaten national security.

In some ways, the new government is reminiscent of the old administration. Some former officials appointed during Roh's term have joined the Moon administration and more are expected to.

Some of these former officials are Prime Minister nominee Lee Nak-yon, spokesman to then President-elect Roh; Senior Presidential Secretary for Personnel Affairs Cho Hyun-ock, who was junior secretary for personnel affairs during Roh's term; National Intelligence Service Director nominee Suh Hoon, who was a working-level official in charge of the 2007 inter-Korean summit; and Presidential Security Service head Ju Young-hoon, who protected the former president when he retired and returned to his hometown of Bongha Village in South Gyeongsang Province.

As people, especially Moon's opponents, watch these former officials fill up the Cabinet and other posts, they can't help but think the Moon administration will be a comeback of the Roh administration.





Moon visited Roh at Roh's home in Bongha Village, Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province, after the former president's retirement in 2008. Behind them is Ju Young-hoon, former security guard for Roh, who was appointed as the Presidential Security Service head by Moon. / Yonhap

Regression or upgrade?

Political pundits say the new government may partly resemble the old one but will be a much refined, upgraded version.

"It's because Moon is the one who realizes the Roh government's failures and weak points most keenly," said Choi Young-il, a political analyst. "He may feel responsible for overcoming such weak points."

Although the Roh administration presented many fresh policies with a non-authoritarian approach, it was attacked by conservative opposition parties as a hotbed of numerous problems.

Roh tried to reform the prosecution to reduce its almighty power but failed to do so; he sided with ordinary workers, not people from the high-income brackets, but the economic polarization only worsened during his term; he took a soft stance toward the North and held a summit with then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, but the North repaid this effort with its nuclear weapons development; and during his whole term, he had a sour relationship with opposition parties, which stranded many of his reform policies and ultimately led to his impeachment.

Choi said Moon and his aides will form a polished version of the Roh government.

"Moon will have to inherit the Roh government's merits and try to avoid its demerits at the same time. He will need to choose from among the merits that are still worthy and upgrade them as a 2017 version," Choi said.

Moon sympathizes with many of Roh's reform ideas, but he knows he needs to take a different approach in pursuing them.

"How will he distinguish himself from Roh? He may seek to employ some new faces," Choi predicted. "He is expected to focus on team playing rather than coming to the forefront himself."

Indeed, new faces have already joined in the Moon government.

To reform the prosecution, Moon appointed Seoul National University professor Cho Kuk, who has long called for an overhaul of the nation's law enforcement authorities, which have been swayed by politics.

He also appointed a former finance ministry official as the secretary for administrative affairs, a position that is tasked with managing Cheong Wa Dae's expenditures and used to be taken by the president's close aide, as a way to run the presidential office transparently.

For prime minister, the president named former South Jeolla Province Governor Lee, to keep his promise to pick a person from the Honam region  the southwestern part of the nation  for the position, in an effort to promote national unity, as Moon himself is from the Yeongnam region  the southeastern part of the country. Regionalism has long been a cause of national divide, especially that between Honam and Yeongnam.

Even those figures who had worked during Roh's term, such as Cho Hyun-ock and Suh Hoon, have not been labeled as "Moon Jae-in's men" and have not belonged to specific political factions  a rare quality because former presidents appointed their close aides to key posts. This is one reason Moon's personnel appointment has not drawn much controversy so far compared to his predecessors'.

Regarding North Korea's nuclear issue, Moon is also showing a different stance from Roh's: he will both impose sanctions and seek dialogue to resolve it. He is stern against the North's provocations.

In a situation in which the ruling Democratic Party of Korea is not the majority at the National Assembly, it will be difficult for the new government to implement policies and pass necessary laws without cooperation with opposition parties.

Well aware of this challenge, having learned from Roh's failure to carry out policies due to a bad relationship with the then opposition parties, Moon visited leaders of opposition parties the morning of his first day of office, even before he had the swearing-in ceremony, in a gesture for unity and communication.

"Moon's government is trying to evolve into the Roh government 2.0' or Roh government 3.0,'" Choi said.
From left are Hong Seok-hyun, Lee Hae-chan, Moon Hee-sang and Song Young-gil, who were named special envoys to the U.S., China, Japan and Russia, respectively. / Yonhap



By Kim Rahn

President Moon Jae-in will send special envoys to the United States, China, Japan and Russia as early as this week, Cheong Wa Dae said Monday.

"Moon has appointed the envoys, and we are talking with the countries about their dispatch," said Yoon Young-chan, senior presidential secretary for public relations affairs. "They will start leaving for the respective countries as soon as discussions are completed."

Each envoy will deliver a personal letter from Moon to the head of each country and meet high-ranking officials there for talks over issues affecting South Korea, such as North Korean provocations.

Hong Seok-hyun, former chairman of the JoongAng Media Network, was named special envoy to the U.S. "Hong was ambassador to Washington in 2005. He is well aware of the country's affairs and has established a wide network there," Cheong Wa Dae said in a statement.

Former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan will head to China. "He had experience as a special envoy during the former Roh Moo-hyun administration. He has abundant experience about China," the presidential office noted.

Rep. Moon Hee-sang from the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), a former National Assembly vice speaker, will be sent to Japan. He was head of the federation of Korean and Japanese lawmakers between 2004 and 2008.

Rep. Song Young-gil, also from the DPK, will go to Russia. The former Incheon mayor received the order of friendship from Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013 for promoting friendship between the two countries, such as setting up a sister relationship between Incheon and Saint Petersburg.

Besides the four countries, Moon also named Sogang University professor Cho Yoon-je as an envoy to the European Union and Germany. Cho was former ambassador to Britain. "Including the EU and Germany on the list of envoy dispatches shows Moon's desire to expand Korea's diplomatic horizon beyond Northeast Asia and diversify diplomatic cooperation," Cheong Wa Dae said.

More lawmakers and professors will accompany them. The president will have lunch with the envoys as a symbol of their appointment.





Chief delegate meets Xi

In the meantime, Rep. Park Byeong-seug of the DPK said he met Chinese President Xi Jinping, Sunday, during his participation in the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation being held in Beijing.

"Xi said he was satisfied with his earlier phone conversation with Moon, adding he highly recognizes Moon's political philosophy and that they have much in common," Park said. "He stressed the importance of South Korea-China relations and said that improving them will contribute to peace not only in Asia but also the world."

China reportedly considered not inviting Seoul to the international summit to protest the deployment of a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery here, but issued an invitation following the inauguration of South Korea's new president. Seoul sent a delegation led by Park.

Park said he and Xi did not talk about the THAAD issue, adding the upcoming special envoy Lee may deal with this. "The phone conversation between Xi and Moon led to my unscheduled meeting with Xi. I believe this has signaled a breakthrough in gridlocked Seoul-Beijing relations."
By You Soo-sun



Reporters at YTN and former journalists fired nine years ago are seeking to remove company President Cho Jun-hee. Reporters and producers issued a statement Friday demanding Cho's resignation and the reinstatement of those dismissed in 2008 for striking after the management at the time allegedly forced them to give pro-government news coverage.



The move followed a similar statement issued by the National Union of Media Workers YTN branch, Wednesday.



The union criticized Cho's earlier demand that the reporters' reinstatement should be conditional upon changing the company's retirement payment system. Appointed under the Park Geun-hye administration, Cho has also allegedly interfered in news reporting decisions, leading to viewership and revenue plummeting in recent years, it argued in the statement.



In an interview with The Korea Times, Hyun Duk-soo, one of the dismissed reporters, also spoke of the need for Cho's resignation. According to Hyun, the company and the union had reached an agreement regarding the fired reporters until Cho raised the retirement fund issue.



Cho's demand, he said, ignited a company-wide move urging him to resign. "All 26 of my colleagues have individually posted statements calling for Cho's resignation," Hyun said.



"Giving jobs back to the discharged reporters would be the first step to bring YTN back on its feet." Hyun believes the entire media industry suffered a setback over the past 10 years of the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations.



"It's not just about us. Restoring jobs will signal if we're back on track to normalize the media industry," he said.



He added that in the process of democratization, arrangements were made legally and within the company to ensure media independence from government influence. These arrangements fell apart during the conservative governments, he argued.



Hyun expressed high hopes for President Moon Jae-in, whom he believes can restore such measures.



"He should take a clear stance, as he did during his presidential campaigns. He needs to stand by the rule of law and protect the freedom of the press, as he said he would do while swearing his oath."



"His victory has given the country a new vibe. I think this will also spread to the media, and thereby bring positive change," he added.



Throughout his campaign, Moon promised major reforms, including in the media. Returning jobs to the former journalists was included in his top ten pledges, as part of a media reform plan. He also seeks to revamp the way top personnel decisions are made and enhance the system of regulatory bodies overseeing the industry. These, pundits note, have infringed on media freedom and put public television networks at a comparative disadvantage to private cable networks.



Since his dismissal, Hyun has joined Newstapa, an independent journalism platform established by a journalist fired from MBC for similar reasons. He hopes to return to YTN, however, where he hopes to build a stronger media environment free from external influence.




By Kim Bo-eun



President Moon Jae-in ordered the shutdown of old coal-fired power plants, Monday, as a means to tackle high levels of fine dust blanketing the nation.



"We plan on closing down all coal-fired power plants which are 30 years or more old as soon as possible within my term, and switch them to environmentally-friendly natural gas power stations," Moon said at Eunjung Elementary School in western Seoul, in a class on fine dust. The visit was organized for the president to hear students and parents talk about the issue.



"In the meantime, the operation of these plants will be halted in the spring months, when we have high levels of fine dust."



Fine dust levels have worsened of late _ warnings were issued in 12 cities and counties nationwide the first weekend of May, as concentrations reached up to 330 micrograms per cubic meter.



Under the plan, eight of 10 plants which were established 30 years ago and earlier will stop operations for the month of June. Starting from next year, the 10 plants will be shut down from March to June.



The 10 plants will be permanently shut down within Moon's term.



These were among Moon's election pledges, as emissions from coal-fired power plants have been identified as one of the major sources of fine dust, along with those from old diesel vehicles and industrial dust coming from China.



Moon also ordered senior secretary of social affairs Kim Su-hyun to establish a body to come up with measures to counter the fine dust.



In addition, he pledged to install measuring instruments at 11,000 schools across the nation and aid schools to build indoor physical education facilities.



Currently there are 59 coal-fired power plants in operation across the nation. The 10 old plants have an installed capacity of 3.3 gigawatts, which is 10.6 percent of the installed capacity of all plants (31.3 gigawatts). However, the 10 plants emit 33,000 tons of pollutants, which is 19.4 percent of emissions from the total number of plants (169,000 tons).



Cheong Wa Dae expects halting operations of eight plants will reduce the generation of fine dust by 1 to 2 percent.



Moon said there is no need for concerns on energy supply shortage.



"The country's energy supply has been designed so that power facilities are 20 percent in surplus. In addition, from March to June, the energy demand is 70 to 80 percent of that of summer or winter months, so there will be no problem with shutting down the plants during those months," he said.



However, he did not elaborate on compensation measures for plant workers other than training for other jobs.



The 10 plants are operated by three state-run energy firms, and are based in Yeosu, South Jeolla Province; Gangneung, Gangwon Province; Seocheon and Boryeong in South Chungcheong Province; and Goseong, South Gyeongsang Province.



Moon was accompanied by Education Minister Lee Joon-sik, Environment Minster Cho Kyeung-kyu, Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon and Seoul Education Superintendent Cho Hee-yeon.











.








Moon urged to allow them alternative ways to serve nation





By Kim Se-jeong



Fourteen conscientious objectors and Amnesty International activists Monday urged the government to stop cracking down on those who refuse to do their mandatory military service due to religious beliefs.



Standing inside a fake prison cell, the protesters dressed in blue uniforms insisted the government stop jailing them for their beliefs and come up with alternate ways for them to serve the nation.



Most conscientious objectors in Korea are members of the Christian denomination Jehovah's Witnesses, and they end up spending a year and a half in prison for refusing to be drafted into the military.



During a protest at Gwangwhamun Square, the conscientious objectors read their testimonies, made a statement calling for the policy change and staged a performance where they were tied up and marched into the mock prison.



The mood at the protest this week was optimistic.



During the campaign, President Moon Jae-in said conscientious objectors' decisions should be respected and he promised alternate ways for them to serve.



"I've watched you closely during the campaign, Mr. President. You often said you wanted to see a society where justice stands," said Na Dong-hyun, who spent a year and a half in prison in the early 2000s.



"Where conscientious objectors can serve the country in different ways without having to go to prison, that's a society where justice stands for me."



A lower court in Seoul recently acquitted two conscientious objectors.



Rep. Park Ju-min of the Democratic Party of Korea reassured the objectors of Moon's determination to solve the problem.



"We need your continued support to bring changes," Park said.



It's too early to say exactly when and how a revision to the military service law will allow these men to serve the nation. Rep. Park said he is working on it.



According to Amnesty International Korea, as of April, 397 men are in prison for resisting the draft. For the last six decades, 19,000 objectors have served prison terms.



Conscientious objectors face a fixed prison term of a year and a half. Some have appealed the court's decision, but all attempts, except one, were unsuccessful  last October, an appeals court ruled in favor of an objector for the first time ever. The Constitutional Court is currently reviewing a separate case, as well.



The issue of conscientious objectors in Korea didn't draw any attention until 2002 when Oh Tae-yang, a former Youth Party secretary general, publicly announced his objection to military service. Instead, he served a prison term.



In 2007, under former President Roh Moo-hyun, the Ministry of National Defense vowed to offer them other choices but took away the offer a year later, citing a lack of public support for the conscientious objectors.



Yet, a National Human Rights Commission survey in January showed increased support for them.




President Moon Jae-in ordered a temporary shutdown of aged coal power plants Monday in an unprecedented move to fight air pollution.

Under the order, eight coal fired thermal power plants that are aged 30 years or older will be closed for 30 days starting June 1, according to the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae.

Coal burning is a key source of emission of fine dust, which coupled with yellow dust largely originating from China, is increasingly becoming a health hazard here.

Currently, there are 10 coal fired power plants in the country, but two of them have been excluded from the temporary shutdown this year due to a possible shortage of power supplies in areas they are located, a Cheong Wa Dae official said.

However, starting next year, all 10 aged thermal power plants will be ordered to close for four months from March each year.

"The president plans to (permanently) close all 10 aged power plants within his term and do it as soon as possible," Cheong Wa Dae said in a press release.

Moon's executive order came as he visited a Seoul elementary school for a special class on fine dust pollution.

The president said his government also planned to set up fine dust detectors at 11,000 schools throughout the nation, enabling them to check the level of possibly hazardous particles in their locations and determine whether to allow outdoor activities.

The president noted the measure will cost about 60 billion won ($53.4 million).
This is the third in a series of suggestions and observations for new President Moon Jae-in _ ED.



By Jeffrey D. Jones





After seven months of political chaos, Korea's people power has demonstrated to the world the strength and unstoppable energy of democracy. The winners in Tuesday's election should feel pride in their victory, but there is no shame for those candidates and their supporters who were not on the team with the most votes. They gratefully participated in a process that ensures a nation and its citizens can remain free and prosperous. Now, on to the business of governing!



One of the most important challenges facing new President Moon Jae-in is forging a healthy and strong relationship with America and the new Trump administration, which is still in transition.



As President Moon begins to focus on his initial summit with President Trump, I hope he will keep a few things in mind; 1) President Trump is a negotiator and 2) a patriot who puts America first, 3) he enjoys the media and uncertainty created by media attention and announcing his negotiating stance in advance through tweets and media interviews, 4) he likes to be perceived as important and the one in charge, which he is, and 5) like all good negotiators, he is very very flexible.



President Moon should approach America and President Trump as an equal and as a negotiator putting Korea first. President Trump will understand and respect such an approach and as we have seen with Xi Jinping, with the right persuasion, President Trump is willing and capable of changing his mind. He just needs to be given the right justifications. AMCHAM can be a valuable resource and channel for President Moon to develop and deliver these justifications.



President Moon should thank President Trump for sending Secretary Mattis, Secretary Tillerson and Vice President Pence so early on to confirm America's commitment to the alliance with Korea and to improve economic ties. He should confirm with Trump his resolve to eliminate the nuclear threat from the North and openly discuss his strategy for meeting and dealing with Kim Jong-un.



After all, Mr. Trump has also said he is willing to meet Kim. Creating a Moon-Kim dialogue with the backing of Trump can be a positive development toward reaching a solution with the Kim regime and avoiding conflict. President Moon should further acknowledge the mutual gains to Korea and the U.S. from the KORUS FTA and show flexibility to improve the FTA so long as it is a win for Korea and a win for the U.S.



To be sure, Mr. Trump has said and tweeted things that have excited many Koreans and created a mood of uncertainty and to some extent antagonism. There is no need to be defensive or feel offended. President Moon should be confident he will walk away from his first summit with Trump as a friend of Donald Trump, who will respect the strength and resolve of President Moon, and with a common purpose and strategy with the U.S. to ensure peace on the Korean Peninsula and a vibrant economic relationship.





Jeffrey D. Jones worked as chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce Korea multiple times, is now chairman of the nonprofit Partners for the Future foundation. He, at Kim & Chang law firm, is regarded as one of the select few foreign experts on Korea.
Korea should stay involved in new Silk Road project



Korea should stay involved in China's "One Belt and One Road" project that will encompass more than 50 countries and account for 40 percent of the world's combined gross domestic product.



Seoul participated in the just-ended two-day summit hosted by Xi Jinping. Over 130 countries sent delegations. Originally, it was not invited, obviously because of the dispute over the deployment of a U.S. missile interceptor battery here.



Most of the western, developed world criticized it for a variety of reasons but much of their criticism should be regarded as sour grapes. They argue that the project is intended to revive old China's reign as a colonial superpower and an attempt to edge out the United States in their contest for regional hegemony.



Such claims indeed make sense because of the project's enormous size. Also true is their observation that Xi is using the project to vitalize China's stagnant economy. As a matter of fact, western countries' heads of state boycotted the summit with autocratic Turkish President Erdogan and Russian President Putin on hand together with leaders of global organizations.



As a democracy that shares values with these western countries, Korea should take this concern to heart. Beijing has employed its old narrow-minded colonial style, harassing Korean firms and stopping Chinese people from traveling to Korea in retaliation for the deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery.



However, newly elected President Moon Jae-in finds himself in a better position than his predecessor, the U.S.-oriented Park Geun-hye, to reason with Beijing and normalize bilateral ties.



For Korea, the lure of the new Silk Road is too big to pass up.



The project can easily grow to be the world's biggest infrastructure project because the states along the route are landlocked with their access to the outside in dire need of improving. A potential for extra trade volume from the region once their roads make access easier could be enormous.



Because of its location on the eastern tip of the Asian continent, Korea may serve as terminus for goods delivered to its ports shipped from the Americas and Oceania. This economic factor can be an added impetus for the unification of the divided Korean Peninsula.



That may sound far-fetched now but considering there are few effective ways of blocking North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, fruits Pyongyang is certain to gain in the event of its participation can be a powerful reason for it to try and become a nuclear-free normal state. The North took part in the summit.



Already, many western companies are jockeying for a better position to reap big contracts from the project in contrast to their government's vapid responses. Korean firms should prepare themselves to ensure they get a piece of action.




Employees watch an electronic board to monitor possible ransomware cyberattacks at the Korea Internet and Security Agency in Seoul, Monday. / Yonhap



Gov't issues nationwide caution against WannaCryptor



By Yoon Sung-won



The worldwide spread of "WannaCryptor" ransomware is raising a warning flag on cybersecurity in Korea even though it has not yet inflicted heavy damage here.



The Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) said Monday it has received nine official reports of the attack. CJ CGV, whose ad servers were affected by the malware, has not registered a report. No public organization has reported any damage yet.



The ransomware, which is also known as "WannaCry," has been attacking servers of enterprises and public organizations worldwide, especially in Europe, since last Friday. According to Europol, it has affected about 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries.



The ransomware encrypts a victim's data and demands cyber payments ranging from $300 to $20,000. The attackers threaten to delete the encrypted files if they don't receive the ransom in seven days.



Consequently, concerns have escalated that servers of many Korean companies and government agencies could be exposed to the attack when they start business this week.













On Sunday, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning released a caution on the national cyber threat level. KISA also introduced a dedicated information website to the public. But this website crashed as of 9 a.m. Monday amid heavy traffic. The agency said it has received over 2,900 calls about the ransomware.



Cheong Wa Dae also called for nationwide caution on the issue.



"The damage inflicted by the ransomware, which abuses loopholes in Microsoft's Windows operating system, is spreading worldwide," the presidential office said in a statement, Monday. "We need thorough contingency plans to prevent damage."



Cheong Wa Dae's chief press secretary Yoon Young-chan said, "The National Security Office is taking actions to prevent the spread of damage." He also advised people to turn their computers on and off while disconnected from the internet, deactivate server message block protocols and update antivirus programs.



Besides the government and public agencies, cybersecurity service providers and experts in the private sector said people should stay alert because there can be more diverse forms of ransomware attacks.



AhnLab, provider of the antivirus program V3 series, advised its users to turn on real-time monitoring and install updates. It also said Windows users should keep the operating system's security features up to date.



"Korea is expected to have less damage compared to other countries thanks to quick responses from public agencies and security companies," an AhnLab official said. "But there can still be more new types of cyberattacks."



ESTsecurity, which provides the antivirus program Alyac series, said its program detected more than 3,000 ransomware attacks on Sunday.



Symantec Korea pointed out the WannaCry ransomware is especially contagious because it is capable of spreading within an intranet on its own. The company also stressed the importance of timely security updates of Windows to prevent further damage.



"Users should keep security patches and antivirus software up to date because there can be more cyberattacks with ransomware and viruses," Symantec Korea CTO Yoon Kwang-taek said. "In particular, the number of ransomware attacks through email is on the rise. Users should delete suspicious e-mails and back up important files in advance."
Recalls can be blessing in disguise



By Lee Min-hyung



Samsung Electronics' latest smartphone, the Galaxy S8, will likely maintain its dominance in the global handset industry for months to come, as the company's archrival Apple may delay the launch of its new iPhone.



The S8 and its larger version S8 Plus made their debut late March, with the Seoul-based tech giant completely reshaping designs for the flagship lineup and adding a series of innovative functions.



Samsung was expected to launch them at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February as it did in recent years for its previous S6 and S7 models.



But Samsung delayed the unveiling event to March so as to make sure that the new handset was free from any faults. The last thing the firm would have wanted was a repeat debacle of the Galaxy Note 7, which suffered battery problems.



The 5.7-inch device made a successful debut with much fanfare with a string of wow factors last August, including an iris scanner, but faulty battery cells prompted Samsung to terminate its production and make global recalls.



Some quality issues erupted on the new S8 series like its red-toned display.



But Samsung claimed in a recent earnings report that this is not a defect because it is a salient feature of its AMOLED display. The company said users can resolve it by adjusting the display image tone in the settings menu of their phone.



Against this backdrop, there seem to be few rivals to match the S8 in terms of function and specifications in the global premium Android handset industry. The LG Electronics' G6 smartphone is also getting off to a good start after its debut in February, but the device lags behind the S8 in market share.



Chinese handset manufacturers Oppo and Vivo have rapidly beefed up their footing in recent years. Outside China, however, they still fail to impress many consumers compared to Samsung and Apple, according to observers.



"The sales outlook for the S8 remains rosy, as Apple will postpone launching the iPhone 8. The new iPhone will not arrive on the market before September until when the S8 is expected to enjoy its leading position," said Kim Jang-yul, an analyst at Golden Bridge Investment & Securities.



"The world's third-largest smartphone vendor, Huawei, will likely reduce shipments of its P10 smartphone, due to a supply shortage of high-end semiconductors. Sales for Oppo and Vivo handsets are also show tepid signs of growth."



According to market researcher Strategy Analytics, Samsung topped the list of smartphone sales with 8.02 million in the first quarter of the year, taking up a 22.7 percent share. Apple came in second with 14.4 percent followed by Huawei, Oppo and Vivo.





Lessons from Note 7 recall



The unprecedented recall of the Note 7 dealt a financial blow to Samsung last year. Much more important were concerns that the incident would affect sales for its next smartphones.



But with the S8 setting a sales record for the company, data shows the recall eventually helped the firm enhance its brand image.



Last month, preorders for the S8 and S8 Plus topped 1 million here, with those in the United States reporting 30 percent growth year-on-year, compared with the S7.



As the company drew criticism from two major markets over the Note 7 fiasco, the record sales seemingly show that Samsung's quick compensatory reaction helped tighten its brand image to some extent.



"Aside from the preorder, sales of the S8 have topped the local smartphone market for a month, proving the Note 7 recall has done little harm to the firm's mobile business," said a source in the industry.




Foreign graduates seek jobs in Shanghai (file photo)

SHANGHAI, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Tatiana Skuratova, a graduate of Shanghai-based Tongji University, went to a job fair in Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) this week with confidence in securing a position.

She is among the first group of foreign graduates to benefit from Shanghai's revised foreign work permit policy.

From this year, international students with a bachelor degree or above can apply for jobs in Shanghai Zhangjiang National Innovation Demonstration Zone and Shanghai FTZ directly after graduation. Previously, foreign citizens required two years of work experience after graduation to work in Shanghai.

Russian national Skuratova said she has always wanted to work in Shanghai since arriving when she was 16.

She is confident in finding a suitable job with her bachelor degree in world politics from the prestigious Chinese university.

Xu Wen, director of the human resources and social security bureau in Shanghai Pudong New Area, said some 39 companies based in Shanghai FTZ were offering 269 positions at the fair.

Ian Soder, an American graduate in humanities from NYU Shanghai, said a job with a monthly salary around 20,000 yuan (2,899 U.S. dollars) would be enough to convince him to stay in Shanghai, while if he looks for a job in New York, he expects a yearly package above 50,000 U.S. dollars.

NYU Shanghai, jointly set up by the New York University (NYU) and East China Normal University in 2013, is the third degree-granting campus in NYU's global network. Soder was among the school's first group of undergraduates.

"I believe better career development prospects in Shanghai. That is why I would consider a lower starting salary here," he said.

Iranian PhD student Mahdi Gharibavi attended the job fair, although he still has another year to go for his mechanical engineering studies at East China University of Science and Technology.

He was happy to see the many job opportunities available in Shanghai.

"I studied for my masters in Italy. The job prospects in Europe were nowhere near that in China," he said.

Most employers at the fair said they are willing to offer foreign job seekers starting salaries 10 to 20 percent higher than that given to Chinese graduates.

Ding Yifan, a recruiter for global travel booking firm Agoda, said foreign graduates are ideal for the company's customer service team. He received more than 20 job applications within the first hour.

As well as enhanced employment policies, Shanghai has also piloted a series of policies streamlining applications for Chinese "green cards," allowing permanent residence for non-Chinese residents. For those working in Shanghai FTZ, a letter of recommendation from the FTZ authorities assists in the application process.

Shanghai has 170,000 foreign permanent residents. The municipal government has encouraged large companies and industrial parks to build apartment buildings to provide housing for their foreign employees.

Similar policies have been rolled out in cities in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces in east China, as increasing foreign talent has become more important than attracting foreign investment.
By Jhoo Dong-chan



Hyundai Motor is gearing up to improve its product quality after the government imposed a recall order on around 240,000 of its cars.



The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport ordered a recall of 12 Hyundai Motor vehicle models last week, including the Genesis sedan and Kia Sorento sport utility vehicle. It marked the first time for the carmaker to face such a government-initiated order.



A Hyundai official said Monday that the carmaker would take the order as an opportunity to improve the quality of its products across the board.



As a part of such efforts, its Strategic Technology Research Institute (STRI) plans to expand its role to preventing possible recalls in the future. Its original mission is to develop next-generation technologies for sustainable growth.



"We have upgraded the status of the institute to an independent research center so that it will be able to direct not only our research projects but also our business operations," the official said.



Observers point out such efforts will enable the carmaker to reduce recalls in the future.



The institute is located inside the Korea Central Research Institute (KCRI) in Uiwang, Gyeonggi Province. The KCRI is one of Hyundai Motor Group's R&D centers where nearly 1,500 researchers study eco-friendly technologies.



Comprised of two divisions _ research engineering and strategic development _ the STRI is now putting its utmost efforts on developing disruptive technologies. It also actively seeks innovation opportunities with top universities, research organizations and technology firms around the world.



"Companies are now facing new challenges from the emerging disruptive innovations in technology in customer satisfaction," the official said.



"Hyundai Motor is also set to offer the highest value to our customers with innovative products and services to satisfy an increasingly complex automotive environment."



After the ministry ordered the recall last week, Hyundai Motor immediately said it would comply with the government's decision.



"Our company explained that five cases do not pose safety risks. However, we have arrived at the conclusion that a recall is reasonable for consumer protection," it said in a press release.



"We humbly accept the ruling. We will make all efforts to come up with an action plan for customers as soon as possible."



Hyundai Motor is required to submit its recall plan within 25 days with the ministry as well as informing affected car owners within 30 days of its plan. Based on the released timetable, the recall for the affected cars is expected to take place next month.







Hyundai hopes to rebound in China







Another setback for Hyundai Motor and its sister brand Kia Motors is the slump in China after Korea's decision to deploy a U.S. anti-missile shield, which China regards as a tool to spy on it.



The two companies' sales in the world's largest automotive market decreased substantially this year.



But they expect sales to rebound after the inauguration of President Moon Jae-in who is trying to mend ties with Beijing. He has vowed to discuss the thorny issue with China.



In his inaugural address last week, Moon pledged to negotiate earnestly with China to solve the sour Sino-Korean relationship. He also asked his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in a 40-minute phone conversation Thursday to find ways to deal with the issue.



"Hopes are high that the new administration will find ways to iron out the differences with Beijing. Then our companies would be able to bounce back. In particular, Hyundai Motor would be happy," a Seoul analyst said.
















Crude oil carriers and other ships are under construction at Hyundai Heavy Industries' shipyard in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. The shipbuilder plans to close the dock in July because of falling new orders. / Courtesy of Hyundai Heavy Industries



Residents call on President Moon to keep the dock open

By Lee Hyo-sik

Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) is set to close a shipyard in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province, after it completes the construction of a last remaining crude carrier.

But the provincial government and residents are protesting the shipbuilder's decision, demanding it bring work from its main plant in Ulsan to keep its subcontractors, which employ hundreds of people in Gunsan and nearby municipalities, from going under.

The residents are also calling on President Moon Jae-in to fulfill his campaign promises to prevent HHI from closing the dock.

The country's largest shipbuilder said Monday that it set a very large crude oil carrier (VLCC) afloat a day earlier, which was the last order for the Gunsan shipyard.

The company plans to close the dock sometime next month after testing the ship in the water and handing it over to its owner. For months, HHI has said it will suspend the operations of the Gunsan dock on July 1, citing falling new orders.

The shipbuilder, which has a total of 11 docks here, has already closed two amid the global shipbuilding industry slump. The Gunsan dock will be the third.

"As we have said numerous times, we have no other choice but to shut the Gunsan shipyard because we haven't secured enough new orders over the past few years," an HHI official said. "It is not that we will permanently close the facility. When we have enough work, we will resume operations."

The company needs to win contracts for at least 140 ships annually to keep all of its docks open, according to the official.

But from 2015 to 2016, it only secured deals for 60. In the first five months of this year, HHI and its two affiliates have secured contracts for 18 new ships worth $1.6 billion. In 2017, it seeks to secure orders, including offshore oil rigs, worth $6.4 billion.

HHI invested nearly 1.2 trillion won ($1.01 billion) to construct the Gunsan shipyard on a 1.81 square-kilometer site, which went into operation in early 2010.

Given the unfavorable global market outlook for the foreseeable future, the shipbuilder is unlikely to reopen the shipyard soon.

In addition, it would cost substantial amounts of money and take quite a long period of time to reactivate the dock because HHI needs to hire new workers and restore partnerships with dozens of subcontractors.

However, Gunsan residents and politicians are calling on the shipbuilder to keep the facility alive, stressing that it accounts for 24 percent of Gunsan's economic output and is responsible for the livelihoods of 6,000 workers.

On Monday, the North Jeolla Provincial Council issued a statement, urging President Moon to step in to prevent HHI from closing the Gunsan shipyard.

"The facility is the backbone of the provincial economy, which accounts for 9 percent of the province's exports. Many depend on it for a living," council member Park Jae-man said. "The president must take necessary steps to normalize the operations of the Gunsan dock as he promised to. The government should issue new orders to the shipyard or offer financial support to HHI in exchange for running it."
Melanie Joh, managing director of McDonald's Korea, poses after receiving a minister's award during the 16th Food Safety Day ceremony at Gwangwhamun Square, Seoul, Friday. Joh has been recognized for the fast food franchise's efforts to introduce healthy food containing no trans-fats and less salt and artificial additives. / Courtesy of McDonald's Korea

By Lee Hyo-sik

The head of McDonald's Korea has won a state award for leading the firm's successful campaign in introducing healthier food containing no trans-fats and less salt and artificial additives, the fast food chain said Monday.

Melanie Joh, managing director of McDonald's Korea, received a Minister of Food and Drug Safety Award during the 16th Food Safety Day ceremony at Gwangwhamun Square, Seoul, Friday.

Most of McDonald's burgers are trans-fats free and its French fries have 20 percent less salt than those of other franchises, according to the company. McDonald's Korea said it places top priority on offering salads and other healthy foods in line with the increasing wellbeing trend.

McDonald's has also introduced the "Made For You" system, enabling its stores to offer fresh food as they cook burgers and other dishes immediately after orders. Store employees are required to wash their hands for 20 seconds every 30 minutes as part of the firm's drive to maintain the industry's highest standard of food hygiene and safety.

"I am glad that McDonald's was recognized for its values of ensuring food safety and providing customers with healthy and nutritional foods," Joh said after receiving the award. "We have adopted the most advanced food safety system, and set up and abided by one of the industry's most stringent hygiene and safety rules. We have and will continue to offer safe and healthy food and beverages to our customers."

Ever since Joh succeeded former CEO Joe Erlinger in March 2016, she has been emphasizing the need for providing high-quality, healthy food and beverages as consumers pay more attention to what they eat.

Joh, who joined the company in 2011, served as a marketing vice president from 2013 to 2016. She has been credited for McDonald's Korea's successful marketing and customer service programs.

She earned a bachelor's degree in living art from Ewha Womans University in 1992 and a master's degree in industrial design from Korea University in 1995. In 2003, Joh received a Ph.D. from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

She began her career at LG Electronics in 1992, going on to hold key posts at Motorola and other multinational companies.
(Photo/CGTN)

The Leaders' Roundtable Summit of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation kicked off on Monday morning at Yanqi Lake International Convention Center in Beijing. The roundtable event in the Chinese capital gives world leaders the opportunity to exchange views on Belt and Road cooperation.

In his speech at the beginning of the summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined the challenges facing the world, saying the international community saw great progress together with profound changes and transformation. He said the countries should join hands to achieve common development. "The Belt and Road Initiative originates from China, but belongs to the whole world," he said.

He proposed several goals to achieve during the forum which are setting the direction of win-win cooperation, strengthening policy cooperation and deepening practical cooperation through concrete projects.

He also stressed the importance to reject the protectionism and to unlock the potential of countries along the trade routes through inclusive and open development.

(Photo/CGTN)

A total of 29 heads of state and government are attending the forum, the highest-profile international meeting on the Belt and Road since Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the initiative in 2013.

A day earlier, Xi delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the forum.

He announced that China will contribute an additional 100 billion yuan (about 14.5 billion US dollars) in financial support for the Belt and Road. He also stressed that the country "will not resort to outdated geopolitical maneuvering" in pursuing the initiative.
Serbian high school student Katrina Stojanovic shares her story in Chinese at an event in Beijing.[Photo/Xinhua]

When 19-year-old Serbian high school student Katrina Stojanovic stood on the stage of the ceremony hall of Xinhua News Agency in Beijing to share her story in Chinese, gasps of amazement spread among the audience when the first word was pronounced - it was hard to tell the voice belonged to a foreigner.

As the champion of the "Chinese Bridge" Chinese Proficiency Competition for foreign secondary school students in 2015, she admitted her Chinese was probably better than her mother tongue.

"I first heard the language when I was in my mother's belly," says Stojanovic, daughter of a Sinologist. "I recall the days when my grandparents said Chinese was my destiny."

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese bicycles and cloth shoes were very popular in the former Yugoslavia, but it was not easy to get them. When her grandfather wooed her grandmother, the man saved up for a long time for a pair of Chinese shoes to make himself look different from others. Believing that China would change his life, he bought a Chinese bicycle after marriage.

"He passed the passion to her daughter, and my mother didn't hesitate to choose Chinese as her major in college," Stojanovic says.

Their love for China passed to the third generation and Stojanovic applied to a high school that had Chinese classes in Belgrade. This is among the 100 stories in The Belt and Road: People with Stories, a recently published book jointly compiled by Xinhua News Agency, State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and the Confucius Institute.
Jack Ma with People's Daily

On May 14, Jack Ma described to the Peoples Daily what he believes makes the Belt and Road Initiative a uniquely effective and inclusive project. Ma, executive chairman and founder of Alibaba Group, granted the interview on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

Ma spoke highly of the vision put forward by President Xi Jinping, citing it as a good opportunity for individuals and countries.

The greatest difference between the Belt and Road Initiative and general globalization lies in the inclusion of young people, women, smaller enterprises and developing countries. [The Belt and Road Initiative] aims to reach more people. This is both a responsibility and an opportunity, Ma said.

Ma also echoed the goals of the initiative with his proposal for an Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) and eRoad in last years communique from the Hangzhou G20 summit.

Last year I spent more than 820 hours traveling all across the globe to gain insight about the world. It is important to be there, observe and think. We want to do something different. Instead of simply selling our products to Belt and Road countries or importing cheap labor and raw materials, we want to create jobs, stimulate overseas economies and improve peoples livelihoods.

In my view, once the eWTP is established, young people in any corner of the world will be able to buy and sell products globally. All they need is a smart phone, Ma explained.

Ma secured the launch of the first overseas eWTP hub in Malaysia in just 10 minutes, working in cooperation with the Malaysian prime minister.

I was convinced by the Malaysian offcials that the project could be completed in three months, on a scale much bigger than those in the past three decades, the chairman said.

In response to a foreigner-curated list of four great new Chinese inventions (Alipay, Taobao, high-speed trains and shared bikes), Ma said: We are already a global leader in mobile payment, and we are ready to share our technology with developing countries. We have not only invested large sums of money in these countries, we have also dispatched our technicians there to help.

Alipay and Taobao are the business arms of Alibaba Group.
S. Korea says to dispatch ex-PM to China as special envoy

Former prime minister of South Korean, Leet Hae-chan (file photo/Xinhua)

SEOUL, May 15 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in has decided to dispatch a former prime minister under the Roh Moo-hyun government to China as a special envoy on the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Senior presidential press secretary Yoon Young-chan told a press conference on Monday that former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan was picked as the special envoy to China.

Lee was sent to China as a special envoy in February 2003 when late President Roh Moo-hyun, for whom Moon served as chief of staff, was inaugurated, according to the presidential Blue House.

The Blue House said in a press release that President Moon selected Lee who can best understand his diplomatic vision and foreign policy.

It noted that Lee has a ripe experience on matters on China and maintains close relations with Chinese figures.

A senior presidential official, who declined to be identified, told Xinhua that the special envoy will discuss a broad range of issues, including the THAAD and the DPRK.

As the two issues are inter-connected, the official said, they would be handled together.
The United States government said Monday that it believes the Syrian government has built a large crematorium near the notorious Saydnaya Military Prison in an effort to hide mass atrocities carried out there,. The U.S. wants Russia to rein in the Syrian regime.

Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department, laid out newly unveiled declassified intelligence in a series of photographs. He said Russia, a supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, must use its influence to stop Assad's continued atrocities.

"Although the regime's many atrocities are well-documented, we believe the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass atrocities taking place in Saydnaya prison," Jones said. "We are appalled by the atrocities taking place in Syria" with the "seemingly unconditional support of Russia."

Jones said the regime could be killing as many as 50 detainees a day at Saydnaya. In February, Amnesty International alleged that thousands of people have been hanged at the Syrian prison just 45 minutes outside the capital of Damascus in a secret crackdown on dissent.

Atrocities with "seemingly unconditional" Russian support

Amnesty's report, Human Slaughterhouse, said prisoners are moved in the middle of the night from their cells under the pretext of being transferred. They are taken to the grounds of the prison, where they are hanged, likely unaware of their fate until they feel the noose around their neck, Amnesty alleged.

The "photos underscore the depths to which the Syrian regime has gone with the support of ... Russia," Jones said. He wouldn't confirm whether the US will take military action in response to the grisly discovery of the crematorium.

"We're not going to signal what we're going to do and what we're not going to do," Jones said, but he added that the US would "bring evidence forward to the international community."

Jones presented the evidence just a week after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met in Washington to discuss a wide range of bilateral issues, including the conflict in Syria.

"The Russian government and Minister Lavrov have indicated to us that they're interested in finding a solution," Jones said, adding that "there is no solution without an end to these atrocities."

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Tillerson "was firm and clear with Minister Lavrov that Russia holds tremendous influence with Bashar al-Assad" and must act to rein him in.

"Simply put, the killing and devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria," Nauert said.

Nauert said "both men agreed the way to bring stability to Syria" is through diplomacy, a lasting cease-fire that brings a reduction in violence and ensures humanitarian access, steps that "will help create political conditions on the ground for lasting solution to the conflict."

Jones showed a series of aerial photos taken from 2013 to 2017 that he said showed the construction of a crematorium beside the infamous prison. The evidence on the crematorium was assembled through local non-governmental organization groups, intelligence community assessments and press reporting, he said.

Since it began in 2011, Syria's civil war has claimed more than 400,000 lives, many of them civilians, Jones said. The regime's track record of torture, sexual violence, air strikes, artillery strikes, barrel bomb, and improvised unguided bombs or air-dropped IEDs, as well as the denial of food, water and medical care, have all been well documented, Jones said.

The Syrian regime has also systematically targeted eastern Aleppo's hospitals and made a practice of abducting civilians, Jones said. He said that between 2011 and 2015, the regime has abducted between 65,000 and 117,000 people.

Jones said the regime has also authorized the extra judicial killings of thousands of detainees at Saydnaya, which is a 45-minute drive outside of Damascus. It is just one of many detention facilities where prisoners are being held, Jones said.

The "continued brutality of the Assad regime" including its use of chemical weapons, represents a continued threat to regional stability and to the United States, Jones said. Given these abuses, "Russia must now with greater urgency exercise its influence," Jones said.

Jones said that despite the talks last week between Tillerson and Lavrov, he "would not say they have mapped a way forward on how to address Syrian atrocities or how to move forward on the Geneva process," which is meant to help establish a political settlement to the conflict.

He said the US has not shown Moscow the photos of the crematorium, but that they have "an ongoing conversation with the Russians" about their failure to condemn Syrian atrocities and the climate of tolerance that creates.
Hilder Edmund Malecela was invited to take part and shared her stories in the thematic session of people-to-people connectivity at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on May in Beijing. [Photo by Zhang Xingjian/China Daily]

"Before Chinese companies came, we had to pay over $50 each month to watch TV, but now we are paying just $3. Just like people in Beijing we can enjoy the best TV programs for only few bucks," said Hilder Edmund Malecela in Beijing on May 14.

Born in a small village of Dar es Salaam, capital city of Tanzania, Malecela never thought of coming to China and working as a professional voice character for Chinese TV dramas.

"Kung fu is my first impression of China as I have watched several interesting films starring Chinese martial artist Jackie Chan," Malecela said.

In 2011, a Chinese family TV series A Beautiful Daughter-in-law Era, a 36-episode light comedy about a modern Chinese couple, was introduced to African countries and gained huge popularity overseas.

The TV series was first aired on Shanghai TV channel on November 26, 2009, and was dubbed in Swahili and broadcast through the Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation in 2011.

"After watching the show, I developed a deep understanding of modern China due to the emotional entanglement and personal relationships depicted in the show. In addition to kung fu, Chinese traditional culture and modernization drive also resonated with me," she said.

"Meanwhile, I learned that Kenyan actress Josephine Moeni Waweru and actor Khamis Juma Swaleh were chosen to do voice dubbing for the two leading roles in the African version of the series. Their jobs were amazing and I longed to be a voice character since then," she added.

In 2013, Malecela got the support of Star Times Group, a technology provider, network operator, and content provider in China's television broadcasting industry, and finally came to China.

Because of her enthusiasm for Chinese culture and fondness of dubbing, she got the chance to work as a voice character for four months and participated in several TV dramas, including Jin Tailang's Happy Life and The Desire of the Old Daddy.

After going back to Tanzania, she shared what she had learned in China, dubbing in particular, among her colleagues and tried her best to integrate the skills with her own work, waiting for the next chance to learn more about dubbing.

In 2016, the Star Times Group held the first Star TV Drama Dubbing Contest in Tanzania and chose potential contestants to work in China. Malecela won the first prize.

At the beginning of 2017, she came to the headquarters of Star Times Group and worked in Beijing. So far, she has done the dubbing in Swahili for more than 20 Chinese TV dramas.

"I am so happy to realize my dream and work on such a good platform. Now, in addition to dubbing, I have learned other skills in the TV field such as editing and recording," she said.

"Dar es Salaam is 1,979 kilometers from Beijing, but Chinese TV dramas bridge us together. In the future, I want to be a cultural ambassador to promote Sino-Tanzania relationship," she added.
BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday elaborated on what had inspired him to come up with the Belt and Road Initiative, stressing that it is aimed at galvanizing global cooperation and is open to all.

Xi made the remarks at the Leaders' Roundtable Summit at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing.

"The Belt and Road development does not shut out, nor is it directed against, any party," Xi told the summit.

Proposed in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative is a grand plan to connect Asia with Europe and Africa along, and beyond, ancient trade routes by putting in place an unparalleled trade and infrastructure network.

At Monday's summit, Xi spoke of the myriad challenges the world faces: sluggish trade and investment, wobbling economic globalization, increasingly unbalanced development, impact from large-scale migration of refugees and immigrants, as well as wars, conflicts and terrorism.

Countries are exploring their own ways to deal with these challenges and have put forward many good development strategies and initiatives, but it is difficult to rely on a single country to manage or solve the global problems, Xi said, citing the inter-dependence between nations.

Only by aligning their policies and integrating economic factors and resources in a global scale can countries create synergy to promote world peace, stability and shared development, he noted.

Under these circumstances, the world may well draw wisdom and strength from the ancient Silk Road, which features the spirit of peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefit, Xi said.

Though originating from China, the Belt and Road Initiative belongs to the whole world, while its development goes beyond regions, stages of development, and civilizations, according to the president.

He described the Belt and Road development as a "brand of cooperation" that is open and inclusive, and a global public good jointly provided by all parties.

Under the Belt and Road framework, Xi explained, all parties can join hands to meet the global challenges in the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits.

The initiative also enables countries to create new development opportunities and impetus, and leverage their comparative advantages for win-win results, to make progress toward building a community of shared future for mankind, he said.

Xi said he is glad to see positive responses to and extensive support for the initiative from the international community, with more than 100 countries and international organizations already engaging in it.

A total of 29 foreign heads of state and government leaders attended the two-day forum.
PRESS RELEASE

Some $115 Billion in New Investments at First Day of BRF

May 14, 2017 (EIRNS)After Chinas President Xi Jinping stated in his keynote speech at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF) that "many new projects will be announced," it was first reported that about $115 billion more in investments targeted exclusively to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) had been announced.

This included, first, a $15 billion addition to the initial $40 billion Chinese commitment to the Silk Road Fund for infrastructure, formed in 2015. The Silk Road Fund has so far invested $6 billion in Silk Road (SRF) infrastructure projects; but with joint commitments from private funds, from Chinas sovereign wealth funds, from the governments of Mongolia, Pakistan, and Turkey, the total commitments are approximately $80 billion according to the Silk Road Fund site. It has also paid in about $2 billion to a joint investment with Kazakhstan into the dry port at Horgho and other projects.

Also newly committed at the Forum on May 14, 2017-15, were $55 billion by two of Chinas state policy banks, and $45 billion from Chinese state commercial lenders.

Xi also said that the Chinese government would encourage its overseas yuan-investment funds to expand their commitments by about $40 billion. An example is given by one of its largest such funds, which has partnered with the German city of Duisburg and its financial institutions, to develop infrastructure around Duisburg as the terminus of one of the new Pacific-to-Atlantic freight rail land-bridges.

New Chinese joint project investments were announced with Pakistan, with Malaysia, and with Hungary, whose Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Chinas Export-Import Bank presented a financing proposal for the new high-speed railway line from Budapest to Belgrade, in Serbia.

And China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) announced it was concluding $20 billion in deals during the Forum, including a $4 billion agreement for a natural gas processing plant in Azerbaijan with the State Oil Co. of Azerbaijan, gas storage and gas-fired power projects with Russias Gazprom, and a Kenya power project.

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pointedly recommended in his Sunday morning speech at the opening session that "the involvement of the sovereign wealth funds of the nations along the Belt and Road is needed," suggesting the need for creation of national credit institutions in all the nations participating.
Jay Leno hosted a group of gear heads at his Burbank garage last week. He wanted to show off the cream of his car and motorcycle collection, and to hawk new products.

Called Jay Lenos Advanced Vehicle Care, its the first branded retail product line to emerge from Lenos passion for vintage vehicles, and from his long-running Jay Lenos Garage TV and Internet series.

The car collector, comedian and former late-night TV host spent two hours leading a small audience around the massive compound, which sits just off a Hollywood Burbank Airport runway.

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Here was his favorite car, a McLaren F1 British racer. There was his oldest, a Stanley steam-driven car from 1906.

In another room stood the 1955 Buick Roadmaster that was Lenos first California car purchase. (He paid $350, slept in it while he looked for an apartment and later took his wife-to-be on dates in it.)

1 / 12 Comedian and car aficionado Jay Leno pauses inside his Big Dog Garage, which houses an extensive, collection of historical cars and motorcycles, in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 12 Collectible cars are lined up in Jay Lenos garage in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 12 A Web series, Jay Lenos Garage, is coming to CNBC, during which comedian and car aficionado Jay Leno will take viewers inside his Big Dog Garage in Burbank, Calif., and on various vehicular adventures. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 12 Comedian and car aficionado Jay Leno is photographed inside his Big Dog Garage in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 12 An orange Lamborghini Miura and a red Lamborghini Countach are two of the more than 140 cars in the extensive collection owned by comedian and car aficionado Jay Leno, inside his Big Dog Garage, in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 12 Jay Lenos collection also includes 117 or so motorcycles. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 12 Some of the memorabilia inside comedian and car aficionado Jay Lenos Big Dog Garage, which houses an extensive collection of cars and motorcycles in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 12 A Hudson, left, and a Buick are two of the more than 140 cars in Jay Lenos extensive collection housed as his Big Dog Garage in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 12 Car buff Jay Leno stops for a photo inside his Big Dog Garage in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 12 Vintage autos are lined up in Jay Lenos Big Dog Garage in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 12 Jay Leno checks out an entirely rebuilt 1914 Baker electric car, which is being retrofitted with a converted battery system from a Nissan Leaf. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) 12 / 12 Jay Leno looks out at his Big Dog Garage in Burbank, Calif. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

In yet another is an assembly of Brough Superior motorcycles  more than a dozen of them  that in the 1920s were the worlds most desirable two-wheeled machines. (Thats what T.E. Lawrence was riding when a crash cost him his life.)

Its like having every girl you ever went out with in high school, all in the same room, Leno said of his collection, which consists of cars and motorcycles kept in constant readiness to drive and ride. And they all look the same, and theyll always look the same.

Guiding around his selfie-snapping fans, Leno seemed to have a complete back story for every vehicle, and a quick quip for every topic.

Self-driving cars: Most cars are driving themselves already, he said. I mean, look around. People are putting on makeup and eating a sandwich. Nobodys driving these cars now.

Cross-country Cannonball Run events: I dont like those things, he said. You dont want to be some rich guy racing across the country. Someones going to run into a school bus full of nuns and ruin the sport for everyone.

Electric cars, and their advertised ranges: They say it gets 50 miles, he said. But electric cars, its like sex. Nobody ever tells the truth about it. None of them get the range they advertise.

Leno said hed long resisted putting his name on car care products. But after spending 10 years developing this line of polishers, rubs and waxes, he said, he thought he might have made a mistake.

The right way to do this is find a company and have them give you a big check to endorse their product, Leno said. Then theres the stupid way. Thats what we did.

Leno worked mostly with Jeremy Porrazzo, who for more than a decade had been Lenos car cleaning specialist.

Years before, Porrazzo had offered to come into Lenos garage during his spare time, to polish and clean Lenos collection of 160 cars and 130 motorcycles  for free.

He was hoping the car legend would help him launch a brand of car cleaning products.

Two years later, Leno offered him the official car-polishing gig. When the former TV host began asking Porrazzo how he made his cleaning compounds, the new company was born.

That was always the endgame, Porrazzo said. To get a branded product out there with Jays name on it.

The line is composed of 14 different vehicle care products, with another six more on the way, said the companys marketing director, Chris Walters.

Unlike similar lines, these are color coded, inside the bottles as well as on the labels  orange for quick detailing, blue for hand wax, red for vehicle wash  for easy identification. All the formulas and mix designs were developed in-house.

Available online only via Lenos Garage website, the products range in price from $9.99 to $17.99 a bottle.

Lenos favorite? The metal polish, Porrazzo said. He goes through a half-gallon of it at a time.

Leno joked that the products are offered with very little markup, which is the other stupid way to do it.

A Leno representative said the military service organization USO, one of the comics favorite charities, would be among the beneficiaries of every product sale.

Video: Go inside Lenos garage

charles.fleming@latimes.com

@misterfleming
After suggesting the U.S. Department of Justice consider a criminal investigation of Uber in a trade secrets theft case, a federal judge on Monday ordered the ride hailing company to stop the man accused of the theft from work on the technology at issue.

The order stems from a lawsuit filed by Waymo, part of the Google family of companies, that alleges former employee Anthony Levandowski stole trade secrets covering lidar, a key technology for self-driving cars, when he left the company.

Evidence indicates that Uber likely knew or should have known that Levandowski had taken and retained possession of Waymos confidential files, according to the judge.

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A court-appointed special master will inspect Uber worksites to ensure compliance.

Judge William Alsup also told Uber to conduct a thorough investigation of the case, including interviews with anyone who might have been involved, and report back to the court June 23.

Read more: Waymo and Lyft team up on technology for driverless cars 

The companies, fierce competitors, are racing to develop autonomous vehicles.

The judges order comes one day after Waymo and Ubers top competitor, Lyft, announced a partnership to collaborate on driverless technology through pilot projects and product development.

The driverless market could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, analysts say.

Waymos suit against Uber is heading toward a jury trial, but the process could take years. Waymo sought to block Uber from any work on lidar in the meantime. The judge will allow that work to continue, but without Levandowski, or any purloined data.

Waymo claimed theft of patents and trade secrets and sought a blanket ban on lidar research at Uber.

The judge on Monday dismissed the patent claims and said only some of the trade secret claims hold merit.

Uber positioned the order as a victory. We are pleased with the courts ruling that Uber can continue building and utilizing all of its self-driving technology, including our innovation around lidar, a spokeswoman said.

Uber aims to replace its human drivers with driverless robot cars. To catch up with Waymo and others, it set up a research center in Pittsburgh in 2015.

Early last year, Levandowski quit Waymo and founded a self-driving-truck company called Otto. Six months later, Uber bought Otto for a reported $680 million and put Levandowski in charge of its driverless project. He still works at Uber, but was replaced by Eric Meyhofer in April as head of self driving.

We welcome the order to prohibit Ubers use of stolen documents containing trade secrets developed by Waymo through years of research, and to formally bar Mr. Levandowski from working on the technology, Waymo said.

UPDATES:

1:20 p.m.: This article has been updated throughout with staff reporting.

8:35 a.m.: This article was updated with comments from Uber and Google, additional details about the case and analysis of the situation.

This article was originally published at 8 a.m.
If the future of transportation is centered on driverless vehicles available to passengers on demand, its first industry powerhouse may have just been hatched.

Waymo and Lyft confirmed Sunday theyve signed a deal to collaborate on autonomous technology through pilot projects and product development. The deal was first reported in the New York Times.

General Motors will be implicitly involved with the deal. The automaker holds a major stake in Lyft, and the two are using GMs new electric car, the Bolt EV, as a test vehicle driverless cars.

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The companies revealed no details, but each would bring unique strengths to a partnership.

Waymo, part of the Google family of companies, has been developing driverless technology longer than anyone. Lyft is the No. 2 ride hailing company in the U.S. GM, of course, is an automobile manufacturing behemoth.

Automakers and tech companies are scrambling for position in the race to develop autonomous cars, trucks and buses. Add ride hailing to the mix, and analysts expect itll be a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The team-up could be bad news for Uber, the worlds leading ride-hailing company, which is undergoing a series of crises, including a lawsuit by Waymo that accuses Uber of stealing trade secrets from Waymo servers. A federal judge last week suggested the Justice Department consider a criminal investigation of Uber, and Monday placed restrictions on Ubers driverless car project while the case continues.

russ.mitchell@latimes.com

Twitter: @russ1mitchell

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Weve said it before and well say it again: In the ridiculous mess that is the American healthcare system, theres one indisputable success  childrens health coverage. Over the last two decades, the uninsured rate for children under 18 has fallen from 14% to less than 5%.

Today that achievement is under threat as never before. Were at real risk of moving backward, says Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. Thats because childrens healthcare in the U.S. is heavily dependent on three public programs, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Childrens Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.

All three legs of that stool, Alker says, are uncertain or threatened.

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Republican lawmakers seldom target childrens health programs with the fervid hostility they aim at Obamacare or Medicaid, but there are pockets of opposition. As a Georgia state legislator, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price voted twice, in 2007 and 2008, against expanding CHIP in his state to cover millions more kids.

President Trump and the Republican Congress are planning to cut more than $800 billion out of Medicaid funding over 10 years while converting the program to a capped block grant to the states and eliminating the ACAs Medicaid expansion. Those provisions are in the American Health Care Act, the House GOPs Obamacare repeal bill.

These changes inevitably would lead to a reduction in funding; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicaid spending would fall by 25% by 2026, compared with what would be available under current law. And although Senate Republicans have expressed doubts about the House bill as a whole, several have endorsed the idea of steep cuts in Medicaid.

States have to plan ahead  if theyre not certain a program is going to continue they have to start thinking about winding it down.  Bruce Lesley, president, First Focus

Then theres CHIP, which currently provides low-cost or free coverage to nearly 9 million children. CHIP was created in 1997 as a program run by individual states but subsidized by the federal government, generally at a rate of 65%. CHIP was enacted as a permanent program; its funding, however, was made subject to regular reauthorization by Congress.

That has led to periodic brinkmanship over whether Congress would act in time to avoid disruption. A few months shy of the last deadline, Sept. 30, 2015, Congress reauthorized CHIP through Sept. 30, 2017. That deadline now looms.

Thats a problem, because states need months of advance notice to keep CHIP functioning. Theres intense concern about the deadline, says Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus, a nonprofit advocacy group for children and families. Weve learned from the past that states have to plan ahead  if theyre not certain a program is going to continue they have to start thinking about winding it down.

In some states, budgets for the coming fiscal year must be enacted as early as the end of March, in others the deadline comes between April and June. The ability of states to carry CHIP past Sept. 30 also varies  some state have enough money to cover children into fiscal 2018, but some will run out before the end of this year.

Even though CHIP is often regarded as a stand-alone program, its fate is inextricably entwined with both Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. In many states, CHIP is integrated with Medicaid, so cuts to Medicaid will affect its funding, too. The ACA, furthermore, gave all states a bump in the federal share of CHIP funding of 23 percentage points through fiscal 2019. In 17 states including California, that brought the federal match to 88%, and in 11 states plus the District of Columbia, it rose to 100%. Although CHIP funding isnt affected by the House Obamacare repeal bill, any wholesale repeal of the ACA would take the increase away.

CHIP is designed to fill in the coverage gap for children between Medicaid eligibility and the ACA or employer insurance. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains, prior to the ACA, state Medicaid programs had to cover children under age 6 with family incomes below 133% of the poverty line. The ACA extended coverage to all children up to age 18 in those households.

States can set their own CHIP eligibility ceilings, but most states provide coverage for children in homes with income of 200% of the federal poverty line or less. For a family of four, that cap would be income of $48,600. The average premium and cost sharing charged nationwide came to $158 per year per child in 2015. Thats well below what those families would pay for employer plans or Obamacare silver plans.

The good news is that CHIP always has received bipartisan support. Though it was enacted as a voluntary program, within three years of its passage CHIP had been accepted by every state. Just last week, the National Governors Assn. urged Congress to reauthorize CHIP to give states certainty about the programs future, in a letter co-signed by its chair, Virginias Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and vice-chair, Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker.

The bad news is that even if the program isnt the target of the hostility that Republicans customarily aim at Medicaid, its threatened by congressional dysfunction in general and GOP dithering over healthcare generally. Every time the Trump White House throws Capitol Hill a curve ball  the James Comey firing merely the latest in a long sequence  doubts rise that Congress will get its act together in time to reauthorize CHIP. Were definitely freaking out that the base work Congress has to do is not getting done, Lesley says.

Thats why the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), a nonpartisan congressional advisory body, recommended in January that CHIP be extended by five years to 2022. The idea was to inoculate the program, at least temporarily, from heightened uncertainty about the stability of the exchange market and proposals to change the structure and financing of the Medicaid program.

MACPAC also recommended extending the 23-point funding bump to 2022 and eliminating a six-month waiting period imposed on children who lose employer-sponsored insurance.

Even if CHIP wins timely reauthorization, its the attack on Medicaid that really threatens childrens health, Alker points out. While CHIP covers nearly 9 million kids, Medicaid covers 37 million.

Republican rhetoric about Medicaid expansion covering able-bodied low-income adults at the expense of the children covered by traditional Medicaid is a smokescreen. Thats pitting children against their parents, she says. We know that covering parents is good for children. Healthy parents are better parents. And when one person is uninsured, the whole family is exposed to financial insecurity.

Republicans stated devotion to childrens welfare is aimed at distracting the public from the truth that their healthcare proposals would have a devastating effect on children. If their plans  especially their attack on Medicaid  go through, the result will be a massive public health crisis. It shouldnt be allowed to unfold in secret.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

Return to Michael Hiltziks blog.
The Republican attack on science, never far beneath the surface even during the Obama administration, has been gathering steam since the election.

Recent sallies have clothed this campaign, which is largely aimed at killing regulations that industry doesnt like, in the mantel of a defense of smarter science. The idea ostensibly is to ensure that the science underlying environmental and health regulations is transparent, fully vetted, and indisputable.

But thats deceptive: The real goal of bills introduced in the House and Senate is to make it easier for industry to tie up the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal bodies in court for months or years. The bills aim to render the rule-making process so costly and burdensome for the regulators that theyll stop regulating at all.

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If you put all these things together, you see the pattern is Lets just stop regulating.  Andrew Rosenberg, Union of Concerned Scientists

All these things are designed to grind the regulatory process to a halt, says Andrew Rosenberg, a biologist who is head of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Lets examine the most recent such effort. Its the Regulatory Accountability Act, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) as the latest version of a measure thats been haunting the halls of the Capitol for years. The bill would require agencies to make public all studies, models, scientific literature, and other information used to develop a regulation. That language tracks several other measures in the Senate and House that cloaked the goal of complicating the regulatory process by claiming to favor better science.

On the surface, this looks innocuous, even laudable. But its more like a wolf in sheeps clothing. The drafters of bills requiring disclosure of raw data and analytical methodologies well know that much of this sort of documentation cant be made public. Some of it is proprietary information belonging to scientists who developed it as part of their research. Some is personal information about human participants in studies underlying science-based rule-making.

Some measures in the House are even worse than Portmans, though not by much. The Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act, a measure introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of Congress outstanding climate change deniers, would forbid the EPA to use science that is not transparent or reproducible. Scientists say that would make it impossible to create regulations based on, say, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, because that was a one-time event. The bill, originally labeled the Secret Science Reform Act, was rechristened this year to give it the labored and cynical acronym of The HONEST Act.

Theres no mystery about whos behind these effortsits big business. Companies and trade groups that lobbied in favor of the House version of Portmans bill are also major contributors to his 2016 reelection campaign to the tune of $3.3 million, according to an analysis by the Environmental Working Group.

Many of those companies and trade groups also show up in the donor lists of the 2014 and 2016 campaigns of Portmans co-sponsor, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.). Not that Heitkamp needed much impetus to support the bill, since North Dakota has become a major oil producer since the fracking boom reached the state in 2006.

The Portman-Heitkamp bill gives industry a whole new arsenal of weapons to slow down or block regulatory action. The measure would allow industry to petition for a public hearing on any proposed regulation based on any scientific, technical, economic, or other complex factual issues that are genuinely disputed.

But the bill doesnt define a genuine dispute. Yogin Kothari of the Union of Concerned Scientists argues that this would allow any industry to produce a study that conflicts with the accepted science on the dangers of a certain chemical or product and thereby slow down the regulatory process. You can always find at least one bogus study that disagrees with the accepted facts. If this provision had been around when the federal government was attempting to regulate tobacco, the industry would have been able to...put a halt to the public health regulations that brought the industry to heel.

Although the bill allows anyone to petition for the hearing, in practice the petitioners are likely to be corporations or industry groups. If you think big business needs more influence over government proceedings, raise your hand. Anyone?

The bill also imposes burdensome requirements for cost-benefit studies for any rule deemed majorthat is, with an annual impact estimated at $100 million or more--or high-impact, meaning an annual impact of $1 billion or more. These numbers look large, but in the context of a U.S. economy valued at $18 trillion, theyre minuscule.

The Regulatory Accountability Act incorporates a few improvements over its House cousins, including exemptions allowing certain data to be kept secret. But its worse in a key way. It takes the restrictions that Smith wishes to impose on the EPA, and extends them to all federal agencies.

Like those bills, too, the Portman-Heitkamp Act is an end-run around regulatory initiatives and laws that enjoy broad public support, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. So the bill erodes the ability of federal agencies to enact rules implementing those laws.

If you put all these things together, says Rosenberg, you see the pattern is Lets just stop regulating.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

Return to Michael Hiltziks blog.
Filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos of Making a Murderer fame have found their own spot behind fences and gates in Los Feliz. The couple were the buyers of Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor and music director Gustavo Dudamels home, which recently sold in the historic neighborhood for $2.849 million.

The Four Square-style Mediterranean sits up from the street and has steps leading up to a portico and a wood-paneled front door that opens to the foyer.

Renovated by SIMO Design and United Remodeled Construction, the 1920s home features an updated kitchen, detailed molding and coved ceilings throughout the 3,600 square feet of living space. Pocketing doors off the foyer open to separate living and dining rooms.

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The master suite has a glass-enclosed shower and a clawfoot soaking tub. There are four full bathrooms and three bedrooms, each with a walk-in closet, in all.

Outside, a trellis-topped patio and decking open to a swimming pool. Lawns, hedges and a detached two-car garage are also within the property.

Dudamel, 36, has been music director of the L.A. Phil since 2009 and is under contract through the 2021-22 season. He also serves as the music director of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela.

This month he is conducting a series of Schubert Symphonies at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Ricciardi and Demos won multiple Primetime Emmy Awards for Making a Murderer, which they wrote, directed and produced. The Netflix documentary series chronicled the case against Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Teresa Halbach.

Thomas Davila and Kennon Earl of Keller Williams Realty were the listing agents. Tomoko Okumura of Re/Max Tri-City represented the buyer.

neal.leitereg@latimes.com

Twitter: @NJLeitereg

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In 1928, when Evelyn Waugh published his first novel, the satirical Decline and Fall, there was no television to speak of. (Books were like television once, culturally speaking, if you can believe it.) But his work, also including the novels Brideshead Revisited and Scoop, is very adaptable to the screen, with its vivid characters, colorful settings and made-for-speaking dialogue. Plus, it has the added bonus of satisfying our undying taste for British period pieces.

Coming to America on Monday via the Acorn TV streaming service is a new three-part BBC adaptation of Decline and Fall, with a cast that notably features Eva Longoria and David Suchet, who played Agatha Christies Hercule Poirot for many years. Screenwriter James Wood, who co-created the ecclesiastical urban sitcom Rev., and director Guillem Morales have made from Waughs text something both lively and leisurely, suitable to the authors brand of antic, deadpan comedy.

Wood has taken almost all his material from the page, pruning and shaping without violating the originals form, adding in incidental exchanges and bits of business that for the most part build upon rather than kill Waughs own jokes. If he sets off (literal) fireworks the original author left unlighted, because that is what the screen likes, Waugh at least put them there.

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Jack Whitehall plays passive hero Paul Pennyfeather, a divinity student expelled from Oxford for reasons beyond his control  his clothes were removed by rowdies  and forced to find work. I expect youll want to become a schoolmaster  thats what most gentlemen do that get sent down for indecent behavior, the college porter tells him on his way out. And with the briefest stop at an employment agency, he is off to a job for which he is barely qualified.

And so he is off to Wales, to a bottom-of-the-barrel academy run by Dr. Fagan (Suchet), who greets his new employee, saying: Ive been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters into it unless he has some very good reasons he is anxious to conceal. Here Pennyfeather encounters fellow teachers Grimes (Douglas Hodge), who drinks and has a wooden leg, and Prendergast (Vincent Franklin), who frets and wears a wig.

Stephen Graham, whom American viewers will best know for playing Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire, is the dissembling Philbrick, ostensibly a butler, but perhaps a criminal, or a novelist. Longoria plays Margot Beste-Chetwynde, the glamorous Latin American mother of one of Pennyfeathers students, who will carry the teacher away from school and land him (as the hapless Grimes says of his own misadventures) in the soup.

It is a semi-fantastical tale, full of extravagant characters who bear names like Lady Circumference and Lord Tangent, the sort of story that does not mind shooting a schoolboy in the foot for the sake of a joke and then giving him gangrene, adding infection to injury. It takes stabs at British secondary education, prison reform, prostitution and modern architecture and saves a few unkind words for the Welsh, the only nation in the world, says Fagan, that has produced nothing of any worth they just sing.

(Some prejudices of the author and/or his characters have been softened slightly, but not eliminated, while matters about which Waugh had to be circumspect are made a little more obvious.)

There are many delightful things here, from the production, with its old fabrics and furniture, through the performances. As Pennyfeather, Whitehall takes a moment or two to register  which is not inappropriate to his character but he fills in the role of a reasonably normal, if fatally naive, person quite nicely. Suchet, whose Poirot was at least one-third comedy, is wonderfully funny when confidentially informing Pennyfeather that the fire escape is very dangerous and never to be used, even in an emergency. Longoria, surprising to see in this context, acquits herself well.

Most pleasant, perhaps, is the sense that there is a kind of order even in a chaotic world, a force that brings these characters together to their benefit, though much might be suffered along the way. Perhaps thats just literature, but its a cheery thought, the odd case of gangrene notwithstanding.

Decline and Fall

Where: Acorn TV

When: Anytime, starting Monday

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

David Suchet bids farewell to Agatha Christies Poirot

Peek inside the Evelyn Waugh collection at the Huntington
BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China's cyberspace authority Monday warned computer users to install and upgrade security software to avoid being hit by the global ransomware attack.

A statement issued by the cybersecurity coordination bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China said the "WannaCry" ransomware attack, which began to spread worldwide Friday, has affected some enterprises and government offices in China.

Police, authorities in the industry, information technology, education, banking and cyberspace sectors as well as some computer security companies have taken response measures, the statement said.

Media reports have also helped increase public awareness of the virus and contain the spread of the attack, it added.

The authority said this global cyberattack has once again shown the unprecedented internet security challenges, calling on all sectors to address to cybersecurity issues.
On Tuesday, voters in two regions of Los Angeles will go to the polls in a pivotal school board election.

In one contest, school board President Steve Zimmer, 47, is facing challenger Nick Melvoin, a 31-year-old attorney whos worked recently for groups trying to limit union influence and promote the growth of charter schools. They are vying to represent District 4, which stretches from the Westside to the west San Fernando Valley.

In District 6, in the east Valley, Imelda Padilla, 29, a community activist and labor organizer, is running against Kelly Gonez, 28, who teaches at a charter middle school. The winner will fill the seat of Monica Ratliff, who did not run for reelection.

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None of the candidates has children.

Melvoin and Gonez are supported by charter-school advocates, Zimmer and Padilla by school-district employee unions.The campaign spending and messages have been dominated by supporters of charter schools on one side and teachers unions on the other.

Because its difficult to get past their overblown and false claims, The Times submitted the same questions to each candidate to clarify where they stand on some key issues.

Portions of their answers, along with some context, are presented below.

Exactly how, if at all, would you change the current tenure and seniority system? Should there be tenure at all? How long should it take to earn tenure? Should it have to be re-earned every few years? How should the layoff system be changed if all? Strictly seniority based? Strictly evaluation based?

Both Melvoin and Gonez favor extending the time required to earn tenure. Under state law, fully credentialed teachers can earn the strong job protections of tenure near the end of their second year in the job.

As far as the last in, first out rules for laying off teachers, Gonez supports the formation of a commission with teachers, principals, parents and academics to look at what works best for the students, teachers and LAUSD as a whole.

Padilla said she is open to new ideas to improve the tenure process, but hasnt staked out a position. Regarding seniority, she said, layoffs should not be strictly seniority based. I look forward to exploring a hybrid idea, but ideally I would look forward to managing the budget in a way that we would never have to deal with the pink-slip era again.

Before attending law school, Melvoin worked for two years as a low-seniority teacher at L.A. Unified during a period of layoffs. As a result, his job was at risk and he had to work several months classified as a temporary teacher. He said he feels strongly that layoffs should be based on performance evaluations and not time on the job. He has participated in lawsuits to limit teacher seniority rights.

Both teacher tenure and seniority-based hiring/firing systems need reform, he said. As a teacher in Watts, I had firsthand experience with these policies and fought for their revision. I remain concerned about the inherent inequities in how layoffs affect students as well as teachers.

Zimmer said the district, during his tenure, developed rules that protect teachers with certain skills, and noted that the district subsequently agreed to protect schools that would be disproportionately harmed by layoffs.

Zimmer said he is open to extending the length of time needed to earn tenure but that other steps are more crucial to improving teachers skills and keeping high-quality teachers in the field of education.

We need to make sure that training and support systems from universities are stronger and that we are broadcasting a positive image about the field of education, he said. And once a teacher is in the classroom, we need to offer continuing support and opportunities for career advancement without leaving the classroom.

Melvoin, Gonez and Padilla agree, but Melvoin in particular places a greater emphasis on limiting current teacher job protections as a centerpiece of reform.

(Most tenure and seniority rules are part of the state education code, however, so L.A. Unifieds unilateral actions are limited.)

Are there any limits that should be placed on the growth of charter schools in LAUSD?

State law limits the grounds on which a valid charter petition can be denied  no matter how many charters already exist  although some charter critics are trying to stretch that interpretation or change state law.

Zimmer says that he would prefer to limit charter-school expansion, when possible, to charters that are offering real innovation. He wants the district to focus on making sure that existing charters  along with district-operated schools  are offering high-quality programs. L.A. Unified, he said, leads the nation in the caliber of its charter-school oversight.

Melvoin said placing any limit on charters is premature. We need to invest in traditional schools so that their excellence eliminates the need for more charter schools, he said. Thats a natural limit to charter growth, and the best one to ensure that all kids are getting access to a high quality education.

Gonez said she does not support an arbitrary cap on charters, but we must ensure that schools are only being opened when there is a real, significant need in the community and that we are being conscientious of potential saturation and over-proliferation.

Padillas views are similar to those of Gonez, although she added that the districts budget situation is one factor to take into account. If there is a transparent application for a charter that serves all children, I will review that application on a case-by-case basis.

To what extent, if any, is this election about expiring union contracts and the unions desire to protect generous retiree benefits?

Gonez: I disagree with this analysis.  And as a teacher, I believe that the hardworking men and women who have dedicated their lives to our schools should receive the competitive salary and benefits to which they are entitled.

Melvoin: If you read [the teachers unions] campaign literature, they do appear to view this election as about teacher contracts and compensation. I view this race as about whats best for the more than 600,000 kids who attend LAUSD schools.

Padilla: I dont agree. There are different things being negotiated every year. Whats at stake is: Are we going to have representatives who are willing to bring both sides to the table, who know how to work with both sides?

Zimmer: The election is about: Are we going to continue the real progress that has taken place largely because of the collaboration among our teachers, our other employees, the administration of Supt. Michelle King and this Board of Education?  Collective bargaining is part of that equation, of course.

What specifically would you change, if anything, in the efforts to make all L.A. Unified students eligible to apply to a state college? Any thoughts about the credit-recovery efforts last year that allowed many students to make up classes they had not passed, which contributed to a record graduation rate?

All the candidates express concern about the rigor of credit-recovery classes that contributed to L.A. Unifieds record graduation rate last year.

All the candidates want to move toward requiring all students to earn a grade of C or better in college-prep classes because thats the standard necessary to apply to a state college in California. In recent years, L.A. Unified has adjusted its graduation requirements and course offerings to push more students on the college path. The percentage of those students has increased, although the district still accepts a D as a passing grade, which means that students are allowed to graduate without being eligible for a Cal State or University of California school. (A student can receive a D in some required classes and still attend some other four-year colleges as well as community college.)

Padilla: I put myself in the shoes of the student and I see that the district has failed in distributing information of what it is to be college bound. Thats why students are asking about getting more counselors over and over again.

Melvoin: I want to give more schools the support they need so that we mitigate the need for online credit-recovery programs. I want to avoid the situation where the board is scrambling to rubber-stamp diplomas to boost graduation rates. When you have math proficiency rates of 27% and yet graduation rates of over 80%, how can the board explain?

Gonez: The district needs to emphasize the quality of their high school diploma.  We should be collecting and analyzing data on our graduates college enrollment, rate of remediation, retention, and college completion as well as workforce readiness.

Zimmer: We need to get more first teaching right so that we dont have to do as much credit recovery, and we need to make sure that credit recovery is rigorous, engaged and led by teachers not computers.

howard.blume@latimes.com

@howardblume
John Noguez was once a rising star in southeast Los Angeles County politics.

He served several years on the Huntington Park City Council before being elected head of the L.A. County assessors office.

In 2012, he was arrested and charged with multiple felonies related to allegations of corruption in the assessors office. For years, he kept a low profile, appearing in court but otherwise staying largely out of the public eye.

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Then recently, Noguez appeared at Huntington Park City Hall, advocating for a proposed Circle K mini-mart. His involvement raised eyebrows in the community.

At the March 29 Huntington Park Planning Commission meeting, Noguez spoke in favor of the project. He passed out materials to planning commissioners, according to people who were at the meeting.

It was a little surprising to see him there, Carlos Cordova, who was vice chair of the commission when Noguez spoke, told The Times. Everyone knows him.

Cordova said it was unclear to the commission whether Noguez was speaking as a formal lobbyist, a business partner, or just a supporter.

According to Cordova, the only reaction to Noguezs presence came from a fellow planning commissioner, who said, Welcome back, John.

Noguez couldnt be reached for comment.

The project applicant listed in city records, Leo Corona of Corona Construction, said the owner of the proposed store, identified in meeting minutes as Dell Singh, received Noguezs assistance with City Hall.

Singh said Noguez is a personal friend and has been helping him with the paperwork necessary to get the stores permits approved. He said he hasnt paid Noguez for the assistance.

I know him as a friend. We were talking, and he said, Let me help you with the paperwork, so all he did was paperwork help, Singh said.

Singh said he wasnt aware of the public corruption charges facing Noguez.

Noguezs attorney, Charles Frisco Jr., said he didnt know his client attended the meeting but said he was entitled to be enjoying life as he should.

Hes innocent. Hes free to do what he wants to do. Theres no court orders prohibiting him from engaging in any activities, Frisco said.

Prosecutors allege that Noguez took $185,000 in bribes from a tax consultant and, in exchange, his office would reduce property valuations for the tax agents clients. The consultant, Ramin Salari, and Mark McNeil, an executive in the assessors office, were also charged.

The case has been stymied by numerous delays, and Noguez still hasnt gone to trial. Prosecutors with the district attorneys office have said they are committed to prosecuting the case and blamed the stall on large amounts of evidence that needed to be turned over to defense attorneys. They also said Noguez and the tax consultant changed attorneys, starting the lengthy evidence review over again.

Prosecutor Craig Hum has said the district attorneys office turned over more than 45,000 pages of evidence to the defense attorneys, along with recordings of interviews and thousands of pages of testimony before an investigative grand jury.

We have been in court  we have been moving forward with the case, he said. Its just taking a little longer than usual, even for these types of cases.

The charges against Noguez and the others have also been amended several times. Noguez initially faced 24 counts of accepting bribes, misappropriation of public funds, conspiracy and perjury. In later complaints, the number of charges against him swelled to 36, but in the most recent amended complaint, filed last July, it was reduced to 25.

Noguezs next preliminary hearing is scheduled for Monday.

adam.elmahrek@latimes.com

Twitter: @adamelmahrek

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A man was fatally shot by police on live TV after a pursuit through South L.A. on Monday afternoon.

The man, along with a woman, had abandoned a white van after leading South Gate police on a chase on the 710 and 91 freeways and nearby surface streets, at times driving into oncoming traffic. The chase and its violent aftermath were observed by a KTLA news helicopter and broadcast live.

The van was stolen, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department, which is investigating the shooting.

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South Gate police officers initially tried to conduct a traffic stop of the van at 12:36 p.m., but the driver refused to stop and led officers on a pursuit, the sheriffs department said in a statement.

During the chase, the van slowed down long enough for one passenger, a 23-year-old man, to exit the vehicle and surrender to officers, authorities said. He was taken into custody without incident.

The chase ended when the man behind the wheel drove the van onto a road that dead-ended at railroad tracks protected by a chain-link fence next to the 91 Freeway in Long Beach.

He and a female passenger, who dropped two large bags on a dirt embankment at the fence line, hopped the barrier and ran along the tracks and under a freeway overpass, the KTLA broadcast showed.

At least two officers were in close pursuit and jumped the fence and ran after them.

After the apparent driver emerged from beneath the overpass, the KTLA camera zoomed in as he rummaged through a backpack he was cradling with his left arm. The man also put on a glove, according to the sheriffs department.

He dropped a black object onto the gravel and then, moments later, pulled out an object and pointed it at pursuing officers.

No gunfire was heard, but the suspect fell to the ground. He got back up as an officer ran into the cameras field of view and took a shooting stance. The suspect fell again as two more officers ran into view with weapons pointed at him.

According to the sheriffs department, one police officer shot the suspect, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

No firearm was found, according to the sheriffs department.

The female passenger was found hiding in a nearby warehouse and was taken into custody without incident, authorities said.

South Gate police did not immediately return a request for comment.

joseph.serna@latimes.com

hailey.branson@latimes.com

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna and @haileybranson on Twitter.

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UPDATES:

May 16, 8:45 a.m.: This article was updated with more information from the sheriffs department.

3:55 p.m.: This article was updated confirming the suspect died.

This article was originally published May 15 at 2:10 p.m.
A fraternity pledge who was ordered to guzzle alcohol during a hazing ritual and twice fell down a flight of stairs before his death was treated like roadkill, his father said Monday after criminal charges were filed against 18 of his sons Penn State fraternity brothers.

Jim Piazza, the father of 19-year-old engineering student Timothy Piazza, said the Beta Theta Pi fraternity members were to blame for his sons February death.

They planned this night out, Piazza said. They had all the intent to feed these young men lethal doses of alcohol  to bring them to alcohol poisoning levels. This was premeditated. They killed our son.

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The family of the college sophomore from Lebanon, N.J., told the Associated Press that they are considering a lawsuit but are focused now on the criminal case against their sons fraternity brothers.

Eight face the most serious charge of aggravated assault, a felony that carries a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison. Timothy Piazza consumed what prosecutors said was a life-threatening amount of alcohol  at one point reaching nearly 0.40%, doctors estimate  during a hazing ritual on Feb. 2 in State College, Pa., and he died two days later.

Piazzas mother, Evelyn, said her grief has worsened the more shes learned about what happened to her son.

My mind used to go to dark places before, now Im imagining more horrors so its really hard to fall asleep, she said.

Jim Piazza said the fraternity brothers tortured their son.

They held him captive and tortured him. They treated him like roadkill, he said. Knowing that your son suffered the way he did over such a long period of time, and died a very slow and very painful death, frankly, its haunting.

A grand jury said security camera footage captured events inside the house that night, including pledges being ordered to guzzle alcohol quickly after the ceremony. Piazza appeared to become inebriated and fell face-first down a flight of basement steps before midnight.

Fraternity brothers made halfhearted and even counterproductive efforts to help him, and when one member strongly advocated for summoning help, he was shoved into a wall and told to leave, the report said.

Piazza apparently fell down the steps again early the next morning but was not discovered until about 10 a.m. Someone called 911 some 40 minutes later. Piazza later died as a result of severe head injuries and suffered other injuries that included internal bleeding from a shattered spleen.

The Piazzas noted that no one representing the university or the fraternity attended their sons wake or funeral services.

Jim Piazza called their absence shameful.

Neither parent would say whether the fraternity members involved should have to serve jail time.

Thats for a jury to decide, Jim Piazza said. Thats not up to us to decide. We just know that they need to be held accountable under the law.

He added: What is a life worth? Our son lost the rest of his life. He lost the ability to graduate, to get married, to have kids, to be his brothers best man.

Evelyn Piazza continued: He gets to sit in a mausoleum. Everybody else gets to continue living their lives. The world goes on for everybody else.

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The White House lurched into a new crisis Monday over reports that President Trump had shared highly classified intelligence last week with visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office.

In the meeting with Russias foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, Trump discussed threats from Islamic State involving laptops taken aboard airliners, intelligence that had been provided by a U.S. ally on the condition that it not be shared, the Washington Post reported.

The revelation touched off widespread dismay among members of Congress, including Republicans, who seemed to credit the published reports even as the White House disputed them.

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The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order, said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obviously theyre in a downward spiral right now, and theyve got to figure out a way to come to grips with all thats happening.

The White House issued carefully worded denials. In a brief and hastily scheduled appearance before reporters outside the West Wing, national security advisor H.R. McMaster said that at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed in the meeting. I was in the room. It did not happen, he said before leaving without answering shouted questions.

The Post did not claim that the president had divulged intelligence sources and methods. Instead, its article said Trump discussed information during his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that could allow Russia to deduce such highly classified matters.

The latest crisis for the administration came less than a week after the president summarily fired FBI Director James B. Comey, a move that was followed by days of often conflicting White House explanations.

The Post stood by its reporting, and the New York Times reported a similar account soon after the Post.

Although it is not illegal for a president to reveal classified information, administration officials were reportedly so concerned that Trumps disclosure would antagonize the foreign ally that provided the intelligence that White House aides quickly notified the CIA and the National Security Agency.

McMaster did say the discussion with the Russians included threats to civil aviation.

Before he faced reporters, the White House distributed statements from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and deputy national security advisor Dina Powell disputing the Posts account.

Tillerson, like McMaster, said there was no discussion of sources, methods or military operations.

Powell, who also participated in the meeting, flatly called the story false.

The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced, she said.

The Russian officials visited the day after Trump fired Comey amid the ongoing U.S. investigation into the Trump campaigns possible links to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

A disclosure like that attributed to Trump would be illegal from anyone other than the president. But Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said, No one is above the rule of law in this country.

It is absolutely terrifying, Blumenthal said. Its another example of the free press uncovering stuff that the American people should know that hopefully will cause an outcry and outrage that will have some cumulative effect in protecting our democracy.

Other senators offered sharp reactions to the reports, calling the presidents action, if true, terrifying, reckless and deeply disturbing. The Posts report came just as senators were arriving for an evening vote.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois, the assistant minority leader, said such disclosure may not only jeopardize our troops and our people, but the security of those who risk their lives to tell us what is actually happening.

If true, deeply disturbing, tweeted Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, echoed McCain, saying of the report, If its true, itd be troubling.

Graham, reflecting the exasperation of many Republicans at being forced to respond to repeated Trump controversies, added, Im not going to speculate. Im tired of speculating about Trump every five minutes.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco called for a full briefing for Congress on the extent of the potential damage done.

Even if President Trump unwittingly blew a highly classified code-word source to the Russians, that would be dangerous enough. If the president outed a highly classified code-word source intentionally, that would be even more dangerous, she said.

During his campaign, Trump seized on reports that Hillary Clinton had conducted State Department business on a personal email account to suggest she mishandled classified information and put the nation at risk. His attacks prompted supporters chants of Lock her up! at every rally, which he encouraged.

Trump, at one rally in Wisconsin, said Clintons actions were worse than Watergate. In another, he declared, Hillarys corrupt criminal scheme put the safety of every American family in danger.

Reporters and Trump critics resurrected a Trump tweet in July in which he quoted Comeys report on her emails: Crooked Hillary Clinton and her team were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information. Not fit!

I dont think its safe to have Hillary Clinton be briefed on national security because the word will get out, Trump said during a rally the same month. Later he promised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton  a vow he withdrew after his election.

michael.memoli@latimes.com

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com

For more White House coverage, follow @mikememoli on Twitter.

Staff writer Noah Bierman contributed to the report.

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UPDATES:

6:50 p.m.: This article was updated with staff reporting.

3:50 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from lawmakers and more details.

This article was originally published at 3:30 p.m.
If theres a silver lining to the toxic cloud hovering over the White House, its that our science-denying president hasnt caused too much damage to the environment. Yet.

But nearly four months into the Trump administration, the risks to the nations air, land and water are large and looming, as is the threat to the countrys belated  and still insufficient  efforts to combat catastrophic global warming. If Trump supporters believe this is an over-regulated nation, they better prepare themselves and their descendants for unhealthier and more disrupted lives.

With help from Congress, President Trump rescinded an Obama administration rule that would have limited what coal mining operations could dump into waterways. The Senate wisely rejected a similar effort to eliminate a rule clamping down on methane releases from new wells on federal land. Trump also directed the Environmental Protection Agency to review President Obamas marquee Clean Power Plan, which aimed to reduce emissions from power plants 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. (The plan has also been stalled by the courts.) He ordered a review of tough future fuel-economy standards for motor vehicles, as well as a government-wide reconsideration of regulations that affect job creation or impose costs that exceed benefits. And he wants to plant more oil and gas rigs along the U.S. coastline, including Californias.

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Listening to reason isnt Trumps strong suit, so perhaps the better tack would be to appeal to his business sense.

Each and all of those changes would be bad for the environment in the near term, and some would make it harder to throttle back carbon emissions that are already propelling global warming and climate change.

Fortunately, most of Trumps most worrisome threats have not yet been realized. The primary line of defense against this greed-fueled approach to the environment will be in the regulatory review process, where the Trump administration will have to make the case that it has sound and valid reasons for undoing regulations that previous administrations had found necessary. And after the regulatory review process? The courts.

Environmental groups and state officials  including in California  have already filed legal challenges over the governments decisions to delay a ban on chlorpyrifos (an agricultural pesticide linked to learning disabilities in children) and to push back the effective dates of six new energy efficiency standards for such electronic devices as ceiling fans and commercial refrigeration units. Also being challenged is Trumps decision to roll back the Obama administrations ban on drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. So the fight is on. And the environment needs to win it.

But even if Trump can clear legal hurdles to his burn-more-faster policies, he still has to deal with the market forces that have made his out-of-date focus on fossil fuels a bad bet. Trump keeps promising that his policies will revive the coal industry, but cleaner-burning and cheaper natural gas has already weakened the demand for coal, sending major coal companies into bankruptcy. And renewable sources as hydro, wind and solar are expected to dominate domestic power production within 15 years.

Trumps willingness to sacrifice environmental protections for corporate profits fits in with the strongly pro-growth, anti-regulatory philosophy that any other zealously pro-business Republican might have brought to the Oval Office. But Trump stands out by aligning himself with those who reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is propelling global warming, and by flatly refusing to recognize that disaster awaits the world if we dont correct our course on carbon emissions.

So what to do? Listening to reason isnt Trumps strong suit, so perhaps the better tack in trying to push him off this disastrous path would be to appeal to his business sense. The renewable energy industry is still in its relative infancy, and there are billions of dollars to be made by leading the world in that transition  and billions to be lost by not confronting rising seas. Its the smart-money choice.

Theres also Trumps legacy. As the dangers of climate change became undeniable, Obama rose to the challenge and helped set the nation and the world on a path toward a less perilous environmental future. Trump should accelerate that change by pushing for even bigger and better programs than Obama championed. Otherwise he could go down in history as the man who was too stubbornly ignorant to try to save the world from ecological disaster.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
As the White House unveils one unhappy surprise after another, its easy to forget the outrages that remain unresolved. In January and March, President Trump signed executive orders broadly known as the Muslim ban or the travel ban. The orders seek to bar foreign nationals from majority-Muslim countries (seven in the original order; six in the second) from entering the United States.

The ban is blocked for now, but the federal court decisions that ordered its halt have been appealed by the Trump administration. The first of those appeals, in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court, was argued a week ago. The second, in the 9th Circuit, is to be heard Monday.

When Trump signed the original ban, chaos ensued. Millions of Americans took to the streets and crowded airport terminals in protest. We came together in those days and weeks; it didnt matter how we prayed, where we were from or how we had voted. We were united in our opposition to a threat to American diversity, our immigrant history, our democracy and our Constitution. We stood together.

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The entire congressional delegation from Orange County [has] decided to play politics instead of doing what is right for the country.

I live in Irvine with my family and thousands of other American citizens of Iranian descent. I came to this country as an immigrant and a refugee of war, and I have never taken for granted the opportunities America represents. All across the country, Iranian Americans have worked to better their communities, participating in all walks of civic life. But because Iran is one of the countries targeted by Trumps ban, we now face persecution and separation from family and friends in our native country. Should the presidents bigoted agenda stand, they will all be treated as would-be terrorists.

I am thankful that Americas judicial branch has stepped in to provide an essential check on the presidents abuse of power and to protect immigration and travel policies that are not based on religion, national origin or ethnic heritage. We can be grateful that our system of checks and balances has worked, and yet our most representative branch of government  the legislative branch  has been glaringly silent.

Congress could end Trumps Muslim ban tomorrow if lawmakers had the political will and moral fortitude to do their jobs. Legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate that would rescind the presidents executive order and put a permanent halt to the fear and uncertainty this administration has unleashed.

Californians can be proud of the role that some of our lawmakers have played on this front. In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein is the lead author of the bill to end the Muslim ban, and Kamala Harris is a cosponsor of the legislation. In the House, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D - San Jose) is the author of legislation to repeal and defund the ban.

Unfortunately, although nearly every Democrat in Congress has endorsed these bills, not a single Republican has had the courage to stand up to the president and sign on to any of this legislation. That includes the entire congressional delegation from Orange County, who have decided to play politics instead of doing what is right for the country.

Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Irvine) has not uttered a word to clearly indicate where she stands on the legislation or the ban itself. All Reps. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) and Darrell Issa (R-Vista) could muster was tepid criticism of the original bans implementation. Royce, as chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, could press for hearings to assess the impact of the executive order on U.S. foreign policy or national security  but he hasnt.

As an American citizen and Southern California resident, I should have my rights and interests represented by my elected officials. But instead of supporting voters like me in their districts, these politicians are protecting the president and enabling his discriminatory policies.

I am a voter in the 45th Congressional District. In 2018, Walters, my member of Congress, will be up for reelection. I have two simple questions for her: Will you stand up for Trump or for voters like me? Will you work to undo one of the ugliest episodes in modern American history? If you decide to turn your back on your constituents who see the Muslim ban for what it is, we will do everything it takes to make sure you are not reelected.

Farshad Farahat was a costar in the Academy Award-winning film Argo. He is a member of the National Iranian American Council and is completing his doctorate in conflict resolution.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook
Sometimes I think newspapers should disregard their stylebooks and identify the senior senator from South Carolina as Lindsey Graham (R-Voice of Reason).

The latest example of his too-rare rationality was his objection to the suggestion that President Trump should appoint Grahams colleague Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to replace James B. Comey as director of the FBI.

John Cornyn under normal circumstances would be a superb choice to be FBI director, Graham said on Meet the Press on Sunday. But these are not normal circumstances.

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Graham was referring, obviously, to Trumps clumsy decision to fire Comey, which, as the president told NBCs Lester Holt, was accompanied by the thought that you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.

Cornyn isnt the only politician under consideration for the FBI position. Trump also is looking at former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), a onetime FBI agent who has been endorsed by the FBI Agents Assn., a group comprising 13,000 present and former FBI agents.

Presented by moderator Chuck Todd with both the Cornyn and Rogers options, Graham stick to his guns: I think its now time to pick someone who comes from within the ranks or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on day one.

Trump and Atty. Gen. his Attorney General Jeff Sessions are interviewing candidates who match Grahams job description, including acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who probably irked the president last week when he told the Senate Intelligence Committee that  contrary to administration claims that Comey had lost the support of the FBIs rank and file  Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does to this day.

Other candidates reportedly under consideration are former Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Alice Fisher, New York appeals court Judge Michael Garcia, FBI special agent Adam Lee and U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson of Virginia.

If even a couple of other Republicans adopted Grahams views and Senate Democrats held the line, Trump could be forced to name an FBI director who hadnt run for office in a partisan election. (That seems a more realistic strategy than holding confirmation of a new FBI director hostage to a promise by Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein to name a special counsel to supervise the investigation of possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.)

The FBI director is appointed to a 10-year-term (admittedly one that a president can cut short) precisely because he or she is supposed to be independent of any political party. Nominating partisan Republicans such as Cornyn or Rogers to head the bureau would blur that distinction in the public mind. If Trump cant see that, Cornyn and Rogers should ponder Grahams words  and withdraw their names from consideration.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
To the editor: In 1998, I was a staffer for state Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco). One of the several bills that I covered for him was known throughout the legislature as the Communist bill, which would have done precisely what current Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Oakland) wants to do with AB 22: to remove the illegal prohibitions on hiring Communists to work in state and local government positions. (Being a Communist would no longer be cause for losing a state job under bill narrowly approved in Assembly, May 8)

How can a law be illegal? When the U.S. Supreme Court says that the law defies the Constitution and must therefore not be enforced. But such laws do not therefore disappear; they remain on the books until removed, even if they cannot be enforced.

Kopps bill got through the Senate in spite of the fact that Republicans complained that California needed protection from the Red Chinese. The bill failed in the Assembly because several Democrats were afraid of appearing being soft on Communism. (It appears that Bontas bill has encountered the same concern.)

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It is truly wondrous to see that the ridiculous fear of an all but extinct ideology hasnt failed to diminish after two more decades have passed.

Nathan A. Paxton, Washington

..

To the editor: Assemblyman Randy Voepel (R-Santee) wants to retain Californias 1953 law that provides for the dismissal of public employees who are members of the Communist Party because military veterans fought wars against communists.

I assume that, if he is a man of principle, his home and office contain no products made in Germany, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Spain or England.

Bob Niccum, Buena Park

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
To the editor: The editorial states that the Department of Homeland Security sent investigators overseas to interview refugees as part of the vetting process. We are not solely investigators. The job title is refugee officer, and I am one. (How the Trump administration has quietly stalled refugee resettlements, editorial, May 8)

In interviewing displaced persons overseas, we determine whether they qualify as refugees, whether they have suffered past persecution, or if they have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of any of five protected grounds: political opinion, religion, a particular social group, nationality or race. In addition, in partnership with U.S. intelligence agencies, we use an array of sophisticated tools to ensure that potential immigrants pose no risk to American public safety or national security.

While we have annually provided protection to tens of thousands of refugees, this number is a minute fraction of those displaced worldwide. More importantly, our existence provides a rationale for third countries on the front lines of refugee crises to shelter those seeking protection while waiting for permanent resettlement. If these countries closed their doors, regional instability would increase, and U.S national security would be threatened.

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Moreover, for those fleeing persecution, refugee officers provide key support to the U.S. as a beacon of hope and dignity.

David Mills, Los Angeles

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
Investment in the Silk Road Fund is sustainable, and China is not using capital injection as a means of buying influence in the global arena, said a senior official of Chinas central bank on Sunday.

The remarks were made on May 14 by Yi Gang, deputy governor of the Peoples Bank of China (PBOC), after Chinese President Xi Jinping promised that the country will contribute an additional 100 billion RMB to the Silk Road Fund. The decision has elicited a mixed reaction from the public. Under the hashtag FocusOnBeltAndRoad," which had garnered over 6 billion page views on Sina Weibo as of press time, many netizens commented that the move will stimulate Chinas economy. At the same time, others worried about the profitability of the investment, speculating that the government may be making a reckless bet.

In response to public concern, Yi said that the fund currently has a large reserve of projects, and the demand for funds will be greater in the future.

We must bear in mind that the Silk Road Fund is an investment fund. It is not unidirectional financial support or a surrender of profits. Our investment will see commercial returns and is sustainable, Yi told the Xinhua News Agency during an interview.

According to Yi, the capital injection will help the fund to be maximally flexible and efficient, and more funding will also boost its leveraging role.

By the end of the first quarter of 2017, 15 programs had been signed under the Silk Road Fund, with a total investment of $6 billion. The programs cover various countries and regions along the "Belt and Road" route, including Russia, Mongolia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, North Africa and Europe.

It is very necessary to increase the capital of the Silk Road Fund at the current stage, Yi emphasized.

To provide more funding for "Belt and Road" cooperation, China will also encourage financial institutions to conduct overseas business using RMB at an estimated level of about 300 billion RMB, Xinhua reported.
To the editor: In Herman Wouks The Caine Mutiny, one example of Capt. Queegs insanity occurs when he turns his ship upside down looking for a missing key to a refrigerator. His senior officers discover that, beyond any reasonable doubt, the key never existed in the first place, but when confronted with this fact, Queeg angrily insists on continuing his fruitless search. (There are plenty of problems with our election system. Voter fraud isnt one of them, editorial, May 11)

Now with America nearly $20 trillion in debt, President Trump is spending taxpayers money to look for not just one fictitious missing key (in this case, a fraudulent vote), but nearly 3 million of them.

If this doesnt qualify as insanity, would someone please explain to me what does?

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Gary Garshfield, Irvine

..

To the editor: The president ordering an inquiry into voter fraud would be funny if it werent so pitiful. Trump still cannot accept the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Its killing him.

Trump is wasting time and taxpayers money. Hes also trying valiantly to obstruct the investigation into his campaigns possible ties with Russia.

Lorraine Knopf, Santa Monica

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
In a victory for voting rights advocates, the Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from North Carolinas Republican leaders and let stand a decision that struck down their 2013 law that added new restrictions on voting.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had branded the law as racially biased and said North Carolina lawmakers had targeted black voters with almost surgical precision.

North Carolina lawmakers took action immediately after the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote had voided part of the historic Voting Rights Act that required some states, including North Carolina, to get federal approval before altering their voting laws.

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The new North Carolina measure made five changes, including restricting early voting, which had been used more often by African American voters, and by requiring registered voters to show one of several photo ID cards at the polls. The appeals court noted the state had chosen the types of photo IDs that were less likely to be held by African Americans.

Then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, slammed the decision and lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court. Last year, four of the high courts conservative justices had signaled they were prepared to block the lower court ruling and revive the law. They then lacked a fifth vote due to the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

But the situation changed in November when the states voters ousted McCrory and narrowly elected Democrat Roy Cooper. And he and the states attorney general, also a Democrat, recently told the high court they did not wish to appeal the lower courts ruling.

At the same time, the GOP-controlled legislature said it did wish to have the appeal heard.

With the recent addition of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, conservatives presumably would have had the votes this time to reinstate the North Carolina law.

But after considering the issue for several weeks, the Supreme Court announced Monday it would not hear the case.

Given the blizzard of filings over who is and who is not authorized to seek review in this court under North Carolina law, it is important to recall our frequent admonition that the denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.

The courts action sets no legal precedent, but it likely ends the litigation over the North Carolina law.

Voting rights advocates hailed the demise of the North Carolina law.

An ugly chapter in voter suppression is finally closing, said Dale Ho, director of the ACLUs Voting Rights Project.

We are grateful that the Supreme Court has decided to allow the 4th Circuits ruling to stand, confirming that discrimination has no place in our democracy and elections, said Allison Riggs, senior staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. This ruling sends a strong message that lawmakers in North Carolina should stop enacting laws that discriminate based on race.

david.savage@latimes.com

On Twitter: DavidGSavage

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A federal appeals court panel of three Democratic appointees grappled with questions Monday over how to determine whether President Trumps revised travel ban was motivated by religious prejudice or national security.

The judges of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, who listened to arguments for more than an hour in a Seattle courtroom, did not clearly indicate how they were leaning and asked pointed questions of both sides.

But Judge Ronald M. Gould wanted to know whether there were grounds to continue blocking Trumps order nationally even if the panel found no constitutional violation of religious freedom guarantees.

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And Judge Michael Daly Hawkins questioned if the lower court order blocking Trumps action may have been overly broad.

Trumps order, directed at six predominantly Muslim countries, did not mention religion though Trump called for a Muslim ban when he was running for president.

How is a court to know if it is in fact a Muslim ban in the guise of national security justifications? asked Gould, who, like the other two judges on the panel, was appointed by former President Clinton.

Hawkins asked if Trump had ever admitted he was wrong about calling for a Muslim ban or stated that the current order was motivated only by concern for national security.

Has he ever said anything approaching that? Hawkins asked skeptically.

Acting U.S. Solicitor Gen. Jeffrey B. Wall said Trump has made many statements about pursuing efforts to combat terrorists.

Lawyers for the Trump administration have argued the court must uphold a presidential order involving national security if it is neutrally worded and there is no clear sign of discriminatory intent.

But Judge Richard Paez noted the order that led to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was neutrally worded. There was no reference to Japanese in that executive order, he said. And look what happened.

Wall appeared taken aback by the comparison and said he would not have been standing in the courtroom if that was the kind of order before the court.

The hearing was held in Seattle s William K. Nakamura Courthouse, named for a U.S. Medal of Honor winner born in Seattle to Japanese immigrant parents who were interned. Dozens of protesters gathered peacefully on the courthouse steps, chanting and waving signs such as No Wall No Ban and Muslim Ban is UnAmerican.

Neal Katyal, a Washington-based lawyer representing the challengers, repeatedly reminded the court of Trumps critical remarks about Muslims.

But Paez noted that Trump made his calls for a Muslim ban in the midst of a highly contentious campaign.

Dont we need to look at it from that standpoint? Paez asked.

Katyal replied that some of Trumps comments came even after his election and that a written campaign statement calling for a Muslim ban had remained on the Trump site until the administration removed it on the eve of another federal circuit court hearing earlier this month.

Does that mean the president is forever barred from issuing an executive order along those lines? Paez asked.

Katyal said Trump could formally disavow his earlier comments and say Islam was a peaceful religion, as did former President George W. Bush.

Instead, we get, I think Islam hates us, Katyal said, quoting the president.

The court is hearing the case on an expedited schedule but did not indicate when it will rule.

The court is weighing Trumps appeal of a March decision that put a nationwide hold on his executive order barring U.S. entry by, or visas for, nationals of Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen for 90 days and blocking all refugees for 120 days.

Hawaii-based U.S. District Judge Derrick K. Watson issued a preliminary injunction after concluding there was ample evidence to show that anti-Muslim sentiment motivated Trumps action.

Watson relied on statements Trump and his advisors made about his proposed Muslim ban during his campaign and after his election. The judge called the evidence of animus significant and unrebutted.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia heard arguments this month in a similar challenge of Trumps travel ban. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to eventually take up the issue.

Gould, 70, based in Seattle, is a moderate. Hawkins, 72, based in Phoenix, is considered moderate to liberal. Paez, 70, who serves in Pasadena, is viewed as the most liberal of the three.

The judges were selected from a computer-generated random list of all panels sitting during the month of May, the earliest the case could be heard.

Some legal experts said it was hard to conclude from the hearing how the judges would rule.

It looked like Paez was looking to make a broader decision [against the travel ban] and maybe Hawkins and Gould were looking into a narrower decision, said Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson. But its difficult to predict.

Margo Schlanger, a University of Michigan law professor, called the questions about the internment of Japanese Americans very telling.

The panel seemed clearly to want to avoid a legal standard under which the Japanese internment camps would be constitutional, and thats good news for Hawaii and the plaintiffs, said Schlanger, who worked on civil rights in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration.

University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said he believed the panel was leaning toward a decision that would continue to block Trumps order, although that is difficult to ascertain with certainty.

Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University, said he disagreed with the travel order but saw the law and Mondays arguments as being on Trumps side.

For Trump to lose on the law, the court would have to ignore the role of the president in foreign affairs, said Kmiec, who served in the Department of Justice in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

The state of Hawaii and Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Assn. of Hawaii, challenged Trumps order, which was a revision of an earlier, broader ban that the 9th Circuit blocked on due process grounds.

The revised order targets six instead of seven countries (Iraq was included in the original), makes no mention of religion, exempts green-card holders and allows for exceptions in certain cases.

Hawaii argued that the new order would still hurt the fight against terrorism and create difficulties in the recruitment of university students and faculty.

The administration has argued that presidents have wide authority over immigration matters and courts are forbidden from second-guessing the executive branch on matters of national security.

Trumps order is simply intended to keep Americans safe while the administration studies the adequacy of security measures, Department of Justice lawyers have said.

Special correspondent Anderson reported from Seattle and Times staff writers Dolan and Kaleem from Orinda and Los Angeles, respectively.

maura.dolan@latimes.com

jaweed.kaleem@latimes.com

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UPDATES:

3:15 p.m.: This article has been updated with more court arguments, analysis, scene outside courthouse.

12:25 p.m.: This article has been updated with court arguments.

This article was originally posted at 3 a.m.
The first time Gavin Newsom ran for governor, he dropped out of the race in deference to a seemingly unbeatable fellow Democrat, Jerry Brown.

He was the right person at the right time, and Im really glad I stepped aside, Newsom said on a recent visit to Los Angeles. We needed the old sage.

Newsom, who once mocked Browns comeback as a stroll down memory lane, settled for the almost powerless job of lieutenant governor, easily winning two terms.

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Now, with Brown, 79, nearing retirement, he is gunning for the governors job again. This time, patience, calculation and lucky timing have combined to make him the early favorite in next years June primary.

Newsom, 49, has deftly used his office as a platform to call for tighter gun control, legalized marijuana, a ban on new offshore oil drilling and rollbacks of university tuition hikes. Next up: universal healthcare.

His agenda carries broad appeal in a Democratic state that has been drifting leftward for more than two decades. With much of California seething over President Trump, the climate could hardly be better for the unabashed liberal politics of a former San Francisco mayor still best known for his trailblazing 2004 decree legalizing same-sex marriage.

California politics updates: Gov. Browns adds cash to budget; McClintock calls for independent prosecutor for Russia investigation 

You want resistance to Donald Trump? Newsom asked a crowd of plumbers and steamfitters at a Bay Area union hall in March. Boy, bring it on, Donald.

Newsom faces fierce competition from at least two viable Democrats: former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a longtime nemesis, and state Treasurer John Chiang. But neither starts with the lopsided advantages of Newsom.

Drawing heavily on Silicon Valley donors, he has raised almost $12 million, outstripping his rivals by far. Newsoms rhetorical blasts at Republicans  mostly Trump these days  are a hit on social media, yielding 1.3 million followers on Twitter and more than 700,000 on Facebook.

The California Nurses Assn., a powerful player in statewide races, has endorsed him. And the liberal Bay Area, where his support is strongest, plays an outsize role in picking the winners in California primaries.

Newsom was a popular two-term mayor, winning reelection with 74% of the vote. But in the two decades since he burst into San Francisco politics as a young protege of Willie Brown, his predecessor as mayor, he has put off many colleagues.

Some, like San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, see him as too willing to do the bidding of campaign donors. He recalled Newsoms appearance in an Airbnb television ad urging San Francisco voters to reject a 2015 ballot measure that would have limited short-term home and apartment rentals. Newsom has accepted more than $225,000 in campaign donations from Airbnb employees, much of it within weeks of the measures defeat.

Follow the money, Peskin said. The fundamental issue is: Are we going to have a governor who governs for the people, or for the special interests that hes beholden to?

Newsoms alliance with Airbnb is no surprise. He was an early champion of the sharing economy and digital revolution. In San Francisco, he moved the lieutenant governors satellite office out of a drab government building and became the star tenant of a trendy shared office space for tech startups.

Newsoms 2013 book, Citizenville, called on government to make better use of technology, but his frequent lapses into Silicon Valley jargon can fall flat, as it did when he was promoting the book on Comedy Centrals The Colbert Report.

Big is getting small, and small is getting big  technology has the ability to level the playing field, he told host Stephen Colbert.

What the  does any of that mean? Colbert asked to a roar of laughter, his profanity silenced by the first of several censor beeps. Is there a ... translator? What are you talking about?

Garry South, the top strategist in Newsoms first campaign for governor, has urged him to keep in mind that many Californians facing financial hardship see little hope for themselves in the tech economy thats flourishing in the Bay Area.

When youre in Fresno or San Bernardino, you cant be talking in such highfalutin terms that people dont really grasp what youre saying, he said.

Newsom, who calls the widening gap between rich and poor the biggest challenge of our time, is still fine-tuning his agenda. He said it would include wider access to prenatal care and preschool, expansion of an income-tax credit for the poor, bail reform and a universal healthcare plan modeled on the one he pioneered in San Francisco.

The works been done; the question is how we scale it, he said.

At the same time, Newsom promises fiscal restraint and economic growth.

Im the only candidate for governor thats actually created jobs, he told the plumbers and steamfitters. I have close to 1,000 employees, 23 small businesses.

That would be Newsoms PlumpJack network of high-end restaurants, bars, nightclubs, wine shops and hotels in San Francisco, Napa Valley, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Lake Tahoe and Palm Springs. The businesses have spun off at least $4.1 million in personal income during his tenure as lieutenant governor, his tax returns show, and last year he reported more than $11.8 million in assets. His state salary is $142,577.

Newsom said he no longer manages PlumpJack day-to-day, but sometimes weighs in on strategic decisions, such as investment opportunities or the design palette of a new venue.

His once-turbulent private life has settled down. His early years as mayor were marred by a personal unraveling  divorce, excessive drinking, a scandal over his affair with a City Hall aide. In 2007, he declared he would be a better person without alcohol in my life and sought informal treatment. He says now that he quit drinking for two years, then resumed drinking wine.

He also remarried and moved with his wife, actress and documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, to a house on a Marin County hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay. They are raising four children: Montana, 7, Hunter, 5, Brooklynn, 3, and Dutch, 1.

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom with his wife Jennifer Siebel-Newsom and daughter Montana before he was sworn in as the 49th lieutenant governor of California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

I dont want to sound like a cliche, but theres an empathy, theres a connection  anyone who has kids understands it, he said. Theres a sensitivity to the world around you thats sort of deep and enriching and fulfilling. I feel more complete as a human being.

Newsoms father-in-law, an avid hunter who lives in Montana, bought the family a freezer for their garage to store the venison, elk, duck and pheasant that they like to eat.

Im a hunter, Newsom told the union crowd when a man in the audience grumbled about his support for gun control.

Newsom, who in his younger days shot lizards with a rifle on visits to his fathers place in the Sierra foothills, said he has hunted ducks and enjoys skeet shooting, but nonetheless supports background checks for gun owners.

The hunting might surprise some of Newsoms fans on Twitter, where he skewers the National Rifle Assn., calls Trump an ignoramus and brands House Speaker Paul Ryan with the nickname Cowardly Ryan.

At the union hall in Concord, Newsom said he was looking forward to succeeding Brown as Trumps chief adversary in deep-blue California.

Were going to push back in very aggressive ways, he said. I guarantee that.

About this story: This is one in a series of articles about the candidates vying to succeed Jerry Brown as governor of California in the 2018 election. Learn more about them at latimes.com/CA2018.

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

Twitter: @finneganLAT

ALSO

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What Democrat would be crazy enough to challenge Nancy Pelosi on her home turf? Meet Stephen Jaffe

Updates on California politics
Californias status as a far-left state was emphatically reconfirmed by Gov. Jerry Browns revised budget last week  not so much by his proposal, but by his presentation.

Browns entertaining rhetoric itself made him sound, as usual, like a skinflint, a penny-pinching scold.

But the introductory document could have been written by Bernie Sanders, if not Depression-era Socialist Upton Sinclair, the losing 1934 Democratic candidate for governor who ran on the slogan End Poverty in California.

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There are only a handful of states where a governor could get away with boasting on Page 1 of the budget that he was spending tax dollars for healthcare of immigrants living here illegally, even if they are children. Not that it isnt a good idea  beats paying for expensive emergency room care when they get sick  but it would draw howls most places.

Same with bragging about gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, increasing payments to welfare moms when they have another baby or providing earned income tax credits for the working poor. This all costs tax dollars.

The very first paragraph introducing Browns $183.4-billion proposal says: The past four budgets have significantly expanded government spending. The Legislature and the governor have focused the spending on counteracting the effects of poverty.

And this on K-12 schools and community colleges: Funding is expected to grow to $74.6 billion in [fiscal year] 2017-18  an increase of $1.1 billion since January and $27.3 billion over six years (58%).

OK, and how have the kids educations improved? The write-up doesnt say.

Brown also sent an extra $6.5 million to Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra so he can hire 31 more people to help fight President Trump. A reporter asked the governor what that was all about.

You know, I just asked [Finance Director Michael] Cohen that this morning, Brown replied. He said, Well, the attorney general is bringing a lot of lawsuits. We do have to defend our rights. I think its reasonable.

Clearly all this amounted to a written message to liberal legislators and anti-Trump activists that they shouldnt fret. Brown already has checked off a bunch on their wish lists.

More budget coverage 

But for anyone watching the big picture nationally, reading it must have seemed surreal when matched against the dominant mood across America. This is a Republican country right now.

Trump carried 30 states to Hillary Clintons 20. He was a big winner in the electoral college, although Clinton narrowly won the popular vote, thanks in part to her 4.2-million-vote victory in California. Republicans control both houses of Congress and 32 state legislatures. Democrats dominate both houses in only 12 legislatures.

In governorships, Republicans outnumber Democrats 33 to 16.

California is a stark contrast. Democrats have supermajorities in both legislative houses and hold every statewide office. They outnumber Republicans in voter registration by roughly 45% to 26%.

There has been a huge leftward shift in the last two decades. Why? Lots of reasons, but the most important is growing ethnic and racial diversity. The GOP hard-line rhetoric on illegal immigration has helped Democrats immensely by offending many new voters of Latino and Asian ancestry.

Among Latino voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans 56% to 14%, according to Paul Mitchell, who heads Political Data Inc. Among Asians, its Democrats by 38% to 22%. Both groups have large numbers of independents who lean Democrat.

Whites are swing voters  as theyve always been in California  with Democrats holding only a 39% to 33% edge in registration. But their percentage of the vote is gradually declining while people of color are gaining electoral clout.

Both legislative houses are led by Latinos who are always pushing to spend more money helping the poor.

Theres even a bill moving through the Legislature to provide free attorneys for immigrants here illegally who are facing federal deportation. Public defenders in state cases are one thing. But for the state to provide them for people accused of breaking federal law would be unprecedented.

So Brown again was playing the role of wise adult as he stood before reporters unveiling a revised budget proposal for next fiscal year.

Warning of the inevitable recession that will reduce tax flows and force budget cuts, the governor sounded almost like the sidewalk preacher proclaiming that the end is near.

Sooner or later, were headed down, he prophesied. Make no doubt about it, cuts are coming over the next few years, and theyll be big. We would be imprudent just to start spending as though we have no risks.

Besides a recession, risks include the threats of a huge cutback in federal healthcare funds and Trumps retaliation against so-called sanctuary cities.

Look, the world of Washington is changing by the hour, Brown said. So its very hard to predict what they will do. But weve got to be wary and prudent.

One reporter brought up an uncomfortable subject that contradicts Browns self-crafted image of fiscal prudence. Thats the $64-billion bullet train project thats over-budget and behind schedule.

What about it? Brown said. Its speeding ahead. Have you been down there in Fresno and seen all the signs of construction? ... Look, these projects take a long time.

The governor then ended the news conference.

Brown remains a fascinating political character. Aside from the bullet train, he does keep a thumb on spending in this lefty state.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on Twitter

ALSO

Trump presidency eases Gavin Newsoms path in his second run for California governor

Gov. Browns adds cash to budget; McClintock calls for independent prosecutor for Russia investigation

In the aftermath of the healthcare vote, some Republicans are nowhere to be found while the resistance prepares for 2018
Boy Scouts: Top leaders didnt call Trump to praise speech as the president said By Associated Press The Boy Scouts denied Wednesday that the head of the youth organization called President Donald Trump to praise his recent politically aggressive speech to its national jamboree. Trump told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Wednesday, I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful. Politico published the transcript of the interview. We are unaware of any such call, the Boy Scouts responded in a statement. It specified that neither of the organizations two top leaders  President Randall Stephenson and Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh  had placed such a call. The White House had no immediate response to the Boy Scouts denial. Surbaugh apologized last week to members of the scouting community who were offended by the political rhetoric in Trumps July 24 speech in West Virginia. Other U.S. presidents have delivered nonpolitical speeches at past jamborees. To the dismay of many parents and former scouts, Trump promoted his political agenda and derided his rivals, inducing some of the scouts in attendance to boo at the mention of former President Obama. I want to extend my sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree, Surbaugh said. That was never our intent. Surbaugh noted that every sitting president since 1937 has been invited to visit the jamboree. Stephenson told the Associated Press two days after the speech that Boy Scout leaders anticipated Trump would spark controversy with politically tinged remarks, yet felt obliged to invite him out of respect for his office. Hoping to minimize friction, the Boy Scouts issued guidelines to adult staff members for how the audience should react to the speech. Any type of political chanting was specifically discouraged. Stephenson, who did not attend Trumps speech, said the guidance wasnt followed impeccably. Facebook

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Mayor of London again calls on Trump to cancel state visit By Christina Boyle (AFP/Getty Images) The mayor of London has reiterated his calls for President Trumps state visit to Britain to be canceled in the wake of the citys terrorist incident, saying his policies go against everything we stand for. The war of words between the two leaders intensified further Monday evening after Trump criticized Mayor Sadiq Khans response to the London Bridge terrorist attack in two tweets, and the mayor said Trump should not be welcomed in the capital. Since Saturday Ive been working with the police, with the emergency services, with the government and others to deal with the horrific attack on Saturday, Khan said Monday evening. I just havent got the time to deal with tweets from Donald Trump. But when pressed on whether he thinks a state visit for later this year should go ahead as planned, Khan was unequivocal. My position remains the same. I dont think we should be rolling out the carpet to the president of the United States in the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for, Khan told Channel 4 news. When you have a special relationship, it is no different to when you have a close mate: You stand with them in times of adversity, but you call them out when theyre wrong. And there are many things about which Donald Trump is wrong. Trump initially criticized Khan hours after the London attack posting on Twitter: At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is no reason to be alarmed! Khans office soon pointed out that the president had, in fact, misquoted Khan, who actually said that Londoners should not be alarmed by the increased armed police presence on the streets. Trump took to Twitter again on Monday to slam the London mayor once more. Pathetic excuse by London mayor Sadiq Khan, who had to think fast on his no reason to be alarmed statement. MSM [Mainstream media] is working hard to sell it! the president wrote. This is not the first time Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a major Western capital city, has called for Trumps state visit to be banned. He previously branded Trumps policies on immigration and proposed travel ban on people entering the U.S. from predominantly Muslim countries cruel. An online government petition calling for the invitation to be withdrawn also gathered more than 1.8 million votes. The visit was first announced during Prime Minister Theresa Mays trip to Washington, where she became the first foreign leader to meet the newly-inaugurated president. State visits are personal invites from the British monarch and involve a significant amount of pomp and ceremony, and usually a state banquet. Facebook

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He helped bring down President Nixon. He thinks President Trump is even worse. By Mark Z. Barabak (Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times) John Dean is a connoisseur of coverups, a savant of scandal, so he can more than imagine what its like inside the Trump White House right now. Its a nightmare, he said, presiding in a high-backed leather wing chair off the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not just for those in the headlines  political strategist Steve Bannon, jack-of-many-duties Jared Kushner  but for their unsung assistants and secretaries as well. They dont know what their jeopardy is. They dont know what theyre looking at. They dont know if theyre a part of a conspiracy that might unfold. They dont know whether to hire lawyers or not, how theyre going to pay for them if they do, Dean said in a crisp law-counsel cadence. Its an unpleasant place. Dean was a central figure in Watergate, the 1970s political scandal against which all others are measured, serving at the tender age of 32 as President Nixons White House attorney. In that capacity Dean worked to thwart investigators after the clumsy break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, then flipped and helped sink Nixon by revealing the presidents involvement in the coverup. Read More Facebook

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Two decades ago, Washington state Republicans repealed and replaced a healthcare overhaul there. It didnt end well By Noam N. Levey Republicans in the state of Washington didnt wait long in the spring of 1995 to fulfill their pledge to roll back a sweeping law expanding health coverage in the state. Coming off historic electoral gains, the GOP legislators scrapped much of the law while pledging to make health insurance affordable and to free state residents from onerous government mandates. It didnt work out that way: The repeal left the states insurance market in shambles, sent premiums skyrocketing and drove health insurers from the state. It took nearly five years to repair the damage. Two decades later, the ill-fated experiment, largely relegated to academic journals, offers a caution to lawmakers at the national level as Republicans in the U.S. Senate race to write a bill to repeal and replace the federal Affordable Care Act. Its much easier to break something, said Pam MacEwan, who led a Washington state commission charged with implementing the law in the mid-1990s and now oversees the state insurance market there. Its more difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  And thats when people get hurt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office echoed that warning last week, when it concluded that the healthcare bill passed by the House last month would destabilize insurance markets in a sixth of the country and nearly double the number of people without health insurance over the next decade. Read More Facebook

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Companies accelerate hiring, adding a robust 253,000 net new jobs, ADP says By Jim Puzzanghera A now hiring sign is seen in Baton Rouge, La., on May 5. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) Companies accelerated their hiring last month, adding a robust 253,000 net new jobs in a sign the labor market remains healthy and the economy is strengthening after a weak winter. The private-sector job creation figures reported Thursday by payroll firm Automatic Data Processing far exceeded analyst expectations and was well above the downwardly revised 174,000 net new positions added in April. Job growth is rip-roaring, declared Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodys Analytics, which assists ADP in preparing its report. Read More Facebook

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All jokes aside, Trumps covfefe tweet sparks questions too By Brian Bennett President Trump sparked a global kerfuffle over covfefe with his bizarrely truncated tweet just minutes into Wednesday, spawning countless jokes across Twitter but also more serious questions for which the White House gave no answers. Press Secretary Sean Spicer, during an unusually short 11-minute briefing in which he insisted he not be on camera, declined to give any explanation for Trumps tweet posted just after midnight. Nor would he translate what the president was trying to say in the garbled message that broke off midsentence. But Spicer told reporters that the public should not be concerned that the president sent what the questioner called somewhat of an incoherent tweet. The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant, Spicer said. Read More Facebook

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Biden launches new PAC, keeping the 2020 door open By David Lauter (Steven Senne / Associated Press) Former Vice President Joe Biden is launching a new political action committee, a platform that will allow him to provide help to favored candidates and, inevitably, boost speculation about a possible run for the Democratic nomination in 2020. The organization, which Biden is calling American Possibilities, will be staffed by a former top political aide to the vice president, Greg Schultz, who is also a veteran of President Obamas reelection campaign. The PAC will allow Biden to raise money that he can use to travel the country, contribute to candidates in governors races this year and congressional and state races in 2018 and generally do the sorts of things that aspiring politicians do to keep their names in the headlines. All that cant help but nurture questions about whether Biden, 74, will try yet again to attain the office he first started running for in 1987. In public appearances, which have taken him to electorally important states, and interviews since the 2016 election, Biden has been sharply critical of the Trump administration, but has also pointed to flaws in his own party. In one interview, he pointed to a bit of elitism thats crept in to the partys approach to working-class voters. At the same time, he has given carefully ambiguous answers when asked about his plans. At a conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, he responded to the question about a presidential run by saying: Could I? Yes. Would I? Probably not. In the announcement for the new group, Biden said that the negativity, the pettiness, the small-mindedness of our politics drives me crazy. Its not who we are. Its time for big dreams and American possibilities, he said. Facebook

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U.S., regions foreign ministers debate Venezuela By Tracy Wilkinson (AFP / Getty Images) The United States and foreign ministers from across the hemisphere met in Washington on Wednesday to attempt to force Venezuelas leftist government and its angry opposition into talks. Hunger and violence have pushed Venezuela to the brink of humanitarian disaster, diplomats say. But Wednesdays meeting of the Organization of American States faced unlikely prospects for success: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro does not trust the organization and has said his nation will withdraw its membership. Some OAS nations, including several U.S. allies in the Caribbean, have criticized the regional bodys efforts as intervention promoted by Washington. But U.S. officials are hoping the sheer weight of the crisis will unite the region to put pressure on Venezuela. Theres more and more concern about what were seeing, and so more and more countries have gotten over their reluctance to question or go against the wishes of the Venezuelan government, a senior State Department official said in a briefing for reporters. Its really hard to stand by and do nothing in the face of the kinds of institutional steps weve seen in Venezuela, and the increasing humanitarian suffering, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, in keeping with frequent administration practice. Although the OAS periodically brings its members foreign ministers together, this is the first time a meeting has been convened to deal with a single topic, U.S. officials said. At the conclusion of Wednesdays session, diplomats said they had discussed two resolutions. One, promoted by Caribbean nations, called on Venezuela to reconsider withdrawing from the OAS. A second more pointed resolution authored by the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Panama and Peru urged the Maduro administration not to go ahead with a constituent assembly that would rewrite the Venezuelan constitution. Many fear it would dissolve the few democratic institutions that remain and favor the ruling Socialist Party. Separately, the Venezuela opposition, emboldened by a string of increasingly massive street demonstrations, sharply criticized Wall Street for extending what it called a lifeline to the Maduro government. At issue is the purchase by Goldman Sachs of Venezuelan government bonds for a reported $865 million, a major discount for paper originally worth $2.8 billion. Goldman Sachs confirmed the purchase of the bonds, issued in 2014 by the state oil company PDVSA, after it was reported in the Wall Street Journal. We are invested in PDVSA bonds because, like many in the asset management industry, we believe the situation in the country must improve over time, Goldman said in a statement. The firm added that it made the purchase through a secondary dealer to avoid direct interaction with the Venezuelan government. That distinction meant nothing to the Venezuelan opposition, which accused Goldman of making a buck off the suffering of the Venezuelan people. The Trump administration previously has targeted the Maduro government, slapping economic sanctions on its vice president and pro-Maduro Supreme Court justices. Facebook

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Former FBI director spoke with new special counsel and is cleared to testify before Senate panel By Joseph Tanfani The special counsel investigating possible links between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign has cleared former FBI Director James Comey to testify before a congressional committee about his contacts with President Trump, according to an associate close to Comey. Comey met with Robert S. Mueller III, whom the Justice Department appointed on May 17 to investigate any Russian ties to the Trump campaign, and Mueller said he had no problems with Comeys testifying, the associate said. Trump abruptly fired Comey as head of the FBI on May 9. The president later said in an interview on NBC News that he was concerned about the FBI investigation into what he called the Russia thing. Comey reportedly wrote internal memos after his meetings with Trump. In one, he wrote that the president had requested he ease up on the FBI probe of Michael Flynn, who served as Trumps national security advisor until he was ousted in February for lying about his contacts with Russian officials. The Senate Intelligence Committee announced on May 19 that Comey had agreed to testify after the Memorial Day holiday. The hearing has not been scheduled. The FBI separately declined a request from the House Oversight Committee to turn over Comeys memos. The bureau said it would need to consult with Mueller before making any decisions. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the committee chairman, said in response that he would not push the matter. The focus of the committees investigation is the independence of the FBI and the events leading to Comeys firing, he wrote. In a separate development, a senior Justice Department lawyer with experience in complex financial fraud investigations has agreed to join Muellers investigation. Andrew Weissman has led the fraud section at Justice, where he oversaw probes into corporate wrongdoing at Volkswagen and Takata. Weissman also is a veteran of the FBI. Weissman is the highest-ranking Justice Department official to join the special counsel office being set up a few blocks from the main Justice building in downtown Washington. Mueller also hired two colleagues from the WilmerHale law firm, where he worked, and brought on a former Justice Department spokesman, Peter Carr, to handle media inquiries. Facebook

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Analysis: In President Trumps wake, divisions mark both Democratic and Republican parties By Cathleen Decker Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez address a crowd at the California party convention in May. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) Six months after President Trump breached long-standing political boundaries to win the White House, the nations major political parties still muddle in his wake. On the sun-swept lawn of the Hotel del Coronado two weeks ago, national Republican leaders sipped cocktails and listened to San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, one of the partys brightest lights in the most populous state, praise a brand of moderate Republicanism that looks nothing like the versions coming out of Washington  either the populism of the president or the more orthodox conservatism of congressional leaders. A week later, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez talked in a Sacramento interview of the remarkably constructive debate underway in his party, characterizing its divisions as largely in the past. Within hours, he and other party leaders were booed as they welcomed delegates to a state convention that would be filled with persistent internal warfare on healthcare and other issues. No political party is immune to disagreement; indeed the path to power often relies on combustible ideological diversity. But Democrats and Republicans alike seem particularly adrift and quarrelsome these days. Read More Facebook

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Trump preparing to pull U.S. from Paris climate accord, amid last-minute lobbying By Evan Halper President Trump hasnt made a final decision on whether the U.S. will quit the Paris Accord on climate change, but White House officials indicated Wednesday that he was headed in that direction, setting off a worldwide reaction. A flurry of leaks, counter-leaks and public statements thrust back into the spotlight a decision that has been agonized and untidy even by the standards of a White House known for internal drama. Wednesday morning, when officials told some news organizations that Trump had settled on pulling out of the climate agreement, seemingly everyone in the world jumped in to try to influence or spin his decision, from the Chinese government to the coal industry to the state of California. That offered a foretaste of the reaction Trump likely will receive if he does follow through on his vow to pull the United States out of the 195-nation pact, which President Obama hailed in 2015 as one of his major achievements. Other nations have swiftly moved to take over the leadership role on climate that the United States would be abandoning. Some states have followed suit, promising they would break with Washington to work with other countries in their efforts to contain global warming. During Trumps recent overseas trip, U.S. allies warned him that Americas broader diplomatic influence would be undercut if the administration gave up its seat at the climate negotiating table. All the public lobbying on Wednesday moved Trump to weigh in himself. He knocked down reports that he had decided to withdraw with a tweet announcing that he was still making up his mind. The mixed messages coming out of the White House left open the possibility that the original news reports reflected the views of officials who were aiming to steer the final outcome by presenting withdrawal as a done deal. Trumps schedule for the day includes meetings with advisors hoping to talk him into staying in the agreement, at least to some extent. If Trump does withdraw the U.S. fully from the Paris pact, scientists warn it will be a tremendous setback to the worldwide effort to contain temperatures from rising an average of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The consequences for the United States would extend beyond global warming. It will be a very big deal all over the world, said Todd Stern, the lead U.S. climate negotiator during the Obama administration. There will be consequential blowback with respect to our diplomatic position across the board. UPDATES 9:27 a.m.: This post was updated throughout with staff reporting and additional details. 6:23 a.m.: This post was updated with Trumps tweet. 6:04 a.m.: This post was updated throughout with additional details. Facebook

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U.S. Supreme Court makes it harder to sue police for barging into homes By David Savage The U.S. Supreme Court made it harder to sue police for barging into a home and provoking a shooting, setting aside a $4-million verdict against two Los Angeles County deputies on Tuesday. The money was awarded to a homeless couple who were startled and then shot when the two sheriffs deputies entered the shack where they were sleeping. The unanimous ruling rejected the so-called provocation rule that some lower courts have used. Under that rule, police can be sued for violating a victims constitutional rights against unreasonable searches if they provoked a confrontation that resulted in violence. Read More Facebook

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Trump lashes out at Germany over NATO spending and trade after Merkel questions the U.S. commitment to its allies By Brian Bennett (Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images) President Trump took aim at German trade practices and defense spending Tuesday following pointed criticism from Chancellor Angela Merkel that Germany may not be able to rely on its allies. We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change, Trump wrote in a tweet. Last week, White House spokespeople had denied that Trump criticized German trade practices after the German newspaper Der Spiegel quoted him as having done so. Trump unsettled Merkel and other allies during the recent NATO summit when, during his remarks, he did not mention the central commitment members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization make to defend each other. We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017 Trumps policy toward climate change is another point of contention with many European countries. Trump promised during the election to tear up the landmark Paris climate accord. Merkel said the conversation with the U.S. on climate change last week during the G-7 meetings in Sicily, which followed the NATO summit, was extremely difficult. During a campaign speech in Munich on Sunday, Merkel said Germany must rethink how much it can rely on its allies. The era in which we could rely completely on others is gone, at least partially, Merkel said. I have experienced that over the last several days. In a 2014 meeting, NATO defense ministers agreed that each state would move toward a goal of raising military spending to 2% of its annual economic output by the year 2024. German defense spending is below that goal. The U.S. trade deficit with Germany shrank to $65 billion in 2016 from $75 billion the year before. Facebook

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Consumers spend at fastest pace in four months in a sign of spring economic rebound By Jim Puzzanghera (Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press) Americans ratcheted up their spending in April at the fastest pace in four months, in a sign the economy has rebounded this spring after a lackluster winter. The new data also could help push Federal Reserve officials to hike a key interest rate again when they meet in two weeks. Personal consumption expenditures increased 0.4% in April, up from 0.3% the previous month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Americans had more money to spend, with personal incomes also rising 0.4%  twice the pace of growth in March. Read More Facebook

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White House communications director Michael Dubke resigns By Associated Press White House Communications Director Mike Dubke listens as a reporter asks a question during a press conference in the East Room of the White House on April 20. (Shawn Thew / EPA) White House communications director Michael Dubke has resigned. Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor, told The Associated Press that Dubke handed in his resignation before President Donald Trump left for his international trip earlier this month. In an interview on Fox News on Tuesday, Conway said Dubke made very clear that he would see through the presidents international trip, and come to work every day and work hard even through that trip because there was much to do here back at the White House. Dubke issued a statement Tuesday morning: It has been my great honor to serve President Trump and this administration. It has also been my distinct pleasure to work side-by-side, day-by-day with the staff of the communications and press departments. A Republican consultant, Dubke joined the White House team in February after campaign aide Jason Miller  Trumps original choice for communications director  withdrew from consideration. Dubke founded Crossroads Media, a GOP firm that specializes in political advertising. -- 6:03 a.m.: Updated with Dubkes statement Facebook

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Should Jared Kushner keep his security clearance? Adam Schiff isnt sure By Laura King The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), says hes not sure that President Trumps son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, should retain his security clearance. The California Democrat, who has been a sharp critic of Trump, also said in an interview aired Sunday that national security advisor H.R. McMaster, a highly respected military officer, had been tarnished by his association with the White House. Schiffs comments, on ABCs This Week, came amid growing questions about Kushners contacts with Russian officials before Trump took office. Trump has denounced the latest round of news reports, saying that some of them could be based on fabricated sources. Top Trump aides, including John F. Kelly, the secretary of Homeland Security, pushed back Sunday against the suggestion that there was anything untoward about establishing back channel communications with the Russians during the presidential transition. Schiff said he regretted that McMaster had done so as well, saying he believed the White House used the solid reputations of people like him to back up dubious actions. Sadly, I think this is an administration that takes in people with good credibility and chews them out and spits out their credibility at the same time, said Schiff, who acknowledged that what McMaster said about back channel communications was true in the abstract. I think anyone within the Trump orbit is at risk of being used, he said. Kelly, in separate talk-show appearances on Sunday, said there was nothing untoward about an incoming administration establishing communications with a foreign power in order to lay the groundwork for better relations. Schiff declined to discuss the substance of the allegations regarding Kushners contact with Russian officials during the transition and whether Kushner had been forthcoming about them, but said enough questions had been raised that his access to top-secret intelligence should be scrutinized. I think we need to get to the bottom of these allegations, Schiff said. But I do think there ought to be a review of his security clearance to find out whether he was truthful, whether he was candid. If not, then theres no way he can maintain that kind of a clearance. Schiff was also critical of continuing involvement in aspects of the Russia probe by fellow Californian Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who stepped aside from the probe earlier this year after the House Ethics Committee began investigating whether he had improperly revealed classified information. Nunes remains involved in decision-making about the issuance of subpoenas, Schiff said, adding: I dont think that he should, given that he has stepped aside or recused himself. The committee is investigating Russian entanglements by figures in Trumps circle, including fired national security advisor Michael Flynn, who has been the target of multiple subpoenas. Facebook

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Trump still wide open on climate change, Pentagon chief says By Laura King With President Trump set to make a decision this week about whether the U.S. should remain part of the landmark Paris climate accord, Defense Secretary James Mattis said Trump remains wide open on the issue. During a visit to Europe that ended Saturday, Trump dismayed European allies by refusing to commit to remaining in the 2015 accord during talks with European Union officials in Brussels and at the Group of Seven gathering in Sicily. The president said in a tweet that he will make a decision this week. Mattis, who was present at some of the Brussels talks, said that Trump is still making up his mind, and that he has been inquisitive about other leaders opinions. The president was open  he was curious about why others were in the position they were in, his counterparts in other nations, the Defense secretary said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS Face the Nation. And Im quite certain the president is wide open on this issue as he takes in the pros and cons of that accord. During his European trip, Trump met privately at the Vatican with Pope Francis, who presented him with a copy of his papal encyclical on environment and climate change. French President Emmanuel Macron, who met with Trump in Brussels, also said he had pressed the issue with the U.S. president, though the White House did not mention that appeal in a summary of their meeting. Facebook

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Homeland Security secretary defends Jared Kushner, blasts Manchester intelligence leaks By Laura King There is nothing inherently wrong with an incoming presidential administration establishing back channel communications with a foreign power such as Russia, Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly said Sunday. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Kelly was asked about reports by the Washington Post and other outlets that President Trumps son-in-law and close advisor, Jared Kushner, sought to set up secret lines of communication with Russian officials prior to Trump being sworn in. The retired general did not confirm the reports, but said the principle of establishing secretive contacts during a presidential transition doesnt bother me and is a legitimate means of building relationships. I think that any channel of communication, back or otherwise, with a country like Russia is a good thing, he said. Kelly did not address a central element of the reports  that Kushner discussed the possibility of using Russian communications channels from a Russia diplomatic outpost to shield from U.S. intelligence surveillance whatever discussions Trump transition officials wanted to have with Moscow. The FBI, a special counsel and multiple congressional committees are probing Russian interference in the presidential campaign and whether the Trump camp colluded in it. The U.S. intelligence community says Russian cyberattacks were meant to boost Trump and harm his opponent, Hillary Clinton. In a separate interview on NBCs Meet the Press, Kelly defended the integrity of Kushner, whose involvement in communications with Russia has brought the investigation closer to Trump personally than has previous scrutiny of others in his campaign circle or the White House. Calling Kushner a great guy, a decent guy, the Homeland Security secretary said the presidents son-in-laws No. 1 interest, really, is the nation. Also in the NBC interview, Kelly excoriated intelligence leaks in the wake of last weeks deadly bombing in Manchester, England. British officials including Prime Minister Theresa May were angered by disclosures about details of the investigation, including the release of the dead attackers name and detailed photos from the bomb scene that were published by the New York Times. Several outlets cited unnamed U.S. officials as the source of the information including the bombers identity. The Times did not say how it obtained the photos. Britain routinely shares intelligence with close allies like the United States with the expectation that it will be kept confidential. Kelly said that failing to keep such secrets could seriously damage intelligence-sharing arrangements with other nations. I believe when you leak the kind of information that seems to be routinely leaked - high, high level of classification I think its darn close to treason, Kelly said. It is not clear what level of classification, if any, the information about the British investigation would have had. Trump himself, who recently caused controversy when he passed sensitive intelligence on Islamic State to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and discussed the location of U.S. nuclear submarines with the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has denounced the Manchester leaks and vowed to track down the source or sources. Facebook

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In tweets, Trump says stories based on White House leaks are fabricated By Laura King President Trump is back  and tweeting. In a Sunday morning series of posts on Twitter, the president repeated his denunciations of the fake media, celebrated the Republican victory in a Montana special election and declared his overseas trip a success. Trump returned to the White House late Saturday after a swing through the Middle East and Europe, the first foreign trip of his presidency. During it, he tweeted only sparingly. While Trump was away, controversy continued to swirl around his White House, with media reports focusing on son-in-law Jared Kushners role in Trump campaign contacts with Russian officials. The GOP healthcare plan and Trumps budget also came under withering scrutiny during the presidents absence. In Sundays tweets, Trump said cascading leaks from within his administration were in fact fabricated lies by news organizations based on sources that did not exist. One tweet was corrected to fix the spelling of exist. It is my opinion that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2017 Trump also complained that the special congressional election in Montana, called to fill the seat vacated when Ryan Zinke became his Interior secretary, was such a big deal to Dems & Fake News until the Republican won. The V was poorly covered, he said, referring to the Republican victory. The victory by Republican candidate Greg Gianforte received extensive coverage. It was widely expected, given Montanas significant Republican edge, but made more suspenseful on the eve of the election when Gianforte was charged with misdemeanor assault for an incident in which he struck a reporter who had asked him a question. The president received mixed reviews for his inaugural overseas venture. He was praised by some for his outreach to Sunni Arab allies in the Persian Gulf, but continued his administrations practice of making no public criticism of serious human rights violations. In Europe, he rattled allies by declining to explicitly endorse the NATO alliances bedrock common defense pledge or pledge to adhere to the Paris climate accord. Whatever the commentary surrounding the trip, Trump counted it a success. Hard work but big results, he wrote. Facebook

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Trumps international trip underscored what America First looks like on the world stage By Michael Memoli Donald Trump made no secret during the presidential campaign of his disdain for Americas trading partners, his skepticism of longtime alliances and his eagerness to refocus U.S. foreign policy on the single-minded pursuit of American security. That was the largely the president the world got as Trump made his way through the Middle East and Western Europe over the last nine days, Trumps first foreign trip may have produced memorable, and at time cringe-inducing, images of the new president, whether grasping a glowing orb in Saudi Arabia or shoving the prime minister of Montenegro at a NATO meeting in Brussels. But perhaps most profoundly, the trip underscored what America First, as Trump has branded his governing philosophy, looks like on the world stage. Read More Facebook

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Trump says hell decide on Paris climate deal next week By Associated Press Seven wealthy democracies ended their summit Saturday in Italy without unanimous agreement on climate change, as the Trump administration plans to take more time to say whether the U.S. is going to remain in the Paris accord on limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The other six nations in the Group of Seven agreed to stick with their commitment to implement the 2015 Paris deal that aims to slow down global warming. The final G-7 statement, issued after two days of talks in the seaside town of Taormina, said the U.S. is in the process of reviewing its policies on climate change and on the Paris agreement and thus is not in a position to join the consensus on these topics. Trump tweeted he would decide his stance on the Paris agreement next week. The announcement on the final day of the U.S. presidents first international trip comes after he declined to commit to staying in the sweeping climate deal, resisting intense international pressure from his peers at the summit. I will make my final decision on the Paris Accord next week!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2017 Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, who chaired the meeting, said the other six wont change our position on climate change one millimeter. The U.S. hasnt decided yet. I hope they decide in the right way. Gentiloni said climate was not a minor point and that he hoped the United States would decide soon and well because the Paris accords need the contribution of the United States. French President Emmanuel Macron also chimed in on the climate issue, praising Trumps capacity to listen. Macron said he told Trump it is indispensable for the reputation of the United States and the interest of the Americans themselves that the United States remain committed to the Paris climate agreement. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was more downbeat, calling the G-7 climate talks very unsatisfactory. Facebook

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Everyones a winner! Or what to take away from that special congressional race in Montana By Mark Z. Barabak Republicans were celebrating Friday, and relieved, and it was easy to see why: The party hung on to Montanas sole congressional seat even though its candidate faced a freshly lodged criminal charge for physically assaulting a reporter on election eve. Though they fell short in yet another special election  Greg Gianforte won handily, 50% to 44%  Democrats also found reason to be pleased: Their candidate, flawed as he was, continued a pattern of polling better than might be expected  over-performing, to use the political parlance, and that could hold future promise. Its possible, as elections analyst Nathan Gonzales put it, to lose and still have momentum. Read More Facebook

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In commencement address, Hillary Clinton remembers fallout from Nixon, makes subtle jab at President Trump By Kurtis Lee Hillary Clinton delivers the commencement address at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., on Friday. (Josh Reynolds / Associated Press) Hillary Clinton delivered a subtle dig at President Trump on Friday, offering some parallels between his presidency and that of former President Nixon. While delivering a commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, a private womens liberal arts school in Massachusetts, Clinton, without naming Trump, recalled how many young people in the 1970s reacted to Nixons reelection and later battles with the Justice Department. We were furious about the past presidential election of a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment for obstruction of justice, she said, pausing to note she was referring to Nixon. Actually, Nixon was not impeached, though many in Congress, including members of his own party, called for it. Clinton said Nixons resignation came after he fired the person heading the investigation into him at the Department of Justice. In 1973, Nixon ordered Justice Department officials to fire a special prosecutor who was looking into taped conversations recorded in the Oval Office as part of the Watergate investigation. A year later, in August 1974, Nixon resigned. Some political observers  mostly Democrats -- have compared Trumps recent firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, who was overseeing an investigation of possible collusion between Russians and Trumps campaign, to Nixons actions. Last week, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) called for Trump to be impeached. Clinton, who has made few public appearances since Trump defeated her in last years presidential election, also assailed the Republicans new budget proposal. She called the budget, which proposes cuts to education and Medicaid, an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us  the youngest, the oldest, the poorest and hard-working people who need a little help to gain or hang on to a decent, middle-class life. In a statement, the Republican National Committee said Clinton was lashing out after her election loss. Clinton graduated from Wellesley in 1969 and last delivered a commencement address at the school in 1992. Facebook

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At G-7 Summit, a day of clarification for the White House By Michael A. Memoli (Sean Gallup / Getty Images) As President Trump met with leaders of the worlds leading economies here Friday within miles of an active volcano, the White House was working to ease a pair of diplomatic eruptions. Trump was due to meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May on the sidelines of the G-7 Summit in this coastal Sicilian resort town, amid tensions between their countries, longtime allies, following leaks to U.S. media outlets involving Britains investigation of the Manchester terrorist bombing. Separately, a top White House adviser partially confirmed reports that Trump had said Germany is very bad during Thursdays NATO meetings in Brussels, but clarified that the president was referring only to German trade policies. Trump said, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, See the millions of cars they are selling to the U.S.? Terrible. We will stop this. Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, acknowledged that Trump made the remark but added that the president doesnt have a problem with Germany. He said his dad is from Germany. He said I dont have a problem with Germany, I have a problem with German trade, Cohn said. Press access to the G-7 meetings has been extremely limited, though the surrounding setting has produced abundant compelling visuals. Editorial press access extremely limited for G7 meetings. But man, pretty pictures & good times for Taormina Chamber of Commerce (via AP) pic.twitter.com/WT2EdKrwJ5  Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) May 26, 2017 Trump tweeted that he expected to spend the day focused on economic growth, terrorism and security. The summit, and Trumps eight-day inaugural foreign trip, ends Saturday. Other allies here were likely to press Trump on another issue: climate change, specifically whether Trump will carry out his campaign promise to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate deal. Trump was hoping to better understand the European position, Cohn said. White House officials have said the president will make a decision once he is back in the United States. He knows that in the U.S. theres very strong opinions on both sides but he also knows that Paris has important meaning to many of the European leaders. And he wants to clearly hear what the European leaders have to say, Cohn said. Facebook

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As Trump wavers over Paris climate accord, European leaders give him an earful By Evan Halper Mining operation near Grevenbroich, Germany. (Martin Meissner / Associated Press) With President Trump balking on his vow to shred the Obama-negotiated Paris agreement on climate change, the last place the pacts staunch opponents wanted to see the president is where he will be this weekend  meeting other world leaders unanimous in their warnings that withdrawal from the accord would seriously damage Americas economy and world stature. Trump has repeatedly delayed fulfilling his campaign pledge to move against the agreement. The longer the White House deliberates over Paris, the more Trump seems to be searching for a face-saving excuse to walk back his previous position. The White House indecision over the climate accord  which has the support of every nation except Syria and Nicaragua  reflects a deeply divided worldview in a Trump inner circle now packed with establishment Republicans. The issue also presents yet another policy reckoning for Trump. On the campaign trail, he vowed to strike blows against the existing world order. But on the Paris agreement, as on other matters, he is finding that political backup for such pledges can fade quickly when the moves lack robust support from major U.S. companies or majority voting blocs. Read More Facebook

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Overcoming assault charge, Republican Greg Gianforte wins Montana congressional seat By Mark Z. Barabak Republican Greg Gianforte overcame a last-minute assault charge to win Montanas special congressional election Thursday, keeping its lone House seat in GOP hands and dealing Democrats a setback in their bid to gain a red-state toehold ahead of the 2018 midterm election. Gianforte, 56, a wealthy businessman who ran unsuccessfully for governor in November, had long been the front-runner against Democrat Rob Quist, a professional bluegrass musician making his first run for public office. With more than 90% of the votes counted, Gianforte was holding a healthy lead with just over 50% support. Appearing at an exuberant victory rally in Bozeman, the congressman-elect hushed the crowd and apologized to the reporter with whom he tangled on election eve, reversing his campaigns initial assertion that the journalist was to blame. Read More Facebook

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FBI investigating Kushner meetings, report says; House leader seeks more Comey documents By Associated Press (Andrew Harrer / Getty Images) The chairman of the House Oversight Committee asked the FBI on Thursday to turn over more documents about former FBI Director James B. Comeys interactions with the White House and Justice Department, including materials dating back nearly four years to the Obama administration. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that the FBI is investigating meetings that President Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had in December with Russian officials. The FBI and the Oversight Committee  as well as several other congressional panels  are looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. Trump fired Comey on May 9 amid questions about the FBIs investigation, which is now being led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a former FBI director. Kushner, a key White House advisor, had meetings late last year with Russias ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, and Russian banker Sergey Gorkov. The Post story cited anonymous people familiar with the investigation, who said the FBI investigation does not mean that Kushner is suspected of a crime. Kushners attorney, Jamie Gorelick, released a statement saying: Mr. Kushner previously volunteered to share with Congress what he knows about these meetings. He will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry. Earlier Thursday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz told acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe that he wants records of Comeys contacts with the White House and Justice Department dating to September 2013, when Comey was sworn in as FBI director under President Obama. In a letter to McCabe, Chaffetz said he is seeking to review Comeys memos and other written materials so he can better understand Comeys communications with the White House and attorney generals office. Facebook

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Banks want higher debit-card swipe fees, but an effort to allow them has crumbled By Jim Puzzanghera Banks had hoped Congress would let them charge merchants higher fees to process debit card purchases, but an effort to allow that has crumbled  a victory for retailers and, possibly, shoppers who might have had to shoulder those costs. In the latest chapter of a long-running fight, a repeal of federal limits on so-called swipe fees no longer will be part of a House financial regulation bill, said the legislations author, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas). Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he decided to strip the provision from the bill because many lawmakers are balking at removing the limits. Read More Facebook

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Appeals court rules against Trump travel ban By David Lauter A federal appeals court has ruled against President Trumps travel ban, upholding a nationwide injunction barring the administration from enforcing the executive order. The ruling is the latest legal setback for Trump on the travel issue and, like several previous court rulings, the outcome rested heavily on his own words. Trumps order restricting travel from six majority-Muslim countries speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination, Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in his ruling. Read the 4th Circuits decision to uphold the block on Trumps travel ban The 10-3 ruling included numerous citations to campaign statements in which Trump called for a ban on Muslims immigrating to the United States. The plaintiffs who have challenged the travel order have argued that it is a disguised version of the Muslim ban that he called for during the campaign. Trumps statements provide direct, specific evidence of what motivated both EO-1 and EO-2, the court said, referring to ther first and second versions of the travel order: President Trumps desire to exclude Muslims from the United States. The 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, Va., is one of two appeals courts that have recently heard arguments on the travel ban. A similar case is pending before the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco. Read More Facebook

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Obama, in Berlin with Merkel, says world cant hide behind a wall By Erik Kirschbaum Hours before German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew to Brussels to meet with President Trump and other NATO heads of state, she rekindled an old acquaintance with Trumps predecessor, Barack Obama. About 70,000 people packed an avenue by Berlins landmark Brandenburg Gate on Thursday to hear the two leaders speak, with cheers and chants of Barack, Barack! breaking out when the former president took the stage. Without mentioning Trump by name, Obama spoke of the need for universal healthcare and a nuanced approach to immigration in response to security threats. This is a new world we live in  we cant isolate ourselves, the former president declared, with Merkel looking on. We cant hide behind a wall. Obama spoke of this weeks deadly bombing at a pop concert in Manchester, England, saying leaders had to find ways to balance security fears and fundamental rights. One of the biggest challenges is how do you protect your country and your citizens from the kinds of things that we just saw in Manchester, he said. And how do you do it in a way that is consistent with your values and your ideals? Making his first European speech since his presidential term ended, Obama told the crowd he had spent the last four months trying to catch up with my sleep and devoting more time to his family. Im very proud of the work I did as president, he said to more cheers, adding that he considered healthcare reform a signature achievement. Republicans are now in the midst of trying to dismantle his Affordable Care Act. My hope was to get 100% of people healthcare, he said. We didnt quite achieve that, but we were able to get 20 million people healthcare who didnt have it before. Obamas speech was not timed to coincide with Trumps first visit to Europe as president, aides said. The invitation was extended before Trumps trip to Brussels  the fourth leg on multi-stop tour  was scheduled. Facebook

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Macron says he pressed Trump on climate accord By Catherine Stupp French President Emmanuel Macron, who met President Trump for the first time on Thursday, said he urged the U.S. leader to respect the Paris climate accord. The White House, however, did not mention the issue in its readout on Trumps working lunch in Brussels with the newly elected French president. Macron told reporters as he headed into the meeting that climate change would be one of the issues he raised, along with concerns about terrorism and the economy. Afterward, at a news conference, the French president said that in his talk with Trump, he reiterated the importance of the landmark climate accord. No hasty decision on this subject should be taken by the U.S., Macron said. Our collective responsibility is to make sure this commitment remains a global commitment. Referring to the agreement, he added: Its one of a kind. In its readout, the White House said Trump urged Macron to meet NATO commitments on French defense spending and help ensure that the alliance is focused on counter-terrorism. It also said the two leaders talked about the importance of defeating Islamic State and other vital issues. Facebook

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Trump lawyers ask Supreme Court to reject 2nd Amendment claim by men who lost gun rights over nonviolent crimes By David Savage President Trump speaks at an NRA event in Atlanta in April. ( Scott Olson / Getty Images) Trump administration lawyers are urging the Supreme Court to reject a 2nd Amendment claim that would restore the right to own a gun for two Pennsylvania men who were convicted more than 20 years ago of nonviolent crimes. The case of Sessions vs. Binderup puts the new administration in a potentially awkward spot, considering President Trumps repeated assurances during the campaign that he would protect gun ownership rights under the 2nd Amendment. But the Justice Department under Trump has embraced the same position in this case that was adopted under President Obama: to defend strict enforcement of a long-standing federal law that bars convicted criminals from ever owning a gun, even when their crimes did not involve violence. Read More Facebook

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Former Sen. Joe Lieberman withdraws from FBI director search By Associated Press (AFP/Getty Images) Former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut has withdrawn his name from consideration for the role of FBI director. Lieberman interviewed last week with President Trump, who publicly identified him as a leading candidate. But in a letter sent to the White House, Lieberman says hes pulling out. He says he wants to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, given Trumps hiring of one of Liebermans law partners to represent him in the investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. The White House declined to comment. Several other people interviewed for the job have also withdrawn from consideration. Trump fired former FBI Director James B. Comey earlier this month. Facebook

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At NATO celebration, Trump tells allies to spend more on defense By Michael A. Memoli (Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images) President Trump used his first NATO meeting to rebuke member nations who fail to meet the trans-Atlantic alliances defense spending target, saying American taxpayers unfairly are left to pick up the slack. Speaking at dedication ceremonies for NATOs new headquarters, Trump noted that the defense budgets of 23 of the 28 members dont meet a target equal to 2% of each respective nations economic output, while the United States has spent more on defense in eight years than the other 27 combined. Many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years, he said. We have to make up for the many years lost. By his scolding, Trump was directly delivering to NATO allies the criticism that was a staple of his nationalist campaign for president. But his lecture came at an event intended to be celebratory, showcasing unity and resolve for the nearly 70-year-old alliance: the dedication of its shining, glass-enclosed new headquarters in Belgiums capital. The ceremony also was meant to call attention to the fact that the only time NATO has invoked its collective defense agreement was on behalf of the United States, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Trump stood beside a section of wrenched steel from the downed World Trade Center Towers, a relic NATO calls the Article V artifact, to signify that post-9/11 invocation of the NATO charters article holding that an attack on any one member would be considered an attack on all. Speaking to reporters before the president arrived, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged that the alliance had a long way to go to meet its goals. But its much better than it was just two years ago, he said. The reality is that when we decrease defense spending when tensions are going down, as we did after the end of the Cold War, we have to be able to increase defense spending when tensions are going up. And now we see that tensions are going up. Facebook

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Watch: Trump lectures NATO leaders on defense spending By L.A. Times staff  As NATO leaders looked on, President Trump told NATO members that they must finally contribute their fair share of defense payments. President Trump lectured members of the NATO alliance on Thursday, urging them to pay their fair share on defense. As NATO leaders looked on during a ceremony at the alliances new headquarters, Trump said that member nations must finally contribute their fair share and meet their obligations. The president has been urging NATO leaders to live up to a 2011 decision to increase spending on defense to 2% of GDP by 2024. Trump said 23 of the 28 member nations are not paying what they should and that the situation is not fair to the people of the United States. Facebook

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President Trump promises to review Manchester investigation leaks after anger from Britain By Noah Bierman Trying to head off a diplomatic rift with Britain, President Trump on Thursday issued a statement promising a complete review of possible intelligence leaks related to this weeks deadly terrorist attack at a Manchester concert. Some British officials have suggested that U.S. officials are leaking sensitive information to American media outlets about the investigation into the attack. The New York Times posted forensic photographs collected from the scene of the Manchester concert bombing, which upset British officials. Whether the photographs were provided by U.S. officials or came from some other source is not publicly known. Trump avoided questions earlier Thursday about the possible leaks. His statement came just before he was set to address NATO at its new headquarters in a speech considered pivotal to his first trip abroad as president. British Prime Minister Theresa May was expected to confront Trump over the issue when they meet later in the day. May told reporters as she entered the NATO gathering that she would make clear to Trump that intelligence shared between law enforcement agencies must remain secure. We have a special relationship with the USA. Its our deepest defense and security partnership that we have, she said. Of course that partnership is built on trust, and part of that trust is knowing that intelligence can be shared confidently, and I will be making clear to President Trump today that intelligence shared between law enforcement agencies must remain secure. In his statement, Trump said that the alleged leaks coming out of government agencies are deeply troubling. These leaks have been going on for a long time, and my Administration will get to the bottom of this. The leaks of sensitive information pose a grave threat to our national security. The statement continued with a promise to request the Department of Justice and other relevant agencies to

launch a complete review of this matter, and if appropriate, the

culprit should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Trump also reiterated said there is no relationship we cherish more than the special relationship between the two countries. Separate leaks within his own administration and related to investigations of his campaign ties to Russia have also been a source of anger to Trump. Facebook

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Montanas congressional election: that assault charge, the Trump factor, and why is it on a weird day (Thursday)? By Mark Z. Barabak Its election day in Montana after a wild 24 hours, with voters deciding who will fill the House seat vacated when Republican Ryan Zinke left to head the Interior Department under President Trump. The contest Thursday has drawn nationwide attention and an extraordinary amount of money  and that was before the GOP front-runner was accused of attacking a national political reporter. The events have turned the contest into one of the strangest in memory. Read More Facebook

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Trump ignores questions about intelligence sharing ahead of NATO meeting By Michael A. Memoli (Peter Dejoing / Associated Press) President Trump refused to answer questions Thursday about concerns among key allies on intelligence sharing with the United States, just as he prepares to join many of them here to inaugurate the new NATO headquarters. During a brief photo opportunity at his first meeting with Emmanuel Macron, Frances newly elected president, Trump for a second time remained silent as a reporter asked about a potential breakdown in the U.S.-United Kingdom intelligence-sharing relationship. British Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to press Trump on the issue when they meet later Thursday, after the New York Times posted forensic photographs collected from the scene of the Manchester concert bombing. The acting U.S. ambassador to Britain told the BBC that the leaks were deeply distressing. Speaking to reporters at the site of a NATO leaders meeting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also deflected questions about whether the incident has led him to reevaluate his nations intelligence-sharing arrangements. We will continue to work with all our allies to keep Canadians and all citizens around the world safe, he said. Ahead of a working lunch with Macron, Trump said terrorism was at the top of the agenda, while also offering his congratulations to the 39-year-old for his tremendous victory. All over the world, theyre talking about it, he said. In addition to terrorism and the economy, Macron said he planned to discuss climate change and energy. His nation hosted the climate summit that produced the agreement under which countries pledged to reduce their carbon emissions, of which the Trump administration is considering dropping out. Trump also ignored a question about whether former national security advisor Michael Flynn should cooperate with the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has no news conference scheduled with reporters for the entirety of his eight-day foreign trip, which ends Saturday. Facebook

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Trump visits European Union headquarters; EU leaders cite some differences By Catherine Stupp Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said Thursday that differences remain between the Trump administration and the European Union on Russia, energy and trade. I am not 100 percent sure that we can say today that we have a common opinion about Russia, Tusk, a former Polish prime minister who is sometimes called the other Donald, said after a meeting with President Trump at EU headquarters. Tusk added that while some issues remain open, like climate and trade, the leaders agreed first and foremost on the need to combat terrorism. EU officials were skeptical in advance of Trumps visit. Their concerns were driven in part by the U.S. leaders positive stance on Britains vote last year to leave the bloc. Trump at the time called it a great idea. However, he has since spoken of the importance of European unity. European officials are also concerned that the Trump administration might withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global warming, and turn away from trade arrangements with the EU. Trumps visit to Brussels marked the fourth leg of his first overseas trip. Before heading into the talks with Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, he spoke enthusiastically about his earlier stops in Saudi Arabia and at the Vatican. His ceremonial welcome last week in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, Trump told the European officials, was beyond anything anyones seen. The Saudis staged elaborate festivities including a traditional sword dance. And the president called his private encounter with Pope Francis on Wednesday very impressive. The president and the pontiff met privately for half an hour, and Francis presented Trump with gifts including a copy of a papal encyclical on climate change. The pope was terrific, Trump said. After the visit to the EUs sprawling new headquarters, Trump headed to a luncheon with the newly elected French president, Emmanuel Macron. The two men were meeting for the first time. During the French presidential campaign, Trump had praised Macrons far-right opponent Marine Le Pen for her tough positions on immigration and borders, but he had stopped short of endorsing her. Facebook

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Manchester attack makes terrorism the focus of Trumps NATO meeting By Michael A. Memoli (Emmanuel Dunand / AFP/Getty Images) The deadly suicide bombing in Britain and threats of more attacks thrust counter-terrorism to the top of President Trumps agenda for talks with NATO leaders here on Thursday, buttressing his bid to enlist the alliance he had called obsolete to join the fight against Islamic State. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, anticipating the alliance meetings, told reporters flying with the president to Brussels from Rome, where Trump met Pope Francis earlier Wednesday, that Mondays attack in Britain is going to strengthen the resolve in this fight against terrorism. Tillerson stopped short of predicting that NATO would agree to formally join the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, but said it would be a really important step if the alliance did so. The attack, which killed 22 people at a pop concert and was said to be the work of a 22-year-old British man whose family is from Libya, also figured in Trumps brief meeting with the pope at the Vatican. Read More Facebook

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Analysis says 23 million more people would be uninsured by 2026 under GOP healthcare bill By Noam N. Levey (Evan Vucci / Associated Press) An analysis released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office finds that the Republican healthcare bill that passed the House earlier this month would nearly double the number of Americans without health insurance over the next decade. The report likely will complicate Republican efforts to get the controversial bill through the Senate. Read More Facebook

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By throwing Americas lot in with Sunni Arabs, does Trump miss opportunities with Iran? By Tracy Wilkinson On his first official trip to the Middle East, President Trump has resoundingly thrown Americas lot in with Sunni Arab states and cast Shiite Iran as a global pariah, even as Iranians reelected a president who has offered to work with the West. During his two days in Riyadh, Trumps full-throated support for the autocratic monarchies in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, as well as his fierce denunciation of Iran, allowed him to claim an historic new coalition of interests. In the next two days, in Jerusalem, he doubled down and argued that Israel and the Arabs should join forces against Iran and along the way, resolve Israels conflict with Palestinians in a grand bargain that has eluded diplomats for decades. But as he departed for Rome on Tuesday, Trump had little to show beyond lofty rhetoric, symbolic visits and a shower of flattery from kings, potentates and a prime minister. Read More Facebook

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Fed officials appear ready for another interest rate hike and are considering how to reduce assets By Jim Puzzanghera Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen (Michael Dwyer / Associated Press) Most Federal Reserve monetary policymakers indicated they were ready for another small interest rate hike -- perhaps as soon as next month -- if economic data strengthened as expected following a weak winter, according to an account released Wednesday of their most recent meeting. Fed officials also considered a plan to start reducing the $4.5 trillion in Treasury and mortgage securities and other assets the central bank has purchased since 2008 in an attempt to stimulate the economy. The plan, which they said likely would begin later this year, would involve slowly allowing some of the maturing securities to be cashed in instead of reinvesting the money in new securities, the meeting minutes showed. The goal would be to avoid roiling financial markets and causing interest rates to jump. Read More Facebook

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So whats with the president and Melania Trump holding, or not holding, hands? By Tom Kington First Lady Melania Trump does not say much in public, but her actions seemed to speak louder than words  or at least sent tongues wagging  when she appeared to rebuff the presidents proffered hand as the couple descended from their plane in Rome late Tuesday. As President Trump looked to take her hand on the steps of Air Force One, Melania Trump quickly moved it out of reach, raising it to her head to adjust her hair. That made for two such episodes in two days. She had appeared to brush Trumps hand away at the airport in Tel Aviv during the previous stop in the presidents foreign tour. Video of that scene, often accompanied by snarky commentary, quickly went viral. Compare that to Melania Trumps positively hands-on visit on Wednesday to a Rome childrens hospital, Bambino Gesu, following the couples visit with Pope Francis. After praying to a statue of the Madonna at the entrance to the hospital, the Catholic first lady smiled cheerfully and chatted to children, posing for selfies and providing a very happy, maternal presence, according to one onlooker. Great visiting you! Stay strong and positive! Much love, Melania Trump, she wrote in the visitors book. Staff at the hospital said Melania Trump had been buoyed by her meeting with Pope Francis, and further proof came when photos emerged of the Trumps quick visit to the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday. As the president and first lady stood together to admire Michelangelos 16th century fresco, the Last Judgment, they held hands. Facebook

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House Intelligence Committee will subpoena Michael Flynn, Schiff says By Sarah D. Wire The House Intelligence Committee is preparing to issue subpoenas to President Trumps former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, according to the committees ranking Democrat, following the lead of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) said the House subpoenas will be designed to maximize our chance of getting the information we need for the committees investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. I think we need to use whatever compulsory [processes] necessary to get the information that he possesses, Schiff said. Earlier this week, Flynns lawyers said he would refuse separate Senate subpoenas for any records about his former business dealings with Russia, citing his constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination. The Senate committee then issued separate subpoenas to two of Flynns businesses, which the panel said were not entitled to 5th Amendment protections. A federal grand jury in Virginia also has issued subpoenas regarding Flynns business dealings with Turkey and Russia, and the newly appointed special counsel investigating the Russia matter, Robert Mueller III, is expected to focus on Flynns role as well. Given the criminal investigations, Schiff said the House panel is highly unlikely to grant Flynns earlier request, through his lawyers, for immunity in exchange for his testimony. He said the panel would need more information about what Flynn would say and whether the testimony would be truthful. It also would need to ensure that granting immunity wouldnt affect the special counsels ongoing investigation, he said. Thats not somthinge I think we would entertain until far later, if at all, said Schiff, a former prosecutor. Certainly count me as very skeptical that we would get to that point. Trump forced Flynn to resign as national security advisor in February after news accounts revealed Flynn had misled White House officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, about his contacts with Russian officials. Schiff spoke to reporters at a breakfast Wednesday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. Facebook

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Watch live: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos testifies on Trumps budget Follow live coverage from Times education reporter Joy Resmovits: Facebook

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Israel acknowledges pinpoint change needed after Trump intelligence disclosure By Joshua Mitnick After a week of silence, Israel publicly acknowledged for the first time, though in oblique terms, that it was the source of sensitive intelligence that President Trump shared with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last week in a White House meeting. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israels army radio on Wednesday that Israeli officials had carried out an internal pinpoint correction after discussing and reviewing the episode. Lieberman did not elaborate, and declined to confirm or deny whether Trumps remarks had endangered an agent of Israel. But he said his government considered the matter resolved. Everything that needed to be clarified with the friends in the U.S. was done, he said. All of the conclusions we had to draw  it was all done. The Israeli defense ministers comments came the day after Trump wrapped up a two-day visit to Israel and the West Bank. When word of Trumps disclosure to Lavrov emerged in U.S. news reports last week, the defense minister and other Israeli leaders confined themselves to expressing public confidence in the two countries intelligence cooperation. Israel did not comment more directly, presumably to avoid embarrassing the U.S. president just before his visit. But Trump himself mentioned the controversy anyway, in an awkward on-camera moment during the trip. With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu biting his lip alongside, Trump volunteered to reporters being hustled out of a news appearance: Just so you know, I never mentioned the word or name Israel. Never mentioned it during the conversation. News reports, however, had not said the president mentioned Israel in connection with the intelligence, only that the specificity of his remarks to Lavrov would in all likelihood have allowed the Russians to determine the source. The White House at first denied Trumps disclosure to Lavrov had occurred as reported, but then the president himself tweeted about it, saying he had the right to share information as he deemed fit. Facebook

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Trump calls meeting with Pope Francis an honor By Michael A. Memoli "A very great honor," Trump says to the pope when they began their meeting in the pope's private study pic.twitter.com/NGsbsahAyT  Carol Lee (@carolelee) May 24, 2017 President Trump held a half-hour private meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Wednesday, declaring it a great honor despite their past public dissension. The unconventional Republican and the first Jesuit pontiff made for an unlikely pair in the Vaticans Apostolic Palace, where Catholic leaders have presided or centuries and American presidents have come or decades. Francis was silent as the two sat across one another at the popes wooden desk to begin the audience at approximately 8:30 a.m. local time. Exactly a half-hour later, the ringing of a bell signified the end of the private encounter. For the White House, the Vatican stop caps a tour through key sites of the worlds three major religions, following stops in Saudi Arabia and Israel, designed to promote tolerance and a united approach to terrorism. When you put it all together, youre really showing that this problem of radical extremism is one of the great problems of our time, a senior Trump aide told reporters Tuesday en route from Israel to Rome, briefing anonymously as is common White House practice. By putting everybody together you can really build a coalition and show that its not a Muslim problem, its not a Jewish problem, its not a Catholic problem, its not a Christian problem, it really is a world problem. In an exchange of gifts after their private meeting, Francis offered the president a medal by a Roman artist of an olive, a symbol of peace. We can use peace, Trump responded. Where Trumps and Francis interests may align on peace and combating terrorism, they disagree sharply on issues like immigration and poverty. Like Trump, the Argentine pope has shown a predilection for unscripted comments that have shaken the staid Vatican bureaucracy, as when he criticized candidate Trumps proposed stricter immigration policies including a border wall as not Christian. Trump fired back, calling the popes remarks disgraceful. Any animosity was not apparent Wednesday, as a meeting between Francis and a larger U.S. delegation ended. Thank you. I wont forget what you said, Trump said. Facebook

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Proposed budget would deeply cut State Department and its programs By Tracy Wilkinson (AFP / Getty Images) The State Department leadership voiced support for President Trumps proposed budget, which would impose deep cuts on spending for diplomacy and foreign aid, but critics vowed to fight to restore the funds in Congress. In a statement, the department said the presidents $37.6-billion request for it and for the U.S. Agency for International Development would support a leaner, more efficient government in line with Trumps America first mantra. If approved by Congress, that would represent a reduction of roughly 30% from the current fiscal year. Nongovernmental agencies that receive State Department support to carry out humanitarian and other work around the globe expressed deep alarm. The State Department statement said its new priorities would include efforts to counter terrorism, support Israel, promote border security and battle transnational crime and the spread of infectious diseases. The statement makes no mention of women-empowerment programs or efforts to fight climate change, issues that rose to prominence under the Obama administration. The proposed budget would allow the United States to remain engaged in the United Nations, but officials would seek a more fair distribution of the funding burden, the statement said. And it would eliminate direct funding for quasi- and non-governmental organizations that serve niche missions. The American Jewish World Service, which fights poverty all over the world through 450 local organizations, said much of its work would be jeopardized. At a time when poverty, human rights abuses, famines and conflicts are wreaking havoc globally, said the groups president, Robert Bank, the United States must not abdicate its long bipartisan tradition of providing development assistance and diplomatic support to the most vulnerable people around the world. Mercy Corps, a U.S.-based development and advocacy organization that works in 40 countries, said gutting development programs was short-sighted and absolutely shameful and could put millions of lives at risk. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called the budget cruel and mean-spirited and said it would force the United States to abandon our global role as a champion for freedom, democracy and the rule of law. If President Trump thinks the United States can shrink into a defensive crouch without long-term repercussions, hes sorely mistaken, Engel said. Facebook

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Sessions first proposed budget: A crackdown on immigration and violent crime By Joseph Tanfani Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) In the first budget proposal under President Trump and Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department is seeking hundreds of millions in new funding to pay for an immigration crackdown on the border and a surge in resources to fight violent crime. Like the Department of Homeland Security budget, which includes billions for expanded immigration detention, more border agents and technology to catch those crossing the border illegally, the Justice Department budget is a reflection of the new get-tough policies promised by Sessions. The budget asks for another 300 federal prosecutors  230 to focus on violent criminals and gangs, and another 70 to concentrate on filing criminal charges on those crossing the border illegally. The shift in the spending priorities are in line with other policy changes ordered by Sessions, including a renewed focus on seeking stiff mandatory minimum sentences for drugs and other crimes. The $27.7-billion budget seeks 450 new attorneys and support workers for the immigration courts, which are now clogged with a backlog of 560,000 cases. There would also be another $50 million for increased immigration detention, plus 40 new U.S. marshal jobs to help take care of the expected increase in immigrants heading to federal court. With Trumps immigration initiatives tied up in federal court, the budget seeks another 15 lawyers to handle that litigation, plus 12 more to help handle property acquisition needed for Trumps promised Southwestern border wall. Violent-crime enforcement would get another $198 million, with the largest amount, $70 million, going toward setting up more anti-violence and gang task forces. Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod J. Rosenstein said more resources are needed because of what he called an alarming increase in the rates of murder and other violent crimes. The department is also asking for another $40 million for more drug enforcement to combat the opioid epidemic, which he said is spreading havoc throughout the United States. Sessions new policies should lead to an increase in prison population, so the budget contains funding to fully open a new supermax prison in Thomson, Ill., with room for 1,500 to 2,000 inmates. The department also wants to put more resources behind the FBIs efforts to counter cyber attacks and to figure out ways around encryption technology, along with another 50 agents to counter foreign intelligence and threats from homegrown terrorists. Facebook

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Economists say Trumps budget proposal doesnt add up By Don Lee President Trumps inaugural budget proposal claims to eliminate the nations deficit in 10 years, thanks largely to faster economic growth that it projects will come from the presidents sweeping tax cuts. Never mind the overly optimistic projections on economic growth. Or that Trumps tax overhaul has not happened yet. Even allowing for both, economists say Trumps budget still does not add up. The administration is counting on generating $2.1 trillion in additional revenue over 10 years from better economic growth. But Trumps budget proposal leaves out the cost, or the revenue lost, from the massive tax cuts. In other words, the economic gains that the administration has said it would use to pay for tax reform is apparently also being counted on to pay for deficit reduction. Some people call that double-counting. You cant use the same money twice, said Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that advocates keeping government budgets under control. Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and top economic advisor to President Obama, called it an elementary but egregious accounting error. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said the proposal did not necessarily mean there was an outright omission or a double-counting. Its possible that the administration is looking for such strong economic growth to drive significantly extra revenue from payroll taxes, he said, or it could be that Trump officials were using different base lines from which they were drawing their results. But on the face of it, he said, the budget and tax-plan numbers dont seem to match. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that Trumps plan to cut corporate and individual taxes would cost the federal government about $5.5 trillion over 10 years, adding more than $6 trillion to the national debt. Details of Trumps tax overhaul, however, are still being developed, and its possible that the administration is assuming a revenue-neutral tax plan  although experts say big tax cuts never pay for themselves. On Tuesday, Mick Mulvaney, Trumps budget chief, did not provide a direct answer or explanation to questions about double-counting. Instead, he told reporters that you have to make assumptions about a budget. He went on to say that one of the assumptions that was not made was to take into account the uncollected taxes every year, which he said amounted to $486 billion last year. And we dont assume an additional penny of that being closed as part of our tax reform, said Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Of the 3% annual economic growth assumption, Mulvaney responded that the Obama administration in its first couple of years had based its budget on growth of 4.5%. In fact, Obamas first budget proposal as president, in May 2009, assumed economic growth of between 4% and 4.6% for the budget years 2011 to 2013. Since the Great Recession ended in mid-2009, the U.S. economy has been growing on average about 2% a year, and the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve and most private economists see the economy advancing at about 2% annually over the next 10 years. Alice Rivlin, a former Fed vice chair and director of the Office of Management and Budget under Clinton, said its true that the Obama administrations growth assumptions proved too optimistic. But she noted that those projections were not unreasonable for that time and period in the economic cycle. Then, there was greater potential for growth with unemployment high and many more people than today available for work. Today, the economy is nearing its eighth year of expansion, and the jobless rate is 4.4%, at or near full employment. With the aging of baby boomers, labor force growth slowing, and lackluster productivity gains, economists see the current moderate growth persisting for the foreseeable future. This has been a very long period of growth and were at the high end already, Rivlin said. If we are so lucky to have continuous, steady growth, its not likely to be at 3% or 4% or 5%. Facebook

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Who wins and who loses in Trumps budget The White House Office of Management and Budget sent Congress the presidents inaugural budget today, projecting spending and revenues over the next 10 years. The fiscal package, which include a partial skinny budget from March, reflects President Trumps priorities for the nation, but lawmakers are sure to reject many of the deep cuts in domestic and foreign affairs programs. The departments of State, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Education and Housing, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, are the biggest losers. The winners are the Pentagon and Homeland Security programs. Even with the increases in defense spending and large tax cuts, the administration projects that economic growth spurred by tax cuts will erase annual deficits by 2027. Take a look at some of the numbers released today. Read More Facebook

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What that Montana special congressional race will  and wont  tell us about Trump and his political problems By Mark Z. Barabak Democrat Rob Quist is a quintessential cowboy who doesnt seem to relish campaigning in Montanas special congressional election. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) On Thursday, the political world will eagerly look to Montana and a closely fought congressional race for the latest test of Democratic strength and Republican resilience in the turbulent age of Trump. The major candidates and outside groups have sunk more than $8 million into the contest, a huge sum in a state where $250,000 pays for a robust week of television advertising. But for all that money and all the outside interest, the election will turn less on national trends than circumstances close to home: on the personalities and histories of the main contestants, their different campaign styles and, perhaps most of all, on who is regarded as the more authentic Montanan. Read More Facebook

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Terrorist attack in England has conservative media focused on safety of allies By Kurtis Lee (Dave Thompson/Getty images ) Its a sight witnessed all too often: an explosion, screams, people sprinting to safety. Late Monday night, this was the scene at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, after a man with possible ties to Islamic State militants set off a suicide bomb, killing 22 people and, once again, setting in motion a global discourse on how to fight terrorism. President Trump, while visiting Bethlehem, said the attack was committed by evil losers in life. Throughout the campaign and early in his presidency, Trump has said defeating the Islamic State is a top priority. (He reiterated that point in a speech Sunday in Saudi Arabia, urging Muslim leaders to plot their own course in combating terrorism.) In recent months, with attacks in Berlin, Paris and London, conservative media have questioned the safety of Europe and warned that the United States could face similar attacks. With the latest attack, some on the right are again homing in on the safety of our allies. Here are some of todays headlines: 2017 has seen a terror attack attempted in Europe every nine days (Breitbart) The attack in Manchester blankets the home page of the right-wing website. Europe has indeed been the location of high-profile attacks this year. In Paris last month, Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack on the Champs-Elysees in which a man fired an automatic weapon, killing a police officer. And in March, a man plowed his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, near the British Parliament in London, and then fatally stabbed a police officer. In all, four people were killed and dozens injured in what police called a terrorist attack. The Breitbart piece is an analysis of different terrorist attacks attempted and carried out in Europe since January. Attacks and attempted attacks have taken place in Austria, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Norway, and Germany, on average every nine days, the piece says. Pences message of civility and open debate lost on those who most needed to hear it (Weekly Standard) The debate over free speech on colleges campuses continues. In recent months, conservative speakers have canceled speeches on college campuses in the face of anticipated protests. And others, who have opted to speak, have faced vocal backlash. On Sunday, as Vice President Mike Pence began to address students at the University of Notre Dame commencement, several dozen stood and walked out of the ceremony. In his speech, Pence talked about civility and open debate, and this piece argues that the m
Twenty-three years ago, Alison Sommer-Castellanos was told her older brother had been shot to death in Huntington Beach.

A college student at the time, she tumbled into an emotional fog, feeling utterly alone.

Now, more than two decades later, authorities have arrested a Colorado man who once taught high school in Santa Ana and Los Angeles on suspicion of killing Kenny Paul Sommer and his friend Chen Cosmo Maui Blanchard.

Lamberto Ricci Castillo, 64, is charged with two counts of murder in the shooting deaths of Sommer and Blanchard, both 23, on the evening of March 31, 1994. He also faces possible sentencing enhancements for use of a firearm. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in state prison.

He is being held at Orange County Jail in Santa Ana. He did not enter a plea at an arraignment hearing Monday morning.

Castillos public defender, Bobby Shui, did not respond to a call seeking comment Tuesday.

The Huntington Beach Police Department said it reopened the case last year and reached out to the Orange County Cold Case Homicide Task Force to help in the investigation.

Castillo was arrested April 27 in Alamosa, Colo., according to a news release from the Police Department and Orange County district attorneys office that cited newly developed evidence.

Authorities did not elaborate on that evidence during a news conference Monday afternoon at Huntington Beach City Hall, where family members of the victims described their deaths as senseless.

Sommer-Castellanos said her brother was a loving and family-oriented sort who was engaged to be married when he was killed.

He was robbed at too young an age, she said.

Sommer-Castellanos said she had learned to depress her emotions and that having the case brought back to the forefront is difficult for her.

We will get some closure, she said. But we will have to relive it first before we do.

Gina Vercnocke, who had a son with Blanchard and is Sommers cousin, said at the news conference that she was in shock when she learned Castillo had been arrested.

It took awhile for me to process my feelings, she said.

Vercnocke got her first look at Castillo at the arraignment hearing Monday morning.

It was very shocking, she said. He didnt look like what I expected. And its still unbelievable to me.

Both she and Sommer-Castellanos thanked the Police Department for bringing what they hope is an end to the search for the killer.

Its been a long 23 years, Vercnocke said. Its been really difficult. Its been something we have dealt with on a daily basis. Theres been a lot of hardships and heartache.

According to authorities, Sommer and Blanchard were socializing in downtown Huntington Beach when Castillo confronted them near Main Street and Orange Avenue.

Castillo, a teacher at the time, had been on a walk with his wife, Meredith, said Huntington Beach Police Chief Robert Handy.

Handy said Castillo may have challenged Sommer and Blanchard for urinating on the street. The three argued and Castillo walked away.

According to authorities, he returned 45 minutes later, at about 10:15 p.m., with a handgun.

Sommer and Blanchard were shot multiple times and the shooter fled. Both victims were pronounced dead at the scene.

An off-duty police officer witnessed the confrontation but not the shootings, authorities said.

Perhaps well never understand why Castillo senselessly took the lives of [Sommer and Blanchard], Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said Monday. But when we prosecute him for the crimes that he committed, hes going to understand a little something about the justice system.

UPDATES:

3:50 p.m. May 16: This article was updated with the result of attempts to reach Castillos public defender.

6:15 p.m. May 15. This article was updated with details from the news conference.

This article was originally posted at 10:35 a.m. May 15.
A paper sign spotted Thursday at the entrance of the former Sport Chalet building in La Canada, proclaiming the space the future site of a Hooters restaurant, caused some controversy before being dismissed as a hoax by state officials.

The hubbub started Friday when a photo was posted to Facebook of a notice, apparently issued by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, that was placed at the vacant 45,000-square-foot retail storefront.

The sign advertised an Application for Ownership Change, with the applicant name listed as TW Restaurant Holder LLC and the business name as Hooters - La Canada. The address listed on the notice was 951 Foothill Blvd.

Throngs of commenters immediately chimed in, some with comical responses and others with doubt La Canada officials would welcome a Hooters in the citys Town Center.

City Manager Mark Alexander was away from the office Friday, but John Carr, a spokesman for the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control office in Sacramento, said he was unable to find any documents in the agencys database that matched up with the specifics provided on the sign.

Ive gone through all the posted publication records and cant find anything, said Carr, who had a chance to see the photo. Thats an interesting picture  it does look very familiar to what we use.

Further, the address provided on the notice does not match up with the Sport Chalet site, changed earlier this year from 2 Sport Chalet Drive to 990 Town Center Drive. Meanwhile, there is still no official word on which business has entered into a memorandum of understanding with the property owners to rent the large retail space.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine
I assume youve heard the definition of an airplane? reader Paul Brown of Santa Ana asked in an email. A silver tube hurtling through the sky from Point A to Point B with 100 or more passengers, all of whom have paid a different fare.

That pretty much sums up travelers experiences with dynamic pricing, the practice of travel providers charging varying prices for the same product.

Its widely practiced, and its annoying, especially because it leaves you with the disquieting feeling that you could have paid less.

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The May 7 On the Spot column offered ideas on how to cope with dynamic pricing (using opaque sites such as Priceline or a money-back online service such as Yapta that keeps an electronic eye on airfare and rental car prices, then helps you get a refund if youve overpaid).

I didnt mention booking separate airline tickets, as travel pro John DiScala (you know him as JohnnyJet of the website of the same name) reminded me in an email when I asked for his favorite tips.

He referred me to a recent column about finding airfares. One of his tips recalled trying to get to Sardinia. Too expensive.

But he saved about a grand when he bought a reasonably priced round-trip ticket to London, then, separately, a ticket from London to Sardinia and back on a low-cost European carrier.

But DiScala and I look like amateur budgeteers compared with Times Travel readers, who generously offered their ideas on how to stretch a buck. Herewith and with our thanks are some of them:

If you have military connections: I have been using the Armed Forces Vacation Club for more than 20 years to save on lodging for vacations, said Mike Wells of Torrance, who added that its definition of military is fairly broad and includes even Department of Defense civilian employees. (Check out the Join today  membership is free tab.)

Wells stayed a week at the Tahiti Village resort in Las Vegas. His cost: $0.

The club had a BOGO [buy one, get one] free promotion. I bought a week in Mexico...and the Vegas week was the free one.

Usually, I pay $350 for seven nights for a condo timeshare in a resort. They have them all over the world.

If youre booking on short notice: Paul Perez of Whittier has had good luck with JetBlue vacations.

He keeps an eye out for bargains and has had success booking close to departure, which usually carries a premium price for hotels and airfare.

Once, five days before my stay, I booked a $300 package. The hotel was the pleasantly nice Signature hotel suites at the MGM Grand, he said of his one-night stay.

Depending on the weekend, you might pay as much as $499 a night at the Signature, but generally in the $200-plus range when I checked Monday.

When I book through JetBlue Vacations packages, Perez noted, I accumulate JetBlue points that can be used for future JetBlue purchases.

If youre driving: Bill Spitalnick of Newport Beach, who likes to visit Vegas as well, called dynamic pricing chilling, adding that it reminds him of the lyrics from Love on the Rocks (think Neil Diamond): When they know they have you, then they really have you.

Besides traveling midweek, Spitalnick, who usually drives to Vegas, suggests staying in a hotel that doesnt charge parking fees. You can read about nine hotels that dont charge.

If youre traveling internationally: Our readers like Vegas, of course, but they also travel the world. Brown, whose definition of dynamic pricing led this column, reminded readers to consider shoulder season  not the worst time to travel (usually cheapest), but not the best, either.

I also watch currency values such as the strong dollar against the pound, euro, Australian and Canadian dollar, and Mexican peso, he said.

And remember what Mom always said about the most important meal of the day: Brown added, Booking a hotel that includes breakfast is convenient and cheaper too as long as it is something you or your family will eat.

Prime example: Fairmont Singapore charges $30 plus [Singapore dollars, about $21 U.S.] for their beautiful buffet breakfast. My last stay was inclusive of this cost for the three days I stayed there.

There are more tips, but I am out of room for this week. Well revisit cost savings one more week, and then youll be armed and ready to go for the summer. Meanwhile, send your money-saving tips to travel@latimes.com with Money saving in the subject line, and include your name and city of residence.

Have a travel dilemma? Write to travel@latimes.com. We regret we cannot answer every inquiry.

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravel
Local authorities in Taizhou, Jiangsu province have provided household registration permits to 20 disabled beggars, in an effort to secure their lawful rights. Experts and media outlets hailed the move as an affirmation of civil rights, arguing that the practice should be promoted nationwide.

The beggars, who suffer from both mental and physical disabilities, had been living at a local shelter for over three months. Due to their lack of household registration, their access to resources including medical assistance and basic living allowances was denied. The local government therefore decided to offer them household registration, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The local governments actions set a good example for ongoing household registration reform around the country. Due to their disabilities, the beggars were unable to reach out to their families, nor - in some cases - to remember their true identities. By granting household registration permits to this long-neglected group, the local government implemented people-oriented social management, Zhu Changjun, a Beijing-based media professional, told the Beijing Times.

In China, social benefits including medical insurance are distributed in accordance with one's employer and city of residence. Unregistered citizens are cut off from various social benefits including healthcare and education. China has been hard at work on the issue in recent times, providing household registration permits to nearly 14 million people over the past four years. However, beggars are often neglected, and no specific laws or regulations are in place to protect their legal rights.

According to documents released by the State Council in 2015, unregistered people are divided into eight categories, but beggars and the homeless are excluded entirely. The decisive action of the Taizhou authorities should therefore be encouraged and emulated, according to Zhu.
Chinese President Xi Jinping conjured up images of caravans and treasure ships. Orange banners promised common prosperity and mutual benefit on Beijing streets lined with red roses. Even the name signaled friendship -- the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

But the two-day infrastructure summit that drew dozens of global leaders here carried an even stronger undercurrent: China is presenting the world with an alternative economic order. Join, or miss out.

What we hope to create is a big family of harmonious co-existence, Xi said at the opening of the event, which focused on resurrecting ancient Silk Road trade routes.

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He called it the project of the century.

The Belt and Road Initiative, Xis signature foreign policy project, aims to build ports, railways and pipelines that connect a sprawling sea and land network from Asia to Europe. This multi-trillion-dollar plan spans more than 60 countries and 30% of the worlds GDP.

Xis central role at the inaugural forum  from his red wine toast to nearly three dozen heads of state at the Great Hall of the People to a keynote address with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the front row  cast him as a suave international statesman ahead of a Communist Party leadership shuffle this fall.

He tied his plan to the past, but it underscored a broad new vision for the world -- one that gravitates more toward Chinas orbit than the Wests. His message comes as the United States shifts inward under President Trump and Europe abandons many of the globalization ideals that once underpinned it.

Xi Jinping has staked a lot of personal political cache and authority on this, said Peter Cai, a fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia, who studies the initiative. Showing publicly how many international leaders came to Beijing to agree, in principle, to what China is promoting was symbolically very important.

Xi pledged more than $100 billion in financing to help develop the project across three continents. He also vowed to tackle poverty in recipient countries  an unusual foray for China, which has historically left such efforts to development agencies like the World Bank.

Leaders signed a broad communique that endorses global trade and seeks to increase economic growth.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, and his wife, Peng Liyuan; Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and other leaders arrive for a banquet for the Belt and Road Forum at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14, 2017. (Wu Hong / AFP/Getty Images)

The group hopes to rebalance economic globalization so that mankind will move closer to a community of a shared future, Xi said at another speech on Monday where he announced agreements with 68 countries and international organizations.

But Chinese officials offered few specifics about loans, or even details about the projects success four years in.

Xi created the initiative to help spur domestic growth and enhance Chinas role abroad. He spoke about its promise Monday at a placid lakeside retreat, surrounded by strongman leaders such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

He emphasized the need to abandon protectionism and exclusive arrangements.

Only one Group of Seven leader attended, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. Few other Western nations sent top officials, although heads of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United Nations attended.

The U.S. sent a small delegation led by Matthew Pottinger, the administrations senior director for Asia at the National Security Council, who emphasized the importance of transparency and private sector participation. Much of Chinas investment, from the companies building highways on the Sri Lankan coast to the crews constructing railways in rural Ethiopia, is state-driven.

Chinese officials intended the forum to help ease fears about Chinas growing influence, given the countrys record on issues such as human rights and the environment. Xi spoke of cultural inclusion, but he has led a campaign against Western values that limits foreign textbooks and makes it more difficult for international nonprofits to operate in the country.

India boycotted the summit, largely due to sovereignty concerns. China is building an economic corridor with Pakistan on land India also claims. The Indian government, in a statement, warned of an unsustainable debt burden for participants. Other countries, such as Germany, have expressed worry about limitations on foreign firms.

The more China can demonstrate the Belt and Road Initiative is open to outside participation in this way, the more it will be embraced by global or even American firms and suppliers, said former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, now chairman of the environmental-focused Paulson Institute, who participated in the forum.

Almost every Chinese newspaper covered its front pages with stories about the summit. State television broadcast live coverage of leaders walking on a red carpet to meet the Chinese president for dinner. A video of Putin, who gave an impromptu piano recital in the state guesthouse before a meeting with Xi, went viral. (He played two 1950s songs from his youth.)

The English-language China Daily, in the lead-up to the forum, released a series of videos of an American father telling his daughter bedtime stories  about the infrastructure plan.

Officials marked the occasion with a glowing golden bridge in Olympic Park. Elderly women wearing red armbands patrolled neighborhoods, police stood outside subways, some nightclubs shut down, and traffic crawled on the citys ring roads. Beijings skies, often a soupy gray, shone bright blue.

Security was tight even outside the city. At Yunling village, a rustic community in the shadow of the Great Wall, propaganda about the forum blared from street-side loudspeakers. Older volunteers instructed visitors to register at a nearby police station.

All the guesthouses here are closed, one villager said, waving her hands. Nobody will receive you.

But China could not script its recalcitrant neighbor. North Korea tested a ballistic missile hours before the forum began, coloring the event and its public goal of unity. China permitted a North Korean delegation to attend the forum, despite consternation from U.S. officials.

Few Chinese newspapers reported on the test. Instead, they were filled with pictures of Xi.

In the short term, its all about the show, said Chen Dingding, an international relations professor at Jinan University in Guangzhou. But if we continue this initiative and move forward on it, hopefully something good will come out of this.

Staff writer Jonathan Kaiman and Nicole Liu in the Times Beijing bureau contributed to this report.

Meyers is a special correspondent.

Twitter: @jessicameyers

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French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged Monday to work closely together to draw up a road map of reforms for the European Union, saying that theyre both prepared even to implement treaty changes if needed.

The two met in Berlin on Macrons first full day in office, which started with his naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister. Merkel called Macrons visit an honor and a sign of the deep friendship between the two European powerhouses.

We each represent the interests of our own countries, but the interests of Germany are naturally closely tied to the interests of France, Merkel said.

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She added that she hoped for a new dynamism in German-French relations, saying that Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that.

Macron said that hed work with Merkel on a road map, and that they needed to work on deep reforms that are necessary and need common work.

Both leaders suggested they were prepared to change European treaties if needed, but Merkel emphasized that such measures were not immediately on the table.

First we need to work on what we want to change, and then if it turns out it needs a treaty change, then were prepared to do that, she said.

The visit to Berlin continued a tradition of French presidents making their first foreign trip to Germany.

A large group of onlookers, some carrying European flags, stood outside the chancellery as Macron arrived.

Germany and France have traditionally been the motor of European integration, but the relationship has become increasingly lopsided over recent years as France struggled economically.

The visit signaled Macrons intentions to move rapidly on campaign promises to revive support for the beleaguered European Union by reforming and strengthening it.

In a nod to German concerns, Macron said at the news conference with Merkel that he had never pushed for jointly issued eurobonds and doesnt favor European countries taking joint responsibility for old debts.

Germany, which has Europes biggest economy, has vehemently opposed taking direct responsibility for weaker eurozone countries debts.

Macron added, however, that what I know is that we have investments to make [in Europe], and so we have to work on investment mechanisms for the future

Earlier, the appointment of Philippe to the top job in his government ticked several boxes for Macron, at 39, Frances youngest president, who took power on Sunday.

Philippes age reinforced the generational shift in Frances corridors of power and the image of youthful vigor that Macron is cultivating. Philippe is also relatively unknown to voters, fulfilling Macrons campaign promise to repopulate French politics with new faces.

Philippe is the mayor of the Normandy port of Le Havre, a trained lawyer and an author of political thrillers. His appointment marks a milestone in the rebuilding of Frances political landscape, which has been dynamited by the election of Macron  the first president of modern France not from the countrys mainstream left or right parties.

Philippe is a member of the mainstream-right Republicans party and could possibly attract other Republicans to Macrons cause, as the centrist president works to piece together a majority in Parliament to pass his promised economic reforms.

Alain Juppe, a former French prime minister, called Philippe a man of great talent with all the qualities to handle the difficult job.

In Berlin, Macron declined to answer a question about his new prime minister, only saying the choice of Philippe is part of the new political landscape hes promoting.

Speed is becoming one of Macrons trademarks. Including the thank you at the end, the announcement of Philippes appointment, delivered by the presidencys new secretary general, took just eight seconds.

As well as the political coup of poaching Philippe from the right, Macron is also siphoning off support from lawmakers on the left. At least 24 Socialists are now campaigning for reelection under the banner of Macrons Republic on the Move party.

But not everyone was pleased with the Philippe announcement.

For far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Macrons rival for the presidency, the selection of Philippe reflects a continuation of the system she hoped to break.

This is the sacred alliance of the old right and left, united in their wish to remain in place at any price, Le Pen said in a statement. Defeated by a Macron landslide, she denounced what she predicted would be a continuation of old policies, including austerity, submission to Brussels, massive immigration.

The populist Le Pen said her National Front party is now the only true opposition for June legislative elections.

French far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who won nearly 20% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, also reacted with hostility.

Voters go to polls again in June to elect 577 National Assembly lawmakers. Melenchon urged them not to give Macron a parliamentary majority.

The right has just been annexed, with a prime minister taken from its ranks, from the Republicans, Melenchon said. Dont give full powers to Mr. Macron and his prime minister.

Macrons trip to Berlin highlighted his pro-European politics and desire to work with Merkel on what he says must become a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe. Macron previously met Merkel when he visited Berlin in March as a candidate.

Germany is looking to Macron to revitalize France as an economic power and political heavyweight in the EU, which is facing complex divorce proceedings with its current No. 2 economy, Britain.

When Britain leaves the bloc in 2019, France will be the EUs only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

As a candidate, Macron called for a new Franco-German deal that would involve much more structured cooperation on investment, on European border security, and on defense.

Macron is the fourth French president in the conservative Merkels nearly 12 years as chancellor. She built a solid relationship with Macrons predecessor, Socialist Francois Hollande, despite their political differences  notably with their joint effort to secure an accord to calm the fighting in eastern Ukraine in tense talks in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015.

Germany is keen to continue the Franco-German diplomatic drive to keep a lid on the situation in Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists are battling the government.

Merkel has praised Macrons embrace of European unity but has offered few concrete details about the way forward for German-French relations.

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UPDATES:

12:35 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Macron and Merkel.

9:20 a.m.: This article was updated with background on Edouard Philippe, as well as details about President Emmanuel Macrons visit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This article was originally published at 6 a.m.
In a rare direct confrontation on the international stage, India and Pakistan sparred Monday at a United Nations court over a death sentence issued to a retired Indian naval officer whom Pakistan calls a spy.

India approached the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Netherlands, seeking a stay of execution for Kulbhushan Jadhav, convicted of espionage last month by a Pakistani military court.

Lawyer Harish Salve, representing the Indian government at the daylong hearing that was broadcast in both countries, said Pakistan had prevented Indian authorities from meeting with Jadhav.

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He was arrested in March 2016 in the southwestern province of Baluchistan in what Pakistan described as a counter-terrorism operation. India has denied that Jadhav is a spy, saying he was kidnapped from Iran, where he was traveling on business, and has been framed by Pakistan.

The case is the latest flashpoint in India-Pakistan relations and comes as the two nuclear-armed rivals trade accusations over worsening violence in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Indian armed forces are accused of using excessive force to quell a civilian uprising in the Himalayan territory, which is divided between the countries but fully claimed by both.

India has consistently refused to take its disputes with Pakistan to an international forum. But New Delhi this month took the unusual step of appealing to the international court, the judicial branch of the United Nations, to suspend Jadhavs death sentence.

The Indian government argued that Jadhavs military trial was farcical because he was given a lawyer only toward the end of the trial and Pakistan had not shared details of the proceedings.

The basic rights of Jadhav were thrown to the winds, Salve said in court, arguing that he was convicted on the basis of a forced confession.

Pakistan countered that Jadhav was an agent of the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian spy agency, and was carrying a passport with a false name at the time of his arrest. Lawyer Khawar Qureshi, representing the Pakistani government, said India was unable or unwilling to explain the discrepancy.

Qureshi said that espionage was a matter of Pakistani national security and therefore out of the international courts jurisdiction.

The hearing concluded Monday, with a judge saying that the 15-judge bench would issue a ruling as soon as possible.

India has fought three wars with Pakistan since both countries gained independence in 1947, but has been reluctant to invite international bodies to weigh in on the dispute. The last time India approached the international court in a case involving Pakistan was in 1971.

In 1999, Pakistan petitioned the court after the Indian air force shot down a Pakistani maritime reconnaissance aircraft in the Kutch region that straddles both countries, killing all 16 naval personnel on board. The court dismissed Pakistans claim, saying it did not have jurisdiction in the matter.

The Jadhav case has become a matter of national pride and was being closely watched in both countries.

In India, experts said the case could open up a new avenue for putting pressure on Pakistan, which it accuses of supporting Kashmiri militant groups that have increased attacks against Indian forces.

Previously, there was a reluctance to internationalize such issues, said Dhruva Jaishankar, a foreign policy fellow at Brookings India, a think tank. If the ICJ rules in favor of India, it will be a major embarrassment for Pakistan. If Pakistan wins the case, India does not have much to lose.

Jaishankar said the Jadhav case has taken on added resonance as India and Pakistan tussle over multiple issues.

India has spoken out against Chinas multibillion-dollar investment in Pakistan as part of Chinas transnational Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, and boycotted a summit on the issue in Beijing over the weekend. Pakistan has used the upsurge in violence in Kashmir to needle India over its policies in the disputed region.

None of these are going in a positive direction as far as India-Pakistan relations are concerned, Jaishankar said. Jadhav is as much of a symptom as a cause of it.

Parth M.N. is a special correspondent.

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A well-known journalist in the violence-plagued state of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico was shot and killed Monday on a street in the state capital of Culiacan, marking the latest in a wave of killings of journalists in Mexico.

Javier Valdez, correspondent for the Mexico City-based daily La Jornada and a co-founder of the regional weekly Riodoce, was shot on a busy street in broad daylight, authorities said.

The veteran journalists body, with his trademark straw hat still covering part of his head, remained on the street as police roped off the scene.

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Law enforcement officials in Sinaloa confirmed the slaying, and the state prosecutor told reporters that police found 12 spent shell casings at the scene. Riodoce reported the news on its website.

Valdez, a father of two, was at least the fifth journalist killed this year in Mexico, which free-press groups have named as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who has been criticized for not speaking out more forcefully in previous cases of slain journalists, sent a Twitter message denouncing the killing and sending condolences to Valdezs family.

I reiterate our commitment to freedom of expression and press, fundamental to our democracy, the Mexican president said, adding that he had instructed local and federal authorities to investigate the matter.

The U.S. ambassador here, Roberta Jacobson, also sent out a Twitter message condemning the slaying of the journalist.

Condenamos el asesinato de Javier Valdez, fundador de Rio Doce. Quinto periodista asesinado en 2017, sexto en Sinaloa desde el 2000  USAmbMexico (@USAmbMex) May 15, 2017

Since 2010, the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group, has documented the cases of more than 50 journalists killed or missing in Mexico. Few of the killings have been resolved in a nation where drug violence and organized crime are endemic, especially in the provinces outside of Mexico City.

In nearly every case of a journalist murdered in direct retaliation for their work, justice remains elusive and impunity continues to be the norm, the organization said in a study in May. This lack of accountability perpetuates a climate of impunity that leaves journalists open to attack.

On Saturday, a group of 100 armed men attacked and robbed a group of seven journalists covering drug-related clashes in the western state of Guerrero. The journalists were robbed of cameras, telephones and other possessions, but were allowed to go.

Let them kill us all, if that is the death penalty for reporting this hell.  Javier Valdez

Valdez was a prolific chronicler of the drug wars and narco-culture in Sinaloa, home base of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, once headed by Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. The former cartel chief was extradited to the United States in January on a range of charges.

Valdez was also an essential source for Mexican journalists and foreign correspondents traveling to Sinaloa to write about the drug violence. He was always gregarious and generous with his time, said colleagues, as tributes from stunned and grief-stricken fellow journalists and others flooded in on social media.

Today in Sinaloa they killed the most brave and most admired journalist, Marcela Turati, a Mexican journalist, wrote in a Twitter message. From the land of el Chapo he showed us how to cover el narco.

Valdez, like other Mexican journalists reporting on the sensitive nexus between organized crime and government in Mexico, was well aware of the dangers he faced.

In March, when a gunman killed Miroslava Breach, a journalist in the northern state of Chihuahua, Valdez sent out a defiant message on Twitter.

Let them kill us all, if that is the death penalty for reporting this hell, Valdez wrote in response to the slaying of Breach, who was also regional correspondent for La Jornada. No to silence.

In 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists chose Valdez as a recipient of its International Press Freedom Award.

Where I work, Culiacan, in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, it is dangerous to be alive, and to do journalism is to walk on an invisible line drawn by the bad guys  who are in drug trafficking and in the government  in a field strewn with explosives, Valdez said in his acceptance speech in New York. This is what most of the country is living through. One must protect oneself from everything and everyone, and there do not seem to be options or salvation, and often there is no one to turn to.

Later that same year, Valdezs Riodoce was awarded the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prize, which recognizes excellence in journalism in the Americas.

Valdez wrote several books about Mexicos drug wars, including a volume last year on narco-periodismo, or narco-journalism. An earlier book, Los Morros del Narco, looked at the lives of youth caught up in the violent drug world.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and special correspondent Cecilia Sanchez in Mexico City contributed to this story.

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

twitter: @mcdneville

UPDATES:

4:55 p.m.: The story was updated with the prosecutors report that spent shell casings were found at the scene.

4:20 p.m.: This story was updated throughout with staff reporting.

This story was originally published at 1:10 p.m.
Syrian activists said Monday that airstrikes on a town held by the Islamic State group have killed at least 20 civilians.

It wasnt clear who was behind the raid on Boukamal, near the border with Iraq, but various activist groups blame the U.S.-led coalition, which is waging war on Islamic State. The claims could not be independently verified.

Omar Abo Laila of the activist-run Deir Ezzor 24 said 15 homes in the town were destroyed in the raid. He said the victims were displaced civilians from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.

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The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the civilian death toll stood at 23 but is likely to rise.

Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman says Islamic State fighters were also killed.

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The Trump administration accused Syrias government on Monday of hanging hundreds of political opponents and other prisoners and burning their bodies at a military prison near Damascus, part of what the State Department called an egregious pattern of atrocities by Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The State Department said the Syrian authorities may be using a large crematorium at the prison to destroy evidence of mass killings that could be used in any future war crimes prosecution.

Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told reporters that about 50 detainees are being hanged each day at the Saydnaya military prison, about 20 miles from Damascus, and that newly declassified satellite photos appear to show a building modified to house a crematorium.

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Cremating the bodies represents an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders, Jones said.

The Syrian government, supported by Russia and Iran, has sunk to a new level of depravity, Jones said.

 The Syrian government did not immediately comment on the report.

An estimated 5,000 to 13,000 prisoners were killed at the prison from March 2011, when the countrys multi-sided civil war began, to December 2015, according to a report issued in February by Amnesty International, the human rights organization.

Once or twice a week, the Syrian government would quietly slaughter up to 50 prisoners at a time in mass hangings at the prison. It said the bodies were buried in mass graves in secret locations outside the capital.

Nicolette Waldman, who wrote the 48-page report after a year-long investigation, said the number of people killed may be much higher. More than 400,000 people have been killed and millions displaced in the Syrian war, according to United Nations estimates.

The last testimony for this report was in December 2015, but there is no reason to think the executions have stopped at the prison, Waldman said in a phone interview in February.

UPDATES:

2:30 p.m.: This article has been updated with staff reporting.

This article was originally published at 9 a.m.
Her face was ashen, her solemn manner suggesting a state of grief.

It is as though we lost a close relative, Haymen Rifai, 60, explained gravely as she stood with her two daughters in the war-pulverized center of Aleppo. Each time we come here it feels worse.

She had not lost a loved one, but rather a cherished, stone-and-mortar symbol: The citys historic Umayyad mosque, which Rifai and her family had come to visit on this sun-drenched afternoon  part of a daily, if forlorn, pilgrimage to the grievously wounded house of worship in the heart of the Old City.

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Another visitor, Mohammed Marsi, 41, and his son surveyed the vast courtyard once distinguished by intricate geometric designs in alternating black and white stones. Now the stones were chipped or shattered, or hidden by mud or implements of war.

The destruction for the whole country is indescribable, just like what happened to the mosque, said Marsi. If you knew the mosque before the damage, and saw it now, it is like someone who lost a child or part of his body.

With Aleppo now back under Syrian government control, many families are coming to see the mosque, a vivid symbol of Aleppo. (Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)

The sublime mosque, along with the nearby, medieval-era covered souk, have long been synonymous with Aleppo, the core of which the United Nations declared a World Heritage site.

The mosque and the souk, along with much of the Old City, suffered calamitous harm during the more than four years that this former Silk Road hub was divided between opposition fighters and forces loyal to the government of President Bashar Assad.

The mosque, souk and adjoining districts were transformed into World War I-style front lines, featuring trenches lined with sandbags, fortified tunnels, sniper emplacements and near-daily shelling.

The mosque, once a pillar of Syrias moderate Sunni Muslim establishment, became a kind of opposition command center, hosting jihadist luminaries such as the firebrand Al Qaeda-linked Saudi cleric Abdullah Muhaysini, who gave YouTube interviews from the stately courtyard.

Construction on the earliest mosque on the site began in 715, and through the centuries the complex has been rebuilt and renovated again and again after earthquakes and fires, looting and war. The mosques signature minaret, nearly 150 tall, had survived since 1090.

But in April 2013, clashes reduced the minaret to a pile of rubble and also collapsed the mosque complexs northwest wall. The rebels blamed Syrian forces. Syria blamed the rebels.

In a 2013 photograph, a rebel fighter faces the mosques signature minaret, dating to 1090. (AFP /Getty Images)

The minaret at Aleppos Umayyad mosque was toppled in 2013. (AFP/ Getty Images)

But the huge scale of destruction only began to become clear to the outside world in December.Thats when opposition fighters and their supporters finally decamped from their last strongholds in Aleppo city after months of government bombardment.

Since December, thousands of Aleppo residents who fled the city have returned from their places of exile. For many returnees, among the first stops has been the Old City and the beloved Umayyad mosque. Visiting here has become a rite of passage for individuals and families.

This is the first time for me to come to the mosque since the war and I was really shocked, Soha Alkhatib, 54, said. I saw a lot of pictures of the mosque on the Internet, but I didnt expect to see this amount of damage. There are no words that can describe my sadness, my pain.

Though cleanup efforts have been underway for months, its walls remain riddled with bullet holes and pocked with shrapnel. Sandbags and 55-gallon drums filled with dirt mark where opposition fighters dug in against relentless government bombardment. Bullets and blasts have damaged some of the regal interior chandeliers, though many remain intact.

A washing or ablution fountain erected centuries ago in the mosque complexs plaza is among the structures damaged in the civil war. (Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)

A pair of washing or ablution fountains in the courtyard still stand, but are shot through and through. Gouges from bullets and shells mar the elegant porticoes and grand wooden front doors.

Still, the people come. And still, it is their mosque.

I have always visited to this mosque, its feel, its smell  it is the essence of Aleppo, said Abdullah Bayoud, 56, a truck driver who was among the many stopping to pray at the walled-off shrine inside the mosque said to contain a relic of Zacarias, a prophet and father of John the Baptist in Islamic belief.

Zacaria is the protector of Aleppo, said Bayoud, a father of 7 who, like so many others here, fled his home during the fighting. He is with our city.

Abdullah Bayoud, right, a truck driver from Aleppo who was stunned by the damage at the Umayyad mosque, prays with his cousin Bilal Mansour. Two children unrelated to the men join them in prayer. (Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)

Both the mosque and the souk, shielded by stone walls at times more than three feet thick, appear structurally sound, despite the immense damage. But restoration is a huge undertaking that will take years, officials say, and cost many millions of dollars. Full repair will likely await the end of a war now into its seventh year.

While Aleppo is now firmly in government hands, rebels remain dug in just west of the city, still in shelling range of various neighborhoods. Ambulances regularly screech through the streets with war victims.

The citizens of Aleppo, however, point out that their august city  called Halab in Arabic and regarded as one of the longest continuously habituated areas on Earth  has come back from previous calamities, including 13th century Mongol sackings. And there are many signs of recovery.

Schoolchildren now scamper about the esplanade of the nearby Citadel, a medieval fortress that remained in government hands throughout the war. Notices posted outside the Citadels walls advise visitors to watch out for unexploded grenades and mortar shells. Other signs proclaim Welcome Back in English and Arabic, and plug a government-backed social media campaign with the hashtag title: #Believe_In_Aleppo.

Down the street, workers are removing the mound of debris that marks the site of the once-luxurious Carlton Hotel, blown up by rebels who tunneled beneath the structure in May 2014 and set off a huge bomb.

The entrance of Aleppos historic Umayyad mosque, in the historic Old City, bears scars from fighting between rebel and government forces during Syrias war. (Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)

Meantime, the people of Aleppo, and visitors, inevitably make their way to Umayyad mosque to say a prayer, contemplate its splendor, its history and its near-ruin, or just reconnect with one of the regions iconic sites.

Among those paying their respect one April day was Syrias chief Sunni cleric, or grand mufti, Ahmed Badr al-Din Hassoun, who had earlier hailed the governments recapture of the crown of Aleppo. The mufti, a key ally of the Assad government and long a would-be target of opposition assassins, arrived in a convoy of more than a dozen vehicles, mostly ferrying bodyguards with microphones in their ears, submachine guns in their arms and pistols in their belts.

Another recent visitor was Eva Jabbour, her presence a reminder that the mosques beauty and majesty, even now, transcend sectarian lines. She is Christian.

This place is so important for all people of Aleppo, whatever their belief or sect, said Jabbour, 60. It is here for all of us. Our most profound hope is that the Great Mosque will be rebuilt, and be even better than it was before.

Also stopping by were a pair of towering Russian soldiers, part of a substantial Russian force backing Assads government. Upon exiting, one Russian showed his respect for this ravaged house of worship in the best way he knew how. He made the sign of the cross.

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

twitter: @mcdneville

Liliana Nieto del Rio contributed to this report.

MORE WORLD NEWS

Hope. Concern. Resignation. Afghans hold divergent views about the prospect of more U.S. troops

Seven striking statistics on the status of gay rights and homophobia across the globe

Microsoft president blasts NSA for its role in WannaCry computer ransom attack
(Photo/CGTN)

Chinese President Xi Jinping is holding a press conference at the Yanqi Lake International Convention Center, where 29 heads of state and government are meeting on the second and final day of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

The media briefing comes after the Leaders' Roundtable. "The Belt and Road Initiative originates from China, but belongs to the whole world," Xi said at the beginning of the meeting.

The two-day event is the highest-level forum on the Belt and Road Initiative since the Chinese president first raised the concept in 2013.
BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Belt and Road Initiative offers many practical opportunities to change people's lives, and UNICEF is very happy to cooperate, senior UN official Anthony Lake said Monday.

In an exclusive interview with Xinhua, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) chief praised the Belt and Road Initiative, calling it an "extraordinary strategic vision."

Lake said while there is a focus on trade and infrastructure, he is also looking forward to the human development the initiative can deliver.

"It is human beings that make development happen, and it's human beings that benefit from development," Lake said.

The UNICEF chief said the healthy growth of children is among the great accomplishments the initiative can make.

Lake said work needs to be done on children's health and reducing child mortality. The key to future prosperity is educating children so they want to contribute to their societies and become good citizens.

The key priority for UNICEF is to reduce inequality, and he is looking forward to cooperating with the Chinese government on this issue, Lake said.

"You have to focus education on the most disadvantaged children, so that when they grow up, they can compete in an even playing field with the children of the wealthy and better-off," said Lake.

"Shifting educational resources and helping improve education of the poor is the best investment you can possibly make," he said.

Unlike China, children in some nations don't have a childhood, so it is imperative for countries to work together and give these children a better chance to grow up, according to Lake.

"I wish while children in China are enjoying their own childhoods, remember out there in the world there are those who are not," said Lake. "If they can have a better life, that will not only be good for their countries, but for China as well."
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On May 13, 2017, while Beijing is welcoming guests from all over the world for the BRF, the 1,000th freight train heading from Yiwu to Madrid was waiting for its departure. (Photo by People.cn)

By the time when Beijing was ready for the two-day grand forum of Belt and Road, good news came from eastern Chinas Zhejiang Province. On Saturday, May 13, the 1,000th freight train connecting China and Europe departed Yiwu and bound for Madrid. A record so far with an increase of 612 trips over the same period last year.

The Yixinou line runs freight services twice per week with a lead time of 16 days. This allows goods from China to arrive in Europe in a shorter time than via shipping by sea.

The train carries Yiwus small commodities such as household items, toys, decors, and garments to Europe. Upon return, European goods such as wine, olive oil and cosmetic products are imported to China. Trains returning from Europe are now scheduled for once a month.

The Yixinou line launched its maiden trip in November 2014. This rail link, measuring over 13,000 kilometers, is by far the longest in the world.

Since then, Yiwu has started operation of a direct rail freight service to London. The Yiwu-London line passes through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France.

As part of their intercontinental rail freight services, the CR Express has now developed a total of 39 train routes connecting 16 cities in China to Europe. Rail freight provides a cheaper shipment method to air, and a more time-efficient option than sea.

According to logistics expert Wang Jianming from Yiwu, the launch of the Yixinou lines not only strengthens trade ties between China and Europe, but also promotes people-to-people and cultural exchanges.

He reveals that the city of Yiwu is also holding discussions with European countries such as Latvia and Poland to establish partnerships and collaborations in trade, education and logistics sectors.

Wang is optimistic that collaborations between China and Europe will flourish as the CR Express runs on a more frequent basis.
May 14, 2017, 1:43pm ET

Nissan to challenge Toyota's Prius for hybrid dominance?

The Note e-Power is a best-seller in Japan already.

Nissan might be coming after Toyota's dominant position in the hybrid field. It has already launched a salvo in Japan to much success and is looking to doing the same in other markets.

Currently, the Prius is the darling of the compact hybrid world. Last November in its home market, Nissan debuted the Note e-Power, a compact hybrid based on the 5-door hatchback we know in the US as the Versa Note. According to Automotive News, the Note e-Power has quickly catapulted a top sales spot in Japan, even beating the Prius.

The Note e-Power system runs on a 1.2-liter three-cylinder engine that operates as charging generator for the lithium-ion batteries which actually power the car. Instead of running through a wide rpm range, the revs are kept at the motor's most efficient rate, resulting in 77 mpg according to the Japanese testing cycle. In comparison, a standard Prius gets 87 mpg on the Japanese testing cycle.

While Nissan did not confirm that the Note e-Power would be coming to the US, the company did acknowledge an accelerated push towards hybrid and EV technology.
May 15, 2017, 3:37am ET

Researchers making crash test dummies older, fatter

Researchers argue safety ratings aren\'t accurate because many motorists are old, obese, or both.

Humanetics, an American company that specializes in designing and building crash test dummies, is working on new models that look more like the average driver.

Currently, the dummies stuffed in a car before it's hurled against a heavy, stationary object are of average size and weight. Researchers argue safety ratings aren't accurate because many motorists are old, obese, or both.

Consequently, Humanetics has built a prototype dummy of a 70-year old woman that's borderline-obese, according to British magazine Autocar. A second prototype is a middle-aged adult man that's 6'2" and obese.
May 15, 2017, 9:37am ET

Waymo joins forces with Lyft to take on Uber

The partnership reportedly aims to accelerate the availability of autonomous vehicles to the general public.

Google's Waymo has teamed with Lyft to bring autonomous driving technology to market.

The companies will collaborate on product development and test technology via collaborative pilot projects, an unnamed source recently told The New York Times.

Before spinning off Waymo to commercialize its self-driving car project, Google envisioned autonomous cars as the ideal technology for a driverless taxi fleet. The company later decided to team with existing automakers rather than develop its own vehicle from the ground up.

Lyft has a similar vision for the future, prompting a partnership with General Motors to test a fleet of autonomous Chevrolet Bolt prototypes. The Waymo deal could help the ride-hailing company accelerate its plans.

"Waymo holds today's best self-driving technology, and collaborating with them will accelerate our shared vision of improving lives with the world's best transportation," a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement.

The partnership represents a competitive threat to Uber, the dominant leader in the ride-hailing business. Waymo recently filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing the company of stealing its proprietary Lidar technology.
A raid in Allentown netted methamphetamine, heroin and charges against two men, according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office.

In March, an informant bought 14 grams of meth from Alex "Domi" Munoz, which Munoz retrieved from 1314 Newton St. in Allentown, investigators said.

On Tuesday, a confidential informant bought almost 30 grams of methamphetamine from Munoz, and agents then searched the home at 1314 Newton St., prosecutors said. Agents arrested Munoz, of Catasauqua, and Maximiliano Batista, who lives at the Allentown address.

Agents said during the search they found 8.9 grams of meth in the home, as well as 1.2 grams of heroin, $5,065 in cash, two digital scales, plastic bags and rubber bands.

The 42-year-old Munoz reportedly admitted purchasing meth from Batista, and the 28-year-old Batista reportedly told agents he supplied Munoz with the drug.

Munoz was charged Friday with being an employee of a corrupt organization, conspiracy, and eight drug charges. He was sent to Lehigh County Jail in lieu of $200,000 bail.

Charged were filed Friday against Batista, but he has not yet been arraigned in the case.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A pickup truck rolled about 5:20 a.m. Monday, shutting a Warren County road for about 40 minutes.

The crash happened on Mine Hill Road north of Bowerstown Road in Washington Township. A man who was driving the Dodge declined medical treatment.

Washington Township police are investigating and were assisted by Washington's rescue squad and township firefighters.

Freelance photographer Rich Maxwell provided information for this post.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The number of people serving sentences in prisons in Portlaoise and elsewhere dropped by more than 10% last year with substantial rise in community services orders.

According to the annual report of the Irish Prison Service for 2016, there were 15,099 committals to prison during the year which is a decrease of 12.2% on the 2015 total of 17,206.

Some 8,439 persons were committed to prison as a consequence of the non-payment of a court ordered fine during 2016. This decrease of 14.6% on the 2015 figure of 9,883 is a direct result of the implementation of the Fines (Payment and Recovery) Act 2014.

At total of 12,579 persons were sent to prison in 2016 compared to 14,182 in 2015, a decrease of 11.3%.

The number of prisoners committed serving sentences of 12 months or less decreased by 12.2%.

The overall daily average number of prisoners in custody in 2016 was 3,718 compared to 3,722 in 2015. This represents a decrease of 0.1%.

There were 2,067 Community Service Orders made in 2016 compared with 1,937 in 2015. This represents an almost 7% increase.

2016 saw 301 people involved in the Community Return Scheme.

The Tanaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality, Frances Fitzgerald TD, welcomed the publication of the Probation Service and Irish Prison Service Annual Reports for 2016.

The Tanaiste also launched the Joint Probation Service and Irish Prison Service Strategy for Development of Social Enterprise in the Irish Criminal Justice Sector 2017  2019.

During 2016, the number of Community Service Orders issued by the Courts and facilitated by the Probation Service increased to over two thousand. I am pleased to note the increase in the use of Community Service, as an alternative to prison. The use of prison as a sanction of last resort is a core principle of penal reform, and I applaud the Probation Service in their success in providing appropriate alternatives to custody," she said.

Welcoming the 12% reduction in prison committals highlighted in the Irish Prison Service Annual Report, the Tanaiste noted the impact that alternatives to custody were having, especially on committals for shorter sentences.

We must continue to ensure that violent offenders and other serious offenders serve appropriate prison sentences while at the same time switching away from prison sentences and towards less costly non-custodial options for non-violent and less serious offenders, she said.

The Probation Service and Irish Prison Service Annual Reports are available, alongside the Joint Strategy for Development of Social Enterprise in the Irish Criminal Justice Sector, at the following websites: www.probation.ie and www.irishprisons.ie respectively and www.justice.ie.

Address by the Tanaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality, Frances Fitzgerald T.D. at the Launch of the Irish Prison Service Annual Report 2016, the Probation Service Annual Report 2016 and the launch of A New Way Forward - the Joint Social Enterprise Strategy 2017 -2019 Mountjoy Prison - May 15th 2017

"Director General Michael Donnellan, Director of Probation Service Vivien Geiran, Governor Brian Murphy, colleagues and invited guests.

I am delighted to join you all in this excellent new Work and Training Facility at Mountjoy Prison, to formally publish the Annual Reports of both the Irish Prison Service and the Probation Service. I would like to thank Governor Murphy for his kind welcome.

Gathering today, we have an opportunity to look back at the year 2016 and to recognise the significant work that has been achieved by both Services. We also look to the future with the launch of the latest innovative collaboration between the Services, and my own Department, with the publication of A New Way Forward  Social Enterprise Strategy 2017-2019.

The Irish Prison Service Annual Report highlights that 2016 was another year of progressive change and modernisation for the Service. In June, I published a series of Strategies for the organisation including the new Strategic Plan 2016-2018 which sets out in detail the key strategic aims for the Service over the coming years. This Strategy builds on the successful implementation of the previous Strategy, which has already seen huge change across the system.

The Annual Report includes a detailed progress report on the implementation of the new Strategy and I am pleased to see that huge progress has already been achieved. This includes the introduction of enhanced supports for staff such as the introduction of an independent counselling service, the commenced roll out of Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) and the appointing of additional Staff Support Officers.

The first Prison Officer recruitment campaign since 2008 took place in 2016 with the first classes of Recruits now currently in training in the Irish Prison Service College. 80 recruits will join the Service this year with up to 250 additional staff joining in 2018.

Staff safety continues to be a priority with a number of actions being progressed including the implementation of the recommendations contained within the recent State Claims Agency Report on Staff Assaults.

Support for prisoners was enhanced in 2016 through the development of initiatives such as Social Enterprise projects, which I will mention in more detail later and initiatives to help prisoners develop and maintain relationships with their families. In addition, sentence management and pre-release planning continues to be improved and enhanced, resulting in better outcomes for prisoners. Much of this, I should point out, has been achieved through collaboration with other agencies and bodies such as the Probation Service.

Early last year we saw the opening of the new Cork Prison, which can be seen on the cover of the IPS Report. This development, and other capital projects including those in Limerick Prison and here in Mountjoy Prison, are the realisation of the Governments commitment and the commitment of Irish Prison Service management, to provide prison facilities that are built to the highest international standards and finally end the practice of slopping out in our prisons.

The Report contains a detailed statistical report for the Prison Service and I would like to note some of the key figures for the year. In 2016 there were 15,099 committals to prison which I am pleased to note is a significant decrease of 12.2% from the previous year. The committals under sentence also significantly decreased by 13% which is also welcome. We must continue to ensure that violent offenders and other serious offenders serve appropriate prison sentences while at the same time switching away from prison sentences and towards less costly non-custodial options for non-violent and less serious offenders.

Alternatives to custody continue to be pursued and legislation has already been passed. This includes the Criminal Justice (Community Service) (Amendment) Act 2011 which requires the sentencing judge to consider the imposition of community service where a custodial sentence of 12 months or less is being considered.

I note that there were 8,439 committals for the non-payment of a court ordered fine in 2016 which is a decrease of 15% on the previous year. It is clear that the Fines Act which came into effect in 2016 is having an impact and further decreases are expected this year with provisional figures for the first quarter of 2017 showing decreases of up to 50% on the same period in 2016.

Turning to the Annual Report of the Probation Service which sets out the work and the performance of the Service against the key objectives outlined in the Probation Service Strategy Statement for 2015 to 2017. The report clearly illustrates the enormous valuable rehabilitative work of the Service with offenders in our communities and with victims of crime.

The Probation Services primary objective is to contribute to public safety, through the effective management and assessment of offenders in the community. Rehabilitating offenders to achieve and maintain positive change is at the core of Probation Service work. In 2016, the Probation Service managed almost 15,000 offenders in the community, completed over 10,000 assessment reports and over 2,300 community service assessments for courts nationwide. The Service also supervised over 6,700 new court orders for supervision, working with offenders to change their behaviours and become more law abiding citizens.

The Probation Service continued to implement the Community Return Scheme, which affords offenders the opportunity to undertake unpaid work in the community, in lieu of a prison sentence while also learning valuable work and life skills.

In 2016, the Service managed over 2,000 Community Service Orders totalling almost 325,000 hours of Community Service work carried out by offenders in lieu of almost 1,000 years in custody. This equated to 3 million of unpaid work for the benefit of the community, with communities across the country benefitting from this contribution of Community Service and Community Return work. Examples of Communities benefitting from community service are contained in the report.

I am delighted to see an integrated model of Community Service introduced on a pilot basis in 2016. This followed a recommendation from the Strategic Review of Penal Policy (2014). Integrated community service allows for up to 1/3 of community service order hours, to be used to facilitate attendance at programmes and support services to address issues connected with a clients offending. This initiative will be evaluated in 2017 and I look forward to the outcome.

The Probation Service worked with 1,500 women offenders in 2016 representing almost 17% of all new court referrals. Women in the criminal justice system face unique issues in addressing and reducing their risk of reoffending. The experience in the Probation Service is that in general, female offenders pose a lower risk to society and have a higher level of need. The Probation Service offers a distinct response when working with female offenders. The overall approach having a particular focus on relationships, trauma, victimisation and parenting, delivered through a co-ordinated and multi-agency response. For example, the SAOL Project developed the BRIO programme (Building Recovery Inwards and Outwards) a two-year pilot programme, which is an opportunity for peer led experiential training in education, facilitation skills and delivery. This was offered to all female service users in Dublin as well as some in the womens prison.

The importance of community involvement in preventing re-offending is highlighted in the report. Funding of 10.7 million was provided through the Probation Service in 2016, to Community Based Organisations working with adults. A further 5 million in funding was provided by the Irish Youth Justice Service through the Probation Service to the Young Person Probation projects and I am delighted to see the work of the Bridge Project highlighted in this years annual report. I had the privilege of officially opening their new premises and launching their strategic plan last November. Bridge are one of the partners involved in J-ARC.

One of the keys to the success of the work of the Probation Service is the nature of the Services interagency and multi-disciplinary approach. One of the best examples of inter-agency co-operation is the Joint Agency Response to Crime (J-ARC).This was established between An Garda Siochana, the Probation Service and the Irish Prison Service. The J-ARC initiative, which commenced in four locations in Dublin, was extended in 2016 to three additional locations, Waterford City, Limerick City and Dundalk. In addition to the expansion of J-ARC , the development of The Joint Strategy on the Management of Offenders 2016  2018, was formally launched back in September. This further supports and shows the commitment to joint agency working.

Finally, 2016 saw the commencement of a recruitment process for new Probation Officers and the commencement of a recruitment process for a number of Community Service Supervisors in key locations nationwide. This recruitment, I believe will help the Probation Service go from strength to strength, provide them with a central role in our criminal justice system and.ensure the delivery of a high quality service, in the assessment and supervision of offenders. To date 30 new Probation Officers have been assigned.



I am delighted to take this opportunity here today to also officially launch, the Joint Social Enterprise Strategy for the Irish Prison Service and Probation Service. I think it is important to acknowledge the wealth of collaboration that is taking place between the Prison Service and Probation Service at many levels.

This close co-operation has been formalised in a Joint Strategy which is being delivered through many successful projects such as Community Return or Community Support. Other initiatives such as the J-ARC initiative have seen that collaboration, extended to other Justice agencies including An Garda Siochana and are helping to deliver a more integrated response to crime.

These initiatives have given real options and opportunities to offenders and as a result our communities are safer.

The launch of this strategy marks the beginning of a new and innovative way of tackling re-offending rates, creating safer communities and ensuring fewer victims. It also highlights my Departments continued commitment to seeking alternative approaches to reducing recidivism rates within Irish society.

This strategy is the result of 12 months collaborative work between the Department of Justice and Equality, Probation Service, Irish Prison Service and our community partners, which was overseen by a dedicated Social Enterprise Steering Committee. This committee was established in May 2016, for the purpose of developing and driving forward this strategy, which supports the development of social enterprises as a mechanism of providing sustainable employment for people with convictions under four strategic pillars. We look forward to the forthcoming National Social Enterprise Strategy, currently being developed by the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs and thank this Department for their support and contribution to our own Joint Strategy.

A Forfas Report into the social enterprise sector published in 2013 identified significant employment growth potential in social enterprises and included enterprises established to provide training and employment to ex-offenders as a recognised form of social enterprise. There are examples of successful social enterprises operating in Britain and other jurisdictions to support employment for people with convictions but as of yet, it remains a largely untapped opportunity here in Ireland. Today marks a significant step forward in this regard, the impact of which will be experienced at individual, family, community and wider society levels.



As an initial social enterprise venture, I was honoured to be invited to officially open the Coffee Shop in Loughan House Open Centre in Cavan last July. This enterprise brings many benefits to the local community and to the serving prisoners alike, as it greatly assists their re-integration into society. I am also very pleased to see other examples of social enterprises operating within the criminal justice sector here today. I envisage that this Joint Strategy can only serve to strengthen the significant role you are playing in the supported employment of people with convictions.

You will be aware that the Spent Convictions legislation was signed into law earlier this year by President Higgins. The effect of this will be that where persons are applying for employment, the person will not be obliged to disclose convictions which are more than seven years old. This will give people with a minor convictions history, the opportunity to get on with their lives.



Finally, I wish to acknowledge the important work of the Social Enterprise Steering Committee on developing this Strategy and commend both Michael Donnellan and Vivian Geiran, for showing such leadership in this area. I would like also to acknowledge the contribution of Siobhan Cafferty who has played a pivotal role in the development of this strategy and to Domini Kemp, the entrepreneur and chef, who spearheaded a pilot Prison Entrepreneurship Programme  known as PEP  in Wheatfield Place of Detention between May 2016 and February 2017.

This was an in-prison, classroom-based business development and monitoring programme.

I express my optimism that this new approach will bring added benefits, to our combined efforts to address re-offending rates. I look forward to seeing the key objectives contained within the strategy being progressed over the coming months and give my Departments full support to this important initiative.

Before I conclude I would like to again acknowledge the sad passing of Judge Michael Reilly, Inspector of Prisons in November 2016. Last Thursday evening we celebrated Michaels life in the presence of his family, friends and former colleagues at a moving memorial service. Michael gave great service to the State and was widely respected by all involved in the criminal justice system.

Finally, I would like to congratulate both Directors and staff for your excellent progress in and attitude to working with offenders both in custody and in the community. I would like to thank you all for the work done to reduce re-offending and create safer communities for all in society."
Each prisoner in Portlaoise's prisons and other Irish jails cost the public more in 2016 than 2015 and is now nearing 70,000 on average, according to the annual report of the Irish Prison Service.

But while the costs have risen, the actual number of people going to prison has gone down according to the figures published in the report. It is also revealed that more than 300 million was spend running Irish jails last year.

The costs are outlined by Michael Donnellan, Director General of the Prison Services in his 2016 annual report.

"The average annual cost of an available prison, staffed prison space during the calendar year 2016 was 69,421, a slight increase on the 2015 cost of 68,628," said the report.

The report says that 2016 saw a decrease in total committals to prison with 15,099 - a decrease of 12.2% on the previous year when more than 17,200 were in jail.

A total of 12,579 people were sent to jail in 2016 compared to 14,182 in 2015. Nearly 80 percent of prisoners are male.

The overall daily average number of prisoners in custody was 3,718 a decrease of just four on 2015.

Each day, on average in Portlaoise, the Midlands Prison had an average of 814 in custody while Portlaoise Prison had 198 behind bars.

The Government gave the Irish Prison Service a budget of more 332 million to run jails in Portlaoise and elsewhere last year. At the end of the year there were some 3,215 staff.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets with Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who is here for the Belt and Road Forum (BRF) for International Cooperation, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Sunday the country is capable of maintaining financial market stability and warding off regional and systemic financial risks.

China will strike a balance between financial stability, gradual deleveraging and stable economic growth, Li said while meeting with Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde, who is in Beijing to attend the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

Li said the country will continue to implement a prudent monetary policy and put the prevention of financial risks at a prominent position.

The government will also continue with a market-based, managed floating exchange rate regime to keep basic stability of the yuan at a reasonable and balanced level, he said.

China is willing to enhance policy communication and coordination with the IMF, and promote economic globalization, trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, as well as multilateral cooperation, to keep the global economy on track of stable development, Li said.

Lagarde said China's growth momentum is encouraging. She praised China's strong support for global economic cooperation and multilateral trade system.

The IMF is glad to see that China's financial system remains on a solid foundation with effective and proper prudential regulation, she said.

In a separate meeting with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim on Sunday, Li said China's economy is in the process of transformation and upgrading, which requires traditional industrial capacity to be overhauled and new growth momentum to be fostered as well.

China is ready to strengthen cooperation with the World Bank and conduct joint research on such subjects as nurturing new growth impetus to help accelerate the country's economic upgrading, Li said.

As the world's largest developing country, China is willing to fulfill its duty as a responsible major country and engage more in cooperation on reducing poverty and promoting development, he noted.

China hopes the World Bank can lead the international community to jointly push forward economic globalization and work together for common prosperity, Li told Kim.

Kim said the World Bank is confident in the prospects of China's drive to deepen reforms, boost innovation and create new growth drivers, and is ready to strengthen cooperation with China.

He also spoke highly of China's efforts to reform its health care system, saying they will provide useful experience for other countries.
A UK cancer treatment company reported to be opening a 50m centre in the former Magee Barracks site has stated that plans are in the discussion phase with a number of organisations both in the UK and internationally.

Proton Partners declined to comment on whether they had bought the former Magee Barracks site for the 50 million cutting edge cancer treament centre.

A statement from the company to the Leinster Leader said We are in discussions with a number of organisations both in the UK and internationally with a view to developing more proton beam therapy centres. Announcements will be made in due course should agreements be reached.

The Barracks was bought last year by property develper David Kennedy who has since been in pre-planning talks with Kildare County Council regarding the site. If purchased by Proton Partners it would mean that the clinic would comprise the core commercial offering on the site subject to planning permission. The rest of the site would then be made up of housing and local amenity space.

Kildare south TD Fiona O'Loughlin said the development could potentially provide up to 70 jobs.

Deputy OLoughlin outlined that she met Professor Karol Sikora, former head of the World Health Organisations cancer programme who founded the Proton Partners International in 2015 last Friday.

She claimed that the professor is however intent on delivering this clinic in Kildare town, along with members of the oncology profession here in Ireland.

This is very exciting news both for Kildare town and the area of health and cancer treatment. The Minister of Health has already outlined that the Department has no plans to build such a centre due to cost, so it is great to see a private developer going ahead and building this centre in Kildare. Much needed jobs will be provided, and of course there will be an economic spin off for Kildare town."

Kildare South TD Sean O'Fearghail said the centre would be welcomed with 'open arms' but added it was the first he had heard about it after news reports.

It would be excellent from the point of view of job creation,he said.

Local councillor Suzanne Doyle said the site is a mixed development site and residential so it could accommodate the centre.

I am very encouraged by this and its potential for the town and the area,she said.

These people are looking at sites and I hope it comes to fruition.

Proton therapy is described as a new state-of-the-art treatment for cancer often considered to be an alternative to radiation therapy. The centre will be equipped to offer the high energy proton beam therapy as well as radiotherapy, chemotherapy, imaging and well being services. It is used in paediatric cases of cancer as it causes less tissue damage. The company which is based in London currently has clinics in Newcastle, Abu Dhabi and Newport in south wales.
A fall which is between 10-15 feet at Dromod Railway Bridge is very dangerous and is a matter of urgency according to Cllr Sean McGowan.

McGowan asked Shay O'Connor, Senior Engineer to have immediate discussions with Irish Rail with a view to providing a safe and secure type of fence along the footpath on both sides of the Railway bridge at Dromod Rail Station, "the hedge that is there presently is falling away and it is quite dangerous for the many people who use the footpath on a daily basis."

The council said they will make contact with Irish Rail and can meet with them at any stage. However, any works regarding the construction of a new parapet extension will require large amounts of funding. Due to back yard developments and slope settlement, a retaining wall or piling design and construction will be required on both approaches to the bridge. A specific grant will be required from both the LA and IR. If immediate footpath funding was available we could provide a temporary solution before settlement re-establishes on the approach embankments. Similarly, if safety barrier funding was made available, a temporary containment system could be constructed."

Cllr McGowan asked what would be the cost if someone falls in? Cllr Sinead Guckian supported the motion and said her colleague was not exaggerating how dangerous the drop is.
The chair of the Scottish Liberal Democrats election campaign Alex Cole-Hamilton has today called on Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson to disown the Conservative MP for Wells who has been caught in foul-mouthed tirade against a young person.

The Sunday People has the details:

A Tory MP blasted a Scottish girl who said she would vote for independence in a second referendum, saying: Why dont you f*** off back to Scotland. James Heappey, 36, fighting to stay MP for Wells, Somerset, has apologised, insisting he was joking.

He asked sixth-formers at nearby private Millfield school how theyd vote in a new Scottish referendum When one Scots girl said shed back independence, he lashed out.

Over the weekend, Conservatives in Midlothian complained (justifiably) about the behaviour of SNP activists who were basically obnoxious. When anyone on whatever side uses unhelpful language, it just ramps up the tension some more and its not fair on those of us who want to see a civilised political environment.

Alex said:

Ruth Davidson needs to immediately disown the actions of her Conservative MP colleague. Once again a senior Conservative manages to help the SNP by being obnoxious. Scots who oppose a divisive independence referendum should vote for the Liberal Democrats because we can manage to oppose independence without swearing at children.

Its clear, too, that Wells has the chance to choose a much better representative on 8 June. Tessa Munt was a stellar MP who stood up for her constituents with bravery and compassion. This may motivate you to help her out a bit and you can do so here.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
Yesterday on Peston on Sunday David Davis claimed that in the Referendum those who supported Leave were knowingly voting to leave the single market, ie a hard Brexit. Thats not what Liberal Democrats are hearing on the doorstep.

Davis also said that we might leave the EU without any deal at all, and we had to plan for that possible outcome.

You can watch the interview here, starting 6:20 minutes in.

Tim Farron said:

David Davis is completely out of his depth. Brexit without a deal would be a disaster. It would mean no deal on trade, no deal on travel rights, no deal on the quality of goods. How on earth can he pretend that is a good thing? Nobody knows what Brexit will look like. The choices Theresa May is making will affect peoples lives and Britain for decades  thats peoples jobs, the weekly shop, our environment, our safety, where we can travel to and where people can live. Thats why Liberal Democrats think everyone must have the final say on whether Theresa Mays Brexit deal is right for them in a referendum. And if people dont like that deal, they should have the choice to remain in the European Union.

* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
The Electoral Reform Society has highlighted a huge drop in the number of young people on the electoral register since individual electoral registration came in.

From the Independent:

The ERS, which campaigns on access to democracy, said while the move to IER had improved the accuracy of the register, it has also led to a significant fall in the number of young people on the electoral roll. Of the nations which introduced IER in 2014, Scotland has seen the biggest drop in the number of attainers (16 and 17 year olds on the register), at 35 per cent, followed by Wales (27 per cent) and England (25 per cent). In Northern Ireland, where the IER system has been in place since 2002, the number of those signed up to vote has fallen by half. Latest analysis shows the number of attainers registered in Westmorland and Lonsdale, the constituency held by the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, to have dropped by three quarters (75 per cent) over three years.

People only have a week to register to vote. The deadline is 23:59 on 22 May.

Tim Farron and St Albans candidate Daisy Cooper have been encouraging young people to make sure that they have a say:

Tim said:

Young peoples wishes have been swept under the rug since the EU referendum when 75% voted to remain. At a time of monumental political change, many feel hurt, ignored and powerless. The Liberal Democrats will not allow young peoples pro-European aspirations to go unnoticed. Their priorities must be our priorities. This General Election is a chance to change the direction of our country. Register to vote now and have your say.

Daisy, who is also the partys spokesperson for young people, added:

Young people have the largest stake in our future, and they deserve a say over what happens next. The Liberal Democrats will fight for their right to vote on the final Brexit deal. It is vital that young people register before the 22nd May deadline. If you want a party that can change Britains future vote Liberal Democrats.

It is incumbent on us all to do all we can in the week that remains to engage with as many young people as possible and make sure that they are registered to vote.
BLINDBOY Boatclub of The Rubberbandits has described Irelands blasphemy law as an embarrassment.

He outlined his support to scrap the crime of blasphemy following calls for reform in response to a garda investigation into comments made by British actor and comedian Stephen Fry.

Countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have very strict blasphemy laws, where people go to jail and get stoned. They can say well Ireland has a blasphemy law in its Constitution, and theyre supposed to be the civilised West. We have to stand up to that, Blindboy told iRadio.

While some of the views Blindboy has himself aired on TV have been described as blasphemous, he said that as long as he wears a plastic bag on his head hes engaged in a continual act of artistic performance, so I can say what I like. Its art.

At the end of the day, youd have to be seriously offended by a man who thinks its right to wear a plastic bag on his head. Everybody has a right to be offended, thats a healthy part of free speech.

But peoples feelings of hurt doesnt mean that they are right, and thats where it becomes tricky. Its legitimate if your feelings are hurt but that doesnt give you a right to silence another person.

Blindboy said there is some very blasphemous stuff in a new fictional book he is writing, which is due out before the end of the year. However, I am protected under artistic freedom so I can do what I want.

Addressing his appearance on The Late Late Show, where he referred to Communion wafers as haunted bread, he said thats literally what it is.

RTE received more than 1,350 formal complaints after the broadcast on January 6 last. It said that a number had been referred to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) under the statutory complaints process.

During a discussion, Blindboy said that young people attending Midnight Mass at Christmas were not going there for haunted bread, adding that everyone at Midnight Mass is half-cut anyway.

In addition, he said that the Church was asking us to eat the ghost of a 2,000-year-old carpenter.

Fr Kevin McNamara, parish priest in Moyvane, north Kerry, was among those to file a complaint with the BAI in relation to the comments, which he described as blasphemous, and downright shameful and hurtful.

If that priest is offended by me referring to it as haunted bread he actually becomes a Protestant, because the core of the Protestant faith is to reject that miracles happen, Blindboy said.

Protestants believe that its actually just a piece of bread, and the Christ stuff is merely symbolism. Catholics believe that you are actually eating the body of a 2,000 year-old carpenter," he added.
On May 14, the BRF is holding in Beijing six parallel thematic meetings, one of them eyes on the people-to-people connectivity. (Photo by Xinhua)

Sunday saw the start of the first-ever Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. Washington sent a delegation led by White House adviser Matthew Pottinger to the summit, a sharp contrast from its previous attitude to Beijing's infrastructure-building proposals. Washington "recognizes the importance" of the Belt and Road initiative, according to the US Commerce Department.

More US scholars are attaching increasing importance to the Belt and Road initiative. Parag Khanna, a former advisor to the US government and now a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, equated the significance of infrastructure to that of national security, and said that connectivity was an indicator of a country's influence in a speech.

American academia has also started to explore the Belt and Road initiative. The University of California Berkeley set up the first institutionalized center dedicated to the study of the history of the Silk Road in April, and a number of seminars on the Belt and Road initiative have been launched in US universities and research institutes.

The US has realized that with an increasing number of countries participating in the Belt and Road initiative, its right to set the rules on the global economic arena may gradually be weakened if it misses Belt and Road-related opportunities. While US President Donald Trump advocates an America First doctrine, striving to revive the US economy, Beijing's Belt and Road initiative honors extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, and is a high-powered engine for global economic growth. Joining Beijing's initiative is an effective way for the US to seize more economic opportunities, thus paving the way for its America First strategy.

In the meantime, Washington's role in promoting the Belt and Road initiative cannot be underestimated. Although countries along the route are largely supportive of the initiative, the Belt and Road faces a number of religious, security and geopolitical challenges in implementation.

As a leading Western power, Washington's participation in the Belt and Road initiative will have knock-on effects, encouraging its allies to see the initiative from a more rational and objective perspective, and thus help win Beijing and its infrastructure projects more international understanding and influence.

Beijing-Washington cooperation on the Belt and Road initiative is highly likely to be the most significant basis for global peace in the 21st century. As the two biggest economies, China and the US should collaborate for mutual benefits, which is of vital importance for global prosperity and stability.
LABOUR leader Brendan Howlin has set out plans to at least double the partys representation in Limerick.

Currently, the party has just two councillors  Elena Secas and Joe Leddin  and one TD in the shape of Jan OSullivan.

They were all present, as Mr Howlin, fresh from his first party conference as Labour leader, toured the Peoples Park, Limerick rail station, the Hyde Road, and Mungret Park recently.

Ms OSullivan said the focus of the visit was to show her leader some of the things the Labour party had done while in government.

With the local elections two years away  but with a General Election possible in the meantime  Mr Howlin said: I've set a national target of doubling our number of seats. We have 50 councillors nationally. I think it's absolutely feasible to have 100 by the end of the next local election cycle.

"We don't know what will happen between now and then though - probably a general election, I think that's highly likely, and that will change the dynamic somewhat. There could be boundary redraws so it is difficult at this distance to be absolutely prescriptive.

He added: We need to move beyond the difficult years we have had. To look to the traditional values of the Labour party, get back to our focus on our core issues like work, ensuring people have a job, ensuring work pays, dealing with the casualisation of work, and looking to what we're good at. Reform, ensuring there is transparency and quality in public administration, and ensuring we have decent public services, investing in health and education.

While in Limerick, the party leader also opened the door to a possible merger with the Social Democrats.

There is no ground for a variety of parties in the same political space, he said.

The fledgling Social Democrat party has just two Dail deputies, and Mr Howlin believes it could be in their interests to converge.

The Labour party has traditionally been the social democratic party of the country. I would be very happy to talk to our social democratic colleagues, because I think we share a value system. I would like to see us working in tandem, and maybe if that works, to have a merger of parties as weve had in the past, he said.

Limerick TD Jan OSullivan, who played a key role when her first party, Democratic Left, merged with Labour, agreed.

She added: I think in terms of policy, were very close to the Social Democrats, and I would be quite happy if we merged. We would be open to it. But for them, they are relatively recently formed, so they may be a little loathe to quickly merge.

The Labour leader believes the Social Democrats are practical politicians of the left who want to bring about change, not just talk about it.

Thats what differentiates people on the left: those who want to roll up their sleeves and make a difference, and those who want to simply make noise. I think the Social Democrats fall into the category of those who want to make a difference, Mr Howlin told the Limerick Leader.

Separately, the Wexford TD admitted he is worried for the Labour party in Britain, which  if opinion polls are to be believed  are hurtling to a heavy defeat in the forthcoming election.
INDEPENDENT councillor Emmett OBrien has claimed that Adare is not getting a fair crack of the whip from Limerick City and County Council.

There is a growing feeling amongst the people and business owners and rate payers of Adare that there is an anti Adare bias when it comes to service from the council, the Adare Rathkeale Municipal District councillor said this week.

And he cited a number of examples to illustrate his point.

Frankly it was unacceptable that I had to contribute money last year from my discretionary fund to the grass cutting of Adare town park. While this situation has now been rectified we have recently seen the grass in the park cut and not collected for a number of days. This is just not good enough in the principal tourist village in County Limerick if not the Mid West, he said.

Of most pressing concern is the suspension of weekend street cleaning, he continued. Adare is internationally renowned and if we are remotely serious about promoting tourism in Limerick the powers that be in the council need to present the village in the manner that we all expect from a major tourist attraction.

This attitude of 'Adare has enough' must stop and I will call upon the council to reinstate weekend street cleaning and ensure that bins are emptied over the weekend and I will be asking my fellow councillors to support me on this, Cllr OBrien declared.

We have lost our weekend street bin service and given the numbers of people who visit Adare that is serious, the secretary of Adare Tidy Towns, Eleanor Purcell said. We do need that bin service restored.

Adare is the prettiest village in Ireland but we feel that in order to present Adare at its best, it is vital the council restore the level of grass cutting in the park which is the backdrop for thousands of weddings.

Last year, the grass was cut but not collected on a number of occasions and on one occasion so far this year, the grass was left uncollected for several days. It was like a meadow, Ms Purcell said.

We are now coming into our summer season and continue to suffer greatly from traffic congestion, Ms Purcell added. Given the huge investment that has taken place in Adare Manor, it is very necessary that the by-pass goes ahead.
LIMERICK has its finger on the pulse, with some of the countrys most influential fashion bloggers helping to get fashion in the city trending on social media.

Fashion designers Sonya Lennon and Brendan Courtney, former Rose of Tralee Maria Walsh, former Xpose presenters Aisling OLoughlin and Sybil Mulcahy, and Gemma Williams from Vogue Italia, were among those who sampled some of what Limerick has to offer in the style stakes.

What really comes through is the sense of community in the best possible way, enthused Ms Lennon. The whole fashion industry in Limerick has really pulled together to create a really extraordinary event.

Mr Courtney added: Limerick really has it. The love affair begins. LSAD has really clawed its way to the top of the ladder, and I think that its generally conceded that it is the most innovative fashion college in Ireland.

Ms Williams, who hopes to feature some of Limericks rising talent in an upcoming issue of Vogue Italia, has attended the LSAD fashion show for the past three years.

She said she has been very impressed with the talent emerging from the school. There have been some really interesting talents and I think its really putting Limerick on the map, so its very exciting. I think Limerick has a really interesting niche in the market at the moment, she told the Limerick Leader.

Fashion blogger Louise Cooney, originally from Dooradoyle, returned to her home city to see what it has to offer.

There are a lot of great designers in Limerick, with their own unique city, and you can really see that passion coming through. Its great to be here to support it, she said.

Model agent Celia Holman Lee said the logistics of putting the event together took months, and the organisers hope to hold a second event in county Limerick later this year.

Under her guidance, attendees were treated to a fashion show in House, showcasing wares from some of Limericks designers including Caroline Mitchell, Aisling Maher and Marion Murphy Cooney.

Later that night they attended the annual Limerick School of Art & Designs fashion show in LSADs Clare Street gallery.

Recently named in the top 100 fashion schools in the world, the LSAD fashion department has launched the careers of some of Irelands top designers such as Joanne Hynes.

Twenty of this years talented graduates showcased their unique creations.

Many had an international twist, as a number of the graduates have returned from work placements with Marc Jacobs in New York, Manish Arora in India and Lever Couture in Berlin.

Some of our digital influencers enjoying their fabulous goodie bags from some of local Limerick at @Houselimerick1 for #LimerickTagged pic.twitter.com/uCOpcXXeL5  Celia Holman Lee (@CeliaHolmanLee) May 11, 2017

So excited to be home in Limerick for the day for the #LimerickTagged event with @CeliaHolmanLee Fashion show  Breakfast  What's next? pic.twitter.com/Px8kRuCBtz  Louise Cooney (@louisecooney_) May 11, 2017
THE AMERICAN wife and her father charged with killing Limerick man Jason Corbett want their trial moved outside Davidson County in North Carolina to ensure a fair hearing, their attorneys have said.

Mr Corbetts second wife, Molly Martens Corbett, 33, and her father, Thomas Martens, 67, a former FBI agent, are each charged with second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter of Mr Corbett in their home in North Carolina in the early hours of August 2, 2015.

Both accused have claimed self-defence, saying Mr Corbett was choking his wife and threatening to kill her at the time of the incident.

The father of two died of blunt-force trauma to the head and had multiple cuts and skull fractures, according to an autopsy report.

Both are scheduled to go to trial in the week of July 17 next.

The Winston Salem Journal has reported that attorneys for both accused have filed a motion for change of venue, alleging their clients would not get a fair trial because of the media attention the case has received.

More than 350 news articles have been published regarding the case to date, attorneys said in their motion.

The motion also outlines that a fair trial could be jeopardised due to the alleged close ties between the Davidson County Sheriffs Office and the family of Jason Corbett.

Attorneys Walter Holton, for Ms Martens Corbett, and David Freedman, for Mr Martens, also contend that the media has published alleged false, inaccurate or misleading information contained in search warrants that were unsealed in January 2016.

The allegations in the affidavits [of the search warrants] became the basis of continuous news stories thereafter, some as recent as March 3 and 16, 2017, the motion said.

The affidavits contained unsubstantiated, inaccurate, misleading and, in some instances, false information prejudicial to Mrs Corbett and her father.

Both attorneys also allege the cases lead investigator with the Davidson County Sheriffs Office maintained constant contact with the family of Jason Corbett.

They also allege the Davidson County Sheriffs Office leaked contents of a 911 call in August 2015 to the Irish media after a judge had ordered the 911 call sealed.

According to the motion, Brian Shipwash, the clerk of court in Davidson County, engaged in improper conduct in both disputes over custody of Jason Corbetts children and his estate.

Ms Corbett wanted custody, but Jason Corbetts sister, Tracy Lynch, and her husband, David Lynch, in Limerick eventually won guardianship and took the children to Ireland. A Davidson County judge ordered the estate case moved to Forsyth County.

Assistant District Attorney Greg Brown said in court papers opposing a change of venue that no judge has made any findings that Shipwash engaged in misconduct.

Both also disputed allegations in the search warrant that Mr Corbett was planning to move permanently to Ireland with his children or that he had planned to transfer $60,000 from North Carolina to Ireland.

In fact, they said, his business partner told investigators that he had planned to surprise his father in Ireland in August 2015 and had considered a possible deposit of $60,000 to a business account but changed his mind.

Brown, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, said in his written response that Holton and Freedman have given interviews to local and international media.

The defendants are creating the exact publicity of which they complain, the response says.

Brown argues that Holton and Freedman have failed to identify any specific prejudice both accused would have if the trial is held in Davidson County.

A hearing on the change of venue and other pretrial motions will be held the week of June 8 in Davidson County Superior Court.
A JURY will begin considering its verdict this Tuesday in the trial of two Limerick men accused of murdering another Limerick man at his girlfriend's home.

Ger Hogan, aged 34, of Raheen Square, Ballinacurra Weston and Dylan Hayes, aged 22, of The Crescent, Kilteragh, Dooradoyle have pleaded not guilty to murdering Shane Murphy at The Grove, Pallasgreen, on April 30, 2015.

During the trial, the jury of five men and seven women was told Mr Murphy died after he sustained 23 stab wounds including one that pierced his heart.

It is the prosecution case that the two accused men acted together with the intention to kill or cause serious injury to Mr Murphy.

In his charge to the jury this Monday, Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said there are effectively two trials happening together and they must consider the charge against each accused separately.

For each man, there are three possible verdicts he said.

If the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused intended to kill or cause serious injury then the correct verdict is guilty.

However, if the jury accepts that the accused could have been provoked into a total loss of self control as a result of something Mr Murphy said or did, then the correct verdict is manslaughter.

When considering provocation, Justice McCarthy said the jury should look at the specific accused person and not some "notional person". "Take into account his personality and his circumstances insofar as you can," he said.

While he said that drink is not a defence, he added that when considering a man's state of mind it is one of the factors to be taken into account.

Mr Justice McCarthy said a not guilty verdict should be returned in either case if the jury accepts that the accused did not intend to kill or to cause serious injury to Mr Murphy.
BEIJING, May 15 -- Two Chinese companies on Monday signed a contract with Kazakhstan's national railway company to buy 49 percent of an inland port near the China-Kazakhstan border.

China COSCO Shipping Corporation and Jiangsu Lianyungang Port Co. will each hold 24.5 percent of the dry port located in the Khorgos-East Gate special economic zone, according to a statement from China COSCO Shipping.

The dry port is about 15 km from the Khorgos port in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on the border of the two countries. From the port, railway cargo can reach Lianyungang in east China's Jiangsu in five days and reach Europe in about 10 days.

Xu Lirong, chairman of China COSCO Shipping, said the dry port is the company's first overseas railway investment project since the corporation was established.

The company aims to build it into an important trade passageway and a model project for China and Kazakhstan under the Belt and Road Initiative.

China COSCO Shipping is a state-owned company set up in early 2016 after the merger of COSCO and China Shipping.
May 2, 2021, 9 PM

The United States Postal Service's board of governors has not had a nominee approved by the Senate in seven years. Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan wants President Trump to nominate people to the board to put it back in business.

Washington Postal Scene  By Bill McAllister



When Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan addressed the May 10 meeting of the United States Postal Services Temporary Emergency Committee, she made an open appeal to President Donald J. Trump.

Specifically, she asked Trump to nominate some people for the Postal Services board of governors.

There hasnt been anyone on the board since December 2016, when the term of the last presidential nominee, James Bilbray of Nevada, expired.

The emergency committee was established when the old board, a panel of great interest to many stamp collectors, began to fade away.

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Under current law, there are supposed to be nine individuals who serve on the board of governors, overseeing the USPS and serving seven-year terms.

A House bill would cut the number of governors to five, but as Brennan noted, there has not been any board nominee approved by the Senate for seven years.

The postmaster general didnt delve into what caused the board to collapse, but she said the Postal Service wants to put the board, which Congress created in 1970, back in business.

Only the board can name or remove a postmaster general and their deputy, and establish service standards.

Some mailing-industry officials have argued that the lack of a board has been just fine. The Postal Service has managed to sail along without any board, they say.

David Partenheimer, a Postal Service spokesman, said Brennan raised the issue as part of our continuous public appeal for a full board, calling on the administration to make the nominations and the Senate to confirm them so we have a full board  a full board based on what the law allows.

Asked how the Postal Service had pressed the issue, he said, Like other government agencies, the Postal Service was in contact with the current administration during the transition period.

Whether or not Brennan will get the board may depend on whether Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who blocked the nominees President Barack Obama submitted for the board, will once again intervene.

For stamp collectors, the board has played an important role in resolving some stamp disputes and pressing for other issues such as the forever stamps.

The boards biggest stamp role might have been the 1994 Legends of the West stamp debacle.

Those were the infamous 5.201 million panes of stamps that were recalled from the nations stamp distribution offices and 330 post offices, because one of the 20 stamps in the se-tenant panes pictured the wrong image of Bill Pickett, a bulldogging rodeo star. The errant stamp actually pictured Bills brother Ben Pickett.

A reported 183 panes of the stamps were sold before their scheduled Oct. 18,1994, official issue date, and they immediately soared in value after the recall.

Collectors were enraged, and they complained to the board of governors.

Enter J. Sam Winters, a lawyer from Austin, Texas, and the chairman of the postal board.

He didnt like the idea of destroying all the misprints that the USPS had rounded up.

After wrestling with Postmaster General Marvin T. Runyon, who had maintained he had total control of the stamp program, the two came up with a solution June 9, 1994.

Winters directed the Postal Service to stage a lottery to give the public a chance to secure 150,000 Legends of the West panes with the misprinted Pickett stamp.

This would balance the interests of the philatelic community with respect for the interests of the Pickett family by selling the panes at a price of $5.80 each plus a $2.90 charge to recoup the costs of printing the recalled panes, Winters said.

Runyon said it was a one-time agreement to allow the board a role in the stamp program.

But to collectors it was a dramatic example of how they could make their voices heard at the Postal Services LEnfant Plaza headquarters in Washington.
May 15, 2017, 9 AM

The webbed feet of a fish otter are visible on this 1987 stamp from East Germany.

This recent Baby Animals stamp from Switzerland is supposed to show a fish otter, but is said to picture an Asian dwarf otter instead.

By Denise McCarty

Swiss Post pictured the wrong otter on a recent stamp, according to a report published in the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten.

The 85-centime stamp was issued March 2 in a set of four featuring baby animals.

The design depicts a young otter on a blue background. The only inscriptions on the stamp are the denomination and country name (Helvetia) on the left side, and the designer's name (Simon Hofer) and year date at the bottom.

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Despite the lack of an inscription on the stamp naming the animal, Swiss Post clearly intended to show the fish otter (Lutra lutra), also known as the Eurasian otter.

For example, in its new-issue bulletin for collectors, Focus, Swiss Post mentioned that otters used to be found living on the banks of practically every stretch of water in Switzerland, but had become extinct in the country in the 20th century due to overhunting. It also noted that attempts were being made to reintroduce this otter.

That description fits the fish otter. However, according to Switzerlands Pro Lutra Foundation, the animal featured on the stamp is the Asian dwarf otter, also known as the small-clawed otter.

Irene Weinberger of the Pro Lutra Foundation told 20 Minuten, Fishing otters have clearly visible webbing and claws as young animals. These are missing from the animal on the stamp.

The mission of the Pro Lutra Foundation is to reestablish the fish otter in Switzerland.

The stamp will not be withdrawn from sale, according to the May 8 newspaper report by Marco Lussi.

Jacqueline Buhlmann of Swiss Post told Lussi that the Otter stamp and the Baby Animals set were popular with the public, and that they would remain on sale until the scheduled March 2018 withdrawal date. Buhlmann also apologized for the inconvenience.

The other stamps in the Baby Animals set picture a lynx (1 franc), wolf (1.50fr), and bear (2fr).
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China will host the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced on Monday afternoon at a press conference at the end of the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

The implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative is in full swing, said Xi, adding that 68 countries and international organizations have signed multilateral agreements with China.

He added that the next step is to seek deeper and broader cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative framework, and that China hopes the initiative will boost economic growth for participating countries and intensify people-to-people bonds.

Xi also expressed confidence in the future of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The two-day event is the highest-level forum on the Belt and Road Initiative since the Chinese president first raised the concept in 2013.
(Xinhua) 18:05, May 15, 2017

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China's cyberspace authority Monday warned computer users to install and upgrade computer security software to avoid ransomware attacks.

Police and various government authorities have taken response measures against a global ransomware attack, and Internet security companies including Qihoo 360, Tencent and Kingsoft Security have also acted to provide increased security services, according to a statement issued by the cybersecurity coordination bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).

The spread of the ransomware is ongoing, but is slowing down, the statement said.

About 18,000 IP addresses in China have been confirmed as infected with the "WannaCry" ransomware, which began to spread worldwide Friday, according to the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center (CNCERT).

Another 5,471 IP addresses, mostly in Beijing, Shanghai and coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, are likely to have been infected by the computer virus, according to the center.

"Intranets in many industries and enterprises involving banking, education, electricity, energy, healthcare and transportation have been affected in different extents," it said.

The ransomware has paralyzed the online payment systems at some petrol stations across China since Friday, and also invaded some colleges encrypting papers and other documents.

Once a computer is infected by the ransomware, almost all documents and programs will be encrypted and users are asked to pay to remove the virus, said Han Zhihui, a computer engineer at CNCERT.

Currently, the cybersecurity industry is not aware of an effective means of decryption, Han said.

Han said users could re-install the operating system on infected computers, but risk of losing important data and documents.

The cyberspace authority said this global cyberattack has once again shown the unprecedented internet security challenges, calling on all sectors to address cybersecurity issues.
(Xinhua) 21:06, May 15, 2017

BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- China's top insurance watchdog will conduct inspections to rectify market irregularities and protect consumer interests, according to an official statement released Monday.

From June to mid-October, local insurance authorities will conduct on-site investigations on 46 branches of 16 insurance entities, as well as seven part-time insurance agents, which had been ranked poorly in terms of customer complaints in the past two years, China Insurance Regulatory Commission said in the statement.

The inspections will focus on violations including fraudulent sales practices, fake or absent customer information, and failure to pay small insurance claims efficiently.

In addition, the insurance regulator will conduct case-by-case investigations into violations reported by the public, and punish typical behavior that hurts customer interests.

"We will never compromise on matters of principle, and we will not disregard violations for any reason," the regulator said in a statement.

The statement also called for toughened supervision on innovative insurance businesses, and said authorities will work to standardize sales behavior not only by insurance firms, but by agents and intermediaries.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

Trend:

Rector of Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) Elmar Gasimov met with four prospective students who earned 700 points at the entrance exams in 1st group of specialities this year, which were held by the State Examination Centre. These are graduate from the secondary school 162 (Baku) Mahira Asadzada, graduate from the lyceum named after Zarifa Aliyeva (Baku) Elmir Akhmedov, graduate from the secondary school 220 (Baku) Khalida Aliyeva, and graduate from the secondary school of Lagich village (Ismayilli) Vakhab Jebrayilov. All of them are going to become Process Automation Engineering students at the Higher School. The meeting also gathered their parents and the Higher School professors and students.

The Rector expressed his warmest congratulations to the prospective students on their remarkable achievement and excellent results of the exams. He said that he is very pleased to see that highly educated, knowledgeable and talented young people choose BHOS to obtain higher education. Elmar Gasimov added that the prospective students attending the meeting could be an example for other secondary school graduates willing to obtain higher education in the future. He also expressed confidence that the young people would dedicate their knowledge and skills for further successful development of the country.

The prospective students and their parents expressed their sincere graduate to the Higher School Rector for the congratulations and warmth reception.

It should be noted that four out of five prospective students who earned 700 points at the entrance exams this year have chosen BHOS.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

Trend:

A few days ago, the International Trade Fairs Group held a press conference in the conference hall of Trend news agency. During this press conference, the companys founder Agahasan Murtadci and director general Nizami Gozalov announced before media representatives that several international exhibitions will be held this year. During the conference, Gozalov told journalists about the exhibitions, which are planned to be held in 2017.

On June 28-30, Baku Expo Center will host Caspian Motor Show international exhibition of cars, spare parts, equipment and accessories presented by the manufacturers and their local distributors.

The event will be held with support of Azerbaijan Export and Investments Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO), National Confederation of Entrepreneurs (Employers) of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijani 'Silk Road' Public Union for Promotion of Development of Entrepreneurship.

All famous car manufacturers and their distributors have been invited to the exhibition which will cover an area of 8,000 square meters.

"The purpose of this exhibition is to demonstrate modern technologies, new developments in the motor vehicle sphere, said Murtadciyev. We stand for ensuring environmental cleanliness and safety of passengers. Therefore, during the exhibition, we want to demonstrate the technologies which will allow us to achieve this.

Nizami Gozalov, for his part, noted that this exhibition will help attract foreign investors who are interested in Azerbaijans motor vehicle sphere. He added that the development of car manufacturing will ensure the flow of investments to the country.

Such exhibitions not only open up economic prospects, but also pave way to flow of investments to the country, said Gozalov. In this regard, we are glad to invite representatives of the ministries of economy, transport, communication and high technologies, as well as organizations engaged in this sphere, experts and others to our exhibition.

We hope that the atmosphere in the exhibition, communication between the participants and guests of this event will help improve the economy, strengthen the production sector, attract investments, to work out new projects and create new jobs, added Murtadciyev.

The founder of ITF Group also noted that in order to exchange views and experience, it is planned in parallel to hold a business forum with participation of foreign firms which will become familiar with car manufacturing in Azerbaijan, as well as experts, specialists and researchers in this sphere.

ITF Group, which has held over 200 various exhibitions and business forums over 25 years, will organize Caspian Industry Expo international industry exhibition on September 13-15 and Halal Product Expo international exhibition on December 13-15, 2017.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

Trend:

The process of restructuring the currency obligations of the International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) will not affect its IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia subsidiary banks, the IBA told Trend May 15.

According to the message, both subsidiaries do not have foreign obligations.

"IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia comply with all regulatory requirements of the central banks of the countries where they operate, the bank said. The financial indices of IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia exceed all requirements of the central banks of both countries."

IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia successfully fulfill their obligations to customers, the message said.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Forty-five years have passed since humans last set foot on an extraterrestrial body. Now, the moon is back at the center of efforts not only to explore space, but to create a permanent, independent space-faring society.

Planning expeditions to Earth's nearest celestial neighbor is no longer just a NASA effort, though the U.S. space agency has plans for a moon-orbiting space station that would serve as a staging ground for Mars missions in the early 2030s. The United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is planning a lunar fueling station for spacecraft, capable of supporting 1,000 people living in space within 30 years.

Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Robert Bigelow all have companies aiming to deliver people or goods to the moon. Several teams competing for a share of Google's US$30 million cash prize are planning to launch rovers to the moon.

We and 27 other students from around the world recently participated in the 2017 Caltech Space Challenge, proposing designs of what a lunar launch and supply station for deep space missions might look like, and how it would work.

The raw materials for rocket fuel

Right now all space missions are based on, and launched from, Earth. But Earth's gravitational pull is strong. To escape Earth's gravity, a rocket has to be traveling 11 kilometers a second  25,000 miles per hour!

Any rocket leaving Earth has to carry all the fuel it will ever use to get to its destination and, if needed, back again. That fuel is heavy  and getting it moving at such high speeds takes a lot of energy. If we could refuel in orbit, that launch energy could lift more people or cargo or scientific equipment into orbit. Then the spacecraft could refuel in space, where Earth's gravity is less powerful.

The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, which makes it an attractive alternative base. The moon also has ice, which we already know how to process into a hydrogen-oxygen propellant that we use in many modern rockets.

Roving Luna

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite missions have already found substantial amounts of ice in permanently shadowed craters on the moon.

Those locations would be tricky to mine because they are colder and offer no sunlight to power roving vehicles. However, we could install big mirrors on the craters' rims to illuminate solar panels in the permanently shadowed regions.

Rovers from Google's Lunar X Prize competition and NASA's Lunar Resource Prospector, set to launch in 2020, would also contribute to finding good locations to mine ice.

Imagining a moon base

Depending on where the best ice reserves are, we might need to build several small robotic moon bases. Each one would mine ice, manufacture liquid propellant and transfer it to passing spacecraft. Our team developed plans to accomplish those tasks with three different types of rovers. Our plans also require a few small robotic shuttles to meet up with nearby deep-space mission vehicles in lunar orbit.

One rover, which we call the Prospector, would explore the moon and find ice-bearing locations. A second rover, the Constructor, would follow along behind, building a launch pad and packing down roadways to ease movements for the third rover type, the Miners, which actually collect the ice and deliver it to nearby storage tanks and an electrolysis processing plant that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The Constructor would also build a landing pad where the small near-moon transport spacecraft we call Lunar Resupply Shuttles would arrive to collect fuel for delivery as newly launched spacecraft pass by the moon. The shuttles would burn moon-made fuel and would have advanced guidance and navigation systems to travel between lunar bases and their target spacecraft.

A gas station in space

When enough fuel is being produced, and the shuttle delivery system is tested and reliable, our plan calls for building a gas station in space. The shuttles would deliver ice directly to the orbiting fuel depot, where it would be processed into fuel and where rockets heading to Mars or elsewhere could dock to top up.

The depot would have large solar arrays powering an electrolysis module for melting the ice and then turning the water into fuel, and large fuel tanks to store what's made. NASA is already working on most of the technology needed for a depot like this, including docking and fuel transfer. We anticipate a working depot could be ready in the early 2030s, just in time for the first human missions to Mars.

To be most useful and efficient, the depot should be located in a stable orbit relatively near both the Earth and the moon. The Earth-moon Lagrangian Point 1 (L1) is a point in space about 85 percent of the way from Earth to the moon, where the force of Earth's gravity would exactly equal the force of the moon's gravity pulling in the other direction. It's the perfect pit stop for a spacecraft on its way to Mars or the outer planets.

Leaving Earth

Our team also found a fuel-efficient way to get spacecraft from Earth orbit to the depot at L1, requiring even less launch fuel and freeing up more lift energy for cargo items. First, the spacecraft would launch from Earth into Low Earth Orbit with an empty propellant tank.

Then, the spacecraft and its cargo could be towed from Low Earth Orbit to the depot at L1 using a solar electric propulsion tug, a spacecraft largely propelled by solar-powered electric thrusters.

This would let us triple the payload delivery to Mars. At present, a human Mars mission is estimated to cost as much as US$100 billion, and will need hundreds of tons of cargo. Delivering more cargo from Earth to Mars with fewer rocket launches would save billions of dollars and years of time.

A base for space exploration

Building a gas station between Earth and the moon would also reduce costs for missions beyond Mars. NASA is looking for extraterrestrial life on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Future spacecraft could carry much more cargo if they could refuel in space  who knows what scientific discoveries sending large exploration vehicles to these moons could enable?

By helping us escape both Earth's gravity and dependence on its resources, a lunar gas station could be the first small step toward the giant leap into making humanity an interplanetary civilization.

Gary Li, Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles; Danielle DeLatte, Ph.D. Student in Aeronautics & Astronautics, University of Tokyo; Jerome Gilleron, Ph.D. Candidate in Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology; Samuel Wald, Ph.D. Student in Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Therese Jones, Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy, Pardee RAND Graduate School

Editor's Note: This story was updated to clarify the distinction between escape velocity and the velocity needed to achieve orbit.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
A recent measles outbreak that has thus far sickened dozens of Somali-Americans in Minnesota  nearly all of them children  can be traced to anti-vaccination campaigns that targeted Somali-Americans and suggested that vaccines are linked to autism, health officials said.

On Friday (May 12), the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) announced that it had confirmed 54 measles cases, 51 of which were in children age 17 or younger  and the majority of those infected were unvaccinated, according to an MDH report published online.

These figures are particularly high when compared to the number of measles cases reported in the state of Minnesota in previous years: a total of 56 cases reported between 1997 and 2016, according to MDH. [5 Dangerous Vaccine Myths]

Measles is highly contagious; if one person is sick, an estimated 90 percent of unvaccinated people who are physically near that individual will also get sick, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains on its website. And while the current outbreak is spreading in a matter of days, its origins can be traced back nearly a decade  to 2008, to be exact, Kristen Ehresmann, director of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Prevention and Control at MDH, told Live Science.

Spreading misinformation

In 2008, local news agencies reported that Somali-American children were accessing special education services in Minnesota school districts more than children in other ethnic demographics. That caught the attention of anti-vaccine groups, who erroneously link immunization to autism (a group of developmental brain disorders), Ehresmann said.

Anti-vaccine activists promptly flooded Minnesota's Somali-American communities with misinformation about links between developmental difficulties in children and vaccination, Ehresmann said. Prominent anti-vaccine spokesperson and discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield met with Somali-American groups in Minnesota "on at least two different occasions," Ehresmann told Live Science. When MHD set up community meetings to talk about immunization, anti-vaccine groups were there, handing out incendiary literature.

"They have been very aggressive in taking advantage of concerns about autism in this community," Ehresmann said. "Before 2008, Somali immunization rates [in Minnesota] were at or above the rate in the rest of [the] state. Starting in 2008, we saw a dramatic decline  now we're at 41 percent."

In 2016, measles was declared to be eliminated from the Americas, in an announcement by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). However, this meant only that cases no longer originated in the Americas; measles could still appear in the U.S. if they were imported, infectious disease specialist Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told Live Science in September 2016.

"Outbreaks will continue"

Measles outbreaks are also a growing source of unease in Europe, particularly in areas where immunization coverage is low. More than 500 cases emerged in the World Health Organization's (WHO) European region in January 2017, and the disease continues to spread, WHO representatives announced in a statement published online March 28.

"With steady progress towards elimination over the past two years, it is of particular concern that measles cases are climbing in Europe," Dr. Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO regional director for Europe, said in the statement.

"Today's travel patterns put no person or country beyond the reach of the measles virus. Outbreaks will continue in Europe, as elsewhere, until every country reaches the level of immunization needed to fully protect their populations," Jakab said.

As health officials in Minnesota race to contain the outbreak, they continue to work closely with Somali-Americans to address concerns about autism and to improve access to resources for children who have developmental needs. Officials are also collaborating with a health advisory group, made up of leaders in the Somali-American health care community, to further promote awareness of the importance of vaccinations  particularly in children, Ehresmann told Live Science.

In fact, it appears that the outbreak has spurred a backlash among Somali-Americans against the anti-vaccine groups, Ehresmann said.

"The community is really starting to push back and say, 'We don't want this,'" she said. "Physicians and other health care leaders in the community are speaking out, which makes a big difference. We're really seeing the community step up and take action."

Original article on Live Science.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

Azerbaijan and China have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on SOCAR GPC project, said the message from SOCAR GPC company.

The document was signed during the high-level international forum held as part of the One Belt  One Road strategy in Beijing.

The MoU was signed by President of Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR Rovnag Abdullayev, chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) Wang Yilin and head of the China Development Bank Hu Huaibang.

The forum, which kicked off May 14, was attended by heads of state and government of 29 countries, representatives of public and private sector from 110 countries, shareholders and representatives of over 60 international organizations.

The GPC project envisages construction of gas processing and petrochemical complex 15 km away from Baku by the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR. The capacity of the complex will be around 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year.

The cost of the project is around $4 billion.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Some of the first spacecraft that humanity sends to other solar systems may carry microscopic ambassadors from Earth.

The $100 million Breakthrough Starshot initiative is working to develop the technology required to accelerate tiny, sail-equipped probes to 20 percent the speed of light, using powerful lasers.

If everything goes well, large fleets of these 1-gram spacecraft could begin launching toward Proxima b and other nearby alien worlds within 20 years or so, project representatives have said. The probes would characterize these planets in detail and search for signs of life, but some could perform other work as well. [Breakthrough Starshot in Pictures: Laser-Sailing Nanocraft to Study Alien Planets]

For example, Breakthrough Starshot adviser Jeff Kuhn, a physicist at the University of Hawaii, said that the project offers a great opportunity to investigate the feasibility of interstellar panspermia  the idea that life might have spread from place to place throughout the Milky Way galaxy, and perhaps even the larger universe.

During a panel discussion on April 21 at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in Stanford, California, Kuhn noted that spores of the bacteria species Bacillus subtilis can survive for at least six years when exposed to the space environment.

"I think it would be fun, on one of these disposable chips, to put a little colony of Bacillus, send it for 20 years, turn it on, give it some nutrients and see if it's still alive, just to experimentally decide whether or not panspermia works over interstellar distances," Kuhn said.

That comment elicited a response from audience member Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who's a key player in the development of Breakthrough Starshot's laser-propulsion system.

"A part of our program  at least on the NASA side, because we haven't cleared this with Breakthrough yet  is actually to put organisms to sleep, in stasis mode," Lubin said at the conference. (Lubin and his group are also developing projects with the aid of NASA grant money.)

"And there are certain organisms known as C. elegans, which were going to embed human DNA into and send them out and then awaken them on arrival," Lubin added, referring to a tiny roundworm species that's a common study animal for biologists. "However, I expect that will be a highly controversial thing to do."

Life moving from world to world?

The panspermia hypothesis posits that Earth life might have arrived, rather than originated, here.

This idea is not as fringe as you may think. For example, some scientists argue that, in the ancient past, the Martian environment was more conducive to life's emergence than that of Earth.

And it's not terribly uncommon for the two planets to exchange material, in the form of rocks and dirt blasted into space by asteroid strikes. Orbital dynamics dictates that it's much easier for Martian stuff to reach Earth than the other way around, so we may all be Martians, according to this line of thinking.

It may even be possible for life-forms to move from one star system to another, some panspermia adherents say. For example, hardy microscopic spores could be transported vast distances by stellar radiation pressure. Or frigid bodies orbiting far from their parent stars could come under the gravitational sway of a neighboring sun. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

"We know that there are interstellar carriers: The Oort Cloud easily transfers from one solar system to another," Kuhn said. (The Oort Cloud is our own solar system's huge comet repository, which is believed to begin about 0.8 light-years from the sun.)

Many questions

But there are a number of factors that could make it difficult for life to move through space.

For example, putative Martian microbes ejected by an asteroid or comet strike would have to survive the intense heat and pressure of the impact, the harsh temperatures and high radiation levels of deep space and the rigors of atmospheric entry to have any hope of colonizing Earth. (The B. subtilis in the long-term experiment cited by Kuhn were in low Earth orbit, which has a more benign radiation environment thanks to our planet's magnetic field.)

Then, there's the issue of time, which makes interstellar panspermia unlikely, according to Harvard University astronomy professor Dimitar Sasselov.

"With the short-lived universe we live in, the more likely scenario is that most of the planets that we'll see life on are also the locations where it emerged from the planetary conditions," Sasselov, who's also the founding director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, said during a different panel discussion at Breakthrough Discuss on April 20.

The transfer of organisms between nearby planets in the same solar system is feasible, he added. But interstellar panspermia "just takes too long, and it's too far of a journey, and the probabilities currently, in the current universe, are just too small," Sasselov said.

All of the above speculation assumes naturally occurring "accidental" panspermia. But it's also possible that intelligent aliens could set panspermia in motion, either unintentionally (via contaminated spacecraft) or intentionally (in an effort to seed other worlds), some scientists have said.

Breakthrough Starshot, and projects like it, could give humanity this ability as well.

"We can be the panspermia which actually seeds other planets if we want," Lubin said. "And it's something to think about for the future."

Now that would be controversial.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
Newborn poison frogs of Peru have quite an appetite. If left home alone in their hatching pool, the ravenous tadpoles will eat each other. To keep the tadpoles from gorging on their siblings, their doting father will carry them one at a time on his back and drop them in separate pools, where other food is available.

Some frog fathers, however, abandon their young. For unknown reasons, these males leave and never return to fetch their developing offspring.

Researchers have now found that abandoned tadpoles don't wait for their father to return, because they run the risk of getting eaten by cannibalistic siblings. Instead, they try to piggyback on any adult frog that happens to visit the pool to breed, sleep or cool off in it. What's more, the researchers found that it made no difference to the tadpoles if the visiting adult belonged to the same or a different species. [40 Freaky Frog Photos]

Lisa Schulte and Michael Mayer, of the Department of Biogeography at Trier University in Germany, studied the behavioral response of tadpoles of the Neotropical poison frog Ranitomeya variabilis toward adults of the same species as well as two different species (Ranitomeya imitator and Hyloxalus nexipus).

To perform the experiments, the researchers set up a makeshift laboratory in an unused coffee plantation next to a forest in Peru. They left tadpoles hatched from the same egg clutch in a plastic bowl filled with water and then placed an adult frog in the bowl. The researchers noticed that the tadpoles approached adults of all three species and tried to wriggle their way up the frogs' backs.

"The tadpoles beg for transportation; it surprised us that for them it does not matter if it is their own species or not," Mayer told Live Science in an email from Peru.

Out of 39 tadpoles, two were able to hop on the adult's back  one on the R. variabilis male (same species) and the other on the R. imitator male (same genus but different species). The tadpoles received no help from the adult frogs, which expressed no interest in piggybacking the tadpoles, "affirming that the tadpoles followed the frogs, not vice versa," Schulte and Mayer wrote in their study, published online May 5 in the Journal of Zoology.

"When in acute danger, they do not passively wait for their parents to pick them up," the researchers wrote, "but instead show a strong, nearly aggressive form of approaching and mounting adults."

Original article on Live Science.
The new series "Year Million" on National Geographic Channel explores what humanity may look like in the year 1 million.

In the year 1 million, Earth's continents will look roughly the same as they do now and the sun will still shine as it does today. But humans could be so radically different that people today wouldn't even recognize them, according to a new series from National Geographic.

Premiering today (May 15), the new National Geographic Channel series "Year Million" investigates what humans might look like far into the future. In six episodes, the show explores the possibility of merging technology with the human body, the potential to drastically extend lifespans, the effects of virtual reality, the use of computers to merge human minds, the availability of new sources of energy and the possibilities of spreading humanity into outer space. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

Brian Greene, a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University in New York City, is one of the famed scientists featured in the series. Greene has written several books on string theory, a theoretical physics model that suggests the universe is made up of miniscule, one-dimensional strings. He has also explored the mathematics that could help explain how the universe has more than three dimensions. Greene said he doesn't think humans 1 million years from now will look much like people do now, and he said their lives will be so different that humans today wouldn't recognize them.

"We'd require an intense education to even understand the parameters of life a million years in the future," Greene told Live Science.

A look at what life was like 1 million years in the past provides an idea: At that time, modern humans didn't exist yet, and the most technologically advanced things on the planet were fire and the hand axe. (Picture trying to explain an office job to Homo Erectus, whose day was spent hunting and gathering wild foods.)

In the future, Greene said, there's a good possibility that humans will find a way to merge with their machines.

"We're already finding, on much shorter timescales, [that the] distinction between biological beings and artificial beings is starting to blur," he said. "I could see a new kind of hybrid species out of the biological and the synthetic."

In physics, humans may solve certain big problems, but that will likely only lead to new questions, he said.

"I guess my feeling is there are certain chapters in the story of physics we will complete," Greene said. "We'll truly understand fundamental forces [and] the basic ingredients of matter, and unite all the equations that describe [quantum mechanics and gravity] into some kind of unified theory."

That will be far from the end of the story, though. "With every chapter we complete, we ask questions we couldn't even formulate because we didn't have the concepts," he added.

One example is Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. "Einstein comes and gives us general relativity in 1915, and with it, a new description of gravity. Now we can address questions of the origin of [the] universe," which wasn't possible with earlier physics, Greene said. In some cases, scientists may find that the very questions they were asking were the wrong ones. For instance, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was born in 1571 and died in 1630, spent decades trying to figure out why the Earth is located 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the sun.

"Now we know it's just happenstance," Greene said.

Beyond scientists, others involved with the show include science fiction writers, whose job it is to dream up future worlds. One of these is Charles Soule, who has written several comics for Marvel and his own science fiction in the comic book series "Letter 44" (Oni Press, 2014), about a near-future mission to investigate an alien anomaly in the asteroid belt.

"The year 1 million concept  it's like an abstract," Soule said. "Take humanity, and it's accelerated far beyond where we are today, where most of the technological problems today are kind of solved."

This would mean humans would still be solving problems, but these would likely be different problems, such as figuring out the role of artificial intelligence or what it means to be human in a world that is dominated by technology, he said.

Those kinds of questions can come up even in superhero-themed books, though science fiction is where Soule said people can think through "far-out, crazy stuff" and its implications  which, he said, is part of the job of the science fiction genre.

Soule added that even though science fiction isn't often right in the details, its influence is felt in many areas. The TV series "Star Trek," for example, influenced the design of gadgets such as flip phones and the concept of touch screens, he said.

But speculation via science fiction also reflects contemporary events, Soule said. In Jules Verne's time, science fiction reflected submarine technology; when comic book heroes the X-Men and the Hulk first appeared, their stories mirrored anxieties over nuclear radiation. Fellow comic book author Warren Ellis, Soule said, has examined the issue of post-humanism  the future evolution of humanity  in his work.

"The ideas we put into stories reflect the world we live in," Soule said.

The world of year one million will certainly be interesting, Greene said. "The only pity is that we won't be here to see it," he added

Year Million premieres tonight on National Geographic Channel (opens in new tab) at 9/8c (check local listings).

Original article on Live Science.
The chairman and CEO of Jost International, one of Belgium's biggest road haulage and logistics groups, Roland Jost, is being held in judicial custody having been charged on several counts, including the alleged fraudulent employment of more than 1,000 Romanian truck drivers, according to reports in the Belgian media.

The groups CFO has also been placed on remand, while two other senior executives have been fitted with electronic tags.

A report by the RTL Belgium radio station quotes a statement from the Federal Prosecutor office, which reveals that Jost is suspected of running a criminal organisation active across Belgium, Luxembourg, and Romania and of social dumping on a large-scale - as well as alleged human trafficking.

Raids on the groups premises have led to evidence of non-declared workers and the non-payment of employers insurance contributions to the Belgian state totalling 55 million over a two-year period, the report claims. There are also reportedly suspicions that Jost has contravened EU labour law in obliging drivers to sleep in cabs for periods of several weeks.

However, the company denies the allegations. In a statement last Friday, the company said: While respecting the confidentiality of the investigation, we firmly refute the allegations that any social dumping may have occurred. Jost Group endeavours to comply with all the complex regulations, which has been acknowledged on a number of occasions in various courts.

Given the shortage of drivers in Belgium and the highly competitive industry in which we operate, we work with people seconded from other European countries, as permitted by European regulations. The Group is also highly conscientious about the working conditions of all its employees.

We welcome the decision of the Pre-Trial Chamber to allow the Human Resources Manager and the Director of the Group's Transport Department to return home and prepare their defence against the allegations made against them. However, we were shocked to learn of the Chambers decision to keep Mr Roland Jost, the Group's Managing Director, and the Secretary-General, in pre-trial detention. The lawyers of the two people involved have informed the company that they intend to appeal immediately. We regret the Chambers decision, especially since Jost Group is cooperating and will continue to cooperate fully with the authorities.

We would point out that the Pre-Trial Chamber has ruled only on the lawfulness of the pre-trial detention and not at all on the merits of the case. Jost Group would also remind readers that anyone is presumed to be innocent unless proved otherwise and regrets the unfounded and false information that has been reported about it.
Bill Hutchinson

Sixteen people were displaced after a fire ripped through a multifamily home in the Balboa Park neighborhood of San Francisco on Sunday afternoon, officials said.

The fire broke out about 2:49 p.m. on the 200 block of Onondaga Avenue near Balboa High School, according to the San Francisco Fire Department.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

A service agreement on the preliminary detailed design for the gas processing and polyethylene petrochemical complex as part of the SOCAR GPC project was signed in Chinas capital Beijing on May 15.

The document was signed between Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Technip company during the international One Belt  One Road forum, said the message from SOCAR GPC company.

This agreement will regulate the services to be rendered by China Huanqiu Contracting and Engineering Corporation (HQC), subsidiary of CNPC and Technip Italy for the preliminary detailed design work as part of the SOCAR GPC project.

The signing ceremony was attended by SOCARs President Rovnag Abdullayev and CNPC chairman Wang Yilin.

HQC and Technip Italy companies will start rendering services in accordance with this agreement from May 15, 2017.

The GPC project envisages construction of gas processing and petrochemical plants 15 km away from Baku by the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR.

The cost of the project is around $4 billion.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
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U.S. shale oil producers are likely to be the biggest benefactors from a pledge on Monday by Saudi Arabia and Russia to extend oil production cuts through 2018.

I sort of wondered if they (Saudi Arabia and Russia) might conclude that it really wouldnt do any good and Im not sure that it will, Thomas Tunstall, an economic development research director at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said. But hey, itll certainly make the shale producers in the U.S. happy.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia backed a 1.8 million barrel-a-day oil production cut by oil producing countries in late-2016 that went into effect in January. The cuts  set to expire in June  helped bolster prices to around $50 a barrel from a 13-year low of $26 a barrel in February 2016. Russia and Saudi Arabia, OPECs largest member, are pushing for the rest of the group to extend those cuts through March 2018 when they next meet May 25 in Vienna.

The Monday announcement pushed U.S. oil futures up 2.1 percent to $48.82 in afternoon trading. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose 1.9 percent to $51.79.

Both OPEC, is a cartel of 12 countries led by Saudi Arabia that produce a third of the worlds oil, and U.S. producers have suffered during the bust in oil prices. But U.S. shale drillers, which can turn a profit with oil below $40 a barrel, quickly ramped up production as prices recovered last year, dampening the impact of the OPEC cuts.

The U.S. oil industry produced an average of 9 million barrels a day in February, compared with a recent low of 8.6 million barrels a day in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Michael Webber, deputy director of the UT-Austin Energy Institute, said oil prices for Saudi Arabia and other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries arent high enough to make traditional drilling profitable.

The question is will shale keep filling in and I think shale can, Webber said. I feel like this is  to the benefit of shale producers who have proven that they can stay competitive at these prices.

OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, agreed in November to cut 1.2 million barrels of day of oil production. That was soon followed by Russia and other non-OPEC oil producers pledging a further reduction of 600,000 barrels of oil production.

Since those announcements, oil drilling rig counts in South Texas Eagle Ford Shale have more than doubled to 83. West Texas Permian Basin oil field has added more than 130 rigs during the same period, according to data from oil service company Baker Hughes.

Big oil producers announced plans in the first quarter to up their shale investments, with Royal Dutch Shell saying the company can make money in the Permian Basin with oil at $40 a barrel, with new wells profitable at about $20 a barrel.

The growing shale production has eaten into the OPEC cuts and Webber said demand growth has been softer than expected.

China is starting to tackle smog which means electric vehicles and softer demand overall, and Europes got soft demand, Webber said. Theres just softer demand in a way that people didnt anticipate.

Oil prices peaked around $107 a barrel in June 2014, with prices plunging after OPEC announced that November that it wouldnt cut production. In March 2015 Texas oil production peaked at 3.6 million barrels of oil a day dropped to 3.2 million in mid-2016. Texas oil production in February was over 3.3 million, according to EIA data.

The Eagle Ford accounted for most of Texas production drop falling more than 500,000 barrels a day of production, according to the data. The Permians production continued to grow during the downturn of 2015 and 2016, offsetting some of the Eagle Fords losses.

The Texas shale plays will continue to grow because this will keep the prices where they are now or a little higher (they) should keep the trend going, Webber said.

rdruzin@express-news.net

@druz_journo
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A long-standing tenant of many religions is "Love thy neighbor."

A church in Tennessee may have taken that one a bit too literally.

Officials in the Nashville suburb of Madison say the United Fellowship Center, which billed itself as a church and signed a lease to operate as a house of worship, was actually a sex club.

TRADE OFF: Police say Florida woman sought to trade sex for cash, chicken McNuggets

In a lawsuit filed by the city, officials said the owner of The Social Club, Alfred Woods and his family, used the 22,000-square-foot building for weekend sex parties.

Officials said members of The Social Club and curious first-time swingers were welcomed and party guests are required to pay $40 to attend as a couple, with single men charged $50 and single women paying $20 to gain entry.

Two undercover officials investigated the club in March and found 12 rooms fitted out with chaise lounges and flat beds where people could have sex or watch others do so.

Bill Herbert, the zoning administrator for the Nashville Metro Government, told WTVF-TV in Nashville that he was shocked to hear from investigators about what was happening inside something that was supposed to be a church.

LA FERIA CLUB: Infamous Houston sex club in national spotlight

"They witnessed sex acts and other acts that indicated that the property was not being used as a church," Herbert said.

A lawyer for the club declined to comment to the station about the city's lawsuit, but said the building was used as a church.

If city officials are right, it's a church that really emphasizes loving thy neighbor.

Scroll through the gallery above to see how social media treated the topic of sex
AUDIOBOOKS FOR MAY

---

Nevertheless

By Alec Baldwin

HarperAudio. Unabridged, 8 1/2 hours

Alec Baldwin's "Nevertheless" is a Hollywood memoir of a familiar ilk: A young man from Tinseltown's idea of nowhere (Massapequa, Long Island) falls into acting and succeeds through luck, dedication, talent and willingness to take advice. Baldwin is more self-flagellating than most celebrity memoirists, and, here, reading his own book, the familiar, slightly husky voice grows at times urgent with contrition. On the other hand, when he speaks of Hollywood's "sweepstakes mentality," or of tabloid journalists, or of a civil-litigation lawyer, his voice becomes sharp with disdain. Having been the victim of much media savagery concerning his personal life, he is mum on the private affairs of others, though he is often critical of their ability and is free with tales of egregious professional backstabbing. Harrison Ford does not come out well ("a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry"), nor does theater critic Ben Brantley ("his writing is random, uninformed snark"). He is enthusiastically praiseful of the actors he admires and is adept at impersonating their voices and manner. Baldwin's trained delivery, his air of candor and, above all, his engagement with what he is reading elevates this book above its printed form.

---

In the Name of the Family

By Sarah Dunant

Random House Audio. Unabridged, 14 1/ 4hours

"In the Name of the Family" follows "Blood and Beauty" to conclude Sarah Dunant's duo of novels rescuing Lucrezia Borgia from her reputation as a vengeful schemer, serial poisoner and incestuous libertine. The book, which can stand on its own, is an enthralling, historically convincing tale of Renaissance intrigue, domestic drama and internecine war. Nicholas Boulton delivers the general narration in a courteous, gentlemanly manner, a temperate foil to his virtuoso performance in capturing the extravagant, Renaissance personalities of the story's many characters. He distinguishes men from women and age from youth with variations of pitch and timbre. Lucrezia has a light, often sorrowful voice. The aging potentate, Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), expresses his monumental will in rumbling, dark tones and an accent that retains traces of his Catalonian origins. His son, the coldblooded, military genius Cesare, is hard-voiced, thoroughly Italian and, eventually, fevered and megalomaniacal as syphilis eats away at his brain. Observing the play of power across "the chessboard of central Italy," is smooth and wary Machiavelli. Meanwhile, the voices of the desperate, hate-filled Orsini speak of the Borgias (those "poxy foreigners") in tones dripping with venom. The general plot, which is to say, history, is well known, but Dunant brings it to life and provides an excellent afterword arguing for her interpretation of Lucrezia as a much maligned woman.

---

The Woman Next Door

By Yewande Omotoso

Random House Audio. Unabridged, 8 1/ hours

Hortensia James, one of the two elderly widows whose stories make up Yewande Omotoso's superb second novel is - like her creator - a native of Barbados who has lived in Nigeria and now in South Africa. A wealthy businesswoman, Hortensia is the only black owner of a house in an upscale enclave in a Johannesburg suburb. For the last 20 years she has lived next door to Marion Agostino, a woman who has never reconciled herself to the idea of racial equality. The two strong-willed old relicts loathe each other. A freak accident leaves Hortensia with a broken leg and Marion temporarily homeless - and, of course, this being a novel, they end up living together. With that, however, the story takes off in surprising ways, sometimes to shocking effect as instances of racial cruelty are recalled, or upsetting at a different level, when the descendants of former slaves make a valid claim for restitution or when the existence of an unsuspected child is revealed. Adjoa Andoh gives a versatile performance to this multiracial, multinational set of characters, delivering convincing Barbadian, Nigerian and standard English speakers, although her white South Africans do wrestle out a very odd accent, one tinctured with cockney and, it seems, Yiddish. Still, the novel's complex plot and convincing characters develop beautifully together and are lightened throughout with flashes of excellent comedy.

---

Powers reviews audiobooks every month for The Washington Post.
"King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" has battle elephants, fashy haircuts, David Beckham and Rodents of Unusual Size. What this messy, impoverished take on Arthurian legend from director Guy Ritchie doesn't have is a basic semblance of cinematic competence, ideas it wants to express or even an obvious rationale for being. It's the worst movie I've seen in theaters since "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice."

Even before we arrive at the substance of "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword," the movie is one of the most impressively incompetent aspiring blockbusters I've ever seen. The editing, by James Herbert, often renders much of what's happening onscreen completely incomprehensible. The soundtrack drones and screams; grafting Arthurian legend and metal together doesn't exactly elevate the latter (there's also a certain amount of exaggerated manly shrieking, too).

The extensive and ill-executed use of CGI to achieve an exhausting and unnecessary level of spectacle ends up making the movie feel cheap rather than overwhelming. At a moment when video games are scaling new heights of visual and narrative ambition, the tacky magical cosplay the film's antagonist assumes upends the pop culture hierarchy. "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" isn't proof of film's dominance; it's a movie desperately straining to be a video game.

These deficiencies wouldn't have merely sunk a movie with a sharper plot and stronger characters: They would have buried it at the bottom of the ocean. "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" is not a movie with either, however.

Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch described Charlie Hunnam's riff on this English founding myth as "chav King Arthur," which is basically correct. By circumstances too convoluted to recount, this Arthur ends up not being fostered in the home of a minor noble, but growing up in a Londinium brothel and running a variety of scams on the side. Once his destiny arrives, Hunnam spends a lot of time squinting, scowling, resisting said destiny, getting knocked out by his magic sword and hollering in the mud. (Jude Law does his own unfortunate share of emoting as the evil usurper Vortigern; it says a great deal about the movie that his very bad performance is not the most memorably awful part of the movie.)

He's surrounded by a collection of characters who made me suspect that Ritchie is either actively trolling advocates of a more diverse Hollywood, or accidentally making an argument that we should abandon the effort, lest we wake unintentional horrors. Djimon Hounsou plays a knight of high and rather dull rectitude named Bedivere. Tim Wu is George, the proprietor of a Londinium kung-fu academy, because that's a thing. Aidan Gillen is in the mix, too, as an ace archer and a representative of the community of people whose accents sound fake, no matter which one they're doing at any given moment.

And these half-baked sketches are scattered through a movie that is not remotely sensible. By the end of it, I couldn't figure out why Ritchie had wanted to tell a King Arthur story at all.

He's not sufficiently interested in the tension between paganism and Christianity to have attempted a "Mists of Avalon"-style revisionist take on the Arthurian legend. Here, Mordred (Rob Knighton) is a generic Bad Sorcerer with hordes inelegantly swiped from "Lord of the Rings" and who challenges Arthur's father, Uther (Eric Bana), rather than a relative of Arthur's who perpetrates an intimate, searing betrayal.

The women of Arthurian legend, including his wife, Guinevere, his half-sister Morgan la Fey and his aunt, Morgause, are absent, too. Astrid Berges-Frisbey's character doesn't even get a name: She's just the Mage, seemingly the last remaining member of England's magical community. Women in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" pretty much only show up to be sacrificed to snake-like things, or to conjure up said serpents. In addition to the snakes and that magic sword, the movie has a bunch of significant towers: This is not a subtle piece of cinema, though it is a relatively sexless one.

And although there is a castle that's called Camelot, and at the end of the whole affair, a table that is circular in shape, it mostly feels as if Ritchie wanted an excuse to throw his signature style of smart-hooligan dialogue, frenetic chase scenes, a large special effects budget and a new setting into a blender. "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" would make more sense if I'd known that Ritchie had thrown darts at a bulletin board with a lot of different mythical traditions on it and come up with this one. As much as "Batman v. Superman" often made choices that felt inexplicable, and executed them in a way that I found ridiculous, I at least understood why Zack Snyder wanted to tell stories about Superman, and his perspective on the character.

Trash can be fun. "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" is dreary garbage.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

By Anakhanum Hidayatova  Trend:

The Turkish Stream will complement the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) and further increase the significance of the Caspian region for Europe, Peter Tase, a political analyst and international relations expert with the Milwaukee-based Marquette University, told Trend May 15.

It shouldnt be forgotten that the SGC is the biggest continental energy project supported by the European Union, noted Tase.

The expert added that the SGC will reduce Europes dependence on Russian gas.

Russia and Turkey signed an intergovernmental agreement October 10, 2016 on implementation of the Turkish Stream project.

The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority energy projects for the EU. It envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey.

At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor projects. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage.

As part of the Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, the gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans Adriatic Pipeline.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Anahanum
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A federal court judge has ruled that WCISD is not liable for the death of a student who died by suicide after he was questioned by school authorities about a possible inappropriate relationship between him and a Bruni High School teacher.

The plaintiffs claimed that Webb Consolidated Independent School District violated federal laws through a failure to train and supervise its employees. The plaintiffs had to show that the school district or its top officials showed deliberate indifference.

They also argued that WCISD created a danger that caused Oscar Ramos Cruzs sexual abuse and suicide.

On Friday, U.S. Senior District Judge George P. Kazen granted a motion for a summary judgment to Webb Consolidated Independent School District.

READ MORE: Man charged with shooting death in Laredo's first homicide of the year

This case represents the sad question of whether a deceased students estate and family can obtain monetary relief from a school district when the student committed suicide after an alleged sexual relationship with a teacher, Kazen wrote in the court order. Under these particular circumstances, the answer is no.

Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, the court finds that neither WCISD nor its officials in charge of supervising Ms. Cremar acted with deliberate indifference in this situation. WCISDs policies prohibited teacher-student relations and required reporting of sexual harassment, and WCISD held regular trainings on these policies.

On Feb. 18, 2013, a Bruni High School educator found Cremar and Ramos hugging on school grounds.

Scroll through the gallery above to see Texas teachers accused or convicted of inappropriate relations with students in 2017.

The day after, according to the lawsuit, Ramos mother, Hilda, visited the school to talk with teachers about her children and none of the teachers, staff or administration informed her of the events of the previous day.

On Feb. 20, 2013, Ramos was kept after class by school officials and questioned by school authorities about his relationship with Cremar, the petition states.

Ramos family was not informed of the interrogation either before or after it occurred, according to the petition. Later that day, Ramos went home and died by suicide.

RELATED: Market Force study reveals America's favorite quick-service restaurants

In 2015, Ramos parents, Hilda Berta and Agustin Ramos, filed a lawsuit against Cremar and Webb Consolidated, Freer and Benavides independent school districts.

The petition claims Cremar left two separate jobs with Freer and Benavides school districts for allegedly having inappropriate relationships with students. It further alleges that due to the negligence of the two school districts, Cremars alleged prior conduct went unnoticed and she was hired at WCISD.

In March 2016, Freer and Benavides independent school districts were dismissed from the lawsuit.

Kazen broke down in his order what occurred after Ramos and Cremar were found hugging in a classroom.

The morning after Principal (Humberto) Soliz first learned of any potential misconduct by Cremar, he observed (Ramos) and contacted Cremar to obtain a statement, Kazens order states. (Severita) Sanchez, the superintendent, quickly took action when she learned of the classroom incident: she took over the investigation, directed teacher Montalvo to prepare a report for Child Protective Services, placed Cremar on administrative leave, and asked (Bruni High School security officer Tony) Flores to meet with (Ramos) and see if he was alright.

WCISD and its officials responded to any risks towards (Ramos) rights and well-being, and their responses were a far cry from being clearly unreasonable.

It is unfortunate that their responses failed to prevent (Ramos) suicide. WCISDs actions were not perfect. For example, plaintiffs presented evidence that WCISD failed to follow certain federal guidelines or inform (Ramos) family of the investigation. Yet WCISD and its officials still responded reasonably to any known risks towards (Ramos) rights.

In April 2015, Cremar received a 10-year probated sentence in the 406th District Court.

She pleaded guilty to three counts of possession of child pornography, a third-degree felony. Cremar had also been charged with two misdemeanor counts of selling, distributing or displaying harmful material to a minor. The two misdemeanor counts were dismissed as part of a plea agreement.
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Two Webb County Sheriffs Office supervisors indicted Wednesday on allegations they engaged in sexual contact with women in custody at the jail have been released on bond.

Lt. Fernando Garcia and Sgt. Fernando Martel were released on $20,000 and $30,000 bonds, respectively, according to the Sheriffs Office, which initiated the investigation.

Attorneys representing the men say they maintain their innocence.

Garcia, 50, denies the allegations against him, according to his attorney Marcel Notzon.

He was indicted on one count of violation of the civil rights of a person in custody; improper sexual activity with a person in custody, a state jail felony, and official oppression, a Class A misdemeanor.

READ MORE: Two members of Webb County Sheriff's Office arrested on improper conduct charges

Garcia not only maintains his innocence that this is not true, he is going to fight it until he is vindicated, Notzon said.

Notzon noted the time lapse between the alleged incident and the start of the investigation, saying it is suspect that these allegations are coming forward almost 15 months later. When asked about Notzons statement, the Sheriffs Office deferred comment to the District Attorneys Office, which is now handling the investigation. LMT could not immediately reach the District Attorneys Office for comment.

We look forward to reviewing the evidence and proving our clients innocence, Notzon said.

Elizabeth Martinez, who represents Martel, said he has worked in law enforcement for over 12 years with an untarnished record.

Click through the gallery above to see where sex offenders live in Laredo and Webb County.

Any allegations that have been made against Mr. Martel were made by criminals whose credibility is extremely questionable. Mr. Martel looks forward to his day in court to fight these allegations, Martinez said Wednesday in a statement to LMT.

Court records show both women have been in and out of jail for the past five years on various offenses.

Martel, 41, faces two charges of violation of the civil rights of a person in custody; improper sexual activity with a person in custody.

The allegations

An investigation into the men was launched about a month ago following allegations of improper conduct with a person in custody, the Sheriffs Office said.

An indictment filed against Garcia alleges he engaged in sexual contact with a 26-year-old woman who was in custody by touching the womans chest in February 2016.

The indictment further alleges Garcia subjected the woman to sexual harassment by making requests for sexual favors or threatening to extend the time she was confined in jail if she did not perform sexual acts.

While the Sheriffs Office stated in an initial release that Garcia resigned April 28, LMT confirmed Friday that Garcia retired after serving 20 years at the Sheriffs Office.

RELATED: Montgomery County child abuse sweep rounds up 18 suspects

Martel, who was indicted in two separate cases, allegedly engaged in sexual contact with two women, ages 26 and 39, by touching their private parts, the indictments against him state.

The alleged incidents occurred with one woman in February 2016 and another woman in September.

Martel began employment with the Sheriffs Office in October 2005. He was served with proposed termination documents, the Sheriffs Office said.

The investigation was led by the Webb County Sheriffs Office and assisted by the District Attorneys Office Special Victims Unit.

Garcia and Martel are scheduled to make initial appearances in their cases on June 9 before 49th District Court Judge Joe Lopez, court records state.
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A man allegedly tried smuggling about 30 pounds of marijuana in a spare tire through the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge, authorities said.

Juan Isaac Contreras-Castillo, 30, was charged with felony possession of marijuana.

On Wednesday, Contreras-Castillo arrived at the bridge in a maroon Ford Expedition.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer referred him to secondary inspection. CBP officers said they allegedly discovered 23 bundles of marijuana in the spare tire.

READ MORE: Laredo man arrested at border, claims friend stashed drugs in car

An investigation showed the Expedition had crossed the border several times. CBP officers also noticed prior occupants have been arrested for smuggling narcotics.

Contreras-Castillo allegedly agreed to a post-arrest interview.

He stated he knew the marijuana was hidden in the spare tire. He was to drive the Expedition to the H-E-B parking on San Dario Avenue and Calton Road and walk inside the store.

Contreras-Castillo said an individual was to remove the loaded tire. He expected a payment of $250 upon returning to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He told authorities he smuggled marijuana the same way last week and got paid $250, according to an affidavit.

Click through the gallery above to see the strangest ways people smuggle drugs across the Texas-Mexico border.
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A man has been indicted in the 49th District Court for his alleged involvement in Laredos first homicide of the year, according to court records.

A grand jury indicted Guillermo Capetillo on charges of murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in relation to a shooting that occurred on Jan. 15.

The indictment, filed April 5, charges Capetillo with the shooting death of Sergio Ramirez Jr., 27.

It further alleges Capetillo caused injury to Leonel Maldonado Jr., 21, by shooting him in the abdomen or body in general.

Initial reports indicated paramedics treated Maldonado for multiple gunshot wounds sustained to his chest and right bicep area. He was alert and oriented, according to the Fire Department. He was rushed in critical condition to Laredo Medical Center, authorities said.

READ MORE: Webb County Sheriff's Office supervisors allegedly engaged in sexual contact with women in custody

At about 5 a.m. on Jan. 15, police and the Laredo Fire Department responded to a shooting reported by the intersection of North Arkansas and Price Street.

There, EMS encountered Ramirez and Maldonado.

Ramirez had at least one gunshot wound to his head. He was pronounced dead at the scene, according to reports.

Police said they learned that an altercation had occurred inside a home on Arkansas and it escalated into a shooting outside on the street.

Authorities said they seized several .40-caliber casings from the crime scene.

RELATED: Montgomery County child abuse sweep rounds up 18 suspects

The indictment against Capetillo alleges he used or exhibited a .40 caliber semi-automatic handgun during his assault against Maldonado.

Capetillo is scheduled to make an initial appearance in the case May 19 before 49th District Court Judge Joe Lopez.

He remains behind bars at the Webb County Jail, held on a $250,000 bond, the Webb County Sheriffs Office said.

Click through the gallery above to see Texas homes still haunted by murders.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Azerbaijan is a reliable partner of Europe in providing energy supplies and their diversification, said Bulgarias Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova.

She made the remarks at a conference dedicated to the 25th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries on May 15, the Bulgarian media outlets reported.

Over the past 25 years, relations between Bulgaria and Azerbaijan have reached a level of strategic partnership, noted the minister.

We will continue to strengthen economic cooperation, focusing on the energy sector, she added.

According to her, Bulgaria attaches great importance to ensuring the security of energy supplies and their diversification in the region, and in this regard, Azerbaijan is a reliable partner, which can be counted on.

Bulgaria, said Petkova, is participating in the construction of two interconnectors, Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) and Turkey-Bulgaria.

According to the minister, during this period, Bulgaria made serious progress, which it couldnt achieve without the partners from Azerbaijan.

Petkova also noted that the IGBs construction will start in the 1Q18.

IGB is a gas pipeline, which will allow Bulgaria to receive Azerbaijani gas, in particular, the gas produced from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz 2 gas and condensate field. IGB is expected to be connected to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) via which gas from the Shah Deniz field will be delivered to the European markets.



The initial capacity of IGB will be 3 billion cubic meters of gas.
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Three Laredo men indicted for their alleged involvement in a drug trafficking conspiracy from Laredo to the Dallas area entered guilty pleas Monday in federal court.

Armando Eloy Gutierrez, 38, Javier Mota Villanueva, 33 and Leopoldo Rodriguez III, 25 entered pleas of guilty to conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute marijuana, Acting U.S. Attorney Abe Martinez announced in a press release.

The men, alongside co-defendant Armando Javier Picazo Jimenez, were indicted in January on one count of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 1000 kilograms or more of marijuana and three counts of possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana.

On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Scott Hacker granted a continuance in Jimenez's case, records state.

READ MORE: Laredo man arrested at border, claims friend stashed drugs in car

Jimenez is scheduled to appear June 5 before Hacker for a pretrial hearing.

In August 2013, authorities identified a drug trafficking organization responsible for the transportation and distribution of kilogram quantities of marijuana from Laredo to the Dallas area.

Gutierrez was in charge of finding warehouses for the organization to use and then soliciting shipping companies to transport trailers with marijuana and cover with loads of merchandise.

He would also act as a scout by following the drivers through checkpoint.

Once through, he would then drive with others to the Dallas or Fort Worth area to assist in receiving and unloading the drugs.

Mota-Villanueva worked at the warehouses. He wrapped the marijuana, moved pallets and loaded the drugs onto trailers. He would also travel to Dallas along with Gutierrez.

Rodriguez was tasked with wrapping marijuana and assisting with loading of narcotics onto trailers at a warehouse.

RELATED: Man arrested by CBP after allegedly attempting to smuggle marijuana in spare tire

The investigation revealed three warehouse in Laredo that the organization used at different periods from on or about September 2013 to on or about July 31, 2014. They were located on the 1800 block of Aduanales, 200 block of Corpus Christi Street and the 1600 block of West Calton.

Three separate marijuana loads were seized that originated from each one of the three warehouses, totaling more than 1600 kilograms and worth an estimated $1.4 million.

Sentencing hearings for the men have not yet been set.

Due to the amounts for which they are held accountable, Gutierrez and Villanueva face a minimum 10 years and up to life in federal prison. Rodriguez faces a minimum of five and up to 40 years imprisonment.

Gutierrez and Mota will remain in custody, while Rodriguez was permitted to remain on bond pending sentencing.

The Drug Enforcement Administration conducted the investigation with the assistance of task force members of the Webb County District Attorney's Office and the Laredo Police Department.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Lou Castillo is prosecuting the case.

LMT staff writer Taryn T. Walters contributed to this report.
Roman Forest Police Chief Stephen Carlisle is in Kingwood Medical Center recuperating from injuries he suffered in a motorcycle crash.

Carlisle has multiple broken ribs, a punctured lung, lacerated spleen, blood clots in his lungs and internal bleeding believed to be related to the lacerated spleen, his wife, Laura, said Monday.

Carlisle on Wednesday was returning home from a trip to Fort Bliss in El Paso where he had gone to see his son who was leaving for a military mission in Afghanistan.

UGLY WRECK: Harris County deputy constable, day care van crash

"On his way home, he was following a storm. When he got to Ozona, Texas, the roads started to get wet so he decided to look for places to pull off the road and put on his rain gear," Laura said. "He pulled off the loop and began looking for places that didn't have gravel when a deer jumped out in front of him. The deer leaped over the front of his bike and caused him to hit his brakes. He missed the deer but hit his brakes too hard."

Carlisle's wife said he fell off the bike, landing on his back and causing the bike to skid 60 feet.

Thinking he wasn't seriously injured, Carlisle got up immediately, walked over to his bike and turned it off. He tried to lift the bike and move it to the side of the road when he realized he might have sustained some injuries.

"That's when the pain hit him. He dialed 911 and kept walking around in circles until EMS arrived. He never passed out," she said. "When EMS came, all the deputies and medics were very helpful. They drove his bike over to a hotel across the street. Stephen didn't want to go to a hospital, so they dropped him off at the hotel and told him to call if he needed to go to a hospital."

About 90 minutes later, Carlisle couldn't get out of bed. Finally, he forced himself to stand up and he called 911 again, his wife said.

He was driven to an emergency clinic in Ozona where X-rays were taken.

"They didn't see any broken bones. They thought the cartilage in his chest might have broken loose and that was causing his pain," Laura said. "They gave him pain medicines and released him. They told him to get to a hospital when he got home."

The next day Laura drove to Ozona to pick up her injured husband. A friend picked up the bike and returned it home.

"He still didn't want to go to a hospital," she said.

Soon it became apparent that the chief's injuries were more severe, so Laura took him to Kingwood Medical Center, where tests revealed broken ribs, the punctured lung, blood clots and lacerated spleen.

Making the normally very active Carlisle slow down to heal is Laura's biggest challenge at the moment.

"My mom told him this weekend, 'Stephen, you aren't Ironman,'" Laura said. "We're having to remind him that he isn't superhuman."
Years of pursuing a passion for fashion is going to continue for one Incarnate Word Academy graduate.

Heights resident Jacqueline Bergeron is a 2017 Distinguished Graduate of Incarnate Word Academy and plans to attend the University of Texas at Austin in the fall to study textiles and apparel.

Bergeron has expressed her design passion since her freshmen year at Incarnate Word when she recreated the school banner with fabric from IWA skirts. She relentlessly pursues her dream of becoming a successful apparel designer and showing her own line at New York Fashion Week one day. She has worked as a design intern for Project Runway Season 2 winner Chloe Dao and will do the same for Elaine Turner this summer.

As part of the Incarnate Word's Young Leaders Program, Bergeron co-directed IWA's annual Sewfest for six years, making dresses and superhero capes for children in need throughout the world.

"I started attending SewFest before I even attended IWA, and it's been amazing to work every role of Sewfest, beginning as a participant and finishing senior year as a co-director," Bergeron said.

"Experiencing all of the different roles has helped me grow into a servant leader and Sewfest dresses are the most special dresses I've ever had the privilege of making," Bergeron added.

In addition to her passion for design, Bergeron was a member of the National Honor Society, St. Thomas High School cheerleading team, Respect Life Club and the Young Leaders Program.
A bus carrying more than two dozen school children and chaperones crashed Monday along Interstate 95 north of Baltimore.

The accident happened around 9:30 a.m. along the southbound side of the interstate near Havre de Grace, officials said. At least two people were taken to a shock trauma unit and the others aboard the charter bus were transported to hospitals. Their conditions were not known.

The cause of the crash is under investigation. Officials with the Maryland State Police said on social media that a preliminary investigation showed that a vehicle tried to pass the bus and lost control. The vehicle then came "back across lanes," officials said, "clipping the front of [the bus.]"

The bus overturned at least once, Maryland State Police said. Officials said there were 26 children, three chaperones and a driver aboard the bus. The group was from Pennsylvania and headed to the District on a field trip.

State police investigators talked with the Harford County State's Attorney's Office and officials said on Twitter that "charges were being withheld pending" the end of the investigation.

That area of the highway was shut down for several hours but has now reopened.

Steven Allers, a deputy chief with the Havre de Grace's Susquehanna Hose Company, which helped rescue some of those involved, said many of the students were "quite shaken up" by the incident.

Authorities said there was another bus behind the one that crashed with cadets from the Philadelphia Police Academy aboard, headed to the District for Police Week. One of the officials from the Susquehanna Hose Company said the cadets were helpful in getting everyone off the bus.
Charges are pending against a 29-year-old man in connection with the violence domestic disturbance Friday night that prompted a response from the Plainview Police SWAT team.

Plainview Police Capt. Manuel Balderas said Monday morning that the suspect spent the weekend hospitalized at Covenant Health Plainview, but now has been cleared by medical officials. He is facing third degree felony charges of unlawful restraint: expose to serious bodily injury and assault family/house members by impeding breath/circulation.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, May 15

By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:

Khajimyrat Khajimyradov has been appointed acting manager of the presidential office and the Cabinet of Ministers of Turkmenistan, the countrys government said in a message.

The former manager of the presidential office and the Cabinet of Ministers of Turkmenistan Mammetniyaz Nurmammedov was dismissed from his post May 12 at the government meeting in the country.
AUSTIN -- The Senate State Affairs committee on Monday took another look at a bill banning texting and driving. The committee approved the Senate version, SB 31 by Laredo Sen. Judith Zaffirini back in March, but the measure never made it to the floor for a vote. A similar measure, by Midland Rep. Tom Craddick, cleared the House floor just a few days after the hearing on the Senate bill. Monday, the committee took up that version of the legislation, House Bill 62.

Under HB 62, sponsored in the Senate by Zaffirini, drivers who are caught using a phone to text, send email or post to social media while driving would face a fine of up to $99 for a first offense and $200 for subsequent offenses. The bill only penalizes texting while driving a moving car; drivers in an idle or parked car could still use their phones to send texts. The ban would not apply to using one's phone as a GPS or music device. Some of the differences between the version that cleared the House and the version before State Affairs include a provision that would enhance the penalty for texting and driving to a class A misdemeanor if it leads to a crash that kills or seriously injures another person. It also requires that an officer directly witness the offense before they can issue a citation. Finally, it would preempt any city ordinance relating to texting and driving. More than 100 cities in Texas have ordinances on the books restricting texting and driving, but this bill would supersede city codes.
President Trump tweeted: James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

---

Top Democrats and Republicans in Congress may say they want to get their hands on any tapes President Trump may have made of his conversations with FBI Director James Comey, which could lend clues as to why Trump fired him.

And if the president won't hand them over, Congress could force him. But almost no one in Congress seems willing to take that step.

First, how Congress could get the tapes: Congress could issue a subpoena requiring Trump to give them the recordings (assuming the tapes actually exist, about which many lawmakers are skeptical). A subpoena would essentially put the president afoul of the law if he doesn't hand them over to Congress. The Senate Intelligence Committee recently issued a subpoena to force Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to hand over documents related to the committee's Russia investigation.

But issuing a subpoena is a serious thing, and it requires both Democrats and Republicans to agree to it. There's no indication Republicans are willing to put their president on the spot for his "tapes." In fact, very few Democrats are even talking about a subpoena.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of the most vocal Republicans in the Senate to be asking for the tapes, seems interested in forcing Trump to hand them over. "If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over," Graham told NBC television's "Meet the Press," on Sunday.

But Graham didn't say whether he'd support a subpoena to get the tapes. His office declined to elaborate except to point to the fact that subpoenas are traditionally used for criminal investigations and Trump's firing of his FBI director is not one.

Sen. Mark R. Warner, Va., is the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He told ABC's "This Week" that he'd "absolutely" support a subpoena for the Trump tapes. But top Democrats on other committees haven't said much, if anything, about it.

A subpoena isn't Congress's only tool to force Trump's hand: It could also vote to hold the president in contempt of Congress or even use a long-dormant power to hold him or people involved in the taping in jail until he complies.

All of this would, obviously, be a significant escalation between Congress and the White House. And no one in Washington is even sure if Trump actually recorded his conversations with Comey. Add that together and you can see why Republicans seem averse to entertaining the idea of subpoenaing the president: It could be a huge battle over nothing.

An important caveat: Democrats don't need ALL Republicans in Congress to help them force Trump to hand over tapes/call the president's bluff. They only need a handful of Republicans. Let's look at the Senate, where most of the conversations about the tapes seems to be centered, for how this could work:

1) The chair of a committee that oversees the FBI agrees to issue a subpoena.

The two committees that have jurisdiction over the FBI are the Senate Intelligence and Senate Judiciary committees.

BUT: Since Republicans control Congress, both are controlled by Republicans - Sens. Richard Burr, N.C., and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), respectively. And neither has expressed any interest in subpoenaing the president; neither has even indicated they want to see the tapes.

2) A majority of committee members vote to issue a subpoena. In the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Trump-Russia ties, that would mean all Democrats and at least one Republican would have to vote to issue a subpoena. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Graham sits on, Democrats would need at least two Republicans to join them.

BUT: Here, too, Republicans have the upper hand. On the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrats' most sympathetic ear would probably be Graham, and for now, he doesn't seem supportive of the idea.

The bottom line: Anyone in Congress who wants to see Trump's "tapes" will have to rely on the power of persuasion to get Trump to hand them over, or hope that Republicans suddenly see a political upside to embarrassing their president.
Security researchers have found digital clues in the malware used in last weekend's global ransomware attack that might indicate North Korea is involved, although they caution the evidence is not conclusive.

An early version of the "WannaCry" ransomware that affected more than 150 countries and major businesses and organizations shares a portion of its code with a tool from a hacker group known as Lazarus, which researches think is linked to the North Korean government.

"This implies there is a common source for that code, which could mean that North Korean actors wrote Wannacry or they both used the same third-party code," said John Bambenek, threat research manager at Fidelis Cybersecurity.

White House homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert said Monday that investigators were still working to determine who was behind the attack, which infects computers with a virus that encrypted data and is accompanied by a demand that victims pay a ransom to decrypt it. "That's the attribution that we're after right now," he said at a White House briefing. "It will be very satisfying for me and for all of our viewers, I think, that if we find them that we bring them to justice. ... I don't want to say we have no clues. ... The best and the brightest are working on that."

Several security researchers studying "WannaCry" on Monday found evidence of possible connections to, for instance, the crippling hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 attributed by the U.S. government to North Korea. That hack occurred in the weeks before Sony released a satiric movie about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

A Google security researcher tweeted a small bit of computer code Monday afternoon that highlighted similarities between that attack and an earlier version of "WannaCry." The attack was first reported Friday and has hobbled hundreds of thousands of computers by encrypting data on the machines. The hackers offer to unlock the data for bitcoin payments of $300.

Software company Symantec, maker of popular security software, published a blog post also pointing to the possible connections, writing, "While these findings do not indicate a definite link between Lazarus and WannaCry, we believe that there are sufficient connections to warrant further investigation."

Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm, also pointed to similar links, writing, "We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack."

However, Bambenek cautioned that the links are circumstantial. "It could be a freak coincidence," he said. "The code in question is not a large portion of the overall Wannacry malware so it's plausible that the attackers got it from somewhere else."

The irony, he noted, is that the ransomware attack was enabled by a leak of National Security Agency hacking tools. "The similar could be true here - that this stuff leaked out from North Korea, but it just hasn't been found yet," he said.

Global markets appeared to largely avoid problems Monday amid worries of digital chaos in the wake of the attack.

The spread of the WannaCry virus has slowed as new cyberdefenses have been put in place, but the malware still found its way into hundreds of thousands more computers while businesses and governments assessed the damage and planned their next moves.

Few problems were reported on stock exchanges and other financial systems Monday. Asian stock markets rose, probably on news of higher oil prices and a new Chinese government spending plan - sending some exchanges to two-year highs.

In Europe, stock markets were generally flat, but no serious hacker-linked disruptions were reported in early trading. Wall Street exchanges closed slightly higher. Among the hot stocks were firms selling online protection services.

In Japan, the government's Computer Emergency Response Team said as many as 2,000 computers at 600 companies were affected by the ransomware, and the government set up a new crisis management office to deal with cyberterrorism.

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that the virus infiltrated a range of networks, including railway operations, mail delivery, hospitals and government offices.

In France, automaker Renault said one of its plants was closed Monday as a "preventive step" while engineers looked at the fallout from the cyberattack.

The virus has mainly infiltrated systems in Europe - particularly Britain's health-care network on Friday - but financial exchanges were closely watched in the first full trading day since the malware surfaced.

Some eight to 10 U.S. entities, including a few in the health-care sector, reported possible Wannacry infections to the Department of Homeland Security, a U.S. official said. But none reported that they had data encrypted or that they suffered significant disruptions.

Bossert said Monday that the situation was "under control" at the moment in the United States.

"We are continuing to monitor the situation around clock . . . bringing all the capabilities of the U.S. government to bear," he said, adding that as of Monday, no federal systems were affected.

While factories, hospitals and schools were disrupted in China by the attack, the spread of the virus appeared to be slowing. State media said 29,000 institutions had been hit, along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

"The growth rate of infected institutions on Monday has slowed significantly compared to the previous two days," said Chinese Internet security company Qihoo 360, according to Reuters. "Previous concerns of a wide-scale infection of domestic institutions did not eventuate."

South Korea reported that just five companies were affected, including the country's largest movie chain. In response, the Korea Internet and Security Agency in Seoul raised its warning level to 3, or "cautious," on a scale of 1 to 5.

In the South Korean city of Asan, an electronic panel meant to show bus arrival times instead displayed a message demanding bitcoin payment. The CGV movie chain, South Korea's largest, said that about 50 of its theater complexes were attacked by the ransomware but that films were still running as scheduled.

Researchers discovered a "kill switch" on the virus that stopped its spread from computer to computer, potentially saving tens of thousands of machines from further infection. There were fears, however, that new versions of the worm, without this vulnerability, could eventually be released.

The worm took advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows operating system. Although the flaw has been patched by the company, not all users had applied the update.

The vulnerability exploited by the ransomware is believed to have been first identified by the U.S. National Security Agency and later leaked online.

The ransomware program, which is spread through email, encrypts computer files and then demands the bitcoin equivalent $300 to unlock them.

The attack hobbled operations at Russia's Interior Ministry, Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica and Britain's National Health Service.

Speaking at a news conference after an economic conference in China, Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalists that Russia "had nothing to do" with the WannaCry virus.

"With regard to the source of these threats, then I believe that Microsoft has spoken directly about this," Putin said. "They said that the first sources of this virus were the United States intelligence agencies. Russia has absolutely nothing to do with this."

---

The Washington Post's Anna Fifield in Tokyo and Andrew Roth in Moscow contributed to this report.
ELIZABETH, N.J. -- It has been two months since the flight landed at Newark Liberty International Airport, delivering Abdul to a country that had promised him safety.

But the 25-year-old Afghan, holding a visa that allowed him to move to the United States after five years of serving the U.S. government in Afghanistan, has never officially set foot on U.S. soil. Instead, he stepped off the plane into a bewildering journey through U.S. immigration detention, during which he was stripped of his visa and placed in a holding facility for illegal immigrants without ever being told why.

Advocates say Abdul is the first known person to have his Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) revoked upon arrival to the United States but is among a few recipients of that visa to face a heightened level of scrutiny - and to be held in detention - since President Donald Trump promised to tighten the nation's borders.

Because the special visas are reserved for those who have risked their lives to help the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, program advocates say, Abdul's detention sends a troubling message to others who might consider helping the U.S. military at a time when the Trump administration is weighing an expanded military role in Afghanistan.

"I don't understand why I'm being held here as a prisoner when I served the American government," Abdul said in a recent interview through an interpreter at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center just outside the airport here.

After Abdul's trip from Kabul on March 13, U.S. border officials denied him entry, kept him in an airport hallway for nearly two days, initially denied him access to a lawyer and had him sign a document that he couldn't understand, he said. The document stated that Abdul had been stripped of his visa.

U.S. officials have provided no reason for denying Abdul entry. A rough transcript of his interview, as prepared by border officials, includes no questions or answers pertaining to a national security threat or criminality, instead hinting at a miscommunication about bureaucratic aspects of his visa.

ICE, which denied Abdul's parole from its facility last month on the basis of his visa having been revoked, told him in a letter that the agency is "currently investigating the basis of that revocation."

Abdul has a theory: "I think that it's because I'm from a Muslim country, and I'm a Muslim."

Abdul, who agreed to speak with The Washington Post on condition that his last name not be used because he fears the Taliban could take revenge on his family, landed in the United States two days before Trump's revised travel ban on citizens of six majority-Muslim countries - which did not include Afghanistan - was set to go into effect. Federal judges have since suspended the ban.

But civil rights advocates say Trump's position sent a message to U.S. border authorities, who they say have increasingly singled out Muslims for additional scrutiny.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group, says it documented a significant increase in complaints of harassment involving U.S. border agents' treatment of Muslims during Trump's first 100 days in office, rising from 17 during the same period last year to 193 this year.

"The volume and intensity of these stops and encounters seem to be of a different type than what we've seen previously," said Johnathan Smith, the legal director of Muslim Advocates, another civil rights advocacy group, noting "heightened questioning based on their perceived religion or national origin," and requests for social media passwords and electronics access.

Abdul's lawyers, Jason Scott Camilo and Farrin Anello, and advocates from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) say Abdul is a casualty of that profiling. And while he appears to be the first SIV-holder to have lost his visa upon arrival, several others have experienced lengthy airport detentions in the past few months; one family with small children was held at Los Angeles International Airport for four days and was nearly deported before a judge intervened.

"What does it say if you served for years, you go through this whole, long process, and then you finally get here and we put you in jail?" said Becca Heller, IRAP's director.

More than 40,000 Afghans have benefited from the SIV program since Congress created it in 2007. Successful applicants for the visas must show that they have worked for the United States for at least two years and that they face "an ongoing serious threat" in their home country.

"Thousands of Afghans have put themselves, and their families, at risk to help our soldiers and diplomats accomplish the U.S. mission and return home safely," Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., a proponent of the program, said in a statement this month after Congress agreed to include an additional 2,500 visas in this year's budget.

But other lawmakers who have pushed for stricter immigration laws have long tried to curtail the program, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, arguing that the visas are costly and applicants deserve deeper scrutiny. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said he supports giving "immigration relief" to Afghans who served the U.S. government. "Having said that, there must be reasonable limits on these programs, including ensuring the proper vetting of applicants to reduce any abuses of the system," he said.

---

Abdul was 9 when the United States military arrived in Afghanistan. His family, ethnic Tajiks from a village outside of Kabul, had already moved in an effort to escape the Taliban's violence. At 19, a friend helped Abdul land a job as a waiter in the dining hall on a U.S. military base. He was later promoted to become a cashier at the U.S. Embassy.

But in 2014, the Taliban warned people in his village that harm would come to anyone who worked for the Americans. As Abdul was returning home from work one day, two men pulled up on motorcycles and beat him with a cable in the street. After a close call with a roadside bomb in 2015, his boss, a former U.S. soldier and government contractor, provided him with temporary housing on the U.S. base and helped him apply for a visa.

"It was dangerous for me to be in Afghanistan, so they were happy for me to be safe," Abdul said of his co-workers when he got the visa.

Abdul's arrival at Newark quickly turned into an ordeal. On his second night in detention, Abdul said two border agents told him that his visa had not been accepted and they asked him to sign a sworn statement acknowledging that fact. "I didn't know what it was, but I signed it," he said.

The interview transcript, reviewed by The Post, gives no indication of why or when Abdul's visa was revoked.

Abdul's lawyers have questioned the document's accuracy and validity given his limited understanding of English. Authorities, for example noted that Abdul speaks Pashto when he actually speaks Dari, and they appeared to believe that Abdul planned to stay with his former boss and sponsor, Marion Leon Goins, in Ohio, though a resettlement agency in had arranged housing for him elsewhere in the state - a disparity that could have played a role in the outcome.

"Mr. Goins indicated that he was unaware of your arrival to the United States, why would this be the case if you intend to reside with him?" the officer asked, according to the transcript.

Goins told The Post that his conversation with border authorities went very differently.

"They asked me: Did I sponsor him to come over? And I told him, 'Yeah,' " Goins said. "And they told me that they were going to release him."

Immigration authorities scheduled Abdul for removal from the United States on a flight the following night. A federal judge, responding to an appeal from Abdul's lawyers, blocked his deportation. He now has a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday.

Department of Homeland Security and State Department officials told lawmakers during a recent House Homeland Security Committee hearing that their agencies conduct meticulous vetting of visa applicants, a process that continues up to and through a visa-holder's arrival. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told The Post that interviews with passengers upon arrival also are critical aspects of that process: "We rely upon the judgment of our individual CBP officers to use their discretion as to the extent of examination necessary."
The federal appeals court panel weighing President Donald Trump's travel ban focused acutely on Trump's own comments at a hearing Monday - lobbing skeptical inquiries at lawyers on both sides of the issue as they tried to ascertain to what extent they should hold the president's inflammatory rhetoric against him.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the United States, and the three judges with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit specifically asked about how much they should consider that and other statements in deciding the future of the president's executive order.

The hearing was important in its own right to the future of the travel ban but was made even more interesting because Trump has repeatedly criticized the 9th Circuit for ruling against him.

Judge Michael Daly Hawkins asked a Justice Department lawyer whether Trump had "ever disavowed his campaign statements," and Judge Ronald Gould inquired about how the court should determine if the executive order was "a Muslim ban in the guise of a national security justification."

Judge Richard A. Paez noted that many of Trump's statements on the matter were made "in the midst of a highly contentious campaign" and asked those suing over the ban, "If we don't consider the campaign statements, do you still prevail?" He did, however, deem the campaign trail comments "profound."

Trump's travel ban - key sections of which have been frozen by two courts - tried to temporarily shut down the U.S. refugee program and suspend the issuance of new visas to residents of six Muslim-majority countries.

Those challenging the ban say it is unconstitutional because it was motivated by Trump's desire to discriminate against Muslims, and they point to Trump's comments and those of his advisers as evidence to prove their case. The Justice Department argues that the executive order is well within the president's purview and that lower courts have been wrong to second-guess him on a matter of national security.

The panel of three 9th Circuit judges - all appointed by President Bill Clinton - will join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in deciding the fate of the ban. To fully reinstate the measure, the Justice Department would have to win in both the 4th and 9th circuits - or escalate the dispute to the Supreme Court.

On Monday, acting solicitor general Jeffrey Wall told the judges that they need only determine whether there was a "rational basis" for the president's travel ban, and if they thought there was some bad intent, they should focus on official, unequivocal statements as evidence.

Wall argued that the president had said "several things approaching" a repudiation of his campaign trail comments, in that he had "clarified that what he was talking about were Islamic terrorist groups and the countries that shelter or sponsor them." But the judges, he said, should nonetheless tread lightly in weighing political remarks.

"We shouldn't start down the road of psychoanalyzing what people meant on the campaign trail," Wall said.

Pressed at the daily briefing Monday about whether the president would repudiate his previous comments, White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to answer specifically but insisted that the ban was "fully lawful and will be upheld."

"Right now, the president is making sure that we make the appropriate arguments to get the ban in place," Spicer added.

Lawyer Neal Katyal, arguing the case on behalf of those who sued over the ban, said the judges should simply ask themselves "what would an objective observer think, with these sorts of statements."

Katyal noted that when Trump signed the first version of his travel ban, which he later revoked and rewrote, the president read the title and commented, "We all know what that means" - a post-campaign hint of a discriminatory intention. And after a court blocked the revised order, Katyal said, Trump declared the new measure a "watered-down" version of the first.

Pressed by Paez on whether the order would be constitutional if it was signed by someone who had not made such comments, Katyal quipped, "If you don't say all these things, you never wind up with an executive order like this."

Katyal allowed, though, that the president would not be forever barred from issuing a similar executive order, if he were to repudiate his previous comments or take other actions to prove that his intent was not to discriminate.

The 9th Circuit blocked Trump's first travel ban, though the revised version is before a different panel. The 4th Circuit, which is based in Richmond, heard arguments on the matter last week. Their decision and the 9th Circuit's probably won't come for weeks.

Last week, a federal judge in Michigan ordered the Trump administration to turn over communications from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other advisers - whose comments judges nationwide have pointed to as they have ordered the ban frozen. That case is separate from the two that have put Trump's latest ban on hold.

Trump has not been shy about criticizing judges who rule against him, but he seems to have particular ire for the 9th Circuit. When U.S. District Judge William Orrick blocked his executive order on stripping federal funding from sanctuary cities, Trump incorrectly attributed the decision to the 9th Circuit as he wrote on Twitter: "First the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban & now it hits again on sanctuary cities - both ridiculous rulings. See you in the Supreme Court!" Orrick is a lower-court judge whose rulings would be reviewed by the 9th Circuit.

Trump then wrote that the circuit had a "terrible record of being overturned" - a claim that is highly debatable - and he said later that he had "absolutely" considered breaking up the court.
Timothy Piazza and the other pledges being hazed in February hoped that the men of Penn State's Beta Theta Pi fraternity would ultimately welcome them as brothers.

Instead, when Piazza's night of binge drinking took a deadly turn, his family says, his would-be brothers treated him "like roadkill."

The family has been outspoken about their 19-year-old son's final hours since 18 fraternity brothers were charged in his death. "It was horrific. This - this wasn't boys being boys," the teen's dad, Jim Piazza, said on the "Today" show on Monday.."This was men who intended to force feed lethal amounts of alcohol into other young men . . .

"And what happened throughout the night was just careless disregard for human life. They basically treated our son as roadkill and a rag doll."

The parents' mission in life is now to change the culture, at Penn State and on other campuses: "The Piazza family feels strongly that their son's death should become meaningful. They hope it will become a catalyst nationally," said Thomas R. Kline, an attorney representing the family, so that no other parent will have to bury a child destroyed by fraternity hazing and alcohol poisoning.

They have established the Timothy J. Piazza Memorial Foundation to raise money to help people in need of prosthetic devices, and to grant scholarships. Piazza's career goal had been to create prosthetic devices.

On Feb. 2, Piazza and the other initiates to Beta Theta Pi had just run the gauntlet, a series of stations where they had to chug wine, vodka and beer. During the night, Piazza fell down a flight of stairs.

After the fraternity members found him at the bottom of the stairs, one wrote on a group message that Piazza "might actually be a problem. He fell 15 feet down a flight of stairs, hair-first, going to need help."

But they didn't seek medical help for more than 12 hours, authorities concluded. Instead, they poured water on Piazza, slapped his face and put a backpack full of books on his back to keep him from rolling over.

During some of it, Piazza was throwing up and twitching.

He had a fractured skull and a lacerated spleen. For hours, blood was seeping into his abdominal cavity.

Fellow pledge Kordel Davis said he told the fraternity brothers that the unconscious Piazza should be taken to the hospital.

"They said 'No, you're overreacting. You don't know what you're talking about,' " Davis recounted in an interview on "Good Morning America." "I said, 'I do know what I'm talking about. He could have a concussion.' "

Piazza tried to get up and at one point walked toward the door, but he fell and hit his head.

A grand jury concluded that "the Penn State Greek community nurtured an environment so permissive of excessive drinking and hazing that it emboldened its members to repeatedly act with reckless disregard to human life."

Eight fraternity members were charged with involuntary manslaughter. Other charges included hazing, aggravated and simple assault, alcohol-related violations and evidence tampering.

Penn State President Eric J. Barron announced beefed-up regulations for fraternities and sororities. Beta Theta Pi, once heralded as a national model for others, was permanently banned from campus.

Beta Theta Pi released a statement this weekend that read, in part, "There are no words to describe the pain we feel for Tim and his family. We are so deeply sorry. We are heartbroken. We are outraged.

"As husbands, fathers, sons, nephews and grandsons, Betas around the world have written and called in to express their anger, disappointment and sorrow. We share their feelings and are left speechless as to how something like this could happen."

William J. Brennan, an attorney for one of the defendants, Joseph Ems Jr., 20, of Philadelphia, who was charged with reckless endangerment, said "This is a tragic and unspeakable situation." He said he did not want to comment on a pending criminal case, but that "Joey Ems and the Ems family feel tremendous compassion," for the Piazza family, and offer their condolences. "Timothy Piazza and his family are constantly in my client's thoughts and prayers."

Piazza was found lying unconscious on the floor of the basement the morning after the party, according to grand jury investigation findings released by Centre County District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller this month, but for more than 40 minutes no one called for help. One member's phone had records of internet searches at the time, according to the findings, such as, "true or false, a person with a serious head injury or concussion should be kept awake," and "cold extremities in drunk person."

When a fraternity member finally called 911 a little before 11 a.m. the next morning, first responders rushed Piazza to a nearby hospital. He was then transported to Hershey Medical Center, where the extent of abdominal bleeding was so extensive that a second surgeon was summoned, according to the grand jury investigation findings. Neurosurgeons removed part of his skull to relieve pressure caused by the swelling of his brain.

Piazza died early the next morning.
Tehran, Iran, May 15

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

The exports of 20 major types of goods from Iran to the European Union rose by something between 28 and 100 percent last Iranian fiscal year (which ended March 20) compared to five years before Iran and world powers implemented the nuclear deal called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Mirhadi Seyyedi, caretaker of the Export Markets Development department of Iran's Trade Promotion Organization, said the JCPOA well managed to help Iran regain its old markets that it had lost due to sanctions, IRNA news agency reported May 14.

The destinations to which the goods were exported last year were also much more diverse than they used to during the sanctions, the official said.

The highest export was of hot-rolled iron with a value of $66 million, he said, adding this is while during the five years prior to the implementation of the JCPOA the annual export of the product stood at an average of $17 million.

According to Seyyedi, Iran's hot-rolled Iron is currently exported to the UK, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and Spain among EU members.

Next stand gas condensates, whose export value last fiscal year stood at $41 million. These were exported to Malta and the Netherlands, the official noted.

The JCPOA was put into practice in January 2016, putting an end to years-long economic sanctions on Iran.
Russia has yet to collect much of what it hoped for from the Trump administration, including the lifting of U.S. sanctions and recognition of its annexation of Crimea.

But the Kremlin has gotten a different return on its effort to help elect Trump in last year's election: chaos in Washington, D.C.

The president's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey was the latest destabilizing jolt to a core institution of the U.S. government. The nation's top law enforcement agency joined a list of entities that Trump has targeted, including federal judges, U.S. spy services, news organizations and military alliances.

The instability, although driven by Donald Trump, has in some ways extended and amplified the effect Russia sought to achieve with its unprecedented campaign to undermine the 2016 presidential race.

In a declassified report released this year, U.S. spy agencies described destabilization as one of the Russian President Vladimir Putin's objectives. "The Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order," it said.

Russia's "active measures" campaign ended with the election last year. But Comey's firing on Monday triggered a new wave of Russia-related turbulence.

His removal was perceived as a blow to the independence of the bureau's ongoing investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Even if that probe remains on track, current and former U.S. officials said that Comey's ouster serves broader Russian interests.

"They feel pretty good overall because that's a further sign that our political system is in a real crisis," said Eugene Rumer, a former State Department official who served as the top intelligence officer on Russia issues from 2010 to 2014. "The firing of Comey only aggravates this crisis. It's now certain to be more protracted and more painful and that's okay with them."

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, offered a similar assessment in Senate testimony last week, even before Comey was dismissed, saying that Moscow must look on the election and its aftermath with a great deal of satisfaction.

"The Russians have to be celebrating the success of . . . what they set out do with rather minimal resource expenditure," Clapper said. "The first objective was to sow discord and dissension, which they certainly did."

Clapper went further in interviews on Sunday, saying U. S. institutions are "under assault" from Trump, and that Russia must see the firing of Comey as "another victory on the scoreboard for them."

Even Trump alluded to Russia's presumed glee at the post-Comey turmoil, although he blamed Democrats. "Russia must be laughing up their sleeves watching as the U.S. tears itself apart over a Democrat EXCUSE for losing the election," Trump said in a posting on Twitter on Thursday.

If Russia's most specific priorities have proved elusive, it may be partly because Moscow overachieved in its effort to cultivate ties to Trump.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who shared many of Trump's pro-Russia positions, was forced to resign in February after it was revealed that he had misled other White House officials about his post-election conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

In a late December phone call that was intercepted by U.S. intelligence, Flynn assured Kislyak that Trump planned to revisit the sanctions issue shortly after taking office. Trump has so far not followed through on that front, largely because the Flynn controversy and multiple Russia probes have made it politically unfeasible.

Trump's policies toward Russia have also taken a harder line in part because of the rising influence of senior members of his administration, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who are critics of Moscow.

Even so, Trump himself continues to send pro-Russia signals, sometimes at the expense of agencies that report to him. Trump recently signaled, again, that he remains unconvinced that Russia was behind the hack of the 2016 election and release of tens of thousands of emails that damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign. His position is a rejection of the consensus view of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Trump has provided a steady stream of material for Russian propaganda platforms.

One day after firing Comey, Trump welcomed Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to the White House. American news agencies were barred from attending but a photographer for Russia's state-run Tass news agency was granted access to the Oval Office.

Photos released later that day showed Trump warmly welcoming his guests, including a shot that showed Trump smiling and shaking hands with Kislyak, the ambassador embroiled in the controversy with Flynn.

Russian officials have denied the country meddled in the U.S. election. In brief public appearances last week, Lavrov joked about Comey's dismissal - "Was he fired? You're kidding!" - and mocked claims of Moscow interference.

"We are monitoring what is going on here concerning Russia and its alleged 'decisive role' in your domestic policy," Lavrov said in a quote reported in Tass.

Trump's defenders acknowledge that he seeks improved relations with Moscow, but insist that his goals are designed entirely to advance American interests.

They point to sharp criticism of Moscow by senior administration officials, strained diplomatic relations on key issues and Trump's decision to order a missile strike on an air base in Syria where Russian military operatives were based as part of Moscow's support to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The assertion that the Trump administration has been advantageous to Moscow "is laughable," said James Carafano, the vice president of foreign and defense policy at the Heritage Foundation, who served as an adviser to the Trump transition team. "The president has actually stiff-armed them on a number of occasions."

But critics argue that many of Trump's foreign policy positions undercut U.S. influence overseas and, as a result, strengthen Moscow - his effective endorsement of nationalist candidates including Marine Le Pen in France; his effort to impose an immigration ban on Muslim-majority countries; and his threats, since softened, to restructure NATO.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed allegations of ties between his campaign and Russia as "fake news." The White House insisted that Comey's firing was based solely on his handling of the investigation of Clinton's emails.

But Trump's own later statements made clear the decision was linked to his frustration that the Russia inquiry was expanding under Comey, a director whom Trump viewed as disloyal.

Trump had telegraphed the move a day earlier on Twitter, saying: "The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?"

The implication that the FBI would perpetuate an unwarranted investigation out of political animus echoes other instances in which Trump has disparaged American institutions or principles.

U.S. intelligence officials said such comments bolster the case that Putin makes against Western democracies.

"It plays into the idea that we are as corrupt as anybody else, that what the United States is exporting isn't something you want," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official involved in tracking the Russian election hack and its aftermath. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

With sanctions still in place, Russia may think that the election interference "didn't pan out the way they expected," the official said. "But what they're getting now is more positive than what they had under [President Barack] Obama and what they feared under Clinton. It's not pro-Russia, but it's certainly not anti-Russia. It's more a kind of chaos. And that does benefit them."
Relatives of a victim of the deadly 2015 Amtrak crash have used a little-known provision of Pennsylvania law to push state prosecutors to file charges against the engineer - an abrupt turn of events in the high-profile case that last week had appeared to reach its end.

The announcement late Friday by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro that Brandon Bostian would face charges of involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment capped a week of legal maneuvering. Just days before, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office announced it would not prosecute Bostian in connection with the crash that killed eight people and injured more than 200 others.

The district attorney's office said that while Bostian's actions likely caused the Northeast Regional train traveling at twice the posted speed limit to derail at a curve, there was not enough evidence to pursue a criminal case.

But the husband and father of Rachel Jacobs, a technology executive who was among those killed in the crash, thought otherwise.

Less than 24 hours after the district attorney's announcement, the two men used Pennsylvania's private criminal complaint process to argue that Bostian should be charged.

As per the law that has been on the books for decades, but is not often used, they took their complaint to the district attorney's office, which cited its original decision in deferring the matter. Then along with their attorney - Thomas Kline, working with Richard Sprague - appealed to President Judge Marsha Neifield of Philadelphia Municipal Court.

Neifield reviewed the complaint and on Thursday ordered the district attorney's office to file charges. Because of their previous involvement, the office referred the case to the state attorney general's office, which late Friday announced that Bostian would be charged with eight counts of involuntary manslaughter, one count of causing or risking a catastrophe and numerous counts of reckless endangerment.

As of Monday, Bostian had not surrendered to authorities. His attorney, Robert Goggin, did not respond to requests for comment.

"When the district attorney's office announced its decision, the victims of Amtrak 188 felt that justice had been derailed," said Robert Mongeluzzi, who is also representing families and victims of the May 2015 crash. "Forty-eight hours later when the attorney general announced he would be filing charges, they felt that justice was back on track."

Amtrak 188 had left the District and headed for New York on the night of May 12, 2015, when it entered a curve just north of Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board determined the train was traveling 106 mph, more than twice the posted speed limit of 50 mph, when it hit the curve; the engine and all seven cars derailed.

Investigators said Bostian may have lost track of where he was and might have thought that he was entering a different curve where the speed limit is 110 mph.

It was Amtrak's worst crash in more than 20 years.

In October 2016, Amtrak paid $265 million to settle claims related to the crash. Federal law limits how much money passenger rail companies must pay in damages.

Jules Epstein, director of advocacy programs at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, said the law allowing privately initiated complaints used by Jacobs's family has been around for years, but is generally used in small disputes between individuals.

He said, however, that even though Bostian now faces charges, there is no guarantee he will face trial, he said.

"There was nothing in the judge's order that preordains the outcome," Epstein said. "The prosecution may later move to dismiss, offer pretrial probation, negotiate a deal for probation or prosecute and seek jail time."

A handful of other states have similar laws that allow private people to file criminal complaints, according to research done by Jeffrey Welty, an associate professor of public law and government and director at North Carolina Judicial College at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pennsylvania law limits complaints to misdemeanor charges only.

The decision by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office came after a two-year investigation. In a statement that accompanied the announcement, the office explained why it opted not to charge Bostian.

"We cannot conclude that the evidence rises to the high level necessary to charge the engineer or anyone else with a criminal offense," the statement said. "Nor do we believe there is sufficient evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal recklessness, which would be the only other basis for criminal liability."

According to the office, Pennsylvania law specifically says that a person acts with criminal recklessness when he or she "consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk."

"Based on the available information, we do not have evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the engineer 'consciously' disregarded the risk," the written statement said.

Mongeluzzi, however, disagreed.

"There is no doubt from the black box recordings that Mr. Bostian was conscious," he said. "There is no doubt the actions he took were conscious. This is no different from a car wreck. If you are going 106 miles per hour into a 50 mile per hour curve, you would be charged. That is exactly what the attorney general said."
In July 2016, few in Washington, D.C., were more incredulous that the FBI decided not to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime for sending and receiving classified information on her private email server than House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Ryan issued one of the Republicans' irate statements:

"No one should be above the law. But based upon the director's own statement, it appears damage is being done to the rule of law. Declining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent. The findings of this investigation also make clear that Secretary Clinton misled the American people when she was confronted with her criminal actions."

And then he held a news conference, where he asked the Obama administration to stop giving Clinton, who was the Democrats' newly minted presidential nominee, classified briefings. "Individuals who are 'extremely careless,' close quote," Ryan said, using the term then-FBI Director James Comey used to describe Clinton's email practices, "should be denied further access to information." (That proposal never got anywhere).

The message was clear: Ryan thought the FBI should have charged Clinton for a crime for sending and receiving classified information on a private email server she used exclusively as secretary of state.

Ryan piped up again about this 11 days before the election, when Comey told Congress his team had found new emails related to Clinton that they were looking into. The FBI did not describe it as a reopening of an investigation, but Ryan sure did:

Here's a statement he tweeted on Oct 28.

"Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame. She was entrusted with some of our nation's most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information. This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators. I renew my call for the Director of National Intelligence to suspend all classified briefings for Secretary Clinton until this matter is fully resolved."

More for you Trump claims 'right' to share info with Russia

We're spending so much parsing Ryan's words about a candidate in an election that is now over because suddenly, it's not Clinton who is on the receiving end of criticism about the way she handled classified information. It's President Donald Trump.

The Washington Post's ace national security team reported Monday that while in an Oval Office meeting last week with top Russian officials, Trump told them highly classified information about the Islamic State. The information he told to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister is so secret it's not even relayed to some U.S. allies, let alone a country that most intelligence officials think meddled in the U.S. election.

"It is all kind of shocking," a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials told The Post. "Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn't grasp the gravity of the things he's dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it's all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia."

Reckless. That's exactly the word Ryan used in another statement, issued in September, after the FBI released its report of its interview with Clinton. The FBI's investigation demonstrates, Ryan said, "Hillary Clinton's reckless and downright dangerous handling of classified information during her tenure as secretary of state."

It's also the exact word that at least one former intelligence official used to describe the fact Trump shared information so secret it requires a code word just to talk about it among U.S. officials.

The Post rounded up some of the comments:

--"Trump seems to be very reckless, and doesn't grasp the gravity of the things he's dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security." - a former senior U.S. official close to current administration officials

--"Russia could identify our sources or techniques." - a senior U.S. official

--"I don't think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out." - a former intelligence official who worked on Russia-related issues

--"He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it - and that has big downsides. Does he understand what's classified and what's not? That's what worries me." - a former U.S. official

Perhaps "reckless" is in the eye of the beholder. But it's going to take a lot of explaining from Ryan - and all the other Republicans who bashed Clinton, including Trump - why this situation is somehow less careless and less reckless and less dangerous than the one they lambasted Democrats for just a few months ago.
Many West Wing staffers have sacrificed their personal reputations by parroting falsehoods on behalf of Donald Trump. How will their devotion be repaid? Perhaps with pink slips.

The president has a congenital inability to take personal responsibility for his own mistakes. Throughout his career, he's sought out scapegoats whenever situations get hairy. He's doing it again amidst the continuing fallout from his decision to fire James Comey as FBI director.

Trump demands unquestioning loyalty from his subordinates, but kowtowing and paying fealty do not ensure that he'll return the favor.

Several people who have spoken with the president tell Philip Rucker that he has been quick to blame his staff for the blowback to axing Comey. "Privately, Trump has lashed out at the communications office - led by press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Michael Dubke - and has spoken candidly with advisers about a broad shake-up that could include demotions or dismissals," Rucker reported on the front page of Sunday's Washington Post. "Yet Trump did not inform Spicer and Dubke of his decision until about an hour before it was announced, keeping them and other senior aides out of the loop because he feared the news might leak prematurely. ... Their defenders said they were assigned an impossible task of orchestrating on short notice a complete rollout plan - from crafting and distributing talking points to lining up lawmakers, legal experts and other Trump supporters to give interviews."

The president and his family members do not want to hear these excuses. "Trump is in some ways like a pilot opting to fly a plane through heavy turbulence then blaming the flight attendants when the passengers get jittery," Phil observed. "Some of Trump's allies said they are worried that the president views the Comey episode entirely as a public-relations crisis - a branding problem - and has not been judicious about protecting himself from legal exposure as the FBI continues to investigate possible links between his campaign and Russia. ... One GOP figure close to the White House mused privately about whether Trump was 'in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.'"

-- Trump reportedly asked Comey to pledge his loyalty three times during a one-on-one dinner in late January, but the FBI director refused to do so. Comey allies say he believes this conversation is what led to his termination last week.

The president denies asking Comey to pledge personal loyalty, but he also says that he does not think doing so would be inappropriate. "I don't think it would be a bad question to ask," Trump said in an interview that aired Saturday night on Fox News. "I think loyalty to the country, loyalty to the United States, is important. You know, I mean, it depends on how you define loyalty."

-- When you consider Trump's history, there is nothing surprising about him asking Comey for a loyalty oath.

You might recall that the president installed minders inside key agencies as soon as he took power in January. These apparatchiks, who have already proven their devotion to the president, are charged - above all - with monitoring the loyalty of cabinet secretaries and reporting back to the White House. "This shadow government of political appointees ... is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary's suite," The Post's Lisa Rein and Juliet Eilperin reported in March. "The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA ... These aides report not to the secretary, but to ... a White House deputy chief of staff."

The administration's head hunters have struggled for months to find well-qualified people for high-level posts because any past criticism of Trump is often disqualifying. Trump rejected Rex Tillerson's first choice to be his deputy because he'd criticized Trump during the campaign. A top aide to Ben Carson was summarily fired and escorted out of the Housing and Urban Development headquarters by security in February after a Trump loyalist discovered a critical op-ed he had written last fall.

During the GOP primaries, Trump asked attendees at his rallies to physically pledge loyalty. "Raise your right hand," he said last March in Orlando, for example. He then told the crowd to repeat after him: "I do solemnly swear that I - no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there's hurricanes or whatever - will vote, on or before the 12th for Donald J. Trump for president." Jewish groups complained at the time about the disconcerting imagery of people raising their right arms in what looked like a Nazi salute.

"Asked during a 2014 speech about the trait he most looks for in an employee, his answer was unequivocal: loyalty," Bloomberg notes.

But loyalty does not cut both ways:

--Last year,Trump repeatedly cited his refusal to fire then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, after he forcibly grabbed a female reporter and then denied it (even though there was video), as a testament to his own character. "Folks, look, I'm a loyal person," Trump said at one town hall. "It would be so easy for me to terminate this man, ruin his life, ruin his family." (He even cited Lewandowski during a meeting with Jewish leaders to make the point that he'd stay loyal to Israel if elected.) "This campaign, above all other things, is about loyalty," Lewandowski told New York Magazine around this time.

Shortly thereafter, however, Trump fired Lewandowski. Then a few months after that, struggling in the polls, the candidate fired his replacement. It was a reminder that, for Trump, loyalty is always conditional. There are strings attached.

-- Trump has described himself as a "loyalty freak,"according to a profile written last summer by Politico's Michael Kruse,but what he really meant by that is that he wants people under him to stay loyal to him.

--From a prescient BuzzFeed profile in April 2016: "A review of the billionaire's tumultuous, decades-long career - including interviews with former employees, aides, and confidantes - suggests that Trump's dedication to even his closest allies can wear thin, particularly at moments of professional crisis. Far from a tight-knit family of blood brothers, The Donald's inner circle has been purged and repopulated many times over the years. Devoted workaholics burn out and flame out. Longtime alliances end with lawsuits and tabloid sniping. Sometimes reconciliation follows, sometimes grudges endure - and rarely does Trump refuse to bury the hatchet when it's good for the bottom line."

Trump has even been willing to throw family members under the bus to avoid accepting fault for his own mistakes. "In 1990, when the disastrous opening of the Taj Mahal Casino threatened to unravel Trump's Atlantic City casino empire, he aimed his fury at his younger brother, Robert, who worked on the project," the Buzzfeed story noted. "According to a 1991 book written by a former Trump executive, the magnate angrily berated Robert in front of other employees. Robert immediately departed the casino seething, according to the book, saying, 'I don't need this.' ... The episode put a lasting strain on their relationship."

-- "Perhaps one of the most fraught positions for someone to occupy in Trump's orbit is that of the PR man,"The Atlantic noted back in March: "Long before he earned the distinction of becoming the first president to live-tweet cable news, Trump was a headline-obsessed media junkie who devoured the New York Post daily and demanded round-the-clock attention from the publicists on his payroll. In one emblematic example from the early '90s, Trump became irate that he was losing the media battle with his first wife, Ivana, as their breakup dominated the tabloids - so he fired the public-relations consultant that his family had employed for more than two decades. Asked about the incident years later, the consultant, Howard Rubenstein, waved it off as a short-lived temper tantrum. 'There was a time when (Trump) was upset with everybody,' he shrugged. Still, in retrospect, the episode seems to have foreshadowed Trump's widely chronicled displeasure with Spicer."

-- The president clearly prefers to surround himself with "yes men." Consider what some of his favorite staffers said on TV in recent days:

"I understand I have to earn his confidence every day," Rex Tillerson said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

(That sounds exhausting.)

Kellyanne Conway did not even try to dispute that Trump demands loyalty.

"The president expects people who are serving in his administration ... to be loyal to the administration," the counselor to the president said on Fox News last Thursday as the Comey imbroglio blew up.

Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, added Sunday on ABC's "This Week": "The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whomever he wants. That's his right."

-- In fact, that is not how it works. Trump is the president, not "the CEO," of the United States. This is a meaningful distinction. The federal government does not belong to Trump. It is not a family business. Or even a publicly-traded corporation with a board of directors. There are checks and balances. There are courts and Congress. There are laws designed to prevent obstruction of justice. As our first president to take office with no prior political or military experience, and lacking any formal training in history or constitutional law, Trump clearly still faces a Herculean learning curve.

-- This point is very important: FBI agents do not take an oath to the president. They take an oath to the Constitution. The bureau explains why this matters on its own website: "It is significant that we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and not an individual leader, ruler, office, or entity. ... A government based on individuals - who are inconsistent, fallible, and often prone to error - too easily leads to tyranny on the one extreme or anarchy on the other. ... The American colonists were all too familiar with the harmful effects of unbalanced government and oaths to individual rulers. For example, the English were required to swear loyalty to the crown, and many of the early colonial documents commanded oaths of allegiance to the king."

---

With Breanne Deppisch of The Washington Post.
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A 36-year-old UCSF psychiatrist and his boyfriend were arrested and charged with possession of hundreds of images and videos of child pornography, officials said Thursday.

Billy Lockhart, a resident at UCSFs Department of Psychiatry and graduate of Yale Universitys School of Medicine, was arrested Tuesday at his home near the hospital on the 100 block of Buena Vista Terrace, police said.

The San Francisco Police Departments Internet Crimes Against Children Unit started looking at Lockhart in March after investigators determined he was uploading and trading child pornography on the Internet, officials said.

Lockhart was using the UCSF Wi-Fi to upload child pornography, police said.

On Tuesday, police said they served a search warrant at Lockharts home, where they found several of his electronic devices containing hundreds of videos and pictures of child porn.

Benjamin Martin, 33, who lives with Lockhart, also had hundreds of files containing child porn on his devices, officials said.

Lockhart and Martin are in a relationship, according to their Facebook pages, on which theyve posted dozens of pictures together.

The men were arrested at the home they shared. Each suspect was charged Thursday with possession of more than 600 files of child pornography. Lockhart was additionally charged with distribution of child pornography.

Lockhart is a medical doctor who graduated from Yale Universitys School of Medicine, according to his UCSF profile page.

UCSF officials acknowledged the arrest on Thursday, saying in a statement that the school takes theses allegations extremely seriously.

The university placed Lockhart on investigatory leave, and suspended all of his clinical activity and access to its systems.

The UCSF Police Department is fully cooperating with the San Francisco Police Department in this investigation, school officials said.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15



By Dalga Khatinoglu  Trend:



Since November 2015, when Iran introduced its newly designed oil and gas agreement model, called Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC), the country hasnt issued any tender yet due to domestic challenges and criticism.



Iran had planned to offer 49 oil and gas projects worth $100 billion (80% of which projected to be attracted from foreign funding) to foreign companies based on IPC.



Meanwhile, IPC is yet to be approved by the National Supreme Security Council.



According to IPC, foreign companies can become the projects operators and own a percentage of produced oil as far as the field is active.



IPC is very similar to Iraqs oil agreements, which pay cash money per an extracted barrel for foreign company as far as the field produces oil.



During 2007-2017, Iraqs oil output increased by 2.5 times to 4.4 million barrels per day (mb/d) thanks to new oil contract model, while Irans output remained the same at 3.85 mb/d.



The most complicated issue for Iran is that about 80 percent of its active fields are in their second half-life and lose 0.3 mb/d of their productivity annually. On the other hand, the recovery rate of Irans oil fields is about 25 percent.



Iran needs foreign investment and technology to maintain the production level or increase it in the coming years.



According to the statistics of International Energy Agency, the global oil discoveries fell to a record low in 2016 as companies continued to cut spending. On the other hand, the global oil and gas investment in 2015 decreased by 25 percent year-in-year to $585 billion.



In this situation, it is very hard for Iran to attract foreign investment based on old buy-back contract model, though the cost of oil extraction in Iran is very low.



The problem is not limited to Irans oil sector. The country has invested $70 billion in South Pars gas field and further $20 billion is needed for full completion of the project to increase the output from the current 500 mcm/d to 720 mcm/d.



However, in 2022, the pressure of reservoir would decrease and the production volume would fall by 25-30 percent. Iran needs $30 billion more to replace the current 1500-ton platforms with 15,000-20,000-ton ones, as each can carry 2-3 compressors to compensate 70 percent of production fall.



Iran's another gas project - the Kish field, is far behind schedule, despite being in development since last decade.



Iran should have invested $2.5 billion in this project to produce 28 mcm/d of gas from the first phase until 2017, but it has invested only $250 million. The project may become operational by 2022.



Irans gross gas output stands at 285 bcm/y and is expected to increase by 90-100 bcm/yr by 2020. But it will fall after 2022, while the gas demand growth would be significant in the next five years.



Iran has no choice but to issue tenders based on IPC to develop its 49 oil and gas fields in coming years to prevent oil and gas output drop.
Brian Keith Bowie, 24, was held in Hale County jail Sunday without bond after being arrested about 8 p.m. Saturday in the 1800 block of Walter Jackson. He was hold on a felony Texas Pardon and Parole warrant for manufacture/deliver controlled substance Penalty Group 1 from 1 to 4 grams.

--A 35-year-old man was held in Hale County jail Monday on $2,500 bond for assault causing bodily injury family violence. He was arrested about 8:10 p.m. Sunday in the 700 block of Amarillo in connection with a reported disturbance involving domestic violence.

--A vehicle was burglarized Sunday while parked in the 1500 block of North I-27.

--A shoplifting incident reportedly occurred about 9 p.m. Sunday in the 400 block of West 24th Street.

--Between $100 and $750 damage results in a criminal mischief incident in the 1000 block of North I-27 between 2-7 p.m. Saturday.

--A sexual assault reportedly occurred between 1-9:50 a.m. Saturday in the 600 block of West Fifth Street.

--A 40-year-old man was held in Hale County jail Monday on outstanding warrants for possession of drug paraphernalia and driving while license invalid. Bond had not been set on either charge Monday morning. He was arrested about 12:10 a.m. Sunday in the 700 block of West Fifth Street following a traffic stop.

--A 22-year-old man was held in Hale County jail Monday on $200 bond for public intoxication. He was arrested about 2:10 a.m. Sunday in the 1500 block of Yonkers.

--A firearm was stolen from the 1200 block of Lexington between 6 p.m. Saturday, May 6, and noon Sunday.

--A 19-year-old man was held in Hale County jail Saturday on $1,500 bond for possession of marijuana under 2 oz. A 22-year-old man was held in Hale County jail Saturday for possession of a controlled substance Penalty Group 1 under 1 gram (bond not set), possession of marijuana under 2 oz. ($1,500 bond), outstanding warrant for valid drivers license (no bond set) and outstanding warrant for failure to appear (no bond set). Both were arrested about 4:40 p.m. Friday in the 1000 block of Yonkers.

--A minor traffic accident about 6:20 a.m. Saturday in the 700 block of North Date resulted in a driving while intoxicated investigation. It could not be immediately determined if an arrested resulted from the incident.

(Anyone with information on crime in Plainview and Hale County may contact the Crime Stoppers Hotline at 293-8477 or 293-TIPS.)


Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15



By Khalid Kazimov  Trend:



Mehdi Karoubi, an Iranian opposition leader, has expressed his support for incumbent President Hassan Rouhani in the countrys May 19 presidential election.



At a meeting with his family members, the opposition figure who has been under house arrest since 2011, has called on Iranians to participate in the election on Friday, opposition news website Saham news reported.



"I will vote for Rouhani," Karoubi told his family members at the meeting.



Karoubi along with Mir Hossein Mousavi and his spouse Zahra Rahnavard have been under house arrest, following the 2009 post-election unrests in Iran.



The country goes to the polls on May 19 to elect president in which moderate Rouhani backed by reformists is seeking re-election against conservative rivals.
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The ACLU of Texas announced Monday that it has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three homeless Houston residents asking a federal judge to halt the city's new ordinances limiting panhandling and camping in public.

City Council passed the two ordinances last month.

The encampment rule forbids tents or other structures for living in public areas and requires that all of a person's belongings fit into a three-foot cube; it took effect Friday.

The panhandling rule, which went into effect when it was signed April 12, extended the city's restrictions against impeding a roadway to also forbid blocking a sidewalk or doorway.

"This law shows little respect or sympathy for the impoverished people of Houston," said Eugene Stroman, who says in the lawsuit that he has been turned away from emergency shelters. "Living in shelters just isn't an option for us, but if you can't find your own place to live, you're treated like a criminal."

READ MORE: Houston's homeless adapt to city's ban on camping, which took effect Friday

Mayor Sylvester Turner defended the ordinances in response to questions from the Chronicle at a Monday afternoon news conference, saying the rules aimed to balance constitutional rights and "the legitimate public health safety and welfare of all citizens in the public space."

"Based on my reading of the lawsuit filed by the ACLU, they would have us do nothing," the mayor added. "We have chosen to work with those living on the streets on a one by one basis to assess and address their individual needs and provide compassionate and meaningful solutions. Make no mistake, this is a public safety issue and we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend that it does not exist. The question is what is the best way or ways to transition people from living on the street."

The mayor has said the panhandling ordinance doesn't put an undue burden on free speech, as the ACLU lawsuit contends.

"We're not penalizing speech," he said last month. "We are saying your conduct cannot be such that you impede the traffic or the flow of people who have every right to utilize sidewalks, hike and bike trails and their doorways."

On Monday he added that Houston's encampment ordinance wouldn't be as vulnerable as those in other cities because it was citywide rather than targeting a particular place, which the Supreme Court made harder to justify in a 2015 ruling, lawyers said.

READ MORE: Turner's homeless plan includes 'low-level shelters' under overpasses

Trisha Trigilio, staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas, said in a news release that the city has "admirably managed to reduce homlessness by pursuing sensible and compassionate solutions. But these latest ordinances abandon that humane approach. The City says they're meant to get people into shelters with 'tough love,' but the truth is the shelters are full and Houston's homeless have nowhere else to go."

However, the Houston Police Department captain who oversees the mental health division told the Chronicle on Friday that he was optimistic about shelter beds.

"Right now, the shelters are working with us and saying that if somebody tells us they want shelter, we're going to get them shelter that night," Capt. William Staney said. "That might not work for 100 percent of the people, but it will work for almost all of them."

Another legal activist took issue with the use of police and other resources to enforce the two laws.

"Laws that criminalize homelessness are ineffective, waste limited public resources and violate basic human and constitutional rights," said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. "The Law Center shares the ACLU's concerns that Houston's new ordinances governing outdoor camping and panhandling violate homeless persons' constitutional rights."

Capt. Staney said Friday that Houston police would slowly ramp up enforcement. He said no one was arrested, cited or even formally warned on Friday. However, police eventually would take away people's property if they keep more belongings than would fit in a 3-foot cube, as the ordinance requires.

The police department circulated a memo Friday emphasizing that arrest is a last resort and that officers must first offer access to medical help, addiction treatment and temporary shelter before taking action under the new rules.

While the ACLU lawsuit and some homeless people contend that shelters don't have room, the mayor's special assistant for homeless initiatives differed on Monday.

"We've worked with these shelters to make sure that even if a bed is not available that there's still room for them to get them out from the elements inside where there's additional services," said the assistant, Marc Eichenbaum.

The ACLU lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, contends that the ordinances infringe on civil rights and violate several constitutional guarantees: First Amendment free-speech rights, Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, Eighth Amendment prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, and Fourteenth Amendment limits on vague laws.

Another plaintiff, Tammy Kohr, said the issue went beyond practical matters.

"The main thing these laws take from us is our dignity," Kohr said. "We're not bad people. We're just trying to survive."

The lawsuit also asks the judge to grant class-action status, meaning the three plaintiffs can sue on behalf of all people similarly affected by the laws.
Tehran, Iran, May 15

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:



Irans conservative candidate Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf has stepped down and will support other like-minded candidate Ebrahim Raisi in the presidential race.



Accordingly, Qalibaf will accompany Raisi on a provincial trip May 16 to announce their coalition, Tasnim news agency reported May 15.

In an announcement voicing his support for Raisi, Qalibaf said his aim is to "change the status quo", remove the economy from the grip of the wealthy, and put an end to "corruption and mismanagement."



Unofficial reports say that Raisi is set to introduce Qalibaf as his to-be first vice president.



The coalition attempt to beat Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent president who is running for his second term.



Rouhani found a huge boost of favor with Iranians after he aced rounds of live-aired TV debates.



The presidential election in Iran is scheduled for May 19.
School & Education, Local News, Community, Charity & Cause

By Chris Boyle Published: May 12 2017

15 year-old Sydney Brett is the founder of Sydneys Smiles, a non-profit that equips kids with the tools they need to end bullying in their immediate environment.

Long Beach, NY  May 15, 2017 - There are many staples of school life; homework, assemblies, morning announcements, class tripsand, unfortunately, bullying.

Over the years, children taking their peers to task for some perceived difference or imagined slight has caused a great deal of harm  often with life-long physical or psychological consequences  but one Long Beach girl is arming bullied kids with the tools they need to fight back against their tormentors and emerge as better, stronger, and more confident young adults.

A 15 year-old sophomore at Long Beach High School, bullying for Sydney Brett started early on in life; as early as first or second grade, she recalled. At an age where most children are struggling with the fear of being different and the quest of finding their own identity, Sydney had an additional barrier to overcome- dyslexia, a disorder that can make learning to read difficult due to how the brain interprets words, letters, or other symbols.



Sydney Brett is arming kids with the tools they need to fight back against bullies and emerge as better, stronger, and more confident. Photo Credit: Chris Boyle

Dyslexia is not a condition that affects general intelligence; the fact that Sydney is currently in the National Honor Society more than attests to that. However, bullies are typically able to pick out even the smallest of things that make one of their peers different from them, and having dyslexia unfortunately put a big red X mark on Sydney's back in that regard. And while bullying can be expected in schools from time to time  although certainly not condoned  it wasn't just her fellow students that Sydney said were the culprits, shockingly enough.

I wasn't just verbally bullied, but I was physically bullied as well...to the point where I had scars on my face. And because I have dyslexia, some of my teachers actually bullied me as well, she said. A Special Education teacher that I was working with on math once told me that her dog was smarter than I was. Even though a dog is one of the smartest animals in the world, you shouldn't ever compare a kid to one like that. That's a terrible thing to do.

Sydney's mother, Jennifer, said that her teachers shocking behavior only paved the way to even more bullying from her daughters classmates.

I think because some of the teachers were very open about making fun of her, it became a license for the kids to make fun of her as well because of her learning challenges, she said. Instead of her teachers being supportive, they just embarrassed her. The culture at the school at that time was just horrible, and it made us all very sad.

The abuse from every direction got so bad, Sydney said, that her parents actually pulled her out of public elementary school and put up the money to send her to a private school in Queens, NY. While there, Sydney finally found a nurturing environment; working hard to overcome her dyslexia and discovering her true worth as a human being, she finally developed the confidence to face life on her own terms. Because of this, Sydney bravely requested to go back to the Long Beach School District for her freshman year of high school.

I had a really good experience at my school in Queens, and they did have a high school program that I could have attended, but I'm someone who is very much into the concept of school spirit and that's something that my school didn't have due to its small size, she said. I wanted more access to activities and clubs, so I transferred last year to Long Beach High School for my freshman year.

The transition back to public school went better than Sydney and her parents could have hoped. While she says that there are still some issues with bullying  mostly from a select handful of students she had issues with in elementary school  she's found herself widely accepted overall, and her ability to overcome her dyslexia has resulted in a hard-working resolve that catapulted her grades into the honor rolland an eventual induction into the National Honor Society. The irony of this distinction, she said, is that due to her dyslexia she literally has to work twice as hard to achieve the same results that other Honor Society members take for granted.



Sydney speaking to local Girl Scouts about how to handle a bully. Photo Credit: Jennifer Brett

An avid proponent of community service  on a typical weekend she may volunteer at the Ronald McDonald House in New Hyde Park, go to a book fair, or participate in any number of other selfless duties - Sydney, who was won the President's Volunteer Service Award three years in a row, decided to use her experiences with bullying to help those going through the same trials and tribulations. It was from there that Sydneys Smiles  a non-profit anti-bullying organization aimed at teaching kids to be upstanders, not bystanders  was born.

I really love the idea of community service, and I loved the idea of creating my own organization, but to be granted non-profit status you have to be very specific about your goals and who you're planning to help, she said. I thought at first dyslexia, but that really affects a small portion of society, so then I got the idea about helping kids whose personal experiences with bullying are like mine. I decided that's what my target was going to be.

Starting an official non-profit organization isn't as easy as you may think; once you've established your goals, there's a lot of paperwork involved, including coining a mission statement, creating a logo, applying for tax-exempt status, and countless other details. But Sydney and her family  along with the help of a community advocate for Long Island teens  approached the endeavor with gusto, and before they knew it the project was up and running at full speed.

Sydney noted that Sydneys Smiles is a unique organization because of its peer-related approach to the bullying problem.

I don't think there are many organizations like mine, because most anti-bullying programs have adults talking to kids, she said. I think my approach is good because when I talk to kids that are my age or younger, they relate to me more.



Sydney is the current USA National Junior Teen Miss New York, a fact that most likely has her former bullies quite jealous. Photo Credit: Chris Boyle

Currently, Sydney addresses Girl Scout troops and other small groups of young people, but the plan is to eventually work her way up to speaking engagements at schools in front of entire auditoriums of students. However, as an avid competitive dancer and pageantry participant  she is the current USA National Junior Teen Miss New York, a fact that most likely has her former bullies quite jealous  Sydney has zero qualms about the idea of speaking in front of hundreds of students at a time to get her important message across.

Bullying, Sydney said, has always been around and unfortunately, probably always will. However, there are many things you can do to minimize its effects and, hopefully, vanquish it from your life once and for all.

I want to teach kids to be upstanders, not bystanders. What that means is, if you see someone getting bullied, don't just stand there and do nothing. Get involved, either by helping them or telling an adult, she said. I know a lot of kids look down upon snitching, but I know that sticking up for yourself and telling an adult is the most important thing, and it will benefit you so much in the long run. In the end, you have to advocate for yourself.

Sydney's Smiles is due to hold their first-ever fundraising event on June 4th, 2017- the Dress 2 Impress charity fashion show, which will be hosted at the North Shore Towers Apartments in Floral Park. The event will feature refreshments, music, raffle prizes and more, with all proceeds going towards furthering Sydney's Smiles outreach to bullied children.

Sydney's mother, Jennifer, said that she's still amazed to this day over the changes shes seen in her daughter, not to mention her willingness to constantly put aside her own needs  she joked that Sydney practically never sleeps  in a never-ending effort to help others.

I remember being a sophomore in school, and how your average kid doesn't normally care much about giving back to their community, she said. But my daughter has already put in 300 hours of community service in the past year, and the minute she gets back from doing anything, she just wants to sit down and plan the next thing she's going to do. It's amazing.

Sydney has come a long way from that frightened little girl in elementary school who was incessantly berated by bullies, and even though the divide between what she was and what she's becoming continues to grow ever wider, Sydney said that she feels good that she can use her negative past experiences to assist others who are traveling down the same road of self-discovery that she once started upon herself years ago.

I'm a lot more confident, I've become a much better speaker, and I know what I stand for and the causes that are really important to me, she said. I'm not afraid to speak up for myself, or for others, which I think is really important."

To leanr more, visit www.sydneysmiles.org.
Local News, Business & Finance, Travel & Local Attractions, Seasonal & Current Events

By Long Island News & PR Published: May 15 2017

Part of a multi-pronged approach to enhancing destination visibility in the marketplace.

Long Island, NY - May 15, 2017 - Discover Long Island joins the ranks of the worlds most desirable travel locations with a new Discover Long Island joins the ranks of the worlds most desirable travel locations with a new Premier Destinations page and audience retargeting campaign with TripAdvisor.com. Reaching an audience of more than 390 million travelers, TripAdvisor is the worlds largest travel site and a vital travel tool for prospective visitors.

Discover Long Islands partnership with the leading travel site allows visitors the opportunity to engage with Long Island content beyond searching for accommodations and attractions. The premier destination page offers site users access to collections, articles, special events and more to help craft a curated itinerary and learn about detailed offerings from Long Island.

Part of a multi-pronged approach to enhancing destination visibility in the marketplace, Discover Long Islands partnership with TripAdvisor also includes an audience retargeting campaign that captures inquiries for New York City and retargets those prospective visitors with Long Island information as a must-visit component of their trip. Statistics and ground breaking analytics from tourism research experts, Arrivalist , will track engagements and conversions of the campaign to determine effectiveness and provide measurable results.

Now more than ever, it is important for destinations to embrace industry trends through market analytics. We are thrilled to partner with industry leaders such as TripAdvisor and Arrivalist to learn more about our target consumers and how we can better connect with them, said Kristen Jarnagin, President & CEO of Discover Long Island. New York City welcomes over 60 million visitors per year and most of them come through airports located on Long Island. Educating those visitors on their surroundings and the distinct offerings that are available to them will allow us to increase visitation to Long Island.

To learn more about Discover Long Island as well as receive news and upcoming events from the destination, please visit www.discoverlongisland.com

ABOUT DISCOVER LONG ISLAND
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause

By Long Island News & PR Published: May 15 2017

Long Island native Petty Officer 3rd Class Luke Maguire works as a hull maintenance technician aboard a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Greenlawn, NY - May 15, 2017 - A Greenlawn , New York native and Harborfields High School graduate, Petty Officer 3rd Class Luke Maguire is serving on one of the worlds largest warships, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69).

Maguire works as a hull maintenance technician aboard the Norfolk-based ship, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and one of only ten operational aircraft carriers in the Navy today. Hull maintenance technicians are the sailors responsible for doing all the metal work necessary to keep all types of shipboard structures and surfaces in good condition. They also maintain shipboard plumbing and marine sanitation systems, repair small boats, operating and maintaining ballast control systems, and manage the Quality Assurance Program.

I like that every single day presents a new challenge, Maguire said.

Sailors jobs are highly varied aboard Eisenhower. Approximately 3,200 men and women make up the ships company, and they keep all parts of the aircraft carrier running smoothly. They do everything from washing dishes and preparing meals to handling weaponry and maintaining the nuclear reactors. Another 2,000 sailors comprise the air wing, the people who fly and maintain the aircraft aboard the ship.

Eisenhower, like each of the Navys aircraft carriers, is designed for a 50-year service life. When the air wing is embarked, the ship carries more than 70 attack fighter jets, helicopters and other aircraft, all of which take off from and land aboard the carrier at sea. Powerful catapults slingshot the aircraft off the bow of the ship, and those planes land upon their return to the aircraft carrier by snagging a steel cable with an arresting hook that protrudes from the rear of the aircraft. All of this makes Eisenhower a self-contained mobile airport and strike platform, often the first response to a global crisis because of an aircraft carriers ability to operate freely in international waters anywhere on the worlds oceans.

I love everything about serving aboard the Eisenhower, Maguire said.

Eisenhower was commissioned in 1977 and named after former president and Army general Dwight D. Eisenhower, who distinguished himself through service and leadership during World War II. As the supreme commander of Allied Forces in Western Europe during World War II, Eisenhower led the massive invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

"Every Sailor aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower plays an integral part in our success, from the engineering and reactor spaces to the galley and flight deck, and everywhere in between, and I couldn't be more proud," said Capt. Paul Spedero, Jr., commanding officer of Ike. "Our many successes are built on their sacrifices and the strength they provide each and every day.

As a member of one of the U.S. Navys most relied upon assets, Maguire and other Eisenhower sailors know they are part of a legacy that will last beyond their lifetimes.
Hempstead Man Under Arrest After Getting into Accident With Vehicle He Allegedly Stole, Authorities Say

Local News, Crime

By Long Island News & PR Published: May 15 2017

Nassau Police: Laron Watts, 17, led officers on foot chase after crashing in Uniondale.

NCPD report the arrest of Laron Watts of Hempstead, 17, for Criminal Possession of Stolen Property in Uniondale.

Uniondale, NY - May 15, 2017 - First Squad detectives report the arrest of a First Squad detectives report the arrest of a Hempstead man for Criminal Possession of Stolen Property that occurred on Sunday, May 14, 2017 at 5:59 P.M. in Uniondale

According to detectives, First Precinct officers responded to assist Freeport Police that were following a stolen 2009 Subaru Forester and had become involved in an accident with a 2012 Toyota on Uniondale Avenue and Cedar Street. The operator, Laron Watts, 17, did exit the vehicle and fled scene, after a short foot pursuit Watts was apprehended in a rear yard on Bedford Avenue. The 33 year old male operator of the Toyota was transported to a local hospital with a non-life threatening injury.

Watts is being charged with Criminal Possession of Stolen Property 3rd degree, Criminal Mischief 3rd degree, Unlawful Fleeing a Police Officer 3rd Degree and Leaving the Scene of an Incident and multiple Vehicle and Traffic violations. He will be arraigned on Monday, May 15, 2017 at First District Court in Hempstead.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Arts & Culture

By Long Island News & PR Published: May 15 2017

World War II tank destroyer now on long term loan from the U.S. Military Museum in Danbury Connecticut.

A M18 Hellcat tank destroyer at the Museum of American Armor in Old Bethpage, on long term loan from the U.S. Military Museum in Danbury Connecticut.

Old Bethpage, NY - May 15, 2017 - Three military museums have created the Northeast Military Museum Alliance to coordinate programs, educational initiatives and marketing strategies that will allow the group to strengthen their collective efforts in contributing to the regions destination tourism economy and understanding of our nations past.

An immediate response to that alliance is the presentation of an operational M18 Hellcat tank destroyer at the Museum of American Armor in Old Bethpage , NY during its upcoming World War II Weekend (May 20th and 21st), a vehicle now on long term loan from the U.S. Military Museum in Danbury Connecticut.

Other founding members of the alliance include the Collings Foundation in Stow, Massachusetts.

Applauding the Alliances formation is Dr. Libby OConnell, Chief Historian Emeritus of the History Channel. She stated, Whether its a Lincoln living historian in Illinois or the Red Baron flying from a Rhinebeck farm, there is no question that heritage tourism has become a multibillion dollar industry throughout the United States. The formation of this group demonstrates the kind of mutual benefit that can be derived by sharing ideas, resources and common goals. It may be viewed as a national model, and I urge other heritage destinations to pursue similar collaborative efforts.

Alliance member, Rob Collings, Chief Executive Officer of the Collings Foundation, explained, Far too often museums work in `silos, and that isolation hurts their strategic goals and damages their bottom line. This coalition breaks through that culture and embraces combined experiences, expertise and resources to assist every member.

In addition to a world famous aircraft collection that tours the nation under "Wings of Freedom," The Collings Foundation is the steward of the legendary Littlefield Collection of military technology that includes over one hundred historic tanks and armor vehicles. Many of those assets will be on display at the Collings Stow, Massachusetts educational complex.

There is enormous talent among our respective institutions and a tremendous degree of respect for each other and our accomplishments, offered Lawrence Kadish, founder and president of the Museum of American Armor. Collectively we have the means to create a compelling force for preserving and projecting our nations heritage to a new generation.

The Museum of American Armor sits under a 25,000 square foot facility inside Nassau County s Old Bethpage Village Restoration on Long Island where visitors can see its collection of operational armor operating along country roads and wooded fields, suggesting France, 1944.

Al Barto, Board secretary at the U.S. Military Museum in Danbury, Connecticut, agreed, We have the means to meet our collective mission by creating a mutual assistance alliance that allows us to support each other by sharing our individual experiences and common purpose.
Local News, Crime

By Long Island News & PR Published: May 15 2017

Robert A. Skinner, 45, has been charged with 1st Degree Assault, Criminal Possession of a Weapon.

NCPD reports the arrest of Robert A. Skinner of Uniondale, 45, for Assault in Westbury.

Rockville Centre, NY - May 15, 2017 - The Third Squad reports an arrest for Assault which occurred on Saturday, May 13, 2017 at 10:15 pm in The Third Squad reports an arrest for Assault which occurred on Saturday, May 13, 2017 at 10:15 pm in Westbury

According to detectives, Robert A. Skinner, 45, of Uniondale , an employee at His and Hers bar located at 259 Post Avenue was in an altercation with a male patron, 53 years of age. They walked outside to the rear of the restaurant where Skinner punched the victim and slashed him in the neck with a knife causing a small laceration.

The victim was taken to an area hospital for treatment for his injuries. Skinner was placed under arrest at the scene without incident.

Skinner is charged with Assault 1st degree (Attempt), Assault 2nd degree, Criminal Possession of a Weapon 3rd degree and Assault 3rd degree. An investigation also revealed Skinner had an open Nassau County warrant from 2012 for Obstruction of Governmental Administration 2nd degree. He will be arraigned on Sunday, May 14, 2017 at First District Court in Hempstead
Tehran, Iran, May 15

By Mehdi Sepahvand, Khalid Kazimov  Trend:

While moderate President Hassan Rouhani is seeking re-election in Irans May 19 presidential election, the USs failure to remove sanctions on Tehran is likely to weaken the incumbent presidents bid for a second term.

Speaking about President Rouhanis recent remarks on improving the economic situation of the country through resuming talks on the removal of sanctions, Mohammad Alipour, former member of parliaments economy committee, told Trend that the US has not demonstrated a good will regarding the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA aka nuclear deal).

Therefore, Iranians do not trust the US, he added.

Alipour added that the upcoming election will impact the countrys economic policies, but the new government must rely on the domestic capabilities regardless of the issue of sanctions.

Although nuclear sanctions on Tehran have been removed following the implementation of the JCPOA last January, most of leading international banks still appear reluctant to do business with Iran over concerns of running afoul of US regulations.

Non-nuclear sanctions on Iran include the US primary sanctions that were devised following the 1979 hostage crisis and now grapple the countrys banking ties with other countries.




Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15



By Fatih Karimov  Trend:



At least 3131 Iranian citizens are jailed in foreign countries, ISNA news agency reported citing the Islamic Republics foreign ministry.



The main part of those in jails are convicted of drug smuggling crimes, according to the message. Other crimes include human trafficking and financial crimes.



Most of these people were arrested in countries neighboring Iran.



Most of the Iranians jailed abroad are detained in prisons in Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Thailand.
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 15

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Two Iranian policemen were killed in an armed confrontation on May 15 morning in Ahwaz city of the country's southwestern Khouzestan province.

Deputy Commander of Khouzestan province police Colonel Ali Qasempour said that the two policemen were shot by unknown gunmen, Iran's Tasnim news agency reported.

Following the assault, Iranian security forces have launched an operation in the region to arrest the killers, Qasempour said without unveiling further details.
The Hague India today called for immediate suspension of its national Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention by denying its 16 requests for consular access. As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearing Jadhav's case, India argued that human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan. All requests for consular access to 46-year-old Jadhav had fallen on "deaf ears", it said. The present situation, attorney Harish Salve said before the court, was grave and that is why India had sought ICJ's indulgence.



India is presenting its case first, followed by Pakistan later in the day. Both sides will get 90 minutes each to argue their case before the UN's principal judicial body.India may avail a "short extension" beyond 90 minutes to present its case, the judge had said in his opening remarks. A Pakistan military court had awarded the death sentence to Jadhav last month for espionage and subversive activities.

Jadhav had been arrested on March 3 last year. India had appealed against the death sentence on May 8 alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan after its 16 requests for consular access were denied. The next day, ICJ stayed the sentence. India, in its appeal to the ICJ, has asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. PTI
Last Friday, Bloomberg published a rather astounding development: There are now more "market indexes" in existence than there are US stocks.

Now, their data are proprietary and not described in detail, so it isn't totally clear what they're counting as indexes here. For instance, there are oodles of sector indexes that are subsets of broader indexes like the S&P 500-are they included? Also, it isn't clear whether we're talking US-only or global, stock-only or bonds/REITs/other securities, or other finer details. But, considering over half of these indexes were born since 2012-and all those sector-level indexes are more mature than that-it seems fair to say a good chunk of these indexes are what the industry calls "smart beta." Bloomberg suggests as much:

What drove the jump?

Demand. Many new benchmarks essentially repackage active investment strategies into indexes, says Eric Balchunas, senior exchange-traded fund analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. They can then be tracked by so-called smart-beta ETFs, which fund companies are rolling out rapidly. ... Money managers are under pressure to cut costs, says Balchunas, as investors shift their money into funds with low fees.

Smart beta, the latest and (not) greatest industry catchphrase, is jargon for indexes that are manually constructed and actively managed, with companies selected according to some arbitrary criteria the manager believes will drive sustained outperformance over traditional indexes like the MSCI World and S&P 500. The general belief is that these stodgy, capitalization-weighted indexes miss opportunities to capitalize on companies' supposed tendency to outperform if they have higher book value, higher revenues, higher dividends or some qualitative quirk numbers can't capture. In the old days, before passive investing became all the rage, companies would have managed mutual funds centered around these themes. But now, with passive so hot, we instead have newfangled indexes-with ETFs tracking them. There are high-dividend indexes, low-P/E indexes, high-revenue indexes, indexes of companies with female execs, probably even indexes containing only companies whose names start with T and employ at least five Bobs.[i]

In other words: "Passive" investing has become so popular that active managers are wrapping active strategies into passive wrappers so they can get in on the passive craze. It's all a big masquerade. We'd be inclined to live and let live and sing a little ode to free markets and innovation, but the smart beta phenomenon is also a bit troubling. Some of these products reek of financial snake oil. Actively managed mutual funds may follow similar themes, but their human element is advertised and taken as a given, along with all the inherent fallibility. Many smart beta funds, however, have more of an academic sheen, boasting back-tested returns that allegedly prove their pet factor (or factors) is a one-way ticket to outperformance. Trouble is, these back-tests are often pseudoscience, an exercise in datamining.

Don't take our word for it. A new study from some University of Cincinnati and Ohio State researchers dug into 447 "supposedly repeating price patterns" to see if they could replicate the findings with a broad, credible dataset and no torturing of data. As Bloomberg explains, they couldn't:

The authors' inquiry involved taking market anomalies previously observed by other researchers -- say, that certain cheap stocks tend to move in a predictable direction -- then trying to replicate them in their own data. Often, they found nothing but noise. Of 447 anomalies examined, 286 generated statistically insignificant predictions for stocks in the category, and the record was much worse for certain kinds of trading signals.

Broadly, the authors said that the signals failed because their discoverers had considered too broad a universe of stocks when they set out to confirm their findings. Tiny companies make up the majority of stocks, they noted, but represent very little market capitalization -- and yet that's where a lot of the anomalies work best. They posited various flaws of analysis that led earlier academics to give too much emphasis to these stocks in their research. ...

The authors said that identifying market anomalies is a "prime target for p-hacking," which, generally speaking, refers to shaping data to fit a preset conclusion. The data are inherently empirical, giving researchers flexibility in manipulating samples, defining variables and choosing methods. There's also a financial motivation for finding new aberrations "with trillions of dollars invested in anomalies-based strategies in the U.S. market alone."

Yep, all marketing. And it all creates big problems for would-be passive investors: How the heck do you choose what to index to? Do you go with something broad and boring, like the S&P 500, or something narrower and flashier? Do you go all-US, since most passive products are US-biased, or do you try to engineer something global? Do you go textbook passive, trying to mirror the entire broad market, or do you get cute with a few niche or "smart" indexes? And if you do the latter, are you really passive at all?

All of this underscores a salient point bond guru (and nascent Twitter superstar) Jeff Gundlach made at an industry conference last week: "Passive investing is just a myth." As he noted, even the S&P 500 is technically actively managed, with a committee selecting its constituents from a universe of over 4,000 US stocks. Hence, even a passive investor using only one S&P 500 index fund for all of space and time technically has an actively managed portfolio of select US large cap firms, albeit one with very low turnover.

If you can be that kind of passive investor, great-history shows you'll do very well. But experience also shows you are rare and might not really exist, because basic human emotions-fear and greed-constantly pummel even the most stalwart set-it-and-forget-it folks. Those emotions make people want to do things like chase heat or sell at the bottom of a downturn. From DALBAR to Morningstar, there is a vast body of research showing fund investors trade too frequently to reap the full benefits of long-term investing.

Everything has its day in the sun and the rain, and newfangled smart-beta ETFs, no matter how much they're back-tested, will have their stormy patches. There is no such thing as a permanent edge in investing. Markets are too efficient for that, and they are cyclical. Smart beta is also largely untested, as it proliferated during this bull market. Like other investing fads before it, there is a risk it vanishes in the next bear market as people panic and assets flee. We aren't inherently against all of them, and we reckon investors who pick relatively diverse funds with wide backing can probably get market-like returns over time if they stay disciplined through the ups and downs. But we'd think long and hard before hopping on the bandwagon.
The United States considers it to be very important to cooperate with Russia in fight against Daesh terrorist group and it is important to find out, in which other areas the bilateral cooperation will be useful, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said, Sputnik reported.

"Now we have to move forward and figure out what can we work with them on, and what we absolutely cannot work with them on However, it is very important to work with Russia on our fight against IS [Daesh]," Haley told the ABC News broadcaster in an interview on Sunday.

According to Haley, Moscow and Washington are currently "testing each other," and Russia is trying to understand how to work with US President Donald Trump.

On May 10, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held talks with Trump and US State Secretary Rex Tillerson in Washington. According to the White House, Trump during the meeting raised the possibility of broader cooperation with Russia on resolving conflicts in the Middle East and around the world.

After the meeting, Lavrov said that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump would hold their first personal meeting during the G-20 Summit coming up in July.
Seventeen prisoners have been shot dead after a mass breakout at a jail in Papua New Guinea, reports said on Monday, with 57 still on the run, France Press reported.

Inmates from the Buimo jail in the Pacific nation's second largest city Lae made a dash for freedom after breaking out of their compound on Friday, with prison warders opening fire.

The PNG Post-Courier and The National newspapers both cited local police as confirming 17 were killed, three were caught and 57 were still at large.

"These are undesirable people and will be a threat to the community, Lae police metropolitan commander Chief Superintendent Anthony Wagambie Jr said of the escapees, warning the public to be vigilant.

"The majority of those who escaped were arrested for serious crimes and were in custody awaiting trial.

"A good number were arrested by police last year for mainly armed robberies, car thefts, break and enter and stealing."

It is the same prison where police shot dead 12 inmates during a jailbreak last year.

Crime and lawlessness in PNG, a sprawling nation where many still live traditional and subsistence lives in remote areas, is rampant.

Wagambie urged family members and associates of the escapees not to harbour them.

"I am warning them that they will be caught. They must do what is good for them and surrender," he said.
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A hearing has been scheduled in a class-action suit against Walmart, alleging the company denied health benefits to same-sex spouses of employees.

The lawsuit was brought against the company in 2015 by Jacqueline Cote, an employee at a Walmart in Swansea, Massachusetts. Cote worked as an associate in the store from 2006 through 2012 and attempted to add her wife, Diana Smithson, to her insurance during Walmart's open enrollment periods.

"When Cote entered her spouse's gender as 'female,' the online system would stop her from proceeding further," states case documents filed on her behalf by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. "When she called Walmart's home office to investigate, she was told that Walmart did not offer health insurance coverage to same-sex spouses."

Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in Massachusetts since 2004.

The retail chain changed its policy in 2013. By then Cote, whose wife lost a fight to ovarian cancer last year, was facing $150,000 in medical bills.

A settlement of $7.5 million between Walmart and current and former employees part of the class-action has been proposed.

A fairness hearing is scheduled for federal court in Boston on Monday. Such hearings are held to determine if proposed settlements are fair.
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(Graphic provided)

SPRINGFIELD -- MassMutual unveiled a newly refreshed brand Monday to celebrate its 166th birthday.

The company said its new branding strategy celebrates the gift of interdependence.

The logo features the letter M spelled out in dots. MassMutual changed logos Monday at its headquarters on State Street and its offices in Enfield. The old logo is down from the MassMutual-owned Tower Square office tower on Main Street. The MassMutual name remains on the building, however.

Johannes Leonardo advertising agency in New York City did strategy and creative work on the campaign. The Working Assembly, also of New York, design studio, did the logo and Giant Spoon marketing agency of New York and Los Angeles did the media work, MassMutal said.

MassMutual has about 7,200 employees in Springfield and Enfield, Connecticut.

The brand refresh includes a multi-channel advertising campaign, updated logo, and dramatically revamped website.

"Since 1851, MassMutual has been guided by our founding principle--we are people coming together to look out for one another," said Gareth Ross, MassMutual Chief Digital and Customer Experience Officer in a news release. "We know people are inherently reliant on one another, whether that's at home, in the workplace or in the community. Our new positioning celebrates these relationships, underscoring that when we depend on each other, we are not only more secure--but life is also happier and more fulfilling."

MassMutual said that its new brand recognizes that while the world celebrates independence, true happiness comes from our reliance on one another. It also seeks to inspire people to see themselves as part of something bigger and to Live Mutual.

166 years never looked so good! pic.twitter.com/UQMICsPCF6  MassMutual (@massmutual) May 15, 2017

The idea of interdependence is a tool MassMutual is using to get Americans to think about their financial future.

American expectations about interdependence continue to evolve, MassMutual said. Nearly one-third, 32 percent, of young adults 18-34 now live at home with their parents, and only one-third of baby boomers are confident they will have enough money to last through their retirement, MasMutual said.

Millennials are the largest living generation and the biggest group in the workforce but they are burdened with more than $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, MassMutual said.
Tanglewood in Lenox, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Keith Lockhart leads the Boston Pops at Tanglewood in this undated photo. (Hilary Scott / Tanglewood)

LENOX -- Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, generates more than $103 million for the Bererkshire and state economies, according to a new study.

Stephen Sheppard, an economics professor at Williams College, released his preliminary findings on Monday. The $103 million represents an increase of approximately $40 million when compared to a previous third-party study in 2008 when Tanglewood's impact was estimated at $60 million.

Sheppard accredits the increase in the economic impact of Tanglewood on the Berkshire region to several factors, including: an increase in the festival's overall attendance; an increase in the amount people spend per visit; an increase in the length of time people stay in the area per visit; and a growing perception of Massachusetts, in general, and Berkshire County, in particular, as a vibrant tourist destination.

"My analysis of the impact of Tanglewood, including the impact of the operations at the music center, the impact of visitors who come to the Berkshires to attend a Tanglewood event, and the impact of planned new construction at the Tanglewood Learning Institute underscores how important Tanglewood is for the region's economy," Sheppard said.

"As a major cultural attraction for the region, Tanglewood is responsible for significant amounts of local employment, labor earnings, tax revenues and economic output. Our economic model illustrates the wide variety of jobs that exist in the region because of Tanglewood," Sheppard said. "This includes many jobs in economic sectors not normally associated with cultural tourism, including hospitals, physician services, banking and business administration where labor earnings easily exceed $70,000 per year. With the other economic challenges that confront communities in the county, we are fortunate to have the continued presence of Tanglewood as a key economic force of the region."

His full 2017 report, analyzing the economic impact of the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood both statewide and on their respective regions, will be released this summer.

BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe was pleased with the findings, which "underscores the ideal relationship between a festival and its surroundings."

"It is deeply gratifying to all of us at the Boston Symphony Orchestra that our investment in the future of Tanglewood -- with the construction of a new four-building complex for the Tanglewood Music Center and the new Tanglewood Learning Center -- will make such a significantly increased contribution to the surrounding area," Volpe said.
Anti Smoking NYC

(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)

(Associated Press)

A public hearing will be held this Tuesday on a new bill that seeks to ban any person under the age of 21 from buying tobacco products in Massachusetts.

Similar policies have been adopted at the local level in nearly 150 towns and cities across Massachusetts, beginning with the town of Needham in 2005. Those in favor of the bill argue that nicotine is a powerfully addictive substance that can be detrimental to young people.

The American Cancer Society reports that 95 percent of smokers first picked up a cigarette before the age of 21. Research has shown the drug can also prime the brain for other drugs, including narcotics, according to pediatrician and Harvard Medical School Professor Jonathan Winickoff.

The Massachusetts Senate passed legislation raising the tobacco age limit in April 2016 by an overwhelming vote of 32-2, but the matter never came up for a vote in the House. Republican Sen. Don Humason, of Westfield, was one of the two senators to vote no last April. Humason said he voted no because tobacco is still legal, and 18-year-olds are legal adults who are capable of making their own decisions.

Bill S.1218/H.2864, introduced by democratic lawmakers Rep. Paul McCurty, of Dedham and Sen. Jason Lewis, of Winchester, would not only raise the legal tobacco purchasing age to 21. The bill would also ban the use of electronic cigarettes - a growing trend in recent years - from the workplace, and would stop pharmacies from from selling tobacco products.
It has been almost a month since Aaron Hernandez took his life in prison. The suicide death of the former New England Patriots player and convicted murderer was surprising to both those close to him and the many following his life from afar. Less than a week before his death, Hernandez was acquitted of two murders.

One of those shocked by his death include perhaps the person the closest to him in his final days: his fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez.

She recently spoke to television host Dr. Phil McGraw in what the show says is an exclusive interview. The two-part interview, which airs on "Dr. Phil" on Monday and Tuesday, will tell Jenkins' perspective on the reported death, as well as insight into the interactions between her and Hernandez, the father of her child.

In clips previewed online before the show's airing, Shayanna-Jenkins told McGraw that she does not believe in the state's investigation.

"None of it is very believable to me. Not the findings, not the investigation. I just, I don't believe it," she told him.

McGraw asked if she believes in the state investigation's timeline of events: that Hernandez was locked into his cell at 8 p.m., and was found hanged by a bedsheet shortly after 3 a.m.

"I believe there is some uncounted time, I don't think things were done properly," Jenkins-Hernandez told him. "I feel like he could've been saved, or something could've been done...I feel like someone was in the wrong somewhere. I want answers."

She added that a separate investigation will allow her to trust where the answers are coming from. Then, she says, "maybe I can have comfort in the truth."

Her words echo that of attorney Jose Baez, who defended Hernandez in the latest murder case where he was found not guilty. Baez said his team will use "any and all of the legal tools" at their disposal to block interference from government officials during their investigation.

"The unprofessional behavior of those entrusted to impartially and professionally conduct an investigation into Aaron's death has caused grave concern as to the validity and thoroughness of the investigation," Baez wrote in a statement following the state's investigation. He cited several leaks to press during the investigation, informing media and public of details before Hernandez's family were notified.

Jenkins-Hernandez told McGraw she also had no knowledge of the scripture found written on Hernandez's forehead.

"He was spiritual, but he wasn't the kind of guy to get up every Sunday and go to church," she said in the interview. Investigative interviews with fellow prison inmates reveal Hernandez was becoming increasingly religious during his time behind bars.

When Hernandez was found hanging naked from a bed sheet in his prison cell at Souza-Baranowski facility in Shirley, he reportedly had the Bible verse "John 3:16" written on his forehead in ink. Investigators said he also had large, circular blood marks on his feet, and a large amount of shampoo was poured on the floor.

Hernandez was serving a life sentence in prison for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd, who was dating the sister of Shayanna-Jenkins. In a legal doctrine known as abatement, that occurs only when a person is unable to complete their appeal process, Hernandez is no longer considered guilty of murdering Lloyd in the eyes of the court.
Massachusetts political leaders made their way to South Boston on Monday to kick off a five-year building process that will end with the largest hotel Boston has ever seen.

The unveiling ceremony comes one month after the Massachusetts Port Authority approved a multi-million dollar development project in the Seaport District. The agreement will allow development of two towers by Omni Resorts and Hotels, the same luxury hotel company that operates the Omni Parker House in downtown Boston.

Of the six proposals submitted to Massport in April 2016, it was Omni, and the company's $550 million investment in the project, that won over the hearts and minds of a selection panel.

MassPort's Tom Glynn welcomes "transformative" Omni Hotel Project to Seaport District. pic.twitter.com/KGud2Atkoz  Lana Jones (@Lanawbz) May 15, 2017

The 1,054-room hotel will take up two acres on Summer Street and D Street in South Boston. Slated to open in 2021, the two new towers will stand amid luxury condominiums, rising businesses and a healthy variety of convention spaces in the waterfront, including the World Trade Center and Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

Like its neighboring buildings, the Omni hotel will dedicate 120,000 square feet of its total 800,000 square feet to hosting events. The addition of more meeting space will further develop the Seaport as the Innovation District, the city and state's newest haven for growing businesses and entrepreneurial ideas.

New Boston Hospitality will collaborate with Omni on creating a hotel that is mixed-use space. The towers will host public spaces, including retail shops, as well as "casual dining," a bar and an event terrace. Reports have suggested there may be a skating rink attached to the hotel as well. But the new Omni's main attraction may be its 25,000-square foot grand ballroom, which will be the largest such room in Boston.

The tall buildings will be connected to the Seaport's Transportation Center, which Massport says will open in 2018. The new center, part of the city's Go 2030 transportation plans, will include vehicle charging spaces, and bike and car sharing options in addition to the Silver Line station next door. More than 1,500 parking spaces - a coveted amenity in Boston and the Seaport - are planned for the transportation center.

"This new hotel will serve visitors while adding to Boston's strong credentials as a premiere destination for the global economy," Massport CEO Thomas P. Glynn. said in a statement.

Some, including Steve Hollinger, the man behind the @FortPointer Twitter account, criticized Massport for not seeking input from the South Boston residential community on the new hotel development.

.@Massport Omni hotel groundbreaking today. Zero input or meetings of SB community. "Article 80 Lite" MOA w @BostonPlans must be DOA.  The Fort Pointer (@FortPointer) May 15, 2017

Example of why at least one public meeting w/@Massport re. Omni Hotel design mattered to this neighbor. https://t.co/CVdKPEtB6o  The Fort Pointer (@FortPointer) May 15, 2017

As a self-sustaining agency that owns much of the land in the Seaport District, Massport can act more independently than other government agencies, such as the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

On Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker is scheduled to visit the site of the new Summer Street hotel towers with Glynn, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Lieutenant Gov. Karyn Polito.
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5/15/17 - HOLYOKE - Holyoke Mayor Alex B. Morse speaks during a ceremony marking the onset of construction of the first phase of the renovation and demolition project at the Lyman Terrace public housing complex on Monday, May 15, 2017. Seated left to right are U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, Matthew A. Mainville, executive director of the Housing Authority, and state Rep. Aaron M. Vega, D-Holyoke.

(SUBMITTED PHOTO)

HOLYOKE -- A ceremony marked the beginning of the first phase of construction of the $36.3 million renovation of the Lyman Terrace public housing complex on Monday with U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, praising the city's commitment.

"It's a very complicated project, and I think that there are few things in urban life that are more challenging than housing. It's like a big game of musical chairs and you hope when it's done that everybody gets a chair," Neal said after the ceremony.

The ceremony was for onset of the combination of demolition, construction and renovation of 88 units and about 60 percent of the project's land area, said Marcos A. Marrero, director of the Hoyoke Planning and Economic Development Department.

Construction actually began a year with installation of new water lines and other utility work. The first-phase construction relates to work beginning on the buildings, Marrero said.

The 18-building, red-brick Lyman Terrace complex is owned and operated by the Holyoke Housing authority. It has 167 units and about 400 tenants. It is in the Prospect Heights-Downtown Neighborhood bordered by Lyman, Front and John streets.

The ceremony included Mayor Alex B. Morse, state Rep. Aaron M. Vega, D-Holyoke, and Gladys Lebron-Martinez, Ward 1 representative on the City Council.

Funding to pay for the project consists of grants and other federal and city funds. One source is government-funded tax credits. A tax credit is a funding mechanism in which an investor puts up money in return for a reduced tax liability.

The revamp involves a combination of renovation and demolition that would reduce the number of units to about 156, increasing unit sizes to comply with handicapped-accessibility standards, officials have said.

Plans are in place to relocate displaced tenants to temporary housing during the construction, Matthew A. Mainville, executive director of the Housing Authority, has said.

Windows, doors, walls and floors have weakened, mold has spread on some surfaces, the complex lacks a designated trash area, heat reliability fluctuates in the winter and crime makes tenants fearful, officials and tenants said.

Construction began on Lyman Terrace in the late 1930s and finished in 1942.

The Community Builders of Boston is managing the Lyman Terrace project.

Check back with MassLive.com for a follow up story with additional detail about the project, including comments from Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, City Councilor Gladys Lebron-Martinez and state Rep. Aaron Vega, D-Holyoke.
Asked whether he supports a proposal to tax Massachusetts household incomes over $1 million that may end up in front of voters in 2018, Gov. Charlie Baker reiterated his reluctance to look at tax increases.

"At this point in time, it's not before the Legislature or the administration," Baker told reporters after he met with top Beacon Hill lawmakers on Monday afternoon.

"But as I've said before, you know, we shouldn't be raising taxes on hard-working people in Massachusetts," Baker said. "We should be focusing on finding ways to do our jobs more effectively and efficiently."

The proposal, an amendment to the state's constitution that would annual Massachusetts incomes over $1 million, is expected to land on the Legislature's plate during the Constitutional Convention scheduled for June 14. The proposal must take a series of procedural steps before it can appear on the 2018 ballot.

Supporters say up to $2 billion from the surtax could be funneled to transportation and education accounts, while opponents say the proposal, if implemented, will lead to the flight of high-income earners.

Baker, a Republican, is widely expected to run for re-election in 2018.

Jay Gonzalez, a former budget aide to Baker's predecessor, Democratic ex-Gov. Deval Patrick, is one of the candidates hoping to knock him out of the Corner Office.

"I support the proposed Fair Share Tax on annual income over $1 million because it will generate about $2 billion in new revenue that we desperately need for education and transportation," Gonzalez said in a Monday morning statement.

"Once again, Governor Baker has sat on the sidelines and taken no position on this issue. The people deserve to know where he stands: does he support asking those at the top who are doing great through this economic recovery to pay more in taxes to support improvements to our education and transportation systems that will benefit everyone, or not?" Gonzalez added.

Baker told reporters his administration has proposed record amounts of state aid to cities and towns for education and local services, and is pushing a capital spending plan that focuses on roads, bridges and public transportation.

"I think so far we're making the right kinds of investments in the right kinds of things," Baker said.

"I'm very proud of the fact that we inherited a one billion dollar deficit, worked with our colleagues in the Legislature to close that deficit without raising taxes," the governor said, referring to budget problems when he first assumed the office of governor in 2015.
SPRINGFIELD -- Eric Hardy told a Hampden Superior Court judge Monday it was hard to ask for the maximum motor vehicle homicide sentence for his own sister.

But, he said, Suzanne Hardy -- the driver in a 2014 crash that killed two of her young passengers -- robbed him and other family members of all the moments they might have spent with brothers Dylan Riel, 4, and Jayce Garcia, 1.

She also robbed him of his trust in others. "If you can't trust your own sister with your child," he said, "who can I possibly trust with anything?"

A jury on May 11 found Suzanne Hardy guilty on two counts of motor vehicle homicide by negligent operation for the deaths of Dylan and Jayce, both of Southbridge. The boys died in a crash on Route 20 in Brimfield on June 20, 2014.

Judge Richard J. Carey ultimately sentenced Suzanne Hardy to spend a year at the Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center in Chicopee. The rest of her 2 1/2 -year sentence will be suspended, with probation. She has 51 days credit on her sentence for time she served before she was released while awaiting trial.

Assistant District Attorney James M. Forsyth asked Carey to sentence her to 12 to 15 years in state prison, followed by three years probation.

Suzanne Hardy, 24, of Holland, was Dylan's aunt. Her brother Eric was Dylan's father. The jury also found her guilty on one count each of involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment of a child for Dylan's death.

She was found not guilty on involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment charges for Jayce's death.

In asking for a long sentence, Eric Hardy told Judge Carey his sister had shown no remorse.

"Watching other fathers interact and play with their children, whether it be real life, a movie, or even a picture, often will throw me into extended periods of depression and sorrow knowing that I, the other two parents involved, the grandparents and all the other extended family will never be able to enjoy moments like that again," he told the judge.

Defense lawyer Joan Williams argued additional jail time for Suzanne Hardy was unecessary. Williams asked for a 2 1/2 -year jail term, with all but the 51 days the defendant had already served suspended with probation.

"To say that she has not been impacted by this case is incorrect," Williams said, adding that Suzanne Hardy wanted to express her remorse to the boys' families.

About 20 family and friends of the boys were in the courtroom Monday, as they had been throughout the trial.

Nicole Riel, the boys' mother, delivered a victim impact statement in which she said the effect of her sons' deaths on her life has been "indescribable."

"Each morning I wake up to a world that I no longer recognize," she said. "I was left with nothing because of someone else's actions. It took everything from me, my faith and my trust in others. My love, I no longer find happiness in anything I do."

She added: "Countless sleepless nights, and nightmares of things I've seen that day continue to haunt me. Some nights unbearable, crying myself to sleep, just wanting to die to be with them."

Debra Rose, mother of Nicole Riel, said helping her daughter plan a funeral and pick out a casket was the worst thing she ever had to do. She said Nicole Riel decided to bury Dylan and Jayce in one casket "... together for eternity."

Forsyth noted Andres Garcia, Jayce's father -- who has been in the courtroom throughout the trial -- chose not to give an impact statement.

In arguing for a shorter sentence, Williams noted Suzanne Hardy had a group of people supporting her throughout the trial, and on Monday.

Williams, in her closing argument at the trial, said the boys' deaths were "Horrible, tragic, but an accident." She said the prosecution did not prove Suzanne Hardy was wanton and reckless or negligent.

But Forsyth, the prosecutor, argued the opposite, describing her actions as both reckless and negligent. As the driver, Forsyth said, she was responsible for the care of Dylan and Jayce.

"The children's lives were in her hands, and she disregarded their safety," he said.

The crash happened as Hardy was driving east on Route 20. A landscaping truck and trailer was in the left lane, also eastbound, waiting to turn into the company headquarters. Hardy swerved to the right, clipped the guardrail, spun out of control into the westbound lane and crashed into an SUV. Her car and another car collided head-on in the westbound lane.

The manslaughter charges against Suzanne Hardy alleged wanton and reckless conduct for her driving, and for not securing each child properly in a car seat. Dylan was not in a child's car seat at all, said Forsyth, who noted that Suzanne Hardy put her own son -- who survived the crash -- in a booster seat.

Jayce, meanwhile, was in a child seat -- a factor the jury appeared to consider in deciding to clear her of the manslaughter and reckless endangerment charges in connection with Jayce's death. The prosecution argued Jayce's child seat should have been rear-facing and that its straps were loose.

Hardy suffered a fractured hip and foot, and had her spleen removed, Williams said.

Mark Riel, father of Nicole Riel and grandfather of the two boys, told the judge Monday that not a single day goes by without sadness, sorrow, or tears shed by the families.

"As a loving father I see the sorrow and anguish in my daughter's eyes every day," Mark Riel said. "I feel helpless and destroyed inside."
SPRINGFIELD - A Holland woman found guilty of negligent motor vehicle homicide in the deaths of her two nephews is scheduled to be sentenced in the case on Monday.

Suzanne Hardy was found guilty of two counts of negligent motor vehicle homicide and one count of reckless endangerment of a child on Thursday. She was the driver in a June 20, 2014 crash that killed Dylan Reil, 4, and his brother Jayce Garcia, 1.

"My sympathy and thoughts are with Dylan's and Jayce's families, who are still coping with the tremendous loss of their beloved boys," Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni said. "The immeasurable loss the victims' families have experienced cannot be put into words. With this verdict, it is my hope that they feel that some justice has been done."

He thanked Assistant District Attorney James Forsyth, who prosecuted the case, and the Massachusetts State Police Detective Unit, its Crash Accident Reconstruction Section, and the Brimfield Police for their investigations which lead to the conviction.

Hardy was driving on Route 20 when she attempted to pass a lawn care truck and trailer that was waiting to turn. She clipped the guardrail and her car spun out of control and collided head-on with another car.

Prosecutors argued Hardy had not properly secured the boys in car seats. Her son was in a booster seat and Dylan was wearing a seatbelt. The jury agreed she was guilty of reckless endangerment for failing to secure Dylan properly but acquitted her for the same charge with Jayce, who was in a car seat that prosecutors argued was not properly installed.

Hardy, 24, suffered a fractured hip and a fractured foot and had her spleen removed in the accident.

"This was an accident. Horrible, tragic, but an accident," Joan Williams, the lawyer for Hardy, said in her closing argument.
A private jet went down in Carlstadt, New Jersey, according to police, CBS New York reported.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane, a Learjet 35 flying from Philadelphia, crashed at 3:30 p.m. Monday while attempting to land at Teterboro Airport.

Carlstadt Police Department officials told CBS News that two flight crew members were killed in the crash. They said there were no passengers on-board.

The plane struck a warehouse, leaving several buildings engulfed in flames, officials said. A thick plume of smoke was seen rising from the site of the crash.

Emergency responders reached the scene a short time later and were working to extinguish the blaze.

The plane crashed into a building in an industrial area.
Though packed tight with brewing equipment, there's a lot of spirit within the walls of Flying Dreams Brewing Co. in Worcester, as Owner and Brewmaster Dave Richardson works on attracting a following for his beers before Worcester becomes dotted with craft breweries.

Amid a renaissance of dining and development in Worcester, Richardson anticipates that the city will have a lot more competition among breweries in the coming years. So now, while Flying Dreams is one of three breweries in Worcester, Richardson hopes to build up his craft and attract beer connoisseurs from across the state, and New England, to Flying Dreams.

As a self-identified foodie, Richardson knows that Worcester's evolving dining scene has attracted attention from people across the state. And he knows how many breweries are making great beer across Massachusetts and New England.

"I think Worcester is going to become home to many new breweries in the next decade and it's going to become a great destination," Richardson, 38, said. "It's already a crossroads of Massachusetts, so I can see it becoming a great beer destination."

Though the second-largest city in Massachusetts, Worcester only has Flying Dreams, Wormtown Brewery and 3cross Brewing Company for breweries. Smaller New England cities, like Portland, Maine, have more than 20 breweries.

But, because Worcester is an industrial city, Richardson thinks it's perfect to attract more.

"Soon enough, it seems like every town is getting its own brewery. It's a beautiful thing," Richardson, of Gardner, said.

Richardson started home brewing in 2000. Three years later, he quit his job, took out a loan and got his master's degree in brewing science from UC Davis.

He got a job at Redhook Brewery in Portsmouth where he stayed for about three years before becoming the brewmaster and part-owner of the Gardner Ale House.

Richardson worked there for almost a decade. Toward the end of that tenure, he started working on a dream to open his own brewery. That dream took flight.

Flying Dreams opened for business on Park Avenue in Worcester on Nov. 20, 2015. The brewery is physically connected to Peppercorns, a glass pane window in between offering diners a look into the brewery. That's one of the features that helps attract new customers to Flying Dreams.

Another is that Richardson's brewing space is the original Wormtown Brewery location. A big part of getting Flying Dreams off the ground was a call from Wormtown's Ben Roesch, telling Richardson that they were moving out of their space already packed with brew tanks.

Richardson took a business plan to the bank and got moving on making his dream a reality.

"Wormtown paved the way in Worcester and now people are receptive to it," Richardson said about the craft beer movement. "I couldn't ask for a better vibe or mojo to get started here."

Some of Flying Dream's flagship brews are Dreaming of Summer Saison, Pond Jumper IPA and Green Dreams Hoppy Pale Ale.

Asking Richardson to pick his favorite of the more than a dozen brews he crafts is a tall task.

"That's like asking me which is my favorite of my kids," said Richardson, who has three children. "I love them all. Part of what got me into brewing is that there's so many different flavors with beer."

One of the keys to his craft, Richardson said, is brewing for himself.

"If I'm really going to believe in it and I'm going to project that belief onto the public then I'm going to make what I love. And if I make what I love and it's amazing then other people will like it too," he said.

And it's worked.

Despite only being in business less than two years, Flying Dreams has already collected some attention for its quality. Richardson's beer was voted second in the 2017 Brew Woo competition, and was named the No. 6 best brewery in Massachusetts by Boston.com and Beer Advocate.

"I just take painstaking efforts to not cut any corners from start to finish," Richardson said, pausing mid-interview to check on one of the seven varieties brewing at the time. "For me, it's all about the beer."

Flying Dreams at 455B Park Ave. is open for tours and tastings from Thursday through Sunday. You can purchase pints of Flying Dreams at various bars and restaurants, as well as at more than 170 retail locations.
Prospera Business Network is the lead non-profit organization advancing and supporting community-centered economic development in southwest Montana. Our focus is helping people start and grow their business  in turn strengthening our regions economy and communities.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said slow decisions and bureaucracy are among the chief problems plaguing the European Union, Anadolu reported.

In an interview with Londons Evening Standard on Monday, Yildirim said: The main problem with the EU is it has become a very bureaucratic state, instead of a political state.

High-level officials are running it on behalf of members. So, decision-making on any subject takes much longer and people are exhausted.

The premier said EU leaders had broken some of their promises to help the 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey and were in deep confusion over Turkeys stalled membership application.

We saved life, we educate children, we care for them and keep them on our soil.

Europe should appreciate this and take responsibility for how we can share the load, he said.

He pointed out that Europes safety was tied with Turkey. The safety of Europe and the security of European people start from Turkey.

If we do not have the necessary security measures in Turkey, Europe will not be safe, he said.

About how long it would take for a trade deal between Britain and Turkey, Yildirim said it could take two to four years: This is quite new for everybody.

British Prime Minister Theresa May paid a visit to Ankara in January and raised British interest for a quick trade deal following Brexit.

Yildirim also criticized Western leaders for failing to support action against those accused of being behind the failed 2016 attempted coup.

He said Western leaders instead criticized the treatment meted out to people he regarded as criminals and terrorists.

What they did is say: Please be polite to those that organized the coup, treat them nicely. What is this? It is not acceptable, Yildirim said.

About Donald Trump, he said the American leader is a very good president on a learning curve.

He is learning fast and taking decisions quickly, he said.

About Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Yildirim said: He is probably one of the most merciful persons in the world.

He said once people get to know the Turkish president more closely they would really like him. He does not play games. He speaks his mind. He does not like to get lost in the labyrinths of diplomacy. That is why some people do not like him.
Watches are not rocket science. Or are they? Watches are not rocket...

Perhaps you dont have a PhD. Well, thats a shame, because with some watches, youll need one to understand how to tell the time. Perhaps you dont have a PhD. Well,...
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I get to visit a lot of watch production facilities and it is always both enlightening and reassuring to see the time and energy that watch brands invest in their quality control. Although there are international standards that govern a watchs ability to resist certain things (ISO 764 for magnetism and ISO 22810 for water, plus ISO 6425 for the stricter requirements for divers watches are three notable examples), watch brands all have their own ways of testing their watches against these standards.



In the case of Officine Panerai, which opened its new production facility overlooking Lake Neuchatel in 2014, the testing regime is quite possibly one of the toughest I have seen, incorporating certain tests and requirements that are unique in the industry. All of this is to ensure that when you buy a Panerai watch, you can be sure it has been tested rigorously, even beyond the scope of the international standards. Here are the main stages in the process.



1) At the level of homologation, series production watches are sampled at random to check a number of essential qualities, from a two-month accelerated age test (which can simulate up to 30 years of wear) to a stint in a climatic chamber at temperatures ranging from -40 to +90 C. Sounds extreme? Think of a Panerai watch in a shop window in Las Vegas at the height of summer and you are pretty close to the upper temperature value.

2) Because one of the main pillars of its research and development over the past three years has been innovation in terms of materials (with the arrival of new case materials such as Carbotech and BMG (Bulk Metallic Glass)), Panerai has put in place measures to verify the integrity of these new materials using a gas penetration machine, which can measure the porosity of such materials at the nano scale.



3) Since the very origins of the Panerai brand are rooted in underwater work, great attention is paid to the effects of salt water on both the case and the legendary Panerai leather straps. In a special machine, these are subjected to artificial seawater and chemical recreations of the different varieties of human perspiration found around the world.



4) In addition to the ISO standard tests, Panerai has a machine that is unique among Swiss watch brands for simulating the effects of different decompression cycles in scuba diving.



5) As far as shock resistance is concerned, Panerai takes its testing so seriously that the entire room containing its various shock testing equipment is actually mounted on shock absorbers. One machine can expose watches to shocks ranging from the equivalent of someone rummaging in their bag for a watch right up to the 5,000g test, which involves dropping the watch from a height of one metre on to a wooden block. It was on this machine that Panerai realised the potential of BMG, since even when dropping the watch from the maximum possible height of the machine (well in excess of a metre) and on to a steel, rather than wooden, plate, the only damage caused was to the steel plate, which the BMG watch managed to dent on impact!



6) In the same room, the anti-magnetic properties of Panerai watches can be tested to the requirements of the above-mentioned ISO 764 standard.



7) As part of the life-cycle tests, a machine can even press the chronograph pushers 5,000 times to make sure that they are up to the task.







Besides these demanding tests, there are a number of other stages that a finished Panerai watch has to go through before it can leave the factory. As part of the final production tests, the movements are tested over the duration of their given power reserve fully automatically while they are still on the production line. Throughout the production process, each movement is accompanied by an RFID chip. At the penultimate stage in the testing process, the watch has its precision tested and the actual results are printed out directly on page 8 of the booklet that accompanies the watch. If the required precision is not achieved, the booklet cannot be printed.



In a final test, every single Panerai watch has its water resistance tested first by overpressurisation followed by depressurisation in air and then (and this is highly unusual for any watch brand) by submersion in water.



As you can see, before it even leaves the factory, every single Panerai watch has already undergone a barrage of severe tests to ensure that it will stand up to the tests of time.
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The history of the Fifty Fathoms dive watch has become a legend in watchmaking circles. As is often the case with timepieces that acquire iconic status (and particularly so with pilots watches), the watch was born out of both a passion and a genuine need, and some extraordinary figures became associated with its development. Back in the early 1950s, Blancpains CEO Jean-Jacques Fiechter was obviously a watch enthusiast, but he was also fascinated by diving. Disappointed at the unavailability of any true diving watches, he decided to design one of his own. He focused on three basic elements: water resistance, dive time safety and legibility. At that time, diving was not a popular sport in the same way as it is today, and was mainly associated with the military. It was a meeting between Fiechter and Robert Maloubier and Claude Riffaud, founders of the French naval combat swimmers, who were also looking for a reliable device to time their underwater missions, that led to the birth of the Fifty Fathoms in 1953.





Fifty Fathoms, 1953

The characteristics identified by Blancpain and the French navy were subsequently adopted by the watch industry as standard specifications for diving watches: superior water resistance provided by a screw-down crown with double gasket; a screwed back with an internal gasket; a secure rotating bezel (which later would become unidirectional); automatic winding to reduce wear on the crown; a black dial with light-coloured, highly legible luminescent indices; a large case size; and protection against magnetic fields.



The name of the new 2017 Tribute to Fifty Fathoms MIL-SPEC is a reminder of the model developed by Blancpain between 1957 and 1958 for the US Navy. The MIL-SPEC 1 and MIL-SPEC 2 models of the day met specific military criteria (including the use of radioactive tritium for the high luminosity necessary for night ops) and contained a new water indicator, which changed colour if any water made its way inside the watch.





Like its historic forebear, the limited edition (500 units) Tribute to Fifty Fathoms MIL-SPEC has the white and orange water indicator at 6 oclock, and the same indices  batons, dots and a diamond at 12 oclock  which stand out clearly against the black dial thanks to their light green SuperLuminova coating. The unidirectional black rotating bezel also has a corresponding diamond at 12 oclock, and large figures for 15, 30 and 45 minutes, and its luminescent material is protected from wear by a sapphire covering.



The 40 mm diameter, 13.23 mm thick stainless steel case is water resistant to 30 bar (approx. 300 metres). It contains the automatic calibre 1151 with 210 parts, including a silicon balance spring, which drives hours, minutes, seconds and a date displayed in a window between 4 and 5 oclock. The two series-mounted barrels supply a power reserve of 96 hours (four days). The sapphire caseback reveals a solid gold rotor coated with a platinum alloy, engraved with the Blancpain logo. The Tribute to Fifty Fathoms MIL-SPEC comes with a choice of NATO or sailcloth strap, or a stainless steel bracelet.

Price: 13,200 CHF with sailcloth strap, 15,200 CHF with stainless steel bracelet.





See all Baselworld news >>
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The Reference 3904  the third Chronograph in the Portuguese family  was presented for the first time in 2013, yet it still retains the unmistakable character of the originals from the 1930s. IWC is now reissuing the Portuguese Chronograph Classic (Ref. 3903) with a slightly revised and updated design. The dial with the typical Portuguese railway-track- style chapter ring looks even neater than its predecessor without the subdivision of the seconds, while the watch as a whole has a more modern impact thanks to the convex sapphire glass.

The top-of-the-line version has an 18-carat red gold case and a silver-plated dial, as well as golden hands and appliques. It is fitted with a hand-finished brown alligator leather strap (Ref. IW390301). Two models are available with a stainless-steel case and a black alligator leather strap. One features a silver-plated dial and blue hands and appliques (Ref. IW390302), while the other has a midnight blue dial and rhodium-plated hands and appliques (Ref. IW390303).

Portuguese Chronograph Classic ref. W390301

When it comes to the technical components inside these watches, IWC relies on the aspect of continuity: the new Chronographs are still driven by the tried-and-tested IWC-manufactured 89361 calibre with flyback function, self-winding system and a power reserve of 68 hours. The recorded time is particularly easy to read on the combined hour and minute counter at 12 oclock. A see-through sapphire-glass back provides a view of the movement and the rotor, which is adorned with Geneva stripes.

The new Portuguese Chronograph Classic models are available now in IWC boutiques and from authorised IWC dealers.
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University of Toronto and Baycrest Rotman Research Institute (RRI) scientists have discovered a potential brain imaging predictor for dementia, which illustrates that changes to the brain's structure may occur years prior to a diagnosis, even before individuals notice their own memory problems.

The joint study, published in the Neurobiology of Aging, looked at older adults who are living in the Toronto community without assistance and who were unaware of any major memory problems, but scored below the normal benchmark on a dementia screening test.

Within these older adults, researchers also found evidence of less brain tissue in the same subregion of the brain where Alzheimer's disease originates (the anterolateral entorhinal cortex located in the brain's temporal lobe).

This U of T-Baycrest study is the first to measure this particular brain subregion in older adults who do not have a dementia diagnosis or memory problems that affect their day-to-day routine. It is also the first study to demonstrate that performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) dementia screening test is linked to the volume (size) of this subregion, along with other brain regions affected early in the course of Alzheimer's disease.

"This work is an important first step in determining a procedure to identify older adults living independently at home without memory complaints who are at risk for dementia," says Dr. Morgan Barense of U of T's Department of Psychology and senior author on the study.

The team studied 40 adults between the ages of 59 and 81 who live independently (or with a spouse) at home. All participants were tested on the MoCA. Those scoring below 26 - a score that indicates a potential problem in memory and thinking skills and suggests further dementia screening is needed - were compared to those scoring 26 and above.

"The early detection of these at-risk individuals has the potential to facilitate drug developments or other therapeutic interventions for Alzheimer's disease," says Dr. Rosanna Olsen, first author on the study, RRI scientist and assistant professor in U of T's Department of Psychology. "This research also adds to our basic understanding of aging and the early mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease." Scientists were able to reliably measure the volume of the anterolateral entorhinal cortex by using high-resolution brain scans that were collected for each participant.

The strongest volume differences were found in the exact regions of the brain in which Alzheimer's disease originates. The researchers are planning a follow-up study to determine whether the individuals who demonstrated poor thinking and memory abilities and smaller brain volumes indeed go on to develop dementia.

"The MoCA is good at diagnosing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (a condition that is likely to develop into Alzheimer's) and we are seeing that it may identify MCI in people who are not aware of a decline in their memory and thinking skills," said Dr. Barense.

Alzheimer's disease is a devastating neurodegenerative illness with widespread personal, societal and economic consequences. Currently, 564,000 Canadians currently live with dementia and 1.1 million Canadians are affected by the disease, according to the Alzheimer Society of Canada. There are 25,000 new cases of dementia diagnosed every year in Canada and it costs $10.4 billion to care for those living with dementia.

"A key take-away from the study is that it highlights the utility of the MoCA test in identifying individuals who are at-risk for dementia," said Dr. Olsen.

Adults who are 40+ and interested in testing their memory and attention prior to raising concerns with their doctor can consult Baycrest's scientifically-validated, online brain health assessment tool, Cogniciti at http://www.cogniciti.com.

Research for this study was conducted with support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canada Research Chairs program, the James S McDonnell Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government.

Article: Anterolateral entorhinal cortex volume predicted by altered intra-item configural processing, Lok-Kin Yeung, Rosanna K. Olsen, Hannah E. P. Bild-Enkin, Maria C. D'Angelo, Arber Kacollja, Douglas A. McQuiggan, Anna Keshabyan, Jennifer D. Ryan and Morgan D. Barense, Neurobiology of Aging, doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3664-16.2017, published 4 May 2017.
SoftBank is helmed by CEO and founder Masayoshi Son. (Photo : Getty Images)

Thanks to its move of selling a stake in Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba, Japanese mobile giant SoftBank has announced that its full-year net profit has tripled, Agence France-Presse reported.



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According to its report, the company earned a net profit of 1.43 trillion yen for the fiscal year that ended last March. It also revealed that its operating profit increased by 12.9 percent.



The firm shared that its share sales in other companies have given them gains worth 238.10 billion yen. The figure is mainly attributed to SoftBank's sale of a partial stake in the Chinese counterpart of eBay.



In 2016, SoftBank has previously announced that it is eyeing to decrease its stake in Alibaba to 28 percent from 32.2 percent.



Earlier in June that year, the mobile giant also sold the Finnish game-making firm Supercell Oy to Chinese Internet powerhouse Tencent for $8.6 billion. Supercell is known as the creator and developer of "Clash of Clans."



SoftBank further remarked that its net profit increase was also attained because of the improvements in its U.S. subsidiary Sprint and of the profits it earned from acquiring ARM Holdings, a British iPhone chip designing company.



The Japanese firm also highlighted its home country's improved domestic telecommunications operations.



Despite announcing its tripled net profit figure, the company did not disclose its earnings estimates for the current fiscal year ending March 2018.



Softbank is helmed by founder Masayoshi Son, who was among the first businessmen who met U.S. President Donald Trump after he emerged victorious in the November elections.



Son was lauded by Trump after he pledged $50 billion worth of investment for business and job creation in the U.S.



Moreover, the Japanese business tycoon shared that he is aiming to invest heavily in the field of robotics, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence by tapping the resources of SoftBank's Vision Fund.


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Direct action of the mother's immune cells - Recognizing and acting on the malarial parasite in her child's body.

Indirect action by teaching the child's immune system to recognize and react to the pathogen.

Whitney E. Harrington, Sami B. Kanaan, Atis Muehlenbachs, Robert Morrison, Philip Stevenson, Michal Fried, Patrick E. Duffy, J. Lee Nelson. Maternal microchimerism predicts increased infection but decreased disease due to P. falciparum during early childhood. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2017; DOI: 10.1093/infdis/jix129 10 facts on malaria - (http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/)

Microchimerism refers to the cells that originate from another individual and are genetically distinct from the host cells.Babies are found to carry a small number of foreign cells that are acquired by their mothers. This is in the order of few maternal cells for every 100,000.The research team found that babies born to Tanzanian mothers infected with malaria during pregnancy. These infections had traveled to the placentas and had evidence for more maternal cells at the time of their births with an average of 1%.The levels also rose to few more cases where it was higher than 10%. Scientists were surprised because of the increased levels of mother's cells in the baby's blood.The researchers hypothesized that the malarial infection was capable of leading to alterations in the placental proteins which could control cell trafficking. This allowed the entry of maternal cells into the fetuses.The research team looked at the health records of the babies and found that those who had a higher level of maternal microchimerism were twice likely to be infected with malaria during childhood. Only half of them were likely to get sick from infection; this could suggest that the mother's cells transferred might offer some protection against the disease.The research study was conducted by examining 53 umbilical cord blood samples collected from pregnant women and babies who were enrolled in a study in Muheza, Tanzania from 2002-2006.Around half of the women were found to have placental malaria. The infected women had inflammatory placental malaria (a condition where the placenta gets diseased and could stop proper functioning).The research team also looked out for the amount of maternal DNA that is present in the baby's umbilical cord blood. This represented the level of maternal microchimerism in children when they were born.Even though, it is not known on how long the level would persist after birth. Women with placental malaria were found to give birth to babies that had higher-than-average maternal microchimerism.Women with inflammatory placental malaria gave birth to babies who had even higher average levels.Further studies would help to explore on how the maternal and infant cells interact to affect the future malaria risk. And on how long it would affect the high levels of maternal cells that persist during children's lives. And also how a person's microchimerism would affect the susceptibility to childhood infections.Malaria is caused by the bite of an infected female anopheles mosquito. Plasmodium falciparum is the most common of the five species of mosquitoes that cause malaria. It is considered to be a leading cause of death in low and middle-income countries. Children under the age of 5 and pregnant women are at a higher risk of malaria.Source: Medindia
Objectifying people isn't something to be boastful about; but when we come across someone who is hotter than Delhi's rising temperature, our ideologies or virtues go for a toss. Let's be honest, it shouldn't surprise you anymore that the internet is a thirsty platform that loves to check out hot men and women and South Korean President, Moon Jae-In's bodyguard seems to be the latest muse.

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For someone who hasn't been closely watching the paradigm shift in South Korea's political scenario or haven't seen the current president, this bodyguard can easily pass off as an actor who is shooting for an action thriller K-drama.

excuse me this is the new korean president's bodyguard pic.twitter.com/aIJVhZjo28  elena yip (@elena_yip) May 12, 2017

Being in a pivotal position, one can't expect him to smile and that's what adds to the intensity and mystery in his looks. We're not surprised why women are going weak in their knees.

@elena_yip Do not make a sexist comment, do not make a sexist comment...he "looks" very capable. pic.twitter.com/BtNcHFw87f  myusrnamistakn (@myusrnameistakn) May 12, 2017

We bet the president must be feeling highly jealous and he has all the reasons. For someone who worked so hard to become the President is now being overshadowed by his bodyguard for being extremely sexy.

@elena_yip This makes perfect sense. Any potential attackers would be too distracted by his looks. They'd stop dead in their tracks. He is a gift?? pic.twitter.com/9BXdD53CFX  CarolynH. (@CarrieCnh12) May 12, 2017

This heartthrob has been identified as Choi Young-Jae, a 36-year-old officer with Korea's Special Warfare Command.

And we aren't the only ones thinking this way. The internet has already lost its sh*t over this guy.

@elena_yip My body needs guarding.  Melinda Salisbury (@MESalisbury) May 12, 2017

However, according to a dampener published in the New York Post, he is married and has two daughters which might have broken a few hearts.

@elena_yip he looks like the square-jawed serious romantic lead, who's going to be his plucky heroine who accidentally captures his heart...  Yulin Kuang (@YulinKuang) May 12, 2017

By the looks of his growing popularity, it seems likely that he will soon need someone to protect him from crazy female fans worldwide.
"Dangal" is currently the highest-grossing Indian film in China. (Photo : UTV Motion Pictures/YouTube)

Indian star Aamir Khan, fondly called by the Chinese as "Uncle Khan," visited the country last month and created buzz when he attended this year's Beijing International Film Festival, the Global Times reported.



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His latest film, "Dangal," is currently the highest-grossing Indian film in the Chinese mainland, earning 141 million yuan six days since its release.



Though his career started in 1972 as a child actor, Khan became popular in China for his 2009 comedy hit, "3 Idiots." The groundbreaking film was a story of three students who portrayed the hardships endured by Indian engineering students.



Wang Yang (not her real name) shared with the Global Times how he became an avid fan of Uncle Khan.



"He totally became a god to me after I watched 'Truth Alone Triumphs,'" she said, recounting that she was able to discover this project after getting acquainted with Khan through "3 Idiots."



"Truth Alone Triumphs," which first aired in 2012, is a TV talk show hosted by the "Dangal" star. The program tackles different sensitive social issues such as rape, domestic violence and corruption.



Wu Qian (pseudonym) pointed out one definitive reason why she adores Khan.



"All those issues touched on in his works also exist in China, but no Chinese has ever made that type of film. Khan's 'Truth Alone Triumphs' was not censored in India. I can't even imagine what a show like that would look like in China," the 29-year-old fan said.



"At first, I liked Khan because he's handsome, cute and is a versatile actor who aims for perfection. But now I admire him for how he uses the power of being a public figure," another Khan fan nicknamed Taitai told the publication through an email interview. "He knows that countries need more than government efforts to develop. Society needs to have its awareness raised as well. . . . I wish there could be celebrities like him in China."



Uncle Khan's most recent project, "Dangal," proves to be at par with his previous works. Earning massive praises from the Chinese audience, the film based on a true story of an Indian amateur wrestler has garnered a 9.2 rating on popular media review site Douban.



Taitai, who maintains the unofficial Sina Weibo account called Aamir Khan Information Channel, revealed that the number of Khan's fans in China has been steadily increasing through the years.



"Uncle Mi's sincere passion for film and his consistent efforts in increasing social awareness is the reason that he has such a massive fan base," Taitai further said.



Uncle Mi or Mi Shu is another name that fans use to refer to the award-winning actor.


China to Allow US Beef, Gas Exports in Trade Deal with Washington

U.S. beef was banned in China in 2003 after a case of mad cow disease was discovered in Washington state. (Photo : Getty Images)

The United States and China have agreed to a trade deal that will allow American beef and natural gas exports to flow into China while opening up the U.S. market for poultry and Chinese banks, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Thursday.



The agreement will enable U.S. beef exports to flow directly into China for the first time since 2003, while the United States would issue a proposed rule to allow Chinese cooked poultry to enter U.S. markets by July 16, Ross told reporters at a briefing.



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The deal will also open up the Chinese market to U.S. electronic payment providers, help Chinese lenders gain broader access to the U.S. financial market, and allow U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas to China.



The deal marks the first results of trade talks that began last month after President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping's meeting in Florida. Trump made renegotiating trade terms between the U.S. and China a key campaign promise and said last month he hoped to make progress with China in the short term.



Ross said that the initial agreement was a "herculean accomplishment" that would help "bring down" the U.S. trade deficit with China, though he did not provide a precise estimate.



Trump railed against the trade deficit during his campaign and pledged to reduce it as president. Although he has publicly suggested imposing drastic measures such as tariffs on Chinese imports, Trump has instead led toward bilateral negotiations thus far.



On Friday, Trump hailed the agreement, tweeting, "China just agreed that the U.S. will be allowed to sell beef, and other major products, into China once again. This is REAL news!"



Ross said that there should be an impact on China's trade surplus with the U.S. by the end of this year and that Beijing could negotiate any type of contract including long-term ones.



Observers hailed the agreement as a positive initial step toward more U.S.-China deals and renewed comprehensive economic dialogue.



The deal could lead to new opportunities for the U.S. agricultural, energy and financial sectors, which have often struggled to gain a foothold in the Chinese market, Joshua Meltzer, a senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution, told CNN.



However, Meltzer expressed caution, saying that China has "made a lot of positive commitments that it hasn't followed through on" in the past.



"It remains to be seen how much of these turn into real market access," he added.



China imposed an import ban on U.S. beef in 2003 due to a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, in Washington state. It has since partially lifted the ban last year, but few purchases have been made.



U.S. companies have also complained of high barriers to entry to the Chinese market, while their Chinese counterparts have been accused of hurting American manufacturers in part as a result of government support.



Trump has accused China and other countries of unfair trade practices and has pushed for investigations into foreign trade abuses.


Roshdy, an Al-Azhar scholar who works for the Ministry of Endowments, was also banned on Monday by the ministry from preaching after backing the controversial comments of another cleric who called Christians 'unbelievers'

The Egyptian party Future of a Nation (Mostaqbal Watan) said on Monday it has suspended the membership of Al-Azhar scholar Abdullah Roshdy, who recently described Christians as unbelievers, saying the scholar's comments were defamatory.

Abdullah Roshdy, an Al-Azhar scholar who works as a preacher at the Ministry of Endowments, has become a well-known figure in recent years for his mainstream religious discourse.

On Saturday, Roshdy was interviewed by presenter Ahmed Moussa on his programme Ala Masoulati (On My Responsibility) on Sada El-Balad TV channel to discuss the controversial comments of another Al-Azhar scholar, Salem Abdel-Gelil, who had called Christians unbelievers during his religious programme Muslims Ask the previous week.

Roshdy defended Abdel-Gelil's description of Christians as "unbelievers", stressing that he supported Abdel-Gelils comments.

Last week, a Cairo misdemeanour court set 24 June to start the trial of Abdel-Gelil on charges of contempt of religion following his comments.

Roshdy said he was recently moved to an administrative job and suspended from preaching, describing the ministry's actions as punishment for his beliefs.

On Monday, the Ministry of Endowments banned both Roshdy and Abdel-Geliil from giving sermons at ministry-affiliated mosques.

The Future of a Nation, a liberal-oriented youth party that won 50 seats in the 2015 House of Representatives election, is the second-largest party in Egypt's parliament.

"The party will not tolerate any member who violates the social and political framework of its organisation, the party said.

In a similar controversy, the president of Al-Azhar University, Ahmed Hosni, was recently forced to resign after he described well-known independent religious commentator Islam El-Beheiry as an apostate.

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On Tuesday, 16 May, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias will pay an official visit to Prague, where he will meet with the Czech Foreign Minister, Lubomir Zaoralek, and the President of the Senate, Milan Stech.



The talks with the Czech side will focus on issues of bilateral, regional and European interest, including migration, the situation in the Western Balkans, and post-Brexit developments in the EU.
Parliament is still considering whether to seat MP-elect Amr El-Shobaki after court rulings determined he was the winner of his constituency, and is also working on the new NGO law

Osama Heikal, the head of parliament's media, culture and antiquities committee, said on Monday that parliament opposes any kind of reconciliation with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group at the moment.

"As the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organisation, and as it still insists on launching organised violent attacks against the state, and as it has so far refused to take any step towards reforming its religious agenda, it is completely rejected that parliament votes in favour of reaching reconciliation with this group," Heikal told journalists at a press conference.

Heikal argued that although Egypt's 2014 constitution states in Article 241 that a transitional justice law be issued as soon as possible to help the country reach a kind of "national reconciliation," this law can't be passed at the moment because it might lead to "reconciliation with the Brotherhood."

"Let all know that Egyptian society is against any kind of reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood and so parliament can't accept such reconciliation at the moment," said Heikal.

Heikal said press conferences will be held on a regular basis to stand up to attacks against parliament.

"We have to highlight parliament's achievements in these conferences because parliament is part of the state and the people should be aware of its important roles," said Heikal.

No decision yet on byelection

Heikal also said parliament has not yet reached a decision on whether a court ruling to seat MP-elect and Al-Ahram political analyst Amr El-Shobaki should be implemented.

Heikal -- a former information minister and head of Egyptian Media Production City -- said "experts affiliated with parliament's legislative and constitutional affairs committee discovered that a final court ruling to seat El-Shobaki goes against the house's internal bylaws."

"While the court ruled that El-Shobaki was the actual winner of Giza governorate's Agouza and Dokki districts, rather than Ahmed Mortada Mansour, parliament's internal by-laws state that if an MP loses membership due to a court ruling, new elections should be held," said Heikal, referring to a court ruling last year that declared El-Shobaki the rightful winner of those districts in October 2015's parliamentary elections.

Heikal said parliament is keen that court rulings be implemented, but that "the issue needs to be investigated and discussed further by the legislative and constitutional affairs committee."

In November, the legislative and constitutional affairs committee accepted that Mansour should be replaced by El-Shobaki.

In July, the Court of Cassation ruled that El-Shobaki should be placed in parliament instead of Mansour, who had initially been declared the winner of Agouza and Dokki districts in December 2015. After reviewing a recount of the votes, the court found that El-Shobaki in fact beat Mansour by 301 votes, making him the winning candidate.

Work on NGO law continues

At Monday's press conference, Heikal also indicated that a new NGO law drafted and passed by parliament last November is expected to be redrafted.

Heikal said the NGO law, which has not yet been ratified by President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, is still under discussion by the social solidarity committee.

"The committee's members are seeing whether some of its articles need to be redrafted," he said.

Heikal said press conferences will be held on a regular basis to respond to the local media's hostile attacks on parliament.

"The relationship between parliament and the media has not been good of late, so we decided that press conferences would be held on a regular basis to highlight parliament's achievements before public opinion," said Heikal.

He said that parliament ratified 340 presidentially issued laws and 82 new pieces of legislation in its first legislative season (between January and September 2016). It has passed 85 laws in its second session, which began in October 2016.



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The spokesman of the Egyptian army, Tamer El-Refai, also announced in a report released on Monday that border guards had seized 1,152 kilograms of narcotics, 511,000 pills of unspecified illegal substances, in addition to large amounts of smuggled weapons of various types and ammunition.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi approved in November 2016 a law aimed at curbing irregular immigration and cracking down on human smuggling amid a hike in the number of migrants, many from sub-Saharan Africa, departing from the country to Europe.



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About 1,000 people held hostage since the weekend by armed militias in a mosque amid violent clashes in southeastern Central African Republic have been freed, U.N. officials said on Monday.

"I can confirm that the mosque is now empty. The last 250 men inside until this afternoon have been transferred out," said Herve Verhoosel, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission (MINUSCA), by telephone from Bangui.

Women, children and the injured had been set free earlier on Monday before the remaining men were evacuated from the building.

He added that MINUSCA forces had since opened fire on the militias who had been guarding the mosque and had mobilised a helicopter to the town on the Congolese border.

The Bangassou clashes entered their third day on Monday and have involved hundreds of fighters with heavy weaponry in the latest sign that a multi-year conflict spurred by ethnic and religious tensions is worsening.

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Iranian opposition figure Mehdi Karoubi, under house arrest since 2011, announced his support for President Hassan Rouhani who is seeking a second term in Friday's election.



Karoubi asked all Iranians to participate in the election and to protect the democratic process by choosing their preferred candidate, but said: "I will vote for Rouhani," Saham News, the official website of his political party reported on Monday.

on Sunday, former president Mohammad Khatami, considered the spiritual leader of Iran's reformists, urged voters on Sunday to re-elect President Hassan Rouhani and support his policy of seeking to end Iran's isolation from the rest of the world.

Iran's hardline security and judicial powers, which operate separately to the presidency and are close to Iran's ultimate authority - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - have banned media from publishing Khatami's image or mentioning his name.

But Khatami has played a prominent role in elections by using social media to urge voters to back pro-reform candidates.

"We have started on a path with Rouhani and we have come half way. We have resolved some problems and bigger problems remain for us to resolve on this difficult path with him," Khatami said in a video message released on social media.

"It is now your turn to renew your vote for our dear Rouhani in order to strengthen hope for a better future," he said.

Rouhani, a pragmatist Muslim cleric, was elected in a landslide victory in 2013 on promises to ease the Islamic Republic's international isolation and open up society.

He is standing for a second term against five other candidates, mostly prominent hardliners, on May 19, with a run-off a week later if no candidate wins more than 50 percent of votes cast in the first round.

In his first term, Rouhani pushed through a landmark agreement with global powers to limit Iran's nuclear programme in return for the lifting of international financial sanctions.

However, even his supporters acknowledge he has made relatively little progress on his domestic agenda, after promising Iranians would enjoy the same rights as anoyone else.

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The Syrian army was moving troops to a desert region near its border with Iraq and Jordan just as rebels are consolidating control in an area from which Islamic State militants had recently pulled out, rebel sources and commanders said on Monday.

They said their intelligence showed that hundreds of Syrian troops and Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias with tanks and heavy equipment had moved in the last few days to the town of Sabaa Biyar, in a sparsely populated desert territory that goes all the way to the Jordanian and Iraqi border known as the Syrian Badia.

The remote town near the strategic Damascus-Baghdad highway was captured by the army and its allies last week as they seek to prevent areas left by the hardline militants from falling into the hands of Free Syrian Army(FSA) rebels say.

"They have sent big reinforcements from artillery, to tanks and armoured vehicles," said Major Issam Al Reis, the spokesperson for the so-called Southern Front group of FSA rebel groups.

The Syrian army was not immediately available for comment.

The Syrian army has been alarmed by two months of FSA advances against Islamic State that allowed the rebels to secure a large swathe of sparsely populated territory stretching from the town of Bir Qassab, some 50 km (30 miles) southeast of Damascus, all the way to the borders with Iraq and Jordan.

"The regime's plan is to reach the Iraqi-Syrian border and cut the road on our advance further towards the north east against Islamic State's strongholds there after they lost territory in the Badia," al Reis said.

The Syrian government warplanes struck rebel outposts near the borders with Jordan and Iraq last Tuesday. In the last few days they also stepped up surveillance missions in the Badia and struck rebel outposts in the town of Bir Qassab.

But the push by the Syrian army and its Iranian backed allies could risk bringing them to close to the Tanf base near the Iraqi border where U.S. special forces operate and train FSA rebels, rebels said.

The base is being expanded to become a launching pad for operations to oust militants from the eastern province of Deir Zor, that straddles Iraq, from the south east of Syria, regional intelligence sources say.

But the presence of Iranian-backed militias from Iraq and Lebanon's Hezbollah in that area has alarmed Jordan, a U.S. ally, which backs the moderate rebel groups.

Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said the kingdom did not accept the presence of these Shi'ite militias as much they fought the threat of the ultra-hardline radical Sunnis.

The kingdom has long been trying to prevent opposition-held southern Syria from falling to Islamic State.

Rebels say the ultimate goal of the Syrian army's push in the Badia was to link its forces with Iraq's Shi'ite paramilitary groups on the other side of the border.

The Shi'ite troops launched an offensive on Friday to drive the militants from the desert region near the border with Syria. . Iraqi Shi'ite militia leaders said they hoped to link up with Syrian government forces.

The Damascus-Baghdad highway was a major weapons supply route for Iranian weapons into Syria until Islamic State seized large territory along the Iraqi Syrian border, regional intelligence sources says.

Rebels say they have begun this week to target outposts they believed were manned by Iranian backed militias.

"The Syrian desert will not accept new occupiers it got rid of Baghdadi's caliphate (Islamic States head) not so that Iran's terrorist militias take its place. It is our strategic depth," said Captain Ahmed Tamer, the head of the Ahmed Abdo Martyrs Forces.

The story has been edited by Ahram Online

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Here are five news stories and events to start your week from the editors at Military.com:

Cyberattack May Return as Workweek Starts, Officials Warn

Via Yuri Kageyama and Louise Watt at The AP: "The worldwide 'ransomware' cyberattack wreaked havoc in hospitals, schools and offices across the globe on Monday. Asia reported thousands of new cases but no large-scale breakdowns as workers started the week by booting up their computers. The full extent of the damage from the cyberattack felt in 150 countries was unclear and could worsen if more malicious variations of the online extortion scheme appear. The initial attack, known as 'WannaCry,' paralyzed computers running Britain's hospital network, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies."

Senators to Discuss Requirements for Military Small Arms

The Senate Armed Service Committee's Airland Subcommittee, headed by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., plans to hold a hearing 3:30 p.m. Wednesday on military small-arms requirements. John M. Bednarek, a retired Army lieutenant general and former chief of the Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq, and Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army major general and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, plan to testify. As Military.com's Matthew Cox has reported, the Army plans to buy the Sig Sauer P320 for the Modular Handgun System program, canceled the XM25 airburst weapon contract, and may buy the Magpul PMAG polymer magazine.

Air Force Sees Unique Challenges in Deploying Stealth Fighters

Via Military.com's Oriana Pawlyk: "With initial overseas deployments of both the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F-22 Raptor completed, the Air Force has a better understanding of the unique maintenance challenges required by its most advanced stealth fighters. The service this month completed the F-35A's first training deployment to Europe and plans to permanently base a squadron of the aircraft on the continent, beginning in 2021. Air Force officials said much of the work needed to prepare bases abroad to accommodate the fifth-generation fighter jets comes down to the different processes for maintaining stealth technology on the aircraft."

Marines' Cold Weather Gear Faces Overhaul After Poor Showing in Arctic

Via Military.com's Hope Hodge Seck in Norway: "A hump through the snow-covered sub-freezing moonscape of the Arctic is the wrong time to find out your boots won't stay latched into your skis. But that's what happened to many troops from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, as they completed an extended stretch of cold-weather training in Porsangermoen, nearly 1,000 miles north of their headquarters position here at Vaernes. During this first deployment for Marine Rotational Force-Europe, troops spent weeks training and operating in gear they described as badly in need of an overhaul."

No Decisions Yet on Sending More Troops to Afghanistan, Somalia

Via Richard Sisk at Military.com: "Sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan and Somalia is under active consideration but will likely await the return of President Donald Trump from his first foreign trip, which begins this week, according to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. At a White House briefing Friday, McMaster, the White House national security adviser, said, "The president has not made a decision yet on a course of action" in Afghanistan, where Army Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, has requested a "few thousand" more U.S. troops in addition to the 8,400 currently there.

-- Brendan McGarry can be reached at brendan.mcgarry@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Brendan_McGarry.
Camp Lejeune Town Halls Aim to Help Those Exposed to Toxic Water. Heres How You Can Go.

Retired Marine Master Sgt. Jerry Ensminger made it his mission to tell the world that if they lived or served on Camp Lejeune...
The whereabouts of a former U.S. Marine who went missing in Syria while working as a freelance journalist remain unknown, an official said Monday.

Austin Tice, who served as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps, was abducted in August 2012 in Darayya, a suburb of Damascus, three months after he entered the country, according to the U.S. government.

The status of Tice and other American hostages in Syria is unknown, according to Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, who spoke during a press conference Monday morning at the State Department in Washington, D.C.

"On the issue of the U.S. hostages, no, we don't see a connection between the U.S. hostages and what we're talking about what's going on here at Sednaya prison," Jones said, according to a transcript of his remarks.

The assistant secretary of state, who didn't specify how many American hostages are believed to be in the country, was referring to the State Department's belief that the Russian-backed regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has installed a crematorium at Sednaya prison, which is one of the largest military prison complexes in the country and located about a 45-minute drive north of Damascus.

"Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Sednaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium," Jones said. "Although the regime's many atrocities are well-documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison."

More than 400,000 people have been killed since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, according to an estimate released last year by Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations and Arab League envoy to Syria.

The State Department, which warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Syria, believes the Assad regime is responsible for killing as many as 50 detainees per day at Sednaya, Jones said.

After leaving the Corps, Tice pursued his dream of becoming a journalist. His work was published by numerous outlets, including the McClatchy Newspapers, The Washington Post and CBS -- and was awarded the 2012 George Polk Award for War Reporting, according to the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, which launched a campaign to free Tice.

The U.S. currently has about 500 troops, mostly Special Forces, in Syria as part of a campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

-- Brendan McGarry can be reached at brendan.mcgarry@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at@Brendan_McGarry.
Getting out of the service can be daunting. Newly-found autonomy can leave a lot of service members bewildered and a little uneasy about their future career options. Roth Staffing Companies got in touch with Jonathan Boyd, a Marine for 10 years and current business analyst, for the top 10 career tips for Veterans. Being able to break the process down into component steps is important to job-hunting success.

1) Prepare: You should be thinking about transitioning out well before you actually do. Think in terms of months or years, not weeks. Job searching is difficult and often takes a long time, and it's even harder if your chosen career requires post-secondary education that you don't yet possess. The key is to form at least a basic plan while understanding that it's okay to re-strategize at any point. Preparation helps you get moving  stagnation is the only surefire path to trouble.

2) Equip: Every branch of the military provides programs and workshops to help service members transition into the civilian workforce. It's tempting to kick up your boots, but the final few months of your service are some of the most critical to post-military success. The programs you'll be exposed to are valuable opportunities to kick your plans into gear and ensure that you face the civilian job market with a good cache of search tools.

3) Define: One of the biggest problems veterans face is translating military jargon to corporate-speak. While the content of what you're saying is important, you need to be able to use terminology and phrases that civilian employers will understand. If you're a little lost on which civilian jobs dovetail with your former MOS, check out Military.com's own military skills translator.

4) Utilize: Aside from workshops and expert advice, there are many financial benefits that the military offers. A recent analysis by Omaha.com showed that only 36% of American Veterans use the GI Bill's educational benefits. College degrees aren't a guarantee that you'll land a career right out the door, but they do help a lot in your search and usually lead to higher paychecks.

5) Network: Many service members experience camaraderie in the military to a degree not often seen in the civilian world. Your transition is the perfect time to reach into the military network and start making connections with others. There are numerous groups and organizations that bring veterans together to help each other find jobs and stabilize life as a civilian.

6) Contact: It's important to spread your options wide when it comes to searching for jobs. Contacting staffing agencies and other veteran-specific job search programs will give you access to professionals who know how the system works and most likely understand where you're coming from.

7) Examine: In the world of social media, an unprofessional online presence can seriously curtail your job options. Whether it's maintaining a modest profile and lowering public access or simply scrubbing your accounts of compromising behavior, make sure that when employers search for you on the internet, they'll find a potential employee, not a loose cannon.

8) Mobilize: The military provides another huge advantage for veteran job seekers: help with relocation. Often, employers will disfavor candidates because they live too far away  it might not be worth assisting with your relocation fees if you're coming in from halfway across the country. If you haven't moved yet, keep this information in mind when being interviewed, it may be a useful bargaining chip.

9) Select: If you've planned appropriately and aren't in financial trouble, be selective about your job options. It might be unnerving to turn something down, but it's important to your well-being that you choose a job that pays what you need and doesn't make you completely miserable.

10) Strategize: The entire process of searching for a civilian job can be overwhelming, but if you treat it like another mission, you'll be fine. Determine your objective, break down the process into multiple steps, and execute the plan. If you're still drawing blanks and are absolutely confounded, consult job-hunting experts for assistance.

Find the Right Veteran Job

Whether you want to polish your resume, find veteran job fairs in your area or connect with employers looking to hire veterans, Military.com can help. Sign up for a free Military.com membership to have job postings, guides and advice, and more delivered directly to your inbox.
Palestinians are commemorating the 69th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands and displaced, with activities in various areas in the Palestinian territories and abroad.

Marches took place earlier today in a number of cities in the occupied West Bank, including Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem.

In in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, Israeli forces attacked a Nakba march at midday, hospitalising at least three people, with one march participant saying that it is one of the worst (tear) gas experiences they had witnessed in the city in five years, Palestinian news agency Maan reported on Monday.

More activities and marches are set to take place later Monday in occupied Eastern Jerusalem and in Arab villages and towns inside Israel.

Israeli forces were prepared to counter any activities and demonstrations declaring a state of emergency in the occupied West Bank Monday, as well raided the bank earlier, arresting number of activists and a former Palestinian minister, state news agency MENA reported citing Israeli media Monday.

At least seven Palestinians were injured after Israeli forces fired rubber bullets and teargas at the march in Beit El military checkpoint, the northern entrance to Ramallah, local sources told Palestinian news agency WAFA Monday.

Earlier on Monday, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah city centre on the anniversary of the Nakba, the news agency reported.

Many wore black T-shirts with the number 1948 written on the back marking the year when Israel was created in Palestine at the expense of its Palestinian Arab population, while some marchers also carried a large Palestinian flag and a black flag with the words we shall return written on it in Arabic.

At the gathering, speakers narrated the history of the Nakba and its political implications, promising that the right of return for the refugees will never be compromised on for the sake of any political solution.

A group of Palestinian activists also blocked off commuter roads leading to Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank for the second day on Monday morning, demanding more solidarity actions to support Palestinian prisoners on a Hunger strike at both official and popular levels, Ma'an reported.

In addition a mass hunger strike by prisoners in Israeli prisons entered its 29th day, with prisoners facing a harsh crackdown from Israeli prison authorities as the medical conditions of the hunger strikers continued to decline.

Palestinian embassies around the world also organised activities marking the day, as did pro-Palestinian activists.

For example, hundreds of Palestinian and German activists took part in marches and activities in the cities of Berlin, Dortmund, and Hamburg.

In Brighton activists organised a stall to mark the day.

Our #Nakba stall today in central #Brighton remembering 69 years of ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the Palestinian people #BDS pic.twitter.com/CRSMoDhhBH

 Brighton PSC (@BrightonPSC) May 13, 2017

Pain, loss, and injustice

As Palestinians worldwide mark 69 years since their uprooting from their homeland, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said this anniversary means "an ongoing journey of pain, loss, and injustice," WAFA reported.

Our nation marking 69 years of the Nakba, our national catastrophe, is symbolised in our exile and the systematic denial of our rights, said Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the PLOs Executive Committee.

Erekat said the Nakba is also the time to remember massacres of the Palestinian civilian population committed by Zionists before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

In order to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, it is important that Israel recognises the Nakba and apologises for it, he said.

"In that sense, we call upon the Israeli government to open all its 1948 archives and show their own nation the truth of what was done to our people, including its ethnic cleansing policies and the policy of shooting to kill Palestinians that attempted to return home, said the PLO official.

It's also the responsibility of the international community to achieve the Palestinian right to self-determination and to solve all final status issues, including a just resolution of the refugee issue, based on international law and relevant UN resolutions, Erekat concluded.

In the Gaza Strip, a march in Khan Younis Camp was organised by the Higher Committee to Commemorate the Nakba to commemorate both 1948 and the current prisoners hunger strike.

On Saturday, Hamas also organised in the Gaza Strip a march to commemorate the Nakba and to support hunger strike prisoners, Ma'an reported.

Hamas official Hani Islayim said that the march aimed to tell hypocrites that we are staying in Palestine.

On the 69th anniversary, we say that the land is ours, Jerusalem is ours and Palestine is ours, Islayim said.

In a press release on Monday reported by MENA, Hamas said that armed resistance is the real thing that will stop Israeli occupation, referring to the right to return that will not fall with time, and that Palestinian people will not give up on any part of their full lands.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian media ministry said in statement Sunday that the Nakba is still a bleeding wound and a terrorism unprecedented in history, and called for putting all murderers on trial.

The statement added that "the Nakba and the massacres that followed is a strong evidence that the Zionist gangs that built Israel practiced genocide against Palestinians."

Around five million Palestinian refugees, either in the occupied Palestinian territory or in the diaspora, still call for the application of to their internationally recognised right of return to their homes and villages in present-day Israel, a right which has been enshrined in international law following the adoption of United Nations Resolution 194.

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BATTLE CREEK, MI -- Casino and hotel operations manager Kathy George has been named chief executive officer of FireKeepers Casino Hotel.

George has 25 years of experience in the hospitality and gaming industry, the last five as general manager and vice president of hotel operations for FireKeepers.

The leadership change was announced Monday by Jamie Stuck, chairperson of the Tribal Council of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, owners of the gaming facility. It is off Interstate 94 (at Exit 104) in Calhoun County's Emmett Township.

"Kathy George brings a wealth of talent and commitment to excellence to her new role on the FireKeepers team," Stuck stated in a press release. "She has been instrumental in building FireKeepers' stellar reputation and laser focus on customer satisfaction and we are confident that with her superior leadership and top-notch skills, we will build on that success and ensure that FireKeepers remains the casino, hotel and employer of choice."

George fills a post vacated about two months ago by Brian Decorah, who had been president and CEO for about three and a half years. In doing so, she will lead the mammoth casino, its 243-room resort-style hotel and its 1,730-person staff. The casino portion of FireKeepers was a $300 million project that opened in August of 2009.

With a 111,700-square-foot gaming floor, FireKeepers casino has 2,900 slot machines, 70 table games, a live poker room, a bingo room and a multi-purpose event center that can seat up to 2,000 people. It also has six restaurants and multiple lounges.

George started her career at the Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, where she spent 13 years in various areas of hotel operations, including seven years as a general manager. She spending more than four years in New York with the Seneca Gaming Corp., owned and operated by the Seneca Nation of Indians. She worked in several management roles there, including general manager of the Casino and Hotel at Seneca Niagara as well as their Buffalo Creek Casino.

After an open search for a new top executive, George was chosen with the Tribal Council of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band noting her "keen eye for ensuring excellent customer satisfaction" as well as her smiling disposition.

"George has overseen every aspect of FireKeepers Casino Hotel operations from its very beginning, including everything from construction of the 243-room hotel to building the team of well-trained staff who would go on to see FireKeepers Casino Hotel earn the coveted AAA Four Diamond rating," according to information provided by the Tribal Council. "In addition to hotel operations, George also led the sales and catering, environmental services, and retail departments, as well as the Quality Inn & Suites next to the casino."

George has a bachelor's degree in Hotel Administration from Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. She was a recipient of Business First's 40 Under 40 award in 2008. And in the wider community, she is a member of the board of directors of the Calhoun County Visitors Bureau, fund-raising efforts for domestic violence shelter S.A.F.E. Place.
Arturo Uzdavinis

Arturo Uzdavinis originally came into the NFL in 2016 as an undrafted free agent of the Houston Texans, but he's now signed with the Detroit Lions.

(AP Photo)

ALLEN PARK -- The Lions have added one backup offensive tackle to take the place of another.

Detroit has signed Arturo Uzdavinis and waived Pierce Burton to make room, the team announced Monday.

Uzdavinis, 24, spent last season split between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Chicago Bears practice squads. The 6-foot-7-inch, 305-pounder originally arrived as an undrafted free agent out of Tulane in 2016, when he signed with the Houston Texans.

Burton, 26, joined in the Lions in February after bouncing around various practice squads and training camps the past three years.

The Mississippi product arrived as a depth signing in a free-agency period with headline acquisitions in right guard T.J. Lang and right tackle Rick Wagner. The Lions didn't add any competition for Burton or anyone on the offensive line in the draft, spending nine picks on other positions, but they did sign former Toledo tackle Storm Norton as an undrafted free agent.

It's the arrival of Uzdavinis that sends Burton out.

The Lions wrapped up their annual three-day rookie minicamp Sunday. In addition to practicing their draft picks and UDFA signings for the first time, they extended tryouts to a number of players, mostly undrafted rookies. They have yet to announce whether they've added any of these players, but those decisions could come soon.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the age provided by Justin Henderson's family.

OCEOLA TOWNSHIP, MI - Alcohol is believed to be a factor in the car crash that killed five people and injured three others on May 9 in Livingston County's Oceola Township, police said.

Police are awaiting toxicology reports to confirm their initial belief regarding the crash about 10:30 p.m. at the intersection of Argentine Road and M-59 in Oceola Township. The location is east of Howell.

Police so far have declined to give any additional information regarding who may have consumed alcohol before the crash.

Though the incident remains under investigation, police believe a vehicle driven by Matthew J. Carrier, 22, of Fenton, was headed southbound on Argentine Road and failed to stop at a stop sign. The vehicle driven by Carrier struck a vehicle driven eastbound on M-59 by Albert R. Boswell, 39, of Oakland County.

Neither driver had a valid driver's license, according to state records,

Boswell's girlfriend Candice Lynn Dunn, 35, of Oakland County, her mother Linda K. Hurley, 69, of Macomb County and Hurley's boyfriend, Jerome J. Tortomasi, 73, of Macomb County, were killed in the crash.

At the time, the group had been driving back from the Michigan Department of Corrections' Employee Appreciation Banquet in East Lansing where Dunn was honored as the MDOC's 2017 Parole/Probation Agent of the Year.

Also killed were two passengers from Carrier's vehicle, Justin Andrew-Humberto Henderson, 18, and Preston Taylor Wetzel, 24, both of Fenton.

Carrier, Boswell, and one other passenger of Carrier's, Kyle Eugene Lixie, 23, were hospitalized in critical condition following the crash.

Police said Monday, May 15 that all three were in stable condition. However, according to the University of Michigan hospital, Carrier remains in serious condition. The hospital had no information on Boswell or Lixie.

Police said several interviews have been conducted and investigators are reviewing physical evidence in the crash. The case will be submitted to the Livingston County Prosecutor's Office for review once the rest of the investigation is completed.
Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf quit Iran's presidential race on Monday and said he would back hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi in Friday's vote.

Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guards commander and police chief, was one of the main conservative challengers to President Hassan Rouhani, who is seeking a second term.

"I should take an important decision to keep the unity of revolutionary forces," Qalibaf said in a statement published in state media. "I ask all my supporters around the country to use all their capacity to help my brother, Mr Ebrahim Raisi, win the election."

Raisi's popularity has rise steadily in recent weeks and Qalibaf's decision should give him a last-minute boost against Rouhani, a pragmatist who has eased Iran's international isolation but failed to spur a sluggish economy.

Qalibaf's allies had argued that he had more recognition in the capital Tehran and among young voters, and offered a more coherent economic plan than some other conservative candidates.

He was left with no option but to quit the race, however, when main conservative parties and clerical bodies threw their support behind Raisi, a jurist and cleric who studied at the feet of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The news Qalibaf was standing down broke as Raisi was delivering a speech in Shiraz, causing delight among his supporters. The crowd started chanting "Qalibaf, Thank you!" according to videos released on social media.

"I am also very thankful," Raisi replied to the crowd. "He did a revolutionary act."

Qalibaf finished second in the last election four years ago with 16.5 percent of the vote. Rouhani won just over 50 percent, averting a second round.

Some conservatives had been unhappy that Qalibaf was standing again and risking a split in the anti-Rouhani vote.

"The biggest fear of the conservatives was that Qalibaf may outperform Raisi on Friday, but not be able to pose a serious challenge, let alone beat Rouhani in the run-off," said Hossein Rassam, a former adviser to Britain's Foreign Office.

Rouhani has warned his supporters that Qalibaf and Raisi, whose backgrounds are in the Revolutionary Guards and Iran's hardline judiciary, will take the country back to "extremism."

He said on Monday he needed a stronger mandate to liberalise Iranian society.

Hamid Aboutalebi, Rouhani's deputy chief of staff, said in a tweet that most of Qalibaf's supporters would now vote for Rouhani as only those two candidates had managerial experience and a solid plan.

New Alliance

"Qalibafs votes will be divided between Rouhani and Raisi. In Tehran, his votes will go mainly to Rouhani but outside Tehran his supporters will vote for Raisi," said political analyst Hamid Farahvashian.

"However, I don't think there will be a significant impact as Qalibaf got six million votes in 2013."

Only minutes after the news, posters appeared on conservative media showing the black-turbaned Raisi alongside Qalibaf, wearing a yellow safety helmet.

Analysts have said Raisi might name Qalibaf as his vice-president to appeal to technocrats, although neither of them has responded to such predictions.

Raisi and Qalibaf will appear together at a rally in Tehran on Tuesday.

The two had adopted similar campaign tactics, criticising Rouhani's economic record -- particularly high unemployment, which rose 1.4 percent last year to 12.4 percent -- and his policy of detente with the West.

Both had promised to create five to six million jobs in their first terms, if elected, and to triple monthly cash handouts to Iran's poor, but have been criticised for not explaining how they would fund such programmes.

"Raisi may not have a very strong vote block, but as some polls have suggested, his negative vote is smaller than Qalibaf's," said Hossein Rassam. "It is not just about the popularity ... of a candidate, but (their) unpopularity too."

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The United States has evidence the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has built a crematorium at a large military prison outside the capital Damascus, a State Department official said on Monday.

Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, said U.S. officials believe the crematorium would be used to dispose of bodies at a prison, where they believe Assad's government authorized the mass hangings of thousands of inmates during Syria's 6-year-old civil war.

"Credible sources have believed that many of the bodies have been disposed in mass graves," Jones told reporters at a briefing.

"We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Sednaya prison complex which could dispose of detainees remains with little evidence," he said.

The United States believes the crematorium would be used to cover up mass murders at the prison and will present the evidence to the international community, Jones said.

Amnesty International reported in February that an average of 20 to 50 people were hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison north of Damascus. Between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Sednaya in the four years since a popular uprising descended into war, it said.

Jones also was not optimistic about a deal to set up "de-escalation zones" inside Syria in an attempt to reduce violence and save lives. The deal was brokered by Russia with support from Iran and Turkey during ceasefire talks in the Kazakh capital of Astana last week.

"In light of the failures of the past ceasefire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical," Jones said. "The (Assad) regime must stop all attacks on civilian and opposition forces. And Russia must bear responsibility to ensure regime compliance.

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Two spokesmen for a group of 8,400 mutinous soldiers in Ivory Coast told Reuters on Monday that they had rejected an agreement proposed by the government to end their four-day mutiny over unpaid bonuses.

"They proposed 5 million CFA francs (each) to be paid tomorrrow. But we want 7 million to be paid in one payment and immediately ," Sergeant Seydou Kone said.

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Egypt will receive two million barrels of crude oil on Tuesday from Iraq, the first shipment to arrive as part of a deal with the Iraq's state oil marketing company SOMO, Al-Ahrams Arabic website quoted Egypts Oil Minister Tarek El-Molla as saying.

Under the terms of the year-long agreement, which was reached last month by Baghdad and Cairo, Iraq will sell 12 million barrels of oil to Egypt.

Cairo has been struggling to procure oil and natural gas for domestic market needs from several sources in the past few years.

However, recent surges in natural gas discoveries and projected finds in the country promise to help Egypt cut down on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports in the coming year.

Egypt, the eighth largest importer of LNG in the world, has been holding talks with its LNG suppliers to defer contracted shipments this year to cut back on purchases in 2018 and achieve self-sufficiency in the alternative fuel source by the end of that year.

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Egypts minister of investment and international cooperation met on Monday with the CEO of the Silk Road Fund to discuss possible mutual benefits from the Chinese funds financing opportunities for other countries, read the ministrys statement on its website.

Sahar Nasr and Jin Qis talks came on the sidelines of their participation in the One Belt, One Road two-day summit, which started on 14 May, under the Silk Road Initiative launched by Chinas President Xi Jinping.

The new Silk Road plan aims to revive the ancient trade routes between China and the Mediterranean countries through Asia and Europe.

According to the statement, Nasr has expressed her aspirations to increase Chinas ranking among the countries investing in Egypt, given that the number of Chinese companies operating in Egypt reached up to 1,300 companies.

The minister said that the recently approved investment law would offer several investment incentives that facilitate procedures for investors and contribute to supporting the private sector.

Egypts House of Representatives approved earlier this month a new investment law that grants investors a number of incentives, including tax breaks.

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Despite announcements by the airline's CEO earlier that Qatar Airways is eyeing the Indian market, sources tell CNBC TV18 that the Doha-based airline might not push for setting up a fully owned airline yet reports.

Sources say the airlines is likely to put its India plans on hold for now till they have further clarity from India government on FDI norms.

They have not yet approached the Indian government yet, say sources.

However, the airlines did not respond to queries from CNBC-TV18.

The company CEO in March had said the airline plans to set up a full-owned venture in India.

However, sources say domestic airlines opposed Qatar Airways proposal to set up a 100 percent owned airline in India. The domestic airlines raised concerns over the lack of reciprocity and demanded a level playing field.
Banking sector in the last three years under the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government may well have seen some big announcements but going just by the financial numbers in the banking sector may present a dark picture of the performance.

However, it may be said that the skeletons were waiting to be out of the cupboard.

In an attempt to help banks, especially public sector banks (PSBs) recognise the ashes of high level of non-performing assets (NPAs) and rise like a phoenix, in December 2015, the Reserve Bank of India under the leadership of former Governor Raghuram Rajan, asked banks to set aside a pool of funds in the form of provisioning towards sub-standard assets. This further dented the banks balance sheets.

Most banks, the backbone of the economy, have been saddled with heavy bad loans hitting at their profitability for nearly two years now. To put a perspective, 28 public sector banks reported a collective net loss of Rs 17,993 crore in 2015-16, government numbers suggested. Of them, 14 banks including the second and third largest banks registered net loss in their books for the same financial year.

So, the Modi government inherited, inter alia, weak banking sector drowned by NPAs due to non-repayment of loans by big corporates suffering from stuck economic projects, a rigmarole legal system for debt recovery, incompetent bank chiefs elected by political interference and about 50 percent of Indians still excluded from access to formal banking channels.

The first two years with Modi at the helm did see announcements of Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojna (PMJDY) in August 2014 and passage of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Act in early 2016 in order to increase banking access and resolve stressed loans by speeding up the legal process.

Having secured its financial inclusion achievements under PMJDY in the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest financial inclusion initiative in the world with banks opening 11.50 crore accounts, covering 99.74 per cent of the households, access to major banking services is yet to see much light.

The resolution of stressed loans or NPAs and potential ones, which is the governments biggest endevour, have met with many decrees including the bankruptcy code and mechanisms set out by RBI such as strategic debt restructuring (SDR), joint lenders forum (JLF) and Scheme for Sustainable Structuring of Stressed Assets (S4A) among others. However, most have failed to bear the desired result so far.

Last one year saw other major announcements like setting up of the Banks Board Bureau and introduction of a framework for accountability in banks by professionalising the PSBs and having revised performance indicators for banks to get capital infusion.

On the PSB leadership positions, even as the government had made changes in the form of CEO and Managing Directors instead of Chairmen in 2015 and hiring some private sector professionals, last month the Finance Ministry again reshuffled some of those existing PSB chiefs and made new appointments.

In April this year, the Modi Government made the biggest reform announcement by amending the Banking Regulation Act and passing the NPA ordinance empowering both the RBI and banks with the help of oversight panels and independent professionals to shield bankers who fear pull up and interference by the legal agencies especially the 3 Cs  CBI, CAG and CVC  which had hampered hard decision making.

Bankers and other experts see the governments intent given these announcements and efforts including to bring the most notorious loan defaulter businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

While experts view the ordinance as a step towards more transparency, time-based resolution of stressed loans and higher decision making capacity by bankers, the implementation is yet to bear fruits. Today, PSBs in total have a stressed loan ratio of 12.3 percent, much higher than their private sector peers.

Also, no more willing to handhold the weaker banks, the Finance Ministry has proposed consolidation in the banking sector to weed out weaker and smaller banks with only 5-6 big banks to remain in existence.

This process has been kickstarted with countrys largest bank State Bank of India having merged its five associates and the all-women Bharatiya Mahila Bank with itself from April 1. But other banks may still be exploring the option to get the right match and price.

Further, the Centre is pushing for affordable housing loans with Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme (CLSS) and aggressive thrust on digital banking transactions aided by the sudden cash crunch due to demonetisation announcement in November that rattled the banking system which is encumbered with credit growth at multi-year lows of sub-5 percent.

In October 2015, Modi said the entire banking sector is undergoing major transformation with the advent of latest technology. "We have to take the country in that direction. As we use technology, we move to paper-less banking, currency-less business operations; the possibility of black money will gradually become negligible," he said.

While black money becoming negligible may still be hovered with lot of unanswered questions, digital push saw a slight decline since February even as it is showing a growing trend.

Modi government may have well-positioned itself for the 2019 elections from industrialists and bankers having shown the intent with many big and small announcements in the banking sector.

However, achhe din for the banking sector will be only when its implementation, in especially resolution the bad loans, will clean their balance sheets and the bottom of the pyramid gets loans from banks avoiding the money lenders wrath.
In the Mumbai bullion market, the yellow metal saw a gain of rs 19 in prices to Rs 38,450 per 10 gram of 24-carat gold (plus 3 percent GST), on the back of festive demand. (Image: Reuters)

Higher demand in the Middle-East and South-East Asia could help India's gems and jewellery export grow this fiscal to about USD 42 billion, an export promotion body said today.

In 2016-17, the export totalled at around USD 36 billion.

According to Anil Sankhwal, Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) northern region chairman, Europe poses a challenge to exporters.

"But in the US, Middle-East nations and South-East Asia, demand is growing. We are expecting that our exports will reach about USD 41-42 billion this fiscal," Sankhwal told reporters here.

He also expressed concern over imposition of 5 per cent import duty by Dubai on gold and diamond jewellery.

"The move would impact India's exports. We are discussing measures to deal with the situation as Dubai is an important market," Sankhwal said.

About steps to boost export, he said GJEPC is organising a buyer-seller meet in the national capital.

A three-day event -- India SAARC-Middle East Buyer Seller Meet -- started yesterday.

"In this meet, 38 domestic manufacturers and 70 international buyers from South Asia, the Middle-East, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Qatar are participating," he said.

On display is a wide range of jewellery products by exhibitors.

"There is a huge potential in these markets. The event provides a platform to bring traders together and explore business opportunities," he said.
Build your skillset: Change is the only constant and with the evolving times an updated skillset would be a handy addition to your resume. Show potential employers what youve learned that can be an asset to their business in the post-coronavirus world. (Image Source: Reuters)

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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked banks to improve their banking systems including their ATM networks with a Windows security update to enhance security and protect them from the malware attack that took place over the weekend.

Ransomware or popularly known as WannaCry, ravaged computer systems in over 150 countries, locking up critical data. The hackers dubbed Shadow Brokers promised to free up the data files only after USD 300 dollars were paid in bitcoins. While the spread of the virus has slowed over the weekend, more than 2 lakh computers have been affected so far.

Even as most banks suggest they are not infected, they are required to upgrade their systems with the latest Windows patches as a precautionary measure.

Bankers and ATM operators suggest that ATMs work in isolation and are not exposed to the internet on which the malware has roamed free.

Meanwhile, many ATMs may remain closed for software updates as they are seen as being vulnerable since almost all of them are run on Windows software. Also, over 60 percent of the total 2.25 lakh ATMs in the country operate on the outdated Windows XP.

An ATM operator said ATMs may not be as susceptible to this particular attack as there is no data stored in the ATMs which the attackers can hold to ransom. At the most, it can stop ATM functions.

A senior Bank of Baroda official said, ATMs, mobile applications and core banking solutions work on closed networks, so this attack may not directly impact them. We have updated our patches on an immediate basis under the RBIs directions. RBI even asked us to get our anti-virus, firewalls and other security measures updated.

A Kotak Mahindra Bank spokeperson said, The bank has robust security controls to guard against various cyber-attacks. We have an on-going process of identifying risks and enhancing controls. We monitor our systems round the clock, and our systems and ATMs are well secured. We have educated our employees on the issue, and are keeping them updated on the secure operations of systems. Action has been taken to validate our systems to ensure that they are protected with appropriate patches against ransomware. We have not encountered any incident due to this attack.

According to another banker, many banks work on outdated systems for not so important functions due to high costs attached to upgrading. Some smaller branches at remote locations may not be working on updated systems and, hence, could be vulnerable.

Microsoft has issued a statement saying that it has developed and released a special update for Windows XP although this particular version of its operating system is no longer serviced by the company.

The Bank of Baroda official quoted above said this is a rare occasion that Microsoft has given an update for the software products which are outdated. But given the sensitivity of the situation and date on the outdated products, it has given us new patches.

No bank has explicitly reported any incidents of a malware attack on their systems. However, there are reports of two south-based banks being infected. There have been no confirmation yet from the RBI on the same.
If you are a Chartered Accountant (CA) aged 45-55 years of age, a job is awaiting you. The Reserve Bank of India has opened applications for the job of Chief Financial Officer at the rank of Executive Director.

This is a first by the central bank as till now, it did not have a dedicated official handling the finance function but worked out by internal staff.

For contractual appointment, the cost to company (CTC) per month works out as Rs 2 lakh per month with housing and Rs 4 lakh per month without housing (due for revision) with an annual increase of 3-5 percent of gross CTC or regular revision as applicable.

For regular appointment, the RBI will pay a starting basic salary of Rs 120,500 per month along with dearness, house, special and local compensatory allowances and the gross emoluments will be at Rs 240,660 per month.

The appointment will be part of a major organisational change being carried out by governor Urjit Patel.

Lateral hiring within the RBI has been spoken about since Patels predecessor Raghuram Rajan who had proposed the idea to hire new talent from outside the central bank.

He had pursued an idea of creating a chief operating officer at RBI but was rejected by the government as it involved changing the RBI Act. Nevertheless, Rajan had hired a slew of specialists from outside.

In a 2,500-word letter to the RBI staff on the last day of 2015, Rajan had said: While we will look for homegrown talent where possible, we need lateral entry in some areas  provided internal people have a fair chance to compete for the jobs.

Rajan spoke about maintaining vibrancy within the institution and called out the rot within the RBI cautioning all 17,000 employees to come out of complacency and self-satisfaction where lies slow descent into mediocrity.

For the role of CFO, the central bank has called for CAs eligible for the job with desirable additional degrees  CFA/MBA in Finance; Certificate in Financial Risk Management from internationally acclaimed University/Associations like GARP.

The appointment will be made for three years and may be extended to maximum of two more years. The performance of appointee will be reviewed annually to decide on the continuance of contract. On completion of 3 years, stagnation allowance may be given which will not be admissible for Dearness Allowance or any superannuation benefits, it said.

The central banks application said that the job role requires a minimum of 15 years in overseeing financial operations in banks or financial institutions or large financial companies after acquiring CA qualification of which a minimum of 5 years should be as a full time CFO or an equivalent position in a regular capacity  and not in a contractual/adhoc capacity.

In the recruitment advertisement put out on Monday, RBI has sought experienced professionals who can help run the central banks accounts.

The key job responsibilities for such a professional would include communicating the banks expected and actual financial performance and overseeing the budget process. The CFO would also ensure compliance with financial regulations and flag off any risks to the central banks finances, it said.

The banking regulator has also invited its own staff with the prescribed qualifications currently working as Chief General Manager, or, as General Manager with five years experience in the grade.

The candidates applying for the post must submit their application by post to The General Manager, Reserve Bank of India Services Board, IIIrd Floor, RBI Building, Opp. Mumbai Central Railway Station, Byculla, Mumbai - 400008 along with relevant documents as mentioned on its website
business RBI's steps will help banks make loans viable: Ashok Lavasa, Finance Secretary The recent NPA ordinance is a part of a multi-pronged approach to resolve the bad debt crisis  that's the word from Finance Secretary, Ashok Lavasa. Speaking to CNBC-TV18's Malvika Jain in the USA, Lavasa also said that the government is looking at taking sector specific steps to tackle the bad loan problem.
The Cannes Film Festival, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, has historically been about as fond of change as day-old baguettes.

As much as its screens light up with the world's most daring, adventurous cinema, the French Riviera festival protects its traditions more closely than its dapper hosts guard the famous Cannes red carpet. But this year, even as Cannes prepares for a lavish birthday celebration, the Croisette is quaking with transformation.

This year's festival, which opens Wednesday with French director Arnaud Desplechin's "Ismael's Ghosts," contains films from Netflix (Bong Joon-ho's "Okja" and Noah Baumbach's "The Meyerowitz Stories"), movies from Amazon (including Todd Haynes' "Wonderstruck"), two high-profile television series (David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" revival and Jane Champion's "Top of the Lake"), and virtual-reality exhibits, including a multi-media installation by Alejandro Inarritu.

But trying to keep pace with today's fast-changing media landscape has come with plenty of challenges for a time-honored institution like Cannes. While unveiling this year's lineup, Cannes director Thierry Fremaux acknowledged the festival's internal hand-wringing over such issues. The festival, he concluded, is "a lab."

Yet some of the festival's experiments have already proven highly combustible. After an outcry from French theaters, organizers announced last week that beginning next year, films without the intentions of a theatrical release in France won't be eligible for Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or competition  the festival's main slate of about 20 films. The move effectively bars Netflix releases from Europe's answer to an Oscar race. Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings bitterly called it "the establishment closing ranks against us."

It's not that such clashes aren't happening throughout the movie industry. But like everything else at Cannes, they're inflated at the festival, arguably the most passionate standard-bearer of cinema.

Sofia Coppola has been coming to Cannes since she was a child, accompanying her father when he debuted "Apocalypse Now." This year, she'll premiere one of the most anticipated films there, "The Beguiled," her fourth at Cannes and second in competition.

"It's still a place that's celebrating and loves international cinema, and the idea of cinema," said Coppola. "I feel like that's at the heart of it."

Cannes has often come under criticism for a lack of female directors  not to mention occasionally turning away women without high heels from red-carpet premieres. There are 12 female-directed films among the 54 official selections this year, including three in competition. (The other two are Lynne Ramsay's "You Were Never Really Here," with Joaquin Phoenix, and Naomi Kawese's "Radiance.")

"I guess there's three instead of two this year," said Coppola. "I think they have more there than we do here. There's always been more of a tradition of female filmmakers in France and internationally."

Coppola's film is its own kind of correction. It's a remake of Don Siegel's 1971 Civil War drama about a Union soldier (Clint Eastwood, who will also be at Cannes to teach a masterclass) hiding out in a Southern girls school. Coppola wanted to flip the story to a female point of view.

Like many other filmmakers, Coppola was racing last week to put the final touches on her film before the festival. But Inarritu was arriving in Cannes days early to finish building the space for his "CARNE y ARENA (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible)," a three-part installation about immigrants and refugees.

"I'm very curious to see how people from cinema will react to this," said Inarritu. "It's an individual experience. It's one-by-one and it's six minutes-and-a-half.

This is not a community experience. That will give the festival something extraordinary to experience and see what people think about it."

Inarritu said he always envisioned the piece in a museum (it will launch later in Milan's Fondazione Prada). But he said after he showed it to Fremaux, the Cannes director was "very insistent" that he bring it to the festival. "I thought it was an interesting proposition," said Inarritu. "Let's see what happens."

While virtual reality is now widespread on the festival circuit, Cannes has been more reluctant to embrace it. It has, though, sometimes showcased TV works, notably Steven Soderbergh's HBO Liberace drama "Behind the Candelabra" and Olivier Assayas' miniseries "Carlos."

The dust-up with Netflix has put a brighter spotlight on "Okja" and "The Meyerowitz Stories."

"It's an interesting issue and it's going to continue," said Joon-ho, "Okja's" director. "While that was all happening, I was focused on post production in Los Angeles. That's really where my focus is. These other bigger industry-wide issues will naturally get resolved with time."

"Okja," starring Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, is the South Korean director's follow-up to "Snowpiercer." It's a fantasy about the gulf between humans and animals, individuals and corporations.

"After all this talk has come and gone," said Joon-ho, "I hope people just focus on the film itself and the story and the images."

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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India is staring at possibly its biggest jobs crisis in the services sector, as information technology and IT-enabled services companies stare at shrinking profits and a dramatically altered business environment. Industry body NASSCOM and its members have denied reports of around 50,000 planned sackings in the sector.

But employees and industry watchers believe nearly 1 lakh IT jobs will vanish by the end of this year, as revenues and profit margins are under severe pressure.

Also, because of increasing automation, the direct co-relation between growth in revenues and hirings has almost halved.

In the past, for a 10 percent growth in revenues, net employee addition was about the same level. Now for every percentage point increase in revenues, net employee addition grows by half a percentage point.

Indias USD 154 billion IT sector has been powering Indias jobs engine for over two decades now. That is set to change. Credible talk is that the pace of job losses will only accelerate in the coming years, and nearly a fourth of all IT jobs could become redundant over the next three years.

The IT sector currently employs around 4.5 million people. And IT companies sack 1 percent of their work force every year, citing performance issues. That alone accounts for roughly 45,000 job losses every year.

Automation may be a major factor behind the vanishing jobs, but it is not the only reason.

In February this year, Capgemini Indias Chief Executive Srinivas Kandula had warned that nearly two-thirds of Indias IT staff cannot be retrained. He also predicted that India would witness the largest unemployment in the middle level to senior level.

Talking to Moneycontrol, R Chandrasekaran, Chairman of NASSCOM declined to comment on the quantum of layoffs in the industry.

We are not picking up any extraordinary change in pattern in terms of people being released and we dont know where these numbers are coming from.

This industry is about skills and maintaining a competitive edge. Industry will look at people with such skill sets. If people have not been able to upgrade as per changing demand then it is difficult to presume that older skills will be sufficient to keep them employed. Unless the skills are upgraded these people would be at risk.

Another worrying aspect of the retrenchment drive is ageism or discrimination based on the age of the professional.

Says a senior associate at a recruitment firm, Even if we recommend a better professional in his 40s at the same salary as a 32-year old, companies are unwilling to even entertain such a person. Age is a big factor now as companies prefer to hire younger people and reskill them as they are cheaper. Not surprising that a majority of the employees who have been asked to quit are between 35-50 years of age.

While companies claim that it is purely about performance, employees at the receiving end disagree. Moneycontrol has interviewed and reviewed performance appraisal records of several such employees who have suddenly been branded as non-performers. The agenda is to sack high-cost employees and increase the proportion of freshers or junior employees with less than five years of experience.

The dispute over the number of people fired also has to do with many companies forcing people to resign voluntarily instead of issuing termination letters.

For instance, Cognizant employees claim that so far 6,000 have been asked to resign and that the year-end target is 22,000.

In response to a questionnaire from Moneycontrol, Cognizant said: Each year, as is the best practice across our industry, we conduct a performance review to ensure we have the right employee skill sets necessary to meet client needs and achieve our business goals. This process results in changes, including some employees transitioning out of the company. Any actions as the result of this process are performance-based and generally consistent with those weve made in previous years. The numbers mentioned in the media are vastly exaggerated and did not come from the company.

A similar story is playing out at various centres of technology companies across India. Mphasis has let go of many in Pune, while Capgemini has a target of retrenching 9000 people over the next month, claim insiders. Numbers of Wipro and Infosys in comparison appear to be very benign in comparison, but are fairly high in absolute terms.

Industry body NASSCOM believes that while there is pain in the market, the numbers are exaggerated. Given the manner in which some companies are asking people to resign, it is apparent that there is a need to make the process of retrenchment more transparent.

While changing dynamics and automation is affecting job creation in the IT sector, consolidation is expected to lead to shedding of jobs in the telecom sector. Lack of new jobs in the three key service sectors will have a cascading impact on the 12 million graduates that India produces every year. Even as hiring has slowed in the services sectors, no new sectors have come up of late that can absorb the newly minted engineers and graduates that India keeps churning out.

Saurabh Mukherjee, CEO of institutional equities at Ambit Capital, says, White collar job creation now seems about to conk off comprehensively as financial services, IT services and telecom  three sectors which, with total employment of 6 million people, have been the mainstays of white collar job creation  get ready to shed staff.

Indias army of a million software engineers and coders need to desperately acquire new skills if they want to stay relevant in the employment market. Nasscom is working with 20 software companies to reskill the workforce over the next two years.

The creation of new jobs has also slowed on a year-on-year basis. Software services exports look at single digit growth and clients drive down costs. Increased usage of technology will create new jobs for engineers, but they will be more specialized jobs and will require more than basic coding skills.
Job loss | The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the job landscape in India. According the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) about 21 million salaries employees lost their jobs during April-August. There were 86 million salaried jobs in India during 2019-20. In August 2020, the count was down to 65 million after 3.3 million jobs were gone in the particular month, mostly among the industrial workers and white collar workers, as per the CMIE. (Image: Shutterstock)

It keeps getting worse for IT stocks. They received a minor jolt on Monday after executive search firm Head Hunters India published a report which put the annual job loss count in the sector at about 2 lakh for the next three years. Though the scrips recovered with the IT index falling by only 0.27 percent, even a minor blip is likely to be seen in the larger context of headwinds battering the sector.

Assuming 6 lakh jobs are indeed on the line, the number constitutes about 15 percent of 3.9 million workforce which are currently employed. However, most of these jobs will either be filled by lower-cost employees or will fall redundant on account of change in technology.

Most of the job losses, as has been seen in the case of Cognizant, is in the middle and senior level positions. Recently, Cognizant asked 1,000 senior employees to take a severance package equivalent to between 6-9 months of pay. Other companies have also reported job cuts, which they term is part of the performance appraisal process.

Since the job cuts are of higher salaried professionals, who will be replaced by swift-footed fresh engineers, the market does not seem to be too perturbed. Fresh blood that is getting absorbed in companies come in with a different skill set which is the need of the hour.

While one would like to blame US President Donald Trump for the crisis in the IT sector, the fact of the matter is Indian companies were slow to react to the changing times. As a result most of the low-end jobs, which are largely carried out by Indian IT companies are soon going to be replaced by robots.

The Head Hunters report points out that the industry will need to retrain 50-60 percent of the workforce as there is a significant shift in technologies. Many of those individuals who need to be retrained are in the middle and senior management space. Companies find it easier and cheaper to hire a fresh candidate than to train the older ones.

As automation takes over IT companies, the job cuts will most likely result in better numbers. But the digital technology space is still too small when compared with the total turnover of IT companies. It would thus take a few more years before digital business starts contributing to operating margins.

From a purely stock perspective, one can look at the recent developments in the IT space positively as excess flab is cut and companies are tightening their belts.

However, the job losses and slower job addition will have an impact on other parts of the economy. IT sector accounts for around 9.3 percent of the GDP, employs 3.9 million directly and over 10 million indirectly.

As the IT jobs of middle management employees are lost, banking sector which has mainly funded cars and houses of these employees will be under pressure. Home prices are likely to remain flat and might even fall as supply increases. Housing rentals are expected to be first casualty.

Real estate sector, banking, especially retail banking, tourism, hospitality and automobile sectors had been a direct beneficiary of the boom in IT space. The entry level salaries have been stagnant at Rs 3-3.5 lakh per annum for nearly 7 years now. But it was the middle and senior level employees that were driving consumption demand.

The main hit could be felt on the student loan segment. Slowdown in the US has already led to a USD 1.3 trillion education loan crisis in that country. Education loan in the US is now the second largest consumer debt, second only to the mortgage loan. India, too, has roughly an exposure of Rs 1 lakh crore in education loans with nearly 15 percent of it being disbursed in Tamil Nadu. On account of lack of jobs or low salary levels, there are more defaults being witnessed in this segment. Like agriculture loans, education loans are also becoming a political issue.

Signs of how the IT sector is gearing up to meet the challenge is visible and well tracked. But the effect of slowdown on account of job losses is yet to make headlines.
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The S&P BSE Sensex rallied 25 percent, while the S&P Smallcap index nearly doubled in the last three years Modi government in office. Investors who were not scared to take some risk ended up making up to 6,000 percent return in the same period.

As much as 30 stocks gave over 1,000 percent returns in the last three years which include names like Uniply Industries, Mangalam Drugs, Cupid, Capital Trust, Indo Count Industries, ITD Cementation, Dwarikesh Sugar, Asian Granito, Can Fin Homes etc. among others.

And, as much as 428 stocks in the S&P BSE Smallcap index more than doubled your wealth in the last three years of Modi government which include names like Nilkamal, Dalmia Bharat, Subros, Nitin Spinners, Avanti Feeds, SpiceJet, Welspun India, JBM Auto, IFB Industries, Dishman Pharma, LT Foods, Sterlite Technologies etc. among others.

Smallcap stocks turned out to be the real beneficiary of the Modi wave which swept across the nation back in the year 2014.

Reforms initiated by the government to boost economic activity, kick start investment cycle, double agricultural income, increase rural consumption, boost manufacturing, curb on the supply of black money and now goods & services tax (GST) all support smallcap companies.

Expectations of better than expected monsoon in the year 2017 have also turned the tide for smallcap companies. Given the sharp run-up in prices, many smallcap companies are trading at valuations which are slightly higher than long-term averages, which makes them slightly risky to own them.

Most analysts are betting on a recovery in earnings as fundamentals of most companies in small or midcap space have not improved much but priced have shot up in the last 3 years.

The Indian stock markets have soared to new highs in the three years since the current Government assumed office. This time around, the rally was not patchy and stock specific but was rather broad based with nearly all sectors fuelling the run-up, Prasanth Prabhakaran, Senior President & CEO, YES Securities India Limited told Moneycontrol.

The market is on an upward trajectory supported by an improvement in the countrys fundamentals. This is clearly reflected in the earnings growth that has improved from the levels seen 3- 4 quarters ago. Although recovery is yet to be broad-based, earnings are on the path of improvement, he said.

Analysts are betting on two big themes which will remain in focus at least in the next two years of Modi government. One is the rural theme, banking and the other is affordable housing and companies across sectors which are liked to these schemes are likely to remain in focus.

The government has been quite vocal about increasing farm output and double the income of farmers. Therefore, stocks focused on agri and/or rural consumption could be the next multibagger.

There are many cylinders that this government has fired in order to kick start the economic engine ranging from Direct Benefit Transfers, passing of various bills to inject life in Real Estate and Banking sector, promoting defense manufacturing locally, encouraging startup culture in India by making appropriate changes in the law, and many more, Jimeet Modi, CEO, SAMCO Securities told Moneycontrol.

The biggest and most important is the genuine attempt by the government to curb corruption by bringing in Demonetization, restricting the use of cash above Rs 2,00,000/-, modifying treaties with tax haven countries to end the tax immunity/holiday all done prospectively so that the integrity of the system is maintained, he said.
Highlighting the mismatch between price and fundamentals in midcap and smallcap stocks, Quantum Securities is sounding caution on these segments.

Midcaps and smallcaps are worrying me now. Price-value mismatch is significant," Sanjay Dutt, Director, Quantum Securities, told CNBC-TV18 in an interview, saying investors should consider taking profits off the table.

Having said that, Dutt believes that this is a liquidity-driven market and not a fundamental one and investors money will move into largecaps. So, there wont be much of change on how the market will move.

The public sector banking space, Dutt said, is still grappling with the problem of what will happen on the NPA front. However, one can still look at good names such as State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda etc. From a long-term perspective, he still prefers this space and believes one can make money here.

Meanwhile, capital goods and consumption space are sectors with high potential, Dutt told the channel. The early numbers look nice there and capital goods is starting to show uptick, he said.

Among his recommendations, he also said that it is time to look at select stocks in the IT and pharma sector. One cannot ignore these two sectors in the current economical setup, he added.

Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview.

Anuj: I wanted your thoughts on how the market has moved over the last three or four months. Absolutely no correction, just one way linear move, do you think this pattern will continue, you will have to buy at these levels or do you think a significant dip could come?

A: I dont think so and in fact I would like to divide the market into two parts at this point of time. One, being the largecaps where substantial liquidity from large investors, particularly overseas, foreign portfolio investors is going to be focused on and the second being the midcap and the smallcap space. In fact I really want to sound a word of caution for the midcap and the smallcap space right now. I see a large number of smallcap and midcap stocks built up phenomenal amount of froth which is way ahead of the fundamentals. So, the price value mismatch is very significant in that segment of the market.

However, at the same time, the fact remains that it is a liquidity driven market, more than purely a fundamentals driven market. Money would continue to flow in but I think a good amount of money would now flow into largecaps. However, at the same time, you will not see a substantial change in the Nifty, or change in the topline indices because within the indices you will see a rotational kind of movement which is typical of bull markets. The stocks that have run up substantially even in the largecap space, some of them have run up 20-40 percent in this year itself, in this calendar year. They would take a break or correct. The ones which are laggards or who are showing early signs of fundamentals picking up would actually do the catching up.

So, to cut the long story short, from an index standpoint, the worst kind of correction you would probably see barring unforeseen black swan events, would be 150-200 points in the Nifty. However, I think the midcap, smallcap space is really worrying me right now and that is where one needs to be extremely cautious as to where one is putting money, where one is holding in fact, you may actually want to take a good amount of profits off from there also.

Sonia: I wanted your thoughts on how one can approach PSU banks now. A lot has happened over there, there is the NPA resolution mechanism that could be finalised by the end of the week, etc. is this a space that one can still jump into or would you advice caution here?

A: I am glad you asked me this question and more so because we have Latha on the show; there is no one better than her to actually comment on the banking space. Banking is really the elephant in the room as far as the market is concerned. We started with the Gyan Sangam and Indradhanush, and the banking bureau board and now we landed up with NPA Ordinance and giving powers to RBI to actually micro-manage individual accounts, that is one space where there is phenomenal potential, there is good amount of undervaluation also in a lot of PSU banks, but I am still not able to grapple with the macro picture that is panning out with regard to the huge NPAs.

What exactly is going to happen, we have committees over committees, we have had so many deliberations over the last three years, so, on- balance and then last weekend we had this bomb thrown at us on the private banking space two, three private banks, their NPA figures not matching the figures reported as per as what RBI said.

So, to cut long story short, I think this is a good time to look at the PSU bank space, no doubt about it. Look at the tier-II PSU banks which I think would have done 99 percent of the clearing up once all of them finish announcing this quarter results i.e. March 2017 results. So, even a State Bank of India (SBI), or a Bank of Baroda (BoB), or Oriental Bank of Commerce (OBC) these kind of places I think are safer bets to look in because you cant ignore the financial services space, you cant ignore the banking space.

However, understand the risk. You are still grappling with the big problem as to what exactly is going to happen on the NPA front. So, there would be surprises coming up there so you will have to live with them. However over the longer term, you will make money in the banking space, no doubt about it, and I definitely prefer the PSU banking space still like I did about 1.5-2 years back.
Car rentals startup Revv is planning to launch a subscription model for renting cars, a first in the industry that will allow users to rent cars for just Rs 25,000 a month.

With this subscription plan starting at Rs 25,000 per month, Revv will provide a user with a car at their disposal 24x7 for as long as they want, at any given instance.

Revv will also allow subscribed users to change the car model up to 12 times in a year between 12 car models currently available  including Maruti Ciaz, Mahindra XUV, Hyundai i10, Honda Amaze, and Ford Ecosport.

The company will take care of the car maintenance, give roadside assistance, and annual insurance.

The aim, says Revv co-founder Anupam Agarwal, is to replace car ownership altogether.

Private car ownership is inefficient. First, it could be lying idle most of the time. Second, even if you own a car its no guarantee that you will drive it to a holiday in the mountains, he adds.

Funded with USD 9 million from investors such as Edelweiss and Mahindra Finance, the startup has increased its car fleet from 25 to 500 cars within two years of its existence.

The company is aiming to offset the leadership position of Zoomcar, which has a fleet of over 3,000 cars, in next three years.

The company might include door delivery of cars with the new subscription plan.

While Revv charges a mandatory fee of Rs 300 for car home delivery and pick-up, it offers the service on all bookings, be it for an hour. On the other hand, Zoomcars home delivery is optional and dependent on the availability of drivers.

Solving the one-way trip problem

The company started in 2015 when ex-McKinsey executives Anupam Agarwal and Karan Jain quit their jobs to start a car rentals business.

Zoomcar already had a first mover advantage as it started in 2013. Competing in the space also required sophisticated logistics and management expertise of high-value asset like cars.

Other startups  JustRide and Myles - had also adopted the Zoomcar model, with minor tweaks in pricing. Currently, its pricing is inclusive of fuel, while Myles expects users to pay for it over and above the actual charges.

But Revv did manage to innovate at one very crucial level - one-way trips. There is no player in India that allows you to travel outstation and drop the car at a parking space there.

I used to rent cars for everything. The need to book a round trip was always a sore point for me. I know many others who would be travelling somewhere for say five days. They couldnt rent a car because it mandates a round trip, says Anupam.

Revv needed to do things differently to stand out in a space that already had more than four players vying for attention.

It clearly highlighted the need to introduce home pick-up and delivery services.

Revv, when launched in 2015, also introduced a pricing plan that doesnt count the distance covered.

When I rent a car, I hate to look at the kilometres. If that constraint is not there, a rented car more-or-less behaves like a privately owned car, says Anupam says.

Zoomcar had introduced such a plan, in select cities, back in 2014.

The company wants to create an experience for users that will resemble owning a car. The unlimited kilometers plan was a step towards realising that aim. Revvs subscription model is also a move in that direction.

Following the hyperlocal model in car rentals

Revv has rejigged the entire hyperlocal parking model that is prevalent today.

In a hyperlocal model, companies have designated parking spaces in every locality - in a vacant plot or at a nearby mall  where the cars are stationed.

Each parking space will have a certain number of cars that caters to that specific locality.

A Zoomcar executive explains that this inventory model makes one-way trips impossible.

We cant offer one-way trips because it will create an inventory imbalance. It could happen that a parking spot in Bangalore is left with no cars, as they have been transported to another location on a one-way trip, Zoomcars Paritosh says.

So how does Revv do it? We designate one driver for every 5 cars. That one driver can manage 3 deliveries and 3 pickups in a day. Its better than food delivery guys where one person can deliver 2-3 packets a day, Agarwal says.

To make this viable, they equip their delivery executives with a foldable electric scooter that fits in the boot of every car and becomes a cost-effective, quick and environment-friendly way of getting back to the parking hubs.

The technology backing Revvs delivery system is designed to manage these deliveries and pickups according to peak times and lean times.

Sometimes, when the system records too many deliveries in a single slot, it will automatically prepone a few deliveries.

We obviously check with our users if they are ok with taking the delivery a night or a day before. Because it doesnt matter where the car is parked as long as the user gets their car, says Anupam.

This reduces the companys need to acquire a parking space in every locality.

The technology is powered by at least three algorithms developed in-house. Apart from managing the deliveries and pickups, it also measures its own performance, manages the inventory, pricing plans, and analyses how much of the fleet is available at a given time.

The algorithm also slots availability according to probable demand for long and short trips.

Today, it manages over 5,000 bookings a month, with over 30,000-40,000 users. About 50 percent of these are repeat customers, claims Anupam.

durba.ghosh@nw18.com

Clarification: An earlier version of this article mentioned that Revv is planning to launch its annual subscription model for Rs 30,000 and that the company is building a war chest for operational purposes which was based on an interview with our reporter.

The company said that it had updated its plans and will now offer the subscription at Rs 25,000 monthly, instead of a Rs 30,000 annual subscription, as told to Moneycontrol, earlier. Revv has also clarified that its not in the process of raising any funds.
An association of online vendors which has a backing of almost 2,000 sellers has written a letter to Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman requesting to hold the merger of e-commerce firm Snapdeal with Flipkart, on account of pending financial dues.

The All India Online Vendors Association (AIOVA) has requested the government for a hold on the deal subject to an approval by at least 75 percent of sellers doing active business on the Gurgaon-based companys platform, citing pending dues and financial disputes.

In a letter, reviewed by Moneycontrol, the association has said that over 500 sellers have complained regarding unsettled matters.

"Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd (Snapdeal) is on the verge of shutting down or merging with another e-commerce marketplace due to lack of funds," the sellers claim.

We would like to inform you via this email that more than 500 sellers have complained to us regarding unsettled financial matters with the current management of Snapdeal, states the letter e-mailed by the seller association to the Government.

(Copy of the e-mail)

The e-mail was addressed to Tapan Ray, Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Nirmala Sitharaman, Commerce Minister of India.

Our members are already riling with the losses faced in Askmebazaar. Now they feel they will face loss in Snapdeal under the new management. We, therefore, request you to hold the winding down/sale /merger of the above-mentioned company subject to approval by 75 percent of sellers doing active business on the platform, the online sellers have appealed in the letter.

The association claims that it was asked by Ms Sitharaman, to approach the Corporate Affairs Ministry regarding dues related to Askmebazaar, where the vendors are yet to receive a settlement.

The association claims that it had compiled and submitted a list of such unsettled financial matters to the management of Snapdeal informally in March.

However they never acted on the same, the letter states.

Responding to the claims made by AIOVA, Snapdeal in an e-mail said "Payments to sellers are made as per pre-defined payment cycles and these continue to be made per normal practice. It should be clear that payments are made only as per contractual commitments and in accordance with seller policies. Robust grievance redressal mechanisms exist to address any escalations from individual sellers."
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Gaurang Shah of Geojit Financial Services told CNBC-TV18, "South Indian Bank numbers were a little disturbing, no doubt about it, but we maintain the positive coverage right from the levels of Rs 18 and Rs 20 when the stock was languishing over there. At the current earnings that we have seen, we believe that there is turnaround that is visible."

"I am quite sure there would be significant changes post the policies that the government is implementing along with the consultation with Reserve Bank of India. So, my belief is that this is one particular bank which may possible take time but it will definitely deliver. So, have at least a year, year and a half, two plus kind of time horizon for its reach to the levels of Rs 26-28," he added.
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The Defence Acquisition Council today discussed the much-awaited 'strategic partnership model' under which select private firms would manufacture fighter jets, helicopters and submarines in India in partnership with foreign companies.

Defence Ministry sources said the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by Defence Minister Arun Jaitley, made "forward movement" towards finalising the 'strategic partnership (SP) model', covering "substantial ground".

Under SP model, select Indian defence firms will be allowed to exclusively build various military platforms for a specified period of time in partnership with chosen foreign entities.

The sources termed the outcome of the deliberations "positive".

Last week, Jaitley had a meeting on the SP model with representatives of defence arms of leading groups including Larsen and Toubro, Ashok Leyland, Mahindra and Mahindra, Reliance Infra, Tata Group, Punj Lloyd, Adani Group and Bharat Forge Ltd.

Opinion is divided on whether to select only one private sector company for each segment identified for defence indigenisation or look for other options.

The Defence Ministry has been maintaining that it was working towards institutionalising a transparent, objective and functional mechanism to encourage broader participation of the private sector in defence manufacturing.

The DAC may again deliberate on some of the issues relating to the proposed SP model before it is taken up by the Cabinet Committee on Security.

At last week's meeting, some industry representatives had favoured a level playing field and expanding the industry base by allowing entry of new players. Some stressed on exercising caution and ensuring that the model does not block the flow of new technology to the sector.

It was learnt that some officials also raised concern about possible "judicial intervention and federal audit" in case of award of successive orders to one 'strategic partner'.

The proposed model envisages 'sequential award' of contracts for four selected segments, and some industry representatives felt such arrangements will lead to delays in implementation of mega projects.

The SP model was proposed by the Dhirendra Singh Committee in July, 2015. It had said for the 'Make in India' initiative to become wider in the defence sector, the government should adopt a strategic partnership model, whereby a private firm is chosen for the development of a specific identified platform.

Last year, the then Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had announced that the policy on SP model would be unveiled soon.
In a first, the Reserve Bank is creating a post of a chief financial officer (CFO) and has sought applications for the position.

The CFO, who will be of the rank of executive director, will be responsible for accurate and timely presentation and reporting of financial information of the central bank, and establish accounting policies and procedures and ensure compliance with regulations.

The official will also be entrusted with communicating RBI's expected and actual financial performance and overseeing its budget processes, the central bank said in a recruitment notification today.

The CFO will also formulate the accounting policy of the bank, maintain the internal accounts and report financial results, and carry out corporate strategy functions like PF policies.

Till now, the central bank did not have a dedicated official handling the finance function, and the tasks were being carried out internally. The appointment is part a major organisational change being carried out by Governor Urjit Patel.

His predecessor Raghuram Rajan had pursued an idea of creating a chief operating officer for the apex bank but the government shot down the proposal as it involved changing the RBI Act. Rajan had also hired a slew of specialists from outside.

The CFO can opt for regular appointment or a contract, and will not be eligible for any career progression within the bank, the circular said.

The RBI said it is looking for a chartered accountant aged between 45 and 55 years, who has a minimum of 15 years of experience overseeing financial operations in banks or financial sector organisations.

It said staffers of the rank of general managers and above can also apply for the post.

For regular appointment, the gross monthly emoluments will be around Rs 2.40 lakh, while for appointment on contract basis, cost per month will be Rs 2 lakh with housing and Rs 4 lakh per month without housing. The proposed salary (for a regular appointee) of the CFO is just Rs 10,000 short of the revised pay of the Governor and on par with that of the deputy governors.

The RBI follows a July-June accounting year and transfers its surplus to government at the end of every fiscal. In FY16 it had transferred over Rs 65,000 crore to the Centre.
1.8 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who have been living under a debilitating Israeli siege for 10 years, do not have much space for cultural events -- there is no proper cinema in the entire enclave -- but this weekend the city's port has been transformed into a venue for outdoor screenings.

The Red Carpet Festival showcases films focusing on human rights issues and aims to provide Palestinians, many of them unemployed, with a rare opportunity to explore their dreams, or at least practise a little escapism.

True to its name, the festival's organisers have laid out a 100-metre (yard) long red carpet. But there are no celebrities, it's for the thousands of ordinary Gazans turning out to watch the films.

"The children and poor people are walking on the carpet," organiser Saad al-Saworki told AFP proudly at Friday's opening night. "They are far more important than the carpet."

The festival, which is in its third year, coincides with the Cannes Film Festival and aims to show that there is an alternative to the catwalks and glamour of its French counterpart, Saworki said.

The maiden event was organised by Palestinian director Khalil al-Muzain in 2015 in the rubble of homes destroyed by the Israeli army in the most recent of the three wars that have devastated Gaza since 2008.

This year for the first time, all of the festival's entries are being screened simultaneously in Ramallah in the West Bank and in the Israeli city of Haifa.

Around 40 films by Palestinian and foreign directors are being screened over five days.

The opening film was Palestinian director Raed Andoni's "Ghost Hunting", winner of best documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year.

It focuses on Israeli prison interrogation techniques and its screening came with hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails on hunger strike for nearly a month in protest over their conditions.

This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the letter in which the British government committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Festival spokesman Saad Abu Ramadan said that the red carpet was 100 metres long to commemorate the anniversary and that parts of the text had been inscribed on it.

Palestinians despise the document, saying it gave away their independence, while Israelis hail it as an early recognition of the need for a Jewish state.

"People walked on the carpet and trampled on (British foreign minister Arthur) Balfour's promise," Abu Ramadan said.

Tamara Matar, a 21-year-old law student, said the festival gave her a chance to "feel free" in the tiny enclave which has been under Israeli blockade for a decade.

"There is no cinema in Gaza," she said. "I watch films at the festival because of the blockade and the closed borders, the unemployment and the electricity crisis we have to endure."

Youth activist Asad al-Saftawi, 25, said the festival helped change Gaza's image in the outside world.

Instead of the "stereotype" of violence and destruction, it showed that "in Gaza young people have creativity and love of life."

"Our message to the Palestinian leadership in Gaza and the West Bank -- we want freedom, we want a cinema in Gaza," Saftawi said.

Rif Kassem, a Syrian refugee who has been living in Gaza for four years, attended a screening with his wife.

"We, as Syrian refugees, share the pain of the Palestinian refugees," he said.

Mohammed, 27, walked down the red carpet with his sick father in a wheelchair.

"I want to feel like I am at Cannes," he said.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will make a speech to the nation and launch a series of vital projects in Assam to mark his governments three years in office on May 26, signaling the importance he attaches to a remote region that is hemmed in by China, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Modis decision to be in Assam on the occasion of his governments third anniversary mirrors the BJPs deepening engagement in a region bordering three countries and home to several rebel outfits.

On the other hand, the BJPs political fortunes are on the rise in the Northeast, where it currently leads the governments of Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.

On May 26, Modi will dart from one venue to another, spanning nearly 1000 km on a single day.

He will begin his trip in a remote northern district, Sadiya, to open Indias longest river bridge, the 9.5 km Sadiya-Dhola link across the Lohit, the main stream of the mighty Brahmaputra.

The bridge, which will ease connectivity between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, is a military-grade river expressway, capable of carrying heavy infantry and will provide swift defence access to the sensitive state.

Modi will then travel to an adjoining district, Dhemaji, to inaugurate an agriculture centre in Gogamukh. He then proceeds to Guwahati, where he will remotely lay the foundation ceremony of an All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the first in the north-east, at the Sarusajai stadium.

The proposed medical college will come up at Changsari in Kamrup (Rural) district, 28.5 km from Guwahati across the Brahmaputra.

The prime minister will conclude his trip with a political rally at Khanapara, straddling the Assam-Meghalaya border, which is likely to be attended by tens of thousands

The Dhola-Sadia bridge, longer than Mumbais Bandra-Worli Sealink by 3.55 km, has been created to carry T-72 tanks. Once commissioned, it will take 30 minutes to cross over to Sadia near the Lohit border in Arunachal, reducing the travel time by four hours.

It will also ease access to the Army cantonment at Walong, and the strategically important Kibithu town in Anjaw district bordering China and Myanmar.

The bridge is located 540-km away from Assam capital Dispur and 300 km from Arunachal Pradesh capital Itanagar. It will also give easier access from Arunachal Pradesh to Tinsukia, one of Assams major rail heads and a civilian airport in Dibrugarh in upper Assam.
Kulbhushan Jadhav

India today demanded the immediate suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was over.

India's forceful submission was made as the ICJ began hearing the case of the 46-year-old former Navy officer who was arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

Battling Pakistan in the UN's highest judicial body, India said the situation was grave and urgent, prompting it to approach the court "at such short notice".

"Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed," joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs Deepak Mittal told the court in opening remarks.

Eighteen years after the two neighbours last faced off at the ICJ  when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft  India took up the issue of consular rights to its national and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".

"The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention," lead attorney Harish Salve said.

The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhav's execution. While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), gets its turn later in the day.

Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, Salve said. "The graver the charges, the greater the need for continued adherence of the Vienna Convention. Jadhav has been in judicial custody without any communication with his family," he said.

The rights of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are sacrosanct, Salve said, citing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that recognises that no one can be arbitrarily deprived of their lives.

India had not been given the copy of the charges filed against Jadhav. "The need for a wholesome compliance is greater when charges are serious. We want appropriate legal representation for Kulbhushan Jadhav."

Not just had all requests for consular access fallen on "deaf ears", the trial was conducted without providing Jadhav his rights. Pakistan did not even respond to Jadhav's mother's pleas to see her son.

Human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan and the trial had been vitiated, India argued.

Though Pakistan says Jadhav has the right to appeal, two-star generals will hear his mercy plea, Salve stressed, questioning the impartiality of the process.

India wants ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Rejecting charges of espionage, it said the Pakistan Foreign Office had made "baseless, contrived and propaganda- driven allegations" against Jadhav.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.
A man stands close to a cattle selling point near the market in the town of Pibor, in Boma state, east South Sudan, February 1, 2017. REUTERS/Siegfried Modola SEARCH "FAMILY MODOLA" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES. - RTSYYVF

Homegrown fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) giant Patanjali has been working on a project to generate electricity using bulls. The initial test done by the company has shown some positive results, reports The Economic Times.

The report said that Patanjali has joined hands with a leading Indian automobile manufacturer and a Turkish partner for this project. They have developed a prototype and are working on to produce more electricity.

The prototype design, having a turbine so far has managed to generate 2.5 kilowatts (kW) of power.

With this the company is trying to attain twin objectives; to protect male bovines from being slaughtered and help rural household who are not able to afford electricity generate it to meet their own household requirement.

Acharya Balkrishna, the brainchild behind this project said the move will help the poor rural household. He also said they are undertaking more research to increase the electricity yield.

The population of bulls has been declining for the past many years with the increased mechanisation at the farm. Today, they account for less than 30 percent of the cattle population.

The firm has clarified that it wont sell electricity.
Superstar Rajinikanth has left the door open for joining politics in the future adding he would not allow "wrong people" to join him if he takes the plunge.

In an open interaction with his fans on Monday, Rajinikanth said, Right now God is using me as an actor, but I cant say anything about the future. If God decides that I join politics, then I will do so.

I committed a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years back, it was a political accident, he said.

The actor indicated his preference was for value-based politics, saying, In case I decide to join politics, I won't allow wrong people to join me. I'll keep them away.

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During the PV Narasimha Rao government in the nineties, Rajini had begun to support the Indian National Congress (INC). However, he shifted allegiance to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) alliance after the Congress decided to align itself with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).
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(Representative image)

China described its new Silk Road as "a project of the century" and offered 100 billion yuan for projects that are part of its ambitious initiative linking the country to much of Asia, Europe and Africa.

"We should build an open platform of cooperation and uphold and grow an open world economy," Chinese President Xi Jinping said in his opening address outlining China's vision.

He said China would contribute an additional 100 billion yuan (USD 14.5 billion) to the Silk Road Fund, which was set up in 2014 to finance infrastructure projects, taking it to USD 55 billion and USD 8.75 billion financial assistance to the countries taking part in his Belt and Road initiative aimed at expanding China's influence and global connectivity.

Xi said the Belt and Road initiative is "a project of the century" that will benefit people across the world.

"We should foster a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation; and we should forge partnerships of dialogue with no confrontation and of friendship rather than alliance," he said, adding that Belt and Road initiative focuses on the Asian, European and African countries, but is also open to all other countries.

He said China will provide assistance worth 60 billion yuan (USD 8.7 billion) to developing nations and international organizations participating in the Belt and Road initiative to launch more projects to improve people's well-being.

China will also set up 50 joint laboratories with countries participating in the Belt and Road initiative to enhance cooperation on innovation, he said.

Also China will encourage financial institutions to conduct overseas RMB fund business with an estimated amount of 300 billion yuan (about USD 43.5 billion), Xi said.

Named after the historic Silk Road, the Belt and Road initiative was proposed by Xi in 2013 to chart out new territories for international cooperation.

India skipped the meeting due to its sovereignty concerns over the USD 50 billion CPEC, which goes through Pakistan- occupied Kashmir (PoK). However, few Indian scholars attended the opening session of the two-day "Belt and Road" conference in Beijing that brought together leaders from 29 countries.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his Sri Lankan counterpart Ranil Wickramasinge, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were among the world leaders who attended the high-profile meeting.

The United States sent a delegation led by Matt Pottinger, special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia at the National Security Council.

Other delegates include officials, entrepreneurs and financiers from over 130 countries, and representatives of key international organisations such as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, and International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde.

The B&R includes a maze of roads and port projects. While CPEC is highlighted as "flagship project", the B&R included Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor, New Eurasian Land Bridge, China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor, China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor and 21st century Maritime Silk Road.
Education

Montgomery County Community College will present the spring installment of the interview/talk show program Issues and Insights April 20 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in Science Center room 214, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The programs will be simulcast to the Colleges West Campus in South Hall room 216, 101 College Drive, Pottstown. Dr. Kolsky will offer a humorous presentation, Carrots, Sticks and Politics: A State of the Nation and the World Message. In this speech, he will provide his interpretation of domestic and international politics and then welcome questions from the audience for discussion. Issues and Insights, is free and open to the public. For information, contact Dr. Thomas Kolsky, professor of political science, at 215-641-6380 or tkolsky@mc3.edu.

Montgomery County Community Colleges STEM Scholars Program will host a STEM Jam! open house April 25 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Advanced Technology Center at the Colleges Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The drop-in event is designed for students interested in learning more about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities will include STEM program information and career advising, STEM speakers throughout the day from industry and academia, micro-helicopter and robotics competitive obstacle courses and demonstrations and static models of STEM student and faculty work. For more information about STEM Jam! or STEM programs at MCCC, contact William Brownlowe at wbrownlowe@mc3.edu or 215-641-6644, or Robin Zuhlke at 215-619-7440 or rzuhlke@mc3.edu.

Temple Ambler, located at 580 Meetinghouse Road, presents the following events:

International Club Global Bazaar April 15 from 5 to 8 p.m. The Ambler Campus International Club invites all students, faculty, staff and the community to celebrate a multitude of diverse cultures, which will be showcased at the organizations Global Bazaar. This family friendly event will highlight cultural traditions and celebrations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South American, North America and Africa through music, entertainment, food and informative displays developed and presented by students at the Ambler Campus. Young visitors will be provided with passports, which they may get stamped at each country they visit. Prizes will be awarded to world travelers who talk to cultural representatives, answer questions about the countries theyve visited and take part in fun-filled activities designed to help them learn about the rich diversity of cultures found throughout the world. Refreshments will be served. The event is free. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail tuc36466@temple.edu.

EarthFest 2011 April 29 from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. More than 75 exhibitors, including the Philadelphia Zoo, The Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Elmwood Park Zoo and the Insectarium, will take part in EarthFest 2011. School students of all ages are invited to attend and develop displays of their own. EarthFest partner the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society also offers its Kids Grow Expo, featuring the Junior Flower Show, as part of the event. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail duffyj@temple.edu.

Annual Spring Plant Sale May 7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The plant sale  an Ambler Campus tradition dating back to the early 1900s  will feature woody plants and perennials in portable sizes, hardy trees, shrubs, and vines, native plants that are attractive to wildlife, herbs, and hanging baskets. There will also be numerous special plants for sale to highlight Amblers special anniversary year. Garden books and garden tools will also be available for sale. Students, staff, and volunteers from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture and the Ambler Arboretum Advisory Committee will be available to answer questions. All proceeds from the Spring Plant Sale will support the Ambler Arboretum Fund and the Pi Alpha Xi National Honor Society. Information: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

June Homecoming/Louise Bush-Brown Garden Dedication June 5 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. (June Homecoming), Bright Hall Lounge; 2 p.m. (Garden Dedication), Ambler Campus Formal Perennial Gardens. Tickets  June Homecoming: Participant  $18 per person; Sustainer  $25 per person; Benefactor  $40 per person. The 2011 June Homecoming, sponsored by the School of Environmental Design Alumni Association, will include the Alumni Association annual meeting and luncheon. June Homecoming will be followed by the formal dedication of Temple University Amblers Formal Perennial Gardens as the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Gardens. During this 100th anniversary of the campus, Temple University Ambler and the Ambler Arboretum of the Temple University is honoring Louise Bush-Browns many contributions to the history of the campus by formally dedicating the gardens in her honor. During the program, campus Executive William Parshall will welcome guests, Ambler Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey will speak about the Bush-Browns and the history of the garden, and an official ribbon cutting will be held for the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Garden. Following the ribbon cutting, guests are invited to take a tour of the gardens, which will wend their way to the Campus Greenhouse for the School of Environmental Designs annual Plant Auction. Information (Garden Dedication): 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Information (June Homecoming): 215-482-0722. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

Northview Garden Tour and Fundraiser for the Ambler Arboretum June 12 from noon to 5 p.m. Call for reservations. Tickets: $15 per person or $20 at the door. In addition to the gardens of the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University, Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey has a garden oasis all her own right in Ambler  Northview. Visitors will have the opportunity to take self-guided tours throughout the many gardens, where garden experts will be available to answer questions about the various designs. The Ambler Keystone Chapter of the Womans National Farm and Garden Association will also provide tea and refreshments. All proceeds from the tours will support the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University. Information or to register: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

The Senior Adult Activities Center of Montgomery County, 536 George Street, Norristown, will hold the following events:

SAAC Adult Day Care, an alternative to Nursing Home Care is available  for information call 610-275-1960

Volunteers are needed for Meals on Wheels Program (call the number above)

SAACs Fifth Avenue Boutique opens Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

Exercise with Theresa will be held every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 1 p.m.

Dance class is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Tai Chi is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Yoga is held every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.

Line Dancing is held every Thursday at 10:30 a.m.

Dancing with Joan is held every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.

Sculpture Class is held Wednesdays from 2 to 3:30 p.m.

Why Should I Learn Spanish? will be held Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m.

Generations On-Line computer classes for seniors will be held Monday through Friday from 8 a.m.  4 p.m.  computers are available during those hours.

Health Living will be held every Tuesday at 1 p.m.

Boomer U will hold the following events. Boomer U is located at 45 Forest Avenue, Ambler. Registration & payment is required for all events: 215-619-8863.

Pilates Class is held Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30 a.m. First class is free; please bring a mat. For information call 610-291-5376.

Blue Bell School of Dance, 921 Penllyn Blue Bell Pike, Blue Bell, hosts Argentine Tango Classes and a Milonga dance party every Friday evening. Lessons start at 8:30 p.m. followed by dancing at 9:30 p.m. Andrew Conway, master Argentine Tango dancer, instructor and performer and his partner Linda Chase will instruct. All levels welcome and no partner is needed. Refreshments will be served. Fee is $12 per person and includes lesson and dancing. Information: 215-634-1101 or www.amoretango.com.

The Montgomery Hospital Medical Center will offer the following classes:

Childbirth Education Class- all parents are invited to participate, including those who are delivering at

other hospitals. For more information on maternity services or classes, call 610-270-2020.

CPR and First Aid Courses are offered for beginners to experiences health care providers. Call 610-270-2313.

The Ambler SAAC (Senior Adult Activities Center), located at 45 Forest Ave in Ambler will hold the following events:

Tai Chi every Monday and Thursday at 11 a.m.

Yoga is every Tuesday at 1 p.m. and Friday at 10:30 a.m.

Strength and balance training every Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Armchair Aerobics is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Gourmet Weight Wise every Thursday at 12:30.

Fitness Center and Pool Room open daily 8 a.m.-4 p.m.

The Diabetes Education Center will offer day and evening classes each month. Health insurance pays for diabetes education classes. Preregistration is required. Call 610-270-2301.

For Kids & Families

The Ambler Kiwanis Club will host its annual Easter Egg Hunt April 26 at 10 a.m. in Ambler Borough Park, located just off of the intersection of Hendricks Street and Valley Brook Road. Members of the Wissahickon Key Club will assist Kiwanians in hiding thousands of wrapped chocolate eggs in a designated area of the park. Also hidden will be plastic colored eggs, which are redeemed for prizes. Elementary school children are separated by age.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation will hold its 21st annual Storybook Egg-Stravaganza April 15 fom 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Upper Dublin Township Building. Toddlers and preschoolers love this annual event where photo opportunities with favorite friends abound! Treasures are collected from UDP&Rs assortment of lifesize cutouts of favorite cartoon characters from Disney, Sesame Street, Nickelodeon and other well-known animation. Children can have their picture taken with Bugsy OHare; bring your own camera. And dont forget a basket for goodies! $7 for UD residents; $12 for non-residents. Pre-register at 215-643-1600 ext. 3443.

Splash Week is a free week-long program that teaches children and families basic swimming skills and water safety practices. All YMCA branches will host multiple classes each day from April 11 to 15. For more information, contact the Ambler Area YMCA at 215-628-9950.

Healthy Kids Day is April 16 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The day is filled with fun, engaging and artistic activities that cultivate healthy living as part of the YMCAs larger efforts to help more kids and families become physically active. All activities are free and open to the community. For more information, contact the Ambler YMCA at 215-628-9950. No reservation is required.

The Ambler Area YMCA has added several new programs for area youngsters. Classes are held late afternoons or evenings on various weekdays. For more information, visit philaymca.org or call 215-628-9950.

Basic Beading: Ages: 10+. Wednesdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. This class will teach you the fundamentals of wiring and stringing along with how color can be used to create unique and vibrant beadwork design. You will create various jewelry including earrings, bracelets, charm pendants and much more! Supplies will be provided. Bringing your own jewelry pliers or tools would be a plus.

Messin with the Masters: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. Learn about some of the worlds greatest artists. You will be inspired to create your own Starry Night with oil pastels and tempera paints, a tissue paper painted Monet garden, a Picasso head using scraps of paper, a Georgia OKeeffe clay flower bowl and a Rousseau jungle collage.

Super Scientist: Ages: 5-7. Mondays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Well be concocting chemistry experiments such as making slime, mixing potions and having fun with magnet magic. Your budding little scientist will enhance his/her creative thinking and motor skills and to top it off will learn that science can be serious fun.

Wacky Junk Art: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 6 to 6:45 p.m. Why throw it away! Instead join us to make household junk into aliens from outer space, wacky specs, crazy hats, body masks or a recycled train.

Globe Trotters: Ages: 4-6. Tuesdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Youre never too young to start thinking globally. Each week, we explore a new country through crafts, games, music, stories and even some taste-testing. A perfect introduction to our great big world!

Crazy about Crafts: Ages: 5-7, Thursdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Let your childs creative juices flow with our fun arts and crafts projects each week. Fine motor skills and creative thinking skills will be enhanced with this crafty class.

Come out and join the Ambler Area YMCAs Teen and Junior Leaders Club. Participants are given the freedom to plan community service projects year round and truly make a difference in the lives of people in need. Those in Teen and Junior Leaders also attend leadership retreats all along the East Coast three times a year and meet other leaders who are doing the same great work in their respective areas. Dont miss out on this inspiring opportunity. Teen Leaders, ages 13-17, meet every Wednesday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Junior Leaders, ages 10-12, will begin in the spring and will meet every Monday. For more information, contact Mike Miles, Teen Director, 215- 628-9950 x 1540 or mmiles@philaymca.org.

Did you know that the new Ambler Area YMCA holds childrens birthday parties at its site for members and non members as well. The Ambler Y does all the work from start to finish and birthday parties include a personalized cake, ice cream, beverage and paper products. Parties are held on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and include two party hosts to lead activities, set-up, clean-up and assist with serving. You can have a Splash Party for children ages six to 12 in the new zero depth entry pool with water slide and spray fountains. Up to 25 children have exclusive use of the pool area with 30 minutes in the party room. Sports Parties are offered for kids ages four to 12 with age appropriate activities and games, and sports such as floor hockey, soccer, basketball or dodge ball. Children ages three to five years of age will enjoy parties in the Family Active Center with use of the Moon Bounce and organized activities, such as parachute play and songs. For information, 215-628-9950 ext. 1583.

Community Events at the Ambler Y:

-YAchievers YMCA Achievers is a developmentally based, extracurricular, educational and team mentoring program designed to help students in grades five through 12 prepare for fulfilled livelihoods in college and beyond. Participation is free and all students in this program receive a free YMCA membership. Registration for the 2009 program begins now. You do not need to be a YMCA member to utilize these special services. Call 215-628-9950 to register.

Greater Norristown Art Leagues Childrens Weeklong Summer Art Camps will be held at 800 West Germantown Pike in East Norriton, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday throughout the summer. The cost per session is $125 per student for ages 6 and up. Jo Ann Cooksey Bono teaches an introduction to basic drawing skills and techniques from 10 a.m. until the lunch break each day. In the afternoon sessions, Mary Vogel Lozinak involves the students in hands on projects such as collage, papermaking, T-shirt printing, 3D design and sculpy clay. Fridays Graduation Day includes an art show, awards ceremony and reception for parents, siblings, grandparents and friends. All supplies are included. Students provide their own lunch. A refrigerator is available and the building is air-conditioned. This is the 15th year to run this successful program. Both instructors are professional artists with State Police and Child Abuse Clearances. To register, call Jo Ann at 610-279-1008, or register on-line at www.gnal.org.

Health

Dresher Physical Therapy is hosting an interactive seminar discussing its Golf Assessment Progam April 30 from 10 a.m. to noon at Dresher Physical Therapy, 1075 Virginia Drive, Suite 200, Fort Washington. Physical therapist Chris Miller, certified through the Titleist Performance Institute, will discuss why your body may be the most important piece of golf equipment you invest in and how this can drastically improve your game. $10 in advance; $15 at the door. Call 215-619-4545 to reserve your spot.

The Chestnut Hill Center for Enrichment, Center on the Hill and Chestnut Hill Hospital will host a Senior Health and Resource Fair April 14 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church, 8855 Germantown Ave. The event is free. For more information, call 215-248-0180 or e-mail chseniors@cavtel.net.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is hosting Help Yourself to Health, a new six-week workshop for older adults with ongoing health conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, heart disease and others. The free workshop will take place at the Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center, 45 Forest Ave. on six Thursdays, May 12 through June 16 from 9:30 a.m. to noon. Although there is no charge to participate, registration is required. To register, call 215-619-8863.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is sponsoring an eight-week program called A Matter of Balance: Managing Concerns About Falls. Presented by the Montgomery County Health Department, this workshop will be held on Tuesdays, May 3 to June 21 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Ambler Center, 45 Forest Ave. If you pre-register by April 27, the fee is only $5! Registration at the first class is $10. (Checks should be payable to SAAC and will benefit our Meals on Wheels program that serves homebound seniors.) A workbook will be provided and refreshments will be served. Call 215-619-8863 to register or for more information.

Fort Washington Wellness Center classes are ongoing. There are several offered during lunch or right after work, for your convenience: Boot Camp from noon to 1 p.m. on Monday; Zumba is MWF from 11 a.m. to noon and Friday at 4 p.m.; there are 25 cycling classes; Ashtanga and Vinyasana Yoga and Pilates; and a group Womens Strength Training class M-F from 10 to 11 a.m. Questions, call Cathy DeMarco at 215-641-1245.

Following the success of other local area programs, Impact Sports and Upper Dublin Parks and Recreation are delighted to team up again to offer a spring program for the 2011 season! Upper Dublin area children ages 3-5 years old can attend a Sports Program featuring their favorite sports games; soccer, rugby, hockey, track and field, basketball, and more. The program will start on April 27 and run through June 1. Cost for the program is $85 for the six weeks. The classes will be running 12- 1 p.m.; 1- 2 p.m.; 2- 3 p.m. For more info or to register, call Upper Dublin Township on 215 643 1600 or visit their website a http://www.upperdublin.net.

Spring Aquatic Programs  UDHS Pool:

-Summer is just around the corner  Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool can help get you into shape! Programs begin in March; preregistration is required.

 Shallow Water Aerobics  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 8-8:45 p.m., $40R/$50NR.

 Adult Swim Instructions  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 7-8 p.m., $50R/$60NR

-Open Rec Swims are fun for the whole family! Come out on Fridays from 7-9 p.m. or Saturdays from 1-4 p.m. and enjoy use of the pool and diving area. Fridays are offered through June 17; Saturdays are offered March 12-May 21.

-Join a growing group of adult lap swimmers and water walkers. Lanes are set aside evenings and weekends for use; lanes are shared. Monday  Thursday from 7:30-9:30 p.m.; Fridays from 7-9 p.m. and Saturdays (March 12-May 21) from 1-4 p.m.

-Private Swimming & Diving Lessons for ages 3-adult are offered at the UDHS Pool through a partnership with the Upper Dublin Aquatic Club (UDAC). Visit the UDAC website for more information, www.udac.us, and click the link to UDHS Private Lessons.

-Looking for local programs for US Masters Swimming (adults) or Water Polo (all ages)? UDAC and UDSD are working together to develop programs that will be offered at the UDHS Pool. Add your name to Interest Lists by emailing slohoefer@upperdublin.net. emails will be sent about clinics and program start dates.

Questions about Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool, group use of the pool or pool rental? Contact Susan Lohoefer, Facility & Community Affairs Manager at slohoefer@upperdublin.net or call 215-643-8800 x8994.

SilverSneakers Fitness Program. The Healthyways SilverSneakers Fitness Program is a result-oriented program that enables older adults to take charge of their health. The program is an innovative blend of physical activity, healthy lifestyle and socially oriented programing. Members of the program are eligible for a free YMCA membership, with use of the pool and exercise equipment, along with customized classes designed for older adults who want to improve their strength, flexibility, balance and endurance. If you are a subscriber to Independence Blue Cross (Personal Choice 65 PPO) or Keystone 65 HMO, Bravo Health, or Health Options Programs (HOP), call the Ambler Area YMCA, 215-628-9950 or Hatboro Area YMCA, 215-674-4545. You can also visit www.silversneakers.com.

Zumba Fitness offers Zumba dance/fitness classes at Academy of Dance and Music/BBAD Studio located at 1524 DeKalb Pike in Blue Bell (behind Sherwin Williams). Classes are offered three times a week: Tuesdays at 6 p.m., Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 8 a.m. For a free trial pass for your first class, email us at info@danceandmusic.biz or call 610-277-2557. For more info, visit our site at www.academyofdanceandmusic.org.

Chestnut Hill Health Systems presents the following Health Education Programs:

FITNESS CLASSES

Golden Yoga: A Breathing, Stretching and Relaxation Class. Fridays, 2:30-3:30 p.m. Lea Auditorium, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. Registration for four classes at a time required. Golden Yoga is Classical Yoga, adapted by the SKY Foundation, to accommodate those who have difficulty getting up and down from the floor. The program includes postures, breathing, relaxation and meditation techniques, all performed while sitting in a chair and standing. Registration required. Call 215-247-3029. Cost: $20 for 4 classes per month.

Tai Chi: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:30  9:30 a.m. Springfield Residence, 8601 Stenton Ave. Classes, for the novice or beginner/intermediate student, are designed to improve balance, power, posture, coordination, flexibility and mental focus. Slow, gentle movements are modified to most everyones abilities. For more information or to sign up for a free introductory class, call 215-882-2804. Cost: $8 per class/paid monthly.

SUPPORT GROUPS

Weight Loss Surgery Support Group: Fourth Wednesday of the month, 7-8 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. Join us for a monthly get-together where well share information for those interested in weight loss surgery, learn from guest speakers discussing current news on issues including lifestyle modification, nutrition and exercise and provide ongoing support for those who have completed surgery. Registration required. Call 215-753-2000.

Breast Cancer Networking Group: Fourth Tuesday of the month 5:30  7 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. A free, confidential support group for women living with a diagnosis of breast cancer designed to provide a forum for sharing information, feelings and concerns associated with breast cancer. Facilitated by Tish Wakefield, LCSW, Oncology Social Worker. Registration required. To register or for more information, call 215-248-8047.

New Moms Support Groups Tuesdays 10:30 a.m.  12 p.m.; contact Jeanine ORourke, MSW or 2:30  4 p.m.; contact Susan Schack, Ph.D Volunteer Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. The Center for Postpartum Depression at Chestnut Hill Hospital is pleased to offer two new support groups to support new moms. Both groups will be run by experienced mental health professionals who really get it when it comes to new motherhood and juggling relationships, extended family, work/family balance and self-care. If you are experiencing new mom challenges that often heighten anxiety and involve hormonally driven depression, join us for an informative and supportive forum to connect with other moms. Infants are welcome. $30 per session (flexible based on need). Registration is required. Call Dr. Schack, 646-265-2484, or Ms. ORourke, 215-206-2931.

Man to Man Prostate Cancer Support Group Third Thursday of the month 8-9 a.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. A networking group for men diagnosed with prostate cancer designed to provide education, support and encouragement. Spouses and partners welcome. Harry M. Baer, MD, Chief, Urology Division, will host Ask the Doctor. Registration required. Call 215-248-8325.

Contact the Senior Center by phone 215-248-0180 or email (chseniors@cavtel.net) with your questions about these programs or any of our on-going activities and classes.

Holy Redeemer HomeCare and Hospice seeks compassionate and emotionally mature volunteers to provide support to local hospice patients and their families in Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. Volunteers may also assist with pet therapy and administrative work within the hospice department and are requested to have daytime availability. Hospice patient care volunteers visit with patients in their homes or nursing facilities once a week for two to three hours. They provide emotional support and companionship to patients and family members, assist with errands or provide respite for caregivers. Bereavement volunteers support the families of hospice patients following the loss of a loved one, while administrative volunteers assist with typing, mailings and/or filing. Hospice care workers provide a great service to families and loved ones of hospice patients. Many volunteers also report a great deal of personal satisfaction as a result of their services. Patient care and bereavement volunteers complete an application and attend an 18-hour volunteer training program that covers the medical, psychological and spiritual aspects of hospice volunteering. Day and evening training programs are offered. To sign up for volunteer opportunities in Pennsylvania, contact Holy Redeemer Volunteer Coordinator Jean Francis at 215-698-3737 or email jfrancis@holyredeemer.com.

Librarytalk

Upper Dublin Public Library, 805 Loch Alsh Avenue, Ft. Washington, 215-628-8744

www.upperdublinlibrary.org

APRIL CHILDRENS PROGRAMS:

Storytimes: Please register in the library.

o Wee Ones: 0 to 23 months Thursdays and Fridays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m.

o Tiny Tots: age 2. Wednesdays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m. and Fridays 11 to 11:20 a.m.

o Jr. Book Lovers: ages 3 to 6. Tuesdays 10:30 to 11 a.m.

o Bedtime Storytimes: 7 to 7:30 p.m. April 20 and 27. Wear your jammies, bring your teddy & hear Miss Barbara read bedtime stories! For ages 3 to 6.

APRIL TEEN PROGRAMS:

North Hills Library Teens April 28 from 4 to 6 p.m. Movie Matinee

APRIL UDPL ADULT PROGRAMS:

NEW! ESL Conversation Group. Tuesdays from 7 to 8 p.m. Interested in practicing your English in a safe and caring environment? Come to our conversation group and improve your skills! Please register with Kay Klocko at 215-628-8744 or kklocko@mclinc.org.

One-on-One Computer Mentoring. Get personalized assistance from experienced computer volunteers! Sign-up for a one-hour session. Limit one session per month. Please register  contact info above.

Book Groups Please register with Kay Klocko 215-628-8744.

o Daytimers: April 21 at 1:30 p.m. Tired of book groups where you all read the same book? Read any fiction or non-fiction book on this months theme: Explorers. Please register.

Meetings:

Annual Meeting of the Friends of UDPL: April 14 at 1 p.m.

Board of Directors: April 20 at 7 p.m.

Blue Bell Library www.wvpl.org Upcoming Events: The Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 650 Skippack Pike (Route 73) in Blue Bell, is diagonally across from the Blue Bell Inn. Call 215-643-1320 or visit their website at www.wvpl.org.

For children and teens at Blue Bell:

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Mondays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* Fridays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Family Movies, new releases, second Saturdays of the month at 1:30 p.m.

* May 14  Despicable Me

* June 11  Alpha and Omega

* Special Events

* April  watch for date of spring/Easter events

* April 14 at 4:30 p.m.  Junior Lego Club for children ages 3 through 5. Parents and caregivers need to stay with children.

* April 14 at 7 p.m.  Jeopardy for ages 11 to 18. Test your book and library knowledge for prizes. Sign up to be a contestant. No sign up to be in the audience. Snacks provided.

* April 16 at 1 p.m.  Adult Mystery Book Group discussing The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie King.

* April 16 at 1:30 p.m.  Childrens event for One Book, Every Young Child celebration. Story and craft for book Whose Shoes?

* April 19 at 7 p.m. and April 26 at 1:30 p.m.- Adult book group discusses The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Group led by Adam Button.

* April 30 through May 3  Friends book sale with about 10,000 items for sale for children, teens and adults.

* May  sign up for Science in the Summer

* June  sign up for Enrichment Programs for Elementary-Age children

* June  sign up for Summer Reading, all ages

For adults at Blue Bell:

* Daytime Book Discussion Group  fourth Tuesday, Jan  April at 1:30 p.m.

* April 26  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Night-time Book Discussion Group  third Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m.

o April 19  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Art Series with Dr. Sheldon Weintraub, docent at The Barnes and speaker at local colleges

o April 27 at 2 p.m. The Art of Looking at Art-Is She Nude or Is She Naked?

*Mystery Book Discussion Group, third Saturday of the month at 1 p.m.; new mystery theme each month; www.wvpl.org/programs

* Yoga on Mondays at 1:30 p.m. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop-in class.

* Tai Chi on Mondays at 3 p.m. with Dr. Kurt Findeisen. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop in class.

* Philadelphia Museum of Art presents class on their Marc Chagall exhibit, April 13 at 2 p.m.

* Giant Book Sale, April 29  May 3

o Starts with almost 10,000 items for children and adults!

o Held during library hours.

o Preview for members of the Friends of the Library, April 28 at 7 p.m.

o Join the Friends and attend the preview sale. Modest fee to join.

* Blooms at Blue Bell Gardening Series

o May 11 at 1 p.m.  Summer Bulbs by PA Horticultural Society

* Knitting group Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Work on your project or observe and learn. The groups continue year-round in the community room.

* Socrates Cafe discussion group every Monday at 7 p.m. You pick the topic to discuss each week. No sign-up, nothing to read.

* Bridge every Friday at 12:30 p.m. New players welcome.

* Mah Jong every Wednesday at 1 p.m. New players welcome.

*Chess every Wednesday at 7p.m. for adults and teens 14 and older.

* Movie Matinee showing recent releases every Thursday at 2 p.m. April 14: Maos Last Dancer; April 21: Welcome to the Rileys; April 28: Conviction; May 5: Inception; May 12: Inside Job; May 19 The Kings Speech; May 26 The Fighter; June 2 Rabbit Hole; June 9 Black Swan; June 16 127 Hours

* Ongoing like-new, year-round book sale for adults & children during library hours

* Library opening at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday!

Ambler Library, a branch of the Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 209 Race St., 215-646-1072. www.wvpl.org. All the following events occur at the Ambler Library.

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Tuesdays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* For adults:

* Beading Group meets the first and third Monday of every month at 1 p.m. Work on your own projects or come to watch and learn.

* Free Family History Lookup with Connie Briggs. Email Connie for an appointment at the Ambler Library. conniebriggs@comcast.net

* Special Events:

* April 14 at 1:30 p.m.  Book Group discusses Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian.

* April 19 at 7 p.m.  Travel to Paris with world traveler Harry Balin. Tea and scones at 6:30 p.m.

* April 21 at 7 p.m.  Art with Sara for children in fourth through seventh grades.

*May 2 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Lone Star with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

*May 10  Robert Capucci discusses Art into Fashion. Tea and scones served at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*May 12 at 1:30p.m.  Book Group discusses The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

*May 17  Tour the gardens of Devon and Southwest England with Lois McMullen. Tea and Scones at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*June 13 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Blade Runner with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

Meetings and Lectures

The Unisys Blue Bell Retiree Group will meet in the Church on the Mall in the Plymouth Meeting Mall April 14 at 1:30 p.m. Kathy Sacket Young, director/trainer with the North Penn YMCA, will speak on Keeping Fit in Retirement. For more information, contact Membership Committee Chairperson Jerry Feldscher at 610-275-3538 or President Al Rollin at 215-368-4833.

The next FWBA meeting will be April 28 at the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Networking begins at 11:30 a.m.; meeting from noon to 1 p.m. Leon Singletary, Principal, First Contact HR and FWBA Executive Board, will present: Social Media: How to Use It To Get More Business. Lunch is provided courtesy of the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Members are welcome to bring a guest. An RSVP is requested by return email or 215-628-0313.

Big Brothers Big Sisters Southeastern PA is hosting a information sessions over the next few weeks on how to become a Big Brother. The information sessions will take place: April 16 at noon, April 19 at 8 a.m. and April 28 at 6 p.m. All sessions will be held at the groups Norristown Office,t 530 DeKalb St., Norristown. For more information, call 610-277-2200.

The North Penn Chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) normally meets on the third Tuesday of each month from now until May. Meetings are held at the William Penn Inn on Route 202 and Sumneytown Pike, Upper Gwynedd, PA. Social hour starts at 5:30 p.m., dinner is served at 6:30 p.m., and the technical program begins at 7 p.m. Cost with reservation is $28 for members. Members without reservations and guests pay $30. Students with reservations pay $15. Reservations may be made by noon on the Monday preceding the meeting by phoning 215-371-1854 or emailing the reservation to northpennima@yahoo.com northpennima@yahoo.com. Information about the North Penn Chapter is available at http://northpenn.imanet.org/.

LeTip, a professional organization of men and women who are dedicated to the highest standards of competence and service meets every Tuesday at Cedar Brook Country Club, 180 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell at 7 a.m. -meeting officially starts at 7:16 a.m. and ends at 8:31 a.m. Our purpose is the exchange of business tips, leads, and referrals. Each business category is represented by one member and conflicts of interest are disallowed. Guests are welcome to visit any of our breakfast meetings.

Every third Thursday of month, Sunrise Assisted Living of Blue Bell (795 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell, PA 19422, 215-619-2777) serves as a satellite site to 148th Legislative district PA congressman Mike Gerber from 10 a.m. to noon. Stop by for help needed with things such as disability placards and license plates, vehicle registration, utilities issues, birth/death certificates,property tax/rent rebates, etc. Notary services arranged by appointment.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce is an action-oriented organization dedicated to promoting its members and the economic health of eastern Montgomery county. The Chamber is committed to serving as a catalyst by uniting business, community agencies, government and education to make our county a great place to live and work. For information, call 215-887-5122 or visit www.emccc.org.

Do you have a fear of public speaking? Blue Bell Toastmasters Club can help. We meet from 7 to 9 p.m., on the second and fourth Tuesday at the Marriott Courtyard, located on Route 202, directly across from the Montgomeryville Mall. Learn how to improve communication and leadership skills in a friendly and supportive environment. Guests are welcome. Admission fee: $5. For more info, visit www.bbtoast.org.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will hold the following meetings (for reservations to any of the following, email info@PennSuburban.org)

-Breakfast News Network, 7:30-8:45 a.m. at Normandy Farm Hotel (1401 Morris Road, Blue Bell, PA 19422) $15 members, includes full buffet breakfast. Join us for a networking program at Normandy Farm Hotel every Thursday morning for breakfast, business news, informative speakers, and plenty of networking. The cost includes a full breakfast buffet. Copies of the business cards will be made available to those who would like them.

The BNI, Fort Washington Chapter meets every Monday at The Hilton Garden Inn, 520 Pennsylvania Ave., Fort Washington for a networking meeting. Meetings are from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. Visitors are welcome. The only cost to attend is the cost of your meal. For information or a reservation to attend, please call Luanne Cram at 215-947-7784, or visit our Internet site at: http://www.BNIDVR.Com and click on the menu item Find a Chapter.

For the past seven years, people have enjoyed participating in WVWAs Adopt-a-Tree program. Individuals can support the Association in its reforestation efforts by purchasing native trees to be planted. Supporters can plant their adopted tree or have WVWA volunteers will plant it. Trees cost $30 each. If you would like to volunteer or purchase a tree(s), please contact: Bob Adams at Bob@wvwa.org or call: 215-646-8866 for more information. Check www.WVWA.org for directions and maps.

Sustainable Upper Dublin, http://sustainableupperdublin.org, meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m., at the Upper Dublin Township Building, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington, PA 19034. Please send any questions to suec@sustainableupperdublin.org or call 610-996-6316. To learn more about Sustainable Upper Dublin, view or join the discussion at http://googlegroups.com/group/sustainableupperdublin.

Special Events

The Mattie N. Dixon Community Cupboard will hold its first nutrition class April 19 at 10 a.m. at the Community Cupboard, 150 N. Main St., Ambler. Lynne Sinclair, a nutritionist from Abington Memorial Hospital specializing in diabetic nutrition, will conduct the class. Topics will include healthy eating, beneficial foods, recipes, making meals with every day foods, and how to use unfamiliar produce. A healthy snack will be provided.The class is is open to all residents in Montgomery County.

The Historical Society of Fort Washington presents The History of Conshohocken April 19 at 8 p.m. at the Clifton House, 473 Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington. Jack Coll will present an illustrated program on the history of the Borough of Conshohocken. Coll is a longtime resident of Conshohocken and a member of the Conshohocken Historical Society. He is co-author with his son, Brian, of the Arcadia Then and Now Series book Conshohocken. He has also done books Conshohocken and West Conshohocken Sports and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Italian Feast. He has taken many photos for the Conshohocken Record and the Norristown Times Herald. This program is free. Refreshments will be served. For additional information, call 215-646-6065.

Taste of the White House Soiree featuring former White House Chef Walter Scheib will take place April 29 at 6 p.m. at Manufacturers Golf & Country Club in Fort Washington to celebrate HealthLinks 10th anniversary and honor its founders, the Eugene Jackson Family. The evening will heat up with a Chef Meet & Greet, followed by a specially selected presidential menu. Gala tickets are $150 per person. Proceeds benefit HealthLink, a free clinic providing compassionate, quality medical and dental care to uninsured, working adults in Bucks and Montgomery counties who fall in between the health care cracks. Go to http://tasteofthewhitehouse.charityhappenings.org to make reservations online or lend support through sponsorship. For event information, call 267-699-0124 or email jmarushak@healthlinkmedical.org.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association will hold an open house at the Evans-Mumbower Mill April 17 from 1 to 4 p.m. The Mill is at the corner of Swedesford and Township Line Roads in Upper Gwynedd. The open house is free but donations are welcome. For more information, call 215-646-8866 o email info@wvwa.org.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce will host Breakfast With Your County Commissioners and State Representatives April 21 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Holiday Inn Fort Washington, 432 W. Pennasylvania Ave. Commissioners: James R. Matthews (Chairman), Joseph M. Hoeffel (Vice Chair), State Representatives: Todd Stephens (District 151) and Josh Shapiro (District 153). Register onlineat www.emccc.org. $10 for EMCCC member; $20 for non-members.

Upper Dublins Districtwide Allied Art Show will be held April 27 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. in the Upper Dublin High School Athletic Complex.

The Rev. Alfred Muli, chaplain at Fort Washington Estates, will be the featured speaker at the Kiwanis sponsored breakfast observing the National Day of Prayer May 5 at 7 a.m. at the William Penn Inn. The breakfast is open to the public ($15). Reservations can be made by calling 215-646-4356 or by emailing georgesaurman@Juno.com.

The Upper Dublin Shade Tree Commission invites people to participate in its spring bare root planting events, sponsored in part by Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Friends of Robbins Park. On April 9, zix trees will be planted at the Evelyn B. Wright Park & Community Pool, 401 Logan Ave., North Hills, at 9 a.m., followed by the planting of 10 trees at Sheeleigh Park, Loch Alsh Avenue and Douglas Street, Ambler, at 10:15 a.m. On April 29, students from Upper Dublin High School will join the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to plant 16 trees in Robbins Park, Butler Pike and Meetinghouse Road, Ambler, to help launch the societys Million Trees campaign. This event will occur in conjunction with Temple Amblers EarthFest. Experienced tree-tenders are sought to assist the students. For more information,contact Ron Ayres at 215-653-0421 or 215-483-4348.

The Friends of the Wissahickon and the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association are teaming up once again to clean the Wissahickon Creek from top to bottom April 30 from 9 a.m. to noon. This spring marks the 41st anniversary of Wissahickon Valley Watershed Associations annual Creek Clean Up, and the second year that FOW has teamed up with WVWA. Volunteers of all ages will clean the creek, the surrounding trails and the many tributaries of the Wissahickon Creek. Armed with bags, volunteers will be assigned to sections of the creek. Following the clean up, all volunteers are invited to WVWAs Talkin Trash picnic in Fort Washington State Park, with food provided by Whole Foods Market of North Wales. The pavilion is located on Mill Road in Flourtown. To help out in Montgomery County, all volunteers must be pre-assigned a section of the Wissahickon Creek to clean. Please contact Bob Adams, WVWA director of stewardship, at 215-646-8866 ext. 14 or bob@wvwa.org. To work with the Friends of the Wissahickon in Philadelphia, meet at the pavilion along Forbidden Drive, a short distance south of the intersection of Forbidden Drive and Northwestern Avenue. Limited parking is available along Northwestern Avenue and other nearby streets. Volunteers are encouraged to bike or carpool to the event. To participate, register at www.fow.org. Contact Kevin Groves with questions at 215-247-0417 ext. 105 or groves@fow.org.

Montgomery County Community Colleges International Club invites the community to the second annual International Festival April 20 from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The rain date is April 26. The International Club will transform the outside quad area into multicultural celebration with various performances by dancers, singers and musicians. Artists will share their artwork at various display tables. Activities include games, raffles, Easter egg decorating and henna tattoos. Students will have samples of international cuisine at tables representing different countries and will serve food from various local ethnic restaurants. Throughout the evening, volunteers will accept donations and will raffle gift baskets and prizes to raise funds for Habitat for Humanity. Donations of food, international clothes and prizes are needed. Volunteers, including artists and performers, are welcome. For more information or to sponsor an activity, contact Gillian Nel, International Club president, at gnel9277@students.mc3.edu or 267-974-0163.

The Arts and Humanities Division at Montgomery County Community College is partnering with the Philadelphia Writers Conference to host Memoirs Matter: How Life Stories (Including Yours) Can Transform Your Relationship to Literature April 23 from 1 to 3 p.m. in Advanced Technology Center room 101, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The event is free and open to the public. In the first part of this two-hour seminar, professor and author Robert Waxler will explain how writing his two memoirs affected his life as well as his relationship to literature. In the second part, blogger and workshop leader Jerry Waxler will present a sequence of steps to help writers find their own story. For information, contact Dana Resente at dresente@mc3.edu.

The Maple Glen Garden Club will hold its fourth annual Plant Sale on May 7 from 8 to 11 a.m. Perennials, shrubs, vegetables and native plants grown by the club members will be sold. The club uses the plant sale proceeds to fund community projects, a college scholarship and community plantings. The sale will be held in the 500 block of Coach Road, Horsham, as part of a neighborhood garage sale. Plants will be sold at bargain prices. For more information, email MapleGlenGardenClub@gmail.com.

The Relay for Life Craft Show is looking for local crafters to participate in show, which will be May 21 from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Wissahickon High School track, 521 Houston Road, Ambler. There is a $10 entry fee, and 20 percent of sales are donated to the American Cancer Society. Participants will receive a 6-foot table under a tent. For information, contact Joanne at joannescoles@comcast.net or Mindy at mcamsilver@comcast.net.

Spring House Estates is hosting its annual book fair on April 18 from 4 to 7 p.m. and April 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Included will be hardback and paperback used books. Spring House Estates is located at 728 Norristown Road, Lower Gwynedd.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will present the Penn Suburban/Hatfield Joint Business Card Exchange April 20 from 5 to 7 p.m. at Univest Bank Lansdale Area Financial Service Center, 120 Forty Foot Road, Hatfield. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. Join Univest National Bank and Trust Co. for a spring-inspired Business Card Exchange at its newest office in the Hatfield Pointe Shopping Center. Come out and meet members of Univests executive management team while enjoying fine food and beverages.

13th Annual Community Reading Day Kick-off Breakfast Get Together April 26 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the North Wales Area Library, 233 Swartley St., North Wales. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. For more information, contact the chamber office at 215-362-9200 or info@pennsuburban.org. Join presenting sponsor Verizon, chamber staff and fellow members for the Community Reading Day volunteer get together. The Community Reading Day program allows volunteers to read a designated book to second-grade students throughout 38 area public and private schools and present the book as a gift to each class. Even if you are not a volunteer, you are cordially invited to stop by to network, enjoy coffee and pastries.

Ambler Mennonite Church is hosting a Spring Craft Show and Flea Market May 21 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Rain date will be May 28. The community is invited to shop the great craft booths, find some gifts and deals, as well as enjoy home baked goods and tasty lunch specials. Childrens activities are planned. All vendors are encouraged to contact the church at 215-643-4876 or AmblerMennonite@verizon.net. Advertising, signage, customer parking and a shuttle to auxiliary parking at nearby lots for vendors will be provided. 10 foot by 10 foot spaces can be rented for $5 each and tables for an additional $5 each. All proceeds from space and table rentals go toward school kits for children around the world. The church is located at the corner of East Mt. Pleasant Avenue and North Spring Garden Street, Ambler.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association presents The Life & Times of Aquatic Insects in the Wissahickon Creek April 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. Join WVWA for a hands-on program. RSVP required: www.wvwa.org or 215-646-8866. WVWA member fee: $5 per person / $15 per family. Non-WVWA member fee: $10 per person / $20 per family.

The photography exhibition Natures Palette by photo-artist Judy Miller will run March 18 to May 19 at the Art in the Storefront gallery, 41 E. Butler Pike, Ambler.

JPRN  Networking For People in Transition & People Who Can Help Them  Unemployment remains high. JPRN, the Jarrettown Professional Relationship Network can help. Are you trying to network your way to a new job? Do you have expertise or contacts that can help people in transition? Is your company or organization looking for people in the area? This is a free outreach program to support those seeking work, involve people with contacts and networking know how, and involve local companies. Meetings held monthly at Jarrettown United Methodist Church, Limekiln Pike.

Pennsylvanias Low-Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) grant program is now open for the 2010-11 heating season. Grants are based on income, family size, type of heating fuel and region. Additional information, such as specific income limits, and applications for LIHEAP grants are available online via the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Access to Social Services (COMPASS) website at www.compass.state.pa.us. Applications are available at most public officals district offices, county assistance offices, local utility companies and community service agencies, such as Area Agencies on Aging or community action agencies.

Begin your holiday shopping at Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation! Entertainment books for 2011, Philadelphia North, are now on sale at $30 each. Regal/United Artists movie tickets are on sale for just $7.50 each, and tickets to the Adventure Aquarium, Baltimore Aquarium, and the Philadelphia Zoo are also available. Discounted ski vouchers to area mountains will be arriving in December; call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information. Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation office hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

RSVP of Montgomery County and the Wissahickon Valley Public Library have partnered again to offer the public their popular free mock interview sessions. The mock interviews are conducted by RSVP volunteers who are retired professionals, some of whom were in hiring positions themselves. Packets of information which include a sample employment application and interviewing tips with mock interview questions are available at the library to pick up prior to a scheduled mock interview or will be sent via email once the interview is scheduled. To schedule your interview, please contact Janis Glusman at RSVP 610-834-1040, ext. 16. The library is also offering a free resume review service. Bring in your current resume and the professional reference staff will assist you with hints and tips on capturing your work history accurately.

Registration for Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation summer playgrounds, Camp B.I.G. and Small Folks, X-Zone, and sports camps has began. Register online at www.upperdublin.net/store, or at the UDP&R office, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington. Call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Danielles Espresso Cafe presents Mornings at Mondaug Bark Park April 16 and May 21 from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Meet fellow dog lovers. These events include complimentary coffee, treats for people and pups and raffles/giveaways.

Upper Dublins Annual Spring Flea Market will be held June 4 from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Reserve a table, or come and shop. Tables are $15 for UD residents, $20 for non-residents. This successful event occurs rain or shine. Refreshments available. Call 215-643-1600 ext. 3443 to register for a table.

Regal movie tickets available for purchase at Upper Dublin Township Parks & Recreation. Reduced rate: $7.50 per ticket. Some restrictions apply. Call 215-643-1600 x3443.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation movie tickets $7.50 Regal Cinemas, United Artist & Edwards Cinemas on sale throughout the year Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation Camp Sign-ups for Stony Creek Day Camp  Stony Creek Tracers and Park n Tots. Register on-line at www.whitpaintownship.org OrCome to Township Building with check or Visa MasterCard Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m. For additional information call 610.277-2400 ext. 374

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation offers exciting new programs for the fall:

-Returning favorites include UK Elite Petite Soccer, Tiny Dancers, Kiddie Tennis, Fun-nastics, Messy Playtime, Little Chefs, and more. Babysitters Training will be offered in November and December. Continuing Adult Fitness Classes include Cardio Circuit, Core & More, Yoga, Boxing, and Adult G.Y.M. For more information call 215-643-1600 x3443. Register for programs online at www.upperdublin.net/store.

Music and Theater

The community is invited to a Cantors Concert April 16 at 8 p.m. Congregation Beth Or, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen. Listen and hum-along to the Yiddish, pop tunes and classical music performed by Congregation Beth Ors own Cantor David Green and his special guest, Cantor Irvin Bell, from Temple Beth Israel in Deerfield Beach, Fla. The cantors will be accompanied by Mark Sobol and his Klezmer musicians. Tickets are $18 in advance and $25 at the door. RSVP with payment to Barb Murtha, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen, PA 19002, or call 215-646-5806 ext. 220.

Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse will host the Jameson Sisters May 14. Doors open at 7:30 pm, performance at 8:00 pm. Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse is located at the corner of Rte. 202 & Sumneytown Pike, Gwynedd. $5 suggested donation. Light refreshment available at a modest cost. For further information, call 215-393-9576 or visit gwyneddmeeting.org/coffeehouse.html.

Celebrate patriotism through song with Gwynedd-Mercy Colleges choir, the Voices of Gwynedd, as it presents Hear America Singing April 15 at 8 p.m. The choir will perform song selections from all over the country, including Georgia on My Mind, New York State of Mind, and a medley including Philadelphia Freedom and Allentown. The performance will end with When the Saints Go Marching In to acknowledge the choirs upcoming tour in New Orleans. Hear America Singing will take place in the Julia Ball Auditorium, located in St. Bernard Hall. Parking is available in lots A, C and D. Admission is free.

The Choristers will present Anton Dvoraks Stabat Mater April 16 at 7:30 p.m. at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler. The choir will be accompanied by a 41-piece orchestra. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens, $10 for students and children are free. Tickets will be sold in advance or at the door. For more information, call 215-542-7871 or visit TheChoristers.org

Religious News

The Staircase Gallery at Or Hadash: A Reconstructionist Congregation in Fort Washington will feature the work of Emily Ennuat-Lustine. The artist will be showing paintings and graphics inspired by her own personal spiritual journey and quest for meaning. Some of the works to be shown have been inspired by Biblical Psalms and writings. Her work has been shown at Abington Art Center, Cheltenham Arts Center and Old City Gallery of Jewish Art among others. The exhibition is open Friday evenings starting Feb. 18 after Shabbat services. Gallery hours are: Mondays through Thursdays 10-4:30, Fridays 10-3 and following Shabbat Services and Sundays 10-1. The synagogue is located at 190 Camp Hill Road in Fort Washington. For additional information contact the synagogue office at 215-283-0276.

Reunions

St. Matthews High School Conshohocken Class of 1961 is looking for classmates. For details, contact Greg Marincola at 215-646-2239, 215-740-1296 or gregcola@comcast.net.

Olney High School Class of 1971 is Lloking for classmates for a 40th reunion Oct. 28. For details, contact Judy at ohsclassof71@yahoo.com or 215-870-7572.

Abington High School Class of 1961 is seeking classmates for a 50-year reunion to be held Oct. 14-15, 2011.Visit the website, www.abington61.com, for details or call 215-947-1779.

Overbrook High School class of January 1956 is having a 55 year reunion on May 22, 2011 at the Bala Golf Club in Philadelphia. For information please contact overbrookreunion56@comcast.net

Germantown High School Class Of January 1961 is looking for classmates for 50th year reunion to take place in May of 2011. Please contact: 215-362-9148, 856-577-0659 or samdelcomo@comcast.net

The June 1961 class of Germantown High School is holding their 50th reunion on May 15, which will be a brunch. For further details please contact Linda Dorfman Alten at lindaalten@yahoo.com or call 215-441-8411.

Support

New Life Presbyterian Church in Dresher, will host GriefShare, a special seminar and support group which will run on Monday evenings from 7 to 9 p.m., from March 7 through June 6. At each meeting there will be a DVD about the grief process, discussion and reference to a grief workbook. Preregistration is required to secure a place in the group and to purchase a GriefShare notebook (for a one-time fee of $15). The notebook goes along with the 13-week schedule covering such topics as: living with grief, the effects of grief, and stuck in grief. For more information or to register, call: Sandy Elder at 215-884-5149.

PUPS (People Understanding Parkinsons) A self-help group for those adjusting to a new diagnosis or dealing with the early stages of Parkinsons Disease. Meets fourth Tuesday of the month from 1 to 2:30 p.m., at Abington Health Center, Schilling Campus, Willowood Building, 2510 Maryland Road, Suite 251, Willow Grove. For more information or to RSVP, contact Lorna at 215-542-2931.

The North Penn Visiting Nurse Associations Meals on Wheels program is looking for volunteers to pack or deliver meals to the elderly and infirmed. Meals are packed and delivered mornings, Monday through Friday. You can volunteer for as many days per week or month as you would like. Packaging meals requires approximately 2-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves making sandwiches, packaging food into individual serving containers and packing coolers with the meals. Delivering meals requires approximately 1-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves loading coolers into your car and delivering a route of approximately 10 to 15 stops. The Meals on Wheels program is also in need of emergency, winter-weather volunteers to pack and deliver meals in bad weather. North Penn VNA is located at 51 Medical Campus Drive in Lansdale and delivers meals in the Lansdale, North Wales and Blue Bell areas. For more information or to volunteer, please call Bridget, North Penn VNA Meals on Wheels coordinator at 215-855-8296.

Elkins Park Area CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) meets the first Tuesday of every month, 7- 8:30 p.m., at Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital in Elkins Park. For information on CHADD or ADHD, please see our website www.chadd.net/249 or call Claire Noyes at: 215-779-6656.

Center for Loss and Bereavement, 3847 Skippack Pike, Skippack (610-222-4110) www.bereavementcenter.org Offers professional counseling for individuals, couples, children and families dealing with issues of loss and bereavement. Six-week adult support groups: Newly forming young adult grief support group  every other Wednesday, 7  8:15 p.m. (free of charge); Monthly loss of child support  second Mondays, 7-8:15 p.m.; Six-week young loss of spouse/partner  Thursdays, 10-11:15 a.m.; Other groups scheduled as interest is shown for suicide loss support, adult loss of parent, motherless daughters, adult loss of sibling, coping with chronic illness and disability and mens loss of spouse. Nellos Corner Family Bereavement program offers peer grief support groups for ages 4 through teen and their caregivers  Every other Tuesday or Wednesday (free of charge) Local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children also meets at the Center. Registration required. Call for further information.

CHADD is a national organization for children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder, providing education, advocacy and support for individuals and their families with AD/HD. Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital, 60 Township Line Road, Elkins Park, PA 19027, will host children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder on the First Tuesday of each month 7  8:30 p.m. Free, no childcare provided.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphias Kehillah of Old York Road is sponsoring a free Caregiver Support Group for individuals who care for an elderly person with cognitive and/or physical impairments. The group meets at SarahCare Adult Day Care Center, 101 Washington Lane, Suite G-6, Jenkintown, Pa., on the first Wednesday of each month. Patty Rich,
Friends In Pink is still on the radar and growing every year
The orchestra will perform in Vienna and Salzburg on Wednesday and Thursday

The Cairo Symphony Orchestra will head to Austria this week to perform two concerts in Vienna and Salzburg.

The first concert will take place on Wednesday at the The Wiener Musikverein hall in Vienna, home to the renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and one of the top international music halls.

The second performance will be held on Thursday at the House of Mozart in Salzburg.

The delegation will be accompanied by the head of the Cairo Opera House, Inas Abdeldayem, and orchestra conductor Ahmed El-Saedy.

The orchestra will also feature Korean soprano Sooyeon Kim, Russian mezzo soprano Lubov Stuchevskaya and Korean pianist Sunyoung Ro.

The programme will present works by Wagner, Bellini, Offenbach, Delibes, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.

According to a report by Al-Ahram Arabic, Abdeldayem said the tour was prompted by an invitation from an Austrian music institution to collaborate with the Egyptian Philharmonic Society for a cultural exchange.

Abdeldayem added that she considers the tour a national mission, and the musicians ambassadors tasked with presenting the Egyptian culture scene to the world.

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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Rabbis installation at Keneseth Israel will get a boost of student creativity
May 15, 2017

State Department: Renamed Al-Qaeda Not A Terrorist Organization - Can Receive CIA Supplies

Max Abrams, a professor who works about terrorism, came up with this new definition of "terrorism":

Nonstate actors who use violence against civilians for a political goal and haven't been supported by the US.

The highlighted part is "new" to those who have not learned from history and the many occasions of U.S. support for (typically extremely right-wing) terrorist organizations like the "contras" in Nicaragua, OUN fascists in Ukraine or Jihadi Mujahedin in Afghanistan. It can indeed be argued that the U.S. created al-Qaeda as well as the Islamic State (ISIS).

But lets just be happy that people get again reminded of the issue.

Prof. Adams remark came after a report by the Canadian CBC which found that the U.S. has not designated al-Qaeda's recently renamed organization in Syria as a "foreign terrorist entity". HTS rules (vid) the Syrian city and governate of Idleb.

The U.S. offered a $10,000,000 reward (official pdf) for Abu Muhammad al-Joulani the founder al Al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra aka Jabhat Fatah al-Sham). But newly again renamed organization which he leads as the official military commander, the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is not on any U.S. (and Canadian) terrorist entity list:

The Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, currently calling itself Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has succeeded in getting itself off Canada's list of designated terrorist entities following its latest identity shift.

...

[I]n January of this year, the group shifted again, nominally dissolving itself and joining with four other jihadi groups. It altered its name, changing the word "Jabhat" (Front) to "Hay'at" (Organization), and "Fateh" (Conquest) to "Tahrir" (Liberation).

...

The State Department did issue a statement in March, in Arabic only, branding HTS a terrorist group. But the State Department's Nicole Thompson told CBC that was a mistake. "Though closely affiliated with al-Nusra, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham is not a designated terrorist organization," she said in an email. "The statement you found should have said al-Nusrah Front and has been corrected." Al-Nusra, however, no longer exists.

The non-designation will make it more difficult to prosecute members and supporters of the organization. Donations and other support to HTS are now legal. While Nusra and HTS had claimed to no longer be part of al-Qaeda (but never retracted their oath to it), scholars within those organization frequently argue for publicly admit the connection. No professional working on the issue denies that HTS is part of al-Qaeda and a terrorist group. But, apparently, the U.S. State Department does.

The CBC speculates why HTS is not (or no longer) designated:

The reasons for the reluctance to list the new al-Qaeda formation may have to do with one of its new members, the Nour ed-Dine Zenki Brigade, a jihadi group from the Aleppo governorate. The Zenki Brigade was an early and prominent recipient of U.S. aid, weapons and training. Zenki was cut off by the State Department only after Amnesty International implicated them in killings of Orthodox Christian priests and members posted a video of themselves beheading a young boy.

A different reason seems more likely to me.

Providing material support or resources to designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations is prohibited under 18 U.S. Code  2339B. Non-designated groups can be supplied and otherwise supported.

As long as HTS is not designated as terrorist group the CIA, and anyone else, can supply it with weapons and money without using any "Free Syrian Army" cut-outs in-between. The cut-out scheme was used and had well worked when many groups like the Zenki Brigade, then hailed as liberating heroes, delivered the CIA supplies as tribute to Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS or fought battles on their side. But the number of FSA groups has dwindled. Many closed shop, fled to Europe, or have joined either al-Nusra (in form of HTS) or the competing Ahrar al-Sham terrorist organization. A direct supply line to al-Qaeda is more convenient and will incur less losses along the way.

As long as HTS is not officially designated it will likely continue to have access to CIA delivered TOW anti-tank missiles (vid) and other heavy supplies like artillery munition. It will continue to prepare for new attacks on Syrian government forces and Syrian civilians. The Syrian government and its allies must stay alert on the issue and work on additional ways to interrupt any deliveries.

Posted by b on May 15, 2017 at 14:12 UTC | Permalink

Comments
Popular this week on Morningstar.co.uk is our coverage of the most recent Morningstar Investment Conference in London, where we heard from respected authorities on the key issues affecting investors today.

Morningstar.co.uk readers are also interested in star UK equity income fund manager Neil Woodford buying Lloyds bank. You can find the best of our content, as voted for by Morningstar.co.uk readers, below.

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Which are the Top 2 Emerging Markets?

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All this week, we bring you a Guide to What the Experts to Say; the top insights from the Morningstar Investment Conference in London; emerging markets, stock picks and the impact of politics.

Emma Wall: Hello, and welcome to Morningstar. I am Emma Wall and I am joined today by Joe Twyman of YouGov. Hello, Joe.

Joe Twyman: Hi.

Wall: So, we just heard from you in your presentation at the Morningstar Investment Conference that there are divisions across Europe. And then not just about whether you want to be in the EU or not. Along what lines are people increasingly divided?

Twyman: Well, that's right. In the old days people would talk about things in terms of left and right, liberal and conservative. And now people think about things in terms of leave and remain. But actually, it is a lot more complicated than that and there are a number of factors that really define these new groups that we are increasingly looking at in order to understand the country better, not just here but actually across the Europe and developed democracies as well.

So, there are things like age, differences in age can have a huge impact on all things; education; social caste. But also, the way that people look at the world around them and so some people may look very much inward and see their country is, where their future lies; others will see a more international perspective. And so, the contrast of all of these and how they interplay together is really providing  starting to provide a much greater level of detail for the population.

Wall: And how important are these divisions when trying to predict the outcomes of the various political decisions that have to be made in the next 12 months?

Twyman: Well, massively important because the world  particularly the political world has changed over the last two, three years and things that one would not expect to happen based on historical precedent, based on lot of other information have indeed occurred whether it is Brexit, whether it is the election of Donald Trump.

And the reasons for those are complicated but they are linked to the fact that the country is now dividing in different ways. And so there is a group of people within both our population in this country, but also in other countries who feel that they are dissatisfied, distrusting and disapproving not just of politicians or political parties but of political institutions.

And often the establishment, as a whole, they feel they've been left behind and the world has moved on in a way that they are not comfortable with and crucially that they do not consent to. And the implications for that in terms of how the established political parties address it be it for a referendum campaign or for a general election are enormous.

Wall: Why is it such a surprise that these divisions exist because you certainly saw over the last 12 months as you touched upon, Brexit was not an outcome people were predicting. Donald Trump was again, not an outcome that the polls predicted and yet here we are in this political landscape where it's very evident that people are angry. Why were we not aware of that before?

Twyman: Because in a lot of cases, its more complicated than simply anger and so the story of the last parliament in this country was about the rise of UKIP and going from 3% in 2010 to nearly 4 million people voting for them in 2015. And that growing anger, that growing dissatisfaction, distrust, disapproval was very clear, when it was manifesting itself in terms of voting for UKIP.

And it was pretty certain that the vast majority of those people would then vote to leave the European Union. But the fact that the referendum on the European Union became a referendum on really modern life in general for a lot of people and became a referendum on the establishment, on the established way of doing things, meant that it was far more difficult to predict because ultimately, it's just a lot more complicated.

Wall: And have we reached peak dissatisfaction or is this just the beginning of something that's going to stretch far out past June 8 and into other political elections?

Twyman: When you look at opinion data across all different measures for this sort of thing. What you're interested in and not the individual polls and small fluctuations or the outliers and everything else. What you're really interested in is identifying the long-term trends, that's what key here. And so, as a political analyst such as myself, I'm looking for the distinction between talking point and turning point.

The difficulty we have at the moment is that it's too soon and we don't know whether Brexit and Trump are the turning points or the talking points or whether for instance, France and Austria, are the turning points or the talking points. We'll only know perhaps in a number of years' time, but it's one of those questions that we're now focused on heavily.

Wall: Prediction for the General Election 2017 in the U.K.?

Twyman: It will take place on June 8.

Wall: Thank you very much Joe. This is Emma Wall for Morningstar. Thank you for watching.
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.
Embattled lender Home Capital Group Inc. has provided an update on its liquidity position, with liquid assets at around $962 million as of end of day May 11, 2017.Combined with the undrawn amount of $600 million under the Company's $2.0 billion credit facility led by HOOPP, the Companys aggregate available liquidity and credit capacity totaled approximately $1.56 billion, Home Capital stated on Friday (May 12). Home Trust s High Interest Savings Account (HISA) deposit balances are expected to be approximately $125 million on May 12, 2017 after the settlement of transactions that took place on May 11, 2017.Total Guaranteed Investment Certificate (GIC) deposits, including Oaken and broker GICs, stood at $12.52 billion and Oaken savings accounts stood at $155 million as at May 10, 2017, the lender added. Home Trust's GICs and HISA deposits are eligible for Canada Deposit Insurance Corp. coverage.Early last week, Home Capital Group Inc. announced that three veteran business executivesCanadian Coalition for Good Governance founder Claude Lamoureux, former Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System CEO Paul Haggis, and former Bank of Montreal senior vice president of real estate Sharon Sallowswill be joining its board effective immediately.The lender has also found a measure of support in Dominion Lending Centres , as president Gary Mauris expressed confidence over Home Capitals prospects.Given the recent news that Home Capital Group will be implementing significant policy changes around their lending criteria, Dominion Lending Centres is proud to stand by Home Capital, and will resume recommending their mortgage solutions to our clients, Mauris said.Dominion Lending Centres has full confidence that under new leadership, Home Capital Group will develop additional sources of funding and will continue serving Canadians with unique mortgage solutions.
Mount Pleasant, SC (29464)

Today

Cloudy with occasional rain late. Low 64F. Winds NNE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Cloudy with occasional rain late. Low 64F. Winds NNE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Higher wind gusts possible.
Testimonials

"He loves these children, and he makes them feel special"

Mr. Curtis Joiner is the highlight of a lot of little kids' mornings at Fannin Elementary. He's the crossing guard, and he meets every child with a "hello, friend!" and a high-five. Car after car in the drive-thru line rolls down their windows so Mr. Curtis can say good morning and get his high-five or thumbs up. He loves these children, and he makes them feel special and safe everyday. He even stands outside the school and prays for the students as they take the STAAR test.

Mr. Joiner is a pastor, a veteran and the world's most loving crossing guard. He deserves all our praise for how he pours into all those kids everyday.

Mr. Joiner is a bright light and a positive role model for all these kids. He just makes all "his kids" feel important, and I can't think of better person to get some recognition of his own.

Chancey Linderman, Fannin Elementary School parent

---

"He is a man after God's own heart"

When talking about an ideal pastor, look no farther than my pastor, Rev. Curtis D. Joiner of Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. He is a man after God's own heart. He is a caring person for his sheep and for those who are lost.

He always goes when needed, asking what he can do to help. He doesn't know any strangers.

He loves talking about "what would Jesus do?" His answer would be: Love your neighbor as yourself. God made all of us, no matter what color or religion.

If you meet him, you will find out how much energy he has. He's always on the go and would give his last dime if he has to.

He loves being a crossing guard at Fannin. He sings on the corner and waves at everyone who passes by.

So if you want to meet my pastor, stop by Fannin. If you do, prepare to stay awhile. And if you get a chance, stop by the church.

Marie King, member of Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church
We are collating signatures to petition ...
On Saturday mornings, the tools of creativity get loaded onto a push cart in a quiet corner of Orlando's Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women.

Crayons, markers, glue sticks, modeling clay and construction paper are the instruments of peace for Madison McNamee.

"I try to find crafts to go along with the nearest holiday or season, the high school sophomore said as she fills up "the art cart" on wheels.

Soon, the 16-year-old student is mobile, not on her phone, rather cruising through hospital corridors, pushing her vehicle of creativity, ready to entertain.

"I just do it for the kids because, I feel like no kid should have to spend their weekend in the hospital," Madison said.

Madison willingly spends her weekends gearing up to calm down little nerves.

"Want help again? she asks a youngster struggling with a marker cap while coloring.

Each Saturday, Madison makes the 90-minute drive with her mom or sister from Melbourne to downtown Orlando's Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women.

"Depending on how traffic is, Madison says with a grin, referencing how many of Central Floridas roads are currently under construction.

Madison enjoys reassuring nervous youngsters whose weekend includes an unexpected trip to the hospital through arts and crafts. It's her "bedside manner," already at work.



She sits in the waiting room, waiting to entertain patients, brothers, sisters and even kids at heart before doctors will see them.

"Ready?" Madison asks, helping a child clean up an art project as a nurse is ready to take the child for treatment.

"I've always enjoyed the medicine side of things, Madison admitted. When I was little, putting BandAid's on siblings, or something as simple as that. I grew to like kids. I love spending time with kids.

While it may be coloring today, Madison's crafts have already lead to getting one foot in the door for the bright career she's designing for herself.

I want to be a pediatric oncologist, so I want to work with the kids that have cancer."

After high school, Madison would like to head to the University of Florida for college and eventually return to work at Central Florida hospital. Until then, her spirit of caring for others continues.

"If I could just do anything to make it a little fun for them, it's worth it for me, she concluded.
The weekends rain didn't put much of a damper on the drought across Central Florida.

Weekend rain didn't improve drought conditions

Burn ban remains in effect in Flagler County

Additional warning signs have been posted

In Flagler County, fire officials are now taking even more precautions to make sure residents understand the seriousness of the burn ban.

Shawn and Danielle Morgan saw the red burn ban sign as they arrived at a Flagler County park, ready to enjoy their Mother's Day boat trip with family.

The mother and daughter said they were looking forward to a day on the water away from dry land.

"It's very dry even my yard is dry, I'm scared somebody's going to come flick a cigarettes and my whole yard is going to go up in flames," said Shawn Morgan.

"That's the scary part, it's very dry and hot it's scary for the fires," said Danielle Morgan.

Fire chief Don Petito said Saturday's rain wasn't close to helping with the drought index.

The county has now added additional burn ban signs.

"That didn't make any effect whatsoever on the drought because it was a light rain and heavy winds and it dried up as fast as it fell," Petito. "We're still in the same drought condition that we were in before."

"We don't burn, we can't use our burn barrel right now, no bonfires at night," said Danielle Morgan.

Grills were bagged in parks so there was no holiday barbecuing going on for Mothers Day.

"No charcoal grills, no fireworks try not to throw any cigarettes out the window, anything that's going to start a fire don't do it," said Petito.

He said their helicopter is strictly on fire duty and extra staff is always ready in case of a fire.

Petito said the state needs about a week's worth of rain right now to really make a difference.

"The rain didn't even touch our drought so even if we're out on the boat today and it rains we'll just get wet, we'll take it," said Shawn Morgan.
Orlando will repair and move to another location a controversial Confederate statue that's stood at Lake Eola Park in downtown Orlando for 100 years.

Confederate memorial has been at Lake Eola Park since 1917

Opponents of its removal marched in front of City Hall on Monday

PREVIOUSLY: Orlando man to ask for removal of Lake Eola Confederate memorial

As supporters of the memorial marched with Confederate flags in front of City Hall during a city council meeting Monday, Mayor Buddy Dyer proposed moving it to Orlandos Greenwood Cemetery.

Dozens of people rallying in support of confederate memorial staying at @LakeEolaPark at @citybeautiful. pic.twitter.com/3dR8k0leJH  John W. Davis (@johnwdavis) May 15, 2017

According to the city, the Confederate statue was donated to Orlando by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1911. The statue was installed at Lake Eola in 1917.

Ive spent my entire life preserving history and heritage for my country, said Patricia Schnurr, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Since 2015, city leaders say theyve received petitions for and against the statue.

Some people like myself see them as historical markers that are dedicated to the fallen dead, while others perceive them as a symbol of white supremacy and a vestige of slavery," Dyer said.

"With this understanding and our city's commitment to inclusiveness, Im proposing that we move the statue to a more appropriate location, which is Greenwood Cemetery. Theres a Confederate veterans section of the cemetery. It is totally appropriate to have a memorial to fallen veterans in that section.

At the meeting Monday, Dyer made the executive decision to repair the statue and move it to Greenwood.

Supporters of the @LakeEolaPark memorial marched with Confederate flags in front of @citybeautiful City Hall Monday: https://t.co/yJqcZVSb7z pic.twitter.com/ZAVUWli6xd  News 13 (@MyNews13) May 15, 2017

The question of what to do with Confederate statues has been faced by city officials in at least two other cities in recent weeks. In New Orleans, workers have removed two of four statues honoring Confederate-era figures. Last weekend, a scuffle broke out at a statue of a Confederate general in Charlottesville, Virginia, over its planned removal.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.



The 'Johnny Reb' Confederate memorial has stood at Lake Eola Park in downtown Orlando since 1917, city leaders say. (John W. Davis, staff)
In honor of Senior Corps Week on May 15-19, 2017, we salute our many volunteers who give of their time, talents, wisdom and experience. Each of our communities are grateful for the positive difference that you make throughout our region. In one year throughout the nation, 245,000 Senior Corps volunteers served 74 million hours making a difference for generations.

Last year, Texas Senior Corps volunteers provided 4,332,244 hours to improve our communities. The independent sector values volunteer time at the rate of $25.11 per hour. Texas Senior Corps volunteers contributed more than $107,782,646 of service throughout the State of Texas.
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The Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport has quite a story to its start.

The airport, built on Conroe's northeast side, was constructed by the Civil Aeronautics Agency in 1939.

Then the airport's story turns quite interesting.

George Strake Jr., son of George Strake Sr. who found oil in Montgomery County in 1931, gave an account as a part of an oral history project of the Heritage Museum of Montgomery County that talks about Adolf Hitler's interest in Conroe's oil fields in the 1930s.

"A person came to him (George Strake Sr.) with a German accent and the word was out (after the Discovery Well) that this might be a really, really big oilfield," Strake said on the DVD recorded on Dec. 1, 2016.

"Allegedly, a fellow in Germany would be interested in buying your (George Strake Sr.'s) oil or your oilfield," Strake Jr. said in the DVD. "His (the fellow's) name was Adolf Hitler and mother and dad (Mr. and Mrs. George Strake Sr.) considered going to Germany to meet with him to determine if he wanted to invest in it, but he (George Strake Sr.) got a negative feeling about this guy and what was going on in Europe, so they canceled their trip to Germany."

Then when the US entered World War II, the U.S. Navy developed an interest in the airport, leasing it as a Naval Air Station throughout the war. The thought was that the base would protect Conroe's oil fields.

Sometime in 1945, the U.S. Navy hosted an open house at the airport that was well attended and documented in photos. Martha Welschaus donated photos of the open house to the Heritage Museum of Montgomery County.

In 1946, following the end of the war, the U.S. Navy signed over the airport to Montgomery County.

According to a May 16, 1946 Courier, the county then leased the airport to George Koehne Jr., Shirley Hubbard and June Wood, who were doing business as Texas Aviation Company. The goal of their company was to transform surplus Armed Forces aircraft into commercial freight and passenger planes.

Mr. Hubbard was to terminate his employment with Globe Aircraft Co. in Fort Worth to move to Conroe with his family and superintend all activities of the operation.

The first plane for modification arrived on May 18, 1946.

The company was to offer complete mechanical services for all and every type of plane.

John Florio served as manager of the Montgomery County Airpark, as it was called.

Airport board chairman, Ed Triplett, expressed his satisfaction with the contract in The Courier and sought for an operator to run the cafe at the airport in the paper.

One of the first events to take place when the county took over the airport was an air show held on June 2, 1946.

Airpark Manager John Florio announced the air show in The Courier. A barbecue was held and planes came from all over Texas for the event.

A full page ad in The Courier promoted the event.

The county began operating the airport as a civilian facility in 1951.

Up until 1972, operation of the airport was done through fixed base operators. After 1972, operations of the airport were assumed by the county.

Over the years, the runways have been extended several times.

On June 13, 1994, the General Aviation FBO hangar caught fire due to worn out electrical wiring. Seven vintage airplanes that included the fan favorite North American AT-6 Snoopy plane were destroyed in the fire.

Although the hangar was rebuilt the next year, citizens of Conroe still remember the original World War II Navy hangar fondly.

"People still tell me how much they loved that hangar," said Bob Covington General Aviation FBO owner in a previous Courier article. "I just have to tell them, 'Well, it's just too bad it burned down.'"

General Aviation FBO continues its operation and in June 2014, had an "Out of the Ashes Celebration" to commemorate the 20 years that had passed since the fire.

Modern times have brought a variety of improvements and unparalleled growth to the airport.

Eventually the airport became known as Lone Star Executive Airport.

A new air traffic control tower was dedicated in May 2009.

Constructed at a cost of $2.4 million, the tower went into full operation May 7, 2009.

"There are a lot of milestones associated with this airport," U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, said at the tower dedication ceremony. "But the opening of the control tower perhaps among its most important milestones. Not only does (the tower) increase air traffic safety, it creates an economic development incentive that is so critical as companies look at locating their businesses around the (Houston) region," he said.

And the airport has just continued to grow from there.

In January 2014, Galaxy FBO announced completion of its three-story facility.

The facility brought a new southern entrance to the airport off Loop 336 in Conroe.

On Oct. 1, 2015, Lone Star Executive Airport changed its name and logo to Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport. Also in 2015, Airport Director Scott Smith was named 2015 Reliever Airport Manager of the Year. In 2016, the airport was named General Aviation Reliever Airport of the Year by the Texas Department of Transportation.

Last fall, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Station opened at the Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport in Conroe.

"This is the trifecta," County Judge Craig Doyal said in the September 2016 Courier article. "We were out here for the tower opening, the runway extension and now our customs facility. I can't wait to see what you do next year, Scott. This airport is an economic tool for Montgomery County."

Just this week it was announced that the new custom's office has cleared 100 international flights in eight months - beating expectations.

An Army Reserve unit, the 7th Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment was activated at the airport in 1988.

The unit changed names to the 1-158th on June 16, 2008, when it was was designated an Army Reconnaissance Battalion. The unit also made news in spring 2016 when the unit flew out the last AH-64D Apache helicopters in a transition to the UH-60L Blackhawk helicopter.

Another big announcement came this spring when it was announced that the B-17 Flying Fortress Texas Raiders, was moving permanently to a hangar at General Aviation Services on the north side of Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport. A ribbon-cutting for the "flying museum" took place in March.

Visit www.lonestarairport.org for more about the Conroe North Houston Regional Airport.

The Courier wishes to thank Sally Copley, Executive Director of the Heritage Museum of Montgomery County and Merle Trammell, Assistant Director of the Heritage Museum of Montgomery County for their continued support of The Courier's 125th anniversary project.
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AUSTIN  The Texas Senate on Monday voted to agree with House amendments to so-called "pass the trash" legislation that is designed to curb the growing number of inappropriate student-teacher sexual relationships.

In doing so, Senate Bill 7 will now go to Gov. Greg Abbott to be signed into law.

SMILE: Texas teacher smiling in mugshot because she know she's innocent, says lawyer

The measure increases penalties for teachers who engage in sexual and romantic relationships with students, crimes that have mushroomed in recent years in Texas and other states.

"It is an epidemic," said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, the Senate author of the measure.

He told Senate colleagues that the House made several changes to the bill, but they were in line with the Senate-passed version and it was important to get the bill to Abbott to be signed into law.

The bill would penalize any administrator who refers an accused teacher to another school district  a longstanding practice in Texas that critics have called "pass the trash." Teachers who are found guilty of violations would be barred from classrooms.

BUSTED: Police say Texas softball coach had sex 10 times with 17-year-old student

Bettencourt said that during the past eight years, a growing number of elementary, middle-school and high-school teachers in Texas have been found to have engaged in inappropriate relationships with students. Between September 2016 and August 2016, the Texas Education Agency opened 222 investigations that involved inappropriate teacher-student relationships.

He reiterated Monday that many of the teachers who are adjudged guilty of inappropriate relationships remain in the educational system because principals, superintendents and other administrators never report the violations to the TEA.

"That will stop under this bill," Bettencourt said.

"A very important bill," Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said after the unanimous Senate vote. Patrick had made passage of the measure one of his top 10 priorities.
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ARLINGTON, Texas  Whats that definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

Thats sort of how things are for the As at Texas, where each game, Oakland seems to make a key mistake or two, fails to score enough to get any cushion and then sees the bullpen hand over the lead. The script unfolded again Sunday, with Ryan Madson the latest As reliever to stumble against the Rangers, who scored three times in the seventh en route to a 6-4 victory, their sixth in a row.

Its frustrating that for roughly two-thirds of the game, you have the upper hand and then lose it, As manager Bob Melvin said. It just got away from us again at the end.

The Texas rally was fueled in part by a unfortunate decision by third baseman Trevor Plouffe. With two down and Carlos Gomez at second base, Delino DeShields hit a grounder to third, and with Gomez going full speed and showing no signs of slowing, Plouffe went for the out at first. DeShields, a fast runner, beat the throw, and Gomez scored.

When I got the ball, I thought I had time to get him with a good throw, and he just beat it. Hes a pretty fast guy, Plouffe said. Gomez was aggressive and I was aggressive, too; I thought I was going to get the out at first. He made a good baseball play.

That made it 4-3, and Melvin lifted starter Kendall Graveman and put in setup man Ryan Madson, who has had a tough time in this ballpark, with two losses, two blown saves and an ERA over 10.00. He promptly gave up a game-tying double to Elvis Andrus and a go-ahead single to Nomar Mazara.

Rookie Bobby Wahl yielded a run in the eighth; the As bullpen has allowed 10 earned runs in the past three games and absorbed all three losses at Texas. Melvin tried every reliever but long man Josh Smith in the series.

We still like our guys, Melvin said. It was just a bad series for our bullpen. ... We used all our best guys and couldnt come away with a win.

Oaklands offense consists almost exclusively of home runs these days, and so it went Sunday. The As got solo homers from Plouffe in the second and Adam Rosales in the fifth and a two-run drive by Matt Joyce in the fifth, all off onetime Oakland starter A.J. Griffin.

As an offense, when we get a team down like this, we have to keep pounding, scoring runs, Plouffe said.

The Rangers struck first in something of an unlucky first inning for Graveman. DeShields reached on a groundball single to right and stole second; Gravemans pitch on the steal was in the dirt and got by catcher Stephen Vogt, who didnt get to it quickly. By the time he did, DeShields was at third. Andrus followed with a roller to short that ticked off Rosales glove for an infield single that sent in DeShields. Then Mazara reached on a grounder past second baseman Jed Lowrie before Graveman got a double-play grounder from Jonathan Lucroy that scored Andrus.

Joyce recorded his first three-hit game since June 24. Vogt reached base three times, with two singles and a walk.

As outfielder Khris Davis, batting .139 with 31 strikeouts in his past 20 games, got the day off.

Susan Slusser is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sslusser@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susanslusser
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Speaking to political science graduates at UC Berkeley Sunday, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra voiced the traditional exhortation to go out and change the world.

But the states first Latino attorney general, the son of immigrants and the first in his family to graduate from college, urged them to employ a special weapon  ganas, Latino slang that, loosely defined, means desire merged with intestinal fortitude.

Fighting for political change in the current challenging times, he said, wont be easy.

Weve got to do it together, he said Weve got to do it with guts, weve got to do it with grit. Weve got to have ganas. ... Look it up.

A critic of President Trump, Becerra invoked the words and spirit of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights leader who has engaged in tussles with the president.

You need to get in the way, he said. You need to get into trouble. You need to get into good trouble.

The graduates cheered, and a few parents undoubtedly winced.

The state attorney general since January, Becerra has pledged to defend California against the Trump administrations immigration policies, including travel bans and threats to defund sanctuary cities.

He didnt really talk politics to the students who studied them for four years, or longer, and didnt directly mention Trump. But he talked about the need to protect the rule of law.

Becerra told the students not to forget where they came from and to make sure they include everyone in their battle for political change  even the manual laborers, clerical workers and people just trying to get by.

It takes everyone, he said.

He told the story of his immigrant parents  his dad, a ditch-digger, his mother, a typist  meeting President Bill Clinton, and said it was the greatest memory in his 24 years in the House of Representatives.

Becerra spoke of moments of inflection  critical times  like the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the recovery after the Wall Street collapse. Fighting to protect everyones rights now, he said, is a similar moment.

You dont have to do it by yourself, he said. You dont have to have done it before. But when you get out there with the guts and the grit and the ganas, you can make a difference.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
HONG KONG  China is home to the worlds largest group of internet users, a thriving online technology scene and rampant software piracy that encapsulates its determination to play by its own set of digital rules.

But as the country scrambles to recover from a global hacking attack that hit its companies, government agencies and universities especially hard, its dependence on pirated software is getting a harder look.

A large number of computers running pirated versions of Windows in China and Russia probably contributed to the cyberattacks spread, according to the Finnish cybersecurity company F-Secure. Pirated software tends to be more vulnerable to malware and viruses. Because pirated software usually is not registered with the developer, its users often miss out on major security patches that could ward off attacks.

China, India and Russia were among the countries most affected by the ransomware attack, according to the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab. The three countries are also big sources of pirated software. A study last year by BSA, a trade association of software vendors, found that in China, the share of unlicensed software reached 70 percent in 2015. Russia, with a rate of 64 percent, and India, with 58 percent, were close behind.

Zhu Huanjie, who is studying network engineering in the city of Hangzhou, blamed a number of ills, like the lack of security on school networks. But he said piracy was also a factor. Many users, he said, did not update their software to get the latest safety features because of a fear that their copies would be damaged or locked, while universities offered only older, pirated versions.

Most of the schools are now all using pirate software, including operation system and professional software, he said, adding: In China, the Windows that most people are using is still pirated. This is just the way it is.

On Monday, some Chinese institutions were still moving to clean out computer systems jammed by the attack, which initially struck Friday and spread across the world. Prestigious research institutions like Tsinghua University were affected, as were major companies like China Telecom and Hainan Airlines.

Chinas securities regulator said it had taken down its network to try to ensure it would not be affected, and the countrys banking regulator warned lenders to be cautious when dealing with the malicious software, which locked users out of their computers and demanded payment to allow them back in.

Police stations and local security offices reported problems on social media, while students at universities reported being locked out of final thesis papers. Electronic payment systems at gas stations run by the state oil giant PetroChina were cut off for much of the weekend. Overall, according to the official state television broadcaster, about 40,000 institutions were hit. Separately, the Chinese security company Qihoo 360 reported that computers at more than 29,000 organizations had been infected.

If those behind the ransomware attack profited from the hacking, they may have figured out how to do something that has been beyond Microsoft: making money from Windows in China. Microsoft and other Western companies have complained for years that a large majority of the computers running their software are using pirated versions.

It is not clear whether every company or institution in China affected by the ransomware was using pirated software. But the huge amount of use in the country makes it likely that universities, local governments and state-run companies have networks that are dependent on unlicensed copies of Windows.

One employee at Hainan Airlines rushed to work from a shopping mall Sunday after being told by the companys top ranks that every computer should be patched by that evening. Any employee whose computer was affected after that would be held personally responsible, according to the employee, who asked not to be identified because the person was not authorized to speak on the record about the episode.

Hainan Airlines did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

At China Telecom, one of the countrys three main state-run telecommunications providers, there was a similar scramble over the weekend, according to an employee who also asked not to be identified because the person was not authorized to speak on the matter. When a company-provided software patch did not work, the employee was told to use one from Qihoo 360, which supports pirated and out-of-date versions of Windows, the person said. A spokesman for China Telecom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The tradition of using copied software and other media has become embedded in Chinas computing culture, according to Thomas Parenty, founder of Archefact Group, which advises companies on cybersecurity. Some people are under the impression that using pirated goods in China is legal, while others are simply not used to paying for software, he said.

Parenty cited an instance when he was working at the Beijing office of a U.S. client. It turned out every single one of their computers, all the software, was bootlegged, he said. They had every Adobe product and movie you could download. The computers were so overloaded by things that werent for work, they had no capacity to do work.

The twin problems of malware and unwillingness to pay for software are so ingrained that they have led to an entirely alternative type of security company in China. Qihoo 360 built a business model by offering free security programs; its uses advertising to make money.

The issue has led to political battles between Microsoft and the Chinese government.

In a bid to get more organizations in China to pay for its software, Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, has tried all manner of approaches. The company has tried education and outreach. It has also stopped distributing Windows on discs, which are easy to copy.

One effort in 2014 put it at loggerheads with Beijing.

At that time, Microsoft cut off support for Windows XP, an operating system that was about 14 years old but that was still widely used by the government and by Chinese companies. But instead of upgrading, many in China complained that the move showed that the country still relied on decisions made by foreign companies. An article by the official news agency Xinhua said that such corporate behavior could be considered anticompetitive. Microsoft later agreed to offer free upgrades and reached a deal with a state-run company that often works for the military to develop a version catered to China.
A police chase in Concord on Saturday ended in the death of a 24-year-old Pittsburg woman who was the passenger in a stolen vehicle being pursued by police, according to the Clayton Police Department.

The chase began around 3 p.m. when Clayton police officers were dispatched to a report of a woman looking into vehicles at the Clayton Station Shopping Center. The woman was seen leaving their area after getting into a white sport utility vehicle that had been reported stolen from Oakley on May 3.
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It all came down to lemon zest for Jason Dady, the San Antonio chef and restaurant empire-builder who made it to Sunday's final three of the Food Network competition series "Iron Chef Gauntlet."

But in the world of Iron Chef, sometimes lemon zest is all it takes to get sent home, and Dady's citrusy shortcomings on an otherwise elegant smoked salmon and egg dish ended his five-week journey toward one singular goal: "I wanted to be the first Iron Chef from Texas."

His reaction, edited down to a few lines on the show, came to this: "Extremely disappointing. I hate losing. I hate it. It's the worst."

The series started April 16 with seven of the nation's best young chefs, and the show's melodramatic challenges whittled the field by one each week until only three were left standing Sunday: Dady  whose San Antonio restaurants include Tre Trattoria, Shuck Shack and the upcoming Range steakhouse  and Chicago chefs Sarah Grueneberg and Stephanie Izard.

RELATED: Jason Dady opening new restaurant downtown in former Luke space in Embassy Suites

The episode opened with host and mad food scientist Alton Brown revealing a Chairman's Challenge altar with three empty baskets and the command to fill them with five ingredients, from which the chefs had just 30 minutes to compose a dish.

Dady lasered in on salmon, salmon roe, eggs asparagus and lemon. With a confident stride and steady hands, he built an impromptu smoker for the fish, then improvised a blender full of scrambled eggs on the way to ... something, confessing to Brown that he had no idea where he was heading.

"No clue! I love it," Brown said. "You're out on the jagged edge."

When the dish came together, with lightly smoked fish, soft-boiled eggs with an aioli sauce and colorful touches of orange salmon roe and bright green asparagus, Brown praised its beauty but called it out for one thing: lemon zest.

"More zest could have helped you here," he said. "Overall, I think these components should have been wed with something more acidic."

Judged against Izard's Japanese custard and Grueneberg's Parmigiano ravioli, Dady's salmon came in third, and Brown lent his condolences: "There are some flavor issues that just didn't get you to Iron Chef level today. But you're a fantastic chef."

In the final elimination challenge, Izard went on to beat Grueneberg, a Houston native who visited Dady in San Antonio early in the show's run. Izard heads into next Sunday's finale against Iron Chef all-stars Bobby Flay, Masaharu Morimoto and Michael Symon  the show's namesake gauntlet  for a chance to become the newest Iron Chef.

Throughout the competition, Dady has championed the cause of San Antonio as a restaurant destination. "Let's go, this is our time to shine. This is our time to really showcase San Antonio," Dady told the Express-News before the premiere.

"Even though it's the seventh-largest city in the country, we're kind of fourth in line when it comes to media, as far as Texas is concerned  after Austin and Houston and Dallas  and so I'm striving really hard to put San Antonio on the culinary map," Dady told the Food Network. "We have great tacos and enchiladas, but there's a heck of a lot more out there too."

RELATED: Food & Wine's Best New Chefs has 2 from S.A.

The show premiered April 16 as a reboot of the network's Iron Chef franchise, with seven contestants: Dady, Grueneberg, Izard, Nyesha Arrington of Leona in Los Angeles, Michael Gulotta of Mopho in New Orleans, Shota Nakajima of Adana in Seattle and Jonathan Sawyer of the Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland.

The series started on a low-key note for Dady, who weathered Episode 1's opening challenge of taming wild game by turning out porcini-crusted elk loin, a dish that Brown summarized without enthusiasm: ""I like the looks. The sauces work." Los Angeles chef Arrington went home that night.

Episode 2 found Dady and the gang going whole hog, and Dady called on his extensive Italian repertoire for pork shoulder ragu and celery root ravioli with pasta he made on the fly.

Again, Dady was somewhere in the middle. Cleveland chef Sawyer was sent packing after losing to Nakajima of Seattle in the first of three successive elimination battles for the young chef, whom Dady hosted at Tre in San Antonio for a one-night guest spot the same week. The two have become fast kitchen friends  Dady flew to Seattle last week to guest-chef at Nakajima's Adana restaurant.

Dady held steady again in Episode 3 with yin-and-yang black and white sesame sauces with soba noodles and a white sesame cheesecake. Brown threw shade on both dishes for underplaying the white sesame. But it was Nakajima and New Orleans chef Gulotta in the elimination cookoff, and Gulotta took the long walk.

By last Sunday's Episode 4, it was an open question whether Dady had the chops to win an opening challenge  and by extension the juice to stand up to a real Iron Chef battle. With only four chefs left, Dady stepped up to win his first Chairman's Challenge, pulling off a last-minute liquid nitrogen coconut ice to energize a Thai curry that led the normally reticent host to declare, "Your curry kung fu is strong."

Nakajima entered the elimination kitchen again, this time losing to chef Izard. That left Dady, Grueneberg and Izard to fight for the last remaining spot Sunday.

It's fair to say that for five weeks, Dady and San Antonio held the same spotlight as some of the country's hottest restaurant cities. Iron Chef or not, that's a heavy-metal accomplishment.

msutter@express-news.net

Twitter: @fedmanwalking
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A manager would love to have a team of 25 Hunter Pences who are gung-ho to play even when they are ailing. But at some point, truth becomes more important than derring-do.

Manager Bruce Bochy explained that Sunday as he hinted that Pence might be headed to the 10-day disabled list with a left hamstring strain.

Hunter is one of those guys who comes in and says, I feel great. Im ready to go, Bochy said. Im saying this in a good way, not a negative way, but weve lost a little trust in him when he says hes ready to go. Its up to me to adjust his playing time.

Pence has undergone an MRI exam. Bochy was waiting for general manager Bobby Evans to arrive to discuss whether to put Pence on the DL or keep him active and available to pinch-hit until the hamstring improves.

If the Giants decide on the DL, they probably would promote Mac Williamson or Orlando Calixte from Triple-A Sacramento. Both are on the 40-man roster.

Pence missed two months last season after hamstring surgery on his other leg.

Bochy had good things to say about Stanford alum Austin Slater, who fell a triple short of the cycle at high-altitude Colorado Springs on Saturday and is hitting .308 with an .803 OPS for Sacramento. The 24-year-old outfielder is not on the 40-man roster, however, making an immediate call-up less likely.

Samardzijas control: For the second time in his career, Jeff Samardzija has a three-game streak as a starter without a walk. His desire to challenge hitters can prove costly at times but also can be rewarding.

With two runs in and a runner on in the fifth inning Sunday, Samardzija fell behind Joey Votto before getting to a 3-2 count, then executed a backdoor slider in the zone and got an inning-ending double play.

Samardzija called walk prevention his main goal.

I went through a spot early in my career where a lot of my problems came from giving free passes and being in the stretch a lot, he said. If Im behind in the count, I like to attack guys and make them put it in play. The more times you do that over the years, you find you get some outs, and some big outs, in hitters counts.

Closer throwing: Mark Melancon, on the DL with a right pronator strain, played catch for the second day in a row and might toss a light bullpen session off the mound Monday.

Melancon is eligible to return from the forearm injury Tuesday, but he will need more time.

Henry Schulman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

Better pitching: The Giants lowered their ERA from 4.76 to 4.45 over their three straight wins Friday through Sunday.

 Henry Schulman

On deck

Monday

vs. Dodgers

7:15 p.m. NBCSBA

McCarthy (3-0) vs.

Cain (2-1)

Tuesday

vs. Dodgers

7:15 p.m. NBCSBA

Hill (1-1) vs.

Blach (0-2)

Wednesday

vs. Dodgers

12:45 p.m. NBCSBA

Kershaw (6-2) vs. Cueto (4-2)
Matthew Busch, For The San Antonio Express-News / For The San Antonio Express-News

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University of the Incarnate Word graduates had star power cheering them on as they walked the stage inside the Freeman Coliseum on Saturday.

Actor Don Cheadle was sitting among the proud families and posing for selfies.

Bryce Williams shared photos of Cheadle with mySA.com. He managed to sneak a bunny Snapchat filter on the Iron Man star.

RELATED: Celebrities share support for the Spurs during 2017 playoff push

"He kinda just went along with it when he noticed he was in the picture," Williams said of the candid Snapchat shot. "He was really laid back. He said he was there to support his family like the rest of us."

Cheadle's wife, Bridgid Coulter, revealed in a Facebook post that Tonantzin Borrego, the daughter of San Antonio-native and actor Jesse Borrego, was the Cardinal who brought them to town.

RELATED: Actress Gabrielle Union-Wade spends holiday weekend in San Antonio

"This one right here...Much love & Congratulations on the college degree to our wonderful & brilliant goddaughter," Coulter shared on her "Bridgid Coulter Crew" Facebook page along with the hashtag #SummaCumLaude.

Cheadle and Coulter apparently also cured their taco fix during their San Antonio visit.

The Instagram account for La Maceta Tapatios taco truck, the business that catered the Borrego graduation party, shared a group selfie with Cheadle and Coulter.

mmendoza@mysa.com

Twitter: @MaddySkye
GREENWICH  The phrases fake news and alternative facts will be the focus of a free panel discussion from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the Greenwich Library.

What the phenomena mean in a bitterly divided country will be the focus of the event, jointly sponsored by the library and League of Women Voters of Greenwich. It will feature three prominent television and magazine journalists: Gretchen Carlson, Amy Davidson and Lizzie OLeary.

It seems the country is so divided right now that even verifiable facts are not trusted, said Sheila Mehta, a member of the leagues program committee and board.

Carlson, a Greenwich resident, is a former host at Fox News who famously sued the company for sexual harassment, leading to the departure of channel founder Roger Ailes. She was one of Foxs most visible talents.

Davidson has 20 years of experience writing for The New Yorker. OLeary is a Peabody Award-winning j ournalist and host of Marketplace Weekend.

The event will be moderated by Lynn Oberlander, a first amendment lawyer.

The press has been under siege lately, Oberlander said. Citizens of all political persuasions should consider the important role that a free press serves in our democracy. This discussion is timely and vital for all.

The topic was chosen by the league because of the amount of public interest around the topic. Jill Oberlander, a member of the league, is organizer of the event and said a record number of people have already signed up to attend.

For as long as I can remember, and certainly before the current president, select media outlets published what were generally accepted to be untrue stories or, in todays parlance, fake news, Jill Oberlander said. While Fake News is the title of this program, we expect that the conversation will address a much broader range of topics related to the mainstream media. We consider the general publics increasing distrust of media and their inability to easily separate verifiable from disputed facts to be topics that cross party lines.

Jill Oberlander said part of the discussion will focus on how mainstream media can respond and regain the confidence of the public.

This conversation could go in many different directions, Jill Oberlander said. There is no pre-determined outcome. The League thinks this is a very important conversation to have and, based on the record preregistration for this panel, it is safe to say that the Greenwich public agrees.

The panel will be held at Greenwich Librarys Cole Auditorium. A 6:40 p.m. reception with refreshments will be held outside the auditorium.

Advance registration is requested at www.eventbrite.com/e/fake-news-alternative-facts-and-the-future-of-mainstream-media-tickets-34310188698?aff=es2.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.com
1 Grisly slaying: An Oregon man killed his mother on Mothers Day at their rural home, then showed up at a grocery store in the nearby town of Estacada carrying what appeared to be a human head and began stabbing a checkout clerk before being subdued, authorities said Monday. Sheriffs deputies would not say if the mothers body was decapitated. Joshua Lee Webb, 36, was booked on charges of murder and attempted murder. The Clackamas County Sheriffs Office says Webb killed his mother, Tina Marie Webb, 59, but did not provide more details. The grocery clerk was hospitalized.

2 Alabama politics: Rep. Mo Brooks joined the U.S. Senate race in Alabama on Monday, casting himself as the only proven conservative leader in an increasingly crowded race for the seat once held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Senate seat vacated by Sessions is held by Republican Luther Strange, who was appointed by former Gov. Robert Bentley and is seeking election. Brooks, 63, a Republican from Huntsville, was first elected to Congress in 2010. The Senate Leadership Fund, which has ties to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and plans to support Strange with $2.6 million in television commercials, issued a statement saying Brooks has never sponsored a bill that became law.
BLANDING, Utah -- Long after the Black Hawk helicopter carrying Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke flew off into the bright Utah sky, James Adakai stood in the airport parking lotwith an angry frown frozen on his face.

As chairman of a tribal commission established to oversee the Bears Ears National Monument, Adakai, who is Navajo, felt he deserved a place in a meeting Zinke arranged at the airport to discuss the monument's fate. Instead, Zinke met and toured the site in helicopters with Utah government officials and others who adamantly oppose the first U.S. monument designated at the request of Native American tribes to preserve artifacts and sacred lands.

"You see how they do us?" Adakai said.

Zinke was on his first trip to southern Utah since President Donald Trump signed an executive order to review Bears Ears and 26 other monuments. Zinke stepped into the center of a land dispute that's as old as the Indian Wars.

The fight over Bears Ears isn't just the usual row between politicians who want to mine and drill the land and conservationists who want to preserve and ogle its natural splendor.

It also pits natives who reside on reservations across three states against many Anglos - as some Navajos and Hopi people call white residents - who live in San Juan County. In its largest city, Blanding, banners streaming "#RescindBearsEars" and homemade signs attached to fences that said "No Monument" told Zinke where folks stood.

Supporters such as the Utah Dine Bikeyah shouted their counterpoint - "Protect Bears Ears!" - everywhere Zinke appeared in public, as he tried to keep a poker face. "I'm in listening mode," he said, trying to hear every side.

Zinke is expected to submit a recommendation to Trump in early June, following a public comment period that started Friday. But conservationists wondered whether the Trump administration had already betrayed its intent.

As he signed his executive order two weeks ago in Zinke's office at Interior, Trump criticized former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, the Democrats who respectively created Bears Ears and another Utah monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante.

"It's time to end these abuses and return the control of the land to the people, the people of Utah," Trump said. The president turned to praise Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a staunch opponent of the monuments, who stood at his side.

Hatch was an early Trump supporter who helped him carry Utah in the presidential election when his victory there was in doubt. He is also chairman of the Finance Committee that will debate tax reform and health-care bills the president desperately wants to pass.

When he was done signing the order, Trump handed the pen to Hatch, who said he would cherish it.

Zinke and Hatch were back together at a meeting in Salt Lake City that kicked off the secretary's Utah trip. In remarks afterward, Zinke kept to his balanced public tone. "I think they are smart, capable, passionate, and have a deep sense of tie to their culture and want to preserve it," he said of monument advocates.

Hatch wasn't as polite, describing the Navajo, Hopi, Ute and Zuni tribal leaders who spearheaded the push for the designation as clueless. "The Indians, they don't fully understand that a lot of the things that they currently take for granted on those lands, they won't be able to do if it's made clearly into a monument or a wilderness," the Salt Lake City Tribune quoted Hatch as saying.

The senator was asked to name something natives do now that a monument would disallow. "That'd take too much time," Hatch replied. "Just take my word for it."

At the Blanding airport 300 miles south of Salt Lake the following day, Leonard Lee, a Navajo activist who stood near Adakai, spat on the ground before sharing his thoughts about Hatch's comment. "It was an insult," he said.

---

San Juan County, among the poorest in Utah, isn't divided just by the issue of Bears Ears. Its population is almost equally divided between white residents at 49 percent, and American Indian and Alaska Natives at 47 percent, according to 2015 Census estimates. Together, African- and Asian-Americans barely make up a single percentage point.

A visitor center, bank and hardware store are among the few modern-looking buildings on a Main Street lined with aging hotels and a dollar store. The city has one traffic signal, a flashing red light managing a four-way stop where Main Street intersects Center Street.

The county got a welcome shot of good news recently that distracted it from the battle over Bears Ears. Its population increased by 1,000 from 2015 to last year, making it one of the proportionally fastest-growing counties in the nation, with some newcomers lured by its gorgeous canyon country.

Bears Ears was projected by the Obama administration to be a tourism draw that could spark the economy and provide more jobs to an area where 30 percent of residents live in poverty, dragging down the median household income to about $41,000.

So why do so many oppose the monument?

"We didn't feel like the previous administration gave us much of a chance to let them know what we thought needed to be done," said Bruce Adams, a member of the San Juan County Commission who's also a rancher in Monticello.

Adams spoke on a cellphone while on horseback herding cattle, wind distorting the reception to break up his voice, which undulated up and down as he moved side to side in the saddle.

Echoing Trump, whom he supported, as did a majority of voters in the county, Adams said the designation was an abuse of the Antiquities Act.

"The act says artifacts of historic and scientific significance should be protected, using the smallest amount of land to protect them. If you read the designation, they're trying to protect cedar trees and small animals. They don't need protection," he said. "If you want to protect an Indian ruin, that's a different story."

Adams suggested, tongue in cheek, that 160 acres could protect the sacred artifacts in Bears Ears.

"They're not just anti-monument, they're prejudiced," Davis Filfred, a representative of the Navajo nation, said. "San Juan County has mistreated our people, mismanaged our funds. I wouldn't side with them any day."

Filfred acknowledged that Zinke took time Sunday to meet for an hour with a contingent representing the tribes. But that short meeting followed months of requests that were not answered, he said.

The meeting was tense because the secretary didn't appear to adequately honor a prayer ceremony, and the delegates read ill will in his body language. Filfred said Zinke leaned back "against a wall as if he's already decided to rescind or amend the monument."

A clear majority of Navajos, not to mention other tribes, agree that Bears Ears deserves protection. But a few oppose it.

Rebecca Benally, a San Juan County commissioner, and Susie Johnson-Philemon, who wrote a resolution against the designation, are members of the Aneth chapter of the Navajo nation.

"The Aneth chapter is the only chapter that's 100 percent in San Juan County," she said. "Others are in Arizona and New Mexico voting on a Utah issue. It's really sad that they never came to hear us out. The only people that stood with us is the San Juan government and the Utah legislature."

---

After the Black Hawk touched back down, Zinke offered a bird's-eye assessment of Bears Ears, calling it "drop-dead gorgeous."

It's just as hypnotizing from the ground. Bears Ears' buttes tower skyward in mountains of red rock near dazzling canyons.

It looks like a miniature of another American beauty, Grand Canyon National Park, but unlike that wonder, Bears Ears is easily accessible by ribbons of two-lane highways that cut through rock and branch off onto dirt roads.

That access is part of the new monument's problems.

A highway in Monticello, the seat of San Juan County, runs past ancient areas such as Newspaper Rock, where native etchings of animals and pottery in sandstone record 2,000 years of human activity.

Viewers can reach across a thin rail and nearly touch it.

The thought of that ever happening makes Heidi Redd's skin crawl. Redd, the former owner of Indian Creek Cattle Country Dugout Ranch, which is now completely within the monument's boundaries, has lived there in tranquility for 50 years.

Outdoor enthusiasts had started to visit more in the past few years, but now that Bears Ears is a monument, its secret is out, and she believes thousands will come to gawk. She and other supporters say funding should be released to hire staff and protect the monument.

"It's something that needs to be addressed now," Redd said. "This will be unintentional vandalism. People don't know they shouldn't lean on a wall. It's funding we need to protect the things that need protection."

Redd is a strong supporter of the Bears Ears monument designation who speaks of the place with a religious reverence. "This is a spiritual place," she said, with spirits in the crevices of stone that speak.

Zinke traveled to Redd's remote ranch to hear her point of view in a private meeting the day after his air tour. Using flat mountains with steep cliffs as the backdrop of a speech following the meeting, Zinke promised to respect all sides in the debate.

Departing from other monument supporters who met him, Redd said, "I'm impressed with Zinke. He respects the beauty of this place."

Bears Ears' beauty has a Hope Diamond quality that is hurting the people who love and seek to possess it, causing what Redd called "friction between neighbors."

"The respect for one another has been greatly trampled, unfortunately," she said.

One concern for the land is cattle stepping on ruins, said Josh Ewing, a member of Friends of Cedar Mesa who lives in the county's southernmost city of Bluff. When he met Zinke, he handed the secretary a list of 300 native antiquities sites dispersed through Bears Ears.

"We conservatively estimate that there are 100,000 sites," he said.

"There will absolutely be strong legal challenges to any effort to shrink or minimize this monument," Ewing said. "I anticipate that the tribes will quickly respond, and Friends of Cedar Mesa will take legal action if necessary."

But Zinke and Trump appear to be setting themselves up to be the first interior secretary and president to possibly undo or dramatically scale back a monument designated by their predecessors.

Before leaving the airport, frowning with anger, Adakai said natives should manage the land that once belonged to their ancestors.

"We do not want drilling and strip mining the lands," he said. "We want to preserve it for future generations."
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BALTIMORE -- No one saw the baby.

She sat in a gold-hued car with tinted black windows as her 26-year-old father lay on the ground outside, dying.

All eyes were on him, another fallen body in a city increasingly defined by them.

In portions of Baltimore, the strobe of police cars is as much a part of the landscape as boarded-up homes. But the pace of the killings this year has been stunning as the city struggles to recover from rioting in 2015. As of Friday, 124 people have been murdered, including five on a recent day, making the Baltimore's homicide rate one of the highest in the country. It is more than triple Washington's rate and higher than the homicide rates in New Orleans and Chicago, two places that have become national symbols of gun violence.

Each murder in Baltimore leaves a mark on those who witness it and those who investigate it. But few have been as haunting as the scene that played out on March 27 in front of a West Baltimore carryout that, in contrast to its cheerful name, Rainbow, has metal bars over its windows.

An area business owner drove by moments after the bullets flew. He slowed his car enough to notice the fade of the wounded man's haircut and that he wore expensive looking jeans. Strangers stared at the victim, Ernest Solomon, from the other side of the police tape, some shouting supportive words.

Officers, too, focused on Solomon, walking past his car, which was surrounded by shell casings.

More than an hour had passed since he'd been shot and taken to the hospital and still no one had opened the locked car. It was a key piece of evidence, and officers knew the less they touched it the better. Following protocol, they planned to tow it to a police lot, and then take it to a crime lab where a technician skilled in finding fingerprints would await a search warrant signed by a judge. It could take hours, or even a day.

Then came a faint cry.

"Did you hear that?" homicide detective Lee Brandt asked another detective and then yelled for an officer to bring keys that had been retrieved earlier from Solomon's pockets.

There, inside the car, he found Solomon's 10-month-old daughter strapped in her car seat, wearing a pink and white onesie under a black sweatsuit. Brandt pulled her out and held her up, as other officers looked on, mouths agape. The moment was captured by a Baltimore Sun photographer in a picture that quickly spread across social media and that Brandt keeps close as a reminder.

"We couldn't be there for her father, but we were there for her," he said. "We got her safe. We got her taken care of. We had one tragic death versus two."

Ernest Solomon was the 71st person killed in the city.

Beyond the other numbers were two boxers, a pregnant woman, and the son of a slain police officer who was shot to death a decade after his father died the same way.

After officer Troy Chesley was killed while off duty in 2007, Sheila Dixon, then Baltimore's mayor-designate, expressed hope that the death wouldn't embitter his sons and declared, "We have got to stop these senseless killings."

After his son Trayvon Chesley, 22, was shot in the head in April, a police major tweeted almost an echo: "Senseless killings have to stop in OUR city!"

The oldest victim this year was 79 and the youngest 16. A 53-year-old man was shot when he heard a knock on his window and looked outside. A 26-year-old man was shot after he sat down in a barber shop to get a haircut.

"People don't realize it's worse than Chicago," said Otis Rolley, former Baltimore planning director and a one-time mayoral candidate. His 23-year-old nephew, Andrew Zachary, a former Marine, was the 15th person killed in the city this year. "This man was trained by the U.S. government and had the skills and ability to survive in a combat situation overseas but was unable to navigate the streets of Baltimore. And that is a scary, scary thing."

Baltimore has long struggled with violence and a strained relationship between its police force and many African-American residents. It went a decade with 300 or more killings each year in the 1990s before the numbers finally began falling in 2000.

But the homicide rate hit a high in 2015, the same year Freddie Gray died in police custody and the city erupted in civil unrest. That year, Baltimore had 344 homicides, the deadliest per capita in the city's history. The next year, marked its second highest, with 318 deaths.

This year, it is on track to beat both records and surpass all other big U.S. cities. The 124 murders in Baltimore, with a population of 614,000, brings the homicide rate to 20.2 per 100,000 residents. Comparatively, Washington, D.C., with 681,000 people, has had 41 murders so far this year, for a rate of 6.

Meanwhile, Baltimore's police force has shrunk in the past several years, from 2,900 officers to 2,700. Washington has 3,800.

"Don't give up on Baltimore," Mayor Catherine Pugh told officers gathered for a roll call in the Southern District police station last week.

Lt. Fontaine Smallwood also encourages his officers before he sends them onto the city's streets. He urges them to play with children and talk with residents. He said he tells them there will be more violence, but also that "it will eventually get better."

Even before Smallwood was called to the scene of Solomon's murder, he knew that corner well. Not only is it in eyesight of where the riots first erupted, but Smallwood grew up in a rowhouse two miles south. His house is no longer there. Instead, the vacant lot is now a tangle of shoulder-high weeds.

Smallwood was 30 when he joined the police force a decade ago, and during the riots, he tried to hold back looters and watched a senior center burn. He said he has no answers when people ask him why the violence has soared since then.

"I think maybe it was a boiling point," he said.

On the day of Solomon's murder, Smallwood's job was to coordinate the response.

Brandt, who joined the force nine years ago after working as a lineman for Verizon, was looking for surveillance video that captured the incident.

His job often involves pulling video from crime scenes, including homicides, but he tries to avoid viewing them. This time, he watched. In the video, he said, Solomon and his killer can be seen wrestling, possibly over a gun.

Witnesses say Solomon was selling shoes out of his car and was targeted by someone who wanted to rob him. Police confirmed that he was robbed and also noted that he did not have a criminal record. Solomon's family declined to be interviewed.

Less than two weeks before his death, Solomon wrote on his Facebook page: "Can't really complain about anything as long as breathing and in good health #blessed."

A few days later, he spoke about his hopes for his little girl: "I swear I want so much more for daughter I don't want her to be nothing like these joints out here at all."

In a funeral program for Solomon, he is pictured lying next to his daughter, both sucking in their bottom lips. In another frame, he holds her hand as she stands. A biography describes her as "the joy of his life," and in a poem, he's described as her "protector."

"Rest easy my Daddy," it reads. "I will always love you with all my heart."

In Baltimore's most violent neighborhoods, obituaries plaster car windows and T-shirts bearing "RIP" crowd dresser drawers.

Wylie Funeral Home gives out wristbands bearing the name of the person being mourned, and some people have enough to stretch from wrist to elbow.

Because of privacy concerns, Brandon Wylie wouldn't say which deaths his funeral home handled this year, but obituary listings show that it oversaw arrangements for several of the city's homicide victims, including Solomon.

Wylie, who grew up above his father's West Baltimore funeral home, said he'd be happy if there were no murder victims to bury. Funeral homes often take a financial loss with killings because they are dealing with unprepared families, he said. He's also grown tired of seeing some of the same young faces at one service after another.

"It's desensitized them in a way," Wylie said.

He recently started a mental health program, called Above it All, that serves young people from ages 5 to 18.

"People are living in fear," Wylie said. Growing up, he used to walk to the corner without worry, knowing others were looking out for him. "Now, a kid might not have that luxury."

After Freddie Gray's death, theories circulated about how it contributed to the surge in killings that year. Some people believed that the use and selling of drugs from looted pharmacies contributed to the violence or that old turf battles had been rekindled amid the chaos. But now two years later, if there is a Freddie Gray-effect, residents say it may lie in a heightened distrust of police that leads people to avoid reporting crimes and to seek their own justice.

The business owner who saw Solomon after he was shot also believes police have changed how they behave for fear of getting in trouble. Six officers were charged in Freddie Gray's death, though none were convicted. The police department - the subject of a scathing Justice Department report that found it had engaged in years of blatant racial discrimination on Baltimore's streets - is being overhauled under a consent decree with the federal government.

"Since the Freddie Gray situation, even if you call the police and give a description, they can't touch" the criminals, the business owner said. "They know they're untouchable. That's the key."

He asked not to be identified by name, saying his life had already been threatened.

"This is a killing field," he said.

When Brandt pulled the baby from the car that afternoon, the business owner said everyone watching was shocked. Solomon had been shot at 1:16 p.m. and pronounced dead 40 minutes later. The baby was found at 2:30, somehow unharmed.

In the photo taken that day, Smallwood can be seen standing behind Brandt, his head tilted and mouth open in disbelief.

"It really hurts to know that our children are getting caught up in the crossfire of some of this violence," Smallwood said. "I was shocked that the child was unharmed throughout that whole ordeal. It was almost as if an angel protected this child."

A copy of the photo is now displayed in Smallwood's office at the Western District police station, tacked to a cork board next to a readout of grim crime stats.

Brandt keeps the image on his phone.

"We have seen enough senseless killings," he said. "To have one person live makes a difference. Who knows what she will grow up to become, but we gave her an opportunity."

---

Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
Washington

American democracy is "under assault" on separate fronts from President Donald Trump and Russia, the former U.S. intelligence chief warned Sunday, expressing dismay over the abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey amid a probe into Moscow's meddling in U.S. elections and possible ties with the Trump campaign.

As Trump works to fast-track Comey's successor, lawmakers from both parties urged him to steer clear of any politicians for the job and say he must "clean up the mess that he mostly created."

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," said James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence. "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When he was asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper said, "Exactly."

Clapper spoke following Trump's sudden firing of Comey last week, which drew sharp criticism because it came amid the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Clapper said America's founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding."

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. "The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump's actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because he may have "tapes" of their conversations. The lawmakers called for a new FBI director without any political background and said Trump would need to hand over to Congress any taped conversations with Comey, if they exist.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset." He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration by Trump, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, explaining that "these are not normal circumstances."

Rogers, an ex-FBI agent and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has drawn the backing of the FBI Agents Association. Cornyn is the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

"It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1," said Graham, R-S.C.

"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," he said, adding, "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all ... but we don't know all the evidence yet."

Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland  the federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court last year by President Barack Obama. Lee said he was "absolutely serious about it."
Washington Post photo by Ricky Carioti

WASHINGTON - Former D.C. city councilman Michael Brown, a onetime rising political star who pled guilty in 2013 to taking bribes, is tying the knot next month in the Hamptons - but only if a D.C. judge lets him.

Brown, 52, who according to court records was released from prison to a Baltimore halfway house in 2016, has been living on home confinement since February with fiancee Jessica Herrera-Nunez, 42, in Arlington, Virginia. The couple plans to wed on June 3 in Sag Harbor, N.Y., but Brown needs the court's approval to travel under the conditions of his probation.
A man in Las Vegas has died after police officers punched him, shocked him with a stun gun and used a controversial neck restraint to subdue him during an arrest outside a luxury hotel and casino on the Strip.

Las Vegas police said they're investigating the incident. The department has not identified the man who died or the officers involved.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada blasted the police response, saying "chokehold practices must stop."

"Too many people have died as a result of this type of excessive force," Tod Story, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, told NBC 3. "And too many questions remain about the use of chokeholds by our police."

The encounter began around 1 a.m. on Sunday when the man approached two uniformed officers inside the Venetian Hotel, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

Police said the man was "acting erratic" and told the officers there were people "chasing him." The Associated Press and the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that he was unarmed.

When one officer tried talking with him, the man darted out of the hotel. The officers followed him to the rear of the building, police said, where they saw the man trying to open the tailgate and driver's side door of a pickup truck.

One officer used a stun gun on the man, according to police. Though it had an "immediate effect" on him, police said, the man continued to "fight with officers despite the attempts made to take him into custody."

Venetian security guards soon arrived. As the fight escalated, police said, one officer hit the man multiple times with a closed fist, then used a chokehold-like technique called a lateral vascular neck restraint to control him.

The man fell unconscious, at which point the officers performed CPR, according to police. He was transported to the Sun Trauma Center, where he was pronounced dead at 1:39 a.m.

A spokesperson for Las Vegas Sands, which operates the Venetian, didn't immediately respond to messages seeking comment Monday morning.

Techniques like the lateral vascular neck restraint have come under intense criticism in recent years, particularly since the 2014 death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man from Staten Island who died after a police officer put him in a chokehold. Captured on cellphone video, the 43-year-old father said "I can't breathe" 11 times before he died of neck and chest compression, made worse by his underlying health problems. Activists around the country adopted the phrase as a rallying cry.

The lateral vascular neck restraint is not considered deadly force by the Las Vegas police. According to the department's general orders, all commissioned officers at or below the rank of lieutenant are trained in the technique, which is described as a "defensive tactic to quickly and safely stop active/aggressive resistance."

The restraint, used by police departments around the country, is designed to restrict blood flow to a person's brain by compressing arteries in the neck, rather than by cutting off a person's airway. Deployed properly, it's supposed to help officers control suspects without killing or seriously injuring them, according to the National Law Enforcement Training Center.

The organization calls neck restraints "a safe, viable and effective option for police officers in arrest and control scenarios." It also stresses that the lateral vascular neck restraint is different than a chokehold or bar-arm choke, which involve squeezing a person's trachea.

Just last week, Las Vegas police reported that use of deadly and non-deadly force by its officers had decreased in recent years. In 2016, the department had 10 officer-involved shootings, the lowest number in 20 years, according to the department's annual use of force report. Non-deadly use of force decreased by 8 percent over the past five years, the report said.

Speaking to local media last week, Undersheriff Kevin McMahill said: "Our officers are trained to exhaust all of their options before resorting to the use of deadly force."
Tens of thousands families in northern Virginia need housing that doesn't bust their household budgets, and the efforts of governments, nonprofits and private developers are not keeping up, several experts and advocates said Monday at a conference on affordable housing.

Neither the funds nor the political will exist to make a serious attempt to solve the problem, experts at the annual State of Affordable Housing seminar said. Expected cuts in federal housing funds under the Trump administration will not help matters.

About 120 activists, advocates and officials met in Arlington, Virginia, and urged each other to think creatively about how to build less expensively in limited space, and find new supporters among the business, law enforcement and education sectors to help persuade local and state governments to devote money to affordable housing.

At the same time, a high-level local brain trust gathered in a closed-door meeting at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments in the District to discuss the same issue.

That group included Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker, D, Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett, D, Fairfax County Board of Supervisors chair Sharon Bulova, D, Alexandria Mayor Allison Silberberg, D, and Arlington County Board chair Jay Fisette, D, along with business and philanthropic leaders, said the council's executive director, Chuck Bean.

Bean said the gathering could lead to creation of a regional work group focused on affordable housing.

Fisette, who also attended the seminar in Arlington, declared a "moral imperative" to create affordable housing in the wealthy communities around Washington, D.C. - a statement that others agreed with.

"We pat ourselves on the back for developing 1,000 units when we need 30 or 40 or 50,000," said developer Jim Edmonston of the real estate and consulting company E & G Group. "We need more resources or we are not going to solve this problem in my lifetime or my grandchildren's lifetime."

Several speakers noted that families, seniors and people with disabilities who manage to get into affordable housing often also need supportive services to live on their own.

But money for those services is entirely separate from housing, and the region's poorest residents often don't have access to the support they need to remain in stable situations, advocates said.

"As good as 'housing first' is, without deep resources on a long-term basis, it's set up to fail," said Michael Scheurer of Cornerstones Housing Development Corporation, which operates a homeless shelter in Reston.

The seminar was held at the Church at Clarendon, which sold the air rights over its property to create eight stories of apartments that range from luxury to affordable - an example of the ways in which housing nonprofit groups are trying to find the resources they need.

Other options include cutting the number of parking spaces, which cost several thousand dollars each, when building an affordable housing complex near public transit.

Edmonston said his firm developed a property at 2321 4th St. NE in Washington with only one parking space for each four apartments - and even those are not fully used.
Iran's presidential election shifted toward a straight fight between moderate incumbent Hassan Rouhani and a leading conservative cleric, a contest that polls suggest is too close to call.

Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the 55-year-old mayor of Tehran who lost to Rouhani in 2013, withdrew his candidacy on Monday and called on his backers to switch allegiance to Ebrahim Raisi. A survey by the state-affiliated Iranian Students Polling Agency last week showed the potential implications: support for Rouhani was at 42 percent, with Raisi on 27 percent and Qalibaf at 25 percent.

"A two-way race between Rouhani and Raisi will polarize society and mobilize the electorate," Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, said by phone. The narrowing of the field to two main candidates, he said, also makes it less likely that voting will go to a second round -- a situation that arises when no one exceeds 50 percent support in the first.

"It's definitely more difficult for Rouhani now," said Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. "We cannot take the renewal of his mandate for granted."

A Raisi victory could put Iran on a more confrontational course with the West -- and in particular President Donald Trump, who visits Iran's chief regional rival, Saudi Arabia, this week. While Raisi has vowed to respect the 2015 nuclear deal that Rouhani secured to end Iran's economic isolation, a government led by him would likely alarm international investors considering doing business in the Islamic Republic.

While Raisi stands to benefit from Qalibaf's withdrawal, analysts cautioned that he won't automatically bank all of his fellow conservative's support. The two men draw on different constituencies, according to Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

"Qalibaf speaks more to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and security apparatus, Raisi more to the traditional conservative" and clerical class, so he'll need to reach out to a wider conservative base, she said.

Another survey by the Iranian Students Polling Agency last week showed that, in a head-to-head contest, neither Rouhani, nor Raisi would garner the 50 percent of votes needed to win in the first round and avoid a run-off. If the then six-candidate field was reduced to the pair, 48 percent of respondents would vote for Rouhani and 39 percent for Raisi, according to the survey released on May 10.

"Not all of Qalibaf's supporters will move to Raisi, but he does provide some capacity for conservatives to unite," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "He should be able to drive a substantial proportion of these voters to the ballot box."

Raisi still faces "an uphill battle" as Rouhani will also benefit from Qalibaf's exit, said Vaez, noting the "paradox" that Iran's so-called Principlist or conservative camp is now rallying around Raisi. It took "20 years to coalesce around a single candidate, but one that lacks executive experience, a clear program and charisma," he said.

Raisi called Qalibaf's withdrawal "revolutionary," the conservative news agency Tasnim reported the cleric as saying on Monday.

Raisi's candidacy has fueled speculation he is being lined up to succeed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 77. It was Khamenei who last year appointed Raisi, 56, to manage the Astan Quds Razavi, an Islamic charity that controls assets worth billions of dollars, as well as the Imam Reza shrine in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad.

Rumors about Khamenei's health have swirled for years, and Raisi's appointment appeared to signal confidence in the younger cleric and that he was being groomed for Iran's most powerful post. Qalibaf's exit only reinforces that view, Maloney said.

In recent weeks, Rouhani, a 68-year-old moderate cleric, has lashed out at the conservatives over issues from freedom of speech to corruption and wealthy institutions that don't pay tax.

He has saved much of his most stinging criticism for Qalibaf, whose withdrawal now means Rouhani's campaign has to adapt for the final few days, said Foad Izadi, a member of the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran who is a critic of the nuclear and Rouhani's foreign policy.

"It was easy to confront Qalibaf because of his debate performance and past experiences, but it's more difficult for them to confront Raisi as he's really a newcomer to the political scene," Izadi said. "Rouhani's camp has lost an easy target to beat up on."

Khamenei, Iran's final arbiter on all matters of state, intervened last week as the campaigns became more confrontational, calling on candidates to avoid "immoral" outbursts that could damage the nation.

Iran's relations with the U.S., which improved under Rouhani and led to the nuclear deal and the lifting of some sanctions, have also hung over the campaigning. Trump, who has called the nuclear deal a "disaster," put Iran "on notice" after it tested a missile test this year, and has pleased the U.S.'s Sunni Gulf Arab allies by vowing to confront growing Iranian influence in the region.

That has led to speculation that Iran's next government will engage less with the West, especially after Khamenei called on whoever wins to avoid relying on foreign investors to strengthen the economy -- a comment widely interpreted as a criticism of Rouhani.

There are five candidates remaining following Qalibaf's withdrawal, including Vice President Eshagh Jahangiri, who supports Rouhani and whose candidacy has been aimed at uniting forces behind him, and fellow reformer Mostafa Hashemi-Taba, a former industry minister. Mostafa Mirsalim is a conservative and former culture minister.
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Paris

In ceremonies marked by youthful optimism and old-world Napoleonic pomp, Emmanuel Macron swept into office Sunday as France's new president pledging to fortify the European Union, redesign French politics and glue together his divided nation.

Macron's presidency began with a visit to troops wounded in overseas combat  a reminder of France's large global military presence and role in fighting extremists from Syria to Africa.

He's expected to name a prime minister imminently, and to show his commitment to reviving European unity. Macron takes his first presidential trip Monday to Berlin to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In a lofty but lucid inaugural speech, Macron vowed to lift France out of its sense of decline and lost purpose, and seize again its place in the world.

"The time has come for France to rise up to the occasion. The division and fractures across our society must be overcome ... because the world expects us to be strong, solid, clairvoyant."

He promised to take France's responsibilities to tackle today's crises  "the migration crisis, the climate challenge, authoritarian abuse, the excesses of capitalism in the world and of course terrorism. Nothing now strikes one and spares the other. We are all Interdependent. We are all neighbors."

The 39-year-old Macron is the youngest president in the country's history and the eighth president of France's Fifth Republic, which was created in 1958. A former economy minister with pro-business, pro-European views, Macron is the first French president who doesn't originate from the country's two mainstream parties.

After Macron was formally declared president at the Elysee Palace, 21 cannon shots were fired from across the Seine River at the Invalides monument, where Napoleon is entombed.

Macron later solemnly paid tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe, greeting veterans and military officers in formation beneath the imposing arch.

Macron takes charge of a nation that, when Britain leaves the European Union in 2019, will become the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Reviving support for European unity will be among his top priorities. France is a founding member of the 28-nation EU and its third-largest economy after Germany and Britain.

"We will need a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe because it's the instrument of our power and our sovereignty, I will work on that," he said Sunday.

Before the ceremony, he met for an hour with his predecessor, Francois Hollande, taking a last few minutes to discuss the most sensitive issues facing France, including the country's nuclear codes.

In a visibly moving moment for both, Macron accompanied Hollande to his car, shaking hands and applauding him along with the employees of the French presidency who had gathered in the palace's courtyard.

The two men had known each other well. Macron was Hollande's former adviser, then his economy minister from 2014 to 2016, when Macron quit the Socialist government to launch his own independent presidential bid.

About 300 guests, officials and family members gathered in the Elysee reception hall, including Macron's wife, Brigitte.

The new president arrived on the Champs-Elysees Avenue under a heavy rain  recalling Hollande's inauguration five years ago. But unlike his predecessor, Macron managed to avoid getting wet. The bad weather often associated with the former Socialist president has become a joke for the French.

After his time at the tomb, Macron went to shake hands with supporters along the Champs-Elysees, who were taking selfies and waving French tricolor flags, before coming back to the palace for a lunch with his family.
For years, Lindsey Price wanted to earn a high school diploma. Though she completed the coursework, one standardized test came between her and graduation.

To prepare for the mathematics portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), Price went to tutoring sessions offered locally through 1 TO 1 Focused Learning. Price, 23, said the guidance helped her pass the test this spring.

I want kids, anybody, to know no matter what life has come to or what theyve been through, they can fix it and pursue their education, Price said. Its important, and its never too late to pursue an education.

At 1 TO 1, tutors helped Price practice with individual instruction and sample tests. The tutoring program partners with local churches and volunteers to offer after-school sessions for students attending Midland High School, Lee High School and San Jacinto Junior High School.

Price heard about the program through Mary Janousek, dropout prevention and intervention coordinator for Midland ISD. Janousek said the district increased its support this school year for out-of-school testers -- people who completed high school credits but needed to pass tests before graduating.

Though Price received support from MISD, Janousek said she also showed perseverance to excel on the TAKS.

Its not like the test comes easier when youve been out a couple of years, Janousek said. I would like to say we helped. Shes the one who put in work.

Betty Ann Prentice, a tutor at 1 TO 1, noticed Prices determination when she started tutoring her less than a month before the test. Prentice focused on test-taking skills, while other volunteers reviewed math fundamentals with Price.

I find now working with adults is unlike kids working for grades, Prentice said. They work to improve themselves.

While preparing for TAKS, Price also turned to her faith. After passing the test that gave her difficulty as a Fort Worth high school student, Price looks forward to attending college.

I want to do something that helps people and is something that gives back to the community  something in the medical profession, even along the lines of wanting to be a nurse, Price said. I want to start off as a paramedic and go to nursing school.

But the road toward college wasnt easy. Price battled substance abuse and eventually entered a treatment center in Midland. She said she came to the Genesis Center of the Permian Basin when she didnt have a place to stay.

The Genesis Center provides shelter and resources to women and their children for up to one year. Caren Caples, case manager, said Price used her situation to assist others in the program.

When I first met Lindsey, she was pretty sad, down and scared because her life had taken a turn for the worse, Caples said. Very quickly her true personality came out, and she made friends. She knew she needed to turn her life around.

Caples and others at the Genesis Center celebrated after Price passed the test. But not long after, the center announced to residents it would close at the end of this month. The nonprofit wants to sell its current building and purchase a smaller local facility.

Though the plan wont allow Price to complete the Midland program, Caples said she was an accomplished participant.

Shes not just a graduate of high school but of the Genesis Center program, which is a pretty high honor, Caples said. Everything we do is life skills.

As Price prepares to continue her education close to relatives in Denton, she values the 1 TO 1 tutors who helped her reach her goals.

I think with the tutoring that if I would have had a program like that when I was in school, I would have passed it much easier and sooner, Price said. The kids now have that benefit for their classes and the [State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, which replaced the TAKS] test.
A 9-year-old boy has been released from the hospital, after he was injured by gunfire at his northeast Houston home earlier this morning, local television stations report.

Around midnight on Monday, three men came to the front door of his home on Bringhurst near Martha. His mother, Shandrika Green, said she and several of her children were inside the house.
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The smell of fresh cut roses hung in the air around Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto on Sunday.

Hundreds gathered on the Oblate Missions grounds to honor Mothers Day in a ceremony that alternated between subdued prayers and blessings for the mothers in their lives and the lively Matachines, who danced to drum beats in headdresses and jingling skirts.

Mothers have much to say, and much to give, said Father Saturnino Lajo in Spanish.

He gave thanks to mothers young and old, those who are expecting a child and who unexpectedly lost one. He told of the way they spread light and hope to the world, and their incredible ability to birth and raise children  our future.

Those words spoke to Luisa Orozco, 20, a rising junior at University of Incarnate Word, who attended the ceremony with her mother, Diana Rios.

She does so much for us. So many mothers stay in their homes and dedicate their life to their children, Orozco said in Spanish. Shes done that for me again and again.

Rios has been suffering from renal insufficiency and various other problems that have put her health at serious risk. Orozco, who rarely stopped hugging her mom, said she has been a role model to her.

Shes been sick for a long time but she keeps trying to recuperate, and I admire her so much for that, Orozco said.

She knows she can tell me anything, and I know I can tell her anything, Rios said  thats why theyre so close.

Miguel Tapia, in a bright red headdress and face paint, is the leader of the Matachines de la Gruta de Lourdes Tepeyac. He said this danza is especially important on Mothers Day because his group is all about family.

Theres adults and children, coming from all over, just all kinds of people in this group, and we care and respect each other as one, he said in Spanish.

The 35-member group volunteers performances at churches in and outside of San Antonio, with their busiest months in November and December. The dance type, which Tapia said is danza de carrizo, hails from central Mexico.

Anyone from all walks of life can join and make friends here. You just have to do it because you care, not to get something out of it, but because you care, he said.

My kids werent born in Mexico, so they didnt grow up seeing this, he added. The danza gives them something of our native land to hold on to.

sfosterfrau@express-news.net
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A Boerne lawyer who formerly was a state district judge in Harris County has received five years probation, surrendered his law license and must attend a rehabilitation program under a plea deal that resolves one of two felony drug cases against him, officials said Friday.

Kendall County District Attorney Nicole Bishop said Kevin D. Fine, 50, pleaded guilty Tuesday to attempted possession of a controlled substance, a third degree felony.

He was arrested Jan. 8, 2016 by Boerne police in an undercover operation initiated in response to tips that Fine was soliciting sex and drugs in return for his services as a criminal defense lawyer, she said.

Fine was free on bond in that case when he was arrested May 2 on the same charge in Kerrville for allegedly trying to obtain drugs from a legal client, officials said, resulting in the revocation of his bond in Kendall County.

Before moving to Boerne, in 2008 Fine was elected as a Democrat to the bench in Harris County's 177th District Court.

As part of the plea deal, Fine agreed in court Tuesday to enroll in an in-prison rehabilitation program, to be followed by a residential aftercare program, said Bishop, who called addiction an evil and ugly condition.

Mr. Fine was given a fair and just plea that will provide him with the highest level of treatment available to us in the criminal justice system, she said, noting the loss of his law license also will preclude him from violating what was his sworn duty to his clients.

Fine is free on $25,000 bond on the charge in Kerrville.

zeke@express-news.net
A proposal by District 8 Councilman Ron Nirenberg to beef up the citys inspections of mobile home parks was approved by the City Council Neighborhoods and Livability Committee on Monday.

The city will now hold public meetings with stakeholders to determine exactly how to amend the municipal code that regulates mobile home parks. Additional changes could include enabling the city to levy higher fines or pursue civil penalties against mobile home park owners who repeatedly violate the code, said Michael Shannon, the citys interim director of development services. Currently, the city can only press criminal charges against mobile home park owners.

This is an effort to address what I think is a gap in policy, to make sure we have some proactive inspections, Nirenberg said.

City officials will bring a refined proposal back to the committee and, eventually, the entire City Council, by late summer or early fall.

Nirenberg proposed the measure months after the city ordered the relocation of 12 families living in the Oak Hollow Mobile Home Park in the councilman's district because of overflowing septic tanks and other poor conditions.

Nirenberg, near the end of his second term on City Council, is hoping to unseat Mayor Ivy Taylor in a June 10 runoff.

Taylor does not sit on the committee and wasnt at Mondays meeting. In a written statement, she said, In light of events where the conditions of mobile home parks have caused the re-location of residents, Im certainly supportive of any policy that seeks to address the problem before it gets to that point. Nirenberg is also not a member of the Neighborhoods and Livability Committee but attended the meeting.

Currently, mobile home parks must register with the city's Department of Health and are subject to inspection but, according to Nirenberg, the sites are not routinely inspected. The city often only goes to the parks after receiving a complaint.

My concern was that we prevent the kind of issue we saw at Oak Hollow, Nirenberg said, prior to Mondays meeting. We know if mobile home parks fly under the radar, theres really no guarantee of that.

Nirenbergs proposal includes dedicating Code Enforcement staff to do the routine inspections, to ensure more mobile homes arent being too tightly packed into the parks and also to monitor the electrical, sewer and water connections. Shannon said its not yet clear how often the inspections would occur.

Changes to the code would likely mean an increase in the registration fee that property owners must annually pay to the city. The current fee is $35 per lot per year.

There are 103 registered mobile home parks in San Antonio and nearly 7,000 lots scattered across the city, according to the citys Metropolitan Health District.

Two-thirds of them had some kind of code violation in the last couple of years, Shannon said. About half of them had more than one such violation.

In the case of Oak Hollow, located in the 6300 block of Prue Road, the city ordered the dozen families to leave in October because the conditions at the site had become so poor. The city noted multiple code violations at the property, and raw sewage was running over the ground. Soil in that area later tested positive for E. coli, though none was found in the water. E. coli found in food or water is considered more dangerous than when the bacteria is found in soil.

Shannon called Oak Hollow one of the worst (mobile home parks) wed all seen.

Nirenberg hopes that increasing inspections is part of a larger package of reforms to the city code that regulates mobile home parks. He wants to establish city communication and assistance protocols for how to handle such a situation should it happen again.

In the case of Oak Hollow, there was an extended displacement, where the residents were placed in hotels, and there was only a short period of assistance for them to do so, Nirenberg said.

Six of the families moved into other mobile home parks; four moved into apartments or rental homes; and two moved within Oak Hollow, to areas that werent affected by the sewage spill, said Edward Gonzales, assistant director for the citys Department of Human Services.

The one person that refused to move was the property manager who was related to the park owner, Gonzales said.

Twenty-six families still remain in Oak Hollow, Gonzales said, and the city is helping nine of them with relocation assistance. The human services department can help with first months rent and utility assistance for families that are income eligible.

The city filed a lawsuit against the owners of Oak Hollow in December and is trying to work out a settlement with the property owner, said Deputy City Attorney Joe Nino. The Bexar County District Attorneys Office is also investigating the owners.

A For Sale sign is posted on the property, Nino said.
A man was hospitalized early Monday after he was shot at a party in the South Side.

Police say around 1 a.m. the owner of a house in the 100 block of Drury Lane, where the party was held, noticed a man in attendance had a gun. The homeowner told the man to put the gun in his car.
One man was killed and another jailed Friday after a brief car chase with Guadalupe County sheriff's deputies ended with a car slamming into the back of an 18-wheeler.

Eighteen-year-old Robert Pratt, of Universal City, was the passenger in a vehicle involved in a law enforcement chase with Guadalupe County sheriffs deputies that ended with the car crashing into the back of an 18-wheeler, fatally injuring Pratt. He died of his injuries at the San Antonio Military Medical Center.
If President Donald Trump picks U.S. Sen. John Cornyn to lead the FBI, its not a given that the Texan would sail through the confirmation process in his own chamber.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, on Sunday said he was uneasy about picking Cornyn  or anyone else with a political background  to succeed James Comey, who Trump last week ousted as FBI director amid the agencys investigation into whether members of Trumps campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

Asked, during an interview on NBCs Meet The Press, whether its the right time for Trump to pick an elected political official, Graham said no.

I think its now time to pick somebody that comes from within the ranks or is such a reputation that has no political background at all, he said. John Cornyn is a wonderful man. Under normal circumstances, he would be a superb choice to be FBI director. But these are not normal circumstances. Weve got a chance to reset here as a nation.

Graham wasnt the only senator on Sunday to suggest Cornyn could face resistance in the chamber.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader from New York, told CNNs State of the Union that Comeys replacement should not be a partisan politician -- not in either party, and that it should be someone who is experienced.

This demands a serious down-the-middle investigation, the Democrat said of the Trump-Russia question.

Schumer also said he supports calls to block a nomination until a special prosecutor is appointed to take over the investigation.

Cornyn has been identified as one of about a dozen contenders for the nomination. Before his election to the Senate in 2002, Cornyn served as Texas attorney general, a Texas Supreme Court justice and a local judge.
Like gold purified in fire, Elida Quintanilla emerged from years of childhood abuse, neglect and poverty to create a legendary life.

Her mother died in childbirth. At 10-years-old, Quintanilla stepped into her mothers shoes, left school and cared for her infant brother. When her father had overnight guests, she and the baby were forced to sleep outside on the porch.

Quintanilla, looking for an avenue of escape, married at 17.

After 25 years of marriage to a man who was a younger version of her father, she divorced. Quintanilla would confess to others that she stayed married for the sake of the jewels in her crown  her four children whom she raised to be fearless and brave.

She taught us how to stand up for ourselves, to stand up for other people, and when she could no longer do it, to stand up for her, said her son, retired San Antonio Express-News fashion and pop culture writer Michael Quintanilla, who still freelances for his hometown newspaper.

Elida Quintanilla died May 9 of pneumonia complications compounded by adult respiratory distress syndrome (ADRS). She was 80.

She looked like Cher to me, with a striking nose and her Aztec bloodline, her son said. She was feisty.

More Information Elida V. Quintanilla Born: March 1, 1937, Seguin Died: May 9, 2017, San Antonio Preceded by: Mother Julia Campos Vasquez; sisters Olga Campos Vasquez, Lola Menchaca; brother Rudy Vasquez. Survived by: Son Michael Ray Quintanilla; daughters Julia Rose Sanmiguel, Linda Q. Verduzco and Rebecca Ann Quintanilla; Chihuahua "Baby Girl;" six grandchildren, 19 great grandchildren and 10 great-great grandchildren. Services: Visitation 5 p.m. today followed by 7 p.m. Rosary at Palm Heights Mortuary, 3711 South Zarzamora. Funeral procession 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at Palm Heights Mortuary followed by 11 a.m. graveside service at San Jose Burial Park, 8235 Mission Road. See More Collapse

Quintanilla sometimes worked multiple jobs to provide for her children.

Known as a wheeler and dealer by friends and family, she won awards at Paragon Cable for her work in sales, said daughter Rebecca Ann Quintanilla.

She once worked at the Levi Strauss plant and was paid 25 cents for each zipper she sewed into blue jeans, her son said.

Quintanilla also was an actress. She was cast as a nun in the 1981 NBC movie 300 Miles for Stephanie, based on stories Michael Quintanilla  who was portrayed in the film, had written for the Express-News.

Her best advice to me was to get an education, her daughter said. She told me, I dont want you to have to rely on anyone. 

Quintanilla, an example to her children, studied hard to get a GED and went on to take courses at San Antonio College.

Not believing in barriers, when her son landed a night police beat job at the Express-News, she drove him to crime scenes  without his editors knowing  until he learned how to drive and got a drivers license, her son recalled.

Driving to crime scenes inspired Quintanilla to volunteer at the San Antonio Police Departments Womans Victim Unit. When riding with officers, she provided comfort to abused women and tried to convince them to press charges against their abusers.

Michael Quintanilla remembers his mothers advice about overcoming barriers: We have been held back by the fear of no, which is why you have to stand up, speak up and make your mark for yourself and for others.

iwilgen@express-news.net
Donald Trumps firing of James Comey has to be the most thuggish, venal act committed by a U.S. president since Richard Nixons desperate Saturday Night Massacre.

Trump is trying to shut down the investigation with the most potential to cripple  or perhaps even end  his presidency. He is attempting a power play straight from the playbook of some tinhorn dictator, and he believes he will get away with it.

The claim that Comeys mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clintons emails is the reason for his dismissal insults the nations intelligence.

During last years campaign, you will recall, Trump loudly cheered the damaging disclosures about his opponent that he now cites as cause for immediate termination.

But just last week, the president tweeted that FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! Trump and his angry crowds brayed for Clinton to be locked up, not treated fairly.

Comeys real transgression was to launch a serious investigation into possible cooperation between Trumps campaign and a clandestine attempt by the Russian government to swing the election in Trumps favor. With both the House and the Senate in Republican hands, the president probably calculates that the various congressional probes can be neutered.

Fox News and other friendly media can be counted on to push the line that the real issue is leaks, not possible collusion with a foreign power to subvert our democracy.

But the FBI is not so easily put off the scent.

Does Michael Flynn  fired as national security adviser for lying about his talks with the Russian ambassador  have a story to tell?

What about Carter Page?

If they are in legal jeopardy, how will they react when the FBI squeezes them? Whom else might agents be talking to? Is the FBI asking about members of Trumps family? About Trump himself?

Yelling fake news hasnt put an end to the investigation. But firing Comey might  if he is replaced with someone less independent and more compliant.

At some point over the past year, almost everyone in Washington has wanted to fire Comey. But a president cannot suddenly, for no good reason, dismiss an FBI director who has the presidents campaign under investigation.

That can only be seen for what it is: an attempted cover-up and an abuse of executive power.

Anyone who thought the Russia story was all smoke and no fire now has to suspect theres really something there.

Congress and the Supreme Court stood up for the Constitution during Watergate. Now they must do so once again.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com
A 21-year-old Branford woman is in trouble with Hamden police for allegedly assaulting not one, but four of its officers.

The encounter started at 11:30 p.m,. Saturday after police went to a Treadwell Street address on a report of a fight in progress.

Capt. Ronald Smith said in a release that upon arrival officers met with Wisdom South, who had facial injuries. South advised officers that she was assaulted. South then attacked an officer, biting him in the hand and leg. She then ran towards Treadwell Street.

Moments later, officers arrested her near Leeder Hill Drive. During the arrest, South continued to assault officers. She kicked an officer and then spit blood-filled saliva into the face of two officers.

Smith said shortly thereafter, South was transported to department headquarters, where her assaults did not end, Smith said.

While in the booking area, South kicked another officer and then spit blood-filled saliva into another officers face.

Smith said an investigation revealed that South was not assaulted and that she lied to police.

Further investigation revealed that she forcibly entered a motor vehicle of an employee of a local business.

She subsequently stole the employees backpack. The employee chased her, at which time she dropped the backpack. South then tripped on a curb, before falling to the ground.

She then spit blood on another employee of a local business, while threatening to stab him.

South, of Montoya Drive, Branford, was charged with four counts of assault on a police officer, assault in the third degree, burglary in the third degree, larceny in the sixth degree, threatening in the second degree, interfering with a police officer and breach of peace.

South, who was jailed on a $100,000 bond, is scheduled to appear in court in Meriden on May 26.
The Zimbabwe Republic Police have launched investigations into the death of two senior Zanu PF officials in Nyatsime area of Chitungwiza with one of them alleged to have been poisoned, while the other reportedly succumbed to a stress-related illness after his house was recently burnt down by CCC supporters rampaging after the murder of a woman by a violent ex-boyfriend, now in custody.

The two officials are former Manyame district chairperson Cde Tina Gweshe, who is suspected by family to have been poisoned after she attended a party last week, and Cde George Murambatsvina, the Zanu PF chairman for Nyatsime, whose house was set ablaze by CCC supporters in Nyatsime about a fortnight ago. Cde Murambatsvina suffered serious injuries and stress from the violent attack.

In an interview yesterday, national police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi said police have begun the investigations over the deaths of the two Zanu PF officials, but now needed the results of the post mortems to ascertain the causes of the deaths.

We are conducting investigations with a view to find out what exactly happened and we would like to urge the public to cooperate with the police, he said.

On the heavy police presence, Asst Comm Nyathi said, There is need for police to maintain law and order especially considering what has happened and the investigations being conducted.

The Herald yesterday visited the area where Zanu PF supporters were still mourning their two leaders.

Senior party officials also visited the area where they handed over food and goods to the bereaved families.

Seke Constituency legislator Cde Munyaradzi Kashambe also reiterated the need for peace and applauded police for ensuring that there is order in the area. Cde Kashambe said he was saddened that after the CCC supporters had unleashed violence, they then lost one of their hard working senior party members.

A few days ago we also lost another comrade, Cde Gweshe who was also known as Greenhouse. As a party we have, however, then decided to donate food to the two families.

I would also want applaud the unity that has been displayed between the party supporters in both the province and also at national level during this period. I would also want to thank you for maintaining peace. Even our President, Cde ED Mnangagwa, has always emphasised the need for maintaining peace as we head towards the 2023 elections, he said.

Mashonaland East Zanu PF provincial vice chairman Cde Kudzai Majuru said Zanu PF was a peaceful party and it was his hope that the law will take its course. Cde Majuru said they had decided to assist the two families with maize meal, rice, cooking oil, flour, salt and various groceries.

As Zanu PF we are a peaceful party and we have allowed the law to take its course. Following the loss of our two officials, as Zanu PF we have decided to assist with some groceries and cash for the bereaved families. We will continue to assist them and even the families left behind, he said.

Cde Murambatsvina is expected to be buried in his rural home in Gutu and Cde Gweshe at Zororo cemetery.

Zengeza West legislator Job Sikhala and his Chitungwiza North legislator Godfrey Sithole, have since been arrested on charges of incitement to commit violence after the violence by CCC supporters in Nyatsime, remarks they are alleged to have made before that violence and allegations of involvement in assembling supporters.

Sikhala, who is also the CCC deputy national chairperson, and Sithole are accused of mobilising their party supporters to unleash violence in Nyatsime during a memorial service for Moreblessing Ali, who they claimed had been killed by a Zanu PF member, when in fact she was killed by her former lover.

Ali, who the CCC said was a supporter, was abducted outside a nightclub in Nyatsime on May 14 and her dismembered remains were discovered in a disused well at a farm in Beatrice about 10km away from where she was taken. The chief suspect in her murder, Pius Jamba (31), was arrested five days later and is remanded in custody.

On Sunday, Zanu supporters also held a demonstration at Chibhanguza Shopping Centre where they castigated the opposition supporters including Sikhala and CCC leader Nelson Chamisa.

 Herald

Breaking News via Email
SAVANNAH, Ga.  Parkers has donated $20,000 to Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools as part of the companys Fueling the Community charitable initiative.

Every time we get funding from Parkers, it goes right back to help our students, said Godley Station School Principal John K. King. This donation provides additional funding for technology that gets our kids ready for 21st-century skills that will help them succeed.

Parkers donates a portion of every gallon of gas sold on the first Wednesday of each month to area schools through the Fueling the Community program. PumpPal club members can select which school will receive the proceeds from their Fueling the Community gas purchase on the first Wednesday. Godley Station School is selected by more PumpPal members than any other school in Chatham County.

"Its exciting to give back to the community," said President and CEO Greg Parker. "At Parkers, we believe that education has the power to transform lives and to uplift communities. We are grateful for the Chatham County teachers who are educating the next generation of students and preparing them for future success."

Parkers originally launched its charitable initiative in 2011 and has donated money to public and private schools in every community where Parkers does business. The company operates 48 convenience stores in Georgia and South Carolina and completes more than 100,000 transactions daily.
Ten years after the crisis, what is happening to the worlds bees? The Conversation

Strapped Pension Funds, and the Hefty Investment Fees They Pay Gretchen Morgenson, NYT

Silicon Valley has too much power FT

Fraud in Silicon Valley: Startups Show Their Unethical Underside Fortune

Silicon Valley: A Reality Check Slate Star Codex

Waymo Forges Driverless Car Tech Tie-Up With Lyft Amid Its Legal Battle With Uber Forbes

Syraqistan

Brexit

French Election

Merkels conservatives score windfall victory in key regional election Politico. North Rhine-Westphalia.

Germanys Strategic Frivolousness Handelsblatt. Hmm

China

Imperial Collapse Watch

New Cold War

Being Russian-American Is a Leeettle Awkward Right Now Fusion

Trump Transition

Is That a Democratic Tsunami Taking Shape for 2018? New York Magazine

The Kennedy Democrats dont want Politico (DK).

Ex-governors ambitions paved way to dam crisis, records say AP. Oroville.

Bernie, the Billionaires, and the School Board American Prospect

Ohios sale of prison farms comes despite $8.9 million in upgrades Columbus Dispatch (BC). BC writes: Governor Kasichs administration wants to no-bid the sale of State property used by the prison farm system. The concern is that, without an open bid, the land will be sold for a fraction of its value as political favors to Kasich donors. The sale is being rushed without debate as well, so many unintended consequences are coming up too. For example several charities have relied on donated excess food from the prison system to feed disabled or poor people that they serve. The rapid timeframe is also impacting local small businesses that provide services or equipment. Just in time for the Sanders v. Kasich debate on May 16!

South Carolina consulting firms tentacles have created an unprecedented political power structure Post & Courier

Six Months After The Election, What Does The Resistance Mean Now? Esquire. Then as now, it means that Neera Tanden can put Resist. in her Twitter profile photo, without irony.

Class Warfare

Why Golfers Overestimate Their Ability WSJ

How real books have trumped ebooks Guardian

Maines richest source of maple sugar faces uncertain future Bangor Daily News

Antidote du jour:

Happy post-Mothers Day.

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.
By Tom Engelhardt , a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Originally published at TomDispatch

The closest I ever got to Mosul, Iraqs second largest city, was 1,720.7 miles away  or so the Internet assures me. Although Ive had a lifelong interest in history, I know next to nothing about Mosuls, nor do I have more than a glancing sense of what it looks like, or more accurately what it looked like when all its buildings, including those in its Old City, were still standing. It has  or at least in better times had  a population of at least 1.8 million, not one of whom have I ever met and significant numbers of whom are now either dead, wounded, uprooted, or in desperate straits.

Consider what I never learned about Mosul my loss, a sign of my ignorance. Yet, in recent months, little as I know about the place, its been on my mind  in part because whats now happening to that city will be the worlds loss as well as mine.

In mid-October 2016, the U.S.-backed Iraqi army first launched an offensive to retake Mosul from the militants of the Islamic State. Relatively small numbers of ISIS fighters had captured it in mid-2014 when the previous version of the Iraqi military (into which the U.S. had poured more than $25 billion) collapsed ignominiously and fled, abandoning weaponry and even uniforms along the way. It was in Mosuls Great Mosque that the existence of the Islamic State was first triumphantly proclaimed by its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi.

On the initial day of the offensive to recapture the city, the Pentagon was already congratulating the Iraqi military for being ahead of schedule in a campaign that was expected to take weeks or even months. Little did its planners  who had been announcing its prospective start for nearly a year  know. A week later, everything was still proceeding according to our plan, claimed then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. By the end of January 2017, after 100 days of fierce fighting, the eastern part of that city, divided by the Tigris River, was more or less back in government hands and it had, according to New York Times reporters on the scene, been spared the wholesale destruction inflicted on other Iraqi cities like Ramadi and Fallujah, even though those residents who hadnt fled were reportedly scratching out a primitive existence, deprived of electricity, running water and other essential city services.

And that was the good news. More than 100 days later, Iraqi troops continue to edge their way through embattled western Mosul, with parts of it, including the treacherous warren of streets in its Old City, still in the hands of ISIS militants amid continuing bitter building-to-building fighting. The Iraqi government and its generals still insist, however, that everything will be over in mere weeks. An estimated thousand or so ISIS defenders (of the original 4,000-8,000 reportedly entrenched in the city) are still holding out and will assumedly fight to the death. U.S. air power has repeatedly been called in big time, with civilian deaths soaring, and hundreds of thousands of its increasingly desperate and hungry inhabitants still living in battle-scarred Mosul as Islamic State fighters employ countless bomb-laden suicide vehicles and even small drones.

After seven months of unending battle in that single city, perhaps it shouldnt be surprising that Mosul has receded from the news here, even as civilian casualties grow, at least half a million Iraqis have been displaced, and the Iraqi military has suffered grievous losses.

Though theres been remarkably little writing about it, heres what now seems obvious: when the fighting is finally over and the Islamic State defeated, the losses will be so much more widespread than that. Despite initial claims that the Iraqi military (and the U.S. Air Force) were taking great care to avoid as much destruction as possible in an urban landscape filled with civilians, the rules of engagement have since changed and its clear that, in the end, significant swathes of Iraqs second largest city will be left in ruins. In this, it will resemble so many other cities and towns in Iraq and Syria, from Fallujah to Ramadi, Homs to Aleppo.

The Disappearance of Mosul

At a moment when Donald Trump makes headlines daily with almost any random thing he says, the fate of Mosul doesnt even qualify as a major news story. What happens in that city, however, will be no minor thing. It will matter on this increasingly small planet of ours.

Whats to come is also, unfortunately, reasonably predictable. Eight, nine, or more months after this offensive was launched, the grim Islamic State in Mosul will undoubtedly be destroyed, but so will much of the city in a region that continues to be  to invent a word  rubblized.

When Mosul is officially retaken, if not ahead of schedule, then at least according to plan, the proud announcements of victory in the war against ISIS will make headlines. Soon after, however, Mosul will once again disappear from our American world and worries. Yet that will undoubtedly only be the beginning of the story in a world in crisis. Fourteen years have passed since the U.S. invaded Iraq and punched a hole in the oil heartlands of the Middle East. In the wake of that invasion, states have been crumbling or simply imploding and terror movements growing and spreading, while wars, ethnic slaughter, and all manner of atrocities have engulfed an ever-widening region. Millions of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, and others have been uprooted, sent into exile in their own countries, or fled across borders to become refugees. In Mosul alone, untold numbers of people whose fathers, mothers, grandparents, children, friends, and relatives were slaughtered in the Iraqi Armys offensive or simply murdered by ISIS will be left homeless, often without possessions, jobs, or communities in the midst of once familiar places that have been transformed into rubble.

Mosul now lacks an airport, a railroad station, and a university  all destroyed in the recent fighting. Initial estimates suggest that its rebuilding will cost billions of dollars over many years. And its just one of many cities in such a state. The question is: Where exactly will the money to rebuild come from? After all, the price of oil is at present below $50 a barrel, the Iraqi and Syrian governments lack resources of every sort, and who can imagine a new Marshall Plan for the region coming from Donald Trumps America or, for that matter, anywhere else?

In other words, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Libyans, the Afghans, and others are likely, in the end, to find themselves alone in the ruins of their worlds with remarkably little recourse. With that in mind and given the record of those last 14 years, how exactly do you imagine that things will turn out for the inhabitants of Mosul, or Ramadi, or Fallujah, or cities yet to be destroyed? What new movements, ethnic struggles, and terror outfits will emerge from such a nightmare?

To put it another way, if you think that such a disaster will remain the possession of the Iraqis (Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans, and Afghans), then you havent been paying much attention to the history of the twenty-first century. You evidently havent noticed that Donald J. Trump won the last presidential election in the United States, in part by playing on fears of a deluge of refugees from the Middle East and of Islamic terrorism; that the British voted to leave the European Union in part based on similar fears; and that across Europe pressures over refugees and terror attacks have helped to alter the political landscape.

Where Is Globalization Now That We Need It?

To frame things slightly differently, let me ask another question entirely: In these last years, havent you wondered what ever happened to globalization and the endless media attention that was once paid to it? Not so very long ago we were being assured that this planet was binding itself into a remarkably tight knot of interconnectedness that was going to amaze us all. As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times put it in 1996, we were seeing the integration of free markets, nation-states, and information technologies to a degree never before witnessed, in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and countries to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever. All of this was to be fed and led by the United States, the last superpower standing, and as a result, the global playing field would miraculously be leveled on a planet becoming a mosaic of Pizza Huts, iMacs, and Lexuses.

Who of a certain age doesnt remember those years after the Soviet Union imploded when we all suddenly found ourselves in a single superpower world? It was a moment when, thanks to vaunted technological advances, it seemed blindingly clear to the cognoscenti that this was going to be a single-everything planet. We were all about to be absorbed into a single market for goods, capital, and commercial services from which, despite the worries of naysayers, almost everyone stood to gain. In a world not of multiple superpowers but of multiple supermarkets, we were likely to become both more democratic and more capitalistic by the year as an interlocking set of transnational corporate players, nations, and peoples, unified by a singularly interwoven set of communication systems (representing nothing short of an information revolution), triumphed, while poverty, that eternal plague of humanity, stood to lose out big time. Everything would be connected on what was, for the first time, to be a single, flattened planet.

It wont surprise you, Im sure, to be told that thats not exactly the planet were now on. Instead, whatever processes were at work, the result has been record numbers of billionaires, record levels of inequality, and refugees in numbers not seen since much of the world was in a state of collapse after World War II.

Still, dont you ever wonder where, conceptually speaking, globalization is now that we need it? I mean, did it really turn out that we werent living together on a single shrinking planet? Were the globalists of that moment inhabiting another planet entirely in another solar system? Or could it be that globalization is still the ruling paradigm here, but that whats globalizing isnt (or isnt just) Pizza Huts, iMacs, and Lexuses, but pressure points for the fracturing of our world?

The globalization of misery doesnt have the cachet of the globalization of plenty. It doesnt make for the same uplifting reading, nor does skyrocketing global economic inequality seem quite as thrilling as a leveling playing field (unless, of course, you happen to be a billionaire). And thanks significantly to the military efforts of the last superpower standing, the disintegration of significant regions of the planet doesnt quite add up to what the globalists had in mind for the twenty-first century. Failed states, spreading terror movements, all too many Mosuls, and the conditions for so much more of the same werent what globalization was supposed to be all about.

Perhaps, however, its time to begin reminding ourselves that were still on a globalizing planet, even if one experiencing pressures of an unexpected sort, including from the disastrous never-ending American war on terror. Its so much more convenient, of course, to throw the idea of globalization overboard and imagine that Mosul is thousands of miles away in a universe that bears next to no relation to our own.

What It Really Means to Be on a Flattening Planet

Its true that in France last week extremist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was defeated by a young, little known former investment banker and government minister, Emmanuel Macron, and the European Union preserved. As with an earlier election in Holland in which a similar right-wing candidate lost, this is being presented as potentially the high-water mark of whats now commonly called populism in Europe (or the Brexit-style fragmentation of that continent). But Id take such reassurances with a grain of salt, given the pressures likely to come. After all, in both Holland and France, two extreme nationalist parties garnered record votes based on anti-Islamic, anti-refugee sentiment and will, after the coming parliamentary elections in France, both be represented, again in record numbers, in their legislatures.

The rise of such populism  think of it as the authoritarian fragmentation of the planet  is already a global trend. So just imagine the situation four or potentially even eight years from now after Donald Trumps generals, already in the saddle, do their damnedest in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Theres no reason to believe that, under their direction, the smashing of key regions of the planet wont continue. Theres no reason to doubt that, in an expanding world of Mosuls  the Syrian capital of the Islamic State, Raqqa, is undoubtedly the next city in line for such treatment  victories wont produce a planet of greater ethnic savagery, religious extremism, military destruction, and chaos. This, in turn, ensures a further spread of terror groups and an even more staggering uprooting of peoples. (Its worth noting, for instance, that since the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Special Operations forces, al-Qaeda has grown, not shrunk, gaining yet more traction across the Greater Middle East.) So far, Americas permanent war on terror has helped produce a planet of fear, refugees on an almost unimaginable scale, and ever more terror. What else would you imagine could arise from the rubble of so many Mosuls?

If you dont think that this is an ever-more connected planet still being flattened (even if in quite a different way than expected), and that sooner or later the destruction of Mosul will reverberate in our world, too, then you dont get our world. Its obvious, for instance, that future Mosuls will only produce more refugees, and you already know where thats led, from Brexit to Donald Trump. Destroy enough Mosuls and, even in the heartland of the planets sole superpower, the fears of those who already feel theyve been left in a ditch will only rise (and be fed further by demagogues ready to use that global flow of refugees for their own purposes).

Given the transformations of recent years, just think what it will mean to uproot ever vaster populations, to set the homeless, the desperate, the angry, the hurt, and the vengeful  millions of adults and children whose lives have been devastated or destroyed  in motion. Imagine, for instance, what those pressures will mean when it comes to Europe and its future politics.

Think about whats to come on this small planet of ours  and thats without even mentioning the force that has yet to fully reveal itself in all its fragmenting and globalizing and leveling power. We now call it, mildly enough, climate change or global warming. Just wait until, in the decades to come, rising sea levels and extreme weather events put human beings in motion in startling ways (particularly given that the planets sole superpower is now run by men in violent denial of the very existence of such a force or the human sources of its power).

You want a shrinking planet? You want terror? You want globalization? Think about that. And do you wonder why, these days, I have Mosul on my mind?
Self-healing tech charges up performance for silicon-containing battery anodes (Nanowerk News) Researchers at the University of Illinois have found a way to apply self-healing technology to lithium-ion batteries to make them more reliable and last longer.

The group developed a battery that uses a silicon nanoparticle composite material on the negatively charged side of the battery and a novel way to hold the composite together - a known problem with batteries that contain silicon.

Materials science and engineering professor Nancy Sottos and aerospace engineering professor Scott White led the study published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials ("Silicon Composite Electrodes with Dynamic Ionic Bonding").

Illinois professors Nancy Sottos and Scott White led a team that developed a silicon nanoparticle composite material for battery anodes that could lead to more reliable and longer-lasting batteries.

"This work is particularly new to self-healing materials research because it is applied to materials that store energy," White said. "It's a different type of objective altogether. Instead of recovering structural performance, we're healing the ability to store energy."

The negatively charged electrode, or anode, inside the lithium-ion batteries that power our portable devices and electric cars are typically made of a graphite particle composite. These batteries work well, but it takes a long time for them to power up, and over time, the charge does not last as long as it did when the batteries were new.

"Silicon has such a high capacity, and with that high capacity, you get more energy out of your battery, except it also undergoes a huge volume expansion as it cycles and self-pulverizes," Sottos said.

Past research found that battery anodes made from nanosized silicon particles are less likely to break down, but suffer from other problems.

"You go through the charge-discharge cycle once, twice, three times, and eventually you lose capacity because the silicon particles start to break away from the binder," White said.

To combat this problem, the group further refined the silicon anode by giving it the ability to fix itself on the fly. This self-healing happens through a reversible chemical bond at the interface between the silicon nanoparticles and polymer binder.

"This dynamic re-bonding process essentially holds the silicon particles and polymer binder together, significantly improving the long-term performance of the electrode," Sottos said.

The researchers tested their new battery against one that does not use the reversible chemical bonding and found that it retains 80 percent of its initial capacity, even after 400 cycles.

These batteries also have a much higher energy density, meaning that they can store more electricity than a graphite-anode battery of the same size.

"The higher the energy density, the better. The other option is to add more batteries, but that gets heavy and is an issue with electric cars, in particular," Sottos said.
Entropy landscape sheds light on quantum mystery (Nanowerk News) By precisely measuring the entropy of a cerium copper gold alloy with baffling electronic properties cooled to nearly absolute zero, physicists in Germany and the United States have gleaned new evidence about the possible causes of high-temperature superconductivity and similar phenomena.

"This demonstration provides a foundation to better understand how novel behaviors like high-temperature superconductivity are brought about when certain kinds of materials are cooled to a quantum critical point," said Rice University physicist Qimiao Si, co-author of a new study about the research in this week's Nature Physics ("Multidimensional entropy landscape of quantum criticality").

Physicists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology used this capacitive dilatometer to measure the thermal expansion in cerium copper gold alloys cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero with a precision of one tenth of a trillionth of a meter, or approximately one-thousandth the radius of single atom. The precise thermal expansion measurements allowed the researchers to map out the stress dependence of entropy in materials as they were cooled to the point of a quantum phase transition. (Image: K. Grube/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

The experimental research was led by Hilbert von Lohneysen of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. Lohneysen's team, including study lead author Kai Grube, spent a year conducting dozens of experiments on a compound made of cerium copper and gold. By studying the effect of stress, or pressure applied in specific directions, and by making the materials very cold, the team subtly changed the spacing between the atoms in the crystalline metallic compounds and thus altered their electronic properties.

The cerium copper gold alloys are "heavy fermions," one of several of types of quantum materials that exhibit exotic electronic properties when very cold. The best-known of these are high-temperature superconductors, so named for their ability to conduct electrical current with zero resistance at temperatures well above those of traditional superconductors. Heavy fermions exhibit a different oddity: Their electrons appear to be effectively hundreds of times more massive than normal and, equally unusual, the effective electron mass seems to vary strongly as temperature changes.

These odd behaviors defy traditional physical theories. They also occur at very cold temperatures and come about when the materials are tuned to a "quantum phase transition" -- a change from one state to another, like ice melting. In 2001, Si and colleagues offered a new theory: At the quantum critical point, electrons fluctuate between two entirely different quantum states, so much so that their effective mass becomes infinitely large. The theory predicted certain tell-tale signs as the quantum critical point is approached, and Si has worked with experimental physicists for the past 16 years to amass evidence to support the theory.

"Liquid water and ice are two of the classical states in which H 2 O can exist," said Si, director of the Rice Center for Quantum Materials. "Ice is a very ordered phase because the H 2 O molecules are neatly arranged in a crystal lattice. Water is less ordered compared with ice, but flowing water molecules still have underlying order. The critical point is where things are fluctuating between these two types of order. It's the point where H 2 O molecules sort of want to go to the pattern according to ice and sort of want to go to the pattern according to water.

"It's very similar in a quantum phase transition," he said. "Even though this transition is driven by quantum mechanics, it is still a critical point where there's maximum fluctuation between two ordered states. In this case, the fluctuations are related to the ordering of the 'spins' of electrons in the material."

Spin is an inherent property -- like eye color -- and every electron's spin is classified as being either "up" or "down." In magnets, like iron, spins are aligned in the same direction. But many materials exhibit the opposite behavior: Their spins alternate in a repeating up, down, up, down pattern that physicists refer to as "antiferromagnetic."

Hundreds of experiments on heavy fermions, high-temperature superconductors and other quantum materials have found that magnetic order differs on either side of a quantum critical point. Typically, experiments find antiferromagnetic order in one range of chemical composition, and a new state of order on the other side of the critical point.

"A reasonable picture is that you can have an antiferromagnetic order of spins, where the spins are quite ordered, and you can have another state in which the spins are less ordered," said Si, Rice's Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy. "The critical point is where fluctuations between these two states are at their maximum."

The cerium copper gold compound has become a prototype heavy fermion material for quantum criticality, largely due to the work of von Lohneysen's group.

"In 2000, we did inelastic neutron scattering experiments in the quantum critical cerium copper gold system," said von Lohneysen. "We found a spatial-temporal profile so unusual that it could not be understood in terms of the standard theory of metal."

Si said that study was one of the important factors that stimulated him and his co-authors to offer their 2001 theory, which helped explain von Lohneysen's puzzling results. In subsequent studies, Si and colleagues also predicted that entropy -- a classical thermodynamic property -- would increase as quantum fluctuations increased near a quantum critical point. The well-documented properties of cerium copper gold provided a unique opportunity to test the theory, Si said.

In cerium copper-six, substituting small amounts of gold for copper allows researchers to slightly increase the spacing between atoms. In the critical composition, the alloys undergo an antiferromagnetic quantum phase transition. By studying this composition and measuring the entropy numerous times under varying conditions of stress, the Karlsruhe team was able to create a 3-D map that showed how entropy at very low yet finite temperature steadily increased as the system approached the quantum critical point.

No direct measure of entropy exists, but the ratio of entropy changes to stress is directly proportional to another ratio that can be measured: the amount the sample expands or contracts due to changes in temperature. To enable the measurements at the extraordinarily low temperatures required, the Karlsruhe team developed a method for accurately measuring length changes of less than one tenth of a trillionth of a meter -- approximately one-thousandth the radius of a single atom.

"We measured the entropy as a function of stress applied along all the different principal directions," said Grube, a senior researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. "We made a detailed map of the entropy landscape in the multidimensional parameter space and verified that the quantum critical point sits on top of the entropy mountain."

Von Lohneysen said the thermodynamic measurements also provide new insights into the quantum fluctuations near the critical point.

"Surprisingly, this methodology allows us to reconstruct the underlying spatial profile of quantum critical fluctuations in this quantum critical material," he said. "This is the first time that this kind of methodology has been applied."

Si said it came as a surprise that this could be done using nothing more than entropy measurements.

"It is quite remarkable that the entropy landscape can connect so well with the detailed profile of the quantum critical fluctuations determined from microscopic experiments such as inelastic neutron scattering, all the more so when both end up providing direct evidence to support the theory," he said.

More generally, the demonstration of the pronounced entropy enhancement at a quantum critical point in a multidimensional parameter space raises new insights into the way electron-electron interactions give rise to high-temperature superconductivity, Si said.
Find the newest releases to watch from National Geographic on Disney+, including favourite documentary series and films Free Solo, The Rescue, Shark Beach with Chris Hemsworth and The World According to Jeff Goldblum.
Helicopter support was needed to put out a potentially catastrophic gorse fire on the Tipperary-Limerick border last week.

And while this week's rain has lessened any risk of an immediate repeat, local Coillte manager John Moore has urged people to be careful.

He said carelessness and delibrate lighting of fires posed a huge threat to land, property, forestry and wildlife.

He pointed out that last Thursday a potentially huge forest fire was prevented on the Limerick/Tipperary border by the swift action of Coillte personnel and Newport, Cappamore and Limerick Fire Services.

Sports News: 'Tipp hurlers must be spot on next Sunday' - Michael Ryan

The fire was reported on Thursday morning burning on an open hill and immediately sent emergency services rushing to the area. The fire location was surrounded on three sides by forests of thousands of hectares in one block stretching almost from the village of Murroe in County Limerick to the village of Rearcross in County Tipperary.

Units of Cappamore, Newport and Limerick Fire Brigades fought the blaze along with Coillte Staff and Coillte contractors on three different fronts. The swift action of these groups kept the fire out of the forest until the afternoon.

But with the fire still raging on the open hill in the afternoon and still a huge threat to the main block of forest, Coillte Forest Manager John Moore decided in consultation with Coillte Head Office to call in Helicopter support.

A helicopter drops water on the blaze.

The Coillte contracted Helicopter which had been fighting a massive fire in Galway all week was on the scene in an hour. Using water from a local residents lake, the helicopter with its massive bambi bucket water carrier doused out any fire threat to the forest with the help of all fire fighters on the ground.

On arrival of aviation fuel, the helicopter took to the air again before darkness to put out the remaining fire on the open hill along with Coillte ground staff. The action of all concerned helped to prevent a much more serious situation.

Another serious fire was prevented the previous week just north of Cappawhite when late at night a load of rubbish was dumped in a Coillte forest and set on fire. But for the swift action of a local Coillte contractor and a local Coillte man, only a small area of forest was burnt. Other areas across Tipperary have had the same issues with fires and only for the swift action of locals, Coillte staff and the Fire Services much more damage would have been caused.

Mr Moore said the recent dry weather with easterly winds drying out the dead winter vegetation made for a serious fire hazard over the past few weeks. This coupled with deliberate lighting of fires on hills and general carelessness by people with regard to burning put everyone at risk.

It also has huge effect on wildlife with their habitat destroyed by the damage these fires can do. Coillte would like to thank all who helped keep these fires under control over the past few weeks.

More news...

What are you doing on Saturday, May 20? Take part in the 5k walk in Clonmel to raise funds for Brig Cahill!

Don't miss our great competition in conjunction with The Clonmel Park Hotel!
NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller began a two-day visit to Estonia on Friday (12 May 2017), stressing that Allied forces in Estonia are at the heart of NATOs collective defence. Visiting British infantry troops at a training range in Tapa, the Deputy Secretary General said that all Allies stand united against any threat. The British army is leading a battlegroup of about 1,000 NATO troops in Estonia. NATO is expanding its presence in the region in response to Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and its military build-up in the Baltic region.

Addressing engineers, anti-tank troops and snipers at the Tapa training range, the Deputy Secretary General welcomed that troops from the United Kingdom stand side-by-side with their colleagues from Estonia, making clear this sends a strong message of unity. At Tapa, the Deputy Secretary General also received briefings by military officers on exercise Spring Storm, which is currently taking place in Estonia with 9,000 troops from several Allied countries taking part. Also on Friday, Ms. Gottemoeller held talks with Estonian Defence Ministers Margus Tsahkna on the current security environment and progress in the deployment of NATO troops to the Baltic States.

On Saturday, the Deputy Secretary General is scheduled to participate in the annual Lennart Mari Conference, where she will speak on the importance of NATO-EU cooperation for European security. Ms. Gottemoeller will wrap up her visit to Estonia by seeing NATO naval forces in Tallinn harbor, where she will thank sailors onboard the Norwegian navy frigate Roald Amundsen for their service in the defence on the Alliance.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says he is not worried about his standing with President Donald Trump following Trump's firing of FBI chief James Comey.

"I have a great relationship with the president," Tillerson told NBC News' Meet the Press on Sunday. "I understand what his objectives are. When I'm not clear on what his objectives are, we talk about it."

Tillerson spoke as Trump prepares for his first overseas trip as president. He heads Friday to Saudi Arabia for discussions with King Salman and to Israel for a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about ongoing turmoil and security threats in the volatile Middle East. Later, Trump is to visit Pope Francis at the Vatican and meet with more world leaders at NATO and at a G7 economic summit.

"I am devoted to helping the president achieve his objectives, helping him be successful," Tillerson said. "And I understand I have to earn his confidence every day with how I go about those affairs and how I go about conducting the State Department's activities consistent with the direction he wants to take the country."


The NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will meet the Deputy Prime Minister for Judicial Reform and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria, H.E. Mrs. Ekaterina Zaharieva at NATO Headquarters on Tuesday, 16 May 2017.

There will be no media opportunity.

Still imagery of the meeting will be available after the event on the NATO website.

Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg)
(Natural News) The number of British men opting for breast reduction procedures due to enlarged or swollen breast, otherwise known as gynecomastia, has increased fourfold over the past five years, according to Dr. Navid Jallali, a leading consultant cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon. The doctor noted that while more men are seeking medical attention for their condition, a higher number of patients have been ridiculed and treated unfairly because of their enlarged breasts.

According to Dr. Jallali, up to 50 percent of all men may be suffering from the condition. Unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle has been associated with the onset of gynecomastia. However, the doctor stressed that other factors such as hormonal imbalance may also play a role in the condition. The expert also warned that the condition may greatly contribute to psychological problems in men. Likewise, social psychologist Dr. Paula Singleton warned of the possible psychological effects of having gynecomastia. According to Dr. Singleton, the federal government should also be allocating funds to cover surgery cost for the condition.

Were seeing more and more patients with gynaecomastiaGynaecomastia can be caused by an imbalance between the hormones testosterone and oestrogen. Too much oestrogen causes breast tissue to grow. While all men produce some oestrogen, they usually have much higher levels of testosterone, which blocks the oestrogen from causing breast tissue to grow. However, if the balance of hormones in the body is altered then this can cause a mans breasts to grow, said Dr. Jallali in DailyMail.co.uk.

Many teenage boys will grow out of the condition after puberty. But for those who are left with large breasts  while the rest of their body is slim and healthy  depression can be a real issue as theyre left shouldering the heavy burden of such a stigma. Its deeply troubling. Many male patients develop suicidal thoughts, and outbursts of torment are evident on many online forums dedicated to gynaecomastia. And Id argue that snap judgements and a lack of understanding is causing unnecessary suffering, Dr. Jallali added.

Gender-bending chemicals may be causing upsurge in number of feminized men

Gynecomastia is only one of the many health conditions that feminize biological men. In fact, other condition such as undescended testicles and altered musculinization have also become rampant over the past few years. According to studies, these conditions have been greatly driven by exposure to gender-bending chemicals such as atrazine and pthalates.

A study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives revealed that pthalates disrupt development in male infants. Pthalates are hormone-disrupting chemicals commonly used in manufacturing plastic product. To carry out the study, researchers at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry examined 85 male infants born to mothers who had daily exposures to pthalates during pregnancy. The research team found that mothers with the highest pthalate exposure were more likely to have a child with short anogenital distance than those with lower exposure levels. The study also showed that 21 percent of boys with short AGD had incomplete testicular descent. The researchers also cautioned that higher pthalate exposure may lead to testicular dysgenesis syndrome in boys. (Related: Follow more news on gender phenotypes at Gender.news.)

An animal study also revealed that exposure to the pesticide atrazine resulted in depressed testosterone, decreased breeding gland size and demasculinized/feminized laryngeal development as well as suppressed mating behavior, reduced spermatogenesis and decreased fertility in male African clawed frogs. According to the researchers, atrazine-exposed frogs had lower testosterone levels and reduced dermal breeding glands compared with the controls. The research team also found that male frogs exposed to the toxic chemical also exhibited fewer testicular tubules with mature sperm bundles than those in the controls. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

NewScientist.com

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov
(Natural News) A recent study published in the journal of Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis revealed that e-cigarettes do not cause cancer, unlike tobacco. The Action on Smoking and Health noted that nearly three million people in the U.K. use e-cigarettes. As part of the study, a team of researchers at London-based British American Tobacco examined laboratory cells exposed to emissions from a standard e-cigarette. The research team used a particular test, known as Bhas 42 assay, to compare tobacco and nicotine products. According to the study, e-cigarettes did not trigger cancer-related toxicity at any nicotine dose. However, emissions from a standard cigarette collected in the cultured cells resulted in tumor development.

The findings were reflective of another recently published study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. According to the study, people who used e-cigarettes in place of conventional tobacco products exhibited lower levels of toxic and cancer-causing chemicals in the body compared with those who continued using standard cigarettes. However, those who continued using both e-cigarettes and traditional tobacco products did not show significant reductions in toxic and carcinogenic compounds in the body. The results suggested that complete tobacco replacement is required to achieve a similar decreases in hazardous chemicals, the researchers noted.

Our study adds to existing evidence showing that e-cigarettes and NRT are far safer than smoking, and suggests that there is a very low risk associated with their long-term use. Weve shown that the levels of toxic chemicals in the body from e-cigarettes are considerably lower than suggested in previous studies using simulated experiments. This means some doubts about the safety of e-cigarettes may be wrong. Our results also suggest that while e-cigarettes are not only safer, the amount of nicotine they provide is not noticeably different to conventional cigarettes. This can help people to stop smoking altogether by dealing with their cravings in a safer way, lead author Dr. Lion Shahab reported in ScienceDaily.com.

Around a third of tobacco-caused deaths are due to cancer, so we want to see many more of the UKs 10 million smokers break their addiction. This study adds to growing evidence that e-cigarettes are a much safer alternative to tobacco, and suggests the long term effects of these products will be minimal. Understanding and communicating the benefits of nicotine replacements, such as e-cigarettes, is an important step towards reducing the number of tobacco-related deaths here in the UK, said Alison Cox, Cancer Research UKs Director of Cancer Prevention.

FDA insists on on e-cigarette warning

Despite the mounting evidence on the relative safety of e-cigarettes compared with traditional tobacco products, the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) continues to warn about the potential health risk associated with the device. According to the FDA, e-cigarettes may promote nicotine addiction in the younger population and may even encourage children to try other nicotine-containing products. A few years ago, the FDA has also conducted a laboratory testing on two leading brands of e-cigarette samples and found that the products contained potentially toxic chemicals. The agency has since then partnered with other health experts to warn about the dangers of e-cigarette use.

Just last year, the FDA and Democratic legislators have pushed for stricter regulations in e-cigarette use, stating that the devices may serve as a gateway to tobacco use among children. However, the Trump administration early this month has delayed the implementation of a final rule imposing stricter regulation of e-cigarettes. In the motion, Justice Department attorneys and industry groups requested for a three-month delay in order to give new leadership personnel at the Health and Human Services more time to mull over the proposed regulations and the issues raised against e-cigarettes.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

ScienceDaily.com

FDA.gov

Observer.com

WashingtonPost.com
Monday, May 15, 2017 by: Tracey Watson Tags: aetna , healthcare , healthcare exchanges , insurance , obamacare This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author

(Natural News) There is no doubt at this point that Obamacare is on life-support. As Republicans work hard behind the scenes to dismantle it completely, insurer Aetna Inc. announced this week that it will no longer be selling Obamacare plans in Delaware and Nebraska  the last two states in which it was still doing so.

At this time have completely exited the exchanges, Aetna said in a statement released May 10.

Though Aetna was initially one of the biggest players in the Obamacare exchanges, this announcement comes as no surprise.

At the end of 2016, Aetna announced that it would cut its participation in the exchanges by 70 percent, reducing the number of states it would sell individual Affordable Care Act plans in from 15 to just four. That decision was made as an effort to claw back some of the companys losses, and came just two weeks after Aetna declared $200 million in pre-tax losses for the second quarter of that year.

As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision, Marc Bertolini, Aetnas CEO, said at the time.

Then, back in February, Bertolini criticized Obamacares markets, saying that with the increase in premiums, and more and more healthy individuals dropping out, they were on the brink of failure. In a video interview with the Wall Street Journal he went so far as to say that Obamacare was in a death spiral.

Chief Financial Officer Shawn Guertin indicated earlier this month that Aetna might withdraw from the exchanges completely to limit the financial hemorrhage that Obamacare has meant for the company. Even with representation in just four states, Aetna projects it will lose $200 million on individual health plans this year.

The Obamacare Health Insurance Exchange Marketplace officially opened in October of 2013 as an online marketplace for health insurance. The idea was that Americans would be able to obtain affordable healthcare coverage from competing private healthcare providers. Side-by-side comparisons would allow them to make the best possible choices for their families. On-site calculators would also enable people to determine if they qualified for cost assistance subsidies, Medicaid or CHIP. The promise was that tens of millions of Americans would qualify for such subsidies, available only through the marketplace. It was also claimed that 60 percent of Americans would qualify for coverage at $100 or less per month.

So, what went wrong?

Well, Obamacare has been very unpopular pretty much right from the beginning. While it is true that premiums can be as low as just $75 a month, deductibles often run into the thousands of dollars.

Natural News reported in 2016, that in certain states, premiums had increased by as much as 67 percent in a desperate bid to keep insurers from leaving the exchanges.

Over 8 million Americans were fined an average of $210 per tax return in 2015 for penalties related to Obamacares individual mandate.

Some people were also unhappy that they had to pay higher costs if they were cared for by providers that were not in their network, and that certain medications had been placed in high-cost categories by their insurers.

Critics of Obamacare have also called it a job killer, since employers are forced to obtain insurance for their staff members, increasing company costs.

Perhaps former President Bill Clinton said it best at a rally in 2016, when he said, So youve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. Its the craziest thing in the world.



Sources for this article include:

Bloomberg.com

Bloomberg.com

MSN.com

ObamacareFacts.com

USNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Ohia.org reminds us that sharks are both scavengers and super -predators, who greatly assist in keeping the oceans ecosystem balanced. Sharks eat fish that are the weakest, sick or dead, and also maintain prey species diversity by keeping other predator species in check. A decline in shark populations not only threatens fishery operations, but can also indicate deeper problems within our ecosystem. This may be the case in the waters of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Francisco, where for more than seven weeks, hundreds of Leopard sharks have been found dying, or dead, as reported by the San Francisco Gate.

This isnt the first time the Leopard shark has had a die-off. US.BlastingNews.com states that the Leopard shark had a population decrease in 2016, as well as in 2011, when a thousand dead leopard sharks perished and washed up on shore with scientists estimating those numbers might be much higher. This years die-off could be in the thousands, as well. According to Sean Van Sommeran, founder and executive director of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, an education and shark research consortium based in Santa Cruz, California, this event could be just the tip of the iceberg.

The epicenter where many of the dead sharks have been found is Redwood City, California. This has led Van Sommeran to surmise that the cause of the deaths can be attributed to the closing of the Redwood City tide gates during low tide, which is done to prevent flooding during the rainy season. When the tide is low, however, the leopard sharks are making their way into the shallower waters to mate. When those flood gates close, the sharks get trapped and exposed to storm water runoff, which contains what Van Sommeran calls extra crud going into the watershed. The water inside the gates becomes stagnant and creates a toxic environment in which the shark cannot survive. When the tide gates are reopened, those rotting carcasses of dead sharks are released into the waters and then contaminate others. Heres a brief synopsis of the current explanation of this years die-off, which is still in progress:

But is stagnant water inside a flood gate the only explanation for what could be thousands of more deaths? Certainly not, according to AllNewsPipeline.com, which explains that in the six years since the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, there have been mass deaths throughout the Pacific Ocean and the West Coast, starting with one-celled organisms and smaller creatures, then moving on to the tuna fish and now up the food chain to an important ocean predator.

There have been other instances of different species of West Coast sharks dying from unusual circumstances. Unknown microorganisms were discovered in a Great White Shark that perished due to multiple organ failure. Other sharks off the west coast have died from unknown pathogens and shared brain infections across species. Could this possibly have anything to do with the plumes of radiation from the Fukushima meltdown that have been detected on Oregons shores? According to this broadcast of the TRT World program called Insight, it will take 100 years for a clean up of the radiation, if indeed there can even be a clean up at all. Perhaps the question will eventually be, will any sea life survive?

Find more news coverage of the unexplained at Unexplained.news.

Sources:

Ohia.org

Science.NaturalNews.com

SFGate.com

US.BlastingNews.com

YouTube.com

AllNewsPipeline.com

YouTube.com
(Natural News) Postnatal care in the UK has reached an all-time low. British parenting website Mumsnet.com released the results of a postnatal care survey that assessed the conditions of over 1,200 women. These women, all of whom had given birth in the UK in the last three years, were asked about food, water, pain relief, and washing facilities. While these are considered as postnatal ward basics, a number of women were unable to access these during their stay. Of the women who took the survey, 61 percent said that they couldnt get food; 45 percent stated that they were given insufficient pain relief; 22 percent stated that they werent given water when they needed it; and 19 percent said that they went without washing facilities while recovering in the ward.

The DailyMail.co.uk reported more disturbing figures about the state of postnatal care. According to the publication, a BBC Freedom of Information request revealed that 305,019 errors were recorded by nurses and midwives within the last three years. These errors ranged from the loss of records to the needless deaths of mothers and babies.

Mothers like Kelly Derry and Millie Gee have shared their stories. Derry recounted to the DailyMail.co.uk about how three different nurses all failed to give her pain relief when the effects of her epidural had begun wearing off. She resorted to asking her husband to buy painkillers when he and the couples two other children came to see Derry and her newborn daughter. He was shocked that Id not been given anything by the nurses, but I was just relieved to see him. I took the tablets and, within minutes, I was feeling better. I didnt say anything to the staff about itI just wanted to get out of there, Derry admitted.

Gee, who gave birth to twin daughters at 33 weeks, said that she was ready for her babies to stay in the Special Care unit. What I was unprepared for was being abandoned in the maternity unit with no pain relief and having to argue with nurses and midwives about seeing my babies, Gee said, before elaborating on her treatment. Gees daughters were born at two pm but Gee herself was unable to see them until 10 in the evening. Just as shocking is Gees account of how she was denied pain relief, food, and water by nurses who told her that they were very busy before walking off. Gee discharged herself within a few hours time; and she believes that her experience led to her developing postnatal depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Women whove just given birth should not be going hungry or thirsty, or having to ask repeatedly for pain relief, or wash in dirty bathrooms, stated Mumsnet.com founder Justine Roberts. New mums are often acutely aware of how much pressure NHS workers are under, and theyre extremely reluctant to complain. But its becoming clear that women need to be offered better ways to give detailed feedback to hospitals on their experiences, so that changes can be made where necessary. (Related: Over 50 percent of women and their newborns put at risk in the UK under a failed centralized healthcare system)

A spokesman for the National Health Service (NHS) responded: In an NHS survey of 20,000 new mothers, 95 per cent felt they were treated with kindness and understanding and 88 per cent felt that if they needed attention they received it. Despite this, 12 percent of surveyees said that they felt otherwise. When asked about the likelihood of having more children in the future, five percent responded that their experience in postnatal care had put them off the idea of expanding their families.

Read up on more news about healthcare by visiting Medicine.news.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

HuffingtonPost.co.uk

Mumsnet.com
(Natural News) The massive global ransomware attack that occured on Friday and which permeated governments, corporations and Britains entire National Health Service, was conducted with malware developed by  and stolen from  the U.S. National Security Agency.

Known as WannaCry, the theft of the malware and its posting online has left many asking what additional malware cyber weapons the U.S. government and American adversaries possess, and how much damage to the worlds critical information technology infrastructure those cyber weapons could do if they were unleashed on the planet?

As reported by The National Sentinel, last week U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Rogers, head of U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA, testified before Congress that American intelligence agencies are concerned not only about state cyber warfare actors like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, but also non-state actors  secretive hacktivist groups who operate in the shadows and who may have an axe to grind with modern society.

The pace of international conflict and cyberspace threats has intensified over the past few years, Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee. We face a growing variety of advanced threats from actors who are operating with ever more sophistication and precision. (RELATED: Ukraine Has Become Ground Zero For The Most Intense Cyberwar Ever Fought)

So what kind of damage could hacktivists like Shadow Brokers  the group responsible for releasing the stolen NSA malware, which exposed a flaw in Microsoft software  actually do? What IT systems could be affected? Here are just a few scenarios:

 U.S. power grid: Systems most targeted by state-sponsored hackers are those controlling various parts of the U.S. power grid. Last year Iranian hackers managed to infiltrate some U.S. financial institutions; also Russia-linked BlackEnergy malware was deployed to hack Ukraines power grid the year before.

In 2015, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., then the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters at the time, I believe that its only a matter of time before these attacks progress to our critical infrastructure, like the electric grid and other systems. When that happens, we wont be talking about stolen money, or destroyed systems, well be talking about thousands of lives that have been endangered.

A massive attack that shuts down most or all of the U.S. power grid  should it last any length of time at all  would cause massive chaos, societal breakdown, and millions of deaths, and our enemies are well aware of this.

Infiltrations in U.S. critical infrastructure  when viewed in the light of incidents like these  can look like preparations for future attacks that could be intended to harm Americans, or at least to deter the United States and other countries from protecting and defending our vital interests, Rogers said.

Another major casualty: Nuclear power plants. Without electricity and without reliable back-up, plants begin to melt down.

 Financial sector: Get online right now and take a look at your bank and retirement accounts. They will vanish in a split second if a coordinated malware attack disrupted or destroyed the U.S. financial sector, instantly wiping out savings, retirement and investment accounts  all of which are kept electronically. Whats more, if Wall Street and other markets around the world were disrupted, data hacked and stolen or destroyed, then the chaos would not be limited to just one country. It would become universal.

 Dams, air traffic control, water treatment, sanitation plants: China has been identified as having regularly hacked Interior Department systems that expose critical U.S. power infrastructure like dams. Included in the hacks: Data on the National Inventory of Dams.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined not to have proper level of access for the information, Pete Pierce, a Corps spokesman, said November 2014. (RELATED: U.S. Just As Active In Hacking Countries As Russia, Despite Trumps Remarks)

Hacked air traffic control systems would ground thousands of flights and strand tens of millions of people. Hacked water treatment plants would create instant havoc, and a lack of sanitation would turn cities into toxic cesspools within a few days.

For now, corporations and personal computers hit with the WannaCry NSA-developed software are only going to be out a couple hundred dollars. But next time, the attack could be much worse.

Stay informed at Glitch.news and Collapse.news.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

AbsoluteRights.com

Cyberwar.news

NaturalNews.com

TheNationalSentinel.com
(Natural News) When theres a medical emergency, the modus operandi is to call 911 and ask for an ambulance. In those tense moments, the last thing people think about is just how much that hospital ride might cost. After all, the insurance covers it, right? Well, not necessarily. Blogcredit.com tells the story of a woman whose car accident prompted an ambulance ride to the local hospital that cost $2,400. Several people have reported paying upwards of $1000 for simple transportation between medical facilities, even without the flashing red lights and sirens.

When the 911 call comes in, states Consumerist.com, the operator will frequently dispatch an EMS ambulance, which may, or may not take you to a hospital that is in-network, that is one that accepts your insurance. Depending on the area of the country you live in, those agreements between local governments, insurance companies and ambulance providers can vary dramatically. Sometimes, even Medicare beneficiaries have to pay a pretty penny, according to a 2012 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Ambulance transport prices for Medicare patients ranged from $224  $2204. Those costs have only increased since.

Just like the growth of big pharma, the business of ambulances, emergency care, and emergency medical services (EMS) training have grown in complexity and cost. EMS service is light years away from the volunteer days of 1960s, according to John, an emergency medical technician (EMT) in his conversation with Blogcredit.com. Today, it costs $100,000 to manufacture an ambulance. Its basically a mobile hospital with $10,000 heart monitors, $12,000 defibrillators, $4000 stretchers, and a myriad of other life-saving medical supplies. The highly skilled EMTs have to be on call 24/7. All of this leads to high costs.

In other words, dont call the ambulance if its a minor problem that herbal remedies and emergency supplies can handle. Additionally, if the patient can be safely transported by a friend or family member to the emergency room, dont call 911.

Some remote areas of the country must depend on air ambulance services for medical emergencies. Butte, Montana is such a place. The Atlantic tells the story of 2-year-old Isla Thomson, who had to be transported via helicopter to a Seattle hospital 600 miles away, due to her failing heart. Isla survived and the Thomsons thought their insurance covered the ride. They were shocked when a $56,000 bill arrived. After many conversations, appeals and turmoil, their insurance company paid $30,000 and an out-of-network fee of $13,000, and the air ambulance would waive the rest of the fee. But not all endings are that happy.

Its wise to discuss just how your particular hospital or insurance provider works with the local EMS providers so you can estimate what charges might occur, should you ever require services. If youve already received an ambulance bill, medical billing expert Adria Goldman Gross suggests, you should be prepared to negotiate. To begin, look over the bills medical codes carefully to see if it reflects the services you received. Gross uses the Medicare fee schedule as a benchmark. Prepare to make many phone calls, says Gross, because if youre being overcharged, it can be worth the fight. Additional strategies include negotiating a monthly payment, or seeing if repayment assistance is available.

In todays ever changing and volatile society, calling 911 may not be an option. Why not sign up for a laymans class in emergency medicine, or learn what medical supplies to have in your prepper bag? While no one can predict when an accident may occur, each of us can learn how to stay as healthy as we can in the meantime. Considering our bodies are 50  70 percent water, drinking clean, non-fluoridated, non-chemical water from a Berkey Water Filter is a great way to start.

Sources include:

Blog.Credit.com

TheConsumerist.com

TheAtlantic.com

Blog.Credit.com
It's almost inconceivable that 467 million hectares of forests -- equal to about 60 percent of Australia's size -- get "lost," but exactly that much previously unreported forests has recently been discovered.

According to a report from Phys Org, a new global analysis surveyed the drylands and found 45 percent more forest area than previous surveys.

The new dryland forest was found in all continents, but most of it were in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, northeastern Brazil, northern Colombia and Venezuela, and northern parts of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia. In Africa, the known dryland forest area has doubled with the study.

Although it seems impossible to have so much forestry left undiscovered, drylands are difficult to measure on a global scale because of it contains very little trees. This type of forest are dubbed drylands because they get less water in precipitation than the amount they lose in evaporation and plant transpiration.

The new study uncovered the new drylands by eschewing the older, low-resolution satellite images without ground validation that were used by previous surveys. Instead, the researchers made use of high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine then used a simple visual interpretation of tree number and density.

"In the modern digital age we think we know everything about the Earth, but a lot of that knowledge comes from satellite imagery, like Google Earth, but when you see that type of satellite data, you have to make estimations on what type of vegetation occurs on the ground," Andrew Lowe of the University of Adelaide, who headed the research, told National Geographic.

Drylands used to be underappreciated, but this study proves they have a bigger capacity to support trees and forests than initially realized.

The findings have been published in the journal Science.
The gigantic carcass that washed up on the shores of Indonesia was so massive that witnesses first thought it was a boat. It turns out, it was just the mangled body of a mysterious monstrous creature.

According to a report from Jakarta Globe, the sea creature was a 15-meter-long monstrosity that attracted huge crowds of locals at Hulung Beach, Iha Village in the West Seram district. The carcass, believed to be dead for at least three days by the time it was discovered, was already beginning to decompose.

Local residents have reached out to the government to help them remove the creature's remains on the beach.

Initial reports defined the dead animal as a giant squid, but officials later concluded that it was more likely to be a whale. Specifically, a baleen whale, according to Alexander Werth, a whale biologist at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

"There is lots of stuff in the ocean that we don't know about - but there's nothing that big" that remains unknown, Werth told Live Science.

Two distinct features revealed the identity of the mystery creature to Werth: the "throat pleats" and the upper jaw that would hold the baleen plates, which is used to filter food. While the scientists have confirmed that the whale belongs to the genus Balaenoptera, they aren't certain what species it is exactly.

In its advanced stage of decomposition, the whale would be emitting a foul stench due to all the bacteria in its guts.

"That's yet another reason you don't want to be close to these things, not because it's a scary, spooky creature, but [because] it would just be releasing some pretty foul, noxious gases," Werth said, adding that it would not be wise to swim or drink the waters near the body.
Tech staffs around the world worked around the clock this weekend to protect computers and patch networks to block the computer hack whose name sounds like a pop song -- "WannaCry" -- as analysts warned the global ransomware attack could be just the first of a new wave of strikes by computer criminals.

The United States suffered relatively few effects from the ransomware that appeared on tens of thousands of computer systems across Europe and into Asia, beginning Friday. Security experts remained cautious, however, and stressed there was a continuing threat.

In contrast to reports from several European security firms, a researcher at the Tripwire company on the U.S. West Coast said late Saturday that the attack could be diminishing.

"It looks like it's tailing off," said Travis Smith of Tripwire.

"I hope that's the case," Smith added. The Oregon firm protects large enterprises and governments from computer security threats.

 Ransomware Attack

The code for the ransomware unleashed Friday remains freely available on the internet, experts said, so those behind the WannaCry attack -- also known as WanaCryptor 2.0 and a variety of other names -- could launch new strikes in coming days or weeks. Copycat attacks by other high-tech criminals also are possible.

"We are not out of the woods yet," said Gary Davis, chief consumer security evangelist at McAfee, the global computer security software company in Santa Clara, California. "We think it's going to be the footprint for other kinds of attacks in the future."

The attack hit scores of countries -- more than 100, by some experts' count -- and infected tens of thousands of computer networks.

Industry reports indicate Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine and Britain were among the countries hit hardest, and more hacking reports can be expected when offices reopen for the new workweek Monday or, in some parts of the world, Sunday.

One of the weapons used in the current attack is a software tool reportedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency and published on the internet by hackers last month.

The tool affords hackers undetected entry into many Microsoft computer operating systems, which is what they need to plant their ransomware. However, Microsoft issued patches to fix that vulnerability in its software weeks ago that could greatly reduce the chances of intrusion.
A federal judge repeatedly rebuked former Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca for bringing shame on his department as he sentenced him Friday to three years in prison for obstructing an FBI investigation into abuses at the jails he ran.

In exceeding the two-year sentence prosecutors recommended, U.S. District Court Judge Percy Anderson said Baca's fall was tragic, but it was his own doing and that his role atop a corrupt department where deputies brutalized inmates had ruined lives and done lasting damage.

"Your actions are an embarrassment to the thousands of men and women who put their lives on the line every day," Anderson told the longtime lawman. "Blind obedience to a corrupt culture has serious consequences."

Baca was the final and most prominent defendant in a case that blossomed from a civil rights investigation of beatings by guards in the nation's largest jail system into a broader corruption scandal that led to the top of the department. In addition to Baca and his top lieutenant, 19 others were convicted of crimes ranging from assaults to obstructing justice.

Anderson said he would have sentenced Baca to five years in prison except for his nearly half-century of public service and because he's in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. The judge, however, took exception to a defense contention that Alzheimer's is a sentence of its own.

"As awful as Alzheimer's disease is, it's not a criminal penalty," said Anderson, who said the suggestion was an insult to millions of others suffering from the condition who have not committed federal crimes. "Alzheimer's disease is not a get-out-of-jail card."

The sentence was a blow to the 74-year-old, who had been seeking probation and home confinement.

Baca, dressed in a light blue suit, delivered a scattered address from hand-written notes outside the courthouse after the sentencing in which he thanked the people of Los Angeles, his lawyers and his wife standing by his side, who he couldn't immediately locate.

He declined to comment on the sentence, but as he waited to cross a street, he said he was a man of faith who believed life was precious.

"I love life no matter where I am," Baca said.

He was ordered to surrender to federal prison authorities July 25. He was convicted in March of obstructing justice, conspiring to obstruct justice and lying to federal authorities.

Baca abruptly resigned in 2014 after underlings were charged with plotting to hide an inmate informant from his FBI handler. Deputies had discovered the inmate was a snitch after finding a contraband cellphone the informant was supposed to use to communicate with his handler.

The crimes tarnished Baca's reputation as a soft-spoken, rail-thin, Zen-like reformer who promoted education and rehabilitation behind bars and preached tolerance and understanding between people of different cultures and faiths.

Furious about the learning his department was under investigation, he told the local FBI head and top federal prosecutor he was ready to "gun up" for battle with them and stated: "I'm the goddamn sheriff, these are my goddamn jails."

"Rather than stop the abuses in the jails, he entered into a conspiracy with his subordinates to obstruct a federal civil rights investigation to protect his legacy," acting U.S. Attorney Sandra Brown said. "He made a decision to protect what he called his empire, his jails and then simply to protect himself."

Defense attorney Nathan Hochman said Baca's misdeeds over six weeks in 2011 and four false answers to 400 questions during a voluntary interview with authorities in 2013 must be weighed against an "extraordinary record of public service" over 48 years and along with his condition, which has progressed from mild cognitive impairment to mild dementia.

More than 200 friends and supporters wrote letters of support for Baca, including former Mexican President Vicente Fox, former Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis, former Los Angeles Ram-turned-minister Rosey Grier, former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, Hollywood executives, clergy and former jail inmates.

"For 48 years, he served the people of Los Angeles with all his might, with all his heart," his attorney, Nathan Hochman, said.

Baca plans to appeal, challenging several of Anderson's rulings that Hochman said prevented a fair trial, including a decision not to allow medical experts to testify whether Baca's medical condition impaired his memory when he lied to federal authorities.
The global cyberattack that took computer files hostage appeared to slow on Monday as authorities worked to catch the extortionists behind it  a difficult task that involves searching for digital clues and following the money.

Among their findings so far: The first suggestions of a possible link between the "ransomware" known as WannaCry and hackers linked to North Korea. Those findings remain quite tentative; one firm advancing them described them as intriguing but still "weak."

Experts had warned that WannaCry might wreak renewed havoc on Monday, particularly in Asia, which was closed for business on Friday when the malware scrambled data at hospitals, factories, government agencies, banks and other businesses.

But while there were thousands of additional infections there, the expected second-wave outbreak largely failed to materialize, in part because security researchers had already defanged it .

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for the Finnish security company F-Secure, said the perpetrators of WannaCry made one crucial mistake.

"The malware became too successful," Hypponen said. "When you are a cybercriminal gang and your mission is to make money, you don't want to infect 200,000 work stations. You don't want to end up on the covers of magazines. There will be no shortage of investigation."

ABOUT THAT NORTH KOREA LINK

WannaCry paralyzed computers running mostly older versions of Microsoft Windows in some 150 countries. It encrypted users' computer files and displayed a message demanding $300 to $600 worth of the digital currency bitcoin to release them; failure to pay would leave the data scrambled and likely beyond repair .

The Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab said Monday that portions of the WannaCry program use the same code as malware previously distributed by the Lazarus Group, a hacker collective behind the 2014 Sony hack blamed on North Korea.

But it's possible the code was simply copied from the Lazarus malware without any other direct connection. Kaspersky said "further research can be crucial to connecting the dots."

Another security company, Symantec, has also found similarities between WannaCry and Lazarus tools, and said it's "continuing to investigate for stronger connections."

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Researchers might find some additional clues in the bitcoin accounts accepting the ransom payments. There have been three accounts identified so far, and there's no indication yet that the criminals have touched the funds. But what good is money just sitting there as digital bits?

Although bitcoin is anonymized, researchers can watch it flow from user to user. So investigators can follow the transactions until an anonymous account matches with a real person, said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer with the California security company McAfee.

But that technique is no sure bet. There are ways to convert bitcoins into cash on the sly through third parties. And even finding a real person might be no help if they're in a jurisdiction that won't cooperate.

Another possible slip-up: Nicholas Weaver, who teaches networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley, said good ransomware usually generates a unique bitcoin address for each payment to make tracing difficult. That didn't seem to happen here.

TELL-TALE SIGNS

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said U.S. investigators are collecting forensic information  such as internet addresses, samples of malware or information the culprits might have inadvertently left on computers  that could be matched with the handiwork of known hackers.

Investigators might also be able to extract some information about the attacker from a previously hidden internet address connected to WannaCry's "kill switch." That switch was essentially a beacon sending the message "hey, I'm infected" to the hidden address, Weaver said.

That means the very first attempts to reach that address, which might have been recorded by spy agencies such as the NSA or Russian intelligence, could lead to "patient zero"  the first computer infected with WannaCry. That, in turn, might further narrow the focus on possible suspects.

THE PLAYERS

Forensics, though, will only get investigators so far. One challenge will be sharing intelligence in real time to move as quickly as the criminals  a tricky feat when some of the major nations involved, such as the U.S. and Russia, distrust each other.

Even if the perpetrators can be identified, bringing them to justice could be another matter. They might be hiding out in countries that wouldn't be willing to extradite suspects for prosecution, said Robert Cattanach, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney and an expert on cybersecurity.

On the other hand, the WannaCry attack hit  and annoyed  many countries. Russia was among the hardest, and Britain among the most high-profile, and both have "some pretty good investigative capabilities," Cattanach said.
A former Episcopal priest who worked at an elite Rhode Island boarding school has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a student during trips to Boston in 1973.

Prosecutors say Howard White Jr., who was stripped of his priesthood by the Episcopal Church, received an 18-month sentence.

Prosecutors say the now 75-year-old White assaulted the boy during two overnight trips to Boston when the boy was 15 and 16 and White worked at St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island.

White, of Bedford, Pennsylvania, was freed on personal recognizance after pleading not guilty in December.

White's attorney tells The Boston Globe that he and prosecutors "came to an agreement on a plea and sentence that we thought was fair"

The victim's lawyer said his client was satisfied with the outcome.
Three Illinois businesses were named among Forbes list of Americas best small companies.

The top 25 list is the second annual ranking from the publication involving small giants.

Two suburban companies and one Chicago business made the list. They include Fusion OEM in Burr Ridge, Nicks Pizza and Pub in Crystal Lake and Basecamp in Chicago.

Forbes said the list included businesses that have sound models, strong balance sheets and steady profitsall privately owned and closely held.

They have been acknowledged as outstanding by others in their field. And they do things any business can learn from, the report states.

Contract manufacturer Fusion OEM and founder Craig Zoberis were listed for doing all their manufacturing at their plant outside Chicago and paying employees above-market rates, with workers starting at $14 an hour.

Nicks Pizza and Pub and owner Nick Sarillo were named for their connection to the northwest suburban community they began in and the vibrant culture built by a managing style called trust-and-track, as opposed to command-and-control.

The ranking notes that Sarillo, a former construction worker, was naive about the finance side of business and took on too much debt over the years, but his connection to the community was so strong, his customers ultimately saved the business.

[Sarillo] was running out of cash and three weeks from bankruptcy in 2011. With all other options exhausted, he wrote an email to customers explaining the situation, taking full blame for it, and asking for help, the report states. "The customers rallied and literally saved the company. Sales almost doubled for the next two months. Some even called the bank, urging it to help Sarillo find a solution.

Basecamp, a Chicago-based IT software and services company, was noted for maintaining its small business status despite the potential for the company to grow at an increasing rate.

It claims Owner Jason Fried turned down investment offers over the years in an effort to preserve growth of at least 5 percent a year to enjoy the culture of a small business.

Among those joys are employee benefits that include a 30-day sabbatical every three years, subsidies for hobbies outside of work and paid family vacations, Forbes reports.
An Ohio police officer is reportedly recovering after accidentally overdosing after a traffic stop.

According to NBC affiliate station WFMJ, officers saw a suspicious vehicle involved in what appeared to be a drug transaction Friday night and eventually pulled the vehicle over in East Liverpool.

During the stop, the driver of the car allegedly tried to use his foot to rub a white powder into the carpet.

The report states that several piles of white powder were discovered throughout the vehicle and on the drivers shoes. Small knotted baggies also appeared to have been torn open.

Patrolman Chris Green entered the car to stop the driver, identified as 25-year-old Justin Buckle, from destroying potential evidence, authorities reportedly said.

Police said the suspects initially told them the white powder was cocaine, but when it tested negative for that drug, the pair revealed it was actually a dangerous opioid known as fentanyl.

Soon after, Green fell ill and it was determined some of the fentanyl had gotten onto his skin and he was experiencing the effects of an opioid overdose, WFMJ reports.

"Officer Green does a great job, and it was just a freak accident that he just accidentally bumped up against something while he was searching this vehicle, and for him to drop out like that is shocking," said Captain Patrick Wright with the East Liverpool Police Department.

Fentanyl, which has been linked to hundreds of overdosing deaths across the country recently, particularly in Ohio, poses an enhanced threat because simply touching the powder can put a first responder at risk, officials said.

"Chris is a big, strong guy, hes an ex-MMA fighter, 220-something pounds of solid muscle, and it overtook him just like that, said Wright.

Green was given Narcan, a life-saving overdose reversal drug, and is expected to be OK, according to WFMJ.



A 24-year-old passenger in the car, Cortez Collins, was also reportedly found to have warrants out for his arrest for the alleged possession of carfentanil, a powerful opioid and fentanyl analog also known as an elephant tranquilizer.

Both Collins and Buckle were charged with tampering with evidence, but authorities expected more charges would be filed, WFMJ reports.
A 24-year-old woman was charged with murder in a grisly attack that left a teenager, the daughter of a Chicago police officer, dead over the weekend.

Chynna Stapleton, of Chicago, is facing a first-degree murder charge in the gruesome killing of 18-year-old Tatyanna Lewis Friday night. Police said the teen was murdered after a woman repeatedly rammed her into a tree with a car on the citys Far South Side.

The incident occurred around 11:10 p.m. in the 11400 block of S. May Street in the city's Morgan Park neighborhood, according to police.

Officials said Lewis and the 24-year-old woman were in a verbal argument when the woman entered an SUV and chased Lewis down the sidewalk.

She then crashed into the teen, repeatedly striking her against a tree before fleeing, authorities said.

Lewis was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Cook County Medical Examiners office.

She died from multiple blunt-force injuries, the medical examiner found, and her death was ruled a homicide.

Bystanders said the SUV jumped the curb at a high rate of speed, tearing through the front lawn before the crash. [[422167163, C]]

As soon as I looked out my window I saw a girl being rammed into the tree, and ran over and backed over and over again, said witness Brittany Patrick. She hit my car, backing over the body and then backed back over the body and got away.

Just hours before her death, Lewis had posted on Facebook about a possible impending confrontation, with neighbors saying the argument was over a man.

Community activist and anti-violence advocate Andrew Holmes said a child was in the backseat of the car at the time, calling the incident very disturbing.

I mean, an altercation between two females, two women and one was a mother  and it went wrong, Holmes said.

The 24-year-old woman fled the scene but was later apprehended by police, authorities said. Investigators recovered the SUV about a mile and a half away, near West 115th and South LaSalle Streets.

Stapleton, who police allege also crashed into numerous other vehicles while fleeing the scene, was ordered held without bail Monday. Her public defender, Christ Anderson, had asked for the charges to be dropped to second-degree murder but the judge said in court that Stapleton is a threat to herself and society.

"My daughter is not a monster," Stapleton's father, Jesse Stapleton, said at the courthouse.

Stapleton is scheduled to appear in court again on June 2.
Police in Cromwell are searching for the man who stole a vehicle early Monday morning.

Police said they responded to a home at 3:30 a.m. after a vehicle break-in was reported and officers found several people rummaging through vehicles on West Street.

They tried to flee and an officer was able to get a plate number and determined the car had been stolen from West Street in Wethersfield, police said.

The officer stopped the car, but the driver ran off and into the woods, police said.

A K9 unit was called in to search for the suspect but so far police have been unable to locate anyone.

The owner of the vehicle, who was not aware his car had been stolen, was notified of the incident, police said.

Police said unlocked cars being burglarized or stolen is an ongoing issue in the area.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Saturday after meeting with officials from the world's other industrialized democracies that he thought they were more at ease with Donald Trump's economic policies.

"People are more comfortable today, now that they've had the opportunity to spend time with me and listen to the president and hear our economic message," Mnuchin said after a two-day meeting in Bari, Italy, with members of the Group of Seven, industrialized nations commonly known as the G7.

Officials from the G7 countries hoped to learn more about the U.S. president's plans, which they feared would revive protectionist policies and result in a global regression on issues such as banking reform and climate change.

After the meeting, officials from Japan and member European countries remained concerned about the economic shift in Washington, particularly after Mnuchin said the U.S. reserved the right to be protectionist if it thought trade was not free or fair.

"All the six others... said explicitly, and some very directly, to the representatives of the U.S. administration that it is absolutely necessary to continue with the same spirit of international cooperation," said French Finance Minister Michel Sapin.
Connecticut State Police arrested a man accused of driving drunk and striking a state police cruiser Saturday night.

Zachary McDougal, 19, of Newington, faces drunken driving charges.

Police said around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, McDougal was driving north on Main Street in Hartford. A state trooper in an unmarked vehicle was traveling south on Main Street. According to police, when the traffic light turned green McDougal failed to yield right of way to the cruiser and tried to turn left onto Pleasant Street, hitting the cruiser in the process.

The trooper was taken to Hartford Hospital with minor injuries. McDougal did not report any injuries.

McDougal admitted to drinking alcohol and failed field sobriety tests, police said. He was charged with operating under the influence and operating a motor vehicle as a minor with an elevated blood alcohol content. He was released on a $500 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on May 25.

Hartford police responded for accident investigation.
If you missed out on Connecticut peaches last season, you should have something to look forward to this year.

The winter season of 2015 into 2016, particularly a deep freeze in February, led to some local orchards having no peaches or significantly fewer than normal. But local growers say this years weather, despite the drought, should make for a great peach season.

At Bishops Orchards in Guilford, theyre looking forward to harvest time too. The 300-acre, sixth generation family farm saw their peach crop slashed by 40 percent last season.

Some growers had nothing, some maybe had 10 or 15 percent of what they normally would pick, Jonathan Bishop, a co-CEO of Bishops Orchards, said.

Bishop said the buds on this seasons peach crop look good and they are on track to be healthy and plentiful when harvest time rolls around in late July.

We didnt have any cold events that hurt anything in the wintertime. We havent had any spring frosts, so we, right now have a full bloom of peach blossoms, Bishop said.

So as long as the weather holds up, you can look forward to a season of sweet cobblers, pies and other treats filled with Connecticut peaches.

People really look forward to locally grown peaches. Its one of the crops where local makes a difference, Bishop said. Well just keep our fingers crossed there arent any frosts or hail storms or things like that.

Find a list of pick-your-own farms in Connecticut on the state Department of Agriculture website.
What to Know A plane crashed into an industrial neighborhood in Carlstadt on Monday afternoon

Officials said buildings and cars were on fire; thick, black smoke could be seen rising above the crash site

Two crew members on the plane were killed; there were no passengers, officials said

UPDATE: Federal Investigators Head to Deadly Plane Crash Site



A small plane crashed into a busy industrial neighborhood in Carlstadt, New Jersey, while attempting to land at Teterboro Airport on Monday afternoon, killing two pilots on board and creating a large fireball, officials and witnesses said.

The impact of the crash set three buildings, more than a dozen cars and a number of power lines ablaze, Carlstadt Police Chief Tom Berta said. Thick, black smoke was seen rising high above the crash site, and was visible as far away as New York City. Witnesses described a surreal scene of melting cars and exploding tires.

"There's nothing really left of the plane at all - you just see the two engines that are burnt up and stuff," one man told News 4.



Firefighters from multiple departments responded to building fires at United Group, Manhattan Door Company and the Carlstadt Dept. of Public Works, Berta said. There were 13 vehicle fires.

Dramatic Images: Plane Crashes Near Teterboro Airport

Members of the FAA and NTSB were en route to the scene as part of an ongoing investigation into the cause of the crash. The Bergen County medical examiner was identifying those who died.

The NTSB said it would initiate its investigation into the crash Tuesday. The FAA said it would join them as it continues its probe.

The Learjet 35 twin-jet, which departed from Philadelphia International Airport, was approaching Runway 1 at Teterboro just before 3:30 p.m. when it went down near Kero Road about 1/4 mile from the airport, the FAA said.

Two crew members were killed in the crash, officials said. There were no passengers aboard.

The plane's tail number is N452DA. It was built in 1981 and is registered to A&C Big Sky Aviation in Billings, Montana. It wasn't immediately clear who was operating the plane at the time of the crash, and News 4 wasn't immediately able to reach the company Monday evening.

Among the many factors investigators from the FAA and NTSB will probe is the plane's maintenance records, which is routine in all plane crashes.

Officials said the plane crashed into a parking lot near the buildings that caught fire. One of its wings was lodged into the roof of the Manhattan Door Company.

Surveillance video shows the red plane right before impact. It appears to be nose-down and on its side as it hits.

[422426123, C]]



"Tower, that Learjet just crashed," the pilot of another plane told air traffic controllers moments later.

"Airport's closed! Airport's closed!" an air traffic controller said moments later.

Witnesses said the plane was flying upside down before it crashed into the parking lot, and a Carlstadt Police Dept. spokesman said the plane appeared to be listing to its side before the crash.

Steve Case, an entrepreneur and co-founder of AOL, wrote in an Instagram post that the plane appeared to have missed a turn and crashed a few hundred yards from the airport. He was aboard another plane at the airport at the time.



Meteorologists forecasted strong winds, including gusts up to 45 mph, for northern New Jersey at the time of the crash.

No one on the ground was reported injured, according to officials, but people familiar with the area said if the plane had crashed just 15 minutes earlier dozens of people would have been in the parking lot. The neighborhood is a densely populated residential and industrial area.

A witness describes what he saw just moments after a plane plummeted into the ground in a neighborhood in New Jersey Monday afternoon.

One witness said she was working at the Manhattan Door Company when the plane came down right outside her office window.

"Everything was shaking in my building, everything turned black all of the sudden," she said. "It landed in the parking lot and then we heard the explosion."

Another man said he was in the car with his girlfriend when the out-of-control aircraft passed overhead.

"I saw the plane come over, in front of us, completely on its side, flying erratically," he said.

Another witness said people rushed to the wreckage to see if they could help, but "unfortunately it was all engulfed in flames and we could do nothing but stand by and watch  really horrific."

Christopher Pastor said he ran from his car to help but the intensity of the fire kept him back.

"All the fuel got all over," Pastor said. "There's cars that are on fire, a building caught on fire, the poles started getting on fire."

Raw footage shows scenes from the aftermath of a fatal plane crash in Carlstadt, New Jersey, Monday.

Spokesperson for Boro of Carlstadt Joe Orlando was at the scene as the plane came down. He said explosions were going off, cars were burning and pieces of the plane, including wheels and part of the fuselage, were scattered at the Dept. of Public Works facility near 99 Kero Road.

Right now theyre trying to put the fires out on the building just next to us... we just keep having little explosions, its a crazy situation here, Orlando said shortly after the crash.

The explosions were the sound of car tires popping due to the heat of the flames, officials later said.

Parts of the plane are laying in the garage, I can see the engines, part of the fuselage. Theres just melted cars all over the place in our yard, Orlando said.

The last crash at or near Teterboro Airport was in 2005, and the last deadly crash was in Nov. 1985, according to the Aviation Safety Network, a well regarded database of international flight incidents. Multiple people died in the 1985 crash.

Dramatic footage shows buildings on fire following a plane crash at Teteboro Airport, New Jersey, Monday.
A 36-year-old Newtown woman who had been missing since Thursday, May 11 has been in touch with her family, according to police.

Police said they were concerned for the well-being of Jessica Guay, of Alpine Drive in Sandy Hook when they appealed to the public to help find her.

On Tuesday morning, police said Guay reached out to her family.
Texas Senior Senator John Cornyn, is among 8 candidates who have been interviewed for Director of the FBI. Cornyn interviewed for the position on Saturday afternoon.

Congressman John Ratcliffe, (R-Rockwall), calls his an excellent choice.

Senator Cornyn is imminently qualified. I am excited that he is the type of candidate President Trump is considering for such an important position, said Ratcliffe.

Cornyn is a former Texas Supreme Court Justice, and he was also Attorney General of the state.

Cornyn has risen to one of the highest positions in republican senate leadership.

One of the concerns that we should all have as Texans would be losing someone of Senator Cornyn's stature. He is the number 2 republican in the Senate, he is the republican majority whip, so he yields a lot of influence and that inures to the benefit of all Texans so that is something that I hope would be within his consideration in making that choice. he added

But fellow Republican Lindsey Graham believes this is not the time for someone with a political background to take over the agency.

I think it is now time to pick somebody that comes from within the ranks, or is such of reputation that has no political background at all, that can go into the job on day one. You know, who does the FBI director work for? To me it is like appointing a Judge. The President actually appoints a judge but the judge is loyal to the law. The president appoints the FBI director but the FBI director has to be loyal to the law. John Cornyn is a wonderful man. Under normal circumstances would be a superb choice to be FBI director. But these are not normal circumstances, said Senator Lindsey Graham, (RSC).

We reached out to Senator Cornyns office about the interview. His staff referred us to his Friday statement, after news broke that he was being considered. Cornyn said "I have the distinct privilege of serving 28 million Texans in the United States Senate, and that is where my focus remains.
President Donald Trump's youngest son, Barron, will attend St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, this fall after he moves from New York to D.C. with his mother.

First lady Melania Trump confirmed the news in a statement to News4.

"We are very excited for our son to attend St. Andrew's Episcopal School," she said. "It is known for its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence. The mission of St. Andrew's is 'to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning, and service,' all of which appealed to our family."

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\/* The National Air and Space Museum no longer plans to show the movie \\u201cJoker,\\u201d citing contractual reasons. The new Warner Bros. film depicts the mental breakdown of the Joker that sets him on a spree...

The school did not respond to an inquiry.

Barron, 11, attended Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School in New York and is reportedly fluent in Slovenian, his mother's first language.

St. Andrew's serves children age 2 through 12th grade. The private school boasts small class sizes, with about 11 to 13 children per class, according to the school's website. Tuition for students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade is $38,590 per year for the upcoming school year.

The drive from the White House to the school is about 35 minutes in light traffic.

[NATL] Melania Trump Statue Unveiled in Her Native Slovenia

The Daily Caller was first to report the news, based on unnamed sources.

Stay with News4 for more details on this developing story.

[[415248063, C]]


North Korea on Monday boasted of a successful weekend launch of a new type of "medium long-range" ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead. Outsiders also saw a significant technological jump, with the test-fire apparently flying higher and for a longer time period than any other such previous missile.

Amid condemnation in Seoul, Tokyo and Washington, a jubilant North Korean leader Kim Jong Un promised more nuclear and missile tests and warned that his country's weapons could strike the U.S. mainland and Pacific holdings.

North Korean propaganda must be considered with wariness  Pyongyang has threatened for decades to reduce Seoul to a "sea of fire," for instance  but Monday's claim, if confirmed, would mark another big advance toward the North's goal of fielding a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Some experts, including officials in Tokyo, estimate that Sunday's launch successfully tested a new type of missile, potentially the longest in Pyongyang's arsenal.

The test is also an immediate challenge to South Korea's new president, Moon Jae-in, a liberal elected last week who expressed a desire to reach out to North Korea. Pyongyang's aggressive push to boost its weapons program also makes it one of the Trump administration's most urgent foreign policy worries, though Washington has struggled to settle on a policy.

North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket," and said the "Hwasong-12" was "capable of carrying a large, heavy nuclear warhead."

Kim witnessed the test and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," according to KCNA.

The rocket, "newly designed in a Korean-style," flew 787 kilometers (490 miles) and reached a maximum altitude of 2,111 kilometers (1,310 miles), the North said, and "verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation and accurate performance of detonation system."

South Korea's Defense Ministry said more analysis was needed to verify the North's claim on the rocket's technological features. Spokesman Moon Sang Gyun said it's still unlikely that North Korea has re-entry technology, which would return a warhead safely back into the atmosphere.

Japanese officials said Sunday that the missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan.

Several South Korean analysts, including Lee Illwoo, a Seoul-based commentator on military issues, said the missile flew higher and for a longer period than any other the North has ever test-fired. North Korea has also launched satellites into orbit on long-range rockets that share some of the same technology as missiles.

North Korea is not thought to be able yet to make a nuclear warhead small enough to mount on a long-range missile, though some outside analysts think it can arm shorter-range missiles with warheads. Each new nuclear and longer-range missile test is part of the North's attempt to build a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile.

Kim said North Korea would stage more nuclear and missile tests in order to perfect nuclear bombs needed to deal with U.S. "nuclear blackmail."

State media paraphrased the North's leader as saying that "the most perfect weapon systems in the world will never become the eternal exclusive property of the U.S.," warning that "the U.S. should not ... disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in (North Korea's) sighting range for strike."

The launch complicates the new South Korean president's plan to talk to the North, and came as U.S., Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.

"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan said. "The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."

Moon, South Korea's first liberal leader in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office last week that he'd be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right.

The U.N. Security Council will hold closed consultations about the launch on Tuesday afternoon, according to the U.N. Mission for Uruguay, which holds the council presidency this month.

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, said on ABC television that the United States has been working well with China, Pyongyang's closest ally, and raised the possibility of new sanctions against North Korea, including on oil imports.

The Security Council has adopted six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions against North Korea.

President Donald Trump's administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable, but it has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

While Trump has said he'd be "honored" to talk with leader Kim under favorable conditions, Haley seemed to rule out the possibility. "Having a missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, because he's absolutely not going to do it," she told ABC.

The U.S. Pacific Command said the flight of Sunday's test "is not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile," a technology the North is believed to have tested clandestinely by launching rockets to put satellites in orbit.

David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the missile could have a range of 4,500 kilometers (about 2,800 miles) if flown on a standard, instead of lofted, trajectory  considerably longer than Pyongyang's current missiles. He said Sunday's launch  the seventh such firing by North Korea this year  may have been of a new mobile, two-stage liquid-fueled missile North Korea displayed in a huge April 15 military parade.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters that the launch was "absolutely unacceptable" and that Japan would respond resolutely.

The White House took note of the missile landing close to Russia's Pacific coast and said in a statement that North Korea has been "a flagrant menace for far too long."

Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni said the G-7 summit his country is hosting later this month would discuss how to deal with the risk North Korea's missile launchings pose to global security.

The launch came as troops from the U.S., Japan and two European nations gather near Guam for drills that are partly a message to North Korea. The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korean navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula, according to Seoul's Defense Ministry.
The story has been updated to reflect the bear could not be saved and had to be euthanized.

Wildlife officials captured an injured bear that lay hidden in bushes after it was struck by a car on a Southern California freeway Monday morning.

The approximately 200-pound animal had wandered onto the westbound lanes of the 210 Freeway in La Verne about 7:40 a.m. and was hit by a vehicle, the La Verne Police Department said. The bear scurried off the freeway and took refuge in an embankment flanked by freeway lanes and homes.

[LA ONLY-PHOTOS UPDATED 7/17] Bear Sightings in Southern California

Officers shut down the Fruit Street onramp and officials with Fish and Wildlife closed in on the bear with tranquilizers. Just after 10:30 a.m., aerial footage showed officers using a tarp to load the bear onto the bed of a pickup truck.

[NATL] Unbelievable Animal Stories: Dog Befriends Abandoned Baby Giraffe

The bear was taken to a rehabilitation center. After surgery, she could not be saved and had to be euthanized.

"Doing any sort of daily care or treatment for weeks and weeks would be very very hard on her," said Dr. Cynthia Kinney of the Inland Valley Humane Society. "Releasing her with these injuries, she would not have survived in the wild."

A California Highway Patrol incident report indicated there were no human injuries in the crash.



Wildlife officials advised residents that they could contact the Department of Fish and Wildlife if ever faced with a bear in their homes.

They also provided tips on what to do if residents encounter a bear:

Slowly back away and don't approach the bear.

Allow the bear plenty of room to pass or withdraw.

Once you are a safe distance away, encourage the bear to leave by banging pots and pans or making other loud noises.

To report a bear problem, residents can contact that following offices:

Northern Region 530-225-2300

North Central Region 916-358-2900

Bay Delta Region 707-944-5500

Central Region 559-243-4005

South Coast Region 858-467-4201

Inland Desert Region 909-484-0167

Sacramento Headquarters 916-322-8911

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The UN Committee Against Torture is urging Korea and Japan to revise their 2015 deal on the Korean victims of sexual enslavement by the Japanese army in World War II.

The committee says the agreement should be modified to "ensure that the surviving victims are provided with redress, including the right to compensation and rehabilitation and the right to truth, reparation and assurances of non-repetitions."

The recommendation could prompt President Moon Jae-in to demand renegotiations. He has already told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that the Korean people "cannot accept" the deal that was reached under the Park Geun-hye administration.

The deal provides indirect reparations for the victims but leaves Japan without the obligation to admit that the atrocity was carried out at orders from the top.
The 18-year-old woman killed in a gruesome attack Friday night has been identified as the daughter of a Chicago police officer, according to sources close to her family.

Tatyanna Lewis was killed when a woman repeatedly rammed her into a tree with a car on the citys Far South Side.

The incident occurred around 11:10 p.m. in the 11400 block of S. May Street in the city's Morgan Park neighborhood, according to police.

Officials said Lewis and a 24-year-old woman were in a verbal argument when the woman entered an SUV and chased Lewis down the sidewalk.

She then crashed into the teen, repeatedly striking her against a tree before fleeing, authorities said.

Lewis was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Cook County Medical Examiners office.

She died from multiple blunt-force injuries, the medical examiner found, and her death was ruled a homicide.

Brittany Patrick lives in the house next to where the violent attack took place and said she heard arguing before witnessing the horrific incident.

I looked outside and I just saw the accident - you know, the impact, Patrick said.

Bystanders said the SUV jumped the curb at a high rate of speed, tearing through the front lawn before the crash. [[422167163, C]]

As soon as I looked out my window I saw a girl being rammed into the tree, and ran over and backed over and over again, Patrick said. She hit my car, backing over the body and then backed back over the body and got away.

The following day, tire marks were clearly visible on the sidewalk, as well as damage to the tree and a piece of the SUV still laying beside it.

"To run somebody over just cold-blooded, it's unthinkable, said neighbor Paul Thomas.

Just hours before her death, Lewis had posted on Facebook about a possible impending confrontation, with neighbors saying the argument was over a man.

Community activist and anti-violence advocate Andrew Holmes said a child was in the backseat of the car at the time, calling the incident very disturbing.

I mean, an altercation between two females, two women and one was a mother  and it went wrong, Holmes said.

The 24-year-old woman fled the scene but was later apprehended by police. Investigators recovered the SUV about a mile and a half away, near W. 115th and S. LaSalle Streets.

The driver remains in custody and charges are pending, according to police, who continue to investigate.
Venezuelans in South Florida are hunting for former government officials they say need to pay for their crimes.

The group is on a so-called "social media manhunt" to find officials who worked under the late Hugo Chavez to publicly shame them while recording them on video.

"These people that are coming now, they are Chavistas, they completely destroyed Venezuela," said Ernesto Ackerman, with Independent Venezuelan American Citizens. "There is a genocide happening right now because of these people. Either here or in Venezuela but they must be punished."

On Sunday, the group says they confronted a man in a Don Pan bakery in Doral. They say the man was one of the ministers in the government when Chavez was in power.

The group yelled at the man, forcing him and his companion out of the restaurant before things escalated.

Members of the group believe that when current president Nicolas Maduro took over, the same corruptions with the same people continued and that in large part is causing all the chaos in Venezuela.

The group says they are looking for more individuals and they are going to start filing human rights complaints with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"They cannot have visas in a country like the United States because this is a country of law," Ackerman said.
American democracy is "under assault" on separate fronts from President Donald Trump and Russia, the U.S.'s former intelligence chief warned Sunday, expressing dismay over the abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey amid a probe into Moscow's meddling in the 2016 U.S. election as well as possible ties with the Trump campaign.

As Trump works to fast-track Comey's successor, lawmakers from both parties urged him to steer clear of any politicians for the job and say he must "clean up the mess that he mostly created."

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," said James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence. "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When he was asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper said, "Exactly."

Clapper spoke following Trump's sudden firing of Comey last week, which drew sharp criticism because it came amid the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Clapper said America's founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding."

The White House had no immediate comment and no White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump.

"The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," Haley said.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump's actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because he may have "tapes" of their conversations. The lawmakers called for a new FBI director without any political background and said Trump would need to hand over to Congress any taped conversations with Comey if they exist.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset." He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration by Trump, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, explaining that "these are not normal circumstances."

Rogers, an ex-FBI agent and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has drawn the backing of the FBI Agents Association. Cornyn is the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

"It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1," said Graham, R-S.C.

"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," he said, adding, "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all ... but we don't know all the evidence yet."

In an interview on NBC's "Meet The Press", Graham also said of the Russia probe: "The president needs to back off here and let the investigation go forward."

Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland  the federal judge nominated for Supreme Court justice last year by President Barack Obama. Lee said he was "absolutely serious about it."

A former top aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, said McConnell is interested in Lee's suggestion. "I think the Senate majority leader thinks that's a fantastic idea," Holmes said.

Garland never got a hearing due to Republican obstruction, and the high court vacancy was filled last month by Neil Gorsuch.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone "not of partisan background" with "great experience" and "courage." Declining comment on a Garland nomination, Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor. Under Senate rules, Republicans could still confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats' 48.

Calling Trump's remarks about possible taped conversations "outrageous," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would "absolutely" subpoena the tapes.

"We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear," Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee.

Less than a week after Trump fired Comey, the administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to be FBI director, and Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday on his first overseas trip as president.

Trump abruptly fired Comey on Tuesday and later said Comey was a "showboat" and "grandstander" who was not doing a good job. Trump said in an interview with NBC that the Russia investigation factored into his decision to fire Comey.

The FBI director serves a 10-year term but can be replaced by the president.

So far 14 people have emerged as candidates. Eight met at the Justice Department on Saturday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein:

Alice Fisher, a high-ranking Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBI's office in Richmond, Virginia.

 Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director.

Michael J. Garcia, a former prosecutor and associate judge on New York's highest court.

Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general.

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a Bush appointee who struck down the centerpiece of the Obama administration's health care law in 2010.

Frances Townsend, a former Bush homeland security and counterterrorism adviser.

Rogers. The FBI Agents Association says it believes his diverse background makes him the best choice.

Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNN's "State of the Union"; Graham spoke on NBC's "Meet the Press"; Haley and Warner appeared on ABC's "This Week" and Warner also spoke on "Fox News Sunday" along with Lee and Holmes.

___

Associated Press writers Sadie Gurman and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
Gov. Tom Wolf says the committee that raised public and private money to put on last summer's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia should have returned surplus funds to the taxpayers rather than handing out staff bonuses and grants.

The Legislature provided $10 million for the event, and some lawmakers voiced displeasure upon finding out that the host committee gave nearly $1 million in bonuses for staff members as well as grants for Philadelphia schools and nonprofits. The bonuses were disclosed in a Jan. 31 Federal Election Commission filing.

"I am disappointed that when the host committee discovered there was a surplus, the first call was not to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to discuss returning the money to the taxpayers," said Gov. Wolf. "The commonwealth supports large events that have an economic benefit to Pennsylvania and the region, but when there is leftover funding, that money should be returned to taxpayers. I am disappointed that the surplus was instead spent on bonuses and grants."

Wolf said Sunday that the commonwealth supports large events that can benefit the region, but leftover funding should be returned to taxpayers.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, the host committee's chairman, called the bonuses a reward for low pay and long hours.
A high-rise apartment fire in downtown Pittsburgh early Monday has left one woman dead, and two residents and two firefighters needing medical treatment, the fire chief said.

Arson and homicide investigators were at the scene to determine the cause of the blaze that forced more than 100 residents to be evacuated from Midtown Towers, a 17-story building that houses apartments on its upper floors and a convenience store on its ground floor.

The fire was reported just after 3 a.m. in a sixth-floor unit. Residents above and below the sixth and seventh floors were told to shelter in place while crews evacuated those on the sixth and seventh floors, where the fire and smoke was the most immediate threat, Jones said. Residents on the other floors were later escorted from the building.

One firefighter was treated for breathing problems and chest pains and taken to UPMC Mercy hospital. His name and condition were not immediately released. Another firefighter and at least two residents were treated for smoke-related breathing problems at the scene, city Emergency Medical Services Chief Robert Farrow said. [[238427591, C]]

A light-rail commuter train station across the street from the fire was temporarily closed due to the emergency response, and a street next to the high-rise was closed because of glass and other debris.

The American Red Cross was assisting the displaced residents, some of whom were taken to an office building nearby for warmth as overnight temperatures dropped to the mid-40s.

The building is older and wasn't equipped with sprinklers, though fire alarms were installed and were working properly, Jones said.

Crews hoped to restore power to the building later Monday so that at least some residents could return.

Additional details about the female victim weren't immediately available.
A Ramona woman and her unborn child died Sunday in a collision along San Vicente Road. The other driver involved in the crash fled the scene, parked his car and hired a Lyft driver before he was tracked down and arrested, officials said.

Jessica Foderingham, 32, was eight months pregnant, according to the San Diego County Medical Examiner. Her family told NBC 7 she had just gotten married in August.

Her husband, a distraught Marine, posted heartfelt messages on Facebook following the crash, saying, "My heart, my world, my best friend, was taken from me."

Foderingham was driving a Dodge Dart along San Vicente Road at approximately 6:46 p.m. when her car was struck from behind by a 2011 GMC Yukon.



Andrew Milonis, 44, was behind the wheel of the Yukon, according to the California Highway Patrol.

The impact sent the Dodge into the center divider area where it collided with a tree. Foeringham died from injuries suffered in the collision.



Milonis fled the scene, CHP Officer Kevin Pearlstein said.

Pearlstein said Milonis parked his vehicle and then hired a Lyft. The driver, Kyle Gammon, said Milonis looked visibly distraught when he picked him up.

"I could tell that he knew that he messed up, he did something really bad, just from his demeanor," Gammon said.



They drove right by the scene of the crash, he said.

"When we passed the accident scene, I was like 'did you crash here man' and he said, 'no, don't worry about that,'" Gammon recalled.



Gammon said Milonis never actually told him what happened to his car, but kept repeating that he was scared and scared of what would happen to him.

Gammon drove him to the Turkey Inn Bar on 716 Main Street, where officers arrested him.

Milonis was booked into the county jail on charges of driving under the influence causing death, felony hit and run and vehicular manslaughter.

The suspect was driving with a suspended/revoked license, NBC 7 has learned. Milonis' wife told NBC 7 he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2008.

A vigil will be held at the crash site on Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. to honor the victim.
In 24 hours, Instagram was flooded with a photo of a girl in a Pamela Anderson-esque red bathing suit lounging pool side.

Sunny Co promised Instagram users if they reposted the photo within 24 hours and tagged Sunny Co, they would receive a free bathing suit.

The offer was a too good to be true for Instagrammers to pass up.

The company went from 7,000 followers to 784,000 overnight, and eventually the account was shut down.

Although the success of the red bathing suit photo is widely known, many do not realize Sunny Co has its roots in San Diego.

The cofounders of the company, Alan Alchalel and Brady Silverwood, are Torrey Pines High School graduates. Now seniors at the University of Arizona, they are not the typical college grads.

Silverwood states, Two weeks ago the only thing on my mind was graduation from the University of Arizona. Now, with graduation only two days away, it's the last thing on my mind. My main priority right now is to fulfill all of the orders we have received. I won't be satisfied until we do so.

Silverwood and Alchalel reiterated that they were completely caught off guard by the viral success of the promotion, and are working as quickly as possible to fulfill orders.

The company will only fulfill the first 50,000 orders, not all of the reposts in the first 24 hours. These bathing suits are targeted to ship within 3-6 weeks. For any customers who inadvertently paid full price for the Pamela swimsuit since the promotions inception, customers can file a claim for a refund. Thus far, the company has issued nearly $73,000 in refunds. Per the Promo Rules, all sales were final for customers who paid shipping and handling.
Javier Valdez, an award-winning reporter who specialized in covering drug trafficking and organized crime, was slain Monday in the northern Mexico state of Sinaloa, the latest in a wave of journalist killings in one of the world's most dangerous countries for media workers.

Valdez is at least the sixth journalist to be murdered in Mexico since early March. The unusually high number of killings are seen as not specifically linked to each other but a reminder that impunity for such crimes remains endemic in Mexico, especially in areas dominated by drug cartels and weak or corrupt government.

Valdez was shot to death in the early afternoon in the state capital of Culiacan, near the offices of the publication he co-founded, Riodoce. State Prosecutor Juan Jose Rios visited the scene and said authorities were investigating all possible motives, including that the killing could have been due to Valdez's work, though he gave no details.

Riodoce reported that Valdez was driving about a block from its offices when he was intercepted by gunmen. Valdez was also a correspondent for the national newspaper La Jornada, which reported that he was pulled from his car and shot multiple times.

Images in Mexican media showed a body lying in a street covered by a blue blanket and surrounded by 12 yellow markers of the kind typically used to flag evidence such as bullet casings.

President Enrique Pena Nieto condemned what he called an "outrageous crime."

"I reiterate our commitment to freedom of expression and the press, fundamental for our democracy," he tweeted.

The federal Attorney General's Office said it was investigating.

Valdez was a nationally and internationally recognized journalist who authored several books on the drug trade, including "Narcoperiodismo" and "Los Morros del Narco." The former is a look at the relationship between journalism and organized crime, and the latter chronicles the lives of young people swept up in Mexico's criminal underworld.

Jan-Albert Hootson, Mexico representative for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said Valdez and Riodoce were known as a rare source of independent, investigative journalism in Sinaloa.

"And for that same reason, he and his magazine and his co-workers were always under threat of violence," Hootson said.

According to CPJ, in 2009 unknown attackers threw a grenade into the Riodoce offices days after it published an investigation on drug trafficking. No one was hurt.

By the group's count, some 40 journalists have been killed in Mexico for reasons confirmed as related to their work since 1992. An additional 50 were slain during the same period under circumstances that have not been clarified.

Journalists targeted in Mexico are most often local reporters in places where the rule of law is tenuous, but there have also been killings of journalists with national profiles such as Valdez and Regina Martinez Perez, who was slain in 2012. The recent spate of slayings includes Miroslava Breach, correspondent for La Jornada in the northern state of Chihuahua, who was gunned down in March.

On Saturday, seven journalists were assaulted and robbed by a mob of about 100 armed men on a highway in the troubled southern state of Guerrero.

Sinaloa has long been a drug trafficking hotbed and is home to the Sinaloa Cartel headed by notorious kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who is in a New York prison awaiting trial on multiple charges. Experts say Guzman's arrest last year and extradition in January have led to upheaval in the area as rival factions war for control of the gang.

"Drug trafficking there is a way of life," Valdez said in an October interview with Rompeviento TV. "You have to assume the task that falls to you as a journalist  either that or you play dumb. I don't want to be asked, 'What were you doing in the face of so much death ... why didn't you say what was going on?'"

Hootson described Valdez as a warm, friendly man, well-liked by other journalists who frequently sought his help to navigate and understand the complex, dangerous state.

"His door was always open. ... Everybody always deferred to his knowledge," Hootson said. "And in that sense, it's a huge loss for everybody."

In 2011, CPJ recognized Valdez with its International Press Freedom Award for his "bravery and uncompromising journalism in the face of threats," the group said in a statement. "His loss is a blow to Mexican journalism and to the Mexican public, who see a shadow of silence spreading across the country.

In a report this month, CPJ noted that most killings of journalists go unpunished in Mexico. It added that even when there are convictions, they are often limited to the immediate killer and do not clarify the motive.

"By not establishing a clear link to journalism or providing any motives for the killings most investigations remain opaque," the report said. "This lack of accountability perpetuates a climate of impunity that leaves journalists open to attack."

Valdez's slaying came less than two weeks after a CPJ delegation met in Mexico City with Pena Nieto and other top government officials.

Last Wednesday, the federal Attorney General's Office replaced the head of its division responsible for investigating journalist killings. Ricardo Sanchez Perez del Pozo, a lawyer with a background in international law and human rights, took over the post.
North Korea launched a ballistic missile on Sunday that flew some 700 km before splashing into the East Sea. The missile was fired from Kusong, North Pyongan Province around 5:27 a.m. Sunday, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff here. The provocation comes just a few days after South Korea's new president, Moon Jae-in, said he would be willing to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang and after U.S. naval forces massed in waters off the peninsula.



President Moon Jae-in chairs an emergency meeting at Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul on Sunday to discuss North Korea's missile launch earlier in the day. /Yonhap

Moon called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, telling officials to respond "resolutely." The White House in a statement said, "Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea." Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada speculated that it was probably a new model and reached a height of some 2,000 km. Assuming it was deliberately launched at a high angle, it would be capable of flying some 5,000 km at a lower angle of 30 to 45 degrees, putting Alaska within its range, according to a military source here.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspects a missile assembly site in an undisclosed location in North Korea in this photo from the Rodong Sinmun on Monday. /Yonhap

On Monday, the official [North] Korean Central News Agency claimed the country successfully tested-fired a new ground-to-ground ballistic missile that puts the U.S. mainland within striking range. It said leader Kim Jong-un observed the launch of the rocket, called the Hwasong-12. But U.S. Pacific Command, based in Hawaii, earlier said the flight "was not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile." In June last year, the North succeeded in testing a missile with an estimated range of 3,500 km capable of hitting Guam, and in February, it succeeded in firing another with a range of 3,000 km that uses solid rather than liquid fuel, which makes launch preparation time much faster. This may be the first time a North Korean missile reached an altitude of more than 2,000 km after the Musudan missile last June reached 1,413 km.

Combined images show ballistic missiles being launched from an undisclosed location in North Korea. /Yonhap

The latest provocation makes it hard for Moon to embark on a more conciliatory North Korea policy. Moon "strongly condemned" the launch. "Dialogue is only possible when North Korea changes its attitude," he said. U.S. President Donald Trump also put the brakes on any thaw, telling NBC on Friday that Moon is "more open to discussion. I don't mind discussion, but it's under certain circumstances." Meanwhile, Matthew Pottinger, a top Asia adviser in the White House arrives in Seoul on Monday to discuss a meeting between Moon and Trump.
Two women were killed and a man was seriously injured in a shooting on a highway in Virginia, police say.

A car carrying seven people was driving north bound on I-95 in Richmond early Sunday when another car pulled along the driver's side and fired shots, Virginia State Police said.

Police said 23-year-old Tanna D. Gardner of Richmond died at the scene and 26-year-old Sharayne Danielle Nichole Holland of Manassas died after being taken to the hospital.

A male passenger was taken to the hospital with serious injuries that are considered life threatening. Police said no one else in the car was injured.

Police are calling the shooting a "targeted incident." They're urging anyone with information about the shooting to contact authorities.
A Maine man is going to prison for 27 years for an attack on a 73-year-old woman that the judge described as "sexual torture."

The victim told 33-year-old Mark Halle on Monday that she forgave him, and Halle asked the judge for "a little bit of mercy."

Halle pleaded guilty to gross sexual assault, burglary and criminal threatening. He was accused of beating and raping the woman early on Feb. 7, 2016, after he gained access to her home by removing an air conditioner from a living room window. The victim recognized him because she'd paid him to shovel off her deck.

A previous plea agreement fell through when another judge suggested a 20-year cap wasn't enough. On Monday, Halle pleaded guilty with no stipulation related to the sentence.
College students at the University of New Hampshire are demanding action from school officials after another racist message was found in a public space over the weekend.

The "n-word" was found scrawled across a bulletin board on the University of New Hampshire campus Sunday.

This hate speech was found in Williamson Hall in front of a black residence hall director's office, on what is referred to as "the inclusion board."

The racist slur is the latest instance of racial and cultural conflict at UNH.

Earlier in the month, some argued that Cinco de Mayo celebrations featured cultural appropriation, as well as an alleged instance of blackface.



On Thursday evening, hundreds of students met with leaders at the college to address perceived failings on the administration's part to adequately address racist incidents and increase diversity among the student body and faculty.



On Friday, several swastikas were found drawn in the stairwell of a dormitory.

In the wake of the swastikas, several plaster raised fists were placed outside on campus  some think to symbolize the spirit of students who are fighting back against this racism.

In the coming week, students plan to protest on campus in solidarity with the targeted residence hall director and others who have been affected.


Newton Flotman Community Lunch - Cell Church

Eighteen months ago Andy Cox, a Community Outreach Worker employed one day a week by Cell Church through the Rural Ministries Foundation initiated a Community Lunch in Newton Flotman, which he runs with a team of local volunteers every month.

The Community Lunch is hosted on the third Wednesday of every month in the Newton Flotman Church Room. With a lack of opportunities and facilities to meet up in the village, the monthly lunch fulfils a social need.



Community Outreach Worker Andy Cox said: There is a good regular bunch of people from the village who just like to get together to have a meal and have a chat with their friends. There is nowhere else in the village that is a meeting place. There is no village shop; the Village Hall has a playgroup in it every day, so community events in the daytime are very few and far between.



Andy also arranged for a minibus full of residents at the local care home, Olive House, to be picked up and brought to the lunch through the Norwich Door-to-Door service. He said: It gives the people at Olive House a chance to see their village and meet up with some people.



The project works in partnership with Newton Flotman CE Primary School, where Andy also works. The school catering staff cooks the meal and package it up in insulated boxes to be picked up by Community Lunch volunteers. This makes it affordable; with those coming charged 2.80 for the lunch.



It is a real joint effort, says Andy.

Factfile

Project: Community Lunch

Who: Organised by Rural Ministries Foundation Community Outreach Worker

What: Low cost meal (with transport if needed) and social time

Where: Newton Flotman Church Room, South Norfolk

How many: 20-25 once a month

Contact: Andy Cox on acox869@btinternet.com or 07923 242 918




Retired Brundall vicar to cycle 200 miles

2017: Retired Brundall clergyman David Casson,75, is to cycle 200 miles of a 750 mile sponsored cycle ride starting on May 16, to raise funds for Release International and Christian Solidarity Worldwide, two charities which serve persecuted Christians.



Dubbed From Wrath to Peace via Hope! the bicycle pilgrimage is the idea of Rev Robert de Berry, who is also 75 this year, and wants to celebrate by riding ten miles for every year of his age!



Starting at Cape Wrath, the most north-westerly point of the UK, David will join a group of riders who will be publicising the needs of Christians who are suffering persecution in many countries of the world. They will stay with church members and speak at meetings on their way south, via Hope Valley in Derbyshire, to Peacehaven in Sussex.



The fifteen riders taking part hope to raise a total of 50,000, and several thousand pounds have already been donated by supporters and sponsors.



If you would like to sponsor David you can do this by donating to Release International at www.releaseinternational.com marking the gift for 'Bicycle Pilgrimage.' David and the other riders would also welcome your prayers.



You can read more about the ride here .



Do you have a news story or forthcoming event relating to Christians or a church in East Norfolk?


Royal statues commissioned for Norwich Cathedral Royal statues commissioned for Norwich Cathedral

Norwich Cathedral has announced plans for newly commissioned statues of Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip, in celebration of the forthcoming 65th anniversary of the Queens coronation.

York-based sculptor, Charles Gurrey, has been chosen to carve the figures depicting the Queen and her Consort in Garter robes, to be positioned in the Cathedral Cloisters. Gurrey has previously completed work at other notable cathedrals in the UK, including a portable font in York Minster and a programme of architectural sculptures over the west doors at Guildford.



The new statues will be positioned in two vacant spaces in the Cloisters, just above the stone troughs where monks once washed their hands before and after meals. Flanking these empty spaces are statues of King George V and Queen Mary and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, carved in the late 1930s by Gilbert Ledward RA, a well-respected sculptor in his day, known for his war memorials in many London public spaces.



The Bishop of Norwich, The Rt Revd Graham James, said:



The fondness for Norfolk shared by both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh is well known. I believe that many people in the county will be delighted with the proposal to fill two empty niches in the Cloisters with statues of the Queen and Prince Philip. These will be an elegant reminder of our permanent gratitude for their service to nation and Commonwealth.



The Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral will be fundraising toward the cost of the new statues and are welcoming donations from anyone wishing to show their support in this way.



The Lord Lieutenant, Richard Jewson, commented:



The announcement that Prince Philip is now 'winding down' his duties as he approaches his 96th birthday reminds us all of the long lifetime of service that he and the Queen have given the nation. Norfolk people, too, feel a strong connection through the royal couples love of Sandringham. I am sure that many of us will be pleased to have this opportunity to contribute to the cost of the two figures which will bear witness to our high regard and gratitude.



Those wishing to contribute to the cost of this project are advised to send a cheque payable to Norwich Cathedral (marked Cloisters on the reverse) to The Chapter Steward, The Chapter Office, 65 The Close, Norwich, NR1 4DH. Any funds left over after the costs have been met will be applied to the ongoing conservation of the Cloisters.



Pictured: sketches of the proposed statues


It is sickening when people prove no good deed goes unpunished to be true. Im looking at you, British tabloids, because it was mean, stupid and very irresponsible to dox the guy who discovered the first WannaCry ransomware kill switch and thereby stopped thousands of old Windows machines from becoming infected.

He goes by MalwareTech on Twitter and has an avatar of a cat wearing sunglasses. If he wanted to use his real name and picture, then he would have. Clearly, he values privacy and tries to maintain at least some degree of anonymity.

Yet after being hailed as a hero for discovering a kill switch as WannaCry ransomware swept across globe, shady journalists doxed him. They dug into everything they could find online about MalwareTech, including trying to pry information from his friends.

I always though I'd be doxed by skids, but turns out Journalists are 100x better at doxing.  MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) May 14, 2017

It seems as if The Telegraph was the first publication to publish his name, photos, where he lives, what his parents do, that he has a sibling and that he likes pizza. What the hell has that got to do with him discovering a kill switch? How does this show any gratitude to a hero who stopped a massive cyberattack by accident? If you want to unmask someone, find the person behind the attack.

Not to be out-sleazed, other British and even Australian tabloids quickly regurgitated the report. Some used the same photos stolen from his account, while others poured over his digital footprint in search of any juicy tidbits. Maybe it started with The Telegraph trying to outdo the Daily Mail, which had published his picture on Saturday and dubbed him as a surfer dude.

I woke up to someone ringing me to say my pic is on the front page of the dailymail.... o_o  MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) May 14, 2017

After that happened, MalwareTech tweeted:

I refused to give out pics or personal info but their journalists are too good, they dug through a ton of OSINT and found me :X

He added that the Daily Mail got his name and location from a different publication, but it did go the extra mile by identifying a girl in a photo with him and showing up at her house to try to get the scoop on him. Hes not the cyberthug responsible for unleashing the WannaCry ransomware attack on the world, so why did the publication believe that was necessary?

Other publications tried to worm their way into a story by approaching his friends.

By being stupid and irresponsible, those publications have potentially put MalwareTech at riskthat is unless they believed the cybercriminals responsible for WannaCry would be perfectly happy about him putting his foot on the neck of their attack. Why stop there when a publication might get even more clicksand further incite the person or people behind WannaCryby weaving in an angle about him working with spooks?

To the latter, MalwareTech made it clear hes not in bed with government spies. He tweeted:

Providing NCSC with data to notify infected companies is not the same as working with spooks, people really want to spin the spy story :(

MalwareTech says he doesnt fear for his safety, but a person need look no further than some of the horrible things cyberthugs have done or tried to do to Brian Krebs for interrupting their operations. Hopefully MalwareTech wont get even a taste of such retribution.

For the record I don't "fear for my safety", I'm just unhappy with trying to help clear up Friday's mess with the dorbell going constantly.  MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) May 15, 2017

Its bad enough when you write about a companylets use Microsoft as an exampleand the very first thing that happens when you attempt to get the first quote is that the company starts trying to dig into who you are for a secret dossier. Its not like youve done anything wrong or who you are should affect the companys stance or quote on an issue. Like it or not, plenty of firms create dossiers on journalists.

MalwareTech didnt write about a company; he stopped a wave of WannaCry ransomware that was crashing over old Windows PCs and halting business at hospitals and other organizations by registering a domain referenced by the WannaCry ransomware in a check to make sure it was unregistered. In thanks, he got doxednot by the thugs responsible for the ransomware, but by tabloids seeking extra clicks.

MalwareTech may not be furious. But Ias someone else who truly values privacyam outraged on his behalf. To those publications: Stay classy and be proud that you helped the bad guys by painting a bullseye target squarely on the back of a real person you called a hero.
President Moon Jae-in has named special envoys to the U.S., EU, China, Japan and Russia to bolster ties with the four major powers amid the escalating military threat from North Korea.

They are mostly stalwarts of the mainstream liberal camp.

A source on Sunday said Moon picked Cho Yoon-je, a professor at Sogang University, as special envoy to the European Union and Germany. Cho was ambassador to the U.K. during the Roh Moo-hyun administration.
Local party says backing Benyon will increase chance of Brexit being implemented

PEOPLE intending to vote for UKIP in Newbury have been asked to vote for Conservative candidate Richard Benyon instead.

UKIP has entered the tactical voting fray in an effort to see Brexit passed.

Mr Benyon campaigned for the Remain campaign in last years referendum, but has since supported the will of the people and voted to trigger the UKs withdrawal from the EU.

The chairman of Newbury UKIP, Roy Tubb, said that Brexit was the main issue facing voters and that Mr Benyon backing the Government over Brexit may cause some diehard remainers to desert him.

He said: Recent electoral history shows that Newbury cannot be considered a safe Conservative seat.

With this in mind, UKIP Newbury has decided reluctantly not to field a candidate, because that would only split the potential Brexit vote.

The result of the referendum needs to be accepted and supported in Parliament.

We suggest therefore that UKIP supporters consider voting for Richard Benyon, if only to increase the chance of the referendum result being properly implemented.

Reacting to the news Mr Benyon said: I think its more about the fact they didnt have anyone to stand here.

Ive not had any conversation with UKIP. Undoubtedly they are in trouble in this election and their decision not to field a candidate in West Berkshire reflects that.

People are more concerned about what Brexit means for West Berkshire and their statement rightly says that I campaigned hard for Britain to remain in the EU.

I want the deal thats reached to reflect the needs of West Berkshire businesses, many of whom trade with and in the EU.

UKIP finished third in Newbury during the 2015 General Election, with 10 per cent of the votes cast (6,195), close behind the Liberal Democrats 15 per cent (8,605) and beating Labours 8.4 per cent (4,837).

UKIPs apparent endorsement of Mr Benyon was welcomed by Liberal Democrat candidate Judith Bunting.

She said: Its not often that I agree with UKIP but in this case I think theyre spot on  this is no longer a safe Tory seat.

The way that Richard Benyon changed his position was very disappointing. I dont think he has changed his mind, hes following the party line.

Hes choosing party over the people he represents.

We need representation of the people who live here, not a representative who puts their needs and political partys needs above those of the area.

To the 48 per cent I say stick with the Liberal Democrats.

We are working in every way we can to stop the destructive hard Brexit course that Theresa May is setting the country on.

Mrs Bunting said that people should have the choice of another referendum once a final deal for leaving the EU had been agreed.

Labour candidate Alex Skirvin said that Labour would seek a progressive deal that would not endanger businesses.

He said: It goes to show that Richard Benyon supports a hard and dangerous Brexit and that UKIP associating with him goes to show what kind of values are on offer in the election.

Theres a clear choice between progressive values offered by the Labour Party and regressive hard values offered by the Conservatives.

Labour accepts the result of the referendum, but wants to retain membership of the customs union and single market.

I would also say that the election is not just about Brexit. Its about schools and local service cuts, which have had quite a devastating affect on the local area and across the country.
Swiss industrial pioneers move offices

Welcome to Sulzer  meet the team

SWISS industrial pioneer Sulzer has moved its Mixpac business UK headquarters to Hungerford.

In 1834, the brothers Johann Jakob and Salomon Sulzer established a foundry with a turners and locksmiths workshop in Winterthur. What began as a small family business 180 years ago has grown into a globally operating company with more than 14000 employees and over 180 production and service sites worldwide.

In April 2016, Sulzer acquired PC Cox  a leading manufacturer of handheld sealant and adhesive dispensers for industrial applications. Based in Newbury since the 1950s they subsequently out grew their Turnpike Industrial Estate site.



Marc Haller - Senior Vice President APS, Head Business Unit Mixpac and

Leigh Smith - MD Sulzer Mixpac (UK)

Managing director Leigh Smith said: For some years wed been looking for the right industrial unit and were very much driven by operational needs. We just couldnt find anywhere suitable in Newbury.

The new headquarters, at Tealgate in Hungerford, comprises a manufacturing site and warehouse next door. It is, said Mr Smith, the ideal set-up.

On Monday May 8, SULZER Mixpac (UK) Ltd. officially opened their new headquarters, inviting local business leaders, key suppliers and civic dignitaries for lunch and a tour.

Sulzer now plans to close its dispenser factory in Denmark and relocate it to Hungerford.

The operation will eventually employ around 200 people once it consolidates its metal pressing, welding, machining, painting and assembly operations. Next year Sulzer may also move its distribution unit, currently based in Kettering, Northamptonshire, to the Hungerford site.

The Hungerford operation marks a multi-million pound investment to acquire long-term leases plus the new plant and equipment.

Production in process

Mr Smith commented: At Turnpike we were in 19 small, separate buildings. Now weve got everything at one manufacturing site and adjoining warehouse.

The company has also gone to great lengths to keep its loyal workforce, providing subsidised staff transport. Sulzer also runs apprenticeship schemes and intends to expand these in the near future.

Mr Smith added: This is not a short-term move  we dont want to be doing this too often! But we needed to stay as local as we could to keep as many of our employees as possible.

With the consolidation of the former PC Cox business, new products being introduced and the business from Denmark, we will more or less double in size from the Newbury operation.

For more information visit: www.sulzer.com
Gurbir Singh By

Express News Service

The circulation figures for newspapers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) last Monday tell us the printed word is still alive and kicking in India. The rest of the worlds legacy media have sung their requiems long ago.

It is a story that is known and perplexing. However, publishers can hardly hope to rest on their laurels as India is on the cusp of realigning with the rest of the world.

The new ABC figures showed that in the last decade, newspaper circulation has grown at an even clip.

From 39.1 million copies in 2006 to 62.8 million in 2016, print media added 23.7 million copies  a 60 per cent growth not seen anywhere in the world.

Comparable data with other countries for 2015 showed that while Indian circulation grew 12 per cent, most other countries lost out with the UK taking the worst hit with a 12 per cent fall, US 7 per cent, and Germany and France seeing 3 per cent each.

Robust Ad Support

Two important aspects have fuelled the print media surge in India. First, it is the rapid decline of illiteracy and the rise of the new educated, especially in the Hindi heartland  an area of darkness two decades ago. While television news provides the national spectrum, local news consumption is invariably through the print medium. It is no wonder that the fastest growth for the decade was accounted for the

Hindi dailies, which grew at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.78 since 2006.

The second and more important factor is advertisers  the main source of revenue  have continued to support this medium. There is something in the printed word  since it can be physically seen and touched, it seems more real than the cyber world. It is possibly the conservatism of advertisers.

Allen Rusbridger, editor of the UKs daily Guardian, who went digital much before anyone else, told this writer four years ago that ad revenues for the newspaper were 70:30 in favour of print. This was despite Guardians online edition reaching 38 million unique users, as compared to a daily print circulation of just 200,000!

Of Indias Rs 61,000-crore annual ad pie, media agency Group M in 2017 sees television and print share growing to Rs 27,378 crore and Rs 18,258 crore, respectively. However, the direction of the money flow is changing rapidly.

While TV and print ad revenue are growing at 8 and 4.5 per cent, respectively, digital ad is galloping at 30 per cent, even though it makes up Rs 9,400 crore or just 8-9 per cent of the pie.

ABC predicts the turf will level out by 2021 when print media and digital ad revenues will both touch around Rs 29,000 crore.

The gung-ho ABC figures hide another story: print media in the language of the old educated like English, Bengali and Punjabi, is already stagnating with less than three per cent growth. Meanwhile, news consumption for those on the go has changed to snippety briefs.

A joint report of the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research firm IMRB showed that 77 per cent of urban users and 92 per cent of rural users consider the mobile / smart phone as the primary device for accessing the Internet.

The ease and flexibility of the mobile device coupled with short formats of news consumption does not augur well for the printed word.

Print Still Has Punch

But does all this mean the death of the print medium? Probably not. It is news television which will feel the heat faster. Appointment TV viewing for news is dead, and like much of Africa, the young, educated pass on straight to the mobile Internet, bypassing both the desktop and television.

The print media story is a different one. It has depth and history. India has the largest number of paid-for dailies, and growing  from 5,767 in 2013, to 7,871 in 2015.

In the US, the number of dailies shrank from 1,395 to 1,347 in the same period. While the reader looks at his mobile for news alerts, he also wants to make sense of the high frequency of news flow that drowns him through the day.

A publisher this writer met a few years ago from the German Spiegel Publishing Group said one of his group magazines had shrunk from 200,000 copies to 20,000. But by focusing on a particular type of reader, more money was made as advertisers found the specific reader base a better business proposition.

Thats the challenge. Audience focus and relevant content. Those who can crack the code will survive.

(The writer can be contacted at gurbir1@gmail.com)

The circulation figures for newspapers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) last Monday tell us the printed word is still alive and kicking in India. The rest of the worlds legacy media have sung their requiems long ago. It is a story that is known and perplexing. However, publishers can hardly hope to rest on their laurels as India is on the cusp of realigning with the rest of the world. The new ABC figures showed that in the last decade, newspaper circulation has grown at an even clip. From 39.1 million copies in 2006 to 62.8 million in 2016, print media added 23.7 million copies  a 60 per cent growth not seen anywhere in the world. Comparable data with other countries for 2015 showed that while Indian circulation grew 12 per cent, most other countries lost out with the UK taking the worst hit with a 12 per cent fall, US 7 per cent, and Germany and France seeing 3 per cent each. Robust Ad Support Two important aspects have fuelled the print media surge in India. First, it is the rapid decline of illiteracy and the rise of the new educated, especially in the Hindi heartland  an area of darkness two decades ago. While television news provides the national spectrum, local news consumption is invariably through the print medium. It is no wonder that the fastest growth for the decade was accounted for the Hindi dailies, which grew at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.78 since 2006. The second and more important factor is advertisers  the main source of revenue  have continued to support this medium. There is something in the printed word  since it can be physically seen and touched, it seems more real than the cyber world. It is possibly the conservatism of advertisers. Allen Rusbridger, editor of the UKs daily Guardian, who went digital much before anyone else, told this writer four years ago that ad revenues for the newspaper were 70:30 in favour of print. This was despite Guardians online edition reaching 38 million unique users, as compared to a daily print circulation of just 200,000! Of Indias Rs 61,000-crore annual ad pie, media agency Group M in 2017 sees television and print share growing to Rs 27,378 crore and Rs 18,258 crore, respectively. However, the direction of the money flow is changing rapidly. While TV and print ad revenue are growing at 8 and 4.5 per cent, respectively, digital ad is galloping at 30 per cent, even though it makes up Rs 9,400 crore or just 8-9 per cent of the pie. ABC predicts the turf will level out by 2021 when print media and digital ad revenues will both touch around Rs 29,000 crore. The gung-ho ABC figures hide another story: print media in the language of the old educated like English, Bengali and Punjabi, is already stagnating with less than three per cent growth. Meanwhile, news consumption for those on the go has changed to snippety briefs. A joint report of the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research firm IMRB showed that 77 per cent of urban users and 92 per cent of rural users consider the mobile / smart phone as the primary device for accessing the Internet. The ease and flexibility of the mobile device coupled with short formats of news consumption does not augur well for the printed word. Print Still Has Punch But does all this mean the death of the print medium? Probably not. It is news television which will feel the heat faster. Appointment TV viewing for news is dead, and like much of Africa, the young, educated pass on straight to the mobile Internet, bypassing both the desktop and television. The print media story is a different one. It has depth and history. India has the largest number of paid-for dailies, and growing  from 5,767 in 2013, to 7,871 in 2015. In the US, the number of dailies shrank from 1,395 to 1,347 in the same period. While the reader looks at his mobile for news alerts, he also wants to make sense of the high frequency of news flow that drowns him through the day. A publisher this writer met a few years ago from the German Spiegel Publishing Group said one of his group magazines had shrunk from 200,000 copies to 20,000. But by focusing on a particular type of reader, more money was made as advertisers found the specific reader base a better business proposition. Thats the challenge. Audience focus and relevant content. Those who can crack the code will survive. (The writer can be contacted at gurbir1@gmail.com)
Jaideep Devare By

Express News Service

There is more to a holiday than applying for a visa, booking tickets and flying off to your Hawaiian destination. There is also travel insurance, which protects you from unforeseen circumstances and enables you to enjoy your hard-earned vacation with peace of mind.

Travellers can either purchase cover for the duration of the trip or opt for a multi-trip policy covering any number of trips within a specific period. Most insurance companies have a provision for one or two extensions.

Where foreign travel insurance is not mandatory, it would still be prudent to buy a policy as the cost of medical treatment is higher than in India, and often unaffordable.

Once you buy travel insurance, make sure all your papers are in order and safely tucked away in the bottom of your suitcase. Here are a few things to remember before you ride off to the airport:

Before you pack

If you are jotting down your packing list, be sure to include all relevant documents related to your travel insurance policy. It will help you reach out to the insurance provider without hiccups.

Document everything on your cellphone. Take a picture of your bag and its contents while packing. In the event you lose your baggage or if it is stolen, it will be easier for you to share a list of your possessions with your insurance provider.

Likewise, keep photo copies and scanned copies of all your travel and insurance documents, including passport. Separately, keep contact details of the insurance provider on a cloud device and also share it with family members.

Call your insurer on time

In the event of a mishap or unfortunate incident, notify your insurance provider within the time mentioned in the policy. Do not hesitate to reach out to the companys call centre or customer service and inform them about unforeseen events like trip cancellation or interruption, travel delays, baggage loss or delay, missed flights and medical emergencies.

In addition, depending on the seriousness of the issue, it might also be important to notify the authorities such as local police and the embassy.

Such a course has twin benefits

You will have established your reasons for filing a claim, so there will be no surprises or disputes later.

The insurer will know you are in need of urgent help and will start the process of getting you out of trouble.

When you call the insurer, be sure to furnish as many details of the event or incident as you can. Following this, you can fill out the claim form sent by the insurer or download it and fill the relevant data.

Proof of loss

Proof of loss, delay or illness is essential when filing a claim against travel insurance. This may include police reports in case of theft or any other crime; written statement from the airline regarding loss of bag or baggage; medical statements in case you sought medical care on the trip; receipts for extra expenses like meals and lodging, and more.

If you follow these simple rules while packing for your trip, and even after you have reached your destination, you wont face any problems during an emergency. More importantly, you will be well prepared to file a claim and reap the full benefits of travel insurance.

Be it a business trip to New York, a cruise to the Caribbeans, a vacation to Disneyland or a shopping jaunt to Dubai, never underestimate the power of travel insurance and its capacity to make your trip a memorable one.

Things to remember

Document everything on your cellphone. Take a picture of your bag and its contents while packing. In the event you lose your baggage, it will be easier for you to share a list of your possessions with your insurance provider. Separately, keep contact details of the insurance provider on a cloud device and also share it with family members



 Jaideep Devare,



managing director, Mahindra Insurance Brokers

There is more to a holiday than applying for a visa, booking tickets and flying off to your Hawaiian destination. There is also travel insurance, which protects you from unforeseen circumstances and enables you to enjoy your hard-earned vacation with peace of mind. Travellers can either purchase cover for the duration of the trip or opt for a multi-trip policy covering any number of trips within a specific period. Most insurance companies have a provision for one or two extensions. Where foreign travel insurance is not mandatory, it would still be prudent to buy a policy as the cost of medical treatment is higher than in India, and often unaffordable. Once you buy travel insurance, make sure all your papers are in order and safely tucked away in the bottom of your suitcase. Here are a few things to remember before you ride off to the airport: Before you pack If you are jotting down your packing list, be sure to include all relevant documents related to your travel insurance policy. It will help you reach out to the insurance provider without hiccups. Document everything on your cellphone. Take a picture of your bag and its contents while packing. In the event you lose your baggage or if it is stolen, it will be easier for you to share a list of your possessions with your insurance provider. Likewise, keep photo copies and scanned copies of all your travel and insurance documents, including passport. Separately, keep contact details of the insurance provider on a cloud device and also share it with family members. Call your insurer on time In the event of a mishap or unfortunate incident, notify your insurance provider within the time mentioned in the policy. Do not hesitate to reach out to the companys call centre or customer service and inform them about unforeseen events like trip cancellation or interruption, travel delays, baggage loss or delay, missed flights and medical emergencies. In addition, depending on the seriousness of the issue, it might also be important to notify the authorities such as local police and the embassy. Such a course has twin benefits You will have established your reasons for filing a claim, so there will be no surprises or disputes later. The insurer will know you are in need of urgent help and will start the process of getting you out of trouble. When you call the insurer, be sure to furnish as many details of the event or incident as you can. Following this, you can fill out the claim form sent by the insurer or download it and fill the relevant data. Proof of loss Proof of loss, delay or illness is essential when filing a claim against travel insurance. This may include police reports in case of theft or any other crime; written statement from the airline regarding loss of bag or baggage; medical statements in case you sought medical care on the trip; receipts for extra expenses like meals and lodging, and more. If you follow these simple rules while packing for your trip, and even after you have reached your destination, you wont face any problems during an emergency. More importantly, you will be well prepared to file a claim and reap the full benefits of travel insurance. Be it a business trip to New York, a cruise to the Caribbeans, a vacation to Disneyland or a shopping jaunt to Dubai, never underestimate the power of travel insurance and its capacity to make your trip a memorable one. Things to remember Document everything on your cellphone. Take a picture of your bag and its contents while packing. In the event you lose your baggage, it will be easier for you to share a list of your possessions with your insurance provider. Separately, keep contact details of the insurance provider on a cloud device and also share it with family members   Jaideep Devare, managing director, Mahindra Insurance Brokers
By Express News Service

Irrfan Khan is currently busy promoting his next Hindi Medium and the actor is soon set to take off to the US for the shoot of his next Hollywood project. He has been roped in by Big Beach Films, who have produced Oscar-winning film Little Miss Sunshine.

The film will be helmed by the co-partner of Big Beach Mark Turtletaub. Puzzle is an adaptation of the Argentine film Rompecabezas which released in 2010.

Irrfan plays the lead alongside renowned actress Kelly Macdonald , who has done films like Trainspotting, Boardwalk Empire.The film tells the tale of a woman, who is consumed for caring for the men in her family. When she discovers she has a gift for assembling puzzles, her world begins to open and her entire family is forced to adjust and grow as well. Irrfan will soon leave for New York to begin work on the project which will last for almost a month in June.

Confirming the news, Irrfan said, Im really looking forward to working with the team who have been associated with great films like Little Miss Sunshine, Loving and many more. My co-actors have an incredible array of work and Im happy to soon be working with someone as talented as Kelly Macdonald. We will begin work in June.

Irrfan Khan is currently busy promoting his next Hindi Medium and the actor is soon set to take off to the US for the shoot of his next Hollywood project. He has been roped in by Big Beach Films, who have produced Oscar-winning film Little Miss Sunshine. The film will be helmed by the co-partner of Big Beach Mark Turtletaub. Puzzle is an adaptation of the Argentine film Rompecabezas which released in 2010. Irrfan plays the lead alongside renowned actress Kelly Macdonald , who has done films like Trainspotting, Boardwalk Empire.The film tells the tale of a woman, who is consumed for caring for the men in her family. When she discovers she has a gift for assembling puzzles, her world begins to open and her entire family is forced to adjust and grow as well. Irrfan will soon leave for New York to begin work on the project which will last for almost a month in June. Confirming the news, Irrfan said, Im really looking forward to working with the team who have been associated with great films like Little Miss Sunshine, Loving and many more. My co-actors have an incredible array of work and Im happy to soon be working with someone as talented as Kelly Macdonald. We will begin work in June.
Ramzauva Chhakchhuak By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: About 10 to 15 years back there were no films in Karnataka that used animation or VFX. But, today, the situation has changed dramatically.

Now there are hardly any movies that do not use animation and VFX. It has become an integral part of filmmaking, says Udayaravi Hegde, managing director of Unifi Media, which works with as many as 60 films in the Kannada industry every year. He was at the Bengaluru GAFX Conference that drew to a close on Sunday.

Unifi Media, presently one of the most well-known VFX and animation studios in the Kannada movie industry, was started in 2006 by Udayaravi and has been involved in designing the VFX affects of local blockbusters such as Uppi 2, U-Turn, Lucia, Maasti Gudi, as well as movies from other industries such as the Baahubali movies.

Making the Change

Udayaravi studied animation for two years before he plunged straight into the television industry working for a few years as a graphic artist and editor. He was involved in a number of productions such as serials like Nanda Gokula. He had a hunch that the wind towards animation and VFX would bring big opportunities and therefore decided to set up his own company early on. And it seems the move has paid off.

Back when I started, visual affects formed around only one or two per cent of a movie. These days some movies have as much as 30 per cent done using visual affects, he says.

Artists for the South

Presently, Unifi Media caters to as much as 40 percent of the movies of the Kannada film industry every year says Udayaravi. In addition to the local industry, we also cater to other film industries in the South. We have been a part of movies such as the Surya-starrer 24 and many others in Tamil Nadu. Work on visual affects of few Bollywood movies such as Ghajni and Ghayal Once Again was also done in our studios, says Udayaravi.

Presently, Unifi Media has an office in Bengaluru as well as in Chennai. We have a total staff of around 120 people, he says.

While there might be many international animation studios that are based in Bengaluru and cater to movies from Hollywood, Udayaravi says that he is extremely proud that his studio is providing his services to the local industry and helping the local animation and VFX industry grow. There are definitely a number of challenges especially in terms of the investment and the technologies. However I am glad that I am part of something that will be very big, he says.

BENGALURU: About 10 to 15 years back there were no films in Karnataka that used animation or VFX. But, today, the situation has changed dramatically. Now there are hardly any movies that do not use animation and VFX. It has become an integral part of filmmaking, says Udayaravi Hegde, managing director of Unifi Media, which works with as many as 60 films in the Kannada industry every year. He was at the Bengaluru GAFX Conference that drew to a close on Sunday. Unifi Media, presently one of the most well-known VFX and animation studios in the Kannada movie industry, was started in 2006 by Udayaravi and has been involved in designing the VFX affects of local blockbusters such as Uppi 2, U-Turn, Lucia, Maasti Gudi, as well as movies from other industries such as the Baahubali movies. Making the Change Udayaravi studied animation for two years before he plunged straight into the television industry working for a few years as a graphic artist and editor. He was involved in a number of productions such as serials like Nanda Gokula. He had a hunch that the wind towards animation and VFX would bring big opportunities and therefore decided to set up his own company early on. And it seems the move has paid off. Back when I started, visual affects formed around only one or two per cent of a movie. These days some movies have as much as 30 per cent done using visual affects, he says. Artists for the South Presently, Unifi Media caters to as much as 40 percent of the movies of the Kannada film industry every year says Udayaravi. In addition to the local industry, we also cater to other film industries in the South. We have been a part of movies such as the Surya-starrer 24 and many others in Tamil Nadu. Work on visual affects of few Bollywood movies such as Ghajni and Ghayal Once Again was also done in our studios, says Udayaravi. Presently, Unifi Media has an office in Bengaluru as well as in Chennai. We have a total staff of around 120 people, he says. While there might be many international animation studios that are based in Bengaluru and cater to movies from Hollywood, Udayaravi says that he is extremely proud that his studio is providing his services to the local industry and helping the local animation and VFX industry grow. There are definitely a number of challenges especially in terms of the investment and the technologies. However I am glad that I am part of something that will be very big, he says.
President Moon Jae-in spent the first weekend since his election hiking up the mountain behind Cheong Wa Dae on Saturday accompanied by around 60 reporters who had covered his campaign. He was joined by his new chief of staff Im Jong-seok, spokesman Yoon Young-chan and other Cheong Wa Dae officials.

Mt. Bugak, which sits right behind the presidential compound, was also a favorite hiking spot for former President Roh Moo-hyun, whose right-hand man Moon used to be. Much of it is heavily guarded and off-limits to civilians.

Moon was advised to take a day off and came up to the idea of going up to the mountain with the reporters who pounded the pavement with him during his presidential campaign, according to a spokesman.

The president chatted with them and posed for selfies during breaks on their 4.4 km hike. The trek was originally scheduled to take 50 minutes but lasted around two hours as the group walked at a leisurely pace and chatted along the way. He then had lunch with them in the Cheong Wa Dae cafeteria.


Sudhir Srinivasan By

Express News Service

Avideo of a fan performing a religious ritual to a poster of a popular hero went viral recently. I couldnt but help wonder what the typical day of such a person must be like. Heres a likely account:

Suresh (name used only for representative purposes) sat up, eyes wide in horror. He had just dreamt that his boss was sending him on out-station work on the release day of his favourite heros upcoming film. This was to be the actors 73rd film. Suresh had done his bit to popularise #galacticstar73.

He wiped the cold sweat off his face, and double-checked his wallet to make sure that the first-day-first-show tickets were very much there. They were. He could already feel that familiar rush of excitement, as he imagined himself anointing the 120-feet cut-out of the actor with milk. Sometimes, at that vantage point, seeing all the hundreds of fans cheering from below, it almost felt like he was a star himself.

He was running late for work today. His boss had been scathing of his latecoming, but he didnt realise how much work had to be done ahead of galacticstar 73s release. He couldnt bear to imagine another area celebrate the film with more fanfare. As he quickly got ready, he surveyed all the posters in his room with pride. The room was decoratedconsecrated as he saw itwith posters of many of the actors films, including galacticstar73, and some drawings he had made of the actor.

One recent drawing of his had been shared 256 times on Facebook, and 129 times on Twitter. It was a beautiful day. The actor himself hadnt shared it though, even though he had tweeted it to him.

He rushed to his workplace, and he hated being there as they wouldnt let mobile phones be carried inside. He wanted nothing more than to spend his day fruitfully by sharing and propagating news about galacticstar73. He spent the entire day running the films opening song in his head.

It was a throwback to the golden days when all Tamil films had mass introduction scenes, and kuthu opening numbers. Sometimes, at work, he got worried that he would miss out on important news about his actor. Recently, he was furious to be among the last people to learn that the actor had travelled on vacation to US with his family. A photo had been shared too. He prayed that no such important news would be shared while he was at work.

Evening finally arrived, and he had an emotional reunion with his phone. On his way home, he sifted frantically through the actors pages, and fan club accounts. He himself ran one, but it hadnt become popular. He hoped his future drawings would do the trick. Some said that they looked nothing like the actor, but he suspected those were fans of the Solar System Star, out to spew hatred. Sometimes, Suresh himself did the same. There were times he liked the rival actors films, but he always had to say they were horrible. He had to remain loyal to the Galactic Star.

The rival actor had released a first look poster. Immediately, Suresh juxtaposed it with the Enna koduma sir photo from Chandramukhi, and shared it. The retweets began; he was pleased. The Solar System Stars fans attacked him, but the Galactic Star fans always came to his rescue. He felt like a hero when that happened. He also felt like they were all his friends. He went on that evening to create many more memes, ignoring the calls of an old friend who had wanted to catch up for many days now. He also published a list of instructions to the Galactic Stars fans on how to undermine the first look poster of the rival actor. He created a hashtag that mocked the rival actor and hoped it would begin trending.

Suresh hadnt gotten married yet, but it didnt really matter. Galactic Star was his family. He felt a lot of affection for the stars newborn child. He had created a meme with the babys photo and the caption, Cutest star baby ever. Like if you agree. It got him a lot of followers. The count now stood at 653. A thousand followers would be nice, he thought. Feeling motivated, he created more memes, and liked and shared many more.

He could have done a lot more if his mother hadnt bothered him with questions about pesky household stuff. Just before he retired for the night, he summoned all his courage, and sent a carefully worded tweet to the Galactic Star: Galactic Star! My hero! Waiting for galacticstar73! Please reply! He slept rather nervously that evening, hoping that when he awoke the following morning, his greatest dream would finally come true.

Avideo of a fan performing a religious ritual to a poster of a popular hero went viral recently. I couldnt but help wonder what the typical day of such a person must be like. Heres a likely account: Suresh (name used only for representative purposes) sat up, eyes wide in horror. He had just dreamt that his boss was sending him on out-station work on the release day of his favourite heros upcoming film. This was to be the actors 73rd film. Suresh had done his bit to popularise #galacticstar73. He wiped the cold sweat off his face, and double-checked his wallet to make sure that the first-day-first-show tickets were very much there. They were. He could already feel that familiar rush of excitement, as he imagined himself anointing the 120-feet cut-out of the actor with milk. Sometimes, at that vantage point, seeing all the hundreds of fans cheering from below, it almost felt like he was a star himself. He was running late for work today. His boss had been scathing of his latecoming, but he didnt realise how much work had to be done ahead of galacticstar 73s release. He couldnt bear to imagine another area celebrate the film with more fanfare. As he quickly got ready, he surveyed all the posters in his room with pride. The room was decoratedconsecrated as he saw itwith posters of many of the actors films, including galacticstar73, and some drawings he had made of the actor. One recent drawing of his had been shared 256 times on Facebook, and 129 times on Twitter. It was a beautiful day. The actor himself hadnt shared it though, even though he had tweeted it to him. He rushed to his workplace, and he hated being there as they wouldnt let mobile phones be carried inside. He wanted nothing more than to spend his day fruitfully by sharing and propagating news about galacticstar73. He spent the entire day running the films opening song in his head. It was a throwback to the golden days when all Tamil films had mass introduction scenes, and kuthu opening numbers. Sometimes, at work, he got worried that he would miss out on important news about his actor. Recently, he was furious to be among the last people to learn that the actor had travelled on vacation to US with his family. A photo had been shared too. He prayed that no such important news would be shared while he was at work. Evening finally arrived, and he had an emotional reunion with his phone. On his way home, he sifted frantically through the actors pages, and fan club accounts. He himself ran one, but it hadnt become popular. He hoped his future drawings would do the trick. Some said that they looked nothing like the actor, but he suspected those were fans of the Solar System Star, out to spew hatred. Sometimes, Suresh himself did the same. There were times he liked the rival actors films, but he always had to say they were horrible. He had to remain loyal to the Galactic Star. The rival actor had released a first look poster. Immediately, Suresh juxtaposed it with the Enna koduma sir photo from Chandramukhi, and shared it. The retweets began; he was pleased. The Solar System Stars fans attacked him, but the Galactic Star fans always came to his rescue. He felt like a hero when that happened. He also felt like they were all his friends. He went on that evening to create many more memes, ignoring the calls of an old friend who had wanted to catch up for many days now. He also published a list of instructions to the Galactic Stars fans on how to undermine the first look poster of the rival actor. He created a hashtag that mocked the rival actor and hoped it would begin trending. Suresh hadnt gotten married yet, but it didnt really matter. Galactic Star was his family. He felt a lot of affection for the stars newborn child. He had created a meme with the babys photo and the caption, Cutest star baby ever. Like if you agree. It got him a lot of followers. The count now stood at 653. A thousand followers would be nice, he thought. Feeling motivated, he created more memes, and liked and shared many more. He could have done a lot more if his mother hadnt bothered him with questions about pesky household stuff. Just before he retired for the night, he summoned all his courage, and sent a carefully worded tweet to the Galactic Star: Galactic Star! My hero! Waiting for galacticstar73! Please reply! He slept rather nervously that evening, hoping that when he awoke the following morning, his greatest dream would finally come true.
By ANI

PATNA: As many as 27 children fell ill on Monday after they ate the mid-day meal in which a dead lizard was found.

The incident took place in Bihars Jamui.

The children have been rushed to a nearby hospital for immediate treatment.

The incident comes to light after a baby snake, also known as a 'snakelet' was found in the food served to children in Rajkeeya Girls Senior Secondary School in Haryanas Faridabad.

On finding the snakelet, the children were immediately stopped from consuming the meal, but unfortunately some students had already eaten portions of it.

Some students even vomitted as soon as they had eaten the meal.

When the principal and other teachers were tasting the food, they saw the snakelet after which they immediately intimated the other students to not eat it.

The students were taken aback upon discovering the reptile in their food. They admitted that they often got a 'stale smell' from the food generally, but this was something which was terrifying for them.

Braj Bala, the school's principal informed about the same to higher officials and Iskcon food relief foundation, the organisation supplying mid-day meal.

The other schools, where the same food was supplied, were also apprised about the same.

PATNA: As many as 27 children fell ill on Monday after they ate the mid-day meal in which a dead lizard was found. The incident took place in Bihars Jamui. The children have been rushed to a nearby hospital for immediate treatment. The incident comes to light after a baby snake, also known as a 'snakelet' was found in the food served to children in Rajkeeya Girls Senior Secondary School in Haryanas Faridabad. On finding the snakelet, the children were immediately stopped from consuming the meal, but unfortunately some students had already eaten portions of it. Some students even vomitted as soon as they had eaten the meal. When the principal and other teachers were tasting the food, they saw the snakelet after which they immediately intimated the other students to not eat it. The students were taken aback upon discovering the reptile in their food. They admitted that they often got a 'stale smell' from the food generally, but this was something which was terrifying for them. Braj Bala, the school's principal informed about the same to higher officials and Iskcon food relief foundation, the organisation supplying mid-day meal. The other schools, where the same food was supplied, were also apprised about the same.
By ANI

AMARKANTAK: A day after a video surfaced where a man was being brutally beaten up by a group of cow vigilantes, Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Bhupendra Singh on Monday said that he has ordered an inquiry in the matter and will ensure justice is done in the case.



The MP Minister said that the guilty once caught, will be severally punished for their unwarranted deed.



This is a serious incident. The moment I got to know about the incident I ordered an investigation in the matter. And once the investigation report comes, we will prosecute the guilty and se that justice is done, Singh said.



Cow vigilantes in Ujjain city of Madhya Pradesh brutally thrashed a man on the suspicion of him hurting a cow.

#WATCH Madhya Pradesh: Man thrashed allegedly by cow vigilantes in Ujjain; police arrested four people, search for others underway pic.twitter.com/UqO7pRqyqy  ANI (@ANI_news) May 14, 2017

The incident took place on Saturday when a group of men claiming to be ' gau rakshaks' cornered a man and started beating him ruthlessly, accusing him of beating a cow.



The victim who sustained severe injuries after the incident was rushed to the nearby hospital.



The police took action after a video of the same incident went viral and registered a case against the miscreants.



Four people have been arrested while the others are on the run.

AMARKANTAK: A day after a video surfaced where a man was being brutally beaten up by a group of cow vigilantes, Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Bhupendra Singh on Monday said that he has ordered an inquiry in the matter and will ensure justice is done in the case. The MP Minister said that the guilty once caught, will be severally punished for their unwarranted deed. This is a serious incident. The moment I got to know about the incident I ordered an investigation in the matter. And once the investigation report comes, we will prosecute the guilty and se that justice is done, Singh said. Cow vigilantes in Ujjain city of Madhya Pradesh brutally thrashed a man on the suspicion of him hurting a cow. #WATCH Madhya Pradesh: Man thrashed allegedly by cow vigilantes in Ujjain; police arrested four people, search for others underway pic.twitter.com/UqO7pRqyqy  ANI (@ANI_news) May 14, 2017 The incident took place on Saturday when a group of men claiming to be ' gau rakshaks' cornered a man and started beating him ruthlessly, accusing him of beating a cow. The victim who sustained severe injuries after the incident was rushed to the nearby hospital. The police took action after a video of the same incident went viral and registered a case against the miscreants. Four people have been arrested while the others are on the run.
By IANS

LUDHIANA: Often called the 'Father of Wheat Revolution', agriculture scientist Dilbagh Singh Athwal has passed away in the US, a Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) official said on Monday. He was 89.

Vice Chancellor B.S. Dhillon, officers and scientists of the university paid tributes to Athwal, who died on Sunday, at a condolence meeting held at the PAU campus here.

Dhillon said the outstanding contributions made by Athwal in the field of agriculture "remain unsurpassable till date".

"Dr Athwal was one of the stalwarts who played a pivotal role in initiating Green Revolution in the country. He was a well-known geneticist, plant breeder and agricultural scientist of international repute," Dhillon said.

"Athwal developed world's first grain pearl millet hybrid 'Hybrid Bajra 1' in 1965 that heralded a new era in cultivation of this important crop," he said.

Athwal was instrumental in developing 'PV 18' in 1966 and the most popular amber grained wheat variety 'Kalyansona' in 1967, named after the village 'Kalyanpur' in Punjab where Athwal was born in 1928.

Punjab, known as the 'Green Revolution' state, had heralded India's campaign to ensure food grain security for the country in the 1960s.

Athwal served as founder head of Department of Plant Breeding in PAU, and made contributions to the genetics and breeding of pearl millet, wheat, gram and tobacco.

A large number of genetic stocks developed by him made a significant contribution to future research on bajra breeding and genetics.

In 1967, he joined the management of International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and eventually served as the Institute's first Deputy Director General. At IRRI, he introduced many innovations in rice breeding.

The University of Sydney bestowed the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on him in 1955.

In 1964, he was conferred with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which is the highest Indian award in the science category.

He was also decorated with Padma Bhushan in 1975 by the government for his contributions to biological science. After his retirement, he settled in New Jersey, US, where he breathed his last.

The university has named its new guest house after his name as 'Dr. D.S. Athwal International Guest House'.

As a mark of respect to Athwal, the PAU remained closed for half a day.



LUDHIANA: Often called the 'Father of Wheat Revolution', agriculture scientist Dilbagh Singh Athwal has passed away in the US, a Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) official said on Monday. He was 89. Vice Chancellor B.S. Dhillon, officers and scientists of the university paid tributes to Athwal, who died on Sunday, at a condolence meeting held at the PAU campus here. Dhillon said the outstanding contributions made by Athwal in the field of agriculture "remain unsurpassable till date". "Dr Athwal was one of the stalwarts who played a pivotal role in initiating Green Revolution in the country. He was a well-known geneticist, plant breeder and agricultural scientist of international repute," Dhillon said. "Athwal developed world's first grain pearl millet hybrid 'Hybrid Bajra 1' in 1965 that heralded a new era in cultivation of this important crop," he said. Athwal was instrumental in developing 'PV 18' in 1966 and the most popular amber grained wheat variety 'Kalyansona' in 1967, named after the village 'Kalyanpur' in Punjab where Athwal was born in 1928. Punjab, known as the 'Green Revolution' state, had heralded India's campaign to ensure food grain security for the country in the 1960s. Athwal served as founder head of Department of Plant Breeding in PAU, and made contributions to the genetics and breeding of pearl millet, wheat, gram and tobacco. A large number of genetic stocks developed by him made a significant contribution to future research on bajra breeding and genetics. In 1967, he joined the management of International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and eventually served as the Institute's first Deputy Director General. At IRRI, he introduced many innovations in rice breeding. The University of Sydney bestowed the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on him in 1955. In 1964, he was conferred with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which is the highest Indian award in the science category. He was also decorated with Padma Bhushan in 1975 by the government for his contributions to biological science. After his retirement, he settled in New Jersey, US, where he breathed his last. The university has named its new guest house after his name as 'Dr. D.S. Athwal International Guest House'. As a mark of respect to Athwal, the PAU remained closed for half a day.
By Express News Service

PATNA: After lying low for six days since facing a setback in the fodder scam cases, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav on Sunday flamboyantly asserted his position in the ruling alliance and attacked PM Narendra Modi, daring him to hold Lok Sabha polls now.

Yadav, whose conversation over the phone with jailed criminal-turned-politician Mohammad Shahabuddin had sparked a political storm recently, called up several police officers over an attack on Dalit villagers. I spoke to the SP and DM of Buxar district, the DSP and also the SHO, and I asked them to take prompt and strong action against the accused who attacked the Dalit people, said Yadav.

With this, he apparently sought to send the message that he holds a significant position in the Nitish Kumar-led grand alliance government, in which his party RJD is the biggest constituent.

Nearly 10 men and women from Dhansoi in Buxar district met Yadav and told him how police took no action against people who beat them up and damaged their houses.

The complainants also gave Yadav a recorded phone conversation one of them had with the SHO of Dhansoi police station.

The complainant is heard telling the SHO he would go to Yadav with the complaint, and to this the SHO is heard replying: Go to Lalu Yadav, Jitan Ram Manjhi, Nitish Kumar or the PM. Go wherever you want to

PATNA: After lying low for six days since facing a setback in the fodder scam cases, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav on Sunday flamboyantly asserted his position in the ruling alliance and attacked PM Narendra Modi, daring him to hold Lok Sabha polls now. Yadav, whose conversation over the phone with jailed criminal-turned-politician Mohammad Shahabuddin had sparked a political storm recently, called up several police officers over an attack on Dalit villagers. I spoke to the SP and DM of Buxar district, the DSP and also the SHO, and I asked them to take prompt and strong action against the accused who attacked the Dalit people, said Yadav. With this, he apparently sought to send the message that he holds a significant position in the Nitish Kumar-led grand alliance government, in which his party RJD is the biggest constituent. Nearly 10 men and women from Dhansoi in Buxar district met Yadav and told him how police took no action against people who beat them up and damaged their houses. The complainants also gave Yadav a recorded phone conversation one of them had with the SHO of Dhansoi police station. The complainant is heard telling the SHO he would go to Yadav with the complaint, and to this the SHO is heard replying: Go to Lalu Yadav, Jitan Ram Manjhi, Nitish Kumar or the PM. Go wherever you want to
By ANI

NEW DELHI: Assuring speedy justice by fast track courts over the horrific Rohtak gang-rape incident, Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar on Monday said the culprits involved in the brutal crime will not be spared.



Two of the culprits have been nabbed. The police is actively investigating the matter. Culprits involved in such ghastly acts won't be spared, will ensure speedy justice by fast track courts, Khatta told the media here.



On May 9th, a woman was brutally gang-raped and murdered, and her mutilated body was later found in an empty plot in Haryana's Rohtak, in the city's IMT area. The incident came to light only when the victim's body was found.



The victim had allegedly refused a marriage proposal, following which the accused reached her home a week later with his friends. A heated argument broke out which resulted in the woman slapping him.



In revenge, the accused along with his friends allegedly raped and murdered her.



The family of the victim said that on May 9, at least five to six youth abducted her from the gate of a private company. After that the accused took her to a deserted place and gang-raped her.



The victim's mother said that the accused have been pressurising her daughter for marriage for the past one year.



Forensic reports suggested that the victim was mutilated with sharp-edged weapons. Later, the accused tried to run her over to hide her identity.



"The victim was tortured and her body was mutilated after the gang rape. She was killed after being raped involving at least seven people.



Her skull was smashed in a way which indicates that she was run over by a vehicle in order to hide her identity," the forensic team has stated.



The victim was living with her mother and brother and used to work in a private medicine company.



The woman's parents had filed a missing complaint, based on which the police tracked her parents down.



The parents were called to Rohtak to identify her body.



The distraught parents have claimed that this ghastly attack was carried out by the girl's neighbour and have demanded capital punishment for the rapists.

NEW DELHI: Assuring speedy justice by fast track courts over the horrific Rohtak gang-rape incident, Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar on Monday said the culprits involved in the brutal crime will not be spared. Two of the culprits have been nabbed. The police is actively investigating the matter. Culprits involved in such ghastly acts won't be spared, will ensure speedy justice by fast track courts, Khatta told the media here. On May 9th, a woman was brutally gang-raped and murdered, and her mutilated body was later found in an empty plot in Haryana's Rohtak, in the city's IMT area. The incident came to light only when the victim's body was found. The victim had allegedly refused a marriage proposal, following which the accused reached her home a week later with his friends. A heated argument broke out which resulted in the woman slapping him. In revenge, the accused along with his friends allegedly raped and murdered her. The family of the victim said that on May 9, at least five to six youth abducted her from the gate of a private company. After that the accused took her to a deserted place and gang-raped her. The victim's mother said that the accused have been pressurising her daughter for marriage for the past one year. Forensic reports suggested that the victim was mutilated with sharp-edged weapons. Later, the accused tried to run her over to hide her identity. "The victim was tortured and her body was mutilated after the gang rape. She was killed after being raped involving at least seven people. Her skull was smashed in a way which indicates that she was run over by a vehicle in order to hide her identity," the forensic team has stated. The victim was living with her mother and brother and used to work in a private medicine company. The woman's parents had filed a missing complaint, based on which the police tracked her parents down. The parents were called to Rohtak to identify her body. The distraught parents have claimed that this ghastly attack was carried out by the girl's neighbour and have demanded capital punishment for the rapists.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: A new law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community would be brought, if all forms of divorce including triple talaq are struck down, the government today told the Supreme Court.

The Centre, which also sought that the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' should not be excluded from the ongoing deliberations, got an assurance from the apex court that these aspects were open and would be dealt with later.

The government termed all the three forms of divorce among the Muslim community - talaq-e-biddat, talaq hasan and talaq ahsan, as "unilateral" and "extra-judicial".

The apex court bench said the government has to first pass the test of "essentiality" and prove that 'triple talaq' is not an essential part of Islam, as this will amount to "tinkering" with religion.

A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar said "we are not only the guardian of the Constitution but also the guardian of minority rights" and will have to see if triple talaq formed a fundamental part of religion and pass the test of "essentiality" under Article 25.

The bench, also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, asked if the court struck down all forms of talaq, then what options would a Muslim man be left with to come out of a marriage.

"The government will not leave the people high and dry once the instant form of divorce (triple talaq) or all forms of talaq are struck down. We will come out with a law to regulate the marriage and divorce among Muslim community," the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Centre, said.

He said the issues of Muslim marriage and divorce were separated from religion in Shariat Act of 1937 itself and have been codified as personal law under Section 2 of the Act.

The apex court has to test them on the touch-stone of the fundamental rights of gender equality, justice, dignity, gender discrimination and human rights under constitutional provisions, including Articles 14, 15, 21 and 51A.

"All personal laws must be in confirmity with the Constitution. Rights of marriage, divorce, property and succession has to be treated in the same class and has to be in conformity with the Constitution," Rohatgi said.

The Attorney General also said what kind of religious practices are essential to a particular religion or faith was difficult to define for the court. But once such practices of marriage and divorce are separated from religion, there cannot be any immunity under Article 25 (freedom to practice any religion).

He said if the practice of talaq was out of Article 25, then it has to be constitutionally moral, which means it has to be secular and non-discriminatory.

"One half of a community in the country has to suffer inequality from their male counterpart. What may be permissible for society may not be constitutionally moral," he said.

To this, the bench observed if the government wanted social welfare and reforms, why can't it bring laws to correct the wrong.

"Yes, we can bring law. There is no law for past 60 years. It has not been done. But the court should first strike down these practices which are not in confirmity with the Constitution," he said.

Rohatgi said when half the population of a particular community is not empowered, no equal opportunity is given, they are devoid of gender equality, then it does not pass the test of constitutional morality.

He said even if triple talaq is considered as an essential part of religion and falls under Article 25, the practice still has to be constitutionally moral.

"Even if talaq is considered under Article 25, it has to be related to the fundamental rights and should abide by the principles of gender equality, non-discrimination and justice," the AG said.

The bench insisted that the government has to prove that this practice of triple talaq was not essential to Islam and only then can it delve further into other aspects.

Rohatgi pointed out that it was not the apex court's job to interpret a religion and said "You cannot go into essential principle because it is not an ecclesiastical court"

To buttress his argument that practices or custom are not essential part of religion, he said that in the Hindu religion, women used to practice Sati till the law termed it as illegal and obsolete.

Rohatgi said the court should not close its door for adopting a reformist approach like even when there was no law on sexual harrassment at work place, it formulated guidelines or even suggest enacting of a law.

To this, the bench said then the government will say "Mr Reformist this is not your domain, you have to be within your limit".

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), said that the core issue was not triple talaq but patriarchy and all patriarchal societies discriminate.

"All patriarchal socities are partial. In Hinduism, a father can will away his property to anyone, but not in Muslim community. I can point out many such practices in the Hindu society. Is it better for a woman to apply for divorce and fight for 16 years and get nothing," Sibal said.

He said in some areas of Himachal Pradesh polygamy was practiced but it has been protected since it is a custom and only society will decide when to change it.

The Attorney General, at the start of the hearing, also cited laws of various Islamic countries which have adopted to repeal the practice of triple talaq as reformatory measures.

He said that except Saudi Arabia, several Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Sudan have repealed triple talaq.

Rohatgi said even Sri Lanka, a secular country, has done away with the practice of triple talaq and Iraq which has a majority of Shia population have matrimonial laws which do not subscribe to triple talaq.

"When theocratic states are moving towards reform, then why is a secular country like India still practicing these things," he said, citing judgements of Kerala, Gauhati, Madras and Delhi High Courts which have said triple talaq was untenable in law.

The attorney general said all these high courts have said that the pronouncement of talaq thrice shall be considered as one, so that there is an opportunity for reconcillation.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said that AIMPLB should apologise for justifying triple talaq by saying that men have greater strength to control their emotions.

At the outset, the apex court said it was keeping open for adjudication in future, the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' among Muslims, while the Centre insisted deliberations on these aspects as well.

The observation was made when Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' were also part of the order of a two-judge bench which had referred to the Constitutional bench the three issues, including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.

"The scope of reference had all the three issues, that is divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the twojudge bench," Rohatgi said.

The bench said "it may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future".

The significant observation was made when Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' were also part of the order of a two-judge bench, which had referred to the Constitution bench the three issues including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.

Today was the third day of the hearing on a clutch of petitions challenging triple talaq, polygamy and 'nikah halala' which is going on before a bench comprising members of different religious communities including Sikh, Christian, Parsee, Hindu and Muslim.

NEW DELHI: A new law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community would be brought, if all forms of divorce including triple talaq are struck down, the government today told the Supreme Court. The Centre, which also sought that the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' should not be excluded from the ongoing deliberations, got an assurance from the apex court that these aspects were open and would be dealt with later. The government termed all the three forms of divorce among the Muslim community - talaq-e-biddat, talaq hasan and talaq ahsan, as "unilateral" and "extra-judicial". The apex court bench said the government has to first pass the test of "essentiality" and prove that 'triple talaq' is not an essential part of Islam, as this will amount to "tinkering" with religion. A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar said "we are not only the guardian of the Constitution but also the guardian of minority rights" and will have to see if triple talaq formed a fundamental part of religion and pass the test of "essentiality" under Article 25. The bench, also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, asked if the court struck down all forms of talaq, then what options would a Muslim man be left with to come out of a marriage. "The government will not leave the people high and dry once the instant form of divorce (triple talaq) or all forms of talaq are struck down. We will come out with a law to regulate the marriage and divorce among Muslim community," the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Centre, said. He said the issues of Muslim marriage and divorce were separated from religion in Shariat Act of 1937 itself and have been codified as personal law under Section 2 of the Act. The apex court has to test them on the touch-stone of the fundamental rights of gender equality, justice, dignity, gender discrimination and human rights under constitutional provisions, including Articles 14, 15, 21 and 51A. "All personal laws must be in confirmity with the Constitution. Rights of marriage, divorce, property and succession has to be treated in the same class and has to be in conformity with the Constitution," Rohatgi said. The Attorney General also said what kind of religious practices are essential to a particular religion or faith was difficult to define for the court. But once such practices of marriage and divorce are separated from religion, there cannot be any immunity under Article 25 (freedom to practice any religion). He said if the practice of talaq was out of Article 25, then it has to be constitutionally moral, which means it has to be secular and non-discriminatory. "One half of a community in the country has to suffer inequality from their male counterpart. What may be permissible for society may not be constitutionally moral," he said. To this, the bench observed if the government wanted social welfare and reforms, why can't it bring laws to correct the wrong. "Yes, we can bring law. There is no law for past 60 years. It has not been done. But the court should first strike down these practices which are not in confirmity with the Constitution," he said. Rohatgi said when half the population of a particular community is not empowered, no equal opportunity is given, they are devoid of gender equality, then it does not pass the test of constitutional morality. He said even if triple talaq is considered as an essential part of religion and falls under Article 25, the practice still has to be constitutionally moral. "Even if talaq is considered under Article 25, it has to be related to the fundamental rights and should abide by the principles of gender equality, non-discrimination and justice," the AG said. The bench insisted that the government has to prove that this practice of triple talaq was not essential to Islam and only then can it delve further into other aspects. Rohatgi pointed out that it was not the apex court's job to interpret a religion and said "You cannot go into essential principle because it is not an ecclesiastical court" To buttress his argument that practices or custom are not essential part of religion, he said that in the Hindu religion, women used to practice Sati till the law termed it as illegal and obsolete. Rohatgi said the court should not close its door for adopting a reformist approach like even when there was no law on sexual harrassment at work place, it formulated guidelines or even suggest enacting of a law. To this, the bench said then the government will say "Mr Reformist this is not your domain, you have to be within your limit". Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), said that the core issue was not triple talaq but patriarchy and all patriarchal societies discriminate. "All patriarchal socities are partial. In Hinduism, a father can will away his property to anyone, but not in Muslim community. I can point out many such practices in the Hindu society. Is it better for a woman to apply for divorce and fight for 16 years and get nothing," Sibal said. He said in some areas of Himachal Pradesh polygamy was practiced but it has been protected since it is a custom and only society will decide when to change it. The Attorney General, at the start of the hearing, also cited laws of various Islamic countries which have adopted to repeal the practice of triple talaq as reformatory measures. He said that except Saudi Arabia, several Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Sudan have repealed triple talaq. Rohatgi said even Sri Lanka, a secular country, has done away with the practice of triple talaq and Iraq which has a majority of Shia population have matrimonial laws which do not subscribe to triple talaq. "When theocratic states are moving towards reform, then why is a secular country like India still practicing these things," he said, citing judgements of Kerala, Gauhati, Madras and Delhi High Courts which have said triple talaq was untenable in law. The attorney general said all these high courts have said that the pronouncement of talaq thrice shall be considered as one, so that there is an opportunity for reconcillation. Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said that AIMPLB should apologise for justifying triple talaq by saying that men have greater strength to control their emotions. At the outset, the apex court said it was keeping open for adjudication in future, the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' among Muslims, while the Centre insisted deliberations on these aspects as well. The observation was made when Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' were also part of the order of a two-judge bench which had referred to the Constitutional bench the three issues, including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims. "The scope of reference had all the three issues, that is divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the twojudge bench," Rohatgi said. The bench said "it may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future". The significant observation was made when Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' were also part of the order of a two-judge bench, which had referred to the Constitution bench the three issues including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims. Today was the third day of the hearing on a clutch of petitions challenging triple talaq, polygamy and 'nikah halala' which is going on before a bench comprising members of different religious communities including Sikh, Christian, Parsee, Hindu and Muslim.
Karamatullah K Ghori By

For Pakistan watchers, the nadir of its policy vis-a-vis its neighbours was reached earlier this week when Irans army chief, Gen. Mohammed Baqeri, publicly warned Islamabad that if it failed to hunt down anti-Iran terrorists in their Pakistani safe havens, his army was ready to go after them.

The Iranian warning came on the heels of a deadly foray by Pakistan-based anti-Iran terrorists into Iran last week, in which ten Iranian security personnel were murdered.

This wasnt the first time that the Pakistan-based murdererscalling themselves Jundallah (Army of God)had feasted on Iranian blood. Iranians have been in Jundallahs crosshairs for long. The Baloch outfit, professing blood identity with Iranians of Baloch descent, seeks to exact revenge for Irans alleged maltreatment of their minorities. It has regularly faulted Iran for discrimination and human rights violations against its non-Shia minorities, of which Balochis are one.

But this time around, the Iranians felt so rattled by the blood-spilling spree of these Pakistan-based terrorists that Irans Foreign Minister Javad Zarif rushed to Islamabad on May 3 where in addition to calling on PM Nawaz Sharif, he also met with the Pakistan army chief. The Pakistani Balochistan, sharing a long border with Iran, has long been under the eyes of Pakistans army, which is trying to put down a separatist insurgency, which Pakistan claims is being fuelled by India.

The saga of Kulbhushan Jadhavthe Indian RAW agent allegedly caught spying for India from his base in Chabahar, the Iranian port city within hailing distance of Pakistanhas also been a factor, lately, in Pakistans relations with Iran. Pakistans all-powerful military had the gall to point the finger at Iran. It claimed Tehran was allowing its territory to be used by spies of arch-enemy India and turning a blind eye to a master-sleuth like Jadhav.

A diplomatic disaster with Iran was avertedwith a lot of toil and finesse by the mandarins of the Pakistan Foreign Officelast year when the Jadhav story broke during Iranian President Hasan Rouhanis visit to Islamabad. The then Pakistani military chief Gen. Raheel Sharif had taken up issue with Rouhani for not keeping an eye on enemies of Pakistan operating from Iranian soil and Rouhani had to trash the generals nonsense in an angry rebuttal.

The same Raheel has just been anointed chief of an Islamic Army, a motley and yet-amorphous force of disparate Muslim states professing loyalty to Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is yet to throw its hat formally into this Saudi-inspired ring but has allowed its retired army ace to don the mantle of its leadershipa perplexing thing, no doubt, to most observers.

Foreign policy pundits and gurus not in awe of Nawaz and the Saudis bemoan Pakistans myopic policy of going out on a limb for the Saudis against an old and trusted neighbour like Iran. Its no secret that the Saudis, wagged by their Wahabi sectarian ideology of Islam, are out to corner the Shia Iran and obviously want to use Pakistan to pull their chestnut out of the fire. Its foolhardy of Pakistan, pundits bewail, to make an adversary of a neighbour like Iran for the sake of a combative Saudi Arabia which is exploiting the pro-Wahabi sentiments of a majority of Pakistans population.

The latest twist in the Jadhav spy saga is set to roil Pakistans already deeply-strained relations with India a notch further. To Islamabads chagrin, the International Court of Justice has just given a ruling in favour of India and stayed the death penalty awarded to Jadhav last month by a Pakistani military court.

The dipping curve in Pakistans not-too-happy-and-sanguine relations with Iran comes close on the heels of a rapidly worsening equation with Afghanistan.

For more than a week now, the PakistanAfghanistan border has been sealed by Islamabad, thus virtually suffocating a land-locked Afghanistan heavily dependent on its transit trade via Pakistan. This harsh, punitive action has been followed ostensibly to punish Afghanistan for unleashing military fire against the Pakistani census workers operating close to the Afghan border. The tit-for-tat action has led to casualties on both sides of the historic border between the two countries.

Pakistan blames Afghan President Ashraf Ghani of toeing the Indian line on policy with its neighbours. It accuses the Afghan leadership of ungratefulness and insensitivity to the past four decades of Pakistani sacrifices for the sake of their Afghan brethren. Pakistan, of course, has a point in being unhappy with the Afghan leadership after having fed and sheltered over 4 million Afghan refugees over the past 40 years. More than a million Afghan refugees are still partaking of Pakistani hospitality. So Pakistan feels it has moral justification on its side for faulting the Afghan leadership for letting New Delhi use them to bait Islamabad and stir trouble at a time when Pakistan would want the world to take notice of Indias punishing policy against the Muslim inhabitants of Kashmir.

To Pakistans utter annoyance and dismay, the Afghans have rekindled the issue of the Durand Line, the 19th century border drawn by the British colonialist power for its own interest. Its no coincidence that many of Pakistans own Pakhtoon tribes loathe the arbitrary colonial demarcation dividing millennia-old tribal and blood affinities.

But the bewilderment of jaded Pakistani pundits, like this scribe, is anchored on the pivotal issue of Pakistani leaders being inexplicably insensitive to the age-old dictum: You cant choose your neighbours; so you must learn to live with them in peace and harmony.

Karamatullah K Ghori

Former Pakistani diplomat

Email: K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

For Pakistan watchers, the nadir of its policy vis-a-vis its neighbours was reached earlier this week when Irans army chief, Gen. Mohammed Baqeri, publicly warned Islamabad that if it failed to hunt down anti-Iran terrorists in their Pakistani safe havens, his army was ready to go after them. The Iranian warning came on the heels of a deadly foray by Pakistan-based anti-Iran terrorists into Iran last week, in which ten Iranian security personnel were murdered. This wasnt the first time that the Pakistan-based murdererscalling themselves Jundallah (Army of God)had feasted on Iranian blood. Iranians have been in Jundallahs crosshairs for long. The Baloch outfit, professing blood identity with Iranians of Baloch descent, seeks to exact revenge for Irans alleged maltreatment of their minorities. It has regularly faulted Iran for discrimination and human rights violations against its non-Shia minorities, of which Balochis are one. But this time around, the Iranians felt so rattled by the blood-spilling spree of these Pakistan-based terrorists that Irans Foreign Minister Javad Zarif rushed to Islamabad on May 3 where in addition to calling on PM Nawaz Sharif, he also met with the Pakistan army chief. The Pakistani Balochistan, sharing a long border with Iran, has long been under the eyes of Pakistans army, which is trying to put down a separatist insurgency, which Pakistan claims is being fuelled by India. The saga of Kulbhushan Jadhavthe Indian RAW agent allegedly caught spying for India from his base in Chabahar, the Iranian port city within hailing distance of Pakistanhas also been a factor, lately, in Pakistans relations with Iran. Pakistans all-powerful military had the gall to point the finger at Iran. It claimed Tehran was allowing its territory to be used by spies of arch-enemy India and turning a blind eye to a master-sleuth like Jadhav. A diplomatic disaster with Iran was avertedwith a lot of toil and finesse by the mandarins of the Pakistan Foreign Officelast year when the Jadhav story broke during Iranian President Hasan Rouhanis visit to Islamabad. The then Pakistani military chief Gen. Raheel Sharif had taken up issue with Rouhani for not keeping an eye on enemies of Pakistan operating from Iranian soil and Rouhani had to trash the generals nonsense in an angry rebuttal. The same Raheel has just been anointed chief of an Islamic Army, a motley and yet-amorphous force of disparate Muslim states professing loyalty to Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is yet to throw its hat formally into this Saudi-inspired ring but has allowed its retired army ace to don the mantle of its leadershipa perplexing thing, no doubt, to most observers. Foreign policy pundits and gurus not in awe of Nawaz and the Saudis bemoan Pakistans myopic policy of going out on a limb for the Saudis against an old and trusted neighbour like Iran. Its no secret that the Saudis, wagged by their Wahabi sectarian ideology of Islam, are out to corner the Shia Iran and obviously want to use Pakistan to pull their chestnut out of the fire. Its foolhardy of Pakistan, pundits bewail, to make an adversary of a neighbour like Iran for the sake of a combative Saudi Arabia which is exploiting the pro-Wahabi sentiments of a majority of Pakistans population. The latest twist in the Jadhav spy saga is set to roil Pakistans already deeply-strained relations with India a notch further. To Islamabads chagrin, the International Court of Justice has just given a ruling in favour of India and stayed the death penalty awarded to Jadhav last month by a Pakistani military court. The dipping curve in Pakistans not-too-happy-and-sanguine relations with Iran comes close on the heels of a rapidly worsening equation with Afghanistan. For more than a week now, the PakistanAfghanistan border has been sealed by Islamabad, thus virtually suffocating a land-locked Afghanistan heavily dependent on its transit trade via Pakistan. This harsh, punitive action has been followed ostensibly to punish Afghanistan for unleashing military fire against the Pakistani census workers operating close to the Afghan border. The tit-for-tat action has led to casualties on both sides of the historic border between the two countries. Pakistan blames Afghan President Ashraf Ghani of toeing the Indian line on policy with its neighbours. It accuses the Afghan leadership of ungratefulness and insensitivity to the past four decades of Pakistani sacrifices for the sake of their Afghan brethren. Pakistan, of course, has a point in being unhappy with the Afghan leadership after having fed and sheltered over 4 million Afghan refugees over the past 40 years. More than a million Afghan refugees are still partaking of Pakistani hospitality. So Pakistan feels it has moral justification on its side for faulting the Afghan leadership for letting New Delhi use them to bait Islamabad and stir trouble at a time when Pakistan would want the world to take notice of Indias punishing policy against the Muslim inhabitants of Kashmir. To Pakistans utter annoyance and dismay, the Afghans have rekindled the issue of the Durand Line, the 19th century border drawn by the British colonialist power for its own interest. Its no coincidence that many of Pakistans own Pakhtoon tribes loathe the arbitrary colonial demarcation dividing millennia-old tribal and blood affinities. But the bewilderment of jaded Pakistani pundits, like this scribe, is anchored on the pivotal issue of Pakistani leaders being inexplicably insensitive to the age-old dictum: You cant choose your neighbours; so you must learn to live with them in peace and harmony. Karamatullah K Ghori Former Pakistani diplomat Email: K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
Ratan K Pani By

Express News Service

PATNAGARH: With no sign of any let-up in temperature, the struggle for water has only intensified in Balangir district. While water scarcity is not a new problem for the people of the area, what is worrying is failure of the State Government to mitigate their woes even after decades of suffering.

Normally, PHED supplies more than 32 lakh litres of water to 15 Wards under Patnagarh NAC drawn from intake well in rivers Subarnarekha and Mayabati on the outskirts of the town.

Instead of increasing the supply after temperature started rising, the supply has dipped to 11 lakh litres in the last one month.

Presently, the NAC is able to draw 8 lakh litres of water while the 206 stand posts in the town refuse to ooze water. Adding to their trouble, water is supplied once in three days for a brief period failing to meet the needs of the people.

The only relief is the presence of some water in natural sources which is attracting people for daily ablutions. But people fear that it may not last till monsoon arrives. Moreover, at the time of crisis,

Hirabandh pond, on which the town depended for their daily needs, has been dried up by the authorities concerned for renovation work.

On the other hand, the trickling flow of water from 338 tube-wells in the town has made it difficult to even collect a bucket of water. Though water is supplied through nine tankers by PHED, the authorities admit that it would not be possible to continue with the arrangement for long as the source from which water is drawn has begun to dry, said sources.

The situation in rural pockets is also getting worse. Although RWSS claims to have restored defunct tube-wells, depleting ground water has made restoration and repair meaningless.

The State Government had directed that tube-wells be repaired before the onset of summer, but the apathetic attitude of the authorities have left the people struggling for every drop of water.

Its raining fire in Western Odisha

SAMBALPUR/JHARSUGUDA: It rained fire across Western Odisha on Sunday as temperature shot up by a few degrees, throwing normal life out of gear across the region. While Sambalpur recorded 44.8 degree Celsius, the mercury in Balangir shot up to 45.2 degrees, surpassing Titlagarhs temperature of 45 degrees on the day.

The maximum temperature in Jharsuguda stood at 43.9 degrees but residents in the coal mining areas of Brajrajnagar experienced at least three degrees more due to the presence of mines, which radiate heat. Other mining areas of Belpahar, Bandhbahal and Banharpali town area also had to bear the extreme heat.

Roads wore a deserted look and due to scorching heat, shops and markets remained closed during most part of the day. Water shortage and power outages only added to the woes of the residents. Rivers Ib and Bheden are drying up while small water-bodies, tube-wells and hand pumps have stopped oozing water. Official sources said two persons have died due to sunstroke so far.

The maximum temperature at Hirakud stood at 44.1 degrees while it was 41 in Sundargarh and Sonepur districts.

Even Kalahandi recorded 43.5 degrees and the intense heat condition made life miserable. Meanwhile, the forecast of thunder squall along with hailstorm and rain in some areas of Boudh, Bargarh, Sonepur, Nuapada and Balangir has raised hopes of some decline in temperature in the next few days.

Sources drying up in Barpali

JHARSUGUDA: Its a daily struggle for a bucket of water for the villagers of Barpali in Chandinimal panchayat of Jharsuguda block. Despite being situated near river Vasundhara, the tiny village with a population of just about 1,100 has been facing acute potable water problem.

The villagers are dependent on only one tube-well whose water too is likely to dry up soon due to fall in groundwater level. Many villagers depend on a small well on Vasundhara river bank for their daily needs.

Chandimal Sarpanch Ritu Sah said the river was their lifeline, but digging of the river bed for sand has led to the decline in the flow of water.

That apart, industrialisation has added to the crisis. The water and sand needs of a power plant in Darlipali village of neighbouring Sundargarh district is met from river Vasundhara, villagers said.

Collector Bibhuti Bhusan Patnaik said action will be taken after getting an inquiry report from the BDO.

PATNAGARH: With no sign of any let-up in temperature, the struggle for water has only intensified in Balangir district. While water scarcity is not a new problem for the people of the area, what is worrying is failure of the State Government to mitigate their woes even after decades of suffering. Normally, PHED supplies more than 32 lakh litres of water to 15 Wards under Patnagarh NAC drawn from intake well in rivers Subarnarekha and Mayabati on the outskirts of the town. Instead of increasing the supply after temperature started rising, the supply has dipped to 11 lakh litres in the last one month. Presently, the NAC is able to draw 8 lakh litres of water while the 206 stand posts in the town refuse to ooze water. Adding to their trouble, water is supplied once in three days for a brief period failing to meet the needs of the people. The only relief is the presence of some water in natural sources which is attracting people for daily ablutions. But people fear that it may not last till monsoon arrives. Moreover, at the time of crisis, Hirabandh pond, on which the town depended for their daily needs, has been dried up by the authorities concerned for renovation work. On the other hand, the trickling flow of water from 338 tube-wells in the town has made it difficult to even collect a bucket of water. Though water is supplied through nine tankers by PHED, the authorities admit that it would not be possible to continue with the arrangement for long as the source from which water is drawn has begun to dry, said sources. The situation in rural pockets is also getting worse. Although RWSS claims to have restored defunct tube-wells, depleting ground water has made restoration and repair meaningless. The State Government had directed that tube-wells be repaired before the onset of summer, but the apathetic attitude of the authorities have left the people struggling for every drop of water. Its raining fire in Western Odisha SAMBALPUR/JHARSUGUDA: It rained fire across Western Odisha on Sunday as temperature shot up by a few degrees, throwing normal life out of gear across the region. While Sambalpur recorded 44.8 degree Celsius, the mercury in Balangir shot up to 45.2 degrees, surpassing Titlagarhs temperature of 45 degrees on the day. The maximum temperature in Jharsuguda stood at 43.9 degrees but residents in the coal mining areas of Brajrajnagar experienced at least three degrees more due to the presence of mines, which radiate heat. Other mining areas of Belpahar, Bandhbahal and Banharpali town area also had to bear the extreme heat. Roads wore a deserted look and due to scorching heat, shops and markets remained closed during most part of the day. Water shortage and power outages only added to the woes of the residents. Rivers Ib and Bheden are drying up while small water-bodies, tube-wells and hand pumps have stopped oozing water. Official sources said two persons have died due to sunstroke so far. The maximum temperature at Hirakud stood at 44.1 degrees while it was 41 in Sundargarh and Sonepur districts. Even Kalahandi recorded 43.5 degrees and the intense heat condition made life miserable. Meanwhile, the forecast of thunder squall along with hailstorm and rain in some areas of Boudh, Bargarh, Sonepur, Nuapada and Balangir has raised hopes of some decline in temperature in the next few days. Sources drying up in Barpali JHARSUGUDA: Its a daily struggle for a bucket of water for the villagers of Barpali in Chandinimal panchayat of Jharsuguda block. Despite being situated near river Vasundhara, the tiny village with a population of just about 1,100 has been facing acute potable water problem. The villagers are dependent on only one tube-well whose water too is likely to dry up soon due to fall in groundwater level. Many villagers depend on a small well on Vasundhara river bank for their daily needs. Chandimal Sarpanch Ritu Sah said the river was their lifeline, but digging of the river bed for sand has led to the decline in the flow of water. That apart, industrialisation has added to the crisis. The water and sand needs of a power plant in Darlipali village of neighbouring Sundargarh district is met from river Vasundhara, villagers said. Collector Bibhuti Bhusan Patnaik said action will be taken after getting an inquiry report from the BDO.
The remains of a girl who perished when the ferry Sewol sank in April 2014 were discovered on Saturday in the wreck of the salvaged ship.

The victim is believed to be Cho Eun-hwa, who was a junior at Danwon High School at the time of the accident. Search officials found her remains, including a tooth with a gold filling, on the fourth floor of the vessel, which was a part of the ship that had been allocated to girl students from the high school.

Articles of clothing apparently belonging to the students were also found at the site.
By Associated Press

PARIS: In ceremonies marked by youthful optimism and old-world Napoleonic pomp, Emmanuel Macron swept into office Sunday as France's new president pledging to fortify the European Union, redesign French politics and glue together his divided nation.

Macron's presidency began with a visit to troops wounded in overseas combat  a reminder of France's large global military presence and role in fighting extremists from Syria to Africa.

He's expected to name a prime minister imminently, and to show his commitment to reviving European unity. Macron takes his first presidential trip Monday to Berlin to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In a lofty but lucid inaugural speech, Macron vowed to lift France out of its sense of decline and lost purpose, and seize again its place in the world.

"The time has come for France to rise up to the occasion. The division and fractures across our society must be overcome ... because the world expects us to be strong, solid, clairvoyant."

He promised to take France's responsibilities to tackle today's crises  "the migration crisis, the climate challenge, authoritarian abuse, the excesses of capitalism in the world and of course terrorism. Nothing now strikes one and spares the other. We are all Interdependent. We are all neighbors."

The 39-year-old Macron is the youngest president in the country's history and the eighth president of France's Fifth Republic, which was created in 1958. A former economy minister with pro-business, pro-European views, Macron is the first French president who doesn't originate from the country's two mainstream parties.

After Macron was formally declared president at the Elysee Palace, 21 cannon shots were fired from across the Seine River at the Invalides monument, where Napoleon is entombed.

Macron later solemnly paid tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe, greeting veterans and military officers in formation beneath the imposing arch.

Macron takes charge of a nation that, when Britain leaves the European Union in 2019, will become the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Reviving support for European unity will be among his top priorities. France is a founding member of the 28-nation EU and its third-largest economy after Germany and Britain.

"We will need a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe because it's the instrument of our power and our sovereignty, I will work on that," he said Sunday.

Before the ceremony, he met for an hour with his predecessor, Francois Hollande, taking a last few minutes to discuss the most sensitive issues facing France, including the country's nuclear codes.

In a visibly moving moment for both, Macron accompanied Hollande to his car, shaking hands and applauding him along with the employees of the French presidency who had gathered in the palace's courtyard.

The two men had known each other well. Macron was Hollande's former adviser, then his economy minister from 2014 to 2016, when Macron quit the Socialist government to launch his own independent presidential bid.

About 300 guests, officials and family members gathered in the Elysee reception hall, including Macron's wife, Brigitte, wearing a lavender blue dress by French designer Nicolas Ghesquiere for Louis Vuitton.

Macron himself wore a dark suit from French brand Jonas and Cie, a tailor based in Paris. It cost 450 euros ($491), according to his team.

The new president arrived on the Champs-Elysees Avenue under a heavy rain  recalling Hollande's inauguration five years ago. But unlike his predecessor, Macron managed to avoid getting wet. The bad weather often associated with the former Socialist president has become a joke for the French.

After his time at the tomb, Macron went to shake hands with supporters along the Champs-Elysees, who were taking selfies and waving French tricolor flags, before coming back to the palace for a lunch with his family.

Earlier, he and France's new first lady briefly posed for photographers at the front porch of the palace after Hollande left. The couple will now live at the Elysee Palace.

Macron met with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo later Sunday and visited the Percy military hospital in the Paris suburb of Clamart to meet with two soldiers injured during French operations in Mali last year and one wounded in Afghanistan in 2010. The media wasn't allowed to cover the visit.

Macron has promised to reinvigorate French politics by bringing in new faces, and will form a government in the coming days.

His Republic on the Move movement  barely a year old  is hoping to elect a majority of lawmakers in next month's parliamentary elections so that he can pass his programs. It has announced an initial list of 428 candidates for the 577 seats up for grabs in France's lower house of parliament in the vote on June 11 and 18.

Many of the candidates are newcomers in politics. Their average age is 46, compared to 60 for the outgoing assembly. Half of them are women. Only 24 are lawmakers running for re-election.

Hollande, meanwhile, went on Twitter to describe the "terrible ordeals" that marked his five-year term, from deadly attacks to Greece's debt crisis. He defended his unpopular presidency in a series of tweets minutes after leaving the Elysee Palace.

Hollande noted his accomplishments in getting the Paris Agreement on climate change, legalizing gay marriage and doing "everything possible to ensure that Greece stays in Europe."

"We lived through crises but we held together. France remained France," he tweeted.

PARIS: In ceremonies marked by youthful optimism and old-world Napoleonic pomp, Emmanuel Macron swept into office Sunday as France's new president pledging to fortify the European Union, redesign French politics and glue together his divided nation. Macron's presidency began with a visit to troops wounded in overseas combat  a reminder of France's large global military presence and role in fighting extremists from Syria to Africa. He's expected to name a prime minister imminently, and to show his commitment to reviving European unity. Macron takes his first presidential trip Monday to Berlin to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel. In a lofty but lucid inaugural speech, Macron vowed to lift France out of its sense of decline and lost purpose, and seize again its place in the world. "The time has come for France to rise up to the occasion. The division and fractures across our society must be overcome ... because the world expects us to be strong, solid, clairvoyant." He promised to take France's responsibilities to tackle today's crises  "the migration crisis, the climate challenge, authoritarian abuse, the excesses of capitalism in the world and of course terrorism. Nothing now strikes one and spares the other. We are all Interdependent. We are all neighbors." The 39-year-old Macron is the youngest president in the country's history and the eighth president of France's Fifth Republic, which was created in 1958. A former economy minister with pro-business, pro-European views, Macron is the first French president who doesn't originate from the country's two mainstream parties. After Macron was formally declared president at the Elysee Palace, 21 cannon shots were fired from across the Seine River at the Invalides monument, where Napoleon is entombed. Macron later solemnly paid tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe, greeting veterans and military officers in formation beneath the imposing arch. Macron takes charge of a nation that, when Britain leaves the European Union in 2019, will become the EU's only member with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Reviving support for European unity will be among his top priorities. France is a founding member of the 28-nation EU and its third-largest economy after Germany and Britain. "We will need a more efficient Europe, a more democratic Europe, a more political Europe because it's the instrument of our power and our sovereignty, I will work on that," he said Sunday. Before the ceremony, he met for an hour with his predecessor, Francois Hollande, taking a last few minutes to discuss the most sensitive issues facing France, including the country's nuclear codes. In a visibly moving moment for both, Macron accompanied Hollande to his car, shaking hands and applauding him along with the employees of the French presidency who had gathered in the palace's courtyard. The two men had known each other well. Macron was Hollande's former adviser, then his economy minister from 2014 to 2016, when Macron quit the Socialist government to launch his own independent presidential bid. About 300 guests, officials and family members gathered in the Elysee reception hall, including Macron's wife, Brigitte, wearing a lavender blue dress by French designer Nicolas Ghesquiere for Louis Vuitton. Macron himself wore a dark suit from French brand Jonas and Cie, a tailor based in Paris. It cost 450 euros ($491), according to his team. The new president arrived on the Champs-Elysees Avenue under a heavy rain  recalling Hollande's inauguration five years ago. But unlike his predecessor, Macron managed to avoid getting wet. The bad weather often associated with the former Socialist president has become a joke for the French. After his time at the tomb, Macron went to shake hands with supporters along the Champs-Elysees, who were taking selfies and waving French tricolor flags, before coming back to the palace for a lunch with his family. Earlier, he and France's new first lady briefly posed for photographers at the front porch of the palace after Hollande left. The couple will now live at the Elysee Palace. Macron met with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo later Sunday and visited the Percy military hospital in the Paris suburb of Clamart to meet with two soldiers injured during French operations in Mali last year and one wounded in Afghanistan in 2010. The media wasn't allowed to cover the visit. Macron has promised to reinvigorate French politics by bringing in new faces, and will form a government in the coming days. His Republic on the Move movement  barely a year old  is hoping to elect a majority of lawmakers in next month's parliamentary elections so that he can pass his programs. It has announced an initial list of 428 candidates for the 577 seats up for grabs in France's lower house of parliament in the vote on June 11 and 18. Many of the candidates are newcomers in politics. Their average age is 46, compared to 60 for the outgoing assembly. Half of them are women. Only 24 are lawmakers running for re-election. Hollande, meanwhile, went on Twitter to describe the "terrible ordeals" that marked his five-year term, from deadly attacks to Greece's debt crisis. He defended his unpopular presidency in a series of tweets minutes after leaving the Elysee Palace. Hollande noted his accomplishments in getting the Paris Agreement on climate change, legalizing gay marriage and doing "everything possible to ensure that Greece stays in Europe." "We lived through crises but we held together. France remained France," he tweeted.
By Associated Press

BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives won a state election Sunday in their center-left rivals' traditional heartland, a stinging blow to the German leader's challenger in September's national vote.

The western state of North Rhine-Westphalia is Germany's most populous and has been led by the center-left Social Democrats for all but five years since 1966.

It is also the home state of Martin Schulz, the Social Democratic challenger seeking to deny Merkel a fourth term in the Sept. 24 national election.

Projections for ARD and ZDF public television, based on partial counting, showed Merkel's Christian Democratic Union beating the Social Democrats by 33 percent or more to around 31 percent. They gave the Greens, the junior coalition partners in the outgoing state government, only 6 percent.

Governor Hannelore Kraft's coalition with the Greens lost its majority in the state legislature. Conservative challenger Armin Laschet, a deputy leader of Merkel's party, was set to replace her.

"The CDU has won the heartland of the Social Democrats," said the conservatives' general secretary, Peter Tauber, calling it a "great day" for the party.

"This is a difficult day for the Social Democrats, a difficult day for me personally as well," Schulz, who wasn't on the ballot Sunday, told supporters in Berlin. "I come from the state in which we took a really stinging defeat today."

But he urged the party to concentrate now on the national election. He said that "we will sharpen our profile further  we have to as well."

"We will continue fighting; the result will come on Sept. 24," Schulz said.

The Social Democrats' national ratings soared after Schulz, a former European Parliament president, was nominated in January as Merkel's challenger. But defeats in two other state elections since then had already punctured the party's euphoria over Schulz's nomination, and its ratings have sagged.

The projected result in Sunday's election, the last before the national vote, undercut the party's previous post-World War II low in North Rhine-Westphalia of 32 percent. In the state's last election in 2012, the Social Democrats beat the CDU by 39.1 percent to 26.3 percent.

The projections put support for the pro-business Free Democrats, who are eyeing a return to the national parliament at September, at a strong 12 percent. The party  whose national leader, Christian Lindner, led its election effort in North Rhine-Westphalia  has tended to ally with Merkel's conservatives over recent decades.

The nationalist Alternative for Germany was seen winning 7.5 percent, giving it seats in its 13th state legislature, and the opposition Left Party around 5 percent.

A likely outcome appeared to be a "grand coalition" of the biggest parties under Laschet, though it was also possible that a slim center-right majority for the CDU and Free Democrats would emerge.

A "grand coalition" would mirror Merkel's national government, in which the Social Democrats are the junior partners.

After a blaze of publicity earlier this year, Schulz  who chose not to join the government when he returned to Germany in January  has struggled to maintain a high profile. He has focused on addressing perceived economic injustices, but critics have accused him of providing too little detail of his aims.

Kraft told ARD television she had "asked Martin Schulz to let national politics wait until the election was over."

Asked whether that was smart, she replied: "I said I would take responsibility for that, and I'm doing that this evening." She resigned as her party's regional leader.

Merkel's conservatives sought to portray Kraft's government as slack on security, and also assailed what they said is regional authorities' poor handling of education and infrastructure projects. The region of 17.9 million, nearly a quarter of Germany's population, includes Cologne, Duesseldorf and the Ruhr industrial region.

Merkel's party seemed keen not to appear too euphoric, insisting that regional issues played the key role.

Asked about Germany's government after September her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, said that "we always have to keep a cool head ... we shouldn't talk about coalitions before the harvest is in."

National polls show the Social Democrats trailing Merkel's conservatives by up to 10 points after drawing level earlier this year.

BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives won a state election Sunday in their center-left rivals' traditional heartland, a stinging blow to the German leader's challenger in September's national vote. The western state of North Rhine-Westphalia is Germany's most populous and has been led by the center-left Social Democrats for all but five years since 1966. It is also the home state of Martin Schulz, the Social Democratic challenger seeking to deny Merkel a fourth term in the Sept. 24 national election. Projections for ARD and ZDF public television, based on partial counting, showed Merkel's Christian Democratic Union beating the Social Democrats by 33 percent or more to around 31 percent. They gave the Greens, the junior coalition partners in the outgoing state government, only 6 percent. Governor Hannelore Kraft's coalition with the Greens lost its majority in the state legislature. Conservative challenger Armin Laschet, a deputy leader of Merkel's party, was set to replace her. "The CDU has won the heartland of the Social Democrats," said the conservatives' general secretary, Peter Tauber, calling it a "great day" for the party. "This is a difficult day for the Social Democrats, a difficult day for me personally as well," Schulz, who wasn't on the ballot Sunday, told supporters in Berlin. "I come from the state in which we took a really stinging defeat today." But he urged the party to concentrate now on the national election. He said that "we will sharpen our profile further  we have to as well." "We will continue fighting; the result will come on Sept. 24," Schulz said. The Social Democrats' national ratings soared after Schulz, a former European Parliament president, was nominated in January as Merkel's challenger. But defeats in two other state elections since then had already punctured the party's euphoria over Schulz's nomination, and its ratings have sagged. The projected result in Sunday's election, the last before the national vote, undercut the party's previous post-World War II low in North Rhine-Westphalia of 32 percent. In the state's last election in 2012, the Social Democrats beat the CDU by 39.1 percent to 26.3 percent. The projections put support for the pro-business Free Democrats, who are eyeing a return to the national parliament at September, at a strong 12 percent. The party  whose national leader, Christian Lindner, led its election effort in North Rhine-Westphalia  has tended to ally with Merkel's conservatives over recent decades. The nationalist Alternative for Germany was seen winning 7.5 percent, giving it seats in its 13th state legislature, and the opposition Left Party around 5 percent. A likely outcome appeared to be a "grand coalition" of the biggest parties under Laschet, though it was also possible that a slim center-right majority for the CDU and Free Democrats would emerge. A "grand coalition" would mirror Merkel's national government, in which the Social Democrats are the junior partners. After a blaze of publicity earlier this year, Schulz  who chose not to join the government when he returned to Germany in January  has struggled to maintain a high profile. He has focused on addressing perceived economic injustices, but critics have accused him of providing too little detail of his aims. Kraft told ARD television she had "asked Martin Schulz to let national politics wait until the election was over." Asked whether that was smart, she replied: "I said I would take responsibility for that, and I'm doing that this evening." She resigned as her party's regional leader. Merkel's conservatives sought to portray Kraft's government as slack on security, and also assailed what they said is regional authorities' poor handling of education and infrastructure projects. The region of 17.9 million, nearly a quarter of Germany's population, includes Cologne, Duesseldorf and the Ruhr industrial region. Merkel's party seemed keen not to appear too euphoric, insisting that regional issues played the key role. Asked about Germany's government after September her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, said that "we always have to keep a cool head ... we shouldn't talk about coalitions before the harvest is in." National polls show the Social Democrats trailing Merkel's conservatives by up to 10 points after drawing level earlier this year.
By Associated Press

WASHINGTON: Final score: Republicans 14, Barack Obama's last-minute regulations, one.

Congressional Republicans anxious to show voters they can get something done are hailing their reversal of more than a dozen Obama-era regulations on guns, the internet and the environment.

Over a few months, lawmakers used an obscure legislative rule to ram through changes that will have far-reaching implications for the coal industry, broadband customers, hunters and women seeking health care at Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

The deadline for scuttling the rules that Democrat Obama imposed during his final months in office was last Thursday. The 1996 Congressional Review Act had given Republicans the power to make the changes with a simple majority, within a set time.

While the rest of Washington focused on the furor over President Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, Republicans were celebrating their effort to reverse the rules, arguing that it would boost the economy and make it easier for businesses to operate.

"I am almost speechless when I think about the success," said Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

Senators pointed out that Congress had only once before used the legislative tools stemming from the Congressional Review Act to quash a regulation  until this year. In all, the GOP was able to reverse 14 regulations that had or will get Trump's signature.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, argued that overturning rules passed at the end of the Obama administration hardly constituted an agenda.

"The fact that they are bragging about these highlights how little else they have accomplished legislatively," Schumer said.

Republicans have a long way to go in their efforts to repeal and replace the health care law, cut taxes and boost infrastructure spending, all Trump priorities. Still, the GOP made clear soon after election victories in November that one of the first orders of business would be to go after Obama administration rules.

The effort has had strong backing from business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association and prominent anti-abortion groups  all key constituencies that generally back Republican candidates. The Chamber endorsed eight of the 14 repeal resolutions that Congress passed. One still awaits the president's signature before it can become law.

Republicans reversed Obama rules that enhanced protections for waterways near coal mines, required contractors to disclose violation of 14 federal labor laws for the previous three years when bidding on contracts and imposed tight restrictions on what broadband companies such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast could do with their customers' personal data.

Neil Bradley, a senior vice president at the Chamber, said that when it comes to slow economic growth, it's difficult to say, "This regulation is the culprit, but collectively, that's what happens."

"Together, they affected a pretty broad base of the business community," Bradley said.

Democrats overwhelmingly voted against most of the regulatory repeals. Republicans generally supported them, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote to allow states to deny federal family planning money to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. That reversed a rule Obama issued in his last weeks in office.

While many of the actions were designed to help businesses, others addressed social issues, including the repeal of a regulation designed to keep guns out of the hands of certain mentally disabled people. The NRA, as well as advocacy groups for the disabled and the ACLU, weighed in. They said it was discriminatory for the Social Security Administration to forward the names of certain beneficiaries to the instant background check system based on a mental disability and having a third party manage their benefits.

Democrats and environmentalists scored one victory last week.

Senate Republicans failed to overturn a rule that would have forced energy companies to capture more of the methane that's burned off or "flared" at drilling sites. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he considered the rule onerous but undoing it would have prevented the Bureau of Land Management from issuing a similar rule in the future.

McCain, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats on the vote.

GOP leaders opted not to bring a couple dozen other repeal resolutions up for a vote, including one that would have blocked a rule designed to protect funds on prepaid debit cards in case of fraud and unauthorized use.

Still, the 14 victories gave Republicans a chance to crow.

"In just a few short months, we have turned a significant corner from how things operated under the Obama administration," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "Instead of going around Congress to push through regulations, the president is working with us to ease the burden."

WASHINGTON: Final score: Republicans 14, Barack Obama's last-minute regulations, one. Congressional Republicans anxious to show voters they can get something done are hailing their reversal of more than a dozen Obama-era regulations on guns, the internet and the environment. Over a few months, lawmakers used an obscure legislative rule to ram through changes that will have far-reaching implications for the coal industry, broadband customers, hunters and women seeking health care at Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. The deadline for scuttling the rules that Democrat Obama imposed during his final months in office was last Thursday. The 1996 Congressional Review Act had given Republicans the power to make the changes with a simple majority, within a set time. While the rest of Washington focused on the furor over President Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, Republicans were celebrating their effort to reverse the rules, arguing that it would boost the economy and make it easier for businesses to operate. "I am almost speechless when I think about the success," said Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. Senators pointed out that Congress had only once before used the legislative tools stemming from the Congressional Review Act to quash a regulation  until this year. In all, the GOP was able to reverse 14 regulations that had or will get Trump's signature. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, argued that overturning rules passed at the end of the Obama administration hardly constituted an agenda. "The fact that they are bragging about these highlights how little else they have accomplished legislatively," Schumer said. Republicans have a long way to go in their efforts to repeal and replace the health care law, cut taxes and boost infrastructure spending, all Trump priorities. Still, the GOP made clear soon after election victories in November that one of the first orders of business would be to go after Obama administration rules. The effort has had strong backing from business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association and prominent anti-abortion groups  all key constituencies that generally back Republican candidates. The Chamber endorsed eight of the 14 repeal resolutions that Congress passed. One still awaits the president's signature before it can become law. Republicans reversed Obama rules that enhanced protections for waterways near coal mines, required contractors to disclose violation of 14 federal labor laws for the previous three years when bidding on contracts and imposed tight restrictions on what broadband companies such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast could do with their customers' personal data. Neil Bradley, a senior vice president at the Chamber, said that when it comes to slow economic growth, it's difficult to say, "This regulation is the culprit, but collectively, that's what happens." "Together, they affected a pretty broad base of the business community," Bradley said. Democrats overwhelmingly voted against most of the regulatory repeals. Republicans generally supported them, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote to allow states to deny federal family planning money to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. That reversed a rule Obama issued in his last weeks in office. While many of the actions were designed to help businesses, others addressed social issues, including the repeal of a regulation designed to keep guns out of the hands of certain mentally disabled people. The NRA, as well as advocacy groups for the disabled and the ACLU, weighed in. They said it was discriminatory for the Social Security Administration to forward the names of certain beneficiaries to the instant background check system based on a mental disability and having a third party manage their benefits. Democrats and environmentalists scored one victory last week. Senate Republicans failed to overturn a rule that would have forced energy companies to capture more of the methane that's burned off or "flared" at drilling sites. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he considered the rule onerous but undoing it would have prevented the Bureau of Land Management from issuing a similar rule in the future. McCain, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats on the vote. GOP leaders opted not to bring a couple dozen other repeal resolutions up for a vote, including one that would have blocked a rule designed to protect funds on prepaid debit cards in case of fraud and unauthorized use. Still, the 14 victories gave Republicans a chance to crow. "In just a few short months, we have turned a significant corner from how things operated under the Obama administration," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "Instead of going around Congress to push through regulations, the president is working with us to ease the burden."
By Associated Press

WASHINGTON: Supreme Court decisions in a half-dozen cases dealing with immigration over the next two months could reveal how the justices might evaluate Trump administration actions on immigration, especially stepped up deportations.

Some of those cases could be decided as early as Monday, when the court is meeting to issue opinions in cases that were argued over the past six months.

The outcomes could indicate whether the justices are retreating from long-standing decisions that give the president and Congress great discretion in dealing with immigration, and what role administration policies, including the proposed ban on visits to the United States by residents of six majority Muslim countries, may play.

President Donald Trump has pledged to increase deportations, particularly of people who have been convicted of crimes. But Supreme Court rulings in favor of the immigrants in the pending cases "could make his plans more difficult to realize," said Christopher Hajec, director of litigation for the Immigration Reform Litigation Institute. The group generally supports the new administration's immigration actions, including the travel ban.

For about a century, the court has held that, when dealing with immigration, the White House and Congress "can get away with things they ordinarily couldn't," said Temple University law professor Peter Spiro, an immigration law expert. "The court has explicitly said the Constitution applies differently in immigration than in other contexts."

Two of the immigration cases at the court offer the justices the possibility of cutting into the deference that courts have given the other branches of government in this area. One case is a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrants who've spent long periods in custody, including many who are legal residents of the United States or are seeking asylum. The court is weighing whether the detainees have a right to court hearings.

In the other case, the court has taken on a challenge to an unusual federal law that makes it easier for children born outside the United States to become citizens if their mother is an American and harder for them if their father is the U.S. citizen. Even after legislation in 1986, children of American fathers face higher hurdles claiming citizenship for themselves.

Both cases were argued before Trump became president in January, and the Obama administration opposed the detainees' claims and the citizenship challenge.

Even if the positions haven't changed, the context has, Spiro said.

"The court has got to be conscious of how these rulings are going to apply to Trump administration activity," Spiro said.

The decisions may directly affect people who are targeted by immigration authorities for quick deportation, or expedited removal, and immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and offered protection from deportation by the Obama administration, said Steven Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor.

"An open question in immigration law concerns how much authority the government has and how strong the Constitution is as a constraint," Vladeck said. For Trump, he said a major question is how much discretion the president has. "It's at the heart of a lot of what the Trump administration wants to do," Vladeck said.

Other cases involve discrete sections of the immigration law in which the decisions either will free or constrain immigration authorities from deporting people convicted of certain crimes.

In one case, a Mexican immigrant is facing deportation after he was convicted in California of having sex with someone under 18 and more than three years younger than he was. The charge covered a period before and after his 21st birthday when the woman, his girlfriend, was 16. That's a crime in California, but not in most of the rest of the country and the immigrant says it should not count as sexual abuse of a minor, which under immigration law would subject him to deportation.

In another case, an immigrant convicted of burglary is challenging a provision of immigration law that counts the crime as serious enough to warrant automatic deportation. Several federal appeals courts have sided with immigrants who have contended the provision is too vague.

Another issue before the court also involves sending people back to their native countries, in a case in which an immigrant received bad legal advice that led to a guilty plea and certain deportation.

Immigration almost certainly will continue to be a very active part of the Supreme Court's docket. The travel ban itself could be at the court in the coming months. On Monday, the federal appeals court in San Francisco is hearing the administration's appeal of an order striking down the ban. Appellate judges in Richmond, Virginia, heard a similar case last week.

WASHINGTON: Supreme Court decisions in a half-dozen cases dealing with immigration over the next two months could reveal how the justices might evaluate Trump administration actions on immigration, especially stepped up deportations. Some of those cases could be decided as early as Monday, when the court is meeting to issue opinions in cases that were argued over the past six months. The outcomes could indicate whether the justices are retreating from long-standing decisions that give the president and Congress great discretion in dealing with immigration, and what role administration policies, including the proposed ban on visits to the United States by residents of six majority Muslim countries, may play. President Donald Trump has pledged to increase deportations, particularly of people who have been convicted of crimes. But Supreme Court rulings in favor of the immigrants in the pending cases "could make his plans more difficult to realize," said Christopher Hajec, director of litigation for the Immigration Reform Litigation Institute. The group generally supports the new administration's immigration actions, including the travel ban. For about a century, the court has held that, when dealing with immigration, the White House and Congress "can get away with things they ordinarily couldn't," said Temple University law professor Peter Spiro, an immigration law expert. "The court has explicitly said the Constitution applies differently in immigration than in other contexts." Two of the immigration cases at the court offer the justices the possibility of cutting into the deference that courts have given the other branches of government in this area. One case is a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrants who've spent long periods in custody, including many who are legal residents of the United States or are seeking asylum. The court is weighing whether the detainees have a right to court hearings. In the other case, the court has taken on a challenge to an unusual federal law that makes it easier for children born outside the United States to become citizens if their mother is an American and harder for them if their father is the U.S. citizen. Even after legislation in 1986, children of American fathers face higher hurdles claiming citizenship for themselves. Both cases were argued before Trump became president in January, and the Obama administration opposed the detainees' claims and the citizenship challenge. Even if the positions haven't changed, the context has, Spiro said. "The court has got to be conscious of how these rulings are going to apply to Trump administration activity," Spiro said. The decisions may directly affect people who are targeted by immigration authorities for quick deportation, or expedited removal, and immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and offered protection from deportation by the Obama administration, said Steven Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. "An open question in immigration law concerns how much authority the government has and how strong the Constitution is as a constraint," Vladeck said. For Trump, he said a major question is how much discretion the president has. "It's at the heart of a lot of what the Trump administration wants to do," Vladeck said. Other cases involve discrete sections of the immigration law in which the decisions either will free or constrain immigration authorities from deporting people convicted of certain crimes. In one case, a Mexican immigrant is facing deportation after he was convicted in California of having sex with someone under 18 and more than three years younger than he was. The charge covered a period before and after his 21st birthday when the woman, his girlfriend, was 16. That's a crime in California, but not in most of the rest of the country and the immigrant says it should not count as sexual abuse of a minor, which under immigration law would subject him to deportation. In another case, an immigrant convicted of burglary is challenging a provision of immigration law that counts the crime as serious enough to warrant automatic deportation. Several federal appeals courts have sided with immigrants who have contended the provision is too vague. Another issue before the court also involves sending people back to their native countries, in a case in which an immigrant received bad legal advice that led to a guilty plea and certain deportation. Immigration almost certainly will continue to be a very active part of the Supreme Court's docket. The travel ban itself could be at the court in the coming months. On Monday, the federal appeals court in San Francisco is hearing the administration's appeal of an order striking down the ban. Appellate judges in Richmond, Virginia, heard a similar case last week.
By PTI

THE HAGUE: India today demanded the immediate suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was over.

India's forceful submission was made as the ICJ began hearing the case of the 46-year-old former Navy officer who was arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

Battling Pakistan in the UN's highest judicial body, India said the situation was grave and urgent, prompting it to approach the court "at such short notice".

"Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed," joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs Deepak Mittal told the court in opening remarks.

Eighteen years after the two neighbours last faced off at the ICJ -- when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft -- India took up the issue of consular rights to its national and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".

"The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention," lead attorney Harish Salve said.

The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhav's execution. While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), gets its turn later in the day.

Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, Salve said. "The graver the charges, the greater the need for continued adherence of the Vienna Convention. Jadhav has been in judicial custody without any communication with his family," he said.

The rights of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are sacrosanct, Salve said, citing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that recognises that no one can be arbitrarily deprived of their lives.

India had not been given the copy of the charges filed against Jadhav. "The need for a wholesome compliance is greater when charges are serious. We want appropriate legal representation for Kulbhushan Jadhav."

Not just had all requests for consular access fallen on "deaf ears", the trial was conducted without providing Jadhav his rights. Pakistan did not even respond to Jadhav's mother's pleas to see her son.

Human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan and the trial had been vitiated, India argued.

Though Pakistan says Jadhav has the right to appeal, two-star generals will hear his mercy plea, Salve stressed, questioning the impartiality of the process.

India wants ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Rejecting charges of espionage, it said the Pakistan Foreign Office had made "baseless, contrived and propagandadriven allegations" against Jadhav.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

THE HAGUE: India today demanded the immediate suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence, expressing fears that Pakistan could execute him even before the hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was over. India's forceful submission was made as the ICJ began hearing the case of the 46-year-old former Navy officer who was arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities. Battling Pakistan in the UN's highest judicial body, India said the situation was grave and urgent, prompting it to approach the court "at such short notice". "Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed," joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs Deepak Mittal told the court in opening remarks. Eighteen years after the two neighbours last faced off at the ICJ -- when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft -- India took up the issue of consular rights to its national and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence". "The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention," lead attorney Harish Salve said. The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhav's execution. While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), gets its turn later in the day. Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, Salve said. "The graver the charges, the greater the need for continued adherence of the Vienna Convention. Jadhav has been in judicial custody without any communication with his family," he said. The rights of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are sacrosanct, Salve said, citing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that recognises that no one can be arbitrarily deprived of their lives. India had not been given the copy of the charges filed against Jadhav. "The need for a wholesome compliance is greater when charges are serious. We want appropriate legal representation for Kulbhushan Jadhav." Not just had all requests for consular access fallen on "deaf ears", the trial was conducted without providing Jadhav his rights. Pakistan did not even respond to Jadhav's mother's pleas to see her son. Human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan and the trial had been vitiated, India argued. Though Pakistan says Jadhav has the right to appeal, two-star generals will hear his mercy plea, Salve stressed, questioning the impartiality of the process. India wants ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav. Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life. India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government. Rejecting charges of espionage, it said the Pakistan Foreign Office had made "baseless, contrived and propagandadriven allegations" against Jadhav. Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.
By Associated Press

WASHINGTON: American democracy is "under assault" on separate fronts from President Donald Trump and Russia, the former U.S. intelligence chief warned Sunday, expressing dismay over the abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey amid a probe into Moscow's meddling in U.S. elections and possible ties with the Trump campaign.

As Trump works to fast-track Comey's successor, lawmakers from both parties urged him to steer clear of any politicians for the job and say he must "clean up the mess that he mostly created."

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," said James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence. "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When he was asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper said, "Exactly."

Clapper spoke following Trump's sudden firing of Comey last week, which drew sharp criticism because it came amid the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Clapper said America's founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding."

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. "The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump's actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because he may have "tapes" of their conversations. The lawmakers called for a new FBI director without any political background and said Trump would need to hand over to Congress any taped conversations with Comey, if they exist.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset." He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration by Trump, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, explaining that "these are not normal circumstances."

Rogers, an ex-FBI agent and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has drawn the backing of the FBI Agents Association. Cornyn is the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

"It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1," said Graham, R-S.C.

"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," he said, adding, "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all ... but we don't know all the evidence yet."

Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland  the federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court last year by President Barack Obama. Lee said he was "absolutely serious about it."

A former top aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, said McConnell is interested in the suggestion. "I think the Senate majority leader thinks that's a fantastic idea," Holmes said. Garland never got a hearing due to Republican obstruction, and the high court vacancy was filled last month by Neil Gorsuch.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone "not of partisan background" with "great experience" and "courage." Declining comment on a Garland nomination, Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor. Under Senate rules, Republicans could still confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats' 48.

Calling Trump's remarks about possible taped conversations "outrageous," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would "absolutely" subpoena the tapes.

"We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear," Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee.

Less than a week after Trump fired Comey, the administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to be FBI director, and Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday on his first overseas trip as president.

Trump abruptly fired Comey on Tuesday and later said Comey was a "showboat" and "grandstander" who was not doing a good job. Trump said in an interview with NBC that the Russia investigation factored into his decision to fire Comey.

The FBI director serves a 10-year term but can be replaced by the president.

So far 14 people have emerged as candidates. Eight met at the Justice Department on Saturday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein:

Alice Fisher, a high-ranking Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBI's office in Richmond, Virginia.

Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director.

Michael J. Garcia, a former prosecutor and associate judge on New York's highest court.

Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general.

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a Bush appointee who struck down the centerpiece of the Obama administration's health care law in 2010.

Frances Townsend, a former Bush homeland security and counterterrorism adviser.

Rogers. The FBI Agents Association says it believes his diverse background makes him the best choice.

Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNN's "State of the Union"; Graham spoke on NBC's "Meet the Press"; Haley and Warner appeared on ABC's "This Week" and Warner also spoke on "Fox News Sunday" along with Lee and Holmes.

WASHINGTON: American democracy is "under assault" on separate fronts from President Donald Trump and Russia, the former U.S. intelligence chief warned Sunday, expressing dismay over the abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey amid a probe into Moscow's meddling in U.S. elections and possible ties with the Trump campaign. As Trump works to fast-track Comey's successor, lawmakers from both parties urged him to steer clear of any politicians for the job and say he must "clean up the mess that he mostly created." "I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," said James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence. "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally." When he was asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper said, "Exactly." Clapper spoke following Trump's sudden firing of Comey last week, which drew sharp criticism because it came amid the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Clapper said America's founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding." The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. "The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said. Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump's actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because he may have "tapes" of their conversations. The lawmakers called for a new FBI director without any political background and said Trump would need to hand over to Congress any taped conversations with Comey, if they exist. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset." He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration by Trump, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, explaining that "these are not normal circumstances." Rogers, an ex-FBI agent and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has drawn the backing of the FBI Agents Association. Cornyn is the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. "It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1," said Graham, R-S.C. "The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," he said, adding, "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all ... but we don't know all the evidence yet." Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland  the federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court last year by President Barack Obama. Lee said he was "absolutely serious about it." A former top aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, said McConnell is interested in the suggestion. "I think the Senate majority leader thinks that's a fantastic idea," Holmes said. Garland never got a hearing due to Republican obstruction, and the high court vacancy was filled last month by Neil Gorsuch. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone "not of partisan background" with "great experience" and "courage." Declining comment on a Garland nomination, Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor. Under Senate rules, Republicans could still confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats' 48. Calling Trump's remarks about possible taped conversations "outrageous," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would "absolutely" subpoena the tapes. "We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear," Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee. Less than a week after Trump fired Comey, the administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to be FBI director, and Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday on his first overseas trip as president. Trump abruptly fired Comey on Tuesday and later said Comey was a "showboat" and "grandstander" who was not doing a good job. Trump said in an interview with NBC that the Russia investigation factored into his decision to fire Comey. The FBI director serves a 10-year term but can be replaced by the president. So far 14 people have emerged as candidates. Eight met at the Justice Department on Saturday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein: Alice Fisher, a high-ranking Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration. Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBI's office in Richmond, Virginia. Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director. Michael J. Garcia, a former prosecutor and associate judge on New York's highest court. Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general. U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a Bush appointee who struck down the centerpiece of the Obama administration's health care law in 2010. Frances Townsend, a former Bush homeland security and counterterrorism adviser. Rogers. The FBI Agents Association says it believes his diverse background makes him the best choice. Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNN's "State of the Union"; Graham spoke on NBC's "Meet the Press"; Haley and Warner appeared on ABC's "This Week" and Warner also spoke on "Fox News Sunday" along with Lee and Holmes.
By Associated Press

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA: North Korea said Monday the missile it launched over the weekend was a new type of "medium long-range" ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead. A jubilant leader Kim Jong Un promised more nuclear and missile tests and warned that North Korean weapons could strike the U.S. mainland and Pacific holdings.

North Korean propaganda must be considered with wariness  Pyongyang has threatened for decades to reduce Seoul to a "sea of fire," for instance  but Monday's claim, if confirmed, would mark another big advance toward the North's goal of fielding a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Some experts, including officials in Tokyo, estimate that Sunday's launch successfully tested a new type of missile in Pyongyang's arsenal.

The test is also an immediate challenge to South Korea's new leader, Moon Jae-in, a liberal elected last week who expressed a desire to reach out to North Korea. Pyongyang's aggressive push to boost its weapons program also makes it one of the Trump administration's most urgent foreign policy worries, though Washington has struggled to settle on a policy.

WATCH VIDEO:

North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket," and said the "Hwasong-12" was "capable of carrying a large, heavy nuclear warhead." Kim Jong Un witnessed the test and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," according to KCNA.

The rocket, "newly designed in a Korean-style," flew 787 kilometers (490 miles) and reached a maximum altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers (1,310 miles), the North said, and "verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation and accurate performance of detonation system."

South Korea's Defense Ministry said more analysis is needed to verify the North's claim on the rocket's technological features. Spokesman Moon Sang Gyun said it's still unlikely that North Korea has re-entry technology, which would return a warhead safely back into the atmosphere.

Japanese officials said Sunday the missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan.

North Korea is not thought to be able yet to make a nuclear warhead small enough to mount on a long-range missile, though some outside analysts think they can arm shorter range missiles with warheads; each new nuclear and longer-range missile test is part of the North's attempt to build a nuclear-tipped long-range missile.

Kim said the North would stage more nuclear and missile tests in order to perfect nuclear bombs needed to deal with U.S. "nuclear blackmail."

State media paraphrased Kim as saying that "the most perfect weapon systems in the world will never become the eternal exclusive property of the U.S., ... strongly warning the U.S. should not ... disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in (North Korea's) sighting range for strike."

The launch complicates the new South Korean president's plan to talk to the North, and came as U.S., Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.

"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan said. "The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."

Moon, South Korea's first liberal leader in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office last week that he'd be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right.

The U.N. Security Council will hold closed consultations about the launch on Tuesday afternoon, according to the U.N. Mission for Uruguay, which holds the council presidency this month.

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said on ABC television that the United States has been working well with China, Pyongyang's closest ally, and she raised the possibility of new sanctions against North Korea, including on oil imports.

The Security Council has adopted six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions against North Korea.

President Donald Trump's administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable, but it has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

While Trump has said he'd be "honored" to talk with leader Kim Jong Un under favorable conditions, Haley seemed to rule out the possibility. "Having a missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, because he's absolutely not going to do it," she told ABC.

The U.S. Pacific Command said the flight of Sunday's test "is not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile," a technology the North is believed to have tested clandestinely by launching rockets to put satellites in orbit.

David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the missile could have a range of 4,500 kilometers (about 2,800 miles) if flown on a standard, instead of a lofted, trajectory  considerably longer than Pyongyang's current missiles. He said Sunday's launch  the seventh such firing by North Korea this year  may have been of a new mobile, two-stage liquid-fueled missile North Korea displayed in a huge April 15 military parade.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters that the launch was "absolutely unacceptable" and that Japan would respond resolutely.

The White House took note of the missile landing close to Russia's Pacific coast and said in a statement that North Korea has been "a flagrant menace for far too long."

Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni said the G-7 summit his country is hosting later this month would discuss how to deal with the risk North Korea's missile launchings pose to global security.

"It's a serious problem for global stability and security, and I'm convinced that the upcoming G-7, in friendship, will contribute to resolving this issue," he said in Beijing.

The launch came as troops from the U.S., Japan and two European nations gather near Guam for drills that are partly a message to North Korea. The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korean navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula, according to Seoul's Defense Ministry.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA: North Korea said Monday the missile it launched over the weekend was a new type of "medium long-range" ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead. A jubilant leader Kim Jong Un promised more nuclear and missile tests and warned that North Korean weapons could strike the U.S. mainland and Pacific holdings. North Korean propaganda must be considered with wariness  Pyongyang has threatened for decades to reduce Seoul to a "sea of fire," for instance  but Monday's claim, if confirmed, would mark another big advance toward the North's goal of fielding a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Some experts, including officials in Tokyo, estimate that Sunday's launch successfully tested a new type of missile in Pyongyang's arsenal. The test is also an immediate challenge to South Korea's new leader, Moon Jae-in, a liberal elected last week who expressed a desire to reach out to North Korea. Pyongyang's aggressive push to boost its weapons program also makes it one of the Trump administration's most urgent foreign policy worries, though Washington has struggled to settle on a policy. WATCH VIDEO: window.__ventunoplayer = window.__ventunoplayer||[]; window.__ventunoplayer.push({video_key: 'OTM1MDk0fHw4fHw2fHwxLDIsMQ==', holder_id: 'vt-video-player', player_type: 'vp', width:'100%', ratio:'4:3'}); North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket," and said the "Hwasong-12" was "capable of carrying a large, heavy nuclear warhead." Kim Jong Un witnessed the test and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," according to KCNA. The rocket, "newly designed in a Korean-style," flew 787 kilometers (490 miles) and reached a maximum altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers (1,310 miles), the North said, and "verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation and accurate performance of detonation system." South Korea's Defense Ministry said more analysis is needed to verify the North's claim on the rocket's technological features. Spokesman Moon Sang Gyun said it's still unlikely that North Korea has re-entry technology, which would return a warhead safely back into the atmosphere. Japanese officials said Sunday the missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan. North Korea is not thought to be able yet to make a nuclear warhead small enough to mount on a long-range missile, though some outside analysts think they can arm shorter range missiles with warheads; each new nuclear and longer-range missile test is part of the North's attempt to build a nuclear-tipped long-range missile. Kim said the North would stage more nuclear and missile tests in order to perfect nuclear bombs needed to deal with U.S. "nuclear blackmail." State media paraphrased Kim as saying that "the most perfect weapon systems in the world will never become the eternal exclusive property of the U.S., ... strongly warning the U.S. should not ... disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in (North Korea's) sighting range for strike." The launch complicates the new South Korean president's plan to talk to the North, and came as U.S., Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific. "The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan said. "The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating." Moon, South Korea's first liberal leader in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office last week that he'd be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right. The U.N. Security Council will hold closed consultations about the launch on Tuesday afternoon, according to the U.N. Mission for Uruguay, which holds the council presidency this month. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said on ABC television that the United States has been working well with China, Pyongyang's closest ally, and she raised the possibility of new sanctions against North Korea, including on oil imports. The Security Council has adopted six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions against North Korea. President Donald Trump's administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable, but it has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy. While Trump has said he'd be "honored" to talk with leader Kim Jong Un under favorable conditions, Haley seemed to rule out the possibility. "Having a missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, because he's absolutely not going to do it," she told ABC. The U.S. Pacific Command said the flight of Sunday's test "is not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile," a technology the North is believed to have tested clandestinely by launching rockets to put satellites in orbit. David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the missile could have a range of 4,500 kilometers (about 2,800 miles) if flown on a standard, instead of a lofted, trajectory  considerably longer than Pyongyang's current missiles. He said Sunday's launch  the seventh such firing by North Korea this year  may have been of a new mobile, two-stage liquid-fueled missile North Korea displayed in a huge April 15 military parade. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters that the launch was "absolutely unacceptable" and that Japan would respond resolutely. The White House took note of the missile landing close to Russia's Pacific coast and said in a statement that North Korea has been "a flagrant menace for far too long." Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni said the G-7 summit his country is hosting later this month would discuss how to deal with the risk North Korea's missile launchings pose to global security. "It's a serious problem for global stability and security, and I'm convinced that the upcoming G-7, in friendship, will contribute to resolving this issue," he said in Beijing. The launch came as troops from the U.S., Japan and two European nations gather near Guam for drills that are partly a message to North Korea. The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft supercarrier, is also engaging with South Korean navy ships in waters off the Korean Peninsula, according to Seoul's Defense Ministry.
By PTI

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka has blamed the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora for backing the genocide charge against the government as the country prepares to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the end of the three-decade long civil war.

On May 12, the Tamil nationalists started a week long commemoration of what they termed the genocide of Tamils.

Northern Provincial Council members held events in parts of the North to remember the victims of the bitter conflict by lighting oil lamps.

"We want to commemorate the genocide of over 100,000 Tamils in 2009," MK Shivajilingam a northern provincial councilor and a hardline Tamil representative had said.

"We need an international investigation into genocide," he said.

Meanwhile, Deputy Defence Minister Ruwan Wijewardene dismissed the genocide charge as an accusation by Shivajilingam at the behest of the pro-LTTE diaspora.

He is seeking support from the diaspora to carry out false propaganda, Wijewardene said adding that government troops had not carried out any genocide of Tamils.

"Shivajilingam must be glad the government troops have been able to free the Tamils from clutches of terrorism," Wijewardena said.

Both Sri Lankan troops and the LTTE were accused of grave human rights abuses during the final phase of the conflict which ended in May 2009.

The UN Human Rights Council which passed three successive resolutions on the need to investigate war crimes has prescribed an international hybrid court.

Sri Lankan is averse to allow an international probe citing the lack of constitutional provisions for foreign judges to operate in the country.

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka has blamed the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora for backing the genocide charge against the government as the country prepares to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the end of the three-decade long civil war. On May 12, the Tamil nationalists started a week long commemoration of what they termed the genocide of Tamils. Northern Provincial Council members held events in parts of the North to remember the victims of the bitter conflict by lighting oil lamps. "We want to commemorate the genocide of over 100,000 Tamils in 2009," MK Shivajilingam a northern provincial councilor and a hardline Tamil representative had said. "We need an international investigation into genocide," he said. Meanwhile, Deputy Defence Minister Ruwan Wijewardene dismissed the genocide charge as an accusation by Shivajilingam at the behest of the pro-LTTE diaspora. He is seeking support from the diaspora to carry out false propaganda, Wijewardene said adding that government troops had not carried out any genocide of Tamils. "Shivajilingam must be glad the government troops have been able to free the Tamils from clutches of terrorism," Wijewardena said. Both Sri Lankan troops and the LTTE were accused of grave human rights abuses during the final phase of the conflict which ended in May 2009. The UN Human Rights Council which passed three successive resolutions on the need to investigate war crimes has prescribed an international hybrid court. Sri Lankan is averse to allow an international probe citing the lack of constitutional provisions for foreign judges to operate in the country.
By PTI

NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump is "CEO of the country, he can fire anyone he wants", America's envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said, while defending him for firing former FBI director James Comey.

Haley said she believed that the criticism of Trump stems from discomfort with his propensity to act on his decisions.

"The president is the CEO of the country," Indian-origin Haley told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" yesterday. "He can hire and fire anyone he wants."

She was responding to a question if she found herself having to explain to foreign diplomats Trump's domestic policy decisions.

"I think what you can see is that this is a president of action," she said of Trump. "The reason people are uncomfortable is because he acts."

Asked whether the president sought a pledge of loyalty from her, Haley replied, "No".

At the same time, she said that during her tenure as South Carolina's governor demonstrations of "loyalty and trust" were important to her.

Regarding the president's tweet this week warning the fired FBI director that he better hope there are no "tapes" of their private conversations, Haley seemed unconcerned by the possibility that the president was taping conversations.

"I assume I'm being taped everywhere," she said.

Haley also addressed a range of other topics, including North Korea's latest missile launch Saturday night.

She said there is a growing international consensus to impose further sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear programme and that the US will "tighten the screws" on North Korean President Kim Jong Un's government.

Trump has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Kim Jong Un, but Haley said such a meeting would only happen if North Korea meets certain conditions.

"A missile test is not the way to sit down with the president," Haley said.

On May 10, Trump fired 56-year-old Comey, abruptly removing the top sleuth overseeing a criminal probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.

NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump is "CEO of the country, he can fire anyone he wants", America's envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has said, while defending him for firing former FBI director James Comey. Haley said she believed that the criticism of Trump stems from discomfort with his propensity to act on his decisions. "The president is the CEO of the country," Indian-origin Haley told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" yesterday. "He can hire and fire anyone he wants." She was responding to a question if she found herself having to explain to foreign diplomats Trump's domestic policy decisions. "I think what you can see is that this is a president of action," she said of Trump. "The reason people are uncomfortable is because he acts." Asked whether the president sought a pledge of loyalty from her, Haley replied, "No". At the same time, she said that during her tenure as South Carolina's governor demonstrations of "loyalty and trust" were important to her. Regarding the president's tweet this week warning the fired FBI director that he better hope there are no "tapes" of their private conversations, Haley seemed unconcerned by the possibility that the president was taping conversations. "I assume I'm being taped everywhere," she said. Haley also addressed a range of other topics, including North Korea's latest missile launch Saturday night. She said there is a growing international consensus to impose further sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear programme and that the US will "tighten the screws" on North Korean President Kim Jong Un's government. Trump has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Kim Jong Un, but Haley said such a meeting would only happen if North Korea meets certain conditions. "A missile test is not the way to sit down with the president," Haley said. On May 10, Trump fired 56-year-old Comey, abruptly removing the top sleuth overseeing a criminal probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.
By AFP

LONDON: The world's biggest ransomware attack levelled off on Monday after wreaking havoc in 150 countries, but Russian President Vladimir Putin called it payback for the US intelligence services.

Microsoft's president and chief legal officer Brad Smith has said the US National Security Agency developed the original code used in the attack, which later leaked in a document dump.

"Microsoft's leadership stated this directly, they said the source of the virus was the special services of the United States," Putin said on the sidelines of a summit in Beijing.

"A genie let out of a bottle of this kind, especially created by secret services, can then cause damage to its authors and creators."

Russia has recently been accused of cyber meddling in several countries, but Putin said they had nothing to do with the attack, which hit hundreds of thousands of computers.

"A protection system... needs to be worked out," he said.

Smith earlier said he hoped the attacks would serve as "a wake-up call", warning governments against stockpiling code that could be misused if it fell into the wrong hands.

And vulnerabilities should be pointed out to manufacturers, he said.

"An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen," Smith wrote.

There had been concern that Monday's start of the working week would see an upsurge in attacks but the number of incidents reported levelled off.

The cross-border police agency Europol said the situation was "stable", after attacks that struck computers in British hospital wards, European car factories and Russian banks.

"The number of victims appears not to have gone up," a senior spokesman for Europol, Jan Op Gen Oorth, told AFP.

But according to Michel Van Den Berghe, director of telecom group Orange's cyber security arm, a "second wave" is to be expected.

"Loads of people will use the original to generate variations... to recreate the panic and try to get some money for themselves," he said.

Telecoms and carmaking hit

The indiscriminate attack was unleashed Friday, striking hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide by exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

US package delivery giant FedEx, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network were among those hit. The attackers demanded money to unblock their computers.

In China, "hundreds of thousands" of computers were affected, including petrol stations, cash machines and universities, according to Qihoo 360, one of the country's largest providers of antivirus software.

Russia said its banking and railway systems were hit.

A fifth of regional hospital associations in Britain's National Health Service were affected and several still had to cancel appointments on Monday.

French carmaker Renault shut its Douai plant -- one of its biggest sites, employing 5,500 people -- on Monday as systems were upgraded.

'Ooops' message, $300 ransom

The attack blocks computers and puts up images on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the locked files will be deleted, according to the screen message.

Bitcoin, the world's most-used virtual currency, allows anonymous transactions via heavily encrypted codes.

Experts and governments alike warn against ceding to the demands and few victims so far had been paying up.

Security firm Digital Shadows said on Sunday that transactions totalling $32,000 had taken place through Bitcoin addresses used by the ransomware.

A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April, claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, according to researchers at the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.

The attack is unique, according to Europol, because it combines ransomware with a worm function, meaning once one machine is infected, the entire internal network is scanned and other vulnerable machines are infected.

'Significant' political fallout

Although the economic fallout is still unknown, the political fallout "will be significant" according to the Eurasia consultancy.

As well as Russia, China and India have blamed the US government for developing the original code.

It also predicted a review in the United States about when to inform software vendors of vulnerabilities in their systems and increased funding to ensure timely patches to protect computer systems.

LONDON: The world's biggest ransomware attack levelled off on Monday after wreaking havoc in 150 countries, but Russian President Vladimir Putin called it payback for the US intelligence services. Microsoft's president and chief legal officer Brad Smith has said the US National Security Agency developed the original code used in the attack, which later leaked in a document dump. "Microsoft's leadership stated this directly, they said the source of the virus was the special services of the United States," Putin said on the sidelines of a summit in Beijing. "A genie let out of a bottle of this kind, especially created by secret services, can then cause damage to its authors and creators." Russia has recently been accused of cyber meddling in several countries, but Putin said they had nothing to do with the attack, which hit hundreds of thousands of computers. "A protection system... needs to be worked out," he said. Smith earlier said he hoped the attacks would serve as "a wake-up call", warning governments against stockpiling code that could be misused if it fell into the wrong hands. And vulnerabilities should be pointed out to manufacturers, he said. "An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen," Smith wrote. There had been concern that Monday's start of the working week would see an upsurge in attacks but the number of incidents reported levelled off. The cross-border police agency Europol said the situation was "stable", after attacks that struck computers in British hospital wards, European car factories and Russian banks. "The number of victims appears not to have gone up," a senior spokesman for Europol, Jan Op Gen Oorth, told AFP. But according to Michel Van Den Berghe, director of telecom group Orange's cyber security arm, a "second wave" is to be expected. "Loads of people will use the original to generate variations... to recreate the panic and try to get some money for themselves," he said. Telecoms and carmaking hit The indiscriminate attack was unleashed Friday, striking hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide by exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems. US package delivery giant FedEx, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network were among those hit. The attackers demanded money to unblock their computers. In China, "hundreds of thousands" of computers were affected, including petrol stations, cash machines and universities, according to Qihoo 360, one of the country's largest providers of antivirus software. Russia said its banking and railway systems were hit. A fifth of regional hospital associations in Britain's National Health Service were affected and several still had to cancel appointments on Monday. French carmaker Renault shut its Douai plant -- one of its biggest sites, employing 5,500 people -- on Monday as systems were upgraded. 'Ooops' message, $300 ransom The attack blocks computers and puts up images on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!" Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the locked files will be deleted, according to the screen message. Bitcoin, the world's most-used virtual currency, allows anonymous transactions via heavily encrypted codes. Experts and governments alike warn against ceding to the demands and few victims so far had been paying up. Security firm Digital Shadows said on Sunday that transactions totalling $32,000 had taken place through Bitcoin addresses used by the ransomware. A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April, claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, according to researchers at the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab. The attack is unique, according to Europol, because it combines ransomware with a worm function, meaning once one machine is infected, the entire internal network is scanned and other vulnerable machines are infected. 'Significant' political fallout Although the economic fallout is still unknown, the political fallout "will be significant" according to the Eurasia consultancy. As well as Russia, China and India have blamed the US government for developing the original code. It also predicted a review in the United States about when to inform software vendors of vulnerabilities in their systems and increased funding to ensure timely patches to protect computer systems.
The Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade in a report earlier this month said Chinese companies are catching up with their Korean rivals in terms of quality and technology.

Korea's steel, petrochemical and smartphone industries are expected to maintain a competitive edge over China for only around five more years, studies suggest.

China has already overtaken Korea in some industries. Some data suggest China is now 10 percent ahead of Korea in non-memory semiconductor technology, which accounts for 75 percent of the global chip market.

According to the Korea International Trade Association, China ranked second in a quarter of the 68 products where Korea leads the world as of 2015. Ahn Hyun-ho at Samjung KPMG said, "At this rate China will overtake us in all areas except memory chips, so we urgently need to come up with ways of preventing that."

In major markets around the world China no longer lags behind Korea. Thanks to massive research and development spending and aggressive government support, Chinese companies have quickly narrowed the technological gap with Korean firms.

KIET said the quality of Chinese home appliances stands at 90 percent of their Korean rivals' and is expected to catch up five years from now. The gap with Chinese smartphones will narrow from 10 to five percent.

When it comes to cars, China is now at 80 to 85 percent of Korea's quality, and is expected to catch up to 90 to 95 percent.
By AFP

WASHINGTON: Security researchers on Monday reported signs of a potential North Korea link to the massive cyberattack campaign that sparked havoc in computer systems worldwide and opened fresh political rifts between Russia and the United States.

After days of disruptions affecting networks worldwide, a top US official said the number of computers affected had reached 300,000, but that infection rates had slowed.

In the first clues of the origin of the massive ransomware attacks, Google researcher Neel Mehta posted computer code that showed similarities between the "WannaCry" malware and a vast hacking effort widely attributed to Pyongyang.

Other experts quickly jumped on this as a sign -- although an inconclusive one -- that North Korea may have been behind the outbreak.

"We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack," said researchers at the Russian-based security firm Kaspersky, adding that further research was needed.

Israeli-based security firm Intezer Labs said it agreed with the North Korea attribution.

The group's chief executive Itai Tevet said in a tweet: "@IntezerLabs confirms attribution to North Korea for #WannaCry, not only because of the function from Lazarus. More info to come."

- US, Russia trade jabs -

Tom Bossert, President Donald Trump's top cyber and homeland security adviser, brushed aside suggestions that the United States was to blame for the attack, which stemmed from a flaw discovered by the US National Security Agency and later leaked.

"This was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data," he said, noting that no US government systems had been hit.

"This is a global attack," he added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier had pointed the finger at the United States.

"A genie let out of a bottle of this kind, especially created by secret services, can then cause damage to its authors and creators," the Russian leader said on the sidelines of a summit in Beijing.

Russia has recently been accused of cyber meddling in several countries, but Putin said they had nothing to do with the attack.

Over the weekend, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said attacks highlighted the dangers from the NSA's "stockpiling" of secret hacking tools.

There had been concern that Monday's start of the working week would see an upsurge in attacks.

But the cross-border police agency Europol said the situation was "stable" after attacks that struck computers in British hospital wards, European car factories and Russian banks.

"The number of victims appears not to have gone up," a senior spokesman for Europol, Jan Op Gen Oorth, told AFP.

But according to Michel Van Den Berghe, director of telecom group Orange's cyber security arm, a "second wave" is to be expected.

- Telecoms and carmaking hit -

US package delivery giant FedEx, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network were among those hit. The attackers demanded money to unblock their computers.

In China, "hundreds of thousands" of computers were affected, including gas stations, cash machines and universities, according to Qihoo 360, one of the country's largest providers of antivirus software.

Russia said its banking and railway systems were targeted.

A fifth of regional hospital associations in Britain's National Health Service were affected and several still had to cancel appointments on Monday.

French carmaker Renault shut its Douai plant -- one of its biggest sites, employing 5,500 people -- as systems were upgraded.

The attack blocks computers and puts up images on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!"

Bossert said that paying the ransom provided no guarantee files would be unlocked.

He told a news conference that "it appears that less than $70,000 has been paid in ransoms and we are not aware of payments that have led to any data recovery."

Bitcoin, the world's most-used virtual currency, allows anonymous transactions via heavily encrypted codes.

Experts and governments alike warn against ceding to the demands and few victims so far had been paying up.

A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April, claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA.

The attack is unique, according to Europol, because it combines ransomware with a worm function, meaning once one machine is infected, the entire internal network is scanned and other vulnerable machines are infected.

Although the economic fallout is still unknown, the political fallout "will be significant" according to the Eurasia consultancy.

In addition to Russia, China and India have blamed the US government for developing the original code.

WASHINGTON: Security researchers on Monday reported signs of a potential North Korea link to the massive cyberattack campaign that sparked havoc in computer systems worldwide and opened fresh political rifts between Russia and the United States. After days of disruptions affecting networks worldwide, a top US official said the number of computers affected had reached 300,000, but that infection rates had slowed. In the first clues of the origin of the massive ransomware attacks, Google researcher Neel Mehta posted computer code that showed similarities between the "WannaCry" malware and a vast hacking effort widely attributed to Pyongyang. Other experts quickly jumped on this as a sign -- although an inconclusive one -- that North Korea may have been behind the outbreak. "We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack," said researchers at the Russian-based security firm Kaspersky, adding that further research was needed. Israeli-based security firm Intezer Labs said it agreed with the North Korea attribution. The group's chief executive Itai Tevet said in a tweet: "@IntezerLabs confirms attribution to North Korea for #WannaCry, not only because of the function from Lazarus. More info to come." - US, Russia trade jabs - Tom Bossert, President Donald Trump's top cyber and homeland security adviser, brushed aside suggestions that the United States was to blame for the attack, which stemmed from a flaw discovered by the US National Security Agency and later leaked. "This was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data," he said, noting that no US government systems had been hit. "This is a global attack," he added. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier had pointed the finger at the United States. "A genie let out of a bottle of this kind, especially created by secret services, can then cause damage to its authors and creators," the Russian leader said on the sidelines of a summit in Beijing. Russia has recently been accused of cyber meddling in several countries, but Putin said they had nothing to do with the attack. Over the weekend, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said attacks highlighted the dangers from the NSA's "stockpiling" of secret hacking tools. There had been concern that Monday's start of the working week would see an upsurge in attacks. But the cross-border police agency Europol said the situation was "stable" after attacks that struck computers in British hospital wards, European car factories and Russian banks. "The number of victims appears not to have gone up," a senior spokesman for Europol, Jan Op Gen Oorth, told AFP. But according to Michel Van Den Berghe, director of telecom group Orange's cyber security arm, a "second wave" is to be expected. - Telecoms and carmaking hit - US package delivery giant FedEx, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network were among those hit. The attackers demanded money to unblock their computers. In China, "hundreds of thousands" of computers were affected, including gas stations, cash machines and universities, according to Qihoo 360, one of the country's largest providers of antivirus software. Russia said its banking and railway systems were targeted. A fifth of regional hospital associations in Britain's National Health Service were affected and several still had to cancel appointments on Monday. French carmaker Renault shut its Douai plant -- one of its biggest sites, employing 5,500 people -- as systems were upgraded. The attack blocks computers and puts up images on victims' screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in the virtual currency Bitcoin, saying: "Ooops, your files have been encrypted!" Bossert said that paying the ransom provided no guarantee files would be unlocked. He told a news conference that "it appears that less than $70,000 has been paid in ransoms and we are not aware of payments that have led to any data recovery." Bitcoin, the world's most-used virtual currency, allows anonymous transactions via heavily encrypted codes. Experts and governments alike warn against ceding to the demands and few victims so far had been paying up. A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April, claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA. The attack is unique, according to Europol, because it combines ransomware with a worm function, meaning once one machine is infected, the entire internal network is scanned and other vulnerable machines are infected. Although the economic fallout is still unknown, the political fallout "will be significant" according to the Eurasia consultancy. In addition to Russia, China and India have blamed the US government for developing the original code.
By AFP

WASHINGTON: The Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in a military prison in order to destroy the remains of thousands of murdered prisoners, the United States alleged Monday.

Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, gave reporters satellite pictures apparently showing snow melting on the roof of the facility.

"Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium," he said, referring to a military jail north of Damascus.

"Although the regime's many atrocities are well documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya."

Jones said Washington's information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US "intelligence community" and that as many as 50 people per day are thought to be hanged at Saydnaya.

He did not give an official estimate for the total number killed, but cited an Amnesty International report that between 5,000 and 11,000 had died between 2011 and 2015 in the prison.

President Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime, he alleged, had detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same period.

The latest satellite photograph presented by Jones dated to January 2015, more than two years ago, and it was not immediately clear why the United States waited to present its evidence.

WASHINGTON: The Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in a military prison in order to destroy the remains of thousands of murdered prisoners, the United States alleged Monday. Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, gave reporters satellite pictures apparently showing snow melting on the roof of the facility. "Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium," he said, referring to a military jail north of Damascus. "Although the regime's many atrocities are well documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya." Jones said Washington's information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US "intelligence community" and that as many as 50 people per day are thought to be hanged at Saydnaya. He did not give an official estimate for the total number killed, but cited an Amnesty International report that between 5,000 and 11,000 had died between 2011 and 2015 in the prison. President Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime, he alleged, had detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same period. The latest satellite photograph presented by Jones dated to January 2015, more than two years ago, and it was not immediately clear why the United States waited to present its evidence.
By Associated Press

MEXICO CITY: Javier Valdez, a veteran reporter who specialised in covering drug trafficking and organised crime, was slain Monday in the northern Mexico state of Sinaloa, the latest in a wave of journalist killings in one of the world's most dangerous countries for media workers.

Valdez is the fifth journalist to be murdered in Mexico in just over two months, and the second high-profile reporter to be slain in the country this decade after Regina Martinez Perez, who was killed in 2012.

A Sinaloa state government official said Valdez was shot dead in the early afternoon in the state capital, Culiacan, near the offices of the publication he co-founded, Riodoce. The official was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

WATCH VIDEO:

Riodoce confirmed Valdez's killing on its web page, saying he was driving about a block from its offices when he was intercepted by gunmen.

He was also a correspondent for the national newspaper La Jornada, which reported that he was pulled from his car and shot multiple times.

Valdez was a nationally and internationally recognised journalist who authored several books on the drug trade, including "Narcoperiodismo" and "Los Morros del Narco." The latter chronicled the lives of young people swept up in Mexico's underworld.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, in 2009 unknown attackers threw a grenade into the Riodoce offices days after it had published an investigation on drug trafficking. No one was hurt.

"Living in Sinaloa is a threat, and being a journalist is an additional threat," Valdez said in an interview with the CPJ, according the group's website. "We learned how to live in times when bullets are flying around us."

Sinaloa state has long been a drug trafficking hotbed and is home to the Sinaloa Cartel headed by notorious kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who is in a New York prison awaiting trial on multiple charges.

By the CPJ's count, 40 journalists have been killed in Mexico for reasons confirmed as related to their work since 1992. An additional 50 were slain during the same period under circumstances that have not been clarified.

MEXICO CITY: Javier Valdez, a veteran reporter who specialised in covering drug trafficking and organised crime, was slain Monday in the northern Mexico state of Sinaloa, the latest in a wave of journalist killings in one of the world's most dangerous countries for media workers. Valdez is the fifth journalist to be murdered in Mexico in just over two months, and the second high-profile reporter to be slain in the country this decade after Regina Martinez Perez, who was killed in 2012. A Sinaloa state government official said Valdez was shot dead in the early afternoon in the state capital, Culiacan, near the offices of the publication he co-founded, Riodoce. The official was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. WATCH VIDEO: window.__ventunoplayer = window.__ventunoplayer||[]; window.__ventunoplayer.push({video_key: 'OTM1NDI3fHw4fHw2fHwxLDIsMQ==', holder_id: 'vt-video-player', player_type: 'vp', width:'100%', ratio:'4:3'}); Riodoce confirmed Valdez's killing on its web page, saying he was driving about a block from its offices when he was intercepted by gunmen. He was also a correspondent for the national newspaper La Jornada, which reported that he was pulled from his car and shot multiple times. Valdez was a nationally and internationally recognised journalist who authored several books on the drug trade, including "Narcoperiodismo" and "Los Morros del Narco." The latter chronicled the lives of young people swept up in Mexico's underworld. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, in 2009 unknown attackers threw a grenade into the Riodoce offices days after it had published an investigation on drug trafficking. No one was hurt. "Living in Sinaloa is a threat, and being a journalist is an additional threat," Valdez said in an interview with the CPJ, according the group's website. "We learned how to live in times when bullets are flying around us." Sinaloa state has long been a drug trafficking hotbed and is home to the Sinaloa Cartel headed by notorious kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who is in a New York prison awaiting trial on multiple charges. By the CPJ's count, 40 journalists have been killed in Mexico for reasons confirmed as related to their work since 1992. An additional 50 were slain during the same period under circumstances that have not been clarified.
Premier Li Keqiang on May 14 met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is in Beijing to attend the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation.

During the meeting, Premier Li said the comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Russia continuously maintains a high-level development and noted that President Xi Jinping held a fruitful meeting with Putin and more new consensuses have been reached.

China is willing to deepen cooperation with Russia in such fields as finance, regional development, agriculture, energy and civil aviation, the Premier said.

Meanwhile, efforts should also be made to exert complementary advantages and explore cooperation potential, Premier Li added.

A new cooperation pattern featuring driving forces of major projects and small- and medium-sized enterprises should be built and people-to-people and cultural exchanges should be strengthened, in efforts to achieve more cooperation results between the nations, Premier Li said.

China is willing to cooperate with Russia to link up Chinas Belt and Road initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union, which aims to inject new drivers into prosperous development of the Eurasian region, stable growth of the global economy and establishment of an open and inclusive economic structure, Premier Li said.

Putin said the relationship between Russia and China has witnessed rapid development, the cooperation mechanism is running smoothly and bilateral trade and investment shows a positive trend, with great efforts from both countries leaders.

Russia is willing to implement bilateral cooperation consensuses, promote major project cooperation on energy, transportation and aerospace, and expand people-to-people and cultural exchanges in education, sports, media, and regional development, to enhance the all-round development of Russian-Sino ties and cooperation.

State Councilor Yang Jing also attended the meeting.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

A few passing clouds. Low near 55F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

A few passing clouds. Low near 55F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Premier Li Keqiang met with International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde in Beijing on May 14, agreeing to strengthen coordination and cooperation.

Lagarde is in Beijing for the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on May 14 and 15.

Premier Li first said he appreciated the IMFs attention and support for Chinas economic development and transformation. He said China is willing to strengthen policy communications and coordination with the IMF and other international organizations, push forward economic globalization, trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, as well as multilateral cooperation, so as to promote the stable development of a global economy.

Premier Li noted that the Chinese government will continue to implement prudent monetary policies, and pay high attention to controlling financial risks to maintain economic growth while ensuring financial stability.

China is capable of maintaining the stability of its financial market and preventing regional, systematic financial risks, the Premier said. And China will continue to implement a managed floating exchange rate system based on market supply and demand to maintain stable exchange rates of renminbi.

Lagarde said Chinas economic growth shows an encouraging momentum, which has provided strong support to international economic cooperation and the multilateral trade system.

The IMF is glad to see that Chinas financial system has a solid foundation and is under prudent and efficient supervision, Lagarde said. And the IMF is willing to continue to enhance communication and cooperation with China, she added.

State Councilor Yang Jing also attended the meeting.
French carmaker Renault stopped production at several sites on Saturday to prevent the spread of a global cyber-attack that hit its computer systems, a spokesman said."Proactive measures have been put in place, including the temporarily suspension of industrial activity at some sites," the spokesman said.The Paris prosecutor has opened an investigation following the cyber-attack, a judicial source told Reuters on Saturday. The probe covers "Renault and other possible victims," the source said.Renault's plant at Sandouville in northwestern France was one of the factories that stopped production, the spokesman said, declining to provide a full list of affected sites.The manufacturer is the first major French company to report being affected by the ransomware cyber-attack that has infected tens of thousands of computers in nearly 100 countries.PSA Group, Renault's French rival, was not affected, a spokesman said on Saturday.
The sources told CNN-News18 that Pakistan rushed to the Hague Moazzam Ahmad Khan, its emissary in the United Arab Emirates and a close friend of the ICJ judge, to try and persuade him to put a stay on the proceedings.



The emissary was asked to convince the ICJ judge that there were still three important steps to go before the hanging, so that there could be a stay allowing Pakistan to come back after the last appeal is exhausted.



India, in its petition to the UN body, also accused Pakistan of denying its right of consular access to Jadhav. India also pointed out that it learned about the death sentence against Jadhav from a press release.



Just hours ahead of the hearing on alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav at the International Court of Justice, Pakistan tried to approach the judge through one of its emissaries, top sources in Islamabad said on Monday.The top Pakistani sources also confirmed that Jadhav is still alive and that Islamabad would go ahead with the hanging only after the entire judicial and appeal process is over.This clearly indicates that Pakistan has opened all back channels to stall proceedings. The recent meeting between Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian businessman Sajjan Jindal was apparently part of the backchannel efforts to ease the current situation.The ICJ will hear on Monday Indias appeal against the death sentence handed to Jadhav by a military court in Pakistan. Later in the evening Pakistan too will get its chance to present its case at a public hearing at the Great Hall of Justice.India has acknowledged Jadhav is a former Navy Officer and a Mumbai-based businessman who was picked up from Iran; Pakistan, on the other hand, said he was arrested from Balochistan.In its plea that India moved on May 8, India had contended that the entire sequence of events was in "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations", and it was not informed about Jadhav's arrest for a very long time.India seeks from ICJ an order restraining Pakistan from giving effect to the death sentence and annulling the decision of the military court. India also pointed out that Jadhav's execution "would cause irreparable prejudice to the rights claimed by India".Pakistan, however, asserts that domestic law and not Vienna Convention will be followed in Jadhav's case, and that consular access can be denied if the national security is at risk. '
Lucknow: An unregistered group and a movement as they call it, Bhim Army started as a social media phenomenon more than two years ago. In a short span of time, thousands of Dalits across the country started identifying themselves with this aggressive and new kind of Ambedkarite politics.



The recent riots in Uttar Pradeshs Saharanpur have brought Bhim Army in the limelight. But much before the violent clashes between Dalits and Thakurs marred the streets of Saharanpur, jibes were being traded over social networking sites for months on end.



This shows that despite their claims of keeping a vigil on social media, law enforcement agencies of UP police failed to sense the outrage simmering on various internet-based platforms for more than a year.



After two-week-long violence in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh police has said it will investigate whether the Bhim Army members had any Naxal links. Police said it will not hesitate in using the stringent National Security Act on the Dalit organisations leaders if they were found to be colluding with the naxals.



Bhim Army members used social media and social networking platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp actively to spread their propaganda for more than a year. Some of their posts were extremely offensive and led to a lot of resentment among the other groups. Yes, brewing tension on social media should have been tracked much earlier and we paid the price for not doing so, said Subhash Chandra Dubey, SSP Saharanpur, who took over as the district police chief in April 2017.



Ten FIRs have been registered against administrators of hundreds of Facebook and WhatsApp accounts which have been spreading rumors and inciting communal hatred. The administrators named in the FIR mostly belong to the Bhim Army. Besides 10 cases registered under IT Act, Saharanpur police have lodged 14 other FIRs and have arrested 36 persons. In the past one week, 25 houses have been burnt down, 23 vehicles have been torched and several buses have been damaged.



Public relations officer of UP police, additional superintendent Rahul Srivastava said, In the past three days, we have taken down close to 380 screenshots of disturbing messages which were exchanged between Dalits and Thakurs on social media against each other. It is clear that the two sides have been baying for each others blood.



There is resentment among Dalits against Mayawati for her lack of strong response after the alleged assault on the community in Shabbirpur. There is anger in Dalit society since there has been no concrete statement by Mayawati, said Praveen Gautam, head of Bhim Army in Saharanpur town. She is more interested in her vote bank than Dalit welfare.



Bhim Armys aggressive style is spreading beyond the boundaries of Saharanpur. On May 11, Dalits in Meerut felt insulted that Chief Minister Adityanath had allegedly refused to garland an Ambedkar statue while visiting a Dalit neighbourhoods. In response, Dalits allegedly shouted slogans against Adityanath and went on a rampage.
New Delhi: The Central government on Monday told the Supreme Court that it will bring a new law if triple talaq is banned by the court.



We will bring a law if you ban triple talaq. I submit that the Centre will bring a law, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told a Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice of India J S Khehar.



The submission came when the AG said that not only instantaneous triple talaq, but also the two other forms of divorce under the Shariat Act were unconstitutional because they were unilateral and irrevocable.



To this, the Bench sought to know what will be the recourse for Muslim men to come out of marriages if the court bans all forms of talaq.



Rohatgi then responded that the government will not leave people of the community high and dry and will bring a law to regulate divorces in Muslims.



He also urged the Bench to exorcise triple talaq by striking down pertinent provisions in the Shariat Act, 1937.
Raipur: One Special Task Force (STF) jawan died while two police personnel were injured in two different conflicts with Naxals in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh on Sunday, police said.



The Jawan succumbed to the injuries early on Monday morning.



On Sunday night, Deputy Inspector General of Police (Dantewada region) Sundarraj P told PTI that the incidents took place in Basaguda area of the district, he added that the two police personnel were injured in an incident which took place around 10:30AM and the jawan was injured in an evening clash.



Joint teams of STF, District Reserve Guard (DRG), CoBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) and district police were out on the operation based on inputs about the location of Maoist hideouts in Basaguda and Awapalli police area, around 450-km away from here, since Saturday.



When security force were advancing through the forests of Raigundam village on the border of Bijapur and Sukma districts around 10:30 am, armed Naxals opened indiscriminate firing on them, leading to a gun-battle between both the sides, the DIG said.



However, the rebels soon fled the spot on finding the security personnel zeroing on them, he added. "A DRG head constable Raju Kodmul and an assistant constable of district police Suresh Madkam were injured in the incident," he said.



"As per the injured jawans, after spotting that a couple of Naxals were hit by bullets in the exchange of fire, they were trying to retrieve their bodies. In the process, they came under fire by back-up support group of Naxals leaving two of the jawans injured," the DIG said.



In the meantime, the ultras managed to drag the body of their colleagues inside the forest taking advantage of the thick vegetation, the official said.



"While Kodmul received bullet injury in his abdomen, Madkam suffered an injury on his leg," he added.



After getting the information, a Mi-17 chopper was sent to evacuate the injured personnel, the DIG said, adding that they were airlifted to Raipur, where they have been admitted to a private hospital.



In a separate incident, the same team of security forces came face to face with a group of ultras while cordoning off the forests later in the evening following which an encounter broke out between the two sides that left one STF jawan injured, he said. The jawan later died in the hospital on Monday morning.



After a brief exchange of fire the Naxals escaped taking the advantage of darkness, he said. The effort was on to evacuate the injured jawan out from the forest. The counterinsurgency operation was still underway in the region, the DIG added.



(With inputs from PTI)
I visited 5-6 ATMs over the weekend in Udaipur and could not withdraw money. Later I read in some papers about the malware attack and realised why the ATMs were unable to dispense money," he told CNN-News18.

While the government has been saying that India has not been impacted by the global attack by the ransomware WannaCry, a top officer struggled to draw money from ATMs post the attack.The officer, who is a key player in the security apparatus, said he could not withdraw money for two days in a row when he visited his home state over the weekend.However, Minister for Information and Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that India has not been majorly impacted by the ransomware attack.Speaking to CNN-News18, Ravishankar Prasad said, "There is no major impact in India unlike other foreign countries. We are keeping a close watch. As per the information received so far, there have been isolated incidents in limited areas in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh."Prasad said that an advisory for this kind of virus attack had been issued on March 15th and steps to guard against such attack has been put in place since then. Prasad reviewed the security mechanism with his ministry officials after news of the ransomware attack came. He said the NIC system, on which most government portals are hosted, was secure and running smoothly. Additional steps are being taken to make the IT system full proof.Meanwhile, some ATMs across the country are facing a shutdown after the malware attack. The Reserve Bank of India has issued guidelines to banks to update the Windows software on which ATMs are run as ransomware could have affected windows.Government officials said critical networks across sectors like banking, telecom, power and aviation are on high alert to ensure that systems are protected against the report of cyber-attack on India's vital networks by the crippling global ransomware, 'WannaCry'.
In its plea that India moved on May 8, it contends that the entire sequence of events was in "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations", and it was not informed about Jadhav's arrest for a very long time.

Pakistan, however, asserts that domestic law and not Vienna Convention will be followed in Jadhav's case, and the consular access can be denied if the national security is at risk.

On Monday, Pakistan could cite the aforementioned case in which India had refused to accept the courts jurisdiction on the pretext that the court could not hear cases related to disputes between the Commonwealth countries.

: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will begin hearing India's pleaseeking an immediate suspension of the death penalty awarded to its national Kulbhushan Jadhav by a military court in Pakistanat 1:30 PM Indian Standard Time (IST) on Monday.The military court had sentenced Jadhav to death on charges of "espionage and subversive activities" on April 10, 2017. Senior counsel Harish Salve will represent India at the ICJ headquarters in the Hague. Pakistan will present its arguments at 6:30pm IST.India has acknowledged Jadhav as a former Navy Officer and a Mumbai-based businessman, who was picked up from Iran; Pakistan, on the other hand, says that he was arrested from Balochistan.India, in its petition to the UN body, also said that Pakistan, despite repeated efforts, had denied India its right of consular access to Jadhav. India also pointed out that it learned about the death sentence against Jadhav from a press release.India seeks from ICJ an order, restraining Pakistan from giving effect to the death sentence and annulling the decision of the military court. India also pointed out that Jadhav's execution "would cause irreparable prejudice to the rights claimed by India".The last case between India and Pakistan at the ICJ was related to the shooting down of Pakistan's maritime reconnaissance aircraft Atlantique by the Indian Air Force (IAF) in the Kutch region on August 10, 1999, killing all 16 naval personnel on board. Pakistan claimed the plane was brought down in its air space and sought $60 million in damages from India for the incident.India has taken Pakistan to ICJ based on the fact that they are both signatories to the Optional Protocol concerning compulsory settlement of disputes. India hopes to draw a distinction between ICJ's jurisdiction based on the Atlantique case and the Jadhav one, based on the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.Yateesh Begoore, a lawyer specializing in public international law who lives in New York, told News18 that a provisional measure (which is, in some aspects, similar to stay under domestic law) can only be ordered by a bench of the ICJ sitting to hear the request for indication of provisional measures filed by India under article 41 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice  this has not happened."Once the provisional measures are issued, whether Pakistan is willing to violate an order of ICJ, and risk being an international pariah, is a political decision which will be made in Islamabad," he said.
New Delhi: As India clashes with Pakistan at the International Court of Justice to seek consular access and fair trial for Kulbhushan Jadhav, Justice BS Chauhan, Law Commission Chairman, said that even if ICJ accepts Indias plea and asks Pakistan not to execute Jadhav, nothing can stop Pakistan to go ahead and execute him.



Highlighting an important lacuna in International Law that it is not binding on nation states, Justice Chauhan told News18 that this was a weak case.



International Law is mostly on paper. The biggest question is that first it has to be decided whether International Law is a subject of political science or law. How to implement this decision of the ICJ? Suppose today (on Monday) even if they order a stay, but Pakistan wants to execute Jadhav. They say, no we want to execute him sorry. Then what is the remedy available to India? Nothing, said the Law Commission Chairman.



Justice Chauhan said that even the next step, which involved approaching the Security Council at the United Nations, cannot yield much result as China holds the Veto power.





India can take this issue up to the Security Council. But there China says No and shows its Veto power and the case is finished. The case is actually very weak. This plea will only help in garnering international support. But while the hearing is going on, if Pakistan executes Jadhav, then there can be no remedy. This is perhaps the biggest critique of International Law, said Justice Chauhan.



While explaining the legal loopholes, Justice Chauhan expressed hope that Pakistan would not execute Jadhav, owing to the International pressure.



On Monday, in the first part of the hearing, eminent Indian lawyer Harish Salve argued before the ICJ that the trial conducted by the Pakistani Military Court was farcical in nature, and that all the requests for consular access to Jadhav had fallen on deaf ears.





This case comes after August 10, 1999, when India shot down a Breguet Atlantique patrol plane of the Pakistan Navy in Indian airspace over the Rann of Kutch. India contested the case, and the ICJ upheld Indias position that the Court had no jurisdiction to entertain Pakistans claim.
As India and Pakistan get ready to face each other at the International Court of Justice on Monday, News18 takes a look at Indias petition. India has not approached the court on the basis of facts or merits of the case, but the denial of right to consular access to Kulbhushan Jadhav. This point may override Pakistans defence in the court on Monday.The 12-page petition filed by India is in the form of an urgent request so that the court takes provisional measures to not only stay the execution order but also allow consular access to Indian government officials.India has argued that the court has jurisdiction to deal with the case in accordance with Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963 and Article 1 of the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations Concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes.It must be made clear that India has not approached ICJ on the merits or facts of the cace but on the denial of the right to consular access. In the 1999 case pertaining to the shooting down of an Atlantique aircraft, India had refused to accept ICJs jurisdiction on the pretext that it could not hear cases related to disputes between the Commonwealth countries.Petition said that arrest and the consequent trial of Jadhav was a violation of the rights to consular access under the Vienna convention.India has laid down a list of 14 reminders to allow consular access to Jadhav which fell on deaf ears. The dates are: March 30, 2016, May 6, 2016, June 10, 2016, July 11, 2016, July 26, 2016, August 22, 2016, November 3, 2016, December 19, 2016, February 3, 2017, March 3, 2017, March 31, 2017, April 10, 2017, April 14, 2017 and April 19, 2017.The petition has claimed that in 2017, Pakistan wanted India to help them with the investigation of an FIR and only based on the help, would Pakistan consider the case of granting Jadhav the right to consular access. This, India claims to be completely contrary to Vienna Convention as it is in a way limitation of the right to consular access and free communication of an Indian national with Indian authorities.India states that on April 10, 2016, it had received a verbal communication from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Islamabad, asking India to co-operate in the investigation of the FIR for gaining consular access. India had replied back stating that the offer was being made after sentencing Jadhav for death. This somehow represented the farcical nature of proceedings of the so-called trial by a Pakistan Military court.The plea further mentions that till date there has been no development on this front even when Jadhavs mother petitioned to the Federal Government of Pakistan to strike down the order of death sentence.New Delhi has raised serious doubts on the confessional statement Pakistan has talked about being the solid evidence which propelled the Military court to award him the death sentence.India has cited past ICJ cases to bolster their point that provisional measures were taken to prevent death executions in applications which violated Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.Raking up the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, India has argued about the sanctity of human life and how an individual deserves a free and fair trial which Jadhav was deprived of.India has only prayed to the ICJ that the court orders provisional measures like directing Pakistan to not execute Jadhav till ICJ decides the case on the basis of its merits.The plea stated that Jadhav only has 40 days to appeal against this order of death penalty and the period ends on May 19, hence an immediate decision of the court was needed.Though Pakistan can claim that ICJ does not have jurisdiction over the issue as it concerns Pakistans national security and goes against the rule of not indulging in matters related to commonwealth nations, but it will be a difficult argument to set forth considering India having taken an alternative route based on denial of consular access and highlighting the denial of a free and fair trial.
It's a crucial day in India's bid to save Kulbhushan Jadhav from the gallows in Pakistan. For the first time in over four decades, India has knocked the doors of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).Jadhav was handed a death sentence by Pakistan's military court on 10th April. He was arrested in March last year on charges of espionage India has already filed an appeal on behalf of Jadhav's mother in Pakistan. But a sense of urgency has pushed India to simultaneously approach the ICJ as 16 requests for consular access to Jadhav have been denied so far.The public hearing will start at The Hague, Netherlands, from 1.30pm IST. India will be represented by senior counsel Harish Salve. Both sides have been given one and a half hour each to make their case.In its petition made on May 8, India says there is an 'egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations'Both India and Pakistan are signatories to the Optional Protocol concerning compulsory settlement of disputes.India was not informed of Jadhavs detention until long after his arrestPakistan failed to inform the accused of his rightsPakistan are denying India its right of consular access to Jadhav despite repeated requests.Pakistan will insist this case will follow its domestic laws not Vienna ConventionConsular access can be denied in cases related to national securityJadhav was tried in a military court as he is a naval officerIt may also say that all legal remedies have not been exhausted yet in Pakistan and so it is not the right time for ICJ to intervene.Immediate suspension of the death sentence awarded to the accusedDeclaring the sentence of the military court brazen defiance of the Vienna ConventionRestraining Pakistan from giving effect to the sentence awarded & directing it to take steps to annul the decisionIf Pakistan is unable to annul the decision, then ICJ should declare the decision illegalThe ICJ is the judicial organ of the UN that settles legal disputes submitted to it by states.
The result of Higher Secondary Certificate Examination (HSE) or Class 12 of Kerala Board of Higher Secondary Education were declared on Monday. Both Directorate of Higher Secondary Education (DHSE) and Vocational Higher Secondary Education (VHSC) declared the results at 2pm.The exams were held between March 8 and March 28. Over 4.4 lakh students appeared for the examination that was conducted in 2030 centres across Kerala, 3 centres in Mahe, 9 in Lakshadweep and 8 in the Gulf region.The Kerala DHSE class 12 Result 2017 is available online at their official websites dhsekerala.gov.in vhse.kerala.gov.in and keralaresults.nic.in - Log on to official website keralaresults.nic.in- Click on the link DHSE Exam Results 2017 or VHSE Exam Results 2017- It will automatically redirect to another page- Enter your roll number in the fields provided- Click to submit- Download the Kerala DHSE and VHSE Class 12 Results 2017 and take a printout for future referenceTo check the Kerala DHSE and VHSE Class 12 Results 2017, students can also visit results.nic.in educationkerala.gov.in websites.The Kerala DHSC Result 2017 can be also be checked via mobile using SMS feature. Send a message in the following format to receive your HSC result 2017 in your mobile KERALA12REGISTRATION NUMBER - Send it to 56263For the academic year 2015-2016, overall passing percentage 94.45 percent with the pass percentage of boys being 94.67 percent and that of girls 94.25 percent.
New Delhi: On Monday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began proceedings in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case and eminent lawyer Harish Salve presented India's case, saying if Jadhav was executed, it would be nothing less than a 'war crime'. Here's a quick look at what India said at the ICJ:



1. India believes that the farcical nature of proceedings and unjust trial by a Pakistani military court in egregious violation of the rights of consular access has led to serious miscarriage of justice.



2. An innocent Indian national, who, incarcerated in Pakistan for more than a year on concocted charges, deprived of his rights and protection accorded under the Vienna Convention, has been held incommunicado and faces imminent execution.



3. Pakistan repeatedly denied consular access to India and no document of Jadhavs trial process was given by Islamabad.



4. All requests for consular access to Kulbhushan Jadhav fell on deaf ears.



5. Human rights which are treated as basics have been thrown to the wind by Pakistan.



6. Jadhav was framed on confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistans military custody.



7. It is clear that Jadhav has been denied of his right to seek legal counsel. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a judicial decision is passed.



8. Pakistan has not provided the chargesheet, any evidence or materials presented against Jadhav in the case despite repeated requests by consular officers.



9. Jadhav has neither consular access nor legal representation even at this stage. Its not known if Jadhav will seek clemency in Pakistan court. Pakistan will be guilty of war crimes if ex-Navy officer is hanged.



10. Visa application filed by Kulbhushan Jadhav's parents is still pending.



INDIA AT ICJ



India has been a party to six cases, four of them with Pakistan, at the International Court of Justice.



May 08, 2017: (INDIA VS PAKISTAN)

INDIA TAKES PAKISTAN TO THE ICJ: Jadhav Case



April 24, 2014: (MARSHALL ISLANDS VS INDIA)

MARSHALL ISLANDS TAKES INDIA TO THE ICJ: Obligations concerning Negotiations relating to Cessation of the Nuclear Arms Race and to Nuclear Disarmament



Sep 21, 1999: (PAKISTAN VS INDIA)

AERIAL INCIDENT OF AUGUST 10, 1999

PAKISTAN TAKES INDIA TO THE ICJ: On August 10, 1999, India shot down a Breguet Atlantique patrol plane of the Pakistan Navy in Indian air space over the Rann of Kutch. India contested the case, and the ICJ upheld India's position that the Court had no jurisdiction to entertain Pakistans claim.



May 11, 1973: (PAKISTAN VS INDIA)

TRIAL OF PAKISTANI PRISONERS OF WAR

PAKISTAN TAKES INDIA TO THE ICJ: Pakistan filed a case to stop the repatriation to Bangladesh of 195 Pakistani nationals in Indian custody after the 1971 War, to face trial on charges of genocide, but withdrew the case the next year. This case, entered on the Court's General List on 11 May 1973 under number 60, was discontinued by an Order of the Court of 15 December 1973.



August 30, 1971: (INDIA VS PAKISTAN)

APPEAL RELATING TO JURISDICTION OF THE ICAO COUNCIL

INDIA TAKES PAKISTAN TO THE ICJ: In 1971, India filed a case against the jurisdiction of International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) to decide on Pakistan's demand that India could not deny it overflight and landing rights. India had withdrawn Pakistan's overflight rights after the January 1971 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight to Lahore, and the gutting of the aircraft by the hijackers. The ICJ ruled against India, saying that ICAO had jurisdiction in this case. This case, entered on the Court's General List on 30 August 1971 under number 54, was the subject of a Judgment delivered on 18 August 1972.



Dec 22, 1955: (PORTUGAL VS INDIA)

PORTUGAL TAKES INDIA TO THE ICJ: CASE CONCERNING RIGHT OF PASSAGE OVER INDIAN TERRITORY

Portugal had filed a case against India over denial of passage to what were then the Portugese territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli. ICJ decided in India's favour in 1960, saying India's refusal of passage was covered by its power of regulation and control of the right of passage of Portugal.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) begins its hearing on Indias plea for suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhavs death penalty. A Pakistan military court had sentenced the Indian national to death on charges of espionage and subversive activities on April 10, this year.

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New Delhi: Two students were killed and five injured when a car fell off from a flyover in west Delhis Punjabi Bagh on Monday morning.



Police said the incident took place around 9am. There were seven students present in the car who were on their way to appear for an exam.



The injured were rushed to a nearby hospital and their condition is said to be critical.



The victims are first-year students of Delhi Institute of Professional Studies. They were on their way to IP College in Narela for their second semester exam when the accident occurred, a senior police officer said.



The deceased have been identified as Sanchit and Ritu. Those injured were Pranav, Garima, Rishab, Rajat and Raja, the police said.



The students were at Rajat's house in Punjabi Bagh and were going to their exam centre, they added. Rajat was driving the vehicle and it is suspected that he might be speeding.



The police is waiting to record the statements of those injured in the accident to ascertain the sequence of events.



(With PTI Inputs)




New Delhi: Presenting its arguments at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Pakistan on Monday sought the cancellation of India's appeal in the Kulbhsuhan Jadhav case.



Pakistani representative Khawar Qureshi said that India's request was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed because "relief sought by India is manifestly unavailable, and the jurisdiction is limited."



Responding to India's contention that Jadhav's trial was in gross violation of Vienna Convention, Qureshi said these provisions were not intended to apply for a 'spy' involved in terror activities.



Hours after India's counsel presented his arguments, Pakistan put forth its case, questioning India's silence over Jadhav's passport - bearing a Muslim name.



Pakistan also alleged that India was using the ICJ as a "scene of political theatre" and was using media to drum up the support for the "spy", recognised by India as a Mumbai-based businessman.



Earlier in the day, Harish Salve, India's lead attorney, called the trial conducted by Pakistan "farcical" and the one without a "shred of evidence".



Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, India's lead attorney Harish Salve said. The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhav's execution. While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), took less than an hour.



India wants the ICJ to annul Jadhav's death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.



Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.



India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government. Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.



(with inputs from PTI)


There is nothing theoretically wrong with introducing transgenes in crops, said Dr MK Reddy of the International Centre of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi, where he leads the research group on crop improvement. There is nothing wrong with transgenic plants and they do not disturb natural habitats, he emphasized, impatiently dismissing the concerns over introducing hybrids into the environment and the possible contamination of other plants by the transgenes.

We desperately need higher yielding crops, especially for mustard oil, said Padmanabhan. Our productivity, yield per acre, is very low. Water problems, lack of available land and rising population only exacerbate the situation.



There is a naturally occurring male sterile mustard line. However, the argument against it is that the sterility breaks down and is not replaceable, said Padmanabhan. It is more efficient to use the modified hybrid.



However, a hybrid will not produce all hybrid seeds. Pental has said that herbicides will not be used in fields, only in controlled environments to select which seeds are hybrids and then take those to the fields.



While activists may be up in arms against the approval for commercial production given to genetically modified mustard, by the governments apex transgenic product regulatory body, senior scientists seemed to be happy with the move. Speaking to News18, scientists working with different institutions said that they welcomed the approval given to DMH11 (Dhara Mustard Hybrid 11), developed by Delhi Universitys Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants, led by Deepak Pental, former vice-chancellor of the university.Over the years, concerns of contamination have been raised not just by activists but scientists too, making GM food crops a subject riddled with controversy and fears. The only GM crop commercially available in India is BT cotton. BT brinjal, which gained the approval of the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee in 2010, the apex regulatory body, under the Ministry of Environment and Forests, was stayed by the ministry itself after a furore over its commercial production. Though DH11 too needs the ministrys final nod, some scientists are already seeing it as breakthrough technology which can lead to production of many other high yielding plant hybrids.Dr. Govindarajan Padmanaban, molecular biologist and the former director of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, addressed the concerns in detail, saying that even in ideal laboratory conditions, the success rate of the plant incorporating the gene was one per cent. We fail 99 per cent of the times, its not feasible that in nature the incorporated gene will transfer from the hybrid to other plants and be incorporated there. He added that, as a scientist, he wouldnt rule it out entirely, as nature is superior to us. However, the chances of this happening were .01 per cent.Hybrids arent easy to produce in mustard, Padmanabhan explained, as mustard plants have both male and female parts and are self-pollinating. Pentals work as introduced the Barnase gene into the plant, that makes one line male sterile, while introducing the Barstar protein in the donor plant that inhibits the Barnase gene. This means that one plant becomes male sterile and female active to accept pollen from the donor. Along with the pollen it gets the inhibitor protein which makes the plant fertile again. Thus, the plant can be crossed with different and better types of mustard lines.Padmanabhans argument is to test both the lines and see which one is better, which will be possible when it is commercially available. Its not going to be commercially produced on a large scale immediately, we have two years to test the hybrid and see how high its yield is.Though the Supreme Court stayed the commercial production of DH11 till October 2017, Padmanabhan and Reddy see commercialisation as the only way to truly test DH11s claims of higher yields of 25-30 per cent.Questions are always raised when we talk of transgenic crops. The other gene introduced here is the BAR gene, which makes it herbicide resistant and that worries activists, said Padmanabhan.Since DH11 is an Indian product and will be commercialized by Dhara, scientists are not worried about agendas of global corporations. Let farmers decide, said Padmanabhan, whether they want to buy hybrids every year or they want other varieties that yield less but where seeds survive. Its not for other to decide for them.
The third day of hearing on a clutch of petitions questioning validity of triple talaq began with Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi kicking off submissions on behalf of the Centre. And he was emphatic  all forms of talaq in Islam were equally bad because they denied Muslim women equality and violated their dignity.

Rohatgi was assertive about Narendra Modi government's stand on the matter: "This has been debated for last 60 years but no government has touched it because the matter is sensitive."

Rohatgi replied that the answer to all this issue perhaps lay with the Uniform Civil Code. "That will take us to the Uniform Civil Code but are we discussing that in these proceedings?" he questioned.

The AG said that all personal laws are also 'laws' within the meaning of Article 13 of the Constitution that makes it clear that no law could be valid if it violates fundamental rights. "Therefore, even the Shariat Act, 1937 comes within the ambit of the constitutional principles... all such provisions in it that are in breach of fundamental rights must give way," he said.

In its affidavit to the court, the Board, defending the validity of triple talaq, had earlier said that if the practice is discontinued, a man could murder or burn his wife alive to get rid of her.

: "So you want all three wickets to go down in one ball," the Supreme Court quipped on Monday when the Government said it would frame a new law if all three "orms of talaq, including triple talaq, are banished for Muslims in India."So how do we remove this inequality?" asked the five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India J S Khehar. The AG retorted: By striking them down...by exorcising talaq from Shariat Act. Instantaneous triple talaq must be outlawed...all three forms of talaq must go." Three forms of talaq under Muslim law are: Talaq ul Biddat (triple talaq), Talaq Ahsan and Talaq Hasan.Justice Uday U Lalit had another question: "Then what's the remedy? How will a husband come out of a marriage?"It was time for the AG to throw a perfect delivery: "If this court strikes it down, we will bring a law. Government will have a law. We won't leave people high and dry."At this, Justice Kurian Joseph said: "We won't say whether the matter is politically sensitive or not, but it definitely is constitutionally sensitive."CJI Khehar also intervened: "So you want all three wickets to go in one ball? The AG responded: Even if all three wickets fall, it is still counted as one wicket."The CJI then asked Rohatgi if the idea was to bring issues relating to marriage and divorce among Muslims on par with women in other religions then why not do away with validity of marriages under all laws such as Hindu Marriage Act and (Christian) Divorce Act. "Let us give sanction only to the marriages under the Special Marriage Act, which is religion-neutral," said Justice Khehar.To this, Justice Rohinton F Nariman said that marriages are inexplicably a part of the religion and that is why we had separate enactments for different religions to deal with such issues. "Besides, religious practices are what people of that religion think are the essential practices. It cannot be what you and I think are the religious practices," he added.Justice Nariman also flagged another significant legal point: "One can complain against violation of fundamental rights against the State. If the State has not impinged upon fundamental rights, where is the question of our interfering? Can we intervene when it is about personal rights?"Rohatgi asked the bench: "Can one half of the women population in a community be denied their fundamental rights on the basis of a legal argument? Is it not the duty of the State to intervene on their behalf and fight for their rights?" He added that the top court could see the practice of triple talaq from any prism and the conclusions would be the same  it is against constitutional norms, gender justice, equality and dignity of women.Rohatgi further said that triple talaq will have to go even if the court were to hold that it was an integral part of the religion and hence protected under Article 25 of the Constitution. "Religious practices are protected under Article 25 subject to morality, public order, health and various other part of the Constitution. What we are talking about here is the constitutional morality, which is completely incongruous if we look at triple talaq. So you can look at this practice from any prism but will reach the same conclusion," he said.The AG added that the apex court did not have to interpret Quran or any other religious scripture while deciding upon the validity of a practice. Constitution is the only test and triple talaq definitely fails the muster, he maintained.The bench will continue hearing the case on Tuesday when All India Muslim Personal Law Board, through its lawyer Kapil Sibal, will argue against judicial intervention in the matter."If there develops serious discord between the couple, and the husband does not at all want to live with her, legal compulsions of time-consuming separation proceedings and expenses may deter him from taking the legal course. In such instances, he may resort to illegal, criminal ways of murdering or burning her alive," it stated.The Board also said that divorce proceedings instead of triple talaq could damage a woman's chances of re-marriage if the husband indicts her of loose character in court."Granting a husband the right to divorce indirectly provides security to the wife. Marriage is a contract in which both parties are not physically equal. Male is stronger and female weaker sex. Man is not dependent on woman for his protection. On the contrary, she needs him for her defence," said the affidavit, adding that triple talaq wards off the possibility of a rise in murders of women whose husbands want to divorce them.
Just like everyone else who are gearing up for the prestigious 70th Cannes International Film Festival 2017, actress Deepika Padukone is also preparing for her red carpet appearance at the event. All ready to stun the audiences with her style and confidence, Padukone left from Mumbai looking chic and wearing a wonderful smile on her face.It was while Padukone was leaving the country for Cannes that the paparazzi snapped her at the airport. The gorgeous B-town beauty was all smiles for the cameras, looking super fashionable.Padukone sported a black and brown Alberta Ferretti outfit and teamed it with Maje Officiel leather jacket and Louboutin boots. Her stylist Shaleena Nathani, the woman behind most of Padukone's looks including red carpet attires, took to Instagram to post a picture of the actress. She also mentioned that the star was leaving for the upcoming Cannes 2017.The Bajirao Mastani actress will be joining the likes of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Sonam Kapoor at the festival and will walk the red carpet representing a cosmetic brand.As per reports, the Hollywood-return star will be walking the red carpet on May 17 and 18.(All images: Yogen Shah)
Actress Monica Bellucci reopened the heated debate on the airbrushing of stars' photographs on Wednesday by declaring, "Thank heavens for retouching."



The Italian beauty, the oldest Bond girl ever at 50 in "Spectre", told AFP that she had learned to accept "seeing my face change" but she was not adverse to a little help from Photoshop.



She said she was glad that magazines were airbrushing less than in the past and that the public was learning to love stars' little "imperfections".



Even so "I say thank heavens for retouching. It's airbrushing that saves us," she declared.



The actress, now 52, said when she watched her latest film, Emir Kusturica's "On the Milky Road", she noticed that she had "lines around my eyes and everywhere. Ten years ago I didn't have them. I see how I have changed on screen.



"That said, I look at myself with compassion," she added.



"I didn't say to myself, 'Oh my God, it's monstrous!' No, I think it is charming," said the mother of two.



"Being seen as a mature woman doesn't bother me. You have to be like that. Maybe in 10 years I will be monstrous and I might change my mind because I have too many wrinkles.



"But for now, I'm fine about it."



The former model, whose new book of interviews "Rencontres clandestines" (Secret Meetings) is published Wednesday in France, also said people should not look down on women who have had cosmetic surgery.



- 'Do what's good for you' -



"When I see mature women who haven't been redone I don't say, 'She should get her face lifted.' I think to myself, 'She is very lovely like that.'



"However, when you see someone who has had work and who is beautiful with it, I say to myself, 'She did the right thing'," she added.



"You have to do what is good for you," said the actress, who will be master of ceremonies at the Cannes film festival later this month.



"Plastic surgery is there. If it makes you happy, why not do it?"



Bellucci said she felt "a big change was under way" with retouching and the way we see older women, which cheered her.



Feminists have long argued that airbrushing contributes to self-image problems, helping to set impossible standards women cannot live up to.



However, the practice has become widespread on social media even as celebrity magazines are regularly attacked for making stars look too perfect.



"They retouch photos because we have become accustomed to a kind of plasticated image," she said.



"But we should sense the skin, the little faults. We are getting more and more used to not looking as these little faults as imperfections."



The Cannes film festival sparked an outcry last month for airbrushing the thighs of Claudia Cardinale in a vintage image of the veteran Italian actress it used for this year's poster.



While the French media and some feminist groups poured scorn on the festival, Bellucci said: "The important thing was that Claudia Cardinale was happy with it".



Last month US reality television star Kim Kardashian reportedly lost 100,000 of her near 100 million followers on social media when unairbrushed pictures of her famous behind were posted online.
New Delhi: Actor Irrfan Khan, who has signed his next Hollywood film Puzzle, says the "beautiful" aspect about the movie is the fact that it's a woman-oriented project -- a la the Bollywood film Piku.



Puzzle will tell the tale of a 40-something woman who is consumed with caring for the men in her family. When she discovers she has a gift for assembling puzzles, her world begins to open up and her entire family is forced to adjust and grow as well.



Irrfan, who is one of the more visible Indian faces on the international film turf, told IANS here: "I was looking for a subject in Hollywood which would be new. And I was waiting for it... Such a film has come to me after a long time. It has aspects that I haven't done as an actor.



"This movie gives those chances to me. I am very excited and looking forward to do it."



The film's concept seems woman-oriented. So what made him choose it?



"That's the beautiful part of it," he said.



"Piku" was also like that, isn't it?"



"Yes, absolutely, and that's why I am saying that's the beautiful part about it."



In Piku, Irrfan had played Rana Chaudhary, a man on a journey with a short-tempered woman, essayed by Deepika Padukone, who takes care of her ageing father, played by Amitabh Bachchan. The emphasis was more on the woman and her father, but Irrfan's role was very crucial to the story.



For "Puzzle", in which he essays the lead alongside actress Kelly Macdonald, the actor will soon leave for New York to begin work on the project.



As of now, he is busy promoting his next Hindi film Hindi Medium, a quirky tale which talks about how the education system is creating a divide in the society.



Irrfan, who has featured in a mix of serious and slice-of-life movies in his career, says exploring such varied characters keeps him alive.



"If you keep doing similar things, you get bored. So it's better that you find a new subject and find yourself something fresh to keep the journey exciting," he said.



Also, the fact that the movie gives an important message but in a lighter vein is what caught his attention.


Despite frequent speculation - the latest being when Gangai Amaran, the BJP candidate in the RK Nagar bypoll, visited him - the 66-year actor has avoided making any commitment on entering politics.

The Thalaivar or Chief as the superstar is popularly known caught up with his fans at Raghavendra Wedding Hall in Chennai after a gap of eight years and allowed them to get pictures clicked with him.

Superstar Rajinikanth has left the door open for joining politics in the future adding he would not allow "wrong people" to join him if he takes the plunge.In an open interaction with his fans on Monday, Rajinikanth said, Right now God is using me as an actor, but I cant say anything about the future. If God decides that I join politics, then I will do so.I committed a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years back, it was a political accident, he said.Rajinikanth met his fans at Raghavendra Mandapam in Chennai on Monday (Image courtesy: Rajinikanth's office)During the PV Narasimha Rao government in the nineties, Rajini had begun to support the Indian National Congress (INC). However, he shifted allegiance to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) alliance after the Congress decided to align itself with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).The actor indicated his preference was for value-based politics, saying, If in case I decide to join politics, I won't allow wrong people to join me. I'll keep them away.Rajinikanth has been keeping away from making political statements, leading at least some to believe he would never take the plunge unlike an MG Ramachandran or Jayalalithaa. Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met him in Chennai, but both later clarified the visit was just a courtesy call.He also had words of advice, asking them to drink only in moderation. "I am not asking you to completely give up alcohol. I am not a yogi," he said.Here is a timeline of Rajinis political stance:Rajini met music composer Gangai Amaran, who was the BJP candidate in the prestigious RK Nagar bypoll. However, the superstar later tweeted that he was not supporting anyone in the by-polls.Speculation was rife on social media that Rajinikanth intended to test political waters after saying he liked power. However, he later clarified that he was talking about spiritual power and not material power.During the audio launch of his film Lingaa, Rajini told the media, "Everybody wants me to join politics. I'm aware of its depth and danger. I'm not afraid, but just a little hesitant. It's not in my hands. If God is willing, I will serve the people."Rajinikanth's statement It would be foolish to think that one is successful in politics due to capability, experience and hardwork. Its all a question of time and circumstances. If the time is not right, nothing can help was interpreted as a subtle hint about his political ambitions.The superstar pledged his vote for the BJP-AIADMK combine because of the BJPs stand on river interlinking, which he opined would solve the countrys drinking water problems.Rajinikanth planned a peoples movement on the Cauvery dispute with Karnataka. However, he denied that he had any political ambitions.Rajinikanth is alleged to have said If Jayalalithaa is voted back to power even god cannot save Tamil Nadu. Jaya had been in power for the past five years, a period which saw allegations of misuse of power against her. The DMK swept to power and Rajinikanths statement was perceived to have played a role in Jayas defeat.
New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will soon be organising a 'Modi Fest' across the country to mark three years of BJP rule at the Centre.



The fete will be part of a bouquet of events being planned for three weeks beginning 26th May to "take Narendra Modi's name and schemes to even remote constituencies".



Having crossed the halfway mark, the main idea behind holding the festival in more than 125 districts is to spread awareness about "development agenda and achievements" of the Modi government.



"We won the last elections by generating a sense of hope in the people. Our narrative in the next general elections should be about delivery and promises fulfilled. And this exercise is a step towards that, a BJP leader coordinating with state units said.



The event will entail seminars on major policy initiatives taken by the NDA government. Intellectuals and discourse-influencers will be invited for discussions aimed at building opinion around performance of BJP at the Centre. The mascot, however, will remain Prime Minister Modi.



The festival is part of half-a-dozen other nation-wide programmes which are being planned by the party and they will extend till mid-of-June.



Senior party leaders and elected representatives will be deputed to preside over these functions.



The celebration of the government dovetails with party's expansion drive currently underway which aims to consolidate BJP at the booth level in preparations for the next general elections.



Party president Amit Shah is spearheading this campaign which will extend till September and focus on areas where BJP has a limited political footprint.



The celebratory campaign will be flagged off on 26th May with Prime Minister's day-long visit to Guwahati where he will be attending a host of programmes.
Patna: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday ruled out any possibility of him heading a grand coalition against the BJP as a Prime Ministerial candidate in the next general elections in 2019.



Kumar also had some words of praise for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Three years ago who was aware that Modi ji would be the Prime Minister of India. But it happened because he was capable of that and people of our country voted him to power. I know, I do not have that capacity. I am the leader of a small party and I have no national ambitions, he said.



Kumar candidly admitted that JD(U) was a small party and he would only concentrate on serving the people of Bihar.



Sharad Yadav served our party (JD-U) as president for three consecutive terms and then party workers decided to give this responsibility to me. But the media tried to link that to national ambitions. As a party president I will try to expand JD (U) in other states but it does not mean that I will dream of PMs post, he said.



He also distanced himself from allegations of corruption against Lalu Yadav whose Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is a partner in the ruling coalition.



Its for Lalu ji to reply on allegations levelled by the BJP. I have nothing to state. If anyone has proof, they should go to the court, the Bihar CM said.



When asked if all non-NDA parties would come together in electing the next President, he said, First of all the ruling party should try to form consensus. It would be the best possible option. If it does not happen then Opposition should come up with a candidate."



Kumar also asserted that unlike RJD, his party was in favour of using electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the elections. We have seen how elections were conducted earlier. I do not wish that time to come again. We are running a coalition government but it does not mean JD (U) ideology would be the same as of the RJD, he said.



He urged the media not to make much of his silence and that he was busy with work.


New Delhi: Hours after superstar Rajinikanth appeared before fans on Monday morning and said if God decides that I join politics, then I will do so, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy called it a joke and advised him to stay out of politics. At the same time, RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy said that Rajinikanth made a well thought out statement.



Interestingly, sources within BJP told News18 that the party is keen to have the superstar, who has appeal across castes and classes in Tamil Nadu, lead the state out of the crisis which has emerged after AIADMK leader Jayalalithas death in December last year.



There seems to be a liking for Rajinikanth not only in the BJP but also in the broader Sangh Parivar. Welcoming Rajinikanths statement on joining politics, RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy suggested the superstar is making well thought out statements. It evokes memories of a time when, as newly elected Prime Minister, Narendra Modi had hit out at corruption and said Na khaoonga, na khaane doonga (Wont take bribes, wont let anyone else take bribes), Gurumurthy told News18.



Earlier in the day, in an open interaction with his fans, Rajinikanth said, Right now God is using me as an actor, but I cant say anything about the future. If God decides that I join politics, then I will do so. The actor indicated his preference was for value-based politics, saying, If in case I decide to join politics, I wont allow wrong people to join me. I will keep them away.



But Swamy, who is known for his controversial remarks, said, Rajini has been with various parties and has no ideology. Rajini is a mere distraction.



Swamy went on to to say that Rajinikanth was not even a Tamilian; in fact, he is a Marathi from Bengaluru, he said. Swamy also took potshots at the megastars fans. It is a cult following, he said. Swamy said that cinema people are good at giving statements as their dialogues are scripted by somebody else.



During his interaction with fans, Rajinikanth said, I committed a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years back, it was a political accident, Rajinikanth said on Monday. During the PV Narasimha Rao government in the nineties, Rajinikanth had begun to support the Indian National Congress (INC). However, he shifted allegiance to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) alliance after the Congress decided to align itself with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).



In February this year, speculation was rife that Rajinikanth intended to test political waters after saying he liked power. However, he later clarified that he was talking about spiritual power and not material power.



Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Rajinikanth in Chennai, but both later clarified the visit was just a courtesy call.




Hyderabad: Raising their voices against the shifting of Dharna Chowk to the outskirts of the city, various political organisations, opposition parties and civil rights groups staged a massive protest to save the spot at Indira Park.



The stir took a violent turn after protesters forcefully entered Dharna Chowk, breaking chairs and police barricades. Both the police and protesters hurled chairs and rained sticks on each other.



The altercation left several injured in both sides. The protesters also faced opposition from residents around the chowk as they want the spot to be relocated. The residents claim that the opposition is politicising the issue.



"Around 50,000 people live around Indira Park. Due to various dharnas, the roads are usually blocked, causing inconvenience to us. Traffic jams, loud noises, unhygienic garbage disposal at site creates more than enough trouble to those living in this locality," said a resident.



The opposition says that the current stir at Dharna Chowk is a symbolic protest against the government banning democratic movements at Indira Chowk.



Dharna Chowk has been a popular spot in Hyderabad to stage protests, the spot was extensively used during the Telangana agitation movement.



This year, the Telangana government abruptly decided to shift Dharna Chowk to city out skirts, citing law a law and order problems. Shifting of the site was criticized and seen as suppression of democratic rights to dissent by the KCR government.



Opposition parties like the BJP, Congress, TDP and even the Left have joined hands with Pawan Kalyans Janasena Party to extend support to the protest called by the Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC).



TJAC Chairman Prof Kodandram in a video message has appealed people from all walks of life to join in the protest to protect their constitutional right.



Senior Congress leader Hanumantha Rao, who participated in the protest, said, "Its a protest against the KCR government, which is trying to suppress voices of dissent and any opposition against him and his familys rule."



The decision to shift Dharna Chowk was taken earlier this year after TJAC called for protests highlighting rising unemployment in the state. This led to a massive showdown between protesters and Police. Prof Kodandaram, along with many activists and leaders were detained.



The protest to save Dharna Chowk has been going on for the past one month.
Chennai: RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy has welcomed Rajinikanths statements on joining politics, saying the Tamil superstar is making well thought out statements.



I think Rajini is making well thought out statements. It evokes memories of a time when, as newly elected Prime Minister, Narendra Modi had hit out at corruption and said Na khaoonga, na khaane doonga (Wont take bribes, wont let anyone else take bribes), Gurumurthy told News18.



In an open interaction with his fans on Monday, Rajinikanth said, Right now God is using me as an actor, but I cant say anything about the future. If God decides that I join politics, then I will do so. The actor indicated his preference was for value-based politics, saying, If in case I decide to join politics, I won't allow wrong people to join me. I'll keep them away.



Gururmurthy, also the co-convenor of Swadeshi Jagran Manch, said that the actor distancing himself from the support he showed to the DMK-TMC alliance in the 1996 elections was very significant in the wake of his statement. I committed a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years back, it was a political accident,Rajinikanth said on Monday.



During the PV Narasimha Rao government in the nineties, Rajinikanth had begun to support the Indian National Congress (INC). However, he shifted allegiance to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) alliance after the Congress decided to align itself with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).



Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met him in Chennai, but both later clarified the visit was just a courtesy call.














The internet world was recently taken by storm by a malicious software that locked people out of their computers. Already declared as a critical threat to cyber-security, Indias Cyber Security organisation  CERT has organised a special webcast on the ransomware, informing Indian users about its threat and how to protect themselves from it.The ransomware, known as WannaCry or WanaCrypt0r 2.0, locked up the files on computers across 2 dozen countries and asked the users for a ransom in exchange of access to their own files. The large-scale attack hit NHS hospitals across London, delivery giant FedEx, Spanish Telecom firm Telefonica, Japans Nissan Motor Co, German Deutsche Bahn rail network and more such firms.The global cyber-attack made use of a glitch in Microsoft Windows which the attackers claim to have gained from a secret NSA server, the United States National Security Agency.The ransomware essentially encrypts the files on the target system and makes them inaccessible to users. In exchange for gaining access back, the malicious software asks the users for a ransom through money transfer on Bitcoin. The initial transfer demanded by the ransomware is USD 300 which may later increase to USD 600.Experts say that there is no assurance of the access being handed back to the users after a payment is made. Moreover, once infected, the ransomware can perform repetitive attacks on the system, asking users for money over and over again with the threat of deleting the files altogether.The webcast by CERT guides the Indian users on how to tackle the ransomware in case they face any such attack.CERT says that the malware targets a host of files on a system like .rar .pdf .mp4. ppt. doc. zip and many more. Once it enters the system, it adds the malware extension .WCRY to the system files.Malware files like tasksche.exe and mssecsvc.exe are added to the system files to encrypt the system. Once infected, it is very difficult to decrypt the system files due to lack of private keys for the same.What happens upon System infection?If a system gets infected, a message will be displayed on the screen by the malware which advises users on how to regain access to their files.Successively, another message scares the user for a ransom by showing that their antivirus has been removed and their data is encrypted.The malware also drops a PleaseReadme.txt file which gives step-by-step instruction to the user in a QnA format. The users are advised not to run the files any further.CERT has laid down certain protective measures which go as follows:- First of all, back-up all the critical data on your system and keep it offline for an easier recovery process, in case the ransomware strikes.- Apply patches which were released by Microsoft under the Microsoft Security Bulletin 2017 MS17  010 on March 2017.- Regular patches for unsupported versions like XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 are not available. Hence, users are advised to upgrade their systems to prevent threat.- Users are also required to upgrade regular patches for the Windows version they are using.- In case the patches are not available, CERT advises to isolate the system from the network. Further, users can download the patches onto a CD or a USB, apply it and then connect the system back to the network.- Maintain an updated Anti-Virus by a reputed software firm.- Block spam on mails.- DO NOT click on unsolicited mails, even from known contacts.- Disable Macros on Microsoft Office products.- For technical measures, users are advised to visit the CERT website.- CERT advises enterprises to use DKIM or other such Email monitoring methods for protection against email spoofing.- Use whitelisting solutions on critical systems i.e. only trusted applications should be run.- Use software restriction policies to prevent the execution of malware.- Deploy web and email filters on the enterprise network.- Scan all emails via a reputed anti-virus solution.CERT says that till now, 7 variants of the ransomware have been detected. It mentions that security tools are freely available on its website which can be used to secure systems. A botnet tool on the website can also be used to detect and remove the malware from the system.Follow these step immediately in case your system gets infected by the malware.- Isolate the system from the network immediately. The malware reportedly spreads very quickly through LAN.. CERT strongly advises against it as there is no guarantee whatsoever that the data will be handed back to the user after doing so. Furthermore, this fuels the attackers intention and propagates it further.- Run cleanup tools mentioned on the CERT website to disinfect the system.- Preserve the data even if it is encrypted.- Report the incident to the law-enforcement agencies. Users can send an email to incident.cert-in.org.in or call on the toll-free number  1800-11-4949.
Dhaka: Bangladesh's apex court on Monday upheld the life sentence given to a Islamist preacher for committing crimes against humanity during the 1971 Liberation War by siding with Pakistani troops.



The Supreme Court dismissed both the pleas filed by the state and defence and stood by its earlier judgement to jail war criminal and Jamaat-e-Islami leader Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, 77, until his death, bdnews24.com reported.



A five-member bench led by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha delivered the verdict today after a two-day hearing, the report said.



Both the state and the defence had filed petitions seeking a review of the Supreme Court's verdict in 2014. The state wanted a death sentence while the defence pushed for an acquittal.



The trial of Sayedee began at the International Crimes Tribunal-1 in 2011 and a verdict was pronounced in 2013.



Of the 20 charges against him, Sayeedi was given the death sentence for two -- the murders of Ibrahim Kutti and Bisabali, and for setting fire to Hindu households in Pirojpur in 1971.



The Supreme Court verdict, delivered in 2014, sentenced Sayeedi on five charges of the 20 that were framed against him.



The verdict reduced Sayedee's death sentence for Ibrahim Kutti's murder to imprisonment for 12 years.



In its second appeal verdict in a war crimes case, the apex court sentenced Sayedee to prison until death for three charges which include the murder of Bisabali and arson in a Hindu neighbourhood, abduction and rape of three sisters of Gauranga Saha.



Saha was a prosecution witness and identified Sayeedi as the man who had handed over his sisters to the Pakistani army to be taken away as sex slaves. They were returned after three days. Sayeedi was also sentenced to prison until death on charges of forcible conversions of 100-150 Hindus.



Six other charges were also proven beyond doubt but no sentencing followed as he had already been given the death penalty.



Fifteen months after the verdict, the Supreme Court published the full verdict in December, 2015, paving the way for reviews.



It was the first case of a war crimes trial in which the state sought review to maintain the tribunal's verdict. Sayedee is the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party that sided with the Pakistan Army during the 1971Liberation War and committed war crimes. He was arrested from his house in Dhaka in June, 2010 in a case filed for hurting religious sentiments.
Ankara: Angered by a U.S. decision to arm Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria, Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan heads to Washington this week for talks with Donald Trump seeking either to change the president's mind or to "sort things out ourselves".



Trump's approval of plans to supply the YPG as it advances toward the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, just days before his first meeting with Erdogan, has cast a shadow over Tuesday's planned talks between the two NATO allies.



Ankara, a crucial partner in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, considers the YPG an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast for three decades and is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and United States.





Washington sees the YPG as distinct from the PKK and as a valuable partner in the fight against Islamic State.



"If we are strategic allies we must take decisions as an alliance. If the alliance is to be overshadowed we'll have to sort things out for ourselves," Erdogan told reporters on Sunday, according to the pro-government Sabah newspaper.



Erdogan was speaking during a visit to China, ahead of his trip to Washington for his first meeting with Trump.



Turkey had hoped that Trump's inauguration would mark a new chapter in ties with Washington after long-running tensions with the Obama administration over Syria policy and Ankara's demands for the extradition of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.



Erdogan blames Gulen supporters for a failed coup attempt last July and has conducted a large-scale crackdown on them, drawing criticism from Washington. Gulen, who has denied involvement in the coup, remains in the United States.



Erdogan welcomed Trump's election victory last November and said he hoped it would lead to "beneficial steps" in the Middle East. When Erdogan narrowly won sweeping new powers in an April referendum, Trump rang to congratulate him, unlike European politicians who expressed reservations about the vote.



DYNAMITE



But hopes for rapprochement took a hit last week. The decision to arm the YPG was "tantamount to placing dynamite under Turkey-USA relations", a senior Turkish official said.



"Just as it was being said that relations (which were) seriously harmed during the Obama period are being repaired, Turkey moving apart from one of its biggest allies would be an extremely bad sign," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.



Erdogan portrays U.S. support for the Kurdish militia - instead of Syrian Arab rebels - as a leftover policy from the Obama administration, which he said had wrongly accused Turkey of doing too little in the fight against Islamic State.



"It is a slander of the Obama administration. Unfortunately now they have left the Syria and Iraq problem in Trump's lap," Erdogan said in China.



Erdogan will tell Trump that backing a Kurdish force to retake Arab territory held by Islamic State will sow future crises, and that other forces in the region including Kurdish Iraqi leaders also oppose the YPG, the Turkish official said.



Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said after talks in London last week with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that Trump's meeting with Erdogan would be an opportunity to "correct the mistake" of support for the YPG.



"Now we will conduct the final talks," Erdogan said. "After that we will make our final decision."



The United States sees few alternatives to supporting the YPG, which forms a major part of the Syrian Democratic Forces advancing on Raqqa, if it is to achieve the goal of crushing Islamic State in Syria.



Erdogan did not spell out what actions Turkey might take if Washington does press ahead with its plans.



Officials have suggested it could step up air strikes on PKK bases in northern Iraq, or YPG targets in Syria. It could also impose limits on the use of its Incirlik air base as a launchpad for the air campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.



But that would hamper operations against jihadis who also menace Turkey and have claimed responsibility for attacks including the bombing of Istanbul airport in June 2016.



"Naturally (Turkey) would have to consider the aftermath of closing the Incirlik base to (U.S.) use," said Soli Ozel, a lecturer at Turkey's Kadir Has university.



"It will not be very easy to put relations back on track," Ozel said. "I think ultimately a formula will be found. I think neither side wants to cut relations."
Ramallah (West Bank): President Mahmoud Abbas's ruling Fatah Party posted a poor showing in Palestinian municipal elections across the West Bank, even though the rival Islamic Hamas movement stayed out of the race, according to results announced.



The vote reflected public discontent with Abbas and his Fatah movement, whose popularity has sunk due to a weak economy, nepotism in its ranks and its failure to lead the Palestinians closer to independence.



Sunday's vote gave Palestinians a rare chance to cast ballots after over a decade without presidential or legislative elections. Abbas' embattled party ran virtually unopposed, and yesterday's election was seen as a litmus test of Fatah's popularity.



But the results indicated lackluster support for the party, which has dominated Palestinian politics for half a century. In an indication of public sentiment, just 53 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. Voter turnout in the previous municipal elections, in 2012, was comparable, elections commission director Hisham Khalil said.



In Hebron, the West Bank's largest city and a Hamas stronghold, Fatah won just seven of 15 seats. "The result wasn't great for us," said Tayseer Abu Sneineh, the head of Fatah's list in the city.



In Nablus, another major city, Fatah won 11 of 15 seats, but only after forming an alliance with Islamist candidates.



Turnout in Nablus was just 21 per cent. Fatah only won clear victories in two major cities, Jenin and Jericho. In several cities, Fatah couldn't piece together enough candidates to field a campaign list, leaving local Fatah politicians to run as independents.



Roughly 2.2 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, of whom just over 787,000 were eligible to vote. East Jerusalem's 300,000 residents didn't take part in the elections.







The Palestinians have been divided between rival governments since Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 legislative elections and drove the latter out of the Gaza Strip the following year, leaving Abbas in control only of the Palestinian Authority autonomy government in parts of the West Bank. Repeated attempts to reconcile have failed.



Fatah and Hamas were supposed to compete in elections last year in both the West Bank and Gaza. But with the rival factions disqualifying each other's candidates, Fatah went forward with the elections in the West Bank alone in a bid to renew its legitimacy.



The Palestinian president is currently more than a decade into what was supposed to be a four-year term. Hanna Nasser, head of the Central Elections Commission, said the organization plans to approach Hamas about the possibility of holding municipal elections in the Gaza Strip.






The meeting has been scheduled in principle for Tuesday afternoon, according to the UN mission of Uruguay, which currently holds the council's presidency.



It was the North's second missile firing in two weeks, and came amid mounting international concern over Pyongyang's progress in developing nuclear weapons that could be carried by long-range missiles.

"There are no excuses that justify N. Korea's actions," Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, tweeted. "This was close to home for Russia. China cant expect dialogue. This threat is real."

Haley said on ABC that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was "in a state of paranoia."

US President Donald Trump issued a brief statement calling for tougher sanctions. "Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea," he said.

The United States and Japan on Sunday called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on North Korea after Pyongyang carried out its latest missile test, diplomats said.North Korea launched a ballistic missile early on Sunday in what was seen as a challenge to South Korea's new President Moon Jae-In, a liberal who has said he wants to ease tensions with the North.The latest projectile, launched from a military base in Kusong near the country's northwest coast, traveled some 435 miles (700 kilometers) before landing in the Sea of Japan.In Brussels, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu called Pyongyang's move "a new flagrant breach of a series of United Nations Security Council Resolutions," constituting "a threat to international peace and security."And EU foreign affairs spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic denounced the launch as "a threat to international peace and security (that could) further aggravate tensions in the region at a time when de-escalation is instead needed."For weeks, the Trump administration has been demanding a tightening of sanctions against the North and urging a tougher stance by Beijing, Pyongyang's principal ally."And so what we're going to do is continue to tighten the screws," she said. "He feels it. He absolutely feels it. And we're going to continue, whether it's sanctions, whether it's press statements, anything that we have to do."The US Treasury indicated it was examining all possible means to cut off international financing to Pyongyang.But the strong focus on sanctions seemed to be a step away from the more threatening language Trump had used earlier in the year, when he sent a US Navy strike group steaming toward Korean waters and pointedly refused to take the military option off the table.
Virginia State Police said two people were killed Monday morning in a head-on collision in Buckingham County.

Police said Deborah A. Stearnes, 49, of Dillywn, and Thomas C. Mason Jr., 61, of Disputanta, died in the crash, which happened at approximately 9:45 a.m. on Route 15 near Willis Mountain Plant Lane in Dillwyn.

Police said a 2005 Pontiac Grand Am driven by Stearnes was heading south on Route 15 when it crossed the centerline and struck a dump truck driven by Mason head on. Mason tried to avoid the Pontiac, but was unable to and after the vehicles collided the truck ran off the left side of the highway, crashed through a guardrail, overturned and hit a tree.

Alcohol was not a factor in the crash, which state police are still investigating. Police said Stearnes was not wearing a seatbelt, but Mason was. Both died at the scene.
Abortion: Democrats' sacred cow

First, Attorney General Mark Herring would not defend Virginias constitutionally approved Marriage Amendment against the attacks at the U.S. Supreme Court. And now, Gov. Terry McAuliffe has circumvented the regulatory review process for his own purposes. But now, we finally have someone who is willing to stand up against the lawless McAuliffe administration.

With the support of The Family Foundation, Del. Kathy Byron, R-22nd District, two Board of Health members and Itzel Melendez of Richmond are suing the McAuliffe administration for violating the Administrative Process Act, various other statutes and the governors own Executive Order. All these illegal actions were in regard to the regulatory process for abortion center health and safety standards.

Abortion is a sacred cow for Democrats. During the Clinton administration, Democrats position was abortions should be safe, legal and rare. Today, that philosophy has morphed into the more extreme stance on abortion  abortions at all cost, even the cost of the mother. The health and safety of women are not the concerns of the Democrats; they want abortion on their terms without any regulations or limits.

Today, Democrats want to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortion unless the pregnancy arises from incest, rape or to save the life of the mother. Although it is not a permanent law, it is a rider routinely attached to appropriations bills. In December 2016, 106 Democrats signed a letter to President-elect Trump to urge him to remove the Hyde Amendment. Not only do Democrats favor no restrictions on abortion, they want those who object to the practice of taking innocent life to pay for it.

In 2011, a bipartisan Virginia General Assembly passed new health and safety regulations for abortion clinics, and then-Gov. Bob McDonnell signed the bill into law. These common-sense measures were designed to keep oftentimes vulnerable women safe in those facilities that until that point had virtually no oversight or accountability. Since the regulations took effect in 2012, Board of Health inspectors have cited more than 1,500 individual health and safety violations through publically accessible inspection reports.

But in November 2013, Virginias electorate voted in a Democrat for governor. McAuliffe had a drastically different view of the abortion clinic regulations, and as payback to the abortion industry, he called for a full review of the regulations on May 12, 2014, in an effort to strip them of their force. In the Health Departments Notice of Intended Regulatory Action (NOIRA), the Board of Health identified six specific sections of the abortion health and safety regulations for review and proposed amendments. They eventually went well beyond those to amend 21 distinct sections. During that lawless process, the public was effectively shut out of the process.

Do we want Gov. McAuliffe to follow the law or make new ways to regulate by obstructing due process?

We should stand with The Family Foundation, Del. Byron, the Board of Health members and Itzel Melendez for standing up for the rule of law and the health and safety of Virginias women.

JANET STASULLI

Forest

We can do better, America

It was a sigh of great relief that flowed from me last Sunday evening when I learned that, unlike the United Kingdom and the United States, France has rejected the dark side and chosen humanity. The victory of centrist Emmanuel Macron for the presidency of France shows that at least one country is not ready to dive back into the Middle Ages before science had established itself.

Also the other week, we saw the Republicans in the House of Representatives slapping each other on the backs and having a party after taking healthcare from about 24 million Americans so they could give big tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the country. One wonders how ecstatic they would be if they cut all funding for social programs and just concentrated on killing people around the globe.

Lastly, the Republican leadership ordered the climate change pages removed from the EPAs web site. That reminds me of the dunces in the North Carolina legislature who disallowed all mention of sea level rise in planning along the N.C. coast. Guess what folks, Mother Nature doesnt give a hoot in hell whether you believe in climate change or not. You will have to live with it though.

We can do better than France; we must do better than we have in the last months. Our grandchildren depend on us.

MIKE TABONY

Gladstone
The maker of Budweiser, facing more competition in America from craft brews and cocktails, is spending billions to fight back.

Anheuser-Busch InBev will devote $2 billion in U.S. capital spending to bolstering its flagship brands and improving distribution. The money also will help support the company's forays into "near beer," alcoholic sparkling water, and other products -- like tea -- that are far afield from its original mission.

The investment, which extends through 2020, is a bet that Anheuser-Busch can push into new categories without neglecting its core business: traditional beer brands. Striking that balance will be key to the company's future, Anheuser-Busch Chief Executive Officer Joao Castro Neves said in an interview.

"What we are trying to do is the 'and' and not the 'or,"' he said.

The first $500 million will be spent this year on what Castro Neves calls the company's three pillars: elevating its biggest beer brands, building its presence in craft brews and imports, and pushing beyond regular beer into low-alcohol beverages and other drinks.

Anheuser-Busch has already bought nine U.S. craft-beer brands, and it's in the process of closing a deal for Asheville, North Carolina-based Wicked Weed, which makes beers with names such as Angel of Darkness, Iron Lady and Barrel Aged French Toast.

Castro Neves sees the company's craft and smaller-scale producers as key to keeping up with rapid shifts in customer preferences. "They are very close to consumers, and they help us stay ahead of the curve," he said.

The company's capital spending will help foster some of its smaller brands. Castro Neves cited a $15 million investment at a facility in Fairfield, California, that will allow craft partner Elysian Brewery to produce its Space Dust beer there. (Elysian's website describes the hops flavor as "pure starglow energy.")

Expanding the portfolio is critical because beer volumes are declining, particularly in Anheuser-Busch's top categories. Beer's share of the U.S. alcohol market lost ground to liquor for a seventh straight year in 2016, falling a percentage point to 47 percent, according to the Distilled Spirits Council, a trade organization. Spirits rose to 36 percent from 35 percent.

The shift has led Anheuser-Busch to look outside beer for growth. The brewer has acquired SpikedSeltzer, an alcoholic sparkling water, and formed a partnership with Starbucks Corp. to brew, bottle and sell ready-to-drink Teavana teas. Anheuser-Busch also has a joint venture with JAB Holding Co.'s Keurig to develop an at-home drink maker.

The investments will include $200 million this year to improve operations at the company's 12 largest U.S. breweries and $180 million to enhance packaging and expand the production of aluminum bottles. Anheuser-Busch will spend $82 million on its supply chain, including new distribution centers in Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio, and $10 million to expand nonalcoholic production in Baldwinsville, New York.

The investment outlook was updated after Anheuser-Busch moved forward on its $103 billion acquisition of SABMiller. It brings the brewer's total U.S. investment to $4.5 billion over the 2011-2020 period.

The company wanted to revamp its plans for the U.S. to ensure it doesn't lose its focus on the world's biggest beverage market, Castro Neves said.

"We are investing big behind this market because it's so important," he said. "But also because we see growth opportunities."
DC's Batman spotlight is expanding to his sidekicks more and more

Members of Batman's family will seemingly play huge roles in the DCU in 2023
Thirteen Reasons stirs controversy

I certainly didnt see this coming when I read the novel shortly after its release ten years ago. But then I didnt envision a Netflix series to sensationalise a touchy subject, namely teenage suicide, when the novel first came out.

Thirteen Reasons Why is the story of Hannah, a depressed teen who commits suicide. Hannah leaves behind a tape stating the 13 reasons why she made this decision. Clay Jenson is a recipient of that tape. He must listen to this tape to see what Hannah perceives to be his role in her suicide.

I cant say I was too impressed when I read the book. I thought the book a bit superficial for such a serious issue. Teenage readers begged to differ. They found Hannahs story opened their eyes to the problem of teen depression, which often goes unnoticed. Teens have ways of hiding their emotions.

Many teenagers who read the novel said it helped them to recognise signs of depression in other teenagers, and that provided a sense of empathy as well as a sense of power in being more supportive of teenagers. The fact that Ashers novel stayed in print as a hardcover book for a decade shows just how important this book was to teenagers.

As far as adults go, this is a book that managed to fly under the radar  unless you were a librarian paying special attention to new YA releases. Of course, all of that changed when the Netflix series came out. Schools issued warnings to parents, child psychologists spoke about what many have perceived to be the romanticising of suicide. I havent seen the Netflix series, but I can only imagine how the series exploits the most sensational aspects of the book. Series and movies tend to do that.

What I do know is that the current controversy raises an important issue: namely the need for parents to be aware of what their children  even teenagersare reading.

This is not to mean parents should be censoring childrens reading or trying in any way to sanitise what they are reading. Parents should merely be aware of their childrens reading choices to understand issues and themes that resonate with children.

Parents should find innovative ways to discuss controversial material their children might be reading.

On the other hand, parents should be aware of the recommended reading age for books. Amazon.

com often provides recommended reading ages from Library Journal.

This is a guideline for parents to decide whether or not a book is age-appropriate. Parents will often find that a book is for a younger age than they imagine. Children today are exposed to drugs, violence, moral and ethical issues long before their parents generation. If you think you can protect them from these issues or prolong their entry into the troubled world we live in, think again. You cant. The best you can do is guide them as carefully as possible.

Literature allows parents to address issues that are uncomfortable to speak about on a parent/child level. Discussing characters in a novel allows children a semblance of distance from the problem.

They can actualise the issue in increments that are comfortable for them. They can lean on a character in a book to help them navigate their own issues in their own time and place, and parents can be part of that important process.
RENNIE DUMAS DIES

He served as an Opposition Senator in 2001, and then began a nine year ministerial career under former prime minister Patrick Manning.

Dumas was minister of state in the Office of the Prime Minister (2001 to 2002), minister of public utilities (2002 to 2003), minister of local government (2003 to 2007) and minister of labour (2007 to 2010). In 2007 he was elected Tobago East MP.

In an interview on I95.5FM yesterday, Dumas ex wife said he was suffering from a faulty heart valve for which he recently had surgery from which his family hoped he would recuperate.

She described him as kind and generous and always willing to help others. Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, in a media release, offered his condolences.

Mr Dumas service to the people of Trinidad and Tobago signified his innate sense of patriotism which was his driving force throughout his public service career, Rowley said.

Former minister of education and minister of local government, Hazel Manning and wife of former prime minister, the late Patrick Manning, offered her condolences to Dumas family.

He was a very good colleague, she said. When I followed him in the Ministry of Local Government, he gave quite a lot of advice. I followed in some of his programmes. We worked closely. Manning added, I knew he was ill. I kept track. I kept talking to others who would tell me what was happening. I chatted with him earlier this year.

Everything was good at that time. Unfortunately he is gone.

GOPEE-SCOON: EASY TO GET ALONG WITH

Another former Cabinet colleague, Trade Minister Paula Gope Scoon, told Newsday Dumas was very easy to get along with. She said, He was very conscientious, always looking after the interest of the man in the street.

A loyal son of Tobago, God rest his soul. Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister and Tobago East MP Ayanna Webster-Roy told Newsday Dumas was her campaign manager in the 2015 general election.

Tobago has lost a brilliant mind. He was quite the intellect, a charismatic individual and a very committed PNM member.

He was my fathers friend, often in our house socialising. I knew Rennie as just the average man, the friendly man, the jovial man, who was always laughing and having a drink with my father at home and reminiscing about their teaching careers. Minister of Public Administration, Maxie Cuffie, also on I95.5 FM said Dumas had made a very good contribution on Tobago issues and had championed the full integration of Trinidad and Tobago, while Tobago House of Assembly chief secretary, Kelvin Charles, said Dumas had made an invaluable contribution to both party and country.

A Ministry of Public Administration statement mourned his passing. Dumas is survived by his companion Annalean Innis and eight children.

A towering figure, whose height earned him the nickname Stretch, Dumas was a true son of the Tobago soil. He received his secondary education at Bishops High School in Tobago, and regardless of where his educational and professional travels took him, he always returned to his beloved Plymouth.

He was relentless in his pursuit of an enhanced quality of life for his fellow Tobagonians and always contributed to the discussion on the issue of greater autonomy for Tobago. His last foray into the political arena was his challenge to become the political leader of the PNM in Tobago in 2016. Minister of Rural Development and Local Government Kazim Hosein, in a statement, hailed Dumas for his dedicated service and good governance.

He brought his intellect, expertise and resourcefulness to every endeavour and his great service and contribution to the development of this nation that he so loved, will be remembered by his colleagues and the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago. I am grateful to stand in his wake at the Ministry of Rural Development and Local Government, knowing that he has in great measure paved a way forward, especially in the area of local government reform.

LEGAL TROUBLES

Dumas, however, also faced his fair share of problems having been found guilty in April 2013 of on two counts of common assault at the Scarborough Magistrates Court. He was accused striking Roger Simon, also known as Abdul Jabar, in his face on June 1, 2011 with his (Dumas) licensed firearm knocking out several of Simons teeth.

On the charge of common assault Dumas was fined $3,500 or nine months hard labour, and on the charge of inflicting grievous bodily harm, he was fined $15,000 or two years in jail.

Dumas appealed and the Court of Appeal set aside the conviction and ordered a new trial as the allegations against him were quite serious and justice required it.

On Facebook yesterday, those offering condolences included former Laventille West MP NiLeung Hypolite, former SWMCOL head Ray Brathwaite, and Sigler Jack, chairman of the Diego Martin West PNM constituency of Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley.

Dumas was born in Plymouth, Tobago and attended Bishops High School and the University of the West Indies , St Augustine.

He worked as a school teacher, as TTUTAs Tobago representative, as coordinator of the THAs strategic oversight unit, and as a business analyst.

A statement yesterday in the name of several family members said funeral arrangements will soon be announced. They thanked all those who provided support and comfort through his illness.

His loss comes as a shock to us all as his will to live was strong.

But we take comfort in the fact that he is now in the safe arms of God. To those who called visited, messaged, enquired, contributed or said a prayer, we say a heartfelt thank you as without your support we would not have made it this far. They thanked the doctors and nurses of the High Dependency Unit, Mount Hope Hospital for the dignity and respect he was given.

Rennie, aka Stretch, was loved and respected by many and our sincere hope is that his memory continues to live on in all of us.
Man shot dead in KFC, St Helena

According to police, at about 10.30 pm, Akino Suya was standing in line waiting to make a purchase when three men entered and shot him twice before running off. However, one of the men returned and fired a third shot at Suya.

Screaming customers and employees scampered for safety.

One customer who witnessed the killing told police he had just paid for his meal when he saw Suya enter the building followed shortly after by his assailants.

This was like something out of a movie, he told Newsday.

At first I thought someone was shooting a movie but then I realised that it was all real when I saw (Suya) slump to the ground. He said he quickly exited the establishment leaving behind his meal.

Officers of the Las Lomas police post responded to reports of a shooting and the area was cordoned off.

The body was viewed by a district medical officer who ordered that it be removed to the Forensic Science Centre, St James, where a post mortem is expected to be conducted today.

The outlet was closed for the rest of the night while police conducted interviews and processed the scene.

Police sources told Newsday that Suya, formerly of Building Five in Maloney, was a suspected gang member who recently began hiding out at Harracksingh Trace, Madras, Cunupia.
Rambharat says food safety a priority for Government

Rambharat spoke about his deep and personal interest in food safety last Wednesday while addressing participants in a High Level Executive Meeting hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and the Pan American Health Organisation/World Health Organisation at Kapok Hotel, Port-of-Spain.

Rambharat recalled that during his first month in office; September 2015, he wrote to his aforementioned colleagues, indicating to them that it was very clear that this ministry (Agriculture) has a vested interest in matters of food safety and nutrition. Regarding his follow up request that they work together on pressing issues such as food laundering and food fraud, Rambharat said consumers have the right to know what they are eating (and therefore) there is a responsibility on all of us to tell our consumers what they are dealing with. According to the Agriculture Ministry, the objective of this meeting was to present to senior Government officials with a synopsis of partners programmes conducted in 2016, to help address negative trends associated with food safety and non-communicable diseases.

They also aimed to reach agreement on proceeding with planned initiatives for 2017 - 2018.

Discussion were centred on the finalisation and approval of the Food Safety Policy; Operationalisation of the Risk-based Manual on Food Safety; Implementation of Food Safety Communication Behavioural Impact (COMBI) Plans; and Implementation of a Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) programme.

In addition, the officials were challenged by Minister Rambharat to: 1) Bridge the gap between these workshops and the vital work we do with what is happening out there and what the citizens of this country have to deal with; 2) Move from the technical work that has been done to implementation; and 3) Recognise their responsibility to communicate with the citizens of this country, drawing their attention to risks, opportunities, cautions and precautions.
Moana is the first Mothers Day baby for 2017

The 20-year-old Champs Fleurs resident gave birth to a girl at 12.01 am at the Mt Hope Womens Hospital, Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, Mt Hope .

Cradling her sleeping daughter Moana Justine, Peters said she started getting labour pains on Friday morning but it wasnt until Saturday night that she checked into the hospital .

Asked about the delivery, Peters told reporters it was terrible because there was a lot of pain. But Im thankful for the blessing of my child. Moana, named after the lead female character in the Disney movie of the same name, weighed 6.3 pounds at birth and is the second child for her father, 24-year-old Shaka Cruickshank .

A smiling Cruickshank told reporters, Im excited to have a daughter. I have a seven-year-old son. The family was also visited by Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh who jokingly asked Peters if he could take her baby girl home because their two children are all grown up but his wife still loves having babies around .

The new mom asked, Just for the day? to which the minister joked, No, forever. As everyone burst into laughter, Peters told Deyalsingh Moanas father wouldnt allow that .

Deyalsingh also asked Peters about her treatment by staff .

The treatment was very nice .

Everybody has a different experience but my experience was nice. It was lovely and I thank all the staff for that. On the other end of the East West Corridor, 32-year-old Mellissia Celestine of Barataria gave birth to a boy at the Maternity Ward of the Port-of-Spain General Hospital at 1.20 am .

Weighing just over seven pounds, Andel Ameer Celestine slept in his mothers arms while she was being interviewed yesterday morning .

This is her third child; Celestine has an older son and daughter; one is 14, the other is 12 .

Deyalsingh also asked the mother if she had experienced poor treatment that is sometimes talked about in reference to the public health sector .

That is old talk, Celestine said with a smile .
Five born in San Fernando

She gave birth to a healthy baby girl at 12.22 am. George and her husband Solomon Phillip agreed to name the baby Amelia who, although born prematurely, is in good health. Stephanie Farrow, 28, became a mother for the third time when she gave birth at 3.08 am. She said her husband Andy Phillips and her two children were excited about the new baby.

They keep calling and asking about the child, she said.

First time mother Vanessa Jagroop, 22, was surrounded by her four sisters and her parents at the hospital yesterday. She named her baby boy Aleem. Jagroop and her husband Imtiaz Ali chose the name before he was born. She said she made three trips to the hospital.

Aleem was initially due on May 5.

And Tesha Mascal, 40, of Moruga was graced by the presence of a baby girl at 7.24 am. This being Mascals fifth child, she said she is happy that everything went well.
Volney: Government not progressive on issue of marijuana use

Last week Volney, who was born in Montserrat and lived in Dominica prior to his move here, caused a stir at a rally hosted by the Dominica Labour Party led by prime minister Roosevelt Skerrit.

He told more than 12,000 supporters, There is one thing I promised the youths to say tonight.

Dont mind I was a judge, I will say it. Prime minister legalise it. Legalise it. Jamaica legalised it, let Dominica legalise it. Contacted yesterday Volney who is a former minister of justice in the Peoples Partnership administration said that he is all for the decriminalisation and even the legalisation of marijuana in this country.

When you legalise you remove criminality, when you decriminalise you allow possession and cultivation in restricted circumstances.

I have had the view ever since I was a judge and I saw all these young men being imprisoned for possession of very small quantities of marijuana and, as a result, destroying their chances of getting visas to travel and getting sustainable jobs locally because of having criminal records. Volney told Newsday he has done a lot of research which suggests there is no empirical evidence that marijuana consumption is any more harmful than the consumption of alcohol.

In fact, it is proven that there are medicinal benefits in the use of marijuana whether it be taken in the form of oils, tea or other methods of consumption. He said there is no corresponding benefits with alcohol and can see no good reason why people should not be allowed to use small quantities of marijuana for recreational and or medicinal needs.

Asked by Newsday if he intends to advocate for Government to legalise or decriminalise marijuana here, Volney said, I prefer to expend my energies in helping more progressive thinking governments in the region to follow the Jamaica lead. I do not hold much hope that this conservative government will consider even the issue of decriminalisation, no matter how limited, during its next 40 months of its term in office. Volney said he is ready and willing to work with Skerrit and revealed that he has been invited by one of 12 groups in Dominica to present a paper on the way forward with the decriminalisation of marijuana.
PTA: Mayaro Govt school a fire hazard

On Thursday afternoon an electric breaker in a standard one classroom overheated and began smoking .

Reports are that the school disconnected the electrical supply and instructed students to gather at the schools muster point. MP for Mayaro Rushton Paray said the problem was contained and classes were suspended .

But PTA president Dexter Douglas, on Saturday, accused Paray and school officials of giving false information to the media .

They did not evacuate the school or send students to the muster point, Douglas said .

They moved children to another class and the children remained in school. They did not even contact the Fire Service until the PTA intervened. Douglas said fire officers then contacted T&TEC as it was primarily an electrical issue and T&TEC recommended that the breaker be changed .

School went on as normal the next day. He fears, however, that the overheating would have weakened the copper brackets and made the wires more susceptible to fire, thus requiring more than a change of breaker. Douglas also said the school does not have a functioning fire hose with an independent water supply and its fire extinguisher had not been serviced in years. All of these problems, along with their concerns about the school being guarded by only one security officer, were protested by the PTA all of last week .

The PTA has scheduled an emergency meeting for tomorrow to determine the best approach to having their issues addressed .
Popular Maracas guitar man dies

The announcement was made by a relative, Melissa J Plummer, on her Facebook page at approximately 10pm that night. She said Plummer died at the Port-of-Spain General Hospital from a seizure.

We thank you for all your prayers and well wishes at this time, Melissa said.

Maracas beach goers were very familiar with Peter since he was known to serenade anyone who will listen to him play his acoustic guitar and sing a range of songs.

Peter even did some extempo at times depending on how exuberant he was at that given moment.

Facebook lit up with tributes to Peter. One such posting from Alvin Ramsarran read: He is a perfect example of not judging a book by its cover, (he) made people laugh with his jokes and music. No amount of money in (the) world could replace the joy he brought to us all. Thanks for blessing us with your earthly presence, now you would be entertaining the angels above. rest in peace. Another from Sandra Williams stated: He was the Maracas Bay Calypsonian. He could make up anything on the spot and sing for you. He was nice. After Arlenes funeral service last month, Peter serenaded mourners outside the Assumption Church, Maraval, in tribute to his sister, 65, who passed away March 27.

The patriarch Dudley Buntin Plummer, 86, went to his maker on August 6, 2011, and mom Barbara 87, in April, 2010.

Denyses only remaining sibling now is her younger sister Belinda.
There Was No Red Wave,

'That's for Darn Sure'
Meanwhile, staff of the corporation told the Crime Branch that the letter pad issued in the name of the mayor was fake.
Let them eat cake? Maybe not on JetBlue. A New Jersey family en route to Las Vegas was kicked off their JetBlue flight after a dispute with flight attendants over birthday cake. According to the New York Daily News, Cameron and Minta Burke were off to Vegas to celebrate Mintas 40th birthday with their two children on May 3. They say a birthday cake, part of their carry-on luggage, was placed in an overhead bin until a flight attendant asked them to move it to a different compartment, before finally deciding it belonged under their seats. Now enter a second flight attendant, says Cameron, who began berating the first airline worker, and then him. "She said I was being non-compliant," recalls Burke. "I said, Miss, have you been drinking? because her behavior was irrational, and she stormed off."

The Burkes were then asked to leave the flight, and when they refused, police officers from JFK Airport boarded to investigate, which can be seen in a video recorded by the family. One can be heard telling the family that nobody did anything wrong. JetBlue then asked all passengers to leave the plane in order to remove the family. ABC News reports that the airline issued a statement countering Burkes story, saying the family refused to move the cake, and "became agitated, cursed and yelled at the crew, and made false accusations about a crew member's fitness to fly." The Burkes, who managed to book a flight via United the next day, plan to file a lawsuit. "We were just so happy," says Minta. "All of a sudden this occurred, and my two children are screaming, crying." (Read more JetBlue stories.)
The reward for information leading to whoever shot a rare white wolf found inside Yellowstone National Park rose to $10,000 on Friday after a wolf advocacy group matched a $5,000 reward offered earlier by the park. Yellowstone officials euthanized the severely injured wolf after hikers found the animal suffering in the northern part of the park, near Gardiner, Mont., on April 11. The 12-year-old wolf that was killed was the alpha female of a group of wolves dubbed the Canyon Pack and a popular target of photographers, the AP reports. The park offered the initial reward after a preliminary necropsy found the wolf had been shot. The Montana group Wolves of the Rockies followed up with its own $5,000 reward.

Park officials haven't said whether they have leads in their investigation into who killed the wolf, but Wolves of the Rockies President Marc Cook suspects that the wolf's killer was someone angry about the reintroduction of wolves to the park more than two decades ago. "People take matters into their own hands and feel they are above the law," he says. Park officials also haven't commented on a motive for the wolf's killing, but many hunting outfitters and ranchers oppose the presence of the wolves, which now number about 100 in the park. Park officials say the dead wolf had at least 20 pups, of which 14 became yearlings. She was together with the same alpha male wolf for more than nine years. (Read more Yellowstone National Park stories.)
North Korea has been bragging about its latest missile launchand experts say the boasts are more than just empty bluster. The Hwasong-12 missile fired Sunday traveled nearly 500 miles before landing in the Sea of Japan near Russia, according to Pyongyang's KCNA state news agency. Analysts say it was fired at an unusually high trajectory and would have been capable of traveling more than 2,500 miles along a normal trajectory. North Korea says the new rocket is capable of carrying a "large-scale, heavy nuclear warhead," the Guardian reports. KCNA claims Kim Jong Un oversaw the test and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research" after it was a success.

The Washington-based monitoring project 38 North says Sunday's launch "represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile," reports Reuters. The group says Pyongyang now not only appears to have a missile that can hit the US base at Guam, it also seems to have made faster progress than expected toward creating an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the US mainland. The BBC reports that Japan and the US, which declared North Korea a "flagrant menace" after the test, have called for an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting Tuesday to discuss the country. (Read more North Korea stories.)
The massive ransomware attack still reverberating around the world is the kind of thing that is going to keep happening unless rules like those governing conventional warfare are brought in for cyberspace, Microsoft says. Microsoft president Brad Smith warned in a blog post Sunday that the "stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments" has once again caused enormous damage, USA Today reports. Smith says the "WannaCrypt" attack, also known as "WannaCry," was created with data stolen from the NSA, which had used a vulnerability it found to create cyberweapons. The equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the "US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen," Smith said.

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call," Smith wrote, repeating the company's call for a digital Geneva Convention. Microsoft issued a patch after the theft was discovered in March, but it was not issued to people and organizations using older versions of its system. More than 200,000 computers in 150 countries have been affected and the AP reports that there were thousands more cases early Monday as people got back to work after the weekend and booted up infected computers. The ransomware is demanding $300 to unlock user's files. The BBC says its analysis of accounts linked to the attack found that around $38,000 had been paid by early Monday. (Read more Microsoft stories.)
A man's death while in police custody on the Las Vegas Strip is making headlines, in part because of an officer's use of a neck restraint. Police say the incident began when the man approached two officers inside the Venetian hotel and casino about 1am Sunday, reports the AP. The officers say he was acting erratically, claiming that people were after him, and took off outside. They followed, spotted him trying to get into someone's pickup, and used a stun gun on him, but the officers say the man continued to fight them. One officer then punched him multiple times and used a department approved control technique called the lateral vascular neck restraint," per a police statement cited by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The man, who was unarmed and has not been identified, lost consciousness and was pronounced dead at a hospital about 1:40am.

The incident is drawing comparisons to the death of Eric Garner in New York City, who could be heard telling police "I can't breathe" while in a chokehold. The department, however, says the restraint used is not a chokehold because, when deployed properly, it does not block a suspect's airway. Instead, it restricts the flow of blood to a persons brain by "compressing arteries in the neck," per the Washington Post, which digs into the semantics via the National Law Enforcement Training Center. In short, the restraint is meant to be a safer alternative to a chokehold, though the ACLU in Nevada isn't making such distinctions. "The incident of a man dying in police custody today is one more reason why the use of chokehold practices must stop," says the group's executive director. "Too many people have died as a result of this type of excessive force." (Read more Las Vegas stories.)
President Trump has settled on Callista Gingrich as the US ambassador to the Vatican, CNN reported first Sunday night, saying the choice has been made but the process has been hung up by the Office of Government Ethics, which needs to give its approval. The network reports a formal nomination of the wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich could come as soon as this week, with Trump wanting it to be made before his May 24 meeting with Pope Francis. That her name was being floated has been known since JanuaryNewt himself told CNN as much shortly after Trump became president. Newt wouldn't say much to the New York Times Sunday night beyond noting both he and his wife had been advised to "be very cautious" until an announcement was made.

The Times has more on Callista's relationship with Catholicism: She helped Newt convert and sings in the Basilica of the National Shrine choir, but it points out she had a hand in the demise of Newt's third marriage. An opinion piece at the National Catholic Reporter makes the case that "the Vatican cares less about the moral history of an ambassadorial nominee than it does about the nominee's access to the decision-makers in the administration." As for the administration, Axios contributes this to the rumor mill: "About six weeks ago ... Trump told our source he was reluctant to send Callista to the Vatican because he likes seeing her husband Newt defending him on TV. Our source told the President they were sure satellite hook-ups could be arranged for Newt at the Holy See." (In other Vatican news, Pope Francis is not convinced by these famed Mary apparitions.)
A police officer in Ohio got a lesson the hard way on just how potent the opioid fentanyl can be. The East Liverpool department says officer Chris Green got some of the powder on his skin after a drug bust and suffered an accidental overdose, reports WFMJ. He ended up in the hospital but is OK after multiple doses of the overdose-reversal drug Narcan. Green had participated in the arrest of two men Friday night who were suspected of conducting a drug deal inside a car. When cops blocked their vehicle, police say the men began trying to dispose of the evidence, and white powder ended up all over the inside of their car.

Officers donned protective gear in collecting evidence from the scene, and accounts differ on how Green got some of the powder on his skin. The best guess is that some ended up on his shirt and he wiped it off with his bare hand, reports WKBN. "Just out of instinct, he tried to brush it offnot thinking," says a police captain. Fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin, and Green quickly began suffering the effects. Meanwhile, Justin Buckle, 25, and Cortez Collins, 24, face drug charges after their Friday night arrests. (Read more fentanyl stories.)
Melania and Barron Trump are prepping for their big move to the nation's capital from New York City, where they remained after President Trump's inauguration so the 11-year-old could finish out the school year. And the Washington Post reports Barron's new school has been chosen: St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, Md., a coed prep school, where he'll enter the sixth grade. "We are very excited for our son to attend St. Andrew's," Melania Trump said in a statement to People, which notes Barron will be the first modern-day first child not to attend the Sidwell Friends School.

Per the Post, the Trumps had wanted to keep the school announcement quiet until the summer, keeping any possible protests during the school year at bay, but St. Andrew's decided to jump ahead of rumors and address community concerns with a letter Monday, forcing the Trumps' hand. Tuition is about $40,000 a year for grades six and up. (Read more Barron Trump stories.)
A Syrian military prison that Amnesty International last year called a "human slaughterhouse" is reported to be executing upward of 50 prisoners daily, and now a US State Department official says President Bashar al-Assad's regime has built and is using a secret crematorium to dispose of the bodies, Reuters and the Washington Post report. Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, puts the number of Syrians who have been rounded up, detained, and "exterminated" at the Sednaya prison outside of Damascus in the thousands, and the killings appear to have "unconditional support" from both Russia and Iran. Jones, who offered overhead photos of the reported crematorium, said evidence was culled from "intelligence assessments," as well as human rights and other sources.

Based on the Amnesty International report, the prisoners are apparently yanked from their cells in the middle of the night, ostensibly to be placed in different cells, then summarily hanged or otherwise killed en masse, per CNN. Jones indicated that while Russia and Iran may not have known specifically about the crematorium, they've certainly been aware of other atrocities said to be taking place, ABC News notes. Jones also had a pessimistic take on a deal last week, negotiated with Russia's help, to set up "de-escalation zones" inside the war-torn country to cut down on the violence. "In light of the failures of the past ceasefire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical," Jones said, per Reuters. (The Syrian Kurds are about to get more help from the US.)
A fraternity pledge who was ordered to guzzle alcohol during a hazing ritual and twice fell down a flight of stairs before his death was treated like "roadkill," his father said Monday, days after criminal charges were filed against 18 of his son's Penn State fraternity brothers. Jim Piazza, the father of 19-year-old engineering student Timothy Piazza, said the Beta Theta Pi fraternity members were to blame for his son's February death. "They planned this night out," Piazza said. "They had all the intent to feed these young men lethal doses of alcoholto bring them to alcohol poisoning levels. This was premeditated. They killed our son." The family of the college sophomore from Lebanon, New Jersey, told the AP that they are considering a lawsuit but are focused now on the criminal case against their son's fraternity brothers.

Eight face the most serious charge of aggravated assault, a felony that carries a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison. Timothy Piazza consumed what prosecutors said was a life-threatening amount of alcoholhis blood-alcohol content reached nearly .40%, doctors estimatedduring a hazing ritual on Feb. 2 in State College, Pennsylvania, and he died two days later as a result of severe head injuries. Piazza's mother, Evelyn, said her grief has worsened the more she's learned about what happened to her son. Jim Piazza said the fraternity brothers "tortured" their son. "They held him captive and tortured him. They treated him like roadkill," he said. "Knowing that your son suffered the way he did over such a long period of time, and died a very slow and very painful death, frankly, it's haunting." More from the interview here; more on the "shocking" details of his final hours here. (Read more Penn State stories.)
Hillary Clinton launched a new political organization on Monday designed to push back against President Donald Trump's agenda, the AP reports. The former Democratic nominee used social media to announce the creation of "Onward Together," an adaptation from her campaign theme, "Stronger Together." The group, she tweeted, will "encourage people to get involved, organize, and even run for office." "This year hasn't been what I envisioned, but I know what I'm still fighting for: a kinder, big-hearted, inclusive America. Onward!" Clinton wrote. The announcement comes as Clinton, 69, works to find a new role in an evolving political landscape.

Monday's move ensures she will not retain a leadership position at the Clinton Foundation, the continued focus of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea Clinton. She did not reference Trump directly on Monday, but the group's mission statement takes an indirect swipe at the Republican president by noting she won 66 million votes in the last election. That's about 3 million more than Trump. CNN, citing an email sent to Clinton's supporters and donors, reports that the group will fund "resistance" groups that push back against Trump; a source tells the network Clinton is "fired up" to help these groups expand their influence. "More than ever, I believe citizen engagement is vital to our democracy," Clinton tweeted. "I'm so inspired by everyone stepping up to organize and lead." (Read more Hillary Clinton stories.)
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New Delhi:

The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) will not announce the ICSE Class 10th exam results on Monday. The Board has urged students and parents to check for official update at cisce.org.

This year the ICSE Class 10 exam was held from March 10 and concluded on April 21. Earlier the exam was scheduled to begin from February 27 and end on March 31, commenced on March 10 and concluded on April 21.

The results are not going to be announced today. The evaluation work is still very much on even today, said Gerry Arathoon, CISCE chief executive and secretary told an English Daiy over phone from Sri Lanka.

To put an end to all speculation over the date of results, Arathoon said, We will announce the exact date of results on the councils website much in advance.

Also Read: Kerala class 12th HSC VSHE result 2017 announced at official site; check your score card here

He said, We cannot give you the dates as of now. We are working on it. And once the evaluation work ends we will announce the result dates.

Last year the Results for ICSE class 10 was announced on May 6, in 2015 on May 18 and in 2014 on May 21.

Last year, Around 1,68,591 candidates appeared for the ICSE class 10th exams including 92,900 boys and 75,691 girls. The pass percentage for ICSE class 10th exam 2016 was 98.54% where girls did better as compared to boys with 98.93%. The pass percentage of boys was 98.13%. Last year, the result was declared on May 6, along with the ISC Class 12 result.

The total pass percentage for ICSE was 98.54% in 2016 while the pass percentage for ISC was 96.56% and girls have done better than boys at both ICSE and ISC examinations last year.

Also Read: CISCE ICSE Class 10th examination results 2017 delayed; stay updated here

About The Council:

The Council has been so constituted as to secure suitable representation of: Government of India, State Governments/Union Territories in which there are Schools affiliated to the Council, the Inter-State Board for Anglo-Indian Education, the Association of Indian Universities, the Association of Heads of Anglo-Indian Schools, the Indian Public Schools' Conference, the Association of Schools for the ISC Examination and members co-opted by the Executive Committee of the Council.
New Delhi:

As 70th Cannes International Film Festival, 2017 is knocking at the door, a number of Bollywood biggies are gearing up to attend this prestigious festival.

Like most of the Bollywood stars actress, Deepika Padukone is all set to be a part of this star-studded night and has recently been spotted while leaving the Mumbai airport.

The diva was looking smoking hot in an orange and black chiffon maxi with a black leather jacket at the Mumbai airport post midnight.

While leaving the city Deepika was looking damn confident with a charming smile in her face which proves that she is all ready to walk the red carpet of prestigious Cannes festival 2017.

Shaleena Nathani, the woman behind most of the mindblowing looks of this B-town hottie took to twitter on Monday to share one of those pictures of the dimple queen.

Being amazed Nathani wrote, "shaleenanathaniaiai@deepikapadukone wearing @albertaferretti jacket @majeofficiel boots @louboutinworld #cannes2017"

Media reports suggest that the festival will get a kick start on 17th May 2017.

aiai@deepikapadukone wearing @albertaferretti jacket @majeofficiel boots @louboutinworld #cannes2017 A post shared by Shaleena Nathani (@shaleenanathani) on May 14, 2017 at 9:17pm PDT

On the work front, the 31 old actress is currently busy shooting her upcoming period drama 'Padmavati'.

Also starring Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor in the leads this Bhansali film is slated to be released on 17th November 2017.

In the movie, while Shahid will be seen portraying the character of Rana Rawal Ratan Singh, Ranveer Singh will essay the character of Alauddin Khilji, the anti-hero to Deepika Padukone's Rani Padmini.

Earlier in January, the 'Tamasha' actress had also achieved a tremendous success in her first Hollywood release xXx: Return of Xander Cage.



In the movie, the diva was seen being featured against Hollywood fame Vin Diesel.



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New Delhi:

Tamil actor Rajinikanth after a gap of eight years addressed his fans on Monday. The superstar will be meeting his fans in "batches", between May 15 and 19, sources close him said.

Invitations to all the respective fan clubs have been sent to attend the various sessions that will be held in batches between May 15 and 19.A

Earlier, the 'Superstar' was suppose to hold a similar meeting but had to A postpone it on a request made by them for individual photographs for which more number of group interactions was required. The last such meeting with fans was in 2009, post his 'Sivaji' success.

The 66-year-old star had earlier planned to meet the fans for photo sessions from April 12-16 in the city, where he was slated to get pictures clicked with them.

Live Updates:

#My name is being used for 'political gains'

#If in case i decide to join politics, I won't allow wrong people to join me,I'll keep them away

#Committed a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years back, it was a political accident

#A I am an actor, god wants me that way

#A I don't know what will happen in future , Doing good things to people as an actor nowA

#A People of TN are intelligent & they r being fooled in only one thing...I don't want to mention what it's A A A A A A A A A A A A

#A If I do enter politics then those making money will not be entertained



#WATCH Actor Rajinikanth addresses his fans in Chennai https://t.co/r4XwzLP5kM a ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

Chennai: After a gap of eight years, actor Rajinikanth meets his fans pic.twitter.com/yc7rJrUrbN a ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

aMy dear fans. I have an information for you. It has been 10 years since we all met and took pictures. You have been constantly requesting to meet me and take pictures. Since I could not find time, I was unable to meet you all then. But I had planned to meet you all from April 12 to April 16a, he said in a audio message to his fans.

Elaborating, he said, afrom April 12 to April 16 we had planned to meet fans hailing from 4-5 districts averaging 300 people daily.

aWe had decided to invite 1,800 to 2,000 fans of them to participate during the meeting. It was my desire.a, he said.

aBut, later, we realised that it is not practically feasible to take individual photographs with everyone during the meeting and had decided to take photo sessions in eight member groupsa, he said.

However, a majority of fans had expressed disappointment saying how they could display an individual photograph with me in their respective homes if it is going to be a group photograph, he said.

aI feel it is fair on their part to make such a demand.A Since we realised it is difficult to take pictures individually, we decided to postpone the meeting. We are planning to conduct it in future by inviting fans from two districts each and take pictures with them individuallya, he said.

aI will announce the meeting date in future. I think you all will understand and extend cooperation.a, he said.

The sudden announcement about the meeting with the fans by the actor had triggered speculation on whether the actor would be once again persuaded to take the political plunge, a demand which he has been resisting.

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New Delhi:

Salman Khan who has already created a buzz for his upcoming movie 'Tubelight' is giving his fans yet another reason to cheer up.

'Radio Song', the first track of this much-anticipated film of the year is going to be released by the 'Dabangg' star in Dubai on 16th of May 2017.

The month's long wait will come to an end as Salman will be launching the song amid much grandeur and celebrations.

The song will give you the feel of a town square typical to those in the 1960's.

After shooting most of the scenes in mindblowing locations of North India, Kabir Khan, the director of the movie constructed an imaginary town, Jagatpura in Mumbai itself to get an authentic atmosphere to shoot the song.

The shooting of the song was completed amid a huge crowd with over 1000 dancers to give the feel of a celebratory song.

Also starring Chinese actress Zhu Zhu the movie is scheduled to be released on 23rd June 2017.

On the work front, Salman is also busy shooting his another forthcoming projects 'Tiger Zinda Hai' and 'Hanuman Da' Damdaar'.

Also starring Katrina Kaif, 'Tiger Zinda Hai' is currently scheduled to be released on 22nd December 2017.

Tubelight Radio Song

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New Delhi:

A bus fell into an overflowing river in Karnataka's Gadag on Monday. The bus was full of passengers. Local people were first to reach the spot and start rescue operations.



The visuals from the spot show local villagers rescued passengers and driver with the help of a rope.



Heavy rains lashed the Gadag area of the state on Sunday night, which caused the river to swell. The bus which was going from Laxeshvara to Kuduru fell in the river.

According to sources, all passengers have now been rescued.

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New Delhi:

A Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawan allegedly shot himself dead on Monday in the insurgency-hit Sukma district, police told. This kind of incident has happened for the third in this month that is May in Chhattisgarh.

At around 4 pm at the paramilitary forces camp at Penta village, constable Divakara Rao (37), who was with 150th battalion of CRPF, shot himself with his own service rifle, according to PTI.

He was immediately taken to a hospital at CRPF camp in Dornapal by his colleagues. He died while he was undergoing treatment in the hospital.

He hailed from Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh.

The reason behind such step has not yet been confirmed.

Earlier in May the two incidents of a CRPF jawan committing suicide had been reported in Chhattisgarhwhere the force has been deployed for the last several years to fight the Naxals.

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New Delhi:

The five-member constitution bench of Supreme Court on Monday resumed hearing on pleas challenging practise of triple talaq in the country.

The Supreme Court made it clear that the matter of Nikah Halala and polygamy has not been closed yet. The SC stated that it will consider it in future and mentioned that they are deferring the matter because of time constraints.

The SC emphasised that it is only pursuing triple talaq on priority because of time constraints.

The Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi presented the Centres stand on the matter. He said that in the times like these when countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh are progressing, secular country like ours is still stuck on discussion on these matters.

The Attorney General argued that many High Courts in the country have given their orders against trip talaq. He also submitted list of marriage laws in different countries to the court.

The Apex Court asked Attorney General that if triple talaq will go, what will be remedy the husband has? To which, AG replied by saying that if there will be vacuum, the Centre will bring law.

Rohatgi told Constitution Bench that triple talaq violates Muslim women's right to equality within the community and also within the country.

Attorney General said that marriage and divorce are part of law and it is not related to any religion and this is for court to decide whether personal law stands on the parameters of Constitution's gender equality and equality rights.

Then, CJI said that we are guardians of Constitution as well as rights of minorities and what you are saying will completely erode the rights of minorities.

Also read: Triple talaq is worst and not desirable form of dissolution of marriages among Muslims, observes Supreme Court

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New Delhi:

The Republic of Botswana in southern Africa and famous for Kalahari desert shall reportedly host a day-long hackathon on Electronic Voting Machines ( EVMs ) on Wednesday. Reports indicate the decision by the Election Commission of Botswana to hold the hackathon comes in the wake of allegations of EVM tampering flying thick and fast in far-away India.

Botswana imports EVM machines from the same manufacturers that supplies EVMs to the Election Commission of India  Bharat Electronics Ltd. The Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal would not have dreamt in its wildest dreams his demand for a hackathon shall echo in an African country, with a population of barely 21 lakhs on last count in 2014, and a voter count far less than in New Delhi Lok Sabha constituency, which comprises several assembly segments one of which  Gole Market - is represented by Kejriwal himself.

But Botswana is certainly setting a precedent of sorts by inviting expert hackers and technical experts to come and try their hands at hacking the EVMs. Imagine a country, which has imported EVMs, undertaking such an exercise not because there is a political opposition to EVMs in Botswana but because there are suggestions of machine tampering and a strong protest against the use of these machines from the country of its origin.

Here in India the ECI did invite all political parties for a round of deliberations on the issue. Other than AAP, BSP ( in fact, it was Mayawatis Bahujan Samaj Party that flagged the issue soon after the results of the elections to the five states were announced in March) Congress Party and the Samajwadi Party too joined the chorus. While the Election Commission never invited the parties for a hackathon but the word went around that ECI meant business and shall nip the controversy in the bud. But it turned out ECI only wanted to assure political parties yet again and assuage their fears that the EVM was an unlikely villain.

Also Read | EVM row: Know why India stands out as a gold standard in electronic voting

This led Kejriwal to tweet  Its sad that ECI backed out of hackathon. For Kejriwal the loss in the recent vidhan sabha elections followed by a drubbing in Delhis municipal elections were more than he could chew. He was not willing to look for an explanation for his partys loss in Punjab, Goa and Delhi in partys weak strategy and in being just not up to it for so many reasons other than the dubious functioning of the EVMs which he said were programmed by design to make the BJP win. Kejriwal did not stop at that. He hurriedly convened a special session of Delhi Assembly to prove his point. A senior member of Kejriwals party, Saurabh Bharadwaj, brought in an EVM prototype inside the house and physically demonstrated how the machine can be easily tampered with. Now that was a prototype and not the actual machine but the special assembly session beaming the proceedings live did give out the signal the allegations need to be given more than just an ear by ECI  the poll monitor.

It is not the first time in India that voices against possible EVM tampering have been raised. Ever since the ECI introduced the EVM, first as a pilot project, in 16 assembly segments across three states - Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi - way back in November 1998 there have been murmurs of discontent and a general opposition against the EVMs by political parties of different hue and colour.

The first wave of protest was more in tune with apprehensions regarding the acceptance of the new technology. The EVMs drastically cut down on time in the process of actual casting of vote and spared the trouble of physical counting of ballot papers ( counting in some geographically large Lok Sabha constituencies would go on for three days in the good old days of voting through ballot papers ). And then there was a time when the administration, the political parties and the voters heaved a sigh of relief as the country shunned the ballot paper for good and switched to EVMs.

But there never was any dearth of tense moments in EVMs almost two decades history in India when political parties, especially the losers, shall not raise the bogey of EVM tampering. It is interesting to see how the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party is lampooning the mere suggestion of EVM tampering by opposition parties now when it was in the forefront of opposition against the use of EVMs soon after the General Elections of 2009, when it faced a drubbing at the hands of Congress-headed coalition despite its more than ordinary pitch for a change of guard at the Centre.

Also Read: EC throws open challenge to parties to prove EVMs can be tampered

In fact the NDA rubbed it in on the issue for as long as the newspapers were willing to give it space on their front pages above the fold and TV news channels found a handle to chase their TRPs. The BJP think tank and its supporters laboured to write a series of articles in support of their claims bolstering their arguments with the fact that several European countries including Germany, Holland and Italy have banned use of EVMs precisely because of the kind of tampering these machines were vulnerable to. Those articles took the shape of a book and can be still be yours for a price on popular e-websites. You cant miss out on the author, the redoubtable Subramanian Swamy.

The ECI on its part did undertake exercise to satisfy the stakeholders. A massive exercise was conducted even after the 2009 elections. The allegations did not die out in 2014. Those making the allegations had swapped positions now. The trend continues in 2017, particularly now, when there is no stopping the BJP bandwagon which romped home with big victories in UP, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur after Assam and following it up with big wins in election to Delhi Municipal Corporation dashing AAP's hopes of taking over the MCD and repeating their performance in 2015 Assembly elections.

On the face of it, it appears the allegations have more to do with the political parties unhealthy ways of negotiating a defeat than intrinsic and fundamental flaws with either the design or its technical capabilities. But ECIs argument sustained by reason and backed by technology can only go thus far and no further when there is a suggestion of trust-deficit.

As much as a democracy is all about number crunching the path to that electoral nirvana does pass through the agneepath of trust and credibility, with a job cut-out for every stakeholder - Politicos vis-a-vis their voters and Institutions like the ECI vis-a-vis the gamut of responsibilities they are under the constitutional obligation to fulfil in order to serve the voters and through them live up to the underlying spirit of democracy which is not just for and by the people but of the people.

In fact, the Supreme Court reminded the Centre last month of its 2013 order to use paper trails in EVMs. The SC asked why was it that its order was not being implemented so far. This was on a plea filed by BSP and argued by former Union Minister and senior Congress leader P Chidambaram who told the court what one man can invent, the other man can hack. The Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails or VVPAT is a machine fixed to the EVM. Through VVPAT the voter can verify through a paper trail whether the symbol he pressed on the EVM is the symbol the EVM registers. Verification of the vote cast is the right of the voter and shall help fill the trust-deficit.

Though the Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi has assured that henceforth all elections including the 2019 Lok Sabha elections shall be conducted with VVPAT but the assurance comes quite late in the day. A storm that brewed against the EVM has already turned into a twister cyclone. The ECI will have to make more than adequate efforts to arrest its intensity lest it swept away its own credibility and trust built assiduously over the last 65 years when it first conducted the elections in independent India. If Botswana can do it, so can India.

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New Delhi :

Expelled BSP leader Naseemuddin Siddiqui on Monday met Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath at the latteras official residence.

Of late, Siddiqui was shown the door by Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) levelling charges of corruption. The party had also expelled his son Afzal.

Last week, Naseemuddin Siddiqui had alleged that Mayawati had demanded Rs 50 crore from him while also accusing her of having made objectionable remarks against Muslims.

At a crowded press conference here, an angry Siddiqui had levelled allegations against his former political boss Mayawati and some other BSP leaders claimed that he had so much material that it could cause an "earthquake". He had also claimed that there was a threat to his life.

Lucknow: Former BSP leader Naseemuddin Siddiqui arrives to meet CM Yogi Adityanath pic.twitter.com/3Wb57Zhls0 a ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 15, 2017

Rebutting point-wise the charges levelled against him by at the time of his expulsion yesterday, Siddiqui had played six audio clippings of his telephonic conversations with Mayawati to back his allegation that money had been demanded from him.

Siddiqui had said he possessed 150 such audio clippings.

"She (Mayawati) was sore after the dismal showing of the BSP in the recent Assembly elections and termed Muslims as betrayers for not voting for the party," Siddiqui had alleged. (With PTI Inputs)

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Chandigarh:

Assuring speedy justice, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Monday asserted that the hearing of the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old Dalit woman in Sonipat will be conducted in a fast-track court.

Such kind of heinous crimes would not be tolerated at any cost in a civilised society and the guilty would be punished, he said.

The decomposed and mutilated body of the woman, who went missing from Sonipat on May 9 and was gang-raped and brutally murdered, was found near the Industrial Model Township in Urban Estate, Rohtak, on May 11. Stray dogs had bitten off the face and lower portion of her body.

The sheer brutality of the crime, reminiscent of the Nirbhaya incident in Delhi which triggered nation-wide outrage, occurred barely a month after the BJP-led Haryana government launched Operation Durga to stop harassment of women.

An autopsy of the victim had stated that the bones of the woman?s skull were shattered into pieces and some sharp-edged objects may have been inserted in her private parts.

The findings suggest that it was a brutal rape and murder, said S K Dhatterwal, head of the department of forensic medicine at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak, who conducted the post-mortem examination.

Two persons, including the main accused Sumit, who is also a Dalit, have been arrested by the Haryana Police which has formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the case.

Also Read | Haryana's Nirbhaya: Police arrests 2 accused in Rohtak gang-rape, SIT formed for fast track investigation

Police said the family of the victim have suspected the involvement of six more persons, out of whom five are related to the main accused.

The kin of the victim have also alleged that they had approached the Sonipat police about a month back with a complaint that Sumit was harassing their daughter, but there was no action.

The chief minister also promised strict action against those involved in the alleged rape of a 22-year-old woman at Gurgaon in the state.

The woman from Sikkim was allegedly raped by three men in a moving car and thrown out on a road in Delhi on Sunday.

Also Read: Haryana shame! Woman gangraped, mutilated body found in Rohtak after refusing marriage proposal

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New Delhi:

The security forces have gunned down two suspected Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militants in Kupwara, north Kashmir on Sunday. They were allegedly involved in a suicide attack on an army camp in Panzgam last month.



A police spokesman said, Acting on specific information about the presence of militants in Waripora area of Handwara, police along with 21 Rashtriya Rifles launched a search operation. During the operation, militants present in the area fired upon the search party. The fire was retaliated and in the ensuing encounter, two militants were killed.

ALSO READ: Indian Army conducts cordon-and-search operations to neutralise 100-plus active militants in south Kashmir



The militants were affiliated with LeT and their identity was ascertained, he further added. Two AK-47 rifles, two pistols, four AK magazines, two pistol magazines, two grenades, maps and cash were recovered from the encounter site.



The militants were involved in the fidayeen (suicide) attack on an army camp in Panzgam area of Kupwara on April 27 in which three soldiers, including an officer, were killed, Commanding Officer of 21 RR, Kuldeep Matoo said.



We have found a yet to heal grazed wound on one of the eliminated terrorists which is indicative of a likely involvement of these two terrorists in the Panzgam suicide attack. We have found some other evidence also among the war-like stores, confirming their involvement in the Panzgam incident, Matoo further added.



With inputs from PTI.

ALSO READ: Army to re-introduce CASO as 'permanent feature' of counter-terror operations in Kashmir

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New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday addressed an event marking the conclusion of 'Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra' in Amarkantak, Madhya Pradesh. Before addressing a gathering, PM Modi also offered prayers at Narmada Udgam Sthal Mandir in Amarkantak.

Here are the highlights:

#The Narmada Seva Yatra has ended but the Yagya has begun, to achieve the aims with which we commenced this Yatra



#I want to thank Swami Avdheshanand for his kind words



#22 out of 100 cities in Swachh Survekshan 2017 were from MP, which has become an inspiration for others



#Our aim is to double the income of farmers in 2022



#The document presented by the MP Government is futuristic with several learnings



#Success of Swachh Bharat Mission is not due to governments, it is due to people



#We are seeing the commendable strides Madhya Pradesh is making in Swachh Bharat Mission. I congratulate Madhya Pradesh



#The biggest strength of a democracy is Jan Bhagidari. We are seeing great enthusiasm towards Swachh Bharat Mission



#The Narmada Seva Yatra is a unique mass movement in our history



#I am very happy that the MP Government is working on afforestation



#MP CM understood the threats the Narmada is facing at a right time & began to work on saving the river



#I salute all those who have taken part in the #NarmadaSevaYatra. The 'Punya' from this Yatra will benefit the 125 crore people of India



#Maa Narmada has been our lifeline for so many years. Maa Narmada is a life giver

#WATCH PM Narendra Modi offered prayers at Narmada Udgam Sthal Mandir in Amarkantak, MP pic.twitter.com/rub4zoBBMj a ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

#WATCH PM Modi speaks at event marking the conclusion of 'Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra' in Amarkantak, MP https://t.co/mJicoYvYg3 a ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

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New Delhi:

Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday described India as one of the most disaster-prone nations and said that more than 50 percent population of the country lives in areas that are vulnerable to calamities.

National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction has been set up by the government to finalise a national strategy to deal with all kinds of disasters in coordination with state governments and other stakeholders, said Rajnath Singh.

Inaugurating a meeting organised by the National Disaster Management Authority, Rajnath Singh said "India is one of the most disaster-prone nations in the world. More than 50 per cent population in the country lives in areas which are prone to earthquakes, floods, cyclones, droughts and tsunami,"

The NDMA meeting was attended by ministers from state governments, officials of the state disaster management authorities, top civil and police officials dealing with various disasters and representatives of non-government organisations.

Singh said the national platform was set up so that it can work effectively for disaster risk mitigation along with various stakeholders.

The home minister said India has learnt lessons from the 1999 super cyclone in Odisha where 10,000 people had lost their lives, the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat and the 2004 tsunami and brought a paradigm change in its approach towards disaster risk mitigation.

"We have been working in a planned manner for disaster risk mitigation that include adopting the Disaster Management Act in 2005, disaster management policy in 2009, raising national disaster response force besides others," he said.

Singh highlighted the government's efforts in setting up the early warning system for disasters, cyclone shelters, saline embankments, disaster response force in central and state levels, community preparedness and capacity building.

The home minister said India has become the first country to prepare a livestock disaster management plan for the safety of livestock during a disaster.

Singh also said India has taken a number of steps for enhancing cooperation with South Asian countries in disaster risk mitigation besides improving ties with BRICS, BIMSTEC and East Asian nations.

He also asked the participants to prepare a special action plan for vulnerable communities.

In his address, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said India could not afford to ignore preparing for disasters as it was one of the most disaster-prone nations.

"We are bound to face disasters, not only natural but man-made too. If we can prepare for the disasters properly, we can have a safe and secured society," he said.

In the meeting, the NDMA released the main features of the national database for emergency management. They are disaster dashboard, incident reporting, data visualisation, decision support tools, interaction tools, resource management, India disaster resource network database, mobile apps and data inventory.

Also Read: Rajnath Singh launches mobile app for paramilitary forces' grievance redressal

Also Read: Rajnath Singh meets CMs of Naxal-hit states, proposes new anti-Maoist strategy - SAMADHAN | Highlights of proposal

(With PTI inputs)

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New Delhi:

The family of martyred Kulwant Singh, who lost his life during Pathankot attack, manhandled by an agent and his friends who denied to return their Rs 5 lakh.

He was one of the martyrs who was killed during the gunfire while fighting for the country. Kulwant Singh was from Gurdaspur.

Pathankot attack happened when heavily-armed Pakistani terrorists attempted to storm the Air Force base, triggering a day-long gunbattle in which six securitymen and all the four infiltrators were killed, days after Prime Minister Narendra Modis surprise stopover in Lahore.

With the obvious intention of destroying fighter jets and attack helicopters housed there, the group of terrorists in army fatigues attempted to storm the base which is barely 35 kms from the international border with Pakistan but failed to go beyond the outer periphery.

Also read: Pathankot attack: The brave Indian martyrs who fought till their last breath

#WATCH:Family of Kulwant Singh, who lost his life in Pathankot attack, thrashed by an agent&his friends who denied to return their Rs.5 lakh pic.twitter.com/mC2NjQEzgF  ANI (@ANI_news) May 14, 2017

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New Delhi:

Batting second term for the President Pranab Mukherjee, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday affirmed that the ruling party (BJP) should try to build a consensus on the Presidential candidate by talking to all the parties, and termed re-election of Mukherjee would set a good precedent.

The JD (U) president said the BJP should come forward to build a consensus to decide on the candidate after taking on board all the parties.

While talking to reporters in Patna on the sidelines of Lok Samnvad programme, Nitish Said, The President represents the entire country and its people and as such the ruling party at the Centre should take an initiative to seek a consensus on selection of candidate for the top constitutional post after holding talks with all opposition parties.

I am not saying it is the duty of the ruling party at the Centre to seek consensus on the presidential candidate, but it should take the initiative in this regard as the presidents post represents entire country and the people, Kumar said.

However, if the ruling party does not go for consensus, then it is the oppositions duty to put up a joint candidate for presidents post, he said.

The JD(U) national presidents remarks assume significance in the backdrop of Congress President Sonia Gandhi attempts to cobble up opposition unity for the presidential elections even as the BJP-led NDA appears confident that its nominee will be elected for the top constitutional post.

Asked about a possible second term for the incumbent president, Pranab Mukherjee, the Bihar Chief Minister, What could be better if he gets a second term, but that has to be decided by the ruling party at the Centre.

Also Read: Sitaram Yechury meets Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to discuss upon presidential polls

He said that the re-election of Mukherjee with consensus will set a good precedent.

The JD(U), then part of the BJP-led NDA, had voted for Mukherjee, the UPA candidate, in the presidential elections in 2012.

Also Read | Presidential polls: Shiv Senas total vote pool could prove to be crucial for BJP

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Amritsar:

Border Security Forces on Monday shot down an intruder from Pakistan in Bariyala in Gurdaspur Sector. BSF personnel spotted some suspicious movement near the fence along the Indo-Pak border, a BSF official said.



He said despite repeated warning by the BSF personnel the intruder kept on marching towards the Indian side after which the troops opened fire at him.The official said that the area where the incident took place is surrounded by the Ravi River from three sides.



Asked if any recovery has been made from the spot where the intruder was shot dead, he said the search operation in the area was under progress.



The incident comes in the heed of the arrest of a Hizbul terrorist from the Indian territory along the Indo-Nepal border on Sunday.



Earlier on Saturday, Jammu Police confirmed that they had arrested five persons and busted a LeT module, following the May 7 attack on a police station on Tanta Doda district.



(With Inputs from PTI)

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Patna:

RJD president Lalu Prasad on Sunday rubbished money laundering charges against his daughter and Rajya Sabha member Misa Bharti. There is no merit in the allegations. Legal notice is being served, Prasad told a press conference in Patna. The charges of money laundering by a shell company against Bharti were brought by a television channel and then by senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi.



That shell company does not exist at all, the RJD chief said adding that They are indulging in character assassination.



Money laundering charges by Sushil Modi



Senior Bihar BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi recently fired a salvo at RJD chief Lalu Prasads daughter Misa Bharti alleging that she had laundered money through a shell company to buy a farmhouse at Delhis Bijwasan area at a throwaway price.

Also Read | Fodder scam: Setback for Lalu Yadav as SC allows CBI plea opposing dropping of charges; gives 9-month deadline for trial



Sushil Modi has been hitherto alleging that Prasads two minister sons - Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav and Health minister Tej Pratap Yadav - had amassed benami properties worth over Rs 1000 crore through various shell companies in Bihar.



He claimed that Misa Bharti converted her black money into white through dubious transaction of sale and purchase of shares of her company - Mishail Packers and Printers Pvt Ltd. The company was incorporated with an investment of Rs 1 lakh in 2002 and registered at Lalu Prasads then official bungalow 25, Tughlaq Road, New Delhi. It was closed in 2005-06.



Bharti sold her companys shares of face value of Rs 10 each to Virendra Jains Shalini Holdings at Rs 100 per share in October 2008, which fetched her Rs 1.20 crore. Eleven months later, Misa purchased all the shares at the rate of Rs 10 per share from Virendra Jain, the BJP leader alleged showing documents to support his claim.



Later in 2008-09 she purchased a farmhouse at Bijwasan area in Delhi at Rs 1.41 crore whose estimated value at present would be around Rs 50 crore, Sushil Modi, who was accompnaied by state BJP vice-president Devesh Kumar, said.



Pointing out that Misa became the owner of Rs 50 crore by investing a mere Rs one lakh, he asked Why would anyone buy shares of a closed company at the rate of Rs 100 per share against the face value of Rs 10 each? Why would the buyer again sell the same shares at Rs 10 each after buying it at Rs 100?Sushil Modi also alleged that Misa had misused the address of Prasads erstwhile official bungalow - 25, Tughlaq Road as her companys address as such an allotment cannot be used for any commercial purpose.



Questioning her source of income, Modi sought to know why she did not reveal it in her affidavit to the Election Commission.

Also Read | Lalu-Shahabuddin link: TV channel tapes show RJD chief 'taking orders' from dreaded criminal, BJP admires expose



Virendra Jain and Surendra Jain, the two brothers and business partners in Shalini Holdings who had allegedly helped Prasad in converting black money which he had allegedly earned as railways ministers into white, were arrested by Enforcement Directorate in connection with a Rs 8000 crore money laundering case in March this year, he said.



Sushil Modi demanded that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar order a probe into the allegations of acquisition of benami properties by Prasads family in Bihar.The central government should probe allegations of amassing properties by the family outside Bihar, he said.



Nitish Kumar says that his government has zero tolerance policy towards corruption. But he has not taken any action so far on allegations levelled against Prasads two minister sons, the BJP leader said.



Sushil Modi has been releasing documents purportedly showing how Prasads family acquired assets of around Rs 1,000 crores through shell companies like Delight Marketing Pvt Ltd, A K Infosystems Pvt Ltd and A B Exports Pvt Ltd.



Asked for comment, RJDs national spokesman Manoj Jha said A jobless Sushil Modi has once again done today what he has specialised in in recent times.



Taking certain documents from the public domain viz. Registrar of Companies, he aims at weaving fictitious stories. He should also convey that his so-called incriminating documents are from the same appropriate authorities to whom we had submitted (documents).



In utter frustration for some space for himself in BJP, he is raking a decade-old genuine business transaction, which was duly reported to authorities, Jha added.

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New Delhi:

Twitter is buzzing with news alerts from India and rest of the world. Here are the latest updates from the micro-blogging site in one scroll:

#10:57 PM

Petrol price cut by Rs 2.16 per litre, diesel by Rs 2.10 a litre, effective midnight tonight- PTI

#9:41 PM

UIDAI operator tried to get Aadhaar card enrolled in Osama bin Laden's name in the Mandal Area of Bhilwara; arrested by police- ANI

#9:31 PM

Dog eats infants body at government hospital of Jeypore (Koraput, Odisha). Cops report people recorded it on phones and claim the incident happened due to hospitals ignorance- PTI

#9:25 PM

Delhi police filed a chargesheet against man arrested for allegedly demanding ransom from the family of missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed

#8:31 PM

SIT arrests Ganga Ram Baderiya, principal secretary (Bhoomi and UPOR), revenue department, in connection with Janthakal illegal mining case- ANI

#8:13 PM

National Herald case: Subramanian Swamy today withdrew application which sought to add name of B S Hooda and 3 bureaucrats as witnesses

#7:30 PM

Former BSP leader Naseemuddin Siddiqui arrives to meet CM Yogi Adityanath

#6:57 PM

Srinagar: J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti holds meeting on LoC trade

#6:45 PM

India has been unable to provide an explanation for Kulbhushan Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name: Pakistan

#6:26 PM

Edouard Philippe, 46, named as prime minister in French President Emmanuel Macron's first government- AP

#5:38 PM

No serious impact in India of global cyber attack, National Informatics System (NIC) working fine, says IT minister RS Prasad- PTI

#5:32 PM

Syrian activists: Airstrikes on town held by the Islamic State group near Iraqi border kill at least 20 civilians- Reuters

#4:55 PM

200 special operations undertaken, strategy reworked post Sukma: CRPF DG RR Bhatnagar- PTI

#4:53 PM

Lucknow HC summons AG on May 24 on a PIL against UP CM Yogi Adityanath & deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya holding their posts while being MPs

#4:41 PM

Bihar CM Nitish Kumar says BJP should try to build a consensus on the Presidential candidate by talking to all the parties- PTI

#4:35 PM

Dead lizard found in midday meal at a primary school in Jamui in Bihar, 27 children fell ill

#4:12 PM

Opposition behaved in indecent, shameful manner on the first day of the state assembly session: UP minister Shrikant Sharma- PTI

#4:07 PM

IGNOU invites online applications for admission to its 173 programmes for July session, 2017- PTI

#4:01 PM

Four computers in a panchayat office of Wayanad, Kerala suspected of being infected by Ransomeware cyber attack, police on the spot- ANI

#3:48 PM

There is a lot that is unknown about proceedings against Mr Jadhav, its all very suspect: Dhruva Jaishankar, Fellow, Brookings India- ANI

#3:42 PM

Man operating an E-Mitra centre in Rajasthan tries to make an Aadhaar Card for slain Al Qaeda terrorist Osamabin Laden- PTI

#2:59 PM

Rohtak gangrape and murder case: 2 accused sent to seven days police remand; to be produced in court on May 22: ANI

#2:45 PM

AIADMK alleged bribery case: TTV Dinakaran produced before at a Delhi court thru video conferencing; judicial custody extended till May 29

#2:36 PM

West Midnapur: Computers at WB State Electricity DistributionCompany atfour locations suspected to be hit by Wanna Cry Ransomware attack:ANI

#2:34 PM

MadhyaPradesh: PM Narendra Modi takes part in an event marking the conclusion of 'Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra', in Amarkantak: ANI

#2:31 PM

Sikkim CM Pawan Kumar Chamling conferred with 1st Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Lifetime Achievement Honour in Public Service by President: PTI

#2:26 PM

Over 50 per cent population of the #country lives in disaster- prone areas: HM @rajnathsingh: PTI

#2:12 PM

Karnataka: Three dead, three injured in a collision between a car and a motorbike in Kalaburagi: ANI

#2:10 PM

Chandigarh: CBI questions former Haryana CM BS Hooda over Manesar land scam: ANI

#1:52 PM

A former PIO to GoI, he worked with with four Prime Ministers including my father. My sincere condolences on his passing: Rahul Gandhi: ANI

#1:46 PM

Veteran of Indian Information Service, Ramamohan Rao ji rose to pinnacle of his career & embodied best values of his profession: Rahul Gandhi

#1:38 PM

Railways will install CCTV surveillance system at more than 900 stations under Nirbhaya Fund at an approved cost of Rs 500 cr: PTI

#1:30 PM

Kulbhushan Jadhav case hearing begins in Hague, Netherlands

ALSO READ: Kulbhushan Jadhav death row: ICJ begins hearing of Indian side in the matter, Pakistan to present arguments at 6:30PM

#1:15 PM

Akhilesh kept quiet, watched silently. Opposition blew whistles, threw paper balls at Governor, shows their mindset: SN Singh, UP Min: ANI

#1:05 PM

Yemen declares state of emergency over a deadly outbreak of cholera in the capital: AFP

#1:02 PM

Tughlakabad gas leak: NGT asks counsel of all parties to file report within a week, AIIMS to file report regarding impact on health: ANI

#12:57 PM

We have constituted a SIT, investigation underway: Sandeep Khirwar, Commissioner on Gurugram rape case: ANI

#12:46 PM

A bus falls in river in Karnataka, rescue operations are on

#12:29 PM

Who said it? Did I say something? Amit Shah came to meet me, I am active in Congress: Shankarsinh Vaghela on reports of joining BJP

#12:23 PM

Rohatgi told Constitution Bench that triple talaq violates Muslim women's right to equality within community, & also within country: ANI

#12:21 PM

AG tells five judge Constitution bench of SC "if the Supreme Court completely strikes down triple talaq, we will bring a law: ANI

#12:17 PM

We are appealing to end this one sided illegal contract: Claudia Waeldich, lawyer & human rights activist: ANI

#12:16 PM

CPEC to have huge impact on Baloch ppl, China will bring its workers &Baloch ppl will bexpelled: C Waeldich,lawyer&human rights activist:ANI

#12:15 PM

Gunfire in two Ivory Coast cities in grip of mutiny: AFP

#12:09 PM

Fire breaks out near Delhi's Azadpur Mandi, 3 fire tenders rushed to the spot. More details awaited: ANI

#12:04 PM

Culprits involved in such ghastly acts won't be spared,will ensure speedy justice by fast track courts: Haryana CM on Rohtak & Gurugram rape

#11:50 AM

Rohatgi tells SC: At a time when theocratic countries like Pak & Afghan are moving towards reform, we being secular country still debating: ANI

#11:49 AM

We are hopeful that ICJ will give verdict in India's favor, so Jadhav is freed soon: Arvind Singh, Kulbhushan Jadhav's childhood friend: ANI

#11:12 AM

Opposition parties in UP assembly create ruckus, throw papers at Governor Ram Naik

ALSO READ: UP Assembly session, Day 1 Live: Opposition parties create ruckus, papers thrown in the well of the House during Governor's address

#11:01 AM

AG Rohatgi told SC that it should also hear nikah, halala and polygamy issues, besides triple talaq . SC says "we have limited time

#11:00 AM

Tripletalaq case: AG Mukul Rohatgi representing Central Govt presently arguing before the five judge Constitution bench in Supreme court

#10:55 AM

Supreme Court slammed Justice CS Karnan for repeatedly filing plea seeking quashing of the Apex court order: ANI

#10:53 AM

Five killed, 50 others injured after a bus, carrying mostly brick kiln labourers, overturned & tumbled into a ditch in Nawada district: PTI

#10:52 AM

SC considers plea of Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, says issues of polygamy & nikah halala will remain open for future adjudication: PTI

#10:51 AM

Very proud of my Indian heritage, says Preet Bharara, India-born former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan: PTI

#10:34 AM

Security increased at Indo-Nepal border after the arrest of Hizbul Mujahideen militant on Sunday

#10:11 AM

India has a very good case. It's clear Pak violated all rules, both in trial & human rights: AG Mukul Rohatgi on ICJ hearing, Kulbhushan Jadhav: ANI

#10:01 AM

Two people dead after a car falls from Punjabi Bagh flyover, in Delhi: ANI

#9:51 AM

People of TN are intelligent & they r being fooled in one thing. I don't want to mention what it's

ALSO READ: Rajinikanth Live | If in case I decide to join politics, I won't allow wrong people to join me

#9:26 AM

Actor Rajinikanth addresses his fans, in Chennai

#9:24 AM

Sensex up by 153.85 points, currently at 30,342. #Nifty at 9,442.35: ANI

#9:07 AM

Madhya Pradesh: 3 dead, 42 injured after a bus lost control and overturned in Dindori

#8:50 AM

Tamil Nadu: Two-day Ooty rose show began in Udhagamandalam on Sunday, 2.5 lakh roses on display: ANI

#8:38 AM

J&K govt re-introduced 'Waadi Ki Sair' train for school children in Kashmir after winter vacations; train to run b/w Banihal to Baramulla: ANI

#8:34 AM

J&K: Army jawan commits suicide at Uniform Force Headquarters in Reasi, using his service weapon last night. FIR lodged in Reasi Police Stn: ANI

#8:25 AM

Three men gang raped victim,a case has been registered & investigation has been started; we are trying to identify culprits:#RKumar, SHO: ANI

#8:13 AM

Toshiba delays annual results, warns of $8.4 bn net loss: AFP

#8:10 AM

PM Narendra Modi to take part in event marking the conclusion of 'Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra', in Amarkantak: ANI

#7:58 AM

Chhattisgarh: STF jawan who was injured in Sunjday's Bijapur encounter, succumbs to his injuries: ANI

#7:56 AM

Mumbai: Two cars rammed into each othr in #Bandra Reclamation, on last night. No casualties/injuries reported: ANI

#7:53 AM

One killed, one injured after collision between two cars and a bike at Eastern Express Highway in Mumbai, bike later fell down from a flyover: ANI

#7:38 AM

Chennai: Bus strike over pending wages and PF in Tamil Nadu, state buses vandalized by unidentified people: ANI

#7:36 AM

Trade unions of Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation's bus strike after failure of talks held with the Govt over pending wages and PF: ANI

#7:27 AM

T.T.V. Dinakaran and hs aide Mallikarjuna to b produced before Delhi court as thr judicial custody ends on Monday: ANI

#7:22 AM

Ghaziabad: Fire broke out in a plywood factory in #LalKuan area last night, gas cylinders in the godown exploded, now under control: ANI

#7:21 AM

International Court of Justice to hold public hearings in Kulbhushan Jadhav case; it had stayed death sentence given by Pakistan to Jadhav: ANI

#7:19 AM

Vatican finance chief, Australia's #CardinalPell, denies new child sex abuse claims: AFP

#6:52 AM

Pakistani intruder shot dead by BSF in Gurdaspur, Punjab-ANI

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Lucknow:

The first session of the newly elected Uttar Pradesh Assembly commencing on Monday is likely to be a stormy affair with the opposition parties deciding to take on the Yogi Adityanath government on the law and order front.



The government too is arming itself with all the relevant data to hit back at the opposition, which has only 74 MLAs against the BJP and its allies massive strength of 325 in the 403-member House.



The BJP legislature party met on Sunday to fine tune its strategy to counter the expected opposition onslaught and also to highlight the achievements of the government in its nearly two months in office.



During the six-day session, the state bill for implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will also be tabled.



The opposition BSP and SP also convened their respective legislature party meetings to discuss ways to corner the government, especially on the law and order front.

Read | Two months of Yogi Adityanath Govt in UP | Of farmer loan-waiver, power for all, anti-romeo squads and communal violence



Samajwadi Party party chief Akhilesh Yadav has raised questions about law and order in the state while BSP leaders too have expressed similar concerns.



Recent caste and communal disturbances in Bulandshahr, Saharanpur, Gonda and Sambhal are likely to be raised by them to pillory the Adityanath government as the BJP had come to power in UP on the law and order plank, terming the situation during the Samajwadi Party government as goondaraj.



We were termed the goonda party. Now, what is happening under Yogi ji? Will he act? former chief minister Yadav said.



The SPs strength has decreased but its morale is high and the party will target the government on the law and order front, said an SP lawmaker.



He claimed that crime had increased with people wearing saffron scarfs taking law into their hands and attacking even the police.



BSP leader in Assembly Lalji Verma too spoke in a similar vein saying his party MLAs will raise law and order issues and also the rise in atrocities against Dalits.



The session will begin with Governor Ram Naik addressing a joint sitting of the state legislature where he is expected to highlight the achievements of the government.

Read | UP CM Yogi Adityanath says need to expose those who distorted history



The highlight of the session will be the state bill for implementation of the GST, for which a workshop will be held in Lucknow for all MLAs and MLCs on Monday, coinciding with the first day of the session to provide them with adequate information on the matter.



Earlier in the day, Speaker Hridaya Narain Dixit convened an all-party meeting where he requested floor leaders to ensure smooth proceedings so that maximum legislative business could be transacted.



For the first time in recent years, no one from SP patron Mulayam Singh Yadavs family would lead the party in the Lower House as Akhilesh has named Ram Govind Chaudhary as the Leader of the Opposition.



Another interesting feature will be the change in the seating arrangements in the Assembly.



Swami Prasad Maurya and Rita Bahuguna Joshi who were BSPs leader of Opposition and a Congress MLA, respectively, in the previous regime would sit in the treasury benches this time as BJP ministers.



In the Legislative Council, where SP has 66 members, former minister Ahmed Hasan will be the Leader of the Opposition.



It will also be interesting to watch whether Akhilesh attends the session he is a member of the Upper House but had rarely attended proceedings when he was the chief minister.



The Assembly secretariat maintained that there will be six sittings in the first session.



From Tuesday to Thursday, time will be given for debate on the motion of thanks to the Governors address, which will continue till next Monday.



The House may have more sittings if Business Advisory Committee of the Assembly so decided.



During a two-day recent training and orientation programme for legislators, the CM had stated his intention that the government wants to have at least 90 days of business at the House per year.

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New Delhi:

Union Minister Jitendra Singh on Sunday appealed to the youth of Kashmir to question those who instigate them to join the so-called freedom struggle. If stone-pelting is a holy task then they should make their own children pelt stones and risk their lives, the minister further added while hitting out at the separatists.



Rejecting separatists as being the stakeholders in Kashmir, Singh said that the real stakeholders of the Valley are its youths who are below the age of 40 and constitute 65 per cent of its population.



Singh while speaking to the reporters said, I have made this appeal to youth of Kashmir that time has come for you (youth of valley) to raise this question-mark on those (separatists), who instigate you to join this so-called freedom struggle.



If they (separatists and others) feel that this struggle of stone-pelting is so holy and a holy task, they should set an example of sparing one child from their own family to become a stone-pelter or lay down his life. This duplicity is not going to work now, he further added.

ALSO READ: Separatists' strike in Kashmir valley hits normal life



Kashmiri youth has rejected this duplicity. That is why, 66,000 youth came out for seeking government jobs yesterday despite hostile circumstances. Hurriyat today stand exposed, Singh said.



Many of the separatist leaders are now losing their credibility for the fact that they stand totally exposed. You cannot have your children lodged in safe havens of Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi or abroad. You cannot go after government jobs for your children and then ask your neighbours children to become stone pelters, Singh said while lashing out at separatists.



The youth of Kashmir want to be part of the development journey of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Singh said.



So this itself is an indication and evidence of the fact that the youth of Kashmir want to be part of mainstream India and all want to be part of the development journey led by Prime Minister Modi. Youth of Kashmir also realise their stake of being part of Modis development agenda. They are also conscious of the fact when youth in other states are taking benefit of schemes initiated by Modi, the youth of Kashmir must not be left out. They are serious and conscious about it, he said.

When asked about Islamisation of Kashmir comment by militant leader Zakir Musa, he said that as far as Islamisation is concerned, it is a universal phenomenon.



Singh also mentioned that talks and engagement with stakeholders are already on.

With inputs from PTI.

ALSO READ: No talks with separatists who use Kashmiris as 'guinea pigs', says Ram Madhav

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New Delhi:

A giant sea creature, washed up on a beach in Indonesia last week, leaving everyone in the virtual world guessing, has been identified by scientists.

George Leonard, the chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, told the Huffington Post that the rotting carcass was probably a baleen whale, judging by parts of a protruding skeleton and what appear to be baleen plates used to filter out food.

Last week, a giant sea creature washed up on the Serum Island of Indonesia.

Residents who first saw the carcass mistook it to be a stranded boat but after closer inspection, they determined that it was the rotting corpse of a 50-foot-long dead sea creature - possibly a giant squid because the remains looked like tentacles.

Watch: Massive 'sea monster' washes ashore in Indonesia, people mistook it to be a stranded boat

Decomposition gases bloated the whale into a very un-whale-like shape, and some of the noxious gases were seeping out.

Seram, the largest island in the Maluku Island group, is near the migration routes for baleen whales, so it makes sense that one would be nearby. Locals have asked the government to help remove the carcass, the Huffington Post reported.

Watch the video here:

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New Delhi:

The detailed master plan for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor stretching out till 2030 has come out. The exclusive report filed by Pakistani daily Dawn reveals Chinese intentions and priorities for in Pakistan, to be implemented in the next decade and a half.



According to the daily, the 'long-term plan' was developed by China Development Bank in December 2015 after a thorough study of Pakistan for two years.



The plan contains details that have not been discussed in public thus far. The CPEC will alter the life of Pakistanis through changes in agricultural land allotments, monitoring and surveillance infrastructure, fibre optics network, open markets to Chinese businesses, including electronics, textiles, garments, building materials, etc.

Read | Belt and Road Forum: Pakistan PM Sharif takes dig at India, says CPEC is open for all in region



Here are the highlights of the plan:



#Thousands of acres of agricultural land will be leased out to Chinese enterprises to set up demonstration projects in areas ranging from seed varieties to irrigation technology, the report said.



#CPEC master plan also includes a full system of monitoring and surveillance to be built in cities from Peshawar to Karachi, with 24 hour video recordings on roads and busy marketplaces for law and order.



#A national fibreoptic backbone will be built for the country not only for internet traffic, but also terrestrial distribution of broadcast TV, which will cooperate with Chinese media in the dissimenation of Chinese culture.



#The plan envisages a deep and broad based penetration of most sectors of Pakistans economy as well as its society by Chinese enterprises and culture. Its scope has no precedent in Pakistans history in terms of how far it opens up the domestic economy to participation by foreign enterprises.

Read | CPEC concerns hold India off from One Belt One Road summit in China



#In some areas the plan seeks to build on a market presence already established by Chinese enterprises, eg Haier in household appliances, ChinaMobile and Huawei in telecommunications and China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) in mining and minerals.



#In other cases, such as textiles and garments, cement and building materials, fertilizer and agricultural technologies (amongst others) it calls for building the infrastructure and a supporting policy environment to facilitate fresh entry.



#A key element in this is the creation of industrial parks, or special economic zones, which must meet specified conditions, including availability of waterperfect infrastructure, sufficient supply of energy and the capacity of self service power, according to the plan.



#But the main thrust of the plan actually lies in agriculture, contrary to the image of CPEC as a massive industrial and transport undertaking, involving power plants, and highways. The plan acquires its greatest specificity, and lays out the largest number of projects and plans for their facilitation, in agriculture.



The Dawn report adds that the newspaper is not clear on how much of the plan will be earnestly followed up and how much is there simply to evince interest from the Pakistani side.



Interestingly, in the areas of interest contained in the plan, it appears access to the full supply chain of the agrarian economy is a top priority for the Chinese, while Gwadar receives passing mention as an economic prospect, mainly for its capacity to serve as a port of exit for minerals from Balochistan and Afghanistan.

Read | CPEC: Pakistan receives third maritime patrol ship from China

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New Delhi:

Stressing on the need to establish peaceful relations with neighbouring nations, former Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari on Sunday criticised the PML-N Government for creating tense relations with Pakistan's neighbouring countries.



Zardari accused Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of following 'American foreign policy' of waging wars.



"Pakistan should resolve all issues with its neighbouring countries through dialogue but Nawaz has the same thought process as the Americans when it comes to waging wars. We will not let this war happen," the Dawn quoted Zardari as saying.

Read | JuD chief Hafiz Saeed spreading terrorism in name of jihad: Pakistan's interior ministry



Addressing a public rally in Peshawar, Zardari has called on the government to resume dialogue with neighbours as peace in Afghanistan is essential for regional peace and stability, an ANI report said.



"A fire is raging in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and those governing the province are not aware of it. My party has decided to merge FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa," Zardari said while addressing a gathering.

Read | Belt and Road Forum: Pakistan PM Sharif takes dig at India, says CPEC is open for all in region

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Beijing:

Indias refusal to join Chinas high-profile Belt and Road initiative is regrettable but New Delhis boycott will not at all affect the cooperation in infrastructure development among its neighbouring countries, a report in a state-run newspaper said on Monday.



The two-day Belt and Road Forum which is being attended by leaders from 29 countries, including Pakistan, has been boycotted by India due to sovereignty concerns over the USD 50 billion CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor), which passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.



While India recently issued an official statement saying it would not be part of the One Belt and One Road (B&R) initiative, it will not affect the trend towards cooperation in infrastructure development among its neighbouring countries at all, Global Times reported on Monday.



India was openly sceptical of Chinas Belt and Road Forum (BRF) hours ahead of the opening of the event, mainly due to concerns over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key project of the B&R, and whether it might influence the disputed Kashmir region, it said.

Read | One Belt, One road: China offers 100 billion yuan for 'project of the century'



The B&R is a grand economic cooperation and development plan open to everyone, and is aimed at improving infrastructure in countries along the B&R route, thus benefiting the local people, it said.



China would never force any country to participate in the B&R if it was too sceptical and nervous to do so. It is regrettable but not a problem that India still maintains its strong opposition to the B&R, even though China has repeatedly said its position on the Kashmir dispute would not change because of the CPEC, the article said.



Referring to the statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs on March 13, a day before the two-day B&R summit, it said India also cited the potential debt burden as one of its other concerns, saying that, connectivity initiatives must follow the principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create an unsustainable debt burden for communities.

Read | CPEC concerns hold India off from One Belt One Road summit in China



It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbours debt burden, the neighbours appear willing to take on more, it said.



On Saturday, Pakistan and China inked new deals worth nearly USD 500 million, covering airport, port and highway construction, it said.



As regards the potential debt burden, Pakistans repayments will peak at around USD 5 billion in 2022, but this will be offset by transit fees charged in the CPEC, it quoted a media report and referred to Nepal officially signing a deal with China to join the B&R with plans to build a cross-border rail link that may cost up to USD 8 billion.



The article further stated that given the active responses from countries along the route, there is no way for India to impede its neighbouring countries from cooperating with China in infrastructure development.



China has formally invited India to join the B&R. If India doesnt want to take a part on the stage, then it should just be a good member of the audience. The role is still available if India changes its mind, but it may only be a small role if it is left too late, it said.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

The 'ransomware' cyberattack that has affected close to 200,000 victims in over 150 countries should be treated by governments around the world as a "wake-up call", IT major Microsoft has said.

The virus exposes a loophole in a version of Microsoft Windows first identified by US intelligence. The attacks exploited the computers because they were running outdated versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system.

The National Security Agency (NSA) alerted Microsoft about the issue three months ago and Microsoft released an upgrade that patched the flaw, but many users were yet to run it, CNN reported.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said in a blog post that his company, its customers and the government all share the blame, the report said.

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call," Smith wrote while also noting how "cybersecurity has become a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers."

Also Read: Global ransomware virus found stalking in Indian cyberspace; Maharashtra police dept partially hit

But he also blamed the governments. The security flaw that hackers used to launch the attacks on Friday was made public after information was stolen from the NSA, which routinely searches for flaws in software and builds tools to exploit them, the report said.

The government is not legally bound to notify at-risk companies. That's wrong, says Smith.

He argued there should be "a new requirement for governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them."

He said tech companies, customers and the government need to "work together" to protect against attacks.

"More action is needed, and it's needed now," he said. The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.

The ransomware is a type of malicious software that infects a computer and restricts users' access to it until a ransom is paid to unlock it. It demands users pay USD 300 worth of cryptocurrency Bitcoin to retrieve their files, though it warns that the payment will be raised after a certain amount of time. The malware spreads through e-mail.

(With Inputs from PTI)

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said that the US-Russia relationship is at its lowest point since the end of the Cold War. Further, he also claimed that President Donald Trump is committed to raise the current level of trust between the two countries. "The President I think has made it clear that he feelsit's important that we re-engage with Russia.

"The relationship with Russia, as he has described and I have described as well, is I think at an all time low pointsince the end of the Cold War, with a very low level of trust," Tillerson said in an interview to "Meet The Press"talk show of NBC News.

"I think the world and it's in the interests of the American people, it's in the interest of Russia and the rest of the world that we do something to see if we can improve the relationship between the two greatest nuclear powers in the world," he said.

"So, the President, I think, has committed to at least make an effort in that regard and he has certainly asked me tomake an important effort as well," Tillerson said, noting that relationship with Russia comes up in his conversation with leaders of Europe as well.

"It is largely viewed that it is not healthy for the world, it is certainly not healthy for us, for the Americanpeople, our national security interests and otherwise, for this relationship to remain at this low level," he added.

"Whether we can improve it or not remains to be seen. Itis going to take some time, it's going to take a lot of hardwork. But the President's committed, rightly so, and I'm committed with him as well to see if we can do something toput us on a better footing in our relationship with Russia," said the top American diplomat.

ALSO READ: Trump administration committed to Tibetan issue, says Secretary of State Rex Tillerson

Responding to a question on alleged Russian interference in American elections, Tillerson said it has been well documented but it is not in US national interest to have sucha low relationship with Moscow.

"We have such a broad range of important issues that haveto be addressed in the US-Russia relationship. Obviously, the interference in the election is one of those. I think it's been well documented, it's pretty well understood the natureof that interference here and elsewhere," he said.

These are not new tactics on the part of the Russian government directed not only at the US but at others too, he noted. "But again, I think we have to look at this relationshipin its broadest contours. And there are many, many importantareas which require our attention if we are to bring it back to a relationship that we believe is necessary for the security of the US," he said.

Tillerson further clarified that the Trump Administration is not trying to reset the relationship with Russia. "I think it's important to understand we're not trying to start with a clean slate. Terms like having a reset are overused. You cannot reset, you cannot erase the past, you cannot start with a clean slate and we're not trying to start with a clean slate," he said.

"We're starting with the slate we have and all theproblems that are on that slate. We don't dismiss any of them.We don't give anyone a free pass on any one of them. They're part of the entire nature of the discussions we're having with the Russians. "And there are a large number of issues that we have to get around to addressing in order to put this relationship back together if that is indeed possible," he said.

With PTI inputs

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
California just purchased a slew of facial recognition cameras to SPY on all citizens, 24 hours a day

It used to be that security cameras on street corners and elsewhere were only capable of producing blurry, hard to see video footage. But now, it appears that big brother is all grown up.

The California Department of Justice (CDOJ) has recently invested nearly $1 million in new facial recognition technology. According to an article published in Muckrock, NECs NeoFace System has been spying on Californians for over a year now, since April 26, 2016. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the taxpayers of California have been funding this, paying NEC roughly $650,000 each year. In other words, the California Department of Justice has been taxing their own people in exchange for what many would consider to be a violation of their constitutional freedom. (RELATED: Read about how Facebook uses facial recognition technology to track people across the Internet).

As further evidence that the Bill of Rights has been thrown out the window yet again, contractors were instructed to destroy all evidence of their collaboration with the CDOJ once the technology was installed. What other reason could the California Department of Justice have for doing this other than to hide the extent of their new spying program from the public? If this doesnt scream assault on individual liberty then nothing ever will.

In the interest of fair and balanced, it is important to note that more than likely, the intent of the California Department of Justice is not a bad one. Obviously, they didnt choose to set up this facial recognition technology just for the sole purpose of spying on random people as they walk down the street. Indeed, it is easy to see how such technology would be able to help law enforcement track down criminals in a relatively short amount of time, thus potentially creating a safer environment for everyone. But more safety should seldom come at the expense of the constitutionally protected liberties of the American people.

When it comes to the law, safety and privacy are a balancing act. Ben Franklin once famously argued, they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. In other words, Franklin believed that the pursuit of liberty was more important than the pursuit of safety because, without liberty, there never will be any safety. When the federal government has so much power that they are able to provide the people with 100 percent security, then they have enough power to do many other things at the peoples expense.

California isnt the only place where the government is using facial features to identify its people. China has been in the news lately for the introduction of similar facial recognition technology that they are using to combat toilet paper theft. At the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, those who have to use the bathroom must now stand in front of a camera-equipped dispenser in order to get just two feet of toilet paper. Once they get it, the facial recognition technology inside of the dispenser will not let that same person get more for another nine minutes.

The goal, according to a park manager who was interviewed by NBC News, is to cope with the behavior of taking public toilet paper home which is theft and abuse of public resource. The park official added, We decided to use face recognition technology as our latest measure to curb excessive paper use which affects the interests of other users.

Naturally, not all of Chinas citizens were too pleased with the technology. On Weibo, which is essentially Chinas version of Twitter, one user wrote, How pathetic. Why do we need to be supervised on EVERYTHING! Although park officials argue that the facial recognition toilet paper dispensers dont use the images for any other purposes, the fact remains that just like in the state of California, the world is looking more and more like George Orwells 1984 novel with each passing day.

Sources:

BlacklistedNews.com

NBCnews.com

Submit a correction >>
/

BROOKFIELD  The Brookfield Museum and Historical Society will honor residents who have lost their lives fighting for this countrys freedoms through an exhibit opening this weekend.

The exhibit uses photographs and background information to remember the towns fallen military heroes.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 15, 2017 /CNW/ -- On May 12, 2017, Taiwan Tourism Bureau hosted its exclusive #TaiwanNowBoarding event at Robson Square in downtown Vancouver. More than 300 attendees gathered to learn about cultural traditions and culinary practices within the vibrant heart of Asia. Immediately following the event, 12 lucky winners were chauffeured by limousine to Vancouver International Airport and boarded a nonstop flight to Taiwan for a fun-filled weekend.

As guests discovered at the #TaiwanNowBoarding event, there are more than 10 nonstop flights each week between Vancouver and Taiwan, making this treasured destination more accessible than ever. Attendees were also treated to a virtual biking tour, tasted signature bubble tea offered by Shiny Tea and enjoyed many more activities unique to Taiwan. Participants also celebrated Taiwan's recent honor of being named the best expat destination in the world, thanks to its breathtaking natural beauty, welcoming atmosphere and affordable cost of living, according to a 2017 InterNations survey.

To enter the instant trip sweepstakes, guests used the hashtag #TaiwanNowBoarding for a chance to win this special package that included: a three-night stay in a design hotel; round-trip flights between Vancouver and Taiwan aboard China Airlines; and a day tour in Taipei sponsored by Lion Travel, Silkway Travel, XO Tours, and Super Value Tour.

For more information about this exciting event, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/1176143345846012/ For more information about Taiwan, please visit: http://eng.taiwan.net.tw/

ABOUT TAIWAN TOURISM BUREAU

The Taiwan Tourism Bureau is the official government agency responsible for domestic and international tourism policy development and execution. There are three North American Tourism Offices located in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

For information about Taiwan, please visit: http://eng.taiwan.net.tw/

Press Contact:

Erin Yang

[email protected] / +1 424 309 0831

SOURCE Taiwan Tourism Bureau
In celebration of Canada's 150th year, 150 STEM-based community solutions bring schools one-step closer to Samsung technology grants

MISSISSAUGA, ON, May 15, 2017 /CNW/ - Samsung Electronics Canada Inc. today announced the 150 regional finalists moving on to the next round of the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Challenge. The Challenge asked Canadian students from Grades 6 through 12 to identify issues in their local communities and develop solutions using science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). These 150 regional finalists now move closer to being awarded one of four $20,000 Samsung technology grant packages as a Regional Winner as well as an exclusive event with Canadian rocket-scientist, Forbes '30 Under 30' and member of a Canadian contingent working on the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover, Natalie Panek.

"These 150 regional finalists embody what Solve for Tomorrow is all about: innovation, teamwork, and a commitment to the future of Canadian communities. As we celebrate Canada's 150th this year, we are excited to see inspired student solutions come to life that will have local, national and even global implications," said Mark Childs, Chief Brand Officer, Samsung Canada.

Each of the 150 regional finalist schools will receive a Samsung technology package which includes a Samsung Gear VR, Galaxy Tab A, Galaxy S7 and Samsung Gear360 camera to assist them in completing their next 'assignment' as part of the Challenge: documenting the implementation of their community solution in a three-minute video. Videos will go on to be reviewed by a panel of Samsung Solve for Tomorrow judges, with the top-scoring four schools being named Regional Winners in June 2017.

The Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Challenge intends to inspire STEM interest and 21st century learning opportunities in Canadian classroomsan area of issue as less than half of Canadian high school students graduate with senior STEM courses though 70% of top jobs require expertise in science, technology, engineering and math*. Together with Solve for Tomorrow ambassador, Natalie Panek, and educational organizations The Learning Partnership and Let's Talk Science, the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Challenge hopes to spark Canadian students' passion for STEM to solve tomorrow's problems today. Examples of 150 regional finalist projects moving on include a mobile app to monitor water pollution levels, a fruit and vegetable production plan to spur healthy eating habits, and other innovative ideas.

"STEM is in everything I do," said Natalie Panek, Solve for Tomorrow Ambassador. "Especially evident with my recent work on the European Space Agency's ExoMars Rover project, is that a career in STEM carries boundless opportunities. I'm so excited to meet these bright minds of tomorrow through Solve for Tomorrowwho knows, they might be the minds designing the next big space telescope or the spacesuits crew members will wear on a mission to Mars!"

The 150 schools moving on in the 2017 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Challenge are: (In alphabetical order)

School Name City Province Acadia School Winnipeg Manitoba Access St. Lambert Quebec Aden Bowman Collegiate Saskatoon Saskatchewan Alexander Muir/Gladstone Junior and Senior Public School Toronto Ontario Allan Drive Middle School Bolton Ontario Amherst Regional High School Amherst Nova Scotia Arthur Day Middle School Winnipeg Manitoba Aurora Academic Charter School Edmonton Alberta Bayside Middle School Saint John New Brunswick Beamsville District Secondary School Beamsville Ontario Bedford And Forsyth Education Centres Bedford Nova Scotia Belleisle Regional High School Springfield New Brunswick Beverley Acres Public School Richmond Hill Ontario Bishop O'Byrne High School Calgary Alberta Bliss Carman Middle School Fredericton New Brunswick Brock Public School Toronto Ontario Burnaby South Secondary School Burnaby British Columbia Charles P. Allen High School Bedford Nova Scotia Chebucto Heights Elementary School Halifax Nova Scotia Citadel High School Halifax Nova Scotia Clarkson Secondary School Mississauga Ontario Condor School Condor Alberta Crescent Collegiate South Dildo Newfoundland David Leeder Middle School Mississauga Ontario David Livingstone Elementary School Vancouver British Columbia Delview Secondary School Delta British Columbia Dorothy Dalgliesh School Picture Butte Alberta Duke of Connaught Junior and Senior Public School Toronto Ontario Earl of March Secondary School Kanata Ontario Ecole de l'Harmonie Quebec Quebec Ecole Garden Grove School Winnipeg Manitoba Ecole John Diefenbaker Senior School Hanover Ontario Ecole Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine Montreal Quebec Ecole Marguerite-Bourgeoys Caraquet New Brunswick Ecole Pauline Johnson Elementary School West Vancouver British Columbia Ecole Phoenix Middle School Campbell river British Columbia Ecole Saint-Edouard Plessisville Quebec Ecole Secondaire Catholique Regionale De Hawkesbury Hawkesbury Ontario Ecole Secondaire Publique Le Sommet Hawkesbury Ontario Edgerton Public School Edgerton Alberta Elmbank Junior Middle Academy Etobicoke Ontario Elmwood High Winnipeg Manitoba Father Michael Goetz Secondary School  Class A Mississauga Ontario Father Michael Goetz Secondary School  Class B Mississauga Ontario Father Michael Goetz Secondary School  Class C Mississauga Ontario Father Patrick Mercredi Community School  Class A Fort McMurray Alberta Father Patrick Mercredi Community School- Class B Fort McMurray Alberta Fort McMurray Composite High School Fort McMurray Alberta Fraser River Middle School New Westminster British Columbia George Fitton School Brandon Manitoba Georges Vanier Secondary School Toronto Ontario Graham Creighton Junior High School Cherry brook Nova Scotia Grandview Heights School Edmonton Alberta Grasmere School Alberta Beach Alberta Greenway School Winnipeg Manitoba Greystone Heights School Saskatoon Saskatchewan H E Bourgoin Middle School Bonnyville Alberta Harry Miller Middle School Rothesay New Brunswick Highland Park Junior High School Halifax Nova Scotia Holy Redeemer Catholic Junior/Senior High School Edson Alberta Holy Spirit High Conception bay south Newfoundland Interdivisional Student Services Winnipeg Manitoba Isabel Campbell Public School Grande prairie Alberta J.G. Diefenbaker Elementary School Richmond British Columbia John Polanyi Collegiate Institute  Class A Toronto Ontario John Polanyi Collegiate Institute  Class B Toronto Ontario John William Boich Public School Burlington Ontario Keswick High School Keswick Ontario King Edward Community School Winnipeg Manitoba Dene High School La Loche Saskatchewan Laval Junior Academy Laval Quebec Lockview High School Fall River Nova Scotia LVTC Sherbrooke Quebec Marlborough Public School Windsor Ontario Matthew Elementary School Bonavista Newfoundland Max Aitken Academy Miramichi New Brunswick McMurrich Junior Public School Toronto Ontario Meadows School Brandon Manitoba Mistassiniy School Wabasca Alberta Moncton High School Moncton New Brunswick Monsignor Fraser College Toronto Ontario Montague Intermediate School Montague Prince Edward Island Mother Teresa Catholic School Russell Ontario Mother Teresa Catholic Elementary School  Class A Courtice Ontario Mother Teresa Catholic Elementary School  Class B Courtice Ontario Mountain Park School Calgary Alberta Ne Sah Soh Is Koh Dahn School Rocky Mountain House Alberta Normandeau School Red Deer Alberta Our Lady Of The Snows Catholic Academy Canmore Alberta Paul Rowe Junior Senior High School Manning Alberta Pender Harbour Elementary/Secondary School Madeira Park British Columbia Pinetree Secondary School Coquitlam British Columbia Pope John Paul II School Saskatoon Saskatchewan Precious Blood Catholic School Scarborough Ontario Prince Andrew High School Dartmouth Nova Scotia Prince of Wales Collegiate  Class A St. John's Newfoundland Prince of Wales Collegiate  Class B St. John's Newfoundland Princess Anne French Immersion P.S. London Ontario R J Lang Elementary & Middle School North York Ontario R.C. Palmer Secondary School Richmond British Columbia Regency Acres Public School Aurora Ontario Resurrection Catholic Secondary School Kitchener Ontario Richmond Secondary School Richmond British Columbia Ridgemont High School Ottawa Ontario River Valley Middle School Grand Bay-Westfield New Brunswick Rockingham Elementary School Halifax Nova Scotia Rocky Christian School Rocky Mountain House Alberta Ruth Thompson Middle School Mississauga Ontario Ryerson Elementary Winnipeg Manitoba Saint John Paul II Kitchener Ontario Santa Maria Catholic School Toronto Ontario Senator O'Connor College School North York Ontario Simcoe Alternative Secondary School - Orillia Orillia Ontario Sir John A. Macdonald Sr. Public School Brampton Ontario Sisler High School/Ecole Secondaire Sisler Winnipeg Manitoba Smallwood Academy Gambo Newfoundland South Colchester Academy Brookfield Nova-scotia St. Boniface All Grade Ramea Newfoundland St. Dominic Savio Elementary Regina Saskatchewan St. Elizabeth Catholic High School Thornhill Ontario St. Joseph's Catholic High School Barrie Ontario St. Malachy Catholic School Toronto Ontario St. Malachy's Memorial High School Saint John New Brunswick St. Margaret Catholic School Toronto Ontario St. Matthew High School Ottawa Ontario St. Michaels Regional High Bell Island Newfoundland St. Patrick Catholic Elementary School Peterborough Ontario St. Paul's Junior High St. John's Newfoundland St. Teresa Catholic Outreach School Spruce Grove Alberta St. Theresa School Brantford Ontario St. Thomas Aquinas High School Kenora Ontario Stamford Collegiate Niagara Falls Ontario Steinbach Regional Secondary Steinbach Manitoba Strathcona Christian Academy Secondary Sherwood Park Alberta Sunningdale Public School Oakville Ontario Sunny View Middle School Brampton Ontario Technical Vocational High School Winnipeg Manitoba Unionville High School Unionville Ontario Vancouver Christian School Vancouver British Columbia Ventura Park Public School Thornhill Ontario Vista Hills Public School Waterloo Ontario Wapanohk Community School Thompson Manitoba Weledeh Catholic School Yellowknife Northwest Territories Wellington School Winnipeg Manitoba West Carleton Secondary School Dunrobin Ontario Westmount Elementary School Kamloops British Columbia Westview Elementary Estevan Saskatchewan Winston Churchill High School Lethbridge Alberta Wood Street Centre Whitehorse Yukon Xavier Junior High Deer Lake Newfoundland

To learn more about the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Challenge, visit solvefortomorrow.ca, or follow #SamsungSolve on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

About Samsung Electronics Canada, Inc.

Samsung Electronics Canada inspires Canadians to reach their full potential through a transformative ecosystem of products and services that deliver innovation and distinct design to every aspect of their connected lives. The company is redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, virtual reality and wearable devices, tablets and digital appliances. In 2016, Samsung was ranked in the top 10 most reputable brands in Canada, based on a study by Leger. Dedicated to helping make a difference in the lives of Canadians, Samsung's award-winning Hope for Children corporate giving initiatives supports public education, sustainability and health-related issues in communities across the country. To discover more, please visit www.samsung.com.

Follow Samsung Canada at facebook.com/SamsungCanada, or Instagram @samsungcanada or Twitter @SamsungCanada

*Data via 'Spotlight on Science Learning 2013: The high cost of dropping science and math'

http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/were-losing-out---new-report-on-science-learning-reveals-the-economic-burden-of-discontinuing-high-school-science-courses-513071801.html

SOURCE Samsung Electronics Canada Inc.

For further information: Katelin Onishi, North Strategic Public Relations, [email protected]
TORONTO, May 15, 2017 /CNW/ - North American Safe Boating Awareness Week will take place across Canada from May 20th to May 26th, 2017. The purpose of this initiative, managed by the CSBC (Canadian Safe Boating Council) and its partners, is to promote safe and responsible boating practices to the 14 million Canadians who participate in recreational boating.

Although boating related fatalities have trended downwards in past years, there continues to be an average of over 100 boating related deaths annually in Canadian waters. With people gearing-up to launch their boats after a long winter slumber, the goal of the week is to continue to bring those numbers down by ensuring that Canadians who head out in any type of boat have the appropriate knowledge to help them have a safe day on the water.

The timing of the week, starting on the May long weekend, is perfectly aligned with the unofficial start of summer and a time when many boating fatalities occur.

There are five key boating safety messages to be delivered, all directed towards the most common boating related accidents. They include:

The importance of wearing a lifejacket The dangers associated with drinking and boating The importance of taking a safe boating course Ensuring that you and your vessel are prepared before casting off The risks associated with a fall into cold water

To help media in communicating safe boating messages, short stories to be used as discrete articles and 30-second audio and video PSAs are available. They are easy to download and free of charge on the www.csbc.ca website. Beta quality is also available upon request.

An article specifically created for the upcoming Victoria Day weekend, entitled "IT'S THE MAY 2  4 LONG WEEKEND, LET'S GET ON THE WATER  CAREFULLY!' is available by visiting http://csbc.ca/en/component/sl_downloads/?view=document&id=84:long-weekend-boating&catid=56:articles-safe-boating-awareness-week

In addition to offering media ready materials, a number of activities are taking place during this year's campaign.

Launches

In Canada, there will be three launches for media, public and boating safety educators alike. On May 18th, Toronto, and Winnipeg will kick off North American Safe Boating Awareness Week. Vancouver will launch Safe Boating Awareness Week on May 20th with a Ready Set Wear It (RSWI) activity as part of their event.

Ready, Set, Wear It

As a part of North American Safe Boating Awareness Week this year, the 8th annual Ready, Set, Wear It (RSWI) initiative will take place. Aimed at increasing awareness around the importance of lifejackets and boating safety, RSWI aims to set a new world's record for the most lifejackets worn and the highest number of inflatable lifejackets inflated. Last year, 6,784 participants from across six countries (including Canada, the USA, Brazil, Japan, Poland, South Korea) took part in this event. The RSWI goal is to bring together boating safety educators, marine enforcement officials, politicians, media and the general public around the world to surpass this number. To see a list of events registered across Canada, visit www.readysetwearit.com.

The Safe Boating Awareness Week initiative is promoted by the Canadian Safe Boating Council (CSBC), a registered charity, with support from its members, partners and Transport Canada's Office of Boating Safety.

For additional information on both the event and boating safety information, please visit www.csbc.ca.

SOURCE Canadian Safe Boating Council

For further information: Ian Gilson, Canadian Safe Boating Council, [email protected], 905-719-5152
Ontario Wood Builds Homes for 15 Toronto Families

TORONTO, May 15, 2017 /CNW/ - In honour of Canada's 150th birthday, the Ontario Forest Industries Association (OFIA), alongside the Honourable Kathryn McGarry, Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry, will be rolling up their sleeves to help Habitat for Humanity GTA build 15 homes for working, low-income families. As the Official Wood Sponsor for these 15 homes, OFIA is proud that these homes will be built with Ontario Wood  the only naturally, renewable resource.

OFIA's forestry community, members of provincial government, Indigenous leaders and students will be providing sweat equity at two build days taking place on May 18th & 19th at the Pinery Trail site in Toronto (140 Pinery Trail). Weston Forest will be facilitating the delivery of Ontario Wood to the build site.

In a sector that is older than Canada, OFIA's member companies have been producing wood to build local communities for over 150 years. By upholding some of the world's best forest management practices, Ontario's forestry community sustainably harvests our forests to ensure that there are renewable wood products available to build and furnish homes for families today and for generations to come.

Canada's future is in our forests. OFIA's members are committed to continuing the forest sector's remarkable legacy of growing local economies by harvesting and growing trees. Ontario's forestry community will continue to put wood to work responsibly by providing wood products to support Habitat for Humanity and the wellbeing of all Ontarians.

So when will Ontario Harvest its last tree and build its last home? Never.

QUOTES

"I'm happy to put on my hard hat and get my hammer out to help with this great project for Habitat for Humanity and I'm proud to see representatives from Ontario's forestry sector stepping up and giving back to our communities. Through these new houses, OFIA is helping working, low-income families here in Toronto and showcasing the great things we can build with quality, locally sourced, and sustainably harvested Ontario Wood."

- Honourable Kathryn McGarry, Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry

"Considering the challenges presented by the Trump Administration trade action, Ontario's forestry leaders are glad to be working hand in hand with partners to do what our sector has been doing for generations  provide provincially sourced sustainable wood for the building of homes. Building communities is in our nature. In addition to honouring our sector's legacy as part of Canada's economic foundation, the Habitat build is also an opportunity for all of us to celebrate the future of forestry."

- Jamie Lim, President & CEO, Ontario Forest Industries Association

"We were thrilled when the OFIA came to us and offered to be the Official Wood Sponsor for these fifteen homes as their way of celebrating the wood industry's role in building Canada over the last 150 years. In the process, we have been learning a great deal about the constant renewal of our forests as a result of sustainable forestry and also about the incredible role Canada's forests play in mitigating climate change."

- Ene Underwood, CEO, Habitat for Humanity GTA

"Weston Forest is very excited to be involved in the partnership between OFIA and Habitat for Humanity GTA. Facilitating the Ontario wood to be used to build the 15 homes at Pinery Trail has been a great honour. It really is encouraging to take part and support the use of the OFIA members' locally sourced, sustainable wood products right here in Toronto."

- Rob Hruby, Vice President - Purchasing & US Commodity Trading, Weston Forest

"We were honoured to be asked by OFIA to participate in their Habitat for Humanity build. The Carpenters' Union contributes to creating a stronger society while building the infrastructure and opportunity for our future. Building with wood is just as important to the members of our Union as it is to the forest sector. That's why it is so important that we educate our youth in investing in a sustainable future. Building these homes alongside students that may be interested in a future in carpentry or forestry, is a very exciting opportunity."

- Mike Yorke, President, Carpenters' Union Local 27

"Ontario home builders are proud to utilize Ontario wood products and support jobs in the forestry industry. Builders believe that wood is good, but Ontario wood is better."

- Joe Vaccaro, CEO, Ontario Home Builders' Association

QUICK FACTS

Ontario has approximately 85 billion trees

has approximately 85 billion trees Ontario's forests cover two-thirds of the province  a land area equivalent in size to Germany , Italy and the Netherlands combined

forests cover two-thirds of the province  a land area equivalent in size to , and combined Less than 0.5% of Ontario's trees are harvested annually

trees are harvested annually Crown land forest management plans are renewed every five years and laid out five generations into the future  we plan for generations!

Wood is the only building material that is both renewable and recyclable

2 out of 3 people would buy wood products from Ontario if they were clearly identified as such

if they were clearly identified as such 66% of Ontario is forested (71 million ha)  this is approximately 17% of Canada's forests and 2% of the world's forests

is forested (71 million ha)  this is approximately 17% of forests and 2% of the world's forests 80.8% of Ontario's forests are on Crown land (57.5 million ha)

forests are on Crown land (57.5 million ha) 44.2% of the forest in the boreal region is unavailable for harvest

Source: Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry Website, 2016

MEDIA EVENT

- Farming Feeds Cities: Forestry Builds Communities -

Join us on for our media event at 8:30am on Thursday, May 18th at 140 Pinery Trail in Scarborough. Among our volunteers will be honoured guests: Honourable Kathryn McGarry, Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, Honourable David Zimmer, Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation and His Worship Roger Sigouin, Mayor of Hearst.

To learn more about the Ontario Forest Industries Association visit www.ofia.com .

SOURCE Ontario Forest Industries Association (OFIA)

For further information: Lauren McBride, Director of Communications, Ontario Forest Industries Association, T: 416-368-2842, C: 647-646-9600, [email protected]; Joanna Dwyer, Sr. Director, Marketing & Communications, Habitat for Humanity Greater Toronto Area, T: 416-755-7353 ext. 259, C: 416-277-3064, [email protected]
Women in the Central New York craft brewing industry

Owner Dawn Hearns Schulz in the brewhouse at the Prison City Pub and Brewery in downtown Auburn.

(Don Cazentre)

New York state's oldest brewery will be joined by four others as finalists in the first Taste NY Craft Beer Challenge in New York City this week.

The five breweries were chosen in a online poll that ran from May 1 to May 12, when voting closed. The finalists, announced by the office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo today, are:

Brewery Ommegang -- Cooperstown, Otsego County

Genesee Brewing Company -- Rochester

Prison City Pub and Brewery -- Auburn, Cayuga County

The Roscoe NY Beer Co. -- Roscoe, Sullivan County

Southern Tier Brewing Company -- Lakewood, Chautauqua County

The five breweries will compete in the final judging Wednesday at Pier A in New York City's Battery Place. More than 42,000 votes were cast online.

Judges will include Cuomo, plus a group of celebrities and experts, including chef Mario Batali and former Buffalo Bill star Thurman Thomas. Cuomo touted the challenge as a way to showcase the booming beer industry in New York. The state now has more than 320 breweries, up from about 100 five years ago.

Brewery Ommegang was the judges' pick in the Best Upstate New York brewery contest conducted by NYup.com in December, while Southern Tier was a finalist.

Genesee is the oldest brewery in the state. Due to its size, it is not considered a craft brewer by the national Brewers Association, although it does make beers at the adjacent Genesee Brewhouse, which are "craft-style" beers.

Prison City has earned lots of praise from craft beer fans, and its Mass Riot IPA was named the best IPA (India Pale Ale) in the country by Paste magazine in 2016. Roscoe Brewing is known for its beers under the label "Trout Town."

Don Cazentre writes about craft beer, wine, spirits and beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.










Clerics from Northern Nigeria under the auspices of the Northern Interfaith and Religious Organization for Peace, has said God revealed to them that he preserved the life of President Muhammadu Buhari so he can fulfill his mission.The group said God gave them the revelation during a Special prayer session for the peace, good governance and leadership of the country under Buhari, which was held in Abuja.National Coordinator of the group, Bishop Musa Fomson, in a statement also said it was revealed during the meeting that Nigeria will express a great harvest and turn-around under the leadership of president Buhari.Fomson urged Nigerians not to be deterred by the heath of the president, assuring he would soon bounce back and continue the good job he had started.The clergyman noted that Buhari is on a mission in the country and should be allowed to complete it.According to him, just like the biblical Hezekiah, God has put the enemy of the nation into shame by extending the life span of the president on earth.Fomson said, It was revealed to the assembly that President Muhammadu Buhari remains Gods answer to the prayer of Nigerians for a leader that would make afflictions, pains and hunger things of the past.The Lord revealed to the gathering of the anointed clergies that Boko Haram has long been defeated about a year ago and those carrying out attacks are the rebels that the devil has refused to release from the bondage of their past and doomed even on earth before judgment in the hereafter.Boko Haram is an enemy of whom we shall hear no more even when persons freshly possessed of the destructive spirits operate under its name. The Lord shall make Nigeria triumph at every turn.The enemies of the President according to revelations received during the meeting are only fighting God and will meet their waterloo if they fail to turn away from their evil ways. The Lord shall keep President Buhari to fulfill his mission in Nigeria.God said he has used the first two years of Buhari to reset the nation and the remaining years ahead are years of harvest for those that would believe in the leader that God has given to them. In this vein Nigerians are enjoined to shun murmuring and not engage in grumbling that is displeasing to God so that their case would not be like the Children of Israel, whose murmuring prevented from entering the promised land.
The Publicity Secretary of All Progressives Congress in Ondo State, Mr Abayomi Adesanya, on Monday urged Nigerians to pray for good health and quick recovery of President Muhammadu Buhari.Adesanya made the call while speaking with journalists in Lagos.President Buhari had on Sunday, May 7, travelled to London for a follow-up medical consultation with his doctors.The APC spokesman appealed for more patience by Nigerians and urged them to pray for good health of the President.Nigerians, home and abroad should continue to pray for the good health and quick recovery of President Muhammadu Buhari so that he can complete the rebuilding of a new prosperous Nigeria free of corruption and nepotism, he said.Adesanya said the emergence of Mohammadu Buhari as President was the best thing to have happened in Nigeria at that crucial time.He said that Nigeria was on the verge of collapse when President Buhari took over from the previous administration led by Dr Goodluck Jonathan.But for President Buharis integrity, Nigeria under former President Goodluck Jonathan was heading and drifting towards anarchy and a failed state.Nigeria is better under Buhari, and I can assure that it would be better and stable at the expiration of President Buhari/APCs presidency.Adesanya also commended the APC for organising a national workshop on external communication for all publicity secretaries of the party in conjunction with the International Republican Institute in Washington DC.The workshop was held in Abuja last week.
The Redeemed Christian Church of God General Overseer (Worldwide), Pastor Enoch Adeboye, in Jos on Sunday urged Christians in the country...

The Redeemed Christian Church of God General Overseer (Worldwide), Pastor Enoch Adeboye, in Jos on Sunday urged Christians in the country not to lose hope but to believe that there is no problem impossible for God to solve.The cleric also urged Nigerians to maintain a peaceful disposition towards one another, no matter the situation they find themselves, saying it was only through such acts that their prayers would be answered.Adeboye spoke at the RCCG inter-denominational service held at Kassa in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of Plateau State, where he rounded up the RCCG 2017 Northern Ministers and Workers Conference, with the theme, The Almighty.At the event, the Plateau State Governor, Simon Lalong, called on citizens to live in peace and support his administration to achieve its mandate.Adeboyes message was taken from the Book of Genesis 17:1-10.He said, Know that there is a God who is the Almighty; hide nothing from Him no matter the situation but put your trust in Him and the Almighty will be available to you. Though you have no one to help, the Almighty will help, remember that He knows all.
The Bishop of Egbu (Anglican Communion) in Owerri North Council Area of Imo State, Right Reverend Geoffrey Okorafor has advised President Muhammadu Buhari against plunging the nation into another civil war.The Bishop, who was worried about the letter Buhari sent to National Assembly over his journey to London on health ground and the administrative stand of Mr. Vice President further added that no nation had survived two civil wars without disintegration.Okorafor spoke on Monday during a Eucharistic service of confirmation, admission and induction for Umuekwune Parish at St. Andrews Anglican Church, Umuekwune in Owerri North Council Area of the State.He said, The letter Mr. President sent to National Assembly over his absence on medical ground and his trip to London has a lot of ambiguity. Irrespective of the relevant constitutional provisions. Mr. President cited, the language of the letter was not in consonance with the spirit of the constitution.Referring to Mr. Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo as the Coordinator of Government Affairs is an aberration, alien and not known to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.Okorafor, who was worried by the controversies generated by the letter and possible consequences, warned Nigerians to be wary and also advised the cabal in the Presidency to refrain from precipitating crisis in the country.He, however, prayed God for the quick recovery of the President. It is my prayer to God for Buhari to recover quickly so that he can return back to the country and continue with his presidential duties.Meanwhile, the Prelate had frowned at Nigerias political leaders who he said have forsaken God for their avid quest for power.Earlier in his sermon, the Chaplain to the Bishop, Rev. Progress Okorafor had urged Christians to be patient and steadfast in God especially in the present economic downtown in the country.The Chaplain said, Whereas you may find yourselves in difficulties in present times, I advise that you persevere and handover the present situation to God. He will surely take control of it, I tenaciously believe.
President Emmanuel Macron of France named Edouard Philippe, a moderate center-right lawmaker, as prime minister on Monday, making his first major political decision a day after being formally installed as the countrys leader.Mr. Macron, who ran as an independent centrist after leaving the Socialist government of his predecessor, is expected to name the rest of his cabinet by the middle of the week. The selection of Mr. Philippe, 46, from the center-right party the Republicans, was announced by Alexis Kohler, the presidents secretary general, in the courtyard of the Elysee Palace.Mr. Philippe, who is also the mayor of the northern port city of Le Havre, is a close political ally of Alain Juppe, a former prime minister who ran, unsuccessfully, in the center-right presidential primary last year, and who is also a central figure of the Republicans centrist wing.Mr. Philippe was not a nationally known figure in France until last week, when the news media started reporting that he was one of the main candidates being considered for prime minister.Before his nomination on Monday, French television channels frantically covered his movements live, with cameramen on motorbikes following his taxi through Paris.Mr. Macron, 39, who had never held elective office before winning the presidential race on May 7, became the youngest head of state in modern French history when he was inaugurated on Sunday. He was scheduled to travel to Berlin later on Monday for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel.In many ways, Mr. Philippe mirrors Mr. Macron: Both are younger than most French politicians, both went to top French universities and both have worked in the private sector.Mr. Macron was an investment banker for Rothschild, and Mr. Philippe worked as a lawyer for the American firm Debevoise & Plimpton, and as head of public affairs for Areva, the French nuclear power giant.I believe they know and like each other, because of their intellectual honesty and their rigor, said Benjamin Griveaux, a spokesman for Mr. Macron and a candidate in the legislative elections in June, on Europe 1 radio.
Some armed men have kidnapped the Permanent Secretary of the Ondo State Hospital Management Board, Dr. Niran Ikuomola and his driver on Sunday evening.According to a source, the dastardly act was carried out on Lokoja/Abuja Expressway when the PS was on his way to Abuja for an official assignment.The source said the hoodlums stopped his vehicle on the way and dragged him and his driver out of the vehicle and whisked them away to an unknown destination.Speaking with newsmen in Akure on Monday on the incident, the Secretary of the Nigerian Medical Association in Ondo State, Dr. Roland Arohunmolase, said one of the kidnappers called the family on the telephone to informed them that the senior civil servant and his driver were in their custody.He said, Dr. Ikuomola was abducted yesterday (Sunday) with his driver on the Lokoja -Abuja road while on his way to Abuja for an official function.The kidnappers have contacted us this morning (Monday) by demanding for the sum of N70 million before he could be released to his family.The Police Public Relations Officer in Ondo State, Femi Joseph, when contacted could not confirm the incident, saying it did not happen in his jurisdiction.Am not yet aware, although, it is outside our jurisdiction but am sure some of our colleagues (police) in Kogi State would have taken prompt action on it Joseph explained.
The charred remains found in a shallow grave in Johannesburg have been confirmed as those of 22-year-old Karabo Mokoena, her family said ...

The charred remains found in a shallow grave in Johannesburg have been confirmed as those of 22-year-old Karabo Mokoena, her family said on Sunday. Hours before her murder on April 27 Karabo Mokoena had a heated argument with her boyfriend Sandile Mansoe in a Sandton nightclub that deteriorated into a physical fight the Sunday Times reported.

The couple left the club together but she was never seen alive again.

The part-time business students body was found in a patch of veld in Bramley Johannesburg two days later by a passer-by who at first thought the body was a burnt mannequin.

Karabo had been necklaced and had acid poured over her body. She was burnt beyond recognition.

Mantsoe, 27, faces charges of murder and defeating the ends of justice. Meanwhile, friends, neighbours and relatives gathered at the Mokoena family home in Soweto today. They are trying to make sense of Karabo's murder.

"We mothers feel the pain, the social workers came and I got a report that the family is still shocked and shattered in terms of what happened and how it happened." said Gauteng Social Development MEC Nandi Mayathula-Khaza.

"Today is Mother's Day, our children are celebrating their mothers, Karabo is no more here to celebrate her mother." she added.

A memorial service for Krabo will be held at the Diepkloof Hall on Wednesday and she will be laid to rest on Friday.
After serving nearly 40 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Ricky has finally been exonerated In 1975, a man was robbed and mu...

After serving nearly 40 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Ricky has finally been exonerated

In 1975, a man was robbed and murdered in Rickys Cleveland neighborhood. Days later, armed police kicked in the door of the home where 18-year-old Ricky lived. Based on the testimony of one young boy who claimed to have witnessed the murder, Ricky and two of his friends were convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.

Ricky (middle)





Ricky believed that his case was forgotten, but the Ohio Innocence Project was fighting to discover the truth. The witness who testified that Ricky and his friends had committed the murder recanted and Ricky was released. After 39 years, I was finally able to walk out.





Ricky is the longest-serving prisoner to have been exonerated in the U.S. After his release, he met with his accuser, who is now a middle-aged man. It was important for me to go to this guy and say, I understand now. Because in a way, he was a victim just as much as we were, Ricky says. I wanted him to move on with his life, as I was going to move on with mine.





Attorney Mark Godsey of the Ohio Innocence Project explains that it took years of effort to exonerate Ricky. Attorney Brian Howe had law students going door-to-door in the Cleveland neighborhood looking for witnesses who remembered the case. Mark is a law professor at the Cincinnati University College of Law and a former prosecutor. He says that, since its founding in 2003, the Ohio Innocence Project so far weve freed 24 Ohioans who together have served 450 years in prison for crimes they didnt commit.





Mark also notes that in many of the cases the project investigates, the prisoners turn out to be guilty. When we confirm guilt, thats what we love, he says  it means that the real perpetrator is behind bars.

Like other exonerated prisoners, Ricky still feels the trauma of his time in prison.
Governor Atiku Bagudu of Kebbi State has urged clerics to offer special prayers for good health for President Muhammadu Buhari.

Governor Atiku Bagudu of Kebbi State has urged clerics to offer special prayers for good health for President Muhammadu Buhari.He made the call at the launch of an appeal fund ahead of the Muslim Ramadan fast by the Jamaatul Izalatul Bidah Waikamatu Sunnah (JIBWIS) in Birnin Kebbi.The governor also urged clerics to sustain prayers for peace, unity and economic advancement of the country.A statement by the Press Secretary to the governor, Alhaji Muazu Dakingari, on Saturday in Birnin Kebbi said the governor donated N5 million, a Coaster Bus and Hilux Van to the group.The governor, who also attended the foundation of the Tijjaniya Islamiyya Mosque and school in Jega Local Government Area of the state, reaffirmed his resolve to uplift religious education and pledged financial support to religious groups.The leader of the Tijjaniya movement, Khalifah Ahmadu Tijjani, performed the foundation laying for the Mosque and school. (NAN)
The Akwa Ibom State Police Command has confirmed the release of Dr. Idongesit Udom, the founder of Sure Polytechnic. It will be recalled th...

The Akwa Ibom State Police Command has confirmed the release of Dr. Idongesit Udom, the founder of Sure Polytechnic. It will be recalled that the former staff of Exxon Mobil was kidnapped by four masked men on his way to church in his hometown Ukanafun local government Area of the state, on Sunday, April 9th.

The Police Public Relations Officer, Chukwu Okechukwu, who confirmed the new development in Uyo, said that Udom was released on Wednesday night, May 10.

He said the kidnappers chopped-off one of the mans fingers while in their custody

"He was released on Wednesday night and receiving treatment at an undisclosed hospital. The Police command is working tirelessly to ensure that the hoodlums do not go unpunished."

Ndianabasi Udom, the victims son, who also confirmed the release, said his father is battling with severe health condition due to the trauma he experienced during over one month of incarceration.





According to Ndianabasi, the rest of the victims were killed, some were injected with acid and their bodies thrown into soakaway.

Below is his Facebook post:

"And to the glory of God, my father who was kipnapped exactly one month and 2 days ago has just been released by his abductors. Let me thank everyone who prayed for us, stood by us and understood our privacy during this trying times. Never in our lives have we received the kind of phone calls and messages like we did recently, we are indeed grateful.

Let me thank everyone who has always been envious and used the opportunity to wag their tongues, some said he was kidnapped because of Nana, some said because of Nana's promotion, some said it's because Nana helps everyone he sees so they feel he has too much money(Do u see people's problems?), some said because of the everyday socials that we use this platform to carry out just to get close, interact with people and inspire people which was suppose to be the main reason for this platform before some irresponsible and people with horrible backgrounds turned it to where they play their envy and jealous games just because they have refused to give their lives a meaning and have resolved to gossiping and backbiting.

It might interest you to know that the hoodlums don't even know i exist, they never called my name for one day and just acted on the information of kidnapping a polytechnic proprietor as they did to the owner of Heritage polytechnic, Eket some years ago.

His only problem was that he built a higher institution in his village, employed most of his people in the school, single handedly bought transformers and brought light to the village, build churches in the village, pays labourers to clear roads in the whole village and keeps his compound open for anybody who cares to come in with their problems( can u believe this?)

Dear people, did you people not want us to advertise our polytechnic after all the sweat? Is it your polytechnic? Should we have built the school and open it as people who are all deaf and dumbs and for the fear of people thinking we are proud?

Do u people know the luxury we have deprived ourselves of for the past years just for those structures you people are envying today? Do you people know the things we did not do while growing up? Do u people think the village donated the land for that school? So why the envy? Why not work for your own future and leave people who have worked for theirs alone?

One thing is certain, Even if they took his life which we knew God would not have allowed because they did not create him, he would have made heaven and will be resting because if there is a goal he wanted to achieve in his lifetime, it was that institution he just inaugurated, continue your envy, continue your gossips, continue investing all your energy(ies) in pulling people down, we pray for your safety in all u do.

Once again, we appreciate everyone who SINCERELY reposted on their facebook pages, newspapers and blogs.

My gratitude will be incomplete if i fail to mention and acknowledge the special prayer sessions held in the whole Qua Iboe churches in Nigeria, God bless the ministers and every other church which took this burden upon their shoulders for because of your prayers and that of all the christians out there, he was released, the rest of the victims were killed, some were injected with acid and their bodies thrown into soakaways. Our God remains a big God.

IN SUMMARY, HELPING PEOPLE IS NOW A PROBLEM IN AKWA IBOM STATE, HELPING MEANS SHOW OFF, THIS IS WHY AKWA IBOM PEOPLE DONT HELP THEMSELVES, THEY PREFER TO RELATE WITH OUTSIDERS, THIS IS WHY PEOPLE INVEST OUTSIDE THAN IN AKWA IBOM, THIS IS WHY WE HAVE AKWA IBOMITES WHO ARE BILLIONNIARES BUT LOOK OUT FOR JUST THEIR IMMEDIATE FAMILIES.

God bless you dear friends and enemies.
Yesterday, some Nigerians on social media were peddling rumors of President Buhari's death in the UK. Reacting to the rumors, Senior Special Assistant to President Buhari on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, in a statement released on social media, said nothing unpleasant has happened to President Buhari.

"Baseless rumors are trending again that an unpleasant thing has happened to our beloved President, Muhammadu Buhari. If you have received this information on WhatsApp or Facebook, disregard it because it is plain lies spread by vested interests to create panic. Nothing unpleasant has happened to the President. No cause for apprehension. Thanks for the many calls" he wrote on Facebook.
Zamfara state governor and Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum, Abdulaziz Abubakar Yari has denied reports that he was building a $3 mi...

Zamfara state governor and Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum, Abdulaziz Abubakar Yari has denied reports that he was building a $3 million dollars hotel in Abuja with money stolen from the state shares of the Paris Club refund.









In a statement signed by the Head of Media and Public Affairs of the Nigeria Governors Forum, Abulrazque B. Barkindo, the governor expressed concern the reports by an online media quoting an unnamed source from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).





The governor condemned the resort to media trial of people by the commission, stressing that such attitude has led to the commission losing many high profile cases of corruption.

He said while the media is entitled to perform its duties as watchdog of society, which is enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, it is not, however, entitled to make unfair attacks, based on unfounded, false and unsubstantiated allegations against responsible public office holders.

The statement reads: Reports on Governor Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar of Zamfara State, and Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum making the rounds in some online media which claimed that the governor is building a $3m hotel from monies stolen from the Paris-London Club refunds to states give cause for worry.

The reports contain harmful, damaging and libelous insinuations which remain largely unsubstantiated despite the fact that it attributes the leaks to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), officials in Lagos.

Governor Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar has said emphatically that he does not even own a plot of land in Lagos not to talk of a hotel. But the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission officials in Lagos claimed as follows: that they have found a hotel being constructed by Governor Yari of Zamfara state with $3m he stole from London-Paris Club loan refund to Nigerian states.

That apart from the $3million, Governor Yari also diverted N500 million from the Paris Club refund to pay off a loan, an Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) source revealed to an online medium.

The medium also added that EFCC officials in Lagos revealed that overall the governor embezzled the sum of N2.2 billion from the N19billion set aside illegally to pay consultants, all of which are wrong, harmful, libelous and misleading disclosures.

Governor Abdulaziz Yari is not building any hotel in Lagos nor were any monies stolen or embezzled from the Paris-London Club refunds to states or from any other source.

The online medium quoted the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) extensively as its source and the Nigeria Governors Forum is alarmed that the EFCC continues to feed the media fibs at the expense of its hard-earned reputation as the anti- graft agency that Nigerians used to respect.

This is perhaps why the EFCC has lost most of the high-profile corruption cases at the law courts after it had unfairly stage-managed media trials and caused their victims personal pain and public umbrage.

This report, typical of most of the exclusive leaks that are becoming characteristic of the sources that court some sections of the media, lacks detail and compelling evidence to be fit to print.

The sources were courageous enough to mention a hotel in Lekki area of Lagos but gave neither a street name nor any specific information on the property to give credibility to the allegations. This does no service to any investigation nor does it help the development of our country Nigeria.

The media, we all know, is entitled to perform its duties as watchdog of society, which is enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It is not, however, entitled to make unfair attacks, based on unfounded, false and unsubstantiated allegations against responsible public office holders.

The media should support the EFCC in ensuring that convicting people on the pages of newspapers shouldnt be the focus of the EFCC in its war against corruption. Instead, EFCC should channel its energies to comprehensive, thorough and credible investigation that can stand the scrutiny of legal examination in court.

There can be no claim to any semblance of due process when individuals are convicted on the pages of newspapers before they are arraigned only to be declared innocent at the end, all at the expense of their reputation and that of their immediate family, through such media hype.

The newspaper is not an alternative court, as far as our constitution is concerned, and all responsible journalists are obliged by the ethics of their profession to ensure that whatever goes into publication is verified and adjudged to be accurate.

I therefore urge, in the spirit of responsible journalism, balance and fairness that journalists desist from absorbing hook, line and sinker scoops from fifth columnists whose actions are tantamount to dragging the reputation of the EFCC in the mud.
The United States of America and the United Kingdom have expressed no doubt in the ability and commitment of Acting President Yemi Osinba...

The United States of America and the United Kingdom have expressed no doubt in the ability and commitment of Acting President Yemi Osinbajo to continue with the anti-corruption war and economic revival in Nigeria.The two countries told newsmen on Friday that they have confidence in Osinbajo to carry on with the quality leadership President Muhammadu Buhari has been providing the country.This is coming on the heels of public outrage and fears expressed by Nigerians over Buharis deteriorating health and continued absence from public.The President left for the UK last Sunday to receive medical attention and he is expected to be there for an indefinite time, according to his media aide, Femi Adesina.In his last medical trip to Britain, Buhari was away for 49 days.In the last few weeks, some prominent Nigerians had expressed angst over a cabal that has purpotedly hijacked power in the Presidency due to Buharis protracted illness, leaving Osinbajo in the cold.The US and the UK, however, revealed that they believe the VP would take off from where the President stopped when he jetted out of the country to the UK for further medical attention.When asked by our correspondent if the US Government was worried that Buharis poor health could slow down ongoing anti-corruption war in Nigeria, the spokesman for the US Embassy in Nigeria, Russell Brooks, said President Donald Trumps administration believed in Buhari and Osinbajo.Brooks said, We are very much in favour of President (Muhammadu) Buharis campaign against corruption. We also believe that Acting President (Yemi) Osinbajo is strongly committed to this agenda and will continue to pursue it while President Buhari is out of the country.Speaking in a similar vein, the spokesman for the UK High Commission in Nigeria, Joseph Abuku, stated that while the British Government could not comment on whether any crisis resulting from Buharis protracted ill-health would lead Nigeria into political instability, he said the UK had confidence in the President and his deputy.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, has said that unless and until strong institutions are built and strengthened, Nigeria may end up punishing corruption but not fighting corruption.He spoke on Monday at the launch of a book Antidotes for Corruption  written by Senator Dino Melaye  in Abuja, where he opined that only strong institutions can fight corruption in the country.He said for the war against corruption to succeed, there must be institutional reforms that will help put in place measures which will make it near impossible for people to engage in corrupt acts.To him, corruption as a disease must be treated from its roots and not just the symptoms, and he argued that it is the moral responsibility of all men and women of good will to fight corruption because every individual pays the price of corruption in the society.As a country, we ran into a situation where corruption was becoming the norm, there was this moral cult that we had created that celebrated corruption, the speaker stated.According to him, the motivation was always there for corruption, but now what is important is not just fighting the old corrupt system. Really, if we must make progress, our focus should be to replace the old order that was corrupt with a new order that makes corruption near impossible to take place.Talking about Senator Melaye, Dogara said he wont be surprised by the avalanche of criticism that may follow this because Dino himself is a combination of so many things. He is highly opinionated, often pugnacious, and sometimes traudulent. So, obviously, he will be a magnet for opinionated and traudulent criticism as well, he will not escape that.To drive home his point, the Speaker said: Corruption, for those who are farmers, is like a tree that grows vigorously. If you end up pruning the trees and not attacking the roots, there is no way you will deal with that thing.So, when those who celebrate the successes of the fight against corruption in terms of the high-profile investigation, high-profile prosecution and even detention, they are missing the point because that is dealing with the symptoms of corruption. That is punishing corruption. But how are we developing remedies that we can apply to ensure that the tree dies?Recently, in the labour community, we went for May Day and some of us were nearly held hostage. You cant blame the workers. While they were agitating for their rights, agitating for minimum wage, some of us are talking about living wage. You see, the workers control, perhaps, about 96 percent of the budget. In the National Assembly, we have about 92 percent, judiciary and the rest. So, if you dont make the environment conducive for those who administer this money not to want to be corrupt, you will end up jailing people.
Denise Bruce in her home. Her bank accounts were frozen and she lost protections for her federal benefits because of a money transfer.

(Keith Muccilli/For NJ Advance Media)

If you owe a debt, there are certain steps a creditor can take to get paid.

The creditor can take you to court and win a judgment against you. To collect, the creditor can put liens on properties, garnish wages or put a freeze on your bank account, also called a bank account levy.

But if you have a government benefit like Social Security direct deposited into your account, the account is protected against non-government debtors. The IRS could get at those funds, but collection agencies, by law, can't take your federal benefits.

Those protections failed Denise Bruce of Andover because of a series of mishaps and misunderstandings.

Bruce has two checking accounts and two savings accounts with Wells Fargo.

One of the checking accounts -- the one that receives her direct deposits from Social Security Disability (SSDI) -- was compromised in December, and Bruce said she planned to close the account.

She'd first need to redirect her SSDI to a new checking account.

She opened the new account, also at Wells, and she asked Social Security to make the switch.

But her February deposit still went into the old account.

"I had to manually reroute my Social Security monies into the new account because I didn't want it to stay in the hacked account," Bruce said.

But those transfers, she'd learn, would become the root of her problems.

On Feb. 15, Bruce's debit card was declined at a supermarket.

She called Wells and learned there was a "legal debt order" on her four bank accounts so the accounts were frozen. The bank charged her $125 for the freeze.

A screen shot of the judgment against Denise Bruce found on a Virginia court website.

The bank's legal department said she should call the creditor and if it was a mistake, the creditor could send the bank a letter releasing the accounts, Bruce said.

Bruce called the Virginia law firm whose number was attached to the freeze, and was told it was a debt of $793.38 from an unpaid doctor's bill. Interest since 2012 brought the balance to $1,315.19.

Bruce said she saw the doctor for two appointments in 2011, but said the visits should have been covered because she had Medicare and a supplemental insurance plan.

She said she never received any overdue bills for the appointments.

She explained this to the collections attorney, who wasn't interested in reasons, Bruce said. The debt would stand.

Then Bruce did some research and learned her SSDI funds are exempt from non-federal debt collectors, so she went back to the attorney.

"I told him that my funds are exempt from non-federal debts and asked him to please lift the hold on my accounts," Bruce said. "He then stated that it was not his or his client's problem and that it was a fundamental mistake on the part of my bank, and that I will have to deal with Wells Fargo."

She contacted Wells several times, and on Feb. 22, a rep offered to help her file a complaint so the bank could investigate.

"I explained that this was a potential crisis situation because I had not been able to purchase my medications since Feb. 15," Bruce said.

Concerned, she asked Bamboozled for help.

THE LAW

We found the judgments against Bruce in Virginia's court records, and suggested she contact Medicare and her supplemental insurance to see if there was a history of payments to the doctor.

There were no records of claims by the doctor, Bruce learned.

That means there's a good chance the doctor made an error and never billed her insurance for service, so Bruce had no way to know there was an unpaid bill.

She was certainly never notified about any legal action against her, she said.

We asked Wells to review the case to explain why Bruce's federal benefits were not protected.

The envelopes from the Wells Fargo notifications. They were postmarked March 2 but the letters were dated more than two weeks earlier.

While the bank looked, on March 9, Bruce received several letters from Wells Fargo explaining her accounts were frozen. They were all dated Feb. 15, but postmarked more than two weeks later on March 2.

That was a very, very slow notification.

By this time, Wells had put a hold on $287.37 of Bruce's money for the creditor, and it took the remaining $15.50 in the account to go towards the $125 fee -- all the money Bruce had in the bank.

We looked at the law.

It's very clear what creditors can and can't do when it comes to seizing certain benefits.

"A judgment creditor cannot levy on certain monies including Social Security benefits, Workers' Compensation payments, child support and unemployment/state disability benefits," said Robert Snellings, a Parsippany-based attorney.

Certain debts to the federal government, such as IRS debt, are not subject to the same rule.

In New Jersey, Snellings said, banks are required to undertake a review of subject accounts to identify whether the funds on deposit are exempt.

And once an account is frozen, you have two weeks before the money is taken out to satisfy the judgment.

Getting the account unfrozen isn't easy.

In Bruce's case, she'd probably have to get the judgment vacated "due to non-service of summons and complaint, along with cause," said Paul Oster, CEO of Better Qualified, an Eatontown credit repair company.

That could work because Bruce said she was never notified of any court actions. But she'd have to go to Virginia to get it cleared up.

A redacted copy of one of the letters mailed from Wells Fargo to Denise Bruce about her frozen bank accounts.

Next, Bruce had additional conversations with Wells Fargo, bringing some new clarity.

A rep explained the account that received her federal benefits was in fact protected from bank levies. Her other accounts were not.

So when Bruce transferred the money from the protected account to the other accounts, the funds were no longer protected.

During the discussion, the rep agreed to a refund of the $125 in bank fees, Bruce said. She said the rep told her not to worry -- the $125 would be protected from the creditor.

That was a start, but Bruce told Social Security to mail her paper checks instead so she wouldn't risk those funds.

"But I have nowhere to cash it because no bank will cash it without having an account with them," she said. "I have been penniless since February. My bills are accumulating. And I still cannot buy my meds."

Bruce eventually cashed her check at a check-cashing joint.

Her instinct was right. After Wells refunded the $125 in fees, the creditor seized the money.

THE EXPLANATION

Several weeks passed, as did many more conversations with the bank.

We finally got a solution, sort of.

Wells Fargo agreed to assign a point person to Bruce's case -- one contact who could help Bruce collect all the evidence she'd need to fight the creditor.

Then Wells said it was refunding the money previously garnished from her accounts, including the money for the $125 fee, and it would work with Bruce to make sure that money isn't garnished again.

Since then, Bruce said, Wells twice more returned money to her, but into an unprotected account, and the creditor seized the funds both times.

Another time, Wells put $412 into the protected account to return the garnished amount and the fees. Bruce said she quickly took out $400, and the creditor took the remaining $12.

How? The account lost its protections because Bruce hadn't had an SSDI direct deposit in more than 60 days.

The bank is crediting the account with the $12 so Bruce can try to get it before the creditor does.

The bank said it will help if she chooses to close the account, or she can re-start her direct deposits again.

Bruce is weighing her options, and she plans to try to get the Virginia judgment vacated.

"I just don't know if ill be able to fix it because I really can't afford to go there," Bruce said. "A mistake like this can destroy any person living paycheck to paycheck."

Email your questions to Ask@NJMoneyHelp.com.

Karin Price Mueller writes the Bamboozled column for NJ Advance Media and is the founder of NJMoneyHelp.com. Follow NJMoneyHelp on Twitter @NJMoneyHelp. Find NJMoneyHelp on Facebook. Sign up for NJMoneyHelp.com's weekly e-newsletter.
The Taco Truck, one of the state's best-known and loved taquerias, has closed its operations.

"It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that The Taco Truck will be closing its doors," read a message on its Facebook page last week.

"For the last decade, it has been our pleasure to serve you and to be an integral part of your community ... for that we will always be grateful."

Founder and CEO Jason Scott, reached by phone, said the move was "very bittersweet for us. It's been fantastic to see how much people loved The Taco Truck. I'd love to find a way for someone to carry on the name.''

Fans of Taco Truck storefronts in Princeton, Hoboken and Morristown reacted with surprise and shock to the news.

"So sad to hear this; we are going to miss you,'' said one loyal customer. "OH NO, even Hoboken!'' added another.

Several food truck owners also weighed in. Here was one:

@TheTacoTruck thank for being an inspiration to us, and for setting a high standard in this business. Good luck in your future endeavors.  El Lechon de Negron (@LechondeNegron) May 2, 2017

The business started as a taco truck on the streets of Jersey City in 2009, eventually alternating between there and Hoboken. Scott was founder/CEO; Chris Viola was chief operating officer. Scott enlisted Roberto Santibanez, a Mexico City native and restaurateur/author, as the truck's "culinary partner.''

In 2010, Scott and Viola told me they would take turns getting up at 6 a.m. to claim a parking spot in Hoboken -- and having a ton of coins for the meter. Their first truck was a former cookie delivery truck.

The truck's tacos, tortas and such dishes as Oaxaca frijoles negros (black beans cooked with avocado leaves and chiles) soon attracted a fanatical following; the business grew to include trucks in New Jersey and Boston, plus storefronts in Princeton, Morristown, Hoboken and King of Prussia, Pa.

The Taco Truck placed #4 in my ranking of the state's best taco shops/restaurants.

"When we launched The Taco Truck our mission was to provide our guests with an American street food experience and we've been lucky enough to do so,'' continued the Facebook page post. "You all have made this chapter unforgettable.''

Peter Genovese may be reached at pgenovese@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PeteGenovese or via The Munchmobile @NJ_Munchmobile. Find the Munchmobile on Facebook and Instagram.
NEWARK -- A Newark man was convicted Monday of attempting to rob a Newark bank and returning to rob the same bank four months later, Acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey William Fitzpatrick said in a statement.

Gregory A. Jones, 60, was found guilty of bank robbery, armed bank robbery and using a firearm in a crime of violence. He faces anywhere from 20 years to life in prison at his sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled.

Jones entered a Capital One bank May 6, 2014, and handed the teller a note demanding cash. Jones left with the money but discarded it when a hidden dye pack burst, also leaving behind glasses, a scarf and a hat he had been wearing. Jones's DNA was found on the glasses and clothing.

Jones returned to the bank Sept. 19, this time demanding cash from a teller at gunpoint. He fired into the ceiling before leaving with several thousand dollars, authorities said.

He was later identified by witnesses and from surveillance video.

Paul Milo may be reached at pmilo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@PaulMilo2. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEWARK -- A jury Monday found a 41-year-old Jersey City man guilty of child pornography charges authorities say stem from his sexual abuse of a child, a crime which has exposed him to a minimum of 25 years in federal prison.

Following a two-week trial before U.S. District Judge William H. Walls in Newark and less than three hours of deliberation, the jury found Felix Restitullo guilty of production and possession of child pornography, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Prosecutors say Restitullo, who was first arrested by the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office in March 2014, made video recordings of his abuse of a child while his mother was babysitting the girl.

The Prosecutor's Office has said Restitullo previously was charged with possessing child pornography in 2009, but pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child, a fourth-degree charge that allowed him to stay off New Jersey's sex offender registry.

A search of computer storage devices found in Restitullo's home in the March 2014 case turned up more than 350 videos and over 3,000 still images of child abuse, according to prosecutors.

Initially charged by the Prosecutor's Office with aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a minor, Restitullo was charged federally by Homeland Security Investigations in July 2015 and was indicted by a grand jury the next month, according to court records.

Walls in October barred any of Restitullo's statements to investigators from being used as evidence in the case, ruling they had implored him to give testimony immediately after he asked for a lawyer. Under questioning by Prosecutor's Office detectives, Restitullo made "admissions" regarding the possession of child pornography but denied taking part in the sexual assault, according to filings by federal prosecutors.

Federal authorities say that although Restitullo would normally face a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison on the production charge, his prior conviction exposes him to a mandatory minimum of 25 and a maximum of 50.

Prosecutors say he similarly faces a minimum of 10 years on the possession charge, which now carries a maximum of 20 years.

Restitullo's sentencing has been scheduled for June 20.

Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
JERSEY CITY - A Pennsylvania man convicted of executing a 16-year-old girl inside her bedroom will die behind bars after losing his two-pronged appeal that a life sentence was excessive and a juror was coerced by the judge.

Cruz Martinez Jr., 46, was convicted of the gunning down Alishia Colon while she watched television and waiting for food to be delivered to her Belgrove Drive house with her then 7-year-old brother. Authorities said the shooting was gang related and Martinez wanted to "send a message" to Colon's family.

In an appeal decided Monday morning, the public defender's office additionally argued the court "coerced a juror into reaching a verdict."

On the second day of deliberations of the 2015 trial, a note was sent to Judge Martha Royster that read: "We have a juror who refuses to deliberate. What should we do?"

The court questioned Juror 2 about why he wasn't participating in deliberations and he said he needed more time to process the evidence presented during trial. Royster said he didn't have to give a verdict immediately, but he was required to participate in the discussions.

At about 5 p.m. all the jurors agreed to deliberate for another hour and a guilty verdict was reached. When asked, Juror 2 assured the judge that he reached his decision on his own, and not because he felt pressure to move quicker.

The appeals court ruled Royster did not "abuse her discretion by the manner in which she questioned Juror No. 2" and Martinez was not "denied a fair trial."

Martinez argued his criminal history was not lengthy enough to be sentenced to life in prison. The appeals court disagreed, saying the 46-year-old had a juvenile record, adult conviction that included aggravated assault and aggravated arson, was twice sentenced to time in state prison, and had been arrested at least six times for "violent and assaultive crimes."

During his sentencing, Assistant Prosecutor Sal Rozzi said Martinez should be sentenced to more than just life and should "never see the light of day."

His life sentence was upheld. The court did order the wording on the judgment of conviction needed to be updated to reflect a life sentence rather than 75 years, which is what a life sentence is equal to.

Authorities said one of Alishia's family members was involved in a street fight earlier in the day, which had nothing to do with the 16-year-old victim.

Martinez and his co-defendants - Lamar D. Farrar, of East Orange, Eric L. Shelton, of Orange and Kyeeth L. Smith, of Willingboro - went to the retaliate for the fight. The other three men pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

Alishia was heard pleading for her life before she was shot and family said she saved her brother's life before she was killed.

Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
gerard Grossi and jessica skinner.jpg

Gerard Grossi and Jessica Skinner, both of Secaucus, were arrested May 12 in Secaucus and charged with various gun and drug counts.

(Courtesy of Secaucus police)

Police recovered three loaded weapons and arrested a Secaucus couple Friday after an officer spotted one of the guns inside an unoccupied vehicle, authorities said.

Just after 2:50 p.m., Secaucus Police Officer Joseph Fuardo was investigating a "suspicious vehicle" on Third Street. The car was parked unoccupied, but all of its doors were left ajar, Secaucus Police Capt. Dennis Miller said.

The officer noticed a loaded semi-automatic handgun was in plain view from outside the vehicle. When the gun was recovered, police determined it had been reported stolen in North Carolina, Miller said.

A loaded shotgun and numerous rounds of ammunition were later found during a search of the vehicle. Police also found suspected methamphetamine, alprazolam, -- an anxiety medication -- and endocet, a pain killer composed of acetaminophen and oxycodone, authorities said.

The owner of the vehicle, Gerard Grossi, 43, was in the process of loading items into the car at time police came upon the vehicle, Miller said.

He was arrested and charged with various drug and weapons offenses, including unlawful possession of a handgun and unlawful possession of a shotgun. Grossi was also charged with receiving stolen property.

Grossi's girlfriend, Jessica Skinner, 27, who was also present at the time, had a loaded semi-automatic handgun with a defaced serial number in her waistband, Miller added.

She was also found to be in possession of methamphetamine, alprazolam, suboxone, a medication used to treat opiate addiction, police said.

Skinner was arrested and charged with weapon and drug counts, in addition to tampering with physical evidence.

In a statement, Secaucus Police Chief Kevin Flaherty commended Fuardo's handling of the investigation, saying: "There is no doubt in my mind that Officer Fuardo's diligence made Secaucus a little safer by getting these guns off the street."
THE "MONKEY TRIAL"

Clarence Darrow, left, and William Jennings Bryan speak with each other at the courthouse in Dayton, Tenn. in 1925 during the so-called "Scopes monkey trial." On July 21, 1925, the trial ended Scopes found guilty of violating state law for teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality. A statue of Darrow will be erected at the Dayton courthouse, thanks to a former New Jersey City University professor. (AP photo)

A former New Jersey City University professor has successfully campaigned for a statue of a man who defended the right to teach evolution to be erected in Dayton, Tennessee, according to Tulsa World.

William Dusenberry, a former professor at NJCU who now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, successfully advocated for and helped work with a local sculptor to erect a statue of Clarence Darrow next to the statue of William Jennings Bryan at the Rhea County courthouse lawn in Dayton, Tennessee.

Over 90 years ago, Bryan and Darrow battled over the right to teach Darwinian evolution in public schools in an epic court case known as the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Dusenberry went to Dayton in 2009 to visit the courthouse of the historic court case. He was surprised, however, to find that a statue existed of Bryan -- the former U.S. Secretary of State and three-time presidential candidate who defended biblical teachings about the creation of the world -- but not of Darrow, who defended a young school teacher charged with teaching evolution.

In the 1925 case -- The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes -- Scopes, a substitute teacher, was charged with violating a state law that forbade the teaching of evolution.

Scopes lost the case and was fined $100, but the ruling was later overturned on a technicality.

"It was obvious to me, when I saw that he was not represented, that I needed to do my best to do something about it," Dusenberry told Tulsa World.

Zeno Frudakis, a well-known Philadelphia sculptor who has previously sculpted Charles Darwin, created a small clay model of a statue of Darrow and got it approved by the county executive.

The sculpture is in the final stages of completion, according to the Tulsa World report.

The statue will be unveiled on July 14 at the courthouse, just in time for the annual Scopes Trial Festival.

"This is something that will survive me," Dusenberry, who will be at the statue's unveiling, told Tulsa World. "I'll be able to say I accomplished something that will leave a message for those who get the world after we leave."
LAWRENCEVILLE - The night beloved middle school teacher Chris Henry was hit by an allegedly drunk driver and rushed to the hospital, his longtime girlfriend, Malikah Washington, knew something was wrong.

She called his family, her family and every hospital she could think of, her mother, Marvis Christie recalled.

But, despite their 10-year relationship - Washington and Henry had been college sweethearts - they weren't married and the doctors couldn't tell her Henry's status.

The 30-year-old Henry lay in the hospital that dreary night in March - alive but listed under the name "John Doe" - while Washington searched for the man she loved.

Two months later, Henry, a teacher at Foundation Academies Middle School is recovering well at the Lawrence Rehab Center after losing one leg in the March 5 crash. And for those months, Washington has been at his side.

But Henry says, the tragedy left him with one question.

"I thought, 'what are you waiting for?"

On Saturday, with the rain beating down on the roof of the rehab center and with his students, his and Washington's friends and their parents all around them, he pulled out a ring.

"There's no one that I would rather spend the rest of my life with but her," he told Washington, who stood shocked and beaming in the crowd.

"I've only got the one knee," he added, with a small chuckle.

Malika Washington smiles down at her new fiance, Chris Henry after accepting the beloved school teacher's proposal

Washington nodded and kissed him in response before a host of students swarmed Henry, hugging, high-fiving and cheering him on.

It was a monumental moment for the couple, whose relationship has strengthened after the crash, according to her family. Their families remember how Washington spent time helping Henry and even bought a journal in an effort to chronicle his achievements and visitors who came to see him.

"This tragedy brought them closer together," Christie said. "It was magnetic. It was an adhesive."

Washington agreed. She stood in the lobby of the rehab center after the proposal, grinning and showing off her new ring.

"This was supposed to be about him!" she said with a laugh, before adding that her relationship with her longtime boyfriend has become much stronger in the past two months.

As for Henry, the proposal was something he's been thinking about for a long time. It wasn't until after the crash that he knew he needed to act now.

He doesn't know when the wedding will be held - though he threw out the possibility of a date next year. He's focused now on getting better and moving forward. Luckily, he's got strong support in his future wife.

"She's got a heart of gold," he said finally, with a smile.

Anna Merriman may be reached at amerriman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @anna_merriman
NEPTUNE TOWNSHIP -- A 41-year-old Lakewood man died early Monday after he was shot at an apartment complex, authorities said.

Police found Mark Ruffin Sr. lying on the ground inside the Jumping Brook apartment complex off Route 33 west after officers arrived at 12:37 a.m., said Charles Webster, a spokesman for the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office.

Ruffin was taken to Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune where he was pronounced dead at 2:47 a.m., Webster said.

Police responded to the complex, near the border of Neptune Township and Tinton Falls, after receiving multiple 911 calls from people hearing gunshots fired.

No arrests have been made, Webster said.

Investigators were still at the apartment complex as of noon on Monday.

Residents in the complex described it as one where police rarely visit and everyone knows each other.

"This neighborhood is so quiet," Angelita Mass said, adding that most people work during the day.

Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
UPDATE: Liam McAtasney pleads guilty in connection with the death of his childhood friend, Sarah Stern.

FREEHOLD -- The Neptune City teenager and childhood friend accused of killing Sarah Stern with his bare hands is scheduled to be arraigned Monday morning.

Liam McAtasney, 19, is charged with murder, felony murder, robbery, conspiracy, disposal of human remains and hindering apprehension.

Authorities say McAtasney strangled Stern, 19, at her home, stole $10,000 from her and then dumped her body off the Route 35 bridge in Belmar early Dec. 3.

McAtasney's arraignment comes weeks after his roommate, Preston Taylor, 19, admitted to helping dispose of Stern's body. Taylor accepted a plea deal in exchange for his testimony against McAtasney.

McAtasney's attorney, Charles Moriarty, has maintained his client's innocence since the pair were arrested in February, months after Stern was first reported missing.

"My client still expresses that he had nothing to do whatsoever with this," Moriarty said after Taylor's guilty plea.

Prosecutors have used an account of a witness who said McAtasney described in detail how he strangled Stern and left her body in her Neptune City house while he went to work.

McAtasney recounted how he watched her die for 30 minutes before leaving, authorities have said.

In pleading guilty to robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, disturbing or desecrating human remains, tampering with physical evidence and two counts of hindering apprehension, Taylor said McAtasney hatched the plan.

Taylor said McAtasney wanted to kill Stern, Taylor's one-time prom date, to steal money he knew she had recently received from her grandmother.

McAtasney is scheduled to appear before Superior Court Judge Richard W. English in Monmouth County at 9 a.m.

Staff writer Alex Napoliello contributed to this report.

MaryAnn Spoto may be reached at mspoto@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaryAnnSpoto. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
BOONTON TOWNSHIP -- A Somerset County man is facing charges after leading officers in a 35-minute highway pursuit through several Morris County towns on Saturday evening, police said.

The pursuit began at Tourne County Park in Boonton Township when Sgt. Ed Koster with the Morris County Park Police approached a suspicious occupied vehicle parked in the lot at about 6:15 p.m., park police said in a news release.

Koster made contact with the sole occupant -- Orest Lopadchak, 37, of Somerset -- who then fled the scene in his vehicle.

The sergeant then pursued Lopadchak who tried to flee officers through neighboring towns, with his speed ranging from 40 miles per hour to 70 miles per hour, Morris County Park Police Detective Paul Williams said.

Lopadchak's front tires became damaged during the pursuit when he struck two Montville police vehicles -- one on the entrance ramp of Route 287 south and the second on Route 202 in Boonton, Montville Police Capt. Andrew Caggiano said.

Williams said one tire burst during the crashes and the other went flat a few minutes later.

The chase came to a close on Route 80 west in Parsippany when Lopadchak's vehicle became disabled and he tried to flee on foot, Williams said. About a minute later, officers apprehended him.

Lopadchak was initially taken to Morristown Medical Center for treatment, but he was later released and lodged in the Morris County Correctional Facility.

Two park police officers -- Casey Petrocy and Christian DiGiralomo -- sustained minor injuries during the pursuit, Williams said. Both were treated at the scene and released.

Lopadchak was charged by Morris County Park Police with possession of suspected crack cocaine, possession of drug paraphernalia, eluding, assault on law enforcement officers and resisting arrest.

In Montville, Lopadchak is facing charges of aggravated assault and eluding in Montville for striking two police vehicles. Neither Montville officer was injured, Caggiano said.

Morris County Park Police are handling the follow-up investigation, Williams said.

Justin Zaremba may be reached at jzaremba@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinZarembaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
The body of a New Jersey man was pulled from a waterway in Massachusetts on Sunday morning, authorities said.

Peter Benya, 59, of Little Egg Harbor was found floating in Saquatucket Harbor off Harwich around 11 a.m., the Cape & Islands District Attorneys Office said in a statement

His death is not considered suspicious, according to officials.

The Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner's Office is investigating Benya's death.

The prosecutor's office didn't disclose any other information.

In 2010, PressofAtlanticCity.com published a feature about Benya, a commercial scallop fisherman. Benya and and one crew member operated a 45-foot boat out of Lighthouse Marina in Barnegat Light.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A resourceful passenger and pizza deliveryman helped feed hungry passengers on a stranded Amtrak train Sunday evening.

Stuck on @amtrak 161 got hangry and problem solved pic.twitter.com/vIN42GPR5H  Mitch Katz (@MitchKatz) May 14, 2017

A video posted on Twitter shows a deliveryman walking along the side of the tracks to bring the unusual order to the waiting customer aboard Northeast Regional train 161.

Katz later thanked Dom's N.Y. Style Pizzeria for "feeding us because Amtrak won't."

Dom's Pizza owner Dominic Philingera told the Associated Press that his driver cut through a backyard, stepped down a steep embankment and over a water-filled ditch to bring the pie to the passengers. Philingera says the driver has delivered pizza in 18 states, but "this was a first for him."

Amtrak said the train was delayed by a mechanical issue shortly after departing Wilmington, Del. Passengers were eventually picked up by a rescue train.

The train from Boston arrived at Union Station in Washington D.C. at 8:40 p.m., more than three hours behind schedule.

When it passed through New Jersey, it made stops at Newark Penn Station, Newark Liberty International Airport, Metropark and Trenton.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
The head of Louisiana's largest and most influential anti-abortion group said Monday his organization intends to push the Legislature to not give up any ground from the state's strict ban on abortion and make the law even stricter by removing one 
OMAHA  Travelers at Eppley Airfield will have one extra stop before picking up a rental car for the next two years.

As part of the airports construction of a new parking garage, the rental car facilities and all rental cars moved to the canopy lot, which is south of the airport terminal, until the project is complete.

Construction of the new six-story garage, which will be located to the north of the existing garage, is expected to take about two years.

Also as part of the construction, the northbound lanes on Abbott Drive next to Eppley Airfield will be reduced to one lane for the duration of the project.

The canopy lot will be equipped with temporary facilities for rental car companies, and a complimentary shuttle service to and from the terminal will be provided.

The green-and-white shuttles will be designated for rental car customers only and will be labeled as such. Travelers can see exact locations of the shuttles and track them via the FlyOMA app.

In April, Eppley closed the surface lot north of the existing rental car garage to make way for the new garage.

When the project is complete, rental car booths will be housed in a new customer service center adjacent to the new garage, and rental cars will be housed on the first two levels of the 3,000-space garage. Public parking will be available on levels three through six.

The project is part of the airports 20-year master plan, approved in 2013. The plan dictates expansion and improvements at the airport as it sees more passengers.

Eppley had about 4.3 million passengers in 2016, up 4.3 percent from the previous year.

Hausmann Construction  a construction management, design, build and general contracting company headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska  is handling the $89 million project.

The project also includes a heated walkway that will connect the new garage to the terminal.

Eppley will fund the project with a combination of revenue bonds and cash reserves.

The work wont affect parking in the existing garage.

 Jay Withrow of the BH News Service contributed to this report.
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Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump's education secretary, built her political resume by raising and contributing millions of dollars to support the cause of giving parents choices on where their children go to school.

The daughter of one wealthy businessman and the wife of another, DeVos has headed a series of groups that help rich contributors spend large sums on elections, including one that was assessed the biggest fine ever by the Ohio Elections Commission.

Here is a look at her political activities.

Who is Betsy DeVos?

DeVos is the daughter of an auto parts manufacturer who married into another wealthy Michigan family, the one that runs Amway.

Her family is steeped in politics. Her father, Edgar Prince, was a major early donor to the Family Research Council. Her husband, Dick DeVos, lost a 2006 run for governor of Michigan, and DeVos herself served as the chairwoman of the state Republican Party. Her brother, Erik Prince, is the founder of the security company, Blackwater, which has had key government contracts.

Her education experience is mainly through advocating for school choice. She attended private Christian schools. Her children, now grown, were educated through a combination of private schools and homeschooling.

During a 2001 appearance at a retreat of Christian philanthropists, she said, "Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's kingdom."

Giving to politics

DeVos personally contributed at least $2.3 million to candidates and political action committees from 2007 through last year.

Her family, including husband and one-time Michigan gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos, mother Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, brother Erik Prince and father- and mother-in-law Richard and Helen DeVos contributed a combined $19 million in that same period.

Raising soft money

Twenty years ago, DeVos wrote an opinion piece for the Washington publication Roll Call in which she said her family was the leading contributor of "soft money" donations to political parties. Unlike money given directly to a candidate, money given to the political parties is largely unregulated, thus the term "soft money."

"We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues," she wrote. "We expect a return on our investment; we expect a good and honest government."

Promoting ballot measures

In 2000, DeVos was a key player in a ballot initiative fight in Michigan over whether the state would allow vouchers for private schools.

She and her husband contributed nearly $1.6 million to the losing effort. The couple and their relatives paid for more than one-third of the campaign overall.

Trouble in Ohio

In 2006, DeVos's school-choice group, All Children Matter, had a political action committee in Virginia, where contributions are unlimited. The group raised $17.8 million that year, and more than 40 percent of it was contributed to affiliated PACs in other states.

The group asked Ohio campaign finance regulators if it would be OK to shift money from Virginia to Ohio, a state with strict campaign contribution limits. The state said it would be illegal.

The committee made the shift, anyway. All $870,000 spent by the Ohio operation of All Children Matter that year was funneled through Virginia.

Ohio campaign finance regulators in 2008 ordered the group to pay $5.3 million in fines, an amount it still has not paid.

Independent expenditures

In recent years, DeVos's groups had significant independent spending on political races.

Generally, groups can spend without limits as long as they don't coordinate with campaign committees. In most places, they're not required to disclose the individuals who fund them, which is why some of this kind of expenditure is known as "dark money."

According to tax filings from 2011 through 2015, groups DeVos ran or that were subsidiaries of those she ran  American Federation for Children, American Federation for Children Action Fund, Great Lakes Education Project and Students First Pennsylvania  combined for nearly $20 million in political spending. Some of that money may have been double-counted after being passed from one of the organizations to another.

It's not clear how much of that money was from DeVos herself.

Benefitting from dark money

At least two groups that do not report their donors ran ad campaigns to support DeVos's confirmation.

Those groups are Club for Growth, a major supporter of conservative candidates across the country, and America Next, which was formed by then-Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in 2013.
WASHINGTON  As President Donald Trump considers a replacement for fired FBI Director James Comey, lawmakers are urging the president to steer clear of appointing any politicians.

The advice came Sunday amid more criticism over Trump's dismissal of Comey during an FBI probe of Russia's meddling with last year's election and any ties to the Trump campaign.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said the Founding Fathers created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding."

"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," Clapper said "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper responded, "Exactly."

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump.

"The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump for his actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because Trump may have "tapes" of their conversations.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset." He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration, ex-FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

"It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1," said Graham, R-S.C.

"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," Graham said, adding: "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all ... but we don't know all the evidence yet."

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland, the federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court last year by President Barack Obama but who was denied a hearing by Republicans. A former top aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, said that McConnell is interested in the suggestion.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone "not of partisan background" with "great experience" and "courage." Declining to comment on a Garland nomination, Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor for the Russia probe.

Under Senate rules, Republicans could confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats' 48.

Calling Trump's remarks about possible taped conversations "outrageous," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would "absolutely" subpoena such tapes.

"We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear," Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee.

The blowback against the firing of Comey angered the increasingly frustrated president, who made the decision after consulting only a small group of advisers, worried the news would leak out. Trump has openly vented his frustration with the media and Democrats on Twitter, musing about canceling press briefings and arguing that it's difficult for aides to know his thinking.

The administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to replace Comey, just over half of the 14 being considered. Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday for the Mideast and Europe, his first overseas trip as president. He was also set to welcome foreign leaders to the White House, with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday and President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia on Thursday. A leader of the United Arab Emirates was scheduled to visit Monday.

Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNN's "State of the Union"; Graham spoke on NBC's "Meet the Press"; Haley and Warner appeared on ABC's "This Week"; and Warner spoke on "Fox News Sunday" along with Lee and Holmes.

___

Associated Press writers Catherine Lucey, Sadie Gurman and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
Jewel-Osco says it will keep the 19 remaining Strack & Van Til and Town & Country stores open and retain most of the employees if its bid to buy the Highland-based supermarket chain out of bankruptcy court is successful.

We are excited to have the opportunity to grow the Jewel-Osco brand in the Midwest and welcome the Strack & Van Til team at those 19 stores to our Jewel-Osco family, said Doug Cygan, Jewel-Osco division president. Our two companies share a rich history of serving customers in the Midwest, as well as core beliefs in working hard to serve customers and deliver value every day on the finest quality fresh foods and local products.

Jewel announced Monday it planned to buy Strack & Van Til stores at 9632 Cline Ave. in Highland, 2800 Calumet Ave. in Valparaiso, 2168 W. U.S. 30 in Valparaiso, 12 Ridge Road in Munster, 200 W. Franciscan Drive in Crown Point, 10851 Broadway in Crown Point, 9825 Wicker Ave. in St. John, 2080 E. Commercial Ave. in Lowell, 1515 U.S. 41 in Schererville, 1600 Pioneer Trail in Chesterton, 9605 Lincoln Plaza in Cedar Lake, 861 S. College Ave. in Rensselaer, 7760 E. Ridge Road in Hobart, 999 W. Old Ridge Road in Hobart, 1836 Calumet Ave. in Whiting, 115 Sibley St. in Hammond, and 4725 Indianapolis Blvd. in East Chicago.

It's also acquiring Town & Country Markets at 1605 Calumet Ave. in Valparaiso and 6046 Central Ave. in Portage.

"The 19 stores will be sold as going concerns," Central Grocers said in a news release. "Jewel-Osco has agreed to interview and extend offers of employment to substantially all of the employees of the stores that are part of the transaction."

Jewel-Osco suggested in a news release it would rebrand the Strack & Van Til stores as Jewel-Osco, describing the acquisition as an "opportunity to grow the Jewel-Osco brand in the Midwest," but a company spokeswoman refused to answer any questions.

Central Grocers said in a news release it was still trying to find a buyer for Ultra Foods stores in Highland, Merrillville on Broadway and Kankakee, Illinois.

Jewel-Osco has entered into an agreement to buy 19 Strack & Van Til and Town & Country Markets from beleaguered Joliet-based Central Grocers, which filed for bankruptcy after prompted by creditors and which is going out of business. The century-old cooperative owned 80 percent of Strack & Van Til, which accounted for roughly half of its $2 billion-a-year business.

Central Grocers picked Jewel as a "stalking horse bidder" in a bankruptcy court-supervised sale, which is when the seller negotiates with a buyer before the auction to ensure a fair price. Another bidder could come in and offer more money by a June 21 deadline. If any other suitors come forward, Jewel could back offer or enter into a bidding war that would raise the price.

Jewel is looking at buying the Strack & Van Til stores for $100 million, or $70 million for the 19 stores and an estimated $30 million for the inventory, according to a filing in bankruptcy court. Central Grocers' attorneys told the judge it entertained six offers, including some that would have included its 930,000-square-feet warehouse in Joliet, and that Jewel had the best bid.

"Central Grocers is continuing to evaluate proposals to acquire its state-of-the-art, 1,000,000-square-foot distribution center in Joliet, Ill., and its six additional Raceway real estate assets as it winds down its wholesale distribution operations," Central Grocers said in a news release. The three Ultra stores not included in the transaction are currently open and operating. The Company is continuing to pursue a sale of those assets. Any such asset sales will be conducted through a process authorized by the Bankruptcy Court."

A public auction will start on June 2. A hearing to approve the sale will take place on June 23 if no other bids come through, or on July 10 if Central Grocers receives other qualified bids.

Jewel-Osco said it does not expect to close any store locations as a result of the transaction, but already operates stores close to some of the Strack & Van Til stores, including in Munster and Chesterton.
HOBART  Work begins today on the two-year, $4.3 million downtown Hobart streetscape project that will include a massive upgrade of all the utilities as well as the beautification of Center and Third streets.

The city held two public sessions recently to explain the project to residents and business and building owners. Mayor Brian Snedecor warned the full house of attendees at an evening session, "It will inconvenience you. There will be some growing pains, but, when you see the end result, people will be happy."

"This project is one of the most substantial we've done in the downtown in quite a while," Snedecor said. "We believe the downtown is a gem. Not many communities have a large lake downtown. With this project we are enhancing and making it a destination that will help grow the downtown. We will try to make it as painless as possible. I apologize for the inconvenience but not for the progress."

Project in the works since 2008

The city has been preparing for the project since 2008, Development Director Denarie Kane said. It's taken that long because the city had to make several requests to the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission for the federal funding help needed. The city's Redevelopment Commission is using a little more than $1 million in tax increment financing funds to cover the local share.

This year the work will be concentrated on Center Street starting with the block between Third and Second streets. That will be followed a couple months later by the intersection of Third and Center and then, a couple of months after that, the section from Third to Fourth streets. In 2018, the project will go block by block on Third from Duck Creek to the bridge over Lake George.

As each block is done, that section of the road will be closed to vehicle traffic, but pedestrian access to homes and businesses will be maintained. The project will include new storm and sanitary sewers, new water lines, new gas mains, decorative lighting and sidewalks, trees, grates, paving, curbs and gutters and wayfinding signs and the overhead utility lines will be placed underground.

Several parking lots will be improved and gateways monuments will be erected at Duck Creek and Lake George to match those installed on Old Ridge Road and Main Street, completing the gateways for each entrance, welcoming people to the downtown, Snedecor said. Improvements to the lakefront park also are planned for this year as part of a separate project.

Snedecor said the city will do its best to communicate with those affected by the project, warning them when work will be done in front of their buildings or homes. Kane said the city will have maps of the project available online on the city's website and on a separate project website. Copies of the map, which shows the timing of the various phases of the work, also will be available at several downtown locations.

"The infrastructure in the downtown is very old," Snedecor said. "We did a repair by the NAPA store a few years ago for a line break and, instead of being a simple repair costing less than $20,000, it ended up costing $100,000 because, as we tried to tie into the existing lines, they would crumble and have to be replaced."

Bob Fulton, Hobart Sanitary District president, said some of the sewer lines on Center might have been installed in the 1920s and some of the water lines might date back to the 1890s. Some were held together only by the clay surrounding them.

"All the bumps and dips you drive over in that area are a symptom of problems underground," Fulton said. "It's only going to get worse, and I can't guarantee that we will be able to keep the sewers working and the water pressure up."

Big concern is parking availability

Those attending the session seemed to favor the work and were most concerned about parking being available and sufficiently marked so people will be able to find it. Snedecor said he will talk to the police chief about relaxing the rules on the use of certain lots. Indiana American Water is taking care of the water line installation at no cost to the city. The operator of the Second Street Theater seemed to have the toughest problem.

The owner said the theater has three events a year for about two weeks each and the first is scheduled to start this week. The theater is located in the first block to be torn up and the operator said they get a lot of elderly people and children. Project supervisor Brandon Towle from Butler Fairman and Seufert, project engineers, said he would meet with the theater operator to see what could be worked out.

Snedecor said four new businesses are coming to the downtown and added, "I really think the downtown has turned the corner on business. A lot of younger people want to invest in the community. The downtown is the life link to the community and what makes it special. We can match our downtown with anybody."

The city is still working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make improvements to the Third Street bridge over Lake George with the goal of doing it next year when the other work on Third is being done. Also, Snedecor said the Indiana Department of Transportation plans to pave Ind. 51 all the way from U.S. 30 to the Miller area, skipping over the area being done as part of the city's project.
DYER  Resurfacing of Calumet Avenue from U.S. 30 to just north of the bridge at 213th Street should begin in several weeks, and will impact traffic.

"It will tie up one lane at a time," said Town Manager Tom DeGiulio.

The grinding and asphalt resurfacing project by crews from Walsh & Kelly will also include the stripping of lanes, DeGiulio said. The lack of lane stripping has been a major problem because motorists cant see what lane they are in, he said.

This project is being funded with money from the towns tax increment financing and a Community Crossing grant awarded last year by the Indiana Department of Transportation.

Phase I was completed in 2016 on Calumet Avenue south of U.S. 30 to the Hart Street bridge, DeGiulio said.

The next phase will go east on 213th to the entrance to Briar Ridge Country Club and west past the intersection of Madison Avenue.

"Walsh & Kelly has extended their 2016 unit contract price for this job. Based on the engineers estimated unit, the anticipated cost will be $429,253," DeGiulio said. "We had projected $650,000 in the grant application."

Phase III will begin at the north side of the bridge at 213th Street and continue to Main Street. However, that phase can only be accomplished after the installation of the fence project "is near completion or completed," the town manager said.

"We have $117,447 remaining in the CCMG (Community Crossing Matching Grant) balance," DeGiulio told the Dyer Redevelopment Commission recently.

"We will prepare additional unit estimates for Walsh & Kelly to give us a price for that phase. It may include some intersection modification and/or widening at 210th and north," he said. "This is under review by the Plan Commission."

DeGiulio said he and Neil Simstad of NIES Engineering will meet with INDOT officials on May 29 to discuss CCCMG application guidelines and will apply for the full amount of a new CCMG grant.

"We will be submitting new requests based on that criteria," DeGiulio said. "Our plan is to submit work between $1.5 and $2.0 million. This will include Sheffield Avenue, 213th Street and other main roads."
HOBART  Two firefighters were injured while battling an early morning blaze that displaced most residents of the Lake in the Woods apartment complex in the 300 block of Neringa Lane, according to a fire official.

"They were under the roof when it collapsed," Battalion Chief Fabian Martinez said of the injured firefighters.

The two firefighters were treated at the hospital and released, he said. They appear to be fine, he said, but await the potential of further care.

The blaze was called in at 3:13 a.m. Sunday, Martinez said. Its cause remains under investigation.

No residents of the apartment complex were injured in the fire, but two thirds of the units were left uninhabitable, he said.
HOBART  Donations are being collected for 80 people displaced after a fire early Sunday at the Lake in the Woods apartment complex, officials said.

The cause of the fire remains remains undetermined, but a preliminary investigation showed it may have been electrical, Fire Chief Brian Kerr said. Fire inspectors think the blaze may have started in an attic, he said.

The fire affected a total of 15 families and left 18 units at the complex uninhabitable, said Kerry Lopez, an account manager with the complex's property management company.

Management at the complex informed the Fire Department four of the displaced families didn't have renters' insurance and are in need of assistance, Kerr said. The American Red Cross has been assisting residents with $150 gift cards, he said.

Hobart officials plan to help spread the word about the donation drive on the city website and Facebook pages, Kerr said.

Donations being sought include food cards, gas cards, toiletries, diapers, wipes, bed frames, children's toys, clothes for men and teenage boys, and nonperishable food, Lopez said.

Donations can be dropped off at the complex in the 300 block of Neringa Lane. For more information, call Heather Crosser, property manager for Lake in the Woods, at 219-942-8711.

Firefighters recovering

Firefighters were called to the complex about 3:15 a.m. Sunday, officials said. All of the residents made it safely out.

Firefighters Lloyd Besaw and Isa Esquivel were injured when a roof collapsed, Kerr said.

Besaw could see reflective tape on Esquivel's gear and pulled Esquivel from underneath fallen materials, he said. Esquivel suffered a knee injury.

Besaw initially did not feel pain and continued fighting the fire for about 30 minutes, before realizing his back was injured, Kerr said.

A second section of roof collapsed, but not in the same area where Besaw was working, he said. Firefighters working in the area of the second collapse safety evacuated from the building.

Besaw and Esquivel were treated for their injuries Sunday morning and released from a local hospital, he said.

Units on the third floor sustained fire damage, and smoke and water damaged units on the lower floors.
MUNSTER  Major infrastructure projects, including the South Shore Rail expansion and Double Tracking, are the next great engine to drive Northwest Indianas economy, will stop the population exodus and provide employment and opportunities for generations to come, according to at least one Indiana representative.

Manufacturing, including the steel industry, also play an important role in the national economy because these jobs pay people living wages, he added.

U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Merrillville, drove home those points during his keynote address Monday at the Northwest Indiana Branch of the American Society of Civil Engineers luncheon meeting at Centennial Park Clubhouse. More than 50 civil engineers and students majoring in civil engineering at Purdue Northwest and Valparaiso University attended the meeting.

Without steel and manufacturing, we will be a very stupid country, he said.

Telling the tale of two counties, Visclosky outlined how mass transit has affected Lake County, Indiana, and Lake County, Illinois, since 1970. Both counties are contiguous to the city of Chicago and both are along Lake Michigans shores, he said.

Lake County, Indianas population has declined 10 percent every year of this decade while Lake County, Illinois population has risen 83.9 percent, the congressman said. The medium household income in Lake County, Indiana, has dropped 12.5 percent, even with two people in the family working three jobs. In Lake County, Illinois, the income has risen 17.7 percent.

The difference, Visclosky said, is the presence of 480 miles of mass transit west of the Illinois/Indiana state line while there are just 38 miles east of that line.

Its like somebody built a wall, Visclosky said. Weve been working on this issue (of mass transit) for 30 years.

He said the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District plans to submit the federal funding application on Aug. 12 for the approximately $615 million West Lake expansion of the South Shore Line between Hammond and Dyer, and the $300 million project to double-track the existing commuter rail line between Gary and Michigan City.

This request for money to cover half the cost of each project is slated to be reviewed by federal officials next February.

However, while Visclosky congratulated state and national bipartisan efforts to keep infrastructure projects such as mass transit at the forefront, he expressed concern about President Donald Trumps $3 trillion federal budget recently announced by Mick Mulvaney, current Office of Management and Budget director.

Mulvaney called it a skinny budget (and) sent out just 60 pages for a $3 trillion budget, Visclosky said.

Even more disturbing, Visclosky said, is the message issued with the budget that said the administration doesnt plan to fund any mass transit project in the U.S. and that a cut of $2.4 billion in Department of Transportation funding is proposed.

I will not support a transportation bill that we dont pay for, Visclosky said.
MICHIGAN CITY  There were six veterans of the Civil War present when a marker for those serving in the battle was first dedicated in Michigan City.

Nearly 80 years later, the anchor for the flagpole outside the courthouse will be rededicated May 20.

To a great extent, the marker dedicated in 1939 by the Daughters of Union Veterans was forgotten until work began recently on repairing the badly rusted pole.

After learning about the significance of the marker, LaPorte County Commission President Rich Mrozinski went to work on lining up a rededication on May 20, which is Armed Forces Day.

The 10 a.m. ceremony will feature Civil War re-enactors.

"As many times as I have walked past it, and probably everybody else, I never really looked at it or noticed it," Mrozinski said.

"And then when they found that plaque on there, I said, wow, that's pretty cool. That's real piece of Michigan City and LaPorte County history," said Mrozinski, a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Mrozinski said great care was taken not to crack the white painted stone molded out of concrete when the flag pole was removed. The flag pole was anchored with bolts into a slab 9 feet beneath the ground and was replaced.

He suspects the 25-foot pole was the original one, judging by the extent of the rust.

The bronze plaque on the stone is a bit faded but still legible.

"When we discovered what it really is, I think that's something that needs to be brought to the attention of people," Mrozinski said.

A newspaper article said six Civil War veterans, including one in his early 90s from downstate Crawsfordville, attended the dedication on June 12, 1939.

The dedication included a presentation on the meaning of the American flag, and a flag was presented to then Mayor Fred S. Parker before it was raised on the pole, according to the article.
VALPARAISO  Martin Binder Jeweler of Valparaiso announces the winners of their sixth annual Mothers Day letter writing contest within Valparaiso Community Schools. Participating fourth-graders wrote letters describing why their mother Shines like a Gem. Students with the winning letters will be awarded jewelry for their mother or the special lady in their life. The campaign encourages elementary students to practice their writing skills and creative thinking.

Local teachers worked with their fourth-grade students to submit hundreds of letters from Valparaiso area schools to Martin Binder Jeweler. Essays were evaluated on content and creativity.

Our staff had a wonderful time reading the letters from the kids, and a few of them even had tears in their eyes, said Robert J. Flude, third-generation owner of Martin Binder Jeweler. The letters were all so good, from the heart. It was hard to choose the winners.

This year's Why My Mom Shines like a Gem class winners are:

Central Elementary: Beatrice Douglas-Arnold and Caidyn Flowers

Memorial Elementary: Landon Holmes and Ryan Webb

Cooks Corners: Ian Dutz and Kate Norrod

Hayes Leonard: Chris Goreski and Macey Colby

Flint Lake: Ally Telesky, Griffin Dennis, Pedro Marto Orta and Ione Skafish

Overall winner was Harry McMurtrey from Flint Lake Elementary

McMurtrey wrote that his mother is like a prism. Taking light and bursting forth light so colorful that you must shield your eyes to protect your retinas. She shines like a gem on the sunniest of days. He describes how his mother gives the best three-minute hugs ever; ones that let you know you are loved and that she is the most patient person he knows. Most of all Harry knows his mom deserves the prize because, Mom is a great person and she shines better than a gem.

The class winners were awarded a mother-of-pearl necklace with sterling silver edging that says Love for their mothers, and Harry won a sterling silver and cubic zirconia pendant, earring and ring set for his mom. We congratulate our young winners and thank Valparaiso Schools and all the principals and teachers who participated, Flude said. We host this event once a year, but the teachers are the ones making a difference every day in the students' lives.
Calvin Bellamy hit the mark in his recent guest column, Honor Rail Commitments."

Property tax caps find many Indiana towns and cities struggling to budget operations. As a former elected official, I understand the propriety of supporting your own constituents. Beyond that, the hard part comes in supporting the common good.

Withstanding the test of time, expanding South Shore commuter service has merit. In 1984, Mayor Thomas McDermott Sr. formed the Hammond Interurban Railroad Study Commission, recognizing commuter rail brought economic development along with less traffic congestion and less pollution.

Thirty-two years ago, federal studies indicated strong population growth to meet demands of routing commuter rail to south Lake County and east to Valparaiso.

Lake County has codified CEDIT local income tax funds, providing the elusive local match for federal transportation grants. Congressman Pete Visclosky has long championed this project as federal transit dollars have been authorized in transportation appropriations.

If we dont use it, other transit projects will.

Janet Moran, Munster
The city's teachers union hosts its annual spring conference.

Mayor Bill de Blasio joined hundreds of members of the United Federation of Teachers at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Saturday.

De Blasio vowed to always support public schools, and warned of funding cuts from Washington.

The Mayor says teachers across the country are facing an uphill battle against Education Secretary Betsy deVos

"People like her are actually having the reverse impact they were intended to have," de Blasio said. "Public school parents all over the country are waking up saying 'wait a minute, I didn't vote for that.' Even the ones who voted differently than I believe are saying 'wait a minute, you didn't tell me you were going to take money away from public schools. You didn't tell me you were going to hurt my children's education."

DeVos supports school vouchers and charter schools.

She has said federal funding cannot help solve issues in public schools.
The city buildings department is investigating the site of a fire at a historic synagogue on the Lower East Side on Sunday night, according to an official.

The three-alarm fire at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol at 60 Norfolk St. was under control around 8:50 p.m., the city fire department said.

Witness photos and videos show that the blaze, which the FDNY first reported shortly after 7 p.m., caused heavy smoke to billow out in the area.

People in the area were advised around 8 p.m. by the city's office of emergency management to close their windows to avoid the smoke, and expect traffic delays near the blaze.

Authorities have not confirmed any fire or smoke-related injuries due to the blaze.



The building appears to have been vacant when the fire started.



Records show that the department of buildings has open complaints on the building.

The Gothic structure was originally built in 1850 as a Baptist church. It later served as synagogue for the Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Orthodox Jewish congregation for over 120 years ago. The synagogue was closed in 2007.

It is considered the oldest Eastern European Orthodox Jewish Congregation in the United States.

The synagogue was given landmark status in 1967.
Author and historian Wayne Flynts connection to southern novelist Harper Lee began decades before the two spoke, or wrote, a word to each other.

As a student of southern history, Auburn University professor emeritus Flynt saw no way to separate his interest from its literary traditions. He took a break from poring over history books before his dissertation at Florida State University in the early 60s and picked up a piece of fiction for the first time in three years.

Flynt chose To Kill a Mockingbird for his reprieve and, like any good piece of fiction, it illuminated something Flynt thought he knew so well.

I thought, Good Lord, if a woman like that from the black belt of Alabama could write a book like that, maybe theres something about Alabama I missed, said Flynt, who had vowed with his wife never to return to Alabama after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. Maybe its more complicated than just Klansman and bombsters and righteous Baptist people who just stay silent in the face of evil.

Flynt and his wife, Dartie, fell in love with Nelle (Harpers first name) Lee in absentia, returned to Alabama and never dreamed they would meet Harper Lee.

But a late-life friendship formed in the early 2000s first through a friendship with Lees sister, Louise Conner, and later through care for each other.

Flynts newest book, Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee was released on May 2. Through letters exchanged between Flynt and Lee, the book gives a glimpse into their relationship and the inner workings of Lees mind.

Chapter 1

Their first meeting was in 1983.

Flynt, professor emeritus in the history department at Auburn University and Auburn resident, helped start the Auburn Humanities Center, and through the centers first conference in Eufaula, Flynt connected with Auburn University alumna Conner, Lees sister.

The group planning the conference wanted to use Conners connections to invite Lee to speak, but they werent sure she would come. Lee eschewed speaking engagements and had not given an interview to a reporter since 1964.

Some suggested reaching out to Truman Capote - the novelist and screenwriter as well as Lees childhood friend - to speak. Flynt saw the horror overcome Conners face at the thought.

He learned years later of Capotes tradition of showing up drunk to speaking engagements and said Lees agreement to come was the ultimate gift of love to her sister so that her sister would not be humiliated by Truman Capote.

Lee signed scores of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird for children at the event, including Flynts 14-year-old son who would go on to name his daughterthe first female Flynt in three generationsHarper.

When Flynt held out his copy, Lee said, I only sign for children, then got up and left.

Thats the end of it, Flynt laughed. Thats my one and only meeting with Harper Leenot a very pleasant one. She didnt seem like somebody Id like to get to know well. But Louisewe fell in love with Louise.

The Flynts grew closer to Conner and Alice Lee, the eldest sister, over the next 10 years, despite not saying a word to Lee. They would drive to Eufaula once a quarter, taking Conner to get soul food and sit on the porch while talking everything Alabama.

The first letter from Harper came in 1992.

Flynt wrote an op-ed column about the three Lee sisters that was published across Alabama, and Lee wrote to thank him.

To learn that a man of your gifts, by faith in onenovel (To Kill a Mockingbird), chose to make his life in Alabama makes the author humble indeed. I can only say thank you for honoring the state with your presence, Lee said.

She continued, pointing out one small error Flynt had made. Lee jested that his mistake, writing that Harper was older than Conner (actually she was the youngest of the siblings) made Louise chortle with delight.

Another 10 years passed before the next letter came. Lee knew of Flynts relationship with her sister who was slipping into dementia and wrote, If she were responsive to anybody, she would be responsive to you.

Flynt wrote and called Conner, but her memory of their relationship was gone.

Then we began to write, Flynt said.

Evolving letters

The letters were first between distant friends. They would write about 12 to 15 pages of handwritten notes about every six months.

Lee would sometimes send stationery or greeting cards simply because she thought it was beautiful and wanted the Flynts to have it. Flynts daughter-in-law would send Lee stationery from Italy. Lee told Flynt, Tell the children I love the stationery. Im just like baby bear; its just right.

But after Lees stroke in 2007, the Flynts developed a more intimate relationship with Harper. She was in Birmingham for six months, then moved to the Meadows, an assisted-living home in her hometown Monroeville. The Flynts came for a visit at least once a month

The letters took a darker turn. They focused on health and death, and most of all, shes worried about having to go back to Monroeville.

All the wads of biographers and people who write about her say she split her time living in New York and Monroevilleshe never lived in Monroeville again, Flynt said. She never owned a house, which is what living someplace means.

She would visit Alice during the holidays, before moving back following her stroke, but she could never wait to get on the train (to return to Manhattan), Flynt said.

The letters morphed into more and more visits, which Flynt documented in more than 300 pages that he hopes to turn into a book called Afternoons with Nelle. During the last years, Flynt saw himself as a counselor for Lee.

She was frightened, Flynt said. To me, this is just part of what I had done as a minister. I felt very comfortable about the relationship, but I certainly didnt feel like I could reveal anything about her.

Beginnings of the book

Flynt said he promised Lee not to write anything about her during her lifetime, adding that she was furious with the biographies written about her.

There are words like reclusive or introvert or shy, all of which are gradations of the same understanding of a persons personality. All are totally wrong as applied to Harper Lee; she is intensely private, Flynt said. Her view was that if people loved her work, thats fine, but she owed them nothing as a result of that.

And since Flynt didnt pry into her personal life, and never asked things such as whether she was a lesbian, she opened up to Flynt.

She shared a lot of things with me that were very personal, but she shared them in her way on her time and, like I say, in terms of her sexual identity - I never asked, and she never said. I dont care, Flynt said.

The thought never crossed his mind to do something with the letters until rumors began to shroud the publication of Lees Go Set a Watchman in July 2015.

Flynt was furious about suspicions that accused Lees lawyer Tonya Carter of pushing Lee to publish the novel. While some have questioned his intent with publishing the letters as well, Flynt said he had one motivation.

I decide, if only these people could read her letters, they would know that what theyre saying is just bunk, Flynt said. I know she wont defend herself. She wont try to explain. She never tried to explain anything. But I can explain this in her own words.  Theres no one thats going to think Tonya Carter or anybody else manipulates Harper Lee because theres nobody who manipulated Harper Lee ever in her entire life, and all I have to do is publish these letters.

Flynt brought the letters to Lees agent Andrew Nurnberg and asked if he would be interested. He returned with a first draft, and Nurnberg told Flynt the interest in Go Set a Watchman would make it a perfect time to publish the letters.

No, that will not do, Flynt told Nurnberg. Were not going to publish this until Nelle dies.

Nurnberg asked Flynt what would happen if Lee were to live another 10 years, and Flynt defended his stance.

She was betrayed enough in her lifetime, Flynt said.

Why the letters?

The manuscript was nearly finished when Lee passed in February 2016. Flynt, inspired by Sally Fitzgeralds edited letters of Flannery OConnor and a collection of Jane Austens, selected and compiled the letters interwoven with commentary and finishing with the eulogy and tribute Flynt gave at her funeral.

Flynt said he hoped Lee would be glad to finally have her say.

I think in some ways she would chortle and grin and laugh and shed say, Right on, brother. You gave it to em, Flynt said.

He had hoped to give readers insight by sharing their written discussions and dispel rumors that Lee had lost her mind by including discussions about C.S. Lewiss works or her memory of what her grandfather said about his role on the second day of Gettysburg.

I hope people will go around and say, At last, I understand Harper Lee, Flynt said.
Bari, Italy, 12-13 May 2017 - G7 Finance Ministers and Central Banks Governors welcomed the ongoing work by OECD on the development of a cyber insurance market with inputs from its members and the OECD report on Supporting an Effective Cyber Insurance Market. Read the G7 communique Download the OECD report Remarks by Angel Gurria, OECD Secretary-General About the report 13/05/2017 - The increasing use of and dependence on information technology in economic activities - while creating significant benefits in terms of productivity and efficiency - is also leading to significant risks. Among them are "digital security risks" which, when they materialise, can disrupt the achievement of economic and social objectives by compromising the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information and information systems. It is widely assumed that most companies have been, will be, or don't know they have been, affected by such "cyber" incidents. Although quantitative measurement is still emerging and raises significant challenges, the frequency and scope of cyber incidents is growing significantly and cyber risk is viewed as one of the main concerns to doing business.



Insurance coverage for cyber risk provides a means for companies and individuals to transfer a portion of their financial exposure to insurance markets. Insurance markets and companies can potentially contribute to the management of cyber risk by promoting awareness, encouraging measurement, and by providing incentives for risk reduction. However, for insurance to have a significant impact on risk reduction, the market must be

offering a material level of coverage to a large share of companies and individuals at risk. This is not currently the case.



Prepared at the request of the G7 Presidency, this report provides an overview of the market for cyber insurance, including the available coverage and potential gaps as well as the current challenges in terms of data availability, quantification of cyber risks, awareness and misunderstanding about coverage. It identifies potential policy measures to address some of the main challenges to the development of an effective cyber insurance market.
The first ever beatification in Ireland, that of Father John Sullivan SJ (1861  1933), took place at 11am today during the celebration of Mass in Saint Francis Xavier Church on Gardiner Street in Dublin.

Beatification, which confers the title Blessed, means that a man or woman is considered to be truly holy and worthy of veneration by the faithful. The next stage after beatification is canonisation to sainthood and this takes place in recognition of this holiness by the universal Church.

The principal celebrant and homilist at todays Mass was Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and he was assisted by the Primate of Ireland Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin. Concelebrants included the Primate of All Ireland Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh; Archbishop Kieran OReilly of Cashel & Emly; Bishop James Moriarty, Bishop Emeritus of Kildare & Leighlin; Father Leonard Moloney SJ, Provincial of the Jesuits in Ireland; and, Father John Dardis SJ, General Counsellor for Discernment and Apostolic Planning and many Jesuit priests. The Church of Irelands Archbishop Michael Jackson of Dublin, and Bishop John McDowell of Clogher, were present on the sanctuary.

Music during the liturgy was provided by students from Clongowes Wood College SJ. Soprano Rachael Croash sang Ave Maria and Panis Angelicus. At the beginning of Mass, Cardinal Amato read the following Apostolic Letter from Pope Francis in Latin, and this was followed by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin who read the text in English:

Apostolic Letter

We, welcoming the desire of Our Brother Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, of many other Brothers in the Episcopate and of many of the Faithful, after having received the opinion of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, by Our Apostolic Authority, permit that the Venerable Servant of God John Sullivan, professed priest of the Society of Jesus, educator of youth and herald of the Gospel, witness of the love of Christ towards the poor and the distressed, from now on be called Blessed and whose feast may be celebrated, in places and according to regulations established by law, every year on the 8th of May. In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Saint. Amen.

Given at Rome, at the See of Saint Peter on the third day of the month of May, on the feast of the Apostles Saints Philip and James, in the year of the Our Lord 2017 and the fifth of Out Pontificate.- Francis

In his homily Cardinal Amato quoted from the submissions of ordinary people to the cause of Blessed John Sullivan. He said, Witnesses in the diocesan processes often repeated that Father Sullivan was a poor man among the poor, the personification of the spirit of poverty. Even though he came from a rich family, once he became a religious he was oblivious to comforts and contented himself with that which was purely necessary. Faithful to the vow of poverty, he gave immediately to others every gift he received.

Cardinal Amato also referred to an incident when Father John, on one of his customary visits to the sick, encountered a priest already in the cottage visiting. The pastor asked him to leave, fearing a dangerous opponent in the ministry. Upon his brusque command, Father Sullivan knelt down and asked forgiveness. The pastor was profoundly moved.

Archbishop Jackson said of Blessed John Sullivan, that he had a special place in the hearts of all of us who are members of the Church of Ireland and of all of us who have an association with Portora Royal School and Clongowes Wood College. He said the day was one of celebration and joy. We mark with the Jesuit Order in Ireland and worldwide, along with the Christian Church everywhere, the beatification in the Roman Catholic tradition of John Sullivan SJ. We do so mindful of the unending need for reconciliation in Ireland and expectant of the abundant grace of God.

Father Dardis SJ, who is a former Provincial of the Jesuits in Ireland, spoke on behalf of Father Arturo Sosa SJ, leader of the Jesuits worldwide. Father Dardis referenced Father Johns Anglican background and paid tribute to the Church of Ireland today.

A large portrait of Blessed John Sullivan was unveiled during the Mass and a relic of his hair was brought to the altar. After the ceremony there was time for prayer and reflection, during which the hundreds of people queued to receive a blessing from the Father John Sullivan cross. A Mass of Thanksgiving for the beatification of Blessed John Sullivan SJ will be celebrated in Clongowes Wood College SJ in Clane, Co Kildare, on Saturday 20 May next at 7.00pm.
North Carolina Teacher Suspended For Comparing Seventh Grader To A Slave Elijah C. Watson Elijah Watson serves as Okayplayer's News & Culture Editor. When

A teacher in Apex, North Carolina has been suspended after comparing a 13-year-old student to a slave.

The incident, which was caught on video via a Snapchat post, shows an Apex Middle School teacher using a racial slur and comparing seventh grader Dayon Warren to a slave.

Did I call you a ni**er? No, I said you are being controlled, by kids, the teacher can be heard saying to Warren. That is exactly what happened to the slaves. They were controlled by their owners, youre letting him control you and youre the one whos getting in trouble.

Warren said the teacher got mad because a group of students would not stop laughing, and used the salve-master analogy in an attempt to say that children need to listen to adults.

I didnt know what to say. He started calling me a slave, Warren said in an interview with ABC 11. He could have said it different instead of using that analogy that I was his slave.

Its more so hurtful than anything because I would never want my children to expect that, Ayona Wilson, Warrens mother, added. [The teacher] should know what to say, what not to say to these children. He also had to know some of the things he says can hurt people and that is going to stick with my son forever.

Following the incident, the teacher was suspended, with the Wake County School District initiating an investigation in regards to the incident.
Agricultural News

Dr. Derrell Peel Takes the Beef Industry's Pulse Ahead of the Memorial Day Boost in May

Mondays, Dr. Derrell Peel, Oklahoma State University Extension Livestock Marketing Specialist, offers his economic analysis of the beef cattle industry. This analysis is a part of the weekly series known as the "Cow Calf Corner" published electronically by Dr. Peel and Dr. Glenn Selk. Today, Dr. Peel reviews the factors that have contributed to the performance of the beef market so far this year, just ahead of the poular summer holidays kicking off with Memorial Day.





"Cattle and beef markets have pushed the spring rally higher and extended it longer than anyone expected. Feeder cattle prices are up 12-14 percent since the beginning of the year while fed cattle and Choice boxed beef are up about 23 percent. Select boxed beef is up about 16 percent since January 1. Feeder and fed cattle markets appeared (once again) to perhaps have peaked seasonally this past week. Fed prices pulled back from the previous week's highs near $145/cwt. However, Choice boxed beef continued to climb finishing the week at nearly $248/cwt. The Choice-Select spread has widened to over $22/cwt. following an exaggerated seasonal pattern similar to one year ago. The May boost of Memorial Day beef buying is likely done and markets may pull back a bit though grilling demand will continue on to Father's Day in June and Independence Day in July.







"Markets have been buoyed by tighter than expected supplies of beef; stronger than expected domestic demand; continued strong beef exports; and speculative support in live and feeder cattle futures contracts. The bullish psychology of the market has been supported by earlier news that China would reopen to U.S. beef and last week to the announcement that an agreement should be in place by July. It is, however, still not clear what requirements must be met and how much and how fast U.S. beef will flow into China.







"Smaller carcass weights are continuing to help hold beef production increases in check. Beef production is up 4.3 percent so far this year while total cattle slaughter is up over six percent for the year to date. In the most recent week of actual slaughter data, steer carcass weights were down 21 pounds from one year ago while heifer carcass weights were down 18 pounds year over year. This is partially offset by heavier cow and bull carcass weights at the current time.







"Forage conditions look very good across much of the country, with the exception of some parts of the Southeast. Although too much of a good thing led to flooding in many regions, recent rains have pushed back dry and drought conditions that emerged through the first quarter of the year. Favorable forage supplies and price, combined with attractive feedgrain and supplement prices, will help moderate cattle production costs in 2017.







"Stocker Survey update : Oklahoma cattle producers who received the Oklahoma State University Stocker survey from USDA-NASS recently but have not returned the survey will soon be receiving a call from NASS to help them complete the survey. A sample of responses so far is very encouraging and will provide unprecedented information about the vital stocker industry in Oklahoma. We are very grateful to producers who take the time to provide this information on a sector of the cattle industry that is not well understood."













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Negotiations with China Reaching the Final Stages as Deadline to Grant Market Access Draws Near







News of the Chinese government's announcement that it has set the deadline to have arrangements in place to begin accepting US beef, has the industry thrilled. But still producers must be patient, with one more round of consultation meetings with Chinese officials left to conduct. Kent Bacus of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association says the specifics of this formality are yet to be known, but he told Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm Director Ron Hays, the devil will be in the details as the two governments wrap-up negotiations.





"We think that most of these concerns have been addressed," Bacus said. "We can't comment as to what those details are, but one thing we can say is that we have really tried to emphasize with the Chinese, the fact that we have safe production systems here in the United States; what we produce is a very safe and high-quality product."





Bacus says the US negotiators have done everything possible to demonstrate American production practices and adds that this last consultation is very important to finalizing the protocols under which US beef will be allowed to be imported by the deadline, which is July 16th of this year.





"That's not too far away and so it's a priority for both the US government and the Chinese government to have this protocol finalized and ready to go," he said. "We're looking forward to seeing what these terms and what this protocol will be."





Listen to Bacus walk Hays through the final steps of the process to reestablishing trade ties with China's beef market, on today's Beef Buzz.





The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today's show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.























Listen to Bacus walk Hays through the final steps of the process to reestablishing trade ties with China

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Wheat Growers Face Grim Economic Picture, Important They Know How Much Risk They Can Afford

Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm Director Ron Hays spoke with Oklahoma State University Extension Grain Market Economist Dr. Kim Anderson, who presented at the OSU Wheat Field Day in Lahoma last week. According to Dr. Anderson, the overall economic outlook for the wheat industry here in Oklahoma and around the country is rather grim, given the ongoing struggle to work through the sheer massive amounts of grain stocks leftover from the record harvest of 2016, that continue to weigh on markets. However, he says if producers can manage their crops in such a way to maximize test weight and protein, the chances of being profitable will be more obtainable, in a market that today is starved of that kind of quality product. You can listen to Hays' complete interview with Anderson, by clicking or tapping the LISTEN BAR below, at the bottom of this story.





Right now, market prices are below the cost of production. But Anderson says for producers who have kept their fields clean, sprayed fertilizer and used fungicides, could potentially stand to break even, if they are able to harvest 60 or more bushels per acre.





"For those producers, we're probably near breakeven or maybe slightly above. But, they're not going to make much," Anderson said. "The majority of farmers though, will be below breakeven price."





Anderson says he sees the industry evolving into two segments: feedgrain and milling grain. The graze and grain method has become a popular production practice in the state, but it has its drawbacks, which can harm the overall quality of a wheat crop. These days, farmers must grow competitively to secure the top premiums for their crop.





"Wheat farming anymore is not just planting it in the ground and harvesting it," he said. "It's managing these fields, throughout the entire year. It's scouting those fields, looking for insects, looking for disease. It's becoming intimate with those fields and knowing how those fields react to different stimulates, different fertilizers."





Regardless a producer's preference, Anderson offers his risk-averse strategy, selling a third of your crop at a time, once a harvest, again between September and October and finally between November and December. He also advises, that if you can afford to, consider merchandizing your grain. But he warns that you first be aware of the risks associated with storing grain and understand the difficulty involved.





"It's a very grim picture," Anderson concluded. "But the producers have to know how much risk they can take."





















Listen to Dr. Kim Anderson and Ron Hays discuss the wheat market's grim situation ahead of harvest

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State Wheat Specialist Dave Marburger Optimistic About Harvest Yields, But Worried Over Protein

In Oklahoma, the 2017 wheat harvest is extremely close to getting underway, and according to State Wheat Specialist Dave Marburger, it would not be a surprise if cutting began as early as this week. He told Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm Director Ron Hays during the Oklahoma State University Wheat Tour in Kildare, Okla. that overall, the crop condition in Oklahoma looks fairly good. You can listen to their full conversation from today's wheat tour, by clicking or tapping the LISTEN BAR below, at the bottom of this story.





"There's a lot of pretty good looking wheat out there," Marburger said. "We did have some diseases in some areas, but I'm looking forward to what the combines are going to start telling us."





Earlier this month, the Oklahoma Feed and Grain Association predicted the wheat crop in Oklahoma would produce a total of about 100 million bushels, roughly accounting for two-thirds of Oklahoma's crop harvested. The United States Department of Agriculture followed that estimate with its own prediction, suggesting production will be a bit lower than the OFGA's guess due to even less harvested acres, at 89 million bushels.





"Ninety to a hundred million bushels this year sounds about right, I think that's a pretty good estimate," Marburger said. "But, we'll see where we end up. I think we'll have above average yields overall. Where it's going to come back to is just the total harvested acres."





And while he feels confident in the numbers, one detail that worries Marburger, is whether or not this crop will have the necessary protein requirements to be competitive in the marketplace.





"There was a lot of acres that might have been under fertilized when it comes to Nitrogen," he said. "There could be a situation where we have a lot of low protein wheat overall in the state this year."























Listen to Ron Hays speak with State Wheat Specialist Dave Marburger about this year's wheat crop

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A 35-year-old Omaha man was shot and critically wounded when an armed fight, which included a machete, broke out Sunday in a residential area near 48th and L Streets, police said.

The man, identified Monday as Erick Andrade, wielded a machete in the fight outside his residence near 49th and L Streets, while the other person had a gun, said Omaha Police Lt. Jerry Siedlik.

It wasnt clear if the man and the person who shot him knew each other.

The shooting was reported at 6:06 p.m. Neighbors said they heard five gunshots, but police thought the man suffered a single bullet wound, apparently to his abdomen.

He underwent surgery and was listed in stable condition at the Nebraska Medical Center, Siedlik said.

After the shooting, police strung crime scene tape in the area around a red pickup that belonged to the victim and was parked askew in the middle of 49th Street. The shooting occurred near the truck, Siedlik said.

Several neighbors were outside when the shooting happened, including one family that had been celebrating Mothers Day and eating pizza in their front yard on the warm day.

The nine people who had gathered said they thought they heard fireworks, until a maroon vehicle with something dragging underneath sped past, followed by a silver car, which continued south.

The maroon vehicle turned sharply to the east and almost hit a car driven by another neighbor. That neighbor told The World-Herald that she had been on her way to get ice cream for her familys Mothers Day celebration. She said she saw what appeared to be a bullet hole in a window on the drivers side but was unable to see the driver because the windows were tinted.

As the vehicle passed her, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw it speeding, swerving and dragging a bumper.

Kids ride their bikes on the street, she said. Thank God no one was out there.

Another resident said she was home washing dishes when she heard what she knew were gunshots. She said she grabbed her gun and went onto her deck, but didnt see anything. A home surveillance camera captured footage of the fleeing vehicle.
Armond Floyd took off his glasses and used his orange jail jumpsuit to wipe away tears after pleading guilty to felony child abuse in connection with the death of a Bellevue toddler.

Floyd, 25, appeared in Sarpy County District Court on Monday and pleaded to lesser charges.

He will be sentenced on June 12 and faces one to 50 years in prison. He had been facing a charge of felony child abuse resulting in death, which carries the possibility of life in prison, before a plea deal was reached.

Prosecutors said Imani Edwards was in Floyds care on Nov. 13 when she was found unresponsive in a bathtub in an apartment at 1811 Lloyd St. in Bellevue.

Imani, who was just shy of turning 2, was taken to Childrens Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, where she later died.

During Mondays hearing, Chief Deputy Sarpy County Attorney Tricia Freeman said Floyd put his hand over Imanis mouth and nose for about 30 seconds because the child was crying. When he removed his hand, Imani was groggy.

According to court documents, Floyd told police he grabbed Imani by her arm and swung her into the wall. Her head hit the wall with significant force. Then Imani vomited.

Floyd then put Imani in the tub and left her unattended for about 10 minutes, Freeman said.

When Floyd returned, Imani was facedown in the tub, Freeman said. He called 911 and tried life-saving measures.

Christopher Lathrop, Floyds attorney, said Floyd left the bathroom only to go take care of his child in another room.

Imani died while Floyd was out on bail on other charges involving Imanis mother.

In that case, Floyd pleaded guilty to amended charges. He will be sentenced for misdemeanor third-degree domestic assault. That hearing also is scheduled for June 12 in Sarpy County District Court. That charge carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Imanis family attended Mondays hearing but declined to comment.
The University of Nebraska at Omaha unveiled a statue last week honoring the universitys founding professor of real estate.

The statue of C. Glenn Lewis, who retired in 1971, is outside the north entrance of Mammel Hall. Lewis died in 1975.

A scholarship ceremony also took place Friday.

The statue, made possible by a gift from alums Alfred G. and Beverly A. Thomsen, was made by sculptor Matthew Placzek.

Sunday with a Scientist to put spotlight on migratory birds

Morrill Halls Sunday with a Scientist program will zero in on birds May 21.

The program for children and families will go from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.

Morrill Hall, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is at 645 N. 14th St.

The event celebrates International Migratory Bird Month. The program will include information about migration and bird-watching.

UNL biologists and graduate students will lead the activities. Children and families will meet with them and learn about research on various species.

Activities include a station on bird-watching with a display of terns, plovers and prairie chickens, and a station to understand wing shapes and sizes.

Sunday with a Scientist highlights the work of scientists while educating visitors on topics related to science and natural history.

Presenters aim to share scientific information in a fun and informal way. The presentations typically take place on the third Sunday of each month.

UNK honors winners of state handwriting competition

The University of Nebraska at Kearney announced the winners in the 27th Nebraska State Handwriting Contest.

The competition is endorsed by the Nebraska State Education Association and the State Department of Education. The activity is administered by UNK.

The winners:

 12 and under: first place, Hannah Thomson, Palmyra; second place, Mary Tran, Lincoln; honorable mention, Ava Kasik, Leigh

 13-16: first place, Grace Bonsall, Kearney; second, Bianca Rademacher, Lincoln

 17-49: first place, Amy Purintun, Gretna; second, Amy Denny, Kearney; honorable mention, Sheila Sindelar, Wisner

 50 and over: first place, Marlene Evans, Elwood; second, JoAnn Rademacher, Kearney; honorable mention, Richard Thies, Omaha, and Linda Follmer, Grand Island.
LINCOLN  Nebraska lawmakers voted Monday to continue helping newly disabled people pay medical bills until they qualify for federal assistance.

Lawmakers advanced Legislative Bill 333 to second-round consideration without changes in the state-funded disability program.

But they adopted an amendment that could mean fewer young people with developmental disabilities getting services after graduating from high school.

The amendment would suspend a 22-year-old law entitling those young people to day services when they reach age 21 and leave public school. The entitlement was passed originally to ensure that young people with developmental disabilities did not lose vocational and life skills they had developed in school.

Ricketts administration officials had proposed repealing the law, saying it conflicts with federal rules about who gets priority for services.

The Health and Human Services Committee amendment would put the entitlement on hold for two years.

State Sen. Sara Howard of Omaha said the suspension would give the state time to consider alternatives for those young people.

Failing to make the change could put federal dollars for developmental disability services at risk, she said.

Sen. Merv Riepe of Ralston, who chairs the HHS committee, said the amendment would give graduates higher priority than other people on the state waiting list for services. But people in emergency situations would get top priority.

He argued that protecting the most vulnerable people is the best way to maximize the limited funding available.

State Department of Health and Human Services officials have reserved 200 slots for graduates, and the Legislature approved a state budget increase large enough to fund services for those graduates.

But under LB 333 the funding could be needed to provide services for higher-priority people, meaning that some graduates would not get services.

A second provision of LB 333 would have eliminated the state disability program. Gov. Pete Ricketts had proposed that move as part of his budget-cutting plan.

But opponents raised concerns that the change would shift costs to counties, which are required to pay for medical care for indigent residents.

Counties now pay for care in the first six months after a low-income person becomes disabled. The state program covers the next six months, after which people may quality for federal benefits.

A third provision of LB 333 would require HHS to come up with a new method of monitoring the quality of developmental disability services.

Advocates have raised concerns that the provision does not require the involvement of people with disabilities and their families in the monitoring process.
LINCOLN  Attorney General Doug Peterson has concluded that the executive director of a state regulatory agency can keep a side job as a telecommunications consultant without breaking the law.

But State Sen. Jim Smith of Papillion said the opinion doesnt change his views about the impropriety of the arrangement.

It doesnt change the fact that he should be focused on his job and not moonlighting, Smith said.

According to an opinion released Monday, Public Service Commission Executive Director Jeff Pursleys job with Parrish, Blessing and Associates, a telecommunications consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., does not violate his oath of office.

The opinion also said the five-year employment contract Pursley signed with the commission was not valid or enforceable.

The PSC regulates several key industries in Nebraska, including telecommunications, natural gas utilities, grain dealers, taxis, manufactured homes and recreational vehicles.

Questions about the legality of Pursleys outside employment arose in March, after his second job became public.

One issue concerned the oath he took on starting the $150,000 per-year state job, in which he swore he was not directly or indirectly interested in entities regulated by the agency. The oath is required by state law.

Pursley continued working part time for Parrish, Blessing and Associates after taking the PSC job on July 1, 2015.

He was previously a director of the company. Pursley said he wanted to keep a job with the company because it offers better health insurance.

Commission member Crystal Rhoades of Omaha had questioned the arrangement, as did Smith. On Monday, Rhoades said she had not seen the opinion and could not comment.

Commission spokeswoman Deb Collins said the PSC and Pursley would have no comment until they had finished reviewing the opinion.

According to Mondays opinion, Pursleys side job does not violate his oath of office because it does not involve doing work for regulated entities or having a business or financial interest in a regulated entity.

But it also said that his contract with the PSC did not comply with state law. The contract said that Pursley could be fired only for just cause during the five-year term.

The Attorney Generals Office said the commission did not have the power to alter a state law providing that employers can fire employees for any reason.

Commission members requested the opinion in March, asking both about the oath of office and about whether Pursley could be considered an at-will employee after having signed an employment contract.

The opinion is the second one from state officials upholding Pursleys outside employment.

Frank Daley, executive director of the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, concluded in March that the arrangement does not run afoul of state conflict-of-interest laws.

In a March 6 memo, Pursley said he works five to six hours a week for Parrish, Blessing and Associates, using evenings, weekends and vacation hours.

He continued to be listed as a director on the companys website as of mid-February. He has since asked the company to remove his contact information from the site and not use his name for marketing purposes.

Pursley said in the memo that Parrish, Blessing recently signed a contract with Windstream, a telephone company regulated by the PSC.

He said other Parrish, Blessing employees would do the work for Windstream but will use a model that he developed.
Nebraskas new statewide testing approach, coming as early as next school year, should give the states teachers more data to tailor and improve instruction for individual students.

A state contractor is designing computerized statewide tests that adapt the questions to each students academic abilities, more quickly and accurately assessing a students understanding.

The new data could boost learning, assuming schools pair the information with results from the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, test, which many Nebraska schools already give earlier in the school year.

Schools could use the comparative data to determine which students made academic progress in which subjects and at what rates. This could help teachers replicate effective lessons and rethink others.

The states new testing contractor, Northwest Evaluation Association, also designed the MAP test, so the two assessment devices, once complete, should be compatible.

The new state tests will evaluate students in grades three through eight, replacing the former Nebraska State Accountability tests, or NeSA. The new tests are expected to require less testing time than NeSA, state Education Commissioner Matt Blomstedt told The World-Herald.

The idea: Test questions get more difficult after each correct answer and easier after each wrong answer, delving deeper into each students understanding of math, language arts and science concepts from state academic standards.

Its a much more complicated way to go about assessments, Blomstedt said. But it has the potential to be a lot more accurate with students. Over time it can change what your goals are.

These new state tests would give schools new information, not only year to year, but within the same school year.

That could help Nebraska teachers better target their lessons to help struggling students grasp missed concepts.

Nebraska has a mixed record with state testing efforts  many remember its flawed STARS tests, which let local school districts set their own standards  but this new approach by Blomstedt and the State Board of Education sounds promising.

Officials anticipate the new tests also will help teachers more clearly communicate a students academic challenges with parents, encouraging all involved to intervene earlier and more effectively.

If the tests and data gleaned meet state education officials expectations, this new approach could help educators boost Nebraska student performance.

Thats a worthy goal.
F-4E fighter jet crash in August caused by engine nozzle defect: Air Force The crash of a South Korean F-4E fighter jet in August was caused by an engine nozzle problem, the Air Force said Wednesday. It announced the outcome of its probe into the cause...
2 lakh jobs would be cut in IT sector in next 3 years: Report

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Job cuts in the IT sector would be between 1.75 lakh and 2 lakh for the next three years due to under-preparedness in adapting to new technologies said executive search firm Head Hunters.

Contrary to media reports of 56,000 IT professionals to lose jobs this year, the actual job cuts will be between 1.75 lakh and 2 lakh per year in next three years, due to under- preparedness in adapting to newer technologies," Head Hunters India Founder-Chairman and MD K Lakshmikanth told PTI, analysing a report submitted by McKinsey & Company at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on February 17.

McKinsey & Company report had said nearly half of the workforce in the IT services firms will be "irrelevant" over the next 3-4 years. McKinsey India Managing Director Noshir Kaka had also said the bigger challenge ahead for the industry will be to retrain 50-60 per cent of the workforce as there will be a significant shift in technologies. The industry employs 3.9 million people and the majority of them have to be retrained.

Lakshmikanth explained that the number of people who will become redundant in the next three years will be about five to six lakhs. This will workout to, on a average, between 1.75 lakh to 2 lakh per year for next three years. However, he said job cuts will not take place in major cities like Mumbai or Bengaluru, but cities like Coimbatore or a few remote places, he said. Lakshmikanth further said the IT services industry is passing through an uncertain time as the growth in digital technologies like cloud-based services is happening at a much faster pace and the companies are combining learning of some of the new technologies and reskilling.

Because of the changing technology, the most affected will be the professionals aged 35 and above, for it would be very difficult for them to get jobs, Lakhsmikanth said.

OneIndia News
AIADMK merger: After Dinakaran and Sasikala, OPS wants their supporters sacked

India

oi-Anusha

Leaders of the O Panneerselvam camp demanded that Dinakaran loyalists Nanjil Sampath and Thalavai Sundaram be removed from the party. Former Tamil Nadu minister and a member of the committee formed by the Panneerselvam camp to hold talks on the AIADMK merger, K P Munusamy demanded the duo's ouster on Monday.

Speaking to the press days after merger talks hit a roadblock, the Panneerselvam camp accused the duo of receiving crore of rupees from Dinakaran and Sasikala to support their positions in the party. Both leaders of the AIADMK have been vocal in their support to Dinakaran and have criticised Panneerselvam camp.

Despite being lodged in Tihar jail for allegedly attempting to bribe officials of the Election Commission of India TTV Dinakaran. Sampath had claimed, had the support of 87 MLAs of the AIADMK. While speaking to the media about the merger, Sampath had categorically stated that the merger was welcome without Panneerselvam and Mafoi Pandiarajan. "They betrayed the party and are not welcome," Sampath had said.

Thalavai Sundaram, the Tamil Nadu government's special representative at New Delhi has been a footsoldier of Dinakaran. Sundaram was accused of obstructing income tax officials from discharging duties during raids at Tamil Nadu Health Minister Vijaya Bhaskar's residence in Chennai. Following a complaint by the income tax officials, an FIR was registered against the AIADMK leader.

O Panneerselvam who has undertaken a statewide tour to hold talks with the public has refrained from making any press statements. His camp today, accused Sampath and Sundaram of speaking lightly about J Jayalalithaa and demanded their ouster from the party. With merger talks hitting a roadblock, the Edappadi Palanisamy camp is doing everything it can to please the BJP, including permitting the review of central government schemes in the state under Venkaiah Naidu, a never-before-seen move.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 13:00 [IST]
AP ICET, AP ECET 2017 results available now

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati and JNT University , Anantapur have released AP ICET and AP ECET 2017 results. The results have been announced according to the notifications posted in the official websites hosted by Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (AP SCHE).

AP ECET 2017 Results

"APECET 2017 Results will be announced today in the afternoon. Final Keys and Response Sheets evaluated with Final Keys will be made available in the website today after the declaration of the results. The results will be available in the official website of AP ICET, sche.ap.gov.in/ECET/.

AP ICET 2017 Results

The APICET 2017 Results will be announced today in the afternoon. Final Keys and Response Sheets evaluated with Final Keys will be made available in the website today after the declaration of the results. The results will be available in the official website of AP ICET, sche.ap.gov.in/ICET/.

OneIndia News
Tamil Nadu: Heavy rains in several parts of Tamil Nadu in next 2 days

Bus strike hits Tamil Nadu: Scores of passengers stranded

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Trade unions of the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation will go ahead with the bus strike. The decision to go ahead was taken after talks with the government regarding pending wages and provident fund failed.

Trade unions of the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation, except the one affiliated to the ruling AIADMK, announced a bus strike across the State on Sunday.

Talks with the government were held at the Pallavan House, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Transport Corporation in Chennai over pending wages and PF. Several rounds of talks have been held before this between representatives of the unions and Transport Minister M.R. Vijayabhaskar.

Though the strike officially begins today, transport employees in places like Madurai, Dindigul and Cuddalore have already begun the strike.

Commuters were left stranded in various parts of Tamil Nadu on Sunday evening. Only members of the ruling party's Anna Thozhirsanga Peravai continued to operate bus services.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 8:08 [IST]
Palanisamy government gets Rs 1,083 crore

In a never-before-exercise, Union minister Venkaiah Naidu reviewed central government schemes in Tamil Nadu. Even as Naidu claimed that the move to sanction money was apolitical and was only aimed at expediting projects to reap benefits, the entire set up reeked of politics. Out of the Rs 1,083 crore given to the Edappadi Palanisamy government, Rs 360.27 crore is sanctioned under Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, Rs 663.93 crore under Prime Minister Awas Yojana and Rs 59.14 crore for implementing the Deen Dayal Antyodaya Yojana.

"No politics, only development"

Speaking to the media, Venkaiah Naidu said that development was the only agenda. "This is being done as per the advice of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He wanted me to inform the states about the budgetary allocation for various programmes and sanction the sum at one go. Instead of Chief Ministers, ministers and officials going to Delhi, I have come here along with my officers and sanction the sum," he claimed.

O Panneerselvam camp sees red

A day after the central government released funds voluntarily to the Edappadi Palanisamy led Tamil Nadu government, O Panneerselvam camp has been seeing red. In a press conference held on Monday, V Maitreyan warned the BJP against allying with the EPS camp. "Bad times lie ahead for the BJP if they ally with Edappadi Palanisamy camp. Spokespersons of that camp have been verbally abusing our mentor J Jayalalithaa for making Panneerselvam the Chief Minister on multiple occasions," he said.

Has favour changed from Panneerselvam to Edappadi Palanisamy?

Panneerselvam camp was considered close to the BJP up until now. Panneerselvam's frequent visits to Delhi, the backdoor support he received after his rebellion against Sasikala Natarajan made it clear that his camp was being backed by the centre. The scenario has however changed. Over the last few weeks, Edappadi Palanisamy had been making efforts to please the BJP. First, he asked his cabinet colleagues to not criticise the Prime Minister in public. Then, his government asked for success stories of Prime Minister's flagship programmes to be highlighted and reported. The Edappadi Palanisamy camp cosying up to the centre has made the Panneerselvam camp, which was so far understood to be the beneficiary, fume.

President poll has a lot to do with change in tide

The change in favour may have a lot to do with the upcoming Presidential elections for the BJP. While Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu maintained that the sanction of funds was strictly development, the sudden softening stand by the BJP towards Edappadi Palanisamy camp has not gone unnoticed. The AIADMK's presence in the parliament is huge and its support matters for the presidential polls.

A number game at play

With the UPA gathering its numbers and seeking the support of all other political parties including Left parties, the BJP is under the compulsion to get all the support it can. With the split in the AIADMK, the BJP is compelled to woo both factions. Did the centre sanction funds to woo Edappadi Palanisamy camp or was it simply returning the favour as a result of EPS going the extra mile to please the BJP? Many political observers in Tamil Nadu are of the opinion that the BJP is playing big brother to the Tamil Nadu government and the sanctioning of funds was an indication of the same.

OneIndia News
Conversations of UP MLAs recorded? Yogi teaches phone etiquettes to BJP politicos

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Lucknow, May 15: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has a 'strong' message for the Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs in the state. The CM wants his colleagues to be "careful", "patient" and "polite" over phone as Adityanath fears that their conversations could be recorded and later misused on social media.

"The CM has asked us to prefer meeting people over any issue in person and minimise conversations over phone," a BJP MLA told The Indian Express.

Adityanath conveyed the message to the MLAs during a BJP legislature party meeting on Sunday. The meeting was conducted a day ahead of the BJP government's first UP Assembly session scheduled on Monday.

"In the past few years, certain officials, particularly of the district police, recorded telephone conversations with MLAs, including heated arguments, and leaked them in the media. Such conversations go viral on social media and that draws criticism towards the MLA and the party. We have to be careful because we are in power in the state as well as at the Centre," the MLA added.

Adityanath also issued guidelines for the BJP MLAs as how to behave in the public to avoid any embarrassment for the ruling government in the state. Recently, Gorakhpur Sadar MLA Radha Mohan Das Agarwal's public spat with IPS officer Charu Nigam had gone viral on social media.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 8:57 [IST]
UP ATS picks up two more accused in Al-Qaeda radicalisation case

CPI-M urges Adityanath to ban cow vigilante groups in UP

India

ians-IANS

By Ians English

Agartala, May 15: Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury on Monday asked Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to immediately ban the Gau Rakshaks or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads in the state.

"Gau Rakshaks or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads are all illegal and unconstitutional groups. The Uttar Pradesh CM must ban these outfits immediately," the CPI-M general secretary said while addressing a public meeting in Belonia of southern Tripura.

He said: "These 'Gau Rakshaks' or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads are the private armies formed by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh).

"These private armies are taking the law in their hands. In the name of protecting law, they are killing Dalits and minorities. They are terrorising people," he added.

The public meeting was organised in connection with the state conference of CPI-M's students wing Students Federation of India (SFI).

The Left leader said the BJP had been trying to topple the Left Front government in Tripura. "Their dream will be shattered by the people of the state."

"You might have heard Prime Minister Modi's 'Mann Ki Baat', but have you heared Modi saying a single word about the 22 crore unemployed youths in India, suicide by thousands of farmers, price rise and religious division and ethnic disturbances in the country," Yechury said.

"Modi and his party are taking the country back to the dark ages... we have to fight it out to make a shining and bright India," the CPI-M leader said.

Tripura Chief Minister and CPI-M politburo member Manik Sarkar, party's central committee member and state's Health Minister Badal Choudhury, and SFI's national and state leaders also addressed the gathering.

IANS
IRCTC update: 151 trains cancelled on Nov 09; here is the complete list

DCW chief demands capital punishment for all rapists

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

In the wake of rising incidents of rape, the Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal on Monday demanded death sentence for all those who commit heinous act of rape.

Maliwal's reaction came when asked about gangrape of a 22-year-old woman in Gurgaon. The victim, a native of Sikkim, was allegedly raped by three men inside a moving car on Sunday.

The DCW chief told news agency ANI that it was a high time that the government sent a strong message to the nation and called for" capital punishment to every rapist in every rape case."

She said that the government should make swift moves and speed up the trial of rape cases by means of fast track courts.

The accused kidnapped the victim from near her residence in Gurgaon and forcefully dragged her into a Maruti Swift car, the police said. They then took turns to rape her in the moving vehicle while driving to Najafgarh in Delhi, about 20 kilometres from where they picked her.

The National Commission for Women had earlier sought a fair and speedy trial of the horrific Rohtak gang rape case.

[NCW calls for fair, speedy trial of Rohtak gang-rape case]

In a savage crime reminiscent of the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case in Delhi, a young woman from Haryana's Sonepat district was abducted, gang-raped and brutally murdered.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 18:10 [IST]
Fresh evidence in Narada sting case put TMC further in a fix

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Fresh evidence has been shared with the Central Bureau of Investigation in connection with the Narada Sting case in which a host of Trinamool Congress leaders are allegedly involved. We have with us now clinching electronic evidence, CBI sources say. A sting operation was conducted in which several TMC leaders are seen taking bribe in exchange for favours.

The fresh evidence that has been shared will help the CBI strengthen its case. A hard disk, CDs among other equipments have been shared with the CBI which will help the agency build up electronic evidence against the accused persons.

The CBI is currently in the process of examining the evidence. Once we are done examining the digital evidence, we will go ahead and question the accused, the source also said.

The CBI recently filed an FIR against 13 persons, including senior leaders of Trinamul Congress. The TMC leaders who are named in the CBI FIR are Madan Mitra, Mukul Roy, Saugata Roy, Sultan Ahmed, Iqbal Ahmed, Kakoli Ghosh, Prasun Banerjee and Suvendu Adhikari.

The CBI took over the case based on a directive by the Calcutta High Court. The Calcutta High Court ordered the investigation on March 17 and asked the CBI to submit the report within 72 hours. The Trinamool Congress appealed before the Supreme Court on 21 March, challenging the High Court's order. However, the SC refused to interfere with the high court order but extended the deadline for the preliminary probe to one month.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 6:02 [IST]
Good, if Pranab Mukherjee becomes President: Bihar CM Nitish Kumar

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

The Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday hinted that he welcomes second term for Pranab Mukherjee as President of India.

'Will be good if he (Pranab Mukherjee) becomes the President again, but it is for the ruling party to take initiative', Nitish Kumar said on presidential polls. Pranab Mukherjee was elected as President during UPA-II he has been in office since July 2012. His term ends in July 2017.

Will be good if he (Pranab Mukherjee) becomes the President again, but it is for the ruling party to take initiative: Bihar CM on Pres polls pic.twitter.com/6R6yGboi35  ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

Nitish Kumar remark comes at a time when speculations are rife with the selection of candidates by ruling BJP and the opposition Congress. But, the chances of Pranab Mukherjee getting a second term depends on the BJP. According to reports, a section of the Opposition believes that if the BJP agrees, a second term for the sitting president is possible.

In the wake of the landslide victory of the BJP and its allies in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand Assembly elections, the ruling National Democratic Alliance is just short of 25,000 votes in its electoral college for the presidency.

In India, no President other than Babu Rajendra Prasad has had a second term. Also, there is no precedence of an incumbent contesting a presidential poll.

OneIndia News
I am sure that Kulbhushan Jadhav will get justice, says Mos Home Hansraj Ahir

India

oi-Madhuri

With the International Court of Justice hearing underway over the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Ahir on Monday said that India will make sure he is not sentenced to death.

While speaking to ANI, Ahir said that India have put forward their views in the International Court of Justice. "I am sure he will get justice. We will make sure he is not sentenced to death. We will fight for his justice," he added.

Last month, a Pakistani military court awarded death sentence to former Indian Navy official for alleged espionage and subversive activities.

India denied that he has any connection with the government and charged that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, Pakistan claimed to have arrested him from Balochistan on March 3, 2016.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 14:50 [IST]
ICJ reserves verdict in Kulbhushan Jadhav case

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The International Court of Justice has reserved its order in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case.

India said that it feared that Jadhav would be hanged before the hearing is concluded. Hence an urgent order is needed. India also said that the trial against Jadhav was farcical and hence he was urging for provisional measures.

[How India convinced the ICJ in 20 minutes not to hang Kulbhushan Jadhav]

Salve in his arguments said that Pakistan had violated the Vienna pact. India repeatedly stated that over 16 requests for consular access were denied. Even Jadhav's mother appealed for access but the same was denied, Salve argued. The situation is grave and urgent, Salve also said.

Further India refuted Pakistan's claim that Jadhav was a spy. He was kidnapped from Iran. The appeal has been filed as a desperate measure Salve said while calling for the suspension of the sentence.

Pakistan during its arguments sought to broadcast the confessional video of Jadhav. The ICJ however did not permit the same. Pakistan said that there are flaws in the defence taken by India. It also said that the request made by India is flawed while seeking that India's application be dismissed.

The ICJ had stayed the execution of Jadhav by Pakistan last week. India ie being represented by one its best advocates Harish Salve who had on the last date argued and obtained a stay.

India has for the second time since 1971 moved the ICJ and this is an indicator of growing confidence in facing multilateral forums. India would argue that several requests for consular access had been rejected by Pakistan and hence the sentence be put off. India would also contend that Jadhav was sentenced on wrong evidence and hence the sentencing be set aside.

Pakistan on the other hand would contend that Jadhav was sentenced on the ground that he was undertaking subversive activities. Pakistan would also question the jurisdiction of the ICJ in interfering in the matter.

OneIndia News
UK PM Liz Truss resigns after 45 days in office, successor to be elected next week

Narmada behind prosperity of farmers in MP, says Modi

India

ians-IANS

By Ians English

Amarkantak (Madhya Pradesh), May 15: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said India's economy is based on its rivers and it is because of the river Narmada that Madhya Pradesh has been able to achieve agricultural prosperity.

"Narmada has the power to change farmers' lives. We say, water is life and river is our mother. Our economy is dependent on rivers and will collapse without them. We have used Narmada haphazardly. So now, we have to make efforts to save it," he said while addressing the concluding ceremony of the 150-day-long "Narmada Seva Yatra".

"Narmada is behind the prosperity of farmers in Madhya Pradesh. The state's agricultural growth rate has reached 20 per cent, in which Narmada has a major contribution," Modi said.

"If we fail in our duty of protecting rivers, it will spell doom for the mankind. I was born in Gujarat and the people of Gujarat know the value of every drop of Narmada," he added.

Modi added that a river in Kerala, Bharatpuja, was about to vanish.

He said the 150-day Narmada yatra for the rejuvenation of the river was a near-impossible task and a rare event.

"It is unfortunate that if a government or a politician joins it, attempts are made to underrate it. If such a drive were carried out by any other country, it would have become a global talk. News channels would have rushed to cover it," Modi said.

The Prime Minister applauded Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for undertaking the drive to plant six crore saplings and preparing a nature conservation plan.

The Madhya Pradesh government will plant fruit-bearing trees at every kilometre on both sides of the river. The government will also give compensation to farmers for the initial three years, as there will be no fruits on these trees till then.

"I have studied the work plan prepared by the Madhya Pradesh government. Everyone has a role in it. It details how it will be carried out and who will monitor it. It is a perfect vision document. I urge Shivrajji to send this document to all states. It is a classic example of conservation of natural resources," he said.

The Prime Minister added that Madhya Pradesh was also ready with its plan to contribute to the nation-wide goal of doubling farmers' income by 2022.

Talking about the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan's success, Modi said involvement of people was biggest power of democracy.

"If we neglect people's involvement, their support, or their power, governments will not be able do anything. Howsoever good leadership it may be and howsoever perfect be the plan, we will not get success without people's support.

"Madhya Pradesh is a classic example of success on account of people's support. In the latest survey, 22 of total 100 clean cities are from this very state," Modi noted.

IANS
No extradition request made for Dawood, Hafiz Saeed says MEA

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

There has been no extradition request received by the Ministry of External Affairs where Dawood Ibrahim or Hafiz Saeed are concerned. The investigation agencies have not put forth any such request, the MEA has said while replying to an RTI query.

The ministry was responding to an RTI query seeking to information on the action taken by the government to bring back terrorists Ibrahim and Saeed. The ministry of external affairs has not received any request for extradition/deportation/return in respect of Hafiz Saeed and Dawood Ibrahim from the investigating agency concerned in India, the reply said.

A few weeks back news had emerged that Dawood the mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts was in a critical condition after he suffered a major heart attack. Hafiz Saeed on the other hand who had masterminded the 26/11 attack is under house arrest.

In April, Home Minister Rajnath Singh had stated that there was no doubt that Ibrahim was still in Pakistan. During the last 10 years, India has sent several dossiers to Pakistan in this regard, linking Ibrahim to the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts.

OneIndia News
Strike down triple talaq, we will bring divorce law for Muslims: Centre tells SC

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

A country like Pakistan has done away with triple talaq and India being a secular state continues to hold on to it, the Supreme Court was told on Monday. Theocratic states like Pakistan have reformed and given up this practice. And we being a secular state is still holding on to it, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told the Bench which is hearing the constitutional validity of triple talaq.

Turkey was always been ruled by military rulers but they also have matrimonial laws. Indonesia, Srilanka, Iran all have matrimonial laws. Iraq has a shia population and they also have matrimonial laws, the AG also said.

The AG said also said that if the SC strikes down triple talaq completely then the government will bring a divorce law for Muslims. The AG was replying to a question posed by the SC which had asked what would be the next course of action if triple talaq was struck down completely.

OneIndia News
Imran Khan discharged from hospital, to resume long march from same point where he was shot

Pak intruder shot dead by BSF at Gurdaspur, Punjab

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

A Pakistani intruder has been shot dead by the BSF at Gurdaspur, Punjab. The incident took place along the International Border with Pakistan. BSF personnel spotted some movement ahead of the fence at the IB.

The alleged intruder was moving around suspiciously which led to the action by the BSF. The intruder despite being challenged repeatedly did not pay heed and hence was shot dead by the BSF. The area has been cordoned off and search operations are on to find out if any more intruders were present.

This is the second such instances of an intruder from Pakistan being shot dead at the IB in two months. It may be recalled that in March a similar incident had taken place at the Paharipur border post in Gurdaspur.

OneIndia News
Morbi Bridge is not the only Incident - Quality of Bridges, roads and Highways in BJPs government!

Rajinikanth mania grips Chennai: Fans meet Thalaiva after 8 years

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Chennai, May 15: Finally, the day came when the die-hard fans of Tamil superstar Rajinikanth met their screen idol in person in Chennai on Monday.

Photographs of long queues of men and women waiting to meet Rajini Sir were taken by photographers of various media outlets in Chennai on Monday. The Tamil superstar, popularly known as Thalaiva, was dressed in black and greeted his fans with a big Namaste at a public meeting in Chennai on Monday.

The fan-star meeting is spread over a period of four days and going to end on May 19.

The meeting between Rajinikanth and his film followers came after a gap of eight years. Thus the mania surrounding the event is huge across Tamil Nadu. Reports say more than one lakh fans of Rajinikanth are likely to meet the veteran actor during the four-day meeting schedule.

The 66-year-old Kabali star will not hold any discussions with the fans, but will only pose for photographs with them, the sources said. As Rajinikanth has agreed to meet his fans, rumour mill has been in overdrive suggesting that the veteran actor might be joining politics soon.

Every time, Rajinikanth makes a public appearance, reports start flooding that the actor might take a plunge in politics--a step every Rajini fan and all political parties want him to take.

His fans have often asked their 'Thalaivar' (leader) to take the political plunge, even as he has been wooed by many political parties on account of his mass appeal. Invitations have been sent to respective fan clubs to attend the various sessions allotted to them between May 15 and 19.

The actor was slated to hold a similar meeting last month, but had postponed it on a request made by them for individual photographs for which more number of group interactions was required. The last such meeting with fans was in 2009, post his Sivaji success.

OneIndia News
Rajini will fail, he is a Marathi from Bengaluru: Swamy

India

oi-Anusha

Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha, Dr Subramanian Swamy attacked Superstar Rajinikanth calling his 'hints on politics a joke'. The BJP MP claimed that Rajinikanth has no clear cut ideology. "He is not even a Tamilian. He is a Marathi from Bengaluru," Subramanian Swamy mocked Rajinikanth.

His attacks come on the day Rajinikanth met his fans after eight years and spoke about the possibilities of entering politics. Even as he neither confirmed nor rejected taking the political plunge, Swamy declared that Rajini would fail as a politician. "The following that Rajinikanth has is not an ideological one but cult following and it is not good. Rajini will fail in politics. His talks of a 'political plunge if God decides' is a joke," Swamy said.

Swamy advised Rajinikanth to 'stay away from politics'. Reacting to Rajinikanth's statement that he would take the political plunge if 'God intended him to', Swamy said that actors were good at delivering dialogues. "People from cinema are good at giving statements since their dialogues are scripted by somebody else," he said. Swamy added that Rajinikanth has extended to too many parties in the past and was a 'mere distraction'.

Swamy's statement comes at a time when BJP leaders, including the party's candidate for the, now countermanded R K Nagar bypoll Gangai Amaran, tried to paint a picture of closeness with the superstar. After years, Rajinikanth met his fans on Monday giving way to speculation that he would soon don the politician's hat soon.

OneIndia News
UP: Five dead after bus hits dozen vehicles

2 dead, dozen injured in a bus-tanker collision in UP

UP ATS picks up two more accused in Al-Qaeda radicalisation case

UP: 4 dead, 4 severely injured in road accident on Yamuna Expressway

Ruckus marks Yogi Adityanath's first UP Assembly session

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

The Uttar Pradesh assembly on Monday witnessed pandemonium on the first day of session over law and order situation in the state.

Governor Ram Naik's speech in the joint assembly was disrupted by opposition parties as they raised banners and posters and came to the well of the house. Congress, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party leaders jointly led the mayhem in the house.

Also, in a bizarre incident, martials were seen fielding paper balls thrown at the Governor.

According to reports, 'whistles and catcalls' were blown by protesting MLAs. This the first assembly session of Yogi Adityanath as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.

Pandemonium in Uttar Pradesh assembly over law and order situation in the state. pic.twitter.com/vHzuFIafRZ  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 15, 2017

UP Minister Siddharth Nath Singh questioned the silence of former Uttar Pradesh CM Akhilesh Yadav over the ruckus. He said,'Akhilesh kept quiet, watched everything silently.Opposition blew whistles, threw paper balls at Governor, it shows their mindset'.

In the 403 members UP assembly, BJP has 312 seats. Major opposition parties: Samajwadi Party has 47 MLAs, Bahujan Samaj Party- 19 and Congress has only 7 members.

#WATCH Opposition protests in UP Assembly over law & order situation in the state; raised slogans on first day of the session pic.twitter.com/ZKj0YliKha  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 15, 2017

OneIndia News
'Save Dharna Chowk' protest turns violent in Hyderabad

India

oi-Anusha

Protest by opposition parties to reclaim 'Dharna Chowk' in Hyderabad turned violent on Monday. Protesters vandalised chairs, broke police barricades to enter the Dharna Chowk. Hundreds of protesters gathered near the Dharna Chowk despite a lack of permission to hold the protest.

Protesters led by Telangana Joint Action Committee condemned the K Chandrasekhar Rao government's move to shift the campus protest site to the city's outskirts from near the secretariat. Agitated protesters broke through police deployment, vandalised barricades, destroyed chairs set up and occupied the Dharna Chowk that was cordoned off.

Violence broke out after another group that was supporting the shifting of the venue clashed with members of TJAC protest. Both groups threw sticks, stones and chairs at each other. Police resorted to lathi-charge to disperse the crowd. TJAC members accused the TRS of engineering the clashes in an attempt to quell growing dissent against Chief Minister KCR.

M Kodandaram of the TJAC gave the protest call and opposition parties joined hands. Members of the Left parties, TDP, BJP, Congress, and Jana Sena came together to protest against the government's move to shift the iconic venue. Opposition parties are protesting against the shifting of Dharna Chowk, a one-kilometre stretch, that even saw the Telangana state agitation gain momentum.

Allegations were levelled against the TRS as well as the police for the clashes. Protesters accused the police of refusing to grant permission for a peaceful gathering despite representations from leaders across opposition parties. Protesters, nonetheless, gathered at the venue and attempted to enter the Dharna Chowk when clashes broke out. Supporters of TJAC have demanded that those people responsible for the clashes be identified by the police,

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 13:22 [IST]
Nike comes up with shoes that can be tied with smartphone

Shoes that make kids smile and save the environment

India

oi-Prabhpreet

By Prabhpreet

Have you ever asked yourselves, what happens to the shoes that you throw away? Ever imagined that instead of just throwing them, if you had given it away to the right people, you would not have only helped those who can't afford shoes but also helped save the environment?

The chance is that the answers to these questions, in most cases, would be a resounding no. But it would be surprising to know that something like this can be achieved by just taking care of who you give your old shoes to.

Shriyans Bhandari and Ramesh Dhami, two professional athletes, are the guys who can help you and your old shoes to bring a smile on kids faces and but also help protect the environment.

The duo, who started Greensole, the company which refurbishes old shoes and designs them into fashionable and trendy footwear for needy school kids.

It is done in a way which is not only environment- friendly, but also makes them easily affordable for those who can't buy trendy shoes normally.

They started their project in 2013, but now have more than 17 corporate partners to support their company and have already received recognition and praise from leaders such as Ratan Tata and Barack Obama.

The first step to their work starts with corporates and individuals donating their discarded shoes to their organisation, which works on them and turns them into almost new like footwears which are donated to underprivileged kids.

They also collect old shoes from across the country through drop boxes and some other collaboration from schools and colleges.

After they get them, there work on the shoes starts with washing, cleaning and separating them from the ones which can be used without renewing.

And they take extra care to avoid melting the shoes, which is the common method adopted by other shoe manufacturers but is hazardous to the environment.

Till now, they have donated several thousand shoes to village kids and have helped conserve the environment.

It is not very difficult to imagine how many kids can be helped if a small percentage of the nearly 300 million pairs, out of the 20 billion shoes produced, that are thrown away each year make to a company like Greensole.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 18:45 [IST]
Morbi Bridge is not the only Incident - Quality of Bridges, roads and Highways in BJPs government!

Sitaram Yechury accuses BJP of betraying people, failing to fulfil promises

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Agartala, May 15: The BJP has betrayed the people during its three years in power at the Centre and totally failed to fulfil its electoral promises, CPI-M General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said here on Monday.

The Communist Party of India-Marxist leader also wondered what all the celebrations planned by the BJP-led central government on completion of its three years in power were about, and added that it was rather a celebration of failure and betrayal.

"BJP has failed to fulfil every single promise they made to the people before the 2014 general elections," he told the media.

The CPI-M leader said that "the Bharatiya Janata Party had promised to generate two crore new jobs every year. No new jobs have, however, been provided, on the other hand thousands of people are losing their existing jobs," he said.

"On the industrial front, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Make in India, Startup India, Digital India and many more things. But no significant investment has been made in the last three years," Yechury said.

"What celebration BJP want to hold on May 26 on the completion of three years of the Modi government? This must be a celebration of failure and betrayal."

Yechury also accused the government of anti-farmer steps. "The government promised to increase the minimum support price of crops but that was not done."

The Left leader said that according to government figures, 12,000 to 16,000 farmers committed suicide every year since 2014.

He visited the Tripura capital on Monday while on way to address a public rally at Belonia in southern Tripura.

The National Democratic Alliance government will hold a programme in Guwahati in Assam on May 26 to mark its three years in office at the Centre. "The BJP-led government backtracked on its promise held out to an all-party delegation that visited the violence-hit state in September last year."

"The Centre said it will implement confidence-building measures and start a political dialogue with all stakeholders, did nothing in the last six months, leading to the situation turning from bad to worse," the CPI-M leader said.

"These private armies are taking laws in their hands. In the name of protecting laws, they are killing Dalits and members of the minority community. They are terrorising the people. We demand an immediate ban on all these private armies."

IANS

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 17:01 [IST]
First introduced in Dec 2016:

The special train 'Vaadi Ki Sair' was first introduced by Mehbooba Mufti in 2016 but was stopped during the winter vacations.

Vaadi Ki Sair for kids:

The idea of running a train exclusively for children was mooted in view of the fact that kids of the Valley have generally limited facilities of outing available locally. And this type of train ride would provide children an opportunity to explore different parts of Kashmir closely and help them mingle with children of other areas and districts.

About the train:

On every alternate Sunday the train service would take off from Banihal at 8.15 am and reach Baramulla at 10.40 am from where it would return back at 10.50 am to reach Banihal back at 01.35 pm. The train would again move from Banihal at 02.10 pm and reach Baramulla at 05.05 pm to finally return back at 05.15 pm for the day.

Train to run b/w Banihal to Baramulla

The train would have stops at Qazigund, Anantnag, Awantipora, Srinagar, Budgam and Sopore before reaching Baramulla. In today's inaugural run, students from Government run schools were taken on the ride but subsequently the facility would be thrown open to children of private schools as well.

Vaadi ki Sair reintroduced in Valley

After the train was re-introduced, around 450 school children from all districts of Kashmir and district Ramban of Jammu boarded the special train at different stations with the Education Minister joining the ride at Nowgam station in Srinagar.
UP Governor Ram Naik blames previous govts for state lagging behind others

India

oi-PTI

Lucknow, May 15: Governor Ram Naik today lauded the Yogi Adityanath dispensation for its "resolve" to transform Uttar Pradesh into a developed state, while indirectly blaming previous governments for the state lagging behind others.

In his 35-minute address, marred by uproar, to the joint sitting of the state legislature on the opening day of the first session of the new government, Naik said Uttar Pradesh was once a leading state, but for the past several years it has lagged behind other states. The chief minister was present when the governor read the 84-page address, which is a note prepared by the government highlighting its achievements.

"UP was once a leading state of the country, but in the past many years it has lagged, if compared to other states. It is the government's resolve to transform UP into a developed state with emphasis on 'Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas'," Naik said. He said the government would not follow the policy of appeasement but will commit towards the protection of interests of the people, while highlighting its initiatives in the past two months. On law and order, Naik said, "We pledge to ensure rule of law completely and a fearless and peaceful atmosphere. Anti- land mafia and anti-Romeo squads have been introduced to ensure safe society." "For effective crime control and legal action against criminals, regular monitoring is being made from range DIG level to DG police level besides directions have been given to lodge 100 per cent FIRs and act in fast and time bound manner," he said.

Some recent incidents of caste and communal disturbances gave opposition SP, BSP and Congress ammunition to pillory the government on the floor of the House, drowning the out the speech. On police recruitment, Naik said, an impartial and transparent recruitment procedure is in progress to fill vacancies of constables, sub-inspectors, inspectors and other posts in the police. Proposals for setting up new police stations, building construction, purchase of weapons and vehicles is under consideration, he said. The governor presented a brief sketch of the ongoing works of several departments in his address.

He said the budget for 2017-18 will be presented soon and certain important bills will be tabled. "I hope that all the members in the interest of common man will cooperate with government in fulfilling aspirations of the people besides manitaining honour and sanctity of the House," he said. "I hope that you will extend constructive cooperation to take the state on the path of speedy development", he added.

PTI

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 15:19 [IST]
Are you a vicim of cyber fraud? Here is the new national helpline number

WannaCry havoc: India issues red-coloured critical alert

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

A red-coloured critical alert has been issued in connection with the WannaCry attack that hit over 90,000 systems across 75 countries across the world including India. India's Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) said individuals or organisations are not encouraged to pay the ransom as this does not guarantee files will be released.

Report such instances of fraud to CERT-In and law enforcement agencies," a statement read.

The ransomware worm that stopped car factories, hospitals, shops and schools over the weekend worldwide, with Asia having escaped the worst so far, could wreak fresh havoc on Monday when employees log back on, cyber security experts have warned. Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks.

Code for exploiting that bug, known as "Eternal Blue", was released on the internet in March by a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers. The group claimed it was stolen from a repository of National Security Agency hacking tools.

The US cyber security researcher who helped halt the WannaCry attack, Darien Huss, said on Sunday that it wouldn't be difficult for those responsible to re-release it or for others to mimic it

Monday is expected to be a busy day, especially in Asia which may not have seen the worst of the impact yet, as companies and organisations turn on their computers.

Ransoms paid amount to tens of thousands of dollars, one analyst said, but it is generally predicted to surge when the deadline to pay the ransom approaches, and people start paying up once news spreads that payment solves the problem. One estimate put it as high as a billion dollars, but till Saturday, some $33,000 had been paid into the several bitcoin accounts associated with the ransomware, according to Elliptic, a company that tracks online financial transactions involving virtual currencies.

OneIndia News
"WannaCry" ransomware hits systems in Kerala, Kolkata

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Four computers in a panchyat office in Kerala have been suspected to be hit by "WannaCry," the ransomware. The incident took place at Waynad in Kerala at a panchyat office. The police and the cyber team is on the spot trying to assess the situation. The ransomware also hit systems in Aruvappalam Panchayat in Pathanamthitta, Kerala. A similar incident was reported at West Midnapore also at the State Electricity Distribution Company. The hit was reported in four locations in Kolkata.

Oops, your files have been encrypted, the message on the system read. On the left hand corner of the screen the hacker asks for a payment in order to restore the system. It also says if the payments are not made, the files would be lost. Further there are instructions given on what happened to the system. Instructions on whether the files could be recovered and also how to make the payment too have been given on the screen.

A red-coloured critical alert has been issued in connection with the WannaCry attack that hit over 90,000 systems across 75 countries across the world including India. India's Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) said individuals or organisations are not encouraged to pay the ransom as this does not guarantee files will be released. Report such instances of fraud to CERT-In and law enforcement agencies," a statement read.

The ransomware worm that stopped car factories, hospitals, shops and schools over the weekend worldwide, with Asia having escaped the worst so far, could wreak fresh havoc on Monday when employees log back on, cyber security experts have warned. Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks.

OneIndia News
Social media companies free to do business, but should be accountable to Indian laws: Ravi Shankar Prasad

Big step towards transparency: Prasad on first compliance report by Google, FB under new IT rules

If over 45 countries use Pegasus, why target just India?, asks Ravi Shankar Prasad

WannaCry ransomware not to impact Indian ATMs: RS Prasad

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

In the wake of WannaCry ransomware disrupting computer systems across the world, Union Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday said the malware will not impact India much.

"It has not had a significant impact on India. There have been some isolated incidents, we have controlled them. We are monitoring the entire situation," he told media personnel in the national capital.

Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of India has asked all banks to put in place a software update at ATMs to protect their systems from WannaCry ransomware that has attacked payment systems across the world.

According to a report, the RBI has asked banks to update specific Windows patches on ATMs urgently and not to operate ATM machines unless updates are in place.

In India, Four computers in a panchyat office at Waynad in Kerala have been suspected to be hit by WannaCry the ransomware. It was also reported at West Midnapore at the State Electricity Distribution Company.

[Avoid your ATM until RBI updates it to beat WannaCry ransomware]

However, ATM operators have denied that there was any threat to customer information and that could lead to theft of money from ATMs.

OneIndia News
Power cut in Chennai on November 8: These areas will be affected

Morbi Bridge is not the only Incident - Quality of Bridges, roads and Highways in BJPs government!

Yes, Rajinikanth wants to join politics, but not with wrong people

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Chennai, May 15: During his meeting with his fans on Monday in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, superstar Rajinikanth broke his silence regarding the much-discussed issue of whether the veteran actor would join politics or not.

[Also Read: Rajinikanth mania grips Chennai: Fans meet Thalaiva after 8 years]

In fact, the 66-year-old actor hinted his interest in joining politics. However, Rajinikanth is careful about not joining hands with 'wrong people'.

"If in case I decide to join politics, I won't allow wrong people to join me. I'll keep them away," Rajnikanth told his fans in Chennai.

Rajinikanth said that it was his 'mistake' to support a political alliance in the past. "I committed a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years ago, it was a political accident," he added.

Hundreds of die-hard fans of Tamil superstar met their screen idol in person in Chennai on Monday. Finally, the day came when die-hard fans of Tamil superstar Rajinikanth met their screen idol in person in Chennai on Monday.

Long queues of men and women waiting to meet Rajini Sir were taken by photographers of various media outlets in Chennai on Monday. The Tamil superstar, popularly known as Thalaiva, was dressed in black and greeted his fans with a big Namaste at the public meeting.

The fan-star meeting is spread over a period of four days and going to end on May 19.

The meeting between Rajinikanth and his film followers came after a gap of eight years. Thus the mania surrounding the event is huge across Tamil Nadu. Reports say more than one lakh fans of Rajinikanth are likely to meet the veteran actor during the four-day meeting period.

OneIndia News
Imran Khan discharged from hospital, to resume long march from same point where he was shot

Pak moves closer to China, hails controversial CPEC

International

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Pakistan moved closer towards China while hailing the controversial China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). During his address at the One Belt One Road (OBOR) conference, boycotted by New Delhi, in Beijing on Sunday, Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif said that the CPEC was an "economic undertaking open to all countries in the region.

He further said that it has no geographical boundaries" and it must not be politicised. India had said that, no country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told the OBOR conference that all countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major concerns.

Stating that China is a close friend and trusted ally, Sharif told the meet that the CPEC is a core project of OBOR. It has been rightly called its flagship because it aims to connect the neighbourhoods of East and West Asia. CPEC makes Pakistan both a conduit and destination for cross-regional investment and trade. Let me make it very clear that CPEC is an economic undertaking open to all countries in the region. It has no geographical boundaries. It must not be politicised. In implementing this corridor, we are not striving to merely leverage geography for economic prosperity, we are also trying to build a peaceful, connected and caring neighbourhood, Sharif also said.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 7:44 [IST]
The three times India and Pak faced off at the International Court of Justice

International

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

This Kulbhushan Jadhav case is not for the first time that India and Pakistan are having a face off at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The first time that the ICJ had to decide an India-Pakistan matter was in 1971. Pakistan had complained to the International Civil Aviation Organisation claiming that India had breached the International Civil Aviation Convention and the International Air Services Transit Agreement.

India had gone in appeal to the ICJ claiming that the Organisation's Council had no jurisdiction to decide Pakistan's complaint. By 14-2 votes, the ICJ dismissed the Indian appeal and determined that the Organization's Council did have the jurisdiction to hear Pakistan's claim. This matter was dropped by both the countries in 1976.

The second time both countries were at the ICJ was in 1973. That year Pakistan went to the ICJ alleging that India's proposed transfer of the 195 Pakistani prisoners of war held by India to Bangladesh for war crime trials was illegal. However the case was withdrawn after India and Pakistan signed the New Delhi Agreement in 1973.

In the year 1999 the Atlantique Incident was up before the ICJ. Pakistan dragged India to the ICJ stating that India had shot down the aircraft. India effectively presented its case that it has filed reservations to ICJ's jurisdiction under Article 36(2) of the Statute of the ICJ in matters involving members of the Commonwealth. The ICJ accepted India's arguments and dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction since Pakistan is a member of the Commonwealth and had filed that case under Article 36(2).

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Monday, May 15, 2017, 14:06 [IST]
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Komfie Manalo, Opalesque Asia:

The French election, the appreciation of the Euro against the U.S. dollar, the slowdown in U.S. economic growth and Frexit fears all contributed to the contrasting performance of hedge funds in April across all strategies, Lyxor Asset Management said in its monthly briefing.

Lyxor AM senior cross asset strategist Philippe Ferreira said that the victory of Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen was a relief for European risk assets in both equities and high yield credit. The victory also resulted for Frexit fears to recede.

"Ferreira said, "These market conditions led to contrasting performances across hedge fund strategies. The Lyxor Hedge Fund index was slightly down in April (-0.2%), as a result of negative returns experienced by global macro and CTA strategies. Both strategies were hampered by short positions on European currencies vs. USD. In parallel, momentum strategies were penalized by the announcement of general elections in the UK, which caused trend reversals across UK assets."

On a positive note, event driven, fixed income arbitrage and L/S equity indices were all positive in April, he added. In particular, the Lyxor Event Driven index outperformed, up 2% in April and 4.2% year to date (as of early May). Overall, higher positions on cyclical sectors such as financials and materials were rewarding.

Within event driven, Ferreira noted that merger arbitrage funds took the l......................

To view our full article Click here
Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva:

The Saemor Europe Alpha Fund returned 4% in April, thanks to its Growth and Quality styles as well as its Momentum strategies, while Fair Value and Cyclical Value metrics ended in the red.

According to the managers at Saemor Capital, "these trends indicate that we are moving closer towards the end stages of this economic cycle."

As the fund's performance in April has shown, they add, the latter part of the cycle is typically a good spot for their multi-factor approach, when high risk and cyclical value aren't the dominant styles anymore.

Saemor Capital is a specialist in quantitative investment management based in The Netherlands. The $473 fund is a market-neutral long/short equity hedge fund incepted in June 2008. It is up 5.3% YTD.

The fund's long positions in LVMH and Christian Dior contributed to the returns, just as LVMH announced it was to acquire Dior's shares that it did not yet own and regroup the entire Dior brand within the LVMH group. Longs in BE Semi Conductors and other cyclical names such as Kering, JD Sports, UPM, Michael Page, PEAB and Persimmon were also among the most successful holdings for the month. Negative contributors were mostly cyclicals, namely Indutrade and Cobham.

Among the European sectors, cyclicals dominated last month's performance, with Industrials, Consumer Discretionary and Financials outperforming, according to the man......................

To view our full article Click here
This past January, we highlighted a syllabus for a tentative course called Calling Bullshit, designed by two professors at the University of Washington, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West.

The coursealso sometimes called Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Dataended up being offered this spring. And now you can see how it unfolded in the classroom. The 10 video lectures from the class are available online. Watch them above, or at this YouTube playlist. Also find them housed in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.









According to The Seattle Times, the course achieved the academic version of a chart-topping pop single: At the UW [University of Washington], it reached its 160-student capacity shortly after registration opened this spring. And now colleges in Canada, France, Portugal, England and Australia have contacted the professors about teaching a version of the course this fall.

The course itself was premised on this basic idea: Bullshit is everywhere, and weve had enough. We want to teach people to detect and defuse bullshit wherever it may arise.

A longer overview of the course appears below. It was cited in our original post. And its worth highlighting again:

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit  and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. Were sick of it. Its time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument. What do we mean, exactly, by the term bullshit? As a first approximation, bullshit is language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence. While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms  and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course. Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.

If youre interested in watching the course, get started with Lecture 1: Introduction to Bullshit.

To learn more about the course, please visit this website.

If you would like to sign up for Open Cultures free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. Its hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks!

Related Content:

Calling Bullshit: See the Syllabus for a College Course Designed to Identify & Combat Bullshit

How to Spot Bullshit: A Primer by Princeton Philosopher Harry Frankfurt
Nanocellulose Market is Expected to Exceed US$ 700 Million by 2023

https://www.marketresearchengine.com/reportdetails/nanocellulose-market-report

https://www.marketresearchengine.com/

New York, May 11: Market Research Engine has published a new report titled as Nanocellulose Market By By Product Type (Nanocrystalline Cellulose, Nanofibrillated Cellulose, Bacterial Nanocellulose); By End-users (Composites, Oil & Gas, Paper Processing, Food & Beverages, Paints & Coatings, Personal Care, and Other - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast 2015 - 2023How Big is the Nanocellulose market?The global nanocellulose market is expected to exceed more than US$ 700 million by 2023; Growing at a CAGR of more than 33% in the given forecast period.Browse Full Report:Nanocellulose is a light-weight substance which is obtained from plant cellulose or wood pulp. The term usually refers to cellulose derivative nanofibrils which can be short rod shaped, long ribbon like or thread shaped. Nanocellulose is obtained through chemical or mechanical action of cellulose, a bio-polymer substance profusely obtainable across the world. Nanocellulose presents immense expansion potential owing to its superior mechanical, rheological, thermal and structural properties Vis a visa other cellulose based derived and nanomaterials. Unique property of nanocellulose includes high strength and low density, biodegradability and high aspect ratio.The major driving factors of Nanocellulose Market are as follows: Better quality structural properties of nano cellulose compared to its counter parts. Largesupport and funding from government projected to enhance Nanocellulose marketThe restraining factors of Nanocellulose market are as follows: Technical and economic difficulty coupled with low customer awareness this hampers market growth.The nanocellulose market is segmented on the lines of its product, end user and end user. Based on product segmentation it covers nanocrystalline cellulose, nanofibrillated cellulose and bacterial nanocellulose. Under end user segmentation it covers the nanocellulose markets geographic segmentation covers various regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. Each geographic market is further segmented to provide market revenue for select countries such as the U.S., Canada, U.K. Germany, China, Japan, India, Brazil, and GCC countries.This report provides:1) An overview of the global market for nanocellulose and related technologies.2) Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2013, estimates for 2014 and 2015, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2023.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for nanocellulose.4) Discussion of research and development, and the demand for new products and new applications.5) Comprehensive company profiles of major players in the industry.REPORT SCOPE:The scope of the report includes a detailed study of global and regional markets for Nanocellulose Market with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.The report covers detailed competitive outlook including the market share and company profiles of the key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include CelluForce Inc., American Process Inc., Innventia AB, UPM-Kymmene Oyj, Stor Enso Oyj, DAICEL FINECHEM Ltd., and Nippon Paper Industries Co. Ltd. Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.The Top Companies Report is intended to provide our buyers with a snapshot of the industrys most influential players.Nanocellulose Market has been segmented as below:By Product Segment Analysis: Nanocrystalline cellulose Nanofibrillated cellulose Bacterial nanocelluloseBy End-user Analysis: Composites Oil & gas Personal care Paper processing Paints & coatings Food & beverages Others (Including biomedical, electronics, pharmaceutical, etc.)By Regional Analysis :North AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificRest of the WorldReasons to Buy this Report:1) Obtain the most up to date information available on all nanocellulose market.2) Identify growth segments and opportunities in the industry.3) Facilitate decision making on the basis of strong historic and forecast of nanocellulose data.4) Assess your competitors refining portfolio and its evolution.About MarketResearchEngine.comMarket Research Engine is a global market research and consulting organization. We provide market intelligence in emerging, niche technologies and markets. Our market analysis powered by rigorous methodology and quality metrics provide information and forecasts across emerging markets, emerging technologies and emerging business models. Our deep focus on industry verticals and country reports help our clients to identify opportunities and develop business strategies.Media ContactCompany Name: Market Research EngineContact Person: John BayEmail: john@marketresearchengine.comPhone: +1-855-984-1862, +91-860-565-7204Country: United StatesWebsite:Address: 3422 SW 15 Street, Suite #8942, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442, United States
Pain Management Therapeutics Market is Expected to Exceed US$ 83 Billion by 2024

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New York, May 11: Market Research Engine has published a new report titled as Pain Management Therapeutics Market by Therapeutics Analysis (Antidepressants, Anesthetics, Anticonvulsants, Opioids (Oxycodones, Hydrocodones, Tramadol), Antimigraine Agents, Other Non-narcotic Analgesic); by Indication Analysis (Migraine, Cancer Pain, Neuropathic Pain, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Back Pain, Arthritic Pain, Post-operative Pain) - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast 2016 - 2024How Big is The Pain Management Therapeutics Market?The pain management therapeutics market is expected to exceed more than US$ 83 Billion by 2024; Growing at a CAGR of more than 3.5% in the given forecast period.Browse Full Report:Pain management is one of the branch of medicine which utilizes an inter punitive approach for improving the superiority and easing the suffering of life of persons who are living with the chronic pain. The usual pain management group consists of clinical psychologists, clinical nurse specialists, physician assistants, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, pharmacists and medical practitioners. Market analyst proposes that almost 20% of worlds population currently suffers from chronic pain. Factors that are increasing number of surgeries, changing lifestyle, increasing geriatric population and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases are responsible for growth in new patients every year.The major driving factors of pain management therapeutics market are as follows:Approving health care reforms and regulatory scenarioIncreasing approval of pain management therapeutics between end usersIncreasing in geriatric population with high risk of different diseasesGrowing frequency of chronic pain disordersThe restraining factors of pain management therapeutics market are as follows:Enduring pain relief from medical devices, alternative therapies and surgical proceduresPrescription drug exploitationExclusive rights expiry of entry of generics and key drugsThe pain management therapeutics market is segmented on the lines of its therapeutics, indication and regional. Based on therapeutics segmentation it covers antimigraine agents, non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs, anesthetics, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, opioids and other non narcotic analgesic. Opioidsis further segmented into tramadol, hydrocodones, oxycodaones and others such as methadone, meperidine, fentanyl, codeine, morphine. Based on indication segmentation the pain management therapeutics market covers cancer pain, post operative pain, migraine, arthritic pain, chronic back pain, fibromyalgia and neuropathic pain. The pain management therapeutics marketis geographic segmentation covers various regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. Each geography market is further segmented to provide market revenue for select countries such as the U.S., Canada, U.K. Germany, China, Japan, India, Brazil, and GCC countries.This report provides:1) An overview of the global market for pain management therapeutics and related technologies.2) Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2013, estimates for 2014 and 2015, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2024.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for pain management therapeutics.4) Discussion of research and development, and the demand for new products and new applications.5) Comprehensive company profiles of major players in the industry.REPORT SCOPE:The scope of the report includes a detailed study of global and regional markets for pain management therapeutics with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.The report covers detailed competitive outlook including the market share and company profiles of the key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include Abbott Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Depomed, Inc., Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc, Johnson & Johnson, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, Merck & Co., Inc., Novartis AG, Pfizer, Inc., Purdue Pharma L.P., and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited. Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary,business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.The Top Companies Report is intended to provide buyers with a snapshot of the industrys most influential players.The Pain management therapeutics Market has been segmented as below:By Therapeutics AnalysisAntimigraine agentsNon steroidal anti inflammatory drugsAnestheticsAntidepressantsAnticonvulsantsOpioidsTramadolHydrocodonesOxycodaonesOthers (Methadone, Meperidine, Fentanyl, Codeine, Morphine)Other non narcotic analgesicBy Indication AnalysisCancer painPost operative painMigraineArthritic painChronic back painFibromyalgiaNeuropathic painBy Regional AnalysisNorth AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificRest of the WorldReasons to Buy this Report:1) Obtain the most up to date information available on all pain management therapeutics market globally.2) Identify growth segments and opportunities in the industry.3) Facilitate decision making on the basis of strong historic and forecast of pain management therapeutics data.4) Assess your competitors refining portfolio and its evolution.About MarketResearchEngine.comMarket Research Engine is a global market research and consulting organization. We provide market intelligence in emerging, niche technologies and markets. Our market analysis powered by rigorous methodology and quality metrics provide information and forecasts across emerging markets, emerging technologies and emerging business models. Our deep focus on industry verticals and country reports help our clients to identify opportunities and develop business strategies.Media ContactCompany Name: Market Research EngineContact Person: John BayEmail: john@marketresearchengine.comPhone: +1-855-984-1862, +91-860-565-7204Country: United StatesWebsite:Address: 3422 SW 15 Street, Suite #8942, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442, United States
Physiotherapy Equipment Market Dominate in North America by 2020

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New York, May 11: Market Research Engine has published a new report titled as Global Physiotherapy Equipment Market Research Study 2015-2020The global physiotherapy equipment market to grow at a CAGR of 6.35% over the period 2014-2020.Browse the full report here:Physiotherapy is a technique that uses various procedures and equipment to relieve physical ailments. It has evolved from a simple massage to a complex variety of treatments. It is an essential part of rehabilitation after surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation procedures to promote mobility. Physiotherapy plays a significant role for physically challenged people and provides relief to the patients with injuries and chronic disorders such as stroke, arthritis, and cerebral palsy.Covered in this reportThe report covers the current scenario and the growth prospects of the global physiotherapy equipment market for the period of 2015-2020. To calculate the market size, the report considers revenue generated through sales of the following product categories: Equipment AccessoriesGlobal Physiotherapy Equipment 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 market and its growth prospects in the coming years. The report includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.by Geography Americas APAC EMEAby Vendors BTL Industries DJO Global Enraf-Nonius Patterson MedicalMarket Driver Increasing incidence of chronic diseases For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket Challenge Availability of alternative therapies For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket Trend Technological advancements For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this report What will the market size be in 2020 and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?About MarketResearchEngine.comMarket Research Engine is a global market research and consulting organization. We provide market intelligence in emerging healthcare technologies, niche technologies and markets. Our market analysis powered by rigorous methodology and quality metrics provide information and forecasts across emerging markets, emerging technologies and emerging business models. Our deep focus on industry verticals and country reports help our clients to identify opportunities and develop business strategies.Media ContactCompany Name: Market Research EngineContact Person: John BayEmail: john@marketresearchengine.comPhone: +1-855-984-1862, +91-860-565-7204Website:Address: 3422 SW 15 Street, Suite #8942, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442, United States
Graphene Market to Grow Globally

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Graphene is a crystallized form of carbon that is million times thinner than human hair or a sheet of paper. It is extremely flexible, highly conductive, and possesses high level of heat resistance as compared to copper and silver.This wonder material absorbs 2% of light and hence,is almost perfectly transparent, impermeable to gases, and chemical components can be added to alter its properties. These attributes of the material enables its incorporation into a wide range of applications in end-use industries such as energy, aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and electronics. Earlier, graphene was artificially produced through mechanical exfoliation process resulting into mono layer of graphite, which is only 1 atom thick. This thinnest material was unstable when exposed to high temperature and air. Superlative materials were manufactured by adding layers and these compounds had potential for its use in more applications.With the advent of technology, the development of exceptional properties of graphene resulted into its combination with other two dimensional semiconductor crystals, which improved the efficiency of the superconductor.To know more about the key players in this market, get in Touch With us for a FREE sample of this report:Global Graphene Market TaxonomyThe global graphene market is classified on the basis of the following segments:By product typeMono- & bi-layerMulti layeredGraphene oxideGraphene nano-plateletsOthersApplicationEnergyAerospace & DefenseAutomotiveBiomedical & life sciencesCoatingsCompositesSensorsElectronicsOthersPrevalent Scenario in Graphene MarketSilicon is second most common element found on Earth and hence is very cheap and is largely manufactured across the globe. Silicon is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity and is widely used in energy storage and electronic applications. However, power consumption is a major concern in conventional silicon-based devices. Graphene is a cost-effective substitute to silicon due to its attributes such as flexibility, high thermal conductivity, and high electrical conductivity. It also runs cooler than silicon and exhibits superior energy harvesting properties.This acts as a key driver for the global graphene market. Due to these key attributes, graphene has attracted major R&D investments of over US$ 1.3 billion committed by the European Commission under graphene flagship projects since 2015. Such government initiatives play a vital role in development and innovation of graphene for wide range of applications.Stalwarts of the electronics and IT industry,such as Apple, Samsung, and IBM are focusing on filing patents for graphene-based technologies developed by them. For instance use of graphene in mobile devices & wearables, graphene membranes for aerospace, and graphene for 3D printing applications. Increasing number of patents has resulted into promising applications of graphene in electronics industry.The energy storage and conversion applications are the fastest growing application of graphene market due to increasing use of graphene owing to its high energy density and fast charging cycle.Browse Global Strategic Business Report :The key restraint for the graphene lies in manufacturing large quantities in different varieties, at affordable prices, while ensuringeffective yields. Lack of band gap as compared to silicon is another restraint which results in lower stability in terms of electrical conductivity. High costs to overcome these restraints and high research and development investments hamper growth of the graphene market.North America contributes a major market share due to its growing automobile and electronics industries as well as energy sector. AsiaPacific market is expected to expandat the highest CAGR due to rampant growthof the electronics market in emerging economies such as China and India. Also, China has the largest graphite reserve in the world and hence, it is the largest global producer of graphene.In spite of the niche nature, the market has high potential and large number of manufacturers are focusing on offering innovative products to enhancetheir market share.Fragmented MarketThe global graphene market is highly fragmented due to the participation of many established and emerging players in the digital genome market. Major players involved in the market include CVD Equipment Corporation (U.S.), Graphene NanoChem Plc. (Malaysia), Graphenea SA (Spain), Grafoid Inc. (Canada), Haydale Graphene Industries Plc (U.K.), Group NanoXplore Inc. (Canada), Thomas Swan & Co., Ltd. (U.K.), Vorbeck Materials (U.S.), 2D Carbon Tech Inc. Ltd. (China), and XG Sciences Inc. (U.S.).About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit Coherent Market Insights Blog @Connect with us on LinkedIn @
Elastomeric Coating Market  Global Industry Insights  2024

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Elastomeric coating is higher volume solid as compared to conventional paints. The main advantage of elastomeric coatings is that it helps secure hairline cracks on the surface. These coatings tend to stretch on these surfaces and thus, provide basic protection to the applied surface from external damage. This has propelled the use of elastomeric coatings in the construction industry. Elastomeric coatings are used extensively on mineral surfaces which develop cracks due to temperature variation. Elastomeric coatings offer numerous advantages such as high solid residue as compared to paints, excellent physical and chemical resistance, and exceptional transparency, glossy finish when used with metals.Elastomeric coatings have received increased acceptance amongst various end users due to properties such as enhanced durability and resistance to temperature variations unlike conventional paints. Elastomeric coatings are also used to coat the surface of plastic parts used in the automotive industry. Elastomeric coatings can also be applied on metals such as steel, which has a hydrophilic nature and if left unprotected can eventually leads to corrosion. Elastomeric coatings are also applied on roofs to provide cooling effect and protect concrete roofs from damage due to varying climatic conditions.Request a sample copy of this report:Elastomeric Coating Market TaxonomyOn the basis of type of product type global market is classified into:SiliconeButylPolyurethaneAcrylicOn the basis of application, the global market is segmented into:Wall coatingsHorizontal surface coatingsRoof coatingsWall coating product segment is expected to remain dominant in the global elastomeric coating market, due to its wide application in the construction industry. Wall coatings offer properties such as water resistance to the surface. Roof coatings offer numerous advantages such as high tensile strength, thermal emissivity, dirt resistance, substrate adhesion, and solar reflectivity. This has increased the consumption of roof coatings in the last few years, which has augmented growth of elastomeric coating market. Acrylic coatings are used in wall coatings, roof coatings and also for surface coatings and thus, remains the most widely used elastomeric coatings product. Acrylic coatings provide excellent color retention property in outdoor conditions.Elastomeric Coating Market Outlook  Burgeoning demand for Waterproof and Durable Coatings to support Flourishing Construction SectorAsia Pacific is expected to be the most potential market for elastomeric coating manufacturers. Asia Pacific is projected to witness relatively high growth in terms of value over the forecast period. Growing population coupled with rapidly increasing construction and automotive industries is expected to fuel demand for elastomeric coatings in the region. This trend is expected to sustain over the forecast period. According to India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF)a trust by the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of Indiaby the end of FY20 the Indian construction industry is expected to reach a value of US$ 5 billion. Increasing demand for high quality and sustainable structures is increasing consumption of elastomeric coatings. Rapid growth of the construction industry in Asia Pacific is a key driver for the market.Click here to know more about this report:Fluctuating prices of raw materials is expected to be one of the restraining factors for the growth of elastomeric coating market over the forecast period. Coating resin used for manufacturing elastomeric coating is derived from petroleum products, something that is subject to high price volatility. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) regulations govern the elastomeric coatings market. The National Volatile Organic Compounds Emissions standards enforced by the According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency aims to reduce VOC emissions by 90,000 tons per year in order to reduce environmental impact. To reduce VOC content in Hong Kong, the government has passed many regulations to prohibit import and manufacture of products which exceed the VOC content limit. Continuous research and development to find alternatives to raw materials such as use of vegetables oils and production methods to reduce VOC emissions is one of the key strategies adopted by the top players in elastomeric coating industry. Some of the companies operating in the global elastomeric coating market are BASF SE, Progressive Paintings Inc., The Dow Chemical Company, Sherwin Williams Company, PPG Industries Inc., Industria Chimica Adriatica SpA, Nippon Paints, Clariant, The Valspar Corporation, and Rodda Paints, among others.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #320000A0Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Formaldehyde-free Resin Market - Global Industry Insights 20162024

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Formaldehyde-free Resin Market OverviewFormaldehyde-free resin is an excellent replacement of the conventional urea-formaldehyde and phenol-formaldehyde resins used for insulation purpose in furniture, adhesive and construction industry. Formaldehyde-free resins are also used in the textile industry to increase the color retention of various shades of jeans. The phenol-formaldehyde (PF) resin industry is facing an increasing challenge with respect to concerns regarding human health owing to the consumption of carcinogenic formaldehyde. Also inclusion of petroleum-based phenol in PF resin manufacturing poses risk towards sustainability.Formaldehyde-free resin offer enhanced moisture resistance, excellent adhesion and cure performance when used in wood adhesives for industrial as well as residential applications. This has led to increase in the use of formaldehyde-free resin in the adhesive industry, which has amplified the growth of formaldehyde-free resin market. Formaldehyde-free resins are also used for binding fiberglass filaments in the fabrication of industrial nonwovens, including fiberglass webs used in roofing insulation, flooring, and HVAC filters.Request a sample copy of this report:Formaldehyde-free Resin Market TaxonomyOn the basis of product type global market is classified into:Wood AdhesiveFiberglass AdhesiveFoil Bonding AdhesiveMineral Fiber AdhesiveOn the basis of end use industry, the global market is segmented into:AutomobileTextileChemicalsFurnitureConstructionAdhesiveOn the basis of application, the global market is segmented into:Commercial and Industrial insulationResidential InsulationWood adhesives are extensively used in the furniture industry and offer enhanced benefits such as excellent adhesion to wood, improved rigidity and flexibility balance, and good resistance to water and fatigue. Fiberglass substrates used in the chemicals, automotive, infrastructure industry are bonded with adhesives which provide corrosion resistance and electrical insulation properties. In chemical industry, formaldehyde-free resins are used as binders in various processes. In textile industry resin finishing offers various advantages such as less tendency to creasing, improved shape retention and dimensional stability, softer and smoother fabric surface, easier to iron, improved wet fastness of dyeings and prints, less prone to color loss, better appearance and therefore more durable, less tendency to pilling, greater wash resistance of mechanically produced luster, especially of fiber blends and stiffening embossed finishes, water-repellents and oil-repellents.Formaldehyde-free Resin Market Outlook  Stringent Regulations on the use of Formaldehyde Expected to Propel DemandStringent laws restricting the use of formaldehyde resins have forced the manufacturers and end users to opt for formaldehyde-free alternatives in the resin market. The World Health Organizations International Agency for Research on Cancer, in June 2004 categorized formaldehyde as a group l chemical, which indicates it is carcinogenic to humans. As a result, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the U.S. regulated the acceptable exposure level of formaldehyde as 1 ppm. This has propelled consumption of formaldehyde-free resins in construction, adhesive and furniture industries, which has augmented growth of formaldehyde-free resin market. Asia Pacific has a major share in volume in the formaldehyde-free resin market. This is mainly attributed to budding urbanization and modern infrastructural needs in the emerging economies of the region.Click here to know more about this report:High price of the formaldehyde-free resin is expected to be one of the restraining factors for the growth of formaldehyde-free resin industry over the forecast period. Research and development related to lowering the cost of the formaldehyde resin in the near future is one of the key strategies implemented by the market players to maintain their position. Some of the companies operating in the global formaldehyde-free resin market are Georgia-Pacific Chemicals LLC., The Dow Chemical Company, DSM, ARCL Organics Ltd., allnex group, Emerald Performance Materials, BASF SE, and Hexion.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #320000A0Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Polyacrylamide Market - Global Industry Insights 20162024

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Polyacrylamide is made up of acrylamide monomer and is water-soluble. It increases the viscosity of water and facilitates the flocculation of particles present in water.Polyacrylamide is used for water treatment and sludge dewatering of municipal wastewater, industrial wastewater, potable water treatment, air flotation, and primary settling. The wide use of polyacrylamide in wastewater treatment has fueled growth of polyacrylamide market globally. Polyacrylamide supports are usually gelatinous in appearance and soft in nature. They also exhibit low nonspecific binding character toward biomolecules, buffer stability, good pH and owing to totally synthetic nature, are resistant to microbial growthAnionic polyacrylamide appear as white powder and have a molecular weight ranging from 6 to 25 million water soluble. This enables it to be dissolved in water in any proportion and insoluble in organic solvents. Characteristics include effective PH range of 7-14, high-polymer electrolyte, and electrolyte salt sensitive. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis is suitable for separation of molecules by size and can be applied in different systems subject to the sample and downstream applications. Polyacrylamide gels thinner than agarose gels are poured between glass plates. This facilitates resolving power albeit, allowing the investigator with the separation of nucleic acid molecules above a much larger size range.Request a sample copy of this report:Polyacrylamide Market TaxonomyOn the basis of type of material, the global market is classified into:AnionicCationicNon-ionicOn the basis of end-use industry, the global market is segmented into:Mineral ProcessingWastewater treatmentPulp and PaperOil recoveryIn mineral processing, polyacrylamide is used for settlement/clarification of fine coal slurry in the thickening vessels, enhancement of solid-liquid separation coal with the help of filtration/centrifugation, settlement/clarification of the waste slurry and enhancement of solid-liquid separation of the tailings. In the paper and pulp industry, polyacrylamide is used as retention agent, dry strength agents and for filter aid. This has resulted in improved paper quality, enhanced physical strength of paper and reduced fiber loss. Drilling fluid additives, waste mud dewatering, enhanced oil recovery, oily water clarification, scale inhibition and as a drag reduced agentPolyacrylamide Market Outlook  Rapid growth of Water treatment Market to Augment Demand for PolyacrylamideExcellent flocculating and coagulating properties has rapidly increased consumption of polyacrylamide in wastewater treatment. Asia Pacific is expected to be the most potential market for polyacrylamide manufacturers. This is attributed to booming mining industry in emerging economies such as India and China. According to IBEF, in 2015, India produced 91.46 million tons (MT) of finished steel and is the third-largest steel producer in the world. Rapidly increasing urbanization and allied sectors have caused a surge in mining activities and boosted the growth of polyacrylamide market. India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF) is a Trust founded by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Department of Commerce in collaboration with the Government of India with the aim of promoting and creating international awareness of goods manufactured in India.Click here to know more about this report:Fluctuating prices of raw material such as acrylonitrile is expected to be one of the restraining factors for growth of synthetic rope market over the forecast period. Mergers and expansions is one of the key strategies adopted by the top players in the polyacrylamide market to maintain their position. In April 2016, BASF SE set up a new bio-acrylamide manufacturing facility in Bradford. This will complement the companys product portfolio of polyacrylamide with improved supply reliability and operational efficiency. Some of the major companies operating in the global polyacrylamide market are Shandong Shuiheng Chemical Co., Ltd., The Dow Chemical Company, Kemira, Ashland Inc., BASF SE, Beijing Heng- Chemical Group Co., Ltd., Shandong Zibo East Polymer Co., Ltd., Group, and Xitao Polymer Co., Ltd.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #320000A0Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Protective Clothing Market - Global Industry Insights 20162024

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Protective clothing includes high-visibility vests, footwear, respiratory aids, gloves, helmets, harnesses, and eye protection gear. These find application in various working environments that are deemed hazardous for legs and feet, such as dampness, falling objects, cuts, slips, chemical spillages, and abrasive materials. The need for prevention such hazards has led to the increased consumption of oil and chemical resistant soles on shoes and boots, safety boots with steel toe caps, leggings, and gaiters. This has augmented growth of protective clothing market across the globeWhile working with chemicals exhibiting a high acute toxicity and corrosive materials in high concentrations, gloves are used based on chemical compatibility. In construction industry, fall arresting systems such as body harnesses, lifelines, and other accompanying equipment are used when fall hazards cannot be controlled by railings, floors, and nets. Protective clothing is used in the healthcare industry to prevent transmission of microorganisms such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Staphylococcus aureus.Request a sample copy of this report:Protective clothing Market TaxonomyOn the basis of type of material, the global market is classified into:AramidPolyamidePolyolefinsCotton FibersPBIUHMW PolyethyleneLaminated PolyestersOn the basis of end-use industry, the global market is segmented into:ConstructionOil & GasMiningHealthcareMilitaryManufacturingOn the basis of application, the global market is segmented into:ThermalChemicalMechanicalBiological/RadiationVisibilityIn the chemicals industry, protective clothing is used for protection against liquid chemicals such as sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, and also from hazardous gases. It is also used for protection from flame, welding, heat, and sparks from molten metal. Polyamide clothing offers various benefits such as protection against flames, high mechanical strength, excellent thermo stability, high chemical resistance, and protection against gas emissions. Protective clothing is used in the construction, chemicals, and oil& gas industries, owing to properties such as inherent non-flammability, high durability, and excellent dimensional stability resistance to chemicals and heat. Waterproof suits, breathing masks, and helmets are widely used in the mining industry.Protective Clothing Market Outlook  Increasing Safety Concerns and Hazard Prevention Expected to Fuel DemandHazardous work environment and stringent regulations for employee safety has rapidly amplified the consumption of protective clothing globally. Laws such as The Construction (Head Protection) Regulations 1989, The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, The Control of Lead at Work Regulations 2002, The Ionising Radiations Regulations 1999, The Noise at Work Regulations 1989, The Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002 and others have inadvertently boosted growth of the protective clothing market. Asia Pacific is expected to be the most potential market for elastomeric coating manufacturers. The market in the region is projected to witness relatively high growth in terms of value over the forecast period. Growing population coupled with rapidly increasing manufacturing and allied industries is expected to fuel demand for protective clothing in the region, which in turn is anticipated to enhance the protective clothing industry.Click here to know more about this report:High initial price of the protective clothing is expected to be one of the restraining factors for the growth of the protective clothing market over the forecast period. Innovation in products and expansions in different geographies are some of the key strategies adopted by the top players in the protective clothing market. In 2016, Honeywell announced investment of US$ 100 million for expansion of the Asia Pacific regional headquarters and R&D facilities in Shanghai. This would complement the companys network of R&D facilities across the globe. Some of the major companies operating in the market globally are 3M Company, Kimberly Clark Corp, Ansell Limited, Lakeland industries, Honeywell International Inc., Royal Ten Cate, Sioen Industries NV, and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #320000A0Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Nanocellulose Market to Grow Globally

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Nanocellulose is a lightweight material processed from plant cellulose or wood pulp. Nanocellulose is produced through chemical or mechanical treatment of cellulosea biopolymer material abundantly available in nature. Nanocellulose finds wide application across various industries, owing to characteristics such as superior mechanical, thermal, rheological, and structural properties. Unique properties of nanocellulose include high aspect ratio, biodegradability, high strength, and low density. Nanocellulose can be employed in virtually every field. It can be used as rheological modifier in oilfield chemicals and oxygen barrier in packaging films. Nanocellulose can potentially replace certain petrochemical-based products and it is relatively cheaper than conventionally used high-performance nanoscale materials.To know more about the key players in this market, get in Touch With us for a FREE sample of this report:Nanocellulose is made from a tightly bonded group of needle-like crystals that makes it incredibly hard. As compared to steel, the strength-to-weight ratio of nanocellulose is eight times higher, making it an ideal material for building strong and light body armor. In the production of nanocellulose, the first stage includes removal of non-cellulose impurities from the wood pulp with the help of a high pressure homogenizer. This is then followed by a process of separating the cellulose fibers by gently beating the mixture. This results in the formation of a thick paste with needle-like crystalsnanocellulose. Nanocellulose is used to enhance the mechanical properties of thermosetting resins, rubber latex, soy protein, and starch-based matrixes.Nanocellulose Market TaxonomyOn the basis of product type, the global market is classified into:Cellulose nanocompositesCellulose nanocrystalsCellulose nanofibrilsOn the basis of end-use industry, the global market is segmented into:BiomedicineComposites and PackagingPaper and Paper boardRheology ModifierFlexible Electronics and SensorsCellulose nanofibrils (CNF) are also known as nanofibrillar cellulose (NFC). Cellulose nanofibrils are advanced biomaterial produced primarily from renewable agricultural and forest resources that have proved exceptional performance in composites. Nanocellulose-based sensors are used to monitor stress levels of structures such as bridges. Nanocellulose is also used as a food packaging material as a substitute to polystyrene-based foams. It prevents the wastage of food contents and oxygen penetration in the food contents. In biomedicine industry, nanocellulose is used in pharmaceutical formulations in a powdered form. In cosmetics industry, nanocellulose is used in hair, nails, eyebrows or eyelashes as a composite coating agent.Browse Global Strategic Business Report :Nanocellulose Market Outlook  Increasing Demand for Durable and Light Weight Materials across Industries Fueling Market GrowthRapidly growing pharmaceuticals and packaging industries is one the major factors underpinning growth of the global nanocellulose market. Asia Pacific is one of the major contributors in the nanocellulose market. This is mainly attributed to the booming industries in developing countries such as India and China. The Indian pharmaceuticals industry accounted for total revenue of US$ 31 billion in 2016. This is augmented by various government initiatives such as Make In India, which has attracted many foreign investors in the region. To meet the increasing demand for products, in December 2015, the Department of Pharmaceuticals under the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers launched the Cluster Development Programme for Pharma Sector (CDP-PS).Research and development for increasing the area of application is one of the key strategy adopted by the top players in nanocellulose market. Innovative products such as aerogels, bioactive materials composites, and inorganic/organic hybrid materials are under development. Research is also being carried out for using Nanocellulose in the manufacturing of vehicles, owing to properties such as lightweight and high strength. Some of the major companies operating in the global nanocellulose market are Daicel Corporation, American Process, Inc., Chuetsu Pulp & Paper Co., Ltd., Novozymes , Borregaard Chemcell, Daio Paper Corporation, Imerys, Kruger Bioproducts, Inc, Stora Enso Ltd., Ineos Bio, Innventia, Ashai Kasei Chemicals Corporation, Shanghai Rongou Chemical Technology Co., Ltd and Innventia AB,.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit Coherent Market Insights Blog @Connect with us on LinkedIn @
Gaffers Tape Market - Global Industry Insights 20162024

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Gaffers tape is meant for temporary use and is designed accordingly so as to leave no residue once removed. Earlier, duct tape was introduced in the packaging industry which created a revolution in the market. Duct tape is least preferred in the construction industry as it does not fare well in conditions wherein it is subjected to cooling and heating of the surface. The temperature variation causes the adhesion to fail over time. Gaffers tape was introduced in the market with improved properties and better performance despite temperature fluctuations. Packaging industry has seen a revolution in over the last decade with introduction of carton sealing, void fill, and pallet wrapping. Rising adoption of carton sealing in turn has increased demand for industrial tapes. Gaffers tape has witnessed increased acceptance due to growing demand for industrial tapes in the global packaging industry.Gaffers tape, also known as camera tape, is a heavy cotton cloth pressure-sensitive tape that has high adhesive properties. Gaffers tape provides packaging companies with the freedom to use any type of packaging material without the use of solvent. The extensive growth of industrial tape industry has in turn propelled demand for gaffers tape. This trend is expected to continue over the foreseeable future. This is mainly attributed to increased consumption of gaffers tape in the construction, electronic, and automotive industries, among others.Request a sample copy of this report:Gaffers Tape Market TaxonomyOn the basis of product type the global market is classified into:Cartoon fastening tapeMasking tapeElectrical tapeDouble sided tapeOn the basis of backing material, the global market is classified into:PolypropylenePVCPaperOn the basis of appearance, the global market is classified into:GlossMattOn the basis of application, the global market is classified into:AutomotivePackagingHealth and HygieneBuilding and ConstructionElectrical and ElectronicsThe application of gaffers tape has increased rapidly in the electronic industry owing to its properties such as adhesive holding capability, easy removability, and relatively better moisture resistance as compared to other conventionally used tapes such as duct tape, box sealing tape and adhesive tape. Masking tape is widely used in the decorating industry as it does not leave any residue on the surface. Gaffer tape is widely used in the film industry in stage decoration, to hold down lights and cables on the platform and for marking instruments.Gaffers Tape Market Outlook - Increasing Electrical and Electronics Industry Growth Leading to Augmented Demand for Gaffers TapeAsia Pacific is one of the largest markets for gaffers tape. This is mainly attributed to the rapidly growing construction industry in this region. According to India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF)a trust by the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India,in FY2020 the Indian construction Industry is estimated to reach a value of US$ 5 billion. This inadvertently would boost growth of gaffers tape market in India. Also, gaffers tape market is expected to receive a boost in APAC region due to wide availability of Polypropylene, PVC, which is used as raw material for production of gaffers tape. Also the growth in automotive industry has further fueled consumption of gaffers tape in Asia Pacific region.Click here to know more about this report:With high ease of entrance for new manufacturers, the global gaffers tape industry has become highly fragmented. This had led to competition among manufacturers. This is expected to be one of the restraining factors in the gaffers tape market. However, the present focus of manufacturers is towards introducing ecofriendly technology in the market. The major players have adopted this strategy to maintain their position in the market. This approach is also expected to prove beneficial for the new entrants in the gaffers tape market over the forecast period. Some of the companies operating in the global gaffers tape market are KGaA, 3M Company, Avery Dennison, Can-Do National Tape, The Dow Chemical Company, Ashland Inc., H.B Fuller, Henkel AG & Co., Le Mark Group, and PROTAPES AND SPECIALTIES, INC.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #320000A0Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Potassium Sulphate Market  Global Industry Insights 20162024

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Potassium Sulphate Market OverviewPotassium sulphate, commonly known as sulphate of potash (SOP), is a water soluble white crystalline salt that finds wide application in the pharmaceuticals industry. In the food industry, potassium sulphate is used as a source of macronutrients potassium and sulphate. Increasing use of potassium sulphate in the food industry as flavoring agent and as an adjuvant has resulted in rampant growth of the potassium sulphate market in the recent past. Potassium sulphate used in food industry is manufactured in accordance with the Food Chemicals Codex regulation implemented by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Potassium sulphate is commonly used in the agriculture industry as a fertilizer for sensitive crops such as flowers, fruits & vegetables, tobacco, turf & ornamentals, among others. Use of potassium sulphate as a fertilizer results in improved quality of agricultural produce, enhanced nutritional value of fruits & vegetables, and is a nitrogen-free source of potassium, as growers find it difficult to match the nitrogen input required for the growth of crops. The increased demand for food has resulted in burgeoning growth of the agricultural industry, which in turn fuels demand for fertilizers to provide quality of agricultural products. Asia-Pacific is the largest consumer of potassium sulphate for agricultural application.Request a sample copy of this report:Global Potassium Sulphate Market TaxonomyThe global potassium sulphate market is classified on the basis of the following segments:ProcessMannheim ProcessSulphate Salts ReactionBrine ProcessingOthersApplicationAgricultureIndustrialPharmaceuticalCosmeticsFoodOthersPrevalent Scenario in Potassium Sulphate MarketGrowing consumption of potassium sulphate as a feedstock for procuring macronutrients, ingredients, activator and nutrient salt across various industries is fueling growth of the potassium sulphate market. The potassium sulphate products offered by the manufacturers are in line with current trend of applications of the products such as in specialty fertilizers, lubricants for wire drawing, production of insulin, and extraction of precious metals such as biobleaching.Potassium sulphate is incorporated into wide range of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and food applications. These are in turn governed by various regulatory bodies, especially in U.S. and Europe, to human health safety. Potassium sulphate is used as an ingredient in food industry in accordance to the level specified by FDA in section 184.1 (b) (1) and the maximum percentage of potassium sulphate used in non-alcoholic beverages is 0.015 which is defined by FDA in section 170.3 (n) (3).Safety of the products is a major concern as potassium sulphate used as ingredient in manufacturing the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food products can have adverse allergic reactions. As the pharmaceutical & personal care, food industry is expanding, there increasing number studies carried on safety of these products and are regulated by related authorities which has become a tasks for the manufacturers to keep updated and aware of the ingredient used in these products. The companies are therefore manufacturing grades of potassium sulphate products which can be used for specific applications. For instance, American Elements (U.S.) manufactures technical grade, food grade, agriculture grade, pharmaceutical grade of potassium sulphate products.Click here to know more about this report:Potassium sulphate is manufactured by extraction of potassium and sulphate ions from natural ores or brines by evaporation or chemical methods. The common methods used for extraction of potassium sulphate are salt lake brine processing, sulphate salts reaction and Mannheim process. Potassium salt derived by the process of salt lake brine processing is cheap as compared to other methods. The average manufacturing co0st of potassium sulphate by salt lakes brine processing is approximately US$ 200/ ton, the average cost of production by sulphate salts reaction is US$ 300/ton and the average cost of production by Mannheim process is US$ 400 to 550/ton. Potassium sulphate manufactured by Mannheim process holds for approximately 50% to 60% of the global supply of potassium sulphate, potassium sulphate manufactured by sulphate salts reaction holds a share of 25% to 30% and salt lake brine processing holds a share of 15% to 20% of the global supply of potassium sulphate. Companies such as Great Salt Minerals Corporation (U.S.), SDIC Xinjiang Luobupo Potash (China) use salt lake brine processing method, K+S Kali Gmbh (Germany), Rusal (Russia) utilize sulphate salts reaction process and Tessenderlo Group (Belgium) use Mannheim process to manufacture potassium sulphate.Fragmented MarketThe Global potassium sulphate market is highly fragmented due to the participation of many established and emerging players in the industry. Major players involved in the market include K+G Kali Gmbh (Germany), Tessenderlo Group (Belgium), Great Salt Minerals Corporation (U.S.), SDIC Xinjiang Luobupo Potash (China), SQM (Chile), Yara International (Norway), Rusal (Russia), Compass Minerals (U.S.), Guotou Xinjiang LuoBuPo Potassium Salt (China), Sesoda (Taiwan)About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #320000A0Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Antimicrobial Coatings Market to Grow Globally

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Antimicrobial coatings consist of a chemical compound or a blend of chemicals compounds that inhibit the growth of microorganisms on the applied surface. These are widely used in healthcare settings and also intensive research facilities, where sanitization of the working area is of paramount importance. These are also used in households, especially in areas such as bathrooms and kitchen areas that are constantly in touch with humans and can be breeding grounds for pathogens. Some of the most common types of bacteria that can be kept at bay using antimicrobial coatings are Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P.a.), Escherichia Coli (E.a), Bacillus subtilis, and Listeria. Biocides such as copper, silver, and Titania core shell particles are added to paint formulations to protect the applied surface from microbial attack and fungal and algal growth. They also help in preventing the product from stains and deterioration of the paint usually caused by these bacteria. Antimicrobial coatings are also applied to hard surfaces such as flooring to keep away germs, molds, and fungi. These highly versatile coatings can be used on various substances such as textiles, food, and construction materials. Its application across such diverse sectors such as pharmaceuticals, construction, electronics, and food & packaging is a major factor fueling growth of the global antimicrobial coatings market.To know more about the key players in this market, get in Touch With us for a FREE sample of this report:In medical devices, antimicrobial coatings are largely used in catheters, pacemaker stents and parts, and medical trays, among others. The growth of the global antimicrobial coatings market is rising significantly, owing to the increasing demand from developed nations such as North America and Europe. Governments in developing and developed countries such as India, china, UK, US and others are mainly focusing on the requirement of reducing hospital acquired infections, including bloodstream diseases, urinary tract infection, and pneumonia to name a few, which turns out be a major concern. Therefore, hospitals and clinics make the most usage of antimicrobial coatings.A wide variety of antimicrobial coatings are available in the market, with copper and silver being the most widely used. Silver accounts for the largest share amongst all other types of antimicrobial coatings, due to it being a highly effective antibacterial agent and is also a toxic agent to fungi, germs, and algae.Antimicrobial Coatings Market: Market TaxonomyBy ApplicationOn the basis of application, the global market is segmented into the following:Building & construction equipmentIndoor air / HVACMold remediationMedical devicesTextilesFood & beverages equipmentOthersBy Type of coatingThe global market can be segmented on the basis of type of coatings into the following:SilverCopperOthersAntimicrobial Coatings Market Outlook- Asia Pacific is expected to highlight potential market for the key players operating in the global antimicrobial coatings marketNorth America accounts for the highest demand for antimicrobial coatings owing to the booming end-user industries such as healthcare institutes, manufacturing units and others in the U.S. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the healthcare industry in the country is estimated to witness a rapid growth over the following eight years. This is mainly attributed to the growing aging population coupled with increasing number of people suffering with physical and mental illness. This in turn, is expected to drive growth of the antimicrobial coatings industry. The growth in antimicrobial coatings is driven by the increased demand from the indoor air / HVAC and medical application. Apart from medical applications, food & beverages and textiles industry especially in the U.S. and Canada also contribute to the market demand of antimicrobial coatings in North America.Browse Global Strategic Business Report :APAC, led by China and India is expected to witness a significant growth during the forecast period owing to the increasing construction projects for commercial and corporate infrastructure along with residential buildings, growing food industry and expanding medical industry wherein, antimicrobial coatings are used in various applications to ensure safety and minimizing infections.Major players operating in the global antimicrobial coatings market include AkzoNobel Coatings Inc., BASF, RPM International, Dow Chemicals, PPG Industries, Diamond Vogel, RPM International Inc., PPG Industries Inc., Royal DSM, and Sherwin-Williams Company.Based on silver as an active antimicrobial ingredient, AgION has been developed by AK Coatings Inc. Carbon and rolled flat stainless steels are few products that are coated with AgION antimicrobial component.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit Coherent Market Insights Blog @Connect with us on LinkedIn @
Naphthalene Derivatives Market to Grow Globally

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Synthesis of naphthalene derivatives require naphthalene compound as a basic precursor. Naphthalene is one of the most important members of the class of organic compounds, wherein two or more benzene rings are fused together at ortho-position. Naphthalene derivatives are synthesized in two stages, namely, ring closure by cyclization reaction, followed by aromatization process. However, various other modifications can be carried out to synthesize different types of naphthalene derivatives. 1, 6-dihydroxynaphthalene, 1-methylnaphthalene, 1-naphthol and 2-naphthol are some of the examples of naphthalene derivatives commercially available in the market. These derivatives are available in powder and liquid form, of which, the powder form finds prominent use. CMI forecasts the global naphthalene derivatives market to grow at a healthy growth rate over the forecast period (2016-2024), owing to factors such as ever rising demand for naphthalene derivatives such as naphthalene formaldehyde in the construction industry across the world.To know more about the key players in this market, get in Touch With us for a FREE sample of this report:Rising construction industry and textile industry along with increasing application of naphthalene derivatives in production facilities across various industries such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, paints and coatings, and others are major driving factors for growth of the global naphthalene derivatives industry. Rising living standards supported by high discretionary income translates to spending on fabrics and textiles wherein, it is used in material dyeing and bleaching, which in turn catalyzes the growth of naphthalene market. Apart from textile and construction industries, a significant rise in demand from the agrochemical industry also contributes to the increasing demand for global naphthalene market.However, the toxic nature of naphthalene derivatives can be a major restraint for the growth of the naphthalene derivatives market.Naphthalene Derivatives Market TaxonomyBy FormOn the basis of form, the global market is classified into:LiquidPowderBy TypeBased on type, the global market is segmented as:Alkyl Naphthalene Sulfonate SaltsSodium PolynaphthaleneCalcium PolynaphthaleneNaphthalene Sulfonic AcidNaphthalene-Formaldehyde Condensates (SNF)Naphthols1-Naphthol2-NaphtholOthers (Amino Naphthalene, etc.)By End-Use IndustryOn the basis of end-use industry, the global market is classified into:AgrochemicalsConstructionTextilesDetergentPharmaceuticalsPaints & CoatingRubber SynthesisStyrene Butadiene Rubber (SBR)Nitrile Butadiene Rubber (NBR)Others (Pulp & Paper and Leather Tanning, etc.)Browse Global Strategic Business Report :Owing to the growing textile and construction industry along with growing production facilities, the naphthalene derivatives market is expected to witness a robust growth during the forecast period. Increasing development plans in the market, continuous urbanization associated with rising living standards, in turn drives growth of supporting industries such as textile and construction., Significant utilization of naphthalene in the construction industry to increase the fluidity of concrete mixtures to strengthen the building infrastructure, is in turn expected to fuel growth of the naphthalene derivatives market over the forecast period.Market Outlook  Increasing construction and textile industry in Asia Pacific is expected to boost the growth for naphthalene derivatives marketAsia Pacific is expected to be the most lucrative market for naphthalene derivatives market, owing to rising economy, strong growth of construction and textile sectors to support the increasing population, along with increasing number of production facilities due to the foreign investments and increasing FDI, especially in China and India. North America and Europe are expected to witness a moderate growth in the market due to implementation of stringent regulations pertaining to the application of the same. For instance, use of naphthalene derivatives is prohibited in cosmetics since it is considered harmful for skin. For instance, in the EU, it is categorized as a carcinogenic, mutagenic, reprotoxic (CMR) substance, while the U.S. FDA has banned its use in cosmetics.Some of the companies operating in the global naphthalene derivatives market include BASF SE, RUTGERS Group, Huntsman International LLC, Evonik Industries AG, Koppers Inc., Arkema Group, Kao Corporation, Giovanni Bozzetto Spa, Cromogenia-Units S.A., and Clariant etc. Key players existing in the global naphthalene derivatives industries are currently focusing on geographical expansion, particularly in the emerging economies of China, India, South East Asia, and Brazil etc. With the increase in population and rapid urbanization, construction and textiles industries in particular are expected to witness a significant rise in demand, which in turn would fuel demand for naphthalene derivatives.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit Coherent Market Insights Blog @Connect with us on LinkedIn @
Cardiac Prosthetic Device Market Will Witness Growth Based On Rising Demand For Minimally Invasive Devices Till 2025: Grand View Research, Inc.

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The global cardiac prosthetic device market is expected to be over USD 8.7 billion by 2025, based on a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. Rising demand for minimally invasive devices has provided greater growth prospects for the market. New product development through technological advancements is anticipated to foster market growth. The major companies are focusing on expanding their product life and safety benefits of the cardiac prosthetic devices. Such initiatives undertaken by the key players have resulted in increasing survival rates and low stroke rates for transcatheter aortic valves.Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) is covered by Evidence Development (CED) Coverage provided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Cardiac pacemakers are also covered under Medicare program. Initiatives for reimbursement from the government for such devices are anticipated to boost the demand for cardiac prosthetic devices.Browse full research report on Global Cardiac Prosthetic Device Market: (Further Key Findings From the Study Suggest: Heart valve segment was one of the largest segments in 2015 owing to rising prevalence of valvular disease and heart valve failure. Pacemakers segment is expected to grow significantly, owing to rising reimbursement policies for pacemaker-related surgeries. Mechanical heart valve segment contributed toward the one of the largest market share in 2015 owing to its increasing product longevity. Moreover, they provide better hemodynamic efficiency. Since mechanical valves are made up of strong durable materials, such as titanium and carbon, they are preferred over other cardiac prosthetic devices. Transcatheter valve is expected to exhibit lucrative CAGR over the forecast period. TAVR has shown improved patient survival rate as compared to medical therapy. In the past years, it has evolved as a minimally invasive alternative treatment for surgical valve replacement. Implantable pacemakers are one of the highest revenue generating segments owing to their greater applicability pertaining to heart failure (HF) and other cardiovascular diseases like stroke. North America contributed toward the largest market share of around 40.0% in 2015. This is primarily due to the fact that the number of pacemaker implantations has increased amongst the Americans over the past two decades. Moreover, companies are focusing on commercial availability of technologically advanced devices in the U.S. Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness highest CAGR over the forecast period owing to the growing geriatric population in Japan. In 2015, the geriatric population base accounted for around 27% in Japan. Some key companies in this market are Medtronic, Inc.; St. Jude Medical, Inc.; Boston Scientific Corporation; Edwards Lifesciences Corporation; Abbott Vascular; Siemens Healthcare GmbH; and Sorin Group. New product development through introduction of advanced technology and mergers & acquisitions are some of the key strategies adopted by the companies to enhance the demand for cardiac prosthetic devices. For instance, in 2015, St. Jude Medical and Thoratec, a company that specializes in mechanical circulatory support technology for the treatment of advanced HF, entered into a definitive agreement aiming at acquisition of the outstanding shares of Thoratec.Access research insight: (Grand View Research has segmented the Cardiac prosthetic device market on the basis of product:Cardiac prosthetic device market Product Outlook (Market Revenue in USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Heart valveso Mechanical valveo Tissue valveo Stented tissue valveo Stentless tissue valveo Transcatheter valve Pacemakerso Implantable pacemakerso Single-Chamber Battery Pacemakero Dual-Chamber Battery Pacemakero Triple-Chamber Battery Pacemakero External pacemakersCardiac prosthetic device market Regional Outlook (Market Revenue in USD Million, 2014 - 2025) North Americao U.S.o Canada Europeo UKo Germany Asia Pacifico Japano China Latin Americao Brazil Middle East and Africao South AfricaFor more information:About Grand View ResearchGrand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.Press ContactSherry James - Corporate Relations Specialist28 2nd Street, Suite 3036San Francisco, CA 94105United StatesPhone: 1-415-349-0058Email: sales@grandviewresearch.com
United States Automotive Exhaust System Market 2017 - Faurecia, Tenneco, Eberspacher, Boysen, Sango, HITER

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The report studies Automotive Exhaust System in Global market Professional Survey 2017 : Size, Share, Trends, Industry Growth, Opportunity, Application, Production, Segmentation, Cost Structure, Company Profile, Product Picture and Specifications during the Forecast period by 2022The report titled Automotive Exhaust System is an in-depth and a professional document that provides a comprehensive overview of the global Automotive Exhaust System market.The report provides an executive-level blueprint of the Automotive Exhaust System market beginning with the definition of the market dynamics. The analysis classifies the Automotive Exhaust System market in terms of products, application, and key geographic regions. With focus on presenting a detailed value chain analysis, the study evaluates the set of region-specific approaches forged by the industry. To determine the market potential for Automotive Exhaust System in the international scenario, the study delves into the competitive landscape and development landscape exhibited by the key geographic regions.Development plans and policies significantly impact the market dynamic. The report therefore studies in detail the impact of the strategies, plans, and policies adopted by leading vendors of the Automotive Exhaust System market. Manufacturing cost of products and the pricing structure adopted by the market is also evaluated in the report. Other parameters crucial in determining trends in the market such as consumption demand and supply figures, cost of production, gross profit margins, and selling price of product and services is also included within the ambit of the report.Request For Sample Report @To provide a detailed analysis on the competitive landscape, the report profiles the key players in the Automotive Exhaust System industry. Information present in these chapters includes details of products manufactured by the leading companies, product specification and price, and production capacity. Using reliable analytical tools, the report evaluates the information sourced from both primary and secondary research. Results obtained through the detailed analysis helps in presenting refined forecasts regarding growth prospects of the Automotive Exhaust System market. Apart from this, the analysts have also conducted upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis to compile and present an exhaustive study on the Automotive Exhaust System market.A detailed segmentation evaluation of the Automotive Exhaust System 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.About Fior MarketsFior Markets is a leading market intelligence company that sells reports of top publishers in the technology industry.Our extensive research reports cover detailed market assessments that include major technological improvements in the industry. Fior Markets also specializes in analyzing hi-tech systems and current processing systems in its expertise.We have a team of experts that compile precise research reports and actively advise top companies to improve their existing processes. Our experts have extensive experience in the topics that they cover.Contact UsMark StoneSales Manager2566, Lincoln StreetPrinceton,New Jersey 08540USAPhone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@fiormarkets.comWeb:Blog:
Papain Market  Overview of Vital Industry Drivers

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Global Papain Market: OverviewPapain is a natural cysteine proteolytic enzyme present in mountain papaya (Vasconcellea cundinamarcensis) and papaya (Carica papaya). It is native to Latin America and is also called as papaya proteinase I. It is used to tenderize meat eaten as it breaks down tough meat fibers. Papain is an active component in powder form for meat tenderizers and has a huge demand in the global market. Papain also used in chemo-mechanical dental caries removal gel known as Papacarie, as a tooth whitener in mint sweets and toothpaste, to clean up dead tissue in chronic wounds, as a component of many enzymatic debriding preparations, and cell dissociation in cell culture preparations. The end-use industries of the papain include leather, food & beverages, detergents, cosmetic, tanning, optical, photographic, textile, and pharmaceutical. The North America papain market accounts for relatively high revenue share, followed by Western Europe papain market over the forecast period, attributed to relatively strong demand for papain and broad availability of raw material in the regions.Browse Market Research Report @Global Papain Market: DynamicsSome of the important factor fueling the growth of global papain market include rising health concern among the consumers, high demand for meat tenderizers, and increasing demand for natural enzymes. To counter the same, papain market players are investing in research and development and production of papain to meet the regulatory specification with increasing demand. Some macroeconomic factors making a positive impact on global papain market includes increasing population, the rapid rate of urbanization, and growing domestic income. The trend identified in the global papain market is mergers and acquisitions between papain producers and papaya suppliers. The company manufacturing papain products has a significant opportunity in regions such as North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, attributed to high demand for natural enzymes and growing health consciousness among a large number of population. Companies have a significant opportunity in global papain market through collaboration with raw material supplier i.e. papaya vendor and through backward integration in the market as a raw material is a key factor for the market.Global Papain Market: SegmentationGlobal papain market is segmented by end-use industry and by region. By end-use industry, the global papain market is sub-segmented as food & beverages, cosmetic, textile, pharmaceutical, other industries such as detergents, tanning, optical, photographic, etc. Among these, the pharmaceutical segment is expected to contribute to the significant revenue share with a relatively high growth rate over the forecast period in global papain market. A pharmaceutical segment follows food & beverages segment with a relatively high growth rate concerning both value and volume in the global papain market.For more information on this report, fill the form @Based on the end-use industry, the global papain market is segmented into:Food & Beverages IndustriesCosmetic IndustriesTextile IndustriesPharmaceutical IndustriesOther Industries (detergents, tanning, optical, photographic, etc.)Global Papain Market: Regional OverviewBy geographies, the global papain market is segmented into seven regions -- North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific except Japan, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa, and Japan. Among the regions, North America accounts for a relatively high share of the global papain market in terms of value, owing to strong demand for natural enzymes particularly in the U.S. Western Europe is followed by North America in global papain market, attributed to high demand for meat tenderizers across the region. Eastern Europe and Japan also accounts for significant value share in the global papain market. The Asia-Pacific is expected to register relatively high growth rate in the global papain market over the forecast period, owing to the robust growth of pharmaceutical industry due to rapidly growing population across the region particularly in the countries such as China and India. Latin America and Middle East Africa is expected to have relatively high opportunity for papain market players, attributed to the rapid rate of industrial growth and high demand for meat products. Overall, the outlook for the global papain market will have a positive growth over the forecast period.Global Papain Market: Key PlayersFew players of papain market include Senthil Papain and Food Products (P) Ltd., FRUZYME BIO TECH INDIA PVT LTD, Shri Ganesh Industrial Enzymes, Aumgene Biosciences, Shree Sai Agros, Parchem fine & specialty chemicals, Ultra Bio-Logics Inc., LGM Pharma, Chemos GmbH, Beckmann-Kenko GmbH, and AXO Industry SA.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.com
Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market 2017 Trends, Sales, Supply, Demand, Analysis & Forecast to 2022

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market 2017 Trends, Sales, Supply, Demand, Analysis & Forecast to 2022For The Global Market Status and Outlook, from 2012 to 2022" to its huge collection of research reports.This examination looks at the global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug market in a persistent way by explaining the main features of the market that are relied upon to hold a sizeable impact on its improvements over the given time frame. The key drivers of the market's development, restrictions, and patterns affecting the global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug market are surveyed in extraordinary detail, notwithstanding a subjective and quantitative examination relating to the anticipated effect of these elements on its development prospects sooner rather than later.The vast volumes of data on the Bacterial Vaginosis Drug by and large makes it an intense undertaking to take it down to the exceptionally significant bits of data and the genuine bits applicable to the present business issues in the market. Many organizations are additionally known to not have the fundamental committed assets and aptitude for taking up an illustrative statistical surveying in view of recorded information. Centered statistical surveying procedures can help these associations in framing clearer thoughts on their business systems and gather significant stakes in the market.Get sample report @A sweeping volume of information concerning the basic components of the Bacterial Vaginosis Drug that can impact its extent of development is given in the report. The report in this manner makes for an exceptionally useful review and can successfully permit organizations and their leads in tending to the main difficulties that  as of now  control the market, and deliberately increase greatest conceivable advantages inside the profoundly focused market scene.The report likewise gives data on the current improvements in items and innovations as currently visible in the market, alongside an examination of the general impact that these progressions may have on any future advancements. The report likewise offers its clients a 360-degree examination of the competitive situation in the Bacterial Vaginosis Drug. This is legitimate for organizations of all sizes and development levels inside the worldwide Bacterial Vaginosis Drug market and helps different associations get a handle on the main dangers and openings that sellers regularly need to manage.Browse full table of contents and data tables of Report @Table of Content1 Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market Overview11.1 Product Overview and Scope of Bacterial Vaginosis Drug11.2 Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Segment by Types (Product Category)21.2.1 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue and CAGR (%) Comparison by Types (Product Category)21.2.2 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue Market Share by Types (Product Category) in 201631.2.3 Rx31.2.4 OTC41.3 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Segment by Applications51.3.1 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Applications51.3.2 Hospital61.3.3 Pharmacy71.4 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market by Regions (2012-2022)71.4.1 USA Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Status and Prospect (2012-2022)71.4.2 China Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Status and Prospect (2012-2022)81.4.3 Europe Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Status and Prospect (2012-2022)91.4.4 Southeast Asia Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Status and Prospect (2012-2022)101.4.5 India Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Status and Prospect (2012-2022)111.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Bacterial Vaginosis Drug (2012-2022)122 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market Competition by Manufacturers142.1 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)142.2 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Gross by Manufacturers (2012-2017)172.3 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Gross Margin by Manufacturers (2012-2017)202.4 Manufacturers Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area, Product Types242.5 Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market Competitive Situation and Trends262.5.1 Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market Concentration Rate262.5.2 Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers272.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion283 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue (Value) by Regions (2012-2017)303.1 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Regions (2012-2017)303.2 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue, Gross Margin and Gross (2012-2017)323.3 USA Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue, Gross and Gross Margin (2012-2017)323.4 Europe Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue, Gross and Gross Margin (2012-2017)323.5 China Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue, Gross and Gross Margin (2012-2017)333.6 Southeast Asia Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue, Gross and Gross Margin (2012-2017)333.7 India Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue, Gross and Gross Margin (2012-2017)344 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Supply, Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2012-2017)354.1 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Consumption by Regions (2012-2017)354.2 USA Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Supply, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)374.3 Europe Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Supply, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)374.4 China Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Supply, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)374.5 Southeast Asia Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Supply, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)384.6 India Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Supply, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)385 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue (Value) Trend by Types395.1 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue and Market Share by Types (2012-2017)395.2 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Revenue Growth by Type (2012-2017)416 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Market Analysis by Applications426.1 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Consumption and Market Share by Applications (2012-2017)426.2 Global Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Consumption Growth Rate by Applications (2012-2017)446.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities456.3.1 Potential Applications456.3.2 Emerging Markets/Countries457 Analysis of Bacterial Vaginosis Drug Industry Key Manufacturers467.1 Bayer467.1.1 Company Profile467.1.2 Product Information477.1.3 Revenue, Cost, Gross and Gross Margin477.2 Pfizer487.2.1 Company Profile487.2.2 Product Information497.2.3 Revenue, Cost, Gross and Gross Margin497.3 Sanofi507.3.1 Company Profile507.3.2 Product Information517.3.3 Revenue, Cost, Gross and Gross Margin51About UsQYReseachReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYReseachReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Orthopaedic Prosthetics Market to Grow at a CAGR of 5% by 2026

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Global demand for orthopaedic prosthetics devices market is projected to reach US$ 1.76 Bn in 2017, up from US$ 1.69 Bn in 2016. Demand for orthopaedic prosthetics devices will be fuelled by increasing baby boomers & geriatric population. Availability of advanced prosthetics that offer customisation and enhanced functionality will continue to witness increasing demand in developed markets. However, high cost and lack of favourable reimbursement policies will continue to pose challenges to wider adoption. North America will continue to remain the largest market for orthopaedic prosthetics devices, owing to strong demand in the U.S. Sales of orthopaedic prosthetics devices in the Western Europe  the second largest market globally  will remain concentrated in EU5.Other key factors expected to fuel demand for orthopaedic prosthetic devices include increase in the number of accidents, higher emphasis on physical sports, and increase in prevalence of conditions that require amputation. Replacement of older prosthetics with lighter, durable materials is also expected to complement demand during the forecast period.FMIs report offers insights on the regulations on orthopaedic prosthetics devices in key markets of the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. In the U.S., orthopaedic prosthetics devices are regulated by U.S. FDA and Centre for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). In Europe, a majority of prosthetic and orthotic devices are class I with CE marking.To provide a detailed analysis on the orthopaedic prosthetic market, FMIs report offers forecast and analysis on the basis of product type, technology, end-use, and region.Request For Sample@Prosthetics Devices Market SegmentationBy product type, the key segments include lower extremity prosthetics, upper extremity prosthetics, liners, sockets, and modular components. Among these, lower extremity prosthetics account for the highest demand, followed by upper extremity prosthetics. All the aforementioned product types will lose market share to lower extremity prosthetics during the forecast period.By technology, electric powered prosthetic devices account for the highest demand and the trend is projected to remain unchanged during the forecast period. Electric powered prosthetic devices are expected to gain 467 BPS during the forecast period and account for over 50% revenue share of the market by 2026. Ease of operation is one of the key factors for high adoption of electric powered prosthetics devices.By end-use, prosthetic clinics accounted for the highest revenue share of the global market, followed by hospitals and rehabilitation centres. Prosthetic clinics will continue to remain the largest end-user segment during the forecast period, gaining 293 BPS between 2016 and 2026.Send An Enquiry@North America is the largest market for prosthetics devices market, accounting for a significant share of global revenues. The U.S. is the leading market for prosthetics devices, accounting for over 78% share of the global market in 2016. The U.S. will continue to be the largest market for prosthetics devices during the forecast period.Leading players in the global prosthetics devices market include Hanger Inc., Blatchford Ltd., Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH Ossur, Touch Bionics Inc., and The Ohio Willow Wood Co.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:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Global Digital Holography Market is Expected to grow at a CAGR of 38.71% during Forecast 2016-2020

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Albany, NY, May 15, 2017: A charge-coupled device (CCD) camera is used in digital holography technology to record a digital hologram of objects. The recorded information is then transferred to a computer and analyzed to form 3D images, which are used to examine and evaluate the objects with greater accuracy. In general, the technology is used to produce realistic 3D images of 2D objects. Digital holography is becoming increasingly popular in the healthcare and retail sectors. Currently, the medical, education, and banking sectors are the major revenue generators for the market. The automotive, aerospace, gaming, and retail sectors are expected to drive the market in the future.The global digital holography market to grow at a CAGR of 38.71% during the period 2016-2020. The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global digital holography market for the period 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, the report uses the revenue generated from digital holography displays and other devices.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:- Americas- APAC- EMEAGet a Sample Research PDF with TOC:Technavio's report, Global Digital Holography Market 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors- EON Reality- Lyncee Tec- RealView Imaging- LEIA- Holoxica- Zebra Imaging- Ovizio Imaging SystemsMarket driver- Increased use in advertising- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge- Low market penetration- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend- Use of digital holography technology in several sectors- For a full, detailed list, view our reportEnquiry at:Key questions answered in this report- What will the market size be in 2020 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?Browse more details at: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:
Sulphite Ammonia Caramel Market Growing due to Food & Beverages Industry & Food Additive Market

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Global Sulphite Ammonia Caramel Market: OverviewSulphite ammonia caramel restores the color of food products and therefore used a color additive. It has a burnt sugar odor, present in solid or liquid form with dark brown to black color. It is used as an emulsifier, thickener, coloring, and bulking agent in food and beverages. Sulphite ammonia caramel is also known as sulphite ammonia caramel, sethness 858, natural brown 10, caramel liquid, and burnt sugar colouring. The North America sulphite ammonia caramel market accounts for relatively high revenue share, followed by Western Europe sulphite ammonia caramel market. Whereas, APEJ account for relatively high volume share in global sulphite ammonia caramel market with significant growth rate.Browse Market Research Report @Global Sulphite Ammonia Caramel Market: DynamicsSome of the important factor fuelling the growth of global sulphite ammonia caramel market include growing food and beverages industry and food additive market. The macroeconomic factors making a positive impact on global sulphite ammonia caramel market includes increasing population, changing consumer lifestyle, the rapid rate of urbanization, and growing domestic income. Increasing caramel ingredient prices is one of the restraining factor for global sulphite ammonia caramel market over the forecast period. The company manufacturing sulphite ammonia caramel products has a significant opportunity in regions such as North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, attributed to high demand for dairy food products over the forecast period. Companies have a significant opportunity in global sulphite ammonia caramel market through collaboration with end-users i.e. food and beverages manufacturers.Global Sulphite Ammonia Caramel Market: SegmentationThe global sulphite ammonia caramel market is segmented by product type, application, and by region. By product type, the global sulphite ammonia caramel market is fragmented as non-GMO sulphite ammonia caramel and GMO sulphite ammonia caramel. Among these, the non-GMO sulphite ammonia caramel segment is expected to contribute to the significant revenue share with a relatively high growth rate over the forecast period considering both value and volume in the global sulphite ammonia caramel market.Enter your information below to receive a sample copy of this report @Based on the product type, the global sulphite ammonia caramel market is segmented into:Non-GMO Bovine RennetGMO Bovine RennetBased on the application, the global sulphite ammonia caramel market is segmented into:Confectionery ProductsBeveragesBakery ProductsOthers (Sauces and Breakfast Cereals)Global Sulphite Ammonia Caramel Market: Regional OverviewBy geographies, the global sulphite ammonia caramel market is segmented into seven regions -- North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific except Japan (APEJ), Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa, and Japan. Among the regions, North America dominates the global sulphite ammonia caramel market in terms of value, owing to a significant revenue share of the region in the dairy industry. Western Europe is followed by North America in the global sulphite ammonia caramel market, attributed to rapidly rising demand for convenient food products across the region. Eastern Europe and Japan also accounts for significant value share in the global sulphite ammonia caramel market. The APEJ is expected to account for relatively high volume share in the global sulphite ammonia caramel market, owing to a relatively high growth rate of food industry over the forecast period. Latin America and Middle East Africa is expected to have relatively high opportunity for sulphite ammonia caramel market players, attributed to high growth rate of the food additives market across the regions. Overall, the outlook for the global sulphite ammonia caramel market will have a positive growth over the forecast period.Global Sulphite Ammonia Caramel Market: Key PlayersFew players of sulphite ammonia caramel market include Hawkins Watts Australia, KF Specialty Ingredients, Cargill Incorporated, Kerry Group, Tsukuba Dairy Products Co. Ltd., Best Flavors, Inc., Secna Group, The John D. Walsh Company, Inc., San Soon Seng Food Industries sdn bhd., Alvin Caramel Colours (India) Private Ltd., Asahi Group Foods, LTD., Sunspray Food Ingredients (Pty) Ltd, Sethness Caramel Color, Puratos Group, Sensient Technologies Corporation, and Bakels Worldwide.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.com
Specialty Fats & Oils Market Achieving Healthy Growth due to Rising Health Concern among the Consumers

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Global Specialty Fats & Oils Market: OverviewSpecialty fats is a substitute for other types of fats including butter, milk fat, cocoa butter, etc. Similarly, specialty oils are the substitute for oils such as peanut oil. Specialty fats and oils are produced under hygienic food safety conditions and selective process conditions. It is a unique category of fat customized for the confectionery applications such as extrusion, filling, coating, and moulding. The specialty fats & oils market is expected to have substantial growth rate across the globe, attributed to increasing health concern among consumers and high demand for low-calorie food products.Browse Market Research Report @Global Specialty Fats & Oils Market: DynamicsThe growth of the global specialty fats & oils market is driven by the rising health concern among the consumers and growing dairy, bakery, and confectionery market. Some macroeconomic factors making a positive impact on global specialty fats & oils market includes rapid rate of urbanization, increasing population, changing lifestyle, and increasing domestic income. The trend identified in the global specialty fats & oils market is the high investment in product development as well as in product promotion through advertisements and campaign. The company manufacturing specialty fats & oils products has a significant opportunity in regions such as North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, attributed to growing health consciousness among a large number of population.Global Specialty Fats & Oils Market: SegmentationGlobal specialty fats & oils market is segmented by product type, end-use, and region. On the basis of product type, the global specialty fats & oils market is fragmented as fats and oils. Among these, fats segment is expected to contribute for the significant revenue share with a relatively high growth rate over the forecast period in global specialty fats & oils market. Specialty fat is again fragmented as dairy fat replacers, CBI, CBS, CBR, and CBE. Among which CBR i.e. coco butter replacer is expected to account for relatively high revenue share in global specialty fats & oils market. Specialty oil is sub-segmented as palm, cottonseed, coconut, rapeseed, and soybean, wherein palm segment is expected to contribute for a relatively high share in terms of value. On the basis of the end-use, the global specialty fats & oils market is segmented as dairy, bakery, and chocolate & confectionery, wherein chocolate & confectionery segment contribute comparatively high revenue share in global specialty fats & oils market is expected to the most attractive segment over the forecast period.For more information on this report, fill the form @On the basis of product type, the global specialty fats & oils market is segmented into:Fat TypeDairy Fat ReplacersCBICBSCBRCBEOil TypePalmCottonseedCoconutRapeseedSoybeanOn the basis of end-use, the global specialty fats & oils market is segmented into:DairyBakeryChocolate & ConfectioneryGlobal Specialty Fats & Oils Market: Regional overviewOn the basis of geographies, the global specialty fats & oils market is segmented into seven regions -- North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, Asia-Pacific except Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. Among the regions, North America accounts for a relatively high share of the global specialty fats & oils market in terms of value, attributed to a relatively high revenue share of the region in the dairy and confectionary market. Western Europe is followed by North America in global specialty fats & oils market, owing to high health consciousness among consumers across the region. Eastern Europe and Japan also accounts for significant value share in the global specialty fats & oils market. The Asia-Pacific is expected to register relatively high growth rate in the global specialty fats & oils market over the forecast period, owing to rapidly growing population and demand for bakery products across the region particularly in the countries such as China and India. Latin America and Middle East Africa is expected to have relatively high opportunity for specialty fats & oils market players. Overall, the outlook for the global specialty fats & oils market will have a positive growth over the forecast period.Global Specialty Fats & Oils Market: Key PlayersFew players of specialty fats & oils market include Cargill, Wilmar International Limited, Olenex, Musim Mas Holdings, Mewah Group, International Foodstuff Company Holdings Limited (IFFCO), Intercontinental Specialty Fats Sdn. BHD, IOI Group, Bunge Limited, and AAK AB.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.com
Global Microbiology Culture Market Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Microbiology Culture Market (Culture Type (Bacterial Culture and Eukaryotic Culture); Culture Media Type (Simple Media, Complex Media, Synthetic Media, and Special Media) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2015 - 2023" to its huge collection of research reports.This market research report on the global microbiology culture market analyzes the current and future prospects of the market in terms of revenue (USD Million). The stakeholders of this report include companies engaged in the manufacture of microbiology culture media and related products. The report comprises an executive summary with a market snapshot providing the overall information of various market segments included in the scope of this report. This section also provides the overall information and data analysis of the global microbiology culture market with respect to the leading market segments based on type of culture, media, and geographic regions.The global microbiology culture market has been broadly segmented on the basis of culture type into bacterial culture and eukaryotic culture (yeast, eukaryotic algae, etc.); by type of culture media into simple media, complex media, synthetic media, and special media; and by geographic regions into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East, and Rest of the World. Each region is further divided for select countries such as the U.S., Canada, the U.K. Germany, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The recommendations section of the report would assist existing market players in expanding their market share and new companies in establishing their presence in the global microbiology culture market. Market revenue in terms of USD million for the period between 2013 and 2023 along with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR %) from 2015 to 2023 are provided for all the segments, considering 2014 as the base year.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The market overview section of the report explores market dynamics such as drivers, restraints, and opportunities that have strong impact on the current microbiology culture market and are likely to influence the market in the future as well. Market attractiveness analysis has been provided in the market overview section to explain the intensity of competition in the market in different geographies. Porters Five Forces Analysis is also provided in this section to understand the microbiology culture market considering different parameters that have an impact on the sustainability of the companies operating in the microbiology culture market. The competitive scenario between different market players is evaluated through market share analysis in the competitive landscape section of the report. All these factors would help the market players to take strategic decisions in order to strengthen their positions and expand their market share in the global market.The report also profiles major players in the microbiology culture market on the basis of various attributes such as company overview, financial overview, business strategies, product portfolio, and recent developments. Major players profiled in this report include Becton, Dickinson and Company, bioMerieux S.A., Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., Eiken Chemical Co, Ltd., EMD (Merck) Millipore, Hi-Media Laboratories Pvt. Ltd., Neogen Corporation, Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC, Scharlab S.L., and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.The global microbiology culture market is segmented into the following categories:Microbiology Culture Market, By Culture Type- Bacterial Culture- Eukaryotic CultureMicrobiology Culture Market, By Media Type- Simple Media- Complex Media- Synthetic Media- Special MediaMicrobiology Culture Market, By GeographyNorth America- U.S.- CanadaEurope- U.K.- Germany- Rest of EuropeAsia Pacific- China- India- Rest of Asia PacificLatin America- Brazil- Mexico- Rest of Latin AmericaMiddle East- Saudi Arabia- UAE- Rest of Middle EastRest of the WorldMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Global T&M Equipment Market To Grow At A CAGR Of 5.21% During The Period 2016-2020

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Test and Measurement Market 2016-2020" to its huge collection of research reports.Test and measurement is a dynamic and fast-growing industry that is gaining use in various high-tech sectors, enabling them to attain a global reach. T&M companies serve a broad range of end-users by providing critical products and services that help their customers improve quality, safety, health, compliance, and productivity in various applications.Technavios analysts forecast the global T&M equipment market to grow at a CAGR of 5.21% during the period 2016-2020.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global T&M market for the period 2015-2020. To calculate the market size, the report considers the demand for T&M equipment from various end-users.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:AmericasAPACEMEATo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Technavio's report, Global Test and Measurement Market 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendorsBureau VeritasDanaherKeysightSGSThermo FisherOther prominent vendorsAnritsuAplab LimitedEXFOFastech TelecommunicationsIxiaJDS UniphaseNational InstrumentsQmax Test EquipmentPremier Measurement SolutionsScientech TechnologiesSPX CorporationTEKTRONIXYokogawa ElectricMarket driverGrowth in communication sector in APACFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeNeed for price-sensitive and multiple technology solutionsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendInteroperability era for T&M equipmentFor a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2020 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?Make an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Global MRO Market For Automation Solutions To Grow At A CAGR Of 12.84% During The Period 2016-2020

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global MRO Market for Automation Solutions 2016-2020" to its huge collection of research reports.The need to optimize operation and produce superior-quality products within the least possible time contributed to the adoption of automation solutions in the production facilities. Also, the need for continuous maintenance and repair work, and the necessity to achieve high operational efficiency of automation products drives the demand for MRO service from service providers, third-party vendors, and OEMs.Initially, end-users used their in-house expertise to address MRO requirements for automation solutions in plants. As a result, they spent huge sum of money to provide training for the employees to carry out MRO. With technological advances in automation solutions, end-users need to update the training modules for the employees, and this has led to a large OPEX. In order to curtail the expenses, end-users started to outsource the MRO activities. The presence of both OEMs and independent service providers ensure service offerings of the highest quality. With the outsourcing of the MRO services, end-users are able to run their operations efficiently, thus reducing the time to market and ensuring higher production volume.Technavios analysts forecast the global MRO market for automation solutions to grow at a CAGR of 12.84% during the period 2016-2020.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global MRO market for automation solutions 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of MRO services for industrial automation solutions.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:AmericasAPACEMEATechnavio's report, Global MRO Market for Automation Solutions 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendorsABBHoneywell International Inc.Rockwell Automation Inc.Siemens AGW.W. Grainger Inc.Other prominent vendorsBilfingerBrammerEmerson ElectricGeneral ElectricOmronRexelSchneider ElectricToshiba InternationalWESCO InternationalWoodYokogawa ElectricYaskawaMitsubishi ElectricMarket driverGrowth in outsourcing of operationsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeLimited presence of single service provider with multi-vendor product knowledgeFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendEmergence of Industry 4.0For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2020 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?Make an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Vegetable Carbon Market Spicing up due to High Demand for Processed Food Products

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Global Vegetable Carbon Market: OverviewVegetable carbon is odourless, insoluble, black color powder used as a food color in products such as ice cream, baked goods, icing, and confectionery products. Authority in the Europe and Canada approves vegetable carbon as a food colorant whereas it is banned in the U.S. Vegetable carbon is known as carbo medicinalis vegetabilis, carbon black, or vegetable black. It is produced by charring or steam activation of vegetable fibers. The vegetable carbon is produced by carbonization of the various source at high temperature including coconut shells, peat, cellulose residues, wood, and other shells. The Western Europe vegetable carbon market accounts for relatively high revenue share, followed by Asia Pacific vegetable carbon market over the forecast period, attributed to relatively high demand for processed food and confectionaries across the regions.Browse Market Research Report @Global Vegetable Carbon Market: DynamicsSome of the important factor fuelling the growth of global vegetable carbon market include high demand for processed food products, growing the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry, and increasing demand for natural food colorants. To counter the same, vegetable carbon market players are investing in research and development and production of vegetable carbon to meet the regulatory specification with increasing demand. Some macroeconomic factors making a positive impact on global vegetable carbon market includes increasing population, the rapid rate of urbanization, and growing domestic income. Whereas, health hazards of vegetable carbon on the workers working in vegetable carbon manufacturing plant for a long time and on the consumers consuming for a longer period leads to restraining the global vegetable carbon market. The trend identified in the global vegetable carbon market is mergers and acquisitions between vegetable carbon producers and food manufacturers. The company manufacturing vegetable carbon products has a significant opportunity in regions such as Europe, and Asia Pacific, attributed to high demand for natural food colorants and high demand for confectioneries. Companies have a significant opportunity in global vegetable carbon market through collaboration with end-users i.e. food product manufacturers.Fill the form for an exclusive sample of this report @Global Vegetable Carbon Market: SegmentationThe global vegetable carbon market is segmented by source, by end-use, and by region. By source, the global vegetable carbon market is fragmented as coconut shells, peat, cellulose residues, wood, and other shells. Among these, the wood segment is expected to contribute to the significant revenue share with a relatively high growth rate over the forecast period in the global vegetable carbon market. Cellulose residues segment is followed by the wood segment with a relatively high growth rate considering both value and volume in the global vegetable carbon market.Based on the source, the global vegetable carbon market is segmented into:Coconut ShellsPeatCellulose ResiduesWoodOther ShellsBased on the end-use, the global vegetable carbon market is segmented into:Food & BeveragesBlack Caviar SubstituteCheese CoatingDecorationsBakery ProductsConfectioneryPharmaceuticalsCosmeticsGlobal Vegetable Carbon Market: Regional OverviewBy geographies, the global vegetable carbon market is segmented into seven regions -- North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific except Japan, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa, and Japan. Among the regions, Western Europe accounts for a relatively high share of the global vegetable carbon market in terms of value, owing to high demand for food colorants in the region. Asia Pacific is followed by Western Europe in the global vegetable carbon market, attributed to rapidly rising demand for processed food and beverages across the region. Eastern Europe and Japan also accounts for significant value share in the global vegetable carbon market. The North America is expected to account for relatively low value as well as volume share in the global vegetable carbon market, owing to the restriction of the use of vegetable black in the U.S. market. Latin America and Middle East Africa is expected to have relatively high opportunity for vegetable carbon market players, attributed to high demand for bakery and confectionery products in the region. Overall, the outlook for the global vegetable carbon market will have a positive growth over the forecast period.Global Vegetable Carbon Market: Key PlayersFew players of vegetable carbon market include DDW The Colour House, Jiangmen Goody's Food Co., Ltd., Bolise Co., Ltd., Wpasta Co. LTD., Guangzhou WellLand Foods Co., Ltd., Chr. Hansen Holding A/S, Univar Food Ingredients, Dynasty Colourants Co., Ltd., KF Specialty Ingredients, Hawkins Watts Australia, and Holland Ingredients.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 Orphan Drugs Industry Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Research Report 2016

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Orphan Drugs Market Report: 2016 Edition" to its huge collection of research reports.A rare disease is the one that occurs uncommonly or rarely in the general population.However, there exists no clear definition for categorizing rare diseases and is usually defined on the basis of the prevalence, and some other factors including the severity of disease and availability of treatment options. Rare diseases are often serious, chronic and progressive. Orphan drugs are medicinal products intended for the diagnosis, prevention or treatment of rare diseases. These drugs are referred to be orphan as under normal conditions because these drugs are not cost effective to be developed by the pharmaceuticals industry, intended for a small number of patients suffering from rare conditions.Increasing sales of prescription drugs, substantial benefits for new entrants in rare disease drug market, increased spending on medicines, rising healthcare expenditure and improving economic conditions of nations are some of the significant factors driving growth of the Orphan drugs market. However, the growth of the market is hindered by certain challenges including tougher regulatory approvals, limitation on charging higher prices and no approved drugs for several rare diseases including Polychethemia Vera (PV).To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The global orphan drugs market is expected to see numerous developments including approval of several Ultra-Rare drugs, increasing scope of Gene therapy, development of drugs for rare blood disease, higher success prospects for Hematology compared to Solid Tumors, attractive pricing option for orphan drug competitors and striking opportunities in developing orphan drugs.The report, Global Orphan Drugs Market analyzes the current prevailing condition of the market along with its future scope of development. The global market along with specific market of the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan, is being discussed in the report. The major trends, growth drivers as well as issues being faced by the industry are being presented in this report. The major players in the industry are being profiled, along with their key financials and strategies for growth.Table of Content1. Orphan Diseases: Introduction1.1 Causes1.2 Prevention1.3 Diagnosis1.4 Treatment Options1.5 Orphan Drugs2. Market Analysis2.1 Global Orphan Drugs MarketMarket ValueGrowth RateMarket Segmentation2.1.1 NonHodgkins Lymphoma (NHL) Market3. Regional Analysis3.1 The U.S. Orphan Drugs MarketApplications & DesignationsSpending Growth Forecast3.1.1 The UltraRare Drugs Market3.2 Canada3.3 Europe3.4 Japan4. Market Dynamics4.1 Key Trends and Developments4.1.1 Striking Opportunities in Developing Orphan Drugs4.1.2 Attractive Pricing Option for Orphan Drug Companies4.1.3 Higher Success Prospect for Hematology vs. Solid Tumors4.1.4 Development of Drugs for Rare Blood Diseases4.1.5 Increasing Scope of Gene Therapy4.1.6 Approval of UltraOrphan Drugs4.2 Growth Drivers4.2.1 Increasing Sales of Prescription Drugs4.2.2 Substantial Benefits for New Entrants in Rare Diseases Market4.2.3 Increased Spending on Medicines4.2.4 Rising Healthcare Expenditure4.2.5 Rising Global GDP4.3 Challenges4.3.1 Limitation on Charging High Price for Orphan Drugs4.3.2 No Approved Drug for Polycythemia Vera Firstline Treatment4.3.3 Tough Regulatory Approval for Orphan Drugs5. Competitive Landscape5.1 Global MarketMarket ShareProduct Comparison5.2 The U.S. MarketMarket ShareProduct Comparison6. Company Profiles6.1 Roche Holdings6.1.1 Business Overview6.1.2 Financial Overview6.1.3 Business Strategies6.2 Novartis6.2.1 Business Overview6.2.2 Financial Overview6.2.3 Business Strategies6.3 Celgene Corporation6.3.1 Business Overview6.3.2 Financial Overview6.3.3 Business Strategies6.4 Novo Nordisk6.4.1 Business Overview6.4.2 Financial Overview6.4.3 Business Strategies6.5 Eli Lilly and Company6.5.1 Business Overview6.5.2 Financial Overview6.5.3 Business StrategiesMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Global Coronary Stent Market Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Research Report 2016

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Coronary Stent Market Report: 2016 Edition" to its huge collection of research reports.The stent market is an important segment of the coronary heart diseases. The stent is a small, elastic, mesh like tube made of a metal stainless steel or cobalt alloy that acts as support. Stents are attached onto small balloons and opened inside the artery to reinstate blood flow and support the vessel wall. Stenting does not involve any major incision and is performed with the help of local anesthesia and low sedation. Stenting is relatively more comfortable for patients in comparison to coronary artery bypass heart surgery.Stents help in avoiding the heart attacks which is caused by narrowing of the coronary arteries. Drug eluting stents which are coated with medication are the most commonly used stents. Many new stents like bio resorbabale stents are in the market and next generation stents like drug filled stent are under research and development. Stents become very necessary in the severe instances of atherosclerosis which is a state where medium and large arteries harden and start narrowing because their insides get filled with plaque. The most common method employed for the treatment of coronary heart disease includes pharmaceuticals, balloon angioplasty, stenting and coronary artery bypass grafting.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The stent market was affected by thrombosis scare in the year 2010. Later the market was also affected due to stent deformity issues and pricing pressures which led the stent market down.The key factors which are anticipated to drive stent market include aging population, improving utilization of hospital, enhancement in the volume of drug eluting stent, improvement in the global health care expenditure, accelerated economic growth, diabetic population, increased consumption of alcohol, rising obese population, increase in hypertension. Some of the significant developments of this industry include introduction of new products from competing companies, Next generation stents and testing of drug filled stent. However, the challenge to be faced ahead is pricing pressure, regulatory issues and complications associated with implantation of stents.This report offers a comprehensive analysis of the stent market. Furthermore, market dynamics such as key trends and development; and challenges are analyzed in depth. On the contention front, the global stent market is reined by few major players namely Boston Scientific, Abbott Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic. The competitive landscape of the respective market, along with the company profiles of the leading players are also discussed in detail.Table of Content1. Cardiology Market  An Introduction1.1 Interventional Cardiology1.1.1 Bypass Surgery (or CABG)1.1.2 Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) or Angioplasty1.2 Stenting and its Types1.2.1 Drug Eluting Stent and Bare Metal Stent1.2.2 Benefits of Stenting2. Coronary Stent Market Analysis2.1 Global Coronary Stent Market by Value2.1.1 Global Drug Eluting Stent Market by Value2.1.2 Global Bare Metal Stent Market by Value2.1.3 Global Drug Eluting Stent Market by Volume2.1.4 Global Drug Eluting Stent Market by Device3. The US DES Market3.1 The US DES Market by Value3.2 The US DES Market Share by Device4. Rest of World DES Market4.1 Rest of World DES Market by Value5. Indian Stent Market5.1 Total Stents Used in India5.1.1 Total Drug Eluting Stents (DES) Used6. Market Dynamics6.1 Growth Drivers6.1.1 Aging Population6.1.2 Global DES Volume6.1.3 Improving Global Health Care Expenditure6.1.4 Accelerated Economic Growth6.1.5 Global Diabetic Population6.1.6 Increased Consumption of Alcohol and Tobacco6.1.7 Rising Obese Population6.1.8 Increase in Hypertension Cases6.2 Trends and Development6.2.1 Introduction of New Products6.2.2 Next Generation Stent Technologies6.2.3 Testing of Drug Filled Stent6.3 Challenges6.3.1 Pricing Pressure6.3.2 Industry Risk6.3.3 Regulatory Issues6.3.4 Complications in Stent ImplantMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Global Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) Market Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Outlook to 2019

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) Market Outlook to 2019" to its huge collection of research reports.Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) is a relatively new technology in the field of medical science. It is a less invasive method of replacing heart valve without undergoing the conventional by-pass surgery. Aortic valve replacement typically requires open heart surgery, thus it disqualifies patients who are at high risk for the process or are too weak to undergo a surgery. As a result, the market of heart valve surgical procedures is witnessing a continuous decline as more and more patients requiring valve replacement are at risk for a surgical treatment. This shortcoming of the traditional surgical method has paved way for the popularity and adoption of TAVR. It was first commercially launched in Europe in 2007 and later in the United States. The market for TAVR is regarded to be promising with immense growth opportunities and unmet demand to cater to.Rise in economic development, increasing old age population, growing obese population, and increase of aortic stenosis patients are some of the key drivers fueling the development of the global TAVR market. Growth of this market is largely dependent on macro indicators, like global GDP and global healthcare expenditure.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @This report analyzes the development of "global TAVR market", with special focus on the major markets like the United States and Europe. The major market trends and drivers that facilitate the growth of this market as well as the challenges it is facing are also analyzed in this report. The top players operating in the TAVR industry include Edward Lifesciences, Medtronic and St. Jude Medical and these companies have been profiled in the report highlighting their key financials and business strategies for growth and market expansion.Table of Content1. Market Overview2. TAVR Market Analysis2.1 Global MarketTAVR Market Value: Actual & ForecastImplants Sold: Actual & Forecast2.2 Regional Markets2.2.1 US MarketTAVR Market Value: Actual & ForecastImplants Sold: Actual & ForecastPatients at High Risk: Actual & ForecastImplants by Patient Type: Actual & ForecastImplants by Access Route: Actual & Forecast2.2.2 Outside US MarketTAVR Market Value: Actual & ForecastPatients at High Risk: Actual & ForecastEU Implants Sold: Actual & ForecastEU Implants by Patient Type: Actual & ForecastEU Implants by Access Route: Actual & Forecast3. Market Dynamics3.1 Growth Drivers3.1.1 Increasing Ageing Population3.1.2 Rising Global Healthcare Expense3.1.3 Increasing Obese Population3.1.4 Global Economic Development3.1.5 Increasing Prevalence of Inoperable Aortic Stenosis3.2 Challenges3.2.1 Regulatory Issues3.2.2 Associated High Risk3.2.3 High Cost of TAVR Devices3.3 Key Trends3.3.1 Favorable Reimbursement in Europe3.3.2 Positive Outcomes from SAPIEN 33.3.3 TAVR for Low Risk Patients3.3.4 Edwards Dominates TAVR Market4. Competitive Landscape4.1 Global MarketProduct ComparisonMarket ShareImplant Centers by CompanyImplant Volume by CompanyASP Comparison4.2 USMarket ShareImplant Centers by CompanyImplant Volume by CompanyASP Comparison4.3 Outside USMarket ShareImplant Centers by CompanyImplant Volume by CompanyASP Comparison5. Company Profiles5.1 Edwards Lifesciences5.1.1 Business Overview5.1.2 Financial Overview5.1.3 Business Strategies5.2 Medtronic5.2.1 Business Overview5.2.2 Financial Overview5.2.3 Business Strategies5.3 St. Jude Medical5.3.1 Business Overview5.3.2 Financial Overview5.3.3 Business StrategiesMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Global Controlled Valves Market Analysis & Trends 2017 - Industry Forecast to 2022

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The Controlled Valves research report by QY Research represents an inclusive evaluation of the Global Controlled Valves Market and comprises considerable insights, historical data, facts, and statistical and industry-validated data of the global market. Additionally, it consists of estimated data that is evaluated with the help of suitable set of methodologies and assumptions. The research report highlights informative data and in-depth analysis of Controlled Valves market and its corresponding segments that are based on technology, geography, and applications.The examination on value chain of Controlled Valves market is provided which covers the growth factors and restraints of the industry along with the key market competitors.To Request Sample Copy Of This Report:The report comprises precise information, comprehensive analysis in two waysqualitative and quantitativeindustry experts inputs, and information provided by industry analysts and industry participants involved in the entire value chain. The report highlights exhaustive study of major market and their present trends, along with corresponding market segments. The Controlled Valves report also provides data regarding various market factors and their impact on the overall market and its segments.Global Research report analyzes the scope of Controlled Valves industry including size, share, analysis, sales, supply, production, definition, specification, classification, demands, application, forecast trends, industry policy, and news. The report focuses on regional as well as global market, its key players, along with market segments including detailed study on various divisions and its applications. The report provides comprehensive information on each and every segment covered of the Controlled Valves market.Furthermore, the report evaluated major market points such as production, revenue, capacity utilization rate, gross, price, capacity, gross margin, supply, cost, demand, export, consumption, import, growth rate, market share, and so on.Browse Complete Report At:The global Controlled Valves market report is a helpful source which assists manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, customers, and individuals and investors who have interest in this market.Market Segment by Regions, this report splits Global into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue, market share and growth rate of Controlled Valves in these regions, from 2011 to 2021 (forecast), likeNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaAbout Us:MRS Research Group is the worlds giant collection of the Market research Reports. Where we specialized in global publisher, tailor made reports and specialists consulting. Global Publisher provides in-depth analysis of global and Chinese market. Tailor-made reports represent methodologies deliverable to proper insight of the client. While, expertise research specialist helps to provide strategic solution in specialists consulting. It consists of head such as, latest report, category, niche market and news. Reports published on the million of category like chemical, machinery and equipment, consumer goods, manufacturing and construction etc. Latest national, international, business News published under news portal.3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138, Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,Tel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651
Smart Electric Meter Market Size to Hit USD 11 Billion by 2024: Growth Analysis, Company Profiles & Trends

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Smart Electric Meter Market Size, Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, France, UK, Sweden, Portugal, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Lebanon, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina), Application Development status, Sales, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017  2024.Smart Electric Meter Market size is set to exceed USD 11 billion by 2024; according to a new research report. Commercial smart electric meter market shipments could exceed 30 million units by 2024.Growing demand for accurate billing coupled with efforts towards energy conservation will augment the global smart electric meter market growth. Rapid development of electricity network along with growing investment in smart grid will further complement the business landscape.Request a Sample Copy of Global Smart Electric Meter Market Research Report @Increasing energy prices and growing instances of electricity theft will further boost product demand. According to a 2013 IMF report, global electricity theft was over USD 100 million. Rising concerns towards accuracy in billing among end users may positively influence the industry size.The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) mandating strict regulations towards accurate billing along with increasing electricity demand will stimulate the U.S. smart electric meter market size. The U.S. Department of Energy and ARRA jointly invested USD 30 billion in 2009, to give an impetus to a wide range of sustainable energy projects and upgrade existing smart grid networks in the region.Stringent regulations towards adoption of intelligent systems to precisely track electricity consumption will augment the smart electric meter market share. European Union Directive 2009/72/EC mandates member countries to undertake initiatives which will increase consumer awareness towards the benefits of adopting these products. Directive 2014/724/EU provides guidance to regulators on safeguarding and protecting consumers' consumption data.In 2016, UK contributed to over 20% of the Europe smart electric meter market share in terms of unit shipments. Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy along with the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (OFGEM) have directed utility providers to install these products in every household by 2020, with a view to conserve electricity.Smart electric meter market size from Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) technology is anticipated to exceed USD 4 billion by 2024. Conventional AMR devices were programmed to collect meter readings and match with the utility provider's consumption data. Additional data parameters can be set in these products to control their functionality remotely, owing to technological advancement. These products give warning in case of meter tampering, low battery and leak detection.Enquire about this report @Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems will grow owing to increasing adoption of the advanced technology in developed nations including the U.S., UK, Sweden, Norway and Japan. These products provide enhanced features like notifications for demand response actions and time based pricing.Japan smart electric meter market is predicted to witness a paradigm shift owing to adoption of AMI products. In August 2015, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) launched an initiative to install over 2.7 million intelligent systems across the country and offer 24-hour customer support service through a Smart Meter Operation Centre.Notable players in the smart electric meter market include Siemens, Itron, Schneider Electric, Landis+GYR, Icsa, Circutor, Holley Metering, Iskraemeco, Osaki Electric, Honeywell International, Sensus Sentec, Elster Group, Badger Meter and Neptune Technology.Smart Electric Meter Market research report includes in-depth coverage of the industry with estimates & forecast in terms of volume (Unit Shipments) and revenue (USD) from 2013 to 2024, for the following segments:Global Smart Electric Meter Market, By Application: Residential, Commercial, Utility.Global Smart Electric Meter Market, By Technology: AMI & AMRThe above information is provided on a regional and country basis for the following: North America, U.S., Canada, Europe, Germany, Italy, France, UK, Sweden, Portugal, Asia Pacific, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Middle East & Africa, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, Lebanon, Egypt, Latin America, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina.For more information about Global Smart Electric Meter Market Report @Related Reports: -Global Smart Electric Meter Market 2017-2021Smart electric meters are utility meters that estimate the energy consumption and gauge the consumption patterns at an advanced level. These meters are often used in the residential segment. The Report analysts forecast the global smart electric meter market to grow at a CAGR of 8.83% during the period 2017-2021.MarketSizeForecasters.com, a Skyline Market Research LLP brand, is an online aggregator of market research reports. MarketSizeForecasters.com offers a comprehensive collection of full length reports on global and regional markets in 100+ industry verticals. We have partnered with some of the leading business and market research publishing houses and regularly update our online library to offer wide range of reports to our customers.Market size forecastersThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketsizeforecasters.comWebsite:News:Connect with us: LinkedIn | Twitter
Deep Research Report On Smart Card Equipment Market In China For 2017 | ResearchMoz

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Deep Research Report On Smart Card Equipment Market In China For 2017 | ResearchMoz" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies Smart Card Equipment in China market, focuses on the top players in China market, with capacity, production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringDatacardMuehlbauerAtlantic ZeiserEmperor TechnologyNBSMaticaUlian EquipmentMarket Segment by Regions (provinces), coveringSouth ChinaEast ChinaSouthwest ChinaNortheast ChinaNorth ChinaCentral ChinaNorthwest ChinaSplit by product Type, with production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, can be divided intoSmall-Volume Card EquipmentMid-Volume EquipmentHigh-Volume EquipmentTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Split by Application, this report focuses on consumption, market share and growth rate of Smart Card Equipment in each application, can be divided intoFinancialGovernmentHealthcareCommercialOtherTable of ContentsChina Smart Card Equipment Market Research Report 20171 Smart Card Equipment Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Smart Card Equipment1.2 Smart Card Equipment Segment by Type1.2.1 China Production Market Share of Smart Card Equipment Type in 20151.2.2 Small-Volume Card Equipment1.2.3 Mid-Volume Equipment1.2.4 High-Volume Equipment1.3 Applications of Smart Card Equipment1.3.1 Smart Card Equipment Consumption Market Share by Application in 20151.3.2 Financial1.3.3 Government1.3.4 Healthcare1.3.5 Commercial1.3.6 Other1.4 China Market Size (Value) of Smart Card Equipment (2012-2022)1.5 China Smart Card Equipment Status and Outlook1.6 Government Policies2 China Smart Card Equipment Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 China Smart Card Equipment Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.2 China Smart Card Equipment Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.3 China Smart Card Equipment Average Price by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)Make an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Global Hearing Aids and Implants Market By Region, By Sub-types, By Implants & By Country: Trends, Opportunities and Forecasts 2016 - 2021

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ResearchMoz presents this most up-to-date research on "Global Hearing Aids and Implants Market By Region, By Sub-types, By Implants & By Country: Trends, Opportunities and Forecasts 2016 - 2021".Hearing aids and implants is witnessing growth on account of growing incidences of hearing loss globally where developed economies including North America and Europe are the major markets due to higher adoption rate whereas emerging economies such as Asia Pacific and Latin America are witnessing rapid growth driven by high per capita expenditure.Rise in the aging population giving rise to increasing incidences of hearing loss combined with higher Internet savvy adult population leading active lifestyles. However, limited reimbursement coverage mainly in developing countries is supressing the growth of hearing aids and implants market, resulting in higher out of pocket expenses of patients.Technological improvements in hearing implants is growing mainly among the increasing paediatric population whereas expansion of retail channel is giving rise to quick availability and wide range of portfolio driven by the private purchasing of hearing aids.Research MethodologyThe objective of the research is to present the historical growth (2011-2015) and the future projections (2016-2021) of the global hearing aids and implants market (global, regional, country-specific) by various segments (Hearing Aids and their sub-types: Behind-The-Ear (BTE), In-The-Ear (ITE), Receiver In-The-Ear(RITE), In-The-Canal(ITC), Completely-In-The-Canal (CIC), Others and Hearing Implants and their sub-types : Cochlear Implant, Other Implants, By End Purchase: Independent Purchase, Retail, Buying Groups/Wholesale, Government). Historical market trend of contact catering has been figured out through secondary research (associations, annual reports, magazines, journals) and by various paid databases. For presenting the dynamics of the industry and future projections, primary research was conducted and experts from the industry were interviewed.Make an Enquiry of this report @Scope of the ReportThe report provides Segmentation by TypeHearing AidsHearing ImplantsThe report provides Segmentation by Sub- TypeHearing Aids : Behind-The-Ear (BTE), In-The-Ear (ITE), Receiver In-The-Ear(RITE), In-The-Canal(ITC), Completely-In-The-Canal (CIC), OthersHearing Implants : Cochlear Implant, Other ImplantsThe report provides Segmentation by End-PurchaseIndependent PurchaseRetailBuying Groups/WholesaleGovernmentThe report provides coverage by RegionNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificLatin AmericaMiddle East and Africa (MEA)The report provides coverage by CountryUnited StatesCanadaUnited KingdomGermanyChinaIndiaBrazilMexicoSouth AfricaTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Pain Management Therapeutics Market : Research, Development, Analytical Forecast to 2025

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Pain Management Therapeutics Market: OverviewPain management therapeutics comprise various methods to ease varied degrees of pain among patients and improve their quality of life. Pharmaceutical therapeutics are usually the first line of treatment for pain management and if this does not work, patients opt for other methods such as pain managing devices, physiotherapy, and chiropractic therapy.Pain management therapeutics can be categorized into antidepressants, anticonvulsants, opioids, anesthetics, antimigraine agents, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS), and non-narcotic analgesics. Various drugs are used for the management of different kinds of pain, such as fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain, arthritic pain, chronic back pain, post-operative pain, migraine, and cancer-related pain. A common trend that has been observed among patients is the consumption of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs rather than prescription drugs.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Pain Management Therapeutics Market: TrendsThe growing prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer has been single-handedly driving the demand for pain management therapeutics and the number of people suffering from this kind of pain has been surging at a substantial rate. In addition to this, a massive geriatric population susceptible to arthritis, nerve damage, neuropathy, and joint pain is also boosting the market for pain management therapeutics. Supplementing market growth are favorable regulatory scenarios in many developed countries around the world.However, as more and more patients opt for generic pain management drugs, the branded segment has been suffering a major setback. Moreover, the patent expiries of a number of blockbuster drugs will have a significant impact on the overall market for pain management therapeutics.Pain Management Therapeutics Market: Market PotentialDespite the fact that leading brands are nearing a point of saturation, the pain management therapeutics market possesses strong potential for growth, particularly for smaller players. For instance, looking to expand its footprint in the global market as well as strengthen its U.S. pharmaceutical unit, Ireland-based Endo International plc acquired Auxilium Pharmaceuticals in 2015. The company also launched the BELBUCA Bucccal Film in 2016, which is used for the management of chronic pain.Request TOC of the Report @Purdue Pharma, headquartered in Connecticut, U.S., ventured into a patent agreement with Acura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Egalet Corporation in 2016 for the development and sales of opioid pain management medicines.Pain Management Therapeutics Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global market for pain management therapeutics comprises North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. North America and Europe hold the largest share in the overall market and are slated to continue their dominance throughout the forecast period. The rising consumption of advanced pain management drugs and the availability of well-established and sophisticated healthcare infrastructure are the key factors driving the North America and Europe pain management therapeutics market. Asia Pacific is an immensely lucrative region and a number of players are looking to expand their operations in the many emerging countries in the region. This can be attributed to strong economic growth in nations such as China, India, Malaysia, and Japan, rising investments in the healthcare industry in these countries, and the increasing affordability of the population.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@Pain Management Therapeutics Market: Competitive AnalysisThere are a host of generic as well as branded drug manufacturers in the global pain management therapeutics market. These include GlaxoSmithKline plc, Novartis AG, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, Merck & Co., Inc., Purdue Pharma L.P., Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, Depomed, Inc., and Pfizer, Inc. Although companies producing branded pain management therapeutics have a strong foothold in the market, the market is actually dominated by generic drug manufacturers, giving small- and medium-scale players immense scope for growth.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting ser-vices to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:Rohit BhiseyHead - Internet MarketingTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.com
Embedded System Market : Revenue, Opportunity, Forecast and Value Chain 2017 - 2025

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Global Embedded System Market: OverviewAn embedded system consists of a microprocessor or microcontroller and acts as the processing core of a large system in order to perform a particular task. The combination of software and hardware in an embedded system create functional targeting device that has several benefits such as accuracy, adaptability, speed, reliability, small size, and power. With an ability to perform in a real time manner, embedded systems have applications in a number of purposes such as mobile communication, railway ticketing, electronic payments, automobile, and aeronautics. As these systems can be customized and designed according to the need, the adoptability is increasing and consequently, the demand in the global embedded systems market is expected to expand at a robust CAGR during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025.Global Embedded System Market: Key TrendsThe exponential escalation in the number of mobile users and its deep penetration into the urban population across developed and emerging economies is the primary driver of the global embedded system market. In several countries, consistent emphasis has been given to improve wireless communication infrastructure, owing to increasing number of users with smartphones and tablets with the requirement of internet connectivity. In addition to that, application of embedded computers as network and backend systems in the telecom sector in order to provide higher bandwidth to the consumers is another prominent factor favoring the growth rate of the market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @By application, the global embedded market can be segmented into telecommunication, healthcare, automotive, consumer electronics, industrial, and aerospace and defense. Although the telecom industry currently serves the maximum demand, the prosperity of the automotive industry, especially in the emerging economies, is expected to expand at most prominent rate during the forecast period.Global Embedded System Market: Market PotentialThe Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to open new opportunities in the embedded system market, revolutionizing how machine-to-machine (M2M) communication are done, and in turn not only increase the efficiency of the machines but also negotiate fatal errors. For instance, if an aircrafts engine sensors detect a mechanical concern, the embedded system can try to diagnose the situation as well as sent information to the appropriate destination. Though IoT is still in its relative nascent stage and there are only a few large-scale deployment of it, together with embedded systems they are opening new opportunities for the players in this market.Request TOC of the Report @Global Embedded System Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the report studies the potential of embedded system market in regions such as North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa. Currently, technologically advanced countries such as the U.S. and Canada make North America the most lucrative region. Asia Pacific, which resides several emerging economies such as India and China, is also expected to expand the demand quickly during the forecast period. The importance of standards-based systems and its growing application in sectors such as healthcare, transportation, and energy are expected to boost the demand from APAC.Global Embedded System Market: Competitive AnalysisThis market is moderately fragmented in nature with a few players holding little over half of the shares. The report identifies Freescale Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics Corporation, and Renesas Electronics Corporation are the leaders in the global embedded system market, whereas Qualcomm, Intel Corporation, Advanced Microdevices, and Samsung Electronics dominate the embedded microprocessor systems segment. Owing to a limited target customer-base, the competition in this market is intensifying among the vendors, which as a result is expected to initiate a price war and result in low bargaining power of vendors as well as increment the adoptability. Radisys, GE, Kontron, Advantech, Eurotech, Mercury, Emerson are some of the other prominent players in the global embedded system market.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting ser-vices to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting ser-vices to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.
Global FlIght SImulator Market 2017 Industry Trends, Growth, Analysis and Overview: QYResearchReports

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global FlIght SImulator Market Research Report 2017" to its huge collection of research reports.The FlIght SImulator has been expressively dissected in this statistical surveying that has been added to our frequently growing industry knowledge arrangement. The archive takes after an arrangement that gives a careful and scientific diagram of the FlIght SImulator and moreover inspects the main sections, compelling components, and market components that administer the development rate of the market and its competitive and regional scenes.The report offers to its clients an all-encompassing 360-degree point of view of the FlIght SImulator from the back to front, starting with the core values of the mechanical components, then proceeding onward to the examination of information on the different perspectives including as industry chain structure, groupings, industry diagram, arrangements, applications, and late advancements.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The data offered in the report has been accumulated through the assistance of various essential and auxiliary research strategies. Quantitative and subjective information appraisal for key market sections on the regional and the aggregate worldwide front have also been given in the report. The gigantic archives of information that have been sifted through by industry-best investigative techniques will give to the user the points of interest that matter the most.The report also gives a portrayal of the administrative situation of the FlIght SImulator and gives points of interest relating to the more prominent arrangements, approaches, controls, and decides in that effect the numerous business related choices in the market. A point by point outline of the competitive scene of the FlIght SImulator has additionally been given in the report, wherein itemized business profiles, SWOT examination, and numerous different insights about a portion of the real sellers in the market are incorporated.Table of ContentsGlobal FlIght SImulator Market Research Report 20171 FlIght SImulator Market OvervIew1.1 Product OvervIew and Scope of FlIght SImulator1.2 FlIght SImulator Segment by Type1.2.1 Global ProductIon Market Share of FlIght SImulator by Type In 20151.2.2 Type I1.2.3 Type II1.3 FlIght SImulator Segment by ApplIcatIon1.3.1 FlIght SImulator ConsumptIon Market Share by ApplIcatIon In 20151.3.2 ApplIcatIon 11.3.3 ApplIcatIon 21.3.4 ApplIcatIon 31.4 FlIght SImulator Market by RegIon1.4.1 North AmerIca Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.2 Europe Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.3 ChIna Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.4 Japan Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.5 Southeast AsIa Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.6 IndIa Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.5 Global Market SIze (Value) of FlIght SImulator (2012-2022)Browse Complete Report with TOC @2 Global FlIght SImulator Market CompetItIon by Manufacturers2.1 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon and Share by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.2 Global FlIght SImulator Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.3 Global FlIght SImulator Average PrIce by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.4 Manufacturers FlIght SImulator ManufacturIng Base DIstrIbutIon, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 FlIght SImulator Market CompetItIve SItuatIon and Trends2.5.1 FlIght SImulator Market ConcentratIon Rate2.5.2 FlIght SImulator Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & AcquIsItIons, ExpansIon3 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue (Value) by RegIon (2012-2017)3.1 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon by RegIon (2012-2017)3.2 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon Market Share by RegIon (2012-2017)3.3 Global FlIght SImulator Revenue (Value) and Market Share by RegIon (2012-2017)3.4 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue, PrIce and Gross MargIn (2012-2017)3.5 North AmerIca FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue, PrIce and Gross MargIn (2012-2017)3.6 Europe FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue, PrIce and Gross MargIn (2012-2017)3.7 ChIna FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue, PrIce and Gross MargIn (2012-2017)3.8 Japan FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue, PrIce and Gross MargIn (2012-2017)3.9 Southeast AsIa FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue, PrIce and Gross MargIn (2012-2017)3.10 IndIa FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue, PrIce and Gross MargIn (2012-2017)4 Global FlIght SImulator Supply (ProductIon), ConsumptIon, Export, Import by RegIons (2012-2017)4.1 Global FlIght SImulator ConsumptIon by RegIons (2012-2017)4.2 North AmerIca FlIght SImulator ProductIon, ConsumptIon, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.3 Europe FlIght SImulator ProductIon, ConsumptIon, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.4 ChIna FlIght SImulator ProductIon, ConsumptIon, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.5 Japan FlIght SImulator ProductIon, ConsumptIon, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.6 Southeast AsIa FlIght SImulator ProductIon, ConsumptIon, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.7 IndIa FlIght SImulator ProductIon, ConsumptIon, Export, Import (2012-2017)5 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon, Revenue (Value), PrIce Trend by Type5.1 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.2 Global FlIght SImulator Revenue and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.3 Global FlIght SImulator PrIce by Type (2012-2017)5.4 Global FlIght SImulator ProductIon Growth by Type (2012-2017)Read More @QYResearchReports.com is an unimpeachable source of market research data for clients that comprise acclaimed SMEs, Chinese companies, private equity firms, and MNCs. 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Powder Packing Machines Market Regional Study: United States, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and India-2017 Report

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Powder Packing Machines market 2017 top companies, regional outlook, product types, industry trends and more in a newly released report now available with eMarketOrg.com.For this report, the Powder Packing Machines market value is provided for 2016 in USD millions, an expected CAGR % as well as USD million worth of industry in 2022. Regionally, the globe is segmented into United States, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia and India to study their market size and local analysis. End user applications of Powder Packing Machines market covering Food, Pharmaceutical, Chemical and Others are studied in this research. Share of Powder Packing Machines market is covered by applications as well supported with potential applications in the future.Buy the complete Powder Packing Machines report with Comprehensive table of contents @An extensive analysis methodology is involved for this Powder Packing Machines research report. The research methodology used to estimate and forecast the Powder Packing Machines market involves a primary and a secondary research. A systematic procedure has been used to arrive at the global size of the Powder Packing Machines market and present revenue of key players in the market. Accurate data has been collected by conducting extensive interviews with people holding key decision making positions in the industry such as CEOs, VPs, directors, and executives.Inquire for discount for this report @Industry chain analysis covering upstream raw materials and equipments of Powder Packing Machines market, their suppliers' information as well as analysis of downstream major consumers for Powder Packing Machines is provided to understand the complete industry chain structure. Overall market analyzed in this report is divided by regions, types and manufacturers/companies. The research estimates 2017-2022 Powder Packing Machines market development trends covering capacity, production and revenue forecasts as well as regional supply consumption forecasts. Towards the end, this report includes a feasibility analysis of New Project Investment covering SWOT analysis of Powder Packing Machines OR marketing strategy analysis and market effect factor analysis. Overall, the report provides factual insights collected and analyzed with detailed primary and secondary research on Powder Packing Machines market.The research compiles profiles of small and big Powder Packing Machines market companies covering their product details as well as important statistics on production, capacity, price and more. These active companies' numbers are supported with information on marketing traders and/or distributors of the Powder Packing Machines industry along with their contact information. This data gives valuable industry insights and direction to individuals and/or companies that are new entrants, eyeing to enter or grow in the Powder Packing Machines market. Some of the Key vendors profiled in this research include: Nichrome Packaging Solutions, Ipk Packaging, Shivalaya Machinery, Viking Masek, Shanghai Shouda Packaging Machinery & MaterialYuanxu Packing, Tom Packing Machinery, Hualian Machinery Group, Tech-Long Packaging Machineries, Sotech Smarter Equipment, Nantong SNT Packing Machinery and Unique Packaging Systems.Partial list of Tables and Figures for this report include:Figure North America Powder Packing Machines Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure Europe Powder Packing Machines Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure China Powder Packing Machines Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure Japan Powder Packing Machines Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure Southeast Asia Powder Packing Machines Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure India Powder Packing Machines Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure Global Powder Packing Machines Revenue (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2012-2022)Figure Global Powder Packing Machines Capacity, Production (K Units) Status and Outlook (2012-2022)Figure Global Powder Packing Machines Major Players Product Capacity (K Units) (2012-2017)Table Global Powder Packing Machines Capacity (K Units) of Key Manufacturers (2012-2017)Table Global Powder Packing Machines Capacity Market Share of Key Manufacturers (2012-2017)Figure Global Powder Packing Machines Capacity (K Units) of Key Manufacturers in 2016Figure Global Powder Packing Machines Capacity (K Units) of Key Manufacturers in 2017Figure Global Powder Packing Machines Major Players Product Production (K Units) (2012-2017)Table Global Powder Packing Machines Production (K Units) of Key Manufacturers (2012-2017)Table Global Powder Packing Machines Production Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)Contact Details:Ronald Aldensales@emarketorg.cominfo@emarketorg.comAbout Us:eMarketOrg.com aims to provide businesses and organizations market intelligence products and services that help in making smart, instant and crucial decisions. Our database offers access to insights from industry leaders, experts and influencers on global and regional sectors, market trends, user behaviour, for companies as well as products. With data and information from reputable and trusted private and public sources, our clients are never short of statistics and analysis that are up to date.F/3, 4A Bharat Pushpa Apt.,Subhash Nagar, Shukrawar Peth,Pune  411002
Growth of Cloud Based Contact Center Market in Global Industry : Trends and Application 2017

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ALBANY, NY, May 15, 2017 : Contact centers are the facilities that manage clients contacts through various mediums such as letter, e-mail, fax, telephone and online live chat. Contact center is defined as a synchronized system of people, strategies, technologies and processes that provides access to resources, data and expertise, through suitable channels of communication. These communication channels enable interaction among various business departments that creates value for the customers and organizations. Companies worldwide are continuously searching for cost-effective approaches with cloud based partners to optimize the effectiveness of their contact center systems and applications. The introduction of cloud computing in the contact center market is playing a vital role in renovating the mature contact center technology sector. Most of the categories of contact centers and customer service applications have been cloud enabled.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @Increasing rate of innovation in this market is accelerating the rate of adoption of cloud based contact centers globally Vendors of cloud based contact center infrastructure are considerably investing in its research and development (R&D) activities to get a competitive edge. The cloud model has witnessed exceptional growth and demand in the contact center market over the past few years. This market is anticipated to experience significant growth owing to increasing areas of applications, which in turn will necessitate all contact centers to shift some of their functionalities to the cloud in the coming future.Customer requests, strategic partnerships, trends such as application of cloud based contact centers in industry verticals such as corporate and enterprise, and necessity to deliver new capabilities to the existing market plays a critical role in the innovation of cloud based contact centers. Cost reduction is one of the key factors driving the growth for cloud based contact centre. Moreover, reduced and simplified maintenance process, fast implementation of business value, simplicity in managing distributed sites, business agility and flexibility along with financial benefits are propelling the market growth. Adoption of cloud solutions is not dependent on a single or fewer industry sectors; but, it is evenly distributed across various industry verticals. High adoption of cloud based solution in industries such as financial services; retail, healthcare and technology are fueling the growth of market.The eradication of cloud linked traditional beliefs related to functionality, control; reliability and security are also leading to an increased adoption of cloud based contact centers globally. Key application areas of cloud based contact centers include customer relationship management (CRM), multimedia contact, quality monitoring, automated call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), outbound contact, workforce management (WFM), and analytics, among others.Expanded application program interface (API) capabilities, speech and text analytics, enhanced workforce management (WFM) capabilities, enhanced sales and marketing offering and enhancement of customer relationship management (CRM) integration that enables customers to string together their workflows within different CRM systems are the expected to be potential future opportunities for this market. With implementation of cloud based contact centers, business enterprises can evade the surplus investment in the infrastructure (that are not based on cloud computing).Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are anticipated to deploy cloud based contact centers to their entire business activities, whereas large enterprises will tend to implement cloud based contact centers for selected functionalities or departments. Some of the major players in the cloud based contact centers market are Liveops, Inc., Aspect Software, Inc., inContact, Inc. and Five9, Inc. among others.This research report analyzes this market on the basis of its market segments, major geographies, and current market trends. Geographies analyzed under this research report includeNorth AmericaAsia PacificEuropeRest of the WorldThis report provides comprehensive analysis ofMarket growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for upcoming yearsThis report is a complete study of current trends in the market, industry growth drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It includes analysis of recent developments in technology, Porters five force model analysis and detailed profiles of top industry players. The report also includes a review of micro and macro factors essential for the existing market players and new entrants along with detailed value chain analysis.Make an Enquiry of this report @Reasons for Buying this ReportThis report provides pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamicsIt provides a forward looking perspective on different factors driving or restraining market growthIt provides a six-year forecast assessed on the basis of how the market is predicted to growIt helps in understanding the key product segments and their futureIt provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitorsIt helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segmentsIt provides distinctive graphics and exemplified SWOT analysis of major market segmentsResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMoz90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United States
Global Dental LCD Displays Market Analysis, Trends, Opportunities

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Research Beam added a report on Global Dental LCD Displays Market Research Report 2016 - Dental LCD Displays Industry Research, Analysis, Technology, Growth, Demand, Report, Trends and ForecastReport splits global into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue, and market share and growth rate of Dental LCD Displays in these regions, from 2011 to 2021Request for Sample Copy @The Dental LCD Displays Market Research Report is an extensive study of the current market trends and growth prospects of the industry. The report offers comprehensive analysis for the historic period, 20112016 and the forecast period, 20162021. Industry overview is provided in terms of definition, specifications, and industry chain structure of Dental LCD Displays. Manufacturing processes and cost structures are discussed along with raw material and equipment suppliers. In addition, in-depth analysis of types and applications is covered in the study with the help of figures offering insights on market share in similar format presented in ReportRegional analysis for the Dental LCD Displays market is offered on the basis of market size, sales, sale price, and growth rate. In addition, import, export, supply, and consumption analysis are included for each region.Report Description with TOC @Following regions are analyzed: North America Europe China Japan Southeast Asia IndiaMajor manufacturers are analyzed in the report based on company profile, specifications, types, and contact information. Furthermore, comprehensive analysis of capacity, production, cost, price, and revenue of each manufacturer is covered.Following manufacturers are analyzed: Planmeca TPC Planmeca Miglionico Kavo G.Comm GnatusGlobal market size in terms of volume & value, growth rate, sales, and sale price are analyzed for the historic period. Moreover, an extensive analysis of market size of types, applications, and regions is offered for the forecast period. The feasibility and SWOT analysis for new project investment is explored along with marketing distributor analysis.Data & statistics are provided with the help of figures and tables to help market players, investors, and stakeholders gain thorough understanding. Research conclusions are presented at the end of the report.For More Information about Report@Split by product type, with production, revenue, price, and market share and growth rate of each type, can be divided into Type I Type IISplit by application, this report focuses on consumption, market share and growth rate of Dental LCD Displays in each application, can be divided into Application 1 Application 2About Us:With the arsenal of different search reports, Research Beam helps you here to look and buy research reports that will be helpful to you and your organization. Our research reports have the capability and authenticity to support your organization for growth and consistency. With the window of opportunity getting open and shut at a speed of light, it has become very important to survive in the market and only the fittest and competent enough can do so. So, we try and provide with latest changes in the market that can suit your needs and help you take decision accordingly.Contact Us:5933 NE Win Sivers Drive, #205, Portland, OR 97220U.S. & Canada Toll Free: + 1-800-910-6452UK: + 44-845-528-1300, India: +91 20 66346070Fax: +1 (855) 550-5975Email: help@researchbeam.comWeb:
Global Hearing Aid Devices Market 2017- Latest Trends and Issues!

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The Global Hearing Aid Devices Market Research Report 2017 is a valuable source of insightful data for business strategists. It provides the Hearing Aid Devices industry overview with growth analysis and historical & futuristic cost, revenue, demand and supply data (as applicable). The research analysts provide an elaborate description of the value chain and its distributor analysis.This report provides comprehensive analysis of Key market segments and sub-segments Evolving market trends and dynamics Changing supply and demand scenarios Quantifying market opportunities through market sizing and market forecasting Tracking current trends/opportunities/challenges Competitive insights Opportunity mapping in terms of technological breakthroughs.Global Hearing Aid Devices Market: Regional Segment Analysis North America China Europe Japan Southeast Asia IndiaOn the basis of product the report split into In the Ear Hearing Aids (ITE) In the Canal (ITC) Completely in the Canal (CIC) Behind the Ear (BTE) Receiver in Canal (RIC)On the basis of end user the report split into application, including Congenital Hearing Loss in Elderly Acquired TraumaGet Free Sample Brochure of report @The Major players reported in the market include: Sonova William Demant Siemens ReSound Starkey Widex Hansaton Beltone Interton Audina Coselgi Audio Service AST Hearing Lisound New SoundReasons to buy This report of Hearing Aid Devices Market provides pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamics It provides a forward looking perspective on different factors driving or restraining market growth It provides a six-year forecast assessed on the basis of how the market is predicted to growIt helps in understanding the key product segments and their future It provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitors It helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segmentsFor complete report @About us:MarketIntelReports (MIR) aim to empower our clients to successfully manage and outperform in their business decisions, we do this by providing Premium Market Intelligence, Strategic Insights and Databases from a range of Global Publishers.A group of industry veterans who are well experienced in reputed international consulting firms after identifying the sourcing needs of MNCs for market intelligence, have together started this business savior MarketIntelReports.MIR intends to be a one-stop shop with an intuitive design, exhaustive database, expert assistance, secure cart checkout and data privacy integrated. It curates the list of reports, publishers and studies to ensure that the database is constantly updated to dynamically meet the targeted, specific needs of our clients.MarketIntelReports currently has more than 10,000 plus titles and 35+ publishers on our platform and growing consistently to fill the Global Intelligence Demand  Supply Gap. We cover more than 15 industry verticals being: Automotive, Electronics, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Chemicals, Building & Construction, Agriculture, Food & Beverages, Banking & Finance, Media and Government, Public Sector Studies.Contact us:Mayur S.Sales Manager2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400,Wilmington, Delaware, 19808United Statessales@marketintelreports.comTelephone: 1-302-261-5343
Automated Intelligence announce customer win in local government

Automated Intelligence (AI) is pleased to announce our latest customer win in local government. The County Council will benefit from enhanced information governance and collaboration using proven solutions from Automated Intelligence.The County Council will migrate to the Cloud and consolidate to a single information platform using Microsoft SharePoint Online. The authority will use AI.COMPLIANCE EXTENDER and AI.SYNCPOINT to extend the governance and productivity of SharePoint Online.Furthermore the Council will use AI.DATAPOINT and services from AI to undertake the migration. This will enable them to reduce current data holdings, save costs and increase efficiencies.AIs capability allows the authority to manage data better, complying with industry standards and providing more agile collaboration across the organisation. 14,000 council staff are expected to use software solution, with enhanced SharePoint Online for EDRMS.Mark Godfrey, CEO of Automated Intelligence comments on the success, We are delighted to announce another customer in local government.Many authorities are looking to utilise the power of the Cloud to deliver cost savings; decommission legacy systems and prepare for forthcoming initiatives such as GDPR . It is important to ensure that council staff can securely access, manage and use information to provide effective citizen services.Authorities can use our solution to avail of the systems like Office 365 and add additional capability to meet their information governance and business productivity requirements. We look forward to working with the council, over the coming years, to enable them to provide a cost-effective information platform that is built around the needs of their users.Automated Intelligence (AI) provides market-leading SharePoint, information governance and cloud solutions and services. AIs technology enables organisations to manage their information end-to-end through its life-cycle, significantly reducing the cost of managing and storing unstructured data. AIs solutions enable customers to comply with legal, government and internal policy obligations, whilst improving user experience, user acceptance information discovery and data quality.Some of the customers benefiting from AI solutions include: The Department for Education, Department of Health, HM Treasury, Department of Energy and Climate Change, London Borough of Islington, City of Cardiff Council, British Red Cross and Amnesty International.Ryan KyleAutomated Intelligence LtdUnit 4,The Legacy Building,Queens Road,Queens Island,Belfast
Coating Equipment Market, regulatory trends, drivers and challenges 2017-2024

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https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/1434

https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/coating-equipment-market

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Coating Equipment Market size is expected to witness a surge in demand owing to increase in end use application in various industries including aerospace, automotive, industrial, transportation, and construction. Rise in automotive sales coupled with growing population, rapid boom of infrastructural industry and upsurging purchasing power of the consumers in emerging economies will boost the demand of coating equipment market growth.Purchase Coating Equipment Market Report by calling Global Market Insights, Inc. at 1-888-689-0688 (Toll Free) or 1-302-846-7766Heavy machineries used in different industries employs various layering apparatus to provide tool resistance from corrosion, abrasion, rusting and wear & tear, which in turn increase the lifespan of these tools. Rise in industrialization in building and manufacturing industries in developing nations will upsurge coating equipment market. Growing application of heavy machines in manufacturing sector will also augment the market. Increase use of layering in household appliances, automobiles, and bicycle will ensure further product growth.Request for detail Table of Contents(toc) @Coating equipment market is segmented on the basis of applications in various industries which include transportation and automobile, infrastructural and building industries, aerospace and manufacturing. Machine layering is increasing with rise in covering of metals including drum parts, automotive parts, house appliances and other music instruments which will drive the coating equipment market.The differentiating factor of Coating Equipment Market report by Global Market Insights, Inc. when compared with other, similar syndicated research studies includes a 360-degree synopsis of trends for a period of more than 10 years including historic information as well as future outlook. Business focussed multiple trends for Coating Equipment Market are discussed along with regional trends to offer an overall view of the market.The industry insights chapter of this research provides the most comprehensive analysis of Coating Equipment Market covering segmentation, size, forecasts, ecosystem analysis and more. Industry impact forces (regional and global) that cover growth drivers and challenges, growth potential analysis, a strategy dashboard for competitive landscape of Coating Equipment Market support this sector specific data and information points.Inquire about to purchase Coating Equipment Market research report@Global coating equipment market is consolidated in nature owing to the presence of few key players at domestic as well as international levels. Some of the key player include SATA GmbH, IHI Ionbond Ag, Graco, Anest Iwata, Nordson, and O.C.Oerlikon.In 2017, Nordson ASYMTEK, a sister company of Nordson Corporation Group, has developed a software Easycoat 6 which provides accurate conformal layering with traceability and process control for conformal coating system. It allows to create conformal programs in an effective and easy way. It consists with several effective functions which allows to maximize productivity and enables precision. Increase in use of circuit boards in electronic & electrical industry will boost the coating equipment market in the forecasted period.Browse complete summary of Coating Equipment Market report @About Global Market Insights, Inc.Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact UsArun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1 888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:29L Atlantic Avenue, Suite L 105,Ocean View DelawareUnited States 19970
Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters Market Forecast 2017 : Induceramic, Bansal Limited, SELEE Corporation, ceChemPack , Tower

Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters

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A market study based on the " Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters Market " across the globe, recently added to the repository of Market Research, is titled Global Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters Market 2017. The research report analyses the historical as well as present performance of the worldwide Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters industry, and makes predictions on the future status of Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market on the basis of this analysis.Sample Copy of Report :Top Manufacturers Companies Covered In This Research Report -1. Induceramic2. Bansal Limited3. SELEE Corporation4. AceChemPack Tower5. Texers Inc.On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into: Ordinary Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters Precision Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam FiltersSilicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market users, sales volume, market share and growth rate of Photo Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters for each application, including - Water and Wastewater Chemical Process Power GenerationThe report studies the industry for Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters across the globe taking the existing industry chain, the import and export statistics in Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market & dynamics of demand and supply of Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters into consideration. The ' Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters ' research study covers each and every aspect of the Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market globally, which starts from the definition of the Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters industry and develops towards Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market segmentations. Further, every segment of the Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market is classified and analysed on the basis of product types, application, and the end-use industries of the Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market. The geographical segmentation of the Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters industry has also been covered at length in this report.The competitive landscape of the worldwide market for Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters is determined by evaluating the various industry participants, production capacity, Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market's production chain, and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market worldwide.Enquiry Here :The global Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market 2017 is also analysed on the basis of product pricing, Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters production volume, data regarding demand and Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. Various methodical tool of Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters such as investment returns, feasibility, and market attractiveness analysis has been used in Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters market research to present a comprehensive study of the industry for Silicon Carbide Ceramic Foam Filters across the globe.About Us:"Spire Market Research" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USA
Flexible Electronics and Materials Market to Observe Strong Development by 2022

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Market ScenarioThe major growth driver of Flexible Electronics and Materials Market includes growing demand for compact and light weight electronic products, increasing competition among commercialized technologies such as LCD, LED, and OLED, and rise in demand for technically upgraded wearable devices among others.However, presence of competent technology is one of the major factors which are hindering the growth of Flexible Electronics and Materials Market.Market SegmentsGlobal Flexible Electronics and Materials Market can be segmented as follows: Segmentation by Components: Silicon materials, dielectrics, sensors, transistors, displays and contact materials among others. Segmentation by Application: Healthcare, automotive, consumer electronics, military & defence and biometrics among others.Request a Sample Report @Study Objective of Flexible Electronics and Materials Market To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 10 years of the various segments and sub-segments of the Global Flexible Electronics and Materials market. To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth. To analyze the Flexible Electronics and Materials Market based on various factors- price analysis, supply chain analysis, porters five force analysis etc. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World (ROW). To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective. To provide country level analysis of the market for segment by component, by application and sub-segments. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global Flexible Electronics and Materials market.Browse Report Details @Key Players:Some of the major players in Global Flexible Electronics and Materials Market include- DuPont (U.S.) BASF (Germany) Merck Kgaa (Germany) ALTANA AG (Germany) LG Corporation (South Korea) Samsung Electronics (South Korea) Cymbet Corporation (U.S.) Fujifilm Dimatix (U.S.) Hewlett Packard (U.S.) Solar Frontier (Germany)Industry News: Altana AG has announced in July 2016 about its expansion of additive business by acquisition of Addcomp, a Dutch company. The Addcomp will be unified into Plastic additives business of Altana. Merck Kgaa has done partnership with UK based Flex Enable company, which is one of the leader of flexible organic electronics market in year 2015. This partnership was implemented to grow in LCD technology market.Request Table of Contents for this Report @The reports also cover brief analysis of Geographical Region including:Americas North America US Canada Latin AmericaEurope Western Europe Germany France U.K Rest of Western Europe Eastern EuropeAsia Pacific Asia China India Japan South Korea Rest of Asia PacificThe Middle East & AfricaAbout 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.Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Lower GI Series Market  Major key players, Opportunity Analysis and Industry Foresight, 2017-2022

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Global Lower GI Series Market by applications (Gastroenteritis, Colon polyps, tumor, Strictures Crohn's disease, lcerative colitis & others), by end users (hospitals, clinics & laboratories) & by test types (double-contrast & single-contrast): forecast to 2027Global Lower GI Series Market: OverviewA lower GI series also said to be a lower gastrointestinal series or barium enema is one of the medical procedure which are used in the examination and diagnose with the problem related to human colon or large intestine and rectum. Lower GI series is one of the test which helps to detect the diseases and abnormalities and diagnose the symptoms such as. The lower GI series test can be examined by the X-ray pictures of patients. This examination assesses the transverse colon, ascending and right colon, the left or descending colon, the sigmoid colon and the rectum. It also includes the portion of small intestine and appendix.Global Lower GI Series Market: Key PlayersThe prominent key players present in the global lower GI series test market are Gastro Intestinal Endoscopy, Gastro Intestinal Specialists, Eisai US, Cadila Pharmaceuticals Limited, Peace Health, Purdue Pharma L.P., Alfa Wassermann, NOVADAQ, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, AstraZeneca, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals and among others.Get a Sample Report @Global Lower GI Series Market: ApplicationThe lower GI series test or barium enemas are mostly used to examine the rectum or large intestine. The lower GI series test are examine to identify and detect the diseases such as Colon polyps, tumors, Diverticular disease, Gastroenteritis, lcerative colitis or Strictures Crohn's disease and others such as constipation, pain or blood in the stools. The lower GI series tests are widely used by the hospitals and clinics due to the large number of patients increasing across the globe.Global Lower GI Series Market: Market Growth InfluencerThe global lower GI Series market has seen a prospective growth in the recent days. Earlier, the diagnoses of the diseases such as Colon polyps, tumors, diverticular disease, gastroenteritis, strictures crohn's disease or icerative colitis was very complex and difficult to diagnose. But the invention of lower GI series test has pushed the healthcare industry to the upper level. The technological advancements, growing disposable income, rising people awareness about the lower GI series test has put a potential scope for the global lower GI series market across the globe. Increase in the number on healthcare centers, hospitals, clinics and laboratories have also driven the market. The major key challenges for this particular market are that X-rays observed and managed to give the minimum amount of radiation to create the picture. Most specialists feel that the danger is low contrasted and the advantages. Children and pregnant ladies are more touchy or sensitive to the risk and dangers of ionizing radiation.Global Lower GI Series Market: Market SegmentationFor the purpose of this study, MRFR has segmented the global lower GI series market into applications, test types and end users.The application segment is divided into Colon polyps, tumors, Diverticular disease, Gastroenteritis, Strictures Crohn's disease or lcerative colitis and others such as constipation, pain or blood in the stools. The test types segment is divided into the single-contrast technique and the double-contrast technique. The end users are divided into hospitals, laboratories and clinics.Get a Browse Report @Global Lower GI Series Market: Regional AnalysisGeographically, the lower GI series market has seen a prospective growth in the developed nation such as the US, Canada, Germany, U.K, Japan and others. The developed and advanced technologies have boosted the lower GI series market. This all regions come under the matured economy where the disposable income and people are very much aware about the different test and diseases. Even though the skilled and professional doctors, large number of hospitals and clinics, and laboratories where the lower GI series tests are available has also pushed the market. But in this region the cost of diagnose is very much high which can create a hurdle in the market growth. In Asia-Pacific, the developing region such as China, India, Singapore, Indonesia, the market has an immense opportunity to grow. In China and India, the huge population and large pool of diagnosed patients can create a scope of potential in the global lower GI series market. Huge investment for people welfare and healthcare, rising awareness are becoming the growing opportunities.The reports also covers brief analysis of Geographical Region includes:Americas- North America (US, Canada)- Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Rest of LATAM)Europe- Western Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, U.K, Rest of Western Europe)- Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia)Asia  Pacific- Asia (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Rest of Asia)- Pacific Countries (Australia, New Zealand)Middle East & Africa- Middle East (Saudi, Qatar, UAE)- Rest of Middle East (Africa, South Africa, Rest of Africa)Market Research Future introduces about Global Lower GI Series Market during the forecast period 2017-2027 which mainly includes the growth drivers, trends and restraints and how the market will grow in the future across the globe. In this report, Market Research Future has focused on the current market scenario which includes market segmentation, market dynamics, and competitive landscape along with company profiles.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.Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Security Labels - Global Industry Size, Share, Trends, Analysis and Forecast to 2021

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/security-labels-market

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Synopsis of the Global Security Labels MarketMarket ScenarioThe market for Security Labels globally is driven by the growth of food & beverage sector. The high demand for packaged foods induces demand for security labels. In addition to this, the surge in demand for pharmaceutical products has also contributed to the growth of security label market. This is further backed by the increased investment in the packaging industries by company to bring in better technology. The global security labels market is expected to grow from 2016 to 2021.Request a Sample Report @Market SegmentationGlobal security labels market is segmented on the basis of Identification method, Type, Form, Composition, Application and Region. On the basis of Identification method it is segmented as radio frequency, bar code, Holographic, and others. On the basis of type it is segmented as Identification, Branding and Information. On the basis of application it is segmented as food & beverages, pharmaceuticals and others. On the basis of region, it is segmented as North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.Key playersThe key players of Global Security Labels Market report include- 3M Company, Avery Dennison Corporation, Data Label Inc., UPM Raflatac, Polylabel, CCL Industries Inc., Tesa SE, RR Donnelley & sons Co., UPM, Intertronix, Seiko Holdings Corporation Honeywell International IncBrowse Report Details @Study Objectives of Global Security Labels Market To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 10 years of various segments and sub-segments of the global security labels market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the global security labels market based on various factors- price analysis, supply chain analysis, porters five force analysis etc.Request Table of Contents for this Report @Regional Analysis of Global Security Labels MarketAPAC dominates the global security labels market with its fast growing market worldwide. It will expand over the forecast period. The growing regions of China and India will drive the market for security labels in the region. The factors such as rising population, increased purchasing power and economic developments are augmenting the growth of security labels market.It is followed by North America which is expected to grow rapidly by 2021. Europe and Rest of the World are also expected to grow from 2016 to 2021.Global Security Labels Market by RegionNorth America US Canada MexicoEurope Germany France Italy Spain U.K. Rest of EuropeAPAC China India Japan Australia Rest of Asia-PacificRoW Latin America Middle East AfricaAt 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.Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Anti-counterfeit packaging market Outlook and Worldwide Forecast to 2027

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The market for Anti-counterfeit Packaging is rapidly growing due to increased health risks with growing population along with government regulations to eliminate counterfeit products. There is an increased demand for hygienic packaging in both the food and healthcare products, which is a key driver for Anti-counterfeit Packaging.Make an Enquiry @Key Players Avery Dennison Corporation, Alien Technology Corp., CCL Industries Inc., AlpVision SA, 3M Company, Sicpa Holding SA., DuPont De Nemours and Company, Zebra Technologies Corporation, Savi Technology, Inc., Catalent Pharma Solution Inc, Authentix, Inc., TraceLink Inc., Essentra PLC, Impinj Inc., Inksure Technologies.Study Objectives of Anti-counterfeit Packaging Market-  To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 10 years of various segments and sub-segments of the Anti-counterfeit Packaging Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To Analyze the Anti-counterfeit Packaging Market based on various factors- price analysis, supply chain analysis, porters five force analysis etc. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective To provide country level analysis of the market for segment by technology, by end-user, and by region. To provide strategic profiling of the key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Anti-counterfeit Packaging MarketAccess Report Details @SegmentsOn the basis of technology, market is segmented as barcode, labels, RFID, holograms, and others. On the basis of end-users it is segmented as healthcare, food & beverages, consumer goods, apparel, automotive, and others. Market has also been segmented on the basis of region into North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.The report for Anti-counterfeit Packaging by Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.ContinueWe are thankful for the support and assistance from Anti-counterfeit packaging market chain related technical experts and marketing experts during Research Team survey and interviews.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.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Best Home Services landmark sign marks family business continuing growth

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On the morning of Wednesday, May 10, a full-sized replica of the iconic Best Home Services van was hoisted to its permanent position 20 feet above U.S. 41 in Fort Myers to mark the location of the family-owned companys new call center. The 15,000-square-foot facility at 16090 S. Tamiami Trail is expected to open in August and will house about 60 employees, representing a continuing expansion of Southwest Floridas leading air conditioning, electrical and plumbing company.The eye-catching sign, measuring the full width of a Ford Transit commercial van similar to many in the Best Home Services fleet of 108 vehicles, features working LED headlights and illumination of the Best Home Services superhero-inspired logo on each side of the van, which will face north- and south-bound traffic.Co-owner Keegan Hodges said, The blue van with the Bestman character is symbolic of the excellence Southwest Florida residents have come to count on over the decades. So it only made sense that it would serve as a recognizable Fort Myers landmark as we look forward to serving the community in the decades to come.Headquartered in Naples, Best Homes Services recently celebrated the ribbon cutting of its new Sarasota location. Earlier this year, Governor Scott presented co-owners Chadd and Keegan Hodges with the Business Ambassador Award in honor of their job creation and expansion. The brothers, who took the business over in 2009 from their parents, Perry and Marilyn, pledged to create 80 new jobs in 2017.The company currently employs close to 150 people and is recognized for a work culture that encourages customer service excellence, continuing professional development, workplace satisfaction and community service. An employment application and description of many attractive benefits are available atAbout Best Home ServicesBest Home Services is a full service, family-owned residential heating, air conditioning, electrical and plumbing company, which has been operating in southwest Florida since 1980. The award-winning company employs about 150 technicians and other associates at its 40,000-square-foot headquarters in Naples, with additional offices in Fort Myers and Sarasota. Best is an Angie's List "Super Service Award" recipient and is A+ rated with the Better Business Bureau. Learn more atConric Pr & Marketing6216 Whiskey Creek Dr B, Fort Myers, FL 33919Josh Milton239-690-9840
Asia Pacific Acrylic Teeth Market Offering High-growth Opportunities for Market Players

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/asia-pacific-acrylic-teeth-market

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The report firstly introduced Asia Pacific Acrylic Teeth Market including classification, application and industry chain overview; Then we deeply analyzed Asia Pacific growth forecast indicators by the as well as the regional market conditions that including the product price, profit, utilization, supply, demand and industry growth rate etc.In the end, the report introduced medical suction device market SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, market share analysis and competitive landscape, company profiles by analyzing the major players. It is a depth research study on Asia Pacific Acrylic Teeth Market. We are thankful for the support and assistance from Asia Pacific Acrylic Teeth Market chain related technical experts and marketing experts during Research Team survey and interviews.Request a Sample Report @TABLE OF CONTENTS1 INTRODUCTION2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY3 REPORT EXCERPT4 FORECAST INDICATORS5 ACRYLIC TEETH MARKET, BY TYPE6 ACRYLIC TEETH MARKET, BY APPLICATION7 ACRYLIC TEETH MARKET, BY LAYERS8 ACRYLIC TEETH MARKET, BY COUNTRY9 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE10 COMPANY PROFILES11 APPENDIX11.1 QUESTIONNAIRE11.2 INSIGHTS BY INDUSTRY VETERANSRequest a Sample Report @LIST OF TABLESTABLE 1 GROWTH DRIVERS: IMPACT ANALYSISTABLE 2 GROWTH BARRIERS: IMPACT ANALYSISTABLE 3 GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES: IMPACT ANALYSISTABLE 4 ASIA-PACIFIC ACRYLIC TEETH MARKET, BY DENTURE TYPE(2013-2021), MILLION$TABLE 5 ASIA-PACIFIC ACRYLIC TEETH MARKET, BY REGION (2013-2021), MILLION$LIST OF FIGURESFIGURE 1 INCREASING INCIDENCES OF DENTAL DECAY TRIGGERS THE GROWTH OF PARTIAL DENTUREFIGURE 2 FUNCTIONALITY APPLICATION ACCOUNTED FOR OVER 70% SHARE IN 2015FIGURE 3 THREE LAYER ACRYLIC TEETH TO DOMINATE IN COMING YEARSFIGURE 4 CHINA TO WITNESS THE HIGHEST GROWTHFIGURE 5 POPULATION AGED ABOVE 60 YEARS IN ASIA-OCEANIA REGIONS, (2015  2050)Continued.Request Table of Contents for this Report @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.Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Night Vision Surveillance Cameras Global Analysis & Forecast to 2024 Market Research Report

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This report provides an analysis of the global night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market for the period from 2016 to 2024, wherein the period from 2016 to 2024 comprises the forecast period and 2015 is the base year. Data for 2014 is provided as historical information. The report covers all the major trends and technologies playing a major role in the growth of the night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market over the forecast period. It also highlights various drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence the markets growth during the said period. The study provides a holistic perspective of the growth of the night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market throughout the forecast period in terms of revenue estimates (in US$ Mn), across Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America (LATAM), North America, Europe, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). The report provides a cross-sectional analysis of the global night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market in terms of market estimates and forecasts for all the segments across different geographic regions.This 123 page report gives readers a comprehensive overview of the Night Vision Surveillance Cameras market Browse through 09 data tables and 40 figures to unlock the hidden opportunities in this market.Night vision (IR) surveillance cameras are used for the purpose of surveillance in low-light conditions such as fog or in the nighttime, with the help of infrared technology. Some of the major applications of these infrared night vision cameras include continuous monitoring of critical assets, face recognition, threat detection, and traffic management. The demand for secured access, secured borders, and secured living premises, is a strong driver for the growth of the market for night vision surveillance cameras across the globe. Moreover, the growing fear of terrorism and increasing cross-border infiltration across critical national boundaries have created further demand for surveillance cameras, globally. Night vision (IR) cameras not only enable round-the-clock monitoring, but also keep unwanted elements away during the day and night.On the basis of shape, the night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market is categorized into box cameras, dome cameras, and bullet cameras. Night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market by type is categorized into fixed cameras and PTZ cameras. On the basis of end-use, the night vision (IR) surveillance cameras are segmented into public sector and defense, retail, transportation, industrial, stadiums, business organizations, and others. The report also includes competitive profiling of the major players associated with the night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market. Important business strategies adopted by them, their market positioning, and recent developments have also been identified in the research report. The companies profiled in the report include FLIR Systems, Axis Communications AB, Robert Bosch GmbH, Pelco Corporation, Raytheon Company, BAE Systems plc., L-3 Communications Holdings, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd. Night vision (IR) surveillance camera vendors are focusing on increasing their market presence through strategic partnerships and the development of low-cost advanced solutions. Video analytics and intelligent imaging are the key focus areas of night vision cameras vendors currently.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Night Vision Surveillance Cameras market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.The global night vision (IR) surveillance cameras market is segmented as below:Night Vision (IR) Surveillance Cameras MarketBy Shape Box Cameras Dome Cameras Bullet CamerasBy Type Fixed Cameras PTZ CamerasBy End-use Public Sector and Defense Retail Transportation Industrial Stadiums Business Organizations Others (Hospitality, Education, and Residential)By Geography North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East and AfricaRequest for Discount of this report - @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. 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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Asphalt Additives Market  Research Report

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Global Asphalt Additives Market  Key TrendsThe rising road construction activities worldwide are significantly aiding the expansion of the global asphalt additives market. Since the Middle East and Africa (MEA) boasts rising spending in construction activities, the demand for asphalt additives is expected to rise considerably from the region. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are currently the most attractive markets for asphalt additives in MEA. According to TMR, the global asphalt additives market will rise at a CAGR of 4.2% between 2015 and 2023, as economies around the world increasingly invest in road development and maintenance activities.This 180 page report gives readers a comprehensive overview of the Asphalt Additives Market.Browse through to unlock the hidden opportunities in this market.In contrast, the availability of numerous substitutes such as bricks, concrete, pavers, cements, and others threatens the markets trajectory to an extent. Nevertheless, the rising use of polymer modified asphalt (PMA) in pavements, waterproofing, and sprayed sealants is expected to fuel demand from the market in the near future.As per Transparency Market Research, the global asphalt additives market stood at US$2.9 bn in 2014. The market is expected to reach US$4.2 bn by the end of 2023.Applications of Asphalt Additives in Road Construction and Paving Grow ConsiderablyOn the basis of volume, the global asphalt additives market was led by the road construction and paving segment in 2014. The segment held over 83.2% of the market in the year. The increasing use of asphalt in road construction activities is expected to fuel demand for asphalt additives considerably in the forthcoming years. Asphalt additives provide superior binding properties to asphalt and also improve film thickness. This is one of the key factors accelerating the demand for asphalt additives in the construction and paving activities.Besides this, the market is also expected to gain significant impetus from the rising application of asphalt additives in the roofing segment. Asphalt additives are generally used for roofing to improve its waterproofing abilities. The rising construction of nuclear homes across developing nations will therefore boost demand for asphalt additives from the roofing segment. Other than this, application of asphalt additives is also expected to increase in the construction of airways, public structure, and parking lots.Rising Construction Activities to Fuel Demand for Asphalt Additives from Asia PacificThe emerging economies are currently exhibiting rising demand for asphalt additives. The robust infrastructural development witnessed across these countries has been pivotal in fuelling demand from the asphalt additives market. Regionally, Asia Pacific has emerged as the largest contributor to the global market. The rising investment in construction activities in the region has sealed Asia Pacifics dominance in the global market. By volume, the region held over 33% of the global asphalt additives market in 2014. Due to the growing construction industry in emerging economies such as India and China, the demand for hot mix additives (HMA) and warm mix additives (WMA) is quite high in Asia Pacific. Furthermore, TMR expects the Asia Pacific market to grow at a steady pace during the forecast period.North America in the same year emerged as second largest market for asphalt additives. The extensive usage of latest technologies for the construction and maintenance of roads provides lucrative opportunities for the asphalt additives manufacturers in North America. Due to the superior value addition offered by HMAs and WMAs, their demand is the highest in North America.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Asphalt Additives Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market @Some of the leading companies operating in the global asphalt additives market are Evonik Industries AG, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Honeywell International Inc., and Akzo Nobel N.V.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Fluorspar Market  Research Report

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Infrastructural Developments Keep Demand for Fluorspar at All-time HighRising disposable income of consumers across the globe has led to a growth in the sales of air conditioners and refrigerators across the commercial and residential sector in recent years. The report by Transparency Market Research observes that rapid urbanization and growing research and development in the automotive sector to enhance cooling equipment have been driving the demand for fluorochemicals, of which fluorspar is an integral element. The rising temperatures resulting from global warming is also expected to trigger a demand for cooling equipment, thereby augmenting the global fluorspar market in the coming years.This 174 page report gives readers a comprehensive overview of the Fluorspar Market. Browse to unlock the hidden opportunities in this market.The global fluorspar market was worth US$2,193.0 mn in 2014 and is expected to reach US$3,489.7 mn by 2023, as the market expands at a CAGR of 5.4% between 2015 and 2023. The global fluorspar market will also receive an impressive impetus from the steel and aluminum industries in Japan and China. Ongoing infrastructural developments in the developing regions of Asia Pacific require dependable transportation facilities and speed in construction activities. This is anticipated to spur the demand for fluorspar in the near future. The positive outlook in the steel industries in India, China, and Brazil will also boost the intake of fluorspar. The only restraint in the global market is the stringent government regulations such as the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987 to reduce the consumption of fluorspar so as to prevent its hazardous impact on the ozone layer.Asia Pacific Emerges as Leading Regional SegmentAsia Pacific has been the frontrunner in the global fluorspar market as of 2014, with a share of 61.4% in terms of volume. Research indicates that Asia Pacific has been the leading consumer and producer of fluorspar due to high reserves in Japan and China and stupendous manufacturing activities in recent years. The rise of steel and aluminum production in the developing countries of Asia Pacific has also been the reason behind the expansion of this regional market.Out of all the products, acidspar has been an extensively used product in the Asia Pacific market. The demand for electronics and steel items and the rise in building and construction activities across Asia Pacific all through 2023 will result in the demand for hydrofluoric acid, which primarily uses fluorspar. The demand for cooling equipment in this region will also augment the market during the forecast period.Thriving Aluminum Industry Continues to Augment Acidspar SegmentThe primary usage of acidspar is seen in the production of hydrofluoric acid, which is largely used in making hydrofluorocarbons (HFC) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFC). Currently, acidspar holds the leading share in the global market, accounting for nearly 55% of the share in the global market in 2014. The growing number of applications of acidspar such as in the aluminum industry and in the manufacturing of hydrofluoric acid is expected to keep this segment in the lead.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Fluorspar Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market @Some of the important players in the global fluorspar market are British Fluorspar Ltd., Jianyang Shanshui Chemicals Industry Corp. Ltd., Kenya Fluorspar Company Ltd. (KFC), China Kings Resources Group Co., Ltd., Mexichem S.A.B. de C.V., and Mongolrostsvetmet LLC. These companies are expected to focus on building strategic partnerships to benefit in terms of geographical reach and manufacturing capacities. Analysts anticipate that focusing on developing affordable goods will attract a wider consumer base in developing regionsAbout 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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Marine Hybrid Propulsion Market - Research Report

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Global Marine Hybrid Propulsion Market: SnapshotThe marine industry is increasingly investing in technologies that help lower emissions, improve fuel efficiency, and adhere to new environmental regulations. Thus, hybrid propulsion systems are being rapidly deployed by vessel operators across the world. Marine hybrid propulsion systems are gradually emerging as one of the most preferred clean propulsion systems globally and are being used in several vessel categories.This 135 page report gives readers a comprehensive overview of the Marine Hybrid Propulsion Market. Browse through 20 data tables and 65 figures to unlock the hidden opportunities in this market.Fuel charges account for substantial share of a vessels operating expenditure. As a result, shipping liners are adopting efficient fuel technologies such as hybrid propulsion to increase their profit margins. Implementation of stringent government regulations and strict monitoring of spillage in the marine ecosystem are driving the demand for hybrid propulsion systems. The operating power requirements and size of drive components are important factors in the selection of appropriate hybrid configurations for vessels.Spurred by the aforementioned factors, the global marine hybrid propulsion market is forecast to reach S$5.25 bn by the end of 2024, from US$2.65 bn in 2015. If these figures hold true, the global market will exhibit a CAGR of 8.2% between 2016 and 2024.Diesel-electric Systems Emerge as Widely Adopted Hybrid TechnologyThe marine hybrid propulsion market has been segmented into three categories: Configuration, end use, and region. In terms of configuration, the marine hybrid propulsion market has been classified into diesel-electric, parallel hybrid, and serial hybrid. Of these, the diesel-electric segment accounted for the leading share of 53.3% in 2015. Diesel-electric system is a widely adopted hybrid technology owing to its simple structure and low installation costs. Diesel-electric systems are easy to configure and install. Therefore, several vessel operators have been switching from the conventional diesel systems to diesel-electric configurations to comply with the environmental regulations prevalent in their respective regions. Diesel-electric propulsion systems have witnessed a rapid growth rate in the past few decades and is expected to dominate the marine hybrid propulsion market based on configuration through the forecast period.In terms of end use, the market has been segregated into tugboats & OSVs, ferries, defense vessels, and others. Installations of these configuration types are completely dependent on the operational requirements of the vessel operators. The operating power requirements and size of the drive components are crucial factors considered while vessel operators select the appropriate hybrid configurations for their respective vessels.Europe to Remain Dominant Market through Forecast PeriodRegionally, the global hybrid propulsion market encompasses North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. Among these nations, Europe emerged dominant with a share of 34.60% in 2015. The region market is driven by the presence of several manufacturing companies. However, growth in the region will remain moderate through the forecast period. In North America, several associations are monitoring carbon emission. The leading nations in North America also have maritime monitoring satellites that detect excess carbon emission from ferries and if there is any oil spillage. Spurred by these factors, the maritime hybrid propulsion market will witness positive growth in North America.In the coming years, Asia Pacific is expected to offer greener pastures to a large number of small- and large-scale hybrid propulsion manufacturing companies. China and Japan have emerged as lead in terms of production and consumption in Asia Pacific. Rising opportunities in these nations will significantly aid the expansion of the marine hybrid propulsion market. Besides this, the market is also expected to witness lucrative opportunities in the Middle East and Africa and Latin America.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Marine Hybrid Propulsion Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market @Some of the major companies operating in this market are Siemens AG, General Electric, BAE Systems plc, Wartsila, and MAN Diesel & Turbo SE among others.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Biomedical Textiles Global Analysis & Forecast to 2024 Market Research Report

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Biomedical Textiles Market: OverviewMedical textiles is a wide class under technical textiles, which includes wound dressings, bandages, and hospital linen (external and theater linen). Biomedical textiles include those implantable on a patient such as arterial grafts, artificial skin and other organs, sutures and ligatures, and artificial repair fabrics. Hence, biomedical textiles can be defined as materials comprising of fibers that are specially designed for use in specific biological conditions, wherein biocompatibility and bio-stability with cells and biological environment are the factors determining the performance of biomedical textiles.Every day the society is changing in the form of increasing population size and desire to have a longer life span. Factors such as unavoidable situations and hazards occurring in the civilization that lands an individual in a hospital and subsequent care required are the reasons for demand for biomedical textiles.Browse Report @Biomedical Textiles Market: TrendsTissue engineering is an upcoming technology, wherein researchers are trying to develop textiles that allow the body to form new tissue around them. This would enable the body to not solely depend on synthetic material implanted in the body. Medical textiles is a speedily expanding segment of the technical textiles market and is expected to witness high growth in the near future.For the last five decades, biomedical textiles and fiber-based implants are being used routinely to help in healing. There exist a number of biomaterials that can be used as medical textiles such as cotton, silk, fiber yarns, collagen, synthetic fibers (PTFE, carbon, polyethylene, polyester, polypropylene, polyamide, and polyurethane), viscose, and alginate. Some of these are bio-degradable, for instance, collagen, viscose, and cotton. The others are non-biodegradable, for example, PTFE fiber, carbon fiber, and polyester fiber.The controllable degradability, biocompatibility, ease of processing, and significant mechanical strength are the factors considered for any biomaterial to be used for soft tissue repair, extracorporeal implants, health care and hygiene products, and other related purposes.Biomedical Textiles Market: SegmentationBased on usages of the biomedical textile, the market can be segmented into implantable and non-implantable (extracorporeal) materials.Based on raw materials, the market can be divided into fibers, yarns, woven, knitted, nonwoven, and others.Based on products, the market can be segmented into suture & ligature, vascular implants, soft tissue implants, hard tissue implants, hernia repair, lenses, dental biomaterials, plasters, dressings & bandages, pressure garments, and others.Based on applications, the biomedical textiles market can be divided into ophthalmology, neurology, cardiovascular, general surgery, dental, orthopedics, all-purpose, and others.Biomedical Textiles Market: Region-wise OutlookThe biomedical textiles market in North America and Europe is mature, due to established health care facilities and availability of sophisticated products in these regions. The market, being mature, provides limited opportunities in terms of untapped potential in the biomedical textiles market. Asia Pacific is expected to be a highly attractive market. Increase in the number of health care facilities in Asia Pacific is expected to boost the biomedical textiles market in the region, as the region accounts for more than 50% of the global population and emerging economies. The biomedical textiles market in Middle East & Africa is likely to expand at a speedy rate.Biomedical Textiles Market: Key PlayersKey players operating in the biomedical textiles market include Secant Medical, Tactile Medical, SWICOFIL, Confluent Medical Technologies, ATEX TECHNOLOGIES, US BioDesign, Bally Ribbon Mills, Meister & Cie AG, and DSM.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.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Biomedical Textiles market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.The study is a source of reliable data on: Market segments and sub-segments Market trends and dynamics Supply and demand Market size Current trends/opportunities/challenges Competitive landscape Technological breakthroughs Value chain and stakeholder analysisThe regional analysis covers: North America (U.S. and Canada) Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others) Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia) Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand) Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period.Highlights of the report: A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent market Important changes in market dynamics Market segmentation up to the second or third level Historical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volume Reporting and evaluation of recent industry developments Market shares and strategies of key players Emerging niche segments and regional markets An objective assessment of the trajectory of the market Recommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the marketRequest for Discount of this report - @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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Rubber Processing Chemicals Global Analysis & Forecast to 2024 Market Research Report

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Global Rubber Processing Chemicals Market: OverviewRubber processing chemicals belong to a group of specialty chemicals added to rubber to make it commercially viable for usage in various application. They are used to impart different characteristics to rubber such as resistance to ozone, heat, mechanical stress, oxidation, and others. They exhibit properties such as resilience, abrasion resistance, flex resistance, hardness, and tensile strength for product-specific end-use applications.The report estimates and forecasts the rubber processing chemicals on the global, regional, and country levels. The study provides forecast between 2016 and 2024 based on volume (kilo tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) with 2015 as the base year. The report comprises an exhaustive value chain analysis for each of the product segments. It provides a comprehensive view of the market. The study includes drivers and restraints for the rubber processing chemicals market along with their impact on demand during the forecast period. The study also provides key market indicators affecting the growth of the market. The report analyzes opportunities in the rubber processing chemicals market on the global and regional level. It also provides the global average price trend analysis.Browse Report @Global Rubber Processing Chemicals Market: Scope of the ReportIn-depth interviews and discussions with wide range of key opinion leaders and industry participants were conducted to compile this research report. Primary research represents the bulk of research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Key players product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents were reviewed for competitive analysis and market understanding. This helped in validating and strengthening secondary research findings. Primary research further helped in developing the analysis teams expertise and market understanding.Secondary research sources that were typically referred to include, but were not limited to company websites, financial reports, annual reports, investor presentations, broker reports, and SEC filings. Other sources such as internal and external proprietary databases, statistical databases and market reports, news articles, national government documents, and webcasts specific to companies operating in the market have also been referred for the report.The report includes Porters Five Forces Model to determine the degree of competition in the rubber processing chemicals market. The report comprises a qualitative write-up on market attractiveness analysis, wherein type, application and countries have been analyzed based on attractiveness for each region. Growth rate, market size, raw material availability, profit margin, impact strength, technology, competition, and other factors (such as environmental and legal) have been evaluated in order to derive the general attractiveness of the market.Global Rubber Processing Chemicals Market: Key SegmentsThe study provides a comprehensive view of the rubber processing chemicals market by dividing it into type, application and geography. In terms of type, the rubber processing chemicals market has been segmented into antidegradants, accelerators, stabilizers, vulcanizing agents, and others. In terms of application, the rubber processing chemicals market has been segmented into tire and non-tire. The non-tire segment has been further segregated into automotive, building & construction, industrial, and other segment. Application segments have been analyzed based on historic, present, and future trends, and the market has been estimated in terms of volume (kilo tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) between 2016 and 2024.Global Rubber Processing Chemicals Market: Regional OutlookRegional segmentation includes the current and forecast demand for rubber processing chemicals in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). Additionally, the report comprises country-level analysis in terms of volume and revenue for type and application segments. Key countries such as the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, the U.K., Spain, Italy, Japan, India, China, Mexico, South Africa, and Brazil have been included in the study. Market segmentation includes demand for individual type and application in all the regions and countries.Global Rubber Processing Chemicals Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report covers detailed competitive outlook that includes market share and profiles of key players operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include BASF SE, Eastman Chemicals Company, LANXESS, Arkema Inc. Akzo Nobel N.V., Solvay, and Sumitomo Chemical Company, Limited, China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, Emerald Performance Materials, LINKWELL, and Merchem. Company profiles include attributes such as company overview, number of employees, brand overview, key competitors, business overview, business strategies, recent/key developments, acquisitions, and financial overview (wherever applicable).Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Rubber Processing Chemicals market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.The rubber processing chemicals market has been divided into the following segments:Rubber Processing Chemicals Market  Type Analysis Antidegradants Accelerators Stabilizers Vulcanizing Agents Others (include processing aids, peptizers, anti-tack agents etc.)Rubber Processing Chemicals Market  Application Analysis Tire Non-tireo Automotiveo Building & Constructiono Industrialo Others (include medical, aerospace, footwear etc.)Rubber Processing Chemicals Market  Regional Analysis North Americao U.S.o Canada Europeo Franceo U.K.o Spaino Germanyo Italyo Rest of Europe Asia Pacifico Chinao Japano ASEANo Rest of Asia Pacific (APAC) Latin Americao Brazilo Mexicoo Rest of Latin America (LATAM) Middle East & Africao GCCo South Africao Rest of Middle East & Africa (MEA)Request for Discount of this report - @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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Preservative Blends Global Analysis & Forecast to 2024 Market Research Report

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Global Preservative Blends Market: OverviewPreservative blends are blends of preservative chemicals that are used to prevent fermentation and decomposition of product by microbial growth or other climatic conditions. It helps in extending the shelf life of the products to maintain the unique aroma, color and consistency of the product. The report estimates and forecasts the preservative blends market on the global and regional levels. The study provides forecast between 2016 and 2024 based on volume (Tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) with 2015 as the base year. The report comprises an exhaustive value chain analysis for each of the product segments. It provides a comprehensive view of the market. Value chain analysis also offers detailed information about value addition at each stage.Browse Report @The study includes drivers and restraints for the preservative blends market along with their impact on demand during the forecast period. The study also provides key market indicators affecting the growth of the market. The report analyzes opportunities in the preservative blends market on the global and regional level. Drivers, restraints, and opportunities mentioned in the report are justified through quantitative and qualitative data. These have been verified through primary and secondary resources. Furthermore, the report analyzes substitute analysis of preservative blends and global average price trend analysis.Secondary research sources that were typically referred to include, but were not limited to company websites, financial reports, annual reports, investor presentations, broker reports, and SEC filings. Other sources such as internal and external proprietary databases, statistical databases and market reports, news articles, national government documents, and webcasts specific to companies operating in the market have also been referred for the report. In-depth interviews and discussions with a wide range of key opinion leaders and industry participants were conducted to compile this research report. Primary research represents the bulk of research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Key players product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents were reviewed for competitive analysis and market understanding. This helped in validating and strengthening secondary research findings. Primary research further helped in developing the analysis teams expertise and market understanding.Global Preservative Blends Market: Research MethodologyThe report includes Porters Five Forces Model to determine the degree of competition in the preservative blends market. The report comprises a qualitative write-up on market attractiveness analysis, wherein applications and countries have been analyzed based on attractiveness for each region. Growth rate, market size, raw material availability, profit margin, impact strength, technology, competition, and other factors (such as environmental and legal) have been evaluated in order to derive the general attractiveness of the market. The report comprises price trend analysis for preservative blends between 2016 and 2024.Global Preservative Blends Market: Segmentation AnalysisThe study provides a comprehensive view of the preservative blends market by dividing it into applications and geography segments. The preservative blends market has been segmented into beauty, home and personal care based on application. Application segment have been analyzed based on historic, present, and future trends.Regional segmentation includes the current and forecast demand for preservative blends in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). Market segmentation includes demand for individual applications in all the regions.Global Preservative Blends Market: Competitive OutlookThe report covers detailed competitive outlook that includes market share and profiles of key players operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report includes The Dow Chemical Company, Lanxess, Galaxy Surfactants Ltd., BASF SE, Clariant Chemicals and others. Company profiles include attributes such as company overview, number of employees, brand overview, key competitors, business overview, business strategies, recent/key developments, acquisitions, and financial overview (wherever applicable).Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Preservative Blends market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.The global preservative blends market has been segmented as follows:Preservative Blends Market - Product Analysis Parabens Formaldehyde Halogenated Alcohols Organic Acids OthersPreservative Blends Market - Application Analysis Beauty Home Personal carePreservative Blends Market - Regional Analysis North America Europe Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa Latin AmericaRequest for Discount of this report - @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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators Contribute Largest Revenue to the Global Active Implantable Medical Devices Market

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According to the study, the global active implantable medical devices market is likely to grow from $17.0 billion in 2016 to $28.9 billion by 2023. Technological advancements, increasing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, rising healthcare expenditures and increasing research and development activities have been driving the growth of the global active implantable medical devices market. The market is further expected to gain revenue due to increasing geriatric population and incidence of neurological disorders. Development of subcutaneous implantable cardioverter defibrillators along with the increasing demand from developing nations is expected to create ample growth opportunities in the global active implantable medical devices market.Access Report Description at:Insights on market segmentsAs per the findings of research, implantable cardioverter defibrillators held the largest share in the global active implantable medical devices market in 2016, primarily due to the development of technologically advanced devices and increasing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases. The neurostimulators market is expected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period. This growth of neurostimulators is attributed to the increasing incidence of neurological disorders and increasing demand from emerging economies. Among different type of implantable cardioverter defibrillators, transevenous implantable cardioverter defibrillators held larger share in the global active implantable medical devices market in 2016, and it is also expected to witness higher growth during the forecast period. Increasing research and development activities and rising compliance for technological innovations and data driven customizations are driving the growth of the global transvenous implantable cardioverter market.Among different types of neurostimulators, spinal cord stimulators contributed the largest revenue to the global neurostimulators market in 2016. Spinal cord stimulators market witnessed significant penetration across all geographies globally. Increasing number of failed-back surgery syndrome, refractory angina pectoris, peripheral vascular disease, and complex regional pain syndrome are the key factors leading to the increased demand for spinal cord stimulators.Explore Report Sample at:Acquisition, a major development strategy for key players to strengthen their position in the global marketKey companies in the active implantable medical devices market are acquiring other companies to strengthen their position in the global market. In January 2017, Abbott completed the acquisition of St. Jude Medical, Inc., including its atrial fibrillation, structural heart and heart failure business as well as neuromodulation business. Similarly, in January 2015, Medtronic plc completed the acquisition of Covidien plc. Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Medtronic, Inc. and Covidien plc are now combined under Medtronic plc. The acquisition strengthened position of the company in the global market with a large number of product offerings.Browse Other Related Report at:Some of the other key players in the market include Boston Scientific Corporation, BIOTRONIK SE & Co. KG, LivaNova PLC, William Demant Holding A/S, Nurotron Biotechnology Co. Ltd., Sonova Holding AG, and MED-EL.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a market research company, which offers market research and consulting services for various geographies around the globe. We provide market research reports, industry forecasting reports, business intelligence, and research based consulting services across different industry/business verticals.As one of the top growing market research agency, were keen upon providing market landscape and accurate forecasting. Our analysts and consultants are proficient with business intelligence and market analysis, through their interaction with leading companies of the concerned domain. We help our clients with B2B market research and assist them in identifying various windows of opportunity, and framing informed and customized business expansion strategies in different regions.Contact:KundanManager  Client Partner347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-Free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb:
Protein Electrophoresis Market Research Report by Key Players Analysis

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The market players in this industry are numerous as the markets are highly fragmented depending upon their region of operation. Some noted players in the global market include; CBS Scientific Company Inc., Cleaver Scientific ltd., Serva Electrophoresis GmbH., LabRepCo., Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC., Lonza Group Ltd, Hoefer Inc., etc, to name a few.View Report @Proteins are biological macromolecules considered as the basic component of a majority of enzymes and other complex bimolecular compounds, and are also required in the synthesis of such compounds. Proteins differ from one another based on the number of peptide structures present within them and they way in which they are folded ore arranged. These peptides are further composed of amino acid molecules that together form a chain to give rise to the peptides respective structure. Protein electrophoresis has been a fundamental research process to evaluate the contents of a protein based on their molecular weight and their charge. Protein electrophoresis can either be done by either denaturing or non denaturing methods. Denaturing process allows protein unfolding and study of various polypeptides by their molecular weight and charge (charge to mass ratio), whereas non denaturing methods (also known as native gel methods) take protein size into consideration as a whole without unfolding the main structure thereby studying its shape and size in the process.Polyacrylamide gel is a commonly used porous gelling agent, for both methods, that allows for movement of proteins within the buffer medium. Denaturing methods employ sodium dodecyl suphate (SDS), a commonly used detergent agent that allows for unfolding of proteins into their polypeptides and in the process assists free movement of ionized protein molecules in the water medium. Together SDS polyacryilamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) is the most common denaturing gel method for protein electrophoresis. Among native PAGE methods blue native and clear native PAGE methods are most common and inexpensive procedures, they are followed by the highly accurate quantitative preparative native continuous PAGE (QPNC-PAGE) that employs Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometer to study molecules of protein polypeptide. Blue native (BN-PAGE) process requires the assistance of a Coomassie brilliant blue dye that provides charges to proteins with weak charge and also makes it easier to spot, however they have been known to denature proteins in the process. Clear native (CN-PAGE) process is therefore used in cases where such denaturing is to be avoided completely. Although they have lower visibility of the proteins, CN-PAGE is much more reliable than BN PAGE offering micro scale separation and retaining supramolecular structure assembly of polypeptide chains.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Protein Electrophoresis Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.Globally, the Asia Pacific region is currently the largest market for the basic protein electrophoresis equipment by sales volume. This is followed by North America, Europe and consecutively the rest of the world (RoW) region. The Asian markets home to a large number of biotechnological analytic device manufacturing companies in the world. The increased spending by the governments of the emerging countries in Asia in research and technology assists the rise in demand for protein electrophoresis equipment in the region which was earlier met by Japanese and European Companies. Other Asian players are expected to enter the market in the near future thereby reducing the cost and increasing the market for the years to come. Raw materials and reagents required for the same are provided by a majority of European and Asian manufacturers.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
M2M Connected Healthcare Market Research Report by Key Players Analysis

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Allscripts, IBM, Apple, AirStrip Technologies, Cisco Networks, Microsoft, AT&T, BL Healthcare, Ingenious Med, NeuroVigil, PharmaSecure, QxMD Software, WellDoc and ObTech Medical are among the major players operating in this market. These players are competing with each other in order to get competitive advantages over others.Over the past few years, the healthcare industry has been witnessing increasing adoption of machine to machine (M2M) technology in order to reduce skyrocketing healthcare costs, increase adherence to medical regimens and improve better patient care. M2M connected healthcare is a healthcare delivery model that operates in an IT ecosystem, and allow easy access and sharing of healthcare related data such as patient medical history data, patient personal information, prescription information, diagnostic results, clinical data and others. Home monitoring, clinical monitoring, assisted living and telemedicine are among the major functions carried out by M2M connected healthcare systems. M2M connected healthcare saves time by connecting patients, healthcare providers and treatment systems over the internet. The M2M connected healthcare systems can use wired or wireless connectivity to share healthcare data between web-connected devices without the need of human involvement.View Report @The global market for M2M connected healthcare has been segmented into home monitoring, clinical monitoring, clinical trials, telemedicine, assisted living, worried well and clinical remote monitoring. Significant advantages associated with M2M connected healthcare have been identified as the major factors driving the M2M connected healthcare market growth. These advantages include reduced time, reduced healthcare cost, easy sharing of healthcare data and remote healthcare monitoring. M2M model also enables patients with more control over their treatment regime. Globally rising incidences of various chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and hypertension are also expected to play a key role in driving the market growth during the forecast period from 2014 to 2020. Persistent rise in geriatric population directly impacts the growth and development of connected health M2M services as elderly population is highly susceptible to acquire several health disorders as compared to younger adults. According to World Health Organization (WHO) projections, in 2010, global geriatric population was around 524 million and is anticipated to reach around 1.5 billion by the year 2050. Thus, a consistent rise in geriatric population would boost the growth of M2M connected healthcare market as they will increasingly seek M2M connected health services. One of the major factors that are expected to affect the market growth is that stake holders should have access to internet connection.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the M2M Connected Healthcare Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.In terms of geography, the global market for M2M connected healthcare has been segmented into four major regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Rest of the World (RoW). North America represented the largest regional market for M2M connected healthcare in 2013. Well established healthcare infrastructure of the North American countries U.S. and Canada, and presence of a large pool of technically-savvy patient population are among the major factors responsible for North Americas leading position in this market segment. Europe represented the second largest market after North America. Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy and Spain are the most potential markets in the European region that accounted for more than 60% of the overall Europe M2M connected healthcare market. During the forecast period from 2014 to 2020, APAC is expected to witness significant growth as M2M connected healthcare model will help in serving patients residing in remote area, overcoming distance barriers.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Pyrimethamine Treatment Market: Technologies, Markets and Players

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Some of the major players in pyrimethamine treatment market include Turing Pharmaceuticals, Impax Laboratories, Inc., Pfizer, Inc. GlaxoSmithKline plc, and others.Pyrimethamine is a medication used for protozoan infections. It is commonly used as an antimalarial drug (for both treatment and prevention of malaria), and to treat Toxoplasma gondii infections, particularly when combined with the sulfonamide antibiotic sulfadiazine when treating HIV-positive individuals. Pyrimethamine is typically given with a sulfonamide and folinic acid due to its resistance against many Plasmodium species. Pyrimethamine has also been found to limit the expression of the superoxide dismutase 1 gene, a protein involved in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Pyrimethamine is considered in the list of one of the most important medications by World Health Organizations list of essential medicines.View Report @Pyrimethamines ability to cure protozoan infection and toxoplasma infections, rising number of HIV positive patients worldwide and immunosuppressed individual at a risk of infections are the factors driving the pyrimethamine treatment market during the forecast period. Moreover, mergers and acquisitions by the manufacturing companies would also the boost the demand and supply for the pyrimethamine medication in the pyrimethamine treatment market. However, the certain side effects that may occur with pyrimethamine medication include allergic reactions, blood disorders, tongue changes, blood in the urine, heart rhythm disorders, anorexia, and vomiting (see Important Safety Information below) which act as a restraining factor for the growth of this market. Additionally, factors such as pricing issues in some countries and resistance developing against the drugs may hamper the growth of the pyrimethamine treatment market during the focus period of 2013 to 2023.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Pyrimethamine Treatment Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.The global pyrimethamine market has been segmented into brands and geography. On the basis of brand, the pyrimethamine treatment market has been segmented into two drugs that are presently marketed such as Daraprim and Fansidar. The Daraprim sub-segment held the largest share for the pyrimethamine treatment market. However, the Fansidar sub-segment is growing at a high rate due to affordable cost and availability.Geographically, North America dominates the global pyrimethamine treatment market followed by Europe. The market domination was majorly due to the pricing structure of the pyrimethamine drug in the U.S. The High prevalence of toxoplasma in the region also acts as the driving factor for the growth of the pyrimethamine treatment in the North America. According to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), toxoplasmosis is one of the five neglected parasitic infections in the U.S. It is the second leading cause of death from foodborne illness in the country and more than 60 million people in the U.S. carry the toxoplasma parasite, and more than one million people in the U.S. are infected annually with the toxoplasma parasite, which is associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality. Asia-Pacific is also increasing constantly in the pyrimethamine drugs market mainly due to the high prevalence of protozoan disease such as malaria in India, China and other developing nations. Moreover, government initiatives and regulatory norms in these countries would fuel the market for pyrimethamine treatment market in the region during the forecast period. Latin America is also a growing market for pyrimethamine treatment due to developing healthcare expenditure and high prevalence rate of malaria and toxoplasma in the region.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Nucleic Acid Aptamers Market 2023 By Top Players

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Companies mentioned in the research reportSome of the prominent companies in the global market for nucleic acid aptamers are Araxis Kits, LLC, Aptamer Sciences, Inc., Aptagen, LLC, Envirologix, Inc., Cytogenix Inc., Mitsui & Co. Inc., and Quest Diagnostics.Global Nucleic Acid Aptamers Market: OverviewAptamers are peptides or oligonucleotide molecules that bond with a specific target molecule. Nucleic acid aptamers are a special class of nucleic acid species created via rounds of in-vitro selection or SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment). Nucleic acid aptamers help in binding various molecular targets such as proteins, cells, tissues, and organisms. They also assist in molecular recognition of certain characters that fight antibodies and, as a result, are quickly emerging as a possible alternative to commonly used biomolecule, antibodies.View Report @Nucleic acid aptamers are not only distinctly recognizable, they also offer other advantages over antibodies, such as the possibility to be synthesized completely in a test tube, desirable storage properties, and extremely little immunogenicity in therapeutic applications. Concurrently, the global market for nucleic acid aptamers is projected for a robust CAGR during the forecast period of 2016 to 2023.The global nucleic acid aptamers market can be segmented on the basis of type of technology and application. Some of the most prominent technologies are oligonucleotide synthesis, bioinformatics and next generation sequencing, modified oligonucleotides, nanoparticles and quantum dot labels, surface plasmon resonance and biolayer inferometry. By application, the market can be categorized as diagnostics and therapeutics. The diagnostics segment is further classified as application in human clinical diagnostic assays, veterinary diagnostics, and environmental monitoring. The therapeutics market is segmented on the basis of the currently available aptamer drugs, drug delivery in cancer therapy, various conditions targeted by aptamer drugs, and use of aptamers in modification of surgical implants.Global Nucleic Acid Aptamers Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe application of aptamers in therapeutics, diagnostics, and research is on the rise as they exhibit enhanced effectiveness, which is driving the global market for nucleic acid aptamers. Favorable policies by several governments across the globe for conducting clinical trials and research is also encouraging market expansion. Another factor expected to positively impact the global market for nucleic acid aptamers is their low manufacturing cost, which makes them ideal for the treatment of common life-threatening diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, and other autoimmune diseases. Additionally, patent expiration of SELEX open new opportunities for players.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Nucleic Acid Aptamers Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.Conversely, unfavorable government regulations in European countries is expected to hinder the growth of the market for nucleic acid aptamers in the region. Moreover, the market is facing similar challenges in developing countries such as India and China, coupled with poor response from consumers due to ethical issues. This factor is curtailing the growth rate in the vastly populated Asia Pacific region. Lack of trained professionals is another restraining factor for the market.Global Nucleic Acid Aptamers Market: Region-wise OutlookDue to robust healthcare infrastructure, high adoption rate of new technology, and favorable government policies in the regional market for nucleic acid aptamers, North America currently dominates the demand and is expected to remain most lucrative during the forecast period. However, Asia Pacific is projected for healthy growth due to vast populations and increased government initiatives towards improving medical facilities.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Retinal Implant Market 2024 By Top Players

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Complex surgery, difference in peoples biological response to foreign objects being placed inside theirbodies, and high cost of procedures are the other major challenges faced by the global retinal implants market. Owing to the complex nature of implant surgeries, comprehensive training in the technology and technique and appropriate selection of patients is also a crucial factor governing the large-scale adoption of retinal implants. Dearth of trained professionals in several regions is limiting demand for retinal implants.View Report @Retinal implants are biomedical microchips designed to provide visual perception to people who have lost vision owing to degenerative eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. These conditions lead to slow degeneration of photoreceptor cells in the retina of human eyes, leading to gradual loss of sight. However, some of the inner retinal neurons capable of transmitting signals from photoreceptors to the brain are preserved in most cases. Electrical stimulation of these remaining retinal neurons with the help of retinal implants, which are essentially microchips containing an array of light-sensitive diodes capable of converting incident light into electrical signals, can help reintroduce some vision to patients.The report presents a detailed overview of the present state of the global retinal implants market and its crucial elements. It presents an analysis of the major factors that will influence the growth dynamics of the market and shape its future.The data has been gathered with the help of primary and secondary research methodologies, and narrowed down with the help of industry-leading analytical methods. A definitive account of the regulatory scenario governing market decisions has also been included in the report, along with an analysis of the expected impact of the regulatory scenario on the market.Retinal Implants Market: Present ScenarioRetinal implants were considered a medical impossibility until a few decades ago, primarily owing to the highly complex design of the human eye. However, some retinal implants have successfully cleared clinical trials and are being regularly used in clinics in developed regions such as Europe and North America.Retinal implants such as Alpha IMS, developed by Germany-based Retina Implant AG, and Argus II, developed by U.S.-based Second Sight Medical Products, have received approval for large-scale marketing and are being successfully implanted in patients with retinitis pigmentosa.With the rising number of successful outcomes of retinal implants and advancement in technologies, the global retinal implants market holds immense potential in helping patients with RP and several other degenerative conditions regain their sight.Increase in the geriatric population and the consequent rise in the prevalence of degenerative conditions, technological advancements, and growing disposable income in developing countries will act as major drivers of the global retinal implant market in the next few years.Currently, retinal implants available in the market fall into two categories: epiretinal implants, which are fixed on the retina, and subretinal implants, which are fitted behind the retina. Retinal implants that can be fitted above the vascular choroid, called suprachoroidal implants, are also in clinical trials.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Retinal Implant Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.Retinal Implants Market: Challenges and Growth OpportunitiesBiocompatibility and long-term stability of the material used for devising retinal implants are the major challenges in the global retinal implants market. These technical challenges have induced manufacturers and researchers to explore the use of new materials and combinations that will be most suitable for human eyes. This factor acts as a major restraint of the market as well as a major opportunity for medical device manufacturers and researchers.Lack of medical reimbursement in developing and underdeveloped countries is a key issue restraining the global retinal implants market. In Germany, the Alpha IMS microchip is reimbursed by the statutory health insurance system, which insures 90% of the countrys population.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Animal Parasiticides Market Opportunities And Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecasts To 2023

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Some of the key players operating in the animal parasiticides market are Ceva Sante Animale S.A., Vetoquinol S.A., Virbac SA in France, Bayer Aktiengesellschaft in Germany, Novartis AG in Switzerland, Merial Limited, Eli Lilly and Company, Zoetis Inc. and Merck & Co., Inc. in U.S.The demand for animal parasiticides is growing due to the increasing awareness of zoonatic diseases. With the rising concern towards animal welfare is one of the major reasons behind the growing popularity of animal parasiticides. The market has been segmented by products into ectoparasiticides, endoparasiticides, endectocides, tablets, oral liquids, sprays, injectables, spot on and pour on, ear tags, collars. Furthermore, the market is also segmented by animal types such as Cats, Pigs, Dogs, Cattle, Sheep and Goats. The market by geography has been segmented into Europe, Asia Pacific, North America and Rest of the World (RoW).View Report @Spot-ons and pour-ons accounted the largest market share of the global animal parasiticides market in 2014. The growth in this segment can be attributed to rising popularity and use of spot-on and pour-on formulations in animal parasiticides market. Furthermore, growing demand for ectoparasites for food-producing animals and companion animals is also expected to stimulate the growth of the market. Availability of wide array of parasiticides product by major players, rising demand for animal-based food and animal protein are some of the driving factors for the animal parasiticides market. In addition, rising animal welfare awareness is increasing the adaption of animals such as dogs and cats among others. Increasing livestock farming as a source of income in developing nations are fueling the demand for animal parasiticides. However, there are some of the restraining factors may hinder the growth of the market in near future such as stringent rules and regulations of authoritative bodies in use of parasiticides in food- producing animals in some of the countries. Moreover, time consuming and expensive procedures of new product development are some of the restraining factors for the market.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Animal Parasiticides Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.Europe is leading the market for animal parasiticides followed by North America, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. In developed nations, implementation of animal welfare acts is one of the major driving factors for the animal parasiticides market. The emerging market in Latin America and Asia Pacific is contributing in the positive growth of animal parasiticides market owing to the increasing population of companion animals and livestock. Moreover, increasing per capita expenditure on animal health along with improving infrastructure of animal welfare is some of the major factors fueling the demand for animal parasiticides in these regions. With growing awareness towards animal healthcare, countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand in developing nations like Asia pacific is expected to depict a significant growth over the forecast period from 2015 to 2021. Argentina and Brazil are potential market for animal parasiticides across Latin America.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Urinary Tract Stenting Market Opportunities And Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecasts To 2023

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Some of the key companies operating in the global urinary tract stenting market include Boston Scientific Corporation, C. R. Bard, Inc., Cook Medical, Inc., and Medline Industries, Inc., Pnn Medical A/S, and Allium Medical Solutions Ltd.Urine is normally carried from the kidneys to the bladder through long, narrow, muscular tubes called ureters. The passage of urine may become difficult if the ureter becomes obstructed due to conditions such as tumors, infections, kidney stone, etc. For such conditions, the physicians place an artificial tube, known as ureteral stent, intended to restore the flow of the bladder. Aging is the most common factor that leads to several types of urology diseases. The global aging population is a direct indication of the possible rise in the patients suffering with urological diseases. With the increasing conditions that obstruct the flow of urine, the use of urological stents have become the most fundamental and valuable technique in the urological practice.View Report @A ureteral stent is specially designed a soft tube 10-12 inches in length that is placed in the ureter for draining urine from the kidney to the urinary bladder. These stents are coiled at both the end to stay in place in the urinary system and therefore also known as JJ stent, pig-tail stent of double J stent. Normally a person can have ureteral stents for not more than 3 to 6 months. If left for longer duration, there is a possibility of stone formation which makes removal of stents difficult. If a patient is required to have stent for a longer duration, he must be admitted in the hospital for stent change. This is a serious limitation for the usage ureteral stent. Several companies operating in the market are trying to overcome the issue of biofilm formation and mineralogical encrustation. Furthermore, there are ongoing research activities in the global urinary tract stenting market to modify the design, discovering novel stent coating and the basic composition materials of the stent. Usage of metal stents in urology is being recommended by some physicians which have not yet become a widespread practice. Some of the advancements required for the industry include anti-body coated stents, nanotube coating, radioactive stents, and absorbable magnesium metal stent. The successful trials of the technologies have a potential to drastically change the existing market dynamics in the global urinary stenting market.The global market for urinary tract stenting can be segmented on the basis of application of urology stents into kidney stones treatment. The major segments in which urological stents are used include procedures such as lithotripsy, ureteroscopy, ureteroenoscopy, and percutaneous nephrolithotomy. Based on the procedures of removing the obstruction in the ureter, the market can be segmented into ureteral stenting, prostate stenting and urethral stenting.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Urinary Tract Stenting Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.Based on the geography, the global urinary tract stenting market is segmented into four major regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. More than 2 million people in the U.S. are annually diagnosed for the presence of kidney stone. The number of people suffering from similar diseases is even higher in the Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. The rising number of kidney stone patients in the world is expected to increase the number of treatment procedures at a faster rate than before eventually increasing the demand for the urinary tract stents. As the economic conditions in the emerging nations such as China, India, and Brazil are expected to improve in the near future, most of the market growth will be fuelled by demand from these countries.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Pre-Pregnancy Genetic Testing Market Opportunities And Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecasts To 2023

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Global Pre-pregnancy Genetic Testing MarketPre-pregnancy genetic testing comprises a suite of tests used to identify genetic abnormalities in a gestating fetus. Genetic abnormalities can cause severe conditions later on, resulting in mental retardation, strokes, paralysis, cardiac conditions, etc. Examination of the genetic makeup of the fetus through pre-pregnancy genetic testing allows gynecologists to identify such conditions and prepare a treatment plan. Chromosomal abnormalities such as trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome) and 18 (Edwards syndrome) are among the conditions that can be identified through pre-pregnancy genetic testing.View Report @The global pre-pregnancy genetic testing market is expanding due to the increasing awareness among expecting mothers about the benefits of conducting genetic testing early on. This allows expecting parents to prepare mentally as well as financially to support a child who could have special needs. The increasing technological innovation in the medical field and extensive research into genetics to understand the causal links between gene expression and phenotypical features have also benefited the global pre-pregnancy genetic testing market, by making the testing processes more reliable, efficient, and convenient.Global Pre-pregnancy Genetic Testing Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe increasing awareness among expecting parents about genetic conditions and the possibility of identifying them early on has been the result of the improving living standards of the global population. The increased average age of mothers, due to the rising preference among urban parents to delay pregnancy, has also played a significant role in driving the demand for pre-pregnancy genetic testing. Along with the awareness, the number of parents who can afford comprehensive pre-pregnancy genetic testing has also increased substantially in the last few decades. These factors have resulted in a growing demand for pre-pregnancy genetic testing.Technological innovation in genetic testing equipment and procedures has also made the testing procedures more reliable and convenient. The increased convenience of advanced pre-pregnancy genetic testing has been particularly important for the global market, as the rising preference for minimally invasive medical procedures has added to the demand for modern pre-pregnancy genetic testing. The increasing health care expenditure in developing economies has also helped the pre-pregnancy genetic testing market.Currently, the high prices of pre-pregnancy genetic testing are the major restraint acting on the global market for the same. This is a major issue in developing countries, where, despite the rampant urbanization and improving living standards of the vast middle class, pre-pregnancy genetic testing remains unaffordable for the majority. Technological innovation and the increasing demand for pre-pregnancy genetic tests will help market players offer these services at affordable rates.Global Pre-pregnancy Genetic Testing Market: Regional OverviewThe global pre-pregnancy genetic testing market has traditionally been dominated by North America. The advanced health care infrastructure established in North America and the high purchasing power of North American consumers, which allows them to avail expensive medical services, have propelled this regional market. North America is also a major hub for medical research, including research into making pre-pregnancy genetic testing more affordable and convenient for the masses. This has made incorporation of technological advances into the existing health care scenario much easier, driving the regional pre-pregnancy genetic testing market.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Pre-pregnancy Genetic Testing Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.In the coming years, Asia Pacific is likely to become a major regional player in the global market for pre-pregnancy genetic testing. The improving living standards of consumers in this region, rampant urbanization and widespread establishment of the accompanying infrastructure in countries such as India, China, Japan, and South Korea, and the increasing awareness about advanced medical procedures in the region are the major factors propelling the Asia Pacific pre-pregnancy genetic testing market at present.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Cluster Headache Syndrome Market Opportunities And Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecasts To 2024

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Global Cluster Headache Syndrome Market: Vendor LandscapeIn order to study the competition prevailing in the market, the report profiles companies such as GlaxoSmithKline plc, ElectroCore Medical LLC, Autonomic Technologies, Inc., and AstraZeneca plc. The recent strategies adopted by these companies to gain a competitive advantage in the market are examined in the report in detail. The report also presents an executive-level blueprint of the strengths and weaknesses of the companies profiled. The threats and opportunities that these companies could face in the near future are also studied in detail.View Report @Global Cluster Headache Syndrome Market: OverviewCluster headache is a neurological disorder. It is a condition characterized by recurrence of severe headache usually around the eye on one side of the head. Cluster headache, in most cases, is accompanied by excessive tears, nasal decongestion, and swelling of the eye. Individuals suffering from cluster headache syndrome might often have to endure agonizing attacks of unilateral headaches.The condition shows symptoms that are quite similar to migraine such as nausea and sensitivity to sound and light. The causes that trigger cluster headache are not completely known; however, possible rare causes could include dysfunction of the hypothalamus and smoking. In some patients, cluster headache syndrome could be hereditary. The intense pain felt during cluster headache may be caused by the dilation of blood vessels, which creates pressure on the trigeminal nerve.A physical examination of the pupils can help doctors diagnose the signs of cluster headache. Globally, there have been several reports of misleading diagnosis of cluster headache syndrome. A cluster headache patient could suffer attacks multiple times a day, with each attack lasting not more than three hours. A patient is likely to endure these attacks daily for many weeks or months. These may diminish for a period; however, the relief could be temporary as cluster headache can recur after a year or even a few months in some cases.Cluster headache syndrome is more prevalent in men than in women. The two types of cluster headaches are episodic and chronic. Of these, incidence of episodic cluster headaches is more common than the latter. About 10% patients suffering from cluster headaches are estimated to suffer from chronic syndrome.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Cluster Headache Syndrome Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.The report provides a comprehensive overview of the global cluster headache syndrome market. It studies the various factors influencing the markets trajectory and includes exhaustive information obtained from trusted industrial sources. Data thus sourced is presented in a logical chapter-wise format interspersed with infographics, statistics, and relevant tables.Global Cluster Headache Syndrome Market: Key Opportunities and ThreatsIncreasing global geriatric population, rising incidence of cluster headache syndrome, and introduction of latest technologies in the health care industry are the key factors boosting the growth of the global cluster headache syndrome market. Rising willingness among people to spend more on health care treatments and awareness about the importance of early diagnosis of cluster headache is anticipated to boost market growth. However, inadequate knowledge among health care providers and unfavorable health care policies that adversely affect overall health care expenditure are hampering the growth of the global cluster headache syndrome market.Global Cluster Headache Syndrome Market: Region-wise OutlookRegionally, North America dominates the global cluster headache syndrome market, followed by Europe. Increasing incidence of the syndrome and adoption of advanced technologies to diagnose the syndrome drive the cluster headache syndrome market in North America.Asia Pacific offers lucrative opportunities for market players due to increasing geriatric population and rising prevalence of cluster headache syndrome.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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Personalized Cancer Genome Sequencing Market Research Report: Market Competition, Value chain Analysis and Forecast 2024

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Global Personalized Cancer Genome Sequencing Market: OverviewCancer genome sequencing refers to the specialized field of genetic engineering focusing on the identification of genetic sequence in cancer cells. A more specialized sub-segment of this niche area is the field of personalized cancer genome sequencing, which refers to the identification and characterization of abnormal DNA and RNA sequencing in a particular cancer cell. Across the globe, the vast rise in prevalence of a variety of cancers has led to a significant rise in research activities aimed at the formulation of effective and accurate diagnostic and treatment methods.Over the past few years, intense research and technological developments in genetic engineering have made the personalized cancer genome sequencing technology a reliable technique for the treatment of several kinds of cancers. This report on the global personalized cancer genome sequencing market presents a detailed overview of the market with the help of in-depth quantitative and qualitative details and verifiable forecast about markets future growth prospects.Global Personalized Cancer Genome Sequencing Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe vast rise in prevalence of cancer across the glove, rising awareness regarding the available treatment methods in the market, and a rising openness towards the adoption of promising futuristic treatment methods are the key factor driving the global personalized cancer genome sequencing market. The market is also driven due to the vast developments observed in gene sequencing techniques and the high accuracy in results.Being a relatively new method of cancer treatment, personalized cancer genome sequencing method is presently under clinical trials in several countries. In some countries across regions such as North America and Europe, these methods are practiced but are dealt through stringent regulatory control and taxing approval procedures from regulatory bodies. In the United States alone, the personalized cancer genome sequencing market is regulated by bodies such as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. FDA.View Report-Global Personalized Cancer Genome Sequencing Market: Regional OutlookFrom a geographical perspective, the personalized cancer genome sequencing market has been examined in the report for regional markets such as Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, and Middle East and Africa. Of these, the North America market presently dominates, followed by the Europe market. Factors such as the highly developed healthcare infrastructures, high prevalence of cancer, presence of some of the worlds leading biotechnology companies, and high expenditure on healthcare present vast development opportunities for the market in these regions.Asia-Pacific is also expected to emerge as a promising destination for development of the personalized cancer genome sequencing market in the next few years. This regional market is expected to exhibit growth at a healthy pace in the next few years. Factors such as the rising disposable incomes, increased expenditure on healthcare and wellness, and an improving healthcare infrastructure across developing economies such as India and China will drive the market. The thriving medical tourism industry in these countries is also expected to be a key driving factor. However, high costs of personalized cancer genome testing could limit the rate of adoption of this technique across the region to a certain extent.Global Personalized Cancer Genome Sequencing Market: Competitive DynamicsAlthough the scope of growth of the global personalized cancer genome sequencing market is huge, the market has witnessed the entry of very few companies owing to the stringent regulatory scenario governing the development prospects of new solutions and their marketing across regional markets with differing sets of approval processes. In the next few years as well, this factor is expected to permit few new players to foray into the global personalized cancer genome sequencing market.Some of the leading players operating in the market are Ambry Genetics, Beckman Coulter Genomics, Illumina, Inc., Cofactor Genomics, and BGI Americas Corporation.Request a brochure of this report to know what opportunities will emerge in the rapidly evolving Personalized Cancer Genome Sequencing Market during 2016- 2024About 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.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Electric Vehicle Battery Market Technological breakthroughs 2023

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Growing concerns related to decreasing oil and gas resources and degrading environmental conditions are having positive impact on the demand for electric powered vehicles.Moreover, subsidies and incentives on usage of such vehicles is another factor driving the market for electric powered vehicles. These vehicles depend on electric batteries to provide the primary or the secondary power.Thus any impact on the demand for electric powered vehicles will affect the electric vehicle battery market. An electric powered vehicle or battery electric vehicle use chemical energy stored in rechargeable battery packs for power.Obtain Report Details:As all the power is derived from batteries therefore, it does not require any combustion engine for propulsion. Battery Electric vehicles include scooters, rail cars, bicycle, forklifts, buses and cars. The advantages in battery storage technology have also positively affected the electric vehicle battery market.The segmentation of the electric vehicle battery market can be done on the basis of technology, application and geography. Technology segment deals with the different types of batteries used for manufacturing of electric vehicle battery.Major battery types include lead acid batteries, nickel metal hydride batteries, zebra batteries and lithium ion batteries. Lead acid batteries are the most common and cheapest type of batteries.Nickel metal hydride batteries have higher energy densities than the common lead acid batteries and if used properly can have exceptionally long lives. The Zebra batteries use molten chloro-aluminate sodium as electrolyte.Lithium ion batteries use graphite anode and lithium cobalt oxide anode. These batteries are use to power the Battery Electric Vehicles, Hybrid Vehicles, Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles and Plug-in Electric Vehicles.Regional segmentation of the electric vehicle battery market includes countries such as the United States and Canada in North America; Germany, France, Sweden and the United Kingdom in Europe.The government incentives on usage of battery powered vehicles are one of the main reasons behind the growth of North American and European electric vehicle battery market.Other prominent market includes Asia Pacific and Middle East. Asia Pacific market includes the countries such as Japan, China and South Korea. Increasing concerns related to energy security and incentives on use of battery powered vehicles are the major factor driving the Asia Pacific market.The Rest of the World segment still lags behind in the electric vehicle battery market. The Rest of the World Market includes countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela.Make an Enquiry:Decreasing crude oil reserves and concerns regarding degradation of the environment are the major factors driving the electric vehicle battery market. With decreasing crude reserves the demand for economical transportation technologies has attracted investment in this market.The governments of many major countries have encouraged adoption hybrid vehicles that utilize the electric battery. Many national agencies have enforced rules and provide attractive concessions on purchasing hybrid cars. Stringent environmental regulations in the European Union nations have encouraged wide adoption of the battery powered vehicles.The fluctuating crude oil prices are another major factor bolstering consumers to adopt such batteries. Expensive nature of electric vehicle battery is one of the major restraints to the market.About TMRTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact TMR90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email:sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
public_safety_oregonian_100.JPG

(The Oregonian/OregonLive)

A man who doused an officer with pepper spray during a traffic stop then fled was captured hiding in a shed by a police dog, Lake Oswego police said Monday.

Bill Paul Anderson

Bill Paul Anderson was pulled over by an officer about 5 a.m. near Carman and Fieldstone drives, police said in a news release.

As the officer approached, Anderson reached out the driver's window and sprayed Officer Josh Price with bear pepper spray before speeding away, police said. The officer was treated by an ambulance crew and not seriously injured.

Anderson was later located in Washington County. West Linn police officers and county deputies set up a containment area, Lake Oswego police said. A Tigard police dog found Anderson in a shed.

Police have accused Anderson of assaulting a public safety officer, first-degree unlawful use of an electrical stun gun, tear gas or mace, and attempting to elude a police officer.

Anderson also had multiple warrants for his arrest. He was booked into the Clackamas County Jail and has $115,000 in bail, according to the Sheriff's Office website.

-- Tony Hernandez

thernandez@oregonian.com

503-294-5928

@tonyhreports
Joshua Webb

A Clackamas County man is accused of decapitating his mother at their home on Mother's Day, then going to a nearby supermarket, where witnesses described him walking in with an 8-inch knife in one hand and a severed human head in the other hand.

Investigators confirmed late Monday that Joshua Lee Webb was holding his mother's head when he went into Estacada's only grocery store.

Tina Marie Webb, 59, was killed at the family's rural home in Colton, authorities said.

One of Webb's sisters who was visiting for the holiday discovered their mother's headless body on the floor of the home, two neighbors said. The distraught sister came to their house to ask them to call police, they said.

She was crying and in shock and told them that she also had found her brother's dog dead on the kitchen counter.

"This is just a nightmare," one of the neighbors said. "It's something you wouldn't imagine someone would do." The two neighbors live within a few houses of the Webbs, but didn't give their names, saying they wanted to let the family know first that they had talked to a reporter.

Webb's father, David Webb, wasn't home at the time his wife was killed, they said.

"My wife was wonderful," David Webb said Monday in a brief phone interview before he was overcome by emotion. "I've been married to her for almost 41 years. Joshua was our son. I never saw a problem. Evidently there was one. I don't know. I start crying every time I think about it."

Joshua Webb, 36, apparently went from Colton, where he lived in a pole barn on his parents' rural property and did odd jobs around the neighborhood, to the Harvest Market.

Employees there described a surreal scene on what had been until then a quiet afternoon in the town of 2,700 about 30 miles southeast of Portland. A 911 call came in at 2:14 p.m. from the store, police said.

A customer first saw a man, later identified as Webb, covered in blood, screamed and ran out of the store in downtown Estacada, said Ashlie Crombie, 25, who has worked there for about three years. Crombie wasn't working Sunday but started to get calls and texts from friends and family asking if she was safe. Co-workers soon told her what happened, she said.

The customer's screams alerted other people in the store, Crombie said as she stood outside the market, which remained closed Monday. It wasn't clear how many people at the time were in the Thriftway, which has about 30 employees, she said.

The man ran to the back of the store, where he encountered clerk Michael Wagner, Crombie said, and told him: "You better run."

The man stabbed Wagner up to seven times, but Wagner, 64, was able to chase after the suspect and tackle him. Other employees kicked and beat the man, wrested the knife away from him, then taped his hands and feet until police arrived, Crombie said.

An employee with first-aid training helped Wagner until paramedics arrived. He has undergone surgery at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland and is expected to recover after suffering wounds in the stomach and sternum, police and friends said.

"He is a tough cookie," his wife, Pam Wagner, said on Facebook as she thanked his "work family" who intervened.

"This is such a crazy random thing that has happened and I am truly at a loss why someone would do what this person did," she said. "Hug your loved ones a little tighter tonight."

Joshua Webb also was taken to Legacy Emanuel, said Interim Sandy Police Chief Ernie Roberts. Webb was "catatonic" by the time officers arrived at the store, he said.

Sandy police, who serve Estacada, are investigating the store stabbing, and the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office is investigating Tina Webb's death.

Joshua Webb was booked into the Clackamas County Jail on allegations of murder and attempted murder. He has no history of violent crime in Oregon. Court records show only a conviction for unlawful use of metal objects on tires in June 2000.

A Facebook page linked to a man of the same name in Colton indicates it was created in April, but has few entries. One of the only entries other than pictures of a dog and a comment about a thunderstorm shows a heart over the words "In a relationship." The post reads "when you cant sleep apart and anything life throws at you isnt too much to be with her ,yep thats where im at"

Curtis Strandy, who described Webb as his best friend, said Webb "loved his mother very much" and wasn't argumentative or violent. He described Webb as "the nicest guy" he's ever met.

"It ain't Josh, at all," Strandy said of the accusations against Webb.

Strandy, a 34-year-old Oregon City resident, said he felt Webb had more gumption over the past month or two to have a profession and better his life.

Neighbors said Webb's girlfriend had recently moved out of Oregon. They called Webb "an OK guy" and said he had an eye condition that made it hard for him to keep a steady job. They never noticed any trouble between family members, they said. Tina and David Webb have four grown children.

The Webbs have lived in the neighborhood for 20 years. Tina Webb graduated several years ago with a horticulture degree from Clackamas Community College and was a master gardener, neighbors said. She had designed and worked on a garden at a local church, they said.

At the Harvest Market on Monday, yellow caution tape encircled the store and parking lot. Some people in hazardous material suits removed items from the store in red bags and placed them into a green truck.

Wagner mostly works as a cashier but also helps out in the produce section and other areas, Crombie said.

"He is the sweetest, most kind-hearted guy," she said. "We all feel terrible that this happened."

Wagner is a well-known figure at the store known for his love of puns and telling jokes, customers said.

"He's such a happy-go-lucky guy," said regular Timmer Robertson, 62, of Estacada. "He'll sit and tell you which vegetables to get and which ones not to. Really nice guy. No one around here will have a bad thing to say about him."

Connie Tumaniszwili, 71, of Estacada, said she'd gone to the store three times on Sunday but had left about an hour before the stabbing.

"Everyone is family here and we all take care of each other," she said. "When something like this happens, we all feel it.

"We're just so thankful that he survived," she said. "If we lost him, this town wouldn't be the same."

A sign outside the market read: "Get well soon, Mike." People left hand-written messages, including: "Miss your smiley face." "Praying for you and your family." "Get well and be careful. There are crazy people out there."

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey
lightbar.jpg

(The Oregonian/OregonLive/file)

UPDATE: Man walked into Thriftway with knife in one hand, human head in the other, witnesses say

The man who appeared to be holding a human head when he entered an Estacada grocery store and then stabbed an employee remains in the hospital Monday for evaluation, but was expected to be taken later to the Clackamas County Jail, authorities said.

The Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office meanwhile planned to do an autopsy on a woman later found dead in nearby Colton in an incident related to the suspect who entered the Harvest Market Thriftway on Sunday afternoon, investigators said.

The man in the grocery store was covered in blood and subdued by other workers, police said.

Both the man and the employee who was stabbed were taken to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland. The employee is expected to survive, said Interim Sandy Police Chief Ernie Roberts.

The suspect was taken to the hospital because he was "catatonic" in the store when officers arrived, Roberts said. Officers found a knife with him, Roberts said, but he couldn't confirm if the man had an actual human head.

Roberts didn't have names of the injured employee or the suspect. A sign outside the Thriftway read: "Get well soon, Mike."

The family-owned Thriftway is the main grocer in town. It remained closed Monday. Estacada is about 30 miles southeast of Portland with a population around 2,700.

Sandy police, who serve Estacada, and Clackamas County Sheriff's deputies responded to a 911 call from the store at 2:14 p.m. Sunday.

Twenty minutes after the first 911 call, another came in reporting a woman dead inside a home on Ellwood Road in Colton. Deputies and officers from other police agencies responded and found the woman dead at the scene.

The Clackamas County Sheriff's Office is investigating the woman's death and Sandy police are investigating the store stabbing.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey
Is it possible to make a homemade appetizer in just 5 minutes? I think so, if you use hard-cooked whole peeled eggs -- widely available in grocery store dairy cases across the country. These cooked eggs help you make a summertime favorite, deviled eggs, in a matter of minutes.

Recipes included with this story: Modern Deviled Eggs with Sweet Pickle, Spicy Bacon Deviled Eggs

Today I'm featuring two new favorites that I have enjoyed serving lately. The first is a twist on my grandmother's recipe, which is the traditional Southern recipe with sweet pickles. She used yellow mustard, but I'm using Dijon; with the extra flavor from the mustard you can back off the salt and pepper. You can add salt and pepper to taste at the end, if you feel like the yolk mixture needs any at all.

The second recipe is smoky and hot from Tabasco (or your hot sauce of choice) and crispy crumbled bacon. Bacon and eggs were made to go together, so why not combine them into a fantastic new favorite: Spicy Bacon Deviled Eggs?

I hope you love trying out these convenient new twists to favorite recipes! Enjoy!

-- Alicia Ross, Kitchen Scoop
Janelle Lindvall

The Oregon Ducks will host a regional in the first round of the 2017 NCAA softball tournament.

(Chris Pietsch/AP/Register-Guard, 2016)

The Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers each are headed to the 2017 NCAA softball tournament, with the Ducks hosting a first-round regional for a sixth consecutive year.

After a second-place finish in the Pac-12 the Ducks (47-6) earned a No. 3 national seed and will host Illinois-Chicago, Wisconsin and Missouri in a regional beginning Friday at Jane Sanders Stadium.

"That's a great seed," UO coach Mike White said.

The Badgers (33-15) and Tigers (29-26) will play Friday on ESPN at 6 p.m. PT and will be followed by Oregon's regional opener against the Horizon League champion Flames (38-20) at 8:30 p.m. on ESPNU. This is UIC's first appearance in the tournament since 2011. UO played Missouri twice in March and won both times.

The Beavers (28-25) will play in a Waco, Texas, regional hosted by No. 15 Baylor (43-13). OSU will open against James Madison (50-6) Friday at 2 p.m. PT on an ESPN3 broadcast. Kent State (32-26) rounds out that regional field.

"I am so proud of this team," OSU coach Laura Berg said. "These ladies have been working hard since last fall and it is fun to see them get rewarded for that hard work. We have had some ups and downs this season, but we've grown as a team and will fight to make some noise this postseason."

The 64-team bracket was unveiled Sunday on ESPN2, with the top 16 seeds hosting first-round regionals. Three of the top five seeds hailed from the Pac-12, with No. 2 Arizona and No. 5 UCLA joining the Ducks. Florida is the top overall seed.

Arizona finished a half-game ahead of UO in the standings after UO played one less game due to a rainout, and their minuscule separation in the bracket reflected how highly the NCAA selection committee regarded both programs' credentials.

The Eugene regional will conclude Sunday as part of the NCAA's new three-day regional format -- instead of two -- with the winner advancing to a super regional the following weekend. Having the extra day is "good for the game," White said, and better than the possibility of playing a doubleheader on the final day of a regional.

"It's extremely difficult to turn the team around in 20 minutes and be ready to play," he said. "There's a lot at stake."

UO is 21-0 all-time in regional play under White, and if it advances would be in line to host a fifth consecutive super regional against the winner of the Lexington regional featuring No. 14 Kentucky, Illinois, DePaul and Marshall. The Ducks beat Kentucky on Feb. 17. Such a matchup would pit Pac-12 against SEC and highlight what could be a dominant storyline of the tournament, as eight of the Pac-12's nine programs are in the postseason, while all 13 from the SEC earned NCAA berths.

Oregon began the season 35-0 and tied the NCAA record for most consecutive victories to start a season, but then lost six times in eight games, a stretch White called "a little lapse." At that point, White believed the Ducks were "scraping" to get into the top eight seeds nationally.

"It felt like things were impossible a couple weeks ago," UO senior Danica Mercado said. "But we got the ball rolling."

To say the least. Oregon enters the tournament on a 10-game win streak, including a three-game sweep of fourth-seeded Florida State two weeks ago. The series against the Seminoles, White said, was billed inside UO's clubhouse as a pseudo-super regional, a test of its postseason readiness.

The Ducks passed, allowing two runs in three games behind a pitching staff that owns the country's fifth-lowest earned-run average (1.33). That led to a sweep of Stanford over the weekend by a combined score of 26-2.

"Let's face it, we pretty much tied for the Pac-12 championship but just lost on a rainout," White said. "I think we deserve our seed."

The Beavers finished 9-15 in the Pac-12 and were rated 38th in the NCAA RPI, which factors in the strength of a team's schedule, entering this week. They are 19-16 away from Corvallis this season and 4-3 overall since being swept by Oregon in late April.

In its regional opener, Oregon State will face a James Madison team that enters the postseason on a 19-game winning streak.

The Women's College World Series will be hosted in Oklahoma City June 1-7. The Ducks have played in three of the last five WCWS.

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

Correction: Oregon will open the regional Friday. A previous version was incorrect in saying UO would play Illinois-Chicago on Thursday.
The Portland State University governing board appointed Rahmat Shoureshi to serve as the school's ninth president.

Shoureshi will succeed Wim Wiewel, who will step down at the end of this school year but remain on the faculty. He arrived at the school in 2008.

"I'm just thrilled with the selection the board is making," Wiewel said, adding to Shoureshi, "I look forward to working with you, and I certainly pledge my full support."

Shoureshi most recently served as the interim president of New York Institute of Technology.

In his new position, he will be paid a base salary of $599,988, comprising $260,700 paid by the university and $339,288 paid by the Portland State University Foundation. His five-year contract begins Aug. 14.

Shoureshi said he wants to increase the school's focus on scholarly research and build specialties research centers that combine academic disciplines from various departments at the university.

He also drew attention from the school's Board of Trustees because of his previous experience raising money through philanthropy.

"When I looked at at Portland State University, I saw the place where I really can make a difference," Shoureshi said. "I saw the opportunities."

His hiring comes as Portland State faces a $20 million budget shortfall as Gov. Kate Brown's proposed budget holds the higher education allocation flat. The university had hoped to make up much of the shortfall by raising tuition 9 percent, bringing full-time undergraduate tuition and fees to $9,030 a year.

A state board last week rejected that proposed increase, a move the school said will require $5 million in cuts.

Shoureshi said he's sympathetic to students who are watching the price for their education climb.

"I was a student that had loans I had to pay back," he said. "I feel what PSU students are going through."

But he said universities are facing rising costs from health care, recruiting faculty and staff and the cost of new technology.

"You have to diversify your sources of funding," he said. "When you extinguish all your other sources of funding, really the last option is to look at the price of tuition."

The 64-year-old Shoureshi started as the provost and head of academics at the New York school in 2011 and was appointed to the interim role in January.

Shoureshi worked as dean of the engineering and computer sciences school at the University of Denver for eight years before moving to New York.

The engineer has a Ph.D. and master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an expert in robotics and other engineering fields.

-- Elliot Njus

enjus@oregonian.com

503-294-5034

@enjus
State historic preservation officials said Monday they'll oppose forming a national historic district in the Eastmoreland neighborhood of Southeast Portland, dealing a significant blow to an effort to curb development there.

The Oregon State Historic Preservation Office said it is withholding its earlier endorsement, citing discrepancies in the count of property owners within the proposed district's boundaries.

"It has the historic character to qualify," said Chris Havel, associate director of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, which oversees the historic preservation office. "But there's a process problem."

The State Historic Preservation Office's recommendation was the target of a lawsuit filed last week in Marion County Circuit Court. Eastmoreland resident Tom Brown sought a restraining order blocking the nomination, but he withdrew the request Friday.

State officials said their concerns predated the lawsuit, and that they were already preparing to recommend against its formation when the case was filed.

The proposal to form a historic district, advanced by the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association, has split neighborhood residents. Some saw the district, and associated development restrictions, as a needed buffer against demolitions and infill construction.

But other residents saw the nomination as imposing restrictions on their property rights without going through a local land-use process.

Some 925 out of the more than 2,000 property owners had filed notarized objections to the historic district as of Friday. And in a poll conducted by the association, more than half of respondents said they didn't approve of the district. The neighborhood association decided to move forward with the nomination anyway.

The exact number of property owners is significant because the district cannot be formed if more than half file objections.

"While the submitted owner list represents our best efforts to date, concerns about it have been raised and unsettled ownership issues remain," Curran said in a letter to the National Park Service. "As a result, we do not have confidence that the list is indeed complete and accurate."

The State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation, a board of volunteers, previously endorsed the application. The Portland Historic Landmark Commission also endorsed the application, but raised concerns about the integrity of the survey of buildings in the district. It identified as historically significant homes that had undergone significant renovations.

Regardless of the state's recommendation, the application will be sent to the National Park Service for consideration. The federal agency has 45 days to make a decision.

The state office has asked for the nomination to be returned until the number of property owners can be finalized.

The delay could largely defang the proposal's effect on demolitions and development. Legislation at the local and state level could limit the protections bestowed automatically on a historic district.

Proponents say the nomination could move forward as expected if the technical matters are ironed out quickly.

"We do not view this as a major setback," said Robert McCullough, the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association's treasurer.

-- Elliot Njus

enjus@oregonian.com

503-294-5034

@enjus
U2 were almost through performing "The Joshua Tree," their 1987 classic, when Bono called for a little help from the CenturyLink Field stage on Sunday night.

"Where's Eddie Vedder?" he called into the chilly stadium air. "Spirit of Seattle!"

The spirit appeared: Vedder, the Pearl Jam frontman and Seattle grunge god, joined U2 to sing on "Mothers of the Disappeared," the finale of the band's "Joshua Tree" full-album performance.

He wasn't alone. Show openers Mumford & Sons returned to the stage, too, offering their own harmonies as U2 brought the night's main set to a close.

Vedder may have been practicing: he covered the band's "All I Want Is You" at a 2016 show, and did "A Sort of Homecoming" in Colombia the year before.

The collaboration was a long time coming. In their early days, Pearl Jam opened for U2 in 1993, playing a handful of shows with the Irish act in Italy on the Zooropa tour.

"U2 was one of my favorite bands of all time," Vedder said in the "Pearl Jam 20" book. "By the time of 'The Joshua Tree,' they were taking the opportunity to push the stadium rock 'n' roll experience to another level, and they felt that was their duty, whether it was going to work or not."

Now, they've done it together.

The Seattle show was the first U.S. date of The Joshua Tree Tour 2017, U2's celebration of the album's 30th anniversary. The tour opened in Vancouver on May 12.

-- David Greenwald

dgreenwald@oregonian.com

503-294-7625; @davidegreenwald

Instagram: Oregonianmusic
RANSOMWARE

(The Associated Press)

By Frank J. Cilluffo and Sharon L. Cardash

AP/THE CONVERSATION: A cyberattack is sweeping the world, infecting thousands of computers and demanding their owners pay a ransom or risk losing all their data. The threat, which has affected the FedEx shipping company, several hospitals in the UK, a major Spanish telecommunications company, and many more, makes even more urgent the need to improve U.S. cybersecurity -- both within the federal government and throughout our internet-connected society.

President Trump's new executive order on cybersecurity for federal computer networks and key elements of the country's infrastructure -- such as the electricity grid and core communications networks -- builds meaningfully on the work of the Obama administration. It focuses on matters of common and bipartisan concern, meaning it is likely to avoid the disquiet and disorganization generated by other recent executive orders.

Cybersecurity is ultimately an exercise in risk management. Given the range of possible threats and the pace at which they may appear, it is impossible to protect everything, everywhere, all the time. But it is possible to make sure that the most valuable resources (such as particular networks and systems, or specific data) are properly protected by good cyber-hygiene, at minimum -- and ideally, more.

The executive order seeks to do just that, by calling on Cabinet secretaries and the heads of other federal agencies to follow the Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology under the Obama administration. That framework also figures prominently in the final report of Obama's Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.

Three key topics of the executive order are of particular interest because they suggest significant new developments in the federal government's approach to cybersecurity. The order rightly highlights cyber-deterrence, the process of discouraging prospective attackers from actually trying to breach our systems. In addition, the order correctly identifies the electricity grid as needing stronger security - as well as the military's war-fighting capabilities.

Stepping up cyber-deterrence

One crucial element that has been largely missing from American cybersecurity efforts so far is cyber-deterrence. Just as nuclear deterrence let countries with nuclear weapons know that launching a nuclear attack would mean their own swift and sure destruction, cyber-deterrence involves making clear to prospective adversaries that attacks will either be too unlikely to succeed, or will be met by certain and severe retribution.

The executive order asks a wide group of senior government officials -- the secretaries of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, State and Treasury, plus the attorney general, the government's top trade negotiator and the director of national intelligence -- to develop options for deterring cyber-adversaries (without specifying any in particular).

Deterrence must, by nature, be multi-dimensional: It has to include a variety of obstacles to incoming attacks, as well as potential consequences for attackers. Coordinating diplomacy, military and economic efforts will be crucial to presenting a unified front to would-be adversaries.

This is not to say that a one-size strategy will fit all. To the contrary, besides a robust general posture, the U.S. must also tailor its specific deterrence efforts to make sure they are effective against individual potential adversaries.

Protecting the grid and the military's warfighting capabilities

The executive order also calls for additional protection of the electricity grid against cyberattacks. The potential is not hypothetical: Ukraine's grid was attacked twice, in December 2015 and December 2016.

And it calls attention to the military's industrial base, including its supply chain - which collectively produces, delivers and maintains weapons systems and component parts that are necessities for the Department of Defense. A successful cyber-attack on key suppliers could hamstring America's armed forces as much as a physical incursion against them on the battlefield.

Yet, as important as it is to identify and remedy existing vulnerabilities, the better course is always to design computer systems securely in the first place. The executive order focuses more on the former than the latter, since we must work with the capabilities and equipment we have, rather than just those we would wish to have.

Basic guidance

More generally, the executive order discusses and reinforces the basic principles of good cyber-hygiene. For instance, it emphasizes the significant risks to departments and agencies, and the citizens they serve, if known vulnerabilities remain unrepaired. For instance, without proper protections, taxpayer records, Social Security data and medical records could be stolen or fraudulently altered.

Sadly, this is a vital issue. Recent testimony from the Government Accountability Office documents the widespread problems government agencies have failing to install routine security upgrades and even using software so outdated the company that created it no longer supports it.

But the executive order also looks to a future federal government that takes advantage of cloud computing and the Internet of Things. The document not only calls for safeguarding existing networks and data; it declares the importance of systematic planning for future technological upgrades and advances, to manage risk effectively. Maintenance and modernization both matter, and both must be done securely.

Overall, the order is a solid document, with guidance that is both measured and clear. Key to its success -- and ultimately to the country's security in cyberspace -- will be the relationship the government builds with private industry. Protecting the country won't be possible without both groups working in tandem.

Frank J. Cilluffo is an associate vice president at George Washington University where he leads a number of national security and cyber security policy and research initiatives. Sharon L. Cardash is associate director of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.
Kate Brown

Th author argues that Oregon schools have been mired in crisis since the recession, yet lawmakers are proposing even more cuts: a two-year budget of $7.8 billion, effectively creating a $600 million shortfall.

(Don Ryan/AP Photo)

By Tass Morrison

If it has seemed a little more quiet than usual recently in the state Capitol, maybe it's because everyone there has been holding his or her breath until Tuesday.

Tomorrow is the day the state's next revenue forecast is due out. Those new projections will provide some certainty about just how bad the next couple of years will be for our public schools and other vital government services.

As a member of the North Santiam School Board since 2006, I've become all too familiar with this waiting game. And I have to confess: Having watched our elected state leaders patch together inadequate budgets over the last decade that have handicapped our schools, my patience has reached its end.

The kindergartners of 2006 when I took office will graduate from high school next year. During the course of their education we have faced a continual cycle of laying off teachers, cutting school days and trying to avoid shortchanging an entire generation of young people.

In the last week alone, newspaper headlines from around the state tell the same dismal schools story: "Proposed budget for Scappoose schools riles audience members," "LOSD projects $1.66 million shortfall," and "Bethel School District considers cutting 10 instruction days next year."

Our schools have been mired in crisis since the recession, yet our legislature is proposing even more cuts: a two-year budget of $7.8 billion, effectively creating a $600 million shortfall. I am astounded and utterly disappointed that our elected leaders, from the governor on down, are unwilling or unable to fund our schools at even a break-even level for the next two years.

Even worse, amid a booming economy our elected leaders have failed to come together to forge the long-term solution of revenue reform that our state so desperately needs. Our business and industry leaders share the responsibility for this failure by acting as an impediment to solutions.

Our state elected officials face no greater issue today than finding a sustainable system for paying for government services. Indeed, it is the only work that counts now.

I urge them, and anyone who cares about our children's future, to bring the issue of revenue reform into focus - immediately. We need to couple that work with containing costs on PERS and health care, and chart a course for the foreseeable future that provides today's generation with the same educational opportunities that we enjoyed in our youth.

Share your opinion

Submit your essay of 500 words or less to commentary@oregonlive.com. Please include your email and phone number for verification.

Who will step into this leadership vacuum? Who is willing to be a hero, as defined by the words of a true Oregon leader, former Gov. Tom McCall? He said:

"Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better."

If it has seemed a little more quiet than usual recently in the state Capitol, maybe it's because everyone there is waiting for a hero to speak up.

Tass Morrison serves on the North Santiam School Board and the Oregon School Boards Association Board.
CLASSROOM.JPG

(Staff/File)

As school foundation leaders in Portland, we are dismayed that Oregonians have not prioritized education funding across the state.

In 1994, due to parent concerns about public education funding in the wake of Measure 5, the Portland School Board passed a resolution authorizing each PPS School to form a foundation that could privately raise money to hire teachers and staff. Now, 23 years later, parents continue to foot the bill to hire necessary staff year after year and student performance in Oregon has slipped far below the national average. This affects every Oregonian.

Courts have ruled in several states that a community's wealth should not determine the financing of its schools, and they have required legislatures to find more equitable ways to fund public schools. Right now in Portland, 77 of the 86 Portland Public Schools have foundations. Of these, only 10 raise enough money to hire even one additional teacher or staff. We need a new system that promotes equity without reducing revenue, a system that provides public funding for hiring teachers and staff.

Foundation leaders want to give their kids the best opportunity they can, while helping others in the process. Yet, through the PPS Equity Fund band-aid, we have failed the majority of our kids, and the gaping wounds in our revenue system continue to bleed.

It is time for all school foundation leaders to demand a new method for funding our schools equitably. Staff at all public schools must be adequately funded by state tax dollars. It is not equitable for some schools to be able to pay for teaching staff through private contributions by families, while other schools suffer from deep budget cuts that reduce instructional support to meager levels.

This problem can be fixed. Oregon is nearly $2 billion short of what the Quality Education Model says is adequate funding for K-12 education. On top of having no sales tax and strict limits on property tax increases, corporate taxes in our state are the lowest in the entire country (according to Ernst & Young's COST Report and Anderson Economic Group's state rankings).

We ask Portlanders and all Oregonians to join us on May 18th on the steps of the Oregon State Capitol in Salem from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. We want to make it clear to legislators that the era of unfunded education in Oregon must end now. The legislature must pass a plan to increase revenue to Oregon schools by $2 billion.

Stephen Chen of the Ainsworth Foundation, Kimberly Brodkin of the Beach Foundation and Brad Nelson of the Bridlemile Foundation, along with foundation leaders from: Alameda, Buckman, Chapman, Forest Park, Maplewood, Richmond, and Glencoe elementary schools; Davinci, Sellwood and West Sylvan middle schools; and Cleveland, Franklin, Lincoln and Wilson high schools.
gomez copy.jpg

Billy Jack Gomez

((Linn Couty jail))

A mother's day family barbecue went horribly wrong Sunday and ended with a Lebanon man in custody for attempted murder and unlawful use of a weapon after he fired a high caliber rifle at his brother.

The Linn County Sherriff's Office said Peggy L Gomez, a 55-year-old Lebanon resident, was having a Mother's Day barbecue with her sons, 34-year-old Hunter Gomez, and 35-year-old Billy Jack Gomez. Both of them live at the home in 100 block of Vaughn Lane, in a residential area of Lebanon.

Police said the two sons had a scuffle before the barbecue, and as Hunter Gomez was preparing the grill, Billy Jack Gomez went inside and retrieved a high caliber rifle. He fired the gun from inside the residence, through the screen door, and narrowly missed Hunter Gomez.

Linn County Sheriff's deputies responded to the reported shooting and found no one had been injured. Billy Jack Gomez was arrested on charges of attempted murder and unlawful use of a weapon.

- Ted Sickinger

503-221-8505; @tedsickinger
Update 10 p.m. Monday

A three-alarm fire that demolished a North Portland warehouse started in the wood pilings and pier that supported the building, which stood partially over the Willamette River, fire officials said Monday.

Portland Fire & Rescue said there have been reports of cooking and warming fires in the area but didn't say what specifically caused the blaze, which began around 10 p.m. Sunday. The warehouse, 1300 N. River St., was previously cited for a host of violations, according to city records.

No one was injured, according to fire officials, but an American Red Cross spokeswoman said the Red Cross is helping four people who had been living in a recreational vehicle nearby.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality said debris from the fire contains asbestos and that health officials "indicated that the type of potential short-term exposure to asbestos related to the fire is unlikely to pose any significant health risks."

The asbestos was found in samples of roofing paper, the department said in a news release. The department said it's working with federal agencies "to determine how best to respond to the release of the asbestos."

The blaze prompted a massive firefighter response that included help from a pair of fireboats, Portland Fire & Rescue said in a news release. The fire was still burning "in and under" the building's floor Monday afternoon, officials said.

Authorities hadn't established a damage estimate, as of early Monday afternoon. The building was a total loss, but firefighters saved a few cars that were inside, said fire spokesman Lt. Tommy Schroeder.

The 1.23 acres of land at the address is owned by Stan Herman of Vancouver, according to Portlandmaps.com, a website owned by the city.

Herman had been cited in 2016 for safety and disrepair problems, according to a construction code violation notice provided by the city.

He was cited with "fire life safety" violations for occupied motorhomes that were parked on the property, unsafe stairs  which were later rebuilt without a permit  and a canopy over a loading dock that was "deflected and deteriorated, indicating structural failure." Other problems included roof and siding disrepair, according to the notice.

The notice references an unpermitted marijuana grow facility in the building's northeast corner. City Bureau of Development Services spokesman Ross Caron said he couldn't speak to what was going on in the warehouse, as of late.

The document also references an unresolved dangerous building case.

The city had previously fielded complaints about rave parties held at the address, as well, according to records.

Fire officials said they anticipate keeping crews at the scene until sometime Tuesday.

They ask anyone who has information about activity at the warehouse in the hours and days leading up to the fire to call the agency's tip line, 503-823-4636.

- Ted Sickinger and Tony Hernandez

tsickinger@oregonian.com; thernandez@oregonian.com

Jim Ryan of The Oregonian/OregonLive staff contributed to this report
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."

This statement by Donald Trump is one of the most memorable of the 2016 presidential election campaign. Most voters saw it simply as the Republican nominee needling Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, after WikiLeaks began posting hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Malcolm Nance, an author, security consultant and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, has a different view of it.

"When Trump made that statement on July 27," Nance says, "he knew Russian intelligence was working for him, in his favor."

Nance's comments are part of a stunning Dutch documentary, "The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump," about the U.S. president's alleged ties with Russian mobsters and other unsavory characters. The first episode of the doc, which states that Trump in the early 2000s became "dependent on shady cash flows," seeks to provide context for the allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian hackers and spies who sought to get the Republican candidate elected.

President Trump, the documentary claims, is deeply involved with Russian "syndicate crime boss" and former FBI informant Felix Sater. (Trump has stated he would have a hard time recognizing Sater if the man walked into the room.) The film also delves into Trump's longstanding business relationship with Kazakhstan-born Bayrock LLC chief Tevfik Arif, who Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio says "probably" has funneled illicit money into the U.S.

Bayrock, says the Pulitzer Prize-winning D'Antonio, is "led by people with extremely shadowy backgrounds and profiles."

Why would Trump, a famous and wealthy businessman for more than 30 years, get involved with such characters?

To answer that question, the documentary's producers turned to James Henry, a lawyer, tax-evasion expert and "economic investigator."

Henry says that because of Trump's 1990s bankruptcies, which were mostly related to his involvement in the casino business, "none of the major New York banks would lend to him. Trump was pretty much unfinance-able."

He continues:

"The only way he was able to finance his resurrection after 2000 was the torrent of money flowing out of Russia and former Soviet Union countries like Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan. The investors he got, at that point, were looking for safe havens or opportunities to launder money -- proceeds from, basically, criminal enterprises."

Adds D'Antonio:

"It's likely there is Russian money that has flowed into Trump Organization entities in one way or another, and that some of this money may have sources that are scandalous and would pose a big problem for a president. And if the Russians have that information it could be what they're holding over him."

It's hard to say whether such accusations could end up being a real legal problem for the president, seeing as the Trump experts interviewed in the documentary carefully use qualifiers like "probably" and "likely." Certainly none of the accusations at this point has been proven in court.

But this much is made clear by watching "The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump": The FBI and Congressional investigations into Russian meddling in the U.S. election aren't Trump's only potential legal problem. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is reportedly pursuing a fraud case and other investigations targeting the president's business empire.

"The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump" includes an interview with lawyer Frederick Oberlander, who has led a civil tax fraud case against Trump. Oberlander had this to say:

"I have concluded, without any question, that Donald Trump may be credibly charged with participating in a racketeering conspiracy based on what happened with Bayrock."

Below you can watch an English-language version of the documentary's first episode:

-- Douglas Perry
To the editor:

After attending a host of meetings put on by The Dow Chemical Co. concerning the rerouting of traffic along Saginaw Road, I understand the concerns of residents about the increased traffic along Bay City and Waldo roads that is certain to occur.

However, I do not share their concerns that the increased traffic means their children and others in the neighborhood will be at increased risk of traffic incidents, because if I did, I would be horrified for the parents of children who live along a street near me, Swede Road, and terrified for the parents of children along the three-mile stretch of Jefferson Avenue that is residential.

Dow has suggested to reroute traffic that would normally travel Saginaw Road going to or coming from Mapleton and Freeland to Waldo and Bay City roads so that a closed campus can be achieved between what used to be Dow Corning on the east side of Saginaw Road and Dow Chemical on the west. Doing so would enhance security while at the same time increase growth opportunities and production efficiencies. It just makes sense.

According to records provided by the city, an average of almost 14,500 cars a day pass residences on Jefferson between Wheeler and Wackerly. Just in that span, those cars pass five churches, numerous businesses and 33 homes. In the midst of that span is a crosswalk for students going to and coming from Jefferson Middle School.

On Swede, north of Ashman, an average of 8,300 vehicles pass daily, impacting all the students who have to cross from residential neighborhoods to Northeast Middle School and Plymouth Elementary during the school year, not to mention all the neighbors who use Plymouth Park year round and its swimming pool in season.

North of Wheeler, the number of cars daily drops to 7,250 in that neighborhood, which also features a crosswalk for children going to and coming from Adams Elementary.

In contrast, Waldo Road, south of Bay City Road, today experiences about 6,250 cars daily. The expected increase in traffic would put about 3,000-4,000 more cars in the Bay City/Waldo roads area, or a little more than Swede but far less than Jefferson. A 2016 traffic study by the consulting firm DLZ shows that even if all the traffic rerouted off Saginaw Road chose to use Waldo Road, traffic would elevate to only 60 percent of the roads potential usage.

All that traffic might not materialize as more and more people recognize the best way, and the fastest, to get to Freeland and Saginaw from Midland is by using U.S. 10 to M-47.

I lived on M-20 while the construction from a two-lane highway to a five-lane highway took place so I am no stranger to change anxiety. I raised four children along that highway, watching them as they walked or biked to my numerous relatives nearby.

I have never worked for Dow and have no horse in this debate. I do, however, have a stake in the community and am working to ensure that our economy grows. I have three of my four children working here, and seven of my 10 grandchildren call the Great Lakes Bay Region home.

I want them in the future to have the opportunity to remain in this wonderful community, which has provided so much to my family, friends and co-workers. A united Dow and a united Midland can provide that. I dont think Dow is asking anything more from its neighbors along Waldo and Bay City than from those residents who have participated in growth in other parts of Midland.

RALPH E. WIRTZ

GROW MIDLAND
BLOOMINGTON  Temporary bicycle lanes were slated, weather permitting, to be installed over night Sunday on Washington Street between Kreitzer and Mercer avenues and completed in time for Monday's morning commute.

The city, in partnership with the local bicycle advocacy group Bike BloNo, is using temporary chalk paint to draw what are called "pop-up" bike lanes as a way to gather public feedback about whether to add permanent lanes there and on a long stretch of the east-west thoroughfare.

The proposed amendment being considered by the Public Works Department includes Washington Street from Lee Street to St. Joseph Drive.

The public can provide input and discuss changes to the plan at three public meetings over the next month.

 5-7 p.m. May 23 in the cafeteria at Washington Elementary School, 1201 E Washington St.

 4-6 p.m. June 13 in the Governor Fifer Courtroom at the McLean County Museum of History, 200 N Main St.

 4 p.m. June 14 during the Bloomington Planning Commission meeting in the city council chambers at City Hall, 109 E. Olive St.

City and Bike BloNo officials encourage residents to try out the temporary bike lanes during the Good To Go Commuter Challenge that starts on Monday.

The challenge is a free and friendly competition between individuals, groups, workplaces, and organizations to avoid driving alone for a week.

To register, visit https://goodtogomclean.org or contact Dan Handel, assistant planner with the McLean County Regional Planning Commission, at DHandel@mcplan.org or (309) 828- 4331, ext. 7.

Any trip is eligible as long as its by walking, biking, riding the bus, carpooling, or telecommuting. Trips can be logged in on the website.

For last years challenge, 352 commuters logged nearly 5,500 miles, burned almost 90,000 calories, and prevented over 600 metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, said city officials.

Bike BloNo sees Washington Street as a critical multimodal connection to many community destinations, said Michael Gorman, the group's co-chairman of public policy and infrastructure.
CLINTON  Naloxone can save the life of someone who may be dying of a heroin or other opioid overdose, but it comes with a price.

I remember waking up with a bunch of EMTs and police officers around me, said Brittany Lord of Clinton, who survived an accidental heroin overdose about five years ago, thanks to the emergency overdose-reversal drug also known under the brand name Narcan.

The first thing I said was that my head was killing me because when you wake back up, it feels like someone took a sledgehammer to your head. It hurts really, really bad.

The state of Illinois mandates that all first responders carry naloxone, which can be administered nasally or intravenously to block the effect of opioids on the brain. Opioids, which also include prescriptions painkillers like oxycodone and hydrocodone, slow respiration and heart rate and can be fatal in an overdose.

McLean County Area EMS providers administered naloxone 136 times during 2016 to restore breathing in people experiencing an opioid overdose, compared to 134 times during 2015, said EMS Director Dylan Ferguson. They also have seen a 25 percent increase when comparing the first quarter 2016 to the first quarter 2017.

For those who have experienced it firsthand, it could be described as a miracle drug that can jump-start a roller coaster of emotions in a short span.

I felt like, Oh My God, I just got my head bashed in, said Lord, explaining the pain is different from a hangover. I kept asking what was wrong with my head and they told me it was normal. They said it was a side effect of the medicine.

Other side effects can include dizziness, tiredness, weakness, nervousness, restlessness, irritability and nausea, but medical experts say each patient reacts differently and there is no consistent set of side effects for the drug that has been available for more than 50 years.

When you wake back up, it takes a few minutes to grasp your surroundings and what is going on now, Lord said. You are pretty alert for about 20 or 30 minutes, but then you start to feel the heroin take hold again.

"The heroin starts to reattach to those receptors (in the brain) and you start to feel like you are getting high again, she said.

In some areas in Illinois, naloxone is available over the counter in pre-measured doses, but whether it is given by a first responder or a concerned bystander, the victim needs to be treated at a hospital, experts say.

My friends were freaking out, apparently, said Curt Fitzpatrick, who overdosed on heroin about a year ago in Bloomington. They didnt know what to do. Some left. Some wanted to clean stuff up. Some did the right thing and got help.

"But when you come out of it, there is a weird sensation," he said. "You realize you almost died. You feel sick, but there are a lot of thoughts going through your head and because you were unconscious, you just have no idea what happened. Its a big roller coaster and its not fun.

Naloxone has been legal for non-medical personnel to use in Illinois since 2009 when the Overdose Prevention Act was signed into law. It is safe, non-toxic, has no potential for addiction and has no effect on someone who has not taken an opioid drug.

It costs between $20 and $40 for a kit that includes everything a person would need to reverse an overdose. Although the law for first responders to carry naloxone was passed in 2015, there remain some funding issues for several local police and fire departments, especially in rural areas, to obtain an adequate supply.

The standard dose of naloxone is 2 milligrams, but stronger opioids are forcing first responders to increase the dosage, Ferguson said. "Sometimes, we're administering 4 to 8 milligrams just to bring their breathing back."

Adding to that is the advent of acrylfentanyl, a chemical cousin of fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid. The Cook County medical examiner's office says the new drug is blamed for more than 40 deaths in the Chicago area so far this year.
MACKINAW  The Mackinaw Stout Foundation has announced its 2017 grants. The foundation, created by Elsie I. Stout, provides grants to qualified organizations that serve the village of Mackinaw and Mackinaw Township.

The following grants were awarded:

Boy Scout of America Venturing Crew 1719; $1,500 to help purchase a scout trailer.

Deer Creek/Mackinaw Boy Scout Troop 86; $248 to help purchase 40 mesh safety vests.

Deer Creek-Mackinaw High School; $11,000 to help purchase a digital sign for the facility.

Deer Creek-Mackinaw Primary School; $400 to help purchase a Buddy Bench.

Dee-Mack Primary/Junior High PTO; $3250 to help update the existing sign on the playground.

Mackinaw Christian Church; $2000 to help with snack packs for low-income children.

Mackinaw Community Center Food Pantry; $1250 to enhance the summer second helping program to supply additional provisions when there are no school lunches and help with holiday boxes.

Mackinaw District Public Library; $1803 to assist in the purchase of an exterior book drop box.

Mackinaw Rescue Squad; $4250 to help purchase oxygen tanks, a mount for a laptop in the ambulance and a motorized stair chair.

Mackinaw United Methodist Church; $4000 to assist in the installation of a handicapped-accessible bathroom and a mop sink.

Mackinaw United Methodist Church Outreach Team; $1000 to help provide snack packs to children this summer.

Village of Mackinaw; $4000 to repair the Westwood Park pavilion, including a new roof, gutters, paint and structural repair.
Q: I am a veteran of the Marine Corps. I served at Camp Lejeune for over a year, back in 1969. My spouse lived with me on post for several months during that assignment. The VA notified me that my spouse and I might have been exposed to contaminated water while serving there. The notification said that if either of us came down with any of a list of maladies, the VA would pay for out-of-pocket medical bills associated with treatment of those maladies. However, the VA indicated that there was insufficient information that exposure to the contaminated water actually caused any of those listed maladies. Therefore, there was no VA compensation for getting these medical problems.

I understand that the VA now says that if I get any of those eight medical problems that it is presumed that I contracted them because of my military service and therefore are compensable. I am hearing about another list of seven medical problems that have been added to the list of medical conditions for which the VA will provide medical care. However, this new group of seven are not considered eligible for VA disability compensation. I am confused!

A: There are eight medical issues that the VA considers presumptively caused by exposure to the contaminated water at Camp Lejeune. Adult leukemia, aplastic anemia and other myelodysplastic syndromes, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and Parkinsons disease are considered to be caused by exposure to the contaminated water. Claims for disability compensation should be filed for these medical problems. The additional seven medical conditions that the VA currently will pay the associated bills for, but will not grant disability compensation, are lung cancer, esophageal cancer, breast cancer, renal toxicity, female infertility, scleroderma, hepatic steatosis, miscarriage and neurobehavioral effects.

The volume and substance of those claims may help the VA to make judgments as to whether any medical condition on the new list, should be considered presumptively compensable. Family members of veterans who also resided at Camp Lejeune during the qualifying period are eligible for reimbursement of out-of-pocket medical expenses related to all 15 covered health conditions. VA can only pay treatment costs that remain after payment from your other health plans. Apply for reimbursement at https://www.clfamilymembers.fsc.va.gov/, or call 866-372-1144 for help.

Q: I served two years in the Army during the Vietnam War. My duty was entirely stateside. I was denied VA Health Care enrollment two different times since I first applied in 2004. According to the VA, my income was too high to qualify for VA Health Care. I thought that a veteran is a veteran is a veteran, etc. I find that not all veterans are equal, in that some veterans can receive VA Health Care and some cannot, just because one was more financially successful than the other. I did not know that VA Health Care was just another benefit for low-income people who happened to have served in the military. What goes?

A: Your frustration is understandable! Many of the wide variety of VA benefits do not apply to all veterans for a variety of reasons. However, prior to Jan. 16, 2003, a veteran with any discharge characterization except dishonorable or non-characterized could obtain VA Health Care if they met the length of service requirement for when they served. Effective on that date in January 2003, a means test based on income at time of application was instituted. The change in the eligibility requirements was widely circulated well before the implementation date, but many veterans who were already getting good health care insurance through their employer did not take notice. The VA also instituted an additional financial requirement based on net worth of the applicant. However, the VA no longer considers net worth as a factor in determining eligibility for VA Health Care.

In addition, a couple of years ago, the VA changed the rules to permit most veterans who served boots on the ground in Vietnam to enroll in VA Health Care in spite of their income being over the means test. You should keep abreast of the changes in the eligibility requirements as they do periodically change. The best way to be informed about changes to your VA benefits is to belong to a veterans' organization for which you qualify (e.g., American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans and Amvets).

Reminder

Armed Forces Day is May 20, or the third Saturday of May each year. Fly your American flag in recognition of those who have served their country proud and thank a vet for his or her service.
BLOOMINGTON  Bloomington-Normal YMCA will provide free Safety Around Water swim lessons in June to 75 children in need who have completed first grade.

The program will be 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. June 5 through 8 at the YMCA, 602 S. Main St., Bloomington. Safety Around Water is open to Bloomington District 87 students who have completed first grade and meet the criteria to receive free or reduced lunch.

The program is free because of a grant from Illinois Prairie Community Foundation.

"Swimming is not only a fun, healthy activity but an important life skill for all children," said Mandy Burge, YMCA Learn-to-Swim coordinator. Drowning is the second-leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 14.

"Learning basic water safety skills is a great introduction to the world of swimming that often continues with swim lessons and competitive swim programs and can even lead to a career," Burge said.

Registration for Safety Around Water is taking place in person at the YMCA.

Meanwhile, the YMCA offers these water safety tips for everyone:

Only swim when there is a lifeguard on duty. Never swim alone.

Adults should constantly watch their children around water. Young children should be within arm's reach.

Inexperienced or non-swimmers should wear a Coast Guard-approved life jacket.

No one should engage in breath-holding activities under water.

The YMCA has a variety of swimming programs, including Learn-to-Swim School, YMCA WAVES Swim Team and Water Exercise classes. Financial assistance is available to families in need. More information is at 309-827-6233 or at mburge@bnymca.org.
Expera Specialty Solutions Receives 3M Canada Service Quality Supplier Award

From left to right: Ryan McDonald (Expera), George Pucula (3M Canada), Tom Wengelski (Expera), Debra Myers (Expera).

May 12, 2017 - Expera Specialty Solutions was recognized for its quality service at the 3M Canada Supplier Awards ceremony on May 4 in London, Ontario. Expera received the 3M Canada Service Quality Supplier Award for 2017 in the area of Supplier Ideation.

3M Canada's annual Service Quality Supplier awards recognize suppliers who consistently exceed the company's expectations, and deliver best in-class performance. Suppliers must also share in 3M's commitment to quality, service, and the responsibility to the environment, while driving considerable and often measurable value for 3M, and the customers it services.

We are extremely honored and humbled to receive this achievement, said Jeff Murphy, Director of Sales and Marketing at Expera Specialty Solutions. Expera has been collaborating with 3M Canada for decades, and this award recognizes the commitment both our teams have to creating state-of-the-art and superior products for our customers.

Expera Specialty Solutions is a leading North American manufacturer of specialty paper products for use in the tape, pressure-sensitive release liner, industrial and food packaging segments. To learn more, please visit: www.expera.com.

SOURCE: Expera Specialty Solutions
Glatfelter Recognized for Service Excellence by Russian Wallcover Producer KOF Palitra

Glatfelter's Dresden facility in Heidenau, Germany was recently recognized for service excellence, consistent high quality, and long-term cooperation by Russia's largest wallcover producer, KOF Palitra.

May 15, 2017 - Glatfelter announced today that its Dresden facility, a part of the Composite Fibers Business Unit, was recently recognized for service excellence, consistent high quality, and long-term cooperation by Russia's largest wallcover producer, KOF Palitra.

Glatfelter was presented the award during Palitra's 15-year anniversary reception held last month in Moscow, Russia. The award recognizes the premium quality, efficient convertibility, and overall consistency of Glatfelter's nonwoven wallcover substrates, which are manufactured at Glatfelter's Dresden facility in Heidenau, Germany.

We thank KOF Palitra for the award and their continued confidence in Glatfelter as a supplier of choice, and congratulate them on their anniversary, said Mattis Gosmann, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Glatfelter Composite Fibers. We are very proud of our ten-year relationship and look forward to continuing it well into the future. Tailored products, combined with impeccable quality and unique service solutions, play a vital role in our ability to service KOF Palitra.

Glatfelter is a global supplier of specialty papers and fiber-based engineered materials, offering innovation, world-class service and over a century and a half of technical expertise. To learn more, please visit: www.glatfelter.com.

SOURCE: Glatfelter
Today, Joshua Brandon Vallum of Mississippi became the first person to be sentenced on federal hate-crime charges for the 2015 murder of 17-year-old transgender woman Mercedes Williamson.

Vallum, who was a member of the Latin Kings, was in a romantic relationship with Williamson. When one of his fellow gang members found out that Williamson was a transgender girl, Vallum began plotting to kill her, and eventually did so by luring her to his family's home and stabbing and beating her to death.

Vallum claims that he feared for his life once other gang members knew about his relationship with Williamson. The Sun Herald reports:

The Latin Kings strictly prohibit its members from engaging in homosexual activity, though Williamson's friends said Vallum was willing participant in the on- and off-again relationship between the two. Vallum said he killed Williamson because he feared for his life if other Latin Kings found out he had been involved in a consensual sexual relationship with Williamson.

Vallum pleaded guilty to the murder in July 2016 in Mississippi state court and is already serving life in prison on that charge. He was also charged under the federal hate-crime law, known as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, in December.

Vanita Gupta of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division told BuzzFeed News, "For this Justice Department, it is important for us to send an unequivocal message that violence based on one's gender identity constitutes a hate crime. It is important for us to have spoken out on the bias motive."

The act was signed into law in 2009 under President Obama. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that 2016 was the deadliest year on record for transgender people in America.
Patna: Police had to resort to lathi charge when the family members of a woman resorted to violence following the discovery of her dead body outside Sai Hospital in Kankarbagh in Patna on Sunday morning.

According to the reports, a woman in her early '30s was brought to the hospital on Saturday night. The family members, however, felt that the hospital was trying to charge more for her treatment than warranted. After some word, the patient was admitted in the hospital.

On Sunday morning, people in the area found the body of the woman outside the hospital on the pavement. Her body was covered in blood and some said it appeared to have been dropped from the roof of the building.

Hearing this, the victim's family members assaulted hospital staff and vandalized the place demanding immediate arrests of those responsible for her death.

Soon the situation got out of hand and police had to resort to lathi charge to restore order in the area.

Hospital officials have denied having thrown the woman from the roof. Police is investigating the matter, Kankarbagh police station in-charge Ravi Kumar said
Qalibaf Quits Iran's Presidential Race, Backs Hard-Line Cleric Raisi

05/15/17

Source: RFE/RL





Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf has withdrawn from Iran's presidential race to back hard-line cleric Ebrahim Raisi. In a May 15 statement published by Iranian media, Qalibaf said the decision was vital for the "preservation of the interests of the people, the revolution, and the country."



The end of Qalibaf

(cartoon by Mohsen Zarifian, Ghanoon daily)





Qalibaf called on his supporters to vote for Raisi on May 19.



"I ask all my supporters around the country to use all their capacity to help my brother Raisi win the election," Qalibaf said in his statement.







Ebrahim Raisi (L) and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf





Qalibaf, 56, was running for president for the third time after being defeated in the 2005 and 2013 votes.



He has accused incumbent President Hassan Rohani of mismanagement and favoring rich Iranians at the expense of the poor.



Meanwhile, Iranian opposition figure Mehdi Karrubi, who has been under house arrest since 2011, has voiced support for Rohani in the vote.



"Based on my knowledge of Rohani, I will vote for him," Karrubi was quoted as saying by the opposition Sahamnews, a website close to the pro-reform cleric, on May 15.



"I urge the dear people of Iran to participate in the election and vote for their desired candidate in order to prevent inflicting more damage on the foundation of the republic," Karrubi was quoted as saying at a meeting with relatives.



Karrubi was put under house arrest in February 2011 after challenging the Iranian establishment over the disputed 2009 vote and highlighting human rights abuses. Opposition figure Mir Hossein Musavi and his wife, university professor Zahra Rahnavard, were

placed under house arrest at the same time.



Rohani, a relative moderate, had promised in his 2013 campaign to release Karrubi, Musavi, and Rahnavard. But Rohani's influence is limited and he has less power than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.



Rohani's supporters have called for the release of the opposition figures at many of his campaign events in recent days.



With reporting by Fars, ISNA, and Sahamnews
Will Proposed Wall Along Turkish-Iranian Border Keep Out Kurdish Separatists?

05/15/17

By Mehdi Jedinia, VOA

Ankara's apparent intention to build a wall along its border with Iran is being met with skepticism by some regional experts who question its practicality and whether it will curb cross-border terrorism as Turkey intends.





A report last week in the Hurriyet Daily News, written by a reporter close to the Turkish government, quoted unnamed Turkish authorities as saying the wall is necessary to keep out militants in Iran associated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is fighting the Turkish State for greater autonomy.



"The PKK has a lot of camps on Iranian territory along the border with Turkey," the newspaper quoted a government source as saying. "These camps house between 800 and 1,000 Kurdish fighters. They cross the border, commit attacks in Turkey and run back.



"As a precaution against this, we are going to build a wall along 70 kilometers of the border near Agr and Igdr, and we will close the rest of it with towers and iron fences," the official said.



The wall proposal copies what Turkey has done along its Syrian border since 2014. Turkey put up concrete barriers topped with razor wire along about 900 kilometers of its border with Syria at a cost of $672 million. The enhanced border security is designed to keep out Islamic State infiltrators and forces associated with PKK in Syria.

Iran supports plan

Tehran reacted positively to the Turkish proposal along the Iranian border, according to Iranian state-run media.



"We are not principally against Turkey's project to build a wall on the Iranian border," an Iranian Foreign Ministry official told the Tehran Times. "Yet every action that takes place on the border should be reported to Tehran."



Tehran hopes a wall will alleviate the smuggling of clothing and other goods from Iran, an illicit trade Tehran says is worth $2 billion annually.



"We even encourage this should happen sooner and the flow of contraband to Iran should be curbed," an Iranian government source told Tehran's IRNA news.



But some experts say walling and fencing Turkey's border with Iran, which stretches more than 500 kilometers, is impractical.



"Considering the fact that most of this borderline is inaccessible, mountainous and in high altitude, building such a wall all along the border is neither possible nor rational," said Savas Bicer, a retired Turkish Army colonel with expertise in Turkey-Iran border affairs.



And as for curbing cross-border activities of the PKK, Rebwar Karim Mahmood, an Kurdish Iraqi international affairs expert, said the PKK is skilled at getting insurgent help from across Turkey's borders in Iran, Syria and Iraq.



"Building a wall on some parts of the border with Iran cannot prevent PKK who know the border and its passages like the back of their hand from conducting operations or passing into Turkey," he said.

Syria wall working

But Turkish analyst Hakki Uygur, who runs the Center for Iranian Studies in Ankara, cities what the Turkish government calls a success in the barriers with Syria.



A Turkish military colonel told Reuters recently that smuggling attempt numbers, which peaked in 2014 at 3,474 incidents, dropped to 77 in 2016. Illegal crossing attempts fell to 8,531 from more than 12,000 over the same period, Reuters reported.

.

"We can surely say that such a wall can prevent PKK and other hostile groups from moving and conducting operations in Turkey at some points if not completely," Uygur said of the Turkish-Iran border proposal.



Turkey has long blamed Iran for providing safe harbor for PKK affiliates inside its territory and accuses the Iranian regime of turning a blind eye to PKK activities. The Iranian border town of Maku is known by locals as a hub for PKK activity with much of it centered in a mosque in one district.



"They [PKK] hold meetings, recruit and even fundraise in that mosque built by a notorious local smuggler - all under the nose of Iranian security forces," Ahmed Najmuddin a Maku resident told VOA.
In the future, your Samsung vacuum cleaner, robot or washing machine will run on an OS called Tizen RT, slated to be introduced and detailed on Tuesday.

The OS for smart devices and gadgetsin other words, internet of things (IoT) deviceswill be introduced by Samsung at its Tizen Developers Conference, which will be held in San Francisco starting Tuesday.

Samsung will share the architecture and future release schedule for Tizen RT at the conference. A number of sessions are being held on how to deploy and update the OS across devices.

The real-time OS is a slimmed-down version of the mainstream Tizen OS, which is being used in Samsung TVs, smartphones, Gear smartwatches and other devices. Though it is an open-source OS, Samsung is its biggest backer.

Samsung is also currently developing Tizen 4.0, which will be released in September. The company will provide updates to the OS at the conference. Samsungs last big Tizen release was version 2.4; the following version, 3.0, never made it to devices.

Tizen is important to Samsung, but the company also uses Windows in PCs and the Android OS in mobile devices. Its multi-OS strategy has created confusion and an unstable user experience among its devices, which dont work well together. That has also kept Samsung a step behind Apple, which provides a consistent user experience across its devices.

The inconsistent user experience is partly because Samsungs many operating units are siloed, and dont work closely together. However, Tizen is making many business units cooperate toward a common user experience.

Tizen isnt as popular as Android, and has a shrinking developer base. But Samsung hasnt shown signs of abandoning the OS, which the company plans to use across all its appliances and devices.

Samsung is trying to bring Microsoft .NET developers on board with Tizen 4.0, which will support the .Net Core. Developers will be able to use .Net to write applications for Tizen devices. Its not clear if Tizen RT will be based on Tizen 4.0 or an earlier version of the OS.

Last month Tizen was a subject of criticism after Israeli researcher Amihai Neiderman exposed 40 critical vulnerabilities in the OS. Samsung is now scrambling to patch them, though the OS doesnt have a streamlined way to report bugs.

Tizen RT will compete with other IoT operating systems like Microsofts Windows 10 IoT Core, Googles Android Things, and a plethora of embedded Linux OSes. The big advantage of Tizen is its easy to port Android applications to the OS.
A 23-member trade delegation from Ghana is currently on a week-long tour through the Netherlands to explore opportunities for business and cooperation in food processing technologies and packaging. The mission is led by the Private Enterprise Federation (PEF), the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) and GhanaVeg.



The goal of the trade mission is to promote cooperation, investment and knowledge exchange between Ghanaian and Dutch businesses. The delegation is visiting a wide range of companies in the Netherlands active in poultry, aquaculture, fruit and vegetables processing.



The program is complemented with matchmaking, a visit to the Interpak fair in Dusseldorf, business networking events and a packaging workshop. The trade mission follows after a mission last year to the Netherlands on food and beverage processing and agricultural inputs.



The mission complements the efforts of the Netherlands on private sector development in Ghanas agricultural sector, a sector accounting for over 20% of Ghanas GDP. Stimulating food processing could help reduce post-harvest losses and contribute to increased trade in products less dependent on cold chains and phytosanitary inspection.



The Netherlands is among Ghanas biggest trade partners and the second largest exporter of agri-food worldwide, exporting 65 billion euros worth of vegetables, fruit, flowers, meat and dairy products each year. The Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Ghana, H.E. Ron Strikker: This trade mission resonates well with the governments renewed focus on promoting agriculture, value addition and industrialization. The mission is yet another example of how the Netherlands and Ghana are growing together.



Private Enterprise Foundation (PEF)



PEF is the apex business council for private sector business in Ghana made of 15 leading business associations and representing over 80% of businesses in the formal and informal sector. The Federations mandate is to advocate and collaborate with Government and other international organizations to promote the creation of an enabling environment for an inclusive competitiveness and profitability of its members.



Mr Nana Osei Bonsu, CEO of PEF: It is our hope that the Ghanaian companies participating in this trade mission will not only receive accurate information on availability of new markets and valuable networking opportunities from participants from the Kingdom of Netherlands and other partaking countries, but may also be privileged with viable partnerships

including financing and innovative technologies to enhance their businesses in the near future.



Association of Ghana Industries (AGI)



Mr Seth Twum-Akwaboah, CEO of AGI: This exposure visit to the Netherlands is most appropriate for AGI members in the wake of government of Ghanas numerous initiatives to support the growth of the industrial sector and ensuring stronger linkage between industry and agriculture.



AGI represents over 1200 members and aims to create a supportive and competitive business climate that will make

Ghanaian companies internationally competitive.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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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.
The General Secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), Mr. Solomon Kotei has appealed to workers of the Ghana Cocoa Board to work assiduously to restore the boards glory days by producing a million tonnes of the product again.



The downward trend of cocoa output, in recent times, has been a source of worry to all stakeholders, and we must see ourselves taking back our one million tonnes per annum once more, he reiterated.



The total production of the crop has been increasing slowly from 450,000 metric tonnes in year 2000, peaking at 1,024,552 metric tonnes in the 2010/2011 crop season

Output however slumped subsequently and the country was able to bag only 690,000 metric tonnes for the 2015/2016 crop season out of a targeted 850,000 metric tonnes.



Ghanas neighbor, Ivory Coast, produced 1.7 million metric tonnes in the same season.

The shortfall has been attributed to poor managerial policies of the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) and unfavourable weather conditions.



Kotei said the government, management and the union must all alike put their shoulders to the plough to make a positive turnaround for the cocoa industry in Ghana to enable it to be resuscitated to its glorious past as a world leading producer of the product.



Kotei was speaking at the inauguration of the newly elected Local Union Executives of the Ghana Cocoa Board last Friday in Accra.



He urged the executives to lead the way by working hard to coordinate all the union members in the company, to create the needed environment to turn the fortunes and expectations of the workers and the firm around.



The newly elected chairman of the union, Mr. Jones Ofosu-Oduro, assured management of the ICU of his willingness to work prudently and to collaborate with union members to ensure the best for the union.



He said he was prepared to use his position to ensure transparency and financial fairness so as to bring success to the union.







Source: Goldstreet Business









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Security Analyst, Dr Kwesi Anning wants security along the countrys Western borders boosted as the countrys western neighbours, Cote dIvoire, struggle to address the recurring mutiny by former rebels in the army.



According to him, security personnel along the border must be quick in detecting any suspicious movements and report to inform the countrys response to the developments there.



Calm returns to Ivory Coast after unrest over soldiers' pay

The institutions along the borders must be a little bit more alert, send the report to Accra as quickly as possible and then the decision is taking as to the level of alertness that we need to put our security too, in order to get the job done, Dr. Aning said.



In January this year, former rebels who had been integrated into the armys ranks staged a mutiny over their demand for bonuses.



The troops, who are one-time rebels backing Ivorian President, Alassane Ouattara and controlled the northern half of the country between 2002 and 2011, were demanding the government pay them 12 million CFA francs (18,000) per soldier.



According to sources, they received five million francs (7,500) in January and had been due to receive the rest this month, rebel sources say.



Some disgruntled soldiers resumed their revolt when one of their senior members on his own accord announced that they had given up their financial demands.



The angry soldiers w soldiers who expressed anger at the announcement blocked access roads in Abidjan, Bouake and other Ivorian cities.



An anti-mutiny attack was staged resulting in the injury of some persons.



Dr. Kwesi Aning said the developments in Cote dIvoire has major implications on Ghana however, the government must not attribute rising incidents of robbery and the proliferation of illegal small scale arms to the mutiny.



The guns are in Ghana already, in abundance so I dont want people to think that if there is the spate of armed robbery in the coming weeks then it is because there are heavy guns in Cote dIvoire. Our own study in Ghana last year demonstrated almost 1.2 million unregistered guns in Ghana so I think we need to be careful in disaggregating the kinds of threat that may impact Ghana because of the Ivorian crisis, he noted in a Citi News interview.

Source: Citifmonline









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Samuel Kwasi Kyei Darkwah, the Akwatia branch manager of GN Bank Ghana Limited, has appeared before an Accra circuit court for allegedly stealing over GH2 million belonging to the bank.



The accused is in the dock alongside one Selassie Awudi Solomon, a real estate developer.



The two, according to the prosecutor, ASP Stephen K. Adjei, conspired with one Kenneth Obina, a Nigerian businessman who is currently at large, to steal GH2,095,610.96.



In a court presided over by Aboagye Tandoh, the two, who were represented by their respective lawyers, denied the offence.



The court however, admitted the accused persons to bail in the sum of GH1 million with three sureties each to be justified.



The surety must be a public servant earning not less than GH1,000 a month.



Granting the bail, Mr. Tandoh stated that the court has to critically examine the facts and the charges against the accused persons.



He stated that the amount involved is also colossal and cannot be glossed over if the court was minded to grant the bail.



He said if the court was minded to grant the bail on the other hand, the condition must be in such a way that it would not frustrate the availability of the accused persons in the trial.



The facts of the case are that the complainant is the Manager of GN Bank in the Eastern Region whilst Samuel is the Branch Manager of the bank at Akwatia and Solomon a real estate developer.



In November, 2016, Solomon, in a Facebook chat with the branch manager, introduced himself as a lady, chief auditor and Head of International Remittance of AL Rayan Bank plc in the United Kingdom.



In the course of the chat, Solomon was said to have proposed to the complainant that her customer, one Harrison Forster, was shot dead whilst in Tripoli, Libya, and left behind a fortune of $14.5 million in his account without a next-of-kin.



Solomon and Obina convinced Samuel that they would give him the account details and also assist him with a solicitor to facilitate the acquisition of the estate of the late Harrison Forster as his next-of-kin.



The two succeeded in convincing Samuel, who agreed to part with GH2,095,610.96 under the pretext of using the money to process necessary documentation at the British Royal Court of Justice, which Solomon and Obina claimed would be used to collect the $14.5 million.



The court further heard that Samuel then took the said amount from the GN Bank and transferred it to various accounts provided by Solomon, including Ecobank, Kwabenya Branch in Accra.



On 21st April, this year, Solomon received GH200,000 into his account but managed to clear GH120,000 the following day.



Solomon was arrested when he attempted to clear the remaining money but Obina managed to escape.



In his statement to the police, Samuel stated that he sent money into the accounts provided by the accused persons. However, the monies transferred were taken from the GN Bank Akwatia without any authorization



Solomon also told the police that the moneys he received were payments for land he allegedly sold to a person whose identity he had not been able to establish.



Police investigation has established that there are other accomplices known to the accused who also received some of the money into their accounts.

Source: ultimatefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Progression of teachers would no longer be automatic due to long service but based on performance measured against the Teacher Standards developed by the National Teaching Council.



Professor Kwesi Yankah, the Minister of State in Charge of Tertiary Education, made this known during the 10th Congregation of Our Lady of Apostles (OLA) College of Education in Cape Coast at the weekend.



The Teachers Standards, the Minister said, would not only change quality of teaching and education but would, most importantly, change the esteem and status of teachers in the country.



He said the move was to make teachers effective, relevant and more responsive to the challenges of education in the 21st century.



These standards serve as the code of conduct and guiding principles for teachers in basic schools and it is against these that the teachers output will be assessed. Every teacher in Ghana must be familiar with this, he said.



The congregation, on the theme: Promoting Quality Teacher Education for Transformation in Basic Schools saw 365 students receiving Diploma in Basic Education, Early Childhood Education and Science and Mathematics Education.



Out of the number, five graduated with First Class Honours, 138 Second Class Upper Division, 157 Second Class Lower Division, 63 Third Class and one Pass.



It was attended by chiefs, heads of colleges of education, ministers of state and the Executive Secretary of the National Council For Tertiary Education, among others.



Prof Yankah urged the teachers to make continuous professional development an integral part of their profession because it was the surest way to maintain high level of expertise to enable them to stay afloat and relevant.

Touching on the theme, he said colleges of education would be allowed to admit as many qualified applicants as their available facilities could allow but without compromising quality and standards.



He said interventions such as the Transforming Teacher Education and Learning Project by the Government sought to strengthen the teacher training sector to make it more responsive to the needs of the basic education sector.

Prof Yankah reiterated governments commitment to improving the lot of teachers and continuous discussions with stakeholders to determine motivations and supports that would make the most impact.



Mr Yaw Osafo Marfo, the Senior Minister, asked teachers to remain good role models as they trained and educated the nations future leaders.



He admonished them to stick to their professional role and shun poor work ethics, absenteeism and acts that would denigrate the image of the teaching profession.



He said Ghana needed grassroots teachers who were ethical, committed and self motivated to be able to restore morality and self-discipline in the youth.



Mr Kwamena Duncan, the Central Regional Minister, expressed worry about the poor results of basic schools, the region not an exception, despite the substantial budget allocations made to the sector.



Reverend Sister Elizabeth Amoako-Arhen, the Principal of OLA College of Education, appealed to the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education to assist the colleges of education in fashioning out need-driven in-service training programmes for teachers.



The training, she said, must be planned with the beneficiaries to identify their challenges for adequate solutions to be found.



Reverend Sister Amoako-Arhen said the College lacked a science laboratory and appealed to the Government to help construct a standard one to enhance its practical work.



She called on philanthropist and other corporate institutions to come to the aid of the College to upgrade its facilities to meet the demands of the contemporary society.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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A New Patriotic Party (NPP) Communicator, Kwame Baffoe, has tagged persons who would troop to the courts to support people in the previous Mahama administration who would be taking to court for looting the state coffers as wizards and witches.



Abronye DC as he is known and called speaking on Adom FMs Morning Show, Dwaso Nsem Monday described as a wicked act the looting of the resources of the state and hence persons who engage in such acts do not deserve to be praised.



Wizardly is not only about killing and destroying people, taking what does not belong to only you amounts to wizardly as well and these people have taking something meant for the common good so they can be termed as witches and wizards who do not seek the common good of the country, he said.



Kwame Baffoe was commenting on a revelation on the Fabewoso segment of the show that the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) blew a whopping $ 4.5 million on the construction of recreational site, Rattray Park.



GHC 7 million cedis (70 billion) out of the amount was spent on fencing the park which boasts of only eighteen tress according to Captain Smart.



An amount of 1200 was also spent on the purchasing of eggs for the workers of the facility while an amount of GHC 5.95 million was costed as Miscellaneous.



The fountain at the facility also cost 150,000 dollars.



This revelation, Kwame Baffoe said points to how some state actors have looted the coffers of the state and hence demanded their prosecution.



He however warned that the time was up for supporters of the previous administration to desist from trooping to the courts and premises of investigative bodies to offer support for them.



Hence all people who would be trooping to the court to support such acts can be described as witches and wizards because only witches and wizards back people who engage in wicked acts, he said.



To Abronye DC, the country would have witnessed a revolution in the way in which monies stolen from the state coffers are recovered if Nana Addo had appointed him to the office of the special prosecutor.



Am just happy that Nana Addo didnt appointed me to the office of the special prosecutorwe would have witnessed a revolution in the strategies used, he said.



Watch Abronyes describe state looters as witches below:







Source: adomonline









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, left Ghana on Monday, May 15, 2017, to begin the second phase of his official working visits to the countries of the ECOWAS region.



This phase will see President Akufo-Addo visiting the following countries:



Senegal: 15th  17th May, 2017



Guinea: 17th  19th May, 2017



Cape Verde: 19th  21st May, 2017



The visits will afford President Akufo-Addo the opportunity to introduce himself, as the new Ghanaian leader, formally to the governments and peoples of our neighbouring countries, explore and deepen our bilateral relations with them, and reiterate Ghanas full commitment to the ECOWAS project.



He will be accompanied by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Hon. Shirley Ayorkor Botchway MP, and officials of the Presidency and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.



President Akufo-Addo will return to Ghana from the second phase of his tour on Sunday, 21st May, 2017. In his absence, the Vice President, Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, shall, in accordance with Article 60(8) of the Constitution, act in his stead.



signed



Eugene Arhin



Director of Communications

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The office of former President Jerry John Rawlings has debunked death rumors about him circulating in the media.



According to a statement signed by Kobina Andoh Amoakwa of the Communications Directorate of the former President's office, Mr. Rawlings "takes a serious view of the recent false media and other online platforms purporting that he is deceased."



"The office strongly cautions persons who have made it their preoccupation to publish such falsehood to desist from such reckless and insensitive actions as they have the potential of causing harm to family, friends and sympathisers of the former President. Persons responsible for such distasteful publications should recognize that they are liable to prosecution under the law if they are flushed out."





Read full statement below:





May 15, 2017





Rawlings Office Takes Serious View Of Fake Reports



The office of former President Jerry John Rawlings takes a serious view of recent false reports on social media and other online platforms purporting that he is deceased.



The office strongly cautions persons who have made it their preoccupation to publish such falsehood to desist from such reckless and insensitive actions as they have the potential of causing harm to family, friends and sympathisers of the former President. Persons responsible for such distasteful publications should recognize that they are liable to prosecution under the law if they are flushed out.



Media personnel who want clarification on matters to do with the former President should contact our office whenever the need arises.



Thank you.



Signed:



Kobina Andoh Amoakwa

(Communications Directorate)

Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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NSW Police have arrested a 28-year-old man in connection with the death of a 55-year-old woman  the mans mother  this morning.

The body of Linda Connors was found in her home at Sylvania, in Sydneys south, earlier this morning. Police subsequently arrested her son, Nathan White, on the Princes Highway at St Peters a short time afterwards. After conducting a search of his car, police reportedly found a crossbow and a pitchfork, which police are investigating as the murder weapon.

Connors was found in the house that she shared with her two sons, including White. Her other son made the grisly discovery and raised the alarm.

Police asserted that Connors was found wrapped in a blanket, with a significant head injury and covered in blood. The injuries Connors suffered were said to be visible and extensive.

White, who is assisting police with their investigation at Newtown Police Station, is reported to have become increasingly isolated over the past 18-months. Fairfax Media reports that neighbours of the deceased woman claim White had begun hearing voices recently, and had experienced a noticeable shift in behaviour ever since being assaulted with a pool cue at a local pub approximately 5 years ago.

Police leading the investigation confirmed the presence of a crossbow in Whites car, but stated that no charges have been laid as of yet. According to Miranda Local Area Command Superintendent Michael OToole:

There was a crossbow taken out of the vehicle, but there are other items [that have] also been taken out of the vehicle that the older son was in.

They also reported that Whites brother, who discovered his mothers body, was helping with the investigation and was very distraught.

Police would not confirm whether Connors had died early this morning, or yesterday on Mothers Day.

The investigation remains on-going.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: Google Maps.
Learning to appreciate each city and country on its own terms is always a highlight of travelling, seeing how the tangles of histories have created a sense of place and culture. But the best part? Seeing how McDonalds attempts to co-opt that identity with its country-specific menu items  sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

See, in France we have croquettes on our menu and in America you have no culture. Meet me in Maccas in nine years.

Immerse yourself in the worlds cultures with our handy guide of where to travel to next if you really, really love fast food.

McSpaghetti, The Phillipines

Hard pass. (Photo: Foodeverywhere.wordpress.com)

When McSpaghetti was launched in Italy in the early 2000s, it flopped more than Rita Oras short stint as host on Americas Next Top Model. But, just as Rita was recently awarded Most Influential International Artist in China, the McSpaghetti has found a surprising fan base in The Phillipines. Its most popular in a combo with a piece of fried chicken, because obviously.

Apparently Italy also had McGazpacho for a little bit, though seems like someones tried very hard to eradicate all traces online.

McWings/Fried chicken, pretty much everywhere but English speaking countries

Purple is a big marketing colour overseas, I guess.

Big chicken has found a nest under the golden arches in plenty of countries, raising serious, serious questions about when itll be Australias turn. In Sri Lanka, youll naw on a McSpicy, while in Hong Kong or Arabic countries, you might eat more McWings than you thought possible. KFC, to put it lightly, is shook.

McSpicy Paneer Burger, India

Cheesy. (Photo: McDonalds India)

Fun fact: India is the only country without a Big Mac on its Maccas menu. With 2014 estimates placing Indias vegetarian population around 70 per cent, Big Ms menu reads much more vego friendly. The highlight might be the McSpicy Paneer, a buffalo cheese and tandoori burger introduced in 2011 as a take on Indias classic cheese snack.





Business Today dive real deep into the paneer burger in this feature. Apparently paneer is very, very hard to make on a mass level  who knew?

McGreek/McArabia/McAfrica, Greece, the Middle East and Norway





Hmmm.

Veering into more controversial territory, these wraps read a little too close to when the Pokemon creative team give up and just changed a couple of pixels here and there.

Guys, you couldve literally created anything.

McGreek is half gyro, half Big Mac  swap out the buns for pita and the classic sauce with tzatziki and youre pretty much there. To quote Burgerlad, it doesnt quite know what it wants to be, which means its the perfect meal for your next existential crisis.

The McArabia was released in Arabic countries in 2003 as a way to quell profit losses in wake anti-American dissent re; the Iraq war. Thats a big burden for one wrap. Not sure if it smoothed over international tensions, but this garlicky chicken wrap is still on the menu.

The McAfrica didnt fare so well: it came out in Norway in 2002 as a tie-in to the Salt Lake City Olympic Games, which makes very little sense. Beyond the general blergness of exoticism as a marketing tool, many African nations were also experiencing a devastating famine at the time, so this wrap was derided as insensitive at best and cruel at worst. It was bought back in 2008 for some reason, which also didnt go well.

McLobster, Canada and USA

Into this. (Photo: McDonalds.wikia.org)

Are we noticing a trend here with the names? The McLobster first came out in 1993, and now it rolls out each summer in New England and Atlantic Canada when seafoods aplenty. In Canada, pair it with McDs take on poutine.

McPizza, two places in America

McPizza may have officially died in the 1990s, but two spots in the USA still make their own version. In an attempt to cut a crust of Pizza Huts growing base, Micky Ds started offering to-order pizzas in the US in 1989, promising theyd take five minutes to make. Which they didnt.

They were slowly phased out by the mid 1990s, but as Canada.com notes, two locations are still making their own versions  one in Pomeroy, Ohio, and one in Spencer, West Virginia. Lets time a road trip for when the McRib makes its inevitable return.

Dont Do What Johnny Dont Does. (Image: Giphy.com)

Other quick mentions? Thailands Hot Corn Pie deserves a shout out, as does all of Japanese McDonalds menu, which isnt weird so much as just really high quality. Do you think Netflix would be into a Gaycation-style show, except we just fly around and eat McDonalds?

Photo: Thrillst.com/Flikr
You have to wonder about Eurovision mooner Vitalii Sediuks masterplan. Sure, he successfully bared his crack to a massive international audience while draped in an Australian flag, but its entirely unclear how the Ukrainian bloke thought he could get away with it, because he sure as hell didnt.

A flasher on #Eurovision WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE pic.twitter.com/aUdYCMyxro  Mel. (@melhill_) May 13, 2017

Its been revealed that the long-time prankster / celebrity harasser / public nuisance is being detained by authorities for 72 hours. In a (incredibly gloaty) Facebook post, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said Sediiuk could face as long as five years behind bars under hooliganism charges.

via Arsen Avakov / Facebook.

via Arsen Avakov / Facebook.





via Arsen Avakov / Facebook.

Avakov writes that Sediuk tried to justify the stunt as part of his work as a provocative journalist. FWIW, his prior works of journalism include badgering Leonardo DiCaprios crotch, assaulting Gigi Hadid, and attempting to tackle Kim Kardashian.

The minister also labelled the guy a disgrace to the country, and said hed be welcome to practice his hobby in the temporary holding facility. And now Sediuks also liable to be punished for besmirching Australias fine reputation at Eurovision. Cya, mate.

Source: The Australian.

Photo: @melhill / Twitter.
Roland Brown.png

Roland Brown

A man who used a Taser, a knife and his fists during a robbery spree he committed with his girlfriend/cousin will keep serving a 45- to 90-year state prison term.



Roland Brown's bid for freedom was shot down recently by a panel of the state Superior Court in an opinion by President Judge Emeritus Kate Ford Elliott.



The 36-year-old Philadelphia man claimed on appeal that the county judge who sentenced him didn't fully take into account all the factors in the case, including the fact that he apologized to his eight victims.



Brown and Mary Jeffries committed the robberies from mid-August to mid-September of 2013, investigators said. In two cases, the female victims were Tased. Police said Brown used a knife to attack three other victims, one of whom suffered a cut to her thigh that required six stitches. They said Brown also stole a car and punched a man repeatedly while stealing his wallet.



Philadelphia Judge Charles A. Ehrlich convicted Brown of multiple counts including robbery and assault after a nonjury trial in 2015.



Man who killed police dog got a fair trial even though a juror cried, Pa. court rules
shutterstock_Assisted Living.jpg

(Shutterstock)

I write in response to a recent Associated Press article (Pa's budget woes will deepen with aging population). The Pennsylvania General Assembly's nonpartisan Independent Fiscal Office recently released a report on the anticipated state budget deficit over the next two years. It's not a pretty picture, anticipating a $3 billion shortfall.

One of the major expenditures in each year's budget is the Medicaid program, accounting for nearly 23 percent of all spending. Of that, long-term care services primarily for older adults account for 21 percent. That cost is only going to go up since Pennsylvania's over-85 population is the fastest growing segment in the commonwealth - increasing at 10 times the rate of all other segments.

These costs will continue to be an anchor on our state budget, but we believe there's at least a way to slow down the rate of budget increases in caring for older adults. And the good news is that consumers would actually benefit.

Currently, if a person with limited financial means needs around-the-clock assistance with activities of daily living, and does not have community supports to be cared for at home, the only option is to qualify for Medicaid and be placed in a nursing facility. What many don't know is that often that person could be cared for in an assisted living facility for half the cost, but Pennsylvania doesn't include assisted living in the Medicaid program.

We very conservatively estimate that the government could save nearly $100 million or more annually if people could access assisted living instead of inappropriately being placed in a nursing facility.

Including assisted living in Pennsylvania's Medicaid program helps the consumer, their loved ones and taxpayers. It's time to make assisted living an option for low-income citizens who need full-time services.

RON BARTH, president and CEO, LeadingAge PA, Silver Spring Township
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Gov. Tom Wolf says the committee that raised public and private money to put on last summer's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia should have returned surplus funds to the taxpayers rather than handing out staff bonuses and grants.

The Legislature provided $10 million for the event, and some lawmakers voiced displeasure upon finding out that the host committee gave nearly $1 million in bonuses for staff members as well as grants for Philadelphia schools and nonprofits.

The bonuses were disclosed in a Jan. 31 Federal Election Commission filing.

Wolf said Sunday that the commonwealth supports large events that can benefit the region, but leftover funding should be returned to taxpayers.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, the host committee's chairman, called the bonuses a reward for low pay and long hours.
democratic-national-convention.jpeg

Pa. Auditor General Eugene DePasquale will review audit materials on how $10 million in state funding to support the Democratic National Convention was spent before deciding his next step. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and three Senate Republican leaders requested the audit after news reports revealed staff bonuses and grants to special interest were paid with surplus public and private money that the convention's host committee raised.

(File photo/Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

Auditor General Eugene DePasquale intends to direct his staff to review the audit materials related to the $10 million appropriated to support last year's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia before deciding his next step.

In a statement issued on Monday, DePasquale said, "The bottom line is the public has a right to know that their state tax dollars were spent appropriately."

Gov. Tom Wolf and a group of Senate Republican leaders separately requested DePasquale to consider performing an audit to take a close look at how the Philadelphia 2016 Host Committee spent the surplus public and private money it raised for the convention.

Recent news reports, including by Philly.com, based on year-end reports filed with the Federal Election Commission indicated the host committee ended up with a $4 million surplus. The committee, chaired by former Gov. Ed Rendell, carved nearly $1 million out of that to pay bonuses for staff members - one as high as $310,000 - as well as give grants for Philadelphia schools and nonprofits, according to the Philly.com report.

Wolf said on Monday following a news conference on an unrelated topic that he was disappointed how the host committee chose to spend the surplus money it raised. He said in a statement on Sunday that indicated his intention to forward the audit to DePasquale that the excess money should have been returned to the commonwealth.

"I want to makes sure taxpayers' money in this and every case is spent wisely and fairly and honestly," he said.

He pointed out that the contract the commonwealth had with the host committee for the convention required an audit to be done in compliance with the state Department of Community and Economic Development's audit guidelines. That audit was done and "the money as far as we can tell was spent the way it was intended to be spent" on event expenses including the venue license and construction costs.

But Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson County; Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre County; and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Pat Browne, R-Lehigh County, called that audit that listed three broad expenditure categories "woefully inadequate" with no details on spending or receipts.

"Therefore, we are fearful that some of the state resources were indeed, directly or indirectly, utilized for staff bonuses and targeted special interest initiatives," the letter states.

They asked DePasquale to perform a full audit not limited to the $10 million of state resources. DePasquale's statement didn't indicate whether that was under consideration.

Wolf said perhaps the reporting requirements for state grants ought to be changed to require more details about how the money is spent but added that the state would have to approach that carefully so it wouldn't create a disincentive to companies that receive grants to grow or locate in Pennsylvania.

In asking for the auditor general to review the audit materials for the host committee's grant, the governor said his administration has done more than any other administration in following up to see how state resources were spent.

Still Wolf added: "This is as troubling to me as that I'm sure as it is to anyone here, Republican or Democrat."

State audit of $10 million grant to support last year's Democratic National Convention by PennLive on Scribd
Lawn signs are a nuisance.

Each election, candidates of every stripe spend big money only to see them stolen or vandalized. They're often left along roadsides months after the election is done and dusted. In 2015, a state police commissioner even found himself the target of critical signs in his neighborhood that led to a brouhaha when he was caught on video removing them.

This year, a municipal candidate fed up of watching his signs disappear has taken matters into his own hands--with a giant trap to deter the bandits.

"I guess I got a little mad," said Joseph Kowalchick, a soft-spoken former long-haul trucker who's running for supervisor in Norwegian Township.

The first-time candidate agreed to spend no more than $250 in order to avoid having to form a committee. That's why it hurt when his signs started disappearing from his rural Schuylkill County community with a population of less than 2,200.

Kowalchick, one of three Republicans in Tuesday's primary, built the trap from 2-by-6 posts, 2-inch steel pipe and coil springs salvaged from an old race car.

But he's careful to note that, although the trap looks menacing, it doesn't actually work.

Joseph Kowalchick, a supervisor candidate in Schuylkill County, built a giant rat trap to deter the bandits.

As it turned out, the contraption garnered Kowalchick far more attention than his stolen signs would have. Since he put it up in his front yard earlier this month, he's appeared on radio and TV programs as far away as Canada and Nevada. The FoxNews morning show "Fox and Friends" invited him to appear later this week.

"People love it," he said. "When I go out door-knocking, as soon as people answer, they recognize me now.

Kowalchick, who's disabled from a back injury, is running on a platform of expanding services to elderly and disabled residents. That includes the creation of a leaf removal program and low-cost grass cutting and snow plow services for those who qualify.

"Even if I don't get in office," he said, "I hope whoever does will look at those programs because they'll help a lot of citizens out."
Governor Tom Wolf 2016-17 budget address

Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai R-McCandless, is seeking support for a possible run for governor. Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com

(Mark Pynes | mpynes@pennlive.com)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai is making his first big pitch for support from the Republican faithful to challenge Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in 2018 and said he hopes to make a formal announcement of his candidacy in the coming months.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Turzai informed state Republican Party committee members he is seriously considering a run, and he detailed his accomplishments in the House and as a fundraiser helping other Republican candidates around Pennsylvania. He also appeared to take aim at competitors for the GOP nomination, without naming them.

"Unlike others, I have been carrying the Republican agenda for more than a decade," Turzai wrote. "I don't need focus groups to tell me where my principles are. And I'm not trying to buy this election with my own money. I have a history of winning, not just elections, but important policy battles."

He wrote in the four-page letter -- received in the mail Friday by committee members -- that he hopes to make a formal announcement in the summer or early fall.

Wolf is running for a second four-year term in next year's election and so far has no announced opponent for the party's nomination.

Two GOP candidates are already in the mix for the Republican Party's nomination.

They include state Sen. Scott Wagner of York County and political newcomer Paul Mango, a longtime former health care systems consultant from suburban Pittsburgh who is expected to formally announce his candidacy Wednesday.

Turzai, who is from suburban Pittsburgh, did not say in the letter whether he will resign as speaker before he runs or whether he will remain speaker during a campaign for governor. He would be free to raise campaign donations into his existing campaign account in the coming months and then transfer it later into a gubernatorial campaign account.

Turzai, a lawyer and former prosecutor in Allegheny County, was first elected to the House in 2001. He became the GOP floor leader in 2011 and speaker in 2015. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1998, aborted a run for lieutenant governor in 2006 and flirted with another run for Congress in 2012.

Wagner, who built two municipal waste-hauling companies and currently owns the $65 million Penn Waste operation, reported loaning his campaign $4 million.
22490985-mmmain.jpg

Getting voters excited for any primary can be an uphill battle but judicial races, in particular, always get the short shrift.

(PennLive file photo)

Getting voters excited for any primary can be an uphill battle but judicial races, in particular, always get the short shrift.

For one, judges tend to shy away from discussing their stances on particular issues. For another, the impact of court decisions may be far-reaching but difficult to grasp in the abstract.

"The judiciary is obviously one of our main branches of government," said Maida Milone, president of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts. "People pay attention to presidential races and to their senators and their representatives but they don't pay attention to their judges or justices."

On Tuesday, Pennsylvanians will vote in a number of municipal primaries--including Harrisburg's hotly contested Democratic mayoral race--but there are also competitive races for seats on the state's appellate courts.

Milone's organization advocates for the merit selection of judges rather than elections, arguing that providing the governor with a menu of qualified judges to select from (and for the Senate to confirm) will result in a less partisan process. That, of course, would require a change to the state constitution, a years-long process.

Until that happens, she said, it's important for voters to pay attention and make informed decisions about judicial candidates.

"Decisions the courts make perhaps have even greater impact on our lives than the decisions made by the other two branches," Milone said.

In 2015's relatively quiet general election, Democratic candidates swept into the state Supreme Court. The new majority has since made a number of crucial decisions with regard to the laws governing the casino and natural gas industries.

On Tuesday, six Democrats are vying for two spots on the ballot in November's election to the Commonwealth Court, which oversees government issues including Right to Know Law appeals. They include: State Rep. Bryan Barbin, Allegheny County attorney Walter Barry, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Ellen Ceisler, appointed Commonwealth Court Judge Joseph Cosgrove, Lackawanna County attorney Todd Eagen and Allegheny County attorney Irene McLaughlin Clark.

Two Republicans--Delaware County Court of Common Pleas Judge Christine Fizzano Cannon and Allegheny County attorney Paul Lalley--are also running for those two seats.

The state's Superior Court, which handles a variety of civil and criminal appeals from the county level courts of common pleas, will see significant turnover this year as five Democrats and five Republicans vie for four open seats.

The Democrats include: Allegheny County attorney Bill Caye, Beaver County Court of Common Pleas Judge Deborah Kunselman, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Maria McLaughlin, appointed Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Moulton and Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Nichols.

The Republicans include: Northampton County Court of Common Pleas Judge Emil Giordano, Blair County Court of Common Pleas Judge Wade Kagarise, Allegheny County Magisterial District Judge Mary Murray, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Paula Patrick and Lancaster County DA Craig Stedman.

A single seat will be open in the state Supreme Court in November but it's not subject to a primary race in either party. Justice Sallie Updyke Mundy, a Republican who was appointed last year, will face Democratic Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas Judge and former Pittsburgh Steeler Dwayne Woodruff.

PennLive and Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts have both created voter guides for the contested primaries. The Pennsylvania Bar Association has also issued recommendations based on its review of the candidates' qualifications and participation in the survey.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands after holding a joint news conference at the White House, in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Feb. 13, 2017. The Liberal government has delayed the release of its new defence policy, setting up a potentially awkward meeting between Trudeau and Trump next week. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura informs the media one day before the resumption of the negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, May 15, 2017. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)
This image provided by the State Department and DigitalGlobe, taken Jan. 15, 2015, a satellite image of what the State Department described as a building in a prison complex in Syria that was modified to support a crematorium. The Trump administration accused the Syrian government of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the dead bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital. It also stepped up criticism of Iran and Russia for supporting the Syrian government. (State Department/DigitalGlobe via AP)
Local clerks report slightly down percentages in voter turnout

Nearly 75,000 people in five Northern Michigan counties had their ballots counted, according to clerks' unofficial election results.


OPEC next cut to cope with the Libyan factor: 814,000 barrels a day output





Break down of Libyan 1.7 million barrels per day (bpd) in oil exports in 2011. Today Libyan oil output creeps higher ahead of OPEC decision on cuts.

CAIRO

Petroleumworld 05 15 2017

Libya is ratcheting up oil output with less than two weeks to go before the world's biggest exporters decide whether to extend production cuts to clear a supply glut.

The OPEC member with Africa's largest crude reserves is pumping more than 814,000 barrels a day, thanks partly to rising output from two fields that re-started last month, Jadalla Alaokali, a board member at the National Oil Corp., said Sunday by phone. Libya was producing about 700,000 barrels a day at the end of April, he said at that time. Output from the politically divided country is at its highest since October 2014 when it pumped 850,000 barrels a day, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The revival in Libyan production coincides with efforts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and allied suppliers to curtail output. OPEC ministers plan to meet on May 25 to decide whether to extend cuts in their production beyond June. The recent increase in Libyan output, together with a surge in North American shale production and signs of recovery in Nigeria, may undercut OPEC's strategy to re-balance the market and prop up prices.

Libya pumped as much as 1.6 million barrels a day before an uprising in 2011, and it was exempted from OPEC's cuts due to internal strife. It's targeting production of 1.32 million barrels a day by the end of this year, the NOC said last week in a statement.



Crude from Sharara, Libya's biggest field, started flowing in late April to the Zawiya refinery following a three-week closure. El Feel, a field also known as Elephant, re-started last month as well, after having been halted since April 2015.

OPEC and other major producers have reached a preliminary agreement to extend limits on output, the state-run Kuwait News Agency reported on Sunday, citing a statement by Oman's Oil Minister Mohammed Al Rumhy. Oman is a member of a committee monitoring compliance with the cuts.

Al Rumhy's counterparts from Iraq and Algeria said Thursday in Baghdad that OPEC and its allies support extending the cuts for another six months. The two biggest producers participating in the curbs, OPEC's Saudi Arabia and non-member Russia, both signaled willingness on May 8 to prolong the deal.






Scandal-hit Odebrecht with red heat from Brazilian banks



Brazilian banks turn up heat on scandal-hit Odebrecht

SAO PAULO

Petroleumworld 05 15 2017

Banks are raising the heat on Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht SA to put its house in order after months of treating the scandal-hit company with kid gloves because of fears its collapse could hurt their balance sheets, sources said.

Odebrecht has agreed to accelerate asset sales as part of a deal with creditor banks to let the heavily indebted company keep $800 million from the divestiture of its water and waste unit announced last month, enough to fund its cash needs for two years, according to several executives, bankers and lawyers involved in the talks.

The conglomerate also agreed to surrender to creditors all dividends from its crown jewel, petrochemicals unit Braskem SA ( BRKM5.SA ), and to place more assets as collateral for loans under renegotiation, said the people, who asked not to be named because the terms of the agreement with creditors were not made public.

"All the parties agreed that steps to resolve this drama once and for all must be taken carefully but quickly," said one of the people involved.

The agreement shows how creditor banks holding a big chunk of Odebrecht's 76 billion reais ($24.34 billion) in outstanding debt are growing increasingly assertive.

In part, banks' new-found confidence stems from a plea deal struck by Odebrecht in December with U.S., Brazilian and Swiss prosecutors, which drew a line under the main legal risks to the group.

Odebrecht and Braskem admitted to bribing officials in 12 countries, mostly Latin America, and agreed to pay $3.5 billion in fines in return for freedom from prosecution.

Lenders also feel they have given Odebrecht enough time and have dealt with other headaches in their credit portfolio over the last year, giving them more room to maneuver.

"Now the leniency deal is a reality, we believe that Odebrecht can downsize assets and liabilities at a faster pace," one senior banker said.

The tougher stance is evident from how banks are dealing with Odebrecht's 38 percent stake in Braskem, Latin America's No. 1 petrochemical firm.

While Chairman Emilio Odebrecht wants Braskem to lead the group's recovery, bankers believe they have the right to decide the fate of the stake - pledged as collateral for a debt restructuring of agribusiness unit Odebrecht Agroindustrial SA.

"It should be up to us, not Odebrecht, to decide what to do with Braskem," said the chief executive officer of a large Brazilian lender.

HIT BY SCANDAL, RECESSION

Once the nation's biggest employer, Odebrecht has been floored by Brazil's "Operation Car Wash" investigation into political kickbacks on state infrastructure contracts. Brazil's harshest recession on record has compounded problems for the family-owned group.

Restricted access to capital and a tarnished reputation led Odebrecht to miss a 12 billion-real asset sale goal for mid-2017.

The target has been extended until next year under the accord governing April's sale of Odebrecht Ambiental SA.

However, Brazil's government has joined creditors in pushing for the bulk of the target to be completed this year, officials, bankers and lawyers familiar with the restructuring told Reuters.

Some banks have balked at how slowly the Odebrecht family, which retains control over the company it founded in 1944, is selling shipbuilding, biofuels and oil drilling assets. Others question whether the family should retain command after its role in the corruption scandal.

In a statement to Reuters, Odebrecht said it is pursuing the downsizing, noting that gross revenue fell to around 90 billion reais ($29 billion) last year. The group declared gross revenues of 132.5 billion reais in 2015.

"After reaching agreements with judicial authorities in Brazil, U.S., Switzerland and Dominican Republic, the group is working to sign similar deals with other countries to take the group to a new standard of ethics, governance and transparency."

On Friday, Odebrecht named Luciano Guidolin, who played a key role in negotiating the plea deals, as its new chief executive officer.

Yet revelations that Odebrecht bribed politicians across Latin America have complicated efforts to win new contracts.

The backlog for civil construction unit Odebrecht Engenharia & Construcao SA shrank 50 percent over two years to December 2016 to $17 billion, the lowest since 2008, according to preliminary financial data seen by Reuters.

Emilio Odebrecht has created stricter compliance structures and vowed to keep family members out of the group's boardrooms.

A person familiar with Odebrecht SA's finances said management agreed to book all of December's fine in last year's income statement, alongside heavy asset writedowns and charges related to the bribery scheme.

That would lead to the group posting a record loss, to be announced in the coming weeks, the person said.

The question is whether the company can rebuild its order book after it was banned from bidding on Brazilian public works contracts and shown the exit from at least four other Latin American countries.

Several top Brazilian officials are lobbying antitrust and auditing agencies to avoid additional penalties.

"I've seen many people spreading the word that Odebrecht will not survive, but that goes against this whole idea of designing leniency deals," said Carlos Lima, a prosecutor in the Car Wash taskforce. "We want the company working and we want it clean."

($1 = 3.1222 reais)






This piece, titled, The New Plague, depicts life in Philadelphia in the age of COVID. Artist and educator Raphael Tiberino began painting at the age of four and has been in the spotlight as a professional creative for over 25 years.
Philadelphia International Airport wants to build a new Federal Aviation Administration air traffic control tower.

The $200 million tower could be situated where the cellphone waiting lot now is, a few hundred feet from the terminals. The current tower, on Hog Island Road, was built in the 1980s and is too small to handle today's technology for directing planes in the air and on the ground.

Airport officials mentioned the new tower on a bus tour Monday of the airfield as part of Infrastructure Week. Former Gov. Ed Rendell joined Airports Council International president Kevin Burke and the airport's CEO, Chellie Cameron, to talk about the need for $100 billion in funding over the next five years to revitalize the country's airports.

The FAA is doing a siting study for the tower, which is being planned at the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City. If it is built where the current 150-space cellphone lot is, the free parking area for people picking up travelers will be relocated, said Joseph Messina, deputy aviation director for regulatory affairs.

The timing for a new FAA tower to be sited, designed, and built is about five years, Messina said.

"The FAA prioritizes tower replacements based on facility condition and available funding," the agency said in a statement. "Primarily, the FAA funds the replacements, but they can also be funded by airport sponsors with guidance and support from the FAA. We do not replace towers based on a standard age."

The most recent airports to get new FAA towers are San Francisco, Tucson, Ariz., Las Vegas, and Cleveland, the FAA said.

A new tower at PHL could be financed through airport bonds or a mix of bonds, grants, and rates and charges paid by airlines. "We're exploring all methodologies with the airlines and with FAA in partnership to try to come up with the best way to pay for it," Messina said.

Airport staff on Monday showed off $200 million in taxiway improvements and a main east-west runway being lengthened from 10,500 feet to 12,000 feet. When completed, it will be one of the longest runways on the East Coast. An additional $20 million was spent on improvements to an aircraft deicing facility.
Amy Aldridge is retiring from Pennsylvania Ballet this afternoon here her final performance her final bow, the flowers, the ovations. Sunday, May 14, 2017. STEVEN M. FALK / Staff Photographer Read more

Pennsylvania Ballet principal dancer Amy Aldridge took her final bows at the Academy of Music on Sunday afternoon, as she retired from the stage with the big smiles and humor that have made her an audience favorite for 23 seasons.

Two by two, her fellow dancers, mostly in street clothes, walked on stage and placed single red roses at her feet as the audience gave her a standing ovation for more than 10 minutes.

The dancers were followed by the artistic staff bearing bouquets, including choreographer-in-residence Matthew Neenan, whose ballet she danced earlier in the afternoon, as well as artistic director Angel Corella and his predecessor, Roy Kaiser, who hired her.

The orchestra members also tossed single roses up from the pit, and confetti canons were shot from the wings.

Sterling Baca and Arian Molina Soca, still wearing costumes from Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, lifted Aldridge on their shoulders.

Aldridge took it in stride, bowing, celebrating with outstretched arms, hugging her colleagues, and chatting with many. She wiped her eyes just once, but also joked about the effort behind what she had accomplished, wiping sweat from her brow and tugging at the heels of her pointe shoes. And yet she still remembered to bow to and thank the orchestra.

Aldridge worked until the very end, dancing principal roles in three ballets: Neenan's Somnolence and two Balanchine ballets: Tarantella and the Rubies pas de deux from Jewels, which closed the performance.

Tarantella was a welcome surprise, as she was not cast in that piece during this week's season finale. But it's a special role for Aldridge, one she danced many times over the years, including in the New York City Ballet's Balanchine Celebration in 2004, when dancers from various Balanchine-oriented companies were invited to perform at New York's Lincoln Center.

On Sunday, she danced the fast, fun choreography with corps de ballet dancer Craig Wasserman, both loaded with personality. The ballet begins with them running on stage waving, one last hello.

In Neenan's Somnolence, Aldridge danced the role that got the last laugh and the most applause.

She closed the afternoon with Rubies, which she last danced in 2013, when the Pennsylvania Ballet performed Jewels for the company's 50th anniversary. Announcing her retirement in March, she remembered that 2013 performance as some of the best dancing of her career.

Rubies was Aldridge's last dance Sunday afternoon, and she performed the angular movements with Alexander Peters, also a beloved principal dancer. It

was also Peters' final moment on stage at the Academy of Music, as he is leaving to join Miami City Ballet.

As the lights went down, the swell of appreciation began.

Aldridge has retired from the stage, but ballet is still in her future, as are jewels. She is planning to stay in Philadelphia, teach ballet, and finish a gemology program at the Gemological Institute of America with an eye toward becoming a jewelry designer.
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Senate Republicans are warning that the odds are high that Trumpcare is going to fail in the Senate, which is going to leave Republicans begging to do a deal with Democrats on health care.

Politico reported:

Though Republicans guarantee there will be a partisan repeal vote at some point this year, some senators and aides believe the chances of failure are greater than success. Crafting a Plan B, they say, is wise.

The stakes are high, and the possibility for failure is high, one Republican senator said of the partisan repeal effort. The senator said it would not be surprising if Republicans are ultimately forced to seek a deal with Democrats.

If Republicans cant pass Trumpcare on their own, and with the House bill dead in the Senate, and the Senate bill looking too much like Obamacare for the House to pass, the odds are very good that the Republican health care effort will collapse under its own divisions and fail.

After Trumpcare fails, Senate Republicans are going to be looking to make a deal with Democrats to get a health care bill passed.

Democrats are in no mood to do a deal until after the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans started this effort replace Obamacare on their own, and Democrats arent going to ride to the rescue and bail them out after their legislation fails.

Republicans were determined to kill Obamacare, and now they are going to sink under the weight of their own failure.
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Prominent Republicans who used not to be frightened are now scared of Trump after the past week, which means that the door is now opening for a serious bipartisan movement to oust this president and his administration.

During an appearance on CBSs Face The Nation, The Washington Posts David Ignatius relayed the growing fear of Trump among Republicans, Talking this week to several prominent Republicans, people who have not been sharp critics of Donald Trump, I heard the same thing, which is: This guy scares me. And I think the reason that people were scared this week is that they saw impulsive behavior, they saw a kind of vengeful, brooding about past slights. They saw a willingness to be  to be  just basically to lie to the country, not to tell the truth. And I think  one person said to me, there are no guardrails on this presidency. Another person said, this is Richard Nixon on steroids. In other words, this is kind of a hyperactive  so, I think thats where we are at the end of the week. A lot of people are scared. And they wonder, how do we get out of this?

The whispers that Republicans are looking for a way out have been getting louder off the record ever since the President accused Barack Obama of wiretapping him.

Republicans really appear to have believed that they could manage Trump. What they are finding out is that they greatly underestimated Trumps capacity for misuse of executive power, the Russia scandal, and Trumps own mental and emotional instability.

A bad 2018 midterm election result combined with growing Trump scandals could be the forces needed to create a bipartisan movement that would lead to the presidents removal. It is important to note that political scandals usually take years to unfold. It understandable that people want Trump gone now, but the reality is that the nation is likely looking at two more years for the Russia scandal unfold.

Republicans in Congress are trying to jam through their agenda because they know they are living on borrowed time. The wheels are going to come off of Trump soon, but before they do, Republicans are trying to get all they can.

The ground is shifting when it comes to Republicans and Trump. The fact that a sizable number of Republicans want a special prosecutor to investigate Trump demonstrates that the presidents support within his own party is cracking.

If Republicans are really scared and looking for a way out of their Trump mistake, Democrats would be happy to work with them on getting an independent investigation into Trump and Russia.

The door is opening a crack towards impeachment, and if Trump keeps dumping gasoline on the fire, enough Republicans will eventually join Democrats in walking in.
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Democratic House Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi made a move to tie Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to the Russia scandal by requesting that Ryan insists that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein brief the House on the Comey firing.

In a letter to Speaker Ryan, Rep. Pelosi wrote:

In the days since the firing of Director Comey, there has been a distressing disparity of information being made available to the Senate but not to the House.

This week, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to brief the full Senate on his knowledge of and his role in the firing of the FBI Director. Director Comey has also been invited to testify before the Senate, but not before the House.

I hope that you will insist that Rosenstein brief and answer questions from the full House. I hope you will also insist that Director Comey be accountable to the House as well as the Senate in his presentation.

The peoples representatives on both sides of the Capitol must have the opportunity to hear from and interrogate the key figures in the FBI Directors firing. The American people deserve to know the truth.

Ryan and the other House Republicans have a choice. They can either keep on defending Trump and go down with an increasingly sinking Republican ship, or they can show some spine and want to get the facts behind the Comey firing.

Pelosis letter is all about forcing the House Republicans to choose. Every time a Republican in Congress thinks they can support and enable Trump without paying the price, they take another step closer to losing their seat.

Democrats arent going to let Ryan cover and enable Trump with no consequences. Pelosi has outsmarted Ryan and is using the Comey firing to drive a wedge between the House Republicans and Trump.

It is smart politics that could pay big dividends even before the 2018 midterms
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Meet Curtis Ellis, a right-wing extremist on par with Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn, who accused Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of conspiring to achieve ethnic cleansing of white working people. He is reported to be a Trump finalist for a U.S. Department of Labor international affairs job.

Billed on TV as a Trump adviser during the campaign but not listed officially, Ellis once posited in an Alex-Jones-meets-Mike-Flynn style thought process that progressives wanted the death of white working people.

Ben Penn, a Bloomberg labor reporter, reported Monday morning, Elliswho has written for controversial conservative publications and is aligned with White House adviser Steve Bannonhas emerged as one of two contenders to run the DOLs Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The little-known deputy undersecretary position at ILAB is considered an essential piece of the White House push to restore U.S. manufacturing jobs by cracking down on labor abuses overseas.

Prepare yourself because this guy is already representing the DOL to foreign governments, He has already been attending ILAB meetings and representing the bureau to foreign governments as a temporary political appointee.

In a World Net Daily column, Ellis sounded as far off the reality path as Alex Jones and Mike Flynn arguing that Obama and Clinton literally want to kill white working people (my bold), If you believe, as do the leftists, that America has more than it deserves and Americans are racists, the global redistribution of our wealth and the death (literally) of white working people is a desired outcome, a feature not a bug.

More if you can stomach it:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want us to believe that the disappearance of American jobs in the new global economy is as inevitable as the sun rising in the east. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the radical left planned the liquidation of white, blue-collar working families in order to fundamentally transform America.

Alex Griswold at Mediaite noted in August of 2016 that Trumps chief strategist Steve Bannon endorsed Ellis column, I want everyone to read this article, declared Bannon in a SiriusXM interview with Ellis, Were going to have you start to come on more on a regular basis.

Here Ellis in World Net Daily claimed that job training is re-education and leads to extermination, Retraining? More like re-education & extermination.

If indeed this man is a finalist for an international affairs Department of Labor job in the Trump Administration, it seems absolutely in line with Donald Trumps history of staffing his administration with people whose resumes often actually read as qualifications for destroying the department or entity for which Trump has chosen them.

Penn in Bloomberg quoted a human rights nonprofit stakeholders warning about Ellis, Its alarming to think our diplomatic counterparts could Google this guy and find these paranoid and xenophobic rantings. It would immediately undermine him and place at risk the U.S. leadership on promoting labor rights as part of the global trade agenda.

Making America Great Again, Trump style.

It should come as no surprise that the Birther Conspiracy Artist that was Donald Trump is now the President Conspiracy Artist drawn to foggy, paranoid thinking and wild accusations presented without any substantiating evidence. This is what conservatives wanted.

ProPublica wrote in a March 2017 piece, Ellis was hired Jan. 20 as a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department. Asked about his role in a brief phone interview Tuesday, he said: Nothing I can tell you.'

Despite being with the department for four months, Ellis still does not seem to understand the most basic aspects of the work, a senior Department of Labor source told Bloomberg BNA. There is widespread concern that if this is the person who represents the interests of the American workforce in international negotiations and other foreign affairs, other countries are going to eat our lunch. It wont end well for American workers.

Greg Autry, who was on the American Jobs Alliances advisory board while Ellis was in charge, disagreed, telling Bloomberg, I believe Curtis is a friend to the American worker and by extension a friend to workers globally.

That may well be, but Ellis thinking problems and lack of judgment are the issue, not his intentions. Plenty of people consider themselves to be friends to American workers but are not fit to be an international voice for the Department of Labor.

While we focus on the important shiny ball of Russia, Trump is busy destroying the United States international standing from within.
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116 days in and things look bad for the entire Republican Party, thanks to Trump. Trumps 39% job rating is a screaming alarm bell for the Republican Party when you think about the midterms, NBCs First Read warned in just one example.

Already pundits are warning Republicans about the 2018 midterms, with Donald Trump becoming a toxic brand even in some Republican leaning districts. As things stand right now, they warn the House is in play and the Senate is no lock up for McConnell either.

NBC First Read noted that while the NBC/WSJ poll showed not a lot of movement for Trumps job approval numbers after the Comey firing, But heres the second way to view the poll: Trumps 39% job rating is a screaming alarm bell for the Republican Party when you think about the midterms, which are still more than 500 days away. To put Trumps 39% into perspective, George W. Bush didnt reach that level in the NBC/WSJ poll until October 2005, so after the Social Security debacle, after the Iraq war turned south, and after Hurricane Katrina. And the GOP lost the House and Senate the following year. And Barack Obama NEVER reached 39% in our poll  his lowest approval rating was 40% in September 2014, right before Democrats lost the Senate (after losing the House in 2010).

Its Trumpcare thats doing the damage, their poll shows. 48% say the health-care legislation that was recently passed by the House and supported by President Trump is a bad idea, versus 23% who call it a good idea. That 25-point gap between good idea and bad idea is larger than the NBC/WSJ poll ever found for Barack Obamas health-care plan.

The same poll showed that 78% want an independent commission or special prosecutor to look at Russia probe, which Republicans are obstructing in both chambers.

That is to say, Republicans are handing Democrats two huge issues to run on in 2018: The American flag and the healthcare they have become accustomed to per Obamacare.

The conservative National Journal warning, If the political environment turns so ominous that Republicans decide not to stick around, it will be a warning sign of a significant wave election But in the coming months, Republican office holders and potential recruits will also be reading the tea leaves to decide whether to run in 2018. Their decisions will go a long way in setting the stage for the midterms.

Its not just that Republicans are suffering from Trump toxicity, but also that Democrats are recruiting good candidates. A DCCC source told Axios ,)T)he Democratic committee has already had serious conversations with more than 300 potential candidates in about 75 districts. There are a great deal of veterans, small business owners and entrepreneurs, and women that are stepping up, the source said. Axios listed Democratic candidates from a Bronze Star Iraq veteran to Captain in the Air Force Reserve to Navy SEAL to a private lawyer who does pro-bono work for abused children.

Although the Comey firing decision has not yet made a dent in Trumps job approval numbers (Id hold off on that as a definite as its a developing story that Saturday Night Live took to popular culture and the constant Watergate comparison is not going to help), a Gallup poll showed that the reaction to Trumps firing of Comey is far more negative than the one Americans had the last and only previous time a president fired his FBI director.

MSNBCs Joe Scarborough is trying to warn Republicans to run from Trump to save the midterms:

Too many Capitol Hill Republicans mistakenly believe they can survive standing by Trump. They are wrong. https://t.co/FSs35iT6kl  Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 14, 2017

ATTN GOP: Trump's approval rating in NBC/WSJ, Gallup & Quinnipiac polls this week are all lower than Mondale's in 1984. (He lost 49 states).  Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 14, 2017

The problem for Trump and Republicans is not only that we are only 116 days in to his presidency, but also that Trump entered office with a historically low approval rating. He didnt have a lot of room or political capital to start off with, and then Republicans jammed Trumpcare down the publics throat adding an amendment that was given no real debate and several Republicans admitted not having even seen the night before the vote, let alone the public.

As we warned in these pages back when Democrats passed Obamacare, once people had the insurance and the security afforded in the regulations of Obamacare, they would not want to give it up. Much like Social Security, people are pretty attached to things that offer them a safety net. Republicans should understand this since they didnt manage to get rid of the bit where they get to keep Obamacare while giving the public Trumpcare, though they told Vox they would pass another bill to close this loophole.

Of course its early yet and Republicans have plenty of time to spend oodles of dark money on fear-mongering messages to distract the public from their behavior, but they are taking on several straight to the gut issues: Republicans are seriously threatening our national security with their alarming lack of patriotism in regards to Russia and they are also threatening peoples ability to live and get healthcare.

So far the Republican effort to combat the Russia narrative is to pretend that Hillary Clinton has a Russia issue, but of course Russia didnt intervene in the 2016 to help Clinton; they intervened to help Trump win because they knew he could do the most damage to the country, even if he didnt win.

Russia wanted the Republican because their goal is to undermine democracy and destroy morale in the U.S. That sentence alone would kill any party that didnt have stores of dark money and Russian help.

Republicans behavior is so atrocious that Chuck Todd (one of three authors of NBCs First Read) and Joe Scarborough are warning them about 2018.

Republicans are learning the heard way that standing by your man doesnt always pay off.
Pizza has been a constant in Brian Kesslers life, from the time he got a job in a pizzeria as a teenager until the day he met his wife in a pizza joint. Read moreIggy's Pizza Shop is now open in Mount Pleasant
Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

Cloudy with occasional rain late. Low 64F. Winds NNE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Cloudy with occasional rain late. Low 64F. Winds NNE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Higher wind gusts possible.
In the aftermath of another turbulent election season, maybe its time for politicians, regulatory agencies and the media to return to something that feels almost quaint: the truth. During World War II, the Superman radio show writers coined the phrase Truth, Justice and the American Way. Read moreCommentary: Now that we're finally past Election Day, let's get back to truth and honesty
The city of Charleston has an amazing opportunity to have a new urban park right in the heart of downtown, on Dominion Energys site between Meeting and King streets, roughly between the City Market and the Four Corners of Law. City leaders and others in the community should seize this chanc Read moreEditorial: Charleston should seize on this unique chance for a new urban park
Legislation outlawing near all abortions in South Carolina is officially dead after a stalemate between the House and Senate ended with GOP leaders in both chambers blaming each other. Read moreFinal Statehouse push to ban nearly all abortions in SC officially over for the year
ST. PAUL  Top state lawmakers are trying to work out a system allowing Iowa residents to start buying medical marijuana oils and pills in Minnesota, a novel arrangement that could raise issues with the federal government.

Iowa could join more than two dozen states with medical marijuana programs under a bill awaiting Gov. Terry Branstad's signature. That legislation would expand a limited 2014 law, allowing more patients to buy the low-dose medication from in-state dispensaries by December 2018.

In the meantime, Iowa residents could look to Minnesota. A provision of the bill specifically references that state as a potential source of medication and directs Iowa regulators to contract with Minnesota's two manufacturers of medical marijuana.

It's the first half of an arrangement being worked out between Iowa House Speaker Linda Upmeyer and Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Daudt, friends who first explored the idea last year until the push to expand Iowa's medical marijuana law fizzled out. Both lawmakers confirmed their discussions to The Associated Press this week.

Upmeyer said Minnesota could offer immediate relief to sick Iowans while the state works to set up its program during the next 18 months. Minnesota even might serve as a permanent back-up in case the state can't secure its own manufacturer, a prospect she and others have feared.

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"It's providing access to Iowans and doing it as quickly as we can," Upmeyer said. "I just want to be sure if we have a tough time finding a grower, we have another source available. It all just fits together."

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad has been noncommittal on the legislation since it hit his desk earlier this month. He is expected to act on the bill before leaving office to become President Donald Trump's ambassador to China, pending the U.S. Senate's confirmation.

While several states with medical marijuana laws recognize cardholders from other states, sending residents across the border to buy their supply would be a new arrangement if both sides move ahead. The nearest of Minnesota's eight dispensaries to Iowa is in Rochester, about three-hour drive from Des Moines.

That arrangement could raise federal concerns. Despite its legal status in nearly 30 states, the federal government still considers medical marijuana a Schedule I drug that can't be moved across state lines. Fears of a federal crackdown on states with medical marijuana laws have increased under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who repeatedly has expressed his disapproval of the drug.

Upmeyer said she's trying to meet with Sessions' office to get greater clarity on how the federal government might treat Iowa's arrangement.

Medical marijuana sales began in Minnesota in July 2015. If Branstad signs the bill, Iowa patients with a doctor's certification could start registering immediately.

Both states would have restrictive programs that ban the use of the plant form and limit the availability of marijuana oils and pills to patients with just a handful of severe conditions. Iowa's law goes further by limiting the potency of the oils that can be sold.

It's unclear how many Iowa patients might take advantage of being able to buy their supply in Minnesota, but Daudt said any patients from Iowa could help manufacturers in Minnesota, where the tight restrictions have led to lackluster patient enrollment, high medication costs and huge financial losses for both companies. Though Daudt voted against the 2014 legislation that created Minnesota's program, he said he's open to the arrangement.

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"One of the problems that we have had here is that the manufacturers ... have a limited number of customers, and it may become difficult to sustain their business," Daudt said Thursday. "It may be helpful to our manufactures and ultimately to our jobs and economy here in Minnesota. I think it could be a mutually beneficial thing."

It would require specific legislation allowing out-of-state residents to buy their medication in Minnesota, a measure that could be tucked into the massive budget lawmakers are working to finalize. Daudt said lobbyists for Minnesota's two manufacturers, Minnesota Medical Solutions and LeafLine Labs, and medical marijuana advocacy groups have been working on crafting the language.

Minnesota's regulators haven't been involved in the discussions, nor has Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, who never was a strong backer of Minnesota's law. Michelle Larson, who runs Minnesota's Office of Medical Cannabis, said they would need to figure out how to handle a new crop of patients from a different state in their patient registry system. The prospect of Iowa residents facing problems for bringing Schedule I medication across state lines worried her.

"We'd certainly want to make sure people were aware of the risk," Larson said.
AUSTIN  A man accused of striking a teenager with a belt and an extension cord, then threatening to kill her, has pleaded not guilty to all counts against him.

Clifton D. Robinson, 37, entered the plea Monday in Mower County District Court, where he faces one count each of domestic assault, terroristic threats and malicious punishment of a child-subsequent offense.

He was released from custody in lieu of $25,000 conditional bail and is due back in court Sept. 22.

The charges stem from an investigation that began April 24 with a call from a staff member at Austin High School. The employee said the victim told her she'd been "beaten" by Robinson the day before, the complaint says.

The girl said the two were arguing when Robinson slapped her in the face, then punched her in the arm, shoulder and leg, the court document says. He told the victim to pull her pants down, then hit her more than 10 times on the buttocks and upper back with a leather belt and an extension cord, the document continues.

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The girl pulled her pants up and ran, but Robinson chased her, caught her and allegedly pulled her back in the house by her hair. The victim claimed Robinson told her, "I will kill you," the report says.

The officer noted bruising and marks on both of the girl's arms, a three-inch laceration on the back of her neck, and marks and raised welts on her buttocks, the complaint says.

Robinson was arrested at his job; according to the court document, he said, "I can't discipline (her) ... I'm going to prison now because of her." At the jail, Robinson allegedly said his hand is not effective, and that's why he used a belt.

A review of his criminal record indicates convictions for gross misdemeanor domestic assault and felony domestic assault in 2015.
SHOREVIEW  Education was always essential for the Bailiff family.

So before Norma Bailiff died in 2013, she said her life savings  which included money she had inherited from her parents, William and Rose Bailiff, decades earlier  should help students.

"They just believed in education," Gail Gaylord, Norma's niece, said about her family. "You couldn't get anywhere unless you had an education. You needed it."

On April 28, the Bailiff family's passion for education became its legacy.

The family announced a $750,000 donation to the Mounds View Schools Education Foundation that will fund the William, Rose and Norma Bailiff Memorial Scholarship for generations to come. It is the largest single donation in the foundation's 30-year history.

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"It's pretty remarkable," said Jonathan Weinhagen, president of the foundation's board of trustees. "It is the largest gift by a significant multiplier. It is absolutely a game changer."

The Bailiff family has been providing scholarships to Mounds View district students since shortly after Norma's death. Gaylord and Weinhagen hope the move will allow the family's memorial scholarships to be awarded annually for the next 30 years or more.

The scholarships are targeted to students who qualify for free and reduced-price meals, a federal indicator of poverty. Gaylord said with the cost of college climbing, it was important to her family to help low-income students achieve their dreams.

The scholarships will be awarded to students from both Irondale and Mounds View high schools. Some of the money will be dedicated to students who plan to attend two-year colleges, Gaylord said.

The focus of the Bailiff family's scholarships fits well with the foundation's priorities and the work of the district to close what's called the "opportunity gap" between poor and minority students and their peers, said Weinhagen, who also sits on the school board.

"We are a school district that, for well over a decade, has been committed to equity in a very intentional way," Weinhagen said. "It is something that has been a guiding principle in every policy decision."

This year about 300 students applied for scholarships from the Mounds View Schools Education Foundation. In May, the foundation will award $127,000 to more than 80 students from the two high schools.

The Bailiff family will still take the lead in picking recipients of their scholarships. But donating their assets to the foundation will take away the burden of managing the money to keep the scholarship program sustainable.

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"We want the fun part," Gaylord said. "What we want to do is choose the kids."
Unity Was Emerging on Sentencing. Then Came Jeff Sessions. So declares the New York Times in a story bemoaning the failure of Congress to pass sentencing reform legislation in 2016 and the recent order from Attorney General Sessions to end lenient charging practices at the Department of Justice.

Jeff Sessions certainly deserves credit for opposing the lenient sentencing legislation. His effort was heroic. But Times reporter Carl Hulse distorts the history of the failure of that legislation to get through the Senate when he suggests there was a bipartisan consensus in its favor until Sessions intervened.

For one thing, although there was never a bipartisan consensus in the Senate, the prospects for passing the leniency legislation peaked when the Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of its Chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, reported the bill favorably over Sen. Sessions strong objection. At that point, Sessions had already intruded. It was when other conservatives joined him that the bill faltered (more on that in a moment).

For another thing, unity was not emerging. The left was unified, as always. But conservatives were not united behind the leniency legislation.

The legislation had gained momentum because key Senators like Grassley, Sen. John Cornyn, and Sen. Mike Lee backed it in committee. But once other Republican Senators focused on the legislation, the tide turned.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who I suspect thought the legislation was a bad idea, took the position that he would support bringing it to the floor for a vote if it had the support of his caucus. It never obtained that support. As far as I know, it never got all that close.

This was not because of Jeff Sessions, though the early warning he sounded helped. Hulse describes Sessions as an outlier. By definition, outliers dont stop legislation. Legislation is stopped when those who are more mainstream on the issue oppose it.

Lets look at some of Hulses other errors. He writes:

As a senator, Jeff Sessions was such a conservative outlier on criminal justice issues that he pushed other Republicans to the forefront of his campaign to block a sentencing overhaul, figuring they would be taken more seriously.

As just noted, this sentence is at odds with the claim that Sessions is responsible for stopping the legislation. Its also not really true.

Naturally, Sessions wanted other Senators to join him in the fight against the leniency legislation. What could be better, for example, than having Sen. Tom Cotton on your side in a battle?

But Sessions didnt take a back seat, as Hulse asserts. After leading the opposition on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he continued to be in the forefront. For example, at a lunch on Capitol Hill attended by influential Republican Senate staffers, Sens. Sessions and Cotton spoke out together against the legislation.

The Alabama man wasnt hiding behind his colleague from Arkansas, as Hulse wants us to believe.

Hulse also says this:

Despite the strong support, stiff opposition from Mr. Sessions and a few other outspoken Republicans  Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia among them  stalled the bill in the Senate and sapped momentum from a simultaneous House effort.

Wrong. The bill stalled because it didnt get enough support from the caucus. The opposition of Sessions and a few other outspoken Republicans wouldnt have been enough to dissuade McConnell from bringing it to the floor  not with the Chairman Grassley and Majority Whip Cornyn, backed by certain conservative elites (see below), pushing for the bill.

Hulses entire slant on the legislative battle is misleading. He wants to portray lighter sentencing as a conservative cause that was halted by a badly misguided man living in the past.

In reality, sentencing reform was the cause of certain conservative elites. It gained a good deal of momentum from the efforts of the libertarian Koch Brothers. It also helped, especially with Grassley, that certain evangelical leaders favored leniency on religious grounds (redemption, etc.). The Heritage Foundation was also on board.

But conservative foot soldiers had little use for lenient sentencing. I learned this first hand when I spoke out strongly against the legislation  e.g., in this Weekly Standard article (co-authored by Bill Otis) and in a media appearances and closed door meetings with conservatives. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised by how resistant conservatives were.

As for living in the past, yes, the past did factor into the opposition to lenient sentencing. Conservatives remembered what crime was like before mandatory minimum sentencing and how it plummeted afterwards. But the present played a role too. Conservatives are aware that, as incarceration rates are decreasing, violent crime is rising.

This leads me to a final thing that intruded as the fight over leniency legislation was reaching its climax  the 2016 Republican primary campaign. Sen. Ted Cruz, a member of the Judiciary Committee, had been sympathetic to sentencing reform. However, he did not back the legislation pushed by his friend Sen. Lee in 2015-16. Neither did Sen. Marco Rubio.

During this period, Cruz was on the campaign trail, spending lots of time in states like New Hampshire, then at the center of the opioid epidemic (by later in 2016, the epidemic was so widespread that it no longer made sense to speak of a center). Given what he heard from Republican voters, Cruz was not about to advocate softer sentences for drug dealers.

Neither, as it turned out, was the Republican caucus in the Senate. Sessions role was not insignificant, but what really intruded was reality.
The Associated Press headlines: In swing districts, voters vent over health care, fear Trump. A more accurate headline would be, A handful of rabid Democrats hate President Trump. But that wouldnt be news. The AP begins:

Skeleton in hand, retired biology teacher Jeannie Scown delivered a message to her Republican congressman at his office northwest of Chicago. Killed by Trumpcare Plague, May 4, 2017, her poster read. In a nod to House Republicans recent vote to gut the health care law, Scown had no intention of sparing four-term Rep. Randy Hultgren with subtlety. He has to understand that sick people vote, too, Scown said, and we are going to go get them and take them to the polls if they cant get there themselves, because we are tired of being used.

AP reporters attend Democratic Party demonstrations, interview one of the participants, and report the interview as news. Who is Jeannie Scown? Judging from her Twitter feed, she is a crackpot left-winger who devotes a good portion of her day to tweeting to her 60 followers.

Is Congressman Hultgren in trouble? It wouldnt seem so. He was re-elected six months ago by a 59%-41% margin, a whopping 18 points.

The AP moves on to New Jersey, where we hear from a dentist named Sam Weissbard:

He did this as Comey wanted to get closer and closer, said Sam Weissbard of Westfield, New Jersey. A dentist who practices in Manhattan, Weissbard said he has no ill-will against his five-term congressman, Republican Leonard Lance, who voted against the health bill. Nonetheless, Weissbard will oppose Lance to send a message to the White House.

The AP offers no hint as to how it selected Dr. Weissbard as somehow representative of national sentiment in swing districts. Maybe he is the brother-in-law of one of the reporters. In any event, Congressman Lance was re-elected in 2016 by 11 points, 54%-43%.

The AP tries to explain why these more or less random Democrats are important:

Trump maintains a hold on his core supporters  about 40 percent according to many polls  but the intensity of voters like Scown and Weissbard offer encouragement for Democrats.

Its going to take a lot of intensity to overcome 18 and 11 point margins. Next, the AP attends another town hall, this one in New Jersey, and interviews a Democrat who says she is nervous about health care:

New Jersey Rep. Tom MacArthur spent five hours last Wednesday fielding intense, sometimes angry inquiries. Vicky Van Wright, 69, who had never attended a town hall, said she was worried about Trump leading the U.S. back to a darker time in our history, but identified the health care bill as her driving concern. She argued it could threaten Medicaid insurance programs for her 35-year-old son with Downs syndrome.

The AP headline referred to swing districts, but so far no such district has been mentioned in the story. MacArthur won in 2016 by 20 points, 59% to 39%. The fact that the Democrats can turn out a few hundred of their faithful for a town hall tells us nothing about the 2018 election, and certainly doesnt suggest that the Democrats can mount a 20-point turnaround.

The AP turns to one more Democrat to wrap up the story. That makes a total of four voters who are supposed to represent a groundswell of opposition to Congressional Republicans.

In 15-term Rep. Dana Rohrabachers nearby district, Patricia Hilaiel-Miller is the kind of voter at-risk Republicans must win over, despite any misgivings over Trump or health care. A registered Democrat, Hilaiel-Miller, praises Rohrbacher as proactive. But the 60-year-old said she and her husband, who is self-employed, benefit from the law and shes unsure about potential changes. The whole thing is a joke, she said. Im just going to move to France.

But wait! Is Congressman Rohrbacher an at-risk Republican? It wouldnt seem so. He was re-elected in 2016 by 57%-29%. Since when is a registered Democrat the kind of voter that a Republican who won by 28 points must win over? This is pure wishful thinking on the part of the Associated Press.

The AP holds out hope for the Democrats in 2018:

The party needs to flip 24 seats to seize control of the House. Democrats top targets are some two dozen GOP-held seats around the country in places such as Arizona, Florida, California and Colorado where Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Trump. Of the 217 Republicans who backed the bill, 14 come from districts carried by Clinton.

That is a surprisingly small number. And, of course, the Republicans will pick up some seats, too. Here in Minnesota, for example, the GOP could well have a net gain of three seats.

It is far too early to make any intelligent predictions about what will happen in 2018, but one thing we can say for sure: a handful of loyal Democrats denouncing the Trump administration and the Republican Congress arent news. They are, however, part of the Associated Presss agenda.
Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, D.C., held its commencement this weekend. California Senator Kamala Harris, a Howard grad, delivered the address.

Sen. Harris told the graduates:

You are graduating into a very different time than it was when you arrived a few short years ago. We have a fight ahead. Its a fight to determine what kind of country we will be. And its a fight to determine whether we are willing to stand up for our deepest values.

Its obviously improper, though no longer unusual, for commencement speakers to use their address to rally graduates to a political cause. Its even worse when a politician does this because then the speaker has a professional interest in rallying potential supporters.

Using commencement speeches this way is also demeaning to the graduates. It implies that they need to be told what to think and how to behave politically. Shouldnt, say, a 22 year-old Howard grad be able to form his or her own view as to whether our deepest values are in danger, thus requiring a political fight to preserve them?

(These problems with political graduation speeches apply whether the speaker is liberal/Democratic or conservative/Republican. They apply to President Trumps commencement speech at Liberty University in which he declared the system is broken and urged graduates to relish the opportunity to be an outsider. College grads shouldnt need to be told whether to be an outsider or an insider. Many go to college hoping to become an insider, a reasonable aspiration.)

Yet, some Howard students do seem quite confused. When Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos visited the college, some urged the college to reject federal funding because President Trump heads the government.

Howards president, Wayne A.I. Frederick pointed out that the college needs federal money due to millions of dollars in unpaid tuition and a backlog of deferred maintenance costs. He also had the audacity to say, in response to protests against DeVos visit, that it was important to interact with people one disagrees with.

This led protests against Frederick, plus a faculty vote of no confidence. It also produced this message on a campus sidewalk:

Welcome to Trump plantation. Overseer: Wayne A.I. Frederick.

Given this level of nauseating ignorance, maybe Howard grads do need to be told how to think about politics, and about history. But not by Sen. Kamala Harris. Thinking her way will only encourage them to view themselves as victims.

Few messages could be more insidious for graduates setting out to make their way in the world.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was one of Barack Obamas worst appointees, which is no small distinction. Today Clapper appeared on CNNs State of the Union. He had no new information of any sort, but he and host Jake Tapper pushed the Democratic Party line relentlessly.

No surprise there. But check out this exchange:

TAPPER: Lets take a wider view of this for one second, and then I want to get back to some of these more detailed questions. This week, with the president firing the FBI director while this investigation is going on, and then saying that he was thinking about the Russia probe when he was making the decision, have we crossed a line here? CLAPPER: Well, I will just say that the developments of the past week are very bothersome, very disturbing to me. I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and thats the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally. TAPPER: Internally from the president? CLAPPER: Exactly.

This is intended as a portentous warning, but for many Trump voters, the fact that he is assaulting some of our institutions is a feature, not a bug.

TAPPER: Because hes firing the checks and balances? [sic] CLAPPER: Well, I think, you know, the founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances. And I feel as though thats under assault and is eroding.

News flash for Mr. Clapper: the FBI is part of the Department of Justice, i.e. the executive branch, which reports to the president. The checks and balances inherent in the three branches of government have nothing to do with it.

The president has the power to fire the Director of the FBI, and if the Director isnt doing a good job, the president has a duty to fire him. That isnt an erosion of checks and balances or an assault on our institutions, it is a president exercising oversight over the executive branch of government.

If he exercised that authority poorly, he may pay a political price. But the federal bureaucracy is not part of the constitutional system of checks and balances. It only seems that way, sometimes, because of its perennial hostility to Republican presidents.
Emmanuel Macron became Frances president today. He chose to mark his inauguration day with military symbolism. For example, he broke with tradition by boarding an open-topped, camouflage military jeep, instead of a civilian limousine, for the traditional drive up the Champs-Elysees where he lit the flame in tribute to Frances war dead at the tomb for the unknown soldier.

I dont assume that Macron is appropriating military symbolism for cynical purposes. One of the few virtues of the Socialist government of Francois Hollande (of which Marcron was part until he jumped that sinking ship) was its willingness to use military force to combat terrorism. France has thousands of troops involved in military operations abroad, from west Africa to Syria and Iraq.

For me, the remarkable thing about today is that despite Hollandes otherwise ruinous tenure, which led to record low approval ratings and the collapse of his party, he is succeeded by a Socialist who served in his government.

To be sure, Macron now belongs to his own party, En Marche (which bears his initials). But during his time in government, he was Socialist and in all likelihood would still be if that party had remained a viable means to personal power.

Barack Obama, not an unpopular president, couldnt hand off power to Hillary Clinton. Francois Hollande, enormously unpopular, has handed off power to Macron (for more on this, see below).

The next order of business is the parliamentary elections. Macron, having no true party, has thrown together a slate that includes a great many no-name candidates. Its far from clear that this slate will do well enough to give him the majority he needs truly to govern. Rather, as our man in Paris has reported, its entirely possible that the parliament will be controlled by a party (or parties) opposed to Macrons program.

Lets take a look at Frances two traditional major parties in the aftermath of the election. Of the Socialists, our man in Paris tells me:

It looks like the Socialist Party (PS) if not dead is in the hospital with family and clergy at the bedside. En Marche could be the new PS, with a shinier screen and updated user interface. The resistance to Macron on the right seems firmer, for the moment.

As for the conservative party, Les Republicains, he writes:

Early polls indicate that what sunk Fillon [its candidate] was his abandonment by the traditional (Catholic) right. These are people who are traditionalist conservatives, perhaps not Reaganesque free-market[ers]. . .but solidly against the traditional left  in the US, they would be values-voters. They were the folks who protested (quietly, decently, as is their wont, but in the hundreds of thousands) against gay marriage. However, the personal scandals that hit Fillon over the last few months (notably, charges of nepotism and corruption) made it impossible for them to support him personally. Two takeaways: First, as it is likely that those scandals were stage-managed by Hollande, with all the powers of the presidency at his disposal, its therefore implicit that Macron directly owes his position to the outgoing Socialist government. Second, the failure of Les Republicains was the fault of a fatally flawed candidate and probably doesnt represent the rejection of center-right ideas.

These takeaways are critical, it seems to me. If the French electorate has not rejected center-right ideas, but just the individual who championed them, then the prospects of the conservative party in the upcoming election (and beyond) should be good. And to the extent that the electorate believes, or comes to believe, that Macron owes his position to the discredited Hollande, he could be in for a very rough ride.
The Nigerian government will soon restart oil prospecting in the volatile Chad Basin liberated from the terrorist sect, Boko Haram, a representative of the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, (NNPC), Maikanti Baru, said Monday.

Saidu Mohammed, who is the NNPCs Chief Executive Officer in charge of Gas and Power, said light and heavy duty exploration equipment were being moved into the basin to commence full oil prospecting by the end of 2017.

He said the NNPC was encouraged to return to site by the assurances given to them by the Nigerian military.

He spoke on behalf of Mr. Baru during a visit to the Borno State governor, Kashim Shettima, at the council chambers of Government House, Maiduguri.

Mr. Mohammed said he was leading a team of officials from Abuja to sympathise with the government and people of the state on the devastating attacks and destructions they had suffered due to the activities of the Boko Haram insurgents.

We are here in Borno to express our full alignment to the ongoing reconstruction, rehabilitation and resettlement process by government in all the liberated communities, he said.

Therefore, NNPC wants to appeal and seek where it can come in and assist, because, the rate of devastation is worrisome.

We are also in the state to inform you that in the next six weeks, we are going to redeploy our team of experts back to Maiduguri to resume oil exploration with better technology in the Lake Chad Basin.

This is necessary with our renewed efforts in harnessing, Oil, Gas and Power to increase the economy of the nation, in line with the agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari in job creation and economic diversification.

Governor Shettima thanked the team, and said his administration will be ready to partner with NNPC to actualize its mission.

He appealed to NNPC to assist the state government in reconstructing and rebuilding thousands of schools and furniture destroyed by insurgents.

The NNPC team also visited the palace of the Shehu of Borno, Abubakar Garbai El- Kanemi.

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Saudi Arabia and Russia, the worlds top two oil producers, agreed on Monday on the need to extend output cuts for a further nine months until March 2018.

Saudi Energy Minister, Khalid al-Falih, and his Russian counterpart, Alexander Novak, said in a statement that they would do whatever it takes to reduce the inventory overhang.

There has been a marked reduction to the inventories, but were not where we want to be in reaching the five-year average, Mr. al-Falih told a news conference in Beijing alongside Novak.

Weve come to the conclusion that the agreement needs to be extended.

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meets in Vienna on May 25 to consider whether to extend output cuts agreed in December 2016 between OPEC and 11 non-member countries, including Russia.

Benchmark Brent oil prices due to the agreement rose above $52.23 per barrel as the market had previously expected the cuts to be extended by as little as six months.

With a nine-month extension now, the minimum expectation for the OPEC meeting, the group has a lot of work to do to persuade its members and some non-OPEC producers to back the move.

OPEC member, Iraq, whose production is growing fast, has said it would support renewing the deal only for six months.

Non-OPEC member Kazakhstan said on Monday it would struggle to join any new deal on the old terms, as its own output was set to jump.

Oman said it fully supported the idea of a nine-month extension.

OPEC wants to reduce global oil inventories to their five-year average but so far has struggled to do so.

Stockpiles are hovering near record highs, partly because of rising production in the United States, which is not part of the existing deal.

(Reuters/NAN)

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The Nigerian Ports Authority, NPA, said it would raise N4.3 billion to reconstruct access roads around Apapa Port as port operators withdrew services over poor infrastructure.

The Managing Director of NPA, Hadiza Usman, told a stakeholders meeting in Lagos on Monday that NPA would provide N1.8 billion while Dangote Group and Flour Mills would provide N2.5 billion.

The News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, reports that the NPA convened the stakeholders meeting to bring back operators who withdrew their services from the port.

We have received proposal for Corporate Social Responsibility of N2.5 billion from Dangote Group and Flour Mills for the full reconstruction of port roads.

The reconstruction entails full drainage service and the total cost of the Apapa port access roads project is N4.3 billion.

The two entities are willing to provide N2.5 billion, while NPA will pay the remaining N1.8 billion to ensure that the roads are done, Ms. Usman said.

The NPA boss said that the reconstruction would begin within one month, adding that she would ensure speedy completion of the project.

She said that the Federal Ministry of Works would request the approval of Federal Executive Council to obtain the necessary approvals for NPA to embark of the project.

Ms. Usman said NPA has asked the Federal Ministry of Works to provide the final engineering design and costing to enable it embark on reconstruction of the Creek road and Liverpool road later this year.

I feel concerned about the deplorable state of these roads and I communicated at a meeting with the minister that we are willing to fund these roads irrespective of which agency of government is doing it, she said.

Ms. Usman said that the management of NPA would make provision for an annual budget for the reconstruction of the roads.

She urged the Federal Ministry of Works to urgently complete the reconstruction of Coconut/Mile 2 road in Lagos.

Ms. Usman said that NPA would seek permission of the Federal Ministry of Works to complete the holding bay under the Public Private Partnership arrangement.

According to the NPA boss, the congestion around Apapa and Tin-Can Island ports was due to lack of an effective holding bay, trailer parks and non-reconstruction of ports roads in Lagos.

Ms. Usman commended the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Shippers Council, Hassan Bello, for dialoguing with port operators who had protested poor infrastructure at the port.

Speaking earlier, Mr. Bello stressed the need for regular dialogue with stakeholders on issues militating against port operations.

He pleaded with the port operators to suspend the withdrawal of their services and await the outcome of the initiatives of the NPA management.

Also speaking, the Chairman Corporate Fleet Truck Association, Folake Soji-George, urged NPA to compel security agencies to stop tanker drivers from using one-way roads.

Mrs. Soji-George said that security agencies should be committed to their duties by ensuring free flow of traffic to reduce the time of doing business at the ports.

Kayode Farinto, National Publicity Secretary, Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents, ANLCA, urged government agencies to address the issue of multiple charges by the customs.

(NAN)

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Lanre Gentry, the estranged husband of Nollywood actress, Mercy Aigbe, is still in Kirikiri prison, one week after he was docked for domestic violence charges.

The efforts of his lawyers and friends to ensure that he regains his freedom on Monday was shattered. This was because all the magistrates in Lagos attended a state-wide conference and none of them was available to attend to his bail application.

Consequently, Asiwaju Gentry, as he is popularly called, will spend his seventh night in prison.

His team, however, hopes that all goes well so he can return home on Tuesday.

The controversial hotelier, who was tried at a Magistrate Court 1 sitting at Ogba, Ikeja, on three count charges under the State Criminal law 2011, has been unable to meet the bail condition of N500, 000 as well as provision of tax verification and two sureties, one of whom must own property in Lagos State.

This may be a confirmation of widespread rumours that he is broke.

Mr. Gentry, who was alleged to have physically assaulted his actress wife, Mercy, appeared before the court last Tuesday and pleaded not guilty to the charges levelled against him by the Lagos State Government.

The state government waded into the alleged domestic violence after the actress reported her alleged attack to the Lagos State Government through the Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Team.

Meanwhile, Mercy has become an advocate for the Lagos State Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Team. She appreciated the Lagos State commissioner for women affairs and Governor Akinwunmi Ambode in a series of Instagram posts on Monday.

She has also been urging her fans and followers to share her posts because they just might be helping a domestic violence victim.

A fight between the couple allegedly led to her bleeding, a situation which informed her decision to storm the office of the Lagos State Women Affairs and Poverty Alleviation Commissioner, Lola Akande, to report the matter.

Mrs. Akande was said to have handed over the case to the state Ministry of Justice. Despite the explanations given by Mr. Gentry that the pictures of the actress bruised face were behind-the-scene images from a movie set, the actress has secured a restraining order against him.

Mr. Gentry has been ordered by a court not to come within one mile of Mercy Aigbes location at all times.

The couple was married for seven years and the union produced a son. While it is Mercys second marriage, it is her husbands third marriage.

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Nigerias main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has been enmeshed in a leadership crisis since May 21 last year when at a national convention in Port Harcourt, it sacked its acting National Chairman, Ali Sheriff, and announced a National Caretaker Committee led by Ahmed Makarfi, a former governor of Kaduna State.

Mr. Sheriff, a former senator and ex-governor of Borno State, however challenged his removal in court. This set the stage for more litigation, some of which were won by the embattled national chairman and others by the Makarfi-led NCC.

In February, the Court of Appeal affirmed the former Borno governor as the national chairman of the party. That judgement is being challenged by the Makarfi faction at the Supreme Court.

Ehiozywa Agbonayinma, a PDP member in the House of Representatives from Edo State, in this interview with PREMIUM TIMES Nasir Ayitogo and Mohammed Lere at the National Assembly complex, called on the Makarfi faction to lay down its arms and obey the court judgement.

PT: The PDP is in crisis, what we see now are two factions. Which side do you belong?

Agbonayinma: There is only one PDP and there is only one leader and that leader is Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, the national chairman of the greatest party in Africa, PDP. He is the Chairman, the authentic chairman, there is no other chairman.

Caretaker committee chairman doesnt exist in law; that is why he (Ali Sheriff) won at the Court of Appeal. You cant give what you dont have, we are not in a lawless society or a banana republic, this is Nigeria. For Gods sake, are we now saying we wont obey the rule of law?

By court pronouncement and even before court pronouncement, he was chairman and they were challenging his leadership because they couldnt manipulate or remote control him. They thought they could remote control or push him around but they found out that they were having a dead end. You cant push Senator Ali Modu Sheriff around, he is a man of principle, he said lets give the party back to the people and that is why it is PDP  Power to the People.

If they knew that he was a bad man, he was wicked like they have been blackmailing him that he was part of Boko Haram, why did they go to plead and appeal to him to come and redeem PDP back to its old glory if they knew all these?

They went to him and begged, all of a sudden, he accepted, he got the highest votes to beat three other contenders when the NEC voted.

By law, since then he became the National Chairman of our party. So, they were hoping that this man that has been three times and a two-term governor, that when he was leaving he left about N67billion in the state treasury, no governor did that in the whole federation.

A man that has built his political career, his business empire for over the years, then all of a sudden you want to dent his image because of politics. For me, I am a lawmaker and not a lawbreaker; I am on the side of the law and let it be that I am the only one standing by him. He is my chairman, the chairman of our great party whether the devil likes it or not.

Sheriff is not the one on trial, those on trial are the ones who are perpetrating themselves as mini gods. Nobody is above the law, you cant play God, and he is the one who gives power.

PT: The Makarfi caretaker committee has approached the Supreme Court, what if the result turns out in its favour?

Agbonayinma: To them, they said if Sheriff happens to win at the Supreme Court, they will not have anything to do with him, to us if it happens to be that Makarfi wins, well obey and stand on the side of the law.

But look at this, it is crystal clear, if you read the constitution of the PDP, there is no such thing as caretaker committee. But you can find it in the state or local government level. The national body can set up a caretaker committee in the state or local government but in the national level, there is no such thing.

The Barrister, Dayo Adeyeye, parading himself as the spokesman of PDP, if we happen to have been in a country that always believes in the rule of law, hell be apprehended and jailed for contempt. He is a lawyer, he should know better.

He is trying to tell the judiciary that whatever judgement they have given does not hold water, for him to still parade himself as the spokesman of PDP. It is unheard of.

They can say whatsoever they want to say, we had several meetings of reconciliations. I, Senator Sheriff, Professor Jerry Gana, Sule Lamido and many other leaders from Makarfis group were in that meeting, sometimes these meetings lasted till 2 to 3 a.m. in the morning. Whatever recommendations they brought, we said no problem, as we are agreeing to support what they want, the following day they are countering the same recommendations they brought themselves.

They were the ones who brought Professor Jerry Gana to head the committee. I have great respect for Professor Jerry Gana but unfortunately, he is dealing with people that do not understand that we are all created equal. A tree that is standing alone by itself cannot be called a forest. One person cannot govern himself, he needs people. As a leader, you need followers. You cant be the leader and follower at the same time.

In that meeting, they brought seven recommendations, we agreed to numbers 1-6, but I asked the chairman of the committee why the seventh recommendation had a question mark. He said they would get back to us, only for us to wake up the following day to hear Governor Fayose spitting fire.

They set up another committee headed by Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa, Ali Modu Sheriff didnt set up that committee, Makarfi faction set up the committee to liaise with us. The committee came up with their recommendation and final report which they came and submitted at the national secretariat (Wadata Plaza). Senator Sheriff together with other NEC members received them and accepted the recommendations and reports. Immediately Sheriff accepted, the following day Fayose said no, no! So, you see, we take one step forward and the want to take us ten steps backwards. Lets call a spade a spade, there is no perfection in humanity, I am not perfect, I am not saying Senator Sheriff is perfect, I am not saying Fayose is perfect but you must respect others.

I dont know where Fayose was when Senator Ali Modu Sheriff was already a governor and senator. He just started yesterday, he should respect elders. I was brought up to respect elders. We can disagree to agree and agree to disagree, politics is about dialoguing, and it is not about using weapons of mass destruction or trying to be negative or abusive. Communicate if you have a superior argument. I have told my honourable colleagues who asked me why I follow Sheriff to explain to me why I shouldnt follow Sheriff, convince me.

I am with him (Sheriff), I am for him, I am by him and we stand with him.

PT: Senator Sheriff has appointed people into the National Working Committee of the PDP such as Cairo Ojuogboh. Is it in the PDP constitution that the National Chairman can singlehandedly appoint a member into the NWC?

Agbonayinma: Dont forget Dr. Cairo Ojuogboh was a vice chairman (south south) of PDP and he is deputy national chairman on acting capacity.

When a seat is vacant, somebody has to fill that position. He is acting since the former Acting National Chairman, Uche Secondus, happens to come from the South-south and Secondus was vice chairman from the south-South, there is nothing wrong for Cairo to act as the National Vice Chairman.

PT: Does the National Chairman have the power to appoint any member to the NWC?

Agbonayinma: Dont forget we have a national working committee. Even the General Secretary of our party is still with Sheriff, a lot of the members of the NWC are still with Sheriff.

For your information, not everybody left. But as at today, more governors are now with Sheriff, are you aware? Only few governors are now on the side of Makarfi, about three governors, the rest of them have keyed in to Sheriff.

PT: Can you tell us the names of these governors that have aligned with Sheriff?

Agbonayinma: Ill tell you the three governors who are not with Sheriff, then you do the remaining calculations yourself.

They are Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State and Ibrahim Dankwambo of Gombe State. Apart from these three, the rest are with Sheriff. You know why? Elections are going on everywhere and by law, INEC only recognizes Sheriff. INEC only accepts names submitted by Sheriff.

PT: How many members of the House of Representatives are with Sheriff?

EJ: As at today, we can no longer count. Before, we were few but as at today, all these governors that have keyed in have instructed their members to also key in. So, they (Makarfi faction) are now confused because that is not the best way to settle issues, they should still come together as one family.

A house divided can never stand, politics is not a do or die affair. Nobody is an island, we need each other to succeed.

PT: President Buhari has been very sick. As a PDP member and a member of the House of Representatives, do you think Buhari should resign?

Agbonayinma: Let me be sincere with you. Yes, I am a PDP member but first I am a Nigerian. I dont want to be partisan in making any statement that has to do with the President of our country.

If you dont value what you have, somebody else will help you devalue it. What we should be talking about and be preaching is love, being our brothers keeper. When your leader is sick, what you should do is to pray for that leader. Anybody can be sick.

Once upon a time, my enemy was sick and I was taken to America for treatment, nobody came and said EJ must resign from being a member of the House of Representatives.

Until proven beyond reasonable doubt that he (Buhari) can no longer function as president, it is a topic for another day.

But as at this time, of course age is no longer on his side, we shouldnt be castigating, using derogatory statements, making negative statements to compound the issue. Rather, we should be our brothers keeper.

We should pray for our leaders, pray for the president, Vice President, Senate President, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Senators and Honorable members of the National Assembly and those that are part of the governance of this country so that this country can move forward.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNvLfiruyKM&w=560&h=315]

If president Buhari succeeds, guess what? Nigeria succeeds; Nigerians will benefit from the enormous good things that will come out of this government.

Unfortunately, we are not together, we are fighting amongst ourselves. APC is fighting amongst themselves, PDP is fighting amongst themselves, and Nigerians are quarrelling amongst themselves. Where do we go from here?

Mr. President is ill, anybody can be ill, the best we can do for him is to pray.

Somebody was telling me the other day that now that the president is not functioning, we should impeach him and the Vice President but I said look, this is where we always get it wrong. Is that the right thing to do now? A man that is sick, cant you pray for him to get well?

None of us will live here forever, everybody, once upon a time will go and meet the almighty creator, we should be our brothers keeper. This is not the best for our nation.

I understand we are not where we used to be, but we are not where we ought to be. Even though we are progressing, that progression should be that which all Nigerians will feel the impact of governance. Please lets call a spade a spade, let us live together as brothers and sisters.

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The World Health Organisation on Monday confirmed that a second Ebola case in Congo.

So far there are 19 suspect cases, including three deaths and two lab-confirmed cases, a WHO spokesperson in Geneva said via e-mail.

The first case was confirmed on Friday in Bas-Uele province in the north-east.

The WHO has said the outbreak appears to be limited to that remote area, and that there is no need for travel restrictions for the time being.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a continent-wide mechanism to monitor disease outbreaks, said it had activated its emergency operational centre to monitor the situation in Congo.

The Central African country has suffered seven previous outbreaks of Ebola since the virus was discovered in the country in 1976.

The last outbreak, in 2014, left 49 people dead.

The haemorrhagic fever has been most detrimental in West Africa, where it claimed more than 11,000 lives in 2014 to 2015.

The WHO declared Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the three countries that had been most effected by the epidemic, free of Ebola in 2016.

NAN reports that the GAVI global vaccine alliance said on Friday some 300,000 emergency doses of an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck could be available in case of a large-scale outbreak, after the WHO confirmed a fatal case in Congo.

The vaccine, known as rVSV-ZEBOV, was shown to be highly protective against Ebola in clinical trials published in December 2016.

NAN reports that the experimental Ebola vaccine was highly protective against the deadly virus in a major trial in Guinea, according to results published in The Lancet.

The vaccine is the first to prevent infection from one of the most lethal known pathogens, and the findings add weight to early trial results published in 2016

The vaccine was studied in a trial involving 11, 841 people in Guinea during 2015.

Among the 5,837 people who received the vaccine, no Ebola cases were recorded 10 days or more after vaccination.

In comparison, there were 23 cases 10 days or more after vaccination among those who did not receive the vaccine.

The trial was led by WHO, together with Guineas Ministry of Health, Medecins sans Frontieres and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, in collaboration with other international partners.

While these compelling results come too late for those who lost their lives during West Africas Ebola epidemic, they show that when the next Ebola outbreak hits, we will not be defenceless, said Marie-Paule Kieny, WHOs Assistant Director-General for Health Systems and Innovation, and the studys lead author.

The vaccines manufacturer, Merck, Sharpe & Dohme, this year received Breakthrough Therapy Designation from the United States Food and Drug Administration and PRIME status from the European Medicines Agency, enabling faster regulatory review of the vaccine once it is submitted.

Since Ebola virus was first identified in 1976, sporadic outbreaks have been reported in Africa.

The 20132016 West African Ebola outbreak, which resulted in more than 11 300 deaths, highlighted the need for a vaccine.

The trial took place in the coastal region of Basse-Guinee, the area of Guinea still experiencing new Ebola cases when the trial started in 2015.

The trial used an innovative design, a so-called ring vaccination approach, the same method used to eradicate small pox.

When a new Ebola case was diagnosed, the research team traced all people who may have been in contact with that case within the previous three weeks, such as people who lived in the same household, were visited by the patient, or were in close contact with the patient, their clothes or linen, as well as certain contacts of contacts.

A total of 117 clusters (or rings) were identified, each made up of an average of 80 people. (dpa/NAN)

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The Kano State anti-graft agency said on Monday that it has a water-tight case against the states emirate council.

The News Agency of Nigeria quotes the Chairman of the Kano State Public Complaints and Anti-Corruption Commission, Muhyi Gado, as saying that though it has a strong case against the emirate council, the probe will remain suspended to avoid concurrent investigation.

PREMIUM TIMES reported the suspension of the probe on Saturday after the Kano State House of Assembly also said it was going to investigate the Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi.

The anti-graft agency was investigating allegations that the emirate council mismanaged N6 billion of its funds, an allegation the council has denied providing details of its expenditure.

Details later

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Following the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday, the Nigerian government has beefed up checks at its various airports.

The federal government also urged Nigerians to remain calm as it is committed to ensuring that the disease is not imported into the country.

The Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, spoke while inspecting thermal screening machines at the Port Health Stand of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja.

We want to assure Nigerians that we have never stopped screening people, it has been going on at the international wing of all the airports in the country, although passengers may not have noticed it, a statement by the ministry on Monday quoted Mr. Adewole as saying.

There is no reason to panic, everything is under control. If there is a need to screen local passengers we would do that but for now we are concentrating on passengers on international travels, he said.

The minister was at the airport to assess if the screening machines were functioning perfectly as Nigeria stepped up surveillance in detecting fever of any kind.

The country began health screening at international airports during the Ebola crisis of 2014, and the screening has continued since then.

Mr. Adewole urged the public to report any signs or symptoms of fever to the nearest health facility.

In his remarks the Director, Port Health Services, Hassan Garba, said that sophisticated thermal camera installed at the airport captures all arriving passengers with or without their knowledge, adding that anyone showing red on the camera would be quietly called aside for questioning.

The Minister directed that any passengers with fever arriving from a county where Ebola has been detected should be taken for further investigation.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared an Ebola outbreak in the DRC on Friday, saying that at least one person had been confirmed dead due to the virus in the countrys north-east.

However, the management of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, assured Nigerians of adequate surveillance at Nigerian airports following the outbreak of the disease.

In a statement on Monday, FAAN assured passengers and airport users of safety at the nations airports.

According to the agencys spokesperson, Henrietta Yakubu, adequate measures have been put in place to checkmate the re-occurrence of any such outbreak in Nigeria.

Mrs. Yakubu emphasized that all measures adopted in 2014 to curtail the dreaded virus remain very much in place and have been fortified.

According to the statement, the Ebola Screening Points and detecting machines have been fully re-instated at Nigerian airports.

She also disclosed that the agency was also collaborating with the Federal Ministry of Health, through the Port Health Service, to reactivate the Ebola Awareness and Sensitization Campaign.

On Monday, the World Health Organization confirmed a second Ebola case in Congo.

So far there are 19 suspect cases, including three deaths and two lab-confirmed cases, a WHO spokesperson in Geneva said.

The first case was confirmed on Friday in Bas-Uele province in the north-east of the country.

But in its statement released in Lagos on Monday, FAAN said there was no outbreak of Ebola in Nigeria or at any Nigerian airport.

The agency, therefore, urged air passengers and airport users to go about their business activities without fear.

Nigeria was declared free of Ebola virus by the WHO in October 2014 and the country praised for its handling of the disease which caused about 4,500 deaths across West Africa.

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The Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Leo Ogor, has accused his colleague, Ehiozuwa Agbonayinma, of lying when he said majority of the People Democratic Party lawmakers are loyal to Ali Sheriff as the party chairman.

Mr. Ogor was responding to an interview granted PREMIUMTIMES by Mr. Agbonayinma where the latter described Mr. Sheriff as the authentic PDP chairman, saying Mr. Sheriff enjoys the support of majority of the PDP members in the House.

Mr. Ogor, however, said his colleagues claim was false.

Let Agbonayinma give you ten names of lawmakers that are with Sheriff, then Ill buy into that.

He sits in meetings with us, there is no way he can mention Sheriffs name in that meeting, Mr. Ogor said.

The minority leader said only a few PDP lawmakers are with the Sheriff faction of the party.

If out of over 140 members, you have two or three people supporting Sheriff, you know that is very insignificant and inconsequential.

The PDP crisis has seen the party split into two factions with Mr. Sheriff and Ahmed Makarfi claiming leadership of the party.

Mr. Sheriff is, however, recognized by law after the Court of Appeal declared him the authentic leader of the PDP. The Makarfi faction has since appealed that ruling at the Supreme Court.

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For the second year in a row, Nigeria is ranked the 13th least stable country in the world on the Fragile States Index, FSI, released by the Washington DC-based think-tank, Fund for Peace, FFP.

The Index measures levels of stability in 178 countries and ranks them according to their vulnerability to threats from social, political, economic and demographic pressures.

The 2017 FSI, released on Monday, is the 13th from FFP. Nigeria has been measured on the Index since it was first published in 2005 when the country was ranked 54, its highest position yet.

This year, Nigeria outranks seven African countries viz South Sudan, Somalia, Central African Republic, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Guinea, who are all considered less stable than Nigeria.

Zimbabwe is co-ranked 13th with Nigeria and Ethiopia follows both countries as the 14th least stable country ion the world.

More details later

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Justice E. A. Obile of the Federal High Court sitting in Warri, Delta State, on May 11 convicted and sentenced two siblings, Chukwudi Ugwueke and Sophia Ugwueke, to two years imprisonment each, with an option of N400,000 fine each.

The duo was charged by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, on a single-count charge bordering on possession of fraudulent documents with intent to defraud one Lisa Marie Nors, an American citizen.

Justice Obile, after going through the evidences tendered by the prosecution counsel, M.T. Iko, found the duo guilty and accordingly convicted them.

The convicts were first arraigned on February 1, but pleaded not guilty to a 13-count. However, when the matter came up on Thursday, for hearing, the accused persons pleaded guilty to an amended one count charge and were accordingly convicted and sentenced.

The convicts were arrested at their residence in Sapele, Delta State based on intelligence on their illegal activities that bordered on defrauding foreigners through internet scams.

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Justice Ayokunle Faji of the Lagos Division of the Federal High Court has fixed June 28 for the hearing of pending applications in a charge against Innoson Nig. Ltd, over alleged falsification of shipping document.

Innoson Nig. Ltd, Innocent Chukwuma, Charles Chukwu, Maximian Chukwura, Mitsui Osk Lines C and Anajekwu Sunny are facing a four-count charge bordering on forgery and conspiracy before the judge.

Last year, Mr. Chukwuma had requested that the judge handling the case, Saliu Seidu, recuse himself from the matter.

When the case was called on Monday, J.I Ajakaiye announced appearance for the prosecution.

George Uwechue, a senior advocate of Nigeria, announced appearance for the first and second defendants; Joseph Mbadugha announced appearance for the third and sixth defendants; while A. Mr. Olusola appeared for the fourth and fifth defendants.

Mr. Uwechue then informed the court of his pending application before the court, while Mr. Mbadugha, a law professor, also drew the courts attention to his application.

However, the new trial judge, Mr. Faji, who replaced Mr. Saidu, said he would need to go through all the processes with respect to the matter.

He then fixed June 28 for the hearing of pending supplications.

In the charge, the accused were alleged to have conspired to commit the offence on October 10, 2013, at Apapa Wharf.

The prosecution alleged that the accused falsified shipping documents, which they deposited with Guaranty Trust Bank Plc as collateral for the sum of N2.4 billion.

The loan facility was alleged to have been granted Innosson Nig. Ltd.

The shipping document was also said to have been falsely presented as genuine and with intent to defraud, in order to clear goods worth N2.4 billion.

According to the charge, the offence contravened the provisions of sections 1(2) (c), and 3(6) of the Miscellaneous offence Act, Cap M17, Laws of the Federation 2004.

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A Federal High Court sitting in Lagos on Monday adjourned to May 22, a suit seeking final forfeiture to the Federal Government, of the sum of $5.8 million belonging to former first lady, Patience Jonathan.

Justice Mojisola Olatoregun granted the adjournment following an argument by counsel to Mrs. Jonathan, Ifedayo Adedipe , that the respondent was not given sufficient notice to file a response.

The court had on April 26 issued an interim order for forfeiture of the sum of $5.8 million belonging to Mrs. Jonathan to the Federal Government.

The order followed an ex-parte application by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), seeking a forfeiture of the sum to government, pending the determination of the motion on notice.

The court had granted the interim order and had further directed that same be advertised in a national daily, to enable any interested party to appear and show cause why the interim order should not be made final.

When the case was called on Monday, counsel to the respondent, Mr. Adedipe informed the court of a notice of Appeal he had filed against the courts ruling, as well as a motion for stay of further proceedings.

He argued that the EFCC ought to have waited to abide by the decision of the court of appeal in respect of the matter.

Mr. Adedipe also noted that the publication of the courts order in the national daily was only done on May 11, adding that such notice was too short to allow for the filing of any response.

Responding, lawyer to the EFCC, Rotimi Oyedepo, stressed that the business of the day was for any interested party to appear and show cause.

He noted that the argument of the respondents counsel fell outside the purview of the courts business with respect to the matter at hand, and urged that progress be made.

In her observation, however, Justice Olatoregun noted that the suit will only be adjourned on the ground that the time frame of the said publication was short.

She, therefore, adjourned the case to May 22, for the respondent or any interested party to appear and show cause why the interim forfeiture order should not be made absolute.

NAN also reports that Justice Olatoregun had sometime in November, 2016, granted a forfeiture order of the said sum following an application by the Commission.

The court, had however, in March this year vacated the earlier order, following an application by Mrs. Jonathans counsel, Mr. Adedipe, who had challenged the propriety of the EFCCs action.

The EFCC had then filed a new motion seeking an order for interim forfeiture of the said $5.8 million dollars lodged in the respondents Skye Bank account.

The Commission also sought an order directing the interim forfeiture of N2.4 billion discovered in an EcoBank account in the name of La Wari Furniture and Bath Ltd, suspected to be proceeds of crime.

It further sought the publication in any national newspaper, of the said order, to enable any interested party to appear and show why the interim order should not be made final.

The commission averred in an affidavit that it received an intelligence report that funds suspected to be proceeds of crime were warehoused in a Skye Bank account belonging to Mrs. Jonathan.

It said that the report was analysed and found worthy of investigation, adding that the ex- First Lady opened the account on Feb. 7, 2013.

According to the Commission, several cash deposits were made by the ex- First Lady in the United States Dollars, through Waripamo Dudafa, a former aide to ex- President Goodluck Jonathan.

The commission averred that another frequent depositor of funds into the said account was one Festus Iyoha, a steward in the State House, Abuja.

The EFCC said that between Feb. 8, 2013 and Jan. 30, 2015, about $6.7 million suspected to be proceeds of crime were deposited into the account.

According to the Commission, Mrs. Jonathan had dissipated the funds, leaving a balance of about $5.7 million.

The Commission further averred that if the fund was not forfeited in the interim, it may be fully used by Mrs. Jonathan.

It added that N2.03 billion suspected proceeds of crime, was currently on fixed deposit in the account of La Wari Furniture, in addition to a credit balance of about N389 million.

The Commission therefore urged the court to grant the application in the interest of justice.

Granting the order, Justice Olatoregun adjourned the case till May 15, to enable any interested party to appear and show reason why the interim order should not be made final. (NAN)

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The trial of two Chinese importers accused of importing sub-standard tyres into Nigeria was again stalled, Monday, at the Lagos Division of the Federal High Court due to the absence of an interpreter.

Taolung Shen, 36, and Jing Yau, 22, two Chinese nationals; and Chinedu Madubuike alongside their companies, Sino Nigeria Import and Export Ltd and Nedeca Ltd., are facing a four-count charge of importation of sub-standard tyres and conspiracy.

The defendants were arrested in February after the Standard Organization of Nigeria, acting on an intelligence, stormed their warehouse in Lagos and seized 60 containers of tyre worth an estimated N5 billion  the agencys biggest ever seizure.

They were arraigned on March 20. The suspects pleaded not guilty to each of the counts, and were granted bail in the sum of N10 million each with two sureties each in like sum. The court also ordered the two companies charged to submit a bond in the sum of N10 million.

Their arraignment had, however, been delayed for weeks following the inability of the prosecution to produce an English-Chinese language interpreter.

On Monday, the trial of the accused could not proceed due to the absence of an interpreter for the accused.

Consequently, Justice Mojisola Olatoregun fixed July 5 for continuation of trial.

In the charge, the accused were said to have committed the offence in February (this year) by conspiring to import tyres which did not meet the relevant Nigeria industrial standard.

They were alleged to have stuffed various sizes of tyres into one, knowing same to be in a dangerous state, or been injurious to human life.

The accused were said to have imported the tyres which did not comply with the mandatory Nigeria standard, on account of their stuffing different sizes into one, thereby making the tyres to be unfit for its purpose.

The tyres were said to have failed to meet the relevant Nigerian industrial standard and likely to endanger human lives.

Again, the accused were alleged to have failed to furnish returns on the conditions of the imported tyres as required by law.

The offences are said to have contravened the provisions of sections 320 and 510 of the Criminal Code Act, Cap C38, Laws of the Federation, 2004.

It is also said to have contravened the provisions of sections 26 and 32 of the Standard Organisation of Nigeria Act, No 14, Laws of the Federation, 2004.

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Justice Adegbola Gbolagunte on Monday discharged Abideen Alasela and Tope Mustapha due to the failure of the prosecution to present witnesses against them.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the defendants had been in prison custody since 2006 on a four-count charge of conspiracy and armed robbery, with others still at large.

The judge noted that the liberty of a citizen is a fundamental human right guaranteed by the Constitution.

He noted that for the 11 years the case had lasted, the prosecution had continued to stall the case due to their inability to get or call any witness to give evidence against the accused persons.

I hereby discharged the accused persons but not on merit, the judge said.

Mrs R. Yusuf, Principal State Counsel, had earlier told the court that efforts to get witnesses to testify on the matter had proved abortive, and urged the court to use its discretion to decide on the case.

The counsel to the defendants, B. Falola, told the court that since the defendants were confined to prison custody in July 2006, the prosecution was only able to present one witness.

Mr. Falola, therefore, urged the court to strike out the case for want of diligent prosecution.

NAN reports that the defendants were alleged to have committed the offences of conspiracy and armed robbery on July 12, 2006 at 1 a.m. in Oke-Apa, Yemetu area of Ibadan.

The prosecutor had alleged that the defendants conspired and robbed three persons, Ayorinde Samsudeen, Kazeem Fakorede and Adebiyi Omobolanle of their properties and N72,000 cash while armed with cutlasses and big stick.

The defendants had pleaded not guilty to the charges and were remanded in prison custody since July 2006 without bail.

(NAN)

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A Badagry Chief Magistrates Court in Lagos State on Monday ordered the remand of one Mohammed Nura in Badagry Medium Prison over alleged rape of a 16-year-old boy.

Mr. Nura, whose address is unknown, was said to have raped the 16-year-old boy on Sunday, April 16.

The prosecutor, Akpan Ikem, told the court that the accused committed the offence on April 16 along Customs Quarters Road, Seme.

He said the accused, who is a father of two, assaulted the boy by forcibly inserting his manhood into his anus.

The boy was just walking pass when the accused grabbed him, overpowered him and forcibly had carnal knowledge of him.

While he was carrying out the act, he was caught by passersby and handed over to the police, he said.

The offence contravened Section 259 of the Criminal Code, Laws of Lagos State of Nigeria, 201.

The accused pleaded not guilty to the offence.

The Chief Magistrate, Jimoh Adefioye, ordered that the accused be remanded in prison.

The magistrate directed that the case file be duplicated and a copy sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for advice.

He adjourned the case until July 3.

(NAN)

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More than 50 entrepreneurs and senior executives from eight economies including Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, have been enrolled in studies in China under the Tsinghua PBCSF Belt and Road EMBA Program for Southeast Asia.

Tsinghua University authorities and some of these students shared their insights on the Belt and Road Initiative in Beijing on Thursday. Let us take a look.

Tengku Zafrul Aziz, CEO of CIMB Group Holdings Bhd, a universal bank headquartered in Malaysia

Tengku Zafrul Aziz, CEO of CIMB Group Holdings Bhd, made a speech at the opening ceremony of the Tsinghua PBCSF Belt and Road EMBA Program for Southeast Asia on May 11, 2017 in Beijing. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

"No doubt, there is a lot happening right now  from the recent political outcome in France to the improving outlook for the global economy  but for Asia, the theme set to anchor the region's future growth is China's Belt and Road Initiative, and China's strengthening relations with its neighbors, including Malaysia.

"What is profound about the initiative is that it is an opportunity to create vital infrastructure that connects and further empowers trade."

"According to the Asian Development Bank, Asia alone needs about $770 billion a year until 2020 in new infrastructure. Belt and Road projects such as a gas pipeline from the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar to Southwest China, or a rail link between Beijing to Germany, might just be the catalyst to address this need."

"For those reasons, I am tremendously excited for the Belt and Road Initiative. "
Human rights defenders, journalists and protesters in West and Central Africa are facing ever-higher levels of persecution, intimidation and violence, warned Amnesty International on Tuesday as it launched a new global campaign demanding an end to the onslaught of attacks against brave individuals standing up to injustice.

The Brave campaign calls on states in the region to recognize the legitimacy of human rights defenders by respecting their work, giving space for it and protecting them from threats. States should take concrete measures to achieve these aims including by adopting strong protection laws and revising or repealing laws used to target human rights defenders.

States across the region have deployed a broad and increasingly inventive range of tactics to stop people standing up against injustice and to coerce them into self-censorship, said Alioune Tine, Amnesty Internationals Regional Director for West and Central Africa

By removing the right to protest, placing activists under surveillance, and intimidating them with threats and physical attacks, many governments are carrying out a full-frontal assault on human rights defenders.

In a briefing Shut down for speaking out: Human Rights Defenders under attack in West and Central Africa published today, Amnesty International documents the mounting danger faced by those defending human rights in the region.

Growing arsenal of tools used to crack down on defenders

The combination of mass surveillance, new technology, the misuse of laws and crackdowns on peaceful protests is exposing human rights defenders to dangerously high levels of risk, the briefing warns.

In almost every country in West and Central Africa, people participating in peaceful protests have been repressed through the banning of demonstrations or by the use of the unnecessary or excessive force against protesters.

Since January 2014, Amnesty International has documented 271 protesters killed  one every five days  and thousands more injured during protests across the region, although the true number is likely to be higher. The overwhelming majority of these killings and injuries were committed by the security forces who used teargas, batons and live ammunition to disperse protesters or armored vehicles to ram their way through the crowds, even when protests were peaceful. There is rarely, if ever, accountability for such heavy-handed repression.

Arbitrary arrests and detentions and administrative measures

Since January 2014, Amnesty International has documented the arbitrary arrest of at least 87 human rights defenders in West and Central Africa. In 2016 alone, 13 anti-slavery activists in Mauritania were brought before court on trumped up charges and sentenced to between three and 15 years in prison. In November last year, an Appeal Court acquitted and released three of them and reduced the sentence of the 10 others.

In Chad, four pro-democracy activists were arrested in NDjamena between March and April 2016 for planning to organise peaceful public demonstrations against the current presidents bid for re-election for a fifth term. They were found guilty of incitement to an unarmed gathering, and received suspended prison sentences after more than two weeks in detention.

Several states including Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo introduced legislation which could be used to target human rights defenders, journalists and whistle-blowers in reprisal for their work, often in the name of countering terrorism and cybercrime.

In Cameroon, anti-terror legislation originally introduced to respond to the security threat from Boko Haram, was used to silence civil society leaders in the English-speaking regions who called for protests against discrimination.

Administrative measures  such as delaying or denying the registration of NGOs to operate or restricting their funding  have also been used to prevent the work of human rights defenders. In Togo, for example, officials refused to deliver registration certificates to a group of LGBTI activists because they challenged cultural and social norms.

Human rights defenders are not enemies of the state; they are individuals who stand against injustice and take peaceful action to improve the human rights situation. Without their courage, our world is less fair, less just and less equal, said Alioune Tine.

Internet and social media restrictions

Among the emerging trends is the use of new technologies and targeted surveillance, including online, to threaten and silence activists.

Restrictions on the use of the internet are increasingly being used across the region. In Gabon, Gambia and the Republic of Congo, access to the internet was cut off for between two and five days before and after Presidential elections in 2016, while social media was restricted around elections in Chad. In the most severe restrictions to date, the Internet was shut down in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon from January to April 2017 following protests about the use of French in courts and schools and demands for greater autonomy.

Many states have passed legislation which restricts internet access and subjects human rights defenders to online surveillance. For instance, in Senegal, amendments to the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure empower the authorities to restrict access to illicit content online and to hack into computers without judicial oversight.

In Nigeria, the Cyber Crime Act, requires internet service providers to keep all traffic and other data of subscribers for two years and make that data available to law enforcement agencies upon request.

The demonization of human rights defenders

Amnesty International urges the authorities in West and Central Africa to refrain from using language that disparages human rights defenders including by labelling them criminals, foreign agents, terrorists, or undesirables.

When they are not threatening or harassing them, governments are attempting to cultivate open hostility towards human rights defenders by peddling demonizing rhetoric that portrays activists as threats to national security, said Alioune Tine.

It is a tribute to the brave men and women across the region that in spite of this continuing repression, they continue to fight for justice. We call on states to recognize and protect the legitimate work of those standing up for the inherent dignity and equal rights of all people.

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The Nigerian government has said that it will not interfere in the on-going court actions in respect of the Malabu Oil Prospecting Lease, OPL 245 scandal.

The Minister of State for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, made this known in a letter addressed to the Chairman of the Civil Society Network Against Corruption, CSNAC, Olanrewaju Suraju.

The organization had written the minister, warning the government against compromising the investigation and prosecution of Malabu and by extension ENI with his (Mr. Kachikwus) recent endorsement of ENI on his recent trip to Italy.

Earlier, while addressing journalists on the sidelines of the annual Offshore Technology Conference in Houston Texas, U. S. A in May, Mr. Kachikwu had disclosed that the Zabazaba deepwater project in OPL 245 will continue in spite of controversies surrounding the oil block.

According to him, the project, a Greenfield offshore licence block located in the OPL 245, which is to be carried out by the trio of the Federal Government, Shell and the Nigerian Agip Exploration Limited (NAE), would go on as scheduled and the protracted dispute on the block with Malabu oil will not affect it.

We need to talk because without any impact in terms of the project, which must continue, these are huge billions of dollars of investment in Nigeria, I am not going to shut that down. The issue of the criminality is outside my realm, he had said.

My realm is doing two things: Make sure the investment go ahead so we can get returns, and two, get back the one billion dollars from wherever they said they have put it and give me back the money so that the Federal Government can have it back.

Mr. Kachikwus stance on the OPL 245 scandal, which saw ENI and Shell pay $1.1 billion through the Nigerian government to private accounts of a convicted money launderer, is at variance with that of the anti-graft EFCC which wants the block returned to the Nigerian government since it was fraudulently obtained.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported how the block was awarded in 1998 to Malabu, a firm partly owned by then petroleum minister, Dan Etete, in violation of Nigerian laws, since the company was later found to have a fictitious director on its board.

But in his response to the CSNAC enquiry, Mr. Kachikwu said the government would await the actions of the court before taking far-reaching decisions in terms of its dealing with ENI.

He added that in the meantime, to the extent that ENI is involved in a thorough-going relationship with the Nigerian government as a Joint Venture Partner, the government would continue to engage the company for the benefit of the country.

Mr. Kachikwu, however, noted that while the government pursues its commercial interest in the deal with ENI, it will not hesitate to enforce the nations laws if the need arises.

Please be assured that the Federal Government has no interests in interfering with the court processes and investigations into the issues surrounding the award of OPL 245 to Malabu oil, least of all in matters relating to corrupt dealings, he said.

Hence, whist we will continue to superintend the interest of the Federal Government in our commercial relationship with the upstream partners, the Government will not refrain from pursuing the enforcement of our laws, the minister added.

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The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, JAMB, on Monday said it has made plans to move candidates of the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, who were scheduled to have their examination at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, LAUTECH, Ogbomoso, to Ilorin to write their examination due to continued unrest at the university.

The candidates who were to sit for the exams on Monday inside the LAUTECH campus Computer Based Test (CBT) centre were prevented from gaining entrance inside the premises by protesting students of the institution.

The students had mobilised themselves as early as 6.00 a.m. for the protest, and stationed themselves in teams across all entrances into the institution.

They reportedly barricaded all the entrances, thereby, preventing any movement in and outside of the campus and in the process also denying all staff of the institution entry.

Reacting to the development, JAMBs spokesperson, Fabian Benjamin, in a telephone conversation told PREMIUM TIMES that the board is concluding arrangements to reschedule the exams for the affected candidates at Ilorin.

We will reschedule them. Even though its not our problem, its the schools problem; but they are our candidates. There is no private centre in Ogbomosho and the closest centre to Ogbomosho is Ilorin.

This disruption happened today and we need to do some technical arrangements first; So, no date has been fixed yet. But we are going to write the exams in Ilorin except if LAUTECH resolves the students unrest, Mr. Benjamin said.

As the UTME commenced on Saturday at 633 centres across the country with 1.7 million candidates expected to sit, many have lamented the irregularities experienced in the network at the Computer Based Centres. Some of the candidates in FCT, Osun, Ebonyi and Nasarawa states expressed dissatisfaction over poor internet challenges at their respective CBT centres.

Speaking at the Digital Bridge Institute, one of the CBT centres in Abuja on Saturday, the Registrar of JAMB, Is-haq Oloyede said that over 57,000 candidates sat on the first day.

He noted that the examination was starting off with two sessions rather than three, to allow the centres cover for any contingencies.

According to him, the examination started late in few centres including the Digital Bridge Institute centre, where the first session started at about 8 a.m., an hour behind schedule.

The first day we are having a little above 57,000; we want to be skeletal today. We do not want to have the three sessions today, this is the first day and we expect that they will have some wiring problems because we know that most of the centres have been abandoned since last year but by Monday, we will start three full sessions.

Mr. Oloyede also disclosed that four centres, which were confronted with challenges caused by some individuals who were out to sabotage the process, were being closely monitored to forestall further hitches.

Out of 633 centres, we have problems with four. We have two problems in Bauchi, one in Kano, one in Ekpoma not from technology problem but from those who are cutting corners in the centres, those who have not put the centres in place and for the ingenuity of certain people and criminals that do not know that we have put technology in place to detect what they are doing.

There was a little disturbance in Ekpoma and we are monitoring what is going on, there is a little problem in Uturu; we are monitoring what is happening there too, he added.

The centres JAMB administrator, Enobong Bassey, who confirmed Mr. Oloyedes visit told PREMIUM TIMES that only two batches sat for the exams on Saturday. He however added that the centre catered for three batches of candidates on Monday.

We were only able to take two batches on Saturday due to some logistic issues which we have resolved. As we speak, the third batch is writing their exams today(Monday), he said.

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A standard gauge rail line stretching from Parakou in Benin Republic will terminate in Ilorin, central Nigeria, upon completion, as part of a budding infrastructure rebirth aimed at unlocking potential investment opportunities in the West African sub-region.

The project was disclosed at Africas premier infrastructure summit which kicked off in Abuja Monday.

The event, organised by Africa Finance Corporation, was held on Monday and continues on Tuesday. It brings together some of the frontline experts in infrastructure investments who would offer suggestions on how to approach the continents infrastructure demands.

The cross-border rail project is part of a series of investment arrangements put in place by Petrolins Backbone Project  which includes a rail line to be built on existing networks linking Cotonou (Benin) to Parakou (Benin), to Dosso (Niger) and to Niamey (Niger) for a total 1,032 kilometres.

The project also includes a new dry port, a new deepwater port, a dry port and a new international airport being planned around Cotonou-Parakou axis in Benin Republic, Petrolin said.

The project will unlock opportunities in other critical infrastructure endeavours such as schools, universities, health centres, and tourism areas.

The core of our business strategy is to use our international strength to bring on board first class international companies and, more importantly, to involve local indigenous partners and investors to associate them to the development of the sub-region, Samuel Dossou-Aworet, Chairman of Petrolin Group, said on the opening day of the event, tagged: AFC Live 2017.

Were currently planning a train line from Parakou to Ilorin, Nigeria, he added.

But details of the construction project, which could span up to 360 kilometres, were not immediately provided at the event.

Andrew Alli, the President and CEO of AFC, who said investors unveiled about a dozen projects that would gulp as much as $13 billion at Mondays session of the event, noted that his team would prioritise partnerships across the continent.

We will focus on deal-making, with a view to leveraging public-private partnerships for continental infrastructure transformation, Mr. Alli said.

AFC, which has its headquarters in Lagos, said the infrastructure projects were planned for Benin, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Niger, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, amongst others.

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A Lagos Division of the Federal High Court has fixed June 6th and 9th for the commencement of the trial involving Nigerias former Aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, over allegations of money laundering and criminal conspiracy.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on Monday rearraigned Mr. Fani-Kayode, who was part of former President Goodluck Jonathans re-election campaign, alongside Nenadi Usman, a former minister of state for finance on a 17-count charge of money laundering and alleged diversion of N4.6 billion.

Others charged include one Danjuma Yusuf and a company, Joint Trust Dimension Nig. Ltd.

The defendants pleaded not guilty before Justice Rilwan Aikawa, a new judge.

The judge had taken over trial after Mr. Fani-Kayode applied for the previous one, Muslim Hassan, to recuse himself from the trial on the grounds that he was the EFCC officer who signed a criminal charge filed against him in 2008.

The defendants had been arraigned before Mr. Hassan in June 2016, but Mr. Fani-Kayode had raised concerns over whether the judge would be impartial during the matter. It is unclear if an incident during trial, in October 2016, when Mr. Hassan ordered the seizure of Mr. Fani-Kayodes mobile phone after it rang out during proceedings, raised a red flag for the ex-minister.

The EFCC had prosecuted Mr. Fani-Kayode before Justice Rita Ofili-Ajumogobia over allegations of money laundering to the tune of N100 million. At that time, Mr. Hassan worked as an EFCC legal officer before his eventual elevation to the bench.

After a trial that lasted seven years, Mrs. Ofili-Ajumogobia discharged and acquitted Mr. Fani-Kayode of all charges, a development the former minister said Mr. Hassan was unhappy about.

Last March, Mr. Hassan while withdrawing from the trial and declining making further decisions on it, insisted he had not been biased against Mr. Fani-Kayode.

It is not in dispute that I signed Exhibit FFK1 as far back as 2008 over nine years ago, as the then Head of Legal, Lagos office of the EFCC, prior to my elevation as a judge of the Federal High Court, Mr. Hassan had said in the ruling announcing his referral of the case back to the Chief Judge for reassignment to another judge.

But it must be emphasized that as at then, I never participated in the trial of the second defendant (Fani-Kayode) and at all material times during the pendency of that case.

A few weeks earlier, Mrs. Usman had applied to the court for an order separating the charges against her from Mr. Fani-Kayode, and also a transfer of her trial to the Abuja division of the federal court for convenience.

On Monday, Justice Aikawa allowed the defendants to continue on the bail granted them by the former judge and adjourned till June 6th and 9th for trial and ruling on whether the case would be transferred to Abuja.

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After 18 years of groping in the dark, Nigeria has finally presented a National Anti-Corruption Strategy (NACS 2017-2021) Framework to stakeholders. This feat, occurring during a recent adoption/validation meeting in April in Abuja, is a watershed, as no administration, since 1960, has managed to place such a framework before the public, despite the seemingly bold rhetoric against corruption by successive governments.

PREMIUM TIMES congratulates the government for this landmark achievement and hopes this would now herald a commitment to greater levels of efficiency in policy and action in the war against graft. While it can be said that the Buhari administration is one of the few in the country to have come to power with a direct mandate to fight corruption, and which has shown remarkable political will to fight this scourge, yet the publication of this strategic framework to guide the fight might not necessarily be the magic wand that would make corruption disappear immediately.

As a framework, the NACS only provides a banner and set of themes that would guide the arms and tiers of government, different sectors, stakeholders, etc. in crafting their own strategic responses and concrete action plans against corruption. This is to produce coherence and synergy in a holistic effort to rid Nigeria of this menace, in line with the stated mission of the document, which is To implement a holistic National Anti-Corruption Strategy which will provide a platform to all sectors and stakeholders in the fight to combat corruption.

The will and strategy to fight corruption are a necessary set of preliminaries to establish, but these in themselves are not sufficient to stimulate the needed stakeholder response. Attention should now be turned towards how each group in society articulates its own fight against corruption, in consonance with the NACS and as underpinned by detailed action plans.

The NACS document is purportedly owned by the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, and has been validated and adopted by key stakeholders (including representatives of the Federal Ministry of Justice, National Assembly, EFCC, ICPC, CCB, the governments Technical Unit on Governance and Anti-Corruption Reforms, elements of the civil society, and the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, to name a few). The strategy is yet to be signed-off by the president, who is only expected to do so sometime later, at a Federal Executive Council meeting.

One question any reflective observer of the war against corruption in Nigeria would ask at this stage is: Do the leaders of the Buhari administration really believe in the vision set out in the document? Do they truly own this strategic vision of a Nigeria free of corruption through preventive measures, law enforcement and the rule of law for human development? Going by the administrations current over-emphasis on prosecution, sanctions and enforcement, and its current obsession with the recovery of stolen funds, complete with a whistle blower policy (which some have argued might be creating perverse incentives rather than truly aiding the fight against corruption), have we put the cart before the horse?

The All Progressives Congress (APC) created a beautiful manifesto and on that platform voters engaged with the candidates, took note of the promises and by a wide margin, voted them in to replace the erstwhile incumbents. Well, not long after coming into office, it became clear that the manifesto was not really owned by the flagbearer of the party and some of his key advisers. Specifically, Garba Shehu, the Presidents spokesman denied that the key campaign document: My Covenant with Nigerians emanated from their campaign promise. PREMIUM TIMES fact-checked the denial and showed definitively in our report of first September 2015 that it did emanate from the APC campaign office. Given this background, PREMIUM TIMES advises the government to take steps to convince Nigerians that the NACS will not suffer a similar fate in the hands of important stakeholders, given that the effort to create it, by admission of the document, started as far back as 2009, during the YarAdua administration.

PREMIUM TIMES also wishes to caution that the question of ownership is likely to become the biggest obstacle to the effective and efficient implementation of the newly presented NACS. The Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT  comprising some 21 agencies of the Federal Government involved in curbing corruption) put together in 2009, developed this strategy to combat corruption. During the Goodluck Jonathan administration, the document and process were not adequately supported by two successive Attorneys-Generals of the Federation, whose aides managed to supplant it with versions and processes of their own (with support from an international donor programme), setting in limbo the great work that had hitherto been done by the IATT in seeking the views and inputs of a great number of stakeholder groups across the country. This, sadly, is one of the reasons the effort has taken this long to see the light of day.

PREMIUM TIMES encourages the Buhari administration to ensure that the current Attorney-General is fully supported in his effort to kick-off the process of ensuring that the coherence and synergy suggested by the NACS, is established for real progress in the war against corruption.

PREMIUM TIMES also encourages the administration to publish the definitive figures on how much has been lost to corruption, how much it has recovered so far and how much it has paid out to whistle blowers through its Whistle blower policy, in view of the purported 2.5 to 5 percent payments from recovered sums to whistle blowers. Even then, one wonders why the government has not chosen to include, similarly, that at least 20 per cent of recovered sums be ploughed into the corruption fight, especially through preventive actions. This would, at least, begin to answer questions such as: How will the action plans developed to implement the strategy be funded? How will it be resourced and driven?

The NACS suggests that achieving aligned incentives will be the key policy thrust in the fight against corruption. This should, at least, reflect in an alignment of vision and political will between the presidency, the public service and the people. PREMIUM TIMES urges the Buhari administration to consider having groups from the business community, the civil service and civil society join hands with the Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-Corruption (PACAC), in a combined effort that is coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Justice, to oversee the implementation of this strategy. An action plan with clearly articulated priorities would also be required.

According to the NACS, Greed, fear, apathy, and ignorance exacerbate the erosion of our value system and standards. When this occurs, formal and social controls against corruption start to break down, and social tolerance for the malaise increases. This leaves many willing to stand by and watch, even admire those acting with impunity, without attempting to put an end to the misbehaviour. As people succeed in taking undue advantage of the system and sanctions prove ineffective, perverse incentives begin to grow, creating greater demand for corruption and institutionalising the rampant negative behaviour observed. Where there is no real incentive to do the right thing, combating corruption is a highly challenging endeavour. The National Strategy assumes an environment in which efforts are being made to achieve better alignment between social, private and public interests through the instrumentality of the budget, public recognition and public vigilance among others.

PREMIUM TIMES feels that without enlisting the public into this fight against corruption, the efforts will be doomed from the get go! Proper stakeholder engagement is vital to the success of the NACS, as published. A great deal of effort has been expended by the Buhari administration in the fight against corruption. However, this is appearing more like a fight between the EFCC and everyone else. This might produce short-term results on the level of the recovery of the proceeds of crime, but destroy the longer-term strategy of aligning policy and action with a clear strategic objective. For NACS to achieve its strategic objective of achieving: a Nigeria free of corruption through preventive measures, law enforcement and the rule of law for human development, a much more comprehensive approach is necessary.

PREMIUM TIMES believes that without a diversity of actions in society by a multiplicity of stakeholders, the fight against corruption will fail to gain traction within society, and support for the anti-corruption effort will fail to attain a critical mass. If we do not achieve this critical mass of actors demanding an end to corruption, we would fail to develop the much-needed momentum necessary for change to occur, first, within the social norms in the Nigerian society, and then more tangibly in the behaviours exhibited by those in positions of trust.

PREMIUM TIMES calls on the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation to circulate the NACS document as widely as possible, so that all stakeholders can engage with its content and start on the proverbial journey of a 1000 miles towards holistically ridding Nigeria of corruption, which begins with such step.

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Normal medical and healthcare activities have resumed at Kogi government-owned hospitals as the state chapter of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has suspended its 11-day old strike.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) correspondent, who monitored the Kogi State Specialist Hospital (KSSH) Lokoja, on Monday reports that life had returned to the hospital.

NAN reports that some patients were seen waiting to be attended to by doctors at the outpatient department of the hospital.

Abdulrahman Jafar, the president of Association of Resident Doctors (ARD), told NAN that they suspended the strike due to intervention from some traditional rulers and other eminent stakeholders.

As you can see, I am presently at my duty post attending to patients; we thank God that the strike has been suspended.

What we noticed during the strike and from our interaction from stakeholders is that there was communication gap between the government and the NMA.

We also want to correct the notion that we are being used by politicians; no one can drag us into politics.

We are professionals, and it is all about our welfare and justice, Mr. Jafar said.

Bamidele Osasuna, Chairman of the hospitals chapter of the Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Professional Unions and Associations, also told NAN that the doctors suspended the strike for two weeks pending the outcome of negotiation with the government.

He added that patients had been receiving treatment in the hospital and doctors were on ground to attend to them.

On JAC, Mr. Osasuna said the committee had given the government till May 19 to resolve all issues regarding their demands so as to forestall an impending danger in the health sector.

One of the patients, Akoh Ojone, told NAN that they were happy that the strike was suspended and commended the doctors for attending to them.

He urged both parties to honour any agreement reached in order to save lives, especially the poor who could not afford the high cost of bills at private hospitals across the state.

NAN further reports that activities have also resumed at other public health facilities in the state capital visited by NAN.

(NAN)

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The Kaduna State Government says it has confirmed eight deaths since the outbreak of Cerebro Spinal Meningitis, CSM. was reported in parts of the country in January.

The Commissioner for Health and Human Services, Paul Dogo, confirmed this when he spoke with journalists in Kaduna on Monday.

Mr. Dogo said that the state had recorded the eight deaths from 11 confirmed cases of CSM as at May 5.

He said that the state recorded 68 suspected cases in 15 local government areas, but 11 cases were confirmed to be CSM and eight among them died.

He said the eight cases were confirmed in Kaduna North, Kaduna South, Igabi and Giwa Local Government Areas.

This makes Kaduna State to be ranked 22 out of the 28 states with confirmed cases of CSM nationwide, the commissioner said.

Over 1000 people are believed to have died from CSM across Nigeria since the start of the latest outbreak.

Mr. Dogo said that proactive measures were being taken and personnel were being trained on CSM outbreak investigation and case management.

According to him, relevant personnel of the ministry are handling procurement of spinal needles, pastorex kits and TI bottles as well as repositioning of drugs, ceftriaxone and medical consumables to health facilities for case management.

Mr. Dogo said distribution of ciprofoxacin to high risk primary contacts of confirmed cases was going on while meningitis alert had been sent to all medical doctors.

Awareness campaigns through radio jingles and distribution of posters, syringes and gloves, training on CSF sample collection and transportation is also going on to tackle further outbreak, Mr. Dogo said.

Meanwhile, the commissioner said that the state had also confirmed two cases of Lassa fever in the state within the period.

We have recorded two cases of Lassa fever in 2017, one male and female, both from Igabi Local Government Area, he said.

Mr. Dogo said the two persons came visited the state from Gombe and Ebonyi states, respectively.

While the male patient was isolated in Kakuri IDCC and treated successfully with Ribavirin, the female patient died on the day of presentation and was diagnosed post mortem with blood sample.

All their contacts enlisted and monitored for 21 days in surveillance and none developed the symptoms, Mr. Dogo said.

(NAN)

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The Lagos State Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, on Monday presented cheques totalling N55 million to the families of security officers who lost their lives in the Ishawo area of Ikorodu after an ambush unleashed on them by militants.

The families of four police officers that died during the operation got N10 million each, while an officer who sustained injury during the attack and is still recuperating in the hospital, Alexandra Ugadu, a Sergeant, got N5 million.

Also, a cheque of N10 million was presented to the family of a military officer, A. Mohammed, who lost his life during the attack.

The officers were killed after successfully rescuing kidnapped victims kept in the riverine area by the militants.

The police officers, whose families benefited from the death insurance scheme of the state government, are late Inspectors Iroagbalahi and Francis Pemi, and Sergeants Mamuda Dembo and Idor Ekoro.

Speaking at the presentation ceremony, Governor Ambode said the move was in appreciation of the supreme sacrifices paid by the late officers in the course of ensuring the safety of residents of the state.

The governor, who was represented by the Secretary to the State Government, Tunji Bello, said the donation was in line with the pledge to review insurance benefits to security operatives in the State.

Mr. Bello recalled that since coming on board, Mr. Ambode immediately reviewed the insurance benefits for security operatives in the State with a pledge to pay N10 million to any officer killed during operation, adding that the ceremony was in consonance with the earlier promise.

This is to appreciate what the gallant officers have done; they sacrificed their lives in the course of protecting several of us and we have to appreciate them. As a matter of fact, if we dont do this, who will? The Governor has always said that we must continue to appreciate those who paid the supreme sacrifice for our lives because they died for us.

We must continue to appreciate them because if we dont do this, who will be ready to pay the supreme sacrifice for our safety? The officers are sent out to protect us and when they are going, they are not even sure of coming back and having paid the supreme sacrifice, should we leave them just like that, definitely not and it is in appreciation of what they have done that we are doing this, he said.

The Governor, while commiserating with the families of the late officers, assured that the State Government would continue to support security officers and their families in the State.

Responding on behalf of beneficiaries, the States Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, commended Governor Ambode and the State Government for the donations, which he described as a moral booster, saying that the gesture would go a long way in motivating officers.

On behalf of the Inspector General of Police, I stand to appreciate Lagos State Government for this morale boosting gesture that you have showed to our colleagues who, in the course of discharging their statutory duties to this nation, demonstrated bravery, gallantry and courage but unfortunately lost their lives in an encounter with criminal elements, said Mr. Owoseni.

The IG appreciates this kind gesture and on behalf of the respective families of the officers that lost their lives, in as much as we know that money will not bring their lives back, but you have given us that confidence that in our trial and sadness period, the State is standing solidly behind us. This will spur us to be more committed to the security of the State, Owoseni said.

Earlier, Governor Ambode, on behalf of the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (LSSTF) presented 20 brand new operational vehicles with modern communication gadgets to the Rapid Response Squad (RRS) of the State Police Command.

The Executive Secretary of LSSTF, Abdulrazaq Balogun, in his remarks, said the donation of the operational vehicles was in furtherance of the commitment of the State Government to bequeath a robust security architecture to residents, just as he assured that the government would soon donate another round of vehicles to other security agencies in the State.

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A traditional ruler has handed three homeless boys aged 11, 12 and 14 years to the Ogun State government for their alleged involvement in armed robbery and other social vices in his community.

The traditional ruler of Owode-Egba community in Obafemi-Owode local government area of the state, Kolawole Sowemimo, said he handed the boys to the government after the police said they do not handle complaints against minors.

Olumide Sotubo, the Director of Social Welfare at the state Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Welfare, told PREMIUM TIMES that the youngsters would be arraigned before a family court in Abeokuta, the state capital.

Mr. Sotubo said the kids had confessed to involvement in armed robbery, house breaking, smoking of Indian hemp and petty stealing.

He said all of them were from broken homes, with one identified as the son of a policeman whose whereabouts were unknown.

The suspects will be charged at the family court ahead of their transfer to the Juvenile Correctional Home in Asero, Abeokuta, Mr. Sotubo said.

The director explained that the state government would carry out rehabilitation of the boys at the correctional home with a view to later reintegrating them in society.

He also said the authorities would try to locate their families, stressing that the state government has zero tolerance for school-age children being out of school .

The traditional ruler alleged that the boys were usually engaged as pathfinders during operations by criminal gangs and had become a thorn in the side of Owode-Egba community.

Mr. Sowemimo said they were homeless and usually slept in shanties and Indian hemp joints in the community.

As a father, I am worried about the future of these kids. The case was reported to the police in Owode but they could not be detained because of their ages, so I had to take them to the palace with the aim to rehabilitate them, the monarch said.

After three days in the palace, I resolved to hand them over to the Ministry of Social Welfare and Women Affairs. As you can see them and hear from their confessions, they need total rehabilitation, the traditional ruler said.

He expressed worry over incessant criminal activities in his domain and its environs, particularly with the new trend of kids serving as pathfinders for robbery gangs.

We cannot sleep with our two eyes closed again in Owode-Egba. We are worried about this new dimension of kids at ages 11, 12 and 14 turning into armed bandits. One of them even claimed he wanted to be like Sina Rambo, the dare-devil armed robber.

Speaking with PREMIUM TIMES, the kids admitted to addiction to Indian hemp and belonging to a robbery gang.

The boys said their gang leader, who was on the run, armed them with knives and always took them out for robbery operations.

They said in most of their operations, they were made to scale security fences and hide within premises to study and give signals to their leaders on when to strike.

I am called Sina Rambo because people see me as a replica of Sina Rambo, one of them said. I smoke Indian hemp with my two other colleagues.

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CHENGDU - After 16 days, 26 tons of frozen pork from the Netherlands arrived in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province earlier this month, the first carried from the Netherlands to China by train.

"Trains can slash about 40 days of shipping time compared to sea, and are about 10,000 yuan ($1,450) cheaper per ton compared to air," said Shu Changguo, general manager of the importer.

As China's Belt and Road Initiative gains steam, international trains are becoming a realistic logistical alternative between China and Europe.

Last year, 460 trains ran between Chengdu, Tilburg in the Netherlands, and Nuremberg in Germany. In the first four months of this year, 91 trains to Chengdu have brought about $150 million of European goods.

"The Netherlands is the most important logistical center in Europe, and Chengdu, in China's west, has huge potential, which means great opportunities for European countries," said Koen Sizoo, head of the Netherlands' consulate in neighboring Chongqing Municipality, which has international trains connecting with Duisburg, Germany.

More European countries are using the trains. In a skyscraper in Chengdu, a Polish store has been in operation for about ten months, offering specialties such as jam, condiments, snacks and vodka.

The store is run by Poland's Hatrans Logistics, a partner in Chengdu-Europe trains. The company also runs an online store called Chopin-Deli on JD.com, selling Polish goods.

"Ten years ago, Polish companies barely knew about Chengdu, but since the trains started running four years ago, things have changed," said Natalie Kosana Goldysiak, manager of the store.

Natalie, who is fluent in Polish, English and Chinese, introduces Poland to local government officials and business leaders to Poland every day, as Chengdu is "increasingly important" for Polish companies.

"There will be more areas for cooperation between China and Europe as trains increase," said Koen Sizoo.
Workers of Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE) on Monday commenced an indefinite strike against alleged victimisation, intimidation and non-payment of hazard allowances.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the workers carried out the protest under the aegis of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, SSANU, Non-Academic Staff Union, NASU, and National Association of Academic Technologists, NAAT.

They also engaged a team of armed police officers led by the Divisional Police Officer in charge of Oye Ekiti, Sadiku Afolabi, a superintendent of police, in an argument.

Mr. Afolabi and his team had warned the protesting unionists against blocking the access road to the campus.

The workers, who held an emergency congress around the institutions gate, accused the management of sitting on the promotion of those employed at the inception of the institution.

They alleged that the newly-employed ones were, however, promoted.

The NAAT Chairman, Ekundayo Ajibaye, demanded the immediate withdrawal of queries issued to them and dissolution of panels allegedly set up by the university to intimidate the workers.

He also said that the workers wanted the universitys management to immediately constitute the Budget Monitoring Committee that would look into cases of alleged financial impropriety levelled against the institution.

Mr. Ajibaye said: We are fighting impunity and corruption, which is at its peak in FUOYE and we want the Federal Government to beam its searchlight on its management.

The chairman of NASU, Dada Adebayo, said the workers resorted to the industrial action because the management allegedly reneged on the agreement it reached with the unions after the last crisis in January.

The chairman of SSANU, Babafunso Awe, accused the management of being insensitive to the workers plights, saying they wont back down until all their demands were met.

Mr. Awe alleged that the institutions management had refused to release workers cooperative funds, which had caused them untold hardship.

The universitys Public Relations Officer, Godfrey Bakji, reacting to the protest, said the unions had no basis to go on strike because their leaders had been suspended by the universitys management.

Mr. Bakji described the workers allegations of corruption, intimidation, victimisation and impunity against the institution as untrue, baseless and unfounded.

He said it was also an attempt to blackmail the management.

He also described the strike embarked upon by the unions as illegal.

The management has issued suspension letters to SSANU and NASU leaders for disrupting a meeting of the Governing Council of the university.

The governing council then directed the management of the institution to issue queries to the leaders of the unions.

They were given an opportunity to defend themselves, which they failed to take advantage of.

On the issue of promotion, those who were qualified for promotion were issued their letters last week.

The Act establishing the university does not give room for everybody to be promoted at once, there are processes to be followed, Mr. Bakji said.

He urged the workers to allow peace to reign on the campus by returning to their duty posts, as well as see reasons with management on how to move the institution further.

(NAN)

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The permanent secretary of the Ondo State Hospital Management Board, Niran Ikuomola, has been kidnapped.

His abductors have called the family of their victim to demand a ransom of N70 million.

Mr. Ikuomola and driver were taken captive by yet-to-be identified gunmen Sunday evening along Lokoja/Abuja expressway.

They were on their way to Abuja for an official assignment when their vehicle was ambushed by gunmen.

The secretary of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) in Ondo State, Roland Arohunmolase, confirmed the incident in Akure on Monday.

He said that one of the kidnappers called to inform Mr. Ikuomolas family about the kidnap, asking for the sum of N70 million as ransom.

Dr. Ikuomola was abducted yesterday (Sunday) with his driver on the Lokoja -Abuja road while on his way to Abuja for an official function, Mr. Arohunmolase said.

The kidnappers have contacted us this morning (Monday) by demanding for the sum of N70 million before he could be released to his family.

The Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO) in Ondo State, Femi Joseph, could not confirm the incident, saying since it occurred in Kogi State, he would expect the police at the area concerned to handle the case.

Im not yet aware, although, it is outside our jurisdiction but Im sure some of our colleagues (police) in Kogi state would have taken prompt action on it, he said.

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The Osun House of Assembly on Monday confirmed 38 out of 39 cabinet nominees submitted by Governor Rauf Aregbesola.

The nominees were confirmed following a motion moved by the Majority Leader, Timothy Owoeye, and seconded by the Minority Leader, Akinwale Akinwole.

The Speaker of the assembly, Najeem Salaam, directed the governor to proceed with the swearing-in of the nominees, having found them worthy of confirmation.

Mr. Salaam, however, urged the nominees to operate an open-door policy and shun corruption.

He advised the nominees to bring in new ideas to governance in order to rekindle the hope of the people in the state.

Mr. Salaam, who noted that the monthly allocation from the Federation Account could no longer sustain the state, urged the nominees to assist government in improving its Internally Generated Revenue.

One of the nominees, Tejumola Adeola, was, however, not confirmed because he failed to appear before the assembly for screening.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the governor had been without commissioners and special advisers since his inauguration for a second term on Nov. 27, 2014.

He had on April 11 forwarded his list of nominees to the assembly for screening and confirmation.

(NAN)

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Polish President Andrzej Duda and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in a telephone conversation discussed the topics to be mentioned at the upcoming NATO summit to be held in Brussels on May 24-25, presidential chief aide Krzysztof Szczerski told PAP.

According to Szczerski, president Duda and Stoltenberg discussed the confirmation of the transatlantic ties and allied obligations within NATO, including the arrangements made at a NATO summit in Warsaw in 2016.

Secondly, the two officials focused on shared responsibility within NATO, namely sharing the costs of NATO functioning.

Thirdly, Duda and Stoltenberg discussed the fight against terrorism as a challenge for international security, according to Szczerski.

The Polish president has also invited the NATO secretary-general to pay a visit to Poland, Szczerski reported. (PAP)
BEIJING - China's efforts to promote industrial capacity cooperation with other countries, especially those participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, are showing signs of success.

"International capacity cooperation is an important approach for jointly building the Belt and Road," Ning Jizhe, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, said at a press conference on Friday.

China has recently signed capacity cooperation documents with more than 30 countries, Ning said.

Taking China-Kazakhstan cooperation as an example, they have signed cooperation projects worth $27 billion, set up a 2-billion-dollar cooperation fund and earmarked loans of $15 billion for the same purpose.

Currently, 34 projects, including copper mining, electrolytic aluminum and cement plants, have been completed and put into production in Kazakhstan. Another 43 are under construction.

These projects will "increase Kazakhstan's industrial development, create jobs and promote local economic development," he added.

Against the backdrop of sluggish global economy, making use of enormous production capacity China possesses to support the development of other countries will serve as an anchor for world economy, Ning said.

From 2013 to 2016, Chinese companies invested more than $60 billion in countries along the Belt and Road.

By the end of last year, Chinese companies had built 56 economic and trade cooperation zones in countries along the Belt and Road, with total output of more than $50 billion, generating more than $1.1 billion in tax revenue and creating 180,000 local jobs.

In the first quarter of 2017 alone, Chinese enterprises signed near a thousand project contracts in countries along the Belt and Road with a turnover of $14.4 billion, nearly half the value of all projects Chinese companies signed in the period.

Chinese companies have brought benefits to all countries involved in the Belt and Road, which improves local infrastructure, increases productivity and creates jobs, Ning said.

Belt and Road countries have also become important destinations for Chinese investment and major markets for Chinese infrastructure capacity, equipment, technology, services and brands, he added.

Xin Guobin, deputy head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, stressed that export of Chinese equipment in the Belt and Road Initiative "saw conspicuous effects."

"High speed trains, electricity and electronics equipment, construction machinery and Chinese ships have become famous brands of China's manufacturing sector," Xin said.

Construction has started or neared completion on some large transport infrastructure projects along the Belt and Road, including the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway in Indonesia and the China-Laos railway.

"The export of capacity, equipment, technology and standards will be good for Chinese companies," according to Ning.

China has worked to improve the investment environment along the Belt and Road. By 2016, China had investment agreements with 53 countries and agreements to avoid double taxation with 54 countries.

China will host the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing from May 14 to 15.

The forum will be attended by more than 1,500 delegates, including officials, academics, entrepreneurs and representatives from financial institutions and international organizations.

Ning said the commission will continue to push forward capacity cooperation to bring mutual benefits to "more and more people from China and countries along the Belt and Road."
ATLANTIC CITY  A city man was arrested Monday and charged with murder in the Mother's Day fatal shooting of another city man with ties to the 800 Blok gang, homicide investigators said Monday.

Police found the body of Keith Cundiff Jr., 32, of North Virginia Avenue just before 3 p.m. Sunday on the ground in the 800 block of North Maryland with multiple gunshot wounds, according to a statement released by Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner.

An overnight investigation resulted in the arrest of Lorin Wright, 31, of Ohio Avenue, who also was charged with possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and unlawful possession of a weapon, according to the statement.

Wright was found inside a home on the 1000 block of Brights Court by city police and the Atlantic County Major Crimes Squad after they executed a search warrant.

He was taken to the Atlantic County Jail in Mays Landing and is expected to appear in court Monday afternoon for his first appearance.

Cundiff was taken into custody in 2013 as part of a major gang operation targeting 800 Blok members, according to Press archives.

Anyone with information about this incident is asked to call the Atlantic County Prosecutors Office Major Crimes Unit at 609-909-7666 or the Atlantic City Police Department Investigations Division at 609-347-5766.

Follow Staff Writer Vincent Jackson @ACPressJackson and photographer Viviana Pernot @ACPressPernot for coverage in court Monday afternoon.

This is a developing story. Check back for details.

Prosecutor's office identifies man found shot to death in Atlantic City ATLANTIC CITY  A man found shot to death Thursday in a parked car has been identified as a 
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A 26-year-old Millville man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for aggravated manslaughter in the 2014 fatal shooting of James Collins, the Cumberland County Prosecutors Office said.

Malcolm Walker must serve about 10 years without parole eligibility. Superior Court Judge Cristen P. DArrigo delivered the sentence Friday.

Walker is one of five men sentenced in connection with Collins death June 26, 2014.

Collins, 22, of Powell Street, was shot about 12:45 a.m. while running into a house in the 1000 block of Church Street. He had been talking to friends on the front porch when shots rang out, police said.

Police alleged Walker shot Collins. They also alleged Walker and the other suspects were key members of the Sex, Money, Murder affiliate of the Bloods street gang in the city.

Venon Blackwell, 33, and Dejohn Wilmore, 25, were each sentenced to five years in state prison last month for unlawful possession of a handgun.

Detyren Hatch, 26, and Carlos Vellon, 30, were sentenced for conspiracy to commit aggravated assault. Hatch was sentenced to five years in state prison and Vellon was sentenced to eight years.
EGG HARBOR CITY  Jermey Cavileer has gathered more than 8,000 signatures in an online petition to support the city creating a skate park.

Cavileer, 29, is closing in on his goal of obtaining 10,000 signatures.

As of Sunday, Cavileer had 9,197 supporters  868 signatures from New Jersey. His petition went online May 4.

My friends and I are willing to look into grants and fund-raise to make this happen, Cavileer said to Care2, where his petition is posted. We are just looking for approval, not money.

Cavileer has been skating for 17 years. He works in information technology for an Egg Harbor City company.

He told Care2 he has been vocal at City Council meetings to propose the idea.

Council President Ed Dennis Sr. was reached Sunday and said the council has voted on this issue, and it is not interested.

Cavileer began the Care2 petition after makeshift do-it-yourself skating spots were destroyed. If the city created a legal skate park, residents would be much safer, he believes.

The typical concerns about skating include property destruction and disruptions to traffic and pedestrians.

He believes a designated skate park would solve the problem.

Skating is such a positive physical activity. Lets give the kids a safe place to skate, without any damage to private property and out of the way of pedestrians or vehicles, Cavileer wrote on the petition.
ATLANTIC CITY  A call for a neighborhood lockdown came Sunday hours after a man was killed on North Maryland Avenue, the third fatal shooting in the neighborhood in the past two weeks.

I am appalled by the callous disregard for human life, said Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon G. Tyner. I urge every resident to work cooperatively with law enforcement, the clergy, and community leaders to end this senseless violence and obtain justice for those families left behind to pick up the pieces.

Authorities responded to the 800 block of North Maryland Avenue, where they found the dead man. The Prosecutors Office said they are currently withholding the mans name.

Two city councilmen who are Democratic mayoral candidates weighed in hours later.

Police are investigating the case as a homicide. The citys ShotSpotter recorded five shots, police said.

City Council President Marty Small said he was on the scene after police were called at 2:49 p.m. an met with the family, residents and police Chief Henry White.

Small declined to disclose the name of the victim.

I asked him to take drastic measures in the Marina District to boost up patrols and hopefully, put the neighborhood on lock down, because three times this week is not a good thing, and the weather has not broken yet, Small said.

David Blackwell Jr., 31, of Hammonton, was found fatally shot about 10:15 p.m. May 5 in the 800 block of North Virginia Avenue.

Anthony A. Jordan, 28, of the city, was found shot to death about 5:30 a.m. May 11 in a parked car in the 1000 block of Brigantine Boulevard, police said.

Small said he spoke to the Atlantic County prosecutor, whose office is investigating.

Hopefully, they can dedicate the resources they have, Small said. At the end of the day, we need the community to come together.

Councilman Frank Gilliamsaid he found it disturbing to hear another young person lost his life in the 2nd Ward.

It is extremely hard to fathom how a mother would feel losing her child on Mothers Day, Gilliam said.

Small, who represents the 2nd Ward, did not like Gilliams comment.

Its rather disingenuous that Frank Gilliam would play politics by mentioning theres another life lost in the 2nd Ward. We know what area it happened in, and for him to make comments now because he is running for mayor  is a shame, Small said.

Small said he takes no pride in someone being murdered in the city, let alone ward.

Anyone with information may call the Major Crimes Unit at 609-909-7666 or text anonymously to TIP411 (847411), beginning the text with ACPD.
TRENTON  Marijuana could be grown, sold and used in New Jersey under new legislation introduced Monday in the state Senate.

The legislation would permit possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana, 16 ounces of marijuana-infused products in solids, 72 ounces in liquid form and 7 grams of concentrate.

Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Middlesex, Somerset, Union, the bills sponsor, said there would also be a sales tax on marijuana from 7 percent to 25 percent over five years to encourage early participation.

Scutari said at a news conference Monday that the measure has little chance of being enacted under Gov. Chris Christie, who opposes legalization efforts, but hes introducing the measure now as a way to lay the groundwork for it to be enacted by the next governor.

He pointed to states such as Colorado that have successfully implemented recreational marijuana laws, and he called the countrys marijuana prohibition a failure.

It is time to end the detrimental effect these archaic laws are having on our residents and our state, Scutari said.

Legalization of marijuana would prohibit home cultivation and establish a Division of Marijuana Enforcement that would be charged with regulating the industry.

New Jersey legalized medical marijuana in 2010, with five dispensaries now operating, including Compassionate Care in Egg Harbor Township.

But Christie, who is leading a White House commission examining the opioid crisis in the country for Republican President Donald Trump, has been a vocal opponent of relaxing marijuana laws.

You all have to speak out against it, he told health care leaders at a May 1 New Jersey Hospital Association substance abuse summit. Because believe me, the professional pot lobby, which is only about making money off this, is going to spend the money they need to get this legalized, and watch what happens in your hospitals. Watch what happens in your medical practices, watch what happens in your neighborhoods.

Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Phil Murphy has said he would support legalization and decriminalization efforts. Other Democrats running for governor, including Jim Johnson, state Sen. Ray Lesniak and Assemblyman John Wisniewski have said they would back legalization as well.

The GOP front-runner, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, said last week that Republican U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions likely wouldnt accept expansion of legalization but stopped short of specifying what her position is on legalization. Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli has said he opposes legalization but favors broadening the states medical marijuana program.

Staff Writer Nicole Leonard contributed to this report.
Itll be one-stop shopping Thursday for people seeking information and resources on living in your senior years.

Stockton Universitys Center on Successful Aging will host its annual Aging Successfully Festival at the Campus Center from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. to celebrate older Americans and focus on advocacy, engagement and activities for adults in their later years.

The event is free and open to the public. More than 20 exhibitors will present information, documentary films, musical performances, discussions and more on aging.

Dr. Christopher Bolich, who specializes in internal medicine in Egg Harbor Township, will talk about end-of-life discussions after a screening of the Frontline documentary Being Mortal.

The film follows Boston surgeon and author Atul Gawande as he explores the relationships doctors have with patients who are nearing the end of life.

Carolyn Bradley, a professor at Monmouth University, will lead a discussion on aging and health care issues in the LGBT community, and Claire Abernathy, Stockton assistant professor of political science, will talk about how older Americans can get involved in political advocacy.

Members of Stocktons Informational Technology Department will give presentations on cyber security and social media and experts from Gitterman, and Associates will talk about financial planning.

Mico Lucide, assistant at the Center on Successful Aging, will present Fake News and Finding Reliable Sources.

The Stockton Faculty Band will perform at noon, and a ceremony will honor graduating students from Stocktons gerontology minor program.

Organizers encourage attendees to bring nonperishable food items that can be donated for the hungry, musical instruments for disadvantaged youth and iPods that can be given to Alzheimers programs.

The event will take place at 101 Vera King Farris Drive in Galloway Township. For more information, visit Stockton.edu/scosa.
The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation will be held on Sunday and Monday in Beijing with more than 1,500 leaders and experts expected to participate.

China Daily reporters asked some of the attendees about their expectations and impressions of the forum.

Yu Hasegawa, Moscow Correspondent for TV Asahi Corporation, Japan

Yu Hasegawa, Moscow Correspondent for TV Asahi Corporation, Japan [Photo by He Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]

"One area of interest is to look at how the Belt and Road Initiative would bring new energy to Asia, with a special focus on the economic cooperation between China and Russia. I also pay attention to high-level meetings among the many presidents that convene at the forum."

"I've been a reporter for over 10 years and have attended a number of international conferences. To be honest, everything here at the forum is so organized and smooth. Volunteers are much more helpful than I had expected. What impressed me the most is how fast the WiFi connection is. I really appreciate people who have put an effort in this."
When 19-year-old Serbian high school student Katrina Stojanovic stood on the stage of the ceremony hall of Xinhua News Agency in Beijing to share her story in Chinese, gasps of amazement spread among the audience when the first word was pronounced - it was hard to tell the voice belonged to a foreigner.

As the champion of the "Chinese Bridge" Chinese Proficiency Competition for foreign secondary school students in 2015, she admitted her Chinese was probably better than her mother tongue.

"I first heard the language when I was in my mother's belly," says Stojanovic, daughter of a Sinologist. "I recall the days when my grandparents said Chinese was my destiny."

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese bicycles and cloth shoes were very popular in the former Yugoslavia, but it was not easy to get them. When her grandfather wooed her grandmother, the man saved up for a long time for a pair of Chinese shoes to make himself look different from others. Believing that China would change his life, he bought a Chinese bicycle after marriage.

"He passed the passion to her daughter, and my mother didn't hesitate to choose Chinese as her major in college," Stojanovic says.

Their love for China passed to the third generation and Stojanovic applied to a high school that had Chinese classes in Belgrade. This is among the 100 stories in The Belt and Road: People with Stories, a recently published book jointly compiled by Xinhua News Agency, State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and the Confucius Institute.

The entries have been selected from hundreds of stories concerning ordinary people in foreign countries that are related to the Belt and Road Initiative. The books have been published in Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Portuguese.

From Pablo Cordova, an Ecuadorean hotel employee who survived a deadly earthquake because of a Chinese rescue technology, to Sherba Kalimovich, a Kyrgyz farmer who lifted his family out of poverty by growing Chinese corn, the book has individual stories to reflect the big picture of the project initiated by China.

As an earthquake survivor, Cordova also met President Xi Jinping during his visit to Ecuador last year.

"I was so excited to give him a hug," Cordova, 52, recalls.

Cordova now works at an earthquake rescue center, which is equipped with Chinese technology.

People's pursuit for better lives is recorded in these stories. For example, Tajik workers at Chinese cement plants successfully supported their country's ambition to be a cement exporter. In Aleppo, Syria, local handmade soaps continued to supply Chinese market in spite of the war.

"Some countries have been dragged into longtime unrest by outside interferences," Cai Mingzhao, president of Xinhua News Agency, wrote in the preface of the book. "However, from China's peaceful development, a large number of developing countries have realized the existence of a path of development that is different from Western models. In their eyes, this path is closer to their national realities and is more rational and feasible."

"The Belt and Road Initiative is the bond maintaining emotions between China and the rest of world," Stojanovic says. "It also leads us to approach a brighter future together."

(China Daily 05/15/2017 page19)
BUCHAREST, Romania, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

TransferGo, the international money transfer company offering the fastest low cost online transfers, are delighted to announce the beginning of a one year collaboration with Andra, one of the most beloved Romanian artists.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160519/369798LOGO )



TransferGo provides international online money transfers, offering a fast and low cost alternative for people working abroad who want to send money back to their families. Romanian immigrants are a large and important part of their customer base, as a result of the large number of Romanians who have moved abroad to work.

"We are extremely honored to have Andra by our side, a true source of inspiration for Romanians all over the world. Her music comes as a relief to the Romanian communities working abroad, brought together by homesickness. This way, they can never forget where they come from. We believe that the partnership with Andra represents an important step for us in understanding and supporting these communities", said Marius Nedelcu, Romanian Country Manager at TransferGo.

Andra echoed this sentiment of closeness and support in the Romanian community. "Every time I sing for the diaspora, I am deeply impressed by the sacrifice these Romanians have made for the good of their relatives back home. Family is everything to me and every time I am away from home, either for a concert or on vacation, I get homesick. I am glad that TransferGo gave me the opportunity to get closer and empathize with Romanians all over the world, with their needs and realities."

The collaboration with Andra is part of TransferGo's drive to be more than just a provider of fast, low cost money transfers to the Romanian community. In addition to helping immigrants send money home to their loved ones quicker and for less than ever before, TransferGo offers support to the Romanian communities across Europe. The company Romanians in Great Britain, helping guide them through the impact of Brexit and day to day life abroad with a dedicated blog - https://www.transfergo.com/ro/blog/ . The blog offers financial education and useful information to Romanians moving to Great Britain, alongside the latest news and detailed explanations of big events, like Brexit.

TransferGo helps Romanians save money

TransferGo gives Romanians working in 44 countries a convenient way of sending money home. Their fast online money transfer service, offer next day, same day and realtime money transfers at much lower costs than banks. The delivery amount is guaranteed at the time of sending, and there are no hidden costs.

In 2016, Romanian immigrants sent over 25 million euros home using TransferGo, saving up to 90% on their transfer costs. The latest product launched by TransferGo is designed for immigrants who need to transfer money fast, outside the banks' working hours. The Express option allows people to deposit money after the banks have closed and have it transferred with priority at the start of the next day (around 9 am).

In less than four years, TransferGo has gained over 200,000 migrants' trust, sending one million international transfers across 44 countries. In that time, TransferGo has saved their customers over 10 million Euros, compared to the cost of sending money using a bank.

About TransferGo

TransferGo is an international fast and cost effective transfer start-up for people who want to send money back to their families without paying excessive bank fees. The company was founded in 2012 in Lithuania and its headquarters is currently located in London, UK.

TransferGo offers fast and low cost money transfer internationally, between 44 countries worldwide. Using the company's innovative system, migrants can transfer money abroad using a digital account-to-account settlement model, which means that money does not have to leave the country. Funds are paid local in local out, sending by not sending. The sender makes a local transaction into a TransferGo bank account from the same country and the company pays out locally in the destination country, saving time and money.

Since the company was founded, they've made more than one million transfers and have saved their customers over 10 million Euros.

TransferGo has been active on the Romanian market since June 2015.

For more details please visit: http://www.transfergo.com/ro

SOURCE Transfergo.com
CollabNet enables enterprise Agile at scale and helps organizations increase the business value of DevOps

LONDON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- CollabNet (www.collabnet.com), a global leader in enterprise software development, release automation and DevOps solutions, is a gold-level sponsor of the 2017 Continuous Lifecycle conference in London from May 17-19.

CollabNet will demonstrate the latest capabilities of the CollabNet DevOps Lifecycle Manager (DLM) solution at the event. CollabNet DLM advances enterprise DevOps initiatives by providing continuous visibility and feedback throughout the DevOps tool chain. In that process CollabNet DLM brings together disparate development processes, tools and teams along with IT operations and management, so everyone can collaborate and create better business outcomes.

"No matter where organizations are in their DevOps journey, one way they can ensure they are providing continuous improvements to the customer experience is through value stream management," said Thomas Hooker, VP of Marketing at CollabNet. "There are critical advantages for businesses that adopt this emerging DevOps best practicenamely, accelerating continuous delivery and vastly improving the value for customers. We look forward to gathering with the European DevOps and Agile community at this upcoming conference and sharing insights on advancing DevOps principles around the world."

Conference attendees can stop by the CollabNet booth to learn how CollabNet DLM allows organizations to apply value stream mapping to DevOps. They can see how to create a holistic view of the entire software development lifecycle, along with key performance indicator (KPI) reporting, making early detection of latent or potential problems easy for organizations.

Continuous Lifecycle London 2017 covers the potential and the obstacles developers, architects and CIOs face in implementing DevOps, Containerization, Continuous Delivery and Agile. The conference will be held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London. For more information or to register for this event, please visit: http://continuouslifecycle.london/.

Learn all about CollabNet DLM at https://www.collab.net/products/devops-lifecycle-manager.

Share This: Stop by the @CollabNet booth at @ConLifecycleLon May 17-19 in London and ask for a demo of #DLM! #ContinuousLifecycle #DevOps

About CollabNet

CollabNet helps enterprises and government organizations develop and deliver high-quality software at speed. CollabNet is a winner of the 2016 Best of Interop Award, a Best in Show winner in the application lifecycle management and development tools category of the SD Times 100 for 13 consecutive years, and a gold winner of the 2016 Golden Bridge Awards. CollabNet offers innovative solutions, consulting, and Agile training services. The company proudly supports more than 10,000 customers with 6 million users in 100 countries. For more information, please visit www.collabnet.com.

Contact:

Laura Balboni

Catapult PR-IR

lbalboni@catapultpr-ir.com

303-581-7760

Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/213850/collabnet_logo.jpg

Related Links

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SOURCE CollabNet
STOCKHOLM, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

EQT VI to sell Bureau van Dijk, a leading global provider of business intelligence and company information, to Moody's Corporation for EUR 3.0 billion

During EQT VI's ownership, Bureau van Dijk has gone through a significant transformation with investments in areas including sales, marketing, and product development

Strong cultural fit, and solid strategic and industrial logic for combination

EQT VI Limited ("EQT VI") has entered into an agreement to sell Bureau van Dijk (or the "Company") to Moody's Corporation ("Moody's") for an enterprise value of EUR 3.0 billion. Bureau van Dijk, operating from its Amsterdam headquarters, captures, treats, standardizes, and distributes the world's richest private company dataset, with coverage of more than 220 million companies. Over some 30 years, the Company has built partnerships with over 160 independent information providers, creating a platform that connects customers with data, to address a wide range of business challenges.

EQT VI acquired Bureau van Dijk in September 2014 with a mission to further expand its leading market position and accelerate growth. The Company has undergone a significant transformation under EQT VI''s ownership through several key initiatives:

- Development of the organisational structure to prepare for further growth

- Investments in the sales organization, including the introduction of a matrix sales structure, implementation of a global CRM system, and expansion of the salesforce

- Strong focus on the development of new products and continued improvement of existing ones, e.g. the launch of a new user interface

- Substantial investments in marketing and corporate branding

The growth initiatives during EQT VI's ownership have resulted in strong financial performance, with Bureau van Dijk generating revenues of EUR 258 million and EBITDA of EUR 132 million in 2016.

"Bureau van Dijk has continued to strengthen its market leading position while accelerating financial growth. This development exemplifies EQT's industrial and growth-focused approach, aimed at supporting management teams in making very good companies even better. The journey continues for Bureau van Dijk  this transaction has a compelling strategic rationale and provides great opportunities for the future. The management team has done an impressive job and we look forward to seeing Bureau van Dijk continue to develop as a part of Moody's", says Kristiaan Nieuwenburg, Partner at EQT Partners and Investment Advisor to the EQT VI fund.

"Over the past three years we have been on an exciting and transformational journey with the support of EQT and their industrial experts. We are now delighted to join forces with Moody's and continue to develop our business", says Mark Schwerzel, Deputy CEO of Bureau van Dijk.

Moody's Corporation is the parent company of Moody's Analytics, which offers leading-edge software, advisory services and research for credit and economic analysis and financial risk management, and Moody's Investors Service, which provides credit ratings and research covering debt instruments and securities.

The agreement is subject to customary anti-trust clearance and the transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2017.

The sellers were represented by Quayle Munro and J.P. Morgan.

About EQT

EQT is a leading alternative investments firm with approximately EUR 35 billion in raised capital across 22 funds. EQT funds have portfolio companies in Europe, Asia and the US with total sales of more than EUR 19 billion and approximately 110,000 employees. EQT works with portfolio companies to achieve sustainable growth, operational excellence and market leadership.

More information: www.eqtpartners.com

About Bureau van Dijk

Bureau van Dijk captures and treats private company information for better decision making and increased efficiency. Its products combine data from regulatory and other sources, including over 160 information providers, to deliver the richest, most reliable private company information, corporate structures, beneficial ownership and deal information in the market. Bureau van Dijk's Orbis database provides information on 220 million private companies in all countries worldwide. Orbis also incorporates powerful software and contemporary data visualisation tools to help users interrogate and manipulate the information for a range of research needs.

More information: www.bvdinfo.com

CONTACT:

Kristiaan Nieuwenburg, Partner at EQT Partners, Investment Advisor to EQT VI, +31-20-262-40-01

EQT Press Office, +46-8-506-55-334, press@eqtpartners.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/eqt-ab/r/eqt-vi-to-sell-bureau-van-dijk-to-moody-s-corporation,c2265535

The following files are available for download:

SOURCE EQT AB
BANGALORE, India and EBENE, Mauritius, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

TO ALL STOCK EXCHANGES

BSE LIMITED

NATIONAL STOCK EXCHANGE OF INDIA LIMITED

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE

EURONEXT LONDON

EURONEXT PARIS

May 15, 2017

Dear Sir/Madam,

Please find enclosed the press release titled "MauBank Adopts Infosys Finacle Leasing Solution to Drive Business Growth".

The same will be made available on the Company's website at the following weblink

https://www.infosys.com/newsroom/press-releases/Pages/drive-business-growth-adopts.aspx

This is for your information and records.

Yours sincerely,

For Infosys Limited

A G S Manikantha

Company Secretary

MauBank Adopts Infosys Finacle Leasing Solution to Drive Business Growth

Infosys Finacle, part of EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys (NYSE: INFY), and MauBank, a leading bank in the Republic of Mauritius, today announced the bank's successful adoption of Finacle's Leasing Solution for its strategic leasing services business. MauBank's leasing system will run on a single platform that enables higher operational efficiency, reduced costs and an enhanced banking experience for its customers.

The merger of Mauritius Post and Cooperative Bank (MPCB) and National Commercial Bank (NCB) in January 2016 created the new MauBank, which is powered by Infosys Finacle Solutions that includes Core Banking, Online Banking, Treasury and Alerts. Furthermore, NCB's subsidiary Mauritius Leasing Company, offering leasing products, was also integrated into MauBank and the Finacle Leasing Solution was chosen to replace its earlier legacy third-party platform.

Highlights:

The implementation was completed in 10 weeks, with zero impact on ongoing customer services

The bank has increased operational efficiency by over 40 per cent with the optimization of processes through the Finacle Leasing Solution

With the new solution, the bank has eliminated duplicate systems and unified various components, achieving a 20 per cent saving in maintenance costs

Automation of processes like statement generation, late fee computation and reconciliation, among others, have resulted in a significant drop in human error and person dependencies

Integration of the new leasing solution with rest of the enterprise applications has ensured consolidation and optimization of customer data into a single source. This supports faster resolution of customer requests and enables the bank to make targeted offerings, thereby improving the end customer experience significantly

Quotes:

Sanat Rao, Chief Business Officer and Global Head, Infosys Finacle:

"Simplifying the technology footprint is a critical step in renewing legacy systems and moving towards a truly digital banking experience. Following the merger, MauBank has been very progressive in its decision to consolidate and modernize its banking systems. The latest step towards a unified platform for their leasing services will ensure a sound technology foundation for the bank, enabling growth, profitability and a smarter banking experience for its customers."

Sayyad Khodabocus, Head - IT Applications, MauBank:

"MauBank is committed to being the most progressive and preferred bank in Mauritius. Our aim of ensuring world-class banking services along with industry leading growth, is tied to consolidating our operations on best of breed banking platforms. We believe the Finacle Leasing Solution will help us scale our leasing operations and boost productivity, thus positioning the service line as a key business driver."

About MauBank

MauBank Ltd started its operation on the 4th January 2016 following the merger of National Commercial Bank Ltd (NCB) with Mauritius Post and Cooperative Bank Ltd (MPCB). MauBank Ltd is held by MauBank Holdings Ltd which is itself a wholly state owned company.

MauBank operates Retail, SME and Corporate banking business locally and internationally for individuals and businesses. The Bank's distribution network consists of 24 branches and 36 ATMs across Mauritius including internet banking to deliver proximity services to its customers. The bank also provides basic banking services across the post office network operated by Mauritius Post Ltd.

MauBank is an ideal platform offering a wide choice of financing, deposits and transactional facilities to meet personal, small & medium enterprise (SME), corporate, global business and retail banking requirements. The Bank has strong capabilities to build solutions around the needs of its customers through innovative banking products and services as a key differentiator. The Bank is providing dedicated and specialized SME banking solutions through 10 out of its 34 branches.

About Infosys Finacle

Finacle is the industry-leading universal banking solution from EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly owned product subsidiary of Infosys. The solution helps financial institutions develop deeper connections with stakeholders, power continuous innovation, and accelerate growth in the digital world. Today, Finacle is the choice of banks across 94 countries, and serves over 848 million consumers - estimated to be nearly 16.5 percent of the world's adult banked population.

Finacle solutions address core banking, online banking, mobile banking, CRM, payments, treasury, origination, liquidity management, Islamic banking, wealth management, and analytics needs of financial institutions worldwide. Assessment of the top 1000 banks in the world reveals that institutions powered by Finacle enjoy 50 percent higher returns on assets, 30 percent higher returns on capital, and 8.1 percent points lesser costs to income than others.

To know more, visit www.finacle.com

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2016. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that the date of this press release is mentioned at the beginning of the release, and any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law.

For further information, please contact:



Asia Pacific

Sarah Gideon

Infosys, India

+91 80 4156 3998

Sarah_Gideon@infosys.com

EMEA

Margherita Di Cerbo

Infosys, Europe

Phone: +44 2075162748

Margherita.dicerbo@infosys.com

Americas

Chiku Somaiya

Infosys, USA

+1 408 375 2722

Chiku.Somaiya@infosys.com

This is a disclosure announcement from PR Newswire.

SOURCE Infosys Limited
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 85 market data tables and 30 figures spread through 145 pages and in-depth TOC on "Medical Bed Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/hospital-beds-market-171671404.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

Factors such as increasing investments in healthcare infrastructural development, technological innovations in ICU beds, increasing number of beds in private hospitals, and increasing volume of chronic care patients are expected to drive the growth of the Medical Beds Market in the coming years. On the other hand, the declining number of beds in public hospitals may limit market growth to a certain extent. The growing trend of home care is expected to provide a wide range of opportunities to players in the market.

The Medical Beds Market is segmented on the basis of type, application, end user, usage, and region. On the basis of usage, the Medical Beds Market is segmented into acute care beds, psychiatric and bariatric care beds, long-term care beds, and others (maternity and rehabilitative beds).

Download PDF Brochure: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=171671404

The acute care beds segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2017. The demand for acute care beds is rising with the increasing number of elderly and disabled individuals which acts as a major factor driving the growth of this segment.

Based on type, the Medical Beds Market is categorized into electric beds, semi-electric beds, and manual beds. The electric beds segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the market in 2017. The large share as well as the high growth of this segment can primarily be attributed to the growing number of patients requiring bariatric care as well as the rising geriatric population across the globe.

On the basis of application, the Medical Beds Market is segmented into two categories intensive care and non-intensive care. Growth in the intensive care segment is primarily driven by the increasing demand for critical care beds owing to the growth in geriatric population.

Talk To Our Research Analysts: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/speaktoanalyst.asp?id=171671404

Geographically, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and the Rest of the World (RoW). Europe is estimated to account for the largest share of the market in 2017. Factors such as the rising healthcare spending, technological advancements, and government support are driving the growth of the Medical Beds Market in Europe. However, APAC is estimated to be the fastest-growing market for medical beds. This is due to the increasing elderly population and increasing manufacturing outsourcing in APAC countries by the major players.

Key players in the Medical Beds Market include Stryker Corporation (U.S.), Hill-Rom Holding, Inc. (U.S.), Getinge Group (Sweden), and Invacare Corporation (U.S.).

Browse Related Reports:

Patient Handling Equipment Market by Product (Wheelchair, Scooters, Medical Beds, Bathroom Safety, Mechanical, Ambulatory), Type of Care (Bariatric Care, Critical Care, Wound), Accessories (Lifting, Transfer) & by End User (Home, Medical) - Forecast to 2021.

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/patient-handling-equipment-market-186358368.html

European Patient Handling Equipment Market by Product (Wheelchair, Scooters, Bathroom Safety Supply, Mechanical, Ambulatory), by Type of Care (Bariatric, Critical, Wound, Fall), by Accessories (Lifting, Transfer), by End User (Medical, Elderly) - Forecast to 2019.

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/european-patient-handling-equipment-market-109569718.html

Know More About our Knowledge Store @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Knowledgestore.asp

About MarketsandMarkets

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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. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve.

MarketsandMarkets'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.



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MarketsandMarkets

701 Pike Street

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Tel: +1-888-600-6441

Email: sales@marketsandmarkets.com



Visit Our Blog @ http://mnmblog.org/market-research/healthcare/medical-devices

Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets

SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
TORONTO, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Just in time for Spring, a new children's book is helping young readers fall in love with National Parks, a famous bear, and several other majestic species that call Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks home. Written by author and photographer Dana Warnquist and illustrated by Warnquist's sister, artist Joi McCarthy, A Bear Named 399 & Friends (ISBN 9781365417221, Lulu Press, $15.50) is the story of young Erik, who meets Bear 399 and several other iconic American animals on his family's summer vacation.

A Bear Named 399 & Friends Author and Photographer Dana Warnquist

Against the backdrop of McCarthy's beautifully realistic oil and watercolor illustrations, Warnquist weaves the tale of Erik and his younger sister Sara, who travel from Colorado to Wyoming one summer to visit Grand Teton and Yellowstone. Along the way, Erik meets Bear 399, Grand Teton's most famous resident, who teaches him about Grizzly Bears and introduces him to her friends in Yellowstone, including Buffy, an American Bison; Teddy the Bald Eagle; and Loki the Gray Wolf. Each gives Erik--and readers--insight into his or her species. Interspersed throughout the story are fascinating facts about the parks and the wildlife that call them home.

"I wrote A Bear Named 399 & Friends in honor of 100 years of the National Park Service," Warnquist explained. "Our National Parks are treasures that are available to all of us, and it's important for young readers to know what a rich cultural resource each of America's 59 National Parks is. Our hope is that through Joi's illustrations and my story, we can pique children's interest in learning more about the parks and protecting their inhabitants."

Warnquist based the cast of characters in A Bear Named 399 & Friends--and to some extent, the story itself--on her own family and their road trips to National Parks when her children were young. A fine art nature photographer and supporter of the National Park Service, Warnquist has pledged to donate all proceeds from the book's sale to environmental protection and wildlife conservation programs. The book is available for purchase from Lulu Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

About Dana Warnquist

Conservationist, photographer and author Dana Warnquist was chosen as a semifinalist in the 47th Annual Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year Contest by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine in 2011. Originally from the U.S., she now calls Toronto home. Through her photographic art, Warnquist hopes to inspire an appreciation for natural beauty, help increase awareness about environmental protection, and further conservation efforts. A Bear Named 399 & Friends is her second book; her first, Roary the Lion, was published in English and Spanish (Roary, el leon) in 2016. She is currently at work on a photo book. Learn more at http://www.danemarkphotography.com.

Contact:

Dana Warnquist

416.554.4483

[email protected]

http://www.danemarkphotography.com

SOURCE Dana Warnquist

Related Links

http://www.danemarkphotography.com


WASHINGTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AARP today sent a letter to every member of the U.S. Senate urging them to start from scratch on the health care legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last week. The letter comes as AARP also begins to inform its members how each House member voted on the bill.

"The deeply flawed House bill would add an Age Tax, increasing health care costs by thousands of dollars each year we grow older, and put millions of American families at risk of finding health care unaffordable or unavailable," said AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond. She told senators: "AARP urges you to 'start from scratch' and craft health care legislation that ensures robust insurance market protections, controls costs, improves quality, and provides affordable coverage to all Americans."

AARP's letter notes that big insurance companies could charge older Americans five times  or more  for coverage, and charge many Americans more than their take home pay, noting, "The median annual income for 50-64 year old Americans is less than $25,000 [The House health bill] would remove pre-existing condition protections and once again allow insurance companies to charge Americans more -- we estimate up to $25,000 more -- due to a pre-existing condition."

About 40% of older Americans, nearly 25 million, have a pre-existing condition.

AARP's full letter to the Senate is here. Past statements and releases about the House bill can be found here. Fact sheets about the Age Tax and other harmful policies can be found here.

About AARP

AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering Americans 50 and older to choose how they live as they age. With nearly 38 million members and offices in every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, AARP works to strengthen communities and advocate for what matters most to families with a focus on health security, financial stability and personal fulfillment. AARP also works for individuals in the marketplace by sparking new solutions and allowing carefully chosen, high-quality products and services to carry the AARP name. As a trusted source for news and information, AARP produces the world's largest circulation publications, AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org or follow @AARP and @AARPadvocates on social media.

SOURCE AARP
SHANGHAI, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Acorn International, Inc. (NYSE: ATV) ("Acorn" or the "Company") today announced that it has filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 15, 2017. The annual report can be accessed on the Company's investor relations website at http://www.acorninternationalir.com.

Acorn will provide a hard copy of its annual report for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016, free of charge, to its shareholders and ADS holders upon request. Requests should be directed to the Company's IR representatives, or in writing to Acorn International, Inc., 19/F, 20th Building, No. 487 Tianlin Road, Shanghai, 200233, PRC.

About Acorn International, Inc.

Co-founded in 1998 by Executive Chairman Robert Roche, Acorn is a marketing and branding company in China with a proven track record of developing, promoting and selling a diverse portfolio of proprietary-branded products, as well as well-established and promising new products from third parties. Its business is currently comprised of two main divisions, its direct sales platforms and its nationwide distribution network. For more information visit www.acorninternationalir.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

This news release contains forward-looking statements. These statements constitute "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "expects," "future," "going forward," "intends," "outlook," "plans," "target," "will," and similar statements. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions, and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the Company's control, which may cause the Company's actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties, or factors is included in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.

SOURCE Acorn International, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.chinadrtv.com


DETROIT, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- AirTime Trampoline & Game Parks has hired franchise veteran Sam Lundy as Chief Operating Officer. He will work closely with the CEO Jimmy Nafso on the company's overall strategy and execution.

Sam has over 25 years of franchising, and was most recently with Marcus Lemonis Company. AirTime and its customers will benefit immensely with Sam as COO.

"I am thrilled to appoint Sam to this important role as we accelerate our company to grow and develop globally," said Jimmy Nafso. "We are excited to have Sam join the team as we continue to move forward relying on his expertise."

AirTime has locations in Grand Rapids, Troy, Sterling Heights, Westland, Novi and is coming soon to Ann Arbor, Michigan. AirTime is currently offering franchise opportunities throughout the United States and abroad.

About AirTime Trampoline & Game Parks

Engineered For Fun. Powered By Music.

AirTime Trampoline & Game Park is a high-energy trampoline and music experience unlike any other. Imagine getting your jump on surrounded by wall-to-wall trampolines with the speakers pumping out your favorite songs. That is AirTime Trampoline & Game Parks.

Launched as a Detroit, Michigan-based business, AirTime is dedicated to supporting local communities while offering a family-friendly, safe and exciting place to jump and experience AirTime.

Because life is good with music. And even better with trampolines.

For more information, visit: AirTimeTrampoline.com.

Contact Information:

Melissa Morris

248-918-0914

[email protected]

Related Links

WebSite

SOURCE AirTime Trampoline & Game Parks

Related Links

http://airtimetrampoline.com


MEMPHIS, Tenn., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Richard C. Shadyac, Jr., President and CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, received the 2017 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, a prestigious award for individuals who have embraced America's ideals of patriotism, tolerance, brotherhood and diversity, in a May 13 ceremony on Ellis Island in New York.

Presented by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor recognizes "individuals who have made it their mission to share with those less fortunate their wealth of knowledge, indomitable courage, boundless compassion, unique talents and selfless generosity; all while maintaining the traditions of their ethnic heritage as they uphold the ideals and spirit of America."

Under Shadyac, Jr.'s, leadership since 2009, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC) has become the largest healthcare charity in America, generating more than 75 percent of funds needed to operate and sustain St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Paul Ayoub, chairman of the board of ALSAC said, "It was so fitting for Rick to be honored on Ellis Island, one of America's greatest symbols of immigrant history. The grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Rick has spent his entire life devoted to St. Jude founder Danny Thomas' vision that no child die in the dawn of life. St. Jude was founded on the principle that all children regardless of race, religion or ability to pay would be treated equally. Today St. Jude has taken the overall childhood cancer survival rates from 20 percent to 80 percent, and we will not stop until no child dies from cancer. The story of the founding of ALSAC and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is a beautiful immigrant story that should forever be celebrated."

His father, Richard Shadyac, Sr., received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1999 when he served as ALSAC CEO. Shadyac, Sr., was personally tapped by Danny Thomas from the beginning to help with fundraising needed to begin St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Danny Thomas opened St. Jude in 1962 as a way to say thank you to God and the United States of America for the opportunities given to him and his fellow citizens of Arab descent. Today, St. Jude is supported by millions of generous donors from communities everywhere. Danny's daughter, Marlo Thomas, National Outreach Director for St. Jude, also received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1999 following in the footsteps of her father who received the honor in 1990.

Since its founding in 1986, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor has been officially recognized by the U.S. Congress as one of the United States' most prestigious awards. Past recipients include six presidents of the United States, as well as esteemed Americans such as Frank Sinatra, Lee Iacocca, Quincy Jones, Muhammad Ali, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Louis Zamperini and Rosa Parks.

Among other 2017 recipients are Dr. Buzz Aldrin, Mindy Grossman, Governor John Kasich, Indra Nooyi and global honoree Malala Yousafzai. A full listing of the 2017 Ellis Island Medal of Honor recipients is available here.

Prior to joining ALSAC as CEO in 2009, Shadyac, Jr., served as the chairman and president of the ALSAC Board of Directors. He was an active board member since 2000. A practicing attorney for 27 years, he also worked as a partner in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia law firm, Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell, LLP. He has been named the CEO of the Year from Inside Memphis Business and the Corporate Social Responsibility's CEO of the Year.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is leading the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer and life-threatening diseases. It is the only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted solely to children. Treatments invented at St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to more than 80 percent since the hospital opened more than 50 years ago. St. Jude is working to drive the overall survival rate for childhood cancer to 90 percent, and we won't stop until no child dies from cancer. St. Jude freely shares the discoveries it makes, and every child saved at St. Jude means doctors and scientists worldwide can use that knowledge to save thousands more children. Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel housing or food  because all a family should worry about is helping their child live. Join the St. Jude mission by visiting stjude.org, liking St. Jude on Facebook (facebook.com/stjude) and following us on Twitter (@stjude).

SOURCE ALSAC/St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital
BOULDER, Colo., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- ArcherDX, the leader in NGS-based fusion assays, today announced the release of Archer Immunoverse B Cell Receptor (BCR) assays to characterize the human B cell repertoire. These assays expand the cadre of Archer immune repertoire sequencing assays and complements the Immunoverse T Cell Receptor assays that were launched last year. ArcherDX announced these B cell repertoire-sequencing assays at Immunology 2017, the annual global immunology conference that began this weekend in Washington, DC.

Immunoverse BCR kits are targeted NGS assays that utilize patented Anchored Multiplex PCR (AMP) chemistry for open-ended amplification with molecular-barcoded (MBC) adapters. These adapters are ligated to RNA prior to amplification, enabling post-sequencing deduplication and error correction. "Recent publications have demonstrated that primer bias from opposing primer-based enrichment can result in a gross misrepresentation of clonal frequencies," said Jason Myers, Ph.D., CEO of ArcherDX. "Our AMP-based approach more accurately represents the immune repertoire by using molecular barcode-based deduplication to eliminate PCR bias."

Once libraries are sequenced, Archer Analysis reports isotype and subclass information for all detected clonotypes along with the somatic hypermutation status for the most frequent clones. "Our BCR assay allows us to identify and report IGHV mutation status, which is critical for researchers studying chronic lymphocytic leukemia," stated Brian Kudlow, Ph.D., Vice President of Research and Development at ArcherDX.

Immunoverse BCR assays include kits for IGH, IGK, and IGL that are provided in 8-reaction kits that use lyophilized reagents to minimize user error, contamination and hands-on time. Flexible input requirements from as little as 25ng RNA from PBMC, FFPE or fresh frozen tissue make this assay suitable for a wide range of applications.

Learn more at archerdx.com/immunoverse.

About ArcherDX

ArcherDX addresses the bottlenecks associated with using NGS in oncogenic mutation detection by offering a robust platform for targeted sequencing. By combining proprietary AMP chemistry with easy-to-use, lyophilized reagents, Archer NGS assays generate highly enriched sequencing libraries to detect gene fusions, point mutations, CNVs and RNA abundance. Archer product lines focus on specific disease states and input types, including VariantPlex and FusionPlex assays for SNV/indel, copy number variation (CNV) and gene fusion detection from solid tumors, sarcomas and blood cancers; Reveal ctDNA 28 assay for mutation detection from liquid biopsies; and Immunoverse assays for immune repertoire characterization.

Complemented by powerful bioinformatics software, ArcherDX technology dramatically enhances complex mutation identification and discovery.

ArcherDX is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado.

Archer, FusionPlex, VariantPlex, Immunoverse, Reveal ctDNA and AMP are trademarks of ArcherDX, Inc.

Contacts:

ArcherDX, Inc.

Jason Amsbaugh

+1 303 357 9001

[email protected]

SOURCE ArcherDX

Related Links

http://www.archerdx.com


WASHINGTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Simeone & Miller, LLP is honored to announce that managing partner Attorney Craig D. Miller has been named to the 2017 Super Lawyers list in recognition of his distinction in personal injury law. He has maintained his position on the prestigious list since 2012, making this the sixth consecutive year he'll be honored with a place. Super Lawyers is a world-renowned attorney ratings organization that produces a list of only the most dedicated and skilled practicing lawyers.

This recognition is rare, with an estimated 5% of lawyers in each state ever earning the recommendation during their careers. To receive it not once, but 6 years in a row indicates a commitment to excellence in practicing law. Craig D. Miller has established himself as a highly skilled lawyer who has sought to help those wrongly injured in accidents.

Attorney Miller has recovered millions of dollars in verdicts and settlements for his clients. A membership in the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum and the Million Dollar Advocates Forum. He focuses his practice on cases involving severe injuries, including traumatic brain injuries, wrongful death, paralysis, vertebral fractions, amputations and more. He has been invited to appear on national television on The Doctor Phil Show and The John Walsh Show, and has made an appearance on The Sam Donaldson Radio Show  Live in America.

In addition to numerous Super Lawyers recognitions, Craig D. Miller has been rated "AV Preeminent" by Martindale-Hubbell. He has earned a 10/10 "Superb" Avvo rating, and he is a member of the National Association of Distinguished Counsel. He serves on the District of Columbia Trial Lawyers Association Board of Governors as well.

Craig D. Miller has been admitted to practice before the courts of Washington, D.C., the Eastern District of Virginia, and the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He is licensed to practice in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Simeone & Miller, LLP is proud of Attorney Miller's professional successes, and looks forward to a continuation of the excellent service and high standards he has held himself to over his career.

For further information regarding the services offered by Simeone & Miller, LLP, visit the website at http://www.simeonemiller.com/.

SOURCE Simeone & Miller, LLP

Related Links

http://www.simeonemiller.com/


COLUMBUS, Ohio, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, and Charles River Laboratories agreed to a multi-year agreement for SciFinder, ensuring the organization's scientists can efficiently access the extensive CAS collection of the most complete and accurate scientific information available.

SciFinder is the world-renowned scientific research discovery solution that provides unlimited access to the authoritative content collection from CAS. CAS scientists curate disclosed chemistry and related scientific research to ensure unparalleled quality, creating relationships and deriving insights from data that are missed by technology applications alone. With powerful search functionality available in SciFinder, scientists at Charles River Laboratories leverage those connections and insights to quickly and efficiently answer complex research questions.

"We're pleased to use SciFinder as one of the many tools and technologies we employ to support the development of new therapeutics," said Kate Hilyard, Corporate Vice President of Global Discovery, Charles River Laboratories.

Charles River Laboratories provides essential products and services to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, government agencies and leading academic institutions around the globe accelerate their research and drug development efforts. Employees are focused on providing clients with exactly what they need to improve and expedite the discovery, early-stage development and safe manufacture of new therapies for the patients who need them.

"We have great respect for the amazing research being done by Charles River Laboratories, and we are simply delighted they continue to rely on SciFinder to help improve people's lives," said Craig W. Stephens, CAS vice president, sales. "Charles River joins a long list of CROs around the world that benefit from faster, more accurate results with SciFinder."

About CAS

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is dedicated to the ACS vision of improving people's lives through the transforming power of chemistry. The CAS team of highly trained scientists finds, collects, and organizes all publicly disclosed substance information, creating the world's most valuable collection of content that is vital to innovation worldwide. Scientific researchers, patent professionals and business leaders around the world rely on a suite of research solutions from CAS that enables discovery and facilitates workflows to fuel tomorrow's innovation.

SOURCE CAS

Related Links

http://www.cas.org


NETANYA, Israel, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Cellcom Israel Ltd. (NYSE: CEL) (TASE: CEL) (hereinafter: the "Company"), announced today that it will be releasing its financial results for the first quarter of 2017 on Wednesday, May 24, 2017, before the US markets open.

The Company will be hosting a conference call at 9:30am Eastern Time (6:30am Pacific Time, 2:30pm UK time, 4:30pm Israel time). On the call, management will review and discuss the results and will be available to answer questions.

To participate, please call one of the following teleconferencing numbers. Please begin placing your calls a few minutes before the conference call commences. If you are unable to connect using the toll-free numbers, please try the international dial-in number.

US Dial-in Number: + 1-866-652-8972

UK Dial-in Number: 0-808-101-2717

Israel Dial-in Number: 03-918-0608

International Dial-in Number: +972-3-918-0608

at:

9:30 am Eastern Time; 6:30 am Pacific Time;

2:30 pm UK Time; 4:30 pm Israel Time

The conference will be broadcast live on the investor relations section of the Company's website: http://investors.ircellcom.co.il. After the call, a replay of the call will be available under the same investor relations section.

About Cellcom Israel

Cellcom Israel Ltd., established in 1994, is the largest Israeli cellular provider; Cellcom Israel provides its approximately 2.801 million cellular subscribers (as at December 31, 2016) with a broad range of value added services including cellular telephony, roaming services for tourists in Israel and for its subscribers abroad and additional services in the areas of music, video, mobile office etc., based on Cellcom Israel's technologically advanced infrastructure. The Company operates an LTE 4 generation network and an HSPA 3.5 Generation network enabling advanced high speed broadband multimedia services, in addition to GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks. Cellcom Israel offers Israel's broadest and largest customer service infrastructure including telephone customer service centers, retail stores, and service and sale centers, distributed nationwide. Through its broad customer service network Cellcom Israel offers technical support, account information, direct to the door parcel delivery services, internet and fax services, dedicated centers for hearing impaired, etc. Cellcom Israel further provides OTT TV services (as of December 2014), internet infrastructure (as of February 2015) and connectivity services and international calling services, as well as landline telephone communication services in Israel, in addition to data communication services. Cellcom Israel's shares are traded both on the New York Stock Exchange (CEL) and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (CEL). For additional information please visit the Company's website http://investors.cellcom.co.il.

Company Contact

Shlomi Fruhling

Chief Financial Officer

[email protected]

Tel: +972-52-998-9755

Investor Relations Contact

Ehud Helft

GK Investor & Public Relations

[email protected]

Tel: +1-617-418-3096



SOURCE Cellcom Israel Ltd.
Rapid-delivery managed solution powered by FlexPod drives improved efficiency and better governance via SAP solution deployments

MONROE, La., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE: CTL) today announced its latest SAP softwarefocused solution with enhanced automation for infrastructure management, SAP software deployment and configuration. The fully managed solution, built specifically for optimizing customers' workloads running on SAP software, is designed to dramatically change how customers address the deployment and ongoing development and management of SAP applications and analytics efforts. The solution, announced at SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference, will be available in early summer.

SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference, the world's premier business technology event and largest SAP customer-run conference, are being held May 1618 in Orlando.

Working closely with Cisco and SAP, CenturyLink built this offering on FlexPod technology developed by NetApp and Cisco. It is designed to help customers realize faster time-to-value at lower costs and reduce risk with improved governance and automation. Customers can leverage CenturyLink's consulting expertise in SAP software, managed private cloud services, and secure network infrastructure that has been specifically designed and certified to SAP operational standards.

CenturyLink's deep expertise around SAP technology includes being a global premier supplier for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and providing managed hosting solutions for a variety of SAP solutions.

"CenturyLink has built comprehensive capabilities for designing, implementing and managing a wide range of SAP solutions," said Gary Gauba, Chief Enterprise Relationship Officer and President Advance Solutions Group in CenturyLink's IT & Managed Services business unit. "With this new offering, combined with our recent acquisition of SEAL Consulting, we are continuing to increase our value proposition to the SAP ecosystem."

"CenturyLink and Cisco are fully committed to the SAP HANA market, and we are pleased that CenturyLink has selected Cisco's Unified Computing System to power SAP customer services," said Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco's Computing Systems Group. "According to a recent primary research study by IDC, Cisco UCS now leads the market in SAP HANA deployments; this deep SAP technology expertise from both companies helps ensure an optimal SAP experience for CenturyLink customers."

CenturyLink's offering includes secure, SAP-certified, enterprise-scale private cloud and application development as well as ongoing management of applications, infrastructure, network and security for SAP HANA, SAP Business Warehouse, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, and the SAP Customer Relationship Management and SAP ERP applications. The offering leverages FlexPod converged infrastructure from Cisco and NetApp, Cisco UCS, and policy-driven automation from an industry-leading vendor to help provide:

Accelerated deployment of SAP systems by leveraging policy-driven automation for the management, auditability and compliance of SAP business applications and SAP HANA environments

Flexible deployment options such as bare metal configuration or a virtualized configuration on the same infrastructure

Single point of contact delivering support for SAP solutions, including facilitation of higher-tier support with partners.

CenturyLink provides solution architecture and design consulting, migration services, application development, managed services on hybrid hosting environments, and advanced analytics expertise specific to SAP software. Flexible deployment models and policy-driven automation differentiate CenturyLink from other hosting providers because the company can support cloud-based development/test environments, manage large-scale production workloads and provide metro-specific disaster recovery services, all of which are enhanced by advanced network capabilities.

About CenturyLink

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is a global communications and IT services company focused on connecting its customers to the power of the digital world. CenturyLink offers network and data systems management, big data analytics, managed security services, hosting, cloud, and IT consulting services. The company provides broadband, voice, video, advanced data and managed network services over a robust 265,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network and a 360,000-route-mile international transport network. Visit CenturyLink for more information.

SAP, SAP HANA, SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP S/4HANA and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE CenturyLink, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.centurylink.com


The expansion of Qidian International will provide China Reading and its writers with a platform to reach readers globally and the potential to become one of the largest platforms globally in online reading. Qidian International's key target markets include North America, Western Europe and Southeast Asia with future potential expansion into Eastern Europe. The content on Qidian International will primarily be in English with future potential editions in Thai, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese provided through cooperation with local-language internet platforms. In addition to the Qidian International website, the Qidian App, available on both Android and iOS are expected to be frequently updated for content and functionality.

"The appeal of culture and literature breaches geographic and ethnic divides," said Mr. Wu Wenhui, CEO of China Reading. "China Reading's unrelenting and meticulous preparation has enabled this launch, which will bring the dazzling world of Chinese online literature to a global audience, foster a surge in interest, and help share elements of traditional and modern Chinese culture with the world."

Sharing New Literary Formats and Concepts with the World

The launch of Qidian International will make a wide selection of high quality Chinese online literary works available globally. To date, China Reading has licensed over 100 literature works for physical and digital publication to publishers in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, the United States, Britain, France and Russia.

Of particular note are serialized novels. These books are published online and continually updated, with a number of works running into the hundreds or even thousands of chapters. These works have largely been made available to international readers thanks to the huge efforts by the in-house team at China Reading, providing a significant amount of content on a daily basis available to international fans of Chinese literature.

Qidian International, through China Reading, is a leading global online literature platform. Over the past few years, China Reading has also built close relationships with many business partners in Asia in the production of adaptations based on original literary content available through China Reading. The Company looks forward to collaborating with additional partners across the globe through Qidian International.

For example, animated films, TV series, and books adapted from China Reading's library of content, such as Once Upon a Time, There Was a Spirit Sword Mountain, and The King's Avatar, have been distributed in Japan whereas titles such as Candle In the Tomb will soon appear in English and French.

Mr. Wu added: "Qidian International was established to introduce more Chinese literary works to overseas audiences in an effort to promote Chinese culture. It will also allow us to extract commercial value from Chinese literary intellectual properties globally."

About China Reading

China Reading Limited was founded in March 2015 through a merger between Tencent Literature and the former Shanda Literature. As a leading authorized digital reading platform and literature intellectual property (IP) incubator, China Reading has a renowned collection of content brands of Chinese digital reading such as QQ Reading app and qidian.com, and many more well-known brands in China. China Reading Limited is a leader in the market in terms of quality and quantity of the content, the influence of the authors, and the value of the original online literacy works.

About Qidian International

Qidian International is a world leading online novel platform and community. It is a well-known brand which affiliates with China Reading Limited. Qidian International focuses on providing high-quality fantasy and mystical stories to millions of readers in the global market. Qidian International also has reliable cross-platform website and mobile apps to provide outstanding reading experience to its readers.

Welcome to visit Qidian International to get more details: www.webnovel.com

Immerse Yourself in Mystical Adventures!

SOURCE China Reading Limited
LONDON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

CloudSense, a leader in Salesforce-native omnichannel commerce, have announced their strategic partnership with Infosys, a global leader in technology, consulting, outsourcing and next-generation services.

The announcement follows the successful work CloudSense, a Platinum Salesforce ISV, and Infosys, a Platinum Salesforce consulting partner, have already delivered together. The partnership has enabled a number of globally recognized brands to deliver omnichannel customer experiences, tailored to their industry-specific requirements. CloudSense will now work with Infosys to accelerate their collaboration across industries including Media, Communications, Utilities and Government.

As customer behavior continues to evolve, the ability of organizations to deliver a seamless customer experience, across every channel, increasingly defines their success. CloudSense's end-to-end Platform, featuring Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Order Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Product Catalog and eCommerce, alongside Infosys' vast knowledge and experience across industries in technology and consulting will deliver organizations the digital capabilities they need to meet ever-growing customer expectations. By partnering with Infosys, CloudSense will also help companies to streamline their businesses to improve processes, reduce operational costs and increase revenues.

Josh Morse, Chief Marketing Officer, CloudSense said "Infosys have extensive industry and technology domain knowledge and experience helping clients around the world transform their company. By working alongside them, we offer clients the ability to provide exceptional customer experiences and vastly improved business outcomes, across every channel. The partnership will help forward-looking organizations to transform the way they sell to, and serve, their customers - boosting agility and profitability in the process."

"CloudSense's Salesforce-native Platform is proven in helping organizations undergo digital business transformations, ensuring they can provide industry-specific experiences in line with customer expectations," said Dinesh Rao, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Enterprise Application Services, Infosys. "Infosys and CloudSense have shared a strong partnership over the years. We look forward to further strengthening this partnership and jointly driving increased efficiency, agility, speed and growth for clients through Salesforce, he added."

About CloudSense

CloudSense is a global leader in Salesforce-native, industry-specific omnichannel commerce applications. The CloudSense Platforms enable customer-centric companies worldwide to transform the way they sell, delivering the capabilities they need to efficiently provide seamless one-to-one omnichannel customer experiences.

Integrating into CRM, ERP and other systems the CloudSense Platforms provide companies with a powerful Commerce SaaS capability for sales teams, eCommerce, mobile workforces, service agents, retail, reseller and telephone sales.

With offices across the world and customers in 26 countries and counting, CloudSense is growing quickly. Both our platform and people have been recognized for their excellence by numerous awards. To learn more, please visit http://www.cloudsense.com.

SOURCE CloudSense
SANTA ANA, Calif., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Cold Genesys Incorporated ("Cold Genesys"), a late-stage immuno-oncology company, today reported interim clinical data from the Phase II trial (BOND2) evaluating Cold Genesys' investigational oncolytic virotherapy, CG0070, in patients with BCG-Unresponsive Non-Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer (NMIBC) at the American Urological Association (AUA) Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, during the Next Frontier Plenary session.

"The interim results are very exciting," said Dr. Gary Steinberg, The Bruce and Beth White Family Professor and Director of Urologic Oncology at University of Chicago Medical Center. "No new drug has been approved in this space for nearly two decades. CG0070 has promising potential to fulfill the unmet medical need in BCG-Unresponsive NMIBC patients."

A total of 45 of 67 enrolled patients had evaluable six-month data in this on-going clinical trial. Of the 45 evaluable patients, there were 24 CIS only (Carcinoma In Situ), 12 CIS with Ta or T1 (CIS concurrent with papillary tumors), and 9 Ta or T1 (papillary only). Overall six-month Complete Response (CR) was 46.7%. Considering six-month CR for pathologic subsets: the CIS only group contained 14 CRs (58.3%), the CIS with Ta or T1 group contained 4 CRs (33.3%) and the Ta/T1 group contained 3 CRs (33.3%).

Table 1. Overall Response in Subset of Patients with Six-Month Evaluation (n=45) Stage N No. CRs (%) No. *Non-CRs (%) No. PDs All 45 21 (46.7%) 11 (24.4%) 13 (28.9%) CIS-Containing 36 18 (50.0%) 7 (19.4%) 11 (30.6%) CIS only 24 14 (58.3%) 1 (4.2%) 9 (37.5%) CIS + Ta/T1 12 4 (33.3%) 6 (50%) 2 (16.7%) Ta/T1 9 3 (33.3%) 4 (44.5%) 2 (22.2%) *Non-CRs denotes Stable Disease and Regression

Arthur Kuan, Interim CEO of Cold Genesys, said, "We are very pleased to announce these top-line interim clinical results from our BOND2 study that has been fully enrolled. Long term follow up data will be provided towards year end 2017. There is an unmet medical need for a bladder sparing treatment for patients with BCG-unresponsive NMIBC. Removal of the bladder is not only a complex surgery, but also life-altering, often associated with at least 28% to 45% surgical complications and up to 8% mortality within six months of surgery in the elderly population. These interim results are encouraging and provide guidance for us to focus on CIS patients in the anticipated registration trial. Additionally, the trial provides insight to locally accessible cancers, where we will focus our development efforts."

For more information, please visit: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02365818

About CG0070:

CG0070 is an investigational oncolytic immunotherapy based on a modified common cold virus backbone that contains a cancer-specific promoter and a GM-CSF transgene. CG0070 was designed to work in two important and complementary ways. First, it replicates inside the tumor's cells causing tumor cell lysis and immunogenic cell death. Then, the rupture of the cancer cells can release tumor-derived antigens, along with GM-CSF, that can stimulate a systemic anti-tumor immune response that involves the body's own white blood cells. The scientific rationale and clinical profile of CG0070 makes it an ideal agent to be developed for a variety of solid tumor types in combination with immune checkpoint modulators.

About BCG-Unresponsive Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer (NMIBC):

BCG-Unresponsive NMIBC patients have limited treatment options. Historically, radical cystectomy (surgical removal of the bladder) is the recommended treatment guideline in this setting. Other intravesical chemotherapeutic agents have been tried as first-line therapy, but results showed limited efficacy. In a pivotal Phase II and Phase II/III open-label study supporting approval for treatment of patients with carcinoma in situ (CIS) who are BCG-unresponsive and not medically eligible for cystectomy, Valrubicin demonstrated a complete response rate of 18% at six months and 6-8% at 18 months.

About Cold Genesys:

Cold Genesys is a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company focused on the development of oncolytic immunotherapies to combat cancer. In 2010, Cold Genesys acquired exclusive worldwide rights to develop CG0070 from BioSante Pharmaceuticals. CG0070 is currently under investigation in a Phase II, single-arm, open-label, multicenter study (BOND2) for patients with NMIBC who failed BCG therapy and refused cystectomy. In addition, Cold Genesys is exploring the use of CG0070 in combination with immune checkpoint modulators in different solid tumors.

Media Contact:

Arthur Kuan

Interim CEO

Cold Genesys Incorporated

(714) 884-3953

[email protected]

SOURCE Cold Genesys
JACKSON, Mich., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Consumers Energy is making good on its commitment to a clean Michigan future by working with large businesses -- including the new Switch Pyramid data center in West Michigan -- that want to be powered 100 percent by renewable energy.

The Michigan utility announced today that it is proposing a program to allow large businesses to match their energy use with renewable energy sources. The energy provider is asking the Michigan Public Service Commission to approve its plan.

Consumers Energy's first large business customer, powering its facilities with 100 percent renewable energy, would be the 1.8 million-square-foot Switch data center campus in Grand Rapids, which opened in the iconic former Steelcase pyramid building in March.

"We are excited to power Michigan businesses who prefer it with more and more renewable energy," said Dan Malone, Consumers Energy's senior vice president for energy resources. "This program, another element of our clean and lean focus, demonstrates how we can help large Michigan employers like Switch to act on their commitments to our state's economic and environmental future."

"Sustainably running the Internet has been a bedrock principle of Switch since Rob Roy started the company in 2000," said Adam Kramer, Switch executive vice president of strategy. "It was a pleasure to work with Consumers Energy to help us continue to meet our commitment to using 100 percent new renewable resources to power our data centers."

The proposed program offers a blueprint for Switch and other businesses that make renewable energy commitments.

Those businesses would help defray the costs for new renewable energy sources.

This would result in new renewable energy in Michigan , in addition to the 10 percent of Consumers Energy's energy supply that already comes from clean sources.

, in addition to the 10 percent of Consumers Energy's energy supply that already comes from clean sources. This is a pilot program that could be expanded if there's enough customer interest.

In short, the new program helps entities like Switch adhere to the renewable principles of additionality (new renewable resources) and locality (resources that benefit the regional grid).

Today, Consumers Energy provides 10 percent of customers' energy use from renewable sources. Michigan's new energy law states that 15 percent of energy will come from renewable sources by 2021.

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 Contacts: Megan Brown, 517-788-6538, or Katie Carey, 517-740-1739

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

SOURCE Consumers Energy

Related Links

http://www.consumersenergy.com


LANGENFELD, Germany and MUNICH and NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- ControlExpert, a leading service provider to the car insurance industry, today announced a strategic partnership with General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm. General Atlantic provides capital and strategic support to growth companies by combining sector-specific expertise, a long-term investment horizon, and a deep understanding of growth drivers to partner with great management and build exceptional businesses worldwide.

Founded in 2002, ControlExpert provides services that streamline various elements of the claims management process by using a combination of software, data analytics, and human expertise to assess the magnitude of damages and the associated repair expenses. The company facilitates the communication among all participants in the claims settlement process, including insurance companies, car repair shops, car owners, OEMs, and leasing and fleet management companies, and enables a more cost- and time-efficient processing of claim expenses. ControlExpert supports its customers internationally and is already present in 13 other countries.

"We have created an innovative offering that continues to revolutionize the car insurance ecosystem," said Gerhard Witte, founder and Managing Director at ControlExpert. "We look forward to partnering with General Atlantic as we expand the business into new markets and strengthen our technology platform. I am certain that ControlExpert will benefit from General Atlantic's expertise with other high growth businesses."

"ControlExpert is a high quality business with an outstanding reputation in the car insurance industry and is a technology and innovation leader," said Jorn Nikolay, Managing Director and Head of Germany at General Atlantic. "We believe that with our industry resources and expertise as well as our global franchise, we can empower ControlExpert to become a global strategic partner to the car insurance ecosystem."

"Together with General Atlantic, we will further advance the business through continued digitization and professionalization of our products and services," said Kai Siersleben, Managing Director at ControlExpert.

"We believe that the combination of proprietary technology, artificial intelligence, big data and human expertise gives ControlExpert a significant competitive advantage," added Achim Berg, Operating Partner at General Atlantic. "We have been impressed by the success of ControlExpert thus far and look forward to leveraging our expertise to elevate the brand globally."

In its next phase of growth, ControlExpert will focus on further enhancing its technology platform to offer top-notch innovation to its customers and continue to concentrate on fulfilling its mission to provide the highest quality products and services in the industry. "We are delighted to take the next evolutionary step in digitalization with such a professional technology partner" said Nicolas Witte, Managing Director at ControlExpert. "We look forward to working with General Atlantic to continue to drive innovation in the car insurance industry globally."

In conjunction with General Atlantic's investment, Jorn Nikolay and Achim Berg will join ControlExpert's Board of Directors. All other management structures will remain the same.

About ControlExpert

ControlExpert is a full-service provider to the automotive industry based in Langenfeld, Germany. ControlExpert develops multifaceted products and services for insurance companies, fleet operators, leasing firms, repair shops, car dealerships, automotive manufacturers, and motor vehicle experts. Its ambition is to link up all the parties involved in the claims and maintenance process and establish an electronic, data-supported communication standard based on structured data. The digital pioneer in automation ensures fast, digitized processes and a high degree of transparency. http://controlexpert.com/en/start/

About General Atlantic

General Atlantic is a leading global growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support for growth companies. Established in 1980, General Atlantic combines a collaborative global approach, sector-specific expertise, long-term investment horizon, and a deep understanding of growth drivers to partner with great management and build exceptional businesses worldwide. General Atlantic has more than 100 investment professionals based in New York, Amsterdam, Beijing, Greenwich, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Mumbai, Munich, Palo Alto, Sao Paulo, and Singapore. http://www.generalatlantic.com/

Media Contacts

Susanne Jahrreiss

Perfect Game Communications for General Atlantic

Tel. +49 [0] 89/3090-529520

[email protected]

Ashley Bowles

Edelman for General Atlantic

Tel. +1-212-642-7737

[email protected]

Beatrix Paeens

ControlExpert

Tel. +49 2173 84 9 84  638

[email protected]

SOURCE General Atlantic

Related Links

http://www.generalatlantic.com


ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- CopaSAT, LLC, a world leader in highly reliable and secure communication technology, today announced it selected LeoSat for LEO satellite connectivity.

LeoSat Enterprises, which is launching a constellation of up to 108 low-earth-orbit communications satellites, has entered into a strategic agreement with CopaSAT, a world leader in highly reliable and secure satellite solutions to U.S Government and Military organizations, to market the fastest, most secure and widest coverage HTS data network in the world.

The Military and Government sector relies on a number of key attributes when it comes to communications networks. Mission-critical operations require advanced sensor capabilities, bandwidth intensive applications and near real-time command and control and the proximity low earth orbit satellites have to the earth, provides the lower latencies and better data rates that are required to support these capabilities. With LeoSat's unique new architecture utilizing inter-satellite laser links, customers will benefit from an optical backbone in space with fiber-like and full duplex gigabit per second data delivery. LeoSat also provides unprecedented security as the data is encrypted from end-to-end across one single network, with no terrestrial touch points. For military or civil government customers these attributes bring the advantages of increased precision, simplified infrastructure and therefore higher success rates for their missions.

Scott Bohnsack, VP of Business Development at CopaSAT commented: "In response to the US Government's increasing requirements for high-speed data connectivity worldwide, requiring LEO satellite solutions  as confirmed by SOCOM's recent connectivity requirements  we are excited to work with LeoSat. While there are options available in the market, LeoSat's security, latency and capacity capabilities are truly unique. Building on the positive response from the military sector which is becoming increasingly interested in the major performance advantages of operating communications networks in low earth orbit (LEO), we look forward to providing LeoSat's faster than fiber, ultra-secure and highly reliable global data solution  enabling us to respond to specific customer needs in this sector which are not being met by today's technology."

Ronald van der Breggen, CCO of LeoSat said: "We're enjoying an excellent relationship with CopaSAT and are excited to welcome them as a service provider. As the entire global community is getting increasingly dependent on Big Data, specifically the Government and Military markets are faced with new and tough requirements for capacity, latency and security, unmet by existing data infrastructure. With our capabilities we will meet those requirements and therefore see LeoSat as a game-changer for the Defense sector's network operations. Leveraging CopaSAT's experience and deep relations with the US Government, we're looking forward to providing CopaSAT with new opportunities through previously unavailable levels of performance, combined with true worldwide reach."

LeoSat is currently working with Thales Alenia Space, a company with unmatched expertise in designing and manufacturing LEO satellites, to finalize the manufacturing plan, paving the way for the production and deployment of the entire constellation.

About CopaSAT

CopaSAT is a certified business provider of turn-key and end-to-end complex satellite solutions to simplify the deployment of specialized satellite communications. CopaSAT provides a wide range of SATCOM products, services, and infrastructure incorporating Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT), airborne ISR/COTM, maritime supporting mission-critical applications. CopaSAT was recently named an awardee on the $2.5 Billion Complex Commercial SATCOM Solution (CS3) Contract. CopaSAT is located in St. Petersburg, Florida. CopaSAT solutions are tailored to the unique requirements of our customer segments in aerospace, maritime, broadcast, government, and infrastructure. www.CopaSAT.com

CONTACT:

Scott Bohnsack

Vice President of Business Development

Email: [email protected]

About LeoSat Enterprises

LeoSat Enterprises was established to leverage the latest developments in satellite communications technologies to develop and launch a new low-earth-orbit satellite constellation which will provide the first commercially available, business grade, extremely high-speed and secure data service worldwide.

With up to 108 low-earth-orbit communications satellites in the constellation LeoSat is the first company to have all the High Throughput Satellites (HTS) in the constellation interconnected through laser links, creating an optical backbone in space which is about 1.5 times faster than terrestrial fiber backbones and without the need for any terrestrial touchpoints. This unique set of features enables LeoSat to provide instant infrastructure from anywhere to everywhere which is fast, secure and reliable.

Based in Washington DC, LeoSat is currently working with Thales Alenia Space for the low-earth-orbit constellation of Ka-band communications satellites. Once operational, the constellation will provide high-speed, low-latency and highly secure communications and bandwidth for business operations in the telecom backhaul, Energy, Maritime, Government and international business markets. Launch of the constellation is expected in 2019. www.LeoSat.com

Contact information:

Melanie Dickie

VP Marketing & Communications, LeoSat Enterprises

Tel: +31 6 14 22 97 62

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE CopaSAT

Related Links

http://www.CopaSAT.com


NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Credit Suisse AG ("Credit Suisse") announced today that it will repurchase at its option its Credit Suisse X-Links Long/Short Equity ETNs ("CSLS") and accelerate at its option its Credit Suisse X-Links Commodity Rotation ETNs ("CSCR") and Credit Suisse FI Enhanced Big Cap Growth ETNs ("FIBG"). With respect to CSLS, the principal amount outstanding as of May 15, 2017 is $10,000,000 or less. The repurchase date for CSLS is expected to be May 26, 2017 and the acceleration date for CSCR and FIBG is expected to be June 5, 2017.

Credit Suisse expects to deliver irrevocable call notices with respect to the repurchase of CSLS and the acceleration of CSCR and FIGB to The Depository Trust Company no later than May 22, 2017.

With respect to CSLS, the trading day immediately following the date of such irrevocable call notice, which is expected to be May 23, 2017, will be the valuation date applicable to the repurchase of CSLS, subject to postponement due to certain events. Investors of CSLS will receive, on the repurchase date, a cash payment per ETN in an amount equal to the daily repurchase value. The repurchase date for CSLS is expected to be May 26, 2017, which is three business days after the valuation date. Accordingly, the last day of trading for CSLS is expected to be May 25, 2017.

With respect to CSCR and FIBG, the five consecutive trading days beginning on the second business day following the delivery of the irrevocable call notice, May 24, 2017 through May 31, 2017 will constitute the accelerated valuation period, subject to postponement due to certain events. Investors of CSCR and FIBG will receive, on the acceleration date, a cash payment per ETN in the amount equal to the arithmetic average of the closing indicative values of the relevant ETNs during such accelerated valuation period. The acceleration date for CSCR and FIBG is expected to be June 5, 2017, which is three business days after the last trading day in the accelerated valuation period. Accordingly, the last day of trading for CSCR and FIBG is expected to be June 2, 2017. As of the date hereof, Credit Suisse will no longer issue new units of CSCR and FIBG ETNs.

None of the other ETNs offered by Credit Suisse are affected by this announcement. Repurchase/ Acceleration Ticker Symbol CUSIP Credit Suisse X-Links Long/Short Equity ETNs due February 19, 2020 Credit Suisse X-Links Commodity Rotation ETNs due June 15, 2033 Credit Suisse FI Enhanced Big Cap Growth ETNs due October 22, 2018 CSLS CSCR FIBG 22542D878 22542D456 22539T563

Credit Suisse ETNs

Telephone +1 800 320 1225, [email protected]

Credit Suisse AG

Credit Suisse AG is one of the world's leading financial services providers and is part of the Credit Suisse group of companies (referred to here as 'Credit Suisse'). As an integrated bank, Credit Suisse offers clients its combined expertise in the areas of private banking, investment banking and asset management. Credit Suisse provides advisory services, comprehensive solutions and innovative products to companies, institutional clients and high-net-worth private clients globally, as well as to retail clients in Switzerland. Credit Suisse is headquartered in Zurich and operates in over 50 countries worldwide. The group employs approximately 46,640 people. The registered shares (CSGN) of Credit Suisse's parent company, Credit Suisse Group AG, are listed in Switzerland and, in the form of American Depositary Shares (CS), in New York. Further information about Credit Suisse can be found at www.credit-suisse.com.

SOURCE Credit Suisse AG

Related Links

http://www.credit-suisse.com


TROY, Mich., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Crestmark is pleased to announce the acquisition of Allstate Capital, a leading provider of equipment leasing. They will be a part of Crestmark's leasing division, Crestmark Equipment Finance, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Crestmark Bank; and will report to Crestmark First Vice President Scot Lund, head of small ticket leasing. Allstate Capital is located in Pompano Beach, Fla.; the division will continue to work out of its current location to ensure the current strong quality of service.

This move will continue to broaden Crestmark's equipment leasing market share. Allstate Capital provides equipment leasing and vendor programs nationwide for business equipment, fitness and gym equipment, computer equipment, medical/dental equipment, communications equipment, office equipment/ furniture, construction equipment, heavy equipment, beauty and tanning equipment.

"Bringing this respected small ticket leasing provider to the Crestmark family helps us round out our strategic plans for our leasing division's continued growth  they were the right company at the right time," said Mick Goik, Crestmark president and COO. "We're looking forward to providing expanded help and growth for our clients together."

"Allstate Capital is impressive in what they have built," said Lund. "This will be a great addition to our leasing division, and I look forward to being a part of the strategic growth of Crestmark's small ticket leasing programs."

"By becoming a part of Crestmark, we will benefit with industry-leading direct lending, allowing us to provide expanded product offerings and services to our client base," said Alex Echevarria, Managing Member and Co-Founder of Allstate Capital. "The Crestmark team has a great reputation, and we're excited about this next step. The expanded diversification of revenue streams along with a depth of commercial financial product offerings will greatly expand our opportunities."

Mike Ramazio, Managing Member and Co-Founder of Allstate Capital, said, "We bring incredible proprietary CRM technology designed to manage and market complex customer relational data for our sales team as well as the managers that oversee them. The acquisition is an excellent cultural fit, and a well-executed deal with meaningful financial growth opportunities. Crestmark's vast product suite and commitment to service customers will enable the combined company to better compete in this growing marketplace. Our team is excited to join the Crestmark team!"

About Crestmark

Crestmark is a nationally known and respected FDIC-insured bank that provides innovative financial solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses. Financing solutions include asset-based lending, accounts receivable financing, lines of credit, factoring and machinery/equipment financing. Headquartered in Michigan, Crestmark has locations in California, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, New York, Illinois; and representatives nationwide.

About Allstate Capital

Allstate Capital is a leading commercial equipment leasing and equipment financing company that provides creative and flexible financing options. Programs include national accounts, major accounts, and new business programs for most equipment types to industries nationwide.

SOURCE Crestmark
MAUMEE, Ohio, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Dana Incorporated (NYSE: DAN) has been honored by FCA US LLC as the "2017 Innovation Supplier of the Year" for North America. The award was presented earlier this month during the automaker's Annual Supplier Conference in Detroit and recognizes extraordinary commitment to innovation, quality, warranty, cost, delivery, and the foundational principles of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V.

Specifically, Dana was acknowledged for developing a technologically advanced heat exchanger for the induction-air system on FCA's 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon. The heat exchanger is a critical component in the vehicle's unique refrigerated charge air cooling system. The system introduces low-temperature refrigerated air into the intake system, delivering a denser charge and boosting engine horsepower.

With extensive expertise in advanced thermal-management technology, Dana quickly developed a prototype for this innovative, advanced solution that effectively addressed the vehicle's unique need to super cool for added performance.

"Dana is honored to be recognized by FCA US for innovating this specialized solution to support its exciting new vehicle," said Dwayne Matthews, president of Dana Power Technologies. "Dana is continually and actively developing advanced technologies that address current industry needs and potential future challenges. This approach allows us to respond to the unique requirements of our customers. Additionally, our strong relationship and collaboration with the FCA team made the process for creating this solution possible, and within a short timeframe."

The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon is the first-ever factory production car with a refrigerated liquid-to-air charge air cooling system. This enables charge air induction temperatures previously not possible in pressure-charged street-legal production vehicles  enhancing engine performance even in extreme temperatures.

About Dana Incorporated

Dana is a world leader in highly engineered solutions for improving the efficiency, performance, and sustainability of powered vehicles and machinery. Dana supports the passenger vehicle, commercial truck, and off-highway markets, as well as industrial and stationary equipment applications. Founded in 1904, Dana employs approximately 27,000 people in 34 countries on six continents who are committed to delivering long-term value to customers. The company reported sales of more than $5.8 billion in 2016. Based in Maumee, Ohio, the company's operations were selected as a 2017 Top Workplace in Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan by The (Toledo) Blade. For more information, please visit dana.com.

SOURCE Dana Incorporated

Related Links

http://www.dana.com


BRASILIA, Brazil, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Andre Motta, President of Postalis, the pension fund for 130,000 postal workers in Brazil, will brief the media on the exploding pension crisis in Brazil on Thursday, May 18, at 10:00 AM at the National Press Club, Zenger Room, 529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC. Postalis is the largest pension fund in Brazil in terms of participants. Postalis is represented by the Law Office of Bart S. Fisher (Washington, DC), the Law Office of Clayborne, Sabo & Wagner (Belleville, Illinois), Lobo Martin Oliveira & Valdetaro - Rua da Assemblela (Rio de Janeiro - Brazil).

Mr. Motta will be leading a delegation from Brazil that includes leaders from Postalis, the Letter Carriers Union of Brazil, and the Congress of Brazil. This delegation will have meetings with members of the U.S. Congress and Executive Branch. Agencies, including the U.S. Department of State and the Treasury Department. Mr. Motta will report on the outcome of those meetings.

Mr. Motta will also report on the status of the litigation now under way in Brazil against BNY Mellon affiliates in Brazil, a case in which $1.5 billion in the value of the Postalis pension fund was erased in connection with the activities of its fiduciary fund administrator and fund manager, BNY Mellon. The claims in the Brazil cases of Postalis against BNY Mellon focus on breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty.

"BNY Mellon has undertaken a series of actions in Brazil that threaten to destabilize an already difficult political and economic situation. Postalis lost $1.5 billion due to the failure of Mellon to perform its duties as fiduciary administrator and fund manager. As a result, instead of having security for retirement, Brazilian postal workers are now required to make additional contributions to Postalis. This is fundamentally unfair. Prompt action is required to address this situation," Motta said.

"U.S. financial institutions such as BNY Mellon must be held accountable for their role in the Brazilian pension fund crisis. Brazil is an important strategic ally of the United States in the Western Hemisphere, and the United States should not tolerate predatory behavior by U.S. financial institutions such as BNY Mellon," Motta said.

SOURCE Law Office of Bart S. Fisher
DALLAS, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- MedChiro Injury Rehab and Dr. Fred Amin D.C. of Dallas, TX are now accepting Department of Labor Injury Claims, also known as Federal Workers Compensation Claims. MedChiro Injury Rehab opened in July of 2016 as a premiere injury rehab facility in the South Dallas Fair Park area for auto and work related injuries. The new facility, which was completely redone in 2016, is 3,600 square feet of brand new equipment for the latest in evidenced-based physical rehabilitation. MedChiro Injury Rehab works with independent Medical Doctors and Specialists on-site to offer a complete multidisciplinary and integrative scope of care.

Dr. Fred Amin D.C. brings over 15 years experience in treating patients of all types, especially patients suffering injuries due to work or auto related accidents. Most recently, Dr. Amin D.C. was head of physical rehabilitation program for a prominent orthopedic surgeon treating predominantly Department of Labor injured workers for their Federal Workers Compensation claims.

MedChiro Injury Rehab also provides the services of a former Workers Compensation Adjuster to assist injured workers with their claim paperwork. Often the most difficult part of the process for Federal injured workers and Texas injured workers is properly filling out and filing the paperwork required to get their claim approved in order to receive their claim benefits. The former Workers Compensation Adjuster at MedChiro Injury Rehab will assist any injured workers with their CA Forms for Federal Workers Comp Claims or DWC Forms for Texas Workers Comp Claims for free, along with appeals for any denied aspects of a claim.

MedChiro Injury Rehab offers free consultations, free transportation, free claims assistance, and same day appointments. You can call 214-643-6688 to schedule your free consultation, or visit their site https://southdallaschiropractors.com for more information.

Media Contact:

David Long

Phone: 214-643-6688

Email: [email protected]

Related Images

image1.png

image2.jpg

Related Links

DOL Doctor of Chiropractic

Federal Workers Comp Doctor of Chiropractic

SOURCE MedChiro Injury Rehab
LONDON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SendOwl makes it easy for people from all over the world to turn their passion into their business. Anyone who has an itch to scratch can build a business by selling their digital products direct to their audience from their own website or blog with help from SendOwl.

On May 11th, SendOwl customers crossed the $250,000,000 milestone in collective sales.

SendOwl sellers make $1/4 billion in sales processed through SendOwl. SendOwl pops a cork to celebrate $250,000,000 customer sales

SendOwl enables people to do what they love and sell what they love. SendOwl customers sell an incredible range of products including eBooks, indie video games, knitting patterns, fitness videos, even tiny house blueprints.

What unites them is a desire to shun the corporate world and 9-5 to make money by doing what they love. And with a quarter of a billion dollars processed by SendOwl, this is hardly a marginal trend.

Selling without borders: At a time when nationalists around the world are talking about 'taking back control' and protectionism, SendOwl customers have been heading fast in the other direction. The internet makes it easy for them to reach a global audience with only a website and a compelling product. SendOwl customers have sold to people in almost every country in the world, including Nepal, Ecuador and even North Korea: they are genuinely sellers without borders.

"SendOwl sellers are at the vanguard of what the business world can look like: connected, entrepreneurial and supportive of people who want to turn their passion into their business, no matter how small their start-up capital, where they live or what their background."

George Palmer, SendOwl Founder

About SendOwl: SendOwl is a London-based tech company founded in 2010 by entrepreneur George Palmer with just $50.

Press contact: George Palmer

+442038683460

[email protected]

SOURCE SendOwl

Related Links

https://www.sendowl.com


Highlights include a Gold and Guilloche Enamel Russian Imperial Presentation Snuff Box with the diamond cypher of Empress Maria Alexandrovna (1824-1880), the wife of Emperor Alexander II (1818-1881). It was made in Hanau, Germany, by C.M. Weishaupt Sohne. Consigned by a New York Estate, the snuff box is appearing on the market for the first time in generations (est. $12,000-18,000). Also offered is an Important Gold Minute Repeating Chronograph Hunting Case Pocket Watch depicting Emperor Alexander III (1845-1894) and engraved with the facsimile signature of his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna (1847-1928). The watch commemorates a state visit to Helsinki in August 1895 (est. $25,000-35,000).

Featured among a diverse group of Faberge is a Silver-Gilt and Guilloche Enamel Desk Clock by head workmaster Henrik Wigstrom, circa 1914. It was purchased by one of the firm's most important clients in London, Mrs. W.B. Leeds (est. $55,000-65,000). Further highlights include a large Faberge Silver Samovar by the workmaster Alexander Wakeva (est. $40,000-60,000); a monumental Faberge Silver and Cut Glass Center Bowl (est. $60,000-80,000); a rare Faberge Silver Cigarette Case depicting Sadko, the principal character in a medieval Russian epic poem (est. $10,000-15,000); and an exquisite Faberge Silver and Guilloche Enamel Miniature Tankard by the workmaster Anders Nevalainen (est. $35,000-45,000) from a Prominent Virginia Collection.

The porcelain section of the sale offers an extensive selection of nearly fifty figures and porcelain plates depicting various national groups inhabiting the Russian Empire and folk characters. They were made by the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory and prominent private factories, such as Gardner and Popov. Highlights include a Porcelain Figure of a Lapp Woman (Loparskaya Zhenshchina) from the Peoples of Russia series by the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory after the model by Pavel Kamenskii (est. $8,000-12,000) and a Porcelain Figure of Vodonoska by the Gardner Manufactory (est. $12,000-15,000).

Among bronzes by Lanceray, Grachev and Moritz-Wolf are two elegant society portraits by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy. Mother and Child (Princess Gagarina and Her Daughter) is a tender portrait of the artist's cousin (est. $30,000-50,000), and The Younger Daughter of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt is one of several portraits by the artist of members of the Vanderbilt family (est. $35,000-45,000).

The sale will also include a selection of Russian historical prints, maps and paintings by such artists as Konstantin Korovin, Ivan Choultse, David Burliuk and Dmitri Plavinsky.

Comprising approximately 200 lots, the Russian Works of Art auction will be offered as a special section of the sale of English & Continental Furniture & Decorative Arts. The public is invited to the exhibition on view from May 20 through 22. Doyle is located at 175 East 87th Street in New York. Sale information and the auction catalogue may be viewed online at https://DOYLE.com

SOURCE Doyle New York

Related Links

https://doyle.com


"Dr. Grupp was the top candidate for this crucial position, and will now expand an already outstanding program that is revolutionizing cell therapy for children with resistant relapsed or refractory ALL and pioneering new strategies for stem cell transplantation," said Stephen P. Hunger, MD, Chief of Pediatric Oncology and Director of the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at CHOP.

Grupp has been an attending physician and oncology researcher at CHOP since 1996, after earning his MD and a PhD in Immunology from the University of Cincinnati. He completed his clinical training in pediatrics and pediatric hematology/oncology at Boston Children's Hospital, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School, performing postdoctoral research in immunology at Harvard. He joined the University of Pennsylvania medical faculty in 1996, and is now a Professor of Pediatrics in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine.

Since arriving at CHOP two decades ago, Grupp has led a basic science lab studying cell therapy, signal transduction and novel therapies in ALL and other pediatric cancers. Reflecting the translational focus of his work, he also developed and led clinical trials that established tandem stem cell transplantation (two separate transplant procedures) as a standard of care for children with high-risk neuroblastoma. He helped to develop and lead clinical trials that resulted in FDA approval of a new treatment for veno-occlusive disease, a deadly complication of stem cell transplantation. In addition, he led the pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship training program at CHOP for almost a decade. Eight current CHOP faculty trained in his lab.

His outstanding contribution to oncology is in the clinical development of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for relapsed and refractory ALL in children and young adults. Collaborating with Dr. Carl June's team at the University of Pennsylvania, Grupp's lab did many of the preclinical in vivo studies, and then developed the first pediatric trial and treated the first pediatric patient at CHOP with CAR T cell therapy in 2012.

Responding to a life-threatening complication of T cell therapy, called cytokine release syndrome, he and his team pioneered a successful treatment for this complication, and thereby revolutionized T cell immunotherapy. Grupp and his colleagues at CHOP have since treated over 150 children with CAR T cell therapy, and he recently led the first multicenter global study of an engineered CAR T cell product that is expected to lead to FDA approval later this year.

About Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals, and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 546-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu

Contact: Amy Burkholder

The Cancer Center, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Phone: (267) 426-6083

[email protected]

SOURCE Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Related Links

http://www.chop.edu


RAMAT GAN, Israel, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

EarlySense, the market leader in contact-free continuous monitoring solutions, announced today that Shenzhen Lachesis Mhealth, China's leading intelligent healthcare developer and sister company of leading medical corporation United Imaging Healthcare (UIH) , has integrated EarlySense's InSight contactless monitoring technology into its new Intelligent Hospital Ward Solution. The joint platform, designed for general ward staff and patients, will be unveiled at the China International Medical Equipment Fair (CMEF Spring 2017), taking place May 15 - 18 at the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai (booth #H2-D03).

Lachesis' Intelligent Hospital Ward Solution provides a complete suite of technologies that enable an advanced and streamlined healthcare flow to deliver more efficient and improved medical services. The platform includes a closed-loop infusion management system, intelligent diagnosis and treatment assistant, nurse digital assistant device, nurse information system, IoT management and a variety of patient monitoring sensors. With the addition of EarlySense, real-time cardiac and respiratory data and notifications will be relayed to the nurses' station, as well as handheld devices and other remote viewing displays within the facility.

"The need to continuously monitor post-acute care patients is growing, and we are pleased to collaborate with leading smart sensor developer EarlySense on a solution that will prove essential to both patients and healthcare staff across the region," said Shuangquan Zhu, CEO of Shenzhen Lachesis Mhealth. "Our platform combines wireless sensing technology and advanced analytics to create a seamless, end-to-end solution for safe, cost-effective monitoring of general care patients."

Placed under a bed mattress, EarlySense's patented sensor accurately and continuously monitors patient heart rate, respiratory rate and movement without ever touching the patient. Leveraging advanced algorithms that analyze two patient data points per second, the solution assists healthcare teams with early detection of patient deterioration, helping to prevent adverse events, including code blues, patient falls and pressure ulcers.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Lachesis to bring our clinically-proven sensors to China, to help improve patient care and empower health teams," said Yfat Scialom, VP of International Sales and Marketing of EarlySense. "China is a key market in our global strategy and we look forward to working together to provide best-in-class solutions to one of the world's largest markets, and to positively impacting healthcare in the region."

About EarlySense

EarlySense provides contact-free, continuous monitoring solutions for the medical and consumer digital health markets. EarlySense's patented sensor and advanced algorithms monitor and analyze cardiac, respiratory and motion parameters. Used in hospitals and healthcare facilities worldwide, EarlySense assists clinicians in early detection of patient deterioration, helping to prevent adverse events, including code blues, preventable ICU transfers, patient falls and pressure ulcers.

LIVE by EarlySense is the first home health and sleep monitor powered by medically-proven, contact-free, continuous monitoring technology. The company's OEM technology is also at the core of wellness and sleep products marketed by international partners including Samsung, Beurer and iFit. EarlySense was founded in 2004 and has offices in Waltham, MA, and Ramat Gan, Israel.

For more information, please visit http://www.earlysense.com and http://www.livebyearlysense.com.

Follow EarlySense on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Follow LIVE by EarlySense on Facebook and Twitter

About Lachesis

Founded in 2010, Shenzhen Lachesis Mhealth Co., Ltd (Lachesis) specializes in intelligent healthcare, with a focus on cross-border innovation of intelligent, high-end medical equipment technology. With world-class talent and professional staff from ICT, IOT and the medical industry, Lachesis pioneered the complete solution for Intelligent Ward and Chronic Diseases Management Platform, leveraging intelligent hardware, Bluetooth IOT, medical cloud big data, AI and more. Lachesis has R&D centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Wuhan and its sales have reached more than 4,700 hospitals across China. For more information, please visit: http://www.lachesis-mh.com.

Media Contact:

Ellie Hanson

Finn Partners

+1-929-222-8006

[email protected]

Twitter: @elliesheva



Company Contacts:

Hila Peleg

EarlySense Marcom Manager

+972-54-527-3117

[email protected]

Twitter: @EarlySense_Ltd



Christie Xiong

Lachesis Business Director

+86-755-26808505

[email protected]



SOURCE EarlySense and Lachesis
PORTLAND, Ore., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Eastside Distilling, Inc. (OTCQB: ESDI), a producer of award-winning master-crafted spirits, reported first quarter 2017 financial results.

Q1 2017 Financial and Operational Highlights:

Gross sales increased 33% to $829,669 during the first quarter of 2017, compared to $621,882 in Q1 2016. This was primarily because of our refocus on our core market in the Pacific Northwest, our acquisition of a contract bottling business, and an increase in product sales at special events in Oregon ;

during the first quarter of 2017, compared to in Q1 2016. This was primarily because of our refocus on our core market in the Pacific Northwest, our acquisition of a contract bottling business, and an increase in product sales at special events in ; Shipments increased 89% from the previous year's shipments of 3,146 cases to 5,937 cases in Q1 2017, lead by continuing record sales of Portland Potato Vodka;

Gross margins improved to 47% during the first quarter 2017 from 44% in the year ago period, because of our concentration on higher margin products and efforts to reduce COGS;

General and administrative expenses decreased 18% from Q1 2016, while gross sales increased 33%, as we aggressively sought operational efficiencies;

Beginning in March 2017 , our results include MotherLode Craft Distilling, the acquisition of which expanded our team to include Allen Barteld , reducing go-forward operating costs and opening new profit opportunities in private labeling;

, our results include MotherLode Craft Distilling, the acquisition of which expanded our team to include , reducing go-forward operating costs and opening new profit opportunities in private labeling; Sales reflect the initiation of shipments to Alaska for the first time, in an expansion of our Pacific Northwest core market; and

for the first time, in an expansion of our Pacific Northwest core market; and As of March 31, 2017 , the Company had a working capital position of $1,700,325 and a cash balance of $883,715 .

Recent Developments

In May 2017 , we acquired a 90% stake in Big Bottom Distilling, a Hillsboro, Oregon -based distillery headed by Oregon craft spirit Ted Pappas and Travis Shoney , formerly of High West. This is a strategic extension of our product line, as a low-cost way to add both distilling capacity and top talent;

, we acquired a 90% stake in Big Bottom Distilling, a -based distillery headed by craft spirit and , formerly of High West. This is a strategic extension of our product line, as a low-cost way to add both distilling capacity and top talent; Began receiving the first "deliverables" from Sandstrom Partners, a leading spirit branding firm renowned for its successes with Bulleit, St Germain, Aviation Gin and Stillhouse. Sandstrom also became a significant investor in Eastside ; and

; and In Q2 2017, all remaining preferred stock has been converted to common stock, and there are zero preferred shares outstanding.

Management Commentary

Grover Wickersham, Executive Chairman of Eastside Distilling, commented, "Our Q1 results reflect continued progress toward our strategic plan. Revenues grew over 30% and our case volumes increased even more significantly, particularly in our key core market of the Pacific Northwest. We made an immediately accretive acquisition during the quarter, the MotherLode private label and bottling business. We followed this with a second acquisition on May 1st, Big Bottom Distilling, a highly-respected craft distiller that fills gaps in our craft spirit lineup with gin and other highly complementary products, and adds distilling capability. We are off to a good start so far and are optimistic about 2017 as we continue to execute on our plans to grow our business and improve profitability."

Steve Shum, Chief Financial Officer of Eastside Distilling, commented, "We have embarked on a number of strategic initiatives surrounding gross margin expansion and improved profitability. Our acquisition of MotherLode and their manufacturing operations enables the bulk purchase of spirits inventory which we are purchasing on much more favorable terms than previously. This decreased input cost should allow for an increase in gross margins in the second half of this year. Additionally, a reallocation of resources from general and administrative towards sales and marketing is proving successful as we drive consumer awareness and shelf depletions, and ultimately improved profitability ratios."

Mr. Wickersham concluded, "We are happy to be moving to newer and much more cost efficient facilities this quarter. There, we will be working closely with our new bottling group to reduce manufacturing costs, as well as exploiting some attractive private label opportunities that are shaping up in the short term. We have applied to the OLCC to immediately start distributing Big Bottom's high margin super premium products through our own retail sales channels in Oregon. Also, over the next 90 days, we hope to implement the first of Sandstrom's product branding improvements. We will begin by making changes to the packaging of our vodka and whiskeys to increase 'shelf impact" and hopefully boost sales."

Financial Results

For the quarter ended March 31, 2017, Eastside Distilling reported record gross sales of $829,669, an increase of 33%. Sales growth was driven during the quarter by increased wholesale traction within the Pacific Northwest, the addition of a new retail location, and contributions from the addition of MotherLode's private label bottling business.

Total shipments increased to 5,937 cases during the first quarter of 2017 from 3,146 cases in the year ago period, an increase of 89%.

Gross profit margins increased to 47% during the first quarter of 2017, compared to 44% in the first quarter of the previous year. The improvement in gross profit margins is primarily due to a more favorable product mix.

Advertising, promotional and selling expenses increased by $229,929, however general and administrative expense decreased by approximately $159,615 as the company focused on driving sales growth, while maintaining tighter overhead cost controls.

Adjusted EBITDA during the first quarter of 2017 was $(564,494), which compared to $(643,112) in the year ago quarter.

Net loss attributable to common shareholders was $(906,855), or $(0.12) per basic and diluted share for the first quarter of 2017, compared $(1,014,679), or $(0.45) per basic and diluted share in the year ago period.

The company ended the first quarter with $883,715 in cash and working capital of $1,700,325. After the end of the quarter, the company raised an additional $833,815 through placement of equity and medium term debt.

Conference Call

The Company will hold a conference call today, Monday, May 15, 2017, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time to discuss these results.

Date: Monday, May 15, 2017

Time: 11:00 a.m. Eastern time (8:00 a.m. Pacific time)

Toll-free dial-in number: (844) 889-4332

International dial-in number: (412) 717-9595





Please call the conference telephone number 5-10 minutes prior to the start time. An operator will register your name and organization. If you have any difficulty connecting with the conference call, please contact Lytham Partners at (602) 889-9700.

A webcast replay will be available in the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at http://www.eastsidedistilling.com/presentations/ or https://www.webcaster4.com/Webcast/Page/1518/21140.

A telephone replay of the call will be available until May 18, 2017:

Toll-free replay number: (877) 344-7529

International replay number: (412) 317-0088

Replay ID: 10107423

About Eastside Distilling

Eastside Distilling, Inc. (OTCQB: ESDI) is located in Southeast Portland's Distillery Row and has been producing high-quality, master-crafted spirits since 2008. Makers of award winning spirits, the Company is unique in the marketplace and distinguished by its highly decorated product line-up that includes Barrel Hitch American Whiskies, Burnside Bourbon, Below Deck Rums, Portland Potato Vodka and a distinctive line of infused whiskeys. All Eastside spirits are master crafted from natural ingredients for unparalleled quality and taste. The Company is publicly traded under the symbolOTCQB: ESDI. For more information, visit: www.eastsidedistilling.com

Important Cautions Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain matters discussed in this press release may be forward-looking statements. Such matters involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including the following: changes in economic conditions; general competitive factors; the Company's ability to continue as a going concern; acceptance of the Company's products in the market; the Company's success in obtaining new customers; the Company's ability to obtain additional capital, the Company's success in product development; the Company's ability to execute its business model and strategic plans; the Company's success in integrating acquired entities and assets, and all the risks and related information described from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the financial statements and related information contained in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2017. Examples of forward-looking statements in this release may include statements related to our strategic focus, product verticals, anticipated revenue and profitability. Further, such forward looking statements in this press release include but are not limited to: that the Company's growth will continue on its current trajectory; the stage is set for significant growth and improved bottom line performance ahead and beyond; that the second half is traditionally our busiest of the year, when the Company typically generates close to 70% of its annual business. The Company assumes no obligation to update the cautionary information in this release.

Company Contact: Investor Relations Contact: Eastside Distilling Robert Blum, Joe Diaz or Joe Dorame (971) 888-4264 Lytham Partners, LLC [email protected] (602) 889-9700

[email protected]

Use of Non-GAAP Measures

Eastside Distilling's management evaluates and makes operating decisions using various financial metrics. In addition to the Company's GAAP results, management also considers the non-GAAP measure of adjusted EBITDA. Management believes this non-GAAP measure provides useful information about the Company's operating results.

The Company defines adjusted EBITDA as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, stock based compensation and gain on spin-off. The table below provides a reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure with the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure.

First Quarter 2017 Financial Summary Tables

The following financial information should be read in conjunction with the audited financial statements and accompanying notes filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 12, 2017 on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2017, and which can be viewed at www.sec.gov and in the investor relations section of the company's website at www.eastsidedistilling.com.

Eastside Distilling, Inc. and Subsidiary Consolidated Statements of Operations For the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016 (unaudited)











Three Months Ended



March 31, 2017

March 31, 2016

Sales $ 829,669

$ 621,882

Less excise taxes, customer programs and incentives 217,188

167,120

Net sales 612,481

454,762

Cost of sales 322,913

256,169

Gross profit 289,568

198,593

Operating expenses:







Advertising, promotional and selling expenses 386,132

156,203

General and administrative expenses 726,396

886,011

Loss on disposal of property and equipment 35,534

-

Total operating expenses 1,148,062

1,042,214

Loss from operations (858,494)

(843,621)

Other income (expense), net







Interest expense (47,809)

(171,054)

Other income (expense) 4,485

(4)

Total other expense, net (43,324)

(171,058)

Loss before income taxes (901,818)

(1,014,679)

Provision for income taxes -

-

Net loss (901,818)

(1,014,679)











Dividends on convertible preferred stock (5,037)

-











Net loss attributable to common shareholders $(906,855)

$(1,014,679)











Basic and diluted net loss per common share $ (0.12)

$ (0.45)











Basic and diluted weighted average common shares outstanding 7,842,971

2,275,625



Eastside Distilling, Inc. and Subsidiary Consolidated Balance Sheets March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016









March 31, 2017 (unaudited)

December 31, 2016 Assets





Current assets:





Cash $ 883,715

$ 1,088,066 Trade receivables 360,126

344,955 Inventories 995,733

780,037 Prepaid expenses and current assets 146,802

187,714 Total current assets 2,386,376

2,400,772 Property and equipment, net 128,560

99,216 Intangible assets, net 373,502

- Deposits 59,400

48,000 Total Assets $ 2,947,838

$ 2,547,988







Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity





Current liabilities:





Accounts payable $ 476,175

$ 457,034 Accrued liabilities 208,418

523,702 Deferred revenue 1,458

2,126 Current portion of notes payable -

4,537 Total current liabilities 686,051

987,399 Notes payable - less current portion and debt discount 365,160

427,756 Total liabilities 1,051,211

1,415,155







Commitments and contingencies (Note 9)













Stockholders' equity:





Series A convertible preferred stock, $0.0001 par value; 3,000 shares authorized; 50 and 300 shares issued and outstanding at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively (liquidation values of $125,000 and $750,000, respectively)

















49,426

245,838 Common stock, $0.0001 par value; 45,000,000 shares authorized; 9,010,352 and 7,627,512 shares issued and outstanding at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively











901

764 Additional paid-in capital 15,566,199

13,699,275 Accumulated deficit (13,719,899)

(12,813,044) Total stockholders' equity 1,896,627

1,132,833 Total Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity $ 2,947,838

$ 2,547,988

Eastside Distilling, Inc. and Subsidiary Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows For the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016 (unaudited)

2017

2016 Cash Flows From Operating Activities:





Net loss $ (901,818)

$ (1,014,679) Adjustments to reconcile net loss to net cash used in operating activities:











Depreciation and amortization 9,006

5,574 Loss on disposal of property and equipment 35,534

- Amortization of debt issuance costs 37,009

11,167 Amortization of beneficial conversion feature -

148,077 Issuance of common stock in exchange for services 86,317

89,100 Stock-based compensation 158,658

105,839 Changes in operating assets and liabilities:





Trade receivables (15,171)

(40,974) Inventories (112,208)

61,356 Prepaid expenses and other assets 29,512

64,751 Accounts payable 13,961

(7,808) Accrued liabilities (466,335)

304,739 Deferred revenue (668)

1,381 Net cash used in operating activities (1,126,203)

(271,477) Cash Flows From Investing Activities:





Cash acquired in acquisition 7,062

- Purchases of property and equipment (39,631)

(6,954) Net cash used in investing activities (32,569)

(6,954) Cash Flows From Financing Activities:





Preferred stock deposit -

151,200 Stock issuance cost related to acquisition (5,580)

- Payments of principal on notes payable (1,716)

(1,286) Proceeds from common stock, net of issuance costs of $6,033, with detachable warrants 802,467

- Proceeds from warrant exercise 159,250

- Net cash provided by financing activities 954,421

149,914 Net decrease in cash (204,351)

(128,517) Cash - beginning of period 1,088,066

141,317 Cash - end of period $ 883,715

$ 12,800







Supplemental Disclosure of Cash Flow Information:





Cash paid during the period for interest $ 10,800

$ 1,380







Supplemental Disclosure of Non-Cash Financing Activity:





Issuance of common stock for the acquisition of MotherLode Craft Distillery, LLC $ 377,000

$ - Common stock issued in exchange of notes payable $ 87,500

$ -



















Three Months Ended





March 31





2017

2016











Net Loss $ (901,818)

$ (1,014,679)

Add:









Interest Expense 47,809

171,054



Loss on disposal of property and equipment 35,534

-



Provision for Income taxes -

-



Stock-based compensation 158,658

105,839



Stock issued for services 86,317

89,100



Depreciation and amortization 9,006

5,574











Adjusted EBITDA $ (564,494)

$ (643,112)

SOURCE Eastside Distilling, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.eastsidedistilling.com


NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The Empire State Building (ESB) today announced that seven students from the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development's (DYCD) Ladders for Leaders program will join the Empire State Building Observatory staff this summer. The students will serve as front-line hosts and cashiers at the "World's Most Famous Building." The Ladders for Leaders is a nationally recognized program that offers high school and college students the opportunity to participate in paid professional summer internships with leading corporations, non-profit organizations, and government agencies in New York City.

The Empire State Building will provide employee training via a two-day orientation with a strong focus on customer service. Each student will also shadow current employees before assuming full responsibility in his or her role at the Empire State Building's Observatories.

"Our partnership with Ladders to Leaders has not only helped our recruiting efforts but has also given the Empire State Building additional opportunities to give back to our community," said Jean-Yves Ghazi, Senior Vice President of the Observatory.

"I am thrilled that our Ladders for Leaders participants will get the opportunity to work this summer at New York City's most iconic skyscraper, the Empire State Building," said DYCD Commissioner Bill Chong. "This internship will not only help enhance our young people's skills in hospitality and customer service but will also open up doors for them to interact with people from all over the world. DYCD is proud to work with Empire State Realty Trust and the Mayor's Fund to ensure NYC youth are exposed to unique jobs that help build the necessary skills to succeed."

"The Mayor's Fund is excited to count Empire State Realty Trust among our dedicated group of Ladders for Leaders employers this summer," said Darren Bloch, Executive Director of the Mayor's Fund to Advance NYC. "The partnership will provide an invaluable experience, at an iconic New York City location, for these young adults  while giving the organization valuable seasonal support from these up-and-coming students. We are proud to have such strong partners that believe in building our future workforce."

For more information about Ladders for Leaders, please visit http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/jobs-internships/nyc-ladders-for-leaders.page.

About the Empire State Building

Soaring 1,454 feet above Midtown Manhattan (from base to antenna), the Empire State Building, owned by Empire State Realty Trust, Inc., is the "World's Most Famous Building." With new investments in energy efficiency, infrastructure, public areas and amenities, the Empire State Building has attracted first-rate tenants in a diverse array of industries from around the world. The skyscraper's robust broadcasting technology supports all major television and FM radio stations in the New York metropolitan market. The Empire State Building was named America's favorite building in a poll conducted by the American Institute of Architects, and the Empire State Building Observatory is one of the world's most beloved attractions as the region's #1 tourist destination. For more information on the Empire State Building, please visit www.empirestatebuilding.com, www.facebook.com/empirestatebuilding, @EmpireStateBldg, www.instagram.com/empirestatebldg, http://weibo.com/empirestatebuilding, www.youtube.com/esbnyc or www.pinterest.com/empirestatebldg/.

About Empire State Realty Trust

Empire State Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: ESRT), a leading real estate investment trust (REIT), owns, manages, operates, acquires and repositions office and retail properties in Manhattan and the greater New York metropolitan area, including the Empire State Building, the world's most famous building. Headquartered in New York, New York, the Company's office and retail portfolio covers 10.1 million rentable square feet, as of March 31, 2017, consisting of 9.4 million rentable square feet in 14 office properties, including nine in Manhattan, three in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and two in Westchester County, New York; and approximately 708,000 rentable square feet in the retail portfolio.

SOURCE Empire State Realty Trust, Inc.
WASHINGTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today the Trump administration's State Department began the implementation of the Mexico City Policy, a policy dating back to every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan's. The policy ensures American taxpayer dollars are prevented from going to any foreign group that performs abortions or "actively promotes" abortion as a method of family planning in other countries. However, President Trump has expanded the pro-life taxpayer protections to include global health dollars, so that it would apply to nearly nine billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds to foreign non-governmental organizations. The order ensures U.S. funds will continue to go to health care, humanitarian relief, and even family planning; it only blocks funding to those groups that perform or promote abortion.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins commented:

"Today, President Trump fulfilled another campaign promise as the State Department began implementing the President's January 23 executive order barring U.S. funds from subsidizing foreign groups that perform or promote abortion. We applaud the Trump administration for not just stopping the pro-abortion policies of the Obama era, but putting in place policies that will reverse the destructive and immoral trends of the last eight years.

"President Trump is keeping faith with the almost 60 percent of Trump voters who supported him and Vice President Pence based on their endorsement of the Republican Party's platform on life and religious liberty.

"Family Research Council and the pro-life movement look forward to continuing to work with the Trump administration in bringing about a culture of life in which every child is welcomed into this world and protected under our laws, both here and abroad," concluded Perkins.

SOURCE Family Research Council

Related Links

http://www.frc.org


CHICAGO, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- A special report by RCF Economic & Financial Consulting, Inc. Vice President Peter Bernstein examines population and employment in Illinois from 2013 to 2016 and shows that despite losing population, Illinois has gained employment and has seen significant improvement in per capita income, especially compared to most neighboring states. The complete special report can be found here: http://www.rcfecon.com/rcf-special-report-fewer-people-and-more-jobs-lead-to-large-gains-in-per-capita-income-in-illinois/

Despite losing population, Illinois has gained employment and has seen significant improvement in per capita income, especially compared to most neighboring states. Despite losing population, Illinois has gained employment and has seen significant improvement in per capita income, especially compared to most neighboring states.

From 2013 to 2016, the population of Illinois declined by 0.6 percent while the population in the U.S. increased 2.2 percent. Other nearby states saw increases in their population, though all these states saw slower population growth than occurred nationally. Some of this population loss is a continuation of a decades-long trend of people moving to southern and western states. However, given that other Midwest states have seen population gains, it is likely that the decline in Illinois' population means that many Illinois residents have a negative outlook regarding the state's future. Moreover, population losses in Illinois have been widespread, with 91 of the state's 102 counties seeing a decline in population over the past three years.

Yet, despite the population loss, Illinois has added almost 200,000 workers over the past three years. Although much of this job growth is in the Chicago area, 79 of 102 counties in Illinois had an increase in employment from 2013 to 2016.

The combination of increased employment and decreased population means that there has been a meaningful increase in the proportion of the state's residents who are employed. In fact, the employment-to-population ratio in Illinois has grown more rapidly than for the nation as a whole.

Furthermore, the increase in the proportion of the state's population that is employed has contributed to an 11.7 percent increase in per capita personal income from 2013 to 2016. This is actually somewhat greater than the 11.4 percent increase in per capital personal income across the entire U.S. during the same period.

Even more significant, per capita personal income has grown faster in Illinois than in virtually all of its neighboring states.

Thus, while many have left Illinois, the economic conditions of those who remain are much better than commonly believed.

A more detailed analysis of county changes in population and employment will be available in our forthcoming report, "Illinois: Fewer People and More Jobs."

For additional information or questions, please contact Mr. Peter Bernstein, RCF Vice President, 312-41-1540 ext.1515 or by email: [email protected]

About RCF Economic & Financial Consulting, Inc.

Founded in 1978, Chicago-based RCF is an economic and financial consulting firm led by internationally renowned economists. The firm works on a wide variety of projects and applies high level economic and statistical analyses to solve important problems. RCF conducts economic impact analyses of policies and contemplated actions by businesses and public agencies, advises clients, and provides support for litigation and regulatory proceedings including expert testimony. www.rcfecon.com

SOURCE RCF Economic & Financial Consulting, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.rcfecon.com


NADI, Fiji, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Fiji Airways, Fiji's National Carrier, has announced the appointment of industry veteran, Marc Cavaliere, as Chief Marketing Officer. Mr. Cavaliere joins the airline's executive leadership team, reporting directly to the CEO, and will be responsible for the new, dedicated global airline alliances and partnerships function, as well as all sales channels, marketing activities and related commercial functions.

"We are delighted to have a seasoned executive like Marc Cavaliere join our team as we take Fiji Airways to even greater heights," Fiji Airways Managing Director and CEO, Mr. Andre Viljoen, said.

Mr. Cavaliere's professional background includes 37 years of airline industry experience, with extensive international assignments, leading airlines in various regions of the world including the United States. He has served as board member of the Star Alliance Airline Management Board for five years, and as Chairman for two years. Mr. Cavaliere also held senior management positions with South African Airways, Spirit Airlines, American Airlines and Pan Am.

"The world of airline marketing is an ever-evolving arena in the global marketplace, and having someone like Marc, with his global knowledge and experience, will give Fiji Airways an enhanced level of capability in the these functions," Mr. Viljoen concluded.

For the full release and the latest updates from Fiji Airways, please visit www.fijiairways.com.

About Fiji Airways: Founded in 1951, Fiji Airways Group comprises of Fiji Airways, Fiji's National Airline and its subsidiaries: Fiji Link, its domestic and regional carrier, Pacific Call Comm Ltd, and a 38.75% stake in the Sofitel Fiji Resort & Spa on Denarau Island, Nadi. From its hubs at Nadi and Suva International Airports, Fiji Airways and Fiji Link serve 64 destinations in 13 countries (including code-share). Destinations to and from the U.S. include: Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. The Fiji Airways Group brings in 64 percent of all visitors who fly to Fiji, employs over 1000 employees, and earns revenues of over FJD$815 million (USD $390m). Fiji Airways rebranded from Air Pacific in June 2013. Visit www.fijiairways.com for more information.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Lauren Hammerson

Myriad Marketing for Fiji Airways

[email protected]

+1 310-649-7700

SOURCE Fiji Airways

Related Links

http://www.fijiairways.com


HOUSTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Flotek Industries, Inc. ("Flotek" or the "Company") (NYSE: FTK) has updated its investor presentation containing material customer trend information and product and business segment detail. The Company urges investors and market participants to review the information, which can be accessed on Flotek's website.

The Company comments: "We believe it is critical to expand transparency for our shareholders and stakeholders. We intend to provide periodic updates on our business and performance metrics as an ongoing effort which will be published on our website."

All investor presentations can be found in the Investor Relations section of the website.

About Flotek Industries, Inc.

Flotek develops and delivers prescriptive chemistry-based technology, including specialty chemicals, to clients in the energy, consumer industrials and food & beverage industries. Flotek's inspired chemists draw from the power of bio-derived solvents to deliver solutions that enhance energy production, cleaning products, foods & beverages and fragrances. In the oil and gas sector, Flotek serves major and independent energy producers and oilfield service companies, both domestic and international. Flotek Industries, Inc. is a publicly traded company headquartered in Houston, Texas, and its common shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "FTK." For additional information, please visit Flotek's web site at www.flotekind.com.

Forward-Looking Statements|

Certain statements set forth in this Press Release constitute forward-looking statements (within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934) regarding Flotek Industries, Inc.'s business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. Words such as expects, anticipates, intends, plans, believes, seeks, estimates and similar expressions or variations of such words are intended to identify forward-looking statements, but are not the exclusive means of identifying forward-looking statements in this Press Release.

Although forward-looking statements in this Press Release reflect the good faith judgment of management, such statements can only be based on facts and factors currently known to management. Consequently, forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results and outcomes may differ materially from the results and outcomes discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences in results and outcomes include, but are not limited to, demand for oil and natural gas drilling services in the areas and markets in which the Company operates, competition, obsolescence of products and services, the Company's ability to obtain financing to support its operations, environmental and other casualty risks, and the impact of government regulation.

Further information about the risks and uncertainties that may impact the Company are set forth in the Company's most recent filings on Form 10-K (including without limitation in the "Risk Factors" Section), and in the Company's other SEC filings and publicly available documents. Readers are urged not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this Press Release. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect any event or circumstance that may arise after the date of this Press Release.

SOURCE Flotek Industries, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.flotekind.com


NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Flying Tiger Copenhagen, the popular Danish variety retailer for own-designed products, will make Citi Bike even a little brighter. The promotion, in celebration of National Bike Month, will bring flowers and tiny vases for one day only, to select Citi Bike bicycles. Flying Tiger Copenhagen will also display branding on Citi Bike bicycle docks in May and June.

"We are excited to partner with Flying Tiger Copenhagen and add a bit more fun to National Bike Month," said Jules Flynn, Citi Bike General Manager. "We think this will help bring a smile to more faces and get more New Yorkers riding."

"The Danish people are among the happiest in the world, and maybe the frequent use of bikes contributes to this," said Soren Friis, Head of North America at Flying Tiger Copenhagen. "It is no secret to Danes that a bicycle and a smile go hand in hand; you save a buck, and you help save the environment. We want to add a little happiness to New Yorkers, and we are thrilled to work with Citi Bike during National Bike Month."

Flying Tiger Copenhagen has popularized a variety of unique products, including bicycle bells, banana pencil cases, art canvases, glitter wrapping paper, and its award-winning tea pot. The products are created to bring people together and add a bit of fun to their daily lives. Flying Tiger Copenhagen originated in Denmark, where capital Copenhagen is the most bike friendly city in the world. The joyful biking culture in Copenhagen has been the inspiration for many Flying Tiger Copenhagen products, and will hopefully also bring a bit of fun to Citi Bike riders this May.

About Citi Bike:

The Citi Bike program is the nation's largest bike share program with 10,000 bikes at over 600 stations. It will have 12,000 bikes by the end of this year. Visit citibikenyc.com

About Flying Tiger:

Flying Tiger Copenhagen is a rapidly expanding chain of Danish stores offering a quirky, ever-changing selection of own-designed products at affordable prices, They introduce up to 300 new products every month. In 1995 the first Flying Tiger store opened in Copenhagen, and there are currently over 3,500 people working in over 780 stores in 30 countries across Europe, Asia, and the U.S. More info: http://www.flyingtiger.com, Soren Friis, [email protected]; (917) 274-9500

Media Contact: Maria Korgaard  917- 753- 6695

SOURCE Flying Tiger Copenhagen

Related Links

http://www.flyingtiger.com


"Stefan strengthens our existing European leadership team and will play a key role in expanding our channel and service provider partner sales in Europe," says Philpott. "Enterprise and government customers continue to deploy Forcepoint to solve business challenges like meeting GDPR requirements and protecting data wherever it resides, on the network or in the cloud -- and Europe is proving no exception."

At Forcepoint, Maierhofer will lead the growth strategy for the company's Central and Eastern Europe business. He'll also be in charge of strengthening partner relationships and extending Forcepoint's leadership in data and insider threat, cloud security, network security and global governments.

"The industry is reshaping with a more human-centric view of cyber and our European business is positioned to help customers address this paradigm shift," said Forcepoint CEO Matthew Moynahan. "Stefan will help us lead the charge in delivering the most intelligent systems that facilitate business and foster productivity while stopping bad cyber behaviors."

"Forcepoint's transformative outlook on behavior and intent of users positions the company to transform the cybersecurity industry," said Maierhofer. "I look forward to helping our customers in Europe protect the human point  where data is most valuable and most vulnerable."

Maierhofer comes to Forcepoint with more than 30 years of progressive leadership experience in the European technology sector. Most recently, Maierhofer was regional vice president for Central and Eastern Europe at Palo Alto Networks where he held senior leadership responsibility for the company's regional sales business. Prior to this, Maierhofer was the senior director of sales for Central and Eastern Europe at F5 Networks. Before joining F5 Networks, Maierhofer spent more than nine years at EMC in sales leadership roles focused on the European market. Prior to EMC, Maierhofer spent over 11 years at Amdahl Deutschland holding roles in sales, professional services and technology management. Maierhofer earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Munich University of Applied Sciences.

About Forcepoint

Forcepoint is transforming cybersecurity by focusing on what matters most: understanding people's intent as they interact with critical data and intellectual property wherever it resides. Our uncompromising systems enable companies to empower employees with unobstructed access to confidential data while protecting intellectual property and simplifying compliance. Based in Austin, Texas, Forcepoint supports more than 20,000 organizations worldwide. For more about Forcepoint, visit www.Forcepoint.com and follow us on Twitter at @ForcepointSec.

Join Forcepoint on Social Media

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/forcepoint

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/forcepointsec

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ForcepointLLC/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forcepoint

Media contact

Liem Nguyen

[email protected]

512.498.8821

SOURCE Forcepoint

Related Links

http://www.Forcepoint.com


AUSTIN, TX and MONTREAL, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - Formation Biologics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, today announces the start of a multi-center, Phase I/IIa trial evaluating AVID100 in patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-expressing malignancies. The trial commenced at South Texas Accelerated Research Therapeutics in San Antonio, Texas.

Formation Biologics also announces closing of a Series B financing with HBM Healthcare Investments participating as the lead Series B investor. HBM Healthcare Investments is a global healthcare-focused investment company with net assets of approximately USD$1 billion. In addition, the investment serves as a match for the previously announced CPRIT cancer drug development grant.

The Series B supports the development of the company's two lead programs, AVID100 and AVID200, through clinical validation. AVID100 is a potent antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) targeting the EGFR. In preclinical studies, AVID100 demonstrated potent anti-tumor activity across a range of EGFR-expressing solid tumors, including those that are resistant to approved anti-EGFR therapeutics. AVID200 is an isoform-selective TGF-beta inhibitor undergoing IND-enabling development for use in orphan diseases and immune oncology.

Formation Biologics is also pleased to announce that one of the foremost clinical drug development experts, Anthony W. Tolcher M.D., FRCPC FACP, has been elected as a new member of its board of directors. Dr. Tolcher is a medical oncologist who has over 20 years of experience in drug development and clinical trials. Dr. Tolcher is also co-founder and president of START, the world's largest Phase I medical oncology program. He has been involved in many studies of new agents that subsequently were FDA-approved including pembrolizumab (Keytruda), trastuzumab-emtansine (Kadcyla), regorafenib (Stivarga), liposomal vincristine (Marqibo), cabazitaxel (Jevtana), carfilzomib (Kyprolis), gefitinib (Iressa) and eribulin (HalavenTM). He completed his medical training at the the University of British Columbia and University of Toronto.

"With these achievements in place, we are well-positioned to successfully execute on our clinical development programs. I look forward to reporting on clinical progress of AVID100 and AVID200, as well as the advancement of additional candidates from our promising early-stage portfolio," commented Mr. Tikhomirov, CEO of Formation Biologics.

SOURCE Formation Biologics
Learn as the designer reveals to Gabriel's Global Style Director and his friend Hal Rubenstein exactly how he keeps the Tommy brand fresh and relevant. Watch as we offer you a front row seat to his latest spectacular show on Venice Beach introducing his spring 2017 Tommy X Gigi collection, and check out how incredible these youthful, colorful, and delightful clothes look when accessorized with sparklers from Gabriel's newest collection of Fine Jewelry Everyday. Like Gigi Hadid, Gabriel loves Tommy. And we think you will too.

In the interview, Hilfiger gives insight how the 35 year old brand is reinventing itself. In a time when other designers are slowing down, the iconic Tommy Hilfiger brand is continually growing its customer base. He also addresses how the company is still committed to the retail brick and mortars. "There is still something wonderful about self-discovery when it's right in front of you," says Hilfiger. "Being able to touch and feel fabrics and textures before you make a decision. So I think what we have to do is create unusual shopping and retail experiences."

Viewers will also see how the Gabriel & Co. 2017 Collection effortlessly accentuates the Casual Gigi Collection. "Look how well the simple elegance of Gabriel pieces go with our Casual Gigi Collection," says Hilfiger. Versatility is key to looking good today." Hal and Tommy show you how easy a pair of diamond hoops worn with the boyfriend sweater or two-toned earrings with the color block dresses can take you straight from day to evening. Simple elegance  at any time.

The interview with Tommy Hilfiger is online now, available here. To listen to Tommy Hilfiger podcast with Hal download now at https://www.gabrielny.com/designer-flash-hub-tommy-hilfiger.

About Gabriel & Co.:

Gabriel & Co. is a New York City based jewelry design house which was founded in 1989 by brothers Jack and Dominick Gabriel. Family owned and operated, the company began in New York City and has since evolved into one of the most prolific fine jewelry brands in the U.S., sold at more than 1,200 retailers nationwide. The story of Gabriel & Co. is one of passion, integrity, service and trust. Gabriel creates beautifully unique and distinctive pieces that are designed to reflect the true beauty that is unique in all of us. Each piece is passionately designed and created as a crafted personal experience. By infusing human passion into natural elements, Gabriel creates jewelry that enhances and celebrates beauty and personal achievements. Individually numbered, each piece is as unique as the woman who wears it.

Gabriel & Co. has consistently won awards since 2011 in both JCK & Instore Magazines for being one of the most innovative and best performing brands in the jewelry industry.

SOURCE Gabriel & Co.
"We are honored to have been a part of the great work that United Way is doing throughout the Nashville metro area for the past 30 years," says Scott McWilliams, EVP of Strategic Development. "At GEODIS, one of our core values is founded on being a good citizen and ensuring that we, as a company and individuals, are contributing to the overall well-being of our beloved city."

Established in 1997, the Iris Circle Award is the highest honor bestowed upon a local company by United Way of Metropolitan Nashville. The recipients of the award exemplify an unwavering commitment to serving the children, seniors, families and neighborhoods in need.

"There is an old African proverb that if you want to go far, you have to go together. GEODIS partners with United Way so that we can help the citizens of Nashville to go farther than any of us could go alone," McWilliams says.

GEODIS  www.geodis.us

GEODIS is a Supply Chain Operator ranking among the top companies in the field in Europe and the World. GEODIS, owned by SNCF Logistics, which in turn is a business line of the SNCF Group, is ranked as the number four logistics provider in Europe and number seven at a worldwide level. GEODIS is also listed as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant of Worldwide 3PLs. GEODIS' reach includes a direct presence in 67 countries and a global network spanning over 120 countries. With its five Lines of Business (Supply Chain Optimization, Freight Forwarding, Contract Logistics, Distribution & Express, and Road Transport), GEODIS manages its customers' Supply Chain by providing end to end solutions enabled by over 39,500 employees, its infrastructure, its processes and systems. In 2016, GEODIS recorded 8 billion in sales.

PRESS CONTACT

Natalie Walkley

GEODIS

615-987-2524

[email protected]

SOURCE GEODIS

Related Links

http://www.ohl.com


LOS ANGELES, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Downtown Los Angeles is home to a new company, GiraffeBuilder, that marries creative architects and tech engineers together to design and develop websites and apps for businesses that want to expand and increase their presence in today's digital space. By seamlessly bridging the gap between inbound marketing and creative design, GiraffeBuilder builds beautiful and affordable websites that propel brands upwards in notoriety.

Connections are the Key to Success

Even as the business world becomes more global in nature and expands to include every corner of the world, the human connections that are made are vital to the success of a business. Nearly every industry today faces extreme competition that requires businesses to set themselves apart in unique and creative ways to garner the attention of those people and their audience who are most likely to need and use their services and products.

Building Connections is at the Heart of Everything GiraffeBuilder Does

The GiraffeBuilder team know how to build viable connections that reach visitors to connect with the brand. Utilizing strategies that elevate brands to household names, GiraffeBuilder helps them build and maintain the momentum necessary to realize and establish global success. With the skills to work with businesses from startups to Fortune 500 companies, GiraffeBuilder delivers results that are tangible, measurable and forward thinking with creative processes that are fresh and innovative.

GiraffeBuilder: The Website Design Agency for All Businesses

As a premium website development and design agency, GiraffeBuilder works with brands that span every sector of business -- from startups and small businesses to Fortune 500 companies like Sony Digital Network Applications, Chevron Fast Lube and eBay anchor stores -- and every type in between. Each client's brand is converted to more sales with web design features and practices that are results driven. Innovative inbound marketing strategies fuel increased conversions by boosting engagement with users on a global level.

GiraffeBuilder Provides a Comprehensive Digital Solution

At GiraffeBuilder, their multi-layer teams deliver solutions tailored to each client's culture and goals. From professional designs that are mobile friendly  and approved by search engine giant, Google  and e-commerce set-up to graphic designs and inventory management systems, GiraffeBuilder offers comprehensive solutions for today's forward-thinking companies. Logo design, an important criteria in effectively building a brand's identity, and lead generation work seamlessly alongside one another to deliver a polished, intuitive website that is fresh, robust and engaging so that a business experiences the customer interaction necessary to reach its goals.

A Partner Clients Can Count on to Deliver Pristine Global Designs

GiraffeBuilder works closely with its clients to deliver premium website design and development with an eye toward global engagement and conversions. Browse their portfolio -- which showcases the diversity of their projects -- read their 5-Star and top rated Yelp reviews or contact them to request a quote. GiraffeBuilder is also creative on social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and in content curation of educational blogging material.

For More Information:

Danny Alsaffar

GiraffeBuilder

515 S. Flower Street Suite 3600

Los Angeles, California 90071

United States

(800) 838-4760

[email protected]

https://giraffebuilder.com/

SOURCE GiraffeBuilder

Related Links

https://giraffebuilder.com


DUBLIN, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Growing Markets for Air Quality Monitors: China, North America, Europe and Developing Markets" report to their offering.

The report begins by introducing the reader to how the market for air quality monitoring technologies has evolved over time and how various factors are impacting the sector.

Air quality monitoring devices consist of hardware (sensors) as well as software that analyze data that is compared to a pre-populated database. An extension of air quality monitoring is analytics, in which software analyzes the air quality from various regions on earth in order to create a detailed map for comparing air quality (and pollution) around the globe.

To calculate and segment the market, we have mainly considered air quality monitoring hardware (sensors and overall devices). However, the report also considered associated software revenue, as well as companies that may not be sensor manufacturers, but market air quality monitoring products as their own by incorporating sensors from other manufacturers. The calculation also considers services revenue from the air quality monitoring technology/device providers.

However, stand-alone software (such as analytics software) that is sold separately from the air quality monitoring device/hardware is beyond the scope of this report. Other categories not investigated by this report include after-market software, hardware and services (including services which do not directly relate to air quality monitoring, such as education, consulting, training, etc.) and air quality control equipment.

Report Includes

- An overview of the global air quality monitoring technologies market.

- Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2015, 2016 and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2021.

- Information about important manufacturers, technologies and factors influencing demand.

- Coverage of the main types, applications and end users of the air quality monitoring.

- Examination of various strategic initiatives and strengths of companies that are expected to help them move forward in this market.

- Relevant in-depth patent analysis.

- Profiles of major players in the industry.



Key Topics Covered:

1: Introduction

2: Summary and Highlights

3: Overview



- Particle Pollution

- Evolution of the Air Quality Monitoring Market

- Various Governmental Measures toward Air Quality Monitoring

- Evolution of Air Quality Monitoring Devices

- Air Pollution Sensors

- New Opportunity and Developments in the Air Quality Monitoring Space

- Key Stakeholders in the Market

- Growth Forecast of the Air Quality Monitoring Devices Market

- Major Market Forces

- Key Buying Criteria

- Key Strategies in the Air Quality Monitoring Space



4: Market Breakdown by Type of Product



- Outdoor Air Quality Monitors

- Indoor Air Quality Monitors



5: Market Breakdown by Pollutant Type



- Chemical Pollutants Segment

- Biological Pollutants Segment

- Physical Pollutants Segment



6: Market Breakdown by End User/Industry



- Overview

- Government and Academia

- Oil and Gas

- Chemical

- Energy and Utilities

- Residential Sector

- Others



7: Industry Structure



- Overview

- Key Trends in the Global Air Quality Monitoring Devices Market

- Venture Capital Funding and Investments

- Industry Challenges and Concern



8: Patent Activity

9: Market Breakdown by Region

10: Company Profiles

For more information about this report visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/bv8jlt/growing_markets

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com


HARTFORD, Conn., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Hartford HealthCare-GoHealth Urgent Care, a partnership created to bring a new model of high quality, patient-focused urgent care centers to central and eastern Connecticut, today announced the opening of its first center. Located in the town of Avon at 385 West Main Street, Hartford HealthCare-GoHealth Urgent Care makes exceptional healthcare even more convenient to those living in Avon and surrounding communities. To celebrate the occasion, Hartford HealthCare-GoHealth Urgent Care will host a grand-opening event and ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday, May 18, at 11 a.m. at the new Avon location.

"Since we announced our partnership with Hartford HealthCare in late January, we have been looking forward to opening our first urgent care center in Avon. Our access-minded, patient-first approach to urgent care, combined with Hartford HealthCare's long history of high-quality care will provide residents of the Avon community with the kind of urgent care they deserve and can be proud of," said Todd Latz, CEO of GoHealth Urgent Care. "Our best-in-class caregivers and team members are ready to provide a welcoming culture of care and effortless experiences that put our patients first."

Hartford HealthCare-GoHealth Urgent Care's Avon center will operate seven days a week with extended evening hours, welcome walk-in patients and offer the opportunity to "save your spot" through a simple online check-in. It also will feature transparent charting on a wide screen in each exam room, mobile X-ray equipment and a unified electronic medical record that can be accessed by caregivers across the Hartford HealthCare network.

"We're thrilled to open our first Hartford HealthCare-GoHealth Urgent Care center in Avon, a town that is home to a number of Hartford HealthCare offices and services," said Jeffrey Flaks, President and Chief Operating Officer of Hartford HealthCare. "We're combining Hartford HealthCare's high-quality, fully integrated acute and ambulatory health services with GoHealth's industry-leading customer experience, innovative technology and award-winning urgent care center designs."

Hartford HealthCare-GoHealth Urgent Care will open at least 15 centers within the next 18 months, spanning Hartford HealthCare's service area.

For more information, visit www.gohealthuc.com/hartford.

About GoHealth Urgent Care

GoHealth Urgent Care is one of the country's fastest-growing and largest urgent care providers. At GoHealth Urgent Care, we place the needs of our patients firstby providing an effortless patient experience, a welcoming culture of care and seamless integration with market-leading health systems and our communities. GoHealth Urgent Care operates over 60 urgent care centers in the New York and Portland, Ore., metropolitan areas, the San Francisco Bay Area and central and eastern Connecticut. GoHealth Urgent Care's current partners include health systems that are at the forefront of care delivery innovation, including Northwell Health, New York's largest health system, Legacy Health, the largest nonprofit, locally owned health system in the Portland-Vancouver area, Dignity Health, one of the nation's largest health care systems, headquartered in San Francisco, and Hartford HealthCare, the largest integrated health system in the state of Connecticut. GoHealth Urgent Care is a d/b/a of Access Clinical Partners, LLC, a TPG Growth portfolio company. TPG Growth is the middle market and growth equity investment platform of TPG, which has over $70 billion of assets under management. To learn more, please visit www.gohealthUC.com.

About Hartford HealthCare

Hartford HealthCare is Connecticut's most comprehensive health care network. Our fully integrated health system includes a tertiary-care teaching hospital, an acute-care community teaching hospital, an acute-care hospital and trauma center, two community hospitals, the state's most extensive behavioral health services network, a large primary care physician practice group, a regional home care system, an array of senior care services, a coordinated cancer institute with five cancer centers, and a large physical therapy rehabilitation network. Please visit us at www.hartfordhealthcare.org.

SOURCE GoHealth Urgent Care

Related Links

http://www.gohealthUC.com


NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Hilco Streambank (www.hilcostreambank.com), along with IPmetrics LLC and Darwin IP Advisors, have been retained by Opus Bank to monetize the patent portfolio, equipment, inventory and related know-how of BeamReach Solar (formerly Solexel).

BeamReach Solar developed and manufactured innovative PV products, including: thin-wafer growth; next-generation back-contact cell technology including high voltage, high efficiency cells; solar panel technology and manufacturing processes including "smart" on-board module electronics; and a lightweight, fast-install integrated solar panel and racking system for low-slope rooftops (SprintTM), targeted primarily at the commercial and industrial segment. The Company developed a strong worldwide portfolio of more than 345 patent assets protecting their products and innovations including large clusters related to:

Thin, kerfless semiconductor wafer and porous Silicon technology;

High efficiency and low or high voltage back contact solar cell technology;

Monolithic "backplane" architecture low voltage solar modules and high voltage, rigid or flexible solar modules with "smart on-board electronics; and

Sprint light weight, rapid install commercial rooftop solar systems

The portfolio includes more than 130 granted patents (covering the US, AU, CN, EP (DE, DK, FR, GB, NL), JP, KR, and MY) and hundreds of pending applications that continue to be actively and aggressively prosecuted worldwide.

"BeamReach's Sprint racking technology not only provides a substantial savings on installation time, it provides a significant step forward in opening up the market to flat and low-slope roof systems that are not engineered for the weight of a traditional panel and racking system. This now opens a significant new market," according to Gabe Fried, CEO of Hilco Streambank. "Additionally, the rapid assembly innovation (video link) reduces installation time and labor costs considerably."

Stephen Shea, former VP of Cell Engineering and Operations at BeamReach Solar and an expert with more than 30 years in the solar industry, states that "Unlike conventional rooftop solar installations, the Sprint solar system is an actualized, fully integrated rooftop solution. The stack of Sprint panels that goes to the roof includes all the required module, racking, adhesion and other parts and simply fold out and lock into place. There are no tools required, no grounding, no ballasts and no roof penetrations, providing a truly elegant solar solution."

Mr. Shea further describes the substantial R&D accomplishments of BeamReach Solar in the area of developing thin, flexible substrates, "Beyond Sprint, Beamreach technologies enable the growth and processing of thin, flexible substrates and processes that produce from these substrates thin, flexible and high efficiency solar modules. These modules, which are assembled rather like a printed circuit board, allow the use of 'smart' on-board electronics for power conditioning, shade tolerance and metrology. The high efficiency cell processes themselves are also adapted for use on conventional substrates. Both the conventional and the thin substrate cells can be made in high-voltage configurations that facilitate the use of inexpensive, low-power onboard electronics in the smart module as well as reducing wiring losses due to high current in conventional systems."

One research and development program with a major car manufacturer focused on developing thin solar panels that could easily and economically be integrated into vehicle roof panels.

BeamReach had filed for protection under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on February 9, 2017 and that case was closed on April 3, 2017. Hilco Streambank, IPmetrics and Darwin IP Advisors, are selling the BeamReach assets on behalf of secured lender Opus Bank. Opus Bank subsequently foreclosed on the assets and now has the ability to quickly close sale transactions without any court process.

Parties interested in learning more about the BeamReach intellectual property assets offered for sale, the sale process and other bidding requirements should contact the parties below. A virtual diligence room will be available for interested parties. The deadline for submitting offers is July 11, 2017 at 5 PM Eastern Time.

About Hilco Streambank

Hilco Streambank is a market leading advisory firm specializing in intellectual property disposition and valuation. Hilco Streambank has completed numerous sell-side transactions including sales in publicly reported Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases, private transactions, and online sales through HilcoDomains.com and IPv4Auctions.com, Hilco Streambank is part of Northbrook, Illinois based Hilco Global (www.hilcoglobal.com), a worldwide financial services company and leader in helping companies maximize the value of their assets.

About IPmetrics

IPmetrics, is a consultancy focused on intellectual property and intangible assets. IPmetrics offers a full range of valuation services to assess the value of trademarks, patents, copyrights and other forms of IP. IPmetrics valuation experts bring specialized knowledge across a wide variety of industries and assets, with the ability to critically analyze these complex assets in a multitude of valuation contexts. In addition, IPmetrics has a substantial background in the provision of IP damages expert witness services including the analysis of confusion / reverse confusion, dilution, unfair competition, and economic damages in litigation. Based in Southern California, IPmetrics can be reached at IPMETRICS.COM or (858) 538-1533.

About Darwin IP Advisors

Darwin IP Advisors advises large companies, start-ups/SMEs and consulting groups at the intersection of law, business and technology. Since its formation in 2016, Darwin IP Advisors team has provided intellectual property support and advisory services on several projects related to strategy, negotiations, IP portfolio development, asset valuation and monetization and acquisition landscaping.

SOURCE Hilco Streambank
IdentityWorks helps consumers recognize potential identity fraud and respond to it, arming them with credit monitoring and alerts, and credit reports and scores  which are often the first indicators of identity theft and fraud. This new product extends well beyond credit information to include dark web monitoring and alerts, and noncredit transaction monitoring (bank account, Social Security number, change of address, etc.) to detect when a consumer's personal information is actively marketed on the web or abused in noncredit transactions. IdentityWorks also includes Experian CreditLock, giving consumers real-time access control to their Experian credit file. In addition to the expertise and assistance of fraud resolution specialists, the product also provides the peace of mind of up to $1 million in identity theft insurance. 1

Concerned about the threat and the hassle

The survey makes clear that complexity, inconvenience and perceived odds of becoming an identity fraud victim have discouraged consumers from making identity protection best practices part of their daily lives.

While 84 percent of respondents acknowledge being concerned about the security of personal information online, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) agree it's "too much of a hassle to constantly worry about securing personal information online." The majority say staying on top of financial transactions is a challenge (53 percent), and nearly half (48 percent) don't even check their credit reports regularly for errors or suspicious activity.

Significant misconceptions about identity theft and fraud

More concerning might be the misconceptions that exist regarding identity theft and fraud. A majority (56 percent) believe the risk of identity theft goes away over time, and more than half (52 percent) are convinced it's not very likely they will become a victim of identity theft. Many think banks and credit card companies monitor their accounts, so they don't have to worry about identity theft (53 percent), and nearly 1 in 10 respondents believe they aren't at risk because "my credit is bad/I don't have enough money."

"Consumers seem to be tuning out rather than tuning in," said Michael Bruemmer, vice president of identity protection at Experian. "Nothing replaces an individual's active role in identity protection, but there are products  like Experian's new IdentityWorks  that help consumers increase their awareness and provide tools enabling quick response to potential fraud. It becomes less of a burden when consumers set up alerts for their credit cards and bank accounts, as well as alerts to flag credit report changes."

In 2016, over 15 million Americans were victims of identity theft, up 16 percent from the previous year.2

"Understanding the risks, being aware of the dark web, and researching what can help monitor and mitigate fraud aren't optional these days. Unfortunately, the survey suggests consumers don't consider these necessities a priority, which makes life easier for fraudsters," added Bruemmer.

Key research findings

Only half (49 percent) of respondents feel they are likely to become a victim of identity theft; of those, 57 percent have house hold income of $100,00 or more and 45 percent have house hold income of less than $50,000 .

or more and 45 percent have house hold income of less than . A significant majority of respondents (72 percent) think thieves are only interested in "wealthy people's identities."

The number one perceived identity theft threat: data breaches (number two: phishing emails).

It's not uncommon for people to search for themselves online to see if anyone else is using their identity (26 percent).

Bankcard monitoring and credit report monitoring were rated highest as "helpful" when it comes to identity theft (58 percent and 55 percent, respectively).

Identity theft is familiar to most, with 52 percent of respondents having been victims or knowing someone who has.

Identity theft victims acknowledged negative impacts to short- and long-term financial goals (37 percent and 27 percent, respectively).

Of those victimized by identity theft while traveling, 55 percent stated it took from weeks to more than a year to resolve issues related to identity fraud.

For information regarding identity protection and dealing with fraud, as well as more details on this survey, visit the Experian Credit Education blog. Consider enrolling in a dark web and credit monitoring product such as Experian IdentityWorks, which can help better track and manage your credit with mobile alerts, lock your Experian credit file with Experian CreditLock, and help mitigate the damage from fraud with access to fraud resolution specialists and up to $1 million in identity theft insurance.

Tips to help monitor for fraud and protect personal information

Check your credit report for accuracy. You can get a free report from each credit bureau annually at annualcreditreport.com.

Consider an identity protection product like Experian IdentityWorks to help monitor your financial accounts and credit report. Experian IdentityWorks provides dark web monitoring to identify if personal information is exposed in illegal markets, a variety of alerts to warn of potential identity fraud and up to $1 million in identity theft insurance insurance for peace of mind.

in identity theft insurance insurance for peace of mind. Password-protect your phone. Your phone provides access to sensitive information and accounts. Set a unique password to unlock the device, and enable remote finding and wiping software to track the phone or destroy the data if it's lost or stolen.

Use a password manager to create strong passwords for online accounts, and change them regularly.

Don't access financial information or shop online using public Wi-Fi or an unsecured network.

Be careful about what personal information you share online (e.g., social networks).

BROLL IS AVAILABLE ON REQUEST (Experian subject matter expert and man on street interviews); please contact Ann Noder at 1 480 263 1557; [email protected]

About the survey

The online survey was conducted by Edelman Berland on Experian's behalf from March 1723, 2017, among 1,000 adults 18 years of age or older who reside in the United States. This online survey is not based on a probability sample; therefore, no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey, methodology, including weighting variables, please contact [email protected].

About Experian

Experian is the world's leading global information services company. During life's big moments  from buying a home or a car, to sending a child to college, to growing a business by connecting with new customers  we empower consumers and our clients to manage their data with confidence. We help individuals to take financial control and access financial services, businesses to make smarter decisions and thrive, lenders to lend more responsibly, and organizations to prevent identity fraud and crime.

We have 17,000 people operating across 37 countries and every day we're investing in new technologies, talented people and innovation to help all our clients maximize every opportunity. We are listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and are a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. Learn more at www.experianplc.com or visit our global content hub at our global news blog for the latest news and insights from the company.

Experian and the Experian marks used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Experian Information Solutions, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

Contact:

(Please use this contact to request available b-roll)

Ann Noder

Pitch PR

1 480 263 1557

[email protected]

1 Identity Theft Insurance is underwritten by insurance company subsidiaries or affiliates of American International Group, Inc. (AIG). 175 Water Street, New York, New York 10038. Please refer to the actual policies for terms, conditions, and exclusions of coverage. Coverage may not be available in all jurisdictions.

2 Javelin Strategy & Research (2017). "Identity Fraud Hits Record High with 15.4 Million U.S. Victims in 2016." Javelin Strategy.

SOURCE Experian

Related Links

http://www.experianplc.com


CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Now in its third year, IKEA U.S. continues its product donation program to the American Red Cross running May 15th  31st. This year, IKEA is focusing on the vulnerable and disadvantaged homeless in its 45 local markets through its donation of 4,500 'Care Kits for the Homeless.' These kits consist of backpacks packed with necessity items such as a poncho, washcloths, towels, water and food. Each designated location will receive 100 'Care Kits for the Homeless'; backpacks, packed by IKEA co-workers to be distributed nationally.

"IKEA wants to help create a better life for the many people and communities touched by our business," said Evamay Lawson, Head of IKEA US Community Affairs. "Through our partnership with the American Red Cross, we are hoping to extend a hand of help to the homeless families and individuals in our local communities without access to basic necessities."

Last year, IKEA worked with the Red Cross and donated over 4,000 care packages for the Disaster Responder Program. These comfort care packages consisted of everyday home items, such as: sheets, pillows, towels and toys to help families get back on their feet.

"We are grateful for the IKEA partnership and their focus on helping homeless and vulnerable populations," said Barb Larkin, American Red Cross Senior Director of Corporate Relationships. "These kits will provide comfort to thousands of people  including support for the homeless veteran standowns that the Red Cross supports across the country and vulnerable people who have experienced emergencies."

The Red Cross depends on the generous support of the American public to fulfil its crucial mission. By making a charitable donation to the Red Cross, you are there for millions of people who face emergencies every year and help as they rebuild their lives. Visit redcross.org or call 1-800-RED-CROSS (1-800-733-2767) to make a donation.

About IKEA:

Since its 1943 founding in Sweden, IKEA has offered home furnishings of good design and function at low prices so the majority of people can afford them. There are currently more than 392 IKEA stores in 48 countries, including 43 in the U.S. IKEA incorporates sustainability into day-to-day business and supports initiatives that benefit children and the environment. For more information see IKEA-USA.com, @IKEAUSANews, @IKEAUSA or IKEAUSA on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.

About the American Red Cross:

The American Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters; supplies about 40 percent of the nation's blood; teaches skills that save lives; provides international humanitarian aid; and supports military members and their families. The Red Cross is a not-for-profit organization that depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to perform its mission. For more information, please visit redcross.org or cruzrojaamericana.org, or visit us on Twitter at @RedCross.

SOURCE IKEA

Related Links

http://www.ikea.com/us/en


CALI, Colombia, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Inca Worldwide (Pink Sheets: QEDN), announces it has revised upward its financing with The Banco Agrario, to increase the financing to include 10,000 hectares not the originally stated 2,300 hectares. This will also include the financing necessary to farm, harvest and manufacture the finished products. Kate Bahnsen, CEO, remarks, "Additionally we will be working with the three councils in Choco, Colombia directly. As a group, we intend to control 48,000 hectares making Colombia the largest producer of Sacha in the world." Again, the company intends to make updates shortly with respect to sales agreements as we roll out production.

To read more about https://www.bancoagrario.gov.co/Paginas/default.aspx

For more information email [email protected] or visit the company website.

About Inca Worldwide

Inca Worldwide is a public listed company on the OTC under the symbol QEDN. Our project offers an alternative to Farmers in Colombia to grow crops like Inca Seeds (Sacha Inchi) instead of Coca Plants. Our Inca Seeds (Roasted Sacha Inchi) a complete protein with all 9-essential amino-acids rich in Omega 3, 6 & 9 and an antioxidant. A real Super-food. Sold to private brands and our own brand Inca Snacks.

www.incaworldwide.com

Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements:

Our public communications and SEC filings may contain "forward-looking statements"  that is, statements related to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address our expected future business and financial performance and financial condition, and often contain words such as "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "believe," "seek," "see," "will," "would," or "target."

Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain, such as statements about our announced plan to reduce the size of our financial services businesses, including expected cash and non-cash charges associated with this plan and earnings per share of QED retained businesses (Verticals); expected income; earnings per share; revenues; organic growth; growth and productivity associated with our Digital business; margins; cost structure; restructuring charges; acquisition-related synergies; cash flows; returns on capital and investment; capital expenditures, capital allocation or capital structure; and dividends.

CONTACT: [email protected]

SOURCE Inca Worldwide

Related Links

http://www.incaworldwide.com


Now the aircraft joins an impressive collection of historical artifacts and contemporary objects at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan. Drones: Is the Sky the Limit? is a temporary exhibit that tells the story of drones, from the earliest attempts to employ unmanned flying machines to the advanced systems of the 21 st century and beyond. In addition to hands-on opportunities to fly drones and experience the thrill of drone racing, visitors will interact with some of the less conventional ways unmanned aircraft are making their mark on pop culture, including the flying lamp shape drone from Cirque du Soleil's short film Sparked .

The exhibit also explores the potential for drones in commercial and civil applications including infrastructure surveillance and precision agriculture, as well as conservation and humanitarian efforts. In service with global militaries since 2004, one of ScanEagle's earliest environmental operations took place in 2010, when Insitu collaborated with the Australian Marine Mammal Centre and researchers from Murdoch University to monitor marine mammals off the Australian coast. Since that time, the aircraft has provided aerial surveillance and information for wildfire, railway, wellhead and pipeline monitoring, as well as search and rescue operations and other applications.

"At a time when drone technology is advancing faster than ever, we take great pride in the pioneering work Insitu has done to help shape this path," said Ryan M. Hartman, Insitu president and CEO. "We are honored to have ScanEagle included in an exhibit that celebrates the limitless nature of unmanned aviation."

The exhibit runs through December 3, 2017, and is free with museum admission.

About Insitu:

Insitu is an industry-leading provider of information for superior decision making. With offices in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, the company creates and supports unmanned systems and software technology that deliver end-to-end solutions for collecting, processing and delivering information. We proudly serve the diverse needs of our global customers in the defense, government and commercial industries. Insitu is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Boeing Company. For more information, visit insitu.com. Follow us on Vimeo, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Contact: Jenny Beloy

Insitu Media Relations

+1 509.637.6196

[email protected]

SOURCE Insitu, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.insitu.com


DENVER, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- InternetReputation.com has been named the Best Reputation Management company of 2017 by 10 Best SEO in its May feature of online providers. The Denver-based firm was recognized for "its outstanding work in online reputation management, a form of search engine optimization."

In its assessment of online agencies, 10 Best SEO compiles and ranks elite members of the reputation management industry. InternetReputation.com "is expert at helping clients fix less than positive results on Google and gain control of their online presence," 10 Best SEO said.

Founded in 2010, InternetReputation.com provides reputation management solutions to individuals and businesses all over the world. Thousands of clients rely on the company to deliver timely and effective solutions for reputation management issues. Now at the forefront of empowering individuals and businesses to take control of their digital footprint, InternetReputation.com is built on the principle that everyone has the right to define and defend themselves online.

Previous industry accolades for InternetReputation.com include recognition as the nation's #1 Reputation Management firm and as the Innovative Tech Firm of the Year by True Wealth magazine. In 2016, InternetReputation.com ranked #583 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing American companies. MSNBC, Fox News, Forbes, and The New York Times have also recognized InternetReputation.com for expertise in the Reputation Management industry.

For more information on the online reputation management, review management and privacy monitoring, please visit InternetReputation.com.

About InternetReputation.com: InternetReputation.com is an award-winning firm specializing in online crisis and reputation management (ORM). With an unparalleled commitment to client satisfaction and online reputation management expertise, InternetReputation.com continues to lead the market in reputation management solutions.

Contact: www.internetreputation.com | [email protected]

Related Links

InternetReputation.com Website

10 Best SEO list

SOURCE InternetReputation.com

Related Links

http://www.InternetReputation.com


CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The Board of Directors of Alliant Energy's Iowa utility, Interstate Power and Light Company (IPL), has declared dividends for its preferred stock shareowners of record on May 31, 2017. The dividends, which are payable on June 15, 2017, are as follows:

$0.31875 per share on the 5.1% Series D Cumulative Preferred Stock

Alliant Energy Corporation (NYSE: LNT), headquartered in Madison, Wis., provides regulated electric and natural gas service to 960,000 electric and 410,000 natural gas customers across Iowa and Wisconsin. Alliant Energy's mission is to deliver the energy solutions and exceptional service customers and communities count on  safely, efficiently and responsibly. Interstate Power and Light Company and Wisconsin Power and Light Company are Alliant Energy's two public utility subsidiaries. Alliant Energy Corporation is a component of the S&P 500. For more information, visit alliantenergy.com.

SOURCE Alliant Energy Corporation

Related Links

http://www.alliantenergy.com


"The BLANCO ATURA faucet blends professional faucet elements with beautiful organic lines which really works well in today's living kitchen," states Tim Maicher, Director of Marketing for BLANCO. "ATURA is an ideal faucet for style-seeking builders and price-conscious consumers. It hits the mark for this vastly underserved pull-down faucet market. The high arc design plus Chrome and Stainless finishes make this faucet a perfect choice for any kitchen style."

BLANCO ATURA is available in a pull-down dual spray as well as a Bar Faucet model. BLANCO ATURA comes in both Polished Chrome and Stainless finish.

To download images and press release, click here.

BLANCO ATURA Details:

16 3/8" high with a 9" reach

Limited Lifetime Warranty

Ceramic Disk Cartridge

MSRP:

Chrome: $275



Stainless Steel: $325

About BLANCO

For three generations, BLANCO has quietly and passionately elevated the standards for luxury sinks, faucets and decorative accessories. Proud of its European heritage and award-winning German engineering, BLANCO is steadfastly committed to their tradition of high quality, innovative design and unsurpassed service since 1925. Dedicated to quality without compromise, every sink is closely inspected many times before it receives the BLANCO name.

A remarkable history of firsts emphasizes BLANCO's zeal for innovation including the first stainless steel sink to achieve a 10mm radius STEELART  the first to market colored hard composite sinks in North America  BLANCO's pioneering MicroEdge technology with its virtual flushmount edge  and the first apron front sink in composite granite.

BLANCO has a long tradition of environmental stewardship and their production facilities operate to strict DIN EN ISO 14001 environmental performance standards.

BLANCO is the brand of choice in the luxury sink and faucet category for its unparalleled quality and an inspirational breadth of design possibilities. From the precision craftsmanship and artistic creativity of its STEELART brand to the stunning durability of its ground breaking SILGRANIT collection, BLANCO has proven that the sink is far more than a mere functional element in the kitchen.

Since 1994, BLANCO has been a member of the Caux Round Table (CRT), an international network of principled business leaders and companies working to promote a moral capitalism.

For more information, visit www.blancoamerica.com.

SOURCE BLANCO

Related Links

http://www.blanco-germany.com


MEDFORD, Mass., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- INVO Bioscience, Inc. (OTC: IVOB), a medical device company who was granted FDA clearance for the first Intravaginal Culture System, INVOcell, today announced its first quarter financial results and recent highlights.

Recent Highlights and Key Milestones:

Company became current on its financial reporting with the filing of a Super 10-K covering 2011 through 2015 in March 2017 , and filed a 10-K for the period year ended December 31, 2016 in April 2017 ;

, and filed a 10-K for the period year ended in ; Announced appointment to the INVO Bioscience Board of Directors, renowned fertility specialist Dr. Kevin Doody , the current President of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) and a board member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM);

, the current President of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) and a board member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM); The Company has now signed up 49 clinics in 11 states to begin offering or referring the INVOcell device and procedure, 29 of which have been signed up since the beginning of the year;

Effortless IVF Canada launched their very first INVO-specific clinic in April 2017 and currently has a waiting list of approximately 150 patients scheduled to get treatment;

and currently has a waiting list of approximately 150 patients scheduled to get treatment; Dr. Francisco Arredondo of RMA of Texas opened the U.S.'s first INVO-only center in McAllen on April 7, 2017 where he has now treated 20 patients in the first month;

of RMA of opened the U.S.'s first INVO-only center in on where he has now treated 20 patients in the first month; Company recently launched a new corporate website at www.invobioscience.com;

Numerous recent media mentions, including WINFertility, Fox St. Louis, Slate, Motherboard, ABC Dallas, and a USA Today Ad Insert; and

Revenue for the first quarter increased 189% compared to the year ago first quarter and surpasses revenue for all of 2016.

Management Discussion

"This is an exciting time for INVO Bioscience as we transition from a non-SEC reporting company, to becoming SEC compliant while beginning to gain traction in the marketplace with our revolutionary fertility treatment," said Katie Karloff, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of INVO Bioscience. "With limited resources, we have made great progress in attracting physicians to offer the INVOcell device and procedure, with 27 new clinics coming on board since the beginning of the year. We anticipate that as physician training occurs in the coming months, we will see increased utilization with successful pregnancy rates which will continue to drive further adoption in the future. Importantly, we are seeing the adoption of clinics exclusively providing the INVOcell treatment, creating a model that we believe will ultimately become the key driver of growth for the Company  INVO Clinics owned by INVO Bioscience. It has taken us a long time to reach this important inflection point, however we are here and look forward to the future with tremendous excitement."

First Quarter 2017 Financial Results

Revenue during the quarter was $52,240, an increase of 189% compared to $18,107 in the year ago period. The company sold initial devices to facilities in South Carolina, Illinois, New York and Michigan.

Operating expenses were $205,000 in the quarter, a slight increase from $196,000 last year. The main expenditure increases during the quarter pertained to training and SEC filing related items. Cash utilized during the quarter for operating activities was $136,000, as the company's executive management team deferred salaries and other expenses were kept to a minimum.

Net loss for the quarter was $(215,000), or $(0.00) per share, compared with $(181,000), or $(0.00) per share in the year ago quarter.

Additional details pertaining to the quarterly financials can be found in our 10-Q filed today with the SEC.

About INVO Bioscience

We are a medical device company focused on creating simplified, lower cost treatments for patients diagnosed with infertility. Our solution, the INVO Procedure, is a disruptive new technology. The INVO Procedure is a revolutionary in vivo method of vaginal incubation that offers patients a more natural and intimate experience. Our lead product, the INVOcell, is a patented medical device used in infertility treatment and is considered an Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). The INVOcell is the first Intravaginal Culture (IVC) system in the world used for the natural in vivo incubation of eggs and sperm during fertilization and early embryo development, as an alternative to traditional In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and Intrauterine Insemination (IUI). Our mission is to increase access to care and expand fertility treatment across the globe with a goal to lower the cost of care and increase availability of care. For more information, please visit http://invobioscience.com/

Safe Harbor Statement

This release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The Company invokes the protections of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategies, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, as well as statements that include words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and other similar expressions are forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements include those set forth in our filings at www.sec.gov. We are under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contact:

Kathleen Karloff, CEOINVO Bioscience, Inc.978-878-9505 ext. 504

[email protected]

SOURCE INVO Bioscience, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.invobioscience.com


FARMERS BRANCH, Texas, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Ironclad Performance Wear Corporation (OTCQB: ICPW), the recognized leader in high-performance task-specific work gloves, reported unaudited financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2017.

First Quarter 2017 Results

The Company reported Net Sales for the first quarter of 2017 of $4.46 million, a decrease of 11.7% from the first quarter total of $5.05 million for 2016. The sales decrease was primarily attributable to two factors:

First, a decrease in sales to our Australian distributor, Performance On Hand ("POH"), primarily due to a delay in purchases as they go through an upcoming product line review with their largest retail customer. Due to this line review, our distributor will not make purchases until their customer's new assortment is finalized.

Excluding sales to POH, sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2017 increased 4.7% over the first quarter of fiscal 2016.

Second, a decrease in sales of approximately $620,000 or 12% of 2016 Q1 sales to the former master distributor of our Kong product, due to the termination of our master distributor agreement with them. Q1 2016 represented the last quarter of significant sales to this former master distributor.

Partially offsetting the decreases above, the Company recorded significant growth in its retail segment.

Gross Profit was $1.56 million, or 34.9% of Net Sales in the first quarter of 2017, compared to $1.82 million, or 36.1% of Net Sales in the first quarter of 2016. The decrease in the Gross Margin percentage is primarily attributable to the mix of sales and fixed costs being spread over a lower net sales number.

Operating Expenses in the first quarter were $2.25 million or 50.4% of Net Sales, as compared to $2.14 million or 42.5% of Net Sales during the same period last year. The increased spending for the first three months of 2017 was primarily driven by two factors: increased wages, benefits and sales related travel due to an increase in our number of field sales people and an increase in headcount required to service the Grainger business and generate new business.

Loss from Operations in the first quarter of 2017 was $692,000, or (15.5%) of Net Sales, as compared to a loss of $323,000, or (6.4%) of Net Sales, during the same period in 2016.

Net Loss for the first quarter of 2017 was $767,000, or $0.01 per share, as compared to a loss of $358,000, or $0.00 per share, in the same period last year.

Ironclad's Chief Executive Officer, Jeffrey Cordes, commented: "As we have stated on numerous occasions, especially with large customers, both ours directly and those of our distributors, we have experienced and will continue to have quarterly fluctuations in our revenue totals. Our focus must be on our full year results that balance out these fluctuations and present a better view of the overall performance of our company. We are working closely with Performance on Hand, our Australian distributor and are excited about the line offering being presented to Bunnings, a long time major buyer of Ironclad products.

Looking at 1st quarter results we are very pleased with the continued expansion of our retail business, driven by a more than 100% increase with Amazon, the roll out of our new full year assortment at Menards, and a rapidly expanding tactical business.

Our industrial business recorded Grainger receipts that nearly matched those achieved during their substantial Q1 2016 stocking roll out. The other industrial business segments recorded nearly a 50% increase in revenues that offset a significant part of the final quarter revenue decline of the old ORR Safety program.

Internationally, we now have representation in more than twenty five countries around the globe, as compared to approximately five at this time a year ago, and continue to add to this network. During Q1, this distributor network drove sales of more than $800,000, more than double the volume of the prior year quarter. A key part of this increase was driven by our new South American distributor network.

We have seen improvements in our working capital this quarter and expect this trend to continue as well. We remain confident of our full year double digit growth expectations."

Conference Call

Ironclad Performance Wear will hold a conference call to discuss first quarter 2017 financial results on Monday, May 15th, at 3:30 p.m. Central Time (4:30 p.m. Eastern Time). To participate in the conference call, interested parties should dial:

Date: Monday, May 15, 2017

Time: 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time (3:30 p.m. Central Time)

Domestic Dial-In Number: (800) 311-6662

International Dial-In Number: (719) 457-2623

Conference ID Number: 8342054

The conference call will be broadcast simultaneously and available for replay at: http://public.viavid.com/index.php?id=124437 and via the landing page of the Company's Website at www.ironclad.com.

Replay Dial-In Numbers:

TOLL-FREE 1-844-512-2921

TOLL/INTERNATIONAL 1-412-317-6671

From: 05/15/17 at 7:30 pm Eastern Time

To: 06/15/17 at 11:59 pm Eastern Time

Replay Pin Number: 8342054

In addition, the conference call will also be broadcast live over the Internet and can be accessed at www.ironclad.com. For those unable to participate during the live broadcast, the Webcast will be archived on this site through June 15, 2017.

The Company's financial results will be posted online at www.ironclad.com once they are publicly released.

About Ironclad Performance Wear Corporation

Ironclad Performance Wear is a leader in high-performance task-specific work gloves. It created the performance work glove category in 1998, and continues to leverage its leadership position in the safety, construction and industrial markets through the design, development and distribution of specialized task-specific gloves for industries such as oil & gas extraction; automotive; and police, fire, first-responder and military. Ironclad engineers and manufactures its products with a focus on innovation, design, advanced material science and durability. Ironclad's gloves are available through industrial suppliers, hardware stores, home centers, lumber yards, and sporting goods retailers nationwide; and through authorized distributors in North America, Europe, Australia, Middle East, Asia and South America.

Built Tough for the Industrial Athlete

For more information on Ironclad, please visit the Company's Website at www.ironclad.com.

Information about Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains "forward-looking statements" that include information relating to future events and future financial and operating performance. Forward-looking statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times at, or by, which that performance or those results will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time they are made and/or management's good faith belief as of that time with respect to future events, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to: fluctuations in demand for Ironclad's products, the introduction of new products, Ironclad's ability to maintain customer and strategic business relationships, the impact of competitive products and pricing, growth in targeted markets, the adequacy of Ironclad's liquidity and financial strength to support its growth, and other information that may be detailed from time-to-time in Ironclad's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Examples of such forward looking statements in this release include statements regarding expanding our base of retailers and distributors, anticipated sales to customers, and anticipated growth and profitability. For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting Ironclad, please refer to the Company's recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, which are available at www.sec.gov. Ironclad undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contact

William Aisenberg, CFO

[email protected]

(972) 996-5664

IRONCLAD PERFORMANCE WEAR CORPORATION CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS





March 31, 2017 (unaudited)



December 31, 2016











ASSETS









CURRENT ASSETS









Cash and cash equivalents

$ 290,311



$ 299,904 Accounts receivable, net of allowance for doubtful accounts of $30,000 and $30,000



5,555,550





7,968,513 Inventory, net of reserve of $197,549 and $197,549



7,959,774





8,733,315 Deposits on inventory



108,597





108,597 Prepaid and other



801,418





575,403 Total current assets



14,715,650





17,685,732















PROPERTY AND EQUIPMENT













Computer equipment and software



321,320





294,117 Office equipment and furniture



379,752





343,499 Leasehold improvements



140,717





140,718 Less: accumulated depreciation



(407,734)





(357,204) Total property and equipment, net



434,055





421,130















Trademarks and patents, net of accumulated amortization of $85,441 and $81,260



231,557





235,738 Deposits and other assets



739,680





451,582 Total other assets



971,237





687,320















Total Assets

$ 16,120,942



$ 18,794,182















LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY













CURRENT LIABILITIES













Accounts payable and accrued expenses

$ 2,295,436



$ 4,674,106 Line of credit



4,484,446





4,248,070 Total current liabilities



6,779,882





8,922,176















Deferred Tax Liability



26,292





- Total Liabilities



6,806,174





8,922,176















STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY













Common stock, $.001 par value; 172,744,750 shares authorized; 85,646,354 and 84,500,454 shares issued and outstanding at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively



85,646





84,500 Additional paid-in capital



21,491,424





21,282,588 Accumulated deficit



(12,262,302)





(11,495,082) Total Stockholders' Equity



9,314,768





9,872,006 Total Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity

$ 16,120,942



$ 18,794,182

IRONCLAD PERFORMANCE WEAR CORPORATION

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS

(unaudited)













Three Months

Ended

March 31,

Three Months

Ended

March 31,



2017

2016 REVENUES











Net sales $ 4,458,843



$ 5,046,783













COST OF SALES











Cost of sales

2,903,247





3,225,842













GROSS PROFIT

1,555,596





1,820,941













OPERATING EXPENSES











General and administrative

783,064





892,148 Sales and marketing

946,789





722,222 Research and development

147,305





162,752 Purchasing, warehousing and distribution

316,216





326,246 Depreciation and amortization

54,710





40,326













Total operating expenses

2,248,084





2,143,694













LOSS FROM OPERATIONS

(692,488)





(322,753)













OTHER INCOME (EXPENSE)

























Interest expense

(48,480)





(36,187) Interest income

37





- Total other expense

(48,443)





(36,187)













LOSS BEFORE BENEFIT FROM INCOME TAXES

(740,931)





(358,940) (PROVISION FOR) BENEFIT FROM INCOME TAXES

(26,292)





670













NET LOSS $ (767,223)



$ (358,270)













NET LOSS PER COMMON SHARE











Basic $ (0.01)



$ (0.00) Diluted $ (0.01)



$ (0.00) WEIGHTED AVERAGE COMMON SHARES OUTSTANDING











Basic

85,017,430





83,011,751 Diluted

85,017,430





83,011,751

SOURCE Ironclad Performance Wear Corporation

Related Links

http://www.ironclad.com


CHARLOTTE, N.C., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- iSolved, an industry-leading human capital management (HCM) solution, will be on full display at the 35th Annual Congress of the American Payroll Association, May 1620 in Orlando, Florida. The theme of the congress is "Payroll Rocks the World," and visitors to the iSolved booth (#427) will learn how iSolved can help small-to-midsized employers "electrify their payroll."

iSolved is a comprehensive HCM platform that allows all relevant data to be stored in one place. This unification eliminates the need for importing/exporting and provides real-time reporting and analytics that simplify tasks for everyone. With more than 35,000 employers and 2 million employees now committed to the technology, it's no wonder iSolved is a rock star of small-to-midsized employer solutions.

"More and more employers are looking to simplify the core workforce management activities through a unified solution," said Dave Dawson, CEO of iSolved. "iSolved includes payroll, HR, time and attendance tracking, benefits enrollment, and ACA compliance in a single system, saving time and helping improve data accuracy."

Congress attendees are invited to visit the iSolved booth (#427) to view demos of the latest features and learn more about the iSolved GO mobile app, iSolved Hire applicant tracking system and NXG, the next generation of time clocks for collecting time and attendance data.

Participants in the congress will also have opportunities to attend various educational seminars over the four-day event and listen to the keynote address by Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, focusing on "Success Through Stillness."

About iSolved

iSolved HCM is an industry-leading human capital management technology company that brings together the key workforce functions in one robust, easy-to-use platform, iSolved. Payroll, HR, Time & Attendance, Onboarding, ACA Compliance and Benefits Enrollment are all delivered from a single application, in the cloud, specifically built for the small-to-midsized employer. It has achieved rapid market share, with more than 2 million employees and growing. iSolved also includes innovative features and options to boost employee engagement and improve productivity, including its mobile app, iSolved Go and its NXG line of time clocks. iSolved is delivered through elite, regional payroll providers who provide customers with the white-glove service they need in today's regulatory environment. This unique approach gives small-to-midsized employers access to a cutting-edge HCM solution, while retaining the local service relationship they prefer. For more information, visit www.isolvedhcm.com.

SOURCE iSolved

Related Links

http://www.isolvedhcm.com


BOSTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The following release is sourced to Outten & Golden LLP:

A federal judge today approved the $7.5 million class action settlement between Walmart and former Walmart associate Jacqueline Cote, that challenged Walmart's lack of health insurance benefits for same-sex spouses of Walmart associates prior to 2014.

The case is known as Jacqueline Cote v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc, No. 15-cv-12945-WGY (D. Mass). The settlement will pay for claims by Walmart associates in the United States and Puerto Rico that they were unable to obtain health insurance coverage for their same-sex spouses from Walmart from Jan. 1, 2011 to Dec. 31, 2013. It also covers the costs of administering the settlement and legal fees and expenses.

In 2014, Walmart voluntarily made the same health insurance benefits available to same-sex spouses of its associates that it offered to opposite-sex spouses. As part of the proposed settlement, Walmart commits to continuing to do so in the future.

The settlement class is expected to include no more than a few thousand current and former Walmart associates. Walmart employs nearly 1.5 million associates in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

Sally Welborn, Senior Vice President, Global Benefits for Walmart, said, "We're happy both sides could come together to reach a resolution. Respect for the individual, diversity and inclusion are among the core values that made Walmart into the company that it is today. We will continue to not distinguish between same and opposite sex spouses when it comes to the benefits we offer under our health insurance plan."

Cote said, "I'm pleased that Walmart was willing to resolve this issue for me and other associates who are married to someone of the same sex. It's a relief to bring this chapter of my life to a close."

Cote is represented by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), Outten & Golden LLP, the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs (WLC), and Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP.

Janson Wu, GLAD's Executive Director, said, "This is an important settlement for LGBTQ workers."

Juno Turner, a Partner at Outten & Golden LLP, said, "We are pleased that class members had the opportunity to receive compensation."

Peter Romer-Friedman, a Counsel at Outten & Golden LLP, said, "We are glad that as part of the settlement Walmart will continue to provide the same health insurance benefits regardless of the gender of the associate's spouse."

Jonathan Smith, the WLC's Executive Director, said, "We believe the settlement is fair and reasonable and are pleased that the Court approved it today. We are pleased to have worked with our colleagues at GLAD, Outten & Golden, and Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer to achieve this settlement."

Media contacts for Plaintiff: Carisa Cunningham, GLAD, (617) 447-6500; Georgia Willett, Outten & Golden LLP, (212) 245-1000; Erin Powers, Powers MediaWorks LLC for Outten & Golden LLP, (281) 703-6000.

Contact for Walmart: Randy Hargrove, (800) 331-0085.

Contacts for Plaintiff and her attorneys: Gary Buseck and Allison Wright, GLAD, (617) 426-1350; Juno Turner and Peter Romer-Friedman, Outten & Golden LLP, (212) 245-1000; Matthew Handley, Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs (202) 319-1000

SOURCE Outten & Golden LLP

Related Links

http://www.outtengolden.com


HOUSTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- KBR, Inc. (NYSE: KBR) announced today it has been awarded a program alliance contract by the Victorian Government for railroad crossing removal projects in Victoria, Australia.

Under the terms of the contract, KBR will remove two railroad crossings in an integrated alliance with John Holland, Metro Trains and the Level Crossing Removal Authority. These projects will commence in the coming months and be completed in 2018 with KBR providing engineering and design services for the crossing removals and associated works.

Subject to these projects being delivered in line with strict performance measures, the alliance has the potential to extend the contract to remove a further four railroad crossings.

The works are being undertaken by the Victorian Government as part of its program to remove 50 of the most dangerous and congested railroad crossings across the city of Melbourne. Last year, KBR and its alliance partners successfully delivered the first four railroad crossing removals as part of this government initiative.

"This latest contract builds on KBR's decade long involvement in railroad crossing removals in Victoria and adds to our current portfolio of major rail infrastructure projects in Australia," said Greg Conlon, President Asia Pacific.

"This includes early works for the multi-billion dollar Metro Tunnel and extension to the Mernda metropolitan line, both in Victoria, the Torrens Rail Junction Project in South Australia and the Sydney Metro project in New South Wales.

"We are pleased to be part of these transformational infrastructure projects that are creating jobs, stimulating local economies and delivering safer roads and railways for Australian communities," continued Conlon.

For more than 50 years, KBR has contributed to many of Australia's landmark transportation developments, including some of the nation's most complex urban and regional rail projects.

The contract value was not disclosed. Expected revenue from the contract will be included in KBR's second quarter 2017 backlog of unfilled orders for its Engineering & Construction business.

About KBR, Inc.

KBR is a global provider of differentiated professional services and technologies across the asset and program life cycle within the Government Services and Hydrocarbons sectors. KBR employs over 34,000 people worldwide (including our joint ventures), with customers in more than 80 countries, and operations in 40 countries, across three synergistic global businesses:

Government Services, serving government customers globally, including capabilities that cover the full life-cycle of defense, space, aviation and other government programs and missions from research and development, through systems engineering, test and evaluation, program management, to operations, maintenance, and field logistics

Technology & Consulting, including proprietary technology focused on the monetization of hydrocarbons (especially natural gas and natural gas liquids) in ethylene and petrochemicals; ammonia, nitric acid and fertilizers; oil refining; gasification; oil and gas consulting; integrity management; naval architecture and proprietary hulls; and downstream consulting

Engineering & Construction, including onshore oil and gas; LNG (liquefaction and regasification)/GTL; oil refining; petrochemicals; chemicals; fertilizers; differentiated EPC; maintenance services (Brown & Root Industrial Services); offshore oil and gas (shallow-water, deep-water, subsea); floating solutions (FPU, FPSO, FLNG & FSRU) and program management

KBR is proud to work with its customers across the globe to provide technology, value-added services, integrated EPC delivery and long term operations and maintenance services to ensure consistent delivery with predictable results. At KBR, We Deliver.

Visit www.kbr.com

Forward Looking Statement

The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding future financial performance, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's control that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the outcome of and the publicity surrounding audits and investigations by domestic and foreign government agencies and legislative bodies; potential adverse proceedings by such agencies and potential adverse results and consequences from such proceedings; the scope and enforceability of the company's indemnities from its former parent; changes in capital spending by the company's customers; the company's ability to obtain contracts from existing and new customers and perform under those contracts; structural changes in the industries in which the company operates; escalating costs associated with and the performance of fixed-fee projects and the company's ability to control its cost under its contracts; claims negotiations and contract disputes with the company's customers; changes in the demand for or price of oil and/or natural gas; protection of intellectual property rights; compliance with environmental laws; changes in government regulations and regulatory requirements; compliance with laws related to income taxes; unsettled political conditions, war and the effects of terrorism; foreign operations and foreign exchange rates and controls; the development and installation of financial systems; increased competition for employees; the ability to successfully complete and integrate acquisitions; and operations of joint ventures, including joint ventures that are not controlled by the company.

KBR's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K, any subsequent Form 10-Qs and 8-Ks, and other Securities and Exchange Commission filings discuss some of the important risk factors that KBR has identified that may affect the business, results of operations and financial condition. Except as required by law, KBR undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.

SOURCE KBR, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.kbr.com


RESTON, Va., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Leidos (NYSE: LDOS), a global science and technology company, was awarded a prime contract by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to continue to provide hazardous materials management and disposal services at more than 440 airport screening checkpoints. The single-award, firm fixed-price contract has a one-year base period of performance, four one-year options, and a total contract value of $45 million if all options are exercised. Work will be performed at all TSA continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, South Pacific and U.S. Virgin Islands screening checkpoints in federalized airport locations.

Under the contract, Leidos will provide regulatory support to ensure compliance with Federal, State, and local hazardous materials and hazardous waste regulations; treatment, storage, and disposal facility due diligence audits; management and operation of the Leidos-developed online documentation and recordkeeping system, HazOUT; emergency and spill response support; and development and execution of training programs.

"This contract award represents the continuation of more than 13 years of Leidos support to the Transportation Security Administration and its more than 440 CONUS and OCONUS airport locations," said Leidos Civil Group President Angie Heise. "The TSA's mission is vital to protecting the nation's transportation systems and ensuring freedom of movement for people and commerce. Our dedicated team remains ready to support this critical citizen solution."

About Leidos

Leidos is a global science and technology solutions leader working to solve the world's toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, homeland security, civil, and health markets. The company's 32,000 employees support vital missions for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $7.04 billion for the fiscal year ended December 30, 2016. For more information, visit www.Leidos.com.

Statements in this announcement, other than historical data and information, constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause our actual results, performance, achievements, or industry results to be very different from the results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Some of these factors include, but are not limited to, the risk factors set forth in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 30, 2016, and other such filings that Leidos makes with the SEC from time to time. Due to such uncertainties and risks, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

SOURCE Leidos

Related Links

http://www.leidos.com


DALLAS, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- LG Electronics USA Air Conditioning Technologies has expanded its North Texas training facility to provide enhanced after-market support, including training and call support for contractors and customers alike.

The facility features a hands-on showcase of the latest LG air conditioning and heating technologies  led by LGs industry-leading variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems  as well as a lecture space for interactive training courses. LG Electronics USA Air Conditioning Technologies has expanded its North Texas training facility to provide enhanced after-market support, including training and call support for contractors and customers alike. The state-of-art new LG Training Academy, located in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, Texas, is nearly three times the size of LGs previous facility  now expanded to more than 15,000 square feet of training and support space.

The state-of-art new LG Training Academy, located in the Dallas suburb of Farmer's Branch, Texas, is nearly three times the size of LG's previous facility  now expanded to more than 15,000 square feet of training and support space. The facility features a hands-on showcase of the latest LG air conditioning and heating technologies  led by LG's industry-leading variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems  as well as a lecture space for interactive training courses.

"We want customers to know when they buy an LG product that they have someone behind them throughout the process, not just at the point of sale," said Kevin McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, LG Electronics USA Air Conditioning Technologies. "From real-time troubleshooting through our new call center to hands-on training with working systems, our new Dallas facility reflects LG's commitment to our contractors and representatives."

The facility features an updated, expanded customer call center, where LG representatives with extensive in-field training can troubleshoot issues over the phone during business hours. LG experts can diagnose and solve a problem using equipment in the facility while still on the phone with a customer, streamlining the process and providing solutions faster than ever before.

The training facility enhancements demonstrate LG's strong commitment to the U.S. marketplace, with a large focus on providing ongoing training for customers and strong after-market support for customers and contractors throughout country, McNamara explained.

The Dallas training facility is among the four LG Training Academies in the U.S., including locations in Orange County, Calif.; Secaucus, N.J.; and Alpharetta, Ga. as well as 30 partner academies across the country.

For additional information on LG's training academies and class schedules, customers can contact their local LG sales representative or visit www.lg-vrf.com and http://www.lg-dfs.com/.

ABOUT LG ELECTRONICS USA AIR CONDITIONING TECHNOLOGIES

The LG Electronics USA Air Conditioning Technologies business is based in Alpharetta, Ga. LG is a leading player in the global air conditioning market, manufacturing both commercial and residential air conditioners and providing total sustainability and building management solutions. From consumer and individual units to industrial and specialized air conditioning systems, LG provides a wide range of products for heating, ventilating and air conditioning. The company's industry-leading variable refrigerant flow (VRF) technology minimizes efficiency losses, provides sustainable energy savings and offers some of the lowest life cycle cost of any system on the market today. LG Electronics USA., based in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., is the North American subsidiary of LG Electronics Inc., a $48 billion global force and technology leader in home appliances & air solutions, consumer electronics and mobile communications. For more information, please visit www.lghvac.com.

SOURCE LG Electronics USA Air Conditioning Technologies

Related Links

http://www.lghvac.com


BALLERUP, Denmark, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- LiqTech International, Inc. (NYSE MKT: LIQT), a clean technology company that manufactures and markets highly specialized filtration technologies, announces today its financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2017.

Financial highlights for the three months ended March 31, 2017

Net sales for the three months ended March 31, 2017 were $3.0 million compared to $3.6 million for the same period in 2016, representing a decrease of $0.6 million or 16.7%.

The decrease in sales consisted of a decrease in sales of liquid filters and systems of $1.5 million offset by an increase in sales of DPFs of $0.9 million.

Gross profit for the three months ended March 31, 2017 was $0.3 million compared to a gross profit of $0.7 million for same period in 2016, representing a decrease of $0.4 million or 57.1%.

Included in gross profit is depreciation of $0.3 million and $0.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016, respectively.

Total operating expenses for the three months ended March 31, 2017 were $1.3 million representing a decrease of $0.4 million or 23.5%, compared to $1.7 million for the same period in 2016.

Net loss attributable to the Company for the three months ended March 31, 2017 was a loss of $0.8 million compared to a loss of $3.8 million for the comparable period in 2016, representing a decrease in net loss of $3.0 million.

Total net loss of $0.8 million for the period ended March 31, 2017 includes non-cash charges for depreciation and amortization, bad debt expense, reserve for obsolete inventory and stock compensation expense charges for a total of approximately $0.4 million.

Cash on hand and restricted cash for the period ended March 31, 2017 was $0.5 million compared to $1.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2016, representing a decrease of $0.7 million.

Working capital for the period ended March 31, 2017 was $2.7 million compared to $3.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2016 representing a decrease of $0.8 million.

Management Commentary

In discussing the first quarter 2017 results, Mr. Sune Mathiesen, LiqTech CEO, remarked:

"Our results for the first quarter were in line with our expectations. We continue to invest significant resources in the development of the marine scrubber market. We have announced several orders for this industry this year, and we continue to form new relationships to manufacturers of marine scrubbers. We expect that our efforts will lead to an acceleration of our business later this year."

"We have invested significant resources in developing a standardized system for power plant applications. Over the past quarters our investments have been rewarded and we have announced several orders for this industry. We are encouraged by this development and we are optimistic that we will see further orders."

"We continue to use our large-scale references within the oil industry for further specification of our technology in new projects. We are in the process of testing our technology with one of China's largest operators in the hydraulic fracturing industry and we are optimistic that this could be a breakthrough for our technology in the Chinese oil industry."

"In April we announced that Hunan Yonker Investment Group had submitted their final application for a $4 million investment in LiqTech to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). NDRC is still reviewing and verifying the submitted documents. To further strengthen our balance sheet we have decided to do a private placement of 6,300,000 new shares that we announced earlier today. The private placement was made directly by LiqTech and we plan to use the net proceeds of approximately $1.6 million for further acceleration of our business in the marine scrubber industry."

Conference Call Details

Interested parties may participate in the call by dialing (877) 407-8029 or (201) 689-8029. It is recommended to dial in approximately 10 to 15 minutes prior to the scheduled start time. The conference call will also be available on replay starting at 3:00 p.m. EDT on May 15, 2017 and ending on June 5, 2017. To access the replay, please dial (877) 660-6853 or (201) 612-7415 and enter the conference id# 13662373.

Callers from Denmark can dial in using the following numbers:

Denmark (fixed) ATT 80 25 21 64

Denmark (mobile) ATT 80 25 19 17

CONTACT:

LiqTech International

Aldo Petersen, Chairman,

+45 2390 0000, [email protected]

Sune Mathiesen, CEO

+45 5197 0908, [email protected]

Financial Tables Follow

LIQTECH INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS

















As of



As of





March, 31



December 31,





2017



2016





Unaudited









Current Assets:















Cash

$ 515,467



$ 1,208,650

Accounts receivable, net



1,269,240





1,111,759

Other receivables



310,384





306,177

Cost in excess of billing



615,313





642,700

Inventories



5,223,700





5,174,874

Prepaid expenses



122,981





62,161



















Total Current Assets



8,057,085





8,506,321



















Property and Equipment, net accumulated depreciation



2,482,797





2,633,558



















Other Assets:















Investments at costs



5,354





5,282

Other intangible assets



4,775





5,614

Deposits



264,119





261,553



















Total Other Assets



274,248





272,449



















Total Assets

$ 10,814,130



$ 11,412,328



LIQTECH INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS

















As of



As of





March, 31



December 31,





2017



2016





Unaudited









Current Liabilities:















Current portion of notes payable

$ 14,244



$ 15,034

Current portion of capital lease obligations



91,405





45,883

Accounts payable



2,489,643





2,262,688

Accrued expenses



2,526,506





2,385,586

Billing in excess of cost



47,145





106,375

Accrued income taxes payable



580





580

Deferred revenue / customers deposits



142,940





192,597



















Total Current Liabilities



5,312,463





5,008,743



















Long-term notes payable, less current portion



36,821





39,895

Long-term capital lease obligations, less current portion



20,993





93,942



















Total Long-Term Liabilities



57,814





133,837



















Total Liabilities



5,370,277





5,142,580



















Commitment and Contingencies See Note 12

































Stockholders' Equity:















Common stock; par value $0.001, 100,000,000 shares authorized 36,929,264 and 36,835,514 shares issued and outstanding at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively



36,929





36,836

Additional paid-in capital



36,144,024





36,084,117

Accumulated deficit



(24,844,613)





(24,011,343)

Deferred compensation



(112,383)





(148,561)

Other comprehensive income, net



(5,780,104)





(5,691,301)



















Total Stockholders' Equity



5,443,853





6,269,748



















Total Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity

$ 10,814,130



$ 11,412,328



LIQTECH INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES (UNAUDITED) CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS











For the Three Months Ended





March 31,





2017



2016

Net Sales

$ 2,968,074



$ 3,629,968

Cost of Goods Sold



2,696,657





2,884,010

Gross Profit



271,417





745,958



















Operating Expenses:















Selling expenses



450,383





591,068

General and administrative expenses



593,638





755,994

Non-cash compensation expenses



96,178





167,351

Research and development expenses



139,336





188,513



















Total Operating Expense



1,279,535





1,702,926



















Loss from Operations



(1,008,118)





(956,968)



















Other Income (Expense)















Interest and other income



226





-

Interest (Expense)



(10,821)





(9,894)

Gain (Loss) on currency transactions



178,675





(12,550)

Gain on sale of fixed assets



6,768





-



















Total Other Income (Expense)



174,848





(22,444)



















Loss Before Income Taxes



(833,270)





(979,412)



















Income Tax Expense (Benefit)



-





2,774,283



















Net Loss



(833,270)





(3,753,695)



















Less Net Loss Attributable To Non-Controlled Interests in Subsidiaries



-





-



















Net Loss Attributable To LiqTech

$ (833,270)



$ (3,753,695)

Basic Loss Per Share

$ (0.02)



$ (0.10)

Weighted Average Common Shares Outstanding



36,929,264





36,835,514

Diluted Loss Per Share

$ (0.02)



$ (0.10)

Weighted Average Common Shares Outstanding Assuming Dilution



36,929,264





36,835,514



ABOUT LIQTECH INTERNATIONAL, INC.

LiqTech International, Inc., a Nevada corporation, is a clean technology company that for more than a decade has developed and provided state-of-the-art technologies for gas and liquid purification using ceramic silicon carbide filters, particularly highly specialized filters for the control of soot exhaust particles from diesel engines and for liquid filtration. Using nanotechnology, LiqTech develops products using proprietary silicon carbide technology. LiqTech's products are based on unique silicon carbide membranes which facilitate new applications and improve existing technologies. In particular, LiqTech Systems A/S (www.provital.dk), the Company's subsidiary, has developed a new standard of water filtration technology to meet the ever increasing demand for higher water quality. By incorporating LiqTech's SiC liquid membrane technology with its longstanding systems design experience and capabilities it offers solutions to the most difficult water pollution problem.

For more information, please visit www.liqtech.com

Follow LiqTech on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/liqtech-international

Follow LiqTech on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LiqTech

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements." Although the forward-looking statements in this release reflect the good faith judgment of management, forward-looking statements are inherently subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those discussed in these forward-looking statements. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made by us in the our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risk factors that attempt to advise interested parties of the risks that may affect our business, financial condition, results of operation and cash flows. If one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if the underlying assumptions prove incorrect, our actual results may vary materially from those expected or projected. Readers are urged not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect any event or circumstance that may arise after the date of this release.

SOURCE LiqTech International, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.liqtech.com


BALLERUP, Denmark, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- LiqTech International, Inc. (NYSE MKT: LIQT) ("LiqTech") is pleased to announce that the Company has received a $380,000 order for the Company's system for treatment of waste water from marine scrubbers. The order is from a new customer and includes an option for further two systems.

Mr. Sune Mathiesen, LiqTech CEO, remarked, "We are pleased to note that the activity level from our customers within the marine scrubber industry continues to increase. We continue to form new relationships to customers in this industry and we are very pleased to see this order from a new customer."

"As earlier discussed we have invested significant resources in the development of a standardized system for this application. We believe that these investments and our long term experience in this emerging industry positions us well for further growth," Mr. Mathiesen concluded.

ABOUT LIQTECH INTERNATIONAL, INC.

LiqTech International, Inc., a Nevada corporation, is a clean technology company that for more than a decade has developed and provided state-of-the-art technologies for gas and liquid purification using ceramic silicon carbide filters, particularly highly specialized filters for the control of soot exhaust particles from diesel engines and for liquid filtration. Using nanotechnology, LiqTech develops products using proprietary silicon carbide technology. LiqTech's products are based on unique silicon carbide membranes which facilitate new applications and improve existing technologies. In particular, LiqTech Systems A/S (www.provital.dk), the Company's subsidiary, has developed a new standard of water filtration technology to meet the ever increasing demand for higher water quality. By incorporating LiqTech's SiC liquid membrane technology with its longstanding systems design experience and capabilities it offers solutions to the most difficult water pollution problem.

For more information, please visit www.liqtech.com

Follow LiqTech on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/liqtech-international

Follow LiqTech on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LiqTech

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements." Although the forward-looking statements in this release reflect the good faith judgment of management, forward-looking statements are inherently subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those discussed in these forward-looking statements. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made by us in the our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risk factors that attempt to advise interested parties of the risks that may affect our business, financial condition, results of operation and cash flows. If one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if the underlying assumptions prove incorrect, our actual results may vary materially from those expected or projected. Readers are urged not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. We assume no obligation to update any forward looking statements in order to reflect any event or circumstance that may arise after the date of this release.

CONTACT:

Aldo Petersen, Chairman,

+45 2390 0000, [email protected]

Sune Mathiesen, CEO

+45 5197 0908, [email protected]

SOURCE LiqTech International, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.liqtech.com


Each year, the company travels to the event at McCormick Place in Chicago to display its brands to current and prospective customers from across the nation. This year, Lollicup USA will feature many products by Karat, Karat Earth, Tea Zone and Total Clean.

New Karat food packaging productsincluding its aluminum products, grease-resistant paper and paper shopping bagswill be a main highlight of the company's booth this year. The brand will also show off all of its popular products, including its cups, lids, straws, utensils, food containers and more. Karat Earth compostable PLA plastic products will be on display, as well as the brand's bio-based products and compostable bagasse products.

Guests will receive samples of tasty drinks made with Tea Zone food and beverage ingredients. The company will serve refreshing raspberry coconut water with Tea Zone cherry or strawberry popping pearls, and a tropical tea with passion fruit popping pearls. Tea Zone will also be displayed at the Lollicup USA booth, with increased emphasis on the brand's popping pearls and this topping's versatility.

The 2017 NRA Show will be held at May 20-23. Lollicup USA will be at booth #1464. Stop by to learn more about the brands.

About Lollicup USA, Inc.

Lollicup USA manufactures and distributes Karat paper and plastic disposable foodservice packaging products and Tea Zone beverage ingredients for thousands of retail business accounts, including several Fortune 500 restaurant franchises. Lollicup USA is proud to provide a true ''one-stop solution'' for all beverage and foodservice needs. Please visit lollicupusa.com for more information, or contact us at [email protected].

Contact: Julia Gutierrez

Phone: (626) 965-8882

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Lollicup USA, Inc.

Related Links

http://lollicup.com


CHICAGO, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- MAG USA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of MAG  the largest UK-owned airport group, today announced complimentary access to their U.S. Escape Lounges for American Express' Platinum Card Members. Beginning today, Platinum Card Members can visit Escape's current and future U.S. locations for free, including existing Escape Lounge locations in Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP), Oakland International Airport (OAK) and Bradley International Airport (BDL) near Hartford.

Platinum Card Members flying on any airline will simply present the U.S. Escape Lounge host with their Platinum Card, along with their boarding pass and government issued I.D. to enter the lounge and begin enjoying the premium amenities. Card Members may be accompanied by up to two traveling companions for no additional charge.*

All members and guests entering U.S. Escape Lounges have the option to enjoy an array of complimentary food and beverages, relax in comfortable seating with adjacent power outlets in most seats, and connect to free high-speed Wi-Fi. Escape Lounge's complimentary hot and cold food offerings are developed by prominent, award-winning local chefs. Escape Lounge's complimentary bar features a selection of well-known national brands along with locally sourced wines, craft beers and spirits**. In addition, premium food and beverage options are available for a fee.

"MAG USA is pleased to offer American Express Platinum Card Members an elevated travel experience through our U.S. Escape Lounges," said Rosemarie Andolino, President and CEO of MAG USA. "Our network of Escape Lounges enhances the traveler's journey by providing them with access to local culinary traditions and flavors through high-quality food options created by prominent local chefs, including Tyler Anderson from Millwright's in Simsbury, Conn., JD Fratzke from Saint Dinette in St. Paul, Minn., and Chris Pastena of the Chop Bar in Oakland, Calif. The Escape Lounge network combines comfort and quality so our guests can dine, relax and connect in unique, modern surroundings."

"At American Express, we know our Platinum Card Members are passionate about travel, and we are focused on providing them with value, service and access for every step of the journey  from booking to boarding and beyond," said Joshua McKay, vice president, Global Benefits & Services, American Express. "With the addition of access to U.S. Escape Lounges, we are continuing to expand the access we provide our Card Members through our Global Lounge Collection and further enhance the value of the Platinum Card as a passport to a premium travel experience."

For more information, please visit www.escapelounges.com.

About Escape Lounges

Escape Lounge is an airport lounge concept available to all ticketed passengers on any carrier. Escape was started in the 1980's with a lounge in Manchester Airport, UK and has since grown to 8 lounges with U.S. locations currently in Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP), Oakland International Airport (OAK) and Bradley International Airport (BDL). Visit escapelounges.com for a complete list of our entry options at each of our lounges.

About MAG

MAG USA, launched in 2015, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Manchester Airport Group, U.K. (MAG). MAG USA is focused on bringing Escape Lounges, commercial parking products and P3, public-private partnerships, retail and terminal developments that transform the passenger experience to U.S. airports. MAG is the UK's leading airport group which owns and operates Manchester, London Stansted, East Midlands and Bournemouth Airports, together with MAG Property, a commercial property division. MAG's aim is to become a global leader in airport management, products and services, and it currently employs over 4,500 people, annually serves approximately 50 million passengers and handles 650,000 tonnes of air freight. MAG is managed on behalf of its shareholders who include Manchester City Council (35.5%), IFM Investors (35.5%) and the nine other Greater Manchester local authorities (29%). For more information about MAG USA, please visit www.magworld.com and connect on twitter.com/MAGAirportsUSA and linkedin.com/company/mag-airport-group-usa.

About American Express

American Express is a global services company, providing customers with access to products, insights and experiences that enrich lives and build business success. Learn more at americanexpress.com and connect with us on facebook.com/americanexpress, foursquare.com/americanexpress, linkedin.com/company/american-express, twitter.com/americanexpress, and youtube.com/americanexpress.

Key links to products, services and corporate responsibility information: charge and credit cards, business credit cards, Plenti rewards program, travel services, gift cards, prepaid cards, merchant services, Accertify, corporate card, business travel and corporate responsibility.

About the American Express Global Lounge Collection: The American Express Global Lounge Collection provides American Express Platinum and Centurion Card Members with access to the most lounges across the globe from a U.S. credit card, including access to more than 1,000 lounges around the world, in 500 plus cities, across 120 countries and counting. In addition to the recently added U.S. Escape lounges, the Global Lounge Collection includes access to American Express Centurion Lounges, International American Express lounges, Delta Sky Club lounges, Priority PassTM Select Lounges upon enrollment, and Airspace Lounges. Card Members can find a lounge at the Global Lounge Collection website.

*Card Members receive complimentary access to any U.S. location of the Escape Lounges. Card Member must present his or her valid Card, a boarding pass showing a confirmed reservation for same-day travel on any carrier and government-issued I.D. In some cases, Card Member must be 21 years of age to enter without a parent or guardian. Card Members may bring up to two (2) companions into U.S. Escape Lounges as complimentary guests. Card Member must adhere to all house rules of participating lounges. Card Members and his or her guests will receive all of the complimentary benefits and amenities afforded to the U.S. Escape Lounge customers, as well as access to purchase non-complimentary items. Some product features may be subject to additional charges. U.S. Escape Lounge locations are subject to change.

**Must be of legal drinking age to consume alcoholic beverages. Please drink responsibly.

SOURCE MAG USA

Related Links

http://www.magworld.com


SPRINGFIELD, Mass., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- It's a whole new look for an industry-leading 166-year-old FORTUNE 500 company1. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) today unveiled a newly refreshed brand, designed to better reflect and build on its legacy and the core values that have guided the company since its founding. Celebrating the gift of interdependence, the new positioning elevates the idea that Americans today want to protect the ones they love with a company whose values align with their own.

Importantly, the brand refreshmarked by the launch of an exciting new multi-channel advertising campaign, updated logo, and dramatically revamped websitecommunicates the company's long history of stability and strength.

"Since 1851, MassMutual has been guided by our founding principlewe are people coming together to look out for one another," said Gareth Ross, MassMutual Chief Digital and Customer Experience Officer. "We know people are inherently reliant on one another, whether that's at home, in the workplace or in the community. Our new positioning celebrates these relationships, underscoring that when we depend on each other, we are not only more securebut life is also happier and more fulfilling."

He added that, based on company research and customer insightscombined with the fact that a substantial number of individuals and families across the U.S. are in need of financial guidanceMassMutual wanted to reinforce the company's vision and identity in a new, fresh and relatable way. The new brand recognizes that while the world celebrates independence, true happiness comes from our reliance on one another. It also seeks to inspire people to see themselves as part of something bigger and to Live Mutual.

"Much has changed in the past decadewe live our lives differently, connecting on social media and depending on each other at all stages of life," said Jennifer Halloran, MassMutual head of Brand and Advertising. "As we took a close look at the key attributes that distinguish us from our competitors, we saw this as not only an opportunity to communicate who we are, but to also help more Americans with holistic financial solutions at a time they need the help the most."

Understanding Interdependence in Today's World

At the core of the refresh is this: American expectations about interdependence continue to evolve. Nearly one-third (32 percent) of young adults 18-34 now live at home with their parents2, and only one-third of baby boomers are confident they will have enough money to last through their retirement3. Add to this that some generations, like Gen X, may be taking care of both parents and children, and it's clear that Americans are turning to their loved ones for support throughout their lives.

The need for holistic financial solutions in rapidly growing and underserved communities is also very apparent. Millennials, the middle class and Latinos are the industry's fastest growing customer base, but many are financially unprepared. Millennials are the largest living generation and the biggest group in the workforce, but they are burdened with more than $1.3 trillion in student loan debt4. Furthermore, median middle class income fell four percent in the past decade5 and although Latinos are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S., more than half say they are financially unprepared6.

New Look Begins Today

MassMutual's exciting new look debuts today, on the exact date of the company's 166th anniversary, and is being rolled out through a broad and comprehensive multi-channel advertising campaign that includes prominent TV, radio, print, outdoor, digital and social advertising across the nation. The company's visual identity has also been updated to focus on its policyowners and customers. The blue chip has been replaced by a newly designed logo, featuring a bold, dynamic blue color and symbolic dots that represent the community of people that MassMutual is helping to connect. Additionally, the company's website, MassMutual.com, has been redesigned to reflect the refreshed brand, improve the user experience and deliver new features.

Since its last refresh in 2007, MassMutual has been unwavering in its commitment to help more Americans achieve financial well-being. From offering a record 9,500-strong financial advisor network7, to developing digital tools and launching direct to consumer digital channels, to providing free, critical financial literacy education through the MassMutual Foundation's FutureSmartSM program, MassMutual has been evolving to be more innovative and accessible in a digital age to ensure it can meet the needs and preferences of all Americans.

"This is just the beginning of the next chapter in MassMutual's long journey of helping people secure their future and protect the ones they love," said Ross.

Agency credits:

Strategy/Creative: Johannes Leonardo

Visual Identity (logo): The Working Assembly

Media: Giant Spoon

About MassMutual

MassMutual is a leading mutual life insurance company that that is run for the benefit of its members and participating policyowners. MassMutual offers a wide range of financial products and services, including life insurance, disability income insurance, long term care insurance, annuities, retirement plans and other employee benefits. For more information, visit www.massmutual.com.

1 FORTUNE Magazine, 6/15/16

2"For the first time in the modern era, living with parents edges out other living arrangements for 18 to 34 year olds,Pew Research Center. July, 2016.

3 Boomer Expectations for Retirement 2015, The Insured Retirement Institute, April 2015.

4Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, February 2017

5The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground, Pew Research Center, December 2015

6Latinos are increasingly positive about current finances, but many say family income is not keeping pace with cost of living, Pew Research Center, June 2016

7As of yearend 2016

Contacts:

James Lacey

413-744-2365

[email protected]

Laura Crisco

413-744-2370

[email protected]

SOURCE MassMutual
NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- A year and a half after launching as a curated residential service in New York City, Maven has evolved into one of the fastest-growing mobility brands in North America. Leveraging its seamless and dynamic mobility platform, Maven offers unique car-sharing services geared toward both consumers and businesses. Maven has rolled out in 17 cities across North America and its members have covered more than 125 million miles.

Maven offers three products to address urban growth trends and the need for mobility as a service:

Maven City is a fully connected, seamless car-sharing experience featuring cars loaded with technology and available for on-demand rental.

is a fully connected, seamless car-sharing experience featuring cars loaded with technology and available for on-demand rental. Maven Home provides the ultimate amenity  transportation as a service  for residential communities and commercial entities.

provides the ultimate amenity  transportation as a service  for residential communities and commercial entities. Maven Gig is an on-demand vehicle rental service that allows drivers in the sharing economy the freedom to switch between several brands, services and gigs.

EXPANDING

Maven is returning to its roots to offer an elevated car-sharing experience in New York City.

More than 80 vehicles are available in Manhattan, from Columbia University to Battery Park, for hourly or daily reservations. Maven will continue to expand into the boroughs and throughout the city to provide cars around the corner from where New Yorkers live, work and play, all without a membership fee.

Sometimes a favorite museum or nature trail is located just outside the city center. New Yorkers now have available cars to fit every need when public transportation does not. Members will be there for the moments that matter most, like weekend trips to the Hamptons or to see family in New Jersey.

Maven carefully selected lifestyle-oriented cars with all the amenities needed for travel in and outside of New York. Residents who feel trapped in the densely populated urban environment can escape for short trips in a sporty sedan or a luxury SUV.

All Maven vehicles are loaded with technology, including 4G LTE Wi-Fi, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Maven 24/7 advisor support is available through OnStar for questions, roadside assistance and emergency response, providing peace of mind for the journey.

Maven eliminates the need to own a car in New York City. Residents no longer have to pay high insurance premiums and costly rates to park in garages when the street is not an option. Personally owned vehicles sit idle 95 percent of the time, and each shared car takes about 15 private cars off the road, helping to alleviate congestion.

INNOVATING

Maven's established mobility platform is allowing for more rapid innovation at General Motors. A hundred-year-old company is disrupting itself with the intention of leading in the share of miles driven, whether through traditional vehicle ownership, car sharing or ridesharing. Maven is creating new business opportunities and helping to make crucial strides toward autonomous vehicle deployment:

Maven recently placed more than 100 Chevrolet Bolt EVs with an EPA-estimated range of 238 miles 1 into car-sharing and ridesharing services in California .

with an EPA-estimated range of 238 miles into car-sharing and ridesharing services in . Maven is actively working with EV infrastructure providers, including service providers and electric utilities, to leverage these high-demand scenarios and deploy EVs into the car- and ridesharing fleets.

providers, including service providers and electric utilities, to leverage these high-demand scenarios and deploy EVs into the car- and ridesharing fleets. Maven is partnering with cities to evolve transportation and provide real-world mobility solutions. Maven is developing opportunities to test and learn how the smart city concepts can be put into action today in places like Los Angeles .

QUOTES

"Maven is a dynamic mobility platform offering solutions for the future of transportation," said Julia Steyn, vice president, General Motors Urban Mobility and Maven. "Maven's growth has been remarkable during the past year and a half and I am excited about our continuing innovation and new products we will bring to market."

"New York City has been part of the fabric of Maven since we launched the brand here in 2015," said Julia Steyn, vice president, General Motors Urban Mobility and Maven. "The addition of Maven City car sharing is an opportunity to showcase what we have learned. We crafted this experience with residents of the city in mind and see this as becoming part of the lifestyle of New Yorkers."

Learn more about Maven at Maven.com

Connect with us:

Facebook: @drivemaven

Instagram: @drivemaven

Twitter: @drivemaven

1 Actual range may vary based on several factors including temperature, terrain and driving technique.

SOURCE Maven

Related Links

http://www.Maven.com


NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- McCann was named Agency of the Year at the One Show, marking the third time in the last three weeks that the agency has been designated with this top creative recognition at a major award show. The latest honor follows being named both Agency of the Year and Network of the Year at last week's ADC Annual Awards and the International ANDY Awards in late April.

"We're incredibly humbled by the One Show Agency of the Year honor, and delighted that all of our major regional offices were recognized in the awards show," said Rob Reilly, Global Creative Chairman of McCann Worldgroup.

McCann New York, which won the One Show's Agency of the Year recognition, led accolades with 19 awards, wherein 18 were gold. Other McCann Worldgroup agencies also contributed to the strong global showing, including those in Barcelona, Colombia, India, Melbourne, Paris, Stockholm, and Tokyo. More than 20 agencies in the global McCann network were recognized with Merit awards, representing teams and campaigns spanning over a dozen countries.

"Without the visionary partnerships of our clients we wouldn't have achieved what we have in the past yearwhether it's inspiring kids to become the first explorers on Mars, or using virtual reality to educate adults and children alike on the dangers of bullying in schools," said Eric Silver, McCann's North American Chief Creative Officer.

The One Club for Creativity, one of the world's leading organizations devoted to "elevating creative work in all aspects of advertising and design," sponsors several major creative awards shows, including both the One Show and the ADC (Art Directors Club) Annual Awards. The ADC and the One Club merged their organizations and awards shows last fall.

"McCann is an iconic agency with an impressive client roster and a long history of producing groundbreaking work," said Kevin Swanepoel, CEO of The One Club for Creativity. "They have had Best of Show winners like 'Dumb Ways to Die,' and now they have taken VR to a whole new level, from an individual perspective to a group experience. With 'Field Trip to Mars' McCann resets the bar for creative excellence."

McCann's One Show Awards performance is the latest of many recent top global creative honors won by McCann Worldgroup, which was ranked in 2016 by The Gunn Report as the world's second most creatively awarded network overall in advertising and specifically in digital as well. In 2017, the agency won Network of the Year and Agency of the Year honors both at the International ANDY Awards (where it also won the Best in Show GRANDY award) and the ADC Annual Awards (where it was also named Digital Agency of the Year and won the coveted ADC Black Cube in Digital for best in discipline for its Lockheed Martin "Field Trip to Mars" VR campaign).

About McCann Worldgroup: McCann Worldgroup, part of the Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG), is a leading global marketing services company with 24,000 employees in more than 100 countries, comprising McCann (advertising), MRM//McCann (digital marketing/relationship management), Momentum Worldwide (total brand experience), McCann Health (professional/dtc communications), CRAFT (global adaptation and production), UM (media management), Weber Shandwick (public relations), FutureBrand (consulting/design), ChaseDesign (shopper marketing) and PMK-BNC.

SOURCE McCann Worldgroup
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Media are invited to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Tuesday, May 16 at 11:30 CDT to see the NASA barge Pegasus and the engine section test article, the first core stage test article for NASA's Space Launch System, the world's most powerful rocket.

The barge Pegasus, carrying a structural test version of the massive SLS rocket's engine section, just arrived at Marshall on May 15 after a 1,240-mile voyage from NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The barge left Michoud on April 28. The delivery -- the first of major SLS hardware from Michoud to Marshall -- marks a critical milestone toward the first integrated flight of the SLS rocket and NASA's Orion spacecraft, and a step closer to sending humans to deep space destinations, including Mars.

Media interested in attending Tuesday, May 16 should contact Tracy McMahan in Marshall's Office of Communications at 256-682-5326 no later than 10 a.m. CDT, Tuesday May, 16. Media must report to the Redstone Arsenal Joint Visitor Control Center at Gate 9, Interstate 565 interchange at Research Park Boulevard by 10:30 a.m. CDT, Tuesday, May 16. NASA officials and members of the barge crew will be available for interviews. Journalists must wear long pants and closed-toe shoes with heels no higher than two inches. Vehicles are subject to a security search at the gate. Photo identification and proof of car insurance is required.

NASA modified Pegasus to accommodate the SLS rocket's core stage, increasing the barge's length and weight-carrying capacity. The SLS rocket's core stage is 50 feet longer than the space shuttle external tank.

The first of four core stage test articles manufactured at Michoud scheduled to be delivered to Marshall for testing, the engine section will house four RS-25 engines and connect the core stage to the SLS rocket's two solid rocket motors. The structural qualification test article was designed with the same specifications as the engine section that will fly on first integrated flight of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft.

At Marshall, the test articles will undergo extensive testing. Engineers will push, pull, and bend the hardware to ensure it can withstand the extreme forces the rocket will experience during launch, liftoff and flight. The tests along with analytical models and other data will show that the design of the engine section is structurally sound. In the future media will have the opportunity to tour the engine section test stand and view the engine section structural test article that Pegasus delivered.

For more information on the SLS structural loads testing, visit:

https://go.nasa.gov/2opxZE2

For more on NASA's barge Pegasus, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/multimedia/barge-pegasus-infographic

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


BOSTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Mizuho Americas today announced that it will host its Global SMID-Cap Opportunities Conference on May 18 at the Langham Hotel in Boston. The conference will provide an exclusive opportunity for investors to engage in one-on-one meetings with C-suite level executives from fifteen participating small and mid-cap companies across multiple sectors.

Participating companies expected to attend span the healthcare, pharmaceutical, real estate, software, automotive, energy, manufacturing and industrial sectors.

The event will also feature a keynote lunch conversation between Mizuho Chief US Economist Steven Ricchiuto and Rick Telesco, Managing Director, US Equity Trading. The discussion topic, "Temper Expectations!" will explore Ricchiuto's muted growth forecast for equity markets, as well as the impact of GDP on SMID-Cap stocks.

"We take great pride in our service-oriented approach to delivering actionable insights and business opportunities for clients on both the investment and corporate sides of our equity business," said Matt DeSalvo, Head of Equities, Mizuho Americas.

Mizuho Americas is dedicated to helping the world's best companies stand out through global events and tailored conferences. The inaugural Global Mizuho Investor Conference (MIC) NY was held in November 2016 and will take place again this December. The MIC brings Mizuho's clients together with key decision-makers and executives across the energy, financials, healthcare, industrials, REITs, TMT, consumer and utilities sectors in a one-on-one setting.

For more information, please contact Mizuho Americas Corporate Access at [email protected].



About Mizuho Americas

Mizuho Americas is a leading financial institution comprising several legal entities, which together offer clients corporate and investment banking, financing, securities, treasury services, asset management, research and more. With professionals in offices throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, Mizuho's operations in the Americas connect a broad client base of major corporations, financial institutions and public sector groups to local markets and a vast global network. Learn more at mizuhoamericas.com

Mizuho Americas is an integral part of the Japan-based Mizuho Financial Group, Inc. (NYSE: MFG). Mizuho Financial Group is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, offering comprehensive financial and strategic services including private banking and venture capital through its subsidiaries. The group has over 900 offices and 56,000 employees worldwide in nearly 40 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA, and Asia. At the end of 2016, its total assets were $1.8 trillion. Learn more about Mizuho Financial Group at mizuho-fg.co.jp/english.

SOURCE Mizuho Americas

Related Links

https://mizuhoamericas.com


WASHINGTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two NASA astronauts, both with one-of-a-kind career credits, will be honored Friday, May 19, when they are inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. The ceremony will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website at 1 p.m. EDT.

Bob Cabana, 2008 hall of famer and current director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will speak at the induction ceremony about the distinguished careers of honorees Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman to go into space and current director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and former astronaut Michael Foale, the only U.S. astronaut to serve on both the International Space Station and Russian space station Mir.

The ceremony will be held at the Space Shuttle Atlantis attraction at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Media interested in covering the event should contact Rebecca Shireman at 321-449-4273.

Ochoa was selected as a NASA astronaut in January 1990. A veteran of four flights, Ochoa logged more than 978 hours in space, serving as mission specialist on space shuttle mission STS-56, payload commander on STS-66, and both flight engineer and mission specialist on STS-96 and STS-110. She has received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Service Medal, NASA's highest award.

Foale was selected as an astronaut candidate in June 1987. A veteran of six missions, he logged more than 374 days in space and four spacewalks totaling almost 23 hours, including a spacewalk to perform repairs and upgrades to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. He also is the only American citizen to have served on both Mir and the International Space Station. Foale retired from NASA in 2013.

For NASA TV schedules and links to streaming video, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


RALEIGH, N.C., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- A.M. Best Company, one of the leading insurance and financial company ratings firms, has reaffirmed North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company's (NCFBMIC) rating of "A" (Excellent). The ratings are a well-established indication of the financial strength of a company.

A.M. Best specifically noted that their strong rating reflects "North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Group's solid capitalization, historically favorable operating performance and strong personal lines presence in North Carolina."

"The reaffirmation of our A.M. Best "A" rating, which we've maintained for more than 50 years, not only recognizes our stability and financial strength but also confirms our commitment to serving our policyholders. Maintaining a consistently strong rating for more than 50 years is a testament to the integrity and hard-work of our agency force, employees and leadership," said Steve Carroll, Executive Vice President and General Manager, NCFBMIC.

NCFBMIC was formed in 1953 when Farm Bureau leaders grew concerned over the lack of insurance coverage for farmers and rural communities in North Carolina. Beginning with the mission to provide affordable insurance to farmers, the company now offers a full range of products and services, including auto, home, life, health, flood, and business insurance policies. With more than 1.1 million policyholders, NCFBMIC is the third largest insurance writer in the state, covering more than 1 million vehicles, nearly 400,000 homes, and more than 14,000 farms. With offices in all 100 counties, NCFBMIC remains committed to providing quality, affordable coverage to members in every North Carolina community.

While only operating as a single state operation, NCFBMIC also ranks as one of the top 100 property and casualty insurance companies in the U.S. based on net premiums written. As of December 31, 2016, NCFBMIC has admitted assets of $1.895 billion and policyholders' surplus of $1.107 billion. NCFBMIC wrote more than $1 billion in premiums in 2016.

Founded in 1899, A.M. Best Company is a global full-service credit rating organization dedicated to serving the financial and health care service industries, including insurance companies, banks, hospitals and health care system providers. A.M. Best uses a standard grading scale to provide consumers with information about the stability and long term financial outlook of financial companies. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

SOURCE North Carolina Farm Bureau Insurance
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Hortau celebrates its 15-year anniversary as one of the pioneers in the AgTech space.

A provider of precision irrigation management systems and services for agriculture, Hortau was founded on May 15, 2002, in Quebec, Canada, by two agriculturally minded entrepreneurs, Dr. Jean Caron, an agronomist with a Ph.D in Soil Physics, and Jocelyn Boudreau, an agricultural engineer with a M.Sc. in Soil Physics.

The company has since grown to more than 90 employees globally, with smart field systems installed from coast to coast in the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Turkey, Morocco, Peru and Egypt.

Hortau also recently opened a new U.S. headquarters in San Luis Obispo, Calif., a year after unveiling a new Canada headquarters in Levis, Quebec.

"In 2002, Hortau did more than launch a new type of sensor to agriculture, we introduced a shift in the way growers receive field data to make smarter irrigation decisions," Boudreau said. "Since then, we've expanded our service with a number of sensors and an easy-to-use platform that goes beyond irrigation management to help our growers anticipate crop stress, significantly reduce water and energy use, and improve overall crop health and production.

"Agriculture is always evolving, to feed our growing population, and I'm proud at how we've evolved with the industry and have partnered with growers to improve their irrigation management programs. It's been exciting to be at the forefront of the AgTech industry, and we can't wait to see what the next 15 years bring."

Hortau's in-field systems have undergone a major evolution over the years, starting off as sensors that communicated data directly to computers on the farm, to leveraging cellular networks, cloud computing and, more recently, predictive data analytics. Today, growers using Hortau's platform can access field data in real time via mobile devices, start irrigation systems remotely and even rely on soil tension-based irrigation automation via proprietary precision irrigation sensors.

Thanks to its latest generation of ST stations, and industry-leading agronomic service, Hortau was named to the THRIVE AgTech Top 50 Growth companies list earlier this year. In 2016, Hortau was named to the Global Cleantech Top 100 Companies to Watch List.

"I always dreamed Hortau would be a significant player in ag technology, but to be the best in the industry, that couldn't have happened without our amazing team," Caron said. "I am really proud of that and the impact we've had on growers' everyday lives."

Hortau will celebrate "15 Years and Still Growing" all week with photo galleries of its systems over the years and a grand opening of its new U.S. headquarters on Friday.

Read more about Hortau's 15 years at www.hortau.com/15

CONTACT: [email protected], 805-545-5994 x 358

SOURCE Hortau

Related Links

http://www.hortau.com


LONDON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Highlights

  High demand from oil & gas industry is expected to drive the pipe coatings market

  The market size for pipe coatings is projected to reach USD 14.42 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 4.7% from 2016 to 2021

  The global pipe coatings industry is expected to grow due to the increasing demand in economies such as China, India, South Korea, Africa, Mexico, the U.S., Germany, Brazil, and Argentina, among others.

  Fusion bonded epoxy, the fastest-growing pipe coatings type.

  North America, the largest market and South America, the fastest growing market for pipe coatings

  This is majorly due to the increasing demand for oil & gas in the region.

  The demand has promoted E&P activities for onshore and offshore reserves, which is facilitating the demand for pipelines and hence driving the pipe coatings market.

High demand from oil & gas industry is expected to drive the pipe coatings market

The market size for pipe coatings is projected to reach USD 14.42 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 4.7% from 2016 to 2021. Increasing demand from the oil & gas industry is the major driver for the pipe coatings market. The global pipe coatings industry is expected to grow due to the increasing demand in economies such as China, India, South Korea, Africa, Mexico, the U.S., Germany, Brazil, and Argentina, among others. The fluctuating demand from the oil & gas industry is a major concern for the pipe coatings market.

Fusion bonded epoxy, the fastest-growing pipe coatings type

Fusion Bonded Epoxy (FBE) coating is the fastest-growing type of pipe coating. This is due to its high adherence to steel pipes and the fact these are resistant to chemical and physical stress. These coatings are widely used in various industries as they also help to improve the flow efficiency of the contents in the pipes.

North America, the largest market and South America, the fastest growing market for pipe coatings

North America is the largest market for pipe coatings globally, with the U.S. being the leading market in this region, which is attributed to the large oil & gas industry. The increasing demand for shale gas is driving the market in this region. Further, transportation, distribution and Exploration & Production (E&P) activities in the oil & gas industry are expected to drive the market. South America is estimated to be the fastest growing market for pipe coatings during the forecast period, 2016-2021. This is majorly due to the increasing demand for oil & gas in the region. The demand has promoted E&P activities for onshore and offshore reserves, which is facilitating the demand for pipelines and hence driving the pipe coatings market.

This study has been validated through primary interviews conducted with various industry experts globally. These primary sources have been divided into three categories: by company; by designation; and by region.

By Company Type: Tier 1 42%, Tier 2 25%, and Tier 3 33%

By Designation: Sales Executives 33%, Managers 42%, and Researchers & Consultants 25%,

By Region: Asia-Pacific 58%, Middle-East & Africa 8%, Europe 17%, North America 17%

The report also includes company profiles and competitive strategies adopted by the major market players such as PPG Industries, Inc. (U.S.), Akzo Nobel N. V. (The Netherlands), The Sherwin-Williams Company (U.S.), The Valspar Corporation (U.S.), Axalta Coating Systems Ltd. (U.S.), Wasco Energy Ltd. (Malaysia), Arkema S.A. (France), Shawcor Ltd. (Canada), The 3M Company (U.S.), and Specialty Polymer Coatings, Inc. (Canada).

Research Coverage

This research report categorizes the market for pipe coatings based on type, form, end-use industry, and region. It forecasts revenue growth and includes an analysis of trends in each of the submarkets. These segments are further described in detail with their subsegments in the report with value and volume forecasts till 2021. It also includes company profiles and competitive strategies adopted by the major players in the global pipe coatings market.

Reasons to buy this report:

From an insight perspective, this research report has focused on various levels of analysesindustry analysis (industry trends), market ranking of top players, supply chain analysis, and company profiles, which together comprise and discuss the basic views on the competitive landscape; emerging and high-growth segments of the pipe coatings market; high-growth regions; and market drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities.

The report provides insights on the following pointers:

Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on pipe coating types offered by the top market players

Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on emerging technologies, Research & Development (R&D) activities, and new product launches in the pipe coatings market

Market Development: Comprehensive information on lucrative emerging markets the report analyzes the pipe coatings market across regions

Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about new products, untapped regions, recent developments, and investments in the pipe coatings market

Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the pipe coatings market

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


BURLINGTON, Mass., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Physicians value useful content from pharma that helps them do their jobs and manage care better, such as quality scientific information, patient education and diagnosis tools. However, physicians say that most of what they get from drug companies online is just advertising and they feel few pharmas are doing a good job at providing quality digital content, according to the Manhattan Research Taking the Pulse U.S. 2017 study. As a result, just 27% of physicians say they find pharma websites to be a credible source of professional information.

The findings are based on a survey of 2,784 U.S. physicians across 25+ specialties, exploring their use of emerging technology, how they find information and make decisions, and what they want from pharma companies.

Key physician findings from the Taking the Pulse U.S. 2017 study:

Poor-quality digital scientific content: Quality scientific content is essential to earning physician trust  70% of U.S. physicians agree "it is crucial that pharma companies provide education resources rooted in science to gain my trust." However, half of all U.S. physicians say that no pharma company is providing quality scientific content online.

Quality scientific content is essential to earning physician trust  70% of U.S. physicians agree "it is crucial that pharma companies provide education resources rooted in science to gain my trust." However, half of all U.S. physicians say that no pharma company is providing quality scientific content online. Physicians feeling ad overload: 62% of physicians agree that the info pharma companies provide on third-party websites for healthcare professionals "are always ads" for their products, and only one in three (34%) trust the information pharmas provide on these websites. Physicians want more from pharma on these websites  for example, 54% of cardiologists want pharma-sponsored continuing medical education on non-pharma websites for providers, and 46% of urologists want disease diagnosis tools.

62% of physicians agree that the info pharma companies provide on third-party websites for healthcare professionals "are always ads" for their products, and only one in three (34%) trust the information pharmas provide on these websites. Physicians want more from pharma on these websites  for example, 54% of cardiologists want pharma-sponsored continuing medical education on non-pharma websites for providers, and 46% of urologists want disease diagnosis tools. Lackluster videos: 49% of physicians who watch professional online video agree it influences their clinical decisions, yet 52% of physicians don't think that any pharma company is doing a good job at providing quality physician video content.

49% of physicians who watch professional online video agree it influences their clinical decisions, yet 52% of physicians don't think that any pharma company is doing a good job at providing quality physician video content. Mobile missteps: 86% of physicians use a smartphone to access digital resources for professional purposes, but 41% of smartphone users don't visit pharma websites more often because it takes too long to find the information they need.

Comments from Decision Resources Group analysts:

"Pharmas are doing a better job of providing a variety of digital content to physicians than they have in the past," said Kelly Pinola , Senior Analyst, Physician Research. "However, physicians are telling us that pharma brands continue to disappoint when it comes to delivering the basic information they need to support their practices. Pharma needs to dial down the promotional messaging and lead with valuable educational resources in order to regain physician trust. The good news for pharmas is that there's an opportunity here for them to differentiate themselves as truly user-centered organizations."

, Senior Analyst, Physician Research. "However, physicians are telling us that pharma brands continue to disappoint when it comes to delivering the basic information they need to support their practices. Pharma needs to dial down the promotional messaging and lead with valuable educational resources in order to regain physician trust. The good news for pharmas is that there's an opportunity here for them to differentiate themselves as truly user-centered organizations." "What this study tells us is that pharma marketers need to stop chasing tech trends and refocus on what their customers really need to make better medical decisions and improve patient care," said Pinola. "Somewhere on the road to digital innovation, pharma lost sight of its core mission to serve physicians as partners in care. Instead of implementing new technologies just for the sake of it, pharma marketers should think about the needs of their customers and deliver solutions that address those needs."

Upcoming Physician Digital Webinar:

5 ways healthcare brands can stand out to physicians in the digital ecosystem

Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 1pm ET | 10am PT

Register here

Senior Analyst Kelly Pinola will be sharing findings from the Taking the Pulse study to help pharma brands create more effective physician marketing campaigns by understanding what their physicians want, how they want to interact with brands, and what drives prescriptions.

Related Products:

Physician Multichannel Playbooks

Our physician playbooks reveal changes that large and small pharma brands and digital groups can make to rebuild damaged physician relationships through more effective and relevant digital marketing efforts:

Understand your physicians' challenges and needs and how to create content and campaigns that will resonate with them

Prioritize marketing and channel investments based on how and where physicians want to interact with brands

Focus on the channels, media and content that are most influential on Rx decisions

Identify best practices for portals/websites, search, publisher partnerships, mobile, video, tablet reps, scientific content, and more

Based on Manhattan Research's Taking the Pulse and ePharma Physician studies, 25+ physician specialty groups available

Contact [email protected] to learn more.

Additional Resources:

An infographic summarizing additional Taking the Pulse key findings can be found here.

About Decision Resources Group

DRG, a subsidiary of Piramal Enterprises Ltd., is the premier source for global healthcare data and market intelligence. A trusted partner for over 20 years, DRG helps companies competing in the global healthcare industry make informed business decisions. Organizations committed to the developing and delivering life-changing therapies to patients rely on DRG's in-house team of expert healthcare analysts, data scientists, and consultants for critical guidance. DRG products and services, built on extensive data assets and delivered by experts, empower organizations to succeed in complex healthcare markets.

To learn more, visit www.decisionresourcesgroup.com.

About DRG Digital

DRG Digital, a part of DRG, is the life science industry's decision support partner for data-driven customer engagement and marketing. DRG Digital's Manhattan Research studies have been the industry's go-to source for physician, patient and payer multichannel behavior and attitudes and digital best practices for more than 15 years. Brands, marketers and digital teams at 40+ leading life sciences companies rely on our experts, research and analytics to understand their customers and engage them with the right channels, content and messaging.

Visit www.DRGDigital.com or follow @DRGDigital to keep up to date on our analysts' thinking and access eBooks, infographics, webinars and other resources.

All company, brand, or product names contained in this document may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

For more information, contact:

Decision Resources Group

Maureen Malloy

(610) 724-2589

[email protected]

SOURCE Decision Resources Group

Related Links

http://www.decisionresourcesgroup.com


MIAMI, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- With the generous support of local roofing contractors and associate members, the RCASF was able to provide a new roof to a family in need.

CBS4's Neighbors4Neighbors brought the need of Jackie Tew and her daughter, Jade to the attention of the RCASF via Board Member, Rob Foote. (Frank H. Furman, Inc.). Mr. Foote elevated Jackie's story to the RCASF Board of Director's and the Association quickly deployed all available resources to assist Ms. Tew.

Tew Re-Roof Project RCASF President, John Chase of Chase Roofing & Treasurer, Rob Foote, of Frank H. Furman Insurance assisting on clean up

Jackie Tew was in foster care from the age of 4 until the age of 18. She was taken from her parents at age four because they were drug addicts with psychiatric disorders whose neglect resulted in the death of Jackie's brother at age two. Jackie's parents are now deceased. Jackie graduated from high school and, at age 19, became a single mother to Jade Tew, now age 11. Jackie worked for many years at Publix and managed to save up enough money to buy the small house in Liberty City in which she and Jade reside. Jackie is now attending college at Miami-Dade Community College.

As a result of an injury to her right leg and foot, Jackie has difficulty walking without a brace. Jackie has been a superb mother to Jade. Jade's father has never cared to meet Jade or financially care for her. Jade plays in the Miami Music Project Children's orchestra and attends a Miami magnet school for gifted child musicians.

The Tew house was badly in need of repair, especially a new roof. After inspection, it was determined that the gift of a roof would mean that Jackie and Jade would not be homeless.

RCASF issued a call to action to members asking for donations and manpower to complete an entire re-roof in one day. RCASF would like to thank the following members for their participation:

John Chase , Chase Roofing - On Site Project Manager

, - On Site Project Manager Silas McHenry , JGA Beacon - Project Manager: Coordination of Materials & Delivery

- Project Manager: Coordination of Materials & Delivery Rob Foote , Frank H. Furman , Inc .- Permitting Fees

, .- Permitting Fees Paulo Souza , PSI Roofing

, Gene Fall , Certified Contracting Group

, Bob Fitzgerald , Weather-Tech Roofing & Waterproofing

, Chris Schulte , Latite Roofing

, Gary Waldrep , Olen Waldrep & Sons Roofing

, Robert Borowski , Allied Roofing

, Tibor Torok , Bob Hilson & Co.

, Michael Kornahrens , Advanced Roofing

, Raquel Eagle , Soprema for the donation of the bulk of the roofing materials.

Contact:

Wendy Harvest, RCASF Executive Director

[email protected]

(954) 558-4982

www.RCASF.org

SOURCE Roofing Contractors Association of South Florida

Related Links

http://www.rcasf.org


This enhancement to Red Lion's RAM products results in industry-leading security and redundancy, improving on traditional VPN communications that rely on point-to-point tunnels that can be difficult to manage. The addition of SDN technology brings flexibility, scalability and resiliency to legacy serial-based infrastructures as well as present-day IP-based networks.

"Customers need the ability to push data to an IIoT cloud platform while ensuring it is securely transmitted over a scalable and flexible architecture," said Colin Geis, Director of Product Management, IIoT at Red Lion Controls. "Red Lion's RAM devices offer the industry's widest array of integrated and pre-configured IIoT cloud platforms. These are now bolstered by the Distrix SDN technology, which provides greater security than traditional VPNs or private APNs. RAM products are known for their robust reliability and automation-rich features for monitoring and controlling remote assets. Now that we have partnered with Distrix to add SDN capabilities, customers have the additional peace of mind that their data is protected from end to end."

Distrix software embeds directly on RAM devices, allowing customers to quickly deploy and manage a secure software-defined industrial network. Capabilities include highly secure end-to-end tunnel connections without common network security risks and complexity, improved network redundancy, sensor data enhancement for analytics as well as simplified machine-to-machine process automation.

"We are excited about our relationship with Red Lion Controls," said Eric Winsborrow, CEO for Distrix Networks. "Red Lion has consistently been an industry leader in industrial automation, and is addressing the immediate needs of customers to provide secure, reliable and cost-effective solutions that enable them to benefit from the Industrial Internet today, without the cost to replace existing infrastructure or increase security risks."

In addition to highly secure cloud integration, RAM products also incorporate a powerful event engine and an integrated I/O database that streamlines the creation and storage of data tags. The combination of industrial automation capabilities, secure and reliable communication and easy-to-connect cloud support provides customers with a seamless IIoT solution.

Red Lion's RAM products also offer multiple serial and Ethernet ports and optional I/O, Wi-Fi and an active GPS, easily integrating with existing equipment to securely monitor and control remote devices. By delivering data visibility, control and real-time notifications on field-deployed equipment and processes via highly secure network connections, the RAM platform enables organizations to take advantage of the benefits of IIoT today.

For more information on Red Lion's Sixnet series RAM industrial cellular RTUs, visit www.redlion.net/RAM.

For sales inquiries or product questions, call +1 (717) 767-6511 or email us at [email protected].

About Red Lion Controls

As the global experts in communication, monitoring and control for industrial automation and networking, Red Lion has been delivering innovative solutions for over 40 years. Our automation, Ethernet and cellular M2M technology enables companies worldwide to gain real-time data visibility that drives productivity. Product brands include Red Lion, N-Tron and Sixnet. With headquarters in York, Pennsylvania, the company has offices across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe. Red Lion is part of Spectris plc, the productivity-enhancing instrumentation and controls company. For more information, please visit www.redlion.net.

About Distrix Networks

Distrix SDN software embeds on industrial and IT network hardware to enable a safer and more resilient Industrial Internet  create secure tunnels in minutes, and eliminate complex firewall & VPN configurations.

Distrix Gateway software simplifies connectivity configurations with an intuitive management console. Whether collecting data from industrial sensors, remotely accessing industrial operations, or connecting branch offices, Distrix makes it simpler and more cost effective to secure and manage your network. For more information, please visit www.distrix.com.

2017 Red Lion Controls, Inc. All rights reserved. Red Lion, the Red Lion logo, Sixnet and RAM are registered trademarks of Red Lion Controls, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Media Contacts: Rebecca Cressler

Red Lion Controls

+1 (717) 767-6961 x6904

[email protected]





Stephen Oakes

LEWIS

+1 (781) 418-2472

[email protected]

www.redlion.net

SOURCE Red Lion Controls

Related Links

http://www.redlion.net


CELINA, Tenn., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- WNC, a national investor in real estate and community development initiatives, announced today that the renovation of Southern Oaks Apartments, a 42-unit affordable housing community in Celina, Tennessee, has been completed. WNC provided approximately $3.1 million in low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) equity to fund the rehabilitation project.

"With the demand for affordable housing continuing to grow across the nation and outpace the development of new stock, it's increasingly important to preserve and protect existing LIHTC communities," said WNC Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Gaber. "We are very pleased to announce the renovation of Southern Oaks Apartments, which provides quality, safe affordable homes to families in need."

Located at 1001 Gainesboro Highway, Southern Oaks Apartments is comprised of eight resident buildings and a clubhouse. Community amenities include a laundry facility, computer center, playground and picnic area.

Southern Oaks Apartments is available to families with incomes at 50 percent and 60 percent of the area's median household income level.

CMS Real Estate Development LLC served as the developer for the renovation project.

About WNC

WNC, founded in 1971 and headquartered in Irvine, Calif., is a national investor in real estate and community development initiatives, as well as a leading investor in low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC). WNC has acquired more than $7.7 billion of assets totaling in excess of 1,300 properties in 45 states, Washington D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Since 2000, WNC has been awarded four New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) allocations, totaling $178 million, and has facilitated development of 17 low-income community projects. WNC's investor base exceeds 19,500 institutional and retail clients, including Fortune 500 companies, multinational banks, and insurance companies. Additional information is available at www.wncinc.com.

Contact

Julie Leber

Spotlight Marketing Communications

949.427.5172 ext. 703

[email protected]

SOURCE WNC

Related Links

http://www.wncinc.com


More than CA$45 million in equipment and trucks sold over two days for new site record

TORONTO, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - Ritchie Bros.' Toronto, ON auction site smashed its sales record for the third time in 12 months, selling CA$45+ million (US$32+ million) of equipment and trucks over two days (May 10  11, 2017). Toronto broke a single-auction sales record in May 2016 at CA$35+ million and then topped it only months later with a CA$39+ million auction in September.

More than 4,500 people from across Canada and 48 other countries registered to bid in the auction last week in Toronto. Approximately 64 percent of the equipment was sold to Ontario buyers (by dollar value); 16 percent was sold to international buyers from countries such as Poland, the United Kingdom and China. A record 2,700+ bidders participated online and purchased 57 percent of the equipment.

"There is a lot of activity in Ontario right now, particularly in the construction sector, with considerable investment in infrastructure, which is expected to continue into 2018. Many contractors are realigning and upgrading their fleets for upcoming work, resulting in a large selection of low-hour, late-model construction equipment being sold in last week's auction with strong pricing across the board," said Anna Sgro, Senior Vice President, Ritchie Bros. "We also had a great lineup of transportation equipment that saw solid demand, with pricing on trucks and trailers exceeding expectations."

Not only did the Toronto auction eclipse its previous sales record, it established a new sales record for Eastern Canada, breaking Montreal's CA$44+ million mark set in 2015. The recent Toronto auction also set new local records in buyers, online sales, online bidders, and total number of consignors.

"The team has worked really hard to build strong relationships with customers and earn our customers' confidence," continued Anna Sgro. "We have an exceptional team who understands our customers' needs and that's why the yard is packed full at auction time."

Equipment in the unreserved public auction was sold for 660 owners, including a fleet of articulated dump trucks for longtime Ritchie Bros. customer Ross Woodward.

"It's an absolutely first-class organization to deal with, right from the ground up. And I've bought and sold with Ritchie Bros. for 30 years at least," said Ross Woodward, President of The Bucket Shop. "It's so professionally handled. Right from the sales reps to the processing. I've always been pleased with the overall outcome. I've sold a lot and bought a lot and 95 percent of the experiences have been financially rewarding for myself and my company. The bottom line is: the competition will never drag me away from Ritchie Bros."

AUCTION QUICK FACTS: TORONTO, ON  MAY 10  11, 2017

Total Gross Auction Proceeds  CA$45+ million (US$32+ million) * new site record

CA$45+ million (US$32+ million) * Amount sold to online bidders  CA$25+ million (US$18+ million) * new site record

CA$25+ million (US$18+ million) * Total registered bidders (in person and online)  4,500+

4,500+ Registered online bidders  2,700+ * new site record

2,700+ * Total lots sold  3,000+

3,000+ Number of buyers  1,280+ * new site record

1,280+ * Number of sellers  660 *new site record

Consignments are now being accepted for Ritchie Bros.' next Toronto auction on July 12  13, 2017. To sell your equipment and/or trucks in the auction please contact the site at +1.905.857.2422.

About Ritchie Bros.

Established in 1958, Ritchie Bros. (NYSE and TSX: RBA) is the world's largest industrial auctioneer, and one of the world's largest sellers of used equipment for the construction, transportation, agriculture, energy, mining, forestry and other industries. Ritchie Bros.TM asset management and disposition solutions include live unreserved public auctions with on-site and online bidding; EquipmentOneTM, an online auction marketplace; Mascus, a global online equipment listing service; private negotiated sales through Ritchie Bros. Private Treaty; and a range of ancillary services, including financing and leasing through Ritchie Bros. Financial Services. Ritchie Bros. has operations in more than 15 countries, including 45 auction sites worldwide. Learn more at rbauction.com, EquipmentOne.com, mascus.com, rbauction.com/privatetreaty and rbauction.com/financing.

Photos and video for embedding in media stories are available at rbauction.com/media.

SOURCE Ritchie Bros.
WALLDORF, Germany, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced new offerings that expand the SAP Digital Commerce portfolio, making it easy to connect and communicate with customers in new ways and to better understand how to chart a digital journey.

"The digital revolution transcends industries, geographies and traditional lines of business," said Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer, SAP. "To help customers maneuver through the changes brought on by it, SAP is unveiling new offerings: services that expand SAP's digital commerce portfolio beyond software, content and data; programmable digital interfaces that enable customers to embed new services into their communications mix; and tools to set the course for successful digital transformation."

Digital Commerce Portfolio Expands

The SAP Digital Commerce team makes it simple for anyone to purchase offerings from SAP via a one-click contract and digital payment on SAP Store  customers in 105 countries have already done so. New offerings include the following:

Packaged services for SAP SuccessFactors solutions  fixed in scope, low-priced, performed 100 percent remotely, and available post-implementation. Traditionally, they've only been included as part of larger service deals, and not sold independently. The seven services expand the portfolio beyond software, content and data.

 fixed in scope, low-priced, performed 100 percent remotely, and available post-implementation. Traditionally, they've only been included as part of larger service deals, and not sold independently. The seven services expand the portfolio beyond software, content and data. New capabilities for the WorkConnect by SAP web application recruiting solution. These provide online customer assistance support, including product documentation, how-to information and tips for troubleshooting issues, allowing users to create a public inquiry on a moderated forum or a private inquiry to an expert. In June, SAP is launching an initiative to build the WorkConnect.io site as the job board of choice for SAP skills. WorkConnect was part of SAP's inaugural Dream Digital contest benefitting the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).

web application recruiting solution. These provide online customer assistance support, including product documentation, how-to information and tips for troubleshooting issues, allowing users to create a public inquiry on a moderated forum or a private inquiry to an expert. In June, SAP is launching an initiative to build the WorkConnect.io site as the job board of choice for SAP skills. WorkConnect was part of SAP's inaugural Dream Digital contest benefitting the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). While SAP Store remains the official channel for customers to seamlessly buy and use offerings endorsed and sold by SAP in a completely digital, low-touch manner, SAP announced the SAP App Center as a consolidated digital marketplace for partner offerings. It provides customers with real-time access to innovative solutions, microservices and plugins to extend their SAP solutions and digitally transform their business.

Making Digital Connectivity More Accessible with Programmability

SAP's interconnect and messaging services reach people in 200+ countries and territories and nearly 99 percent of global mobile subscribers. The SAP Digital Interconnect team (previously SAP Mobile Services) is now offering a set of easily consumable and configurable interconnect application programming interfaces (APIs) that empower programmers and business professionals to incorporate interconnect capabilities into their applications and workflows. With these "programmable digital interfaces," we're enabling businesses worldwide to embed Short Message Service (SMS), email, push-notifications and one-time-pins into their communications mix. New services include:

SAP IoT Connect 365, available stand-alone and as part of the SAP Leonardo services  simplifying the connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT). With one contract and connection, enterprises can monitor and control IoT object connectivity and data usage globally from one user interface (UI) and API, avoiding integration lock-in to one operator's coverage and tariffs.

available stand-alone and as part of the SAP Leonardo services  simplifying the connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT). With one contract and connection, enterprises can monitor and control IoT object connectivity and data usage globally from one user interface (UI) and API, avoiding integration lock-in to one operator's coverage and tariffs. SAP People Connect 365  providing intelligent, automated workflows and insights that enable multichannel communications to manage responses to regular activities and major disruptions. For example, during a natural disaster, local government can connect people via mobile devices to communicate and share information  live. SAP can now help predict where these things will happen (for example, with Earth Observation Analysis) and intelligently connect people in affected areas instantly.

Empowering CxOs, Promoting Digital Innovation

The SAP Center for Digital Leadership has helped 200+ CxOs navigate their digital transformation journeys. To further empower them and cultivate agile innovation, we offer:

Digital Innovation and Transformation Assessment , version 2.0 now available. Version 1.0 of the free tool has been used by 150+ companies. Version 2.0 provides extended content and a new look and feel, giving CxOs a better understanding of their current digital maturity as a foundation to build a company-specific, digital-transformation road map.

Version 1.0 of the free tool has been used by 150+ companies. Version 2.0 provides extended content and a new look and feel, giving CxOs a better understanding of their current digital maturity as a foundation to build a company-specific, digital-transformation road map. Fostering innovation, an open digital ecosystem and selfies from space. The center is building an open digital ecosystem, allowing users to benefit from shared data, technology and expertise. One result is the Earth Observation Analysis service. Visit SAPPHIRE NOW conference pod DS422 to create selfies from space, provided by SnapPlanet, winner of the 2017 Space App Camp prize.

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device  SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 350,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

 2017 SAP SE. All rights reserved.

SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx#trademark for additional trademark information and notices.

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:

Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24

United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:

Cindy McKendry, +1 (503) 231-7274, [email protected], PDT

SAP News Center press room; [email protected]

SOURCE SAP SE

Related Links

http://www.sap.com


TROY, Mich., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- To help automakers balance the requirements of the evolving industry with current and next-generation technologies, Schaeffer will share insight into four of the global supplier's key optimization efforts at the 11th Annual CTI Symposium held May 15 to 18 in Novi, Mich. A long-time event sponsor, Schaeffler will also showcase key innovations related to these presentations, as well as transmission application and emobility technologies at its product exhibition.

"Driven by our 'Mobility for tomorrow' strategy, Schaeffler has proven itself as a committed partner in helping our automotive customers achieve their mobility goals for both conventional and next-generation powertrains," said Philip George, director advanced development, Schaeffler. "With an average of 60 products on every global vehicle, Schaeffler works to understand and anticipate our customers' needs to create solutions  like the ones we're presenting at the CTI Symposium  which fit their vision and vehicles."

May 17th Production Discussions

Torque Converters: Addressing the Needs of Modern Powertrains at 3 p.m.

Brian Zaugg , director of product development, torque converter, will share how engineers can balance fuel economy and NVH through use of the centrifugal pendulum absorber and 4-Pass clutch technology in the torque converter.

, director of product development, torque converter, will share how engineers can balance fuel economy and NVH through use of the centrifugal pendulum absorber and 4-Pass clutch technology in the torque converter. Reduction of Energy Losses in Transmission Systems at 5:15 p.m.

Matt Frary , director of transmission applications, will discuss friction reduction loses in bearing and clutch packs. Solutions for both conventional and hybrid systems, including power on-demand accumulators with low energy consumption, Schaeffer's E-Clutch system and its P2 hybrid module engine disconnect clutch, will be discussed.

May 18th Product Discussions

Dedicated Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) Hybrid at 12:15 p.m.

Maximilian Podschwadt, program manager for CVT, will showcase Schaeffler's dedicated plug-in hybrid concept for front-transverse application that's based on a CVT. The presentation provides a detailed overview on powertrain modeling and an evaluation of fuel efficiency and vehicle performance.

Maximilian Podschwadt, program manager for CVT, will showcase Schaeffler's dedicated plug-in hybrid concept for front-transverse application that's based on a CVT. The presentation provides a detailed overview on powertrain modeling and an evaluation of fuel efficiency and vehicle performance. Hybrid Transmission and Electric Drives at 12:15 p.m.

Patrick Lindemann , vice president transmission systems and hybrid drives, will cover Schaeffler's Mobility for tomorrow emobility activities, including E-drives from front-wheel-drive and rear-wheel-drive applications, as well as compare P2 hybrid designs and requirements.

Created and organized by CTI, the 11th International Automotive Transmissions, HEV and EV Drives Congress and Exhibition offers an international exchange of experiences and opinions among key automotive representatives. Participants, including automakers, transmission manufacturers and suppliers from the United States, Europe and Asia, will discuss the latest in technical developments and applications for conventional and alternative drives. For more information, please visit http://www.transmission-symposium.com/usa.

About Schaeffler

The Schaeffler Group is a global automotive and industrial supplier. Top quality, outstanding technology, and exceptionally innovative spirit form the basis for the continued success of the company. By delivering high-precision components and systems in engine, transmission, and chassis applications, as well as rolling and plain bearing solutions for a large number of industrial applications, the Schaeffler Group is already shaping "Mobility for tomorrow" to a significant degree. The technology company generated sales of approximately EUR 13.3 billion in 2016. With around 86,600 employees, Schaeffler is one of the world's largest family companies and, with approximately 170 locations in over 50 countries, has a worldwide network of manufacturing locations, research and development facilities, and sales companies.

Schaeffler is a recognized development partner for global automakers and suppliers. To serve the North American automotive market, Schaeffler operates development centers in: Troy, Mich.; Fort Mill, S.C.; Wooster, Ohio; and Puebla, Mexico. The company's 600 North American engineers and technicians, who are supported by a team of more than 6,700 global R&D engineers, drive development in the region by utilizing state-of-the-art test and measurement equipment, computational tools and CAD systems. Schaeffler Automotive has headquarters in Fort Mill and manufacturing facilities in: South Carolina; Missouri; Ohio; Ontario, Canada; Puebla and Irapuato, Mexico. For more information, please visit www.schaeffler.us.

Follow us on Twitter @schaefflergroup to get all of our latest press releases and news.

SOURCE Schaeffler

Related Links

http://www.schaeffler.us


SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Seerene, the leading platform for code+people management (CPM), has announced Bill Macaitis as a new member of its Advisory Board.

With over 20 years of experience leading marketing, sales, customer service and support teams, and scaling startups and growth companies into multi-billion dollar enterprises, Bill brings exceptional experience and knowledge to help grow Seerene globally. Bill previously served as the Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer for Slack Technologies, Inc. as well as Zendesk. Prior to that, Bill was the Senior Vice President of Online Marketing and Operations at Salesforce.com and a Senior Vice President of Online Marketing at Fox Interactive Media.

"Bill has a stellar track record in creating category leaders and turning startups into multi-billion dollar enterprises, and we're thrilled to have him on our board," said Oliver Muhr, Seerene's CEO." As a member of Seerene's Advisory Board, Bill will be a key resource for us, and will provide strategic insights and advice on category creation, brand creation, and turning Seerene into a billion-dollar company."

"I believe in mission-driven companies that change the world with innovative technology, and am very excited to serve as a board member for a business that provides companies with the previously inaccessible insights required in this digital age," said Bill Macaitis. "Seerene is establishing a new category in CPM and will change the way CIO's manage their most important strategic assetstheir codebase and engineering capacity. I look forward to helping the company and partnering with the management team."

Seerene helps large companies distill millions of code+people interactions so executives can better understand where their resources are invested, what's slowing things down, and which projects need their attention. With software transforming how businesses operate and grow, it's crucial that CIOs have a platform that allows them to make sense of their data and gives them a clear view of their IT performance.

About Seerene

Serene's code+people management (CPM) platform sets a new standard for how executives manage their most important resourcestheir codebase and engineering capacity. It lets them see across all of their software initiatives to easily understand the related effort, cost, and risks. Seerene has offices in Berlin, London, New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong, and is used by Fortune 500 companies including SAP, T-Mobile, and Adidas. Seerene is funded by Lakestar and Earlybird, two of the most prominent VCs in Europe. In 2016, it won the Digital Top 50 'Best Startup' award from Google and McKinsey & Company.

SOURCE Seerene

Related Links

http://www.seerene.com


SEATTLE, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SENSORO, a leading Internet of Things (IoT) sensor device and network technology company announced their securing of $18 million in Series B funding led by Tsing Capital and followed by Bosch and Sumitomo. Following first round financing of $10 million from Nokia Growth Partners in 2015, SENSORO's Series B investment serves as an endorsement of the company's vision and execution.

SENSORO's flagship technology line, the Alpha Product Suite, provides a long-range, low-power, and cost-effective solution for large-scale IoT sensor networks focusing on two major applications: environmental monitoring and asset tracking. The company anticipates producing and shipping over 100,000 environmental related devices and 500,000 asset tracking tags in 2017 to support infrastructure in cities, buildings, and industries including: manufacturing, oil and gas, warehousing, logistics, fleet management, and retail.

The Microsoft Accelerator program, from which SENSORO hails, exhibits Microsoft's commitment to collaborating with innovative startups to bolster their go-to-market strategies and accelerate their success.

Tzahi (Zack) Weisfeld, General Manager from Microsoft Startup Growth Partners at Microsoft Corp said: "We believe that IoT sensor and network technology will become ubiquitous over the next several years. We are proud to see the strong growth of SENSORO within the Microsoft Accelerator program and we're excited to see how their technology, integrated with Microsoft Azure IoT technologies, will transform the way businesses run."

Vivian Li, SENSORO Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, impresses that "Our goal at SENSORO is to leverage technology to create a better, safer, and smarter way of life. We are building technologies that, combined with the power of Microsoft IoT products and services, will play a critical role in the IoT ecosystem and will facilitate widespread implementation of intelligent resource management and life safety solutions."

SENSORO is providing IoT technologies for various smart city projects in the UK, Europe, Malaysia, and China. SENSORO delivers environmental monitoring and asset tracking solutions for Manchester City Verve, STORM, Putrajaya - Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), and Nanjing China Fire Safety Department. SENSORO leverages Microsoft Azure IoT technologies to power its solutions.

About SENSORO

SENSORO was founded in 2013 as part of the Microsoft Accelerator program. The company manufactures both beacon devices that collect and send information via proximity interaction with mobile apps and long-range wireless sensor networks that aggregate digital data from the physical world for IoT applications. SENSORO customers have deployed over 400,000 of our beacons in over 75 countries. SENSORO is headquartered in Seattle and has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.

SOURCE SENSORO INC.
GUANGZHOU, China, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Sino Agro Food, Inc. (OTCQX: SIAF | OSE: SIAF-ME), a specialized investment company focused on protein food including seafood and cattle, is pleased to announce the following quarterly results ending March 31, 2017:

















(USD M, except per share and margin data) Q1 '17 Q1 '16 %















Revenue 70.6 55.8 27















Gross Profit 14.4 15.0 (4)















Gross Profit Margin 20.4% 26.9% (24)















Net Income attributable to SIAF 8.7 8.6 1















Earnings Per Diluted Share (USD)  from continuing operations .36 .25 44







Earnings Per Diluted Share (USD)  from continuing and discontinued operations .36 .39 (8)

Key Points

Summary Financials

Results reflect the carve-out of aquaculture operations announced March 2. Income from Sino Agro's 36.6% interest in the carved-out company, Tri-Way Industries Ltd. is reported as "income from unconsolidated equity investee." Net income from the sale of goods for 2016 from the former aquaculture business segment is reported as "net income from discontinued operations."

Quarterly revenue from continuing operations increased by 27% year over year to USD 70.6M (55.8). Revenue from the sale of goods increased by USD 14.8M , or 35%, to USD 57.4M (42.6), while revenue from project development of USD 13.2M remained steady when compared to Q1 2016 (13.1).

Gross profit from the sale of goods for Q1, 2017 declined 12% to USD 10.0M (11.4), while the gross profit from project development increased 22% to USD 4.4M (3.6).

Net income attributable to SIAF stockholders increased by 1% to USD 8.7 (8.6, with fully diluted earnings per share of USD .36 .

As of March 31 2017, the Company had net working capital of USD 302.2M .

Stockholders' equity increased by USD 9.7M to USD 614.4M or USD 24.78 per share, based on the weighted average number of fully diluted outstanding shares in the quarter.

Core Businesses and Outlook

SIAF believes that its Carve-out spinoff ("COSO") strategy to restructure its businesses into standalone companies while retaining significant equity stakes in each one will:

Create well capitalized endeavors receiving peer group valuations on suitable exchanges, and

Result in higher long-term returns on investments from having spent resources today to open opportunities provided by the protein food arenas in China , tomorrow.

The carve-out of aquaculture operations into Tri-Way Industries Inc. Ltd. provides the blueprint for bringing operations with a proven track record and credible projections onto the Hong Kong exchange or a main China exchange, with markers imputing increasing value along the way. For instance, having substantially completed renovations and modernization at AquaFarm 1 ("AF1"), AF2, and AF3 before the transaction closing was designed to tailor assets for easy handover and to jumpstart performance toward an IPO. In addition, the 36.6% equity stake retained by SIAF is confidently expected to be solidly accretive to earnings in 2017 when compared to the previous year. Current estimates show an improvement in realized gross profits upwards of 65% resulting from the new structure versus the carve-out having not been exercised.

Executing on this strategy comprises the Company's foremost and most beneficial corporate initiatives throughout 2017 on behalf of its shareholders. Preparing assets for optimal appreciation, the COSO process will guide the Company's strategy throughout 2017.

Integrated Cattle (SJAP)

SJAP has three revenue drivers: sale of livestock feed and fertilizer at SJAP; sale of live cattle; and value added processing at the abattoir of SJAP's wholly owned subsidiary, Qinghai Zhong He Meat Products ("QZH").

Overall Q1 2017 revenue from the sector decreased year over year by 17% to USD 21.8M (26.3M) contributing to a 50% decrease in gross profits to USD 4.2M (8.3M). The value added component accounted for 88% of the gross profit decline. All three components were affected to various degrees by unstable market conditions, with the biggest factors being margin pressure on imported beef due to increased competition from more exports entering the China market.

These external factors are volatile, with pricing and demand fluctuating quarter to quarter. Into these headwinds in Q1 2017, SJAP did manage a positive blended gross profit margin of 19% (31.5%).

The Company had initiated plans to increase overall profitability, primarily upgrading its line of cattle directing toward the high-end market and adding to its range of value added products, including canned beef products. These operational enhancements were part of the efforts to prepare SJAP for maximum valuation while the company concurrently used the aquaculture COSO strategy as a blueprint for SJAP  including sourcing capital needs through third parties and targeting a listing on the NEEQ ("Third Board") of the Shanghai stock exchange some time in 2018. Now, because of additional more sweeping plans resulting from an understanding with the Xining government, SIAF intends to list SJAP on the main board in either Shanghai or Shenzhen.

During Q1 the Xining government engaged SJAP in discussions aimed to help the cattle and beef industry and promote economic development in the district, which boasts annual production of over four million head of cattle. SJAP was selected as the lead company to coordinate and carry out regional plans over time. While adhering to its original company specific plan, the main features of this overarching coordinated plan include:

Through a Joint-Use Agreement with the District Government, concentrating and centralizing all slaughterhouse operations in the Xining District to SJAP's facility by funneling existing abattoir companies to one location.

Creating a main cattle and meat center for wholesaling, cold storage, down-stream distribution, processing of value-added products, and other logistics, trade, and support activities. SJAP has been chosen to become one of the leading companies operating such a business.

The government intends to provide SJAP with additional commercially and industrially zoned land adjacent to its existing site. This will increase SJAP's valuable "land bank" by 170%.

The government will also provide SJAP additional land at a second location to move its existing operations, apart from value added processing.

SJAP will expand the co-operative farming model to mold local growers and farmers into a united team with the aim of helping all farmers out of poverty by the end of 2018.

The government has agreed to support SJAP in an effort to procure a listing on the main stock exchange board either in Shanghai or Shenzhen . SJAP believes the government's support will facilitate a successful listing effort and that the main board offers many advantages, likely including a higher valuation. If listed, the company shares will be designated as "domestically listed foreign investment shares," enabling foreign investors to trade shares globally.

SIAF and SJAP are honored by the government's recognition and excited by the prospects it bestows. SIAF has invited a main board listed company to join the SJAP team to help promote these goals, including procuring project financing.

Project Development -- Capital Award (CA)

Capital Award remains a wholly owned subsidiary after the carve-out transaction. It will no longer earn revenue derived from the sale of goods. It will be the turnkey provider of development services for Tri-Way in China, although not necessarily limited to Tri-Way or China. CA will also derive revenue in the future from license fees for its A-Power Recirculating Aquaculture System technology.

Q1 revenue increased slightly year over year by USD 63,000 to USD 13.2M (13.1M). Cost of goods decreased by USD 728,000, driving a 22% increase in Y-O-Y gross profit to USD 4.4M (3.6M). Margins vary quarter to quarter, depending on the type of work performed.

Discontinued Operations (Aquaculture sale of goods)

In early March, the Company announced the successful carve-out of its interests in aquaculture assets:

The carve-out now holds SIAF's previously held assets, namely AF1; and acquired assets from their respective owners/investors, including SIAF, namely AF 2, 3, 4, and 5; as well as rights to technology licensed from Capital Award a wholly owned subsidiary of SIAF

SIAF holds an equity interest of 36.6% in the carved-out, separate Hong Kong domiciled corporation, Tri-Way Industries, Ltd.

The certified fair value of SIAF's equity interest is $124.7M (36.6% of $340.5M ). SIAF booked a revised, audited deemed gain on sale of $56.9M in relation to the transaction.

In the future Tri-Way will provide periodic updates on its progress and development. SIAF, as a major stakeholder in Tri-way, will also provide periodic updates of milestones and markers related to both production and strategic progress, either as web updates or standalone press releases. Quarterly results will provide a breakdown of production volumes and prospects for each AquaFarm operation, as they materialize.

Seafood and Meat Trading

Quarterly revenue increased by 261% Y-O-Y to USD $23.1M (6.4M). The increase was primarily due to scaling the business toward capacity and sourcing seafood from multiple countries instead of solely from Madagascar, as in the past.

Gross profit grew 173% to USD 2.6M (.9M) for the quarter ended March 31, 2017, generating a blended gross margin of 11%. While accounting for 32% of total revenue, both the revenue and gross profit for seafood each grew 399% Y-O-Y.

Increased competition in beef imports caused the cost of goods rate to increase slightly more than the rate of revenue.

The import Trading business continues to be a reliable and growing operation.

Carve-out Exercises

The Company firmly believes that the sum of its parts is worth considerably more than the market's value of the whole. Accordingly, it has undertaken efforts to carve out its major businesses, establishing each as a standalone corporate entity. These carve-out enterprises will seek to establish value within the same financial measures afforded peer group companies, establishing step-wise increasing valuations in part through private placement prior to applying to higher valued market exchanges for IPO.

Major milestones reached in the process will reflect progress, imputed value, and liquidity; completing the aquaculture carve-out was the first.

Upcoming steps are as follows:

Tri-Way has begun work with its appointed Hong Kong based Corporate Service Company ("HKCS") to issue and allocate Tri-Way shares in bookkeeping form to respective owners including SIAF's 36.6% interest and the remaining 63,4% among approximately 50 original investors/partners. As of April 27,2017 HKSC records reflected 36.6M shares of Tri-Way having been allocated to the Company, the issuance of which is anticipated to completed at the end of May.

Upon completion, HKCS will file corresponding documents to the Hong Kong Company Register noting paid up capital estimated at USD 340M and total outstanding shares of 100M at a par value of HKD 1 each. This submission of corresponding documents will occur 10 days after share issuance.

Concurrently, SIAF is working with U.S. attorneys preparing required documentation for submission to the SEC in preparation for the distribution of a dividend in the form of Tri-Way shares, totaling 18.3% of Tri-Ways equity shares. Broadridge Solutions, the Company's transfer agent in the U.S. will distribute the dividend in book entry form pending SEC and FINRA approvals, targeting completion by the end of July.

Tri-Way and its investment banker are preparing presentation with attendant legal and accounting materials to initiate a Private Placement Program including road shows, PR/IR programs, and readiness for due diligence processes by interested investors. Completion is targeted to commence mid-July.

At the same time, apart from equity financing, Tri-Way is working with several other reputable investment banks to secure alternative or complementary debt financing. One bank completed its due diligence last month presenting the possibility of securing a loan facility in May; others have started the process in May.

With respect to the facility offer of USD 36.3M granted by a local bank to JFD China, this facility is purposed for working capital to be utilized after new facilities have been developed, and their respective operational costs warrant a drawdown on the LOC

These steps and others to follow provide the blueprint for later COSO candidates, with SJAP on deck.

Share Count

The total issued and outstanding share count ("TIO") as of December 31, 2016 was 22,726,859. As of May 13, 2017, TIO share count is 23,994,199. The additional shares were utilized to secure/underwrite a loan on behalf of Tri-Way from a third party lender.

The figure includes shares issued as collateral for credit loan facilities and other debt. At any given time, there are a variable number of such shares within the total issued and outstanding. It important to note that subject to some customary provisions, these shares must be returned to SIAF upon debt repayment. A commonality would be these shares likened to a lien on property in the sense that neither dilutes equity. These shares do not carry voting rights, nor are they eligible for dividend disbursements. For example, these shares would not be eligible for Tri-Way shares once a dividend is declared.

The Company is rather confident that Tri-Way will be successful in its fundraising program to self-finance its CapEx requirements. As well, SJAP has been making progress toward self-funding. As such, both Tri-Way and SJAP soon will no longer be as dependent on SIAF to provide bridge financing. Thus, the Company should be positioned to repurchase both collateral shares from its lenders as well as from the market to help improve overall share value in the near future.

CEO Commentary

Sino Agro Food's Chairman and CEO Solomon Lee addressed the quarter and 2017 corporate strategies:

"We entered 2017 with strong momentum, having undertaken a series of initiatives in 2016 to position our operations to continue growth trajectories while making significant progress on our strategic plan to restructure the business and maximize value for shareholders. During the quarter, we announced the successful completion of the carve-out of our aquaculture operations into Tri-Way Industries Ltd., a Hong Kong domiciled corporation. An independent valuation determined that the certified fair value of the transacted assets to be USD 340.6M. Sino Agro Food, "the parent," holds a 36.6% equity interest equating to USD 124.7M, or USD 5.03 per share SIAF share, based on the weighted average number of fully diluted outstanding shares in the quarter.

"The Company has long believed that its embedded businesses are undervalued in the current structure and as traded on the current exchanges. The carve-out was a major step in our Carve-out/Spinoff ("COSO") strategy designed to accomplish several significant, related objectives:

Foremost, the COSO strategy aims to demonstrate increasing valuations backed by third party assessment, third party investment, and new exchange trading, where the assets are expected to be valued commensurate with "pure play" peers. The carve-out valuation already resulted in a deemed gain on sale of $56.9M . Further stepped up valuations are targeted through pre-IPO investment(s) and ultimately an IPO.

The new organization for the aquaculture business will support accelerated growth due to its streamlined business structure. Furthermore, it is now better suited for infusions of working and development capital. The transferred assets have recently undergone renovations and modernizations to improve their interoperability and to prime them to increase production growth rate targets.

Retain a substantial interest in the self-sufficient spun off companies which are expected to generate sufficient cash to self-fund capital expenditures after the initial debt and/or equity financing(s), while also distributing dividend shares to SIAF shareholders.

After maturing businesses and demonstrating scalability, and COSO steps are realized, SIAF, "the parent," is expected to become a more streamlined and flexible company. As development capital expenditures become the responsibility of the "children" companies, SIAF expects to increase free cash flow with the intent to distribute it in the form of cash dividends and/or a share buyback program.

"Our primary objectives for 2017 are to increase returns from our aquaculture investment at a larger scale; likewise, for other business segments as the right opportunities surface. We are now in a strong position to capitalize on the new capacity developed in 2015 and 2016, and look forward to moving toward actualizing properly appreciated IPO valuations.

"Although the COSO strategy is an inherently long and complex process, we are proud of our accomplishments to date in the aquaculture business, and are encouraged by the current timeline for progress as outlined in the "Carve-out" section above. Discussions with our advisors and investment banker support this milestone path; likewise, they reinforce our firm belief that the sum of our business parts is worth considerably more than the market's value of the whole. I am very confident that the strategy will succeed in unlocking substantial value for our shareholders, as steps along the way are designed to evidence.

"Buoyed by encouragement to date, your management team remains committed to fulfilling the COSO strategy, starting with the aquaculture business. At the same time, the team is further encouraged to manage and grow all businesses efficiently. The beef business (SJAP) is facing unstable markets as noted earlier in this release. In a very real sense, these challenges have presented an opportunity to collaborate with the provincial government to develop a plan that from our perspective will better position SJAP as a major player in the China beef market, culminating with a listing on the main board in China, either in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

"This was a strong start to the year and we will continue to execute against our strategic plan to reach the milestones outlined above during this pivotal time in the Company's evolution."

Q1 2017 Interim Report

For detailed segment operational performance and developments, please take the time to read our latest 10-Q filing, or refer to the Q1 2017 Interim Report posted to the Company website at http://sinoagrofood.investorroom.com/download/Sino-Agro-Food_FQ1-2017-Interim-Report.pdf

Earnings Call Information

The Company will host an earnings call on Friday, June 9, 2017 at 10:00 AM EDT/4:00 PM CET to discuss quarterly financial results.

Please submit questions by email to [email protected]. These will be organized and answered with questions submitted during the call, followed by live calls from institutional investors and/or analysts.

To listen to the conference call please use the following information:

SIAF Q1 2017 Results Call Information Date: June 9, 2017 Time: 10:00 AM, EDT/4:00 PM CET Participant Dialing Instructions: SE: +46 8 5059 63 06 UK: +44 203 139 48 30 NO: +47 23 50 05 59 CN: +86 400 681 54 21 US: + 1 (866) 928-7517

Conference Pincode99818813#

The earnings call will also be available over the web.

To access, click the following link: Sino Agro Q1 2017 Earnings Call

CONTACT:

Peter Grossman

Investor Relations

+1 (775) 901-0344

[email protected]

Nordic Countries

+46 (0) 760 495 885

[email protected]

Todd Fromer / Elizabeth Barker

1 (212) 896-1215 / 212-896-1203

[email protected]

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/sino-agro-food/r/sino-agro-food--inc--reports-q1-2017-results,c2266011

The following files are available for download:

http://mb.cision.com/Main/13869/2266011/674671.pdf PDF http://mb.cision.com/Public/13869/2266011/97e81056fb7ad26e.pdf Sino Agro Food Inc -- 10-Q -- 2017-05-15

SOURCE Sino Agro Food

Related Links

http://www.sinoagrofood.com


AMSTERDAM, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Splitit, an interest-free credit card-based installments technology, announced that it was awarded the Red Herring award.

Red Herring Top 100 Europe enlists outstanding entrepreneurs and promising companies. It selects the award winners from approximately 1,200 privately financed companies each year in the European Region. Since 1996, Red Herring has kept tabs on these up-and-comers. Red Herring's Top 100 list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs.

"In 2017, selecting the top achievers was by no means a small feat," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "In fact, we had the toughest time in years because so many entrepreneurs had crossed significant milestones so early in the European tech ecosystem. But after much thought, rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across Europe to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Splitit embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Splitit should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong."

Splitit enables retailers to instantly offer 0% interest monthly payment plans to their customers directly at checkout. Splitit works on existing Visa and MasterCard credit cards so customers enjoy all of their regular credit card benefits such as points, cash-back and mileage without filling any application or credit check. Retailers enjoy increased conversion rates, higher average order values, decreased cart abandonment, and increased customer satisfaction without any greater risk than they have with regular credit card transactions. Businesses worldwide can offer Splitit installment plans to consumers from any country.

We are honored to be recognized by Red Herring as one of the Top 100 Europe outstanding entrepreneurs and promising companies," said Gil Don, CEO of Splitit. "Tapping into credit card purchasing power is a unique business opportunity for retailers to increase overall sales. Customers also benefit from Splitit, as they are able to pay on their existing credit cards, avoid undergoing a credit check, receive their usual credit card benefits and avoid high APRs and late fees associated with merchant financing."

About Splitit:

Splitit is revolutionizing the credit card industry by extending to all sizes of merchants/retailers the ability to offer interest-free monthly payments on their customer's existing credit cards. The Splitit product has been patent protected in the United States since 2012.

To learn more, please visit http://www.splitit.com

Company: Splitit

Email: [email protected]

Phone: +1-844-775-4848

SOURCE Splitit
BOSTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Data being presented at the 112th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) shows harmful links between the use of e-cigarettes and bladder cancer risk, and associates the intensity of smoking traditional cigarettes to a higher risk of mortality among bladder cancer patients. Even a small decrease in the amount of traditional smoking a bladder cancer patient makes may help them live longer. Researchers will share data highlighting these links during a joint press conference at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on Monday on May 15 at 8 a.m. ET. Sam S. Chang, MD, MBA, professor of urologic surgery at Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center will moderate the session

Use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), which is also known as "vaping", has grown drastically since first entering the marketplace more than a decade ago. While traditional cigarette smoking is a clear cause of bladder cancer, much less has been studied about the bladder cancer risk associated with e-cigarettes. Furthermore, there is limited information regarding the association between the amount of traditional cigarettes a bladder cancer patient smokes per day and their mortality risk.

Study Details

Smoking Intensity as a Predictor of Survival in Bladder Cancer Patients: Results From a Population-Based Florida Cancer Registry (1981-2009) - (#MP04-18): Survival rates were compared between more than 14,000 smoking adults with bladder cancer living in Florida between 1981 and 2009. Median and five-year overall survival rates were compared between patients who smoked less than one pack of cigarettes a day, to those who smoke 1-2 packs per day and patients who smoked more than two packs per day.

Results showed:

Smoking more packs per day was associated with an increased risk of mortality among patients with bladder cancer.

Patients smoking a minimum of 1-2 packs per day were significantly more likely to have a higher risk of mortality compared to patients that smoke less than one pack per day.

Even a small reduction in the amount of smoking a patient makes may potentially allow them to survive longer with bladder cancer.

Evaluation of E-Cigarettes Users Urine for Known Bladder Carcinogens (#MP88-14): Researchers compared the urine of e-cigarette users to that of non-smokers. Urine samples were examined for five known bladder carcinogens that are either present in traditional cigarettes or common solvents believed to be used in some e-cigarette liquids.

The users were mostly male with an average age of 39 years old. The non-smokers had abstained from traditional cigarettes for at least six months prior to the test.

Results showed:

Urine from 92 percent of e-cigarette users tested positive for two of the five carcinogenic compounds.

Further study is needed to clarify the contribution e-cigarettes make to the development of bladder cancer, given the greater concentration of carcinogenic compounds in the urine of e-cigarette users in this study.

E-Cigarette Smoke is Potentially Bladder Carcinogenic  It Induces Tumorigenic DNA Adducts and Inhibits DNA Repair in Urothelial Cells (#PI-11): E-cigarettes have been advertised as a way of delivering the stimulating effects of tobacco smoke, without the harmful health risks. Since 90 percent of inhaled nicotine is excreted to urine, New York University researchers set out to examine if e-cigarette smoke induced DNA damage in bladder mucosa. Researchers also looked at the effect of nicotine and its metabolites, nitrosamines and formaldehyde on DNA repair and mutational susceptibility in cultured human urothelial cells. Urothelial cells form the tissue that lines much of the bladder.

Results showed:

E-cigarette smoke induced tumorigenic DNA damage in bladder mucosa.

Nicotine, nitrosamine and formaldehyde also induced the same types of DNA damage in human urothelial cells, as well as inhibited DNA repair and enhanced mutational susceptibility.

Nicotine can be nitrosatized in urothelial cells, then further metabolized into carcinogenic nitrosamines and formaldehyde.

Overall, researchers predicted e-cigarette smokers have a high bladder cancer risk.

"These studies raise new concerns about the harmful impact of e-cigarettes on bladder cancer," said Dr. Chang. "We've known traditional smoking raises bladder cancer risk, and given the surge in popularity of e-cigarettes, it's imperative we uncover any potential links to e-cigarette smoke and bladder cancer.

This research underscores the importance of smoking cessation (of both traditional and e-cigarettes) for people with bladder cancer, and people looking to avoid it."

NOTE TO REPORTERS: Experts are available to discuss this study outside normal briefing times. To arrange an interview with an expert, please contact the AUA Communications Office at 410-689-3932 or e-mail [email protected].



About the American Urological Association: The 112th Annual Meeting of the American Urological Association takes place May 12  16 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, MA.



Founded in 1902 and headquartered near Baltimore, Maryland, the American Urological Association is a leading advocate for the specialty of urology, and has more than 21,000 members throughout the world. The AUA is a premier urologic association, providing invaluable support to the urologic community as it pursues its mission of fostering the highest standards of urologic care through education, research and the formulation of health policy.



Contact:

Christine Frey, AUA

443-909-0839, [email protected]

SOURCE American Urological Association

Related Links

http://www.AUAnet.org


BOSTON, May 13, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study being presented at the 112th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) shows topical 4% benzocaine wipes improved the physical and psychological symptoms of premature ejaculation based on a double-blind randomized controlled trial. The study will be presented to the media during a special press conference on Saturday May 13, 2017 at 11:30 a.m. EST in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. This session will be moderated by AUA spokesperson, Tobias S. Kohler, MD, MPH, FACS, associate professor and residency program director at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

Premature ejaculation is the most common form of male sexual dysfunction affecting roughly 1 in 3 men between the ages of 18 to 59 years old. Currently, in the United States, pharmacological treatment therapies for premature ejaculation are administered as a cream or spray. Treating premature ejaculation with local anesthetic therapies has been restricted due to a lack of efficacy in previous studies.

Study Details

Publication Number: PD69-02

Double-Blind, Randomized Controlled Trial of Topical 4% Benzocaine Wipes for Management of Premature Ejaculation: Interim

An analysis was conducted on 21 adult men in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship with premature ejaculation. Premature ejaculation was defined by self-reported poor control over ejaculation, personal distress related to ejaculation, and an average intravaginal ejaculatory latency time (IELT) at, or below, two minutes. The men were randomized with 15 undergoing the treatment and 6 receiving the placebo.

Results showed:

After two months, men undergoing the treatment had significant improvement in IELT than men on placebo.

A greater proportion of men in the treatment group achieved IELT of at least two minutes vs. men on placebo.

Compared to placebo, men in the treatment group reported greater improvement in distress relating to intercourse, control of ejaculation and satisfaction with sexual intercourse over the study period.

"This study is encouraging in demonstrating a new and innovative way to reduce the symptoms of premature ejaculation," said Dr. Kohler. "Premature ejaculation can cause a variety of issues related to negative feelings and emotions that can lead to problems with sexual relationships. This data shows topical 4% benzocaine wipes is a promising therapy to treat the most common form of sexual dysfunction among men."

NOTE TO REPORTERS: Experts are available to discuss this study outside normal briefing times. To arrange an interview with an expert, please contact the AUA Communications Office at 410-689-3932 or e-mail [email protected].

About the American Urological Association: The 112th Annual Meeting of the American Urological Association takes place May 12  16 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, MA.



Founded in 1902 and headquartered near Baltimore, Maryland, the American Urological Association is a leading advocate for the specialty of urology, and has more than 21,000 members throughout the world. The AUA is a premier urologic association, providing invaluable support to the urologic community as it pursues its mission of fostering the highest standards of urologic care through education, research and the formulation of health policy.



Contact:

Christine Frey, AUA

443-909-0839, [email protected]

SOURCE American Urological Association

Related Links

http://www.AUAnet.org


NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- In conjunction with their platinum co-sponsorship of RecTech 2017, Talent Inc. today announced its partnership with Madgex, a SaaS company providing career technology to the world's leading media owners, online recruitment businesses, and associations. The integration will enable Talent Inc.'s resume and CV brands, TopResume and CVNow, to operate as turnkey partners for numerous job sites that use Madgex's platform. Through their network of experienced writers, Talent Inc. writes and analyzes millions of resumes, CVs, and LinkedIn profiles around the world, each year.

"In constantly evolving industries such as media, job boards continue to play a greater role in revealing job vacancies, candidates, and untapped revenue streams," said Todd Goldstein, Executive Vice President, Strategy & Business Development, Talent, Inc. "We are excited to announce our multinational partnership with Madgex, especially as it affords us an opportunity to showcase our offerings to their clients in the UK, as well as in the US."

As part of the collaboration's rollout, Talent Inc. will benefit Madgex's UK clients including Financial Times, Telegraph, Trinity Mirror, EMAP, and Newquest Media.

"Our market-leading technology powers some of the world's most significant job boards. We pride ourselves on our ability to help our clients grow their audience, deepen their engagement, and unlock value," said Mike Fahey, Product Director, Madgex. "Partnering with Talent Inc.'s empowers us to offer a turnkey revenue opportunity for our industry-leading clients."

Talent Inc.'s other recent partnerships include Work In Sports, The Recruiter Network, and s1jobs.

For those attending RecTech 2017 in Barcelona who wish to meet with Talent Inc.'s CEO and Founder Jeff Berger, or Executive Vice President Todd Goldstein, should email [email protected].

ABOUT MADGEX:

Madgex partners with the world's leading media brands and organisations to help unlock the value of their professional audience. Offering market-leading job and course board technology, Madgex helps businesses grow their audience, increase engagement and drive their bottom line. With offices in Brighton UK, Toronto and Berlin, they provide their technology in multiple languages to clients across the world. For more information please visit madgex.com.

ABOUT TALENT INC.:

Talent Inc. is the largest resume-writing service in the world. Through its resume brands, TopResume and CVNow, the company writes and analyzes more resumes, CVs, and LinkedIn profiles than any other service. Job seekers work directly with professional writers and industry experts to redefine their personal brand and stand out from the crowd during the job-search process. Follow Talent Inc. on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

SOURCE Talent Inc.

Related Links

http://TalentInc.com


TAMPA, Fla., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES INDUSTRY CONFERENCE -- Textron Systems Unmanned Systems, a business of Textron Inc. (NYSE: TXT), announced today the achievement of two significant milestones in the continued maturation of its family of lightweight Cased-Telescoped (CT) Machine Guns.

Textron Systems' 15-pound 7.62mm CT Medium Machine Gun recently completed Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 demonstrations, consisting of validating the performance of the integrated weapon's operating mechanism. Upcoming milestones include obtaining a limited safety release and participation in Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment (AEWE) 2018.

Additionally, Textron Systems' 9-pound 5.56mm CT Light Machine Gun, which is at TRL 7, recently completed a demonstration for the Swedish Armed Forces. The demonstration, which was conducted at the Land Warfare Centre in Kvarn, Sweden, assessed the weapon's accuracy, mobility and maintainability against their current lightweight machine gun. Results showed that the 5.56mm CT Light Machine Gun required 30 percent less ammunition to accomplish a fire mission, provided a 20 percent tighter shot grouping and scored significantly higher soldier ratings for ease of maintenance, trigger operation, recoil reduction and burst fire control.

"We are pleased with the recent results achieved during testing on both the 7.62mm and 5.56mm CT Machine Guns, as well as our development progress to-date," says Unmanned Systems Vice President of Control & Surface Systems Wayne Prender. "As we develop these weapons, our intent is to make them as lightweight as possible while also improving performance  these tests and developments validate that we are accomplishing these goals."

As part of the U.S. Army's Lightweight Small Arms Technologies (LSAT) program, Textron Systems' CT program seeks to enhance and improve upon the Army's current technology. To accomplish this, the Textron Systems 5.56mm and 7.62mm CT Machine Guns offer reduced system weight, lower ammunition weight, and increased lethality and reliability.

The 15-pound 7.62mm CT Medium Machine Gun will be on display at the Textron Systems booth (620) at the 2017 Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) in Tampa, Fla. Other variants of the lightweight Cased-Telescoped family of weapons will also be represented.

About Textron Systems

Textron Systems' businesses develop and integrate products, services and support for aerospace and defense customers, as well as civil and commercial customers including those in law enforcement, security, border patrol and critical infrastructure protection around the globe. Harnessing agility and a broad base of expertise, Textron Systems' innovative businesses design, manufacture, field and support comprehensive solutions that expand customer capabilities and deliver value. Textron Systems consists of its Advanced Information Solutions, Electronic Systems, Geospatial Solutions, Lycoming Engines, Marine & Land Systems, Support Solutions, TRU Simulation + Training, Unmanned Systems and Weapon & Sensor Systems businesses. More information is available at www.textronsystems.com.

About Textron Inc

Textron Inc. is a multi-industry company that leverages its global network of aircraft, defense, industrial and finance businesses to provide customers with innovative solutions and services. Textron is known around the world for its powerful brands such as Bell Helicopter, Cessna, Beechcraft, Hawker, Jacobsen, Kautex, Lycoming, E-Z-GO, Greenlee, Textron Off Road, Textron Systems, and TRU Simulation + Training. For more information visit: www.textron.com.

Certain statements in this press release may project revenues or describe strategies, goals, outlook or other non-historical matters; these forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and we undertake no obligation to update them. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

Media Contact:

Public Relations Team

Textron Systems

(978) 657-2020

[email protected]

SOURCE Textron Systems

Related Links

http://www.textronsystems.com


TAMPA, Fla., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES INDUSTRY CONFERENCE -- Textron Systems Weapon & Sensor Systems, a business of Textron Inc. (NYSE: TXT), announced today the successful testing of the Fury lightweight precision guided glide munition against moving targets at Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. This test marks a significant milestone, as it marks the completion of the Fury weapon's development.

The Weapon & Sensor Systems team conducted 13 test flights for the Fury weapon, which accumulated to a total of 23.8 flight hours between captive carriage, survey flights and 10 weapon releases from unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Two tests were conducted from Textron Systems' own Shadow Tactical UAS at an altitude of 8,000 feet and a 1.5 kilometer standoff against a moving target. Both munitions successfully impacted the target. These results demonstrate end-to-end testing of the Fury weapon and improve both system maturity and Technology Readiness Level (TRL).

"Based on the results achieved during Fury flight testing, we are pleased with the development progress of the Fury lightweight precision guided munition," says Weapon & Sensor Systems Senior Vice President & General Manager Brian Sinkiewicz.

The Fury weapon uses a common interface for rapid integration on multiple manned and unmanned platforms. The weapon's tri-mode fuzing  impact, height of burst and delay  further enables a single Fury to address a broad target set, ranging from static and moving light armored vehicles to small boats and dismounted personnel. Fury is guided by a GPS-aided inertial navigation system with a Semi-Active Laser terminal guidance, enabling engagement of moving targets.

About Textron Systems

Textron Systems' businesses develop and integrate products, services and support for aerospace and defense customers, as well as civil and commercial customers including those in law enforcement, security, border patrol and critical infrastructure protection around the globe. Harnessing agility and a broad base of expertise, Textron Systems' innovative businesses design, manufacture, field and support comprehensive solutions that expand customer capabilities and deliver value. Textron Systems consists of its Advanced Information Solutions, Electronic Systems, Geospatial Solutions, Lycoming Engines, Marine & Land Systems, Support Solutions, TRU Simulation + Training, Unmanned Systems and Weapon & Sensor Systems businesses. More information is available at www.textronsystems.com.

About Textron Inc

Textron Inc. is a multi-industry company that leverages its global network of aircraft, defense, industrial and finance businesses to provide customers with innovative solutions and services. Textron is known around the world for its powerful brands such as Bell Helicopter, Cessna, Beechcraft, Hawker, Jacobsen, Kautex, Lycoming, E-Z-GO, Greenlee, Textron Off Road, Textron Systems, and TRU Simulation + Training. For more information visit: www.textron.com.

Certain statements in this press release may project revenues or describe strategies, goals, outlook or other non-historical matters; these forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and we undertake no obligation to update them. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

FURY is either registered trademark or trademark of Textron, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. SHADOW is either a registered trademark or trademark of AAI Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

Media Contact:

Public Relations Team

Textron Systems

(978) 657-2020

[email protected]

SOURCE Textron Systems

Related Links

http://www.textronsystems.com


PHILADELPHIA, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Philadelphia Orchestra returns to national broadcasts with a vibrant new, year-round series on SiriusXM. This series casts a focused lens on the unique Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nezet-Seguin partnership, with the Philadelphia Orchestra music director offering insights into the unique sound of The Philadelphia Orchestra, his thoughts on artists and repertoire, and more.

Additionally, this combination of two major organizations, each a leader in its field, makes The Philadelphia Orchestra the only American orchestra providing exclusive content to SiriusXM on a regular basis.

"It is a thrill to be providing such unique programming to SiriusXM," said Philadelphia Orchestra President and CEO Allison Vulgamore. "Working with such an innovative industry leader marks our historically founded, current, and ongoing commitment to make our art accessible via technology, and with the extraordinary Yannick/Philadelphia relationship, we have content of the highest quality to offer."

"The Philadelphia Orchestra has one of the most storied American orchestra legacies, dating back to its iconic Music Directors Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy, who crafted what is known and celebrated as the 'Philadelphia Sound.' Under current Music Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the Orchestra is reaching new and impressive musical heights, and SiriusXM is both pleased and honored to share these exclusive concerts with our subscribers," said David Srebnik, classical music director, SiriusXM.

The new concert series begins May 15 at 7 PM and will air three times a week on SiriusXM's Symphony Hall, SiriusXM channel 76. In addition to commentary by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the series will be enhanced by insider information from a range of members of the Orchestra. Lesser-known works such as music from Shostakovich's The Gadfly balance great masterworks.

The first program was selected as a prime illustration of the "Philadelphia Sound," a sound summed up by Yannick as "a spirit of generosity: generosity of sound, generosity of imagination and creativity. There is also a generosity that is the true key, the generosity of the spiritthe dedication and the passion to which everybody is 100% committed at all times." The performance opens with Une Barque sur l'ocean, Ravel's cascade of shimmering sounds and dramatic moments. The concert continues with Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 4, a work originally premiered by The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, with the composer at the keyboard. Here the soloist is Daniil Trifonov, who has recorded Rachmaninoff (Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini) with The Philadelphia Orchestra, bringing that rich tradition into a new generation. The program concludes with Rimsky-Korsakov's showpiece Sheherazade, a tour-de-force of orchestral splendor.

A list of the first eight programs follows. The programs on the SiriusXM series are from throughout Yannick Nezet-Seguin's tenure in Philadelphia. Weekly broadcasts of The Philadelphia Orchestra will continue to be heard on terrestrial radio on WRTI each Sunday at 1 PM.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's weekly broadcasts on SiriusXM are sponsored through a generous anonymous gift by a Board member of The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation.

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Music Director

on SiriusXM

Program 1May 15

Yannick Nezet-Seguin Conductor

Daniil Trifonov Piano

Ravel Une Barque sur l'ocean

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 4

Rimsky-Korsakov Sheherazade

Program 2May 22

Yannick Nezet-Seguin Conductor

Alexandre Tharaud Piano

Weill Symphony No. 2

Ravel Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

Gershwin An American in Paris

Program 3May 29

Yannick Nezet-Seguin Conductor

Hilary Hahn Violin

Bizet Suite No. 1 from Carmen

Vieuxtemps Violin Concerto No. 4

Stravinsky The Firebird (complete ballet)

Program 4June 5

Yannick Nezet-Seguin Conductor

Emanuel Ax Piano

Haydn Symphony No. 92 ("Oxford")

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3

Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 4

Program 5June 12

Yannick Nezet-Seguin Conductor

Jean-Guihen Queyras Cello

Brahms Symphony No. 3

Haydn Cello Concerto in C major

R. Strauss Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

Program 6June 19

Gianandrea Noseda Conductor

Carol Jantsch Tuba

Daugherty Reflections on the Mississippi, for tuba and orchestra

Mahler Symphony No. 5

Program 7June 26

Yannick Nezet-Seguin Conductor

Kirill Gerstein Piano

Beethoven Symphony No. 5

Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2

Shostakovich Selections from the Suite from The Gadfly

Program 8July 3

Yannick Nezet-Seguin Conductor

Haydn Symphony No. 103 ("Drum Roll")

Bruckner Symphony No. 4 ("Romantic")

About The Philadelphia Orchestra

SOURCE Philadelphia Orchestra Association

Related Links

http://www.philorch.org


ROUND ROCK, Texas, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- TSS, Inc. (Other OTC: TSSI), a data center and mission critical facilities and technology services company, reported results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2017.

First Quarter Highlights:

First quarter 2017 revenue of $4.4 million compared with $7.7 million in the first quarter of 2016 and $7.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2016.

compared with in the first quarter of 2016 and in the fourth quarter of 2016. Gross margin of 42% in the first quarter of 2017 compared with 17% in the first quarter of 2016.

Reduced selling, general and administrative expenses by $0.5 million or 23% compared to the first quarter of 2016.

or 23% compared to the first quarter of 2016. Achieved operating income of $300,000 in the first quarter of 2017 compared to an operating loss of $1.1 million in the first quarter of 2016.

in the first quarter of 2017 compared to an operating loss of in the first quarter of 2016. Net income of $254,000 or $0.02 per share, in the first quarter of 2017 compared to a net loss of $1,167,000 or $(0.07) per share in the first quarter of 2016.

or per share, in the first quarter of 2017 compared to a net loss of or per share in the first quarter of 2016. Adjusted EBITDA income of $450,000 compared with Adjusted EBITDA loss of $848,000 in the first quarter of 2016.

"This is the first quarter where we saw the full financial benefits from our realignment efforts. As we expected, we made significant improvement in the quality of our revenue, reduced our operating costs and generated a significant year over year improvement in profitability," said Anthony Angelini, President and Chief Executive Officer of TSS. "Moving forward, continuing to grow our systems integration and modular datacenter businesses will be key to sustaining and growing profitably. We are seeing many more opportunities in the datacenter lifecycle services market and believe we are now well positioned to benefit."

Quarterly Conference Call Details

The Company has scheduled a conference call to discuss the first quarter 2017 financial results for Monday, May 15 at 4:30 PM Eastern. To participate on the conference call, please dial 877-691-2551 toll free from the U.S., or 630-691-2747 for international callers. The conference code is 44859803#. Investors may also access a live audio web cast of this conference call under the "events" tab on the investor relations section of the Company's website at http://ir.totalsitesolutions.com/events.cfm .

An audio replay of the conference call will be available approximately one hour after the conclusion of the call and will be made available until June 14, 2017. The audio replay can be accessed by dialing 1-888-843-7419 in the U.S. or 630-652-3042 toll free then enter conference ID number 4485 9803#. Additionally, a replay of the webcast will be available on the Company's website approximately two hours after the conclusion of the call and will remain available for 90 calendar days.

About Non-GAAP Financial Measures

Adjusted EBITDA is a supplemental financial measures not defined under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss) before interest expense, income taxes, depreciation and amortization, impairment loss on goodwill and other intangibles, stock-based compensation, and provision for bad debts. We present Adjusted EBITDA because we believe this supplemental measure of operating performance is helpful in comparing our operating results across reporting periods on a consistent basis by excluding non-cash items that may, or could, have a disproportionate positive or negative impact on our results of operations in any particular period. We also use Adjusted EBITDA as a factor in evaluating the performance of certain management personnel when determining incentive compensation.

Adjusted EBITDA may not be comparable to similarly titled measures reported by other companies. Adjusted EBITDA, while providing useful information, should not be considered in isolation or as an alternative to net income or cash flows as determined under GAAP. Consistent with Regulation G under the U.S. federal securities laws, Adjusted EBITDA has been reconciled to the nearest GAAP measure, and this reconciliation is located under the heading "Adjusted EBITDA Reconciliation" following the Consolidated Statements of Operations included in this press release.

About TSS, Inc.

TSS provides a comprehensive suite of services for the planning, design, deployment, maintenance, refresh and take-back of end-user and enterprise systems, including the mission-critical facilities they are housed in. TSS provides a single-source solution for enabling technologies in data centers, operations centers, network facilities, server rooms, security operations centers, communications facilities and the infrastructure systems that are critical to their function. TSS's services consist of technology consulting, design and engineering, project management, systems integration, systems installation and facilities management. For more information, visit www.totalsitesolutions.com or call 888-321-4877.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release may contain "forward-looking statements" -- that is, statements related to future -- not past -- events, plans, and prospects. In this context, forward-looking statements may address matters such as our expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as "guidance," "prospects," "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "seeks," "should," or "will." Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain. Particular uncertainties that could adversely or positively affect the Company's future results include: our independent registered public accounting firm's reports on our 2015 and 2016 financial statements contain an explanatory paragraph that expresses substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern; we may not have sufficient resources to fund our business and may need to issue debt or equity to obtain additional funding; our reliance on a significant portion of our revenues from a limited number of customers; risks relating to operating in a highly competitive industry; risks relating to the failure to maintain effective internal control over financial reporting; risks relating to rapid technological, structural, and competitive changes affecting the industries we serve; risks involved in properly managing complex projects; risks relating to the possible cancellation of customer contracts on short notice; risks relating our ability to continue to implement our strategy, including having sufficient financial resources to carry out that strategy; risks relating to our ability to meet all of the terms and conditions of our debt obligations; uncertainty related to current economic conditions and the related impact on demand for our services; and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016. These uncertainties may cause our actual future results to be materially different than those expressed in our forward-looking statements. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements.

TSS, Inc. Consolidated Balance Sheets (In thousands except par values)









March 31,

December 31,







2017

2016







(unaudited)



Assets









Current Assets







Cash and cash equivalents

$ 1,295

$ 2,152

Contract and other receivables, net

1,477

2,389

Costs and estimated earnings in excess of billings on uncompleted contracts

290

539

Inventories, net

66

59

Prepaid expenses and other current assets

191

252

Total current assets

3,319

5,391 Property and equipment, net

475

544 Goodwill



1,907

1,907 Intangible assets, net

669

704 Other assets



112

30

Total assets

$ 6,482

$ 8,576 Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity





Current Liabilities









Convertible notes payable, current portion, net

$ 98

$ 246

Borrowings under receivables factoring agreement

434

737

Accounts payable and accrued expenses

3,696

5,319

Billings in excess of costs and estimated earnings on uncompleted contracts

2,571

2,818

Total current liabilities

6,799

9,120 Convertible notes, less current portion, net

835

825 Other liabilities

16

62

Total liabilities

7,650

10,007 Stockholders' Equity (Deficit)









Preferred stock- $.0001 par value; 1,000 shares authorized at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016; none issued

-

-

Common stock- $.0001 par value, 49,000 shares authorized at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016: 16,316 and 16,370 shares issued at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively

2

2

Additional paid-in capital

68,532

68,522

Treasury stock 759 and 748 shares at cost at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively

(1,533)

(1,532)

Accumulated deficit

(68,169)

(68,423)

Total stockholders' equity (deficit)

(1,168)

(1,431)

Total liabilities and stockholders' equity (deficit)

$ 6,482

$ 8,576

















TSS, Inc. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations (In thousands except per-share values, unaudited)































Three Months Ended March 31,











2017

2016

Results of Operations:













Revenue



$ 4,389

$ 7,675



Cost of revenue, excluding depreciation and amortization

2,530

6,370



Gross profit

1,859

1,305



Operating expenses:















Selling, general and administrative

1,741

2,252





Depreciation and amortization



139

147





Gain on sale of assets



(321)

-



Total operating costs



1,559

2,399



Operating income (loss)



300

(1,094)



Interest income (expense), net



(77)

(80)



Other income (expense), net



-

7



Income (loss) before income taxes



223

(1,167)



Income tax expense (benefit)



(31)

-



Net income (loss)



$ 254

$ (1,167)

Basic and diluted income (loss) per share:













Net income(loss) per share



$ 0.02

$ (0.07)































TSS, Inc. Adjusted EBITDA Reconciliation (In thousands, unaudited)











Three Months Ended March 31,









2017

2016















Net income (loss)





$ 254

$ (1,167)















Interest income (expense), net



77

80 Depreciation and amortization



138

147















Income tax expense (benefit)







(31)

14 EBITDA







$ 438

$ (926)















Stock based compensation



10

72 Provision for bad debts





5

6 Adjusted EBITDA





$ 450

$ (848)

















SOURCE TSS, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.totalsitesolutions.com


SYDNEY, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- UBank, one of Australia's leading digital only banks, has today unveiled RoboChat, Australia's first virtual assistant to help potential home buyers and refinancers complete their online home loan applications. RoboChat will be available on the home loan section of UBank's website and will be available to guide customers through the application form. By providing real-time input on questions like "what term do you offer on home loans?" and "do you offer redraws and how do they work?" RoboChat aims to help reduce the time needed for customers to complete the form by offering on-the-spot help. Built with IBM Watson (NYSE: IBM), RoboChat is still in training and will continue to learn as more customers engage with it, becoming smarter and more user-friendly over time.

RoboChat will join the current live chat functionality already offered on the site, and is the latest technological advancement in UBank's innovative cognitive banking offering. RoboChat uses IBM Watson Conversation API and will use natural language to respond to customers on 40 core home loan topics along with hundreds of associated questions.



RoboChat has been trained on data collected from customer questions submitted via UBank's LiveChat experience, and has been tested by dozens of users and iteratively trained. Thousands of questions and responses have now been plugged into RoboChat and analysed with IBM Watson, ensuring customer's queries are responded to in an efficient manner. Ensuring the home loan process is as enjoyable as possible, RoboChat has even been built with a sense of humour, offering a number of tongue-in-cheek responses, such as Q: How much does a hipster weigh? A: An Instagram.

"Our goal is to deliver simpler, better, smarter banking to our customers and RoboChat will help deliver on this by streamlining the application form," said Lee Hatton, CEO of UBank. "If you've gathered all of your paperwork, the form can be completed in as little time as it takes you to have your breakfast. And, securing one of the most competitive rates in the market could help a customer save thousands of dollars in interest over the life of a loan."

Whilst this new form of technology will provide a streamlined approach to the home loan application, it won't affect the size of the local UBank Customer Service team or the great work they do.

"RoboChat will be a very welcome addition to our team of customer service experts," continued Hatton. "UBank will still have experienced staff on hand to chat on the phone, via email and our live online chat offering, RoboChat will provide an added option for those needing quick online responses or those that are close to finalising the form."

RoboChat provides support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"From deepening the customer experience, to increased productivity for employees, virtual assistants are being adopted across industries and becoming more advanced in natural conversation and emotional intelligence, with the help of cognitive technology," said Brock Douglas, Vice President Watson, IBM Asia Pacific. "This year IBM Watson will engage with more than a billion people, across 20 industries. UBank's work with IBM Watson is a powerful example of how organisations are leveraging cognitive virtual assistants that have the ability to engage in a conversation, ask questions, learn and respond in context  as opposed to providing stock responses.

About UBank:

UBank was launched in 2008 and was developed and is supported by the financial strength and global capabilities of National Australia Bank Limited (NAB). UBank is a fintech and aims to simplify banking  being entirely online and over the phone. Operating under NAB's banking licence, UBank currently offers a range of products competitive home loans, high-interest online savings accounts, a range of high interest and Term Deposit accounts (which can be used by Self-Managed Super Funds).  National Australia Bank Limited ABN 12 004 044 937 AFSL and Australian Credit Licence 230686.

For more information, visit: https://www.ubank.com.au

Media contact:

Carla McMurray

IBM Media Relations

[email protected]

+612-9463-5344

Elizabeth Johns

[email protected]

02 8437 5347

SOURCE IBM

Related Links

http://www.ibm.com


WASHINGTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is the daily "Profile America" feature from the U.S. Census Bureau:

POLICE WEEK

Profile America  Monday, May 15th. This week, we honor those public servants we too often take for granted, if not regarding them with wariness. But we owe much their service, especially the peace and safety of our neighborhoods and roads. It's National Police Week, signed into law in 1962 by President John Kennedy to acknowledge the service and its associated dangers. The American Police Hall of Fame and Museum in Titusville, Florida, notes that over 9,000 police officers have died in the line of duty. In 2015, there were nearly 1.2 million violent crimes committed, and more than 10 million property crimes. Confronting this lawbreaking are some 12,000 local police departments nationwide, staffed by around 214,000 police and sheriff's patrol officers, detectives and supervisors. Profile America is beginning its 21st year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Sources:

Police Week/accessed 3/14/2017:

www.policeweek.org/

Violent crimes/accessed 3/14/2017:

www.fbi.gov/news/stories/latest-crime-statistics-released

Property crimes/accessed 3/14/2017:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/property-crime

Local PDs/accessed 3/14/2017:

www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=71

Law enforcement employment:

https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/B24121

Profile America is produced by the Center for New Media and Promotion of the U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics and accounts drawn from cited non-Census sources are employed for illustrative or narrative purposes, and are not attested to by the U.S. Census Bureau. These daily features are available as produced segments, ready to air, on the Internet at http://www.census.gov (look for "Audio" in the "Library" pull-down menu).

SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau

Related Links

http://www.census.gov


PHILADELPHIA, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The power of collective intelligence and empowering women to excel in business are the hallmarks of Her Corner. As entrepreneurs, Frederique Irwin and Kimberly Berger help women break through barriers that keep them from achieving their maximum potential in business.

Her Corner has arrived here in Philadelphia, launching the company's first offshoot from its Washington D.C. base. By using education in a peer group setting, Her Corner brings its power of collective intelligence to Philly and its suburbs.

Frederique Irwin, Founder & CEO of Her Corner Kimberly Berger, President & COO of Her Corner

"Philadelphia was the obvious choice for us because of its reputation for being a great city for women to grow a business. Plus, Kimberly went to Wharton and has roots here," says Irwin, Founder and CEO of Her Corner.

Women business owners are invited to meet Irwin and Berger at morning coffee and networking events in Center City Philadelphia on June 14 and July 12. The events are free but registration is required at www.HerCorner.org/philadelphia.

Her Corner's Accelerator Series begins in September. Past participants in the Accelerator Series have seen an average of 46-percent growth in their revenue, says Berger, President and COO of Her Corner.

Irwin and Berger will be speakers at upcoming high-profile programs. Irwin will be the keynote speaker at NAWBO Philadelphia's signature event on June 7, while Berger will be a panelist at the Stimulus #Connect2Resources on May 15 in University City.

"There are more than 11 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. generating nearly $2 trillion in revenues, as of 2016. We want women to know they have a resource in Her Corner, to help them with whatever it takes to grow their business," Irwin says.

Berger adds, "We are so grateful for the enthusiasm and creativity of the women we work with. They prove that it doesn't matter your age, industry or where you live  women can truly do anything in business. And we love being part of their growth stories."

The training, connections and the support offered by Her Corner is the boardroom from which each member can draw as she grows her business. That's the power of collective intelligence. https://hercorner.org/philadelphia/

MEDIA CONTACT: Cheryl Squadrito, [email protected], 856-857-0145.

Her Corner is global community of about 800 women business owners committed to helping women grow their businesses. Her Corner launched in Washington, D.C. in 2011 and is a rapidly growing business resource that offers collaboration with fellow business owners, peer groups, business accelerators and original business guidance from prominent experts. www.hercorner.org

About Frederique Irwin

Frederique is the Founder and CEO of Her Corner. She has spoken on the topic of the state of women and entrepreneurship at The White House, The U.S. State Department, as well as companies such as Marriott, Chobani, Microsoft, AstraZeneca, and TD Bank. She teaches entrepreneurship at American University and she holds an MBA from William & Mary and a BA from Davidson College.

About Kimberly Berger

Kimberly, President and COO of Her Corner, is an active angel investor with a passion for women-owned companies. She has worked with venture-backed companies and large publicly-traded companies in the areas of digital marketing and strategy consulting. She holds an MBA from the Wharton School with a focus in Marketing and Finance and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

SOURCE Her Corner

Related Links

http://www.hercorner.org


LAS VEGAS, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- WGU Nevada will celebrate its second commencement by honoring nearly 400 graduates from around the state on Saturday, May 20, at The Smith Center. With a diverse student population, the online, nonprofit university is helping graduates meet the high demand of skilled workforce jobs in the Silver State. The ceremony, which will take place at 10 a.m., is open to the public and will be broadcast live on WGU Nevada's Facebook account.

Learn more about WGU Nevada and it's degree programs at nevada.wgu.edu and by following @WGUNevada on social media.

Representative Ruben Kihuen of Nevada's 4th congressional district, will give the commencement address. Joining him on stage will be four of the graduates who will share their stories at the ceremony: Carrie Brown, M.S. in Management and Leadership from Sparks; Logan McDaniel, B.S. Business Management from Henderson; Samantha Brady, M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction from Las Vegas; and Cae Swanger, MBA in Healthcare Management from Henderson.

Kihuen said: "WGU Nevada is helping build the next generation of future leaders in our state. I am so proud of the graduates, staff, and faculty for working towards making Nevada a better place. Nevada needs leaders capable of moving our state forward and working to solve the emerging challenges of today's world. The hard work of these students - some with full time jobs and families - will not go unnoticed. Because of WGU Nevada, these students are prepared for long-term success and will help diversify our workforce."

Of the nearly 400 graduates that will be honored during Saturday's ceremony, 132 are from the College of Business, 113 are from the College of Health Professions, 112 are from the Teacher's College, and 38 are from the College of Information Technology.

"As the state-endorsed online university, WGU Nevada is helping working adults earn the respected degrees they need to advance their careers and succeed in the workplace," said Chancellor Spencer Stewart of WGU Nevada. "We know that education has the power to change the lives of individuals, families, and communities."

About WGU Nevada

WGU Nevada is an online, nonprofit, competency-based university established to expand Nevadans' access to higher education throughout the state. Formed through a partnership between the state of Nevada and nationally recognized Western Governors University (WGU), WGU Nevada is open to all qualified Nevada residents. The university offers more than 60 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in the high-demand career fields of business, K12 teacher education, information technology, and health professions, including nursing. Degrees are granted under WGU's accreditation through the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU). Additionally, WGU's Teachers College programs are accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), and its nursing programs are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE)*.

In addition to WGU Nevada, there are five other WGU state-based, state-endorsed universities: WGU Indiana, established in June 2010; WGU Washington, established in April 2011; WGU Texas, established in August 2011; WGU Missouri, established in February 2013; and WGU Tennessee, established in July 2013. For more information, visit the WGU Nevada website, nevada.wgu.edu, or call 877-214-7005.

*Western Governors University offers nursing programs that are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (One Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 5380, Washington, DC 20036, 202-877-6791).

Follow WGU Nevada:

https://www.facebook.com/WGUNevada/

https://www.linkedin.com/edu/wgu-nevada-167032

https://twitter.com/wgunevada

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYl2xE6dv7pMshZsiiddEJA

Contact for media inquiries:

Holly Silvestri

702-367-7771/Cell: 702-340-6262

[email protected]

Contact for enrollment information:

877-214-7005

nevada.wgu.edu

SOURCE WGU Nevada

Related Links

http://nevada.wgu.edu/


COLLEGE PARK, Md., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Cuba is experiencing a brain drain, though it's not the kind that forecasters were predicting when the long-closed country began opening its borders. It's internal brain drain, says Rebecca Bellinger, managing director of the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business Office of Global Initiatives and Center for International Business Education and Research.

The small island nation's doctors and other highly skilled workers aren't emigrating for more lucrative jobs in Miami and elsewhere. In fact, they aren't emigrating at all. They're staying in Cuba, but moving toward the burgeoning hospitality sector.

And it's posing a major new threat to Cuba, Bellinger says. "Cubans are deciding that they'll have a higher quality of life if they enter the travel and service industry."

To be sure, some highly skilled Cubans  doctors, lawyers, professors and others  are leaving the country in search of opportunity. But many more who are staying in Cuba are opting to leave their jobs because of low state salaries or are taking on second jobs, becoming taxi drivers, waiters and bellhops  jobs involving regular interaction with foreign visitors and their hard currency. The government is experiencing a sort of "drain" as well, as state workers flee their jobs for the more lucrative private sector.

"These are people who are leaving the jobs for which they have been trained," Bellinger says. "Last year, we met an English teacher who left his rural school position to become a tour guide, both to use the language he had learned and to gain access to hard currency."

Cuba's universities have long been regarded as the best in Latin America, but in recent years, gross enrollment has been plummeting, sparking additional worries.

The country maintains two forms of legal tender: the Cuban peso (CUP) and the Cuban convertible peso (CUC). The CUC is pegged to the U.S. dollar, and is many times more valuable than the CUP. Neither trades on the global forex market. Most Cubans are paid in the weaker peso (CUP), limiting their buying power. Visitors to the country use the CUC and leave tips, and that's helping to fuel Cuba's internal brain drain.

Bellinger has been traveling to Cuba since 2010, studying what's happening there as she forges experiential learning opportunities for students and collaborative partnerships with the University of Havana and its associated research centers. As part of her work with NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, she has worked with the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a Treasury Department unit that manages sanctions, to educate the higher education community in the U.S. on regulations that govern legal travel to Cuba. She also leads the CIBER Faculty Development in International Business (FDIB) Program to Cuba for faculty from across the U.S.

She has seen an uneven upturn in travel, steep in Havana, but shallow everywhere else.

"Last year, we were told by a hotel manager that Havana has 100 percent capacity in hotels all year long," she says. The capital city is so full of foreign travelers today that it's scarcely recognizable from even a year ago.

Travel to Cuba's secondary cities, meanwhile, has been generally missing the boom. That's in large part because U.S. travelers have faced highly restrictive travel conditions in the past and may not be aware of what the island has to offer outside of Havana.

To be approved for travel to Cuba, Americans must have an itinerary that aligns with one of 12 approved purposes, which include religious activities, journalism, humanitarian projects and people-to-people outreach. "And tourism is not one of them. This is not a destination that U.S. citizens can just explore for sun and sand," Bellinger says. That has kept most U.S. travelers in Havana for now, but gradually that will change, Bellinger says, as U.S. relations with Cuba continue to evolve.

As Cuba looks to its future, Bellinger says, it must focus on these eight things.

Support economic reforms: This has already begun, Bellinger notes, but much work remains. The economic reforms announced in 2010 have encouraged development and job creation in the non-state sector, which has eased the financial burden on the state. Over 500,000 Cubans are now self-employed in their own microenterprises and private cooperatives, but the regulations that govern these businesses are still constraining. For example, private restaurants are able to have only 50 seats, and private companies are not permitted to import any goods or foodstuff to support their business.

Address the dual currency issue: Rebuild the country around a single currency, to level the playing field for Cubans and increase consumer confidence.

Address salary issue: Traditionally esteemed, high-skilled work should be appropriately compensated, to counter brain drain tendencies in the country.

Invest in innovative capacity: "Because of Cuba's history," Bellinger says, "it does not lack the ability to innovate. Just think about the old jalopies." Closed off from much global trade, Cubans have long found ways to maintain and retrofit 50-year-old automobiles. "That type of innovation exists," she says, "but so do impressive global innovations in health, biomedical and pharmaceutical fields.

Ease access to information: Access to the internet has increased in Cuba, with about 2,000 homes in Havana authorized to receive the internet directly and with the number of Wi-Fi hotspots growing virtually every day. "It is fantastic," Bellinger says, "that the government is no longer afraid of giving people access to information." The country should encourage the democratization of the internet, allowing greater accessibility at a fair and level price, she adds. In most countries, internet prices are determined based on the amount of data used. In Cuba, users are charged based on the types of websites visited, with domestic websites costing less than foreign ones. Some foreign websites are still blocked in Cuba.

Educate a generation of business leaders: For a half-century beginning around 1960, the economy was generally controlled by the Cuban government. Now, the country faces a crisis in business education: Who will educate the next generation of business leaders, job creators and entrepreneurs? The reforms that have allowed for the creation of private business have not been supported with education, meaning that the individuals starting and running small businesses do not have access to the formal training they need to be successful. The Catholic Church has begun a program that's similar to a masters of business program, and a Miami-based nonprofit is doing some startup business training on what Bellinger describes as "a very small scale." But education remains an area where Cuba prohibits joint ventures with foreign entities, so prospects for business education remain murky.

Improve transportation and infrastructure: Cuba has infrastructure problems, "first and foremost," Bellinger says, making travel cumbersome between Havana and the country's secondary cities. Addressing those problem would spread economic development across the island.

Choose democracy: Elections are planned for 2018, when Cuban President Raul Castro plans to step down. "But if there's going to be an election, is it going to be fair? Who will be the key players? We don't know," Bellinger says. "It's as important as ever that Cuba listen to its citizens."

Central to her suggestions is the notion of investing in human capital. "At the end of the day," Bellinger says, "if you don't invest in human capital  if you don't invest in your workforce  nothing is going to change in Cuba."

Visit Smith Brain Trust for related content at http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/faculty-research/smithbraintrust and follow on Twitter @SmithBrainTrust.

About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and part-time MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, specialty masters, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.

Contact: Greg Muraski at 301-892-0973 or [email protected]

SOURCE Robert H. Smith School of Business

Related Links

http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu


NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Wholesale Trading Insurance Services, LLC (WTIS) announced today that industry veteran William Reyes has joined the firm as Director/Casualty Broker in Laguna Niguel, Calif.; he will work in conjunction with the firm's principal office in San Francisco.

"With over 17 years in casualty broking and underwriting throughout California and the Western U.S., Bill brings WTIS and its retail broker-clients significant experience and knowledge of all facets of complex casualty brokerage. In addition, his expertise in real estate, construction, distribution and hospitality are recognized by the key carriers that participate in those sectors," said Kristopher Bauer, President of WTIS.

Reyes joins WTIS from Risk Placement Services, where he was a Senior Vice President and worked for over twelve years. Prior to his tenure at RPS, Reyes was a senior property and casualty underwriter at Chubb.

WTIS is a privately-held wholesale insurance broker created and managed by industry veterans whose goal is to better align the business interests of the retail broker, the wholesaler and insurance carriers for the benefit of the buyer. WTIS has substantial expertise in Property, Casualty and Professional/Management Liability. WTIS is a JenCap Holdings Company.

For more information about WTIS, visit: http://wtisllc.com/.

About JenCap Holdings, LLC:

JenCap Holdings is a consolidator of specialty insurance distribution and program management businesses, including managing general agencies, specialty program underwriters, transactional wholesale brokers and captive managers. JenCap Holdings will drive organic growth and strategic acquisitions leveraging technology and advanced data analytics. JenCap Holdings is headquartered in New York.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Les Ross, of WTIS

415-442-8502

[email protected]

Nicole Conley

650-422-3156

[email protected]

*LOGO for media: Send2Press.com/mediaboom/17-0215s2p-wtis-300dpi.jpg

This release was issued through Send2Press, a unit of Neotrope. For more information, visit Send2Press Newswire at https://www.Send2Press.com

SOURCE Wholesale Trading Insurance Services, LLC

Related Links

http://www.wtisllc.com


This elite NCI designation means that Winship has demonstrated that its outstanding programs are reducing the cancer burden on the state of Georgia through research conducted in its laboratories, its clinical trial program, and its population-based science. Winship members have received $110 million in external peer-reviewed funding in 440 grants in support of this innovative research.

"The NCI comprehensive cancer center designation signifies Winship's outstanding research and education programs are changing the lives of the citizens of Georgia for the better," says Winship Executive Director Walter J. Curran, Jr., MD. "As the first and only NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center in the state, our clinicians and researchers work tirelessly to substantially lessen the burden of cancer on the lives of Georgia's residents."

An estimated 50,000 Georgians will be diagnosed with cancer this year. About a third of them will receive some component of their treatment at one of Winship's clinical locations in metropolitan Atlanta. For patients, Winship's innovative research translates into better ways of detecting and diagnosing cancer. Patients also have full access to teams of experts using approaches to cancer not available outside of a top research cancer center. Winship has over 250 clinical trials enrolling patients in pursuit of better approaches to nearly every type of cancer.

Emory President Claire E. Sterk says that the NCI comprehensive cancer center designation will help improve the health and well-being of Georgia citizens. "Winship's achievement is the result of years of hard work and commitment by many people, both within the university and the greater Georgia community. The NCI comprehensive cancer center designation will help Emory expand its extraordinary faculty of scientists and innovative thinkers by attracting new and highly qualified investigators," she says. "We thank Governor Deal and the Georgia Congressional Delegation for their support of Emory's mission to better serve Georgia's citizens."

"Earning the NCI comprehensive cancer center designation is a tremendous honor for Winship Cancer Institute and the state of Georgia," says Governor Nathan Deal. "This distinction elevates Georgia as a model for superb cancer care and scientific discovery."

For all Georgians, the comprehensive cancer center designation recognizes that Winship researchers are studying the environmental and genetic issues unique to cancer in Georgia with the very specific goals of reducing the risk of cancer and detecting cancer at the earliest possible stage.

"Winship is the only institution of its kind in the state. It has become Georgia's epicenter of cancer research, education, and care," explains Jonathan S. Lewin, MD, Emory University's executive vice president for health affairs and president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Emory Healthcare. "Winship is a gateway to clinical trial enrollment for metro Atlanta and beyond, importantly including our historically underserved populations."

Winship's comprehensive cancer center designation was awarded after a rigorous evaluation process conducted by the NCI that included submission of a written grant and a site visit conducted by more than two dozen scientists from peer institutions. During that visit, the review committee watched videotaped remarks from former President Jimmy Carter supporting Winship's application. He said: "I never knew that my own life would be saved by research that was funded through the NCI and its program that laid the foundation for such centers as Winship. Recently, I needed the very care that I have advocated for, care that exists through NCI's cancer center program."

Winship earned its first NCI cancer center designation in 2009, and the grant was renewed in 2012. Established 80 years ago by a foundational gift from Robert W. Woodruff, Winship Cancer Institute continues to receive funding support from the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center Fund, Inc. Mr. Woodruff believed that no cancer patient should ever have to travel outside the state of Georgia for care. The NCI comprehensive cancer center designation for Winship continues to make that vision a reality.

"Winship is fulfilling Robert Woodruff's vision of a world-class cancer center," says Curran. "Through outstanding research discoveries and patient care, Winship is leading the way in ending cancer as we know it here in Georgia and around the world."

SOURCE Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University
SEATTLE, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), the state's unifying voice for the tech community, is hosting its FullConTech  conference and workshop in partnership with Seattle CityClub. Now in its third year, FullConTech connects community leaders across business, education, and government sectors under this year's theme of Civic Collaboration on Monday, May 22 at Seattle City Hall.

FullConTech inspires citizens to get involved and combine each other's skills to solve problems and create new, more effective action plans. This begins with a deeper understanding of the city's civic challenges to discover better ways to make real progress on opportunities. At this year's event, the Seattle CityClub will unveil its Seattle Civic Health Index, which compiles research on the Pacific Northwest region and analyzes how it compares to other top tech hubs. The research outlines the overall civic health of Seattle after taking a closer look into the strengths and weaknesses, changes over time and demographic disparities.

"The city of Seattle is rich in talent and expertise. It is essential we leverage these strengths to create a better community for all who live and work here," said Michael Schutzler, CEO of WTIA. "Our collaboration workshop is a powerful experience. With open minds well informed by facts, we can help each other solve problems in ways we never thought possible."

"Seattle CityClub's Civic Health Index provides context for our region's civic strengths and needs and by partnering with the WTIA, we are able to leverage the connections, skills, and means for the tech sector to work on civic issues successfully," said Diane Douglas, executive director of Seattle CityClub.

The half-day conference will consist of TED-style Flash Talks with executives from Zillow and Graduate Tacoma, panel discussions, breakout sessions and networking opportunities. The keynote will be given by Nigel Jacob, Co-founder of the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. Attendees will also participate in a series of interactive discussions working to address some of the issue areas outlined in the Civic Health Index.

WTIA FullConTech Conference

Date: Monday, May 22, 2017

Time: 7:30am  1:30pm

 Location: Seattle City Hall, 601 5th Ave (Cherry St and 5th) Seattle, WA 98104

City Hall, 601 5th Ave (Cherry St and 5th) Seattle, WA 98104 Follow the Conference on Twitter: #FullConTech

For more information, visit: http://www.washingtontechnology.org/fullcontech/. To register to attend and be a part of the civic collaboration, visit: http://www.washingtontechnology.org/fullcontech/register/.

About Seattle CityClub

Seattle CityClub is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization improving the civic health of the Puget Sound region by informing residents, engaging community leaders and providing programs that bridge politics, professions, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.

About the WTIA

The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) is a non-profit trade group. The primary mission of the WTIA is helping Washington residents gain access to high-wage tech-industry jobs. The WTIA acts as an independent, unifying voice to motivate industry, education and government peers to collaborate effectively and also uses group-buying power to help tech companies grow profitably. The WTIA group includes the 501c6 WTIA Member Trade Association, the 501c3 WTIA Workforce Institute, the 501c9 WTIA Voluntary Employees' Beneficiaries Association, and the for-profit company WTIA HR Benefits, Inc. Apprenti is a program operated by the WTIA Workforce Institute.

SOURCE Washington Technology Industry Association

Related Links

http://www.washingtontechnology.org


SHANGHAI, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Yum China Holdings, Inc. ("Yum China") (NYSE: YUMC) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a controlling interest in the holding company of DAOJIA.com.cn ("Daojia"). The transaction is expected to close by the end of May 2017, subject to customary closing conditions.

Daojia, which also operates Sherpa's, was founded in 2010 and is an established online food delivery service provider focusing on higher-end orders in large cities in China including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. This transaction marks another step in executing Yum China's strategy to accelerate growth through digital and delivery by building know-how and expertise in this growing segment.

Following the transaction, Hank Sun, founder of Daojia, will continue to lead the business. "We are honored to integrate our business with Yum China, which operates China's two leading restaurant brands, KFC and Pizza Hut," said Mr. Sun. "With the combination of the Yum China business and our technological infrastructure, we look forward to achieving digital and delivery synergies for both of us."

Micky Pant, CEO of Yum China, commented: "Digital and delivery are long-term strategic drivers of our business, and I am pleased to build on our technological know-how and capabilities in this high growth area."

Yum China has one of the largest restaurant delivery networks in China, with over 4,400 of its 7,663 restaurants offering delivery services as of the end of first quarter of 2017. In the first quarter of 2017, delivery represented approximately 12% of Company sales.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements regarding the expected timing of the closing of the acquisition, expected leadership at Daojia following the closing of the acquisition, anticipated synergies from the acquisition and beliefs regarding the long-term drivers of Yum China's business. We intend all forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts and by the use of forward-looking words such as "expect," "expectation," "believe," "anticipate," "may," "could," "intend," "belief," "plan," "estimate," "target," "predict," "likely," "will," "should," "forecast," "outlook," "look forward to" or similar terminology. These statements are based on current estimates and assumptions made by us in light of our experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors that we believe are appropriate and reasonable under the circumstances, but there can be no assurance that such estimates and assumptions will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and are inherently subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and could cause our actual results to differ materially from those indicated by those statements. Some of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to: the possibility that conditions to closing the acquisition may not be satisfied in a timely manner or at all; the fact that the integration of Daojia may require significant time, attention and resources, potentially diverting attention from the conduct of our business; and the expected synergies from the acquisition may not be realized. We cannot assure you that any of our expectations, estimates or assumptions will be achieved. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are only made as of the date of this press release, and we disclaim any obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, except as required by law. All forward-looking statements should be evaluated with the understanding of their inherent uncertainty. You should consult our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (including the information set forth under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Forward-Looking Statements" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K) for additional detail about factors that could affect our financial and other results.

About Yum China Holdings, Inc.

Yum China Holdings, Inc. is a licensee of Yum! Brands in mainland China. It has exclusive rights in mainland China to KFC, China's leading quick-service restaurant brand, Pizza Hut, the leading casual dining restaurant brand in China, and Taco Bell, which opened its first restaurant in China at the end of 2016. Yum China also owns the Little Sheep and East Dawning concepts outright. Yum China is well positioned for growth thanks to its strong competitive position, integration of its brands into Chinese popular culture and consumers' daily lives, expanding geographic footprint in China and existing operational expertise. It has a strong capital position, no external debt and expects to continue growing its system sales and profit by adding new restaurants and through growing same-store sales. Yum China had more than 7,600 restaurants and more than 420,000 employees in over 1,100 cities at the end of February 2017. A new generation of younger consumers who are digitally sophisticated and brand driven are fueling growth in consumption in China. The ongoing growth of the middle class and urban population in China is expected to create the world's largest market for restaurant brands, with Yum China poised to be the market leader.

Analysts are invited to contact:

Christie Ju, Vice President  Finance, Investor Relations, at +86 21 2407 8090

Elaine Lai, Director  Finance, Investor Relations, at +86 21 2407 8278

Members of the media are invited to contact:

Forest Liu, Director, Public Affairs, at +86 21 2407 7505

SOURCE Yum China Holdings, Inc
NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- ABO Capital announced today that its CEO Zandre Campos was featured in the Huffington Post discussing fostering and empowering African youth. The article entitled "Fostering African YouthThree Young Entrepreneurs Who Are Making A Difference" was originally published on Huffington Post on May 1, 2017.

Young people play a critical role in developing Africa and building a brighter future. A quality education is the foundation of building that future. Mr. Campos has worked with three of Africa's brightest students, Cerineu Ginga, Helder Cabonde, and Juvenal Lunguenda. In high school, they built software to assist blind and mute individuals with their communication needs as part of a technology workshop. The project received several awards and accolades and Mr. Campos recognized the need for investors to sustain its growth. Mr. Campos helped them secure a sponsorship from his old company, Movicel Telecommunications, and paid the rest of the bill out of pocket to send them abroad to study at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Since graduating, all three gentleman have returned to Africa to continue moving the continent forward.

"We need to empower the youth's aspirations by providing a platform and meaningful resources to transform Africa," said Mr. Campos. "Africa's youth are burning with a desire to change the status quo and are spearheading efforts that not only reflect their talent and ingenuity, but also show that they deeply understand their own problems and know how to address them with homegrown initiatives."

Zandre Campos is chairman and CEO of ABO Capital, an international investment firm that invests in companies in the healthcare, energy, transportation, hospitality, technology and real estate sectors throughout Africa. ABO's mission is to create global value for developing countries in Africa, while contributing to their economic development.

Read the full Huffington Post article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/590750f4e4b084f59b49fb21

About ABO Capital

ABO Capital, formerly Angola Capital Investments, is an international investment firm that invests in companies in the healthcare, technology, energy, transportation, hospitality and real estate sectors throughout Africa. The mission of ABO Capital is to create global value for developing countries in Africa, while contributing to their economic development.

About Zandre Campos

Zandre Campos is one of the great, innovative business leaders and global entrepreneurs emerging out of Africa. Currently, he is chairman and CEO of ABO Capital, an international investment firm headquartered in Angola with holdings throughout the Globe. Mr. Campos was named one of the Top 25 African business influencers and was a recipient of the Distinguished Business Excellence Award by African Leadership Magazine. He is frequently quoted as an expert on Africa in the media and is a recurring contributor for The Huffington Post and US News & World Report. He recently addressed both students and professors at the NYU Africa House on the opportunities in Africa.

SOURCE ABO Capital

Related Links

http://www.abocapital.net


SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Zimperium, a global leader in enterprise mobile threat defense (MTD), today announced integration with Microsoft Azure to detect and thwart advanced mobile attacks. Available now, the Zimperium mobile threat defense (MTD) platform easily integrates directly with Microsoft Azure to give enterprise customers all of the benefits of Zimperium's award-winning platform in the Azure Cloud.

The solution delivers real-time, on-device threat detection and remediation for Android and iOS devices. The platform's management console, zConsole, integrates with leading enterprise mobility management (EMM), security incident and event monitoring (SIEM) and single-sign-on (SSO) solutions. The platform's deployment options include Shared SaaS, Dedicated SaaS and On-Premise (via an organization's private cloud).

"Azure's integrated cloud services help developers and IT professionals build, deploy and manage applications through Microsoft's global network of datacenters," said John Michelsen, Chief Product Officer at Zimperium. "With Zimperium, Microsoft's passion to make security and privacy a priority at every step, from code development through incident response, can now be immediately extended to mobile devices. We are excited to work with Microsoft on many more initiatives to make the mobile ecosystem safe for everyone."

Ryan McGee, director, Security Product Marketing, Microsoft Corp. added,"Microsoft has invested heavily in a robust set of security technologies and practices to help ensure that customer data is secure. The integration with Zimperium provides visibility across all mobile devices, empowering security administrators to assess enterprise risk, identify security gaps and update policies to maintain a strong security posture."

Important Detail on Zimperium's Momentum

More than 10 million mobile devices are licensed with Zimperium Mobile Threat Defense

In February, Zimperium released Danger Zone and Activity Monitor, two key product features providing valuable risk information related to the Wi-Fi networks around a device, as well as comprehensive threat data on the devices, networks and applications.

The company partners with leading mobile operators to power critical security initiatives that secure millions of endpoints, including: SoftBank, Deutsche Telekom, and Blackberry.

Zimperium's research unit, zLabs uncovered some of the biggest vulnerabilities to date in mobile operating systems including the AirDroid vulnerabilities and Stagefright.

Social Media

Twitter: Today, @Zimperium announced integration w/ @Azure to detect and thwart advanced, mobile cyberattacks. More here: http://bit.ly/2pHB2qV

LinkedIn:

Announced today, Zimperium is integrated with Microsoft Azure and available for enterprise customers, providing unprecedented security visibility into virtualized networks created in Azure. Read more here: http://bit.ly/2pHB2qV

About Zimperium

Zimperium, the global leader in enterprise mobile threat defense (MTD), offers real-time, on-device protection against both known and previously unknown threats, enabling detection and remediation of attacks on all three mobile threat vectors - Device, Network and Applications. Zimperium's patented z9 detection engine uses machine learning to power zIPS, mobile on-device Intrusion Prevention System app, and zIAP, an embedded, In-App Protection SDK that delivers self-protecting iOS and Android apps.

Leaders across the mobile ecosystem partner with Zimperium, including mobile operators (Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, SmarTone, SoftBank and Telstra), device manufacturers (Samsung, SIRIN, TriGem), and leading enterprise mobility management (EMM) providers (AirWatch, MobileIron, BlackBerry, Citrix and SAP). Headquartered in San Francisco, Zimperium is backed by Sierra Ventures, Samsung, Telstra, Warburg Pincus and SoftBank. Learn more at www.zimperium.com or our official blog at https://blog.zimperium.com.

Zimperium, the Zimperium name and logo, Powered by Zimperium, zIPS, zIAP and z9 are registered trademarks or trademarks of Zimperium, Inc. in the US and other countries.

Media Contact:

Darah Patton (InkHouse PR for Zimperium)

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Zimperium

Related Links

https://www.zimperium.com/


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Fedora Update Notification

FEDORA-2017-162b95c5fd

2017-05-14 20:16:02.223863

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Name : proftpd

Product : Fedora 25

Version : 1.3.5e

Release : 2.fc25

URL : http://www.proftpd.org/

Summary : Flexible, stable and highly-configurable FTP server

Description :

ProFTPD is an enhanced FTP server with a focus toward simplicity, security,

and ease of configuration. It features a very Apache-like configuration

syntax, and a highly customizable server infrastructure, including support for

multiple 'virtual' FTP servers, anonymous FTP, and permission-based

directory

visibility.



This package defaults to the standalone behavior of ProFTPD, but all the

needed scripts to have it run by systemd instead are included.



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

Update Information:



With the previous security update for CVE-2017-7418, setting

`AllowChrootSymlinks off` could cause login failures depending on filesystem

permissions. This fixed release uses the IDs of the logging-in user to perform

the directory walk, looking for symlinks, to be more consistent with similar

checks done during login. * http://bugs.proftpd.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4306 *

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1443507

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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This update can be installed with the "dnf" update program. Use

su -c 'dnf upgrade proftpd' at the command line.

For more information, refer to the dnf documentation available at

http://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/command_ref.html#upgrade-command-label



All packages are signed with the Fedora Project GPG key. More details on the

GPG keys used by the Fedora Project can be found at

https://fedoraproject.org/keys

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Jerusalem, May 15 : Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday urged the US to move its embassy to Jerusalem, responding to an earlier statement by US State Secretary Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson suggested on Sunday that moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem might not impact the Trump administration's efforts to reach a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

He told NBC that President Donald Trump "I think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region, and understanding, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have."

In the evening, Netanyahu released a statement, charging that the move "won't harm the peace process".

According to Netanyahu, transferring the embassy will "advance peace" by "shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel".

Israel occupied East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Shortly later, it annexed the territory, in a move condemned internationally.

The Palestinians want to establish a state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Were thrilled we were able to once again celebrate our military spouses during the Military Spouse Town Hall. It continues to be the perfect forum for showcasing this groups accomplishments, and to introduce new tools to empower these men and women.

Resiliency, civilian careers and educational opportunities, as well as family resources and advocating for the greater military community, were all a central theme during the Military Spouse Town Hall on Thursday, May 11. The event, called Empowering YOU, was led by Military Spouse Magazine in conjunction with title sponsor Allstate Insurance Company and held at the Army Navy Club in Washington, DC.

Boasting an agenda addressing issues important to the countrys 1.1 million military spouses and their families, the Military Spouse Town Hall was held the day before the 2017 Armed Forces Insurance Military Spouse of the Year Awards Luncheon and national Military Spouse Appreciation Day. Breakout sessions provided time for in-depth discussion on topics like presenting ideas and your personal brand to decision makers; how Military Spouse Friendly Employers and leading companies support military spouse employees; and learning how to focus inward to develop ones best self to positively affect others.

Were thrilled we were able to once again celebrate our military spouses during the Military Spouse Town Hall. It continues to be the perfect forum for showcasing this groups accomplishments, and to introduce new tools to empower these men and women in their own families, on their military bases, in their communities and across the nation, said Suzie Schwartz, President of Military Spouse Programs. And, the Town Hall gave them an opportunity to connect with businesses ranging from our corporate sponsors to start-up spouse entrepreneurs, higher education admissions officers, government officials and each other.

More information about the Military Spouse Town Hall event and up-to-date military spouse news and events can be found at http://msoy.militaryspouse.com/.

Every day, military spouses display tremendous courage and strength, said Allstates Senior Vice President of Agency Operations John ODonnell, a former Marine. We recognize the valuable skills and experience military spouses bring, and Allstate hopes to help them pursue successful careers while addressing the unique challenges they may face.

The 2017 Military Spouse Town Hall's sponsors included: Allstate (Title Sponsor); Capital One, Starbucks and The Home Depot (Gold Sponsors;) and Combined Insurance, Hilton, Medcerts and Verizon (Silver Sponsors).

###

About Military Spouse:

Military Spouse is the leading destination and brand for the nation's 1.1 million military spouses, who contribute to their communities, the military and each other every day. Military Spouse provides online and print resources for military families on PCS, careers, education opportunities and family life. Follow us at militaryspouse.com, or on Facebook and Twitter.

About Allstate:

The Allstate Corporation is the nations largest publicly held personal lines insurer, protecting approximately 16 million households from lifes uncertainties through auto, home, life and other insurance offered through its Allstate, Esurance, Encompass and Answer Financial brand names. Other growth platforms include predictive analytics company Arity and consumer-product protection plan company SquareTrade. Allstate is widely known through the slogan Youre In Good Hands With Allstate. Allstate agencies are in virtually every local community in America. In 2016, The Allstate Foundation, Allstate, its employees and agency owners gave $42 million to support local communities.

For more information or to arrange interviews, contact:

Suzanne Trevino or Brian OMalley at Gordon C. James Public Relations

602-618-7857 or 602-274-1988

strevino(at)gcjpr(dot)com or bomalley(at)gcjpr(dot)com
CSA | Guidance Consulting We plan to provide greater efficiencies to NAVAIR by streamlining processes, measuring performance and establishing high performing teams.

Client Solution Architects (CSA) LLC has been awarded a $31 million contract for logistics and technical support to the U.S. Navy at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR). CSA will provide support services in the areas of planning, acquisition, analysis, development, training, support equipment management, facilities and execution for Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) AIR-6.7 Lakehurst.

NAWCAD Lakehurst at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is the world leader in Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment and Naval Aviation Support Equipment. It is the critical link between Naval Aviation and Navy Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups worldwide. NAVAIR Lakehurst is responsible for maintaining fleet support and infusing modern technology across the entire spectrum of equipment needed to launch, land and maintain fixed and vertical wing aircraft at sea and in expeditionary airfields worldwide.

This is a great opportunity for CSA to deliver on our differentiator, Guidance Consulting, said Todd Yanik, CSA Northeast Regional Director of Operations. We plan to provide greater efficiencies to NAVAIR by streamlining processes, measuring performance and establishing high performing teams, which will allow our client to reinvest and reallocate limited resources to other worthy objectives.

The work will mainly be performed at NAWCAD Lakehurst and CSAs Lakehurst office. Additional support will be provided at Patuxent River, Maryland; Joint Program Office, District of Columbia; Hurlburt Field Air Force Base (AFB), Florida; Eglin, AFB, Florida; Cannon AFB, New Mexico; and Mildenhall AFB, United Kingdom. The period of performance is five years, inclusive of all options, and will expire on April 26, 2022.

CSA supports other NAWCAD Lakehurst programs in the areas of program management and acquisition: Foreign Military Sales, Integrated Logistics Support (ILS) under AIR 6.7.6 and the domestic components for E-2-C/D Hawkeye, F/A-18 Hornet models and MV-22 Osprey.

About CSA

Client Solution Architects LLC (CSA) is a management consulting firm serving clients in the public and private sectors. The firms solutions help clients engineer, acquire, optimize, and sustain complex systems and infrastructures through their full life cycle and across a host of environments. Through consulting, optimization, analytics, vast industry expertise, engineering, and technology, CSA helps clients achieve their goals, optimize their technology investments, and solve their toughest challenges.

CSA is headquartered in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and operates out of additional offices in the National Capital Region, Southern California, and New Jersey. For more information visit http://www.csaassociates.com.
Duck Donuts Franchising Company announces its expansion to the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia. The city of Alpharetta replicates our companys family-friendly environment, and we are thrilled to plant deeper roots in the Peach State. With each new franchise location, Duck Donuts welcomes 25-40 new jobs to the community. Past News Releases RSS Duck Donuts Franchising Company...

Duck Donuts Franchising Company...

Duck Donuts Launches National...

Duck Donuts is expanding to the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, according to Russ DiGilio, founder and owner of Duck Donuts Franchising Company LLC.

Franchise owner Youn Hee Lee plans to open on May 19, at 3005 Old Alabama Road, Suite 170, Alpharetta, five minutes from North Point Mall. The 1,300 square-foot shop will reflect the franchises iconic beach theme and offer select retail items in-store.

While I was making plans to relocate and retire, I decided instead to shift careers and start a small business venture with my children. My son suggested Duck Donuts, and after visiting various Virginia locations, we decided it would be a great business opportunity, says Lee. The donuts were as delicious as my son described, and I love seeing the memories made among families when visiting Duck Donuts. As a grandmother, I wanted to contribute to that family-friendly atmosphere.

The city of Alpharetta replicates our companys family-friendly environment, and we are thrilled to plant deeper roots in the Peach State, says DiGilio. With each new franchise location, Duck Donuts welcomes 25-40 new jobs to the community.

Alpharetta is located in northern Fulton County, 22 miles north of downtown Atlanta. It is well-known for its vibrant southern culture. Ranked number seven on Forbes list of Americas Friendliest Towns, Alpharetta was also named number one by Forbes in 2009 as the Best Place to Move in America. It is home to branch campuses of Georgia State University, Gwinnett Technical College, and Reinhardt University, as well as many cultural events. Coined the Technology City of the South due to its large number of tech-focused companies, Alpharetta is Georgias 12th most populous city.

As of May 9, 2017, Duck Donuts Franchising Company has 37 open stores and 126 contracts.

As the sole proprietor and first-time franchise owner, Youn Hee Lee welcomes support, help, and insights from her two children, Rebecca Lee and Jae Lee, as well as her husband Hee Kwon Lee.

Our Duck Donuts family is growing, and were thrilled that new franchisees like Yon Hee Lee are also involving their entire family in the business. Our purpose statement is, Our family serving your family, and with each new store opening, we become more passionate about this promise, says DiGilio.

Its hard for my family to choose a favorite Duck Donut flavor, but we love the Strawberry Lemonade. It offers the perfect combination of sweet and tangy, says Lee.

Donuts at this location will be made fresh to order, MondayThursday, 6:30 a.m.-3:00 p.m., and FridaySunday, 6:30 a.m.-7:00 p.m. for the first two weeks. Opening weekend hours are May 19May 21, 8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. For Grand Opening specials, regular store hours, and donut topping updates, visit the Duck Donuts Alpharetta, GA Facebook page or connect on the web at DuckDonuts.com.

About Duck Donuts

Duck Donuts was founded in 2006 by Russ DiGilio in Duck, North Carolina. His intention? To solve a family vacation problem: Our family wanted a place to buy warm, delicious & made to order! donuts, and when we couldnt find one, we decided to start our own.

By 2011, Duck Donuts had expanded to four Outer Banks locations and the donut business was so successful that DiGilio was continuously approached about franchise opportunities and by fans who begged for a Duck Donuts in their communities. The first franchise opened in Williamsburg, VA, in 2013, and there are now 37 open franchise locations and 126 contracts.

Duck Donuts store openings are scheduled for:

Nags Head, NC  May

Dayton, Ohio  May

Jacksonville, NC  May

Wilmington, NC  May

Hershey, PA  May

Baltimore, MD  May

Kissimmee, FL  June

Duck Donuts emphasizes the importance of giving back to the local community through their #QuackGivesBack initiatives every month and their national corporate partnership with Chemo Duck. Our mission is twofold, says DiGilio, to serve the most amazing warm, delicious, and made-to-order donuts, and to contribute to the communities we call home.

The Duck Donuts Experience

We discovered that the most powerful marketing advantage we have is the aroma of warm donuts wafting from every store. Our light vanilla cake donut is a little crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, made fresh right in front of you, hand-dipped in hot icing, and sprinkled with your choice of delicious toppings and drizzles. Its that simple, says DiGilio.

Children (and grownups) love to stand on the strategically placed step in the waiting area, allowing them to see the entire process as the donut machine cooks and carries their donuts down the line, where they are dipped, topped, packaged, and served warm in the box. Duck Donuts serves its own signature coffee blendsRiptide Roast, Light House Blend, and Sunset Pier Decaf with new special seasonal flavors changing throughout the yearand offers breakfast options, as well as catering services. Indoor and outdoor seating is available at most locations.

To learn more or to share your Duck Donuts experience, Like us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, or send us a Tweet.
White Lotus, a company known for its line of holistic eastern anti-aging regime, announced its products are now for sale on NPIBeauty.com, a popular website for beauty and wellness brands.

The company was founded in 2007 in Brisbane, Australia as an offshoot of Golden Dragon TCM. Anthony and Kamila Kingston founded the company after studying acupuncture and Chinese medicine, having traveled all over the world in their work and studies. Ultimately they returned to Brisbane with knowledge of this ancient field of medicine and cosmetics. These principles are present in all White Lotus products, which are now available on NPIBeauty.com.

We are excited to be able to provide our products through yet another digital platform that reaches customers all over North America, said Anthony Kingston. This new sales partnership with NPIBeauty.com is yet another step toward broadening our market reach and being able to help more people benefit from eastern medicine and acupuncture.

While other companies have some level of focus on Chinese medicine and acupuncture for anti-aging purposes, these companies do not have the same standards of testing and research for their products as White Lotus. All of White Lotuss products carefully address important issues such as aging spots, stretch marks, scars, wrinkles, skin conditions, hair loss, chronic pains, and more in a safe, effective manner.

The companys jade products have already found a level of success in the United States. The jade roller, for example, improves lymphatic drainage, skin smoothness, and microcirculation. The White Lotus clinics in Australia have become known for their jade facials. Therefore, this roller allows international customers to experience some of that clinic experience from thousands of miles away, from the comfort of their homes.

We are eager to continue expanding our brands reach and to help people on a wider scale to achieve a fresh, youthful appearance with some natural, time-tested techniques, said Kingston.

For more information about White Lotus and its products, visit http://www.whitelotusantiaging.com.
BergHOFF operates in nearly 70 countries representing thousands of brands and has the relationships and experience needed to expand our market penetration as we build the FaceCradle brand in the U.S. and Canada.

FaceCradle USA has partnered with BergHOFF International's North American Division to distribute FaceCradle to consumers across the United States and territories within Canada.

The FaceCradle travel pillow, made headlines in 2016 as one of the most successful travel products in Kickstarter history.

Were excited to have BergHOFF represent our product as we introduce FaceCradle to consumers, retailers and wholesalers across North America, said FaceCradle USA President Dylan J. Doherty. BergHOFF operates in nearly 70 countries representing thousands of brands and has the relationships and experience needed to expand our market penetration as we build our brand in the U.S. and Canada.

Developed by Australian Entrepreneurs David Scrimshaw and Roz Ruwhiu, FaceCradle raised over $1.1 million USD from nearly 20,000 customers on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter last fall. The parent company, based in Australia, started FaceCradle USA in February 2017 to provide quick product fulfillment to North American customers.

BergHOFF has launched hundreds of problem-solving inventions like TrolleyBags and PerfectSlice to the North American market with great success, said BergHOFF International Founder and President Ray Van Den Langenbergh. We believe FaceCradle will be very well received by consumers who crave comfort and actual sleep when they travel in economy class. When choosing to represent a brand, we look at the people behind the product, and I immediately appreciated David and Rozs vision and entrepreneurial spirit. Also, creating a product out of a need is an exciting accomplishment, and when we see an opportunity like this and can contribute to the route to success, we want to be there.

Van Den Langenbergh added that BergHOFF is always looking for unique solutions and designs.

We support many products with on-site demonstrations and market them directly to consumers at road shows, trade shows, as well as home shows and fairs, he said. We also interact with major North American retailers. The breadth of our reach made it a logical step for FaceCradle to partner with us as their official distributor for the U.S. and regions within Canada.

Unlike other travel pillows on the market, FaceCradle is designed for the way people actually sleep, with their head in a horizontal position. FaceCradle presents five sleep modes for travelers. Each provides multiple options for comfort  including a deep-sleep mode that simulates the natural horizontal sleeping position. This presents a face down position (as if in a massage chair) even while the traveler is seated in a vertical, economy-class seat.

The companys viral Facebook video, which received more than 18 million views, demonstrates that FaceCradles comfort positions conform to nearly any kind of seating situation aboard a plane, bus, train or even in a car.

To find out more about the most popular travel pillow on the market today and to order, visit http://www.facecradle.me.

About FaceCradle USA

FaceCradle USA was founded in 2017, after the success of the product on Kickstarter in the fall of 2016  when the travel pillow raised $1.135 million ($1,479,231 AUD) to become the most-funded travel accessory in the website's history. The parent company was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2015 by two of the countrys seasoned Australian Entrepreneurs, David Scrimshaw and Roz Ruwhiu. Scrimshaw, the founder of one of Australias most innovative companies (awarded by Thompson Reuters) founded the market-leading Power Tool Brand, Ozito. He has designed, developed and marketed more than 30 consumer products globally. Ruwhiu is a Head of TV Production for a leading advertising agency behind several award-winning commercials for some of the worlds most famous brands. The two combined their expertise to create FaceCradle, designed to help all travelers get a good nights sleep. For more information, visit the companys website.

About BergHOFF North American Division

BergHOFF North America is a division of BergHOFF International. Founded in 1994, the company, grew to become a leading designer and manufacturer of kitchenware and tableware. BergHOFF offers only in-house designs and working with a company-based design department  which has garnered numerous design awards including Red Dot Design Awards, the IF Design Award, Designpreis Deutschland Award and the Good Design Award.

The company has also received environmental recognition for its Earthchef collection, and BergHOFF continues to renew its commitment to support local sustainability projects worldwide. Using natural resources in a responsible way is paramount to the companys mission.

For more information, visit http://www.berghoffworldwide.com.
In the age of healthcare consumerism, provider organizations must focus on providing digital experiences that create value throughout the entire consumer experience  from first touchpoint through the continuum of care

Influence Health, the healthcare industrys leading consumer experience solution provider, today announced the INFLUENCE! Healthcare Consumer Experience Conference. Powered by Influence Health, the conference will be held Sept. 27-28 in Orlando, Florida, and will provide attendees the education, resources and connections to help transform their organizations into digitally-savvy, consumer-centric businesses.

In the age of healthcare consumerism, provider organizations must focus on providing digital experiences that create value throughout the entire consumer experience  from first touchpoint through the continuum of care, said Mike Nolte, CEO of Influence Health. INFLUENCE! is a premier event that will bring together the most innovative and successful healthcare marketers, IT professionals, executives and business leaders to discuss the latest technologies and strategies for engaging todays healthcare consumer.

Founded in 2000, INFLUENCE!, formerly known as Client Congress, has evolved from a user group summit to an industry event. The new agenda includes healthcare thought leaders sharing how to best collaborate and leverage a better consumer experience as a competitive advantage. Taking a holistic approach, INFLUENCE! will help health provider organizations understand the cross-functional team, as well as the tools and processes necessary to achieve success.

Building off the momentum of Influence Healths 21 years of healthcare consumer engagement experience,

INFLUENCE! shares insights gleaned from launching and optimizing more than 3,700 websites and digital campaigns for over 250 healthcare organizations across North America. The sharing of collective experience at the conference empowers the healthcare industry to go beyond just traditional marketing tactics to proactively embrace the empowered consumer. The event will deliver tangible takeaways, such as how to:



Establish a shared vision and roadmap for consumer experience

Create an omni-channel experience that will get and keep patients engaged

Personalize communications and measure campaign effectiveness

Go beyond the patient portal to provide value and drive revenue

"INFLUENCE! is a great opportunity to learn from peers and industry leaders about optimizing your customers digital experiences, said Christine L. Bon, director of digital marketing, Advocate Health Care and conference attendee. From engaging keynote speakers, peer-to-peer networking opportunities and thought-provoking user groups, you will take away new ideas you can immediately implement at your organization. I would recommend this event for all healthcare leaders and marketers."

For more information and to register for INFLUENCE!, visit http://influenceconference.healthcare. To find out more about Influence Health, visit InfluenceHealth.com or follow @InfluenceHlth on Twitter.

###

About Influence Health

Influence Health provides the healthcare industrys most comprehensive suite of healthcare consumer experience solutions. The Influence Health platform enables provider organizations to positively influence consumer decision making and health behaviors well beyond the physical care setting through personalized and interactive multi-channel engagement. Since 1996, the Birmingham, Ala. based company has helped more than 1,100 provider organizations positively influence consumer relationships in a way that is transformative to financial and quality outcomes. For more information visit InfluenceHealth.com.
Their backgrounds and experience fit right in with our company and will immediately be valuable additions to the Sales team.

NES Financial, a Silicon Valley FinTech company providing technology-enabled solutions for efficient back and middle office administration of complex financial transactions, recently added senior executives Eric Weinstein and Chet Hayman to its sales organization. Both will report to Senior Vice President of Sales, Christian Lyndes.

Weinstein joins the Company from Conifer Financial Services where he was Director of Development, Fund Services. His prior experience includes Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at Vastardis Capital Services. Weinstein will be based in New York City.

Hayman joins the Company from Satuit Technologies, where he was Senior Vice President of Sales. His prior experience includes senior roles in sales and finance at Oracle Corporation, First Union Securities, and UBS. Hayman will be based in the Boston area, working out of the Companys Rockland, MA office.

With our unique solutions and the rapid growth we are seeing in private equity, it was incumbent upon us to tap executives like Eric and Chet that blend technology sales and financial services expertise, said Lyndes. Their backgrounds and experience fit right in with our company and will immediately be valuable additions to the Sales team.

On what set NES Financial apart from other service providers, Weinstein said, NES Financial is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of todays private equity fund managers and investors with a next-generation third-party fund administration solution.

Added Hayman, The combination of Silicon Valley technology prowess and Big Four accounting acumen sets NES Financial apart from other firms in the private equity fund administration space.

The Companys innovative Private Equity Administration Solution provides a fully integrated, scalable, and cost-effective technology platform for third-party fund administration. Designed to help private equity firms raise capital faster, the solution reduces operational risk by improving compliance and data security, creating greater transparency and service to limited partners, and using data analytics to generate valuable business intelligence for general partners.

About NES Financial

NES Financial is a Silicon Valley financial technology (FinTech) company providing technology-enabled solutions and services for the efficient back and middle office administration of complex financial transactions. Serving private equity, commercial real estate, and Fortune 1000 clientele, we offer industry-leading fund administration, loan servicing, specialized EB-5 administration, and 1031 tax deferred exchange services. Our unwavering commitment to data security, operational redundancy, and compliance reporting is evidenced by 11 consecutive years of successful independent audits of our technology, processes, and financial controls. Today, NES Financial services over 190 funds, administers over $75B of 1031 transactions annually, and has worked with over 550 EB-5 projects. For more information, visit NES Financial.
As the wealth management industry continues to consolidate at the top-end, we are seeing extensive interest in our total platform approach of valuation, M&A advisory and management consulting services.

ECHELON Partners, a leading investment bank focused on the wealth & investment management industry, announced today the growing momentum in its core wealth management Mergers and Acquisitions business. After a record year of M&A advisory activity in 2016, ECHELON is contributing to the continued momentum in wealth management M&A, advising on two of the largest transactions in the first four months of 2017. With the completion of these recent assignments, ECHELON has now advised more than 70 wealth management firms with over $1 billion in AUM.

According to the recently released ECHELON RIA M&A Deal Report, the fastest growing segment of RIA M&A is occurring at the top end of the market as billion dollar firms are identifying inorganic growth as a powerful way to leverage their size and scale.

As the wealth management industry continues to consolidate at the top-end, we are seeing extensive interest in our total platform approach of valuation, M&A advisory and management consulting services, said Dan Seivert, CEO of ECHELON Partners. The Massey Quick  William E. Simon & Sons merger and the recent acquisition of Bordeaux Wealth Advisors by Focus Financial are excellent examples of how M&A is driving the industrys transformation as RIA firms seek to gain further scale and access to capital to accelerate their own growth plans.

Founded in 2003, Massey Quick is a leading wealth management and investment consulting firm which provides services to individuals, families, endowments, foundations and single family offices. Massey Quick focuses on providing a unique investment management solution, with an emphasis on investment expertise and innovation, a focus on long-term investing, and a guiding principal of personal commitment, ethics and integrity.

William E. Simon & Sons is a family office, which serves former Treasury Secretary William E. Simons children and grandchildren. Its Co-Chairmen, Peter and Bill Simon, add significant expertise in public and private capital markets, venture capital and real estate to the leadership team at the newly formed Massey Quick Simon.

ECHELON worked extensively with the leadership of Massey Quick to analyze the combination of the two firms, providing valuation, management consulting and merger advisory services. ECHELON is a long-term partner of Massey Quick, having worked with the leadership of Massey Quick on numerous projects in the past.

ECHELONs merger process and detailed valuation models provided the tools to work smoothly and efficiently through the deal process, and paved the way for seasoned Wall St. veterans to quickly find common ground on the key quantitative elements of the deal, said Stewart Massey, Founding Partner of Massey Quick Simon.

ECHELON also recently advised Bordeaux Wealth Advisors on their sale to Focus Financial Partners, which was ECHELONs fourth transaction involving Focus Financial. Bordeaux Wealth Advisors originated out of Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth, a well known $10 billion RIA with offices in Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York and Atlanta. Bordeaux Wealth Advisors, a $2 billion RIA, serves ultra-high net worth clients including entrepreneurs, corporate executives, technology professionals and principals of private equity and venture capital firms.

With a focus on succession planning, Bordeaux Wealth sought out Focus Financial to provide needed capital and leverage to plan for the future of the firm. ECHELON Partners was extremely helpful in getting the deal done, said Tom Meyers, CEO of Bordeaux Wealth. Dan and his team were instrumental in helping us navigate a fairly complex financial transaction and we look forward to working with ECHELON in the future.

We have been delighted by the industrys reception of our total-platform approach, which is a differentiator compared to other investment banks who only offer M&A services, said Seivert. As the wealth management industry continues to be impacted by large, macro-trends such as new technology-enabled competitors, changing regulations and shifting consumer expectations, we anticipate that the pace of deal-making will continue to increase. We look forward to continuing to invest in the ECHELON Partners platform to be the go-to resource for industry participants.

About ECHELON Partners

Founded over 15 years ago, ECHELON Partners http://www.echelon-partners.com combines the high quality expected of a large investment bank with the high-touch expected of a personal boutique. Compared to traditional investment bankers, ECHELON Partners offers a total platform approach of investment banking, valuation and management consulting services - bringing together financial advisory, strategic consulting, and senior-level operational experience to each engagement. ECHELONs keys to successfully serving clients are a deep understanding of the wealth and investment management industry, an extensive network of contacts and strategic partners, a powerful set of processes and databases, integrity, and trust. ECHELON Partners is committed to bringing all of these qualities to every client assignment. With a track record spanning hundreds of engagements ECHELONs team understands the unique needs of owners and executives in the financial services industry.
Global Voice Group (GVG) attended the Transform Africa Summit under the theme Smart Cities: Fast Forward, and was a proud partner of the Summit. As part of the Summit, GVG hosted a conference on Governance Through Big Data with the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA), on Wednesday May 10.

The conference was very successful and well attended by ministers and government officials in ICT and related sectors; such as digital economy infrastructure, finance, health, education and energy, over 300 mayors of African cities, telecoms and utilities regulators, the heads of international and regional organisations, ICT industry leaders, innovators and investors, young innovators, small and medium businesses, entrepreneurs and innovators seeking business opportunities, non-governmental organisations, academics, consultants, thought leaders and digital thinkers. With such an illustrious gathering, many valuable insights and discussion points emerged.

Transform Africa Summit (TAS 2017) was designed to foster constructive conversation towards building a Smart Africa and facilitating meetings of like-minds seeking policy and opportunities to accelerate the continent towards socio-economic transformation. The Summit brings leaders together to collaborate on new ways of accelerating Africas digital revolution.

Rwandaof all the countries in Africahas made enormous progress in communications, extending Internet accessibility, installing 2,300 kilometre fibre optic cabling nationwide, improving infrastructure and integrating ICTs, while prioritising e-Health and digital literacy initiatives. It has transformed itself into a nation that is progressing rapidly towards its ambitious vision for socio-economic development, peace and reconciliation.

As part of its participation and in partnership with the Summit, and the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA), GVG hosted its conference Governance Through Big Data on Wednesday May 10. GVG has been working with the RURA and the government of Rwanda since 2012 in an advisory capacity on issues relating to telecoms data control and regulation.

Governance Through Big Data has recently become a particularly hot topic as much has been written about the power and potential of Big Data and predictive analytics. The insights gathered from Big Data can help solve some of the biggest global business challenges and many of these are also applicable to the sphere of government and policy-making. The solutions Big Data can provide in the area of governance are of paramount importance to the governments of emerging countries.

The International Gateway Traffic Verification System (IGTVS), a joint initiative of GVG and the RURA is a comprehensive data solution allowing RURA to audit and monitor the networks in Rwanda independently and for a number of purposes: accurate billing, traffic measurement, quality of service assessment, market surveillance, dispute resolution and fraud management. Rwanda now has transparency and visibility into the international calls being terminated in the country. This has brought a proactive approach to ICT-based regulation and real-time data collection and has generated significant additional revenue for both the State and the local operators.

Rwandas successes are largely due to a collaborative effort between the country and ICT partners like GVG.

If the governments of emerging countries embrace revolutionary technologies, this will enable them to leapfrog many technological developments, develop Smart Cities, and accelerate the movement towards inclusivity in their countries - solving hunger, poverty, and creating sustainable jobs.
CEV Multimedias iCEV platform brings real-world knowledge into the classroom, and Clever is excited to help bring that learning experience to students.

The expectations students face when entering the workforce are changing and as a result, educators are changing how they teach. With 15 percent of all credits earned by high school graduates coming as part of Career and Technical Education (CTE), educators are looking for ways to improve and streamline students experiences with CTE. To ease the use of online CTE curriculum, CEV Multimedia announces a partnership with Clever to create a more seamless online experience for educators and students.

CEV Multimedias online learning platform, iCEV, will connect with Clever to enable educators to easily access CTE curriculum for their students. Through iCEV, educators and students have access to a large variety of lessons in the areas of health science, business and marketing, family and consumer sciences, architecture and construction, law and public safety, agriculture science and career exploration. After completing courses, students can earn industry-backed certifications created with the help of partners such as Southwest Airlines, Elanco, Bayer CropScience, Express Employment Professionals, the American Meat Science Association, and the Equipment and Engine Training Council.

Educators continue to view CTE as the best way to prepare students for college or careers as it provides students with real-world knowledge, said Dusty Moore, iCEV president. This partnership with Clever will make it easier for educators and students to access our curriculum, which will ensure that students are prepared for the next step in their career.

We have witnessed the remarkable growth of CTE over the years and are thrilled to work with CEV Multimedia to simplify the learning process, said Ben Adida, vice president of product and engineering at Clever. CEV Multimedias iCEV platform brings real-world knowledge into the classroom, and Clever is excited to help bring that learning experience to students.

For more information about CEV Multimedia, please visit http://www.icevonline.com.

About CEV Multimedia

With 33 years of experience, CEV specializes in providing quality Career & Technical Education (CTE) curriculum and education resources for several major subject areas: Agricultural Science and Technology, Family & Consumer Sciences, Business Education, Marketing Education, Trade and Industrial Education, Health Science, Law Enforcement and Career Exploration. CEV received the U.S Chamber of Commerces Blue Ribbon Small Business Award in 2012 and has been honored numerous times for its excellence in content creation and exemplary business practices. iCEV is the most comprehensive online resource for CTE educators and students. With iCEVs learning-on-demand capabilities, video clips stream instantly to any device with Internet capabilities. Through iCEV, students can earn industry-backed certifications across multiple areas of CTE that prepare them for college and beyond. For more information, visit http://www.icevonline.com.

About Clever

Clever was founded in 2012 by educators and technologists who knew that widely available educational apps could improve both teaching and learning, but that tools to deploy and secure the applications were simply unavailable. Today, half of K-12 schools in the U.S. trust Clever to secure their student data as they adopt learning apps in the classroom. In 2014, Clever won the Crystal Clear award by the Digital Innovation Learning Awards. It is also the trusted provider of the American Federation of Teachers, who uses Clever to secure its own Share my Lesson platform with its teacher members. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Partners, Peter Thiels Founders Fund, and GSV Capital, Clever currently has 100 employees and is based in San Francisco, California. For more information visit http://www.clever.com.
The work being carried out by Therachons team is truly innovative and could have a significant impact for those diagnosed with achondroplasia and suffering the associated complications.

Catalent Pharma Solutions, the leading global provider of advanced delivery technologies and development solutions for drugs, biologics and consumer health products, today announced that it has signed an agreement with Therachon AG, a Swiss biotechnology company focused on rare genetic diseases, to support preclinical and clinical development of TA-46, a novel protein addressing achondroplasia, which is the most common form of short-limbed dwarfism.

Under the agreement, Catalent Biologics has employed its proprietary GPEx technology to produce different protein variants for Therachon, allowing them to screen multiple molecules and subsequently select their clinical candidate for further development.

Catalent has been working with Therachon for more than a year to support the selection of the clinical candidate, and will now go on to manufacture cGMP material for a Phase I clinical study, scheduled for 2018. The project will be conducted at Catalents Madison, Wisconsin, biomanufacturing facility.

The work being carried out by Therachons team is truly innovative and could have a significant impact for those diagnosed with achondroplasia and suffering the associated complications, commented Mike Riley, Vice President and General Manager of Catalent Biologics. The development work undertaken by Catalent Biologics to support Therachons outstanding research has the potential to bring this potentially life-changing product to the market as quickly as possible.

Catalents proprietary GPEx technology creates stable, high-yielding mammalian cell lines with high speed and efficiency. The advantages of applying GPEx technology span from early feasibility studies, to clinical manufacturing, through to commercial scale production. To date, seven GPEx-based antibody and protein products are approved and marketed, and more than 40 therapeutic candidates are currently in the clinic across the world. Catalents facility in Madison, Wisconsin provides a full range of cell line development, process development, analytical and manufacturing services leveraging single use bioreactor systems. An expansion of the facility is underway, which will house a two 2,000 liter single use bioreactor configuration capable of producing 2,000 liter or 4,000 liter batches, and will be completed by October 2017.

For more information on Catalent Biologics, visit http://www.CatalentBiologics.com

Notes for Editors

About Therachon AG

Therachon is a global biotechnology company focused on developing medicines for rare, genetic diseases that currently have no available treatments. The companys lead pipeline candidate, TA-46, is a novel protein therapy in development for achondroplasia, the most common form of short-limbed dwarfism. This rare genetic condition affects about one in 25,000 children and is caused by a genetic mutation of the FGFR3 receptor, which stunts child bone growth. Therachon is committed to translating the promise of its science into new treatments for patients with high unmet medical needs. For more information, visit http://www.therachon.com. Follow Therachon on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About GPEx technology

Catalent performs GPEx programs at its commercial biomanufacturing facility in Madison, Wisconsin. Designed for flexible cGMP production from 10 L up to 1,000 liters, and non-GMP production up to 250 liters, the site features extensive single-use technologies and unidirectional flow to maximize efficiency and safety. Catalent recently announced the commencement of work to extend its Madison facility and add 22,000 square feet of space.

About Catalent

Catalent is the leading global provider of advanced delivery technologies and development solutions for drugs, biologics and consumer health products. With over 80 years serving the industry, Catalent has proven expertise in bringing more customer products to market faster, enhancing product performance and ensuring reliable clinical and commercial product supply. Catalent employs approximately 10,000 people, including over 1,400 scientists, at more than 30 facilities across five continents, and in fiscal 2016 generated $1.85 billion in annual revenue. Catalent is headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey. For more information, visit http://www.catalent.com

More products. Better treatments. Reliably supplied.
The Charlotte Museum of History will host the Ron Hankins History Talks lecture series with the first free lecture on Thursday, May 16. The lecture series will include meaningful opportunities for community conversations and dialogue with renowned history speakers.

The Charlotte Museum of History today announced the first in a series of lectures titled the Ron Hankins History Talks Lecture Series. The inaugural lecture will take place on Thursday, May 18, 2017 at 6 p.m. with a talk by retired U.S. Army Col. Tom Vossler. Vossler is an author and well-known military historian.

Vossler will discuss the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, and the role North Carolina troops played in the struggle. Vossler also will sign copies of his book, A Field Guide to Antietam: Experiencing the Battlefield through Its History, Places, and People, which he co-authored with Carol Reardon.

A reception will follow the lecture, giving attendees the chance to continue the discussion after the formal talk concludes.

We are so pleased that The Wells Fargo Foundation is supporting history education in Charlotte by funding this lecture series and by engaging the community in discussions with nationally recognized thought leaders in the field of history, said Kay Peninger, president and CEO of The Charlotte Museum of History.

How to Go

The lecture will take place on Thursday, May 18, 2017 at 6 p.m. at The Charlotte Museum of History at 3500 Shamrock Dr. Tickets are free. The Museums requests that all attendees register in advance at charlottemuseum.org under the Events tab.

About the Ron Hankins History Talks Lecture Series

The lecture series is named after Ron Hankins, a retired Wells Fargo executive and former trustee of The Charlotte Museum of History. He is a long-time supporter of the Museums mission to engage and educate a broad public audience in the exploration of the Charlotte regions history. Hankins is a native Charlottean who is passionate about history and the lessons we can learn from it.

Our vision for the Ron Hankins History Talks Lecture Series is to bring Charlotte residents together with leading historians to better understand the history of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County and to explore other timely topics related to history, said Jay Everette, senior vice president of Government and Community Relations at Wells Fargo. The lecture series will include meaningful opportunities for community conversations and dialogue with these renowned history speakers.

In addition to his work with The Charlotte Museum of History, Hankins serves on the board of Charlottes Trail of History and has been instrumental in education outreach related to the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.

Ron believes in the power of history to help us learn from our past and to shed light on current issues and events, said Peninger. Its very fitting that this lecture series is named in his honor.

About Tom Vossler

Vossler holds a bachelors degree from the Pennsylvania Military College and a masters degree from Georgia State University. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the U.S. Army War College. He is a Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guide.

About The Charlotte Museum of History

The Charlotte Museum of History engages a broad public audience in the history of the Charlotte region through the stories of its people, places and events in order to promote dialogue and historical perspective. The Museum is the steward of the Hezekiah Alexander House (ca. 1774) and home site, a National Register of Historic Places site and the oldest existing home in Mecklenburg Country. Hezekiah Alexander was a leader in the years that led to the American Revolution and served on the committee that drafted North Carolinas 1776 constitution and bill of rights. For more information, visit charlottemuseum.org or follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@CLThistory).

About Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified, community-based financial services company with $1.9 trillion in assets. Founded in 1852 and headquartered in San Francisco, Wells Fargo provides banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance through more than 8,600 locations, 13,000 ATMs, the internet (wellsfargo.com) and mobile banking, and has offices in 42 countries and territories to support customers who conduct business in the global economy. With approximately 269,000 team members, Wells Fargo serves one in three households in the United States. Wells Fargo & Company was ranked No. 27 on Fortunes 2016 rankings of Americas largest corporations. Wells Fargos vision is to satisfy our customers financial needs and help them succeed financially. News, insights and perspectives from Wells Fargo are also available at Wells Fargo Stories.
Terillium has one of the most experienced teams of ERP experts in the country. Combining Terilliums ERP and industry expertise with NetSuite will greatly benefit companies in the market for cloud ERP.

Terillium, a Platinum level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) consulting company, announced today it has joined the NetSuite Solution Provider Program. The relationship with Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit allows Terillium to increase its cloud service offerings to meet the growing demand for cloud solutions among Terilliums mid-market client base in the manufacturing, distribution, and services industries.

Since its inception, Terillium has helped hundreds of mid-market companies realize the business benefits of implementing end-to-end ERP applications. Terillium will leverage its industry and Oracle ERP expertise to implement, customize, integrate, and extend NetSuite cloud solutions.

Terilliums success is dependent on the success of our clients. This philosophy drives everything we do. Theres a reason NetSuite is one of the leading cloud ERP software suites on the market today. Offering NetSuite Cloud ERP to the businesses we work with is aligned with our mission to provide the best solutions and services possible, said Steve May, Vice President at Terillium.

We are delighted to have Terillium as a new provider. Terillium has one of the most experienced teams of ERP experts in the country. Combining Terilliums ERP and industry expertise with NetSuite will greatly benefit companies in the market for cloud ERP, said Craig West, Vice President of Channel Sales at Oracle NetSuite.

Launched in 2002, the NetSuite Solution Provider Program is the industrys leading cloud channel partner program. Since its inception, NetSuite has been a leader in partner success, breaking new ground in building and executing on the leading model to make the channel successful with NetSuite. A top choice for partners who are building new cloud ERP practices or for those expanding their existing practice to meet the demand for cloud ERP, NetSuite has enabled partners to transform their business model to fully capitalize on the revenue growth opportunity of the cloud. The NetSuite Solution Provider Program delivers unprecedented benefits that include highly attractive margins and range from business planning, sales, marketing and professional services enablement, to training and education.

Terillium will be presenting NetSuite as part of the upcoming Ultra Cloud ERP Webinar Series. Learn more.

About Terillium

Terillium is an award-winning Platinum level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork specialized in Enterprise Resource Planning solutions including JD Edwards, ERP Cloud, and NetSuite. Our team has unsurpassed product knowledge and is straightforward in their project approach. Terillium helps businesses with: on-premise and cloud ERP implementations, upgrades, support services, custom development, cloud services, software licensing, and special projects. https://terillium.com/

About Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit

Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit pioneered the Cloud Computing revolution in 1998, establishing the world's first company dedicated to delivering business applications over the internet. Today, Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit provides a suite of cloud-based financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR and omnichannel commerce software that runs the business of companies in more than 100 countries. http://www.netsuite.com.
 Pound Sunday Morning Burger At TR Fire Grill, we put a lot of work into making sure we deliver truly innovative and craveable craft food and beverages, paired with a fun and friendly atmosphere with outstanding service

Romacorp, Inc., parent company of TR Fire Grill is fired up to announce that Orlando Magazine has recognized the restaurant in the categories of Best Brunch, Best Appetizers, and Best Place for Cocktails as part of its 2017 Dining Awards. The Orlando Magazine Dining Awards recognize reader favorites across dozens of restaurant categories and are determined based on voting by members of the Orlando community. This is the latest in a continuous string of accolades for the Winter Park restaurant since its November 2015 opening, including TR Fire Grills recent win for Best Happy Hour at the 2017 Ovations Awards.

Orlando continues to be recognized as a leader in the national culinary scene, with new dining concepts popping up every year, said Stephen K. Judge, President and Chief Executive Officer of Romacorp, Inc. At TR Fire Grill, we put a lot of work into making sure we deliver truly innovative and craveable craft food and beverages, paired with a fun and friendly atmosphere with outstanding service. In just a short time since opening, weve been honored to receive a variety awards in multiple categories, and were delighted to be recognized by our guests and the community for our efforts.

Earning a coveted spot on the Best Appetizers list are TR Fire Grills scrumptious snacks, table shares and flatbreads. Guest favorites include the Smoked Chicken Lollipops, Prime Rib Egg Rolls, Smoked Meatballs, Roasted Chicken and Avocado Flatbread, and the Oven Baked Pizza Dip, which are almost too good to share. Our Oven Baked Pizza Dip has been described by some guests as life changing, and thats a moniker that we take a lot of pride in, said Judge.

Theres no waffling around to find the Best Brunch on Saturdays and Sundays with a menu that features fan favorites such as Flank Steak & Eggs, the  Pound Sunday Morning Burger, Chicken & Waffles, and Southwest Eggs Benedict, as well as TR Fire Grills popular bottomless mimosas. Making brunch even more enjoyable, TR Fire Grill invites guests to bring their favorite pooch to brunch as the restaurant hosts Yappy Days on the patio every weekend.

Touting expertly handcrafted cocktails made in-house with local ingredients, TR Fire Grill is also excited to raise a glass to its spot on the list for Best Place for Cocktails in Orlando. The restaurants Local Hour was recognized earlier this year by the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce, Park Avenue Merchants Association, and the Winter Park/Maitland Observer as their 2017 Ovations Award winner for Best Happy Hour. Taking place every day from 5pm  7pm, Local Hour features food and drink specials highlighting local and regional TR Fire Grill partners including Winter Park Distilling, St. Augustine Distillery, Ten10 Brewing Company, and Central 28 Beer Company.

About Romacorp, Inc.

Romacorp, Inc. is the parent company of TR Fire Grill, a new chef-inspired American bistro located in Winter Park, Florida and Honolulu, Hawaii, with an additional location planned for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia later in 2017. Launched in November 2015, TR Fire Grill is an award-winning restaurant recognized as Best New Restaurant (2016 Winter Park Maitland Ovations Award), Best Craft Cocktail Bar (2016 Orlando Sentinel Best Bets Award), Best Happy Hour (2017 Winter Park Maitland Ovations Award) and for Best Cuisine in Orlando (2015 and 2016 OpenTable Awards). TR Fire Grill is also proud to partner with the Make-A-Wish Foundation (http://www.cnfl.wish.org), one of the world's leading children's charities, in an effort to help grant the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses across Central and Northern Florida. For more information about Romacorp, Inc. and our new TR Fire Grill concept, visit http://www.trfiregrill.com.

For more information about TR Fire Grill franchising opportunities, please visit http://www.trfiregrillfranchise.com or call (866) 981-0586.
We are thrilled to have been awarded WBE certification. Diverse businesses add significant value to the Massachusetts economy and these certifications shine a light on who those businesses are to enhance such economic contributions.

Banner Environmental Services, an environmental services company headquartered in Massachusetts, announced today they have received Women Business Enterprise (WBE) certification.

The WBE certification is the result of an extensive process and on-site interview by the Supplier Diversity Office (SDO) to determine that the company meets the state statutes and regulations and is at least 51% women-owned. Certification and access to the various phases of state purchasing and contracting provides a valuable service to WBEs, which are the states fastest growing business sector. By partnering with companies that are WBE-certified, corporations, non-profit organizations, and government agencies can demonstrate their commitment to supporting and strengthening diversity.

We are thrilled to have been awarded WBE certification, shared Stephanie Robl, Co-owner, Banner Environmental Services. Diverse businesses add significant value to the Massachusetts economy and these certifications shine a light on who those businesses are to enhance such economic contributions.

Banner Environmental Services is a licensed asbestos contractor in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with extended service to Marthas Vineyard and Nantucket. In addition to asbestos testing, surveying, and abatement, the company also provides mold removal and remediation, black and gray water clean-up, complete and select demolition services, as well as vermiculite removal. Their environmental services are offered for residential, commercial, and institutional projects.

For more information on Banner Environmental Services, visit bannerenvironmental.com.

# # #

About Banner Environmental Services

With over 25 years of environmental experience, Banner Environmental Services, Inc., both a WBE and DCAMM certified company, focuses on the mission of promoting positive change for their customers, the community, and the environment. Banner Environmental Services is fully-licensed in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, covering the Greater Boston area and including Cape Cod and the Islands. For more information, including comprehensive services provided, visit bannerenvironmental.com.
It is especially vital for members of the industry to ensure they are compliant with the latest FDA requirements for validation

Tunnell Consulting announced that Julia ONeill, principal and statistician, will be sharing her insights in a presentation of The Key Role of Specifications in Process Validation, at the Process Validation Summit 2017, May 18 and 19, at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia. The event will bring together leaders from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to explore processes, strategies and new approaches to ensuring that they meet or exceed regulatory expectations and avoid costly FDA delays.

ONeill also recently presented at the Regulatory Sciences for Biologics and Vaccines Conference in Leesburg, Virginia, which focused on accelerating and enabling manufacturing innovation. During that conference, which was held in April, the subject of ONeills presentation was Lifecycle approach to validation supports accelerated approvals. She also took part in a panel discussion in Aprils Outsourced Pharma event in Boston, where she moderated discussions of Winning workforce: A new generation in the supply chain. and FDA, regulatory, and quality dynamics for innovative outsourcing.

As regulators require ongoing monitoring of processes throughout a drug products lifecycle, pharmaceutical companies must modernize their validation and risk management approaches. This event will cover these issues, along with discussions of global technology transfer, process validation lifecycle management, and how the Drug Supply Chain Security Act relates to validation.

ONeills presentation explores alternative approaches for specification setting, and recommends specific strategies for both traditional and accelerated validation. I am looking forward to attending this important industry event, said ONeill. It is especially vital for members of the industry to ensure they are compliant with the latest FDA requirements for validation. During her presentation, ONeill will discuss the challenges of gaining information about true product requirements, and the challenges involved in breakthrough or orphan drugs, where data may be limited.

ONeill is a CMC statistician with over 30 years of experience bridging statistics and chemical engineering, applied to a broad range of challenges in vaccines, biologics, pharmaceutical and chemical development and manufacturing. Prior to joining Tunnell, she was responsible for development and deployment of process robustness strategy for manufacturing at Merck. She is an expert at resolving challenging problems using statistical, engineering, and Six Sigma methods.

About Tunnell Consulting

Founded in 1962 and serving many of the worlds leading life sciences firms and government agencies, Tunnell Consulting, Inc. integrates strategic, technical, process, and organizational skills to design and implement sustainable solutions that exactly meet client needs. With deep industry knowledge, extensive scientific credentials, and superior measurable results, we consistently boost the operating performance of each unique client we serve. To learn more, visit us online at http://www.tunnellconsulting.com.
Bill Proudman, Co-founder of WMFDP, discusses the LGBT community and the discrimination they face in the tech industry. Discrimination in any form is unacceptable, and the LGBT community is a vital segment of the workforce.

An April, 2017, study conducted by Oakland non-profit Kapor Center for Social Impact, the Tech Leavers Studythe first of its kindhas taken a detailed look at discrimination in the tech industry, citing an annual loss in the sector of about $16 billion.(1)

The study conducted a national survey of over 2,000 adults who left a job in a technology-related industry or function within the last three years. Nearly 40 percent of those who left cited unfairness and mistreatment as their primary reasons for leaving. With an average cost of replacing a professional tech employee at $144,000 due to lost productivity, recruiting, salary, etc., a large tech company with 10,000 engineers would lose approximately $27 million per year by allowing a culture of discrimination to persist.

An earlier detailed study reported that Americas corporate losses from bias and discrimination added up to $64 billion.(2) This new studys conclusion of $16 billion in losses for tech does correlate with that, remarked Bill Proudman, co-founder of Portland, Oregon-based diversity and inclusion consultancy firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners (WMFDP).

While bias and unfair treatment in tech is becoming more and more high-profilethanks in large part to breaking news stories regarding toxic work environments at Uber and other tech companies(3)what has not been as well-documented is the treatment of techs LGBT employees, who have experienced the most bullying in comparison to their peers, the study reports. Twenty percent of LGBT employees had been subjected to bullying in the workplace, often citing mistreatment as the number one contributing factor in their decision to part ways. Public humiliation or embarrassment was more prominent among LGBT employees as compared to other groups.

While employees of diverse backgrounds left employment due to unfairness, their experiences differed according to race, gender and sexual orientation. Nearly one-quarter of men and women of color experienced stereotyping. Almost one-third of women of color were passed over for promotionmore than in any other group. One in ten women in tech reported experiencing inappropriate sexual attention.

Discrimination in any form is unacceptable, and the LGBT community is a vital segment of the workforce, Proudman said. After two decades in the trenches, weve found that shutting out any segment is detrimental to the resthence the idea of FULL diversity and inclusion.

The situation has spilled over into the governmental arena. There is concern on both sides of the aisle that the current administration will repeal an earlier executive order designed to protect LGBT federal workers from discrimination.(4)

The need for cooperation is paramount, Proudman pointed out. The quick fix of telling your employees to be politically correct and skirting the issue has been ineffective. The tech industry has underlying cultural issues, and youve got to start at the top and work your way down. It takes dedication, but most people, when asked, are more than willing to put in the hard work.

This sentiment is echoed by the study, which concluded, Diversity and inclusion initiatives can improve culture and reduce turnoverif they are done right. Develop and implement a diversity and inclusion strategy that starts with unequivocal leadership from the CEO and executive team, is comprehensive, and implements multiple initiatives.

About White Men As Full Diversity Partners (WMFDP):

White Men As Full Diversity Partners (WMFDP) is a diversity and leadership development firm founded in 1996 by Bill Proudman, Michael Welp, Ph.D., and JoAnn Morris in Portland, Oregon. WMFDP takes an unorthodox approach towards eradicating bias and discrimination in the workplace. Its client list includes Alaska Airlines, Dell, Lockheed Martin, Northwestern Mutual, Chevron Drilling & Completions, The Nature Conservancy, Mass Mutual, and others. The majority of C-level executives are white and male, and they are frequently omitted from a vital role in diversity and equality. Proudman and Welp observed that these critical subjects were not being taken to the doorstep of these leadersall to the detriment of struggling minorities and the economy as a whole. With a background that includes extensive field work in post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, Proudman and Welp have dedicated the last two decades to educating and engaging leaders of any race, color, gender or orientation. Welp is the author of the book, Four Days to Change. With an insightful foreword by Proudman, the book chronicles the journey from rural South Africa to the boardrooms of Americaall to lay the groundwork of a global paradigm shift.

1. Kapor Center for Social Impact. TECH LEAVERS STUDY. Web.

2. Welp, Michael. Workforce Discrimination Is Costing Business $64 Billion Every Year. Entrepreneur. 27 July 2016. Web. 09 May 2017.

3. Spector, Nicole. After Sexual Harassment Claims at Uber and Tesla, Is Silicon Valley Prone to Discrimination? NBCNews.com. NBCUniversal News Group, 09 Mar. 2017. Web. 09 May 2017.

4. Whats at Stake for LGBT Rights in the Workplace Under Trump | Money. Time. Time. Web. 09 May 2017.
This is a very special project for us that will change lives for years to come, said Clearinghouse CDFI President and CEO Douglas Bystry.

Clearinghouse Community Development Financial Institution (Clearinghouse CDFI) announced today that it has closed a New Markets Tax Credit transaction with General Communication Inc. (GCI) for the construction of an additional phase of TERRA (Terrestrial for Every Region of Rural Alaska)a hybrid fiber-optic microwave network. The project will establish broadband internet access and directly connect the five Inupiat Eskimo communities of Buckland, Noorvik, Selawik, Kiana, and Noatak, Alaska with the internet backbone. When completed, the TERRA network will deliver critical bandwidth to native organizations, school districts, regional health corporations, and individual residents throughout these distressed, northwest Alaskan villages.

This is a very special project for us that will change lives for years to come, said Clearinghouse CDFI President and CEO Douglas Bystry. We are honored to help GCI bring this basic, yet critical communication resource to Native Alaskan communities that previously have been isolated.

The TERRA project is Clearinghouse CDFIs first loan in the State of Alaska as part of its ongoing service area expansion benefiting sovereign nations throughout the western United States. The TERRA network currently serves 72 communities in western Alaskamany of which are so remote, they are only accessible by boat or plane. Once complete, the new broadband network will deliver multiple benefits and services throughout the Norton Sound region of rural Alaska.

GCI has delivered high-speed internet to some of the most remote locations on earth, said Vice President of GCI Business Lewis Schnaper. Weve seen how access to broadband can improve healthcare, education, and public safety and understand its importance. We are excited that our NMTC financing from Clearinghouse CDFI will help to extend this transformational service and bring more economic opportunity to additional communities in Alaska.

The current project will also create 100 construction jobs and 13 permanent jobs paying an average salary significantly higher than the area living wage. Additionally, countless new employment opportunities will become possible thanks to the introduction of reliable internet access in this remote area.

US Bank was the tax credit investor in this $10 million transaction.

~

ABOUT NEW MARKETS TAX CREDITS

New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) were established by Congress in 2000 to encourage the investment of private capital in designated low-income communities in order to create jobs, generate economic activity and improve the quality of services in low-income communities and to low-income persons. NMTCs attract investment capital to low-income communities by permitting individual and corporate investors to receive a 39% tax credit against their federal income tax return over a period of seven years in exchange for making qualified equity investments in specialized financial institutions called Community Development Entities (CDEs). In turn, CDEs provide below-market financing to transformative development projects in low-income communities across the country. For more information, visit http://www.cdfifund.gov.

ABOUT CLEARINGHOUSE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FINANCIAL INSTITUTION (Clearinghouse CDFI):

Clearinghouse Community Development Financial Institution (Clearinghouse CDFI) addresses unmet credit needs in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Sovereign Nations in the Western U.S. Clearinghouse CDFI is an industry leader helping to bridge the gap between conventional lending standards and the needs of low-income and distressed communities.

Over 20 years, Clearinghouse CDFI has funded $1.4 billion in total loans for over 1,780 projects which have created or retained more than 16,000 jobs and benefit over 1.4 million individuals. Clearinghouse CDFI is also a B Corpa certification received from the nonprofit B Lab. B Corps are companies who meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability, and use business as a force for good. At December 31, 2016, Clearinghouse CDFI has total assets of $363 million. More information is available at: http://www.clearinghousecdfi.com.

Media Contact:

Ron Demeter, Partner

Vectis Strategies on behalf of Clearinghouse CDFI

Phone: 310-614-1059

Email: rdemeter(at)vectisstrategies.com
American Residential Services (ARS), a Memphis, Tenn. based, privately-held national provider of air conditioning, heating and plumbing services, has partnered with Nest Labs, Inc. to include the Nest Learning Thermostat as a standard component of most of its middle and upper tier residential HVAC system installations. ARS will also offer professional installation of Nest Thermostats as an optional upgrade when performing service and preventative maintenance in previously installed systems.

We are delighted to be recognized as a Nest Pro Elite partner across our network of more than 70 service centers. As a national leader in the residential HVAC and plumbing industry, ARS service centers can now leverage this exciting technology enabling homes to be smarter and more energy-efficient, says Luis Orbegoso, President and COO of ARS. The benefits that a smart and connected home offers are very compelling. This partnership will allow us to offer even more value to our customers with Nests cutting-edge, yet approachable technology.

While Nest products are designed so that homeowners can choose to install themselves, Nest wants to make it easy for those whod prefer to take advantage of the benefits of a pro installation, says Gene LaNois, Head of Professional Channel, Nest. ARS shares our passion for enabling the thoughtful home, and were excited that they will be incorporating the Nest Thermostat into their installation offerings.

The Nest Thermostat learns the temperatures a homeowner prefers and then programs itself. Independent studies have shown that the Nest Thermostat saves homeowners on average 10-12% on heating and 15% on cooling costs. Nests algorithms allow customers to monitor their energy history daily, in addition to receiving an easy-to-understand monthly report. The Nest Thermostat will also alert homeowners in the event it detects certain problems with the homes HVAC system.

The Nest Thermostat and other Nest products are now available at all ARS Network branches that provide HVAC services and installations.

-See attachment for photo, and additional photography/collateral available upon request-

From Left to Right: Chris Mellon, CMO & SVP (ARS); Dave Slott, CEO (ARS); Luis Orbegoso, President & COO (ARS); Marwan Fawaz, CEO (Nest); Peter Simpson, Digital Director (ARS); Jim McMahon, CFO (ARS)

Description: ARS Leadership Team Visits Nest Headquarters to Announce National Partnership

ABOUT ars.com [AMERICAN RESIDENTIAL SERVICES __title__ AMERICAN RESIDENTIAL SERVICES]: Based in Memphis, Tenn., privately-owned ARS operates a network of more than 70 locally-managed service centers in 23 states, with approximately 6,500 employees. The ARS network features industry-leading brands including, A.J. Perri, Aksarben ARS, Allgood, Andys Statewide, ARS, Aspen Air Conditioning, Atlas Trillo, Beutler, Blue Dot, Brothers, Columbus Worthington Air, Comfort Heating & Air, Conway Services, Efficient Attic Systems (EAS), Florida Home Air Conditioning, Green Star Home Services, McCarthy Services, Rescue Rooter/ Proserv, Rescue Rooter, RighTime Home Services, RS Andrews, The Irish Plumber, Unique Services, "Will" Fix It, and Yes! Air Conditioning and Plumbing. United by Exceptional Service, the ARS / Rescue Rooter Network serves both residential and light commercial customers by providing heating, cooling, indoor air quality, plumbing, drain cleaning, sewer line, radiant barrier, insulation and ventilation services. Each location has a knowledgeable team of trained specialists, who have undergone rigorous drug testing and criminal background checks. Providing exceptional service and ensuring the highest standards of quality, ARS has the experience to do any job right  the first time, with all work fully guaranteed.

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First, L.A., then New York and now, the City of Pork Shoulders  rather, Big Shoulders -- where foodies in Chicago can Taste the Difference.

Following the rollout of online gastronomic taste maps of Los Angeles and New York City, Coast Packing Company, the leading supplier of animal fat shortenings in the Western U.S., is yet again putting its website where its taste buds are (http://bit.ly/2nBvhhd), mapping restaurants and eateries, from Wicker Park to Hyde Park, from the Loop to Wrigleyville, where locals can try dishes prepared with lard or beef tallow.

The Chicagoland litany  some 35+ strong  just scratches the surface and will expand over time. Still, discerning diners will find the Michelin-starred (Acadia, Blackbird, Duseks, El Ideas, Long Man & Eagle, Oriole and Roister) alongside popular hangouts like Michael Jordans Steakhouse, Bang Bang Pie Shop and six convenient locations of Stans Donuts & Coffee.

The best way to understand how much our food benefits from healthy animal fats  as opposed to heavily processed, industrially produced substitutes  is to go out on the town and experience what Chicagos amazing chefs are up to, said Eric R. Gustafson, Coast Packing CEO. While the conversation about the health benefits of any given food or ingredient is continuous  and, indeed, will probably lack an endpoint in any of our lifetimes  most of us have a pretty fair idea of what tastes good (even if we cant always say why). Artificial trans fats are out, and minimally processed animal fats  in the form of lard, derived from pork, and beef tallow  are decidedly making a comeback, he noted.

In terms of freshness, flavor and texture, there really is no comparison, which is exactly why were so delighted when consumers taste for themselves, Gustafson said. Toward that end, we at Coast Packing are continuing our efforts to compile a running list of establishments where consumers can let their palette make the call. Having begun in Los Angeles, we have now expanded that list to New York City and Chicago. Next on our itinerary: the great state of Texas.

Have a favorite restaurant that puts lard or beef tallow on the menu (or just in some of its prize dishes)? If so, drop Coast an email at info@coastpacking.com and the company will put it on the map  in L.A. , New York, Chicago or anywhere in the U.S. Consumers can also post an image or link to the eatery via Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest, etc., with the hashtag #LardOnTheMenu or #TallowOnTheMenu.

And remember to praise the lard.

About Coast Packing Company

Now marking its 95th year in business, Coast Packing Company (http://www.coastpacking.com), a closely held corporation, is the number one supplier of animal fat shortenings  particularly lard and beef tallow -- in the Western United States. The company sells to major manufacturers, distributors, retailers, smaller food service operations and leading bakeries. The company participates actively in various ethnic markets  from Hispanic retail chains, with its VIVA brand, to various Asian specialty markets. Based in Vernon, Calif., Coast Packing Company is regional, national and, increasingly, global. In some cases, supplier relationships are multigenerational, extending back 50 years and more. Coast is a founding member of the Healthy Fats Coalition (http://www.healthyfatscoalition.org/).

For more information about Coast Packing Company, visit: http://www.coastpacking.com. Follow us via social media on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/coastpackingco, Twitter @coastpackingco and Pinterest http://www.pinterest.com/coastpackingco.
Michael Gerard, Chief Marketing Officer, e-Spirit The power of content to impact a customers digital experience is unprecedented. The most effective marketers will leverage the proliferation of channels and marketing technologies to tap into this power of content to drive customer engagement ..."

e-Spirit Inc., maker of the best-of-breed FirstSpirit content experience hub, today announced that Michael Gerard has joined its executive team as Chief Marketing Officer. Mr. Gerard will be a key driver in helping e-Spirit continue its rapid growth across North America and Europe. He will oversee e-Spirits global marketing team, focusing on marketing strategy, brand awareness, demand generation and sales enablement.

I am very excited about the expertise that Michael brings to the team in leading and scaling global marketing software companies, said Udo Straesser, chief revenue officer for e-Spirit. e-Spirit is experiencing its largest year-over-year growth in our 18 year history, and we have greatly increased our presence in North America where we grew our customer base by 50 percent. The addition of Michael to our executive team will help to maintain this momentum, solidifying our global marketing success in the coming years.

Its an exciting time to be joining the organization, said Michael Gerard, chief marketing officer for e-Spirit. The power of content to impact a customers digital experience is unprecedented; and the most effective marketers will leverage the proliferation of channels and marketing technologies to tap into this power of content to drive customer engagement and business growth. e-Spirit is a leader in enabling companies to achieve this vision, delivering truly personalized and omnichannel digital experiences for their customers. They are already helping many of the worlds leading brands to meet their digital experience needs, and preparing them to meet future demands. e-Spirits FirstSpirit content management software solution gives customers the flexibility and agility needed to build digital ecosystems that uniquely address their strategic business needs. In addition, their market-leading Content as a Service (CaaS) solution is uniquely positioned to enable customers to further unlock the power of digital content to drive business growth and differentiate their products and services.

Mr. Gerard brings over 25 years of marketing and sales experience to e-Spirit, having helped many of the worlds largest technology organizations to develop and execute their marketing strategies. His specialties include leading global teams to tap into the power of digital marketing strategies, coupled with traditional marketing tactics to drive awareness, leads and revenue. Prior to joining e-Spirit, Michael was the CMO of Curata, a leader in the content marketing software space. Prior to Curata, Michael was the head of IDC's CMO and Sales Advisory Practices where he worked with companies such as Oracle, IBM, Citrix, Symantec, Salesforce.com, Adobe, Eloqua and Marketo to improve their marketing and sales productivity.

Michael has presented at leading industry events, such as IDCs annual Directions event, MIT Sloan School of Management's events, and Sales 2.0 conferences. Michael is often cited in leading publications, including Content Marketing Institute, Sales and Marketing Management, and Marketing News by AMA; and has been recognized as a Top 50 Content Marketing Influencer. He received his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a BS in Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and an MS in Engineering from Northeastern University.

About e-Spirit

e-Spirit changes the way companies in every sector monetize their content. It is a leader in enabling companies to unlock the value of digital content and transform the way they communicate with customers and employees. FirstSpirit combines all systems, applications, data and content into a central content experience hub that helps customers create engaging customer experiences. It gives companies the infrastructure needed to efficiently supply increasingly large quantities of personalized content for a growing number of channels and touchpoints along the customer journey, allowing them to systematically reach customers worldwide.

With FirstSpirit, FirstSpirit Cloud and FirstSpirit CaaS, e-Spirit offers users diverse solutions for significantly accelerating the time-to-market of their communication for products and brands and rolling out digital marketing measures target group specific and in real time.

e-Spirit was founded in 1999, is part of the adesso Group and has offices in 16 locations in the US, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. Customers include international brands and corporations such as LOreal Luxe, BASF, Bosch, Commerzbank, EDEKA, MAN, Media-Saturn and many others. http://www.e-Spirit.com
When entrepreneurs are looking for a business ownership opportunity, breaking into the residential cleaning industry may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But with more than $50 billion in annual sales and the average cleaning business making around $1 million every year, its clear that theres room for business owners to grow and make the segment their own.

Thats why more and more people are deciding to franchise with Maid Right. The brands unique business modelthat includes both Master and unit franchiseesis positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for residential cleaning services across the country. And its clear that its concept is catching on among consumers and business owners alike. Right now, the Maid Right team is made up of 36 Master Franchisees and 150 unit franchisees that serve around 3,000 customers. That means that its annual system-wide revenue tops $10 million. But despite that success, the brand knows that theres still room for growth.

The residential cleaning industry has never been more popular, and we offer our franchisees a proven system that cant be found anywhere else. Thats what continues to make the Maid Right brand stand out from the crowdwe go above and beyond to ensure that our local owners have the tools and resources that they need to succeed, said Scott Thompson, vice president of development for Maid Rights parent company Premium Franchise Brands. From our IT systems and national vendor relationships to our marketing materials and top tier equipment, Maid Rights system is the one to beat.

Beyond its quality resources, Maid Rights franchise system also stands out in the franchising industry because of its affordable two-tiered model. Unit franchisees have the opportunity to launch a home-based franchise for as little as $1,600, where they go into peoples homes and clean them, ultimately creating relationships with customers in their local communities. Master Franchisees, on the other hand, grow alongside the Maid Right brand by serving as area developers who are responsible for establishing and maintaining a strong presence in their territory. Initial investments for that business ownership opportunity range from $208,000 to $600,000.

Right now, there are more than 240 territories that are still available for Master Franchisees to develop and own. Thats why over the course of the next year, Maid Right is planning to bring its unique concept to new communities with the help of passionate entrepreneurs who are excited to be a part of a rapidly growing brand. To make that development goal a reality, the brand has identified key target markets that offer the greatest potential for growth. Orlando, Florida is one of those areas.

Were confident that Orlando is going to be a hotbed of growth for the Maid Right brand in 2017 and beyond. As more families and young professionals continue to move into the city, the need for our services in the area will climb at an impressive rate, said Danessa Itaya, vice president of Maid Right. Maid Right has already established a strong presence in Florida markets like Miami, so Orlando is a natural next step as we continue to expand.

To jumpstart Maid Rights growth in Orlando, the brand is now actively searching for new Master Franchisees to team up with the brand in the area. In addition to joining a system thats backed by a network of supportive corporate team members and franchisees, the brands Master Owners have the opportunity to get in on the ground level of one of the franchising industrys fastest growing segments.

With consumer demand for residential cleaning services at an all-time high, Maid Rights growth potential is seemingly limitless. But the benefits of our system dont stop thereweve created a system that allows entrepreneurs to give back to their local communities, Thompson said. By helping unit franchisees get their businesses off the ground and providing consumers with a job well done, Maid Rights Master Franchisees have the opportunity to be a part of an incredibly rewarding business ownership experience.

Corporate Team Member Turned General Manager Finds Success Through Maid Rights Supportive Network of Master Franchisees

One Maid Right team member that values the brands ability to give back is TJ Kissane. After starting out with Maid Rights sister company JAN-PRO, Kissane transitioned to a new role with the residential cleaning brand shortly after its formation. Initially serving as its director of training, Kissane saw first-hand how Maid Rights Master Franchisees have the ability to take their businesses to the next level in their local communities by teaming up with individual unit owners. Thats why when the opportunity presented itself for Kissane to take over the role of general manager of the brands company owned Roswell, Georgia territory, he jumped at the chance.

Now working on the same level as Maid Rights other Master Owners, Kissane has the opportunity to expand the brands reach across the Georgia community. And with 12 unit franchise owners working out of his office, he has the ability to give other aspiring entrepreneurs the chance to be a part of the brands ever-growing system.

Maid Right offers entrepreneurs a one of a kind business ownership opportunityit feels like the American Dream wrapped up into one neat package. If you come in, work hard and determine how to push your business to its fullest potential, theres no limit to how successful you can be, Kissane said. Maid Right offers its local owners more tools to be successful than the average franchise system. From both the technical and relationship sides of the business, we go above and beyond to ensure that our owners are creating positive relationships with members of their communities.

How Maid Rights Unique Business Model is Setting Master Franchisees Up for Long-Term Success in Denver, Colorado

Maid Rights one of a kind franchising model has proven itself to be successful in a variety of different regions. Outside of its home base in the Southeast, the brand has also established a strong presence out West with the help of its Master Franchisees in Denver, Colorado.

Ross Miller and Rob Ratchinsky first discovered Maid Right after looking into potential business ownership opportunities in the area. Since officially launching their business last summer, the longtime friends and business partners have already solidified their position as the residential cleaning brand to beat in the city.

Rob and I have known one another for 10 years. Weve always talked about starting something on our own, so when the opportunity to franchise with Maid Right came up, we knew we couldnt pass on it. We havent looked back since, said Miller. We decided to franchise with Maid Right over other brands because of its unique model. Its rare to find a concept that allows you to become a part of a successful system while also giving back to your local community. Being visible to potential customers and forming partnerships with other companies to gain more business is a key task for us, and were looking forward to boosting Maid Rights brand awareness as we continue to grow in Denver.

With a handful of locations currently up and running, Miller and Ratchinsky are focused on expanding by creating relationships with key players in the Denver area. By introducing Maid Rights concept and Master Franchisee model to both prospective owners and consumers in the area, the duo is ensuring that theyll grow at a rapid yet sustainable pace.

We absolutely love Maid Rights model. Theres nothing else like it, especially in a tough industry like residential cleaning. Most companies pay their employees an hourly minimum wage, which means that they arent truly invested in the business. But with Maid Right, unit owners are invested in the success of their own company. That means that theyre more dedicated to their work, ultimately making our model different, said Miller. There are so many reasons why Maid Rights model works really well, but thats one of the main factors fueling our growth. The brands concept attracts top tier entrepreneurs, and were confident that well continue to experience success as we welcome more people into our local system.

Experienced Entrepreneur Bob Cole Taps into Maid Rights Strong Growth Potential to Develop the Brand in Boca Raton, Florida

Maid Right Master Franchisees are also experiencing success in the Sunshine State. Bob Cole, for example, decided to leave his corporate job with JAN-PRO behind to become his own boss and launch his own business when Maid Rights opportunity first launched. With his sights set on continued expansion, Cole started recruiting unit franchisees.

I was looking for a way to get back to South Florida when Maid Right launched its franchising opportunity. Since I was familiar with its Master and unit franchisee model, I knew that the brands system was something that could work in any community. So I signed on to develop the Maid Right brand in Boca Raton, said Cole. So far, weve been incredibly successful. We have 14 unit franchisees working with us to boost brand awareness in the area, and were experiencing growth every year.

Thats a trend that Cole expects to continue as he continues developing the brand across Boca Raton. Hes planning to add between six and eight new unit franchisees to his system this year, ultimately enhancing the brands support system and network in Florida. That increased man power will also enable Coles team to reach even more consumers in the state, which will continue to fuel Maid Rights growth and momentum going forward.

By tapping into that strong potential and working with Maid Rights corporate team to see long-term success, Cole is confident that the brand will solidify its position at the forefront of Floridas increasingly popular residential cleaning industry.

Every member of the Maid Right team is incredibly supportive of me and my businessits clear that theyre invested in seeing me succeed. Thats something thats evident across the entire system, which is why theres such a great sense of community throughout the entire brand, Cole said. In the months and years to come, I have no doubt that Maid Right will continue to fine tune its system and enhance its opportunity for both Master and unit owners. Thats why Im looking forward to growing alongside Maid Right and being a part of this top tier community.
Weaver Nut Company We desire to have even greater tasting chocolates, while keeping pricing competitive...you will see increased efficiencies as well as even better quality formulations leads to an end result of fantastic quality chocolates at a very competitive price

Weaver Nut Company, Inc. is excited to announce the addition of new chocolate production capabilities to their Ephrata, Pennsylvania location. The Ephrata location is well known for its contribution to the Weaver Chocolates line, which consists of premium panned, enrobed, and molded chocolates. As a vertically integrated manufacturer, Weaver Nut Company, Inc. purchases the highest quality ingredients directly from the growers. This allows them to create delicious farm to mouth fresh chocolates in their state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.

Weaver Nuts recent investment in the latest chocolate production equipment allows the company to continue its tradition of delivering the finest quality, premium flavor, and competitively priced chocolates to their clients, always backed by Weavers 100 percent satisfaction guarantee. The latest additions at the Ephrata facility mean even higher quality, new formulation capabilities, and more luscious chocolates than ever before  created to please chocolate lovers everywhere with indulgent, decadent, smooth, and flavorful chocolate confections.

Weaver Nuts line of premium chocolates includes a grand sampling of distinctive chocolates from the classics like chocolate covered nuts, raisins, malt balls, and advances to the cutting edge, including chocolate covered candy corn, gummies, espresso beans, and other delights. Additionally, Weaver Nuts Premium Chocolates consist of a number of specialty selections featuring nonpareils, dark chocolate orange peels, milk chocolate butter crunch, and other scrumptious pleasures. It is easy to see Weaver Nut Company is passionate about chocolate, artfully designing each delicious bite with quality, integrity, and enthusiasm!

We desire to have even greater tasting chocolates, while keeping pricing competitive. In fact, you will see increased efficiencies as well as even better quality formulations leads to an end result of fantastic quality chocolates at a very competitive price. Taste the difference for yourself, add our Weaver Chocolates to your next order!  Edward Weaver, COO Weaver Nut Company, Inc.

Located in lovely Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Weaver Nut Company began in 1975; built on the foundation of quality, integrity, and enthusiasm that persists today in each and every product offering from chocolates and nuts, to coffees and teas, to nuts and dried fruits, and a vast collection of extraordinary gourmet foods. As a family business, the Weaver Nut Company goal remains the same, serving customers the way they want to be served.

Weaver Nut Company, Inc. promises the highest quality products from Weaver Chocolates to gourmet foods and beverages sourced from around the globe, always delivered with outstanding customer service and fair, competitive pricing.

Shop today at http://www.weavernut.com and choose your favorites, while saving time and money, by selecting delectable Weaver Chocolates along with tasty nuts, dried fruits, candies, coffees, teas, and gourmet foods from around the world.

Bio: From their home basement, the Weaver Family launched their business more than 40 years ago with the mission to serve customers as they want to be served with quality, integrity and enthusiasm. Since that time, the company has grown into Weaver Nut Company, Inc. thanks to a fully dedicated team and a vast array of satisfied customers. Today the company includes Food Brokers International, the Amish Maid private label, Weaver Chocolates, Land of the Gummies, and Weaver Nut Sweets and Snacks retail and online. Visit http://www.weavernut.com today, choose your favorites, and experience the delectable difference that is Weaver Nut Company, Inc.
Dutch Bros Cold Brew Coffee Handcrafted, and nitrogen-infused, Dutch Bros Cold Brew Coffee officially launches on Friday, May 19.

Friday, May 19, marks the official launch of Dutch Bros' Nitrogen-Infused Cold Brew Coffee.

On Friday, all Dutch Bros locations will have Cold Brew Coffee available for purchase. Dutch Bros Cold Brew Coffee is made from the companys private reserve, three-bean blend and water. It is nitrogen infused, and contains no added sweeteners.

"I am biased, but this is the best cold brew on the planet," says Travis Boersma, President and Co-Founder Dutch Bros Coffee.

Handcrafted and chilled from beginning to end to ensure consistency and flavor, Dutch Bros Cold Brew Coffee stays refrigerated from production to the customers hands. Dutch Bros Cold Brew is bottled in 11.5-oz. nitrogen-infused cans enabling customers to purchase this ready-to-drink product and drink it at their own leisure while on the go, at work or at home.

The nitrogen infused cold brew is not only loaded with caffeine, but also has numerous benefits. Dutch Bros Cold Brew Coffee is amped up with more caffeine than a typical quad shot of espresso, this is due to the Cold Brew process, coffee being steeped with cold water over a long period of time, instead of the typical hot water steep, which dilutes the caffeine content in espresso. Cold Brew Coffee is also sugar-free, as it is comprised of coffee and water only. Cold Brew Coffee is high in antioxidants, as well as low in acidity.

Dutch Bros Cold Brew can be enjoyed straight from the can or over ice. In true Dutch Bros fashion, its Cold Brew is completely customizable with flavors and milk.

Dutch Bros Cold Brew is of highest of quality due to its use of Dutch Bros private-reserve with beans from Brazil, Colombia and El Salvador. Beans are roasted individually, in Grants Pass, Ore. then blended together to further ensure freshness and quality. The nitrogen infusion enables Dutch Bros Cold Brew Coffee to be creamier and richer than other Cold Brew products because nitrogen does not easily dissolve in water, leading Dutch Bros Cold Brew to be more velvety in nature.

###

About Dutch Bros Coffee

Dutch Bros Coffee is the countrys largest privately held, drive-thru coffee company, with over 280 locations and over 7,000 employees in seven states.

Dutch Bros serves specialty coffee, smoothies, freezes, teas and a private-label, Dutch Bros Blue Rebel energy drink.

The rich, proprietary coffee blend is handcrafted from start to finish. Every ingredient is measured, every process timed, and every cup perfected.

With a mission to serve as a role model in they community committed to doing the right thing, Dutch Bros donates over $2 million annually to nonprofit organizations and local causes selected by local owner-operators.

Dutch Bros Coffee is headquartered in Grants Pass, Ore., where it was founded in 1992 by Dane and Travis Boersma, brothers of Dutch descent.

To learn more about Dutch Bros, visit http://www.dutchbros.com, like Dutch Bros Coffee on Facebook or follow @DutchBros on Twitter.
With this latest release, we have created a solution that puts the power of real-time freight visibility back into the hands of the manufacturer and distributors, and at a very attractive price point.

Freight Exchange Network LLC, is pleased to announce the release of FreightTracer v2.5, which is an optimized release of the companies full truckload freight tracking platform targeting manufacturers, distributors, brokers and carriers. The SaaS, cloud-based web and mobile applications will be generally available to all customers on May 15, 2017.

FreightTracer v2.5 is an extremely powerful Full Truckload GPS Management Tool. Release 2.5 implements a new full-featured, freight control center dashboard that uses predictive analysis and real-time GPS tracking to provide up-to-date statistics on a companies freight. Also released, is an extremely powerful feature called DriverLink, which gives carriers and brokers the ability to assign drivers and dispatch shipments on tendered loads. FreightTracer also allows users to track the level of service being provided from carrier networks by tracking on-time pickups and deliveries and satisfaction scoring. Within minutes customers can be set up and running on the platform. There is no expensive hardware to purchase and customers pay one low monthly fee(1) for our entire platform. With FreightTracer, full freight visibility is now possible anywhere, anytime, across any carrier.

With this latest release, we have created a solution that puts the power of real-time freight visibility back into the hands of the manufacturer and distributors, and at a very attractive price point - especially for smaller companies unwilling to pay a big price tag. We are excited to show these capabilities to companies looking to gain visibility into their supply chain, said Mark Eichinger, FreightTracers VP of Product Management & Operations.

FreightTracer has also developed mobile applications for drivers that run on both Android and iOS mobile devices. The mobile applications are free and easy to download and install. FreightTracer only tracks drivers when they are dispatched on a load, while allowing drivers to disable tracking when they are on breaks. This latest release also provides powerful features that include POD uploads, driver alerts and driver onsite confirmations. We are very aware of driver privacy concerns and were therefore extremely driver-conscious when developing the latest releases of mobile applications. We understand that drivers demand an application that requires minimum interaction and touch and we feel we have accomplished our goal with this latest release. We want drivers to be very comfortable using our apps while working, said Eichinger.

For more information about FreightTracer, visit our website. We will be more than happy to speak with you about our product and schedule a demo for interested parties. This press release and other related content can also be found at our FreightTracer Blog.

(1) Our pricing model is based on monthly load volume per account.
Williams Syndrome Awareness Socks I was so happy when John and Mark said they could make a Williams Syndrome Awareness Sock

Johns Crazy Socks has released a series of Williams Syndrome Awareness Socks. These beautiful socks feature the blue and green hands and red heart that symbolize Williams syndrome (and is part of the WSA logo), against a white background. The company will donate $2 from the sale of each pair to the Williams Syndrome Association.

John Cronin, co-founder of Johns Crazy Socks, is a 21-year-old man with Down syndrome. He says, I want people to know about Williams syndrome, what people with Williams syndrome can do, and the challenges they face.

The idea for the Williams syndrome awareness sock came from a Long Island Mom, Kelly Dombroski, whose son Tyler, 17, has Williams syndrome. She heard about Johns Crazy Socks and the awareness socks and asked the company to create a sock. Kelly says, People with Williams syndrome face many challenges and shining a light on the condition will help everyone. I was so happy when John and Mark said they could make a Williams syndrome Awareness Sock.

Jennifer OByrne, the volunteer and event coordinator at the Association, says, Were very excited for the release of these awareness socks. Part of our mission includes increasing awareness and understanding of Williams syndrome. And the donation will enable us to do more for our individuals and their families.

What is Williams syndrome?

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a genetic condition that is present at birth and is characterized by medical problems, including cardiovascular disease, developmental delays and learning challenges. At the same time, people with WS often display striking verbal abilities, highly social personalities and an affinity for music. WS affects 1 in 10,000 people worldwide including an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people in the United States. It occurs equally in both males and females.

The Connection of Johns Crazy Socks with Williams syndrome

Down syndrome, which co-founder John Cronin has, shares many similarities with Williams syndrome including cardiac issues, developmental delays and learning disabilities. Like children with Down syndrome, children with Williams syndrome tend to be social, friendly and endearing. Every day, John demonstrates what a person with disabilities can do: he helps lead his business, works hard within that business and serves as the public face of the business. It is only natural for us to raise awareness of Williams syndrome.

Johns Crazy Socks and their Awareness Socks

Johns Crazy Socks is committed to demonstrating what is possible for people of all abilities. The company also has a core value of giving back. It donates 5 percent of earnings to the Special Olympics and has a series of Awareness Socks. The Down Syndrome Awareness Socks raise money for the National Down Syndrome Society and ACDS. The Autism Awareness Socks raise money for Autism Speaks and the Autism Society of America (Nassau/Suffolk Chapter).

Johns Crazy Socks offers other charity socks that raise money for breast cancer research, the Special Olympics and the Whaling Museum of Cold Spring Harbor, NY. Each month, the company publishes its Giving Back Report to let customers know about its charitable activities.

About Johns Crazy Socks

Johns Crazy Socks was co-founded by the father/son team of Mark and John Cronin. John says, We have a mission to spread happiness through socks. They opened their online store on December 19, 2016 and have managed to grow the company rapidly and have shipped more than 16,000 orders in less than five months.

Mark X. Cronin says, We offer over 1,200 different socks that people can love: beautiful, colorful, fun and crazy socks that let people express their passions and personalities. We deliver the socks through fast and personal service and every package includes some candy and a thank you note from John. The company ships world-wide, but John still makes personal local deliveries. John says, I like to meet our customers and make them happy.

Johns Crazy Socks has garnered media attention from ABC News, Money Magazine, The Mighty and Fox-5NY among other media outlets.

About the Williams Syndrome Association

The Williams Syndrome Association (WSA) is the most comprehensive resource for people and families living with Williams syndrome as well as doctors, researchers and educators. The WSA provides resources, support and the latest medical information to help people with Williams syndrome and their families.

You can learn more about John and Johns Crazy Socks at our website and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can subscribe to Johns videos on our YouTube channel.
The Mount Sinai Health System and The New Jewish Home are continuing their expansion of services to improve the care of hospitalized patients who require specialized post-acute or long-term care at a skilled nursing facility after leaving the hospital. Through the Mount Sinai-New Jewish Home Hospitalist Program, Mount Sinai doctors specializing in hospital care (known as hospitalists) will provide a seamless transition for patients who need nursing care at The New Jewish Home.

The transition of care between hospitals and skilled nursing facilities is a highly vulnerable time for patients. Information may not be adequately relayed and urgent priorities can be overlooked. This innovative model will facilitate greater communication and ensure the transfer of vital information between these venues, allowing patients to receive the expert care they need without interruption. The joint expertise of these two renowned institutions will provide enhanced protocols for follow-up care and will reduce the risk of re-hospitalization in order to provide the best possible outcomes for patients discharged from the hospital.

Building on The New Jewish Homes already deep and long-standing relationship with Mount Sinai, this new partnership will help accomplish our shared goal of improving care transitions for our patients, said Audrey Weiner, PhD, President and CEO, The New Jewish Home. This innovative model ensures the highest quality care for our patients.

We are excited about this next step in our partnership with The New Jewish Home, said Andrew Dunn, MD, MPH, SFHM, FACP, Chair-elect of the American College of Physicians Board of Regents, Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System. The collaboration will allow us to meet a growing need for high-quality nursing home care while strengthening our commitments to the patients and community we serve.

About The New Jewish Home

Serving New Yorkers of all faiths and ethnicities for 168 years, The New Jewish Home is transforming eldercare as we know it. One of the nations largest and most diversified notforprofit geriatric health and rehabilitation systems, Jewish Home serves 12,000 older adults each year, in their homes and on campuses in Manhattan and Westchester, through short-term rehabilitation, longterm skilled nursing, low-income housing, and a wide range of home health programs. Jewish Home believes that high quality care and personal dignity are everyones right, regardless of background or economic circumstances. Technology, innovation, applied research and new models of care put The New Jewish Home at the vanguard of eldercare providers across the country.

About the Mount Sinai Health System

The Mount Sinai Health System is an integrated health system committed to providing distinguished care, conducting transformative research, and advancing biomedical education. Structured around seven hospital campuses and a single medical school, the Health System has an extensive ambulatory network and a range of inpatient and outpatient servicesfrom community-based facilities to tertiary and quaternary care.

The System includes approximately 7,100 primary and specialty care physicians; 12 joint-venture ambulatory surgery centers; more than 140 ambulatory practices throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and 31 affiliated community health centers. Physicians are affiliated with the renowned Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is ranked among the highest in the nation in National Institutes of Health funding per investigator. The Mount Sinai Hospital is in the Honor Roll of best hospitals in America, ranked No. 15 nationally in the 2016-2017 Best Hospitals issue of U.S. News & World Report. The Mount Sinai Hospital is also ranked as one of the nations top 20 hospitals in Geriatrics, Gastroenterology/GI Surgery, Cardiology/Heart Surgery, Diabetes/Endocrinology, Nephrology, Neurology/Neurosurgery, and Ear, Nose & Throat, and is in the top 50 in four other specialties. New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked No. 10 nationally for Ophthalmology, while Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Mount Sinai St. Luke's, and Mount Sinai West are ranked regionally. Mount Sinais Kravis Childrens Hospital is ranked in seven out of ten pediatric specialties by U.S. News & World Report in "Best Children's Hospitals."

For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org/, or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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The AstroBox Touch Since Touch owners have infinite options to extend its capabilities by tapping into the creativity of developers & content creators, each Touch will be a customized reflection of its owner. We are taking the industry from flip phones to smartphones.

The AstroBox Touch, a powerful cloud connected touchscreen for 3D Printing blazed through its original funding goal in just 3 hours after launching on Kickstarter. After the first 48 hours, the campaign has surpassed the original funding goal by over 500%.

Drew Taylor, Co-Founder, and CEO of AstroPrint, explains: Since our last Kickstarter, our users have 3D Printed over half a million hours on our platform - that's almost 60 years of 3D Printing! This campaign, for the AstroBox Touch, is the result of over 3+ years of direct feedback from this amazing community. We are really excited to play a part in simplifying 3D Printing for the masses.

The AstroBox Touch is a powerful touchscreen that provides it's user's unlimited opportunities to extend it's capabilities through AstroPrint's app marketplace.

The Touch also synchronizes the users printer across desktop software, mobile apps, and web portals. The primary reason for the creation of the AstroBox Touch is to enable even more non-technical folks to use 3D Printing technologies without being intimidated. The AstroBox Touch is currently compatible with approximately 80% of Desktop 3D Printers in the market.

Daniel Arroyo, Co-Founder, and CTO of AstroPrint, added: "Without quality content, 3D Printers are just giant, useless, paper weights. The Touch is a device that gives unparalleled distribution power to third party application developers and content creators. We believe that The Touch is the most effective way to reach home 3D Printer owners at scale as the industry yearns for a disruptive killer application. Since Touch owners will have limitless options to extend its capabilities by tapping into the creativity of developers and content creators, each Touch will be a fully customized reflection of its owner. We are taking the industry from flip phones to smartphones."

In addition to the Touch, AstroPrint has also released a suite of cross-platform Desktop Applications, Mobile Applications for both Android & iOS platforms, and a Developer API in beta.

The AstroBox Touch will allow developers and content creators to distribute applications on the AstroPrint platform and reach 3D Printer owners easily. The Touch will harmoniously work with the AstroPrint platform to deliver a seamless 3D Printing experience.

AstroBox Touch Features



Beautiful 3.5" touchscreen (480 x 320 pixels)

Runs AstroBox Touch Software

Infinitely extensible with custom apps from the AstroPrint app marketplace

Easy and intuitive to use

Just plug it into your 3D printer and it's ready to go! (No self assembly necessary)

Intuitive, gorgeous user interface built with simplicity in mind

Wirelessly control your 3D Printer without needing to use SD Cards or Cables

Connected to the AstroPrint ecosystem (including Android & iPhone apps)

Developer friendly

Powered by the Raspberry Pi

Compatible with all printers running standard Marlin, Repetier, & Sailfish firmware

The AstroBox Touch Kickstarter campaign will end on June 8, 2017.

Currently the campaign has over 350 backers from over 15 countries, and has been written up by publications

such as NBC San Diego, Fabbaloo, All3DP, San Diego Business Journal, 3ders, and Open Electronics.

Press Contact: For information and questions, please email Dilanka via: dilanka at astroprint dot com.

ABOUT ASTROPRINT

AstroPrint is a venture backed company based in San Diego, CA., and is the fastest growing cloud, and content delivery platform in the 3D printing industry. The AstroPrint platform is designed to be simple, elegant, and intuitive for the non-technical 3D Printer Owner. It is currently compatible with ~80% of Desktop 3D Printers on the market. The AstroPrint marketplace also allows brands and developers to deliver content to any 3D Printer owner around the globe with it's scalable distribution platform.

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eTargetMedia Email continues to be the most effective marketing channel and email marketers who embrace successful email tactics including email personalization, mobile responsive email design and email interactivity will see the best results.

eTargetMedia, a leading provider of Email Lists, Postal Lists, Data Append and Creative Solutions announces email marketing has been ranked as the top digital marketing channel for the third consecutive year for producing return on investment (ROI). Email marketing beat out search marketing, display advertising and even social media marketing to be the top ROI producer. The results are based on a recent study of top global email marketers and the majority of marketers stated that their email marketing campaigns generated a successful return on investment. eTargetMedia is offering a free consultation and 20% off new email list orders to customers who mention the press release.

Email marketing continues to see strong performance metrics because the email audience is growing, engaged and increasingly mobile. Reaching the customer at the relevant time and through the relevant channel has helped to deliver success to email marketing performance rates. Email open rates and click-through rates (CTRs) are steady while most of the other digital marketing channels are seeing decreased performance rates. Designing more relevant and personalized emails is also helping to drive stronger performance metrics.

Email continues to be the most effective marketing channel and email marketers who embrace successful email tactics including email marketing automation, email personalization, mobile responsive email design and email interactivity are seeing the best results, said Harris Kreichman, Managing Partner of eTargetMedia. Email marketers who implement a comprehensive email strategy that focuses on targeting the correct audience through email segmentation and continuous email tracking, testing and optimization will reap the rewards of email marketing including a positive ROI.

eTargetMedia has 20 years of experience in the industry and has built successful email campaigns for some of the top brands in the world including Mercedes Benz, Alcon, MetLife, Marriott, AARP, P&G, TGI Fridays, Anthem, Sony and more. eTargetMedias leading edge technology, smart and dedicated campaign managers and high quality database comprised of responsive prospects can help companies improve their email campaigns, generate revenue, increase brand loyalty and build strong relationships with customers.

eTargetMedia, based in South Florida, provides Email Lists, Postal Lists, Data Append and Creative Solutions to a wide variety of direct marketing customers. eTargetMedia is a member of the Direct Marketing Association. You can download the report and visit eTargetMedia online at http://www.eTargetMedia.com.
The Mid-Atlantic Precast Association (MAPA) recently announced that one of its producers, High Concrete Group, has received industry honors for an office building project in Philadelphia, PA.

The Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI) presented High Concrete with two awards, including the 2016 Design Award: Best Office Building and the 2016 Design Award Specials: Harry H. Edwards Industry Advancement Award. Both honors were for their four-story office building project at 1200 Intrepid Avenue in the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. The project proves that precast concrete enables the most innovative architectural designs while providing a highly energy-efficient and durable envelope.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The building was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), a Danish architectural firm that has long relied on precast to achieve form and function in their designs. We came very quickly to the idea that precast concrete would be a great way to achieve our goals on this project, says Kai-Uwe Bergmann, principal at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the architect on the project.

One of the most prominent features of the building is the white precast concrete facade, which dips dramatically away from the walkway along the eastern edge, then tips back out again, much like the buildings in a Dr. Seuss story.

One of the key design challenges was to create that curved facade from precast panels, says David Bosch, design team leader for High Concrete Group, the precaster on the project and one of MAPAs producers. The curved load-bearing design was achieved by assembling flat, traditional precast concrete panels to form a complex faceted geometry. An interlocking structural system was embedded within the panels to eliminate the need for traditional precast concrete spandrel panels. The resulting facade creates an aesthetic versatility that is unique to the project, Bosch says.

The design breaks away from traditional architecture to better engage with the local surroundings, says Bergmann. In many cases, architects design big, boxy buildings that could be placed anywhere and dont connect directly to the site. He argues that the curved white facade, and deeply reflective windows in this design were inspired by the citys rectangular city blocks and the adjacent circular park that sits just in front of the building. It also echoes the geometries of maritime architecture and nearby waterway. You would really be hard-pressed to place this building anywhere else other than where it is, due to how it connects, Bergmann says. We like to think about a building beyond its borders and look at how it interacts with its neighbors and the open spaces around.

PRECAST SOLUTION

Along with being visually inviting, the owners wanted the building to achieve LEED Gold certification, which led to several sustainability measures enabled by the use of precast concrete. The thermal benefits of the precast facade lowered projected heating and cooling costs, contributing 7 of the 60 total LEED points for overall energy performance. The panels were also created using local raw materials and recycled content less than 60 miles from the project site, minimizing the greenhouse gas emissions related to transport and adding more LEED points to the total. While the concrete production requires a larger carbon footprint initially, it is a material that will have a long life span and can be recycled if needed, Bosch adds.

Finally, the precast concrete facade solved the fact that the buildings steel structure was designed to carry only lateral loads, which meant the precast concrete facade had to transfer the gravity loads directly through the precast concrete panels to the foundations. To achieve this, the engineers designed a structural steel system embedded into the precast concrete panels. Pockets were formed into alternating panels at the spandrel level to allow the interlocking of each panel during installation. All the gravity loads are transferred from any given panel to the adjacent panel on either side until they reach the foundation, Bosch explains. In order to prevent a progressive collapse in the event that one connection should happen to fail, each panel also has a safety backup connection.

For video content and a project photo gallery, visit the 1200 Intrepid Project Profile on the MAPA website.

PROJECT AT-A-GLANCE

Location: 1200 Intrepid Avenue in the Navy Yard (Philadelphia, PA)

Precast Producer & Precast Specialty Engineer: High Concrete Group (Denver, PA)

Owner: Liberty Property Trust (Philadelphia, PA)

Architect: BIG  Bjarke Ingels Group (New York, NY)

Engineer of Record: Environetics (Philadelphia, PA)

Contractor: Turner Construction Company (Philadelphia, PA)

Project Cost: $19,017,393

Square Footage: 99,450 sq. ft. precast concrete facade for four-story building in Navy Yards of Philadelphia

Architectural Precast Elements: Include 421 architectural precast concrete panels at an average nominal size of 5 ft. x 18 ft.

LEED: The facade is 30% more efficient than the baseline ASHRAE assembly, contributing to the LEED Gold certification.

ABOUT MID-ATLANTIC PRECAST ASSOCIATION

The Mid-Atlantic Precast Association (MAPA) is a professional marketing organization committed to the growth and greater profitability of the Precast Industry in the Mid-Atlantic region. Founded in 1978, MAPA is comprised of 13 prestressed/precast producer member firms located throughout the Mid-Atlantic States, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. The organization is closely associated with the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI) and has over 50 associate member companies that produce a variety of concrete industry related products. For more information, visit http://www.mapaprecast.org.
The story of the radium girls represents a watershed moment in the history of workers' rights and stands as a horrifying reminder of how big companies have taken advantage of their employees. It's a shocking story, though surprisingly few people know it: female workers at a series of U.S. factories were hired in the 1910s and 1920s to paint watch dials with luminous radium-infused paint, unknowingly contracting radium poisoning. As their illnesses came to light and their employers attempted cover-ups, legal battles raged, and one group of radium girls won a landmark 1938 ruling. But who were these women, really, behind the headlines and legal histories? Bestselling author Kate Moore delves into their lives in her finely researched nonfiction page-turner The Radium Girls.

Moore's goal in writing the book was to bring the historical record to life: "I wanted to walk in step with the women and describe each moment as though it were happening here and now," she says. "I hoped that, in this way, readers would be able to engage with the twists and turns of this decades-old history and to empathize with the individual radium girls. I wanted the women to feel like friends."

Moore dives into the booming business of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in early 20th-century Newark and Orange, N.J. She focuses her story on a few of those factories' new employees in the lead-up to World War I, particularly on Katherine Schaub in New Jersey and on Catherine Wolfe, who worked at a similar factory in Ottawa, Ill.

Only 14 years old when she landed the job, Katherine had no idea that the "liquid sunshine" she was painting on watch dials was actually poisoning her. Her employer and other companies who employed these girls ignored pleas to do more research into the effects of the paint after evidence suggesting its dangers was found. Women working in these factories were told to "lip-point" their brushesdipping them into the radium solution, then putting the brushes in their mouths to create a fine tipas they painted the dials, causing them to actually ingest the dangerous chemical.

The book got its start while Moore was directing a play about the radium girls. Her interest was piqued, and she began to do deeper research, realizing that these particular women's powerful stories were collecting dust in archives, waiting to be told.

Coming to the stories through the play "had a massive impact" on how she decided to write the book, Moore says: "My actors and I strove to create well-rounded, believable characters, and I wanted to do the same with the book. I wanted to tell the story in a dramatic way: not dry and dusty, but gripping and page-turning. Most of all, I think, having got to know the women and their sacrifice through the play, I felt close to them and I wanted to bring their story to as wide an audience as possible."

The Radium Girls moves seamlessly back and forth between daily struggles in the factoryand later in the courtroom and the world-shaking events that brought booming business to radium factories in 1917. With America entering World War I, demand for all things glow in the dark skyrocketed and the factories expanded. The book's marvelous interplay of macro and micro details required years of researchincluding tracking down many living relatives of the radium girlsand a novelist's ability to create a lived environment out of those facts. The book, Moore says, "reads like a novel, but it still has to be rooted in fact."

In fact, there was too much information to fit it all into the book, so Moore is building a website as an added resource for readers. The more information available the better, Moore believes, because factories are still exploiting their workers. "Companies don't adhere to safety standards; they obstruct investigations; there is negligence as well as orchestrated cover-ups. Today, I also think companies are closer to legislators than ever before, something I find worrying," Moore says. "I think when we read similar stories in the press today we need to remember that behind the headlines and statistics there are always human beingsand wildlifewhose lives are being irreparably damaged." As with the blockbuster films The Imitation Game and Hidden Figures, The Radium Girls brings a crucial historical moment to vivid life, standing as a cautionary tale for the present and future.

Also check out this podcast, in which Moore describes writing The Radium Glrls.
It's been four years since a district court effectively shut down ReDigi, the upstart online service that enabled consumers to resell their iTunes files. But the case is heating up on appeal, and ReDigi attorneys have asked the Second Circuit to expedite oral arguments, before a bankruptcy court potentially impacts ReDigi's ability to litigate the case further.

The latest moves come after judge Richard Sullivan, in his March 2013 summary judgment in Capitol Records vs. ReDigi, dubbed ReDigi a clearinghouse for copyright infringement. ReDigi subsequently suspended service, and in 2016 entered into Chapter 11 bankruptcy after agreeing to pay millions to settle Capitol's damages claim, contingent upon ReDigi's liability being upheld on appeal.

But in a twist, Capitol attorneys last month asked a bankruptcy court to convert ReDigi from a Chapter 11 reorganization to a Chapter 7 liquidation. In a May 1 filing, ReDigi attorneys called that move "transparent chicanery, meant to sabotage the company's liability appeal before it is heard on the merits, and turn Capitol's "contingent judgment into a permanent, fixed debt.

Capitol attorneys counter that the "significant" copyright issues raised in ReDigi's appeal do not excuse the company from satisfying the requirements of its bankruptcy. Appellants are pursuing the appeal exclusively for their own purposes," Capitol claims, "without regard to the mounting expenses that they have no ability to pay."

AAP: Reversal Would be 'Catastrophic'

The ReDigi case has been closely watched by the publishing industry, as ReDigi (and other players including Amazon) have expressed interest in creating a resale market for e-books.

More broadly, the case involves a key copyright question for the digital age: do consumers have the right to resell their lawfully acquired digital media, as they are entitled to do with physical media, under a section of the Copyright Act known as the doctrine of first sale?

ReDigi sought to create a legal digital resale solution: users uploaded their iTunes files to ReDigi, ReDigis technology deleted the files from the owner's device, held them in cloud-based storage, and then transferred them to a buyers device. The "used" files were sold at a discount. ReDigi kept 60% of the proceeds, passing 20% to the seller, while holding 20% for the copyright holder.

In his 2013 ruling, Sullivan conceded that ReDigis program mimicks an analog resale, but he could not get past the fact that ReDigis system necessarily created unauthorized material reproductions. And because those reproductions were not lawfully made, he held, first sale does not apply. Put another way, Sullivan explained, the first sale defense is limited to material items, like records, that the copyright owner put into the stream of commerce. He also rejected ReDigis fair use defense, a point that could loom large on appeal.

In a joint amicus brief filed in February, a coalition of library groups, including the American Library Association and the Internet Archive claim that Sullivan's truncated fair use analysis does not properly weigh the purpose of ReDigis alleged infringementalthough the brief stops short of endorsing ReDigi.

 In its amicus brief, the Association of American Publishers argues that legalizing services like ReDigi would be "catastrophic" for the entire publishing industry. 

Enabling transfer of the right of possession...should be viewed as a favored purpose under the first fair use factor, the brief argues, while conceding that such a view would not necessarily mean the ReDigi service itself is a fair use. However, it is worth noting that the ReDigi service has the same market impact as a distribution under [first sale]. At the beginning of a transferthe seller has a copy, and the buyer does notat the end of the process, the buyer has a copy, and the seller does not."

But in an amicus brief filed last week, the Association of American Publishers urged the court to uphold Sullivans decision. AAP argues that legalizing services like ReDigi would be "catastrophic for the entire publishing industry," as a secondary market made up of cheaper, yet indistinguishable "used" e-books would swamp the industry's primary market.

With e-books, used copies are a perfect substitute for new copies, and digital lending allows multiple readers to access a single digital copy simultaneously, the brief argues. Moreover, unlike the makers of films and sound recordings, e-book publishers cannot effectively distribute their works by means of online streaming, rendering the e-book market uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of a reversal in this case on first-sale grounds.

The AAP brief then takes particular aim at the ALA and the Internet Archives Open Library project, a program that converts donated copies of print books to digital copies and enables libraries to lend them, with restrictions.

The ALA brief makes a plea for this Court to issue an advisory opinion blessing the unfettered distribution of unauthorized electronic copies of printed books, the AAP brief states. Such a finding in favor of ReDigi in this case would have grave and immediate consequences for the publishers of literary works in print and digital formats, and would be out of step with the careful calibrations employed by Congress and the courts when considering infringements.

At press time, oral arguments had yet to be scheduled for ReDigi's appeal.
G'day! It's Murray here. I've put together a little quiz to test your musical knowledge. Think you can score top marks in Murray's Magic Music Quiz? Give it a go now!
This represents a major turnaround for the ruling Liberal Party, which in the past has been reluctant to provide federal funding for urban rail projects.

The investment progresses the government's Smart Cities agenda, recognising that urban rail projects have the capacity to assist in regeneration and promoting better integration between land use and transport planning.

The government says there are several city-shaping rail projects around the country at various stages of development.

Projects eligible for funding include Cross-River Rail in Brisbane; AdeLink extensions to the Adelaide tram network; a potential rail link to Melbourne Airport and proposed Western Sydney Airport; and Perths Metronet rail project.

Federal funding for these projects will be linked to a tailored package of funding and financing measures to ensure that the appropriate balance of Commonwealth, state and private funding and financing.

Additional funds are being provided to for Perth Metronet ($A 792m) and development of a business case for the Melbourne Airport Rail Link ($A 30m). The transport corridor between Melbourne city centre and Melbourne Airport has been identified by Infrastructure Australia as one of the most heavily congested in Melbourne.

The government says its initial focus on better regional connections will be improving the network in Victoria, with an additional $A 500m in the 2017-18 budget for improvements to the North-East, Gippsland and Geelong lines.

Shadow infrastructure minister Mr Anthony Albanese criticised the announcement by saying that despite promised funding, no money had been set aside until the 2019-20 financial year. The third Budget paper shows a $A 200m commitment to the National Rail Programme in 2019-20 and $A 400m in 2020-21, with no further projections offered at this stage, Albanese says.
SilverRail distributes tickets for 35 operators and handles more than 25 million bookings per year. Established in 2009, the company is based in London and has offices in Stockholm, Boston and Brisbane.

Rail is ready for an online revolution and were ready to be part of it, says Expedia president and CEO Mr Dara Khosrowshahi. We are tremendously excited to welcome the incredibly talented SilverRail team into our family.
Canadian Pacific and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference Maintenance of Way Employees Division (TCRC-MWED) announced they have reached a tentative five-year agreement.

We have been working collaboratively and proactively with the TCRC-MWED leadership on a deal that makes sense for both sides and provides stability over the long-term, said CPs President and CEO Keith Creel. CP has worked hard, and will continue to work hard, to achieve long-term, innovative agreements with its unions that provide the framework for continued success for the company and its valued employees.

Details of the agreement will be presented to the TCRC-MWED for ratification by the unions leadership.

Canadian Pacific CEO Keith Creel addresses the Challenges, Issues, and Trends Affecting the North American Rail Market. REGISTER NOW for Railway Ages 3rd Annual RAIL INSIGHTS June 7 & 8, 2017, Chicago.
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With operations against the Islamic State in Mosul continuing successfully, if slowly, much of the focus is shifting toward an impending assault on the city of Raqqa. The U.S.-led coalition has continued to reclaim territory from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the militant group's finances have been weakened in the process.

After the Islamic State seized Mosul in summer 2014, it enjoyed the dubious honor of being the richest terrorist group in the world. But this distinction is gone: The United States and its allies have aggressively targeted the Islamic State's finances and have made significant progress. Between late 2015 and the end of 2016, coalition aircraft struck 1,200 Islamic State oil tankers. A single raid destroyed 168 vehicles in December in Syria. A senior U.S. Treasury Department official stated that the Islamic State's oil revenue was roughly halved, from an estimated $500 million ( PDF ) in 2015 to an estimated $250 million in 2016.

The loss of territory and direct control over urban populations has shrunk the Islamic State's tax base and decreased extortion opportunities, which has also strained the organization financially. Reports trickling out of Mosul in January suggest that it may have stopped paying the salaries of its fighters altogether, sapping morale and triggering desertions. With finances tight, the Islamic State's leadership is even closely monitoring utility usage throughout parts of western and northern Iraq....

The remainder of this commentary is available on lawfareblog.com.

Patrick B. Johnston is a political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, and Colin P. Clarke is a political scientist at RAND and an associate fellow at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT)-The Hague.

This commentary originally appeared on Lawfare on May 14, 2017. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
Russian oil companies claim against AFK Sistema set for June 6

MOSCOW, May 15 (RAPSI)  The Commercial Court of the Republic of Bashkortostan will hear a 106.6 billion ruble lawsuit ($1.9 billion) lodged by Rosneft and Bashneft against AFK Sistema holding company on June 6, according to court records.

The oil companies have filed the claim seeking to collect money from AFK Sistema both with the Moscow Commercial Court and the court in Ufa. On May 10, the Moscow Commercial Court returned the lawsuit to the plaintiffs.

Press service of Rosneft earlier said that claim lawsuit is connected with alleged siphoning of assets. Actions of AFK Sistema allegedly led to decrease of assets at this sum.

According to AFK Sistema, the plaintiffs demands are illegal and groundless.

Bashneft was controlled by the government of Russias Bashkortostan region until 2003, when a major stake was sold to companies affiliated with Ural Rakhimov, son of the former head of Bashkortostan Murtaza Rakhimov.

The company was privatized in 2009, when Russian oil-to-telecoms conglomerate Sistema gained control of it.

A court in Moscow ruled that Bashneft had been privatized in violation of law. The Prosecutor General's Office brought a suit to return a 71.6 percent stake in Bashneft to the government. The Moscow Commercial Court ruled on October 30, 2014, in favor of the Prosecutor General's Office.
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Price: $ 1,626 Seller State of Residence: Wisconsin Property Address: 4895 Elliot Rd. State/Province: California Zip/Postal Code: 95458 City: Lucerne Location: 532**, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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Vacant Land in Gulfport, Harrison County, Mississippi! Item Id: Jackson08 Case Name: Jackson, Joseph & Elizabeth Case Number: 15 06809 Trustee: Description: Estate's interest in 0.13 acres of vacant land in Gulfport, Mississippi near Three Rivers Park. The property is located on Curtis Street, Gulfport, MS 39503. The status of water, power, sewer and utilities is unknown. The APN# is 1007L-04-090-000. The PPIN # is 88830. The legal description is 'Lot 12 Blk 28 Biloxi River Estates Unit 3 S/T/R ...

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Award-winning lawyer, Claire Montgomery, the Queens Counsel, is likely to fight the Indian governments attempt to extradite him to India.

Beleaguered Indian businessman Vijay Mallya has consulted an award-winning lawyer, Claire Montgomery, the Queens Counsel, to fight the Indian governments attempt to extradite him to India. Chambers & Partners, famous for ranking legal luminaries, described her as the most formidable member of the bar. Montgomery is likely to defend Mallya at forthcoming hearings in British courts.

India, it was reliably learned from a high level source, will adopt a strategy of trying to convince the British judiciary that Mallya committed fraud, so as to get him back to India. This was finalised at discussions between officials of India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Director of the Finance Ministry and Britain's Crown Prosecution Service lawyers in London.

In effect, what will be pursued is the CBIs charge in India that Mallya, whose Kingfisher Airlines collapsed owing thousands of crores to various Indian banks, colluded with officials of IDBI Bank to obtain a loan of Rs 900 crore. The facility was allegedly granted despite the companys weak financial position and low credit rating.

The extradition process between Britain and non-European Union countries, notwithstanding a 1993 treaty on the subject between the United Kingdom and India, is long and tortuous. No absconder wanted by India under this agreement has involuntarily ever been repatriated by a British court, including people allegedly involved in acts of murder and terrorism.

Last year, Samirbhai Patel, said to be connected with the heinous 2002 Gujarat riots, returned of his own will. It is believed he did so thinking Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at both Gujarat and the Centre may take a lenient view of his wrongdoing. This was indirectly an indictment of the present dispensation's human rights credentials.

The British Home Office explained, a 2003 Act applies to non-EU territories with international extradition arrangements with Britain, such as India. Under this, the process began with the Indian High Commission in the UK requesting the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office to extradite Mallya.

This was then forwarded to the Home Office, which approved the requisition. Following this, a judge issued a warrant of arrest against Mallya, who was produced in court on April 18 before being granted conditional bail.

The next stage is a preliminary hearing on May 17. After this will take place, the actual extradition hearing sometime later in the year. Here, the judge, according to Home Office guidelines, must be satisfied that the conduct amounts to an extradition offence (dual criminality), none of the bars to extradition apply, where applicable, there is prima facie evidence of guilt (in accusation cases), and whether extradition would breach the person's human rights.

Regardless of the ruling of the magistrates' court, either side can appeal to two levels at the High Court and finally to the Supreme Court.

The human rights aspect is where applications for extradition by India have generally floundered. In Britain, extradition is prohibited by statute if the person could face the death penalty (unless the Secretary of State [for Home] gets adequate written assurance that the death penalty will not be imposed or, if imposed, will not be carried out.

In other words, India will have to extend such an assurance. This may not be a problem since Mallya has been accused of an economic offence, not killing anyone. But the hurdles don't end there.

India is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention against Torture. This is normally held against it. Last but not the least, Indian prison conditions are deemed to be unsatisfactory, including the lives of prominent detainees being threatened by other prisoners.

Over and above, there is the issue of a media trial that's been taking place in India, which in the eyes of a British judge may have prejudiced the case against the defendant.

Any exaggerated, false and malicious story put out by the central government and its agencies, whether on or off the record, and carried by news media could be cited as mal-intent.

Mallya has argued the Narendra Modi government is on a witch-hunt against him for political purposes. To counter this, the Union government has recently moved against other alleged defaulters to establish the liquor baron is not being solely victimised.

Besides, British law is less stringent about business failure as opposed to deliberate fraud. So, Mallya's lawyers could well contend Kingfisher Airlines becoming defunct was a genuine downfall in adverse market conditions.

Unconfirmed reports say, Mallya has offered to repay Rs 6,000 crore as a settlement  Rs 4,000 crore upfront and another Rs 2,000 crore if he wins a suit against an engine manufacturer.

If the petition is upheld, the Secretary of State for Home will be called upon to decide whether to ratify the order. Since there is said to be a political will on the part of Prime Minister Theresa May to please India, the political part is a foregone conclusion.

But, history suggests it is an uphill climb. The UKs Home Office confirmed its Second Permanent Secretary, Patsy Wilkinson, met senior officers of the Indian Home Ministry on Thursday.

She held constructive discussions with the Government of India on a range of home affairs issues, a statement said. There was, however, no mention of the Mallya matter having come up.
If the deal goes through, Snapdeal founders will get $60 million (cumulative), of which half will be given to employees.

Sale of a company often leaves employees high and dry, but not in the case of Snapdeal that may offer a Rs 193 crore bonanza to its staff if the homegrown e-commerce firm is taken over by larger rival Flipkart.

According to sources, if the deal goes through, the founders will give half of their payout (USD 30 million) for the proposed scheme which would cover all current employees of Snapdeal.

Snapdeal has about 1,500-2,000 staffers.

"The founders have asked the Board to carve out $30 million (about Rs 193 crore) from their settlement for payouts to the Snapdeal team. They want to ensure that the team does not get sidelined in any manner," they added.Some former senior executives of Snapdeal, who have left the firm in the last 12 months, could also benefit from the process.

E-mails sent to Snapdeal did not elicit any response.

The intent is also to compensate for the ESOPs that were issued to senior employees.

The value of their shares and options have eroded and would be worthless once the deal is signed, one of them said.Interestingly, the deal-linked payment would also be extended to employees who do not own ESOPs to reward those staying on with Snapdeal till the proposed transaction with Flipkart is complete.

If the deal goes through, Snapdeal founders will get $60 million (cumulative), of which half will be given to employees.

Japanese conglomerate and Snapdeals largest investor SoftBank has initiated the process to sell the beleaguered online marketplace to bigger rival Flipkart.

It has managed to get Board members, which also includes the founders (Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal) and early investors Kalaari and Nexus Venture Partners, to agree to the potential deal.

Nexus Venture Partners could get close to $80 million and a stake in the merged/new entity, while Kalaari could get about $70-80 million.

As per regulatory filings, SoftBank currently owns over 30 per cent in Snapdeal, while Nexus has roughly a 10 per cent stake and Kalaari holds 8 per cent share in the firm.

A non-binding term sheet to start the due diligence by Flipkart for Snapdeal is expected to be signed soon between the two parties.

In the past few months, Snapdeal has seen a number of voluntary and involuntary exits. While the company has hiked salaries by up to 15 per cent, employees are concerned about their future as the impending takeover looms ahead.

One of the leading contenders in the Indian e-commerce space, Snapdeal has seen its fortunes failing amid strong competition from US-based Amazon and Flipkart.

Compared to a valuation of about $6.5 billion in February 2016, the sale to Flipkart could see Snapdeal being valued at about $1 billion.

SoftBank had recently said it suffered a loss of $1 billion (Rs 6,500 crore) on its investment in Snapdeal during 2016-17, almost matching the money it put in the home-grown marketplace.

The deal between Snapdeal and Flipkart, if completed, would mark the biggest acquisition in the Indian e-commerce space and change the landscape of the sector that is witnessing intense competition among players.

Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters
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Taipei, May 15 (CNA) A national investment company will be set up if an initial NT$2 billion (US$66.48 million) fund designed to support Taiwan's startups in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector can be raised from the private sector in the next six months, said Chen Tain-jy (), head of the Cabinet's National Development Council (NDC).
Awfis stands out for its ambience and ease of doing business.

As Amit Ramani was re-imagining what the workplace of the future would look like for large corporate clients in the US, he began noticing some of his clients moving their employees out of satellite offices and into shared workspaces.

While he didnt see the shift as a threat to his own business Nelson, he did see an opportunity. If even large corporates were unwilling to pay hefty rents in cities such as New York, certainly large corporates in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai must feel the same way.

Being so up close and personal with this massive change between 2008 and 2014 in the US, Ramani decided that replicating a similar model in India could pay hefty rewards.

In April 2015 he founded Awfis, a start-up that would offer shared office space to individuals and companies in India.

The beginning

Ramani says some part of the success Awfis has seen so far is because he was able to spot the trend of co-working quite early on in the US.

While certainly not the first player to enter the Indian market, the timing couldnt have been better - in 2015, both start-ups and SMEs saw a massive surge thanks to both an influx of foreign funding and a push from the government.

I think it was a very interesting time in the evolution of work itself. Co-working spaces are actually addressing some key problems - a start-up doesnt have money, corporates have money but dont want to spend on real estate and SMEs have realised that they need to be presentable, said Ramani, founder and CEO of Awfis.

Unlike many of its competitors, Awfis did not go after just start-ups to fill seats at its centres. Instead it turned to SMEs and large corporates, giving it steady growth and a stable base of customers. From the beginning, Awfis was incubated out of The Three Sisters: Institutional Office (TTS:IO), the family office of YES Bank founder and Managing Director Rana Kapoor.

Today Awfis has 21 centres across eight cities and the space to seat 7,500 people. The company has pushed hard to get large corporates to use its service, winning clients such as ReNu Power which occupies 200 seats at one of its centres in Gurgaon.

The opportunity

While its hard to put a figure to the coworking sector in India owing to it still being highly fragmented, a few players such as Awfis, 91Springboard, BHIVE and even global majors such as WeWork have started gaining scale. Real estate consultancy JLL expects the space to receive $400 million in investments by 2018.

Awfis says growth is often outpaced by demand, ensuring that occupancy at all its centres is high and allowing each of its centres to break even in under 90 days. While Ramani says profitability has been a core focus right from the start, he isnt able to put a timeline when the company will stop investing in growth.

There are a lot of variables to that, we will have to see how the market is, what the competition is doing. But rest assured, if we stop investing in new centres we will become profitable very soon, he adds.

With the price for a seat ranging all the way from Rs 3,000 to Rs 14,000, Awfis says it is 30 per cent cheaper and can vouch that the quality of its workplace will be 50 per cent better than if a company opted to have its own office. But Ramani agrees that coworking spaces cant just be providers of on-demand real estate.

Amit has a very strong understanding of the real estate sector but its not the only place his expertise lies. Co-working is more of building a value bridge where there are alliances, engagements and so many other things and from very early on being incubated in-house we knew this would be big, says Radha Kapoor, who along with her two sisters oversees the running of TTS:IO.

The way forward

Ramani says while today coworking is disrupting the idea of the traditional workplace, in a few years it could become the de facto real estate offering for companies. In that case in a few years coworking will be known as just working, he adds.

For Awfis, moving towards that goal involves opening over 100 centres across the country, with the ability to seat 35,000 people at any given time. The firm is looking to get there in as little as 24 months and for this recently raised $20 million from Sequoia India.
Businesses coming to terms with Ind-AS (Indian Accounting Standards) implementation, GST can do without further uncertainty and costs, say N Sundaresha Subramanian & Sudipto Dey.

Section 2 (41) of Companies Act, 2013, which came into force on April 2014, made it mandatory for companies to follow an April-March financial year. Companies following other periods were given two years to migrate. Those who wanted to use periods other than the official financial year needed approval from the National Company Law Tribunal.

What changes for companies



Reset loan repayment and interest payment dates



Payment of interest coupon



Budgeting and planning exercise



Changes in I-T systems and processes

Employee appraisal and increment processReset loan repayment and interest payment datesPayment of interest couponBudgeting and planning exerciseChanges in I-T systems and processes

In 2013, there were some 226 listed companies whose financial year did not end in March, while 74 followed the calendar year; 58 had their year ending in September, while 89 had a July-June financial year. A few listed companies followed the financial year ending April (2), August (2) and October (1).

This was possible because the Companies Act, 1956, which was in force then, did not mandate any specific period as the financial year. But, with passing of the Companies Act, 2013, companies ceased to have this choice to choose their financial year.

Now cut forward to 2017. According to the data from BS Research Bureau, almost all large companies - all 30 in the Sensex and 48 of the Nifty 50 - follow the April-March financial year. Among BSE 500, only 17 companies have other years. Of these 14 follow the calendar year.

Most companies have migrated except a few subsidiaries of multinationals that needed to align themselves with their foreign parents.

However, three years on, life is threatening to turn full circle for Indian businesses with the proposal of change in the financial year gathering steam. For those who have been following the April-March financial year, the shift could be cumbersome, say experts.

A discussion paper put up by the NITI Aayog identifies Companies Act, 2013, as one of the laws that might be impacted by the change. SN Viswanathan, a senior company secretary, points out that companies have settled with the April-March financial year.

This also aligns with the assessment year and accounting year under the Income-Tax Act. If the government wants to change the financial year, there could be corresponding amendments in I-T Act. That could lead to a lot of migration issues, says Viswanathan.

Most experts feel that the proposal is still at a discussion stage and might take two or three years to become operational. There is likely to be intense stakeholder discussion involving industry and the government before a final call is taken on the issue.

Around the time an expert committee headed by former chief economic advisor Shankar Acharya was set up last year, industry federation Assocham had released a note slamming the proposal.

The body said that the change in financial year would mean changes in book-keeping, HR practices, accounting software, and taxation system, involving costs running into hundreds of crores for big and small industries.

According to the chamber, feedback from its members suggested that it was an ill-advised move.

Under no circumstances would the move lead to any improvement in the ease of doing business. Instead, it would create unnecessary hurdles and bureaucratic and systemic delays. At this point of time, India cannot allow any such disruptions, says the Assocham note.

Companies, which are still adjusting to big changes such as Ind-AS implementation and the upcoming GST regime, could do without further uncertainty and costs, say lawyers and consultants.

From an accounting perspective, companies will be required to change the accounting year by doing nine months accounts and then move to the calendar year. This will also require lots of cut-off procedures to be advanced, like goodwill impairment testing, transfer pricing study, and reconciliation of books of accounts, experts added.

Rakesh Nangia, managing partner, Nangia & Co, feels the change in the financial year will initially be disruptive. With their hands full of GST transition, another transition in the financial year will increase pressure on businesses, he says.

Sandeep Khetan, partner in an Indian member firm of EY Global, notes that such a move will impact all the companies having transactions with the government sector. Since the budgeting and resource allocation process of government will change, companies will have to align the same, he adds.

Khetan points out that every change will add to the transition costs but long-term benefits of the move may help to deal with this. On the positive side, Nangia feels this shift will align India with the fiscal year followed by most developed countries worldwide.

With an increasing number of global companies engaging in business activities with Indian companies, the integration of the Indian economy with the global economy will become convenient and there will be standardisation and uniformly in reporting, he adds.
'Gujaratis need not be ashamed of the lack of martial tradition.'

'They contribute to their country in other ways.'

'And, of course, they can also claim that while they may not have produced many martyrs, they produced the greatest one: Gandhi,' says Aakar Patel.

Are there Gujarati martyrs? Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav offended some people by asking if any Gujaratis fought and died for the country. He made the comment after a Kashmiri officer, Lieutenant Ummer Fayaz, was killed in the valley.

The answer to Yadav's question is: A few, but not many. And the reason is that not many Gujaratis join the army. I had researched this a few years ago.

In 2009, only 719 Gujaratis enrolled in an army of over 10 lakh soldiers. This number was a record and the highest ever sent from Gujarat and it came after a big awareness campaign.

In the preceding two years, 2008 and 2007, the number of Gujarati recruits was only 230.

Gujarat has more than six crore (60 million) people, but there have been more foreigners in India's army than Gujaratis. This is a fact.

Nepal, a nation less than half the size of Gujarat, has sent many times more soldiers to fight for India than Gujaratis. The Gurkha regiments are in fact one of the finest fighting units anywhere in the world.

In contrast, Gujarat has no tradition of soldiery and this is not totally unique. Recruitment to the army in India and also in Pakistan is unevenly spread.

Ghalib said 'sau pusht se, hai pesha e aaba sipahgari' (for 100 generations, the profession in my family has been soldiery). No Gujarati community can say that, though Marathas and Punjabis and Gurkhas can say it.

This has nothing to do with being brave, it has mostly to do with opportunity and then tradition.

The British raised most of their mercenary army from the parts that they originally captured. There are some exceptions.

The British turned to the Punjabi Hindu, Muslim and Sikh in large numbers after the 1857 mutiny which involved the Bengal army.

These Punjabis were mostly Jats (it was observed by many in the Pakistan army that General Zia-ul Haq came from the non-martial Arain community). However most of the recruitment had begun much before the mutiny.

Near my house, which is in a military area in Bangalore, the Madras Sappers unit was raised and has continuously served the Indian Army since 1780.

When such a long tradition is established, the work is carried on from father to son. This is not possible in areas which have no historical recruitment.

There are some 'martial' communities in Gujarat, and these are the ones that join the army.

Among them are the durbar (Rajput) communities, with names like Jadeja and Solanki. And so the number of martyrs cannot be zero, even though it is few.

Another reason Gujarat has produced few soldiers is that it has not seen much war.

Gujarat was conquered by Allauddin Khilji in 1297. After this, though there was some fighting in Gujarat, very little of it involved Gujaratis.

The northern Muslims fought among each other till Akbar took Ahmedabad and the Mughals kept Gujarat.

Then the Marathas captured large parts of it, and they still hold onto Baroda.

Then the English took over, starting at Surat.

In very little of this fighting were Gujaratis, whether, Hindu, Muslim or Parsi, involved.

Another reason for the lack of Gujaratis in the army is that the state has a powerful mercantile ethic. This stresses pragmatism and does not give much importance to honour.

Many 'martial' communities will scoff at this ethic, but it is the reason Gujarat has produced great businessmen.

The ability to compromise instead of standing fixed on honour is also the reason Gujarat has produced many great statesmen.

Before Independence, three of India's four greatest political figures -- Gandhi, Jinnah and Patel -- were Gujaratis.

One of the interesting ways in which this culture showed today is in my caste of Patidars.

We have, along with the Jats of Haryana, one of the lowest sex ratios of any community in India and often female foetuses are aborted or little girls strangled at birth.

This is a matter of great shame and Patidars must correct it.

However, unlike the Jats, Patidars do not do honour killing, meaning murdering adult women who marry their lover. And the reason is that the mercantile ethic does not value honour.

It is fine for people to be offended at Yadav's statement, but it is based on some fact and reality.

Gujaratis need not feel ashamed of the lack of this martial tradition. They contribute to their country in other ways.

And, of course, they can also claim that while they may not have produced many martyrs, they produced the greatest one: Gandhi.

Aakar Patel is Executive Director, Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are his own.

You can read Aakar's earlier columns here.

IMAGE: Troops from the 11 Gorkha Rifles march during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

DON'T MISS the features in the RELATED LINKS BELOW...
'There are retaliatory incursions, ambushes, captures and killings by Indian forces along the 700 km border; alleged spies are caught on both sides, then mutually traded as pawns; envoys are summoned in both capitals to be routinely given dressing downs.'

'And there is always a handy courier pigeon, like Sajjan Jindal, sent over to test the troubled waters,' says Sunil Sethi.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com

Shortly before the gruesome beheading of two Indian soldiers by the Pakistani army, what was Sajjan Jindal, head of JSW Steel, India's second biggest private steel producer, doing consorting with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Murree?

Was he perhaps enjoying a glass of chilled beer proffered by Mr Sharif from the hill station's famous brewery far from the heat and dust of the plains, the mud and blood of the LoC?

The gorier the killings, cloak-and-dagger ambushes and spy vs spy kidnappings of secret service operatives, Indo-Pak war games are shadowed by grotesque sideshows.

So it was last October when the jingoistic jungle cry of surgical strikes reverberated through the country, the tremors were felt in distant Bollywood with farcical force -- filmmakers and movie stars were made to cringe in apology and pay guilt money for hiring Pakistani actors.

Hawks and trolls are par for the course, but here's a comment posted by a retired IAS officer after the beheadings: 'May I urge the Indian government to order the forces to march upon Islamabad after capturing Lahore?' he demanded after asking 'What is this renowned mehman nawazi (hospitality) in reverse?'

Tragically, the memory of Narendra Modi dropping in uninvited to avail of 'Mian Sahib's' hospitality and wish him a happy 66th on Christmas Day 2015 is all but erased.

A few days later, Pathankot's air force base was attacked by terrorists; Burhan Wani was killed in Kashmir in July; then Uri happened in September.

Kashmir has been on a slow burn since, and Indo-Pak relations have plunged into a deep hole. The Indian Express reports that the army lost 60 soldiers in 2016 nearly -- twice the number killed in 2014 and 2015 -- to a combination of Pakistani gunfire and terrorist attacks.

The last time there was a ghastly beheading, of soldier Hemraj in 2013, Sushma Swaraj, breathing fire and brimstone, demanded 10 heads from the other side.

Today, the response is measured, of old platitudes such as 'We will give a befitting response.' Yes, retaliation is necessary, but what deeper surgery does the BJP have in mind after the spent fusillade of surgical strikes?

It's a little facile to wholly blame Pakistan for fuelling the fire in Kashmir. The turnout for the Lok Sabha by-poll in Srinagar last month was an abysmal 7.14 per cent; the Anantnag by-election has been postponed; and the BJP-PDP alliance itself is a battered victim of the unceasing volleys by stone-pelting protestors.

New Delhi is a town that seethes with Indo-Pak conspiracy theories and among the stories afloat are that link the beheadings to Pakistan's chief of army staff General Javed Bajwa.

If so, then given his appointment by Mian Nawaz Sharif last year as a less hawkish successor to General Raheel Sharif suggest a deteriorating relationship between Pakistan's political and military leadership.

This has always been a delicate balance in Pakistan; it could be that given the Pakistani premier's troubles in explaining away his family's illegal overseas fortune, the balance is shifting.

And why did the violent beheadings come in the aftermath of Mr Jindal's warm reception by the Pakistani premier?

All these suggest an intricate ongoing cat-and-mouse game, a decoding of complex ciphers.

Add to this the secret agent drama, of the proposed execution of captured naval commander-turned-sea merchant Kulbhushan Jadhav, versus the sudden disappearance last month, of former Pakistani army officer Lieutenant Colonel Mohd Habib from the India-Nepal border, and you have a sub-plot worthy of a John Le Carre espionage thriller.

Cooler-headed observers of the currently fraught India-Pakistan relationship will tell you that these games have been going on a long time.

There are retaliatory incursions, ambushes, captures and killings by Indian forces along the 700 km border; alleged spies are caught on both sides, then mutually traded as pawns; envoys are summoned in both capitals to be routinely given dressing downs.

And there is always a handy courier pigeon, like Sajjan Jindal, sent over to test the troubled waters.

However, the political and strategic reality is this: Narendra Modi's Pakistan policy is wayward, inconsistent and unplanned. It is running out of options.

The ruling party has no tangible solution to lower temperatures in Kashmir either.

The media carried a curious little item two days ago. A group of 47 blameless schoolchildren from Lahore invited by a Delhi NGO for a visit were hastily sent back hours after their arrival.

The foreign ministry spokesman said their visit was mistimed. A tiny window had opened, but it was slammed shut.

Apart from excellent PR, if the Indian government had provided them security and hospitality, it would have spelt India's confidence and maturity and perhaps touched a few hearts and minds on both sides of the border.

But in the tortured Indo-Pak relationship -- of one step forward and two backwards -- the gruesome and grotesque go hand in hand.

DON'T MISS reading the features in the RELATED LINKS BELOW...
'We need to change the attitude of Muslims.'

'Muslim youngsters have to be taught not to misuse triple talaq.'

The Supreme Court on May 11 began a historic hearing on a clutch of petitions challenging the Constitutional validity of the practice of triple talaq, polygamy and nikah halala among Muslims.

The court has so far ruled out scrutiny on polygamy, and said it would first determine whether the practice is fundamental to Islam.

In the run-up to this hearing, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met a delegation of Muslim clerics led by the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, telling them that the issue of triple talaq should not be politicised and urged Muslim leaders to initiate reform within the community.

Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf spoke to Maulana Mahmood Madani, leader of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind and a member of the All India Muslim Personal Board, on how the community views the ongoing debate.

What does Islam say on triple talaq?

Read the Quran and the Hadith (Prophet Mohammed's sayings).

Sunni Muslims all over the world follow four schools of thought: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali.

All of them say triple talaq is allowed, but yes, it is wrong.

The real issue is that people are misusing triple talaq.

Triple talaq is banned even in countries where Islam is the State religion.

These countries you are talking about are fighting terrorism. Have you asked why? Have you ever thought about this?

India is not a Muslim country. It is ruled by non-Muslims and still Indian Muslims are not involved in terrorism.

They have never joined ISIS or Al Qaeda because they love their religion.

But with this case, you will push him away from religion.

These countries which have banned triple talaq, use religion for their own political gain.

In India, our religion is our life. We do not use religion in politics.

I am talking about women's rights.

Islam has given 14 different types of rights to women -- more than any other religion.

It is true that some people are misusing triple talaq.

I oppose any move where a woman is thrown out of her house by giving triple talaq, but I want to ask a counter question: Is the percentile of divorce among Indian Muslim men higher than in other religions?

If the answer is yes, I am ready to sacrifice my head.

You met Prime Minister Modi on triple talaq. What did he say?

The prime minister told us there should be no politics on triple talaq. We welcomed it.

He said the Muslim community must solve this problem on its own.

He told us the government cannot do much until we (the Muslim community) change things.

We told him we were happy with his suggestions and told him that he should then take a step back (on triple talaq) and so must the courts.

We will tell Muslims that they must not give triple talaq at any cost. We will stop nikaahs (Muslim marriage) and tell couples to first know their rights in Islam before they get married.

Only when they familiarise themselves with their rights will they get a marriage certificate.

But we don't want the government to interfere in this issue.

The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case on triple talaq.

It's a sub judice matter, so let me not comment on it. Wait for the judgment to come.

Maulana Mahmood Madani, leader of the Jamiat Ulema-I-Hind.

The Muslim community is divided over the issue, with 50 per cent saying triple talaq is not legal.

Neither I, nor anyone else, have the power or the right to change what is written in the Quran.

Allah doesn't need us; we need Allah. People are free to not follow the Quran.

It is also wrong to say 50 per cent oppose triple talaq.

There are only a few Muslims who believe that triple talaq is wrong because women's rights are impinged upon.

But we cannot change the Quran just because some angry, crazy person has given triple talaq.

Even in countries which have banned triple talaq, the reality on the ground is different from the law.

In India, too, the court has ruled on 11 cases of triple talaq. Do you think the couple will start living together after the judgment?

If a devout Muslim woman is divorced by her husband and she still continues to live with him and has a child with him, that child will then be a bastard.

No Muslim woman will want to stay with such a man.

People believe triple talaq is an outdated practice.

It doesn't matter what people say or believe. I feel triple talaq is the best and right way for divorce.

I believe there is no need to change the system of triple talaq.

Yes, we need to change the attitude of Muslims.

Muslim youngsters have to be taught not to misuse triple talaq.

There are ways to improvise on all matters.

For instance, they can sign an agreement before marriage that two senior people in the family will have a say in the divorce procedure.

This agreement can be a part of the nikaah-nama (marriage contract).

There were even reports that Muslim women were reciting the Hanuman Chalisa praying for deliverance against triple talaq.

I do not know if these women (reading the Hanuman Chalisa) are in fact Muslim, or if they belong to another community.

If someone is fed up of Islam and does not want to believe in Allah, I can only pray that He should show them the right path.

Kindly note: Main image published only for representational purposes.
The International Court of Justice is hearing the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of being an Indian spy.



Here is a detailed timeline of the important developments in the matter of Jadhav so far:



March 3, 2016: Jadhav, a retired navy officer, arrested in Balochistan on charges of being an operative of Indian Intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing.

March 25: Indian authorities are notified about Jadhavs arrest in a press release.

December 7: Pakistan Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz confirms that conclusive evidence against Jadhav has not been found. Pakistan Foreign Ministry releases a statement the same day stating that the statement attributed to the adviser is incorrect.

January 6, 2017: Pakistan announces that it has submitted a dossier to the new United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres over Indian interference in Islamabad, which was aimed at destabilising the nation.

April 10: Pakistan Armys Inter-Services Public Relations in a press release informed that Jadhav had been awarded the death sentence by a military court in Pakistan.

April 26: Pakistan denies Indias 16th request for consular access to Jadhav.

May 8: India moved a petition in the UN seeking justice for Jadhav after being denied consular access 16 times, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan.

May 9: The ICJ puts a stay on the death sentence to Jadhav after an appeal from India, which accused Pakistan of egregious violations of the Vienna Convention.

IMAGE: Ex-servicemen protest outside the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi, demanding release of Kulbhushan Jadhav. Photograph: PTI Photo.
How hard can it be to find a judge?

Very hard if the judge in question is CS Karnan.

Desperate police teams from West Bengal to Tamil Nadu are at their wits end as they hunt for the Calcutta high court judge, hoping to capture him and bring him to justice. But the 61-year-old has proved to be as elusive as he has been brash, defying the Supreme Court and passing his own judgments against his peers.

Clues that he could be in a temple town in Andhra Pradesh or a holiday resort in Tamil Nadu have proved to be dead ends. Police are now staring at the possibility that Karnan, who was last seen in Chennai, may have fled the country, perhaps to Sri Lanka.

A senior police officer in Chennai said: The whereabouts of Justice Karnan are not known yet. A West Bengal police team continues its search for him. He said the role of Tamil Nadu police was limited to providing logistics and technical support to the visiting team.

Karnans flight from justice -- the Supreme Court ordered him arrested six days ago on contempt of court charges -- has provided endless fodder for mirth and ridicule by netizens, not only against the countrys security apparatus but also against the judiciary itself.

And in the end top police officers of two states of India are not able to locate a high court judge -- are we joking or this is the state of affairs of police and judiciary? asked Dinesh Jain, contributing his comments to a chorus of readers reaction to a news article on a national newspapers website.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sentenced Karnan, a native of Chennai, to six months imprisonment, and directed his immediate arrest in an unprecedented order against a sitting high court judge. The court ordered West Bengals Director General of Police to carry out the arrest and lodge him in a jail.

If the Intelligence (apparatus) cannot keep an eye on persons like Karnan, who has been in the news in the last six months if not more, can they be relied upon for other important duties? said another netizen in the readers comments section.

Targeting the judiciary, another reader posted: A judge doesnt believe in law and they claim they have the right to pass judgment.

The West Bengal police team has already questioned several persons, including Karnans kin. Karnan left Kolkata for Chennai by an early morning flight on Tuesday, hours before the apex court ordered his arrest.

Until a couple of hours after the court order, Karnan, who was staying at the Tamil Nadu government state guest house in Chennai, was meeting and discussing nonchalantly with journalists and visitors. He then went incommunicado when the full impact of the apex court ruling dawned on everyone.

A posse of policemen, headed by an assistant commissioner of police-cadre officer from Kolkata, landed in Chennai the next day.

When the police team arrived at the guest house, it did not find either the judge or the two lawyers who had accompanied him.

Initially it was rumoured that Karnan was somewhere in Tindivanam, about 100 km from Chennai, and later it was said that he had gone to the temple town of Kalahasti in Andhra Pradesh. But the police team came back empty-handed.

They also reportedly rushed to a holiday destination called Tada near Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh border after picking his mobile phone signal.

Word also spread that Karnan had fled to Sri Lanka through Madurai, but that information turned out to be false as no one by the name of Karnan had passed through the Madurai airport customs.

Karnan moved the Supreme Court on Thursday seeking recall of the order holding him guilty of contempt of court and sentencing him to a six-month jail term.

Karnans troubles started after he was transferred to Calcutta from the Madras high court for his repeated allegations and run-ins with its chief justice and fellow judges. He claimed he was being discriminated against and being denied promotions because he is a Dalit.

Last year, a recalcitrant Karnan stayed his own transfer order, which was suspended by the Supreme Court. Later, a constitution bench initiated contempt of court proceedings against Karnan after he repeatedly levelled allegations of corruption against Madras high court chief justice and other judges.

On March 10 this year, the apex court issued a bailable warrant against Karnan to ensure his presence before it in the contempt case. Karnan appeared before the court on March 31, a first in Indian judicial history, and sought restoration of his judicial powers. The plea was rejected.

A belligerent Karnan told the Supreme Court he would never again appear before it, even if he was arrested and put in jail.

Since going underground, a petition on his behalf has been mentioned before a five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar.

When the Chief Justice of India asked about his whereabouts, Karnans lawyer Mathews J Nedumpara said he is very much in Chennai.

But whether he intends to emerge and surrender anytime soon is anybodys guess.
Sacked Delhi minister Kapil Mishra on Monday broke his fast and was discharged from the hospital where he was admitted after he had fainted at a press conference on Sunday.

Soon after being discharged, Mishra said he would go to the offices of the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Central Board of Direct Taxes to lodge complaints against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal whom he had accused of corruption.

The former Delhi minister termed his fast as satyagraha against Kejriwal.

Taking a dig at Mishra, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said, There cannot be a satyagraha on the basis of lies.

The former water minister of Delhi had on Sunday accused Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party of massive financial irregularities while taking donations.

Mishra said doctors at the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital refused to discharge him until he broke his fast.

Mishra had been on a fast for the past six days in protest against the Aam Aadmi Partys refusal to disclose details of five party leaders travels abroad.

Doctors wont discharge until I start taking liquids. I hv to go to CBI and CBDT. starting on liquids now (sic), he tweeted.

Tmrw case of Hawala, Black Money, Money Laundering & Operating thru shell companies will be filed in CBI & CBDT against Arvind Kejriwal Ji(sic), he said on another tweet.

Image: Sacked Delhi minister Kapil Mishra talking to the media after he was discharged from RML Hospital in New Delhi. Photograph: PTI Photo
Frances President Emmanuel Macron has chosen centre-right mayor Edouard Philippe as the new prime minister.

Philippe, who is also the mayor of the northern port of Le Havre, takes over from Socialist PM Bernard Cazeneuve.

The 46-year-old comes from the centre-right faction of Les Republicains -- the party led by Nicolas Sarkozy until last year that saw its candidate, Francois Fillon, knocked out in the first round of the presidential election.

He is seen within his party as a centrist, and supported the moderate former prime minister Alain Juppe in the partys primary race to choose a presidential candidate last year.

He has been a member of parliament for Normandy, where he abstained during the vote to legalise same-sex marriage in France in 2013. He has never held a government post.

By choosing a conservative to be his first minister, the centrist independent President Macron has highlighted his determination to ignore the traditional Left-Right divide, and pick colleagues on merit.

Macron himself served as an unelected economy minister in the Socialist government, but was not a party member at the time.

Instead he has now created his own party, REM and insists that anybody who wants to join will be considered.

Philippes decision to join REM will attract other Republicans, who are traditionally Frances main governing or opposition party.

As mayor of a major English Channel port, Philippe often praised the decision to keep the border with Britain shut to asylum seekers so as to make sure that migrants were processed properly in France.

Image: Newly-appointed French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe attends a handover ceremony at the Hotel Matignon, in Paris. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters
As the Odisha CM prepares to face the BJP onslaught, the BJP hopes to rope in some BJD heavyweights.

Dillip Satapathy reports.

An important takeaway from the Bharatiya Janata Party's executive meet in Bhubaneswar, apart from resolutions on various national issues, was the pitch the party made for power in Odisha in the 2019 assembly elections in pursuance of its agenda to make inroads into new territories, particularly in the eastern region.

The road map for this is ready: Galvanise the party workers from the booth level upwards and draw in people from the Biju Janata Dal, which is the ruling party, and the Congress.

This strategy was palpable during the party's executive meeting and the roadshow by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aimed at boosting the morale of party workers and attempting to throw the BJD into disarray through statements such as many leaders of the regional outfit were in touch with the saffron brigade and ready to jump the fence, seeing the rise in the BJP's stock in the state.

There was speculation that some BJD stalwarts would join the BJP when the national executive was on.

Though this did not happen, the apprehensions remained primarily due to the sombre mood in the BJD after its drubbing in some districts in the panchayat polls and the public squabbling among its senior leaders.

Some days earlier, BJD MP Tathagat Satapathy created a controversy by tweeting that a party MP was in league with the BJP to split the party and take away the party symbol.

His party colleague and MP Baijayant Panda replied to this and then wrote an article in a local daily, blaming vested interests for the decay in the party and calling for introspection.

Even before this, BJD Vice-President and minister Damodar Rout had blamed 'conspirators' for the party's lacklustre performance in the rural local body polls.

BJD supremo and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, who wields an iron grip on party affairs and usually reins in such acts of public sparring by leaders with stern warnings, has maintained a stoic silence over the issue.

Patnaik is known to have taken tough action to boost his and the party's image whenever he has faced any challenge.

"He (Patnaik) always surprises everyone with his action. This time also he has many surprises up his sleeve. You will find them unfolding soon," said a party leader, adding, "The chief minister is currently busy taking stock of the party's performance in different districts and, for a change, interacting even with grassroots workers to have a feel of the situation in their respective areas."

"You will find him taking action after the consultation process is over."

Even as Patnaik prepares his strategy to face the BJP onslaught and keep the party's flanks covered, the saffron party hopes to rope in some BJD heavyweights.

"A split in the BJD may look unlikely, but you will see some of their leaders crossing over to us as the election approaches. We have already emerged as the alternative to the BJD in the state," said a BJP leader.

In that case, the big question that crops up is the rehabilitating and assimilating these leaders who are coming from other parties.

"Some top political leaders like Bijay Mahapatra, Dillip Ray and Giridhar Gamang (Congress), who had joined the BJP after long careers in the BJD and Congress, are now in the wilderness," pointed out S N Mishra, a political analyst.

"Though Mahapatra and Ray are (BJP) national executive members, they did not steal the arc lights, unlike their counterparts with roots in the BJP during the party's national executive meet," Mishra said, adding, "So much so that Modi didn't even receive bouquets from Mahapatra at the airport, where he had gone to welcome him."

These would play in the minds of those who wish to join the BJP.

In the zilla parishad elections, which were the only ones contested on party tickets, the BJD's vote share was 40 per cent (a slide of 3 per cent), the Congress' 18 per cent (a slide of 6 per cent) and the BJP's 33 per cent (a gain of 11 per cent).

With the BJP already being the beneficiary of most of the anti-incumbency votes, can it cover the gap of seven per cent, banking on the popularity of Modi, the Centre's pro-poor policies, the development plank, etc?

One thing is certain: Patnaik, who never faced a serious challenge in the past 17 years as chief minister, is set for a tough fight in 2019.

"Apart from the anti-incumbency votes, the BJP gained because of the Congress' weakening support base in the panchayat elections," Mishra said.

"But a change in the state Congress leadership and the installation of a leader who could enthuse Congress workers in the state might act as a spoiler in the BJP's 2019 plan."
The students of the Sri Pratap College were protesting against the alleged high handedness of security forces.

All photographs: Umar Ganie/Rediff.com

Two policemen were injured on Monday when stone-pelting students of a college clashed with the police after their attempt to take out a march in the heart of the city was thwarted.

According to the police, the students of the Sri Pratap College were protesting against the alleged high handedness of security forces in the April 17 incident in Degree College in Pulwama.

The students tried to march towards the Maulana Azad Road but were stopped by the police, leading to clashes between the two sides, a police official said.

The students threw stones at the police personnel, injuring two of them, including station house officer of police station Kralkhud, Suhail Mushtaq, the official said.

The injured cops have been shifted to police hospital for treatment, he added.

Police fired tear gas shells to disperse the stone-pelting students, the official said.

He said a few of the protesting students later entered the nearby Womens College and pelted stones at the forces from there.

The clashes went on for a while after which the protesters dispersed.

Earlier last month, the authorities had ordered suspension of classes for a week in the Sri Pratap Higher Secondary School, in the vicinity of Sri Pratap College, as a precautionary measure.

The government order had come after students of the school clashed with the security forces last week.

The police raid on the state-run college in Pulwama had triggered widespread protests by students across Kashmir on April 17.

The clashes have been going on intermittently since then.
Pakistan violated the ceasefire for the third consecutive day on Monday by firing small arms on forward posts and four hamlets in Nowshera sector of Jammu and Kashmirs Rajouri district even as authorities shifted more than 1,500 border dwellers to safer areas.

IMAGE: A villager points out damaged wall of a house after mortal shelling from Pakistan, at Jhanghar village area near the Line of Control at Nowshera sector. Photograph: PTI Photo

There was fresh ceasefire violation by Pakistani troops along the Line of Control in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district. They resorted to small arms firing on forward areas and four hamlets since 1600 hours today, Deputy Commissioner Rajouri Shahid Iqbal Choudhary said.

He said intermittent firing was reported in the villages of Sarya, Khamba, Anwas and Bhandar.

More than 1,500 people have been shifted from the shelling-hit LoC hamlets to relief camps. SDM, Nowshera, Harbans and local police officers rushed to Kalsian to coordinate with assessment teams, he said.

The Pakistani troops had on Sunday shelled mortars on civilian areas and Indian army posts along the Line of Control in Nowshera and Manjakote sectors in the district, affecting over 10,000 people.

IMAGE: Border migrants arrive to take shelter in government school after shelling from Pakistan side at Nowshera sector of Rajouri district. Photograph: PTI Photo

They had on Saturday pounded civilian areas and forward posts along the LoC in Nowshera area with mortar shells, killing two persons and injuring three.

Fifty-one schools in the area have been closed for an indefinite period, while 36 in Manjakote and Doongi zones have been closed for three days due to the shelling by

Pakistan.

Warning Pakistan of a fierce retaliation to any mischief being engineered from its soil, Union minister Jitendra Singh had on Sunday said the Indian Army is giving a befitting reply to Pakistani ceasefire violations.
Opposition MLAs flung paper balls at Governor Ram Naik and marshals frantically deflected the projectiles with files as the opening day of the maiden session of the new Uttar Pradesh assembly presented a spectacle of complete mayhem.

IMAGE: Marshals protecting UP Governor Ram Naik from paper balls thrown by agitating SP MLAs during his address to the first sitting of the 17th Uttar Pradesh Assembly in Lucknow on Monday.

Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI Photo

The ear-splitting sound of a whistle and uninterrupted slogan-shouting continued through the 35-minute customary address by the governor, but the 83-year-old Naik stood his ground and read out the 84-page speech.

The spillover effect of a bitterly fought assembly election, which saw Bharatiya Janata Partys return to power in the state after a hiatus of 15 years, was clearly visible from the very start as the Samajwadi Party, Congress and Bahujan Samaj Party members raised slogans against the government over law and order problems, including cow vigilantism.

As soon as Naik, flanked by UP assembly Speaker Hridaya Narain Dixit and Legislative Council Chairman Ramesh Yadav, began reading aloud his address, the entire Opposition was on its toes, shouting slogans against the Yogi Adityanath government and trooping into the Well.

A BSP placard read Police pit rahi thano mein, Yogi tere zamane mein (police getting beaten up under Yogis rule), goraksha ke naam par gundai band karo (stop hooliganism in the name of cow protection).

Akhilesh, Shivpal don't share pleasantries The strained relations within the Mulayam Singh Yadav clan was once again on display, with Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav avoiding any contact with his estranged uncle Shivpal Yadav. Shivpal, an MLA, reached the House and occupied the last bench with SP members, while Akhilesh, an MLC, sat in the front row during the governors address. After prodding by some SP members, Shivpal moved ahead and took a seat behind Akhilesh, but even after seeing him the former chief minister did not greet him or exchange pleasantries. -- Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI Photo

SP legislators also sought to corner the government on the law and order issue.

Congress too joined the opposition with slogans like -- Kanoon vyastha dhwasth hai, sarkar bucharkhane, teen talaq me vyast hai (law and order is in a shambles as government is busy with slaughter houses and triple talaq).

Though the governors address, SP legislator Rajesh Yadav blew a whistle whose piercing sound ensured little was heard of what the octogenarian Naik, a seasoned saffronite who still maintains his relationship with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, spoke.

As the governor read out his speech, the opposition members hurled paper balls towards him with many landing on him despite attempts by marshals to fend off the missiles.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was present during the governors address which is note prepared by the government highlighting its achievements.

Amid the din which refused to ebb away, an annoyed governor was heard telling the opposition members -- Sara Uttar Pradesh dekh raha hai aap ko (the entire Uttar Pradesh is watching you).

It was for the first time that the proceedings of UP legislature were being telecast live by Doordarshan. After the BJP came to power in the state, a decision was taken to telecast live the proceedings of the House.

IMAGE: he Assembly witnessed unruly scenes and pandemonium with the opposition disrupting proceedings over the issues including law and order situation in the state.

Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI Photo



"Sadan ki garima banaye rakhiye (maintain dignity of the House, the governor pleaded with the agitated members, but in vain.

Condemning the Opposition for creating uproar in the House, cabinet minister Sidharth Nath Singh later told reporters, People of the state have witnessed hooliganism in the SP regime. After seeing their behaviour in the House, the people of the state must be happy that they have dumped SP.

The way in which SP members jumped atop tables and threw paper balls is condemnable. They made a mockery of democracy, he said.

In an indication that the Opposition would continue to attack the government over law and order, SP Legislature Party leader Ram Govind Chowdhury later said, Rape and murders have increased. Even incidents of rape with children have gone up... This government is a failure.

IMAGE: A samajwadi Party MLA blows whistle during the Governors address.

Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI Photo



Congress Legislature Party leader Ajay Pratap Lallu also tried to put the state government in the dock over law and order.

Crime in the state has increased and state government has failed to take any concrete action against law breakers, he alleged.

In his address, the governor indirectly blamed the previous governments for the prevailing state of affairs in Uttar Pradesh and lauded the Yogi Adityanath dispensation for its resolve to transform it into a frontline state.

Naik said Uttar Pradesh was once a leading state, but in the past many years it had become laggard.
The hearing of the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old Dalit woman in Sonepat will be conducted in a fast-track court, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Monday.

Such kind of heinous crimes would not be tolerated at any cost in a civilised society and the guilty would be punished, he said.

Two persons, including the main accused Sumit, who is also a Dalit, have been sent to seven days in police remand. They will be produced in court on May 22.

Haryana Police has formed a Special Investigation Team to probe the case.

The decomposed and mutilated body of the woman, who went missing from Sonipat on May 9 and was gang-raped and brutally murdered, was found near the Industrial Model Township in Urban Estate, Rohtak, on May 11.

Stray dogs had bitten off the face and lower portion of her body.

The sheer brutality of the crime, reminiscent of the December 16, 2012 incident in Delhi which triggered nationwide outrage, occurred barely a month after the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Haryana government launched Operation Durga to stop harassment of women.

An autopsy of the victim had stated that the bones of the womans skull were shattered into pieces and some sharp-edged objects may have been inserted in her private parts.

The findings suggest that it was a brutal rape and murder, said S K Dhatterwal, head of the department of forensic medicine at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Rohtak, who conducted the post-mortem examination.

Police said the family of the victim have suspected the involvement of six more persons, out of whom five are related to the main accused.

The kin of the victim have also alleged that they had approached the Sonipat police about a month back with a complaint that Sumit was harassing their daughter, but there was no action.

The chief minister also promised strict action against those involved in the alleged rape of a 22-year-old woman at Gurgaon in the state.

The woman from Sikkim was allegedly raped by three men in a moving car and thrown out on a road in Delhi on Sunday.

IMAGE: Policemen, with the accused, inspect the scene of crime where the brutally mutilated body of a woman was dumped after she was abducted, gang-raped and murdered, in Rohtak on Sunday. Photograph: PTI Photo
United States President Donald Trump is CEO of the country, he can fire anyone he wants, Americas envoy to the United Nations Nikki Haley has said, while defending him for firing former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey.

Haley said she believed that the criticism of Trump stems from discomfort with his propensity to act on his decisions.

The president is the CEO of the country, Indian-origin Haley told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on This Week on Sunday.

He can hire and fire anyone he wants, she said.

She was responding to a question if she found herself having to explain to foreign diplomats Trumps domestic policy decisions.

I think what you can see is that this is a president of action, she said of Trump. The reason people are uncomfortable is because he acts.

Asked whether the president sought a pledge of loyalty from her, Haley replied, No.

At the same time, she said that during her tenure as South Carolinas governor demonstrations of loyalty and trust were important to her.

Regarding the presidents tweet this week warning the fired FBI director that he better hope there are no tapes of their private conversations, Haley seemed unconcerned by the possibility that the president was taping conversations.

I assume Im being taped everywhere, she said.

Haley also addressed a range of other topics, including North Koreas latest missile launch Saturday night.

She said there is a growing international consensus to impose further sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear programme and that the US will tighten the screws on North Korean President Kim Jong-uns government.

Trump has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Kim Jong Un, but Haley said such a meeting would only happen if North Korea meets certain conditions.

A missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, Haley said.

On May 10, Trump fired 56-year-old Comey, abruptly removing the top sleuth overseeing a criminal probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore and Uttam Ghosh spoke with CRPF officers who are hot on the chase to arrest the Maoist who has emerged as a major threat to the security forces in Chhattisgarh's Sukma district.

"I can't share his recent photographs with you," says a CRPF officer grimly, as we discuss Hidma Madvi.

"He will find out the person who leaked his photographs to us through the location, his dress, the people around him in these photographs. He will then hunt down the informer and eliminate him ruthlessly," he says explaining his refusal to share Hidma's photographs with the media.

Brushing aside your disbelief about Hidma's extraordinary prowess to discover the identity of the person who leaked his pictures just by seeing the photograph, this officer emphasises that he means every word he has spoken about one of the most dangerous Maoists operating in Sukma today.

The man under discussion is believed to have planned and executed the ambush that killed 25 CRPF jawans in an ambush in Burkapal, a tiny hamlet in Sukma district.

Hidma is also being touted as the mastermind of yet another ambush along the Bheji-Injaram axis, about 30-odd kilometres from the April 24 ambush, where in a similar manner, Maoists killed 12 CRPF personnel and looted their arms and ammunitions on March 11.

Based on the information provided by the local police and CRPF, the Maoists escaped with 20 AK-47 rifless, four under-barrel grenade launchers, a score of INSAS rifles and more than 500 rounds of bullets after the April 24 ambush that lasted almost 45 minutes.

"The operation has Hidma written all over it," says the CRPF officer.

"He not only plans killings, but also makes sure his men loot our weapons too."

Ask him if mutilating bodies of dead jawans is also a hallmark of operations planned and executed by Hidma, he says, "the wounds on the chests and arms of our dead jawans was the result of the Maoists taking away their weapons."

"They dragged the dead jawans to places that were safe for them and then stripped them of their weapons and ammunition using sharp weapons," he says.

Hidma Madvi, known to his Maoist comrades as Hidma, is 32 years old, though some experts who study him closely and local CRPF informers reckon his age could be anywhere between 30 to 40.

According to Dr Girish Kant Pandey, former head of the department of defence studies, Government Science College, Raipur, Hidma is known to be active along the Dornapal-Errabore-Konta and Golapalli tract and has been tasked with disrupting construction of roads along this axis, considered a stronghold of the Maoists.

"He is very sharp and ruthless. He is hero worshipped by his followers, mostly his close friends, and commands military operations along this axis with the help of five rigorously-trained companies of 100 men each," says Dr Pandey.

Dr Pandey, however, contests claims that Hidma masterminded the April 24 ambush.

"The police usually registers an FIR against the Naxal who is active in a particular area. Now, Hidma has come to the forefront after the Burkapal attack because this area is considered to be under his command," says Dr Pandey.

Yet another CRPF officer says the Maoist leadership, who mostly hail from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, has in recent years began to groom Adivasis to take leadership of their armed battalions and that explains Hidma's swift ascension.

"Hidma belongs to the military dalam that has armed wings like 'section', 'platoon' and 'company'," he says.

"The military dalam is the most rigorously trained in the use of heavy weapons, and does not have area limitation. These dalams are quick on their feet, operate in small numbers and go to any area to execute Burkapal-like operations," adds Dr Pandey.

Given such a reputation, Hidma is a marked man in Sukma.

The local police and CRPF are pursuing leads from informers and assessing intelligence inputs coming in from the state and Centre to arrest or eliminate Hidma.

"Hidma is like Napoleon Bonaparte," says the CRPF officer who refused to share his photographs, "he may have been successful till now, but he too will meet his Waterloo."
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.
Hong Kong Rejects Asylum for Snowden Helpers

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 15 May 2017 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Hong Kong Rejects Asylum for Snowden Helpers, 15 May 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/591958204.html [accessed 10 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.

Seven people who sheltered the whistleblower Edward Snowden in June 2013 are at risk of return to torture and persecution at home, Human Rights Watch said today. On May 11, 2017, the Hong Kong Immigration Department rejected their asylum claim; their lawyers are in the process of appealing the decision and pursuing a separate case for entry and asylum in Canada, where sponsors are ready to assist them.

"Those who helped Edward Snowden in Hong Kong when he was seeking asylum now find themselves at dire risk if sent back to their countries," said Dinah PoKempner, general counsel at Human Rights Watch. "Canada has the opportunity to a prevent a terrible outcome and should act immediately."

The asylum-seekers include two men and a woman from Sri Lanka, and a woman from the Philippines, along with their three children who were born in Hong Kong and are stateless. The adults allege that they suffered torture and persecution in their home countries, and have been pursued by powerful people or officials who have tracked or threatened them.

Their asylum lawyer, Robert Tibbo, brought Snowden, another client, to their homes in 2013 after he revealed he had disclosed classified information to the press. The families each freely allowed Snowden to stay with them for a short time after his disclosures became public, but before his arrest was sought.

Neither the asylum-seekers nor their lawyer revealed their role in Snowden's journey. However, journalists independently discovered their identities shortly before the release of an Oliver Stone movie about Snowden that show him being hidden among asylum-seekers in Hong Kong. At that point, the asylum seekers went public in an effort to have some control over how they were portrayed in the media.

Stories and photographs of the asylum-seekers have been published worldwide, including in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, where they fear persecution. In October 2016, Sri Lankan Criminal Investigation Department officers were in Hong Kong trying to locate the asylum-seekers, showing their photographs to people there. The asylum-seekers have since moved location in Hong Kong but are living in considerable fear of being forcibly returned to their countries.

"This could end very badly for these people, who have identified persecutors searching for them," said PoKempner, who noted that Hong Kong for many years has had a shockingly poor record on recognition of asylum claims. "It is all the more urgent for Canada to intervene swiftly and protect them."

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Indonesia: Overturn blasphemy conviction of Jakarta Governor and repeal law

Publisher Article 19 Publication Date 11 May 2017 Cite as Article 19, Indonesia: Overturn blasphemy conviction of Jakarta Governor and repeal law, 11 May 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/591960744.html [accessed 10 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.

ARTICLE 19 condemns the criminal conviction for blasphemy of Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (also known as Ahok), and his sentencing to two years imprisonment. The conviction and heavy-handed sentence clearly violate the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief, and will likely reduce the space for open debate and discussion in Indonesia, in particular on matters relating to pluralism, diversity and inclusion.

Ahok was convicted for citing a passage of the Quran in the context of his re-election campaign to become Governor of Jakarta in September 2016. He claimed Muslim leaders were manipulating that passage to influence Muslims to vote against him, which led to him losing the election. Prior to his conviction, he was also subject to a travel ban. Ahok is a Christian and ethnically Chinese, which are both minority groups in Muslim-majority Indonesia. He is due to be succeeded as Governor by his opponent in the election contest, Anies Baswedan, who is a Muslim, in October.

Section 156(a) of the Criminal Code of Indonesia provides up to five years imprisonment for whosoever in public intentionally express their views or engage in actions [] that in principle incite hostilities and considered as abuse or defamation of a religion embraced in

Indonesia. The Constitution recognizes six such religions: Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Confucianism.

ARTICLE 19 has previously argued to the Constitutional Court of Indonesia that Section 156(a) of the Criminal Code, and the 1965 Presidential decision from which it and other discriminatory provisions originate, violate Indonesias obligations under international human rights law. While the Constitutional Court rejected the petition to declare the law unconstitutional in 2010, they did find that it should be made clearer.

Reviewing Indonesias compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 2013, the UN Human Rights Committee was critical of the Constitutional Courts 2010 decision, and urged the repeal of Section 156(a) of the Criminal Code. This recommendation finds support in numerous developments to international human rights law standards that have taken place since the Indonesian Constitutional Court last addressed this issue.

The UN Human Rights Committee itself made clear in General Comment No. 34 (2011) that prohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a religion or other belief system, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with [the ICCPR] and in particular that it would not be permissible for such prohibitions to be used to prevent or punish criticism of religious leaders or commentary on religious doctrine and tenets of faith.

ARTICLE 19 has long argued that blasphemy laws violate the right to freedom of expression for three reasons:

The right to freedom of religion or belief attaches to individuals, and cannot be invoked to justify limitations on the right to freedom of expression for the purpose of protecting religions or beliefs per se from adverse comment or criticism;

Blasphemy laws are frequently used to prevent and punish the expression of dissenting or controversial views, inhibiting open debate, encouraging self-censorship, and sowing distrust within and between different religion or belief communities;

Blasphemy laws are often discriminatory in their impact, targeting religion or belief minorities, as well as dissenters within majority religion or belief communities.

Blasphemy laws are therefore often counter-productive to the purposes governments frequently invoke to justify their use.

These are among the reasons that the OHCHR-led Rabat Plan of Action (2012) recommends the repeal of blasphemy laws. Several UN Human Rights Council (UN HRC) special procedures also take this stance, including the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief (March 2017) and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (2015). Fellow UN Member States also recommended the repeal of Section 156(a) of the Criminal Code during Indonesias recent Universal Periodic Review (3 May 2017).

UN HRC resolution 16/18, adopted in 2011, marked a shift in the international communitys response to religious intolerance. Dropping divisive calls for States to combat defamation of religions, the resolution represented consensus agreement on a package of positive and non-coercive measures to open space for dialogue and understanding within and between different religion and belief communities. The criminal law is foreseen as an exceptional and last resort measure, and only in response to incitement to imminent violence on the basis of religion or belief. Indonesia has been a vocal supporter of the resolution, and participated actively in the Istanbul Process, an inter-governmental series of meetings on the implementation of the resolutions action plan.

ARTICLE 19 considers the criminal blasphemy conviction and two-year sentence of Ahok marks a dangerous moment for freedom of expression in Indonesia. We urge the Indonesian government to quash Ahoks conviction and release him, and to repeal Section 156(a) of the Criminal Code, together with the 1965 Presidential decision and all laws adopted pursuant to it, without delay.

President Joko Widodo must unequivocally condemn the conviction and initiate an inclusive national dialogue on the actions needed to protect the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief for all people in Indonesia, in line with UN HRC resolution 16/18 and the OHCHRs Rabat Plan of Action.

Copyright notice: Copyright ARTICLE 19
Uganda: Academic and activist Stella Nyanzi released on bail for free speech charges

Publisher Article 19 Publication Date 11 May 2017 Cite as Article 19, Uganda: Academic and activist Stella Nyanzi released on bail for free speech charges, 11 May 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/591960c34.html [accessed 10 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.

UPDATE

Uganda: Academic and activist Stella Nyanzi released on bail for free speech charges

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ARTICLE 19

11 May 2017

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ARTICLE 19 welcomes the news that after 33 days in jail, the Buganda Road Magistrates Court today released Stella Nyanzi, an academic, activist, and poet, on bail. However, she continues to face charges under the Computer Misuse Act, in violation of her right to freedom of expression.

Nyanzi was arrested and charged on 7 April under Sections 24 and 25 of the Computer Misuse Act 2011, allegedly for harassing and using indecent language against the President and the first family online. She had posted criticism of the President on her Facebook page, and now faces three year and one year prison sentences, respectively, under the charges.

Nyanzi appeared visibly unwell at the court hearing. While she will now be released, she is required to attend her next court hearing on the charges on 25 May 2017.

Responding to the release, ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa Director Henry Maina said: "We are extremely pleased to hear that Stella Nyanzi has been released on bail, but disappointed that the charges against her remain. Her prosecution for comments posted online violates her right to freedom of expression and should be immediately dropped."

"We call on the Ugandan government to drop all charges against Dr Nyanzi and other artists and journalists being prosecuted for exercising their freedom of expression, and to reform the Computer Misuse Act to bring it into line with international standards."

Following the court hearing, four students from Makerere University were arrested outside the Court for demonstrating against Nyanzi's prosecution and held at Kampala Central police Station.

___________________________________________________________________________

Editorial notes:

The sections of the Computer Misuse Act provide as follows:

24. Cyber harassment. (1) A person who commits cyber harassment is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding seventy two currency points or imprisonment not exceeding three years or both.

(2) For purposes of this section cyber harassment is the use of a computer for any of the following purposes-

(a) making any request, suggestion or proposal which is obscene, lewd, lascivious or indecent;

(b) threatening to inflict injury or physical harm to the person or property of any person; or

(c) knowingly permits any electronic communications device to be used for any of the purposes mentioned in this section.

25. Offensive communication. Any person who willfully and repeatedly uses electronic communication to disturb or attempts to disturb the peace, quiet or right of privacy of any person with no purpose of legitimate communication whether or not a conversation ensues commits a misdemeanour and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding twenty four currency points or imprisonment not exceeding one year or both.

Copyright notice: Copyright ARTICLE 19
Papua New Guinea: Officers responsible for prisoner killings must meet justice

Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 15 May 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, Papua New Guinea: Officers responsible for prisoner killings must meet justice, 15 May 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5919b0e84.html [accessed 10 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.

Responding to the killing by Papua New Guinea security forces of 17 prisoners who escaped Buimo jail as part of a mass breakout, Amnesty International's Director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Champa Patel, said:

"The Papua New Guinea authorities must immediately order an independent and effective investigation into these killings. They must suspend any officers involved until the investigation is concluded, and hold suspected perpetrators to account through fair trials without recourse to the death penalty. It is alarming that the security forces' first response was to use lethal force against unarmed people without any concern for their right to life.

"Poor sanitary conditions, overcrowding, and long remand periods have sparked mass breakouts before. Prison reforms and accountability mechanisms are crucial to stop these incidents from happening again. Whatever the crime committed by inmates, they have the right to be treated humanely."

Copyright notice:  Copyright Amnesty International
From 2-7 to sectional champs, Monrovia has one question: 'Why not us?'
China has ordered businesses to close and carried out mass detentions of petitioners and rights activists in a nationwide security operation during its "New Silk Road" forum in Beijing.



As nearly 30 heads of state gathered in Beijing for President Xi Jinping's "Belt and Road" global infrastructure initiative, restaurants were ordered to close by local police, while power to polluting enterprises in neighboring Hebei province was cut.



Several homegrown Chinese fast-food chains said they would shut down "in order to support the Belt and Road Forum" Sunday through Tuesday.



Meanwhile, local power companies announced a shutdown of power supplies to a number of polluting enterprises from May 12 in Langfang city in neighboring Hebei province.



"Local enterprises are required to halt production pending environmental rectification," a directive issued by a local government in Wen'an county said.



Meanwhile, groups of "interceptors" were dispatched by local governments to detain and escort home anyone traveling to Beijing to pursue a complaint against the government.



"During the Belt and Road forum, there has been a huge crackdown on petitioners, with illegal kidnappings and detentions by local governments," a Shandong petitioner surnamed Jiang told RFA.



"They're spending tens, hundreds of billions to support foreign countries, but back in China, ordinary people can't even get reliable health care coverage or pensions," Jiang said.



More than a dozen Sichuan petitioners including Li Zhaoxiu, Yan Tafeng, and Zhou Wenming were detained by interceptors en route to the forum venue at Huairou on Sunday and taken to the out-of-town unofficial detention center at Jiujingzhuang on the outskirts of Beijing, they told RFA.



"When I was in Beijing yesterday, there were police checkpoints at all of the public transportation stops, particularly those heading out to Yanqi Lake and Huairou, with police checking people's ID," Li told RFA. "When they find petitioners, they take them to Jiujingzhuang."



"Security is also very tight around Tiananmen Square and Qianmen [in downtown Beijing]," she said. "There are police vehicles everywhere, regular police and riot police."



Li said she was escorted home by interceptors along with the rest of her group of petitioners from Sichuan's provincial capital, Chengdu.



'Nothing but slaves'



And police in Tianjin surrounded the home of a 91-year-old woman in a bid to prevent her traveling to Beijing during the forum, prompting a standoff with her grown children.



"You are all slaves. You are nothing but slaves," a woman yells at the visibly embarrassed officials. "One day your slave-masters are going to kill you all, and your descendants will be petitioning for human rights, democracy, and a constitutional government, just like us."



"Petitioning isn't a crime. Why do you treat us like this, protecting your corrupt regime? You have sold out!" she shouts.



Meanwhile, President Xi hit out at growing protectionism in a keynote address at the forum launching his new Silk Road plan, calling for greater openness and cooperation.



"We need to seek results through greater openness and cooperation, avoid fragmentation, refrain from setting inhibitive thresholds for cooperation or pursuing exclusive arrangements, and reject protectionism," he told delegates, who included Russian president Vladimir Putin and Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.



Comparing nations to "swans and geese" that can fly through storms as a team, Xi pledged to pour an extra U.S.$124 billion into the China-bankrolled project, includes plans for ports, railways, roads, and industrial parks, on top of some U.S.$890 billion earmarked by the China Development Bank.



However, a number of European Union countriesFrance, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Portugal, and Britainrefused to sign one of the forum's trade communiques, citing concerns over the transparency of public procurement and social and environmental standards, Reuters reported.



And India boycotted the summit over plans to create the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor linking northwestern China to the Arabian Sea via disputed territory in Kashmir.



Bid for legitimacy



Xia Ming, political science professor at the College of Staten Island in New York, said Xi's Belt and Road plan is a bid by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to shore up its legitimacy by boosting economic growth.



"Central Asia is rich in energy and other resources, which is needed for China's economic development," Xia said. "It can also help Central Asian countries to build railways, ports, and bridges and other infrastructure, but also to digest China's excess capacity."



He said Xi is also pouring money into building maritime routes.



"They want to connect up shipping routes from the East and South China Seas with the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean," Xia said.



"This is part of the economic strategy to enable Chinese goods to be shipped to various parts of Europe and Asia," he said. "But it's also part of China's political strategy to become a major naval power."



But Hong Kong China analyst Willy Lam said the forum is largely a public relations exercise for Xi.



"It is very clear that a lot of these investments and geopolitical positioning by China has to do with balancing the power of the United States," Lam said. "Personally, I think that this is a very dangerous move, because while China may seem rich and powerful on the face of it ... it is more like an investment black hole."



Hu Xingdou, economics professor at the Beijing University of Science and Technology, said the success of Xi's project will ultimately depend on private-sector involvement.



"It can't be allowed to turn into a completely government-led project, as we had during the Great Leap Forward [1950-1953] era," he said. "They should ensure private sector participation and investment ... and make it subject to market forces."



"That's the only way to turn this into a win-win scenario for multiple parties."



Reported by Qiao Long and Gao Shan for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wong Si-lam for the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.




China issued a nationwide cybersecurity alert on Monday in the wake of global WannaCry "ransomware" attacks that left tens of thousands of computers compromised and showed up gaping holes in the online security practices of higher education institutes, experts said.



The enterprise-security division of anti-virus software provider Qihoo 360 said 29,372 institutions ranging from government offices to universities, ATMs and hospitals had been infected by the outbreak, including around 4,000 universities and research institutions.



However, the country's Cybersecurity Administration said the spread of the malware was believed to be slowing on Monday, although Chinese government bodies from transport, social security, industry watchdogs and immigration said they had suspended services ranging from processing applications to traffic crime enforcement in the wake of the attacks.



A computer expert in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong surnamed Gao told RFA on Monday that the spread of the malware was exacerbated by the fact that some institutions had disabled their own firewalls.



"Sometimes the institutional firewalls make the computers very slow, so sometimes they are switched off," Gao said. "Sometimes the government sends out directives warning [them] about this."



Sang Young, cybersecurity expert at the Internet Society's local chapter, agreed, saying that the attack had highlighted gaping holes in the cybersecurity of many Chinese educational institutions.



"A lot of the technical colleges in mainland China are directly linked to the internet, which is to say that they use their real IP addresses, so it's very easy for the virus to find them," Young said.



"Here in Hong Kong, a lot of companies are hidden behind firewalls, or wifi routers, which has the same effect."



Ransomware attack



The attack comes as China gears up to implement a tough new cybersecurity law from June 1, which critics say discriminates against overseas service providers.



Among government agencies affected were a social security department in the central city of Changsha, the exit-entry bureau in northeastern Dalian, a housing fund in southern Zhuhai and an industry watchdog in eastern Xuzhou, Reuters reported.



The attack encrypts infected machines, before demanding ransom payments of U.S.$300-600 to unlock them again, using the digital currency Bitcoin.



The Cyberspace Administration warned Chinese computer users to install and upgrade computer security software to avoid further attacks.



Xinhua news agency said that some 18,000 IP addresses in China have been confirmed as infected with the "WannaCry" ransomware, citing the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center (CNCERT).



"Intranets in many industries and enterprises involving banking, education, electricity, energy, healthcare and transportation have been affected in different extents," it said, quoting experts as saying that reinstalling the operating system is one way of dealing with the problem.



"The growth rate of infected institutions on Monday has slowed significantly compared to the previous two days," Chinese Internet security company Qihoo 360 said in a statement.



"Previous concerns of a wide-scale infection of domestic institutions did not eventuate."



However, China remained a major source of attack from infected computers, according to a Hong Kong-based cybersecurity company.



Michael Gazeley, managing director of Network Box, said nearly half of the attacks on Network Box's clients came from China.



Reported by Goh Fung for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Authorities in Vietnam on Monday detained prominent activist Hoang Duc Binh for anti-state activities and announced a warrant to arrest fellow rights defender Thai Van Dung for violating probation, amid a crackdown on those protesting the governments handling of a devastating 2016 toxic waste spill.



The police of central Vietnams Nghe An province arrested Binh, 34, for opposing officers on duty and abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state under Articles 257 and 258 of Vietnams penal code, according to a report by the Nghe An Public Security newspaper.



Binh will be detained for 90 days on the charges, which the report tied to defaming the ruling Communist Party on social media and using the April 2016 waste spill by Taiwan-owned Formosa Plastics Groups steel plant as an excuse to cause social disorder through protests in Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces.



Emily Page Le, a U.S.-based democracy activist currently visiting Vietnam, told RFAs Vietnamese Service that she had been riding in a car with Binh and Priest Nguyen Dinh Thuc Monday after leaving Song Ngoc parish in Nghe Ans Quynh Luu district when plainclothes officers pulled them over in neighboring Dien Chau district and arrested Binh.



As we left Song Ngoc parish, there were two security guards following us, so Priest Thuc tried to take pictures of them, Le said of the Catholic priest, who in early May was one of two clergymen denounced by the Vietnamese government for organizing protests against Formosa.



When we had driven about 40 kilometers (25 miles), a police car stopped us to check our papers. As the driver opened the door to give them the papers, they pulled him out of the car and security personnel dragged Binh out.



Binhs father, Hoang Duc Hoa, confirmed that his son had been arrested by plainclothes officers, but said his family has no clue where he is being held.



We dont know anything [about his situation] because the authorities havent spoken to us, he told RFA.



Our family and his friends are looking for him at the moment.



The Formosa waste spill killed an estimated 115 tons of fish and left fishermen jobless in four coastal provinces.



Formosa has voluntarily paid U.S. $500 million to clean up and compensate coastal residents affected by the spill, but slow and uneven payout of the funds by the Vietnamese government has prompted protests that continue to be held more than a year later.



Hundreds of people gathered in front of the Dien Chau district government office to demand Binhs release Monday and security personnel were deployed to stop the demonstration.



Activists convicted of plotting to 'overthrow' the government listen to their verdicts at a court in Vinh, Nghe An province on Jan. 9, 2013. Credit: AFP/Vietnam News Agency Arrest warrant



Also on Monday, the official Nghe An newspaper announced a nationwide hunt for Catholic activist Thai Van Dung, citing an arrest warrant signed by the provincial police on March 8, 2017 for failing to comply with his sentence from an earlier prison term under Article 304 of Vietnams penal code.



According to the report, Dungwho has helped to organize anti-Formosa protestsviolated his terms of probation and fled his residence on March 1.



Dung told RFA on Monday that neither he nor his family had received a warrant for his arrest or any kind of notification from the authorities in the two months since the order was signed.



Today  the authorities put it on their website without coming to see me directly to present the arrest warrant, Dung said.



If the authorities really issued that warrant, then I am willing to let the authorities arrest me because before I was released from prison I declared that I  would continue to fight for justice and peacefor the rights that people deserve to have.



Dung was arrested on August 19, 2011 and on Jan. 9, 2013 was sentenced to four years in jail and four years of probation for trying to overthrow the government' under Article 79 of Vietnams penal code and for his alleged affiliation with banned opposition party Viet Tan. Sentences in Vietnam typically account for time spent in pre-trial detention.



Upon his release from Thanh Hoa Camp in August 2015, Dung told RFA that prison authorities had offered to reduce his sentence if he signed a confession admitting to the charges against him, but said he had refused.



He said he was forced to routinely fight for his limited rights and conduct hunger strikes to get his way while incarcerated, including one 12-day fast in early 2014 to try to win the right read religious books.



Thai told RFA at the time that he would continue working with civil society organizations and fighting for peoples rights, adding that he knew he could be arrested again and was prepared for that.



A file photo of Thich Quang Do, patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, at the Thanh Minh Zen Monastery in Ho Chi Minh City. Credit: AFP Hunger strike



Reports of the arrest and warrant came as Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights (VCHR) announced that Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) secretary-general Le Cong Cau is holding a hunger strike in protest of a ban prohibiting him from visiting Thich Quang Do, the churchs critically-ill detained leader.



VCHR said that Do, 89, had called Cau on Sunday, asking him to come urgently to Vietnams commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City from his home in Hue city in Thua Thien-Hue province to discuss his health situation and related UBCV affairs.



Cau purchased a plane ticket and was preparing to fly to Ho Chi Minh City Monday, but policewho monitor the telephones of both Do and Cauintercepted the communication, traveled to his home Sunday evening, and prohibited him from traveling without providing any order or explanation.



Cau has announced that he is holding a hunger strike until May 22 in protest.



VCHR condemned the travel ban on Cau and slammed Vietnams government for its inhumane treatment of Do, who has been detained for decades, without any justification or charge.



Today, when his health is failing, police prevent him from receiving support from his followers, the group said in a statement.



VCHR urged the international community to pressure Vietnam to lift all restrictions on Do and guarantee his right to communicate with and receive visits from UBCV members, and to immediately lift the travel ban on Cau and enable him to meet with Do, in accordance with Vietnams obligations as a state party to the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.



Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Emily Peyman. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
A 29-year-old Amelia County woman has been charged with murder in the slaying of a 64-year-old Amelia woman who was found dead Sunday in her home.

Shannon M. Chaney, 29, was arrested Sunday and charged with first-degree murder. She is accused of killing Barbara A. Bradley.

The Amelia County Sheriffs Office said Bradley suffered obvious trauma to the head, but the medical examiners office has not yet ruled on her cause of death.

Authorities have not disclosed the suspects relationship to the victim.

The sheriffs office said they were called about 10:50 a.m. for a report of an unconscious woman not breathing in the 2900 block of Richmond Road. When officers arrived, they found Bradleys body.

The victims death was immediately classified as suspicious.

Chaney made a brief appearance Monday morning in Amelia County General District Court. She is being held without bail in the Piedmont Regional Jail.

Chaney was charged last year with malicious wounding in an Oct. 4 assault, but the charge was dismissed against her on Jan. 10, according to online court records. Details of that incident were not immediately available.

The sheriffs office is asking for anyone who may have information to call (804) 561-2118 or Crime Solvers at (804) 561-5200.
A Richmond man has been charged in connection with a double homicide in the Midlothian Village Apartments that occurred in April, Richmond police said Monday.

Jarmaine T. Free, 21, of the 6000 block of Salem Street, was indicted last week on two counts each of murder and use of a firearm in commission of a felony, as well as possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Free was already in police custody on an unrelated charge.

About 7:30 p.m. on April 8, police responded to the 4000 block of Midlothian Turnpike, where they found Kejuan L. Goode, 18, and Terrell D. Thomas, 20, inside an apartment with gunshot wounds. They died at the scene. Both lived in Midlothian Village, police said.

Anyone with additional information about this incident is asked to call Major Crimes Detective K. Hughes at (804) 646-3917 or contact Crime Stoppers at (804) 780-1000 or www.7801000.com.

You can also submit tips about people in illegal possession of a gun by texting Crime Stoppers at 274637, using the keyword GUN250 followed by the tip. Rewards of up to $250 are possible.

All Crime Stoppers methods are anonymous.
It was nearly 2 a.m. and the car was driving slowly through the Chesterfield County neighborhood.

The police officer took notice of this vehicle packed with teenagers driving so slowly at such a late hour. So he circled his car around and parked along Burnage Court in a subdivision in western Chesterfield, and watched.

Soon, the car drove farther into the neighborhood, parked, and five teenagers piled out. They branched out on foot down the street, opening car doors and taking things from the vehicles. They only had to break into a few of the cars. Most of them were unlocked.

By the end of the night, all five teenagers, ages 17 to 19, had been arrested and faced more than two dozen charges.

Its consistent with a lot of other cases we see, in terms of age and how the crime was committed, in groups, Chesterfield police Capt. Wes Fertig said.

That same month, another group of teenagers from ages 17 to 19 and dressed in black clothing ended up facing a total of nine charges. That was after they drove through the Mineola neighborhood in the countys Chester area in an unmarked car at nearly 2 a.m. and started stealing items from mostly unlocked cars.

***

This type of crime has been on the rise in the region in recent years, and the majority of the incidents happen to unlocked cars.

The trend prompted Chesterfields chief of police, Col. Thierry G. Dupuis, to mention it to the Board of Supervisors at a recent work session.

Larcenies from cars in Chesterfield increased from 924 in 2014 to 1,323 in 2015 to 1,434 in 2016. A majority of those happened to unlocked cars, which accounted for 599 of those larcenies in 2014, and 986 in 2016.

In Richmond, larcenies from cars increased from 1,899 in 2015 to 2,144 in 2016. In Hanover, 192 thefts from cars were reported in 2015, compared with 279 the next year.

In Henrico, thefts from cars increased from 1,783 in 2015 to 1,988 in 2016, again with unlocked vehicles seeing the largest increase.

The crime also increased in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year in Richmond, Chesterfield and Hanover  but not in Henrico.

Hopefully, that is a result of our efforts to educate the public about always locking their cars, said Lt. C.L. Garrett with Henricos police division.

Neither the city nor Hanover breaks down the numbers according to locked and unlocked vehicles, but police spokespersons from both departments said the vast majority still come from unlocked cars.

Often, said Lt. Jason Stocks with Chesterfields police department, loose change and such small items as cellphones or iPads are stolen.

Chesterfields Capt. Fertig said the younger people who steal dont often go to pawn shops. Thats more indicative of an older offender, he said. Younger people often keep stolen items for their personal use, or sell it online.

***

People often never see their stolen items again.

In Chesterfield, police often determined there wasnt enough evidence for an investigation.

For example, there were a total of 1,434 reported larcenies from automobiles in Chesterfield in 2016.

Police cleared 39 percent of the cases for which an investigation was opened in 2016. But when also taking into account the incidents for which an investigation wasnt opened, the clearance rate dropped to 10 percent.

And for a crime to be cleared, charges do not have to be pressed and a conviction doesnt need to occur. A crime can be cleared through an arrest, finding probable cause for an arrest, or by finding that there was no criminal act.

Richmond police spokeswoman Koury Wilson said the departments primary focus is to address violent crime.

We understand the frustrations of citizens, however the best prevention of theft from motor vehicles is ... taking personal responsibility, awareness, and communities to take ownership, Wilson wrote in an email.

***

Jay Albanese, the chair of Criminal Justice Programs at the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University, said most thefts are opportunistic when people pull on door handles or notice open windows in cars, grab what they see, and run away. Unlocked cars are the largest cause of theft, he added.

Causes for thefts vary, he said, and it would take an analysis of offenders caught locally to understand the regions situation. But in other places, he said, it is often unsupervised and roaming locals looking to cause trouble or finding a car to joyride around in. Now that cars are more difficult to steal, theft from cars is an alternative.

The other common cause is drugs, he said.

Drug users are often desperate for cash, so a number have been found to pull on car door handles, usually late at night, to see if any open so valuables inside can be fenced for cash or drugs, he said.

Nationally, the estimated number of motor vehicle thefts increased 3.1 percent in 2015 compared with 2014, but decreased 41 percent compared with 2006, Albanese said. The final numbers for 2016 have not been released yet by the FBI Uniform Crime Report.

Law enforcement officials said residents should lock cars, roll up windows and hide valuables. They also noted increased public awareness campaigns by their departments.

They offered various reasons for the increases. Hanover sheriffs Sgt. James Cooper said he could not speculate on the reasons behind the rise in Hanover.

In Richmond, Wilson noted age and substance abuse as two factors. Were finding that some youth are independently committing these crimes of opportunity. Also, those with substance abuse problems who trade items found in vehicles for illegal narcotics. Its a prime opportunity for these individuals. And typically, they will continue to commit these crimes until theyre caught, Wilson wrote in an email.

Chesterfields Lt. Stocks said the department could be receiving more reports of this type of crime because its now easier to report. The department increased the ways people can file a report, he said, and Chesterfield has increased its public awareness campaign. In addition, he said, the population in Chesterfield has grown.

In a 2015 study, economist Geoffrey Fain Williams of Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., suggested that age plays a key role in why people steal.

He wrote that theft appears to be a phenomenon of impatient individuals entering a temporary period of intensified risk-taking in adolescence.
CHARLOTTESVILLE  Three people face charges from a counterprotest in Lee Park after scuffles broke out Sunday night.

During the last minutes of the candlelit event, held in response to a torch-lit rally at the park the night before, several fights broke out, police said. While breaking up a fight, a city officer was struck in the head by a cellphone thrown from the crowd. The officer suffered a minor injury, police said.

Police arrested Charles W. Best, 21, of Richmond after officers identified him as the person who threw the phone. When police searched Best during the arrest, officers found a fully automatic-opening knife that he had concealed, police said.

Best faces a charge of assaulting a law enforcement officer as well as a charge of carrying a concealed weapon.

Police also arrested Jordan C. McNeish, 28, of Afton and right-wing blogger Jason Kessler, 33, of Charlottesville. Officers said McNeish spit on Kessler, who in turn did not obey officer commands to leave the area and to stop using a bullhorn to incite others, according to police.

Both were charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

At a news conference outside City Hall on Monday, city Deputy Police Chief Gary Pleasants said police are still investigating the events of the weekend. Officers will look at all of the available body camera footage to determine if any additional charges are appropriate.

We have not finished what were doing, Pleasants said. Were going to take our time and look at everything that occurred over the weekend.

Pleasants also said police were caught off guard over the weekend and were not told about either event.

About 100 torch-wielding protesters gathered in Lee Park on Saturday night, chanting You will not replace us, Russia is our friend and Blood and soil.

Organizers of Sundays counterprotest said they met to outshine their torches with our love and to send a message that they will not come here to intimidate us unchallenged.

Estimating the crowd at 300 to 500 for Sundays counterprotest, Pleasants said that in the future, organizers should give police notice. Pleasants said police need to know about large gatherings in order to keep everyone safe.

We are going to protect the constitutional right of everyone to protest, as long as those protests are peaceful, Pleasants said. Once they are not peaceful, then well stop them. If they become violent, they will not continue.
In May, theres no way to know exactly when and where this seasons hurricanes will strike. But history shows that vacationers are most vulnerable in the late summer and early fall months.

In the Atlantic Ocean, hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, but storms occasionally start to spin up in the spring.

Hurricane activity usually increases significantly in August and peaks in mid-September, when ocean waters are at their warmest.

But in the past several years, we havent seen many intense hurricanes during September.

The most menacing hurricanes took aim at the U.S. (or threatened to) during October, like Matthew last year, Joaquin in 2015 and Sandy in 2012.

This regions most intense storm in living memory was also an October storm: 1954s Hurricane Hazel. The Category 4 storm wiped away coastal development around the North Carolina-South Carolina border. Hazels destructive wind gusts went as far inland as Richmond, Washington, Pennsylvania and Ontario.

Usually, June will be a safer time than September to book a week at a North Carolina or Florida beach, but its worth being aware of the risks in any warm month.

Major hurricanes like Hazel and Matthew are relatively rare in June and July, but weaker tropical storms in the early summer are still capable of ruining beach plans.

Storms in June and July may be the kind that develop when a cold front stalls just off the East Coast or the Gulf Coast. Instead of a storm marching west across the ocean with days of warning, the storm simply brews up right along the shore. That kind isnt usually fierce enough to warrant evacuations, but heavy rain and rough surf can make the coast an unpleasant and dangerous place to be.

In 2015, the only storms to hit the U.S. mainland all season arrived in the late spring.

Tropical Storm Ana made landfall near Myrtle Beach in late May, and Tropical Storm Bill hit the central Texas coast in mid-June.

2014s only hurricane landfall in the U.S. came over the Independence Day weekend when Hurricane Arthur brushed the North Carolina coast.

The Atlantics first tropical storm has developed before June 1 in six of the past 11 years.

This years first storm, Tropical Storm Arlene, swirled harmlessly through the open ocean in mid-April.

Forecasts for how many storms there will be in a season dont mean much from a preparedness standpoint.

The 1992 hurricane season was statistically below average with six named storms in the Atlantic Ocean. One of them  Category 5 Andrew  happened to devastate South Florida and Louisiana.

By the numbers, 2010 was quite busy with 19 storms and five major hurricanes in the Atlantic  but there were no hurricane landfalls in the U.S.

Like every year  this hurricane season is guaranteed to brew up a storm that sets a new record, ends a long streak of inactivity for some city or behaves in a way we havent seen before.

Be ready for anything.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
PLATTSMOUTH  A Springfield man who stole items from a Louisville business learned Monday morning that he would serve four years on probation for the crime.

Michael J. Newberg, 47, appeared in Cass County District Court for a sentencing hearing. He pled guilty to a Class IIA felony charge of burglary in April. The state agreed to dismiss a second burglary charge in exchange for the plea.

A Louisville real estate company was burglarized twice in October 2016 and twice in November 2016. A chainsaw and weed trimmer were taken from the business on one occasion and $450 was stolen on another date. Security cameras captured images of Newberg entering the business during one of the November incidents.

Authorities from Cass County Sheriffs Office and Sarpy County Sheriffs Office executed a search warrant at Newbergs property shortly after the final theft. They discovered a chainsaw and weed trimmer at the house. Newberg had written his name on the items but the names of the victims were also visible on both yard tools. Newberg originally denied any involvement with the thefts but eventually confessed.

Deputy County Attorney Colin Palm told the court the state would recommend probation in order to allow Newberg to pay restitution to the victims. He also said he felt Newberg had not fully admitted his role in the case. He said Newberg had told probation officials that he had gone to the business on one of the evenings solely to retrieve a ladder.

I was bothered by his lack of responsibility, Palm said.

Palm said the victims understood why the state wanted to recommend probation. They said they were still bothered by the actions Newberg had taken. Newberg had been a former maintenance worker at the company.

They feel this man wasnt appreciative of the employment they had given him, Palm said. They felt it was a slap in the face when he stole from them.

Defense attorney Julie Bear told the court Newberg had two prior theft cases that came from writing checks on a closed banking account. She said the remaining entries on his record were traffic-related offenses. She also said Newberg had spent 32 days in jail before starting a pre-trial release program.

Judge Michael Smith told Newberg he had debated whether a jail or probation sentence would be more appropriate. He said he settled on probation only so Newberg could make restitution payments.

Smith ordered Newberg to serve 48 months on probation. He will be required to pay $1,221 in restitution and complete 40 hours of community service. He must also attend victim empathy and cognitive behavior therapy programs.
Business News Can Ethiopia Make A Beeline To Successful Honey Export Business | RobinsPost News & Noticias

If you fall into the latter category and are raring to go, consider these four ways you can set yourself up for entrepreneurial success ... you make over the course of your business journey ... Read More Traveling for can be fun but remember these helpful tips to stay on task and accomplish all your goals. Brought to you by Entrepreneur Partner Studio Staff Now that many business owners and ... Read More If youre a leader or entrepreneur and your business ... can get a little complicated, but it can be done. You just need to have the right people, processes, culture and communication to ensure ... Read More They believe success will follow when they implement a few systems and onboarding software. Finding the finest possible opportunity is the number one challenge to a successful business. We make ... Read More Beekeeper, the leading frontline success system, today announced it has raised $50 million in Series C funding after more than doubling revenues since the start of the pandemic. New investors like EGS ... Read More Millionaire and billionaire business habits that could work for you too The Mark Cubans and Oprah Winfreys of this world didnt make it ... power napping can be a step towards success. Read More One of the biggest challenges in navigating inflation is that it affects each and every business differently. To make a necessary plan of action ... supplies and service providers is crucial to your ... Read More The strategies that help win chess matches work just as well in business. I should knowI went from being a professional chess player to the CEO of a successful ... If you can see more than ... Read More you can do it," she explained. That someone was the network of mentors, family members and community members who helped her learn how to start a business. The woman who taught her to make cakes ... Read More For business owners, they represent a unique opportunity to make their employees feel valued  so when it comes to travel perks, choosing a reasonable standard of quality can pay dividends. Read More Roughly a decade since its official introduction to the public, Bitcoin has become the most successful ... can significantly improve your business operations. The way Bitcoin technology works make ... Read More The NPS offering in Business Insights Services will be the first in a growing engagement catalog to address specific topics unique to BSPs. Working with Customer Success, BSPs can create plans and ... Read More
Business News Arizona Legislature Adjourns But Leaves Unfinished Business | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Republicans are headed back to court next week to get what what they said are some missed votes in Arizona restored. Read More A handful of U.S. House races in Arizona remained too early to call as Republicans hoped to shift the states 5-4 Democratic tilt by picking up two and possibly three seats. Read More In a recent letter to federal officials prompted by the head of a Southern Nevada water company forecasting a dire situation, Thomas Buschatzke, director of Arizona Department Of Water Resources ... Read More The Arizona Republic's opinion team helps translate what voters were thinking in key midterm races as the smoke clears. Read More In Georgia, incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock is slightly outpacing Republican Herschel Walker, 49.4 percent to 48.5 percent, with the final result headed to a runoff next month that could decide ... Read More WASHINGTON (AP)  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is temporarily blocking the turnover of phone records belonging to the leader of the Arizona Republican Party to the House committee ... Read More Editor's note: The Business Journal conducted a lengthy interview with Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Each day this week we will publish key excerpts from the interview ... Read More A woman is suing Bullhead City, Arizona, after she was arrested earlier this year for feeding homeless people in public, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday. Norma ... Read More An Arizona prisoner who is scheduled to be executed ... who co-owned a printing business. They said Cruz wanted to take over the business and was unhappy that Redmond had rejected his offers ... Read More A handful of U.S. House races in Arizona remain too early to call Wednesday as Republicans hope to pick up enough seats to flip the majority of the delegation to ... Read More Both signed a document falsely claiming they were Arizonas true electors, despite Bidens victory in the state. 24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events ... Read More Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is temporarily blocking the turnover of phone records belonging to the leader of the Arizona ... including top news, local, sports, business, entertainment ... Read More
Business News Singapore Airlines A380 Business Class Singapore To London Sq 322 | RobinsPost News & Noticias

It also will display flights on other airlines that are part of your trip with a booking reference entered. After close to three years of no international travel for me, the ubiquity and improved ... Read More The double-decker A380 ends ... in an all-economy class configuration. However, Singapore Airlines opted for 471 seats in three classes  12 Singapore Airlines Suites, 60 business class and ... Read More Singapore Airlines now has three trips between Asia and New York every day, including one aboard a double-decker Airbus A380 that ... Airlines gave its business- and first-class lounges a $36 ... Read More premium economy and business class on a Singapore Airlines long-haul A350 flying a remarkable new short-haul route between Barcelona and Milan. Despite the short flight time, the reviewers are ... Read More We expect Singapore's new first-class suites will be considered among the world's best products. But the airline still faces intense competition from Gulf and Asian airlines. It's not clear how ... Read More American Airlines Group Inc. is replacing its first-class seats on international flights with new business-class suites. The reason: Customers arent that interested in buying first-class seats ... Read More If you were to fly 100 miles on a Virgin Australia flight in Business Class (200%), for example, you would earn 2,000 KrisFlyer miles. Although Singapore Airlines ... on an A380 in the Suites ... Read More American Airlines plans to phase out ... and comfort are going out the window. The news about "first class" seats comes from a report by Business Insider, which reported Friday that the Fort ... Read More Business class has gotten more luxurious, leading some airlines to get rid of long-haul first class. Premium economy now fills the gap that business class was first designed to address. Read More American Airlines expanded on its plan to drop first-class seats on its international flights and replace them with more business class seats. Some of the new seats on long-haul international ... Read More Check back for updates. READ MORE:American Airlines dropping first class for more business class seats CHECK OUT WPTZ:Get the latest Plattsburgh and Burlington news of the day. See the stories ... Read More American Airlines is dropping its first class cabins and replacing them with more business class seats. The move was disclosed in a conference call with investors Thursday by Vasu Raja ... Read More
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I think a great leader is one who makes those around them better, Dana Brownlee, founder of Professionalism Matters, told Business News Daily ... their goals. We spoke with CEOs ... Read More Our investment management business generates asset-based fees, which are calculated as a percentage of assets under management. We also sell both admissions and sponsorship packages for our ... Read More After the last couple of years, launching a business might not be at the top of your to-do list for 2023 ... good questions to ask: I know. I know. You thought wed done everything to launch ... Read More Fox Business ... News Digital: Why should someone who isnt particularly interested in Wall Street check out what FBN has to offer? Cavuto: For one thing we wont bore you. Everyone wants to ... Read More Shes also worked as a digital content strategist We want to help ... launch your business and avoid incorporating or paying formation fees, sole proprietorships do have their drawbacks. Read More Business News Daily got in touch ... high-quality customers for them. We search on LinkedIn for people who fit their criteria, and then introduce them. (We do it so it looks like the client ... Read More Congratulations to all our honorees and best wishes for the work they do!  A. Kam Napier, editor-in-chief of Pacific Business News ... simply, we chase after diversity because we know that ... Read More When you schedule, they will give you a two-hour appointment window so you know when they will arrive. Then they will give a courtesy call when they are on the way. Were here ... Read More Citing the summary, Grassley said that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their business associates created a joint venture that would serve as a ... plse let me knw if we will do early dinner w ... Read More Yes, I know youre busy with your small business, and fall is a hectic time. You may think, "Why bother?" What our elected officials do, and who ... As importantly, who we choose to lead us ... Read More It is difficult to assess the possible impact of a business interruption loss in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane, as policyholders typically do not yet know the magnitude of financial loss ... Read More This is important because we know that education, employment, and independence are key ways people build status and become more competitive in the mating market, particularly men. It also suggests ... Read More
Politics News Politics Dictionary France S Youngest President Emmanuel Macron | RobinsPost News & Noticias

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday met the parents of ... "I'll speak as I find. Doing petty politics, using the coffin of a 12-year-old girl as a stepping stone, is shameful," he added. Read More Indeed, the French political ... for Emmanuel Macron, especially in the big cities where Melenchons supporters have a sociological profile fairly close to that of the incumbent president. Read More French parliamentary politics ... President Emmanuel Macron proved that they can muddle on, despite losing their parliamentary majority in June. They have successfully used emergency provisions in the ... Read More Pope Francis received French President Emmanuel Macron ... News. The meeting also covered the region of the Caucasus, the Middle East, and Africa, the Holy See said. The French presidents ... Read More France's President Emmanuel Macron suggested that he would not use nuclear weapons against Russia in retaliation for a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine. Macron, in a TV interview Wednesday night ... Read More French President Emmanuel Macron's centrist government ... their democratic choices and consistent with our political direction. Macrons centrist alliance lost its parliamentary majority ... Read More French President Emmanuel Macron is urging the countrys most climate-damaging industries to double their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade. Macron convened a meeting i ... Read More French President Emmanuel Macron (L) and his wife Brigitte Macron leave after a private audience with Pope Francis in the Vatican, on October 24, 2022. Credit - Dominique JACOVIDES-AFP This is not an ... Read More French President Emmanuel Macron and new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni held talks in Rome on Sunday in the first, though informal, meeting between the two political leaders. Macron, who's ... Read More Ukraine President Says He Had 'Urgent Call' With France's Macron PARIS (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday that he had held an "urgent call" with French President ... Read More Pope Francis received French President Emmanuel Macron ... News. The meeting also covered the region of the Caucasus, the Middle East, and Africa, the Holy See said. The French presidents ... Read More
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El cambio se hara efectivo a partir del proximo 15 de noviembre; el aun titular de Comunicaciones y Transportes sera asesor del presidente ... Read More Las Universidades para el Bienestar 'Benito Juarez Garcia' cuentan actualmente con 145 planteles en todo el pais y en 2023 tendra 55 mas para llegar a 200, anuncio su directora general, Raquel Sosa El ... Read More Ciudad de Mexico.- Con pendientes como la cobertura universal de salud o el abasto de medicamentos, el Gobierno federal echara a andar el Sistema ... Read More Durante comparecencia de autoridades de Salud en el senado, los legisladores acusaron que el sistema de salud es peor que antes. Read More Salud a lo largo de la vida Sistema sanitario publico Seguridad alimentaria Calidad, investigacion y gestion del conocimiento Entornos saludables Planificacion en salud Consumo Participar en salud ... Read More Despues de que en redes sociales nominaron a Edy Smol para convertirse en el siguiente gran representante de la Secretaria de Economia tras la salida de Tatiana Clouthier de nueva cuenta el hombre con ... Read More y por la Federacion Mundial para la Salud Mental en 2013 para darle visibilidad a un problema que cada vez es mas comun en la poblacion. Segun la OMS, 1 de cada 4 personas tendra un ... Read More Orange entra en el sector de la telemedicina de la mano del gigante de los seguros, Mapfre. El frances ha lanzado Orange Salud, un servicio de bienestar digital low cost, es decir, a bajo precio. Read More Si hicieramos un simil tuitero, se podria decir que la salud mental fue trending topic en 2021, despues de anos de runrun y de una base de concienciacion, y tras el estallido de una ... Read More
Politics News Us Diplomat Trying To Mediate Compromise In Albania Politics | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Eager to stand out as a steadfast U.S. ally, Tirana often entangles itself in geopolitical issues far from its shores. Read More
PLATTSMOUTH  Two Omaha residents learned Monday morning that they would serve probation time for bringing methamphetamine into Cass County.

Jeffrey G. Gaston, 43, and Christina C. Smith, 31, both appeared in Cass County District Court for sentencing hearings. Both pled guilty to drug charges earlier this year. Gaston pled guilty to a Class IV felony charge of possession of controlled substance-methamphetamine. Smith pled guilty to a Class I misdemeanor count of attempted possession of controlled substance-methamphetamine.

The court heard Gastons case first. He was arrested in April 2016 after a Cass County Sheriffs Office deputy saw there were no license plates on his car. The deputy pulled him over at the intersection of Highway 50 and Highway 1 and determined he was under the influence of some type of drug.

A search of Gastons car revealed a small baggie with a crystalline substance. Workers at the state crime lab later tested the substance and confirmed it was meth.

Deputy Cass County Attorney Steven Sunde told the court the state was recommending a term of incarceration. He said Gaston had benefited from the state dropping a habitual criminal designation as part of a plea bargain. Gaston would have served a minimum of ten years in prison if the designation had remained in place.

Sunde said Gastons criminal record stretched eight pages and included multiple felony and misdemeanor charges. He served five years in prison for a May 2002 robbery and spent time in prison in 1998 for an attempted burglary conviction. Sunde also listed three pending cases that occurred after the April 2016 incident in Cass County.

The question before the court is with this kind of record, is he really a suitable candidate for probation? Sunde said. I would submit that he is not.

Defense attorney Julie Bear asked the court to place her client on a probation that had an intensive level of supervision. She said Gaston had been given less-supervised forms of probation twice in the past 20 years. She also said Gaston had been sober since December and was much healthier than he had been last spring.

Judge Michael Smith said he had strongly considered sending Gaston to prison because of his lengthy criminal record. He said he opted for probation to give Gaston a chance at treatment. He warned Gaston that he would not be very patient with him if he violated any probation requirements.

Smith ordered Gaston to serve 48 months on Specialized Substance Abuse Supervision (SSAS) probation. Gaston must obtain a chemical dependency evaluation within 30 days and pay a $1,000 fine. He must also complete 100 hours of community service, attend 12-step rehabilitation meetings and abstain from all alcohol and drugs.

The court heard Smiths case at the end of the morning. She was arrested in August 2016 after a traffic stop in Cass County. Authorities found a syringe in her purse and methamphetamine in the trunk of the car she was riding in.

Deputy County Attorney Colin Palm told the court he felt Smith was a borderline candidate for probation. He said Smith had originally declined to be considered for probation during a pre-sentence investigation interview. He said he felt that did not bode well for her future chances of success.

The states concern is that the defendant initially didnt want probation and didnt think she needed or wanted treatment, Palm said. If a defendant isnt fully committed to treatment or probation, those things dont work.

Bear told the court her client had changed her mind and was now requesting probation. She said she felt Smith would benefit from treatment services.

Judge Smith said he had considered both incarceration and probation but decided on the second option. He ordered Smith to serve 24 months on probation. She must obtain chemical dependency and psychological evaluations within 30 days and attend appropriate decision-making and cognitive behavior therapy courses. She must also pay a $500 fine and abstain from all alcohol and drugs.
Politics News Arab Politics Beyond The Uprisings Experiments In An Era Of Resurgent Authoritarianism | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Most far-right Jewish parties drew less than 2%; the increase seemingly put the Knesset far beyond their reach ... to reduce Arab political representation. But that theory was belied by the ... Read More UMM AL FAHM, Israel (AP)  The voices of Israels Palestinian citizens are often drowned out or delegitimized in the country's noisy politics. Yet in the upcoming parliament election ... Read More Catch up on more political news. Election Guides and Explainers What is decided in the 2022 midterm elections, and how do they work? Start by learning the basics. We surveyed every state about ... Read More In his book "The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915," historian Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American ... Read More A full video of Boeberts conversation with Stine was not immediately available but during another nearly six-minute clip of their discussion, the two discussed politics in Washington and the ... Read More Premier blames previous government for problem of crime in Arab society, citing 15 years of neglect With just two weeks left until elections, Israel's Prime Minister Yair Lapid is calling on the ... Read More To round up everything thats going on, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew tries to rank the electoral significance of some of the biggest stories in the news right now. They also ask ... Read More
Elections News Rouhani Rallies Supporters In Khorramabad In Final Stretch Before Iran Elections From | RobinsPost News & Noticias

The final stretch of 2022 midterm campaigns will no ... consider these trends that we've seen in the past after elections, specifically after the 2020 presidential race between Donald Trump ... Read More Around the world, protesters have taken to the streets in solidarity in a show of international support for demonstrators ... over disputed elections. EU SANCTIONS IRAN FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES ... Read More Former President Donald Trump is filling up his schedule in the final days leading up to the midterm elections ... have to do it again," he said at a rally this past weekend. Read More You can't understand this election without understanding them. On the issues, they've told us they don't believe Biden won in 2020; want the Republican party and its candidates to support the ... Read More Biden has not held a campaign rally since before Labor Day, even as the future of his agenda and his own political career are at stake in the midterm elections ... Bidens plans for the final stretch ... Read More Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Robstown ... less than three weeks before the midterm elections. Early voting is already underway in many states across the country ... Read More The 2022 midterm elections will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 8. The midterms are elections that occur halfway through a president's four-year term. All 435 seats in the U.S. House are up for ... Read More We are one in this, demonstrators yelled, before marching ... over disputed elections. In Tehran on Saturday, more antigovernment protests took place at several universities. Irans security ... Read More
Elections News Nepal Local Elections Results 2017 Live News Updates Counting Of Votes Underway Cpn Uml Takes Early Lead | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Live Nevada election results from the 2022 midterm elections including Senate and House races and ballot initiatives. Read More With control of Congress in the balance, you can track the updated election results with these live interactive maps. Read More Polls closed in the state at 8 p.m. local time, or 9 p.m. EST. Minnesota's eight congressional representatives are up for reelection, with the election in Minnesota's 2nd District seen as especially ... Read More A Nepali worker at a screen printing unit dries the flag of the left alliance party after printing ahead of the May 13 local body elections in Kathmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, May 3, 2022. Nepal is ... Read More Despite worries about voter intimidation and suppression, Election Day 2022 passed without much in the way of major disruptions or technical problems.In addition, while several statewide and ... Read More By ALI SWENSON Why might live election results fluctuate? The short answer: People make typos sometimes. As local election ... appear in news graphics and social media updates. Read More When the polls close at 8 p.m., go here for a look at the latest results for the 2022 midterm election. Tonight ABC7 News will bring you local, state and national news updates on our live stream ... Read More Why might live election results fluctuate? The short answer: People make typos sometimes. As local election offices across the U.S. count millions of votes on election ... temporarily appear in news ... Read More Polls closed in the state at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Read More Why might live election results fluctuate? The short answer: People make typos sometimes. As local election offices across the U.S. count millions of votes ... news graphics and social media updates. Read More Why might live election results fluctuate? The short answer: People make typos sometimes. As local election offices across the U.S. count millions of votes ... news graphics and social media updates. Read More
Elections News Elections In France | RobinsPost News & Noticias

They were the big winners of France's elections, tearing apart President Emmanuel Macron's majority. The broad left-wing alliance under Jean-Luc Melenchon and Marine Le Pen's far right were ... Read More First round Results of the first round of the presidential elections in France 2022 French presidential election first round result in relation to registered voters 2022 Results of the first round ... Read More David Andelman gives a rundown of how the US election was playing out on Paris newspaper stands Wednesday morning. Or, as France's leading newspaper Le Monde put it: "A bad surprise for Republicans." ... Read More Cleaner defeats former minister in French elections. Video, 00:01:56Cleaner defeats former minister in French elections Up Next. Macron rivals celebrate projected gains. Video, 00:00:36Macron ... Read More Rep. Joe Courtney defeated Republican state Rep. Mike France in Connecticut's 2nd Congressional District. The 2nd District takes up almost the entire eastern part of the state and covers more than 60 ... Read More French leader Emmanuel Macron on Sunday congratulated Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on winning Brazil's presidential election, saying the poll opened "a new page" in the country's history. Read More Here are five key things to know from yesterdays election. Scroll down to see the archive of our Election Night live blog. 1) Gov. Gavin Newsom was Californias big winner Only a year ago, the ... Read More The United States holds its midterm elections on 8 November 2022. In these elections, all seats in the House of Representatives are up for election along with one-third of the ... Read More Kyle Morris covers politics for Fox News. On Twitter: @RealKyleMorris. Election season is here! Get the latest race updates, exclusive interviews, and more Fox News politics content. Read More The 2022 midterm elections will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 8. The midterms are elections that occur halfway through a president's four-year term. All 435 seats in the U.S. House are up for ... Read More
Elections News Investigative Committee 10 Reports Received On Electoral Breaches Recorded During Yerevan Council Elections | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Nelson found no "intentional wrongdoing or misconduct" in his investigation. But former Elections ... per the report. That meant that each polling place received fewer ballots than it should ... Read More as evidence of a breach of the law on elections, prior to referring them to stand an urgent trial, said Advocate General, Head of the Electoral Crimes Investigation Committee. Decree-Law No. 15 of ... Read More Instead, we aim to examine the broader themes defining candidates, their campaigns and Ohio's political landscape during and after the election. Seasoned news judgement and years of political ... Read More One of Dales reports includes ... of ascertainment in presidential elections that verifies the appropriate electors represent the state at the counting of electoral votes. Read More One key one: Those who engage with local officials, with a meeting or donation, have a better understanding of elections. SEE THE LATEST POLITICAL NEWS AND BUZZ FROM WASHINGTON SECRETS But ... Read More The 2022 midterm elections will take place on Tuesday ... All 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for election during the midterms, because representatives serve two-year ... Read More The approaching midterm elections may indicate just how much damage has been ... Fresh and Sunshine Hillygus, a Duke professor of political science and public policy, spoke during a virtual briefing ... Read More To really understand an election, you have to understand the motivations ... We've got the data for it: tens of thousands of interviews in our CBS News polling over the year where people ... Read More
Elections News Vote Counting Slow In Nepal S First Local Elections In 20 Years | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Nepal is gearing up for federal and provincial elections to be held on November 20. This is the second election ... s Office have been under criticism over the last few years for functioning ... Read More A worker screen prints a flag of a political party ahead of the upcoming Nov. 20 general election in Kathmandu, Nepal, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022. Frequent changes in government and ... Read More County clerks serve in many different county roles, from issuing marriage licenses to counting ballots. When it comes to voting, not only do they run local elections ... years as clerk of Utahs ... Read More Nepal will hold national and provincial elections on Nov. 20, in a contest that the country's ruling coalition, led by the centrist Nepali Congress party, hopes to win against a loose alliance of ... Read More This would include difficulties for election staffing, including volunteers, if the day set aside for counting ... s coronation in the same week as local government elections, which will be the ... Read More North Carolinians are voting in the U.S. Senate race, General Assembly races and many local races depending on where they live. The elections system ... which started Oct. 20 and runs through ... Read More The phrase midterm elections is often taken to refer to Congress: All 435 seats in the House are up for election every two years, and a third of the Senates (this year there are 35). Read More A version of this story appears in CNNs What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. Im going to win the election ... local officials refusing to certify ... Read More The midterm elections are Nov. 8, and it's common to have some questions as you prepare to cast your ballot. The midterms arrive halfway into President Joe Biden's first four years. The ... Read More Nine congressional seats are also up for a vote: Van Hollen faces Republican Chris Chaffee in the Senate race, and Marylands eight House seats are all contested. Local elections will solidify ... Read More A worker screen prints a flag of a political party ahead of the upcoming Nov. 20 general election in Kathmandu, Nepal, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022. Frequent changes in government and ... Read More
Elections News The 2015 2016 Central African Repulic Elections A Look Back | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Mr Touadera, 65, won elections in 2016 and 2020. Many protests have ... others injured after a roadside bomb explosion in Central African Republic, the UN peacekeeping mission there said. Read More The president of the Central African Republic has sacked the head of ... Mr Touadera, 65, won elections in 2016 and 2020. Many protests have been held against the courts decision. Read More Polls closed at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 8, but the results of the general election were unavailable at press time. A complete breakdown of the results can be ... Read More Central African Republic's President ... court to overturn election, article with image November 4, 2022 Europe French far-right MP hit with temporary ban for 'Go back to Africa' shout in ... Read More To really understand an election, you have to understand the motivations ... We've got the data for it: tens of thousands of interviews in our CBS News polling over the year where people ... Read More US midterm election is just days away, and candidates across the country are making their final pitch as early voting is underway. Follow CNN for the latest election news and updates. Read More Welcome to MinnPosts 2022 election central page. Its a big midterm ... who they support for Hennepin County attorney and why A look at fundraising in Hennepin County contests one week ... Read More The event will be moderated by Sasha Hupka, the Arizona Republic reporter who covers Maricopa County and its elections department ... 2020 that it would begin to look inward. Read More we compared the share of votes cast by different demographic groups in every midterm from 1974 to 2018 and those groups' vote shares in presidential elections from 1972 through 2016. During that ... Read More The 2022 midterm elections will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 8. The midterms are elections that occur halfway through a president's four-year term. All 435 seats in the U.S. House are up for ... Read More Central African Republic's Top Court Head Refuses to Retire ... The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ELECTION DUE IN 2025 The vast but-sparsely populated nation ... Read More
Potus News Trump Let Congress Do Russia Investigation | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Misha Japaridze/ReutersAfter adamantly denying interfering in the 2016 U.S. election that brought Donald Trump to power, a Kremlin insider has admitted that suspected Russian interference in American ... Read More
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Potus News California Politics Updates Brown Says Trump Doesn T Have The Answer Uc Audit Finds More Questionable Expenses | RobinsPost News & Noticias

That is a searing indictment of the Republican Party, said Fox News pundit Marc Thiessen of the lack of a red wave on Election Day. That is a searing indictment of the message that we have been ... Read More
Internet News How Australia Bungled Its 36b Broadband Modernization Effort That Began In 2009 As The Country Now | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Australia has proposed tougher penalties for companies that fail to protect customers personal data after two major cybersecurity breaches left millions vulnerable to criminals CANBERRA ... Read More Explainer-Australia Floods: Why the Country Is Battling Weather ... Sydney, marked its wettest year since records began in 1858. In Tasmania, flooding has affected northern regions, especially ... Read More The latest Ookla Speedtest Global Index report reveals that Australian mobile speeds ... month Ooklas report breaks down mobile and broadband internet speeds across the world. Read More Australia is becoming an increasingly lucrative target for cyber criminals, who have launched more attacks  and with higher severity  against businesses and individuals in the country. Read More (Luerssen Australia ) Australia's naval shipbuilding and sustainment activities are to be overseen by a new group quietly created within the country's Department of Defence (DoD), a DoD ... Read More (Janes Defence Budgets) Australia's defence expenditure ... or 1.96% of gross domestic product (GDP), the country's Labor government announced on 25 October in its first budget statement. Read More Australia -- Australias new government released plans Tuesday for more spending on families, the elderly, defense and its Pacific neighbors as the country braces for an economic slowdown due to ... Read More Hundreds of homeowners began a long clean-up after storm ... Two very wet years have left much of eastern Australia sodden, and floods now frequently follow even moderate downpours. Read More Earlier in October, Australia's biggest city, Sydney, marked its wettest year since records began in 1858 ... brings above-average rainfall to the country's east. Another contributor is the ... Read More
Technology News Technology Takes Center Stage At Kingpins New York | RobinsPost News & Noticias

The Business Journals' Book of Lists provides you with more than 1,000 of the hottest area companies in their fields, by ranking. VMLY&R announces today the appointment of Abbie Baehr as chief ... Read More a safer New York for every child." At an unrelated news conference Monday, Hochul dismissed the idea that she hadn't been talking about crime. "Im not letting the political theater out there ... Read More As venture capital investments and deal counts dip in the city, early-stage startups may prove to be a bright spot in the tech sector ... public offerings in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut ... Read More ALBANY, N.Y.  Sparring over crime, abortion and the deadly U.S. Capitol insurrection took center stage Tuesday as New York Gov ... Hochul with failing to take seriously the concerns of New ... Read More Kathy Hochul for control of Albany in the midst of heightened worries over crime, especially in New York City, and a broader pandemic malaise. The two will meet on the debate stage Tuesday night. Read More Crime, Trump Center Stage ... New York City subways. Two teenagers were also injured in a drive-by shooting outside his home earlier this month. Zeldin on Tuesday charged Hochul with failing to ... Read More
Technology News North Denver Students Win With Dps 1 To 1 Technology | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Ranked by No. of full-time employees in Denver area Ranked by No. of full-time employees in Denver area Ranked by No. of full-time employees in Denver area Communications Strategy Group (CSG), a ... Read More North Middle School Health Sciences and Technology is a public ... reading.The schools minority student enrollment is 95%. The student-teacher ratio is 17:1, which is worse than that of the ... Read More "While painful, and we understand that, it's what's best for students," said Scott Pribble, director of external communications with DPS. While the metro area grows, Denver classrooms are ... Read More But about six dozen of the countrys largest technology companies and platforms have operations in Denver, according to Access Ventures, a local venture capital firm. Besides Meta, that list ... Read More According to DPS, Denver expects an additional loss of 3,000 students over the next four years. This decline will cost the district an annual loss of $36 million to schools across Denver because ... Read More DENVER  Denver Public Schools is set to close ... The school board approved criteria to close schools with fewer than 215 students, as well as schools with fewer than 275 students and a ... Read More DPS previously said ... schools with fewer than 215 students, as well as schools with fewer than 275 students and a projected decline in enrollment. Tuesday, Denver Public Schools said they ... Read More Joseph Vazquez is a third-year mechanical engineering student from Rochester and is a part of the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP ... National Science Foundation has awarded RIT ... Read More On Thursday, Oct. 27, Michigan Technological University brought its acclaimed Unboxed Challenges program to Heritage High School in Saginaw Township as part of its mission . . . Michigan ... Read More ParetoHealth has achieved a significant milestone with the 2000th employer joining its captive program, marking Ernest D. Menold, Inc. was contracted for a wide array of miscellaneous metals on ... Read More Were bringing in some other fun ways to integrate technology ... get students to think critically and creatively. Because the new items are available to all teachers in the North Olmsted ... Read More together with his graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, have developed a new technology that can accurately analyze cell properties through the use of a single-cell electrorotation ... Read More
Technology News Brazil S Technology Start Ups Lure Capital Back After Recession | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Brazil's Nubank to ... 70 million clients. Polygon Technology, an Ethereum scaling blockchain developer, will provide technology and technical support for Nucoin's expansion, the firm said ... Read More Austin, Texas  October 28, 2022  The Litowitz/Fox Team of Capital Strategies, a $100 million Slack Davis Sanger specializes in navigating  and winning  the challenging personal ... Read More NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope/Handout via REUTERS Oct 18 (Reuters) - Space technology startups ... capital intensive companies with low or long-term profitability models," Space Capital ... Read More Brazil's Telefonica Third-Quarter Profit up More Than 9% SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Telefonica Brasil posted a wider third-quarter net profit on Friday, up 9.3% compared to the same quarter last year ... Read More Franchised dealers who have invested in a new venture capital fund want to support early-stage technology startups that can ... in DealerFund told Automotive News they believe the industry has ... Read More While this growth is great news, it has also brought about a new challenge: Retail Capitals growth has been so rapid that it has needed to upgrade its existing technology stack to keep up. Read More (Reuters) - Space technology startups are being forced to limit ... firms "are looking to reduce their exposure to capital intensive companies with low or long-term profitability models," Space ... Read More ParetoHealth has achieved a significant milestone with the 2000th employer joining its captive program, marking Ernest D. Menold, Inc. was contracted for a wide array of miscellaneous metals on ... Read More While it could be too soon to tell how widespread a potential recession will be ... The Legaltech News Technology Survey 2022 found that almost half of firms are either decreasing their IT ... Read More Microsoft has been expanding where and how its customers engage with its game offerings, looking to acquire video game company Activision Blizzard as part of that plan. Microsofts gaming chief ... Read More Founder and CEO Pritesh Kanani was exhibiting Seattle-based AIMIRRs technology ... room technology. The company is also officially launching its first product and service in November after ... Read More Space technology startups are being forced to limit their sky-high ambitions, as their venture-capital ... the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the worlds largest international ... Read More
Us News Tillerson Israeli Palestinian Peace Deal Will Determine Whether Us Moves Embassy | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Asked by The Times of Israel during a phone briefing whether the newly announced maritime deal between Israel and Lebanon took into account Hezbollahs threats, the senior US official says ... Read More The man's father told Palestinian Qudsnet news that his son was headed for work when he was shot. It was unclear whether he ... by Palestinians in Israel. U.S.-brokered peace talks, aimed at ... Read More but kept the embassy in Jerusalem. He also has not attempted to restart peace talks, focusing instead on more modest goals such as boosting the Palestinian economy. Israel and the Palestinians ... Read More RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) -Israeli forces killed a Palestinian during an overnight raid in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Palestinian Islamic Jihad ... Read More Please tell us before you do anything ... between the U.S. and Israel over West Bank settlements, peace with Saudi Arabia, relations with Moscow, Palestinian rights and how best to prevent ... Read More Lebanon isnt signing a deal with Israel, and Hezbollah is making no commitments. All Israel is getting is a guarantee from the US. What does that say, what is the nature of America ... Read More He added that Palestine also looks forward to achieving peace with Israel. The Palestinian president said, Let us make this peace to live in security, stability and prosperity for the benefit of our ... Read More Ramallah, occupied West Bank  Israeli forces have killed a Palestinian teenager during a military raid on the northern occupied West Bank city of Jenin, according to officials. The Palestinian ... Read More Relatives of Palestinian Omar Abdalmajeed Asad, 78, say no settlement has been reached with Israeli defence ministry ... and calls from US legislators for a thorough investigation. Read More It was the latest in a wave of deadly Israeli-Palestinian violence in the area ... considers the settlements illegal and obstacles to peace. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, along ... Read More
Us News Lebanese Central Bank Trying To Communicate With Us | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Lebanon's central bank will halt purchases of dollars on its Sayrafa platform starting on Oct. 25 until further notice, a statement from the central bank said on Sunday. The statement said the bank ... Read More Two men entered a Lebanese bank with a gun today demanding access to their savings. What happened: Ali al-Saheli and Ibrahim Baydoun stormed a branch of Credit Libanais in the town of Hazmieh, Mount ... Read More The United States pledged $72 million in humanitarian assistance to Lebanon on Wednesday aimed at helping to feed hundreds of thousands of Lebanese struggling to put food on the table, the director of ... Read More A plan to send gas to cash-strapped Lebanon ... The US has always been committed to getting that deal through, Hochstein said. We are going to work with the World Bank and Treasury ... Read More Lebanon approved a US-brokered maritime border deal with Israel ... the Lebanese government officially endorsed it. The Barron's news department was not involved in the creation of the content ... Read More Beirut, Oct 15 (IANS) The Lebanese pound has sank to a new historic low to the US dollar on the parallel ... Also, the obligatory reserves at the Central Bank of Lebanon continue to be depleted ... Read More Lebanon MP Sanctioned by US Says He Played Behind-The-Scenes Role in Border Talks By Maya Gebeily (Reuters) - A leading Lebanese politician who is sanctioned by the United States said on Thursday ... Read More To make a direct call to United States From Lebanon, you need to follow the international dialing format given below. The dialing format is same for calling United States mobile or land line from ... Read More While Lebanon, Israel and the United States have hailed the end of talks, the deal itself has yet to receive final stamps of approval in either Israel or Lebanon. Lebanon's president, premier and ... Read More Lebanon's central bank will halt purchases of dollars on its Sayrafa platform starting on October 25 until further notice, a statement from the central bank said on Sunday. The statement said the ... Read More
Us News Us Diplomat Trying To Mediate Compromise In Albania Politics | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Eager to stand out as a steadfast U.S. ally, Tirana often entangles itself in geopolitical issues far from its shores. Read More
Us News Israel Us Spat Erupts Ahead Of Trump Visit To Region | RobinsPost News & Noticias

More from the top US official, who tears into critics from the Trump ... citizens of Israel. Iranian officials say authorities have arrested a Zionist spy, the Tasnim news agency reports. Read More Trump, 76, has previously chided American Jews  who mostly lean Democratic  for not showing enough support to Israel, a major US security ally in the unstable region. Jonathan Greenblatt ... Read More Donald Trump has said that US Jews should appreciate what hes achieved for Israel before its too late. Mr Trump claimed that Evangelicals have been more appreciative of his support for ... Read More Former President Donald Trump on Sunday criticized Jews in the United States over a perceived lack of support for Israel. In a Truth Social post, he contrasted the support for Israel among "our ... Read More US president ... 2022 Israels President Isaac Herzog will travel to Washington, D.C., next week, at the invitation of U.S. President Joe Biden. This will be Herzogs first official visit ... Read More Former US president Donald Trump railed against US Jews on Sunday, telling them to get their act together and accusing them of not being appreciative enough of his support for Israel, while ... Read More Instagram and Twitter removed posts by the artist, who had been featured on conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson's show. Trump has ... to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship," Anti ... Read More President Issac Herzog departed to the United States Monday night for an official visit after being invited by US President Joe ... to host during his visit to Israel a few months ago," Herzog ... Read More days after he criticized US Jews and asserted that they do not appreciate what he has done for Israel, Haaretz reported. In an interview promoting his new book on MSNBC, Netanyahu said of Trump ... Read More Trump also told Ami Magazine, an Orthodox Jewish news publication, last year that Jewish people who live in the United States dont love Israel enough and that he believes it is strange ... Read More The suggestion, made on Trumps social media platform Truth Social, plays into the antisemitic trope that US Jews have dual loyalties to the US and to Israel, and it drew immediate condemnation. Read More
Us News China Airlines Launches First A350 Xwb Flights To The Us | RobinsPost News & Noticias

China Airlines, currently the only carrier flying the Taiwan-Palau route, began offering charter flights to Palau in 2008 and scheduled services were formally launched in 2009. During the COVID-19 ... Read More This photo taken on Nov. 9, 2022 shows the combination of the Tianzhou-5 cargo spacecraft and a Long March-7 Y6 carrier rocket transferred to the launching area in south China's Hainan Province. Read More US Department of Transportation has said airlines should bear ... 3.2% of domestic flights were canceled by U.S. air carriers within the first six months of 2022 and given this, 61% of travelers ... Read More With travelers keen to travel post-pandemic, airlines are struggling to adjust. Bounce reviewed news announcements from major U.S. airlines on cuts and cancellations from major carriers. Read More Singapore Airlines (SIA) on Friday announced the introduction of its A350-900 medium haul wide-body aircraft services from Hyderabad to Singapore. The SIA will operate daily flights between ... Read More Taiwan-based Starlux receives its first of five A350-900 series aircraft. It hopes to begin operations to Los Angeles in April 2023. Read More It's China's 45th launch overall in 2022 ... Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in ... Read More The Boeing 737 MAX aircraft is displayed at the Farnborough International Airshow, in Farnborough, Britain, July 20, 2022. REUTERS/Peter Cziborra/File Photo BEIJING/SYDNEY, Oct 10 (Reuters) - A ... Read More American Airlines is eliminating first-class tickets on international flights, saying the carrier isn't selling enough of the pricey seats. "First class will not exist on the 777, or for that ... Read More The US military conducted a successful test launch of a rocket with experiments for hypersonic weapons development at the Wallops Flight Test ... capabilities. The first test was conducted in ... Read More (CNN)  American Airlines expanded on its plan to drop first-class seats on its international flights and replace them with more business class seats. Some of the new seats on long-haul ... Read More
World News Story Gop Mega Donor Adelson Upset Over Tillerson S Comments Regarding Us Embassy In Israel | RobinsPost News & Noticias

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images. Load Error The GOPs most prominent megadonor wants nothing to do with the fight over the 2024 presidential primary ... Read More But the partys most prominent megadonor wants nothing to do with the fight. Republican benefactor ... already maneuvering to win over donors, Adelsons decision takes off the board the ... Read More The group has contributed about $8.4 million so far directly to Republican ... PACs incessant appeals over email and text message have contributed to burnout among small-dollar donors who ... Read More Sheldon Adelson was the most generous single donor ... U.S. embassy to Jerusalem when he won. The couple also contributed significantly on down-ballot races. Since the death of the Republican ... Read More The 50 biggest donors this cycle have collectively pumped ... founders of a shipping company and key benefactors behind the GOPs move to the hard right in recent years. Many of the figures ... Read More Me Too is staying quiet following Politico's decision last week to publish details of a Republican congressional nominee's sexual assault without her permission. Fox News Digital reached out to ... Read More Curtis alluded to the June ruling by the US ... GOPs pre-eminent figures, even proposed that Republicans push for a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Republicans were split ... Read More President Biden said during a visit to Pennsylvania on Thursday that voters should back Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman over his Republican ... U.S. policy. Pointing to recent comments ... Read More
World News Story Chelsea Manning To Remain On Active Duty For Army | RobinsPost News & Noticias

This is what really happened Chelsea Mannings memoir opens like a ... That was the largest part, I think. I felt a duty to make the world understand what was happening in Iraq and ... Read More She is a former U.S. Army intel officer imprisoned for a document leak. Chelsea Manning ... I could make a mark on the world and not just be struggling to stay afloat. PRIME: Some people are ... Read More American whistleblower, transparency activist, politician, and former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning speaks about ... extensively in support of active-duty military members and ... Read More Chelsea Manning's rise to prominence was through her disclosure of secret and classified documents. The decision would shape her life for years to come. In her new book, "README.txt: A Memoir ... Read More Manning says that when she joined the military, she was committed to the Army's mission ... one side of a story here," essentially is how I felt. And yeah, I think that the world would greatly ... Read More README.txt: A Memoir, by Chelsea Manning On a ... as a result of the U.S. Army intelligence analysts decision in 2010, while still in her early 20s, to alert the world  largely through ... Read More NEW YORK  Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence officer ... I wanted to feel like I could make a mark on the world and not just be struggling to stay afloat. PRIME: Some people are ... Read More army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic records about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks in what's regarded as the largest ... Read More
Marriott International announced that Protea Hotels by Marriott has been named the Coolest Hotel Brand in the Sunday Times Generation Next Survey 2017. Protea Hotels by Marriott is the leading hospitality brand in Africa and it is one of the most widely recognized brands in Africa.

Designed for the progressive yet pragmatic traveller seeking a high-quality travel experience, Protea Hotels by Marriott has been consistently emerging as a favorite in South Africa particularly with the young travellers winning this coveted recognition for the 7th consecutive year.

Our forever-young market comprising of the next generation of travellers consists of a vital segment of progressive individualists and forward-thinkers and we are delighted to see that Protea Hotels by Marriott is a brand that is resonating with this audience in South Africa, said Neal Jones, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Middle East and Africa, Marriott International. South African brands look to the prestigious Sunday Times Generation Next Survey as an industry benchmark and we are excited to be featured in the coveted list, year on year, gaining the confidence of this important and key market and the next generation of travelers.

Emphasizing the importance of being perceived as cool, Danny Bryer, Area Director for Sales & Marketing, Protea Hotels by Marriott added, Reinvention is the key to success in an extremely competitive market and must take place on a continuous basis to stay relevant. We are committed to providing a dynamic and personalised experience at every touchpoint of the guest journey. Our associates, a large number of them from the next generation themselves, help us deliver a level of service that not only matches global standards but is also uniquely local, understanding and anticipating needs and making each guest stay memorable.

Now in its 13th year, Generation Next polls the opinions of over 5,500 young South Africans mainly below 22 years of age from urban and peri-urban environments in six provinces across South Africa. The lifestyle and consumer behaviour questionnaire is boosted by over 4,500 additional face-to-face interviews. The results of the 2017 Generation Next Survey were published on 12 May 2017.
Jackson, the baby alligator. Picture courtesy Louise Larcombe

MEET Jackson  the latest addition to the Tropical Butterfly House.

The American alligator is on loan from the zoo at Crocodiles of the World and has been named after the US state capital of Mississippi, where they are commonly found in the wild.

Two-year-old Jackson is just 16ins long but could grow to more than 12ft-long and up to 50 years old.

Visitors to the North Anston tourist attraction will be able to meet Jackson during the centres Exotic Animal Encounters sessions, as well as snakes, insects and lizards.

For more information, visit www.butterflyhouse.co.uk.
Indian banks have supported the Indian gem and jewellery industry over the years, so much so that today the sector has grown to become a world leader. However, in recent times due to many unfortunate incidents of defaults resulting in NPAs, banks have become wary and tightfisted in financing the industry. With margins reducing and end product prices becoming more volatile, it is not surprising that banks have restrained themselves from lending to the gem and jewellery sector.

A few large diamond financing banks have already left the industry, withdrawing from the industry totally, resulting in changes affecting the financing available to the industry; and alternates to bank financing.

While the larger diamond companies are comfortable with adequate bank finance support in India, the question for them is more about the cost of finance rather than their availability. However, the MSMEs are finding themselves struggling to access finance from banks as their sales are not in exports. Instead, they sell the diamond to larger domestic companies, who in turn export the diamond to overseas customers.

Most nationalised banks lend only against a full credit insurance cover. The problem arises when rating agencies and banks approach to risk management and assess potential clients. After 'demonetization' by the Indian government, a larger number of smaller unorganised units looked to follow the formal banking and financing channels.

The 'Diamond Financing 2017: New Opportunities, New Realities seminar organised by The Gems & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) in the month of February coinciding with the 2017 Presidents Meeting in Mumbai, India. During the Seminar, bankers and industry members explored options on how banks can work with MSMEs as well as examine credit insurance and risk management mechanisms that can be improved by the lending banks.

The inaugural sessions were graced by Maharashtra State Minister, Jt. Secretary, Union Ministry of Commerce, Government of India, Chairman, Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), Bankers and industry members. Praveenshankar Pandya, Chairman, GJEPC while tracing the Industry's growth and hoping the financing banks will continue to support the industry even in the future, said that GJEPC was taking every step to make the sector further organised to enable banks to get concrete information to do the right due diligence while sanctioning credits. He said GJEPC is taking steps to corporatize MSME units in diamond cutting and polishing; and to further improve transparency in transactions in the sector, GJEPC is starting a KYC online networking platform for the diamond industry. Pandya also sought the formation of a Banking Committee that meets regularly to give direction to the industry.

From the central government side, Shri Manoj Dwivedi, Joint Secretary, Union Ministry of Commerce expressed great appreciation of the Indian gem and jewellery sector in India. He felt that the banking sector should create customised solutions for the gem and jewellery business in terms of new credit rating parameters, a modified modern relevant version of ECGC, standardised structures, guidelines for minimising risk and stimulating growth amongst MSMEs.

Ernest Blom, WFDB President said that as the global gems and jewellery business is facing liquidity issues, its time to introduce new financing models for the gems & jewellery business such as Peer to Peer (P2P) lending, Government supported lending schemes, etc. He suggested setting up of a Financing Task Force which includes members of the trade from all centres and spoke for continuous roundtable dialogues with the financial institutions so that real solutions could be found to any issues which arose.

With MSMEs being in the limelight during the seminar, one of the Indian bankers that are into diamond financing (Rajneesh Sharma, GM- Bank of Baroda), announced that it would help the MSMEs in diamond cutting and polishing business with finance. He said that the product will be launched soon on a pilot basis for units that procure roughs from large mining companies and supply finished products.

It's obvious that while the manufacturing sector needs the finance and also survive on it, the lending banks too benefit a great deal financing such companies. In fact, as the MSME sector is in a major growth mode, it offers a great opportunity to banks to provide financing and thereby grow themselves. Besides, the MSME sector constitutes one-third of the total business, which is a great opportunity for the banks to provide financing. And by starting a KYC online networking platform for the diamond industry, the GJEPC has taken an important step to further improve transparency in transactions in the sector that is commendable.

Another problem faced by the sector is that different banks charge different rates which ranged between LIBOR + 2% to LIBOR +6% and other charges as well. In addition, Banks use ECGC cover, which adds to the burden raising the cost of finance by five times. Therefore, the need of the hour is to standardised the structure so that there is uniformity, so that borrowers are not unnecessarily burdened.

Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished




De Beers registered a higher than usual volume of sales in the first quarter following a strong rebound in demand levels for lower value stones during the first sales cycle of 2017.

The unexpected introduction of demonetisation in India late last year had resulted in weak demand, albeit temporary, for smaller, lower quality rough diamonds from the Asian countrys cutting and polishing industry.

De Beers had to temporarily put in place some additional flexibility for Sightholders purchasing a range of lower value rough diamonds following the introduction of the Indian demonetisation programme, as they recognised the challenges some customers would face as they adjusted to the new monetary environment.

However, group senior manager, media and commercial communications, David Johnson told Rough & Polisheds Mathew Nyaungwa that the diamond giant was now projecting sales volumes for the rest of the year returning to more normal levels as demand was more balanced across the assortment.

He said the group had already reverted to the normal supply situation with its Sightholders.

Below are excerpts of the interview.

De Beers sold almost double the diamonds it mined in the first quarter. Does this show that the group is now clearing stocks that piled up after Indias demonetisation?

The sudden introduction of demonetisation in India in late 2016 led to a temporary reduction in demand for smaller, lower quality rough diamonds from Indias cutting and polishing industry.

It appears, however, that the impact of demonetisation has been less pronounced than first anticipated. The first sales cycle of 2017 saw a strong rebound in demand levels for these lower value stones, which is why there was a higher than usual volume of sales in the first quarter.

However, we anticipate sales volumes for the rest of the year returning to more normal levels as demand is more balanced across the assortment.

The group allowed its clients room to refuse more of its cheaper stones than usually allowed under complex offering arrangements following the Indian policy. Is this still the case and are you achieving intended results?

We temporarily put in place some additional flexibility for Sightholders purchasing a range of lower value rough diamonds following the introduction of the Indian demonetisation programme, as we recognised the challenges some customers may face as they adjusted to the new monetary environment.

However, as we have seen demand for this material return to more normal conditions, we have reverted to the normal supply situation with our Sightholders.

Barclays Bank analysts suggested that your first quarter figures show that the group reduced stocks by 6.7 million carats, or 43 percent more than for the whole of last year. Is this assessment correct, if so will you continue at the same rate?

In the first quarter of 2017, De Beers Group produced 7.4 million carats of rough diamonds, but sold 14.1 million carats. However, as noted above, a high percentage of this sales volume was of the lower value material that saw low demand at the end of 2016 (as the demonetisation programme was introduced). As such, there was a significant reduction in the volume of inventory to the tune of 6.7 million carats, but this was mainly due to the average price of the material sold in the first quarter.

We have now seen demand return to more normal levels across the assortment so we would expect sales and production volumes for the rest of the year to be more in balance.

The same analysts also raised concern over the sustainability of the current market environment. Do you share the same sentiments?

De Beers takes a responsible approach to the sale of rough diamonds in line with demand from our customers. We continue to experience good rough diamond demand from customers and global consumer demand for diamond jewellery remains robust.

As Indian demonetisation was a one-off event, and as demand levels have stabilised, the industry has reverted to more normal trading conditions.

It is also important to recognise that, while there was an increased volume of sales in the first quarter, most of this was in the lower value area as a result of the rebound in demand from Indian cutters and polishers following significantly reduced demand in this area at the end of 2016.

What is your projection of the diamond market for the second half of the year?

The US consumer market is expected to continue to be the main driver of global demand for diamond jewellery in the second half, although we have also seen improvements in the Chinese and Indian consumer markets this year when compared with 2016.

The extent of global growth in 2017 will be dependent on a number of macro-economic factors, including the strength of the US dollar impacting consumer demand and economic performance in China.

Bloomberg cited unnamed sources claiming that De Beers has cut the amount of gems it plans to sell to some clients by about a fifth. What is your comment on this?

The total value of allocations in terms of the 2017-2018 ITOs (intention to offer) is lower, as we have lower forecast availability for the forthcoming ITO period versus what we had forecast at the start of the 2016-2017 ITO year.

The amount by which individual ITOs have changed varies by location and pool of availability (i.e. international ITO, Botswana beneficiation ITO, Namibia beneficiation IT, South Africa beneficiation ITO), as well as each customers own demonstrated demand and the availabilities for the particular categories of goods in which they have an ITO.

While we cant give out the detailed amounts and changes for commercial reasons, the overall impact has been biggest in the international ITOs as our producer country beneficiation commitments have seen a greater share of our availability being allocated through these channels.

The group had been directing more sales to Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Will this affect supply during the 2016-2017 ITO year and beyond?

De Beers Group has a number of commitments to beneficiation sales in the countries of our producer partners and last year we signed a new 10-year sales agreement with our government partners in Namibia.

Over time we have seen an increasing amount of our global availability sold through beneficiation channels and the new sales agreement with the Government of Namibia also provided for the establishment of a new government-owned trading entity, Namdia, which will sell 15% of Namdebs rough diamond production each year.

What is your projected impact of output from Gahcho Kue in Canada for the group this year in terms of volume?

Unfortunately, we do not publish forward-looking production data on a mine-by-mine basis. However, we have been very pleased with the progress of Gahcho Kue to date. The mine achieved commercial production in March, on budget and ahead of schedule, and will be an important contributor to De Beers Groups global production portfolio.

Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished


The 1st stage of the auction of natural diamonds for small and medium-sized enterprises held in Yakutsk The display of jewelry diamonds weighing from 2 to 10 carats as part of an auction for Russian small and medium-sized enterprises ended on November 8 in Yakutsk. The second stage is the show in Moscow, then the winner of the auction will be determined...

2022 US holiday sales estimated to grow amid concerns about inflation The US National Retail Federation (NRF) says it expects holiday retail sales will grow 6%8% over last years record holiday season, but the organization also says that consumers will spend cautiously amid a high-inflation and high...

Zimbabwe starts enforcing new mining royalty policy Zimbabwe has started enforcing a new regulation that allows the state to collect mining royalties in both cash and minerals as it seeks to grow its reserves of precious metals. "Royalties remitted to the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority in respect of...

Tertiary identifies several copper soil anomalies at Zambia project AIM-traded mineral exploration and development company, Tertiary Minerals says provisional results from its detailed soil sampling programme at the Jacks copper project in Zambia show defined multiple copper soil anomalies in different areas of the exploration...
CIBJO President Gaetano Cavalieri met in Arezzo with Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament to discuss the recently approved by the EU legislature in Strasbourg Conflict Minerals Regulations as well as issues related to the taxation on jewellery imported from the Europe Union.

The EU Conflict Minerals Regulation was approved on March 16 by a massive majority in the European Parliament, and received the green light from the European Council on April 3. It will be phased in gradually, and become fully applicable on January 1, 2021, with the intention being that companies use the interim period to adapt to its requirements.

The new regulations primarily affect all but the smallest importers of gold, tin, tantalum and tungsten, and also refiners and smelters of the minerals within and outside the EU. Not focused on any specific geographic region, they mandate supply chain due diligence from all areas of risk, including a five-step framework for its conduct, which parallels the OECD Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas.

By the end of 2017, the European Commission should be issuing guidelines on the identification of conflict-affected and high-risk areas from which the relevant minerals are sourced. A list of such areas will be compiled and regularly reviewed by external experts designated by the European Commission, which also intends to produce a global list of responsible refiners and smelters.

During their discussions, Dr. Cavalieri expressed CIBJO's intention to work together with the European Union. CIBJO, he said, is coordinating together with other representative bodies in the European jewellery industry, and they plan to liaise with the EU to ensure that the regulations are adopted successfully by all sectors of the trade.

Dr. Cavalieri also urged the Mr. Tajani to work with the jewellery industry to ensure fair reciprocal tax and tariff rates when jewellery is imported and exported. It was agreed that these issues will be discussed further during an official meeting between the EU and a CIBJO-organised delegation.



Alex Shishlo, Editor of the Rough&Polished European Bureau in Brussels




The government of Sierra Leone has rejected a $7.8 million bid for the 706-carat rough diamond, recovered last March in the eastern Kono, saying it was below its own valuation.

The stone was found by a Christian pastor, Emmanuel Momoh, who gave it to the government to handle the sale.

Reuters reports that only five bids were handed to auctioneers in a sealed brown envelope, ranging from $2 million to $7.8 million.

"We've decided not to sell the diamond today because the highest bid price ... does not match the government reserve price," Sahr Wonday, chief auctioneer and head of the National Minerals Agency was quoted as saying.

Sierra Leone was now planning to auction the stone in either Antwerp, Belgium or Tel Aviv in Israel.

Momoh said he was happy to wait for another auction.

"I was unhappy with the highest bid price, [the stone] is worth a lot more than $7.8 million," he said.

Some reports quoted him as saying that he was expecting $50 million from the stone.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




Andrzej Stec: According to Financial Times, in 2016, Poland was one of the top European destinations in terms of the value of foreign direct investment. The 74% growth, to $9.9 billion, is particularly impressive. How does Poland attract foreign investors? What are our main assets? Cheap labor, or maybe something else?

Reklama

Mateusz Morawiecki: Financial Times ranking and Polands place in the ranking are the best proofs that the change in the economic model proposed by the government 18 months ago as a part of the Responsible Development Plan, delivers better and better results.

Thats why we started to implement the new social and economic policy which, on one hand, fixes the mistakes the previous transformation made, and - on the other hand  allows us to take active part in the industrial revolution 4.0. Under the Polish Development Funds program and in line with the global benchmarks, we have consolidated dispersed development institutions; we have adopted new evaluation criteria for foreign investment flowing into Poland. We have also stopped talking about innovations, but instead created specific tools with positive impact on truly innovative economy. And because of that, we have stopped being just cheap labor supplier. Poles have solid  sometimes very rare  competencies that might appeal to the investors from IT, automotive, aircraft, household suppliers, financial, R&D and business services industries. I am sure the investors appreciate the improved transparency of the public tender law, successful fight against unemployment and economic crime as well as better conditions for research and development.

Has Deputy Prime Minister Morawiecki played a role in the outcome?

For sure, the steps taken by our government serve Polands economy very well. I will be totally honest  when I see todays results in fighting until-recently-unsanctioned tax and VAT criminals, the more clear I notice to what extend the previous states power was purely theoretical. I see huge potential in Polish entrepreneurship that expects from the state a kind of azimuth - a long-term development strategy. And effective and responsible state is a strong signal both for domestic and serious foreign investors. The fact that today key financial and The upward revision of macroeconomic forecasts for Poland by European institutions is not a result of some economic boom in Europe, because there is no boom, but stems from everything what is going on in our economy.

Reklama

Because of these upwardly revised economic forecasts, do you hope for even faster inflow of foreign investments to Poland?

Apart from how much of the capital flows into Poland, equally important is what accompanies the inflow. Such tools, like refreshed activity of the Special Economic Zones or a program to support investments of key importance for the economy, allow to attract to Poland the investments, which, through new technologies, R&D centers and unique products will not compete with Polish businesses, but will take domestic subcontractors to the higher level and will create high quality jobs. LG Chem, a modern electric car batteries plant, Mercedes and Toyota engine plants, Rolls-Royce aircraft engine plant as well as many other greenfield investments are the best examples.

What kind of investments does Poland try to woo right now?

The re-industrialization strategy assumes consolidation in some selected sectors. The industries with high value added, where Polands competencies are already high, and their importance for global economy will increase. These are, for instance, air and space industry, transport means manufacturing, high quality electronics. We want to use Industry 4.0 trends in order to increase Polish companies innovation in modern industries, integrate industrial manufacturing with the use of specialized IT technologies. At present, we are trying to attract investors from advanced technology and service sectors.

On the other hand, a research among foreign companies already present in Poland shows that a majority of them is afraid of political risk in our country, especially violent, sometimes hastily launched legislative changes that make running their businesses more difficult. What would you say? Has political life been more quiet, had the legal changes been launched with due diligence, maybe the economic growth would be even faster?

Poland has a stable government, stable parliamentary majority and the best citizen and entrepreneur sentiment regarding their financial situation and development prospects. Most Western countries could envy Poland such an accumulation of optimism and stability. One should also understand the reasons for the legal changes. When I think about the Business Constitution or the 100 changes in the business package, I feel there is no time to loose. The changes should have been launched ten years ago. We see the new, better and more consistent legal architecture for business activity in Poland emerging in a front of us. In many cases the solutions we implement make whole areas of running economic activity more civilized. The legal certainty clause, the presumption of entrepreneurs integrity, the principle that whats not legally prohibited is allowed  yes, all of them are legal changes, but changes that introduce into relations between a company and administration Western regulations while eliminating Eastern ones.

Reklama

When talking to so many foreign investors, do you come across questions and concerns related to unpredictability of Polish policy?

Serious and large foreign investors are rather immune to the oppositions rhetoric, because they know how democracy works. The fact that Polands investment position gets better and better is the best example; it proves that we have become one of Brexits beneficiaries  those who had invested in the UK, when looking for new headquarters for their businesses very often choose Poland. This way we have already attracted investments that today provide between 30,000 to 40,000 highly paid jobs for Polish specialists. And the exodus from London to Poland will continue.

Broadly speaking, the investment trends in Europe as a whole are negative. In 2016, the total investment value declined by about 10%. What one has to do to encourage companies to invest more?



The question shows European context of the problem. The fall in foreign investment in Europe for another year in a row mainly results from uncertainty caused by tensions within the EU as well as unsolved structural problems of many economies, especially Southern ones. Against this background, Poland looks really good. We are one of the most dynamic countries in the EU. The fact is supported by the most recent data released on Friday: according to Eurostat, the dynamics of Polands industrial output is three times higher than the EU average. And, according to GUS (Polands statistical office), in the first quarter Polands exports sales rose by almost 10%. I am not concerned about significant, event high domestic investment growth this year and beyond. This is not only a question of a very good contracting of the EU funds, but also implementation of incentives for domestic businesses. The main goal of the governments Strategy for Responsible Development is to increase the investment spending as a GDP share to over 25% in 2025. Structural policy activities aimed at improving the investment climate for domestic and foreign investors, stable macroeconomic and legal environment, capital market development and strengthening will make this ambitious goal achievable.
Lindsey Collins

U.S. Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) joined representatives from Arkansas & Missouri Railroad (A&M) for a tour and policy discussion May 12.

A&M took the group from Ft. Smith to Rudy, Ark., in one of the railroads excursion cars, stopping along the way to tour the Arkansas River Bridge. The bridge is on of three rail bridges that would be repaired through a planned project with the city of Ft. Smith, which applied for a Fostering Advancements in Shipping and Transportation for the Long-term Achievement of National Efficiencies (FASTLANE) grant. President Trump signed an omnibus appropriations bill that allocates $850 million for a second round of FASTLANE grants. A short portion of A&M, including the Arkansas River Bridge, is included in the Strategic Rail Corridor Network, which provides access to essential military bases and supports installations for the deployment of military equipment during emergencies and natural disasters.

Stakeholders say the project would prevent disruptions to rail and river traffic, which threatens to put tens of thousands of extra heavy trucks on I-49 each year and ensures that the fast-growing Northwest Arkansas region is reliably, connected to national freight networks.

I am pleased to support the city of Ft. Smiths 2017 FASTLANE grant application to repair three rail bridges, including the critical Arkansas River Bridge, said Rep. Womack. It is vital we ensure the future viability of rail transport through the western Ozarks.

The group also discussed the Building Rail Access for Customers and the Economy Act (BRACE). The BRACE Act will allow the nations small, local freight railroads like A&M to increase its reinvestments to upgrade and expand the first and last mile of transportation infrastructure, benefiting Arkansas shippers that depend on affordable freight access.

A&M, which is a member of the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association, transports construction materials, metals and food products through its freight business and also offers special excursion train services.
Trams carried passengers along Woodward Avenue in Detroit for the first time in 61 years on May 12 with the inauguration of the 3.29-mile Q Line from Larned Street to West Grand Boulevard.

The $140-million project is claimed to be the first public-private partnership deal to be funded by private businesses and philanthropic organizations, in partnership with local, state and federal governments.

Supporters of the project include Bank of America, Detroit Downtown Development Authority, Detroit Medical Center, Ford Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Michigan Department of Transportation, Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the United States Department of Transportation.

The project was also supported by the federal government through a $25-million grant from the Transport Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program.

In 2007, the projects backers formed M-1 Rail, a non-profit organization, to lead the design, construction and operation of the 20-station line. Stacy & Witbeck was subsequently awarded the contract to build the line and major construction began in July 2014.

Services are operated by a fleet of six bidirectional Liberty LRVs supplied by Brookville Equipment Corporation.

The 20.3-mile-long three-section bidirectional vehicles will operate without catenary on 60 percent of the line, drawing power from an onboard energy storage system which utilizes 750V lithium-ion batteries. The 70 percent low-floor vehicles will also operate in catenary-free mode around the lines depot.

Each vehicle accommodates up to 125 passengers, 32 of them seated.
The first hotel of a new generation near Brussels airport opens. It is a Park Inn by Radisson hotel with a new look and feel near the Brussels airport. The hotel is explorer themed, paying homage to the men and women that traveled our world in search of new places and people.

The theme also reflects the hotels location and Park Inns new community-based approach to hospitality. From Magellan to Vasco de Gama, every meeting room is named after famous explorers and every guest room decorated with earth tones to inspire a sense of discovery. The explorer theme is enhanced by the use of dark woods and dark greens. All rooms feature stylish decor, flat-screen TVs, a safe, tea and coffee facilities, and Free Wireless High-speed Internet.

Were creating a social space that lets guests interact. We love the idea of guests getting to know each other over a drink or a television program  its a vibrant and colorful image that we plan to make a reality. Tineke continues, If theres one difference with the sharing economy, its the role of being a real community hub  a place where strangers can really gather together, said Park Inn by Radisson at Brussels Airport will be the first hotel in Belgium with a live-inn room concept. Tineke de Wit, General Manager of Park Inn by Radisson Brussels Airport.

In the same spirit of creating a community, the hotel will open the RBG, a trendy grill restaurant and bar with a terrace for guests and locals alike. There arent a lot of cozy places to eat for people that work around the airport. We want to offer them a lunch break full of sophisticated and tasty experiences, says Tineke. Hotel guests looking for something lighter can easily grab a snack from the 24-hour Hungry Kiosk: it is just like taking a snack out of the fridge or using the microwave at home.

The hotel also offers nine stylish meeting rooms equipped with the latest audio-visual technology and plenty of natural lighting. Park Inn by Radisson hopes to attract businesses around the airport as well as Brussels startups, making the hotel a hub for those exploring the future of technology and business.

The hotel is also environmentally friendly, by having solar panels on the roof, the hotel will conserve energy, and LED lighting will be used throughout the hotel. Park Inn by Radisson has prioritized this down to the smallest details: even the toilets will reuse rainwater to reduce water wastage. Finally, there will be a green rooftop at the entrance of Park Inn by Radisson Brussels Airport. Click to see and book hotels near Brussels Airport.
British telecom major Vodafone Group Plc (VOD,VOD.L) announced Monday that its unit Vodafone International Holdings B.V., has agreed to transfer part of its indirect shareholding in Safaricom Limited to Vodacom Group Limited, its sub-Saharan African subsidiary.

Based on the agreed terms of the deal, Vodafone will be exchanging a 35% indirect interest in Safaricom for 226.8 million new ordinary Vodacom shares.

The transaction, which has a value of 2.361 billion euros based on Vodacom's closing share price on May 12, will increase Vodafone's ownership in Vodacom to 70% from 65%.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of the 2017 calendar year.

Vodafone currently holds a 40% indirect interest in Safaricom through a subsidiary, Vodafone Kenya Ltd. Vodacom has agreed to acquire an 87.5% shareholding in VKL, representing a 35% indirect interest in Safaricom. Vodafone will retain the remaining 12.5% shareholding in VKL, representing a 5% indirect interest in Safaricom.

Vodafone will continue to hold a 5% indirect interest in Safaricom following the transfer, in addition to the indirect interest held through Vodacom.

As part of the transaction, Vodafone Group has given appropriate assurances to the Government of Kenya to ensure the ongoing success of the long standing partnership between Safaricom, the wider Vodafone Group and the Government of Kenya.

The transaction is expected to generate clear benefits for Safaricom, Vodacom and Vodafone Group:

The transaction is not expected to have a material impact on Vodafone Group's free cash flow or its earnings.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Editors Pick

Facebook parent Meta Platforms decided to lay off more than 11,000 employees, representing about 13 percent of its global workforce, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. The reductions are across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs segments. In a message to Meta employees, Zuckerberg said the company intends to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending...

The Wendy's reported on Wednesday that profit for the third quarter increased 23 percent from last year, driven by higher operating profit and double-digit revenue growth. Adjusted earnings per share topped analysts' estimates by a penny, while quarterly revenues missed their estimates. The company also maintained its adjusted earnings guidance for the full-year 2022.

Tesla Inc. founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has sold at least $3.95 billion worth of his stake in the electric vehicle maker after completing his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter Inc., U.S. regulatory filings showed. In pre-market activity on Nasdaq, Tesla shares were gaining around 1.5 percent to trade at $194.22.
Activity in the New York manufacturing sector has unexpectedly seen a modest contraction in the month of May, according to a report released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday.

The New York Fed said its general conditions index fell to a negative 1.0 in May from a positive 5.2 in April, with a negative reading indicating a contraction in regional manufacturing activity.

The index's pullback into negative territory came as a surprise to economists, who had expected the index to rise to a positive 7.0.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more.
Pembina Pipeline Corp. (PBA,PPL.TO) said that it, along with Petrochemical Industries Company K.S.C. or "PIC" of Kuwait, has reached key milestones for the proposed integrated propylene and polypropylene production facility in Sturgeon County, Alberta ("PDH/PP Facility" or the "Project").

Pembina and PIC have executed 50/50 joint venture agreements that includes binding commercial terms in support of the Project and have formed a new entity, Canada Kuwait Petrochemical Corporation or "CKPC". Additionally, Pembina said that CKPC will proceed with activities for front end engineering design or "FEED" for the Project.

The decision to proceed with FEED, execution of definitive Joint Venture agreements and the establishment of CKPC represent major milestones for Pembina and PIC. Deliverables of FEED include a refined capital cost estimate, a project execution plan, regulatory applications, an updated construction schedule and projected in-service date, among numerous other items.

The anticipated cost of FEED is expected to represent about 2.0 percent to 2.5 percent of the Project's current cost estimate. FEED activities are expected to be completed by late 2018, followed by a final investment decision or "FID" from each partner.

The proposed PDH/PP Facility is expected to consume 22,000 barrels per day of Alberta-produced propane, which is expected to be sourced from Pembina's Redwater Fractionation Complex or "RFS", as well as other regional facilities. The Project is anticipated to produce in excess of 1.2 billion pounds per year of polypropylene which would be transported to North American and global . Subject to required approvals and a positive FID, the Joint Venture expects to construct the PDH/PP Facility in close proximity to RFS in Sturgeon County, part of Alberta's Industrial Heartland. The preliminary capital cost estimate of the Project is $3.8 - $4.2 billion.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Because airlines can't go 24 hours without antagonizing paying cutomers, JetBlue is accused of kicking an entire family from a flight due to a confrontation over a birthday cake.

The New York Daily News reports Cameron Burke, his wife, Minta, and their two children were flying from New York's Kennedy Airport to Las Vegas on May 3.

The New Jersey couple, hoping to celebrate Minta's 40th birthday, brought a cake on board. After a disagreement between two stewards over where to put the cake, one of the stewards apparently had it out with the husband.

"She said I was being noncompliant," Burke said. "I said, 'Miss, have you been drinking?' Because her behavior was irrational, and she stormed off."

Moments later, the family was approached by law enforcement and made to de-plane.

"The customers became agitated, cursed and yelled at the crew, and made false accusations about a crewmember's fitness to fly," JetBlue spokesman Doug McGraw.

Video has been posted on numerous websites, but JetBlue denies any wrongdoing.

Another spokesperson tells People Magazine that "the video circulating does not depict the entire incident and only starts after the objectionable behavior occurred."

On Twitter, some users claiming to have been fellow passengers say that Cameron Burke was yelling and cursing before he turned the camera on.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
A vast majority of Americans want an independent investigation of Russia's involvement in the 2016 presidential election, according to the results of a NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans said they would rather see an investigation led by an independent commission or a special prosecutor. Just 15 percent said Congress should lead the investigation.

The survey was conducted after President Donald Trump's abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Russian meddling in the election.

The strong support for an independent investigation comes as Americans are mixed in their level of confidence in Congress to conduct a fair and impartial investigation.

Thirty-one percent of Americans said they have "some confidence," while 28 percent said they have "only a little confidence" and 30 percent said they have "no confidence at all."

Americans have more confidence in the FBI's ability to conduct a fair and impartial investigation, with 25 percent saying they have "a great deal of confidence" and 40 percent saying they have "some confidence."

Despite the strong support for an independent investigation, Trump and Republican leaders in Congress have rejected calls for a special prosecutor.

Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., noted investigations are already being conducted by the FBI, the House Intelligence Committee, and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"I really do believe that these three investigations are the way to go," Ryan said in an interview with Fox News. "Let's get them done. Let's see them through. Let's go wherever the facts may lead."

Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have indicated they will attempt to block any nominee to succeed Comey until a special prosecutor is appointed.

The NBC/WSJ survey of 800 adults was conducted May 11th through 13th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Kansas have called off their upcoming European tour due to "safety and security warnings."

"The cancellation is based on safety and security warnings issued by the United States government and various U.S. law enforcement agencies concerning Americans traveling in Europe this summer," the band said in a statement. "Kansas is extremely saddened that the band will not be able to perform for its European fans this year."

Kansas was supposed to launch their European tour on June 4 in Reykjavik, Iceland. The band was set to tour overseas this summer with dates in Helsinki, Oslo, Paris, Berlin and dates in Sweden, Denmark and Germany in support of their latest album, The Prelude Implicit, coupled with a 40th anniversary run celebrating 1976's Leftoverture.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Entertainment News
Vietnams low-cost-carrier, Vietjet today announced the addition of a new international route connecting Hanoi to Yangon (Myanmar) with tickets priced from only VND205,000 (USD9.00).

The new route is set to take off on 31 August 2017 with the aim of meeting the increasing travel demand of individuals, tourists and corporate travelers between Vietnams capital city and the Burmese tourism hub.

The Hanoi  Yangon route is operated on a daily basis with a flight time of 1 hour 55 minutes per leg. The Hanoi  Yangon flight departs at 12.05pm and arrives at 1.30pm (local time). The return flight departs Yangon at 2.30pm and arrives in Hanoi at 4.55pm (local time).

The new routes tickets are available for booking within the golden hours of 1.00pm to 3.00pm (Malaysian time) daily at www.vietjetair.com

The capital city of Hanoi marks Vietjets second connection with Yangon, with Ho Chi Minh City - Yangon being the first established route between the two countries. The new route is expected to contribute towards the development of regional integration and boost trade between the two countries.

Formerly known as Rangoon, Yangon boasts the largest number of colonial-era buildings in the region and is also home to the gilded Shwedagon Pagoda  Myanmars most sacred Buddhist pagoda. Historical monuments aside, downtown Yangon also boasts its share of attractions with its pavements lined with food vendors, colourful open-air markets and impressive colonial architecture. Click and book a hotel in Yangon.
Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited (BA) announces its operating results for the first quarter of 2017 which has achieved total revenue amounting to 7,469 million baht. The net profit was reported at 565 million baht and the average passenger load factor was 71.3 percent in this quarter.

Mr. Puttipong Prasarttong-Osoth, President of Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited commented that, "In the first quarter of 2017, total revenue of the company was 7,469 million baht. The Net profit was reported at the amount of 565 million baht in which the profit attributable to the equity holder of the company was 548.4 million baht, earnings per share equal to 0.26 baht. In this quarter, companys passenger yield per RPK was 4.91 Baht while the growth in number of passengers rose by 2.7 percent. Furthermore, the airport-related businesses of the company including catering services and ground services, overall performance positively grew from the same period of 2016 by 11.9 percent which was mainly derived from 14.4 growths in revenue of Bangkok Air Catering (BAC) when compared to the first quarter of 2016. The increased revenue was derived from additional airline customers. For ground services, the revenue grew by 10.4 percent while the number of flights grew by 9.7 percent compared to the same period of 2016.

Earlier this year, Bangkok Airways launched its non-stop flight service between Samui and Guangzhou (China) with 7 flights per week. In addition to that, in the first quarter, the airline increased its flight frequency on various routes such as Bangkok-Danang (Vietnam) route from 4 flights per week to 7 flights per week, Chiang Mai-Mandalay (Myanmar) from 4 flights per week to 7 flights per week, Chiang Mai-Mae Hong Son from 10 flights per week to 14 flights per week.

In February 2017, Bangkok Airways became the first airline in Thailand to receive this new air operation certificate (AOC) in accordance with ICAO standards from the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand. Receiving this certificate demonstrates that Bangkok Airways operational management and control systems are rising up to the highest standards and are internationally recognized. added, Mr. Puttipong.
By SA Commercial Prop News





A South African infrastructural development company, Bigen Africa, has expressed interest in partnering Ghanaian real estate companies to build affordable houses for the poor and middle income earners.

Speaking on the sidelines of Bigen Africa roundtable to introduce the operations of the company to the Ghanaian market, Mr Emmanuel Anesu Kere, the Africa Region Director of the company, said the company had the capacity to deliver and help reduce Ghanas housing deficit.

Currently, Ghanas housing deficit stands at about 1.5 million. Even though several real estate companies have had a full plate, the cry of many is that the houses are not affordable largely as a result of cost of materials and the high demand for housing.

But Mr Kere gave the assurance that Per our experience in South Africa, where we have provided low-cost housing to millions of people, we will transfer that expertise here to support not only the sector in Ghana but infrastructure development in general.

According to him, the company constructs close to 30,000 houses annually in South Africa and was keen to share its knowledge and skill with Ghanaian companies.

With engineering, management consulting and development finance as the heart of its business, the company also has expertise in real estate, water, electricity transmission and distribution. The companys capabilities are also in waste-water treatment, structural engineering and building technology.

Bigens footprint in Southern Africa, especially South Africa includes structural designs of concrete stand for the 45,00-seater Mombela Stadium in Nelspriut, Klarinet Ministerial Integrated, Olievehotbosch Ministerial housing projects, the Oliver Tambo International Pier Project and ESKOM Coal Hauleage Road Repair Programme all in South Africa.

On long term financing in Ghana, he said the financial institutions in the country were unable to provide lines of credit to finance long term projects because most of the local intuitions did not get long term lines of credit for such ventures.

He, however, gave the assurance that Bigen could help provide such facilities to enable the banks to provide 5-30 years long term credit to their clients.

Ghana, just like most African countries, has huge infrastructural deficit but funding remains a major challenge as the national budget has many projects.

In that regard, the Chairman of Bigen Africa, Dr Iraj Abedian, stated that the best way to attract investment into the country was to categories the countrys infrastructure needs to make it easy for investors to identify projects that needed private funding.

He said the value proposition of the company integrates the entire value chain in an infrastructure development process through in-house capabilities and strategic partnerships from feasibility studies through project preparation, management and implementation to development finance and on-going assets management.

We believe that the success of any cost effective and sustainable communities, namely social, institutional, financial and physical elements. Furthermore, we provide clients with a complete solution to all facets of a project based on among others our intimate understanding of the requirements of governments, local authorities and other stakeholders.

The companys Chief Operating Officer, Mr Anton Bosoff, noted that the company was using Ghana as a launch pad for West Africa and would soon extend its tentacles to Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Senegal.

He said the company was attracted to Ghana because of the countrys stable political environment and friendly business atmosphere.
By SA Commercial Prop News

SA not doing enough to help foreigners to get bonds.



Foreigners, some of whom have high level qualifications and skills and who could, therefore, be very useful to South Africa, face an uphill battle when it comes to qualifying for South African residency permits and South African bonds on homes, says Rob Lawrence, national manager of the bond origination service, Rawson Finance.

Foreign national bond applications, said Lawrence, are assessed under three categories.

 Temporary residency permits which include the applicants work permits, the permit for the spouse and other documentation.

 Permanent residency permits, which are in most cases issued to foreign nationals who have been in SA with temporary permits for at least five years. Holders of this permit can apply for a South African identity document which will show that they are non-South African citizens. This document confers on them the same rights to mortgage loans as apply to bona fide South Africans  which means that such people are not restricted, as are most foreigners, to a 50% loan.

 South African citizenship. If and when a foreign national who has qualified for permanent residency renounces his previous citizenship, he can attain SA citizenship. However, if his country of origin allows dual citizenship, he can hold that citizenship as well as a South African citizenship.

To get a bond the foreign applicant, says Lawrence, has to have a valid work permit, which must be stamped in his/her passport.

What is more, said Lawrence, the work permit has to have at least three years remaining before its renewal date, in order to qualify the applicant for a bond.

Even if, however, the applicant has all this documentation in place, he will still be unable to get nearly the full loan amount on his prospective purchase because, as indicated, most banks limit the Loan to Value (LTV) to 50% despite the applicants salary being credited to a SA bank account.

Those foreigners who believe they qualify as bona fide refugees, said Lawrence, face even greater difficulties in qualifying for a bond, their first and possibly most difficult challenge being to get the coveted refugee maroon identity document which has to be renewed every two years

The whole business of trying to assist such people  and thereby assist South Africa  is, said Lawrence, made more difficult by inefficiencies and very lengthy delays at the Home Affairs office. These are encountered not only on first time permit applications but also on renewals, which can take more than a year to be approved by the Department of Home Affairs.

In one case, he said, a qualified female mining engineer holding a unique level of excellence achieved by only one other person in the world had been blocked for eight months, despite having an employment contract with Gencor.

In another case, a USA professor in virology could not get a work permit for six months, even though he is a recognised international expert in AIDS treatment.

South Africa, said Lawrence, is desperately short of qualified people genuinely able to help us attain higher growth. We should be trying a great deal harder to assimilate them  and to assist them in becoming home owners.
By SA Commercial Prop News

Artist's impression of The Lion Match Company new corporate head office and distribution facilities in Durbans Point Waterfront node funded by Nedbank Corporate Property Finance. Image gallery



The Lion Match Company, which produces the iconic Lion Safety Matches, has increased its commercial office investment in Durbans Point Waterfront node with R80 million loan package granted by Nedbank Corporate Property Finance.

The new corporate head office, comprising just over 10 000m, will be developed through the construction of a three storey mixed use development which includes a distribution warehouse, a retail portion and covered parking.



Nedbank Corporate Property Finance (NCPF) Regional Executive in KwaZulu Natal, Anand Joseph says the Banks funding of this project is consistent with its commitment to providing agile commercial property finance solutions which allow clients to realise their property opportunities.



The new Lion Match property is located in the Point Waterfront area of the Durbans CBD at the corner of Mahatma Ghandi and Signal Roads, and is accessible from all major network routes.

This development is located close to the Durban port hub and is the latest addition to the area that will contribute significantly to the vision of the redevelopment of this node, says Joseph.



According to Joseph, the Point Waterfront area is being transformed from an old established industrial area serving harbour-related industries, to an area which has now been redeveloped into modern mixed-use buildings.

Investment into the area continues to grow, creating a modern mixed-use environment which, over time, will command the value that the Point Waterfront properties demand," he said.

The Lion Match Company is a well-established Durban-based business and has been home to some of South Africas favourite brands, from the iconic Lion Safety Matches, to its growing range of personal grooming products.

The company has amassed an impressive family of brand names that have become segment contenders and leaders in their own right.



Gora Abdoola, Chairman of Lion Match commented, The Point Waterfront area is becoming a highly sought after area for businesses in KwaZulu Natal and we are pleased to have found a new home for the organisation in this growing area which we believe will aid towards the domestic economic revival.
By SA Commercial Prop News

Cape Towns CBD is seeing a rise in coworking, a trend that describes consultants, freelancers and entrepreneurs sharing office space.



Cape Towns CBD is seeing a rise in coworking, a trend that describes consultants, freelancers and entrepreneurs sharing office space.

The numbers of young entrepreneurs choosing to be based in the central city is climbing, attracted by the vibrancy of the CBD, cost effectiveness, readily available office infrastructure, convenience and the knowledge, sharing and networking opportunities.

Two trends seem to be forming in the central city of Cape Town. The first is small to medium sized businesses renting private office space within a larger communal office. This allows them access to office infrastructure such as, kitchen and boardroom facilities, receptionists, and even Internet connectivity without their company having to solely cover all of these overhead expenses or compromise on their companys professionalism, says Rob Kane, Chairperson of the Central City Improvement District (CCID).



The second trend that is proving popular and affordable for start-ups and freelancers is to rent a desk in an open-plan office, which allows one to escape isolated home offices and increase networking opportunities, says Kane.



Not only are tenants benefiting from office sharing but landlords too.



Landlords within the central city seem to be eager to implement the concept of coworking as it is resulting in an increase in tenants occupying space, says Kane.



Cape Town start-ups and freelancers are on par with their global counterparts such as America and Europe, in adopting the office sharing trend. Last years Global Coworking Survey, the largest annual authoritative survey around office sharing, noted a year on year 83% increase in people choosing to be based in office sharing spaces worldwide, and this figure continues to rise.



Office sharing is a great concept and is working exceptionally well in the central city of Cape Town as more and more workingfromhome consultants, freelancers and entrepreneurs are seeing and experiencing the value of collaborative working and a central location which is surrounded by the quality suppliers and amenities that the CBD has to offer, says Kane.



Cube Workspace is the latest office sharing business hub, situated on the first, second and third floors of the newly renovated Icon building, in the active Foreshore of Cape Towns CBD.



Cube Workspace is suitable for small to medium sized business owners requiring a flexible short or long-term lease, with the benefit of convenience, luxury furnishings and technology all included.



We opened the Cube Workspace in Cape Towns Foreshore, the financial district of Cape Towns CBD, as we wanted to be at the centre of the CBDs commercial hub and to be part of the cosmopolitan culture. Having researched the needs of business owners as well as start-ups, we identified the demand for immediate occupation spaces as well as the evolution of the office space from fixed rentals to more modern, flexible, custom environments, said Anthony Manas, CEO of Cube Workspace.



The trend of hiring a desk in an office is becoming increasing popular amongst young social entrepreneurs and freelancers. A web development company Greenbox Designs recently hired desks in a shared office space in Shortmarket Street in the central city to do just that.



We wanted to be based in the central city to be part of the electric buzz that the city radiates. Much of our business comes from conversations and networking within in the CBD. We decided to share office space with like-minded individuals who are involved in similar industries in order to create a space where knowledge and expertise can be exchanged, said Alex Kirsten, co-owner of Greenbox Designs.



Formally known as the East City, the Fringe in Cape Towns CBD is also seeing a spike in coworking spaces relocating to its precinct. The Hostel, a coworking space has created a shared office space environment for small design, media and ICT companies and boasts one of the most affordable rentals of office space in the CBD. The Hostel chose the Fringe for its location as it is an innovation district and up-and-coming entrepreneurship hub, most suitable for young entrepreneurs and start-ups.



In the year ahead, we can expect to see an increase in the number and size of coworking spaces forming in the central city of Cape Town. This will lead to the development of a variety of spaces to support the different needs among consultants, freelancers, start-ups and entrepreneurs. This trend encapsulates the CBDs versatility and is yet another proof point that Cape Towns CBD is a world class destination for businesses of all sizes and sectors, says Kane.
International Congress and Convention Association - ICCA, has released a list of the best congress and convention destinations in the world. Prague retains the excellent 11th position and Prague Congress Centre has contributed the success.

The eleventh position in the ICCA ranking is not bad at all. On the contrary. If we consider the growing competition and the increasing number of strong Asian destinations on the market, we have to admit that Prague is doing well. After all, in European comparison it took the ninth place. However, our ambitions are higher. We would like to see Prague among the five best destinations, says the PCCs Sales and Marketing Director Lenka Zlebkova.

PCC Aims Higher

High ambitions of PCCs management have a solid base. We follow new trends and try to keep up with the new congress industry trends or ideally be ahead. The Prague Congress Centre stands in front of an important extension. We are looking forward to a winning study of the architecture-urban design competition which will include the plan of a new exhibition hall and urbanistic solution for the surrounding area. We are currently investing into new technologies which will make the event management easier and will raise the quality of the event. We are investing 15,5 million CZK into AV technology, nearly the same amount of money in digital navigation system and more than two million in mobile technology throughout the building, adds the General Manager Roman Ray Straub.

New Trends in Congress Business

According to studies the congress business takes the path of digitalization and aims at so called Y generation  people born between 1980 and 2000, who use internet, smart phones, applications and fast solutions on daily basis. We take all this into consideration and change PCC in this direction. We carefully chose suppliers of the best technologies and welcome novelties which turn an even into a pleasant unforgettable experience. Everything needs to be quick, effective and fun. We have noticed that the duration of events shortens and we would like to make sure that our clients will be able to organize even in a shorter period of time an event which will be an outstanding experience for the delegates, continues Lenka Zlebkova.

Unquestionable advantage of PCC is the variety of its space. It can host big as well as smaller events and it can also host more events at a time due to the architecture of the building divided in three logical units with their own entrances. By the end of 2020 PCC will have to current 13,000 m2 of exhibition space a new exhibition hall which is requested especially by clients from medical field.

Will investments pay off?

Prague Congress Centre pays to the state government and the City of Prague about 400 million CZK every year from standards events which take approximately 2 days and have about 450 visitors. About 300 million CZK it is yearly from irreplaceable events which last about 4,3 days, accommodate 1,900 attendees and because of the requirements on space they cannot be organized anywhere else. Additionally, from the researches done by ICCA it is obvious that the number of events doubles each decade. From the above mentioned it is clear, that to invest into the building, which is very well situated, logically planned with excellent transportation accessibility, makes sense, closes the General Manager Roman Ray Straub.
Turnout for general election less than expected for Saline County

Ballots are still being counted as of Wednesday, but it seems the turnout for the 2022 general election was lower than expected by the county clerk.
ICCA and BestCities Global Alliance today launched the new ICCA Incredible Impacts Programme before IMEX. To apply for a grant, associations must demonstrate a track-record in a beyond tourism or legacy programme or project related to their international meetings.

They need to explain how they would use the grant to support, expand, extend or enhance their chosen programme or a future project.

Examples of beyond tourism impacts or legacy include:

 Knowledge and/or skills transfers to developing countries.

 Public awareness of healthcare or environmental issues, or achievement of improved outcomes.

 Positive impact on national and regional policies and practices.

 Advancing future intellectual and/or societal leaders (could be general young members of the association, or young women, or young people from developing countries, etc).

The programme will be judged looking for great examples rather than for best example of, to stimulate further projects, better measurement, and wider understanding of the range of impacts that international association meetings can generate.

An independent jury will determine which three associations will be awarded a grant of US$7,500 each. The winners of each years grants will be announced at the ICCA Congress in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

The partnership is a direct result of ICCAs five-year strategic plan which was launched at the end of 2015, compromising of six strategic goals. With a number of these goals, including full engagement with association clients and more effective global knowledge sharing, closely aligned to BestCities own ambitions, discussions commenced in July 2016 to explore potential opportunities. The result is a strategic partnership that celebrates and directly advocates the beyond tourism value of international association meetings.

Paul Vallee, Managing Director of BestCities said: Creating a lasting legacy has become pivotal in the planning of meaningful meetings and events and we want to educate associations on how this can be achieved successfully. Incredible Impacts will not only showcase examples of excellence but will inspire others to actively incorporate this into their own events.

At BestCities we aim to nurture and develop the purpose of events beyond traditional planning, focusing on vital areas including legacy development, sustainability and accessibility so were excited to see what will come of the Incredible Impacts programme and the diverse range of entrants that we receive.

ICCA CEO Martin Sirk stated: The biggest shift in the global meetings market over the last decade has been the mindset change from part of tourism to economic and societal impact. Its now broadly accepted that even though meeting delegates are one of the most valuable tourism sectors in terms of their direct spend in a destination, the biggest value from international association meetings comes from the vast quantities of knowledge that are created and shared, the inward investment and business connections that are stimulated, and the societal, healthcare and economic challenges that are addressed and solved. Incredible Impacts has been designed to celebrate some of the best examples of projects that showcase the wider impact of these meetings, and more importantly, to encourage greater awareness and new projects. Were grateful for BestCities generous support, and look forward to hearing some amazing stories about the power of meetings.

Escrow Trust Services

Incredible Impact funds will be held in trust and released directly to grant recipients by Meeting Escrow Inc., an independent provider of secure payment and escrow solutions for the meetings industry worldwide.

ICCA CEO Martin Sirk commented: "For complete transparency, it is important these grant funds not be commingled with ICCA or BestCities operational accounts, and that recipients have the confidence they will automatically receive payments when qualifying projects are scheduled to take place. Financial security is a very important concern for associations, and we want to demonstrate how this type of escrow service can help streamline and secure their financial affairs.

Meeting Escrow President & CEO Grant Snider commented: Were very proud to be supporting Incredible Impacts with our award-winning Escrow Trust Services. Association meetings deliver vitally important societal value and by protecting their financial assets, whether funds received from sponsors and registrants, or funds paid out to vendors, we form an important part of their overall risk management strategy.

Send in your nominees

Associations can nominate themselves or candidate associations can be nominated by any ICCA member. Nominations can be sent to ICCAs Director of Association Relations Mrs. Ksenija Polla by email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
At the macroscopic level thats familiar to us, birds chirp, whales sing and we talk. But at the microscopic level, our cells pulsate, bacteria swim and pressure waves ripple on a scale we cant reach.

UC San Diego engineers have developed a tool to access that realm: an optical nanofiber that deforms in response to ultra-minute forces, sending patterns of light detectable by a microscope.

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With this device, subtle motions of cells associated with biological processes, said Donald Sirbuly, a UCSD nanoengineering professor who led the study that created the instrument. These potentially include motions pertaining to cancer and stem cell development.

Just 100 times thinner than a human hair, this nanofiber can detect the force exerted by swimming Helicobacter pylori, a sometimes-resident of stomachs that can cause ulcers.

It also can hear, Sirbuly said. Sound is a wave of pressure, and these occur in the water as well as the air.

The prototype can detect forces as small as 160 femtonewtons, about 10 trillion times less than a newton, the standard measure of force. An object weighing 3.6 ounces is subject to a force of one newton from gravity.

The study was published in Nature Photonics. When placed online, it can be found at: j.mp/nanofiber. Sirbuly was the senior author. The first authors were Qian Huang, Joon Lee and Fernando Teran Arce, also of UC San Diego.

Mechanical biology

Life processes are usually discussed in terms of metabolism, biochemistry and genetics. But mechanical forces also play a major role, Sirbuly said. For example, mechanical forces can guide stem cell differentiation into mature cells. Cells also employ mechanical cues to communicate with each other.

But to deeply study such cues and communication, scientists need an instrument that can sit amidst these cells, recording the microscopic forces, so they can correlate them with how cells react.

Those tools dont really exist, Sirbuly said.

To develop these tools, Sirbuly has been working with various materials to find the right combination that can both respond to these microscopic forces and somehow relay the information up to the macroscopic world.

What Sirbuly and colleagues developed was a nanofiber capable of being temporarily deformed by the microscopic forces. The core is an ultrathin fiber of light-conducting tin dioxide, coated with polyethylene glycol. The surface is bedecked with gold nanoparticles that move in response to the impinging forces, scattering some of the light in the adjacent nanofiber.

The closer the nanoparticles are driven to the light-carrying nanofiber, the more light they scatter. In this way, the device can quantify the relative amount of the forces.

I actually won my NSF career award specifically on this concept, he said. Ironically, we capped off the five year award with this paper. So we actually did it.

Three scientists who work at the nano-scale praised the accomplishment.

I found the paper interesting and I do think it breaks new ground for sensing extremely small forces within a solution on a nano-scale, said Stephen Arnold, director of the MicroParticle PhotoPhysics Lab at NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering.

Responding by email, Arnold described in detail the engineering that went into making the nanofiber sensor.

Force scales work by compressing a calibrated spring. The more the spring is compressed the greater the force. Now imagine a spring in the form of single molecules in parallel that is only about ten nanometers long ( about 1/10000 the width of a human hair), with a nano-particle as a weighing tray, Arnold said.

The spring is attached at the other end to a very thin optical fiber, that provides the key to reporting the compression. The nanoparticle reports its position by scattering an increasing amount of light as it approaches the fiber.

All of this adds up to an extremely small detector (~1/1000 the width of a human hair) of an unimaginably small force (0.0000000000001 pound), Arnold said. It can sense the swimming of a nearby bacterium, or a sound much less intense than the lowest detectable whisper.

New possibilities

Its a really nice result, said John Marohn, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University. It really does give you a window into the microscopic world.

Marohn called the prototype a huge first step.

The prototype instruments main advantage is its size.

There are certainly more sensitive instruments, he said. But theyre all really big. Whats nice about their detector is that its really small and that it works in water, which is really neat.

Also advantageous is the use of a microscope to detect the light, he said, because optical microscopes are pervasive throughout the biological sciences.

Its pretty easy to imagine how they would put these things inside a culture of cells and use it to measure the pressure at different places, Marohn said.

This could help scientists piece together a more complete picture of how stem cells decide which cell type to turn into, he said.

So one of the cues that cells get, and they listen to these cues to decide how to change how to evolve, are just outside forces. This would give a way to kind of feel the outside forces that the cells feel, in a noninvasive way.

Eli Rothenberg, an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU School of Medicine, also praised the devices versatility.

One of the main challenges in measuring things in biology is forces, Rothenberg said. We have no idea whats going on in terms of forces in cells, in term of motion of molecules, the forces they interact with.

But these sensors (from Sirbulys group), you can put anywhere. Theyre tiny, you can place them on the cells. If a cancer cells surface is moving, you can measure the forces.

The device is also easy to make, Rothenberg said.

The fabrication of this device is quite straightforward. So the simplicity of having this device and what you can measure with it, thats kind of striking.

To get the prototype out into the scientific community, Rothenberg said the device could be placed on a microfluidics chip, as Sirbulys team did. To make it truly useful, a component should be added to detect the light and give a readout.

From a standpoint of integration, its not going to be a major thing, I think, he said.

You couple very simple components together and you have a very powerful thing to measure the tiniest forces and fluctuations in the cellular environment. So for me, simplicity that comes to such a level of sophistication speaks for itself.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation; the University of California; the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine; and the National Institutes of Health.

Science Playlist  On Now In a first, scientists rid human embryos of a potentially fatal gene mutation by editing their DNA On Now Space station flyovers visible from San Diego this week 0:55 On Now UCSD's 'ghost drivers' begin testing people's reaction seemingly empty cars 1:29 On Now 10 interesting facts about Mars On Now Kids can add years to your life On Now LA 90: SpaceX launches recycled rocket On Now Big passions, big giving: Malin Burnham 2:30 On Now Big passions, big giving: Darlene Shiley 2:40 On Now Big passions, big giving: Joan and Irwin Jacobs 2:45 On Now Ocean temperatures warming at rapid rate, study finds

bradley.fikes@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1020

UPDATES:

10:10 a.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 8:00 a.m.
Crawfish, zydeco and draft beer werent all that was in evidence at this weekends 16th annual Gator by the Bay festival at Spanish Landing.

Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, in full-fledged tourism-promotion mode, was on hand all four days to sample the food and drink  he said he gained five to 10 pounds  and check out San Diegos approach to drawing and managing crowds. He also hoped to lure San Diegans to the real thing in New Orleans.

Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser spends his last few hours at Gator by the Bay (note the blow-up alligators behind him) before returning home. (Roger Showley/U-T)

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They love Louisiana food and music, he said Sunday. Its a little easier to convince these people that they should visit Louisiana.

Nungesser, 58, was elected lieutenant governor in 2015 after serving two terms as Plaquemines Parish president, the equivalent of a county board of supervisors chairman.

During the San Diego festival, he introduced bands and chefs imported from his home state and pronounced the festival first rate.

When I got on stage, I told the crowd I could close my eyes and I thought I was in Louisiana, he said.

Gator by the Bay drew an estimated 15,000 to 18,000 revelers, a big increase from last year, when hail and inclement weather cut attendance by some 30 percent, a spokeswoman said.

Nungesser said he wished he could import some of San Diegos low humidity to ever-sticky New Orleans.

The near cloudless weather  and especially the dance music  drew veteran Gator-goer Janet Winkler, 59, from Golden, Colo. Shes a United Airlines gate agent.

Ive got two kids, 30 and 27, and they havent seen me on Mothers Day for 16 years, she said.

Sandra Fowler, 60, came with her husband from Lafayette, La., for the second time. She said they plan to tour San Diego sites Monday before heading to San Francisco for more sightseeing before returning home to her Blue Cross/Blue Shield executive job.

Theyve done justice to our dishes, she said, though she called the portions on the small side. But she said she loves California and called San Diego a wonderful city.

That brings smiles to Joe Terzi, CEO of the San Diego Tourism Authority, who said such festivals fill the gaps between Comic-Con, Red Bull air races and other megaevents.

They help build San Diegos reputation, he said.

For a state of 4.6 million, only a third bigger than all of San Diego County, Louisiana boasts an average 400 festivals annually, celebrating everything from alligators and ducks to peaches and vegetables, Nungesser said.

What is the old saying? If you can drink it, shoot it, eat it, wed name a festival after it, he said.

Returning to San Diego after 30 years, Nungesser said he was struck by how the city and its waterfront had changed: It was kind of the wow factor when I got off the plane to see how much its grown.

Nungesser, who also serves as his states commissioner of culture, recreation and tourism, said he was here to promote his state and plans to lead a bigger contingent here next year.

Back home, he is embroiled in the call to remove Confederate statues from public parks and street corners. As soon as he gets back, he plans to act on his request that New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu turn the statues over to the state so they can be relocated to state battlefields.

People come to Louisiana for the culture and history, some good and some bad, he said. And the minute you forget history, it has a tendency to repeat itself. Its just a battle that didnt need to be fought at this time. Weve got bigger problems than monuments in Louisiana.

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roger.showley@sduniontribune.com; (619) 293-1286; Twitter: @rogershowley
Dear Liz: My wife and I own a home with $61,000 left on the mortgage. I have a 401(k) with about $30,000 in it and she has a pension plan. We are both in our 50s. We stand to inherit around $180,000 in cash and a condo worth about $250,000 from her mother, who is dying. We have no other debt. I want to use the cash to pay off the mortgage, then stick about $100,000 in a retirement account, then remodel the condo and rent it out. My wife wants to sell the condo because of negative memories and bank the money to use for the kids college fund in a couple of years.

My argument is that with our regular income, plus the burden of the mortgage lifted, plus the monthly rental, we should be able to fund college costs on an ongoing basis. But if we liquidate, then in six to eight years we will have no college fund left, no condo and no additional income stream. In addition to all of this, I have home repair and remodeling skills (I remodeled our bathroom, new plumbing, new tub, etc. by myself). She thinks Ive got too much on my plate already (I own my own tech consulting business). My counter is I can hire a property management firm if need be. What do you think?

Answer: Its possible, but unlikely, that you will inherit from your mother-in-law. She probably will leave her money and condo to her daughter, who can (and in many cases should) keep the assets as separate property. Ultimately, your wife will make the decisions on what to do with her inheritance.

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Being a landlord, even with the help of a good property management company, is not for everyone. Tenants can be demanding, destructive and litigious. Remodeling, repairs and maintenance can get expensive. Although you may be proud of your do-it-yourself skills, your wife is probably right to question how much time youll be able to devote to this property when youre running your own business. Perhaps that bathroom took a lot longer than you expected, and she realizes that similar delays with the condo could mean months of expenses before shed receive any rental income. Being a landlord may just be more stress than she wants to inflict on herself and on your marriage.

Fortunately, she could generate an income stream by investing the money instead. Stocks and bonds wont call her in the middle of the night, demanding that their toilets be fixed, and a well-diversified portfolio probably will earn a better return over time than real estate. Using at least some of the money to offset college costs could be another smart move. A fee-only financial planner can help her sort through her options, including determining how much college is likely to cost and how much of it she wants to pay.

You may want to consult the planner as well. If youre in your 50s, you should have at least six times your income saved in that 401(k) according to Fidelity Investments, which has developed handy metrics for retirement readiness. Given how far behind you are, you probably should focus more on generating income that can be stowed into retirement funds rather than on burnishing your plumbing skills.

How to improve your FICO score

Dear Liz: My FICO score is just under 800. The reason given that it is not higher is that I dont have any non-mortgage leases. What would be the cheapest way to remedy this without buying something expensive?

Answer: When you get your credit scores, you may be given sometimes-vague reasons for why theyre not higher or lower. The reason code you saw probably said something like no recent non-mortgage balance information. What that means is that you havent been using revolving accounts such as credit cards. To get higher scores, youd need to dust off your plastic and use it once in a while. (You dont need to carry a balance to get or keep good scores, however. You can and should pay credit card balances in full each month.)

Any improvement in your scores is likely to be modest, however. Your numbers are already high and the factor known as mix of credit  which means responsibly using both revolving and installment accounts  accounts for just 10% of your FICO scores. Plus, theres no real point in having scores over 800, other than to brag about them. Once your scores exceed 760 or so, youre already eligible for the best rates and terms.

Liz Weston, certified financial planner, is a personal finance columnist for NerdWallet. Questions may be sent to her at 3940 Laurel Canyon, No. 238, Studio City, CA 91604, or by using the Contact form at asklizweston.com. Distributed by No More Red Inc.

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Most employee handbooks say -- in multiple places -- that employment is at-will, meaning that the employer or the employee has the right to end the relationship at any time for any reason.

Handbooks often also say that behavioral or performance problems generally will be addressed through progressive discipline, meaning counseling or lesser discipline will be used before employment is terminated.

Could an employer give up its right to terminate employment at will by having its managers consistently administer progressive discipline before any termination? The California court of appeal recently ruled that, at least when dealing with a long-term employee, the answer is yes.

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The case involved Christine Oakes, a Barnes & Noble store manager who had been employed for 22 years. After years of solid performance reviews and raises, Oakes was sharply criticized by her latest manager, Lori Schmit, for performance deficiencies. Schmit and other company officials decided to terminate Oakess employment.

Barnes & Nobles employee handbook declared that employment was at-will. Just as [the employee] has the right to terminate his/her employment for any reason, the company retains the absolute power to discharge anyone at any time, with or without cause and without prior notice.

The same handbook had a progressive discipline policy. And a separate manual made it standard operating procedure for managers to use progressive measures prior to termination. Management reserved the right to skip a step in process, such as where an employee had committed serious misconduct.

Managers, including Oakes, were told to apply progressive discipline uniformly. Indeed, Schmit could think of no instance where progressive discipline had not been followed.

In determining whether an employer may exercise its presumptive right to dismiss an employee at will, a California court will consider whether: (1) the employer adopted and applied policies limiting its right to terminate at will; (2) the employee served a long time; (3) an employer gave assurances, by word or deed, of continued employment; and (4) other employers in the same industry terminate employees at will.

Oakess lengthy, generally satisfactory service plus both the written progressive discipline policy and evidence that Barnes & Noble had a consistent unwritten practice of applying some form of discipline to all employees enabled her to defeat the companys effort to have the case dismissed by a judge before a jury trial.

How can an employer move toward preserving disciplinary flexibility without sacrificing disciplinary fairness?

First, consider whether a progressive discipline policy is necessary. What every employer of any size needs is managements commitment to make all hiring, firing, and promotion decisions fairly.

Second, clearly state that any progressive discipline policy cannot address every reason an employee is no longer right for a particular job. Even absent serious misconduct, an employees personality or other subjective, uncorrectable attributes or other circumstances (such as layoffs) may make progressive discipline in a particular case pointless. Accordingly, progressive discipline policies should state  and managers should be told -- that progressive discipline is not warranted in every situation before employment is terminated. This is more than just reserving the right to skip a step in the process.

A clear at-will policy still provides employers with some measure of legal protection. Even the most clearly stated at-will policy, however, is not a license to make employment decisions arbitrarily or inexplicably. Avoiding a claim of an implied limitation on the right to terminate at will is not worth heightened exposure to a claim that the real reason for a particular termination was unlawful discrimination or retaliation.

The useful guidance an employer may take from the Barnes & Noble opinion is that, as a management tool, progressive discipline is warranted in some situations and not in others. And any such policy should say so.

Dan Eaton is a partner with the San Diego law firm of Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek where his practice focuses on defending and advising employers. He also is an instructor at the San Diego State University Fowler College of Business where he teaches classes in business ethics and employment law. He may be reached at eaton@scmv.com. His Twitter handle is @DanEatonlaw.
The San Dieguito American Legion Post 416 based in downtown Encinitas announced that Cole Gonzales, a junior at San Dieguito Academy, was selected to be its delegate to 2017 American Legion Boys State.

California Boys State will be held in June at the California State University Sacramento campus. The Encinitas Post funds the scholarship which pays for its delegates tuition, lodging, and travel expenses.

Gonzales, a Carlsbad resident, is active in forensics at San Dieguito Academy, was active in the YMCA Youth and Government program, and the Model United Nations Club. Earlier this year, Cole organized a school trip to Washington, D.C., for 15 San Dieguito Academy students, to attend the Presidential Inauguration.

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Seth Rossiter, a Santa Fe Christian High School junior was selected as the alternate delegate and San Dieguito Academy juniors Zachary Lewis and Klaus Neyer were finalists in the selection process.

Visit calegionpost416.org or call (760) 908-3550.
Reporter Morgan Cook has been named the 2017 Journalist of the Year by the San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, honoring a series of reports on Rep. Duncan Hunters campaign expenses.

Since Cook began reporting on Hunters expenditures in April 2016, the Alpine Republican has returned more than $60,000 to his treasury for personal, mistaken or undocumented expenses. The matter is the subject of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.

Reimbursed expenses include $6,142 at Costco, $6,081 on United Airlines, $4,223 at Albertsons, $2,892 at the Arizona Grand Resort and $2,867 at Chevron.

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San Diego has seen its share of big stories this past year, but our board believes no local journalist did better work than Cook in her relentless accountability reporting on Congressman Duncan Hunters use of campaign funds for personal expenses, the journalism group said in announcing her selection. She broke the story last year and continues to follow it after the Department of Justice made clear in March that it is investigating Hunter.

The honor will be given at the groups annual awards banquet, July 19 at the Kona Kai resort.

Throughout her coverage, Cook has explained to readers why this matters  the practice of campaign contributors funding a candidates personal life, not just his campaign, opens up the possibility of undue influence, the announcement states. To that end, Cooks reporting has included who was giving the money and what they might be getting in return. She has persevered in her coverage despite a barrage of criticism and lack of cooperation from Hunters campaign.

Hunter has said he took part in no illegal activity and did not make any of the expenditures in question himself.

He told TV station KUSI last month that he takes full responsibility. At the same time, the congressman has repeatedly ascribed partisan motives to the newspapers coverage, claiming liberal bias. An early supporter of Donald Trump, Hunter has echoed the presidents criticism of the media.

Theres always politics involved in this, he told KUSI. The local paper here hates me  they hate Donald Trump, they hate people that endorse Donald Trump, and thats  I think theyve written about 47 stories about this or something, and thats all right. Were going to keep working for San Diego and keep on working for the country, and make America great again.

The U-T archives show Cook has written 21 stories about Hunters troubles. Including columns, editorials and letters to the editor that have been published in response to her coverage, Hunters estimate is not far off.

Cook has worked on the investigative reporting team for The San Diego Union-Tribune since February 2015. She previously worked at The Orange County Register and the now-defunct North County Times.

Cooks colleague, Jeff McDonald, received the same award in 2015 for his coverage of the shutdown of the failed San Onofre nuclear plant.

Previously: Hunter
Science funding cuts in President Trumps federal budget has sparked a community call for action in the South Bay to stop the doors from closing on a vital research reserve.

As it stands, the presidents budget threatens $250 million in cuts to grants and programs supporting coastal and marine management, research and education from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Locally, it threatens the closure of the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve in Imperial Beach, the only national estuarine research reserve in Southern California.

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The estuary is also a recreation destination.

On Saturday, Friends of San Diego Wildlife Refuges, community members and elected officials gathered in Imperial Beach to call and write their representatives in Congress, asking them to reject the cuts and save the reserve.

States, communities and people depend on estuaries like the Tijuana River (research reserve) to protect us against flooding, keep water clean, create and sustain jobs, support fish and wildlife habitats and offer quality outdoor recreation opportunities, said George Dowden, president of Friends of San Diego Wildlife Refuges.

In 2016, the Tijuana River reserve:

Hosted more than 75,600 visitors

Offered more than 2,000 hours of science-based training on coastal management issues

Reached more than 1,600 local students

Provided refuge to more than 370 bird species while protecting the nesting ground for six species of birds designated as threatened or endangered

The Tijuana River reserve is one of 29 national estuarine research reserves that protect 1.3 million acres of precious coastal and estuarine lands across the country.

Funding for it is matched by state, local and other federal dollars at more than two times the amount contributed. If the budget is cut, matching sources would likely disappear.

More information is available at https://trnerr.org/.
Thursday, May 18: Eat. Drink. Read

Chefs from across San Diego County will take a page from their favorite books with dishes inspired by literary works at the annual Eat. Drink. Read. fundraiser Thursday.

The eighth annual event, to be held at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park, will support the San Diego Council on Literacy with dishes from more than a dozen chefs and sips from eight breweries, distillers and others.

One chef, Alfonso Pisacane from Little Italys Civico 1845, is paying homage to The Little Prince, for example, with eggplant ravioli in caciocavallo silano cheese fondue. Other participating restaurants include Waypoint Public, 608 Oceanside, Casa Guadalajara, Nobu San Diego, Double Standard Kitchenetta, Galaxy Taco and Solare. Expect bookish creations, as well, from students at San Diego Continuing Educations Culinary Arts Program.

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Providing drinks will be Stone Brewing Co., Monkey Paw Brewing Co., Port Brewing Co./The Lost Abbey/ The Hop Concept, Cutwater Spirits, Living Tea Brewing Co., among others.

Proceeds from the $75 festival will go toward the San Diego Literacy Councils 29 affiliated literacy programs, which helps more than 170,000 San Diego County children and adults.

5:30 to 8 p.m., 2001 Pan American Plaza, Balboa Park. Buy tickets at literacysandiego.org/eatdrinkread

Twitter: @sdeditgirl

michele.parente@sduniontribune.com
For the 37 years David and Lesley Cohn have been in the restaurant business, their charitable giving has taken many forms, ranging from the pocket-sized (donated restaurant gift cards) to the massive (a 20-ton truckload of groceries for a food drive).

On Wednesday, the couples philanthropy will take the form of a gourmet taco.

Libertad Tacos a la Brasa in Hillcrest will be the Cohn Restaurant Groups 26th restaurant  and the first thats a not-for-profit, with 100 percent of its proceeds going to charity.

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Each month, a local organization will be designated by an advisory board to receive the net profits made at the small shop on University Avenue, with a guaranteed minimum of $3,000.

Libertad is believed to be the only eatery of its kind in San Diego and just one of a handful like it in the United States. The national trendlet, which can be traced to the 2013 opening of the craft brew-centric Oregon Public House in Portland, has given rise to such requisite clever mash-ups as philanthro-pub and ale-truism.

Tacos for good is Libertads slogan and while no tortilla-related moniker has emerged yet, the Cohns call their latest enterprise a milestone in their mission.

Weve always wanted to do something on a larger scale that brings more money to the charities we work with and  we thought this would be the perfect venue, said Lesley Cohn, who said a late-night walk-up window, heavy foot traffic in the area and San Diegos love of tacos should combine to generate robust sales.

We hope this catches on with the community and they support it. Were really excited about it. Its on a different level than the rest of our philanthropy.

The whimsical decor at Libertad reflects the adventurous spirit of the not-for-profit restaurant in Hillcrest. To capture that, owners Lesley and David Cohn tapped long-time collaborator Philippe Beltran. (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune)

How do you say no?

Cohn, who manages the charitable arm of the Cohn Restaurant Group, estimates that the ever-expanding company gives away at least $250,000 a year to more than 300 organizations, including St. Vincent de Paul, Father Joes Villages, the San Diego Food Bank, The Old Globe and KPBS.

Since 1997, CRG has also raised $500,000 for the Garfield High School Foundation, which serves at-risk students. Its marquee fundraising event every year is a Thanksgiving lunch  cooked and served by Garfield culinary program students  thats held at the Cohns Prado restaurant in Balboa Park. They will celebrate the 20th anniversary lunch this November.

The couple has been recognized with a slew of awards and commendations; the Cohns have become so identified with giving that there are instructions on the company website on how to request a donation.

Each month, Lesley Cohn fields the inquiries  from schools, arts groups, homeless service providers, hospitals and their auxiliaries.

How do you say no to childhood cancers? How do you say no to cystic fibrosis? How do you say no to Rady Childrens Hospital? Ronald McDonald House? You dont, Cohn said.

In addition to direct contributions, the Cohn Restaurant Group runs regular fundraising promotions, like its Dollar-A-Dish campaign, running through May. Each time a customer orders a select dish, the Cohns donate $1 to the San Diego Food Banks Food-4-Kids Backpack Program. And nonprofit and school groups can hold a function for free at restaurants like the Corvette Diner at Liberty Station and Vintana in Escondido, and take home 15 percent of the proceeds from whats ordered.

Money Making Mondays.  Raise money for your organization without having to sell anything? NO more Car Washes or Bake Sales. Simply schedule an event and bring in your supporters, the CRG website says.

Cohn said the couple is committed to sharing its success with the tens of thousands of San Diegans who have eaten at their restaurants over the years.

Its important to give back to a community that has supported you for 30 years, she said. I dont know if were trying to preach philanthropy. I think that people who have found success really have to look beyond themselves. And theres a lot of hurt out there. San Diego is a not an easy place to make a living, to raise a family.

A sense of community responsibility, particularly to feed those in need, was instilled in the Cohns at an early age, from their parents.

Especially David, she said. He came from a family of grocers and they would always donate food by the truckload.

My (late) mother-in-law, the only thing she ever wanted for her birthday was for the whole family to get together to feed the homeless. And we do it every year  even though she died a few years ago  we do it the first Sunday in October. We bring seven, eight sheet cakes from Costco and sing Happy Birthday.

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The idea for Libertad was David Cohns, whom Lesley Cohn described as the creative brains of the company.

I have learned not to second guess David, he has a very long and wide lens, she said.

The original plan was to try to open a restaurant staffed by the students at Garfield, but that proved unrealistic, David Cohn said.

That became too complicated. Too many layers, he said.

Inspired by the buzz surrounding what the Oregon Public House was doing, the Cohns decided to jump into the charity restaurant business, securing the lease of a University Avenue furniture shop that had gone out of business. It just happened to be next door to their restaurant 100 Wines, which they were transforming into the fourth iteration of Bo-Beau, a family of French bistros. (Bo-Beau Kitchen and a speakeasy behind Libertad, named Cache, are also opening on Wednesday.)

With a guarantee of $3,000 a month for the designated charity, the $250,000 invested in building the taco shop and the free services the restaurant group will provide  such as marketing, IT and human resources  Libertad may do good for the community, but not necessarily the Cohns bottom line.

Ultimately, well lose money doing it, said David Cohn. Theres no way well cover all that we put into it.

William Sannwald, a lecturer at San Diego State Universitys College of Business Administration, said the concept for the restaurant is a natural extension of both Americas continued obsession with chef culture and the Cohns giving back to the community.

Theyre a fantastic couple as far as being leaders in supporting San Diego, he said.

Theyve always been very philanthropic and this is a way to combine their interest in food and restaurants with their interest in giving to the community, Sannwald said.

Charitable giving is evolving, he said, with people realizing the government cant do it all, and like-minded citizens going back to the communal spirit of barn raising.

And now its moving into food  all of a sudden chefs, who you never saw before Julia Child, are like rock stars, he said.

Now its become more ingrained into the culture, and the Cohns, as always, are at the forefront of it.

Even though Ryan Saari, the founder of Oregon Public House, was really at the forefront of the trend, he still sounded floored by what the Cohns are doing.

Theyre guaranteeing $3,000 a month? Wow. Not many people can do that, he said. When we were starting, the biggest donation we ever got was $2,500.

The Portland restaurant designates six charities at a time and gives customers a choice of which to support when they order.

Sometimes theyll just say you choose, which helps those at the end of the month that didnt do so well, Saari said. Portlanders, not surprisingly, have been enthusiastic for the concept. The challenge of the model is you have to make money every month and restaurants are a very seasonal industry, he said. For this model, you cant get around that its requiring us to be as diligent as we can.

Restaurant margins are notoriously thin, noted David Cohn, with profits averaging only 5 cents on each dollar of sales.

Which may make some wonder if theyll regret launching Libertad. No way, the couple insisted.

In a set of FAQs put out in March, the Cohns hypothetically asked:

This seems like a crazy idea, are you sure you want to do this?

Absolutely.

Union-Tribune reporter Lori Weisberg contributed to this report.

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Twitter: @sdeditgirl

michele.parente@sduniontribune.com
A driver found dead after a crash in Miramar Monday morning likely suffered a medical emergency, a San Diego police officer said.

The man was traveling on Miramar Road near Eastgate Mall when his car crashed into several parked vehicles about 7 a.m., Officer Billy Hernandez said.

A witness went to check on the driver and found him unconscious and not breathing. He died before he could be taken to a hospital.

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Investigators determined the driver likely suffered a medical emergency which led to the crash.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.com
The last time Kathy Shott spoke to her son was shortly before Christmas 2013.

She recalled that he was sad  the 31-year-old was going through a divorce  but he also seemed to be looking to the future. She said he thanked her for the socks she had sent to him in Missouri and mentioned they would come in handy when he returned to work.

Mom, dont ever forget how much I love you, she remembered him saying over the phone.

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On Christmas Day, he took his life.

Its a story Shott, who lives in San Diego, has told multiple times since the death of her son, an Iraq War veteran who served in two branches of the U.S. military. She shares it in support groups that help people who have lost loved ones to suicide.

She and other parents agreed to tell their stories publicly after a 15-year-old boy called police to Torrey Pines High School with a BB gun in his waistband and a suicide note in his pocket.

Police shot and killed Jacob Peterson, a freshman at the Carmel Valley school, on May 6 after he pointed the BB gun at one of the officers and refused to drop the weapon. The note was discovered a day later.

Shott and the other parents who spoke to The San Diego Union-Tribune last week said they wanted to help others dealing with a similar loss. They said they hoped to encourage open discussion about suicide and the efforts to prevent it, and to fight the stigma they felt because of how their children died.

Once the funeral is over, its over. People go about their lives, said Shott, whose therapist told her about Survivors of Suicide Loss, one of many organizations around the country that provide resources to people dealing with this type of tragedy.

She attended her first support group in San Diego County just two months after Tony Shott, the youngest of her three children, ended his life. Shes been attending them ever since.

In those meetings, she found people who understood what she was going through. She knew she wasnt alone.

At least when you walk in that room, you arent judged, said Kathy Shott, who retired from the Air Force after 30 years, reaching the rank of chief master sergeant. We dont need to be judged anymore. We do it enough ourselves.

Shott said she now views her life in two parts: before Tony and after Tony. Before, she had known her son to be a happy-go-lucky kid who joined the Marines shortly after he graduated from high school and later served four years in the Army, where he worked as a military intelligence specialist. But life and military service changed him, she said. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Support groups helped Shott learn to live her life after Tony, rather than to simply exist. She now leads a meeting every month in Chula Vista and is working to start a group in June at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

But its the Hillcrest group that feels most like home.

I call the Hillcrest group MY group, where I get to talk about my feelings and how Im doing, she said. In the Chula Vista group, Im the one thats trying to let (others) know  we will survive together.

Diane Pignato was living in the Chicago suburbs when her daughter committed suicide. It was 2012. Shana Lebiedz was 28.

She was actually 16 when she started to show some signs, you know, of distress, Pignato said. I could see that she was having some problems.

Pignato said she took her daughter to counseling. Her daughter began taking medication for depression and seemed to get better after that, graduating from high school, then college and later pursuing a graduate degree in social work. She got married in 2011.

All these great things were happening, Pignato said.

Then things began to change. After earning her masters degree, Pignatos daughter had trouble finding a job in her field. She became angry and started to isolate herself from family and friends. She stopped taking her medication and eventually told an uncle she had thoughts of suicide.

She was hospitalized once the family found out that she had a plan to end her life.

I was trained in school that if they have intent and they have a plan, its imminent, said Pignato, who worked in the Illinois court system as a forensic social worker before she retired.

Shana Lebiedz stayed in the psychiatric hospital about a week before she was discharged. Afterward, she refused to go to outpatient care, her mother said. She continued to isolate herself from family. She told her mother she was planning to cut down on her medication.

I was freaked out, Pignato said. I didnt know what to do.  I just felt helpless.

Lebiedz left the hospital in August 2012. She died Oct. 1.

About three weeks later, Pignato found a support group in her hometown and began attending meetings. I knew I needed help, she said.  There was no way I was going to do this on my own.

The groups, she said, helped her process her thoughts and feelings: sadness, anger, guilt, blame. The meetings, along with other resources  books, lectures, online resources  helped her understand what she was feeling and know that it was OK.

This is normal, she said. This is grief.

Pignato is in the process of moving to San Diego to be closer to her son and grandchild. She is involved with Survivors of Suicide Loss, practices meditation and is spending more time outdoors.

You realize that thats your old life and you have to create a new life, she said. I have actively created a new life.

Rozsa and Aaron Harris of San Marcos lost their 21-year-old son, also named Aaron, to suicide on April 17, 2015. It wasnt the first time he had tried the take his life. He made an attempt when he was 19.

After that first attempt, the parents let their son know how important he was to the family, including his two siblings. They sought help from a mental health professional for their sons depression.

We did everything according to what people were recommending, Rozsa Harris said.

Because their son was older than 18 and a legal adult, he could decide for himself whether he would continue treatment, which frustrated his parents. They could not access his medical information without his consent, his mother said.

But he appeared to be doing better. He was in college and had a part-time job and a girlfriend, his mother said. He was quiet but didnt seem to be in a state of distress.

I think I was just worried to bring up the words, Aaron, are you thinking about suicide? the mother said. Those are exactly the questions you have to ask.

After their sons death, the parents started attending support groups regularly. They were hesitant at first, unsure whether they could speak about their son among strangers. But they learned at the meetings that they could talk if they wanted, about what they wanted, when they were ready.

There was no pressure.

It makes a huge, huge difference, said the father, Aaron Harris, adding that the groups allowed him and his wife to meet people who managed to find joy and laughter again after a heartbreaking loss.

That gave them hope, he said.



Suicide prevention resources and support groups

 San Diego Countys Its Up to Us program provides an array of resources at up2sd.org.

 The San Diego Access and Crisis Line, for anyone in immediate need of help, can be reached at (888) 724-7240.

 The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available at (800) 273-8255 or by texting TALK to 741-741.

 Survivors of Suicide Loss, which provides support groups for those who have lost a relative or friend through suicide, can be reached at (619) 482-0297.

 American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, San Diego Chapter, has an outreach program that provides support to people who have lost someone to suicide: (855) 869-2377.

dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @danalittlefield
The San Diego County Democratic Party has agreed to pay fines totaling $6,000 for failing to report late contributions made to separate campaigns in 2012 and 2013, according to the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

The commission found that the local Democratic Party and treasurer Xavier Martinez failed to report five late contributions to Bob Filners campaign for San Diego mayor within 24 hours as required by law.

They also did not promptly disclose three late contributions to the San Diego City Council campaign of Mat Kostrinsky within the 24-hour period required in the run-up to the June 2012 primary election, the commission said.

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The committee also failed to report receiving five late contributions on 24-hour reports it filed prior to the June 2012 primary election, the November 2012 general election and the special election in January 2013, the commission said.

The public harm in this case is the public was denied the full information regarding SDCDPs campaign activities in the run-up to several elections, said the stipulation released Monday. Although the Filner and Kostrinsky committees did disclose some of the contributions made by SDCDP, a voter that examined SDCDPs campaign reports would not have seen these contributions reported

The county partys chairwoman, Jessica Hayes, said via email, After the loss of a key member of our accounting team for personal reasons in 2012, the party did not report several contributions within the required period of time. The FPPC acknowledged in its stipulation that it found no evidence of an attempt by the party to deceive and that the San Diego County Democratic Party properly filed more than 200 timely reports during the same election cycle. We have since redesigned our process, and we continue to support transparency and disclosure in campaign finance.

In 2012, the San Diego County Democratic Party contributed more than $115,000 in cash and non-monetary contributions to the Filner mayoral campaign. The political party did not promptly disclose almost $22,000 of those donations, the commission said. All of the contributions were reported by the party later, when it filed a semi-annual campaign statement, the commission noted. Filner placed second in the June 2012 primary and went on to win the November run-off. He resigned in 2013 following a spate of sexual harassment allegations and pleaded guilty to a felony.

Kostrinsky received $54,000 from the San Diego County Democratic Party for his unsuccessful City Council campaign in June 2012, the commission said. Of that, the party failed to properly report $21,734 on time.

Watchdog Videos On Now Sexual misconduct accusers worry deputy is being protected 6:16 On Now City funded $2-million waterfront bathroom 1:26 On Now Public water district charges customer for legal work, response to records request On Now Video: Tiny homes won't be reused amid housing, homeless crisis On Now Attorney General seeks documentation for Miss Middle East On Now Rep. Hunter probe covers possible fraud On Now Video: SDG&E delaying solar credit for some low-income housing tenants On Now Video: Former San Diego Junior Theatre teacher sentenced for sex with teen girl 0:24 On Now Video: Shelter volunteers believe they were fired for finding a dog a home 0:49 On Now McKamey Manor is leaving San Diego 3:35

jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald

UPDATES:

This story was updated at 3:37 p.m. to add a statement from the local Democratic party.
Rep. Duncan Hunters latest financial filings show his campaign continues to incur expenses at places like cigar lounges, where he has previously said he prefers to hold small-scale fundraising events.

His campaign spent $353 on food/beverages at Alpine Tobacco Company, a smoking lounge. The first quarter report also shows Hunters campaign paid a $1,042 hotel bill at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and spent $896 at one of the hotels bar, The Chandelier, where patrons can drink inside a huge crystal chandelier.

Hunter, R-Alpine, has reimbursed more than $60,000 in mistaken, personal or undocumented expenditures to his treasury since the Federal Election Commission and The San Diego Union-Tribune began questioning his expenses a year ago.

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More recently, the House Ethics Committee announced that it would halt an inquiry into Hunters spending in deference to a federal criminal investigation. Use of campaign funds for personal benefit is illegal, to avoid undue influence by contributors such as defense contractors, whose bottom line can be affected by decisions in Congress.

Hunters office did not respond to questions about the official or campaign-related reasons for the recent travel to Las Vegas or the charges at the smoking lounge. After a previous U-T story about spending at cigar lounges, spokesman Joe Kasper sent an email to supporters saying all the expenses were permissible.

Hunter holds events at cigar lounges and has raised money there  in one instance, folks from D.C. were in the area and Hunter hosted a small fundraiser, the email said. In fact, Hunter prefers small events over large ones, and the idea that only big events can occur is ridiculous. Its also not uncommon for members of Congress to support campaign staff, volunteers and supporters through campaign funds

So the mere suggestion that something occurred out of the parameters of permissible expenses is dead wrong.

The campaign reported paying the Chandelier bar on Jan. 11, and the hotel charge on Jan. 19. The campaign reported one contribution around those dates  $500 from David A. Whelan, a Boeing Co. executive from California, on Jan. 17. It was the first contribution the campaign reported receiving in January. The campaign received two contributions on Jan. 23 and four on Jan. 29.

The latest campaign reports also show Hunter spent $69,000 in legal fees and paid $9,000 in campaign consulting fees to his wife, Margaret.

The campaign reported receiving $146,000 in the quarter, with significant support from defense contractors. The final balance of funds in the treasury was $701,000.

The campaign has been under scrutiny since the unusual spending came to light in April 2016. Hunter has reimbursed the campaign treasury for charges including video games, oral surgery, private school tuition, a garage door and a family trip to Italy.

The charges Hunter has reimbursed included thousands of dollars for gas fill-ups, groceries, fast food, and items purchased from department stores  all of which could be legitimate campaign expenses, but also have a lot in common with the expenses of a typical suburban family.

The new spending report shows no charges for gas, grocery stores, fast food, or department stores.

Hunter has denied involvement in any criminal activity and attributed the charges in question to innocent mistakes and mix-ups between his campaign and personal credit cards, both of which are blue.

At least $16,500 of the money Hunters campaign raised during the first quarter of the year came from people associated with the Louisiana-based shipbuilder Edison Chouest Offshore and two of its subsidiaries, Galliano Marine Services and Bollinger Shipyards.

On Feb. 22, the U.S. Coast Guard  overseen by a subcommittee that Hunter chairs  announced that Bollinger Shipyards was one of five companies awarded about $20 million in fixed-price contracts for design studies for faster, less-expensive production of new ice-breaking ships.

The Union-Tribune reported last year that Hunter was pushing the Coast Guard to lease or buy the Aiviq, an icebreaker owned by Edison Chouest Offshore even though Coast Guard officials had insisted the ship did not meet its needs without significant upgrades.

The five icebreaker contract-winners also included General Dynamics/NASSCO. The companys political action committee reported contributing $1,500 to Hunters campaign Feb. 15 and another $2,500 on Feb. 26.

Edison Chouest Offshore did not respond to the Union-Tribunes request for comment. A spokesperson for General Dynamics/NASSCO declined to comment.

A spokesman for Hunters office provided a statement in response to questions about the contracts and campaign contributions.

Its no secret that Congressman Hunter is a champion for his constituents and for the American defense industry, the statement said. To suggest that any official action he may have taken was related in any way to a campaign contribution is categorically false, and its worth noting that all contracting selection decisions are made by the United States Coast Guard and not by the Congress.

Experts in campaign law say its common to see federal contractors donating to campaigns for lawmakers who serve on committees and subcommittees that oversee contracting agencies. The practice is permissible as long as contributors and campaigns follow rules and keep contributions within legal limits.

Previously: Hunter

Watchdog Videos On Now Sexual misconduct accusers worry deputy is being protected 6:16 On Now City funded $2-million waterfront bathroom 1:26 On Now Public water district charges customer for legal work, response to records request On Now Video: Tiny homes won't be reused amid housing, homeless crisis On Now Attorney General seeks documentation for Miss Middle East On Now Rep. Hunter probe covers possible fraud On Now Video: SDG&E delaying solar credit for some low-income housing tenants On Now Video: Former San Diego Junior Theatre teacher sentenced for sex with teen girl 0:24 On Now Video: Shelter volunteers believe they were fired for finding a dog a home 0:49 On Now McKamey Manor is leaving San Diego 3:35

morgan.cook@sduniontribune.com
Monday marked the fourth day a cyber attack known as WannaCry held hostage hundreds of thousands of computers all over the world with the intent of collecting money in exchange for retrieving files and data that become locked and inaccessible, supposedly unless a ransom is paid.

Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and China were the latest to announce being hit by the malicious virus that began in Europe on Friday, but the spread of the ransomware appeared to be slowing thanks to the discovery of a kill switch over the weekend by a 22-year-old being called an accidental hero.

Questions linger as to who is responsible for setting off this global attack on Windows computers  including those belonging to Britains National Health Service, the Renault SA automaker and other major organizations  and there remains some uncertainty about the scope of the damage over the past few days.

But since Friday, much else has been learned. Here are six things to know about the cyber attack known as WannaCry to hit the world.

1. How many computers have been infected so far?

Over the weekend, European authorities estimated that at least 200,000 computers were infected, but the sum may have substantially increased on Monday with China reporting some 40,000 public and private organizations hit with the malware.

Cyber security expert Matthieu Suiche has posted a number of updates on Twitter with the latest figures. On Sunday, he posted an infection map and called it a bloodbath.

2. What is it and how does it work?

The ransomware known as WannaCry or WannaCrypt or WannaDecrypt affects vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows computers and it is believed to be using technology developed by the National Security Agency that, according to The Intercept, was leaked by hackers in mid-April.

Those vulnerabilities are safeguarded by a Windows update Microsoft released in March, and another one released Friday. Organizations that rely on dated computer software  as was the case at the National Health Service where 90 percent of its computers run on 15-year-old software, according to tech blog The Register  are the most vulnerable.

The ransomware spreads like a worm virus, from machine to machine, first by luring a user into clicking a link or an attachment. Once the virus takes hold of the computer, it then encrypts files, locks the user out of the computer, requests a ransom and then spreads to other computers within a network, as is the case in major organizations with large computer networks.

Wall Street Journalist Katy Barnato on Twitter shared a graphic that explains how the ransomware works.

3. How much money is being sought and has anyone paid?

The virus is called a ransomware because it holds a computer hostage until a ransom is paid. WannaCry victims are demanding $300 in bitcoin payments to unlock the files within the computer and after some time the price goes up to $600, CNBC reported.

But despite the widespread infection, only a small number of payments have been made. CNBC reports that payments have added up to some $50,000 worth of bitcoin payments. Security experts continue to urge victims to not pay the ransom fee.

4. Will it continue to spread?

On Monday, the spread of the ransomware appeared to be slowing and, according to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, no major disruptions were being reported. The thawing may be partly credited to a 22-year-old researcher who found a kill switch that slows the spread of the virus by simply registering a website name, the Wall Street Journal reported.

5. What were the biggest companies affected?

Those affected by the ransomware include major consumer brands and government agencies around the world. Among the biggest to be hit was Britains National Health Service, which caused disruptions to at least 36 hospitals across the country on Friday, The New York Times reported. Others affected include Nissan Motors, FedEx, China National Petroleum, Renault SA, Deutsche Bahn, Russian bank Sberbank, the Yancheng police department in China, the Russian Interior Ministry, and Hitachi to name a few.

Using data from two major cyber security companies, Symantec and Datto, Statista illustrated the spread of WannaCry with a graph showing the types of industries affected by the ransomware and the leading cause of infection.

So whats next?

A manhunt for those behind the attack is now underway and security experts everywhere are encouraging WIndows users to update their software. And while this attack was aimed at Microsoft software, concerns loom over whether this attack could also affect Apple computers.

All this global attention has brought new focus to calls for a Digital Geneva Convention.

Is it time for the world to come together and avoid these wide-scale cyber attacks the same way nations came together to avoid major global conflicts?

Have some thoughts to share?

Join me in a conversation: Shoot me a private email with your thoughts or ideas on a different approach to this story. As always, you can also send us a tweet.

Email: luis.gomez@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @RunGomez

Read The Conversation on Flipboard.
A 44-year-old Ramona man faces vehicular manslaughter and felony hit-and-run charges after his alleged involvement in a collision that killed a pregnant San Diego woman and her unborn child in San Diego Country Estates around 6:45 p.m. Sunday.

Jessica Foderingham, 29, who was eight months pregnant, was eastbound on San Vicente Road west of Arena Drive when a 2011 GMC Yukon driven by Andrew Milonis rear-ended the 2016 Dodge Dart she was driving, according to authorities. The collision pushed the Dodge into the center divider area where it struck a tree, said the California Highway Patrol.

First responders initiated resuscitative efforts and prepared her for medical transport, but her death was pronounced while en route to the hospital, stated the county Medical Examiners Office.

Milonis fled the scene in his vehicle, left it at Riviera Oaks Resort on Pappas Road, and took a ride with Lyft to Turkey Inn at 716 Main St., where he was arrested, said officers. He was booked into jail for driving under the influence causing death, felony hit-and-run, and vehicular manslaughter, said CHP Public Information Officer Kevin Pearlstein.

San Vicente Road near Arena Drive was closed until about 11 p.m. Sunday while authorities investigated the crash.

A Ramona man reported that he witnessed a vehicle fitting the description of the Yukon peel out of Cheers onto state Route 67 around 6:30 Sunday night and then swerve back and forth on the highway. Similar reports were posted on social media.

Foderingham leaves two sons, ages 9 and 11, and her husband, Christian, a U.S. Marine, said Ramona resident Kandace Smith. The couples baby girl was due at the end of next month, said Smith, adding that she and Jessica had been best friends since they were in the third grade.

Jessica, who had been on her way to visit her grandparents Sunday, grew up in Ramona and Poway and was living in military housing in San Diego, noted Smith.

To help the family, a barbecue fundraiser will be held from 3 to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 18, at A & S Catering and BBQ, 1158 Main St. A candlelight vigil was scheduled for Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the crash site.
The International Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced a Congolese warlord to 14 years in jail for using child soldiers - a punishment meant to bring justice for his victims, to signal a warning to others and to act as a potential landmark in the struggle to protect children entangled in wars.

Thomas Lubanga was found guilty in March of recruiting, kidnapping and abusing children in his Union of Congolese Patriots militia - sending them to kill and be killed during tribal fighting over land and resources in Congos northeast Ituri region in 2002-2003.

Lubangas was the first guilty judgment passed down in the courts decade-old existence; Tuesdays announcement was the first time the tribunal sentenced a convicted war criminal.

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Otherwise the mustachioed Lubanga, who cried when he was put on a plane from Congo to The Hague in 2006, is a small player among Congos many belligerents.

Lubangas case this year has brought increasing pressure for the arrest of his much more infamous partner in crime, renegade Congolese army Gen. Bosco Ntaganda. Ntaganda had moved on from being a militia leader in Ituri to being the No. 2 leader in a tribal-based rebellion in 2006, when the ICC indicted both men for war crimes involving child soldiers.

In late 2008, when the rebels reached the outskirts of the eastern provincial capital of Goma, Congos government was forced to negotiate. A 2009 peace deal saw Ntaganda wearing the stripes of a general as he integrated his fighters into the Congolese army. President Joseph Kabila dismissed calls for his arrest under the ICC warrant, until recently, arguing that Ntagandas cooperation was essential to keeping the peace in Congos troubled east. U.N. peacekeepers in Congo who should have been arresting Ntaganda were forced to work with soldiers under his command.

Sensing the end of the road this year, the veteran warlord took off and now is accused of orchestrating a new rebellion that erupted in April with the defections of hundreds of the former rebels whom he had integrated into Congos army.

Ntaganda denies any part in the mutiny, and the new 23 March Movement denies that Ntaganda is its leader. But a U.N. experts report that accuses Rwanda of helping create and arm the rebellion, says Ntaganda is behind it and that new recruits from Rwanda are bedded and fed at a hotel Ntaganda owns on Congos border with Rwanda.

In May, Human Rights Watch accused Ntaganda of again press-ganging children - this time for the M23 rebellion. The New York-based body charged Ntaganda had forcibly recruited at least 149 boys and young men in the first month of the rebellion.

Earlier in May, the ICC prosecutor had filed a request for a new arrest warrant against Ntaganda on additional charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for murder, rape, sexual slavery, and pillaging in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Ituri in 2002-2003.

At The Hague on Tuesday, Judge Adrian Fulford criticized former chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo for not bringing charges of sexual violence against Lubanga, or presenting evidence of such crimes at a sentencing hearing last month.

Prosecutors had asked for a 30-year sentence, but said they would be willing to cut it to 20 years if Lubanga offered a genuine apology to his victims. Lubanga did not offer an apology.

He showed no emotion as Fulford announced the sentence, which he can appeal along with the conviction.

Fulford said the time Lubanga has been detained since March 2006 will be deducted from the sentence, meaning the 51-year-old will be free before he turns 60.

Human rights activists hailed Tuesdays announcement.

This sentence sends out a stark warning across the world to those engaged in the use of child soldiers that their criminal actions will land them in prison, said Armel Luhiriri of the Coalition for the ICC, a private group that supports the courts efforts to end impunity for the worlds worst crimes.

International Criminal Court judges have sent a clear message to perpetrators of crimes: You will not go unpunished, trumpeted a statement from the ICC prosecutors office.

Still, it indicated it was unhappy with the sentence. It said it was studying the judgment in detail to consider whether or not to appeal, and was expecting the judges decision on reparations so Lubangas victims see the full scale of justice.

It also noted the latest charges against Ntaganda and added: Those responsible for these crimes should be isolated, arrested and brought to justice. This is the only way to put an end to this vicious cycle of violence, reprisals and attacks against the civilian population.

Children still are being recruited in Congo; Ntaganda remains free; and the people of Ituri still are plagued by militias.

Lubangas sister in Ituri, Angele Zasi, continued to insist on his innocence. We (the family) are very disappointed, she said Tuesday. Everyone knows that my brother is innocent of all that they reproach him.

Ntaganda also vigorously denies the charges against him. In a 2010 interview with The Associated Press he also said he did not fear arrest on the ICC charges.

I dont think that the U.N. is able to arrest me in Congo because they have arms that I also have and that can protect me when they try to arrest me, he said. If it is established that I committed crimes, I wont hesitate to answer them to a court in my country. But I will never accept answering charges by the International Court.

Ntaganda and others have accused the court of racism in pursuing Africans, and especially Congolese. Sudans President Omar al-Bashir remains on the courts agenda along with Ntaganda and two other Congolese warlords. Congos back-to-back civil wars that drew in soldiers from a half dozen nations killed an estimated 5 million people - more lives than any conflict since World War II.

---

Associated Press writers Mike Corder in The Hague and Saleh Mwanamilongo in Kinshasa, Congo, contributed to this report.
Memorial fund The Victor C. Saucedo Memorial Fund, account #164107146486, has been set up at Bank of America to benefit his son.

A strip-club worker jailed early Wednesday on suspicion of fatally shooting her ex-boyfriend in his Imperial Beach apartment was, his friends said, a spurned lover who wouldnt let go of their relationship.

Vegas Batallya Bray, 24, of San Diego, was arrested by sheriffs homicide investigators after the Tuesday afternoon shooting.

About 60 family members and friends gathered at the foot of the Imperial Beach pier Wednesday evening to mourn 30-year-old Victor Saucedo in a candlelight vigil. Saucedo had served in the Navy for 12 years and had a 6-year-old son, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Saucedo at the vigil for his father. Susan Shroder / U-T San Diego (Susan Shroder / U-T San Diego)

His son attended the vigil with his mother and grandmother. Holding a candle and surrounded by friends and family, he talked about how his father took him to parks and Toys R Us.

"My dad is the only guy I know. That's why I love him so much," he said.

Jeremiah Messenger, who had served with Saucedo on board the Decatur, said his friend got out of the Navy in January and enrolled in school so he could spend more time with his son.

Vegas Bray  Facebook photo ( / Facebook photo)

He said Saucedo was attending the University of Phoenix and wanted to get into law enforcement.

Zulema Reyes, who said she had been engaged to Saucedo for a time, said he later dated Bray, then broke up with her nearly a year ago. Reyes said Bray stalked him, harassed him and vandalized his car and his apartment at the Mariners Point complex on Caspian Way near Fourth Street.

It comes down to a fatal attraction, Messenger said. He said Bray and Saucedo used to go target shooting together, and that she owns a revolver.

Reyes said Saucedo did not have a gun at his apartment because of his son.

Sheriffs homicide Lt. Glenn Giannantonio said the shooting victim had called the Sheriffs Department two or three times to report vandalism, but no suspect had been identified.

He said Bray works at Little Darlings strip club in Lemon Grove, but not as a stripper. An employee at the club said Wednesday afternoon that management had no comment about Bray.

Neighbors at the Caspian Way complex called 911 about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday to report hearing multiple gunshots. Deputies found the victim dead inside the second-story unit, and recovered a firearm, Giannantonio said. He said no one else was in the apartment during the shooting.

He said Bray was detained outside and later arrested. She was booked on a first-degree murder charge and held without bail. Bray is scheduled to be arraigned Friday afternoon.

Saucedo's parents, who live in Chicago, flew to San Diego Wednesday, Reyes said.

Reyes said Saucedo was a "great dad" who was "all about his son."

At the vigil, Stephanie Stratton, whose daughter is Jeremiah Saucedo's mom, said she doesn't understand why more wasn't done to protect her grandson's father. She said he had tried to get a restraining order against Bray but was told he did not have enough evidence.

Stratton said Saucedo had feared for his life and purchased a life insurance policy for his son just two weeks ago.

"He loved his son. That was his life," she said.
LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP)  At a high school named Free State to honor Kansas anti-slavery past, the Confederate flag waved off the back of a students pickup truck in the parking lot. When classmates who were offended removed it, the student replaced it and displayed the flag again.

Its sparked debate about race and discussions of free speech at Free State High, an overwhelmingly white school of 1,700 students in the university city of Lawrence that was founded by settlers opposed to slavery.

Administrators relented to complaints last month and barred the flag, labeling it a disruption. The district says the student wont be disciplined, and that the situation is being used as a learning moment. But thats not sufficient for some students, who are trying to persuade the school board to expand the prohibition.

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Its kind of at the point where we have to start doing things on our own to see the change, said junior Seamus Ryan, one of four students leading a petition drive calling for such flags to be forbidden on all district property. He and the other petition organizers  another white student and two black students  have gathered hundreds of signatures.

The debate comes as Confederate symbols across the country face increasing scrutiny since last Junes shooting deaths of nine black congregants at a Charleston, South Carolina, church. The white suspect, who has pleaded not guilty, had posed in photos with the Confederate flag.

The Free State students pressing for the wider ban had a closed-to-the-public meeting Wednesday of the schools Can We Talk Club, a group focusing on matters of race, which was devoted to the topic with guest speakers.

Administrators at the school arent publicly discussing the issue, and point to Superintendent Rick Dolls statement that it is being channeled into a learning opportunity. The student whose flag launched the debate did not respond to an Associated Press interview request. Members of the school board, which next meets on Monday, did not respond to messages.

Among the student body, which is 7 percent black, opinions are diverse.

I understand in other places that (the Confederate flag) is culture, but its not an example of Kansas culture, said Harrison Miller, a white 15-year-old sophomore who recalled being kind of dumbfounded that someone would bring that kind of thing to school.

But at Free State, he added, I dont think that its a racism issue. I just think it was a kid trying to get attention, and I think its disrespectful.

Breanna Wray, a junior, said Wednesday she believed the dustup was a free speech matter but its honestly being blown out of proportion.

There is history behind it (the flag), but its also a history used in racist terms, said Wray, who is black. Im not particularly offended  just kind of angry it was used in that way.

No matter what you say, it could be offensive to some and OK with others, she said. Its just kinda how life is.

Free State alumna Nadia Imafidon, who is black, spoke at Wednesdays student gathering. She supports the push to ban the Confederate flag districtwide, calling it a horrifying symbol often associated with white supremacists.

The Confederate flag was used to symbolize a system in which slavery is OK. Thats something we decided, at least should have, isnt OK, said Imafidon. For black people to see it, theyre reminded of lynchings and sheer terror. To see the flag, its almost like people dont want you to feel safe, and theres no reason to display it now.

Ryans group plans to present the petitions to the school board in the coming weeks.
Flip flops are an absolute necessity here on Ambergris Caye. When I moved down here full time with my bag of 2 for $5US Old Navy flops, I realized quickly that I was going to need more. The cheap sandals are great  lots of different colors, not a big deal if you lose one or have a blow out and easy to throw in your beach bag.

Old Navys in India

But as soon as the cheapies get wetin a sudden downpour or just when walking along the edge of the seagrab a mouth guard and a helmet. Its like trying to run to get cover from the rain on ice. SO slippery its actually easier to run without them.

And some of the tile floors in town? A little rain and they become LIFE THREATENING.

So over the years, especially as I get older and walking in a totally flat flip flop starts to hurt my feet, Ive tried upgrading.

First, the Havianas. Made in Brazil, they are the only name brand rubber flip flop I know. Easily IDed by the little Brazilian flag on some of the styles. They are also a good deal more than Old Navys  running from $20 to $50US.

They look super cute and casual. They come in tons of great colors and styles AND they can actually GRIP when they are wet. But your toes need to cling to themlike monkey feetand its not a good long term strategy. For a rainy week in September  these are not the comfortable choice.

So it was time to upgrade againto a shoe that I could wear day and night, every day of the week, every day of the year. AndI dont want them to be super ugly.

I loathe Crocs.

I dont want some that looks crazy technical or overly sporty

I meanwho am I kidding?

I also dont want to look like I have a truck tire strapped to my feet.

Andas I was just googling Tevas and found this Teva-Ugg collaboration. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!

Now I know what you are thinking. I fully understand that my life here in Belize is not a fashion show but I want something that looks decent. So I moved on to Reef Sandalsand they are comfy but slippery and no support.

I ordered a pair of Tevas  the least ugly pair I could find  to travel andthey hurt. I cant have all these abrasive straps all over my feet. Ive worn them maybe 15 times and I got an oozing blister with each of those wearings.

The Teva Kayentas in beautiful Flores, Guatemala

I then upgraded  heeding the advice of Dr. Oz  to Orthaheels. A HORRIBLE name for a shoe but man are they comfortable!

I think they are now called Vionics. And I loved these shoes.

Comfortable, neutral, non-offensive but pricey at $59.95US. I liked them so much that I bought them three times. And each time, after 4-5 months, the in-between-the-toe strap snapped rendering them useless.

Getting these shoes wet does them NO favors. They stretch and the fabric weakens. I love these but they just dont last.

Especially for $59,95US. DO you know how many Old Navy Flip Flops I can buy for that?!

So just a few months ago, after getting about 40 suggestions from my facebook friends, from Chacos to OluKai, I ordered Rainbows.

RAINBOW SANDALS! Cute, totally Calfornia surfer in the 70sthey arrived.

Leather AND they wet and dry beautiful. No slip when wet. Super comfortable and a great arch. Its almost 2 months now and I couldnt be happier. They have a six month warranty  which I think makes them well worth the $56US price.

They also come in Rubber and Hemp andI just found a photo on their website that makes me MORE certain that I chose correctly.

Photo from the Rainbow Sandals site

HOLY MOLY! Rainbows in Caye Caulker! How super cool.

AND what is not to love about their message? Our goal has always been to make a quality product that will not end up as landfill. Our commitment to that goal does not end when our sandals leave the store. When you are through with your Rainbows, if they are past warranty but still have life left, please return them. The layered construction allows us to repair where needed and instead of throwing them away, we will donate these sandals to protect the feet of the homeless, orphaned, and victims of natural disasters.

PLEASE let me know what you think  if you are in love with any certain sandal. Id love to test some others out. Why not get crazy and have TWO pairs of sandals!
North Korea is in the news once again. How did we get here? Get a quick overview and timeline of the Korean War and its aftermath.

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Ever since the Cold War ended, Americas international worries have focused on problems in the Mideast. But now, North Koreas recent missile launches and defiance of UN resolutions is shifting our focus back to Asia and a piece of unresolved business: the Korean War.

On November 10, 1951, the Post published Why We Went to War in Korea, explaining President Trumans decision to send troops to that conflict. The Truman administration, desperate to stop communists from seizing more countries than theyd already grabbed at the end of World War II, had pledged help to any country resisting a communist takeover. So from 1950 to 1953, America fought to prevent communist North Korea from overrunning the democratic South Korea.

The United Nations also recognized Korea as a test of its peacekeeping mission. If the international community allowed the communists to seize South Korea, the UN would become as useless as the long defunct League of Nations.

More than 30,000 Americans lost their lives in that conflict before a cease-fire went into effect. But the Korean War never really ended  not for Korea, nor for us. North Korea still threatens South Korea as well as other Asian neighbors. It has long trumpeted its nuclear weapons program. It has launched missiles with increasingly longer ranges and conducted underground tests of its nuclear weapons, contrary to international law and its own promise to cease these activities.

North Korea is particularly hostile to the U.S. and claims it now has the capabilities to launch a nuclear attack on America.

Many Americans have been hoping that North Korea would simply go away  implode, as the Soviet Union did. Despite the odds, the communist North Korean regime remains, now led by the third generation of the same family.

While the battles of World War II are honored and the complexities of the Vietnam War are frequently rehashed, comparatively little coverage is given to Americans forgotten war  the Korean War. The timeline below gives an overview of the Korean War and its continuing consequences.

Perhaps we celebrated the end of the Cold War a little too soon.

Timeline for Korean Conflict

The Hot War

1945: World War II ends. American troops are stationed in the southern half of Korea, and Russian troops in the north. The dividing line between two zones is the 38th parallel.

1946: Russia sets up a puppet communist government in North Korea, headed by Kim Il-sung.

1947: American forces start withdrawing from South Korea, leaving the government in the hands of pro-American President Syngman Rhee.

1948: Soviet forces begin withdrawing from North Korea. North and South Koreas governments both claim sovereignty over the entire country.

1950:

With Soviet backing, North Korea crosses the 38th parallel to invade the south. It quickly pushes back South Korean forces, eventually capturing the South Korean capital of Seoul.

South Korean President Syngman Rhee responds to the invasion by rounding up any political opponents in South Korea. His forces executed more than 100,000 South Koreans during the Summer of Terror.

President Truman orders American troops to South Korea. The United Nations also sends forces to defend South Korean autonomy.

After a long retreat, Americans and South Koreans finally halt the North Korean advance.

In August, General MacArthur achieves a decisive victory by landing troops at Inchon, close to the 38th parallel. U.S. troops cut North Korea troops supply lines, forcing them into a rapid retreat northward. Americans soon retake South Korea. President Truman authorizes MacArthur to cross the 38th parallel and pursue the fleeing North Koreans unless he meets opposition by Chinese or Russian troops. American troops enter the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Chinese troops cross their border into North Korea and attack South Korean troops. The Chinese push the Americans and South Koreans back toward the 38th parallel.

1951: The armies reach a stalemate north of the 38th parallel. The United Nations calls for negotiations by the four participants  North and South Korea, China, and America  to end the conflict. Meanwhile the shooting continues with heavy losses on both sides.

The Cold War

1952: Dwight Eisenhower wins the presidency by promising to secure an honorable truce in Korea.

1953: Representatives of all four nations agree to an armistice that recognizes North and South Korea. Representatives meet at Panmunjom, on the border between North and South Korea, for talks to reach a final, permanent peace treaty, but negotiations quickly break down.

1954: A meeting between the U.S. and China to resolve the Korean conflict also fails to reach a resolution. Talks at Panmunjom continue to this day.

1968: North Korea captures a U.S. naval intelligence ship it claims was in its territorial waters. Negotiations eventually lead to the crews release.

1985: North Korea joins the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which prevents it from developing nuclear weapons.

1986: North Korea starts up a nuclear reactor capable of making weapons-grade material.

1993: The International Atomic Energy Agency demands that North Korea allow inspectors into the country to examine storage sites of nuclear waste.

1994: North Korea agrees to halt its nuclear program in return for oil and nuclear technology. Kim Il-sung dies and is succeeded by Kim Jong-il.

1996: An estimated three million North Koreans starve to death, the result of floods, drought, and government mismanagement. North Korea masses thousands of troops in the demilitarized zone near the 38th parallel.

1998: North Korea launches a rocket that travels beyond Japan, farther than a North Korean missile has ever reached.

2000: Kim Jong-il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung agree at a summit to renew negotiations.

2002: President George W. Bush calls North Korea a part of the axis of evil, which includes Iran and Iraq, all of which, Bush claims, are building weapons of mass destruction. South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. stop all oil exports to North Korea after learning that the North had resumed its nuclear weapons program.

2003: After years of threatening to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, North Korea finally ends its agreement to cease production of nuclear weapons.

2005: North Korea publicly declares it has developed its own nuclear arsenal.

2006: North Korea fires a new missile said to be capable of reaching the U.S. It fails shortly after takeoff. North Korea begins illegal underground testing of nuclear weapons. The United Nations responds with economic and commercial sanctions.

2007: North Korea closes down its main nuclear reactor in return for foreign aid. South Korea sends $50 million for flood relief.

2009: North Korea terminates all military and political agreements with South Korea. It resumes its nuclear weapons program, conducting underground tests and launching another long-range rocket.

2010: An American scientist is shown a secret uranium-enriching facility in North Korea.

2011: Kim Jong-il dies and is succeeded by Kim Jong-un.

2012: Another long-range rocket test fails, but the government announces it now has missiles that will reach America.

2013: A third underground nuclear test by North Korea brings new UN sanctions. China, North Koreas only ally, stops the export of any items that will help North Korea build nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.

2014: North Korea launches two medium-range missiles. They agree to resume talks with South Korea. North Korea and the U.S. accuse each other of cyber attacks.

2015: After conducting its fifth underground nuclear test, North Korea is hit with United Nations sanctions that will cost the country $800 million.

2016: North Korea claims it has completed tests of its first hydrogen bomb, which is doubted by experts.

2017: North Korea announces it is in the final stages of developing long-range missiles with nuclear capability. Kim Jong-uns half-brother Kim Jong-nam is assassinated in Malaysia; investigators suspect North Korean involvement.

Featured image: Shutterstock
Pune, Maharashtra -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/15/2017 -- Market research future published a half-cooked research report on Saudi Arabia Medical Devices market. The Saudi Arabia Medical Devices market is expected to grow at a CAGR of ~9.5% during the period 2017 to 2023.



Test the market data and market information presented through more than 30 market data tables and figures spread over 45 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content (TOC) & market synopsis on "Saudi Arabia Medical Devices Market Research Report - Forecast to 2023".



Market Highlights:



A medical device is any instrument, appliance including any software, biologic or non-biologic material, to be used for the diagnostic or therapeutic use for management of diseases and disorders.



The medical device industry witnessed one of the fastest growth propelled by innovation and rapid uptake of technologies. The medical devices industry has also resulted in the successful fusion of information technology and healthcare. Technology and product development remain the main pillars for the growing market for medical devices. The market involves two segments one high-tech devices with extreme sophistication and another is the low tech improved devices. The high tech segment such as diagnostic imaging devices is witnessing higher rates of growth. The low tech segment is also growing at a good rate but has witnessed growth in developing regions as the market for these in developed regions is stagnant. The other market driving factors are rising public healthcare expenditure in Saudi Arabia, development of large hospitals such as King Faisal hospital in Riyadh, demand for noninvasive therapy etc.



Request a Sample Copy @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2801



The market constraints are strict and ambiguous regulatory framework, growing concern for security especially data security, differential availability between developed and developing regions, connectivity issues in Saudi Arabia, the interference Sharia courts etc.



The future developments will include cloud integration, connected healthcare devices and growing demand for personalized medical wearable devices. Healthcare mobile applications will also lead the market.



Saudi Arabia Medical Devices Market:



The Saudi Arabia Medical Devices market has been evaluated as a growing market and it is expected that the market will touch high growth figures in future. The Saudi Arabia medical devices market is expected to grow with CAGR of ~9.5 % during the forecast period. The growth will be primary channeled by the rising public healthcare expenditure. The falling crude oil revenues will be a future threat to the market.



The major participants of this market are: Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, Medtronic, Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV., Baxter Internationa, Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co., Cardinal Health, Al-Salehiya Medical Estableshment, Saudi Pharmaceutical Industries & Medical Appliances Corporation (SPIMACO), Al Amin Medical Instruments Company (AMICO), Al Faisaliah Medical Systems (FMS), Siemens Ltd and others.



Segmentation:



Saudi Arabia medical devices market has been segmented on the basis of product type which comprises monitoring devices, diagnostic devices, diagnostic molecular devices, drug delivery devices, surgical devices, bio implants and stimulation devices, automation and robotics and others. On the basis of therapeutic application; market is segmented into general surgery, diagnostic imaging, respiratory, orthopedics, cardiovascular, dental, neurology, ophthalmology, ear-nose-throat (ENT), nephrology and urology, and others. On the basis of end users; market is segmented hospitals, ambulatory, home and others.



Regional Analysis:



The healthcare sector of Saudi Arabia is divided between private and state. The public healthcare expenditure accounts for approximately 75% of total health expenditure in 2014. Local manufacturing represents a poor outlook which is limited to consumables and ordinary articles. The government has established some of the best hospitals in the region such as King Faisal specialist hospital and research center, Riyadh military hospital, Saudi Arabia's National Guard health affairs hospital etc. Saudi Arabia is extremely dependent on imports for medical devices and imports account for approximately 92% of total market for medical devices. U.S. medical device suppliers dominate the scenario with European vendors in the second position. Among the regions of Saudi Arabia Riyadh tops the healthcare expenditure list followed by Tabuk, Makkah and Madina.



Access Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/saudi-arabia-medical-devices-market-2801



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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 Middle East and Africa, 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.



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Its time for the countdown as the total solar eclipse of this year is getting closer. On 21st August 2017, the sun will totally disappear for some time across America and it is less than 100 days away.

CNN has reported that the citizens of Portland, Oregon, Charleston, and South Carolina will get the better opportunity to witness the amazing total solar eclipse. They will also experience the Sun to be turned off for a certain amount of time. Weather experts and scientists described this event as the Great American Eclipse.

According to FOX 8, American citizens last witnessed such total solar eclipse on June 8, 1918. That time the eclipse crossed from DC to Florida. So, its been almost 99 years the eclipse crossed the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

A total solar eclipse happens only when the Moon completely covers the sun entirely. The Moon will pass between the Sun and the Earth during the celestial event and it would keep the sun block for one and half hour. The Moon would cast two types of shadow while blocking the sun.

These two shadows are called the umbral and penumbral shadow. Umbral shadow is the small and direct shadow where peoples will feel the intense darkness of the eclipse, while the penumbral shadow is partial. Kansas City, Nashville and St. Louis peoples have a chance to enjoy the total solar eclipse completely. It would be a great opportunity for the space enthusiasts to be part of this rare event.

Although, the eclipse would be visible from every corner of America, but still peoples are booking hotels and holidays st those selected cities. NASA has planned to telecast the real-time footage of the eclipse so that every people from elsewhere in the world can see the total solar eclipse.
The ongoing Yemen war has already taken a huge number of lives and pushed millions to the edge of starvation. Presently, the contention debilitates to delete a one of a kind piece of the nation's antiquated history. The millennia-old mummies are now a part of the risk, which can be devastated by the war.

According to The Hindu, there is a chance that the old collection of antique historical mummies at the Sana'a University Museum located in the Yemeni capital can be destructed due to the Yemen war. This devastating result of the Yemen war can happen anytime. There is a total of 12 ancient mummies which are kept in the museum.

These mummies are dated back to 400 B.C. which require care constantly. But as a result of the Yemen war, these mummies have started rotting as a part of the city has no more electricity. Archaeologists are struggling for sourcing the chemicals which are required for the care of the mummies. Due to the closure of Sana'a Airport and port restrictions, it is very hard for the scientists to get the required chemicals.

News Week reported that till now the Yemen war has resulted in the death of more than 10,000 people in the country and has given rise to ISIS and rejuvenated Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Both of these groups are continuing to attack the capital city and the southern regions of the country. Months after a Saudi-drove coalition mediated against Iran-supported Houthi revolts in March 2015, UNESCO added the antiquated city to its List of World Heritage in Danger.

For overcoming with the dangerous results of the Yemen war, archaeologists have made an appeal to the local authorities as well as the international organization for a help in preserving these mummies which are in danger. They are demanding the required flow of supplies and personnel which are essential for the safety of the mummies.
Nanotechnology is the future of engineering and technology. The area of nanoelectronics is seen to be progressing productively with researchers and scientists designing them to address global needs. All fields of science will involve nanotechnology and in how it will shape the outlook of the mankind's development.

The upcoming Silicon nanoelectronics Workshop comes June 4 and 5, 2017 is going to happen in Rihga Royal Hotel, Kyoto Japan. The future of nanoelectronics and update of events will be the point of discussion in the symposium. Nanoelectronics, in particular, will usher in nanotechnology in the field of upgrading the processes of harnessing renewable energy.

Back in February 2014, Stephen Goodnick, a Professor in a school of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering in one of Arizona State University Schools made advancements in his research. The availability of nanoelectronics could pull down costs in obtaining renewable energy from the sun, wind, and water. The future of nanoelectronics in addressing global needs is evident for renewable energy. Nanoelectronics can be utilized by scientists to design cost-effective storage devices and maximize the capacity of energy storage in a fast and efficient technology, reports Science Daily.

Goodnick further states that a nanometer is a billionth of a meter (one meter is about 39 inches long). An estimated count of 100,000 nanometers is almost as thick as a sheet of paper. Tiny scale of solar panels can be used to harness and store solar power at an efficient rate with minimized costing, ushering the future of nanoelectronics.

Another team of researchers from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Colorado School of Mines, and the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois has a discovery of a new method to blend a composite material and apply it in the field of nanoelectronics. Hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) is the new material which is similar to graphene and could be stably formed and layered to a thickness of an atom. This discovery will form part in the future of nanoelectronics.

According to Dr. Michael Snure, Senior Physicists of the AFRL, these type of materials will be highly useful in creating high-density devices, flexibility improvement, and considerably reduce energy consumption. The ceramic material hBN will highly improve the future of nanoelectronics that is in use in the Air Force, reports Physics.Org.

Dr. Snure and his team will take the future of nanoelectronics a step further by integrating hBN with these 2D semiconductors, graphene, and phosphorene. The team has their work published in a science journal of the American Chemical Society.
As an unfortunate result of the global warming, the Glacier National Park has now only 26 glaciers on sight. Previous records show that the tourist attraction used to have 150 glaciers.

In an article published in Mashable, the decrease of the Glacier National Park's well-known glaciers resulted in a sudden decline in tourism revenue. United States Geological Survey (USGS) has reported in a news release that the park only attracted 2.9 million visitors last year.

The decrease of glaciers in the Glacier National Park also resulted in a decline as a host of ecological changes. This impact would focus on the local rivers and streams of the park.

"The park-wide loss of ice can have ecological effects on aquatic species by changing stream water volume, water temperature and runoff timing in the higher elevations of the park," Daniel Fagre, a scientist with the USGS, said in the press release. The decline of glaciers in the Glacier National Park is not an isolated phenomenon though.

In an article published in EcoWatch, it is not just the Glacier National Park, which is located in Montana, that is having this problem. Glaciers in different parts of the world like Alaska, Chile, the Alps, and Antartica are also observed to have a shrinking response to a changing climate. "While the shrinkage in Montana is more severe than some other places in the U.S., it is in line with trends that have been happening on a global scale," Fountain said.

Besides the Glacier National Park. the Greenland Ice Sheet already lost 375 gigatons of ice in every year on an average between 2011 to 2014. This is an equivalent to 4.6 miles on a block of ice on all sides.

The problems being faced by Glacier National Park and Greenland Ice Sheet could be attributed to the loss of land-based glaciers that is causing the sea levels to rise. This makes coastal cities and towns to have an increasing vulnerability to flooding.
People in Massachusetts are ready to bring new legislation to hike the age of sale for tobacco products. The legislation includes the increment of age limit from 18 to 21.

According to WCVB, doctors, teenagers, former smokers and the public health advocates are preparing to attend the Statehouse for the public hearing on this legislation. They are heading to attend the public hearing on this new legislation on Tuesday. The key fact is to increase the age of sale for the tobacco products from 18 to 21 in Massachusetts.

Interestingly, the new legislation would add the e-cigarettes to the current smoke-free workplace law. Even the law can also prohibit the selling of the tobacco products from health care institutions like the pharmacies. Charlie Baker, the Republican Gov. of Massachusetts, uttered that he last year supported the banning of the sale of the tobacco products including cigarettes.

He supported this move to prevent the people who are under 21 from purchasing any kind of tobacco products. The important fact is same legislation has already been effected in almost 150 towns and cities in Massachusetts on a local level. This list obviously includes Worcester, Lowell, and Boston.

On the national level, two Democratic Sens. in the U.S., Edward Markey, and Elizabeth Warren, also supported the similar legislation. That means Massachusetts is heading to take an essential step regarding the health care improvement. A few months ago the Genesee County in Michigan took initiative to hike the age for purchasing the tobacco products to 21, M Live reported. The major portion of the county Board of Commissioners voted to support the initiative.

Supporters said that this initiative could save many lives. Even it could play a significant role in preventing the early tobacco addiction. Difficulty in accessing the tobacco products would surely bring some positive impacts. So it is quite clear that many U.S. states like the Massachusetts are aiming to prevent the early age addiction.
The U.S. military plane X-37B has landed back on Earth after a flight of nearly two years in space. The drone has been the subject of many rumors due to its mysterious mission.

The craft that landed in Florida last Sunday looks like a small version of an old NASA space shuttle, measuring just under 30 feet in length with a nearly 15-foot wingspan, NDTV reported. The U.S. Air Force announced that the Orbital Test Vehicle had completed a 718-day voyage around the planet.

Since its first flight in 2010, when the plane was launched into low-Earth orbit atop a rocket, X-37B has fueled many speculations about its real purpose. According to Financial Express, public guesses have ranged from the drone being a space weapon and space-based bomber to it being a killer satellite capable of inflicting damage on enemy satellites. Speculations have also suggested that the craft is a spy plane that orbits Earth to keep a watch on enemy territories.

However, many experts do not believe that the X-37B is the prototype for a true espionage or war weapon. "The X-37 is the size of a pickup truck -- it would be difficult to have an effective weapon on board," expert with the Secure World Foundation, Victoria Samson, said. Furthermore, since the plane is only powered by solar panels, it will not be very maneuverable once in space.

According to a Deccan Chronicle report, experts think the drone on a mysterious mission is actually used as an experiment base rather than it being a weapon. The X-37B is most probably being used to test the performance of certain equipment and sensors in space. Incidentally, U.S.-based company Rocketdyne had announced that an ionic thruster, used by satellites to travel in space, was tested on X-37Bs most recent flight.
Google's Pixel was undoubtedly one of the best Android phones of 2016. As the search engine giant has already confirmed that it will release a new Pixel handset this year, there is a lot of excitement among fans about the next-gen Pixel handset, possibly dubbed as Google Pixel 2.

Google Pixel 2's specs, price and release date have been mostly the subject of rumors for quite some time now. It is expected that the yet-to-be announced Pixel handset will give a tough fight to Samsung's flagship Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus smartphone as well as Apple's highly anticipated iPhone 8.

Notably, it is rumored that this year, Google will be launching not two but three Pixel handsets. The three handsets recently appeared in code commits from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) with the codename Walleye, Muskie and Taimen.

According to Yahoo, Google's next-generation Pixel 2 smartphone with codename Taimen has now been spotted on the benchmarking website Geekbench via the Primate Labs website. As per the Geekbench 4 benchmark test results, the Google Pixel 2 Taimen variant obtained single-core score of 1804 and multi-core score of 6284. What is interesting to note is that the Pixel 2 prototype used for the tests was running Android O, Value Walk reported.

Among other specs, the Google Pixel 2 is expected to feature Qualcomm's top of the line Snapdragon 835 processor, a 5.5-inch QHD display with 2,560 x 1,440 pixels screen resolution, bezel-less design, 6GB RAM, 128GB and 256GB of internal storage, dual-camera setup on both front and back sides, an IP68 rating and Daydream VR support, IBTimes reported.

As far as Google Pixel 2's price is concerned, the base model is rumored to cost around $699, while the XL variant is expected to come with a price tag of around $800. The tech giant is highly likely to announce some details of Google Pixel 2 handset at its Google I/O developer conference that will kick off on May 17, Wednesday. The Google Pixel successor is expected to get an October release date.
The Cupertino-based company still remains silent regarding the updates for its iPad Pro. Recent reports claim that Apple might add a 10.5-inch iPad Pro to its tablet lineups this year. The redesigned iPad Pro is rumored to arrive at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next month.

According to Forbes, Ming-Chi Kuo, the KGI Securities analyst, said that there is a 70 percent chance that a new iPad Pro will debut at the upcoming WWDC. The 10.5-inch iPad Pro will have some similarities with the 9.7-inch model, but it will feature a larger display screen. The new iPad Pro will also have thinner bezels compared to its predecessors.

Apple is expected to launch two new devices for the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference. As per Tech Crunch, besides the iPad Pro, Apple might also launch a Siri speaker. Apple has been working for a revamped version of Siri for a while. The company is planning to integrate it with its new speaker. The Siri-powered speaker will rival the Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers.

Aside from the iPad Pro and the Siri speaker, Apple is also expected to announce its new operating systems, as stated by 9To5Mac. This means that Apple might announce the iOS 11, macOS 10.13, tvOS 11 and watchOS 4. Ming-Chi Kuo also predicts that Apple might ship about 6 million 10.5-inch iPad Pros this year. The main target of the iPad Pros is the corporate and commercial sectors around the world.

For the last couple of years, the Worldwide Developers Conference event has been a software show only. But this year might be different. Fans can watch the live stream of the event on Apple's official website.

The Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on June 5, 2017. Fans can expect several announcements including the most speculated flagship phone, the iPhone 8.
A zombie argument is one that seems to be long dead until somebody brings it back to life. Barack Obama's post-presidency has raised a zombie argument: How should ex-presidents dress and behave?

"Barack! Get back here  we need you!" somebody posted on Richard Branson's Facebook page after video went viral of Obama kite surfing with the Virgin Group founder in the Virgin Islands.

Another writer posted with more sarcasm: "Much easier to be on that boat than helping the poor black American in Chicago ... same old story, Democrat with elites and they say they are on the side of the little people, hypocrites."

Right. If I believed that writer really cared about poor black people in Chicago, I might take that message seriously. Maybe.

Instead, I expect public opinion about the lifestyles of ex-presidents to be like opinions of every other public issue these days: polarized along party lines.

But regardless of party, I'm not going to begrudge any ex-president's right to take a vacation after eight years as leader of the free world.

Yes, that includes the peculiar, yet not badly executed picture that former President George W. Bush painted of his toes sticking out of the water as he rested in a bathtub. Priceless.

I'm not even upset, as even some of Obama's supporters are, over the huge speaker fees and book contracts hauled in by Barack and Michelle Obama, since neither of them holds a public office or other apparent conflicts of interest.

Obama is slated to receive $400,000 for a speech to Wall Street bankers and earned an undisclosed amount estimated to be worth as much as $3.2 million (based on the price of the 3,500 tickets) for a speech at the Seeds & Chips Global Food Innovation Summit in Milan this past Tuesday.

And that's not including the estimated $60 million deal that the Obamas reportedly signed for their yet-to-be-written books.

All of this buck-raking was described in a report on Fox News (where else?) as "deals that seemed to contradict his image as a champion of the 99 percent."

Ah, yes, the image. That concern might hold more water if the Obamas were not also busily raising money for such projects as the Obama Foundation, the Obama Presidential Center to be built on Chicago's South Side and the $2 million the Obamas are donating toward two Chicago programs that provide summer jobs and apprenticeships.

Like them or not, big speaker fees have become the norm for ex-presidents since at least 1989 when Ronald Reagan accepted $2 million (worth about twice that amount in today's dollars) for two speeches to a communications corporation in Japan.

I will leave it to the Obamas to guard the integrity of their brand. It is up to them to avoid the conflicts of which Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused in operating the Clinton Foundation  or for that matter, the questionable practices of which President Donald Trump has been accused, such as purchasing a six-foot portrait of himself with his charity's money.

But of all the complaints that I have heard raised by a post-presidency, I find the fussiest fault-finding these days to be in the fashion media. As GQ's site headlined after Obama's Milan speech: "Barack Obama's post-presidency style called too casual.

Why? Because the nation's 44th president wore a tailored suit with  Gasp!  no necktie and  Double gasp!  two of his shirt buttons left unbuttoned.

The fashionista press went wild. New York Magazine hailed him as a Street Style Star. But GQs Max Berlinger tsk-tsked that 44 might just be getting a little too casual.

Berlinger sounded shocked at Obama's open collar, a whole lot of open real estate in the chest region and the skin-to-seriousness ratio thats being broken here.

To wit, he wrote, if youre going to wear a suit but go tieless, one undone button (and a shirt with a nice, stiff collar) is kinda the unspoken mandate.

Indeed. Well, call me a slob (it wouldn't be the first time; ask my wife), but I applaud our former presidents effort to break through the walls of fashion fascism.

Maybe the man who used to be cool enough to be called No Drama Obama on the campaign trail can teach the fashionistas a thing or two.

Good luck with your battle against the necktie, Mr. President. A nation of guys tugging at uncomfortable collars salutes you.

Email Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.
MASON CITY | Carroll Bogard was honored by the Mason City Noon Rotary Club Monday for his service to his community and to his country.

Bogard, 95, a World War II prisoner of war who later served as principal at Mason City High School, received the club's annual Service Above Self Award.

Bogard was the lead organizer of flexible modular scheduling at the high school in the late 1960s.

After he retired he took several mission trips to Latin America, where he helped build schools.

Bogard served in the U.S. Air Force during World War II as an assistant navigator and a gunner. His crew was forced to bail out over France in August 1944, where they were taken prisoner until their release in May 1945.

Bogard has volunteered to help other veterans and their families. He also has shared his POW experiences with high school classes and participated in numerous Memorial Day and VFW services.

POW's message: Help today's veterans living with scars of service OSAGE | Our responsibilities to our newest veterans are just as important as they are to the

In 2011 Bogard became the commander of the American Ex-Prisoners of War organization. As commander he took part in the wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Mason City Noon Rotary Club established the Service Above Self Award in 1993 to recognize those who have made outstanding contributions to the well-being and advancement of the culture of the community.
CLEAR LAKE | The 2017 Clear Lake Farmers Market season will kick off Saturday in the Surf Ballroom and Museum parking lot.

The market is starting a week earlier this year to accommodate vendors as well as customers, according to Andrea Evelsizer, Farmers Market board president.

The Clear Lake Farmers Market was named on Facebook this year as one of the Top 10 Iowa Farmers Markets by Best Things of Iowa."

The Farmers Market will be held every Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon through Oct. 21.

Vendors will provide local, homegrown produce, artisan breads and baked goods, coffee and fresh juice, meats and eggs, honey, maple syrup, fresh flower bouquets, bedding plants and seedlings, jams and jellies, handcrafted soaps and lotions, jewelry and other handcrafted items.

Food vendors will sell breakfast items.

All items are locally produced.
MESERVEY | A former Mason City man has been ordered to spend up to five years in prison after having his probation revoked on a felony conviction stemming from a break-in at a Meservey home.

Tyler B. Fitz, 21, who now lives in West Des Moines, was given a suspended prison sentence in January 2016 for third-degree burglary. He was put on probation for three years.

Mason City man charged with felony theft, burglary MESERVEY | A Mason City man has been charged with felony theft and burglary in connection wi

A probation violation report was filed in February of this year.

Fitz broke into a garage and house in the 300 block of Delaware Street in Meservey in May 2015 and stole several items with a total value of $3,621, according to a criminal complaint from the Cerro Gordo County Sheriff's Office.

He pleaded guilty in December 2015.

-- Mary Pieper
Travelers who take advantage of the line's limited-time 'Book Now Bonus' offer can receive $500 shipboard credit per new suite booking to apply toward select, curated adventures.

'Shore excursions are particularly important in order to experience the most of Alaska, and Regent Seven Seas Cruises offers up to 43 free, unlimited shore excursions on our seven-night Alaska voyages,' president and ceo Jason Montague said.

The 'Book Now Bonus' can be applied to what Montague called 'some incredibly breathtaking, supplementary experiences.'

Due to their individual or small-group basis and extraordinary nature, 'Regent Choice' experiences carry an additional charge. For example, on the July 5 cruise, one option is a three-hour, six-person salmon sport-fishing excursion from Sitka, with the option to process and ship the catch home.

From Skagway, a relaxing rafting ride through the Valley of the Eagles gives the chance to catch sight of raptors swooping for fish among towering mountains, hanging glaciers and lush forest. Other 'Regent Choice' options include a floatplane ride to Prince of Wales Island to view black bears, and dogsled mushing atop Mendenhall Glacier, accessed via helicopter from Juneau.

The 'Book Now Bonus' offer is valid for bookings made through May 31. US and Canadian travel agents also will receive up to a US$200 gift card for each new Alaska booking they make.
The ministry said it has asked 10 yards to update on their operating status within an unspecific time frame.

Five of them are state-owned yards comprising CSSC Shanghai Jiangnan Changxing Shipbuilding, CSSC Guijiang Shipbuilding, CSSC Xijiang Shipbuilding, CSIC Chongqing Chuandong Heavy Industry, and CSIC Chongqing Donggang Shipbuilding Industry.

Another five are privately-owned yards consisting of Jiangsu New Yangzi Shipbuilding, Jiangsu Yangzi Xinfu Shipbuilding, Fuijan Huadong Shipyard, Sainty Marine, and Nantong Sinopacific Offshore & Engineering (SOE).

Sainty Marine is expected to be removed from the white list as it has completed a restructuring with its parent firm Jiangsu Guoxin Group, and has quit the shipbuilding business and renamed as Jiangsu Sainty Assets Management Co.

SOE, subsidiary of Sinopacific Shipbuilding, has been liquidated and thus far failed to attract any investor to help restructure the company.

The ministry stated that a further 10 yards have changed their names or will be rebranded due to restructurings and consolidation.

Among the 10, six names belonged to Cosco Shipping Heavy Industry and they are poised to be rebranded. The six are Nantong Cosco KHI Ship Engineering (NACKS), Dalian Cosco KHI Ship Engineering (DACKS), Dalian Cosco Ship Engineering, Zhoushan Cosco Ship Engineering, Guangdong Cosco Ship Engineering, and China Shipping Industry (Jiangsu).

Nanjing Jinling Shipyard and Qingshan Shipyard, both subsidiaries of Sinotrans & CSC, will be rebranded following the completion a merger between China Merchants Group and Sinotrans & CSC.

The remaining two that have changed their names are CSSC Offshore & Marine Engineering Co or COMEC (previously Guangzhou Shipyard International) and Anhui Wuhu Xinlian Shipbuilding (previously Wuhu Shipyard).

The latest reshuffling followed last months announcement by MIIT on the removal of seven yards and the addition of six to the white list.

The MIIT added that it has also temporarily stopped accepting applications for the white list in 2017.

Chinas shipbuilding industry has been troubled by severe overcapacity of shipbuilding facilities since post-global financial crisis, prompting Beijing to introduce the white list policy in September 2014 for the listed yards to gain prioritised support from domestic bank credit facilities.

However critics of the policy have said that the white list status for private shipyards has not brought about any meaningful benefit, as the policy is ultimately meant to help the state-owned enterprises.
MASON CITY | Police responding to a report of a man pointing a gun at another person recovered a gun from a Mason City apartment complex on Saturday.

The handgun was found in an apartment on the 1400 block of North Federal Avenue, said Mason City Police Lt. Rich Jensen.

The incident was reported about 2:40 p.m.

A large number of officers responded due to the nature of the call, but did not find any evidence that shots were fired, Jensen said.

He said investigators also did not find anyone who claimed to be a victim or anyone who admitted to pointing a gun at anyone.

Drugs were also found during a search of the apartment.

No arrests were made as of Monday night.

The case remained under investigation.

-- Molly Montag
Press Release

May 14, 2017 Villanueva spends Mother's Day celebration on medical, dental mission in Bocaue, Bulacan Senator Joel Villanueva has spent his Mother's Day celebration with the people of Bocaue, Bulacan for a medical and dental mission on Sunday, May 14. The said mission was held in coordination with the local government unit of Bocaue, and Bulacan Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. who was in charge with bringing in volunteer doctors to service the people of Bocaue. Over 1,000 residents were benefitted by the medical and dental mission in Barangay Batia, Bocaue, Bulacan. The place is one of the relocation sites in the said town. Villanueva, who hails from Bocaue, said that this mission is "a way of giving back to the people". Mayor Joni Villanueva of Bocaue was also present at the event. "We expect that there will be more medical and dental missions such as this not only in Bulacan but also in several parts of the country in the coming months or years. I believe this is one form of public service where we really go to the grassroots and initiate a program with LGUs and organizations to help those who are in need especially in addressing their health issues," Villanueva said. Among the services rendered by the said medical and dental mission were dental extraction, general check-up, and optical check-up for the elderly aged 40 and above. FullSizeRender 11
Press Release

May 15, 2017 SENATE PASSES "BETTER AND STRONGER" ANTI-HOSPITAL DEPOSIT LAW The Senate on Monday passed on third and final reading a law that strengthened the rights of emergency-case patients who are in life and death situations by preventing hospitals from asking for any form of advance payment as a prerequisite for admission or medical treatment. Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros, sponsor and principal author of Senate Bill No. 1353, said the measure seeks to amend and strengthen Republic Act. No. 8344 otherwise known as the Anti-hospital Desposit Law by imposing stricter penalties such as 4 to 6 years of imprisonment to erring hospitals who demand any deposit or other form of advance payment, as a prerequisite for admission or medical treatment of an emergency patient. Hontiveros's bill also increases the fines for hospitals which refuse to administer basic emergency care from P100,000 to P1,000,000. It also gives authority to the Department of Health (DoH) to revoke the license of a health facility after three repeated violations committed pursuant to an established policy of the hospital or clinic or upon the instruction of its management. "Sumbungan Board" To investigate patient complaints and facilitate the filing of cases in court, the bill also proposes to establish a "Sumbungan Board" or a Health Facilities Oversight Board, which will be under the Department of Health (DOH). In a short manifestation, Hontiveros expressed her gratitude to her colleagues in the Senate for helping her pass the bill. She particularly thanked Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III, Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III, Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon and Senator Richard Gordon, co-authors of the said measure. "I am happy that the Senate passed a better and stronger Anti-hospital Deposit Law to ensure that our people will not be denied hospital treatment just because they are poor," Hontiveros said. "We have come one step closer today to our vision of universal health. Harinawa, sa batas na ito, wala nang mahirap na itataboy ng ospital. Wala nang pagkakaitan ng serbisyong pangkalusugan," Hontiveros added. Fourth bill to be passed The measure is the fourth bill to be passed by Hontiveros in the Senate in third and final reading after assuming office last July 2016. The other three are: The Expanded Maternity Leave Bill providing women workers 120 days worth of paid maternity leave, the Mental Health Law, which seeks seeks to integrate mental health services and programs in the public health system, and The Speech and Language Pathology Bill, which aims to regulate the practice of speech therapists.
Press Release

May 15, 2017 Transcript of Ambush Interview of Senate President Koko Pimentel III On the junking of the impeachment complaint against President Duterte SP Pimentel: Regarding the House decision on the impeachment complaint, we have no other choice but to respect it because in the first place, they were the ones who examined thoroughly and in detail the impeachment complaint. I have not yet even seen the impeachment complaint kasi in the impeachment process, the senators sit as judges, hence we should really be passive. Just await the decision of the prosecutors that should be the House of Representatives. Let us respect their decision. Q: Majority daw kasi ng congressmen allies ng Duterte administration kaya expected? SP: Impeachment, para po malaman ng ating mga kababayan, is a mix of politics and law so dahil nakararami sa house ang mga supporters ni President Duterte, we consider that to be expected. But I'm sure, since kailangan din ng legal basis, I'm sure na meron din silang point. Meron din silang good reason why they rejected the impeachment complaint. Maybe it was not sufficient in form, mali po ang form, or maybe they found it insufficient in substance sa pagbasa nila. Sabi nila, this is not worth our time, to waste time on such a complaint for impeachment. On the transfer of Napoles SP: The place of the detention of a detainee is addressed to the sound discretion of the court which has jurisdiction over the person of the accused but in the case of Napoles, marami yata yan so they have to sort out the complexity. There are different divisions of the Sandiganbayan involved so dapat meron silang unanimity kung saan nilagay yung detainee. Q: Is it too early for this kind of development? SP: yung transfer, tama rin yun kasi yung correctional institute for women is for those who have been convicted with finality. Since naoverturn yun, then she is just a detention prisoner. But the complexity of her case is marami pang courts which have jurisdiction over her person being an accused before the court. All of these courts must decide where to put her.
Press Release

May 15, 2017 Transcript of Sen. Grace Poe's Opening Statement

Public Hearing on MRT 3 issues Good morning. Magandang umaga po sa inyong lahat. Salamat po sa inyong pagdalo. The hearing will now come to order. This public hearing is called with regard to Resolution No. 355, which I filed, seeking an inquiry into two issues regarding the MRT 3 - the dismal maintenance of trains leading to frequent breakdowns and the purchase of unusable trains for the MRT3 capacity expansion project. This committee has conducted hearings on the MRT 3 maintenance deal before and recommended the filing of appropriate charges by the Office of the Ombudsman, the Department of Justice and Civil Service Commission for violations of RA NO. 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act. I gather that several charges were eventually filed by the Office of the Ombudsman and by concerned citizen groups against the former officials of the DOTC. We have also recommended that the government consider the possibility of forging a termination to arbitration and to buy-out the MRT. But the one thing that ticks me the most, aside from the blatant misuse of funds by entering into disadvantageous contracts, is the insensibility of public officials to the plight of the Filipino riding public. Hindi ba't buwis nila ang pinambabayad sa pagaayos at pagmementena ng mga tren at pagbili sa mga bagong mga bagon? Kung ganun, e di dapat masulit naman ang pinambabayad nila. Napakalaking perwisyo sa mga pasahero kapag nasisira ang MRT lalo na kapag ilang minuto na silang nakapila tapos tsaka sasabihin na magkakaroon pa ng delay. Trapik na nga sa kalsada pero madalas, mas napapabilis pa byahe nila kapag nagbus na lang sila papunta sa kanilang paroroonan. Hindi lang iyun, kapag sinabing "maintenance" hindi ba dapat kasama rito ang pagayos ng mga escalator at elevator para magamit ito lalo na ng mga nagdadalang tao, PWDs at senior citizens? Until now, the maintenance and operation of the MRT are beset with so many problems that it appears that the only solution is to overhaul it completely--but is it? As earlier mentioned, we aim to discuss two issues as regards the MRT: the first concerns the maintenance deal with BURI and the second concerns the MRT capacity expansion project with Dalian. Both deals involve around P3.8 billion. Before we start pointing fingers allow me to present to you a summary of the maintenance deals our government, through the then-DOTC, entered into with various maintenance providers. For 10 years, or from 2000 to 2010, Sumitomo was in charge of the upkeep and maintenance of the MRT 3. However, instead of renewing their contract with Sumitomo, the DOTC decided to simply renew their contract for six-month periods until October 2012. In October 2010, then DOTC Secretary Abaya manifested the government's intention not to renew its contract with Sumitomo and later awarded an interim maintenance contract to PH Trams-CB&T through emergency procurement. It was during this time, when the DOTC decided to award short-term contracts to dubious maintenance providers did the MRT start to experience frequent breakdowns. These contracts were awarded by the bids and awards committee (BAC) composed of its chair, Usec. Jose Lotilla, BAC members Rene Limcaoco, DOTC BAC Secretariat Catherine Gonzales and MRT General Manager Roman Buenafe. The contract was later approved by then DOTC secretary Jun Abaya. Ang nakapagtataka, is that unlike Sumitomo, which had years of experience, PH-Trams was only incorporated 2 months before it was awarded the MRT 3 maintenance contract. The company had only P625,000 in paid-up capital but it was awarded a P54 million per month maintenance contract. A year after, in September 2013, the MRT maintenance contract was awarded to APT-Global. Now, what does PH Trams and APT Global have in common? They are both connected to a certain Marlo Dela Cruz (an alleged LP stalwart). Dela Cruz was not just Chairman of PH Trams, but was also the authorized representative of APT Global. Maybe later, Sec. Abaya can enlighten us as to who really is this person. In 2015, the DOTC failed to bid out the MRT maintenance contract and thus decided to undergo negotiated procurement with the approval of the GPPB. But according to our sources, hindi raw GPPB ang nag-approve kung 'di NEDA. Maybe the GPPB and NEDA can clarify this later. Sino ba talaga nagbigay ng go signal sa DOTC na mag negotiated or emergency procurement? Ano ba ang tamang proseso para dito? As a result, the DOTC awarded several maintenance contracts for 6-month periods each to various contractors. Ito ang tunay na chop-chop--hinati hati ang mga kontrata sa kung kanikanino covering only a period of 6 months. What can you expect these companies to accomplish in 6 months, when that is how long it usually takes to purchase spare parts? Finally, because of two failed biddings, the DOTr underwent negotiated procurement for the MRT maintenance contract. And on December 2015, the DOTr awarded the contract to the Busan Universal Rail Incorporated or the BURI consortium composed of Busan Transportation Corporation, Edison Development & Construction, Tramat Mercantile, Inc., TMICorp Inc., and Castan Corporation. As with the previous contract with PH Trams, the BURI-DOTr contract is marred with controversy due to BURI's questionable corporate structure. According to documents from the SEC, the certificate of incorporation of Edison and TMI Corp were revoked in 2003 due to their failure to file their reports. Have they re-incorporated? If not, then how were they able to participate in the bidding? Also questionable is the fact that Korea's railway giant, Busan Transport Corp. only owns about 4.6% of BURI shares (Busan owns 200,984 shares out of 4,320,000 total shares), which means they hardly have any say in how BURI conducts its business. Another issue is the fact that the invisible hand of that certain Marlo dela Cruz appears to be at play here. He, together with Eugene Rapanut, allegedly brokered the deal with DOTr. Parang tuloy may secret mafia na kumokontrol sa pagaward ng mga kontrata. The BURI consortium's 3.8-billion peso contract includes the following components: a. P1.96 billion for the maintenance of the train system; b. P907.37 million for the general overhauling of the 43 light rail vehicle units; c. P888 million for total replacement of the signaling system; and d. P51.76 million for "additional maintenance works," according to the copy of the contract dated Jan. 7. Again, the negotiating team from the government were comprised of the same people who awarded the past maintenance contracts to PH Trams and Global APT. It was during BURI's time as maintenance provider that the unforgivable happened. After a routine check up during the Holy Week, the MRT experienced two derailments, several train stoppages, and smoke emission. Ibig sabihin ng smoke emission ay umusok ang MRT habang nasa byahe. We have received BURI's report explaining their side, which generally say that the breakdowns are due to the fact that the trains are old. However, we cannot simply blame train breakdowns on the age of these trains. The trains are only 15 years old, as compared to those of the LRT 1, which are around 30 years old. In today's hearing, we intend to find out if it was proper, to begin with, to award it to BURI. Did the DOTC go through the proper process? Did they truly qualify, such that were they able to submit all the requirements, like a bill of quantities? What is the scope of work in BURI's contract? Why will there be a change from the fixed-block signaling system to the moving block signaling system? Next, we will move to the Dalian deal, which was approved by the NEDA Board in September 2012. If you will recall, allegations of corruption surfaced in 2013, after Inekon Chairman, Josef Husek claimed that MRT General Manager Al Vitangcol was asking for $30 million from Inekon in through a supposed liaison from Czech company Inekon in exchange for being the project's supplier. In 2014, the Php 3.8 billion contract for the supply of 48 Light Rail Vehicles (LRVs) for the MRT-3 contract was awarded to Dalian. It was also during this year that Al Vitangcol along with PH Trams-CB&T representatives, were sued criminally and administratively for their alleged involvement in the extortion scandal with Inekon. Now, come 2017, after Dalian delivers all 48 LRVs, we are told that these trains are unusable--kesyo hindi raw compatible ang power supply at kulang ang power supply, at di raw compatible ang signaling system ng mga bagong tren sa sineset up ngayon. Perhaps people from the current DOTr can explain to us what these problems are, which is why they no longer want to continue paying Dalian for the delivery of these trains. May nagsabi sa akin, setting up a train system is already a complicated matter, but we Filipinos love to make the matter more complicated than it already is. Siguro kaya natin pinapakomplika pa lalo ay dahil may mga gustong kumita sa mga proyektong ito. I do hope that despite the short time we have today, we will be able to shed light on the many issues I have raised. I also have some preliminary questions that I will ask later after the DOTr's presentations.
Press Release

May 15, 2017 Sponsorship Speech by Sen. Grace Poe

On Extending the Validity of Driver's Licenses From Three Years to Five Years Mr. President, distinguished colleagues, and guests, magandang hapon po. Today, I proudly sponsor Senate Bill No. 1449 or An Act Extending the Validity Period of Driver's Licenses, from the current three years to five years. This is a very straightforward bill that may appear a simple amendment to Republic Act No. 4136 or the Land Transportation and Traffic Code, but greatly impacts the convenience of motorists in securing a license. In 2016 alone, there were 5.8 millon people who applied for a driver's license, this includes applications for a student permit. Just imagine how many people will benefit from this amendment. Extending the validity of a driver's license is a commonsensical idea that should have been done a long time ago. Hindi lang makakaiwas sa trapik at sa pagpila ng mahaba ang ating mga kababayan na nangangailangang magrenew, pero nakakaiwas din sila sa red tape sa gobyerno. Although the LTO has already issued Administrative Order No. 2016-34 in line with the President's pronouncements to extend the validity of driver's licenses, we should bear in mind that an EO cannot amend a law. What Congress prescribes, only Congress can amend. Thus, while we commend the executive branch for initiating the steps that will pilot the issuance of a five-year license, it is my position that passing this bill into law is definitely still needed. Once passed into law, the validity of a driver's license will not just be extended from three years to five years, but those without infractions during those five years, may also be granted a 10-year license. The new license will also have better security features. Ngayon, kapag kinumpiska ng local government ang lisensya ng isang motorista na pasaway, gagawa lang affidavit of loss ang driver na iyun at makakakuha siya ng isa pang lisensya. So there are instances when one person has two licenses. With the new licenses, this will no longer be possible. The licenses will be connected to a system that will alert the LTO if the license was previously confiscated. This can be done through the biometrics feature of the card. Another problem of the current ID is the useless barcode on the card. Wala pang laman yung mga barcode na yun. The LTO has assured us that this will change with the issuance of the new card by August. The barcode, when scanned, can easily inform police officers of any violation committed by the driver. Currently, the LTO requires deputized agents to upload a driver's violation by way of a temporary operator's permit within 24 hours. In the bill, we will require all agencies and even LGUs issuing traffic violations to continue this practice of uploading violations to the LTO's system within 24 hours. This is the reason why it takes time to procure this type of card. Hindi po ito parang school ID lang na napapagawa sa tabi-tabi. But the question we all want to ask is this: Will it cost more? The answer is no. Baka bumaba pa. From the current fee of Php 820, the LTO is expected to charge only around Php 700 for the new cards. Some may be apprehensive extending the validity of driver's licenses to five years, considering that there are a lot of bad drivers out there. The remedy for this has nothing to do with the period of validity of a driver's license, as the license can be revoked or suspended anytime by the LTO. The remedy is for the LTO to conduct better tests and implement training programs for motorists, especially those who drive public utility vehicles. These solutions, however, will be the subject of a different committee hearing, which I intend to hold. I hope that my colleagues in the Senate will see to the immediate passage of this bill, which will save all the drivers in this land millions of man-hours otherwise spent in queuing to get the permit to operate a motor vehicle. Maraming Salamat po.
Press Release

May 15, 2017 APPROVE LONGER DRIVER'S LICENSE VALIDITY--POE A measure seeking to extend the validity of driver's licenses from the current three years to five years is inching closer to approval after Sen. Grace Poe sponsored the bill in plenary on Monday. "Extending the validity of a driver's license is a commonsensical idea that should have been done a long time ago. Hindi lang makakaiwas sa trapik at sa pagpila ng mahaba ang ating mga kababayan na nangangailangang magrenew, pero nakakaiwas din sila sa red tape sa gobyerno," said Poe, chairperson of the Senate committee on public services and sponsor of Senate Bill No. 1449. The measure seeks to amend Section 23 of Republic Act No. 4136, as amended by Batas Pambansa Blg. 398 and Executive Order No. 1011 or the Land Transportation and Traffic Code. The proposal is a substitute of Senate Bill Nos. 271, 941 and 1224 filed separately by Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto, Senators Richard Gordon, Joseph Victor Ejercito and Joel Villanueva. Poe said she hopes that her colleagues will see to the immediate passage of this bill, "which will save all the drivers in this land millions of man-hours otherwise spent in queuing to get the permit to operate a motor vehicle." Although the Land Transportation Office (LTO) has already issued Administrative Order No. 2016-34 in line with the President's pronouncements to extend the validity of driver's licenses, an agency issuance cannot amend a law. "What Congress prescribes, only Congress can amend. Thus, while we commend the Executive branch for initiating the steps that will pilot the issuance of a five-year license, it is my position that passing this bill into law is definitely needed," the lady senator added. Once passed into law, the validity of a driver's license will not just be extended from three years to five years, but those without infractions during those five years may also be granted a 10-year license. The bill also provides for an online application process for the renewal of professional and non-professional licenses. Local government units, the Metro Manila Development Authority and other agencies issuing traffic violation receipts shall report within 24 hours the details of the traffic violation of the driver to the LTO, which shall be the repository of all traffic violation records. In 2016 alone, there were 5.8 million people who applied for a driver's license.
Press Release

May 15, 2017 Senate seeks to extend passport validity to 10 years The Senate approved today on third and final reading a bill extending the validity of Philippine passports from five years to 10 years. Senate Bill No. 1365, or the Philippine Passport Act, was approved with 18 affirmative votes, zero negative vote and zero abstention. The bill was authored by Senators Richard Gordon, Cynthia Villar, JV Ejercito, Loren Legarda, Sonny Angara, Joel Villanueva, Grace Poe, Alan Peter Cayetano and Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto. Villar, vice-chairperson of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and sponsor of the bill, said the proposed law sought to extend the validity of the passport from five years to 10 years to make travel abroad easier, especially for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). "We owe a lot to our OFWs. They keep our economy afloat with their remittances of approximately $50 billion annually. Giving them a 10-year guarantee on their right to travel abroad will certainly be a great help to them," Villar added. She said the passport's current period of validity of five years was in actuality less than the five years because travel abroad was often disallowed for persons whose passports were about to expire within six months' time or less. "Our Constitution guarantees our countrymen's right to travel. We should indeed have the freedom to move around and even leave the country for whatever valid purpose we may have. We could only be prevented by the government from leaving the country if there is a statutory basis for it; and the grounds are limited only to matters of national security, public safety or public health," Villar said. She said the measure also sought to prevent backlogs in the issuance of passports with the extension of its validity. Cayetano, who chairs the Committee on Foreign Relations, said that the passage of the measure into law would be in line with President Rodrigo Duterte's promise to promote the welfare of the people. He said that there was a need to make the passport application process more "seamless, convenient, and pro-people, especially to OFWs, as any delay in processing their travel documents could cost them their employment abroad. "Simplifying our passport application system would ease our people's burden of having to renew their passports every few years. It would also prevent any backlogs in the issuance of passports," Cayetano said. (Yvonne Almiranez)
Press Release

May 15, 2017 Bill to protect media practitioners Ok'd A bill seeking to strengthen the law to protect media practitioners from revealing their sources has been approved by the Senate today. Senator Grace Poe, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Public Information and Mass Media and sponsor of Senate Bill No. (SBN) 1255, said the proposed law was a consolidation of Senate Bill No. 6 and Senate Bill No. 486, filed by Majority Floor Leader Tito Sotto and Senator Sonny Trillanes, respectively. Poe said the bill sought to amend Republic Act No. 53, better known as the Shield Law or the Sotto Law, which was passed 70 years ago upon the proposal of Sotto's grandfather, the late Senator Vicente Yap Sotto. She said the Shield Law exempted the publisher, editor, columnist or duly accredited reporter of any newspaper, magazine or periodical of general circulation from divulging their sources unless it endangered the security of the State. The law, Poe explained, ensured press freedom and guaranteed the freedom of speech by allowing the press to report on matters involving public interest without fear of undue pressure from the government to reveal their sources. But the Shield Law, Poe said, was solely confined to print media. She said the passage of SBN 1255 into law would also protect broadcast and online journalists as well as foreign and local wire news services from revealing their sources. "Under our proposed measure, we shall expand the coverage of RA 53, as amended, to any publisher, owner or duly recognized or accredited journalist, writer, reporter, contributor, opinion writer, editor, manager, producer, news director, web master, cartoonist or media practitioner involved in the writing, editing, production and dissemination of news for mass circulation, of any print, broadcasts, wire service organization, or electronic mass media, including but not limited to the internet and cable TV and its variants," Poe. "We now receive news not just through print media but also through broadcast media such as television, radio and the internet," she added. Poe cited a 2012 survey conducted by the TNS Global Market Research which showed that 45 percent of the 1,000 respondents from classes A,B,C,D and E connected through the internet while 365 listened to the radio. Another 12 percent of the respondents said they read the newspapers and four percent said they read magazines. However, she said, the Shield Law could not be used to protect a person from libel. She said the law would protect media practitioners from being compelled or forced to reveal their sources but "not from spewing out malicious imputations under the guise of journalism." "Through this law, we want to embolden whistleblowers to speak out. If they cannot approach government institutions, then they should at least be able to approach the media," Poe said.
CHARLES CITY | A fire caused heavy damage to the roof and attic of a home in Charles City late Sunday.

No one was injured in the blaze at the residence at 611 Pfeiffer St. The residents, who were home at the time of the fire, safely escaped, according to a news release from the Charles City Fire Department.

Fire Chief Eric Whipple said a bystander across the street from the scene was injured, but it was not related to the blaze.

The department responded around 10:30 p.m. to a report of the home's porch and roof on fire.

Upon arrival, smoke and fire was seen coming from the homes roof and attic area. Entry was made, and firefighters found that the fire was solely above the ceiling in the attic.

Firefighters attempted ventilating the roof, but the blaze had expanded across the homes entire attic space, and having firefighters on the roof was a hazard to their safety, according to the fire department.

Inside the home, firefighters tore down ceilings to extinguish the fire.

Charles City fire officials say the blaze started outside near the front door, and may possibly have been caused by improperly discarded smoking material.

There was heavy fire damage to the attic and roof, and major water damage to the rest of the home.

The fire remains under investigation.

The people in the home were renting it, according to Whipple. He said he didn't know the names of the occupants.

The home is owned by Jerry and Roxanne Redmond, according to Floyd County Assessor online records.

The fire department was assisted at the scene by the Charles City Police Department, Floyd County Sheriffs Office, AMR Ambulance, Floyd County Search and Rescue, and MidAmerican Energy.
BARTs seat hog ordinance became law last fall, making it illegal for passengers to take up more than a single seat on a commute train. But it has never been enforced, and it may never be.

The transit agencys Board of Directors passed the ordinance on a 5-4 vote on April 14, 2016, after much debate over whether it singled out homeless people, and it became law on Oct. 10. And then, nothing happened.

BART police are waiting for an enforcement policy to be approved by the board, said BART spokesman Taylor Huckaby. But the board is waiting for the Police Department, which has been without a chief since the end of the year, to recommend a strategy. BARTs new police chief, Carl Rojas, is to start May 24.

Meanwhile, the composition of BARTs board has changed, and its president, Rebecca Saltzman, never a fan of the ordinance, says shell try to get it overturned if an enforcement plan is ever put in place.

I intend to bring it back, she said, and the results may be different.

Director Joel Keller of Brentwood, who suggested the ordinance in early 2016 and pushed through its narrow passage, said he was surprised the law hadnt been put into effect yet. He had recently requested that BART police provide him with information on how many citations had been issued under Ordinance 2016-1, which BART calls the one-ticket, one-seat ordinance. Others refer to it as the seat hog or the man-spreading ordinance.

Keller said he believes publicity about the ordinance has reduced the problem, but he still wants it to be enforced. His constituents, most of whom face long and pricey BART rides, deserve to have as many seats available as possible, he said.

We are way behind in reviewing that policy, he said. Its disappointing. I know it was controversial, but a lot of people thought it was a step toward ensuring that the limited number of seats (on a train) is available.

They get tired of seeing seats taken up by luggage, personal property and people sleeping on two seats.

That was the intent of the ordinance, to prevent seats from being occupied by the suitcase of an airport-bound passenger or by the sprawled legs of a sleeping rider, leaving passengers to stand.

People who were found taking up more than a single seat during commute hours would first be given a warning. After that, the first ticket would cost $100. The penalty would increase to $200 for a second violation and to $500 after that. People whose size or medical condition requires them to occupy more than a single space would be exempt.

The ordinance was intended to be enforced from 6 to 10 a.m. and 3 to 7:30 p.m., the peak hours for BART commuters.

Many, perhaps most, of the 423,000 passengers a day that pack onto BART trains believed the law was already in effect, even if it seemed like a low priority for police. Jon Krueger, a software engineer who commutes from Dublin/Pleasanton Station to Montgomery Street Station daily, was among them.

On at least a couple of occasions over the past six months, Krueger used the BART Watch app on his phone to notify agency police of passengers sprawled across multiple seats on his train. Typically reports were met with silence or a suggestion that he request a welfare check on the safety of a snoozing rider taking up more than a single seat.

But last Monday, he got a confusing response after reporting two riders sprawled across seats.

Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle

There is no Seat Hog Rule, the unsigned message read. Although BART is trying to get one established.

Krueger was appalled. He looked up stories from last year to make sure the ordinance had been passed, then contacted The Chronicle.

There is a law, he said. What was the BART board doing? If you cant get it done in a year, you cant get it done.

Alicia Trost, a BART spokeswoman, confirmed that no ordinance was in place, and the agency later clarified that, while it had been passed, the Board of Directors was waiting for an implementation plan from BART police.

We are waiting on the police to bring their plan before the board, spokesman Huckaby said.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Acting Police Chief Jeffrey Jennings did not respond to requests for comment. Huckaby said he didnt know the reasons for the delay in developing an enforcement plan and suggested asking members of the board.

The ordinance seemed to take a detour in June when then-Chief Kenton Rainey introduced a policy in which officers would question those taking up more than a single seat, record their names and check their criminal records. As part of the policy, police would keep the names of offenders.

Some directors bristled and sent the police back to rethink the proposal. The board never delayed the laws enforcement, and enforcement guidelines were supposed to be presented in October. They still havent been.

Now Saltzman, of Oakland, said she wants the plan killed altogether. She said she sees the ordinance as an attack on homeless people and a waste of BARTs limited police resources. With three new directors on the board, she believes the law can be rescinded. The boards new makeup would probably make director Lateefah Simon of Oakland the deciding vote.

Simon, who replaced Zakhary Mallett, an ordinance supporter, said she plans to vote to defeat the ordinance, which she considers offensive.

When it comes up, I can guarantee you that Director Saltzman and I and other directors who care about equity will make sure it sunsets, she said.

Krueger, meanwhile, is stunned that BART has let the ordinance go ignored so soon after its passage.

Im really disappointed in the BART system, he said. Im somewhat astounded at their stonewalling. Seems to me, at this point, a year after it was adopted, you have a really good reason or you have an apology.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
A popular 18-year-old student at James Logan High School in Union City was killed early Sunday in a car crash while her mother was driving her home from her senior prom, officials said Monday.

Shane Marcelino was set to graduate in less than a month, school officials said. She planned to perform in a concert with the school band Tuesday night, and her future was a bright one, according to school Principal Abhi Brar.

Everyone Ive spoken with, all her friends, teachers, theyve all said pretty much the same thing  she was a kind soul, just an amazing person, Brar said Monday. She always had a smile on her face.

Her mother was driving her in a black Toyota Yaris when she made a turn in Fremont and collided with a blue Chevy Malibu about 2:27 a.m. Sunday, just two blocks from their home, according to police.

Shane was pronounced dead at the scene. Her mother, whose name was not immediately released, was taken to a local trauma center and was expected to survive major injuries, police said.

The 23-year-old driver of the Malibu and his 25-year-old passenger, both men from Union City, were taken to local hospitals with minor injuries, according to police.

The Fremont Police Department was investigating the cause of the crash.

Grief counselors, psychologists and social workers were available at school to help students cope with the death. Shane and classmates has celebrated their prom Saturday night at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center.

Shane excelled academically, played flute in the school band for four years and was well liked by her classmates, school officials said.

Shane was a talented musician, Brar said. Its been a difficult day for many of our students.

He added that the loss has been felt acutely especially in the tight-knit school band community. Tuesdays concert may be canceled if the students are not emotionally ready to perform without their friend, he added.

St. Annes Church in Union City, where Shane worshiped, was planning a memorial, Brar said.

This is the second car accident to claim the life of a James Logan student this school year, according to Brar. An early September crash killed one student and one former student in Hayward.

As tragic as it is, the fact that we had to plan the response for a death earlier in the year meant we were somewhat more prepared to respond to the student need, said Brar.

He added that residents from throughout Union City have been an important source of support for the school.

One thing Ive been very touched by is even though were part of the greater Bay Area, were still a very tight knit community. Were a small city with one large high school, so whenever something happens, good or bad, our community really comes together and rallies to support our students, he said.

Filipa Ioannou is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: fioannou@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @obioannoukenobi
Editor s note: Here are five Bay Area startups worth watching this week.

With no formal college education or any experience in tech, Rafael Olimpiada was held back by his resume.

Then he signed up for training with AlwaysHired  a San Francisco company that taught him how to land a job at a tech startup. AlwaysHired describes itself as a tech sales boot camp. Engineering talent is coveted in Silicon Valley. But for those who are not as computer savvy, sales jobs are often a good point of entry. Trainees dont just learn how to sell tech products; they learn how to sell themselves, too.

During the AlwaysHired program, Olimpiada, a U.S. Air Force veteran, was taught the basics of making a sales call, from what tone to use with a prospective client to which phrases to use when a customer doesnt seem interested. Shortly after he graduated from the three-week program in February, he landed a job as an account manager at Base CRM, a business software company in Mountain View.

Now I want to move up the ranks, and see how far I can go from here, Olimpiada said.

AlwaysHired charges about $300 in tuition up front. Once a student lands a job, they pay AlwaysHired 6 percent of the new gigs first-year salary.

Product managers and (user experience) designers don't have entry-level roles, said AlwaysHired CEO Gabriel Moncayo said. Sales is an easy way to get people in and then they can grow their business.

AlwaysHired, founded in 2015, has raised $500,000. Some AlwaysHired graduates now work at Bay Area companies as big as Yelp and Google.

Moncayo said the increased attention on Crunchbase, the startup database, could come from a new group of trainees who start this week.

Also trending:

Bright Funds

Gives employees a way to make charitable donations matched by their employers.

What happened: CEO Ty Walrod said Bright Funds has teamed up with many Fortune 500 companies.

Why it matters: Walrod says his company makes charitable donations as easy as sending a tweet.

Headquarters: San Francisco

Funding: $6.8 million

Employees: 20

ClearGraph

Offers a search function for business data that allows workers to ask questions in plain English, instead of having to learn special software tools.

What happened: The company won the Celent Research Model Bank award for emerging tech.

Why it matters: ClearGraphs technology allows businesses to understand their clients and industries better.

Headquarters: Palo Alto

Funding: $3 million

Employees: 15

BirdEye

An online reputation-management tool for businesses.

What happened: The company was honored at the 2017 American Business Awards this month.

Why it matters: As companies online reputations become increasingly important and sensitive, BirdEye monitors Internet reviews so it can fix any problems as they happen.

Headquarters: Sunnyvale

Funding: $33 million

Employees: 101 to 250

Good Parents Inc.

Maker of Kiddo, a health and wellness tracker for kids.

What happened: In the past, it has secured endorsements from UCSF Medical Center and UC Davis, the company said.

Why it matters: This technology allows parents to monitor their kids stress, activity, skin temperature, heart rate and perspiration levels.

Headquarters: San Francisco

Funding: $2.5 million

Employees: 10

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadadni

How we pick the companies

Every week, The Chronicle and Crunchbase, a San Francisco firm that tracks key businesses in technology, analyze private Bay Area companies based on their financial backing, employees and activity on Crunchbase. We feature five that are moving up in the ranks. For more information on the companies: www.crunchbase.com
WASHINGTON  The burgeoning fallout from President Trumps firing of FBI Director James Comey has thrust Californias two senators into a new prominence on the national stage that shows no sign of diminishing anytime soon.

The two Democrats, veteran Dianne Feinstein and freshman Kamala Harris, widely seen as a potential presidential contender in 2020, sit on committees that are at the center of a gathering maelstrom.

Feinstein is the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, which oversees law enforcement, and the former chair and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, where she remains a sitting member. Harris also sits on Intelligence, which is conducting a high-profile investigation of Russian meddling in Novembers election. It is running parallel to a separate investigation by the House Intelligence Committee and an FBI probe that Comey had headed.

This is a time of testing for our institutions and for the people who are responsible for safeguarding them and making sure they work in the interests of the country and not just the party, said William Galston, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

This is a moment of truth for Republican senators, Galston said, because with their control of the Senate, they must make sure that, first of all, the conduct of the investigation into possible links between Russia and the Trump administration is not compromised, sidelined or slowed down in any way.

For Californias two Democratic senators, Galston said, the right stance ... (is) to be tough but judicious. Theres a way of doing that, and hysterical partisanship will not serve them or the party or the country very well in the long run.

So far, both Feinstein and Harris have responded in ways that are emblematic of their different personalities, said Jessica Levinson, a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Both are calling for a special counsel to investigate the Russian meddling, but Feinstein had a more pragmatic, less emotional response, she said, while Harris appears very comfortable positioning herself as one of the leaders of the anti-Trump movement.

Feinstein drew wide media coverage last week for her views on the Comey affair. As a leading voice on national security, her methodical style tends to enhance her reputation as one of the less partisan Democrats.

Harris, a former prosecutor and California attorney general, made her first foray as a senator on national television Thursday to discuss the Comey firing. As a committee member, Harris typically employs a prosecutorial style when questioning witnesses and tends to appeal in her rhetoric to her partys liberal base.

Trumps abrupt dismissal of Comey late Tuesday stunned Congress, and in reaction, both senators homed in on the official White House explanation. Written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, it explained the FBI directors firing as a response to his mishandling of last years investigation of Hillary Clintons emails.

Feinstein told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday that the memo did nothing to allay her concerns. The motive for Comeys firing is central because of his role leading his agencys investigation into possible collusion between Russia and Trumps campaign.

I could have written it myself, or my press office, Feinstein told reporters, referring to Rosensteins memo. Feinstein amplified her concerns later at a Judiciary Committee hearing, where she said she had read the memo three times, and laid out at length its lack of legal or other substantive analysis.

Feinsteins comments were soon overtaken in the news by Trumps boast in a national network television interview that he had wanted to fire Comey long before doing so was recommended by the top two Justice Department officials, and that the Rosenstein memo was irrelevant. Responding to a request by Feinstein and Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Rosenstein has agreed to brief the full Senate on the matter this week.

Harris was one of just six Democrats who voted against Rosensteins confirmation last month, on the grounds that he had refused to commit to appointing, if necessary, a special prosecutor on Russian meddling.

In her CNN interview, Harris sought to poke holes in Trumps claim, which accompanied the firing, that Comey had told him three times that he was not under investigation.

Highlighting her experience as a prosecutor, Harris said, it is the practice of law enforcement, especially when were conducting an investigation, that we never talk to someone who may be in the zone of our investigation and tell them that they are not someone we are looking at. That just does not happen.

Harris also sought to put the firing in context, comparing the firing of an investigator by a potential target of that investigation to the experience of ordinary citizens involved with the criminal justice system.

There is everything wrong with that, Harris said. Every day, people are walking into courthouses around our country. Theyre victims, theyre witnesses or theyve been accused of a crime, and what must they think ... you can just fire the cop and you can fire the prosecutor? Thats wrong.

By Friday morning, Harris interview was also overshadowed. News reports began calling into question Trumps account of his dinner with Comey, and Trump responded with a series of tweets, including a threat that James Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

The House Judiciary Committees ranking Democrat, John Conyers of Michigan, and House Oversight and Government Reforms ranking Democrat, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, sent a letter to the White House counsel saying Trumps actions could constitute criminal obstruction of justice and demanded release of any purported tapes.

Feinstein sent a letter demanding any tapes as well Friday.

If President Trump actually has recordings of his conversations with FBI Director Comey, that is a very serious matter, particularly since he appears to be threatening the FBI director with their release, Feinstein said. Any recordings must be preserved by the White House.

Both Feinstein and Harris have consistently called for an independent investigation of Russian influence in the election but are limited in what they can do by Republican control of Congress. Their strongest option is to broadcast their views to the public and generate political pressure on Trumps allies, including Republican senators, to concede to an independent probe.

While several GOP senators have expressed concern about Comeys firing, none has called for an independent special prosecutor. Republicans have much to weigh, said John McGlennon, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

The key question Republicans have to ask themselves is: Do they reach a point where its worth it for them to withstand the fury of their base because theyre concerned about the broader implications of Russian involvement in the next midterm and presidential elections? McGlennon said.

Meanwhile, Levinson said, Feinstein and Harris both carry strengths they can employ as the situation unfolds.

Feinstein could argue, Levinson said, that now more than ever we need experienced leadership, while Harris can use her background to talk about how we need special prosecutor and how these actions are unacceptable. Both of them have the experience to say, You need me in this environment.

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead
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A federal appeals court reviewing President Trumps revised ban on U.S. entry of travelers from six mostly Muslim countries on Monday gave few hints of how it planned to rule. But the panel asked some provocative questions, particularly from one judge who compared the ban to the order that sent Japanese Americans to U.S. internment camps during World War II.

Judge Richard Paez of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asked the Trump administrations lawyer at a hearing in Seattle whether President Franklin Roosevelts 1942 order incarcerating Japanese Americans would be defensible under the same standards he was applying to the travel ban.

Paez noted that Roosevelts order never mentioned Japanese Americans but was clearly aimed at them  just as challengers to the recent order contend it was aimed at excluding Muslims. Would the (1942) executive order pass muster under your test today? Why not? he asked.

From a religious perspective, said Jeffrey Wall, the acting U.S. solicitor general, Trumps March 6 executive order was neutral on its face and neutral in operation. It was directed at the six nations  Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen  after Congress had previously found that they pose a risk of terrorism, he said.

If a discriminatory order like the one that led to the incarceration of at least 110,000 Japanese Americans was before the court, Wall said, I wouldnt be standing here, and the United States wouldnt be defending it.

Walls adversary, Neal Katyal, representing the state of Hawaii, said Paez had made an apt comparison.

The government is asking the court to defer to the president in a way that history teaches us is very dangerous, Katyal said.

Judge Michael Hawkins observed that as a Justice Department lawyer in President Barack Obamas administration, Katyal had often argued for judicial deference to the executive branch. Why shouldnt we be deferential to the office of president of the United States on his intentions in issuing the order? he asked Katyal.

Trumps words, the attorney replied, should be understood from the perspective of an objective observer  who, he argued, would interpret them as an unconstitutional ban on entry by Muslims.

Those words included Trumps advocacy, as a presidential candidate, for a ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States.

The randomly selected three-judge panel  Paez, Hawkins and Ronald Gould, all appointees of President Bill Clinton  heard 70 minutes of arguments on the governments appeal of a ruling by a federal judge in Hawaii, who said Trumps order appeared to be religiously motivated and blocked its enforcement. Another federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., heard arguments last Monday after a similar ruling by a federal judge in Maryland.

The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to have the last word, perhaps by the end of this year.

Trumps order would impose a 90-day ban on U.S. admission of residents of the six nations, whose Muslim populations range from 90 to 99 percent. It would also halt for 120 days all U.S. admission of refugees fleeing violence and hardship in their homelands.

Unlike Trumps first executive order, which federal courts blocked, the revised version would exempt holders of U.S. visas and allow consular officers to issue individual exemptions in hardship cases. The first order also banned travelers from a seventh nation, Iraq, which was dropped because of U.S. support for Iraq in the regions military conflicts.

The order would also reduce overall U.S. admission of refugees from 110,000 to 50,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The Justice Department contends the ban was based on terrorism, not religion, and would give the administration time to devise tougher screening standards for entrants from zones of conflict.

The critical issue in the case is how far courts can go in examining Trumps words and actions, as candidate and president, to determine the intent and impact of his order.

As a candidate, Trump followed his call for a ban on Muslim immigration by declaring that Islam hates us. When he signed the first version of his order on Jan. 27, which did not mention religion, he looked up and said, We all know what that means. A day later, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser, said the president had asked him to form a commission to find a legal way to enact a Muslim ban.

Has the president ever disavowed his campaign statements? Hawkins asked Wall, the governments lawyer.

Trump clarified, over time, Wall replied, that what he was talking about was Islamic terrorist groups and countries that sponsor or shelter them. The president has broad legal authority over immigration and national security, he said, and courts should refrain from psychoanalyzing things said on the campaign trail.

But Katyal contended Trump has rekindled his campaign statements since taking office. He noted that the call for a ban on Muslim immigration remained on Trumps campaign website until it was taken down last Monday, the day of the first appeals court hearing.

He also cited Trumps Jan. 30 statement to a Christian Broadcasting Network interviewer that he would give priority to Christian refugees from Muslim nations, and his comment to rally-goers that the second version of his travel ban, which lawyers had drafted purportedly to meet prior judicial objections, was merely a watered-down version of his first order.

Does that mean, Paez asked Katyal, that a president who expresses anti-Muslim sentiments is forever barred from issuing a valid order restricting entry from largely Muslim nations?

Congress could accomplish the same thing by passing a law, Katyal replied. Or Trump could disavow his statements in a credible way, perhaps by following the example of President George W. Bush, who said in a speech six days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that the assailants did not represent all Muslims, because Islam is peace.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @egelko
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A masked robber with a bogus gun messed with the wrong Fairfield smoke-shop clerk on Sunday  and now hes in critical condition with a bullet hole in his chest, officials said.

The botched holdup occurred around 12:40 p.m. at the tobacco and vape shop tucked into a strip mall at Pacific Avenue and North Texas Street, police said.
MASON CITY | The Mason City Community School District is participating in the Summer Food Service Program.

Meals will be provided to all children and teens ages 1 to 18 without charge. No registration or identification is required.

Meals will be provided, at a first-come, first-serve basis, at the following sites and times:

 Mason City YMCA -- Lunch from 11:30 a.m. to noon and a snack from 3 to 3:15 p.m. Monday through Friday, June 5 to Aug. 25. Children do not need to be YMCA members to participate. No meals or snacks will be served on July 4.

 Roosevelt Elementary School -- Lunch from noon to 12:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, June 19-30.

Meals in the federally funded program are the same for all children regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability, and there will be no discrimination in the course of the meal service.
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Drenching hot spots in a massive heap of twisted metal and debris, firefighters on Sunday secured the smoldering remains of an Emeryville construction project that burned to the ground over the weekend for the second time in less than a year.

Along with ensuring the fire doesnt reignite and continue to threaten homes near the building site on the 3800 block of San Pablo Avenue near the Oakland border, crews worked to preserve the scene for investigators who set about looking into the origin and cause of the inferno.

But the suspicious fire, which started about 5 a.m. Saturday, has left little doubt for the projects developer, who encountered the nearly identical situation on July 6, when the very same project burned to the ground in eerily similar circumstances.

I think its arson  to me it just feels like it, said Rick Holliday, president of Holliday Development.

Investigators were never certain of the cause of the July fire but speculated it may have been started by fireworks due because of the time of year, Holliday said. The latest fire has him rethinking that assessment.

Workers were just days away from putting the roof on the $35 million multistory housing and retail development project, and most of the complicated work with insurance companies and contractors was ironed out, he said.

Despite the aggravation of losing the project to fire twice in 10 months, Holliday found comfort knowing that no one was injured and that a damaged 80,000-pound crane jutting out of the rubble was successfully brought down overnight with no trouble.

We dropped that thing without any more damage, he said Sunday. Thank God it went absolutely perfectly.

Residents in the ever-changing neighborhood near the Highway 24 and Interstate 580 interchange and walking distance from the MacArthur BART Station stopped to stare at the scene throughout the day Sunday.

The fire was an unwelcome sight to many people already reeling from an unusual spate of destructive fires in the East Bay.

Residents were still talking about a fire just blocks away from the scene two weeks ago, when about 20 tents went up in flames in a homeless encampment under Interstate 580. In March, a fire at a halfway house on San Pablo Avenue in West Oakland killed four. And many around the Bay Area are still shocked and saddened by the Ghost Ship fire, which killed 36 partygoers at a converted warehouse in December.

Theres been an awful lot of fires in the Oakland area, Juliet Mevi said as she walked her dog past the scene. If you dont have fear of fire, you better now.

She and others in the neighborhood joined in Hollidays theory about how the fires started.

This is intentional  no doubt, she said. I dont know if this is a backlash to gentrification, but how could you not wonder? All I know is weve had these two massive fires at this same development.

Valerie Jackson sipped her morning coffee looking through a fence barricade as smoke continued to seep from the rubble heap, giving off a sour stink of water-soaked charred lumber and melted building fragments.

Its crazy. Its almost as if someone didnt want it up, she said. Its a little scary. Fires are dangerous.

Residents in townhomes along Apgar Street on the eastern border of the fire were forced to evacuate when the fire exploded around 5 a.m. Saturday. Terry Manning lives across the street from the townhomes, where several units were still uninhabitable after the July fire.

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 makes all of us a little nervous, he said while looking over the damage from just outside his front door. This is so familiar. Its exactly the way it looked last time. It makes us suspicions this time  thats for sure.

But identifying the cause of the fire wont be fast or easy. Investigators with the Alameda County Fire Department were working alongside state fire officials and agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Nothing has been ruled out, but its early to speculate on the cause, said Aisha Knowles, a spokeswoman for the Alameda County Fire Department. But its understandable why people are suspicious.

While they waited until all fire threats were extinguished, investigators on Sunday began interviewing neighbors, businesses owners, firefighters and anyone else who might have information about how and when the fire started.

Investigators have also collected video surveillance footage from around the area as they piece together a timeline of how things unfolded.

City officials reopened San Pablo Avenue as crews from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worked to restore power to the remaining residents and businesses still in the dark Sunday.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
Welcome to another episode of the top-rated game show, Who Can Really Afford to Rent in the Bay Area? Im your host, It Beats the Heck Out of Me.

On the last episode, the audience got to play the role of a distressed renter attempting to survive while living in poor conditions and working for low wages.

On todays episode, the audience gets to play the role of a distressed renter attempting to survive in a city where a landlord will brazenly demolish your apartment before you can move out.

Heres youre living situation: For 22 years, youve rented a unit attached to the back of a two-story home near Lake Merritt. Your minor son is living with you when a new owner buys the property. They tell you theyre moving in, so you start looking for another place to live.

While youre scouring ads on Craigslist, standing in open-house lines and paying $25 to $40 for rental applications on the places youre interested in, you learn the new owner has submitted plans to build more rental units on the property. And that, in reality, theyre not moving in.

The new owner wants you gone by Christmas Day. But because you decide to fight the eviction into the new year, the new landlord eventually cuts off your electricity, heat and water.

If you rent in the Bay Area, this could happen to you  even in cities like Oakland, where ordinances are in place to protect tenants from unscrupulous landlords.

My faithful audience, its time to answer the question thats worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,800, which is the average monthly rent in Oakland, according to the website Rent Jungle: What would you do?

Now, let me tell you what happened to Jahahara Alkebulan-Maat, who refused to leave the apartment he had lived in for two decades.

March 15, Alkebulan-Maat went to court to negotiate a resolution with his new landlords, said his attorney, Joe Colangelo. Because one couldnt be reached that day, the sides agreed to return to the negotiating table five days later. But on March 16, the locks of Alkebulan-Maats apartment were changed, Colangelo said. He had no way to get all his stuff, which was still inside.

On March 17, a construction crew began knocking down exterior walls of the add-on unit, and on March 22, the entire unit was demolished.

And get this: Alkebulan-Maat, 64, never officially moved out. Some of his personal belongings were removed before the demolition and put into a storage container in the driveway of the brown shingle house that was built in 1910.

All this happened after Alkebulan-Maat and his young son lived without lights and water. Shutting off heat, electricity and water on a tenant is inhumane and, according to Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker, also illegal.

Thats why the city of Oakland filed a lawsuit against the owners, Eugene Gorelik and Jessica Sawczuk, alleging they illegally destroyed the unit. The lawsuit charges Gorelik and Sawczuk with violating Oaklands Tenant Protection Ordinance and Californias Bane Act for harassing, threatening and unlawfully evicting a tenant.

We have a severe ongoing housing crisis in Oakland, and it is especially onerous when a landlord abuses, threatens and wrongfully evicts tenants in the midst of this crisis, because they have no place to go, Parker told me.

The lawsuit sends a message to landlords that Oakland wont allow them to harass and intimidate their tenants. (Please, dont hold your applause.) And just because landlords have a property stake, it doesnt mean they can indiscriminately put people out on the curb like theyre cigarette butts.

The housing problems that have been widely documented in San Francisco have now spread across the bay, and longtime residents and longtime families of Oakland and other neighborhoods and cities are being forced out, said Colangelo, an attorney with the Eviction Defense Center, a nonprofit that defends low-income tenants.

Colangelo represented Alkebulan-Maat, who didnt return my calls, in negotiations with Gorelik and Sawczuk, who also could not be reached for comment.

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.

In Oakland, tenants cant be evicted without reason. In other words, landlords cant kick someone out because they want to, oh, renovate a property before selling it for a quick profit.

In Jahaharas case, they tried to claim that his unit was not covered under the rent ordinance, because it was either fully or partially illegal, Colangelo said. And that turned out not be the case. The city never made that determination that his unit wasnt covered.

The property, at 369 MacArthur Blvd., has seen better days. The shingles are warped in patches, and there appears to be paint splattered on the exterior.

From the sidewalk, a lumpy dirt pathway leads to the porch. A few windows have been boarded, but peering inside I could see that the first floor had been gutted. A Black Lives Matter poster is wedged between a porch column and a power line for floodlights.

The house is currently listed for $399,000. But according to Redfin, a real estate database, the house was listed for $600,000 in March 2016 before selling for $500,000 two months later. Soon after, according to the lawsuit, Gorelik and Sawczuk approached Alkebulan-Maat, saying they intended to move in.

In April, the house was placed back onto the market for $399,000. According to Redfin, a sale is pending, but no purchase price was listed.

Colangelo told me Alkebulan-Maat still hasnt found a permanent place to live and, as of last week, he was still trying to coordinate with Gorelik and Sawczuk so he could get the rest of his belongings.

How long will it take? Cmon, folks, you know my name: It Beats the Heck Out of Me. Have a good morning, and please join us next time on Who Can Really Afford to Rent in the Bay Area?
Why did the Department of Housing and Urban Development choose San Francisco as a demonstration site to end youth homelessness? HUDs Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program is a pilot for 10 communities nationwide, and more than 150 of them applied for grants like the $2.9 million that HUD awarded San Francisco in January.

One reason is that San Francisco pairs tremendous potential with staggering need. An estimated 21 percent of people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are youth and young adults under 25, and 89 percent of them are unsheltered, making San Francisco the nations city with the highest percentage of unsheltered youth and young adults. Our local policymakers are parents as well as politicians, and we should all agree that it is a public crisis and a moral outrage for college-age people to spend their time and energy surviving in the streets without a safe place to sleep.

Fortunately, local momentum is growing to make game-changing investments in housing. The Tipping Point Communitys $100 million effort to cut chronic homelessness in half will also cut public costs by housing those who would otherwise cycle expensively between our sidewalks and our public systems. The Heading Home Campaigns $30 million private-public partnership to end family homelessness by 2019 will resolve homelessness for 800 families who would otherwise live in shelters or the streets.

As a homeless service provider, we celebrate these key investments leveraging our city-funded programs with the resources (and resourcefulness) of private-sector partners. As a youth service provider, we call on the city to make a greater investment in youth, and to leverage that investment with state general funds and ballot measures, as well as private-public partnerships.

If we underinvest in youth-specific programs  or make adult-centered investments that impact youth derivatively  then our unsheltered young people will simply age into adult homelessness. And we will have perpetuated the problems we set out to solve. Ending adult homelessness is a short-term Band-Aid if we dont talk about ending youth homelessness as a long-term prevention mechanism.

How should San Francisco end youth homelessness? The $2.9 million HUD award is the public-sector equivalent of a seed round. Its a cash infusion that must be leveraged with other resources as part of a multiyear, multi-sector partnership. The HUD money is a springboard: It is not a solution. We need a targeted mix of investments to protect the generation of young people squeezed between the post-recession boom and our housing affordability crisis.

Supervisor Jeff Sheehy recognized this when he called a public hearing on youth homelessness last week. Together with Supervisors Sandra Lee Fewer and Hillary Ronen, he heard testimony on disparities in how the city spends its resources. The Youth Commission, for example, recommended that reauthorized Childrens Fund dollars be proportionally applied to transition-age youth (18-24). This would quadruple the current investment to $10 million. Ronen reiterated the boards unanimous support for a youth navigation center and pressed for resources to make it a reality.

The travesty is that youth are sleeping in the streets  or making choices forced by predators to avoid the streets entirely  because were not investing proportionately to meet their distinct needs. The homeless departments mayoral mandate is to end homelessness for key subpopulations: adults, including families and veterans, and young people. Solutions-focused talk about ending homeless must make youth an equal part of the public conversation  and a proportionate share of the budget. Otherwise, were sinking costs, not saving futures.

We know what we need to end youth homelessness, and in an era of shifting federal priorities, we cannot expect HUD to do the work for us. We have decade-old recommendations from the Transition-Age Youth Task Force for a housing plan. These strategies arent getting any younger, and neither are our young people. Its time to invest in ending homelessness, by ending youth homelessness.

Sherilyn Adams is executive director and Mary Kate Bacalao is director of public funding for Larkin Street Youth Services.
In January, I was sitting in my Latin American Studies class when my professor walked in wearing a pink knitted hat, with two cat ears on stitched on top. You know the one I mean. Instead of starting his typical history lecture, he started talking to the class about President Trumps proposed border wall with Mexico, saying things like, I know Im a professor, but I have biases.

I looked around the lecture hall. All around me, kids were nodding and doing that snapping thing with their fingers. A lot of people were like, yeah, were getting our free speech on. I smiled and didnt say anything. I knew I was outnumbered.

Thats pretty typical when youre a Republican at UC Berkeley.

Ive been a Republican as long as I can remember. Im used to being surrounded by people who disagree with me. I grew up in a predominantly blue city, Miami. I really like having debates and discussions about politics. Thats part of what I hoped to find when I decided to go to UC Berkeley, one of the most liberal campuses in the United States, for undergrad studies. But instead of discovering open-minded individuals ready to debate their views, I found myself silenced by my liberal peers. In search of political and moral support, I joined the Berkeley College Republicans at the beginning of this school year.

Being an official member of that organization has its ups and downs. Its nice to talk openly about my political opinions, but it comes with a price. When I staff the groups table on Sproul Plaza, strangers come up to yell at me  and not in a fun I want to debate you kind of way. They call me a bad person. They ask me where Im from, and then tell me to go back there. Ive even been physically attacked.

And you know what? I get it. The organization has a bad name on campus. Affirmative action bake sales (that one was before my time), Ann Coulter speaker requests, the whole Milo Yiannopoulos thing. Dont get me wrong, I believe in a healthy dose of controversy, but in my opinion, asking Would you rather your child get feminism or cancer isnt controversial, its horrible.

Most people  Berkeley Republicans included  dont actually want these extreme speakers to show up.

Yes, being provocative irritates the liberal masses, which can be funny, but in the end, its self-promotional, not thought-provoking. Until the hard-core conservatives and liberals around me tone things down, I feel like Im a moderate stuck in the middle, fighting for reasonable discussion on two fronts.

And yet, I have hope. Occasionally, when I spend all day on Sproul, there are some individuals who will come up to me and engage in a lively conversation  a real conversation. Well go back and forth on the ethics of abortion, or global warming, or gun regulations. In some cases, we start agreeing and coming up with new ideas on how to tackle these issues. And in those moments, it feels like the UC Berkeley I originally came for.

Jonathan Chow recently completed his third year at UC Berkeley and is a commentator for Youth Radio, a media production company in Oakland.
SACRAMENTO  Days after Timothy Grayson won election to the Assembly, a Sacramento lobbyist greeted him at a reception with sheepish congratulations.

Her client had supported his opponent during the campaign, the lobbyist explained, but now that hed won, she told him she wanted to move past the election and forge a good working relationship. Oh and by the way, did he need any money to cover costs from the campaign?

Makeup money is what its called in Sacramento  the contributions that flow to newly elected officials from interest groups that backed a losing candidate during the campaign. Its a completely legal way of saying, in political terms, Lets kiss and make up.

Grayson has not taken advantage of the offer  campaign statements to date show no contributions to the Concord Democrat from clients of the lobbyist who introduced herself in November. But conversations like theirs occur in the months after an election, as interest groups shift from betting on a winner during the campaign to lobbying those who won a seat in the Capitol.

The best way to make amends, fortunately or unfortunately, is a contribution, said Republican political consultant Mike Madrid. Its not uncommon to have a strategy where somebody spent six figures against (a candidate) with approval to write them a check to rebuild the relationship if that candidate ends up the winner.

In other words: Makeup money is built into the budget for interest groups that spend big on politics. Those groups had a lot at stake in the 2016 legislative races, because it marked the last time for the next eight years that a significant number of Assembly seats would be vacant.

A review of campaign finance reports from last years most contentious races shows plenty of makeup money in the mix. It came from trade associations, corporate interests and labor unions. Some examples:

In the race for a Malibu-area state Senate seat, the dentists trade association spent nearly $50,000 opposing Democrat Henry Stern. After he won, the dentists gave him $4,200.

In the race for a San Jose Assembly seat, the Realtors association spent more than $483,000 attacking Democrat Ash Kalra. After he won  and landed a spot on the Assemblys Housing and Community Development Committee  the Realtors group gave $8,500 to Kalra.

Realtors made another losing bet in the Democrat-on-Democrat race for a Glendale-area Assembly seat, spending nearly $253,000 to support Ardy Kassakhian. After his opponent, Laura Friedman, won, the Realtors group wrote her a check for $6,800.

Friedman said she met with the Realtors after the election  just as she met with many other interest groups  for a version of the lets move on and have a good relationship conversation. The money, she said, doesnt affect how shell vote on their issues.

I dont feel like Im holding a grudge, but Im certainly not going to not work with them, not take their meetings or not take in their perspectives, Friedman said. My goal is to represent my constituents and my conscience.

The dentists and Realtors associations are among the biggest spenders in legislative races, pouring millions into recent election cycles. Representatives of both groups declined requests for interviews. The dental association provided a statement saying its political action committee puts a great deal of consideration into choosing which candidates it supports.

Interest groups that spend smaller sums of political money have done some flip-flops, too:

In the race for a Palo Alto-area Assembly seat, two local labor unions  one for firefighters, another for school support staff  that gave to the losing candidate have since written $5,000 checks to the winner, Democrat Marc Berman.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and the pharmaceutical industry association both donated to the campaigns of the losing candidate for a Salinas-area Assembly seat. Weeks after the election, they wrote checks to the winner, Democrat Anna Caballero.

In October, the prison guards union gave $4,200 to Graysons opponent in the race for his Assembly seat. Two months later, the union wrote a check for that amount to Grayson.

Grayson, who previously worked as the chaplain for the Concord Police Department, said his relationship with the prison guards union stems from his own career in law enforcement  not from the money it donated.

For interest groups he doesnt know, Grayson said he finds offers of makeup money awkward. He said he never followed up to seek a donation from the lobbyist who introduced herself at the postelection reception.

My first desire is to meet and have a conversation in which they can get to know me, who I am, what I am and how I am, he said. What they choose to do after that, thats their business.

There is nothing illegal about giving makeup money to a politician, said Jessica Levinson, a law professor who is president of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission. Political contributions break the law only when they involve a direct exchange of money for governmental action.

But, Levinson said, giving money to the winner of an election  after backing an opponent  shows that donors are looking to curry favor with whoever has the power to make decisions.

It brings into stark relief what we all know, which is that people give money to get something, Levinson said. Youre not expressing support. Youre buying access and influence.
Neapolitan Origin: Naples, Italy Oven: Wood-fired Temperature: 900 degrees Cook time: 90 seconds Also found at: Una Pizza Napoletana, Del Popolo and A16. Legend has it that the cheese pizza originated in Naples in 1889 when a pizzaiolo made a plethora of pies for Italys Queen Margherita of Savoy. Of the pies she ate, her favorite was topped with tomato, basil and mozzarella. Maybe the queen really enjoyed the novelty (prior to that day, no one had thought to adorn the top of pizza with cheese); or perhaps the colors of the ingredients reminded the queen of the Italian flag. But from then on, cheese on pizza became a thing. The Margherita pizza was born. Cooked in a 900-degree wood-fired oven in less than 90 seconds, the crust is charred and chewy. A lot of people think a Neapolitan should be crispy like a New York-style pizza  its totally the opposite, actually, Gemignani says, pointing out that traditionally, the Margherita is somewhat wet in the middle. He uses oak for the fire, which he says burns the hottest of all woods. Kenji says the softer dough is a result of the combination of a quick cook time and high heat. He also notes that the combination of temperature and the natural convection airflow of the oven  made possible because of the dome-shaped oven  causes the beautiful leopard spots on the chewy crust, which is made with zero-zero flour imported from the Caputo region of Italy (zero-zero, or 00, refers to the finest grind of flour). Because zero-zero flour is milled from soft wheat, theres less elastic gluten, which makes the dough softer to the touch.

Romana Origin: Rome, Italy Oven: Electric Temperature: 700 degrees Cook time: 7 minutes In Rome, pizza is rectangular, cut to order and sold by weight. Theres about three or four different styles of pizza cooked in Rome, explains Gemignani. Some are cooked in a pan, some are cracker-thin, some are a little thicker, some are cooked right on the stone. Mine is cracker-thin. To be specific, it is modeled after Romes Forno Campo de Fiori. The pizza at Forno is a thing, to say the least. In the latest season of Netflixs Chefs Table, Nancy Silverton explains its life-changing significance for her; Kenji, too, has made the pizza pilgrimage, and theres an entire chapter dedicated to the pizzeria in food writer Jeffrey Steingartens The Man Who Ate Everything. Kenji also points out that at Forno Campo de Fiori, the pizza is cooked on big 9-foot wooden panels and you can order it by the meter. This version isnt quite as large  its 3 feet at most and divided into three sections, each with a different set of toppings. The crust was indeed particularly thin, crispy and crunchy  the result of a longer 7-minute bake time coupled with heating from both the top and bottom elements of the electric pizza oven.

Classic Italian Origin: Italy Oven: Electric Temperature: 700 degrees Cook time: 6-7 minutes The Classic Italian refers more to a general category of round, 12- to 13-inch pizzas found in most pizzerias, restaurants and gas stations across Italy. The specific pizza we ate was the Artichoke Joe, covered with mozzarella, artichoke chunks (artichunks?), semi-circle slices of provolone and little dollops of a parmesan-cream situation. If it all sounds like a deconstructed artichoke/spinach dip pizza, thats because thats exactly what it is  the ingredients are nearly identical. One notable and noticeable thing about the Classic Italian pie is the end crust  or, as the pizza nerds like to call it, the cornicione. It has an especially larger crumb and stronger structure, a result of the autolyse method, wherein the flour is soaked in water prior to adding salt and yeast. This allows the enzymes in the flour to break down the proteins and starches and to develop gluten. The texture of the outside rim is a particularly craggy, crispy and bubbly exterior, almost similar to the fried wrapping on a Vietnamese imperial roll, a result said to be the combination of semolina and oil.

New Yorker Origin: New York, USA Oven: Coal-fired Temperature: 1000 degrees Cook time: 3-4 minutes Pizza came to New York in the early 20th century by way of Italian immigrants. Gennaro Lombardi started selling pizza at his grocery store, and in 1905 received an official business license to sell pizza, making Lombardis the first official pizzeria in America. (Its still open in Manhattans Little Italy at 32 Spring St.) Coal was commonly used to heat East Coast homes in the early 20th century. When Italians came to New York and started making pizza, they used coal rather than wood because thats what was available, Gemignani explains. Although coal burns at a higher temperature than a wood-fired oven, the pizzas take longer to cook. This is because coal produces a bed of heat, rather than the direct flame from wood-fired cooking. The longer cook time results in crispier crusts. The New Yorker is topped with a dry (low-moisture) mozzarella, which is well-suited to withstand coals high heat, as well as thick pipes of ricotta, sliced sausage and pepperoni.

White Pie Origin: New Haven, CT Oven: Coal-fired Temperature: 1000 degrees Cook time: 3-4 minutes Also found at: Tomassos New Haven-style pizza, or as the Connecticut locals call it, apizza (pronounced ah-beetz), is charred, thin and crisp. Its made with the same dough as the New Yorker, but the crust is pushed down for a crispier crust. The pizza is topped with chopped littleneck clams, a few open clams still in the shell, garlic, lots of oil and pecorino Romano. The bottom of the crust  commonly referred to as undercarriage by pizza people  is decently charred and flavorful. This pizza is a nod to Frank Pepes, the oldest pizzeria in New Haven and the originator of the clam and garlic pizza. Kenji notes that most of the time in New Haven, they use preshucked clams that are fresh but never in the shell. I recently made a trip to New York and took a 2.5 hour train ride to New Haven to wait an hour in line to eat at Pepes. Kenji was right  no shells on the ah-beetz!

Trenton Tomato Pie Origin: Trenton, New Jersey Oven: Gas Temperature: 550 degrees Cook time: 8 minutes Also found at: Jersey The Trenton Tomato Pie has sliced whole milk mozzarella on the bottom and hand-crushed tomato sauce on top. Gemignanis version is modeled after De Lorenzos in Trenton, N.J., which opened in 1947 and was one of the pioneers of the tomato pie. The center of the pizza is especially thin compared to the large, thick crust on the perimeter. I thought the crust on this pie tasted lighter than the New Yorker  it was easier to chew and felt less heavy. I learned that this is a product of using an older dough  its aged for 48 hours. Kenji explains that the longer fermentation in the dough allows enzymes to break down flour proteins, which in turn leads to a gluten structure that is well-developed but more relaxed. He adds that longer-aged doughs typically form a bigger, more rustic bubble structure. More bubbles mean more air, which means a lighter dough. I pick a piece of pizza from the plate of discarded crust corpses in front me to compare and slowly nod my head in understanding.

Grandma Origin: New York, NY Oven: Gas Temperature: 650 degrees Cook time: 10-12 minutes The Grandma is a square pizza that is slightly thicker than the Roman-style pizza. Technically, it originated in homes in Italy where Nonna would make a pizza dough and push it out in a pan with lots of olive oil. But it was sold and popularized in America, and Umbertos in Long Island is recognized as the first place to start doing this style of pizza. Tonys utilizes a two-step baking process where the dough is first par-cooked sans toppings, allowed to rest, topped and then given a second bake. The lower temperature and longer double-bake process more thoroughly cooks the pizza and creates crispness. Kenji says hes noticed a renaissance in the last five to 10 years of Grandma squares in the East Coast with places like Best Pizza and Prince Street Pizza, which both do Grandma styles really well.

Slice Pie Origin: New York, NY Oven: Rotoflex Gas Temperature: 525 degrees Cook time: 8-9 minutes Also found at: The Pizza Shop, Arinell This 20-inch pizza is cooked on a rotating gas-brick oven and is an ode to the classic pie you can get at random pizza shops in NYC by the slice. The platonic ideal of a New York slice  one that is thin and crispy on the bottom while simultaneously slightly chewy on top  is here. Kenji adamantly asserts that youd never find pizza dough dusted in semolina in New York. I ask Kenji whether New Yorks tap water is the real reason pizza in New York is generally so much better than elsewhere in America, and he simply replies, Yeah, thats b. He explains that he has done many tests making pizza with water from different sources, where he measured the effects of mineral content in water (referred to as Total Dissolved Solids, or TDS), and he says you cant tell the difference: There are so many other compounding variables like oven temperature and rise time and other things that have way more affect in the end result.

Sicilian Origin: New York, NY and Sicily, Italy Oven: Gas Temperature: 550 degrees Cook time: 12-15 minutes Also found at: Golden Boy Just as the round pizza started to spread across New York and the greater East Coast in the early 1900s, thick, fluffy square slices cooked in rectangular pans also proliferated. The pizza style likely traces back to Sicily, where fluffy focaccia-like sfincione (literally, thick sponge in Italian) is lightly topped with tomatoes, onions and anchovies. Compared to the Grandma pizza, Sicilian dough is softer/spongier and measures about twice the size. The puffiness is a result of a higher hydration (the ratio of water to flour), which creates steam and helps the dough to expand when baking. Its also found at Golden Boy, around the corner from Tonys in North Beach. Upon seeing the curly roni cups (yes, thats a real abbreviation for pepperoni among the inner circles of pizza professionals), I was reminded of a piece Kenji wrote about the cupping phenomenon  in which pepperoni slices curve up when cooked forming crispy, greasy little cups. Are size and temperature variables? I ask Kenji (I really wanted to use the word variable in front of him). It has to do with the natural casing, Kenji explains. The casing doesnt stretch as much, so it ends up riding up the sides when youre stuffing in the middle. Itll bend more or less depending on the temperature you cook it.

Detroit Red Top Origin: Detroit, MI Oven: Gas Temperature: 550 degrees Cook time: 10-12 minutes Detroit-style pizza originated in 1946 at Buddys Pizza when founder Gus Guerrera ingeniously repurposed a rectangular blue steel pan used for carrying automotive parts into a pizza pan. The pizza style is distinctive for its chewy Sicilian-style pizza dough topped with high-fat Wisconsin brick mozzarella that melts into a crispy edge where the dough meets the pan. After baking, the pizza is finished with two red racing stripes of tangy uncooked marinara sauce, a dusting of pecorino and oregano, and drizzle of garlic oil. Thanks to white cheddar cheese around the edges, the taste is pleasantly akin to the crunchy cheese-spillover of a grilled-cheese sandwich. Kenji says that because the steel pan is so thin, it transmits heat really well, resulting in the super crispy bottom and almost-burnt cheese edges. I quickly Google Detroit pizza pan buy on my iPhone.

St. Louis Origin: St. Louis, MO Oven: Gas Temperature: 550 degrees Cook time: 9 minutes St. Louis style-pizza is a round, thin unleavened pizza made popular by Imos, a local chain and institution. According to pie lore, the pizza is cut into small squares because, prior to a career in pizza, founder Ed Imo used to cut linoleum-tile squares. (This square cutting style is also known as the tavern cut and party cut.) The pizza is topped with Provel cheese, a processed blend of Swiss, provolone and cheddar. Gemignani describes it as if Velveeta and cream cheese went on a date; after my first bite, I realize its more like a Tinder date gone very, very wrong. Swipe left, swipe left! I scream in my head. The cheese has a weird, thick texture with a sort of unpleasant aftertaste on the palate that tastes nothing like the other pizzas. It reminds me of the frozen red boxes of personal pizza my parents would buy when I was a kid; it isnt a flavor memory I am fond of. (I later learn that Provel is not even legally classified as cheese under FDA guidelines.) Kenji, who has been to Imos, describes the dough as almost like a flat tortilla.

California Origin: Los Angeles, CA Oven: Wood-fired Temperature: 900 degrees Cook time: 90 seconds Also found at: Zuni Cafe, Chez Panisse Cafe California-style pizza was born in the 1980s, thanks to Alice Waters, who started making pizza in a wood-fired oven at Chez Panisse Cafe, and Ed LaDou, the pizza chef at Wolfgang Pucks Spago in Los Angeles, who took the genre to new levels and notoriety. Duck sausage, goat cheese and peppers, smoked salmon and caviar  these once-unusual and high-quality ingredients and combinations were all fair game. The famous barbecue chicken pizza at the chain restaurant California Pizza Kitchen? LaDou invented that pizza  as well as most of the rest of the menu as its opening chef back in 1985. The version at Tonys continues the experimental theme with a wood-fired pizza whose dough is made from spelt, whole wheat and semolina that is topped with fried kale, bacon, Calabrese peppers, muenster cheese, honey and lemon. It covers the entire flavor spectrum of sweet, salty and spicy, and is surprisingly delicious.

Bonus:

After 12 pies, I was ready to end the pizza journey and suggested we skip over any pseudo-pizza approximations I had initially been enthused about. Kenji egged me on. So onward we marched to the bonus round:

Gluten-free: Its especially difficult to replace gluten in pizza since, as Kenji puts it, gluten makes dough stretchy and is what makes it retain bubbles and rise. You need the right mix of ingredients that can hydrate and absorb water while also providing structure. The gluten-free dough at Tonys is made with rice flour, xantham gum, tapioca flour, potato starch, agave nectar, rosemary, thyme, salt and yeast. They sell more than 100 per week. To me, the taste was more akin to freshly fired pita bread.
Biting wit and a farcically frothy plot make Decline and Fall a delight. The three-part miniseries, available Monday, May 15, on Acorn.tv, is so much fun, youll be disappointed when the third episode is over.

James Wood has done a beautiful job adapting the novel of the same name by the singular Evelyn Waugh. In fact, it was Waughs first published novel, and those who know his work will find familiar themes in the Acorn adaptation. Jack Whitehall stars as the almost indefatigable optimist Paul Pennyfeather, who mistakenly wanders into some late-night revelry at Scone College (a fictionalized stand-in for Oxford) that gets him sent down for dashing about the campus starkers.

He winds up in a very low-ranking public school in Wales run by Dr. Fagan (David Suchet) who is desperate to marry his daughters off and isnt much of a school administrator.

Pennyfeather isnt much of a teacher either, but then again, Llanabba isnt much of a school. No matter that he cannot speak German or play a musical instrument: He will be teaching German and music and running the physical education department at the school, which he does rather badly, but the rest of the faculty is so drunk, incompetent or both, no one cares.

Fellow teacher Grimes (Douglas Hodge) is never sober and very often caught in the soup  code for getting in trouble after being caught servicing hunky men.

Pennyfeather is adjusting to his new life, more or less, when he meets the beautiful, multiply married South American Margot Beste-Chetwynde (Eva Longoria), which is pronounced rather like beast-cheating, and her capable son Peter (Oscar Kennedy).

Pennyfeather is smitten with the lady, but his wide-eyed nature leads him straight to prison for white slavery.

The performances are exquisite, especially those of Whitehall, Suchet, Longoria and Kennedy, with great caricature works offered by Hodge and Stephen Graham, as Philbrick, a drunken teacher with a very cheap toupee.

The story is post-Dickensian, with a heavy reliance on coincidence and characters who are over the top in one way or another. The whole confection turns on how blindly trusting Pennyfeather is. He only sees the good in others, even when the bad is looking him straight in the face and taking undue advantage of him. All the better for our endless amusement.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV

Decline and Fall: Three-part miniseries. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Evelyn Waugh, available for streaming on Monday, May 15, and thereafter at Acorn.tv
DES MOINES  This Fourth of July in Iowa promises to feature significantly more patriotic booms, pops and cracks as a new state law that legalizes home displays of consumer-grade fireworks takes effect.

Across the state, Iowans are preparing for a more festive Fourth  and not just folks who will be shooting off bottle rockets and lighting Roman candles and firecrackers in their backyards.

Iowas new version of Independence Day also has created new opportunities and responsibilities for businesses, public safety and emergency response personnel and local government officials.

Gov. Terry Branstad last week signed into law the legalization of consumer-grade fireworks. Before the new law, Iowa was one of only seven states with similarly or more restrictive fireworks laws, according to the American Pyrotechnics Association.

Business opportunity

Flashing Thunder Fireworks has been operating in northern Iowa for more than three decades.

But this will be a milestone year for the Mitchell-based company when, for the first time, it will be able to sell its consumer-grade fireworks directly to Iowans.

Flashing Thunder performs professional fireworks shows for cities and organizations, roughly 200 shows per year across the Midwest, according to Katie Mostek, who owns the company with her husband, Jeremy.

Flashing Thunder also sells consumer-grade fireworks to individuals and companies in other states and even has its own line of consumer fireworks.

Now the company can sell those consumer fireworks in its own backyard.

It is a big deal, Katie Mostek said. Every state around us, practically, has consumer fireworks sales open, so everybody (in Iowa) was buying them anyway. They were just bringing it back from other states, and those businesses and those states got the tax money. ...

Now the money can stay inside the state. Thats a big deal.

Mostek said that in addition to the companys normal brick-and-mortar stores  the home base in Mitchell includes a showroom  Flashing Thunder plans to add more locations, including temporary units under tents.

Flashing Thunder and other fireworks retailers find themselves scrambling a bit; the new law was signed by the governor on May 9, and companies can begin selling fireworks on June 1, just 23 days later.

Its going to be a little hectic, Mostek said, noting the state fire marshal as of Friday morning had not yet completed the application for businesses to receive a sales permit. Its a quick turnaround.

Bellino Fireworks, based out of Omaha, Nebraska, also has been operating for more than three decades and plans to expand into Iowa this year.

Owner Vincent Bellino said his company has 130 stands in Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas and Missouri. He hopes to add 50 to 60 locations in Iowa this year, he said, some in stores and others in temporary structures.

Bellino said he traveled to the Iowa Capitol many times over the past three years to encourage state lawmakers to legalize consumer-grade fireworks. He said he expects a lot of interest from Iowans, who for the first time will be able to purchase these fireworks legally in their home state. He thinks it will be similar to when in 2011 the city of Omaha ended its ban on the sale of fireworks.

Theres obviously going to be some excitement around it, some good demand in the Iowa markets, Bellino said. Its obviously an exciting time for everyone, whether its the consumer or businesses.

Emergency response

Its less of an exciting time for emergency response personnel, who are bracing for increased activity this Fourth of July season.

More than a dozen organizations that represent emergency response and health care workers opposed the new law, including the Iowa Medical Society, Blank Childrens Hospital, the Iowa Nurses Association, the Iowa Emergency Management Association and the Iowa Firefighters Association.

Firefighters across the state, for example, already feel short-staffed and stressed by call volume, which they figure will only increase this Fourth of July as more people shoot off fireworks at home.

Now that theyre legal but law enforcement is the same, Halleran said, we can only assume that injuries and potential fires are going to go up.

Halleran said emergency response groups think the new law was freight-trained through the legislative process despite their near unanimous objection. He also expressed frustration with the short time period from the laws approval to the first holiday season.

The law was just signed the other day, and the Fourth of July is right around the corner, Halleran said, noting local fireworks ordinances likely will take another couple of weeks to implement. ... Theres not a lot of time on this to get on top of it.

City's choices

The new law provides some flexibility for cities, which are now determining how best to implement fireworks regulations in their areas.

The law permits home, consumer-grade fireworks displays from June 1 through July 8 and Dec. 10 through Jan. 3, but it also allows cities to shorten that time period or continue to ban home fireworks displays altogether.

Some cities appear content to let the new law take effect and see how it goes, while others are considering restricting the dates residents can display fireworks, said Robert Palmer, a lobbyist for the Iowa League of Cities.

Opinions on what to do and how to proceed are as varied as the number of cities we have in Iowa, Palmer said.

In northwest Iowa, the council in the small town of Moville voted unanimously to adopt the state law as written.

We will go with the state rules, Moville Mayor Jim Fisher told the Sioux City Journal. We will see how people react. If they do it properly, no problem. If it is misused, we will go ahead and make other arrangements (in 2018).

To the opposite extreme, officials in Johnson County are considering a challenge to the provision in the law that says cities can adjust when fireworks are displayed, but they cannot prevent consumer-grade fireworks from being sold.

A local ban on fireworks sales would run afoul of the new law. But Johnson County officials think that runs afoul of local control, and they are considering at least a temporary moratorium on sales until they can better understand the new law.

I dont know where we will end up after this moratorium, but we need time to figure it out. I think everybody in Johnson County is concerned of temporary sales, Johnson County Board of Supervisors chairwoman Janelle Rettig told the Cedar Rapids Gazette. We dont think thats safe in any way, shape or form.
A nude parade meant to celebrate the ideology and values of the "Summer of Love" is set to march through San Francisco on Saturday, May 20.

The event is organized by Gypsy Taub, a nude activist who fought San Francisco's nudity ban, and puts on clothes-free events throughout the year. Saturday's event is no different, with Taub calling others to join in the parade "as we celebrate the body freedom that the hippie movement spread across America and the world." (NSFW event link here)
The massive ransomware attack that began in Europe on Friday has locked down thousands of computers in more than 150 countries, leveraging access to data  in hospitals, businesses and public utilities  for payment.

The attack itself, experts said, was not a sophisticated assault, but rather a simple cybercrime that preys on vulnerabilities left open by individuals or institutions that did not install software fixes to known security holes or that were using outdated software, like Windows XP, for which Microsoft no longer provides technical support.

What makes the attack unique, cybersecurity providers said, was its scale.

The virus used in this attack infected as many computers as it did because it was made to spread across an entire network  in a hospital, for instance. All it took was one person clicking on a bad link or opening an attachment containing the virus.

Most ransomware attacks, like the one that struck Muni Metro late last year, strike individuals or organizations one at a time, said Carl Wright, general manager and vice president of worldwide sales at security firm TrapX.

Malware, or malicious software that hackers use to take control of or lock up peoples data, can be transmitted when people click on a link from an unknown source. Links containing malware can be sent via email  a tactic known as phishing  or buried in online advertisements that get delivered through websites consumers are more inclined to trust like the New York Times.

That means the onus tends to fall disproportionately on individual people and companies to keep their data safe  or else pay a ransom once a hacker has gained control.

Here are some tips to better protect yourself:

Verify all email

A common tactic used to infect computers with malware is also a simple one: emailing people a link or attachment that appears to come from a trusted source.

The easiest way to defend against this method of attack is to check with the person the email appears to be coming from  be it your bank, your boss or your parents  to make sure its really them. Call them or send a new email to a confirmed address to contact them; dont just hit reply or call a number listed in the email.

Back up data regularly

Maintaining an up-to-date back-up copy of your data  in the cloud or on an external hard drive  means anyone who locks you out of your data is out of luck. You wont need to pay a ransom, because you have an another copy of everything a cybercriminal may be threatening to destroy.

This is how Muni Metro dodged the $73,000 ransom hackers asked for during an attack on the system in November.

Experts recommend daily backups to ensure that in the event of such an attack, you would lose as little as possible. But if youre using an external hard drive, or another local storage device, be sure to unplug the device once backups are completed. If left plugged in, an attacker could infect both the main computer and your backup device.

Ssecurity updates

Operating systems are routinely updated with security patches to keep viruses out and close known holes in the system. Set your system to automatically update, if possible, Wright said, or make it a regular habit to check for updates.

With Internet-connected devices in your home like smart refrigerators or childrens toys, installing updates may be difficult or impossible. Nir Gaist, CEO of security firm Nyotron, recommends asking manufacturers and retailers about security before purchasing any so-called Internet of Things device to make sure the system can be patched to better fend off cyberattacks.

To pay or not to pay

Cybercriminals using ransomware to extort individuals and businesses collected more than $24 million last year from victims in the United States who reported such attacks, according to the FBI.

Continuing to pay these criminals off contributes to a cycle that makes such attacks profitable, and thereby encourages more attacks, law enforcement agencies often argue.

But not paying may result in the permanent loss of irreplaceable data.

Everyone who advises you not to pay, they have a point because if everyone stopped paying the business model would not work and maybe it would finally stop this phenomenon, said Gaist said. But its like vegetarian people  they can stop eating meat, but theyre not going to prevent animals from being killed because so many other people are still eating meat. If you really care about your data, you should just pay the ransom if its reasonable.

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae
A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that debt collectors can use bankruptcy proceedings to try to collect liabilities that are so old the statute of limitations has expired.

Voting 5-3, the court said companies dont violate the U.S. Fair Debt Collection Practices Act when they file bankruptcy claims on that type of years-old debt. Justice Stephen Breyer joined the courts conservative wing in the majority.

Critics accused debt collectors of violating the law by filing tens of thousands of outdated claims with bankruptcy courts in the hope that some debtors wont object.

The result of the decision appears to give creditors a free pass to file stale claims without fearing FDCPA liability, Andrew Muller, a partner at Stinson Leonard Street LLP, said. The flip side is that trustees and debtors lawyers may be under increased pressure to more closely review claims to determine whether the claims are subject to a statute of limitations defense, Muller said.

The ruling is a victory for Encore Capital Group Inc.s Midland Funding in an Alabama case that started with an effort to collect a $1,900 credit-card debt. The debtor, Aleida Johnson, sued Midland after a bankruptcy judge threw out Midlands claim.

Midland argued that federal bankruptcy law lets creditors file claims in those proceedings even if the statute of limitations wouldnt allow a lawsuit.

Like the majority of Courts of Appeals that have considered the matter, we conclude that Midlands filing of a proof of claim that on its face indicates that the limitations period has run does not fall within the scope of any of the five relevant words of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Breyer wrote.

Johnsons lawyers said that, by filing outdated requests, debt collectors are falsely suggesting those claims are valid and enforceable.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion in which Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joined. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined the court after the case was argued in January, didnt participate in the ruling.

Professional debt collectors have built a business out of buying stale debt, filing claims in bankruptcy proceedings to collect it, and hoping that no one notices that the debt is too old to be enforced by the courts, Sotomayor wrote. This practice is both unfair and unconscionable, she added.

Debt collectors do not file these claims in good faith; they file them hoping and expecting that the bankruptcy system will fail, Sotomayor wrote.

Lower courts had been divided on the issue. The Obama administration backed Johnson in the case.

The case is Midland Funding vs. Johnson, 16-348.

Greg Stohr and Dawn McCarty are Bloomberg writers. Email: gstohr@bloomberg.net, dmccarty@bloomberg.net
Tesla lost a buy rating from one of its longtime bulls, with a Morgan Stanley analyst boosting his projection for how much cash the carmaker will burn through as more prosperous rivals encroach on its business.

Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanleys top auto analyst, has been one of the biggest advocates for Tesla stock, envisioning offerings of a ride-for-hire service that could double the value of the company. He now sees operating losses continuing through next year and estimates the company will consume $3.1 billion of cash this year, compared with an earlier estimate of $2.3 billion.

We expect much larger and more well capitalized competitors to unveil strategies that directly address sustainable transport and mobility, Jonas wrote in a note to clients. The expansion by Alphabet Inc.s Waymo of its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivan fleet and Apple Inc.s plans to test autonomous cars in California amount to an assault of the market by large tech firms, he said.

Tesla dropped as much as 3.8 percent after jumping 52 percent this year through Friday. The shares fell 2.8 percent to close at $315.88 Monday, the biggest decline in the 29-member Bloomberg World Auto Manufacturers Index.

Ivan Feinseth, chief investment officer at Tigress Financial Partners LLC, took issue with the assessment, noting that traditional automakers such as General Motors and Ford Motor remain more immediate competitors for Tesla than the likes of Apple.

I really dont understand the rating change based on competition from Apple and Amazon, said Feinseth, who says he isnt invested in Tesla. I dont think that Apple will be best served making a car, though they have the money to make anything.

Tesla burned through $622.4 million in cash during the first three months of the year, about half the amount raised in equity and debt offerings in March. The company has said it expects to roughly triple capital expenditures in the second quarter, boosting first-half spending to more than $2 billion before production of the cheaper Model 3 sedan begins.

Tesla may need to raise more capital to pull off a 2017 launch of the mass-market Model 3 and to fund battery, solar and other investments, Kevin Tynan, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, wrote Monday. The balance sheet is already stretched and Teslas shares could be significantly diluted if stock is issued instead of debt.

Jamie Butters is a Bloomberg writer. Email: jbutters@bloomberg.net
MASON CITY  Contractors are putting on the final touches for ZMariks Noodle Cafe in Mason City.

Its turning out pretty well, Gary Kinseth said.

Kinseth, part owner of Kinseth Hospitality, is overseeing the development of the complex. The restaurant is expected to open May 30.

Theyre finishing the backsplash and the restrooms, Kinseth said. The cafe is full of fun colors, pasta-themed canvas art, industrial light fixtures and more.

ZMariks offers made-to-order noodle, rice, soup and salad bowls. The location will also offer beer and wine.

Mac and cheese, pesto, marinara, buffalo chicken mac and Asian spicy peanut are just a few customizable options on the menu. Consumers can add or substitute veggies, shrimp, chicken, meatballs, tofu and more.

Kinseth is pleased with customizable food options for food sensitivities.

We have a ton of vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options, Kinseth said.

Nikki Nicholson, who is the general manager for Mason City, is excited for the food and to see it all come together.

My favorite is the zfajita rice bowl, Nicholson said. Everything is made to order.

The location will staff about 20 employees. When completed, the seating area should hold about 40 people, not including the outdoor terrace patio. The location will offer curbside pickup and catering.

We have free Wi-Fi and outlets for laptops and computers, Nicholson said.

The name ZMariks comes from Greek word for pasta, zimarika.

ZMariks Noodle Cafe first opened in 2002 in Iowa City.

Company owners Dave and Ellie Allen have three Iowa locations in Des Moines/Clive, Iowa City and Ankeny as well as two South Dakota locations in Rapid City and Sioux Falls.

Mason City would make six locations for the Iowa-based noodle cafe.

Zmariks is part of the complex that includes the Hampton Inn & Suites, Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bagels.

Completion of the restaurant is part of phase two for Kinseth. Apartments and condominiums are expected to be built later as part of phase three.

Kinseth Hospitality Companies purchased the Clarion Inn, which was located on the same site as the hotel. It was demolished to build the Hampton Inn & Suites.
The free section of Craigslist is a jumble of objects in limbo  items that owners refuse to toss, but wouldn't bother selling.

What inspires someone to list an object for free on Craigslist, rather than throw it away? Hauling a sagging mattress or a heavy table to the dump can be costly; it's often easier to let a stranger take hefty objects off your hands.
WASHINGTON  The Trump administration has approached the wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, days before President Trump embarks on his first foreign trip.

Trump will nominate Callista Gingrich for the post, two people with direct knowledge of the discussions said Monday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly before an official announcement.

Trumps foreign trip this month includes a stop at the Vatican.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Callista Gingrich is president of Gingrich Productions and has produced a number of documentaries, including one about Pope John Paul II.

She worked for the House Committee on Agriculture as chief clerk until 2007. She was a key figure in her husbands 2012 bid for the Republican nomination.

She was a congressional aide when she began a six-year affair with Newt Gingrich, then a married Republican congressman.

In 2012, Gingrichs second wife, Marianne Gingrich, told ABC News that he had proposed an open marriage so he could continue to see Callista Gingrich without divorcing.

The former House speaker denied the charge.

He converted to Catholicism in 2009, after years of attending Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., where Callista Gingrich has performed in the choir.

Trumps vision for foreign relations and diplomacy has been starkly different from that promoted by the vastly popular Pope Francis. Francis has spoken of the need for bridges between nations, while Trump has advocated for walls and travel restrictions as a means of national security.

Francis also has called for an end to the use of fossil fuels, while Trump has pledged to cancel payments to U.N. climate change programs and pull out of the Paris climate accord.

But both share a populist appeal and speak with a down-to-earth simplicity that has endeared them to their bases of supporters. And both share a common concern about the plight of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Islamic militants.

Speaking to reporters while traveling home Saturday from a trip to Portugal, Francis said he would listen respectfully to what Trump has to say when the two meet. Trump will call on Francis mid-way through his first foreign trip, after visiting Saudi Arabia and Israel and before attending a NATO summit in Brussels and a summit of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations in Italy.

I never make a judgment about a person without hearing him out, the pope said.

Asked specifically if he would try to soften Trumps policies, Francis said: That is a political calculation that I dont allow myself to make. Also in the religious sphere: I dont proselytize.

Steve Peoples and Vivian Salama are Associated Press writers.
GULFPORT, Miss.  A Mississippi man received a 49-year prison sentence Monday for the first-ever conviction on federal hate crime charges arising from the murder of a transgender woman.

U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. sentenced Joshua Vallum in connection with the 2015 killing of 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson. It was the first case prosecuted under the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act involving a victim targeted because of gender identity.

Prosecutors said Vallum, 29, shocked Williamson with a stun gun, stabbed her and beat her to death in 2015 to keep fellow Latin Kings gang members from discovering the two had been having sex. Gang rules barred homosexual activity and declared that punishable by death, the prosecutors had said.

Guirola could have sentenced Vallum to life in federal prison, but stuck to a lesser sentence suggested in a plea agreement between defense attorneys and prosecutors, citing Vallums neglected childhood and other issues. Both the judge and defense lawyers said Vallums history of abuse as a child had to be considered.

Vallum pleaded guilty to the federal charges in December. He also had pleaded guilty earlier to a state murder charge that drew him a separate sentence of life without parole.

The case has been closely watched by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocates nationwide, who applaud federal officials first use of a 2009 hate crimes law to prosecute an offense against a transgender person.

The taking of a human life because a person has a particular gender identity is particularly heinous and cannot be tolerated in an enlightened society, Guirola said.

At sentencing in federal court in Gulfport, Vallum begged forgiveness Monday from Williamsons family and friends, but none of them were present to hear his words  only a few reporters, the judge and Vallum supporters.

Vallum initially told sheriffs deputies and later told the Sun Herald newspaper that he found out that Williamson had a penis on May 30, 2015  moments before he killed her. He said he blacked out and doesnt remember the crime, a variation of whats known as a gay panic or trans panic defense.

However, his lawyers have never contested evidence that Vallum had long known Williamson was transgender.

Jeff Amy is an Associated Press writer.
CLEAR LAKE | Opportunity Village Childrens Autism Center will host the second annual North Iowa Autism Summit on June 23.

This day-long educational event designed for professionals in the field and families of children with autism spectrum disorders.

The summit will be held at E.B. Stillman Auditorium at Clear Lake Middle School, located at 1601 Third Ave. N.

Registration begins at 8 a.m. The summit kicks off at 8:30 a.m. and concludes at 3 p.m.

The summit features sessions with doctorate-level professionals covering a variety of subjects that affect children with autism, their families and those who support them. Attendance is open to individuals throughout Iowa and surrounding areas.

Session topics and times, as well as registration, are available at www.northiowaautismsummit.org.

The cost is $30 for professionals and $15 for families with children with autism. Individuals may register in-person the day of the event for $40.

Lunch is included in the registration cost.
SHEFFIELD | A high school student has been referred to juvenile court in relation to what law enforcement officials are calling a threat to West Fork Schools.

Police last week were investigating a "threat to the school system as a whole," Sheffield Police Chief Sam Cain told the Globe Gazette May 8.

It is not known what the referral was for. Juvenile court records are now confidential due to a recent change in state law, but police are allowed to provide basic information, which includes criminal charges and the age of the juvenile.

The Globe Gazette does not identify juveniles unless they have been charged in adult court.

Cain has not returned four phone messages from the Globe Gazette Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Monday that were seeking additional information.

The district in a statement on its Facebook page Sunday night said one individual "continues to be detained by law enforcement" while others -- on law enforcement recommendation -- have been "temporarily suspended per school policy until the investigation is complete."

In addition to the teen referred to juvenile court, Superintendent Darrin Strike said via phone Monday three high schoolers have been suspended.

Strike said the high schoolers were involved in an alleged threat against the school district and its students on the last day of school, which is Friday, May 26.

Strike would not say what the threat involved and deferred questions related to juvenile court to Cain.

Cain in a statement on the districts Facebook page Monday afternoon said the department is continuing to investigate inappropriate social media posts and statements made last week and over the weekend.

Although we continue to interview people associated with the inappropriate content we can safely assure parents that there is no risk that should cause any further alarm with this incident, Cain said in the statement.

Strike emphasized the district and law enforcement are working together.

Were going to have increased law enforcement presence at the school district throughout the end of the school year, he said. Officers will be trying to provide reassurance to both students and parents that West Fork Schools are a safe place.

As a precaution, law enforcement officers were on-site at the high school Monday, with entrance restricted to the schools main north door. Officers were also at Sheffield Elementary and West Forks Rockwell campus for the purpose of providing comfort to parents and students, according to a statement released by the district.

"Again, these measure are taken not because of a continued threat but to help parents feel reassured," Strike said in the statement. Parents who withheld their children from school Monday are encouraged to send them to school Tuesday.

Franklin County Sheriff Linn Larson said via phone Monday deputies will be providing an extra level of security for the district, as needed, through the rest of the academic year, in conjunction with the Sheffield Police Department. On Monday morning, that included being present at school buildings.

Larson was unable to provide further information, as the investigation is being handled by the Sheffield Police Department.

The district planned to review its emergency management plan during a School Board meeting Monday night.

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to contact the Franklin County Law Enforcement Center at 641-456-2731 and ask for the Sheffield Police Department.
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A generation-wide obsession with avocados is apparently what stands between millennials and home ownership, according to one property mogul.

Australian developer Tim Gurner, who is 35 and worth half a billion dollars, chastised the youths of the world on a recent episode of Australia's "60 Minutes."

"When I was buying my first home, I wasn't buying smashed avocado for 19 bucks and four coffees at $4 each," he said.

"I think until this generation realizes that the people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it, saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property ladder [they won't get ahead]," Gurner added.

"You might have to buy an investment property first, you might have to share with mum and dad, you might have to buy with a friend, but you've got to get your foot in the door and you've got to slowly get up the ladder."

Gurner began his career in property development when he was given $34,000 by his grandfather at age 19.

"[Millennials] want to eat out every day, they want to travel to Europe every year," Gurner told "60 Minutes." "This generation is watching the Kardashians and thinking that's normal. Thinking that owning a Bentley is normal, that owning a BMW is normal."

A study by HSBC found that the United States has a millennial home ownership rate of 35 percent. Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia all have lower rates, putting the U.S. about in the middle of the pack.

Sixty-nine percent of the 9,000 millennials in nine countries surveyed said they did not have enough money for a deposit.

HSBC did not follow up with questions about whether their average avocado consumption was to blame.
The family of a Vietnam War veteran, who died last year from a head injury he suffered at a Department of Veterans Affairs facility in Palo Alto, filed a lawsuit Monday against the hospital, alleging elder abuse and wrongful death.

Douglas Wayne Ross Sr., a frail 72-year-old Navy veteran recovering from a heart attack he had after undergoing revascularization surgery, tumbled over and hit his head while left unattended in his hospital room in April 2016, according to the complaint filed in federal court in San Jose. He died a week later.

Despite knowing that Mr. Ross was in a frail condition and a fall risk, the VA Palo Alto left him alone in a chair for, according to his medical records, roughly 40 minutes, the familys attorney, Niall McCarthy, wrote in the court papers. That was like leaving an infant unattended in a bath for 40 minutes.

The suit seeks unspecified damages.

Ross, who became a sailboat captain and gold miner after his military service, had come to the VA in February 2016 to receive multiple surgeries to increase blood flow to his lower extremities. But after his first surgery, he had a heart attack and had to be revived.

Ross later started getting infections in his legs and developed a black and gangrenous foot from lack of circulation. He became dependent on dialysis for life.

Doctors prescribed Ross the maximum amount of blood thinners to prevent another heart attack, and determined further surgeries were out of the question, McCarthy said.

But on April 28, 2016, hospital staff left Ross unsupervised in a chair in his room, where he sat with a feeding tube, rectal tube and an IV.

Staff members returned to find Ross splayed on the floor. He died a week later. The cause of death listed on his death certificate was a closed head injury sustained during an unwitnessed fall.

The Palo Alto VAs deputy chief of staff wrote a letter to Ross son, acknowledging and apologizing for the incident.

We are always very concerned about fall prevention, and we continue to look for opportunities to reduce them even further by considering procedure changes based on what happened with this fall, Dr. Stephen Ezeji-Okoye wrote in a letter to the family.

The VA, though, found no negligent or wrongful act by its staff and denied responsibility for Ross death. The VA did not immediately return phone calls or emails on Monday.

The VA admits that they left him in a chair, they admit he died of an unwitnessed fall, but they deny responsibility, McCarthy said Monday.

He said he hopes the lawsuit will hold the VA accountable and lead to reforms on how it treats its patients.

For whatever reason, the quality of care at the VA is substandard, McCarthy said. Wed like to see some major reforms. The first thing you do is put procedures in place when someone is a known fall risk, so it doesnt happen to the next person.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
Washington, DC, May 14, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Washington, DCFor the third year, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justices Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and BJAs VALOR officer safety initiative, collaborated on the Destination Zero Program to highlight agency-level achievements in the areas of officer safety and wellness. The primary goal of the program is to create a platform that provides all U.S. law enforcement agencies with the ability to research successful and/or promising officer safety and wellness programs and identify the resources necessary to begin their own risk management initiatives. The result of this program will culminate with presentation of the National Officer Safety and Wellness Awards at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Funds annual Awards Dinner on Sunday, May 14, 2017.

The Destination Zero Program began in late 2014, with a goal to identify agencies conducting unique and innovative programs aimed to reduce risk factors and to share the design and outcomes of these programs with the entire law enforcement community. Agencies with successful programs were asked to submit details of their initiatives and be considered for the National Officer Safety and Wellness Awards, which will be presented during National Police Week in Washington, D.C. There was also a national open call for applications though an online application process.

Awards will be presented in the following four categories:

General Officer Safety : This category features programs that directly affect officers physical safety while performing their jobs.

: This category features programs that directly affect officers physical safety while performing their jobs. Officer Traffic Safety : These initiatives are designed to reduce automobile crashes and limit the risk factors of operating a motor vehicle or managing traffic. Programs that increased seatbelt use, limited distractions or reduced driving speeds are also included in this category.

: These initiatives are designed to reduce automobile crashes and limit the risk factors of operating a motor vehicle or managing traffic. Programs that increased seatbelt use, limited distractions or reduced driving speeds are also included in this category. Officer Wellness : Fitness programs, mental health programs and initiatives, such as peer support groups and nutrition, are included in this category.

: Fitness programs, mental health programs and initiatives, such as peer support groups and nutrition, are included in this category. Comprehensive Safety: Includes programs that demonstrated the most comprehensive approach and were strategically implemented into safety and wellness efforts. Agencies considered for this award had a strong overall program that was successfully marketed and innovative in its approach to gain employee participation.

Following months of review and evaluation of the submitted programs, the award process selected 11 finalist agencies whose respective program fell into one of the four officer safety and wellness award categories. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund convened a distinguished panel of judges to evaluate the finalist programs. A seven-member selection committee, representing nearly every type of law enforcement agency, carefully considered each finalist program and selected the award recipients for each of the four categories.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and the Bureau of Justice Assistance are proud to announce the following 2017 Officer Safety and Wellness Award winners:

General Officer Safety : Suffolk County (NY) Police Department

: Suffolk County (NY) Police Department Officer Traffic Safety : Snohomish County (WA) Sheriffs Office

: Snohomish County (WA) Sheriffs Office Officer Wellness : Stockton (CA) Police Department

: Stockton (CA) Police Department Comprehensive Safety: Burlington (NC) Police Department

In addition to the four winning agencies, the following finalists were also acknowledged:

General Officer Safety : Henderson (NV) Police Department

: Henderson (NV) Police Department Officer Traffic Safety : Las Vegas (NV) Metropolitan Police Department

: Las Vegas (NV) Metropolitan Police Department Officer Wellness: Rockville (MD) Police Department, Sidney (OH) Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice

Rockville (MD) Police Department, Sidney (OH) Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice Comprehensive Safety: City of Bend (OR) Police Department and the University of Vermont Police Department

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and the Bureau of Justice Assistance are grateful to all participating agencies and extend congratulations to the four winning agencies and finalists for 2017. The National Officer Safety and Wellness Awards are presented annually, and agencies are encouraged to submit details about their successful safety and wellness programs to Nick Breul, Director of the Memorial Funds Officer Safety & Wellness Initiative, at www.DestinationZero.org.

-- ### --

About the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund

Established in 1984, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund is a nonprofit organization dedicated to telling the story of American law enforcement and making it safer for those who serve. The Memorial Fund maintains the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., which honors the names of 21,183 officers who have died in the line of duty throughout U.S. history. The Memorial Fund is now working to create the National Law Enforcement Museum, which will tell the story of American law enforcement through high-tech, interactive exhibitions, historical artifacts, and extensive educational programming. For more information, visit www.LawMemorial.org.

About the Bureau of Justice Assistance

The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. BJA's mission is to provide leadership and services in criminal justice policy development and grant funding and administration to support local, state, and tribal justice stakeholders to achieve safer communities. BJA supports programs and initiatives in the areas of law enforcement, justice information sharing, countering terrorism, managing offenders, combating violent crime , adjudication, advancing tribal justice, crime prevention, protecting vulnerable populations, and capacity building.

For more information about BJA, visit www.bja.gov. For more information about VALOR, visit www.valorforblue.org.

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4e2f23e2-54ee-499d-b53b-b1ec44f32ef9
LONDON, May 14, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The share of CEOs forced out of office for ethical lapses has been on the rise, according to the 2016 CEO Success study released today by Strategy&, PwCs strategy consulting business. The study, which analyzed CEO successions at the worlds largest 2,500 public companies over the past 10 years, reports that forced turnovers due to ethical lapses rose from 3.9 percent of all successions in 200711 to 5.3 percent in 201216  a 36 percent increase, due in large part to increased public scrutiny and accountability of executives.



The increase was more dramatic at companies in the U.S. and Canada. Forced turnovers for ethical lapses at these companies increased from 1.6 percent of all successions in 200711 to 3.3 percent in 201216  a 102 percent increase. In Western Europe, the share of CEOs forced out for ethical lapses increased to 5.9 percent from 4.2 percent, and in the BRIC countries, to 8.8 percent from 3.6 percent.

Our data cannot show  and perhaps no data could  whether theres more wrongdoing at large corporations today than in the past. However, we doubt thats the case, based on our own experience working with hundreds of companies over many years, says Per-Ola Karlsson, partner and leader of Strategy&s organization and leadership practice for PwC Middle East. Over the last 15 years, five trends have resulted in boards of directors, investors, governments, customers, and the media holding CEOs to a far higher level of accountability for ethical lapses than in the past.



The Five Trends Shaping CEO Accountability

Public opinion : Since the financial crisis of 200708 and the Great Recession that it ignited, confidence and trust in large corporations and CEOs has been declining; the public has become more suspicious, more critical, and less forgiving of corporate misbehavior.



: Since the financial crisis of 200708 and the Great Recession that it ignited, confidence and trust in large corporations and CEOs has been declining; the public has become more suspicious, more critical, and less forgiving of corporate misbehavior. Governance and regulation : The rise of public criticism of executives and corporations has translated directly into regulatory and legislative action, and companies in the U.S. and many other countries have moved to a zero-tolerance approach toward bad behavior in the C-suite.



: The rise of public criticism of executives and corporations has translated directly into regulatory and legislative action, and companies in the U.S. and many other countries have moved to a zero-tolerance approach toward bad behavior in the C-suite. Business operating environment : Companies increasingly are (1) pursuing growth in emerging markets where ethical risks, such as the possibility of bribery and corruption, are heightened, and (2) relying on extended global supply chains that increase counterparty risks.



: Companies increasingly are (1) pursuing growth in emerging markets where ethical risks, such as the possibility of bribery and corruption, are heightened, and (2) relying on extended global supply chains that increase counterparty risks. Digital communications : The use of email, text messaging, and social media has created new risks for ethical lapses. A companys digital communications can provide irrefutable evidence of misconduct, and their existence increases the likelihood that a CEO will be held accountable.



: The use of email, text messaging, and social media has created new risks for ethical lapses. A companys digital communications can provide irrefutable evidence of misconduct, and their existence increases the likelihood that a CEO will be held accountable. The 24/7 news cycle: Unlike in the mid- to late 20th century, when most executives and companies could maintain a low public profile, today the lightning-fast flow of Web-based financial news and data ensures that negative information travels quickly and widely.

Despite the global increase in forced turnovers for ethical lapses, companies in the U.S. and Canada have the lowest incidence of such dismissals  3.3 percent in 201216 compared to 5.9 percent in Western Europe and 8.8 percent in the BRIC countries. More stringent governance regulation is one likely reason. Both the legislative requirements for codes of conduct and anti-bribery statutes have been tightened significantly in the United States.

Bigger Company, Bigger Target

The study also found that at the largest companies (those in the top quartile by market capitalization) in the U.S. and Canada and Western Europe, the overall share of CEOs forced out of office was significantly greater than the share forced out in the other market-cap quartiles.

The fact that forced turnovers for ethical lapses were even higher at companies in the top quartile by market capitalization in these regions supports our hypothesis, since the largest companies are the most affected by the five trends and are subject to the greatest scrutiny, says Kristin Rivera, partner and global forensics clients and markets leader with PwC US.

The increasing incidence of CEOs being forced out of office for ethical lapses may have a positive effect on public opinion over time by demonstrating that bad behavior is in fact being detected and punished, says DeAnne Aguirre, global leader of Strategy&s Katzenbach Center of Innovation for Culture and Leadership, principal with PwC US. In the meantime, CEOs need to lead by example on a personal and organizational level and strive to build and maintain a true culture of integrity.

More Facts from the 2016 CEO Success study

CEO turnover: CEO turnover at the worlds largest 2,500 companies decreased from its record high of 16.6 percent in 2015 to 14.9 percent in 2016, due largely to the drop in merger and acquisition activity. CEO turnover was highest in Brazil, Russia, and India, at 17.2 percent, followed by Japan (15.5 percent) and Western Europe (15.3 percent) and China (15.2 percent). CEO turnover fell in every region we studied except for the U.S. and Canada.



CEO turnover at the worlds largest 2,500 companies decreased from its record high of 16.6 percent in 2015 to 14.9 percent in 2016, due largely to the drop in merger and acquisition activity. CEO turnover was highest in Brazil, Russia, and India, at 17.2 percent, followed by Japan (15.5 percent) and Western Europe (15.3 percent) and China (15.2 percent). CEO turnover fell in every region we studied except for the U.S. and Canada. Women CEOs: There were 12 women globally appointed to the role of CEOs in 2016  3.6 percent of the incoming class. This marks a return of the slow trend toward greater diversity that had been in place over the last several years, and a recovery from the previous years low point of 2.8 percent. The share of incoming female CEOs was highest in the U.S. and Canada, rebounding to 5.7 percent after falling for the previous three years. Five industries  healthcare, industrials, information technology, consumer staples, and telecom services  did not have a single incoming female CEO in 2016.

About the 2016 CEO Success Study

Over the course of the past 17 years, Strategy& has been tracking continuous data on CEO successions. The 2016 study analyzed CEO successions at the worlds 2,500 largest (by market capitalization) public companies over the last 10 years. For the purposes of this study, we define an ethical lapse as a scandal or improper conduct by the CEO or other employees; examples include fraud, bribery, insider trading, environmental disasters, inflated resumes, and sexual indiscretions.

Ends

To learn more about the 2016 CEO Success study, visit www.strategyand.pwc.com/ceosuccess. A copy of the global study, including findings by geography and industry, is available from the media contact. Multimedia content, including infographics and video, is also available.

About Strategy&

Strategy& is a global team of practical strategists committed to helping you seize essential advantage. We do that by working alongside you to solve your toughest problems and helping you capture your greatest opportunities. We bring 100 years of strategy consulting experience and the unrivaled industry and functional capabilities of the PwC network to the task. We are part of the PwC network of firms in 157 countries, with more than 223,000 people committed to delivering quality in assurance, tax, and advisory services.

Notes
NEW YORK  The cyberattack that took computer files hostage around the world appeared to slow Monday as authorities worked to catch the extortionists behind it  a difficult task that involves searching for digital clues and following the money.

Thousands more infections were reported with the start of the workweek, largely in Asia, which had been closed for business when the ransomware locked up computers Friday at hospitals, factories, government agencies, banks and other businesses.

But the big second-wave outbreak that many feared they would see when users returned to their offices Monday morning and switched their computers back on failed to materialize.

Lynne Owens, director-general of Britains National Crime Agency, said there was no indication of a second surge in the cyberattack but warned, That doesnt mean there wont be one.

Security researchers in the meantime have been disassembling the malicious software, known as WannaCry, in hopes of uncovering clues to who released it. They are doing the same with the phishing emails that helped the ransomware embed itself in computers.

Investigators also hope to learn more by examining ransom payments made by computer users via bitcoin, the hard-to-trace digital currency often used by criminals.

WannaCry paralyzed computers running mostly older versions of Microsoft Windows in some 150 countries. It encrypted users computer files and displayed a message demanding anywhere from $300 to $600 to release them; failure to pay would leave the data mangled and likely beyond repair.

A cybersecurity researcher in Britain managed to slow down its spread by activating the softwares kill switch, but there were fears that the cybercriminals would release even more malicious versions.

Steve Grobman of the security company McAfee said forensics experts are looking at how the ransomware was written and how it was run. WannaCry is a sophisticated piece of work, he said, which helps rule out the possibility it was released by mere pranksters or lower-level thieves.

So far, not many people have paid the ransom, said Jan Op Gen Oorth, a spokesman for Europol, the European police agency.

In Britain, many hospitals and clinics that are part of the countrys national health service were still having computer problems. Patients have had to be turned away because their records were inaccessible.

Experts urged organizations to immediately update older Microsoft operating systems with a patch released by the company.

Anick Jesdanun, Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka are Associated Press writers.
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BERLIN  French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged Monday to work closely together to draw up a road map of reforms for the European Union, saying that theyre both prepared even to implement treaty changes if needed.

The two met in Berlin on Macrons first full day in office, which started with his naming 46-year-old lawmaker Edouard Philippe as his new prime minister. Merkel called Macrons visit an honor and a sign of the deep friendship between the two European powerhouses.
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MANILA  Lawmakers in the Philippines on Monday threw out an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte that accused him of orchestrating the mass murder of thousands of people in his crackdown on drug use.

The Justice Committee of the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Duterte backers, reviewed the complaint and declared it insufficient.

The majority leader, Rudy Farinas, said that Congressman Gary Alejano, who initiated the complaint, had no personal knowledge of the allegations, which he said were taken largely from news reports of the killings.

Alejano said the action to stop the complaint showed the governments unwillingness to act. Since Duterte became president in June, more than 4,000 people have been killed by the police in antidrug operations or by vigilantes in drug-related cases, according to police statistics.

Institutions are just unwilling and are unable to prosecute the president, Alejano said in an interview. What is the peoples recourse? Where will you complain? We will look for other ways to seek justice.

The decision to kill the complaint bars until March any new impeachment case against Duterte.

The move comes after a complaint was filed against Duterte at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Last month, a Filipino lawyer for two men who say they were paid assassins for Duterte when he was mayor of Davao city asked the court to charge Duterte and 11 other Philippine officials with mass murder and crimes against humanity.

Alejano said he and his advisers were considering joining the case at The Hague. The court takes cases of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes when a nations judicial system is unable or unwilling to investigate or prosecute them.

Duterte welcomed the dismissal of the complaint, according to his spokesman, Ernesto Abella.

We maintained that it was from rehashed, trumped-up charges aimed at undermining the duly constituted government, Abella said in a statement.

Felipe Villamor is a New York Times writer.
1 Iraq fighting: The fight to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group is approaching its final stages, a senior U.S. official said Monday. Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the global coalition against the Islamic State, said Iraqi forces are completely defeating the militants in one of the most difficult urban battles since World War II. But local Iraqi officials say they will need more funding from the U.S. and the international community to rebuild in territory recently retaken from the extremists. The operation to retake Mosul began in October and in January the citys eastern half was declared fully liberated. The fight for the citys west has devastated infrastructure there and inflicted high civilian casualties.

2 Yemen cholera: The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Yemen said Monday that a cholera outbreak has killed 124 people over the past two weeks. Jamie McGoldrick said that another 11,100 people were believed to have been infected and that medicine was arriving. But he also urged donor countries to fulfill more than $1 billion in aid pledges made in Geneva last month. A Saudi-led coalition has been battling Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen since March 2015 in a war that has killed more than 10,000 civilians. The World Health Organization said last month that fewer than 45 percent of health facilities in Yemen are now fully functioning.
North Koreas launch of a longer-range missile shows advances in its technological capabilities and offers the sternest test yet of President Trumps strategy to work with China to combat the threat.

Will China fully enforce global sanctions on North Korea and back tough new penalties? If not, will Trump accept the growing calls from Congress to start targeting Chinese companies that help Pyongyang access international markets, even if that puts U.S.-China ties under new strain?

The U.N. Security Council is set to discuss North Koreas latest provocation Tuesday. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley raised the possibility of a new set of global economic restrictions for the North, including on oil imports. France and Britain on Monday both publicly supported tougher sanctions.

China is feeling increasingly alienated from its wayward North Korean ally, and Sundays headline-grabbing missile launch wont help matters. It came as Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted 30 world leaders for talks on trade and infrastructure. The test also immediately closed the space for maneuvering for U.S.-allied South Koreas new president, who favors engaging North Korea.

But Trump and Xi may have the most at stake. Beijing is wary of piling on economic pressure that could cause North Koreas collapse, and it wasnt clear Monday if it would support new sanctions. Opposing the Norths test, Chinas Foreign Ministry called on all sides to exercise restraint.

China is the linchpin of Trumps strategy for halting North Koreas pursuit of a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the U.S. mainland. Trump has feted Xi in hope of securing more pressure on the North, which counts on China for up to 90 percent of its trade.

Trump also has flexed U.S. military muscle, though with little apparent effect in deterring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The U.S. aircraft carrier Carl Vinson was ordered to the region last month and is still in the Sea of Japan.

U.S. defense officials said the missile landed about 60 miles from the Russian coast. More significant, however, was that it flew higher and for longer than previous missiles.

U.S. experts said Sundays launch was likely a mobile, two-stage, liquid-fueled missile that could have a range of about 2,800 miles, putting the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam within range.

Matthew Pennington is an Associated Press writer.
The United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Islamic State militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to U.S. interests in the volatile Middle East.

The Turks are fiercely opposed to the U.S. plans, seeing the Kurdish fighters as terrorists. And when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visits the White House on Tuesday, the most he and President Trump may be able to do is agree to disagree and move on.

The Turks see this as a crisis in the relationship, said Jonathan Schanzer at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

The challenge is hardly new. Long before Trump took office, U.S. presidents have grappled with the fragility of partnering with Turkeys government and the Kurds to carry out a Middle East agenda.

Past administrations have sought a delicate balance. Too exuberant in its support for the Kurds, and the U.S. risks pushing ally Turkey toward U.S. geopolitical rivals like Russia or emboldening the Kurds to try to create an independent state  a scenario that would destabilize multiple countries in the region. Too little cooperation with the Kurds risks squandering a battlefield ally with proven effectiveness against extremist threats and who have staunchly supported Washington.

Trump has made his priorities clear. His administration is arming Syrian Kurdish fighters as part of an effort to recapture the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State groups self-declared capital. Coupled with the U.S.-backed fight in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Raqqa is seen as a key step toward liberating the remaining territory the militants hold.

Turkey has been pressuring the U.S. to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesnt want them spearheading the Raqqa effort. Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish group, known as the YPG, a terrorist group because of its ties to the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, inside Turkey. The United States, the European Union and Turkey all agree the PKK is a terrorist organization.

The Turks fear any weapons the U.S. provides the Syrian Kurds could well end up with their ethnic brethren in Turkey, whove fought violently as part of a separatist insurgency for more than three decades. As a nod to Turkeys concerns, the Pentagon has promised tight monitoring of all weapons and greater intelligence sharing to help the Turks better watch over their frontiers. Kurds are an ethnic group predominantly concentrated along the borders of four countries  Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Experts also see Erdogan using the meeting to confront Trump on other Turkish grievances. Those include extraditing Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania cleric whom Erdogan blames for fomenting a failed coup last summer.

Josh Lederman and Vivian Salama are Associated Press writers.
Miraka, the milk processor majority owned by several North Island Maori trusts, is to export its first branded consumer product into Malaysia, followed by shipments to Singapore, the Philippines and China, says Maori Development Minister Te Ururoa Flavell.

Taupo-based Miraka and Malaysian distribution partner Storiiu signed a memorandum of understanding in Kuala Lumpur, witnessed by Flavell during a visit to Malaysia with a delegation of seven Maori companies to raise the profile of New Zealands food and beverage sector, he said in a statement.

"This is an example of Maori leading with the principle of kaitiakitanga (guardianship of the land, its people and environment) and shows the positive response this approach is receiving in international markets," said Flavell. The agreement was evidence of Maori innovating and moving products and services up the value chain, forming long-term international partnerships, and building economic value for the future, he added.

Miraka uses geothermal steam from the Mokai geothermal field, owned by shareholder Tuaropaki Trust, to run its processing operations. Up until now it has manufactured products for its customers, including powders and UHT but will now start shipping the Whai Ora smoothie blend, without specifying when the exports will start.

New Zealand exported $851 million to Malaysia in the year to March 2017, 4.5 percent lower than in the prior year.

(BusinessDesk)

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New Zealand's services sector, which accounts for about two-thirds of the economy, shuffled along at its slowest pace in almost five years as a combination of school holidays and unseasonably wet weather were seen as weighing on activity.

The BusinessNZ-Bank of New Zealand performance of services index dropped 6 points to 52.8 in April, its lowest level since December 2012 and a slide from what was the second-highest reading in the prior 18 months. A reading of 50 separates expansion from contraction, and New Zealand's services sector has been in expansion since July 2010.

Two of the five sub-indices shrank in April, with stocks/inventories down 10.3 points to 46.7 and supplier deliveries falling 7 points to 48.5. Activity/sales dropped 8.6 points to 52.3 and new orders/business fell 10.2 points to 55.6, while employment increased 2.8 points to 55.8.

"The timing of school and public holidays looks to be the main culprit disrupting activity, although some appalling weather through the month didnt help spending either," BNZ senior economist Doug Steel said in a note. "If there is a slowing in underlying economic momentum underway, the drop in the PSI surely overstates it."

The PSI follows its sister survey, the performance of manufacturing index, on Friday which showed a dip in manufacturing activity last month. The performance composite index, which combines the two, fell 5.2 points to 53.4 on a GDP-weighted basis and 2.9 points to 55.1 on a free-weighted basis mainly due to the slump in the services component.

BNZ's Steel said the contraction in inventories in April could support activity in the future when stock levels are replenished and that the strong employment reading indicated firms "have a fair degree of confidence in the sales outlook".

Across the regions, Northern services activity dropped 8.2 points to 51.5, while Central was down 9.1 points to 51.5. Canterbury/Westland posted a reading of 54.4, down from 58.8 in March, while Otago/Southland was the only region to register shrinking activity with a reading of 49.4 compared to 59.1 a month earlier.

(BusinessDesk)

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Carter Holt Harvey Group pulled out an A$55.4 million dividend from its Australian unit in 2016, its first such return after several years of shoring up the wood products company's books.

The Australian unit's holding company, Carter Holt Harvey Building Products, paid a dividend bigger than its profit of A$21.3 million in calendar 2016, down from A$30.7 million a year earlier, financial statements lodged with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission show. While revenue edged up 3.1 percent to A$964.7 million, the company's gross margins shrank to 8.6 percent from 9.5 percent in 2015. Still, the forgiveness of A$275 million of related party debts between 2012 and 2014 helped the Australian division get back on an even footing after slipping into negative equity and operational cash flow climbed 42 percent to A$62.3 million in the latest year.

Carter Holt's billionaire owner, Graeme Hart, tested the waters for an initial public offering of the forestry group in 2015 before shelving those plans indefinitely. A year earlier, Hart's Rank Group sold the Carter Holt Harvey's pulp and packaging businesses for $1 billion to Japan's Oji Holdings Corp and Innovation Network Corp of Japan.

The Australian operation is currently in a dispute with the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, locking out about 200 workers at its Myrtleford ply board manufacturing site when pay negotiations broke down. The company's Australian wage bill rose 6.4 percent to A$159.8 million in 2016, while pension contributions were flat at A$11.8 million. The manufacturer employs 1,700 people across 12 factories and six distribution and sales centres in Australia, according to its website.

Carter Holt Harvey Building Products reported an A$10.8 million tax expense in 2016 compared to A$10.1 million a year earlier, although its cash-flow statement showed it paid A$1.3 million to a related entity for the transfer of tax balances in 2016, down from A$5 million a year earlier. In separate accounts for Rank Group's head tax entity in Australia, Burns, Philp & Co, it said it anticipated Carter Holt Harvey's Australian business "will continue to purchase tax losses from the group during 2017" which will be paid in cash.

Carter Holt Harvey is made up of three divisions: building products makers Wood Products NZ and Wood Products Australia, and building products trade and retail supplier Carters.

(BusinessDesk)
The dairy industry's year-three report on its commitment to mitigating the environmental impact of farming shows it has achieved six of 13 goals that were set out in 2013 but hasn't yet made a dent in nitrogen loss, underlining the long-term nature of the task of improving waterways.

Nitrogen leaching in the 2015/16 year was a national average 39 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare per year, unchanged from the previous year. Of the 13 regions surveyed using the Overseer computer modelling system, seven actually had an increase in nutrient loss, the worst being Canterbury, which climbed to 64 kg/N/ha/year from a 50 kg N/ha/year rolling average for 2013/14 and 2014/15. Otago has the second-worst deterioration, with an increase to 39 kg N/ha/year from 33 kg N/ha/year.

That particular data has to be taken with a grain of salt because both Canterbury and Otago regions provided more irrigation data for the latest survey, which bumped up their nitrogen loss measure, while a more sophisticated version of Overseer was employed and there were likely changes on individual farms. A total of 9,516 farms nationwide were sampled for the 2015/16 season.

"Nitrogen loss will take longer and in some cases it's going to get worse before it gets better," DairyNZ acting chair Alister Body told BusinessDesk after a briefing in Wellington for the release of the report. He said the lack of improvement in nitrogen loss reflected changes to Overseer which masked what he believed had been "real progress".

Of the 13 goals, only two of the six goals achieved related to the latest season - riparian guidelines were completed for all regions by May 31, 2016, and for the 2015/16 season, all new dairy conversions complied with environmental standards before milk supply commenced.

Of the others, four goals missed their deadlines; 100 percent stock exclusion of all wetlands identified by a regional council as at May 31, 2012 by May 31, 2014, was marked as still in progress; A target for 50 percent of dairy farms with waterways to have a riparian management plan by May 31, 2016, was missed, with only 27 percent reached; A deadline of having nutrient management data collected from 100 percent of farms by May 31, 2015, was missed, with 83 percent of farms reached; A target of nitrogen loss and nitrogen conversion efficiency performance information reported back to 85 percent of dairy farms by Nov. 30, 2014, was missed, with 83 percent achieved.

Dairy farmers have been on the defensive because of campaigns from environmental groups and as well as taking positive steps such as fencing off and planting waterways. The sector's lobby groups and biggest participant, Fonterra Cooperative Group, have gone on the offensive - pointing to dirty urban waterways and the role of city folk on one hand, while making efforts to reconnect with those same people on the basis that they've lost contact with the reality of farming.

"Dairy farmers are certainly feeling pressure from public opinion," Body said. That's why they're keen now to "tell their story. I don't think we've been very good at that in the past."

Minister for Primary Industries Nathan Guy was on hand to help the cause at today's briefing, saying the "fantastic numbers" in the report meant it was "a day about celebration".

He praised the voluntary efforts of farmers including 26,197 kilometres of new fencing since the Sustainable Dairying: Water Accord was announced while adding that urbanisation and industrial waste was part of the problem and it was "pointless to play the blame game."

DairyNZ chief executive Tim Mackle was asked by Federated Farmers president William Rolleston if he agreed with "greenie groups" that New Zealand actually needed to reduce the national dairy herd. He replied: "I'm an optimist. I believe we can have our cake and eat it. I believe that science can offer us solutions". The nation shouldn't rush to a conclusion that there were too many dairy cows.

His acting chair, Body, added that "fewer animals and greater protection for the environment is the better way", while Guy said it wasn't a question of a moratorium of dairy cows but a catchment by catchment issue.

(BusinessDesk)
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SEATTLE: Artificial intelligence or AI as it is called in cyber parlance, and believed to be the next big thing in information and technology, can play key role in good governance, a senior Microsoft official has said.



"We are seeing that governments are benefitting through Artificial Intelligence and are able to bring (governance) closer to people in their countries," Dave Forstrom, director of communications for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) group at Microsoft, told PTI.

"Absolutely," he said when asked if AI can be a tool in good governance.



"In terms of helping create good governance we're seeing an approach industry-wide right now where it's focused on ethical design and those principles that will help to really govern that," he said on the sidelines of the Microsoft's annual developers conference Build 2017.



Microsoft's India-born CEO Satya Nadella has identified AI as the center piece of the company's growth strategy.



Forstrom said Microsoft is having partnerships with a number of governments in this regard.



"Singapore is one that we recently worked with last year to actually help them create bots to better engage their customers," he said.



"We're seeing organisations, we're seeing governments, Singapore being one of them, where they've actually been working at creating bots where people can come to their bot through their website and be able to access any information that they want. They can ask questions, it really shortens the process and the interaction between government and customer," Forstrom said.



With the amount of data that is being now generated, it is but natural that artificial intelligence has now arrived at a take off stage, he said.



Microsoft, he said, is currently working with numerous governments on different AI related technologies, not just bots, but also cognitive services and how they can take those and infuse those into different solutions for folks who govern.



In India, for instance Microsoft is working on the applicability of AI on improving approach to agriculture and crop sowing.



"It's a great example of what we're doing in India where we're actually using the power of AI to help farmers determine best times for seeding and for sowing their crops. And they're seeing 30 per cent return from it," Forstrom said.



The senior Microsoft official said AI could be of great usage in various fields, including public health, law and order, education and even city sanitation and cleanliness.



But AI comes with challenges too, he said.



"How do you make sense of the data that exists within an organisation, within a government? AI is starting to help fuel that, and a lot of the products and services, the tools that are coming out, are helping to fuel that too," he said in response to a question.



At the same time, he acknowledged that AI has a long way to go.



"If you look at where we are in terms of AI's progression, it has been around for 50-60 years, the historical research and what's been going on. But it's only been these last few years where we really see things start to accelerate because of these areas like cloud computing, progress in terms of algorithms and the power of data, being able to use these massive amounts of data, but it's really early days now," Forstrom said.



"We're actually able to see tangible results and outcomes now in terms of how we can use AI in consumer scenarios and business scenarios. We will start to see that just continue to explode exponentially as we move forward over the next ten years," he said.

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NEW DELHI: Indian students, with 63 scholarships, were the second largest beneficiary of the EU-funded Erasmus Mundus Programme, to take a Joint Masters degree in Europe, a statement said.

A total of 1,345 students from all over the world have been awarded an Erasmus Mundus scholarship in 2017, with students from Brazil, India and Iran the top beneficiaries, a statement from the European Union said.

The grants will cover all the costs of their study, most of them lasting two years. Around 5,000 Indian students from all parts of India have already received Erasmus Mundus Masters scholarships between 2004 and 2016, making India the single largest beneficiary of the Programme.

The awardees for 2017 were selected from nearly 24,000 applicants. 25 per cent of scholarships go to students from the EU and five other countries that have signed up and pay to take part in the Erasmus programme, with the other 75 per cent going to students in partner countries. Students from over 120 countries will benefit from the EU-funded scholarships.

Leading the ranking of sending countries is Brazil, with 79 scholarships, followed by India (63), Iran (59), Bangladesh (58) and Mexico (49). The US, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Philippines and Ukraine also figure prominently.

Currently, there are 100 Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters degree programmes on offer, involving 513 institutions. Each programme is offered by a consortium of at least three higher education institutions, though most are larger, and participants study in at least two of the organising institutions.

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SINGAPORE: Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba on Sunday held extensive talks with his Singaporean counterpart Lai Chung Han and explored ways to further step up maritime cooperation between the two countries.



Lanma arrived in Singapore on Sunday to participate in an event on Monday to commemorate 50 years of the Singaporean Navy as well as to witness a mega exercise between the navies of the two countries.

Four warships of the Indian Navy and long range anti- submarine warfare aircraft P-8l would be part of the exercise with the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN). The aim of the exercise is to enhance and expand coordination between the two navies in the Indian Ocean Region.



In their talks, Lanba and Lai touched upon a number of key issues concerning maritime security and deliberated on ways to boost cooperation between the two navies.



Admiral Lanba will be attending the International Maritime Review (IMR) tomorrow, an event being organised by the RSN to celebrate its 50th years of establishment. The event is being attended by navy chiefs of at least 30 countries.



He will also attend the International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (IMDEX) 2017.



"Besides attending the IMR and IMDEX 17, the visit aims to consolidate existing Maritime Cooperation initiatives as well as explore new avenues," Indian Navy Spokesperson Captain D K Sharma said.



Indian naval ships Sahyadri and Kamorta have also arrived in Singapore to participate in the IMR and IMDEX.



Defence cooperation between India and Singapore is on an upswing in the last few years. India had signed a defence cooperation agreement with Singapore in 2003, which was renewed in 2015.



The Indian Navy and Singapore Navy are partners in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), a multilateral maritime cooperation forum, conceptualised and pioneered by the Indian Navy in 2008.



Both the countries have been conducting the bilateral exercise 'SIMBEX' (Singapore India Maritime Bilateral Exercise) since 1994. The next edition of the exercise is scheduled to be conducted off Singapore from May 18 to 24.



Warships from both the countries regularly visit each other's ports.



The last visit by the Chief of the Naval Staff to Singapore was by then chief Admiral R K Dhowan in 2015.



Singaporean Navy Chief Lai had last visited India in February last year.



"Singapore share similar maritime challenges such as coastal security, large coastal shipping and fishing fleet, wherein both navies have opportunities to learn from each other's experiences. In addition, ground exists for cooperation on a number of issues common to both navies," said Sharma.

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Will Take India's Regional Cuisine To The World: Chef Vikas Khanna

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NEW DELHI: He has been named the "Hottest Chef of America" by People magazine and has won a Michelin star for his restaurant in New York, but Chef Vikas Khanna's roots remain in India -- and he now wants to take the country's regional cuisines to the world.

"My focus for the next 10 years will be on regional cuisine. Though it is extremely tough to assimilate all of Indian cuisines under one roof, I am trying my best. I want to bring as much of India as possible to the US," Khanna, 45, told IANS in an interview on the sidelines of an event where he launched Quaker Nutritious Food products.

Khanna has put Indian gastronomical delights on the world food map and was recently named by Gazette Review in its list of Top 10 Chefs in the World.

His charm is no secret. From serving food to the Obamas to gifting his book "Utsav" to a host of global personalities, Khanna has immensely contributed to giving Indian culture and delicacies a global identity.

Twelve handcrafted, gold-gilded, hand-painted copies of "Utsav" were created. They have been presented to world leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, former US Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Britain's Queen Elizabeth, religious leades like the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis and celebrities like Lata Mangeshkar, Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, among others.

The 12th was to have been presented to Apple founder Steve Jobs, but he died before this could happen. It was auctioned earlier this year and went for a whopping Rs 30 lakh (more than $46,000) that will feed 200,000 under-privileged children in India through the NGO Smile that Khanna supports.

Talking about his love for regional cuisines, nothing can be more exciting for him than discovering the hidden recipes of the eight northeastern states.

"I would love to explore the northeast more. I have travelled extensively in the northeast, even have taken choppers to go to the remote corners of the region to know about their hidden food and recipes. Their way of life has not been touched because of connectivity issues. Things are very pure and natural over there," Khanna explained.

On his many trips to the northeast he encountered several techniques that cannot be performed in a modern kitchen.

"I have found how, in places where there is no refrigeration, people are preserving food. For instance, take spinach, add garlic, wrap it in a banana leaf and bury it under the ground. It'll virtually be fresh for ever. The whole of the northeast is home to such natural culinary tricks," he pointed out.

His love for regional recipes is evident from "Utsav", a magnum opus of 1,200 pages that covers the length and the breadth of the country. The book, which took 12 years to compile, also explores the festivals, ceremonies and rituals that symbolise India.

"But still it covers only 12 per cent of what we have. The remaining 88 pct cannot be penned down. You will not get to know them because they are from diverse regions and so many of the recipes have been forgotten," the chef lamented.

Khanna opened his first restaurant, Junoon, and, in virtually no time, it started attracting praise from every quarter. Junoon has been awarded a Michelin star by the Michelin Guide for six consecutive years since 2011.

Former US President Bill Clinton once said to him: "Vikas, I hope you will focus on selling culture and not food. Because culture is more important than the food."

"More than focusing on food, we need to highlight our culture as cuisines are equally a part of it. We are aware of Western dishes because of their marketing. We have so much of beauty and diversity, but we don't push it," Khanna lamented.

Asked about the trends that would rule the gastronomic world this year, he said it was the Spanish Tapas cuisine for him. And what would be over done? "Punjabi food," was the quick reply.

Everything else apart, he is also working on a new book.

"My new book, 'My First Kitchen', is going to be released soon. It is a massive book on how to run your kitchen, how to do parties in your kitchen, how to make cocktails and mocktails, and how to be very , very conscious about your cooking," Khanna said.

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WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has said that he wants to stop illegal immigration into the US and called for a merit-based immigration system that could benefit high-tech professionals from countries like India.



"I want to stop illegal immigration...I want people to come into the country legally. I want people to come in on merit. I want to go to a merit-based system," Trump told The Economist.



He praised Australia and Canada for their merit-based immigration system.



"I like those systems very much, they're very strong, they're very good, I like them very much. We're going to a much more merit-based system," Trump said without giving an indication of the details of his new immigration policy to come.



"I absolutely want talented people coming in, I want people that are going to love our country coming in, I want people that are going to contribute to our country coming in," said the US President, who last month ordered a review of immigration policies in particular the H-1B work visas which is highly popular among Indian IT workers and companies.



"We want a provision at the right time, we want people that are coming in and will commit to not getting not receiving any form of subsidy to live in our country for at least a five-year period," Trump said in an apparent hint at the forthcoming policy.



"We also want farm workers to be able to come in. You know, we're going to have work visas for the farm workers. If you look, you know we have a lot of people coming through the border, they're great people and they work on the farms and then they go back home. We like those people a lot and we want them to continue to come in," he said in response to a question.

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Source: PTI
"Beasts of No Nation" courtesy photo | Netflix

By John Serba | jserba@mlive.com

Need a Netflix recommendation? Never fear. Your intrepid, highly opinionated movie critic is here to help. A while back, I listed 25 movies you should watch on the streaming service, and now I'm following up with an additional 25. And yes, you cynics out there, Netflix indeed features 50 movies worth watching - and then some, I might add. Here are fresh recommendations, available as of May 13, 2017.

Don't Edit

'All Good Things'

Did you watch the brilliant HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Live and Deaths of Robert Durst? Well, this drama starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst - both excellent - is based on the unsolved murder believed to be perpetrated by Durst in 1982. Making All Good Things led director Robert Jarecki to the true story, which eventually became The Jinx.

Don't Edit

'Anvil: The Story of Anvil'

One of the great music-biz documentaries is about a band you probably dont know exists - although this 2008 film put them in a spotlight brighter than the Canadians heavy metal sounds ever inspired. I call this movie, a chronicle of Anvils decades-long struggle to earn a living as a recording and touring act, the poverty-ridden flipside to Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and a real-life riff on This is Spinal Tap. Its a fascinating, funny and sad examination of the disarmingly tender friendship between musicians Steve Lips Kudlow and Robb Reiner and, by extension, the human condition.

Don't Edit

'Beasts of No Nation'

Note to True Detective fans: first season director Cary Fukunaga makes movies, too. Beasts is his 2015 drama - a Netflix original movie - about African child soldiers, starring the ever-charismatic Idris Elba. Note: Fukunagas excellent Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, is also streaming.

Don't Edit

'Coraline'

Author Neil Gaiman is once again atop the pop-culture bubble thanks to the new, critically acclaimed TV adaptation of his bestseller "American Gods." He also penned the book that inspired "Coraline," a superb, terrifically creepy stop-motion-animation story about a girl who discovers a door to a parallel world that seems better than her own. Until she meets her Other Mother, at least.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

'Downfall'

More people have seen the myriad Adolf Hitler rant parody clips on YouTube - e.g., Hitler reacts to the sub-prime mortgage crisis - than have seen the film that inspired them. Bruno Ganz plays the fascist dictator in this biodrama chronicling the final days of World War II. Its a tremendous film.

Don't Edit

'The Fly'

If youve ever wanted to see Vincent Price play a guy with a giant insect head, well, here you go. A cult horror classic from 1958, and one of Prices most beloved roles.

Don't Edit

'Glengarry Glen Ross'

I have a great lead for you here: Watch this impeccably written 1992 film - courtesy David Mamet, based on his play - for its meticulous characterizations of desperate salesmen, played by Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin. Is this the greatest boys-club cast ever? Its at least a finalist.

Don't Edit

'Gremlins'

Because one can never get enough 80s nostalgia. Or creatures exploding in microwaves.

Don't Edit

'Heathers'

This dark, dark 1989 comedy about vicious high school cliques - starring Winona Ryder, Christian Slater and Shannen Doherty - boasts one of the most highly quotable scripts ever. Show this in a triple-feature with Clueless and Mean Girls.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

'Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey'

Two dogs and a cat are on the road together after they mistakenly think their owners abandoned them. A corny kiddie Disney flick from 1993? Sure, why not, if only as a nostalgic look back at a world when live-action dogs and cats were played by real dogs and cats, and not created with computers. Also, hey, Michael J. Fox and Sally Field are in this? Side note: Heres hoping Disneys deal with Netflix means more goofy old catalog titles like this make it to the streaming service.

Don't Edit

'The Immigrant'

Filmmaker James Gray is enjoying some critical acclaim for his current release "The Lost City of Z." But it'll be hard to top his previous film, 2014's "The Immigrant," a sumptuously photographed 1920s-set drama starring Marion Cotillard as a desperate French woman, new to America, who's exploited by Joaquin Phoenix's unscrupulous creep. Jeremy Renner plays the righteous fellow who steps in to help her. This is a great movie.

Don't Edit

'The Impossible'

If your couch armrests need a good gripping, fire up this intense survival drama about a family separated and swept away by a tsunami while on vacation. Naomi Watts was Oscar nominated for her performance; Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland co-star.

Don't Edit

'Kubo and the Two Strings'

Trivia: Kubo is one of the very few animated films ever Oscar-nominated for its visual effects. The story of a boy on a quest for his fathers powerful samurai armor is a beautiful display of stop-motion - it employs puppets and 3D-printed figures - and features the voices of Art Parkinson, Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey.

Don't Edit

'The Midnight Meat Train'

Here's this list's requisite hoot: a terrible, just terrible horror film starring a pre-superstar Bradley Cooper ("The Hangover" came a year later) as a photographer stalking a serial killer who cuts people up on a subway train. As a wise film critic friend of mine once put it, this thing offers "a heaping helping of grade-A turkey." Serve it up at your next "MST3K" party.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

'Milk'

I still would've given the Oscar to Mickey Rourke for "The Wrestler." But don't begrudge Sean Penn his award for playing groundbreaking gay activist Harvey Milk in this excellent bio from director Gus Van Sant.

Don't Edit

'Mulholland Dr.'

Considered by some to be David Lynchs masterpiece (I'm a "Wild at Heart" supporter, for what it's worth), this surreal thriller stars Naomi Watts as an amnesiac whose dreams are blurring into reality. Put any concerns about logic and linear narratives on pause when you watch this, and let Lynch suck you into his bizarre world.

Don't Edit

'Pete's Dragon'

This live-action (with CGI dragon, of course) Disney remake is charming and well-directed by David Lowery, who trades strong indies ("Ain't Them Bodies Saints") and big-budget stuff like this. His next project is the "Peter Pan" remake.

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'The Prestige'

"Inception," Christopher Nolan's other "between Batman" movie, tends to steal the spotlight. But this twisty 2006 thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as rival magicians trying to out-trick each other is well worth a watch - or a re-watch.

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'Queen of Katwe'

This terribly overlooked family-friendly based-on-a-true-story drama does something remarkable - it makes you feel good without manipulating you. Madina Nalwanga is brilliant as Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan teen who goes from illiterate girl to international chess champion, and pulls her family out of poverty in the process. David Oyelowo is her dutiful coach, and Lupita Nyong'o is her stressed-out mother; both are excellent. Mira Nair's direction is colorful and inspired.

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'The Secret Life of Pets'

This 2016 animated box-office hit - about what pets do when their owners arent around - is a recent Netflix addition.

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'The Shining'

Is this the scariest movie ever made? Yes. Does it need any introduction or further description? No. Already seen it? Watch it again.

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'Snow Buddies'

The immortal 1997 Disney film Air Bud - about a Golden Retriever who plays basketball real good - spawned one of the most creatively vital franchises in cinema history. Once Bud subsequently mastered football, baseball, soccer and volleyball (hockey gets no respect, again), the series shifted to Buddies, about a pack of Golden Retriever pups conquering the world with cuteness in no less than seven films, all of which are on Netflix. I choose Snow Buddies over Space Buddies, Santa Buddies, Air Buddies, Super Buddies, Spooky Buddies and Treasure Buddies because I like snowy cinematography, and the Buddies befriend a widdle Husky pup.

Inventory note No. 1: the two "Santa Paws" films are spinoffs, part of the "Buddies" narrative, but please note, "The Search for Santa Paws" is actually a prequel to "Santa Buddies," despite being released a year later. Inventory note No. 2: "Drinking Buddies" is not, and I underscore not, part of the franchise.

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'We Need to Talk About Kevin'

This 2011 psychodramatic thriller stars Tilda Swinton - playing the mother of a boy displaying troubling behaviors - in whats among her many, many fine performances to date. Its an exquisite display of acting, and Lynne Ramsays direction matches it. Dont overlook this dark, challenging story.

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'Wet Hot American Summer'

This 2001 comedy has a passionate cult following - its chock-full of pre-fame stars (Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler) and boasts an approach to comedy thats almost anti-funny, with jokes and gags so lame, you laugh at them. Its an offbeat curiosity that spawned an eight-episode, direct-to-Netflix prequel series.

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'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'

A watershed technical achievement upon its release in 1988, this live action/animation combo is still very funny and visually convincing. Its also a superb send-up of classic Hollywood noir.

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"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" courtesy photo | Disney/Marvel

More on movies

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25 terrible movies on Netflix you should delete from your list

Summer movie preview: The season's 31 most anticipated and 12 least anticipated movies

Movie reviews:

'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2': More of the same clever fun is just fine

'Colossal': Anne Hathaway is a beast in bizarre comedy

'Free Fire': Bullets and zingers fly in cynical action-comedy

'Gifted': Chris Evans gives contrived melodrama shot of sincerity

'The Fate of the Furious': The franchise's dumbest entry yet
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Today's archive page is from Jan. 10, 1952.

Frankel's presents "three exciting new fashions" in an ad on the society page of the Advance.

The three Leeds brand pieces are a short coat, suit and coat. All are available for $49.98.

The store, located in Port Richmond, urges customers to come in and open a new charge account with the purchase of one of the Leeds products.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- While Rep. Daniel Donovan won re-election in November with a 20+ point margin, the moderate Republican already has three challengers waiting to spar in 2018, and he is facing criticism from conservative constituents who voted for him but feel betrayed by his recent Obamacare repeal vote.

For months, protestors from liberal activist groups like MoveOn.org and Make the Road New York, and a host of health care-related organizations held court outside Donovan's Staten Island and Brooklyn district offices as Congress prepared to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

While they chanted, sang and spoke on the street below, one story up Donovan said he only supports a repeal if a suitable replacement followed.

Donovan said he would vote against the initial GOP plan, although it never came to a vote, and finally voted "no" when the House of Representatives cast ballots.

He cited the New Yorkers who would lose health insurance and the hospitals that would lose tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.

He opposed the Medicaid amendment that would give tax breaks to all counties outside the city, leaving the five boroughs to pick up the $2.3 billion tab, and the provision that prohibits tax credits to be used on plans that cover abortions, making New Yorkers ineligible.

While the vocal critics applauded the congressman they once lambasted, Donovan found himself in the crosshairs of his conservative constituents.

They took to social media to air their grievances: Their congressman who vowed to change the health insurance plan instead voted against ending Obamacare.

'HE'S GOING TO HAVE A BIG PROBLEM'

"I was a begrudging Donovan supporter but I'm telling you though, he's going to have a big problem," conservative Scott Fertitta told the Advance.

He voted for Donovan, but sees him as ignoring his constituents, who support President Donald Trump's agenda.

Donovan campaigned on repealing Obamacare with its high premiums and deductibles, while making clear he supported components of it, like coverage of pre-existing conditions and keeping young adults on their parents' plans.

"He did a complete 180 and we might as well have a Democrat," said Fertitta, who used to be a member of the Richmond County Tea Party Patriots.

"This is not what we want from an elected Republican sitting in our own congressional seat," he added.

He said he believes Donovan bowed to pressure from the constant protesting and calls to his office.

"He was susceptible to a calling campaign from a few people who are never going to vote for him to begin with," Fertitta said.

Cara Trentadue also voted for Donovan and is disappointed.

"My problem with him is how he voted 'no' to repeal and replace," she said. "He promised he would, and I feel [he] is using ridiculous excuses why he changed his mind.

Trentadue sent the Advance a photo of her standing next to Donovan, both of them smiling.

"The big picture is that Obamacare had to go," she said. "I supported him and voted for him because of that reason, and I feel betrayed."

'COMMITTED TO FIXING HEALTH CARE'

Donovan spokeswoman Alexia Sikora said, "Congressman Donovan's position hasn't changed. He believes Obamacare is broken and is committed to fixing health care, but this bill didn't get us there. There are always some people who will want you to vote another way, but the congressman believes strongly in trying to do what's best for the people he represents. The AHCA is still being worked on, and it's his deep hope that we can come together to reform the bill to actually make costs affordable and deliver quality care."

Both Fertitta and Trentadue said they may not vote for the congressman again.

"To tell the truth, I'm not sure," Trentadue said. "But I certainly would be open to another candidate now. I'm very disgusted."

Fertitta said that while in the past few elections Democrats haven't put up strong challengers, "I hope the next election they do. I would probably vote for Mike McMahon over him."

3 CHALLENGERS AND COUNTING

So far, three Democrats have filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run against Donovan in 2018 and more are expected to join them.

Zach Emig is a bond trader who moved from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to Tompkinsville a few months ago.

The 40-year-old Democrat has never run for office before but after volunteering for Hillary Clinton's campaign and seeing people who were "feeling outraged or paralyzed ... shocked" by Trump's win, decided to run.

The one goal of progressives in 2018 "is to defeat the one Republican congressman in the city," he said.

He's focusing on putting together a campaign team and "relentlessly fundraising."

Boyd Melson is a retired boxer and member of the Army Reserve who lives in Bensonhurst after recently moving from Manhattan.

He was in health care sales for five years and currently teaches fitness classes at a gym.

He has visited family on Staten Island and spent time at William H. Pouch Scout Camp as a child, but he never lived in the borough.

While Melson confirmed a paperwork snafu has him registered as a member of the Independence Party in Manhattan, he assured that he has rectified the issue to be properly registered as a Democrat in Brooklyn.

At age 35, he too has never run for public office, and said he doesn't like partisan politics, preferring not to "[shove] a party direction to the far right or far left down people's throats."

He wants to challenge Donovan because, "this congressman's not responsive to the people, he's not willing to hold town halls."

Neither candidate has met with party leaders in either Staten Island or Brooklyn to discuss their candidacy and possible support for their campaigns.

Michael DeVito Jr. lives in Westerleigh, is a former staff sergeant in the Marines and is the third candidate to challenge Donovan.

He is senior director of workforce initiatives at New York Center for Interpersonal Development.

He was unavailable for an interview before deadline.

Donovan campaign spokeswoman Jessica Proud said, "We literally just had the election, where Congressman Donovan won a resounding victory. Dan is focused on doing the people's business and delivering results, not worrying about partisan attacks from the sidelines. People are rightfully sick of the constant campaigning when there are serious issues that need our leader's attention."

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A repeat felon facing a potential lifetime sentence for three armed holdups last year, begged a justice Monday to lower his $1 million bail, saying he has addiction and medical issues and wants to be with his family until the case is resolved.

"I'm 58 years old. I am not a flight risk. I will humbly take what lies ahead of me," Carlo Dipadova told state Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Rooney at a conference.

"I've been addicted most of my life," said the Eltingville resident, adding he has serious health issues which sometimes prevent him from "stand[ing] on my feet."

"I've done things high I never would have done sober. ... I do not have any significant monies. Your Honor, let me spend some time with my mother, my father, my brother," implored Dipadova.

The defendant said he'd submit to random drug tests and would wear an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Moments earlier, defense lawyer Maxwell Gould had called Dipadova's bail "excessive" and requested lowering it to $50,000 cash or $100,000 bond.

Assistant District Attorney Frank Prospero opposed the application, saying the circumstances of the case had not changed since bail was initially set.

Citing the defendant's multiple prior felony convictions, his warrant history and a sentence in this case requiring a lifetime prison component, Rooney kept bond at $1 million, but dropped cash bail to $250,000.

Dipadova did not post the revised bail, according to online city Correction Department records.

During the conference, Prospero said prosecutors are offering Dipadova, designated a mandatory persistent felon due to his criminal history, a sentence of 16 years to life in exchange for a guilty plea to second-degree robbery.

Dipadova faces a minimum sentence of 20 years to life if convicted of first-degree robbery, the top charge against him. He could potentially be sentenced to three consecutive terms if found guilty at trial of all three counts of first-degree robbery lodged in an indictment against him.

"My client does want to think about that," Gould said, referring to the plea offer.

Prosecutors allege Dipadova brazenly stuck up three stores at gunpoint shortly before last Christmas.

He struck at GameStop, 2875 Richmond Ave., New Springville, on Dec. 7; New York Man Suits, 2555 Richmond Ave., New Springville, on Dec. 12; and Payless shoe store, 2955 Veterans Road West, Charleston on Dec. 13, said prosecutors.

Dipadova netted less than $1,000 for the three heists, officials said.

Cops nabbed him after the final robbery and recovered a .380-caliber handgun he allegedly brandished during the robberies. Officers also found crack cocaine, said police.

The case was adjourned to June 7 for another conference.

Online records of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision show Dipadova has served three state prison stints for robberies in Brooklyn.

Most recently, he was paroled in November 2008 after serving a sentence of 10 years to life.

---

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- They say it takes a village to raise a child, and, according to a recent lawsuit filed against the city by a Tottenville High School instructor, it requires at least three teachers to police a lunchroom packed with more than 250 students.

Adam Yannotta, a teacher and dean at the school, alleges he was attacked and injured while trying to break up a fight in the cafeteria on May 13 of last year.

Yannotta was the "only authority" in the lunchroom then; however, three teachers "were supposed to be ... in the school cafeteria at all times," his civil complaint alleges.

The city and Education Department, also a named defendant, were "negligent and careless in allowing their personnel to be left alone with over 250 high school students," contends the complaint.

Yannotta, 37, a Tottenville resident, allegedly suffered "severe injuries to various parts of his body ... and will continue to suffer for some time to come great pain and anguish in body and mind," alleges the complaint.

Yannotta's injuries aren't specified, nor does the complaint contain additional details about the altercation.

The suit, filed in state Supreme Court, St. George, seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Yannotta's lawyer, Orin J. Cohen, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Likewise, spokespersons for the city Law Department and Education Department did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

However, those agencies typically don't discuss pending litigation.

---

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Derek Jeter's No. 2 has been retired by the New York Yankees, who dedicated a plaque in his honor that will be placed in Monument Park behind center field.

Jeter captained the Yankees during much of a 20-year career that ended in 2014 and included five World Series titles and a New York-record 3,465 hits.

He is the 22nd player to have his number retired by New York, by far the most among major league teams, and he was the last to wear a single-digit number.

Jeter picked Mother's Day for the ceremony, and his grandmother, parents, sister, nephew and pregnant wife joined him at Yankee Stadium on Sunday.

He says "there isn't a person or player I would trade places with that's playing now or ever."
Page Content

Almonte is a bright and well-spoken young lady who enjoys heightening her vocabulary. She holds first honors and has a 90+ average in all of her subjects.

The student researchers joining Chanel are Fourth Formers, Zoria Arrindell, Marie Fidel-Balthazar, Jeremiah David and Third Former Aiyaunty Romney.

Zoria holds second honors and enjoys watching anime and reading. Marie is a sharp and endeared leader, brilliant at cards and singing. Jeremiah is a first honors student who thrives in exploring mathematics, biology, and art.

Aiyaunty is an outgoing young lady, who enjoys community service, sports, and has achieved awards in creative writing and spoken word.

The Charlotte Brookson Academy students have done an impressive amount of research on their topic. Their individual gleaning of information, in addition to the relevant material presented by guest experts invited to talk to them, have added to the depth of their discussion points tremendously.

All five students look forward to the experience of sharing their research and presenting their points with a newfound appreciation and understanding for the topic.

The panel discussion will take place on Friday, May 19 at the Sonesta Great Bay Beach Hotel from 9.00am to 12.00pm.

The winner of the panel discussion will represent Sint Maarten at the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) Youth Tourism Congress in Grenada in October.

The participating schools are: Milton Peters College four sections (MPC), Sundial School, Methodist Agogic Centre, St. Dominic High School, St. Maarten Academy and Charlotte Brookson Academy.

PHOTO CUTLINE: Charlotte Brookson Academy Panel Discussion Team.

Representing Charlotte Brookson Academy as speaker for the St. Maarten Tourist Bureaus (STB) Jr. Minister of Tourism Inter-Scholastic Panel Discussion of 2017 is Fourth Form student Chanel Almonte.
Page Content





The Sundial School Team presented the following synopsis of its debating group. The speaker of the group is Oveidy Soriano. Our speaker is a former student of Oranje School which is located right in middle of the biggest shopping promenade, Front Street. As the daughter of two working class parents Oveidy understands the benefits of hard work and plans to get into legal professions as a way of enhancing the quality of life of St. Maarteners.





Caleb Carter, the lone male researcher of the group is the last of his siblings but first in his academics. With a demonstrated interest in group and outdoor activities, he sees his participation in this activity as a chance to offer ideas that will offer ideas to help St Maarten to improve its tourism product.





Janelle Andre boasts of firsthand knowledge of the tourism industry since she has had numerous conversations with visitors while on tours conducted by her father. She expects that the experience of participating in this event will give her a better appreciation of her island home while bringing to light some of the lesser known wonders of St. Maarten.





Future medical doctor, Naomi Desaines, expressed her interest in learning more of St. Maarten, and finding some of its hidden attractions. Her fathers job at the Harbor port of entry has given her an inside view of the less glamorous activities that goes into ensuring that visitors to the island are safe and satisfied while they transfer in and out of the island. She hopes to reach more conservative visitors and give them a quality experience that will turn them to repeat visitors.





Shaniah is a responsible student who is very organized. She is quiet, kind, positive and very supportive of her peers. Shaniah is driven and inquisitive; she works hard in school and finds it important to assist where necessary. All of these attributes make her a great asset to the team.





The panel discussion will take place on Friday, May 19 at the Sonesta Great Bay Beach Hotel from 9.00am to 12.00pm.





The winner of the panel discussion will represent Sint Maarten at the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) Youth Tourism Congress in Grenada in October.





The participating schools are: Milton Peters College four sections (MPC), Sundial School, Methodist Agogic Centre, St. Dominic High School, St. Maarten Academy and Charlotte Brookson Academy.





PHOTO CUTLINE: Sundial School Panel Discussion Team.

Preparations are in full swing by the St. Maarten Tourist Bureau (STB) for the annual Junior Minister of Tourism Inter-Scholastic Panel Discussion.
Activities





Veena Chandra, Tillman Nechtman Veena Chandra, Tillman Nechtman

Veena Chandra, private music instructor, and Tillman Nechtman, associate professor of history, recently collaborated on a musical and historical presentation, "East Meets West," April 30 at the Saratoga National Historical Park. Chandra performed a concert of 18th-century Indian music, and Nechtman spoke about the relationship between 18th century India and the American Revolution. The event was sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts.



Feryaz Ocakli Feryaz Ocakli

Feryaz Ocakli, assistant professor of political science, won the Frank Cass Prize for Best Article by a Young Scholar in the journal Democratization (Volume 23, Issue 4) for his essay, "Political Entrepreneurs, Clientelism, and Civil Society: Supply-Side Politics in Turkey." The Cass prizes are awarded annually for articles that "most enhance our knowledge and understanding of democratization."



Mary Zeiss Stange Mary Zeiss Stange

Mary Zeiss Stange, professor emerita of women's studies and religion, attended the General Assembly of the International Council on Game and Wildlife Conservation April 2729 in Montreux, Switzerland. As a member of the US delegation, an expert member of the organization, and vice president of its Artemis Working Group on Women and Sustainable Hunting, Stange addressed the conference on the subject of "Urban and Rural Perceptions of Women and Sustainable Hunting in the U.S." Earlier, she attended the annual "Rendezvous" of the conservation group Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, April 79 in Missoula, Mont. She served as moderator in a workshop session on hunting ethics.



Gordon Thompson, Ben Harwood Gordon Thompson, Ben Harwood

Gordon Thompson, professor of music, and Ben Harwood, lead instructional technologist in Academic Technologies, spoke at the Council of Independent Colleges' "Information Fluency" workshop April 21 in New Orleans. The topic was "Advances in Resources for Arts Education." They described how they created an integrated online component to Thompson's Beatles course. Thompson also facilitated conversations between teams from liberal-arts colleges looking to articulate information literacy and fluency policies in their curricula.







Please send submissions to Paul Dwyer in the Office of Communications and Marketing.
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.
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If you live in California you can find out which other neighborhoods in California are most similar to your neighborhood using the new Mix...
The GABS Beer, Cider and Food festival kicks off in May and three Canberra brewers are heading along, each armed with a unique brew just for the event.

The festival, which is the biggest of its kind in Australia and one of the top of its kind in the world, visits Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, and Canberrans can also get a smaller taste when the GABS Festival comes to Canberra on June 3 at The Durham.

Kevin Hingston of Pact Beer Co. They have teamed up with Melbourne's Butterbing Cookie Sandwiches to make a salted caramel porter called 'Who poured the porter in the cookie jar'. Credit:Jamila Toderas

Each year, brewers are asked to produce a unique festival beer. Past years have included beers with belly-button lint, whale vomit, and this year there's one with bone marrow.

Pact Beer Co has taken the liquid dessert angle, teaming up with Melbourne's Butterbing Cookie Sandwiches to make a salted caramel porter delightfully titled 'Who Poured the Porter in the Cookie Jar'.
The country's first freelancer protections against nonpayment go into effect in New York City today, so now's a good time to brush up on a law intended to help a full third of the city's workforce get paid on time.

To recap, the law mandates that freelancers be paid in full for work worth $800 or more, either by a date set forward in writing or within 30 days of completing an assigned task. The Freelance Isn't Free Act also aims to protect freelancers from employer retaliation, and can increase monetary consequences for employers who refuse to pay. We broke down the finer details last fall, with insights from the legislation's author, Brooklyn Councilman Brad Lander, as well as the Freelancers Union, the Department of Consumer Affairs, and attorneys who represent both employers and workers.

"Starting today, New York City will be the first city in the nation to protect freelancers and independent contractors from getting stiffed," Councilman Lander stated Monday.

A 2015 report from the Freelancers Union found that more than 70 percent of freelancers in New York report problems with receiving payment.

Within two years of being stiffed, a freelancer can now file a complaint with the city's Office of Labor Standards, within the Department of Consumer Affairs. The office director will then draft a certified letter to the employer within 20 days, explaining how the freelancer's contract was allegedly breached. Best case scenario, the law will scare employers straight before a freelancer has to resort to claims court.

But court is still a possibility. And while the new law mandates double damages and attorneys fees if the judge rules in the worker's favor, the prospect of acquiring an attorney can still be a daunting one for tight-budget freelancers.

In an effort to smooth this road, the Freelancers Union today launched the Freelancers Union App to connect workers with attorneys who both specialize in small claims, and are eager to take on these types of cases.

"We had so many freelancers reaching out to us looking for attorneys that want to represent them, and realized that those can be hard to find," spokeswoman Caitlin Pearce told Gothamist last week. "And many of our members are attorneys who see this as key to their business."

The app launches today as a pilot, with about 30 attorneys active in the NYC area, according to Pearce. And while the union isn't involved in brokering the agreement between attorney and client, in general, they said, attorneys in this field tend to take cases on contingency. They understand that "if you are dealing with freelancers they won't be able to pay lawyers fees," Pearce explained (to be clear, assuming you win your case, the court directs the hiring party to pay your lawyer).

The Freelancers Union joined forces with the Department of Consumer Affairs Monday morning to distribute informational fliers at eleven transit hubs across the city, according to the DCA.

"Freelancers aren't free," Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday. "It's now the law in New York City that they be paid on time, have the written contracts they deserve and have the tools to defend their rights."
ACT youth minister Rachel Stephen-Smith was unable to explain how a Bimberi detainee managed to upload a photo of themselves inside the centre to Facebook when questioned in the ACT Legislative Assembly on Thursday.

A link to the Facebook post showing an inmate at the youth detention centre was emailed to Liberal MLA Elizabeth Kikkert.

Youth minister Rachel Stephen-Smith. Credit:Jamila Toderas

Mrs Kikkert brought the issue to the attention of the directorate.

The person who saw the image and sent it to Mrs Kikkert raised concern that the image should not have been taken or published, and suggested action be taken to have it removed.
The Commonwealth Bank appears to be testing the waters for an advertising campaign against the federal government's proposed bank levy, by paying to spread its chief executive's criticism of the new tax on social media.

Australia's big four banks and Macquarie have cried foul over the 0.06 per cent levy on their liabilities announced in last week's budget, saying they will have to pass the cost on to customers and shareholders.

The banks' public anger raised speculation they would launch an advertising assault against the policy, replicating the mining industry's successful attack on the Rudd government's resources super profits tax.

The banks and their lobby group, the Australian Bankers Association, have so far been silent on any plans for an ad campaign.
Following her son's death from diabetes, Violet* shifted his belongings to the back shed to help her move on. One night, a thief broke in and fled with $20,000 worth of items.

But the theft wasn't what exacerbated Violet's grief. It was the way she was treated by her insurance company's fraud investigator after she lodged a home contents claim.

The third-party investigator told her that he believed she stole the items and was a liar. He also asked a string of irrelevant questions, including about her plans for the weekend and the death of her son.

The most outrageous comment was: "No wonder you don't have a husband".
Missing out on Australia's natural gas export boom may be the best thing that happened to Arrow Energy.

The decision by the Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina joint-venture to scrap a $20 billion project to ship Arrow's fuel overseas as liquefied natural gas looks like a blessing in disguise.

Arrow Energy now plans to boost output. Credit:Robert Shakespeare

The Brisbane-based producer now plans to boost output, allowing it to take advantage of Australian prices pressured higher by tighter supply at home. Meanwhile, rivals that opted to export are grappling with cost overruns, low international prices and mounting criticism as the country faces a looming gas shortage.

"They're probably thanking their lucky stars they didn't go ahead with Arrow LNG," said Graeme Bethune, chief executive officer of EnergyQuest, an Adelaide-based research company.
The NSW government continues to lead the way on innovative criminal justice policy. Having last year committed $3.8 billion to new and improved prisons, the government is now pivoting to reforms designed to reduce the need for further prison spending over the longer-term, by lowering reoffending and improving community safety.



The government last week announced a package of reforms, including the abolition of suspended sentences and a new procedure for managing offenders released on parole. While prison is absolutely necessary for violent criminals, these reforms acknowledge that for those criminals we do release into the community, we need more options for managing their behaviour.



These reforms correctly identify reducing reoffending as a top priority. Fifty-two per cent of NSW prisoners have been imprisoned before. Twenty-nine per cent of convicted adults commit another crime within two years of their conviction. More effectively correcting offenders' behaviour will make a significant dent in the crime rate.



The parole changes are a clever way of addressing this problem. Under the current system, parole breaches are reviewed by the State Parole Authority, a time-consuming process. The reformed system will empower Community Corrections Officers to punish minor parole breaches quickly by imposing new conditions or taking away privileges. A series of breaches will lead to escalating punishments.



This change is informed by evidence from overseas. In the US, many states have adopted "swift, certain, and fair" punishments for parole and probation breaches. The idea is a response to the reluctance of some case officers to punish breaches if the only available punishment is imprisonment. Many case officers were looking the other way at minor breaches, like missed appointments, rather than sending offenders to prison. Without consequences, or with only the vague threat of revocation hanging over them, offenders had no incentive to change their behaviour.



The main benefit of this change is that it increases the certainty of punishment for parole breaches. By drawing a clear connection between the breach and the punishment, Community Corrections Officers will be able to better correct the behaviour of parolees.



This program has achieved significant results in Hawaii, especially with reducing drug use among program participants. Missed and positive tests fell 80 per cent in the first five years of the program. This in turn reduced participants' likelihood of reoffending. Other states have copied the idea and have also seen some positive results. In Texas, for example, program participants were up to 50 per cent less likely to be convicted of new crimes.



However, the program cannot guarantee success. A 2016 study of four jurisdictions found mixed results, especially for higher-risk offenders. What this suggests is that habitual offenders and those convicted of serious crimes should not be on parole in the first place. The NSW government has acknowledged this in its reforms by making community safety the foremost consideration in the decision to grant parole and by making supervision mandatory for all parolees.



Overall, managed properly, this system can reduce reoffending for lower-risk parolees. The increased level of supervision required is paid for by reducing reoffending, slowing the growth of incarceration and by handling of parole breaches more efficiently.



These parole reforms are part of a broader rationalisation of the corrections system towards community safety. This agenda can also be seen in the decision to replace suspended sentences with the expanded use of community-based corrections. Currently, convicted criminals are either imprisoned or released into the community. This change will give judges more options for punishing nonviolent, low-risk criminals, who may now be subject to home detention, curfews, and movement restrictions. These punishments are associated with better results in terms of reoffending. Breaches of corrections orders will also be subject to swift and escalating punishments. Again, the focus is on managing the transition of offenders back into society by filling in the spectrum of available punishments.



Crucially, the government is not reinventing the wheel. Its actions are consistent with community expectations of personal responsibility and fair punishment. This is good policy and good politics. The state government is showing that it is possible to both be tough on violent criminals and to pursue targeted, safety-driven punishment reform for nonviolent offenders.



Andrew Bushnell is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Consider, too, how Trump embroiled Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, despite Sessions' recusal from involvement in the Russia investigation, in preparing admittedly phony justifications for the firing on which Trump had already decided. Consider how Trump used the vice president and White House staff to propagate a set of blatant untruths - before giving an interview to NBC's Lester Holt that exposed his true motivation.

Trump accompanied that confession with self-serving - and manifestly false - assertions about having been assured by Comey that Trump himself was not under investigation. By Trump's own account, he asked Comey about his investigative status even as he was conducting the equivalent of a job interview in which Comey sought to retain his position as director.

Further reporting suggests the encounter was even more sinister, with Trump insisting that Comey pledge "loyalty" to him in order to retain his job. Publicly saying he saw nothing wrong with demanding such loyalty, the president turned to Twitter with a none-too-subtle threat that Comey would regret any decision to disseminate his version of his conversations with Trump - something that Comey has every right, and indeed a civic duty, to do.

To say that this does not in itself rise to the level of "obstruction of justice" is to empty that concept of all meaning. Obstruction of justice was the first count in the articles of impeachment against Nixon and, years later, a count against Bill Clinton. In Clinton's case, the ostensible obstruction consisted solely in lying under oath about a sordid sexual affair that may have sullied the Oval Office but involved no abuse of presidential power as such.

But in Nixon's case, the list of actions that together were deemed to constitute impeachable obstruction reads like a forecast of what Trump would do decades later - making misleading statements to, or withholding material evidence from, federal investigators or other federal employees; trying to interfere with FBI or congressional investigations; trying to break through the FBI's shield surrounding ongoing criminal investigations; dangling carrots in front of people who might otherwise pose trouble for one's hold on power.
But the attention soon waned. In February, he was interviewed for 45 minutes of publicly funded time on a podcast for The Dingoes. Only Buzzfeed's Mark di Stefano thought it wasn't the best use of a politician's time. Today, Christensen is trying to distance himself from that appearance. He's rejecting The Dingoes' anti-Semitism and racism, saying he didn't really know what they were like. It turns out The Dingoes are part of a group organising a visit from American neo-Nazi Mike Enoch. Enoch's website is littered with hate and I won't repeat it here because you all have better things to do with your time. This guy was to be the headline act for DingoCon, to be held in Sydney in July. Just to repeat: this is organised by those same Dingoes for whom Christensen appeared earlier this year. Christensen told the ABC on Monday he regretted appearing on the podcast. "It's since been pointed out to me they're extremely anti-Semitic, regularly make racial-based slurs and they subscribe to white nationalism ... I if I had known that, there is no way I would have done that interview." But to say he had no idea is bollocks. I made myself listen to the podcast. A couple of what sound like teenagers sniggering over a "hot conservative" talking to an elected representative. But the beginning of the podcast is what's instructive when listening to Christensen's claims about not knowing The Dingoes were anti-Semites. The very first thing he talks about on the podcast is GetUp's attempt to unseat him and the thousands of phone calls to constituents in his electorate during the election campaign.

He says he was targeted because he wasn't a "yes sir, no sir" kind of politician. And he describes that campaign as "George Soros-funded potshots", and then goes on to talk about Soros's mindset. If you don't know, Soros is a billionaire investor who funds progressive causes and despises Donald Trump. Soros is also Jewish. And if ever there was an anti-Semitic dog whistle, the mention of Soros is it. As Media Matters For America wrote last year, Breitbart News commonly attacks Soros and attaches anti-Semitic rhetoric to any mention of his name. The far right has accused him of everything, from the refugee crisis to the "black lives matter" movement. As The Independent wrote last year: "As the world turns to the hard right, one man has become a figure of hate for resurgent nationalists across the globe." That man is Soros. It's not the first time Christensen has fallen in with the wrong crowd. Again in February this year (he must have really felt he needed the attention), he defended his attendance at an anti-Islam function sponsored by the Q Society, because he wanted to stand against the "erosion of free speech" by the left in Australia. If you make yourself listen to the two-hour podcast  I gave up at the 45-minute mark  you will find a litany of bullshit, conspiracy theories, racism, sexism and downright lunacy. And then Christensen tries to put in a good word for Peter Dutton.

It's a complete falsehood that he didn't know who they were. At any time during the ramble, He could have pulled the plug at any time during the ramble. But he giggled and smirked, like a Dingo. Christensen: Queenslanders are magnificent. They aren't raging populists. You already saw a swing against you at the last election, mainly through the efforts of a bunch of 50-year-olds staffing the phones for GetUp and the ACTU. Pull yourself together. Take your own advice. In the podcast, you say "people want their politicians to listen but, if you are just listening and nodding your head" and not doing anything useful, then voters get upset. Then you say that if, you were a voter in the seat of a politician like that, "I would vote against that person". Your voters are already upset at your various untenable positions, your grandstanding and your nauseating self-promotion. You are a voter in a seat like that. Time to do the right thing, Christensen: pull the plug.
In 2005, while in South Africa, David Smith read a letter to a newspaper from a Cambridge academic.-It advocated organic farming in Africa and the avoidance of chemical-based agriculture including superphosphate, and argued that the lower yields from organic systems might be a good thing, because if people were not well fed they might not reproduce as much.

The argument outraged David, who wrote, in turn, to the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, to the Vice Chancellor's private secretary, to the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the Minister for International Affairs Margaret Becket and the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State, Lord Teisman.

David Smith, leading administrator and teacher in agriculture.

The episode is a good insight into David's energy and determination. It was this drive that took him from a dairy farm in the Adelaide Hills during the Depression  he was born on October 27, 1928. There was no electricity, no gas and, once petrol rationing started, no car.

David's first ambition was to be a rabbiter, the rabbits being the family's main source of food and income. Despite the obstacles David finished a degree at Adelaide University, and soon became a schoolteacher at Cummins on the Eyre Peninsula, teaching agriculture.
The community is genuinely shocked and appalled by the CCTV footage of the mistreatment and subsequent death of Miriam Merten at the acute mental health facility at Lismore Hospital. On Friday, our Prime Minister was asked if he was sufficiently affected to take immediate action as he had done in response to the video footage of the mistreatment of young people in the Don Dale Centre in the Northern Territory. The responsibility for immediate and effective action does not sit with the Prime Minister. It lies squarely with NSW Health.

So today is the day to stop passing the buck and have our NSW Health Minister, the chief executives of our Local Health Districts and our senior medical and nursing leadership take immediate action to cease the common practices of seclusion and restraint in acute psychiatric facilities. Importantly, these practices have no therapeutic value. They are psychologically and physically traumatic. They can end these practices today by direct instruction to those who implement these actions.

Very few people in this acute situation pose a major risk to the public, most are in the chaotic and disorganised state so graphically depicted in the Miriam Merten video. Others are young people, at times including children, who are being hospitalised for the first time.

The practices of seclusion and restraint simply perpetuate the stigma and public fear that surround mental health. They communicate the message that if you need acute psychiatric care, you'll simply be "locked up", not treated with respect or dignity, or worse, punished. This makes it even harder to move mental health care to where it should be located in the 21st Century, namely, in alternatives to hospitalisation. These include early intervention services, "step-up" and "step-down" facilities in residential settings and active co-ordinated programs to prevent re-hospitalisation
No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.

This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba. His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

The Tesla S electric car has only 18 moving parts.

Seba's premise is that people will stop driving altogether. We will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are 10 times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel.

Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership. The rest will adapt to vehicles on demand. It will become harder to find a petrol station, spares, or anybody to fix the 2000 moving parts that bedevil the internal combustion engine.
An influential New Jersy congressman sent a letter to a board member of a local bank in March telling him that an activist who opposes him works there.

WNYC reports that the senior employee, Sally Avelenda, was grilled after Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen sent the letter highlighting her affiliation with NJ 11th for Change, a grassroots group formed after the election of Donald Trump to challenge Frelinghuysen, a Republican and 22-year incumbent.

Avelenda was a senior vice president and attorney for Lakeland Bank but resigned recently. Speaking to the radio station, she said that pressure over her political activism was one of several reasons she stepped down.

"Needless to say, that did cause some issues at work that were difficult to overcome," she said.

Frelinghuysen represents parts of Morris, Essex, Sussex and Passaic counties in northern New Jersey, where Lakeland Bank has its branches, and chairs the House Appropriations Committee. NJ 11th For Change started as a Facebook group urging the congressman to hold a town hall, emphasizing that he hasn't held one in four years, and to oppose Trump's attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The group now boasts nearly 6,000 members, and has spawned a political action committee, founded by Avelenda with Google ad honcho Jonathan Bellack. The group is friendly with the union-backed Working Families Party.

WNYC explained further:

The group has also held weekly protests at [Frelinghuysen's] office and visits to his Washington offices. Frelinghuysen has held two telephone town halls, which offer more control than an in-person event. Last week, he complained about the number of phone calls he is receiving. For people who have jammed our lines and made it difficult for us to meet our constituent needs, it would be nice for you to back off, Frelinghuysen said. Im not suggesting people dont have a right to speak and let their views be known, but some of this is highly orchestrated and its unfortunate.

Frelinghuysen isn't up for reelection until next November, but sent a form campaign letter to supporters in March, citing "organized forcesboth national and localwho are already hard at work to put a stop to an agenda of limited government, economic growth, stronger national security." The congressman sent one of the letters to Lakeland board member Joseph O'Dowd, who donated a total of $700 to past campaigns. At the bottom of the letter, Frelinghuysen hand-wrote, "P.S. One of the ringleaders works in your bank!" He attached a news article quoting Avelenda.

Subsequently, Avelenda had to explain herself in a written statement to the bank's CEO, she said. "I thought my congressman put them in a situation, and put me in a really bad situation as the constituent, and used his name, used his position and used his stationery to try to punish me," Avelenda said.

O'Dowd, WNYC notes, is one of several people affiliated with Lakeland who donated to the New Jersey Bankers Association, a funder of the American Bankers Association. The national group lobbies extensively in Washington.

Frelinghuysen's campaign office wrote in a statement:

The Congressman wrote a brief and innocuous note at the bottom of a personal letter in regard to information that had been reported in the media. He was in no way involved in any of the bank's business and is unaware of any of the particulars about this employee's status with the bank.

His spokesman did not respond to a follow-up email asking whether he stood by the characterization of the letter as "innocuous" given that the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the word "ringleader" as meaning "a person who initiates or leads an illicit or illegal activity."

Following the publication of the WNYC report, Lakeland Bank published this statement on its Facebook page:
Are the critics right to say the Greens shouldn't entertain doing a deal with the government? No, I don't think they are. Are there flaws in the latest Gonski that could jeopardise the principle of needs-based funding it purportedly advances? Yes, there are.

By Saturday, Hanson-Young had issued a clarifying statement . The Greens had not yet made a decision on Gonski 2.0, they reiterated their call for a Senate inquiry , and they would reserve their decision until after they considered the evidence presented to the inquiry.

Shadow education minister Tanya Plibersek declared that "teachers and parents will never forgive the Greens for selling out public school kids". The I Give a Gonski campaign was no less critical : "We never thought we would see the day this would happen." The Greens' position was "unbelievable" ACTU secretary Sally McManus declared. Even Hanson-Young's Greens colleague, Lee Rhiannon, joined in, enthusiastically retweeting criticisms directed at her own party.

When Sarah Hanson-Young confirmed last week that the Greens were willing to negotiate with the federal government to pass a new school-funding package, the reaction was rapid and stinging.

Greens education spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The first problem is that the journey towards needs-based funding set out by Malcolm Turnbull and Education Minister Simon Birmingham is excruciatingly slow. As the Australian Education Union's Victorian president, Meredith Peace, pointed out: "a student in year 4 today will have left school by the time this funding is delivered". Instead of the nearly $4 billion of extra funding that was originally scheduled to arrive in years five and six of the Gonski agreements (2018 and 2019), the Turnbull government has committed to $2 billion over four years. Most of the funding growth is delayed until beyond the forward estimates.

The government's obvious response is that funding will grow: in real terms, and faster than it promised at the last election. That's true. But it's also true that the government has signed up to be judged by a different standard. In accepting the Gonski review's fundamental findings, it accepted that funding should be provided according to student need  and, on that criteria, many young Australians don't receive appropriate educational resourcing. The onus on a government that accepts this reality is to act with all speed to change it.

We've been here before. The year 4 student of today wasn't even in preschool when David Gonski presented his report to the Gillard government in November 2011. We've now reached the point when the big bucks were supposed to arrive, and they've been deferred again. If recent events have confirmed that a week is a long time in the politics of school funding, circumspection about 10-year timelines is in order. Things change, including governments.

What the Greens' critics don't seem to have noticed, though, is that the minor party has clearly recognised the imperative of locking in needs-based funding increases as quickly as possible. In the same comments in which she indicated a willingness to negotiate with the government, Hanson-Young signalled that getting more money, sooner, to disadvantaged students would be a priority.
Influential Coalition MP George Christensen has called on the government to bar US white supremacist Mike Enoch from spreading hatred in Australia, despite having appeared as a guest of the racist group hosting Mr Enoch.

The anti-Semitic American is slated to attend a Sydney white nationalist conference on July 1, organised by local racist group The Dingoes, Fairfax Media revealed on Saturday.

The anonymous Dingoes interviewed Mr Christensen on their podcast in February, but the staunch free-speech MP now argues a visa application by their "neo-Nazi" guest should be knocked back.

"Like radical Islamic sheikhs that come here to spread messages of hate, these people ... shouldn't be allowed into the country," Mr Christensen told ABC radio.
The Turnbull government will need to spend $1.3 billion on shipyards and oversee the creation of an army of skilled workers to realise a national naval shipbuilding industry.

The Naval Shipbuilding Plan, released on Tuesday, outlines how the government will achieve one of its signature promises: the creation of a local industry that can build $89 billion worth of ships over the coming decades.

Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne. Credit:Louise Kennerley

But the plan outlines the scale of the challenge, including massive upgrades of the shipyards outside Adelaide and at Henderson in Western Australia, the $1.3 billion cost of which will be borne by the taxpayer and comes on top of the price tag for ships themselves.

It also warns there will be significant challenges in raising and training a skilled workforce that will have to grow sharply from the early 2020s and which, unless centrally managed by the government, could fall short and rob other industries and the navy of vital skills.
Former prime ministers Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, whose famous clashes were some of the most hostile in Australian political history, will both be presented with honorary doctorates by Israeli universities this week.

Mr Abbott, a staunch backer of Israel, will be honoured by Tel Aviv University on Thursday while Ms Gillard, also sympathetic to the Zionist cause, is heading to Ben-Gurion University on Tuesday for what will be her fifth honorary degree.

"The Israelis, in their wisdom, are giving me an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University later in the week," the former Liberal leader told Sydney radio station 2GB, speaking from Jordan.

"And I'll also have the chance to discuss the wider security situation and I'm also hoping to visit some Australian troops who are visiting this part of the world."
My father updated his will just before his death. I have absolutely no idea what he was trying to document.

I should have asked him years ago. But once he got sick, it was too late.

Sudden poor eyesight was diagnosed as an aggressive brain tumour requiring surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and handfuls of medication. It bought us six months with him.

Doctors warned Dad to get his affairs in order. I thought he'd already done that. But there he was, re-writing his will in the final two or three months of his life. He talked about his wishes and told me he'd made notes, but none of it ever saw the light of day.
It's the time away from his grandchildren that angers Mike Bounds the most about having his driver's licence revoked.

The 75-year-old can no longer drive to visit his two youngest grandkids after he received a letter saying he was unfit to drive due to having an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Michael Bounds, 75, has had his driver's licence revoked despite having a medical condition deemed as safe by his specialist. Credit:Steven Siewert

The aneurysms, which are balloon-like swellings of arteries, can cause sudden death if they burst, which is why people who have them require a 12-month conditional licence.

But if the aneurysms are under about five centimetres or are repaired, they pose no danger.
It was during the lunch break on her fifth day of evidence that it all became too much for Eman Sharobeem.

To the allegations of fake PhDs and a fake CV had been added fake names and fake claims.

Eman Sharobeem leaves the ICAC on Monday. Credit:Kate Geraghty

Fake names she used to bill $100,000 in a year on top of her pay, fake claims for fridges and a dishwasher in her home.

And with $11,000 of taxpayer funds dropped at a cosmetic clinic, including at least $2000 on Botox, perhaps even more isn't quite as it seems.
A 12-year-old girl, sexually assaulted on her way to school on Monday morning, was able to give a "very clear" description of her attacker despite the ordeal, police say.

The girl was walking to school along a path at Narara, on the Central Coast, about 7.45am when she was grabbed from behind and dragged into nearby bushland.

Police have cordoned off a path where a schoolgirl was grabbed and sexually assaulted. Credit:Seven News

A man wearing camouflage clothing and wielding a hunting knife tied her up before she was sexually and indecently assaulted.

Police say the girl was eventually able to escape, running to school where she raised the alarm at 9am.
A sobbing man told Sydney police: "I want my baby back, she's dead, she killed herself."

Gavin John de Beyer then motioned as if he were holding a knife with both hands and thrust it towards his stomach, a jury has been told.

He said he tried to save his wife, Sharon Louise Michelutti, who had jumped on a knife, the NSW Supreme Court heard on Monday.

A number of police officers gave evidence on Monday in the trial of Mr de Beyer, 51, who has pleaded not guilty to murdering Ms Michelutti at their Riverwood home on February 1, 2016.
Clint Greagen's decision to become a stay-at-home dad to his four sons made perfect sense for his family, but he acknowledges the choice makes him a rarity among families.

The 43-year-old gave up his job as a youth worker 10 years ago to allow his wife Tania Pizzari to focus on her physiotherapy practice while he concentrated on child-rearing.

"I was happy to stay at home," he said. "It made sense for our family."

Now father to Archie, 12, Lewis, 10, Tyson, 8, and Maki, 5, Mr Greagen is surprised by how few families take the same path.
A popular Upper West Side restaurant closed today, apparently without warning. Isabella's posted a sign noting that "this location has permanently closed," according to West Side Rag, which also reported a passerby saying, "Wow, they were open last night."

Isabella's occupied the southeast corner of West 77th Street and Columbus Avenuea block from Central Park and across the street from the American Museum of Natural Historyand had a large al fresco dining section on Columbus Avenue. Lines for brunch were a familiar weekend sight. It was also a "hot" restaurant back in the 1990sin the Seinfeld episode "The Visa," Jerry complained about it:

Elaine: Alright, well if you change your mind, we'll wind up at Isabella's probably around seven. Jerry: No, no Isabella's, I don't want to go to Isabella's. Elaine: Why? Jerry: No, it's too trendy, no Isabella's.

"The landlord chose not to renew our lease," an employee told West Side Rag. Isabella's was owned by BR Guest, which also owns Blue Water Grill, Dos Caminos and Bill's Burgers. The company was recently bought by restaurateur Tillman Fertitta, who had boasted in November, "Its 15 Manhattan restaurants that include the Dos Caminos, the Bills Burgers of Manhattan, the Atlantic Grills, Blue Water Grill and Isabellas. When you put those with our Chart House and Bubba Gumps and Maestros and Mortons, it will give us 21 restaurants in Manhattan, which will make us the largest independent operator in Manhattan."

Upper West Side resident Joseph Bolanos told West Side Rag, "What one man built and operated successfully for over two decades, was destroyed by corporate entities in recent years that lacked any knowledge of our UWS community and the landmark value of Isabellas."

A diner posted a review of her Mother's Day brunch experience on Yelp today, "Going to Isabella's was a Mother's Day tradition but that came to end yesterday. They no longer give you a complimentary beverage, not even coffee or tea, with your brunch entree on holidays. This was the appeal of going for brunch there considering the food is nothing to brag about..."
A Brisbane chef who killed and dismembered his Indonesian partner before taking his own life in 2014 had seen a doctor for anxiety, depression and a sleep disorder in the weeks before their deaths, an inquest has heard.

Mayang Prasetyo, a transgender escort, was allegedly murdered and maimed by Marcus Volke at their Brisbane apartment before he then fled the scene and took his own life in a nearby industrial bin soon after police arrived for a welfare check.

During questioning before state coroner Terry Ryan on Monday, Detective Sergeant Joshua Walsh said Mr Volke had presented to a Newstead-based doctor for mental health issues two weeks before the couple's deaths in October 2014.

Sergeant Walsh, who investigated Mr Volke's death, also said police had obtained medical records showing that he had sought treatment at Victoria's Ballarat Hospital when he was 16 years old.
Warning: Distressing content

A policeman who first attended the scene of a ghastly Brisbane murder thought it was a sick Halloween prank before realising a chef had been cooking the remains of his girlfriend, an inquest has heard.

The officer told how Marcus Volke locked out police investigating the whereabouts of his Indonesian transgender girlfriend from their upmarket unit before the chef self-harmed and fled the scene.

The Brisbane Coroners Court heard Volke, 27, killed and dismembered Mayang Prasetyo in October 2014 and then proceeded to dispose of her remains by cooking them on the stove top.
In a matter of days, a new form of ransomware known as WannaCrypt (or WannaCry) has crippled thousands of computers and locked up essential services including hospitals in Britain, FedEx in the US and Telefonica in Spain.

Using the long-established strategy of encrypting a computer's contents and then demanding a payment for the decryption key (in this case around $400 worth of Bitcoin), WannaCrypt is notable for the incredible speed with which it has spread and the high profile targets it's hit.

Why did this ransomware spread so much faster than others?

Ordinarily ransomware is spread in the same way as other malware: users are asked to click a link in an email or website to unknowingly install the software, or computers are scanned for potential vulnerabilities that the software can use to slip in.
The explosive, violent deaths of stars are being used to help measure how much our universe is expanding.

The Australian National University is calling for citizen scientist's help in their quest to spot supernovae, a flashpoint so powerful it can briefly outshine millions of stars in the galaxy.

Dr Anais Moller of the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics Credit:Stuart Hay ANU

Using a web portal on zooniverse.org people can search for these luminous bursts in thousands of images taken by the SkyMapper telescope at the ANU Sliding Spring Observatory.

Co-lead researcher ANU astrophysicist Dr Brad Tucker said scientists could measure the distance of a supernova from Earth by calculating how much the light from the exploding star faded.
Social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter could be forced to offer British young people the right to delete information about them if Theresa May is re-elected prime minister on June 8.

Users under the age of 18 will be able to request the removal of all records relating to them. The measure is one of a series that May's Conservative Party will promise in its election manifesto, due to be published some time this week. It aims to both protect children online and make it easier for businesses to set up and operate on the web.

Theresa May, UK prime minister, wants social media companies to do more. Credit:Bloomberg

May proposes tighter rules for how the companies deal with hate speech, pornography and illegal content and she wants to empower regulators to fine firms. There will be restrictions on how companies store data and users will be able to access information about them.

The move from the UK government to require social networks to delete personal data goes far beyond existing requirements. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are a trove of information, with platforms storing years of personal details, from posts to photos. Google has been pushing back against European rulings around the right to be forgotten.
Police are hunting as many as four masked intruders who shot a man and clubbed three other people with baseball bats during an early morning home invasion in Melbourne's west.

Armed crime squad detectives are yet to establish whether the intruders knew those inside the house, and would not comment about whether anything had been taken during the raid.

Police and paramedics were called to the home on Conway Street, Tarneit, at 4.15am on Tuesday after the attack.

A 31-year-old man who lived in the house was treated for an upper body gunshot wound and was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Millions of dollars in state funding will be spent on outer suburban train stations and schools  but it could be too little too late.

Planning Minister Richard Wynne and Suburban Development Minister Lily D'Ambrosio on Monday released details of fresh funding from the government's Growth Areas Infrastructure Charge.

Car parking at Merinda Park railway station near Cranbourne is to be upgraded using money from the government's growth fund. Credit:Rob Carew

More than $60 million will be devoted to new projects.

But property groups and opposition parties say it is nowhere near enough because the tax on developers will raise almost $1 billion in the five years to 2021.
Mainstream retailers are catching up to the Paris end of Collins Street by employing new tactics to attract Chinese shoppers.

While the luxury brands have for years catered to the city's most significant inbound shopping market, retailers in the general pool have been slower to adapt. But that's changing.

Teresa Vu is one of the Melbourne social media influencers who have been recruited to target Chinese shoppers ahead of the Shop the City event. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Viktoria and Woods, one of the fastest-growing Australian labels, recently hired a Mandarin-speaking sales assistant at its Emporium store. And its list of VIP customers who are Chinese or Chinese-Australian is growing daily.

It's a similar story for Collins Street shoe store Luisa Boutique, which has about 75 per cent Chinese patronage.
Victoria's gaming regulator has approved more poker machines in one of Melbourne's worst areas for family violence - despite admitting that gambling fuels the problem.

Rates of family violence in the City of Hume are among the highest in Victoria with more than 1550 cases recorded for every 100,000 people. Punter losses on pokies in Hume last financial year were also among Melbourne's worst  more than $106 million lost in 12 months.

New polling suggests very strong support in Canberra for tighter rules about how much money people can lose at a time. Credit:Bloomberg

Only a small increase in poker machines was approved by the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation last week  the Highlands Hotel in Craigieburn, where punters lost $8.1 million last financial year on 60 machines, was allowed to add another 20.

But social impacts are given only "marginal weighting" when the gaming regulator considers applications.
A homeless man who stole food defaulted on his bail because he had no fixed address and didn't turn up to his next hearing; a 17-year-old who has never been in custody was remanded for a serious assault; an Aboriginal boy with an intellectual disability and a drug addiction was refused bail.

These vulnerable and relatively low-level offenders are among hundreds clogging up the legal system with crimes that should not require jail time nor multiple court appearances, legal groups say.

One of the cells in the Metropolitan Remand Centre. Credit:Craig Abraham

Supreme Court Justice Paul Coghlan has warned that Victoria's remand cells are filled with people who should not be there.

"It has become apparent ... that a significant number of accused persons are on bail or remanded in custody for minor, non-violent offending," he wrote in his review of the bail system, which was commissioned as a result of the Bourke Street massacre.
Ms Bool before she was bitten by a tick, and Ms Bool now "It started with my leg getting a bit sore. Then I thought it was gastrothen I lost control of my bladder." Ms Bool was hospitalised three times during her holiday, then transferred to Geraldton, then Armadale. She was eventually sent home with an "unknown virus". She said no one looked at her tick-bite or rash. Fast forward three years and Ms Bool is almost permanently hospitalised with symptoms including seizures that shake her whole body and blind her with pain, sometimes leading to temporary paralysis.

Last year one particularly severe seizure left her unable to swallow and without the use of her right hand. But referring to her condition as Lyme disease or 'lyme-like' comes with controversy. Lyme disease is caused by bacteria called borrelia burgdorferi, which is carried by some ticks. When bitten by these ticks, the infection is carried into the bloodstream. Believed to have originated in Lyme, Connecticut, it can attack multiple organs and mimic other illnesses, making it hard to diagnose. Ms Bool suffers sever seizures that sometimes result in face paralysis

At first, a red bullseye rash may appear around the bite, and symptoms may simply be flu-like, with aching muscles, headache, fever and fatigue. If left untreated, symptoms may include seizures, facial paralysis, twitching of muscles, hair loss, Alzheimers-like symptoms and acute headaches, among others. The Australian government acknowledges the disease's existence in North America and Europe, but despite increasing talk of a Lyme-like illness in Australia, the WA Health Department says the species of ticks carrying borrelia burgdorferi has not been identified anywhere in Australia. Perth-based doctor Hugh Derham diagnosed Ms Bool with Lyme disease after sending her blood tests to Australian Biologics, and Infectolab - Germany's premier Lyme disease testing centre. Ms Bool said both tests came back positive for Lyme disease, even though she had never had a tick bite outside Australia.

"All the co-infections showed up at a lab in Geelong too. They are allowed to treat those co-infections here, but they won't," she said. "They're not treating me for anything related to Lyme at all." Lyme disease continues to court controversy in Australia. Infectious diseases physician and clinical microbiologist Miles Beaman said 30 years of research showed no evidence of Lyme bacteria in patients who had not left the country. "Those who claim to [have tested positive] used unlicensed laboratories which are not legally endorsed to test patients," he said.

Dr Beaman said Australian Biologics was unlicensed, and Infectolab didn't operate to the standards required in Australia. He said common medical wisdom was that as Lyme disease could only be obtained outside the country, patients who had not gone overseas should not be tested for Lyme. Instead, he said they should be tested for rheumatological disease or fatigue syndromes and other infectious agents known to be transmitted by tick bites in Australia. "In the meantime, symptomatic treatment, including psychological support, should be offered," he said. But 'symptomatic treatment and psychological support' appear to be failing Ms Bool and others in her position.

Ms Bool has now been listed as a mental health patient and is watched constantly in her hospital room. "You aren't allowed to go to the toilet by yourself; you've got to have a nurse standing there in the doorwaythey don't trust me, it's humiliating," she said. "I don't feel like I'm in good hands here." Ms Bool's bull's eye rash around the tick-bite Doctors are not the only ones divided on the presence of Lyme disease in Australia - the controversy has torn Ms Bool's family apart.

Last September her husband left her, saying he didn't believe she was sick; but her nasal tube, catheter bag and huge worried eyes show that irrespective of her diagnosis, or lack there of, her journey has been a long and exhausting one. Three months after the initial tick-bite, feeling abandoned by doctors, Ms Bool tried to take her own life. In April 2015 she was put into an Armadale mental health facility, and given 12 electric shock treatments. "The antidepressants weren't working," she said. "They're not seeing me for the illness I have."

She said once at [another] hospital they left her three days with no nasal feeds, but refused to discharge her. Eventually she self-discharged and went to her current hospital, very ill. "For about a week or two when I was first here, they took my nasal tube out and they just kept leaving my meds on the bench for me to take," she said. "They thought if I was faking, I'd take my meds. I can't swallow. I can't eat anything, "I can't drink anything, and still they don't believe me." Ms Bool says she often wakes with strange bruises and sores

While the argument on the presence of Lyme disease in Australia continues, people continue falling sick with Lyme-like symptoms and making allegations of callous treatment by medical professionals. The disease has now become so taboo that people who acknowledge they were bitten overseas still cannot be diagnosed or treated for it in Australia. Susan, 72, who preferred her surname not to be published, was bitten by a tick in Nepal in 2005 and diagnosed with Lyme disease by the same German lab as Ms Bool. Susan was also turned away by Australian doctors, despite having been bitten in areas commonly accepted to contain ticks that carry the borrelia burgorferi bacteria. She was treated with antibiotics and eventually turned to alternative medicine after seeing no improvement for two years.

"The first doctor I ever went to here in Perth, and mentioned Lyme disease to, told me it was all in my head and referred me to a psychiatrist," she said. "I spent six months visiting the psychiatrist and he also told me it was all in my head." Many Australians with Lyme-like symptoms, therefore, end up seeking treatment overseas. Susan plans to go to Cyprus for treatment in August, but to do so needs to save thousands of dollars. Another Perth woman, Sharon Badger, has recently completed treatment in Cyprus herself.

Ms Badger had experienced random bouts of illness for 35 years, and was bitten by ticks as a child and in her twenties in WA. She has travelled overseas, but does not remember being bitten by ticks outside the country. Ms Badger said blood tests showed she had the co-infections of Lyme disease, and borrelia bacteria were present but again doctors turned her away. She chose to undertake five weeks of treatment at Hyperbaric Therapy Treatment Centre in Cyprus.. Systematic whole body hyperthermia treatment involves overheating the body to temperatures of over 42 degrees to kill borrelia bacteria that caused Lyme disease.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves patients spending regular 30-minute periods in an oxygen chamber regulated to the equivalence of diving 14 metres. They breathe 100 per cent oxygen, which is said to accelerate healing processes and is effective with many degenerative diseases. She was one of four Australians seeking the treatment at the centre at the time. She said before treatment she was unable to walk even a kilometre and spent most of her day sleeping, but within one week of her treatment finishing, claims she was able to walk nine kilometres. As the debate between clinicians rages on about its existence, a 2015 Senate inquiry found growing evidence of tick-borne disease that causes Lyme-like illness for many Australian patients - informed by submissions including one from Ms Bool's current GP. That GP said he knew of several doctors ridiculed and targeted for investigation for their willingness to treat people for a spectrum of "Lyme-like" illnesses.

The inquiry included a recommendation that the Australian government increase funding for research into tick-borne pathogens as a matter of urgency. It also recommended a clinical trial of treatment guidelines be established, with the aim of determining safe treatment protocol for patients with tick-borne disease. As research into the strange Lyme-like disease continues, scientists at Murdoch University said borrelia DNA had been discovered in ticks attached to echidnas, but their analysis revealed it was a new type of borrelia that was not part of the group that causes Lyme disease. Professor Peter Irwin of the university's Vector and Waterborne Pathogen Research Group said it was likely they were suffering a similar illness, from a different bacterium. "The problem is we don't know what bacteria yet," he said.

Despite evidence that such patients respond well to Lyme treatments, the taboo remains. President of the Lyme Disease Association of Australia Sharon Whiteman said no one had taken leadership. "The government focuses on 25-year-old research on ticks, and no research has been done on current patients," she said. "There were 1200 submissions to the senate inquiry, and the majority were patients. "Doctors have changed to evidence based medicine  that doesn't work with an emerging disease because there is no evidence. The patient is the evidence."

The Association claims there are 22,000 new cases of Lyme disease in Australia each year. A spokesperson for Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said while medical authorities had yet to conclude that Lyme disease existed in Australia, he believed families deserved a full medical review and analysis. But this may come too late for Rebecca Bool. Sitting in the sun in her wheelchair, watching traffic go by, Ms Bool said she wanted to ask the government and the Australian medical system to properly look into Lyme-like illness. "Stop mocking us, stop putting us down. How are you going to explain to our families why we're not here anymore?" she said.
A guard at the Colombian prison where accused drug mule Cassandra Sainsbury is being held has accused the Australian of being an attention seeker and lying about the conditions inside the facility, Channel Nine reports.

The 22-year-old South Australian woman has complained that she is not getting proper access to medical attention inside Bogota's El Buen Pastor women's prison, and is being bullied by her cellmates.

But those claims are simply not true, the guard, who wanted to be known only as Anna, told Channel Nine.

"Cassie likes attention and she knows how to get it," the guard said.
London: The jury at a trial of Rolf Harris underway in London has heard that it is "beyond coincidence" that three teenage women who allege the Australian entertainer groped them at separate events over the course of a decade should come forward with their claims independently of each other.

The 12-person jury, comprising seven women and five men, was sworn in on Monday for the trial of the 87-year old artist and musician who is charged with four counts of indecently assaulting the three women who were aged 16 or below at the time. The incidents all took place at events dating between 1971 and 1983.

Rolf Harris is facing a London court on four charges of groping teenage girls. Credit:AP

Harris appeared via video-link, sporting his trademark goatee and spectacles. He wore a grey suit, white shirt and dark blue tie with red braces. He is pleading not guilty to all counts.

The first day of the trial heard evidence from two witnesses  the first was Larry Westland, the organiser of the festival for youth music which took place at London's Lyceum theatre in Covent Garden on the weekend of the 10 -11 July in 1971.
Beijing: China's apparent anger at North Korea's latest missile test saw a ban on any mention of the successful launch in state-controlled media on Monday.

The longer range of the Hwasong-12 (Mars-12), which travelled 787 kilometres and reached an altitude of 2111.5 kilometres, caused alarm internationally on Sunday. The China Daily, The Global Times and People's Daily noticeably failed to report it.

US experts at the North Korean missile-watch centre 38North said the launch was a "substantial advance" towards the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile which might have the capacity to strike the US base at Guam.

The centre's John Schilling wrote that the missile would have flown 4500 kilometres if launched on maximum trajectory. South Korea's Yonhap reported that the missile appeared to have used a new type of fuel.
Bangkok: Police have arrested a 62-year-old American man in a widening crackdown on a $1 billion-a-year child cyber porn and torture industry in the Philippines.

The arrest of the Lee David Colglazier came after the country's largest seizure of illicit material that police allege was linked to a major operation that streamed children performing in explicit sex acts live from dark corners of the internet to predators in Australia, the United States, Canada and Europe.

Cigarettes overflow from an ashtray in the home of suspected child webcam cybersex operator, David Timothy Deakin, in the Philippines. Credit:AP

Mr Colglazier was arrested in Bacolod City, 720 kilometres south of Manila, where police say a widowed Filipino mother earlier offered one of her three young daughters to perform in a live video sex show for an Australian for money.

The mother also offered her two other daughters to be live-streamed performing acts for predators in other countries, police said.
US President Donald Trump. Credit:AP When Congress and the White House are controlled by the same party, lawmakers usually try to use the full weight of the presidency to achieve legislative priorities, through a clear and co-ordinated vision, patience with intransigent lawmakers and message repetition. Trump's transient use of his bully pulpit for policy messaging has upended that playbook. "It does seem like we have an upheaval, a crisis almost every day in Washington that changes the subject," Senator Susan Collins, a Republican of Maine, who has been trying to advance healthcare legislation, said in a television interview on Thursday night. "It does seem like we have an upheaval, a crisis almost every day": Senator Susan Collins, Credit:AP The latest subject-changing crisis has been the fallout from Trump's sudden dismissal of Comey, who was leading the FBI's investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump suggested last week that he might have surreptitiously taped his conversations with Comey, and on Sunday two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said the President should turn over any such tapes, if they exist.

In the days after Trump's election victory, the mood was different, as Republicans expressed high hopes that they could move quickly on a conservative agenda that merged with Trump's. Ohio senator Rob Portman speaks at a Lincoln Day dinner in 2016. Trump's decisionmaking has shaken the faith of some Republican senators. Credit:New York Times "We're going to be an enthusiastic supporter almost all the time," McConnell said of Trump in November. But Republicans have achieved few of their legislative priorities, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act or cutting taxes. When Trump suggested this month that the Senate should change its rules to make it easier for Republicans to push bills through, McConnell firmly rejected the idea. Former FBI Director James Comey. Credit:AP

Lawmakers are also bucking the President by pushing ahead with bipartisan measures on sanctions against Russia. And this month, Republicans rejected many of the administration's priorities in a short-term spending measure, including money for a wall along the border with Mexico. Two Republican senators who face potentially tough re-election fights next year - Dean Heller of Nevada and Jeff Flake of Arizona - have been unabashed in their criticism of Trump and his administration, which they have clearly begun to view as a drag on their political prospects. "In Arizona, we grow them independent," Flake said, noting the unpopularity in his state of Trump's views on the border wall and NAFTA. "I expect people want someone who will say, 'I'm voting with Trump on the good stuff and standing up to him on the not good stuff.' " Trump retains the support of about 80 per cent of Republican voters and, although his overall popularity is at historic lows at this point in a presidency, it remains well above the depths eventually reached by presidents such as George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter.

At those levels, larger numbers of lawmakers might start to turn away from Trump - although, even if they wanted to do so, Republicans would not be able to separate themselves completely from him on issues such as a tax overhaul, where his blessing would be needed to move forward in any major way. But, while Trump's approval rating has been sufficient to prevent mass defections, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released on Sunday showed it at 39 per cent - it is too low to pressure Democrats to support him in any significant way. Any bills that require 60 votes to pass - almost everything aside from Republicans' healthcare and tax measures - will be impossible to advance without the help of Democrats. Republicans had been counting on Senate Democrats who are up for re-election next year in states won by Trump to bend to their will. But those Democrats, such as Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have been largely comfortable standing against Trump, especially when their Republican colleagues tell them that they, too, have had about enough. "I'm hearing more and more of them say privately that they are more and more concerned," said Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. "More importantly, there is a lot less fear of him than there was just a month ago."

Already, Republicans are talking openly about rejecting components of the budget request Trump is expected to release in two weeks. Any new request for money for a border wall would almost certainly be rejected, as would large cuts to drug control programs. Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, has spoken in support of the programs on the Senate floor, and Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, which has had large numbers of opioid deaths, issued a news release calling on the administration to "propose a realistic budget that demonstrates the administration's commitment to combating drug addiction". If it does not, she warned in a letter to Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, "I will lead a bipartisan group of my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee and in the Senate to reject those proposed cuts." During his campaign, Trump found a winning message in criticising trade agreements. But traditionally pro-trade Republicans - after yielding for a while to his rejection of such deals, including when he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first full week day in office - have begun to push back. The President has vacillated on whether to also abandon NAFTA. "If you cancel NAFTA, you harm the economy of my state," said Republican Senator John McCain from Arizona.
Bali: Australian woman Sara Connor has had her jail sentence increased to five years for the fatal group assault of a Bali police officer after the prosecution appealed to the High Court.

The increased sentence will come as a bitter blow to the 46-year-old from Byron Bay, who was not in court. She had faced an anxious wait for the ruling from Bali's Kerobokan jail.

Wayan Sudarsa, a police officer in Bali for 35 years, was found dead on Kuta beach on August 17 last year with 42 wounds, including grisly head injuries.

Connor and her British DJ boyfriend David Taylor were found guilty of fatal group assault in the Denpasar District Court in March and sentenced to four and six years' jail respectively. Both sentences were comparatively light given an on-duty police officer had been killed and the maximum penalty for fatal group assault is 12 years.
Washington: The United States has accused the Syrian government of using a crematorium to hide mass murders at a prison where thousands os inmates are believed to have been summarily executed during the nation's civil war.

The assertion, based on newly declassified satellite photographs of the prison, significantly expanded the accusations the United States has levelled at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with some officials appearing to draw a parallel to Nazi Germany.

"The attempt to cover up mass murders in the Assad crematorium is reminiscent of the 20th century's worst offences against humanity," said Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations.

Assad's forces and their allies have been widely accused by human rights groups and others of killing thousands of prisoners and burying their bodies in mass graves during the course of the war, now in its seventh year.
Donald Trump, the destabiliser. Credit:AP James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, offered a similar assessment in Senate testimony last week, even before Comey was dismissed, saying that Moscow must look on the election and its aftermath with a great deal of satisfaction. "The Russians have to be celebrating the success of . . . what they set out do with rather minimal resource expenditure," Clapper said. "The first objective was to sow discord and dissension, which they certainly did." Clapper went further in interviews on Sunday, saying US institutions are "under assault" from Trump, and that Russia must see the firing of Comey as "another victory on the scoreboard for them." Even Trump alluded to Russia's presumed glee at the post-Comey turmoil, although he blamed Democrats. "Russia must be laughing up their sleeves watching as the US tears itself apart over a Democrat EXCUSE for losing the election," Trump said in a posting on Twitter on Thursday.

If Russia's most specific priorities have proved elusive, it may be partly because Moscow overachieved in its effort to cultivate ties to Trump. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who shared many of Trump's pro-Russia positions, was forced to resign in February after it was revealed that he had misled other White House officials about his post-election conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. In a late December phone call that was intercepted by US intelligence, Flynn assured Kislyak that Trump planned to revisit the sanctions issue shortly after taking office. Trump has so far not followed through on that front, largely because the Flynn controversy and multiple Russia probes have made it politically unfeasible. Trump's policies toward Russia have also taken a harder line in part because of the rising influence of senior members of his administration, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who are critics of Moscow. Even so, Trump himself continues to send pro-Russia signals, sometimes at the expense of agencies that report to him. Trump recently signaled, again, that he remains unconvinced that Russia was behind the hack of the 2016 election and release of tens of thousands of emails that damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign. His position is a rejection of the consensus view of US intelligence agencies.

Trump has provided a steady stream of material for Russian propaganda platforms. One day after firing Comey, Trump welcomed Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to the White House. American news agencies were barred from attending but a photographer for Russia's state-run Tass news agency was granted access to the Oval Office. Photos released later that day showed Trump warmly welcoming his guests, including a shot that showed Trump smiling and shaking hands with Kislyak, the ambassador embroiled in the controversy with Flynn. Russian officials have denied the country meddled in the US election. In brief public appearances last week, Lavrov joked about Comey's dismissal - "Was he fired? You're kidding!" - and mocked claims of Moscow interference. "We are monitoring what is going on here concerning Russia and its alleged 'decisive role' in your domestic policy," Lavrov said in a quote reported in Tass.

Trump's defenders acknowledge that he seeks improved relations with Moscow, but insist that his goals are designed entirely to advance American interests. They point to sharp criticism of Moscow by senior administration officials, strained diplomatic relations on key issues and Trump's decision to order a missile strike on an air base in Syria where Russian military operatives were based as part of Moscow's support to Syrian President Bashar Assad. The assertion that the Trump administration has been advantageous to Moscow "is laughable," said James Carafano, the vice president of foreign and defense policy at the Heritage Foundation, who served as an adviser to the Trump transition team. "The president has actually stiff-armed them on a number of occasions." But critics argue that many of Trump's foreign policy positions undercut US influence overseas and, as a result, strengthen Moscow - his effective endorsement of nationalist candidates including Marine Le Pen in France; his effort to impose an immigration ban on Muslim-majority countries; and his threats, since softened, to restructure NATO. Trump has repeatedly dismissed allegations of ties between his campaign and Russia as "fake news." The White House insisted that Comey's firing was based solely on his handling of the investigation of Clinton's emails.

But Trump's own later statements made clear the decision was linked to his frustration that the Russia inquiry was expanding under Comey, a director whom Trump viewed as disloyal. Trump had telegraphed the move a day earlier on Twitter, saying: "The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?" The implication that the FBI would perpetuate an unwarranted investigation out of political animus echoes other instances in which Trump has disparaged American institutions or principles. US intelligence officials said such comments bolster the case that Putin makes against Western democracies. "It plays into the idea that we are as corrupt as anybody else, that what the United States is exporting isn't something you want," said a former senior US intelligence official involved in tracking the Russian election hack and its aftermath. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
PHILIPSBURG:--- The Central Committee will meet in a session on May 15, 2017. The Minister of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment and Infrastructure, who is the Shareholder Representative of GEBE, will be present.

The Central Committee meeting requested by Members of Parliament, F.A. Meyers, T.E. Heyliger, S.M. Bijlani, T.E. Leonard, and C.M.M. Connor, has been set for Monday, May 15, 2017, at 15.00 hrs in the General Assembly Chamber of the House at Wilhelminastraat #1 in Philipsburg.

The agenda point is:

Deliberation on the current state of affairs of GEBE.

Members of the public are invited to the House of Parliament to attend parliamentary deliberations.

The House of Parliament is located across from the Court House in Philipsburg.

The parliamentary session will be carried live on St. Maarten Cable TV Channel 120, via Pearl Radio FM 98.1, the audio via the Internet www.pearlfmradio.sx and via www.sxmparliament.org.
 For the fifth time in the last six years and the 13time overall in school history, Mississippi State (36-20) is NCAA Tournament bound as the Bulldogs' road to Oklahoma City begins in the Salt Lake City Regional.MSU will open the double-elimination regional on Thursday, May 18 at 5:00 p.m. CT against the BYU Cougars (44-11) at the Dumke Family Softball Stadium. Along with MSU and BYU in the Salt Lake City Regional is host No. 11 Utah (33-14) and Fordham (45-15), who will square off at 7:30 p.m., on Thursday.The regional's first two games will be live streamed on ESPN3.com. Fans can access those broadcasts through WatchESPN.com or the ESPN app. Television/live streaming assignments for the remaining games will be announced later in the week.The winner of the Salt Lake Regional will go on to face the winners of the Seattle Regional, hosted by No. 6 Washington (43-11). Also included in the region is Michigan (41-11-1), Fresno State (34-21) and Montana (35-22).State will make its 13NCAA Tournament appearance in its 21season as a member of the Southeastern Conference, with an overall record of 12-24 in the regional round. All 13 appearances have come since the 2000 season. MSU has won a regional game in its last three appearances and will be aiming to make its first NCAA Super Regional showing in school history.In their last NCAA Tournament appearance, the Bulldogs traveled to Lafayette, La., falling in the series opener against Baylor, 8-4. MSU picked up a 2-0 win against Weber State before being eliminated by Baylor in game three.Overall, all 13 Southeastern Conference teams earned NCAA Tournament bids, marking the first time that the league has sent every team to the NCAA's postseason event. It also set an NCAA record for most teams sent to the postseason by a single conference. The SEC is the first conference to have all its members receive NCAA Tournament bids since the Pac-12 in 2007.Thursday, May 18G1: Mississippi State vs. BYU (Thursday, 5 p.m., ESPN3)G2: Utah vs. Fordham (Thursday, 7:30 p.m., ESPN3)Friday, May 19G3: Winner Game 1 vs. Winner Game 2 (Friday, 2 p.m., TBA)G4: Loser Game 1 vs. Loser Game 2 (Friday, 4:30 p.m., TBA)G5: Winner Game 4 vs. Loser Game 3 (Friday, 7 p.m., TBA)Saturday, May 20G6: Winner Game 3 vs. Winner Game 5 (Saturday, 3 p.m., TBA)G7: Winner Game 6 vs. Loser Game 6 (If Necessary) (Saturday, 5:30 p.m., TBA)Utah leads, 4-2First Meeting1-1Mississippi State def. Utah, 10-3 (Feb. 26, 2005 in Palm Springs, Calif.)Mississippi State, +1Mississippi State leads, 2-12-10-1BYU def. Mississippi State, 4-3 (9) (May 17, 2012 in Eugene, Ore.)BYU, +1Mississippi State leads, 2-01-0First MeetingMississippi State def. Fordham, 8-0 (5) (March 2, 2013 in Orlando, Fla.)Mississippi State, +2Sunday night's selection marks MSU's fifth NCAA Tournament appearance in the last six years, which is the best stretch since going seven out of eight years from 2002-09.State will make its 13NCAA Tournament appearance in its 21season as a member of the Southeastern Conference, with an overall record of 12-24 in the regional round. All 13 appearances have come since the 2000 season. MSU has won a regional game in its last three appearances, but will be aiming to make its first NCAA Super Regional showing in school history this year.In their last NCAA Tournament appearance, the Bulldogs traveled to Lafayette, La., falling in the series opener against Baylor, 8-4. MSU picked up a 2-0 win against Weber State before being eliminated by Baylor in game three.The Bulldogs' road to Oklahoma City will begin in Salt Lake City, Utah, as MSU makes its first trip out west for the NCAA Tournament in 2012. That season, which was's first at the helm, the Dogs visited Eugene, Ore.For the first time in history, the Southeastern Conference has sent every member to the NCAA Tournament. All 13 teams earned an NCAA Tourney bid, with seven reeling in regional hosting spots. Three of those hosts, No. 1 Florida, No. 7 Auburn and No. 8 Tennessee, also hold Super Regional hosting duties should they advance past Regional play.The selection of all 13 teams also marks the first time a conference has sent all of its members to the NCAA Tournament since Pac 12 in 2007.For more on Mississippi State softball, follow the Bulldogs on Twitter Facebook and Instagram by searching for "HailStateSB." You can also find all-access coverage of the program on SnapChat by searching for "HailStateSnap".
MARIGOT:---- USM SCELL completed one of its cross-border training program for 22 participants from French St. Martin in collaboration with USM, Observatoire and Pole Emploi on Friday, May 12, 2017. The duration of the training was from the period January 3 to May 12, 2017.

Participants have completed their three-phased course: Job Training/Preparation facilitated by Observatoire and USM SCELL courses Multi Lingual Appreciation (MLA) facilitated by Ms. Dorothy Richardson and Mr. Thijn Laurensse; Health and Wellness facilitated by Ms. Brunilda Illidge and; Customer Service facilitated by Ms. Dorothy Richardson.

The award ceremony was held at the Obervatoire in Marigot with both Dutch and French side press core in attendance. The theme was Be Persistent, Keep Educating Yourself.

Mr. Maison the Director of SCELL encouraged participants to be persistent and manage their impulsivity. He said these were just two of the 16 Habits of the Mind by Costa and Kallick. When we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. Wendell Berry. Life will throw you dilemmas and uncertainties, you may not know the answer to every question, you may even fail at some things, but press on: finish the task, continue on your education journey, complete programs that you started. Deny the impulse in service of that big goal. You can react in a disrespectful manner, retaliate with force in situations that may even, in your judgment warrant it, but remember you must be able to control your own emotions Mr. Maison said that as educators we are developing wholesome personalities for family, communities and for nations in the areas of sports, arts, and politics to make our island competitive. We are training critical minds to appreciate and operate within a universal culture that includes science and technology, and Caribbean values.

Presentations were also given by Dr. Jeffrey and Mr. Benet. President of the USM Board Mrs. Valerie Giterson-Pantophlet charged the graduates via her written message to be innovative and build the society.

Graduates responded with love and appreciation for the facilitators and the training programs. They are now equipped and able to better decide on what they want to do for their future: some endeavor to pursue a nursing career, other will seek employment in the hospitality sector. Class projects such as identifying transferrable skill sets, job interview, survey and designing a boutique hotel gave participants the motivation to be social entrepreneurs who use would go on to establish non-profit organizations to fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues.

USM continues to promote academic tourism through cooperation and cross-border projects in any form, also to organize continuing and post graduate education and training.

USM entered into this agreement with the Observatoire consistent with its mission to offer quality career and academic education that will provide students with a solid foundation to enter the field of their chosen profession or to further academic studies. The University is also committed to the continuous development of programs that will enhance the quality of life of the residence of St. Maarten and St. Martin.

Thanks to the organization and hard work of Dr. Louis Jeffrey; Director of the Observatoire, Mr. Arnauld Benet; USM President Dr. Francio Guadeloupe; and USM SCELL Director Eion Maison.
GREAT BAY:--- As a director trying to capture the essence of the story, ... Im interested in developing a Caribbean aesthetic, said filmmaker Asha Lovelace about making movies.

In Joebell and America that is exactly what Lovelace manages to do in the award-winning movie that she directed and produced in her native Trinidad and Tobago, according to writer Chelsea Rampaul.

Joebell and America will have its St. Martin premiere at the Philipsburg Jubilee Library on Monday, May 29, at 7:30 PM. Asha Lovelace will be on hand to discuss the feature film with movie lovers, said Shujah Reiph, St. Martin Book Fair coordinator.

In Joebell and America, lead character Joebell (played by Brian Green), is a gambler, hes in trouble with the law, and concocts a risky plan to escape Trinidad for the promise and fantasy of a better future in America. Hes prepared to leave everything behind, including his newfound romance with the village beauty, according to caribbeanfilm.com. What could possibly go wrong?

The St. Martin screening of the movie is an exciting highlight of the week-long pre-book fair activities, said Jacqueline Sample of HNP, co-organizer of the literary festival.

Joebell and America has its own literary beginnings. It is based on the short story by the same name, written by Ashas father, the noted novelist Earl Lovelace from Trinidad and Tobago. The movie won Best International Narrative Feature from the Womens International Film Festival.

Along with Joebell and America the book fairs early bird activities  starting on May 25  include an outdoor poetry reading; the launch of six books; an expert discussion on electoral reform; a closed-door critique of a St. Martin historical play in its draft form; and a curated book cover art exhibit related to St. Martin (1978 to 2017), at Sheer Restaurant Gallery, said Sample.

Asha Lovelace, who is also a University of the West Indies lecturer, will give a filmmaking workshop at the 15th anniversary of the St. Martin Book Fair, June 1  3, 2017, said Reiph.

The St. Martin Book Fair opens at Cite Scolaire Robert Weinum on June 1, at 8 pm, said Reiph. The auditorium of the new high school/jr. high school complex located in The Savanna (the area between Rambaud and Grand Case), will be turned into a virtual art gallery/studio to match the festivals Art theme, said Reiph. The main book fair workshops, open mic readings, book sales and book signings by famous, new, and upcoming writers take place on June 3, at the University of St. Martin.

Conscious Lyrics Foundation and House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP) are organizing the 15th annual St. Martin Book Fair in collaboration with St. Maarten Tourist Bureau, University of St. Martin, and LC Fleming Foundation, along with SOS radio 95.9 FM, Peridot Foundation, and Irie Life, said Reiph.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Minister of Tourism and Economic Affairs Mellissa Arrindell-Doncher dedicated multiple days last week to signing business licenses and clearing up and significant part of the backlog that has built up over the past few months.

The Minister, her cabinet and Department Head of Economic Licenses Valya Lake-Pantophlet, drastically cut down a backlog that was built from late last year to present. The Minister explained that due to the election period, formation of government and the delay in identifying a Minister of Tourism and Economic Affairs, the signing of business licenses slowed down.

It was nothing intentional, but the workload of one Minister carrying multiple Ministries in the absence of another Minister, contributed to the backlog although we did what we could in the interim to get some signed off. Now however, I thought it was vital that we took a few days and focus solely and getting these businesses going so they can contribute to our economy, the Minister said.

The Minister if off-island this week on personal matters and will clear the remaining backlog upon her return. She explained that what remains is a very small amount compared to what was. The Minister complimented Lake-Pantophlet and the entire team of her department who had to take on the brunt of frustration from citizens waiting for their business license.

And this is totally understandable. Rest assured we will get to all the business licenses in very quick time. We ask for your continued patience as we eliminate this backlog, the Minister said.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Over 250 Young Professionals were informed about filing taxes on (Dutch) St. Maarten via Livestream.

On Saturday 6 May 2017, USC hosted a Young Professionals Tax Workshop in collaboration with our partners Meijburg & Co. Caribbean and KPMG DC&S. The University of St. Martin collaborated as well by offering the use of its facilities. The workshop, facilitated by Mr. Quincy Lont, Tax Manager and Ms. Nicole Echobardo, Tax Assistant at Meijburg & Co. Caribbean was geared towards Young Professionals on island in need of information about the tax system on St. Maarten.

"For those of us returning to St. Maarten from Europe and in particular from the Netherlands, we are faced with reverse culture shock. As far as taxes are concerned we are faced with the challenge of moving from a digital automated platform to a paper-based system.

In addition the tax system in St. Maarten is in sharp contrast to the system in the Netherlands as it applies to establishing sole proprietorship.

These are some of the concerns which prompted us to host this workshop," explained USC Board Member, Ms. Melissa Gumbs.

Moving forward, USC will focus on offering more web-based seminars and workshops addressing the relocation concerns of Young Professionals abroad.

To learn more about USC or to volunteer send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
Berenice Onofre Vasquez, 70, earns her third degree from California State University Los Angeles

Berenice Onofre Vasquez previously earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a Master of Science in Nursing and Master of Public Administration from California State University Los Angeles

When Berenice Onofre Vasquez walks across the stage to receive her Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership, it will mark a proud moment in a life-long journey for the 70-year-old Santa Monica grandmother.

As the oldest member of the California State University, Los Angeles Class of 2017, Onofre Vasquez has shown that that is never too late to pursue a passion.

She will conclude a long history of success at Cal State LA. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a Master of Science in Nursing and Master of Public Administration from the University.

"When I got my BSN that was a very proud moment. Now I am getting my Ed.D. for a very clear purpose, it is amazing and I am really excited," she says. She will receive her degree during the Charter College of Education Ceremony on May 22.

Since her days as a child on a small farm in Peru, she has placed education at the center of her life. Her reason for pursuing an Ed.D. began taking shape long ago when she arrived in the United States at the age of 21.

After moving to Santa Monica with the help of her aunt, Onofre Vasquez enrolled at Santa Monica College to become a nurse, but she recalls being restricted to introductory level math courses due to her lack of English skills. Onofre Vasquez, a bright student who had attended a university in Peru, was frustrated. Then she heard from a fellow student that Cal State LA had an excellent nursing program.

Since then, Cal State LA has played an important role in her continued success, such as when she received her first paycheck as a registered nurse.

"It was my proudest moment as a product of Cal State LA," she says. "I really was very thankful to the institution and my teachers who helped me."

She worked nursing and nursing administration for about 38 years. A single parent, she often worked two jobs, but still found time to attend Cal State LA part time to further her education.

Juggling jobs and coursework wasn't always easy, but she coped during stressful times by telling herself: "I am knowledgeable, I am experienced. I am a Cal State LA graduate."

Her can-do attitude is showcased in her work on her dissertation, which focuses on the experience of Spanish-speaking Latino parents and the issues English learners face.

"Us immigrants, we come with the desire to do something better. To be somebody, to do something," she says.

Onofre Vazquez grew up raising chickens, cows and pigs on a small family farm, Caiqui, in the department of Huanuco, in central Peru. She attended the local school until third grade, the highest level the school offered. Her parents wanted her to continue her education, so she moved to the nearby city of Ambo to finish her elementary education. She attended high school in Lima, the capital of Peru, during the week, returning to the farm on weekends to visit her family.

She opened a school at Santa Isabel, a town in Huanuco, in a small room donated by the community. She worked there as a teacher and principal for two years. She later attended Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal (UNFV) in Lima to become a professor of chemistry, physics and mathematics.

Once she receives her Ed.D., Onofre Vasquez plans on teaching at a university and continuing her research related to Latino parent engagement and English learners. Her goal is to help Latino parents and English learners stand up for themselves and empower their communities.

"I hope that in my life I can contribute toward that," she says, "maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways."
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer enters her second term with Democrats likely to control all levels of power in the state Capitol for the first time since the 1980s and backed by a dramatic show of voters' support for keystone Democratic issues including abortion and voting rights.
Warm up to winter with ski film, adaptive skiing, Mushing 101 and more

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Mars and Earth have very different histories. A simple example: Earth is mostly covered with water, while Mars lost its water in the distant past. But scientists have also known that the elements on Mars have different isotopes, or atomic masses, particularly for chromium, titanium, and oxygen.

A new paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters argues these compositional differences arose because Mars formed in a different part of the solar system than where it is now located. Instead of being between the sun and the asteroid belt, the paper argues Mars formed within the asteroid belt before migrating somewhat closer to the sun to where it is now. The migration occurred, the paper says, due to Mars gravitationally interacting with planetesimals  small bodies such as asteroids  within the belt.

"Since Mars is more massive than the planetesimals, it tends to lose energy when it scatters these planetesimals because it passes them to Jupiter, which then ejects them from the solar system," Ramon Brasser, lead author and associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Earth-Life Science Institute, wrote in an e-mail.

RELATED: How Mars Went From Warm and Wet to Cold and Dry

The prevailing theory of the solar system's formation suggests that the sun and its planets formed after a cloud of gas and dust was gravitationally compressed, perhaps from a passing star. Over time, small gas and dust particles stuck together, forming the sun and the modern-day planets.

There is still some debate about whether planets migrated during this process. Previously, scientists theorized that the rocky planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars collected less gas than the gas giants of Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune because the rocky planets were closer to the sun. It was thought that the sun's radiation blew most of the gas into the outer solar system. However, scientists have spotted several Jupiter-sized exoplanets very close to their host stars, which could imply a different formation process that included migration.

In this case, the team tested their hypothesis about Mars' formation by running simplified computer scenarios of the formation of the terrestrial, or rocky, planets, and also looked at samples from Earth, Mars, the moon, and Vesta, which is an asteroid. "We looked for Mars analogs that accreted material in a portion of the disc which Earth did not, and we concluded that the only way to do this is to form Mars far from the Sun, in the inner asteroid belt," Brasser wrote.

Based on previous work from the University of Chicago's Nicolas Dauphas and colleagues, the simulations used by Brasser's team started with sub-Mars planetary embryos. The simulations suggest that Mars grew quickly, then lost access to most of the material, such as gas and dust, to grow within 5-10 million years after the solar system formed. It settled into its current orbit about 120 million years after the solar system's birth, at which point its liquid surface hardened into a crust.

RELATED: Habitable Exoplanets Might Not Be Very Earth-Like After All

Mars likely had liquid water running on its surface in the ancient past, but over time its atmosphere thinned and made it impossible for water to exist in liquid form on the surface. Brasser said, however, that the origins of Mars would not influence that process. While Mars was formed in a colder environment (since the asteroid belt is further from the sun), it was only there for a few million years before migrating to its current location.

"Since it only spent less than 100 million years farther than its current location, its atmospheric loss is dominated by the effects at its current location and by the brightening of the sun and loss of its magnetic field," Brasser wrote.

He next plans to test his hypothesis using different terrestrial planet formation models to see if they are better at reproducing traits of Mars than the current model. Brasser added that Mars could be a "smoking gun" at how all the rocky planets formed, so that's one reason he's so interested in attacking the problem.

Originally published on Seeker.
WASHINGTON  Blue Origin said May 14 it suffered a setback in the development of its BE-4 engine with the loss of a key hardware component of the engine in a recent test.

In a pair of tweets late May 14, the company said it lost "a set of powerpack test hardware" for the BE-4 on a test stand at the company's West Texas test site in a May 13 incident. "Not unusual during development," the company said, offering no other details about what caused the accident, or any damage to the test stand or other equipment.

See more

The powerpack is a key component of a rocket engine that includes the turbomachinery that pumps propellant  in this case, liquid oxygen and methane  through the engine. The BE-4 powerpack generates about 75,000 horsepower, getting its power from a small engine called a preburner.

Blue Origin has been testing BE-4 powerpack systems since 2014, according to past company statements. The company has been gearing up for tests of the full BE-4 engine, once planned to begin in 2016 but which company officials had more recently been saying would begin in the coming weeks. The company announced in March that it had shipped the first BE-4 engine from its headquarters near Seattle to its Texas test site.

The company, in the second of two tweets about the accident, said it would bounce back quickly. "That's why we always set up our development programs to be hardware rich. Back into testing soon," it stated.

See more

Blue Origin executives have emphasized that "hardware-rich" nature of its testing program even before this mishap. "We really wanted to go into the test program hardware-rich," Rob Meyerson, president of Blue Origin, told reporters at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs April 5. The company, he said, had two test stands for testing either the full BE-4 engine or its powerpack.

At that time, he said, the first BE-4 engine was on a test stand and the second and third engines would be shipping "soon" to the test site. "We want to have three engines in the queue," he said.

"We believe with two stands, a hardware-rich program, lots of sensors and great tools and great people, we can move through the test program quite rapidly," he said.

Blue Origin is developing the BE-4 engine both for the company's own New Glenn orbital launch vehicle as well as for use on United Launch Alliance's planned Vulcan rocket. While full-scale testing of the BE-4 has been delayed, Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said in an April 5 interview at the Space Symposium that the engine was still the leading candidate for use on Vulcan.

"They've been testing powerpack at full scale and doing quite well," Bruno said in that interview, along with tests of the engine's preburner. "Both have been going very well, and they've been tuning their design and that tuning finds its way into the full-scale [engine]."

The other option for ULA's Vulcan is the AR1 engine under development by Aerojet Rocketdyne, which uses a more conventional combination of liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants. Aerojet announced May 8 that the AR1 recently completed its critical design review, several days after reporting successful tests of a full-scale preburner for that engine. Those milestones, the company said, keep the engine on schedule for certification in 2019.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Rocket Lab's first Electron rocket, seen here in a hangar at the company's New Zealand launch site, is scheduled for launch during a 10-day window that opens May 21.

WASHINGTON  Rocket Lab, the U.S.-New Zealand company developing the Electron small launch vehicle, plans to carry out its first flight in a window that opens May 21.

The company announced May 14 that a 10-day window for the first Electron launch, which the company has dubbed "It's a Test," will open at 5 p.m. Eastern May 21 (9 a.m. local time May 22) from the company's launch site at Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island.

"We are all incredibly excited to get to this point," Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a statement about the planned launch. "Our talented team has been preparing for years for this opportunity and we want to do our best to get it right."

The company is setting expectations for a test launch that may suffer delays and could end in failure. "During this first launch attempt it is possible we will scrub multiple attempts as we wait until we are ready and conditions are favorable," Beck said in the statement.

The launch, as the company's name for it emphasizes, is a test flight, with no satellite payload on board. The launch is the first of three such test flights Rocket Lab plans before beginning commercial launches later this year.

Rocket Lab plans to carry out the launch largely out of public view. The company said a press kit about the mission that there will be no public viewing sites in the vicinity of its New Zealand launch site for this mission. There are also no plans to webcast the launch, although the company said it will provide video footage "following a successful launch."

Although Rocket Lab is launching from New Zealand, the company is headquartered in the United States, and thus will require a launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for this and future Electron missions. As of May 14, the FAA had not published a launch license for this flight.

Rocket Lab's Electron rocket on the pad at the company's New Zealand launch site during tests prior to this month's planned launch. (Image credit: Rocket Lab)

The Electron is a small launch vehicle capable of placing up to 150 kilograms into a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. The rocket's first stage is powered by nine Rutherford engines, burning liquid oxygen and kerosene for two and a half minutes. A single modified Rutherford engine is used on the second stage, which releases the rocket's payload into orbit seven and a half minutes after liftoff.

Rocket Lab had planned to launch Electron last year, but suffered delays because of both vehicle and launch site development. In a March interview, Beck said he still hoped to perform five to seven launches this year, including the three test launches and initial commercial missions.

Among its customers is Moon Express, a Florida-based company facing a deadline of the end of this year to launch its commercial lunar lander in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. Other customers include NASA, who awarded the company a Venture Class Launch Services contract in 2015, and Planet and Spire, two companies developing constellations of Earth-monitoring cubesats.

In March, Rocket Lab announced that it had raised $75 million in a Series D financing round, led by two venture capital firms, Data Collective and Promus. The company has raised $148 million to date, and said the new round would allow it to increase Electron production capacity.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Fully 64 percent of Germans are opposed to allowing Paris to take on more debt than allowed by EU rules. Even a majority of SPD supporters reject the idea. But the chancellor still doesn't want to be overly firm with France -- that wouldn't be looked kindly upon in Europe or at home. "The tone we adopt with France will be important," says one source in the Chancellery.

Neither Merkel nor Finance Minister Schauble rule out the appointment of a European finance minister. But "the person would of course also have to be able to enforce European budget rules so that they are adhered to by all," Schauble says. Thus far, though, it was often the French who rejected extensive intrusions on national sovereignty.

Ultimately, Merkel believes, the degree of cooperation between Berlin and Paris will depend largely on Macron. If he is able to improve the French economy and adhere to European stability criteria, then she is prepared to make concessions. "If Macron delivers, it will be easier for us to give him something," says one person in Merkel's circle.

The new French president has many allies in Europe, which is another reason the chancellor is eager to avoid open conflict. "Macron stands where I stand," says Matteo Renzi, the former and perhaps future prime minister of Italy. A few days ago, Renzi met with his buddy Barack Obama in Milan. Together, they made the spontaneous decision to call Macron. Once Renzi had the Frenchman on the line, he said: "This is the assistant to Barack Obama. I'll put you through."

In addition to Italy, countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece will try to get Macron on their side. The idea of increasing investments by way of a eurozone budget is music to their ears. And even further to the north, austerity is falling out of favor. "Insisting on the very last cent of the stability pact as poverty spreads across parts of Europe -- that shouldn't be our position," says Jean Asselborn, the long-time foreign minister of Luxembourg.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is also supportive of much of what Macron is planning. And the two know each other well. Even before Juncker had officially taken office, he and Macron had breakfast together on the terrace of a hotel in Brussels. "I am more than open to what Mr. Macron says, in part because I said the same things three years ago," Juncker said recently in Berlin.

Europe's Greatest Opportunity in Years?

It could be that Macron's election is the greatest opportunity presented to Europe in years. Europe needs a new beginning. That which long made Europe successful -- an economic alliance without real political power -- has become a problem.

The EU has 27 commissioners, with one responsible for fisheries while another focuses on agriculture. Indeed, competencies are so fragmented that armies of bureaucrats are necessary to prevent one commissioner from intruding on the portfolio of another. But one thing the eurozone doesn't yet have is a finance minister.

Instead of a prime minister, two presidents exist side-by-side, though neither has control of European troops nor can they lower taxes or take on debt. The EU invokes its social values but it can do nothing when the economy booms in one region while another is swallowed up by poverty.

The currency union needs an economic and a financial government. In principle, everyone agrees. But how exactly should that look?

The Germans want an agency that is primarily responsible for ensuring that nobody takes on too much debt. The French envision more of a European social security office that aligns living conditions across the continent.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. When the SPD announced in January that Sigmar Gabriel was stepping down as party chair and former European Parliament President Martin Schulz was taking over -- and would be the SPD's chancellor candidate in the Sept. 24 general election -- nationwide support for the SPD immediately jumped by over 10 percent.

The survey bump initially made it look as though Merkel was vulnerable. Having staked her tenure on allowing over a million refugees into the country in 2015, it looked as though German voters were tiring of her leadership -- particularly in North Rhine-Westphalia, a state that took in more refugees than any other. Merkel's own apparent lack of enthusiasm for running again only served to strengthen that impression.
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Antwerp (Belgium), May 15, 2017 (SPS) - The Sahrawi community in Belgium celebrated Sunday, in Antwerp (Belgium), in Northern Belgium, the 44th anniversary of the creation of the Polisario Front, on 10 May 1973, and the triggering of the armed fight for the liberation of Western Sahara, ten days later.

In a meeting organized at the Geel cultural centre in Antwerp, the representative of the Polisario Front in Belgium Jamal Zakari reiterated the determination of the Sahrawi people to continue their long fight to achieve their goal: that of returning to the completely freed territories of Western Sahara.

We renew, today, our commitment to continue the fight on all fronts to gather the people of Western Sahara on their land, he said in this ceremony, reiterating the aspiration of its people to live in peace.

The president of the organization of the Sahrawi community in Belgium Mohamed Hossein Mohamed Fadel called for the continuation of the fight for the recognition of the Sahrawi peoples inalienable right to self-determination, expressing his wish to see the international community support the Sahrawi cause.

The president of the International Conference for Support and Solidarity with the Sahrawi People (EUCOCO) Pierre Galand hailed the progress made by the Sahrawi people in their fight to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination. (SPS)

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Paris (France), May 15, 2017 (SPS)  The decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) which excludes Western Sahara territories from the EU-Morocco trade agreements is "mandatory" for both the European Commission and its member states, said Algeria's ambassador to Brussels, Amar Belani, in reaction to reports that the European Commission had requested the Unions approval for a new negotiating mandate with a view to "adjusting" certain provisions of the agreements.

Theoretically, this is unlikely to happen as the provisions of the ECJ ruling of 21 December 2016 are clear and stipulate that the products and resources from Western Sahara territory are excluded from the trade agreements between the EU and Morocco," Belani said in an interview with Afrique Asie magazine.

According to Afrique Asie, which quotes the international NGO Western Sahara Resource Watch, the European Commission has requested the EU member states approval for a new negotiating mandate to adjust certain provisions of the trade agreement with Morocco, to include products from Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco since 1975.

In this regard, the Algerian diplomat recalled that "the irreversible decision of European justice is binding for the European Commission and the EU member states. It derives from the distinct status recognized by the international law and the UN Charter, of Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory."

However, he said that "the statements of certain senior EU officials and the low-key visits by these officials to Rabat suggested that the two parties work together to find technical means for circumventing this decision, which explains the incessant interrogations of the MEPs as to the content of these unclear negotiations.

The Moroccan authorities, which are usually so quick to react to the EU slightest recall of the international law principles, such as the non-autonomous status of Western Sahara territory or its eligibility for self-determination referendum, have been quiet in recent months, as if they received guarantees about the outcome of those negotiations."

For Belani, "it would be regrettable that the EU, in the name of pragmatism, decides to breach the principles and the values of its foundation and its relations with the rest of the world."

As well, he voiced "confidence" that the law would prevail. "My confidence is backed up by the European companies announcement of ending the exploitation of Western Sahara resources, like Swiss multinational Glencore PLC in offshore oil exploration."

Belani has welcomed "the end of the impunity through which Morocco illegally exported Sahrawi resources.

A South African judge seized a New Zealand-bound vessel carrying $-5-million 54,000 tonnes of phosphates, from the Boucraa mines in the Sahrawis occupied territories by Morocco.

Regarding Morocco's "dithering" over its agreement for the naming of a UN new personal envoy for Western Sahara,- a prelude to the relaunch of Morocco - Polisario negotiations-, Belani said that "Morocco is entangled in its own contradictions" recalling "the permanent representatives speech in New York at the end of the Security Council meeting on April 28, who conditioned the relaunch of talks, as proposed by the UN chief and supported by the Security Council, by the departure Polisario Front elements from Guerguerat region."

The Polisario Front has withdrawn its elements as a sign of appeasement and readiness to relaunch talks.

The diplomat regretted that "Morocco was exaggerating by saying that it would approve Horst Kohler as a UN Personal envoy on the only basis of its 2007 autonomy proposal, which is contrary to the Resolution calling for direct negotiations and without pre-conditions."

"There is another schizophrenic attitude of Morocco. The Kingdom wants to accede to the African Union (AU), by obtaining the support of most members, but it doesnt recognize or abide by the Pan-African Organization dispute settlement mechanisms. Morocco has adhered unreservedly to the AU constituent charter," concluded Belani. (SPS)

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Hubris and rank amateurism are killing President Donald Trump when it comes to his Russia problem. And that's the most charitable explanation.

First, Trump made the very questionable decision to meet with top Russian officials a day after making the very questionable decision to fire the man leading the FBI's Russia investigation, James Comey. And now The Washington Post is reporting that, in that very same meeting, Trump shared highly classified information about the Islamic State with the Russians.

This is information that current and former U.S. officials say could jeopardize a valuable source of intelligence in the fight against ISIS and give an adversarial Russia a strategic advantage in Syria, where its goals are different from ours. If there is something worse Trump could have done in that meeting, I'm not sure what it would be.

The details of what exactly Trump discussed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Wednesday are sketchy, and The Washington Post is withholding some of them for national security reasons. But according to the officials, Trump relayed information from an intelligence-sharing arrangement that is so sensitive that some details aren't even shared with U.S. allies or broadly within the U.S. government. Trump cited the specifics of an ISIS plot and, most problematically, named the city in the Islamic State's territory where the U.S.' partner detected the threat.

More News Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian...

Needless to say, sharing information with the Russian government that isn't even being shared with allies is a big blunder. Trump has broad authority to declassify information, so he was probably within his rights to talk about it. But this is something that can credibly be described as Trump doing damage to the fight against the Islamic State with his loose lips.

The officials The Post spoke with are clearly exasperated. Here's a sampling of their reactions:

--"Trump seems to be very reckless, and doesn't grasp the gravity of the things he's dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security." - a former senior U.S. official close to current administration officials

--"Russia could identify our sources or techniques." - a senior U.S. official

--"I don't think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out." - a former intelligence official who worked on Russia-related issues

--"He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it - and that has big downsides. Does he understand what's classified and what's not? That's what worries me." - a former U.S. official

Given how unusual a politician Trump is and how shocked most of us were that he was elected president, we're always in a constant search for alternate explanations for the off-kilter things he does. Maybe the tweets work! Maybe his offensive comments were calculated! Maybe he's just trying to distract us! Maybe he's really a secret political genius, despite his 36 percent approval rating!

But the Comey firing last week, its badly bungled aftermath and now Trump's disclosure of highly classified information to Russia in the Oval Office paint a pretty clear picture. This is a president who shoots from the hip. Sometimes he shoots from the hip and hits the target, but it's also causing him major, major problems now that he's President Trump and not Candidate Trump. It's one thing to say something offensive during the New Hampshire primary; it's quite another to jeopardize tools for fighting terrorism because you speak before you think.

Conspiracy theorists who are fond of the claims in that dossier will believe that this is Trump deliberately feeding valuable information to his buddies in Russia as payback for their help in the 2016 election. But sharing it out in the open during a meeting with other national security officials in the room would seem to be a very curious move. As The Post report notes, Trump's flub was quickly recognized and the damage control began almost immediately.

On a much more basic level, this appears to be Trump being careless and completely unaware of how the things he's saying may create problems - both perception problems for himself, and real-world problems for the fight against terrorism. He lets his hubris get the better of him and starts bragging about the power and information at his fingertips - just like he did at Mar-a-Lago back in February. "I get great intel," Trump reportedly told the Russians on Wednesday. "I have people brief me on great intel every day."

Trump badly miscalculated the public reaction to his firing of Comey and bungled the explanations; then he went ahead with the Russia meeting anyway; then he did something in that Russia meeting that is only going to feed the narratives that he's (a) in the tank for Moscow and/or (b) totally in over his head as president in ways that are dangerous.

It's a series of tightly packed-together errors that can only be accomplished with an extraordinary amount of ego and a lack of a better angel.
In the last month or so, weve seen a sweeping tax reduction proposal grab headlines, with some arguing that its the best way to spur economic growth in the United States. But while pass-throughs and repatriation of offshore funds were filling talking heads mouths, a few pieces of below-the-radar news signified a fundamentally different approach to spurring entrepreneurial growth in the U.S. that extends far beyond the coasts and metros. The first is about a state government stepping up to virtually connect all of its citizens, while the second points to the Trump administrations disinterest in physically connecting its most rural inhabitants. Both developments illustrate an opportunity to create a foundation for individual entrepreneurs to succeed while promoting a larger sense of connection within our countrys economy.

Related: Don't Believe Success Comes From Hard Work Alone

Digital isolation withers small-town economies.

There has never been more content competing for our (increasingly) limited attention spans. As entrepreneurs in this environment, success comes with our ability to engage and connect with current and prospective customers across multiple channels and means of communication. Its not enough to be in the Yellow Pages. You need to be on social channels, your own web property and, perhaps most importantly, recognizable via search. Businesses need to be online to even begin playing the awareness, recognition and perception game across digital channels.

But according to the FCC, 34 million Americans lack broadband access today. As a country, the United States ranks 15th in broadband connectivity, behind countries such as South Korea and Canada, with at least 30 percent of people in states like Mississippi and Arkansas lacking broadband access.

While we can argue the merits of tax cuts to spur growth, broadband access is table stakes for todays businesses and, according to a federal court, no different than water or electricity as a utility. New York state has recognized the power of access for businesses large and small, rising to the challenge of bringing it to all of its residents through its Broadband for All program. The goal of this public/private partnership is to broadband access to everyone, everywhere in the state by 2018. That is an aggressive and lofty aspiration.

New Yorks efforts show how foundational improvements can foster a climate for entrepreneurial growth for underserved areas in the country, but the states actions also point to a reality of todays business ecosystem. We live in a connected economy, and small town independent businesses cannot succeed long-term within only hyperlocal environments. Whether its retaining Main Street customers or branching out to address a national or global market, digital connectivity is necessary for continued success.

Related: Is Internet Access a Human Right? Mark Zuckerberg Thinks So.

Connect isolated entrepreneurs to world markets.

When the President rolled out his proposed budget in March, much was made of the increase spending on defense, border security and other hot-button items. One proposed program cut seemed relatively benign, but highlights how something like a government program can spur connectivity or completely shutter it for U.S. citizens. The Essential Air Service (EAS) program was begun in the late 1970s subsidize commercial flights to the smaller regional airports. Without a subsidy, commercial airlines simply wouldnt fly into places like the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia or Escanaba in Michigan.

The budget line item for this program? $175 million. To put that in perspective, the same budget called for an additional $52 billion in defense spending. Protecting the President and his family costs roughly $120 million, while this program serves 175 rural communities across the country (60 of them are in Alaska, which is completely dependent on the program).

Related: Here's How Investors Can Help Put the 'United' Back Into 'United States'

Putting aside the disconnect between a populist president and a budget cut that disproportionately affects his supporters, axing the EAS would have been a symbolic gesture from the president. Aside from the jobs and businesses that are directly tied to the regional airports, providing a physical connection to the larger country and business community allows those in small towns to conduct business in a way they otherwise couldnt.

To compete in a global economy, entrepreneurs need the infrastructure -- broadband, airports, shippers, roads, ports and so on --to connect with everyone, everywhere. Thats true in the virtual and physical sense as businesses evolve and scale. Building and preserving more ways to connect rural communities with the larger national economy will nurture more entrepreneurs contributing to their local economy while promoting economic growth throughout the country.

Thanks to a bipartisan deal in Congress, federal spending legislation was passed that preserved the EAS at least until September. While many will (rightly) wage war against the FCCs net neutrality decisions, the impact of broader broadband access should not be forgotten, either. After all, Americans boast an entrepreneurial streak. More of them simply need the foundation and opportunity to use it.

Related:

5 Wrong Reasons for Becoming an Entrepreneur

Tax Cuts Are Not the Help Entrepreneurs Need to Grow the Economy

What 17 Entrepreneurs Learned From Their Mothers



Copyright 2017 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
C ity veteran Peter Hambro on Monday accused Petropavlovsks rebel shareholders of trying to kick him out in an effort to take control of the Russian gold miner he chairs.

Renova, M&G and Sothic, who control more than 30% of the London-listed miner, last week proposed installing four directors of their choosing, including Chelsea FC chairman Bruce Buck, and voting against the re-election of Hambro as chairman at next months annual general meeting.

Hambro, who oversaw a painful restructuring two years ago which saved the firm from going under, hit back today with his own proposed changes.

He will be replaced by mining veteran Andrew Vickerman, but will remain an executive director.

This is a difference of culture. Renova, Sothic and M&G  theyre all experts at mining the market. And Petropavlovsk mines the mines, Hambro said.

There are two ways that you can take over a company. One is to pay something close to its net worth The other is to pack the board with nominees and have them do what you want with it.

Hambro added he wouldnt stand in the way of a bid at the right price.
Y ou wouldnt need to have drunk too many gin and tonics to have lost count of the number of times Fever-Tree has upgraded guidance since its hit float.

The AIM-listed maker of posh mixers repeated that trick again today. It revealed ahead of its annual meeting that strong sales this year would flow down to its annual results, which will be comfortably ahead of current market expectations.

Shares in the AIM-listed posh mixers maker fizzed to a new high, up 57p, or 3%, to 1761p, valuing it at more than 2 billion for the first time. The shares have surged 185% in 12 months. It floated at 134p in 2014.

The upgrade will prove just the tonic for shareholders wondering whether it is time to cash in their winnings.

Analysts at Whitman Howard today expressed concern about the valuation. Mixers rely on distilled spirits for their volume and in the case of Fever-Tree western-style spirits volumes. These spirits volumes are broadly static, they said.

Strength from mining and oil firms pushed the FTSE 100 to new highs as it climbed 16.98 points to 7452.37. Copper miner Antofagasta rose 15.5p to 789.5p and Royal Dutch Shell was up 23.22p to 2216.72p.

They were buoyed by news over the weekend that China pledged $124 billion (96 billion) for the new Silk Road trade network in a sign that it will continue to consume raw materials apace.

When oil rises and China opens its chequebook, this helps to lift risk sentiment and act as a soothing balm, Kathleen Brooks, City Indexs research director said.

On the mid-cap index, funerals operator Dignity jumped 189p, or 7.5%, to 2719p as it reported a strong start to the year. Revenues rose 15% to 93.3 million and underlying profits were 20% higher at 37.4 million in the first quarter.

On AIM, gold miner Avesoro was unmoved at 2.15p as it unveiled plans to add to its portfolio in West Africa. It said it is considering buying the Youga gold mine in Burkina Faso and another project from its private parent company.

Investors took profits at video advertising firm RhythmOne, formerly known as Blinkx. It slipped 1.49p to 47.01p despite trimming full-year losses to $18.8 million.
The team of math wiz kids at Capital High School was a bit stunned to learn last week that they are one of the top two teams in the nation in the High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM).

Now they are one of two U.S. teams competing in the International Mathematical Modeling Challenge of 27 teams.

Last November they started out as one of 330 competing from the United States.

In that round they spent 36 hours tackling a problem about where to place warehouses in the country for a company to be able to do one-day delivery anywhere in the country.

In the 19 years of the competition, the CHS team was the first Montana team to be named a qualifier, and was named one of nine National Finalist Teams.

In the most recent round of competition, the problem they tackled was jet lag.

The team had to create algorithms to pick the best spot for an international meeting for citizens coming in from different countries so they would suffer the least amount of jet lag and productivity loss.

One scenario had six attendees, another with 11.

The team took five days, mostly over spring break in March, to solve the problem.

Once again, the team of seniors Jack Murphy, Caleb Noble and Willie Gross and junior Jaskrit Singh did some impressive analysis and modeling to finally decide that two communities in Russia would be the best location for the first meeting, and Beirut or Cairo would be best for the second.

In their model, they considered such factors as distance, travel time, number of time zones the attendees had to cross, climate changes and costs.

There was a lot that went into our decision-making, said Gross.

We did some research on how these different factors would affect a persons work productivity, said Noble.

I think the reason we did so well is we wrote a program that automated the whole process, said Murphy.

After their program worked for the two scenarios, they then tried it out on a real world problem of choosing a city for a G20 Summit.

Their model tested well, said Murphy. This year the meetings being held in Germany and that was one of our top results.

Among the many things they learned was that flying east was more detrimental to productivity than flying west, said Noble. When you fly east you lose hours, thereby losing sleep.

Their winning paper from this round is what goes forward to the international competition.

By late June, well have our results, said Noble.

As they did in the November competition, they divvied up the workload.

Pretty much all we did was coding, said Murphy of this problem, rather than any complex math. They primarily used a lot of Python and MATLAB coding.

Singh did data mining, focusing on costs and travel times.

Gross worked on time zones and the effect time zones would have on each participant based on where they were from.

Noble split the world into 75 zones and and took the data for time zones, travel time and climate change and created an algorithm to score the regions against each other for productivity.

I did the distance between each person in every region...and synthesized all the other things and put it in an automation program ...so you could easily see what was the best and worst regions, said Murphy.

Grueling and fun was how they described the experience.

For me, it was the experience that will last a lifetime, said Gross, four teenagers locked away doing math and computers. ...It was a pretty cool experience.

Singh found out that working on math five days straight was something he enjoys. If I had a job like this, it would be a lot of fun.

We really didnt expect this, said Murphy, noting that their team was going up against some of the elite private schools in the country as well as science and math magnet and charter schools, including such schools as Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and Rutgers Preparatory School.

I dont think any of us expected to get this far. ...to get top two in the nation," said Murphy. "Were all really proud to be from Montana and representing our state on the worlds stage. ...It kind of seems surreal.

Helena School District should be very proud of producing world class talent, he added. This has been a pretty good month for them with the school bond.

Theyre going to represent the United States,  said their math teacher Dennis Peterson. Thats pretty impressive. So all those big magnet schools and prep schools, they beat them.

The three graduating seniors are heading in various directions next fall, Murphy to Williams College; Noble, MIT, both located in Massachusetts; and Gross, the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.
T he Prime Ministers commitment today to bring employment rights up to date is welcome. It is not just good politics; it is good economics too.

The political opportunity is straightforward. It is obvious that the Conservative Party should seek to occupy new electoral territory among working people whose interests have been abandoned by the current Labour Party. These working people want more than just protection from exploitation; they want economic opportunity and patriotic government. More fool the Corbyn leadership for leaving such an open goal.

The economic benefits of modern employment rights are less straightforward but in the view of this paper no less compelling. It is no coincidence that the most successful firms are those that already go far beyond the minimum legal requirements when it comes to offering time off to have a baby, or to care for a sick relative and to work flexibly when family pressures demands it. Thats because smart employers know that happy employees are likely to be far more productive than unhappy ones.

It is worth remembering that for many workers in the gig economy, that happiness comes from being able to work at a time of their own choosing and for multiple employers. Its important that any new employment rights dont inadvertently make that impossible. Our flexible workforce has been the reason why Britain has seen so many new jobs created over these past seven years. Its also in societys interests that families care for sick or disabled relatives, rather than the state picking up the bill  and modern employment laws can help that happen. The law acts as the floor upon which good companies can build committed teams  and the changes made by the last government to extend flexible parenting rights have set the direction this government follows.

It is in the interests of both social justice and economic efficiency that as a society we continue the progress in eliminating any pay gap that remains between men and women. The news, exclusively revealed to this paper, that the Conservatives will extend reporting requirements on companies to cover different ages and ethnicity can help achieve equitable pay, provided good intentions are not translated into overly bureaucratic implementation.

It is also sensible to build on the success of the National Living Wage, by promising to update it. If the consensus in favour of the capitalist economy is to be maintained, then those who go out to work and put in the hours need to see a decent return for their efforts. It is fashionable these days to turn to Marxs Das Kapital for inspiration. It is in the interests of supporters of the free market that the providers of labour  the workers  see a return for their contribution alongside the owners of capital.

That return on capital is also fundamental. For modern workplace rights to remain affordable and to avoid the risks of unemployment, other steps need to be taken to make sure businesses remain competitive. Here the Conservatives have been less forthcoming. Where are the plans to continue to reduce business taxes? How are we going to ensure unhindered access to our main export markets post-Brexit? We have yet to hear convincing answers. Without successful firms there are no workers. Without workers there are no workers rights.

Avoid rail trauma

A raft of engineering works over the August Bank Holiday will restrict rail services at Waterloo, London Bridge and Charing Cross. It will be painful but the work has to be done and it makes sense to do it over the long weekend. As ever, commuters will worry about the work overrunning; one pleasant way to avoid that possibility might be to take a slightly longer summer holiday.
M ost senior politicians simply dont understand what Donald Trump, winningly, calls the cyber. I dont blame them. I dont either. For most of us, phrases such as zero-day exploit, spoofing, port-forwarding and so forth might as well be in Betelgeusian.

I take an interest in this stuff  and Im a good deal less busy than most of our political masters  yet when I read a detailed blog post by an expert about something catastrophic that just happened online, some mass data-dump, or ransomware contagion, or vulnerability in a major data repository, I tend to come away with no more insight, finally, than that, er, something catastrophic just happened online.

But the bottom line must be that if senior politicians dont understand the cyber, they need to employ people  seriously good people  who do. And the insights of these people must be passed up the chain of command, adequately translated and fed directly into policy. Because what weve got now is half-understandings parsed into gobbledygook policy pronouncements (see every Home Secretary back to Jack Straw on the subject of encryption, which is the absolute shallow end of this stuff, conceptually) and vulnerabilities left unaddressed in a fingers-crossed way until such time as the balloon goes up and were into Something Must Be Done territory. And that just aint good enough. Not even close.

We make much of Trident, the maintenance of the armed forces, and counter-terrorism measures. But these 20th-century security preoccupations mean next to nothing if our national cyber-security is being treated as an afterthought. As witness those Iranian nuclear centrifuges taken down by Stuxnet, its not much use having a nuclear deterrent if the IT systems that operate it are vulnerable to hackers. Everything from the financial system to military intelligence to the very operation of democracy itself  as the examples of America and France warn us  depends on information security. Information war is the new frontline.

The NHS was dinged good and proper last week and, perhaps most dismaying of all, was dinged not by some genius black-hat hackers who systematically targeted the organisation but by, most experts agree, a bunch of random amateurs. The attack was a ransomware virus  it locks a computers data and demands the user pay a ransom to unlock it. It wasnt targeted at the NHS: it was just something that floats around the web in the hopes of snagging a few suckers with badly out-of-date operating systems.

Cyber attack hit 200,000 victims across 150 countries, says Europol chief

We know that its authors (because of the transparent nature of Bitcoin, in which their victims pay up) have made no more than around 20k from their worldwide reign of terror; and we know that so clumsy are they that their attack was stopped by accident: an infosec specialist registered a domain name he found in the malwares code and discovered that that nixed the spread of the virus.

Essentially, then, the NHSs computer systems  on which lives depend  fell vulnerable to the Chuckle Brothers of the hacking world because a significant minority of their systems were running the steam-age Windows XP; because they hadnt been patched since the Government shrugged and let a security contract with Microsoft lapse two whole years ago and didnt bother to replace it (5.5 million that was worth: pocket-change in national budgets); and because Jeremy Hunt had ignored serious and well-sourced warnings of the systems vulnerability  most eye-catchingly the opinion of a neurology registrar, one day before the attack, that hospitals will almost certainly be shut down by ransomware this year.

This is the picture-dictionary definition of taking your eye off the ball. We cant have a hit-and-hope attitude anymore. Not for one second longer.

Its time to mind the political bollocks

Emily Thornberry Says Bollocks on Andrew Marr

Oh, what a joy it was to see shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, see off Tory MP Michael Fallon on the Andrew Marr programme yesterday. After Mr Fallon suggested that, under a Labour government, the status of the Falkland Islands would be up for grabs, Ms Thornberry said: You really cant just go around making this stuff up. Theres an election on and people need to make decisions based on the truth. Youve just said, for example, that I want to negotiate the status of the Falklands. That is bollocks. Its untrue.

Good English epithet, that; not heard enough. And its a useful epithet because theres a lot of it about. The idea that a huge Tory majority is vital to see off the non-existent parliamentary opposition to Brexit, for instance. Or, to be even-handed, nearly every line of the Labour manifesto. On the same day last week there were three separate books called Post-Truth published, all of them dealing with what we might call bollocks in public life. The more people prepared to call it what it is, the better.
N aved Nasir, who has been executive chef with Dishoom group of restaurants from day one, minus 30 days, grew up in the north of India in a small town about 40 miles outside Delhi, before training as a chef in Bukhara in an Itc Hotel in Delhi and afterwards spending seven years working in Mumbai.

Today he visits the city twice a year, either alone or with his head chefs or other team members for research - or any time we need to get inspiration, which he admits is more than he goes back home.

I love the craziness of Bombay, he says. Its absolutely mad - there are so many people around, and theres always hustle and bustle and noise. But there is a synchronisation in all of that and then you get used to it. It never sleeps. Its also fairly safe - you can walk around at 1 in the morning - at least compared to what its like in other cities in India, and you can have a meal for 10p which is incredible in todays world.

Here he tells us his favourite places to eat there.

Where do you always return to eat when you visit Mumbai?

Ashok Vada Pav, which is near Kirti College in Dadar and its very very famous for the vada pav (like a spiced, deep-fried potato served with chutneys in a roll) as its the only dish they do. People usually a queue for that, which is very unusual for Mumbai, which has a pav place every few metres. Its brilliant. If I go to Bombay or someone from the team does, I make sure they visit this place.

Ashok Vada Prav

The other one is Gajalee, which has several branches across Bombay, but usually I go to the one in Andheri. They do a very good pomfret masala curry, which is fresh pomfret fish, fresh chillies and coconut which is amazing.

Gajalee, E3, Udyog Sadan No.2, MIDC, Opposite ESIS Hospital, Andheri East, Mulgaon, Andheri East, Mumbai

Which street food do you seek out?

The places around Mohammad Ali Road are very famous for street food. I particularly recommed Surti 12 Handi for good nihari (a slow-cooked meat stew) and paya (trotters) and tongue soup. They dont do bread, they only do curries, but you can get bread from the shop next door and have it together. Its a place thats now quite well-known as has become very popular.

Surti 12 Handi, Saifee Jubilee St, Kumbharwada, 400003, 60, 2nd Ln, Ajmer, Kumbharwada, Mumbai

What drinks are good to share in Mumbai?

I dont drink alcohol, but chai is what anyone would associate with the city, and there are sellers every 50 metres selling it so everyone claims to have the best recipe - theres anything from lemongrass to mint and ginger. An interesting small chai bar concept is in Oxford Book Store in Churchgate, and they have about 100 different varieties of tea on the menu from all around the world.

Oxford Book Store, Apeejay House, 3 Dinsha Vachha Road, Churchgate, Mumbai

Where would you go for a special treat?

Britannia & Co

Gomantak in Dadar does very good local Gomantak cuisine, and whenever Im with friends thats where we go. I also strongly recommend Britannia & Co. cafe which is one of the oldest surviving Irani cafes - go for their sali boti (a fragrant Persian slow-cooked mutton curry) and berry pulao (a barberry pilau rice dish). Or, for a really special occasion, you could go to the restaurant where I trained, Peshawri in Itc Hotel Grand Maratha near the airport, which is very famous for North West Frontier cuisine.

Britannia & Co., Wakefield House,11, Sport Rd, 16, Ballard Estate, Opp New Custom House, Mumbai

Peshawri, Itc Hotel Grand Maratha Sheraton & Tower,, Sahar Village, Andheri East, Mumbai

Where would you shop for specialist food products?

For fresh fish I usually go to the fish market at the Sassoon Docks early in the morning to get the catch of the day. If youre a bit late you can go to a very good place called Null Bazar where you can also buy seafood, fish, game, and vegetables.

Sassoon Docks, Colaba Causeway, Azad Nagar, Colaba, Mumbai

Null Bazar, Bhuleshwar, Mumbai

And for sweet things or desserts?

Lassi

There is a sweet shop near the Minara Mosque, called Burhanpur Mawa Jalebi and they do lots of Tawakkal sweets, and also the Mawa Jalebi milk pudding that they cook for so long that it almost caramelises into a dark colour.

Burhanpur Jalebi, 23, PL Lokhande Marg, ACC Nagar, Chedda Nagar ACC Nagar, Chedda Nagar Mumbai

Any final foodie tips?

Noor Mohammadi for their shami kebab, which I think it is one dish that I always fancy. They dont share the recipe for it with anyone, which they pride themselves on. Ive tried it many times, and it never comes as close to the one they do so I always recommend it to anyone coming here. I also love a place behind Taj Mahal Hotel called Bademiya, which is open all night and very good for a late night snack.

Noor Mohammad Hotel, 181-183, Abdul Hakim Noor Mohammadi Chowk, Bhendi Bazar, Mumbai

Bademiya, behind Hotel Taj Mahal,Tullock Road, Apollo Bandar, Colaba, Mumbai

Naved Nasir is the executive head chef at Dishoom, which has various branches across London; dishoom.com
W hy stop the wedding fun when the ceremony ends? According to Conde Nast Traveler, couples are extending the festivities by inviting their friends along on the honeymoon, creating a phenomenon dubbed the buddymoon.

A survey from Travelex indicated that one in five couples have already shared their honeymoon with more than just their spouse. CNT suggests that the trend stems from a bit of celebrity influence. Back in 2015, Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux invited Chelsea Handler, Jason Bateman, and Courteney Cox along for their honeymoon in Bora Bora (must be nice, right?).

"We had thought about it; we could just do a normal honeymoon or we could go with friends, keep the party going, relax, and have fun," Theroux told Extra at the time.

Another reason for the rise in buddymoons? CNT adds that with more couples living together before they get married, the honeymoon isn't seen as such a "precious" occasion anymore.

"For them, I think having friends come along is less of a big deal," W. Bradford Wilcox, sociologist and director of the National Marriage Project, told The New York Times. "And in some ways makes it more of a special and exceptional occasion."

Additionally, weddings in general have become more relaxed. Long gone are the days of white tie and tails  at least for most people planning a ceremony. Traditions related to the ceremony are changing and evolving, so it makes sense that the honeymoon would follow suit. For destination weddings, where people have already jetted off to a faraway locale, it also makes sense to keep the party going.

Alternative honeymoon destinations - in pictures 1 /10 Alternative honeymoon destinations - in pictures Yosemite National Park, California Corbis Cape Winelands, South Africa Corbis Arches National Park, Utah Corbis Madagascar Corbis Ishigaki, Japan Corbis Copenhagen, Denmark Corbis Grindavik, Iceland Corbis Stockholm Archipelago Stockholm Archipelago Corbis

"As people tend to get married later in life, weddings have become a lot less traditional," Lia Batkin, cofounder of planning company In The Know Experiences, told CNT. "Couples are planning more destination weddings than ever, so theyre tacking on a trip with their friends at the end of it to extend the celebration."

So, not only are honeymoons becoming a group hang, they're also getting longer, sometimes extending to monthlong excursions. Seeing the sites with your new partner may be fun, but it seems that more and more people are letting their pals join in real life, not just via social media.

Read more from Refinery29:

The Benefits of Honey-Based Skincare

What Your Weird Sex Dreams Really Mean

Does Mentorship Actually Help Anyone?
.

The north-west coast of France almost feels too near to count as a real holiday, but beautiful seascapes, sleepy old towns and traffic-free motorways make this feel a world away from the bustle of London.

Getting an early start, my friends and I arrived in Calais in the afternoon and headed straight down the coast. Picardy is better-known for its First World War history, however, the region has tranquil stretches of coastline and one of Frances few nature reserves.

The Somme Bays estuary is home to several species of birds including regal herons and spoonbills. As spotting these birds calls for quiet, youll be forced to slow down and take in the marshy surroundings at a more leisurely pace. However, should you want to be a little bit more active, visitors are able to hire bikes and explore the reserve's trails on two wheels.

After a peaceful few hours at the estuary, we hopped back in the car and headed inland past Rouen, to our stopover destination, the quiet village of Montreuil-LArgille.

Beautiful seascapes and sleepy old towns make this feel a world away from the bustle of London

The next day we set off for Mont Saint-Michel, around a three and a half hour drive away from Rouen. In some ways the town is best admired from the outside. There are daily barefoot walking excursions when the tide is out to the nearby island and bird reserve of Tombelaine.

We were feeling adventurous, so booked a kayaking trip around the bay with local British expat Ian Wood at Sea Kayak Mont St Michel. Wetsuits were provided, which made us brave enough to take a quick dip in the chilly water afterwards.

After our kayaking excursion, we made the three-hour drive to Brittany, staying in the countryside near the small and sleepy Goulven. Brittany has a proud heritage with its own Breton language and road names in both French and the local dialect.

Dining out: Aimee and her friends enjoy a meal

We wanted to enjoy Brittany's coastline, so the next morning we stocked up on picnic food and headed to Ploumanach, which has beautiful granite rock formations lapped by crystal clear waters. Swimming is permitted but we limited ourselves to just dipping our toes in.

The bay has plenty to explore, but for those wishing for an extra challenge, there are walks of varying degrees of difficulty along the coast. We then set off for Pointe de Pen-Hir, a more westerly part of the coast, stopping off for a picnic on the beach at Saint-Michel-en-Greve on our way.

Winding through the Armorique Regional Natural Park with its rows of stately pine trees and flashes of rugged seas, the drive to Pointe de Pen-Hir is almost as enjoyable as the destination itself. A particular highlight is driving across the Terenez Bridge, with cable stays that seem to fan out around you as you travel across.

Pointe de Pen-Hir itself is, of course, spectacular: staring out into the sunset 70 metres above the sea is a pretty breathtaking end to a holiday.

Along the way - Mont Saint-Michel

Mont Saint-Michel makes for an exciting drive, as the monastery that gives the commune its Disney castle-like appearance is visible in the distance. Walking around doesnt take longer than half an hour and there are plenty of restaurants to enjoy and shops to browse.

Alamy / Alamy

While youre there - Pointe de Pen-Hir

With islands of spiky rock that were once promontories stretching out into the sea, its no wonder that Pointe de Pen-Hir is popular with climbers seeking an adrenaline rush. But for those after a more meditative feel, there are plenty of places to perch and simply contemplate the view.

Alamy

Book with Eurotunnel Le Shuttle and you can get to the Continent by car in just 35 minutes, travel in the freedom of your own car, and explore Europe at your own pace. Visit eurotunnel.com
I m watching two lions mating. I feel a little uncomfortable about this invasion of privacy - all Im missing is a grubby trenchcoat - but the big cats dont seem to mind. Perhaps a gaggle of gawping tourists parked close by provides a welcome break from the monotony - lions mating rituals last three days, most of which is spent lying around looking exhausted, punctuated by quick, ahem, bursts of activity. But as the beasts go to lie back down in the dirt, tails flicking lazily at flies, something switches in the male - hes suddenly alert. A herd of buffalo has sauntered into the scene, realising their mistake too late. Now Im watching a tense stand-off; the animals hold each others gazes, waiting for someone to make the first move. Go on boy, go for it, breathes our guide, Barney, urging the lion to hone in for the kill.

It happens in an instant. The buffaloes start off running and the lion, lightning fast, is right behind them. Barney guns the engine and our open-top, open-sided 4x4 vehicle lurches to life; my sunglasses, propped up on my head, fly right off as we race over the uneven red earth to catch up. By the time we make it around a clump of mopani trees into which the pursuit had disappeared, the lion has claimed his prize - he pins a struggling buffalo to the ground with one heavy paw, his jaws on the fallen animals neck. The lion looks like a vampire sucking his prey free of life; in fact, hes suffocating it. Barney drives us so close that, when the lioness deigns to slink over, we can hear her rough tongue on the buffalos hide as she gives it a lick.

Id been told andBeyonds newly refurbished Ngala Lodge is ideal for a beginners safari, with its luxurious - and lockable - cottages providing comfort to nervous campers. Plus its private game reserve, on the western border of Kruger, is easily accessible from nearby Hoedspruit airport (so no rickety bush planes or interminable off-road drives). Id fretted that might mean the experience wouldnt be quite as wild as Id like, and before jetting off told myself to manage my expectations. I neednt have worried. On the drive from the airport, an enormous rhino wandered right by my window, and I spotted giraffes, zebras and elephants, too. That afternoon, my first game drive ended with me photographing a pregnant leopard as she lapped at a waterhole, before climbing a tree to eye me ominously from above.

Our drives dont traverse the wide, open plains of African savannah Id expected - heavy rains have seen thick, bright greenery sprout abundantly from the ochre soil. This is the bush alright, but game viewing isnt impeded. Along with Barney, Ngalas softly-spoken head guide (as knowledgeable as he is good-humoured), I have a tracker, Arab, who sits on a raised seat at the front of our vehicle scanning the landscape for activity with his expertly-attuned eyes.

The evening after we witness the kill, giddy with the thrill of the day, I joke at dinner that now I need to see a birth. (The meal is served within a lovely, lamp-lit walled courtyard; the lodge strives to vary mealtime settings and before this, Id eaten in its sand-floored boma and at a ridiculously romantic private table out in the bush.) I add its about time I saw a hippo, too. Sure enough, the next day we drive out at dawn and surprise a hippo wallowing in a puddle just seconds from reception. It trots off hastily, giving us a rare, close-up look at the animal out of water, where it spends most of its time. Just as I think I cant get any luckier, Arab points to a thicket. An impala is giving birth, Barney whispers, edging us as quietly as possible into the trees. I watch, incredulous, as the mother births the slick, floppy-eared infant, and even witness it take its first shaky steps. We should go now, Barney says, because we dont want to alert anything to their presence.

The chic cottages

The lodge itself is all classic colonial romanticism - more sherry-filled decanters and afternoon tea than the unfortunate truths. The refurb has turned previously dark and dated cottages light and airy, with high, thatched roofs, outdoor showers and standalone tubs. Theres also a pool with a dedicated water trough for any elephants who drop by and a small spa.

A lioness / trade

Yet there is real wildness among all this refinement. The lodge is unfenced and anything can wander in; a note in my room gives fair warning that the laundrys drying yard is regularly raided by hyenas and baboons. Im told to lock my cottage every time I leave lest the latter, who have learned how to open doors, let themselves in. The baboons have even noted when guests leave for game drives and stage break-ins accordingly. One morning, I see the muscled backside of one such would-be burglar bounding towards our abodes the moment our engine starts up.

The swimming pool

This proximity to such an untamed environment is exhilarating - and a bit terrifying. On my last evening, we head to the reserves biggest waterhole, where waiting lodge staff have set up a pop-up gin bar; I sip craft South African G&Ts as the sun sets, and crocs and hippos poke their heads above the waterline down the hill. One guest asks why the hippos keep yawning. Opening their huge jaws like that is a sign of aggression, Barney replies. Theyre warning us to keep our distance. I stop sipping my gin every so often to glance around and check were not being stalked.

Like most safari operations, andBeyond does its bit funding conservation and anti-poaching, especially a problem for its white rhino population, who are mercilessly hunted for their horns. But as I watch a parade of hippos exit the water to seek some privacy away from nosy gin drinkers, I think perhaps the bigger contribution is how humble it makes us feel to be up close to these spectacular creatures - and how keenly that helps us appreciate the blow struck by their loss.

A batthroom

Details

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A rguably the Greek Islands most enduring and magical image is one of blue-domed churches and whitewashed homes overlooking a cobalt sea. Captured on countless postcards, its the signature shot of Santorini and has single-handedly put the island on many a bucket list. For Londoners keen to experience this sensational spot, theres good news: British Airways operates summer, non-stop flights from London City Airport. And because the airport is in Zone 3, and you only have to arrive 20 minutes before your flight, this Greek odyssey really is so easy to reach.

Explosive history

Santorini may be beguiling, but it belies an explosive past. The crescent-shaped isle and its offshore outposts are all that remain of a once larger landmass that was devastated by volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago. In fact, those cliff-top homes and churches gaze out on a sea-filled caldera  though visitors can be confident that the volcano is long since extinct.

Its legacy (beyond those gorgeous views) can be seen on Santorinis coves and beaches, where smooth, dark, sea-worn pebbles and sweeps of black or coloured sand indicate the islands volcanic origins. Now lapped by the Aegean Sea, these stretches of coast attract summertime sun-seekers.

The best beaches and biggest resorts are found on the southeastern shores, where Kamari shines for its upmarket ambiance and dramatic setting beneath rugged cliffs. Nearby Perissa offers a water park with pools and slides, making this perfect for family holidays. The west coast, meanwhile, is better known for pebbly coves set within the former volcanos crater. This is also where Santorinis main towns are located, perched on the craters rim. Between them and the resorts, they offer accommodation spanning from budget to boutique and blowout.

Exquisite views

As well as postcard-worthy views, Fira, the island capital, is noted for its cobbled streets and sophisticated shopping and dining. It also has some notable attractions, such as the Museum of Prehistoric Thira, which houses murals and artefacts from the Minoan era (a civilisation whose demise followed Santorinis volcanic eruption). Many items were unearthed in the south at Akrotiri, one of Greeces most important archaeological sites. The site itself is well worth visiting, as is hilltop Ancient Thira to the east of the island  reached by foot or donkey from the beach resorts below.

Fira offers a different experience when visiting in the evening. With bars, clubs and restaurants all enjoying an al-fresco element, the nightlife is magnetic  and especially so during Santorini Jazz Festival in July and the International Music Festival in September. For something less crowded, head down to Kamaris open-air cinema, or simply sit back under the stars and sample quality wines from island-grown grapes. Vinsanto (a sweet, red dessert wine) is Santorinis particular speciality.

Spectacular sunsets

But despite all these obvious appeals, the islands star turn will always be Oia  an impossibly pretty village near Santorinis north-western point, with whitewashed rooftops, painted domes and endless Aegean views that are instantly recognisable as the ultimate in postcard perfection. The sunsets here are legendary, too, drawing crowds to celebrate the end of each day in this gorgeous Greek island paradise.

Quick and easy

Fancy joining them? Take advantage of British Airways service from London City to Santorini  one of three Greek islands (the others being Skiathos and Mykonos) it serves from this convenient airport on the doorstep of the capital. With flights operating three times per week, from 79 each way, London City is quick and convenient for Londoners to get to and through. Located in Zone 3, its less than 30 minutes from central London and allows passengers to check in up to 20 minutes before take-off. The result? A stress-free start to your trip  plus extra time to plan your Greek getaway with your own pictureperfect postcard moments.

Whether youre after pretty-as-a-postcard views, archaeological artefacts or volcanic sands and hidden coves, Santorini has it all. And with British Airways flights direct from London City Airport, its so easy to get there. Visit ba.com/londoncity

Weve teamed up with British Airways to offer readers the chance to win a pair of return flights from London to Skiathos. Click here to find out more and enter. Terms apply.
T he husband of travel writer Sara Wheeler is facing jail for breaking her arm at their home.

Peter Graham, 67, attacked his author wife in March last year, breaking her arm in three places in a domestic violence attack.

Ms Wheeler, 56, is a respected travel writer noted for her accounts of the polar regions, whose work includes the international bestseller Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and The Magnetic North: Notes on the Arctic Circle.

She has also published two biographies on famous travellers and was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

The attack by her husband was revealed when police were called to their home in Hampstead, north London, in February this year, Blackfriars crown court heard.

Peter Graham, 67, attacked his author wife in March last year

Prosecutor Babtunde Alabi said it was a malicious call to police but Ms Wheeler then told officers about an attack the previous year on March 26.

Mr Graham made full admissions about it, he told the court.

The court heard the couple, who have two sons together, are now separated, and Graham has moved to an apartment in Highbury.

He is banned from contacting Ms Wheeler but is allowed to visit the family home as long as he leaves before she returns.

Ms Wheeler has talked about their home, a converted Victorian butchers shop, as a treasure trove of mementoes from her travels around the world.

Graham, who was born in Quebec, Canada, was formerly the director of a Granott, a video production company, and was also in charge of a property developer in Hastings.

This is a rather unusual case, said Orla Daly, defending.

Police were called out in relation to a separate incident, and during the investigation was the revelation that there had been a previous incident.

The defendant when arrested admitted previously there had been an incident which is the subject matter of this indictment.

Judge Rajeev Shetty freed Graham on bail until a sentencing hearing on June 7.

You have pleaded guilty to a serious matter, and all options are open including potentially the possibility of custody, he said.

Graham, of Highbury, pleaded guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm.
Helena Regional Airport is again getting a full-body scanner, which it hasnt had since March 2013.

A crew was at work on the installation last week as Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel began to arrive for the early afternoon in-bound Delta Air Lines flight from Salt Lake City.

Passengers would use the metal detector that has been in service since the scanner was removed.

The new scanner was anticipated to be operational within a couple of days, Jeff Wadekamper, the airports director, said.

There is no cost to Helena's airport for the scanner.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont, a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had a significant role in helping airports in Helena and Great Falls receive scanners, Wadekamper said.

He really worked hard to get Helena and Great Falls the full-body scanners as soon as possible, he continued, and added we really appreciate that.

As a member of the Homeland Security Committee, keeping our country safe is my top priority, Tester said in a statement on the installation of the scanner.

I am pleased to see this state-of-the-art equipment installed in order to help the TSA and Helena Regional Airport better serve Montanans. This equipment will make traveling safer, more efficient, and more convenient for folks across Montana.

After repeated inquiries and questioning by Tester at hearings, TSA announced in December 2016 that Helena would be receiving this equipment.

Helenas previous scanner was removed as TSA didnt have enough to supply the nations hub airports and had to relocate some to meet its goal, Wadekamper said.

The scanner is made by L3 Technologies, which is based in New York, said Lori Dankers, a TSA spokeswoman who covers a nine-state region that includes Montana.

Nationwide, 155 of these second-generation scanners are being installed at a cost of about $150,000 each that includes installation, Dankers said.

This scanner uses advanced imaging technology that produces a non-descriptive image of either a male or a female, depending on which button is selected by the scanners operator.

An image from the 2- to 3-second scan is displayed on a screen outside of the scanner where the person who was scanned can see a yellow box on the body image that indicates an area on the body of concern.

The scanner is neither an X-ray machine nor a metal detector but detects metallic and non-metallic items outside of a persons body, which means people with implants are not automatically singled out for further screening, Dankers said.

Bunched clothing can trigger the scanners alert as can items in a pocket, she noted and said cash, keys, tissues, even your boarding pass should be removed from pockets before going through the scanner.

Helena Regional Airport spent about $150,000 to prepare for installation of the scanner that was removed in 2013.

Because the airport previously had a scanner, wiring and other cables needed for its operation are already in place, Wadkamper said. Structural modifications to the passenger screening area were also completed as part of that project.

Part of the building modifications was the installation of a second lane for airline passengers to better manage the flow of people to the scanner.

The two lanes for airline passengers is seen as a way to help manage passenger flow for some years to come, although setting aside an area for a third lane could be part of the airports expansion thats planned for 2018.

Just as the airport authority has yet to finalize what work to include in that first phase of a much broader plan, so too is the cost yet to be determined.

Wadekamper estimated the expansion at between $6 million and $10 million. Some of what may be spent on the upcoming phase one of the project may be to prepare the airport for future expansion.

Additional restrooms are part of the expansion but adding plumbing for future restrooms would be more cost-effective than adding it later, he noted.

Another of the cost considerations facing the airport authority is whether to add a second elevator during the expansion as the single one that ferries passengers between floors is old and perhaps in need of replacement.

Its a matter of what we think we can afford and what makes good operational sense, Wadekamper said.

Additional room is needed for waiting passengers. The second floor waiting area can see people standing as seats fill with passengers and luggage.

Further adding to that crowding in future years will be passengers on Alaska Airlines. The airline is planning to switch from the turboprops that serve Helena to jets that will mean it no longer boards passengers from the airport terminals ground floor.

Another part of the upcoming expansion is adding a third jet bridge, which is the enclosed walkway that links the terminal to aircraft.

One of the two existing jet bridges can move to simultaneously serve two aircraft while the other is limited to just one aircraft, Wadekamper said.

Adding a third jet bridge that could serve two aircraft would mean the airport can accommodate up to five aircraft at once.

And this is important because airlines park late night flights here for early morning departures to larger airports where passengers can continue their travels.

Flights to Denver, Salt Lake City and Minneapolis already spend the night here for early morning departures.

The airport hopes to restore the second Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle that was discontinued in August 2015. With its return, there would be a fourth aircraft here overnight, Wadekamper said.

The airport also hopes to seek a federal grant to entice Alaska Airlines to offer Helena service to Portland, Oregon.
P olice are trying to find a crucial witness after a student was gunned down at the wheel of his car in east London a year ago.

Abdi Gutale, 24, was ambushed by gunmen who fired shots into his Vauxhall Zafira as he drove home after finishing a job as a minicab driver on May 14, 2016.

He was hit in the chest from close range before careering into a car parked at the roadside in a Leyton street.

Five men, aged between 19 and 25, were arrested in connection with the murder, but all were released with no further action taken.

Student: Abdi Gutale was gunned down as he drove a minicab / Metropolitan Police

One year on, police say they still want to speak with a woman with black hair who was at the scene.

The potential witness climbed over a low fence at the church on Capworth Street before walking away.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the incident room on 0208 345 3865 or via Twitter @MetCC. Alternatively Crimestoppers can be contacted anonymously on 0800 555 111.
A man who viciously attacked a flower seller at a busy train station after trying to steal an orchid has been spared jail.

Paul Rogers, 29, was walking past the stall next to Clapham Junction station on October 17 when he attempted to walk off with the expensive flower without paying for it.

When the the man on the stall asked what he was doing, Rogers began punching him repeatedly in the head before two passing police offices intervened and arrested him.

The seller had to go to hospital for treatment and was left with injuries to his eye.

Rogers, of Barset Road, Southwark, pleaded guiltyto common assault and theft at Westminster Magistrates Court.

He was later sentenced to eight weeks imprisonment, suspended for 12 months, ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work and pay 1516 compensation.

Detective Constable Christopher Smethem, from British Transport Police, condemned the unprovoked attack.

He said: Violence will not be tolerated by BTP and I am pleased that Rogers has been sentenced for this crime, and hopefully it will deter him from acting in such an aggressive and unacceptable manner in future.
A station pest who tried to gouge a police officers eyes out while being arrested has been jailed and banned from key London transport hubs.

Brandon Crozier, 20, was wanted for failing to appear at court in relation to a number of anti-social offences when officers spotted him loitering at Euston Station on May 1.

He ran off as soon as he saw the officers coming towards him and they were forced to give chase.

Upon being caught, Crozier became aggressive and began violently kicking and resisting arrest. He then used his fingers in a bid to gouge out the eyes of the officer who was trying to restrain him, police said.

As more officers arrived in support, one was bitten by Crozier.

Crozier was eventually arrested at Euston Station / Getty Images

He was eventually taken into custody and later charged with two counts of assaulting a police officer.

At Highbury Magistrates Court on May 4, Crozier, who lives on Quex Road in Camden, was handed a 10-week prison sentence.

He was also issued a two-year criminal behaviour order which bans him from using King's Cross, St Pancras or Euston stations.

Commander for Euston station, Inspector Tim Tubbs, said: Crozier was a pest around the Euston and Kings Cross area and we are pleased with the sentence.

"The violence he demonstrated in trying to evade police custody was simply disgusting, resulting in two of my officers being assaulted."

He said: This order should also be welcomed by members of the public, who will thankfully not have to experience his anti-social and at times, threatening behaviour.

If anyone spots Crozier in breach of his order they should report it to us immediately by sending us a text to 61016 or by calling 0800 40 50 40.

Crozier is also prohibited from entering any mainline or underground station without intending to travel with a valid ticket, or entering while drunk.
P olice officers who chased a car at speed through south London were stunned to discover a stolen goldfish in a pint glass in the boot.

The pet fish miraculously survived the entire chase and ensuing crash in an unsecured glass filled with water, loose on the floor of the boot.

The chase began when a suspicious car was spotted by officers in Chessington and quickly sped off into the distance.

A team of police cars tracked down the vehicle to a nearby road where it had crashed. As they pulled up the driver and passenger got out and fled towards houses.

Stolen: the goldfish was returned to his home following the car chase / Kingston Police

Officers began searching the inside of the car and immediately found items believed to have been stolen in a burglary. They then opened the boot where a pint glass full of water was standing upright, with a live goldfish swimming around.

Kingston Police spokesman Seb Ellis told the Standard: We discovered a goldfish, in a pint glass, just sitting there chilling and casually staring at us. We couldnt understand how even after the fast driving and the crash the pint glass was still upright!

Officers at the scene affectionately named the fish as Peter. Goodness knows what the fish was thinking after his tour around Chessington in a pint glass.

Police immediately linked the incident, which happened on May 5, to a recent burglary in which TV, cash, shoes and a goldfish had been swiped.

Peter the goldfish was taken back home and returned to his tank, where he is reported to be recovering well. Kingston officers are continuing to investigate the burglary.

The driver of the car was later found and arrested, police said.
T his is the terrifying moment violent thieves smash a windscreen with hammers after a dramatic five-mile car chase through east London.

The shocking dashcam footage shows the men, who had stolen thousands of pounds worth of audio equipment, jump out of a white van and repeatedly smash the front window of the car.

Victim David Grunfeld, who stayed on the phone to the police as he pursued the thieves in his vehicle, shouts in terror as the men rush back to their van and speed off.

Mr Grunfeld, who works for DG Sound delivering and setting up speakers, said the chase started in Lordship Road in Stoke Newington when he was parking his car near the van, which had earlier been filled with equipment.

One of the men who attacked Mr Grunfeld's car

The incident happened just over a month after 10,000 of equipment had been stolen from Mr Grunfelds van in the same area.

The 24-year-old told the Standard: I had an event so I picked up quite a few things from the warehouse, speakers, and went shopping for half an hour.

When I came back I saw something fishy going on. There were two speaker stands leaning on my van.

I thought to myself that's not usual, this is not supposed to be there.

I wanted to park there with my own car and I see two people jumping into a van pressing down the gas and quickly fled from the scene.

A second man who was involved in the incident

Then I made my decision that I'm going to chase after these two thieves so I quickly pressed down my gas pedal.

I chased after them. They did not care, cars were coming and people were crossing the roads, they drove like crazy.

Mr Grunfeld said the van went through red lights on Seven Sisters Road but he managed to keep it in his sights.

It screeched to a halt after it had turned into Vartry Road in Stamford Hill.

David Grunfeld said the attack was "horrible"

He added: Then they came to a situation where a car blocked them, so they jumped out the van with hammers and ran towards my car and started smashing my windscreen so that I wouldnt be able to see them anymore.

I felt horrible, like they wanted to murder me.

A spokesman for the Met Police said: Police were called at Friday, March 10 at around 10.30am to Lordship Road to reports of a theft from a motor vehicle.

The victim disturbed the theft as it was in progress and pursued the suspects in his vehicle.

At Vartry Road the pursuit ended. The vehicles stopped and the suspects got out of their vehicle - a white Ford Transit van - and damaged the windscreen of the victim's car before leaving the scene.

A number of items of electronic equipment was stolen.

The suspects are both described as being white men, aged 30-35, and around 6ft tall.

There have been no arrests and enquiries continue.

If you have any information about this incident, call police on 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 if you would prefer not to give your name.
C hanges to the Governments school funding formula could result in the equivalent of 17,645 teaching posts being lost across London over the next three years, a new analysis showed today.

The most deprived parts of the capital could be hit hardest with Newham losing the equivalent of 1,074 posts, Tower Hamlets 891 and Southwark 808 by 2020.

The boroughs least affected by the proposals included more affluent areas such as Richmond, Kingston-upon-Thames and Merton. There are currently about 64,000 full-time teachers in the capital.

Headteachers have warned they may have to lay off support staff, reduce the school week and stop teaching some subjects to avoid losing teachers.

Many have written begging letters to parents asking for them to contribute financially to help fill the budget gap.

The figures are based on Department for Education data which shows schools across the capital face a real-terms cut of 360 million in 2018/19, an average of 333 per pupil.

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Education Secretary Justine Greenings attempts to rebalance funding across the UK means that every school in London will lose out in real terms.

Andrew Lynch, managing director of teachingjobsinlondon.co.uk, which analysed the data, said: The system cannot afford these cuts. It is not only damaging to the lives of teachers but the future of children currently in education.

"Our research highlights ludicrous plans to cut jobs in the most deprived areas, risking future hope and social mobility for those children.

Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of teaching union ATL, predicted the changes would result in increased class sizes with fewer teachers and less support for vulnerable children.

Senior Conservatives have been lining up to urge the Prime Minister to abandon the Governments school funding reforms before voters go to the polls.

The Department for Education has previously said: The system for distributing funding is unfair, opaque and outdated. We are going to end the postcode lottery.

"Under the proposed national funding formula, more than half of Englands schools will receive a cash boost.
A 16-bedroom mansion on one of Londons most exclusive streets where Madonna and Jeffrey Archer have owned homes has had 10 million slashed off its asking price.

The huge stucco-fronted villa on The Boltons in Chelsea is back on the market for 30 million, just over a year after for sale signs were removed when it failed to sell for almost 40 million.

Property experts said the 25 per cent price cut showed how far the top end of the once red-hot London super prime market has cooled since it peaked in 2014.

The 12,250 sq ft property is made up of a semi-detached main house with 11 bedrooms - nine with en-suite facilities - and a mews house behind with five further bedrooms.

Other features include a 58ft drawing room, air conditioning, an internal lift and off-street parking for up to five cars.

Price cut: The mansion is now being sold for 10m pounds less

However, pictures on the website of agents Knight Frank show that its dated internal decor  including Nineties-style heavy draped curtains and gilt architraves and covings  will indeed require modernisation throughout.

The street is regarded as one of the half dozen best addresses in London but, like many other expensive areas, has seen demand hit by stamp duty rises and uncertainty triggered by the Brexit referendum.

The property is on one of London's most exclusive streets / Knight Frank

A buyer will pay 3.5 million in stamp duty if it is bought as a sole residence, or 4.4 million if purchased as a second home or a buy-to-let investment.

Matthew Steeples, editor-in-chief of online magazine The Steeples Times, said: The price reduction is plainly indicative of the new post-Brexit world were living in.

The mansions of The Boltons just arent as desirable as they were 10 or even three years ago. And in spite of the fall of the pound, the French and Italian markets are worried about our attitudes towards the EU and immigration.

The house comes with an enormous dining room / Knight Frank

However, James Pace, head of Knight Franks Chelsea office, said: After just one week, we have four or five very interested parties.

Its surprising it didnt sell before, it needs a lot of work doing, but its a wonderful potential home for someone who wants a residence of ambassadorial proportions.

He added that selling in the current market was all about getting the price right.

Thomas van Straubenzee, managing director of agents VanHan, said: There remain a number of extremely wealthy buyers that want to own in London. We have properties for sale from 4 million to 65 million and there is good interest in all of them.
T hese are the five biggest stories from the last 24 hours in the capital and across the globe.

Teenager stabbed to death after violence erupts at Snapchat party

An 18-year-old was stabbed and killed on the steps of a Hindu temple in Enfield after a private party publicised on Snapchat raged out of control has been named as Joao Gomes.

Two other teenagers, aged 17 and 19, were left with serious injuries as violence flared among more than 100 youths, some as young as 12, who spilled out into the streets at 10.30pm on Saturday.

All three were taken hospital where the 18-year-old was pronounced dead at 11.41pm, becoming the 13th person killed on the capitals streets in three weeks.

Stabbing: Police at the scene in Enfield / Angela Bailey

The killing came six hours after Brenton Roper, 41, was chased, shot and stabbed to death in a daylight hit yards from his home in Bow, east London.

Ransomware cyber attack hits China and Japan

China and Japan have both fallen victim to the global "ransomware" cyber attack that has created chaos in 150 countries.

Hackers, responsible for the initial attack known as WannaCry hit the NHS on Friday.

A message appearing on a computer at an NHS trust / PA

On Monday, Chinese state media said more than 29,000 institutions across the country have been infected, along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

Xinhua News Agency cited the Threat Intelligence Centre of Qihoo 360, a Chinese internet security services company.

Spurs legends bid farewell to White Hart Lane

Tottenham beat Manchester United in the final match at White Hart Lane following 118 years at the stadium.

Former legends including Terry Dyson, Les Allen and Cliff Jones walked onto the pitch for the last time on Sunday following the 2-1 victory.

Final farewell: Fans celebrate Spurs last game at White Hart Lane / Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images

Spurs have played 2533 matches at the venue, winning 1472 of them. Demolition work on the ground will start from Monday.

The club will spend a minimum of one season at Wembley Stadium before returning to north London and their new 61,599-capacity home.

BBC drama Happy Valley beat Netflix favourites to top category BAFTAs

Happy Valley beat The Crown in the top categories during Sunday nights BAFTA TV Awards.

The BBC crime drama beat big-budget Netflix show The Crown to be named Best Drama, while Sarah Lancashire was named Best Actress over favourite Claire Foy.

Winners: The cast and crew of Happy Valley with their BAFTA / PA

Adeel Akhtar beat Benedict Cumberbatch, James Nesbitt and Babour Ceesay to be named Best Actor for his role in Murdered by My Father, while Joanna Lumley won the coveted BAFTA Fellowship.

Louis Theroux presented the BAFTA Special Award to documentary-maker and Storyville creator Nick Fraser, describing him as a creative risk-taker.

Vince Cable predicts emergence of new centre left party after Tory landslide

A new centre left, pro-business party could emerge in the event of a heavy defeat for Labour in the General Election, Sir Vince Cable has predicted.

Vince Cable said the party would put an end to "pitiful increases" / AFP/Getty Images

The Liberal Democrat former Business Secretary said a landslide victory for Theresa Mays Conservatives would pave the way for conversations about the formation of a new political party.

Sir Vince, who is hoping to regain his former seat in Twickenham, said there would be a period of blood-letting in Labour if the party suffers the heavy losses predicted.

There has been speculation a new party could be set up after the General Election amid rumours up to 100 MPs could be plotting to form a breakaway group.
A litter warden working for a London council boasted he was going to give out tickets like Smarties because of an alleged bonus scheme linked to the number of fines issued.

The trainee, who was based in Bexley, was recorded by an undercover reporter who was working on a BBC Panorama investigation into dirty tricks used by litter enforcers to boost fines.

The reporter also recorded a manager at security firm Kingdom Services describe how its officers are paid at least 5 a ticket on top of their basic 9.47 an hour  once they have issued four in a day. Kingdom has around 28 contracts with local authorities.

About 140,000 tickets were handed out in England and Wales last year under the Environmental Protection Act, which allows councils to issue fixed penalty notices of up to 80. Non-payers can be prosecuted and fined as much as 2,500 and end up with a criminal record.

The programme, broadcast tonight, shows a Bexley officer pretending to call police to pressure a man on benefits into handing over ID.

A woman in Tower Hamlets is threatened with a call to the police when she is falsely accused of leaving dog mess from her German shepherd.

The case was later dropped. The reporter is told how to trick people into walking away from litter they have dropped, triggering the legal requirement that they must intend to leave it on the ground.

A woman in Ealing is hit with a fine after pouring her coffee dregs down the drain, and another woman in the borough is given an 80 fine for fly-tipping after putting her bins out on her own property at Christmas.

Kingdom Services made a profit of almost 3 million and paid dividends of 640,000 to directors last year.

One trainers is recorded saying: Obviously we are here to make money. Another manager boasts the firm has turned down contracts because they are not profitable, they just wont let us enforce in the way that we need to.

"They want it all to be pink and fluffy and they want to give people warnings and cautions.

Allison Ogden-Newton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, said: Enforcement can change peoples behaviour but it needs to be fair and have the public on our side.

Kingdom denied the bonus, which it calls a discretionary competence allowance is to incentivise enforcement officers to issue FPNs.

It said it trained officers to only issue fines to people they reasonably believe have committed an offence and it would investigate any unprofessional behaviour or misconduct.

Panorama: Inside the Litter Police is on BBC1 at 8.30pm on Monday.
S taff at Europes biggest hospital were warned on Monday not to switch on their computers as the NHS battled to recover from the crippling cyber attack.

Medics at the Royal London in Whitechapel were under strict orders not to touch their PCs for fear of spreading the ransomware virus that hit the biggest NHS trust and 46 others.

The order came as West End bosses representing stores such as Selfridges and John Lewis today asked for an urgent summit with police experts on how to protect themselves from a new attack.

Microsoft said the attack, which affected 150 countries, should act as a wake-up call to governments to improve IT security.

An IT expert warned that the WannaCry worm, the virus that sparked the meltdown, had the potential of a weapon of mass destruction.

Patients awaiting non-emergency procedures tomorrow were warned they could also be affected, as a NHS boss rounded on the hackers.

Devices across Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs the Royal London and four other east London hospitals, were marked with red tape by IT staff as they battled to get systems online.

An 8am staff message from Simon Harrod, medical director at the Royal London, said: While work continues on clearing the virus it is important NOT TO TURN ANY PC ON. Doing this will delay the repairs.

NHS cyber hack: Five key questions answered

An unknown number of patients had non-emergency procedures cancelled today, with more likely tomorrow. Patients were advised to turn up as planned unless they had received a phone call to rebook.

The attack also hit Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS trust, which operates Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, West Middlesex Hospital and several clinics, including 56 Dean Street, Europes biggest sexual health clinic, which was closed until 1pm today.

Fridays attack left the Royal London, one of the capitals four major trauma centres, unable to accept new trauma cases for nearly two days. Ambulances were diverted until Sunday afternoon and it was closed for stroke emergencies, while the Barts Heart Centre, part of St Bartholomews Hospital, was unable to accept heart attack patients for a day.

A message appearing on a computer at an NHS trust / PA

Staff worked over the weekend to keep the hospitals, including Whipps Cross and Newham, safe. Everyone has pulled together, said a Barts spokesman.

Lesley Watts, chief executive of Chelsea and Westminster trust, said: People causing disruption to NHS IT systems should look in the mirror and feel shame.

Amid fears of more ransomware attacks, an international operation is under way to find the perpetrators of the attack that infected 200,000 machines with a virus that exploits a flaw in Microsoft Windows.

Adam Meyers, vice-president of intelligence at cyber security company CrowdStrike, said the WannaCry worm, said hackers saw the NHS as low-hanging fruit, with outdated and vulnerable Windows XP software allowing the virus to spread quickly.

He said: Theres about 179 different file types they tried to encrypt, so I imagine theres probably some damage to files that are essential to the healthcare system.

This was like a weapon of mass destruction compared to previous ransomware because it was able to spread on its own, very quickly, over a vulnerability that was largely unpatched. The only thing you can do to recover from this is either pay them, figure out some way to decrypt the files, decide that you dont need the files or restore from backup.

Jace Tyrrell, chief executive of the New West End Company, which speaks for hundreds of traders on Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street, said: We are working closely with partners, including the Metropolitan Police, to review our resilience and update guidance to businesses.

In Russia, state-controlled media blamed US secret services. Channel One cited whistleblower Edward Snowden as claiming that it was particularly concerning that the viruses that attacked the world were created at the National Security Agency.
T heresa May today pledged to expose the injustice of employers who pay black and Asian workers less than their white counterparts.

In a new policy announcement in the Conservative manifesto, firms will for the first time be told to disclose how much they pay people of different races.

The fact that different ethnic groups are being paid less for doing the same jobs is an injustice which cannot be allowed in 21st-century Britain, the Prime Minister said.

The new rules on pay transparency will be part of a worker rights package that Downing Street hopes will convince millions of traditional Labour supporters to switch to the Conservatives, including working-class people and racial minorities.

Trades Union Congress research suggests there is a 17 per cent pay gap for black and minority ethnic staff educated to A-level standard, and a 10 per cent gap for those with degrees.

The Conservatives last month introduced a requirement for companies to report differences between pay to men and women.

Under plans in the partys manifesto, expected on Thursday, this will be extended to different ethnic groups. There will also be a new requirement to publish information on the pay gap at different grades of staff and their ages. The rules will apply to larger companies who will have to publish more data than ever before.

British Chambers of Commerce director-general Adam Marshall said businesses would be worried at the prospect of costly or bureaucratic new obligations, no matter how well-intentioned while Mike Cherry, national chairman at the Federation of Small Businesses, said new employment regulations must be backed up with proper support for smaller businesses.

Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green denied the party had watered down its commitment to put workers on company boards. Companies would be able to have a workers advisory committee rather than direct board representation for employees under the Tories plans.

There are three options that companies can choose, either a direct representative or designated non-executive director, or a workers advisory committee, he told BBC Radio 4,

Mrs May, who ordered a racial equality audit into access to public services as one of her first acts on entering Downing Street, said rights and responsibilities should be equally shared. My plan will deliver a fairer deal for all workers, by extending rights and protections, guaranteeing rises in the national living wage and delivering a strong and stable economy, she said.

Her new deal for workers, aimed to steal Labour clothes by offering protections for those in the gig economy, a statutory right to leave for those who need to care for a family member and a commitment to further increases in the living wage. But Labour said Mrs May was taking working people for fools while the GMB union members would believe it when they see it.

The measures follow the BHS pension furore and worry about the spread of zero-hours contracts.
J eremy Corbyn hijacked a Facebook Live Q&A session with Theresa May to issue a direct challenge to the Prime Minister to take part in a TV debate with him.

Mrs May dismissed the challenge and said it was more important to her to take questions directly from voters and that people did not want to see politicians have a go at each other.

She became the first leader of a political party to take part in a Facebook Live broadcast, hosted by ITV News on Monday afternoon, answering questions sent in by voters using the social media website.

The Labour leader sent in his own question which highlighted a range of issues including housing, policing and the NHS before challenging Mrs May to a live TV debate.

Mrs May is grilled during a Q&A session with members of the public through Facebook Live / ITV News

Presenter Robert Peston told her he had received a query from "Jeremy Corbyn of Islington", who said: "Hello Theresa May, as Prime Minister you've served your elite friends by giving them tax cuts when wages have stagnated, house-building is at its lowest since the 1920s, there are 20,000 fewer police on our streets since 2010 and the NHS is in crisis.

"Do you not think the British people deserve to see me and you debate live and on television?"

Mrs May replied: What I think is more important is actually that I and he take questions directly from the voters. I don't think people get much out of seeing politicians having a go at each other, I think people want to hear directly."

Jeremy Corbyn on the campaign trail on Monday / PA

In the wide-ranging Q&A session, hosted by presenter Robert Peston, Mrs May discussed her experience of type one diabetes, revealing that she injects herself with insulin four or five times a day, and urged fellow sufferers not to allow the illness to hold them back from doing what they want in life.

Mrs May was also asked question on subjects including the NHS, foxhunting, child poverty, rail fares and Brexit.

She was also asked what she would say to voters in London who have witnessed a recent surge in knife crime.

Mrs May said the surge in knife crime was worrying but insisted the government has done a lot to tackle it, citing a new offence of threatening someone in a public place and a crackdown on Zombie knives.

She admitted that she had never been foxhunting but said that the issue was about keeping numbers down and that other methods of killing foxes can be so cruel.

When asked if she could commit to keeping the free bus pass for over 65s, Mrs May replied that voters will have to wait and see what is in the Conservative manifesto.

ITV will on Thursday host a live televised election debate in Salford, and has said that an invitation to the leaders of the seven biggest parties will remain open until the broadcast starts.

But Mrs May has insisted she will not take part in any televised head-to-head clashes with her rivals, and Mr Corbyn has indicated he will not take part if the Prime Minister is absent.
L abours Clive Lewis has denied the suggestion that his support for tactical voting is an act of defiance against leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The former shadow cabinet minister came out in support for the Progressive Alliance campaign, a cross-party alliance encouraging people to vote tactically, at its launch in London on Monday evening.

The aim is to defeat the Conservatives by parties working together. Some parties  for example the Greens  may decide not to field candidates to give others a better chance of winning.

The Labour Party has so far rejected calls for a progressive alliance.

Mr Lewis, the party's candidate for Norwich South, said at the launch event: "It's not an act of defiance.

"It's about understanding there are lots of people, hundreds and thousands of people, who actually want to see politics done differently.

"Jeremy Corbyn came in on the platform of doing politics differently.

Jeremy Corbyn on the campaign trail on Monday / PA

"This is about doing politics differently in a constructive way and I think that's a good thing."

Mr Lewis said first-past-the-post rules were "shoe-horning a multi-party system into a two-party electoral system" and described tactical voting as a "reality".

"There are lots of people who are accepting that tactical voting is a reality," he told reporters.

"It's always been a reality, it doesn't take me or the people here today to tell anyone how to tactically vote.

"People can see if they want to stop Theresa May on June 8 - they understand, they are sensible, they can work it out. So let's see what happens."

Last week three Labour members were expelled from the party after they agreed to back a progressive alliance in a bid to unseat Heath Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Addressing the crowd at the event, Mr Lewis said: "Our society is more complex, our social allegiances less fixed, our identities less certain than they were when the Labour Party was born.

"Other progressive parties now speak to parts of our country where we are no longer heard.

"And that means that just as you cannot thrive without us, so we cannot thrive without you."

Mr Lewis urged Labour supporters to "be true" to the party's history, adding: "The Labour Party at its birth and in its strongest most influential era has always been a progressive alliance."

Ending his plea for a cross-party alliance to prevent a Conservative landslide, he said: "The future is not inevitable.

"The future is what we collectively make it.

"We have fought and overcome bigger obstacles than this in our history, much bigger.

"But we are only strong when we stand together and offer a vision that says we stand for something bigger, something bolder, something better."

Additional reporting by Press Association.
P rominent Labour candidates in London are shunning Jeremy Corbyn to put Sadiq Khan on their Twitter profile pictures as they seek to cling on to marginal seats.

Traditionally, parliamentary candidates have been keen to feature prominently with their party leader. However, five ex-MPs standing for re-election in London are pictured shoulder-to-shoulder on their accounts with the Mayor, who is seen as an asset, compared with Mr Corbyns dismal poll ratings.

The five include Andy Slaughter seeking to retain Hammersmith, Joan Ryan in Enfield North, Ruth Cadbury in Brentford and Isleworth and Karen Buck in Westminster North. Rosena Allin-Khan has an even bigger background picture of her and Mr Khan, her predecessor as Tooting MP.

Asked why she was using him rather than Mr Corbyn, she said: Sadiq has the biggest political mandate of any politician in British history. Hes Mr Tooting.

Shunned: Jeremy Corbyn / PA

Ms Ryan said she had Mr Khan on her Twitter account as he was key to fighting crime. There were multiple stabbings in Enfield North over the weekend.

In a further sign of Labour candidates seeking backing from beyond the party leadership, Gareth Thomas, who is seeking to retain Harrow West, put out a video of former Blairite foreign secretary David Miliband backing him. He knows the risk to our jobs, incomes and living standards if we get a bad deal on Brexit, said Mr Thomas.

The main challenger to Labour in all the six seats is the Conservative Party. But an analysis by Professor Tony Travers, of the government department at the London School of Economics, points to Labour not being in such danger of losing marginal seats in the capital, as suggested by the Conservatives double-digit lead in the national polls. He said the differential between the London and Great Britain vote share of the two parties appeared to have widened dramatically in recent years.

General Election polls and projections: May 15

Before 1997, voting for the parties in the capital broadly reflected the national picture. But Labours performance in London, compared with the regions, jumped in 2015 and has got even wider, according to a YouGov poll last week. London is increasingly another country, said Professor Travers, who compared th trend with a constituency-by-constituency breakdown of the Remain/Leave vote.

Between two thirds and just over three quarters of voters backed Remain in Westminster North, Tooting, Hampstead and Kilburn, Ealing Central and Acton and several other London seats. It looks as if the Brexit overlay  the Remain vote  may give some protection to marginal Labour seats, he added.

General Election 2017 Campaign - In pictures 1 /57 General Election 2017 Campaign - In pictures Jeremy Corbyn joins leaders for the BBC's Election Debate Stefan Rousseau/PA Prime Minister Theresa May samples cheese at the Royal Bath and West Show in Shepton Mallet Leon Neal/Pool/Reuters First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during the launch of the SNP General Election manifesto at Perth Concert Hall Jane Barlow/PA Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at the launch in central London of a Liberal Democrats campaign poster attacking the Conservatives' school meals policy Victoria Jones/PA Jeremy Corbyn appears on The One Show BBC Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron and the party's local candidate Sir Simon Hughes are given a baking lesson at Comptoir Gourmand, an artisan bakery in Bermondsey, London Gareth Fuller/PA Prime Minister Theresa May answers questions from the studio audience during a joint Channel 4 and Sky News general election programme recorded at Sky studios Stefan Rousseau/PA Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is interviewed by Jeremy Paxman during a joint Channel 4 and Sky News general election programme 'May v Corbyn Live: The Battle for Number 10' at Sky studios Stefan Rousseau/WPA Pool/Getty Images Home Secretary Amber Rudd (left) and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott appearing on the BBC One current affairs programme, The Andrew Marr Show. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday May 28, 2017. Abbott has said she no longer opposed the security services as she insisted her time as a graduate civil servant would prepare her for becoming home secretary Jeff Overs/BBC/PA A new poster by the Green Party featuring pictures of the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary either side US Preseident Donald J Trump Green Party/PA Conservative party leader Theresa May during the Welsh Conservative manifesto launch at Gresford Memorial Hall, Gresford, Wrexham Stefan Rousseau/PA Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott during General Election campaigning in Hull Chris Radburn/PA A man is arrested after protesting against fox hunting as Theresa May arrives at the Welsh Conservative manifesto launch at Gresford Memorial Hall, Gresford, Wrexham Stefan Rousseau/PA Green Party co-leaders Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley launch the Green Party's 'Green Guarantee' of key priorities for the party at a general election campaign event in London AFP/Getty Images Julie Etchingham presents the ITV Leaders' Debate, a live two-hour debate with Caroline Lucas, Tim Farron, Leanne Wood, Paul Nuttall, Nicola Sturgeon ITV/PA Conservative party leader Theresa May during her party's general election manifesto launch in Halifax Danny Lawson/PA Demonstrations take place before the arrival of Prime Minister Theresa May as she launches the Conservative Party Election Manifesto in Halifax Getty Images Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond listens as Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during an election campaign event in east London Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn launches the party's manifesto at the University of Bradford, in Bradford Nigel Roddis/EPA Prime Minister Theresa May meets Cathy Mohan at Abingdon market in Oxfordshire during an General Election campaign visit Stefan Rousseau/PA Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron leaves the Royal College of Nursing conference at Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre following a General Election campaign visit Gareth Fuller/PA Screengrab taken from Facebook Live broadcast, hosted by ITV News of Prime Minister Theresa May answering questions sent in by users of the social media website, with presenter Robert Peston ITV News Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking about national security and foreign policy at Chatham House in Londo David Mirzeoff/PA Jeremy Corbyn the leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party holds one year old Angelo during a campaign event in Harlow, Essex Neil Hall/Reuters Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reads with children as he visits Brentry Children Centre in Bristol on 21 April 2017 during Labour's election campaign. Steve Parsons/PA Jeremy Corbyn looks around as he arrives at Savoy Place. His vehicle hit BBC Cameraman Giles Wooltorton on the way into the garage entrance Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images British Trade Union leader Len McCluskey falls on the steps outside the Clause 5 Labour meeting to finalise the Labour manifesto in Londo Andy Rain/EPA Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller breaks down after receiving an ovation from the crowd during her speech at the Convention on Brexit in central London Andy Rain/EPA The Liberal Democrat party campaign bus is unveiled at an event at the Harts Boatyard on 01 May 2017 in Surbiton Leon Neal/Getty Images Co-Leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, speaks during the launch of the Green Party Brexit policy at the Space Studio in London Stefan Rousseau/PA The Liberal Democrat party leader Tim Farron listens to a speech during an event at the Harts Boatyard on May 1, 2017 in Surbiton Leon Neal/Getty Images Anti-racism protesters speak to the media after being removed ahead of UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall's speech Jack Taylor/Getty Images UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall gestures as he makes a speech as the party launch their general election campaign at the Marriott County Hall Hotel on 28 April 2017 in London Jack Taylor/Getty Images Britain's opposition Labour party Leader Jeremy Corbyn walks past a bus shelter with Alan Whitehead, Labour MP for Southampton, and local councillor Satvir Kaur (right), before meeting local residents Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott Diane leaving Four Millbank in Westminster, London, following her stumbling explanation of how the party would fund its plans for 10,000 extra police in an interview that left her struggling to do the sums live on air. Victoria Jones/PA Philip Hammond and David Davis at a General Election campaign event in Central London Jeremy Selwyn Pensioner Malcolm Baker confronts Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron while he was the election campaign trail in Kidlington, near Oxford Sam Lister/PA Prime Minister Theresa May eats chips as she meets with residents in Mevagissey, south-west England Dylan Martinez/AFP/Getty Images Conservative party handout of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on a new poster, warning that families face a tax and debt bombshell under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership Conservative Party/PA Nick Clegg delivers a campaign speech on the European Union at the National Liberal Club in London Stefan Rousseau/PA Ukip leader Paul Nuttall (left) eats grapes during a walkabout in Dudley town centre in the West Midlands, with Ukip West Midlands MEP Bill Etheridge (right) and Phil Durnell, West Midlands Metro Mayor candidate Richard Vernalls/PA Former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband retweeted a photo of him mowing a lawn whilst canvassing in his Doncaster North constituency Jane Nightingale Prime Minister Theresa May makes a statement on 18 April calling for a general election Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

He stressed that the Labour to Conservative swing nationwide appeared to be seven to eight percentage points, while in London it looked like two to three.

If Labour retains 40 seats in the capital, he added, it could make up around 25 per cent of the parliamentary party after the election, double the 1997 figure.

Mr Khan was campaigning at the weekend in key London marginals and has now visited 10 seats to launch local candidates' campaigns.

In Hammersmith on Saturday members of the public stopped for selfies and to shake his hand, while drivers wound down car windows to shout his name - in echoes of the popularity enjoyed by his predecessor Boris Johnson.

Mr Khan said: I fought an election last year so the issues are reasonably fresh to me. All the candidates are friends of mine. Its not a slight on Jeremy Corbyn that Im on peoples leaflets.

* The Progressive Alliance was this evening launching its ground campaign, with speeches at an event in the City from Labours Clive Lewis, Sian Berry of the Greens and Sophie Walker of the Womens Equality Party.
A voter told Theresa May she was the best of a bad bunch as the Prime Minister went on a walkabout in a market town.

Ill take that as flattering, replied the PM during a tour of the centre of Abingdon in Oxfordshire.

Mrs May was quizzed about housing and mental health, and chatted to stallholders on the market during the brief visit.

As the Prime Minister stopped off at a pet food stall, she was questioned by pensioner Duncan Macarthey 83, who lives in Abingdon, on why high earners were able to take advantage of Government schemes to buy new homes.

Meet and greet: Theresa May shakes hands with a stallholder / PA

He said: "Rich people jumped on the bandwagon of that and got houses that they shouldn't have got."

Mrs May replied: "Help-to-Buy is working because tens of thousands of young people have been able to get on to the housing ladder."

Mr Macarthey said: "I fought for my country and I'm very annoyed. I could have asked her a lot of other questions about the expenses and all that, and that gets me."

Mrs May defended the Government's record on disability after criticism over the controversial personal independence payments (PIP).

General Election 2017 Campaign - In pictures 1 /57 General Election 2017 Campaign - In pictures Jeremy Corbyn joins leaders for the BBC's Election Debate Stefan Rousseau/PA Prime Minister Theresa May samples cheese at the Royal Bath and West Show in Shepton Mallet Leon Neal/Pool/Reuters First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during the launch of the SNP General Election manifesto at Perth Concert Hall Jane Barlow/PA Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at the launch in central London of a Liberal Democrats campaign poster attacking the Conservatives' school meals policy Victoria Jones/PA Jeremy Corbyn appears on The One Show BBC Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron and the party's local candidate Sir Simon Hughes are given a baking lesson at Comptoir Gourmand, an artisan bakery in Bermondsey, London Gareth Fuller/PA Prime Minister Theresa May answers questions from the studio audience during a joint Channel 4 and Sky News general election programme recorded at Sky studios Stefan Rousseau/PA Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is interviewed by Jeremy Paxman during a joint Channel 4 and Sky News general election programme 'May v Corbyn Live: The Battle for Number 10' at Sky studios Stefan Rousseau/WPA Pool/Getty Images Home Secretary Amber Rudd (left) and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott appearing on the BBC One current affairs programme, The Andrew Marr Show. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday May 28, 2017. Abbott has said she no longer opposed the security services as she insisted her time as a graduate civil servant would prepare her for becoming home secretary Jeff Overs/BBC/PA A new poster by the Green Party featuring pictures of the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary either side US Preseident Donald J Trump Green Party/PA Conservative party leader Theresa May during the Welsh Conservative manifesto launch at Gresford Memorial Hall, Gresford, Wrexham Stefan Rousseau/PA Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott during General Election campaigning in Hull Chris Radburn/PA A man is arrested after protesting against fox hunting as Theresa May arrives at the Welsh Conservative manifesto launch at Gresford Memorial Hall, Gresford, Wrexham Stefan Rousseau/PA Green Party co-leaders Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley launch the Green Party's 'Green Guarantee' of key priorities for the party at a general election campaign event in London AFP/Getty Images Julie Etchingham presents the ITV Leaders' Debate, a live two-hour debate with Caroline Lucas, Tim Farron, Leanne Wood, Paul Nuttall, Nicola Sturgeon ITV/PA Conservative party leader Theresa May during her party's general election manifesto launch in Halifax Danny Lawson/PA Demonstrations take place before the arrival of Prime Minister Theresa May as she launches the Conservative Party Election Manifesto in Halifax Getty Images Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond listens as Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during an election campaign event in east London Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn launches the party's manifesto at the University of Bradford, in Bradford Nigel Roddis/EPA Prime Minister Theresa May meets Cathy Mohan at Abingdon market in Oxfordshire during an General Election campaign visit Stefan Rousseau/PA Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron leaves the Royal College of Nursing conference at Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre following a General Election campaign visit Gareth Fuller/PA Screengrab taken from Facebook Live broadcast, hosted by ITV News of Prime Minister Theresa May answering questions sent in by users of the social media website, with presenter Robert Peston ITV News Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking about national security and foreign policy at Chatham House in Londo David Mirzeoff/PA Jeremy Corbyn the leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party holds one year old Angelo during a campaign event in Harlow, Essex Neil Hall/Reuters Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reads with children as he visits Brentry Children Centre in Bristol on 21 April 2017 during Labour's election campaign. Steve Parsons/PA Jeremy Corbyn looks around as he arrives at Savoy Place. His vehicle hit BBC Cameraman Giles Wooltorton on the way into the garage entrance Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images British Trade Union leader Len McCluskey falls on the steps outside the Clause 5 Labour meeting to finalise the Labour manifesto in Londo Andy Rain/EPA Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller breaks down after receiving an ovation from the crowd during her speech at the Convention on Brexit in central London Andy Rain/EPA The Liberal Democrat party campaign bus is unveiled at an event at the Harts Boatyard on 01 May 2017 in Surbiton Leon Neal/Getty Images Co-Leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, speaks during the launch of the Green Party Brexit policy at the Space Studio in London Stefan Rousseau/PA The Liberal Democrat party leader Tim Farron listens to a speech during an event at the Harts Boatyard on May 1, 2017 in Surbiton Leon Neal/Getty Images Anti-racism protesters speak to the media after being removed ahead of UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall's speech Jack Taylor/Getty Images UKIP Leader Paul Nuttall gestures as he makes a speech as the party launch their general election campaign at the Marriott County Hall Hotel on 28 April 2017 in London Jack Taylor/Getty Images Britain's opposition Labour party Leader Jeremy Corbyn walks past a bus shelter with Alan Whitehead, Labour MP for Southampton, and local councillor Satvir Kaur (right), before meeting local residents Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott Diane leaving Four Millbank in Westminster, London, following her stumbling explanation of how the party would fund its plans for 10,000 extra police in an interview that left her struggling to do the sums live on air. Victoria Jones/PA Philip Hammond and David Davis at a General Election campaign event in Central London Jeremy Selwyn Pensioner Malcolm Baker confronts Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron while he was the election campaign trail in Kidlington, near Oxford Sam Lister/PA Prime Minister Theresa May eats chips as she meets with residents in Mevagissey, south-west England Dylan Martinez/AFP/Getty Images Conservative party handout of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on a new poster, warning that families face a tax and debt bombshell under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership Conservative Party/PA Nick Clegg delivers a campaign speech on the European Union at the National Liberal Club in London Stefan Rousseau/PA Ukip leader Paul Nuttall (left) eats grapes during a walkabout in Dudley town centre in the West Midlands, with Ukip West Midlands MEP Bill Etheridge (right) and Phil Durnell, West Midlands Metro Mayor candidate Richard Vernalls/PA Former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband retweeted a photo of him mowing a lawn whilst canvassing in his Doncaster North constituency Jane Nightingale Prime Minister Theresa May makes a statement on 18 April calling for a general election Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

"We have got a lot of plans for people with mental health particularly," Mrs May insisted.

Shoppers stopped the PM to shake her hand and she posed for pictures with passers-by.

One man told her to "keep it up" while a woman said the visit was an "unexpected pleasure".

The visit came after Mrs May pledged to expose the injustice of employers who pay black and Asian workers less than their white counterparts.

In a major new policy, the Conservatives announced they would require firms disclose how much they pay people of different races after the General Election.
A s Britain prepares to sit opposite the EU in Brexit talks, one leader with first-hand experience of dealing with Europe from the outside predicts a long ordeal.

People become exhausted, warned Turkish prime minister Binali Yildirim about the protracted tactics used by Brussels to conduct negotiations. The main problem with the EU is it has become a very bureaucratic state, instead of a political state.

High-level officials are running it on behalf of members. So decision-making on any subject takes much longer and people are exhausted.

In an interview with the Evening Standard during a visit to London, Mr Yildirim spoke candidly about Britains prospects of a much-vaunted trade deal. It turns out that it may take longer than some people have bargained for.

We dont want to lose what we have now, he said, adding that Turkish ministers are already busy forming working groups on a post-Brexit trade agreement.

But how long does he expect it to take? This is quite new for everybody, he said cautiously. They will learn by their mistakes. Nobody knows. Some say two years. Others say three or four years.

Turkey is the only country outside the EU that has a customs union with it, which it wants to expand to cover agriculture and services. Would he recommend such an arrangement for the UK? Yes, it is going to be much easier than otherwise, he said instantly.

Mr Yildirim is disappointed with the EUs deep confusion over Turkeys membership application, which has been under discussion since 1999.

He also says Europe has flagrantly broken promises to help more than 2.2 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey under a deal to stop families trying to cross the Mediterranean.

We saved life, we educate children, we care for them and keep them on our soil, he said.

Europe should appreciate this and take responsibility for how we can share the load. Otherwise they would be saying Welcome to Europe!

The PM said Turkeys relations with Russia had recovered from the shooting down of an Su-24 war plane on the border with Syria in 2015 / EPA

He firmly denied plans to scrap the refugee deal in retaliation, contrary to some reports, insisting: We are not going to let these people die in treacherous waters simply because we are angry with Europe.

But he appealed for more co-operation, including intelligence-sharing, to defeat Islamic State. The safety of Europe and the security of European people start from Turkey, he pointed out. If we do not have the necessary security measures in Turkey, Europe will not be safe.

By contrast he praised the pragmatism of Russias Vladimir Putin, saying relations between the two countries were almost fully recovered from the trauma when Turkish F16s shot down a Russian Su-24 attack plane on its border with Syria in November 2015.

He described Donald Trump as a very good president who was on a learning curve. He is learning fast and taking decisions quickly, he said. Was Mr Trump an improvement on the Obama administration? I believe, not now, maybe later, this administration will better understand the situation.

Next week, Turkeys president Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be with Mr Trump in Washington discussing, among other security concerns, what Mr Yildirim calls the Gulen Problem.

What to do about Fethullah Gulen, the presidents former ally turned bitter enemy, now a wanted man and exiled in Pennsylvania.

President Erdogan, however, is a deeply controversial figure accused of purging some 145,000 officials including judges and teachers, having 49,000 people arrested, closing media outlets and denounced by Amnesty for a crackdown of exceptional proportions following the failed coup of July 15 last year.

On Friday 53 former employees of the Istanbul stock exchange were held in dawn raids for alleged links to Gulen. Did Turkey accept that its image around the world was being harmed by the crackdown?

Mr Yildirim responded with incredulity that Western leaders had criticised the treatment of people he regarded as criminals and terrorists embedded in the state. What they did is say, Please be polite to those that organised the coup, treat them nicely. What is this? It is not acceptable.

But wasnt blocking Wikipedia, a symbol of modern social media and freedom, impossible to justify to international opinion?

On April 29, Turks found access denied to the online encyclopaedia due to what the authorities called an administrative measure. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responded by saying: Access to information is a fundamental human right.

Mr Yildirim responded that it would be unblocked if pro-terrorist articles were removed in compliance with a court order. If they carry out the court decision then everything will be normal, he claimed.

He is to be Turkeys last prime minister, as the office is due to be abolished at the next election under the transfer of sweeping executive powers to President Erdogan, whom some now call a dictator. What sort of man is the president whose hardline policies have caused outrage around the world?

He is probably one of the most merciful persons in the world, responded Mr Yildirim. You get to know him more closely you would really like him. He does not play games. He speaks his mind. He does not like to get lost in the labyrinths of diplomacy. That is why some people do not like him.

He pointed out that Mr Erdogan himself had been imprisoned and banned from politics for dissent. But had the powerful president perhaps forgotten his own struggle in his determination to crack down on enemies?

They are not true, Mr Yildirim said of the claims. Unfortunately some of our European friends, allies, are influenced. They listen to representatives of terrorist organisations and they take their words at face value.

He added: In Europe, Islamophobia is on the rise, and anti-Semitism is on the rise. What are Europeans doing about it?

Did he think Turkey had a role in promoting a more moderate Islam in its region? It is not enough to teach, said the last prime minister. You have to lead by example.
M oors Murderer Ian Brady has died after spending more than five decades behind bars.

The bedridden 79-year-old killer was being held at a high-secure hospital in Merseyside after torturing and killing five children with partner Myra Hindley.

His death, hours after he was urged to "do the right thing" and reveal where the last of his child victims is buried, means he takes some of his secrets about the horrors to his grave.

Brady was jailed for the killings of John Kilbride, 12, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, 17, in 1966.

Ian Brady was one of the UK's most infamous serial killers. / PA

He went on to admit the murders of Pauline Reade, 16, and 12-year-old Keith Bennett.

Glasgow-born Brady had been held at Ashworth High Secure Hospital since 1985 and died at 6.03pm on Monday.

A spokesman said the serial killer, who used the name Ian Stewart-Brady before his death, had been on oxygen.

Brady was not found dead in his room in the Merseyside unit, the spokesman said, but he was unable to confirm if anyone was with him when he died, adding: "Quite possibly. I don't know."

Winnie Johnson, mother of Keith Bennett, in 1992. / Rex Features

Terry Kilbride, the brother of victim John, said he will still have to deal with the "nightmare" Brady has left behind.

He told the Sun: "It's a lot to take in. It's been years and years of anguish and pain for us and the families of the victims.

"But nothing will change. He's dead but we will have to still live with the nightmare that he left behind.

"He's ruined our lives all these years and he'll still ruin it even though he's gone. I feel numb."

Mr Kilbride added that there were no other words to describe Brady apart from "a murderous psychopath".

Brady and Myra Hindley. / Rex

The crimes of Brady and Hindley - who died in prison in 2002 - shocked the nation as details of how the pair snatched children off the street, abused and tortured them to death were recalled during their trial at Chester Assizes.

Brady escaped the hangman's noose as the death penalty was abolished just months earlier and was handed three life sentences.

In 2013 Brady asked to be moved to a Scottish prison so he could not be force fed, as he could be in hospital, and where he could be allowed to die if he wishes.

His request was rejected after Ashworth medical experts said he had chronic mental illness and needed continued care in hospital.

Saddleworth Moor: Victims Keith Bennett (top right), Pauline Reade (bottom left) and John Kilbride (bottom right) / Getty Images

In February he was refused permission to launch a High Court fight to have the lawyer of his choice representing him at a tribunal where the decision would be reviewed.

Former police officer Norman Brennan, who represented the family of victim Lesley Ann Downey, told Newsnight about the "grief and torment" he saw on the faces of her mother and father.

He told the programme: "To know that your daughter was lost, alone and murdered and then actually her death was recorded, the grief can never ever be etched from your mind.

"Those two individuals, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, they didn't just destroy five young children's lives.

"For their relentless appeals and false hopes that they gave the families for over 50 years destroyed all of the families as well, even to this day."
A lain Mincs relationship with Emmanuel Macron, the new French president, is probably best described by the man himself.

I am an uncle, an adopted uncle, Minc says cheerfully. When I dont like something he has done I send him a text, signed your disappointed uncle.

Later he says: I speak to him freely  you get that quite seldom in the French system.

In fact, Minc, aged 68, speaks quite freely all round; hes ebullient even when hes talking about Brexit. Hes impossible to pin down  presidential adviser (to Nicolas Sarkozy before Macron), economist, political consultant and a man apparently with a finger in every pie, with contacts to match  Peter Mandelson is a close friend.

Born in Paris to a father who dabbled in communism, Minc still lives there with his wife, Sophie Boisnard. He is small, cheerful and combative with excellent, heavily accented English.

We meet in the office of a friend in St Jamess, between the gentlemens clubs and the Ritz  pretty well the London base of the global elite.

They go way back, this diminutive economist and the new president of France. I was his mentor in a very elitist club, the inspectors of finance  a high rank in the French administrative system.

Emmanuel Macron sworn in as French president

The first time he came to pay to me the classical visit of the young inspector to an old one, I asked him the usual question: where will you be in 30 years? Without hesitation or modesty, the young man replied: President of France.

I say to him now, your answer was wrong, says Minc. He should have said, in 30 years I shall be former president of France.

Actually, Macron owes Minc more than avuncular mentoring. He advised Rothschilds bank to take on the promising young recruit; it did. It seems Macrons career could have taken a different turn if politics hadnt worked out. He was going to be a part-time professor at the LSE, says Minc. The LSEs loss, Frances gain.

This reinforces what Minc says about Macron again and again. He loves Britain! He speaks perfect English. He feels at home in London. He is instinctively, says Minc, pro-British.

Which is why Brexit has been for Macron such an acute disappointment. Minc repeatedly uses the language of the rejected lover: You slammed the door in our face; you do not know what a shock it was for us.

Mentor: Alain Minc / Matt Writtle

Naturally he thinks, with Macron, that Brexit is a disaster. You will find that it is catastrophic for you, and most definitely catastrophic for Europe. And it will be much more difficult for you with Macron.

You will see, especially after his election, that there will be a strong French-German link. For him, his first duty is to establish the strength of the relationship with Germany.

"And because of him, Germany will be more pro-French than ever. We wanted Europe to be a three-legged stool  France, Germany and the UK; now it will have just two legs.

Later, he puts it another way: We wanted to have the UK in bed in a threesome. Ahem.

Minc returns repeatedly to the theme: in the absence of Britain, the bond at the heart of Europe is going to be the Franco-German alliance. Much of the strength of that bond will depend on the personal relationship between the new president and Angela Merkel  he sees her for talks today  but Minc is sunnily confident.

The relationship with Merkel will be fantastic! He will be the son she never had; she will be his mother. Right; we know he doesnt have a problem with older women.

The generation gap may be helpful, says Minc. Macron is impressive; Merkel will be impressed. She will be fascinated by this wunderkind. Hes charming! Everyone falls for his charm. In politics this is an asset. But he is an iron young guy. President Putin will find that he is as hard to manoeuvre as Mrs Merkel.

Trouble is, as Minc freely admits, Macron is also a product of the French elite  He doesnt come from nowhere, he comes from French Republican aristocracy  he succeeded through our elitist system  and there is a part of France that does not feel warmly about elites right now.

Emmanuel Macron says he will defend France and its vital interests

His victory was the victory of happy France over unhappy France, he says. As he points out, more than 90 per cent of voters in Paris voted for Macron and that proportion goes down the further you go from the capital.

Macron has, thinks Minc, much more of a challenge at home than abroad. There will, he says confidently, be trouble in store from the unions when he starts to institute labour reforms.

None the less, Macron occupies a gap in the French political psyche. French presidents are kings, he says. We are a republican kingdom  we need a king. And what does a king need? He needs a person close to him able to tell him what not to do. Which is where Minc comes in.

Macron was, says Minc, lucky, just like Napoleon. He took the risks, but he was lucky. And part of the luck was in what happened to his opponents on left and right; four of his most formidable adversaries fell, one by one.

I said to him, you have a long-term contract with God. He said, If its a very long-term contract, thats OK.

But more than that, Macrons victory is, he thinks, something new and significant. Its mainstream populism, he says. Normally, populism is extremist  Trump in America, Ukip here.

"Macrons populism is pro-Europe, business-minded, business-friendly, he shows you may be revolutionary in your means but moderate in your ends. Its a lesson to be learned everywhere. Macrons lesson is that you can win mainstream votes with populist tools. Populism needs figureheads.

Macron is something new in another respect too. He is lib-lib, says Minc enthusiastically. He is politically liberal and socially liberal. Usually those who are socially liberal arent politically liberal. He is pro-gay marriage, for instance. He is also, says Minc, a liberal Catholic.

So far, so Blairite. Which isnt a coincidence because as Minc says approvingly, Macron is a Blairist  a child of The Economist [magazine]. A Whig! Macron in 2017 is Blair in 1997  almost exactly 20 years later. Ideologically he is a Blairist. I am sure Tony Blair will visit him.

Later Minc mischievously goes further: Blair will be his concubine  but you wont say that, will you? As for the downsides of Blairism  ill-judged support for US intervention in Iraq and an open-door approach to immigration  it doesnt seem to register.

So what about the important thing  will Macron be able to attract the London French community back to France? The wealthy people will come back, Minc says confidently  once the wealth taxes are scrapped. Hes less sure about the rest.

London, he acknowledges wistfully, is livelier than Paris Macron will not succeed in five years to have London in Paris. London will remain the centre of the non-American world.

But Minc is keen to emphasise that the ties between France and Britain are also, crucially, military and strategic. I hope we shall be able to protect our defence and intelligence links, he says. Mrs May should strengthen them, not undermine them.

Trying to maintain that strategic co-operation at the same time as taking a tough line in the Brexit talks will, he says, make Frances role in the negotiations harder than for Germany. France should be good cop to the German bad cop, he muses.

Neither France nor Britain can stand alone in terms of defence and intelligence, he thinks, but together he feels they can be formidable. Same goes for the Security Council. So, Frances relationship with Britain does go beyond the EU.

As for the intangible human relationships between the two countries its plain they are the most important thing of all. Mincs own daughter lives in London and is staying put.

She cried after Brexit, he said. I told her to take British citizenship. He sighs. You, Britain, do not deserve the love we French have for you.

With that, hes off to another business meeting and, after that, the Eurostar. Brexit or no Brexit, hell be back.
N orth Korea says it had tested a new type of missile capable of carrying a heavy nuclear warhead.

The countrys dictator Kim Jong-un witnessed the test and hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing, according to the state Korean Central News Agency.

Referring to the missile, fired yesterday, as the Hwasong-12, KCNA described it as a new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket ... capable of carrying a large, heavy nuclear warhead.

The announcement sparked international condemnation, with the US and Japan calling for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council tomorrow.

The rocket flew 7,490 miles and hit an altitude of 1,310 miles, Pyongyang said, and verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation and accurate performance of detonation system.

Launch: Footage from the test was shown on South Korean television / AP

If the claims are true, the test would be a major advance in the countrys bid to make a nuclear-tipped rocket, flying higher and for a longer time than any of its previous missiles.

South Koreas military said it could not verify the claims but that the Norths rockets did seem to be able to leave and re-enter the atmosphere  crucial to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Officials in Japan said the missile flew for half an hour before landing in the Sea of Japan. South Koreas new president Moon Jae-in called it a reckless provocation.

Kim promised more tests and said his weapons could strike America. The US said Pyongyang had been a flagrant menace for far too long and that this latest provocation should serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions.

Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the UN, said that until Kim meets US conditions were not sitting down with him.
S tars including Eleanor Tomlinson, Holly Willoughby and Tess Daly led the glamour at this years BAFTA TV Awards, before rushing inside as the heavens opened.

Actors, actresses, comedians and TV presenters were all forced to dash into the Royal Festival Hall as a heavy rain downpour ruined the red carpet ahead of Sunday nights ceremony.

Stars including Joanna Lumley, Joan Collins, Tuppence Middleston and Benedict Cumberbatch were able to pose for photos before grabbing BAFTA umbrellas.

Poldarks Tomlinson said that she was used to being outside in extreme weathers for filming.

Holly Willoughby poses for pictures ahead of the downpour / REX

Speaking to Roman Kemp on the red carpet, she said: Its lovely that the public have their say and Im so grateful that theyve supported Poldark so much.

Lumley, who is being awarded the prestigious Bafta Fellowship, claimed that shed ripped open the letter informing her of her win with her teeth.

This is just the event of the year and to be awarded the Fellowship is just wonderful, she said. I ripped the envelope with my teeth Im going to wear [the trophy] as a hat for about a week.

Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman share a joke on the red carpet / REX

A sleep-deprived Cumberbatch told Kemp: Ive had about 4 hours sleep in the last few days but is great to be here. I dont hold out much hope of winning but its great to be nominated.

I just think the level of quality that's being acknowledged tonight is amazing. Theyre fantastic endeavours. Were in the heart of London, were near the BFI - its wonderful.

TV Baftas 2017: In 60 seconds

Strictly Come Dancings Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly arrived together, although Winkleman managed to get the giggles.

I just had a moment, I got the giggles and was laughing so hard I thought my eye was going to pop out. I spit my gum out on the floor, she said.

Charlotte Riley wears a sequined gown with thigh-high split / PA

Ed Balls was enjoying his first BAFTA experience but wasnt too impressed with the rain.

I love summer, he joked. Its colder in Russia I hear. Its chilly but amazing, Ive never been to the BAFTAs before.

Its just nice to be invited to the party and have fun, said the Crowns Matt Smith. It would be nice to win but Im just here for the bevs.

Claire Foy will face-off against Jodi Comer (Thirteen), Nikki Amuka-Bird (NW) and Sarah Lancashire (Happy Valley) in the Best Actress category.

Her co-stars Jared Harris, John Lithgow and Vanessa Kirby are up for Supporting Actor and Actress respectively.

Eleanor Tomlinson on new series of Poldark

The Leading Actor category will see Adeel Akhtar (Murdered by My Father), Babour Ceesay (Damilola, Our Loved Boy), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Hollow Crown: The War of the Roses) and Robbie Coltrane (National Treasure) battle it out for the coveted gong.
As a 28 year Registered Nurse I can tell you that I have been intimately involved in the outcomes of peoples lives. Their physical, mental and spiritual health is a tremendous responsibility that deserves thoughtful attention, knowledge and expertise, and a genuine commitment to protect patients, nurture their healing, and advocate for them at all costs  and DO NO HARM.

Last week, members of Congress passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA) more commonly referred to as Trumpcare; 217 Republicans voted in favor of passage and 213 voted against, including 193 Democrats and 20 Republicans.

MNA opposes the ACHA as it would dismantle important health care benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Additionally, the ACHA was opposed by almost all the national healthcare groups, including the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Nurses Association (ANA), and the American Hospital Association (AHA). The ACHA bill was not scored before the House voted on it. No thoughtful review of financial impact or health coverage impact had been completed. Montana just passed Medicaid expansion in 2015 covering over 70,000 Montana citizens. Now, to roll this back and compromise the lives of approximately 142,000 Montanans is reckless and unacceptable. Lawmakers rushed to vote on this bill, even though they lacked the responsible level of knowledge on how it would impact the lives of millions. It was an uninformed decision.

When I ponder what would drive such inappropriate conduct, it occurs to me that unlike many healthcare professionals, these Congressmen have no idea what its like to beg the parent of a small child to continue treatment because without it, the parent will die. They have no idea what its like to tell cancer patients they need more treatment only to have them refuse because it will cost their family too much. These Congressmen never had to tell a patient that death was imminent because care wasnt received early enough due to lack of access and affordability. They have no idea what it is like to cut pills in half to make them last longer, to skip medical tests to avoid unaffordable bills, or to lose their dignity and self-worth under the weight of mounting medical debt. Those hurried 217 Congressmen will never have to choose between buying food or insulin. They will never be driven to bankruptcy over medical debt. They have no idea what it is like for patients to choose death over life. This should NEVER be a choice for Americans because of affordability or access to healthcare.

Nurses believe in using our knowledge and skills for good. We believe in being ethical, compassionate, dedicated, and most importantly educated. We believe others, making decisions in this capacity, should be demonstrating those same ethics.

Montana had no representative in this U.S. House decision because our seat is currently vacant. On May 25th in a special election well elect our Congressman to speak for us on healthcare and other issues. Please do your research and make sure the candidate who receives your vote is deserving of your trust and will honor the lives and healthcare needs of our families and communities. Make sure its someone who will improve our healthcare system and not rush to tear it apart.

The week of May 6 is National Nurses Week and what nurses want is the ability to provide quality care and promote health. This year please thank a nurse and help us elect and hold accountable a Montana Congressman who will be a champion for human life, wellness and access to affordable quality healthcare for all.

Vicky Byrd, RN, is the executive director of the Montana Nurses Association (MNA), the professional association and labor organization advocating for over 17,000 Registered Nurses in Montana.
J ean-Christophe Novelli and fiancee Michelle Kennedy have revealed that their baby son is cancer free.

After months of treatment, eight-month-old Valentino is in recovery after being diagnosed with neuroblastoma cancer in November last year.

His only communication - he couldn't talk at that age - was his sad expression and tears, the French chef told Hello Magazine.

If I could have swapped places with him, I would have done it like a shot.

Novelli said he went from feeling like he had everything to a few months of absolute misery.

The only thing I could do was stay strong for my family. But what was happening to our baby made me think about my life, he said.

I had everything I'd ever wanted: a family I love, a job I adore, my own cookery academy and a home in the best country in the world to me, the place of my childhood dreams.

But suddenly, I was faced with the worst situation possible: my youngest child's life was at stake. In my prayers I asked God, "What are you doing? What's going to happen?" But I didn't get an answer for a long time.

The family suffered another health scare earlier this year when Kennedy was rushed to hospital with deep vein thrombosis.
M asterChef champion Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed has been targeted by racist trolls after winning the BBC cooking show on Friday.

The 29-year-old lifted the trophy after her faultless three-course menu impressed judges Gregg Wallace and John Torode who praised her East-meets-West cooking style.

The abuse began during the episode with Twitter users accusing Saliha of not showing enough 'versatility' during the competition.

Others claimed that the doctor, who is of Pakistani descent, was only capable of cooking curry.

Watching #Masterchef on catchup, just asked my wife " what's #Saliha cooking?" She said "don't know" I replied "I bet you do" #CurryFlavours  john taylor (@jtgooner) May 12, 2017

Why do I feel that Saliha isn't versatile enough for #MasterChef? #OneTrickPony she's a decent cook, but not for me   ChelseaLeigh (@ChelsealeighLB) May 12, 2017

However, the trolls were a small minority with many more Twitter users complimenting Salihas inventive cooking and personal dedication.

So #Masterchef final. How is that lovely Saliha simultaneously a junior doctor, young mother and MC contestant?!? No wonder John T cried.  Siobhan Logan (@siobsi) May 14, 2017

Well done Saliha. Three absolutely stunning dishes! Incredible east meets west combination. Definitely deserves to be #MasterChef champion  Steven Hoang (@StevenHoang7) May 12, 2017

Most junior doctors just wanna live through another shift and Saliha just won #masterchef and has a 2yo child. Teach me your superpowers.  Caroline (@caroline_77) May 12, 2017

And others were quick to point out that her winning menu had featured a variety of cuisines including Italian and French classics with a twist.

A panna cotta is Italian.

Duck & cherries is French.

But Saliha can only cook curry?



Go home Twitter, you're drunk. #MasterChefUK  The Lone Tweet (@TheLoneTweet) May 12, 2017

Just love the ignorance on here, if you think Kebab or Baklava are curry you shouldn't be commenting. Congratulations Saliha #MasterChefUK  Jillybrum (@JillyBrum) May 12, 2017

Friday nights final was an emotional affair with Salihas win bringing presenter John Torode to tears.

Mahmood-Ahmed said of her win This is most definitely the coolest thing that Ive ever done in my life, while fellow finalists Steve Kielty and Giovanna Ryan congratulated her on her success.

Love U Saliha & totally deserved it !! What an amazing adventure !Met so many amazing ppl !To much to say not enough characters #masterchef  steve kielty (@steve_survival) May 12, 2017

Couldn't be happier for @salihacooks she is SUPERWOMAN and an incredible cook and I'm so so proud to call her a friend. #MasterChefUK pic.twitter.com/p6YESNi1ec  Giovanna Ryan (@giovannamryan) May 12, 2017

The 29-year-old junior doctor has been busy ever since appearing on This Morning, Radio 5 Live and BBC News to discuss her star performance.

She has said she hopes to use her new platform to improve hospital food and plans to carry on working as a doctor while writing recipe books to drive the nation to eat more healthily.
P hoebe Waller-Bridge has denied that she is going to be taking over from Peter Capaldi as the first female Doctor in Doctor Who.

The British actress and writer rubbished reports that she is being lined up to take on the lead role as she picked up an award for Fleabag at the BAFTA TV Awards on Sunday night.

I am not going to be the first female Doctor, not that I know of, she said after collecting her trophy.

Waller-Bridge did confirm that she is set to appear in the new Star Wars Han Solo spin-off film, adding: As far as I know, I am in the Star Wars film, yes.

Doctor Who - series 10 trailer - BBC

I thought about making up a ridiculous plot for the film and just telling everyone that was the plot but Ive been heavily advised not to do that as well. Poker face it is Im afraid.

The 31-year-old has been bookies favourite to become the first female Doctor for weeks, with sources suggesting that the BBC were keen to hire her.

Bafta TV Awards 2017 - red carpet 1 /48 Bafta TV Awards 2017 - red carpet Eleanor Tomlinson steals the show with in a silver sequinned gown Rex Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman David Fisher/REX/Shutterstock Ed Westwick and his girlfriend pose for pictures David Fisher/REX/Shutterstock Anna Friel arrives for the red carpet Dave Benett Ant and Dec are suited and booted for the event PA Joan Collins adds some glamour to proceedings in silver PA Holly Willoughby in her show-stopping red carpet gown REX X Files actress Gillian Anderson PA Benedict Cumberbatch gets the biggest cheer from the crowd Line of Duty star Thandie Newton Dave Benett British actress Tuppence Middleton PA Charlotte Riley wears a dress with a thigh-high split PA Claire Foy is nominated for Best Actress for her role in The Crown Joanna Lumley arrives to collect her Fellowship PA Eleanor Tomlinson on the red carpet PA Eleanor Tomlinson and her friend arrive in style Dave Benett The Crown's Vanessa Kirby goes backless PA Fleabag star Phoebe Waller Bridge is nominated for her role in the comedy PA Daniel Mays and Louise Burton Dave Benett Surrane Jones blends in with the carpet in a striking red gown PA Ella Eyre doesn't mind the rain as she twirls for the cameras PA The Crown's Jared Harris and Allegra Riggio PA Roxanne Pallett in a fairytale white gown PA Ed Balls and Katya Jones waltz their way into the ceremony PA Katie Piper and husband Richard James Sutton Dave Benett Aisling Bea arrives at the Royal Festival Hall PA Scarlett Moffatt and her mum arrive on the red carpet Dave Benett Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman lark around on the red carpet REX Laura Whitmore wears an eye-catching print gown PA Pregnant Hollyoaks star Jennifer Metcalfe PA Jim Sturgess and his date arrive for the ceremony REX Danny Dyer is nominated for his episode of Who Do You Think You Are? PA Amy Nuttal and Andrew Buchan arrive Dave Benett Amy Nuttal shows off her blue satin gown PA Denise Welch posed for pictures before the downpour PA Grayson Perry is an early arrival PA

Beeb bosses love Phoebe. They thought she did an amazing job with Fleabag and is certainly one of the rising stars in TV and film, a source told The Mirror.

They see her as the perfect fit as a Time Lord and the first female Doctor Who.

Waller-Bridge admitted to being over-the-moon to win the Best Female Comedy Performance gong for the critically-acclaimed Fleabag, beating Diane Morgan, Lesley Manville and Olivia Colman.

Sharing her mothers advice, she told the crowd: Darling you can be whatever you want to be, as long as you are outrageous.
HELENA  Former legislator Jeff Mangan took over Monday as Montana's enforcer of campaign, ethics and lobbying laws, succeeding Jonathan Motl's turbulent tenure in which Motl and his staff prosecuted campaign corruption in the 2010 Republican primaries and re-wrote state campaign finance rules.

Mangan, who served in the Montana Legislature as a Democrat from Great Falls from 1999 to 2006, was sworn in Monday to a six-year term as commissioner of political practices. In an interview last week, he said he will begin work immediately after spending time getting up to speed on pending litigation and campaign complaints.

"I've reviewed all of them," he said. "I'll start writing decisions on Monday."

The commissioner's office is a political hot seat by nature of its role as the independent overseer of the campaign activities of the state elected officials. Allegations of partisan bias tend to dog the commissioner, who is appointed by the governor and must be confirmed by the Senate.

As a result, the commissioner's office has seen frequent turnover  Mangan will be the fifth person to hold the office since Dennis Unsworth in 2010, and he is the first in that time to be confirmed to a full six-year term.

Motl survived the longest of the rest, four years, but his tenure has only increased Republican accusations of partisanship. That's mainly because of the civil lawsuits Motl filed against nine Republican candidates in the 2010 elections alleging they received illegal contributions in the form of campaign aid provided by corporations connected to the anti-labor union National Right to Work Committee.

Most of those cases were settled out of court, though one resulted in a highly publicized trial of a sitting lawmaker last year, former Rep. Art Wittich. A jury found Wittich took illegal corporate contributions and was ordered to pay a $68,000 fine.

Wittich, who lost his re-election bid last year, has denied the charges, and an appeal is pending.

Motl and his staff also cleared a backlog of campaign complaints that had piled up for years. He and his staff wrote regulations to enforce sweeping changes to the state's campaign finance laws passed by lawmakers in 2015. Candidates for state office are now required to file reports and disclosures electronically and more frequently as a result.

Motl said the partisanship accusations against him are untrue, and that he enforced more campaign violations against Democrats than Republicans during his tenure. He said he believes he is leaving an independent office that voters have confidence will act on any issue that casts doubt on the fairness of Montana's elections.

"I think that's the expectation now," he said. "I think it's something people should expect. It's something Commissioner Mangan should have as an asset."

Matthew Monforton, a former Republican legislator and an attorney who has represented lawmakers in litigation against Motl, said he believes Motl's legacy will be that he "weaponized" the political practices office against conservatives.

"If there is one redeeming quality, I've been able to make a comfortable living over the last few years defending conservative Republicans against Motl's violations of their civil rights," Monforton said.

Mangan said he believes Motl has done a good job and that he is leaving the office in good shape.

"Getting through campaign finance these last few years, dark money, different things that have happened in Montana  it's quite remarkable the amount of work that has been done," Mangan said.
MISSOULA  A 22-year-old Bozeman man was sentenced to a decade in federal prison on Monday after pleading guilty earlier this year to prostituting two teenage girls in Missoula.

But U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy made it clear he had reservations about the sentence he imposed upon Roam Savage Chandler.

I dont know that you can punish a personality disorder out of a person. It seems like a Middle Ages idea, Molloy said.

Chandler's presentencing report characterized him as having an antisocial personality disorder.

Molloy seemed to struggle with what sentence to impose, eventually deciding to go lower than the federal guideline and opting for the mandatory minimum of prison time. Chandler will also have an additional decade of supervision after he is released from custody.

Even that the judge appeared to find too harsh, saying the idea that you can punish somebody enough to force them to change behavior is questionable.

He termed his final decision the sentence required by Congress.

In January, Chandler pleaded guilty to two of his seven federal trafficking, drug possession and prostitution charges as part of a plea agreement that dropped the remaining counts.

Chandlers indictment says that in the spring of 2016, he used backpage.com to solicit prostitution clients for two teenage girls in Missoula. He was also accused of providing the teens with methamphetamine and heroin. He was charged last fall following an investigation by the Montana Regional Violent Crime Task Force, a collaboration between the FBI and local law enforcement agencies.

Chandlers attorney, Andrew Nelson, as well as Molloy and prosecutor Tim Racicot agreed that the trafficking statute under which Chandler was charged was misleading, given the specifics of his case.

That just seems a little grandiose for what happened here, Nelson said. Its not really trafficking to the extent that most people would envision when they hear that term.

Despite that, Racicot said that Chandlers crime was very serious, especially given that he had plied the teens with drugs as part of the plan to prostitute them.

He used their weakness against them in order to engage in this conduct, he said.

For someone who is only 22, Molloy said Chandlers criminal history is pretty remarkable, citing six misdemeanor and three prior felony convictions including burglary and drug possession in Gallatin County.

If Chandler had been sentenced to the period of incarceration recommended by federal guidelines  which was roughly 14 to 18 years  it would have cost taxpayers $448,000 to $560,000 just for the time he would be in prison, the judge added.

I do know if hes in prison for 210 months, hes likely to come out as a sociopath.
This page is archived. Data published after 5 April 2022 can be found on the renewed website. Go to the new statistics page

Published: 15 May 2017

Value of exports grew in March, net capital inflow to Finland

Corrected: The appendix tables have been uppdated on 15 May at noon.

The value of exports of goods grew by 17 per cent and the value of imports by eight per cent from the previous year. The current account was slightly in deficit in March. Capital flowed to Finland on net. The data appear from Statistics Finland's statistics on balance of payments and international investment position.

Current account and trade account

Current account

The current account was EUR 0.1 billion in deficit in March. The 12-month moving total of the current account was EUR 2.2 billion in deficit.

Of the sub-items of the current account, the trade account in balance of payments terms was EUR 0.4 billion in surplus. The value of goods exports in balance of payments terms grew by 17 per cent year-on-year and totalled EUR 5.2 billion. The value of goods imports in balance of payment terms also grew by eight per cent from twelve months back. The service account showed a deficit of EUR 0.2 billion.

The primary income account was EUR 0.1 billion in deficit. The primary income account includes investment income like interests and dividends. The secondary income account was EUR 0.1 billion in deficit.

Current account and trade account, 12 month moving total

Financial account

In March, net capital inflow to Finland amounted to EUR 1.9 billion. Of the sub-items of the financial account, net capital inflow was mostly in the form of portfolio investments, EUR 4.9 billion. Net capital outflow from Finland was mainly in the form of other investments, EUR 2.9 billion.

Source: Balance of payments and international investment position, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Saana Ranta-Ruona 029 551 3375, Tapio Kuusisto 029 551 3318, balanceofpayments@stat.fi.

Director in charge: Ville Vertanen

Publication in pdf-format (258.5 kB)

Updated 15.5.2017

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Balance of payments and international investment position [e-publication].

ISSN=2342-348X. March 2017. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 10.11.2022].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/mata/2017/03/mata_2017_03_2017-05-15_tie_001_en.html
This page is archived. Data published after 5 April 2022 can be found on the renewed website. Go to the new statistics page

Published: 15 May 2017

Turnover in manufacturing grew by 7.5 per cent in the December to February period

According to Statistics Finland, turnover in manufacturing in the December to February period was 7.5 per cent higher than in the corresponding period of the year before. Domestic sales grew by 7.1 per cent and export turnover by 7.7 per cent from one year ago.

Three months' year-on-year change in turnover in manufacturing (C) sub-industries (TOL 2008)

Turnover went up from the corresponding period of the previous year in nearly all manufacturing (C) sub-industries . Turnover increased most in the chemical industry, by 19.3 per cent, and in the metal industry, by 7.2 per cent. Slightly more turnover than last year was generated in the textile, clothing and leather industry, 0.2 per cent, and in the food industry, 0.6 per cent.

Three months' year-on-year change in turnover in main industrial categories (TOL 2008)

The turnover of all main categories of manufacturing industries grew year-on-year. Turnover grew strongest in the industry of mining and quarrying, 23.9 per cent. Turnover in water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation activities increased by 7.3 per cent, and in electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply by 1.0 per cent from one year before.

The index of turnover in industry describes enterprises whose main industry is manufacturing. The calculation of the indices is based on the Tax Administrations self-assessed tax data which are supplemented with data obtained with Statistics Finlands sales inquiry. The monthly turnovers of manufacturing enterprises can vary considerably, especially in the metal industries. The variation is mainly due to invoicing practices. The final invoice for major machinery deliveries and projects may be recorded in the sales of one month, even if the delivery had required the work of several months or years.

Changes in the Tax Administrations self-assessed tax data have not so far had an effect on the data of turnover indices

The effects of the changes in the Tax Administration's self-assessed tax data have been analysed in Statistics Finlands turnover indices. Based on the analyses, the changes have thus far not been found to have significant effects on enterprises VAT reporting in terms of statistics production. More information about this in Changes in the periodic tax return data used in turnover indices.

Source: Index of turnover in industry 2017, February, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Maija Sappinen 029 551 3348, Kirsi-Maaria Manninen 029 551 2681, myynti.teollisuus@stat.fi

Director in charge: Mari Yla-Jarkko

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ISSN=1798-596X. February 2017. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 10.11.2022].

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The balance of payments' current account recorded a EUR 690 million in the first quarter of 2017, more than double as compared to the similar period of 2016, when it was EUR 314 million, the National Bank of Romania (BNR) informs on Monday.

According to the central bank's website, in January - March 2016, the deficit on trade in goods widened by EUR 281 million, the secondary income and services surpluses narrowed by EUR 317 million and EUR 19 million respectively, while the deficit on primary income balance contracted by EUR 241 million.

Non-residents' direct investment in Romania (estimates) totalled EUR 1,075 million, of which equity (including estimated net reinvestment of earnings) amounted to EUR 1,258 million and intercompany lending recorded a net negative value of EUR 183 million.

Long-term external debt at end-March 2017 stood at EUR 68,968 million (74 percent of total external debt), almost flat from end-2016. Short-term external debt at end-March 2017 topped EUR 24,224 million (26 percent of total external debt), up 3.5 percent against end-2016.

In the above-mentioned period, the total external debt grew by EUR 815 million, on the back of the rise in non-publicly guaranteed debt (by EUR 596 million) and public debt (by EUR 224 million).

Long-term external debt service ratio ran at 16 percent in January - March 2017 against 27.4 percent in 2016. At end-March 2017, goods and services import cover stood at 6 months, as compared with 6.3 months at end-2016. At end-March 2017, the ratio of the National Bank of Romania's foreign exchange reserves to short-term external debt by remaining maturity came in at 90.3 percent, against 90.1 percent at end-2016.

agerpres.
Former President Ion Iliescu appeared on Monday, at the General Prosecutor's office, in order to be head by military prosecutors in the June 1990 miners' riots case.

Former Prime Minister Petre Roman also appeared on Monday morning at the headquarters of the General Prosecutor's office.

According to sources in the judiciary, Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman were called by prosecutors to be informed of the extension of criminal investigation, as they were charged in December 2016 with crimes against humanity.

Ion Iliescu stayed for around half an hour in the headquarters and made no statements upon his exist.

Among several investigated in "the Mineriad" case are the following persons: former President Ion Iliescu, former Prime Minister Petre Roman, former Director of the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) Virgil Magureanu, former Deputy Chairman of the National Salvation Front, former Deputy of Romania's Prosecutor General and Chief of the Military Prosecution Directorate General (in reserve) Mugurel Cristian Florescu.

Military prosecutors claim that in the period 11 - 15 June 1990, the defendants have decided, organized and coordinated "a generalized and systematic attack," launched against the civil population, against the manifestations in the University Square in Bucharest respectively, as well as against the population residing in Bucharest, an attack which involved the participation of armed forces of the Interior Ministry (MAI), National Defence Ministry (MApN), Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), as well as a number of over ten thousand miners and other workers from multiple areas of the country.

The alleged attack, prosecutors say, had the following consequences: the killing of four persons by shooting and the wounding of three others by the same means; harming the physical or psychical integrity of 1,269 persons; deprivation of freedom, for political reasons, of a total number of 1,242 persons.

agerpres.
BILLINGS  The man who was shot to death by officers Friday afternoon on Highway 3 had fired at least one shot before he was killed, Billings Police Chief Rich St. John said in a release Monday.

The four Billings officers involved in the shooting were identified as 19-year-veteran Sgt. Clyde Reid; 20-year veteran Officer Steve Swanson; Officer Philip Tanis, who has been with BPD for two years; and Officer Michael Freeman who has been with the department for a year and a half.

Swanson was previously involved in a shooting at Billings Clinic in October 2015, the release said.

The involved officers have been placed on paid administrative leave.

Yellowstone County Coroner Lt. Bill Jones said a Monday morning autopsy was scheduled for the man who was killed on Highway 3. The mans identity will be released after the autopsy.

The shooting occurred Friday after police responded to a 2:30 p.m. report of an armed and suicidal man on Highway 3 between the airport roundabout and Zimmerman Trail.

Officers found the man in his vehicle about 10 minutes later. An hourlong standoff ensued, during which the man displayed a handgun several times.

At about 3:40 p.m. the man began walking toward officers and ignored their orders to stop. He was shot by four officers who were 80 to 100 feet away.

Officers provided medical aid, and the man was taken to Billings Clinic. During a Friday night press conference St. John said he had received "unconfirmed information" the man was dead.

Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office is investigating the incident.
The job title "Wall Street trader" once evoked sleek suits, martini-soaked lunches and chaotic offices  a gateway to prosperity at a relatively young age. But earlier this year, Marty Chavez, the chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, revealed that some of the investment bank's well-paid humans were being replaced by unpaid robots.

Over the last 17 years, the number of stock traders at the firm has shrunk from 600 to two, he told a Harvard computer science symposium in January.

"We are rapidly transforming the business model," he told the crowd, according to a video of the event.

Chavez's talk offers a cautionary tale to the next generation of job seekers: As technology advances, a fat paycheck doesn't necessarily guarantee job security. In fact, a report on lifetime earnings across college majors suggests the lowest-wage jobs are actually more likely to withstand the digital revolution.

Researchers at the Hamilton Project found that students who studied finance, engineering and computer science tend to make the most money after graduation, while those who majored in counseling, social work and early childhood education saw the lowest wages  but in fields computers aren't likely to dominate.

"The hardest activities to automate with the technologies available today are those that involve managing and developing people," noted the authors of a recent McKinsey study.

Robots can't feed toddlers or break up disputes among cranky 4-year-olds. Their grip isn't gentle enough to lift a crying child. Preschool teachers, who earn an average of $35,000 annually, can't be replaced by the machines of today or the near future.

"A lot of child care has to do with taking care of physical and emotional needs, like changing diapers or providing food," said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Caring for children demands nurturing instincts, such as knowing when to wipe away a tear or spotting a child who isn't interacting with others. Artificial intelligence isn't great at reading emotions or helping to regulate them.

Those jobs, Gould said, aren't going away  though a tough market prevents them from growing much. Preschools and day cares across the country, both public and private, tend to stay at or around capacity.

The cost of employing licensed teachers is high, but raising the price of child care carries a risk of pricing out parents. This is one reason some economists argue the country's child-care system needs more state or federal financial support to flourish.

"There's absolutely demand, you see that in the waiting lists," Gould said. "But a lot of parents can't get in or afford it."

Robots also can't feel empathy, the special ingredient that helps us connect with other people. Like social workers, who make an average of $43,000 per year, they can ask about your childhood  but they can't then help you work through issues with your mom.

"There are robots that can mimic empathy," said David Deming, a Harvard professor who studies the market of social skills. "They can read human faces and try to pick up on responses. But they're just pretending. They don't really understand you."

Apps can deliver counseling services on your phone, but real people are still sending the therapeutic texts. Talkspace, which emerged in 2012, just removes the face-to-face part of counseling. (Licensed counselors in the U.S. make an average salary of $44,000).

The top-paying work in the Hamilton Project's report, on the other hand, demands less of a human touch, said Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute, a technology consulting firm.

"Investment banking is next on the chopping block," Webb said. And engineering isn't off the hook, either. "The next iteration of artificial intelligence," she said, "is artificial intelligence creating software for itself."

In one Google Brain experiment, for example, software became better at teaching itself tasks  such as navigating a maze, for example  than the engineers who were charged with making it smarter.

"That obviates the need," she said, "for a human engineer."
Updated at 10 a.m. with confirmation of President Donald Trump's appearance at event.

Officers, friends and family members of fallen St. Louis County Officer Blake Snyder are expected to attend a ceremony to honor his memory and the lives of other fallen officers today in Washington.

Snyder was fatally shot while responding to a disturbance call in Green Park, a small community in south St.Louis County, on Oct. 6. An 18-year-old has been charged with his murder. Snyder was the 10th St. Louis County officer to die in the line of duty since the departments founding in 1955.

The St. Louis County Police Welfare Association paid for 11 members of Snyders family along with 25 members of the St. Louis County police department to go to the nations capitol for the events, known as Police Week, according to the nonprofits president, Lt. Karl Bulla.

The events are intended to honor the fallen whose names have been added to the National Law Enforcement Monument, as well as those who have been there from the beginning. Two other area officers also have been recently added to the wall.

County officers will make a pencil rubbing of Snyders name on the monument and bring it back to the departments Clayton headquarters. It will be framed and hung in the foyer underneath a bronze relief portrait of Snyder, alongside those of the departments nine other fallen officers.

Snyders widow, Elizabeth Snyder, and son Malachi, 2, as well as his parents, Peggy and Dick Snyder of Godfrey, and brother, Adam Snyder, are among those attending, as are Chief Jon Belmar and County Executive Steve Stenger, Bulla said.

The St. Louis County police departments Pipes and Drums Division is performing during various events, Bulla said.

Snyder has been posting pictures of the journey to her Facebook page, including one showing officers standing at attention and saluting Friday as she carried her son in her arms off the plane and into the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

The St. Louis contingent attended a national candlelight vigil Saturday and a parade Sunday.

On Monday, the group is expected to attend the National Law Enforcement Memorial Ceremony behind the capitol. Donald Trump is expected to attend, as have some previous presidents. He plans to illuminate the White House in blue lights to commemorate the national day of remembrance as well urge governors and other elected officials to fly flags at half staff.

The St. Louis County Police Welfare Association, the nonprofit that financially assists officers families, spent about $73,000 to cover the cost of the trip, Bulla said. The organization saw donations pour in following Snyders death.

In all, the names of 394 law enforcement officers who died in the line of duty  including 143 who died in 2016  were dedicated Saturday during the 29th annual candlelight vigil on the National Mall.

The other area officers recently added to the wall include St. Francois County Deputy Paul Clark, who died last year from injuries he suffered after a fleeing car struck his vehicle; and Lakeshire Officer Ronald Strittmatter, who had a heart attack after a shift in which he responded to multiple calls.

Chuch Raasch of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
Like many areas of the country, Perry County is seeing an increase in heroin usage and the crime and despair that come with it.

Gary J. Schaaf, sheriff of this rural county of 19,000 people about 85 miles south of St. Louis, has been in office for 25 years. He says people involved with drugs are making his county unsafe and deserve to go away.

So he was in agreement with a memo to federal prosecutors nationwide issued Thursday by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions that could result in longer prison terms for some drug offenders in federal court.

In the memo, released to the public Friday, Sessions reversed a 2010 policy set under then-President Barack Obama that instructed prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with offenses that would trigger mandatory minimum sentences. Under the directive by then-Attorney General Eric Holder, if the defendant met certain criteria, such as being nonviolent or not part of a cartel, he could avoid long, mandatory sentences.

Holder instructed federal prosecutors to reserve the toughest charges for high-volume drug dealers or those who were involved in violent crime. And he encouraged them to decide on charges based on the merits of each case.

But Sessions instructed federal prosecutors to return to a core principle of the Justice Departments charging and sentencing policy, by charging defendants with the most serious, provable crimes carrying the most severe penalties.

Schaaf said he agreed with that. He did not agree with Holders memo, because people who do the crime should do the time.

If theyre not on the street, theyre not committing crimes, he said. Youre never going to get crime to drop, and never going to get (drug dealers) off the street unless you charge them with something that sticks and they go away for a long, long time.

It was not clear how federal drug prosecutions could change in the St. Louis area. Richard Callahan, Obamas appointee to U.S. attorney for Eastern District of Missouri, said the Holder memorandum never prevented us from using all the statutory minimums when we thought it was appropriate. And prosecutors before the Holder memo would use discretion in charging drug defendants.

Callahan was one of several U.S. attorneys who were forced to resign by President Donald Trump; a replacement has not yet been named. He said that he didnt know Sessions but that I very much doubt that hes going to require people to use statutory minimums when theyre not appropriate.

But the letter did signal a markedly different attitude toward drug offenses, and suggests the Trump administration will not be as likely to reduce sentences for drug defendants.

Thats something Obama regularly did in his second term. Among the prisoners whose sentence was reduced was Calvin Dwayne Sangster. In 2007, he was sentenced in U.S. District Court in St. Louis to 15 years, eight months, for intent to distribute crack cocaine.

In a letter to the court in 2007, he said he and his family had been in a house fire. His biological son, Calvin Jr., was killed. His wifes son, who was 10 at the time of the fire, was devastated. He said that he and his family had been in counseling and that he had been trying his best.

He asked for lenience but didnt get it.

In 2015, Obama commuted his sentence, reducing it by half, reuniting him with a family that needed him.

Reached on Friday on his way to work, Sangster, 48, of Florissant, said the eight years in prison gave him a better outlook at where my life is headed. And it gave myself a chance to improve my life. He took courses in business and accounting.

I felt 15 years was kind of harsh, but what could I do about it? he asked.

Obamas clemency was a blessing, and it gave me a chance to reconnect with my family and my life, and go out be more productive for society. And I have taken advantage of that.

He now works as a freight handler.

A prisoner re-entering society and being productive is exactly what Americans want, said Eric Selig, a defense attorney who represents clients with drug charges.

They dont want the war on drugs to start up again, with lengthy sentences that punish people for possession or distribution of drugs. The American people want treatment and to look at the reasons behind drug use, and address that instead of locking up people for lengthy periods of time. That doesnt benefit the community.
A police sergeant from Manchester was seriously injured Friday in an off-duty vehicle crash in Franklin County.

The four-car crash Friday on Highway 50 in Union injured Sheree Waterhouse.

Manchester police Chief Tim Walsh said Waterhouse has been on the force about 20 years. She is a Community Oriented Policing officer.

Everybody is saying a prayer for her, Walsh said. Everybody is concerned and worried for her.

Waterhouse was stopped at a traffic light on westbound Highway 50 at Prairie Dell Road about 6 p.m. when a westbound Ford F450 work truck rear-ended her, according to Union police. The truck pushed her 2010 Nissan Altima through the intersection, with her car striking a southbound Toyota Corolla, police said. The work truck also hit an eastbound Chevrolet Tahoe that was stopped at the light.

Both the work truck, driven by James Mills of Washington, and Waterhouses Altima ended up off the south side of Highway 50, police said.

Waterhouse was the only person seriously injured in the crash. She lives in Leslie, Mo., along Highway 50 about 15 miles west of the crash scene, police said.

The intersection was closed for about five hours after the crash, and the crash remains under investigation.

An online account to raise money for her medical care said Waterhouse was in intensive care with brain trauma.
Aaron Carter, the singer-rapper who began performing as a child and had hit albums starting in his teen years, was found dead at his home in Southern California. He was 34. Representatives for Carters family confirmed the singers death Saturday. They did not provide any immediate further comment. A sheriff's official says deputies responding to reports of a medical emergency found a person deceased at the home in Lancaster. Aaron Carter, the younger brother of Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys, performed as an opening act for Britney Spears as well as his brothers boy band, and appeared on the familys reality series, House of Carters.
A few weeks ago, not long before announcing Sean Williams of El Primer Mundo as the new Cohiba brand ambassador, General Cigar Co. revealed Cohiba Blue. From a packaging perspective, the new line is a departure from the silvers and blacks that dominate the rest of the Dominican-based brands portfolio.

I dont know this for sure, but my sense is the Cohiba marketing team was aiming for a differentiated look that expressed modernity and approachability. The purpose of Cohiba Blue, after all, seems to be to attract more (presumably younger) consumers to the brand at a less intimidating price point.

The four inaugural vitolas that are just now arriving at retailers nationwideChurchill (7.5 x 50), Robusto (5.5 x 50), Rothschild (4.5 x 50), and Toro (6 x 54)sell in the $8.99 to 10.99 range. While they are by no means discount or value smokes, they are less expensive than many of the other options within the Cohiba collection. Each vitola is presented in a box of 20 thats hand-paintedyou guessed itbright blue.

The Cohiba Blue recipe includes a Honduran Olancho San Agustin (OSA) wrapper and binder (no, cigars do not typically use the same kind of tobacco for both the wrapper and binder) around Honduran Jamastran, Nicaraguan Ometepe, and Dominican Piloto Cubano filler tobaccos. The layered wrapper-binder deepens the smoking experience and imparts subtle, earthy notes, reads a General Cigar press release. The unique, three-country blend represents the worlds most revered tobacco growing regions and delivers a sophisticated, memorable smoke.

I smoked a handful of Cohiba Blue Robustos for this review. Appearance-wise, this cigar is unimpressive. The OSA wrapper is grayish and pale with several prominent veins that leave the splotchy, moderately oily surface rugged and unrefined. And the band seems quite cheapnot because its blue, but because its flat and plain.

Looks are far from the most important aspects of any cigar. So I went into lighting up my first Robusto with an open mind. What I found was a well-balanced, spice-forward, medium-bodied profile thats best characterized by cinnamon, cedar, roasted nuts, warm tobacco, and a bit of honey. From the outset, both the draw is a bit tight and the smoke production at bit light.

After half an inch, the draw opens considerably, the smoke production becomes more in line with expectations, and the spice recedes. The cedar becomes oak and the cinnamon is replaced by a sweet, creamy backdrop akin to nougat. Thereafter, there are few changes, save for a slight increase in intensity in the final third. Throughout, the burn line is well-behaved, though dont be surprised if you need to employ a few torch touch-ups.

All things considered, the Blue Robusto is a satisfying, well-made smoke with good flavors. I dont think its going to wow anyone, yet theres still a lot to like about this new Cohiba. In my book, it earns a solid rating of three and a half stogies out of five.

[To read more StogieGuys.com cigar reviews, please click here.]

Patrick A



photo credit: Stogie Guys
Nick Skelton and Big Star at the Royal Windsor Show on Sunday. Photo: British Showjumping

DOUBLE Olympic champion Nick Skelton bid an emotional farewell to showjumping in the presence of the Queen on Sunday.

Skelton and his Rio 2016 gold medal-winning ride Big Star both formally retired on the final day of the Royal Windsor Horse Show.

As the Queen watched from the Royal Box, Skelton, who lives near Alcester, entered a packed Castle Arena on Big Star - fans were also stood several deep outside it, craning for a view - riding through a guard of honour formed by officials and riders.

Wearing his Great Britain team jacket and adorned by the Rio gold medal he won so spectacularly last summer, a clearly moved Skelton said his public goodbye.

"From the day we bought Big Star when he was five-years-old, I had it in my mind that he could win an Olympic gold medal," said the 59-year-old.

"He has been an outstanding horse, and he has never let me down.

"I have an amazing team around me, and I have been very lucky all my life.

"I've had the most wonderful horses, great owners and great sponsors, and I am very proud of what I have done.

"I would do it all again if I could."

More on Skelton's farewell in this week's Herald.
The United States and Japan have called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council over North Korea's latest missile test, amid tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.

On Sunday, Washington and Tokyo asked the council to convene an urgent meeting a few hours after South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that Pyongyang had launched a ballistic missile earlier in the day, the second missile firing in two weeks.

The missile test, however, was the first since South Korea's new President Moon Jae-In came to power with the promise of reducing tensions with the North.

The Sunday's projectile was launched from a military base in the vicinity of Kusong, in central North Pyongan province, near the country's northwestern coast, and traveled some 700 kilometers before landing in the Sea of Japan.

On Monday, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said that Sunday's launch had been a "newly-developed mid/long-range strategic ballistic rocket, Hwasong-12," adding that North's leader Kim Jong-Un had "personally" overseen the test-launch.

The report further said that new type of missile was capable of "loading powerful heavy-weight nuclear warheads. It also claimed that the rocket managed to soar to "the maximum peak altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers."

US President Donald Trump condemned the test and called for tougher sanctions against Pyongyang. "Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea," he said in a brief statement.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, also echoed Trump's comments, saying there was "no excuses that justify" Pyongyang's actions. "This was close to home for Russia. China can't expect dialogue. This threat is real," she tweeted.

NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu also slammed the missile test in a statement and labelled the North's move as "a new flagrant breach of a series of United Nations Security Council Resolutions," constituting "a threat to international peace and security."

European Commission spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic also denounced the launch, saying it was "a threat to international peace and security (that could) further aggravate tensions in the region at a time when de-escalation is instead needed."

The latest test was the Norths first launch since a US missile system,known as Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), deployed in the South became operational earlier this month. Pyongyang has time and again slammed US moves in the region, which it sees as a threat to its security.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have significantly increased in the past several weeks. The US, concerned by North Koreas rapidly-developing missile and military nuclear programs, has sent a strike force to the peninsula. Pyongyang has said it is combat-ready. The two sides have been increasingly trading threats of military action against one another.

Amid the recent tensions, the US has called on China, which is also North Koreas major economic benefactor, to help increase pressure on Pyongyang to have it abandon its nuclear program. While China has opposed any military action against North Korea, it has long maintained that Pyongyang should not have a military nuclear program and has recently increased pressure on Pyongyang by imposing sanctions of its own.

The North, already under an array of sanctions for its missile and nuclear programs, says it is developing arms as deterrence against the US threat. North Korea has also said that it would not abandon its missile and nuclear programs unless the US ended its hostility toward Pyongyang.

North Korea missile launch poses no danger to Russia: Defense Min.

The Russian Defense Ministry has rejected claims that North Koreas latest ballistic missile test poses a danger to Moscow as it landed about 500 kilometers from its border.

This missile launch represented no danger for the Russian Federation, the ministry said in a statement on Sunday carried by official Russian news agencies.

The Russian missile attack warning systems followed the ballistic target during its 23-minute flight until its landing in the central part of the Sea of Japan (about 500 kilometers from the Russian territory), the statement added.

North Korea launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile from the northwestern city of Kusong at around 5:30 am (2030 GMT Saturday) and it flew about 700 kilometers (435 miles) before landing in the sea between North Korea and Japan, the South Korean military said in a statement.
Over 480 asylum seekers and refugees were rescued in the Mediterranean as they attempted the perilous crossing from North Africa, with seven bodies also recovered, Italy's coastguard said.

Some 484 migrants were plucked from dinghies on Saturday in four operations involving coastguard boats, an Italian navy ship, the German NGO Sea Eye and the OHIO mercantile ship. The bodies of seven men were recovered during the operations.

More than 45,000 people have been rescued and brought to Italy so far this year, a 44-percent increase from the same period in 2016, according to Italy's Interior Ministry.

About 1,309 have died or are feared dead after trying to make the journey, the International Organization for Migration said.

Nigerians make up the largest group, followed by people from Bangladesh, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast.

Nigeria is home to the Boko Haram terrorist group, which has terrorized the country with an eight-year fight that has killed some 20,000 people and forced at least 2.6 million others to flee their homes.
Lankan authors insight into Kafkas famed work View(s):

Any reader of Franz Kafkas writings will know how unsettling his books leave one feeling. Hence it is no surprise that the word Kafkaesque is now widely used to describe situations that are nightmarish, bizarre or even illogical. But as dark as his novels maybe, Kafka who died in 1924 remains one of the most widely read authors with millions of people continuing to be enthralled by his works.

One such person is Bellanwila O.T.Perera, a Sri Lankan domiciled in the UK who has done a study on The Trial, one of Kafkas most famous books and also traced the life of the world renowned Czech writer in an attempt to understand how much of his personal experiences are reflected in his writings. But Perera knows that like many others who have tried to unravel Kafka, it is not an easy task.

When Perera set out to write the book he titled, Franz Kafka and his celebrated novel The Trial: A Study, a friend had told him, I hope you wont destroy the mystery.

Like Perera himself admits, there is little danger of that happening. The mystery that has been explained in so many ways is still a mystery. No one systematic interpretation has been able to pin down all the possible meanings of Kafkas work. Nor do we really know for certain what any story of Kafkas is really about, the author says in the foreword.

The Trial, a book published in 1925, a year after Kafkas death tells the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information.

And despite his frantic efforts, he is unable to discover the authority behind his arrest, the identity of the accusers, the nature of the charges or gain access to the judges who condemn him.

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. This is the opening line of The Trial and as we know from experiences in our own country, an arrest without reason, by unidentified persons is a nightmare that has become a reality to hundreds of people.

When Josef.K. asks the man arresting him, And why am I under arrest? he is bluntly told, Thats something were not allowed to tell you.

From then on, Josef.K lives a nightmare day in and day out as he struggles to understand why he is being put through the predicament and with each turn of the page, his situation gets more and more desperate only to end in very Kafkaesque fashion with his killing.

For Perera, who is an ardent fan of Kafkas work, hidden amidst the dark tale is how helpless man can be when living within systems that are closed and secretive.

As the author says, The Trial is open to interpretation by each reader who can draw their own conclusion on whether Josef.K. is actually guilty of a crime or if he is a pawn in the hands of invisible forces who want to see him dead. The questions are best left to each reader to answer, Perera concludes.

Chandani Kirinde
More than a decade and a half into a war against a global Islamist terrorist threat that endangers both the United States and many of its allies, Washington is still having trouble describing what its fighting.

The Obama administration favored a generic approach. It tried to cleave terrorists from the religion they profess, describing efforts to combat radicalization as countering violent extremism, a phrase often shortened to CVE. Indeed, many of the programs the government conducted or promoted under Obamas watch discouraged discussions of Islamist-related terrorism.

That solved exactly nothing. The general public has no idea what a bureaucrats talking about when he mentions CVE, and its hard to fight a war of ideas if theres no focus on the idea. That would be like trying to win the Cold War without ever mentioning communism.

The Trump administration ought to rethink our approach from top to bottom.

First, the U.S. government ought to get over its fear of labeling extremist political movements and terrorists as Islamists. The term is not a pejorative short-hand for Muslims we dont like. In the modern era, the term has always been meant to infer a political movement that argued it was based on a particular interpretation of religious concepts. When the goals of such a movement are tied to anti-democratic methods, violence and terrorism, labeling the group Islamist is simply a matter of accuracy.

Second, dump the term CVE. Its an awkward label that does little to explain our governments efforts.

Third, revisit CVE-era domestic programs. Americas radicalized population  comprising every individual who has plotted a terrorist attack or been convicted of providing material support to terrorism since 9/11  amounts to 1,000 individuals. Thats out of a total population of 320 million. Domestic efforts ought to be focused on traditional counter-terrorism operations that have proven most effective at stopping and thwarting attacks.

Further, the government ought to put more effort into examining subversive political movements such as American affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood. My Heritage Foundation colleague Robin Simcox has rightly called for an up-to-date review of the Brotherhoods strategy in the U.S. and ideological or operational ties to American groups  to ensure that the U.S. government does not fund or engage with groups and charities tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Fourth and finally, our overseas programs should fit their surroundings. The Islamic State and al-Qaida have global footprints, but their influence looks very different in different parts of the world. The U.S. doesnt needs a universal label for what should be a plethora of discrete and crafted activities dealing with a global-but-disparate Islamist threat.

What the U.S. does to support freedom and democracy in Tunisia might, for example, look very different from efforts to get Pakistan to discredit the Haqqani network.

As master general Sun Tzu once wrote, If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Its time to jettison the CVE label  and be honest about who and what were fighting.
Tauranga City Council is being asked to round out its contribution to the cost of the iconic arched bridge planned for the cycleway crossing at the Wairoa River to $1 million.

The call comes after a shortfall in the funding of the bridge was identified.

Western Bay of Plenty Mayor Garry Webber told councillors at last weeks Annual Plan hearings that this will mean a $600,000 increase in the citys contribution, which can be made in two $300,000 payments over two financial years.

The shortfall is $2.64m, and mostly relates to the Wairoa Bridge.

The bridge is currently estimated to cost $7.1 million to build. The updated total cost of the Omokoroa/Tauranga cycle trail is $12.24m.

So far, the project has secured $9.6m funding, including the $400,000 from Tauranga City, and $1,000,000 from TECT for the naming rights of the bridge.

The TECT support came as a result of the cycle trail being the joint councils top priority for funding.

To date, Western Bay of Plenty District Council has worked hard to secure funding from multiple sources to ensure this flagship cycle trail is built with committed total project funding from:

NZ Transport Agency Urban Cycle way Programme - $1.5m

NZ Transport Agency Highways and Operations - $1.4m

NZ Transport Agency subsidy - $2.4m

Western Bay of Plenty District Council - $1.52m

Tauranga Energy Consumer Trust - $ 1.0m

New Zealand Community Trust - $1.0m

Tauranga City Council - $400,000

Omokoroa Community Board - $160,000

Tauranga Business Round Table - $100,000

On Route Developer Contributions - $20,000

PowerCo - $100,000

This range of funders demonstrates the strong community support for the project. Feedback has also been overwhelmingly positive and there is a desire to see it achieved sooner rather than later, says Garry in his submission.

However, to make it happen will require extra funding. We are currently applying for funding from Bay of Plenty Regional Council and will be applying to Lotteries once the resource consent is secured. We will also be applying for further funding from NZTA, TECT and the New Zealand Community Trust.

The cycle trail is expected to bring both domestic and international tourism to the region by providing a world class cycle trail from the doorstep of Bethlehem through the Wairoa Active Reserve, over a nationally iconic Wairoa Bridge, and on through Te Puna to the Omokoroa Peninsula.

At its design launch late last year, Transport Minister Simon Bridges said the bridges stunning design and unique concept would be a drawcard for the Omokoroa to Tauranga Cycle Trail - and an additional  destination attraction for tourists exploring the region by cycle or foot.

Local Tangato Whenua, Ngati Kahu hapu of Ngati Ranginui Iwi, whose marae and whanau are on the Wairoa River banks, have given their blessing to the bridge due to its design over-arching the waterway without any intrusion into it, says Garry.

The completed cycleway is expected to bring tourism from around the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand and the world, benefitting the communities it passes through. It is also intended to become a commuting corridor, a recreational hub, and green belt destination.

The route itself will connect Bethlehem to the upcoming Wairoa Active Reserve and the iconic Wairoa Bridge, through to Omokoroa on a scenic ride which highlights stunning coastal scenery.The Omokoroa to Tauranga Cycle Trail is also a major section in the long term vision for a Great Ride Cycle Trail between Waihi Beach and Tauranga.

The Western Bay of Plenty District Council is already working on funding the link from Waihi Beach to Waihi, which in tum links on to the existing Hauraki Rail Trail which ultimately will connect through to Auckland.
Thirty New Zealand Defence Force personnel and a Royal New Zealand Air Force C-130 Hercules strategic airlift aircraft are supporting New Zealand, Australian and coalition operations in the Middle East.

Leading the air transport mission is Squadron Leader Brad Scott, from the northern Waikato town of Taupiri, who was encouraged by his parents to sign up for the Air Force and train as a pilot 11 years ago.

I look forward to the opportunity and the challenges of commanding the mission. This is the first time I will be leading a deployment and the positive reaction from my peers has been encouraging, says Squadron Leader Scott.

The aircraft and the supporting detachment are being deployed until mid-June at the request of the Australian Defence Force and will operate as part of their Air Mobility Task Group.

The Hercules primary task is to transport people, equipment and supplies in support of New Zealand and Australian operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and the Sinai Peninsula. It may also support coalition operations in these countries, says General Tim Gall, the Commander Joint Forces New Zealand.

Thirty New Zealand Defence Force personnel and one of the Royal New Zealand Air Forces C-130 Hercules strategic airlift aircraft left this morning to support New Zealand, Australian and coalition operations in the Middle East.

He says the short-term deployment aimed to provide additional capacity during a period of high operational tempo.

The upcoming mission also marks our latest contribution to security and stability in the Middle East and affirms our longstanding commitment in the region, says Major General Gall.

This is the second time an RNZAF air transport team has been deployed to the Middle East in the past 12 months. A Hercules aircraft and a 32-member detachment were sent to the Middle East in May 2016 to provide logistics support to coalition operations for six months.

The detachment includes aircraft technicians, logistics specialists, maintenance personnel, and an Air Movements Load Team to support coalition aircraft in the region.

A pilot and flying instructor for the C-130 aircraft, Squadron Leader Scott joined the Air Force in January 2006. During his last year at Hamilton Boys High School, he thought about becoming a field engineer in the New Zealand Army after attending a leadership programme at Waiouru camp.

Before handing in his application to for the Armys Officer Cadet School, he sought advice from his parents, who suggested that he consider the other Services.

My recruiter, who was an Air Force C-130 pilot, came to my parents farm and over coffee, convinced us that joining the Air Force was a pretty good career choice, he recalls.

Squadron Leader Scott has previously been deployed to the Middle East, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines and Timor-Leste.
An exhibition already seen by thousands of people in Australia and the United States is now open in New Zealand at Waikato Museum.

Permian Monsters: Life Before the Dinosaurs details life on Earth 290 million years ago, with life-sized animated models and fossils of the extraordinary creatures who ruled the land and sea.

The exhibition was created by Gondwana Studios in Australia, and has been touring Australian and United States cities since 2013.

While on display at Tasmanias Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, the exhibition attracted more than 56,000 visitors, making it the venues most popular touring show in the last 10 years.

Visitors to Waikato Museum are the first in New Zealand to have the chance to experience what life was like before the age of dinosaurs, in a time known as the Permian.

Guests can meet the top predator of the time, the giant saber-toothed gorgonopsid Inostrancevia, as well as giant insects, bizarre-looking sharks and strange reptile-like creatures with mammal characteristics.

The Permian period ended with the largest extinction Earth is believed to have experienced, which wiped out 90 per cent of all species on the planet. The exhibition sheds light on the cause of this catastrophe which turned Earth into a biological desert.

Waikato Museum Director Cherie Meecham is proud to be unleashing these fascinating yet little-known monsters ahead of other New Zealand venues.

The combination of moving models, fossils, imagery, interactive dig pits and easy-to-digest information provides visitors with a captivating window into this pivotal era of natural history, she says.

The exhibition runs until 13 August. Admission costs: $12 adult, $8 child, $10 concession, $20 small family (one adult and two children), $40 large family (two adults and up to four children), children 0-3 years old free.

Waikato Museum is open daily from 10am to 5pm.
Maori Development Minister and Associate Minister for Economic Development Te Ururoa Flavell witnessed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between Miraka Ltd and its Malaysian distribution partner, Storiiu, in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

Miraka is New Zealands first Maori-owned dairy processor. The agreement means the company will start exporting its first own-branded consumer product.

Mr Flavell says the agreement was evidence of Maori innovating and moving products and services up the value chain, forming long-term international partnerships, and building economic value for the future.

This is an example of Maori leading with the principle of kaitiakitanga (guardianship of the land, its people and environment) and shows the positive response this approach is receiving in international markets.

It also shows the power of whanau collaboration and commitment. Investing in relationships and playing a long game is fundamental to Maori core values and this is an important part of any export strategy.

I congratulate Miraka on their progress and on the contribution it is making towards lifting incomes and providing aspirational role models for other Maori exporters.

Mr Flavell is visiting Malaysia with a delegation of seven Maori companies to raise the profile of New Zealands food and beverage sector.

Malaysias total food and beverage sales are forecast to grow to around US$21 billion in the next three years.

SOURCE: Office of Te Ururoa Flavell
With superyachts such as Atlante, Lucky Me and Exuma leading the fleet; sailing yachts such as Principessa Vai Via, Dahlak and The Aquarius bringing exemplary style; and exhibitors from across the Italian marine sector bringing all forms of expertise, the Versilia Yachting Rendezvous was a true homage to the Italian yachting culture.

Its a good opportunity for Italy, being the largest producer for yachts around the world, explains Lamberto Tacoli, the newly appointed CEO & Chairman of Perini Navi & Picchiotti and President of show creators Nautica Italiana. Viareggio for sure is the base, theres no town with facilities producing yachts every single day. May is a good window for the show and a good opportunity on top of the others for Italian brands inviting friends and competitors from outside Italy to present their products here.

Im quite happy as its a huge success, adds Michele Gavino, CEO of Baglietto, the area is wonderful thinking about next year, one more year of work and we can do something really special. This could be a very important [show] for Viareggio, for the Italian industry, and the Italian boating industry.

This is an area where people are building things, says Vincenzo Poerio, CEO of Benetti. Its on the water and easy to convert into a show to not only see boats but also the way they are produced. This is the best of building, showing what we do and enjoying the life.

I didnt know what to expect, Im used to Monaco, Fr Lauderdale and Miami but weve had a front row seat seeing this change I think its actually quite a good effort and a good platform to build upon, comments Captain Jeffrey Foerster of M/Y Skyler.

The place is just beautiful, says Stefano de Vivo, CCO of CRN & Ferretti Group, theres Florence close by and Forte dei Marmi, its a natural destination to come to for a boat show. In May we dont really have a boat show, so this is good for clients thinking for boats for not only this summer but next summer and to place their order.

Created by Nautica Italiana - with organisation by Fiera Milano with Distretto Tecnologico per la Nautica e la Portualita Toscana and support from the Municipality of Viareggio and the Tuscan Regional Authorities - the Versilia Yachting Rendez-Vous is a new event for the superyacht calendar and a promising new addition to the year.
Deceased aristocrat Leoncio Gonzalez, the husband of of Luisa Isabel Alvarez of Toledo, who was popularly known as the Red Duchess (La Duquesa Roja), was proven this week to have been the biological father of his servants illegitimate child, Rosario Bermudo.

Despite opposition from two out of three of the dukes legitimate children, Leoncio Gonzalezs body was exhumed from the Palacio de Quintana Redonda cemetary in March, after Rosario, now 66 years old, demanded a paternity test.

After DNA obtained from the dukes bones matched 99.99 per cent of Rosarios DNA, incontestably confirming the dukes extramarital sexual relations with her servant mother, Rosario now believes she is entitled to a fifth of her biological fathers wealth.

On Monday, the lawyer of the servants daughter suggested that Rosario is now justifiably entitled to receive some inheritance: After such overwhelming evidence, the trial (20 September in Madrid) will be a mere formality, she commented, after the results of the National Toxicology Institutes report were revealed.

Rosarios lawyer also added that while the deceased dukes total wealth has not been quantified in monetary terms, consisting mostly of property, land and art, her client could be staking her claim of more than two million euros worth of assets.

In the demand, the lawyer states that Rosario Bermudo was born on 4 February 1951 in Madrid as a product of intimate extramarital relations between her mother and Leoncio Gregorio Gonzalez de Marti when she was working as a servant for the duke in one of his properties in Madrid.

Logically, given the dates, my client doesnt have a contract or document which proves that her mother was working there at the time, she admits. But what she does have is an old photograph, in black and white, which despite the poor quality shows the husband of the Red Duchess at a table with three women.

Rosarios mother, condemned and abandoned, eventually married another man on 8 December 1956 and had another six children. Her husband accepted Rosario Bermudo as his own.
National Police officers have arrested members of a gang that stole two kilometres of acoustic barriers that ran along a stretch of dual carriageway between Malaga and Torremolinos.

All seven members of the gang are Spaniards aged between 21 and 34.

The barriers, installed to reduce noise pollution, were valued at more than 80,000 euros. After being removed by thieves they were cut into pieces and then sold as scrap.

During the investigation, police found 350 kilos of iron and 16 kilos of aluminium which had come from the barriers at a scrapyard on the Guadalhorce industrial estate.

The 28-year-old in charge of the scrapyard was arrested on suspicion of receiving stolen goods.

The gang is also believed to have stolen 19 telephone cables worth around 155,000 euros, which were then also sold to scrapyards in the city.
Nikol Pashinyan, whose Yelk Alliance came in a distant second in yesterdays election for Yerevans municipal council, told reporters today that he was headed to take his seat in the parliament, even though he was high enough on the Yelk ticket to secure a spot on the council.

In last months parliamentary election, Pashinyan won a seat in Armenias National Assembly.

The Yelk Alliance, coming in second with 21% of the vote, won 15 seats on the council.

Armenias ruling Republican Party handily won with 71% of the vote, thus garnering 46 seats on the municipal council. The Yerkir Tzirani party trailing in third with 8% of the vote won five seats.

Top photo: Edmond Maroukyan, Nikol Pashinyan
Tazewell County will again have a representative on the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority Board.

Governor Terry McAuliffe announced May 12 that Northern District Supervisor Maggie Asbury has been chosen to fill one of the two spots his office had vacant on the board. Becki Coleman, former staff member for Rick Boucher was the other appointment.

"What an honor ! I am so excited to be appointed by Governor McAuliffe in our coalfield region here in Southwest Virginia. I appreciate so much the Governor's recognition and assuring Tazewell County has a voice on the VCEDA. With the decline in coal in our region I am more committed than ever to not only be part of enhancing our economy but also helping to diversify wherever needed. I look forward to working with Jonathan Belcher and the VCEDA staff as well as Chairman J.P. Richardson and the members of the Authority," Asbury said.

She currently chairs the Tazewell County Recreation Development Authority and is co-chair of the board of supervisors. The appointees will join McAuliffes Administration focused on finding common ground with members of both parties on issues that will build a new Virginia economy and create more jobs across the Commonwealth, the release from the Governors office said.

Asbury replaces Mike Hymes who was removed by the legislature during its attempt to appropriate money from VCEDA to the Cumberland Plateau and Lenowisco planning districts.
Miss D.C. USA is the Miss USA winner for the second year in a row, but it's not without controversy.

Kara McCullough, a 25-year-old scientist working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was crowned Miss USA 2017 on Sunday by 2016 winner DeShauna Barber, also of the District of Columbia, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. McCullough will go on to represent America in the Miss Universe contest.

"I'm extremely thankful for this opportunity," McCullough told reporters after the event. "I just want to encourage so many women nationwide to find their passion in any subject possible and understand that nothing is difficult if you really, truly put the work in for it."

McCarthy was one of 51 contestants, representing each state and the nation's capital, in the 66th annual Miss USA pageant. Miss New Jersey USA Chhavi Verg, a marketing and Spanish student at Rutgers University, was the first runner-up and Miss Minnesota USA Meridith Gould, who is studying apparel retail merchandising at the University of Minnesota, was second runner-up.

Miss New York USA Hannah Lopa, a native of Spencerport near Rochester, finished in the top 10.

Miss Illinois USA Whitney Wandland, Miss South Carolina USA Megan Gordon, Miss Alaska USA Alyssa London, Miss Tennessee USA Allee-Sutton Hethcoat, Miss California USA India Williams and Miss Missouri USA Bayleigh Danton rounded out the ten finalists.

Barber, the first-ever military member to win Miss USA, was proud to pass on the title to McCullough.

McCullough, who was born in Italy and raised in Virginia Beach, said she wants to inspire children to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. She graduated with a chemistry degree from South Carolina State University, where she was a member of the Honors College, the American Association of Blacks in Engineering and the Alpha Nu Sigma Honor Society; she also funds program encouraging Science Exploration for Kids.

However, McCullough's win was criticized on social media after her controversial comments about health care and feminism. She called affordable health care a "privilege" for U.S. citizens, not a right.

"As a government employee, I'm granted health care and I see firsthand that for one to have health care, you need to have jobs," McCullough said during the question-and-answer round for the top five finalists.

The remark ignited political divides over President Donald Trump and the Republican Party's efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Trump previously co-owned the Miss Universe Organization, which operates the Miss USA pageant.

D.C. girl I was rooting for you but that answer on healthcare was bad  #MissUSA  po wicata gail  (@raccorns) May 15, 2017

So unemployed people don't deserve healthcare? Yikes DC #MissUSA  hendery nation (@sciattas) May 15, 2017

YAS Miss DC, you go girl. One of my favorite questions regarding healthcare and I couldn't have answered it better myself! #MissUSA  Tianna Vanderhei (@TiannaVanderhei) May 15, 2017

When the competition was narrowed down to the final three -- McCullough, Verg and Gould -- McCullough came further under fire for suggesting feminism meant women are better than men.

"I don't want to call myself a feminist," she said. "Women, we are just as equal as men, especially in the workplace."

Verg, who finished in second place, said "I think it's a misconception when people believe that feminism is women being better than men. But it's really not. It's a fight for equality."

DC IS CANCELLED THATS NOT WHAT FEMINISM IS.IT IS EQUALISM #MissUSA  Jenera (@effulgentkordei) May 15, 2017

However, McCullough expanded her views on feminism after the pageant.

"I believe we've come a long way and there is more work to be done," McCullough told the Associated Press. "I think domestically we are making progress and I do believe that we will become equal one day."

The rest of the show was much less dramatic. Julianne Hough, Ashley Graham and Terrence J. hosted the NBC telecast, which featured performances by Pitbull, Brett Eldredge and Cirque du Soleil's Michael Jackson "ONE."
emergency lights photo.jpg

NEW HARTFORD, N.Y. --An 8-year-old boy was killed today when a truck struck him as he was walking in the parking lot of Sangertown Square Mall, police said.

The truck was backing out of a parking space when it struck the boy, according to New Hartford police.

Police responded to the crash at 1:55 p.m. today. They have not released the names of the driver or the victim.

After the crash, the boy was taken by ambulance to St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Utica, where he was pronounced dead, police said.

The New Hartford police were assisted in their investigation by the state police's collision reconstruction unit, and by the the New Hartford Fire Department.

No tickets have been issued, police said.

Police said they will disclose more details, after they've reviewed the evidence and wittness statements.
Dewline fire photo.JPG

Firefighters from Moyers Corners, Mattydale and North Syracuse battled a fire this afternoon at 19 Dewline Road in Clay.

(John O'Brien | jobrien@syracuse.com)

CLAY, N.Y. -- Firefighters quickly doused a fire in a Clay home this afternoon after an occupant reported smoke on the second floor.

Firefighters from Moyers Corners, Mattydale and North Syracuse responded to the fire at 19 Dewline Road shortly before 3 p.m.

An occupant of the home had called 911 to report electrical issues and smoke on the second floor, said Jered Zeppetello, battalion chief for the Moyers Corners Fire Department.

Firefighters encountered flames in the home, which they extinguished in about five minutes, Zeppetello said.

No injuries were reported.

The cause of the fire is under investigation, Zeppetello said.

Contact John O'Brien anytime by email, Twitter, or at 315-470-2187.
Lake Ontario's water level is currently higher than it has ever been -- at least since records on it began getting collected nearly a century ago.

"Lake Ontario's level was at 75.84 meters (248.8 feet) Sunday, which is above the highest water level since the US and Canada began keeping coordinated records in 1918," according to Frank Bevacqua, spokesman for the international Joint Commission, which controls the lake's water level.

"The previous record was 75.82 meters (248.75 feet) in June 1952," he said.

The International Joint Commission is using Plan 2014, which was put in place earlier this year, as its guideline for determining what the lake's level should be, using water releases from the Moses-Saunders dam on the St. Lawrence River in Massina to control the lake's level.

However, that's a balancing act. The IJC must also consider the impact of water releases -- specifically how they impact communities downstream from the dam, particularly Montreal.

"The level of Lake St. Louis, the part of the St. Lawrence River where it is joined by the Ottawa River at Montreal, is 22.50 meters (73.8 feet), which is also a record high," Bevacqua said. "However, drier conditions and declining flows in the Ottawa River have facilitated increases in Lake Ontario outflows, from 7,700 cubic meters per second yesterday (271,900 cubic feet per second) to 8,500 cubic meters per second (300,200 cubic feet per second) today."

Flooding in Montreal in recent weeks has resulted in thousands been evacuated from certain parts of the city where dikes have been breached.

Critics of Plan 2014 have blame for the lake's current situation on Plan 2014 -- even calling for President Donald Trump to intervene.

However, IJC and Canadian officials have said the incredibly wet spring in the greater Great Lake region and in the watershed around Lake Ontario are solely to blame.

Bevacqua has stressed repeatedly that the actions the IJC are currently taking are similar to what would have been done under the old plan governing the lake's high water levels.

How much longer will the lake continue to rise?

"The timing and elevation of this year's peak on Lake Ontario will depend on how much it rains, " said Bevacqua in an interview last week. "We expect the lake to rise for at least another two weeks and that it will take several weeks before high water conditions on the lake recede."
Former Vice President Joe Biden is getting his own ice cream flavor.

The Syracuse University law school alumnus has long been a fan of the sweet treat, getting photographed at events with President Barack Obama while holding an ice cream cone -- or two. One of many memes inspired by his political career shows Biden wearing aviator sunglasses and flashing cash while scarfing down the cold snack.

"My name is Joe Biden, and I love ice cream," Biden admitted last year while visiting Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream in Ohio. "You all think I'm kidding -- I'm not. I eat more ice cream than three other people you'd like to be with, all at once."

So Cornell University is working on naming an ice cream flavor after the former VP, who will speak during the Ithaca school's commencement weekend this month.

The Cornell Daily Sun reports the Cornell Dairy Processing Plant and the Cornell Convocation Committee are creating a new flavor in Biden's honor.

Deanna Simons, quality manager and academic programs coordinator for Cornell Dairy, told the newspaper that they did research to find out his favorite flavor is classic chocolate chip ice cream. The UDairy Creamery at the University of Delaware, where Biden got his undergraduate degree, told Simons that there has never been a flavor named after Biden.

According to Teen Vogue, a vanilla ice cream and chocolate chip-based concoction was crafted, and more than 150 possible flavor names were submitted. Students can vote until Monday night for one of five finalists:

Biden's Chocolate Bites

Bits n' Biden

Big Red, White & Biden

Not Your Average Joe's Chocolate Chip

Uncle Joe's Chocolate Chip

According to the Daily Sun, the final name will have to be cleared with Biden's representatives, but they hope to announce the winner before convocation and serve it during the graduation weekend festivities. Biden will speak at convocation on Saturday, May 27.

"If it gains momentum, we'll make more," Simons told the publication. "We're keeping our fingers crossed, we're holding our breaths."

Find someone who looks at you like Joe Biden looks at his second cone of ice cream pic.twitter.com/SnWuZB59PH  Manu Gargeya (@mgargeya) May 3, 2017
20170428-20170428_conleycase_nst032.JPG

Kaitlyn Conley looks back during a break in testimony by William Yoder, husband of slain chiropractor Mary Yoder, in Oneida County Courthouse in Utica on Friday, April 28, 2017. Conley is accused of fatally poisoning Mary Yoder in 2015. N. Scott Trimble | strimble@syracuse.com

UTICA, NY - A jury deliberating the guilt or innocence of Kaitlyn Conley, a 24-year-old woman accused of fatally poisoning her boss, has told the judge they can't reach a unanimous verdict, according to media reports.

Oneida County Court Judge Michael Dwyer has told the jury to keep deliberating, according to media outlets.

Judge reading instructions - "start with a clean slate."  Cara Decker (@CaraThomasNews) May 15, 2017

The jury deliberated for about an hour Thursday afternoon after closing arguments, all day Friday and about a half hour today. This morning, the jury said they are deadlocked.

Jury says they so far cannot reach a unanimous verdict. They are also requesting the legal definition of "intent". #conleytrial  Sean I Mills (@RDS_SeanIMills) May 15, 2017

The panel also asked for the definition of intent, according to reports by numerous media outlets on social media.

Conley is charged with second-degree murder in the death of Mary Yoder, 60, who was Conley's boss and also the mother of Conley's on-again, off-again boyfriend, Adam Yoder. She was accused of using colchicine to poision Yoder in July 2015.

The jury has asked for several pieces of testimony to be read back Friday, including the legal definition of reasonable doubt, what Mary Yoder told the hospital she'd eaten for lunch, how Bill Yoder learned about colchicine toxicity and forensic analysis of Mary Yoder's electronic devices, according to media reports.

The jury also asked to watch a portion of Conley's Dec. 21, 2015 interview with Oneida County sheriff's detectives again, a bit before she said "poison is a lady's weapon," according to media reports.

Jury wants to see 15 minutes prior to Conley saying 'Poison is a lady's weapon' and a little bit after. #ConleyTrial  Cara Decker (@CaraThomasNews) May 12, 2017

The prosecution outlined its case during closing arguments Thursday, and provided a motive for the first time during the trial. Oneida County Assistant District Attorney Laurie Lisi said Conley killed Mary Yoder to try to get Adam Yoder back together with her.

When that didn't work, Lisi said Conley got mad and decided to seek revenge by framing Adam for the crime.

Lisi has said throughout the trial that the evidence, while all circumstantial, is compelling.

Defense lawyer Christopher Pelli called the prosecution's case "flimsy and difficult to understand" and said there is more than enough reasonable doubt. He said his client was "an innocent, gullible young woman" who police decided was their one and only suspect.

Pelli has said Bill Yoder, Mary Yoder's husband, killed her so he could continue a romantic relationship with one of Mary's sisters. He also said money was a motive: Bill Yoder had received a $400,000 inheritance from his father that he didn't want to share with his wife, Pelli argued.

The prosecution has said Conley tried to frame Adam Yoder, and pointed to forensic evidence they said showed Conley set up a Gmail account in Adam Yoder's name and then ordered the colchicine using that account.

The password on the Gmail account that Lisi said Conley set up was "adamisgay." That password shows the person who created it had a beef or was angry with Adam, Lisi said.

Conley's DNA also was found on the vial of colchicine found in Adam Yoder's car. An anonymous letter tipped off police where to find the vial, she said. Conley later admitted she was the author of that anonymous letter, Lisi said.

Lisi said Conley also admitted to buying two prepaid cards at a local grocery store. Those cards were used to purchased the colchicine, Lisi said.

Conley faces a sentence of 25 years to life.
Logan_Lints.JPG

Logan Lints was struck by a truck backing out of a parking space Sunday in the Sangertown Square Mall parking lot in New Hartford.

(Provided photo)

NEW HARTFORD, N.Y. -- Police have identified an 8-year-old boy struck and killed Sunday in the Sangertown Square Mall parking lot in New Hartford.

Logan Lints, of Bartlett Road, Rome, suffered severe head injuries and was pronounced dead at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Utica, according to New Hartford police.

Saul A. Rivera, 19, of Wetmore Street in Utica, was backing out of a parking space when his truck struck the boy at 1:55 p.m. Sunday outside Target in the Sangertown Square Mall parking lot, police said.

New Hartford police remained at the scene of the crash for several hours. State police took measurements and helped reconstruct the crash. The New Hartford Fire Department also assisted.

The crash remains under investigation.
Preet Bharara

Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara pictured during a news conference at the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015. Bharara was fired in March 2017 by President Donald Trump.

(Kathy Willens / AP)

Bharara, a scholar in residence at New York University Law School, was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 until this March.



By Preet Bharara | The Washington Post



The most dramatic hearing I helped to arrange as chief counsel to a Senate subcommittee took place 10 years ago Monday, when James Comey, then deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, described how he and FBI Director Robert Mueller intervened at the hospital bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft.



The encounter occurred in 2004, after White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales tried to overrule Comey's and Mueller's legal objection to a secret terrorist surveillance program. When the White House nonetheless sought the ailing Ashcroft's blessing to proceed, Comey prepared to resign. Ultimately, Comey and Mueller prevailed.



Jim Comey was once my boss and remains my friend. I know that many people are mad at him. He has at different times become a cause for people's frustration and anger on both sides of the aisle. Some of those people may have a point. But on this unsettling anniversary of that testimony, I am proud to know a man who had the courage to say no to a president.



And in the tumult of this time, the question whose answer we should perhaps fear the most is the one evoked by that showdown: Are there still public servants who are prepared to say no to the president?



Now, as the country once again wonders whether justice can be nonpolitical and whether its leaders understand the most basic principles of prosecutorial independence and the rule of law, I recall yet another firestorm that erupted 10 years ago over the abrupt and poorly explained firing of top Justice Department officials in the midst of sensitive investigations. The 2007 affair was not Watergate, the more popular parallel invoked lately, but the lessons of that spring, after the Bush administration inexplicably fired more than eight of its own U.S. attorneys, are worth recalling.



When the actions became public, people suspected political interference and obstruction. Democrats were the most vocal, but some Republicans asked questions, too. The uproar intensified as it became clear that the initial explanations were mere pretext, and the White House couldn't keep its story straight. Public confidence ebbed, and Congress began to investigate.



In response, the Senate launched a bipartisan (yes, bipartisan) investigation into those firings and the politicization of the Justice Department. Early on, the then-deputy attorney general -- Comey was gone by then -- looked senators in the eye and said the U.S. attorneys were fired for cause; although such appointees certainly serve at will, this assertion turned out to be demonstrably false. We learned that the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias, was fired soon after receiving an improper call from Republican Sen. Pete Domenici pushing him to bring political corruption cases before the election. We learned that Justice Department officials in Washington had improperly applied a conservative ideological litmus test to attorneys seeking career positions, to immigration judges and even to the hiring of interns.



Ultimately, amid the drumbeat of revelations, every top leader of the department stepped down under a cloud. Finally, Gonzales himself resigned. Strict protocols were put in place severely limiting White House contacts with Justice officials on criminal matters. The blow to the morale and reputation of the department was incalculable.



For me, the past week has been deja vu all over again. To restore faith in the rule of law, three obvious things must happen: First, we need a truly bipartisan investigation in Congress. That means no partisan nonsense - just a commitment to finding the facts, whatever they may be, proving (or disproving) Russian interference in our election and anything related. Congress is a check and a balance, and never more important than when a bullying chief executive used to his own way seems not to remember the co-equal status of the other two branches.



Second, the new FBI director must be apolitical and sensitive to the law-enforcement mission, not someone with a long record of reflexive partisanship or commentary on the very investigative issues that will come before the bureau. Unfortunately, some of the candidates paraded by cameras this past weekend reality-show style fall into that category. I can't think of anything worse for FBI morale, for truth-finding or for public trust. More than ever the FBI needs a strong and stabilizing hand, which means somebody who has not spent most of his or her career pandering for votes, groveling for cash or putting party over principle.



Finally, I join in the common-sense call for an independent and uncompromised special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation. Given the manner of Comey's firing and the pretextual reasons proffered for it, there is no other way. My former colleague, now-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, is a respected career prosecutor but has mostly deserved the doubts he generated with his peculiar press-release-style memo purporting to explain Comey's sudden sacking. He can still fix it. The move would not only ensure the independence of the investigation, but also provide evidence of Rosenstein's own independence.

History will judge this moment. It's not too late to get it right, and justice demands it.
crappie1.JPG

The state record for a black crappie is held by Kenneth Kierst, who caught the fish in 2008 while casting off his family's dock on Duck Lake, a small waterway in Cayuga County.

(DEC)

The host of an online, Youtube fishing show is at a Cayuga County lake this week, hoping to break the New York State record for a black crappie.

Joseph "Fishnwithjoe" Jordan

Joseph "Fishnwithjoe" Jordan and his wife Emily, of Columbus, Ohio, are staying at a cabin at the Duck Lake Campground to make a fishing video of Jordan's efforts to break the record, along with making a drone video of the lake and the campground, according to the Duck Lake Campground Facebook page.

The record is currently held by Kenneth Kierst, who caught his 17 3/4 inch fish in 2008, fishing at his family's camp on Duck Lake. The fish weighed 3 pounds, 12 ounces. State records are based on weight, not length.

Kierst could not be reached for comment.

Evan Walsh, of Lancaster with the huge black crappie he caught on Chautauqua Lake that just missing breaking the state record.

In a 2008 interview with The Post-Standard, Kiest's father, Peter Kierst, said his son caught the fish while sitting on a lawn chair and casting off a dock.

"He used a lure he made himself and was just trying it out," the father said.

The father said after it was confirmed as a state record, his son kept the fish alive in a 150-gallon holding tank for about three weeks.

"My son at one point was feeding it fathead minnows out of his hand," he said, adding his son had the fish mounted.

Earlier this year, Evan Walsh, a ice fisherman on Chautauqua Lake in Western New York, caught a black crappie that had a good shot of breaking Kierst's record. However, he waited a day to have the 17-plus inch fish weighed and during that time it's likely that the crappie shrunk slightly, according to the bait shop owner who weighed it.

It missed the record by a mere. 06 pounds.

Duck Lake is a small, shallow waterway located in the town of Conquest in Cayuga County. It is about 1.2 miles long, with a maximum depth of 20 feet.
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Patrick Madden, 50, of Vestal, will seek the Democratic nomination for Congress in the 22nd Congressional District. The computer scientist at SUNY Binghamton is making his first run for public office.

(Provided photo)

WASHINGTON -- A computer scientist at SUNY Binghamton plans to announce today that he will challenge Rep. Claudia Tenney in the 2018 election because he wants to bring "facts back to Congress."

Patrick Madden, 50, of Vestal, becomes the first Democrat to challenge Tenney, R-New Hartford, in the 22nd Congressional District race.

Madden said in an interview this morning that he decided to make his first run for political office because he's concerned about "an all-out attack on the very idea of facts" since Donald Trump's campaign in the 2016 presidential election.

"The ramp-up of fakes news and out-and-out lying just went off the rails in this last election cycle," Madden told syracuse.com. "It seems like we have less hesitation to tell bald-faced lies, or to actively distort things."

Madden, an associate professor of computer science, has taught at SUNY Binghamton since 1998, specializing in integrated circuit design.

He said he never considered entering politics prior to last year, but decided to run for Congress with the encouragement and backing of 314 Action, a nonprofit (named after the mathematic ratio for pi) that wants to elect more scientists to public office.

Madden said he is running as a progressive Democrat who is willing to work across the aisle, and is less tied to ideology than facts.

"I don't want to look at this through a partisan lens," he said. "I'm an engineer and a scientist."

If he receives the Democratic nomination, he would take on Tenney, a first-term Republican who supported Trump in the presidential election. Trump cruised to an easy victory in the 22nd District in November, winning its largest county, Oneida County, by 21 percentage points.

Madden, who first supported Bernie Sanders and then Hillary Clinton for president, said he's confident that he will pick up support from some disappointed Trump voters.

"I think a lot of the Trump win was an anti-Hillary vote," Madden said. "A lot of criticism of her was unfair, but she was a polarizing and mobilizing figure. So I don't blame the Trump voters for not preferring Hillary Clinton."

On his campaign website, Madden said he's disturbed by an attack on the idea of facts. "Scientists. Journalists. Every honest person is threatened, with the president leading the charge," Madden wrote.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington has made Tenney's seat one of its top two pickup priorities (along with the seat held by Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus) in New York state for the 2018 election.

The 22nd Congressional District covers all of Madison, Oneida, Cortland and Chenango counties and a portion of Oswego, Broome, Herkimer and Tioga counties.

Contact Mark Weiner anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751
Egiebor.jpg

Nosa Egiebor

(Provided Photo)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry has named 32-year engineer Nosa Egiebor its next provost and executive vice president.

Egiebor most recently worked as a chemical engineering professor and chief international officer at the University of Mississippi, according to a press release. He starts at ESF immediately.

President Quentin Wheeler said Egiebor would be invaluable in helping to prepare students to address the "environmental challenges that face the world."

Egiebor earned his doctorate in metallurgical engineering from Queen's University in Canada. He holds a master's degree from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and a bachelor's from the University of Benin in Nigeria.

Egiebor has developed his own degree programs, grown international programs at other universities, and advised the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. He's won several prestigious awards for his work.

His research focuses on wastewater and other waste treatment.

Valerie Luzadis served as interim provost for the last two years. She will continue working on special projects with ESF, particularly to expand the school's partnerships with universities around the world.

Reporter Julie McMahon covers Syracuse University and Syracuse city schools. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992
For Jaclyn Aubin, the most exciting part of Sunday was supposed to earning her degree in psychology from Siena College.

That is, until her brother showed up to surprise her at graduation.

After making her way across the podium in the Times Union Center in Albany and posing for a photo, Jaclyn spun around to see her brother, Airman 1st Class Kyle Aubin, waiting to embrace her.

Kyle had been stationed at Pope Air Force Base at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and Jaclyn was not expecting him on her big day, The Albany Times Union reported. He last saw his sister in December.

The happy reunion was caught on video. Take a look:

According to The Daily Gazette, the surprise was months in the making. First, Kyle had to convince his superiors in the Air Force to allow him leave for the ceremony. Then he had to orchestrate the surprise with Siena's Academic Affairs office.

During the ceremony, Kyle hid behind a curtain, and Jaclyn's parents got special seating in the front row so they could see the surprise play out.
An Upstate New York man called 911 on Saturday to admit murdering his wife.

Captain Robert Blovsky of the Olean Police Department told WKBW-TV that Edward J. Smith Jr., 50, of Olean, told a 911 dispatcher that he had murdered his wife Kathy Smith in their apartment.

Edward Smith, Olean, arraigned on murder charge in wife's death. Not guilty plea, jail no bail. @SPECNewsBuffalo pic.twitter.com/fOkPbneDBD  Mark Goshgarian (@Mark_Goshgarian) May 14, 2017

Police arrived at the apartment around 6:40 a.m. Saturday, where Edward met them at the door. They discovered Kathy's body inside, The Associated Press reported.

Blovsky told WKBW that Kathy had been stabbed in the chest.

Edward was charged with felony second-degree murder and first-degree assault as well as misdemeanor criminal possession of a weapon, the Olean Times Herald reported.

Edward is being held at Cattaraugus County Jail without bail.

Residents in the Smiths' apartment complex told the Times Herald that there was no indication the couple had a troubled relationship, and neighbors expressed shock at Kathy's death.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
ALBANY, N.Y. -- Two Central New York state senators were authorized to receive tens of thousands in cash bonuses designated for committee chairs despite never serving in that role, according to the New York Times.

The practice has drawn the ire of good-government groups and compelled the Senate leader's lawyer, David Lewis, to issue a Saturday-night memo arguing that the bonuses did not rise to the level of criminal fraud. He also said the practice is longstanding and authorized under state law.

The senators, according to news reports, are Patty Ritchie (R-Oswegatchie) and Dave Valesky, a Syracuse-area member of a group of breakaway Democrats called the Independent Democratic Conference.

Valesky, vice-chair of the health committee, received two bonuses of $15,000 in 2015 and 2016, and Ritchie was authorized to get $15,000 as deputy vice-chair of the health committee in March, according to payroll records reviewed by the news outlets.

To receive the payments, known as "lulus" or stipends, the Senate submitted payroll certifications to the state comptroller listing each senator as "chair" of their committees, the news outlets reported this weekend.

At least four other senators also got the stipends despite never actually serving as committee chairs, according to news outlets.

Senators are given the bonuses for serving as committee chairs or for other leadership positions in the Senate. In some cases, senators serve in more than one role and opt to take a larger stipend.

So when Sen. Kemp Hannon (R-Long Island), the health committee's actual chair, chose in 2015 and 2016 to take a $25,000 stipend for another leadership role instead, his $15,000 stipend went to Valesky. The same transfer is behind Ritchie's authorization to get the stipend submitted earlier this year.

The stipends are in addition to both senators' salaries of $79,500.

Good-government groups and Senate Democrats blasted the stipends as an abuse of taxpayer money, and last week Common Cause New York's leader called on law enforcement to investigate, according to the Times.

The practice is coming to light amid renewed calls for ethics reforms for lawmakers.

The IDC, which struck a partnership with Republicans to help it maintain its control over the Senate, is also under fire from Senate Democrats who want it to return to the mainline group.

Valesky and Ritchie did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday morning.

Candice Giove, the IDC's spokeswoman, told Syracuse.com last week that Valesky's work as vice-chair was worthy of the payment and cited a provision in state law that states those "directly connected" to the work of committees are entitled to the stipends.

However, the law does not explicitly say vice-chairs are entitled to the cash, and it goes on to detail how much committee chairs and other leadership positions are to receive in those roles.
Helming.jpg

Sen. Pam Helming (R-Canandaigua) said Monday she would return the "lulu" she received as vice-chair of a Senate committee. The cash bonus she got is designated for committee chairs in state law.

(File photo)

CANANDAIGUA, N.Y. -- New York State Sen. Pam Helming said Monday she will return the cash bonus check she received while serving as the vice-chair of a Senate committee.

The cash bonuses like Helming's -- known as "lulus" -- are outlined in state law as rewards for committee chairs and other leadership positions in the New York Senate and Assembly.

Under a recently revealed practice, however, certain senators serving as vice-chair or even deputy vice-chair have received the bonuses, drawing the ire of good-government groups.

To secure the money for the senators, the Senate GOP submitted payroll credentials falsely listing at least six senators as "chair" to the state comptroller.

Helming (R-Canandaigua) was one of those senators falsely designated in state payroll records as chairwoman on the Senate Crime Victims, Crime and Correction committee. She said Monday in a statement to Syracuse.com she never deposited the money, reported to be $12,500.

"I have not, and will not, accept any payment for my work as Vice Chair of the Crime Victims, Crime and Correction committee. My office is in the process of returning these uncashed checks to the taxpayers of our state," she said.

A lawyer for Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan (R-Long Island) late Saturday issued a four-page memo justifying the practice as longstanding and acceptable under state law. His memo said the Senate is allowed to allocate "institutional resources to its own members...without interference from the other two branches of government."

The senators who received the payments are Republicans and members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of breakaway Democrats that partnered with the GOP to help it maintain control over the Senate.

The cash bonuses appear to have been given to senators who did not serve as committee chairs in situations where the actual committee chairs opted to receive larger payouts they earned for other leadership positions in the Senate.

IDC Sen. Dave Valesky of Syracuse and Sen. Patti Ritchie (R-Oswegatchie) also received or were approved to receive the money, according to news reports. Neither senator has responded to requests for comment.

On Monday, a lawyer for Senate Democrats also issued a memorandum that drew the opposite conclusion of the the lawyer. Shontell Smith said the bonuses are illegal and accused the GOP of trying to hide the payouts in records submitted to the comptroller.

"If their actions were above-board, they would have indicated to the Comptroller that these Senators were actually vice-chairs or deputy vice-chairs," Smith wrote.

Good-government groups like New York Public Interest Research Group have called on the Senate GOP to end the practice.
Vita Coco.jpg

(The Associated Press / Screenshot from Twitter)

An Upstate NY woman claims she found a "squid-like" substance in her Vita Coco coconut water that made her sick.

Barbara Kline, of Goshen, told FiOS 1 News that she has no idea what the substance was, but that it was "disgusting."

"Stuck a big straw in it, and a big clump went through the straw and I swallowed something and I didn't know what it was," Kline told the station. "It tasted really thick and it had a disgusting flavor to it."

She shared photos of it on Facebook, which quickly went viral and garnered over 70,000 shares.

New York woman says squid-like substance was floating in bottle of coconut water. https://t.co/yoXyWuLRk8 pic.twitter.com/5YH1el6xZ9  Action News on 6abc (@6abc) May 14, 2017

Kline told the station that she became immediately ill after ingesting the substance, suffering vomiting and diarrhea.

Since the incident, Kline has complained to the company several times, and her story has gotten national coverage from BuzzFeed and other outlets.

The company issued a statement about the incident, calling it "random spoilage":

"What Ms. Kline encountered was random spoilage and does not pose a health risk. What she claims she found is the result of either leaving the package opened and unrefrigerated, or her opening an already damaged beverage unit."

Kline told FiOS 1 she always refrigerates her Vita Coco, and said the expiration date on the drink isn't until July of 2017.

The company has asked for the substance to test it, but Kline said she is going to have it tested independently and with a lawyer present because she doesn't trust the company.

Kline said she's not interested in money, but wants to warn consumers about the issue.

Kline isn't the first person to find similar substances, which BuzzFeed said appears to be significant mold growth, inside Vita Coco containers. Here are a few examples:
Chelsea Manning will remain on active duty in the U.S. Army and receive health care benefits after her release from prison this week.

An Army spokesperson told USA Today that the transgender soldier, who was convicted of espionage while known as Bradley Manning, will remain a private and have access to commissaries, but will not be paid.

"Pvt. Manning is statutorily entitled to medical care while on excess leave in an active duty status, pending final appellate review," the military rep said.

Manning underwent hormone therapy while behind bars and attempted suicide twice, but said she's looking forward to life as a free woman.

"For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea," she said in a statement. "I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world."

"I want that indescribable feeling of connection with people and nature again, without razor wire or a visitation booth. I want to be able to hug my family and friends again. And swimming - I want to go swimming!"

Manning's lawyer told the BBC that Manning plans to complete her transition soon. She was not allowed to grow out her hair while in prison, though the military said she could proceed with gender reassignment surgery upon her release.

According to the New York Daily News, though, she could lose her health benefits if her appeal of her court-martial conviction is denied and she's dishonorably discharged.

Manning was convicted in 2013 for releasing more than 700,000 classified military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks. She served nearly seven years of a 35-year sentence at an all-male prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

The former whistleblower was granted clemency in the final days of President Barack Obama's administration, and her sentence was commuted.

"Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible," now President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter.

The Army did not say what post Manning will be assigned to or who she'll report to.
Netflix has become the latest company to stop users of rooted and unlocked Android devices from downloading its app from the Play Store. The video streaming service's app still works on modified handsets/tablets that already have it installed, but this could eventually change.

Like numerous mobile payment apps, Pokemon GO, Snapchat, and many others, Netflix has joined the list of applications making life difficult for those with devices that are rooted or have unlocked bootloaders. The company has confirmed that the decision is due to the full integration of Google's Widevine digital rights management (DRM) in version 5.0 of the Netflix app.

With our latest 5.0 release, we now fully rely on the Widevine DRM provided by Google; therefore, many devices that are not Google-certified or have been altered will no longer work with our latest app and those users will no longer see the Netflix app in the Play Store.

After it introduced the ability to download titles so they can be viewed offline, Netflix will see this move a way of clamping down on potential piracy. Anyone with an affected device can still install the app using other methods, such as sideloading the APK, and, according to Android Police, it still functions normally for now.

Netflix's Play Store listing is seemingly tied to whether or not a device is cleared to use Android Pay, rather than Widevine, meaning those that merely have unlocked bootloaders won't be unable to download the Netflix app from Google's store.

Unsurprisingly, the move isn't being welcomed by Android users. It seems the many people who modify their devices just for that extra layer of customization, rather than for nefarious purposes, are also being punished.
The sheer idea that graphing calculators are still a thing in 2017 is a bit absurd when you consider that nearly every student is toting around a far more powerful device in their pockets in the form of a smartphone.

Fortunately, the burden of purchasing and lugging around the technological dinosaur will soon be lifted in favor of a modern option.

Students in 15 states will soon have access to the Desmos online calculator for use in the classroom courtesy of a new partnership with testing consortium Smarter Balanced.

Desmos isn't some fly-by-night operation. Launched in 2011, the San Francisco-based company already has users across 146 countries collectively logging more than 300,000 hours each day. Its platform affords users a colorful interface, live graphing capabilities, accessibility features for those with disabilities and connectivity using a computer or mobile device - all free of charge.

The deal will likely be welcomed news for both students and parents as they'll no longer need to purchase a standalone calculator that typically retails for north of $100.

Market leader Texas Instruments, which has sold more than 75 million graphing calculators since 1990, likely isn't thrilled with the development. Peter Balyta, the company's head of education technology, defended the high price of TI's calculators as a "one-time investment in a student's future" in a message to Quartz.

Desmos CEO Eli Luberoff, on the other hand, described pricey graphing calculators as a huge source of inequity and "not the best way to learn."
It was evident during the ceremonial hand-off at the Rio Olympics that Japan was taking its duty of hosting the 2020 Summer Games seriously. From potentially featuring a man-made meteor shower and broadcasting in 8K to incorporating recycled electronics into its medals, it's clear that Japan wants to impress the world with its technical prowess.

Speaking of the opening ceremony, Japanese automaker Toyota has announced that it is giving 40 million yen (around $353,000) to the Cartivator group to further boost the optics of the spectacle.

The Cartivator group is crowdfunding the creation of the Skydrive car, a drone-like flying car with a top speed of 62 mph that claims to be the smallest in the world with measurements of 9.5 feet by 4.3 feet. The idea is to use the Skydrive flying car to light the Olympic flame during the opening ceremony of the 2020 Olympics.

Cartivator's Ryutaro Mori told Digital Trends on Monday that they had previously approached Toyota several times and were very happy to finally get the funding. The money, Mori said, will primarily be used to purchase components to build the three-wheel flying vehicle.

Hopefully the country has a backup plan (or in this case, a backup vehicle) on hand in case something goes awry.

Tokyo in September 2013 won its bid to host the 2020 Olympics, beating out Istanbul, Turkey, and Madrid, Spain, for host city honors.
Fake news website World News Daily Report published an article simply titled "Qatar: Jealous Husband Seals Wife's Vagina with Crazy Glue" today, another one in a long series of articles about outrageous, made up crimes. Today's offering starts like this:

A Qatari man thought it was a good idea to seal his wife's vagina with crazy glue as he was going away for a few days on a business trip, reports the Doha Tribune this morning. The 33-year-old man was brought forth before the court after his wife was rushed off to the emergency room and suffered medical complications and excruciating pain. He confessed to the judge that he was guilty of gluing her genitals but only because he believed she had adulterous ideas after he found out she had liked a post of his 12-year-old cousin on Facebook.

The name of the supposed judge was "Muhammad Bin Saden" and predictably the husband got off with a $10 fine while the woman fared a lot worse:

Also, the judge pointed out that, after going through the evidence and photos the husband had brought to court, the suffering was in part justified but still decided the woman should be administered 100 lashes as to prevent further "misunderstandings" between her and her husband.

The image used with the story actually comes from a 2010 story from France about polygamy featuring Lies Hebbadj (the veiled woman).

The website World News Daily Report is a well known hoax website specialized in posting hoaxes and made up stories. The disclaimer on their website is pretty clear about that even though you have to scroll all the way down the page to find it:

WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.

Usually the fare on World News Daily Report is about crazy, over-the-top crimes with a high WTF-factor. Today's offering veers uncomfortably close to inciting religious hatred and racism in our opinion but it still is getting quite a few likes on Facebook as the Trendolizer graph at the end of this article demonstrates. If you see people believing this story and getting their stereotypes reinforced by it, don't hesitate to send them here to learn the truth.
It was a bad day for gummy snacking for a little boy in New York.

A 10-year-old boy from Rockland County was rushed to the emergency room after consuming sour gummy candy laced with medical marijuana, the Ramapo police department has revealed.

Case Details

The police reported that the boys father let him sit in the family car by himself, where he also saw the package of pink lemonade belts laced with cannabis.

The boy ate the treat and suffered the impact of THC shortly after. He was then sent to the hospital.

Police officers were called to the ER of Good Samaritan Hospital, where they were informed that the victim consumed at least one piece of the gummy snack containing not less than 250 milligrams of THC.

Ephraim Zagelbaum, the boys 37-year-old father and a resident of Spring Valley, was arrested and then charged with endangering the welfare of a child. He was released from police custody afterward, and the candy was taken for testing and weighing additional possession charges.

These additional possession charges for the father remain pending.

What Is THC?

Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the chemical responsible for most of the psychological effects of marijuana. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), it acts practically like the cannabinoids naturally made by the human body.

Live Science explained that cannabinoid receptors are concentrated in specific brain areas linked to thinking, memory, pleasure, coordination as well as time perception. THC binds to these receptors and activates them, influencing factors such as an individuals memory, thinking, movements, pleasure, coordination, and even sensory perception.

THC stimulates brain cells for dopamine release, therefore creating euphoria. It can also alter thinking, induce hallucinations, and lead to delusions.

"Some of the side effects of THC include a decrease in IQ, memory and cognition, especially in younger people," explained Dr. Damon Raskin of Cliffside Malibu Treatment Center. "However, the jury is still out on long-term effects, as not enough research has been done on it yet.

The higher the THC, the stronger the brain effects, warned the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The average content in marijuana is 1 to 5 percent, 5 to 15 percent in hashish, and up to 20 percent in hashish oil. THC in recreational marijuana doses highly varies.

Gummies And Baked Goods Laced With Cannabis

In December 2016, 12 high schoolers experienced unpleasant symptoms after ingesting gummy bears brought by a fellow student. A doctor revealed later that the goods were laced with cannabis oil.

Last month, North Carolina hospital workers were also sent to the ER after munching on baked goods laced with marijuana. The six employees of Davis Regional Medical Center reportedly consumed cookies and muffins containing cannabis oil  goods that were brought by an employee to work.

The employee denied knowing that the treats contained THC oil. No charges were filed, and the authorities later on discovered that the workers family members made the sweets and left them at the kitchen counter, not intending to give them to the hospital staff.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
On Mothers Day, two strangers finally meet after years of anticipation: Anna Hutt, a mother who lost her teenage son in 2014, and Gary Flint, the man who had a second lease in life thanks to her sons heart.

Accompanied by his wife, children, and grandchildren, Flint of Lexington waited at the lobby of the Durham Outpatient Center at Nebraska Medicine Sunday afternoon to meet Hutt of Clarinda, Iowa. Their arms locked in an embrace during their first ever encounter.

Death And Rebirth

It was still all clear for Hutt: On May 21 three years ago, her son Payton died in a deadly dirt biking accident near their home. He wasnt wearing a helmet and had severe head trauma when he was hit by a van.

Payton registered as an organ donor some weeks before the accident. Hutt even tried to talk the teenager out of it.

I told him no. I said No, I dont think youre going to do that, and he was like No, mom. I want to be a donor, Hutt recalled, adding that her son changed her whole outlook on organ donation.

Flint was in a truly bad shape back then. As a 64-year-old, he was given only months to live amid a worsening heart condition. Back in 2007, the man was diagnosed with heart enlargement or nonischemic cardiomyopathy.

Cardiologist Dr. Ronald Zolty told WOWT 6 News that Flints days were actually numbered and that he wouldnt have survived another two or three months without the transplant.

Getting Connected

Flint, six days after being listed for his awaited transplant, learned of the new opportunity but had no idea it was from Payton. He likened his operation to being born again.

A year after the transplant, Flint along with his family wrote Hutt a letter, which the hospital forwarded to its recipient. From there, the two families have been in communication, with the mother telling the transplant recipient about her sons likes and interests.

Payton lives through Flint through their shared interests: cars and motorcycles, music, and being a prankster, to name a few.

Hutt, on the other hand, felt her son taught her the important lesson that it will be such a great gift for Flint and his family. She could not think of a better man to receive her sons heart, Hutt added.

On Sunday, May 14, after years of communicating, the two met for the first time. Flint greeted the pining mother with flowers on her special day. There are hardly any words to describe her emotions, Hutt said.

Perhaps the most significant part of it: listening to her sons heartbeat inside Flints chest using a stethoscope and receiving from Flint a teddy bear that plays back a recording of Paytons heartbeat.

They intend to stay in touch and wish love and happiness for each other and their families.

Organ Donation In Focus

In the United States, its been estimated that 18 people die each day while waiting for an organ.

An individual donor can be a hero to up to eight individuals, as well as enhance more lives via eye and tissue donation.

In January last year, Drew Lienemann of Iowa, an honor student and achiever in his local high school, committed suicide. His organs and tissues, however, managed to help 194 people. His skin, for instance, assisted nine post-mastectomy breast reconstruction surgeries.

A precious baby was also born to Oklahoma couple Keri and Royce Young, but instead of terminating the pregnancy upon knowledge of the babys terminally ill condition, the couple decided to proceed with giving birth to her to donate her organs.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Lenovo-owned Motorola is expected to release a slew of smartphones in 2017. Some rumors hinted at the probable devices from the company, including the new flagship.

A new picture has leaked online and not only details the name of the upcoming Motorola handsets, but also offers an insight into the features the smartphones will house.

The Leaked Image: What Does It Reveal?

The leaked image in question is from tipster Evan Blass, who has a decent track record when it comes to leaks. Blass posted the picture on his Twitter account and cited an anonymous tip as his source.

Motorola 2017 [via tip] pic.twitter.com/qahD9PIxrD  Evan Blass (@evleaks) 14 May 2017

The leaked image details all of the devices which Motorola will reportedly release before the year is out. It lists two smartphones from each of the company's "C", "E", "G", and "Z" series. The leaked image also points to a device belonging to the "X" line up.

Motorola Z Series

The "Z" series devices have been tagged "Unlimited Capabilities" and comprise the Moto Z Play and Moto Z Force. The Z Play will reportedly boast a 5.5-inch Full HD display and offer support for Moto Mods. The Z Force's screen size is not listed. However, the smartphone will likely support Moto Mods, ShatterShield, and gigabit data speeds.

Moto X Lineup

Based on the leak, the Moto X line up comprises only one smartphone for 2017. The Moto X series has been tagged "Unlimited Perfection." The smartphone in this category will apparently come with a 5.2-inch Full HD display along with 3D glass and SmartCam support. The unnamed device could be the recently-leaked Moto X4; however, this handset was said to sport a 5.5-inch display.

Moto G Series

The "G" series is dubbed "Unlimited Premium." The Moto gS and gS+ are listed under this series for 2017. While the Moto gS will come with a 5.2-inch FHD display, the gS+ will boast a 5.5-inch FHD screen. The gS may come in a full metal body while the Moto gS+ will feature a dual-camera setup.

Moto E Lineup

The "E" series dubbed "Unlimited Value" consists of the Moto E and Moto E Plus. The Moto E will feature a FHD display along with a 5-inch screen. The Moto E Plus will bear a bigger 5.5-inch screen with a large 5,000 mAh battery capacity. It will also have a 2.5D glass and fingerprint sensor in tow.

Moto C Series

Last but not the least, the "C" series falls under the "Unlimited Essentials" category. The Moto C and Moto C Plus come under this category. Both devices will allegedly have a 5-inch screen, but there will be a difference in resolution. While the Moto C will have a maximum resolution of 480p, the Moto C Plus would boast a native 720p resolution. The C Plus will likely come with 4,000 mAh battery.

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Brazil's president-elect, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, met this Wednesday in the country's capital with the leaders of the National Congress: the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur... | Read More
Since 2012, the Louisiana Legislature has at least twice considered completely eliminating all funding for the Inspector General, a state office tasked with rooting out government corruption.

A proposed law would lock funding into the state budget, so that elected leaders  ones that could find themselves at odds with the Inspector General's investigations  could never again attempt to defund the office.

"Now it's been demonstrated that this office needs this protection," state Inspector General Stephen Street said.

The House Appropriations committee advanced a bill by Rep. Julie Stokes, R-Kenner, to dedicate $2 million to the Inspector General's Office, which would fund the office to its 2015 budget level. House Bill 443 is a constitutional amendment, so it would also require a vote of the public.

Stokes stressed that the dedication is a mere ".0007 percent" of the total state budget, and would create a truly independent agency.

"Do you think it's proper for the government watch dog to have to ask for its funding from the government? The answer categorically is no," she said. "This office may be funded at the moment, but it is one big investigation away from having someone out of our 144 legislators try and defund it."

Inspectors general: Funding, access create hurdles for corruption investigations in Louisiana Louisiana Inspector General Stephen Street is bracing for the threat of another round of bud

Street said a $2 million budget would allow him to be fully staffed. His budget was cut by 20 percent in 2016, and the office had to reduce its staffing by three criminal investigator positions.

"It's incredibly time consuming and it saps the energy out of the room for me to constantly be on the defensive down there," Street said, referring to having to fight for funding. "Especially because the types of cases we are working on are the types that could incur the wrath of people in the Legislature."

The measure was advanced out of committee and will get a full vote on the House floor. But a few members of the committee expressed some concern with the bill.

Rep. Tony Bacala, R-Prairieville, said he was concerned with the idea the Legislature would be creating yet another untouchable dedicated fund, that can no longer be considered when the lawmakers struggle to balance the budget in tough times.

An effort to involuntarily defer, or table, the bill failed 5-13 before it was later approved.

The Inspector General's office, unlike the Louisiana Legislative Auditor's Office, is a law enforcement agency tasked with investigating public corruption and fraud. Street has held the job since 2008, and was appointed for his second six-year term which ends in 2020.
The ACT Government unveiled a $21.6 million arts funding package on Monday but Canberra artists have questioned the investment saying it will not meet the needs of the arts' community.

The Canberra Arts Action Group, a lobby group of more than 160 of Canberra's leading artists, said they were "shocked" at the Government's breach of faith.

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr, member for Ginninderra Tara Cheyne and ACT Arts Minister Gordon Ramsay at the Belconnen Arts Centre Credit:Rohan Thomson

In a press release it said Monday's announcement, coupled with the funding cut in December 2016, had signalled to artists across Canberra that current arts funding and policy lacked strategic direction and necessary consultation between government and the community.

In December 2016 Canberra artists were stunned when the ACT Government made an unannounced 66 per cent cut to the project fund component of the ACT Arts Fund. In response to a public outcry from local artists, ACT Arts Minister Gordon Ramsay announced additional funds in February.
While institutional music was often veering towards atonality about the time Dooley was studying classical composition and piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1979-1980, he says he decided he didn't want to compose like that: he wanted a larger audience to enjoy his music.

Not that he's utterly against modernity: he says the third movement sounds a little like minimalist composer Phillip Glass and has influences from leading Australian composer Ross Edwards, who was one of his teachers.

The concert will also include works by Rachmaninov, Debussy and Piazzolla, among others.

Dooley also composed the new song cycle that soprano Louise Page will sing in the concert The Voice of Heroic Love on Sunday, accompanied by Rachel Best on clarinet and Phillipa Candy on piano

"I started working on it while walking on Mount Taylor. I found the inspiration to write a song cycle inspired by nature and the rejuvenation we get from nature."
It's Tuesday and you're in luck - today is tipped to be sunny.

Today's forecast is for a top of 17 degrees. Something to get used to as we are in for a string of 17 degree days until cooler wetter weather hits on Friday.

Two Indigenous inmates were bashed at the Alexander Maconochie Centre this month. Credit:Jay Cronan

Let's look at what's making headlines.

Canberra prisoner's last written words to partner
An inmate who died at Canberra's jail at the weekend wanted to turn his life around, his partner said.

In a message sent less than 24-hours before his death, the 29-year-old man told his girlfriend he was being locked back in his cell, and hoped she would have a good night.

A message sent from the man to his girlfriend less than 24 hours before he died.

"I'll email ya when thay [sic] let me out 2morrow k beautiful love ya," the message read.

The girlfriend said he knew he deserved to be there but was looking forward to coming home.
The ability of banks to respond to future fast-moving financial shocks could be undermined by the government's $6.2 billion bank tax, several of the country's largest lenders claim.

In submissions to Treasury on Monday, banks argued the budget's levy would work against efforts for lenders to build up more liquid, or easy-to-sell assets, designed to help banks cope through a period of turmoil.

Since the global financial crisis, banks have been forced to run themselves in a way that means they could continue to stay open for business during a thirty-day period of financial stress.

The rule is meant to ensure banks have enough high-quality assets that could be easily sold to cover any short-term outflows. But submissions from the ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank all claimed the tax would work against this goal.
It's looking nearly certain that one-time tech darling 1-Page has gone the way of so many CVs in recent times  in the bin.

On Monday, the shareholders of the company, which had licensed technology to create one-page resumes, voted to boot the company's co founder, Joanna Riley, from the board and close the operating side of the business.

Joanna Riley will now have to pursue other ventures in Silicon Valley.

1-Page will now be a shell company with a multimillion-dollar whack of cash that can be used on all manner of things  like the back-door listing of an equally spurious tech start-up? A speculative miner? The options are endless.

Riley, a former elite college rower and no Lay Down Sally in this tumultuous affair, will now have to pursue other ventures in Silicon Valley where she is based.
Call it a First World problem, a disease of affluence or just people being careless with kitchen knives.

It's avocado hand, and there is an epidemic of it in British hospital emergency departments.

It happens when someone trying to get the stone out of the smashable fruit jabs at it with the point of a knife, and ends up jabbing themselves. Laceration, exsanguination and even nerve and tendon damage result. Some people never fully recover the use of their hand; some never eat an avocado again.

The British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons wants to put a warning on the fruit. Simon Eccles, the honorary secretary, says he treats four people a week. Middle-class urbanites are particularly susceptible.
The tweets started just after 9pm on Friday and kept coming relentlessly, in alphabetical order, for the next 48 hours.

Over 2000 tweets in total - all aimed at Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young - listing how much each public school in NSW would lose unless the Turnbull government funds the six-year Gonski agreements in full.

The fusillade from the NSW Teachers Federation was a response to the Greens' education spokeswoman's comments, in an interview published by Fairfax Media just hours earlier, that it was time to seize the "once-in-a-generation opportunity" to fix the nation's school funding system.

"We have to face reality," Hanson-Young said, signalling a willingness to do a deal with the government.
We all know Tuscany in Italy, Provence in France, and Mendoza in Argentina. But Shimane, in Japan? Sorry, never heard of it. When I say as much, Yu Sasaki smiles. "Nobody knows my home," he says. "Nobody has been there."

So it's fitting that Sasaki's tiny restaurant in Surry Hills is not on everybody's radar, sandwiched, as it is, into a laneway behind his Cre Asian cafe and macaronerie on the city side of Wentworth Avenue.

Go-to dish: 'Caramel and nuts' from the hitokuchi-gashi menu. Credit:Christopher Pearce

Pretty much everything about the place  the Sodeshi pottery, gyuto knives and washi paper on which the menus are printed, even the architect, Natsumi Yawata  hails from the remote prefecture on the western side of Honshu island.

The spare, intrinsically Japanese interior celebrates the beauty of everyday things. A single shelf for ceramics. A single candle on the wall. A small box on the floor for holding bags, or for those sitting in the antechamber open to the street, knee rugs.
The NSW government will privatise the running of scores of bus routes in Sydney's inner west, risking a major dispute with thousands of heavily unionised bus drivers.

Transport Minister Andrew Constance has justified contracting the tender for bus region six  covering suburbs from Kensington in the city's south-east to Strathfield and Olympic Park in the west  out to the private sector by citing poor performance.

The inner-west region is one of four in NSW in which buses are run by the government-owned State Transit Authority. The other 11 regions are in the hands of private operators such as Transdev and Hillsbus.

The bus union said drivers were furious about the decision and accused the Transport Minister of betrayal following guarantees just six months ago from his department about extending the contracts.
Five people have been charged with animal cruelty offences over the alleged torture and death of a wallaby in north Queensland last year.

Police say a complaint was made in November that a man punched the injured wallaby and stomped on its head in Charters Towers while another man filmed it and posted the footage to Snapchat.

A north Queensland wallaby was allegedly stomped and punched to death.

Townsville police raided a number of addresses and seized mobile phones, dash cam footage, weapons and clothing.

Three men, aged 19 and two aged 17, and two boys, aged 15 and 16, have been charged with a total of 48 offences, including 12 counts of animal cruelty.
More than 25 years after a Sandgate bank was robbed at gunpoint, a police review into the case has led to a man being charged on Monday.

On December 18, 1991, a man entered a NAB bank on Brighton Road wearing a balaclava about 11.45am.

More than 25 years after the armed robbery of a NAB bank in Sandgate, a man has been charged over the incident.

It will be alleged he then pulled a gun, jumped the counter, stole a large sum of cash and fled in a stolen car.

After using modern technology to review the evidence, a 54-year-old Northgate man was charged with armed robbery and unlawful use of a motor vehicle.
Marine scientists heading out on a month-long voyage to explore for the first time the deep waters off Australia's east coast, estimate that up to half of all animals they encounter will be new species or, at least, ones never seen in Australian waters.

Led by Museums Victoria, the international team of researchers will sample and film the cold, dark abyss that begins where Australia's continental shelf ends.

It's an unknown world, largely populated by creatures science is yet to meet.

The pioneering expedition left Launceston on Monday. Over the coming month the 40 scientists on board will sample fish, sea stars, crabs and worms from up to four kilometres beneath the surface.
The federal government has conceded it can't be certain public service departments are secure against major hacking attacks, as Malcolm Turnbull's senior cyber adviser suggested Australia might have dodged the latest international crisis because it fell during the weekend.

At least eight Australian businesses have been infected by the bug crippling some systems in Britain, Europe and the US, with a series of investigations ongoing.

So-called ransomware was placed on thousands of computers as part of worldwide extortion plot, shutting down systems unless authorities and businesses paid out hackers' demands.

At least 200,000 systems in 150 countries have been hit since Friday, including Britain's National Health System, US parcel giant FedEx and and Germany's national railway operator.
While Mr Hunt is certain of future ransomware events, he is yet to be convinced as to whether insurance is the best approach for businesses. The incident is a stark reminder of the risk of consumers' personal data being exposed online, security experts said. "It is a bit of a double-edged sword. One quarter of the business insurance brands we work with now offer some sort of cyber liability cover," said Angus Kidman, editor-in-chief at finder.com.au. "Despite the prevalence of high-profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, the take-up of cyber liability insurance policies is still quite low. Businesses understand the potential threats, but are only just starting to realise that specific cover is available." "They are also reluctant to spend more money on insurance, especially given that maintaining IT security is already seen by many businesses as a major expense."

Insurance provider AIG offers a cyber insurance policy on its Australian website titled CyberEdge. It features an optional extra - Cyber/Privacy Extortion - that covers "any ransom payments to third parties required to end an extortion threat". Companies that were not prepared for WannaCry can expect to rack up business interruption costs that far exceed a ransomware payment. Kevin Kalinich "Insurance is only part of the puzzle. The cost can be covered but if data is lost then that's where the problem is," said Dr Naveen Chilamkurti, cyber security program coordinator at La Trobe University. "It's a well known trick/vulnerability. It's just a matter of time before it happens again." As of Monday afternoon, the attack had netted nearly $US40,000 ($54,000) in bitcoin payments.

Nearly nine out 10 cyber insurance policies in the world are in the United States, according to Kevin Kalinich, global head of Aon Plc's cyber risk practice. The annual premium market stands at $US2.5-$3 billion. The biggest reason for the larger penetration in the United States, says Bob Parisi, US cyber product leader for insurance broker Marsh, "is that the US has been living with state breach notification laws for the past 10 years". The greater transparency created an incentive for US companies to get insurance to compensate for damage from incidents they were required to publicly report. An upcoming European Union directive is expected to have the same impact there. Companies that were not prepared for WannaCry can expect to rack up business interruption costs that far exceed a ransomware payment, said Kalinich. "If you're a hospital that turned away patients, if you're a global delivery company that can't send package, or a telecom company in Spain, Russia or China, the financial statement impact from the business interruption is much larger than the $300 ransomware," he said.

Organisations hit by the attacks, which lock up computer systems until the victims pay a ransom, including a handful of Australian companies. The secrecy around the identity of the companies affected in Australia is believed to be in place to avoid an over-reaction by the public. "A lof of people are panicking because they didn't realise it would be so big. For the government to take these steps shows a lot of caution," said Dr Chilamkurti. International victims include Britain's National Health Service, French car manufacturer Renault, and Spain's Telefonica. Sources close to Telefonica said the company had insurance to cover the attacks but it was too soon to estimate the economic impact.

Renault and the NHS did not respond to requests for comment. West Coast cyber risk modelling firm Cyence estimated the average individual ransom cost from Friday's attacks at $US300 ($405), and the total economic costs from interruption to business at $4 billion. The US Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit research institute that advises governments and businesses on the costs of cyber attacks, estimated more modest total losses. They were likely to range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and unlikely to exceed US$1 billion, the group forecast. A typical cyber insurance policy will protect companies against extortion like ransomware attacks, which insurers say have spiked in the past 18 months. It would cover the investigation costs and also pay the ransom, according to Parisi. But there are caveats. Companies that did not download a Microsoft patch issued in March to protect users from vulnerabilities may be out of luck, since many cyber policies exclude coverage in such an instance.

Companies using pirated software are also unlikely eligible for an insurance payout, Kalinich said. Most cyber insurance policies cover breaches of up to $US50 million, with much of the losses related to the interruption of the firms' business, Parisi said. Some policies can cover losses for as much as $500-600 million. Cyber insurance policies also typically cover the cost of notifying those whose data has been breached, hiring a PR agency to address reputational damage and arranging credit monitoring for those affected, as well as potential legal suits. It is a high-margin business. Insurer Sciemus, for example, has previously said it charges around $100,000 for $10 million in data breach insurance and as much as seven times that to cover attacks causing physical damage. Loading
Thick cloud is expected to shroud the CBD for another couple of hours, Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Rod Dickson has told Ebony Bowden.

"I think by 10am to 11am we should start to see that break up, but in the outer eastern and western suburbs it should take until lunchtime to clear up," he said.

Fog is caused by clear nights with calm conditions and little cloud cover. Today's fog blanket is reaching as far as Warrnambool in the east and Echuca in the north.

Mist has thickened in the city in the last half an hour, which is normal as the sun comes up and stirs up surface air and moisture, Mr Dickson said.
It was her job that caused paramedic Belinda Ousley's post-traumatic stress disorder, but she says it was the battle to prove the link that left her feeling suicidal.

"Before I started the WorkCover process, suicide was not even on my radar," the 33-year-old said.

Paramedic Belinda Ousley got PTSD after attending a series of horrific incidents. Credit:Jason South

It took 10 months for her claim to be accepted, a time she calls 10 months of "wallowing".

"I lost my house, I lost all my savings. My family had to pay medical bills for me to get help, and at the end of it, it was all approved, but it was all too late. I still have debt," said Ms Ousley, a mother of one.
A Perth man has been charged with 11 offences including allegedly assaulting a police officer on reported drunken sprees in Singapore.

Jason Peter Darragh has been captured on video obtained by 9 News tussling with police officers and security guards at Changi Airport on April 20.

The 44-year-old appeared in a Singapore court on Saturday charged with a string of offences including three counts of using vulgar language on police officers; two counts of using criminal force on them and two counts of causing annoyance to others while drunk in a public place.

He has also been charged with allegedly assaulting a police officer which carries a maximum seven-year jail term in Singapore.
Ferrari Owners Club GB Celebrate 50th Anniversary With Special Parade Across Forth Road Bridge +VIDEO

LONDON - May 15, 2017: The Ferrari Owners Club GB celebrated their 50th Anniversary this past weekend with a special parade of Ferrari cars across the Forth Road Bridge which was specially closed to mark the clubs half-century. As one of the oldest Ferrari Owners Clubs in the world, the FOC GB now has over 2,750 members and a packed calendar of social meetings, track activities and regional events which enable Ferrari owners to share their passion for the iconic brand.

The FOC GBs special parade over the Forth Road Bridge included cars from Graypaul Edinburgh, the official Ferrari Dealer for Scotland, as well as several very exclusive models such as the Limited Series LaFerrari and F12tdf, and a number of historic models, such as the 330 GT, 246 Dino and 308 GTB. The Forth Road Bridge was closed from 08:00-08:11 to allow the parade to pass from Edinburgh to Fife, heading north for a FOC GB track day at Knockhill Circuit.

The event also pre-empts the official Ferrari 70th Anniversary UK Tour which takes place from June to September at various locations around the country. The LaFerrari Aperta will headline Ferraris presence at the Goodwood Festival of Speed from 29 June to 02 July, leading a parade of the most iconic road and racing Ferraris from the companys past 70 years during each day of the event. Ferrari will also have a full display of the current product range at the event, including the new GTC4Lusso which makes its dynamic UK debut at the event.

The Ferrari 70th Anniversary UK Tour then continues with the LaFerrari Aperta visiting every official Ferrari Dealer in the UK during July and August, and on public display on the following dates (exact location in each city to be announced):

Date Location 5th July Lyndhurst 9th July Exeter 12th July Swindon 15th July Egham 20th July London 22nd July Colchester 25th July Nottingham 28th July Birmingham 1st August Manchester 5th August Leeds 8th August Edinburgh 12th August Belfast

The final event on the LaFerrari Apertas UK Tour will be Ferrari Racing Days at Silverstone, from 22-24 September, where the car will once again lead a parade of iconic and historic Ferrari cars around the British GP circuit. Ferrari Racing Days is the UK round of the Ferrari Challenge European Series, in which the 458 Challenge makes its final appearance alongside the 488 Challenge which will run solus in the Ferrari Challenge in 2018.

Ferraris Corse Clienti division will also be running a number of sessions for F1 Clienti and XX Programme cars, including a number of important race-winning F1 cars from several different decades of Ferraris racing past. For more information, or to purchase tickets, visit: http://www.silverstone.co.uk/events/ferrari-racing-days/.
if the people of Biafra want Republic of Biafra, it will be a reality during my administration. ----Donald Trump Donald Trump I wi...
After a drug-related tragedy, administrators at Californias Santa Monica High School decided the school needed a drug education program. But the school went cold turkey on its new drug education program after just three seminars when parents realized the program was actually run by the Church of Scientology.

After the LSD-related death of a Santa Monica High School first-year student in March, the school hired the Foundation for a Drug-Free World to host three anti-drug assemblies for freshman and sophomores, the Hollywood Reporter initially reported. But behind the groups innocuous-sounding name was controversial religious organization. Although the affiliation is not immediately clear through any of the Foundations literature, the group is run by the Church of Scientology, a highly controversial organization sometimes accused of being a cult.

The Foundation reportedly led three seminars for students over several weeks, before hosting a workshop with approximately 200 parents on May 9. It was during this meet-up that parents reportedly began questioning the group that was leading regular seminars in the public school. While the Foundation does not advertise its affiliation with Scientology, its connections with the church are evident in its publicly available tax documents, and have drawn significant media attention since the Foundation was launched in 2006.

A number of parents, made newly aware of the groups Scientology ties, reportedly complained to the schools principal, who decided to cut short the drug program this month. The school district did not return a requests for comment on Sunday.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, the Church of Scientology accused Santa Monica High School of religious discrimination.

The Church of Scientology is saddened to hear that religious discrimination would stand in the way of saving young lives, the church wrote in a statement. The Church is a proud sponsor of the Drug-Free World education program which has helped millions of young people to learn the truth about drugs and how to live a drug-free life.

One would think that the tragic death of a student from LSD would be enough to set aside bigotry when there is evidence-based information that is invaluable, free of charge and provided out of good will and open hearts, the statement continued. The mother volunteering to assist Santa Monica High School with this program gave of her time freely out of her own compassion to help other parents keep their kids safe and living clean, productive lives.

A school district spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter that the schools principal had fully vetted this organization and felt that it would be excellent for our students. Despite being sponsored by the religious organization, the presentations and materials do not have any reference or mention of Scientology.

But even without reference to Scientology, the Foundations materials have drawn skepticism from drug policy experts for the programs sensational claims.

Coming down from the drug causes depression so severe that a person will do almost anything to get the drugeven commit murder, the Foundations website reads on a page about cocaines side-effects. And if he or she cant get cocaine, the depression can get so intense it can drive the addict to suicide.

The program promotes a zero-tolerance policy of scare tactics and worst-case scenarios, an approach experts describe as ineffective. An abstinence-only drug education gives teens little understanding of how to safely handle drugs. According to a 2016 study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, some 38.3 percent of high school seniors have experimented with marijuana, and another 14.3 percent have experimented with drugs other than marijuana.

Its like if drivers education consisted simply of sitting down and showing kids pictures of crashesand nothing else, Jerry Otero, a youth policy leader at the Drug Policy Alliance told The Daily Beast in 2015. No one would learn how to drive.

The Foundation has previously been ousted from public schools in New York City, where it administered a similar anti-drug program until its ties to Scientology were revealed. In 2015, the Foundation boasted of lecturing at 30 New York City public schools, as well as with the New York City Police Departments youth programs, where it reportedly led anti-drug training for school safety officers.
We were all there because of Berkeley. Hundreds of people gathered on Boston Common Saturday after word spread for weeks of a free speech rally orchestrated by right-wing groups. But the real draw for protesters and counter-protestors alike seemed to be a shared view of the conflict between Antifas (self described anti-fascists) and Nazisor anarchists and Americans, depending on who you askedas a travelling fight club that had come to town.

In Berkeley, you might have been able to glimpse history looming grandly in the background. There, at the birthplace of the countrys free speech movement, protestors, militants, and masked street fighters clashed, sometimes violently, over whether Milo Yiannopoulos should be allowed to speak publicly, what kind of dystopia America is becoming, and who the real fascists are. In Boston, there was little of that pretense. Everyone seemed to be thinking about Berkeley.

A group of several hundred right-wing aligned protesters, who claimed their rally was being held to defend free speech, occupied one piece of ground in the park. The variety of subcultural uniforms and insignia among them, blended paramilitary, biker, and videogame cultures.

About a hundred and fifty yards across from the rally, various left-wing and Antifa counter-protesters assembled on a hill in front of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Between the two factions, a dozen or so officers from the Boston Police Department occupied a narrow pedestrian walkway. Curious onlookers took seats on nearby park benches.

To the onlookers, who almost to a person expressed either slack-jawed bemusement or concern over what they were seeing, it must have looked like the Internet, having been brought to life for a day, decided to spend it playing capture the flag in the countrys oldest public park.

It all started when a group of teenagers on 4Chan had an idea and shared it with a former Occupy Wall Street organizer. The rally, originated on 4Chans /pol/, said Steven Verette, the events central organizer.

Verette, still in high school, describes himself as a libertarian who believes in individual freedoms and the free market. He says that after getting the idea from an anonymous post on /pol/ he migrated discussion into a dedicated planning forum on the discord server. He hoped the rally would turn out to be a big celebration of our rights as Americans, a patriotic event, really.

But he added that it came about as sort of a reaction to Berkeley. We wouldnt have planned something like this otherwise, he said. Verettes friend and fellow event organizer Kevin Crowley, 18, agreed. It was partially anti-Antifa, he told The Daily Beast, especially because theyve been threatening people and harming people.

With the idea for an event in Boston and a private discussion board set up for planning, Verette put up a notice on 4Chan for more planners. That brought in John Rasmussen.

I had a whole bunch of history with occupy and other activist movements, Rasmussen said. He took up the job of applying for permits with the city and coordinating with the police department. Of the other organizers, Rasmussen said, I was the oldest one at 32. By far the oldest one. The rally only started to gain momentum, Rasmussen claimed, once Antifa paid attention to it.

We used [Antifas] posters to advertise it, Rasmussen said. Bringing people out by publicizing in online forums like 4Chan and Reddit, that Antifa was going to be stopping this rally from happening. Once the antifa threat had been established, Rasmussen said, then the Oath Keepers came in offering security for it.

It was a similar story on both sides of the divide: that the other side had assaulted innocent people in Berkeley and they had come out in Boston to prevent something like that from happening here.

We saw in Berkeley what happened, said an Antifa protester who identified himself as Puppy and covered his face with a red motorcycle helmet worn over a black mask. In Berkeley, Puppy said, there were people getting sucker punched and beaten by literal neo-Nazis.

In the end, not much actually happened during the rally, which was planned for 12-5 but ended early. The opposing sides hurled memes and slogans at each other, expressing both their politics and their self awareness. There were traditional chants like USA! USA! and No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA! But a moment later, Gender studies would be called outas if that said it allwith Go back to 4Chan, the response.

There was one fight and two arrests when someone from the MAGA side crossed the lines and, after a confrontation, punched an Antifa member. The Boston police identified the two involved as a 19-year-old California woman and a 28-year-old New York man.

The man arrested identified himself to reporters as Salvatore Cipolla, a member of the right-wing nationalist and Western Chauvinist organization The Proud Boys, which has been making itself a presence at events like this as enforcers for the anti-Antifa side.

For the most part, though, violence was averted. A line of oath keepers provided a kind of internal crowd control at the free speech rally pushing their own cohort back when they moved up to confront the other side.

Neither was there the attempt by Antifa to physically disrupt or attack those participating in the rally as they did in Berkley. The line of Boston police between them surely had something to do with this, but it also seemed that Antifa, though highly visible waving red and black flags at the front of the counter protest, was smaller than the various socialist and left-wing groups to their rear who, while coordinating with Antifa, had pledged their own members to non-violence.

There was little of the overt racism and neofascism that featured in the Berkeley clashes. One of the events featured speakers Kyle Chapman, known on the internet as Based Stickman, spoke about the left trying to destroy western civilization by going after whites," but there was little overt white nationalism on display and visibly more minority presence on the free speech side than among its antagonists on the hill.

Its not that such elements were invisiblethere was at least one Holocaust revisionist livestreaming the eventor that they would have been entirely unwelcome. As the organizers told me, it was open to anyone, including neo-Nazis and even Antifa if they wanted to speak.

But the culture of this particular event was weirder and less radical than that. It had adolescent play-acting aspect of 4chans culture, wedded, bizarrely, to the military dressup aspect of the Oathkeepers and the frat boy energy of the Proud Boys. On the surface, what held it all together was a libertarian conservatism that would be derided alt-light by more radical white nationalists. But the real force behind it was the anti-Antifa sentiment. Antifa: Ha! Ha! Ha! went one of the last chants of the day.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the white nationalist and alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer held an event of his own. There, according to a report in the Charlottesville news outlet The Daily Progress, he led dozens of people wielding torches in a march to protest the City Councils vote to sell a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Spencers march, according to the report, featured the kind of white nationalist chant, not heard in Boston, of You will not replace us, and Blood and soil!

In the Internet culture where the Boston rally was birthed, it came in for some harsh criticism compared to what Spencer had pulled off. The fact that Spencer had brought out far fewer people to participate in something IRL was incidental to the power of the imageryfewer marchers wielding torches through the night and explicitly invoking white nationalism was better than a group of old conservatives and paramilitary aficionados joining video game players to celebrate something as boring and establishment as free speech.

The Boston ralliers were cucks who had sold out to stodgy old establishment conservatives like the Oathkeepers and hadnt even gotten into any fights with Antifa, which was supposed to be the point.

Some of the people complaining on the boards claimed that they had been present on the Commons on Saturday and saw its lameness up close. It reminded me of one of the last interactions I observed before everyone headed home. I had been talking with the teenage organizersnot one of whom looked old enough to play someone their own age on TVwhen an even younger looking boy approached the rallys 17 year organizer Verette.

Hey, he said, are you Theanadon on discord? Then followed up, Im keksinpep. Good to put a name to the face. He carried his American flag back over to where his mom and younger sister were waiting. He was fifteen.
Physically speaking, there is no place cozier than an old Amsterdam barthey tend to be snug, well-worn spots, with charmingly age-skewed angles, a pleasant gloom and lots of simple, dark wood paneling, polished by ten or more generations of drinkers hands. The Dutch, however, are not a cozy peoplenone of this hygge silliness weve been hearing so much about lately for them. Theyre short on idle chit-chat and empty formalities and long on getting the job done properly.

The contrast between the snug bars, and the brusque, quietly sardonic men and women who tend them makes the city a paradise for a certain type of barfly. If you like a good DJ spinning in the corner; if you appreciate a cocktail that shows a dangerously creative mind at work; if youre most comfortable surrounded by sleek and successful young go-getterswell, then these bars are not for you.

If, however, youre content with the quiet buzz of interested conversation; if cold, crisp beer (the Heineken here is a whole different thing from what we get) and little sips of malty, lightly-spiced jenever (the flavored whisky that is the ancestor of gin) are all you need to get by; if you take pleasure in rubbing shoulders with people of all ages and paths through this weary-making world, you might just want to plan for a few days in Amsterdam.

Here are a few of my favorite old Amsterdam barsbrown bars, as theyre known, from the centuries of tobacco smoke that weathered the walls (none of that anymore). There are plenty of other good options, thoughjust look for a quiet spot on an out-of-the-way corner and you should be fine, even if nobody knows your name or apparently gives a damn what it is.

Cafe Brandon (Keizersgracht 157)

This is not a large bar. Depending on where you stand in the barroom, the door may hit you in the back every time someoneusually a localdrops in. A no-bullshit drinkers bar of considerable age (it got its liquor license in 1626) Brandonaccent on the ogets a lot less of the tourist trade than youll find in the city center, only ten minutes-walk away. (As in most cities, tourists here tend to be self-filtering, with the most obnoxious ones clotting together in the most obnoxious establishments; these old bars are not to their taste.)

Cafe De Dokter (Rozenboomsteeg 4)

The Doctor has been in the same family since the time of Napoleon, which may explain all the stuff on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. This, too, is not at all a large bar. But its dark and pleasant and the taciturn owner, whom youll find behind the bar, spins jazz LPs from his large collection (the turntable is right behind the bar), constructs a hand-cut cheese-plate that looks like a stack of building blocks and knows a hell of a lot about Scotch whisky, of which he has a fine collection.

Wynand Focking (Pijlsteeg 31)

Dutch can be a comical language for the English speaker, as the name of this ancient proeflokaal (tasting room) illustrates. The bar, however, is not funnyunless Andre is working, who is as outgoing as the gent at De Dokter is quiet. The bar, attached to the ancient distillery of the same name (still in operation, but now owned by Bols, the leading Dutch distilling company), serves as a sample room for the distillerys wide range of house-made liqueurs, traditional and otherwise, and some very fine genevers. Try the one distilled from spelt, unique to Wynand Focking and quite delicious. And if Andres around (youll know it if he is), ask him to mix you some Dutch-style drinks, made right in the glass without ice. These are far better than they sound, but I suppose theyd better be.

Cafe Hoppe (Spui 18-20)

Hoppe opened in 1670 as another proeflokaal. The distillery is gone, but the bar soldiers on, light in front and dark and a little bit cavernous in the back, like a scene from a Rembrandt painting. A little bigger and busier than the others, its still a fine place to sip barrel-aged genever and eat cheese and bitterballen (little fried balls of potato and whatnot) and thresh out the meaning of life.

Drie Fleschjes (Gravenstraat 18)

Tucked down a little street off the Dam square in the heart of the city center is another former proeflokaal. Once owned by the Bootz family (the 19th-century distillery is next door, converted into, of all things, a Best Western Hotel), the so-called Three Little Bottles dates back to 1650 or so. One wall is taken up by rows of small wooden barrels, each with a locked spout. These are where the regulars store their genever (supplied these days by Bols), letting it age until they come in to draw a little jug or two off. Theres not a lot of seating in the bara little alcove in the back, some tables and chairs out frontbut that makes it the perfect place to perfect your kopstootje technique.

Kopstootjecop-SCHTOUT-che, roughly (pronouncing Dutch sits roughly at the same difficulty level as writing Cantonese)means little head butt and is the name for a shot-and-a-beer, properly served: short glass of cold lager placed on the low bar and next to it a little tulip-shaped glass filled to surface tension with chilled genever. You put your hands behind your back, bend from the waist and slurp off the top of the genever. Then beer. The rest you drink normally. Then have some cheese or sausage (be aware that one of the ones they serve is a sort of beef tartare sausage; some find it challenging) or some fresh maatjes herring, if its in season, and get back to bending. It doesnt take long for it to become a habit.
Even before attempting any new attack on an airplane, terrorists could be on the brink of inflicting the most serious disruption of air travel since the 9/11 attacks.

If the Department of Homeland Security goes ahead with plans to ban laptops from the cabins of all flights from Europe to the U.S., the economic impact on airlines will far exceed that caused by previous measures, like removing shoes at security and the ban on carrying liquids in hand luggage.

The laptop ban would most affect those who are the most lucrative market for the airlines flying the Atlantic, business and first class passengers. These are often professionals like corporate managers, lawyers, accountants, scientists, and media producers whose laptops contain proprietary or confidential information that their companies will not allow to go into checked baggage for fear of being lost, damaged, or stolen.

The U.S. is the second-largest business-travel market after China. Business- and first-class passengers produce at least two-thirds of the revenue on any transatlantic flight. In effect, the fares paid by passengers at the front end allow the airline to sell the cheap seats at the back.

If a laptop ban diverts top echelon executives to the rapidly growing use of time-share corporate jets where they can use their devices, the airlines would lose not just the immediate revenue from the seats but the revenue generated by high-end loyalty programs through their branded credit cards. Some companies have already decided that in the event of a ban their executives will ship devices ahead via couriers like Fedex and UPS.

Michael McCormick, executive director of the Global Business Travel Association said last week, The question remains whether the targeted application of policies banning personal electronics is an effective measure to reduce the risk of terrorism.

According to travel industry insiders, European officials are so alarmed by the probable economic costs of the ban that they are demanding Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly provides them with a more convincing case for the measures than they have so far received.

After a conference call on Friday between U.S. and European officials, a spokeswoman for the European Union said they had invited Kelly and other officials for talks at a political and expert level to jointly assess the potential risks and review future measures. That meeting is taking place in Brussels this week.

EU transport commissioner Violeta Bulc was more explicit about their concerns when she said she had pointed to the safety implications of putting a large number of electronic devices in the aircraft hold.

As The Daily Beast reported last week, this worry arises from a well-documented risk to airplanes posed by fires that start in the lithium-ion batteries of personal devices, particularly in tablets and laptops. This risk would actually be increased if laptops placed in checked baggage were concentrated in a dedicated section of the cargo hold, where a runaway fire in one device could easily spread to others to eventually cause a fire that the current fire suppression systems in cargo holds cannot inhibit.

Steve Landells, the flight safety specialist at the British Airline Pilots Association, BALPA, said in a statement: If these devices are kept in the hold the risk is that if a fire occurs the results can be catastrophicwe urge the authorities to carefully assess the additional fire risk from storing personal electronic devices in the hold to ensure were not solving one problem by creating a worse one."

Some intelligence experts also believe that there is an underlying logical flaw in the proposed laptop ban. They say that an expert terrorist bomb-maker like the notorious Ibrahim al-Asiri of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would assume that the DHSs decision that laptops should be kept out of cabins indicates that the screening technology used in European airports, both for carry-on bags and checked luggage, can be defeated by a small explosive charge concealed in a battery.

The terrorists would simply move the threat from one part of the airplane to another by having a suicide bomber check in the weaponized laptop, which could be detonated in the cargo hold either by a smart phone or a timer, and bring down the airplane.

In March a former British army intelligence officer told The Daily Beast that such battery bombs likely use the same explosive, PETN, used by Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who attempted to destroy a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001. Just 100 grams of PETN can destroy a car.

Cargo-carrying airlines have developed new containers for shipments of lithium-ion batteries that can contain a fire so that it cannot endanger an airplane, but these containers are too heavy to be used on passenger jets. As part of a program to develop lighter but bomb-proof containers, an international team of scientists at the University of Sheffield in England have successfully tested a new cargo-hold lining that acts as flexible membrane rather than rigid wall. This, however, is only a prototype and it would take years to equip airline fleets with the technology.

Beyond the loss of elite passengers the airlines and the travel industry are concerned about the effect of a laptop ban as a serious irritant to passengers on this summers transatlantic tourist traffic. There are more than 3,000 flights a week bringing Europeans to America. Eighty percent of this traffic is on just four carriers: American Airlines, Delta, United, and the International Airline Group that combines British Airways and Iberia. Lufthansa and Air France/KLM are the remaining major players.

The airports that handle most of these flights are London Heathrow, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam Schipol. If the laptop ban goes into effect these will no doubt be the setting for a summer of passenger high discontent.
I think its fair to say it scared the hell out of me, Norah ODonnell told The Daily Beast.

The CBS This Morning cohost was talking about her recent bout with cancer, not expressing alarm about the strange and unpredictable behavior of Donald Trumps White House, although ODonnell was deeply troubled by an incident last Wednesday.

The day after Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey as the law-enforcement agency continued to investigate the Trump campaigns possible collusion with Russian operatives, the White House barred American journalists from a presidential photo op with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak while permitting a photographer from the Russian propaganda agency TASS to snap away and publish the photos.

Ive covered three White Houses, ODonnell declared. Most White Houses are so concerned about message discipline. Theyre fixated on message discipline. That extends to photographs because of what message that sends around the world. So, the fact that they allowed a Russian state agency to control that was surprising. I think its concerning that the president and the White House trusted TASS over the White House press pool.

When it comes to having the hell scared out of her, however, ODonnell was recalling her reaction last November to her own diagnosis of melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancerbasically a tumor of the cells that make melaninthat kills one victim every hour in the United States.

I come from a family of doctors who talk about skin cancer and prevention all the time, said the 43-year-old ODonnell, who, like the rest of her family, is fair-skinned and freckled, as befits their Irish heritage. I like to keep my personal life private, but if I can help or encourage someone to go get their yearly skin check, then thats what I wanted to do.

The network anchor is the daughter and sibling of Army doctors: internist and tropical-disease specialist Francis ODonnell, a retired colonel who was drafted during the Vietnam War era, and surgeon Mary ODonnell, Norahs younger sister and best friend.

ODonnells mother, also named Norah, was pre-med at New Yorks Fordham University when she met and later married Francis, then at the medical school, and didnt finish her degree.

But she has recently returned to college at age 70 to study microbiology and organic chemistry at the University of Maryland where, her daughter brags, shes maintaining a 4.0 grade average.

Getting a skin check is easy to do, but I let it lapse and didnt go to the dermatologist for two years, said the younger Norah, noting that while growing up with her sister and two brothers in San Antonio, where their dad was stationed at Fort Sam Houston, she spent endless hours by the pool and out of doors, without using sunscreen or other protection.

Skin cancer is the No. 1 diagnosed cancer, and although melanoma is less than 1 percent of those diagnoses, it accounts for a majority of deaths, she saidan estimated 9,730 expected this year alone.

As she spoke by phone Saturday from the nations capital, where she shares an embassy-worthy home with her husband, Washington restaurateur Geoff Tracy, and their three young children, ODonnell was getting ready for an on-air discussion of her medical ordeal with the doctor who cut the malignancy out of her upper back last December, and closed the three-inch-long wound with 25 stitches.

Manhattan dermatologist Elizabeth K. Hales appearance on Mondays installment of CBS This Morning is timed to the release of ODonnells bylined story in Good Housekeeping magazine.

I felt my anxiety building, ODonnell writes, recounting her emotional state after receiving a we need to talk email from Hale. It was the day after last Thanksgiving and ODonnell was in the bedding section of Bloomingdales, taking a break from relatives for some me-time and retail therapy.

Why couldnt this wait at least until Monday? she writes. Tears welled up in my eyes. I sat on one of the stores display beds, took a deep breath and called [Hale]. There wasnt much small talk. Your biopsy came back. Its melanoma, she said. I was stunned. Atop a mountain of high-thread-count linens and fluffy pillows, I suddenly wanted to crawl under the covers and hide.

ODonnell describes telling her three children as the worst part of this whole ordealnever more painful than when her 9-year-old son Henry asked her if she was going to die.

Im absolutely not going to die, she promised. I mean, eventually, I will. But not from this surgery.

Telling the kids was a decision I struggled with, ODonnell writes. My husband, Geoff, and I try to be as open with our children as possible, so it seemed like the right thing to do. But as I left my daughters bedroom that night, I was flooded with guilt. I felt horrible for worrying them. What had I been thinking? But I was scared and, perhaps selfishly, I appreciated their deep concern.

Six months later, ODonnell reports that her skin is beginning to resemble the cratered surface of the moon from repeated follow-up biopsiesalthough, as her dad rightly pointed out, Better craters than cancer.

ODonnell, who must visit her dermatologist for checkups every few months to confirm that shes cancer-free, realizes shes lucky, not only because her melanoma was caught early before it metastasized, but alsounlike some 24 million Americans who stand to lose their health-care insurance under the Trump administrations proposed Obamacare replacement passed by the Republican-led House of Representativesshe has access to the best doctors and medicine that money can buy.

There is a health-care crisis in this country, ODonnell said, noting that she and her family are covered not under CBSs health plan but under the insurance provided by Geoff Tracys 300-worker restaurant chain.

My husband owns a small business, and our insurance premiums have gone up 30 percent in the past year. Who can afford that? said ODonnell, who acknowledges that she can. I have a good job and we are a relatively healthy family. But the system is so broken. The premiums have gone up so much on our personal plan that we just decided to have a higher deductible. We spend $5,000 out of pocket before the insurance kicks in. And often the drugs arent even covered.

Especially disadvantaged, ODonnell said, are patients suffering from chronic illnesses and retired military personnel who must brave long waiting periods at Veterans Administration hospitals before receiving needed treatment.

You do not have access to good doctors unless youre wealthy, ODonnell said.

It goes without saying, of course, that the people likely to be hurt most by the latest iteration of Trumpcare are millions of middle- and working-class folks in the red statesmany of them fair-skinned, and thus susceptible to skin cancerwho voted last November for the president.

Speaking of Trump, ODonnell said that his fledgling presidency, on the positive side, has engaged more people in what happens in Washington and how it affects our lives I have learned more in the last six months about surveillance and how it works, and Ive learned a lot more about unmasking, and how that works, and how that intelligence was sharedthat is, when a spy agency reveals the identities of U.S. citizens whose communications with foreigners (as with fired Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynns chats about sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak) have been intercepted during routine intelligence collections.

What about taping, as the president hinted that hed done in a tweet that was widely interpreted as a threat to dismissed FBI Director Comey, should he dare to contradict Trumps public claim that Comey reassured him three times that he wasnt personally under investigation?

I wasnt around during WatergateIm 43, ODonnell said. Its exposed and generated so much interest because its the most powerful position in the world. The fascination and interest in what President Trump is doing is helping a lot of people learn what goes on and how much power resides in the White House.

ODonnell added: I will say this: Verbal attacks on individual journalists are not as important as an attack on the free press. By not allowing the White House pool into the Oval Office when the Russian foreign minister is there with othersthats serious.

Regarding Trumps frequent assaults on the Fourth Estate, ODonnell said, President Trump is the same as candidate Trump in terms of his actions and ad hominem attacks. Thats his rhetorical skill set. Its to attack the person or journalist who disagrees with him.

A recent example was the presidents April 30 interview with Face the Nation host John Dickerson, during which Trump childishly insulted the venerable Washington public-affairs program, calling it Deface the Nation, and ended up essentially kicking Dickerson out of the Oval Office when the latter pressed him to justify his unsubstantiated claim that his predecessor, Barack Obama, is a bad, sick guy who had wiretapped Trump Tower.

Yet, whatever bad blood, if any, existed between Trump and Dickerson didnt top CBS This Morning from broadcasting the next day from the White House East Room, and getting friendly interviews with press secretary Sean Spicer, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, and even a spur-of-the moment sit-down with Ivanka Trump.

A few minutes after the broadcast ended, the president himself came down to say hello.

We talked to him for a fair amount, ODonnell said, referring to her cohosts Gayle King and Charlie Rose. We had a conversation with him about health care, about foreign policyit was all off the record. Hes interesting to talk to. Hes not threatening in person when you talk to him. But he does plenty of the push-back off the record that he does publicly. Hes always kind of working people over. Hey, I saw you reported this, it should be this way. Hes fighting one hundred percent of the time for his reputation and his message. He really is relentless.
After arresting two men in a drug bust, Ohio police officer Chris Green returned to the East Liverpool Police Department headquarters to fill out the necessary paperwork. When another officer pointed out a white, powdery substance on Greens shirt, he wiped it off without giving it a second thought.

An hour later, he passed out.

Green had was overdosed on fentanyl, an opioid so potent it can be absorbed into the body just by making contact with skin. The drug is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. It is also leading to a steadily increasing rate of overdose-related deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because its cheaper than most other opioids , the drug is often used to cut cocaine and heroin.

Green pulled over Justin Buckle and Cortez Collins after watching them perform what he thought was a drug sale, WKBN 27 reported .

The guys in the car knew they were going to be searched, so they were trying to dispose of the drugs, East Liverpool Police Chief John Lane told The Daily Beast. They threw the bags on the floor and were trying to smash them on the carpet, which broke them open. Powder got all over the inside of the car.

Collins and Buckle were each charged with tampering with evidence, their car was towed, and Green returned to the stationhouse to fill out their arrest forms. Before approaching the car, Green put on gloves and a face mask.

Lane said Green was processing evidence at the station when someone pointed out a substance on his clothing.

Someone says to him, Hey, you got something on your shirt. He wipes it with his hand, an hour later he says, Man, I dont feel so good. And he collapses.

The other officers called an ambulance for Greene, who was given multiple doses of Narcan , emergency nasal spray that blocks the effects of opioids. For their own safety, East Liverpool police officers are required to wear gloves and a face mask when dealing with the substancebut in cases like Greenes, these precautions may not be enough to stave off danger.

You cant just have one guy doing this kind of evidence collection, Lane said. If he gets overcome with something like that and passes out, if theres nobody there, he could just die. We have to have more than one officer on this, and when you have a small department, its hard.

The East Liverpool Police Department has 17 officers, Lane said. Theyve been making opioid-related arrests for years, but fentanyl is a more recentand more deadlyproblem. The small city, which borders West Virginia and Kentucky , had a population of just over 11,195 in 2010. Lane said the surge in fentanyl cases was coming from Cleveland, although officers also regularly monitor the state border to catch potential drug traffickers.

Some police departments have begun carrying Narcan or other naloxone-based medications to reverse opioid overdose side-effects, but the East Liverpool PD officers havent. According to Lane, equipping each police car with Narcan would be costly and complicated, especially since the citys ambulance services are trained to quickly respond to opioid-related calls.

Statewide, 1,155 people unintentionally overdosed on fentanyl in 2015, the most recent year the data was available. There were more fentanyl-related overdoses in 2015 in Ohio than the three previous years combined: in 2014, there were just 503 fentanyl-related overdoses. In 2013, that figure was 84.

East Liverpool police made headlines last year when officers posted pictures on Facebook of a couple passed out in a car on the side of the road, presumably from an opioid-related overdose, with a small child in the back seat.

We feel its necessary to show the other side of this horrible drug. We feel we need to be a voice for the children caught up in this horrible mess, officers wrote on Facebook. This child can't speak for himself but we are hopeful his story can convince another user to think twice about injecting this poison while having a child in their custody.

There were more than a dozen confirmed fentanyl-related overdose deaths in Columbiana County, where East Liverpool is located, in 2016, Salem News reported . The Columbiana County coroners office is still working on compiling a list of total fentanyl-related deaths for last year, a spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

Greene was lucky to survive and is in stable condition as of Sunday, but Lane expressed concern that had the drug gone undetected, it could have killed members of the officers family.

If he goes home and takes his shirt off, his wife, mother, girlfriend, whoever does the laundry could grab it, get it on her hand, and that could kill her, he said.

Lets say he goes home, his kids run up to him, Daddy, daddy! and jump on him to give him a hug. It can get on their body, it could kill them. It can just go on and on.
James Hewitt, the dashing, polo-playing army officer who was Princess Dianas former lover and the man who has long been the subject of rumors concerning Prince Harrys paternity, is fighting for his life at a hospital after suffering a stroke and heart attack.

The 58-year-old former army officer was rushed into intensive care after an emergency operation relating to a pre-existing illness, according to a report in the Sunday Mirror this weekend.

Doctors gave him just a slim chance of survival after he reportedly suffered a cardiac arrest just before the procedure.

However his family is now said to be hopeful he will pull through.

He had a pre-existing illness, then got seriously ill. Suddenly it got very critical and he was rushed to hospital, a source told the Sunday Mirror. It was pretty serious, but hopefully were all OK now. He is recovering.

Hewitt, a dashing household cavalry officer, had a five-year affair with Diana in the 1980s while she was still married to Prince Charles.

In a now-iconic photo, taken during the affair, Diana is pictured presenting the Captain and Subalterns Cup to a flushed Hewitt, who had just led his army polo team to glory at Tidworth, Wiltshire.

However Hewitt earned the nickname the Cad after he sold the story of his affair to the media, and he has repeatedly attempted to sell Dianas letters for millions of dollars.

Diana admitted to interviewer Martin Bashir in 1995 that she had an affair with Hewitt.

Asked by Bashir whether she had been unfaithful with James Hewitt, she said: Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down, before seguing onto her damning remark about her husbands love for Camilla Parker-Bowles: Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.

However it is the persistent rumor that he might be Prince Harrys father, with whom he shares a strong physical resemblance, that has sustained public fascination with Hewitt.

(Harry loyalists argue that the resemblance stems from the fact that Hewitt looks like Dianas brother, Charles Spencer.)

Hewitt has spent much of the past decades denying the allegation, but has often been suspected of quietly stoking the claims for publicity when it has suited him.

For instance, he told the playwright Jon Conway, in a scene portrayed in his play Truth, Lies, Diana that he and Princess Diana began their affair some years before Prince Harry was conceived.

The official line has always been that Hewitt did not meet Diana until her youngest son was already a toddler.

But he told Conway: Diana and I started our relationship more than a year before Harry was born. Now that doesnt prove that I am his father. Its just the inconvenient truth.

However speaking on Australian TV in March, when was asked if he was Harry's biological father, he replied: "No I'm notIt's worse for him, probably, poor chap."
Are we now engaged in a new great civil war?

Are we already slipping into an existential battle to the finish between the legions of an inaugurated king who is denounced as illegitimate by foes, and the legions of the defeated pretender, who is decried as criminal by foes?

Two well-built new histories suggest that the tumult we witness in Washington and across the land, with mass protests and volcanic wordsscorning the president as a despot, calling for a special prosecutor to rescue the Constitutionare in fact tableaus in a drama that has played out repeatedly across the last two thousand years of tragic civil wars.

David Armitages Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, and Sidney Blumenthals Wrestling with His Angel, 1849-1856: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, both paint scenes of discord and despair that would work readily on the TV pundit panels and in the enflamed editorials of this day.

How can you know that you are in a civil war?

Language is a useful guide. Armitage points toward the English poet John Milton who discerned the poetry of civil war with its own characteristics and recurrent figures of speech, images, and themes.

Importantly, signs of contemporary civil war around us are usually so difficult to fix and so dreadful to acknowledge that scholars have found it helpful to study historical civil wars for lessons learned.

Observers during the 17th Century English civil wars, or during the 18th and 19th century French and American civil wars, especially looked to the stories of the Roman civil wars in the 1st Century B.C.E in order to discover past narratives to describe present chaos.

The Roman poet Lucan of the 1st Century B.C.E.a time ripped by civil wars from Dictator Sulla to Emperor Augustus  presented civil wars with a horror that sounds through twenty-one centuries: and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of/ a mighty people/ attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand/ of kin facing kin

The Roman historian Florus of the 2nd Century C.E. chose metaphors of disaster to portray the Roman civil wars: The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire

In the stormy prelude to the English civil wars, pitting the Puritan regicides against the crown, the English poet Samuel Daniel (d. 1619) echoed Lucans construction: Whilst Kin their Kin, brother the brother foyles/ Like Ensignes all against like Ensignes band:/ Bowes against bowes,/ the Crowne against the/ crowne,/ whilst all pretending right, all throwen down.

Notably there is a surprising recurring reluctance by combatants to admit that a conflict with their kin about the legitimacy of the sovereign is, in fact, a civil war.

After 1789, it became useful to invoke the political construction of a revolution in order to aggrandize a rebellion of rival claimants to sovereignty.

For example, fifty years after Yorktown, James Fenimore Cooper argued against the popular notion of an American Revolution: The dispute between England and the United States of America, though not strictly a family quarrel, had many of the features of a civil war

In early 1863, Francis Lieber, Prussian-American professor of law, published a legal code of conduct for war-fighting, defining a civil war carefully, Civil war is a war between two or more portions of a country or state, each contenting for the mastery of the whole, and each claiming to be the legitimate government

Later in 1863, Abraham Lincoln was bold in his Gettysburg Address to assert that what was routinely denounced by the North as a war of rebellion and argued by the South to be a war of secession, was, in fact, a great civil war.

It wasnt until 1907 that the U.S. Congress agreed to call the war of 1861-1865, the Civil War.

What I learn from Armitage and Blumenthal is that the most telling condition that suggests strongly that you are engaged in a civil war is when you find yourself part of a mighty people who are faced with two claims of legitimacy, two crowns that are pretending right two camps with the rage of Caesar and Pompey.

In 1850, the failing Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used his last days to promote his defiant vision to create two presidents of the United States, one for the Norths Abolitionists, one for the Souths slaveholder Ultras, in order to restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government

Ten years later, Calhouns devious protege, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, took up the two presidencies invention and led the Souths slave power into the catastrophe of the Confederacy.

A glance at todays news from Washington suggests that there are a few of the same shadows of civil war in 2017 that the Roman Senate could sense when Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BCE, or when the English Rump Parliament declared itself the supreme power in the nation in 1649, or when South Carolinas Ultras opened fire on Fort Sumter in 1861.

Was the election of 2016 stolen by a foreign power in league with a troublesome prince?

Is the legitimate chief executive the candidate who won the popular vote by 2.8 million ballots?

Is the Constitution in peril of failure because of Russian meddling, Congressional chicanery, an illegitimate sovereign?

In 1856, the troubled Lincoln sat awake pondering the lesson in the Gospel of Mark, And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.

Lucan offers us an even more unsettling lesson after two thousand years of divided houses, What madness was this, O citizens?
As our most important democratic institutions continue to crumble and slip like sand through our fingers, its good to know that at least one time-tested tradition is immune to governmental stupidity/congressional malice/obstruction of justice/light treason/Russian intervention. We speak, of course, of the great American ritual of lining abnormally thin women up like candlepins and judging them on their appearance, poise, and posture. Because while administrations may come and go, ogling women in swimwear and ranking them accordingly is forever.

Talking about feminism and the Miss USA pageant is like discussing whether or not Bernie Sanders would have wonits beside the point, and its not very fun. Grilling pageant contestants on their personal politics is bound to lead to confusion and disappointment, and anyone searching for a truly radical contestant will inevitably find themselves sitting through multiple Cirque du Soleil performances and Julianne Hough monologues before finally figuring out that there isnt a future Gloria Steinem or Angela Davis in the bunch. This isnt to say that pageant contestants cant be feminists or womanists, or that a competition that funds womens futures cant be considered inherently feminist (although the whole judging beautiful women on the basis of their appearance certainly complicates things). But if youre channel surfing on a Sunday night in the hopes of getting your feminist rocks off, youre probably better off skipping the pageant Q&A portion.

This past Sunday, the Miss USA pageant offered a master class in what can go wrong when you ask pageant contestants policy questions that even politicians cant seem to answer. During a 30-second, necessarily superficial opinion round aptly sponsored by theSkimm, Miss Minnesota, Miss Illinois, Miss South Carolina, Miss New Jersey and Miss District of Columbia were asked to speak to some of the most important issues currently facing our nation. While come contestants got off relatively easyhigh teen suicide rates=bad, social media=good but sometimes badMiss D.C. was forced to grapple with whether healthcare in America is a right or a privilege. To be fair, thirty seconds is now the approximate time increment that any American gets to express an opinion before the counter-screaming or commercial break cuts in. Accordingly, Kara McCulloughs problem wasnt brevity, but the upshot of her brief remarks: Im definitely going to say it is a privilege. As a government employee, I am granted healthcare and I see firsthand that to have healthcare, you need to have jobs. That, my friends, is a healthcare mic drop.

McCulloughs controversial comments are a far cry from the stereotypical pageant pleas for peace on earth. The D.C. contestants fiscally conservative fantasy came as a shock to some of McCulloughs fans, who had spent the pageant lead-up praising her on everything from her natural hair to her professional competence. In many ways, McCullough is the perfect pageant contestant for the I really shouldnt be watching this beauty pageant set. The 25-year-old African-American scientist works for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and competes on a platform of supporting women and girls in STEM fields.

McCullough further scandalized viewers when she was asked if she considers herself a feministagain, must we do this? only to respond, As a woman scientist in the government, Id like to transpose the word feminism to equalismI try not to consider myself this die-hard, like, I dont really care about men. Bad news for the handful of Miss USA watchers who wanted to see a misandrist finally take the crown (also bad news for anyone who knows that the literal definition of feminism is the struggle for gender equality). You may disagree with McCullough, but I, for one, have to commend her for actually articulating her beliefs, instead of pulling a page from the Ivanka Trump feminist playbook of random verbs and nouns.

Despite or perhaps due to her polarizing responses, McCullough ended the night as Miss USA. In an interview after the event, she clarified her personal brand of not-feminism, adding, I just want to encourage so many women nationwide to find their passion in any subject possible and understand that nothing is difficult if you really, truly put the work in for it. Of course, millions of women who have put the work in for it only to find themselves discriminated against, undervalued, or passed over may beg to differ.

In so many ways, this years Miss USA competition was one step forward and two steps back. The pageant faces particular scrutiny as a former pet project of our very own President, Donald Trump. From 1996 to 2005, Trump owned Miss Teen USA, Miss Universe, and Miss USAvery presidential. His pageant participation came to an end in 2015, when NBC decided to sever ties on account of the Presidential candidates racist campaign statements against Mexicans. According to TMZ, Trumps stint on the pageant circuit was chock-full of alarming incidents. Allegedly, Trump instituted The Trump Rule. As The Daily Beast previously reported, the ex-reality host would oversee a pre-screening of the Miss USA contestants in revealing outfits and play his own personal game of Hot or Not, dividing the women into groups. Hed then demand that each beauty contestant name another contestant they felt was the most beautiful, and separate the contestants accordingly.

Former Miss California Carrie Prejean described Trumps tactics in her autobiography Still Standing. It became clear that the point of the whole exercise was for him to divide the room between girls he personally found attractive and those he did not, Prejean noted. Many of the girls found this exercise humiliating. Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after he left, devastated to have failed even before the competition really began to impress The Donald, she continued. Most of us respected Donald Trump as an amazing businessman and leaderand certainly I still do. But we naturally felt sorry for the girls who were left in the reject line. Even those of us who were among the chosen couldnt feel very good about itit was as though we had been stripped bare.

Now that the Miss USA competition is no longer under Donald Trumps tiny, grope-y thumb, its easy to interpret aspects of the pageants progress as something of a clap back. For example, theres the fact that this years list of finalists was impressively diverse. Miss Alaska is a member of the Native Tlingit tribe, runner-up Miss New Jersey speaks Hindi and practices traditional Indian dance, and Miss Missouri is the first ever African American contestant to be crowned in her state, to list just a few examples. Additionally, this years pageant featured five immigrants vying for the title. While accurately reflecting the ethnic diversity of our nation might seem like a no-brainer, if last years Miss Teen Universe Becky-gate taught us anything, its that weve still got a long way to go.

And so our newly crowned Miss USAthe second D.C. contestant to take the crown in as many yearscomplicates things, to say the least. Shes undeniably smart and charismatic, with all the glamour and pageant poise of Melania Trump, and all of the hometown pride of someone who actually lives in D.C. At the same time, her personal opinions have quickly elevated her to the status of ultra-conservative shero. On Fox & Friends, columnist Kristin Tate announced that McCulloughs win was a triumph of true diversity. A lot of people making these nasty attacks say that they are feminists, she opined, Yet theyre tearing down this strong woman because, again, she doesnt fit their narrative. The Laura Ingraham-founded LifeZette offered this hot take: The reactions to McCullough's answers showed that the Left has a deep love for diversity, except when it comes to political opinions that dont precisely match theirs.

Naturally, the Twitter debate was heated, with left-leaning users announcing that McCullough was cancelled, and right-wingers mocking the arguably fickle #LovingandTolerantLeft. For every tweet, there was a counter tweet. But as Sunday nights dust settled, we were left with a strange, uncomfortable truth: Trumps America will be sending a conservative Miss USA to represent our deeply divided country at this years Miss Universe.
This weekends episode of Saturday Night Live took aim at its latest target from the Trump administration, introducing its take on deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Because not much is known about Sanders, who filled in for press secretary Sean Spicer at a handful of briefings this week, Aidy Bryant, debuting as Sanders, filled us in: My father is Mike Huckabee. My mother is a big Southern hamburger.

While the sketch later complimented her as more charming than Spicer, it also featured her munching on an apple when the shows mock press corps suggested she take over for the volatile Spicey.

It was a brief introduction to SNLs depiction of Sanders that was arguably overshadowed by Melissa McCarthys return as Spicernot to mention an odyssey through the streets of New York City on a motorized podium and a make-out session with Alec Baldwins Donald Trump.

Still, there are critics calling the shows jokes at her expense for being in poor taste.

I will say this: you guys were mean about Huckabee Sanders, CNNs New Day co-host Chris Cuomo said on the morning program. You were fat-shaming her. You were talking about how she looks and what she wears. I thought it was mean, not funny.

His co-host Alisyn Camerota was less bothered by it, but an eavesdrop of the watercooler conversation in The Daily Beasts New York headquarters Monday morning revealed an overwhelming majority sided with Cuomo, finding the jokes sexist.

Regardless of where you fall on the matter of offense, it is certainly lazy to go after a womans appearance as the sole source of comedy. Surely there are other punchlinesSanders brusque, exasperated demeanor, her poor grasp of the meaning of atrocitiesthat dont mock her body image.

The devils advocate argumentwhich isnt that devilish in this case, to be honestis that the outrage over this is overblown. Re-watching the segment, it didnt seem like the jokes against Sanders were exceptionally mean-spirited, and, aside from the joke about her mother being a Southern hamburger, seemed to steer clear of her weight.

Maybe critics are projecting simply because Sanders was portrayed by SNLs only plus-sized cast member and construed that as fat shaming in some regardwhich would be completely ridiculous.

Regardless, this is hardly the first time SNL has caught flack for perceived sexism. Most egregious was the segment earlier this season featuring Kate McKinnons Kellyanne Conway in a spoof of Fatal Attraction.

That sketch caught far more deserved fire. In it, McKinnons Conway tries to seduce Beck Bennetts take on CNNs Jake Tapper. She threatens to kill him with a knife until he agrees to let her back on TV. Moments later, she falls out of a window and appears to die, only to pull her body parts back together again.

Casting Conway as the Glenn Close character from Fatal Attraction and depicting her death in such a way was considered sexist, unfair, and even a gift to the administration who would now be able to dismiss more valid criticisms of Conway using this as a mean-spirited example.

More, it was a misjudged escalation of what otherwise been a largely successful portrayal of Conway by McKinnon, taking a lazy leap by arguing that Conway would resort to sexual extortion and violence to maintain her TV star status and warping what had been a shrewd skewering of her dogged willingness to defend Trump.

Whats interesting about the current season of SNL is how female-positive it has seemed to be otherwise, stretching back to its Margot Robbie-hosted episode in October that skewered Hollywood sexism with an Actress Roundtable. Its gone after fake male feminists in a hilarious bar sketch, mocked the burden of feminist anthem songs, and, of course, catapulted Kate McKinnon to superstardom with her smartest-woman-in-the-room impression of Hillary Clinton.

So why do we pounce so hard when it comes to these missteps?

Part of it has to do with both our sensitivity to the shows portrayal of real people and our concerns that how theyre portrayed could be used to discount criticism against them if theyre too mean. Then, too, there is the problematic history of using stereotypes about womens bodies and sexuality.

But even the outrage police is inconsistent in its anger. This is the same show that cast John Goodman as Linda Tripp and Will Ferrell as Janet Reno. These castingspossibly some of the cruelest mocking of a womans appearance in the shows historywere so celebrated that Reno herself made a cameo on the show alongside Ferrell dressed in character.

Would that stand today? Most probably wouldnt have blinked an eye if the show had cast Bobby Moynihan as Sanders instead of Bryant. Is it that the Sanders jokes, as they aired on Saturday night, were realistic enough to be considered cruel, whereas a broader portrayal would be cartoonishly removed from reality, and thus less biting? Maybe, but the idea of turning the dial up and going bigger certainly backfired in the case of the Fatal Attraction sketch.

Perhaps the answer is that this conversation itself is the very point of SNL. The fact that, to some eyes, it oversteps boundaries in its comedy is exactly the point. Pushing comedy to an invisible line is the hallmark of a show that relies on shock and awe to provide the kind of laughs that seize the zeitgeist and arguably move the cultural needle. Its not an exact science, and its not going be palatable for everyone.

Its why, especially now, in an age where SNL thrives as much off its sketches going viral the next day as it does airing live on Saturday nights, the fun of watching the series each week has nearly been eclipsed by arguing about it after it airs.

A debate over whether SNL is funny or relevant is perennial. What were seeing now is an entirely new phenomenon from the veteran show: the ability to feed, week after week, an entire news cycle.
David Glomp: Show your local police that you care about them!
Mackmyra releases 10 years old single malt

Swedish whisky producer, Mackmyra has launched its 10 Years Old single malt whisky.

It will be the first Mackmyra whisky with an age statement available to a wider public. Released in Sweden on 5 May, it will also be available in selected export markets.

Ten Years has been matured in ex-bourbon casks as well as new American oak casks that held Oloroso sherry. The whisky is created from the Mackmyra unpeated elegant recipe.

Ten Years has been matured for over 10 years, 50 metres underground at Mackmyras own Bodas mine warehouse. This seasonal whisky will be available in much greater quantities than Moment Tolv, which Mackmyra launched in February this year. In total, there are 20,000 bottles, of which 12,000 were bought by Systembolaget, the Swedish alcohol monopoly retailer. The remaining volume will be sold in Mackmyras prioritised export markets.

Magnus Dandanell, CEO of Mackmyra says: "We are very proud to launch Ten Years. It is a special whisky which we have given a great deal of attention to and so it gives us extra pleasure to be able to share it with so many in the first really large public release of a Mackmyra whisky with an age statement."

Angela D'Orazio, master blender at Mackmyra says: "It is very special to have blended our oldest whisky from four different types of cask. Demand has been great and it will be exciting to see how it will be received."

15 May 2017 - Sam Coyne The Drinks Report, news editor
Two drivers found unconscious behind the wheel by police were arrested on DWI charges in unrelated incidents over the weekend.

College Station police discovered 30-year-old Neril Aguilar slumped over with his car in drive and foot on the brake in the 100 block of Wellborn Road late Friday, according to court documents.

The officer reached through an open car window, put the car in park and performed a field sobriety test on Aguilar, authorities said. He was taken into police custody and, because he's a Mexican national, he was then taken into custody the following day by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At about 7:40 p.m. Saturday, motorists alerted police to a man who was slouched over the steering wheel at the intersection of N. Texas Avenue and E. 23rd Street in Bryan, according to police. The officer tried several times to wake up Manuel Rodriquez, as he noticed a small amount of what turned out to be synthetic marijuana in his lap, court documents state.

Rodriquez, 23, finally awoke when the officer, who was joined by an off-duty officer, unbuckled him and removed him from the vehicle, authorities said. Rodriquez was transported to Chi St. Joseph's ER, where he told police that he had consumed Xanax and smoked synthetic marijuana before getting in the car, the documents state.

In addition to DWI, Rodriguez was charged with possession of a controlled substance under two ounces. Bail had not yet been set Sunday for Rodriquez.

The DWI charge, which is a Class B misdemeanor, is punishable by up to six months in jail, a fine of $2,000 and community service. The drug charge is a state jail felony, which is punishable by 180 days to 2 years in jail and a fine up to $10,000.
Des Moines County Supervisors to grant conservation funding request

The increase will allow Des Moines County Conservation to restore the full-time naturalist position needed to run summer camps.
The science behind the cranberry industry is about to get a significant boost.

The Wisconsin Cranberry Research & Education Foundation announced Monday that it will buy about 155 acres of land in Jackson County to create a USDA-supported cranberry research station.

Work conducted at the facility, the first of its kind in the state, will help develop and refine cranberry growing practices to improve crop yield and quality, support the industrys economic sustainability, minimize environmental impact and determine how to best manage pests and disease, said Bill Wolfe, president of the foundations board. The facility will be located on part of an existing cranberry farm, Robinson Creek Cranberry, about 10 miles south of Black River Falls.

We are thrilled to have identified the site for a world-class cranberry research station for Wisconsin, Wolfe said. This is a major milestone in a long-term project that will immensely benefit current and future Wisconsin cranberry growers and the industry as a whole.

Wisconsin grows 65 percent of the U.S. cranberry crop. In 2016, state growers produced 600 million pounds of cranberries on 21,000 acres. The $1 billion industry in the state also accounted for about 4,000 jobs, according to the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association in Wisconsin Rapids.

The $1.5 million research station is being paid for through a public-private partnership that includes $750,000 in private funds and $650,000 from the USDAs Agricultural Research Service. The property will include 30 acres of production cranberry beds to generate revenue to help support research, along with another five acres of beds for further research studies by faculty at UW-Madison and the USDA.

The project, scheduled for completion by late 2018, will include renovating cranberry beds and constructing a small work station building with offices for researchers, a locker room with showers, and dry storage to prepare research samples for shipment to UW-Madison for further study.

Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of Massachusetts have similar research facilities, but the larger Wisconsin station will allow for more in-depth studies on issues like water use and quality, root growth and development, nutrients and damage control, said Tom Lochner, executive director of the growers association.

For cranberry research in the state its a huge step forward. This will allow us to really conduct a lot of research that isnt currently being done, Lochner said. This (facility) will ensure necessary research in our growing conditions in order to maintain our leadership position, significant economic impact and sustainable and progressive agricultural practices in Wisconsin.

Robinson Creek Cranberry was founded in the 1930s and is owned by Jim Bible, who will continue to grow cranberries on other properties for Ocean Spray Cooperative.
The story of an Australian man's romantic proposal to his girlfriend has gone viral after he managed to hide the engagement ring under her nose for over a year.

Literally.

Terry and Ann (who asked to be identified by only their first names) are from Tasmania, Australia.

Terry explained it all started when he made Ann a wooden necklace as a gift for their one-year anniversary, which she wore practically every day for a year and a half.

"I had always loved the idea of giving someone a gift where they didn't know its true value until years later," Terry wrote in a statement sent to SFGATE.

Terry revealed the necklace's hidden surprise during a trip to Smoo Cave in Scotland. He asked to borrow Ann's necklace to photograph it separately near the cave. That's when he snuck away and carefully cut a seal on the necklace with a small knife.

"Once we got to the cave, I set up my camera on a timer and ran into the frame for the nice photo of the two of us, then said 'Oh, I'd better give you the necklace back.'"

Terry got down on one knee and broke open the necklace to reveal the ring inside.

Ann's reaction was caught on camera, as she jumped into her new fiance's arms. But after the initial shock and excitement wore off, Ann told Terry what we're all thinking: "Wait ... it's been in there the entire time? I could have lost it you f---ing idiot!"

And in fact, Terry said that nearly happened. Not once, but twice.

"There were some occasions where I was really worried," Terry said. "At one point, I thought she was going to trade it with a blacksmith at a market (the blacksmith loved the necklace, and she loved the blacksmith's work), but luckily I didn't need to crash tackle her."

There was another close call at the airport when the necklace set off a warning at security.

"I hadn't thought about the fact that she might be asked to put it through the X-ray, which could have very quickly turned into an airport security proposal!"

Fortunately, the surprise wasn't spoiled and everything went as Terry planned at Smoo Cave. The cave is thought to be named after the Norse word for "hiding place," which Terry believes he should get "extra points for."

Terry posted the story of their engagement to YouTube. As of Sunday evening, the video had racked up nearly 1.5 million views.
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If only the R after Erin Stewarts name doubled as a registered trademark symbol.

The New Britain mayor called out fellow 30-something Republican Tim Herbst on Facebook recently over the gubernatorial hopefuls choice of campaign slogan: A New Generation of Leadership.

Stealing my slogan? Nice, Stewart posted on Herbsts wall last Wednesday night.

During Stewarts first run for mayor of the Hardware City in 2013, her slogan was a a new generation of leadership. The second-generation mayor referenced it in January, when she announced she was seeking a third term. Stewarts name has also been linked to statewide office.

Herbst, 36, who is forgoing a re-election bid as Trumbulls first selectman to concentrate on the governors race, apparently didnt get the memo.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery I suppose. But its still a cheap shot, Herbst responded, along with a thinking face emoji. Erin (Stewart), I honestly didnt know it was your slogan. I guess youre going to have to get in (the race) so I get a new one.

Herbst signed his response with a wink and a kiss emojis, eliciting this comeback from Stewart.

Your worst nightmare.

Fallout between one-time running mates

There will be no John McKinney-Dave Walker reunion tour.

Not after Walkers exploratory committee for governor sent out a recent fundraising appeal to McKinneys entire contributor list from 2014, when the GOP duo unsuccessfully joined forces as running mates for governor (McKinney) and lieutenant governor (Walker).

No, its shades of Simon and Garfunkel.

McKinney, the former state Senate minority leader from Fairfield, is entertaining a bid for governor, too.

Ive been in Connecticut politics most of my life, McKinney said Monday. I know Dave hasnt lived in Connecticut very long. I think he only lives heres part-time now. To solicit my donors without any approval on my part, although it may be legal, it certainly is not good decorum. Quite frankly, Im quite shocked and disappointed that he did that.

Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who has made Bridgeport his adopted home, said he tried to give McKinney a heads-up.

Ive been trying to reach John for three weeks without success, Walker said. Theres nothing in it that (letter) he would object to. I think Johns a very good man, but hes better positioned for federal office than governor. I dont expect for John to run.

In 2014, the pair qualified for $1.4 million in public financing for the GOP primaries for governor and lieutenant governor after pooling their contributions to get to $250,000. McKinney lost to Tom Foley in governor primary, while Walker finished third in a tight primary for lieutenant governor.

Murphy uses same fundraising guru as Bernie

Chris Murphy is attempting to pick right up where Bernie Sanders left off.

Murphys Senate colleague wrote the book last year on bundling small campaign contributions into a vaunted war chest, with funnyman Larry David immortalizing the $27 average donation during his Saturday Night Live impersonations of the curmudgeonly Hillary Clinton rival.

Murphy, who is up for re-election in 2018 and whose name is being bandied about as a 2020 presidential dark horse, is using the same D.C. fundraising powerhouse that helped Sanders.

Murphys campaign paid $391,000 to Revolution Messaging during the first three months of this year, filings with the Federal Election Commission show. The return on investment was $3 million in contributions for the quarter, with the average being less than $100. Murphys association with the firm actually predates that of Sanders.

Sanders former digital fundraising director, Tim Tagaris, is a partner in the firm and former Connecticut political operative. He ran the digital operation of Ned Lamonts 2006 insurgency campaign against Sen. Joe Lieberman, when the Greenwich upstart upset Lieberman in the Democratic primary, but lost the general election to the independent Lieberman. He was digital director of then-Sen. Chris Dodds 2008 presidential campaign and has worked for Murphy in the past.

nvigdor@hearstmediact.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy

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My work takes me all over the world, and every time someone tells me how lucky I am to travel I want to smack them square in the mouth.

On the other hand, when people grouse about how awful air travel has become I want to smack them in the mouth. One could infer that I enjoy smacking people in the mouth, but thats not the case; heck Ive seen travel turn nuns into maniacs, but as torturous as air travel has become, it beats swinging a pickaxe for a living. At the risk of sounding like Hobo, the character in Slaughter House Five who, after being stuffed into an overcrowded boxcar headed for the prison camp, keeps repeating, this aint so bad until he arrives at the slaughterhouse dead. As bad as travel can be, a lot of it can be readily avoided.

Travel can be an enjoyable way to spend your time or it can be a Kafkaesque nightmare. To a large degree we can control which of these extreme our trip will be. Surprised? Dont be; not only is it possible to greatly reduce your risk of travel hassles, its relatively easy to do.

Avoiding travel hassles starts with understanding what you are buying and the conditions placed on it.

Be nice.

No one is going to go above and beyond to help you -- whether at the airport or a hotel or on a reservation line -- if you start off making demands and snotty remarks. You are asking for help. Ask in a professional and polite manner most people associated with your travel plans will do their best to help you out.

Related: 11 Qualities of Nice People Who Get Ahead

Recognize the risk of bargain travel sites.

Years ago, I and a friend of mine I worked with were going to the same trade show in Dallas. She called me and suggested that I stay at the same hotel in downtown Dallas where she and her boss were staying. She had procured, through a travel cheap site, a room for an amazing $35.

I bought in and arrived (too late to get another hotel) at a skid row hotel populated by ex-cons and prostitutes. The room was so filthy that I took out the trash bag that I routinely pack (long story) and placed my bags in it to prevent leaving with bed bugs. The bathroom was so filthy I wouldnt enter it for ANY purpose, and the bed...well lets just say that Im pretty sure that Jack Ruby slept on those sheets.

Most bargain sites dont lead to that kind of catastrophe, in fact most have terrific deals, but you need to understand that if you want a price break theres always a catch - a less than desirable flight, a longer layover, a disappointing room or something else that makes the deal so cheap.

There is always a trade off between price and quality and only a fool ignores that. Sites that offer a deal that seems too good to be true might just be that.

Related: Screaming Babies on a Plane? This Couple's Solution is a Poignant Lesson in Travel Etiquette.

Understand your fare and room rates.

Weve seen the ugly videos of passengers being removed from planes. The people who bought the ticket traded a guaranteed seat for a reduced price. When you see a ridiculously low price on a major airline with some restrictions apply in small print, for the love of all thats holy READ the small print.

If you paid for a bargain seat theres a good chance that you may have agreed to give up your seat should the airline require you to do so. Most of us dont read that small print and while they probably wont, airlines could add things like, passenger agrees to clean the bathroom before deplaning or passenger agrees to allow the airline to harvest the passengers organs and sell them on Craigslist.

The point is, whether it be an airline ticket or a trombone, you had better understand the whats and wherefores of the deal.

Related: United Airlines Passenger Dragged Off Plane by Airport Employees

Know what youre buying

From airlines, to rental cars, to hotels, one of the most important things you can do to save yourself from hassle is to know terms and conditions and the change and refund policies of the company you are dealing with.

For example, you might be better served buying a more expensive ticket that doesnt explicitly say that airport thugs are allowed to punch you repeatedly in the head before dragging you off the plane. If you are too lazy (as I am) to read all the small print than ask the company representatives flat out, about the things that most concern you.

Related: 'Dear Mr. Human': United Airlines Suffers Another Embarrassing Customer Service Blunder

Do your due diligence.

There are a host of resources at your disposal online from Yelp to the Better Business Bureau to the bedbug registry (no Im not joking). Before booking with an unfamiliar hotel, airline, car rental, or cruise-line spend some time researching them. Understand that all companies have a small percentage of disgruntled and unreasonable customers who will gripe about anything, but researching your travel plans is the strongest way of avoiding a hassle.

Related: Considering Escaping the U.S.? Here Are Some Deals You Can't Miss.

Use website, behave like a grown up and check-in online.

Most airlines and hotels not only allow you to check-in up to 24 in advance, in general they allow you to choose your seat and your room. If you are worried about missing out on a potential upgrade, don't be; most hotels and airlines put you on the upgrade list irrespective of when you check-in and if you are eligible you will be upgraded even if you have an assigned seat or room.

No one is going to go above and beyond to help you whether at the airport or a hotel or on a reservation lineif start off making demands and snotty remarks. You are asking for help, and if you ask in a professional and polite manner most people associated with your travel plans will do their best to help you out.

Sites that offer a deal that seems too good to be true might just be that. Years ago a friend of mine who used to work with me and I were going to the same trade show in Dallas. She called me and suggested that I stay at the same hotel in downtown Dallas where she and her boss. She had procured, through a travel cheap site, a room for an amazing $35. I bought in and arrived (too late to get another hotel) at a skid row hotel populated by ex-cons and prostitutes. The room was so filthy that I took out the trash bag that I routinely pack (long story) and placed my bags in it to prevent leaving with bed bugs. The bathroom was so filthy I wouldnt enter it for ANY purpose, and the bed...well lets just that Im pretty sure that Jack Ruby slept on those sheets. Most bargain sites dont lead to that kind of catastrophe, in fact most have terrific deals, but you need to understand that if you want a price break theres always a catcha less than desirable flight, a longer layover, a disappointing room, or something else that makes the deal so cheap. There is always a trade off between price and quality and only a fool ignores that.

Weve seen the videos of passengers being removed from planes and theyre ugly (the video, I leave it to you to judge the attractiveness of the passengers), but the people who bought the ticket traded a guaranteed seat for a reduced price. When you see a ridiculously low price on a major airline with some restrictions apply in small print, for the love of all thats holy READ the small print. If you paid for a bargain seat theres a good chance that you may have agreed to give up your seat should the airline require you to do so. Most of us dont read that small print and at some while they probably wont, airlines could add things like, passenger agrees to clean the bathroom before deplaning or passenger agrees to allow the airline to harvest the passengers organs and sell them on Craigslist and within some limits the law will uphold the airlines right to do so. The point is, whether it be an airline ticket or a trombone, you had better understand the whats and wherefores of the deal.

From airlines, to rental cars, to hotels, one of the most important things you can do to save yourself from hassle is to know terms and conditions and the change and refund policies of the company you are dealing with. For example, you might be better served buying a more expensive ticket that doesnt explicitly say that airport thugs are allowed to punch you repeatedly in the head before dragging you off the plane. If you are too lazy (as I am) to read all the small print than ask the company representatives flat out, about the things that most concern you. Signing up for customer loyalty programs is a good way to ensure a positive encourage

There are a host of resources at your disposal online from Yelp to the Better Business Bureau to the bedbug registry (no Im not joking). Before booking with an unfamiliar hotel, airline, car rental, or cruise-line spend some time researching them. Understand that all companies have a small percentage of disgruntled and unreasonable customers who will gripe about anything, but researching your travel plans is the strongest way of avoiding a hassle.

Check-in onlineMost airlines and hotels not only allow you to check-in up to 24 in advance in general they allow you to choose your seat and your room. If you are worried about missing out on a potential upgrade, don't be; most hotels and airlines put you on the upgrade list irrespective of when you check-in and if you are eligible you will be upgraded even if you have an assigned seat or room.

Related:

Business Travel Really Doesn't Have to be Awful

These 10 Countries Will See the Most Business Travelers in the Next Decade

3 Ways to Bootstrap Your Startup's Business Travel Budget



Copyright 2017 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
NORWALK  A Norwalk man has been charged with cruelty to persons after, police said, two young children in his care were found to be severely malnourished and bruised.

Police charged Calvin Brady, 39, of Meadow Street, with two counts each of cruelty to persons, third-degree assault, risk of injury to minor, and tampering with a witness. His bond was set at $50,000 and he was given a court date of May 12.

According to court records, Brady is the grandfather of the 2-year-old boy and 4-year-old girl.

The childrens mother, who lives in Akron, Ohio, told police that she had had some financial issues and had left her two children in Bradys care since December 2015. Police said that Brady was the childrens primary caretaker.

When the woman came from Ohio to retrieve the children in March, Brady did not want to return the children to their mother, court records stated.

Assisted by Norwalk police, and with a court order in hand, she did retrieve her children in March.

Once back in Ohio, police said, she saw marks and bruises on the children and an underweight appearance, so she brought them to a hospital.

According to court records, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families received a call from a social worker at Akron Childrens Hospital, who reported suspected abuse and neglect of the children.

The 4-year-old was admitted to the hospital in Akron and was treated for child maltreatment, bruising and failure to thrive, according to court records.

Court records state that an Ohio doctor noted that the child dropped from the 56th percentile in weight to the 13th percentile. The child gained significant weight while hospitalized.

The 2-year-old exhibited numerous bruises, as well as signs of malnutrition including abdominal distention, court records stated.

The case in Norwalk was investigated by the Special Victims Unit. Detective Tim Marquis said that the investigation included a review of the childrens hospital records.

According to court records, during a police interview, Brady said that his daughter contacted him in September 2015 and asked him to care for the two children while she got a home and a job.

Brady was questioned about the bruises on both children and reportedly told police that the 2-year-old falls a lot and that the 4-year-old did not have any bruises that he was aware of, court records state.

The mother told police that while driving back to Ohio, she noticed makeup covering bruises on the 2-year-olds abdomen.

Brady reportedly told police that the two children had been fed three meals a day and he did not know why they appeared malnourished.

A warrant for Bradys arrest was obtained and on Thursday, he turned himself in at Norwalk police headquarters.

According to police, Bradys own 5-year-old child was also living in the home, and that child appeared to be healthy.

Brady was arraigned at Norwalk Superior Court on Friday. He posted bond and was given a court date of June 28.
A Sun Prairie student won an award Sunday after the high school's jazz band competed in a national competition.

The Sun Prairie High School Jazz Ensemble I joined 14 other bands from across the country in the "Essentially Ellington" competition. The event, which ran from Thursday through Saturday, brought aspiring musicians together in New York City to celebrate their shared passion and compete against each other.

At the end of the week, Bennett LeClaire won an individual award for outstanding tenor saxophone performance, while Dillon Crawford earned an honorable mention for the instrument. Both are juniors.

This year was the fifth year in a row that Sun Prairie High School was invited to "Essentially Ellington" and the 11th time overall since 1998.

Judges selected the 15 finalists from a group of nearly 100 high schools hoping to take part in the contest, several of which are schools dedicated to performing arts.

As a finalist, the Sun Prairie High School will receive $500 to improve its jazz education program.

[Editor's note: This story has been updated since it was originally published to note that LeClaire and Crawford are both juniors.]
It takes a while for it to sink in that you are truly a high school graduate.

A few minutes after Northwest High Schools commencement Sunday, Lauren Gebhardt was asked what it felt like to be a graduate.

Oh my gosh. Its so weird, said Gebhardt, who then repeated its so weird two more times. I cant even describe the feeling. Its a little unreal, she said.

It seems like the last four years have flown past in one year, she said.

When will she fully realize shes a high school graduate?

I think when I wake up tomorrow morning, she said. Shell awaken and think, Whoa. Im done with high school. Im graduated. Im going to college soon.

Gebhardt, like most of the 174 people who graduated Sunday, had a busy weekend. She went to at least 10 graduation parties Saturday and had seven on tap for Sunday. So its not certain that she will be awake Monday morning.

For Gebhardt, the best part of high school was just building relationships with people  with my classmates, with my teachers, with the administration. Northwest has been a really, really great place to build relationships, and they really, really care about you.

Gebhardt wasnt the only one who had trouble grasping the fact that high school was over.

Im very happy that Ive graduated, but Im kind of in a daze right now. It still hasnt set in, said Daniel Velasquez.

The end of commencement left Keytan Lemburg in a very good mood.

Im ecstatic. Im not sure about what the future holds but I think its going to be great because Ive got all these people supporting me, he said. Im going to use everything Ive learned from Northwest to apply my skills in the future.

In the middle of the ceremony at Rosencrants Gymnasium, each graduate took a red rose back to his or her mother. The fact that it was Mothers Day probably made that presentation a little more emotional. A number of mothers were seen shedding tears after the hug. As they parted, some graduates and mothers had noses as red as the rose.

Graduation left Mariah Gingrich feeling a little nervous  excited but a little nervous. She gave credit to the Northwest teachers, who were very supportive, and her dad, because he pushed me a lot.

The graduating class included twin brothers Andrew and Arik Streck. Andrew Streck liked the fact that Northwest has so many activities for students. He was in band, wind ensemble and marching band. He shot trap, and he was in FFA.

Asked what its like to have a twin, Arik Streck said, You always have a friend to go to. Youre never left out. Hes just always there for you.

Samantha Matt is looking forward to going back to Baton Rouge, La., on Tuesday. I moved here this year because of a flood, said Matt, who stayed with an aunt and uncle in Grand Island.

Paige Shubert said she was pretty proud to be a high school graduate, to be honest. Shubert is dyslexic. So schools really hard. But she worked hard to accomplish her goal.

During the ceremony, one of the graduates amused the audience by using a selfie stick to take a picture of himself, with his fellow graduates seated behind him.

In addition to the 174 graduates, the program also listed five foreign exchange students.

Graduate addresses were presented by Sophia Mittelstaedt, Matthew Fredricks, Kaylee Gibson and Mitch Fisher.

Gibson said after attending so many graduation ceremonies in the past, it was nice for the students to be the ones wearing caps and gowns. Never in the past have we been the ones that get to relax while the rest of the band plays Pomp and Circumstance for 15 minutes straight, Gibson said.

Mittelstaedt said, We are a generation of people who arent afraid to dream big, and do things no one has done before. Maybe we will be the first generation of doctors and farmers on Mars. We are a group of students, of people, who are going to walk out these doors, eat some cake, and take over the world. We have no limits when it comes to our goals.

In his talk, Fisher said Fritz Mountford of Hastings College said something to my choir class that has always stuck with me, Make a dent in the world. I live by this saying every day. At least I try to.

Fisher also said we must find purpose in our actions before we can wholeheartedly commit to something. I believe it is when we fall in love with our everyday routine that we discover true happiness, he said.
The Dane County Sheriffs Office said Monday that detectives have spoken with a person of interest already in custody on unrelated charges in Saturdays hit-and-run that killed a pedestrian in the town of Westport.

The 30-year-old victim, who has not yet been named by authorities, had a last known address in Waunakee and was found at 11:55 p.m. Saturday on or along the southbound lanes of Highway 113 just south of Highway M in the town of Westport, according to the Sheriffs Office.

The person of interest was already in the Dane County Jail on a probation hold, but no one has been officially charged, said Elise Schaffer, a spokeswoman for the Sheriffs Office.

We believe (the victim) was a pedestrian, Schaffer said, saying his injuries were consistent with a pedestrian being hit by a vehicle.

She encouraged anyone with information or tips to call the Sheriffs Office at 608-284-6900.

The investigation is still at the early stage and even small amounts of information can be crucial to making an arrest, Schaffer said.

She added the Dane County Medical Examiners Office had completed an autopsy, and the name of the victim and cause of death will be released later Monday.

It was not clear if the man was walking alongside or in the roadway or trying to cross the highway, Schaffer said.

The Sheriffs Office is searching for a vehicle, which could be gray, silver or tan, that may have damage to the front end near the headlights. Authorities believe the driver had been traveling south on Highway 113 from Highway M toward Northport Drive in Madison.

Investigators are also reviewing surveillance footage from a nearby Kwik Trip store on Highway M about a quarter-mile south of Highway 113. A clerk at the convenience store said Sunday that detectives had asked to review the gas stations surveillance footage from between 11:30 p.m. and midnight.
The week of May 14-20, is National Prevention Week. It is an annual health observance dedicated to increasing the prevention of substance use and promotion of mental health. It is put on by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). This years theme is Making Each Day Count. This theme highlights the important role that individuals and communities alike have in helping people lead healthy, productive lives and in raising awareness about the importance of substance use prevention and promotion of mental health.

The cost of underage drinking to Nebraska in 2013 was approximately $0.3 billion. These include medical costs of $48.6 million, work lost costs of $76 million and pain and suffering costs of $199.7 million. A lot of these costs can be alleviated if we put money up front-for prevention.

On Saturday, May 20, the Grand Island Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition, along with Tobacco Free Hall County, are hosting a family fun run (or walk), whichever you choose. Outrun Addiction, Finish with Hope is designed to create awareness for addiction to tobacco and/or other substances. Proceeds will go to develop a scholarship at CCC for their Drug and Alcohol Counseling program and prevention services in Hall County. Go to www.tobaccofreehallcounty.net for more information.

If you would like more information about quitting tobacco or youth substance abuse prevention, call Katie or Michelle at (308) 385-5520.
Assailants shot a person and assaulted another during a home invasion in Sun Prairie on Saturday, the Sun Prairie Police Department said.

The invaders entered a home on the 1000 block of Andrews Drive around 10:20 p.m. and ordered the residents to the ground at gunpoint, police Sgt. Brian Luckus said. The person who was shot had non life-threatening injuries, was brought to a hospital and released, Luckus said. The other victim was injured in the invasion, he said.

The assailants left before police arrived, Luckus said. Sun Prairie police Sgt. Jason Lefeber said at least three people were involved in the break-in, and they demanded money.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Sun Prairie Police at 608-837-7336 or anonymously at 608-837-6300.
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Linkedin Siauw Tiong Djin (The Jakarta Post) Melbourne  Mon, May 15, 2017 14:37 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0dc29e 3 Opinion democracy,ahok,basuki-tjahaja-purnama,Joko-Widodo,Indonesian-politics Free

Supporters of outgoing Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama could not hold back their tears. The international community was also shocked. The verdict from five-judge panel exceeded the demand from the prosecutors, who had earlier dropped the blasphemy charges.

Ahok, who had left remarkable legacies for Jakarta and is loved by many  judging from the numbers of citizens, flowers, and balloons flooding the City Hall, was brought immediately to Cipinang detention center. Coincidentally, the place served as a home for many political prisoners during New Order era, most notably Col. Latief, former Air Force chief of staff Omar Dhani, and former vice prime minister Soebandrio.

If Ahoks appeal fails, he will stay behind bars for two years. The sentence is relatively short compared to decades that the above figures had to bear.

But they all share the same fate: A victim of politics.

If one scrutinizes the judicial process of these four figures objectively, one can conclude there was a lack of legal basis and somewhat flawed process behind the sentencing.

Last Tuesday, Indonesia failed to live up to its claim as a country which upholds the rule of law. A country where someone can enjoy freedom until proven guilty according to the law.

Latief, Omar Dhani, and Soebandrio were declared guilty for participating in the attempted coup dubbed the September 30 Movement. The coup was said to aim to replace the Pancasila state ideology with communism. Yet the three figures were among the most loyal to then president Sukarno. The facts in court showed that the coups objective was to protect Sukarno. There was no proof that the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was involved. However they were declared guilty and sentenced harshly  a life sentence for Latief and death for Omar and Soebandrio.

Ahok was found guilty of committing blasphemy by the panel of judges, even though there was no evidence that the governor had committed blasphemy. Some of the witnesses had even allegedly fabricated their testimonies. Just as it was in the 1960s, facts and legal logics did not apply.

Ahok said he learned the meaning of the Quranic verse Al Maidah:51 from former president Abdurrahman Gus Dur Wahid, who said a governor is a servant to the people instead of a leader. Gus Dur, who chaired the prominent Islamic organization Nahdatul Ulama, surely had the qualification to interpret the verse, and it was improbable that someone like Gus Dur would commit blasphemy against Islam. Anyone who follows Ahok closely before and after he became Jakarta Governor would swear that he would not have the heart to commit blasphemy against Islam.

However, between the two proceedings, 52 years apart, there was a stark difference.

Latief, Omar, and Soebandrio were put through legal theatrics in which executive bodies led by second president Soeharto directly played a role in determining the decision of the judiciary  the Extraordinary Military Court or the Military Supreme Court.

In Ahoks case, there were differing opinions among the judiciary, between the prosecutors and judges, and also in the executive.

Was there legal theatrics or just a political power play in all levels of government?

A series of events and the result of the Jakarta gubernatorial election and the verdict show a political power play is brewing in Indonesia.

Ahok is not only a double minority  a Christian of Chinese descent, he is also a breakthrough in the decades-old rotten political system. Ahok shows that with enough commitment and courage, corruption can be stopped to provide greater development for the people.

This anti-corruption sentiment burden many key players in the government and business elites, regardless of their ethnicities.

It is no wonder that Ahok has become a common enemy of old players in Indonesian politics. Money politics, a racially and religiously charged campaign, and the exploitation of mosques had resulted in victory for Ahoks rival.

Is it possible that the old forces only want to stop Ahok? It seems that their final objective is further than City Hall; the Presidential Palaces very own Joko Jokowi Widodo, who just like Ahok has stood against the system.

With Ahok and Jokowis popularity, an open rivalry is hard to win. The old forces then opt to exploit the increasingly radical notion of Islam in the country.

In this context, the judges were hiding behind an independent judiciary, while they support this anti-Ahok force. This is a message of political terror for everyone brave enough to stand up against corruption, a message that their efforts can bring them behind bars.

While the displayed target of the series of rallies was Ahok, it is obvious for the Jokowi administration that an underground radical wave can be switched on to turn against him.

More than half a century ago, Soeharto used the pure implementation of 1945 Constitution and Pancasila to justify bringing down Sukarno and left-wing politics. Now Jokowi must face those who want to bring down the unitary state of the republic and Pancasila.

Before he becomes a victim of this political power play like Ahok, Jokowi must move swiftly to save Indonesia from this destructive force, by upholding the rule of law and democracy at least until the 2019 presidential election.

Only then will the old forces crumble down, providing space for a fresh, accountable government we deserve.

***

The writer, who chairs the Herb Feith Foundation, received his PhD in political science from Monash University, Melbourne.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
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Linkedin EDITORIAL (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 09:26 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0c5532 4 Editorial China,#Editorial,Jokowi-administration,Joko-Widodo,infrastructure-development Free

Even though Chinas One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative is still in the process of developing as a coherent blueprint of an interconnected international infrastructure program, President Joko Jokowi Widodos participation in the first OBOR summit in Beijing on Sunday and Monday still augurs well for our national interests.



Of more strategic importance is that the OBOR agenda of boosting connectivity between mainland China and 65 countries in Asia and Europe by building infrastructure ties (rail, roads, seaports) fits well with the ambitious infrastructure development that has become the top priority program of the Jokowi government.



Since President Xi Jinping launched the OBOR initiative in late 2013, the Chinese government has put its money where its mouth is, committing more than US$200 billion in financing resources through Chinas state banks, $100 billion through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and $50 billion through the Silk Road Infrastructure Fund.



A survey by the Economist Corporate Network in early 2016 concluded that from a geographic point of view, Indonesia stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries among ASEAN economies.



But even though OBOR is expected to help draw the region together by creating infrastructure-related investment opportunities, China needs to nurture better understanding of its intentions and its vision for the OBOR initiative while it tries to flex its economic muscle as a regional and global power to prevent unnecessary suspicions about its geopolitical ambition.



As China, the worlds second-largest economy, is vying for influence, it has become the largest trading partner and largest foreign investor in Indonesia, Southeast Asias largest economy.



We badly need the huge infrastructure spending that China is bringing. China Development Bank in late 2015 committed $3 billion in 10-year loans to three state banks  Mandiri, BNI and BRI  mostly for financing infrastructure projects such as power generation, light-rail transportation and airport expansion. In addition, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, one of the worlds largest banks, has also pledged $30 billion in loan commitments to Indonesias infrastructure sector.



Indeed, such long-term loans come with certain conditions: the loans should be extended to Indonesian state companies, which tie up with Chinas companies in building infrastructure; and about 30 percent of the total loans should be extended in yuan to strengthen the internationalization of the renminbi.



We dont see any problems with such loans as long as the engineering, procurement and construction works are all supervised by capable, independent engineering consultants. Moreover, the renminbi has become the fifth most-widely used currency in the world after the United States dollar, the euro, pound sterling and yen.



We should not be inordinately paranoid about the inflow of Chinas highly trained and skilled workers. Certainly, the construction of so many big infrastructure projects funded by Chinese banks and constructed by Chinese companies will initially bring in large numbers of workers from China as the contractors are tied to a fixed schedule for project completion. However, the workers will leave after the completion of their projects.
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Linkedin Richard Horstman (The Jakarta Post) Ubud, Bali  Mon, May 15, 2017 13:02 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d708e 3 Art & Culture art-and-culture,exhibition,ARTJOG2017,contemporary-art,Yogya,Jogja-Art-Weeks Free

A milestone in Indonesian art will be celebrated in May during the Grand Opening of ART|JOG|10, marking a decade in the ART|JOG journey, and beginning on May 19 at the Jogja National Museum (JNM).

Themed Changing Perspective, the fair will exhibit emerging and established artists side-by-side, while featuring some of Indonesias hottest contemporary talents.

An initiative born from the collective will of the Yogyakarta art community, ART|JOGs significance is its model: a supporting and promotional platform for artists, not galleries, introducing fresh names to the market. It is the vision of CEO and co-founder Heri Pemad, who, through his support of the local art scene starting some 20 years ago, developed strong relationships of trust within the community.

ART|JOG has grown quickly since 2008, when it was the Jogja Art Fair [JAF]. From 2009, we included curators, selected special themes and artists, and commissioned artists to remodel the facade of the building, originally Taman Budaya Yogyakarta, Heri said.

Wanting to create an international event, in 2010 we renamed it ART|JOG.

A feature of ArtJog 10 2017: Meet The Artist Tour, last year with Joko Pekik(Courtesy ArtJog10/File)

We attracted more and more international visitors in 2011 due to increasingly widespread publication, and began inviting international artists for special presentations. From 2012, our curatorial themes evolved. In short, ART|JOG has grown along with the development of the art world itself, because it has presented the development of artwork from Indonesia and the world, he added.

With a keen eye for artists needs, Pemad launched Heri Pemad Art Management (HPAM) in 2004, an organization that evolved out of his personalized art services. HPAM has since played a defining role in the development of Indonesian contemporary art. This year ART|JOG|10 will exhibit over 120 artworks comprising two-and three-dimensional works, installations, videos, site-specific objects and performances.

ART|JOG is the anchor event for the Jogja Art Weeks, a month-long festival of openings and events around the Yogyakarta Special Regency, which has developed into an art and cultural tourism boon, attracting national and international art lovers, industry insiders and collectors.

ArtJog 10 Curator Bambang (Courtesy ArtJog10/File)

"We selected 73 national and international artists this year via our Open Call Application, whether by invitation or those who self-applied," said ART|JOG|10 co-curator Ignatia Nilu. Our selection process is not only based on the compatibility between the artwork and curatorial concept, but also the presentation method and the freshness of the artistic concept.

The Open Call program is an unsurpassed way to scout the best young talents.

ART|JOG|10s main program includes the exhibition by artists from Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, England, the United States and Australia. Some of the local names showing are Angki Purbandono in collaboration with Nicholas Saputra, Agus Suwage, I Nyoman Masriadi, Tromarama and Agan Harahap.

Read also: Borobudur art exhibition features works by Balinese artists

This years commissioned works are by Wedhar Riyadi, a young Yogyakarta artist, presenting his balloons installation that is decorated with eye icons, transforming the main facade of JNM.

Through the theme, Changing Perspectives: The Challenge for The Artist, we dare the artists to take a fresh look at how they work from various point of views, said Bambang "Toko" Witjaksono of the curatorial team. Not only from a technical aspect, but also the interpretation, to hopefully enhance and achieve beyond what we have had and have experienced up to now.

"The Making of the Statue of RJ Katamsi," a 2.5 bronze made in conjunction with Wahyu Santoso.(Courtesy ArtJog10/File)

A new and special highlight of ART|JOG|10 is The Making of The Statue of RJ Katamsi, a 2.5 bronze piece made in conjunction with Wahyu Santoso. The statue honors the artist, one of the founders and the president director of the Indonesian Academy of Art (ASRI), the first fine arts campus in Indonesia, which was opened in 1950 and is now known as ISI. The statue will be erected at the historical Jogja National Museum, the original ASRI site.

The events supporting program includes an open-air cinema by the Jogja-Netpac Asian Film Festival (JAFF); The Young Artist Award, an award for the best young participating artists under 33 years old; Jogja Art Weeks, a publication providing comprehensive information about art and cultural happenings in Yogyakarta from May-June; and the Merchandise Project, which has invited 20 artists, including Eko Nugroho, Papermoon Theatre, Oky Rey Montha, Farid Stevy, and Bob Sick Yudhita to create special buyables.

For ART|JOG|10 VIP guests, the special preview on May 19 begins five hours before the exhibition officially opens. (asw)

ArtJog 10 e-poster(Courtesy ArtJog10/File)

Supporting Program Time & Dates:

Curatorial Tours: Saturday, May 27 & June 10, 3 p.m.; Sunday, June 4 & 18, 3 p.m.

Meet the Artists: Sunday, May 28 & June 11, 3 p.m.; Saturday, June 3 & 17, 3 p.m.

Open Air Cinema: Tuesday, May 23 & 30, June 6 & 13, 7:30 p.m.

ASRI Tours: Tuesday, June 6 & 13, 3 p.m.

ART|JOG|10

Open on 7 p.m. on May 19, continues through June 19.

Open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Jogja National Museum

Jl. Prof. Ki Amri Yahya No. 1, Yogyakarta

www.artjog.co.i

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
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Linkedin Adam Plowright (Agence France-Presse) Paris  Mon, May 15, 2017 10:22 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0cc243 2 People Emmanuel-Macron,France Free

France's 39-year-old president Emmanuel Macron is an ex-investment banker whose rapid rise has smashed traditions and raised expectations sky-high.

The son of two doctors from the northeastern city of Amiens -- the youngest president in French history -- breaks the mould of a traditional French leader.

The pianist and poetry lover is married to his former teacher, glamorous 64-year-old Brigitte Macron, a divorced mother of three children whom he fell in love with as a schoolboy.

Their relationship has been a subject of fascination, often encouraged by the media-savvy Macron, and she is set to take on a prominent role as a First Lady focused on education and charitable causes.

He has also charted one of the most unlikely paths to the presidency in modern history, from virtual unknown three years ago to leader with no established party behind him.

French President Emmanuel Macron leaves the City Hall after an official ceremony with the city mayor after his formal inauguration ceremony as French President on May 14, 2017 in Paris. (AFP/Eric Piermont)

In a country where political careers have traditionally been built over decades, he has never before held elected office.

He launched his independent movement Republique En Marche (Republic on the Move, REM) only 13 months ago, which he said was "neither of the left nor the right".

This unusual positioning for France, which has seen him borrow economic policies from the right coupled with social measures from the left, was initially met with cynicism.

"There is a left and a right... and that's a good thing, that's how our democracy functions," former critic Manuel Valls, a Socialist ex-prime minister, said at the time.

Others saw the ambitious graduate of elite public sector university ENA as too young and too inexperienced to become leader.

Few apart from his loyal core of advisors believed that he had the ability to triumph in 2017 at the age of 39, a year younger than Napoleon Bonaparte when he took power in 1804.

Momentum

But Macron pressed on, using his image as a dynamic young modernizer to draw in thousands of volunteers to En Marche, which was modeled partly on the grassroots movement of ex-US president Barack Obama in 2008.

After resigning from his job as economy minister in August last year, he set about writing his pre-election book "Revolution" and then finally declared he was running for president on November 16.

"We can't respond with the same men and the same ideas," he said at the launch in a jobs training centre in a gritty Parisian suburb.

After that, he benefited from the woes of the Socialist party and a scandal that engulfed one-time favorite Francois Fillon from the rightwing Republicans party, the other mainstream force in French politics.

French newly elected President Emmanuel Macron poses with his wife Brigitte Trogneux at the Elysee presidential Palace after the handover and prior to the inauguration ceremony on May 14, 2017 in Paris. (AFP/Eric Feferberg)

Read also: France's Macron seen as UN ally

Fillon was accused of paying his wife hundreds of thousands of euros from the public purse for a fake job as a parliamentary assistant -- allegations he denied but which sunk his campaign.

"He's been lucky," veteran political journalist Anne Fulda, who wrote a recent biography called "Emmanuel Macron, Such A Perfect Young Man", told AFP. "That's something that helped him considerably. The stars aligned."

With frustration at France's political class running high, Macron was able to tap into a desire for wholesale change that also propelled his far-right rival Marine Le Pen into the final round of the election last Sunday.

Fans compare him to ex-British prime minister Tony Blair or reformist Italian premier Matteo Renzi, while his most ardent admirers see parallels with assassinated US president John F. Kennedy.

Already hated?

But he will now face formidable political opponents in the Republicans party and Le Pen's National Front as well as fierce resistance from the country's powerful trade unions which are gearing up for a fight.

"I've spoken with hundreds of people and you can feel it in the air: you are already hated," one far-left critic, Francois Ruffin, wrote recently in Le Monde newspaper.

While at ease among ordinary voters, Macron has been accused of being condescending in the past, whether referring to "illiterate" abattoir workers, "alcoholic" laid-off workers or the "poor people" who travel on buses.

French President Emmanuel Macron (L) and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (R) walk down the stairs as Brigitte Trogneux (Top L), wife of Macron, and Bruno Julliard (Top R), first deputy mayor, follow, after an official ceremony at Paris' city hall after his formal inauguration as French President on May 14, 2017 in Paris. (POOL / AFP/Charles Platiau)

In an infamous exchange, when confronted by a protester in a T-shirt in May last year, he lost his cool, saying: "The best way to buy yourself a suit is to work."

His immediate task now will be to name a prime minster and government, then set about winning a majority in parliamentary elections set for June 11 and 18.

Macron has promised to refresh France's parliament and his party unveiled 428 out of its 577 candidates on Thursday. Half of them had never held elected office and half were women.
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Linkedin Sebastian Partogi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 11:11 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0cecb9 4 Art & Culture #essay,history,books,spice Free

Recently, I bought and read the history book Nathaniels Nutmeg: the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, Penguin Books, 1999) by Giles Milton.

The book came into my radar a few months ago thanks to an acquaintance. She talked about this book at a discussion forum, about the rivalry between Dutch and English colonial adventurers around the 16th to the 17th centuries and their attempts to seize control over the abundant spices growing in Run Island, Maluku, to cater to Europeans excessive desire for these spices, particularly nutmeg.

The power struggle between the two forces resulted in Englands defeat, forcing it to trade Run for another island, called Manhattan, today one of the boroughs of New York City.

The acquaintance, known to be an Indonesian Anglophile, continued to joke about how Manhattan would have remained a backward little place if it had remained in Dutch possession and thereby became a part of Indonesia after independence in 1945.

Then she trod on dangerous territory when she said that perhaps some countries, like Indonesia, deserved [emphasis mine] to be colonized. Why would Indonesians be willing to be ordered around and colonized like that? She went on to pepper her arguments with present-day situations, on how Indonesia lags behind its peers on almost every aspect, especially business and technology.

Her question haunted me for weeks. Is it true that we deserved to be colonized? I maintained a healthy skepticism, though, to keep a sense of dejection at bay. I recognized she had some kind of hardness that could easily slip into a blame-the-victim mentality. For example, if you are too timid to stand up for yourself, then you deserve to be ordered around and bullied.

This burning question and curiosity gave me the impetus to buy and read the book, as well as other sources. My hint at her blame-the-victim stance appeared to be accurate. In discussing the book, she apparently dismissed the cruelty of the Dutch imperialist, Cornelis de Houtman, when he was enraged by the inflated price of spices (due to high demand from Europe, for Gods sake) and channeled that frustration by slaughtering Indonesians and setting their houses on fire.

The book also outlines how, in the mission to beat England and gain total control of Runs riches, he brought artillery to Indonesia. Speaking of my acquaintances idea of us being stupid enough to be ordered around by colonalists, I had to wonder: if an army appeared right in front of her house with artillery, would she still be able to negotiate with them?

I would bet not.

The greedy Indonesian aristocrats and kings, who chose to cooperate with the colonialists at the expense of their subjects in order to accumulate wealth for themselves and their inner circles, as outlined in the book, also rendered Indonesia vulnerable to the imperialists abuse and exploitation.

No people on Earth deserve to be slaughtered, massacred and exploited to death for anyones greed; but Indonesias geographical context did make it vulnerable to colonization.

What is that risk factor? Alan Beattie in his 2009 book False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World dedicates a chapter in which he answers a nagging question: why is it that resource-rich countries are prone to conflicts and poverty? The answer: because these resources actually entice other nations, particularly those with stronger and greater military power and technology, to exploit these resources through force and manipulation.

Spice-rich Indonesia was not alone: an article in the May 2017 edition of National Geographic discussed the question of why the Central African Republic, despite being blessed with abundant oil and mineral resources, ended up being a failed state. The exploitation of resources by colonialists is one of the root causes.

Indian scholar Ania Loomba in her 2005 book Colonialism/Postcolonialism argued that the means through which colonialists gained control over a resource-rich country, which includes divide-and-conquer, corruption as well as deliberately stunting the mentality of its conquered people, destroyed the people and the legacy of colonialism endures within the struggles of post-colonial countries struggle with issues relating to horizontal conflicts, corruption and mental backwardness.

Although I disagree with the idea that Indonesians are inherently mentally backward and thereby deserve to be colonized (read Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs and Steel and The World Until Yesterday for further references on the colonialism and traditionalism versus modernity debates) I also disagree with the foolish jingoism displayed by certain Indonesians when dealing with the fact that our country is being left behind in many aspects, including literacy, technology and economy, etc.

Yet outlining problems without offering solutions would also be a wasteful endeavor on my part.

Historian JJ Rizal once told me in a 2015 interview that Indonesias troubles were partly caused by the lack of visionaries and intellectuals in our country. He mentioned how Indonesias founding parents (I consciously use this term to avoid gender bias), as an example, achieved independence; because they were intellectuals who read and exchanged ideas, thereby boosting their bargaining power and negotiation skills when dealing with the colonialists.

Rizal, lamented the witch-hunt of intellectuals and artists by the New Order regime during the 1965 communist purge, as well as how the totalitarian governments mind-stunting, anti-civilization and anti-intellectual education system succeeded in turning back the clock for Indonesia, back to the backwardness created by the colonialists.

Therefore, instead of complaining about Indonesias backwardness or becoming xenophobes, it is better that we educate ourselves and pass the knowledge forward. Our own jihad (battle) is to fight against our own sloth and ignorance through intellectualism, hard work and education. Nobody is going to hand us self-respect and dignity; we have to attain them for ourselves.

P.S.: Nutmeg is a wonderful book, by the way. Highly recommended.
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Linkedin A. Kurniawan Ulung (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 13:44 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d909e 4 People Indonesia,travel,travelers Free

Unlike American journalist Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the popular travel book titled Eat, Pray, Love, which tells of her journey to mainstream tourism spots in Italy, India and Indonesia, Das prefers to take trips to lesser-known destinations.

The popularity of Gilberts book has meant Bali has received recognition as the worlds best tourist destination on TripAdvisor, the worlds largest travel site.

But if you ask Das about Bali, he would say that the resort island is overrated and for him, Madura in East Java, Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan and other lesser-traveled places are no less interesting.

At the Salihara cultural center in South Jakarta on April 22, Das shared stories about his trips to lesser-known places during the launch of his third book, Angels by the Murky River, a collection of travel narratives that he says stay off the beaten track.

The memoir, which took six years to complete, contains 32 stories about his trips to 15 countries, ranging from Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia, to China, South Korea, Iran and Brazil.

I do like traveling to Indonesia as well as many other countries. What draws me to Indonesia again and again is the wealth of stories, the sheer diversity, and the warmth and honesty of all the people I encounter there, he said.

The book tells of his meetings with homeless Korean people in Seoul, ageing anarchists in Melbourne, Australia, self-abnegating monks in Singapore, farmers-turned-painters in China, women boxers and beauty pageant specialists in the Philippines, to name a few.

In Indonesia, he met diamond miners in Banjarmasin, salt farmers in Janeponto in South Sulawesi, sulfur miners in Mount Kawah Ijen in Banyuwangi, East Java, and a medicine woman in North Sumatra and others.

Those people, who would not typically attract tourists attention, are the angels by the murky rivers for the Singapore-based, 38-year-old writer.

Read also: Ten Indonesian travelers who may inspire your next trip

Das travels from one country to another with a mission.

I wanted to capture human resilience and their capacity for being creative, kind and humorous in the midst of adversity.

In Banjarmasin, for example, he went to the Pumpung village where his eyes were glued to poverty-stricken diamond miners risking their health for a living.

Under the stinging sun, they slipped and slid in a pit again and again to seek diamonds. When climbing out of the pit, they were almost unrecognizable as they were covered entirely in mud. Then, they dug again into the pit with their shovels before sliding down.

What Das experienced in Pumpung is a world apart from the lavish jewelry stores in Singapore and Jakarta, with their perfect air-conditioning and sharp-suited salespeople and wealthy clients.

For Das, the village gave him an appreciable experience, something that he would not get in well-traveled places where the whole travel experience has been commercialized and prevents visitors from understanding the lives of people.

Thats why I prefer to travel to lesser-traveled areas where it is possible to realize what I believe traveling is all about  getting enriched by appreciating the diversity of human conditions yet realizing the common humanity that we all share, he said.

Read also: Indonesian millennial travelers prefer authenticity, new experiences: Study

Before Angels by the Murky River, Das published Journey with the Caterpillar: Travelling through the Islands of Flores and Sumba, Indonesia in 2013, which he said was a humble and humorous attempt to capture the dramatic simplicity of the people living in East Nusa Tenggara.

Das hopes that his book will inspire readers to engage themselves with what he calls non-required travel, in which interacting with locals and venturing beyond the walls of tour guides, chain hotels and malls become the main activities.

Das said he believed the kindness of strangers would undoubtedly soften the souls of travelers and help them develop a keen appreciation of what made them all human.

I hope every reader becomes a fearless traveler and develops the habit of asking the bus driver to stop in an unknown town and run off to its only barber for a non-required haircut, he said.

I hope every traveler finds their own angels by the murky rivers, he added.

Topics : Indonesia travel travelers
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Linkedin Mohammad Baqir Bayani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 11:06 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0cde76 4 Art & Culture #shortstory,short-story,fiction,refugees,conflict,human-rights Free

"Dad, I want to finish my studies, says Jamshed in outrage while throwing his schoolbag on to the floor. I dont want to continue my education anymore, not even a single day. I would prefer illiteracy than literacy.

He takes aimless steps toward the kitchen and sinks into the darkness. He turns on the light and then strikes the switch off. He then reemerges into the light in the living room where he had left his father.

Pinching a lit cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and twirling an empty cup of tea in his other hand, while leaning back against a pillow, he sucks the cigarette smoke into his lungs and puffs rings of white clouds into the air and lets them dance in the dim light pouring directly from the window.

Jamsheds father gazes at the boy in a panic and asks, What has happened to you, son?

Havent you heard the latest news? The terrorists have gunned down another five innocent Hazaras. Three of them were professors and two of them were university students. The culprits opened fire on them while they were coming back home from the university. The living situation here in Quetta is not favorable anymore. There is no violence left that I havent seen in my life. I lost my uncle in a blast a year ago. The beheaded body of Ahmed still haunts my dreams, says the boy.

Jamshed moves impulsively to the edge of the shelf standing by the window. He leans forward and rests his elbows on his thighs, blocking the light. He clasps his hands and crosses his fingers, then takes his gaze off the floor. His eyes pierce through the dancing clouds of smoke in the air.

After a while, he sighs and says, The violence has killed my desire to learn anything in school. Walking to school every morning, all I see is death and despair. I want to go to Australia. I want a future I can count on. 

Jamshed pauses, takes a deep breath and continues with another long sigh, When you leave home for work in the morning, I cant think straight until I see you safe back at home in the evening. I keep thinking the worst is going to happen at any moment. Dad, two years ago there were 40 students in our class. Today, theres only half that. Most of my classmates were killed in the attacks. How am I supposed to live, Dad?

Silence permeates the room. The father kills the cigarette by pressing forcefully its angry orange tip against the bottom of the ash pan. Son, I truly understand what you are going through. You and I are not the only ones suffering this genocide. The black cloud is hanging over the heads of all Hazara people in every corner of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but quitting education is not the solution. On the contrary, education is the only weapon by which we can gain our rights back and raise our voices.

But what if we do not survive? What should we do with the education for which we study hard, day and night? After all weve done, all we get in return is death? After a small pause, he continues in anguish, Tell me Dad, wasnt Mom educated? She was among the first Hazara women advocates. She served the nation and the government with true devotion and commitment. She fought in every possible way for our rights and raised our voices on every platform she came across. What did she get in return?

There is a long pause.

Two bullets: one in the head and one in the heart. Nothing else, Dad! Finally, the terrorists took her right to life and silenced her forever.

But still we can hope for a better tomorrow.

Hope? Hope from whom, Dad? Jamshed swallows the sorrow that rises to a storm deep down in his gut and triggers his voice briefly. He can feel the panic bubble up in his throat. He swipes the tear that has glistened in his eyes and digs his teeth into his lower trembling lip and continues Hope from the government, which even didnt bother to pay their condolences to mum? The government that she served throughout her career?

The father leans forward and stretches his legs. He covers both knees with his hands to support his frail body. He thinks of the tragedy that claimed his wifes life. He speaks with a hoarse voice as he looks at Jamshed. He says, There is no certainty you will make Australia your home, either. Do you think you will survive the boat journey over the ruthless ocean that has already swallowed hundreds of lives, which has separated children from their parents and husbands from their wives and their families? The journey that has neither beginning nor end, and which only serves as a bet between life and death?

The father continues, Did you forget your cousin, Saqib, who disappeared into the great nothingness from the day he left years ago? His old mother still waits for him to return, hoping against all hope that one day he will show up at her doorstep. Do you not think of what may happen to you if you were to take on that treacherous road toward  what, exactly?

Jamshed replies, almost too sternly, There are many ways to get to Australia, Dad. We can go to Indonesia and seek asylum there. We can wait until we are approved to relocate to Australia. I can secure my own future.

The father shakes his head. The world does not recognize humanity, anymore, he says. Our people have been turned away so many times and these places you believe will show you mercy will do nothing but watch you suffer. My son, we are a vulnerable people and we will be vulnerable for years to come. In the last 60 years, we have been deprived of our basic rights. No one is listening to us. We continue to live in fear. Our wounds are left open for all to gawk at and to pick at. Son, you know how our women have been made widows, the children orphans, and the blood of our innocent people continues to wet the earth. It doesnt matter where you turn, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only safe place for us. Theres nowhere else for us to turn to. Were waiting for tragedy to claim our lives by staying here, but for the moment it is the only choice we have.

Jamshed drops his gaze, his eyes searching the floor. Then, he buries his head deeper into his arms. His breathing slows, now exhausted and hopeless. He looks up and gazes at the ceilings. At long last, he mutters a prayer, God, must you be so cruel to us?

***

The writer is an activist, the founder of Refugees of Indonesia and is currently in the process of seeking asylum.

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shortstory@thejakartapost.com

We are no longer accepting short story submissions for both online and print editions. New submissions towill not be published.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 16:50 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0e4248 1 Science & Tech Nintendo,#Nintendo,video-game,#videogame,The-Legend-of-Zelda,smartphone,#smartphone Free

Good news Zelda fans, Nintendo has just announced a new addition to their lineup of mobile games, with this one to be based on The Legend of Zelda franchise.

Originally reported by The Wall Street Journal, The Legend of Zelda mobile game will likely be released following the mobile version of Animal Crossing, which is anticipated to arrive in late 2017.

Tatsumi Kimishima, Nintendo CEO, stated that the company plans to release two to three smartphone games by Spring 2018.

Read also: Review: Nintendo Switch is impressive, but needs more games

No other details have been announced as yet, so it is not yet known if The Legend of Zelda game will be pay-to-play like Super Mario Run or free, like Fire Emblem Heroes, Nintendos two current mobile games.

The announcement comes on the heels of the success of the most recent Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, for Nintendo Switch and Wii U, which has sold nearly a million copies in the US alone. (sul/kes)
Mark Green is a rare bird in Washington these days  a Donald Trump nominee with broad bipartisan support.

But theres a catch to his potential posting as administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency faces a starkly uncertain future, including potentially big budget cuts and the possibility of being folded entirely into a restructured State Department.

Within hours of the White Houses announcement of his nomination last week, the former Republican congressman from Wisconsin and U.S. ambassador to Tanzania under President George W. Bush had collected an impressive array of endorsements from lawmakers in both parties, and from development groups that had up to then largely opposed other Trump nominees and policies. That bodes well for Greens confirmation, even if it may not be enough to stave off what some see as the Trump administrations intent to dismantle USAID.

Theres no way Ambassador Green, or anyone for that matter, could effectively execute the mission of USAID under the proposed cuts and changes that President Trump is proposing for this critical agency, said Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will evaluate the nomination. The cuts would devastate the United States ability to conduct diplomacy and development and harm our national interests.

Created in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, USAID oversees American civilian assistance abroad, including health, education, environment, democracy and economic programs, and provides emergency humanitarian aid in response to natural disasters. It administers more than $20 billion in foreign assistance each year.

The administrations initial proposal for the 2018 budget called for slashing State Department and USAID funding by 31 percent. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has countered by proposing a 26 percent cut and creating a committee to study USAIDs full integration into his department.
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Linkedin Abhaya Srivastava (Agence France-Presse) Dharamsala, India  Mon, May 15, 2017 12:08 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d0c39 2 Health Tibet,tibetan-medicine,yeshi-donden,traditional-medicine Free

Before dawn in the Indian Himalayas, scores of patients clutching small vials of urine queue patiently to see Yeshi Dhonden, a Tibetan monk who became a legend as personal healer to the Dalai Lama.

Tibetan medicine, known as Sowa-Rigpa, draws on centuries-old techniques such as blood-letting, cupping, and moxibustion -- burning herbs on energy points of the body -- to try to heal ailments.

The practice draws on aspects of traditional Chinese medicine and India's Ayurvedic system as well as its own unique theories and treatments. It also features spiritual practises including meditation and Buddhist prayer.

Today it attracts devotees from all over the globe, hoping for help with conditions from back pain to cancer and degenerative diseases.

"If the sick come to me I will take care of them," Dhonden told AFP at his private clinic in McLeodganj, surrounded by Tibetan scrolls and beaming images of his most famous client.

Dhonden -- who spent three decades tending the health of Tibet's spiritual leader -- relies on his senses to divine what ails patients.

"I don't go for tests like X-ray and all. I trust myself. I just test the pulse and the urine," he explained.

A touch at the wrist is how he ascertains the health of vital organs and blood pressure.

The urine, held in a white porcelain cup, is stirred with two small bamboo sticks. Color, bubble formation, sediment and smell can all shape the diagnosis.

Devotees swear Tibetan medicine works, though few scientific studies have been conducted into its efficacy.

In this photograph taken on March 23, 2017, a cup containing bamboo, used to examine patients' urine, sits in a room at Tibetan medical practitioner Yeshi Dhonden's Tibetan Herbal Clinic in the Indian town of Dharamsala. Before dawn in the Indian Himalayas, scores of patients clutching small vials of urine queue patiently to see Yeshi Dhonden, a Tibetan monk who became a legend as personal healer to the Dalai Lama. Tibetan medicine, known as Sowa-Rigpa, draws on centuries-old techniques such as blood-letting, cupping, and moxibustion -- burning herbs on energy points of the body -- to try to heal ailments.(AFP/Prakash Singh)

'Imbalanced energies'

The teachings -- contained in some 2,000 textbooks and the messages of the Buddha, considered the guardian deity for all spiritual healers -- are believed to have originated in Tibet.

But as it features elements of both ancient Chinese and Indian healing practices, and is rapidly evolving from a niche tradition into popular alternative treatment, both nations have scrambled to claim it as their own.

In April, the Asian giants nominated Tibetan medicine for inclusion on a UNESCO list for "intangible culture". China and India have engaged in countless spats over the Tibetan community since New Delhi granted sanctuary to the Dalai Lama in 1959.

Beijing took control of Tibet eight years earlier and was furious when India granted the Dalai Lama permission to headquarter a government-in-exile in McLeodganj.

The traditions of Tibetan medicine are based on four root texts known as the 'tantras' that evolved in two medical colleges, Chakpori and Men-Tsee-Khang, in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

Read also: 10-year lifespan gain for some HIV patients: study

These tantras classify thousands of diseases into separate categories, with unique mixtures of herbs and minerals -- mostly sourced from the upper reaches of the Himalayas -- listed as remedies for each ailment.

"We believe diseases are caused when our inner energies are imbalanced," said Tsewang Tam Din, a medical practitioner at the McLeodganj branch of the Men-Tsee Khang school, one of many across India.

Taking a delicate golden hammer, Din demonstrated how healers heat the instrument over fire and place it against the body to offset pain and other common malaises.

"The idea behind our medicine system is that one should not have to take medication all his life for chronic problems like arthritis and diabetes," Din said in McLeodganj, nicknamed "Little Lhasa" for the large Tibetan community residing there.

In this photograph taken on March 23, 2017, a staff member of Tibetan medical practitioner Yeshi Dhonden's Tibetan Herbal Clinic packs traditional Tibetan medicine to send to patients by courier in the Indian town of Dharamsala. Before dawn in the Indian Himalayas, scores of patients clutching small vials of urine queue patiently to see Yeshi Dhonden, a Tibetan monk who became a legend as personal healer to the Dalai Lama. Tibetan medicine, known as Sowa-Rigpa, draws on centuries-old techniques such as blood-letting, cupping, and moxibustion -- burning herbs on energy points of the body -- to try to heal ailments.(AFP/Prakash Singh)

Science of healing

The increasing popularity of Buddhism in the west, as well as a global Tibetan diaspora has helped spread awareness about its unique alternative medicine.

But like other Eastern health treatments, it is viewed with scepticism among the conventional medical fraternity.

A lack of standardization and clinical trials means it will be some time before Tibetan medicine can go mainstream, said cardiologist D. Prabhakaran from the Public Health Foundation of India.

But even doubters acknowledge the natural treatment appears to assist some patients in certain cases.

"I know of anecdotal examples where people with terminal diseases have lived much longer than predicted after taking Tibetan medicine," Prabhakaran said.

"I think there's a lot of empathy towards the patient in Tibetan medicine. Basically it comes from the thinking of Buddhism and that may be one of the reasons why it's becoming more popular," he added.

In 2010, India officially recognized Tibetan medicine as a "science of healing" and enshrined it within the nation's healthcare system, paving the way for future research and investment into the spiritual discipline.

It's good news for devotees like 60-year-old Abdul Rehman, who has eschewed mainstream medicine his entire life in favor of Tibetan alternatives.

"I suffered from a recurrent cold which was cured in one year," said Rehman as he collected herbal pills at a clinic in a posh Delhi suburb.

He added: "Now I have some back and neck pain and I think it will also be cured soon."
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Linkedin Ian King , Pavel Alpeyev and Takako Taniguchi (Bloomberg)  Mon, May 15, 2017 14:32 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0dc04a 2 Science & Tech Western-Digital,Toshiba,joint-venture,partnership,technology,#technology,tech-companies Free

Western Digital Corp. is taking legal action to try to guarantee a say in who gets to buy the chip unit of Toshiba Corp., its partner in a manufacturing joint venture.

The U.S. company invoked an arbitration clause in their business agreement, which could postpone a sale Toshiba needs to complete quickly. In preparation for the divestment, the Japanese technology company transferred ownership of the unit to a separate legal entity but didnt get permission before doing so, according to Western Digital. The two should enter binding arbitration to resolve the dispute, Western Digital said.

In response, Toshiba said it hasnt received any notice of arbitration, and rejected claims that the process is in breach of the joint venture agreement.

The companies are increasingly at odds as Toshiba tries to raise cash needed to keep itself afloat following a disastrous investment in nuclear power. The joint venture may find itself at risk if Toshibas chipmaking operation is snapped up by a Western Digital competitor. Western Digital executives have described Toshibas situation as desperate.

We firmly believe that we provide Toshiba with the optimal solution to address its challenges and that we are the best partner to advance its legacy of technology innovation in Japan, Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Steve Milligan said in a statement. Toshibas attempt to spin out its joint venture interests into an affiliate and then sell that affiliate is explicitly prohibited without SanDisks consent.

Tokyo-based Toshiba said in an emailed statement that it will continue to handle the sale properly, and that Western Digital has no grounds to interfere with the process.

The possibility of this dispute delaying the chip unit sale is bad news for Toshibas shares, said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute. Toshibas memory business is very appealing and has attracted a lot of potential buyers. But Western Digital, just coming out of a major acquisition itself, simply cant afford it and must make the most out of its position as a joint venture partner to get to an outcome more favorable to itself.

Read also: Alibaba's next online stop: the whole world

Underscoring the need for Toshiba to secure a sale of the chip business, the company announced preliminary results for the year that ended in March showing a net loss of 950 billion yen ($8.4 billion). Shareholder equity was negative 540 billion yen for the year, and will be another 540 billion yen again in the current fiscal year unless a divestment happens, the company said. Toshiba is selling assets to contend with writedowns in its Westinghouse nuclear business, stemming from excessive costs and construction delays. The Japanese company put its Westinghouse Electric nuclear unit into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Separately, utility owner Southern Co. has agreed to take the lead from Toshibas bankrupt U.S. nuclear power unit on building two reactors at its plant in Georgia as soon as next month. Toshibas stock rose as much as 5.7 percent in Tokyo on Monday.

Toshiba previously told Western Digital not to interfere in the sale plans and that it may take legal action. It also said the U.S. company failed to formalize their relationship after Western Digital became its-flash memory manufacturing partner after the acquisition of SanDisk Corp. last year. Toshiba said the two companies must come to an agreement by May 15 or it would bar Western Digital employees from its facilities and networks.

Arbitration will take place in San Francisco, Western Digital said. Each side will propose one member of the three-person panel. The third, who will serve as chairman, will be chosen by either the two other members or the International Chamber of Commerce, which will oversee the arbitration. The process can take as long as a year. Any move that undermines arbitration, such as a sale of the unit before the panel reaches a decision, could allow the issue to go to court.

The type of chip produced by the joint venture, known as flash memory, is enjoying a bumper year. Micron Technology Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. have all reported strong demand for the product as the industry moves away from magnetic disks in computer storage. Toshibas sale has garnered significant interest, with preliminary bids as high as $26 billion from Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Bloomberg reported last month. Other bidders include SK Hynix and Broadcom Ltd.

Mark Long, chief financial officer of Western Digital, said this month that each of the rumored bidders is problematic. The company has talked to all of the prospective buyers to look for a solution.

Western Digital has held discussions with Innovation Network Corp. of Japan and Development Bank of Japan Inc. about options for making a bid of its own. It hopes to secure exclusivity with Toshiba and has argued that a sale to a third party is in breach of their joint-venture agreement -- a claim that the Japanese side disputes.
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Linkedin Arya Dipa (The Jakarta Post) Bandung  Mon, May 15, 2017 10:48 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0ccde1 4 National MissingPerson,bandung,ITB Free

The body of man identified as Suryo Utomo, a lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) who had been missing since Wednesday, was found on Saturday evening floating in the Cirata reservoir in Cianjur regency, West Java.

Police found the body after receiving a report from citizens of nearby village. The body was reportedly discovered by children from the village.

Suryo was reported missing after accompanying his mother to Leuwi Panjang bus terminal in Bandung on Wednesday.

Suryos car, a Toyota Vios, was later found by Ciranjang Police in the Citarum rest area.

The body was examined at Cianjur General Hospital and identified by Suryos relatives, said Ciranjang Police chief Comr. Syafril Lubis.

The medical report showed that Suryos body bore several bruises and wounds.

Separately, Bandung Police chief Sr. Comr. Hendro Pandowo said his team was coordinating with the Cianjur Police to investigate the cause of Suryos death. (rdi/wit)

Topics : MissingPerson bandung ITB
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Linkedin Severianus Endi, Ivany Atina Arbi and Moses Ompusunggu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 09:01 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0c4d9d 2 National basuki-tjahaja-purnama,blasphemy,sectarian-issues Free

The highly divisive blasphemy conviction against non-active Jakarta governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama has sparked tensions in some regions, with supporters of the Christian governor upping the ante against the Islamist group that has been calling for his incarceration.

The situation in West Kalimantan, which saw hundreds of people killed in two bloody ethnic conflicts in 1996/1997 and 2001, is particularly worrying as rising sectarian tensions in the capital have reignited suspicions among different religious and ethnic groups in the province.

Mercelina Erni, 46, a Christian resident in the provinces capital Pontianak said she had heard rumors, mainly from social media, that raids were imminent against Dayak people and Christians.

I had to take down the rosary I used to hang on the rearview mirror of my car when I heard the rumors, she told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

The rumors were triggered by a speech made by West Kalimantan Governor Cornelis, in which he said he would oppose the presence of Islam Defenders Front (FPI) leader Rizieq Shihab, a vocal antiAhok figure, in the province.

The Dayak people, one of West Kalimantans largest ethnic groups, have expressed their support for the governors stance.

On Friday, two FPI leaders, Sobri Lubis and Hidayat Quaiandri Batangtaris, who came to Pontianak to inaugurate members of a local FPI branch, were forced to return to Jakarta only 30 minutes after landing at Supadio International Airport.

Authorities said they asked the two FPI leaders to return because of security concerns.

The incident has angered a group of people claiming to represent Malays and Muslims. They called on authorities to prosecute the governor for stoking sectarian tensions.

Meanwhile, rumors are also rife that some Malay and Muslim groups plan to disrupt an annual cultural event to be held by Dayak people in the city on May 20.

Leaders of Dayak and Malay communities have met to respond to the rumors and called on the public to remain calm.

The Pontianak Police have also beefed up security in the city and gave an assurance that authorities would act professionally in handling possible clashes.

We have prepared 4,000 personnel from the police force and the Indonesian Military to maintain security. We will take action against anyone who tries to disrupt security,  said Pontianak Police Chief Sr. Comr. Iwan Imam Susilo.

Dayak people account for around 35 percent of West Kalimantans population, followed by the Malay (34 percent), Javanese (10 percent) and Chinese (8 percent). Sixty percent of the provinces population is Muslim, while 34 percent is Christian.

In predominantly Christian Manado, North Sulawesi, hundreds of people on Saturday swarmed Sam Ratulangi International Airport and the governors office to protest againts the presence of House of Representatives deputy speaker Fahri Hamzah, who was accused of supporting the FPI.

The protests came just three days after thousands gathered in the city for a candlelight vigil supporting Ahok, who is now detained after being sentenced to two years for citing a Quranic verse in a speech deemed as blasphemous.

Fahri Hamzah is not a tolerant person. That is why we reject his presence here, said Brian Maloor, chairman of a local group that participated in the Sam Ratulangi rally.

Fahri had to be evacuated by the police after spending only six hours in the city.

In other regions, the FPI has been more daring in carrying out their actions. In Makassar, South Sulawesi, dozens of alleged FPI members attempted to disperse a group holding a candlelight vigil for Ahok.

Salim Said, a senior political and security analyst, expressed concerns about the rising sectarian tensions, which he believed could threaten the countrys diversity.

He called on the countrys leaders in Jakarta to be fully aware of the situation to prevent horizontal conflicts.

Meanwhile, Indonesian diasporas in major cities abroad have held rallies to support Ahok and Indonesian diversity, including in Amsterdam, Auckland, Los Angeles, New York, Perth, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo, Toronto and Vancouver.
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Linkedin Indra Budiari (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 21:01 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0ee3e8 1 City #AhokDetention,#ahok,activities Free

Detained non-active Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama is adjusting to life behind bars by reading the Bible and writing, his sister said on Monday.

Fify Lety Indra said that her brother had been an avid reader of the Holy Bible since he was in the university, however his tight schedule while serving as Jakarta Governor sometimes stood in the way. Now, after being sentenced to two years in prison from his blasphemy case, Ahok continues his religious habit while he also sharpens his Mandarin language.

My brother also asked for a notebook, I think he needs a medium to share his feelings because sometimes prison cells can be so lonely, Fifi told The Jakarta Post.

Who knows, he may produce quality writing in prison, just like Soekarno, she continued, referring to the countrys first president.

In 2008 Ahok wrote a book titled Merubah Indonesia in which he shared his life experiences including his political career and how many of his political opponents quoted the Quranic verse, which later became the center of his blasphemy case, to campaign against him.
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Denpasar, Bali  Mon, May 15, 2017 19:01 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0eb92f 2 National bali,denpasar,murder,murder-case Free

An Indonesian court Monday increased the jail term of an Australian woman convicted of killing a policeman on the resort island of Bali to five years after prosecutors appealed her original sentence.

Sara Connor, 46, was handed a four-year jail term in March after being found guilty along with her British DJ boyfriend of killing officer Wayan Sudarsa, who was beaten to death on a popular beach on the island.

The Briton, 34-year-old David Taylor, was jailed for six years.

Traffic policeman Sudarsa's blood-soaked body was found in August covered with dozens of wounds on his neck, chest and head.

Taylor, whose stage name is DJ Nutzo, admitted getting into a fight with Sudarsa on the beach after accusing the officer of stealing Connor's handbag. Mother of two Connor had maintained her innocence but judges found her guilty, ruling she had held the victim down during the fight.

Prosecutors appealed the four-year sentence for Connor, which was lower than the eight years they had recommended to the judges, arguing it would not have enough of a deterrent effect.

Bali High Court Monday increased the term by one year. The judges said the reasons were that her actions could impact the tourism industry and she had left the victim to die when he was lying face down on the beach.

"The defendant has damaged the image of Indonesian tourism, especially tourism on Bali," said judge Sutoyo, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

Connor did not attend the appeal hearing at the court in the Balinese capital Denpasar.

Bali, a pocket of Hinduism in Muslim-majority Indonesia, is a popular tourist destination known for its tropical climate and palm-fringed beaches.

Minor crime is common but murders are rare.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 12:48 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d389e 1 National HTI,caliphate,MUI,conservative-Muslims Free

An Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) leader has said that the Islamic caliphate system often propagated by ultraconservative Muslim groups was not suitable for Indonesia, calling it outdated by standards of a modern democracy.

Ikhsan Abdulah, the deputy head of the council's law commission, said the caliphate political system was a legacy from the past, making the system, which is part of the campaign of hard-line group Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), outdated.

The caliphate system has lost its legitimacy in the world. It ended with the last of the Ottoman empire in Turkey, so it is not relevant anymore, he said as quoted on tribunnews.com on Monday.

He explained that when the Ottoman empire ended, the caliphate system was no longer used and Turkey established modern state institutions.

He said that although the caliphate system contradicted the Pancasila state ideology and the Constitution, if brought up in the context of teaching history, it should not be banned by the government.

"What we must suspect and be wary of is what the HTI means by promoting the caliphate system in Indonesia," he said.

On May 5, the Office of the Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister announced its plan to disband the HTI on the grounds that it was promoting the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Indonesia, contravening the Pancasila state ideology and Constitution.

The announcement drew criticism from various groups calling for the government to comply with a law that requires the government to consult the courts before making such a decision. (dis/wit)
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Linkedin Syofiardi Bachyul Jb (The Jakarta Post) Padang  Mon, May 15, 2017 08:30 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0c4688 4 National animal-trading,Sumatran-tiger,crime,Kerinci-Seblat Free

A team of forest rangers at Kerinci Seblat National Park arrested two people allegedly involved in the trade of tiger skin and tiger bone on Saturday night.

The head of the national park, Arief Toengkagie, said the team, led by Nurhamidi, arrested two farmers, Awaludin, 46, and Sabian, 40, in Air Muring village in North Bengkulu, Bengkulu.

They were arrested carrying two sacks of tiger skin and bones. They are now at the North Bengkulu Police station for further investigation, Arief told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

Kerinci Seblat is the largest national park in Sumatra, spanning parts of West Sumatra, Jambi, Bengkulu and South Sumatra.

The population of Sumatran tigers in the 1.37-million hectare conservation area remains low as they are under constant threat from poachers. The national park estimates a population of between 162 and 174 tigers in the area.

Previously, the team arrested two other suspects, Syamsir, 55, from East Dumai, Riau, and Aris Sulardi, 57, from Dharmasraya, West Sumatra, for allegedly transporting tiger skins to the border area between Bungo, Jambi, and Dharmasraya on April 23.

The team estimates that the tigers were captured six to twelve months ago in forests in Dharmasraya, Arief said. (rdi/wit)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 22:06 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0f00a8 1 National Quran-procurement-graft,KPK Free

Former Religious Affairs deputy minister Nasaruddin Umar underwent questioning at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) on Monday as a witness in a graft case related to Quran procurement at the ministry.

[I was] asked information about Fahd. At that time, I had been appointed deputy minister, so I didnt know much, Nasaruddin said at the headquarters of the KPK as quoted by Antara news agency on Monday.

Fahd El Fouz, who was named a suspect on April 27, is accused of corruption in the Quran procurement project at the Religious Affairs Ministrys directorate general of Islamic mass organizations management from 2011 to 2012.

He is also accused of corrupt practices related to a computer laboratory procurement project for madrasah tsanawiyah (senior Islamic high schools).

Nasaruddin said that during the budgeting and procurement period, he was carrying out duties abroad trying to free 200 Indonesian citizens on death row.

I did not know the process, nor did I sign any letters approving any sort of budget, Nasaruddin, who is now a grand imam at Istiqlal Mosque, said.

Fahd and two other people are suspected of having swindled Rp 14.8 billion (US$1.11 million) from the two projects.

Former Golkar Party politician Zulkarnaen Djabar and his son Dendy Prasetia have been tried in the same case.

Zulkarnaen was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined Rp 300 million.

His son was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined Rp 300 million. (dis)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15 2017

Rolas Sitinjak, a lawyer for non-active Jakarta governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama, has said that Ahok, who is currently being detained at the National Polices Mobile Brigade (Brimob) detention center in Depok, West Java, is in good spirits and conducting normal activities, including reading books and welcoming guests.

His condition is good and he reads books a lot. Hes also welcoming many visitors, Rolas said on Sunday as quoted by tempo.co.

The panel of judges at the North Jakarta District Court sentenced Ahok to two years in prison for blasphemy last week and instructed that Ahok be directly transferred to Cipinang detention center in East Jakarta. He was transferred to the detention center in Depok the next day for security reasons.

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As chair of the Dane County Board, I appreciated the recent guest column by Lindsay Wallace of the Dane County Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She urged a reduction in the number of inmates in any new jail facility.

I did want to emphasize, however, that the Mead & Hunt study referenced by Wallace calls for reducing  not increasing  the size of the county jail. The current jail space on the sixth and seventh floors is unacceptable from a mental health and public health perspective. Simply put, Dane County needs to make a change.

To that end, the Dane County Board has made it abundantly clear it supports alternatives to incarceration and is participating in two national efforts aimed at reducing the number of individuals in our jail.

One program is using a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to address over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails  with the hashtag: #rethinkjails.

Dane County is one of 20 additional jurisdictions selected to join the MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge, a national $100 million initiative to test innovative local justice reforms designed to safely drive down jail usage and reduce racial and ethnic disparities. Dane County will focus on training of local peacemakers and technical advances to support expansion of its Community Restorative Court countywide.

The other program allows for a public safety assessment at initial court appearances to help determine flight risk or risk of new criminal activity before an offender is sent to the Dane County Jail. Funding for two positions to handle the pretrial assessments of offenders is provided by a $167,000 grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston, Texas.

As a community we face a major decision on replacing the unsafe and outdated jail facility and invite the public to participate by attending a presentation by the consultants Mead & Hunt to the Dane County Board on June 15 at 6 p.m. in Room 201 of the City-County Building. We will continue our sincere effort to partner with our community, stakeholders and national partners to craft a criminal justice system that is safe and equitable for all.
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Linkedin Fedina S. Sundaryani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 16:20 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0e2f7f 1 Business Italy,ASEAN,Indonesia,dialogue Free

Italy has expressed interest in strengthening economic ties with Southeast Asia during the first meeting of a two-day event involving high-level dialogue on ASEAN-Italy economic relations starting Monday.

The event, held at the Shangri-La Hotel, Jakarta, involves business speakers and political speakers from both Italy and ASEAN member countries.

Italy is serious about its intention to increase investment in ASEAN despite global trends toward protectionism because the country believes that multilateralism and free trade are the future of the global economy, said chairman of the Italy-ASEAN Association Enrico Letta.

Letta also said that Italy would increase its investments in Indonesia, despite ongoing political tension in the country.

We know very well that Indonesia is facing political tension. We are here despite this tension. We want to bet on Indonesia -- on Indonesias future and on the future of the relationship between Europe and Indonesia and Italy, he said during a press conference.

Meanwhile, Italian Trade Agency president Michele Scannavini said Italy currently ranked 31st in investment in ASEAN with around only 0.1 percent market share.

Meanwhile, data from the Trade Ministry shows that the trade balance between Indonesia and Italy reached US$184.9 million last year, dropping drastically from $504.7 million the previous year. (bbn)

Topics : Italy ASEAN Indonesia dialogue
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 09:48 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0c9548 1 City ramadhan,StapleFood Free

The Jakarta administration has set up three food kiosks for subsidized foods to anticipate an increase in prices of commodity foods ahead of the fasting month of Ramadhan.

Three kiosks in total were set up; two in Cipete Utara and Pejaten Barat in South Jakarta and one in Cijantung in East Jakarta.

The president director of Tjipinang Jaya Food Station, Arief Prasetyo Adi, said the administration readied several trucks containing staple foods.

"Every day, we station three trucks of staple foods in three locations," Arief said as quoted by beritajakarta.com on Sunday.

He said that residents could directly buy food from the kiosks without the use of coupons as there was a wide supply of food.

"People won't need to use coupons. We have a considerable stock of staple foods," he said.

Some of the food sold in the kiosks include rice, sugar, cooking oil and flour. (dea/wit)

Topics : ramadhan StapleFood
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 17:26 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0e7420 4 Business jusuf-kalla,European-Parliament,palm-oil Free

Vice President Jusuf Kalla has called on the European Union to stop its negative campaign against palm oil products based on environmental issues.

It is a matter of trade competition. But they use environment issues, said the Vice President as quoted by Trade Minister Enggartiasto Enggar Lukita after accompanying Kalla to meet with Italian Economic Development Minister Carlo Calenda in Jakarta on Tuesday, as reported by tempo.co.

During the meeting, Enggar said Kalla assured Calenda that Indonesia had high commitments to protect the environment.

Enggar said he also expressed concern over the issuance of the EU resolution although it was not binding for members of the union. He said he told Calenda that Indonesia had been treated unfairly by the negative campaign.

On April 4, the EU parliament issued a resolution to only import sustainable oil palm products after 2020. The resolution also called for a single sustainability standard, although Indonesia already has its own Sustainable Palm Oil standard.

Enggar said Calendas visit to Indonesia was part of the countrys effort to improve its trade relations with the largest Southeast Asian country. The value of trade relations between the countries decreased by 9.4 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Indonesian posted a trade surplus of US$200 million, last year.

They (Italy) want more balance trade. We welcome their idea, said Enggar, adding that his Italian counterpart asked Indonesia to use more technology products from the country, such as machinery for the leather industry. (bbn)
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Linkedin Safrin La Batu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 15:27 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0e0fde 1 National Miryam-S-Haryani,e-ID,perjury Free

The arguments presented by former lawmaker Miryam S. Haryani in a pretrial hearing of her perjury case at the South Jakarta District Court on Monday were not relevant to the hearing, Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) legal division head Setiadi has said.

The pretrial hearing of Miryam, a former Hanura Party lawmaker and suspect in a mega scandal related to the electronic identity card (e-ID) project, did not follow the rules as it had discussed issues related to the case, Setiadi said.

"A pretrial hearing does not handle the substance of an issue," he said after the hearing.

"In this case, all parties are expected to follow the rule."

During Monday's hearing, Miryams lawyers asked the court to rule the KPK's decision to name their client a suspect invalid, arguing the anti-graft body was only authorized by law to investigate the corruption case, not other alleged crimes, including the perjury case.

The KPK named Miryam a perjury suspect after she retracted her affidavit in a hearing in March. In the affidavit, Miryam alleged that some lawmakers in the House had benefited from the e-ID funds and that she herself was the one who distributed the money. However, testifying under oath, Miryam said in a hearing that she made the statements because she was threatened by KPK investigators.
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Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 16:27 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0e2fdb 1 National HTI,conservative-Muslims,Pancasila,radical-group,caliphate,ICMI Free

Joining other supporters of the dismissal of anti-Pancasila groups, the Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals Association (ICMI) said on Monday that it supported the governments plan to ban Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) through a court process.

ICMI chairman Jimly Asshiddiqie said the association supported the government because HTIs aspiration for an Islamic caliphate contradicted the country's ideology of Pancasila, but the group said the state's decision to do so should be based on justice and impartiality.

The most important thing is to give HTI the opportunity to explain itself to the public. Thus, a transparent and fair court process must take place in order to give political education to people, Jimly said in a statement. The government can also openly provide its argumentation for the ban.

(Read also: Jokowi administration moves to ban Islamic group)

Jimly further called for the government to apply the same procedure to other organizations that promoted values contravening the states ideology. The constitution has clearly guaranteed the freedom to assemble. Everyone can set up an organization as long as it complies with the constitution.

The 2013 Law on Mass Organization allows the government to disband an organization that it considers against the state ideology, but the government should follow certain procedures, including a court process. (wit)
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Linkedin Nethy Dharma Somba (The Jakarta Post) Jayapura, Papua  Mon, May 15, 2017 19:31 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0ecd72 1 National #AhokDetention,rally,Papua Free

Thousands of citizens of Jayapura in Papua have joined waves of national and international support for the release of non-active Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama from detention as well as to save the state ideology of Pancasila from efforts to undermine it.

The four-kilometer long march from Papua Regional Representatives (DPRD) to the governors office on Monday, which was coordinated by Ecumenical Council of Churches in Papua (PGGP), also demanded the dissolution of Islamic hard-line group Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), Islam Defenders Front (FPI) and the arrest of FPI leader Rizieq Shihab.

PGGP chairman, Catholic bishop Leo Laba Ladjar stated that radicalism in Indonesia had reached an alarming level. We believe the radical movements trouble our security and nationhood. We are becoming polarized, he stated.

Many believe that the North Jakarta District Courts decision to sentence Ahok to two years imprisonment for blasphemy on May 9 was the result of pressure from hardline groups.

Addressing the rally at his office, Papua deputy governor Klemen Tinal said the rallys aspiration is to remind us that we live in the NKRI [Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia] under Pancasila and the UUD 45 Constitution.

Every evening since May 10, Jayapura residents have held a candle light vigil at Imbi park to support Ahok.

Ahoks conviction has sparked protests from thousands of Indonesians nationwide and worldwide, who have staged gatherings demanding authorities release him from prison, as well as to support the unity of Indonesia against Islamic radicalism.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 12:18 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d1541 1 City FPI,pornographic-content,Rizieq-Shihab Free

The Jakarta Police plan to issue a warrant to pick up Muchsin Alatas, head of the Islamic Defender Fronts (FPI) Jakarta branch, in relation to a pornographic conversation that allegedly involved the groups leader, Rizieq Shihab.

A warrant for Muchsin would be issued along with a similar warrant against Rizieq, Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono said on Monday.

He added that Rizieq had allegedly told Muchsin to throw his smartphone away.

We have called him twice for questioning but he never showed up, Argo said as quoted by tempo.co.

Previously the Jakarta Police has announced that they would detain the firebrand leader as soon as he returned to the country after Rizieq failed to show up twice for questioning as a witness in a pornography case.

Rizieqs lawyer, Kapitra Ampera, said on April 27 that Rizieq went on a minor haj, or umrah, with his family. He has not returned to Indonesia since. (idb/wit)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 12:45 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d3276 4 Business tobacco,Excise,increase,cigarette-producers,comments Free

The Association of Indonesian Light Cigarette Producers (Gaprindo) has said that the excise increase for light cigarettes should not be more than 5 percent because of ongoing economic slowdown in the country.

"Customs and excise is quite burdensome for industry players. This year, it rose by 10 percent, and even last year it rose by 15 percent," Gaprindo chairman Muhaimin Moefti said over the weekend as quoted by kontan.co.id.

The association also requested that the government review customs and excise rates every three to five years, instead of every year as done currently, said Muhaimin.

Separately, the Finance Ministry's customs and excise director general, Heru Pambudi, said the government did not plan to increase revenue for tobacco products and had even projected a decrease in production by 2 percent this year.

As of April alone, he added, his directorate recorded a decrease by Rp 200 million (US$15,018) of customs and excise revenue to Rp 29.4 trillion (US$2.20 billion) from the same period last year.

Of the figure, tobacco excise contributed Rp 16.4 trillion, which was Rp 400 billion lower than the figure in the same period last year. (yon/bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 10:18 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0ca613 2 National ransomware,cyber-attacks,WannaCry,Dharmais-Hospital Free

Ilham Negara, who was taking his girlfriends mother for surgery at Dharmais Cancer Hospital in West Jakarta on Saturday morning, was perplexed when he discovered he could not get a queue number for admission.

Suffering from stage 2 cervical cancer, his girlfriends mother was scheduled for surgery on Monday and was advised to stay at the hospital for two days prior to the surgery.

When Ilham proceeded to take the queue number he was greeted by an unusual message on the computers display saying Ooops, your files have been encrypted!.

The red background display was equipped with a digital timer to inform the reader how many hours were left before the files were deleted by the hacker, as well as a ransom statement, which stated they must send US$300 worth of bitcoin, or around Rp 4 million to a site address to recover the encrypted files.

Puzzled, Ilham tried to search for it on the internet only to discover the hospital was among those to have fallen victim to ransomware WannaCry that had attacked over 100 countries.

Ilham had to wait for three hours to finish the registration as the administration had to do it manually. His girlfriends mother finally entered her room at 11 a.m.

I cannot imagine what will happen on Monday, when more patients come to register at the hospital. They are cancer patients, if they are in a more severe condition, it must be troublesome for them to wait in line for longer periods of time, he said on Sunday.

The cyber attacks controlled the computer system and blocked access to data until the computer owner paid the ransom. Among those that have been reportedly under attack were Britains public health system, the Russian Interior Ministry as well as businesses like international shipper FedEx and automotive manufacturer Nissan.

Widi Budianto, the hospitals head of information and technology, said the ransomware had locked access to patients medical records and medical bills in around 600 computers in the countrys largest cancer treatment center.

This is the second day since the attack occurred and we have checked and isolated 70 percent of our computers, Widi said. Widi who learned about the first attack on Saturday at 5 a.m. said that as the hospital always backed up its data they were not too worried.

But service at the hospital is expected to be slower than usual as it may have to operate manually on Monday.

On Monday, when the patients traffic is at its peak, there may be some clogged queues for patient services at the hospital since everything will be done manually, hospital director Abdul Kadir said on Sunday.

He said the situation might prolong patients waiting time and slow down the patient handling process.

The communications and information minister visited the hospital on Saturday to observe the situation. This is a severe attack, but we are sure we are on top of it, and we are still trying to minimize the impacts of the attack, said Minister Rudiantara on Sunday, Indonesia got attacked, yes, but the attack in our country is not the most severe.

The ministry has also disseminated instructions on what to do when the attacks happen, including updating the security on Windows by installing Patch MS17010, disabling macros and SMB v1 functions, and disconnecting LAN cable and internet connection from computers.

The ministry also asked everyone to remain calm if they are being attacked and to consult with the Indonesia Security Incident Response Team on Internet Infrastructure (ID-SIRTII) or seek online consultation at nomoreransom.org

Adi Jaelani of ID-SIRTII said that WannaCry victims were those who used Windows 8 or any windows system operations before that and had not updated the patch.

Whatever happens, dont pay the ransom, Adi said. There is no guarantee that the hacker will give the decrypts after the victim pays the money. On the contrary he might ask for more money, he added.

Sr. Comr. Fadil Irman, the head of the National Polices cybercrime unit said that the police would collaborate with international law enforcement and Microsoft representatives to solve the cyber crime attack. (hol)
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Linkedin Grace D. Amianti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017

The government is finalizing a derivative rule to the Tax Amnesty Law that is expected to ease further efforts in hunting for recalcitrant taxpayers following the end of the signature tax amesty program.

Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution has said that authorities are currently discussing a draft government regulation (PP) that refers to Article 18 of the 2016 Tax Amnesty Law, which stipulates that any undeclared asset owned between Jan. 1, 1985, and Dec. 31, 2015, will be considered as additional income and subject to a costly penalty even three years after the end of the tax amnesty in March.

That means the undeclared assets will be charged with income taxe ranging from 5 percent to 30 percent, plus a 200 percent fine.

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Linkedin Ganung Nugroho Adi (The Jakarta Post) Surakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 13:18 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d7348 4 National national-unity,sectarian-issues,surakarta Free

The Surakarta Police dispersed on Sunday evening a candlelight vigil held in front of the Surakarta City Hall, citing a lack of permit as the reason behind its move to stop the assembly.

At the start of the vigil, the police peacefully monitored hundreds of participants, all of whom wore black attire as they gathered in front of City Hall at around 6 p.m. However, as the crowd grew, the police told the participants to leave the area.

The crowd ignored the warning and sang the national anthem, prompting the police to form a barricade.

"This evening's gathering violated Law No. 9/1998 [on freedom of expression]. That is why we dismissed it," said Surakarta Police head of operations Comr. Arief Joko Saptomo.

Arief said the police did not intend to put a stop to the gathering. "But we hadn't received any notifications about it," he said.

A member of the vigil's organizing committee, Mujiono, said his committee had yet to inform the police about it. He, however, defended the participants, saying they only intended to call for national unity and tolerance.

"They came here by their own will. Also, this gathering has nothing to do with similar assemblies in other cities," he said. (msa/wit)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 13:45 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0d951e 1 News AirAsia,#airlines,Airlines,budget-airlines,Chinese,China Free

Low-cost airline AirAsia has signed a joint agreement with China to found a budget carrier based in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

AirAsia (China) will be a joint venture between AirAsia, Everbright Group, and Henan Government Working Group, according to a statement made by the airline.

"This Chinese venture represents the final piece of the AirAsia puzzle," said AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes. "In just 16 years, we have successfully built a presence in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, India and Japan, with China closing the loop on all major territories in Asia Pacific.

Read also: AirAsia plans Vietnam venture on Southeast Asia travel boom

While few details of the LLC were revealed, according to the statement, AirAsia (China) plans to invest in aviation infrastructure, including a dedicated terminal at the Zhengzhou Xinzheng International Airport and an aviation academy to train pilots, cabin crew and engineers, as well as develop maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facilities to service aircraft.

Both AirAsia and its sister airline AirAsia X fly to 15 destinations in China. It is the largest foreign LCC operating in the country. (sul/kes)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, May 15, 2017 10:59 2004 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a0cd51c 1 News kelapa-dua-island,festival,Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,Thousand-Islands-regency Free

Saturday was a festive day on Kelapa Dua Island in the Thousand Islands regency. Local residents, most of whom work as a fisherman, held a Sea Party as a form of syukuran (a gathering to express gratitude to God) for the earnings that they gathered from the ocean. This Sea Party is an annual tradition that has gone on for 20 years.

The syukuran was conducted on fishing boats, with the main event comprising prayers held on two Kelapa Dua docks. It was followed by a madua sipulung, in which participants sat together for a meal.

Read also: Paradise awaits: Pulau Macan village & eco resort

This tradition is a form of togetherness among the people, to show that there isnt any hierarchy whatsoever between officials and residents, said H. Amir, who heads the Pesona Bahari Kelapa Dua Island Festival.

After feasting, water fights then broke between residents, people from all ages try to splash each other with water using plastic buckets.

This water fight is a tradition that has been passed down from our ancestors; it is a way for us to give thanks, Amir added. (asw)
We have more details on tonights devastating fire at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, the 167-year-old synagogue building at 60 Norfolk St.

More than 100 firefighters fought the blaze, which broke out just before 7 p.m. It was under control by about 8:50 p.m., but not before ravaging the historic landmark. Thankfully, no one was injured.

A short time ago, we spoke with Rabbi Mendl Greenbaum, who was on the scene to begin assessing the damage to the building. The synagogue was shuttered in 2007. He told us that groups of young people had entered the property in recent weeks. Police have been called on numerous occasions, he said. They apparently set a small fire last Sunday evening (exactly one week ago). A TLD reader, Paul Power, sent us the photo you see below, showing fire trucks in front of the synagogue Sunday, May 7. Greenbaum said authorities are checking security cameras in the area for evidence that the same kids were on the scene tonight.

Greenbaum said he was scheduled to pay a visit to the Landmarks Preservation Commission in the coming week to discuss the future of the building. He was to be accompanied by representatives of the Chinese American Planning Council (CPC), which owns the parcel behind the building. CPC has for many years been contemplating a new commercial building on the site. Greenbaum said a development plan for both parcels was to include the renovation of the dilapidated synagogue building.

In 2012, Greenbaum filed a hardship application with the Landmarks Commission, seeking permission to demolish the building. Under pressure from preservation groups, he withdrew the application. Several organizations, including the New York Landmarks Conservancy, have been advocating for a full restoration. Beth Hamedrash Hagadol is the oldest synagogue of Russian Jews in this country. It was built in 1850 as a church.

Earlier tonight, City Council member Margaret Chin was on site to gather information and to assist residents of the Hong Ning senior housing complex, located next door to the synagogue. The elevators were shut down for a time, and there was concern about tenants potentially suffering smoke inhalation, or having to evacuate. Fortunately, they were all okay, and evacuations were not necessary. Chin called the fire devastating, and said officials will be working hard to save the historic landmark. Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou also put out a statement tonight, saying she was in close contact with emergency officials and staff members were on Norfolk Street to assist residents with any pressing needs.

Wayne Ho, president and CEO of Chinese American Planning Council was in the lobby of the Hong Ning building, as well (his organization owns the property). He declined to discuss any potential development of the site adjacent to Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, except to say that, many conversations have been taking place.

It will be tomorrow before Department of Buildings inspectors get their first look inside the badly damaged building. Local preservationists already fear the worst, strongly suspecting that the cherished Jewish sacred site will be condemned and demolished. The now charred and gutted synagogue, of course, sits right in the middle of the Essex Crossing development site. As a vacant parcel, it would be worth many millions.
Heres a midday update on the fire that destroyed Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, one of the Lower East Sides most cherished Jewish historic sites.

Investigators are still sifting through the ashes of the synagogue to determine how last nights fire at 60 Norfolk St. started. Channel 4 reported:

Authorities believe the fire started from within the historic Congregation Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, though how, and precisely where, remains under investigation. Fire marshals began conducting a ground search at the synagogue on Norfolk Street Monday, about 12 hours after the three-alarm blaze tore through the 19th century structure.

DNAinfo reported that police are reviewing surveillance footage showing three young people running from the area Sunday night, but it is still unknown whether they were fleeing the historic synagogue and it is too early to say whether criminality was involved in the massive blaze.

According to the New York Post, a witness told fire investigators he saw three people running from the synagogue. ATF agents were on site today. Somehow this fire started in a building that isnt being used. So were going to investigate further, said FDNY Manhattan Borough Commander Roger Sakowich.

Officials with the Landmarks Preservation Commission were on the scene this morning. In 1967, the synagogues legendary spiritual leader, Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, led a successful effort to designate the Gothic Revival structure as a New York City landmark. It was shuttered in 2007 after years of neglect. While the current rabbi, Mendl Greenbaum, considered demolishing the structure, he relented in 2013, agreeing to work with local preservationists for an alternative to demolition.

One organization involved in those efforts is the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Earlier today, we spoke with Colleen Heemeyer, manager of grants and technical services. She said that the conservancy has had no contact with the synagogues leadership since 2014 and 2015, when there was talk of renovating the building and using it for some type of commercial facility. The Landmarks Conservancy awarded Beth Hamedrash Hagadol a $14,000 grant in 2013 for a structural study of the building. Asked for her response to last nights fire, Heemeyer said, The loss of a landmark is always tragic. The impact on the community is tragic, especially when a community is losing part of its local fabric.

We also contacted Joyce Mendelsohn from Friends of the Lower East Side (a preservation group). Shes also author of Lower East Side: Remembered & Revisited. She made reference to our report last night that neighborhood youths have been seen going in and out of the building in recent weeks and to a prevailing point of view in the community: that this fire seems awfully suspicious. Heres what Mendelsohn had to say:

The destruction of Beth Hamedrash Hagadol Synagogue is a devastating loss to the Jewish heritage of the Lower East Side. Erected as the Norfolk Street Baptist Church in 1850, the building was acquired and remodeled as a synagogue in 1888. It was the nations oldest Orthodox Jewish Russian congregation founded in 1852 and stood as a tangible reminder of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants  fleeing programs and economic deprivation  who found justice and opportunity in America on the streets of the Lower East Side. Accident or hate crime? It is easy to place the blame on the carelessness of neighborhood youth, but there may have been a darker motive. Could the fire have been deliberately set to clear the site for redevelopment with vast profits as luxury housing?

Over the years, we have covered the plight of Beth Hamedrash Hagadol. Heres an excerpt from our January 2014 story:

(In the spring of 2013) the New York Landmarks Conservancy conducted an engineering study to assess the buildings condition. A draft report was completed during the summer, according to Ann Friedman, director of the conservancys Sacred Sites Program. The initial inspection found some structural problems, including a destabilized balcony, collapsing joists and erosion of the space between the roof and one of the buildings walls. But the evaluation showed that the foundation is secure and that the synagogues basic structure has not been compromised. The interior, however, has been badly damaged from water seeping in from the leaky roof. The report recommends removal of all plaster (there may be a few salvageable decorative elements) and a complete renovation. Friedman said the next step is to create a proposed budget for the project. In the past, preservation experts have estimated restoration costs of at least $3.5 million. In 2010, the conservancy estimated it would cost about $1 million just to seal the building, a critical step in preventing further flooding and water damage. Once the report is finalized, it will be forwarded to the Landmarks Commission. In a recent phone conversation, Rabbi Greenbaum said he remains dedicated to the preservation effort. We know we have to act, he said. Greenbaum said preliminary talks have taken place involving the developers of Essex Crossing, the large mixed-use project being planned on several parcels surrounding the synagogue. The hope is that the developers will want to purchase the Norfolk Street property, pay for the restoration of the synagogue and incorporate it into their project as some kind of community center. Greenbaum said no promises have been made, but Essex Crossing representatives were receptive. In response to an inquiry from The Lo-Down last fall, a spokesperson for the development team declined to speculate on any kind of future relationship with Beth Hamedrash Hagadol.

AMNY has more comments today from Rabbi Greenbaum:

Everybodys in shock I had to hold on not to collapse For us, besides a community tragedy, its a personal family tragedy as well (Speaking of more recent preservation efforts, he added:) Originally when the congregation dwindled down, there were no congregants, there was no meansto be able to save our congregation But then through intervening from some people, good friends, we changed our mind and we were all out to save the building, to save the landmark.

Finally, heres the 1967 designation report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission:
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The last two Radio Shack locations Downriver will be closed by the end of the month.

Locations in Lincoln Park, 1887 Dix-Toledo, and Southgate, 14100 Fort Street, are among the locations that are closing after the company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March.

For nearly 100 years, RadioShack has proudly served local communities across the United States, offering consumers unique, high-quality products at a great value, said Dene Rogers, RadioShacks President and Chief Executive Officer. Over the course of the past two years, our talented, dedicated team has worked relentlessly in an effort to revitalize the Company and the RadioShack brand, while providing outstanding service to our customers. We greatly appreciate their hard work and dedication.

This is the second bankruptcy since 2015 for the company. At least 200 of the remaining 1,500 stores will definitely close, with others to be evaluated over the course of the bankruptcy. Prior to the filing there were 5,900 employees nationwide.

At one point in the companys history there were more than 5,000 stores nationwide.

Since emerging from bankruptcy two years ago as a privately owned company, our team has made progress in stabilizing operations and achieving profitability in the retail business, while our partner Sprint managed the mobility business, Rogers said. In 2016, we reduced operating expenses by 23 percent, while at the same time saw gross profit dollars increase 8 percent.
An opportunity for foodies and beer lovers to get lost in a world of food and drink from a hand-selected range of food trucks and breweries from around New Zealand.
Bollywood star Ranbir Kapoor, an avid traveller, was on Monday announced as brand ambassador of online travel portal Yatra.com.

"I am an avid traveller myself and travel has played an important part in my films. So a partnership with a travel brand like Yatra was a natural fit for me. I am particularly excited to be part of this new journey and I am looking forward to a long and fulfilling 'Yatra' with the brand," Ranbir said in a statement.

Popularly known for portraying versatile and youthful roles on screen in films like Tamasha and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Ranbir has been chosen to endorse the platform as he is "technologically savvy, modern and has a passion for travelling".

On roping in the actor, Sharat Dhall, Chief Operating Officer (B2C), Yatra.com, said: "Ranbir's persona is in line with these qualities, and he also brings with him a sense of casual coolness that today's youth relates to."

The fact that Ranbir appeals to all age groups and demographics is also exciting for the brand officials, said Vikrant Mudaliar, Chief Marketing Officer, Yatra.com.
After giving a smashing performance in Rangoon, National Award winning actress Kangana Ranaut is back with her quirky side in Simran. The film's teaser was released by the director on Monday.

In the teaser, Kangana, who plays the role of a Gujarati NRI named Praful Patel aka Simran, shows her various moods while donning different wigs, dancing and running inside a grocery store. Her outlook in the teaser bears a strong resemblance with her character in Tanu Weds Manu.

By looking at the teaser, one gets a feeling that Kangana's character is full of life mostly like her other characters  in Queen and Tanu Weds Manu series.

Kangana has collaborated with filmmaker Hansal Mehta for the very first time.

Simran is slated for release on 15 September.

(With inputs from angencies)
Among the great American authors of the 20th century, if not the greatest, Ernest Hemingway was not only known for his terse, minimal style but also his adventurous, larger-than-life persona. Yet in his last decade, he only wrote two works while his robust health declined to the point that he chose to end his life. Why did he enter this twilight zone?

It was the pressure of his actions as a "premature anti-fascist" at the beginning of World War II that weighed on him in the hysteric atmosphere of "the Red Scare" in the US as the Cold War flared up, contends Nicholas Reynolds in this riveting, hitherto unknown account of the literary icon's latter life.

Stressing the author's "involvement with mid-twentieth-century spycraft was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with risks than has been previously understood", he reveals before a "complex set of secret relationships" with various American agencies, Hemingway had even agreed to cooperate with the Soviet NKVD.

And how, to what extent and what its consequences were is the story that Reynolds unveils here with verve  and balance  for he is no sensationalist. Having substantial proof as well as credentials for his claim, he shows the truth is more nuanced than the bare revelation would have us believe (Hemingway fans especially have no reason to fear).

A historian turned Marine turned CIA operative who ended up as the historian of the CIA Museum, he tells us that this book originated when he, researching for an exhibit on CIA's World War II-forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), "made an off-hand connection one day that would lead to deep waters".

Remembering reading earlier that Hemingway and an OSS colonel had "liberated" the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris from the Germans in August 1944, he wondered if there was more to the story.

Reynolds started digging among every source he could find and after a few months found the outline of a very different portrait of Hemingway, noting that the "writer had  almost obsessively I thought  tried his hand at various forms of fighting and spying" from 1937 as well as during World War II. The settings were "varied, often exotic: the battlefields of Spain, the backstreets of Havana, a junk on the North River in China".

And it was then he came across the surprising fact that Hemingway "had signed on with another intelligence service, one that did not fit the conventional narrative of his life"  the predecessor of the KGB.

And while it was like an "elbow deep in the gut" for the lifelong Hemingway admirer, Reynolds persevered till he found as much of the story as possible, as well how this influenced Hemingway art and even life  and death.

It begins with Hemingway setting out in September 1935 on his new cabin cruiser to Florida's upper Keys to help survivors of the one most powerful hurricanes to hit America, and how this influenced his political outlook. Taking an extensive look at his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, which would be reflected in some of his best work, before coming to his "recruitment" by the Soviets (he was codenamed "Argo"), it then takes a detour into some unexpected territory.

We follow Hemingway visiting China in 1941, where he met Chiang Kai-shek but also Chou En-lai, his espionage and combat contributions in the Cuba and the Caribbean, and then, as war correspondent in France following D-Day. However, the story picks the high gear subsequently when the House Un-American American Activities began probing communist sympathisers in 1947.

This, as Reynolds shows, along with later Cold War episodes like the US-Cuba acrimony soon after Fidel Castro came to power on the island, made Hemingway despairing and paranoid, and started his decline till the time he picked up that shotgun that July morning in 1961.

But more than the view of the writer's secret life, the book's significance lies in showing how fanatical patriotism, demonising an opponent and anyone who may even have had the slightest contact with him and constant calls to demonstrate loyalty can even wreak havoc on the strongest. Are these worth it?

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961; Author: Nicholas Reynolds
As the impact of the worst northeast monsoon in 140 years unfolds across Tamil Nadu, farmers sowed a third less land than they did in 2015-16, water levels in six major reservoirs continued to plunge, and suicides in the farm sector increased over five years.

In the midst of this agrarian turmoil in a state that produced 5.6 per cent of India's rice in 2014-15, the agriculture ministry has predicted a record national harvest.

The agriculture ministry's third advance estimate forecast India's foodgrain production to be the highest ever, increasing by about 9 per cent to 273.4 million tonnes (mt) in the crop year 2016-17 ending June from 251.57 mt in 2015-16.

Tamil Nadu has reported a 29 per cent year-on-year drop in overall crop sowing till February 2, 2017, according to the latest situation report from the agriculture ministry.

The retreating northeast monsoon  usually unnoticed in India owing to the singular importance of the larger southwest monsoon-in 2016 was the worst ever over the last 140 years, according to Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) records, since 1876, as IndiaSpend reported in January 2017.

Record-keeping began in 1871, but a worse northeast monsoon, which sweeps across Tamil Nadu, coastal Andhra Pradesh, south interior Karnataka and Kerala, between October and December, was recorded in 1876, making 2016 the year of the second-worst monsoon in 145 years.

Water levels in three of six major Tamil Nadu reservoirs monitored by the Central Water Commission dropped 25-70 per cent between January 5 and May 11, 2017, according to the commission data, even as the average across the six reservoirs was 82 peer cent less than normal for the week ending May 11, 2017. There are no official data on what percentage of Tamil Nadu farms are irrigated using water from the state's 78 reservoirs.

As the drought-officially declared as such on January 10, 2017  rolls on, the state government has told the Supreme Court it is not linked to suicides by farmers, a contention disputed by a representative of farmers in New Delhi, where a protest is drawing international attention, as protesters display what they say are the skulls of dead farmers.

Farm suicides not because of drought: State government

The Tamil Nadu government's claim that only 82 farmers have committed suicide since October 2016 is wrong, P Ayyakannu-one of the representatives of Tamil Nadu farmers in Delhi and Tamil Nadu president of Desiya-Thennindhiya Nathigal Inaippu Vivasayigal Sangam (National-South Indian Rivers Interlinking Farmers Association)-told IndiaSpend.

He claimed that over 400 farmers had killed themselves because of reasons attributable to the drought and police reports about these suicides had been filed. IndiaSpend could not independently verify this claim.

As many as 106 farmers died in January 2017 alone, according to Tamil media reports, following which the National Human Rights Commission issued notice to the state government asking for a detailed report about the steps proposed to be taken by the state government.

Suicides in the farm sector in Tamil Nadu-including landless farmers and agricultural labourers-increased 12 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to the latest available data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

The police wrongly register many suicides related to drought or crop loss as those due to family problems, old age and other reasons, Ayyakannu told IndiaSpend. Besides, NCRB's new classification of farm-related suicides under two categories-farmers and agricultural labourers-has also led to an apparent drop in farmer suicides over six years to 2014, as IndiaSpend reported in July 2015.

The Supreme Court, in a hearing on May 8, 2017, refused to intervene in the matter of compensation to the families of farmers who died in the wake of drought following the state's worst monsoon in 140 years, the farmers' counsel, N. Rajaraman, told IndiaSpend.

Ayyakannu has challenged the state government's submission to the Supreme Court that farmer suicides were not because of drought. The Supreme Court bench, comprising Justices Dipak Misra and A.M. Khanwilkar, on being informed that 20 cases of farmer suicides in the past year or so have been reported to district collectors, advised Rajaraman to bring those to the notice of the high court instead of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court had said on May 3, 2017, that it was interested in the structural aspects of minimum support prices and mandis (local markets). The Supreme Court seemed reluctant to get involved in the more pressing issue of compensation, Rajaraman told IndiaSpend.

S Panneerselvam, Professor and Head, Agro Climate Research Centre, Tamil Nadu Agriculture University, Coimbatore, told IndiaSpend that they would be issuing an advisory based on the first forecast in April 2017 by the India Meteorological Department of the southwest monsoon as normal. The forecast will be updated in June.
India's exports revival continued for the eighth successive month, recording 19.77 per cent growth during April 2017, official data showed on Monday.

According to data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, exports grew by 19.77 per cent to $24.63 billion from $20.56 billion worth of merchandise shipped out during April 2016.

"In continuation with the double-digit growth exhibited by exports during March 2017, exports during April 2017 have shown growth of 19.77 per cent in dollar terms valued at $24,635.09 million as compared to $20,568.85 million during April 2016," the ministry said in a statement.

"Non-petroleum and non- gems and jewellery exports in April 2017 were valued at $17,718.87 million against $15,136.41 million in April 2016  an increase of 17.06 per cent."

However, the country's imports during the month under review increased by 49.07 per cent to $37.88 billion. India's oil imports during last month increased by 30.12 per cent to $7.35 billion.

"The global Brent prices ($/bbl) have increased by 25.40 per cent in April 2017 vis-a-vis April 2016 as per World Bank commodity price data," the statement said.

The data revealed that non-oil imports were up by 54.50 per cent, to $30.52 billion from $19.75 billion in the corresponding month of last year.

Consequently, the trade deficit during the month under review was higher by 173.47 per cent to $13.24 billion from $4.84 billion reported for April 2016.

Further, the ministry disclosed the services exports data provided by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

"Exports during March 2017 were valued at $14,179 million registering a positive growth of 8.57 per cent in dollar terms as compared to negative growth of 3.76 per cent during February 2017," the ministry's statement said.

"Imports during March 2017 were valued at $8,267 million registering a positive growth of 14.26 per cent in dollar terms as compared to negative growth of 13.96 per cent during February 2017."

The ministry said that cumulative trade balance including merchandise and services sectors has improved.

"Taking merchandise and services together, overall trade deficit for April-March 2016-17 is estimated at $40,980 million which is 16.87 percent lower in dollar terms than the level of $49,297.53 million during April-March 2015-16," the statement added.
The IT ministry has reached out to key stakeholders like RBI, National Payments Corporation of India, NIC and UIDAI (Aadhaar) to advise them to protect their systems against 'Wanna Cry' ransomware to ensure that the digital payments ecosystem in the country is protected.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has also instructed cyber security unit CERT-In to gather information of 'Wanna Cry' ransomware that has wrecked havoc across sectors like healthcare and telecommunications in more than 100 countries.

Over the weekend, the ransomware hit systems in over 100 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history. It infected computers running on older versions of Microsoft operating systems like XP, locking access to files on the computer.

The cyber criminals have demanded a fee of about USD 300 in crypto-currencies like Bitcoin for unlocking the device.

Microsoft has introduced a security patch to tackle the situation, and consumers across the globe have been advised to download the solution at the earliest.

Noting that no reports have been formally received so far related to the ransomware attack, MeitY said a few systems of the Police Department in Andhra Pradesh were impacted and that the state government has been informed to follow the advisory by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

"MeitY is keeping a close watch on the developments on the ransomware and is working in close coordination with all relevant agencies," it said in a statement.

The ministry has also reached out to the Department of Telecom (DoT) to alert Internet service providers (ISPs) to secure their networks as well as the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and CDAC to ensure that users across the country, especially those in the private sector, are cautioned about the ransomware.

Besides, it has also requested Microsoft India to inform all its partners and customers to apply the relevant patches.

As per the advisory issued by CERT-In, the ransomware infects other computers on the same network and is also spreading through malicious attachments to e-mails. Security firms have suggested that users immediately disconnect the infected device from the local network to contain the spread of infection.

In Spain, major companies including telecommunications firm Telefonica have been infected. The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.

Reports suggest that over two lakh systems globally could have been infected by the malicious software.

Experts fear the situation could further aggravate as a number of computers in India run on the older operating systems and have not been updated yet.

"The impact has been somewhat contained in India because of the weekend. However, one will have to watch the situation as people return to work tomorrow and access their computers," Kaspersky Lab Head for South Asia Region Altaf Halde told PTI.

A report by the security solutions firm claims that India is among the countries worst affected by the Wanna Cry outbreak, accounting for about five per cent of the attacks.

"This attack is perhaps the largest, most widespread and contiguous malware attack in history as the attackers have used a flaw in Microsoft software to infiltrate unguarded systems. It is important that users keep their systems updated and take a proactive approach to security rather than a reactive one," Pradipto Chakrabarty, Regional Director at CompTIA India said.

Saket Modi, CEO and co-founder of Lucideus said, ransomware, as a mode of attack, seems to be gaining traction as it now gets 4-5 requests from a week from enterprises across the country for providing support from such attacks
The battle between suspended AAP leader Kapil Mishra and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal is hotting up, with family members taking sides in a public war of words.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's wife, Sunita, on Monday took to Twitter and slammed Kapil Mishra.

"Law of nature never errs. Seeds of deceit, lies sown, so shall he @KapilMishra reap. Inevitable," the former income tax commissioner tweeted.

Mishra was quick to respond to the barb.

"Sunita ji is a very committed wife. She doesn't know what type of conspiracies are being hatched in her house. She is fulfilling her duties," the sacked minister said on Twitter.

Mishra's mother, Annapurna Mishra, had fired a public salvo at Kejriwal last week, accusing him in an open letter of spreading "falsehood" against her son by saying he was associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

In Monday's Twitter battle, Mishra, who on Sunday, had accused AAP of receiving illegal donations from shell companies, suggested that Kejriwal was using his wife's account to post messages.

"Sir @ArvindKejriwal return Sunita ji phone to her," tweeted Mishra.

"Sunita ji is unaware of truth. She is upset with her husband's downfall. I respect every negative comment from her side. (But) I will not utter a single word against her," Mishra said in another tweet.

Sunita's attack on Mishra is the second in a week.

She had called Mishra "stupid" in a tweet last week, without naming him, after the Anti-Corruption Branch registered an FIR against a company that belonged to Kejriwal's late brother-in-law, Surender Bansal, in another scam.

"My brother-in- law is no more n this stupid man is speaking all written script without any mind," Sunita had tweeted on May 8, a day after Bansal's death.

Mishra's mother, meanwhile, accused Kejriwal's closest friends of circulating misleading photographs on the social media.

"How many lies, Arvind? How many Lies will not help you. Be afraid of God," she said in the letter.

(With inputs from Agencies)
Both the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress are likely to have a straight fight on May 25 for the lone Raja Sabha seat from Manipur.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, with the support of the coalition partners, has fielded Khetrimayum Bhabananda, the state BJP President; while the Congress has fielded Elangbam Dijwamani.

Chief Minister N Biren Singh held a meeting with the leaders of the coalition partners on Sunday night on the forthcoming elections.

He reportedly told them to ensure that the party candidate is elected to the upper house of parliament. Sources said that all of them assured him of support to Bhabananda.

In the March assembly elections, the Congress bagged 28 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party 21 while the splinter parties shared the remaining eleven seats the 60-member Manipur assembly.

The BJP joined hands with some smaller parties and staked claim to form the government with 31 members. Later, six Congress legislators also crossed the floor.

T Shyamkumar was the first to join the BJP even before the formation of the government. He was one of the ministers sworn in on March 15.

Though an expulsion notice was issued against him, it was later revoked. Expulsion notices and petitions to disqualify the five Congress legislators who crossed the floor are yet to be issued.

Party sources said that it was a tactical move with an eye to the Rajya Sabha election.

The Rajya Sabha bypoll was necessitated after the death of sitting member Haji Abdul Salam.

The demand by the people of eight assembly segments to elect one candidate from any of the segments has fallen on deaf ears.

People of the eight assembly constituencies have been launching agitations demanding election of one person from among them. Y Thambal, an activist, said that this is to compensate the people.

Thambal said: "The segments are included in the reserved Lok Sabha seat, which means that they can elect a tribal candidate but they cannot contest the seat. This is a negation of democracy."

To appease the agitating people, the erstwhile Congress government had elected Salam to the Rajya sabha since he is from one of the segments.

It was a foregone conclusion that the BJP would field and elect its state unit President as the next Rajya Sabha member from the state.
Suspended AAP leader Kapil Mishra on Monday said that he will approach the CBI and the CBDT to take forward his corruption charges against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party.

"Whenever I would be discharged from the hospital, I will make a written complaint to the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Central Board of Direct Taxes under black money, hawala and money laundering cases (against Kejriwal and the AAP)," Mishra tweeted.

On Sunday, Mishra accused the party of lying to the Election Commission (EC) about donations and laundering money through shell companies, before he fainted midway through the presser and was hospitalised.

Addressing a press conference, Mishra alleged that the AAP had over Rs 45 crore in its bank account during the financial year of 2013-2014 whereas the party in its declaration to the EC had showed an income of around Rs 9 crore.

Mishra alleged that the party concealed around Rs 36 crore from the party workers and the government.

He said the party has accumulated the money through shell companies.

The AAP dismissed the charges as a "conspiracy" by the Bharatiya Janata Party and said the latter was shooting from the sacked minister's mouth.

The former minister has been on an indefinite hunger strike since May 10, at his official residence here, demanding that Kejriwal must reveal the source of funding of the foreign trips of five AAP leaders  Sanjay Singh, Ashish Khetan, Raghav Chadhha, Satyendar Jain and Durgesh Pathak  in the last two years.

Mishra was sacked on May 6 in a sudden move and later was also suspended from the party.
A major fire broke out in a chemical factory in Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, police said on Monday. The casualties so far has been the livestock.

Two cows and a calf were burnt to death and over a dozen of these animals were injured in the late Sunday night blaze. The fire broke out in the Pandav Nagar industrial area around midnight, the police added.

It took three dozen fire brigades from neighbouring Noida and Meerut, besides Ghaziabad itself, to douse the inferno that spread due to the gusty winds, an officer said.

The blaze was continuously fed by the regular explosions in the chemical factory as the stockpiles of chemicals exploded along with the LPG cylinders kept inside.

All neighbouring factories have been vacated, a district official informed. The fire also spread to a paint factory in the vicinity.

The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) team has also been called to oversee rescue of any persons trapped inside the blazing factory campus.

District Magistrate Ministi S. and other senior officials are present at the spot.

Official on Special Duty (OSD) at the District Magistrate's office Sunil Sharma told IANS on phone that the situation was under control now and the assessment of the damage was being done.
In a move to re-build the organisation, the Punjab wing of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday dissolved all its units, from block-level to the state committee.

The decision was taken at a meeting chaired by state chief and Lok Sabha member Bhagwant Mann. The only posts that stand unaffected are those of Mann and state co-president Aman Arora. Both Mann and Arora were appointed to their respective posts last week after a review of the state unit by AAPs political affairs committee that includes Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, at a meeting in New Delhi.

Manns elevation led to resignation by outgoing state unit chief Gurpreet Singh Waraich from the primary membership of the party. Partys chief whip in the Assembly, Sukhpal Khaira, also resigned from the post in protest.

The latest move could also spark fresh trouble as factions have been working against each other ever since the partys below-expectation performance in the assembly elections.
Heat wave across Uttar Pradesh continues unabated, with temperatures set to cross 45 degrees Celsius, said the weatherman on Monday as power cuts added to people's woes with no signs of respite.

In the past 24-hours, the mercury crossed 44 degrees Celsius at most places, with Banda being the hottest at 46.8 degrees Celsius, the Met official said.

The mercury climbed 2.7 degrees in the last one day, signalling the onset of a gruelling summer and a scorching heat wave in the state.

Barring a brief period of gusty winds followed by a dust storm and hail at some places, weather has been very inclement, forcing changing of timing of many schools and early closure for summer breaks at others.

The Regional Met Office predicts a further rise in day temperatures, which are likely to cross 45 degrees Celsius at most places in the state, particularly in Bundelkhand and Poorvanchal.

With the rising mercury, it is likely that the past record of 46.5 degrees average May temperature, (set in 1995) might be shattered soon, the Met office said.

Power outages in many places is also leading to additional woes in many towns and cities.

The state government and the Power Minister Shrikant Sharma have been claiming 247 power supply in the state's cities and 18 hours in smaller towns. But the power cuts in most places are extending for more than four-five hours.

Angry residents here in Telibagh and Southcity areas barged into a substation late on Sunday night to protest long duration of unscheduled power cuts.

In Hariharnagar too, the power cuts have increased and so is the case in Indiranagar, Aliganj.

Power cuts here last close to six hours on an average and power supply officials blame it on overloading, local faults.

Ashutosh Kumar, chief engineer of Lucknow Electricity Supply Administration (Lesa) informed that the power demand has peaked by 25 per cent in the last few days. He, however, assured that the supply would be normalized soon.
Tamil superstar Rajinikanth on Monday met his fans after a gap of eight years and said he has no plans to join politics and if at all he joined, he would not allow wrong people to join him.

"If in case I decide to join politics, I won't allow wrong people to join me, I'll keep them away," the superstar told his fans in Chennai.

Saying that people who make money in politics will not be entertained by him, Rajinikanth said he made a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years ago.

"If I do enter politics, then those making money will not be entertained," he said, adding, "Committed a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years ago and it was a political accident."

According to reports, Rajinikanth will meet his fans for four days in Chennai starting from Monday. The actor will meet his die-hard fans in batches, between May 15 and 19.

He had said it was long due for me. The 66 year-old Kabali star will not hold any discussions with the fans, but will only pose for photographs with them.

His fans have often asked their Thalaivar (leader) to take the political plunge, even as he has been wooed by many political parties on account of his mass appeal.

According to reports, over 750 fans from across Tamil Nadu were present at the venue to meet their superstar.

(With inputs from agencies)
Andres Barbe has been the Ambassador of Chile to India since 2014. He is a post-graduate in African History from the University of Nairobi. He has served Chile in different capacities within the country as well as abroad, including Canada, Kenya, Peru and Argentina.

In this interview to Ashok Tuteja and Debdeep Mukherjee at the Embassy of Chile in posh Vasant Vihar, the 61- year-old Ambassador spoke at length about India-Chile relations and how the two countries propose to expand ties. Excerpts:

How do you see the current state of economic and political relations between India and Chile?

Well, the ties have enormous potential. In the international arena, we have similar views, we have very close and friendly relationship for so many years since we opened the Embassy here sometime around 1948-49. Even before, we participated in the ceremony of Indian independence in 1947So its a long relationship. Not to forget, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda while serving consular position in Sri Lanka came close to India and developed great friendship with another Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Its true that the connectivity is poor between these two geographically far-off countries. We dont have a direct flight between India and Chile and we need to stop over somewhere to reach either nation. This is hampering greater people-to-people connection. We have many things in common.

Has the India-Chile Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) signed last year helped the two countries increase the volume of bilateral trade?

We just signed the PTA in November last year. It would benefit both sides. This agreement has expanded number of agreeable trade products between the two nations to 2,800 from 400. This deal will reduce the duties and encourage commerce between two sides. This is going to come into force on 16 May in Santiago in the presence of Indian embassy officials.

Sometime back, there was a proposal to train troops from Chile in Indian mountains and deserts. What is the current status?

We are not sending troops. Chiles priorities have been to work with India though we don't have any defence agreement as of now.We have been involved with the Indians in multilateral maritime exercises in the Arabian Sea in the past and more possibilities are being explored.

How do you look at India's ties with Mercosur considering Chile is its associate member?

We are just associated with Mercosur but more active with Pacific Alliance. But in the last six months, we have tried to strengthen the alliance between Mercosur and Pacific Alliance of Chile, Peru, Mexico and Colombia. We have held meetings with Mercosur members.

India is an observer at Pacific Alliance. We invite India to be part of cooperation in specific areas like Information Technology (IT) and solar energy because India has a vast experience in these fields.

How do you see India's role in global affairs given the size of the country and its population?

Well, definitely India is one of the biggest and most important countries in the world. We recognise that and believe that India has played a role for a long time since the 1960s when the Non- Aligned Movement was launched. It is playing a role in BRICS and UN. In that sense, we are close to India and we support India's bid for a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council.

So Chile supports India's bid for a permanent seat at the UNSC?

Yes, we support India's bid but at the same time we believe that no nation (old and new) should have the veto power in the Security Council. We recommend modification of the Security Council. It's not fair for one nation to veto a proposal introduced by majority members. Once there is a majority in favour of a decision, it should not be vetoed. There should be democracy principally in UNSC too.

What is being done by Chile to promote people to people contact with India?

We are doing what we can to facilitate easy travel especially for entrepreneurs and businessmen along with students. Indian students interested in South American studies go to Chile for post-graduate courses. It's definitely not a large community, around 100 students now. For us it's a large group.

We are trying to promote Chile as a tourist destination through our attaches and honorary consuls in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Even in Kolkata book fair, we tried to promote Chilean tourism and we are also trying to promote Chile as a honeymoon destination. It is possible to find a complete variety of climates: from the driest desert to the polar climate with glaciers in Patagonia.

Are any high-level visits from either side in the offing?

Last year, the former President of Chile came to visit India and this year we would hold political consultations between the two sides in Santiago in July. As Chilean presidential elections are scheduled for November, a high-level visit is unlikely this year.
India is emerging globally with a paradigm shift in the market economy. For those interested in shopping for luxury jewellery from the comfort of their home, heres something to look forward to. Bengalurus BlueStone.com, the countrys largest online jewellery brand, has a high penetration in West Bengal with a wide reach in major towns of North Bengal.

The online global group unveiled its novel traditional jewellery collections  Nava and B-Iconic  in Kolkata on the occasion of Akshaya Tritiya.

The Indian jewellery business is the largest and fastest-growing market in the country. When it comes to the jewellery groups leading markets in India, West Bengal ranks in the seventh position and Kolkata occupies the sixth position. Gaurav Singh Kushwaha, founder and chief executive officer, BlueStone.com, said, We present the most convenient way for luxury shoppers to buy jewellery online from the comfort of their home and customers are spoilt for choice with our amazing collections.

West Bengal forms our key pillar and our customers are young women within the age group of 28 to 34 years. Our jewellery brand caters to 130 cities and major towns in West Bengal and the fast moving jewellery items are gold leaf earring and the circa pendant.

Keeping with fast-changing fashion trends, the groups Nava collection comprises antiquethemed jewellery with the recreation of the navaratnas through poetic eyes depicting the architectural grandeur of Hampi. The B-Iconic collection involves beautifully-crafted jewellery with intricate designs based on gold and pearls and is a tribute to the groups logo making a powerful fashion statement.

Kushawa said, We have a presence across 18 cities of India where customers have the option for free trail of jewellery items at home. We have a robust market in major cities of West Bengal including Kolkata, Howrah, 24 Parganas, Siliguri and Durgapur. Even customers from remote corners of the state like Nandigram and Hasimara, a miniature town in Alipur Duar district in North Bengal in the vicinity of Bhutan border, have embraced our jewellery products that are very affordable starting Rs 5,000.

The manufacturing facility of the group is in Mumbai and the speciality in design makes the jewellery items stand off from others. We believe in creating jewellery that can be worn every day. We add nearly 250 new designs every month. There are embellished jewellery stuff that serve as wedding collections. Our online jewellery business in West Bengal is around 42 per cent and our market share in North Bengal is quite minuscule.

But our group has posted around 70 per cent growth in revenue in West Bengal last year, further said Kushwaha. The online jewellery firm has forayed into all the major towns of North Bengal like Siliguri, Malda, Darjeeling, Cooch Behar and Gangtok in Sikkim. Kushwaha said, We hope there would be around a three per cent growth in the online jewellery business in Bengal in the next five years.
Can citizenship be thought of from the point of view of the excluded? This has been an important question among scores of political theorists and policy and opinion-makers across the world.

Mark S Werbner and Yuval Davis define citizenship as a more total relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging.

In the present referral to the full constitutional bench of the Supreme Court in the case about the constitutional status of Clause 6(A) of the Assam Accord, all these factors shape the stand taken by the various parties involved.

One of the major arguments is that if those immigrants from erstwhile East Pakistan who came to Assam till 1971 are granted citizenship under the said 6(A), it will alter the demographic pattern, change land holdings and ownership and as such, undermine the place of Axomiya language and culture.

The Assam Accord  looked upon as a constitutional safeguard to Axomiya language, culture, identity and development of Assam  is both inclusive and exclusive.

The Accord broadly construed an inclusive notion of difference and otherness to accommodate multiple nonAxomiya ethnic and cultural groups, while it restricted the grant of citizenship to post-1971 immigrants.

The Accord combined difficult political and social realities  on one hand, it created a framework for detection and deportation of post- 1971 illegal immigrants and on the other, it took care of the need for assimilation and co-belonging of multiple settlers; native and migrant linguistic, religious and ethnic groups.

In no way can either one of the two aspects be given precedence over the other, as Assams delicate ethnic balance depends on a continuous pursuance of the letter and spirit of the Accord to ensure stability, growth, redistribution and social cohesion, both in the state and the entire Northeast.

In the early stages of the hearing on the constitutionality of Clause 6 (A), Justice Madan Lokur raised the matter, in no uncertain terms, by asking the solicitor of Assam whether the Sammiliato Mahasangha, a conglomerate body of ethnic groups, want to nullify the Assam Accord.

The contenders avoided answering this uneasy question but reasserted that they only wanted abolition of Clause 6 (A). To this, the court pointed out that such abolition would amount to scrapping of the Accord itself. After that, the bench suspended hearing until further listing.

This brings one back to the context of constitutional perspectives on the Assam Accord and related events. One of the major judgments passed by the Supreme Court was the declaration in 2005 of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1985, as unconstitutional.

While repealing the act, the Supreme Court put the onus on the suspected illegal immigrant to prove his/her antecedents, and not on the one who makes a complaint.

It was welcome as a step towards identification and deportation of illegal immigrants to their country of origin.

Further, the same judgment declared that the IM (DT) Act violated Article 355 of the Constitution as well as Article 14, as it only applied to Assam.

One of the implications of the judgment is that there can be no Assam-specific rule that does not apply to rest of India. But carrying out a National Register of Citizens by the executive according to Rule 4A and Schedule of Citizenship Rules, 2003,  that states nothing in Rule 4 of the same rules shall, on and after the commencement of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizenship and Issue of National Identity Cards) Amendment Rules, 2009, apply to the State of Assam  creates a legal incoherence as there cannot be Assam-specific rules that do not apply to the other parts of India for the purpose of citizenship.

To this legal incoherence, the idea of legacy data and link documents  which is not prescribed in the procedure of census of registration of citizenship  is invoked in case of Assam as only a procedure following a twomember Supreme Court judgment, for which there is no extant law.

Although a Supreme Court judgment in a specific case is equivalent to law of the land yet its larger applicability over the whole country remains a question under the scope of Article 14.

So the National Register of Citizens of India in the state of Assam is determined by special laws, and as such there are no similar and parallel procedures available in any other state of India.

To make matters more exceptional, the Assam government had set up detention camps for suspected and doubtful D voters in Goalpara, Kokrajhar, Silchar, Dibrugarh, Jorhat and Tezpur, that house many suspected D voters, who are declared foreigners, sometimes in the absence of proper legal defence.

As most of the detainees are poor and illiterate, they were not in a position to bear the high legal costs of defending them as Indian citizens.

The conditions within such detention camps also have raised concerns from human rights standards that are adopted globally.

One wonders whether there are any such detention camps in other parts of the country. The moot point is that executive procedures and multiplicity of legal processes need to take care of rights of the accused or the victim. In most cases, the procedures are not properly justiciable and skewed, much to the disadvantage of the ethnic and linguistic minorities of Assam, once they are dubbed D voters or Bangladeshis.

The Assam Accord, which established a sense of normativity, reason and justice, stands out as the most rational fine print of a para-legal document and it needs to be implemented by upholding the due process of law.

Also the universality of human rights, which is above the constitutional human rights, as John Rawls stated in his Law of People, need to be maintained in a sensitive manner by taking into account humanitarian concerns.

(This article was written after the Supreme Court deferred its hearing on Clause 6 (A) of the Assam Accord, on 8 May)

The writer is an author, a human rights activist and philosopher based at the North Eastern Hill University, Shillong
Johann Sebastian Bach once said, "It is easy to play any musical instrument: All you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself"; but many will agree that this is easier said than done! However, when Denis Novato, a Slovene musician and arguably one of the world's best artist on the diatonic accordion, played his instrument, it all seemed so simple, perfect and musical that one could not help but agree with Bach's quote.

Performing at the India International Centre during a special evening of Slovenian culture, organised by the Embassy of Slovenia as part of the celebrations pertaining to the 25th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between Slovenia and India, Novato held his audience in awe. Beginning his career way back in 1988, he has won more than 20 international competitions, was awarded the title 'World Champion' on the diatonic accordion twice (1996 and 1999) and has composed since more than 50 original songs.

"This year, Slovenia and India are celebrating 25 years of diplomatic relations. For this special occasion, we wanted to give the Indian audience a little taste of the rich Slovenian culture. We are, indeed, delighted to have Denis Novato on stage, in New Delhi, to share his talent and the Slovenian folk musical tradition with the Indian audiences," said Ambassador of Slovenia Jozef Drofenik on the occasion.

Novato says, "Since childhood, I have grown up with Slovenian folk music and as a member of the Slovenian ethnic minority community in the neighbouring Italy, maintaining our tradition was paramount. Though this form of music was not popular amongst the youth when I was growing up, things have been changing lately, which makes me both happy and proud." He adds, "The biggest challenge for me in my 30 yearlong-career has been the creation of my own compositions, because I do not want to be only known as a performer, but also as a composer. I do not want to adhere to only existing folk and instrumental music but look for inspiration towards other styles too."

The response of the audience, which was both positive and enthusiastic, came as a bit of a surprise to the artist. He explains "I did not expect much, as I knew that this instrument is practically unknown to Indian audiences. But to my surprise, the performance was received with a lot of openness and appreciation. I was, indeed, very pleased when the programme finished, and the audience requested for additional songs to be played. This is the kind of a reaction one very much looks forward to as a performer."

Being on his first performance in India, how did he manage the weather? Novato answers with a smile, "I really love it here despite the heat and I look forward to my performance in Mumbai and Chennai too."

Any future plans with regard to projects in India? "This is my first time in the South Asia region. Part of my role as a musician from Slovenia is also to showcase my country's tradition. The accordion is very closely connected with the Slovenian culture and is also our national music instrument. This makes me, actually, proud to be an "ambassador" of the diatonic accordion. If another chance arises, I would be delighted to come back and share this instrument with the generous Indian audiences."

"I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we are from. Everyone loves music." So said Billy Joel, and so say all of us.
India is yet to open the Myanmarese port of Sittwe for the Northeast despite setting 2015 as the deadline. On the other hand, China has already put in operation its much-awaited crude oil pipeline, parallel to the natural gas channel, from Kyaukphyu port of Myanmars western state of Arakan (also known as Rakhine) to Kunming in south-western China.

It is designed to carry crude oil from West Asia and Africa through Myanmar to feed the worlds second biggest oil consumer. Now the Chinese no longer need to depend on the troublesome cargo shipping of crude through the South China Sea for refineries in its Yunan province, run by the China National Petroleum Corporation.

The 771-km pipelines cost nearly $ 2.45 billion and are expected to carry 22 million tons of crude oil annually (around 442,000 barrels a day).

Once it becomes fully operational, the pipelines will be able to carry nearly six per cent of Chinas total imports (as per a 2016 record).

A joint venture of CNPC (with 50.95 per cent stake) and Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (more than 49.1 per cent) the pipelines almost divide Myanmar.

The country is in desperate need of finance and can claim a road-right fee of $13.81 million for both the oil and gas pipelines annually, along with a transit fee of $1 per ton of crude oil under a 30-year agreement. Moreover, Myanmar can take two million tons of crude oil annually from the line for its consumption.

The agreement to build the pipelines was signed in 2009 and construction started the next year. The gas pipeline was readied and made operational by 2015.

The oil pipeline, parallel to it across Myanmar, was also planned to start in the same year, but because of political differences between the two countries and also public resistance, the operation was delayed. However, after the recent visit of President Htin Kyaw to Beijing, the hurdles were removed.

The most trusted ally of Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi, one who runs the democratically elected National League for Democracy government as a defacto chief, signed the operational agreement in the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping on 10 April 2017.

Both sides agreed to make the oil pipeline operational at the earliest. The Earth Rights International, a non-governmental and non-profit organisation, has said that it was a welcome development for Chinese investors to officially operate the projects after a two-year delay.

However it argued that there are still some major issues waiting to be solved, such as land compensation to communities, safety concerns, and ecological restoration at the project site.

The CNPC, as one of the main investors, should keep its commitment to health, safety, and the environment and solve these problems with effective consultation with local communities, said Valentina Stackl, communications manager of the US-based ERI while responding to Asia Sentinels queries.

She added that when Myanmar was under military government, the affected communities had no choice but to remain silent even when their legal rights were violated.

After the election of the NLD, more and more communities have started standing up for their rights, not just on projects with Chinese investors, but all potential delinquent investors, said Stackl.

Of course, the CNPC claimed that the project was materialised after keeping an eye on the environment protection and land restoration.

Moreover, the emphasis was laid on community development activities like building of schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, power and water supply and telecommunication arrangements for the benefit of affected families across Myanmar.

The strategic relationship between China and Myanmar has improved but it may be noted that both the neighbouring countries had enjoyed a trusted diplomatic relationship for a long time.

The semi-democratic government in Rangoon (now known as Yangon) then recognised the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 soon after the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong emerged victorious on all battle fronts. Later both the countries established a formal diplomatic relationship in 1950.

It was followed by the anti-Chinese uprising in 1967, when the agitating Burmese people targeted the Chinese embassy in Rangoon.

The Communist Chinese government took a hard stand against the General Ne Win-led Burmese regime. Later, when the South-east Asian country went under complete military rule, its ties with Beijing improved in the 1980s.

After the Burmese uprising that overthrew Ne Wins regime and paved the way for the military junta to rule the country, China became friendlier to Burma as the international community started isolating the General Than Swe-led regime.

The military dictators rejected the outcome of the 1990 general elections, where Suu Kyis NLD won a landslide victory and even put the Nobel Peace Laureate under house arrest.

Slowly Myanmar became more dependent on China and it continued till a quasi-democratic government took power at Naypyidaw (Myanmars new capital) in 2011.

Former Myanmar President Thein Sein, who took some strong decisions against China, including the suspension of the Beijing-owned Myitsone hydropower project in Kachin province, tried to build closer ties with Europe and the USA.

The relationship survived with the initiative of Myanmars state counsellor and foreign minister Suu Kyi again. India, as a neighbouring democracy, was expected to have a better access to Suu Kyi, who stayed in New Delhi during her childhood days.

The democracy icon, on numerous occasions, remembered Mahatma Gandhi and that her father General Aung Sun had deep affection for Indias great freedom movement leader Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, but even then New Delhi has not succeeded in reaching Naypyidaw allegedly because of Indias unclear foreign policies.

The Kaladan river and road project, starting from Arakans Sittwe port to Guwahati is waiting commissioning for years now. This project includes development of Sittwe port, dredging of the Kaladan River along with a road link from Kalewa in Burma to Aizawl in Mizoram and improvement of the Aizawl-Guwahati highway.

The multimillion Indian rupees project, conceived by India in 2003 and financed by it, is expected to encourage economic activities in the Burmese provinces of Arakan and Chin along with the eastern Indian states. Moreover, it was perceived as an opportunity for New Delhi to counter the increasing Chinese influences in Myanmar. But in reality, amid all contradictions, China continues to take advantage of the situation.

The Beijing administration, even playing the role of a peace broker in Myanmar, maintains a secret relationship with its rebel groups, including the United Wa State Army, Kachin Independence Army and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army.

China also allegedly supports a few Northeast India-based armed separatist groups, including the United Liberation Front of Asom (Independent) headed by Paresh Barua, who is operating from the China-Myanmar border, adjacent to Ruili of Yunnan province. This is not due to a revolutionary spirit but as a card against New Delhi for harbouring the Dalai Lama for decades.

The writer is Guwahati-based special representative of The Statesman
Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury on Monday asked Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to immediately ban the "Gau Rakshaks" or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads in the state.

"Gau Rakshaks or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads are all illegal and unconstitutional groups. The Uttar Pradesh CM must ban these outfits immediately (in his state)," the CPI-M General Secretary said while addressing a public meeting in Belonia of southern Tripura.

He said: "These 'Gau Rakshaks' or cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads are the private armies formed by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh).

"These private armies are taking the law in their hands. In the name of protecting law, they are killing Dalits and minorities. They are terrorising people."

The public meeting was organised in connection with the state conference of CPI-M's students wing Students Federation of India (SFI).

The Left leader said the BJP had been trying to topple the Left Front government in Tripura. "Their dream will be shattered by the people of the state."

"You might have heard (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi's 'Mann Ki Baat', but have you heared Modi saying a single word about the 22 crore unemployed youths in India, suicide by thousands of farmers, price rise and religious division and ethnic disturbances in the country," Yechury said.

"Modi and his party are taking the country back to the dark ages we have to fight it out to make a shining and bright India," the CPI-M leader said.

Tripura Chief Minister and CPI-M politburo member Manik Sarkar, party's central committee member and state's Health Minister Badal Choudhury, and SFI's national and state leaders also addressed the gathering.
Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has emphasised on the need of providing quality education to all across the country to build a strong future for its citizens.

"After providing access to education for all, now the focus is to ensure quality education to students across the country. The government is working actively on it as it believes that only quality education has the potential of developing a good citizen with a strong character. Quality education is a must for all-round development of the country," he said.

Javadekar was here to attend an international youth convention at Sokhada village last night.

The minister also hinted on formulating a law on regulating fee structure of private schools in the country.

The Gujarat government has already framed a law on regulating fees charged by private schools in the state. We will discuss its provisions while formulating a law at the national level, he said.

Schools affiliated to CBSE have already been directed not to indulge in commercial activities like sale of books and uniforms because rules do not permit them do so, Javadekar said.

"We want healthy competition between private and public schools for providing quality education to students," he added.

The HRD Ministry has invited feedback and suggestions from teachers, parents and stakeholders to make suitable changes in the curriculum as well, he said.

"Education is not something only between students and teachers. Parents, communities, society and other stakeholders should be involved in the process. This will bring productivity and improvement in education," the minister felt.

Speaking on the occasion, Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani said youth need to be provided with quality education and skill development for making India a powerful nation.

Gujarat Education minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama, Jitendra Vaghani, President of the Gujarat unit of BJP; Rajendra Trivedi, Gujarat MoS for Sports; BJP MP Ranjanben Bhatt and city mayor Bharat Dangar city attended the convention.
The government is planning to develop multi-modal logistics parks at 15 locations all over India at an estimated cost of Rs.33,000 crore, said an official on Monday.

As part of the plan, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) on Monday inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Ltd (TIDCO) to develop one such park in the Ponneri Industrial Node area near Kamarajar port in the state.

The MoU was signed in the presence of Road Transport & Highways and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari and M.C. Sampath, Tamil Nadu Minister for Industries, an official release here said.

"It is an important agreement for the development of an integrated, multi-modal transport infrastructure in the country," said Gadkari while speaking on the occasion.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is planning to develop multi-modal logistics parks at the 15 locations under its Logistics Efficiency Enhancement Programme (LEEP).

The proposed logistics parks, the ministry believes, will bring down the overall freight costs, reduce vehicular pollution and congestion and will enable reduction of warehousing costs.

All this is expected to result in lower logistics costs.
In pursuance of Indias Act East Policy, Naval Ships Shivalik and Jyoti are on an overseas deployment to South East Asia and the Southern Indian Ocean. Since Sunday, the ships are on a six-day visit to Malaysian port Kuantan.

The visit seeks to underscore Indias peaceful presence and solidarity with friendly countries towards ensuring good order in the maritime domain and to strengthen existing bonds between India and Malaysia.

During the stay in harbour, various activities such as official calls, formal reception on board ships, ships open to visitors, guided tours for Indian naval personnel and professional interaction between naval personnel of both the nations have been planned. INS Shivalik, a multi-role stealth frigate is commanded by Captain R Vinod Kumar while INS Jyoti, the fleet replenishment tanker is commanded by Captain S Shyam Sundar.
Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav was arrested by Pakistans counter-terrorism officials for allegedly working as a spy for the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW).

He is said to be a former Indian Navy officer and had taken premature retirement. After a military court awarded death sentence to him on the charges of espionage, India moved the International Court of Justice, which stayed the death penalty.

The case is listed for a hearing in the ICJ on Monday (May 15) where both India and Pakistan are expected to vehemently defend their respective positions on the issue. India has maintained that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran, and his trial was farcical in the absence of any evidence against him. Pakistan has denied consular access to Jadhav even as India requested for the same 16 times.

India is said to have made the denial of right to consular access as the main point while approaching the ICJ.

Heres a timeline of the Jadhav saga:

3 March 2016: Pakistan counter terrorism officials arrest Jadhav on the charges of terrorism and sabotage from Saravan, near the Iran border to the south east of Zahidan.

24 March 2016: Pakistani army claims Jadhav is a RAW agent.

26 March 2016: Pakistan summons Indian High Commissioner, lodging protest on the illegal entry into Pakistan by a RAW officer and his involvement in subversive activities.

29 March 2016: Pakistan releases Jadhav's confessional statement video, in which Jadhav is seen as saying that he is a serving Indian Navy officer and operative of the RAW. India questions legitimacy of the confession video, alleging third-degree techniques could have been used to get a tutored statement.

April 2016: Provincial government of Balochistan files an FIR against Jadhav on charges of terrorism and sabotage.

7 December 2016: Sartaj Aziz, Pakistan prime minister's adviser on foreign affairs, admits not enough evidence was provided on Jadhav.

31 December 2016: Pakistan claims it will hand over a dossier on Jadhav to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

3 March 2017: Aziz takes U-turn from previous statement on insufficient evidence on Jadhav, saying he will not be extradited to India come what may.

10 April 2017: Pakistan's military establishment announces that Jadhav will be hanged after a military court found him guilty of espionage and sabotage.

10 May 2017: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has asks Pakistan not to act on Jadhav's execution.

15 May 2017: Hearing scheduled in the ICJ.
The Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday began hearing the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Indian Navy officer sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court for spying.

An Indian legal team led by former Solicitor General Harish Salve is already in the Hague.

"We may have a hearing on Monday," Salve said, after India won the stay over Jadhav's death sentence at the ICJ last week.

India is scheduled to first argue its case. This would be followed by arguments from the Pakistan team led by Attorney General Ashtar Ausaf.

The Indian team is expected to focus on the violations of the Vienna convention by Pakistan on the issue of denying consular access to Jadhav, and on the lack of transparency in the Pakistani military court, which India said was "illegal".

India moved the ICJ last week to save Jadhav after Pakistan denied consular access despite 16 requests.

Pakistan has said the Indian move to approach ICJ was an attempt to divert attention from "state-sponsored terrorism in Pakistan" and that it was analysing the ICJ's authority in the matter.


West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday announced that she has kept her options open on the issue of common opposition candidate for the presidential election.

"My options are always open when it comes to betterment of the country and the party," Banerjee told reporters here.

She, however, said that she would be in a position to speak more on the issue after meeting Congress President Sonia Gandhi, whom, she said, she had known for long.

"Now I can't say anything, I don't know anything. Let me meet her, then I'll be able to say (on common presidential candidate issue)," said Banerjee, who is also the Trinamool Congress chief.

Asked about the possibility of her tying up with the Left parties at the national level while they fought in the state, she said: "The Left, Congress and even the BJP were against Trinamool in the state. But it is their problem."
As the issue of triple talaq is being debated in the Supreme Court, a city court has ruled that the marriage performed by a Muslim woman during the 'iddat' (waiting) period is not void.

The Delhi court dismissed the claim of a man, accused of domestic violence by his wife, that their wedding was invalid as the per Islamic law, as she had not completed 'iddat' after getting a divorce from her first husband.

In Islamic law, a divorced woman has to wait during the 'iddat' period for about three months before she can remarry.

"Any marriage performed by a Muslim woman during the iddat period is an irregular marriage and not a void (batil) marriage. Hence, the contention of the man on this aspect is found to be without any merits," Special Judge Bhupesh Kumar said while relying on a Supreme Court observation.

The court said there was "sufficient evidence" to issue notice to the Muslim man, who worked with the Coal India Ltd in Chhattisgarh, under the domestic violence act, saying "even depriving aggrieved person economically or financially amounts to domestic violence."

In her complaint seeking Rs 10 lakh compensation and monthly maintenance from the accused man, her second husband, the woman had said that he had concealed his first wedlock from her and when she found out about it, he started avoiding her and stopped sending her money.

She said she had married the accused after obtaining divorce from her first husband.

The man, on the other hand, denied that he had married the complainant, saying she was in the 'iddat' period and any wedding during this period is invalid.

"As per Islamic law, the female cannot remarry during 'iddat' period and any marriage taking place during 'Iddat' period cannot be termed as valid marriage," he said, adding that the woman got divorced from her first husband on October 4, 2012 and the second nikah was performed two days later.

The court also rejected the man's contention that the provisions of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence (PWDV) Act are not attracted as there are no allegations of physical, sexual or verbal abuse in the application.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday said he is not in race for the post of Prime Minister in 2019 elections.

The Janata Dal-United (JD-U) leader said he had no personal aspiration for the post.

"I am not a contestant for the post of PM in 2019 general elections. My party is a small one. I was given the mandate to run Bihar," Nitish Kumar told the media here.

When asked about reports of a move to form a grand alliance of non-BJP parties ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Chief Minister said opposition parties should be united at the national level.

"Like Bihar's Grand Alliance, there is a need for the unity of all non-BJP parties."

"Anyone can emerge as a candidate for the top post if he or she has a capacity for it. The candidate for the PM post will come before the people at the right time," he said.

"Modi had emerged as a candidate for the top post in 2014 because he was capable for it as per people's wishes," Nitish said.
Border Security Force (BSF) troopers shot dead an intruder from Pakistan early on Monday in Punjab's frontier district of Gurdaspur, a BSF official said.

The intruder was shot dead near pillar 15/3, the official added.

The identity of the intruder is being verified.
Border Security Force (BSF) troopers shot dead an intruder from Pakistan early on Monday in Punjab's frontier district of Gurdaspur, a BSF official said.

The intruder, a woman, was shot dead near pillar 15/3 of the Barial border out post (BoP), the Border Security Force official added.

He said that the incident took place around 3 a.m., when the troopers noticed movement inside the Indian territory.

The intruder kept moving towards the border fence and did not stop despite warnings, the official added.

Security along the 553-km long International Border (IB) between the two countries in Punjab, is always on high alert.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday expressed concern over the condition of rivers in the country and said there are many rivers which have no water.

"Many rivers in the country are on the map but do not have any water in them," Modi said while addressing a gathering to mark the conclusion of 'Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra' in Madhya Pradesh.

"I congratulate you all from the bottom of my heart. While the yatra ends here, but its time to begin the yagya. Its now time to rejuvenate the Narmada. Narmade Sarvade," the prime minister added.

"People have laid down their lives for this nation. Can we not pledge to do our bit for our country?," he said, adding, "Lets pledge to make a new India by 2022. Lets come together like we did for the freedom struggle."

Lauding the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government for taking up the campaign to conserve one of the country's major lifelines, Modi said the Narmada conservation roadmap prepared by the state is a "perfect document for future vision".

"The document was sent to me in advance and I had gone through it. It has the details of what is to be done, by whom, and at what time. In my opinion, it is perfect document for future vision," he said.

The Narmada river conservation awareness campaign was launched on December 11, 2016 and will conclude on Monday. The yatra has covered a distance of 3,344 km and passing through over 1,100 villages and towns.

"Narmada Seva Yatra is an excellent mass movement to protect the Narmada & conveys a larger message of saving the environment as well," Modi had tweeted on Sunday.

(With inputs from agencies)
President Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday urged the media to take note of positive things taking place in day to day life as it has a far-reaching impact on people.

"Media has a far-reaching impact and influence on people. Today indeed the world is one. It is important to maintain objectivity and truthfulness in news. Media must take note of the positive things taking place in day to day life. News may different but not the facts," the President said on the occasion of Essel Group's 90 years celebrations.

Giving examples of such positive things, he mentioned that during the Annual National Innovation Festival at Rashtrapati Bhavan, many young innovators display solutions to daily problems of life.

The President, who was the chief guest, congratulated the Essel Group on completion of its 90 years and the launch of its new initiative WION (World is One News), Sarthi, an initiative of becoming a bridge between the government and masses, and the DSC foundation.

He appreciated the spirit of the celebrations Young at 90' and said that one should always remain young and look at issues with fresh new perspectives.

"In the next ten years the Essel Group would be organising its centenary celebrations. They should remain young even at 100, remain young forever."
As the world keeps its fingers crossed and struggles to tame the WannaCrypt attack, the ransomware has emerged as the most dangerous cyber threat in recent months, with global losses now likely running into hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is a type of malicious software that blocks access to data on a connected device, such as a computer, tablet or smartphone, and displays a message requesting payment to unlock it.

It requests payment in Bitcoins, because this crypto-currency cannot be tracked by cyber security researchers or law enforcements agencies. A time is set for paying the ransom. It uses a complex set of evasion techniques to go undetected by traditional antivirus.

According to Norton by Symantec, one of the global leaders in cyber security software, there was a 36% increase in the ransomware attacks in 2016 and the ransomware families have grown three times  from 30 in 2014 to 101 in 2016.

In 2016, we identified over 100 new malware families released into the wild, more than triple the amount seen previously, and a 36% increase in ransomware attacks worldwide, Tarun Kaura, Director, Solutions Product Management, Asia Pacific & Japan, Symantec told a news agency.

India alone faces 4% of the total ransomware attacks while the US is most affected, with 34% of the ransomware attacks globally.

India has been ranked fifth in terms of global threat rank by destination, with 3.8% global threat detection. Over 180 Indian companies were victims of ransomware in the first six months of 2016, said Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in security software and solutions.

While most major ransomware groups tend to be indiscriminate in their attacks, consumers are often less likely to have robust security in place, increasing the possibility of falling victim.

The average ransom demanded globally by attackers also saw an upward spike this year. The average ransom demanded to date in 2016 more than doubled from Rs. 19,670 in 2015 to Rs. 45,428, a recent Norton by Symantec study highlighted.

WannaCrypt  the ransomware malware used in Fridays massive cyber attack  has the ability to spread itself within corporate networks, without user interaction, by exploiting a known vulnerability in Microsoft Windows.

Computers which do not have the latest Windows security updates are at the risk of infection.

Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan that has a payload disguised as a legitimate file.

It has the ability to encrypt all kinds of files, from documents to pictures, videos, audio files and other things you may have on your PC. It can scramble the users file names, a trick used to confuse and coerce victims into paying the ransom.

(With inputs from IANS)
India on Monday put up a spirited defence and urged the international court to immediately suspend the death sentence awarded to alleged spy Kulbushan Jadhav in Pakistan, saying "the situation is grave" and there was fear that he may be executed even before the court decides the case.

Lawyer Harish Salve, who led the Indian legal team at the Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ), said the matter was "urgent and hence India approached this court" that took up the case "at such a short notice".

Salve told the court that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran in 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and confession was extracted in a military custody.

"Pakistan did not inform India of the arrest," Salve said, pointing out that India had moved the ICJ seeking suspension of the sentence awarded to Jadhav by a military court following a "farcical trial".

The former Indian Navy officer was awarded the death sentence by a Pakistani military court last month, a year after he was arrested on espionage charges. India says Jadhav has been kidnapped and framed.

Islamabad has rejected 16 Indian requests for consular access to Jadhav, who is held at an unknown prison in Pakistan.

Salve said a communication from Pakistan dated May 12 didn't clarify what the charges against Jadhav were.

"Pakistan said Jadhav's sentence is based on credible evidence in espionage against Pakistan. India refuses these allegations. India has taken measures to ensure appropriate legal measures for Jadhav. It is not known whether Jadhav will seek clemency in the present circumstances."

Salve cited three past similar cases in which the ICJ had intervened. These cases include Paraguay versus the US in which the court decided that the American government needed to take steps to give rights of access of a Paraguayan national.

In Germany vs the US, Salve said, the court held that execution of a German national was "an irreparable damage to justice".

Deepak Mittal, an Indian official, told the court in his opening remarks that there was a fear that Jadhav may be executed soon even before the decision of the UN court. "Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed."

Mittal told ICJ President Ronny Abraham, who presided over the proceedings, that India's repeated requests to Pakistan on consular access to Jadhav were denied.

"India learnt from press reports that the death sentence was awarded to Jadhav on the basis of an alleged confession. Pakistan has not provided the chargesheet, any documents on the case despite repeated requests.

"It is clear that Jadhav has been denied of his right to seek legal counsel. Jadhav's parents have applied for visa to travel to Pakistan which has fallen on deaf ears."

V.D. Sharma, a Joint Secretary in the External Affairs Ministry and co-agent, said Pakistan had failed to comply with all its legal obligations by denying consular access to Jadhav ever since he was arrested in March 2016.

Sharma also urged the court to restrain Pakistan from "giving effect to the sentence awarded by the military court" and to direct it to annul its decision.

The day-long hearing, which began on Monday morning, involves two sessions of an hour-and-a-half each to India and Pakistan to make their cases.

Court declines Pak plea to see Jadhav confession

The ICJ which was hearing India's plea to suspend the death sentence to alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, on Monday declined Pakistan's plea to play a video of his "confession".

The ICJ declined to play the alleged confessional video during the hearing of Jadhav's case, when Pakistan's session began in the afternoon.
A new law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community would be brought, if all forms of divorce including triple talaq are struck down, the government on Monday told the Supreme Court.

The Centre, which also sought that the issues of polygamy and 'nikah halala' should not be excluded from the ongoing deliberations, got an assurance from the apex court that these aspects were open and would be dealt with later.

The government termed all the three forms of divorce among the Muslim community ?- talaq-e-biddat, talaq hasan and talaq ahsan, as "unilateral" and "extra-judicial".

The apex court bench said the government has to first pass the test of "essentiality" and prove that 'triple talaq' is not an essential part of Islam, as this will amount to "tinkering" with religion.

A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar said "we are not only the guardian of the Constitution but also the guardian of minority rights" and will have to see if triple talaq formed a fundamental part of religion and pass the test of "essentiality" under Article 25.

The bench, also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, asked if the court struck down all forms of talaq, then what options would a Muslim man be left with to come out of a marriage.

"The government will not leave the people high and dry once the instant form of divorce (triple talaq) or all forms of talaq are struck down. We will come out with a law to regulate the marriage and divorce among Muslim community," the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Centre, said.

He said the issues of Muslim marriage and divorce were separated from religion in Shariat Act of 1937 itself and have been codified as personal law under Section 2 of the Act.

The apex court has to test them on the touch-stone of the fundamental rights of gender equality, justice, dignity, gender discrimination and human rights under constitutional provisions, including Articles 14, 15, 21 and 51A.

"All personal laws must be in confirmity with the Constitution. Rights of marriage, divorce, property and succession has to be treated in the same class and has to be in conformity with the Constitution," Rohatgi said.

The Attorney General also said what kind of religious practices are essential to a particular religion or faith was difficult to define for the court. But once such practices of marriage and divorce are separated from religion, there cannot be any immunity under Article 25 (freedom to practice any religion).

He said if the practice of talaq was out of Article 25, then it has to be constitutionally moral, which means it has to be secular and non-discriminatory.

"One half of a community in the country has to suffer inequality from their male counterpart. What may be permissible for society may not be constitutionally moral," he said.

To this, the bench observed if the government wanted social welfare and reforms, why can't it bring laws to correct the wrong.

"Yes, we can bring law. There is no law for past 60 years. It has not been done. But the court should first strike down these practices which are not in confirmity with the Constitution," he said.

Rohatgi said when half the population of a particular community is not empowered, no equal opportunity is given, they are devoid of gender equality, then it does not pass the test of constitutional morality.

He said even if triple talaq is considered as an essential part of religion and falls under Article 25, the practice still has to be constitutionally moral.

"Even if talaq is considered under Article 25, it has to be related to the fundamental rights and should abide by the principles of gender equality, non-discrimination and justice," the AG said.
Continuing hearing the triple talaq issue for third day, Supreme Court on Monday said that it will keep issues of 'polygamy' and 'nikah halala' pending because of lack of time but will focus on triple talaq.

It may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future, a five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar said.

The top court made the statement after Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, representing the Central government, told the apex court that it should hear nikah halala and polygamy issues, besides triple talaq.

The scope of referring had all the three issues that was divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the two- judge bench, Rohatgi said.

The top court had on 12 May observed that triple talaq is the worst and not a desirable form of dissolution of marriage among the Muslims, even though there were schools of thought which called it legal.

Triple talaq is the worst and undesirable form of dissolution of marriage among Muslims, the top court said on the second day of the hearing on Friday. However, different schools of thoughts in Islam term triple talaq as legal, it added.

The second day saw two veterans, jurist Ram Jethmalani and former Union Minister and Islamic scholar Arif Mohammad Khan, coming out all guns blazing against the practice of triple talaq.

(With inputs from agencies)
Musician James McVey says he almost quit The Vamps as the pressure of being in a popular music group took a toll on his mental health.

The 23-year-old guitarist says he was on the verge of leaving the band due to his struggle with depression during a tour of America in 2016, reported FemaleFirst.

I had a really difficult time last year where we were on tour in America and things were just building and building for me. I was getting terrified of being late for a hotel lobby call.

I wouldn't be sleeping because of it. I'd be on stage and I'd be like I hate this, because I didn't understand how I was feeling or why. I was on the verge of saying 'I'm leaving the band', McVey tells UK radio station LBC in support of Mental Health Awareness Week.

The Can We Dance musician says he turned to decided his band mate and The Vamps frontman Brad Simpson for advice and is happy that he did.
There is something superficial to the manner in which the NDA government seeks to oversimplify complex problems, and proffer oneliners or catchy terminology as solutions. The latest in that series of limited successes is the home minister projecting SAMADHAN as the panacea to the Left Wing Extremism that has taken firm hold across a vast swathe of Central India in what has come to be known as the Red Zone. At a recent meeting of chief ministers, Mr Rajnath Singh sought to highlight the new game-plan as S for smart leadership, A for aggressive strategy, M for motivation and training, A for actionable intelligence, D for dashboard-based key performance indicators and key result areas, H for harnessing technology, A for action plan for each theatre, and N for no-access to financing. True that the several strands sought to be thus interwoven would add up to a comprehensive approach ~ but in reality it amounted to precious little since the home minister was economical when fleshing-out the way in which each prong of the policy formula was going to be implemented.

As an academic exercise, Mr Rajnath Singhs presentation might be regarded as clever, but slim are the chances that it will reverse the trend of the recent debacles in Sukma ~ which had prompted the high-level meeting. Whether the police officials who will be required to translate the home minister's words into action on the ground fully comprehended what he had in mind will only be known if, and when, the security agencies gain the upper hand in the difficult, hostile, jungle environment.

Not that all the chief ministers present lapped up the verbal banquet: Mr Nitish Kumar of Bihar charged the Central government with shirking its duty and passing the buck by citing the Constitutional demarcation that has law and order on the states list. Others, including some from the BJP, demanded greater financial backing from the Centre for anti-Maoist operations, a few called for the employment of air power. And, contrary to Raisina Hills 56-inch chest approach, more than a couple favoured a revival of the previous governments Integrated Action Plan. Perhaps a few rungs down the ladder, the senior police officials present were able to work out ways of better local coordination and exchange tactical feedback, but overall the meeting yielded little.

The short point being that when the Centre and the states have differing perceptions on where the solution lies, there can hardly be a unified attempt to pressure the insurgents to shun violence. Before trying to get the states to jointly flex their muscle North Block needs to do much homework: a meeting called by the union home minister must rise above mere jaw-jaw and serve as more than a photo-op. Else Samadhan will remain one more hollow slogan.
From one dispensation to another, from Nandigram in East Midnapore to Bhangar in South 24-Parganas, the CID has come under a cloud yet again over its handling of an enquiry in the aftermath of agrarian agitprop, which tragically turned out to be fatal. Just as the Bengal Left had desperately tried to airbrush reality, so too is the present dispensation anxious to conceal rather than expose the circumstances that led to the shooting of a 23-year-old man at Bhangar on 17 January this year. Central to the mayhem was the spirited protest by villagers against the setting up of a power sub-station after forcible acquisition of land.

As much as the CPI-M, the Trinamul administration is intent on conducting the CID probe on its terms of reference, indeed to serve its political ends. This is pretty obvious from the subtext of Thursdays observation of Calcutta High Court (coram: Joymalya Bagchi, J) ~ The CIDs investigation is opaque. It is difficult to believe that a person was killed in broad daylight in the presence of a huge police force, but the investigators could not trace the culprits yet. That observation, advanced four months after the killing of Mofizul Mollah, is suggestive both of the sluggishness of the probe and the political considerations at play. Still more crucially, the Bench has binned the state administrations claim that the young man was killed when outsiders ~ and not the police ~ had fired. Verily has the court questioned the perceived efficacy of policing with a sharp query in the presence of the Additional Director-General, CID ~ How can a person be killed in the presence of the police? It is the question of safety and security of the common people, and the CID should be transparent in its investigation.

Regretfully, it is the lack of transparency over Bhangar that has rattled the High Court, whose observations reflect poorly on the conduct of the investigators. The CID is claiming that the man was killed during a clash between two groups of villagers and not in police firing. Then, why cannot the investigators find out the culprits? There was no convincing answer.

The Advocate-Generals plea that there are some missing links is a strained attempt to evade the states responsibility. Clearly, the High Court is not satisfied with the progress report on the investigation, that was filed on 27 April, recalling the rejection by the trial court at Barasat of a perfunctory report, advanced by the CID, on the Kamduni rape-cum-murder case a couple of years back. The courts indication that it will have no option but to hand over the probe to the CBI is almost a statement of no-confidence in the CID and the state police. Fridays renewed tension in Bhangar may or may not be wholly coincidental.
An idle mind, it is said, is the devils workshop. Justice CS Karnan, a Judge of the Madras High Court, was transferred to the Calcutta High Court as punishment for his unconventional behaviour and kept idle without any judicial work. As such, he posed no threat to administration of justice. Instead of letting him complete the remaining one month of his term as Judge of the High Court and retire, a hurriedly constituted seven-member Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court has stirred a hornets nest by convicting him of contempt of court without a trial and sentenced him to six months of imprisonment.

The Bench observed, We are of the unanimous view that Justice CS Karnan committed contempt of court  If we do not send him to jail, there will be a blemish that the Supreme Court has condoned the contempt committed by a judge and thereby set a dangerous precedent of removing inconvenient judges. The Bench ruled, Since the incident of contempt includes public statements and publication of orders made by the contemnor, which were highlighted by the electronic and print media, we are of the view that no further statements made by him should be published hereafter.

Section 13 of the Contempt of Court Act says, Notwithstanding anything contained in any law for the time being in force, no court shall impose a sentence under this Act for a contempt of court unless it is satisfied that the contempt is of such nature that it substantially interferes, or tends to substantially interfere with the due course of justice. The gag order reminds the media of the dark days beginning 25 June 1975 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed Press censorship.

Justice Karnans lawyer, Mathew Nadumpara, wanted to move a petition in the Supreme Court seeking suspension of the six-month jail sentence, but was unable to get authorisation for filing the petition from any advocate-on-record. Nedumpara told Chief Justice of India JS Khehar that he was unable to file the writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution challenging the contempt proceedings and the jail sentence of Karnan in the Supreme Court Registry, but not a single advocate-on-record wanted to get involved. My Lord, all are afraid of you, Nedumpara said. Cases in the Supreme Court can be filed only through an advocate-on-record. Counsel for Karnan contended that the petitioner is a judge of the Calcutta High Court which is not under any disciplinary jurisdiction of either the CJI or the seven-judge Bench constituted by the CJI in this case.

The Contempt of Courts Act was a cathartic jurisprudence which belonged to the Dark Ages, the era of inquisition and torture, distinct from the classical Roman law which constitutes the foundation of modern jurisprudence. The CJI refused to receive Karnans petition and asked Nedumpara to approach the Registry. Under Article 20 (2) of the Constitution, No person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once. The Supreme Court had already punished Justice Karnan twice: first on 8 February by issuing a notice directing him to refrain from handling any judicial or administrative work and on 1 May restrained all courts, tribunals, commissions or authorities from taking cognizance of any orders passed by him (Karnan) after 8 February.

On 9 May, the Supreme Court created history by convicting and sentencing a fellow judge for the first time since independence, and that too without a trial. The following day he left Kolkata for Chennai and held a press conference at the Chepauk government guest house. Meanwhile, a crack West Bengal police team led by DGP Surajit Kar Purkayastha and ADGP (Armed Reserve) Ranvir Kumar landed in Chennai and held consultations with the Tamil Nadu DGP TK Rajendran and Chennai Police Commissioner Karan Singa. Joined by another police team from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, a hunt was launched to secure the arrest of unarmed Justice Karnan, a sitting judge of the Calcutta High Court. It strains ones credulity that such a high powered police force from three states could not track down Karnan in Chennai within a matter of hours while his lawyer had no difficulty visiting the fugitive in the city to obtain his signature on the vakalatnama before a notary public to file a petition in the Supreme Court. On day one the Bengal team visited Srikalahasti, a pilgrim centre in Andhra Pradesh, and returned with divine blessings, while another team went to Tada on the Andhra-Tamil Nadu border made into a popular picnic spot because of the ample liquor shops that came up during the brief period the late MG Ramachandran experimented with total prohibition in Tamil Nadu.

On the same day Karnan was sentenced, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held another person, liquor baron Vijay Mallya, guilty of contempt of court, but the proceedings before the Bench of Justices AK Goel and UU Lalit did not receive the publicity Justice Karnan got. Unlike the larger Bench headed by the CJI which dispensed instant punishment to Justice Karnan, the smaller Bench gave Mallya ample time to appear in person in court on 10 July and make his submissions before pronouncing any punishment. The incongruity of the differential treatment might have escaped the notice of their Lordships, but not Justice Karnan for whom it is yet another instance of humiliation heaped on him for being a Dalit.

Born in a humble Dalit family in a remote village in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, Karnans father was a school headmaster. On his own admission, Karnan failed in the sixth and eighth standards, PUC, BSc and BL examinations. Nevertheless, he completed his bachelor in law degree from Madras Law College in 1983 and got himself enrolled as an advocate the same year.

By 2001, he became a booth-level election agent of the AIADMK which put his career on a rapid growth path. In September 2008, he found himself among 14 selected by the Madras High Court collegium comprising Chief Justice AK Ganguly and Justices PR Mishra and SJ Mukhopadhaya. Before the 14 names reached the Supreme Court collegium headed by CJI KG Balakrishnan, Justice Sathasivam wrote a letter of recommendation saying Karnan belonged to the Dalit community and was well versed in all branches of law. Justice Markandey Katju endorsed all the 14 names to be appointed as judges of the Madras High Court. This is how the collegiums system works.

There is no doubt the behaviour of Justice Karnan was not in keeping with the dignity of the higher judiciary. As Judge of the Madras High Court, he had passed strictures against the Chief Justice. When he was transferred to the Calcutta High Court, he issued an order staying his own transfer.

If the Supreme Court had any doubt about Justice Karnans mental health, its 9 May order needs re-examination. Apparently, what irked the Honourable Supreme Court was Justice Karnans 23 January letter to the CJI with copies to the President of India and the Prime Minister, leveling serious charges of corruption against fellow judges, including a few from the Supreme Court, and seeking an inquiry into them. It may be recalled that Shanthi Bhushan, Union Law Minister in the government of Morarji Desai, also leveled similar charges against a few Supreme Court judges. No action was taken against him. Justice Karnan named the corrupt judges in the flock and offered to prove his allegations. He even challenged them to prove him wrong.

The named persons in the higher judiciary could have sued Justice Karnan for civil and criminal defamation. But none took up the challenge. Instead, the CJI took up the cudgels and landed Justice Karnan in his current predicament. He is determined to fight it out. The Supreme Court instead of following the procedure laid down in Article 124 (4) of the Constitution to remove an errant judge, as it did in the case of Soumitra Sen of the Calcutta High Court, took upon itself to punish Justice Karnan. The soap opera continues.
Mark Twain lauded three gifts: freedom of conscience, freedom of choice and the prudence never to exercise them. Noam Chomsky observes that speaking truth to power solves nothing. Power knows the truth and is very pleased with it. What is required is for people to speak truth to one another. Only then can they realise their strength and create a path towards a new truth one which pleases them instead of their exploiters. I.F. Stone said all: governments lie. All state narratives are false.

Moreover, an independent, educated and well-informed public opinion is an enemy to governments that serve financial, social and power elites, and not the common folk, especially in socalled democracies. A democracy that actually empowered the people would be anathema to those who matter in phony democracies. George Orwell believed an expensive education was necessary to learn what opinions not to have or express in order to prosper.

Within this context, Pakistan finds itself where it is today. At sea, both at home and abroad! At home, it faces a triple whammy: an elected government that refuses to govern in any acceptable sense of the word, a military that insists on governing outside its sphere of competence and capability, and supreme oracular judgements that plunge citizens into confusion and uncertainty. A simple people foolishly expect clear and comprehensible verdicts in complete ignorance of the majestic complexity of the law. They are justly rebuffed.

As for the late and unlamented Dawn leaks (no real kin of Panama leaks which remains in intensive care and bleak prognosis) there was an interesting division of interest: the uninformed spectators were interested in how true the report was, while the fully informed players were interested in how the truth got out. The alleged high treason lay in the power question; not the information question.

Abroad, Pakistan finds itself facing a similar triple whammy. With a Foreign Office rendered irrelevant, the countrys foreign policy is in powerful hands that can sort out differences of varying intensity with three of Pakistans four neighbours.

Our Iranian brethren cant seem to understand that our joining, commanding or advising a Saudi-led military alliance against them is actually an act of friendship. Would they prefer some hostile Arab commanding the military alliance against them instead of a brotherly Pakistani soldier? But our Iranian friends prefer to recall irrelevant parliamentary resolutions and impractical government policy statements. How unhelpful! They even protest the use of our territory for attacks on their soldiers in most unfriendly terms. Can we really trust such a neighbour? What have they to offer us?

As for Afghanistan, our uniformed foreign policy forcefully assumes that Pakistan is the constant friend and guide our Afghan brethren have always sought and prayed for, even when they are sadly unaware of it. While strategic depth has such lovely policy resonance, we should learn from Orwell that it simply will not do to suggest it to untutored Afghan minds. It can lead to Chamans and other unpleasantness for perennial miscreants to take advantage of. Similarly, our uniformed search for the right balance of forces inside Afghanistan to ensure the success of an Afghan-led peace process centred round the interests of Afghanistans one true friend has often been grossly misinterpreted  even by Afghan leaders themselves  abetted by the usual external miscreants. We can now only rely on forcibly repatriated Afghan refugees from Pakistan, often separated from their families and businesses, to undo the damage.

As for India, there are all the reasons one can think of not to have good relations with it. There are Indias attitudes, policies, provocations, etc. There are issues and disputes. In the 21st century, there will be many more. Unfortunately, no sensible argument can be made that it is not in the interest of Pakistan to work towards a better relationship with India. The same is true for India towards Pakistan. However, there are many powerful vested interests in both countries that challenge this line of reasoning with passionate arguments that cannot survive a moments scrutiny. Yet these untenable arguments prevail because vested interests overpower national and peoples interests in both countries. In India the opportunity costs of untenable policies are manageable. In Pakistan they are not.

So, should we forget Kashmir? Should we change our stand on Kashmir? Should we surrender to India on Kashmir? Should we delete all reference to UN resolutions on Kashmir? Should we play down Indian atrocities and human rights violations in Kashmir? Should we withhold support for the Kashmiri freedom struggle? Obviously not. However, the honest truth is there are no short-term or zero-sum solutions to the Kashmir dispute. Improving the climate of relations with India for a longer-term compromise settlement acceptable in Srinagar, Islamabad and Delhi is the only way forward. There are also undeniable responsibilities in being neighbouring nuclear weapons states. The status quo in Kashmir can change but only through a mutually acceptable process which will take time, and will involve a transition from resistance and repression to negotiated movement. Accordingly, progress on the respective core concerns of Pakistan and India regarding Kashmir and terrorism must become a time-lined policy imperative jointly announced by the prime ministers of both countries.

But for some, relations with India are irrelevant. With China and CPEC nothing can go wrong. CPEC will transform and strengthen Pakistan. Our strategic location will pay for Chinese diplomatic and military support, the working and capital costs of CPEC, including commercial projects, technology transfers, the Singaporing of Gwadar and the infrastructural and intellectual transformation of Pakistan. We shall be handed our future  including Kashmir  on a platter!

But do the Chinese encourage such myths? Do they suggest they will solve Kashmir for Pakistan? Do they say they share Pakistans enmity with India? They do not. They are honest. China has its own policy imperatives. Does our government inform our public accordingly? If not, why not? Because it wages political and economic class warfare against them.

The writer is a former Pakistan ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.Dawn/ANN.
When do I see you again?

I am not quite sure.

Have you completed the papers the consulate has sent you.

I will get around to those this week.

Please do. Those are essential for the visa.

I had been busy and my life seemed full. I had a demanding corporate job, managed a nonprofit in the evening and taught part-time in the university. Also, I edited a literary journal, wrote columns for a professional magazine and did serious photography. I rowed early morning and partied late evening.

In walked an intruder, least expected. She spoke softly and smiled often. Her boss, a close friend, wanted me to help her with a project she was supervising. We worked together but soon found each other more interesting than the work. My work and my writing went on the back burner and the parties began to seem lacklustre. I longed to be with her.

The next eighteen months, carefree and joyous, passed quickly. The freshfaced, gentle-eyed woman, who had walked so unceremoniously into my life, was now to leave it just as unceremoniously. Her project was nearly done; the deadline for her overseas report was approaching fast, in a far-off US university; her parents in Minnesota wanted her back for Christmas. Disconcertingly, definitively, a friendly police officer told me her visa, extended twice already, would not have a period of grace.

Would you like to come with me to the US, for a short visit?

But your parents want you with them.

You could come with me. Dont you have your project report to finish?

All right, all right.

I couldnt get any leave at the time, in any case. Off she went, alone, back to the US, her parents and her university.

She quickly submitted an application for a visa for me. The local consulate sent me the papers. It was a complicated affair and I shrank from the task. She persisted and called me to urge completion.

Then she went a step further. She went to her Senator, who chaired the committee dealing with immigration. The next thing I knew I had a call from the US Consul, Please come and see me tomorrow. The forms were done in ten minutes. The Consul waived the requirement for documents I didnt have. The visa arrived in a week.

Now began a frantic race against the clock. I had to persuade my company to let me go, without the required notice. The non-profit organization I had painstakingly built had to be left with a friend. There was no time to sell my home; I just handed the key to my brother and the furniture to people who wanted them, at a price or at no price. My books went to a library, my clothes to a charity, my music collection to friends. I did not close the bank account, for the prevailing exchange control meant I couldnt exchange my rupees for dollars.

When do you leave?

I dont know yet. Trying to get some dollars.

Dont worry about it. Just come, please.

I dont want to arrive and panhandle!

You wont have to. Come quickly.

My parents came to see me off at the airport. They waved from a balcony as I treaded the tarmac to board the plane. I was leaving the place I knew, the people I loved, for a distant land and unknown future. I did not have the reassurance of a promised job or even a padded wallet.

The aircraft was crowded, the flight painfully long. My short seatmate sat sullenly and drank wordlessly. That left me alone with my uncertain thoughts.

The plane stopped at Dulles International Airport with a sharp jolt. A warm, sultry July afternoon greeted us. I jostled ahead with a motley crowd of summer tourists, getting into lines, going up and down stairs, riding on escalators, showing papers, answering questions, and finally entering the lounge.

Around me people were greeting people, talking, laughing, hugging. My sullen seatmate, smiling broadly, held the hand of a little boy. Amid the hubbub, I stood aside, tired, lost, expectant.

And, then, there was a sudden swirl of long blonde hair, a familiar flash of glimmering blue eyes, a dizzy blur of the worlds sweetest sounds, smells and sensations. Next moment, the bright overhead lights of the airport were going round and round, as were a pair of slender arms around my neck. Found! I was no longer tired or lost: I was home, I was home.

The writer is a Washington-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at [email protected]
A cyber-attack that hit 150 countries since Friday should be treated by governments around the world as a "wake-up call", Microsoft has said.

The computing giant said software vulnerabilities hoarded by governments had caused "widespread damage", the BBC reported.

A statement from Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith on Sunday criticised the way governments store up information about security flaws in computer systems.

There are fears of further "ransomware" attacks as people return to work on Monday.

The latest virus attack last week exploits a flaw in a version of Microsoft Windows first identified by US intelligence.

Many firms have had experts working over the weekend to prevent new infections. The virus took control of users' files and demanded $300 payments to restore access, the BBC report said.

The spread of the virus slowed over the weekend but the respite might only be brief, experts have warned. More than 200,000 computers have been affected so far.

"We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the US military intelligence organisation National Security Agency (NSA) has affected customers around the world," Smith wrote.

"An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen."

The Microsoft President also added: "The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call."

Microsoft said it had released a Windows security update in March to tackle the problem involved in the latest attack, but many users were yet to run it.

"As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, there is simply no way for customers to protect themselves against threats unless they update their systems," BBC quoted Smith as saying.
Using data from European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellites, researchers have detected rapid acceleration of an Arctic glacier.

The Negribreen glacier on Norway's Spitsbergen island has recently seen a surge in ice surface speed, increasing from one metre to 13 metres a day over the winter, ESA said in a statement on Friday.

When a glacier 'surges' a large amount of ice flows to the end in an unusually short time.

While the surge causes in the Negribreen glacier are not completely understood, researchers believe that they could be linked to changes in the amount of heat or water in the lowest layers of the glaciers.

The last time Negribreen experienced a surge like this was in the 1930s, as documented in aerial photographs. At that time, it advanced almost 12 km into the fjord in one year along a 15 km-wide section of the front.

Since then the front of the glacier had been steadily retreating, with large icebergs breaking off.

This latest jump in speed began in July 2016 and has been climbing ever since  even over the cold winter months.

A team of scientists working under ESA's Climate Change Initiative in the Glaciers_cci project are using satellite radar and optical coverage to map glaciers at different times and determine their changes in extent, elevation and speed.

"Sentinel-1 provides us with a near-realtime overview of glacier flow across the Arctic, remarkably augmenting our capacity to capture the evolution of glacier surges," said Tazio Strozzi from Swiss company Gamma Remote Sensing and scientist on Glaciers_cci.

"This new information can be used to refine numerical models of glacier surging to help predict the temporal evolution of the contribution of Arctic glaciers to sea-level rise," Strozzi said.

Sentinel-1 is a two-satellite mission for Europe's environment monitoring programme, Copernicus.
Actor Barun Sobti will be back on small screen after a five-year break with Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon 3. His friend and actress Sanaya Irani says she is excited to see him in action on TV.

The actress played Khushi Kumari Gupta in the first season of the show opposite Barun.

"I am really looking forward to season three and what the storyline shapes up to be. Barun has been one of my most favourite co-stars, and continues to be an amazing friend even today," Sanaya said in a statement.

She added: "Now that he's back on TV, I'm really excited for him. Barun is a crazy person and I wish him all the craziness and good luck for the third season."

In the third season of the show, Barun will be seen opposite Shivani Tomar. The serial will beam on Star Plus channel soon.
A rail bridge over the Chenab river which, at 359-metre, is claimed will become the world's tallest, will significantly improve Kashmir Valley's connectivity with other parts of the country and also create tourism facilities that are expected to boost local employment.

The construction work on the "engineering marvel"  slated to be completed by 2019  has already provided employment to over 1,000 local residents and the Railways has plans to turn the area into a major tourist hub with facilities for adventure sports, including bungee jumping.

The 1,315m-long bridge would be 35 metres taller than the Eiffel Tower and will complete the missing rail link between Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar and the rest of the country. It will join Bakkal in Katra town of Reasi district in Jammu region with Kauri in Srinagar district.

Engineers working on the project have braved several challenges, including the difficult topography, and have even had to account for high wind speeds for a structure so high.

The bridge, with a 14m-wide dual carriageway and a 1.2m-wide central verge, is part of Jammu-Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Line (JUSBRL) project of Indian Railways.

The bridge, with a lifespan of about 120 years, has unique safety features. It can withstand an earthquake of high magnitude and also high wind speeds. Sensors would measure the speed of wind and if this exceeds 90 km per hour, trains would not be allowed to pass over the bridge.

The mountainous terrain has entailed the construction of about 200 km of approach roads and this will prove useful in ushering in tourism.

"This project will bring a lot of prosperity to the area. We have already employed over 500 local youths. Construction of more than 200 km of approach roads will provide connectivity to far-flung villages," Railways spokesperson Anil Saxena told IANS.

The railways have also provided permanent jobs to a member of family whose land has been acquired to the extent of 75 per cent. Jobs have been given to 768 persons so far, said an official of the Konkan Railway, which is executing the project.

Project Manager Rajendra Kumar said the place will be a big tourist destination with water sports, different sightseeing points, hotels and other tourism infrastructure.

"The rail line will help bring tourists from different parts of the country. While the bridge will be a tourist attraction, tourists will also visit other parts of the state. The bridge will also significantly improve intra-state connectivity and boost economic development," he said.

The roads along JUSBRL have connected several villages which were were linked only by sheep paths and foot trails. The roads have also proved beneficial to school-going children, patients and farmers looking for better markets for their produce.

The transformation in the lives of locals is also evident from new shops and other commercial establishments coming up to meet needs of the persons working on the project. Bus services have started to connect far flung villages.
Counting of votes cast in the local elections in Nepal began on Monday.

An all-party meeting forged consensus to begin the counting process at 11.45 a.m. in Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC), Hetaunda Sub-Metropolitan and Pokhara Lekhanath Metropolitan cities, the Kathmandu Post cited the Election Office as saying.

Election Commission spokesperson Surya Prasad Sharma said officials found a piece of paper wrapped inside the ballot paper that mentioned "Right to Recall, Right to Reject" while votes for the KMC were being counted.
India and Pakistan on Monday clashed at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the fate of alleged spy Kulbushan Jadhav with New Delhi invoking the court's jurisdiction to see that the death sentence against him was annulled immediately.

But Pakistan rejected the plea on the ground that India had no right to invoke the jurisdiction of the UN's highest court because the Vienna Convention does not provide for matters relating to spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.

However, Islamabad suffered a jolt when it was not allowed by the court to play the video containing a purported confession by Jadhav, a former navy official, who India says was abducted from Iran and taken to Balochistan.

At the end of the day's proceedings ICJ President Ronny Abraham announced that the verdict in the matter would be given "as soon as possible" and the date delivered in a public sitting.

The Indian case was put up strongly by noted lawyer Harish Salve who demanded that Pakistan should annul Jadhav's death sentence and see that he was not executed as his trial was held under "farcical" circumstances in violation of the Vienna Convention.

"I urge the ICJ to ensure that Jadhav is not executed, Pakistan reports to this court that the action (of not executing him) is taken and that no action is taken that might prejudice the rights of India in the matter of Jadhav," Salve said in his over 90-minute presentation.

The ICJ had last week "stayed" the execution on a petition by India, which approached the UN court after 46 years on an issue with Pakistan.

Jadhav was awarded the death sentence by a Pakistani military court last month, a year after he was arrested on espionage charges. India says Jadhav has been kidnapped and framed. Islamabad has rejected 16 Indian requests for consular access to Jadhav, who is held at an unknown prison in Pakistan.

The brunt of Salve's argument was that the entire matter of arrest, chargesheet and trial of Jadhav were all done in violation of the UN Charter and Vienna Convention in farcical circumstances and on concocted charges as the Indian national was not given legal assistance to defend himself.

Salve said the matter was "grave and urgent" as Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran on March 16, 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and confession was extracted in custody before a magistrate. He was incommunicado and the trial was also held incommunicado.

The lawyer urged the ICJ President to take note of the farcical nature of the circumstances of the military court.

Salve said the provisions of the Vienna Convention recognised that any prisoner has a right to be tried by an independent tribunal as established by law and he should be tried in his presence and defended by legal aid assigned to him. In Jadhav's case all the basic provisions of human rights were "thrown to the wind", he said.

The facts presented by India establish the violation of all principles of UN charter and Vienna Convention because of the nature of the trial which destroyed any credibility or sanctity of the army court's decision sentencing him to death, he said.

Salve cited three past similar cases in which the international court had intervened. These cases include Paraguay versus the US in which the court decided that the American government needed to take steps to give rights of access of a Paraguayan national.

In Germany versus the US, Salve said, the court held that execution of a German national was "an irreparable damage to justice". He also referred to a case between the US and Mexico in which lives of 54 Mexicans were at stake as they faced execution.

Pakistan mounted a strong defence of its case with Counsel Khawar Qureshi rejecting India's attempts to invoke ICJ's jurisdiction in the case, saying provisions of the Vienna Convention did not apply on spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.

Rebutting India's case, he asserted that this forum is not a criminal court of appeal nor does it exercise criminal jurisdiction.

"India's plea for invoking provisions of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention is not relevant in this case. The Vienna Convention was adopted for better communication between friendly countries. But it cannot apply in this case of a spy set up by a state.

"It is clear from the Vienna Convention that the provision being sought under Article 36 by India cannot be entertained by this court," Qureshi said in his 45-minute reply to arguments put forth by Indian counsel Harish Salve earlier.

The lawyer claimed that India had on September 8, 1974 told the ICJ to exclude itself from its jurisdiction in disputes with Pakistan and from any interpretation and obligation of multi-lateral treaties.

He also noted that Pakistan had reservations over the jurisdiction of ICJ on matters it considered as impinging on its national security.

Qureshi also dismissed India's charge that Jadhav was kidnapped.

"No evidence was provided by India to back the charge that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran. We have a long border with India where millions of people reside. If we wanted, one of them could have been picked up. To say that we abducted Jadhav from Iran and brought him to Pakistan seems at best to be far fetched."

He said India had at no point made any comment on the Muslim name of Jadhav on the passport seized from him. "This requires explanation."

Qureshi said the issue of consular access to Jadhav was not considered as he was accused of spying and it was not considered to be applied on terrorists.

Overall, the relief India is seeking from this court is not available and the "provisional measures" sought by India cannot be initiated, Qureshi said.

He said parallels drawn by Salve of the precedents of cases relating to involving US and other countries, including Mexico and Germany, were not relevant and factually incorrect.

At the outset, Qureshi said India was invoking the jurisdiction of the court for "political theatre" and described as "bizzare" the description of Jadhav's trial as a kangaroo court.

Dismissing India's contention that it invoked the jurisdiction of the court because of the "imminent" possibility of execution of Jadhav, Qureshi said the court was bound to settle disputes between countries peacefully and not waste time on issues sought to be raised for political purpose.

In this regard, he cited the possibility of clemency which was mentioned by Pakistan Foreign Advisor Sartaj Aziz.

Qureshi also said India did not respond to communication from Pakistan in January this year seeking cooperation in the probe relating to Jadhav.
Nepal expects to enhance cooperation with China within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, Nepal's Foreign Minister Prakash Sharan Mahat told Xinhua on Sunday.

"The Chinese president's announcement to contribute an additional 100 billion yuan (about $14.5 billion) to the Silk Road Fund is a piece of good news for neighboring countries like Nepal that have recently joined the Belt and Road Initiative," Prakash Sharan Mahat said.

The initiative, proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, aims to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along and beyond ancient Silk Road trade routes over land and sea.

Commenting on Xi's speech at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in Beijing on Sunday, the foreign minister said that Nepal wishes to receive more investments from China to develop inter-connectivity and infrastructure projects within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a wide concept. China has given top priority to promoting this initiative since it was introduced in 2013, he added. Nepal wants to enhance railway and road inter-connectivity with China and attract more investments, he said, adding that "We are expecting more loans from China to develop various infrastructure projects within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative."

Nepal and China signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) earlier this week, which is aimed at enhancing cooperation in promoting inter-connectivity of infrastructure, trade links, financial integration and inter-connectivity of peoples.

Meanwhile, the forum has received widespread attention from all walks of life in Nepal.

"This is an extraordinary address by President Xi at the forum this morning," Suresh Sharma, former brigadier general of the Nepal army, told Xinhua.

"Nepal, a birthplace of Buddha and an apostle of peace, always has remained an admirer of this noble Belt and Road Initiative to bring peace, prosperity and brotherhood for the entire world," said Sharma, who is also the executive director of the Kathmandu-based private think-tank National Institute of Strategic Studies.

"Nepal as the closest neighbor is soon to benefit from this Belt and Road Initiative," he added.

Nepal's Deputy Prime Minister Krishna Bahadur Mahara, who heads a high-level delegation, is attending the two-day Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing.

The forum is also covered by mainstream daily newspapers, online media outlets and television channels in Nepal.

Kosh Raj Koirala, a Kathmandu-based correspondent with Republica Newspaper, told Xinhua, "In his speech, President Xi has categorically put emphasis on the need to build peaceful and stable environment in the region to implement the initiative. This is expected to create conducive environment in the region for peace and prosperity."

The Belt and Road Initiative provides opportunities for countries like Nepal that face difficulties in infrastructure development, he added.
North Korea on Monday confirmed the test firing of a medium long-range ballistic missile one day earlier.

The official Korean Central News Agency said the test fire of a new gorund-to-ground strategic ballistic missile "Hwasong-12" was successfully carried out on Sunday by scientists and technicians in the field of rocket research.

North Korea top leader Kim Jong Un guided the test fire on the spot, said the report.

"The test fire was conducted at the highest angle in consideration of the security of neighbouring countries. The test fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead," it said.

The missile "accurately hit the targeted open waters 787 km away after flying to the maximum altitude of 2111.5 km along its planned flight orbit, said the report.

"Kim Jong Un hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," said the report.
Pakistan on Monday rejected India's attempts to invoke the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to save the life of alleged spy Kulbushan Jadhav, saying provisions of the Vienna Convention did not apply on spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.

Rebutting India's case before the ICJ, Counsel Khawar Qureshi asserted that this forum is not a criminal court of appeal nor does it exercise criminal jurisdiction.

"India's plea for invoking provisions of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention is not relevant in this case. The Vienna Convention was adopted for better communication between friendly countries. But it cannot apply in this case of a spy set up by a state.

"It is clear from the Vienna Convention that the provision being sought under Article 36 by India cannot be entertained by this court," Qureshi said in his 45-minute reply to arguments put forth by Indian counsel Harish Salve earlier.

At the end of the Pakistani argument, ICJ President Ronny Abraham announced that the court would give its verdict in the case "as soon as possible".

The date will be delivered at a public sitting, Abraham said.

At the outset, Qureshi said India was invoking the jurisdiction of the court for "political theatre" and described as "bizzare" the description of Jadhav's trial as a kangaroo court.

Dismissing India's contention that it invoked the jurisdiction of the court because of the "imminent" possibility of execution of Jadhav, Qureshi said the court was bound to settle disputes between countries peacefully and not waste time on issues sought to be raised for political purpose.

In this regard, he cited the possibility of clemency which was mentioned by Pakistan Foreign Advisor Sartaj Aziz.
A secret tunnel has been discovered in a Mexican prison, stashed with drugs, alcohol and sharp tools, the media reported on Monday.

Police in Tamaulipas state on Sunday night said the tunnel in Reynosa, a city close to the US border, was hidden by bricks and was up to five metres deep, reports the BBC.

It was found after authorities used geothermal technology to detect activity underground, according to local media.

They said it was unfinished and no one has escaped.

Tamaulipas police said they were conducting a search for further holes after the latest tunnel was discovered, the BBC reported.

In 2015, one of the country's biggest drug lords, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, escaped via a tunnel from Altiplano prison.

He was recaptured after six months on the run and later extradited to the US.


US President Donald Trump has called for improving health care access for "quality prenatal, maternal, and newborn care", in addition to ensuring paid family leave for both mothers and fathers, the media reported.

"Ensuring affordable, accessible, and quality health care is critical to improving women's health and ensuring that it fits their priorities at any stage of life," Trump said in a statement on the occasion of Mother's Day on Sunday.

"Under the current health-care system, however, the lack of choice in health insurance and in health-care providers, along with skyrocketing premium and out-of-pocket costs, are failing our citizens, our families, and, in particular, our women," Politico quoted Trump as saying.

In addition, Trump said: "Women are living longer, healthier lives than their mothers."

"The number of women dying from heart disease and cancer  the top two killers of women in America  has been decreasing for decades," he continued in the statement.

"Thanks to new breast cancer treatments, our health care professionals have saved lives and improved the quality of life for millions of women. We must continue to foster an environment that rewards these needed advances in research."

The President also said that he is committed to working with Congress for paid family leave for mothers and fathers, and to "invest in the comprehensive care that women receive at community health centres", reports Politico news.

"Through these reforms, and my 2018 Presidential Budget, we will enable access to the critical health-care services women need."

Trump's daughter, Ivanka, has been an advocate for affordable child care and paid family leave and has reportedly tried to build support for it within her father's administration.

The President's statement comes as the Senate is working on a Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act.

Under the House bill that was passed last month, the American Health Care Act, funding for Medicaid, which covers approximately 40 percent of pregnancies, would be slashed.

The bill would also prohibit the use of federal tax credits to buy insurance that includes coverage of abortion.

States would also be allowed under the legislation to seek waivers of provisions of the Affordable Care Act that require insurers to cover maternity care.
Former President Asif Ali Zardari on 14 May said he stood for good relations with Pakistan's neighbouring countries and criticised the Nawaz Sharif led government for creating discord along the lines of what he perceives to be "American foreign policy".

Addressing a rally in Peshawar, the former President said that while he was in power, Pakistan's relations with Afghanistan and India were good and there was peace.

"We should be friends with our neighbouring countries (Prime Minister) Nawaz (Sharif) has the same thought process as the Americans when it comes to waging wars."

"We will not let this war happen," Zardari said.
Olympic gold medalist Kaetlyn Osmond can't wait to skate in front of Newfoundland crowd for her first performance since COVID

When Kaetlyn Osmond steps on the ice at the Mary Browns Centre in St. Johns next month, it will be the first time the Marystown native has performed on ice in front of an audience since before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. It's also the ...
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But the tribe has a long way to go
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will be holding public hearings in the Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav case today.



The ICJ had, on May 9, put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.



The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.



India earlier contended that it was not informed of Jadhav's detention until long after his arrest and that Pakistan failed to inform the accused of his rights, an official release from the ICJ said.



India further said, in violation of the Vienna Convention, the authorities of Pakistan were denying it its right of consular access to Jadhav, despite its repeated requests. It's also pointed out that India learned about the "death sentence against Jadhav from a press release."



India submitted that it had information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy, and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan" on March 3, 2016, and that the Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on March 25, 2016.



India also asked the ICJ to declare the decision illegal being violative of international law and treaty rights and restrain Pakistan from acting in violation of the Vienna Convention and international law by giving effect to the sentence or the conviction in any manner, and directing it to release the convicted Indian National forthwith, if Pakistan is unable to annul the decision.



Pakistan had claimed that Jadhav was arrested from the Baluchistan province last year. A military court sentenced him to death, alleging he was involved in espionage and anti-national activities. Pakistan also claimed that he was "a serving officer in the Indian Navy."



India out rightly denied the claims, saying Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was running a business, and adding he was a retired Navy officer.



Pakistan has turned down 16 requests from India for consular access to Jadhav.



Jadhav was sentenced to death by the Field General Court Martial last month for his alleged involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan.



Meanwhile, defence experts asserted that Pakistan may not appear before the court as it would stand totally exposed.



"India has made a very voter tight case. There is no way that Pakistan will get away. However Pakistan may not even appear and they should not appear and say that ICJ has no jurisdiction over the case. They will stand totally exposed," said defence expert P.K. Sehgal.



He further said the Pakistan would be scared of facing ICJ as it may direct them to physically allow consular access to India.



Another defence expert Ranjeet Rai said there is a possibility of Pakistan boycotting the ICJ hearing.



"I am sure Pakistan will either defend or run away from this by boycotting the ICJ. The onus is on Pakistan now to vigil out of it or come and argues its case for Commander Jadhav," said Rai.
The biggest ransomware attack, Wanna Cry, that has hit the cyber space across multiple countries including India recently, has prompted the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to issue a detailed advisory asking all government bodies to immediately prepare an up-to-date inventory of all ''digital assets'' at various locations and facilities used by various functionaries of the organisations. NIC is the apex government body that steers e-governance applications at the central, state and district level in the country.

The NIC has said that such digital assets need a ''back up'' immediately so that it can restore encrypted data in case of a ransomware attack. It has particularly warned the health, education and social sectors saying that these three are high on the target list of the hacker attacks, owing to their ''antiquated or mis-figured security systems and the amount of sensitive data they hold.''

The two-page advisory explains that the attack involves malware delivered through spear phishing emails that lock up valuable data assets and demand a ransom to release them. The NIC has listed an 11 point list of do's and don't where it has clearly stated that any ransomware attack needs to be reported to enable the government to launch a prompt investigation.

"If every bit of data of the organisation is safeguarded and back up is kept secretly, even if hackers attack and demand ransom, government can launch an investigation rather than making a payment,'' it said.

The NIC has also said that a trustworthy knowledgeable functionary, preferably a permanent government employee, should be made the administrator of the digital assets of the organisation at each location, who can then keep all the software, especially the system software, including operating systems and applications up-to-date. The NIC is also roping in all these officials to help them train their staff on cyber security practices, like emphasising on not opening attachments or links from unknown sources and undertaking regular security audits for all the digitial assets as mandated by the government policy.

Explaining the various modus operandi of the cyber attackers, the advisory said that social media platforms were highly vulnerable. "Hackers now check a victim's social media account and create a fake email address pretending to be a friend or contact in order to get them to click on an infected link of attachment,'' it said.

The attack in the cyber space is also keeping the financial sector on its toes as digitial monetary transactions have come under threat. Amid reports that banks have shut down some ATMs following the ransomware attack, the Union home ministry has swung into action seeking reports from the state police agencies on reports of complaints and cases registered by them in this regard. Sources in the ministry said that those reports were awaited and the MHA was working in close coordination with the ministry of finance and other institutions particularly to monitor the ''digital assets'' in far flung areas where they are most vulnerable.

The officials concede that the systems are not fool-proof which is an area of concern for the government. MHA sources said that finance ministry and other agencies were directing shutting down of vulnerable systems, if any, even as a close watch was being kept on the developing situation.
A cross-border infiltration bid was successfully foiled by the Border Security Force (BSF) troops who gunned down a Pakistani intruder at Gurdaspur in Punjab.



This comes after a Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist was arrested from along the Indo-Nepal border yesterday.



Earlier on Saturday, Jammu Police confirmed that they had arrested five persons and busted an LeT module, following the May 7 attack on a police station on Tanta Doda district.



Inspector General of Police (Jammu) Dr S.D. Singh, who confirmed the news of the arrests, informed media that a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of five senior officers has been formed to interrogate the suspects for more information on their operations.



So far, the SIT has picked up local suspects, including one Abdul Rashid Harga, a surrendered former LeT militant.



Indian security forces are maintaining severe caution in keeping a check on the cross border infiltrations, especially after the Krishna Ghatti incident, where two Indian soldiers were mutilated by Pakistan Army.




Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the detailed conservation programme of river Narmada on the concluding day of Narmada Yatra by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. He said "We have exploited Narmada for ages, now its time to return to her".

In a mammoth gathering, organised to mark the conclusion of 148 days, at Narmada Yatra at Amarkantakthe source of river Narmada in eastern Madhya Pradesh, the PM asked other states to emulate the MP model of cleanliness and river conservation.

Speaking on the occasion, Modi praised the state government's efforts to plant more than five crore trees in coming years. He praised the state for winning 22 awards out of 100 in the cleanest cities in the country survey.

The CM termed Narendra Modi as godsend blessing for the people of the country. He announced that Amarkantak would be developed as the countrys first 'mini' smart city.

The CM said the cities and villages on the banks of Narmada would be made addiction-free and no liquor would be sold. He announced a fund of Rs 15.50 crore for Sewage Treatment Plant to free Narmada from pollution in Amarkantak. Concrete shops will be constructed on the banks of river Narmada.

The 148-day Narmada Yatra concluded on Monday after covering a distance of total 3,500 km. Around 24,34,000 persons participated in the Jan-Samvad held during the yatra to generate awareness towards the Narmada river conservation.

Over 500 eminent personalities of different fields participated in the yatra including Dalai Lama, Unicef country chief, film stars and religious gurus.

The yatra started from Amarkantak on December 11 and covered 615 gram panchayats, 1093 villages and 51 blocks. The main yatra was joined by 1862 up-yatras. Moreover, about 85 thousand persons have registered themselves on the website of Narmada Seva.

A total of 40 thousand saplings have been planted till date in a symbolic form during the yatra. 2032 social and voluntary organisations are cooperating in meals and other arrangements for yatris. A total of 712 Narmada Seva Committees have been formed in gram panchayats situated on the banks of river Narmada.

A world record of human chain was made in January at Hoshangabad district, where more than 25,000 people formed a human chain at 78 places and on the Narmada ghat up to 125 kilometres to support the cause.

Amarakntak of Anuppur district in Eastern MP is a hilly area bordering Chhattisgarh. It's forms part of Maikal hill ranges which are full of bauxite and coal.

The area also forms part of Achanakamar wild life sanctuary. The Sal forests of the region are home to some of the most rare wild animals like tiger and chinkaras.

Apart from Narmada, Amarakntak is also source of river Johila. Johila flows towards the east and join Ganges while Narmada heads westward to fall in Arabian sea.

Due to the source of sacred river Narmada Amarakntak also houses several ashrams of saints and hermits. It is one of the auspicious pilgrimage of Hindus.
The severity of the agrarian crisis in Maharashtra is increasing day by day, and the growing anger of the protesting farmers is a highly worrying issue for the BJP-Shiv Sena government. Raosaheb Danve, BJP's state President has been only adding fuel to the anger among farmers with his derogatory language.

On the morning of May 8, Raosaheb Danve, after seeking blessings of Sai Baba in Shirdi, said, Opposition should give a guarantee that farmers will stop committing suicides if loan waver is given. This created a huge controversy, with the opposition and farmers strongly reacting against the insensitivity of Danve. Ashok Chavan, Congress President said, Loan waiver is just one of the reliefs that farmers need. UPA had given loan waiver of Rs 71,000 crore along with a substantial increase in the Maximum Selling Price (MSP) for all crops and steps for improving irrigation.

Before the first controversy subsided, Danve, while addressing party workers in Ahmednagar said, Rahul Gandhi leads Congress, but has never even shook hands with a single Member of Parliament. He doesn't understand public issues. Rahul Gandhi is dumb and deaf animal. He will never become PM. Later in the evening, while replying to a question by one of the party workers at the inauguration of Babanrao Lonikar's office in Jalna, Danve used an abusive word for farmers complaining about the 9 lakh quintal of Toor dal remaining to be purchased by the government.

Ratnakar Mahajan, Congress spokesperson, said, Even Modi has used highly unparliamentary language about Gandhi family. Danve uses language that suits his level of thinking and culture. It has been RSS way to ridicule opponents in a derogatory manner. He added that a sort of race of uncivilised madness has begun within the BJP leaders to supersede each other in the derogatory language that they use.

Having the worst language qualifies for a higher post for RSS and BJP. They never want discourses on legitimate issues to happen and, hence, invariably use such language, but we refuse to stoop down to their level, Mahajan said.

Soon after Danve's usage of the abusive word for farmers, six youngsters from different district in Maharashtra went to Bhokardan, Danve's village in Jalna district, and sat in protestation in front of his house. We demand that Danve give an unconditional apology and not just issue a regret. Or else, we demand his resignation, said Manas Pagar, a 24-year-old student and son of a farmer. Manas Pagar, Hanumant Pawar, Akshay Puranik, Nilesh Chavan and two other youths, all of them sons of farmers, participated in the protest.

This was not politics. Danve insulted our father, he insulted the sweat and blood that we put into farming despite an unforgivable treatment by the government, Hanumant said. We had every democratic right to register our protest.

But these six youngsters were arrested on May 12 at 11.30 p.m. under sec 151. They were locked up like petty criminals for 24 hours and were released only on the condition for leaving Jalna district immediately.

They started talking about our arrest after many friends and journalists started questioning them about our sudden disappearance, Manas said. Danve thought that some faction within the BJP was behind our protests. The act of arresting six harmless youths, who are sons of farmers, invoked huge reactions across the state, and every political party condemned it.

Ashok Chavan issued a press statement comparing these arrests with the Nazi rule of Hitler. Nitesh Rane said, We will adopt a highly aggressive approach in the Sangharsh Yatra in the coming days. BJP should realise the extremely angry sentiments of farmers in distress.

Maharashtra is bound to see more combative protests in the days to come.
The Supreme Court on Monday rapped Calcutta High Court judge Justice C.S. Karnan for repeatedly filing pleas to recall his arrest order in contempt of court case.

Karnan counsel was rebuked over the stream of pleas of 'urgent hearings' seeking quashing of the apex court order.

The court headed by Chief Justice of India Jagdish Singh Khehar (CJI) said, "You are wasting the court's time, will hear plea when it comes up"

Advocate Mathew Nedumpara, appearing on behalf of Karnan mentioned the matter for urgent hearing.

Justice Karnan's lawyer on Friday had requested the apex court bench to stay the arrest order.

The CJI asked Justice Karnan to file an application and told him that he can be heard when all seven judges would be available for the hearing.

Justice Karnan's lawyer told the SC that he wanted to tender an unconditional apology, but the apex court registry did not accept his application. Yesterday, the counsel again sought relief in the contempt-of-court matter.

Nedumpara, who was appearing for Justice Karnan, was asked for the documents to prove that he is Karnan's lawyer. He told the apex court that he has the 'wakalatnama' and authorisation letter.

Earlier, the Supreme Court had sentenced Justice Karnan to six months in jail while holding him guilty of contempt of court. It was a landmark ruling, as it is for the first time ever that a sitting High Court judge has been sentenced. The SC had ordered Justice Karnan's immediate arrest.

The seven-judge bench of the apex court headed by CJI Khehar was hearing the contempt petition against Karnan.

Justice Karnan had earlier sentenced the Chief Justice of India and six other apex court judges to five-year rigorous imprisonment after holding them guilty under the SC/ST Atrocities Act-1989 and amended Act of 2015.

Along with the Chief Justice of India, six judges - Justice Dipak Misra, Justice J. Chelameswar, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan B. Lokur, Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose and Justice Kurian Joseph - had initiated suo motu contempt proceedings against Justice Karnan in February after he had named 20 "corrupt judges," seeking a probe against them.

Justice Karnan had alleged this was done because he is a Dalit. He had directed the court's registrar to issue non-bailable warrant against these seven Supreme Court judges on May 2. He tagged the apex court judges as 'accused' for not being present.

On May 1, in response to the apex court ordering an examination of his 'mental health', Justice Karnan asserted that he would issue a suo moto suspension order against West Bengal Director General of Police (DGP) if he forcefully conducted a medical checkup.

Karnan further asserted that the DGP should take all the seven accused judges for medical test too.

Earlier, the apex court constituted a medical board to examine the mental condition of Justice Karnan on May 5 and also directed the DG West Bengal to assist the medical board to get him examined.

The SC said in its order that High Courts, any tribunal and authority would not take any cognizance on the orders passed by Justice Karnan.

Earlier, in an unprecedented move, the apex court had invoked its powers to initiate contempt proceedings against Justice Karnan, for writing letters casting aspersions on several judges.

Justice Karnan has been accused of circulation of disparaging letters against sitting High Court judges of the Madras High Court. He also allegedly wrote about Supreme Court judges in his letters to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).
Uproarious scenes marked the first appearance of Yogi Adityanath in the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly as chief minister. Amidst noisy protests from the opposition over the poor law and order situation in the state, the session was suspended for the rest of the day.

As soon as session began, the opposition members, including the SP, BSP and the Congress, began shouting. They hurled paper balls at Governor Ram Naik who was addressing the joint session of the assembly. Marshalls had a tough time covering the governor from paper balls. His speech was frequently disrupted by continuous hooting. Even as the sloganeering and shouting continued, the governor read out his address.

Minister Siddharth Nath Singh slammed SP chief Akhilesh Yadav for keeping quiet when his party members were creating a ruckus in the house.

Meanwhile, the house, with the consent of the chief minister, decided to telecast the proceedings of the house through Doordarshan.

The session will continue till May 22 with six sittings. In the 403-member house, the ruling BJP has 312 members, followed by SP (47), BSP (19) and Congress (7).
Newly sworn-in French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday named Edouard Philippe, the 46-year-old Mayor of Le Havre city, as his Prime Minister.



Philippe is a member of the centre-right Les Republicains party and is close to Alaine Juppe, the former Prime Minister, reports CNN.



The 39-year-old former investment banker and economy minister was inaugurated on Sunday as the 25th President of France and also the youngest in the nation's history in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace.



Macron is counting on winning votes from centre-right supporters in the legislative elections next month.



His party Le Republique en Marche is scrambling to get 577 candidates together to contest every seat in the country.



Philippe, a lawyer with experience working in the private sector, was born in Rouen and grew up a Left-wing environment.



He was a socialist in his younger days before switching his allegiances to the right.



He has only been a member of Parliament for one term, serving in the National Assembly representing the constituency of Seine-Maritime in Normandy, northern France, since 2012.



He has been Mayor of Le Havre since 2010.



Macron was sworn-in as the President after his landslide victory over far-right National Front leader Marine le Pen, with 66 per cent of the vote in the run-off poll held on May 7.



He is also slated to travel to Germany later on Monday to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel.


The Justice Karnan episode does raise several questions on the state of the Indian judiciary today. The Constitution has conferred enormous powers on the superior courts to maintain rule of law and good governance and ensure their independence. Expecting high standards and integrity of those who come to occupy positions in the higher judiciary, the Constitution-makers thought it unnecessary to incorporate provisions demanding good behaviour, integrity and accountability. It is only on very rare occasions that the difficult procedure of impeachment is contemplated against erring judges.

The present situation manifested through the spat between Justice Karnan and the Supreme Court is the culmination of a series of self-inflicted wounds on the part of the judiciary in which no action or inadequate action was taken when stern and transparent action was called for.

The collegium system introduced by the judges themselves started with a promise to cleanse the system of appointments, promotions and transfers of judges. It was allowed to degenerate on occasion to favouritism and partisanship without anyone outside knowing how selections were made and what criteria were followed. The minority judgment in the National Judicial Appointments Commission case reveals the weaknesses of the system kept secret by select judges in power.

The circumstances in which and the procedures by which Justice Karnan came to be appointed require a thorough probe. The argument that transparency and participation of even retired judges in the selection processes will undermine the independence of judiciary requires re-examination. The Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill which provides for disciplinary action against erring judges needs to be enacted as the so-called in-house mechanism, about which there is little knowledge even amongst judges, has failed to deliver probity and accountability.

The Supreme Court could have sought the impeachment procedure to remove Justice Karnan instead of the contempt action. Furthermore, if contempt procedure were to be invoked, it could have been initiated when the so-called unfounded allegations were first raised by him several years ago. Instead of ignoring the allegations made, an in-house judges committee could have given a hearing to the judge, examined the truth and disposed of the matter on merits.

Under no circumstances can the action on the part of Justice Karnan be justified. The wounds he has inflicted on the institution seem to have been deliberately done not to correct it, but to denigrate it, something unthinkable from a sitting judge. He may have reason to feel isolated or even humiliated which led him to seek protection under the dalit card. There have been many judges including chief justices in the Indian judiciary who were dalits and none of them complained of caste-based discrimination in judiciary. There is already reservation in the subordinate judiciary and there is a sizeable number of dalit judges performing their duties honourably. They are being let down by Justice Karnans behaviour. With more dalits joining the legal profession, one can expect more dalit judges in the higher judiciary as well. The record of the Indian judiciary in articulating affirmative action under the Constitution for the depressed classes including dalits is unique and much appreciated in different jurisdictions. However, it cannot afford to be populist like the executive if fair constitutional balance in rendering justice for all sections of people is to be maintained.

To be fair to the political class, they have no part in the making of the Justice Karnan affair and therefore cannot be accused of mala fides in being inactive particularly when the matter is actively being handled by the Supreme Court. No doubt, the court is in a catch-22 situation and it is wise to proceed on a low key lest the judge in question should come up with more ugly stories now in his dreams!

Dr Menon is a distinguished legal scholar and educator.
Leader of Telugu Desam Party in Telangana A Revanth Reddy came down heavily on the Telangana government for their unscrupulous attitude towards Chilli farmers. Speaking at the Khammam TDP Rythu Deeksha, he asked, if KTR sold ice cream for 50000 rupees, why is he not selling quintal Chilli for 10000 rupees? The TDP leader questioned, if the government is not able give fair price for 2lakh acres of crop, how will they pay for 1 crore acres. Revanth Reddy further held that the government is giving fair price for cinemas but not for farmers. TDP organized protest condemning the manner in which farmers were arrested and handcuffed on April 30 when they protested against the falling Mirchi prices. He said farmers tried to protest as the traders were trying to cheat them. Revanth Reddy critiqued Minister Tummala Nageshwar Raos attitude towards farmers. The TRS minister reacting to the allegations said that the KCR government is doing more than expected for Agriculture by giving current, developing fields and laying roads. Nageshwar Rao further said that TDP has no moral right to speak about Telangana movement.
Supreme Court decisions in a half-dozen cases dealing with immigration over the next two months could reveal how the justices might evaluate Trump administration actions on immigration, especially stepped up deportations.

Some of those cases could be decided as early as Monday, when the court is meeting to issue opinions in cases that were argued over the past six months.

The outcomes could indicate whether the justices are retreating from long-standing decisions that give the president and Congress great discretion in dealing with immigration, and what role administration policies, including the proposed ban on visits to the United States by residents of six majority Muslim countries, may play.

President Donald Trump has pledged to increase deportations, particularly of people who have been convicted of crimes. But Supreme Court rulings in favor of the immigrants in the pending cases could make his plans more difficult to realize, said Christopher Hajec, director of litigation for the Immigration Reform Litigation Institute. The group generally supports the new administrations immigration actions, including the travel ban.

For about a century, the court has held that, when dealing with immigration, the White House and Congress can get away with things they ordinarily couldnt, said Temple University law professor Peter Spiro, an immigration law expert. The court has explicitly said the Constitution applies differently in immigration than in other contexts.

Two of the immigration cases at the court offer the justices the possibility of cutting into the deference that courts have given the other branches of government in this area. One case is a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrants whove spent long periods in custody, including many who are legal residents of the United States or are seeking asylum. The court is weighing whether the detainees have a right to court hearings.

In the other case, the court has taken on a challenge to an unusual federal law that makes it easier for children born outside the United States to become citizens if their mother is an American and harder for them if their father is the U.S. citizen. Even after legislation in 1986, children of American fathers face higher hurdles claiming citizenship for themselves.

Both cases were argued before Trump became president in January, and the Obama administration opposed the detainees claims and the citizenship challenge.

Even if the positions havent changed, the context has, Spiro said.

The court has got to be conscious of how these rulings are going to apply to Trump administration activity, Spiro said.

The decisions may directly affect people who are targeted by immigration authorities for quick deportation, or expedited removal, and immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and offered protection from deportation by the Obama administration, said Steven Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor.

An open question in immigration law concerns how much authority the government has and how strong the Constitution is as a constraint, Vladeck said. For Trump, he said a major question is how much discretion the president has. Its at the heart of a lot of what the Trump administration wants to do, Vladeck said.

Other cases involve discrete sections of the immigration law in which the decisions either will free or constrain immigration authorities from deporting people convicted of certain crimes.

In one case, a Mexican immigrant is facing deportation after he was convicted in California of having sex with someone under 18 and more than three years younger than he was. The charge covered a period before and after his 21st birthday when the woman, his girlfriend, was 16. Thats a crime in California, but not in most of the rest of the country and the immigrant says it should not count as sexual abuse of a minor, which under immigration law would subject him to deportation.

In another case, an immigrant convicted of burglary is challenging a provision of immigration law that counts the crime as serious enough to warrant automatic deportation. Several federal appeals courts have sided with immigrants who have contended the provision is too vague.

Another issue before the court also involves sending people back to their native countries, in a case in which an immigrant received bad legal advice that led to a guilty plea and certain deportation.

Immigration almost certainly will continue to be a very active part of the Supreme Courts docket. The travel ban itself could be at the court in the coming months. On Monday, the federal appeals court in San Francisco is hearing the administrations appeal of an order striking down the ban. Appellate judges in Richmond, Virginia, heard a similar case last week.

(AP)
American democracy is separately under assault from President Donald Trump and Russia, the former U.S. intelligence chief warned Sunday, expressing dismay over the abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey amid a probe into Moscows meddling in U.S. elections and possible ties with the Trump campaign.

As Trump works to fast-track Comeys successor, lawmakers from both parties urged him to steer clear of any politicians for the job and say he must clean up the mess that he mostly created.

I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and thats the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system, said James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence. I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.

When he was asked, Internally, from the president? Clapper said, Exactly.

Clapper spoke following Trumps sudden firing of Comey last week, which drew sharp criticism because it came amid the FBIs investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election. Clapper said Americas founding fathers had created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now under assault and eroding.

The White House had no immediate comment on Clappers remarks on a morning in which no White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows to discuss Trumps firing.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trumps actions last week, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comeys dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because he may have tapes of their conversations. The lawmakers urged Trump to select a new FBI director without any political background and said the president would need to hand over to Congress any taped conversations with Comey, if they exist.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said promoting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to reset. He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration by Trump, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, explaining that these are not normal circumstances.

Rogers, an ex-FBI agent and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has drawn the backing of the FBI Agents Association. Cornyn is the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

Its now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1, the South Carolina Republican said. Asked whether it was the right time to have someone such as Rogers or Cornyn, Graham flatly said, no.

The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created, Graham said, adding, I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all  but we dont know all the evidence yet.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should certainly be someone not of partisan background with great experience and courage. He left open the possibility that Democrats might try and withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor. Under rules of the Senate, Republicans could still confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats 48.

Calling Trumps remarks about possible taped conversations outrageous, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another congressional committee would absolutely subpoena the tapes.

We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, dont mysteriously disappear, he said.

Warner also said he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee. Comey earlier declined an invitation this week to testify in a closed hearing.

Less than a week after Trump fired Comey, the administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to be FBI director, and Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday on his first overseas trip as president.

Trump abruptly fired Comey on Tuesday and later said Comey was a showboat and grandstander who was not doing a good job, drawing a firestorm of criticism. Trump said in an interview with NBC that the Russia investigation factored into his decision to fire Comey. The changing rationales the White House offered added an element of chaos to the presidents action.

The FBI director serves a 10-year term but can be replaced by the president.

So far 14 people  lawmakers, attorneys and law enforcement officials among them  have emerged as candidates. Eight met at the Justice Department on Saturday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein.

The first candidate to arrive for interviews was Alice Fisher, a high-ranking Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

Also interviewed were:

Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBIs office in Richmond, Virginia.

 Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director.

Michael J. Garcia, a former prosecutor and associate judge on New Yorks highest court.

Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general.

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a Bush appointee who struck down the centerpiece of the Obama administrations health care law in 2010.

Frances Townsend, a former Bush homeland security and counterterrorism adviser.

Rogers. The FBI Agents Association says it believes his diverse background makes him the best choice.

Sessions has faced questions over whether his involvement in Comeys firing violates his pledge to recuse himself from investigations into Russian interference in the election.

Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said Sessions and Rosenstein were involved in the interviews because the FBI director reports to them as attorney general and deputy attorney general.

Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNNs State of the Union; Graham spoke on NBCs Meet the Press; and Warner appeared on ABCs This Week and Fox News Sunday.

(AP)
A top North Korean diplomat said Saturday that Pyongyang would be willing to meet with the Trump administration for negotiations if the conditions are set.

Choe Son Hui, director general for North American Affairs at the Foreign Ministry, spoke briefly to reporters in Beijing en route to Pyongyang. She was traveling from Norway, where she led a delegation that held an informal meeting with former U.S. officials and scholars.

Choe did not elaborate on what the Norths conditions are, but her comments raise the possibility of North Korea and the U.S. returning to negotiations for the first time since 2008, when six-nation talks over Pyongyangs nuclear weapons program fell apart.

President Donald Trump opened the door this month to talks, saying he would be honored to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Tensions have mounted in recent months after the Trump administration said it would keep all options on the table to halt North Koreas nuclear weapons program, including a military strike. The North responded by pledging to retaliate with a devastating nuclear counterattack, a threat it has made in the past.

In recent weeks, North Korea has arrested two American university instructors and laid out what it claimed to be a CIA-backed plot to assassinate Kim. Choe did not address the matter of the detained Americans on Saturday.

In Norway, Choe met with former U.S. officials and scholars for what are known as track 2 talks. The talks, which cover a range of nuclear, security and bilateral issues, are held intermittently, and are an informal opportunity for the two sides to exchange opinions and concerns.

(AP)
This incident, which occurred last week, took place on a 425 bus traveling from Ohr Yehuda to Jerusalem. The chareidi male in the photo was seated on the left side of the bus, directly behind the driver.

An IDF soldier boarded carrying his weapon and a large bag. The driver asked him to present his IDF identity card as required to board the bus without paying. He did not have one and the papers who presented to the driver were not adequate to permit him to board without paying the fare.

The soldier did not have his ID as required (Teudat Choger). The soldier began combing his pockets in the hope of having enough to cover the fare. The chareidi man seated behind the driver suddenly got up and handed the driver enough money to cover the soldiers fare. The soldier responded, Wait a moment  I have money. The chareidi man said Ma pitom  you are not supposed to pay for you are serving. Soldiers who are serving dont pay.

The person who photographed the man and published the story was so moved he decided to document the event and pass it along in the hope of spreading the act of this one individual to as many as possible. He concludes, I dont know who you are, but you made a major kiddush Hashem today.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
In Addition, a Central Organization Streamlining Joint Economic Activity Between Israel and Japan Will Be Established. Minister of Economy and Industry Mr. Eli Cohen and Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Mr. Hiroshige Seko, Signed Two Agreements Strengthening Economic Ties between the Countries.

Following a meeting this month between the Minister of Economy and Industry Eli Cohen and the Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Hiroshige Seko, the two signed agreements to promote economic cooperation between Israel and Japan in a joint ceremony. The first is a joint statement calling for increased cooperation between Israeli governmental bodies, economic organizations and companies with Japanese companies in a variety of fields. One of the key achievements in the statement is the establishment of a body that will unite relevant economic organizations in Israel and in Japan and upgrade joint economic activity, primarily in the fields of advanced industries, including: artificial intelligence, robotics, IoT, autonomous driving and more.

In addition, the ministers signed an agreement of cooperation in the field of cyber-security. The agreement calls for increased investments and joint activity in this field, establishes joint training programs and joint work seminars, and calls on Israeli experts to contribute to a new cyber-security center of excellence being established in Japan, and more.

Eli Cohen, Israeli Minister of Economy and Industry: I see cooperation with Japan, the worlds third largest economy after China and the US, as a strategic goal for the Israeli economy. The visit of Minister Seko in Israel is a sign of Japans serious determination to strengthen joint relations and to take our economic relations to the next level. Cooperation agreements with Japan strengthen the Israeli economy. My Japanese colleague and I have set a joint goal of doubling the scope of trade between the countries and I believe we will reach this goal.

The Japanese minister praised the meeting and said relations between Israel and Japan will foster economic growth in Japan. We need Israeli support in cyber-security, especially ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and are looking forward to fruitful cooperation.

Ohad Cohen, Trade Commissioner at the Foreign Trade Administration of the Israeli Ministry of Economy and Industry, said: Israel is seen in Japan as a source of innovation and a cyber-security superpower which can greatly help Japan meet its challenges and threats in this field. We expect that both agreements will help Israeli companies integrate into the Japanese market and forge cooperation with Japanese corporations, especially ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

According to Israels Central Bureau of Statistics, trade of goods between Israel and Japan reached a sum of $3 billion in 2016, with Israeli exports to Japan reaching $700 million. Israeli exports to Japan are varied and include optical and medical devices, machinery, electrical equipment and chemicals. Import of goods from Japan reached $2.6 billion in 2016. The leading sectors include: machines and mechanical devices, computer equipment and automotive vehicles.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
One hundred two members of the Bnei Menashe Jewish community, all of whom immigrated to Israel from the northeastern Indian state of Mizoram in February, will officially join Israeli society on Monday, 19 Iyar, after having completed their formal conversion to Judaism and an intensive Hebrew course at Shavei Israels absorption center in Kfar Chassidim. The new immigrants, who have received Israeli citizenship, will all settle in Nazareth Illit, which already has a flourishing Bnei Menashe community.

The new immigrants arrived in Israel in February thanks to the Jerusalem-based nonprofit Shavei Israel. They all hail from Mizoram, India, which borders Burma and Bangladesh and is home to the second-largest concentration of Bnei Menashe in India after that of the state of Manipur.

This is an exciting day for all of us, said Shavei Israel Founder and Chairman Michael Freund. After spending the past three months at the Shavei Israel Absorption Center, the Bnei Menashe immigrants will now settle in Upper Nazareth in the Galil, where they will begin to build their new lives here in the Jewish state. We will do everything we can to ensure that their integration into Israeli society goes as smoothly as possible. More than 2,700 years after their ancestors were exiled from the Land, the Bnei Menashe are returning home. Our task now is to ensure that they truly feel at home as well.

The Bnei Menashe claim that they are descendants of the tribe of Menashe, one of the Ten Lost Tribes exiled from the Land of Israel more than 2,700 years ago by the Assyrian empire. So far, some 3,000 Bnei Menashe have made Aliyah thanks to Shavei Israel, including more than 1,100 in the past four years. Some 7,000 Bnei Menashe remain in India waiting for the chance to return home to Zion.

Shavei Israel reaches out to and assists lost Jews seeking to return to the Jewish people. It works with various groups around the world, such as the Bnei, the Bnei Anousim (Marranos) of Spain, Portugal and South America, the Subbotnik Jews of Russia, and the Hidden Jews of Poland from the time of the Holocaust. The organization also engages in the absorption of new olim in Israel, including providing assistance with housing, employment, and professional training.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem/Photo Credit: Yehuda Schwartz/Shavei Israel)
MK David Amsellem, who chairs the Knesset Interior Committee, is calling on 1,600 officers serving in Israel Police to take a polygraph exam towards determining the level of their integrity and character. The officers maintain such an exam is an aggressive move as well as intrusive.

Police Chief Roni Alsheich has already probed the background of candidates for senior posts, and in some cases, asked the candidate to submit to a polygraph. Of late, the department has been cooperating with Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan, who is working to legislate a law that any candidate for the post of Nitzav (Deputy Chief) will have to take a polygraph.

The department seems fine with the process for the high-ranking post but there is a shout of disapproval in response to Amsellems call to extend the polygraph to lower ranking officers, totaling about 1,600 officers. He feels officers should be required to take a lie-detector test once every three years towards maintaining the integrity of the department. He adds If you have nothing to hide, what is the big deal, that If I were head of the department I would back such a move. Amsellem adds the department spends hundreds of thousands of shekels on public relations and towards maintaining its image, and he feels this will do more towards maintaining the departments image than spending money as mentioned.

Representatives of the departments rank and file explain Amsellems plan is simply too aggressive a move, by placing the integrity of the entire department in question.

They are calling on Amsellem to back down and withdraw the bill that may become law and thereby compelling the officers are he envisions should be the case.

Public Security Minister Erdan backs the bill, and feels this will give Police Chief Alsheich another tool towards increasing the public trust in the department. Erdan adds that he understands the concerns of Amsellem and other law makers and a compromise must be found that will also reduce the risk of leaking information pertaining to investigations while also avoiding placing the integrity of the entire department into question as well as leveling suspicions at all its officers.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Parents and three children, residents of Modiin Illit, was traveling on Sunday, Lag BOmer, in their vehicle from Jerusalem, using Waze to navigate, ending up in a PA (Palestinian Authority) village near Birzeit in Ramallah.

Needless to say, the family was frightened when they realized what occurred as they were in an area designated by Oslo as B, which means total PA civil control and Israeli security control. They quickly phoned Israel Police for assistance.

Police immediately contacted IDF Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which in turn contacted PA police. They found the family and provided an escort out of the area without incident, arriving at a checkpoint near Beit El in the Binyamin Regional Council of the Shomron. From there, they continued their trip home to Modiin Illit.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
As President Donald Trump considers a replacement for fired FBI Director James Comey, lawmakers are urging the president to steer clear of appointing any politicians.

The advice came Sunday amid more criticism over Trumps dismissal of Comey during an FBI probe of Russias meddling with last years election and any ties to the Trump campaign. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said the Founding Fathers created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now eroding.

I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally  and thats the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system, Clapper said I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.

When asked, Internally, from the president? Clapper responded, Exactly.

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants, she said.

Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump for his actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comeys dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because Trump may have tapes of their conversations.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to reset. He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration, ex-FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.

Its now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1, said Graham, R-S.C.

The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created, Graham said, adding: I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all  but we dont know all the evidence yet.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland, the federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court last year by President Barack Obama but who was denied a hearing by Republicans. A former top aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, said that McConnell is interested in the suggestion.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone not of partisan background with great experience and courage. Declining to comment on a Garland nomination, Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor for the Russia probe.

Under Senate rules, Republicans could confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats 48.

Calling Trumps remarks about possible taped conversations outrageous, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would absolutely subpoena such tapes.

We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, dont mysteriously disappear, Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee.

The blowback against the firing of Comey angered the increasingly frustrated president, who made the decision after consulting only a small group of advisers, worried the news would leak out. Trump has openly vented his frustration with the media and Democrats on Twitter, musing about canceling press briefings and arguing that its difficult for aides to know his thinking.

The administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to replace Comey, just over half of the 14 being considered. Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday for the Mideast and Europe, his first overseas trip as president. He was also set to welcome foreign leaders to the White House, with Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday and President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia on Thursday. A leader of the United Arab Emirates was scheduled to visit Monday.

Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNNs State of the Union; Graham spoke on NBCs Meet the Press; Haley and Warner appeared on ABCs This Week; and Warner spoke on Fox News Sunday along with Lee and Holmes.

(AP)
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who whiled away the time playing the piano while waiting Sunday for the Chinese leader, says he has not decided yet what he would play when he meets U.S. President Donald Trump.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met Putin with in April, followed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs meeting with Trump at the White House several weeks later.

The date for the much-anticipated meeting between Trump and Putin has not been set but its likely that they would meet at the G-20 summit in July in Germany.

Asked Monday by reporters which song he would play when he meets with Trump, Putin said they need to meet first, talk and then choose the tune to match.

(AP)
President Reuven Rivlin on Monday morning 19 Iyar, met at his residence with Prime Minister of Ukraine, Volodymyr Groysman, who was making an official visit to Israel accompanied by a delegation of government ministers who were participating in a wider set of G2G meetings with their Israeli counterparts.

It is a real pleasure and honor to host you here in Jerusalem the capital city of Israel, said President Rivlin welcoming his guest, and spoke of his visit to the Ukraine last year. I really believe that in order to bring a new era of understanding between our two peoples, we have to recognize the past. We appreciate very much what you are doing against hatred, against, fascism, and against anti-Semitism.

The President praised the growing cooperation and partnership between Israel and the Ukraine, and said he hoped that these good relationships would be expanded.

Prime Minster Groysman thanked the President for his welcome and said, We are here to develop even better relationship with our friend Israel, and to deepen our strategic partnership. He noted that the two countries had last year celebrated 25 years of diplomatic relations. This visit should be another step in the development of that friendship, he added.

We have just returned from a visit to Yad Vashem, the Prime Minister told the President. It was a tragic page in history and is directly related to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, and we are proud to have had 2,500 Righteous Among the Nations who represented Ukraine, it was a really tragedy, the murder of six million Jews just for being Jews, and this horrible figure includes 1.5 million children, and noted he had been particularly moved by his visit to the Childrens Memorial.

He continued, Mr. President, we appreciate your visit to Ukraine to mark the anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy. The site was used to murder Jews and also people of Ukrainian and Roma ethnicity and other ethnicities because fascism and Nazism didnt spare any ethnic group. He added, Today humanity has other challenges facing it, and Ukraine highly values human rights and human life and we have to fight for peace, we have to stand untied to protect our democratic values and to protect global peace.

President Rivlin added, When we say as Jews never again, we are not preaching to our people, we learned the lesson, we know what we have to do, we know that the security, and the burden of security. He continued, When we are talking about what happened, we have to teach all the people in order that it will not happen again. Fascism is a phenomenon, Nazism is a phenomenon, and it was all over Europe, there were a lot of people who thought like the Nazis about the Jews, and every one of us has to learn the lesson for their own people. No one can ignore the facts of history.

The two went on to hold an extended discussion about the developments in the region, and about ways to further strengthen the ties between Israel and Ukraine.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem/Photo Credit: Mark Neiman, GPO)
Incoming US Ambassador to Israel attorney David Friedman is beginning to set up shop and for him, this includes kashering his official residence in Herzliya, not relying on the kashrus of his predecessor Dan Shapiro, who was not shomer Shabbos. Towards achieving this goal; Ambassador Friedman turned to a close friend and chavrusa, head Chabad Shaliach to the Five Towns Rabbi Zalman Wolowik. Wolowik told the ambassador that he will fly to Israel and personally see to it that the job is done.

Friedman tried to persuade him not to fly himself, but the rabbi was insistent, and together with his team, they arrived to the home in Herzliya Pituach and kashered the kitchen, affixed new mezuzos, and did whatever necessary so the home was ready to accommodate a frum family.

Speaking on Monday morning 19 Iyar with Noam Zeigman of Kol Berama Radio, Rav Wolowik explained from my perspective, it was natural that I would fly and personally kasher the home and bring new mezuzos.

Zeigman asked if there was a need to kasher since Shapiro was Jewish. Wolowik explained I do not know the former ambassador but I can say now, the house is kosher mehadrin as per the ambassadors standards.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
A few weeks after former Chief Rabbi of Israel Yonah Metzger entered Massiyahu Prison to begin serving his sentence on a fraud conviction, former Rishon LTzion Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron was found guilty in the Jerusalem District Court of fraud and breach of trust and other white collar crimes after seventeen years of judicial process. The conviction comes despite the prosecutor announcing the case is closed about a decade ago.

The law-breaking activities included in the conviction took place between 1999 to 2003, connected to Rabbi Yitzchak Ochana, who was in charge of the Chief Rabbinate testing unit. He sold Chief Rabbinate of Israel rabbinical ordination certificates to persons who used them to advance their careers and increase their salaries; including members of the Israel Police and Israel Prison Authority. Rav Doron turned a blind eye to the illegal operation and he did not profit at all.

Today, 76, the rav stood in court and heard the conviction. The ravs medical condition is precarious and he arrived in the courthouse in a wheelchair. Despite the courts 135-page decision, the ravs punishment is expected to be quite light.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Cyber security and IT firms are set for a lift this week as spooked businesses tighten up their defences following Fridays global hack.

They were told to update their security software after the attack on the NHS, Telefonica in Spain and FedEx in the US among others.

Technology analyst Paraag Amin said the warning was likely to benefit cyber security consultants and IT services firms  such as Redcentric, Coretx, NCC and Sophos.

Defence: Cyber security and IT firms are set for a lift this week

Amin said: At board level people will be asking the question about what cyber security they have in place. People will go out and buy more software.

Interpol chief Rob Wainwright, pictured, also urged companies to ensure their security was up to date.

The ransomware attack released a virus that took control of users files and demanded payments to unlock them, with the US and Russia among the worst-hit countries.
Frankfurt's efforts to steal Londons business have been dealt an embarrassing blow by Germanys own central bank.

The Bundesbank has moved into one of the few office blocks suitable for international lenders in Frankfurt, undermining attempts to woo British banks ahead of Brexit.

It is to lease an extra 75,000sq ft in Frankfurts Trianon skyscraper  one of the only high quality spaces that might suit a bank.

Germany's Bundesbank has moved into one of the few office blocks suitable for international lenders in Frankfurt

Although Frankfurts office vacancy rate is 9 per cent  higher than many other German cities  the quality is mostly too poor for big institutions.

The City has a rate of 7.2 per cent due to demand from global firms. But 5.4m sq ft of offices are being built to accommodate more.

Several international banks are looking for office space in Frankfurt, estate agent Savills told Bloomberg. It turns out there arent that many suitable properties available.

John Longworth, of the campaign group Leave Means Leave, said: London has an enormous gravitational pull on financial services. The City is miles ahead of Europe.
Glaxosmithkline could face a bruising run-in with investors after an 8bn takeover plan was revealed.

It comes just days after star investor Neil Woodford ditched his 1.2bn stake.

The pharmaceutical giant has reportedly told shareholders to expect it to buy out Swiss rival Norvartiss 36.5 per cent stake in GSK Consumer Healthcare.

GSK is facing fury from investors over 8 billion deal

The move, reported in The Sunday Times, would give the firm full control over brands including Horlicks, Nicorette and Beechams.

But it follows Woodfords decision to sell his GSK holding over its refusal to consider a break-up, and his doubts over the sustainability of its dividend.

Woodford is one of Britains most successful fund managers, and his lack of confidence could spook GSKs other major shareholders.

He has held shares in Glaxo for more than 15 years, but ran out of patience because it wouldnt split into more focused businesses.

The sum of the parts is significantly greater than the whole, he said. My viewpoint, and that of other like-minded institutional investors, has been heard but ultimately ignored  repeatedly.

He said Glaxos HIV treatment division had been responsible for more than half of its growth, but warned: If the companys one remaining growth engine starts to falter, this could pose a threat to its future revenue growth, earnings and cash flows.

Packages of GlaxoSmithKline's best selling asthma drug Advair

Glaxo is also under threat from rival drug makers such as Hikma Pharmaceuticals, which has applied to make a cut-price equivalent of the blockbuster asthma drug Advair. GSK received a short-term boost last week when US regulators turned down a second application, pushing the threat back until mid-2018.

Chief executive Emma Walmsley, 47, is understood to support Glaxos existing structure, with consumer and vaccine divisions given equal weight to pharma.

But she is under pressure to come up with the kind of multi-billion-pound blockbuster drugs produced by big pharma rivals.

The company has struggled to deliver decent returns to investors for about five years due to sluggish drug sales, although steady growth has returned.

Walmsley has already revealed that she is on the lookout for deals, but said this would most likely involve buying early stage experimental drugs.
London shares edged higher this session after oil prices lifted, boosted by energy ministers from Russia and Saudi Arabia agreeing to extend production cuts by another nine months to the end of the first quarter of next year.

The two countries - who make up a fifth of total daily output - are crucial to the success of the cuts.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih and his Russian counterpart Alexander Novak said in Beijing that a joint deal to cut crude supplies would be extended from the middle of this year until the end of March 2018.

As a result brent crude, the international benchmark, was at $51.88 per barrel, up $1.04, or 2.1 per cent, from its last close at a level last seen in early May.

US West Texas Intermediate crude was also up over 2 per cent at $48.85 per barrel.
Thomson holidays owner TUI Group was the biggest faller in the FTSE 100 this morning, with shares down more than 5 per cent, as it posted widening losses in its last quarter.

TUI, which is also behind First Choice, posted a loss of 177.7million at constant currency in the first three months of the year, against a loss of 126million in the same period last year.

Group losses for the half year improved to 308.6million from 394.9million in the same period last year. The news sent the shares 5.3 per cent lower to 1,126p.

More losses: TUI again made a loss in the six months between October and March

This is despite TUI saying that current demand from UK holidaymakers remained resilient despite Brexit, with 65 per cent of its summer programme sold, in line with last year, and revenues 8 per cent higher.

Security concerns mean that demand for holidays in Turkey and North Africa continued to be subdued, but TUI said this was offset by the popularity of other destinations including Spain and Canaries, Greece, Cyprus, Cape Verde and the Caribbean.

TUI chief executive Friedrich Joussen said: Whilst the turbulent macroeconomic and geopolitical backdrop is evident in certain destinations and markets, our operational experience, integrated model and balanced portfolio of markets and destinations mean that we are well placed to deal with these challenges and continue to deliver sustainable growth into the longer term.'

The firm reiterated that it expects to record a 10 per cent increase in underlying earnings for the full year.

TUI said it had also been boosted by good overall demand for its cruise holidays, hotels and resorts.

This helped lift customer numbers up by around 3 per cent.

It said growth was driven by higher demand for long-haul travel, higher selling prices in the UK for destinations in the Eurozone and the acquisition of a French tour operator business.

TUI has been offloading parts of its business and been using the proceeds to grow its own-brand hotels and cruises.

The latest sale was earlier this year, when the group sold its luxury division Travelopia to private equity firm KKR for 325million. The group said this was on track to be completed in the second half.

TUI also recently said it was in talks with Etihad Airways for the sale of TUI Fly to create a new airline.


NHLANGANO  It has emerged that the South African woman in the horrifying rape incident, which occurred at an informal border crossing, encountered the terrifying ordeal after making arrangements to meet a local man she had become acquainted with on social media.



The 33-year-old woman reportedly told investigators that at the time she met her attackers, she was on her way to meet a Swazi man she had befriended on facebook.

Reports are that the woman disclosed that after the facebook encounter with the unidentified Swazi national, they made plans to meet in the country at the mans residence.



This was after days of conversing via facebook text messages.

So when the woman set out to meet her newly-found friend two weeks ago, she happened to bump into two male strangers just moments after she had made it into the country, through an undesignated entry point around Mshololo area, in the outskirts of Nhlangano.



What followed later was a horrendous ordeal which lasted for over an hour as the strangers pounced on the terrified woman, pinned her down and repeatedly raped her.

After the men were finished, it appeared the nightmare was far from reaching an end for the victim.



Torture



Things went from bad to worse as the assailants subjected her to even more cruel torture as they stuffed stones inside her private parts, leaving her soaked in blood.
MBABANE  The battle has just begun! This was the bold statement by President of the Swaziland Nurses Association (SNA), Bheki Mamba when addressing nurses after they resolved to embark on a go-slow.



The nurses took the resolution during a meeting that was held at the Mbabane Government Hospital yesterday. They further vowed that they would not attend to any emergencies today.



Some of the demands by the nurses are; the issue of shortage of drugs, current uniform policy, continued harassment of nurses, new proposed structure and a Health Indaba. Some of the drugs which are currently unavailable in the countrys health facilities according to the nurses include drugs for sexual transmitted infections(STIs), epilepsy drugs, hypertensive drugs and diabetes drugs.



According to the nurses, the go- slow will be in all the health facilities countrywide with effect from today.

They agreed on this resolution after an order directing them to report to work on Tuesday and Wednesday was issued by acting Industrial Court Judge Musa Sibandze yesterday.



The nurses had previously resolved to go on strike with effect from May 15-16, 2017.

The order by the court comes after government filed an urgent application seeking an order restraining and interdicting the nurses from participating in the intended strike action or withdrawal of their services on May 15-16, 2017.

Although having agreed to call off the strike action, the nurses yesterday resolved to engage in a slow gear from today until government heeds to their demands.



Let us make hospitals ungovernable so they can heed to our grievances, said Mamba.
Comment



What value does our government place on the life of an ordinary citizen when it allows our hospitals and clinics to run short of essential drugs? There is no guessing the answer to this because this has been going on for weeks, if not months.



There is also no guessing the answer to whether or not any sick person should bother going to hospital today, because we wake up to threats of a go-slow strike action by nurses to force government to attend to grievances of their own.



One layer of our Florence Nightingales beef with the employer is the inability to effectively carry out their work due to the shortage of drugs in hospitals and clinics nationwide.

Where then is the peoples budget that the Finance Minister viciously defended, if the people are now the ones suffering to death, literally?



First it was the life of government service providers hanging by a thread due to a cash-flow crisis. Sadly, on the list of unpaid service providers were medical suppliers and now the ordinary citizen has no access to medication.



The Health Ministry is too scared to say just how much is being owed and seems helpless with regards to coming up with a solution that ensures people go to the hospital today to find the drugs they need to stay alive.



And it is not just the drugs that we expect to find, but the nurses who are not on a go-slow strike because they are part of an essential service. They cannot bargain with peoples lives. The cruelest thing they could ever do is join governments heartless action of killing innocent people.



Likewise, we call upon government to stop gambling with the health of a nation by not paying those who supply essential medication.

The Health Minister Sibongile Simelane had better start spending cold sleepless nights at the door of the office to the Minister of Finance Martin Dlamini from today, until money is released to buy the drugs needed to treat people.



Governments skewed priorities should not result in a mass grave of Swazi citizens who have duly paid their taxes because the Swaziland Revenue Authority (SRA) is leaving no cent unchecked - ruthlessly so in some cases might we add.



The timing of it all could not have been more ironic. We are certain that the prime minister, who turns 75 today and is currently away receiving medical treatment abroad, would have loved a happier birthday than to be accorded the best medical treatment while his government allows those it should serve diligently, to die.
By Bill Parry

The citys Department of Education has learned that it was not an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who was turned away by school officials at PS 58 in Maspeth last Thursday. But the visit by a federal immigration officer touched a nerve in Queens with U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Flushing) and Borough President Melinda Katz.

City officials said an officer had come to the Grand Avenue School of Heroes to confirm facts about a fourth-grade student, but was asked to leave because he did not have a warrant, according to the mayors office.

Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina and Nisha Agarwal, commissioner of the mayors Office of Immigrant Affairs, greeted parents at the school Monday morning and calm fears that it was a visit by ICE officers. They said two officials from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency that is part of DHS but not directly affiliated with ICE, appeared at the school.

All students, regardless of immigration status, are welcome in New York City public schools, and parents should rest assured that we will do everything in our power to protect students, staff and families, Farina said. The federal agent was turned away  were looking into this incident and are providing schools with additional information on our protocol and more trainings.

Farina said the Department of Education is aware of the students identity and the family has been informed and it is not believed to be an immigration issue but part of an administrative inquiry pertaining to an immigration benefit request.

This was not ICE. This was an agent that we are still trying to discover. He didnt bring a card, he didnt bring a badge, Farina said. He never got beyond the front desk. Our protocol now is to make sure when anyone comes into the building (he or she is required) to show information. He waits outside the school building, then that school notifies the lawyers at DOE, we notify immigrant services, and its handled on that level.

Meng said the incident raises many questions and her office would seek answers in the coming days. PS 58 is in Mengs district.

Just yesterday during a community discussion on immigration at the Jamaica Muslim Center, I again criticized the lack of consistency and standards in which agents enforce immigration policies at our airports and borders, and how they randomly pop up at courts and hospitals. Now, unfortunately, this has extended to our schools, Meng said in a statement Sunday. Officials at PS 58 did the right thing by turning this immigration agent away. We cannot allow an incident like this to create an atmosphere of fear in our schools. Our schools must be a safe and welcoming environment for all students, regardless of their immigration status or the status of their families.

Katz declared Queens schools are to be off-limits to federal immigration agents.

As a mother, I am deeply troubled and horrified at this attempt on the part of federal immigration agents to reach any child in our schools, Katz said. PS 58 officials did the right thing by following proper protocols of the city administration, stopping the agents at the door and protecting their students. No parent should have to worry about any unauthorized persons or entities reaching their children while in school.

The USCIS Public Affairs Officer Katie Tichacek Kaplan released a statement Monday.

While we cannot discuss the details of the case, we can confirm that two USCIS officials visited an elementary school in Maspeth, Queens, as part of an administrative inquiry pertaining to an immigration benefit, she wrote. Although school visits are not routine in these circumstances, they are not unprecedented. I must emphasize that the purpose of the visit was to verify certain facts about the students enrollment in relation to a request for an immigration benefit. At no time did the officers ask to see or speak with the student, who was not the subject of the administrative inquiry.
Times' Game of the Week Preview: No. 4 Mapletown vs. No. 5 South Side

No. 5 South Side gears up to stop the top-scoring No. 4 Mapletown Maples and star running back Landan Stevenson in the quarterfinal Class 1A matchup.
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Bethlehem

CSX plans to shut down its hump operation that sorts rail cars using gravity at its massive Selkirk railyard in coming weeks as a cost-cutting measure. The news was contained in a memo sent to members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a copy of which was obtained by the Times Union.

It's not clear how many jobs might be eliminated by the move. The memo describes a meeting between CSX management and union representatives at which the union was told the yard was costing too much to operate and that work would be shifted to other yards, including Syracuse.

In the memo, Mark Krajewski, chairman of the union local, called the move "heartbreaking." Krajewski and other union officials couldn't be reached for comment.

The move likely isn't a surprise. CSX Corp.'s new CEO Hunter Harrison is in the midst of a major cost-cutting effort, and the railroad has already closed hump yards in Atlanta, Louisville and Toledo, according to news reports.

CSX officials wouldn't confirm the upcoming closure, which could happen within two weeks.

"CSX's management team is undertaking a comprehensive review of the company's operations and making changes across its network to improve efficiency, safety and service to customers," spokesman Rob Doolittle said. "As changes are made, the company is communicating them to employees, customers and other stakeholders who may be impacted. CSX has not made any announcements about changes to operations in Selkirk, N.Y."

The Selkirk yard was the largest in the New York Central system, and later was operated by Penn Central and then Conrail before CSX and Norfolk Southern each acquired part of the Conrail operation.

Harrison closed at least four hump yards when he headed Canadian Pacific Railway, according to CanadianBusiness.com, viewing them as inefficient.
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Seoul, South Korea

North Korea said Monday the missile it launched over the weekend was a new type of long-range ballistic rocket that can carry a heavy nuclear warhead.

North Korean propaganda must be considered with wariness, but if confirmed, the claim marks another big step forward in the country's escalating efforts to field a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Outside experts don't believe the North can do that yet, but each new test pushes them closer to the goal.

The launch Sunday is an immediate challenge to South Korea's new leader, a liberal elected just five days earlier who expressed a desire to reach out to North Korea. The country's push to boost its weapons program also makes it one of the Trump administration's most urgent foreign policy worries.

The missile flew for half an hour and reached an unusually high altitude before landing in the Sea of Japan, the South Korean, Japanese and U.S. militaries said. Tokyo said the flight pattern could indicate a new 'type of missile.

North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency called the missile a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12" that's "capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead." Leader Kim Jong Un was said to have witnessed the test and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing," according to KCNA.

The launch jeopardizes new South Korean President Moon Jae-in's willingness to talk to the North, and came as U.S., Japanese and European navies gather for joint war games in the Pacific.

"The president expressed deep regret over the fact that this reckless provocation ... occurred just days after a new government was launched in South Korea," senior presidential secretary Yoon Young-chan said. "The president said we are leaving open the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, but we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating."

Moon, South Korea's first liberal leader in nearly a decade, said as he took his oath of office last week that he'd be willing to visit the North if the circumstances were right.

The U.N. Security Council will hold closed consultations about the launch on Tuesday afternoon, according to the U.N. Mission for Uruguay, which holds the council presidency this month.

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said on ABC television that the U.S. has been working well with China, Pyongyang's closest ally, and she raised the possibility of new sanctions against North Korea including on oil imports.

The Security Council has adopted six increasingly tougher sanctions resolutions against North Korea.

President Donald Trump's administration has called North Korean ballistic and nuclear efforts unacceptable, but it has swung between threats of military action and offers to talk as it formulates a policy.

While Trump has said he'd be "honored" to talk with leader Kim Jong Un under favorable conditions, Haley seemed to rule out the possibility. "Having a missile test is not the way to sit down with the president, because he's absolutely not going to do it," she told ABC.
Mike Groll

With his vote in favor of the American Health Care Act (Trumpcare 2.0), Rep. John Faso, R-Kinderhook, proved that he is not the thoughtful, moderate Republican he sells himself as but rather a doctrinaire, Trump-Ryan conservative.

As the article "Repeal bill vote likely Thursday," May 4, reported, Faso supported the original AHCA and was willing to advance the amended version without seeing its text or the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculation of its impacts. The earlier version would have stripped health care from 68,000 of his district's residents  or at least 10 percent of Faso's constituents. The AHCA gives $600 billion in tax cuts to the top 2 percent of earners while cutting a like amount from needy Medicaid recipients, including the elderly, the disabled and children.
[May 15, 2017] SpiderWebShow celebrates the official release of CdnStudio, Canada's first digital rehearsal hall

Rehearse, Converse and Perform Online When: Monday May 15, 1pm-2pm

What: CdnStudio Launch

Where: The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M6J 3T4

Host: SpiderWebShow Performance TORONTO, May 15, 2017 /CNW/ - SpiderWebShow, Canada's first digitally-engaged, nationally-driven performing arts company, invites the public to celebrate the launch of a revolutionary new technology CdnStudio at a special launch event on Monday, May 15 from 1pm  2pm at the Theatre Centre. At the event, attendees can learn more about this unprecedented tool for performance creation and are invited to try out the groundbreaking new technology on their own laptops. CdnStudio is an online 'room' that uses Internet technology to bring collaborators from across Canada together. This digital tool takes separate video streams and blends them together in real time, allowing users to see and hear each other in the same digital space. The technology is specifically designed to be used with non-proprietary technology so that it may be accessible to all artists with minimal set-up. With a few key props such as a laptop with webcam, a green screen, and a high-speed Internet connection, Canadian artists may rehearse in real-time and in a shared virtual space from anywhere in the country. A video of the beta test of CdnStudio atQueen's University may be viewed here:





https://vimeo.com/215504407 "CdnStudio challenges some of the core tenets of what theatre is," said SpiderWebShow Artistic Director Michael Wheeler. "Do the physical bodies of audience and performer need to occupy the same physical space? Usually, but not with CdnStudio, where the a performance can occur live but the shared space is a digital one."

"CIRA's Community Investment Program funds innovative projects that contribute to the Canadian Internet," says David Fowler, vice president of marketing and communications at the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). "CdnStudio brings together Canadians who were previously separated by distance through new technology and CIRA is proud to have supported it." The first demonstration of this technology was presented at the LMDA Conference at Portland State University in July 2016. Its first public users, consisting of a select group of early supporters, were granted access on May 1 of this year. The Studio will be officially released to the general public the same day as the launch. SpiderWebShow hopes to continue to collaborate with the Canadian performance community to refine and grow its capacity. The project is supported by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) Community Investment Program, and was developed in residency at Queen's University in the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, where a public performance using CdnStudio titled The Revolutions will take place in September 2017. The CdnStudio Team includes: Joel Adria, Technologist; Sarah Garton Stanley, Creative Catalyst; Michael Wheeler, Artistic Director; and Em Piro, Digital Stage Manager. Pictured: Sarah Garton Stanley (in front of screen), Camila Diaz-Varela and Michael O'Brien in CdnStudio. A high-res version of this image can be downloaded here:

https://spiderwebshow.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/High-Res-CdnStudio-Image.jpg ABOUT SPIDERWEBSHOW: SpiderWebShow.ca is the first and only nationally-driven performing arts website of its kind in Canada. It is a practice-based network where cultural change is captured and examined. SpiderWebShow began as a dramaturgical inquiry. The question that led the charge was straight up and complex: What defines Canadian Theatre now? Over the past four years, we have developed a variety of different types of media to engage with this question: a weekly magazine, podcasts and audio "thought residencies", video interviews and now a virtual rehearsal studio. We tell complicated and contradictory stories about our enormously small country. Our work is rooted in cultural diversity, and our programming now asks a broader range of questions about political responsibility, identity, and difference. ABOUT CIRA: Through the Community Investment Program, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) funds projects that demonstrate the capacity to build a better online Canada. The CIRA team manages Canada's country code top-level domain on behalf of all Canadians. A member-based organization, CIRA represents the interests of Canada's Internet community internationally. To date, the Community Investment Program has supported 78 innovative projects across Canada with grants totalling $3.2 million SOURCE Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)

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[May 15, 2017] UnitedHealthcare Donates $40,000 to the Boys & Girls Club of Washington to Fund Youth Mental Health Programs

UnitedHealthcare Community Plan donated $40,000 to the Boys & Girls Club of Washington to fund youth mental health programs. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005191/en/ Matt Watrous, executive director of Boys & Girls Clubs Washington, was recently presented with a $40,000 check by Cindy Spain of UnitedHealthcare Community Plan to fund youth mental health programs. Many Boys & Girls Clubs of King County members participated in the event (Photo: Kim Doyel). The donation will fund programs that include anti-bullying, anti-drug and peer-support initiatives that help build self-confidence, and programs focused on physical activity and proper nutrition. "UnitedHealthcare is grateful for the opportunity to support the Boys & Girls Club of Washington's mental health programs that can have a positive impact on children's health and quality of life," said Doug Bowes, CEO of UnitedHealthcare Community Plan, which provides free Boys & Girls Club memberships to children who are enrolled in its Medicaid plans. Youth mental health is a growing national concern and can put many children and teens at increased risk of substance abuse, dropping out of school, involvement in the juvenile justice system and suicide. Studies show that about half of Americans will meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental health disorder sometime in their life, with first onset usually in childhood or adolescence1. Early engagement and support are crucial to improving outcomes for mental health conditions, such as depression or anxiety, that affect a person's thinking, feeling or mood. "We appreciate UnitedHealthcare's continued support for our efforts o address mental health," said Matt Watrous, executive director of Boys & Girls Clubs of Washington. "This funding will enable us to provide a safe environment to educate young people about the importance of good mental health and healthy lifestyle choices."



UnitedHealthcare sponsored the Washington State Youth of the Year event earlier this spring. This program promotes and recognizes youth across the state for their service to the Boys & Girls Club and the community, and reinforces the effectiveness of Boys & Girls Clubs and how they provide essential resources to the communities they serve. Boys & Girls Club of Washington, which serves nearly 80,000 young people statewide, inspires and enables kids to realize their full potential as productive, responsible and caring citizens. The clubs provide a safe place for young people to learn and experience life-enhancing programs and character development.

UnitedHealthcare serves over 1 million Washington residents with a network of 97 hospitals and more than 38,000 physicians and other care providers statewide. About Boys & Girls Clubs of Washington

The Boys & Girls Clubs of Washington exist to inspire & enable all young people to realize their full potential as productive, responsible and caring citizens. Professional staff and volunteers use a combination of locally developed programs and those developed and tested nationally by Boys & Girls Clubs of America in the following Program Impact Areas: Academic Success, Character & Citizenship, and Healthy Lifestyles. Currently, 79,013 Washington state youth in grades K-12 are served through annual membership and over 45,000 youth through community outreach. There are programs currently offered at 150 separate locations, including Clubhouses, native lands, public housing, schools and community centers. About UnitedHealthcare

UnitedHealthcare is dedicated to helping people nationwide live healthier lives by simplifying the health care experience, meeting consumer health and wellness needs, and sustaining trusted relationships with care providers. The company offers the full spectrum of health benefit programs for individuals, employers, military service members, retirees and their families, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and contracts directly with more than 1 million physicians and care professionals, and 6,000 hospitals and other care facilities nationwide. UnitedHealthcare is one of the businesses of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH), a diversified Fortune 50 health and well-being company. For more information, visit UnitedHealthcare at www.uhc.com or follow @myUHC on Twitter (News - Alert). 1Mental Health by the Numbers Report. 2015 National Alliance of Mental Illness. http://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-By-the-Numbers Click here to subscribe to Mobile Alerts for UnitedHealth Group. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005191/en/

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[May 14, 2017] Inside 3D Printing Conference & Expo in Seoul reveals First 50+ Exhibitors and Sponsors and Full Conference Program with 30+ Speakers

NEW YORK, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- South Korea has become one of the hottest markets in the 3D printing industry. In April 2017, the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning announced that they would invest KRW 41.2 billion (approximately, USD $37 million) to boost Korea's 3D printing industry. The director general of the ministry said that financial resources would be spent primarily on bio printing, 3D software and material development, which are essential in this sector. To build on this momentum, Korea International Exhibition Center (KINTEX) and Rising Media will hold the 4th annual Inside 3D Printing Conference & Expo in Seoul on June 28-30, 2017. Inside 3D Printing is the largest professional 3D printing event series worldwide, having hosted 39 events globally since its launch in 2013 in New York City. Over 9,000 attendees are expected at this year's event in Seoul. The theme for this year's event is "The New Era of Digital Manufacturing." The exhibit category has been widened from 3D printers to 3D scanners, CNC milling machines, CAD/CAM/CAE software, metrology, reverse engineering, post processing an materials to showcase developments in this new era of digital manufacturing.



This year's exhibition is expected to have over 70+ exhibitors including global corporations such as EOS, MakerBot, German Reprap, XYZ Printing, MSC Software as well as major Korean additive manufacturing players such as ZWCAD Korea, 3D Box, Motion Works, and Owl Works 3D. The connections made at Inside 3D Printing Seoul 2016 resulted in over 120 contracts signed worth USD $80 million within 6 months after the show. View the full list of confirmed sponsors and exhibitors at inside3dprinting.com/seoul. This year's opening keynote speech will be delivered by Omer Krieger, President, Stratasys APAC and Japan. The multi-track program will have over 30 world-class speakers from Autodesk, Stratasys, 3D Systems, EOS, Arcam, and Dassault Systemes. The session topics focus on manufacturing, metal, business, and the aerospace & automotive industries. The complete agenda is available at inside3dprinting.com/seoul.

Prices increase on-site, so advanced registration is recommended. Online registration is available at inside3dprinting.com/seoul. To inquire about sponsorship & exhibition opportunities, contact [email protected] or [email protected]. About Rising Media Rising Media is a global events and media producer excelling in Internet and technology-related events and content. Events include Inside 3D Printing, RoboUniverse, Virtual Reality Summit, Data Driven Business, Building Business Capability, Predictive Analytics World, Text Analytics World, eMetrics Summit, Conversion Conference, AllFacebook Marketing Conference, Search Marketing Expo, Affiliate Management Days, Influencer Marketing Days, Future of Immersive Leisure, Global Online Classifieds Summit, and Web Effectiveness Conference in the USA, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, India, China, Korea, Singapore, Australia, Brazil. For more information, please visithttp://www.risingmedia.com. Christoph Rowen

+852 9190 4412,

[email protected]

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[May 14, 2017] Cooey Rolls Out its Enterprise Platform 'MyCooey' for Caregivers

HOUSTON, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Cooey recently rolled out its enterprise platform - MyCooey for caregivers, a robust point-of-care solution designed for remote healthcare monitoring, with a smart design that brings together residents, caregivers, and family members irrespective of their location. (Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/510736/Empowering_Caretakers.jpg)

"Our end-to-end health monitoring mobile platform covers requirements of assisted living, in-home care, remote monitoring, post-surgical rehab and chronic disease management," says Manu Madhusudanan, Co-founder, CEO and CTO. MyCooey stands out with its smart voice assistant 'Maya', which simplifies routine health monitoring tasks with simple voice commands. And there is <>Alexa skills incorporated for bed-side assistance as well.



Rules engine powered by their self-developed algorithm empowers the user to customize care plans, trigger events, viz., lifestyle advice, health monitoring, and goal setting and get real time actionable data, using machine learning and cognitive systems. Further, its flexible design framework enables faster deployment and zero maintenance, which saves time and money. MyCooey now has 40,000+ on board users across US, Japan, and India, and they demonstrated how one can leverage best practices and enable better patient engagement, effective communication and care monitoring.

"We are celebrating the customer acceptance leading to more acquisitions and profitability. The response so far is truly heartening and proves that this has enriched the lives of those who we care about," adds Prabhakaran T P, Co-founder and COO. Healthcare has adopted technology but it leaves a lot to be desired for remote health monitoring, and Cooey based out of Texas and Bangalore is focused on connecting the dots across the healthcare ecosystem. Today, there are more and more 'digital natives' coming into the 'sandwich generation', where they are responsible for taking care of both - their children and their parents - while they also try to balance the demands of their careers. "With US healthcare moving from fee-for-service to fee-for-outcomes, the care delivery models are being redesigned towards keeping patients out of hospitals. And there is huge incentive up for grabs for those who foster remote monitoring options,"says Dr.Nagaraj Honkote, Head of Product Strategy. About Cooey Cooey is an end-to-end mobile-based remote health-monitoring platform provider, which allows its users to stay connected anytime, anywhere. It also interfaces with medical devices and other external systems. Media Contact:

T.P.Prabhakaran

Co-founder

[email protected]

+91-9845017398/+91-9148997082



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[May 14, 2017] TwentyEighty Strategy Execution and Duke Corporate Education Announce New Partnership

SINGAPORE and DURHAM, North Carolina, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- TwentyEighty Strategy Execution, a leading global training company, announced its partnership today with Duke Corporate Education, a world-class provider of global leadership solutions, ranked in the top 3 by the Financial Times in Custom Executive Education for 16 consecutive years. Together, Strategy Execution and Duke Corporate Education are launching their Adaptive Strategic Execution Programme, which focuses on developing leaders of project-based work as they navigate unanticipated market shifts and unpredictable industry disruptions. The partnership, which blends decades of academic and professional expertise, will reach a broad audience beyond traditional project and programme managers. Webinar

In conjunction with the partnership announcement and Adaptive Strategic Execution Programme launch, Strategy Execution is hosting a webinar, Adaptive Strategic Execution for a Complex World, led by Vice President of Product Management for TwentyEighty Strategy Execution, Jonathan Gilbert and Duke Corporate Education's Global Head of Strategic Leadership Solutions, Tony O'Driscoll. The live event will expand upon the new partnership and explain how leaders of project-based work need to evolve their skill sets in order to adapt to changing situations where what "has always worked" no longer does. To register for the webinar, being held on Wednesday, May 24, at 7 p.m.8 p.m. SGT, click here. During the live presentation, participants can contribute to the conversation using #StratExLive on Twitter. The background

Today's business environment is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). In this world, projects have become the means by which all work gets done, and the leaders driving this project-based work have become the organisation's most valuable asset. The techniques and skills that have traditionally worked for getting project-based wok done are evolving as leaders at every level are forced to become more responsive, resilient and adaptive. Organisations must consistently balance the need to meet strategic goals while also equipping their talent to adapt and grow with changing needs.



The programme

Strategy Execution and Duke Corporate Education's Adaptive Strategic Execution Programme will be completed in collaboration with Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, ranked #3 this year by Bloomberg Businessweek. The programme will empower leaders to navigate the three domains that influence and define how work gets done: Strategy, Work and People. Learning to harness these domains allows organisations to maximise agility in strategic execution, which not only improves their results, but also enables them to thrive in the face of competition. Each of the eight courses in the Adaptive Strategic Execution Programme curriculum is purposefully designed to extend the mindset, tool set, and skill set of the project-based work leader to navigate these three domains in increasingly complex contexts. Upon successful completion of the programme, participants will receive a certificate.

The partnership

Strategy Execution's proven business techniques combined with Duke Corporate Education's cutting-edge university research and learning methodologies infuse the programme with a one-of-a-kind project-focused perspective designed to increase alignment and engagement across organisations. This collaboration makes them uniquely qualified to help teams, business units and entire enterprises execute complex strategy in a relevant and practical way. "We found the perfect partner in Duke Corporate Education because, while their model of approaching executive education is fundamentally unique, their emphasis on influencing the future of leadership aligns with our values and vision," said Strategy Execution CEO Bob Seiler. "We have an exciting opportunity to produce innovative solutions to not only help our clients get work done, but to elevate and influence the people who propel their strategies." Duke Corporate Education CEO Michael Chavez added, "Strategy execution through education is at the heart of what we do because sustainable execution cannot happen without great leadership. In order for organisations to thrive, they have to move faster and be more adaptive. In our view, people are the real levers to make this happen. And in the face of ever-increasing global ambiguity, leadership has never been as important as it is now. We're eager to work with Strategy Execution to create solutions for tomorrow's new challenges." About TwentyEighty Strategy Execution

TwentyEighty Strategy Execution, a TwentyEighty Inc. company that combined industry leaders ESI International and IPS Learning, delivers performance education that closes the strategy execution gap by strengthening people's strategic and project execution capabilities to drive higher performance. Through our robust and deep curriculum taught by instructors with real world experience, TwentyEighty Strategy Execution helps organisations reach their strategic goals through improving the execution of project-based work. Learn more today at strategyex.com.sg. About Duke Corporate Education

Duke Corporate Education is the premier global provider of leadership solutions that enable leaders at all levels to adapt and move the organisation forward. With delivery in over 75 countries, we work together with clients to understand their context and craft the right educational solution for any level of leadership managers, directors, high potentials or executives. Headquartered in Durham, NC, Duke Corporate Education is a not-for-profit wholly-owned support organisation of Duke University, with global offices located in Carlsbad, CA; London, UK; Johannesburg, South Africa; Singapore and Ahmedabad, India. To learn more, visit dukece.com. Contact: Joyce Tan

[email protected]

+65-3158 9507 Christine Robers

Director, Global Marketing, Duke Corporate Education

[email protected]

+1 919.680.5053



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[May 14, 2017] AC Technologies Joins Warren & Brown Technologies to Expand Connectivity Infrastructure Offering for the New Zealand Market

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Auckland based company AC Technologies Limited has joined the Warren & Brown Technologies Pty Ltd (WBT) group of companies which is a global leader in telecommunications network and connectivity infrastructure. Under a new company name, AC-WB Technologies, the business will continue to provide customers with the outstanding level of technical support with which they have become accustomed, but with the added benefit of an expanded solution offering. AC Technologies owner and Managing Director, Brian Barnett will continue in the business ensuring a smooth transition. Brian said, "I have built the business over the last 25 years but I felt the time was right to move the business to the next level, with W&BT being able to add a significant range of solutions that will better serve our New Zealand customers. During the time I have been involved with W&BT it has become increasingly obvious that the cultures of the two businesses are very similar and combined with the synergies that will result, AC-WB Tchnologies will become instrumental in improving the competitiveness of our customers."



WBT is a long established (95 years) and successful manufacturer and supplier of telecommunications network and connectivity infrastructure to telecom operators and Enterprise customers worldwide. With headquarters and extensive operations in Melbourne, Australia, and offices and manufacturing facilities in the Philippines, India and Vietnam. With capabilities in product development, 3D printing, advanced manufacturing and technical solution design, AC-WB Technologies will be able to provide the New Zealand telecommunications market with new innovative solutions and excellent customer service.

WBT Managing Director, Mr Neil Domelow said, "We are very excited to be expanding our horizons to New Zealand and look forward to building on the good work carried out by Brian and his team." Mr Domelow added, "It has been a goal of ours to establish Warren & Brown Technologies in New Zealand and the opportunity to join with such a well-respected and successful existing local business is a perfect fit for WBT." "WBT will bring considerable new technological developments to the AC-WB Technologies customers as a result of W&BT's involvement with the Australian NBN and being the major supplier of structured cabling, distribution and management infrastructure to Telstra. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial future with our NZ customers." AC-WB Technologies

P: +64-9-302-2668

E: [email protected]

www.actechnologies.co.nz

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[May 15, 2017] Great Basin Scientific Obtains Release of $1.36 Million of Restricted Cash from Series B Convertible Notes

SALT LAKE CITY, May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Great Basin Scientific, Inc. (OTCQB:GBSN), a molecular diagnostics company, today announced that holders of the 2017 Series B Senior Secured Convertible Notes (the Series B Notes) have agreed to the release of $1.36 million from a restricted cash account. As a condition of the release, the Company reduced the conversion price of the Series B Notes to $1.10 per share until July 14, 2017. After July 14, the conversion price of the Series B Notes will revert to $3.00 per share. Assuming the Series B Notes are converted in full prior to July 14, the noteholders will potentially receive 1.24 million shares of common stock in exchange for the conversion in full of the Series B Notes. The release of all remaining restrictions on the restricted cash accounts resulted in the elimination of the variable-priced conversion feature of the Series B Notes. All shares issued under the Series B Notes are subject to a 35% daily volume leak-out provision for the earlier of 15 days from Monday May 15, 2017 or $4 million of shares traded.

We are pleased that our noteholders agreed to release $1.36 million of restricted cash in exchange for a temporary reduction in the conversion price of our Series B Notes. These funds will be used to support our growth initiatives and for other corporate purposes, said Ryan Ashton, co-founder and chief executive officer of Great Basin Scientific. This transaction is part of our continuing effort to simplify our capital structure, which we believe will help investors better understand the Companys value, and facilitate our efforts to pursue future financings and other strategic initiatives to fund our 2017 and 2018growth plans.



On May 12, 2017, Great Basin Scientific filed a Current Report on Form 8-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission describing the transaction documents for the release of restricted cash and leak-out (the Current Report) and has attached those documents as exhibits to the Current Report. Investors and shareholders are encouraged to review the Current Report in its entirety, including its exhibits. The information in this press release is qualified in its entirety by the contents of the Current Report, including its exhibits. About Great Basin Scientific

Great Basin Scientific is a molecular diagnostics company that commercializes breakthrough chip-based technologies. The Company is dedicated to the development of simple, yet powerful, sample-to-result technology and products that provide fast, multiple-pathogen diagnoses of infectious diseases. The Companys vision is to make molecular diagnostic testing so simple and cost-effective that every patient will be tested for every serious infection, reducing misdiagnoses and significantly limiting the spread of infectious disease. More information can be found on the Companys website at www.gbscience.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes forward-looking statements regarding events, trends and business prospects which may affect our future operating results and financial position, including but not limited to statements that imply that we can successfully simplify our capital structure and that future financings or strategic alternatives will be less dilutive to the Company and our shareholders. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially, and reported results, should not be considered as an indication of future performance. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the assumptions of management in the revenue projections not occurring as anticipated, delay or denial in obtaining FDA approval of pending assays, uncertainty in the Companys ability to commercialize new assays, changes in customer needs, competition in the industry being greater than anticipated, our limited operating history and history of losses; our ability to develop and commercialize new products and the timing of commercialization; our ability to obtain sufficient capital in transactions that are less dilutive to our shareholders that will allow us to continue as a going concern and implement our business plan; and other risks set forth in the Companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risks set forth in the Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof, and Great Basin Scientific specifically disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Contact: Betsy Hartman Great Basin Scientific 385.215.3372 [email protected]

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[May 15, 2017] Owens Corning to Acquire High-Performance Cellular Glass Manufacturer Pittsburgh Corning

Owens Corning (News - Alert) (NYSE:OC) today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Pittsburgh Corning, the world's leading producer of cellular glass insulation systems for commercial and industrial markets. Upon closing, the company will pay approximately $560 million in cash, on a cash free and debt free basis. The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is anticipated to close in the third quarter of 2017. Pittsburgh Corning produces FOAMGLAS cellular glass, a sustainable, high performance insulation offering water and fire resistance, high compressive strength and long-lasting thermal protection. This unique combination of properties makes FOAMGLAS the insulation of choice for low-temperature industrial applications and in premier commercial buildings around the world. Pittsburgh Corning also offers an extensive line of accessory products. "The acquisition of Pittsburgh Corning will further expand Owens Corning's commercial and industrial product offering and grow our presence in Europe and Asia," said Julian Francis, president of Owens Corning's Insulation Business. "The addition of Pittsburgh Corning will build on our core glass technologies and accelerates our progress in making Owens Corning the leading provider of insulation solutions with fiberglass, foam, mineral fiber, and cellular glass." Pittsburgh Corning employs over 1,100 people in 17 countries. It operates facilities in the United States, Belgium, Czech Republic and China. Pittsburgh Corning delivered 2016 sales of over $240 million. "The combination of Pittsburgh Corning and Owens Corning will provide a tremendous opportunity to better serve our customers, grow our business and enhance career opportunities for our employees," said Jim Kane, chairman, president and CEO of Pittsburgh Corning. "The Pittsburgh Corning team is proud of the 80-year heritage of our company and is looking forward to abright future as part of Owens Corning."



About Owens Corning Owens Corning (NYSE: OC) develops, manufactures, and markets insulation, roofing, and fiberglass composites. Global in scope and human in scale, the company's market-leading businesses use their deep expertise in materials, manufacturing, and building science to develop products and systems that save energy and improve comfort in commercial and residential buildings. Through its glass reinforcements business, the company makes thousands of products lighter, stronger, and more durable. Ultimately, Owens Corning people and products make the world a better place. Based in Toledo, Ohio, Owens Corning posted 2016 sales of $5.7 billion and employs about 16,000 people in 26 countries. It has been a Fortune 500 company for 62 consecutive years. For more information, please visit www.owenscorning.com.

About Pittsburgh Corning Pittsburgh Corning produces sustainable, high-performance cellular glass insulation products for commercial and residential buildings and energy and industrial applications. FOAMGLAS Insulation offers a unique combination of properties, making it one of the highest performing insulation materials available. Billions of board feet have been installed throughout the world in thousands of buildings and industrial plants. Pittsburgh Corning also offers a wide range of complementary accessory products including sealants, adhesives, and jacketing. Pittsburgh Corning's products keep people safe and provide lasting protection for homes, offices, public facilities and processing operations. For more information, please visit www.pghcorning.com and www.foamglas.com. This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors and actual results may differ materially from those results projected in the statements. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, without limitation, issues related to acquisitions and the achievement of expected synergies and cost reductions and/or productivity improvements and factors detailed from time to time in the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The information in this news release speaks as of May 15, 2017, and is subject to change. The company does not undertake any duty to update or revise forward-looking statements except as required by federal securities laws. Owens Corning Investor Relations News View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005588/en/

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[May 15, 2017] AIG Appoints Brian Duperreault President and Chief Executive Officer

American International Group, Inc. (NYSE: AIG) announced today the appointment of Brian Duperreault as President, Chief Executive Officer and Director effective May 14, 2017. Mr. Duperreault has resigned as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hamilton Insurance Group (Hamilton). Peter D. Hancock resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer and Director concurrent with Mr. Duperreault's appointment. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005699/en/ Brian Duperreault, AIG, President and Chief Executive Officer (Photo: Business Wire) Douglas M. Steenland, AIG's Chairman of the Board, said: "Brian is uniquely qualified to lead AIG at this important time. Brian has spent his entire career in insurance. He worked for AIG for 21 years at the start of his career, so he knows this company well. He was the CEO of ACE, one of our main competitors. He ran Marsh & McLennan Companies, one of AIG's largest broker partners. At Hamilton, he introduced cutting edge data science and analytics into the insurance business. He is a hands-on leader who has consistently delivered strong bottom-line results. He has demonstrated a passion for deploying new and innovative ways to serve clients. All of this will enable Brian to help AIG achieve its full potential to be the leading insurance company." Mr. Steenland continued: "The Board and I want to thank Peter Hancock for his leadership in positioning AIG for the future. During his tenure, Peter set the course for the company to deliver higher quality, more sustainable earnings and dramatically reduced reserve risk. We are grateful for his leadership over the past seven years." Mr. Duperreault said: "It is a privilege to return and lead AIG. I look forward to building on AIG's nearly 100-year heritage as one of the world's leading insurers for its next century." He continued: "In my discussions with the Board and management team, I have been impressed with the progress made. I look forward to working with AIG's global team to build on this momentum to grow the business, and continue delivering innovative solutions and extraordinary service to clients. I also welcome the opportunity to continue AIG's work with Hamilton and Two Sigma to become the most technology-enabled and capital-efficient carrier in the industry." Mr. Duperreault's compensation arrangements are described in AIG's Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the date of this Press Release. Pursuant to New York Stock Exchange Rules, AIG notes that these arrangements include a grant, made upon Mr. Duperreault's commencement of service with AIG, of stock options to purchase 500,000 shares of AIG common stock, which vest subject to AIG's stock price exceedig certain price targets and which will be made outside of AIG's equity incentive plans as an "employment inducement grant" under NYSE Listing Rule 303A.08.



Mr. Duperreault previously served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hamilton Insurance Group, a Bermuda-based holding company, with property and casualty insurance and reinsurance operations in Bermuda, the U.S. and the UK. Prior to this, Mr. Duperreault was President and Chief Executive Officer of Marsh & McLennan Companies, a global professional services firm offering clients advice and solutions in risk, strategy and people, from 2008 to 2012. Before joining Marsh, he served for two years as non-executive Chairman of ACE Limited, an insurance and reinsurance company, and CEO of ACE Limited from October 1994 through May 2004. Prior to joining ACE, Mr. Duperreault served in various senior executive positions with AIG and its affiliates from 1973 to 1994. Mr. Duperreault is Chairman of Attune, a data-enabled company established by Hamilton Insurance Group, AIG and Two Sigma, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Blue Marble Microinsurance. He is the former Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the School of Risk Management of St. John's University, New York. Mr. Duperreault is a member of the Boards of the International Insurance Society, the Insurance Information Institute and the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Studies (BIOS), and is a former Member of the Association of The Metropolitan Opera, New York. He serves on Johnson Controls' Board of Directors.

Mr. Duperreault will make introductory remarks at AIG's Consumer Investor Day on Monday, May 15, 2017, at 9:30 a.m. ET. The webcast is open to the public and can be accessed via a live listen-only webcast in the Investor Relations section of www.aig.com. A replay will be available after the investor meeting at the same location. Certain statements in this press release constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are not historical facts but instead represent only AIG's belief regarding future events, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain and outside AIG's control. It is possible that actual results will differ, possibly materially, from the anticipated results contemplated by these statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ, possibly materially, from those in the forward-looking statements are discussed throughout AIG's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission pursuant to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. American International Group, Inc. (AIG) is a leading global insurance organization. Founded in 1919, today AIG member companies provide a wide range of property casualty insurance, life insurance, retirement products, and other financial services to customers in more than 80 countries and jurisdictions. These diverse offerings include products and services that help businesses and individuals protect their assets, manage risks and provide for retirement security. AIG's core businesses include Commercial Insurance and Consumer Insurance, as well as Other Operations. Commercial Insurance comprises two modules - Liability and Financial Lines, and Property and Special Risks. Consumer Insurance comprises four modules - Individual Retirement, Group Retirement, Life Insurance and Personal Insurance. AIG common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Additional information about AIG can be found at www.aig.com and www.aig.com/strategyupdate | YouTube (News - Alert): www.youtube.com/aig | Twitter (News - Alert): @AIGinsurance | LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/aig. These references with additional information about AIG have been provided as a convenience, and the information contained on such websites is not incorporated by reference into this press release. AIG is the marketing name for the worldwide property-casualty, life and retirement, and general insurance operations of American International Group, Inc. For additional information, please visit our website at www.aig.com. All products and services are written or provided by subsidiaries or affiliates of American International Group, Inc. Products or services may not be available in all countries, and coverage is subject to actual policy language. Non-insurance products and services may be provided by independent third parties. Certain property-casualty coverages may be provided by a surplus lines insurer. Surplus lines insurers do not generally participate in state guaranty funds, and insureds are therefore not protected by such funds. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005699/en/

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[May 15, 2017] HolidayIQ Announces the Winners of 'Better Holiday Awards - 2017'

BANGALORE and DELHI, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Millions of travellers choose their favourites on India's largest travel community portal HolidayIQ, India's largest online travel community and holiday planning website, announced the best in Indian travel and tourism at the Better Holiday Awards - 2017 on 11th May, 2017. These annual tourism awards have been established to celebrate the sheer beauty in diversity that India offers and equally importantly acknowledges the role of the Indian traveller that is driving Indian tourism like never before. (Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/511678/HolidayIQ_Better_Holiday_Awards_2017.jpg )

The award ceremony was attended by a host of dignitaries including Dr. Jitendra Singh, Hon'ble Union Minister of State (Independent Charge), Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region; Mr. Arun Nanda, Chairman & Founder, Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Ltd.; Mr. Priyank Kharge, the Hon'ble Minister of State (Independent Charge) Tourism and Information Technology, Government of Karnataka, and Mr. Umang Bedi, Managing Director, Facebook (India & South Asia). Speaking on the occasion Mr. Hari Nair, Founder & CEO, HolidayIQ said, "The Better Holiday Awards are the most credible awards in Indian tourism simply because they represent the authentic voice of the Indian traveller. All the winners are chosen purely on the basis of Ratings & Reviews shared by the millions of Indian travellers on the HolidayIQ.com platform. The Better Holiday Awards are an acknowledgement of the best in Indian tourism products and services; the winners being those who have been able to not just meet but exceed the expectations of a very large number of Indian travellers." Mr. Nair added, "The Indian traveller today is not just discovering India more than ever before, but is also sharing detailed advice through text and video reviews - using technology to enable fellow travellers to have better holidays. We are happy to be part of this journey where a whole new identity and community is in the making - 'The Indian Traveller' is both a badge of pride and a movement to help others discover the best in India. Speaking on the occasion, guest of honour Dr. Jitendra Singh, Hon'ble Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Prime Minister's Office and North Eastern Region spoke on the immense potential of North East India with respect to tourism. He highlighted how platforms like HolidayIQ are key to people from across India discovering new destinations, specially the North East and thus inspire Indian citizens to travel. Dr. Singh gave out the top awards at the event and congratulated the winners. While speaking on the occasion about disruptive practices that impact tourism growth, guest of honour Mr. Priyank Kharge, Hon'ble Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Tourism and Information Technology, Government of Karnataka emphasised how critical it was to keep a direct ear to the ground with respect to travellers' feedback, experiences and reviews which is why platforms like HolidayIQ were importat for policy makers to engage with.



Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Arun Nanda, Chairman and Founder, Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Ltd. said, "I am delighted to receive this award as it is a tribute to our team that has continuously created 'magical moments' for over 211,000 member families who holiday at our 46+ resorts. I congratulate the HolidayIQ team for creating such a wonderful platform which helps vacationers in making informed travel choices based on experience sharing." Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Venu V, IAS Principal Secretary, Kerala Tourism said, "It is an honour to receive an award which recognises the efforts of the tourism department. This award reiterates the popularity of the state tourism as it was chosen by over 15 crore Indian travellers. Kerala Tourism department is always keen in implementing new and innovative ideas and projects for the growth of Kerala as the best destination. Prestigious awards like these are an inspiration to raise the benchmark in taking up new initiatives, which will further enhance our projects to provide best-in-class experience in the future as well."

"I'm excited to learn that Alleppey, the evergreen backwater destination of Kerala, continues to be the favourite among the travellers and tour operators. Getting an award for another individual feature of the state in itself shows how versatile our state is as a tourist destination. And I'm so overwhelmed by the fact that Kerala is gaining popularity and is preferred by people all over," commented Shri. Kadakampalli Surendran, Minister for Tourism, Government of Kerala. A key highlight of the evening was a Knowledge Seminar jointly presented by Facebook's Managing Director (India & South Asia) Umang Bedi and HolidayIQ Founder, CEO Hari Nair. The presentation brought to fore the importance of mobile in the travel planning lifecycle and how it has impacted the path to purchase for travellers. Attendees found it a very informative session with deep insights that would help them plan their own user engagement strategies. Facebook also set-up a booth with Oculus Virtual Reality headsets that had attendees queue up to enjoy the unique experience provided by these headsets. The HolidayIQ - 'Better Holiday Awards' have multiple categories that include the old and the new, an indication of changing travel trends. Resorts find their place along with new age Hotel Networks. In addition, the Better Holiday Awards recognise the best Indian tourism services in airlines, airports, bus operators and railway stations making this the most comprehensive tourism awards for India. The awards are critical at a time when India seeks its place on the global tourism map. Increased domestic tourism indicates a higher level of trust and acceptance of what Indian travel and tourism has to offer. For travellers, it is a wonderful opportunity to set new expectation benchmarks for service standards, be it in the hotels they stay at or the destinations that they visit and recommend. Tourism businesses will have to exceed these expectations if they are to cater to a population that is aware, discerning and most importantly not hesitant to share feedback. For an Indian that is increasingly focusing on work-life balance, reviews enable them to holiday better by giving them a range of options and trusted reviews to make a better choice and enjoy their holidays. Over twelve million travellers logging in every month through the site and the app make HolidayIQ India's largest travel community. The platform places great emphasis on innovation, differentiates itself with frequently-held offline traveller community meets and has global firsts like video reviews. HolidayIQ's traveller reviews and content now reach millions of additional Indians by powering many third-party websites and apps including MakeMyTrip, JustDial, trivago, MSN and Daily Hunt. List of Winners Award Title India's Favourite Sea-Side Destination Havelock Island, Andaman & Nicobar India's Favourite City Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh India's Favourite Spiritual Attraction Kamakhya Temple, Guwahati, Assam India's Favourite Wildlife Destination Sasan Gir, Gujarat India's Favourite Urban Attraction Kingdom Of Dreams, Gurgaon, Haryana India's Favourite Adventure Attraction Gulmarg Gondola, Gulmarg, Jammu & Kashmir India's Favourite Beach Gokarna, Karnataka India's Favourite Waterfront Destination Alappuzha, Kerala India's Favourite Waterfall Raneh Falls, Madhya Pradesh India's Favourite Hill Attraction Shillong Peak, Shillong, Meghalaya India's Favourite Heritage Destination Konark, Odisha India's Favourite Pilgrimage Destination Amritsar, Punjab India's Favourite Natural Attraction Pichola Lake, Udaipur, Rajasthan India's Favourite Hill Station Gangtok, Sikkim India's Favourite Destination For Adventure Sports Rishikesh, Uttarakhand India's Favourite Historical Attraction Victoria Memorial, Kolkata, West Bengal India's Most Popular State For Holidays Maharashtra India's Best State For Tourism Goa India's Emerging State For Tourism Chhattisgarh India's Favourite Budget Airline For Holidays Indigo Airlines India's Favourite Full Service Airline For Holidays Jet Airways India's Favourite Airport For Holidays Kempegowda International Airport Limited (KIAL), Bengaluru India's Favourite Resort Chain Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Ltd Club Mahindra Resorts India's Favourite Hotel Chain Lemon Tree Hotels India's Most Promising Hotel Network OYO About HolidayIQ: HolidayIQ is India's largest travel community with 12 million travellers across 220+ cities and is also the first holiday planning website in India powered entirely by reviews, photos, videos and other advice generated from these travellers. More than 70% of all vacations planned on HolidayIQ are through mobile devices. HolidayIQ.com is a VC-backed company, invested in by Tiger Global, Accel Partners and Makemytrip.com operationally headquartered in Bangalore, India. HolidayIQ.com lists over 5000 tourism destinations and 75,000+ accommodation options (hotels, resorts, home-stays, jungle camps and serviced apartments) in India. All of which are bookable through over 1600 partnerships with leading online travel agencies like Makemytrip, Yatra and Expedia & offline players such as Thomas Cook, SOTC, etc. Media Contact:

Trinity Kashyap

[email protected]

+91-8971327570

HolidayIQ



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[May 15, 2017] Towerstream Reports Upon First Quarter Results for 2017 and Comments on Key Performance Indicators

MIDDLETOWN, R.I., May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Towerstream Corporation (OTCQB:TWER), a Fixed Wireless Fiber Alternative Provider, announced today financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2017.

OVERVIEW "Towerstream has entered a new and exciting evolutionary phase during the first quarter of 2017 which I call Towerstream 2.0," commented Mr. Ernest Ortega who assumed the role of the Company's Chief Executive Officer on January 24, 2017, "and that is reflected in the favorable changes in the financial and other operating metrics discussed throughout this news release." KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS "Our Key Performance Indicators ("KPIs") tell a great story for the start of 2017 and reflect the initiatives put into place during 2016 and early 2017," said Mr. Ortega. "When the KPIs for the first quarter of 2017 are compared to the immediately preceding quarter and the comparable quarter one year ago, the evidence is clear." Quarters Ended

March 31, December 31, March 31 2017 2016 2016 (All amounts in thousands of dollars except Churn)

Cash Flow $ (1,204 ) $ (1,992 ) $ (5,476 ) Sales 149 122 142 Churn 1.39 % 1.52 % 1.65 % ARPU 550 496 525 Revenue 6,572 6,625 6,734 EBITDA 245 (488 ) (2,415 ) Cash Flow This KPI represents cash flow from our continuing and discontinued operations for the indicated periods. (The latter is now less than $75,000 on a quarterly basis and is expected to decrease during the balance of 2017.) Cash flow has steadily improved from ($5,476,000) in the comparable quarter one year ago, to ($1,992,000) in the immediately preceding quarter, to ($1,204,000) in the first quarter of 2017. "I am pleased to report significant reductions in our quarterly cash burn from one year ago. That swing represents a $4,272,000 IMPROVEMENT in our quarterly cash flow. Similar to the improvements in EBITDA reported below, this reduction in our quarterly cash burn is a direct result of management's actions throughout 2016 coupled with the hard work of all members of the Towerstream Team during 2017," said Mr. Ortega. "In the quarters ahead we have routine improvements to make in our network infrastructure along with further investments in our sales force and marketing efforts. Consequently, we expect to see net cash outflows for capital expenditures and operations during the remaining quarters of 2017 which are comparable to those reported for the first quarter." Sales This KPI represents the monthly recurring revenue value of contracts signed with customers during the period. This amount increased 5% over the comparable quarter last year and increased 22% over the immediately preceding quarter. "This KPI is an excellent measure of the productivity of our sales force. Our sales organization has been restructured to create a more disciplined approach to identifying and target our prospective customers. Included in this strategy is a new methodology on how we market our products to our end-users," reported Mr Ortega. "This new methodology, which includes professional sales and development training, will assist our sales professionals with achieving both volume and velocity."



Churn This KPI represents the normal monthly attrition of revenue which is conventional in the internet connectivity industry. This amount improved 18% versus the comparable quarter last year and improved 9% versus the immediately preceding quarter.

"These percentages show consistent improvement which I attribute to the excellent customer service provided by every department within Towerstream," said Mr. Ortega. "While a measure of churn is unavoidable, I am pleased to report that our 1.39% churn rate for the first quarter of 2017 compares favorably to our industry peers and is the FIRST TIME IN FIVE YEARS that Towerstream has had a quarterly churn rate below 1.5%. This is a significant milestone and tangible evidence of the effect of Towerstream 2.0 initiatives." ARPU This KPI represents the average revenue per user ("ARPU") for contracts signed with customers during the indicated periods and added to our Customer Base. This amount increased 5% over the comparable quarter last year and increased 11% over the immediately preceding quarter. "While I am pleased with the improvements to this performance indicator, there is room for improvement in this area," observed Mr. Ortega. "This is being addressed through the changes in the sales organization previously discussed, continued modification to our product offerings, and our 'Three-Point Service Guarantee' program. The last item is a program which addresses value, but also guarantees prompt delivery and response as well as network stability and reliability." Revenue This KPI represents the revenue value of all active installations for the indicated periods. This amount is roughly comparable to the quarters for last year and the immediately preceding quarter. This amount decreased 2% versus the comparable quarter last year and 1% versus the immediately preceding quarter. "While revenue amounts were relatively unchanged quarter to quarter, I am confident that we have reached our inflection point whereby the revenue erosion that has plagued the Company for the last five years is now behind us," stated Mr. Ortega. "Further, as described above, we have made significant changes within our sales organization and expect improvements to revenue in the quarters ahead." EBITDA This KPI represents earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization ("EBITDA") for continuing operations and excludes non-cash charges for stock-based compensation. It has steadily improved from ($2,415,000) in the comparable quarter one year ago, to ($488,000) in the immediately preceding quarter, to a POSITIVE $245,000 in the first quarter of 2017. "I am thrilled to report the improvement in EBITDA from one year ago," commented Mr. Ortega. "That swing represents a $2,660,000 IMPROVEMENT in our operating results and is a direct result of management's actions throughout 2016 coupled with the hard work of all members of the Towerstream Team during 2017. I look forward to reporting additional positive EBITDA numbers during the year ahead." SUMMARY As I have indicated in previous press releases, we have 'right-sized' our cost infrastructure to be more in line with our revenue, thus allowing us to take advantage of the opportunities that exist in the marketplace. Our vision for Towerstream 2.0 in 2017 and beyond is to be the trusted, reliable, and cost-efficient service provider through leveraging our state-of-the-art fixed wireless network to serve both enterprises and service providers," indicated Mr. Ortega. "We will achieve this objective through our Three-Year Plan which includes continual rationalization of our product portfolio, investing in our sales organization, and leveraging our existing reliable high-capacity multi-city network. As discussed in the preceding paragraphs, we can already see the results of those initiatives in the positive results for the first quarter of 2017." In closing, Mr. Ortega said, "As stated once before, our focus is now to flawlessly execute the Towerstream 2.0 strategy described above. My management team and I firmly believe we have the right strategy in place that will catapult Towerstream into a very prosperous future."



FINANCIAL STATEMENTS Summary Statement of Operations for the Quarter Ended March 31, 2017 and 2016

(Amounts in millions except loss per share) 2017 2016 Revenues $ 6.6 $ 6.7 Operating expenses 9.1 10.4 Operating loss (2.5 ) (3.7 ) Interest expense (1.3 ) (1.6 ) Loss from continuing operations (3.8 ) (5.3 ) Loss from discontinued operations - (1.7 ) Net loss ($ 3.8 ) ($ 7.0 ) Loss per share (basic and diluted): Continuing operations ($ 0.19 ) ($ 1.55 ) Discontinued operations - (0.51 ) Total ($ 0.19 ) ($ 2.06 )

Summary Balance Sheets as of March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016 (Amounts in millions) 2017 2016 Cash $ 11.1 $ 12.3 Other current assets 1.2 1.1 Total current assets 12.3 13.4 Property and equipment (net) 13.8 15.3 Intangibles, goodwill, and other 5.3 5.7 Total assets $ 31.4 $ 34.4 Current liabilities - Continuing operations $ 3.4 $ 3.3 Current liabilities - Discontinued operations 1.2 1.2 Total current liabilities 4.6 4.5 Long-term liabilities - Note payable (net) 32.1 31.5 Long-term liabilities - Other 1.0 1.2 Total liabilities 37.7 37.2 Equity (deficit) (6.3 ) (2.8 ) Total liabilities and equity (deficit) $ 31.4 $ 34.4 NON-GAAP MEASURES

The KPIs discussed above used for the monitoring of the Company's business performance are Non-GAAP measures. These Non-GAAP measures are not recognized under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ("GAAP") and, accordingly, investors are cautioned about using or relying on them as alternatives to recognized GAAP measures. Our methods of calculating these measures may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. ABOUT TOWERSTREAM CORPORATION Towerstream Corporation (OTCQB:TWER) (www.towerstream.com) is a leading Fixed-Wireless Fiber Alternative company delivering high-speed Internet access to businesses. The Company offers broadband services in twelve urban markets including New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay area, Miami, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Las Vegas-Reno, and the greater Providence area. SAFE HARBOR Certain statements contained in this press release are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable federal securities laws, including, without limitation, anything relating or referring to future financial results and plans for future business development activities, and are thus prospective. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified based on current expectations. Such risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, the risks and uncertainties set forth from time to time in reports filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Consequently, future events and actual results could differ materially from those set forth in, contemplated by, or underlying the forward-looking statements contained herein. The Company undertakes no obligation to correct or update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. INVESTOR CONTACT Frederick Larcombe Chief Financial Officer Towerstream 401-608-8223 [email protected]

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[May 15, 2017] Lock Trust, Inc. Reinvents Payment Processing

LONDON and SALT LAKE CITY, May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lock Trust announces a proposal to the Trump administration for automated tax collection for all e-commerce sales. Lock Trust would act as a portal to all online transactions with patents pending in both the United States and European Union. Lock Trust disrupts the payment industry with innovative technology.

Lock Trust, Inc. envisions closing the digital gap by making the internet universal, affordable, and safe; and strengthening stringent regulations that are hindering the growth of the digital economy, and nurturing accountable instittions. Clients will benefit from features such as recurring billing, and multi-currency transactions in addition to governmental needs to regulate and collect tax on real-time transactions.



Lock Trusts technology has the ability to track and monitor transactions such as gaming and Medical Marijuana; we can decline transactions to stop cross border risk and mitigated with real time monitoring of transactions instead of using outdated BIN databases of issued cards to stop these illegal transactions. About Lock Trust, Inc.

Lock Trust, Inc. was founded in 2013 by a 25 year vet in the industry. The company was born in Florida, with offices in London, UK. and now head-quartered in Salt Lake City, UT. Lock Trust is a streamlined technology and payment processing firm providing the frame work to Banks and governments. We serve individual consumers, small to large-market institutions, and governments with customizable suites ranging of banking, automated taxing, and other financial and risk management products and services. Our vision is that Lock Trust technology will move the world into a one world market; securely combining both physical and digital channels.

Lock Trust, Inc. Gina LeBlanc Tel.: +1 407 520 9731 Email: [email protected]

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[May 15, 2017] Stellar Loyalty Partners with Cayman Airways to Enhance the Sir Turtle Rewards Program and Delight Customers Across All Channels

FOSTER CITY, Calif., May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Stellar Loyalty, the consumer relationship company with a mobile-best SaaS loyalty solution, has announced an agreement with Cayman Airways to provide the flag carrier airline of the Cayman Islands with rich capabilities to enhance its Sir Turtle Rewards program. Powered by modern technology and an innovative program design, the Sir Turtle Rewards will enhance the traveler experience and differentiate Cayman Airways.

Paul Tibbetts, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Cayman Airways said, We at Cayman Airways look forward to working alongside Stellar Loyalty to enhance our popular Sir Turtle Rewards program. We are confident that Stellar Loyaltys software solution will allow Cayman Airways to provide passengers with added features and benefits, while developing a more meaningful passenger engagement and experience overall. Expanding on the current Sir Turtle Rewards program, the Stellar Loyalty solution will enable Cayman Airways to better segment audiences and precisely deliver customized offers and promotions by leveraging member data such as preferences and interests, as well as demographics. In addition, the Stellar Loyalty solution will enhance the mileage-based loyalty program with engagement features, allowing Cayman Airways to incentivize members participation in the program and encourage new membership. The program will provide Sir Turtle Rewards members with a web-based interface as well as a native loyalty and engagement mobile app for Android and iOS smart phones. Through thispartnership, Stellar Loyalty will provide Cayman Airways with a full loyalty and engagement marketing solution including features such as:



Multi-channel campaigns: email, push notifications, recommended offers, targeted promotions

Real-time consumer interaction profile, correlating transactional as well as social media data, for a complete, 360-degree view of each customer

Built-in analytics and dashboards for customer loyalty success metrics, program measurement against key performance indicators, etc. The airline industry has an opportunity to demonstrate a renewed commitment to its customers and raise the bar in delivering personalized, engaging and rewarding experiences to its travelers, said Kevin Nix, Stellar Loyalty CEO and Co-Founder. Were thrilled to be selected by Cayman Airways as their partner to take the Sir Turtle Rewards program to the next level. With a modern technology solution powering the program, we are poised to exceed travelers expectations with a loyalty program that delights them, while enabling Cayman Airways to meet and exceed business and customer success metrics. ABOUT STELLAR LOYALTY

Headquartered in Silicon Valley and founded by Siebel CRM veterans, Stellar Loyalty delivers brands with the most advanced solution for customer acquisition, engagement, transactions and rewards. Built around real-time customer interaction profiles leveraging every signal from social, mobile, web, and in-store transactions, the Stellar Consumer Relationship Cloud helps brands drive frequency, maximize customer revenue, and build more loyal and profitable relationships. Founded in 2014 and funded by InterWest Partners and TDF Ventures, Stellar Loyalty is privately held with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. For more details please visit www.stellarloyalty.com or follow Stellar Loyalty on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter @StellarLoyalty.

Stellar Loyalty is a trademark of Stellar Loyalty Inc. All other brands, products or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. CONTACT: Sue Parente Tier One Partners for Stellar Loyalty 781-642-7788 [email protected]

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[May 15, 2017] Red Lion RAM Industrial Connectivity Products add SDN Functionality with Distrix

YORK, Pa., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Red Lion Controls, the global experts in communication, monitoring and control for industrial automation and networking, today announced that its Sixnet series RAM industrial cellular RTUs and wired routers now offer enhanced communication security using Distrix Networks' software-defined networking (SDN) technology. Distrix's SDN technology, running on RAM devices, speeds and simplifies deployment of communication networks between industrial devices and IIoT cloud platforms, and delivers unsurpassed security for remote machine access. Using this solution, organizations can quickly and easily establish secure communications regardless of whether the backhaul medium is cellular or wired. This enhancement to Red Lion's RAM products results in industry-leading security and redundancy, improving on traditional VPN communications that rely on point-to-point tunnels that can be difficult to manage. The addition of SDN technology brings flexibility, scalability and resiliency to legacy serial-based infrastructures as well as present-day IP-based networks. "Customers need the ability to push data to an IIoT cloud platform while ensuring it is securely transmitted over a scalable and flexible architecture," said Colin Geis, Director of Product Management, IIoT at Red Lion Controls. "Red Lion's RAM devices offer the industry's widest array of integrated and pre-configured IIoT cloud platforms. These are now bolstered by the Distrix SDN technology, which provides greater security than traditional VPNs or private APNs. RAM products are known for their robust reliability and automation-rich features for monitoring and controlling remote assets. Now that we have partnered with Distrix to add SDN capabilities, customers have the additional peace of mind that their data is protected from end to end." Distrix software embeds directly on RAM devices, allowing customers to quickly deploy and manage a secure software-defined industrial network. Capabilities include highly secure end-to-end tunnel connections without common network security risks and complexity, improved network redundancy, sensor data enhancement for analytics as well as simplified machine-to-machine process automation. "We are excited about our relationship with Red Lion Controls," said Eric Winsborrow, CEO for Distrix Networks. "Red Lion has consistently been an industry leader in industrial automation, and is addressing the immediate needs of customers to provide secure, reliable and cost-effective solutions that enable them to benefit from the Industrial Internet today, without the cost to replace existing infrastructure or increase security risks." In addition to highly secure cloud integration, RAM products also incorporate a powerful event engine and an integrated I/O database that streamlines the creation and storage of data tags. The combination of industrial automation capabilities, secure and reliable communication and easy-to-connect cloud support provides customers with a seamless IIoT solution. Red Lion's RAM products also offer multiple serial and Ethernet ports and optional I/O, Wi-Fi and an active GPS, easily integrating with existing equipment to securely monitor and control remote devices. By delivering data visibility, control and real-time notifications on field-deployed equipment and processes via highly secure network connections, the RAM platform enables organizations to take advantage of the benefits of IIoT today. For more information on Red Lion's Sixnet series RAM industrial cellular RTUs, visit www.redlion.net/RAM. For sales inquiries or product questions, call +1 (717) 767-6511 or email us at [email protected]. About Red Lion Controls

As the global experts in communication, monitoring and control for industrial automation and networking, Red Lion has been delivering innovative solutions for over 40 years. Our automation, Ethernet and cellular M2M technology enables companies worldwide to gain real-time data visibility that drives productivity. Product brands include Red Lion, N-Tron and Sixnet. With headquarters in York, Pennsylvania, the company has offices across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe. Red Lion is part of Spectris plc, the productivity-enhancing instrumentation and controls company. For more information, please visit www.redlion.net. About Distrix Networks

Distrix SDN software embeds on industrial and IT network hardware to enable a safer and more resilient Industrial Internet  create secure tunnels in minutes, and eliminate complex firewall & VPN configurations. Distrix Gateway software simplifies connectivity configurations with an intuitive management console. Whether collecting data from industrial sensors, remotely accessing industrial operations, or connecting branch offices, Distrix makes it simpler and more cost effective to secure and manage your network. For more information, please visit www.distrix.com. 2017 Red Lion Controls, Inc. All rights reserved. Red Lion, the Red Lion logo, Sixnet and RAM are registered trademarks of Red Lion Controls, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.







Media Contacts: Rebecca Cressler

Red Lion Controls

+1 (717) 767-6961 x6904

[email protected]





Stephen Oakes

LEWIS

+1 (781) 418-2472

[email protected]

www.redlion.net

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/red-lion-ram-industrial-connectivity-products-add-sdn-functionality-with-distrix-300457176.html SOURCE Red Lion Controls

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[May 15, 2017] E2open Unveils Harmony - The One Place in the Cloud to Operate the Connected Supply Chain

E2open today announces the availability of Harmony as a part of its 17.2 Product Release. Release highlights also include On-Time In-Full functionality for Walmart's suppliers, robust transaction searches, enhanced security, and powerful scenario planning. Orchestrating the supply chain continues to challenge even the best run companies. While the physical supply chain has always been connected, the software tools that enable decision-making and execution are fragmented and disconnected making it increasingly difficult to match supply with demand. Legacy applications continue to sub-optimize the supply chain, forcing companies to build siloed organizations that use manual processes to bridge the gap. Bloated lead times, high inventory, frequent expedites, and lower customer satisfaction are the symptoms of this problem. Compressed cycle times, increased customer expectations, and the use of external specialists make end-to-end operation of the extended supply chain essential but increasingly complex. Harmony eliminates these siloes so the enterprises can operate as one connected supply chain. E2open's vision is to orchestrate the end-to-end supply chain for the world's best companies. Today, E2open takes a major step toward that vision with its latest innovation - Harmony. Harmony synchronizes the entire supply chain - from raw material to final consumption, all from one platform regardless of role or company involved. State-of-the-art cloud connectivity enables Harmony to connect, collect, and normalize information across the entire supply chain in real time. Machine learning, self-tuning algorithms use this timely and accurate information to automate decisions from one end of the supply chain to the other. Real-time visibility and collaborative workflows allow the enterprise and its partners to work together to rapidly adjust to changes. Plans and decisions are of little value if they cannot be executed by a connected digital supply chain. Harmony provides the connection between planning and execution to choreograph decisions across the extended supply chain allowing all paricipants to operate using the "same version of the truth." To learn more about Harmony, visit: http://info.e2open.com/harmony-release.html.



"Ease of use, performance, and productivity is built into the DNA of Harmony. We interviewed clients operating the world's best supply chains in order to understand the tools they need to be more effective. We used a collaborative design process across the globe, across industries, and across functional disciplines, coupled it with leading-edge technology to develop Harmony. Our clients believe Harmony will dramatically increase their effectiveness," said Pawan Joshi, Senior Vice President for Products and Strategy at E2open. "In addition to Harmony, E2open's 17.2 release delivers capabilities across our entire product portfolio including On-Time In-Full (OTIF) capabilities per Walmart's guidelines, enhanced scenario planning capabilities, as well as ongoing security enhancements for E2net-based connectivity," he added. "Harmony will make us all re-think traditional supply chain management and operations. The ability to connect, collaborate, sense, plan, and execute across the entire supply chain will allow enterprises to operate to a credible forecast, monitor execution and adjust their supply chains to the inevitable changes that occur. We are delivering on our promise to connect the entire supply chain and operate it from one place in the cloud. We invite everyone to come see this vision become a reality at the Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference," said E2open CEO Michael Farlekas.

Harmony at the 2017 Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference During the 2017 Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference taking place May 23-25 in Phoenix, E2open executives will be sharing additional details and showing the power of Harmony in your supply chain. Please stop by E2open booth #409 to learn more. E2open is a premier sponsor of the Gartner (News - Alert) Supply Chain Executive Conference, the world's most important gathering of supply chain leaders. For more information, visit: http://www.gartner.com/events/na/supply-chain. About E2open E2open is the one place, in the cloud, to run your supply chain. Powered by the world's largest direct business network and a broad portfolio of next generation solutions, E2open enables the world's largest and most complex supply chains to better plan, execute and collaborate. We understand supply chain. Bring us your challenges and E2open will deliver better outcomes. e2open.com View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005757/en/

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[May 15, 2017] Pax8's Jennifer Bodell Recognized as 2017 CRN Women of the Channel and Power 100

DENVER, May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pax8, the leading value-added cloud distributor, today announced that CRN  , a brand of The Channel Company, has named Jennifer Bodell, director of Emerging Channel at Pax8, to its prestigious 2017 Women of the Channel list and the Power 100, a subset of the CRN Women of the Channel who have earned a special distinction based on their exemplary record of success and their level of influence in the channel. The executives who comprise this annual list span the IT channel, representing vendors, distributors, solution providers, and other organizations that figure prominently in the channel ecosystem. Each is recognized for her outstanding leadership, vision and unique role in driving channel growth and innovation.

In her role as director of Emerging Channel at Pax8, Jennifer manages the strategic direction and go-to-market efforts of the companys key IT channel relationships, including new growth opportunities and program development. Before joining Pax8, Jennifer held multiple channel-focused leadership positions at StorageCraft, including her most recent position as the companys Channel Marketing Manager. Throughout her career, Jen has earned several achievements including the 2016 Presenter of the Year by HTG, one of CRNs Power 100 in 2016, a CRN 2016 Women of the Channel, and she was named a 2015 Rising Star by the Utah American Marketing Association.



Jennifer is a leading force in the IT channel, and we are excited to congratulate her on this outstanding award, said Nick Heddy, vice president of Sales at Pax8. As a trusted advocate for the partner community, Jennifer is committed to helping solution providers build their cloud businesses and profitably grow. Her ability to listen, engage, and create solutions tailored to meet the partners needs truly sets her apart. CRN editors select the Women of the Channel honorees based on their professional accomplishments, demonstrated expertise, and ongoing dedication to the IT channel.

These extraordinary executives support every aspect of the channel ecosystem, from technical innovation to marketing to business development, working tirelessly to keep the channel moving into the future, said Robert Faletra, CEO at The Channel Company They are creating and elevating channel partner programs, developing fresh go-to-market strategies, strengthening the channels network of partnerships and building creative new IT solutions, among many other contributions. We congratulate all the 2017 Women of the Channel on their stellar accomplishments and look forward to their future success. The 2017 Women of the Channel list will be featured in the June issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.CRN.com/wotc. To learn more about Pax8, please contact the cloud experts at (855) 884-PAX8, email [email protected], or visit www.pax8.com. About Pax8

Pax8 is the leading value-added cloud distributor offering top cloud products and solutions to the IT channel. The company is driving the business transition to the cloud through its comprehensive enablement and technology. The Pax8 cloud marketplace provides efficient and intelligent cloud product configuration so service providers can easily create and customize bundled solutions for their customers. To fuel partners success, Pax8 offers on-demand marketing programs, sales assistance and training, provisioning automation, and subscription billing. As the experts in cloud innovation, Pax8 is well-engineered to sell, assemble, and deliver quality cloud solutions to its worldwide channel of service providers. For more information, please visit www.pax8.com. Follow Pax8 on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers and end users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequaled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. To learn more, please visit www.thechannelco.com. Media Contact Amanda Lee ARL Strategic Communications for Pax8 (727) 272-0781 [email protected]

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[May 15, 2017] Arcserve Leaders Recognized as CRN's 2017 Women of the Channel

MINNEAPOLIS, May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arcserve, LLC, whose breakthrough data protection and availability solutions deliver enterprise power with small team simplicity, today announced that Vice President of Product Management Erica Antony and Director of Marketing Communications Leslie Keil have been named to the prestigious CRN 2017 Women of the Channel list. The executives who comprise this annual list by CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, span the IT channel, representing vendors, distributors, solution providers and other organizations that figure prominently in the channel ecosystem. Each is recognized for her outstanding leadership, vision and unique role in driving channel growth and innovation.

Antony is an industry veteran who has led Arcserve global product planning, pricing strategy, technical communications and competitive intelligence since 2016. She and her team recently launched new versions of technologies within the flagship Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) solution portfolio, including Arcserve UDP and the Arcserve UDP Appliance series, which have gained early traction for helping partners deliver higher operational efficiencies as they improve their RPOs and RTOs, as well as the new Arcserve UDP Archiving, with a design and go to market strategy centered around the Arcserve partner community. Keil joined Arcserve Global Marketing in 2015 and leads the companys global brand positioning that drives worldwide awareness, accelerates business growth and strengthens channel partner relationships. Most recently, Keil launched a new content marketing strateg to improve the buyers experience and understanding of the Arcserve portfolio and to provide the Arcserve channel with an increasing number of qualified leads. She also helped re-architect the Arcserve Partner portal, which includes one-click partner access to education and rewards programs.



A well-deserved congratulations to Erica and Leslie, two outstanding leaders at Arcserve, said Mike Crest, CEO of Arcserve. From launching new products and enhancements within our UDP portfolio that have transformed Arcserve into an industry leader, to rolling out compelling Partner Program enhancements, Leslie and Erica continue our commitment to deliver innovative technologies through a partner-first approach to everything we do. Arcserve is a channel-first organization focused on providing mid-market organizations with a comprehensive portfolio of robust, yet elegantly simple data protection solutions and world-class support. The combination of Arcserve UDP and partner benefits enable maximum profitability through: advanced demand generation and leading sales methodologies, unmatched incentives, a turnkey deal registration process, complementary training and accreditation, and product and marketing support through the entire customer lifecycle.

CRN editors select the Women of the Channel honorees based on their professional accomplishments, demonstrated expertise and ongoing dedication to the IT channel. These extraordinary executives support every aspect of the channel ecosystem, working tirelessly to keep the channel moving into the future, said Robert Faletra, CEO of The Channel Company. They are creating and elevating channel partner programs, developing fresh go-to-market strategies, strengthening the channels network of partnerships and building creative new IT solutions, among many other contributions. We congratulate Erica and Leslie, as part of the 2017 Women of the Channel, on their stellar accomplishments and look forward to their future success. The 2017 Women of the Channel list will be featured in the June issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.CRN.com/wotc. Tweet This:

@TheChannelCo names @Arcserves Erica Antony and Leslie Keil to @CRN 2017 Women of the Channel list #WOTC17 #CRNPPG www.CRN.com/wotc. About Arcserve

Arcserve is a leading provider of data protection and recovery software that gives organizations the assurance that they can recover their data and applications when needed. Launched in 1990, Arcserve provides a comprehensive solution for cloud, virtual and physical environments, on premise or in the cloud, backed by unsurpassed support and expertise. Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), available on Arcserves appliance or your hardware, drives a full range of highly efficient and integrated data protection capabilities through a simple, web-based user console. Arcserve has a customer base of 45,000 end users in more than 150 countries and partners with over 7,500 distributors, resellers and service providers around the world. Arcserve is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Visit www.arcserve.com. Follow Arcserve: Blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers and end users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequaled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelco.com Follow The Channel Company: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook Copyright 2017. The Channel Company, LLC. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Media Contacts: Melissa Rossiter Arcserve 480.749.4324 [email protected] Melanie Turpin The Channel Company 508.416.1195 [email protected]

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[May 15, 2017]

CRTC ruling a blow to local TV: Unifor

TORONTO, May 15, 2017 /CNW/ - Today's ruling from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission does nothing to stop further cuts to local television news across Canada, Unifor says.

"With the CRTC failing to use the tools at its disposal to help ensure Canadians continue to have reliable news and information about their communities, the ball is now in the federal government's court to take action," said Unifor National President Jerry Dias.

"Local TV in this country is in crisis. Unifor had hoped that the CRTC would take that seriously with today's ruling. We are now looking to the government to act swiftly."

Dias was critical of the CRTC allowing major broadcasters the opportunityto reduce local news programming far below current levels; and imposing not a single requirement for staffing of local newsrooms and bureaus.







"The time for fine speeches from [CRTC Chair] Jean-Pierre Blais about big media's corporate responsibility is over. A cabinet directive is needed to do for local TV what the CRTC lacks the will to do," said Unifor Media Director Howard Law.

With more than 12,000 journalists and media workers in television, newspapers, magazines, news websites and film production, Unifor is Canada's primary media union.

Law said Unifor is nonetheless pleased by the CRTC decision to revive the popular daily newscasts at the Rogers OMNI stations in Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi and Italian.

"OMNI plays a vital role in Canada to help our diverse communities feel more at home here. Its continued viability is essential," Law said.

Law said Unifor applauds the opportunity in the CRTC decision for other TV companies to come forward with their own proposals for even more ethnic programming.

Unifor is Canada's largest union in the private sector, representing more than 310,000 workers. It was formed Labour Day weekend 2013 when the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union merged.

SOURCE Unifor
[May 15, 2017] Chroma Receives the Highest Industrial Innovation Award in Taiwan

TAOYUAN, Taiwan, May 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Chroma ATE Inc. CEO Leo Huang received the Distinguished Enterprise Innovation Award, the highest honor available from the 5th Industrial Innovation Award during the awards ceremony held on April 21. Leo Huang expresses his gratitude towards the Evaluation Committee from the 5th Industrial Innovation Award for awarding Chroma this honor, "This award also belongs to all members of Chroma who have devoted their long effort in developing innovative testing solutions." Chroma wasfounded in 1984, with dedication in research, development and manufacturing of precision test and measurement instruments to sell globally under "Chroma" brand. After years of experiences in automation integration and MES technology, Chroma has become a "Turnkey Solution" provider since 2011 with core technology in measurement.



Chroma test solutions are mainly applied to ICT industry, semiconductor, and clean technology, which includes solar energy, LED lighting, lithium battery and electric vehicle industries, that are widely used for R&D, manufacturing and quality assurance. At all times, Chroma's solutions have been proven to effectively improve its customer's product quality and production efficiency, as well as to increase their competitiveness. This is Chroma's biggest value. Chroma strives to providing testing solutions with precision, reliability and uniqueness. By developing innovative technology, enhancing its brand value and globalization, the company holds on to the vision of growing Chroma into a world-class enterprise with world-class products.

With leading technologies, Chroma is able to partner with the world's 1st tier customers in collaborative development to timely grasp the market trends and demands. Using advanced big data analytics, Chroma can improve the production process and yield, and assist customers in aspects of pre-analysis, pre-diagnosis and preventative maintenance prediction under the era of Industry 4.0 for smart manufacturing. For instance, Chroma has recently independently completed the production line setup of battery cell formation for China's largest lithium battery manufacturer to improve the product quality and consistency. Chroma's power module automatic test system, with the highest market share worldwide, is also deployed by global European and American 1st tier automakers. To facilitate super hi-vision video broadcast during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Chroma introduced its ultrahigh 8K (Super-Hi Vision) resolution display test solution in early 2017. Furthermore, prior to the market forecast of launching 3D camera for smart phones, Chroma has already developed unique and innovative test equipment for laser diode in 3D imaging application. Chroma insists on providing new technologies, high value-added products and services to satisfy customer's demands and reach out worldwide opportunities to achieve sustainable growth. Product Contacts: Chroma ATE Inc. (Headquarters), Tel: +886-3-3279999

Chroma ATE Inc. (U.S.A.), Tel: +1-949-421-0355; Toll Free +1-800-478-2026

Chroma Systems Solutions, Inc., Tel: +1-949-600-6400

Chroma ATE Europe B.V., Tel: +31-318-648282

Chroma ATE Germany, Tel: +49-821-790967-0

Chroma Japan Corp., Tel: +81-45-542-1118

Chroma Electronics (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., Tel: +86-755-2664-4598

Quantel Pte Ltd., Tel: +65-6745-3200 [email protected]

www.chromaate.com Video - http://static.prnasia.com/pro/media/mnr/video/20170515Chroma.mp4

Logo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20170306/8521701415LOGO

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Proposed Kentucky constitutional amendment to end right to an abortion defeated in vote
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A year ago, Google executives took the stage at the company's annual I/O developer conference and unleashed a torrent of products  an AI-powered assistant with an Echo-like speaker, a new virtual reality platform and a way to try out apps without downloading them first.

With the 2017 edition of Google I/O kicking off this today (May 17), expect a lot of those projects to be back for an encore appearance, as Google looks to move forward with its assorted initiatives.





(Image credit: Daydream VR debuts at Google I/O last year. (Credit: Philip Michaels/Tom's Guide))

How to Watch Google I/O

Google's Sundar Pichai will take the stage at the Shoreline Amphitheatre at 1 p.m. ET today  you can watch a live stream here  and here's what he and other Google executives are likely to reveal.

What We Expect

As always at a developers conference, the focus at Google I/O this week will be on the under-the-hood tools developers need for Android, Google Assistant and the many other pies in which Google has its fingers. That likely means very little hardware will come out of this week's show. Google may have taken the wraps off Google Home at the 2016 I/O keynote, for example, but the voice-powered speaker didn't arrive until five months later. So don't expect a big reveal for the Pixel 2 smartphone this week is what we're getting at.

More Android O Features

This one's about as big a no-brainer as you can get. Obviously, with thousands of developers converging upon its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters for three days, Google is going to have something to say about the next version of its Android operating system.



We already have some idea of what to expect with Android O, thanks to a developers-only preview edition rolled out in March. Among the highlights in that release were improvements to battery life by limiting what apps can do in the background, improved Bluetooth audio, categorized and snoozed notifications and platform support for autofill features.

MORE: 40 Best Free Android Apps

Other notable improvements include system-wide picture-in-picture video, support for physical keyboards and a cleaner, simpler Settings page.

Google's likely to introduce a second preview version of Android O at some point during I/O, which will introduce even more features that the company will be happy to talk about during its keynote.



(Image credit: Google)

One possible topic of conversation could be Google's Project Treble. As reported by The Verge, the goal of Treble is to speed up the rate at which Android updates arrive on your phone. Google is looking to separate the Android OS framework from device-specific software that chipmakers write, which would let phone makers push out updates faster.



Google could announce an official name for Android O at I/O, but it seems more likely to follow the course it took last year when it asked developers and users to offer up suggested names, as if Android O isn't going to be called Oreo.

Google Assistant Hits the Road

Google Assistant already lives on your phone and, if you've got a Google Home handy, in an Amazon Echo-like speaker. The next frontier for Google's voice-powered assistant looks like it's going to be your car.



Bloomberg reports that Google will show off Audi Q8 and Volvo V90 SUVs that are running Android as the OS for their infotainment and navigation systems. Google Assistant will ride shotgun on these Android-powered cars, allowing you to use your voice to look up directions and initiate phone calls, among other features.



Google showed off some Android-powered concept cars at I/O last year, but the partnership with Audi and Volvo shows just how serious Google is about Android's automotive future.

Other Google Assistant Advances

With Microsoft unveiling a Cortana-powered speaker last week and Amazon still enjoying a major edge with all the things its Alexa-powered Echo speakers can do, don't expect Google to content itself just by getting its Assistant into cars. Several sessions at I/O focus on the Assistant's capabilities, with a high-profile talk in the main amphitheatre looking at how developers can "plug into the Google Assistant services ecosystem."

That sounds an awful lot like Google looking for more ways to expand its Assistant's feature set.





One of the new devices that Assistant could wind up on is the iPhone. Android Police reports that an iOS version of Google Assistant will launch soon in the U.S. This week's I/O keynote would certainly draw a lot of attention to that launch.



Google's Assistant push could translate into new capabilities for the Google Home speaker. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was looking to add telephone features to its speaker  something Amazon just added with the video-calling capabilities on the Echo Show.

Google is also rumored to be considering the addition of mesh Wi-Fi features to the Home speaker. These sorts of hardware announcements aren't typically made at a developer-focused event like I/O, but given the tech world's focus on voice assistants these days, you wouldn't be surprised if Google talked up its own plans.

Last year's I/O saw the introduction of Google's Daydream virtual reality platform. Since then, Google's rolled out a VR headset that few phones beyond its own Pixel devices really support. (Google's own website lists the Mate 9, Axon 7 and Moto Z as Daydream-ready.) We're likely to get an update on Google's VR plans, which could include new features, added support from new phone makers or new hardware altogether.



On that front, the Wall Street Journal reported in February that Google was working on a standalone headset that wouldn't rely on a phone or computer to drive the VR action. Microsoft has a similar effort underway, and we're starting to see some of the first mixed reality headsets it's creating with the help of hardware partners. If Google's serious about its own standalone headset, I/O would be a good venue for letting developers know what's coming.

Chrome

We've known since last year's I/O that Chromebooks would be able to run Android apps. And in January, Google said that every single Chromebook going forward would be able to access the Google Play Store. The feature remains in beta though, and we haven't heard much from Google when to expect a ready-for-prime-time release.



With an I/O session entitled "Android Apps for Chromebooks and Large Screen Devices," we're expecting Google to provide more detail.

Instant Apps

Speaking of app-related news from last year's I/O, the 2016 conference teased the idea of Instant Apps in which you can try out apps without having to download them. The feature is now available in a very limited way, but multiple I/O sessions this year on Instant Apps suggest that this will be the feature's coming-out party.
New Found Glory are heading to Australia in a few months for their 20 Years of Pop Punk Anniversary Tour. In celebration of this milestone, we explore how pop punk has aged nicely while remaining forever young.



When punk first broke in Brisbane or Berlin, London or New York City, it was about laying waste to the traditions of the past, shocking the establishment  all that punk stuff. Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust jeered The Clash on Londons Calling, while Glen Matlock was fired from the Sex Pistols for writing songs with what Steve Jones hilariously referred to as Beatles chords. The old guard was stuffy and done, and punk rock was here to sneer while it all burns down.

Punk was once the domain of the disenfranchised, and the very young, but in 2017 it is the older acts, established in the 90s, who receive the most dare we say it, respect. This comes from both the younger pop punk bands coming up, and the fans who have remained loyal to their teenage obsessions for two or three decades. While punk was once synonymous with distrust of elders, a punk crowd these days is a cross-section of generations. The most reverence is given to the old road dogs who have proven themselves in the genre. There is a respect for history, for tradition, for hard work. How did that happen?

Using the loosely defined pop punk genre as a case study, lets take a look at some of the most popular bands in the genre from throughout the 90s: Pennywise, The Offspring, Green Day, Bad Religion, Blink-182, The Ataris, NOFX, Frenzal Rhomb, Lagwagon, Rancid, New Found Glory, Unwritten Law, Sum 41.

All these bands, many formed between bong hits in garages, are still operational in 2017: touring the world, making livings on new records, old records, merchandise, and tour receipts. This is a remarkable feat, considering the short lifespan of most bands, especially ones who play a style of music synonymous with youth pursuits. As the genre ages, the music does not, remaining infused with juvenile lyrics, simple chord patterns, and the type of emotional over-sharing that belongs in teenage diaries. It is a visceral art form, even as the purveyors of it settle into comfortable lives with wives, husbands, children and P&C meetings.

Interesting, none of these bands have radically changed their sound over the decades  there has been some evolution, sure  but as most of these bands best of collections showcases, the change between albums was often an improvement on sonics rather than a shift in style. Sure, there was a period after Time Of Your Life when many of them had stabs at writing an Earnest Acoustic Crossover Hit, but these were aberrations. Pop punk has remained, pleasingly, consist  with the blueprint having basically stayed the same since the Descendents 1982 album Milo Goes To College.

Love The Beatles? Get the latest The Beatles news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more JOIN

New Found Glory are touring Australia this August for their 20 Years Of Pop Punk tour. Often referred to as the Godfathers of pop punk (purists will hate this term, but purists will hate this article) the Florida band actually rose in the late 90s, forming three years after the commercial tipping point of pop punk in 1994. This year saw the release of many of the genres landmark albums: Green Days Dookie, The Offsprings Smash, Rancids Lets Go, Bad Religions Stranger Than Fiction and NOFXs Punk In Drublic, all of which sold incredibly well. The commercial success of these albums  especially Dookie and Smash, which have sold a combined 31 million records  set the stage for a generation of younger bands who could forge lengthy careers from a sound widely dismissed as a fad at the time.

Last month New Found Glory released their ninth studio album, Make Me Sick, but their upcoming tour will focus on nostalgia  which is to say, they will be paying homage to two decades of music that sounds a lot like their new music. The audience will be a mixture of teenagers currently falling in love with both the urgency and the history, and older fans who came on board at some point, and never left.

As musical trends often repeat every 20 years, pop punk is swinging back around in fashion. Pop punk in 2017 is much the same, but now it is also about respect for your elders, a sea of middle-aged men in Vans; it is power chords, and pop melodies, and aggression and juvenile. It is ageless. Blink-182 sang about growing up in 1997; in 2017 they sang I wanna see some naked dudes/thats why I built this pool.

The thing is nobody really wants to grow up, and as pop punks lengthy reign shows us  nobody really has to.

New Found Glorys 20 Years of Pop Punk Anniversary Tour begins in Fremantle on August 8. Tickets are available here.
Devin Townsend has no agenda when it comes to returning to Australia this week.

You do get asked that, especially in Australia, What are you going to do this time thats going to be different than the last time? the multi-instrumentalist and producer explains to Rogue Inc ahead of his Australian tour with Devin Townsend Project and sleepmakeswaves, kicking off this Saturday in Brisbane.

The answer to that question is Well there isnt one.

As corny as it sounds (and even Townsend admits this), its all just about striving to be better for Canadas metal icon. He tells Spotlight Report, Its interesting having as many albums as I do, and trying to put together something that works for the band and myself and the audience, but also people that have an emotional investment in any of these things.

What are you going to do this time thats going to be different than the last time?

Those records span decades and vast sonic textures, notably across 90s Vancouver metal group Strapping Young Lad, his eclectic solo material, and the astral spirit and complexity of The Devin Townsend Project (DTP). While change is an inherent, constant part of the musician, being immediately fixated on his next project, the running undercurrent is a fear of the unknown.

Yet its also the void which excites him.

Thats all culminated into DTPs seventh release, 2016s Transcendence, with Townsend enlisting Peripherys Adam Nolly Getgood (bass) as the albums additional producer, engineer and mixer. Eight months since it dropped, Townsend admits that its ironically the comfort zone of DTP thats got him on edge.

It feels like it really needs to morph into something else and Transcendence was almost like, literally that  a transcendent piece of work so that I can move onto the next thing. And what that is Im currently battling  if you wanna look at it that way  to find out what that direction is, he muses to Metal Injection.

During his recent chat with Tone Deaf, he gave some thought about what that direction might be, or at least his mentality going into his next phase.

He admits with a chuckle, The leash that Ive been on since I quit Strapping, especially with having kids, has been so short that theres a part of me right now thats really looking forward to losing control. But my hope is that when I do, it will be from a place where Ive learned what works for me and what doesnt, rather than self-destruction.

Perhaps its Townsends latest work on a musical production titled The Moth thats allowing him to do just that. His own eccentricity mirrors that of the piece during a chat with Noisey, as he gushes, Its this symphony with all these cocks and vaginas and death and its gotta be so over-the-top, with symphonies and choirs and its got to include the best of the best!

The leash that Ive been on has been so short that theres a part of me right now thats really looking forward to losing control

While he warns gleefully that the show certainly wont be for children, the whole things a larger metaphor for sex and power, and the idea of it all being related to some sort of God whos ultimately futile. Thats certainly a testament to Townsends need to ricochet right off of his last release from DTP.

Although he hasnt revealed too much about just how the The Moth will dig into these concepts, his expansive projects have certainly fueled a need to, as he related recently to Louder Than War, dig deeper thematically to find things that resonate with me.

It is not as simple as love and loss anymore, so I think Ocean Machine holds a place for people  and myself  because it is an archetype of what I continue to do, he says of his second solo record, which turned 20 this year. It was really about the big stuff in way that I simply cant connect to in the same way anymore. These things arent new to me anymore. I think theres a quaintness to the emotional content, but also sonically.

Maybe Townsend feels that he can only peer into his past lives rather than experience them, and its this ebb and flow where, at times, these lives seems blurred together, while at others theyre as distinct as ever.

Having turned 45 earlier this month though, there are two things that ring clear in this era of the passionate artists life: being a dad, and breaking the mold of what it means to be successful.

Our chat was rich with talk of the former. Between changing diapers, cleaning the garage and doing all the things that come with being a dad, and then trying to write a piece of music at the same time I found that in order for me to get all the things I needed done in life, I had to be strategic about it, and patterns like waking up and exercising at a certain time really helped with that

With that schedule you can get a lot done, but it requires consistently changing gears, which is the only cross Ive got to bear.

you need to be successful, you need to adhere to certain parameters, but that just breeds a lot of the same shit

As for breaking boundaries rather than conforming to them, that mindset bled into his online lecture on creativity last month as part of the Online Music Business Summit. Thats just one snapshot of Townsend getting in touch with some Aussie friends, with the lecture series curated by Music Business Facts Rodney Holder  previously the drummer for Canberra metal band Alchemist.

A lot of the rhetoric that we hear is that you need to be successful, you need to adhere to certain parameters, but that just breeds a lot of the same shit, Townsend asserts to Spotlight Report.

My objectives in terms of talking or teaching are not necessarily to be the teacher, but more to try and promote whatever it is Ive learnt to keep a creatively free angle going. Its what I can do to contribute.

Continue to push the boundaries and join Devin Townsend Project with sleepmakeswaves on their Aussie tour, kicking off in Brisbane this Friday May 20  tickets on sale now.
In his 11 on the air, triple js resident film expert  or rather, movie guy  Marc Fennell has become the most prominent voice in Aussie film criticism this side of David and Margaret, his weekly reviews hitting our stereos every week and always proving to be a great listen no matter how little interest we may have had in seeing the actual movie.

But now, hes announced that hes reviewed his last flick for the station, and is ready to move on.

Ive been That. Movie. Guy for almost my entire adult life, Fennell announced in a blog post this morning, going on to detail the approximately 734 movie reviews hes recorded for the station over the course of 11 years at the station, and his sleepless nights as he also toiled away on SBS The Feed or ABCs Hungry Beast and Download This Show.

Sitting here alone tonight in an empty, cavernous public broadcaster feels somehow both anti-climatic and entirely appropriate, he adds, before swiftly turning his goodbye into a job ad.

I think now is the time for someone new, he says, and Im pretty sure the next person will be 100% better than me.

Because that person is probably you.

Fennel explains that triple j are now on the hunt for someone to take his established format and run with it, and implores aspiring movie critics to Be that person who decides the way we *should* be talking about movies and TV in 2017. Make it your own. Make it awesome. And, above all, make it better than this dickhead.

Fennell has built a career interviewing film icons like director Quentin Tarantino

He will, of course, still be heavily involved in film across a variety of other platforms, and will be devoting more of his time to the newly-launched not-for-profit called Media Diversity Australia  but it would be a difficult goodbye regardless.

Taking a turn for the sentimental, Fennell explains how station boss Kingsmill introduced me to my new favourite music but also gave me reasons to appreciate the music I hated.

Sure, they played a bit more Jack Johnson than any of us would like to admit, he added, but  look  everyone fucks up occasionally.

Despite that particular musical disagreement, Fennell is thankful for his time at the station, and everything thats come since.

Thank you triple j, he concludes. Thank you for the horizon.

So, if youve been inspired by Marc Fennells work over the last decade and think you can pack that same amount of humour and insight in weekly two-minute doses, well, this sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime  it certainly was for him.

You can read the entire goodbye on his blog.
Another festival and, predictably, another host of arrests for drug-related offences, as Sydney police swooped on the citys festival attendees over the weekend.

As Music Feeds reports, the sold-out hardstyle festival Midnight Mafia saw police search over 200 of the several thousand attendees, resulting in a total of 32 arrests for drug possession and the more serious charge of supply.

MDMA accounted for the majority of cases, with some arrests also made for cannabis and GHB, with four men charged with supplying a prohibited drug. Police have responded to the most recent spate of arrests, claiming that Clearly the message is not sinking in.

Too many people are playing Russian roulette with their lives, Detective Chief Inspector Gus Viera stated. Not only is it extremely dangerous, but you are also risking a criminal record and future employment prospects.

Not to mention the worry and concern you are causing your family and the unknown long term effects these drugs may have on your health. Its time to start making better choices.

Meanwhile, the case for pill testing at festivals rather than sniffer dogs is still being made in many corners, with Music Feeds reporting that Canberra festival Spilt Milk is pushing to be the first Australian festival to introduce the harm-reduction measures  despite the ACT Government knocking back plans to allow it at the recent Canberran leg of Groovin the Moo, and the NSW Government also standing similarly firmly against it.
OLATHE, Kan. - The man accused in the deadly triple shooting at Austins Bar & Grill in Olathe will be back in court Monday morning. Adam Purinton is charged with one count of premeditated murder and two counts of attempted murder in connection with a deadly shooting at the bar on February 22.
KSHB: Churches fight assessment fee for streetcar Some churches along the proposed streetcar route are concerned they won't be available to afford a yearly assessment fee.

IS STREETCAR EXPANSION A THREAT TO KANSAS CITY FAITH COMMUNITIES?!?!

FIRST and before anybody else in Kansas City . . .Now more religious groups are expressing their concern. Checkit:And so . . .Or is this simply the cost of progress and a sign of this development initiative trumping local faith life???You decide . . .
They will be in church Saint Barbara for pilgrimage, Athens until June 15th

In a moving atmosphere, thousands of believers welcomed on Sunday in Saint (Agia) Barbara the Holy Relics of Saint (Agia) Helen, the mother of Constantine the Great, from Venice to Athens along with a piece of Holy Wood. They both were brought from the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice were they are being kept.

It is the first time the Holy Relic came out of Venice, and so thousands of believers had gathered early to watch his reception and the events that followed.

Their journey begun with a the Holy Relics being accompanied by priests with candles, Byzantine flags and the banner of Venice under the sounds of a Venetian band in the canals, accompanied by Cretan and Pontian with traditional uniforms.

They were received in accordance with the Head of State diplomatic protocol by Archbishop of Athens Ieronymos and the President of the Hellenic Republic, Mr. Prokopios Pavlopoulos, in the presence of representatives of the government, the Parliament, the Armed Forces and the Diplomatic Corps, while the Minister of National Defense Panos Kammenos attended their reception at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport where young Cretans and Pontians dressed in traditional uniforms descended from the plane and escorted the sacred relics at the church of Agia Barbara.

The Holy Relics were taken from Constantinople in 1211 AD to Venice, almost 1700 years ago.

They were brought to Athens on the occasion of the completion of the 80th anniversary of the work of the Apostolic Ministry of the Church of Greece. The sacred relic will be exhibited at the sacred temple of Agia BarBara in the Athenian municipality until 15 June.

The Archbishops spokesperson, Haris Konidaris, stated in Proto Thema: This fact in itself highlights the spiritual and cultural identity of Europe. Europe can really serve its people and live only if its foundations are still the ancient Greek thinking, Roman Law and Christianity. Far from its Christian roots, it is not the Europe that its founders, the Europe of justice and solidarity, envisioned.

Agia Helen is the first Christian Empress.

Agia Eleni, is known and the finding of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem and for her enormous charity work while the Greek people have associated many traditions with her in Asia Minor, Cyprus, Rhodes, Kalymnos, Tilos, Kastelorizo, in Naxos, Paros.

The protector of the Christians of St. Helena died in 328 AD at the age of 80 years.

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

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Decius License: CC-BY-SA
On Sunday, the Resurrection of the Lord Orthodox Cathedral Church opened a new cathedral in Lagos, Nigeria. The Church held a service by the Archbishop of Orthodox Archdiocese of Nigeria, Alexander Gianniris, to commemorate the event.

Gianniris gave a service which was titled, The solemn opening and first Divine Liturgy of the New Cathedral Church of the Resurrection of the Lord in Lagos. Following his service, Gianniris told The Guardian that he was Grateful to God and those who contributed to make the project a reality. It is a sanctuary and the heartbeat of the Orthodox Church in Nigeria, Benin and Togo.

The first church was built in this place in 1966 for the needs of the Greek community and from there mission work started in the country gradually. From there too, the old building was demolished because of the damages from the rising horizon of the lagoon and the waters. Finally, by the Grace of God, we have this one today, he added.

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

Source:greekreporter.com

Photo Source: greekreporter.com
Saudi Arabia and Russia have agreed to extend the Opec and non-Opec oil output reduction deal for another nine months till March 2018, reports said.



Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih and Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak in a joint statement said that the two countries will recommend at the meeting of the agreement participants on May 25 to extend the agreement for another 9 months, said a Tass report.



Oil prices jumped over 1.5 percent on Monday after the Saudi-Russia statement. Brent crude was at $51.65 per barrel at 0500 GMT, up 81 cents. US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was at $48.62 per barrel, up 78 cents.



"I think the decisions will be positive in Vienna. We bring together a complete consensus of the group," the minister said.



"Our nations agreed to extend the deal up to the end of March 2018 with the same volume of allocations, which was included in the agreement from December 10," he said.



Russian oil companies share the position of the Russian Ministry of Energy to extend the agreement, said Novak.



Opec countries and countries outside the cartel participating in the deal on reducing oil production have reached a full consensus on extending the deal, Al-Falih said.



Russia and Saudi Arabia wil hold consultations with the parties to the deal before May 24, according to the joint statement of the two countries.


The Taiwan Tourism Bureau (TTB) is targeting the Middle Eastern tourist market, which it believes has the potential for vast growth.



"Taiwan drew about 10 million tourists last year. The combined population of Muslim countries is approximately 1.7 billion, which presents a high potential for international visitors, commented Trust Lin, director - Taiwan Tourism Bureau, Singapore Office.



The Taiwan Tourism Bureau (TTB), along with a special delegation, participated in this year's Arabian Travel Mart - which concluded in April; and as part of its trade initiatives organized two special Mice evenings in association with Cozmo Travels and ATS Travels apart from travel agent workshops in Dubai and Bahrain.



The events were attended by top-notch travel trade fraternity, media professionals who received well-rounded presentations on Taiwan with exciting prizes and giveaways as well.



The delegation from Taiwan was led by Lin comprised of teams from Pro Tour Express Inc, Lion Travel Service Co, Mushroom Pot Organic Restaurant, Jabez Creative Inc, Big 5 Tours Co. Ltd., Taiwan Leisure Farms Development Association.



2017 came in close heels to 2016 which was an exceptionally successful one for TTB Middle East. The tourism board received The Arabian Travel Market New Frontiers Recovery Award 2016 that recognised Taiwan for its efforts to repair, rebuild and recover after devastating earthquake in February.



Arabian Travel Market (ATM), the regions leading travel industry showcase, had named Taiwan as the recipient of the New Frontiers Recovery Award 2016 at a special presentation that was also broadcast on ARN radio on the final day of the annual event.



We wanted to recognise Taiwan not only for its swift physical rebuilding, but for the way the country has maintained its optimistic outlook with regards to maintaining and growing its tourism industry, particularly when it comes to targeting travellers from the Middle East region. said Noblet-Segers, spokesperson of ATM.



Unique to Taiwan, this year our theme was to promote the mesmerizing natural beauty and stunning landscapes. Bamboo and orchids were shipped in from Taiwan to decorate the booth. The green theme attracted both visitors and other exhibitors alike. Aboriginal dance performances typical of Alishan region, tea-maker and calligrapher were also organized.



For the Mice evenings corporate clients were invited on each day, and to strengthen the trade and relations between UAE and Taiwan, TAITRA also had presentation slots at the events (except in Bahrain). The trade workshop received a massive response from top outbound travel companies of UAE.

At the Taiwan booth at ATM, suppliers from Taiwan gave out information, handing out brochures, promotional material, itineraries and a wealth of suggested activities to help plan a perfect Taiwanese holiday.



The Taiwan Tourism Bureau warmly invites the people of UAE to come and experience the beauty and splendor of the island country. - TradeArabia News Service
The Airport Show Dubai opened today (May 15) at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC) with over 300 companies from 50 countries participating.



The show, which was inaugurated by Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of Dubai Civil Aviation Authority (DCAA), Chairman of Dubai Airports and Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates Airline and Group, expects to see over 7,500 aviation industry professionals attend over the next three days..



Accompanied by VIPs and senior government officials, Sheikh Ahmed toured the worlds second biggest airport B2B event spread over 15,000 square metres in Zabeel Halls 4, 5 and 6, at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC).



Sheikh Ahmed said: The aviation industry expansion in the Middle East continues to surpass average global growth rates. Future projections are equally promising and are behind the ongoing and considerable investment in aircraft, technology and infrastructure. The Airport Show brings together solution providers from around the world giving them the opportunity to explore the latest trends and bring forward innovative products and services designed to support ongoing industry growth and service enhancements.



Sheikh Ahmed met with the exhibitors, who explained about their latest technology products and services being offered for the aviation sector. Among the stalls that he visited were emaratech, which described its latest baggage handling system being showcased at the Airport Show; General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) in Dubai, which is displaying the latest smart technologies being used to enhance customer experience; General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) Saudi Arabia, who explained the latest facilities and expansion of airports in Saudi Arabia; Dubai Police, who described the latest training programme and security centres; and Oman Airports Management Company (OAMC), who are showcasing their unique virtual reality applications; among many others.



Sheikh Ahmed also visited the World Travel Catering and Onboard Services Expo Middle East (WTCEME), co-located with the Airport Show, where he visited stands of Emirates Flight Catering, Pinar from Turkey, Unilever, Pearls, who launched a new beverage product at the show and other exhibitors.



He also met with the representatives of Women in Aviation Middle East, which hosted its 2nd General Assembly today at the Airport Show. In line with the vision of the UAEs leadership to empower women and enhance their participation across all sectors, Airport Show is supporting Arab Women in Aviation which aims to promote the higher participation of women in the Middle East's robust aviation sector.



Billed as the worlds most dynamic airport event, the Middle Easts iconic aviation industry show features a wide line up of innovative technology products and services from over 50 countries, including Germany, China, Switzerland, France, UK and Denmark which have set up dedicated pavilions.



Daniyal Qureshi, group exhibitions director, Reed Exhibitions Middle East - organisers of the show - said: We have experienced a much larger interest in Middle East aviation developments and the Airport Show in particular over the last year, signaling the growing confidence of international suppliers in the regions expansion programmes. We have experienced an almost 10 per cent growth in exhibitors this year, with new country pavilions and more security, ICT and passenger technology companies than ever before at the event. We also have larger delegations from Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan, highlighting the collaboration that Dubais aviation authorities and integrators have built with authorities in the region.



The exhibitors said the Airport Show is an ideal platform to showcase their products and services, strengthen their business presence as well as forge new business relationships.



International Pavilions



The 17th edition of the Airport Show has a significant international participation with eight dedicated country pavilions for global exhibitors to showcase and launch their products, services and solutions for the aviation industry.



The Germany Pavilion celebrated its 17th year of participation in the Airport Show and has the largest participation this year with 34 exhibitors showcasing at the event, in addition to seven pavilions dedicated to exhibitors from France, Switzerland, UK, China, Denmark, Benelux and North America.



The France Pavilion, which made its first appearance at the Airport Show nine years ago, is organised by Business France, providing the participants of the worlds leading B2B event for the airport industry the opportunity to gain insights into their latest portfolio of products and expertise in different domains.



The Swiss Pavilion is being organised by T-LINK, which serves export oriented Swiss companies an ideal networking platform to access the local market and extend present business relationships.



The Swiss and UK pavilions have 12 exhibitors each this year, while the North American pavilion has seven exhibitors, and China, Denmark and Benelux pavilions have 23 exhibitors.



The worlds largest annual airport event is supported by International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, Dubai Aviation Engineering Projects (DAEP), Dubai Airports, dnata, Supply Chain and Logistics Group (SCLG) of Middle East and UAE Contractors Association, alongwith with emaratech as the gold sponsor, FMT as the silver sponsor and Huawei as the ICT Partner.



Huawei also hosted its Global Aviation Summit today, where experts discussed the most innovative ICT constructions in the aviation industry.



Global Airport Leaders Forum (May 16-17)



Co-located with Airport Show, the fifth Global Airport Leaders Forum (Galf) will open tomorrow (May 16) with more than 36 eminent aviation industry leaders and experts discussing the global airports outlook 2026, airport capacity, how airports can most effectively respond to the requirements of airlines, onboard retail, the latest technology trends and other highly relevant aviation industry issues. - TradeArabia News Service
The St. Regis Maldives Vommuli Resort in the Maldives has welcomed Alexander Blair as the new general manager of the island resort.



Blair joins The St. Regis Maldives having been the complex general manager of Al Faisaliah Hotel in Saudi Arabia since 2014. Prior to this, he held managerial roles at Oriental Residence Bangkok and HPL Hotels & Resorts, Maldives. He brings 25 years of experience in luxury hospitality across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, having begun his career in the UK with Marriott International and progressing through the company over 14 successful years.



Blair was born in the UK and gained a National Certificate in Hotel Catering whilst studying in Scotland, before embarking upon the Management Trainee programme with Marriott in 1991.



Speaking on his new appointment, Blair said: I am delighted to join The St. Regis Maldives, particularly in such an key year for the resort, following its opening in November. Im looking forward to working with the team to help drive the resorts continuing success and reputation globally with our unrivalled experiences in the Maldives, our unique design and breath-taking location.



The St. Regis Maldives Vommuli Resort, which was included in the Conde Nast Traveler 2017 Hot List, is nestled on a private island in a secluded Maldivian atoll, amidst thriving marine life. Just 40 minutes from Male by seaplane, guests are transported into a newfound paradise in the Dhaalu Atoll. The all-villa resorts unique design, inspired by the marine setting, has been created to evoke a sense of tropical island village living. Each of the 77 villas embody the perfect combination between privacy and luxury. - TradeArabia News Service


BICC was the honor host of the 3rd IDB Member Countries Sovereign Investments Forum which is an annual event of Islamic Development Forum (IDB) partnering with the Ministry of Finance Republic of Indonesia.



(TRAVPR.COM) INDONESIA - April 30th, 2017 - Nusa Dua, Bali April 2017Bali International Convention Centre (BICC) is delighted to share the recent uplifting conference that was held in its magnificent Mangupura Hall. BICC was the honor host of the 3rd IDB Member Countries Sovereign Investments Forum which is an annual event of Islamic Development Forum (IDB) partnering with the Ministry of Finance Republic of Indonesia.

The event was held from 10th to 12th April 2017 and organized by PT Sarana Multi Infrastruktur (Persero) or known as PT SMI; a State Owned Enterprise (SOE) with 100% shares owned by the Government of Indonesia through the Ministry of Finance Republic of Indonesia with presentation of an extraordinary exhibition, meetings and a lavish gala dinner to all the IDB members. The event was opened by Indonesia Vice President H.E Jusuf Kalla accompanied by President of IDB H.E Bandar M.H Hajjar and it was also attended by the Minister of Finance H.E Sri Mulyani Indrawati along with other Ministers of Republic Indonesia. This years conference brought the theme of Promoting Responsible Investments in IDB Member Countries and showcased various exhibitions from local crafts to company products in supporting the infrastructure.

The Executive Chef Manoj Rawat and his culinary team had a carefull and thoughtful preparation for the delightful gala dinner held at Mangupura Hall. The Westin Resort Nusa Dua, Bali once again proved to be the perfect venue to host for a large scale group and conference together with its iconic BICC. BICC continues to proudly lead the way with its gracious Balinese hospitality and impeccable service standards for all meeting participants.

For more information, please visit the Bali Convention Center website http://baliconvention.com or follow the resorts social media channels Facebook www.facebook.com/westinbali and www.instagram.com/westinbali.

###
New Delhi, May 15 (IBNS) Canon India Pvt. Ltd, a Digital Imaging Company, on Monday announced a promotion offer on select Canon PIXMA Wireless printers.

The offer is applicable on PIXMA MG3070S, PIXMA E470 and PIXMA E560.



Under this offer, customers can redeem Philips headset worth Rs.999, on the purchase of any of the aforementioned printers.

These PIXMA series printers range from Rs.3995 to Rs.6995 and are ideal for home and office use.
New Delhi, May 15 (IBNS): The National Highways Authority of India signed an MoU with the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Limited (TIDCO) in New Delhi on Monday, for the development of a Multimodal Logistics Park in the Ponneri Industrial Node area near Kamarajar Port in Tamil Nadu.

The MoU was signed in the presence of the Road Transport and Highways and Shipping Minister Shri Nitin Gadkari and M.C. Sampath, Minister for Industries of Tamil Nadu government.



Speaking on this occasion, Gadkari said that it is an important agreement for the development of an integrated, multi-modal transport infrastructure in the country.



The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is planning to develop Mutimodal Logistics Parks in under its Logistics Efficiency Enhancement Programme (LEEP) in 15 locations all over India at a cost of Rs 33,000 crore, including Rs 1295 crores investment for the Chennai Region.

The proposed logistics parks will bring down the overall freight costs, reduce vehicular pollution and congestion and will enable reduction of warehousing costs. All this is expected to result in lower logistics costs.


Mumbai, May 15

Pureplay mortage player HDFC on Monday followed suit of its rivals and lowered new low-cost home loan prices by 15 bps to 8.35 per cent for women borrowers and by 10 bps for men, thereby matching the rates offered by SBI last week and ICICI Bank earlier in the day.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

HDFC has lowered its mortgage pricing for new low-cost home loans to 8.35 per cent from 8.50 per cent for loan below Rs 30 lakh for women borrowers and by 10 bps to 8.40 per cent for men. The new rates will be applicable with immediate effect.

One basis point is one-hundredth of a per cent.

For loans between Rs 30 and Rs 75 lakh, the new rates will be 8.50 per cent for all borrowers and for above Rs 75 lakh, new loans will be priced at 8.55 per cent, the largest pureplay mortgage lender said.

Earlier, the lender had a flat rate of 8.50 per cent for all types of borrowers.

With this, the three largest players offer similar prices for new affordable home loans.

Earlier in the day, the largest private sector lender ICICI Bank cut its offering by 30 bps to 8.35 percent for loans up to Rs 30 lakh, bringing it in line with the country's largest lender SBI, which had last week set the tone for the market.  PTI
Ishrat Banwait

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 14

A major fire broke out in the accounts branch of the administrative block of Panjab University in the wee hours of Sunday morning. It took eight fire engines three hours to put out the fire. However, the fire engines stayed on till 1 pm and kept sprinkling water on the smouldering debris. The fire not only destroyed the wooden furniture and files but also melted the ceiling.

Other than pension and service tax rooms, all other departments in the accounts branch were gutted. These include salary section, exam and payment, grants and planning and a major part of the budget section.

The authorities said there was severe power fluctuation yesterday evening and a power outage at around 4 pm. At around 4:30 pm, the employees left their respective offices as there was no power. Some appliances may thus have been left switched on, which caused a short-circuit at night. However, the authorities and the Fire Department are yet to ascertain the exact cause of the fire.

While 90% of the records are manually stored in the department, the Registrar, GS Chadha, said: We have a complete backup of all data in a server, which is located far away. The firefighting system installed in the building prevented the fire from spreading to other areas. He, however, said the fire alarms did not go off. The firemen told them that the hydraulic system installed in the building worked only for 10 minutes, added Chadha.

Fire Station Officer Parmajit Singh Gill said they received a call of fire around 3.10 am in the morning from the police control room. Fire engines were immediately sent to the spot and those reached the spot within five minutes. The fire engines did around 40 rounds of the fire stations for refilling and more than 1.5 lakh litres of water was used to douse the flames. Two hydraulic platforms were also used. Around 40 firemen participated in the operation and they broke the windows to enter the building.

The Vice-Chancellor, Registrar, DSW, Chief Security Officer, Senator and former Railway Minister Pawan Bansal visited the spot. Chandigarh BJP president Sanjay Tandon and other senators were at the spot throughout the day. Tandon said: I rushed to the spot as soon as I got to know about the incident. I enquired about the damage and asked the authorities to recover it all soon.

A clerk, Amit, said: Almost all our work is done on papers and will not be retrieved. Even the one that can be retrieved will take months to do so. Bills, transaction records, service records, applications, mark sheets and many other documents were lost to the fire.

Staff extend support to authorities

The teaching and non-teaching staff of the university has extended support to the authorities. President of PUTA Promila Pathak said: This is a tough time for the whole university and we are with the authorities. President of PUSA Deepak Kaushik expressed deep concern over the incident. He said: I appeal to all my colleagues to work together and help the university recover from the huge loss that it has suffered. The VC has said he will involve the staff to better equip the university in terms of disaster management.

TIMELINE

2:45 am Students notice smoke billowing out of the first floor and inform the security guard

3:10 am Security guard Jaswant Singh makes a call to the Police Control Room

3:10 am PCR calls the Fire Control Room

3:15 am Chief security officer receives a call from the guard who in turn makes a call to the Registrar and VC.

3:25 am Firefighters located in Sector 11 arrive at the spot along with police officials

3:30 am More fire engines arrive and other keep moving to and fro to refill water

6:00 am The fire is majorly put out

A wake-up call, need to assess buildings: VC

Vice-Chancellor AK Grover has said an inquiry committee will be formed in a day or two to look into the matter. It will submit a preliminary report first and then a detailed report. He has also admitted that the university was not adequately prepared to tackle the situation. We were not conducting periodical checks. This is a wake-up call and we will now assess all buildings and make sure that they are well prepared, said Grover.
Kulwinder Sangha

Mohali, May 14

Unsafe rooms, shortage of water, wild growth on the premises and a lack of adequate accommodation stand out like a sore thumb at Government Middle School in Badmajra village.

A lot of wild growth was seen at various points in the open area of the school, especially near the toilets, when The Tribune team went to the institution on May 9.The big campus had not been maintained properly as there is not enough manpower. A part of the school building is cleaned by midday-meal workers. Classrooms have to be cleaned by the students themselves.

The staff room is also being used as a computer room due to a shortage of rooms. One room, which is in poor shape, has been vacated as it is unsafe to hold classes in it. The Tribune team saw big cracks in the roof apart from a lot of seepage during its visit to the institution, posing a danger to the lives of students. The Education Department has not bothered to declare the room unsafe for use. Water drips from the roof in different rooms whenever it rains.

Various sections have to be combined during classes as there are not enough rooms.

The school, having a student strength of 194, also faces a problem of water scarcity. Storage of water is the first task to be undertaken when the school opens for the day. The school did not get a supply of water for about a week around March. Water had to be got from houses in the village. An old hand-pump on the school premises does not work and about Rs 25,000 is needed for getting it repaired, which cannot be done right now due to a fund crunch.

Teachers of the school, which falls under the Sarv Sikhya Abhiyan, have to make voluntary contributions to pay its water and power bills. Shockingly, teachers have not received their salaries since December last year.

Amanpreet Kaur, who is in charge of the school, said a request for getting the building repaired had been made to the authorities concerned. She said teachers were making contributions for providing fans in the school.

About the school

The building was constructed in 2009 and no fresh government grant will be given before 10 years. As such, no repair work could be carried out on it. One room had recently been constructed by a donor, Tube Product of India. However, the room did not have a single fan even though the students attend classes in it due to a shortage of space.

.
New Delhi, May 15

BJP MP Subramanian Swamy on Monday withdrew his plea seeking summoning of former Haryana chief minister and Congress leader BS Hooda as a witness in the National Herald case filed by him against top Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and others.

Swamy had earlier told the court that Hooda was questioned by the CBI in a case related to the Panchkula plot allotment matter and his deposition in this case would help the present case since both the matters were related.

Swamy, however, on Monday told the Metropolitan Magistrate Lovleen that the present case was not related to the one being investigated by the CBI.

The court allowed his plea and posted the matter for further hearing for July 1.

Swamy, in his private criminal complaint, has accused the Gandhis and others of conspiring to cheat and misappropriate funds by paying just Rs 50 lakh through which Young Indian Pvt Ltd (YI) obtained the right to recover Rs 90.25 crore which the Associate Journals Limited (AJL) owed to the Congress.

The Gandhis and other accused--Motilal Vora, Oscar Fernandes, Suman Dubey and Sam Pitroda--have denied the allegations levelled against them.

On April 22, Hooda was arrayed as a witness by Swamy in support of his complaint in the case.

The list also included the names of three other public servants in the Haryana government--Sandeep Singh Dhillon, an IAS officer then associated with Haryana Urban Development Authority; Vineet Garg, IAS; and Shakuntala Jakhu, then Financial Commissioner at the Town and Country Planning department of the state.

Swamy had also filed a copy of the CBI case documents in Panchkula plot allotment matter and claimed that even the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had filed a case in the matter and had reportedly questioned Hooda, Robert Vadra and Motilal Vora on alleged money laundering with regard to Associate Journals Ltd (AJL).

The submission was opposed by the counsel appearing for the Gandhis and others who claimed that CBI and the ED matters were not related to the present complaint of Swamy.

Swamy had said that he needed time to verify whether the CBI and ED cases in the Panchkula matter were connected to the present matter.

The court had summoned the accused persons, besides YI on June 26, 2014.

On December 19, 2015, it had granted bail to Sonia, Rahul, Vora, Fernandes and Dubey, who had appeared before it pursuant to summons. Pitroda was granted bail on February 20, 2016, when he had appeared in the court.

Sonia, Rahul, Vora (AICC treasurer), Fernandes (AICC general secretary), Dubey and Pitroda were summoned for alleged offences under Section 403 (dishonest misappropriation of property), 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) read with Section 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC. PTI
Chandigarh, May 15

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar will lead a delegation to Singapore and Hong Kong from May 21 to 25 to promote the state as an investment destination.

Speaking at a meeting here, Khattar said the visit is aimed at attracting investors.

Developing Haryana as a preferred investment destination was among the top priorities of the state government, he said.

The visit would accelerate the pace of investment in the state, he said, according to an official release here.

During discussions with the entrepreneurs held in Delhi today, the Chief Minister referred to his visits to the USA, Canada, China and Japan and said that investors there had evinced keen interest regarding investing in Haryana.  PTI
Washington, May 15 (IBNS): In February, NASA began an effort looking at the feasibility of putting crew aboard the first integrated flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft -- Exploration Mission-1, or EM-1. After weighing the data and assessing all implications, the agency will continue pursuing the original plan for the first launch, as a rigorous flight test of the integrated systems without crew.

However, engineers will apply insights gained from the effort to the first flight test and the integrated systems to strengthen the long-term push to extend human presence deeper into the solar system.

NASA determined it is technically capable of launching crew on EM-1, but after evaluating cost, risk and technical factors in a project of this magnitude, it would be difficult to accommodate changes needed to add crew at this point in mission planning, read a NASA website.



The effort confirmed that the baseline plan to fly EM-1 without crew is still the best approach to enable humans to move sustainably beyond low Earth orbit.

We appreciate the opportunity to evaluate the possibility of this crewed flight, said NASA acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot. The bi-partisan support of Congress and the President for our efforts to send astronauts deeper into the solar system than we have ever gone before is valued and does not go unnoticed. Presidential support for space has been strong.

Exploration Mission-1 is the first in a broad series of exploration missions that will take humans to deep space, and eventually to Mars. It is designed to be a flight test of our entire system -- one that is challenging in itself and will offer the opportunity to better understand our capabilities and limitations and ultimately build confidence in our ability to safely send crew into deep space.

Were considering additional ground testing of the heat shield prior to EM-1 as well as the possibility of advancing the ascent abort test for the Orion launch abort system based on findings from the study, said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASAs Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. Conducting these tests in advance of EM-1 would provide additional data that will advance our systems knowledge faster and possibly improve the robustness of the overall plan for sending humans into deep space.

As part of the assessment, NASA also reviewed the schedule for EM-1, including production schedules across the enterprise, anticipated budgets and appropriations, projected delivery of the European Service Module, first time production issues related to the core stage that is at the leading edge of new manufacturing, and the ongoing impact of the February tornado that directly affected the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana. As a result of these factors, NASA will adjust the target launch date for the EM-1 mission to 2019, and will execute its normal process in the coming weeks to determine an official revised launch date.

NASA continues to keep each part of the enterprise  Orion, SLS, and ground systems  moving at their best possible pace toward the first integrated test mission. While components for EM-1 are being delivered, contractors can turn to the next phase of their work for the second flight, Exploration Mission-2, which will carry crew beyond the moon.

Flight hardware for SLS and Orion is currently in production for both the first and second missions, and progress continues across the country. The SLS engine section structural test hardware is currently aboard a barge on its way to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama for testing, a series of engine tests is taking place in Mississippi, and the Orion abort attitude control system was tested in Maryland. An abort motor for the launch abort system will soon be tested in Utah, and avionics systems for the Orion European Service Module have been integrated into the Orion testing laboratory near Denver. Meanwhile at the Kennedy Space Center, Orions heat shield is being installed, and ground systems and software continue development. In addition, deep space habitation and propulsion system development activities also are underway and life support and related technologies are being tested 250 miles above the Earth aboard the International Space Station now.

We are building both systems and supporting infrastructure to ensure a sustained cadence of missions beginning with EM-1 and continuing thereafter, said Lightfoot. NASA will continue to work with the Administration and Congress as we move toward a crewed flight test on EM-2 and, right now, we are very focused on accomplishing the EM-1 flight test.

NASA continues to lead the way in sending humans into deep space beyond the moon through building a flexible, reusable and sustainable capability and infrastructure that will last multiple decades and support missions of increasing complexity.

This infrastructure will be available for use by others both domestic and international as they want to join in the effort to advance human presence into the solar system.

These systems create an incredible capability from which future generations will continue to benefit.

Image: NASA website
Geetanjali Gayatri

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 14

The mother of the 23-year-old gangrape victim, whose mutilated body was found in Rohtak on May 11, has named six more suspects, even as the Sonepat police have traced the route taken by the criminals, from the victims house in Sonepats Kalupur village to the site where her body was dumped.

Sources said the police were gathering details of the cellphone location of those named. It had obtained CCTV footage of cameras installed between Sonepat and Rohtak and identified a Santro car used for abducting the victim.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Rekha Sharma, member of the National Commission for Women, which has taken suo moto cognisance, today met the victims mother and wrote to the government and the police to act swiftly. She said the police had its own version in the light of the fact that the victims family lodged an FIR only on May 11, two days after the girl went missing.

Sources said among the six names mentioned in a supplementary statement were that of the mother of key accused Sumit Kumar and their relatives. As the victim was a Dalit, additional charges under the SC/ST Act have been filed against Sumit Kumar and co-accused Vikas. They were arrested by the Sonepat police on Friday night.

Haryanas Director General of Police BS Sandhu claimed they had almost pieced together the sequence of events leading to the barbaric rape and murder and were interrogating those named by the victims mother.

The Inspector General of Police, Rohtak Range, Navdeep Singh Virk, and Sonepat SP Ashvin Shenvi today met the family and assured them of a fair investigation. ADGP (Law and Order) Mohammad Akil too visited the family. Three of the six suspects named today are yet to join the investigation, he said, adding that a PCR team had been deployed at the deceaseds house as a security measure.

A five-member SIT headed by DSP Mukesh is handling the case. The district administration has announced a compensation of Rs 10.5 lakh for the aggrieved family.

Autopsy reveals extent of savagery
Chandigarh, May 15

The hearing of the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old Dalit woman in Sonepat will be conducted in a fast-track court, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Monday.

Such heinous crimes would not be tolerated at any cost in a civilised society and the guilty would be punished, he said.

The decomposed body of the woman, who went missing from Sonepat on May 9, was gang-raped and brutally murdered, was found near the Industrial Model Township in Urban Estate, Rohtak, on May 11. Stray dogs had bitten off the face and lower portion of the body.

The sheer brutality of the crime, reminiscent of the Nirbhaya incident in Delhi which triggered nation-wide outrage, occurred barely a month after the BJP-led Haryana government launched Operation Durga to stop harassment of women.

The autopsy of the victim had stated that the bones of the womans skull were shattered into pieces and some sharp-edged objects may have been inserted in her private parts.

The findings suggest that it was a brutal rape and murder, said SK Dhatterwal, head of the department of forensic medicine at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak, who conducted the post-mortem examination.

Two men, including the main accused Sumit, who is also a Dalit, have been arrested by Haryana Police which has formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the case.

Police said the family of the victim suspected the involvement of six more men, of which five are related to the main accused.

The kin of the victim have also alleged that they had approached the Sonepat police about a month back with the complaint that Sumit was harassing their daughter, but there was no action.

The chief minister also promised strict action against those involved in the alleged rape of a 22-year-old woman at Gurugram.

The woman from Sikkim was allegedly raped by three men in a moving car and thrown out on a road in Delhi on Sunday. PTI
Amir Karim Tantray

Tribune News Service

Jhangar (LoC), May 14

A day after two civilians were killed in Pakistani shelling in Jhangar village of Nowshera sector on the Line of Control (LoC), the misadventure from the Pakistani side continued today with its army resorting to unprovoked ceasefire violation in the Rajouri sector.

The firing started at 6.45 am and ended at 8 am. Though there was no loss of life or property, the fear in villages was palpable as since May 10 the Pakistani army has violated the ceasefire pact daily.

More than 2,000 persons have been evacuated to migrant camps at Nowshera since yesterday and the government machinery has been pressed into service to take care of their needs.

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Wearing a deserted look, Jhangar and other villages, targeted by Pakistan yesterday, remained on the edge. Rajouri Deputy Commissioner Shahid Iqbal Choudhry said, A fleet of buses was sent to bring people from Jhangar but it couldnt go beyond Nonial due to heavy mortar shelling. Later, bulletproof vehicles with a capacity of 16-18 persons were pressed into service to rescue people.

We no more feel safe in our houses as Pakistan targets civilian areas every now and then. The Centre must take steps to provide relief to border residents, said Deep Kumar, 45, who has shifted base to a Nowshera camp.

Many who reached Nowshera on their own found it difficult to find space in a camp in a government school and were told to move to other places.

Bulletproof vehicles used
Srinagar, May 15

Fresh clashes broke out between student protesters and security forces near a college campus here in the heart of the summer capital on Monday.

According to police, the students of SP College took out a protest rally from the college against the highhandedness of security forces in the April 17 incident at Degree College, Pulwama.

The students tried to march towards MA Road but were stopped by the police, ensuing clashes between both the sides, a police official said.

The students threw stones at the forces, who fired a few teargas shells to contain them, the official said.

He said the clashes were going on when the reports last came in.

The SP college runs two more educational institutesSP Higher Secondary School and Womens College.

The authorities ordered suspension of classes at SP Higher Secondary School as a precautionary measure. The students of the school had clashed with the security forces last week.

The police raid on the state-run college in Pulwama had triggered widespread protests by students across Kashmir on April 17. The clashes have since been going on intermittently, prompting authorities to suspend classes in the higher educational institutes for over a week last month. PTI
Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 15

Taking strong exception to the Supreme Courts attempt to examine if triple talaq was an essential practice in Islam to decide its validity, the NDA government on Monday asserted that the practice had to be tested on the touchstone of constitutional principles of equality and non-discrimination alone.

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"Your job is not to interpret the Quran. You are not an ecclesiastical court to check whether a practice is essential to Islam or not," Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar.

You are approaching the problem of triple talaq from the wrong end, the Attorney General told the bench. "What religious practices are essential to a particular religion or faith is difficult to define for this court, he added.

Rohatgis submission came in response to the CJIs insisting that the government first address the bench whether triple talaq was essential to Islam or not.

"Let's say, tomorrow you declare that triple talaq is not an essential part of religion. So what? Nothing... You have to first decide whether this practice is against constitutional morality or not," Rohatgi told the bench, adding constitutional morality included secularism, human dignity and non-discrimination. "What may be permissible for society may not be constitutionally moral, he submitted.

Describing all three forms of triple talaq  talaq-e-biddat, talaq-e-hasan and talaq-e-ahasan  as "unilateral, extra-judicial, unequal", the Attorney General demanded that they should be declared unconstitutional altogether and not just the instantaneous form of triple talaq i.e. talaq-e-biddat.

Earlier, senior counsel Ram Jethmalani and Indira Jaising had attacked all forms of triple talaq on the ground that they were extra-judicial, arbitrary and essentially discriminated against Muslim women who didnt have such a right.

Responding to a courts query as to what will happen in such a situation, Rohatgi said the Centre would enact a new divorce law if as the "guardian of the Constitution" the top court took such a decision.

CJI Khehar said the Supreme Court was not only the guardian of the Constitution but also the guardian of the minorities and the matter involved "tinkering with religion itself".

Rohatgi said issues of marriage, divorce and inheritance were not essential part of right to religion which covered only belief, religious practices and rituals. He, however, said even if triple talaq was an essential part of religion protected under Article 25; it would still be constitutionally immoral and impermissible.

"Article 25 is subject to all other fundamental rights. So no matter whether a practice is essential to religion or not, triple talaq has to abide by the principles of gender equality," Rohatgi contended.

As the CJI said tenets of a religion can neither be tested on scientific grounds or on other grounds, the Attorney General shot back, What would the court do if someone came says Sati is an essential part of Hinduism?

Rohatgi insisted that the issues referred to the Constitution Bench had to be decided on the touchstone of constitutional principles alone.

"Tell us why are we here before a Constitution Bench if we cannot open the Constitution? Matters are referred to the Constitution Bench because they have something to do with the Constitution," he said.

Batting for equal rights for Muslim women, the Attorney General objected to the CJIs comment that "Women should be equal, but within the particular religion."

Rohatgi said: One half of a community (Muslims) suffers inequality from the male counterpart of the same community How can you shut your eyes to it? Women in India are marching shoulder-to-shoulder with men in every field. We are before a Constitution Bench and you cannot shut your eyes to their constitutional rights of equality and gender justice."

The bench  also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, Rohinton Nariman, UU Lalit and S. Abdul Nazeer, said it would interfere only if the State discriminated against rights of Muslim women and not when private persons did it as fundamental rights of equality and non-discrimination were essentially rights against the State.

Responding to the courts proposition, Rohatgi said practices of Muslim marriage and divorce had been codified as "Muslim law" under Section 2 of The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937. He said the 1937 Act being a law within the meaning of Article 13(3) of the Constitution can always be tested on the touchstone of the fundamental right to equality, right against non-discrimination, right to live with human dignity, gender justice and human rights.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta requested the court to expunge certain objectionable submissions of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board against women.

They clarified that due to paucity of time it would not go into the issues of polygamy and nikah halala which would continue to remain before the Constitution Bench to be decided later.

Senior counsel Kapil Sibal commenced his arguments on behalf of AIMPLB and would continue on Tuesday.
Beijing, May 15

Indias refusal to join Chinas high-profile Belt and Road initiative is regrettable but New Delhis boycott will not at all affect the cooperation in infrastructure development among its neighbouring countries, a report in a state-run newspaper said on Monday.

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The two-day Belt and Road Forum which is being attended by leaders from 29 countries, including Pakistan, has been boycotted by India due to sovereignty concerns over the $50 billion CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor), which passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

Also read: China vows $124 bn for new Silk Road

China, Pak take veiled swipe at India

While India recently issued an official statement saying it would not be part of the One Belt and One Road (B&R) initiative, it will not affect the trend towards cooperation in infrastructure development among its neighbouring countries at all, Global Times reported on Monday.

India was openly sceptical of Chinas Belt and Road Forum (BRF) hours ahead of the opening of the event, mainly due to concerns over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key project of the B&R, and whether it might influence the disputed Kashmir region, it said.

The B&R is a grand economic cooperation and development plan open to everyone, and is aimed at improving infrastructure in countries along the B&R route, thus benefiting the local people, it said.

China would never force any country to participate in the B&R if it was too sceptical and nervous to do so. It is regrettable but not a problem that India still maintains its strong opposition to the B&R, even though China has repeatedly said its position on the Kashmir dispute would not change because of the CPEC, the article said.

Referring to the statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs on March 13, a day before the two-day B&R summit, it said India also cited the potential debt burden as one of its other concerns, saying that, connectivity initiatives must follow the principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create an unsustainable debt burden for communities. It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbours debt burden, the neighbours appear willing to take on more, it said.

On Saturday, Pakistan and China inked new deals worth nearly $500 million, covering airport, port and highway construction, it said.

As regards the potential debt burden, Pakistans repayments will peak at around $5 billion in 2022, but this will be offset by transit fees charged in the CPEC, it quoted a media report and referred to Nepal officially signing a deal with China to join the B&R with plans to build a cross-border rail link that may cost up to $8 billion.

The article further stated that given the active responses from countries along the route, there is no way for India to impede its neighbouring countries from cooperating with China in infrastructure development.

China has formally invited India to join the B&R. If India doesnt want to take a part on the stage, then it should just be a good member of the audience. The role is still available if India changes its mind, but it may only be a small role if it is left too late, it said.  PTI
Simran Sodhi

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 15

India and Pakistan on Monday made their observations in the International Court of Justice in The Hague and as expected exchanged sharp words over the fate and status of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav who has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of being a spy.

While India accused Pakistan of having violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Access by denying India access to Jadhav, Pakistan said Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a "spy" involved in terror activities.

India got to make its observations first and was represented by senior lawyer Harish Salve who harped on the urgency of the situation and said that, The situation is grave, it is urgent, and hence we approached this court at such short notice."

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India bases its claims solely on Vienna Convention. It states that any arrested needs to be reported expeditiously to the relevant country, Salve said.

This is a prima facie case of a violation of the Vienna convention, he added.

Also read:

Comment: Jadhav case, the road not taken

India also appealed that Jadhavs death sentence be immediately suspended and Salve described Jadhavs trial as farcical. India argued that the 2008 bilateral agreement between India and Pakistan for Consular Access was irrelevant.

Refuting Pakistans charges of Jadhav being a spy, Salve said, Pakistan has claimed overwhelming evidence of covert/spying activities. But despite India's repeated requests, it has not provided a single shred of evidence or any documentation regarding the same.

Fearing that Jadhav could be executed by Pakistan before its arguments are heard, Salve said the Indian national, who had been arrested on March 3 last year and sentenced to death on allegations of espionage and subversive activities, had been framed on the basis of confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistans military custody.

Later in the day, Pakistan made its observations to the ICJ and was represented by counsel Khawar Qureshi who refuted Indias allegations that Pakistan had violated the Vienna Convention.

Pakistan sought to draw attention to the fact that there exists a 2008 bilateral agreement between the two nations which India is now referring to as irrelevant.

Pakistan said it invites the court to dismiss the application and said, Jurisdiction under Vienna Convention is limited by the 2008 agreement.

In statements that were caustic in their nature Pakistan also hit out at India and said Pakistan has no desire to waste court's time and resources to score political points.

Pakistan stuck to its position that Jadhav was indeed a spy and a terrorist whom Pakistan had arrested from the restive region of Baluchistan in 2016. India has accepted that Jadhav is indeed a former Indian Naval officer but denied charges of espionage labelled against him.

The court denied permission to Pakistan to play the confessional video of Kulbhushan Jadhav.

While India took over 90 minutes to make its case, Pakistan took less than an hour. The decision of the Court could come in the next few days or it might even take longer.  With agencies
New Delhi, May 15

With the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing the case of former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of being a spy, his friends continued to pray for him.

The stay on execution has lit a ray of hope. But now everything depends on Mondays hearing. We are continuously praying that the judgment should be in Kulbhushans favour. He is an ordinary and innocent man, he must be released, said Vandana Panwar, Jadhavs friend.

We gave a free trial to a terrorist like Kasab and Pakistan hasnt even revealed in what condition Kulbhushan is in. We hope we will get justice from the International Court of Justice and bring him back to India, Jadhavs friend Vijay Kanojia said.

He said there are almost 70,000 signatories that there should be a discussion at the White House on this case.

Praveen Bhoj, another friend, said, India has international support in this case. We hope Kulbhushan gets justice. We thank the present government for pursuing the case so well.

The ICJ on May 9 had put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.

The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.

Last month, Jadhav was sentenced to death by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) for his alleged involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan. ANI
New Delhi, May 15

As part of precautionary measures, banks did not operate some ATMs running on old software in view of threat from ransomware 'WannaCry'.

The RBI has asked banks to follow the instructions of government organisation CERT-In on ransomware, which has impacted various IT networks in over 150 countries.

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has come out with a list of dos and dont's and webcast on how to protect networks from the global ransomware attack.

Most automated teller machines (ATMs) were running fine, there could be some which may not have updated Microsoft's Windows operating system, sources said.

Such ATMs could be prone to attack so as precautionary measure banks running such ATMs refrained from feeding cash, sources added.

However, there was no official information in this regard from the RBI in this connection till late evening.

There are a total of 2.2 lakh ATMs in India, of which few may be running on old Windows XP.

In a separate malware attack last year, 3.2 lakh debit cards were compromised in the country. Data of the users who transacted from ATM machines of Hitachi were compromised during three months of May, June and July last year. The Hitachi ATMs deployed by many White Label ATM players and Yes Bank were impacted by the malware.  PTI
Bhubaneswar/Kolkata, May 15 (IBNS): The top 20 budding astronomers from across Odisha are all set for a visit to the Space Application Centre( SAC) of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Ahmedabad.

Chief Minister of Odisha, Naveen Patnaik, flagged off the visit on Monday during a function held at the state Secretariat, Bhubaneswar.

Patnaik congratulated the winners for their interest in the unique programme and extended his best wishes for their visit.

Lauding the efforts of Tata Steel and Pathani Samnta Planetarium he said, YATS provides an opportunity to the students in rural and remote areas of the State to exhibit their talent and come to the forefront in the field of astronomy. While creating awareness about Pathani Samantas contribution to the field of astronomy and space science, YATS also motivates the young minds of Odisha to that field.

Expressing his happiness to see the student across the state who have been selected Shri Patra urged them to make best use of their trip to ISRO.

On the occasion, Rajiv Kumar said, In this years YATS, Tata Steel has managed to reach out to 34,000 students across 300 schools in 27 districts. We shall continue to strive to make YATS bigger and better with each passing year.

The team heading for the visit, comprises 10 boys and 10 girls from across Odisha, accompanied by their respective guide teachers and an official from Tata Steel. Besides visiting the facility at ISROs Space Application Centre, the students will also get one of those rare opportunities of interacting with some of the top-notch space scientists of the country. The Space Application Centre of ISRO at Ahmedabad is engaged in developing satellite technology and implementation of satellite systems for scientific, technological and application missions.

Tata Steel has been organising YATS since 2007, with an aim to popularise the noteworthy contributions of legendary astronomer of Odisha, Pathani Samanta and to carry on his legacy. The company identifies and encourages young talent from high schools across the State in the field of astronomy and space science. In order to provide world-class exposure to young talents of Odisha, each year a total of 20 winners from classes VIII-X across Odisha are selected based on an essay-writing and quiz competitions and are thereafter sent on an exposure trip to different centres of ISRO.

YATS was a four-month long exercise designed to find 20 best young talents in the state. The 10th Edition witnessed participation of nearly 34,000 students from over 300 schools, spread over 27 districts of Odisha in essay and quiz competitions. This four-month long exercise culminated on December 13, 2016, the birth anniversary of Pathani Samanta. An added attraction was the ten-day ISRO Exhibition organized by the company as part of this annual event.

Tata Steel stands committed to partnering the development in Odisha. One of the key aspects the company has identified is to leverage and provide best in class opportunities in education, which motivate students to think out of the box and venture into diverse career options.
Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 15

Questioning WhatsApps privacy policy to share user data, the Supreme Court on Monday asked it to explain the change after the company was acquired by Facebook in 2016.

Why did you change the policy and what is the purpose for sharing the data? a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra asked WhatsApp on the first day of hearing.

What is bothering us is that the earlier policy was transaction between WhatsApp and the user. Now you create a mega-data base to exploit it commercially, Justice AK Roy, one of the judges on the bench, said expressing concern over sharing of user data.

Under the new policy, WhatsApp--an instant message service--can share all its subscribers data with social networking platform Facebook. Alleging that the decision impinged on privacy of 160 million Indian users, the petitioners have challenged WhatsApps privacy policy on the grounds that it violated users fundamental right to communicate freely.

The courts poser came after senior advocate Siddhartha Luthra denied on behalf of WhatsApp that its pre-2016 policy didnt include data-sharing and asserted that the company never snooped on messages or shared users content.

What is shared is the phone number of the user, the identification number of the devise used, users registration detail and last access of the service by the user, Luthra told the bench, adding that in todays global world it was necessary to communicate with other platforms.

Our promise is to provide enhanced services by sharing limited information without impinging an individuals rights, Luthra said. A users name was not shared by the company, he added.

Initially, WhatsApp was thought to have a sphere for communication, which was safe and trustworthy. A change in the policy has taken the trust away, the court said. You may not be sharing the name but attributes of the identity are shared, it added.

The Centre has supported the petitioners, saying there was a need for a regulatory regime for data protection. It had told the Supreme Court on April 18 that it was actively mulling to put in place a comprehensive data protection framework and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had already started consultations for preparing a draft law.

It said the mechanism was in the offing as an individuals freedom of choice needed to be protected.

Petitioners Karmanya Singh Sareen and Shreya Sethiboth students--have dragged the WhatsApp to court questioning its privacy policy.

The Delhi High Court had last year ruled that WhatsApp should delete all data in its possession till September 25, 2016, but said the company was free to share the data with Facebook post September 25, 2016, thus enabling subscribers to voluntarily withdraw from the service if they were not keen on sharing their data with Facebook.

The high court had asked the Centre and TRAI to examine the feasibility of bringing the messaging services under a regulatory regime in India. The petitioners have challenged the HC verdict in the top court.

Launched as an application in 2010, WhatsApp has millions of users, including over 160 million in India. Its privacy policy at the time of launch did not allow sharing of users data with any other company.
New Delhi, May 15

The Supreme Court on Monday said it was keeping open for adjudication in the future the issues of polygamy and nikah halala among Muslims as the Centre insisted deliberations on these aspects as well.

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The observation was made when Attorney-General (A-G) Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said the issues of polygamy and nikah halala were also part of the order of a two-judge Bench which had referred to the Constitutional Bench the three issues, including the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.



It may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future, a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar said.

Also read: Like pre-Islamic burying of girls alive: Arif on triple talaq

Heat is on: From politics to Triple Talaq



If triple talaq invalid, suggest way out: SC

The scope of referring had all the three issues that was divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the two-judge Bench, Rohatgi said.

A five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar said, It may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future.

The Centres assertion assumes significance in the backdrop of the remarks of the apex court that it will only deal with the issue of triple talaq that too if it was fundamental to Islam.

The A-G asked the Bench, also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, RF Nariman, UU Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, to make it clear that the issues of polygamy and nikah halala are still open and would be dealt with by other Bench in future.

It will be dealt with in future, the Bench clarified.

The Bench is hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.

The Centre has resumed its arguments in the case today.

During the last hearing, the apex court had observed that triple talaq is the worst and not a desirable form of dissolution of marriage among the Muslims, even though there were schools of thought which called it legal.

The remark was made by the Bench when senior lawyer Salman Khurshid referred to the various schools of thought and the stand of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) that triple talaq was abhorrent, yet valid.

The day-long hearing on the matter last Friday also saw two veterans, jurist Ram Jethmalani and former Union Minister and Islamic scholar Arif Mohammad Khan, coming out all guns blazing against the practice of triple talaq.

While Jethmalani attacked the practice on various constitutional grounds including the right to equality and termed it abhorrent, Khan said it was akin to the pre- Islamic era practice of burying a female child alive in the Arabian region.

Khan had said the whole Shariat law has been distorted as Shariat is the Holy Quran and not the opinion of these people (clerics). The Holy Quran considers the importance of family and it provides four steps before pronouncement of divorce.

Triple talaq is far from being fundamental and very far from being sacramental to Islam. It violates every good thing which Islam prescribes. What we are seeing in the form of triple talaq is similar to the pre-Islamic era practice where female infants were buried alive, he had said.

Jethmalani had said the right of triple talaq is available only to the husband and not to the wife and it breaches Article 14(Right to Equality) of the Constitution. He had said triple talaq was a discrimination on the ground of sex and this practice was abhorrent to the tenets of holy Quran and no amount of advocacy can save this sinful practice which is contrary to constitutional tenets.

How can a woman be allowed to become ex-wife only because her husband wants and this is the highest kind of unconstitutional behaviour, the noted jurist had said.

Khurshid, who is assisting the court in personal capacity, had said he himself found triple talaq sinful and anything which is sinful could not have been ordained by Islam. He also reiterated that triple talaq was a non-issue which does not require judicial scrutiny.

He had said the irrevocable nature of triple talaq can be negated if the three-time pronouncement of talaq in one go is considered one leaving the scope for reconciliation and re-union during the iddat (waiting) period.

Referring to the prevalent practice in Islamic nations, he had said even if one says talaq thrice in a go, it was considered as one, thus negating irrevocability of divorce.

The Bench had asked Khurshid if triple talaq was India- specific and what had led to its repeal in other countries.

Khurshid said whatever was happening in India now, might have happened in other countries, leading to the ban.

To this, the Bench had said, it is like death penalty which is abhorrent but permissible in the law of many countries and many have repealed it, adding whether anything which is sinful be taken as prescribed by God and made a law by man.

When advocate Farha Faiz, a petitioner in the case, had started her arguments, the bench had said it was not concerned with personal facts.

She had said what Imams and clerics say is not important, the only thing is that the holy Quran says everything.

The Holy Quran is in mandatory language. It is not an advise. If we are adopting one procedure for marriage, why cant we have one procedure for talaq also? she had said.

To this, the Bench had said, we cannot do that. We cannot wipe out (the difference between) Shias or Shunnis.

Faiz also alleged that the Muslim clerics were running a parallel judicial system like the trial courts and the high courts and the clerics were forcing Muslims not to go to the courts.

Point taken, you have raised a very valid and good point, the Bench had said.

The apex court has fixed a six-day schedule for hearing in which three days would be available for those challenging triple talaq and three days for those defending it. PTI


Ravi Dhaliwal



Tribune News Service



Gurdaspur, May 15



Security was tightened in the border districts of Gurdaspur and Pathankot as the BSF shot dead a Pakistani woman intruder near the Bharial post under Behrampur police station of Gurdaspur in the wee hours of Monday.



The 60-year-old woman, whose identity is being kept a secret, was gunned down around 3 am after she refused to heed to the warnings of security personnel of the 120 Battalion of the BSF.

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Officers said the security agencies shot her dead after suspecting that she might be a human bomb.



Sources say the ISI is trying to infiltrate boys in the age group of 10 to 15 in the guise of inadvertent crossers for collecting information on security agencies before the actual infiltration is undertaken by hardcore terrorists.



Mondays incident cannot be viewed in isolation. It should be seen in the larger context, an officer said.



As soon as the word spread, the Gurdaspur and Pathankot police went into an overdrive. Security around the railway stations, bus stands and the Pathankot ammunition dump was tightened.



Pathankot SSP Vivek Sheel Soni went to the Pathankot-Jammu National Highway in the morning to check the arrangements. By 8 am, several check posts on this stretch were established. The road links J&K with the rest of the country.



Gurdaspur SSP Bhupinderjeet Singh Virk said all roads leading from the city, particularly the Gurdaspur-Amritsar road via Batala and the Gurdaspur-Pathankot road via Dinanagar, were put under watch. I have set up a dozen check posts on these roads. We are also combing the border with a special team in collaboration with the BSF, he said.






Paris, May 14

Emmanuel Macron took power as President of France on Sunday in a solemn ceremony heavy with tradition at the Elysee Palace and he pledged to work to heal divisions in societya nod to the bitter campaign he fought to defeat a far-right leader.

His inauguration marked a first for the worlds fifth largest economy and founding member of the European Union, installing a 39-year-old centrist newcomer unknown to the wider public three years ago and who stands outside any traditional political grouping.

The former investment banker becomes the youngest post-war French leader and the first to be born after 1958 when President Charles de Gaulle put in place the countrys Fifth Republic.

In his first word in office, he addressed himself to the fraught and fiercely contested election campaign in which he overcame the National Fronts Marine Le Pen but which was a disappointment for almost half of Frances 47 million voters.

Many people feel dispossessed by globalisation as manufacturing jobs move abroad and as immigration and a fast-changing world blur their sense of a French identity.

A convinced European integrationist unlike Le Pen and other candidates, Macron said: The world and Europe need more than ever France, and a strong France, which speaks out loudly for freedom and solidarity.

Macron took power formally after an hour-long private meeting with outgoing President Francois Hollande in which official access to Frances nuclear missile launch codes were handed over.

Macron then accompanied his political patron, for whom he once worked as economy minister, down the red carpet to a waiting car in which the Socialist leader departed to applause from VIP guests and his former household staff.

The new President faces a host of daunting challenges including tackling stubbornly high unemployment, fighting Islamist-inspired violence and uniting a deeply divided country. Socialist Hollandes five years in power were plagued by a sluggish economy and bloody terror attacks that killed more than 230 people and he leaves office after a single term.  Agencies

Departing from tradition

The new President chose to be driven by military jeep rather than civilian limousine up to the Arc de Triomphe in driving rain to light the flame in tribute to Frances war dead at the tomb to the unknown soldier

Macron also showed determination in the fight against terrorism since the Arc is not far from where a policeman was shot dead by a gunman acting for Islamic State shortly before the May 7 second round of the election

The arrival in power of Macron, which was marked by a 21-gun salute, signalled at least a pause in the anti-globalisation trend that brought Donald Trump the US presidency and led British voters to pick a future outside the EU

The division and fractures in our society must be overcome. I know that the French expect much from me. Nothing will make me stop defending the higher interests of France and for working to reconcile the French.  Emmanuel Macron, French President
Seoul, May 14

North Korea fired a ballistic missile on Sunday in defiance of calls to rein in its weapons programme, days after a new leader in its old rival South Korea came to power pledging to engage it in dialogue.

The US Pacific Command said it was assessing the type of missile but it was not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Japanese Defence Minister Tomomi Inada said the missile could be of a new type.

The missile flew 700 km and reached an altitude of more than 2,000 km, according to officials in South Korea and Japan, further and higher than an intermediate-range missile North Korea successfully tested in February from the same region of Kusong, northwest of its capital, Pyongyang.

North Korea is widely believed to be developing an intercontinental missile tipped with a nuclear weapon that is capable of reaching the US. US President Donald Trump has vowed not to let that happen. Experts said the altitude the missile tested on Sunday reached meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it travelled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000 km experts said.  Reuters

US for tough sanctions

The White House on Sunday described a missile test by North Korea as a provocative behaviour and called for stronger sanctions. Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said.

A threat to global peace

North Koreas test-firing of a ballistic missile constitutes a threat to international peace and security as Pyongyang ratchets up tensions in the region, an EU spokesperson said. This and previous launches will further aggravate tensions in the region, he said.
Paris: Frances new President Emmanuel Macron, 39, wore a suit costing a modest 450 euros (just under $500) for his inauguration on Sunday, in an apparent attempt to dissociate himself from bling-bling politics.

The fact that Macrons staff revealed the cost of the dark suit, and that his wife Brigittes lavender Louis Vuitton outfit was loaned by the fashion house, was in itself noteworthy.

Once the favourite, Macrons conservative rival Francois Fillon became entangled during the campaign in financial scandals that included the gift from a wealthy businessman of two tailor-made suits worth about 13,000 euros.

With opinion polls showing honesty is among the top qualities desired in a President by French voters fed up with such scandals, Macrons choice of clothing also seemed to send a signal that he would be different from his predecessors.

Conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who led France from 2007 to 2012, was nicknamed President Bling-Bling for his flashy lifestyle. Macrons direct predecessor Francois Hollande, a self-styled Normal President, meanwhile came under fire for paying nearly 10,000 euros a month to his hairdresser.  Reuters
United Nations, May 14

The United States and Japan Monday called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on North Korea after Pyongyang carried out its latest missile test, diplomats said.

The meeting has been scheduled in principle for Tuesday afternoon, according to the UN mission of Uruguay, which currently holds the councils presidency.

North Korea launched a ballistic missile early today in what was seen as a challenge to South Koreas new President Moon Jae-In, a liberal who has said he wants to ease tensions with the North.

It was the Norths second missile firing in two weeks, and came amid mounting international concern over Pyongyangs progress in developing nuclear weapons that could be carried by long-range missiles.

The latest projectile, launched from a military base in Kusong near the countrys northwest coast, traveled some 435 miles (700 kilometers) before landing in the Sea of Japan.

There are no excuses that justify N. Koreas actions, Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, tweeted. This was close to home for Russia. China cant expect dialogue. This threat is real.

In Brussels, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu called Pyongyangs move a new flagrant breach of a series of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, constituting a threat to international peace and security.

And EU foreign affairs spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic denounced the launch as a threat to international peace and security (that could) further aggravate tensions in the region at a time when de-escalation is instead needed. For weeks, the Trump administration has been demanding a tightening of sanctions against the North and urging a tougher stance by Beijing, Pyongyangs principal ally.

Haley said on ABC that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was in a state of paranoia.

And so what were going to do is continue to tighten the screws, she said. He feels it. He absolutely feels it. And were going to continue, whether its sanctions, whether its press statements, anything that we have to do. US President Donald Trump issued a brief statement calling for tougher sanctions. Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea, he said.  AFP
Kathmandu: The counting of votes cast in Nepals first local-level polls held in two decades began on Monday after an all-party meeting here. The vote counting began in 11 local units of Kathmandu and six local units of Lalitpur district after an all-party meeting forged consensus at National Assembly Hall. The second round of polls in provinces 1, 2, 5 and 7 will be held on June 14. PTI

Cholera hits Yemens Sanaa; state of emergency declared

Sanaa: Authorities in Sanaa, which is controlled by Shia rebels, have declared a state of emergency in the Yemeni capital, where a deadly outbreak of cholera has spread rapidly. The Houthi-run health ministry said it was unable to contain this disaster: and appealed for international humanitarian assistance to deal with the crisis. Yemen is witnessing a devastating war between the Iranian-backed Houthis and the Saudi-supported government, and less than half of the countrys health facilities are functioning two years into the conflict. The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday the cholera outbreak has killed 115 people and left 8,500 ill between April 27 and Saturday. This is the second outbreak of cholera in less than a year in Yemen. AFP

Philippine lawmakers reject Dutertes impeachment

Manila: Philippine lawmakers rejected an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte that accused him of a crime against humanity over the deaths of thousands of people killed in his war on drugs. The complaint alleged Duterte had adopted a state policy of extrajudicial killings that led to more than 8,000 deaths in his first eight months as President, and was involved in mass murder as well as widespread corruption in his previous stint as a mayor of a southern city. The congressional justice committee quickly dismissed the complaint in its first day of hearings on the issue, overwhelmingly voting that it was insufficient in substance. Duterte won presidential elections last year after promising to launch an unprecedented crackdown on crime. AFP
Kolkata, May 14 (IBNS): aBook publishing company Power Publishers announced the launch of aa'aPower Publishers Classrooma'a; their new educational division.

This new division has published a range of school level textbooks, guidebooks for ICSE, ISC and West Bengal board schools recently. It also plans to come up with classroom courses of media studies.

Power Publishers aClassroom ahad published ICSE Sonkolita and ISC Probondo aO aGodyo Sonkolon aBengali text books for ICSE and ISC studentsa sometime back. Power Publishers Classroom also released ISC Accounts books for class 11 and 12 recently. These books are popular among ICSE and ISC board studentsa.

This year Power Publishers Classroom has come up with a complete range of West Bengal board guidebooks for students appearing for class 10 school leaving board exams.

The series of guidebooks is named as Power to Crack series. The first two books of this series released this week - Power to Crack Madhyamik English and Power to Crack Madhyamik Ganit Prakash.

aThese guidebooks aim to provide students with in depth information and better knowledge about the English and Mathematics chapters included ain atheir syllabus.

aPower to aCrack Madhyamik English will provide students with comprehensive English guide for every student who have been preparing for their exams all throughout the year and will help them to score well.

The book covers all the topics of the new syllabus introduced by WBBSE 2016.

Editor of Power to Crack Madhyamik English book, Anupriya Dutta said: We have provided additional textual questions and varied grammatical exercise for the students that will help them to improve both reading and writing skills. aWe have simplified the learning areas through compact definitions and necessary Bengali translations. This book will help the students solve exercises without guidance.

aPower to Crack Madhyamik Ganit Prakash concentrates on varied and miscellaneous mathematical exercise to provide the students with better knowledge and understanding about every chapter and discover simpler method to tackle difficult problems.

This book can be treated as an additional tool that can assist students in preparing for their Madhyamik maths paper.a

The books will be adistributed bya Future aBooks and also online stores like Amazon.in, Flipkart, ebay, shopclues, infibeam, powera-apublishers.com.
On May 9, 2017, a Sub-Inspector of the 15th Battalion of the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) and a suspected cadre of the I.K. Songbijit faction of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB-IKS) were killed in an encounter in the forests around the Manas National Park in Chirang District. One INSAS rifle was recovered from the encounter site.

On March 30, 2017, two NDFB-IKS militants, identified as Lukash Narzary akaLangfa and David Islary, were killed by the Security Forces (SFs) in an encounter at Simlagri under Amguri Police Station in Chirang District. One INSAS Rifle with 10 rounds of live ammunition, one 7.65 mm revolver with three rounds of ammunition and one Chinese grenade were recovered from the possession of the slain militants.

On February 9, 2017, unidentified militants shot dead two civilians, Bakul Rabha (40) and Saru (35), at Chengapara village under Kolaigaon Police Station in Udalguri District. Militants also set ablaze the hut of the deceased couple. "Since we found bullets, we are certain about the involvement of militants in the incident but we are yet to pinpoint the group. Both United Liberation Front of Asom-Independent (ULFA-I) and NDFB-IKS are active in the area and we are trying to identify the assailants," an unnamed Police official in Udalguri said.

These two districts - Chirang and Udalguri - along with two other districts - Kokrajhar and Baksa - form Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD). BTAD was formed after the signing of the Memorandum of Settlement (MoS) in February 2003 and the subsequent creation of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) in December 2003 under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. BTC administers BTAD.

An earlier Bodo Accord of 1993 had led to the formation of the Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC). The BAC arrangement ended in failure; its territory was not fully demarcated resulting in confusion and conflict, and further resentment amongst the Bodo tribesman.

Despite the MoS, the region has witnessed continuing violence. According to partial data collected by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), since its formation on December 7, 2003, BTAD has registered a total of at least 452 fatalities, including 188 civilians, 21 SF personnel and 242 militants, in 285 incidents of killing (data till May 14, 2017).

Worryingly, in year 2016, BTAD witnessed at least 41 fatalities (19 civilians and 22 militants) as compared to 22 fatalities in 2015 (two civilians and 20 militants), thus witnessed an alarming increase of 86.34 per cent. Though the number of total fatalities in the region has witnessed a cyclical trend, on year on year basis, the incidents of killing have been constantly increasing since 2013. The number of killing incidents stood at 23 in 2016 as against 21 in 2015 and 14 in 2014. There were 11 such incidents in 2013 as against eight in 2012.

The region has already recorded six fatalities, including two civilians, three militants and one trooper, in three separate incidents in 2017 (data till May 14, 2017).

NDFB-IKS continues to be linked to most of the violent incidents in BTAD. Of 78 fatalities (73 civilians and five SF personnel) reported from BTAD since November 20, 2012, the date of the announcement of the formation of the outfit, NDFB-IKS has been found responsible for 69 (64 civilian and five SF personnel). Of 19 civilian fatalities reported from the region in 2016, NDFB-IKS was responsible for 16. While one surrendered NDFB cadre was killed during a group fight in a camp, two civilian fatalities remain unattributed. No SF fatality was reported in 2016.

In the meantime, the outfit itself has suffered severe losses during 'Operation All Out' launched against the outfit on December 26, 2014, after the NDFB-IKS militantsmassacred over 69 Adivasis on December 23, 2014. The operation which still continues has resulted in elimination of 48 NDFB-IKS cadres.

NDFB, the parent party, was formed on October 3, 1986, with the aim of creating a "Sovereign Bodoland' and to secure "self-determination of the Bodos". NDFB entered into a Suspension of Operation (SoO) agreement with the Central and State Governments on June 1, 2005. However, following the October 30, 2008, serial blasts in Guwahati, which resulted in 81 deaths, the organization suffered a vertical split - the pro-talks faction of NDFB (NDFB-PTF) led by B. Sungthagra aka Dhiren Boro, and an Anti-talks faction led by the Ranjan Daimari aka D.R. Nabla, NDFB-Ranjan Daimari (NDFB-RD). On November 20, 2012. NDFB-RD split into two - NDFB-IKS and NDFB-RD. NDFB-RD entered into a formal SoO agreement on November 29, 2013, and this has been renewed periodically. Most recently, on January 1, 2017, the SoO agreements with NDFB-RD and NDFB-PTF were extended by another six months.

Though talks are also being held with Adivasi militant groups, including the All Adivasi National Liberation Army (AANLA), Adivasi Cobra Militants of Assam (ACMA), Adivasi People's Army (APA), National Santhal Liberation Army (NSLA), Birsa Commando Force (BCF) and Santhal Tiger Force (STF); anti-talks faction of the NSLA (NSLA-ATF) and Adivasi Defence Force (ADF) remain active in BTAD.

There is, moreover, a schism between the various groups inhabiting shared spaces in BTAD. Since its formation, the BTAD region has witnessed three ethnic clashes between Bodos and Non-Bodos. In 2008 clashes claimed 55 lives, 109 lives were lost in 2012 and 46 in 2014. During the May 1-12, 2014, violence, heavily armed NDFB-IKS militants targeted the Muslim community living across the Baksa and Kokrajhar Districts.

Worryingly, another emerging threat is the radicalization of Muslims and the presence of Islamist militants in the BTAD. 31 Islamists militants [including 19 from Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB)] have been arrested in the BTAD area since the October 2, 2014, Burdwan blasts in neighbouring West Bengal. Indeed, one of the key JMB operative, Lal Mohammed aka Ibrahim (30), suspected to be involved in the Burdwan blasts, reportedly told his interrogators that JMB's subversive activities in Assam were to 'counter Bodo aggression' against Muslims. Ibrahim was arrested on April 18, 2015, from Jharkhand's Pakur District.

That the 2003 accord has failed to bring desired results is evident from the continuing violence in the region. Worse, even NDFB-PTF is demanding a separate Bodoland State. NDFB-RD also supports the creation of a separate State. The separate statehood demand is also backed by the All Bodo Student's Union (ABSU), the initiator of the separate 'Bodoland State' with 'Divide Assam 50-50' slogan in the 1980's. Claiming that the BTAD experiment has failed, ABSU 'president' Promod Boro observed, on April 27, 2017

Creation of the Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC) after the first Bodo Accord of 1993 proved futile, leading to its scrapping and a fresh Bodo Accord in 2003... After that, the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) experiment too has proved inadequate, convincing all Bodo groups that a separate Bodoland State is the only option left.

Promod Boro issued this statement a day after meeting Union Home Minister (UHM) Rajnath Singh along with Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and leaders of other Bodo organizations, including NDFB-PTF. In the meeting, Union Home Minister (UHM) Rajnath Singh had offered a vague assurance that, "Our Government will take all-out measures to ensure overall development of the Bodos living in Assam."

ABSU renewed its demand for a separate 'Bodoland State' on December 2, 2010, on the grounds that BTC had failed to fulfil the hopes and aspirations of the Bodos and that the Assam Government had failed to protect the identity, culture and language of the people. The creation of a separate Telangana State through the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in Southern India on June 2, 2014, was also a factor, since an implicit moratorium of the formation of new states was broken. Indeed, in an interview, published on August 20, 2013, Promod Boro argued, "It's the same justification that was applied in Telangana, or before that in the creation of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand. The aspirations are the same, only the people are different."

BTAD has failed to address Bodo grievances, even as it has exacerbated conflict with other ethnic groupings. Such group-focused autonomous bodies give rise to further sets of grievances, both within and outside the target group. Clearly, generous developmental funding and autonomy are no panacea to ethnic insurgencies. Issues related to identities are barely static and are often competitive in the Northeast; consequently attempting to pacify individual ethnic groups through partisan accords in an ethnically diverse region is fundamentally flawed approach. Inclusive democracy, founded in the rule of law, and an urgent focus on long neglected issues of development are needed, even as groupings that choose armed violence are dealt with through effective counter-insurgency campaigns.
(By Tsem Rinpoche and Pastor Adeline Woon)

Among the many countries around the world, Sri Lanka is known for its rich Buddhist culture and heritage. It is where the the ancient city of Polonnaruwa is located, a place where kings ruled Sri Lankas central plains more than 1,000 years ago. It was a thriving commercial and religious city from the 11th to the 13th centuries, and the ancient city has many precious relics and Buddha statues.

The ancient city of Polonnaruwa has been declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO as it is one of the best planned archaeological relic sites in Sri Lanka, a reputable testimony to the greatness of its first rulers. In 1982, Duran Duran filmed their Save a Prayer music video amongst the beautiful scenery there.

Present day Polonnaruwa is the main town of Polonnaruwa District located in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka. It is the second largest city, known as one of the cleanest and more attractive cities in the country with a lush and green environment, amazingly ancient buildings, and the big attraction of the Parakrama Samudra Lake built in 1200 CE. The new town of Polonnaruwa now hosts the Kaduruwela area whilst the remaining is the ancient city with the same name.

Located 22 minutes away from Polonnaruwa is Giritale village. The driving distance between Giritale and Polonnaruwa is approximately 19 kilometers (11.8 miles) by car. Giritale is 216 kilometers away from northwest Colombo, 140 kilometers northwest of Kandy, 104 kilometers southwest of Anuradhapura and 30 kilometers northwest of Dambulla. Surrounding Giritale are various sites such as the Lotus Bath, the Gal Viharaya (Rock Temple), the majestic kings council, the Lanka Thilaka Viharaya, and the statue of Parakramabahu  one of Sri Lankas greatest kings. These are to name just a few of the many tourist attractions in close proximity to Giritale.

Giritale has a lake that was built by King Agbo II in the 12th century and it is said to be the deepest lake in Polonnaruwa and includes one of the most extensive ancient irrigation systems within Sri Lanka. Giritale was a place that didnt attract that much attention, in order for it to remain unspoilt, and without large groups of visitors.

What is priceless is experiencing the calm and feeling the gentle breeze that constantly blows across the lake creating conditions for the mind to relax and forget all lifes worries. The extraordinary sight of the ghostly image of Gunners Rock (Dimbulagala) standing atop the lakeshore through the morning mist adds to the mystic of the place.

The Minneriya-Giritale National Park is formed by the catchment area and the forestry that blends seamlessly with Minneriya Lake. There is an abundance of safari jeeps ready to offer transport at the entrances located near the Minneriya part of the Park, and it is not uncommon to see many wildlife around Giritale itself. Hence, Minneriya and Giritale form one of Sri Lankas Important Bird Areas (IBA). Giritale also seems to have a magnetic effect that draws in large flocks of diverse avian fauna.

Flocks of hundreds of egrets belonging to various subspecies cross the shoreline and attend to their catches daily. Their greatest threat or competition comes from eagles and falcons, circling the waters surface waiting and timing their dive to catch fish.

The aerial waltz acted out by these two species of avian predators is enough to keep an observer spell bound. At times this aerial dance swells with dramatic effect when flocks of egrets also decide to join in, forming vortex spanning hundreds of feet into the air.

Walking around in the lush, resplendent green plains of Giritale can be a perfect getaway. The silence is serene and the cool breeze is soothing, what more can one ask for? As the white-green grass sways silently in the gentle breeze, local fishermen set out in their boats, heading out to draw in their catch. On the horizon men and women alike dot the placid lake, carefully hauling in nets onto their boats. The visual feast is something extraordinary today.

Although it has undergone extensive renovations during the past century, Giritale holds strong to its ancient roots. The sluice gate of the bund is still clearly seen, set in smooth granite. When the water level rises sufficiently, the outlet swings to life, gushing out water onto the irrigation canal that has been conveying water to the paddy fields for centuries.

The mystery of this outlet is that the sluice inlet is yet to be discovered, despite numerous attempts to find it. Only time will tell, how the kings of the long lost era preserved it as a well held secret. For certain, the ancient monarchs wanted to be sure that the people are never without water. In addition, scattered across the plains are carvings on rocks, presumably for anchorage of some superstructure, which remains lost in time.

If visitors are not lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the natural wildlife in Giritale, they can visit the next best show, a wildlife museum in close vicinity. This museum offers a limited yet exclusive collection of specimens including a few notables, such as the elusive black leopard, the white deer, the skull of Sri Lankas last known elephant with crossed tusks, and many other animals which are preserved as stuffed specimens such as a baby elephant, sambar and flying squirrels to name a few.

Last but not least, is the magnificent 12 meter (39 feet) high standing replica of Avukana Buddha (also spelt as Aukana, Awkana) that was believed to have been sculpted during the 5th century, during the reign of Dhatusena. There are some sources that date the Buddha statue to the 12th or 13th century. The best time to see this magnificent representation of the Avukana Buddha is at dawn, when the suns rays cast onto the statue revealing its finely carved features.

The replica of the Avukana statue, like the original one located in Dambulla is in typical Sri Lankan Buddhist style, first recorded in the 4th century during the Anuradhapura period. This style features the Buddha in robes with the right shoulder exposed.The edge of the robe is shown on the left side. The open end of the robe is usually held up due to an upraised left hand, over which the open side hangs. This style and representation is related to the Mahayana forms of worship in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Buddhas pose and ashiva mudra signifies blessings, while the burst of fire above his head represents the power of complete enlightenment.

A number of tourist hotels have been built bordering the Giritale Lake, and Giritale has now become one of Sri Lankas major tourist destinations, not only with foreigners but also locals. Throughout the years tourist numbers at Giritale have increased tremendously. All the hotels are built in such a manner that guests get panoramic views of the Giritale Lake from their rooms. The general area of Giritale is also said to have been venue for monks retreat during the time of the ancient kings. A neglected rock pond and a lone temple at Agbopura in the jungle hint at that.

Travellers Information

How To Get There

Bus from Colombo (6 hours), Kandy (3 hours), Anuradhapura (3 hours) or Dambulla (1 hour). Or hire a car with driver.

What To Wear

Wear clothes that cover knees and shoulders (especially women) when visiting some of the ruins at the Ancient City.

Where To Stay In Giritale

Deer Park Hotel

The Deer Park has accommodation in a string of cute little buildings scattered around beautiful wooded grounds with fine lake views. Visitors can choose between the spacious rooms and even larger two-storey cottages, all with nice open-air showers. Facilities include a cute two-tier pool and Ayurveda centre.Address: The Deer Park, Girithale, Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka.

Tel: +94 (0)27 777 7777 | +94 (0)27 224 6272

Fax: +94 (0)27 27 224 6470

Email: Reservations:reservations@deerparksrilanka.com

Website: www.deerparksrilanka.com

The Deer Park has accommodation in a string of cute little buildings scattered around beautiful wooded grounds with fine lake views. Visitors can choose between the spacious rooms and even larger two-storey cottages, all with nice open-air showers. Facilities include a cute two-tier pool and Ayurveda centre.Address: The Deer Park, Girithale, Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. Tel: +94 (0)27 777 7777 | +94 (0)27 224 6272 Fax: +94 (0)27 27 224 6470 Email: Reservations:reservations@deerparksrilanka.com Website: www.deerparksrilanka.com Giritale Hotel

The longest running of Giritales hotels, looking a bit dated in places (the pool is so old its almost retro), although the recently renovated rooms (all with lake views) are cosy and well maintained, and the superb location, in a commanding position high above Giritale lake cant be beat.Address: Giritale Hotel, Giritale, Polonnnaruwa, Sri Lanka.

Tel: +94 (0)27 224631

Email: giritaleh@carcumb.com

Website: www.giritalehotel.com



References:

Avukana Buddha statue from Wikipedia.org

AGiritale: The Silent Angel Of Rajarata from Btoptions.lk

Gavin Thomas, The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka, 5ft edition, November 2015

Giritale: the 12th century Ocean Lake from Archives.sundayobserver.lk

The case of Avukana Buddha: Misconceptions about Sri Lankan Buddha image by D. G. B. de Silva from Island.lk

For more interesting information:



Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 13 of the Malaysian Copyright Act 1987, allowance is made for fair dealing for purposes such as non-profit research, private study, criticism, review or the reporting of current events. The Operator and author(s) of TsemRinpoche.com, a not-for-profit blog, do not claim ownership on the intellectual property rights of the contents, images and/or videos reproduced in this article. Any subsisting intellectual property rights shall belong to the legal owner of the contents, images and/or videos.
Beijing, May 15 (IBNS): China's state-run media has said that India's decision to boycott over sovereignty issue the "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) summit in Beijing in which Pakistan is a participant, will not affect the regional cooperation to build infrastructure for connectivity,

"While India recently issued an official statement saying it would not be part of the One Belt and One Road (B&R) initiative, it will not affect the trend toward cooperation in infrastructure development among its neighboring countries at all," said Global Times in an editorialized article.

"China has formally invited India to join the B&R. If India doesn't want to take a part on the stage, then it should just be a good member of the audience. The role is still available if India changes its mind, but it may only be a small role if it is left too late," it said criticising India.

"India also cited the potential debt burden as one of its other concerns, saying that, 'Connectivity initiatives must follow the principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create an unsustainable debt burden for communities.'

"It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbors' debt burden, the neighbors appear willing to take on more," read the article bylined by a Global Times reporter.

Earlier, amid an Indian boycott of "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) summit that began at Beijing on Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that all countries should respect each other's "sovereignty and territorial integrity."

In his opening remarks, Jinping said: "All countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major concerns."

Christened as China Pakistan Economic Corridor, the 57 billion-dollar project envisages connectivity across Asia on to Europe through ports, railways and roads.

Besides Pakistan, India's other neighbours Sri Lanka and Nepal are attending the summit.

India boycotted the summit over sovereignty issues as the initiative for cross border connectivity runs through Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

The decision has been taken on the ground of sovereignty as India considers POK its part.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay in a media statement on Saturday said: "Regarding the so-called 'China-Pakistan Economic Corridor', which is being projected as the flagship project of the... OBOR, the international community is well aware of India's position... No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity."

"Guided by our principled position in the matter, we have been urging China to engage in a meaningful dialogue on its connectivity initiative," he stated.

Baglay also mentioned that India is awaiting positive response from China.

The Chinese initiative is also being seen as a move to establish its dominance in Asia, including India's neigbhours.


Who are the Kalmyks?

Prior to the 15th Century and a long time ago, there were many west Mongolian tribes who referred to themselves by their respective tribal names. Spread throughout this region are countless archeological sites with petroglyphs, cave paintings, standing stone monuments and ancient forts that date back as far as 10,000 years.

By the 15th Century, four major West Mongolian tribes had formed an alliance, adopting Dorben Oirat as their collective name. However, this alliance subsequently dissolved and the West Mongolian tribes were simply called Oirat.

In the early 17th Century, a second Oirat state emerged, called the Dzungar Khanate. Khanate is a political entity ruled by a Khan or Khagan.

While the Dzungars (initially Choros, Dorbet and Khoit tribes) were establishing their empire in western Inner Asia, the Khoshuts were establishing the Khoshut Khanate in Tibet, protecting the Gelugpa sect from its enemies, and the Torghuts formed the Kalmyk Khanate in the lower Volga region, north of the Caspian Sea. (See map)

The Khoshuts of the Dzungar Khanate remained influential until the Qing annihilated them in 1755.

Ayuka Khan (1669  1724)

Born Torghut Prince Iska Minh, Tsem Rinpoches maternal ancestry can be traced back to Ayuka Khan who was a Kalmyk Mongol leader whose rule brought the Kalmyk Khanate to its zenith in terms of military, economic, and political might.

According to Elza-Bair Mataskovna Gouchinova in her book The Kalmyks, Ayuka Khans childhood was spent with his maternal grandfather, Erdin Khun-taiji (Supreme Chief), whose guidance stimulated Ayukas aspiration to leadership over the steppe peoples.

Ayuka Khan had Russia as an ally and protected the latters southern borders on behalf of Russia, engaging in numerous military expeditions against the tribes of Central Asia, the North Caucasus and Crimea. This included the suppression of the Astrakhan (1705-1706) and Bulavin (17071709) uprisings, as well as in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) and the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723).

To honour his service in the Russo-Persian War, Ayuka Khan received a golden sword and a belt covered with precious stones from Peter the Great.

This alliance was significant as Peter the Great was the cultural revolutionist or progressive who replaced the traditionalist and medieval socio-political systems with modern, scientific and westernised systems based on The Enlightenment. This included principles centred on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and this base came to advance ideals like liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

During this era, Ayuka Khan also kept close contacts with his Oirat kinsmen in Dzungaria, as well as His Holiness the 5th Dalai Lama in Tibet.

The Kalmyks are the only inhabitants of Europe whose national religion is Buddhism. They embraced Buddhism in the early part of the 17th Century and belong to the Tibetan Buddhist Gelugpa tradition.

In 1690, the 5th Dalai Lama bestowed Kalmyk Taisha Ayuka Khans title with a seal. In actuality, it was the 5th Dalai Lamas Regent Desi Sangye Gyatso who carried this out since the 5th Dalai Lama passed away in 1682 but his Regent kept this a secret for 15 years before sending a delegation to the Kangxi Emperor of Qing China in 1697 to announce that the 5th Dalai Lama had died and the 6th had been discovered.

After Ayuka Khans rule, internal feuds weakened the Kalmyks and Russian interference increased. In 1771, the Russian Tsarina Catherine II abolished Kalmyk self-government and integrated the Khanate into the Russian Empire.

Most of the Torghut Kalmyks moved back to Dzungaria in 1775, and are now known as the Torghut of Xinjiang in China who number more than 150,000. There are also more than 10,000 living in Khovd Province, Mongolia and over 180,000 Kalmyks living in Russia.

Torghut Khans of the Kalmyk Khanate Kho Orluk (d. 1644)

Shukhur Daichin (16441661)

Puntsuk (16611669)

Ayuka Khan (16691724)

Tseren Donduk Khan (17241735)

Donduk Ombo Khan (17351741)

Donduk Dashi Khan (17411761)

Ubashi Khan (17621771)

Badma Ubushi Noyon (Ubashi Khan) (1744  1774)

Noyon  The Qing Dynasty, which ruled Mongolia from 1694 to 1911, entrusted rule in Mongolia to the descendants of Genghis Khan, who were also called Noyon.

Ubashi Khan was the great-grandson of Ayuka Khan and the last Khan of the Kalmyk Khanate. In January 1771, he led the return migration of the majority of the Kalmyk people from the Kalmyk steppe to Dzungaria, their ancestral homeland, then under the control of the Qing Dynasty.

Since the Kalmyks were Tibetan Buddhists of the Gelugpa tradition, when Ubashi Khan decided to return his people to Dzungaria, His Holiness the 8th Dalai Lama was contacted to request his blessings and to set the date of departure.

After consulting the astrological chart, the 8th Dalai Lama set the return date but at the moment of departure, the weakening of the ice on the Volga River allowed only those Kalmyks who roamed on the left or eastern bank to leave. Those on the right bank were forced to stay behind.

Approximately 200,000 Kalmyks began the journey from their pastures on the left bank of the Volga River to Dzungaria. Approximately five-sixths of the Torghuts followed Ubashi Khan. Most of the Khoshuts, Choros and Khoits also accompanied the Torghuts on their journey to Dzungaria. The Dorbet tribe, by contrast, elected not to go at all.

The total size of the departing group has been variously estimated between 150,000 and 400,000 people, with perhaps as many as six million animals (cattle, sheep, horses, camels and dogs). Beset by raids, thirst and starvation, approximately 85,000 survivors made it to Dzungaria, where they settled near the Ejin River with the permission of the Qing Manchu Emperor Qianlong. The Kalmyks who resettled in Qing territory (Dzungaria) became known as Torghuts.

After failing to stop the flight, Catherine the Great abolished the Kalmyk Khanate and the title of Khan, making Ubashi Khan the last to hold this title.

Bayir Wang, Palta Wang and Migyur Wang

Wang (), is a title for a descendant of Qasar or any of Genghis Khans brothers who had his own fief.

Palta Wang (1882  1920)

Tsem Rinpoches great-grandfather Prince Palta or Palta Wang was a senior prince of the Torghuts and the administrative ruler of Xinjiang Province.

In 1906, the Chinese Qing dynasty transferred western Mongolias Altai Uriyangkhai, New Torghut, and Khoshut banners from the jurisdiction of Khovd Province to the new Altai district, with Chenghua as its capital (now Altay in Xinjiang).

In 1913, the new Altai district was divided between newly independent Mongolia and the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Torgut Prince Palta became the administrative ruler of Xinjiang Province during the early 20th Century.

At the same time in 1917, Prince Paltas father Prince Bayar (Bayir) or Bayir Wang moved to Peking to take up the post of senator of the Chinese Republic.

As a young man, Palta Wang is described to have astonished Chinese scholars by his profound knowledge of Chinese history and literature. He was also well versed in English and Japanese.

The famous Finnish orientalist G. Ramsted was reportedly greatly impressed by the young Palta Wang when during a visit to the estate of his father, Bayir Wang, they talked about such diverse subjects as Buddhist philosophy, and the mutual influence of western and oriental culture in the future.

Palta Wang believed that a persons greatest riches were his intellect, erudition and knowledge, and wanted his four children to receive both an oriental and a western education, thus including elements of a Eurasian nature.

Palta Wang was also a statesman with a thorough grasp of military science which he had studied in Tokyo in the years 19061908.

Mingyur Wang (unknown  1975)

In 1915 at his request, Tsar Nicholas II granted Palta Wangs eldest son, Prince Mindzhur-Dordzhi (Mingyur Wang), admission to the Russian officers school for the nobility in St. Petersburg. When this son returned to Peking three years later, he was initially considered by some as a Russophile, but after his fathers death inherited his titles and dedicated himself to the task of increasing the well-being of his people.

In 1932, Tsem Rinpoches grandfather Mingyur Wang traveled with a large entourage from Mongolia to Tibet. They brought with them tributes of gold as they were going to pay homage to His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama. In return, the 13th Dalai Lama presented them with the Panchen Lamas hat. It has a label of authentication which bears the innermost seal of the Panchen Rinpoche of Tashilhunpo.

In a sighted auction, two pieces of paper showed a passport that granted free passage to Prince Mingyur for his visit to Tibet. This included information about and approval for his entourage of up to 25 people, the duration of their travels, how many animals (eight camels and 64 horses), and even the military checkpoints they stopped at during their journey.

In 1949, after the Guomintang was defeated, Mingyur Wang fled with his family to Tibet, then arduously to India where they faced death during their journey. From India, he emigrated to Taiwan.

Mingyur Wang briefly served as a member of parliament in Taiwan and passed away in 1975.



15

15

17



1755

1669 1724



Elza-Bair Mataskovna GouchinovaThe Kalmyks

1705-17061707-17091700-17211722-1723







17

1690. 1682151697

1771

17751518

 1644

16441661

16611669

16691724

17241735

17351741

17411761

17621771

1744  1774

Noyon16941911

  17711





20

1540





 Qasar

1882  1920



1906

1913201917

G. RamstedG. Ramsted



19061908

  1975

1915

1932

2564

19491975



Sources

https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/me/panchen-lamas-hat.html

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ayuka_Khan

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ubashi_Khan

The Kalmyks (Caucasus World: Peoples of the Caucasus) 1st Edition; Elza-Bair Mataskovna Gouchinova

Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire, Christopher P. Atwood, Indiana University, Bloomington

http://www.barkman.nl/en/werk_compleet.jsp



Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 13 of the Malaysian Copyright Act 1987, allowance is made for fair dealing for purposes such as non-profit research, private study, criticism, review or the reporting of current events. The Operator and author(s) of TsemRinpoche.com, a not-for-profit blog, do not claim ownership on the intellectual property rights of the contents, images and/or videos reproduced in this article. Any subsisting intellectual property rights shall belong to the legal owner of the contents, images and/or videos.
New Delhi, May 15 (IBNS) : The Supreme Court on Monday turned down the appeal of Calcutta High Court judge CS Karnan to recall the order for his arrest for implementation of the sentence for six months jail, reports said.

Justice Karnan, who was sentenced to imprisonment by the top court on contempt ground-the first of its kind in the country's judicial history-appealed to it last week against his conviction questioning about its constitutional validity.

He was held guilty of contempt by a seven-judge constitution bench after he named 20 judges he said were "corrupt".

After his conviction, justice Karnan went missing and the police of three states-West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh- made futile attempts to locate him.

The apex court has banned the media from reporting any of his statements or rulings as Justice Karnan has defied the Supreme Court at every step by coming out with his own "rulings" against the seven judges.
Edmond state Rep. Ryan Martinez asked police officers if he should call the governor when they arrested him last week for suspension of driving under the influence, his second such offense since 2014.
New Delhi, May 15 (IBNS): Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated the two-day second meeting of National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (NPDRR) here on Monday.

The theme of the Second meeting of NPDRR is Disaster Risk Reduction for Sustainable Development: Making India resilient by 2030.

The Union Minister for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Harsh Vardhan, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju and Additional Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Dr. P. K. Mishra were also present on the occasion.

The NPDRR is a multi-stakeholders National Platform headed by the Union Home Minister and it promotes participatory decision making in disaster management, and strengthens federal policy of our country.



Speaking on the occasion, Rajnath Singh said that NPDRR is a multi-stakeholders National Platform for sharing the experiences in disaster management and for making a collective effort for disaster risk reduction.

He emphasized the role of prevention and mitigation in reducing disaster losses.

He pointed out that 1 extra Rupee spent on disaster preparedness and mitigation could save 10 Rupees of disaster loss.

He recollected global agreements like Sendai Framework, Sustainable Development Goal and Paris Agreement on Climate Change (COP21) for disaster risk reduction.



He highlighted the ongoing efforts of Governments in disaster risk reduction like preparation of disaster management plan and policy, development of early warning systems, construction of cyclone shelters and saline embankments, raising of disaster response forces at national and state levels and capacity building of communities through continuous training and awareness programme.



Shri Rajnath Singh also shared the recent initiatives of Government of India for increasing the regional co-operation, like launching of dedicated satellite for South Asian Countries, Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR) 2016 and setting up of SAARC disaster management centre.

He appealed to the stakeholders to prevent preventable death caused by disasters and also prepare an action plan for vulnerable communities of societies. As sustainable developments are closely related with better disaster management, he urged all stakeholders to make all development initiatives disaster resilient. He informed that 14 pre-events were organized as build up to this meeting.



Kiren Rijiju, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, informed that India is a disaster prone country and stressed the need to continuously enhance our preparedness and risk reduction measures.

He referred to 10 point-agenda for disaster risk reduction given by our Prime Minister during AMCDRR 2016 and urged the participants to draw concrete plans to implement this agenda into reality.

He requested the disaster managers to give proper consideration to geo-physical condition of the particular State/UTs, while making any action plan for disaster risk reduction.



R. K. Jain, Member, National Disaster Management Authority in his welcome address highlighted the achievements of Government of India in disaster risk reduction.



A film emphasizing the theme that Disaster Management is Everybodys Business was screened. Further, version 3.0 of National Database on Emergency Management (NDEM) was launched by Rajnath Singh. This version of 3.0 is device independent and browser independent and equipped with latest resource mapping tools and audio and video conference facilities.
Udaku Special

NAFASI ZA AJIRA BONYEZA HAPA





Samaritans Purse has brought three severely injured Tanzanian children, the only survivors of a bus accident that killed 35 people and recently made world news, to the United States. They will be receiving specialized trauma care at a hospital in Sioux City, Iowa.





On Friday, May 12, Samaritans Purse sent our DC-8 airplane to Tanzania to pick up the childrenWilson, a 12-year-old boy; Sadhia, a 12-year-old girl; and Doreen, a 13-year-old girl. Their mothers have accompanied them on the journey, along with a Tanzanian doctor and nurse, as well as Ed Morrow, director of World Medical Mission, the medical arm of Samaritans Purse. They all arrived in Charlotte late Sunday night, May 14, and were quickly transferred to a specially equipped Phoenix Air plane that transported them to Sioux City.





When I heard about the tragic bus accident in Tanzania and the three children who survived, I knew Samaritans Purse had to do everything we could to help, President Franklin Graham said.





Thirty-two of the childrens primary school classmates and three adultstwo teachers and the driverwere killed in the May 6 crash when their bus plunged off a gravel road into a steep ravine in remote northern Tanzania. They were on the way to another school to take an exam when the accident occurred. Tanzania President John Magufuli called the accident a national tragedy.
New Delhi, May 15 (IBNS) Fighting to save Kulbhushan Jadhav, the Indian national on death row in Pakistan, India on Monday told the International Court of Justice that there is an "immediate threat" that he may be executed any time that calls for urgent suspension of the sentence, media reports said.

"The situation is grave, it is urgent, and hence we approached this court at such short notice," senior lawyer Harish Salve, representing India, told the UN court as an an open hearing of the case was underway at the Great Hall of Justice at the Hague in Netherlands following India's challenge to Jhadhav's death penalty.

Jadhav, a former navy officer, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court last month after being convicted of spying.

Describing it as "farcical," India said Pakistan must ensure he is not executed until a court decision.

Salve said Pakistan had repeatedly denied consular access to India, which violates the provisions of Vienna Congress and no document of Jadhav's trial process was given by Islamabad.

"The basic rights of Jadhav were thrown to the winds," he said.

Last week, after India challenged the death sentence, Pakistan was asked by the International Court to put it on hold.

The last time the two countries fought at the world court was when Pakistan's maritime reconnaissance aircraft Atlantique was shot down by the Indian Air Force in the Kutch region in August, 1999; all 16 naval personnel on board were killed.

In 2000 the court dismissed Pakistan's claim, saying it had no jurisdiction in the case.
A health worker screens a child for signs of malnutrition at a health center in Nyumanzi refugee settlement in Uganda, May 2017.  UNHCR/Jiro Ose

GENEVA  As fighting and hunger drive ever-greater numbers of desperate refugees to flee South Sudan, UNHCR and its partners are today calling on donors to step up funding to provide life-saving aid.

The UN Refugee Agency, the World Food Programme and 57 other humanitarian agencies are seeking more than US$1.4 billion to provide food, shelter and other vital support to more than 1.8 million South Sudanese refugees through the end of 2017.

Each day 2,800 men, women and children are fleeing worsening violence and looming famine, with many arriving in surrounding countries pinched by hunger with nothing but the clothes of their back, haunted by horrific experiences.

Besides being the largest refugee crisis in Africa ... South Sudan is one of the greatest tragedies of our time.

Besides being the largest refugee crisis in Africa  South Sudan is one of the greatest tragedies of our time, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told a donor conference in Geneva at which the appeal was launched on Monday (May 15).

South Sudan is the worlds fastest growing refugee crisis. Among those seeking safety in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR) are around one million children.

Grandi said refugees were reaching neighbouring countries with numerous bad stories cataloguing a very long list of evils including extortion, forced recruitment, rape and killings.

UNHCR and WFP urge donors to step up support for refugees fleeing South Sudan

A previous joint humanitarian appeal for South Sudanese refugees sought US$ 1.2 billion, but was only 14 per cent funded. Since it was made, the situation in South Sudan has continued to deteriorate.

We cannot do a lot of the things we need to do in terms of basic relief and addressing some of the worst consequences of the incredible violence that prevails in South Sudan, Grandi said in a subsequent interview.

In addition, refugees trauma also needs to be addressed, but to do all this resources are needed.

Worst refugee crisis in Africa: 1.8m South Sudanese have fled war+famine. 1.4bn $ needed to help them+host countries. @WFPChief @WorldVision pic.twitter.com/wuu3WmkthB  Filippo Grandi (@RefugeesChief) May 15, 2017

The current rate at which people are fleeing South Sudan exceeds the humanitarian communitys already pessimistic estimates. For example, the number of people who sought refuge in Sudan in March surpassed the expected figure for the entire year.

Uganda, meanwhile, is also seeing higher-than-expected numbers of arrivals and, at the current rate of displacement, is soon tipped to host over one million South Sudanese refugees. Many of those arriving say they have taken dangerous journeys on foot, often without food or water.

If we get the funding we need we can stave off the danger of famine spreading.

If we get the funding we need we can stave off the danger of famine spreading, said WFP Executive Director David Beasley. We urgently require additional resources to save lives and pull the country back from the brink.

UNHCR coordinates the overall response with governments, humanitarian agencies as well as with refugees and host communities. Currently Uganda hosts some 898,000 refugees, with 375,000 in Sudan, 375,000 in Ethiopia, 97,000 in Kenya, 76,000 in DRC and 2,200 in CAR.

WFP provides food and cash assistance to more than 1.8 million refugees in the neighbouring countries.

The updated response plan does not cover humanitarian needs of around two million people displaced internally in South Sudan.
A health worker screens a child for signs of malnutrition at a health center in Nyumanzi refugee settlement in Uganda, May 2017.  UNHCR/Jiro Ose

GENEVA  The UN Refugee Agency and the World Food Programme today urged donors to step up support for desperate refugees fleeing South Sudan. Humanitarian agencies are seeking US$ 1.4 billion to provide life-saving aid to South Sudanese refugees in the six neighbouring countries until the end of 2017  according to an updated response plan presented in Geneva on Monday.

The South Sudanese refugee response plan so far remains only 14 per cent funded.

Bitter conflict and deteriorating humanitarian conditions in South Sudan are driving people from their homes in record numbers, said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

The situation in South Sudan continues to worsen  with a combination of conflict, drought and famine leading to further displacement and a rapid exodus of people fleeing one of the worlds most severe crises.

The suffering of the South Sudanese people is just unimaginable, said WFP Executive Director David Beasley. They are close to the abyss. Violence is at the root of this crisis. Aid workers often cannot reach the most vulnerable hungry people. Many are dying from hunger and disease, many more have fled their homeland for safety abroad.

South Sudan has now become the worlds fastest-growing refugee crisis, with more than 1.8 million refugees  including one million children  having sought safety in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic.

The current rate of people fleeing South Sudan exceeds the humanitarian communitys already pessimistic estimates. For example, the number of people fleeing to Sudan in March surpassed the expected figure for the entire year. Uganda is also seeing higher than expected arrivals and at this rate is likely to soon host over one million South Sudanese refugees.

Our funding situation forced us to cut food rations for many refugees in Uganda," Beasley said. "I find that unacceptable, and I hope you do too. These are families like yours and mine, our brothers and sisters, and the world must help them now  not later. Please help us do the job these people need us to do."

UNHCR welcomed the outstanding generosity refugees have received in South Sudans neighbouring countries, but is alarmed by a situation which is now critical.

Countries like Uganda have done all one could expect, but wont be able to sustain support for refugees unless the rest of the world steps up, warned UNHCRs Grandi while presenting the revised needs to donors in Geneva.

With acute underfunding, humanitarian agencies are struggling to provide food, water, nutrition support, shelter and health services to refugees.

Communities hosting refugees are among the worlds poorest and are under immense pressure.

Helping refugees is not just about providing emergency aid, said UNHCRs Grandi. It also means supporting governments and communities in neighbouring countries to shore up services and economies in the areas receiving them.

UNHCR coordinates the overall response with governments, humanitarian agencies as well as with refugees and host communities. Currently Uganda hosts some 898,000 refugees, with 375,000 in Sudan, 375,000 in Ethiopia, 97,000 in Kenya, 76,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and 2,200 in Central African Republic (CAR).

WFP provides food and cash assistance to more than 1.8 million refugees in the neighbouring countries.

The updated response plan does not cover humanitarian needs of around two million people displaced internally in South Sudan.

Revised South Sudan refugee response plan

About WFP:

WFP is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience. Each year, WFP assists some 80 million people in around 80 countries.

Follow us on Twitter @wfp_media

About UNHCR:

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, was established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. UNHCR safeguards the rights and well-being of refugees and stateless people. In more than six decades, the agency has helped tens of millions of people restart their lives. UNHCR is on the front lines of the world's major humanitarian crises, including Syria, Iraq, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and countless other emergencies. Visit www.unhcr.org/  Follow Twitter @Refugees  @Refugeesmedia and www.facebook.com/UNHCR/

For more information please contact:

UNHCR

WFP
The fatigue and worry etched on Bora Rizikis face belie her 24 years. As a teenager, she fled the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after her parents were killed, and tried to make a life for herself in South Africa.

A few years later, now the mother of two young children, she saw her husband fatally shot in front of her in a violent car-jacking and soon afterwards her brother, with whom she had been reunited after a long separation, was also killed.

However, today Bora is happy. She and her children  Amina, five, and seven-year-old Ibrahim  are leaving their township home near Cape Town to start a new life in France under a UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, scheme to resettle the most vulnerable refugees.

Interviewed by UNHCR in her small house in the township of Delft shortly before her departure, Bora described the growing xenophobia in South Africa and how she came to live in fear for herself and her children.

My husband was murdered, then my brother  I dont know why, she said, as Amina, whose hearing is impaired, and Ibrahim played nearby. Since then, Im afraid whenever anyone looks at me. In Delft, it is best to avoid attracting attention, especially if you are a foreigner.

My husband was murdered, then my brother."

Bora grew up in the city of Uvira in South Kivu Province in the DRC, on the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika. After her parents were killed, she first sought shelter with her uncle but, at the age of 15, decided to flee the conflict. She set off on a five-month odyssey that eventually took her to South Africa.

It was war, my father was dead, my mother was dead, she said. Life was so hard I felt bad, stressed. Sometimes I could not eat.

She travelled across Tanzania, where she spent a month in prison for having no identity documents. After her release she continued her journey, on foot and by boat and train, stopping off in Malawi en route. Eventually, she reached South Africa, having lost contact with her sister and two brothers.

She arrived in the township of Philippi, near Cape Town, where a fellow Congolese refugee, Rusiga, took her under his wing and helped her to find accommodation and apply for asylum. Soon afterwards, they married and moved to Delft to open a business.

Rusiga ran a small hairdressing salon and set up a makeshift grocery store for her, where she sold soft drinks and sweets. But with the shop the problems started. There were always thieves in the house.

Bora has been given the chance of a new start with her children in Europe.  UNHCR/James Oatway

Bora and her children prepare to leave South Africa for France.  UNHCR/James Oatway

A Congolese family heads to a new life in France, Cape Town International Airport, South Africa, March 2017.  UNHCR/James Oatway

Bora's husband was murdered, leaving her alone to care for her two children.  UNHCR/James Oatway

Bora and her children get ready to board their plane.  UNHCR/James Oatway

Bora and children say goodbye.  UNHCR/James Oatway

Her voice dropped and she looked away as she described the attack by three armed men while they were in their car outside their house, during which her husband was fatally shot. Amina was still a baby in my arms. Ibrahim, who was three at the time was sitting in the back," she recalled. The gunmen surrounded the car and fired on her husband, but she managed to run into the house with Amina and hid in the toilet. The attackers caught Ibrahim in the car and beat him.

The boy managed to escape and rejoin his mother as the thieves drove off in the car. Her husband, who was badly wounded, managed to drag himself into the street to speak to a passer-by. He handed over his cell phone and asked the stranger to call for an ambulance, but he simply ran off with the phone.

Bora eventually found him lying in the street covered in mud and blood. He told me: Look after the children  I think Im dying. Bora went to get help, but no-one would help me. No-one.

"No-one would help me. No-one.

After the death of her husband, her brother who lived in Durban, came to live with her and help look after the children. A year passed and things seemed to be improving for the family, and Bora hoped she could put the events of the past behind her.

One day, I was in the house and someone called me, told me my brother was shot. I went to the hospital, but it was too late.

Her brothers death was one family tragedy too many for Bora. She fell into a depression and a friend suggested she seek psychiatric help. She attended the Cape Town Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture, which steered her towards the local UNHCR office.

When she told her story, UNHCR representatives realised the family met the agencys vulnerability criteria and a case was put forward for their resettlement. A month later the application was accepted by France.

Ilija Todorovic, UNHCRs senior regional resettlement officer for Southern Africa, said South Africa was one of the main countries from which the agency had submitted cases for resettlement of refugees, because specific locations in South Africa have been affected by serious security problems due to xenophobia.

"I went to the hospital, but it was too late."

France asks us to submit very vulnerable cases, cases with protection problems or specific medical needs. Strong cases, quantifiable and justifiable. They want to be sure that these persons are real refugees. And they also take certain cases that have specific needs for urgent resettlement.

Although Bora knows little about France and is a little fearful of the unknown, she is pleased to be leaving. Sometimes I am scared, sometimes happy. But now I am very happy.

As the hour of departure approaches, Bora and the children are dressed in their Sunday best. They are escorted to the airport by an official of the International Organization for Migration, Zoe Rohde, who helps them organize their luggage.

With a final backward glance, Bora says: I am happy to leave Delft, but sad to leave my friends and my [other] brother here.

She would like to visit them one day, but not in Delft. I dont want to come back in Delft, this place is not safe.

At the airport, after a tearful goodbye to her friends, Bora turns her back on the past and walks through the departure gate and into her new life.
New Delhi, May 15 (IBNS): At least two people were killed as the car in which they were travelling fell from the Punjabi Bagh flyover in west Delhi, media reports said.

The incident reportedly left five people injured.

The deceased were reportedly students of Delhi Institute of Professional studies.

The car, police was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times, was at high speed and toppled after the student at the wheel failed to control it.

The vehicle fell from the flyover and the two students reportedly died on spot.
May 15 2017

Asset management specialists M&G Real Estate have won consent to proceed with a 100m speculative office development at 33 Cadogan Street, Glasgow. Corunna House would be demolished and replaced by a 12 storey BREEAM Excellent build conceived by Cooper Cromar , delivering 275,000sq/ft of Grade A office space, in addition to a ground floor retail unit and under floor parking.Lynn Smith, director - development management at M&G Real Estate, said: There is a clear occupier appetite for high quality office space in Glasgow and a lack of supply in the citys office market, which makes it a prime location for investment. We are confident that 33 Cadogan Street will attract a strong line-up of tenants, bringing new jobs to the city, and we are looking forward to beginning this exciting project.Analysis by commercial lettings agent JLL found office supply fell below trend to just 8.22% over the first quarter, with just two new build Grade A developments with limited space on the market  with no speculative developments presently underway.Work on the new building isnt expected to get underway until the second quarter of 2018 however.
Published: May 15, 2017

L. Keith Todd Named Head of Advancement at The University of Tampa

L. Keith Todd, who recently spearheaded the largest fundraising match in U.S. philanthropic history, has been named The University of Tampas vice president for development and university relations. Todd will begin his duties at UT in early June.



As vice president, Todd will be tasked with further building a strong culture of giving at UT that will provide unprecedented support for scholarships, endowment and institutional initiatives. He will focus on increasing philanthropic support of the University, building relationships across Tampa Bay and nationwide, securing private support from donors and increasing public awareness of UT. Furthermore, Todd will serve as an advisor to UT President Ron Vaughn on key advancement and university relations topics, and other institutional issues.



Todd comes to UT with more than 30 years of experience in advancement, serving on advancement teams at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, The Ohio State University, The Medical College of Georgia, the Medical University of South Carolina, University of Illinois-Chicago, and most recently, at Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU).



As president and CEO of the OHSU Foundation from 2013 to 2017, Todd most notably architected the $500 million two-year match campaign that was supported by Phil and Penny Knight and is considered the largest match campaign in U.S. philanthropic history. The campaign ultimately raised $1.4 billion.



Prior to that, Todd served as vice chancellor for university development and senior vice president of the University of Illinois Foundation. By focusing on campus priorities, principal gifts and re-establishing volunteer structures, he was able to raise $250 million while leading the Office of Advancement for the College of Medicine.



Todd said the UT position is very appealing, and he looks forward to creating a creative and collaborative culture of philanthropy that will benefit UT, its students and the entire region.



UTs focus on building a robust culture of philanthropy to support its vision of securing pathways for its students and alumni to lead successful lives is admirable and exciting, Todd said. By working together and increasing philanthropic support, theres no limit to what can be achieved at The University of Tampa."



Vaughn said Todd was impressive in his passion for higher education as well as his ability to strategize and manage high-level development initiatives, opportunities and challenges.



Keiths successes in philanthropy for higher education are outstanding, Vaughn said. His sense of urgency, his experience and his ability to manage complex opportunities will serve him well as we build UTs fundraising efforts that include endowed scholarship needs and future capital projects.



Todd received a masters degree in education-institutional advancement from Vanderbilt University and a bachelors degree in psychology from Clemson University.



Todd will succeed Dan Gura, who is currently serving as interim vice president for development and university relations. Gura previously served as vice president since 1990. Gura will transition back into a position of vice president of the capital campaign and assistant to the president.
Eleven UW Nursing Faculty and Staff Recognized

Eleven University of Wyoming nursing faculty and staff members were recently recognized for their efforts with special awards bestowed by the Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing and other groups during various events in April.

-- Denise Gable, business manager in the School of Nursing, won the 2017 UW staff award for Supervisor of the Year during the universitys Staff Recognition Day April 10.

Four nursing faculty and staff members received awards at the College of Health Sciences awards presentation April 20. They were:

-- Susan Steiner, associate dean and a clinical associate professor, was honored with the College of Health Sciences Career Achievement Award.

Susan Steiners impact on nursing will continue to be significant because of her involvement with so many students and graduates from the University of Wyoming Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing, who are in practice all over the state and region, UW Nursing Dean Mary Burman says. Moreover, she will be leaving a huge legacy because of her mentoring of faculty and her involvement in curriculum development. Her impact extends beyond nursing education due to her practice as a nurse practitioner and her commitment to health and health care in our community.

-- Claire Hitchcock, office associate, was honored with the Outstanding Staff Award (over five years). She has been on the nursing staff for 20 years, seeing her job morph from basic secretarial duties to webmaster, public relations, alumni relations, marketing, publicity and photography. Such changes emboldened her to go back to school to take classes to improve her skills in the new areas of her job.

-- Joanne Prahl was honored with the Outstanding Staff Award (0-five years). She has been on the nursing staff as the assistant project coordinator in the Clinical Simulation Center since 2014.

In her relatively short time with us, she has made a huge and lasting impact on the faculty and staff in the School of Nursing, faculty and staff in the other divisions and schools in the College of Health Sciences, and our students, her supervisor says. She is extremely creative and continually comes up with brilliant ideas to make our patients as realistic as possible. Joannes energy and independence, combined with her skill and knowledge about her position, make her a supervisors dream employee.

-- Jenifer Thomas, an associate professor, received the Innovation in Teaching Award.

Dr. Thomass innovative approach to teaching health behavior change to the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students and research skills to undergraduate students in the College of Health Sciences, as well as her overall, clear student-centered organizational approach, has made her an effective and beloved teacher in the School of Nursing, one nominator says.

Four nursing faculty and staff members received awards at the School of Nursings Communication of Wisdom awards ceremony April 26. They were:

-- Rebecca Carron, an assistant professor, received a 2017 Sharron S. Humenick Grant award for a follow-up study on women and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Her research focuses on understanding psychosocial stress and coping mechanisms in women with PCOS.

PCOS is an androgen-excess disorder in which a womans ovary produces too much testosterone. Increased testosterone results in several masculine symptoms, including facial hair; thinning of scalp hair in a male-type pattern; and more difficulty becoming pregnant due to infrequent or absent ovulation. Long-term risks include type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There is no cure for PCOS, only control and management of symptoms and problems. Women with PCOS also are at risk for depression and anxiety.

Carron plans to use her Humenick funding to interview a sample of women from her doctoral work.

-- Elizabeth Goodwin, an assistant lecturer, was honored with the Communication of Wisdom Award for her publication this year. She was the first author on a paper, titled The Experience of Treatment Barriers and Their Influence on Quality of Life in American Indian/Alaska Native Breast Cancer Survivors, that appeared in the journal Cancer.

-- Ann Marie Hart, a professor and DNP Program director, also was awarded a 2017 Sharron S. Humenick Grant for a project to pilot academic-primary care practice partnerships between the DNP Program and select primary care practices in Wyoming.

-- Sherrie Rubio-Wallace received funding through the schools 2017 Wald Award for the purpose of completing a genetics course. She is currently enrolled and taking the course through the Genetics Institute, offered by the Genetics Education Program at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital. This online program is designed to teach nursing faculty about genetics, so that more genetics content can be placed into nursing curricula. Rubio-Wallace plans to create modules for UW nursing curriculum to inform students about genetics.

-- Kimberly Raska-Miller and Linda Williams, both associate lecturers, received Faculty Summer Institute awards from the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning. The institute targets faculty members who have been at UW for at least 12 years. The institutes agenda is designed as a time to reflect, reframe and re-energize teaching alongside a number of other faculty peers at UW.

There will be lots of energy from faculty who attend, so I will be learning from them as well as from the speakers, Raska-Miller says. I look forward to developing new activities to increase student engagement and learning in the on-campus and online settings.

Teaching has challenged me for the past 18 years and, this summer, I am looking forward to collaborating with some UW colleagues about teaching and learning, Williams says. I am hoping to gain some new ideas, and I will share my ideas in an atmosphere of give-and-take. I am very interested in getting a start on designing a new course that I will be teaching in the future. I hope that this Summer Institute will energize me to finish out my teaching career on a successful note.
UW Gains Seat on State Board of Education

UW College of Education Dean D. Ray Reutzel will serve on the Wyoming State Board of Education. (UW Photo)

University of Wyoming College of Education Dean D. Ray Reutzel will represent UW on the Wyoming State Board of Education.

UW President Laurie Nichols made the appointment in response to House Bill 42, signed by Gov. Matt Mead in February, granting the university president a nonvoting, ex-officio membership on the State Board of Education. The move aims to improve communication and collaboration among the states educational institutions, and create a more seamless transition for students from Wyomings public K-12 schools into higher education.

I think the impetus of this was to try to create a seamless preschool-to-graduate school system, where were talking to each other rather than talking by or past each other, Reutzel says.

He adds that sometimes there is a disconnect between K-12 perceived proficiencies and whats required at the university level. UWs voice on the board can help clarify these issues. In addition, as the College of Education dean, Reutzel has an expert knowledge of K-12 curriculum, and his college prepares many of Wyomings current and future teachers, as well as administrators.

There are, on occasion, issues that relate to school curriculum and teacher preparation that traverse the two institutions of higher and regular education, he says.

State Board of Education Chair Pete Gosar welcomed the change as a way to remove silos and improve student preparation.

The State Board of Education was established in 1917 to set key educational policies for Wyomings K-12 districts. It is an independent body, appointed by the governor to represent stakeholders throughout the state, including Wyomings more than 90,000 students. The board is responsible for setting key policies in districts related to state standards, school accreditation, accountability and assessments to help ensure that all students have equal access to a quality education. The board works closely with the Wyoming Department of Education, which implements many of the policies the State Board of Education is responsible for setting.
Guwahati, May 15 (IBNS): Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Monday took stock of preparations for the inaugural ceremony of Dhola-Sadia bridge ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modias visit to Assam on May 26 when the latter will dedicate the 9.16 km bridge to the nation.

The high level review meeting held at Sadia was attended by state PWD Minister Parimal Suklabaidya, MoS Power and Revenue Pallab Lochan Das, several MLAs, all Deputy Commissioners, Superintendents of Police and DTOs of upper Assam districts, officials of Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) and Navayuga Engineering Co Ltd (Visakhapatnam).

Expressing the view that the Dhola-Sadia Bridge would fulfill a long felt need by improving communication link between the people of Sadia and Arunachal Pradesh with rest of the state, the Assam CM directed the construction company, Navayuga Engineering Co Ltd to complete construction works in all respect within May 22, 2017 to ensure smooth inauguration of the same.

The Navayuga Engineering is performing a great service to the nation as the Dhola-Sadia bridge would not only ease hardship of the people of Sadia but would also fulfil a vital requirement in terms of countrys defence perspective considering the fact that Arunachal Pradesh shares boundary with China, Sonowal professed.

The Assam CM also directed the Tinsukia district administration to carry out all preparatory works for the inaugural ceremony on a war footing in active consultation with local MLA Bolin Chetia and informed that PWD Minister Parimal Suklabaidya and MoS Power & Revenue Pallab Lochan Das would oversee the preparations.

Sonowal also put special focus on implementation of Swachh Bharat Mission in letter & spirit at the venue and directed the district administration and district PHED officials to construct adequate number of toilets for the expected visitors and ensure availability of safe drinking water.

Directing the officials of district administration to take comprehensive measures to make the event best in all respect, the Chief Minister asked them to maintain cleanliness at the venue and involve local people for the purpose so that the basic aim of SBM could be achieved.

Stating that communication and transportation are very important sectors for ushering development and inauguration of the bridge would boost development activities in Sadia, the Assam CM also sought co-operation of all nearby districts to successfully hold the event.

Sonowal asked the deputy commissioners of all the upper Assam districts to extend full support to the host district.

Sonowal further expressed dissatisfaction on poor condition of NH 37 particularly the portions passing through Sivasagar, Jorhat and Numaligarh and directed the officials of National Highway and Infrastructure Development Corporation to immediately repair the NH to ensure hassle free road communication.



Taking part in the review meeting, Deputy Commissioner, Tinsukia Ranjan Chakraborty informed that all preparations for the event would complete on May 22.



The Deputy Commissioner also informed that SHGs have been allowed to put up food stalls at the venue and construction work for helipad with rest house etc. is going on smoothly.

MP Pradan Baruah, MLAs Bimal Bora, Tapan Gogoi, Kushal Dowari, Teros Gowala, Binod Hazarika, Jogen Mohan, Chakradhar Gogoi and Sanjay Kishan were also present in review meeting.

Chief Minister Sonowal also visited the proposed construction site of an extended campus of Indian Council of Agricultural Research at Gogamukh in Dhemaji district today where the Prime Minister would lay the foundation stone of the project on May 26, 2017.

The review meeting attended by State Agriculture Minister Atul Bora, Irrigation Minister Ranjit Dutta, P&RD Minister Naba Doley, MLAs of Dhemaji, Jonai, Lakhimpur, Bihpuria, Biswanath Chariali, Sotea, Gohpur and Tezpur, DIG, Northern Assam Range, DCs, SPs and DTOs of all districts of North Bank of the Brahmaputra was held at Missing Autonomous Council office at Gogamukh.

Addressing the public representatives and govt. officials, the Chief Minister underlined the importance attached to the event and said that setting up of ICAR campus in Gogamukh would unleash a new era of agricultural growth in the entire state.

The Assam CM further sought spontaneous participation from all sections of the society considering the fact that the event is not a mere government programme but an event of immense public importance.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Kolkata/New Delhi, May 15 (IBNS): Amidst the political hue and cry between the Trinamool Congress and Congress in the state, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee flew off to the national capital to meet the Congress national president Sonia Gandhi, to discuss about the upcoming presidential election, according to media reports on Monday.

Pranab Mukherjee's term as a president will expire in the month July, and the Congress president is expected to meet Trinamool Congress supremo on Tuesday, to decide the possible face to be projected from the opposition's side in the presidential election.

The meeting between Banerjee and Gandhi raised the political controversy already in the state, particularly after the recent clashes and confrontation between the two parties in the municipal election of the state.

The president of the Congress' state unit, Adhir Chowdhury, in a letter to the party's national president, explained that they (state Congress) are fighting against both the communal (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the undemocratic forces (Trinamool Congress).

The meeting between Banerjee and Gandhi further enhanced the speculation of bringing the opposition forces closer to formthe unified opposition, with an aim to counter the BJP in the Lok Sabha poll in 2019.

Speaking about the opposition provided by the state Congress and her meet with Gandhi for the presidential election, Banerjee said: "Locally in West Bengal, CPI(M), Congress and BJP are doing together (fighting against TMC). It is their problem and not my headache. My options are always open for the betterment of the country and the party. That is why when good decisions or suggestions come, our mind is always positive."
The certificates were awarded at the closing ceremony of the project Supporting the Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Vietnam funded by the UK government.

ICAEW, in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance (MoF), the State Securities Commission, and the British Embassy in Vietnam, held the closing ceremony and awarded IFRS certificates to the financial experts and university lecturers who have successfully completed the programme.

This is the first time the IFRS certificate of an international organisation has been awarded in Vietnam to such a large number of accomplished trainees.

The recipients are financial and accounting experts from MoF, the State Securities Commission, and the two stock exchanges, a number of listed companies, large auditing firms, and lecturers from various universities. They have completed online training courses, including a five-day course with specialists, and passed module tests as well as a final exam, meeting the standards of ICAEW.

Going through the training process, most experts have grasped the basic concepts as well as the core principles of IFRS, and its practical uses. Moreover, experts were also updated on international IFRS practices as well as learnt lessons and encountered challenges that may come up during the application of these standards.

This was the largest group to receive IFRS certificates in Vietnam to date

Under the current progress on international integration and development, the adoption of IFRS in financial reporting is becoming increasingly popular on a global scale. Statistics show that there are 131 countries and territories that allow or mandate the application of IFRS.

In Vietnam, IFRS is also part of MoFs plan because of the international standards benefits, which include enhancing transparency, eliminate barriers to financial accounting standards, and strengthening competitive advantages in attracting foreign investment, which plays an important role in sustaining Vietnams GDP growth.

The adoption of IFRS in financial reporting is crucial to the realisation of Vietnams aspirations to move from a frontier market to an emerging market status, as measured through the MSCI index. Increasing standards of corporate governance, transparency, and business integrity through IFRS adoption will boost foreign investors confidence and support Vietnams further integration into the global economy, said Giles Lever, British Ambassador to Vietnam.

I am delighted that training funded by the UK government and delivered by ICAEW is helping to build knowledge among regulatory agencies, universities, and major companies. I hope this will help create the conditions for a future decision by MoF to adopt IFRS standards in Vietnam, he added.

Adopting IFRS in Vietnam is necessary because of the standards multiple advantages. Nevertheless, adopting it on a wider scale remains a challenge.

Officially applying IFRS is not easy. IFRS is a complex standard with a frequently changing nature. Meanwhile, the majority of the people working within the accounting and finance field are not qualified, because they lack experience or foreign language skills, said a representative of MoF. Therefore, I think IFRS training programmes of prestigious international organisations, such as ICAEW, will allow our experts to grasp the basic concepts as well as the core principles of IFRS in practice. I highly appreciate the effectiveness of this training programme and expect it to be implemented on a wider scale in the coming years.

Currently, corporate financial statements have to meet the 26 Vietnam Accounting Standards (VAS) issued by MoF between 2001 and 2005. Thus, the international standard training programmes of international professional organisations provide financial workforce and university lecturers with useful and highly practical knowledge, which will improve their professional competence.

Participants of this programme undergo a highly interactive training course, including active group discussions and real world examples, which help them grasp the core principles of IFRS and its applicability. Through this project, we wish to make IFRS and its knowledge more popular under the standards of a leading international professional organisation, said Mark Billington, ICAEW regional director in Southeast Asia.

At the same time, ICAEW also wishes to share knowledge, provide professional support, and assist MoF in advancing the application of IFRS, which will help improve the transparency and professionalism of the financial sector in Vietnam, he added.

After successfully piloting the project, ICAEW, in cooperation with MoF and the British Embassy in Vietnam, will consider further expanding it in the coming time.
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies will establish a common framework to manage the issue of labour mobility in the region, said Tran Viet Thai, Director of the Vietnam APEC Study Centre under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.-VNA/VNS Photo An ang

Labour mobility has become an urgent issue for not only APEC but also the global economy, especially in the context of digitalisation and the on-going fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), he told the Vietnam News Agency yesterday on the sidelines of the APEC Study Centres Consortium (ASCC) Conference as part of the APEC 2017 Second Senior Officials Meeting (SOM2) and related meetings.

This revolution is affecting a number of occupations and groups of unskilled and low-skilled labourers, he said. The establishment of the APEC Labour Mobility Framework will help member economies identify opportunities and challenges in the context of labour mobility, thus putting forth suitable policies to make the best of the process. Speaking at an APEC workshop on skills education & training and social protection on the same day, Deputy Minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs Doan Mau Diep said that there will be a strong trend of labour mobility in the APEC region with the development of Industry 4.0.

Many traditional occupations will disappear to be replaced by new ones (in the areas of digitalisation, programming and data protection), he said, adding that there will be many more requirements for skills and qualifications of the workforce for employment.

According to Mary Morola, Coordinator of the APEC Labour & Social Protection Network, Industry 4.0 will require APEC member economies to share opportunities in investment and vocational training to ensure the stability of the regional labour market. Prof Michael Ka Yiu Fung from the CUHK Business School at the Chinese University of Hong Kong said labour mobility is important for not only Hong Kong but also other economies as it benefits both senders and receivers. Countries which send guest workers get experience and technology from recipient countries, which in turn have enough labourers to serve their development, he said. Sharing views with the Hong Kong expert, Michael T Kumung, First Assistant Secretary of Macro Planning Division under the Department of National Planning and Monitoring of Papua New Guinea, emphasised the need for APEC economies to enhance cooperation in this field, with a focus on training workers. For Viet Nam in particular, as the country has sent workers to many other countries, it needs to improve the quality of human resources by equipping them with necessary skills.

APEC science prize

On Thursday, Dr Yanwu Zhu from Chinas University of Science and Technology was announced the winner of the APEC Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education (ASPIRE 2017) in an awards ceremony held on Thursday.

Zhu won the prize for his research on new carbon materials.

The prize is an annual award recognising young scientists who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in scientific research, as evidenced by scholarly publication, and cooperation with scientists from other APEC economies. It aims to strengthen international science and technology networks and improve linkages between research and innovation. It is also designed to boost economic growth, trade and investment opportunities in harmony with sustainable development.

For this year, "New Material Technologies is the ASPIRE theme. This interdisciplinary theme focuses on how new and advanced materials are used to drive scientific innovation.

The seventh year of the prize drew 17 nominees from APEC member economies, the largest number of participants to date.
Representatives of BAT Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City Police newspaper, and local authorities cut the ribbon inaugurating the new bridge. Photo: Quoc Dung

This is one of the bridges constructed via the project of natural disaster prevention and fighting funded by BAT Vietnam in 2016. Another bridge project receiving support from BAT Vietnam last year is Vuon Tre Bridge, with the length of 25m and width of 3m and a total cost of VND220 million ($9,700). The bridge is in Khanh Hai commune, Tran Van Thoi district, Ca Mau province.

These bridges were erected in the framework of the disaster prevention charity project run by Ho Chi Minh City Police newspaper under the cooperation programme with BAT Vietnam since 2013. The cooperation programme aims to facilitate various charity goals, including building rural bridges in the Mekong Delta, especially in impoverished cities and provinces where peoples lives are still very difficult and education is limited.

Since 2016, BAT Vietnam has been coordinating actions with Ho Chi Minh City Police newspaper to carry out charitable projects and build six rural bridges in Ben Tre, Tra Vinh, Vinh Long, Dong Thap, Bac Lieu, and Ca Mau provinces. Each bridge costs between VND150-220 million, bringing the total funding provided by BAT Vietnam to over VND1 billion ($44,000).

The new bridge will help children go to school safely and locals to travel conveniently, promoting a better life, Photo: Quoc Dung

With the new bridge in Phu Thuan A commune, I hope dwellers in the Mekong Delta region will be able to travel safely and more conveniently. This would offer them the security to make a living through more legal activities and take care of their children, improving their quality of life and productivity on the long run, said Nguyen Hoang Hue Linh, senior Corporate Communications and CSR manager. We will continue to build new bridges in other localities to help children go to school and meet locals needs for transportation and trading towards a better life.

According to Hue Linh, these rural bridge projects are part of a global CSR programme that BAT has implemented over the years to sustainably support communities in disadvantaged localities.

Representatives of BAT Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City Police newspaper and local authorities hand out gifts to poor people in Dong Thap province at the inauguration ceremony of the rural bridge, Photo: Quoc Dung

Apart from building bridges, over the past years, BAT has made valuable contributions to alleviate poverty in Vietnam. BAT focuses on supporting and inciting charity programmes, combating poverty, and extending education opportunities, as well as improving the living quality of disadvantaged communities and encouraging sustainable agricultural practices. In particular, the company has run a programme supporting households, benefiting more than 300 families nationwide over the past 12 years.

To date, BAT Vietnam has built more than 80 charity houses and 20 bridges in rural areas. In addition, it has supplied three million seedlings to farming households, helping turn 10,000 hectares of barren land into green areas in Lang Son, Cao Bang, Gia Lai, Tay Ninh, Dong Thap, and Bac Kan provinces.
After the first dialogue on April 29, 2016, what did the government do to realise its promise to support companies?

The first dialogue resulted in the issuance of Resolution No.35/NQ-CP dated May 16, 2016 on supporting and developing companies from 2016 to 2020.

Before the second dialogue, the Steering Committee for Enterprise Innovation and Development worked with the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Vietnam Association of Small and Medium Enterprises to organise two working groups to visit half of the localities, including Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, where 56.7 per cent of companies are operating, including those topping the provincial competitiveness index. These provinces include Danang, Quang Ninh, Dong Thap, and Binh Duong. However, the government also made sure to include localities that are especially disadvantaged economically, such as Ha Giang, Bac Kan, Lai Chau, and Cao Bang.

Nguyen Hong Long, deputy head of the governments Steering Committee for Enterprise Innovation and Development

Through these working groups, we evaluated the progress made by Resolution 35. Basically, the leaders of the localities all remember the spirit of the resolution and continue to work along with private sector companies to elevate them to be their drivers of competitiveness and means of economic independence.

At the provinces we visited, the leadership followed the directive of the PM to have at least two dialogues a year with private companies to listen to their complaints and act to remove the obstacles they are facing. Many provinces hold more than the minimum required.

I would like to add that besides meeting with the provincial authorities, we also met with the local business associations separately to evaluate their review of the leaders objectively.

How did the companies evaluate the cooperation with government agencies?

There are complaints about some government agencies in the provinces, but in general the associations lauded the efforts and attitude of the agencies. They said that procedures have been shortened and simplified in many areas, including business licensing, tax, import and export, and social insurance.

Many of them said that thanks to Resolution No.19/NQ-CP dated March 18, 2014 by the government on major tasks and solutions for improving the business environment and national competitiveness and Resolution 35 they have saved significant time, resources, and moneyespecially under-the-table money.

One of the most important targets of Resolution 35 is to have one million companies by 2020. As of the end of 2016, the number was only 477,800. This means, from now till 2020, there needs to be 174,000 more new companies each year on average. Is this a difficult target?

One million is only the numerical target. In terms of quality, the government targets that by 2020 the private sector will contribute 48-49 per cent of the annual GDP and 49 per cent of the total investment in the country.

The first meeting between the government and the private sector, chaired by the PM himself, kindled entrepreneurial spirit and strengthened companies confidence in the government. In addition, it pushed government agencies and provincial leaders to remove the obstacles from the path of companies and accelerate the administrative reform to support them. I think the fact that the leader of the government met face-to-face with companies is a very important push to realise the targets.

As the government is showing determination, local authorities regard companies growth as their own and the National Assembly is going to ratify the Law on Supporting Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises at the upcoming third session, which will create a legal framework to support companies. With all these positive developments at hand, I believe the target is surely within reach.

Firms want hotline to Govt leaders Businesses agree that Government Resolution 35 on supporting and developing enterprises augurs change, but are adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward its implementation.
For the follow-up investment, SonKim Land and EXS Capital are also partnering with ACA Investments, a leading Japanese fund management firm based in Singapore with a strong track record of investments across the Asia-Pacific region. ACA Investments has a wide variety of experience in the Vietnamese market, through investments in companies such as Bibo Mart and Cung Mua.

Hiroyuki Ono, partner at ACA Investments, said, ACA Group is excited to co-operate with Nguyen Hoang Tuan, chairman of SonKim Land, and the SonKim Land team to mutually contribute to the development of the Vietnamese property market. This is our fifth investment in Vietnam. We have explored more than 100 opportunities in this country and identified SonKim Land as one of the few companies with both discipline and long-term vision. We hope to realise the potential demand between Japanese corporates hoping to expand into Vietnam and SonKim Land, which hopes to assist them.

EXS Capitals initial investment in 2013 began a multi-stage partnership with SonKim Land, aiming to build a leading real estate firm in Vietnam. EXS Capital helped to fund SonKim Lands growth during a challenging time in the Vietnamese real estate market  and was even able to provided superior returns to investors during that period. The success of EXS Capitals partnership with SonKim Land represents a strong validation of both SonKim Lands performance as well as EXS Capitals differentiated investment approach.

Eric Solberg, CEO of EXS Capital, said, We are pleased to be partnering again with chairman Tuan and the SonKim Land team, helping to build the company into a leading listed real estate company in Vietnam. We are proud of SonKim Lands strong reputation of being at the forefront of design, quality, and lifestyle in the Vietnamese market. We look forward to continuing our co-operation to ensure SonKim Lands ongoing success.

Since 2013, SonKim Land has grown rapidly, launching several award-winning luxury properties in Ho Chi Minh City, including Gateway Thao Dien and The Nassim.

Given the success of the first round of fundraising, SonKim Land and EXS Capital are excited to partner up for subsequent rounds. The first $46 million round was issued in convertible SonKim Land bonds, redeemable at any time. Participants in this round included many of the original investors from 2013, who have chosen to bolster their position in SonKim Land, thereby signalling confidence in the companys track record and expected future earnings.

With this additional fundraising, SonKim Land aims to continue to develop its repertoire of attractive developments across the country, including luxury residential and commercial developments in Ho Chi Minh City.

EXS Capitals follow-up and ACAs initial investment into SonKim Land is strong evidence of our success in the Vietnamese property market. We have positioned ourselves as a pioneer property developer that creates unique living conditions for our customers, said Tuan. As a premier lifestyle brand, SonKim Lands strategy is to focus on customers desires, co-operate with reputable partners, and learn from them to create customised and unique concepts for the Vietnamese property landscape. We believe that we will continue to be successful in strengthening our property development profile and improving the living standards of the Vietnamese people.
Mumbai, May 15 (IBNS): The trailer of Prawaal Raman's Dobaara - See Your Evil, which was released recently, has struck the right chord with critics and audiences alike, claimed its makers.

The promo got the thumbs up from the audiences for matching up to Hollywood standard in this genre. Even ace Hollywood director Mike Flanagan was impressed after seeing the trailer, they said in a release.

Mike Flanagan who directed Oculus took to social media and tweeted, This is so cool and it looks like a fantastic and faithful adaptation. Michael Hoffman, the director of One Fine Day, also praised the director. Dobaara  See Your Evil is the official adaptation of Oculus

Back home, Bollywood wasn't left far behind in showing its love for the project. Filmmaker Karan Johar found the trailer scary, while Ritesh Deshmukh admitted on his social media page that It's scary as hell. Taapsee Pannu added that the trailer had spooked the hell out of people.

Dobaara - See Your Evil, presented by B4U Motion Pictures in association with Relativity Media and Zahhak Films Limited and produced by Intrepid Pictures Production, releases on June 2.
People watch a TV news programme showing a file image of a missile launch conducted by North Korea, at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea. ( Photo source AP /Ahn Young-joon)

The meeting has been scheduled in principle for Tuesday afternoon, according to the UN mission of Uruguay, which currently holds the council's presidency.

North Korea launched a ballistic missile early on Sunday in what was seen as a challenge to South Korea's new President Moon Jae-In, a liberal who has said he wants to ease tensions with the North.

It was the North's second missile firing in two weeks, and came amid mounting international concern over Pyongyang's progress in developing nuclear weapons that could be carried by long-range missiles.

The latest projectile, launched from a military base in Kusong near the country's northwest coast, travelled some 700 kilometres before landing in the Sea of Japan.

"There are no excuses that justify N. Korea's actions," Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, tweeted. "This was close to home for Russia. China can't expect dialogue. This threat is real."

In Brussels, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu called Pyongyang's move "a new flagrant breach of a series of United Nations Security Council Resolutions," constituting "a threat to international peace and security."

And EU foreign affairs spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic denounced the launch as "a threat to international peace and security (that could) further aggravate tensions in the region at a time when de-escalation is instead needed."

For weeks, the Trump administration has been demanding a tightening of sanctions against the North and urging a tougher stance by Beijing, Pyongyang's principal ally.

Haley said on ABC that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was "in a state of paranoia."

"And so what we're going to do is continue to tighten the screws," she said. "He feels it. He absolutely feels it. And we're going to continue, whether it's sanctions, whether it's press statements, anything that we have to do."

US President Donald Trump issued a brief statement calling for tougher sanctions. "Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea," he said.

The US Treasury indicated it was examining all possible means to cut off international financing to Pyongyang.

But the strong focus on sanctions seemed to be a step away from the more threatening language Trump had used earlier in the year, when he sent a US Navy strike group steaming toward Korean waters and pointedly refused to take the military option off the table.
Despite the trending, misguided focus on feed-in-tariffs, wind energy has enormous potential in Vietnam Photo: Vang Minh Khoa

Vu Chi Mai, senior project officer at Geman Technical Cooperation (GIZ), highlighted at a wind power forum hosted by the Asia Wind Energy Association last week that experts are now more optimistic regarding the foreseeable cost reductions in the industry.

The newfound optimism, Mai noted, may be coming as a result of technological advancements that have yet to be implemented. The forthcoming advances suggest that wind energy is not as mature a technology as was previously thought, Mai added.

Wind power technology and its advancing development is cutting costs and time for developers, Mai said, highlighting that developers see a 9 US cent feed-in-tariff (FiT) as bankable.

Late last year, GIZ sent a proposal to the government stating that the best way to make projects feasible is to offer a FiT of 10.4 US cents.

Mai explained that per request from the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) to get the real cost of wind production in Vietnam, GIZ has conducted a study which has been based on the operational costs of the three existing wind farms in Vietnam (the first wind farm has been operational since 2011). A bankable FIT of 10.4 US cents per kWh has been then suggested so that the government target of 800 megawatts by 2020 could be reached.

William Gaillard, regional sales director at Gamesa Siemens  the exclusive supplier for the 40MW Dam Nai project in the central province of Ninh Thuan, said that Now you can have profitable wind projects that few years before was not possible, thanks to larger rotor size and bigger generator, but also larger volumes and economies of scale from our side. Also other suppliers need to make some efforts. Balance of plant like civil and electrical works also need to drive cost down. Gaillard added that even current of 7.8 cents can make projects bankable.

He pointed out that in Vietnam there is very little experience and so risks are high and contractors expect high margins. But the key issues is to get a bankable power purchase agreement (PPA), according to international standards.

Olivier Duguet, CEO of The Blue Circle  developer of the Dam Nai project, and the first foreign-backed wind power project in Vietnam  told VIR that the current FiT is perfectly suitable for 2,000MW wind projects in Vietnam.

Duguet said focusing on the FiT is the wrong approach. Investors should instead be focusing on conditions that attract long-term debt financing for projects in Vietnam, as this is the only way to develop wind power within the country. Only the very best projects in terms of wind resources and installation costs will be financially viable in the current environment, he added.

A representative of NRG Systems GmbH noted the wind power industry in Asia is experiencing strong growth, and emerging economies in the region continue to invest heavily in it.

According to MoIT, Vietnams power industry has been facing many challenges around the shortage of energy sources.

The Vietnamese government has approved several programmes to encourage the development of renewable energy in the country, including the Renewable Energy Development Strategy to 2030, with a vision to 2050. The strategy aims to increase the production of electricity from wind sources to 2.5 billion kilowatts by 2020, 16 billion kilowatts by 2030.


remaining of

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Motormouth: Water leaks in cars can be as elusive as mermaids
The United Nations says conflict-related incidents in Afghanistan killed more than 280 children in the first four months of this year, a 21 percent increase compared to the same period in 2016.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, released the figures Monday, noting the number of child fatalities is the highest for the same comparable period since it began documenting civilian casualties in 2009.

"Between 1 January and 30 April 2017, UNAMA preliminarily recorded 987 child casualties [283 deaths and 704 injured]," the mission said.

While ground fighting was blamed for 42 percent of the child deaths, the rest were caused by explosive remnants of war, aerial operations by pro-government forces and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, planted by insurgents.

UNAMA said it was deeply concerned by the continued increase in child deaths this year and called on parties to the conflict to take urgent steps to reduce harm.

The latest incident of Afghan child casualties took place Sunday when an unexploded mortar round killed five boys from the same family in the eastern Laghman province. The victims ranged in age from six to 12 years old, according to local officials.

"A family destroyed in seconds. This horror is just one of too many incidents documented at the onset of this fighting season," UNAMA quoted its chief, Tadamichi Yamamoto, as saying.

It noted that child deaths have risen during 2017, largely as a result of persistent use of indirect and/or explosive weapons in civilian-populated areas and due to the use of illegal and indiscriminate improvised explosive devices.

"Many of the more than 700 children injured in conflict-related incidents have suffered life-changing injuries, including loss of limbs, as well as significant and lasting trauma such as witnessing the death of siblings, parents, destruction to their homes or displacement," according to UNAMA.

Civilian casualties, however, are expected to increase this year because of a widely anticipated escalation in Afghan hostilities.

The Taliban has vowed to expand the conflict to all Afghan provinces, and U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is considering sending several thousand additional troops to help Afghan forces reverse insurgent gains.
Anheuser-Busch is upgrading its U.S. breweries and plans to build two new distribution centers as it adapts to an increasingly fragmented beer market.

The maker of Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois says the upgrades and new distribution centers in Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio, will allow it to store a greater variety of products and get them to customers faster. The measures are part of the $500 million that the company said Monday it will invest in its U.S. operations this year, marking an increase compared with recent years. It's a portion of the $3.7 billion in global capital expenditures that the Belgian company had already budgeted for 2017.

Anheuser-Busch has struggled to boost sales volumes as craft beers grow increasingly popular in an already crowded marketplace. In 2016, total volume at Anheuser-Busch declined 2 percent, including a 1.6 percent volume decline in North America.

The same thing is happening with non-alcoholic drinks. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi has said the industry is becoming more ``niche,'' and that PepsiCo needs to learn how to thrive amid that growing complexity.

The investment announced Monday by Anheuser-Busch includes upgrades to breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado, and St. Louis, Missouri. The company did not say how many new jobs it expects this year's U.S. investments to create. It has added around 2,500 jobs since 2013, the company said. Anheuser-Busch employs more than 17,000 people in the U.S.

In 2015, Anheuser-Busch had said it expects to invest $1.5 billion from that year to 2018. The Monday announcement was an update, with the company saying it is spending $2 billion from this year through 2020.
First lady Melania Trump announced Monday that her son, Barron, will attend a private Episcopal school in Maryland, beginning this fall.



The announcement answered one of the lingering questions surrounding the first family's unusual living arrangement. Mrs. Trump and 11-year-old Barron have been living at Trump Tower in New York since Donald Trump took office in January, while the president has lived at the White House.





Trump has said his wife and youngest child will relocate to the White House after the current school year ends, which meant finding a local school for Barron.



Mrs. Trump said Monday that they have chosen St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, for their son.



"It is known for its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence," she said in a statement. "The mission of St. Andrew's is `to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning, and service,' all of which appealed to our family."



Annual tuition ranges from more than $23,000 for pre-K to more than $40,000 for students in grades 9-12.



"We look forward to the coming school years at St. Andrew's," Mrs. Trump said.



Founded in 1978, St. Andrew's, a day school, has a total enrollment of 580 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade, according to its website. Class sizes are small, with anywhere from 11 to 13 students, and all of its graduates go on to college, the school said.



"As we came to know Barron through the admission process, it became clear that he, like all of our newly enrolled students, will be a great addition to St. Andrew's," school administrators wrote in a letter to parents on Monday.



A spokesman said the head of the school, Robert Kosasky, would not have any additional comment out of respect for students' privacy.



The school is known for research-informed teaching and the use of neuroscience and other brain-based research, both to help high-achieving students unlock their potential and to tailor education to children with learning disabilities or differences.



Barron currently attends Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.



St. Andrew's is located in the wealthy enclave of Potomac, about 17 miles northwest of the White House and a 30-minute drive in light traffic.



"School leaders are working directly with the Secret Service to ensure that ... logistics and security will continue to work smoothly and discreetly next year for all of our students and families," the letter to parents said.



The Trumps' decision to send Barron to St. Andrew's marks the first time in decades that the school-aged child of a president will attend a school other than at Sidwell Friends, an elite Quaker school with campuses in Washington and Bethesda, Maryland.



President Bill Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, attended Sidwell. So did President Barack Obama's daughters, Malia and Sasha.



Malia Obama, 18, graduated from Sidwell in June 2016. She is taking the year off, what is known as a "gap year," before her expected enrollment at Harvard this fall. Sasha Obama, 15, is a sophomore at Sidwell Friends. Her parents decided to live in Washington after leaving the White House so she can finish her studies there.





President George W. Bush's daughters had graduated high school and were headed to college when he was elected.



President Jimmy Carter is the only recent president to send his child, daughter Amy, to a District of Columbia public school.
Mumbai, May 15(IBNS): Yatra.com,an online travel portal, on Monday announced Bollywood superstar and youth icon, Ranbir Kapoor, as their brand ambassador.

The actor just added another feather to his cap by inking a deal with India's premier travel Portal.

Most of Ranbir's films have travel as an integral element to the story and they showcase a destination more than just a location, which is what travel is all about, exploring your inner self and broadening your horizons.

Ranbir thus makes a perfect brand ambassador. Also the massive fan following and youth connect the actor enjoys, would help enhance Yatra's already robust customer base. Popularly known for portraying versatile and youthful roles on screen, Ranbir Kapoor is a perfect fit for the brand.

One of the primary reasons of the association is that RanbirKapoor is a youth icon who brings a cool and casual vibe to travel. There is an entire new set of travellers comprising backpackers, adventure enthusiasts and solo travellers, all of whom can relate to Ranbir, which makes it a strategically fruitful association.

Speaking on the partnership, Ranbir Kapoor said, I am delighted to be associated with Yatra.com which has been a preferred travel partner for millions of Indian customers. I am an avid traveler myself and travel has played an important part in my films . So a partnership with a travel brand like Yatrawas a natural fit for for me. I am particularly excited to be a part of this new journey and am looking forward to a long & fulfilling 'Yatra' with the brand.

Commenting on the occasion, Vikrant Mudaliar, Chief Marketing Officer, Yatra.com, said, With Ranbir Kapoorcoming on-board, we are confident of strengthening Yatrasbrand appeal and recall amongst our customers. Today, Yatrais bursting with new ideas, and we wanted our brand ambassador to exude similar qualities, hence, Ranbir was our natural choice. We are confident that this association will help us stand out in an increasingly cluttered media environment. Ranbir appeals to all age groups and demographics across the board and we are excited about using him in our marketing communication. 
This weekend's global online extortion attack reinforces the need for businesses and other large organizations to update their computer operating systems and security software, cybersecurity experts said.

The attack largely infected networks that used out-of-date software, such as Windows XP, which Microsoft no longer offers technical support for.

"There's some truth to the idea that people are always going to hack themselves," said Dan Wire, a spokesman for security firm FireEye. "You've got to keep your systems updated."

The attack that authorities say swept 150 countries this weekend is part of a growing problem of "ransomware" scams, in which people find themselves locked out of their files and presented with a demand to pay hackers to restore their access.

Hackers bait users to click on infected email links, open infected attachments or take advantage of outdated and vulnerable systems. This weekend's virus was particularly virulent, because it could spread to all other computers on a network even if just one user clicked a bad link or attachment.

Lawrence Abrams, a New York-based blogger who runs BleepingComputer.com, says many organizations don't install security upgrades because they're worried about triggering bugs, or they can't afford the downtime.

Here are five tips to make yourself a less-likely victim:

Make safe and secure backups

Once your files are encrypted, your options are limited. Recovery from backups is one of them. "Unfortunately, most people don't have them," Abrams says. Backups often are also out of date and missing critical information. With this attack, Abrams recommends trying to recover the "shadow volume" copies some versions of Windows have.

Some ransomware does also sometimes targets backup files, though.

You should make multiple backups  to cloud services and using physical disk drives, at regular and frequent intervals. It's a good idea to back up files to a drive that remains entirely disconnected from your network.

Update and patch your systems

The latest ransomware was successful because of a confluence of factors. Those include a known and highly dangerous security hole in Microsoft Windows, tardy users who didn't apply Microsoft's March software fix, and malware designed to spread quickly once inside university, business and government networks. Updating software will take care of some vulnerability.

"Hopefully people are learning how important it is to apply these patches," said Darien Huss, a senior security research engineer for cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, who helped stem the reach of the weekend attack. "I hope that if another attack occurs, the damage will be a lot less."

The virus targeted computers using Windows XP, as well as Windows 7 and 8, all of which Microsoft stopped servicing years ago. Yet in an unusual step, they released a patch for those older systems because of the magnitude of the outbreak.

"There's a lot of older Windows products out there that are `end of life' and nobody's bothered to take them out of service," said Cynthia Larose, a cybersecurity expert at the law firm of Mintz Levin.

Use antivirus software

Using antivirus software will at least protect you from the most basic, well-known viruses by scanning your system against the known fingerprints of these pests. Low-end criminals take advantage of less-savvy users with such known viruses, even though malware is constantly changing and antivirus is frequently days behind detecting it.

Educate your workforce

Basic protocol such as stressing that workers shouldn't click on questionable links or open suspicious attachments can save headaches. System administrators should ensure that employees don't have unnecessary access to parts of the network that aren't critical to their work. This helps limit the spread of ransomware if hackers do get into your system.

If hit, don't wait and see

Some organizations disconnect computers as a precautionary measure. Shutting down a network can prevent the continued encryption  and possible loss  of more files. Hackers will sometimes encourage you to keep your computer on and linked to the network, but don't be fooled.

If you're facing a ransom demand and locked out of your files, law enforcement and cybersecurity experts discourage paying ransoms because it gives incentives to hackers and pays for their future attacks. There's also no guarantee all files will be restored. Many organizations without updated backups may decide that regaining access to critical files, such as customer data, and avoiding public embarrassment is worth the cost.

Ryan O'Leary, vice president of WhiteHat Security's threat research center, points out that this weekend's hackers weren't asking for much, usually about $300.

"If there is a silver lining to it, you're not out a million dollars," he said.

Still, "My answer is, never pay the ransom," Abrams said. "But at the same time, I also know that if you're someone who's been affected and you've lost all your children's photographs or you've lost all your data or you lost your thesis, sometimes $300 is worth it, you know?"
Food shortages in northern Cameroon are raising tensions between local communities and Nigerian refugees displaced by the Boko Haram conflict.

As a quarrel erupted between hawkers at the food market near the Minawao refugee camp, 17-year old Paul Sibane accused a Nigerian refugee of stealing his money. He said he would rather settle the issue himself because he believes police are biased in favor of refugees.

At the local police post, officers said they were not authorized to comment, but they added that disputes between refugees and local residents are growing more common.

U.N. aid agencies have been carrying out activities to sensitize refugees and host communities, and to promote peaceful conflict resolution, but tensions remain.

Njenabu Jani lives in Aramba village, six kilometers from the refugee camp. She said she lost six of her goats in the past month. She suspects refugees who visit a nearby stream for water.

She said local authorities have not pursued the villagers' complaints and that the villagers have decided to beat any refugees caught stealing.

Meanwhile, the refugees say they are struggling as local water and food resources are stretched thin.

The Minawao camp and surrounding communities are home to about 75,000 Nigerians who fled Boko Haram violence. The conflict spilled over into northern Cameroon more than two years ago. The insecurity has hurt farming and trade.

In January, funding shortfalls forced the U.N. World Food Program to cut rations for refugees at Minawao by 25 percent. U.N. staff told VOA the reduced rations are expected to continue until new funding arrives in June.

Falmata Moustapha, who has lived at the camp with her four children since 2015, said after rations were cut, she decided to pull her two oldest children from school to send them to nearby wild bushes and farms to forage for food and water. She said they are eating just one meal a day and they are very hungry.

Aid workers and educators at the Minawao camp said they have seen as much as a 50 percent drop in school attendance.

Nigerian-born teacher Moussa Lava leads his class in their lessons.

"They do not participate in the class because they are facing some problems like lack of clothes, lack of something to satisfy their needs at home," he said. "You can see children, 40 in the class today. Tomorrow you will see them 20 or 15 only. And that one is a challenge to the teacher."

The government says just one third of the $690 million needed to meet the needs of displaced people and host communities this year has been received.
Armed militias targeting Muslims in the remote Central African Republic town of Bangassou in recent days have killed up to 30 civilians and six U.N. peacekeepers.

The U.N. Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic, or MINUSCA, says it is sending reinforcements to Bangassou where it says displaced civilians are seeking refuge in a mosque, a Catholic church and a Doctors Without Borders hospital.

MINUSCA chief Parfait Onanga-Anyanga told Reuters, "The situation is extremely deplorable and we are doing everything to rapidly retake control of Bangassou." He said child soldiers, who appear to be drugged, are among the assailants.

A statement Sunday from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he is "outraged" by the attacks against the civilians and the peacekeepers in Bangassou. He said the attacks against the peacekeepers "may constitute a war crime."

CAR President Faustin Touadera said Sunday he intends to go to Bangassou to give his "support to the wounded population." He said CAR will "never be abandoned in the hands of death brought by those who reject all peace process."

Aid workers in CAR have warned that the country may be sliding back into conflict. Tens of thousands of people have fled violence in the countryside over the past six months. More than half of the population relies on humanitarian aid, but the U.N. says relief efforts are dangerously underfunded.

The violence recalls the fighting and communal clashes that plunged the country into chaos nearly four years ago. Aid workers say the renewed violence has been a major setback.

One-fifth of the country's population is currently displaced.

Doctors Without Borders says civilians are being attacked at levels not seen in years.

CAR is one of the poorest countries in the world.
Hundreds of civilians are seeking refuge inside a mosque in the Central African Republic's border town of Bangassou amid ongoing attacks by Christian militias that have killed up to 30 civilians, U.N. officials and aid workers said on Sunday.

The attacks throughout the weekend on the town of Bangassou on the Congolese border have involved hundreds of fighters with heavy weaponry and appeared to be aimed at Muslims, they said, in the latest sign that the multi-year conflict is worsening.

The U.N. base there has also been targeted, prompting the deployment of extra troops to the remote town on Sunday in anticipation of further attacks. They had succeeded in partly securing the town by dusk, said Herve Verhoosel, spokesman for the U.N. mission (MINUSCA).

"The situation is extremely deplorable and we are doing everything to rapidly retake control of Bangassou," MINUSCA chief Parfait Onanga-Anyanga told Reuters in an interview.

Asked about the civilian death toll, he added: "It is clear that we are looking at numbers that could easily reach 20 to 30." Many of the fighters are child soldiers who appeared to be under the influence of drugs, he added.

Local Red Cross President Pastor Antoine Mbao Bogo said gunfire continued to ring out from the town on Sunday, blocking attempts by his organization and others to reach the wounded and recover the dead.

In recent months, roaming militias spurred by ethnic and religious rivalries have stepped up violence despite pledges to take part in a government-led disarmament program.

Aid workers say that militias seem to be exploiting security voids after Ugandan and French soldiers left in the past few months when their missions ended.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Sunday he was "outraged" by the attacks on the 13,000-strong mission that have killed six peacekeepers around Bangassou, an area previously sheltered from conflict.

Prime Minister Simplice Sarandji condemned the attacks in a statement on local radio on Sunday and said those responsible would be brought to justice.

Central African Republic has been plagued by inter-religious violence since 2013 when mainly Muslim Seleka fighters seized power and ousted then-President Francois Bozize, prompting reprisal killings from anti-balaka militias drawn from the Christian minority.

More than 400,000 people in the former French colony are displaced internally and 2.2 million, or nearly half the population, are reliant on aid.
A cholera outbreak in Yemen has killed at least 180 people since April 27, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Monday.

Two years into a war between Houthi rebels and government forces allied with a Saudi-led Arab military coalition, which has killed more than 8,000 people, Yemen has declared a state of emergency in the capital Sana'a over the outbreak.

Fighting has taken a toll on medical facilities in the war-torn country, as more than half of Yemen's facilities, which are now operated by Houthi rebels, no longer function.

The U.N. says some 17 million of Yemen's 26 million people lack sufficient food and at least three million malnourished children are in "grave peril."

U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick and other international officials met with the health ministry in the Houthi-run capital of Sana'a, urging aid donors to assist to avoid an "unprecedented disaster."

Yemen, which is the Arab world's poorest nation, is now classified by the World Health Organization as a level three emergency, alongside Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and Iraq.

Cholera is highly contagious and can be contracted from ingesting contaminated food and water.
Asian lawmakers say their region is pivotal to any global efforts at limiting climate change and they are committed to finding solutions.

At a just concluded meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in Vietnam, lawmakers from countries across the region gathered to share their fears stemming from hotter global temperatures - as well as what to do about it - from incorporating the input of indigenous peoples, to carving out underground reservoirs for times of flooding.

Climate change has no passport, IPU Secretary-General Martin Chungong said at the three-day meeting in Ho Chi Minh City, which ended Saturday. Its cross-national.

The host city also exemplified why the Asia-Pacific region is at the center of environmental concerns worldwide. The region has one billion urban dwellers, more than the rest of the globe combined, according to the U.N. Development Program. And urbanites have an outsized impact on their ecosystems.

Ho Chi Minh City, a massive metropolis of 10 million people, generates waste and consumes water at a volume equal to 17 times the average across Vietnam, said the citys Communist Party chief, Nguyen Thien Nhan.

He later led the parliamentarians down to the Mekong Delta to plant mangrove trees and witness the coastal erosion of what Vietnam says is among the worlds top three deltas threatened by climate change.

Thai officials told VOA they would be planting mangroves after they returned from the Vietnam trip, too.

The most imminent threat to Thailand in terms of climate change is first, of course, deforestation and the reduction of green [areas] in Thailand, Chaiyuth Promsookt, chair of the Thai National Assemblys committee on natural resources and environment, said on the sidelines of the conference.

He said the government set a goal of maintaining at least 40-percent forest cover over the next two decades. The mangroves are meant to help reach that target, as well as guard the coasts from erosion.

Another measure is to shift ethnic minorities toward cherry and apple farming to discourage illegal logging. Chaiyuth said this would effect a fair distribution of income and distribution of the outcomes of development.

His majesty the late king believed that this would be more inclusive in terms of development, in terms of joining the people, especially the underprivileged people in the rural areas, he said.

Thats also in keeping with a suggestion from Anna Schreyoegg, climate change policy and mitigation adviser at GIZ Vietnam, a German-based development agency. She recommended officials craft environmental policy that incorporates scientific evidence, as well as input from indigenous groups and women.

Deforestation is cause for concern in Laos, too. The small country may seem immune to climate change because it is landlocked, unlike the island constellations of Indonesia and the Philippines, and the long coastlines of Vietnam and Myanmar. But the lost trees are raising temperatures in Laos, according to Sanya Praseuth, vice chair of the Laos National Assemblys economic, technology and environment committee.

Our country [is] getting hotter comparing with the previous years, he told VOA. And the typhoons are not coming as were expecting, as in each season. And that is a change that we cannot predict, and that is a main problem.

Laos is trying to curb the problem by suspending logging permits.

But Indonesian parliamentarian Siti Hediati Soeharto suggested developing nations could only do so much. She said rich economies have a greater responsibility to stem greenhouse gas emissions, as well as provide aid for climate change efforts in the developing world.

Indonesia is of the view that developed countries should continue taking the lead, she said.
U.S. President Donald Trump said the search for a new FBI director is moving "very rapidly" following his decision last week to fire James Comey, who was leading the investigation into Russia's meddling in last year's presidential election and links between Trump campaign aides and Moscow interests.

Trump did not elaborate when asked about the matter on Monday.

Some opposition Democratic senators are suggesting they will not confirm Comey's successor until a special prosecutor is appointed to carry out an independent investigation of Russian interference in the election that was aimed at helping Trump defeat his Democratic opponent, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But White House spokesman Sean Spicer said "there's frankly no need for a special prosecutor" since the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Comey headed and committees in both the Senate and House of Representatives are already conducting probes on Russia's involvement.

The Trump administration has interviewed at least eight candidates for the top FBI job, and Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday on his first overseas trip as president.

Meanwhile, the president continued to make headlines and rankle lawmakers from both parties. Even some supporters criticized Trump after the White House offered changing explanations for Comey's firing and an ominous tweet by the president that said the ousted FBI leader had better hope there are no "tapes" of their conversations.

Are there tapes?

On Sunday, lawmakers urged Trump to turn over any tapes of conversations with Comey. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said the White House must "clear the air" about whether there are any taped conversations.

"You can't be cute about tapes. If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over," Graham told NBC's Meet the Press program.

Spicer, at Monday's briefing with reporters, deflected all questions about whether Trump has installed a taping system at the White House, neither confirming nor denying its existence.

"I do not have the foggiest idea whether there are tapes or not," Democrat Mark Warner, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday. "But the fact that the president made allusions to that, and then the White House would not confirm or deny?"

"First of all," he added, "we [have] got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear. So I have asked, others have asked, for the tapes to be preserved, if they exist."

Democrats also are accusing Trump of attempting to thwart the FBI's investigation of alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. election, and possible ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign. Some have called for some type of independent inquiry.

Also on NBC television, Trump said Comey asked to meet with him in January so as to convey a desire to remain on the job at the FBI. But the president's account does not match the recollection of someone who interacted with Comey shortly before the FBI director dined with Trump at the White House.

James Clapper, former national intelligence director who served under the Obama administration from 2010 until Trump's inauguration, told ABC's This Week, "I spoke briefly with Director Comey about the dinner. He conveyed to me that he had been invited and he was - this is my characterization  uneasy with it, simply because of the optic or the appearance of potentially compromising his independence and that of the Bureau [FBI]."

He also had harsh worlds for the president's actions toward Comey.

"I think in many ways our institutions are under assault," Clapper told CNN's State of the Union Sunday. "Both externally  and that's the big news here  is Russian interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."

When asked to clarify if the internal assault came from the president directly, the former spy chief added: "Exactly."

Preet Bharara, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who was fired by Trump, said Sunday in a Washington Post opinion piece that in order to restore faith in the system, there needs to be a bipartisan investigation in Congress as well as a special prosecutor to probe Russia's election activities.

"Congress is a check and a balance," he wrote, "and never more important than when a bullying chief executive used to his own way seems not to remember the co-equal status of the other two branches."

He also praised Comey as someone who is willing to "say no to the president" and called for the choice of the next FBI chief to be someone "apolitical" and without a partisan resume.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday found only 29 percent of Americans approved of Comey's firing, while 78 percent support an independent commission or special prosecutor to investigate Russia's interference in the election.
The most disruptive cyberattack in the history of Britain's National Health Service propelled a debate over state hospital funding to the center of the election campaign on Monday, though officials said there had been no second wave of infections.

The "WannaCry" worm global attack, which locks computers and demands a $300 ransom, sowed chaos on Friday through the computer systems of some NHS hospitals which cancelled operations and reduced non-emergency care.

Although experts had voiced fears that a second wave of attacks could strike systems on Monday, the British authorities said this appeared to have been avoided.

"Across the globe, events today have been at the lower end of our expectations," said Ciaran Martin, the head of the National Cyber Security Centre which is part of Britain's surveillance spy agency GCHQ.

"We're continuing to investigate a small number of potential cases but there is nothing new to report," Martin said.

Scores of organizations inside the NHS, which provides free medical care for all and is a source of pride for Britons, were hit by the ransomware on Friday.

On Monday, the opposition Labour Party said Prime Minister Theresa May's response to the crisis had been poor and her government was to blame for failing to invest to keep the service secure.

Some hospitals still asked patients on Monday to seek treatment only for life-threatening emergencies.

Opinion polls show the NHS is the issue voters care most about, ahead even of Britain's exit from the European Union and the economy, before the June 8 national election.

"The government's response has been chaotic, to be frank," Labour's health spokesman Jon Ashworth said. "They've complacently dismissed warnings which experts, we now understand, have made in recent weeks.

"The truth is, if you're going to cut infrastructure budgets and if you're not going to allow the NHS to invest in upgrading its IT, then you are going to leave hospitals wide open to this sort of attack," he added.

Britain spends about 145 billion pounds ($187 billion) a year on health, or about a fifth of its state budget. Spending is projected to rise in real terms, although Labour says the government's plans do not provide enough to prevent a looming health crisis due to an ageing population.

The NHS, which was showcased in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, employs more than 1.5 million people, making it the world's fifth biggest employer after the U.S. and Chinese militaries, Walmart and McDonald's.

Cyber election crisis

Officials struggled to explain why some NHS computers had not been "patched" with Microsoft updates to close the vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across its networks.

"There are things you can do that everyone can do (...) in particular making sure that our data is properly backed up and making sure that we are using the software patches," said Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Security Minister Ben Wallace said the government used to contract for computer services across the entire NHS but that in 2007 - when the Labour Party was in power - that was stopped and left to the local trusts that run hospitals.

In a snap election campaign which May has dominated so far, the debate over the cyberattack on the NHS forced her onto the defensive, although it was not immediately clear what impact, if any, it would have on her popularity.

Britain's spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, warned in 2014 that some NHS organizations had "limited understanding of the threat and they do not yet understand what would represent an appropriate level of threat protection".

Asked if the government had ignored warnings over the NHS being at risk from cyberattack, May told Sky News: "No. It was clear [that] warnings were given to hospital trusts."

She said the attack had not been focused on the NHS but was part of a wide international issue, and said the government had invested 2 billion pounds in cyber security.

"We take cyber security seriously," said May, who was responsible for domestic security for six years as home secretary before becoming prime minister last year.

A poll on Monday found three-quarters of Britons thought the NHS was in a bad condition and more than 50 percent blamed the Conservatives for its current woes.

Government ministers were due to hold an emergency response meeting later on Monday to deal with the crisis. A spokesman for May said the annual information technology budget in the NHS was 4.2 billion pounds and that an extra 50 million pounds had been allocated for updating cyber security.

($1 = 0.7735 pounds)
The Czech Republic's political crisis is nowhere near an end after Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka rejected a proposal for a new finance minister.

Sobotka asked President Milos Zeman to fire Finance Minister Andrej Babis, one of the country's richest people, over unexplained business dealings. Babis has denied wrongdoing, saying he won't resign.

Zeman has so far refused to fire his ally and says he considers Babis a successful minister.

In an effort to resolve the crisis, Babis proposed his deputy, Alena Schillerova, who isn't affiliated with any political party, as a replacement Friday. ANO is favored to win October's parliamentary election well ahead of Sobotka's leftist Social Democrats.

But Sobotka said Monday that Schillerova is too close to Babis and he had no guarantees she would act independently.
With the deportation of 67 people last week, the U.S. has now removed about 326 Somali nationals since January, more than the total for all of 2016. This makes it the third year in a row that the number of Somalis removed from the U.S. has increased, stoking fears of raids, detentions and deportations.

The Somali citizens are part of a broader trend. In the first three months of 2017, the U.S. ordered the deportation of more than 1,200 Africans, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Citizens of Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia and Kenya have so far received the most removal orders.

Recent deportation orders reverse a decade-long trend. From 2006 to 2016, the number of Africans deported annually from the U.S. fell from 2,100 to just over 1,000. By the end of this year, the deportation rate will surpass 2016 numbers fourfold, if current rates hold.

Sudden spikes

Last week's deportation was the third such removal of Somali citizens in 2017. Despite recent spikes, however, the rate at which Somalis are deported from the U.S. is less than half the average for all immigrants. And, overall, immigrants from African countries are far less likely to be removed from the U.S. than other immigrant groups.

African citizens represented less than 0.4 percent of all deportations from the U.S. in 2016. That's partly because most immigrants coming to the U.S. are from non-African countries. In 2015, less than 5 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. were from Africa, according to Pew Research.

But Africans are also deported at far lower rates. Compared to all nationalities, citizens of African countries are about 10 times less likely to be deported. In 2016, one out of every 1,087 African immigrants was deported. That same year, one out of every 94 foreign nationals was deported, based on data from Pew Research Center, the Migration Policy Institute, and the U.S. Census.

Depending on their country of origin, some African immigrants are more likely to be deported, though these rates are still well below the overall average. The African countries with the highest deportation rates in 2016 were Somalia (one out of every 217 immigrants deported), Nigeria (one out of every 728 immigrants deported) and Ghana (one out of every 889 immigrants deported).

Almost 5,000 Somali nationals have received final orders of removal from the United States, according to ICE spokesman Brendan Raedy. The U.S. had held off on deporting Somalis because of a civil war in the country, but in 2012, the situation was considered stable enough that deportations were resumed.

As of April 1, 2017, there were 4,801 Somali nationals with final orders of removal, Raedy said last week.

Rejected asylum applications

Immigrants face deportation when they commit crimes, but non-criminal deportations are even more common. Last week's removals, for instance, included individuals whose asylum applications were denied.

According to an ICE official, An immigration judge presided over full and fair immigration proceedings for each individual. After considering the merits of each case, the judge found them ineligible for any form of relief and ordered them removed. ICE effectuated their orders of removal in accordance with applicable U.S. law.

However, hundreds of African refugees have been resettled in the U.S. this year, including 1,679 Somali refugees and 334 Sudanese refugees, according to U.S. State Department data from the Refugee Processing Center. Both countries are included in President Donald Trump's executive orders limiting travelers and immigrants from some majority-Muslim countries for 90 days. The current travel order has been halted by the courts and is now on appeal in two higher courts.

Fears, perceptions

Overall, removal rates may remain comparatively low, but that doesn't change the impression of African immigrants living in fear of deportation.

Recent research published in Frontiers of Public Health suggests that anti-immigration policies, heated rhetoric, and persistent stereotypes can undermine the well-being of all immigrants, even those not facing deportation.

Despite African immigrants' high levels of education and an English proficiency rate that trails only immigrants from Europe and Canada, only 26 percent of Americans have positive views of African immigrants, according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center. Perceptions about immigrants' impacts on crime and the economy fueled this low rate, Pew found.

Victoria Macchi contributed to this report
Islamabad, May 15 (IBNS): A blast at Mastung's Splingi area in Pakistan has left three security officials injured, media reports said on Monday.

An improvised explosive device (IED) was used for the roadside explosion, security forces were quoted as saying by Geo News.

The target of the attack was a security forces' car, media reports said.

It was partially damaged, security sources told Geo News.

The area has been cordoned off after the blast.

More details are awaited.
The European Union is pressing Venezuelas government and opposition groups to resume negotiations toward peacefully resolving the political crisis that has convulsed the country for nearly two months.

In a statement issued Monday, the EU repeated concerns it had expressed last July seeking "an urgent, constructive and effective dialogue."

The EUs current statement calls for "all Venezuelan political actors and institutions to work in a constructive manner" and to "avoid violent acts." Since early April, at least 38 people have died and many more have been injured in clashes between opponents and backers of President Nicolas Maduros government. The EU statement called for investigating "all incidents of violence."

Dissatisfied Venezuelans have taken to the streets to demand that the socialist Maduro schedule long-delayed elections, release political prisoners and permit the delivery of humanitarian aid. Their demonstrations, and those of Maduro's backers, have escalated since the government-friendly Venezuelan Supreme Court's late-March attempt to strip the National Assembly of its legislative powers and since Maduro's May 1 call for a new constitution.

The EU has a direct stake in the conflict, its statement noted, "with more than 600,000 European citizens" living in Venezuela. The EU said it "reiterates its readiness to cooperate with the Venezuelan authorities" to ensure their safety.

Protests continue

On Monday, responding to a call for a nationwide sit-in, activists again barricaded streets and highways with lawn chairs, tree limbs and garbage.

"Im here for the full 12 hours" of the sit-in, which started at 7 a.m., human resources worker Anelin Rojas, 30, told Reuters news service while perched cross-legged with a novel in the middle of Caracas main highway. "And Ill be back every day theres a protest, for as long as is necessary. Unfortunately, we are up against a dictatorship."

Appeals to troops

Maduro repeatedly has accused the United States of leading an attempt to overthrow his government. He has ordered troops to block opposition marches, using equipment including tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons.

On Sunday, Maduro opponents sought to win over the troops to their way of thinking.

Dozens of women in black converged on the National Guards headquarters in Caracas, in a Mothers Day appeal to the countrys armed forces to "listen to your mothers" and set aside weapons.

"Today, Venezuelan mothers have come to talk to the soldiers, to the National Guard, at all the barracks in Venezuela," said former National Assembly lawmaker Maria Corina Machado, according to Reuters. These women are telling soldiers "not to obey orders from the dictatorship, from the dictator who has robbed food and brought blood to his country. Listen to your mothers!"

Separately, the head of the opposition-led National Assembly also urged security forces toward conversation, not combat.

Maduro "is pushing you as an institution to ignore the constitutional order of Venezuela and you have to stop that situation," Julio Borges, the lawmaker, said at a news conference Sunday.

VOA Spanish Service correspondent Alvaro Algarra contributed to this report from Caracas.
In Somalia, a country long troubled by deadly violence, there's a disturbing new trend: an increase in summary executions.

Somali military courts and the militant group al-Shabab have each executed about a dozen people so far in 2017, all of them killed in public settings as crowds of between 30 and 300 people looked on.

While executions in Somalia are nothing new, the sudden increase has drawn the attention of human rights groups like Amnesty International as well as the local European Union delegation, which has asked Somali authorities to enact a moratorium on the death penalty.

Activists have been particularly critical of executions carried out by military courts, which they say are trying cases beyond their jurisdiction and failing to give defendants fair legal process.

Military courts put to death 11 people in April alone, including a policeman convicted of murdering a civilian, a soldier convicted of killing a civilian, and four al-Shabab militants sentenced for explosions that killed some 80 people in the town of Baidoa.

The execution of five young men by firing squad in the semi-autonomous Puntland region on April 8 sparked the most controversy. Amnesty International says the defendants, all accused of murdering officials in the town of Bossaso, were too young to be tried as adults, never given access to a lawyer and coerced into giving false confessions.



Tortured



The rights group says that according to family members, the boys confessed to the killings only after being beaten, raped, subjected to electric shocks and burned with cigarettes on their genitals.

These horrific allegations of torture must be fully and independently investigated and those found responsible held to account," said Michelle Kagari, Amnesty's deputy regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.

The head of Puntland Military Appeals Court, Salah Liif, said the court does not force confessions and denied the allegations about the defendants being underage.



Puntland Administration does not execute children and will never do that, he told VOA's Somali service. It was a propaganda spread by elements playing human rights groups against Puntland.

Al-Shabab gives defendants virtually no legal process at all. On the morning of May 6, residents of tiny Quar'a Madobe village were going about their business when al-Shabab militants ordered them to assemble. Dozens gathered to see the militants holding two men in civilian clothes at gunpoint.

"They brought the men in front of a tea restaurant, and told the residents they were captured enemy soldiers," said a witness who spoke to the Somali service. One militant then recited a Quranic verse, he said, and two others used large knives to slice off the men's heads, as those watching gasped and screamed.

A Somali National Army colonel identified the men as Mowlid Hussein and Ahmed Ya'qub, and said they were driving to the town of Jowhar to tend to family emergencies when al-Shabab intercepted their vehicle. The colonel said they were "off duty, uniformed and unarmed."

On May 1, al-Shabab executed two other men -- Ahmed Ibrahim Ragow, 29, and Yusuf Ali Bajin, 22 -- for allegedly raping a girl and killing her brother in the city of Beledweye. One was shot by firing squad; the other was publicly stoned.

Hassan Shire Sheikh is chairperson of the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Network (EHAHRD). In an interview with VOA Somali, he called for a complete stop to the executions.



Carrying out executions abruptly wont help the nation as it can cause the death of innocents, said Shire. The current executions represent retrogressive and unjustifiable [policy], as there is no evidence to suggest that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than other punishment."

Cleric backs death penalty



Sheikh Bashir Ahmed Salad, an influential cleric and the chairman of the Council of Religious Scholars of Somalia, said his council backs use of the death penalty, which describes as "a strong principle in our Islamic law."



The cleric, who survived a car bomb in Mogadishu in 2013, is one of the few Somali clerics to publicly criticize al-Shababs extreme ideology and terrorist attacks. He supports any harsh sentences against the militant members.



We generally believe that al-Shabab militant members disrespect human life, kill innocent people indiscriminately and destabilizes peoples peace and norm, so we support any iron hand dealing with them," he said.
The interior ministers of Germany and Italy are urging the European Union to set up a mission along Libya's border with Niger in a bid to stop mainly African migrants from reaching Europe.

In a letter to the European Commission, the ministers say that international efforts so far to curb the migrant flow have proven insufficient. According to the United Nations, more than 43,000 migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, have reached European shores this year from Libya and a surge in migrant crossings is expected this spring and summer.

Nearly 1,200 migrants have died at sea trying to cross the Mediterranean.

In their letter, which was first reported by the German weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag, the ministers, Thomas de Maiziere and Marco Minniti, said they "are convinced that we all must do more" to prevent that hundreds of thousands of people once again risk their lives in Libya and on the Mediterranean Sea in the hands of smugglers.

They called for the setting up of "an EU mission at the border between Libya and Niger as soon as possible," which could include mobile patrols and border posts as well as vetting of asylum-seekers. They also want for the EU to help support economic growth and development in communities along the border. "The goal is as quickly as possible to build up an EU mission on the border between Libya and Niger" to stop migrants entering war-torn Libya.

Italy has borne the brunt of the migration crisis since Europe concluded a deal with Turkey to stem the movement of migrants and war refugees into EU countries. European leaders are worried about a possible rush of newcomers, increasing the pressure on southern European states, such as Italy and Malta, but also roiling further politics on the continent and fueling anti-immigrant and far-right sentiment.

A scheme to relocate asylum-seekers continues to face stiff opposition from central European countries, especially Hungary and Slovakia.

The ministers request to the European Commission envisages shifting the EUs external border in effect to North Africa. It coincides with a warning from U.N. migration officials that hundreds of migrants along sub-Saharan migration routes are being traded openly in slave markets as well as in Libya. The office of the IOM in Niger has reported: "Sub-Saharan migrants were being sold and bought by Libyans, with the support of Ghanaians and Nigerians who work for them."

How enthusiastic EU member states will be to the request to set up a mission along the Libya-Niger border will partly be colored by the reaction of European military officials, say analysts.



EU navies alongside the Italian navy have been running a joint mission called Operation Sophia at sea, intercepting smugglers boats and picking up migrants to transfer them to centers in Italy. Critics of the operation say the humanitarian rescue mission is a pull factor encouraging migrants to make the journey.

EU plans proposed in 2015 for EU military forces to be more proactive, including mounting coastal raids to destroy traffickers boats, fell to the wayside.

European defense chiefs were fearful of mission creep and of being drawn into the conflict in Libya pitting rival governments and militias against each other. In a confidential memo, they warned their political superiors that plans to stop migrant-smuggling boats crossing the Mediterranean would lead inevitably to land operations in Libya and possible clashes with the Islamic States affiliate in the North African state. The memo counseling caution was leaked to WikiLeaks.

The International Organization for Migration estimated that more than a quarter-of-a-million migrants crossed the Libya-Niger border last year. The EU already has five migrant centers located in Niger, part of an effort to vet asylum-seekers and discourage migrants from risking the crossing into Libya and the Mediterranean and putting their lives into the hands of traffickers.

One of the three governments vying for control of Libya, the internationally-recognized Government of National Accord, has said it is willing to cooperate with the Europeans, but it has no reliable forces of its own and relies on the volatile backing of some militias whose loyalty could shift unpredictably.

The GNAs vice president told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Sunday, "the difficult economic situation in that [border] region pushes lots of young people to work for the traffickers."

On Monday, Italian police chief Franco Gabrielli announced that ships involved in the rescue of asylum-seekers in the Mediterranean wont be allowed to dock at any port on the island of Sicily until after a G7 summit this month in the town of Taormina. He said the move was designed to ease the burden on police and security agencies for the two-day summit, which begins May 26.
Historic rivals China and Vietnam are working on substantive agreements that could cover trade, investment and maritime resource sharing despite a bitter sovereignty dispute that had snarled relations less than a year ago.

The Communist neighbors are inching toward new trade and investment ties that analysts say would help shore up overall relations. Some believe the two might later approach stickier topics such as joint use of disputed waters or humane treatment of each others fishermen. The two countries still contest sovereignty over tracts of the vast, resource-rich South China Sea east of Vietnam and southwest of Hong Kong.

Prospects of some kind of agreement came into focus during Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang's visit to China, which ends Monday. He suggested the two sides work on complementing each others trade and investment advantages with a view toward improving overall relations, state media from Hanoi said.

President Quang is in China, and China promised a lot, said Yun Sun, senior associate with the East Asia Program under Washington-based think tank the Stimson Center. From an economic point of view, it is certainly practical and beneficial for Vietnam to have some sort of deal, but then again I think this still relatively early to tell.

In a meeting with Quang Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for more cross-border economic cooperation zones and joint infrastructure building, according to Chinas official Xinhua News Agency reported. China pledged to mitigate its trade deficit with Vietnam and increase direct investment, Sun said.

Talking probably does help lower tensions and improve the odds of things happening, said Alaistair Chan, an economist covering China for Moodys Analytics.

The Vietnamese president suggested China finalize rules on opening the Chinese market for farm products, dairy and seafood, media outlet vietnamnet.vn said. He also called on China to make more preferential loans and urged a working group to develop renewable energy investment projects that play on Chinas strengths and demand in Vietnam, the Vietnamese news report said.

On Friday companies from both countries signed agreements on milk distribution, tourism and rice processing.

China is the largest trade partner of Vietnam, with imports and exports worth about $72 billion last year. Vietnam also calls China one of the top 10 investors in the country.

But both countries are likely to hedge on letting outsiders invest in infrastructure, a possible source of direct investment, Chan said. If they can get there purely on trade and stay away from investment, a touchy subject in both countries, I think thats probably where they can get their quickest gain, he said.

China and Vietnam stepped up dialogue after July 2016, when a world arbitration court ruled that Beijing lacked a legal basis to claim more than 90 percent of the sea, a boon to rival claimants in Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. China responded to the ruling by seeking one-on-one dialogue with each country. Vietnam was one of the most hostile toward China before the court ruling.

Beijing and Hanoi dispute sovereignty over much of the 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea, including two chains of tiny islets. Beijings go-ahead for a Chinese oil rig in contested waters set off a clash in 2014. The two countries also still face distrust fanned by centuries of political rivalry as well as a border war in 1979.

Both countries stake their fast-growing economies on export manufacturing. Vietnamese companies resent China for using their larger production scales to sell goods in bulk at relatively low prices.

Relations got a lift in September when the Chinese premier and Vietnamese prime minister agreed to manage maritime differences. Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong visited China in January to help smooth relations.

Another boost came as China emerged last year as the top single-country source of tourism for Vietnam. About 2.2 million Chinese visited Vietnam from January to October. Chinese tourists have reshaped the economies of Hong Kong and Taiwan over the past decade.

Agreements on managing disputed tracts of the South China Sea may come later if the two sides keep getting along, experts say.

Vietnam and China have agreed to an informal median line in the tract of sea where their claims overlap, said Carl Thayer, Southeast Asia-specialized emeritus professor of politics at The University of New South Wales in Australia. They might eventually work on expanding joint exploration for oil under the seabed and a way to ensure humane treatment of fishermen, he said.

Its to stop the ramming, boarding, seizing fish catches and radio equipment and in the old days taking them hostages for money, Thayer said. Under a human treatment agreement, he said, If you find them, you report them to the other side and return them rather than bash them up and take everything.
Cyber security researchers on Monday pointed to code in a "ransomware" attack that could indicate a link to North Korea.

Symantec and Kaspersky Lab each cited code that was previously used by a hacker collective known as the Lazarus Group, which was behind the high-profile 2014 hack of Sony that was also blamed on North Korea.

But the security firms cautioned that it is too early to make any definitive conclusions, in part because the code could have been merely copied by someone else for use in the current event.

The effects of the ransomware attack appeared to ease Monday, although thousands more computers, mostly in Asia, were hit as people signed in at work for the first time since the infections spread to 150 countries late last week.

Health officials in Britain, where surgeries and doctors' appointments in its national health care system had been severely impacted Friday, were still having problems Monday. But health minister Jeremy Hunt said it was "encouraging" that a second wave of attacks had not materialized.

He said "the level of criminal activity is at the lower end of the range that we had anticipated."





In the United States, Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, told the ABC television network the global cybersecurity attack is something that "for right now, we've got under control."

He told reporters at the White House that "less than $70,000" has been paid as ransom to those carrying out the attacks. He urged all computer users to make sure they install software patches to protect themselves against further cyberattacks.

In the television interview, Bossert described the malware that paralyzed 200,000 computers running factories, banks, government agencies, hospitals and transportation systems across the globe as an "extremely serious threat."

Cybersecurity experts say the hackers behind the "WannaCry" ransomware, who demanded $300 payments to decrypt files locked by the malware, used a vulnerability that came from U.S. government documents leaked online. The attacks exploited known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems.

During the weekend, Microsoft president Brad Smith said the clandestine U.S. National Security Agency had developed the code used in the attack.

Bossert said "criminals," not the U.S. government, are responsible for the attacks. Like Bossert, experts believe Microsoft's security patch released in March should protect networks if companies and individual users install it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country had nothing to do with the attack and cited the Microsoft statement blaming the NSA for causing the worldwide cyberattack.

"A genie let out of a bottle of this kind, especially created by secret services, can then cause damage to its authors and creators," Putin said while attending an international summit in Beijing. He said that while there was "no significant damage" to Russian institutions from the cyberattack, the incident was "worrisome."

"There is nothing good in this and calls for concern," he said.

Even though there appeared to be a diminished number of attacks Monday, computer outages still affected segments of life across the globe, especially in Asia, where Friday's attacks occurred after business hours.





China



China said 29,000 institutions had been affected, along with hundreds of thousands of devices. Japan's computer emergency response team said 2,000 computers at 600 locations were affected there.

Universities and other educational institutions appeared to be the hardest hit in China. China's Xinhua News Agency said railway stations, mail delivery, gas stations, hospitals, office buildings, shopping malls and government services also were affected.

Elsewhere, Britain said seven of the 47 trusts that run its national health care system were still affected, with some surgeries and outpatient appointments canceled as a result. In France, auto manufacturer Renault said one of its plants that employs 3,500 workers stayed shut Monday as technicians dealt with the aftermath of the Friday attacks.

Security patches



Computer security experts have assured individual computer users who have kept their operating systems updated that they are relatively safe, but urged companies and governments to make sure they apply security patches or upgrade to newer systems.

They advised those whose networks have been effectively shut down by the ransomware attack not to make the payment demanded, the equivalent of $300, paid in the digital currency bitcoin.

However, the authors of the "WannaCry" ransomware attack told their victims the amount they must pay will double if they do not comply within three days of the original infection, by Monday in most cases. The hackers warned that they will delete all files on infected systems if no payment is received within seven days.
Two Ivory Coast cities were in a state of shutdown Monday as disgruntled soldiers continued firing in the air to demand the government pay them promised bonuses.

Reporters for VOA's French to Africa Service say the shooting in Abidjan and Bouake had stopped by mid-afternoon, but tension remained high, with shops closed down and the streets nearly empty.

A spokesman for the soldiers, speaking from Bouake, told VOA that soldiers are not attempting a coup. He said they simply want President Alassane Ouattara to keep his promise to pay them bonuses of about $20,000 per person.

The spokesman said soldiers have received less than half the money and want the rest paid in monthly installments.

Ivory Coast's defense minister, Alain-Richard Donwahi, said on state-run television late Monday that an agreement with the solders had been reached. However, two spokesmen for the mutineers told Reuters news agency that the proposed deal has been rejected by the soldiers.

Military operation



Ivory Coast has launched a military operation to take back Bouake, where at least one civilian was killed Sunday and reports say more than 20 others were hurt when they ignored warnings from the mutinous soldiers to stay in their homes. The soldiers took over Bouake on Friday.

Residents in Abidjan say the mutiny is affecting their livelihood. One street vendor, Elodie Aya Yao, said she went to the street market Monday to try to sell her cakes, but no one was there to shop.

"This morning I was making my cakes. I heard the shooting. I came out anyway, but there is no one around. Who is going to buy my cakes? It's the only means of supporting myself in Abidjan that I have. I have three children. We live off of what I can make selling," she said.

The Ivorian government promised the soldiers bonuses after a short-lived uprising in January, but is having trouble making the payments due to low prices for cocoa, the country's chief export.

Ouattara took office in 2011, after months of post-election violence in which thousands of rebels backed him against troops supporting longtime president Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to concede defeat in the election. Thousands of those rebels were later integrated into the army.
Tehran has warned Islamabad that it would hit bases inside Pakistan if the government does not confront Sunni militants who carry out cross-border attacks.

An anti-Iran Sunni Muslim militant group called Jaish-ul-Adl (JA), which calls itself the Army of Justice, took credit for an April 26 ambush in which 10 border guards were killed in Iran's southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan. Tehran said the militants crossed into Iran from neighboring Baluchistan province in Pakistan.

Here's what is known about the group:

What is Jaish-ul-Adl?

Jaish-ul-Adl  known as JA  is a Sunni insurgent group in Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province and fights Iranian security forces in the region.

The group was founded in April 2012 by Abdul Rahim Mollazehi, a Baluch militant, after the Iranian regime captured and executed Abdul Malek Rigi, former leader of the insurgent Jundullah group that claimed to be fighting for "equal rights of Sunni Muslims in Iran," in June 2010.

JA was first comprised of members of a weakened Jundullah. JA's first attack killed at least 10 members of Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Forces (IRGC), days after the group formed.

Where is JA based?

JA operates primarily in the Sistan-Baluchistan province, but it also operates from bases in neighboring Baluchistan province in Pakistan where it gets support from local Baluch tribes.



"Most militant groups in Baluchistan are based on tribal connections," said Abdullah Haqyar, who told VOA he is a former JA member. "These tribes have a tradition of helping and harboring members of allied tribes. Many tribes in Pakistani Baluchistan support their oppressed brothers in Iran."

Local tribes control large swaths of the region and neither Iranian nor Pakistani security forces have a permanent presence in the region.

What does JA fight for?

The group describes itself as a "political-military" movement and claims to be fighting to achieve justice for the "oppressed Sunni Baluch" people.

Sistan-Baluchistan, which is home to many Sunni Baluch and Sistani Persians, is one of the most underdeveloped and poverty-stricken areas in the country. The minority Sunnis in Iran are highly underprivileged and have been deprived of political and economic opportunities.

According to Iranian lawmaker Hamid Reza Pashang, over 70 percent of the province population lives in "absolute poverty."

JA says it must fight the Shi'ite-dominated regime in Iran because it persecutes the Sunni minority.

"Since this regime only uses the language of force and humiliation, we have no other means but to fight back," JA said in a video statement in late 2012.

JA also said it opposes Iran's military involvement in Syria where elite Iranian forces and the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hezbollah are supporting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's civil war.

Who are JA fighters?

According to a statement on the group's website, JA is "composed of young Iranian Sunnis who have come together to defend the oppressed to the divine command."

The exact number of JA members is unknown, but according to some reports, it has over 500 members and followers. The number of active fighters is said to be over 100. Some of its fighters are seasonal, including some from Pakistan, who are called upon for occasional operations against Iranian security forces.

How many attacks has JA conducted?

Since 2012, JA has claimed responsibility for conducting more than 200 attacks and killing and abducting more than 150 Iranian security forces members.

In its attacks, JA has taken credit for shooting down a military helicopter and destroying dozens of army vehicles. Iranian authorities have confirmed some of the JA claims.

In addition to the April 26 ambush, which killed 10 border guards, JA claimed responsibility for attacks that killed eight border guards in April 2015 and 14 in October 2013 near the Pakistani border.
As President Donald Trump considers a replacement for fired FBI Director James Comey, lawmakers are urging the president to steer clear of appointing any politicians.



The advice came Sunday amid more criticism over Trump's dismissal of Comey during an FBI probe of Russia's meddling with last year's election and any ties to the Trump campaign. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said the Founding Fathers created three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, but with Trump as president, that was now "eroding."



"I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally - and that's the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system," Clapper said "I think as well our institutions are under assault internally."



When asked, "Internally, from the president?" Clapper responded, "Exactly."

The White House had no immediate comment. No White House aide appeared on the Sunday news shows, leaving Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to defend Trump. "The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whoever he wants," she said.



Lawmakers from both parties reprimanded Trump for his actions, which included shifting explanations from the White House for Comey's dismissal and an ominous tweet by Trump that warned Comey against leaks to the press because Trump may have "tapes" of their conversations.



Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said selecting an FBI agent to lead the agency would allow the nation to "reset." He dismissed as less desirable at least two of the 14 candidates under consideration, ex-FBI agent and former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.



"It's now time to pick somebody who comes from within the ranks, or has such a reputation that has no political background at all that can go into the job on Day 1," said Graham, R-S.C.



"The president has a chance to clean up the mess he mostly created," Graham said, adding: "I have no evidence that the president colluded with the Russians at all ... but we don't know all the evidence yet."



Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, continued to argue that the president should consider Merrick Garland, the federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court last year by President Barack Obama but who was denied a hearing by Republicans. A former top aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, said that McConnell is interested in the suggestion.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the new FBI director should be someone "not of partisan background" with "great experience" and "courage." Declining to comment on a Garland nomination, Schumer left open the possibility that Democrats might withdraw support for a new FBI director unless the Justice Department names a special prosecutor for the Russia probe.



Under Senate rules, Republicans could confirm an FBI director with 51 votes. Republicans hold 52 seats in the chamber to Democrats' 48.



Calling Trump's remarks about possible taped conversations "outrageous," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel or another committee would ``absolutely'' subpoena such tapes.



"We have got to make sure that these tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear," Warner said, adding that he hopes to have Comey testify in a public hearing before his committee.



The blowback against the firing of Comey angered the increasingly frustrated president, who made the decision after consulting only a small group of advisers, worried the news would leak out. Trump has openly vented his frustration with the media and Democrats on Twitter, musing about canceling press briefings and arguing that it's difficult for aides to know his thinking.



The administration has interviewed at least eight candidates to replace Comey, just over half of the 14 being considered. Trump has said a decision could come before he leaves Friday for the Mideast and Europe, his first overseas trip as president. He was also set to welcome foreign leaders to the White House, with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday and President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia on Thursday. A leader of the United Arab Emirates was scheduled to visit Monday.



Clapper and Schumer made their comments on CNN's "State of the Union"; Graham spoke on NBC's "Meet the Press"; Haley and Warner appeared on ABC's "This Week"; and Warner spoke on "Fox News Sunday" along with Lee and Holmes.


A second U.S. appellate court this month is considering whether to uphold the suspension of travel restrictions for the nationals of six countries to the United States, as well as the arrival of refugees.

Three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in Seattle on Monday morning, after the government challenged a decision by a judge in Hawaii that paused the most substantive parts of a revised executive order issued by President Donald Trump in March.

The court did not immediately issue a ruling.

At the center of the case is a question of whether the 90-day ban on most travelers from six majority-Muslim countries and a 120-day stop on refugee arrivals is discriminatory and unconstitutional.

"The executive order sets out national security justifications, but how is a court to know whether in fact it's a Muslim ban in the guise of national security justification?" Judge Ronald Gould asked.

The government rescinded a January version of the order, replacing it after lawsuits across the country alleging what was then a seven-country ban on travel disproportionately targeted Muslims. Trump, who called the second order on March 6 a "watered-down" version, until last week maintained a 2015 statement on his campaign website that called for a ban on Muslims coming to the United States.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall attempted to distinguish between Trump's words before his inauguration Jan. 20, and his executive orders in the following weeks and months, in the Seattle courtroom.

"People say things on a campaign trail and then they take an oath to uphold the Constitution, they form an administration and they consult with them on the policies that they develop, and we shouldn't start down the road of psychoanalyzing what people meant in the campaign trail," Wall argued.

Attorney Neal Katyal, who represented the plaintiffs, told the judges the president showed a "repeated pattern" of behavior that supports a discriminatory attitude toward Muslims, and a ruling in favor of the government would set a precedent for discrimination.

"This is something new and unusual in which you're saying, 'This whole class of people, some of which are dangerous, we can bar them all,'" Katyal argued.

Monday's hearing followed similar arguments in a Richmond, Virginia, court last week, when a panel of 13 judges in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments regarding a Maryland judge's suspension of the 90-day moratorium on travel from six majority-Muslim countries. The court has not yet ruled in that case.

The administration has to win both cases to fully reinstate the order.

If it loses either case, the next step would be the Supreme Court  a step Trump enthusiastically tweeted in favor of last month.
French President Emmanuel Macron spent his first full day in office traveling to Germany, telling Chancellor Angela Merkel he wants to work closely with her to create "deep reforms" to the European Union.

Macron said in Berlin Monday there must be a "less bureaucratic" Europe and that he is ready to change EU treaties if needed.

He also said France will push for economic reforms in the country to bring down unemployment and implement a reform agenda "not because Europe requests it, but because France needs it.''

Macron said he does not favor European countries taking joint responsibility for old debts and that he has never pushed for jointly issued eurobonds. Germany, which has Europe's largest economy, has always opposed taking direct responsibility for weaker EU countries' debts.

Merkel told Macron "Europe will only do well if there is a strong France, and I am committed to that."

The German chancellor said she and Macron agreed to develop a medium-term road map on how to deepen European Union integration. She said Germany would also be willing to change EU treaties if the changes make sense. But the two countries should first work on what they want to reform, she added.

She said the French and German governments would hold a meeting on key issues in July.

The visit to Germany marked Macron's first foreign trip after his inauguration on Sunday, continuing a tradition of French presidents making their first international trip to Germany.

In his inaugural address, Macron vowed to restore France's place in Europe and the world.

Macron, a centrist, was elected last week, defeating anti-EU, anti-immigrant candidate Marine Le Pen. The campaign exposed deep splits in France over the country's role in Europe.
A New Hampshire man who was injured in a house explosion is thanking Siri for saving his life.

Christopher Beaucher says he was checking on his mother's vacant cottage in Wilmot on May 1 when he saw something suspicious and went inside.



He tells WMUR-TV that when he switched on a light, the house exploded.



"The whole place caught fire," Beaucher said. "Part of it collapsed while I was in it during the initial explosion, so I couldn't really tell where I was."



Beaucher's face and hands were badly burned. He grabbed his cellphone but was unable to dial because of his injuries. He says he somehow asked his iPhone's voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri to call 911, believing he was going into shock.

A spokeswoman for Apple said Monday that statistics on Siri being used for emergencies weren't available, but noted some recent emergencies in which it was used. Those include three boaters off the Florida coast in April who used the water-resistant phone when their craft capsized; a 4-year-old boy from London who used his mother's thumb to unlock her iPhone and called Siri after she collapsed at home in March; and a man in Vancouver who collapsed, became paralyzed, and was able to use his tongue to use Siri.



Beaucher is undergoing treatment for his injuries and says he hopes to return to his job as a cook and tend to his farm.



"I'm very, very, extremely lucky to be alive," he said.



The New Hampshire state fire marshal's office is investigating the explosion.
Kara McCullough, a scientist working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has been crowned Miss USA.



McCullough, who represented the District of Columbia in the decades-old pageant, was born in Naples, Italy, and raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She said she wants to inspire children to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.



"I love science," McCullough said after the Sunday event. "I look at this as a great opportunity to ... get to experience worldwide culture, as well as just having the opportunity to be impacted by so many children, hopefully in the math and sciences."



McCullough bested 50 other contestants and will represent the U.S. at the Miss Universe contest.



This was the second year in a row that the representative of the nation's capital won the Miss USA title. Last year, District of Columbia resident Deshauna Barber became the first-ever military member to win Miss USA.



This year's top five finalists were asked questions that touched on the pros and cons of social media, women's rights and issues affecting teenagers. McCullough was asked whether she thinks that affordable health care for all U.S. citizens is a right or a privilege. She said it is a privilege.



"As a government employee, I'm granted health care and I see firsthand that for one to have health care, you need to have jobs," she said.



McCullough said she will be discussing with her supervisor whether she will take a leave of absence from her job at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during her one-year reign.



Miss New Jersey Chhavi Verg, who studies marketing and Spanish at Rutgers University, was the runner-up at the event held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on the Las Vegas Strip.



Verg was one of five women who participated in the pageant who told The Associated Press they immigrated to the U.S. with their families at a young age. Verg and the women representing Florida, North Dakota, Hawaii and Connecticut described the challenges and opportunities they faced as immigrants.



Verg told The AP that she and her parents immigrated from India to the U.S. with only $500 in their pockets when she was 4 years old. Her first winter she did not have a winter coat and the family struggled to adjust.



"I want to show Americans that the definition of what it means to be American is changing," the 20-year-old said. "It's not just one face. There are many different people who are Americans, and I feel like Asian-Americans often times are left out of the conversation."



The contestants' remarks contrast with the controversy that surrounded the pageant in 2015, when then-part owner and now U.S. President Donald Trump offended Hispanics when he made anti-immigrant remarks in announcing his bid for the White House.



Trump co-owned The Miss Universe Organization with NBCUniversal, but the network and the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision quickly cut ties with him, refusing to air the show. Trump sued both networks, eventually settling and selling the pageant to talent management company WME/IMG.


A Syrian war monitor says airstrikes early Monday killed 23 people near the country's border with Iraq.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes in Al-Bukamal were likely carried out by the U.S.-led coalition that has been targeting Islamic State with bombs since late 2014.

There was no immediate comment on the airstrikes from the coalition, which has said its actions were likely responsible for killing more than 350 civilians since the air campaign began. Rights groups say the figure is much higher.

The strikes came a day before U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura was set to convene the next round of peace talks aimed at bringing an end to the conflict. The envoy said Monday he expects the negotiations to go until Friday or Saturday, and that efforts led by Russia and Turkey to achieve smaller cease-fires cannot be sustained unless there is progress toward a political resolution.

More evacuations

On Sunday, at least 1,500 Syrian rebels and their families abandoned another long-held district just outside Damascus, as the army of President Bashar al-Assad and its allies push to seize full control of the capital and surrounding areas for the first time in nearly five years.

State media and witnesses said the evacuation began at dawn, less than a day after government forces captured the Qaboun district, and just days after hundreds of other beleaguered rebel fighters and their families departed two other nearby districts.

A government deal facilitating the Qaboun evacuation was announced late Saturday. It replicates earlier agreements under which rebels were granted safe passage to rebel-held territory near the Turkish border in exchange for an end to weeks of shelling and airstrikes by Syrian and allied Russian warplanes.

Government forces have pressed for several months to recapture rebel districts north and east of Damascus, and analysts say they succeeded only after discovering and destroying underground tunnels that connected the three neighborhoods.

As civil war raged near the capital, Kurdish-led Syrian forces far to the north pressed a separate offensive against Islamic State extremists just outside the de facto IS capital, Raqqa.



Syrian Kurds battle IS in north

Monitors from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported a third straight day of fighting between the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and IS fighters seeking to defend their stronghold city.

There were no reports of casualties, but witnesses reported hundreds of civilians fleeing toward SDF battle lines on Sunday as the anti-jihadist force took aim at extremist fighters.

Monitors on Saturday reported that SDF forces had advanced within four kilometers of Raqqa, and an SDF spokesman predicted an all out offensive on the city within the next several months.

Forces pushing to liberate Raqqa include SDF forces attacking from the north and rival Syrian ground forces backed by Shi'ite allies and Russia pressing toward the city from the south.

Sunni Arab and Turkmen militias also are involved, along with a separate contingent of Turkish-backed forces opposed to a faction of Kurdish fighters in the U.S.-backed SDF alliance.

U.S. advisers have so far maintained peace within the factions by creating buffer zones separating Kurdish fighters from Turkish-backed forces.





Anti-jihadist push gains steam

It remains unclear what, if any, role Syrian government forces and their Russian allies will play in the planning or execution of the complex Raqqa offensive.

The push to retake Raqqa appears to have gathered strength, after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a decision last week to arm Kurdish-led forces with heavy weapons.

That decision has been roundly criticized by Turkey, which sees a key Syrian Kurdish unit in the U.S.-backed SDF alliance, the so-called YPG, as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK.

Turkish leaders have voiced fears that any heavy weaponry used by the SDF against extremists at Raqqa will eventually fall into the hands of PKK fighters, who have battled the Turkish government for an autonomous homeland in Turkey's southeast for more than three decades.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who opens an official visit to Washington Tuesday, told reporters last week that he hoped "this [U.S. decision] will be reversed immediately."
Just days after being elected, South Korean President Moon Jae-in faced his first North Korean provocation, putting an early test to his stated policy to pursue peaceful dialogue with his defiant nuclear neighbor.

The South Korean leader expressed solidarity with the United States and Japan by condemning North Korea for conducting what is believed to be the successful test of a new two-stage liquid fueled rocket on Sunday capable of flying up to 4,500 kilometers. The North Korean state news agency KCNA on Monday said the test was to verify the capability to carry a "large scale heavy nuclear warhead," and the missile flew 787 kilometers, reaching an altitude of 2,111 kilometers.

President Moon warned Pyongyang that provocations will be met with stern responses. He also called for the development of the Korean Air and Missile Defense system to be used in addition to, or in lieu of, the controversial U.S. THAAD missile shield that China objects to as a threatening increase of American military capabilities in the region.

Conditional dialogue

As a candidate Moon promised to pursue negotiations and engagement with Pyongyang. But as the new commander in chief of the military, he stressed that dialogue is possible only when North Korea changes its behavior.

Moons clarified position on conditional talks seems fundamentally the same as that of U.S. President Donald Trump, and essentially the same as past American and South Korean administrations.

Seoul and Washington remain on the same page that the ultimate goal, that cannot be compromised, is the dismantlement of North Koreas WMD (weapons of mass destruction) capability and facilities, said political analyst Bong Young-shik with the Yonsei University Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul.

North Korea, in defiance of international sanctions, has openly declared itself a de facto nuclear state. The Kim Jong Un government considers its continued efforts to develop a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the U.S. mainland as essential to its survival.

Unless Pyongyang agrees to discuss its eventual disarmament for economic aid and security guarantees, Bong said, Moon will not make any progress to restart talks or reopen cooperative projects like the Kaesong industrial project which had employed 54,000 North Korean workers and provided about $100 million a year to the local economy and the government, before it was closed in 2016.

The Moon Jae-in government is very well aware of how difficult it is for Seoul to start engaging Pyongyang, because any improvements to inter-Korean economic cooperation has to overcome the obstacle, or the international suspicion, that economic cooperation with North Korea may provide Pyongyang with the financial capacity to further develop WMDs, Bong said.

Chinese pressure

The Trump administration has made stopping the development of a North Korean ICBM a top priority and stressed the U.S. would consider military action to take out launching sites and nuclear facilities, if needed. To back up the threat of force, the U.S. Pacific Command recently sent increased military assets to the region, including the USS Carl Vinson nuclear-powered aircraft carrier strike force.

More recently, Washington has emphasized increased cooperation from Beijing to more strictly implement U.N. sanctions against North Korea. But after enforcing a strict ban on North Korean coal and other measures in early April, there are indications China has eased some pressure on its economically dependent ally. There are reports the price of gasoline in North Korea returned to normal after the fear of a Chinese oil embargo dissipated. And the suspension of Air China flights to Pyongyang in April lasted only three weeks.

This week North Korea sent a delegation to the Belt and Road initiative in Beijing. The United States and South Korea also sent representatives to this international economic forum.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing reportedly complained to China's foreign ministry, saying that inviting North Korea sent the wrong message at a time when the world is trying to pressure Pyongyang to halt its nuclear and missile programs.

The fact that China did not discriminate and invited North Korea to stand on the diplomatic stage shows North Korea's hardline strategy is diplomatically working. I think we have to consider what kind of (additional) sanctions will make North Korea give up its nuclear weapons, said North Korea analyst and defector Ahn Chan-il, with the World Institute for North Korean Studies.

South Korea diplomacy

South Korea said Monday it will send special envoys to the United States, China, Japan, Russia and Germany to discuss how to deal with the growing North Korean nuclear and missile threat.

Former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan will head to China. Lee also served in the past as a special envoy to Beijing for former liberal President Roh Moo-hyun, who supported the Sunshine policy of unconditional inter-Korean aid and trade programs that was eventually halted due to the Norths continued nuclear development efforts and other provocations.
A senior Palestinian official says he "hopes" Israel will halt settlement construction if U.S.-led peace talks resume, but stopped short of making it a condition.

Saeb Erekat spoke Sunday in Jordan after meeting with the foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt, ahead of a Mideast trip next week by President Donald Trump.

Trump says he wants to broker an Israeli-Palestinian deal.

The Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in 1967. Israel has built settlements on war-won lands, now home to 600,000 Israelis.

In recent years, the Palestinians refused to resume talks without a settlement curb.

Asked about linking negotiations to a settlement freeze, Erekat said "no one stands to lose more in the absence of peace and negotiations" than Palestinians.
Prison officers in Papua New Guinea shot and killed 17 inmates involved in a mass prison break, local media reported on Monday, sparking calls for an investigation into overcrowded jails in the South Pacific nation where Australia detains asylum seekers.

Fifty escapees were still on the run from the Buimo prison in the city of Lae on Papua New Guinea's north coast, police said on their official Facebook page, warning the public that an increase in carjackings and armed robberies was likely.

"These are dangerous individuals," Lae Metropolitan Police Command said. "Police anticipate an increase in serious crimes in the city."

Local media reported than more than 70 prisoners attempted to escape from the Buimo prison, nearly 320 kilometers north of the capital Port Moresby, on Friday. The Post Courier and The National newspapers reported that 17 prisoners were shot dead, three captured, and 57 were still at large.

It was the third mass breakout from Buimo in three years. International human rights groups have repeatedly called for an inquiry into PNG jails, citing concerns about overcrowding, limited access to medical treatment and delays in court proceedings.

"Unfortunately these incidents, tragic as they are, happen all too frequently in Papua New Guinea as there is poor accountability with police and security officers," Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International's Pacific Researcher, told Reuters by telephone.

In February last year, 11 prisoners were killed in an attempted breakout at Buimo after 30 prisoners attacked guards.

Fifty-five men escaped from the prison in a breakout in 2015 and two years earlier one detainee was shot dead when 44 fled the same facility in another mass escape.

Australia maintains an asylum-seeker detention center on PNG's Manus Island, in accordance with its policy of not allowing people who attempt to reach Australia by boat to settle in the country.

The Manus camp, one of two South Pacific island asylum seeker detention centers funded by Australia, has been criticized by human right groups and the United Nations for cramp conditions, inadequate medical facilities and violence.

The PNG Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the camp was illegal and should close, forcing Australia to confirm it would shut down the camp by the end of 2017.

Australia struck a deal with former U.S. President Barack Obama to take some detainees who were deemed refugees, an agreement criticized by President Donald Trump as a "dumb deal" when he took office earlier this year.
Ankaras apparent intention to build a wall along its border with Iran is being met with skepticism by some regional experts who question its practicality and whether it will curb cross-border terrorism as Turkey intends.

A report last week in the Hurriyet Daily News, written by a reporter close to the Turkish government, quoted unnamed Turkish authorities as saying the wall is necessary to keep out militants in Iran associated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is fighting the Turkish State for greater autonomy.

The PKK has a lot of camps on Iranian territory along the border with Turkey, the newspaper quoted a government source as saying. These camps house between 800 and 1,000 Kurdish fighters. They cross the border, commit attacks in Turkey and run back.

As a precaution against this, we are going to build a wall along 70 kilometers of the border near Agr and Igdr, and we will close the rest of it with towers and iron fences, the official said.

The wall proposal copies what Turkey has done along its Syrian border since 2014. Turkey put up concrete barriers topped with razor wire along about 900 kilometers of its border with Syria at a cost of $672 million. The enhanced border security is designed to keep out Islamic State infiltrators and forces associated with PKK in Syria.

Iran supports plan

Tehran reacted positively to the Turkish proposal along the Iranian border, according to Iranian state-run media.

"We are not principally against Turkey's project to build a wall on the Iranian border, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official told the Tehran Times. Yet every action that takes place on the border should be reported to Tehran."

Tehran hopes a wall will alleviate the smuggling of clothing and other goods from Iran, an illicit trade Tehran says is worth $2 billion annually.

We even encourage this should happen sooner and the flow of contraband to Iran should be curbed, an Iranian government source told Tehrans IRNA news.

But some experts say walling and fencing Turkeys border with Iran, which stretches more than 500 kilometers, is impractical.



Considering the fact that most of this borderline is inaccessible, mountainous and in high altitude, building such a wall all along the border is neither possible nor rational, said Savas Bicer, a retired Turkish Army colonel with expertise in Turkey-Iran border affairs.



And as for curbing cross-border activities of the PKK, Rebwar Karim Mahmood, an Kurdish Iraqi international affairs expert, said the PKK is skilled at getting insurgent help from across Turkeys borders in Iran, Syria and Iraq.



Building a wall on some parts of the border with Iran cannot prevent PKK who know the border and its passages like the back of their hand from conducting operations or passing into Turkey, he said.

Syria wall working



But Turkish analyst Hakki Uygur, who runs the Center for Iranian Studies in Ankara, cities what the Turkish government calls a success in the barriers with Syria.



A Turkish military colonel told Reuters recently that smuggling attempt numbers, which peaked in 2014 at 3,474 incidents, dropped to 77 in 2016. Illegal crossing attempts fell to 8,531 from more than 12,000 over the same period, Reuters reported.

.

We can surely say that such a wall can prevent PKK and other hostile groups from moving and conducting operations in Turkey at some points if not completely, Uygur said of the Turkish-Iran border proposal.



Turkey has long blamed Iran for providing safe harbor for PKK affiliates inside its territory and accuses the Iranian regime of turning a blind eye to PKK activities. The Iranian border town of Maku is known by locals as a hub for PKK activity with much of it centered in a mosque in one district.



They [PKK] hold meetings, recruit and even fundraise in that mosque built by a notorious local smuggler  all under the nose of Iranian security forces, Ahmed Najmuddin a Maku resident told VOA.
In most nations, having a billionaire financier and philanthropist would be a source of great pride, a person many elected officials would want to cozy up to.



Not for George Soros.



The demonization of the American-Hungarian billionaire and Holocaust survivor has spread across Central Europe, with the 86-year-old increasingly accused by nationalists of using his money to force his liberal values, including support for refugees, on their societies.



And it's not just those on the fringes, but elected officials who are attributing all manner of sins to Soros, a political strategy that seems aimed at de-legitimizing projects that Soros has supported in Central and Eastern Europe's transition to democracy.



This groundswell began in late 2015, as large numbers of migrants and refugees were arriving in Europe. A far-right nationalist at an anti-refugee rally in Poland set fire to an effigy of an Orthodox Jew as a crowd chanted slogans against Islam and the European Union. The man said the Jewish figure represented Soros.



It wasn't always this way. In 2012, Poland's then-president, Bronislaw Komorowski, bestowed one of the country's highest orders on Soros, thanking him for his contributions to a nascent democratic civil society after communism.



Soros' donations have advanced human rights, the rule of law, public health, LGBT and Roma rights, education and even improved transportation. Many of the leaders turning against him now  including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban  got scholarships from Soros in the 1990s to study in the West or received research grants.





Officials today are much more likely to accuse Soros destroying their countries.



Liviu Dragnea, chairman of Romania's ruling Social Democratic Party, says Soros and his work "have fed evil in Romania.''



Krystyna Pawlowicz, a lawmaker with the ruling conservatives in Poland, called him the "most dangerous man in the world'' on Radio Maryja, a Catholic broadcaster. She said his foundations "finance anti-Christian and anti-national activities."



Sociologists see such rhetoric, which gives Soros almost supernatural abilities to destroy traditional societies, as a modern manifestation of old anti-Semitic conspiracies amid new populist rage against elites and the European Union.



"This narrative about Soros as an evil presence started with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is spreading," said Jacek Kucharczyk, a sociologist and director of the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw. "It is a witch hunt that is being promoted by authoritarian right-wing populists."



"And there is an undertone of anti-Semitism behind it. Because he promotes liberal values, has a Jewish background and is a billionaire, he is the perfect figure for explaining to hard-core voters why the world is the way it is," he said.



Kucharczyk, whose institute receives some Soros funding, said in places like Russia and Poland, where anti-Semitism has deep roots, Soros is "a very useful enemy to have."



Soros says his fight against intolerance is rooted in his own experience of living through the Nazi occupation of Hungary  which his family survived by hiding their Jewish identities. He has given away $12 billion to date, according to his Open Society Foundations.



Of that, $400 million has gone to Hungary, where Orban, the prime minister, has taken steps that could force the closure in Budapest of the acclaimed Central European University, which Soros founded in 1991 to help support the region's emerging democracies.



Orban has described Soros as an "American financial speculator attacking Hungary'' who has ``destroyed the lives of millions of Europeans."



Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the European Commission, said he found that language anti-Semitic  prompting an angry reaction from the Hungarian government, with Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto saying Budapest's disputes with Soros have "absolutely nothing to do" with his Jewish origins.



Laura Silber, a spokeswoman at Soros' Open Society Foundations, said Orban's attacks on Soros are an attempt to distract Hungarians from the country's real problems.





"Orban is using George Soros as a scapegoat in an effort to deflect attention from issues of real importance to the Hungarian people, such as the country's deteriorating health care and education," Silber said.



The Associated Press requested an interview with Soros, but Silber said that he wasn't giving any interviews.



Rafal Pankowski, head of Never Again, an anti-racism organization in Warsaw, says the "current tendency to see Soros as a central figure in an alleged global Jewish conspiracy" is growing along with a rise in xenophobia and hate speech.



"Soros is a convenient target for those who reject liberal values and the vision of an open, pluralist society," said Pankowski, who gets no Soros funding. "Anti-Semitism is a core element of nationalist identity across Eastern and Central Europe."



The anti-Soros mood is particularly strong in Macedonia, where many right-wingers blame him for a political crisis that has dragged on for two years over a massive illegal wiretapping operation of top leaders that has revealed wrongdoing. A group called Stop Operation Soros, or SOS, emerged in January.



Poland's ruling party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accuses Soros of trying to destroy traditional societies by forcing multiculturalism on them.



"The ideas of Mr. Soros, ideas of societies that have no identity, are convenient ideas for those who have billions, because such a society is extremely easy to manipulate," Kaczynski said.



Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, sees the rhetoric as ``reminiscent of previous anti-Semitic patterns.''



"This is not to say that Soros should be above criticism. But there are certainly other elements involved that go beyond legitimate and specific criticism and focus on his Jewish roots," Weitzman said. There's a need by some "to create a global manipulative Jewish monster which can be blamed for all the evils and problems."
In South Africa on Monday, the Constitutional Court heard arguments on whether the upcoming parliamentary vote of no-confidence against President Jacob Zuma should be a secret ballot. The court's ruling could have political consequences.

Lawyers representing the opposition parties argued in favor of their petition before a full bench of the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg.

"The core submission is that the function of the court is to create conditions in which members of the National Assembly can carry out their constitutional duty of oversight and that the only way to create that condition is to allow a secret ballot," said Geoff Budlender, a legal representative of the opposition. "The fear is that if there is an open ballot, you will be expelled from the party and expelled from parliament through that mechanism. That is why there needs to be a secret ballot."



Lawyers representing President Jacob Zuma and the speaker of parliament countered that no-confidence votes have never taken place in secret. They argued the constitution does not allow the courts to tell parliament how to conduct its business.

Outside the court, members of other opposition parties, civil society organizations, and religious groups demonstrated in support of a secret ballot.

Zuma has faced mounting criticism following several corruption scandals in the past year and a controversial Cabinet reorganization last month. Members of his ruling coalition have been among those calling on him to step down.

While the questions before the Constitutional Court are legal, the stakes are highly political.

The opposition needs to garner a two-thirds majority in parliament to vote Zuma out. To get it, the opposition would need some ANC lawmakers to break ranks.

The ruling African National Congress has already instructed its MPs to back Zuma.

Speaking to reporters last month, ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe said a secret ballot will not change the way the ANC lawmakers vote.

"There will be no ANC member who will vote in either way for a motion of the opposition. We are members of the ANC in a party political system and we will not vote against the ANC," said Mantashe.

Once the court delivers its judgment on how the vote can be conducted, parliament is expected to set a date to consider the motion of no confidence. Zuma's second elected mandate does not expire until 2019.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says President Donald Trump is concerned about how moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would affect the Mideast peace process.

"I think it'll be informed, again, by the parties that are involved in those talks and most certainly...whether Israel views it as being helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction," Tillerson told NBC's Meet the Press Sunday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted immediately.

"Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem will not harm the peace process. It will do the opposite," his office said in a statement. "It will advance it by righting an historical wrong and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1967 and regards the entire city as its eternal capital. It has long urged the international community to relocate embassies there.

The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, and Israel's allies have been reluctant to move their embassies.

Trump promised to relocate the U.S. embassy as one of his campaign pledges. He has yet to make any concrete moves toward carrying out that promise.

Trump will meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders as part of his first foreign trip as president later this week.
The Trump administration has approached the wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to be the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, days before President Donald Trump embarks on his first foreign trip.



Trump will nominate Callista Gingrich for the post, two people with direct knowledge of the discussions said Monday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly before an official announcement.



Trump's foreign trip this month includes a stop at the Vatican.



The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



If nominated, she would require Senate confirmation.



Callista Gingrich is president of Gingrich Productions and has produced a number of documentaries, including one about Pope John Paul II.



She worked for the House Committee on Agriculture as chief clerk until 2007. She was a key figure in her husband's 2012 bid for the Republican nomination.



She was a congressional aide when she began a six-year affair with Newt Gingrich, then a married Republican congressman.



In 2012, Gingrich's second wife, Marianne Gingrich, told ABC News that he had proposed an "open marriage" so he could continue to see Callista Gingrich without divorcing.



The former House speaker denied the charge.



He converted to Catholicism in 2009, after years of attending mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., where Callista Gingrich has performed in the choir.

Trump's vision for foreign relations and diplomacy has been starkly different to that promoted by the vastly popular Pope Francis. Francis has spoken of the need for bridges between nations, while Trump has advocated for walls and travel restrictions as a means of national security.



Francis has previously remarked that anyone who wants to build walls to keep migrants out is "not Christian."



Francis also has called for an end to the use of fossil fuels, while Trump has pledged to cancel payments to U.N. climate change programs and pull out of the Paris climate accord, although his recent actions and statements have cast some doubt over whether withdrawal from the agreement is still planned.



But the president and the pope share a populist appeal and speak with a down-to-earth simplicity that has endeared them to their bases of supporters. And both share a common concern about the plight of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Islamic militants.



Speaking to reporters while traveling home Saturday from a trip to Portugal, Francis said he would listen respectfully to what Trump has to say when the two meet. Trump will call on Francis midway through his first foreign trip, after visiting Saudi Arabia and Israel and before attending a NATO summit in Brussels and a G-7 summit in Italy.



"I never make a judgment about a person without hearing him out,'' the pope said.
U.S. President Donald Trump is about to embark on his first foreign trip, a nine day journey that takes him to the seats of the worlds three great Abrahamic (monotheistic) religions and signals a 180-degree shift from his predecessors approach toward the Middle East.

The most useful way to look at President Trumps strategy is to see him as the anti-Obama, said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is definitively changing American foreign policy from the Barack Obama era to the Donald Trump era as it concerns the Middle East.

Obama made a purposeful effort to talk directly to the people, Satloff explained. His first trip to the Middle East included speeches not to national assemblies and parliaments, but to universities where he could talk over the heads of the leaders. He wanted to create a new balance in the Arab world, characterized by speaking to people rather than leaders.

Trump wants to undo all that, Satloff said.

Symbolic first stop

The first stop on Trumps tour will be Saudi Arabia, site of Islams holiest shrines, where he will be welcomed by King Salman, who is assembling a greeting committee of as many as 20 heads of state representing a large percentage of the worlds 1.5 billion Sunni Muslims.

Trumps advisers see the Riyadh visit as an opportunity to repair the presidents image with Muslims after an election campaign marked by rhetoric many saw as Islamophobic, and a presidency that began with announcement of a temporary ban on Muslim refugees, and visas for citizens from a handful of Muslim-majority countries.

Within the human rights community, the visit has been met with a collective shrug. Its certainly a consistent choice, given the parade of dictators whove been welcomed at the White House, said Andrea Presow of Human Rights Watch.

Before he makes his first presidential step outside the United States, Trump will have hosted several autocratic Muslim leaders, including such heavyweights as Egypts Abdel Fatah al-Sissi and Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Expectations are low, said Richard LeBaron of the Atlantic Council, a former U.S. ambassador to Kuwait. The travel ban didnt come as a shock to Muslims, LeBaron told VOA. They had built it into their expectations about Trump."

But the image of being warmly greeted by such a strong representation of Sunni Muslim kings, emirs and presidents is a potential bonanza for a U.S. leader beleaguered by domestic troubles.

Radical ideology addressed

Briefing reporters about the trip, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said Trump would deliver a strong message to Sunni leaders about the need to confront radical Islamism, which McMaster called an ideology that uses a perverted interpretation of religion to justify crimes against all humanity.

He [Trump] will encourage our Arab and Muslim partners to take bold, new steps to promote peace and to confront those, from ISIS to al-Qaida to Iran to the Assad regime, who perpetuate chaos and violence that has inflicted so much suffering throughout the Muslim world and beyond, McMaster said.

That message is likely to be welcomed by Sunni Muslim leaders, who worried about Obama's outreach to Iran, which they see as a regional troublemaker.

Ali Shihabi, a Saudi national who is executive director of the Arabia Foundation, a Washington based research organization, says Trumps visit sends a message that he understands that Americas Muslim allies are the first line of defense in the fight against terrorism.

Others question whether, as with so many Trump initiatives, theres less than meets the eye with the Middle East policy shift.

But it may signal a possible shift in the marked hostility to Islam characterized by Trumps campaign,said Nathan Brown, professor of international relations at George Washington University.

Robert Satloff says substantive change or not, the symbolism of simultaneously reaffirming Americas longstanding ties with Sunni Arab states and Israel sends a powerful message to Iran that the other team - the pro-Western, pro-stability team - seems to have a captain that is ready to lead."

Does that team actually have a strategy? Does it have a series of well-defined tactics ready to be executed? Satloff asks. That remains to be seen. But the first step, mainly getting the team together and providing leadership is important, and Im quite sure the Iranians, and their team, are taking notice.
The United Nations has increased its appeal for aid to help South Sudanese refugees, calling for at least $1.4 billion to provide food, water, and health services.

Bitter conflict and deteriorating humanitarian conditions in South Sudan are driving people from their homes in record numbers, said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

A U.N. statement Monday said South Sudan has "become the worlds fastest growing refugee crisis with more than 1.8 million refugees  including one million children," who fled to Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

A civil war in its fourth year has displaced another 1.8 million South Sudanese within the country. The U.N. says the situation continues to worsen "with a combination of conflict, drought and famine."

A previous U.N. appeal called for $1.2 billion in foreign assistance.

World Food Program chief David Beasley described the suffering in South Sudan as unimaginable," saying many are close to the abyss.

The conflict was sparked by clashes between supporters of President Salva Kiir and his rival, then vice-president Riek Machar. A 2015 peace deal failed when new clashes in the capital last July killed nearly 300 people.

Beasley, who was named WFP chief in March, said he is deeply saddened by the misery and famine suffered by the South Sudanese people. He also noted that the situation is not getting any better.

These are families like yours and mine, our brothers and sisters, and the world must help them now  not later, he said.

U.N. agencies UNICEF, UNHCR, and WFP all reported that they have not reached their desired funding level for the year. The agencies say they will not be able to address the needs of the South Sudanese people if they do not get to their goals by the end of the year.

Beasley, who said he will return to South Sudan later this week, blamed donor nations for focusing on domestic politics instead of international crises.

Weve got to break through all of the smoke and attract more attention to people on the brink, he told reporters in Geneva," he said.
The United States accused Syria on Monday of carrying out mass killings of prisoners on a daily basis and then burning their bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital of Damascus.

The U.S. State Department said as many as 50 prisoners a day are being hanged at the Saydnaya prison. It alleged that the government of President Bashar al-Assad then is using the crematorium to hide evidence of the extent of the mass killings.

The top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, Stuart Jones, said Syria "has sunk to a new level of depravity," with the continuing military assistance of Russia and Iran, two countries that have supported the Assad government's six-year fight against various rebel groups attempting to overthrow it. About 400,000 people have been killed in the fighting.

Russia's role in question

Jones stopped short of accusing Moscow of involvement with the crematorium, saying the State Department had not presented evidence of the mass killings to Russian officials.

But he said the U.S. has "an ongoing conversation with the Russians, talking about the problem that their failure to condemn Syrian atrocities and their apparent tolerance of Syrian atrocities has created. And we have urged ... the Russian government to hold the regime responsible for these atrocities."

U.S. President Donald Trump last month ordered a missile attack on Syria after the Damascus regime's alleged chemical weapons assault on civilians.

Asked whether the U.S. is considering a new attack to destroy the crematorium, Jones said that as Trump has said, the U.S. is "not going to signal what we are going to do and what we're not going to do. At this point, we are talking about this evidence and bringing it forward to the international community, which we hope will put pressure on this regime to change its behavior."

Soldiers, civilians treated same

The State Department official said that "since Syria's civil conflict began in 2011, the Assad regime has treated opposition forces and unarmed civilians as one and the same  committing widespread violations of international law, including the law of armed conflict and human rights law.

"Although the regime's many atrocities are well documented," Jones said, "we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya."

He said the U.S. claim is based on information from credible humanitarian groups and its intelligence community.

Amnesty International report

Jones did not give an official estimate for the total number killed at the Saydnaya facility. But he cited an Amnesty International report that between 5,000 and 11,000 had died at the prison between 2011 and 2015.

He alleged that the Syrian government had detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same four-year period.

"The idea of a crematorium of course has dreadful connotations for those with a memory," Anthony Billingsley, a Mideast lecturer at the University of New South Wales, told VOA. "The idea of massacres in prisons  there was one in Iran, there was one in Libya  it doesn't surprise, and I suspect that the U.S. and Amnesty, who previously reported on this, have reasonably good intelligence about this facility."

The State Department released newly declassified commercial satellite photos of what it said is a building at the prison used as the crematorium.

The latest photo dated to January 2015, more than two years ago, taken during the administration of former President Barack Obama. It was not immediately clear why the United States waited to present its evidence.
Developments over the weekend concerning President Donald Trump, the continuing controversy around the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the search to replace him, and comments made by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's on Sunday morning talk-shows:

Poll: Few in US Support Trump's Firing of FBI Chief  A new public opinion poll shows more Americans than not are opposed to President Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey last week.

Comey Dismissal Continues to Reverberate in Washington  A massive search is under way for a new FBI director, after Trump fired Comey last week, with the administration having interviewed at least eight candidates for the job over the weekend. Meanwhile, the president continued to make headlines and rankle lawmakers from both parties who criticized his actions last week in firing Comey.

Top US Envoy Tillerson Confident of His Relationship with Trump  U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says he is not worried about his standing with the president following Trump's firing of FBI chief Comey. "I have a great relationship with the president," Tillerson told NBC News' Meet the Press on Sunday.

Tillerson: Trump Concerned About Moving Embassy to Jerusalem  Tillerson says Trump's is concerned about how moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would affect the Mideast peace process.

Mnuchin Says G-7 Nations More Comfortable With New US Economic Approach  U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Saturday after meeting with officials from the world's other G-7 industrialized democracies that he thought they were more at ease with Donald Trump's economic policies. However, officials from Japan and other member European countries remained concerned about the economic shift in Washington, particularly after Mnuchin said the U.S. reserved the right to be protectionist if it thought trade was not free or fair.

Trump Tells Liberty University Graduates to 'Embrace' Outsider Status  President Trump has told graduates of Liberty University, the nation's largest Christian college and located in Virginia, to "embrace" the label of an outsider. Trump paid tribute to the university's president, one of his earliest political supporters, and criticized the Washington establishment as the keynote of his remarks at Liberty's commencement ceremony Saturday.

Trump Says New FBI Director Could Be Named Next Week  Trump said Saturday that a new FBI director could be named in the next week. "We can make a fast decision," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. Former Director James Comey was fired on Tuesday.

US Supreme Court Could Signal View on Trump Immigration Plans  Supreme Court decisions in a half-dozen cases dealing with immigration over the next two months could reveal how the justices might evaluate Trump administration actions on immigration, especially stepped up deportations. Some of those cases could be decided as early as Monday, when the court is meeting to issue opinions in cases that were argued over the past six months.

Pope Says Will be 'Sincere' with Trump at Vatican Meeting  Pope Francis said on Saturday he would be "sincere" with U.S. President Donald Trump over their sharp differences on subjects such as immigration and climate change when the two hold their first meeting at the Vatican later this month.

Broad Support for Trump Foreign Aid Nominee, With a Catch  Mark Green is a rare bird in Washington these days  a Trump nominee with broad bipartisan support. But there's a catch to his potential posting as administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency faces a starkly uncertain future, including potentially big budget cuts and the possibility of being folded entirely into a restructured State Department.

THE WEEK AHEAD: Trump plans to take his first trip abroad as the U.S. president. He leaves Washington Friday for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Jerusalem and Rome. He also plans to travel to Brussels for a May 24 NATO meeting and Sicily, Italy, for a meeting on May 26 of the leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized nations.
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The opposition Movement for Democratic Change led by former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has appealed to Zimbabwe's youth to register to vote so as to clinch the coveted presidency from President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF. MDC-T Manicaland chair, David Chimhini, also called for peace.
Photo: Johannes Eisele/Getty Images

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Johnny Depp is readying himself to bring his subtle, understated touch to yet another outsize character: John McAfee, the eccentric millionaire creator of McAfee antivirus software. Based on Joshua Daviss 2012 Wired article John McAfees Last Stand, King of the Jungle will offer a darkly comic retelling of Daviss experience at the computer programmers compound in Belize, a story interwoven with the rumors of drug trafficking and alleged murder that plagued McAfee at the time. If Captain Jack Sparrow is a ten, hopefully Depp is prepared to crank this thing to at least an eleven.
King Arthur. Photo: Warner Bros.

Looks like the tale of King Arthur is about to become a cautionary one. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword flopped hard in its opening weekend, grossing just $14.7 million on a $175 million budget. The disappointing debut of the Guy Ritchie epic made for an easy weekend win for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2., which nabbed $63 million in its second weekend. Outside of the realm of summer blockbusters, Amy Schumers Snatched opened in second place with $17.5 million, a decent start helped out by a lack of competing comedies. The Fate of the Furious, with $5.3 million, and The Boss Baby, with $4.6 million, rounded out the top five. All in all, time for Charlie Hunnam to head back to the drawing board.
Mangia! Photo: Netflix

It may seem like the second season of Master of None begins in Modena, Italy, because foodie extraordinaire Dev Shah (Aziz Ansari) ran out of Manhattan restaurants the first time around. But soon enough Dev is back in the Big Apple eating his way through career opportunities and unrequited love, from stops at Carbone (the second Mario Carbone establishment to be featured on the show) for octopus pizzaiolo, to a series of dates at the Four Horseman, one of Ansaris and co-creator Alan Yangs favorite New York bars (its owned by one of their friends). Its our hangout space, Yang told Vulture. We ended up adding decorations to the place and they kept them.

But first, there are two episodes set in Modena, where Dev is finishing a pasta apprenticeship, resetting his life, and, as usual, eating a lot.

Its one of our favorite places in the world, co-creator Alan Yang told Vulture in an interview. We like to travel. During the off-season, we had gone to Italy a couple of times, and it seemed like a logical place for Dev to want to go because Dev is not too dissimilar from Aziz. Looking for offbeat locations, Ansari and Yang traveled to Bergamo in the north and Puglia in the south, but fell for Modenas charms. Its a picturesque little town in the middle of the Emilia-Romagna region and people were so friendly, and it seemed like a great choice.

To pick restaurants for Dev in Italy, Ansari and Yang used the same formula they use in Manhattan. We pick our favorite places whenever possible. If its feasible with the schedule, we just like to go where we like to go because we feel that adds realism to the show, Yang explained. So its really the neighborhood places we like or sometimes its our friends places that were familiar with.

In episode one, Dev goes to dinner at Hosteria Giusti, where one must walk behind a deli counter and through the kitchen to be seated. Its incredible! said Yang. We had a meal with our crew at Giusti when we first landed into Modena. Just delicious. The setup is all real, too. They have the great shop up front where you can buy meats and cheeses and stuff to take on a picnic with you. And then in the back is this amazing, homey, delicious restaurant. Bonus tips for those inspired to travel: The two bars featured in the episode are Archer (where Dev and a new friend have a drink), and Enoteca Compagnia del Taglio (the site of Devs birthday party).

Hosteria Giusti.

Before Dev and Arnold (Eric Wareheim) go to a wedding in episode two, they stop for lunch at the landmark Bar Schiavoni in Modena, home of the famous sausage sandwich. The sandwiches are delicious! Yang said. Located next to Mercato Albinelli, where the best friends wander around and taste fruit, the restaurant serves prosciutto and pork sandwiches, along with lighter fare.

Arnold also surprises Dev with dinner reservations at Osteria Francescana, a three-Michelin-star restaurant owned by Massimo Bottura. Just a humble corner restaurant! Yang said, laughing. Yeah, no. Its really unbelievable that we got to shoot there. Massimo and his team were so kind to us. I believe were the only scripted show to shoot there. If youre wondering if you, too, can dine in the wine cellar like Dev and Arnold do, Yang has some bad news for you: Its not accessible to the public, which made it even more special.

The wine cellar at Osteria Francescana.

But there are plenty of other restaurants from Master of None you could snag a reservation at, and rest assured: We like to go to the good places, Yang said. We dont want to show bunk places.
Picture this: Its November 2015. Donald Trump is leading in the polls for the GOP primaries, and Ben Carson is polling right behind him. Then the king of free publicity gets a bit more, and makes a much derided appearance hosting Saturday Night Live. Critics claimed the gig would help humanize Trump and normalize his radical views, and while we cant say for certain that thats what happened or that SNL is to blame, Trump did go on to win the GOP nomination and then the presidency. But now that were here, SNL would like to say its not their fault Trump now has the nuclear launch codes. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, some members of the SNL team defended having the thenpresidential candidate host in the show.

I always think its so funny when people talk about the idea that we somehow introduced him to America or that our show or Jimmy Fallon has humanized him, castmember Colin Jost told THR. [Trumps] been on the cover of every tabloid consistently for 30 years. When he hosted last season, the worry was, Would he have burned out by the time he even came to host? That was Lornes concern more than the concern of, How will this help him? SNL writer Bryan Tucker agreed, adding that back when Trump hosted, his victory seemed almost unthinkable. People had different opinions about him being there at that time, but during that week, he was in second place in Iowa, behind Ben Carson. He was definitely a national phenomenon, but he was not imminently going to be president.

Jost did say that, at times, SNLs current election-induced upswing has him feeling a little weird: Politics right now is probably the closest weve come to a full-blown national phenomenon as anything in a long time, and anytime people are paying more attention to politics, its good for our show, Jost said. But you almost feel like a war profiteer at times because weve benefited from a situation thats so tough. Oh, the nostalgia for the days of fall 2015, when a Trump presidency seemed impossible.
Okay, here goes. On this weeks episode of The Leftovers, a French naval officer strips naked, blasts old music at full volume to attract the attention of his captain, murders the man, steals his nuclear launch key, seals himself in the missile launch control room of a submarine, and fires a nuke at an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. With commercial flights grounded following the explosion, a quartet of our heroes led by Reverend Matthew Jamison board a relief plane and land in Tasmania, where they board a boat to travel to Melbourne and rescue Kevin Garvey so he can resume his duties as the messiah. This boat happens to be the venue for a massive lion-themed orgy. One of the guests is a former Olympic bronze-medal decathlete who rose from the dead after breaking his neck three years ago and now believes hes God. If he looks familiar, thats because he appeared in the hallucinatory afterlife purgatory where Kevin went when he died and came back from the dead. God murders a guy by tossing him overboard in the middle of the party; Matts the only witness and no one really believes him. Matt is also, apparently, dying. Matt confronts God twice, first getting punched in the gut, then knocking him out with an axe handle and holding him prisoner until, half-convinced hes got the real deal on his hands (or just too delirious to care), he frees the deity in exchange for being saved from his illness. The cure doesnt seem to take. When the boat finally docks, police arrive to arrest God because a fishing boat found a floating corpse, which confirms Matts story. In the confusion, a splinter faction of the lion orgy frees the actual live lion brought onboard as the guest of honor. The lion promptly kills and eats God as he attempts to flee. Matt turns from the scene toward the camera, looks at his friends, and says, Thats the guy I was telling you about. The end.

When you lay it all end-to-end like that, the sheer narrative and tonal audaciousness of The Leftovers is clearer than ever. From the crazy lion orgy boat to the storm-tossed cargo plane to the nuclear submarine commandeered by a madman in his birthday suit, this is a strange trip. But the shows confidence that it will get to its appointed destination carries you along for the ride  just like Matts sheer bloody-minded belief in God, in Kevin, and in himself was enough to drag former skeptic John Murphy, his devoutly Christian son, Michael, and his strictly rationalist wife, Laurie, all the way across the globe. Right down to a willfully goofy title  Its a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World  that practically dares you not to take it seriously. This episode is The Leftovers at its boldest and best.

Clearly, much of its success is owed to the balls-to-the-wall script, by Lila Byock and showrunner Damon Lindelof. It plays out like a game of Can You Top This? with jokes and scares and sex and pathos escalating deliriously from scene to scene. The very idea of a sex club inspired by the 70s fad surrounding Frasier the Sensuous Lion  an honest-to-God real animal who caused a sensation and inspired both a movie and a song (by Sarah Vaughan, no less) when he fathered nearly three dozen cubs by a half-dozen lionesses at an extremely advanced age  is inspired madness. The specifics of their rituals are a scream too: Matt learns to his horror that if you say Frasiers name after midnight, youre treated to forcible semen extraction via a device thats basically a Wicker Man lioness replica. He escapes this fate, but this show is willing to go so far that I wouldnt have bet against it.

Theres more here than just the lion sex cult, though. Matts battle of wills against Laurie is fascinating to watch. Its not without its funny moments, for sure: Witness the grin she flashes when he tells her the seventh anniversary of the Sudden Departure is just days away and she responds with a cheerfully blasphemous So? Or how she offers the fact that her ex-husband Kevin shits four times a day as proof hes not the son of God. (The cargo plane nearly gets flipped over by turbulence that very moment, giving Matt a reason to smile this time.) Throughout the hour, we see how Laurie blames Matt and his Book of Kevin business for causing what she feels is a relapse of the delusions her ex experienced several years earlier. By teaming up to rescue Kevin, theyre basically agreeing to use each other, hoping that their viewpoint will win out in the end once they have him safe and sound.

Matts struggle with God  a.k.a. David Burton, Australian sportscaster turned local curiosity  plays out along similar lines. Laurie doesnt believe in Matt, but humors him to the extent that itll get her what she wants. Matt doesnt believe in Burtons claims, but unlike Laurie, he has no intention of letting him get away with making them. Again, there are funny bits here, from Burtons business card (YES I AM GOD it reads on the front; Patrick Bateman, eat your heart out) to their debate about the divinity of Jesus, which Burton claims is bogus. (He wasnt my son. Youre denying paternity? Marys word versus mine.) But since this strange man was, somehow, present in Kevin Garveys personal limbo years ago, everything he does is imbued with eerie menace, even before he murders a guy for no apparent reason, or takes credit for doing the Sudden Departure because I could.

Of course, the mans psychological insight is his most formidable weapon. It doesnt take long for his interrogation by Matt to reverse course, so that Matt is the one whose secrets are laid bare. Everything youve done, youve done because you thought I was watching, because you thought I was judging, but I wasnt, God-Burton tells him. The life of selfless and self-sacrificing virtue Matt claims he led was, according to Burton, just a lifelong way to cover his ass. Is that why youre killing me? Matt asks, revealing the severity of his condition for the first time. Whatever he does or doesnt believe about Burtons divinity, he knows the guy has his number.

By the end of the episode, Matt is weirdly serene about his fate  or perhaps fatalistic is the right word, since hes also given up on finding Kevin and is completely blase about, you know, watching a guy get eaten by a runaway lion that the cops promptly shoot to death. Its here that the team-up of Christopher Eccleston as Matt and director Nicole Kassell, returning to the show after helming last seasons powerful Matt spotlight, reaches its apex. Standing on the top deck, ocean wind in his hair, the gray light of dawn hitting every line in his face and every gray hair in his beard, Matt looks like a true prophet, perhaps for the first time. Eccleston has always used his expressive facial features to convey Matts outsize passion and enthusiasm; now hes closed off, drawn in, as impassive as an Easter Island statue, and he wears it just as well. When he turns to us and the words Thats the guy I was telling you about emerge from his wizardlike face, this blackly hilarious understatement feels like it could be about any human whos done something strange and terrible, up to and including the naked nuclear bomber who began the episode by unleashing the fires of creation itself. After all, isnt the evil that men do the true subject of every seer and scripture-writer, including the ones who write this show?
Most of the time, Veep lets us relish the vicious, scheming, shallow, self-loathing yet arrogant insult machine that is Selina Meyer. We dont have to worry, too much or too often, about what kind of childhood could have produced this sad, deeply insecure, attention-craving woman, someone who married a philandering grifter, employs people for whom she has nothing but disdain, and parents her daughter like her goal is to produce the millennial generations answer to the Unabomber.

Last season, we started to see the root of Selinas cruelty and dysfunction when her mother died. (So nonexistent was Meemaws devotion to her only child that she left exactly none of her fortune to Selina and gave it all to Catherine.) Selina has a way of realizing the failings of her parents  and the ways in which those failings left her damaged  just by describing their behavior out loud, like when she said her mother would want her nails done in death because Mother loves her hands. She always wore dish-washing gloves when she gave me my bath  which is why I dont do dishes. I just realized that.

Selina has always clung to the idea of her father as this wonderful, darling man who adored her, a fellow victim of Meemaws heartlessness who tragically died before he could see his daughter ascend to the presidency. So it is a REAL downer for Selina  at a time when she cannot exactly stomach yet another downer  to find out that her dad was a run-of-the-mill dirt bag who literally died while screwing his secretary.

But lets backtrack: Selina is even edgier and meaner than usual, which Amy realizes is because shes in a post-heart-attack depression. Apparently its a not-unusual occurrence, because the human body is a miracle but also a monster, and why not inflict some psychological suffering on top of a physical trauma? National Volunteer Day seems to bother Selina more than it should  God almighty, I wish Id been assassinated in office. Although with my luck, Id be then crippled for life, sitting in a wheelchair, in my reading room with my name on a thing  as does the prospect of lunch: I hate every food, ever, from everywhere. (Richard: Have you tried ice cream?)

Once she discovers her wax figure at Madame Tussauds is stuck next to Gerald Ford  Is this the Hall of Half-Term Wonders?  she totally spins out. GET THEM TO MOVE ME NEXT TO LINCOLN. (Of course no matter where Selina is in the museum, guests take photos pretending to be having sex with her, because being a woman is amazing.) When Amy, who did not learn from how quickly she got shut down last week for suggesting Selina might have menopause, assures Selina that this is an expected depression, Selina replies that she is not depressed, thank you very much: I just feel like Im in a thick, dark fog and everyone disappoints me and nothing works out and whats the point of anything anyway.

Some great foreshadowing follows, as Mike says of his time in therapy: I cried so hard I threw up, but it was the best thing Ive ever done. By the end of this episode, Selina will have a total sobfest-meltdown and Mike will vomit, and it will probably be one of the best things Selina has ever done.

Its a small moment, but I love when, as shes walking away from this shitty conversation, Selina just chucks her bag and coat on the ground: Ill tell you what else, Im not gonna carry that.

At least Selinas depression turns out to be a boon for Mikes troubled soul: He actually gets her to open up about her life, which, what do you know, finally provides him with material for his book. Who knows if Mike is intelligent enough to write down all this juicy stuff, seeing as he doesnt even realize Selina is talking about him when she says, We just hired the least fuckable press secretary we could find. (Oh, thats right when I started working with you! Jesus, Mike.) But he does manage to go what seems like a full 12 hours in Selinas good graces. He slumber-parties with her at the brownstone  much to Garys horror  and learns about the doomed horse of the episodes title, Chicklet. The horse was a gift to Selina from her dad, who told her, Squirrel, youre an intense little girl, and now you finally have a friend.

We know as soon as Selina drops a telling detail  that the night her daddy died, his secretary came banging on the door at 2 a.m.  that the door wasnt the only thing this secretary was banging ( sorry), but it takes Selina a bit longer to figure out her father was a fraud. When Mike attempts to point out that these stories about Daddy Meyer are a little alarming, Selina flips out: My daddy was a very good family man! He was charismatic, he was gregarious, he was somewhat peculiar, but all interesting people are.

Eventually, these two temporary besties take a field trip to Uncle Georges house and it all comes tumbling out: Barbara the secretary was just one of Mr. Meyerss mistresses; also, shes the one who bought all the snow globes; also there was no trip to Cuba; also Daddy sold Chicklet to get the IRS off his back; also he converted the barn so he wouldnt have to go to seedy motels; also, Mike notes, Uncle George sounded pretty sweet on Meemaw; and that is enough for Selina. It is time to get trashed and trash in return.

I know no one reading these recaps needs to be reminded that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a national treasure, to the point where amateur cryptologist Nicolas Cage is probably looking for her house using a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence right now. But every single thing about this barn-destruction scene is so good, from Selinas bittersweet memory of hiding under her dads desk after he died because I was so petite and pretty, to her rage-yelling, HE WAS A CHEATER AND A LIAR, HE WAS A HORSE THIEF, to wrecking the place, to drunk-driving her car right through the wall, to gently offering her security detail that ceramic pen holder. I made this at camp! (I also enjoyed Mikes self-loathing shouts: IM A GROWN MAN, I SHOULDNT EAT WHEN IM FULL.)

Anyway, Selina has an epiphany that may or may not last until the morning: This is the book! This is the story of the gifted girl who triumphed over her parents toxic marriage to become an American icon! Her eyes are wild. Dont you see I had no choice but to go into politics and be extraordinary and a sex symbol! And youre gonna write it! Mike vomits immediately.

Back off the ranch, Jonah finds love at a fundraiser with Sherman Tanzs daughter. Though they dont exactly hit it off at first, because Jonah (understandably!) cant tell which Tanz-adjacent woman is his wife and which is his daughter  after Shawnee, the daughter, snaps at him, Jonah says to Tanz, I see why you married the other one  he eventually charms her with a monologue about his ability to overcome adversity. Yes, charms.

After Jonah gets Shawnee back to his place, which is his office and not because he lives with him mom (She wishes), she wastes zero time making over Jonah in her ideal image by (1) donating most of his suits to a charity for rescued circus giraffes, (2) giving him a bow tie like a small-town grocer, (3) taking away his glasses because they make him look smart, and most crucially, (4) telling him how to vote with no regard for Kent and Bens counsel.

This recap is running way long so Im going to trust you all are worshiping at the altar of genius/goddess Jane (who is leaking the rumors about her relationship with Dan to Page Six so she can stay on the better side of the grandma-to-fuckable spectrum), and also that you thoroughly enjoyed discovering that Richard, Catherine, and Marjories second-choice donor, has never masturbated before  Im sorry, I mean, hes never shook the devils hand and doesnt totally know how to self-husband. Hope he doesnt go to hell like Grandma Splett said he would!

A Few Other Things 

 I want to know who from the Veep writers room has a vendetta against American University, which, as Selina says, Sounds like a made-up college in Egypt, but alas is the only school interested in accepting her archives. Later, its the source of Janes disdain for some bright young thing who wants to take her spot on CBS This Morning: I will be replaced by two tits with a degree from American University.

 If Selina knew she had to throw on that T-shirt for volunteer day, why did she wear that form-fitting short dress and heels? I know Veep exists in a world without Michelle Obama ( oh my God, can you imagine how awful that would be?! No wonder everyone is so pissed all the time), so maybe Selina doesnt have a role model for age- and status-appropriate athleisure.

 Selina, upon learning Catherine has been in therapy since the age of 13: Well, what you really needed was a dermatologist.

 Gary, disgusted by Mikes request for sausage patties: What is this, Yonkers?

 Selinas vomit-sound impression of Mikes voice is honestly spot-on.

 Amy bragging about how she relocated Selinas wax figure to a bench next to FDR: Zero anal access. Hows that for a new deal?

 As I said last week, I would like to be Jane when I grow up: I know were not actually fucking because youre not a billionaire and I dont want to catch anything.

 Jonah continues his alarming pattern of saying things I totally agree with by telling Shawnee that D.C. rents are insane as an explanation for why he lives in his office.

 Kent, offering Jonah a color-coded chart to help him keep his information straight: Ive become close with a woman at Kinkos who makes educational materials for preschoolers.

Insult of the Episode

Selina, in response to Amys assurance that her dad went through a depression after his heart attack too: Trust me, Amy, it was not the heart attack that depressed your dad.

Compliment of the Episode

Amy, to Dan, re: him and Jane, You are my moms favorite couple.

Also Jonah, talking about himself: Puberty at 19? When it hit, it hit like a fucking thunderbolt.

Jonah Shall Henceforth Be Known As:

A giant barbecue fork, h/t Ben.
Kool Smiles Waco, 529 N. Valley Mills Drive, will have its third annual Sharing Smiles Day event, a day of free dental care for local uninsured children up to age 18, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday.

Available treatments will include dental exams, limited emergency care, extractions and restorative care.

A limited number of appointments are available. Parents are strongly encouraged to register their children in advance at www.mykoolsmiles.com/sharingsmiles.

Dentists will try to see all patients, but treatment is on a first-come, first-served basis, and preregistration does not guarantee treatment.

For more information, call 751-9867.

Film screening

The Waco Friends of Peace/Climate will screen the documentary Antarctica: Ice and Sky at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Poppa Rollos Pizza, 703 N. Valley Mills Drive.

The film is a biographical record of glaciologist Claude Lorius, the first scientist to discover conclusive evidence of anthropogenic climate change.

The event will include a pizza and salad buffet.

For more information, visit www.friendsofpeace.org.

Clifton 5K Glow Run

The city of Clifton is sponsoring the fourth annual Legacy Park 5K Glow Fun Run at 9 p.m. June 3 at Clifton City Park, Farm-to-Market Road 219 in Clifton.

Check-in will start at 7:30 p.m. at the City Armory in the park.

Cost through Monday is $30 and is $35 thereafter through race day.

Entry fee is $10 for children ages 12 and younger through Monday.

Online registration is available through May 27 at https://runsignup.com/Race/TX/Clifton/Clifton5KGlowRun.

For more information, call 675-8337.

Seniors lunch program

Lake Shore United Methodist Church, 3311 Park Lake Drive, will host a free lunch speaker program for senior citizens at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Staff from Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest Medical Center will conduct a 30-minute Car-Fit inspection to make sure the seat belt, rearview mirror, etc. of guests personal cars are properly fitted for the driver.

Because of limited space, reservations are required by noon Tuesday.

For reservations, call 754-7333.

Woodway Wine Tour

The second annual Woodway Wine Tour will be from 7 to 10 p.m. May 26 on the grounds of the Carleen Bright Arboretum, 9001 Bosque Blvd.

The event will be an intimate evening celebrating international and Texas wines, with food pairings.

Tickets cost $50 and are available at http://bit.ly/2kVcNXM.
Testimony opened Monday in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a Corsicana woman who died at the former Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center 48 hours after she was admitted for lower back pain in 2011.

Daniel Gann, a former chaplain at Hillcrest; his two sons; and Marjorie Coslett, his deceased wifes mother, are suing Scott & White Memorial Hospital, doing business as Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, in what the family claims is the drug overdose death of his 35-year-old wife, Sarah.

Attorneys in the case selected a jury in 170th State District Court jury Monday morning and gave opening statements Monday.

Plaintiffs attorneys Jim Walker and Todd Kelly told jurors in opening statements that the hospitals lackluster record keeping and inattention to detail led to a lethal overdose of pain medications after Sarah Gann was admitted to the hospital complaining of back pain similar to kidney stones on Oct. 5, 2011.

Dallas attorney Stan Thiebaud, who represents the hospital, countered that Gann twice had been admitted to a hospital in Georgia the previous year and was given larger doses of pain medications than she received at Hillcrest. He said an autopsy showed she had an enlarged heart, which he said was more likely the cause of her death.

Case predates partnership

The lawsuit was filed before the hospital partnered with Baylor to become Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest Medical Center.

Walker told jurors that Sarah Gann, a certified medical assistant and phlebotomist, was a loving mother, wife and daughter who adopted two sons and cared for a total of 35 foster children in their home.

This case is also about trust, the trust Sarah Gann put in the hands of the doctors and nurses at Hillcrest and what they did with that trust, Walker said.

Gann was given Dilaudid, a powerful pain medication, in the emergency room but had a negative reaction to it, Walker told jurors. The reaction was not properly noted in her charts, Walker said, and her pain continued after she was admitted on a level of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.

As the pain persisted, hospital staff members gave her morphine through the night. When that didnt work, they gave her Dilaudid again, which, coupled with the morphine, depressed her respiration and caused her to Code Blue, Walker said.

When she was discovered, the lack of oxygen had damaged her heart and her brain. So they gave her Narcan. There is one and only one use for Narcan, and that is to reverse the effects of a narcotics overdose, Walker said. They knew she was overdosing, and they are the ones who gave it to her.

History of poor health

Thiebaud told jurors that it will be important to review Ganns medical history before she was admitted at Hillcrest. He said she was admitted to a hospital in February 2010 and again a month later for kidney stones and headaches.

During those admissions, she was given far more painkilling drugs that she ever got at Hillcrest, he said. It doesnt make sense that she overdosed, and it is not consistent with scientific evidence.

Thiebaud said the adverse reaction Gann experienced in the emergency room was to a transfusion, not the Dilaudid. Later, when the morphine was not easing her pain and she could not sleep, another small dose of Dilaudid got her to sleep and goal achieved, Thiebaud said.

She was given appropriate drugs in appropriate doses at appropriate times, he said. The drugs didnt cause her death. She was given drugs in therapeutic ranges that wouldnt be expected to cause her death.

Thiebaud said doctors, nurses and a respiratory therapist were caring for her during the night.

Thiebaud also asked the jury to judge the credibility of the expert witnesses each side will call in the case.

Kelly said Daniel Gann, who has since remarried and is a missionary in Fiji, also has paramedic training and could hear the urgency in the voice of the hospital employee who called him about his wife early that morning.

He understood the tone in that voice, Kelly said. The first thing he asked was, Did she code? Did she code? 

He later had to make the painful decision to disconnect his wife from life support, he said.

Court officials expect the trial to last two weeks.
By Press Trust of India: Kolkata, May 15 (PTI)West Bengal state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury today wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, drawing his attention to the violence during yesterdays municipal poll and the "murder of democracy."

Chowdhury also wrote separate letters to AICC president Sonia Gandhi, AICC vice-president Rahul Gandhi and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

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In his letters, Chowdhury said he had referred to the "ground situation" in Bengal where democracy was being trampled by the Mamata Banerjee government.

"I have given them a complete picture of yesterdays violence. It is the same letter that I had written to the State Election Commission yesterday," Chowdhury told PTI.

Chowdhury wrote at a time when West Bengal Chief Minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee is set to meet Sonia Gandhi to discuss a strategy for the presidential polls, much to the discomfort of the Congress state unit.

Asked why he wrote to Modi, Chowdhury said, "The people of this country should know what kind of democracy is prevailing in the state, how the people are not allowed to vote freely and fairly here."

The election to seven municipal bodies in West Bengal was held yesterday amid violence and booth-capturing allegedly by the ruling Trinamool Congress as major opposition parties CPI-M, Congress and BJP demanded countermanding of the poll. PTI PNT MD RAX

--- ENDS ---
Richmond captain Trent Cotchin headlines the list of AFL players sweating on the match review panel's findings after round eight.

Cotchin clocked Fremantle midfielder Lachie Neale in the jaw with a jumper punch during the Dockers' two-point win at the MCG on Sunday.

Cotchin could escape sanction, be fined or potentially miss the Tigers' clash with Greater Western Sydney on Saturday, depending on how the panel grade the blow.

Sydney superstar Lance Franklin and Brisbane Lions youngster Nick Robertson exchanged jumper punches in the preceding round but both players were cleared on that occasion.
As coverage of the Cassandra Sainsbury case progresses, it's been suggested more than once that there is a possibility that Sainsbury (if convicted) may be eligible to serve out some of her sentence in Australia.

This is not currently a legal possibility. There are 68 countries that have specific prisoner transfer agreements with Australia - unfortunately for Sainsbury, Colombia is not one of them.

Adelaide woman Cassandra Sainsbury faces up to 25 years in a Colombian prison. Credit:Facebook

Even where the necessary legal framework is in place, negotiation of each prisoner transfer takes a great deal of co-ordinated effort and negotiation.

The prisoner, the foreign government, the Australian government and (for incoming prisoners) the state government must all agree to the transfer in order for it to occur.
Influential Coalition MP George Christensen has called on the government to bar US white supremacist Mike Enoch from spreading hatred in Australia.

The anti-Semitic Mr Enoch has been slated to attend a Sydney white nationalist conference on July 1, organised by local racist group The Dingoes, Fairfax Media revealed on Saturday.

The anonymous Dingoes interviewed Mr Christensen on their podcast in February but the staunch free-speech advocate now argues that a visa application by their guest should be knocked back.

"Like radical Islamic sheikhs that come here to spread messages of hate, these people, you know, shouldn't be allowed into the country," Mr Christensen told ABC radio.
Scott Morrison is not one of Australia's more popular politicians, with only 2 or 3 per cent of voters generally preferring him as Liberal leader.

But if he harbours a secret ambition to become prime minister one day, Monday's opinion poll contains a strong clue for how he may be able to achieve it.

Tax the big banks. More. And keep increasing the tax, as the British have done, year after year.

The government's decision in last week's federal budget to apply a new tax to the biggest five banks is a tremendously popular one.
By Press Trust of India: Singapore, May 15 (PTI) Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba today attended Singapores first International Maritime Review (IMR) held at the countrys prime Changi Naval Base here.

Lanba attended the review along with navy ships INS Sahyadri and INS Kamorta.

A total of 46 warships and four aircraft from 28 countries, including Singapore, participated in an exercise that included a parade, a land review and a sea review, as part of the IMR.

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"The INS Sahyadri was part of the land review while INS Kamorta was part of the sea review. Both the ships had earlier participated in the pre-IMR multinational group sail," Indian Navy Chief Capt D K Sharma said.

Speaking on the occasion, Singapore President Tony Tan Keng Yam said the maritime review "marks the coming of age" of Singapores navy, and is a "testament to the strong friendships and extensive network the country enjoys across the world".

The event was organised by the Republic of Singapore Navys (RSN) to celebrate its 50th years of establishment.

Yesterday, Lanba held extensive talks with his Singaporean counterpart Lai Chung Han and explored ways to further step up maritime cooperation between the two countries.

Lanba will also attend the International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (IMDEX) 2017 tomorrow.

His visit aims to consolidate existing Maritime Cooperation initiatives as well as explore new avenues between India and Singapore.

Defence cooperation between the two countries is robust and is primarily focused towards Maritime Cooperation.

India signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement with Singapore in 2003, which was renewed in 2015.

Indian Navy and Singapore Navy are partners in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), a Maritime Cooperation construct conceptualised and pioneered by Indian Navy in 2008.

The Indian and Singapore navies will conduct bilateral exercise "SIMBEX" off Singapore from 18 to May 24.

Both countries have been conducting "SIMBEX" since 1994.

Both navies also engage in Navy to Navy Staff Talks, which commenced in 2004.

The 12th Staff Talks were conducted in March 2017 and the 13th Staff Talks are scheduled to be held in 2018.

The Singapore Navy has participated in all the MILAN- series interactions organised at Port Blair by the Indian Navy.

Warships of both countries regularly visit each others ports. PTI GS/MPB MRJ AQS AQS

--- ENDS ---
A weight-loss device described as "medical bulimia" that drains undigested food from the stomach at the press of a button is among an explosion of new treatments for obesity available in Australia.

As concern continues to grow about obesity, some doctors are alarmed that some treatments in the lucrative market aren't being adequately researched or followed up.

The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration-approved AspireAssist system connects a tube inserted into the stomach to an outside port on the skin of the belly, which is drained into an external device.

Its American manufacturer promises about 30 per cent of food is removed before calories are absorbed into the body when used 20 minutes after a meal.
Michele Allen was already working as a teacher when her husband proposed they home school their eldest son.

Academically gifted but struggling socially, Alex, then in grade one, would cry himself to sleep every night after a long day in the classroom.

Homeschooled: Michelle Allen of Queanbeyan and her sons Xander, 9, and Alex, 11. Credit:Karleen Minney

Home education was not easy choice but it's not something the family regrets.

"It's not an easy thing because you are giving up a whole wage, and for me it's giving up a career in some ways but not, because I'm still teaching," the Queanbeyan mother said.
Sydney: At least 17 male prisoners have reportedly been shot dead in Papua New Guinea during a mass jail break in which 77 people escaped.

The incident took place in Buimo jail in the city of Lae on Friday, but only became public after media reports on Monday.

Nearly 30 prisoners attacked two prison guards during a mass jail break at Buimo prison in Lae, Papua New Guinea. Pictured, the prison cells at the Lorengau police station on Manus Island. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The prison has seen at least one mass escape every year since 2014.

The bodies were being kept in a local hospital morgue, the Post-Courier newspaper reported. Lae police warned residents to expect an upsurge in crime and asked them to "remain vigilant."
Thala Ajith Kumar has finally wrapped up the remaining portions of his upcoming spy thriller Vivegam.

By India Today Web Desk: When it comes to fan frenzy, Thala Ajith Kumar is only next to superstar Rajinikanth. His Vivegam teaser, which was unveiled on May 10, has clocked more than 10 million views in 5 days. Last seen in Vedalam, fans have been waiting with bated breaths to catch a glimpse of their idol.

As per recent developments, Ajith Kumar has wrapped up the remaining portions in Bulgaria.

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"With the completion of the latest schedule in Bulgaria, the makers have finished the principal shooting. Except for some patchwork, the rest of the shoot is wrapped up. The post-production work is already underway," a source from the film's unit told IANS.

Going by the trailer, Ajith Kumar plays a stylish Interpol officer in Vivegam, which has Bollywood actor Vivek Oberoi playing a pivotal role. It is also said that Thala is playing dual roles in the film. However, we await an official confirmation.

Vivegam marks Ajith's third collaboration with Siruthai Siva, who helmed blockbuster projects like Veeram and Vedalam. Going by the unprecedented craze for the film, Vivegam is expected to do big business in Tamil Nadu.

Kajal Aggarwal and Akshara Haasan play important roles in Vivegam, which has Anirudh Ravichander's music. Made on a lavish budget, Vivegam is expected to release in August this year.

ALSO READ: Alia wants to work with Prabhas, says Baahubali 2 is rock-buster

ALSO READ: Superstar Rajini meets fans after 8 years, takes pictures, says will join politics if God wills

WATCH: Vivegam Teaser

--- ENDS ---
By Press Trust of India: Indore, May 15 (PTI) The narcotics wing of Madhya Pradesh police have arrested three men from different places in the state and seized over 21,000 Alprazolam tablets from them, a senior official said today.

"As part of the drive that has been going on since the last four days, three persons identified as Aamir Khan, a resident of Indore, Mohammad Farooq Gachi, owner of a medical store in Dewas and Gaurav Agrawal, a medicine trader based in Bhopal, were arrested by the police based on a tip-off," narcotics wing Additional Director General (ADG) Varun Kapur told reporters.

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The accused are associated with one another and were involved in the sale of Alprazolam tablets to the drug addicts at a higher rate than the market price, he said.

Total 21,510 tablets worth Rs 1,43,400 were seized from their possession, the officer said.

"As per the rules, Alprazolam can be sold only by pharmacists on the prescription of doctors and they are mandated to keep records of the sale and purchase of this drug," Kapur said.

According to sources, drug addicts have been consuming this tablet as a cheaper option in place of brown sugar in Indore and the surrounding areas. PTI HWP MAS NP

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At the invitation of the Vice-Chair of the region, Mr. Tom Moyane, WCO Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya attended the 22nd Governing Council hosted by the Uganda Revenue Authority in Kampala, Uganda, on 11 and 12 May 2017.

The meeting was chaired by Mr. Tom Moyane, Commissioner, South Africa Revenue Service and Vice-Chair of the East and Southern Africa region. Mr. Moyane acknowledged the important role played by the WCO in advancing capacity building activities in the region, and emphasized the need for Customs to engage in effective revenue collection and enhanced trade facilitation for legitimate trade.

Ms. Doris Akol, Commissioner General of the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), welcomed delegates to her country and highlighted the substantial progress made in Uganda since a major reform process had begun some eight years ago. She emphasized the challenging and diverse role of Customs which now extended far beyond that of revenue collection, and consequently, required increased resources to continue to operate at an optimum level. Underlining the many synergies that exist between Customs and Tax, the Commissioner reiterated the need for both agencies, and indeed, other government agencies, to share information.

The Deputy Secretary of Treasury delivered a speech on behalf of the Minister for Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Hon. Matia Kasaija. The most important developments in the URA were highlighted in his address: the Electronic Cargo Tracking System; the One Stop Shop initiative; the Electronic Single Window; the AEO Programme and a centralised document processing centre for better coordination on Customs clearance. Collectively, these initiatives had led to an increase in excess of 8% in exchequer receipts. The representative welcomed the work underway on cooperation between Tax and Customs and Illicit Financial Flows.

In his report as Vice-Chair of the ESA Region, Mr. Tom Moyane, SARS, recalled the discussions at the December 2016 Policy Commission and drew delegates attention to the notification of the accession of Kosovo to the WCO from the depository and the representations received from Serbia expressing disagreement and requesting that this decision be revoked.

Mr. Moyane also mentioned the imminent departure of Mr. Sergio Mujica, WCO Deputy Secretary General, adding that the Secretary General and the management team in the Secretariat would assume all the duties related to the role of Deputy Secretary General pending the election of his successor during the 2018 Council Sessions. Furthermore,he expressed his gratitude to the many donors active in the region for their commitment and support. Finally, an overview of the successes of South Africas two-year term as Vice-Chair of the region was presented.

Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya outlined the five main priority areas of work for the WCO Secretariat:

Trade facilitation and the challenges and opportunities offered by the entry into force of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement.

E-Commerce and its implications for revenue collection, control of goods and the protection of society as a result of the increase in trade of small packages.

Security and the need to determine and consolidate the role of Customs in the fight against terrorism.

Customs/Tax Cooperation, highlighting the need for a well-resourced Customs Administration, regardless of the structure adopted nationally.

Secretary General Mikuriya also outlined the work underway on Illicit Financial Flows. In addition, he stated that the issue of Performance Measurement should be pursued, an issue also identified by the ESA Vice-Chair, and welcomed the support by the Vice-Chair for the interim management measures proposed consequent on the departure of the Deputy Secretary General.

A presentation on governance was delivered, and delegates agreed that further discussion was not necessary, particularly as the Council had delivered a decision on this issue in 2016. Consequently, that decision needed to be respected, and the issue should not be revisited. Additional reports on the ROCBs activities, the consultation with the private sector within the region, and the Finance and Audit Committees outcomes were delivered. A new Website for the region was formally launched by the dignitaries present. Additional topics also included the impact of the growth in e-Commerce, Customs/Tax cooperation, and combatting Illicit Financial Flows.

Secretary General Dr. Kunio Mikuriya also held bilateral meetings with H.E. Hon. Ruhakana Rugunda, Prime Minister of Uganda, Hon. Matia Kasaija, Minister of Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development as well as the URA. He also addressed staff engaged in trade facilitation and witnessed a demonstration of the Electronic Cargo Tracking System (ECTS) that tracks goods in transit through the East African Community.

Dr. Mikuriya thanked the Uganda Revenue Authority for the warm welcome extended to delegates and the excellent logistical arrangements.
These hairstyles sported by Anushka Sharma will make you want to get a makeover, right now.

By Shivani Chhabra: Anushka Sharma is the perfect blend of all things bold and the beautiful. From her powerful acting skills to her bold statements, there's nothing one would not love about Anushka. While she amazes us with her chic fashion choices and boss-like personality, we always have our eyes set on one thing--her evolving, super-stylish hairstyles.

Not one to be scared by experiments, Anushka stands out due to her dauntless haircuts, and the spirit to pull them off. When most actresses stick to the classic straight, long hairstyles, this lady isn't afraid of chopping them off in style.

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Also Read: Get rid of all your hair woes with these home remedies

These hairstyles by Anushka prove that she is not scared of challenges and we bow down to her for that.

1. Anushka was recently spotted with a new hairstyle, and god, she looked sharp. The wavy lustrous locks were beautiful and perfect for the scorching heat.

Photo: Yogen Shah

2. If you think that retro is in the past, take a look at Anushka's super short hair. Fashioned in an old way, Anushka carried this look for the film Bombay Velvet with extreme confidence.

Nobody but Anushka could have the heart to chop her long mane this short, and still look so sensual.

Picture courtesy: Youtube

3. Anushka's look for PK became the talk of the town, and rightly so. She sported pixie hair, and looked magical in the short hairdo. Now, that was one statement hairstyle, Anushka.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest

4. Purple streaks with wavy hair, enough said. Anushka coloured her hair purple, and looked brilliant. How else do we descirbe a gorgeous woman with long purple streaks?

Picture courtesy: Pinterest

--- ENDS ---
The Bangladesh government today ratified the draft of an agreement to establish diplomatic relations with the island nation of San Marino, located near Italy.

By Sahidul Hasan Khokon: Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's Cabinet today ratified the draft of an agreement to establish diplomatic relations with San Marino, a European nation.

Cabinet Secretary Mohammad Shafiul Alam said the draft proposal of the agreement's ratification was approved at a regular Cabinet meeting chaired by Hasina.

San Marino, a small island country near Italy, received UN membership in 1992, Alam said. The country's area is 61.2 square kilometers, its population is 30,000 and per capita income $ 55,449 (US).

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"As a member of the United Nations, diplomatic relations may be set up with the country but their Constitution says that relations will be maintained formally and bilateral basis...They have given us a contract to establish diplomatic relations with us, our cabinet ratified it, now relations between the two countries will be established," Alam said.

Shafiul Alam said San Marino has expressed interest in opening an embassy in Bangladesh.

ALSO READ | Bangladesh: 5 members of a family blow themselves up as police raid their hideout in Rajshahi

ALSO READ | Pakistan call off tour of Bangladesh in July

--- ENDS ---
As a former student, it was a proud moment for me to see Christ University coming out on top once again as the No. 1 college in the country for a Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA) degree. If there's one thing the university has taught me, it's that life is filled with opportunities just waiting to be grabbed. The three years I spent in the college not only instilled in me a solid foundation but also equipped me with all the tools one needs to face the challenges life throws at you.

If there was a word to describe the 2014 BCA batch, it would be 'colourful'. We were a talented batch from all over the country, and various other parts of the world as well. In my first year, I was introduced to the world of programming (as well as the world of Christ University). Our lecturers put in a lot of effort at every session to help us understand the fundamentals of their subject. The faculty were all highly approachable and understanding.

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College life is not all about academics, so I joined the student welfare office as an anchor for university-level programmes. In fact, my professors encouraged me to participate when I got a chance to be an anchor for 'Inbloom', the national-level intercollegiate fest at Christ University (even though I had to miss a few classes for it).

My second year was quite a challenge as more subjects were added to the syllabus. It included ones from other streams such as Financial Accounting and Technical English. In fact, the university puts a lot of focus on interdisciplinary studies (even psychology), which has made us better prepared for the outside world. And on top of that, as second-year students, we had to take on the responsibility for organising departmental events, which included our very own national-level fest, 'Interface'.

This was an incredible learning opportunity for all of us, as we got to meet students from colleges across India and hone our talents. We also got opportunities to visit colleges within Karnataka as well as outside the state to participate in various IT fests.

As part of the course, we had to dedicate two to four hours a week to working on our own research projects. On a personal level, I felt the third year was the best as we managed to take Interface to a whole new level. I also gained a lot of clarity about career opportunities in this chosen field of mine as well as options for a post-graduate degree thanks to the various placement activities.

Another memorable event I was part of was 'Daksh', the college's career fair. It was a unique experience getting to interact with the pre-degree students and helping them with their career choices. With that, the academic year ended, so after an amazing farewell party thrown by our juniors, my classmates and I bid farewell to B.C.A and Christ University.

Photo: Niloptal Baruah Photo: Niloptal Baruah

Looking back, I realise that I will forever cherish all the wonderful moments I had at Christ University, whether it was eating hot momos in the college cafeteria or once even being reprimanded in the counsellor's office for some mischief mongering. I guess that's the beauty of college life. It stays in your heart forever, long after you've climbed those dizzying ladders of success.

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Vishnu Nath was part of the 2014-'17 BCA batch.

--- ENDS ---
Steven Horwitz by

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

As Venezuela descends into a nightmare of starvation and violence, the long-standing debate over the feasibility of socialism takes on new relevance. Years of explicitly socialist policies from the Chavez and Maduro regimes have taken their toll, as nationalization and a variety of other attempts to abolish or subvert market processes have destroyed what was once one of South Americas richest countries.

Even with the wealth of their oil reserves, redistribution and price controls have brought production, and therefore consumption, to a halt. Once they exported grain to the rest of the world, now they cant even feed their own people.

Who Is at Fault?

Many on the left will start by denying that socialism is at fault.

This humanitarian disaster has raised the question of who or what to blame. That question puts self-proclaimed socialists and their progressive sympathizers in a difficult spot. After all, one can easily find lots of examples (from Michael Moore to Bernie Sanders) of people on the left praising or endorsing Chavezs economic policies. So what can people who took that position say in the face of this disaster? And what can the defenders of free enterprise say as well?

Many on the left will start by denying that socialism is at fault. Sometimes theyll deny that the Chavez-Maduro policies were real socialism. In other cases, theyll argue that while their intentions might have been good, corruption and poor implementation doomed good policies to failure.

Both of these arguments have real problems.

If those policies were not real socialism, then why did so many sympathetic to socialism express so much support for them and argue that they would be transformative in ways socialists value? Chavez himself made such claims.

Do all of them not understand what socialism is? The variety of attempts Chavez made to prevent markets and prices from working and to substitute some form of economic planning in the name of the people have been broadly consistent with socialism since Marx. If thats not socialism, what exactly is meant by that word anymore?

Real Socialism

For many on the left, the answer to the last question is the Scandinavian countries. The problem, however, is that the Scandinavian countries have, by some measures, freer markets than the US, which the left sees as the archetype of capitalism. At the very least, they are not significantly different from the US in their degree of economic freedom.

If you love the Scandinavian model, you dont love socialism.

Historically, socialism has broadly been defined as the elimination of the private ownership of the means of production and the substitution of common or public ownership and economic planning for what Marx called the anarchy of production of the market.

Doing away with private ownership, exchange, prices, and profits would, in Marxs view, end the alienation, exploitation, and crises that characterized capitalism. In addition, rationalizing production through planning, rather than leaving matters to the trial and error method of the market, would eliminate waste and bring on a burst of productivity that would enrich us all.

Abolishing markets does not describe the Scandinavian countries, though it does capture a lot of what was going on in Venezuela. Socialism, at least historically, did not simply mean a large welfare state as we see in Scandinavia. In fact, the only way countries can afford larger welfare states is to have economies productive enough to produce the wealth that can be taxed away to support such programs. This is why the Scandinavian countries deregulated (and lowered tax rates) so much in the last decade or two: only through freer markets could they afford their transfer programs.

If you love the Scandinavian model, you dont love socialism. You love market capitalism, because thats what makes that model possible. (Whether large welfare states are necessary or desirable is a matter for another column.)

At what point are these not all coincidences?

What of the argument that well-intentioned policies were frustrated by corruption and poor implementation? The problem here is that this seems to happen every time socialism has been tried. The Bolsheviks began to implement Marxian socialism within a year of taking power and a decade later they had Stalinism. Cuba quickly turned to a dictatorship. China. North Korea. The list goes on. At what point are these not all coincidences?

Every. Single. Time.

Economists have long understood the dynamic at work here. Marx and other socialists thought that those in charge of the planning process, and for Marx that was the whole community, could rationally determine what to produce and how best to produce it in the absence of markets, exchange, and prices. Since Misess famous essay in 1920, however, we have known that doing so is not possible.

Genuine market prices are necessary for people be able to make determinations of value in anything larger than a household. Without prices, there is no way to know, not just what people value but (more importantly) how to make what they value using the least valuable resources possible.

In other words, rational production decisions are impossible without market prices, and market prices cant exist without exchange and therefore there has to be private ownership, especially of the means of production.

Markets are like weeds in that they will grow in the cracks left by the failures of planning.

But what happens when those given the power to make such decisions realize they cannot achieve their perhaps well-intentioned goals? The power does not go away. More often than not, the first reaction is precisely what weve seen in Venezuela: crack down harder on producers for not living up to impossible demands and ration goods to punish consumers for hoarding. And when that doesnt work, go to more draconian authoritarianism, and do whatever it takes to hold on to power.

After a while, these exercises of brute power have consequences. They attract those with a comparative advantage in exercising such power (and perhaps those who have a high consumption value for doing so) into positions of power. Marxism is not Stalinism, but the inability of Marxian socialism to live up to its promises creates the conditions that make Stalinism possible and likely. In other words, Stalinism is an unintended consequence of Marxian socialism.

In addition, as state control becomes more clearly ineffective, people start to work around it by establishing distorted forms of market exchange. Bribery of politicians and bureaucrats, threats to producers, cronyism, and nepotism all become the ways of getting things done. Scarce resources have to be allocated somehow, and markets are like weeds in that they will grow in the cracks left by the failures of planning.

Intellectual Negligence

To the outside world, corruption and poor implementation caused socialism to fail. But that gets matters completely backward: corruption and ineffective political actors are not the cause of socialisms failure, but a result of that failure. When you make real markets illegal and when your attempts at planning inevitably fail, what you get is the bribery and corruption of black markets. Once again, these are not what Marxism intends, but they are an inevitable unintended consequence.

They are guilty of a severe intellectual error that has real moral consequences.

So what does this say about those who supported the policies of Chavez and Maduro? Its easy to say that they are evil for wishing starvation and destruction on the Venezuelan people, but I think thats too easy. I do believe that many who supported those policies genuinely believed they would have good results. In that sense, they did not act immorally.

However, they are guilty of a severe intellectual error that has real moral consequences. Though they may not have intended the humanitarian disaster that we now see, they do bear responsibility for not being aware of the long-standing criticisms of socialism that have given us reasons to expect such a disaster.

Our friends on the left who supported Chavezs policies are by and large not guilty of the intentional evil we broadly call vice. What they are guilty of is something more like intellectual negligence. They didnt mean that in the case of Venezuela, but theres no doubt that they should have known better.

Those of us who understand the power of markets to improve the lives of all of us wont be very effective in persuading others of that truth if we write off those sympathetic to socialism as evil-doers. Its better to engage them gently and intellectually, and offer them an alternative narrative, than to write them off as irredeemable.

Moral condemnation ends productive dialogue  offering an alternative narrative can start it. The human cost of socialism is too high to not engage those sympathetic to it in the most effective ways possible.

Steven Horwitz is the Schnatter Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University, where he also is a Fellow at the John H. Schnatter Institute for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise. He is the author of Hayeks Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions. and is a Distinguished Fellow at FEE and a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Tatum's 39 points help Celtics hold on to beat Grizzlies 109-106
By Tim Brockwell May. 15, 2017 | 04:21 PM | WESTERN KENTUCKY

Police organizations in the area held memorial services Monday in observance of National Peace Officer Memorial Day.Police officers and members of the public gathered Monday afternoon on the lawn of the McCracken County Courthouse for the 2017 Peace Officer Memorial Service. The service is held each year year during Peace Officers Memorial Week, and is sponsored by Jackson Purchase Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #15. It honors officers nationwide who have lost their lives in the line of duty.Pastor Joel Cauley from Relevant Church was the guest speaker at this year's service. He expressed his support for law enforcement."You all are constantly in our support and prayers, and our condolences to everyone who has felt the loss of a fellow officer." Cauley said.Kentucky State Police Post 1 also held memorial services Monday in Graves County. Troopers and staff placed wreaths at the memorial outside of KSP Post 1. The memorial lists the names of Trooper Eric K. Chrisman and Trooper Joseph Cameron Ponder, two Troopers who died in the line of duty in the Post 1 area.Chrisman was killed on June 23, 2015 in a vehicle collision while en route to a reckless driving complaint on US 62 in Livingston County. He was 23. Ponder was fatally shot on September 13, 2015 while conducting a traffic stop on Interstate 24 in Lyon County. He was 31.National Peace Officer Memorial Day was created by President John F. Kennedy in 1962.Click the link below to listen to full audio of the Paducah Peace Officer Memorial service.

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By West Kentucky Star Staff May. 14, 2017 | 07:36 AM | MURRAY, KY

A Calloway County man has been arrested on sex offenses.

According to Kentucky State Police, 55-year-old Joseph A. Lawrence of Murray, was arrested Saturday night. State police received a report on Saturday involving the sexual assault of a minor. Their investigation revealed that Lawrence engaged in numerous sexual encounters with a child under the age of 12, between 2014 and 2016.

Lawrence was located on Peach Orchard Road Saturday at approximately 8:30 pm. After an approximate five-hour standoff, he was taken into custody without further incident.

Lawrence is charged with twenty counts of 1st degree sexual abuse, and one count of 1st degree sodomy.



He was lodged in the Calloway County Jail.
By The Associated Press

By The Associated Press May. 14, 2017 | 09:20 PM | LOUISVILLE, KY

KentuckyOne Health says it plans to sell its flagship Jewish Hospital and other facilities in Louisville in order to focus on its operations in central and eastern Kentucky.

Media outlets report other facilities being sold by the health system are the Frazier Rehab Institute; Sts. Mary & Elizabeth Hospital; Medical Centers Jewish East, South, Southwest and Northeast; Jewish Hospital Shelbyville; Saint Joseph Martin and several physician practices in Louisville and Martin, Kentucky.

The company says it will use investment adviser Morgan Stanley to market and sell the facilities.

The move will leave KentuckyOne with about 5,000 employees.

KentuckyOne was formed in 2012 by the merger of Jewish Hospital & St. Mary's HealthCare and Saint Joseph Health System of Lexington. Its parent company is Catholic Health Initiatives of Englewood, Colorado.
By The Associated Press

By The Associated Press May. 14, 2017 | 09:09 PM | LEXINGTON, KY

Briana Driskell marked her first Mother's Day after giving birth to healthy quintuplets at a Kentucky hospital. Her next goal is bringing them home.

Media outlets reports the three girls and two boys were delivered May 2 at University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital.

The 29-year-old Driskell entered the hospital in her 22nd week. The babies were delivered by cesarian section at 28 weeks.

UK chief of neonatal medicine Dr. Peter Gianonne says the babies are doing well in the neonatal intensive care unit. The babies' names are Zoey, Asher, Gavin, Dakota and Hollyn.

Driskell became pregnant after undergoing five fertility treatments. She and her husband, Jordan, of Versailles, Kentucky, thanked doctors and nurses at a news conference on Friday.

It was the second quintuplet birth at UK Hospital in less than a year.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said that said it was necessary to coordinate policies with the development goals of institutions including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), ASEAN, African Union and the European Union.

By Reuters: Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday urged major multilateral institutions to join his new Belt and Road Initiative, stressing the importance of rejecting protectionism in seeking global economic growth.

Addressing other world leaders at a summit on the initiative in Beijing, Xi said it was necessary to coordinate policies with the development goals of institutions including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), ASEAN, African Union and the European Union.

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Xi pledged $124 billion on Sunday for his new Silk Road which aims to bolster China's global leadership ambitions by expanding links between Asia, Africa, Europe and beyond, as US President Donald Trump promotes "America First".

"We need to improve policy coordination and reject beggar-thy-neighbour practices," Xi told the 29 national leaders attending the forum.

Xi, who was seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was speaking at a convention centre by a lake in northern Beijing on the summit's second and final day.

"This is an important lesson that can be drawn from the global financial crisis and is still very relevant to the development of the world economy today," he said.

"We need to seek win-win results through greater openness and cooperation, avoid fragmentation, refrain from setting inhibitive thresholds for cooperation or pursuing exclusive arrangements and reject protectionism."

CHINA'S ANSWER TO TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

The Belt and Road initiative is seen as part of China's answer to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, a regional trade pact involving Pacific Rim countries, but excluding China.

The TPP, touted by the previous US administration of President Barack Obama, has effectively been killed by Trump, who has withdrawn US support.

BELT AND ROAD PLAN INCLUSIVE

In contrast, Xi said China's Belt and Road plan would be inclusive and open to all. He said deep-seated problems in global development had yet to be addressed effectively, with international trade and investment sluggish, and economic globalisation encountering headwinds.

"In a world of growing interdependency and challenges, no country can tackle the challenges, also the world's problems, on its own," Xi said.

Leaders from 29 countries, including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, as well as the heads of the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank, are attending the Belt and Road forum.

CHINA'S GLOBAL INFLUENCE

But some Western diplomats have expressed unease about both the summit and the plan as a whole, seeing it as an attempt to promote Chinese influence globally. They are also concerned about transparency and access for foreign firms to the scheme.

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European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen told Reuters on Monday that that EU member states would not be signing ministerial statements connected to the summit, though he downplayed the significance.

"The European Commission, who has a mandate, who has the capacity to negotiate on behalf of member states on trade-related issues, we were not given a chance to negotiate on the text," he said

"But it's not an issue. The event, what Chinese authorities have organised here, and the joint understanding of what should be done and what must be done, is very positive."

Also read: 'Nervous' India can't stop neigbours backing OBOR: Chinese media

Also read: When Russian President Vladimir Putin started playing piano while waiting to meet China's Xi Jinping

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

--- ENDS ---
In an exclusive interview, General Bipin Rawat said the Indian Army is on the trail of the killers of Lt Ummer Fayaz and asked people in Kashmir to take lessons from the death of one of their own.

By Manjeet Negi: Army chief General Bipin Rawat on Sunday said his force was actively hunting for the three terrorists who murdered Lieutenant Ummer Fayaz and would soon carry out an intelligence-based operation to avenge his death.

Speaking to Aaj Tak, the Army chief said that Indian Army has had an upper hand on the Line of Control and this has rattled the Pakistani Army, which is now targeting civilian areas in Kashmir.

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"First of all, I want to say that this (Lt Ummer Fayaz's murder) is an unfortunate incident and the youth of Kashmir should condemn it. We are going to take strong action against his murderers. Three terrorists have been identified by the J&K Police. Very soon, there would be an intelligence-based operation against them," Rawat said.

The General said the force would also try to identify if any more persons were involved in the murder of the young Lieutenant from 2 Rajputana Rifles. Fayaz was on leave when he was abducted from his house in Shopian district and killed.

Rawat said that the youth of the Kashmir should draw lessons from the death of Fayaz, who was one of their own. "Now, the people of Kashmir have to decide that they must expose the masters of terrorism. Terrorism is damaging the Kashmir valley," he said, adding that people should realise that while masters of terrorism are sitting in their castles, they create a tense situation and atmosphere in Kashmir as it is good for them.

It is suspected that Fayaz was targeted by terrorists because he was a role model in the area and had even inspired youth to join the Army like him. "We want more and more youth to join Army but if they meet the same fate as Fayaz, then it would not be good," he said.

General Rawat said to rid the Valley of terrorists, the Army was carrying out the clear and search operations. This will desist terrorists from taking shelter in villages, he said. Rawat said the operations would not impact the civilians like the cordon and search operations of the 1990s.

HE said the situation in south Kashmir was most affected due to the unrest but the Army is working towards improving it. On the border situation where the Pakistan Army has been violating ceasefire in last few days, Rawat said, "If there is an attempt to vitiate atmosphere, we retaliate in a strong manner."

"Pakistan has been getting a beating on the borders, which is why they are rattled and have launched attacks on our civilian areas," he said. He said with the melting of snow, infiltration attempts were increasing from across the border, leading to the ceasefire violations in Naushera and Rajouri sectors. "Along with this, Pakistan also keeps attempting BAT (Border Action Team) strikes, but 99 per cent of such attempts have been foiled by our troops," he said. He also said that there were reports that Pakistan would want to foil the Amarnath yatra but arrangements are being made to strengthen security for it.

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Commenting on rise of terrorists like Burhan Wani and Zakir Musa, Rawat said they were all creation of the propoganda on social media by the separatists. Asked whether the Army was ready for carrying out a surgical strike on terrorist camps like it did the last time after the Uri attacks, he said "Army was ready and if Pakistan continues to do what it is doing, then we will do our operations."

He declined to comment on demands from some quarters to hold parleys with Hurriyat Conference saying it was for the government to decide and the force to follow.

WATCH | Misguided youth of Kashmir should introspect in light of Ummer Fayaz's killing: Army chief Bipin Rawat

ALSO READ:

Why Hizbul Mujahideen is rattled after murder of Army officer Ummer Fayaz

Who is Zakir Musa? Why Hizbul Mujahideen distanced itself from his 'Islamic Kashmir' remark

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Ummer Fayaz killing: Jammu and Kashmir Police identifies 3 Hizbul Mujahideen suspects

--- ENDS ---
Naidu held a meeting with EPS and top bureaucrats of the state to review the implementation of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana in the state.

By Pramod Madhav: Sending out a strong signal to AIADMK, Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu has said the Centre will support the Tamil Nadu government till the time it provides good governance to the state.

Naidu held a meeting with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami and top bureaucrats of the state in Tamil Nadu secretariat. The meeting was held to review the implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) in the state.

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Post the review meeting, Venkaiah Naidu held a joint press conference with CM Palaniswami, in which the center stage was grabbed by the former with EPS sitting to his right and SP Velumani, Minister for Cooperative Society, sitting to his left.

After reading the memorandum given to him by CM Palaniswami, Venkaiah Naidu went on to read about the Centre's proposed grants to Tamil Nadu. However, the plot thickened after Naidu's remark stating that the Centre wants Tamil Nadu to provide proper governance if it wants the unhindered support of the Centre.

BJP TO JOIN HANDS WITH AIADMK?

Moreover, the meeting also provided a discreet hint to imminent joining of hands of BJP and AIADMK. The speculation, though, garnered mixed reactions.

"It was expected after his speech (Palaniswami's) at the NITI Ayog meeting in Delhi last month. Our CM will become the favourite of the Centre," said a member of team EPS.

On the other hand, AIADMK MP sounded suspicious about the fate of the merger. "It doesn't seem that way at the moment but if BJP join hands with EPS, bad times are going to begin," he said.

Earlier, Naidu, who is also the Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting, reviewed the performance of All India Radio and Doordarshan Kendra in Chennai.

A reporter working for Doordarshan channel, while talking about Naidu's visit said, "He even visited the lavarotories and spoke to the authorities about the implementation of the Centre-run programmes. He even expressed disappointment when told about the irregularities in the payment of salaries to the workers and contract workers."

ALSO READ:

Centre to come out with new Metro Rail policy: Venkaiah Naidu

Under Yogi govt, UP has joined Mission Modi: Venkaiah Naidu

WATCH:

--- ENDS ---
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BOARDS

Jack London

has been appointed to the CancerCare Manitoba board. London is a senior counsel with Pitblado Law, a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba, and founding chairman of the Manitoba Law Foundation. He has extensive local, national and international experience in matters of aboriginal and constitutional law, succession planning and taxation and alternate dispute resolution, particularly mediation. His appointment to the board was effective April 18 and will expire on Jan. 18, 2020. Under the CancerCare Manitoba Act, the board includes 22 members and sets the agenda for the long-term strategies, vision and planning of CancerCare Manitoba.

Nostalgia Broadcasting Inc. (93.7 FM)

has elected its board of directors for 2017-18. Executive members are: Tom Dercola (president); Dorothy Dobbie (vice-president); Bill Perlmutter (secretary-treasurer); Adam Glynn (station manager). Directors are: Jan Currier, Carrie Diacos, Gil Forrest, Jim Ingebrigtsen, Jaye Langdon, Grant Patterson, Jim Pappas, Ernie Nairn, Wayne Rogers, Lyle Smordin, Cathy Stephens and Larry Updike. Community engagement and partnership development: Chris Stevens. Meeting secretary: Sheila Down.

AWARDS

One credit union and two credit union managers from Manitoba were among the 2017 National Credit Union Awards Program recipients who were recently honoured at the Canadian Credit Union Association annual meeting in Halifax: Assiniboine Credit Union received the 2017 National Credit Union Social Responsibility Award for their Eco-Excellence Program. Receiving a National Young Leaders award were: Emma Lafreniere, manager, loss prevention, at Steinbach Credit Union; and Sara Rusak, manager, business integration, at Assiniboine Credit Union. The CCUA is the national trade association for Canadas credit unions and caisses populaires outside of Quebec.

2017 Mayors BIZ Awards

Mayor Brian Bowman has recognized 16 Winnipeg individuals and organizations that have made contributions to enhance their local Business Improvement Zones. This years Mayors BIZ Award recipients are: Jeff Kerr, Academy Road BIZ; Rob Benson, Corydon Avenue BIZ; CHAT & Watch Program, Downtown Winnipeg BIZ; Zephyra Vun, Exchange District BIZ; Robert McDonald, North End BIZ; Glenn Crawshaw, Norwood Grove BIZ; Tim Woodcock, Old St. Vital BIZ; John Coward, Osborne Village BIZ; Nuit de_ART, Provencher Blvd BIZ; Chapman Goddard Kagan, St. James Village BIZ; Ward Bruner, St. Norbert BIZ; Ideal Electric Manufacturing Co Ltd, Selkirk Ave BIZ; Denis Fletcher, South Osborne BIZ; Wendy Galagan, Transcona BIZ; Synonym Art Consultation, West Broadway BIZ; and Christian Cassidy, West End BIZ. The mayors awards provide an opportunity to show our appreciation for all the great work our BIZs do making our communities, neighbourhoods and city a better place to live, work and do business, Bowman said.

EVENTS

The Elmwood High School Legacy Fund

is holding its annual general meeting and election of officers and trustees May 18 at 7 p.m. at Elmwood High School, 505 Chalmers Ave. The AGM will be preceded by a re-dedication of the donor plaque to recognize contributors to the fund. The AGM will also include a discussion on plans for the EHS 60th-anniversary reunion to be held in the fall of 2018.

COMPANIES

Imperial Properties

has announced that Bukki Solanke, a property manager in the companys Winnipeg office, has received Accredited Residential Manager certification from the Real Estate Institute of Canada. The certification is conferred upon qualified applicants who have demonstrated outstanding capabilities in the management of residential properties. The designation will enable Bukki to continue his work as a leader among Imperial Properties management team and allow him to better contribute to meeting clients needs.

The Headhunters

has announced the appointment of Ryan den Teuling to the Winnipeg branch of The Headhunters. Den Teuling will be leading the information technology recruitment practice, where he will source, assess and place IT candidates for organizations across Manitoba. He has more than 15 years of successful IT sales and consulting experience, most recently as major account manager with Toshiba Business Solutions and previously as major account manager with Ricoh Canada. He also has a degree in business administration from the Netherlands and extensive sales training, including presidents club status with Sandler Sales Training. The Headhunters is a full-service recruitment firm with offices across Western Canada.

Got a promotion or a new contract? Email your submission to: bizlistings@freepress.mb.ca.
By Press Trust of India: Raipur, May 14 (PTI) Chhattisgarh Congress chief Bhupesh Baghel, booked in an alleged irregular land allotment case, today accused a senior IPS official of "misusing his position" to grab a land in Durg district way back in late 1990s.

Baghel alleged thatAdditional Director General (anti corruption bureau/economic offences wing) Mukesh Gupta had reportedly acquired land in an illegal way in Nehru Nagar area of Bhilai while he was posted as Durg superintendent of police.

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"An FIR should be registered against ADG Mukesh Gupta and he should be removed as the Chief of EOW and ACB with immediate effect," Baghel told reporters here.

Gupta was posted as SP Durg between August 1996 and September 1998 and was the ex-officio member of the board of directors of Special Area Development Authority (SADA) in erstwhile Madhya Pradesh.

A land (around 6,000 square feet) was allegedly allotted in the name of Gupta in Nehru Nagar, Bhilai by SADA, Baghel claimed.

As per the information available, the then MP government had dissolved SADA on June 8, 1998 and Gupta had made registry of the land on June 9, 1998, he said.

Besides, according to an order issued by Chhattisgarh?s Urban Administration and Development Department, Government of Chhattisgarh, all the activities carried out in the name of SADA after its dissolution were illegal, the Congress chief said.

He further questioned how come Gupta got registered his land after the agency was dissolved.

Baghel also claimed that SADA had given land to Gupta at cheaper rate.

Gupta could not be contacted immediately for his reaction.

Alleging that Gupta misused his position to acquire land in an illegal way, Baghel demanded a case to be registered against the officer with EOW and his immediate removal from the top post of the anti-corruption agency.

Meanwhile, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has asked the Congress chief to approach the court, if he has evidence to prove his allegations.

"Bhupesh Baghel is trying to create sensation. If he has evidence to prove his points, he should approach the court," Shivratan Sharma, a senior BJP MLA, said in a statement.

Sharma said Baghel is trying to escape from the case lodged against him by EOW by levellingsuch baseless allegations.

Notably, the EOW has recently registered a case againstBaghel, his wife, mother and then officials of Special Area Development Authority (SADA) in connection with alleged irregularities in allotment of land underMansarovar housing scheme in Bhilai (Durg district)in 1995.

As per the case,as an MLA from Patan constituency in Durg in 1995,Baghelwas then ex-officio member of the SADA that allotted the land in name of his wife and mother reportedly violating the guidelines.

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However,Baghelhad rejected the allegations, saying the case is a result of political vendetta. PTI TKP RMT KIS

--- ENDS ---
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ernie Didur is passionate about purple martins.

He became so fascinated by the swallows, that he and a few fellow purple martin enthusiasts founded the Manitoba Purple Martin Club in 1980. He has served as the clubs president since 1982.

Purple martins are the largest North American swallow. They breed throughout the continent and migrate to the Amazon basin each winter.

Didur, 77, first noticed the birds in the late 1970s when two purple martins tried to nest in a two-holed birdhouse in his yard. He enlarged the entrance holes to the birdhouse and the purple martins stayed.

I didnt know what the heck these birds were, so I started researching, says Didur, a retired welder who lives in the RM of Springfield.

I found out that they were purple martins, that they go to Brazil each year and that they eat mosquitoes. I thought, geez, these birds are beneficial to humans.

PHOTOS BY TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Ernie Didur, 77, volunteers his time with the Manitoba Purple Martin Club, where he helps erect towers for the birds to live in.

Didur also learned that purple martins are in decline. The club was established to help the species.

The eastern subspecies of the purple martin depends on apartment-like birdhouses provided by people who maintain the houses, monitor the nests and help provide protection.

The clubs founders decided they would raise funds to build or buy purple martin houses to erect throughout Manitoba and work to educate people about the birds.

Since 1982, Didur and the club have erected six purple martin towers in Manitoba. Each tower contains 20-plus apartment-style purple martin houses.

The club has also erected 160 purple martin houses throughout the province at schools, museums, hospitals and cemeteries. More than 90 per cent of the 16-room, castle-style houses have been placed at seniors homes.

I thought it would be nice for the seniors to enjoy them, Didur says.

Once you hear them sing, its beautiful.

Didur organizes an annual picnic for club members each July, as well as a Grey Cup raffle that serves as the clubs biggest fundraiser. He also writes a quarterly newsletter that includes news and tips about purple martins, as well as news about the clubs 75 members.

For Didur, the club is about its members. Its a community of friends brought together by their love of purple martins.

They tell their experiences with martins and we learn from it, he says. We tell them our experiences and its enjoyable all the time. Its a never-ending thing.

The relationships extend beyond Manitoba. During the past 35 years, Didur has developed contacts with purple martin enthusiasts across North America. He has also assisted scientists from B.C. and Manitoba in their research on the birds.

Didurs years of work earned him the Premiers Volunteer Service Award at the 34th annual Volunteer Awards last month.

Letty Lawrence, a club member since 1982, nominated Didur for the award.

I have found Ernie to be one of the most compassionate and caring people I have ever met, Lawrence says. Hes been so dedicated all these years and hes just a good person.

Didur says the recognition was unexpected. For him, one of the best parts of being involved in the club is receiving feedback from residents of the seniors homes where the club puts up birdhouses.

The thanks we get in letters coming back from them is better than money, he says.

If you know a special volunteer, please contact aaron.epp@gmail.com.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If home is where the heart is, then an American IT administrator who moved to Winnipeg and volunteers with refugees has found a place to set down roots.

I came to Winnipeg as an immigrant myself from the U.S. in 2012, said Alex Szele, 42. Long before Donald Trump was elected president, American-born Szele said he began to notice a creeping growth in religious intolerance, racist rhetoric, gun culture and the gap between haves and have-nots in the U.S. The Wisconsin man with a good job that included health insurance said he no longer felt at home in the country of his birth.

It was part of a life-long growing dissatisfaction with general direction America was taking, said Szele. He immigrated to Canada and settled in Winnipeg.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Alex Szele (left) is an American who moved to Winnipeg in 2012 and is paying it forward by helping people such as Adam Asaleya, who arrived in Canada from Syria in December.

With its universal health care, gun control, respect for human rights and religious minorities, Canada seemed more in line with Szeles values, he said. This past winter, once he was ensconced in his job in his new home in Canada, he was unsettled once again. This time by reports of refugee claimants risking life and limb fleeing the U.S. and crossing into Canada through frozen farm fields.

I couldnt sit on the sidelines anymore, said Szele. It broke my heart. He called Welcome Place and asked how he could help as a volunteer. Now hes teaching computer classes there every Wednesday and spending time once a week with Adam Asaleya, a government-assisted Syrian refugee who arrived in Canada in December.

Ive always been active in the community and volunteering, Szele said. It took me a little while to get on my feet and have enough time to volunteer and feeling able to give back to a community that welcomed me so much.

What government-assisted refugees such as Asaleya need more than anything is a Canadian friend to spend a bit of time with them, said Maysoun Darweesh, who runs the matching program for the Manitoba Interfaith Immigration Councils Welcome Place.

When it began in 2016, the goal was to match 30 refugee families with Canadian families and individuals, she said. They ended up bringing 33 together, said Darweesh, who organized a celebration for the resettled refugees and the volunteers on Saturday at the St. James Civic Centre.

The effort and support that was provided by Canadian families made refugees feel welcomed and loved, said Darweesh.

I just got a friend I like hanging around with, said Szele. We watch movies, go out for dinner, he helped us move when we had to move  nothing crazy. They get together once a week when they can, he said. When Szele bought a house and when Asaleya got a job as an assistant store manager, they spent less time together, Szele said.

Theres no special skills involved in this, said Szele who works for the IT consulting firm Broadview Networks. The biggest thing is if you have a little bit of time in your week  a couple of hours to spend and get to know some new people.

The volunteer matching program sounds like such a big deal but really all its about is people who are socially isolated and need someone to hang out with, said Szele, who can relate to that.

I spent six months living in a hovel without a soul that I knew, he said, recalling when he first arrived in Canada. I spoke the language and knew the culture already. I cant imagine what thats like for someone who doesnt speak English or have any friends. Asaleya does speak English, thanks mainly to his mother, Suhir Mubayed, who was an English teacher in Aleppo.

Szele said his friend from Syria has an apartment and a job here but is worried about his mother, who needs knee surgery and can no longer move. Their family was wiped out financially by the fighting in Syria and a friend of Asaleyas started a GoFundMe page to raise the $10,600 needed for his mothers surgery.

There are some big money problems people are facing when theyre just getting here, said Szele. Sometimes I think we as Canadians cant fathom it, he said. Hes happy to be a Canadian resident and learning from other newcomers such as his friend, Asaleya.

I have a much better cultural understanding of what the refugee situation is, what Syrian families here are going through and what role Canada as a nation and as individuals we can play to help ease some of the suffering.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With its second- and third-floor windows open to air out the smell of smoke Sunday, neighbours who were looking forward to the redevelopment of the Merchants Hotel breathed a sigh of relief that fires set inside it Friday night didnt destroy the project.

Anything new being built on Selkirk (Avenue) and the North End is welcome, Steven Reinheimer said Sunday after stopping at the pharmacy across the street from Merchants Corner, where a passerby noticed smoke and flames Friday at 9:30 p.m. and called 911.

I think weve been lucky in that the firefighters were on the scene quickly and did their jobs well, said Jim Silver, chairman of the Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies at the University of Winnipeg, one of three groups that will share the space when it opens in January.

PHOTOS BY TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Merchant Corner where a fire took place Friday night, Sunday, May 14, 2017.

Theres minimal damage from the fires and there should be no construction delay, said Silver. Thats based on the construction companys tour of the building after the fire inspectors had left late Friday night/early Saturday morning.

A Winnipeg police spokesman said theyre still investigating the fire that threatened the $15-million construction project, which incorporates the notorious hotel that shut down in 2012 and has since been gutted.

It was bloodbath-and-crime central, said Reinheimer, who bid good riddance to the Merch five years ago.

It wasnt a good place, said his partner, Rhona Bruce, who is looking forward to its reincarnation as Merchants Corner, a community learning hub and social enterprise cafe. The couple and two women passing by Sunday said the gutted hotel had been a target for vandals and squatters. Reinheimer said he was surprised that  after an old main-floor entrance was replaced recently with a steel security door  intruders were still able to get inside the building.

Small fires were set on the second floor and third floor, said Silver, who guessed that kids might have set them.

We have always been aware of the need for security to prevent this kind of thing, said Silver. Friday nights blaze heightened that awareness, he said.

Rhona Bruce and Steven Reinheimer are relieved Merchants Corner was not destroyed.

There will be discussions about beefing up security, he said.

For now, the completion of Merchants Corner is on schedule, said Silver.

Were still looking at being in the building and teaching to start the winter term in January 2018.

The U of W will run university-level courses during the day. The Community Education Development Associations Pathways to Education  a North End high school support program  will use the same classroom space in the evenings for after-school tutoring and mentoring programs. Students in the culinary arts program at nearby R.B. Russell high school will run the community cafe as a social enterprise to get practical experience and help them land jobs after graduation. The project includes turning adjoining city lots into 30 units of fully subsidized student housing.

This continues to be a particularly innovative project, one that is unique in Canada and will have a significant impact in Winnipegs North End, Silver said. The community has raised $2.3 million, and 100 per cent of the capital funding is in place, he said. Fundraising efforts continue for Merchants Corner, said Silver.

The plan is to raise another $200,000 to buy some equipment for the kitchen and to operate some of the community programs, he said.

A police spokesman said theyre still investigating the fire that threatened Merchants Corner, a $15-million construction and revitalization project.

There are plans for cultural and educational programs, including Oji-Cree language classes for preschoolers, their parents and grandparents. Merchants Corner will serve as a safe indoor meeting place for neighbourhood groups such as Meet Me at the Bell Tower  Stop the Violence.

The fundraising has gone very well, Silver said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Theres going to be a byelection in Point Douglas on June 13. Try to contain your excitement.

Lets face it: byelections are far and away the most underwhelming of all political events. Very rarely does the outcome of a byelection play a role in determining which party forms government. And without the fuss and bother of a general election campaign to drive news coverage, voter turnout tends to be very, very low.

Perhaps thats why Premier Brian Pallister waited until almost the very last moment to call a byelection in Point Douglas, made necessary when former NDP MLA and leadership hopeful Kevin Chief suddenly retired from politics last January.

PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Bernadette Smith hopes to become Point Douglass fourth NDP MLA.

Desperate to retain the riding, the NDP has nominated Bernadette Smith, a high-profile aboriginal activist who helped found the Coalition of Families of Missing and Murdered Women in Manitoba, and in the process was made a member of the Order of Manitoba.

The Tories are pinning their hopes on electrical contractor Jodi Moskal, a charismatic entrepreneur and former chair of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.

The Liberals are touting John Cacayuran, a former federal Liberal staffer who is a well-respected member of Winnipegs Filipino community. The Greens are also in this race, having nominated community activist Sabrina Koehn Binesi.

Why would anyone pay attention to a byelection in Point Douglas, arguably the most diehard NDP riding in the province?

The simple fact of the matter is an NDP loss in Point Douglas would very much represent the insult to the injury suffered in last years general election, when the party was driven from power by the Tories in convincing fashion.

The riding as it is currently constituted dates back to 1969, and since then, it has had only three NDP MLAs: Donald Malinowski (1969-86), George Hickes (1990-2011) and Kevin Chief (2011-2017). In the 10 elections over that period, the NDP has never received less than 52 per cent of total votes cast.

However, Point Douglas also traditionally boasts the lowest voter turnout in the province. In the 2016 general election, 58 per cent of all registered voters in Manitoba showed up to vote; in Point Douglas, turnout was 44 per cent.

The low turnout is largely due to the fact that Point Douglas is a gritty, urban riding that captures some of Winnipegs poorest neighbourhoods. However, in recent years, residential development in the southern part of the riding has changed its socio-economic profile somewhat. New condominium development along Waterfront Drive and throughout the east Exchange District have added hundreds of new potential voters with distinctly upper-middle-class sensibilities whove shown a modest tendency to vote for the PCs.

In the 2016 election, the poll that captures most of the new condos on Waterfront Drive was the only one that former MLA Kevin Chief did not win. In that one poll, the Tories came out ahead by eight votes.

IAN FROESE / BRANDON SUN FILES John Cacayuran is running for the Liberal party.

What strategy will each of the three major parties follow in this byelections?

The Tory strategy for the June 13 byelection is to squeeze the maximum number of votes out of these areas, and work strenuously to pull whatever votes they can from the other, older polls.

However, this riding has not embraced Tory candidates; in the past 10 general elections, the Tories have only polled more than 1,000 votes twice, and only three times have they been able to produce a second-place finish.

Moskal will also have to deal with the fact that the party she wants to represent has accumulated an impressive collection of political baggage in its first 12 months in office. From a premier who fiercely defends his right to spend leisurely vacations in Costa Rica, to recent fiscal decisions to close hospital emergency rooms and ration funding for health care and education, the Tories have delivered an array of policies that will not be popular in Point Douglas.

The Liberals have easily outperformed the Tories in Point Douglas since 1969, but have not really come close to winning. The Grits will be largely relying on Cacayurans capacity to attract votes from the Filipino community in Point Douglas, thought to be the fasting-growing in the riding.

Cacayuran reportedly has the retail political skills to compete, but as a Liberal, he is running for a party that is  like the NDP  leaderless and cash poor. And, largely because they have not run fulsome campaigns in the past, neither the Liberals nor the Tories have access to detailed voter-identification data to guide their canvassing and election-day efforts.

For Smith, the strategy is quite simple: convince diehard NDP supporters the party is on the rebound, and they have to show up in numbers more typical of a general election turnout. If New Democrats in the riding are still harbouring resentment over the Selinger years and decide to stay home, then the fortunes of both the Liberals and Tories start to rise.

The hard reality for Smith is the NDP is a still deeply damaged brand in Manitoba politics.

The NDP is a party without a leader or a positive bank-account balance. Smiths salvation may come from the fact she will have access to more detailed, more accurate voter identification data than any of the three major party candidates.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Jodi Moskal is representing the Progressive Conservatives in a riding where the party has achieved no success.

The Point Douglas byelection seems unlikely to generate much in the way of excitement. And the result  no matter how it breaks  will not necessarily reveal some greater truth about the parties involved.

However, there is no escaping the fact an NDP loss in Point Douglas would represent an enormous body blow to a party that has suffered quite a bit since last years general election.

A win by either the Liberals or Tories would be nice, but not essential in this instance. On the other hand, the NDP needs to retain Point Douglas to show Manitobans that it doesnt have any further to fall.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An inmate stabbed at Stony Mountain Institution Sunday night is in stable condition, RCMP say.

STARS air ambulance was dispatched to the medium-security facility at about 7 p.m. to transport a 28-year-old man being held in maximum security to hospital in Winnipeg, 25 kilometres south.

The inmates injuries were consistent with having been assaulted, a Correctional Services Canada spokesman said in an email to the Free Press.

Stony Mountain Institution (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press files)

He declined further comment, citing an active investigation.

The RCMP says no charges have been laid yet.

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For those closely following the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, it would appear that the days of the self-proclaimed caliphate of Daesh (a.k.a. ISIS, the Islamic State group or ISIL) are coming to an end. Backed by Russia and Iran, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his loyalist forces have had recent success against the Daesh forces based in and around the city of Raqqa.

Some reports suggest that embattled Daesh fighters have sought to desert the current fight and join the ranks of al-Qaida instead. However, Im not sure how, in the bigger picture, this change of alliance will matter squat, given that both Daesh and al-Qaida are fundamentalist Sunni extremist evildoers.

In the same way that the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President made George W. Bush appear like a sage statesman by comparison, Daesh atrocities somehow have made al-Qaida seem like a more reasonable brand of Islamic terrorists. But I digress.

Bram Janssen / THE ASSCOIATED PRESS FILES A humvee of the Iraqi Federal Police drives through an abandoned street in western Mosul, Iraq.

In Iraq, the U.S.-led international alliance has stepped up its siege of the Daesh-held city of Mosul. This combat offensive is now well into its seventh month, and Canadian special forces soldiers have been playing an active role in assisting the Kurdish militia in that quest. The reason for such a lengthy battle can only be partially attributed to the fanaticism of the Daesh defenders. It is now estimated there are fewer than 1,000 Daesh fighters holding on to approximately 30 per cent of the western part of Mosul. The eastern half of the city was reported as being fully liberated by the alliance in late January.

To keep their fighters loyal to the cause, Iraqi news reported that Daesh has begun lopping off the ears of those suspected to be plotting surrender or desertion. This seems like a heck of a way to enforce loyalty, but if nothing else it should make it easy to identify these one-eared individuals after the battle.

The final stronghold of Daesh in Iraq is in the old city of Mosul, which, with its labyrinth of narrow streets, will prove a nightmare for the alliance attackers.

It is, of course, reluctance on the part of the allied units to endure that nightmare that has led to the snails pace of the overall siege. Although the assorted hodgepodge of allied units outnumbers the remaining Daesh forces groups by something like 25 to 1, the fact is that all of these disparate groups are fighting for a different ultimate objective.

There are American advisers and troops on the ground, and the U.S. is co-ordinating the massive aerial armada, which includes Canadian refueller and reconnaissance aircraft. The U.S. policy is to support the corrupt regime of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in securing a unified, Daesh-free Iraq under a central Baghdad authority. That is also the stated intent of Global Affairs Canada.

While al-Abadi is a Shiite, many of the Shiite militia assisting in the siege of Mosul are waging a punitive offensive against the Sunni followers of Daesh, in the name of a holy war. Revenge atrocities committed by the Shiite militias in the early stages of the Mosul offensive have cast doubt upon their suitability for any post-victory occupation role.

Also on the ground are a large number of Iranian military advisers who are working directly with the Shiite militias.

Then, of course, you have the Kurdish militia, which has been tutored by some of Canadas most professional commandos. But these Kurds are not fighting to liberate the Sunni Arab residents of Mosul from the Sunni Arab Daesh extremists. They are, instead, fighting to increase Masood Barzanis bargaining position in the Kurdish quest for an independent state. Barzani is the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and he has been adamant from the get-go that he has no intention of ever returning to a unified Iraq under the control of al-Abadi.

The allied commanders have vowed that they will liberate the remainder of Mosul within the next three weeks. With the elimination of their common enemy, the power struggle among the various allies is sure to erupt. Rather than sticking around to pick sides, Canada would be wise to pull out our trainers and leave the future of Iraq and Syria to the regional stakeholders and the worlds superpowers.

Not our fight.

Scott Taylor is the founder and publisher of Esprit de Corps Magazine. He is a bestselling author and award-winning documentary filmmaker.
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Theres something about Ivanka Trump. Something that weve finally decided we dont like.

Last year, in that halcyon period when it seemed assured that Donald Trump couldnt possibly win the presidency, most still held a begrudging respect for his eldest daughter. Her convention speech! Her poise! Her business savvy! We were spooked (or comforted) by the theory that even though he couldnt possibly make it to the White House, his capable-seeming scion one day might.

These days, were much less impressed. Nearly everything about Ivanka Trump prompts a rolling of the eyes, whether its her clothing line (struggling), her role in the White House (unclear) or her recent book (badly panned). Will she do anything to counter that perception? It seems unlikely. The most frustrating thing about Trump is that she doesnt seem to do much of anything at all.

Michael Sohn, pool / The Associated Press Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser of U.S. President Donald Trump, visits the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe after participating in the W20 Summit in Berlin.

Goodness knows America doesnt love a woman who tries too hard: look at the response to Hillary Clinton, the ultimate striver. What we do appreciate, however, is a hint of hard work. Theres an understanding that a person should have to put in at least a modicum of effort to get  and stay  in a position above ours. President Trumps original appeal stemmed in large part from his purported bootstrapping to business success. And much of Ivanka Trumps promise lay in the way that, although a child of privilege, she seemed willing to work hard and maybe even make a difference for others.

But the first months of her fathers presidency have undermined that impression. The emptiness of her claims to enterprise have become increasingly apparent. And in the few instances where a shadow of exertion dares appear, its done in her own self-interest  and even then, rarely well.

Despite lofty pronouncements during the campaign that she wasnt her fathers adviser, Trump was quick to take an official White House advisory position and an office in the West Wing. But what exactly has she done since? She has shilled her jewelry by wearing it at official events and dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping the day Chinese trademarks for her business were approved.

But as for actual policy, even in the areas  women, gender and work  that she promised to make her own? I do believe that in time Ill get to the right place, she told the New York Times. Thats a public figures version of the Im still researching excuse every student has used for an overdue paper, and its just as unconvincing.

More recently, the publication of her book seems to have served as a flashpoint for those fed up by her increasingly lackadaisical persona. Women Who Work has already been shredded in enough columns to make up their own, much more useful book of essays. Its a mishmash of anodyne advice, cribbed baldly from the most popular of the other having it all books for white-collar working women. The inspirational quotes, of which there are many, are trite and often misused. The book adds nothing to the conversation, a disappointment from someone whom we thought might work to change the conversation for us all.

But perhaps the most irritating thing about the book is how glib and careless it appears from the first page onward, and how Trump clearly couldnt be bothered to hide it. A Woman Didnt Work very hard on this book at all. Had even a moments effort been put into text, apart from assessing its revenue potential, a good deal of the vapidity that plagues it could have been avoided.

Its not that Trump should be forced into a role she doesnt want to play. Her stepmother Melania, for instance, has made it clear that she is not interested in expending the effort needed to be first lady, and we rather appreciate her silent candour. Yet many progressive, ambitious women harboured some secret hope that Ivanka Trump might be one of the few in Trumpland who got it. With recent days as evidence, its no longer possible to hold out that hope.

Deep down, after all, Americans still love a doer and dislike being sold a false bill of goods. Ivanka Trumps not as much the former as we would have liked to believe. Now were left with the disappointing sensation of holding the latter.

Christine Emba is the editor of In Theory, and writes about ideas for the Washington Posts Opinions section.

 Washington Post
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/05/2017 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A perfect system.

Which means, of course, nothing could possibly go wrong.

Could it?

Tim Smith / The Brandon Sun files Premier Brian Pallister

Premier Brian Pallisters flippant response last week to questions about his methods of communicating on government business while vacationing in Costa Rica has done nothing to diminish legitimate concerns about the security and, for that matter, the volume of information being transmitted between the premier and his staff and cabinet colleagues while he is out of the province.

After a freedom-of-information request by the NDP revealed no records of phone calls or emails between Mr. Pallister and his staff via government-issued devices during his southern sojourns, the premier declared that he employs other (non-government) methods of communication but refused to elaborate, stating that specifying the nature of those accounts and/or devices might compromise the security of the information being transmitted.

Perfect system so far, he added glibly while declaring that no information leaks have occurred as a result of employing his secrecy-shrouded techniques.

As public relations strategies go, this approach has some rather obvious flaws.

In his run to become Manitobas premier, Mr. Pallister pledged an open and accountable government. This approach is most decidedly at odds with that aspiration. The use of private, rather than governmental, telephones and email servers might be a perfect way for a politician or government to shield communications from public scrutiny, but its also a strategy that inevitably produces less-than-perfect outcomes for those who favour it.

For a glimmer of where the Manitoba governments simmering information-stream imbroglio might be headed, Mr. Pallister might consider the plight last week of Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who was found to have been using a private email service to conduct provincial government business.

Despite offering initial assurances that the private email account is administered by an IT security company whose standards and software are on par with those of government servers, Mr. Wall was forced to backtrack a day later and his office issued a statement saying he will be using a government of Saskatchewan email account for government business.

Or perhaps Manitobas premier, who has described himself as a voracious reader during his Costa Rican getaways, might spend a few hours poring through the reams of newsprint devoted to Hillary Clintons private email server woes during the U.S. presidential election.

The lessons are obvious. Mr. Pallisters obstinacy, however, seems to prevent him from heeding them.

As is the case with the newly discovered numbered company that also raised questions last week  when asked for details about Pallister Investments 22 Ltd., and whether he derives monetary benefit from it, the premiers response was Frankly, its none of your business  Mr. Pallisters handling of the government communications issue demonstrates a level of stubbornness and arrogance that will continue to undermine his governments efforts unless his closest advisers can convince him to amend his message.

Theres no scandal here, as much as the NDP wishes there were. But unless Mr. Pallister comes clean about communications and adopts more transparent and provably secure methods of keeping in touch while hes tropically reclined, itd be best to insert the word yet into the previous sentence.

What hes doing now amounts to a perfect recipe for a longer-term political mess.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/05/2017 (2005 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Lori McFarland sits down with her family to celebrate Mothers Day this weekend, there is one person she knows wont be there. But the family will make sure there is a special place at the table for Amber.

Its a way for us to acknowledge her and let her know we are thinking about her  not only her absence but also her presence, said McFarland, 58.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Amber McFarland's family, sister Ashley (from left), mother Lori, father Scott, nephew Christian and sister Lisa. She was 24 when she went missing in October 2008.

The sadness is an underlying current in any happy occasion  Lori McFarland on her missing daughter, Amber

Sunday marks the ninth Mothers Day the Portage la Prairie resident will spend without her daughter Amber McFarland, who went missing in 2008. As they always do on important dates and holidays, her family will set a place for her.

Mothers Day can be bittersweet, she said. While I am happy to spend the day with my two daughters and am proud of the women they have become, I remain deeply saddened by the loss of Amber, as would any mother who has lost a child.

To mothers, they are our children at any age. The sadness is an underlying current in any happy occasion.

Amber McFarlands family  including her father, Scott, her identical twin sister, Ashley, her younger sister, Lisa, and her nephew, Christian  have not seen or heard from her since October 2008. She was 24 when she went missing.

SUPPLIED 'Amber was beautiful inside and out. Amber was loving, and she was loved,' her mother, Lori McFarland, says.

Her mother was told in a phone call on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008 that she had not shown up for her morning shift at Marks Work Wearhouse in Portage la Prairie.

One day after that phone call, Lori McFarland received a second call saying her daughter had not showed up for work for a second straight day.

The second call we received the following morning, when they said that Amber again did not show up to open the store, was a turning point, she said. This is the moment that I knew something was terribly wrong.

Our lives have never been the same after receiving that phone call.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A woman enters the Cat & Fiddle Nite Club. Amber McFarland was at the Portage la Prairie bar the morning she went missing.

Amber McFarland was last seen by friends at the Cat & Fiddle Nite Club in the Midtown Motor Inn at 177 Saskatchewan Ave. W. in Portage la Prairie at around 1 a.m. on Oct. 18.

Her friends have said she was seen at the nightclub with her ex-boyfriend, Kelly Garrioch. Security footage shows her with Garrioch and another man, later identified as Graham Saxon, in the Midtowns beer vendor.

Garrioch, who was 38 at the time, later admitted he was with his ex-girlfriend early that morning despite a court order prohibiting him from being around her, stemming from an alleged assault in May 2008.

Garrioch has always said he had nothing to do with Amber McFarlands disappearance and doesnt know what ultimately happened to her that morning.

A Winnipeg Free Press article from June 2009 states when a friend and relative of Amber McFarlands called Garrioch after she went missing, he told them she had come to his Portage la Prairie home on Yellowquill Trail on the morning of Oct. 18, 2008.

He told them she later called an unknown person and left his home, the friend said.

Garrioch said he has not seen or heard from Amber since.

Saxon, the other man in the footage from the beer vendor, told the Free Press in 2009 that after the group left the hotel, he dropped McFarland off with Garrioch at Garriochs home.

Her vehicle was found the morning she went missing at the Canad Inns Destination Centre at 2401 Saskatchewan Ave. W., where she had left it the previous day before going out for the evening.

Garrioch did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Amber McFarland was recorded by a security camera at the Midtown Motor Inn before she went missing.

Years after her disappearance, which RCMP confirmed was being investigated as a homicide in 2009, Lori McFarland and her family still search for answers about what really happened to her daughter that October morning.

We will always seek the truth, Lori said. We believe there are people that know details that could help us find justice for Amber. We implore those people to please come forward with information.

We want the investigation to continue. We want justice for Amber.

On Wednesday, Manitoba RCMP announced its historical case unit had arrested a woman in connection with the 2007 killing of another Portage la Prairie woman, 46-year-old grandmother Charlene Ward. The night before she was found slain, Ward had been at the Cat & Fiddle. On Thursday, RCMP said the 30-year-old woman arrested had been released without being charged.

Sgt. Dan Barnabe of the historical case unit said the investigation into Ambers disappearance is an open and active investigation.

Obviously, the evidence pointed us in that direction, and thats why we came out and said it was a homicide despite the fact the remains have never been recovered, Barnabe said.

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Scott McFarland (left) and volunteers drain the Portage Spillway looking for clues in late October 2008.

Barnabe confirmed two searches took place at Garriochs former home in Portage la Prairie, the first happening in the fall of 2008.

Barnabe said the investigation led them back to the house for a second search in June 2009 after new owners had moved in.

Its just the way the investigation progressed, he said. Something piqued the interest of investigators at the time and required them to go back and do a second search.

In the 2009 search, officers from the forensics identification and major crimes units reportedly dug up parts of the property.

Ive done nothing, Garrioch told the Free Press at the time of the second search, adding his life had been horrid since his ex-girlfriends disappearance.

Barnabe confirmed Garrioch and Saxon were arrested in 2009 and brought in for questioning. Both were released without being charged. Saxon told the Free Press that fall he later passed a lie-detector test at RCMPs Manitoba headquarters in Winnipeg.

Barnabe said RCMP want anyone with information on the case to come forward.

This is still an active investigation, and we are making a plea for any information to be brought to us, Barnabe said.

Sometimes people know something but just think the cops must know about that, but (they) should never take for granted that just because they know something that we know it.

We will take any and all information that anyone has.

A tip line has been set up for the case, and anyone with information about Amber McFarlands disappearance is asked to call 204-984-6447 or Manitoba Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS).

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Volunteers drain the Portage Spillway in October 2008 to search for clues.

Lori McFarland said unanswered questions and a need for answers often consume her thoughts.

Any alone time or quiet time, my mind drifts toward all the questions and scenarios and suspects, she said.

She said she has always believed she knows who is responsible for her daughters disappearance.

I do believe that the truth will come out someday. I just hope it is not after we are all passed on, she said.

We will not be satisfied until the person responsible for the murder of our daughter is securely behind bars.

A $20,000 reward is being offered to anyone who comes forward with information that leads to the discovery of Amber McFarlands remains or a prosecution and sentencing in the case.

Despite the pain, Lori McFarland said her family has tried to live as normal a life as possible, although doing so is not easy.

We all try to go about our work and aspects of daily living like everyone else, but we do have an underlying current of sadness, Lori said.

There are good days and bad days, but generally we put on our game face and head out for the day.

This is our normal family life now, going along in life masking the sadness and the anger at the injustice each and every day.

Lori McFarland said she has always tried to stay strong for her two daughters and said the loss has always been particularly hard on Ambers identical twin sister, Ashley.

In the early days, Ashley would become extremely upset if someone offered their condolences or sympathy for her loss of her sister because she could not resign herself to the fact that this was really final, she said.

Twins have a special bond, and Ashley has lost not only her sister, but also her best friend.

This Mothers Day, Lori McFarland will remember the woman Amber was and imagine the kind of woman she would have been today.

She loved fashion and style, and her dream job was to be an interior decorator, and she would have been awesome, Lori said. I wish she had the chance to go to school to follow her dream.

She has a huge family that loved her. She deserves to be laid to rest surrounded by the family that loved her.

Amber was beautiful inside and out. Amber was loving, and she was loved.

Dave Baxter is a freelance reporter, photographer and editor who writes about Manitoba crimes for the Sunday Special.

crimefilesmanitoba@gmail.com

Twitter:@davebbbaxter
On Saturday, a day before China's major Belt and Road Forum, India issued its strongest statement till date on the plan, not only voicing concerns on CPEC but also hitting out at the wider principles underpinning OBOR.

By Ananth Krishnan: China has rejected the concerns voiced by India on the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative violating India's sovereignty and on its lack of transparency, saying today that "The international community's warm response speaks volumes".

In a statement to India Today, the Chinese Foreign Ministry also reiterated its stand on the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which India has opposed as it passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, saying, "It is not directed at any third parties, not relevant to disputes over territorial sovereignty and does not affect China's position on the Kashmir issue."

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On Saturday, a day before China's major Belt and Road Forum, India issued its strongest statement till date on the plan, not only voicing concerns on CPEC but also hitting out at the wider principles underpinning OBOR, saying that "Connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognized international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality" and "Avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities".

CHINA REITERATES ITS STANCE ON KASHMIR

Responding to the statement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry told India Today, "We have noted the statement by the Spokesperson of India's External Affairs Ministry. The Belt and Road initiative was proposed in 2013, and four years on, over 100 countries around the world and international organizations have supported and got involved in this initiative. Important resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly and Security Council contain reference to it. In the speech made by President Xi Jinping on the morning of May 14 at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for international cooperation, he elaborated on the progress and achievements of the initiative over these years in terms of policy, infrastructure, trade, financial and people-to-people connectivity. All these show that the Belt and Road initiative responds to the trend of the times, conforms to the law of development, and meets the people's interests. It surely has broad prospects. The international community's warm response to the Belt and Road Forum for international cooperation also speaks volumes for that."

It also reiterated the remarks made by Xi at the opening which said "All countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each other's development paths and social systems, and each other's cores interests and major concerns".

As India Today reported, China has also formalised the status of CPEC as the "flagship" project of OBOR.

Rejecting India's concerns, the Ministry said, "Regarding the issue of Kashmir which the Indian side is concerned about, we have been stressing that the issue was left over from history between India and Pakistan, and should be properly addressed by the two sides through consultation and negotiation. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is an initiative on economic cooperation. It is not directed at any third parties, not relevant to disputes over territorial sovereignty and does not affect China's position on the Kashmir issue."

ALSO READ | 'Nervous' India can't stop neigbours backing OBOR: Chinese media

ALSO READ | China formalises CPEC as One Belt One Road 'flagship' while Xi says will 'respect sovereignty' ALSO READ | Beijing's One Belt, One Road Summit will embarrass India, says Chinese media

Also watch: Why is India opposing One Belt One Road Forum?

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Saint Marys University of Minnesota is seeking the publics help in finishing off a $57 million fundraising campaign that is bringing much-needed dollars to many corners of the campus, school officials say.

The university kicked off the public leg of its Discover Inspire Lead campaign on Friday, having already raised $49.5 million through mostly large donations from school alumni. The campaign began four years ago and is scheduled to wrap up next May.

Our hearts are full with gratitude, but our work is not done, said Audrey Kintzi, vice president for development and alumni relations, adding that she expects Saint Marys to exceed its original $57 million goal. Were hoping to do great things for Saint Marys and the community.

The campaign is divided into seven initiatives and capital additions:

A $1.5 million stadium at the soccer and track and field complex  complete with press boxes, gathering spaces and VIP access areas;

New labs and classrooms inside the Adducci Science Center, as well as a makerspace where students will be able to use 3D printers, laser cutters, robotics components and more;

The $20 million Science and Learning Center, which was unveiled at a ribbon-cutting last Friday;

A fund that will pay for Lasallian training programs for students, faculty and staff;

The renovation of a carriage house on the Twin Cities campus into a school building with classrooms and learning spaces;

The First Generation Initiative, which provides academic, financial, social and cultural support to first-generation students;

And, finally, scholarships for students who might not be first-generation college students but nonetheless need financial help if theyre to attend college.

Some of the projects have been in place, or in the works, for a few years now.

Saint Marys has already graduated 33 students who were on full-ride scholarships through the First Generation Initiative.

Education should be available to all students  not just those who can afford it, Kintzi said. This initiative helps us reclaim our Lasallian mission and bring bright and promising students to our campus.

The Discover Inspire Lead campaign is the most ambitious and comprehensive fundraising effort in Saint Marys history.

Kintzi said the university has made it this far in the campaign thanks to the generosity of mostly affluent alumni who dont necessarily live near Winona. Now, she said, Saint Marys is hoping the public  especially those in this community  will take care of the rest.

Were so grateful to be a part of Winona, to be in a community that supports us, Kintzi said. Every gift is going to be important to our campaign. If everybody does something, nobody will have to do everything.
In 2009, I interviewed Mark Weber and Bradley Smith, two amateur historians notorious for being among the leading Holocaust revisionists. Smith is an old-school denier, dubious about the existence of gas chambers, while Weber merely believes that Jews exaggerate history to help consolidate Zionist power.

I interviewed Weber in his offices outside Los Angeles, and Smith at a coffee shop close to the border of Mexico, where he lived. In each case I went alone. Although I wasnt afraid  neither had a history of physical violence  meeting with two men whod spent their professional lives spinning theories about the perfidy of my people was, at the least, a bit creepy. Lets put it this way: I hugged my wife extra tight before leaving home.

Lately, Ive been reminiscing about my time with Smith and Weber, and not just because white nationalists now have a president who they feel is sympathetic to their cause. Rather, the triggering event, if you will, is the national debate about how to confront speech we find odious.

On college campuses across the country, students have reacted with fear and anger to the possibility that far-right (or even slightly right) thinkers might speak some words somewhere in their vicinity. At Middlebury College, students violently protested a talk featuring Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a 1994 book that many call racist. At Claremont McKenna College, protesters shut down a speech by Heather Mac Donald, whose recent book defends police officers. Ann Coulter had to cancel a speech at UC Berkeley.

Protesters have not argued these speakers pose an immediate physical threat to students of color, or women, or anybody. Instead, they posit that its wrong or somehow psychically damaging to allow certain views a platform.

At Wellesley College, for example, a student editorial in March insinuated that Laura Kipnis new book, which questions how Title IX is applied to sexual life on campuses, undermines the existence and rights of others. Students at Claremont McKenna, and the other four colleges in Pomona, wrote a letter stating that merely engaging with Mac Donald is a form of violence.

The same logic undergirds the vicious campaign against philosopher Rebecca Tuvel, who recently published an article using the analogy of trans people to interrogate the transracialism of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who famously passed as black. In a letter to Hypatia, the feminist journal that published Tuvels article, hundreds of signatories argued that the articles failures of scholarship do harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia. The articles continued availability, they claimed, causes further harm.

Unquestionably, words can, and do, cause harm. Im not interested in lending support to policies that I despise. But free speech is an important value, one that protects everyone with unpopular views: critics of Israel, defenders of revolutionary movements, anti-vaccine activists. Those who run from unpopular views, moreover, may ultimately harm themselves.

Let me return to the question everyone asked me in 2009: What was it like to meet with Holocaust revisionists? And then spend many more hours on the telephone, listening to their cracked, sinister theories about me, my relatives, my dead co-religionists?

Truth be told, it was invigorating. They were so deluded, so sad, and so alone in the world. Their lives were tangled webs of failed ambitions, failed ideas, even failed marriages. They werent well. I was. It was heartening to listen to my enemies respectfully, and conclude that in a country that permits free inquiry, they would never win.

Interviewing Smith and Weber  two men who downplay the literal genocide of my people; who dehumanize me more profoundly than even Murrays critics believe that he dehumanizes others  actually empowered me as a thinker, as a progressive, and as a Jew. Having looked at evil, I found it puny. We can beat this, I found myself thinking.

I dont think that can be everyones response to every speaker. There are good reasons that a victim of sexual violence might avoid speeches that could trigger memories of the assault. Victims of police violence might carefully consider how theyd feel listening to a speaker who plays down their experience. A concentration-camp survivor might not, to put it mildly, be the right person to interview Smith and Weber.

Each person has to be her own best judge of what experiences will be valuable, detrimental, painful or simply a waste of time. Id skip Coulter because I know what I think of her views. Id rather read a novel or scramble some eggs.

But imagine if, instead of protesting Mac Donalds speech at Claremont, students had waited until she finished, taken the microphone, and then described the abuses theyd experienced at the hands of police officers?

They might have changed her mind, if only a little. But even if they hadnt, theyd have used their experience to shrink hers. Theyd have said, You dont scare us. Theyd have enlarged the scope of their world, and theyd have done so as allies of free speech. And I suspect that theyd have left the room emboldened, ready for the next time.
Submit an event for Around Town by emailing calendar information to bnr-news@wiscnews.com at least three business days before the event date.

Today

Observance ceremony: 8:30 a.m., Sauk County Courthouse, 515 Oak St., Baraboo. Respect for Law Day observance. The event will be held on the Broadway Street side of the courthouse. The ceremony is a part of the nationwide observance each May to recognize National Police Week and to honor law enforcement officers who have given their lives in service of their communities. In addition to law enforcement, fire and EMS will also be honored.

Sewing repairs: 9-10 a.m., Baraboo Area Senior Center, 124 Second St., Room 24, Baraboo. Senior sewing repairs and alterations will be offered by Teena Castle. Fees will vary depending on the specific project. For more information call Diane Pillsbury at 608-356-8464.

Senior Android workshop: 9 a.m. to noon, Baraboo Area Senior Center, 124 Second St., Room 24, Baraboo. Cell Plus Device Specialist, Gene Rolland, will lead the workshop which includes a class booklet, instruction about calls, messaging, email, apps, settings and more. There is no charge. For more information call Diane Pillsbury at 608-356-8464.

Senior writing group: 10:30 a.m. to noon, Baraboo Area Senior Center, 124 Second St., Room 24, Baraboo. There is no cost for this program. For more information, call Diane Pillsbury at 608-356-8464.

Caregiver group: 6 p.m., Aging and Disability Resource Center of Sauk County, Sauk Prairie Community Center, 730 Monroe St., Sauk City. Family Caregiver Support Group is a support group for those who care for their parents, spouse or children. The group meets the third Tuesday of the month. Light dinner will be provided. For more information, call Marina Wittmann at 608-355-3289.

Tuesday, May 16

Luncheon: 1 p.m., Lodi Area Womens Connection, Luckys On The Lake, W11579 Highway V, Okee. Jason McGrath and Shelly Pare will perform. Dr. Judith Rolfs shares Stages From the Heart to the Page about the transitions of a womans life. Cost is $12. For more information and to check availability, call 608-Eileen at 592-3265, Dianne at 608-293-2333, or email SPLreservation@yahoo.com.

Fish survey demo: 6:30-8 p.m., Lake Wisconsin Alliance, Camp Rest Park & Boat Launch near N3814 Tipperary Road, Poynette (lakeshore is Dekorra). Educational seminar with Tim Larson and Dave Marshall demonstrating near fish surveys techniques on Lake Wisconsin. For more information, call Melissa Keenan at 608-355-4838 or email mkeenan@co.sauk.wi.us.

Wednesday, May 17

Blood pressure screening: 9-11 a.m., Baraboo Area Senior Center, 124 Second St., Room 24, Baraboo. Screening is provided by SSM Health-St.Clare Hospital. Information will also be available on oral health. For more information call Diane Pillsbury at 608-356-8464.

Senior coloring: 10 a.m. to noon, Adult Coloring Time, Baraboo Area Senior Center, 124 Second St., Room 24, Baraboo. Bring a coloring book and coloring tools or use those that are available. There is no cost for this program. For more information, call Diane Pillsbury at 608-356-8464.

Exotic birds: 2:30 p.m., Ruth Culver Community Library, 540 Water St., Prairie du Sac. Bird enthusiasts from Animal House will be on hand to share their birds and knowledge. Appropriate for school-age children. For more information, call Beth at 608-643-8318 or visit www.pdslibrary.org.

Thursday, May 18

Garage sale: May 18-20, Reedsburg Community Wide Garage Sale.

Author visit: 6 p.m., Reedsburg Public Library, 370 Vine St., Reedsburg. Author James Campbell will discuss his book Braving It, an unforgettable journey with his daughter into the Alaskan wild. For more information, call 608-768-7323.

Friday, May 19

Garage sale: May 19-20, Reedsburg Community Wide Garage Sale.

Book sale: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friends of the Ruth Culver Community Library, 540 Water St., Prairie du Sac. For more information, call 608-643-8318 or visit www.pdslibrary.org.

Chair yoga: 10-10:45 a.m., Baraboo Area Senior Center, 124 Second St., Room 21, Baraboo. Instructor Tatsiana ONeil will lead the group in stretches while seated. There is a $1 fee. For more information call Diane Pillsbury at 608-356-8464.

Gala: 5:30 p.m., Durwards Glen, W11876 McLeisch Road, Baraboo. Gala for the Glen will include dinner, a special display of Bernard Durwards Mater Dolorosa painting, raffle and more. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit www.durwardsglen.org, call 608-356-8113 or email theglen150@gmail.com.

Open stage: 7:30 p.m., The Village Booksmith, 526 Oak St., Baraboo. Toast of the Town Open Stage will take place with host Ron Frye. All acts, musical or otherwise, are welcome to the stage. For more information, call 608-355-1001 or visit www.villagebooksmith.com.

Saturday, May 20

Garage sale: Reedsburg Community Wide Garage Sale.

Book sale: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Friends of the Ruth Culver Community Library, 540 Water St., Prairie du Sac. For more information, call 608-643-8318 or visit www.pdslibrary.org.

Saunter: 9 a.m., Lodi Valley Chapter of the Ice Age Trail Alliance, Devils Lake State Park, Roznos Meadow parking lot, Highway 113. Eighth annual saunter starts at the park and ends at Gibraltar Rock, about 11 miles. A bus will shuttle hikers back to Roznos Meadow. Dress appropriately for hiking and the weather. Bring lots of water and a snack/lunch. For more information, call Bill at 608-843-3926 or email at billpatti@charter.net.

Hike back in time: 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Devils Lake State Park. Join retired Park Naturalist Ken Lange on a geologic exploration of Devils Lake. See boulders transported by glaciers, a glacial lake bed, potholes, Devils Doorway and much more. This hike is approximately 3.5 miles, with some steep sections. Wear proper footwear and bring plenty of water. Meet at the Steinke Basin parking lot. For more information, call 608-356-8301.

Annual meeting: 7 p.m., Pleasant Valley Cemetery, 207 Campusview Drive, West Baraboo. For more information, call Jerry Henke at 608-697-1384.

Sunday, May 21

Trap shoot, barbecue: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Honey Creek Rod & Gun Club, E 7412 Highway C, Leland. Chicken barbecue from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., spring trap shoot starting at 10 a.m., shooting Annies at 1 and 3 p.m. Carryout available. For more information, call Rick at 608-477-0895.

Environmental presentation: 10:10 a.m., Free Congregation of Sauk County, 307 Polk St., Sauk City. Curt Meine, a conservation biologist and writer based in Sauk County will present, This Place in Time: Getting our Bearings in a Rapidly Changing World, discussing environmental change. Presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.freecongregation.org.

Movie discussion: 1:30 p.m., Reedsburg Public Library, 370 Vine St., Reedsburg. Retired film critic Jimmy Gillman and the Deeper into Movies series features Jane Got a Gun. Viewing guides and copies of the movie are available for check out. For more information, call 608-768-7323 or email info@reedsburglibrary.org.

Workshop: 2-4 p.m., Reedsburg Area Concerned Citizens, Reedsburg Recreation Center, 134 Locust St., Reedsburg. What Can I Do?, a citizens workshop and informational event discussing area issues. The public is invited; snacks and beverages will be served.

Concert: 7 p.m., First United Church of Christ, 504 Washington Ave., Sauk City. Fifth annual choral concert, with fellowship, cake, coffee and milk to follow. Open to the public.
The Sauk County Board will consider employee raises, confirm the appointment of a new member and hear from several officials about major strategic issues during its monthly meeting Tuesday.

The agenda includes three presentations intended to prepare board members for a meeting later this month during which they will discuss long-term goals.

One of the presenters will be Sarah Pittz, a consultant who will update the board on a plan she developed to help draw people to visit, work and live in Sauk County.

In September, the board approved a $42,000 contract with Pittzs firm, Ganem Consulting of Reedsburg, to provide placemaking planning services. The boards Economic Development Committee recently got its first look at a draft version of the 129-page plan.

The board also will hear from Sauk County Parks Director Matt Stieve about plans to construct a high-performance building at White Mound County Park, which is located southwest of Baraboo in Hill Point.

The board has allocated $250,000 to incorporate green technologies into the office and community building. Although the basic design already has been developed, officials recently learned that plans for the building may require state approval.

The third presenter, Brian Simmert, the countys chief planner, will provide an update on development of the Great Sauk State Trail.

The board has plans to discuss long-term strategic issues during a special meeting May 30, at 6 p.m., at the University of Wisconsin-Baraboo/Sauk County campus.

Appointment confirmation

Also Tuesday, the board is scheduled to consider Board Chair Marty Kruegers appointment of Clark Pettersen, 73, of the town of Ironton, to fill a vacancy in the countys 5th supervisory district.

Pettersen, a graduate of Sebeka High School in Minnesota and a former Reedsburg clothing store owner who has served on the Richland Center School Board, would replace Connie Lehman. She resigned her seat last month after moving from the district.

Candidates interested in filling the vacancy were to express interest by April 28. The Baraboo News Republic requested documents identifying applicants for the position on that day, before private interviews were conducted.

Krueger provided the documents 14 days later, on Friday, after he announced that he had chosen Pettersen to fill the unexpired term.

The documents show that two other people expressed interest in the position. One applicant was James Thornsen, a Madison Area Technical College graduate who has served on the Wonewoc School Board and as chair of the Woodland Town Board.

Another applicant was Robert Newport, a Milwaukee Area Technical College graduate and retired Miller Brewing Company employee.

If confirmed, Pettersen would serve through April 2018. The district includes the towns of Ironton and Woodland, the villages of Ironton and Lime Ridge, Ward 3 in the town of La Valle, and Ward 2 in the village of Cazenovia.

Raises considered

The board also will consider a recommendation to budget an across-the-board 1 percent raise for most county employees next year. The increase would bring total wages for the affected employees to $24.9 million, an increase of about $540,000 over this year, according to a fiscal note from Sauk County Controller Kerry Beghin.

The increase would affect the hourly equivalent of 478 full-time employees who cannot collectively bargain for wages under state law. It would not apply to the sheriffs department sworn officers, who still can collectively bargain, or to elected officials.

A county ordinance mandates that the Personnel Committee conduct an annual salary review and make recommendations to the board.

That review was conducted Friday during a joint meeting of the Personnel and Finance committees. The two committees turned down Personnel Committee Chair Tim Meisters proposal to raise wages by 0.75 percent. They then unanimously supported the suggestion of Krueger, a Finance Committee member, to budget for a 1 percent raise next year.

With benefits included, the 1 percent raise would bring the total package cost for the affected employees to $34.7 million in 2018, an increase of about $900,000, according to Beghin.

The raise would apply to all the affected employees, regardless of their job performance, and is in part intended to ensure that the countys wage matrix remains competitive. Employees also can receive merit-based raises.

In other business, the board is slated to take action on the following items:

Appointment of new members to the countys Ethics Inquiry Board.

Authorization of a multi-year data sharing agreement between the countys Veterans Service Office and the Wisconsin Department of Veteran Affairs.

Authorization of an estimated $7,136 in reimbursements to Krueger and 19 other board members for attendance at the Wisconsin Counties Association Conference this September in Wisconsin Dells.

Approval of amendments to the 2016 budget. The changes include budget overages requiring $127,000 from the countys 2016 rainy day fund, and the return of $300,000 to that fund due to the delayed purchase of an armored vehicle. The vehicle was not purchased until 2017.

Authorization of the sheriffs purchase of a patrol boat, trailer, and motor for a total cost of $16,500.

Authorization of the $2,500 sale of a Town of La Valle property for which the county had taken the tax title.
The Dodge County Masons brought back a beloved tradition on Saturday while celebrating paying off the mortgage for its building. They held a mortgage burning ceremony.

Dodge County Lodge #72 Free & Accepted Masons sold the building downtown at the northeastern corner of Front and Center Streets in 1998, Robert Dolan, Worshipful Master from Dodge County Lodge 72, said. From 1998 to 2011, they met at Campus Inn in Beaver Dam. The Masons were able to be more helpful to people and keep with their spirit without the mortgage, but always knew they needed a home.

They found that home at 1212 DeClark Street in 2011 and held a cornerstone laying ceremony on May 27, 2012.

Dolan said that the lodge members came together to make the special meeting place that they crafted from the old storage facility they purchased five years ago.

Ken Gorgnan, Senior Grand Deacon for the Free and Accepting Masons of Wisconsin, said that Dodge County should be proud of paying off its mortgage but should remember to save for the little expenses that might come up for the lodge in the future.

Celebrating a mortgage burning is a great feeling, Gorgnan said. You are debt free. We are never really debt free though. You may need a new roof at some point or the parking lot may need to be repaired. Always put a few bucks away to have a fund to draw from in case of an emergency.

Bob Keller was asked to burn the mortgage to end the ceremony.
State Shape Art is The Workshop's Exploring Creativity class this week on Thursday, May 18 and Friday, May 19 from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Participants will create art with state outlines cut with the Cricut. The cost is $12 or one punch on a six-class pass. Choose from the Thursday or Friday class.

On Saturday, May 20 from noon to 6 p.m., The Workshop will have Open Studio, Glass Mosaic Workday, and Concrete Leaf Casting available. Concrete leaf casting is an easy and fun way to add a stepping stone or birdbath to your landscaping. Participants will learn to preserve rhubarb leaves in cement in this hands-on class. The cost is $25 per person. The project takes about an hour. Registration is required. For the Glass Mosaic Workday, all supplies will be available to make 5-by-7-inch or 8-by-10-inch faux stained glass mosaics. A 5-by-7 piece usually takes two to three hours; an 8-by-10 piece usually takes three to four hours. The cost is $20 for a 5-by-7, $35 for an 8-by-10. Registration is required. Participants can choose one or both classes.

On Sunday, May 21 from 1 to 6 p.m., The Workshop will have Open Studio and Wooden Sign class. Supplies and assistance will be available for making painted wooden signs. It takes anywhere from one to three hours to make a sign depending on the size and quantity of lettering. The cost is $25. Please preregister to reserve a specific size board and a times lot.

Ladies Night at The Workshop this month is a jewelry making class on Sunday, May 21 from 7 to 9 p.m. Enjoy a night out at The Workshop. The cost is $12 or one punch on a six-class pass. All Open Studio supplies are available to use or bring in a project. Join in with jewelry making if desired. One bracelet or two pendants are included in the class fee; additional pieces are $5 each.

Weekday Open Studio times this week at The Workshop are Thursday and Friday 10 a.m. to noon and 3:30 to 5 p.m. The cost for Open Studio is $5. Additional dates/times are available by appointment.

The Workshop is located at 128 W. James St. in Columbus. For more information or to register for classes, visit www.workshopcolumbus.com or call 920-319-6956.
A New Lisbon man faces three charges, including resisting an officer, after he had some choice words for a Child Protective Services worker.

Reginald L. Bratchett, Jr., 34, was also charged with felony bail jumping and disorderly conduct after an incident in mid-April. For the bail jumping charge, Bratchett Jr. could face a $10,000 fine or six years in prison, or both. Bratchett Jr. could get a $10,000 fine or a prison term or no more than nine months in prison or both for the resisting an officer count and for the disorderly conduct charge he could get a $1,000 fine or 90 days in prison or both.

According to a criminal complaint:

On April 13, an officer from the Mauston Police Department assisted two supervisors from CPS in interviewing Bratchett. Bratchett allegedly has a history of violent tendencies and the supervisors wanted a law enforcement officer present to ensure their safety.

During the interview, Bratchett was allegedly highly confrontational and used loud, profane and boisterous language toward one of the CPS workers. Bratchett was sweating heavily and continued to remain agitated. According to the report, Bratchetts pupils were pinpoint size and he seemed to be under the influence of a drug. When the Mauston officer told Bratchett to calm down, he glared at him and asked him what he was talking about.

Bratchett continued to get angry, swearing at one of the CPS supervisors and yelled at her for bringing the police to the interview. When the officer tried to arrest Bratchett for disorderly conduct, he tensed his arms up and tried to pull away. As the officer tried to place handcuffs on Bratchett, he tried to slip away and strike the officer. The officer was able to place Bratchett on his back on a table, but he continued to resist. As the officer grabbed for his taser, Bratchett tried to strike him with his right hand. The officer was able to gain control of Bratchett and forced him back onto the table.

During the scuffle, CPS workers called for additional law enforcement. An officer from the Juneau County Sheriffs Office arrived and Bratchett was searched for other items. Officers didnt find any and he was transported to the county jail.

Bratchett was arrested in 2016 and charged with substantial battery-intend bodily harm and disorderly conduct. Due to the bond conditions in that ongoing case, Bratchett was to not commit any crime without facing bail jumping charges. Bratchett has a pre-trial conference scheduled for June 6 at 10 a.m. and a plea hearing on July 5 at 12:45 p.m., both at the Juneau County Justice Center. He was released from jail after posting a signature bond of $5,000 on April 18.
Information is taken from the records of the Portage Police Department and does not represent a comprehensive list of police activity. Each individual named in this report is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

The Portage TRIAD is seeking donations for the groups rummage sale fundraiser June 1-3 to support spring training and senior safe night out. For more information contact Jerilyn Jerome at 608-742-2174. Possible pick-ups within city limits.

Between 6:42 a.m. Wednesday and 7:49 a.m. Friday police responded to 78 calls.

West Wisconsin Street: Police on Wednesday at 10:36 a.m. stopped Marcos Avila, 21, of Portage, who was arrested and cited for misdemeanor bail jumping, operating a vehicle after revocation of a license, failure to install an ignition interlock device and driving without proof of insurance. Avila was placed on a probation hold and transferred to Columbia County Jail.

Historic Apartments: Police on Wednesday at 5:19 p.m. responded to an incident where a 15-year-old Portage girl was cited for trespassing.

DeWitt Street: Police on Thursday at 2:40 a.m. responded to a call regarding a man unconscious in the bed of a pickup truck in front of a bar. Cody J. Johnson, 35, of Portage, was arrested on a warrant and cited for carrying a concealed weapon and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Hamilton Street: Police on Thursday at 8 a.m. stopped Maria Leyva, 22, of Portage, who was cited for operating a vehicle after suspension as a third offense and driving without proof of insurance.

Dorn Drive: Police on Thursday at 9:20 a.m. issued a misdemeanor citation to Kevin F. Sullivan, 41, of Killeen, Texas, for unlawful use of computerized communication for emailing harassing and obscene messages.

Wayne Bartels Middle School: Police on Thursday at 11:15 a.m. responded to an incident involving a 13-year old carrying a knife. The boy was referred to Columbia County Health and Human Services for obstructing an officer and possession of a dangerous weapon on school property.

MacFarlane Road and West Wisconsin Street: Police on Thursday at 12:59 p.m. responded to a reported traffic accident where Janet Andres, 61, of Briggsville, reportedly ran a red light and was struck by a southbound vehicle on MacFarlane road, with the southbound vehicle secondarily colliding with a truck. The driver of the southbound vehicle was reportedly injured, though not in need of an ambulance. A passenger in Andres vehicle was taken to Divine Savior Healthcare by ambulance. Andres was cited for inattentive driving.

East Franklin Street: Police on Thursday at 3:21 p.m. responded to a disturbance where Shayla Morris, 17, of Portage was arrested and cited for disorderly conduct.

New Pinery Road: Police on Thursday at 9:02 p.m. responded to a report from an off-duty officer of a vehicle parked outside Subway smelling of marijuana. Katti Jo Laack, 23, of Rio, received a misdemeanor citation for possession of marijuana. Isaac Lovebreed, 32, of Rio, was arrested on a Marquette County warrant.
By Press Trust of India: Hyderabad, May 15 (PTI) Members of a resistance group campaigning against the TRS governments move to shift the popular protest site Dharna Chowk at the Indira Park here clashed with local residents after their protest turned violent today.

The workers of different opposition parties supporting the campaign launched by Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) were also present during the demonstration.

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Police said they are verifying reports that four persons were injured in the scuffle, which led to tension in the area.

Following the clash, police cane-charged the gathering to disperse the protesters.

The Dharna Chowk is a popular place for holding demonstrations in the city.

The TJAC, headed by M Kodandaram, with the support of opposition parties had planned a Save Dharna Chowk protest meet against the governments proposal to shift it.

The residents of the adjoining areas along with the Indira Park Morning Walkers Association had opposed the TJACs campaign, stating that the protest caused inconvenience to them.

"Following heated arguments, the two groups clashed by throwing chairs at each other," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central Zone) D Joel Davis said.

"Violence broke out after a large number of protesters, who had assembled as part of a protest call opposing shifting of Dharna Chowk, tried to go at the site, and clashed with another group seeking to shift the Dharna Chowk," he said.

"Additional police forces have been deployed...the situation is now under control," the DCP told PTI adding that at least four persons are said to be injured during the clashes.

"We are verifying on how many people were injured. Cases will be booked accordingly," he said.

As part of the Save Dharna Chowk protest call, the members of TJAC and opposition parties, including the Left, Congress, TDP, BJP, besides Telugu film star Pawan Kalyans Jana Sena holding placards, marched towards the Indira Park and raised slogans against the government.

They alleged that the ruling TRS government was adamant on shifting the Dharna Chowk and "suppressing" the democratic rights of peoples organisations and Opposition parties to express their views on its policies.

They demanded that the government drop its proposal to shift the Dharna Chowk to the citys outskirts.

The Hyderabad police commissioner had earlier granted permission to both the groups to hold protests today at the Dharna Chowk.

Pawan Kalyan earlier said that, "Dharna Chowk has been a great venue for people to voice their protest for decades. Now, it is no longer available for expressing their anguish and sufferings. Keeping it away (shifting the site) is not democratically correct."

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Dharna Chowk, like Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, is a democratic space to voice anguish, he had said.

A couple of months ago, the TRS government disallowed protests at the chowk, saying they caused inconvenience to residents of the locality, and suggested an alternative site.

The matter had also gone to courts. PTI VVK GK NM GK

--- ENDS ---
When Art Krolikowski first donated blood in Vietnam, he never imagined hed someday need some in return.

The Reedsburg veteran has been diagnosed with leukemia and receives regular transfusions. Donations are so important Art was featured during a blood drive at the Reedsburg VFW on May 12. He and his family were on hand to talk about his experiences and answer questions.

Art said he donated prior to his illness, and his first donation occurred in the Army years ago. At the time, his commander offered him two options: Fill sandbags or give blood. The choice was obvious, he said.

He and the other donors were later thanked for their contribution because theyd saved a second lieutenants life. Art said the officer lost his legs when he stepped on a mine.

Art now knows first-hand what its like to benefit from donations.

Without the blood Id be a goner right now, he said.

Phillip Hess was one of several VFW members who turned out to donate. Hed already had a medical-related blood draw that day so he used the other arm to give blood.

This is for Art, he said, showing his bandaged arms.

Hess said his best friend also had leukemia so he understands the importance of blood donation. He also has O blood, meaning his contribution can benefit all blood types.

It makes sense for the VFW to host a blood drive, he said, because veterans can help other veterans.

Arts wife, Debbie Krolikowski, was among the first-time donors at Fridays blood drive. She said she wanted to do it for her husband, especially since she has attended his medical appointments and watched him receive transfusions.

Its a good thing, she said of donating.

Art said hes grateful for those who backed the drive, including the VFW and event sponsor, Magnum Media. Arts daughter-in-law, Andrea Krolikowski, works for Magnum and has been a key proponent of the drive. She said shes proud of Art and his willingness to spread the word about giving.

She said this drive turned to the BloodCenter of Wisconsin, which tries to keep donations as local as possible. Its just another way peoples gifts matter in their communities.

When asked if the drive had a goal for pints collected, Art smiled and said, As many as possible.
Not everyone has a grandparent to spend time with. Some more people may soon thanks to a new Sauk County program.

The Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program was recently awarded $27,000 to expand a national service endeavor called the Foster Grandparent Program to include Sauk County.

The Foster Grandparent Program has been around for more than 50 years, and is one of three programs of the National Senior Corps which taps into the skills, talents and experiences of senior Americans to meet a wide range of community needs.

According to Cindy Gher-Deckert, foster grandparent program director, the program isnt offered everywhere, which is why they are excited to be able to expand into Sauk County.

The program pairs limited-income senior adults with schools and youth programs.

They work with children and give them one-on-one attention to help enhance their abilities, Gehr-Decket said.

The seniors who qualify for the program receive a small stipend. To qualify, the senior participant must meet an income guideline and receive an extensive background check. The income they receive isnt taxable and doesnt affect income-sensitive programs such as housing or social security. Participants agree to volunteer a minimum of 15 hours per week but can volunteer more hours based on the schools need. Schedules can be flexible, Gehr-Deckert said.

Its a win-win; seniors who have limited income get an opportunity to get out of the home and earn a little income and make a real impact on the community by helping these students, she said. We all want children to become productive adults and this is one more avenue of helping kids a long that way.

Currently Gehr-Deckert said they are in the process of reaching out to school districts in Sauk County to make them aware of the programs availability. Schools can be public or parochial. Some non-profit daycares also qualify.
By Press Trust of India: From Shirish B Pradhan

Kathmandu, May 15 (PTI) The counting of votes cast in Nepals first local-level polls held in two decades began today after an all-party meeting here.

The vote counting began in 11 local units of Kathmandu and 6 local units of Lalitpur district after an all-party meeting forged consensus at National Assembly Hall.

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Ballot boxes from Ward Number 1 were opened first to begin the counting.

Helicopters were used for airlifting ballot boxes from mountainous districts to district headquarters.

According to Election Commission spokesperson Surya Prasad Sharma said helicopters were mobilised in Rasuwa, Dhading, Dolpa, Humla, Gorkha and Mugu districts.

The first phase of local elections was held successfully across three provinces yesterday to choose leadership in Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) and its 32 wards .

Millions of Nepalese voted in the countrys first local- level polls in two decades as the Himalayan nation took a crucial step towards cementing democracy amid political turmoil.

The first phase of the local elections took place peacefully at 281 local units out of 283 in province 3, 4 and 6.

The second round of polls in provinces 1, 2, 5 and 7 will be held on June 14.

Local-level elections could not be held after 1997 largely as a result of the decade-long Maoist insurgency that claimed more than 16,000 lives in Nepal.

Nepal has been witnessing political instability.

Some Madhes-centric parties have opposed the elections until the new Constitution is amended to accommodate their views: more representation in the Parliament and redrawing of provincial boundaries.

The Nepal government has tabled a new Constitution amendment bill in the Parliament to address the demands of the agitating Madhesis.

Madhesis, mostly of Indian-origin, launched a prolonged agitation between September 2015 and February last year against the implementation of the new Constitution which they felt marginalised the Terai community. PTI SBP MRJ MRJ

--- ENDS ---
Expressing dissatisfaction at the slow construction pace of the MCD's civic projects, the Delhi High Court said it 'pained its judicial conscience' when it had to hear such matters.

By Mail Today Bureau: Stalled projects of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD)have caught the attention of Delhi High Court that has expressed its disappointment with the slow progress. While hearing one such public interest litigation on a stalled project, the high court observed that taxpayers' money is going down the drain, due to the delay.

made when activist Sandeep Kumar told court about a stalled project in West Delhi, where the BJPrun MCD had inaugurated the construction of a foot-over-bridge (FoB) and an underpass in 2008.

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The civic body has been directed to file a status report by July 25, mentioning the deadline as well.

Kumar told court that the delay in construction of the bridge and the underpass, at Nangloi and Sultanpuri respectively, has been creating problems for commuters. The projects were undertaken as the unmanned railway crossing in these areas had led to fatal accidents in the past.

"It pains our judicial conscience, when we deal with such issues. Authorities are squandering taxpayers' money and this speaks of a very sorry state of affairs," said acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and justice Anu Malhotra.

BREACH IN TIMELINE

The court noted that the MCD had breached even the extended timeline of 2014.

"The project is not even moving at snail's pace," it said, besides pointing out that BJP, which has won the MCD polls for the third time in a row, is ruling the tri-furcated civic body for over ten years now and yet projects are far from being completed. We pay for these projects. Our money is being misused," it said.

The bench added that continuous deadline breach must have escalated the project cost by many notches.

The counsel for the civic body could not apprise the court about the escalated cost of the two.

There are several other stalled MCD projects like construction of Purnima Sethi Multi-Speciality Hospital in Kalkaji, Jangpura multi-level parking, Rani Jhansi Flyover, Nirbhaya Science Museum, Tahirpur amusement park, Balak ram hospital in Timarpur.

Speaking to MAIL TODAY, Preeti Aggarwal, councillor and the unopposed candidate for mayoral poll of North MCD said, "We will not let taxpayers' money go waste and put our best in finishing stalled ones. The corporation is committed to give a facelift to the civic amenities."

ALSO READ | A look at SDMC's incomplete projects- from Nirbhaya museum to Kalkaji hospital, all promises unfulfilled

ALSO READ | MCD election results 2017: Here's why AAP lost Delhi civic polls so comprehensively

--- ENDS ---
Thomson Reuters Corporation provides business information services in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. It operates in five segments: Legal Professionals, Corporates, Tax & Accounting Professionals, Reuters News, and Global Print. The Legal Professionals segment offers research and workflow products focusing on legal research and integrated legal workflow solutions that combine content, tools, and analytics to law firms and governments. The Corporates segment provides a suite of content-enabled technology solutions for legal, tax, regulatory, compliance, and IT professionals. The Tax & Accounting Professionals segment offers research and workflow products focusing on tax offerings and automating tax workflows to tax, accounting, and audit professionals in accounting firms. The Reuters News segment provides business, financial, and international news to media organizations, professional, and news consumers through news agency and industry events. The Global Print segment offers legal and tax information primarily in print format to legal and tax professionals, governments, law schools, and corporations. The company was formerly known as The Thomson Corporation and changed its name to Thomson Reuters Corporation in April 2008. The company was founded in 1851 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Thomson Reuters Corporation is a subsidiary of The Woodbridge Company Limited.
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An Indian man sent by his father to work in Malaysia mysteriously went missing three months after arriving in the country in 2011. The Delhi High Court has asked Centre to provide information on what steps it has taken to trace his whereabouts or fate.

By Sneha Agrawal: Mukesh Kumar was aged 19 when he was sent to Malaysia in September 2011 by his father to work in a shipping company.

His father Kheta Ram did not know that he was seeing his son for the last time. Three months later, he received the news of his son's mysterious disappearance.

Six years later, Kheta Ram is still struggling to learn about his son's fate. After repeated failure to learn the whereabouts of his son, he moved Delhi High Court on Friday through his counsel Rabin Majumder. The court has directed the Centre to update him either about his son's whereabouts or his fate.

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"His son had gone missing barely two months after he had started working on a ship in a Malaysian shipping company. He needs closure," said Justice Vipin Sanghi and Justice Deepa Sharma.

CENTRE ASKED TO RESPOND

The court directed the ministries of external affairs, shipping and overseas Indian affairs to place on record the steps taken by them to trace the missing son of the Haryana resident, and listed the matter for hearing in July.

It also asked the government about the status of the FIR lodged by the company with the Malaysian Police after Mukesh disappeared.

As per the company, Kumar had disappeared on December 24, 2011, and while searching the ship for him, they had found his slippers, gloves and cigarettes floating in the water, but his body was not found.

The worried father has pleaded that he wants to know what had happened to his son and whether any effort was made to locate him since 2011.

"We live in a locality where there are 60 families associated to merchant navy. My son Mukesh was impressed with the whole idea of being in merchant navy.

"After his class 12, he filled up the form and with the help of a neighbour who is in the same profession, we sent him to Malaysia. We never thought it was the last time we were seeing him. One day we got the news that he has disappeared. Since then, I am writing to the government to help me reach out to my son or at least tell me what happened to him," Ram told MAIL TODAY.

"On a ship with so many crew members and people in the middle of the sea, where can Mukesh go missing is the question no one could satisfactorily answer," he told court.

Kumar had been employed as an ordinary seaman with the Malaysian company in October 2011.

Ram claimed that the company had washed off its hands from all responsibilities after lodging an FIR and then offering Malaysian Ringgit 25,000 (Rs 369,793.91) as final settlement amount. The petitioner had requested the company for an interim compensation of RM 175,000 (Rs 2,588,557.38).

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ALSO READ | Missing Indian Sufi clerics return from Pakistan

ALSO READ | Indian Air Force officer mysteriously missing from Army command hospital in Kolkata

--- ENDS ---
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Ltd., Drinkstation Limited, Dutch Snacks Holding S.A. de C.V., Duyvis Production B.V., EPIC Enterprises Inc., Echo Bay Holdings Inc., Elaboradora Argentina de Cereales S.R.L., Enter Logistica LLC, Environ at Inverrary Partnership, Environ of Inverrary Inc., Eridanus Investments S.a r.l, Evercrisp Snack Productos de Chile S.A., FL Transportation Inc., FLI Andean LLC, FLI Colombia LLC, FLI Snacks Andean GP LLC, Fabrica PepsiCo Mexicali S. de R.L. de C.V., Fabrica de Productos Alimenticios Rene y Cia S.C.A., Fairlight International SRL, Far East Bottlers Hong Kong Limited, Food Concepts Pioneer Ltd., Forest Akers Nederland B.V., Forty-Six Peaks Holding Inc., Fovarosi Asvanyviz es Uditoipari Zartkoruen Mukodo Reszvenytarsasag, Freshwater International B.V., Frito Lay Gida Sanayi Ve Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Frito Lay Poland Sp. z o.o., Frito Lay Sp. z o.o., Frito Lay de Guatemala y Compania Limitada, Frito-Lay Australia Holdings Pty Limited, Frito-Lay Dip Company Inc., Frito-Lay Dominicana S.A., Frito-Lay Global Investments B.V., Frito-Lay Inc., Frito-Lay Investments B.V., Frito-Lay Manufacturing LLC, Frito-Lay Netherlands Holding B.V., Frito-Lay North America Inc., Frito-Lay Sales Inc., Frito-Lay Trading Company Europe GmbH, Frito-Lay Trading Company GmbH, Frito-Lay Trading Company Poland GmbH, Frito-Lay Trinidad Unlimited, Fruko Mesrubat Sanayi Limited Sirketi, GB Czech LLC, GB International Inc., GB Russia LLC, GB Slovak LLC, GMP Manufacturing Inc., Gambrinus Investments Limited, Gamesa LLC, Gamesa S. de R.L. de C.V., Gas Natural de Merida S. A. de C. V., Gatorade Puerto Rico Company, General Bottlers of Hungary Inc., Golden Grain Company, Goveh S.R.L., Grayhawk Leasing LLC, Green Hemlock International LLC, Grupo Frito Lay y Compania Limitada, Grupo Gamesa S. de R.L. de C.V., Grupo Mabel, Grupo Sabritas S. de R.L. de C.V., Gulkevichskiy Maslozavod JSC, Hangzhou Baicaowei Corporate Management Consulting Co. Ltd., Hangzhou Haomusi Food Co, Hangzhou Haomusi Food Co. Ltd., Hangzhou Tao Dao Technology Co. Ltd., Health Warrior, Health Warrior Inc., Heathland LP, Helioscope Limited, Hillbrook Inc., Hillgrove Inc., Hillwood Bottling LLC, Hogganfield Limited Partnership, Holding Company "Opolie" JSC, Homefinding Company of Texas, Hudson Valley Insurance Company, IC Equities Inc., IZZE Beverage Co., Inmobiliaria Interamericana S.A. De C.V., Integrated Beverage Services Bangladesh Limited, Integrated Foods & Beverages Pvt. Ltd., International Bottlers Management Co. LLC, International KAS Aktiengesellschaft, Inversiones Borneo S.R.L., Inversiones PFI Chile Limitada, Inviting Foods Holdings Inc., Inviting Foods LLC, KAS Anorthosis S.a r.l, KAS S.L., KFC, Kevita Inc., Kinvara LLC, Kungursky Molkombinat JSC, Larragana S.L., Latin American Holdings Ltd., Latin American Snack Foods ApS, Latin Foods International LLC, Lebedyansky, Lebedyansky Holdings LLC, Lebedyansky LLC, Limited Liability Company "Sandora", Linkbay Limited, Lithuanian Snacks UAB, Mabel, Marbo Product d.o.o. Beograd, Marbo d.o.o. Laktasi, Matudis - Comercio de Produtos Alimentares Limitada, Matutano - Sociedade de Produtos Alimentares Lda., Mid-America Improvement Corporation, Mountainview Insurance Company Inc., Muscle Milk, NCJV LLC, New Bern Transport Corporation, New Century Beverage Company LLC, Noble Leasing LLC, Northeast Hot-Fill Co-op Inc., Office at Solyanka LLC, Onbiso Inversiones S.L., One World Enterprises LLC, One World Investors Inc., P-A Barbados Bottling Company LLC, P-A Bottlers Barbados SRL, P-Americas LLC, PAS Luxembourg S.a r.l, PAS Netherlands B.V., PBG Canada Holdings II LLC, PBG Canada Holdings Inc., PBG Cyprus Holdings Limited, PBG Investment Partnership, PBG Midwest Holdings S.a r.l, PBG Soda Can Holdings S.a r.l, PCBL LLC, PCNA Manufacturing Inc., PR Beverages Cyprus Holding Limited, PR Beverages Cyprus Russia Holding Limited, PRB Luxembourg S.a r.l, PRS Inc., PSAS Inversiones LLC, PSE Logistica S.R.L., PT Quaker Indonesia, Papas Chips S.A., Pei N.V., Pep Trade LLC, Pepsi B.V., Pepsi Beverages Holdings Inc., Pepsi Bottling Group Global Finance LLC, Pepsi Bottling Group GmbH, Pepsi Bottling Group Hoosiers B.V., Pepsi Bottling Holdings Inc., Pepsi Bugshan Investments S.A.E., Pepsi Cola Colombia Ltda, Pepsi Cola Egypt S.A.E., Pepsi Cola Panamericana S.R.L., Pepsi Cola Servis Ve Dagitim Limited Sirketi, Pepsi Cola Trading Ireland, Pepsi Logistics Company Inc., Pepsi Northwest Beverages LLC, Pepsi Overseas Investments Partnership, Pepsi Promotions Inc., Pepsi-Cola Advertising and Marketing Inc., Pepsi-Cola Bermuda Limited, Pepsi-Cola Bottlers Holding C.V., Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company Of St. Louis Inc., Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Ft. Lauderdale-Palm Beach LLC, Pepsi-Cola Company, Pepsi-Cola Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Pepsi-Cola Far East Trade Development Co. Inc., Pepsi-Cola Finance LLC, Pepsi-Cola General Bottlers Poland Sp. z o.o., Pepsi-Cola Industrial da Amazonia Ltda., Pepsi-Cola International Cork, Pepsi-Cola International LLC, Pepsi-Cola International Limited, Pepsi-Cola International Limited U.S.A., Pepsi-Cola International Private Limited, Pepsi-Cola Korea Co. Ltd., Pepsi-Cola Management and Administrative Services Inc., Pepsi-Cola Manufacturing Company Of Uruguay S.R.L., Pepsi-Cola Manufacturing International Limited, Pepsi-Cola Manufacturing Mediterranean Limited, Pepsi-Cola Marketing Corp. Of P.R. Inc., Pepsi-Cola Mediterranean Ltd., Pepsi-Cola Metropolitan Bottling Company Inc., Pepsi-Cola Mexicana Holdings LLC, Pepsi-Cola Mexicana S. de R.L. de C.V., Pepsi-Cola National Marketing LLC, Pepsi-Cola Operating Company Of Chesapeake And Indianapolis, Pepsi-Cola Sales and Distribution Inc., Pepsi-Cola Technical Operations Inc., Pepsi-Cola Thai Trading Co. Ltd., Pepsi-Cola de Honduras S.R.L., Pepsi-Cola of Corvallis Inc., PepsiAmericas Nemzetkozi Szolgaltato Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, PepsiCo ANZ Holdings Pty Ltd, PepsiCo Alimentos Antioquia Ltda., PepsiCo Alimentos Colombia Ltda., PepsiCo Alimentos Ecuador Cia. Ltda., PepsiCo Alimentos Z.F. Ltda., PepsiCo Alimentos de Bolivia S.R.L., PepsiCo Amacoco Bebidas Do Brasil Ltda., PepsiCo Asia Research & Development Center Company Limited, PepsiCo Australia Financing Cyprus Limited, PepsiCo Australia Financing Limited Partnership, PepsiCo Australia Financing Partner 1 LLC, PepsiCo Australia Financing Partner 2 LLC, PepsiCo Australia Financing Pty Ltd, PepsiCo Australia Holdings Pty Limited, PepsiCo Australia International, PepsiCo Austria Services GmbH, PepsiCo Azerbaijan Limited Liability Company, PepsiCo BeLux BV, PepsiCo Beverage Sales LLC, PepsiCo Beverage Singapore Pty Ltd, PepsiCo Beverages Bermuda Limited, PepsiCo Beverages Hong Kong Limited, PepsiCo Beverages International Limited, PepsiCo Beverages Italia Societa' A Responsabilita' Limitata, PepsiCo Canada Finance LLC, PepsiCo Canada Holdings ULC, PepsiCo Canada Investment ULC, PepsiCo Canada ULC, PepsiCo Captive Holdings Inc., PepsiCo Caribbean Inc., PepsiCo China Limited, PepsiCo Consulting Polska Sp. z o.o., PepsiCo De Bolivia S.R.L., PepsiCo Del Paraguay S.R.L., PepsiCo Deutschland GmbH, PepsiCo Eesti AS, PepsiCo Euro Bermuda Limited, PepsiCo Euro Finance Antilles B.V., PepsiCo Europe Support Center S.L., PepsiCo Finance Americas Company, PepsiCo Finance Antilles A N.V., PepsiCo Finance Antilles B N.V., PepsiCo Finance South Africa Proprietary Limited, PepsiCo Financial Shared Services Inc., PepsiCo Food & Beverage Holdings Hong Kong Limited, PepsiCo Foods A.I.E., PepsiCo Foods China Company Limited, PepsiCo Foods Group Pty Ltd, PepsiCo Foods Guangdong Co. Ltd., PepsiCo Foods Nigeria Limited, PepsiCo Foods Private Limited, PepsiCo Foods Sichuan Co. Ltd., PepsiCo Foods Taiwan Co. Ltd., PepsiCo Foods Vietnam Company, PepsiCo France SAS, PepsiCo Global Business Services India LLP, PepsiCo Global Business Services Poland Sp. z o.o., PepsiCo Global Holdings Limited, PepsiCo Global Investments B.V., PepsiCo Global Investments S.a r.l, PepsiCo Global Mobility LLC, PepsiCo Global Real Estate Inc., PepsiCo Global Trading Solutions Unlimited Company, PepsiCo Golden Holdings Inc., PepsiCo Group Finance International B.V., PepsiCo Group Holdings International B.V., PepsiCo Group Spotswood Holdings S.a r.l, PepsiCo Gulf International FZE, PepsiCo Hellas Single Member Industrial and Commercial Societe Anonyme, PepsiCo Holding de Espana S.L., PepsiCo Holdings, PepsiCo Holdings LLC, PepsiCo Holdings Toshkent LLC, PepsiCo Hong Kong LLC, PepsiCo Iberia Servicios Centrales S.L., PepsiCo India Holdings Private Limited, PepsiCo India Sales Private Limited, PepsiCo Internacional Mexico S. de R. L. de C. V., PepsiCo International Hong Kong Limited, PepsiCo International Limited, PepsiCo International Pte Ltd., PepsiCo Investments Europe I B.V., PepsiCo Investments Ltd., PepsiCo Ireland Food & Beverages Unlimited Company, PepsiCo Japan Co. Ltd., PepsiCo Light B.V., PepsiCo Logistyka Sp. z o.o., PepsiCo Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., PepsiCo Management Services SAS, PepsiCo Manufacturing A.I.E., PepsiCo Max B.V., PepsiCo Mexico Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., PepsiCo Nederland B.V., PepsiCo Nordic Denmark ApS, PepsiCo Nordic Finland Oy, PepsiCo Nordic Norway AS, PepsiCo Nutrition Trading DMCC, PepsiCo One B.V., PepsiCo Overseas Corporation, PepsiCo Overseas Financing Partnership, PepsiCo Panimex Inc, PepsiCo Products B.V., PepsiCo Products FLLC, PepsiCo Puerto Rico Inc., PepsiCo Sales Inc., PepsiCo Sales LLC, PepsiCo Services Asia Ltd., PepsiCo Services CZ s.r.o., PepsiCo Services LLC, PepsiCo Twist B.V., PepsiCo UK Pension Plan Trustee Limited, PepsiCo Ventures B.V., PepsiCo Wave Holdings LLC, PepsiCo World Trading Company Inc., PepsiCo Y LLC, PepsiCo de Argentina S.R.L., PepsiCo de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., PepsiCo do Brasil Industria e Comercio de Alimentos Ltda., PepsiCo do Brasil Ltda., PepsiCola Interamericana de Guatemala S.A., Pet Iberia S.L., Pete & Johnny Limited, Pine International LLC, Pine International Limited, Pinstripe Leasing LLC, Pioneer Food Group Pty Ltd, Pioneer Foods Groceries Pty Ltd, Pioneer Foods Group Ltd., Pioneer Foods Holdings Pty Ltd, Pioneer Foods Pty Ltd, Pioneer Foods UK Ltd, Pioneer Foods Wellingtons Pty Ltd, Pipers Crisps Limited, PlayCo Inc., Pop corners, PopCorners Holdings Inc., Portfolio Concentrate Solutions Unlimited Company, Premier Nutrition Trading L.L.C., Prestwick LLC, Prev PepsiCo Sociedade Previdenciaria, Productos Alimenticios Rene LLC, Productos S.A.S. C.V., Productos SAS Management B.V., Punch N.V., Punica Getranke GmbH, Q O Puerto Rico Inc., QFL OHQ Sdn. Bhd., QTG Development Inc., QTG Services Inc., Quadrant - Amroq Beverages S.R.L., Quaker Development B.V., Quaker European Beverages LLC, Quaker European Investments B.V., Quaker Foods, Quaker Global Investments B.V., Quaker Holdings UK Limited, Quaker Manufacturing LLC, Quaker Oats Asia Inc., Quaker Oats Australia Pty Ltd, Quaker Oats B.V., Quaker Oats Capital Corporation, Quaker Oats Europe Inc., Quaker Oats Europe LLC, Quaker Oats Limited, Quaker Sales & Distribution Inc, Raptas Finance S.a r.l., Rare Fare Foods LLC, Rare Fare Holdings Inc., Reading Industries Ltd, Real Estate Holdings LLC, Rockstar Energy Drink, Rolling Frito-Lay Sales LP, S & T of Mississippi Inc., SIH International LLC, SVC Logistics Inc., SVC Manufacturing Inc., SVE Russia Holdings GmbH, Sabritas LLC, Sabritas S. de R.L. de C.V., Sabritas Snacks America Latina de Nicaragua y Cia Ltda, Sabritas de Costa Rica S. de R.L., Sabritas y Cia. S en C de C.V., Sakata Rice Snacks Australia Pty Ltd, Sandora Holdings B.V., Saudi Snack Foods Company Limited, Sea Eagle International SRL, Seepoint Holdings Ltd., Senselet Food Processing PLC, Senselet Holding B.V., Servicios GBF Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada, Servicios GFLG y Compania Limitada, Servicios Gamesa Puerto Rico L.L.C., Servicios SYC S. de R.L. de C.V., Seven-Up Asia Inc., Seven-Up Light B.V., Seven-Up Nederland B.V., Shanghai PepsiCo Snack Company Limited, Shanghai YuHo Agricultural Development Co. Ltd, Shoebill LLC, Simba (Proprietary) Limited, Simba Proprietary Limited, Sitka Spruce, Smartfoods Inc., Smiles and Bites Holdings S.de R.L. de C.V., Smiths Crisps Limited, Snack Food Investments GmbH, Snack Food Investments II GmbH, Snack Food Investments Limited, Snack Food-Beverage Asia Products Limited, Snacks America Latina S.R.L., Snacks Guatemala Ltd., So Spark Ltd., Soda-Club CO2 Atlantic GmbH, Soda-Club CO2 GmbH, Soda-Club CO2 Ltd., Soda-Club Switzerland GmbH, Soda-Club Worldwide B.V., SodaStream, SodaStream Australia Pty Ltd, SodaStream CO2 SA, SodaStream Canada Ltd., SodaStream Enterprises N.V., SodaStream France SAS, SodaStream GmbH, SodaStream Iberia S.L., SodaStream Industries Ltd., SodaStream International B.V., SodaStream International Ltd., SodaStream Israel Ltd., SodaStream K.K., SodaStream New Zealand Ltd., SodaStream Nordics AB, SodaStream Poland Sp. z o.o., SodaStream SA Pty Ltd., SodaStream Switzerland GmbH, SodaStream USA Inc., SodaStream Osterreich GmbH, South Beach Beverage Company Inc., South Properties Inc., Spitz International Inc., Sportmex Internacional S.A. de C.V., Springboig Industries Ltd, Spruce Limited, Stacy's Pita Chip Company Incorporated, Star Foods E.M. S.R.L., Stokely-Van Camp Inc., Stratosphere Communications Pty Ltd, Stratosphere Holdings 2018 Limited, Streamfoods Ltd, TFL Holdings LLC, Tasman Finance S.a r.l, The Gatorade Company, The Good Carb Food Company Ltd., The Pepsi Bottling Group Canada ULC, The Quaker Oats Company, The Smith's Snackfood Company Pty Limited, Thomond Group Holdings Limited, Tobago Snack Holdings LLC, Tropicana Alvalle S.L., Tropicana Beverages Limited, Tropicana Europe N.V., Tropicana United Kingdom Limited, Troya-Ultra LLC, United Foods Companies Restaurantes S.A., V-Water, VentureCo Israel Ltd, Veurne Snack Foods BV, Vitamin Brands Ltd., Walkers Crisps Limited, Walkers Group Limited, Walkers Snack Foods Limited, Walkers Snacks Distribution Limited, Walkers Snacks Limited, Whitman Corporation, Whitman Insurance Co. Ltd., Wimm-Bill-Dann Beverages JSC, Wimm-Bill-Dann Brands Co. Ltd., Wimm-Bill-Dann Central Asia-Almaty LLP, Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods LLC, Wimm-Bill-Dann Georgia Ltd., Wimm-Bill-Dann JSC, and Wimm-Bill-Dann Ukraine PJSC.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Nokia Oyj: AO Nokia Solutions and Networks, ATG Germany GmbH, Aircom International, Alcatel - Lucent, Alcatel Centroamerica S.A., Alcatel IP Networks Limited, Alcatel Lucent, Alcatel Lucent Middle East North Africa DMCC, Alcatel Lucent Teletas Telekomunikasyon A.S., Alcatel SEL Unterstutzungs GmbH, Alcatel Submarine Networks, Alcatel Submarine Networks Brazil Ltda., Alcatel Submarine Networks Denmark ApS, Alcatel Submarine Networks Hong Kong Limited, Alcatel Submarine Networks Marine, Alcatel Submarine Networks Norway AS, Alcatel Submarine Networks UK Ltd, Alcatel Submarine Networks USA Inc., Alcatel de Venezuela C.A., Alcatel-Lucent Angola Limitada, Alcatel-Lucent Benin SA, Alcatel-Lucent Centro Caribbean Holding Limited, Alcatel-Lucent East Africa Limited, Alcatel-Lucent India Limited, Alcatel-Lucent International, Alcatel-Lucent International Holdings Inc., Alcatel-Lucent Managed Solutions India Private Limited, Alcatel-Lucent Nigeria Limited, Alcatel-Lucent Pakistan Limited, Alcatel-Lucent Participations, Alcatel-Lucent Participations Chine, Alcatel-Lucent Portugal S.A., Alcatel-Lucent RT International B.V., Alcatel-Lucent Saudi Arabia Co. Ltd., Alcatel-Lucent Services International B.V., Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell Information Products Co. Ltd., Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (Cabo Verde) Lda, Alcatel-Lucent Trade International AG, Alcatel-Lucent UK Limited, Alcatel-Lucent Ukraine SC, Alcatel-Lucent Vietnam Limited, Amber Networks Inc., Antelec, Apertio Ltd., Avvenu, Bell Laboratories Inc., C-Dot Alcatel-Lucent Research Centre Private Limited, Camilec, Comptel, Comptel Communications EOOD, Comptel Communications Holdings Limited, Comptel Communications India Private Limited, Comptel Communications Limited, Comptel Communications Oy, Comptel Communications Sdn Bhd, Comptel Oy, Comptel Palvelut Philippines Inc., DeepField, Diamond Lane Communications, Digiskin UK, DiscoveryCom Inc., Dopplr, ETA Devices Inc., Eizel Technologies, Elenion Technologies, Elenion Technologies LLC, Enpocket, Epistrophe Limited, Europe*Star Limited, Evolium, F5 Networks Inc., Hunan Huanuo Technology Co. Ltd., IRIS Service Delivery UK Ltd, IRIS Telecommunication Austria GmbH, IRIS Telecommunication France, IRIS Telecommunication GmbH, IRIS Telecommunication Poland sp. z o.o., IRIS Telekomunikasyon Muhendislik Hizmetleri A.S., InTalk Corporation, Intellisync Corporation, Intellisync LLC, Ipsilon Networks Inc., LCC International's U.S., LLC "Nokia Solutions and Networks Ukraine", Loudeye Corp., Lucent Technologies GRL LLC, Lucent Technologies Investment Co. Ltd., Lucent Technologies Nanjing Telecommunications Co. Ltd., Lucent Technologies Networks (Thailand) Limited, Lucent Technologies Nicaragua S.A., Lucent Technologies Philippines Inc., Lucent Technologies Qingdao Telecommunications Enterprises Co. Ltd., Lucent Technologies Qingdao Telecommunications Systems Ltd., MRAC Inc., Matra Nortel Communications, Mesaplexx Limited, MetaCarta Inc., Metrowerks Corporation, Mformation Software Technologies India Pvt Ltd, Motally, NE-Products Oy, NGI Industrial (NGI), Nakina Systems, Nassau Metals Corporation, Navteq, Network Alchemy Inc., Nokatus Insurance Company Designated Activity Company (DAC), Nokia (Shanghai) Enterprise Management Co. Ltd., Nokia (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Nokia Apps Distribution LLC, Nokia Arabia Limited  100.0, Nokia Asset Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Nokia Bell NV, Nokia Canada Inc., Nokia Costa Rica S.A., Nokia Denmark A/S, Nokia Display Technics GmbH i.L., Nokia Dominican Republic S.A.S., Nokia Egypt S.A.E., Nokia El Salvador S.A. de C.V., Nokia Electronics Bochum GmbH i.L., Nokia Federal Solutions LLC, Nokia Hong Kong Limited, Nokia India Private Limited, Nokia Innovations Japan G.K., Nokia Innovations Oy, Nokia Innovations US LLC, Nokia Investment Management Corporation, Nokia Investments Oy, Nokia Ireland Limited, Nokia Jamaica Limited, Nokia Kunststofftechnik GmbH i.L., Nokia Networks (Chengdu) Co. Ltd., Nokia Networks S.R.L., Nokia New Zealand Limited, Nokia Operations de Guatemala S.A., Nokia Operations de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Nokia Paraguay S.A., Nokia Puerto Rico Inc., Nokia Services Pty Limited, Nokia Services and Networks Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Nokia Shanghai Bell (Hong Kong) Limited, Nokia Shanghai Bell Co. Ltd., Nokia Shanghai Bell Lao Sole Co. Ltd., Nokia Shanghai Bell Philippines Inc., Nokia Shanghai Bell Software Co. Ltd., Nokia Siemens Networks Afghanistan LLC, Nokia Siemens Networks Algerie SARL, Nokia Slovakia A.S., Nokia Solutions Networks Iletisim A.S., Nokia Solutions and Networks (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks (Suzhou) Supply Chain Service Co. Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks AB, Nokia Solutions and Networks Argentina S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks Asset Management Oy, Nokia Solutions and Networks Australia Pty Ltd, Nokia Solutions and Networks B.V., Nokia Solutions and Networks Baku LLC, Nokia Solutions and Networks Bangladesh Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks Bolivia S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks Branch Operations Oy, Nokia Solutions and Networks CCC, Nokia Solutions and Networks CJSC, Nokia Solutions and Networks Chile Ltda., Nokia Solutions and Networks Colombia Ltda., Nokia Solutions and Networks Czech Republic s.r.o., Nokia Solutions and Networks EOOD, Nokia Solutions and Networks Ecuador S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks Ethernet Services Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks GmbH & Co. KG, Nokia Solutions and Networks Hellas Single Member S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks Holding Osterreich GmbH, Nokia Solutions and Networks Honduras S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks India Private Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks International Holding GmbH, Nokia Solutions and Networks Investment (China) Co. Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks Israel Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks Italia S.p.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks Japan G.K., Nokia Solutions and Networks Kazakhstan LLP, Nokia Solutions and Networks Kft., Nokia Solutions and Networks Korea Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks Kuwait Company W.L.L, Nokia Solutions and Networks LLC, Nokia Solutions and Networks Lanka (Private) Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks MEA FZ-LLC, Nokia Solutions and Networks Management GmbH, Nokia Solutions and Networks Morocco SARL, Nokia Solutions and Networks Myanmar Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks Nederland B.V., Nokia Solutions and Networks Nicaragua S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks Nigeria Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks Norge AS, Nokia Solutions and Networks Oy, Nokia Solutions and Networks OU, Nokia Solutions and Networks Pakistan (Private) Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks Peru S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks Philippines Inc., Nokia Solutions and Networks Portugal S.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks S.R.L., Nokia Solutions and Networks S.p.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks SIA, Nokia Solutions and Networks Schweiz AG, Nokia Solutions and Networks Serbia d.o.o. Beograd, Nokia Solutions and Networks Singapore Pte. Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks South Africa Pty. Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks Sp. z.o.o, Nokia Solutions and Networks System Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks Taiwan Co. Ltd., Nokia Solutions and Networks Tanzania Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks Tashkent LLC, Nokia Solutions and Networks Technical Services Vietnam Company Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks TraffiCOM Kft., Nokia Solutions and Networks Tunisia SA, Nokia Solutions and Networks UK Limited, Nokia Solutions and Networks Venezuela C.A., Nokia Solutions and Networks d.o.o., Nokia Solutions and Networks d.o.o. Banja Luka, Nokia Solutions and Networks d.o.o. Sarajevo, Nokia Solutions and Networks do Brasil Telecomunicacoes Ltda., Nokia Solutions and Networks telekomunikacijske resitve d.o.o., Nokia Solutions and Networks Osterreich GmbH, Nokia South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Nokia Spain S.A., Nokia Technologies (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Nokia Technologies (UK) Limited, Nokia Technologies Oy, Nokia Technology Center Philippines Inc., Nokia Technology GmbH, Nokia Teknologia Oy, Nokia Training Center Russian Federation, Nokia Transformation Engineering & Consulting Services Spain S.L.U., Nokia UK Limited, Nokia US Holdings Inc., Nokia Unterstutzungsgesellschaft GmbH, Nokia Uruguay S.A., Nokia West and Central Africa SA, Nokia of America Corporation, Novarra Inc., OOO Nokia Solutions and Networks, OOO RTK  Network Technologies, OZ Communications, OZ Communications HK Limited, P.T. Lucent Technologies Network Systems Indonesia, PT Nokia Solutions and Networks Indonesia, Pishahang Communications Networks Development Company (Private Joint Stock), Plazes, Plum, R.F.S. (UK) Limited, RFS Brasil Telecomunicacoes Ltda, RFS Holding GmbH, RFS India Telecom Private Limited, RFS Italia SRL, RFS Radio Frequency Systems (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., RFS Radio Frequency Systems (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Radio Frequency Systems (Africa) Pty Ltd, Radio Frequency Systems (S) Pte Ltd, Radio Frequency Systems France, Radio Frequency Systems GmbH, Radio Frequency Systems Inc., Radio Frequency Systems Pty Limited, Radio Frequency Systems de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Ramp Networks Inc., Redback Networks Inc., Rooftop Communications Corporation, SAC AE Design Group Inc., SAC Wireless, SAC Wireless LLC, SAC Wireless of CA Inc., SRA Computer C.V., STC, Sega.com Inc., Smarterphone, Societe de Telecommunication Camerounaise  Sotelcam, Space Time Insight, Symbian Limited, Symbian Ltd, Tahoe Networks, Taiwan International Standard Electronics Limited, Technophone Ltd, Telekol Group, Trolltech (Qt Development Frameworks), Twango, UAB Nokia Solutions and Networks, Unium, User Interface Design, Vertu Holdings Oy, Vienna Systems Corporation, Western Electric Company Incorporated, Western Electric International Incorporated, Withings, Zyzyx Inc., bit-side GmbH, cellity AG, earthmine, and gate5 AG.

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Deutsche Telekom AG, together with its subsidiaries, provides integrated telecommunication services. The company operates through five segments: Germany, United States, Europe, Systems Solutions, and Group Development. It offers fixed-network services, including voice and data communication services based on fixed-network and broadband technology; and sells terminal equipment and other hardware products, as well as services to resellers. The company also provides mobile voice and data services to consumers and business customers; sells mobile devices and other hardware products; and sells mobile services to resellers and to companies that purchases and markets network services to third parties, such as mobile virtual network operators. In addition, it offers internet services; internet-based TV products and services; and information and communication technology systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions with an infrastructure of data centers and networks under the T-Systems brand, as well as call center services. The company has 242 million mobile customers and 22 million broadband customers, as well as 27 million fixed-network lines. Deutsche Telekom AG has a collaboration with VMware, Inc. on cloud-based open and intelligent virtual RAN platform to bring agility to radio access networks for existing LTE and future 5G networks; and partnership with Microsoft to deliver high-performance cloud computing experiences. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Bonn, Germany.
Deutsche Post AG operates as a mail and logistics company in Germany, rest of Europe, the Americas, the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. The company operates through five segments: Express; Global Forwarding, Freight; Supply Chain; eCommerce Solutions; and Post & Parcel Germany. The Express segment offers time-definite courier and express services to business and private customers. The Global Forwarding, Freight segment provides air, ocean, and overland freight forwarding services; and offers multimodal and sector-specific solutions. This segment's business model is based on brokering transport services between customers and freight carriers. The Supply Chain segment delivers customized supply chain solutions to its customers based on modular components, including warehousing and transport services; and value-added services, such as e-fulfilment and returns management, lead logistics partner, real estate solutions, service logistics, and packaging solutions for various industrial sectors. The eCommerce Solutions segment provides parcel delivery and cross-border non-time definite international services. The Post & Parcel Germany segment transports and delivers mail communication, parcels, physical and hybrid letters, and special products for the delivery of goods; and offers additional services, such as registered mail, cash on delivery, and insured items. This segment also provides digital products, including stamps with data matrix codes and various postal services. Deutsche Post AG was founded in 1490 and is headquartered in Bonn, Germany.
By Ram Kinkar Singh: Police have arrested one Sufiyan on the charges charges of murder of a bar dancer Pooja Paswan in Delhi.

Police said the 30-year-old woman had some heated argument with a bar girl Naina. The accused is Naina's boyfriend, who decided to teach a lesson to Pooja Paswan after a tiff with her girlfriend. He also thought that Paswan had lot of money and jewellery. Sufiyan first slit her neck and then her wrist to confirm that she was dead.

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The semi-decomposed body of Paswan was found at her rented accommodation at Lajpat Nagar Phase-4 in south Delhi on March 27.

The body was discovered at around 5 pm by the woman's sister and brother-in-law, after they came to check on her as she was not responding to their calls.

MURDER CASE

A case of murder was registered against unknown persons at the Amar Colony Police Station.

By the time the body was found, it had started putrefying, suggesting she was murdered more than 48 hours ago, police said. The police, however, did not find any sign of sexual assault on her.

The slain woman was staying on rent in a single room on the second floor of the building for the last one-and-a-half-years. She earlier worked at a spa and cosmetic parlour in Lajpat Nagar. Prior to that, she used to work as a bar dancer and before that she used to sell bed sheets after buying them in bulk. However, she was unemployed for the past few months.

A native of Patna in Bihar, Pooja Paswan was married to Sumit Paswan for two years but had been working and living in Delhi alone. Her husband works for a mobile company in his home town Patna. The police have learnt that the couple had been estranged ever since differences arose between them after a few months into their wedding.

Also read: Rohtak gangrape and murder: Post-mortem finds victim's food pipe missing, Rs 10.5 lakh assistance to kin

Also read: Justice delayed? Nirbhaya-like case pending before Supreme Court for over 2 years

--- ENDS ---
Dinakaran, Mallikarjuna and Sukesh Chandrasekar will be produced before Tis Hazari Court today after expiry of their judicial custody.

By India Today Web Desk: TTV Dinakaran, his aide Mallikarjuna and Sukesh Chandrasekar will be produced in Tis Hazari Court today in connection with the Election Commission (EC) bribery case.

Dinakaran's judicial custody expires today. Delhi police had also sought their voice samples for its probe into the Rs 50-crore graft case.

The ousted AIADMK leader was arrested on April 25 after four days of questioning by Delhi Police for allegedly attempting to bribe an unidentified EC official to get the undivided AIADMK's two-leaves election symbol. His faction hoped to obtain the symbol for a by-election to the RK Nagar Assembly seat in Tamil Nadu, which was later cancelled by the EC.

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The EC had frozen the AIADMK's symbol after two factions of the party - one led by Dinakarans aunt Sasikala and the other by former chief minister O Panneerselvam - staked a claim to it.

Dinakaran has been accused of allegedly arranging the amount from undisclosed sources and getting it transferred from Chennai to Delhi through illegal channels. He has been lodged in Tihar jail.

CASES AGAINST DINAKARAN

Earlier on May 12, a city court in Tamil Nadu ordered that he be produced before it to face its proceedings in a FERA violation case against him. The Economic offences court-II had issued a Prisoner on Transit (PT) warrant against him to enable the Enforcement Directorate to produce him at Chennai court. Dinakaran is facing two cases filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against him for alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) in 1994.

The Delhi Crime Branch earlier recovered Dinakaran's 5 bank accounts from Chennai, through which transactions of money was carried out, after which the police sought for further remand of the ousted AIADMK leader. According to reports, most of the money was paid to a Hawala operator.

Dinakaran's Chartered Accountant was also called by the crime branch for questioning in the case. The crime branch officials also recovered mobile phone of alleged middleman Sukesh Chandrashekhar from Chennai and also found the details of communication between Chandrashekhar and Dinakaran.

Earlier on Friday, a Delhi court had sent Chandrashekhar to judicial custody till May 12.

Also read: AIADMK symbol controversy: Probe widens, man who provided money to Dinakaran's aide arrested

Also read: AIADMK symbol row: Middleman Sukesh's phone reveals conversations with Dinakaran, says Delhi Police

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According to a report in the Washington Post, US President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information about the Islamic State to the Russian foreign minister. Trump's actions potentially jeopardised a US source of information, the report said.

By Reuters: US President Donald Trump disclosed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister during their meeting last week, potentially jeopardizing a source of intelligence about Islamic State, The Washington Post reported on Monday, citing current and former US officials.

Reacting to the newspaper's report, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, called Trump's conduct "dangerous" and reckless," while the Republican head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, called the allegations "very, very troubling" if true.

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The newspaper said the information Trump relayed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak had been provided by a US partner through a highly sensitive intelligence-sharing arrangement.

The partner had not given Washington permission to share the material with Moscow, and Trump's decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State militant group, the Post said, citing the unnamed officials.

TRUMP WENT OFF-SCRIPT

During his Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump went off-script and began describing details about an Islamic State threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft, the officials told the Post.

In his conversations with the Russian officials, Trump appeared to be boasting about his knowledge of the looming threats, telling them he was briefed on "great intel every day," an official with knowledge of the exchange said, according to the Post.

While discussing classified matters with an adversary would be illegal for most people, the president has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that Trump's disclosures broke the law, the Post said.

Trump's meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak at the White House came a day after he fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the agency's investigation into possible links between Trump's presidential campaign and Moscow.

'INTEL SOURCES NOT DISCUSSED'

Asked about the disclosures, Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, who participated in the meeting, said no intelligence sources or methods were discussed that were not already known publicly, the Post reported. Asked by Reuters about the Post story, McMaster declined comment.

US officials have told Reuters that US agencies are in the process of drawing up plans to expand a ban on passengers carrying laptop computers onto US-bound flights from several countries on conflict zones due to new intelligence about how militant groups are refining techniques for installing bombs in laptops.

So serious are assessments of the increased threat that Washington is considering banning passengers from several European countries, including Britain, from carrying laptops in a cabin on US-bound flights. The United States has consulted about the intelligence with allied governments and airlines.

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One source familiar with the matter told Reuters at least some of the intelligence that went into the planned laptop ban expansion came from a US commando raid on an al Qaeda camp in Yemen in which a US special operator was killed.

The source said one of the most troubling aspects of the new intelligence was that it showed that Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had figured out how to produce sheets of explosives so thin they could be concealed in the insides of a laptop and would be very hard to detect.

ALSO READ | Nawaz Sharif and Donald Trump to meet next week? And if they do, will it help Pakistan?

ALSO READ | Donald Trump must be impeached after James Comey firing drama, says US professor who predict Trump's win

ALSO WATCH | Modi and Trump speak for first time, decide both countries will combat terrorism together

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South African ministry accepts court ruling

15 May 2017

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South African Energy Minister Mmamaloko Kubayi said on 13 May she will not appeal against a High Court decision declaring ministerial determinations underpinning the country's nuclear procurement plans to be unlawful. Intergovernmental agreements set aside under the ruling will be replaced with new agreements, she said.

The Western Cape High Court judgement of 26 April ruled that approval by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) of two ministerial determinations on South Africa's need for and procurement of 9600 MWe of new nuclear capacity had failed to include the requisite public participation. This rendered the determinations, made in 2013 and 2016 under Section 34 of South Africa's 2006 Electricity Regulation Act, unlawful. The court ruling also set aside any requests for information or proposals issued under the two determinations. Such a request for information was issued by South African utility Eskom in December.

Section 34 allows the energy minister, in consultation with Nersa, to determine that new generation capacity is needed and the types of energy sources to be used. It also gives the minister power to enter into contracts to facilitate the tendering process for new capacity.

Kubayi said the government and her department remained committed to the approved energy mix policy and would "strive to implement all forms of energy sources" to secure the country's energy supply. "We appeal to our stakeholders to stop the temptation to divide the sector between nuclear and renewables," she said.

After consultation with Department of Energy officials and legal representatives, Kubayi said she had decided not to appeal the court decision and had instructed the department to review all existing and future Section 34 determinations to ensure their compliance with the ruling.

The court ruling set aside South Africa's intergovernmental nuclear cooperation agreements with Russia, South Korea and the USA. Existing agreements with China and France were not included in the ruling. Kubayi said the department would in future seek to standardise procedures when concluding intergovernmental agreements to ensure "no impropriety" would be suggested. She said the ministry would sign new agreements "with all five countries" and table them for parliamentary consideration "within a reasonable time".

The Nuclear Industry Association of South Africa (Niasa) today said it supported the minister's decision not to appeal the judgement. "As an association our founding principles of transparency and following due process are paramount, especially when setting the foundation for the start of a significant project with the potential to dramatically improve the lives of ordinary South Africans," Niasa managing director Knox Msebenzi said today. "We have no doubt that nuclear energy is the future of South Africa, as part of the overall energy mix."

The High Court judgement was made in response to challenges by Earthlife Africa and the Southern African Faith Communities' Environmental Institute.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

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IAEA head visits planned Greenland mine

15 May 2017

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Authorities in Greenland have carried out robust safety and security preparatory work for a possible rare earth and uranium mine, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Yukiya Amano noted during a visit to the country.

Amano is briefed on the Kvanfjeld project during his visit to Greenland

(Image: C Brady/IAEA)

Amano - accompanied by Greenland's premier, Kim Kielsen - visited the Kvanefjeld site in the south of Greenland last week during a trip that also took him to the Danish capital Copenhagen. Whilst in Greenland, he met with members of the government of the Southern Municipality, as well as representatives from Australia-based Greenland Minerals and Energy Limited.

Greenland Minerals completed a feasibility study for its Kvanefjeld uranium and rare earth element project in southern Greenland in May 2015. In November of that year, the project received pre-hearing approvals from the government of Greenland and moved into the permitting phase. The government also approved the terms of reference setting the agreed initial development strategy for Kvanefjeld. In January 2016, the governments of Denmark and Greenland signed of a series of agreements setting the framework for future cooperation on foreign, defence and security policy issues related to the mining and commercial export of uranium.

Amano said, "Protection of the public and the environment in mining is crucial. I am pleased to learn that the authorities of Greenland have been working hard with the safety and security preparations for the possible mining operations." He noted that stringent regulatory oversight and industrial best practices must be followed during the uranium mining project.

The IAEA said it has been cooperating with the authorities of Greenland and Denmark on the project, and conducted a workshop on uranium production in Copenhagen in 2014, which covered issues pertaining to this field, including international safety and security standards and requirements.

Whilst in Copenhagen, Amano met with Denmark's minister for foreign affairs, Anders Samuelsen, with whom he discussed cooperation between the IAEA, Denmark and Greenland in relation to the Kvanefjeld project, as well as wider international issues.

In June 2015, Greenland Minerals formally announced JORC-compliant maiden ore reserves for the Kvanefjeld project. Total ore reserves of 108 million tonnes contain uranium at 362 ppm U3O8, comprising 43 million tonnes of proven reserves with 352 ppm U3O8 (12,834 tU) and 64 million tonnes of probable reserves with 368 ppm U3O8 (19,970 tU).

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
I always wanted to study design and become a fashion designer. Even as a child, I used to experiment and embellish my shoes with bric-a-brac and make them look distinct and stylish. Studying fashion after Class 12 was the obvious choice for me, and the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) Delhi was the only institute I wanted to attend.

The four years I spent at the sprawling Hauz Khas campus-studying, learning and relearning the tricks of the trade, putting them to practice and polishing my skills-were full of fun and hard work. I took up a Bachelors in Fashion Design, a four-year programme that equips students with almost everything related to the field. In the first year, for instance, we studied the basics of fashion, but from second year onward, it got intensive. We learned very specific things, such as pattern making, illustrating, draping and craftsmanship to mention a few, as well as taking on industry internships and workshops.

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Photo: Yasir Iqbal

There is a great deal of creativity on campus, and you are surrounded by creative minds. There is a different energy, very unique to NIFT, which you can feel the moment you step past the gates of the design school. A storehouse of talent and the alma mater of some of the best known fashion designers in the country, the school is filled with life, design and lots of learning. There is stress on practical as well as theoretical knowledge, and professors know how to push students to do their best. Our classes would begin at 9 am and go on till 3 pm; and there were extra classes after that, where we would work on dummies in the labs, learning how to drape and creating mood boards. I, for example, created a collection of Bengali saris for draping while studying, and also did a mood board for Bhojpatra.

We did not just learn inside the classrooms but outside as well. We were, in fact, encouraged to go out and acquire first-hand experience from local craftsmen. I remember going to Seelampur market in East Delhi to get swatches for my projects.

What I really liked about studying at NIFT is that there is a focus on entrepreneurship, and students are encouraged to start on their own after graduating. That's how I was inspired to start my own label. The infrastructure and on-campus facilities are the best in the industry; we had so many dummies to drape while working on projects (and mood boards as well). We even had JUKI sewing machines to work on for making clothes.

I most vividly remember my days sitting in the canteen, brainstorming with my batchmates over piping hot samosas, Maggi and bread pakoras. Those days were simply great, and will always be fond memories for me.

I still remember how well I was cared for, when, in 2012, I fell down some stairs in college and injured my hand. I was hospitalised for a week, and it seemed as though everyone at NIFT had come to the hospital to take care of me. I get emotional every time I think about it.

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If I am asked today what I learned studying at NIFT, I would say that I learned how to focus, and also, that I gained self-belief. I learned that if I really want to do something, I can do it. The advice I would give fashion design aspirants is that if they want to be in the industry of design, then they need to study at NIFT, and nowhere else. It is the only place for design, and for designers.

Shilpa Agarwalla graduated in 2013 from NIFT Delhi.

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Cotton, a top fiber for textile-making, is derived from the cotton plants of the Gossypium genus of the Malvaceae family. Raw cotton is a soft and fluffy fiber that grows as a boll around the seeds of the cotton plant. The cotton fiber is composed of almost pure cellulose. The cotton plant is a shrub that grows in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Mexico, Australia, and Africa host the greatest diversity of wild cotton species. Cotton was independently domesticated in the both the Old and the New World. Raw cotton is spun into thread or yarn that is used to make cotton textiles which are soft and breathable. Archeological excavations have revealed that cotton was used since prehistoric times. In Mexico and the Indus Valley, cotton fabric dating back to 5000 BC have been recovered.

Cotton Production In The World

Although cotton has been cultivated in the world since antiquity, the invention of worm-gear roller gin in India in the 16th century and then the modern mechanical cotton gin in 1793 by the American inventor Eli Whitney, allowed the large-scale commercial production of cotton. It also lowered the cost of the product making cotton the most widely used natural fiber used in the textile industry of the modern world.

According to estimates, the world production of cotton is about 110 million bales or 25 million tons annually. China is the worlds leading cotton producing country but most of the cotton produced here is consumed by the domestic market. India ranks second in cotton production but a large proportion of the cotton produced here is also consumed by the Indian textile industry. The United States ranks third in cotton production in the world.

Top Raw Cotton Exporting Countries In The World

The United States

The United States is currently the largest raw cotton exporting country in the world by exporting cotton worth $4.06 billion USD, accounting for 36% of the total cotton export in the world. Almost all of the cotton grown in the country is produced by the southern and western states of the country with Texas, California, and Arizona being the leading cotton producing states in the country. Over 99% of the US grown cotton is the Upland variety and the rest is of the American Pima variety. In the US, cotton production is a $25 billion-per-year industry. More than 200,000 people are employed in this industry in the country.

Four out of the top five markets for US cotton are located in North America. 33% of the total cotton produced here is imported by Honduras. The next biggest importer of US cotton is Mexico. Exports to Mexico account for 18% of the US cotton export earnings. The Dominican Republic is the third leading importer of US cotton. China is the fourth leading cotton export market for the US. Cotton exports to this country increased from $46 million USD in 2000 to over $2 billion USD in 2010.

India

India is the second leading exporter of raw cotton in the world. Exports of raw cotton from India account for 15% of the total global export value of this product. Cotton plays a vital role in the economy of the country and cotton export contributes significantly to the countrys GDP. Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Telangana are the three leading cotton producing states in the country.

Cotton Export From African Nations

As can be seen from the data below, a number of African nations feature in the list of the top 10 cotton exporting countries in the world with Burkina Faso being the African leader in raw cotton export. The share of Africa in the cotton trade has doubled since 1980. Although Africa does not have a significant domestic textile industry, cotton is grown by small holders in some countries of Africa. Certain US companies like the Dunavant Enterprises, based in Memphis, Tennessee, act as cotton brokers in Africa and operate cotton gins in the African countries and supports the intensive cotton farming industry in the continent. The US companies offer loans for seed purchase to the farmers and advise them on farming methods. Thus, cotton production and export from the African countries is steadily increasing.
What is Cheese?

Cheese is a popular dairy product that comes in a wide variety of textures, flavors, shapes, and sizes. It can be produced by using milk from cows, sheep, goats, or buffalo and can be flavored by adding a number of ingredients including spices, wood smoke, garlic, herbs, black pepper, and even fruit. Cheese generally has a high content of calcium, protein, and fat. The production and consumption of cheese dates back to before written history. Today, cheese is produced all over the world. The US alone is responsible for producing 25% of the worlds cheese. This article takes a closer look at which US states are the top cheese producers.

How is Cheese Produced?

Cheese is produced by first adding some type of acidic liquid to milk - this acid could come from vinegar, lemon juice, or bacteria. This action curdles the milk, producing a solid. The solid is then separated from the remaining liquid, pressed, and shaped. The final product may sometimes be encased with a rind. It is then left to age, the duration depending on the requirements of the particular cheese.

Top Cheese Producing States of the US

In 2013, the US produced 5.4 million tonnes of cheese, making it the top producer in the world.

Often referred to as Americas Dairyland, the state of Wisconsin lives up to its nickname. This state produced 2,910,299,000 pounds of cheese in 2014, making it the top producer in the country. When compared to other countries around the world, Wisconsin ranks 4th after the US, France, and Germany. There are 127 cheese plants in this state, more than double that found in other US states. The most common type of cheese produced in Wisconsin is mozzarella, which accounts for 34.2% of all production. This is followed by cheddar (20%) and other Italian cheeses (15.8%). Cheesemaking in Wisconsin dates back to the 19th century, when it was introduced by European immigrants. Today, Wisconsin is the only state in the country that offers a "Master Cheesemaker" program, which follows the standards of European programs.

The second top cheese producing state in the US is California, which produced 2,444,260,000 pounds of cheese in 2014. This state is the largest milk producer in the country and uses approximately 46.4% of its milk to produce cheese. Around 50 cheesemakers produce over 250 kinds of cheese in California. The most common type of cheese produced here is mozzarella, which accounts for 59.3% of all production. Mozzarella is the most consumed cheese in the nation. Following this type of cheese is cheddar (13.7%) and Monterrey Jack (12.1%). Monterrey Jack was actually created in California missions over 200 years ago. Additionally, this state is the top producer of Hispanic style cheeses, making more than 125 million pounds of it in 2016.

Idaho is the third top cheese producing state in the US. In 2014, this state produced 895,189,000 pounds of cheese. Idaho has 22 dairy processing plants that produce cheese, as well as butter, whey, and dry non-fat milk. Around 85% of the milk produced in this state is used to produce cheese, one of the highest percentages in the country. The Idaho cheese industry grew by 182% between 1992 and 1995. In 1998, the state was only producing around 515 million pounds of cheese, indicating significant growth over the last 20 years.

The chart published below offers a more complete look at the top 10 cheese producing states of the US.
What is a Pariah State?

The term "pariah state" is used to describe a nation which is not accepted or recognized by the majority of governments around the world. This distinction has two considerations: the disadvantage of being a pariah state and the justification given by the international community.

The disadvantage of being a pariah state is that the nation is excluded from international relations, put under economic sanctions, and sometimes invaded by external military forces.

Other nations justify identifying a nation as a pariah state by claiming that the nation violates established international norms at either a domestic or international level. Pariah states may have policies that disturb the rights of the world or a large group of nations, intentions to expand its territory, abstain from diplomatic relations with neighboring countries, or be a threat to the world if it obtained nuclear arms.

Criteria of the Pariah State Distinction

The criteria for defining a pariah state has not been regulated by any international authority (such as the UN, for example). In the same vein, nothing prevents another nation or organization from calling another country a pariah state. If an economically or politically powerful state identifies another nation as a pariah state, it may apply sufficient pressure in international relations in order to gain a consensus. One example of this is when the US identified Cuba under Fidel Castro as a pariah state and used its standing within the Western Bloc to impose these views on other countries.

Despite the lack of specific criteria, some experts have proposed a set of 4 categories that qualify a country as a pariah state. The first category is nations that acquire, own, or utilize weapons of mass destruction with disregard for current international treaties. The second category is nations or governments that support acts of terrorism or terrorist groups. Countries that operate outside of the lines of democracy fall into the third category. Finally, the fourth category includes those countries with a known or documented history of human rights violations.

Examples of Pariah States

Throughout history, the world has experienced the existence of several pariah states. Because there are no internationally defined and regulated criteria, this history is not always agreed upon.

One such instance occurred between the Ottoman Empire and European states. Under the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, European States considered the Ottoman Empire an outcast state on the grounds of religion. This treaty went on to serve as the building block of international law.

Iraq has also been considered a pariah state on several occasions. This distinction is mainly due to the fact that it is a relatively young country that, under Saddam Hussein, operated without clearly defined and agreed upon boundaries. For many international relations experts, a clear indicator of a pariah state is one that lacks strong national identity, like borders.

Other nations that are often considered pariah states are those that violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is one example of this. In fact, the US, Great Britain, and France have all designated Iran as a pariah state due to its nuclear acquisition program.

Several African countries came out against Sierra Leone between 1997 and 1998. Its democratically elected president was overthrown, an act that was heavily criticized. Several West African countries treated this nation as a pariah state in response.

It is important to remember that what is considered a pariah state by one nation may be the ally of another.
How Time Flies. I joined the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Banaras Hindu University in 2010 for a Masters in Fine Arts and went on to pursue my research here. In all these years, I have never stopped appreciating how welcoming BHU is to newcomers: a vast, green and peaceful campus away from the chaos of Varanasi. Even more attractive is the Faculty of Visual Arts, with sculptures and installations around. The range of courses offered is mind-boggling-applied arts, painting, sculpture, textiles, pottery and ceramic, print-making and history of visual arts.

During my masters, while I was under the supervision of one teacher, I was always free to interact with any of the faculty members. Our dean Professor Hiralal Prajapati's inputs and knowledge about advertising design and applied arts always encouraged us to push the boundaries in our creations. While we would feel overburdened by the daily classes, assignments and tight exam schedules, you now realise it was all for the good-a baptism by fire.

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I feel proud that the BHU campus is ragging-free, has a nice mix of students, a distinguished faculty and facilities such as free internet, free healthcare, art labs, a rich library and 24-hour power supply. We get ample opportunity to take part in art competitions and apply for fellowships with the HRD ministry.

Our teachers are our best guides - both in and outside class. But they never hesitate to pull us up when assignments are missed or sloppy work is presented. There's also cut-throat competition between the students. It can get frustrating at times, but an odd movie or leisure walk down Varanasi's ghats helps us spring back into action.

The city of Varanasi, with its heady mix of spirituality, culture and heritage, offers students endless inspiration and material for their creations. Campus life is fun - with an array of cultural activities, art competitions and events, exhibitions, sports, music, singing, dancing. If you have the talent, BHU provides the platform. The two national art galleries here put up exhibitions by eminent artists, and even we get the freedom to exhibit our work. National and international artists keep visiting our department to interact with us.

Photo: Maneesh Agnihotri

The annual art fair is a three-day affair, with the works displayed for sale. Besides, the faculty members organise art events outside the campus, where we leave our mark by participating and wining prizes.

The department has a good record in campus placements. Students get placed across industries, and even find government jobs easily. Those who don't, get freelance projects to work on. Our alumni include names from the film, advertising and design industries. Many are into academics, animation, scriptwriting and photography. The alumni are supportive and encouraging. Their campus visits are trips down memory lane, occasions to look forward to.

The author is a research scholar at the Faculty of Applied Arts, BHU.

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This resolution on the war was passed unanimously with seven abstentions at the Seventh All-Russian Bolshevik Conference, which took place in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) from May 7 to 12 (April 24-29, O.S.). The text of the resolution was drafted by Lenin. It is published here in a new translation, based on the Russian original text.

For a review of the background, see This Week in the Russian Revolution, May 8  14

I. The present war is, on the part of both groups of the belligerent powers, an imperialist war, i. e., one waged by the capitalists for the division of the profits obtained from world domination, for markets for finance (banking) capital, for the subjugation of the weak nationalities, etc. Each day of war enriches the financial and industrial bourgeoisie and impoverishes and saps the strength of the proletariat and the peasantry of all the belligerent and also the neutral countries. Moreover, in Russia itself, prolongation of the war presents the greatest threat to the revolutions gains and its further development.

The passing of state power in Russia to the Provisional Government, a government of the landowners and capitalists, did not and could not alter the character and meaning of the war as far as Russia is concerned.

This fact was demonstrated in an especially striking manner when the new government not only failed to publish the secret treaties between Tsar Nicholas II and the capitalist governments of Britain, France, etc., but even formally and without consulting the people confirmed these secret treaties, which promise the Russian capitalists a free hand to rob China, Persia, Turkey, Austria, etc. The concealing of these treaties from the people of Russia means that the latter is being deceived about the true character of the war.

Therefore, the proletarian party cannot support the current war, or the current government, or its loans, without completely breaking with internationalism, i.e., the fraternal solidarity of the workers of all countries in the struggle against the yoke of capital.

No trust can be placed in the present governments promises to renounce annexations, i. e., conquests of foreign countries or retention by force of any nationalities within the borders of Russia. For, in the first place, the capitalists, bound together by thousands of threads of banking capital, cannot renounce annexations in this war without renouncing the profits from the billions they invested in loans, concessions, war industries, etc. And second, the new government, after renouncing annexations to deceive the people, declared through the person of Miliukov on April 9, 1917 in Moscow that it had no intention of renouncing them, and, in the note of April 18 and its explanation of April 22, confirmed the aggressive character of its policy. In warning the people against the capitalists empty promises, the Conference therefore declares that it is necessary to make a clear distinction between a renunciation of annexations in words and a renunciation of annexations in deeds, i. e., the immediate publication and abrogation of all secret, predatory treaties and the immediate granting to all nationalities of the right to determine in a free vote whether they wish to form independent states or to be part of some other state.

II. The so called revolutionary defencism, which in Russia has now permeated all the populist parties (the Popular Socialists, the Trudoviks, and the Socialist-Revolutionaries), and the opportunist party of the social-democratic Mensheviks (the Organizing Committee, Chkheidze, Tsereteli, and others), as well as the majority of the revolutionaries who are not aligned with any party, represents, in terms of its class significance, on the one hand, the interests and point of view of the prosperous peasants and a section of the small proprietors, who, like the capitalists, profit from the force exerted over weak peoples. On the other hand, the revolutionary defencism is a result of the deception by the capitalists of a part of the urban and rural proletariat and semi-proletariat, who, by virtue of their class position, have no interest in the profits of the capitalists and in the imperialist war.

The Conference recognizes that any concessions to revolutionary defencism whatsoever are absolutely impermissible and in effect signify a complete break with internationalism and socialism. As for the defencist tendencies among the broad popular masses, our party will fight against these tendencies by ceaselessly explaining the truth that an unconscious and trusting attitude toward the government of the capitalists is at this point one of the chief obstacles to a quick end of the war.

III In regard to the most important question of all, namely, how to end the present capitalist war as soon as possible, not by a coercive peace, but by a truly democratic peace, the Conference recognizes and declares the following:

This war cannot be ended by a refusal of the soldiers of one side only to continue the war, by a simple cessation of hostilities by one of the belligerent sides.

Yet again, this conference protests against the base slander which is spread by the capitalists against our party, namely that we are in favor of a separate peace with Germany. We consider the German capitalists to be robbers just as the Russian, British, French, and other capitalists, and Emperor Wilhelm to be a crowned robber just as much as Nicholas II or the British, Italian, Rumanian, and all other monarchs.

Our party will patiently but persistently explain to the people the truth that wars are waged by governments, that wars are always indissolubly bound up with the policies of definite classes, that this war can be ended by a democratic peace only through the transfer of the entire state power, in at least several of the belligerent countries, to the class of the proletarians and semi-proletarians, which is really capable of putting an end to the yoke of capital.

In Russia, the revolutionary class would after the seizure of state power adopt a series of measures that would undermine the economic rule of the capitalists, as well as measures that would completely disarm them politically, and it would immediately and openly offer to all nations a democratic peace on the basis of a complete renunciation of any annexations and indemnities. Such measures and such an open offer of peace would create complete trust among the workers of the belligerent countries toward each other and would inevitably lead to uprisings of the proletariat against those imperialist governments which would resist the offered peace.

Until the revolutionary class in Russia takes the entire state power, our party will do all it can to support those proletarian parties and groups abroad that are, already during the war, truly conducting a revolutionary struggle against their imperialist governments and their bourgeoisie. In particular, our party will support the mass fraternization of the soldiers of all the belligerent countries that has already begun at the front, seeking to turn this spontaneous expression of solidarity of the oppressed into a movement that is conscious and organized as well as possible for the transfer of all state power in all the belligerent countries into the hands of the revolutionary proletariat.
Rebutting India's case before the ICJ, Pakistan's counsel Khawar Qureshi asserted that this forum is not a criminal court of appeal nor does it exercise criminal jurisdiction.

By India Today Web Desk: At the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague today, Pakistan came up with these five fabricated statements to defend their case of sentencing Indian citizen Kulbhushan Jadhav to death after claiming he was a spy.

India had approached the ICJ on May 8 with its plea to stay Kulbhushan Jadhav's execution till it hears the matter and reaches a conclusion.

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PAKISTAN'S FIVE LIES ON KULBHUSHAN JADHAV:

#Lie No. 1:

Pakistan's counsel Khawar Qureshi told the International Court of Justice that they have not breached the Vienna Convention.

Fact:

No consular access was ever granted to Jadhav despite umpteen number of requests from India.

#Lie No. 2:

Pakistan has claimed that Jadhav was held in the restive Balochistan province.

Fact:

Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran by Pakistani authorities. German diplomat Gunter Mulack has corroborated the fact.

#Lie No. 3:

Pakistan claims to have given a fair trial to Jadhav.

Fact:

Jadhav, a retired Indian naval officer, was however sentenced to death in a secret military trial.

#Lie No. 4:

Pakistan has put out a so-called confession video of Jadhav.

Fact:

The confession was made under duress as he was under arrest. The court did not allow Pakistan to play the video during the hearing today.

#Lie No. 5:

Pakistan claims that Jadhav is a terrorist who caused instability and terror activities.

Fact:

Pakistan hasn't given any evidence on Kulbhushan's terror connections and sabotage activities.

In an exclusive interview with India Today, Pakistan government's Attorney General Ashtar Ausaf gave bizarre responses to defend his country's stand on Jadhav issue.

He claimed that India has been misleading the world and the court.

"If India was so keen to have consular access then why did it wait for full one year," Ausaf said.

On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life by issuing a stay order. India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. India has denied that he has any connection with the government.

Also read:

Pakistan's counter-argument in The Hague: Vienna Convention does not apply to spies

How India argued against Pakistan for Kulbhushan Jadhav at International Court of Justice

Also watch:

Pakistan's full argument of Kulbhushan Jadhav's case in ICJ

--- ENDS ---
A new waste treatment facility located in southwest Detroit is pumping chemical emissions into the air, harming nearby residents and their children in the neighborhoods.

The facility is operated by New England Fertilizer Company (NEFCO), a biosolids processing company. It takes raw sewage from the Jefferson Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) treatment plant across the street and uses centrifuges to spin the waste into fertilizer for agriculture.

In May 2013, DWSD signed a 20-year, $683 million contract to become a client of NEFCO. The biosolids drying facility is the largest plant of its kind in the US.

Because the water treatment and processing plant had previously been fined for waste overflow violations, the plan was hailed as a sustainable and environmentally sound development by the media and Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) CEO Sue McCormick. The for-profit company operates in a partnership with the ostensibly publicly owned water authority.

The $143 million biosolids plant began operating in April 2016. According to an analysis of smokestack data by the Detroit Free Press , the plant has exceeded its permitted levels of harmful sulfur dioxide emissions over 2,500 times from April 2016 through February 28, 2017. This is in violation of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards for ostensibly acceptable emission levels every hour.

Air pollution in the southwest side of the city, a major industrial hub with an oil refinery, two steel mills, an auto plant and a garbage incinerator, is already worse than anywhere else in the state and the health risks facing the residents are serious. Detroits asthma hospitalization rate is three times higher than the national average.

NEFCOs At A Glance portion of the front page of its web site claims that the company has a socially responsible commitment to public health and safety, and the environment. On the Detroit project, the site states, The facility will feature technologically advanced air pollution, noise, and odor control systems ensuring NEFCO is a good neighbor to the community  Benefits from this contract include significant annual cost savings over the current management practice, capital cost savings by NEFCO providing dewatering at a significant cost reduction versus a DWSD centrifuge capital project that was planned, more efficient staffing, and a facility that greatly reduces impacts to the local community.

The 2013-2014 Detroit bankruptcy, initiated by the Republican administration of Governor Rick Snyder and backed by the Obama administration, was used to attack city worker jobs and pensions, and sell off public assets. It led to the spinoff of the DWSD to a regional water authority, the contracting out of services to private companies like NEFCO, and funneling even more money into the hands of wealthy bondholders.

Mass water shutoffs have been reinstituted to squeeze the working class and poor residents of the city and a multi-national water privatizerParis-based Veoliawas brought in to lay off staff and slash costs. This process was inextricably linked to the switch of Flints water supply from water delivered by DWSD to the polluted Flint River, and the lead poisoning of the city.

As for NEFCOs commitment to public health, the areas residents adamantly disagree.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Liliana, a stay-at-home mom to her four children, and her husband Joel, an electrician, on their front porch in River Rouge, just a few blocks from the Jefferson plant. She has lived in River Rouge for eight years and five in the home she now owns.

All my kids were raised in Southwest [Detroit], she said. We never had a problem there, never got sick. But when we moved here [River Rouge], my 13-year-old daughter started having spots on her skin. The doctor said it was fungal, and sometimes it goes away but it always comes back.

I was pregnant with my youngest here. My son has speech problems. Hes still a little too young for a diagnosis, but they think he has ADHD. And when he was first born they had to put him on a nebulizer for breathing problems. I didnt have to do that with any of my other children.

Liliana pointed to a row of houses across the street and explained the complicated health issues facing former residents in each of the homes, including myriad respiratory issues and cancer. Each house is now vacant following the 2008 housing crisis. My neighbor used to work for a steel company and he lived there for over 40 years, she said. His mom died of lung cancer and so did he. I never saw either of them smoke.

Liliana and Joel purchased the home from her father after renting an apartment for a few years. She wanted to live near her parents around the block. She talked about how difficult it was to raise a family in filth and pollution, the effects of the poor air quality on her children and her own health. You buy where you can afford, she said. But its not worth it here. I would have kept renting if I knew. Im trying to get my parents to move, too. My parents are both diabetic and I want to be there for them but unfortunately not for much longer because I have to do right for my kids. She and Joel are saving up money for a down payment on a new home in a different neighborhood, hopefully one with less pollution.

When asked about the water quality, she laughed. Oh no, we dont drink the water here, she said. If you let the water sit for too long it turns pink. I looked it up and I dont know why it happens. So yeah, we dont drink the water until we filter it, and were constantly changing the filter. Better safe than sorry. When you buy a house, the inspectors want everything to be a certain way. I mean we even had to buy special batteries for the smoke alarms and we had to redo the pipes. I told them we can fix everything up but if the city doesnt fix the main pipes then it doesnt make a difference what we do in our home.

Referring to the poisoning of the water supply in Flint, just a few hours north, she said, Whenever I hear people saying, Id move [from Flint] if it was me, I always said, Well, if that was the case then wed all be living in nice homes in Rochester, a better-off suburb north of the city of Detroit.

River Rouge and southwest Detroit have abandoned industrial buildings and fields, filled with broken glass, trash and piles of rubbish left over from long-closed production facilities like General Motors Fleetwood Fisher Body and Cadillac plants. There are so many other places with nothing around. Why dont they make those areas useful where no one will be harmed? Liliana asked, saying that the factories should be moved where they will not be harmful to families. Why would they do this if its hurting people? Why have all these industrial places near homes where people live?
The political crisis brought to a head by President Donald Trumps firing of FBI Director James Comey is rapidly intensifying, with calls for Trumps impeachment and threats by the White House to go even further in attacking democratic rights and constitutional norms.

Trump provoked further recriminations from within the political establishment with his tweeted threat Friday, warning that Comey should be careful what he says to the media and to Congress about his private discussions with the president, because tapes of their conversations might exist. This led to immediate responses from both Democrats and Republicans that any tapes could be subpoenaed as part of the ongoing investigations into the conduct of the 2016 elections.

There were unconfirmed press reports of an impending purge within the White House staff, with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Stephen Bannon and press spokesman Sean Spicer all potential targets. As more than one media commentator noted, this would leave the White House staff under the direction of Ivanka and Jared, the presidents daughter and son-in-law, making even more extreme the personalist and quasi-dictatorial character of the Trump administration.

Trump fueled such speculation by suggesting that daily White House press briefings might be canceled, to be replaced by infrequent press conferences by the president himself. He refused to allow any White House spokespeople to appear on the Sunday television interview programs after the networks rejected demands that they refrain from asking questions about the Comey firing and its aftermath.

The Washington Post published an editorial Sunday warning that Trumps conduct threatened the independence of federal law enforcement and sullied key institutions of U.S. democracy, adding that The president injected himself into an investigation where he has absolutely no right to interfere. While demanding that congressional and FBI investigations into alleged Russian interference in the US election be stepped up, the newspaper published an op-ed column by Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe calling for Trumps impeachment.

Even more extraordinary were the remarks of retired Gen. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence under President Obama. Interviewed Sunday morning on the CNN program State of the Union, Clapper had the following exchange with host Jake Tapper after Tapper asked for his response to the firing of Comey:

Clapper: I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externallyand thats the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally. Tapper: Internally from the president? Clapper: Exactly.

Clapper is no friend of democracy or accountability. By rights, he should be serving a prison sentence for perjury, having denied under oath, during congressional testimony in 2013, that there was widespread US government spying on the communications of Americans. A few weeks later, the revelations of Edward Snowden exposed him as a liar.

If the retired general, who until January 20 stood at the head of 17 agencies with more than 100,000 spies, analysts and agents, now declares that Trump, the nominal commander-in-chief, is a threat to the institutions of the American state, that is a sign of a state machine at war with itself. This is only one step removed from advocating that the military-intelligence apparatus step in to preserve order, the pretext invariably given in country after country for coups and military takeovers.

No one should believe that it cant happen here. Both sides in the conflict within the ruling elite are turning to the military as the final arbiter. Trump himself has filled his cabinet with former and currently serving generals in an effort to strengthen his ties with the military. He has repeatedly addressed military audiences while offering his top commanders free rein to order more aggressive battlefield tactics and troop buildups, and promising police similar leeway within the United States.

The Democratic Party is incapable of raising a single democratic principle in opposition to Trump. It has chosen to oppose the president on the basis of the completely reactionary and bogus claim that he owes his presidency to alleged Russian intervention into the 2016 campaign. Its media supporters have followed suit: two New York Times columnists (Nicholas Kristof and Tim Egan) yesterday suggested that Trump may be guilty of treason, while a third (Thomas Friedman) appealed openly to the military last month to carry out a palace coup.

The world is confronting a crisis of historic dimensions in the center of global capitalism. Decades of social and political reaction, unending war and the artificial suppression of class conflict are coming to a head. Wealth and power have been concentrated to an extraordinary degree in the hands of a narrow oligarchy, while the vast majority of the population is driven into increasingly desperate economic straits and deprived of any political influence.

The dysfunctionality of American society is everywhere in evidence. Crumbling roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, deepening poverty and social misery, collapsing schools, the slashing of social spending and private pensions are in their totality the consequence of the subordination of all rational consideration of the public interest to a manic drive for profit.

Social anger among working peoplewho see the government shutting them out from any access to decent health care, poisoning the water supply in cities such as Flint to enrich speculators and their bribed politiciansis reaching the boiling point. Both parties and all of the official institutionsCongress, the Supreme Court, the mediaare discredited. What is unfolding is a breakdown of the entire framework of constitutional government.

If Trump is a rogue president who accepts no legal or constitutional limits on his actions, he only mirrors the conduct of the corporate CEOs, bankers and hedge fund moguls who crashed the world economy in 2008 with impunity, and now reap untold profits while working people suffer the consequences.

There is no way out of this crisis through the existing political framework. If Trump is replaced through the machinations of the Democrats or its allies in the military-intelligence apparatus, the result will be a further turn to the right, an acceleration of militarism and reaction, and potentially a US nuclear war with Russia. Trump himself can prevail only through the mobilization of ultra-right and fascistic elements, both within the military and outside it, with the most ominous consequences for the social interests and democratic rights of working people.

The only way to resolve the political crisis on a progressive and democratic basis is through the political mobilization of the working class. Only the working class, fighting on the basis of a socialist program, independently and in opposition to the two parties of big business and their stooges in the trade unions, can open a new road forward.
A notice recently went up in the staff rooms of the Tate Modern and Tate Britain asking employees to put money towards a sailing boat as a surprise gift for director Sir Nicholas Serota, who is leaving after 28 years, sparking anger and derision.

It is symptomatic of the growing commercialisation of the arts and insensitivity to the overwhelming majority of workers on poverty wages on the part of the handful of arts administrators who have profited from it.

Serota, who was paid around 200,000, including bonuses, in the year ending March 2016, heads a 3,100 workforce in four galleriesTate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate St Ives, Cornwall and Tate Liverpool. Apart from 26 people (up from 17 in 2008) paid more than 60,000, the Tates workforce earns on average 24,000, significantly less than the national median of 27,600. For the majority of the Tates employees who live in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, this means poverty wages.

Economic hardship is matched by insecure conditions of employment. Many, including those who staff information points, cloakrooms, cafes and retail outlets, answer visitor questions, show visitors around and provide security services, are employed by facilities management companies. A year ago, Serota oversaw the outsourcing of jobs to Securitas, which then tore up union agreements and imposed zero-hours contracts, paying the so-called London living wage, 9.75 an hour. This equates to less than 20,000 for a 40-hour week for 50 weeks (there is no holiday pay). Some work for agencies that pay even less.

Low pay and outsourcing, which has resulted in lower pay than for Tate employees doing the same work, are the subject of on-going discussions between the unions and the gallery. Furthermore, the request to stump up cash for Serota comes just one week after the Tate took away workers 10 percent discount at the canteen.

One Securitas employee told the Guardian on condition of anonymity that there was disgust among colleagues when they saw the request for donations. There was a mixture of shock and laughter, he said. For us, Serotas legacy among staff is one of privatisation and union busting and turning the Tate into Westfield with pictures.

When the scale of workers outrage became clear, Tate management took down the notice. The Tate issued a statement saying that all staff had been invited to Serotas leaving party and that there was no obligation for any staff to give towards a leaving gift. However, they can if they wish. It added, Tate has invested considerably in raising salaries over the past three years, a reference to the fact that the gallery had agreed in 2014 to pay the London Living Wage. Conscious of the reputational damage to their image, management and Securitas called on staff to discuss their concerns with them, not the media.

Workers at Tate Modern told the World Socialist Web Site that Serota himself sent a personal email to all staff saying he was not expecting a present. Many were reluctant to speak about it, fearing retribution.

One worker at Tate Modern, a fine arts graduate, explained that she thought it was funny. How can you ask people on low wages who cant afford to pay the rent to contribute to the cost of a boat? She explained that she had been working for the Tate Modern for two and a half years, and was now on a zero-hours contract with Securitas, saying, Zero-hours works for me because I am living at home. But it doesnt work for everyone. But it is not even as though we know him, she added.

Tate Modern, one of the worlds most popular galleries of modern and contemporary art, is the fifth most visited gallery in the country with 4.7 million visitors annually. But visitor numbers have dropped to their lowest for 10 years, with a corresponding fall in income, compared to the record-breaking year in 2014 with 5.8 million visitors, due to the success of the Henri MatisseThe Cut-Outs exhibition.

While entrance to museums and galleries has been free since 2001, most rely on special exhibitions with paid entry and commercial activities to boost income. Public funding for the arts, never generous, has fallen since the global financial crisis. Funding for Englands national museums has been cut by around 30 percent in real terms since 2012, with similar cuts in the block grants for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

But 94 percent of museums in the UK do not receive government or Arts Council funding and are dependent in whole or in part on locally sourced grants. The plans outlined in the November 2015 spending review will slash the local government grant by more than half from 2015-16 to 2019-20, after 14 percent cuts since 2010, jeopardising the survival of many local authority museums, which are nonstatutory services, and many independent museums.

Forty-four local-authority-funded museums in the UK have closed since 2010, and further casualties seem inevitable. While Lancashire is reportedly the most badly affected, Birmingham City Council has announced a third round of funding cuts to arts and culture since 2010, reducing its annual spend from 6.4 million to 4.8 million as of March 2016, including funding to the recently opened Birmingham City Library, now open just six hours a day.

According to the Museums Associations survey of cuts in 2015, nearly one in five regional museums closed a part or branch of their museum to the public in the previous year, or planned such a closure in 2016. One in 10 expects to introduce entrance charges to cover reductions in local authority funding and/or sell some of their assets. Many museums reported staff cuts, with a quarter cutting their full-time staff, and nearly half increasing the number of volunteers, compared with 32 percent the previous year.

The overwhelming majority of public funding for museums goes to those in London, in part at least as a subvention to the hospitality industry, to which museums and galleries contribute 1.45 billion. The combined Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council of England spending amounts to 68.99 per head of population in London and 4.58 in the rest of England.

Tate, while more generously funded than many of Britains museums, has not been exempt from the cuts, with its public funding down from 31.7 million in 2008 to 28.7 million last year. Always dependent on low waged staff, and able to rely on its cache to attract art graduates as interns, it has cut its costs by outsourcing and boosting income from donations and commercial activities. Last year, its trading operations brought in 55 million, up by around 67 percent since 2004. Nevertheless, this was less than in the previous year when visitor numbers were boosted by the Matisse exhibition. The prime consideration now is hosting block-buster exhibitions with hefty admission fees and expensive merchandise to meet revenue targets.

Last year, Tate Modern opened the 260 million Switch House, a massive new building, largely empty of art, next to the original Tate Modern building. It has since been renamed the Blavatnik Building after USSR-born billionaire Len Blavatnik donated more than 50 million to the museum. Pledged in 2011, the money was accepted by the Tates board of trustees this month and is the largest-ever financial donation to a UK museum. Blavatnik, who made his fortune by seizing former state assets after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is worth 15.982 billion. He is Britains second richest individual, according to this years Sunday Times Rich List.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - A South Florida police dog that was wounded by a bullet during a shootout with a robbery suspect is recovering and has been released to his handler.

Local news outlets reported Sunday that Palm Beach Sheriff's Office K9 Casper was released from veterinary care after the round was removed from his hindquarters.

The sheriff's office says Casper recovered from anesthesia, is now on antibiotics and is walking well considering the circumstances.

The suspect, 46-year-old Phillip Oshea, was killed in the Friday shootout with deputies in Jupiter. Investigators say he was involved in a bar robbery earlier that day and had outstanding criminal warrants in North Carolina.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - You may know her from Twelve Years A Slave or Star Wars, but Monday, the family of Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o visited Florida A&M University to discuss the impact of cancer in Africa.

Her father, professor and Kenyan Senator Peter Nyong'o, and her mother Dorothy Nyong'o, are founders of the "Africa Cancer Foundation".

Monday, they addressed the FAMU community as a part of the "Global Cancer Inequities" series at the university's institute of public health.

During their visit, the Nyong'o's will also meet with FAMU administrators and faculty, discussed future opportunities to work together to combat cancer via research, education, and awareness.
MIAMI (AP) - Police say three beachgoers at a Miami-area park suffered scrapes and bruises after they were run over by a county pickup truck.

Miami-Dade police say the driver of the pickup, 23-year-old county employee Kevin Gonzalez, told them he didn't see the three before his Ford F-150 truck rolled over them as they sunbathed. The incident happened late Friday at Crandon Park on Key Biscayne.

The Miami Herald reports that no charges have been filed against Gonzalez.

The three beachgoers suffered injuries mainly to their legs and feet but were not seriously hurt.
By Press Trust of India: From Lalit K Jha

Washington, May 15 (PTI) Former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said he is in agreement with US President Donald Trumps disruptive approach to politics and foreign policy.

"Im a strong believer in the need for reform of government agencies and departments. They have gotten fat and sloppy and theyre not user friendly. They are inefficient. They cost too much," Gates told CBS News on Sunday.

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Gates, who has the rare distinction of serving in the Bush and Obama administrations said there was a need for disruptive approach on the foreign policy as well.

"Broadly philosophically, I am in agreement with his disruptive approach," Gates said.

"Weve had three administrations follow a pretty consistent policy toward North Korea and it really hasnt gotten us anywhere. So, the notion of disrupting and sort of putting the Chinese on notice that its no longer business as usual for the United States I think is a good thing," he said.

"I think when it comes to the issues Id advise him to stick to the script. But, he is going to have some very tough conversations and hes going to be talking about some very tough and complicated issues in all of the places that he visits. Any time the President does things that are humanising, its good," he said.

Trump leaves on a five-nation maiden foreign trip next week. He will visit Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, Brussels and Italy.

Gates strongly defended Trumps meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Oval Office.

"For a long time, Soviet foreign ministers would come in to see the President all the time, routinely. Jimmy Carter stopped that after the invasion of Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan resumed it in 1984, I think. And so the fact of a meeting like that is not that big a deal," he said.

Asked about the allegations of Russian interference in the US elections last year, Gates said Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to communicate to the rest of the world that Western elections are illegitimate.

"I think this is a guy who saw the US basically come out against him in his reelection campaign in 2012. He saw the US being behind all of the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and in Georgia and Ukraine and so on. So his view is the West has been interfering in his politics for years," Gates said.

"I think that he has decided, in a very strategic way, to turn the tables and do everything in his power to, as weve described Russian elections as illegitimate, to try and communicate to the rest of the world that Western elections are illegitimate," the former defence secretary said.

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Gates said for the first time the US has been able to draw the attention of China on North Korea.

"I think that the disruptive nature, the tough talk on North Korea, the military deployments, sending the missile defence system to South Korea, I think these are all good things to have done."

As a result, Trump has gotten Chinese attention to a degree that his predecessors have not, that this is a very serious matter for the United States, Gates said. PTI LKJ NSA

--- ENDS ---
In this 2004 file photo, just-filled 4-liter boxes of Chardonnay await shipment from the Tefft Cellars winery in Outlook. Joel Tefft, left, seals the boxes as Marty Johnson fills each bag with wine and places it in a box. (GORDON KING/Yakima Herald-Republic file)
Bernabe Rodriguez prepares a pallet of Gala apples for shipment to Mexico at Washington Fruit and Produce Co. Nov. 5, 2015 in Yakima, Wash. GORDON KING/Yakima Herald-Republic file)
By Press Trust of India: Chennai, May 15 (PTI) Directorate of Revenue Intelligence sleuths have seized foreign origin gold valued at Rs 2.45 crore here and arrested two persons in this connection. Acting on a tip-off, DRI officials intercepted and questioned D L Thara and L K Zou, who arrived by the Guwahati-Trivandrum Super Fast Express at the Central Railway Station yesterday, an official release said today.

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On being questioned, they admitted that the gold was concealed in two bags carried by them, it said.

The duo were allegedly carrying foreign origin gold smuggled through the Indo-Myanmar land border.

"8,330 grams of foreign origin gold of 24 Karat purity valued at Rs 2.45 crore that were concealed in the bags carried by the two passengers were seized," it said.

The two passengers were arrested on charges of smuggling gold under the Customs Act and remanded to judicial custody, the release added. PTI VIJ ROH BN

--- ENDS ---
Amid heavy police barricading, the Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) protestors rallied against the Telangana Rashtra Samiti government over their plan to shift the Dharna Chowk.

By Ashish Pandey: In a massive protest, activists of Telangana Joint Action Committee (TJAC) along with protestors from various Opposition parties gathered today at India Park also known as Dharna Chowk to agitate against its proposed shifting.

Amid heavy police barricading, the TJAC protestors rallied against the Telangana Rashtra Samiti government over their plan to shift the Dharna Chowk.

Earlier, the Hyderabad Police had denied permission for the sit-in protest but retracted after TJAC leaders said they will hold the 'Save Dharna Chowk' protest nevertheless.

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Criticizing the ruling TRS government, members from all Opposition parties of Telangana, like Congress, TDP, BJP and Left-wing parties extended their support to the 'Save Dharna Chowk'.

Protesting parties allege that the ruling TRS is using police to suppress their dissenting voice, thereby denying the right to protest, that is also unconstitutional.

Tollywood movies star Pawan Kalyan's Jana Sena Party too has backed the protest.

Meanwhile, clashes erupted between locals and TJAC protestors, as former pulled them and other political party members for disrupting peace and contributing to noise pollution.

The Indira Park Morning Walkers' Association staged a protest opposing TJAC's demonstration alleging inconvenience to locals and morning walkers because of such protests.

--- ENDS ---
Now that the Nationality Billor in its formal name, Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish Peoplehas passed a preliminary Knesset reading, we should remember that the legislation was originally proposed by Knesset Members Zeev Elkin and Avi Dichter, with the latter being a member of the Kadima party at the time.

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In fact, nearly all Kadima lawmakers supported the bill at the time, much to Chairwoman Tzipi Livnis chagrin. Dichters first version, by the way, was more radical than the one approved last week.

The bill's supporters will say that after it passes a second and third reading, a balance will be struck between the rights of the individual, which are already protected in two basic lawsHuman Dignity and Liberty and Freedom of Occupationand the definition of the States Jewish character. Up until now, they will claim, there has been a clash between these two components, the rights of the individual and the national definition. From now on, there will be equality. Or as Minister Elkin said last week: The law doesnt change things, it just gives them legal validity.

Arab MKs protest Nationality Bill. Will Israel, which is incapable of deciding on the structure of a public television channel, be able to agree on a basic law? (Photo: Knesset Channel)

On the surface, it seems that the entire purpose of the Nationality Bill is to show the Arabs, once and for all, whos boss here. A deeper, thorough look reveals that this is indeed its only purpose.

In other words, the Nationality Bill offers no dramatic changes. All it does is repeat things that already exist in legislation. One of the best examples is the alleged downgrade in the status of the Arabic language compared to Hebrew. Its unclear what this clause can actually achieve that doesnt already exist.

About half a year ago, a Beer Sheva resident complained to the citys mayor that the Arabic signs and public announcements on Dan buses were irritating to see and irritating to hear. Another person wrote: Dan offers signs in Arabic too. Am I the only one troubled by this? Its as if I live in Hebron. The mayor immediately ordered the bus company to remove the Arabic announcements, and the company rushed to implement his order. Even the court ruled years ago that if it is complicated or expensive to publish every order or law in two languages, Hebrew will suffice.

Everything the Nationality Bill seeks to offer already exists in the State of Israels different laws: The Israeli Flag, Emblem and Anthem Law; the Law of Return; the Independence Day Law; the Memorial Day Law; the Hours of Work and Rest Law; the Foundations of Law Act; the Protection of Holy Places Law. Together, they cover everything proposed in this new legislation, and there is essentially nothing new.

Its possible that in the State of Israel of the 1960s or 1970s, such a law would have been adopted by a large majority. Even the left-wing Mapam party would have voted for it. But in the current Knesset, even Yair Lapids Yesh Atid party voted against it.

The tempest created by the bill brings to mind similar, although smaller, tempests. Daylight saving time, for example: There are arguments in favor and against it, and frequent changes every year in the day it starts and the day it ends. Industrialists and economists offer scientific evidence of the millions of shekels that each additional day adds to the state coffer. On the other hand, rabbis complain about how difficult it is for Ashkenazi Jews to observe the Selichot tradition of the month of Elul. And the decisive factor is the demand to apply standard time before Yom Kippur so as to make things easier for those who fast, as if the purpose of the fast is to be easy. The entire daylight saving time issue is, in fact, aimed at showing the religiousand, on the other hand, showing the secularwhos boss.

MK Hanin Zoabi protesting the bill (Photo: Knesset Channel)

The Knesset factions are like six blind men touching an elephant, and trying to explain what an elephant is. Each faction sees something different in the bill. Some see it as a way to pressure the High Court of Justice, which is sometimes inclined to rule out of democratic considerations, and force it to favor Jewish considerations. For example, to save the residents of south Tel Aviv from the infiltrators, or as Minister Naftali Bennett once said: The next time the High Court discusses a law to stop the infiltration, it will have to include in its considerations the fact that Israel is the Jewish peoples national home, and not just human dignity and liberty.

The only clear and pronounced thing about the bill that passed a preliminary Knesset reading last Wednesday, causing quite an uproar, is that it will be changed completely. The different wordings proposed so farDichter and Elkins proposal, Arie Eldads proposal, Ruth Calderons proposal, Ayelet Shaked and Yariv Levins proposal, Benny Begins proposal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus proposal, Elazar Stern, Meir Sheetrit, Amram Mitzna, David Tzur and Amir Peretzs proposal, Hana Sweid, Dov Khenin and Afu Agbarias proposalhave all been carried by the wind. The proposal that passed a preliminary reading last week will be carried away too, and so will the proposals that replace it.

There was unrest last week even in the coalition. The bill was almost thwarted by the ultra-Orthodox parties. Shas and United Torah Judaism are afraid of basic laws, ever since the two human rights legislations from the 1990s. Their objection also stems from the fact that the legislation includes Zionist symbols like the anthem and the flag, and they are being cautious about it.

In their coalition agreements, they demanded a right to veto this bills wording and advancement. When the bill was submitted to the Knesset last week, they wanted to use their veto power. The only reason they finally agreed to support it in the preliminary reading was that Dichter and Coalition Chairman David Bitan promised that each coalition faction would have the right to veto the bills advancement. Nevertheless, the Haredi dissatisfaction indicates that future votes wont be that simple. Will todays Israel, which is incapable of deciding on the structure of a public television channel, be able to agree on a basic law?

The bills main goalfor the Jewish people to give the Arab people the fingerhas already been achieved.
Palestinian hunger strike leader Marwan Barghouti denies the authenticity of a video purportedly showing him eating secretly in his cell and is preparing to see his protest "to the end" by refusing to drink water, his lawyer said Sunday.

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Khader Shkirat, speaking after the first meeting with his client since the protest began nearly a month ago, said Barghouti was noticeably thinner but remained in good spirits.

Barghouti has lost 13 kilograms, or nearly 29 pounds, and is down to 53 kilograms (117 pounds), Shkirat said. The weight loss "is clear on his face and his body," he said. "His face is thin."

Barghouti, along with hundreds of other Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, launched the strike on April 17, demanding better conditions, including family visits.

Israel has alleged Barghouti, widely seen as a potential successor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, staged the strike to raise his political profile.

Barghouti's family has denied the protest is driven by political ambitions.

Barghouti, 58, is serving multiple life sentences after an Israeli court convicted him of directing attacks that killed five people during the second Palestinian uprising. Barghouti, in prison since 2002, never mounted a defense, saying the court had no jurisdiction over him.

Last week, Israeli authorities, in an apparent attempt to discredit Barghouti, released a video that they said showed Barghouti snacking in his cell.

Shkirat said he described the video to Barghouti who told him it's not authentic. Barghouti said the cell featured in the video, with a bunk bed, is much nicer and cleaner than the run-down cell where he is being held, which has a single bed, smelly blanket and no pillow.

"Marwan said that he does not know when these pictures were taken, and he considered publishing the video as blackmail and illegal action by the Israeli government," Shkirat said.

Barghouti has been kept in isolation since the strike began. Shkirat said Barghouti told him he has not been permitted to change his clothes, and that Israeli guards search his room four times a day. He said Barghouti hears "annoying voices" outside the cell door and pounds on the door to find out what is going on.

"They tell him, 'There are no voices, you are dreaming,'" he said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a rare statement last week that it is Israel's responsibility to ensure prisoners receive family visits. Human rights groups say it is a violation of international law to move prisoners from occupied territories to detention centers in Israel, which also makes it more difficult for relatives to visit the inmates.

Israeli Prison Service spokesman Assaf Liberati said the video was authentic and was taken in Barghouti's current cell.

He said that Barghouti faced some "punitive measures" for breaking prison rules by staging the hunger strike, but that his and the conditions of the other prisoners met international standards.

Liberati pointed to the visits by the Red Cross and lawyer as proof that "we have nothing to hide concerning his treatment here." He accused Barghouti's lawyer of stating "incorrect facts."

Shkirat said Barghouti told him that Israel has so far refused to negotiate over his demands. He quoted Barghouti as saying that he is prepared to pay a great personal price to improve conditions.

"I plan to escalate my hunger strike soon. I will stop drinking water," Barghouti was quoted as saying. "There is no backtracking. We will continue until the end."

Shkirat was just the second visitor to see Barghouti since the strike began. Last week, a representative from the Red Cross paid a 10-minute visit to check on his condition.
Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked spoke to Ynet on Monday about the possibility of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, saying "the differences between us are too great, there's not going to be a Palestinian state established within the Green Line. Israel must stand for its own interests, not hand Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian National Authority or Hamas."

Shaked added that the message that Netanyahu must pass to US President Donald Trump is that "there is currently no chance for a Palestinian state."
In anticipation of US President Donald Trump's visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia, pressure is mounting on him to start a diplomatic process and leave the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Sunday told NBC's Meet the Press that the though US Embassy would move to Jerusalem, the president wanted to know how such a move would affect the peace process.

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At the same time, the Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and Secretary of the PLO's Executive Committee Saeb Erekat, met in Amman and expressed opposition to "unilateral steps in Jerusalem."

Tillerson interviewed ahead of Trump visit

X

"The president I think rightly has taken a very deliberative approach in understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region in understanding what such a move, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have," Tillerson said. "The president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process."

So this could be a while. So if the peace process is active, he'll hold off on moving the embassy.

" Well, I think it would be informed, again, by the parties that are involved in those talks, and most certainly from Israel's view, on whether Israel views it as helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction," the Secretary of State replied. "It think the president is being very measured as to how he goes about this, and appropriately so."

Tillerson (Photo: AP)

Tillerson's comments also drew reactions in the Israeli political system. The Prime Minister's Office said that "Israel's position has been expressed many times to the American administration and to the world ... The transfer of the American embassy to Jerusalem not only will not harm the peace process, but will promote it by correcting a historic injustice and by smashing the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."





Bennett (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)

Earlier, Education Minister and Bayit Yehudi Leader Naftali Bennett called on Netanyahu to "make it clear that we expect the US administration to transfer the embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty." Bennett added that "the transfer of the US embassy to the Israeli capital strengthens Israel," adding that "any agreement based on the division of Jerusalem is destined to fail.

"Just as the embassies of the countries of the world are in the capital of the United States, Washington, they should be in Jerusalem, our eternal capital for 3,000 years," concluded Bennett.

The Likud responded to his remarks by saying, "We congratulate Bennett on his memorizing the press releases issued by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and quoting them as if they were his own demands, as he has done on many issues. This is consistent with Netanyahu's demand for the transfer of the American Embassy to Jerusalem."

PA does not believe the embassy will be moved

In a joint press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri and PLO Executive Committee Chairman Saeb Erekat, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said that east Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine, while West Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Safadi said that the issue of Jerusalem should be treated with caution. "Everyone is convinced that the president of the United States wants to act effectively for peace. The three of us felt a genuine commitment by Trump to resolve the conflict. "

L to R: Safadi, Erekat and Shoukry (Photo: AFP)

The US Embassy in Tel Aviv (Photo: AFP)

The Palestinian leadership in Ramallah believes that the American embassy will remain in Tel Aviv. Until three months ago, such a move by President Trump would have caused a great deal of concern in Ramallah, but a senior Palestinian official involved in the discussions told Ynet that the issue of transferring the embassy was not on the agenda.

Tillerson (L) and Trump (Photo: Reuters_

The source hinted that the Palestinians received a positive signal regarding their demands from the Trump administration, in addition to the arrival of CIA Director Mike Pompeo for secrets visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah about three months ago, during which Pompae met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Mazen.

Another source outside the Palestinian Authority told Ynet that Ramallah had already sent messages to the various interested parties in the area two months ago. The very positive meeting between Abbas and Trump at the White House encouraged the Palestinians to believe that the embassy will remain for the time being in Tel Av
A new "polygraph bill" has raised a great deal of opposition in the Knesset and Israel Police, with an police commissioner, public security minister, attorney general and an MK warring over which version of the bill will win out.

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Initially, the polygraph bill was introduced by Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh, who together with Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud),) has been promoting it in an effort to require anyone promoted within the police to the rank of major general or higher to be tested by a lie detector. This version was addtionally approved by Attorney General Michael Mandelblit.

Mandelblit (Photo: Mark Israel Salem)

Before Alsheikh was appointed police commissioner, polygraph tests were very rarely performed on police officers, and only in cases where field security violations were suspected (such as contact with a foreign agent or leaking of classified information).

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan (L) and Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh (Photo: Ofer Meir)

But Alsheikh, who is the former Shin Bet deputy director, is leading a new procedure whereby any senior officer in the rank of chief superintendent or higher needs to undergo an inquiry.

MK David Amsalem: 'If everything's fine what is there to worry about?'

At present, an officer who does not pass the inquiry will be instructed to undergo a polygraph test that will include questions on sexual misconduct, inappropriate romantic relations with either a superior or subordinate and potential connections to a crime organization.

After being approved during the first round of voting, however, the bill was rewrittern by MK and chairman of the Internal Affairs and Environment Knesset Committee David Amsalem, so that is would now require all police investigators to undergo a polygraph test, the sum tota of whom is around 1,600 officers.

In response to Amsalem's changes, Mandelblit issued a letter to Commissioner Alsheikh, Minister Erdan and Justice Minister Shaked, severely criticizing the bill's revised format.

Mandelblit wrote that while he found it acceptable to have investigators undergo a polygraph test once every three years, to preserve the integrity of the Israel Police, the new version of the bill "significantly deviates from the version I had approved at the time.

Maldelblit added that due to this development, the bill should be brought for new deliberation in the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

"I would also like to point out that the police commissioner approached me and noted that the (Israeled) Police's position is currently that it is better not to advance the bill at all, than to promote the version proposed by Amsalem. "

Mandelblit ended by noting that if the committees intends on passing the new version of the bill, he will have to reexamine it as it is altogether different than what was approved by him and his committee.

Amsalem, for his part, defended the changes he made. "If everything's fine, what's there to worry about?" he said. "If I was the commissioner, I would promote this, because its purpose is to safeguard the force.

"They spend hundreds of thousands of shekels on publicity advisors, they have a whole system for public relations," said Amsalem. "So I think this law will strengthen the image and dependability of the police in the best possible way."

Members of the police force, however, have voiced strong disapproval of Amsalem's move. "You can't cast doubt on every officer in the force," said several sources in the police. "A polygraph test is a very aggressive tool. You 'undress' in front of the tester, and there's no reason for every investigator to go through it. The fact that we don't have a workers' union doesn't mean that you can impede on the officers' rights in this manner."

Even though sources in the police preferred not to make any official comments, many showed resentment over accusations that officers in the force are leaking information to the press, which was mentioned as one of the reasons for Amsalem's sweeping legislature.

Officers hope that Erdan will aid them in finding a compromise between the police officers' general reluctance and Amsalem's demands.

However, members of the police warned that if a compromise will not be made and Amsalem refuses to negotiate, they will ask that the the polygraph bill by rejected.

"It is very important that the bill pass and allow the commissioner another necessary tool, in an effort to strengthen the public's trust in the police," said Erdan on Sunday, referring to the original version. "We need to reach a logical compromise that will diminish the risk of leaks from investigations but also not burden the entire force and create a feeling of suspicion towards its officers," he added.

(Translated & edited by Lior Mor)
India took Pakistan to the United Nations' highest court Monday in an attempt to save the life of an Indian naval officer sentenced to death last month by a Pakistani military court after being convicted of espionage.

"India believes that the farcical nature of proceedings and unjust trial by a Pakistani military court in egregious violation of the rights of consular access ... has led to (a) serious miscarriage of justice," Deepak Mittal, joint secretary of India's Ministry of External Affairs, told judges at the International Court of Justice.

India claims that Pakistan breached a long-standing international convention on consular relations by not granting Indian officials access to Kulbhushan Jadhav after his arrest last year.

"It is clear that Mr. Jadhav has been denied the right to be defended by a legal counsel of his choice. He has not been informed of his right to seek consular access," Mittal said, adding that the conviction and death sentence appeared to be based on a confession made while "in captivity without proper legal representation."
The last time when India and Pakistan were at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was in 1999 when Indian Air Force had shot down a naval aircraft of Pakistan.

The Peace Palace which houses The International Court of Justice at the Hague, Netherleands. (Reuters)

By India Today Web Desk: The face-off between bitter neighbours India and Pakistan at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence comes 18 years after the two countries were at the world court.

The last time India and Pakistan were seen countering each other was in 1999 when the Indian Air Force (IAF) shot down Pakistan's maritime reconnaissance aircraft Atlantique in the Kutch region of Gujarat. All 16 people on board the Pakistani aircraft were killed.

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Pakistan had approached the ICJ claiming that the plane was shot down by India in its airspace and demanded 60 million dollar in compensation from New Delhi. However, the ICJ had then rejected Pakistan's petition saying it had no jurisdiction.

WHAT HAPPENED ON AUGUST 10, 1999

It was 11 am when the Naliya Air Force Station in Gujarat was informed about a suspected aircraft violating Indian air space. The IAF decided to investigate the unidentified aircraft. Two MiG 21s took off to look into the skies for the 'intruder' plane. The Indian fighter jets confronted a Pakistani Atlantique reconnaissance aircraft. The Pakistani aircraft was asked to land at the Naliya air base immediately. Neglecting the warnings by Indian jets, the Pakistani aircraft tried to move ahead and veered sharply towards the border. The Atlantique did just what it shouldn't have done. Veering sharply is seen as a 'combative gesture' in air force parlance. The pilot of one of the MiGs relayed the happening to the ground control at the air base. Moments later his ear piece crackled with an order to shoot. And the next minute, a heat-seeking air-to-air Matra missile had pierced into the Pakistani aircraft. The aircraft burst into flames killing 16 people on board. The wreckage of the aircraft was found spread across the Kori Creek wasteland.

WATCH: Can India secure a stay over Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence? ALSO READ:

Kulbhushan Jadhav death sentence: India, Pakistan clash at the International Court of Justice today

Who is Kulbhushan Jadhav, the Indian sentenced to death in Pakistan?

Kulbhushan Jadhav death sentence: Pakistan to overrule International Court of Justice's order

--- ENDS ---
At exactly 5pm (GMT+3) today, the new Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) is set to launch Monday night, as veteran anchorwoman Geula Even will host its first live news broadcast.

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Following that, journalists Dror Feuer and Anat Korol will host their new daily segment "Original 5," after which Dov Gil-Har will host the economy segment, and lastly, Michal Rabinovich and Yoaz Hendel will host the current affairs segment. Radio presenter Romy Neumark will present the interim news bulletins.

Geula Even (Photo: Raffi Daloya)

At 8pm, Even will return to host the evening news, which will replace the longtime running newscast "Mabat LaHadashot."

Asaf Liberman will then host the new investigative journalism show called Real Time (not to be confused with the US talk show Real Time with Bill Maher).

In the last few days, employees of the IPBC have been working tirelessly to make sure that their broadcasting will start without any problems.

"We're trying to prepare both professionally and emotionally," said Neumark on Sunday. "Everyone's feeling the weight of our position, it adds to the anxiety. We need to remember that we're still at a testing stage, so that even we are curious to see how it'll go.

"It's a process that took a long time,yet this birth was pretty rushed; we've just started the countdown, and the head is begining to crown."

"There's an insane level of excitement here," said Rom Lior, the police reporter for the IPBC news team. "We waited for months, and now it's finally happening. There's a mixture of excitement, pressure and expectation for this day to finally come."

"I know that everyone will pin their hopes on us, and I hope that we will live up to expectations," said IPBC's Digital Department Manager and Depuy CEO Elad Tene. "It's not a trifling matter toin just one dayabsorb 450 employees, who arrive and straight away get into position while some still need to learn how to operate new systems.

"After all the craziness of the Israel Broadcast Assocaition's shut down , people came here with very positive spirits and I hope we'll do a good job."

"We trying the last few loose ends to make sure that everything's working," summarizes Li-or Averbach, head of content at the new Israeli Public Radio of the IPBC. "There were changes right up until the last moment. They delayed us so many times, backpedaling again and again, that in the endeven though we've been preparing for this for the last two yearsit still came as a surprise."

(Translated & edited by Lior Mor)
After being disinvited from a scheduled official visit to Israel last December to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the establishment of Ukraine-Israel diplomatic relations, Volodymyr Groysman, the Prime Minister of Ukraine has arrived in Israel with a delegation of ministers for meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finalize cooperation deals with regard to counter-terrorism, health, and statistical data exchanges.

Groysman met on Monday with President Reuven Rivlin and was scheduled to see Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, members of the business community and the heads of Teva Pharmaceuticals, as well.

Groysman said that his visit was meant to develop an even better relationship with our friend Israel, and to deepen our strategic partnership.
Turkey has blocked a request for German lawmakers to visit their country's soldiers at the Incirlik air base, the German government said Monday, increasing the possibility that it might relocate planes supporting the campaign against the ISIS.

Germany has about 270 troops at the base. The refusal was communicated to Germany's ambassador over the weekend, Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer told reporters.

He said Turkey indicated the refusal was tied to Germany's decision to grant asylum to Turkish soldiers accused by Ankara of participating in last year's failed coup.

"This is unfortunate, and we have made this clear through various channels," Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
Border Police volunteer was sentenced to seven months in prison on Monday over the death of an illegal Palestinian worker in 2013.

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David Arik Bibi Rubi, 43, agreed to a plea bargain with the prosecution, which will also include an additional four months of probation following his release from prison.

In November 2013, Rubi arrived at the Yarkon cemetery as part of a joint police operation to identify and arrest illegal Palestinian workers.

Border Police officers on patrol (Photo: Yoav Davidkovich)

After a group of 41 illegal Palestinian workers had been discovered and detained, Rubi was assigned to watch over them while forces continued their searches for additional suspects. At this point, Antar Akra, one of the workers rounded up in the sweep, attempted to escape.

According to the indictment, Rubi gave chase to Akra and ordered him to stop. Akra then ducked downan act that, according to the defense, led Rubi to believe that the Palestinian had picked up a rock or another weapon with which to attack him.

Rubi drew his weapon and shot Akra in the chest, killing him.

During his testimony, Akra's father, an officer in the Palestinian security services, detailed the tragedy his family had been going through following the death of his son.

Commander of the Border Police, Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai, also testified during the trial, adding that Rubi, whom he personally knew, acted out of a sense of mission and that immediately after the shooting, Rubi provided emergency first aid to Akra.

In reading the verdict, Kfar Saba Magistrate's Court Judge Michael Karshen referred to the incident, saying, "We have a serious case of negligence before us today that had lethal consequences." Karshen also ordered Rubi to pay Akra's parents NIS 30,000 and his widow NIS 70,000 in compensation.
HAMAM AL-ALIL -- A senior US official says the fight to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group is approaching its "final stages."

Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the global coalition against ISIS, says Iraqi forces are "completely defeating" ISIS in one of the most difficult urban battles since World War II.

But he says local Iraqi officials say they will need more funding from the US and others in the international community to rebuild in territory recently retaken from the extremists.

McGurk spoke to The Associated Press from a water treatment plant south of Mosul where Iraqi forces closely backed by the US-led coalition are slowly closing in on the remaining cluster of ISIS-held neighborhoods in the city's west.
BERLIN - Berlin may move its soldiers to another country if Ankara does not grant permission to members of the German parliament's defense committee to visit staff currently serving in a NATO mission on a Turkish air base, Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

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Speaking at a Monday news conference, Merkel said it was essential for lawmakers to be able to visit the 270 soldiers serving at Incirlik air base in Turkey, where they are involved in a NATO mission targeting the Islamic State militant group in Syria.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer told reporters that Turkey indicated the refusal to grant the lawmakers access was tied to Germany's decision to grant asylum to Turkish soldiers accused by Ankara of participating in last year's failed coup.

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen visiting soldiers in Ursula von der Leyen (Photo: Reuters)

"This is unfortunate, and we have made this clear through various channels," Merkel said.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel plans to raise the issue at a meeting with allies in Washington this week, Schaefer said.

Defense Ministry spokesman Jens Flosdorff said the military is examining moving Germany's Tornado reconnaissance jets and a refueling plane from Incirlik to another country.

Merkel reinforced that point, noting that "We will continue to talk with Turkey, but in parallel we will have to explore other ways of fulfilling our mandate. That means looking at alternatives to Incirlik, and one alternative among others is Jordan."

The Incirlik refusal, which follows a similar standoff last year, is the latest in a long line of irritants in Turkish-German relations.

German fighter jets in Incirlik (Photo: AFP)

Among other recent events, Berlin is pushing - so far in vain - for consular access to a German journalist, Mesale Tolu, who was detained in Turkey. It also has said that it wouldn't allow voting in Germany on a possible Turkish referendum on reintroducing the death penalty.

Last summer, Turkey refused to allow German lawmakers to visit personnel stationed at Incirlik following a German parliament vote to label as genocide the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago. Turkey relented after the German government stressed that the resolution wasn't legally binding.

German military missions abroad need parliamentary approval, typically on an annual basis.

"The Bundeswehr is a parliamentary army, and so it is absolutely necessary that there be possibilities for our lawmakers to visit their soldiers," Merkel said.

The parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats, Merkel's junior governing partners, said the latest refusal was "a drastic development."

"Under these circumstances, the Bundeswehr cannot stay at Incirlik," Thomas Oppermann said.
Former Chief Rabbi of Israel Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron was convicted Monday of fraudulently obtaining benefits, attempting to fraudulently obtain benefits, providing false identification and breach of trust.

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Bakshi-Doron was indicted in 2012 along with several other Chief Rabbinate officials for issuing 1,500 false Torah education certificates to members of the security forces, making them eligible for pay raises.

Bakshi-Doron's trial lasted for more than four years and the offenses attributed to him were committed more than 15 years ago, during his tenure as Chief Rabbi of Israel.

Former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

Throughout the trial, Bakshi-Doron and his defense have maintained his innocence and have been trying to have the charges against him dropped for a variety of reasons, including the rabbi's medical condition.

The indictment alleges that from 1999-2003, Rabbi Yitzhak Ohana, Director of the Rabbinical Examinations and Accreditation Department, was asked either directly or through intermediaries to issue certificates to members of the security forces who studied at various colleges.

The fraudulent documents contained false information regarding the true scope of the supposed studies, including credits, hours studied, and past and future academic activities.

According to the indictment, Rabbi Ohana eventually approached Rabbi Bakshi-Doron and requested assistance in dealing with the issuing of the fake certificates. Bakshi-Doron instructed Ohana to issue members of the security forces certificates for higher-level religious education and "turn a blind eye" to the criteria in order to "close the matter."

Initially, the State Attorney's Office cleared Bakshi-Doron of the suspicions against him and informed him that the case had been closed.

However, five years later, following trials of additional suspects and new information related to Bakshi-Doron, the State Attorney's Office reopened the case against him, leading to Monday's conviction.
A notorious German neo-Nazi was arrested Monday in Hungary, where he had been seeking asylum after fleeing to avoid serving a prison sentence for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic incitement, officials said.

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Hungarian police said Horst Mahler was taken into custody in the northwestern city of Sopron in the early afternoon.

Horst Mahler (Photo: AP)

Ken Heidenreich, a spokesman for prosecutors in Munich where the European arrest warrant for Mahler was issued, confirmed that they had been informed by phone that Mahler was in custody.

Mahler, 81, was a founding member of the left-wing Red Army Faction militant group who later turned to the far-right and has had numerous neo-Nazi-related convictions.

In addition, a court in Mainz in 2003 found Mahler guilty of condoning a crime for saying that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States were justified, and fined him several thousand euro.

He was also convicted in the mid-1970s for Red Army Faction-related activitiesincluding several bank robberies and for helping notorious terrorist Andreas Baader, another founding member of the group, to escape from jail.

He was serving a 10-year sentence for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic incitement when a court ruled two years ago that he could leave prison due to serious illness. He was ordered to return to prison late last year, but he refused and fled the country.

The Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Monday published a letter from Mahler saying he was asking "the leader of the Hungarian nation, Viktor Orban, to grant me asylum as someone who is being politically persecuted."

Heidenreich said it was not yet clear when Mahler would be extradited back to Germany to complete his sentence.

The Budapest Regional Court is expected to set a hearing date on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office was quick to deny Monday evening a report by Fox News Foreign Correspondent Conor Powell that the prime minister has asked US President Donald Trump to hold off on moving the American embassy to Jerusalem.

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"Everyone I've spoken to in DC that has been briefed on Jerusalem embassy move says Netanyahu told Trump not to move embassy at this time," Powell wrote on his Twitter account

The Prime Minister's Office, however, was quick to issue a denial, saying the report was "false."

Netanyahu and Trump's meeting in Washington (Photo: MCT)

The PMO presented notes from Netanyahu and Trump's meeting in February, which were written by then-acting national security adviser Yaakov Nagel, to show the prime minister's support of moving the embassy to the capital.

"The PM was asked about the embassy and explained (that moving it) would not lead to bloodshed in the region, as some were trying to intimidate (President Trump) into believing," Nagel stated in his notes.

The PMO also presented notes from Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer's meeting with Michael T. Flynn, at the time Trump's designated national security advisor.

Ambassador Dermer, the notes said, "explained why moving the embassy would help advance peace and not the opposite. This would send the message that we are in Jerusalem to stay. Moving the embassy would force the other side to contend with the lie theyve constructed  that Israel has no connection to Jerusalem  and will cause them to understand that Israel will be here forever with Jerusalem as its capital."

Netanyahu himself insisted earlier on Monday that his "consistent and unequivocal position is that the US Embassy should move to Jerusalem, as should other embassies."

The prime minister was responding to Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who has been urging Netanyahu to press the matter during Trump's upcoming visit to Israel next week.

Netanyahu speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting (Photo: AP)

Netanyahu also asserted that "Not only is moving the embassy not going to hurt the peace process, quite the contrary. It will advance it by righting a historical wrong and shatter the Palestinian illusion that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Sunday that President Trump was assessing whether moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would help or hurt prospects for clinching an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Since taking office, Trump has backed away from his campaign pledge to move the embassy in a gesture to Israel, instead saying he's still studying the issue. But Tillerson linked Trump's deliberations directly to his aspirations for brokering Mideast peace.

"The president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact the peace process," Tillerson said in an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. He said Trumps decision would be informed by feedback from all sides, including "whether Israel views it as helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction."

In the beginning of June, Trump is expected to sign an order postponing the embassy's move, as his predecessors had done.

Jordan's King Abdullah had warned Trump that moving the embassy could set the Middle East aflame.

The new American ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who arrived in Israel on Monday evening, has in the past declared that he would live in Jerusalem and work from the US Consulate in the capital. But in another sign the White House is proceeding cautiously on the matter, Friedman will instead live in Herzliya Pituach, as his predecessors did, and work from the embassy in Tel Aviv.

Friedman arriving in Israel

Trump is preparing to depart Friday on his first foreign trip. After stopping in Saudi Arabia, Trump will visit both Israel and the Palestinian territories, in a nod to his nascent bid to strike the Israeli-Palestinian deal that has eluded his predecessors.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.
SEOUL -- France's UN ambassador says Security Council members are working on a resolution that would impose new sanctions against North Korea and strengthen enforcement of existing sanctions.

Francois Delattre told reporters Monday that France favors "a strong, swift and firm reaction of the council" to North Korea's test on Sunday of a new longer-range ballistic missile, which he called "a serious threat to peace and security both in the region and the world."

The Security Council is scheduled to hold closed-door consultations on the missile test on Tuesday.

British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft also called the test a threat to international peace and security and said "the UK favors tougher sanctions."

Swedish UN Ambassador Olof Skoog said the council needs a firm, united response but "we also feel there needs to be openness for a conversation for dialogue."
Reacting to the Allahabad High Court's observations on fatwas, Islamic clerics in Agra say it doesn't have jursdiction over Islamic religious matters.

By Siraj Qureshi: Islamic clerics in Agra have defied the Allahabad High Court's observations on fatwas, asserting that the court had no jurisdiction over Islamic religious matters under Article 25 of the Constitution of India - which governs freedom of religion.

Notably, the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad had observed during the hearing of a case of a Muslim couple, that fatwas had no legal standing, and couldn't be imposed forcibly on anyone.

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The court had also observed that triple talaq couldn't be used against women just on the grounds of Muslim personal law.

Opposing these observations, Agra Mufti Abdul Khubaib Rumi said nobody has a legal right to turn down the orders of the Islamic Court.

Article 25 of the Constitution of India specifically allows everyone the freedom to observe one's religion, and similarly, Article 26-B gives everyone the right to have their own personal religious beliefs, he said.

If a Muslim gets married as per Sharia law, he should also be allowed to seek talaq as per Sharia if the need arises, and the Court shouldn't interfere in this matter, Rumi said.

'TAKE CASES RELATED TO PERSONAL LAW TO CLERICS ONLY'

Qari Mudassar Ali Qadri said this matter was connected to personal law, and that the Court couldn't hold a hearing on this.

Personal law has been made in the light of the Quran and the Hadith, and can't be rewritten in the name of social changes, he said.

Qadri advised Muslims to contact only clerics in cases related to personal law, and not take them to the Court - which he said had no jurisdiction in these matters.

Jamit-ul-Quresh district President Mohammed Sharif Kale said that the High Court's observations on Islamic fatwas were unacceptable, and went against the spirit of the Constitution.

Muslims will go to the Supreme Court against this and would request the top court to issue instructions to all judges in the country to not pass such statements again, he said.

The Imam of a local mosque said on the condition of anonymity that while Muslims may go to the Supreme Court against the High Court's observations, it's a fact that whatever the High Court at Allahabad has said will become the law unless it's challenged in a higher court.

However, if the Supreme Court too upholds what the High Court has said on fatwas, what Islamic clerics will do then is a question to be pondered in advance, he said.

'MEN, WOMEN EQUAL IN ISLAM, BUT HAVE UNEQUAL STATURE TODAY'

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A BA Student - Sonam - said that Islam considers men and women to be equal, but both have a highly unequal stature in today's society.

She said when women go to clerics with grievances, they don't consider them to be important.

But when men do, redressal is swift - and often against women, she said.

Sonam added that if any Indian court rules on a matter related to something also contained in religious law, then the court's orders should be accepted.

SUPREME COURT HEARS TRIPLE TALAQ CASE

Notably, the triple talaq issue is currently being addressed by the Supreme Court of India. A constitutional bench has observed that it needs to be determined whether triple talaq was originally a part of Islam, and whether it can be included in Muslim's fundamental rights.

If it is proved that triple talaq was originally a part of Islam, then the Court may probably not interfere with its constitutional validity.

However, most legal and religious experts agree that triple talaq can't be made a fundamental right at any cost.

ALSO READ | Triple talaq undesirable, worst form of dissolution of marriage among Muslims: Supreme Court

ALSO READ | If triple talaq declared illegal, will bring in law to regulate Muslim marriage, divorce: AG Mukul Rohatgi to Supreme Court

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ALSO WATCH | Listen to this triple talaq victim rip apart a maulavi with her tearful ordeal

--- ENDS ---
An Israeli family attempting to get to Kiryat Sefer (Modi'in Illit) got lost in the West Bank and accidentally entered the Palestinian village of Bir Zeit near Ramallah, where they were transferred to a Palestinian police station.

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The Cohen family, including their four children, were eventually safely returned to Israeli territory.

In an interview with Ynet, Ayelet Cohen described the experience as "terrifying" and said, "I feared for the children."

Ramallah checkpoint where the Cohen family was released (Photo: Inbal Reuveni/TPS)

"It was nearly 1am, the kids were asleep in the back seat and the village seemed to never end. At some point, there was no cell reception either. I was terrified the whole time for the safety of the children. We eventually managed to call the police.

"The police told us not to get out of the car and to continue driving back and forth for almost 40 minutes. Inside the car, there was a sense of tension and fear. All of a sudden, four cars came speeding up and blocked the road.

"I was sure they were going to lynch us. A lot of young Arabs came out of the cars and started banging on our car and my husband told them he was on the line with the police. They then opened our car doors and took us to the (Palestinian) police and they spoke Arabic. They took our phones and drove us to the Palestinian police station. At this stage, I had no idea where we were going at all."

Unbeknownst to the family however, IDF and police forces had already made contact with Palestinian security forces. Shortly after the Cohen family was brought to the police station, they were transported to a Ramallah checkpoint and released back into Israeli territory.
Terrorist Marwan Barghouti has threatened to further escalate the Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike, issuing the Israel Prison Service (IPS) a list of demands on Monday.

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Barghouti, who is leading the hunger strike, has been put in solitary confinement since it began almost a month ago. The only visitors he has been allowed to have are representatives of the Red Cross and his attorney.

His lawyer, Hader Shkirat, told Ynet after their meeting on Sunday that if no agreement is reached between the striking prisoners' leadership and Israeli authorities in the coming days, the prisoners would also stop drinking water in addition to not eating.

"It could happen in the next two or three days," Shkirat said.

Marwan Barghouti in 2010 (Photo: AP)

Shkirat also discussed Barghouti's current physical and mental state. "He lost 13 kilograms since the strike began. He's cut off from the outside world and doesn't know anything about what's happening. He seemed very weak, but his morale is high and he is determined to see the prisoners' demands met."

The lawyer claimed Barghouti has not been allowed a change of clothes and has been wearing the same clothes he was wearing when he was put in solitary confinement.

Barghouti also claimed to his lawyer that the IPS was trying to "break him" in different ways. "He told me he's being played very loud noise for ten hours a day. It prevents him from sleeping," Shkirat said. "When I met him, he had toilet paper stuffed in his ears. He complained about the loud noise to IPS personnel at the prison, and they said there was no noise and that he had a problem."

Shkirat said Barghouti "really laughed" over a video showing him eating a chocolate bar in his cell. "It's a fake video and he said it was expected (the Prison Service) would do it, just as they filmed him allegedly eat during the hunger strike in 2004," the lawyer said. His client, he added, "thanked the IPS for releasing the video, because it only served to increase the determination of the striking prisoners."

Barghouti caught eating during the strike (Credit: IPS)

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He also noted Barghouti was not involved in any negotiations or dialogue with Israeli authorities to end the strike. "He has no information about what's happening, but the decision to end the strike is his alone. He is opposed to conducting the negotiations himself, but he has no problem with others doing it."

Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for his involvement in the murder of Israelis, sent a letter to Prison Service Commissioner Ofra Klinger on Monday with a long list of demands. Among other things, he demanded that prisoners once again be able to take courses at the Open University, as well as be allowed to prepare their own food.

Below is the full list of demands:

Installing a public pay phone for the prisoners' use. Improved visitation rights. An annual medical examination for every prisoner, more frequent medical examinations for prisoners over 50, transporting sick prisoners in a special vehicle, dental implants, allowing private doctors to enter the prison without delay. Cancelling disciplinary action taken against the prisoners. Giving prisoners access to 20 TV channels. Giving Gaza prisoners the same visitation rights as other prisoners. Allowing books, weeklies and newspapers to be brought into the prison without limitations. Changing and increasing the products available at the prison's store and increasing the amount of money a prisoner's family can deposit for him to NIS 2,000. Improving the conditions during prisoner transfers. Transporting female prisoners in special, separate transports, improving their conditions. Installing air-conditioners in the prisons, particularly in Gilboa Prison. Resolve the issue of overcrowding in cells by housing no more than four prisoners per cell, in accordance with the Supreme Court's ruling. Allowing prisoners to study at the Open University, as well as study for and take the high school matriculation exams. Improving and changing daily living conditions by having a dialogue with the prisoners. Compensating prisoners who don't get a visit from their family with a phone call. Putting an end to the policy of placing prisoners in solitary confinement. Releasing prisoners who are chronically ill or have special needs. Allowing prisoners to prepare their own food and manage their own kitchen. Keeping the prison cells open in the summer until 10pm.







Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said that Barghouti's list of demands "only proves how extreme and farfetched his demands are. No other country in the world would negotiate with terrorists over such demands, especially Israel, which is waging a battle against terror organizations, is not going cave in to extortion and in that hurt its deterrence against terrorists."
SEOUL -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is condemning the latest North Korean ballistic missile test as a violation of Security Council resolutions and a threat to peace and security in the region.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Monday that Guterres had called on North Korea to fully comply with its international obligations "and return to the path of denuclearization."
Two junior Shin Bet employees working in the administrative and financial departments have been indicted and charged with stealing public funds, it was cleared for publication Monday.

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Suspicions against the two were raised when the internal security agency conducted an audit, which found financial and administrative irregularities. The information was then turned over to the Department of Internal Police Investigations (IA) at the State Attorney's Office.

The Shin Bet

Following an investigation, IA filed an indictment against the two suspects and requested their remand extended until the end of legal proceedings.

The indictment charges the two employees with theft by a public servant and forgery, among other crimes.

Details of the investigation and the identities of the employees are sealed.

Officials in the defense establishment said the theft has been estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of shekels and that most of the funds have been seized and returned.

Officials also emphasized that the irregular nature of the case and the fact the two employees were junior level, with one even being a student.

In response to the case, the Shin Bet has said it regards the charges as an attack on the state and the organization's values. Furthermore, the agency trusts the IA and law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Members of the American delegation preparing for President Donald Trump's arrival in Israel have reportedly asked the Israeli prep team to leave the Western Wall, telling them "this isn't your territory; it's the West Bank."

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The American and Israeli teams were visiting the holy site on Sunday ahead of Trump's visit next week.

The Israeli team requested to have Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accompany Trump during his visit to the Western Wall, but were turned down by the Americans. This led to a loud argument between representatives from the two teams.

Netanyahu and Trump meet in Washington (Photo: AP)

Two officials from the US Consulate in Jerusalem spoke curtly to the Israeli team, telling them among other things: "We're asking you to leave, and we need to be left alone. Israeli officials cannot be here; this is not your territory, it's the West Bank. This is a private visit by the President and has nothing to do with you. It's none of your business."

The shocked members of the Israeli team told the Americans, "This is completely unacceptable, and we reject these statements out of hand. This is a holy place under Israeli sovereignty."

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman visits the Western Wall (Photo: TPS)

The American delegation then insisted on separating from the Israeli team and continued their visit to the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on their own.

The American team also rejected Israeli suggestion to have Government Press Office teams document President Trump's visit to the holy sites in Jerusalem and broadcast it live. "This is a private visit," the Americans insisted.

US Ambassador David Friedman visits the Westen Wall (:  )

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The Israeli team reported the American comments to the Prime Minister's Office.

A PMO official said in response, "The claim that the Western Wall is in the West Bank was met with shock. Jerusalem is convinced this statement is at odds with President Trump's policy, as it was expressed in the firm American objection to the latest UN Security Council resolution. Israel is seeking clarifications from the US on this matter."

The new US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport on Monday afternoon and headed straight for the Western Wall to pray, where he had a chance encounter with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.
BEIRUT - Dawn air strikes on a Syrian border town in the Islamic State-held eastern province of Deir al-Zor killed at least 30 people, most of them civilians including more than a dozen children, a war monitoring group said on Monday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said jets thought to belong to the US-led coalition hit the town of Al-Bukamal near the border with Iraq. They struck near a residential area and a mosque, wounding dozens more, the Britain-based monitor said.

The Islamic State-linked media outlet Amaq said coalition strikes killed 15 people and wounded 35 others in Al-Bukamal.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition against Islamic State did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As a homeowner, you probably already know that you should be working to maintain your home. But, chances are, you Read More
Denizens of a village in Jammu's Arnia sector have been gripped by fear after two Pakistani mortar shells fell in nearby fields.

By Manjeet Sehgal: Residents of Pindi Chadkan Kalan village in Jammu's Arnia sector have been gripped by fear, and have lost sleep, ever since two mortar shells fell in nearby fields.

They hide themselves in damp, poorly-managed bunkers whenever they hear gunshots fired by Pakistan rangers at Jarwal post, located nearly a kilometre from the hamlet.

"I was brushing my teeth when splinters hit my palm. Darshana and Nikki were also hit by the splinters," says Bodh Raj, recalling a mortar shell attack from last year.

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Bodh Raj and the two other victims have yet to recover from the shock and the pain.

Last Friday, a mortar shell fell outside a house in Kaku Ki Kothi. A BSF jawan was injured in the attack.

Continuous shelling has caused panic among the women, who refuse to come out of their homes. The local administration has asked people to take precautions - particularly at night - as Pakistan may target civilian areas in the future too.

"There is no guarantee that Pakistan may not indulge in unprovoked shelling in future. We are prepared and have cautioned people," said Satish Kumar, SHO, Arnia

"We are prepared to deal with any situation," he added.

WHEAT FIELDS ON FIRE AFTER PAKISTAN SHELLING

While a sizeable chunk of forests in Naushera sector in Rajouri district has been razed by forest fires, wheat fields in Arnia Sector facing Pakistan's Jarwal Post also caught fire recently.

Locals say the fields and forests caught fire after Pakistan started shelling villages.

The India Today crew covering the border villages filmed the flames on Monday.

Naushera's wheat crop is yet to be harvested, as villages have been evacuated following indiscriminate firing by Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the administration has sounded a high alert in border areas of five districts including Kathua, Sambha, Jammu, Punch, and Rajouri.

The government has also ordered the closure of 43 schools in Mendher.

87 schools in other border areas had already been closed.

As many as 1,114 people were evacuated from seven Naushera sector villages after ceasefire violations by Pakistan. They have been shifted to four makeshift relief centres.

ALSO READ | Pakistan's ceasefire violations: Mass evacuation begins on border

ALSO READ | How India argued against Pakistan for Kulbhushan Jadhav at International Court of Justice

ALSO WATCH | Jammu: Pakistan Rangers violate ceasefire in Arnia sector

--- ENDS ---
New York: India-born former top federal prosecutor Preet Bharara, who received a phone call from US President Donald Trump just two days before he was fired, said he "was done with" the American leader and did him a favour by not returning his call.

"I was doing everyone a favour by not returning the call. I was doing the President a favour by not returning the call," Manhattan's former prosecutor said during a conversation last week with New York University's School of Law Dean Trevor Morrison here.

Two days before he was fired, 48-year-old Bharara had got a phone call from Trump's office asking him to call the President back. Bharara did not return the call. Asked if he had considered returning that call, Bharara said there are lots of regulations regarding how contacts should be made between the White House and the Justice Department.

"This is a man who campaigned day after day after day on the argument that (former President) Bill Clinton met with the sitting Attorney General during the pendency of an investigation," Bharara said, referring to the controversial meeting in Phoenix between Clinton and Loretta Lynch.

Trump had repeatedly said during the campaign trail that he did not believe that talks about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server had not come up during that meeting between her husband and Lynch and that the two had just talked about their grandchildren and other frivolous things.

Bharara said any interaction between him and Trump could have raised doubts in people's minds over any future investigation his office would have undertaken.

"Who on earth was going to believe that the President of the US in a remarkable and unprecedented fashion is cultivating a relationship with the US Attorney in Manhattan, whose jurisdiction includes various things, only to shoot the breeze? Who is going to believe that," Bharara said.

"I saved a lot of people a lot of grief (by not returning the call). At that point, I was kind of done with him (Trump) so I didn't return the call," Bharara said.

Referring to him being unceremoniously fired, Bharara recalled the meeting held with much "fanfare" between him and then president-elect Trump in Trump Towers in Manhattan shortly after the Presidential Elections. He said Trump had then explicitly asked him to stay on for another term.

Bharara also stressed the independence of the US Attorney`s Offices.

"The mass of what goes on in any US Attorney's Office is not political and doesn't become political, no matter who the president is," Bharara said.

"My job was not to serve the president, whether that`s Barack Obama or Donald Trump or anyone else. It was to serve the public, and to serve the interests of justice," he added.
The Supreme Court refused to give an urgent hearing to controversial Calcutta High Court judge CS Karnan's plea challenging his arrest order. The apex court warned Karnan's lawyer not to waste time by filing appeals repeatedly.

By India Today Web Desk: The Supreme Court today refused to entertain a plea by Kolkata High Court judge CS Karnan against his arrest order and warned his lawyers not to waste the apex court's time.

"You are wasting our time. We will hear the petition when it comes to us," the top court told Karnan's lawyer who were seeking an urgent hearing over the controversial Calcutta High judge's plea to quash his .

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The Supreme Court had sentenced Karnan to six months in jail on May 9 finding him guilty of contempt of court.

KARNAN UNTRACEABLE

A team of West Bengal police is camping in Chennai, Karnan's home town, to carry out the Supreme Court's order but has failed to locate the elusive the judge.

The visiting police team, with the aid of local police, have already questioned several persons, including the kin of Justice Karnan to trace his whereabouts.

Justice Karnan, who has been on the warpath with the Supreme Court for last several months, is the first sitting judge of a high court to be sentenced. He is due to retire next month.

WATCH: Supreme Court finds Justice CS Karnan guilty of contempt of court, sentences him to jail

ALSO READ:

How Justice Karnan's conviction in contempt case may bring order in higher judiciary

West Bengal police continue search for Justice Karnan

Justice Karnan goes 'missing' as Kolkata cops reach Chennai to arrest him

Justice CS Karnan first judge to be sentenced to jail by Supreme Court

--- ENDS ---
Tel Aviv: An Israeli patrol boat fired at Palestinian fishermen accused of breaching the blockade off the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, seriously wounding one, officials said.

Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza have fought three wars since 2008 and the strip has been under an Israeli blockade for 10 years.

Fishing off the northern part of the strip, adjacent to Israel, is limited to six nautical miles offshore and the Israeli navy regularly fires at Palestinians at the zone`s outer limit.

Fishermen`s union head Nizar Ayash said that the shooting and the arrest of four other crewmen happened in one incident and two more arrests were made when the military boarded another Gaza boat overnight.

The injured man`s family identified him as Mohammed Majed Bakr, 25.

An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the shooting but did not speak of additional arrests.

"A vessel deviated from the designated fishing zone in the northern Gaza Strip," the spokeswoman told AFP. "Naval forces in the area called upon the vessel to halt and fired warning shots into the air."

She said that the boat ignored the warning and the navy then fired at it.

"As a result of the fire a Palestinian was injured and was evacuated to an Israeli hospital for immediate medical treatment," she added.

UN officials have called for the blockade to be lifted, citing deteriorating humanitarian conditions, but Israel says it is needed to keep Hamas, which runs the strip, from importing weapons or materials used to make them.

The size of the fishing zone has varied over the years, having been set at 20 nautical miles by the Oslo accords of the 1990s before being reduced by Israeli authorities.

About 4,000 fishermen work off the coastal strip, more than half of whom live below the poverty line.
Colombo: Sri Lanka has blamed the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora for backing the genocide charge against the government as the country prepares to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the end of the three-decade long civil war.

On May 12, the Tamil nationalists started a week long commemoration of what they termed the genocide of Tamils.

Northern Provincial Council members held events in parts of the North to remember the victims of the bitter conflict by lighting oil lamps.

"We want to commemorate the genocide of over 100,000 Tamils in 2009," MK Shivajilingam a northern provincial councilor and a hardline Tamil representative had said.

"We need an international investigation into genocide," he said.

Meanwhile, Deputy Defence Minister Ruwan Wijewardene dismissed the genocide charge as an accusation by Shivajilingam at the behest of the pro-LTTE diaspora.

He is seeking support from the diaspora to carry out false propaganda, Wijewardene said adding that government troops had not carried out any genocide of Tamils.

"Shivajilingam must be glad the government troops have been able to free the Tamils from clutches of terrorism," Wijewardena said.

Both Sri Lankan troops and the LTTE were accused of grave human rights abuses during the final phase of the conflict which ended in May 2009.

The UN Human Rights Council which passed three successive resolutions on the need to investigate war crimes has prescribed an international hybrid court.

Sri Lankan is averse to allow an international probe citing the lack of constitutional provisions for foreign judges to operate in the country.
Pyongyang: North Korea on Monday celebrated the launch of what appeared to be its longest-range ballistic missile yet tested in a bid to bring the US mainland within reach, saying it was capable of carrying a "heavy nuclear warhead".

Leader Kim Jong-Un personally oversaw the test on Sunday, the official Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) said, and pictures by state media showed him gazing at the missile in a hangar before the launch.

In others he gleefully clasped hands with officers and staff after the black missile -- named as the Hwasong-12 -- ascended into the sky in the dawn light, atop a column of fire.

The isolated North is under multiple sets of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, which have triggered global alarm.

The missile was launched on an unusually high trajectory, with KCNA saying it flew to an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometres and travelled 787 kilometres before coming down in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).

That suggests a range of 4,500 kilometres (2,800 miles) or more if flown for maximum distance, analysts said.

Aside from Pyongyang`s space launches, Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in the US told AFP: "This is the longest-range missile North Korea has ever tested."

On the respected 38 North website, aerospace engineering specialist John Schilling said it appeared to demonstrate an intermediate-range ballistic missile that could "reliably strike the US base at Guam" in the Pacific.

"More importantly," he added, it "may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)".

The North has carried out two atomic tests and dozens of missile launches since the beginning of last year in its quest to develop a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States -- something President Donald Trump has vowed "won`t happen".

KCNA said the new rocket was a "perfect weapon" which was "capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead".

It cited Kim as saying the North would never succumb to what it called the "highly ridiculous" US strategy of "militarily browbeating only weak countries and nations which have no nukes".

"If the US dares opt for a military provocation against the DPRK, we are ready to counter it," it said.

Tensions between the two reached a peak in recent weeks, with Washington saying military action was an option under consideration and Pyongyang issuing threats of its own.

Trump later appeared to hold open the door to negotiations, saying he would be "honoured" to meet Kim and calling him a "smart cookie".

Last week the South elected a new president, Moon Jae-In, who advocates reconciliation with Pyongyang and said at his inauguration that he was willing "in the right circumstances" to visit the North to ease tensions.

But he slammed the latest missile test as a "reckless provocation" and said dialogue would be possible "only if the North changes its attitude".

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday that North Korea`s latest missile test was "dangerous", but he warned that Pyongyang was being intimidated and called for a peaceful solution to regional tensions.

"We consider (the missile test) counter-productive, harmful and dangerous," Putin told reporters after an international forum in Beijing.

But, he added: "We must stop intimidating North Korea and find a peaceful solution to this problem."

Pyongyang says it needs atomic weapons to defend itself against the threat of invasion.

In April it put dozens of missiles on show at a giant military parade through the capital, including one that appeared to be the type launched on Sunday.

KCNA said the test "proved to the full" the missile`s capabilities, including guidance and stabilisation systems, its engine performance in flight, and "the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation and accurate performance of detonation system".

There are doubts whether Pyongyang can miniaturise a nuclear weapon sufficiently to fit it onto a missile nose cone, and no proof it has mastered the re-entry technology needed to ensure it survives returning into Earth`s atmosphere.

Schilling said the ability to hit Guam, 3,400 kilometres away, was not a game-changer, but that the new missile could be a step along the way.

"What would change the strategic balance is an ICBM capable of reaching the US mainland," he said.

The United States called for tougher sanctions against the North, with the White House saying it "has been a flagrant menace for far too long".

Washington and Tokyo called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, which was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

China, Pyongyang`s sole major ally and main trading partner, which has been under growing US pressure to help rein in its wayward neighbour, urged restraint.
Manila: Philippine lawmakers on Monday rejected an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte that accused him of a crime against humanity over the deaths of thousands of people killed in his war on drugs.

The complaint alleged Duterte had adopted a state policy of extrajudicial killings that led to more than 8,000 deaths in his first eight months as president, and was involved in mass murder as well as widespread corruption in his previous stint as a mayor of a southern city.

The congressional justice committee quickly dismissed the complaint in its first day of hearings on the issue, overwhelmingly voting that it was "insufficient in substance".

"The complaint filed was frivolous. How can you proceed if the complaint has no basis," committee chairman Reynaldo Umali, who is a member of Duterte`s ruling party, told reporters afterwards.

The committee vote effectively ends the impeachment case, which even Duterte`s opponents conceded had little chance of prospering with the president enjoying a commanding majority in the lower house of congress.

A plenary of the lower house still needs to endorse the committee`s decision, although political observers and lawmakers said there was zero chance of Monday`s vote being overturned.

"We have nowhere to go (but) we will find a way to get justice," opposition lawmaker Gary Alejano, who filed the impeachment case, told reporters.

Duterte, 72, won presidential elections last year after promising to launch an unprecedented crackdown on crime in which tens of thousands of people would die.

Police have reported killing about 2,700 people since Duterte took office at the end of June and immediately launched his war on drugs.

Unknown assailants have killed more than 1,800 others, while about 5,700 other violent deaths are under investigation, according to police data.

Duterte has called for addicts to be slaughtered and repeatedly promised to pardon police if they are found guilty of murder while prosecuting his drug war.

But Duterte also insists that he is not breaking any laws with his rhetoric, and that police are only allowed to kill in self-defence. He has said he does not encourage or endorse extrajudicial killings.

The United Nations, the European Union and the US government have criticised the drug war, while rights groups have warned Duterte may be orchestrating a crime against humanity.

However surveys show Duterte remains a popular president at home and that many Filipinos support the drug war, believing tough tactics are needed to tackle crime.

Duterte has also won some support internationally, including from China.Duterte`s spokesman Ernesto Abella welcomed Monday`s rejection of the impeachment complaint.

"We maintained that it was from rehashed, trumped-up charges aimed at undermining the duly constituted government," Abella said.

Monday`s vote showed that Duterte still enjoyed the overwhelming backing of lawmakers, according to Gladstone Cuarteros, a political analyst at Manila`s De La Salle University.

"They are sending the message that from the first instance they will dismiss it and they are showing the president has large support. `We are the super-majority,`," Cuarteros told AFP.

A Filipino lawyer last month filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Duterte of mass murder in relation to the drug war.

However many observers saw that complaint as premature, arguing all legal remedies had yet to be exhausted in the Philippines, which is an ICC requirement.

The ICC has not given any indication as to whether it will pursue that complaint.

Alejano said Monday he was also considering filing a case with the ICC.

Cuarteros said Alejano`s failed impeachment effort could have been part of a strategy to pave the way for an ICC probe.

"He wants to show people that (Philippine) institutions are compromised because of strong support for Duterte and by extension perhaps external institutions, international organisations can step in," Cuarteros said.
Patna: Bihar Chief Minister and JD(U) national president Nitish Kumar on Monday emphatically said that he was not in the race for the prime minister's post in 2019.

"I am unnecessarily being targeted. We are a small party. I am not a fool... If I become the national president of my party, it does not mean that I harbour national aspiration (of becoming the PM)," Kumar told reporters on the sidelines of 'Lok Samvad' programme here.

Stating that he believed in working for the people, Kumar said he has served the people throughout his political career - be it as MP, Union minister and now as the chief minister.

At present, the people of Bihar have given the mandate to grand alliance and he was doing his work in a positive manner, he said.

Asked whether he has the capability to lead a non-BJP alternative, Kumar said that "I neither have any aspiration nor the ability to become the PM."

The JD(U) president, who was flanked by ministers and party leaders during interaction with the media, said that it was difficult to say as to who will emerge as the PM candidate in 2019.

"It sounds weird... I am not the claimant for the prime minister's post in 2019 (general elections)," he said.

"The person in whom people will see potential will become the prime minister. People saw potential in Narendra Modi during last elections, he has become the PM," Kumar said adding that Modi, then the Gujarat Chief Minister was not even in the frame to become the PM five years ago.

On his party having a view divergent to his ally RJD on the sanctity of EVMs, Kumar said that there cannot be one view of all parties... Different parties can have different views on various issues.

"We had a different take on demonetisation. Similarly, we are of the view that elections should be held with EVMs. But all apprehensions with regard to voting machines must be removed," he said.

With regard to a query that alcohol bottles seized during anti-liqour drive have been drained in the river Ganges, Kumar feigned ignorance about such incident.

"I don't have any such information that liquor has been drained in the holy river. The seized liquor has to be destroyed. It cannot be drained in the river," he said, adding that his government will not tolerate if any river, specially the Ganges, was polluted by any means.

On the arrest of the relative of a JD(U) youth wing office-bearer, Kumar said that the development was not any embarrassment to him or the party as he was of the view that anyone found to be violating law must be punished.

It (action against JD(U) youth wing functionary's relative) established the fact that the government machinery will act without any prejudice, howsoever high he/she may be, he said.
Mumbai: Actress Alia Bhatt has praised filmmaker SS Rajamoulis magnum opus Baahubali 2: The Conclusion and says she is keen to work with its lead actor Prabhas.

Alia spoke about Prabhas while chatting with her fans on Twitter on Sunday.

"Need a new word for this giant. Rock-buster? Loved it.. it was epic," Alia tweeted when a fan asked her to describe Baahubali 2: The Conclusion in one word.

Alia later said she considers Prabhas as her favourite south Indian actor.

Asked whether she would like to work with Prabhas, Alia wrote: "For sure!"

The 24-year-old currently has films like Dragon and Gully Boy in her kitty.

She said she is "excited" about Dragon, which also features Ranbir Kapoor.
New Delhi: The CRPF has conducted about 200 special operations with a "re-worked" strategy, apprehending 26 Maoists and seizing a huge cache of munitions, since the April ambush in Sukma where Naxals had massacred 25 of its personnel.

Of the 26 Maoists apprehended, 15 were involved in the deadly ambush in Sukma district in Chhattisgarh on April 24.

The force has also seized a huge assortment of arms and ammunition as part of these operations, an operations dossier revealed.

Newly appointed Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Director General R R Bhatnagar said today that a special focus was being laid on result-oriented operations in the south Bastar region of Chhattisgarh to curtail the strength and resources of Maoist cadres.

"Post the Burkapal incident in Sukma, we have reworked our operational strategy in south Bastar and the focus is now to conduct joint intelligence-based operations.

"Despite the harsh summers and sweltering heat, we have intensified our operations in those areas where there is a security vacuum. A number of special operations have been launched by us," the DG told PTI.

He said that the road construction work being done by the force in large parts of Chhattisgarh and a few other states will not suffer and that the CRPF will ensure their completion.

Bhatnagar, appointed as the force chief by the government two days after the April 24 ambush, recently travelled to Sukma and analysed the ambush spot, besides the site near Bheji where a dozen CRPF men were similarly killed by Naxals when they were out to conduct a road sanitisation exercise on March 11.

The operations dossier prepared by the security headquarters of anti-Naxal operations stated that after April 24, when 25 CRPF men were fatally ambushed by Naxals in Sukma, 98 such special operations were conducted in the worst Left Wing Extremism-affected district of the state.

All such tasks, the dossier accessed by PTI said, are either led by the CRPF or its special jungle warfare guerrilla force -- the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA).

The areas where these operations were launched in Sukma include villages of Karigundem, Minapa, Kasalpara, Milampalli, Tokenpalli, Phulampad, Bedapad, Gauraram, Palodi, Barmor, Potakpalli, Tumalpad, Aliguda and Regargatta.

In order to further step up offensive along the borders of Sukma, 36 such operations have been conducted till now in the neighbouring district of Dantewada while 55 have been launched in the villages and deep forest areas of Bijapur district.

"As part of these operations, it is being ensured that a good number of state police personnel form an essential part of the patrol party along with the CRPF.

"While the target is to have at least one-third strength of the squad from that of the state police, it will take some more time before these numbers are achieved for all the operations to be conducted in the future," a senior officer said.

The force, the dossier said, has also apprehended 26 Naxals as part of these post-Sukma operations, out of which 15 were involved in the Burkapal attack.

"Out of the 26, six Naxals had police warrants issued against them for various acts of violence and killing in the south Bastar area," the senior officer said.

The dossier, which has now been shared with the Chhattisgarh Police investigating the Sukma ambush, said during the attack, the CRPF men retaliated and killed two Naxal commanders identified as Anil alias Deva, who was the commander of platoon No. 24, and Ravi, commander of the Cherla LOS (local organisation squad) of the Maoists.

"Apart from these two, body of the third Maoist was recovered from the ambush site on April 27 by the CRPF. He has been identified as Mukkam Baman of Burkapal village," it said.

After the Burkapal ambush, it said, "the CRPF has apprehended 72 Maoists while 21 have surrendered before the forces in the entire LWE theatre. 17 arms, 4,304 rounds of ammunition, 291 kgs of explosives, two grenades, 85 improvised explosive devices and 5,125 detonators have also been seized. At least seven exchange of fire incidents have occurred till now between the CRPF-led security squads and the Naxals."

About 10 states are LWE-affected in the country.

After the Sukma attack, the strategic anti-Naxal operations command headquarters of the CRPF has been shifted from Kolkata to Chhattisgarh's Raipur for effective operational coordination between multiple security forces.

The lead anti-Naxal operations force is also deploying a fresh squad of about 2,000 CoBRA commandos in and around Sukma district.
New Delhi: Speaking on his ministry's latest achievement UDAN, Minister of State for Aviation Jayant Sinha in an exclusive conversation with Zee Media's Executive Director and CEO regional channels Jagdeesh Chandra informed that five aviation companies have joined the scheme and more flights would be added in routes with the increase in demand.

Appearing on the show A Dialogue with JC, the first time parliamentarian from Hazaribagh spoke about all the current issues. Jayant Sinha, who was associated with the corporate world for 25 years, joined Modi cabinet as MoS Finance after winning from his father's seat in Jharkhand.

He acknowledged the cooperation he received from the state governments. Speaking on North East, he said there are immense possibilities of new airports there. He told about the new Pakyong airport built in Sikkim. He also said that a new multimodal airport would come up in Guwahati. On the financial condition of Air India, he said the transformation plan is ready. He also added that the company is earning operational benefits but the loan burden is a matter of worry. Answering a question on fare hikes, he said price rise of fuel and security expenses are the major reasons behind such hikes.

Sinha said that in the last one year Modi government has operationlised 33 new airports. This in itself is a big achievement considering India had 75 airports in the last 75 years.

To a question on traffic conjestion in Delhi and Mumbai airports, he replied that the pressure is there on the whole network in Mumbai due to it's only runway. Considering the rising pressure on Delhi airport, he recognised the necessity of a new airport in western Uttar Pradesh. He said it would not only decrease congestion in Delhi but also benefit the industries of this region. Speaking on the Gaikwad-Air India episode, he said, his ministry is working on the formulation of No Fly List with regard to the safety also.

Jayant Sinha when asked about his government's aims in the coming two years, answered his governemt would provide better facilities to the poors. For his constituency, Jayant said, a new airport is coming up in Hazaribagh. He also added that Raghwar Das governemt is working for the betterment of the people in Jharkhand. Road connectivity is getting better, power is being provided to the villages and Dobhas are being built for conserving water.

Speaking on the Modi Model of development, he said many developing countries are learning from us. He gave all the credits to PM Modi and Party president Amit Shah for recent victories in state elections especially Uttar Pradesh. Finally he said that opposition should think of contesting with them only in the year 2034.
New Delhi: RBI has asked banks to follow the instructions of government organisation CERT-In to prevent the attack by ransomware, 'WannaCry', which has impacted various IT networks in over 150 countries.

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has come out with list of dos and don'ts and webcast on how to protect networks from the global ransomware attack.

It has been reported that a new ransomware 'WannaCry' is spreading widely, RBI advisory to the banks said.

Wannacry encrypts the files on infected Windows system and spreads by exploiting vulnerabilities, it said.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) also asked all banks to put in place a software update at ATMs to prevent their systems from a malware that has attacked payment systems across the world.

In a separate malware attack last year, 3.2 lakh debit card were compromised in the country. Data of the users who transacted from ATM machines of Hitachi were compromised during three months of May, June and July last year. The Hitachi ATMs deployed by many White Label ATM players and Yes Bank were impacted by the malware.

According to reports Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) are highly vulnerable to such malware attacks as they presently run on old version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, making a software security patch update a necessary exercise.

There are a total of 2.2 lakh ATMs in India, of which many old ones run on Windows XP.

Over the weekend, the ransomware has hit systems in more than 150 countries, including Russia and the UK, in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history. It infected computers running on older versions of Microsoft operating systems like XP, locking access to files on the computer.

The cyber criminals have demanded a fee of about USD 300 in crypto-currencies like Bitcoin for unlocking the device.

Microsoft has introduced a security patch to tackle the situation, and consumers across the globe have been advised to download the solution at the earliest.

CERT-In today said it has not received any formal report of cyber attack on India's vital networks by the crippling global ransomware, 'WannaCry'.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had said yesterday that a few systems of the Police Department in Andhra Pradesh were impacted and that the state government has been informed to follow the advisory by the CERT-In.

Besides, the Maharashtra Police department said it was partially hit by the ransomware.

Following the alert, the Gujarat government began equipping its state computer systems with anti-virus softwares and upgrading its Microsoft operating systems.

As per the advisory issued by CERT-In, the ransomware infects other computers on the same network and is also spreading through malicious attachments to e-mails. Security firms have suggested that users immediately disconnect the infected device from the local network to contain the spread of infection.

In Spain, major companies including telecommunications firm Telefonica have been infected. The most disruptive attacks were reported in the UK, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers.
New Delhi: Two college students died and five others were injured after their car fell off from the Punjabi Bagh flyover in west Delhi on Monday morning, the police said.

The car had seven occupants who were on their way to appear for an exam. While two persons died, the others are undergoing treatment at a city hospital.

The victims are first-year students of Delhi Institute of Professional Studies. They were on their way to IP College in Narela for their second-semester exam when the accident occurred, a senior police officer said.

The deceased have been identified as Sanchit and Ritu. Those injured were Pranav, Garima, Rishab, Rajat, and Raja, the police said.

The students, who were all in their teens, had assembled at Rajat's house in east Punjabi Bagh and were going to their exam centre, they added. Rajat was driving the vehicle and it is suspected that he might be speeding.

The police are waiting to record the statements of those injured in the accident to ascertain the sequence of events. The injured are still unconscious, they added.
By Devarsi Ghosh: There are some people you can get the best out of if you just leave them alone. Kangana Ranaut is one such person.

Kangana Ranaut is at her best when she is the sole driving force in a film. Sure, she has delivered blockbusters which were multi-starrers. Fashion, for instance. Or Krrish 3. But the first gave Kangana her first National Award and she got seriously noticed for her work in the Priyanka Chopra-starrer. But Krrish 3 was an out-and-out Hrithik Roshan vehicle and all Kangana got to do in the film was leap around in spandex and romance Hrithik.

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Here is the thing: If you saddle Kangana Ranaut with heroes, you will not get peak Kangana. Hence, Kangana Ranaut could not rattle any cages with her last two releases, Katti Batti and Rangoon. Kangana Ranaut is such a superior performer, a furious force of nature, that if you put another male superstar opposite her, all he will do is dampen her performance and steal her thunder. Not because of any fault of Kangana's but because few can match up to the delirium so innate and fundamental in Kangana Ranaut's best performances.

Which is why the recently released teaser of Simran seemed very pleasant to the eyes. The teaser, exactly one-minute long, is pretty much a show-reel for Kangana Ranaut. She is seen in various get-ups, one could say disguises, laughing, jumping, frowning and running from one end of the frame to the other. The Simran teaser immediately tells you that this is a one-woman show entirely and it will be 120 minutes of pure, unadulterated Kangana Ranaut, the last of which we had seen in Queen.

Without the baggage of having to play a romantic interest to a male superstar or having to play a part in somebody else's story, Kangana Ranaut looks spontaneous. She looks like she can catch you by surprise with her performance in Simran like she has before in the Tanu Weds Manu films and Queen.

Now, yes, Tanu Weds Manu and Tanu Weds Manu Returns did have Madhavan playing Kangana Ranaut's romantic interest but Madhavan did not have the star-wattage, so to speak, to overshadow or chip away at Kangana's performance. Kangana Ranaut had the more showy, author-backed role in both the films. It is in films such as these, which appear to be exclusively written for Kangana Ranaut, that she gives her best performances.

Simran seems to be the kind of film that can catapult a new star, playing the protagonist, to super-stardom and an established star to next-level success. Written by Aligarh and Shahid scribe Apurva Asrani, Simran is the story of a Gujarati NRI housewife Praful Patel who takes to a world of crime because of financial woes. Supposedly based on the real story of 'Bombshell Bandit', Sandeep Kaur, who started off as a nurse in US only to become a bank robber. She got convicted of robbing four banks in the US in April, 2015, and got a 66-month imprisonment term.

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If this is not a role that Kangana Ranaut can pull off with adequate Kangana-ness, what else is? The failure of Rangoon coupled with the malicious scandal she got involved in with Hrithik Roshan and of course, the nepotism-Karan Johar debate... amidst all these, what fans of Kangana Ranaut and cinema really missed was a solid Kangana Ranaut performance. Simran looks like it won't disappoint.

(The writer tweets as @devarsighosh.)

WATCH: Kangana Ranaut's Simran looks like the Queen sequel we had all been waiting for

WATCH: Kangana Ranaut on being called a witch, whore and a psychopath

--- ENDS ---
New Delhi: The Mishra-Kejriwal battle is hotting up, with family members taking sides in a public war of words.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's wife, Sunita, took potshots at his former disciple and now chief detractor, Kapil Mishra, on Twitter today.

"Law of nature never errs. Seeds of deceit, lies sown, so shall he @KapilMishra reap. Inevitable," the former income tax commissioner tweeted.

Mishra was quick to respond to the barb.

"Sunita ji is a very committed wife. She doesn't know what type of conspiracies are being hatched in her house. She is fulfilling her duties," the former minister -- sacked by Kejriwal last week -- said on Twitter

Mishra's mother, Annapurna Mishra, had fired a public salvo at Kejriwal last week, accusing him in an open letter of spreading "falsehood" against her son by saying he was associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In today's Twitter battle, Mishra suggested Kejriwal was using his wife's account to post messages.

"Sir @ArvindKejriwal return Sunita ji phone to her," tweeted Mishra, who had yesterday accused Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party of receiving illegal donations from shell companies.

In another message, the sacked minister said he was not going to "utter a single word" against Sunita Kejriwal.

"Sunita ji is unaware of truth. She is upset with her husband's downfall. I respect every negative comment from her side. (But) I will not utter a single word against her," Mishra tweeted.

Though Sunita is not seen to be dabbling in politics, her attack on Mishra was the second in a week.

She had called Mishra "stupid" without naming him in a tweet last week after the Anti-Corruption Branch registered an FIR against a company that belonged to Kejriwal's late brother-in-law, Surender Bansal, in another scam.

"My brother in law is no more n this stupid man is speaking all written script without any mind," Sunita had tweeted on May 8, a day after Bansal's death.

Mishra's mother, meanwhile, accused Kejriwal's "closest friends" of circulating "misleading photographs on the social media.

"How many lies, Arvind? How many... Lies will not help you. Be afraid of God," she said in the letter.
New Delhi: Higher demand in the Middle-East and South-East Asia could help India's gems and jewellery export grow this fiscal to about USD 42 billion, an export promotion body said on Monday.

In 2016-17, the export totalled at around USD 36 billion.

According to Anil Sankhwal, Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) northern region chairman, Europe poses a challenge to exporters.

"But in the US, Middle-East nations and South-East Asia, demand is growing. We are expecting that our exports will reach about USD 41-42 billion this fiscal," Sankhwal told reporters here.

He also expressed concern over imposition of 5 percent import duty by Dubai on gold and diamond jewellery.

"The move would impact India's exports. We are discussing measures to deal with the situation as Dubai is an important market," Sankhwal said.

About steps to boost export, he said GJEPC is organising a buyer-seller meet in the national capital.

A three-day event -- India SAARC-Middle East Buyer Seller Meet -- started yesterday.

"In this meet, 38 domestic manufacturers and 70 international buyers from South Asia, the Middle-East, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Qatar are participating," he said.

On display is a wide range of jewellery products by exhibitors.

"There is a huge potential in these markets. The event provides a platform to bring traders together and explore business opportunities," he said.
New Delhi: A giant, decaying sea creature found washed up on the shores of Seram Island in Indonesia's Maluku province earlier this week has baffled residents, who initially thought it was a giant squid.

However, after further examination, officials now said that the remains of the massive marine animal looks more like a sperm whale.

As per reports, the almost 50-feet long carcass was discovered by 37-year-old local resident Asrul Tuanakota near Iha village in West Seram district on Tuesday evening (09/05).

Watch the video below!

Nasrun, who works for the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries in West Seram, was quoted by news portal Detik.com as saying that it was most likely a whale.

It is a type of sperm whale, Nasrun, who works for the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries in West Seram, was quoted by news portal Detik.com as saying.

According to Nasrun, residents insisted that the dead animal was a squid because part of the remains looked like tentacles.
Chandigarh: Haryana Police chief B S Sandhu on Monday directed the Commissioners and the Superintendents of Police to constitute Special Investigation Teams and initiate legal action in sensitive cases.

The direction of the Director General of Police (DGP) came during a meeting with the Commissioners of Police (CPs), the Inspectors General of Police (IGPs), the Superintendents of Police (SPs) and Deputy Superintendents of Police (DSPs) via video conferencing here today, in the wake of the brutal gang rape and murder of a Dalit woman from Sonipat.

In view of the overwhelming response from the people about 'Operation Durga', launched last month, he said it would continue to ensure safety of women and provide them a secure environment.

He directed the officers to ensure publicity of women helpline number 1091, so that they could contact police in case of any emergency.

Gazetted officer in each women?s police station would be responsible for examining information received on the helpline on a daily basis The officer would inform supervising officers of police stations concerned about any sensitive incident, it was informed in the meeting.

The supervising officers would take immediate action on such information and ensure its disposal.

Sensitisation training would be provided to police officers and other employees dealing with cases of crimes against women at district level, he added, according to an official release.

He said that scheme was being prepared to effectively assess and rebut any information being posted on social media so that wrong information does not reach the people.

Sandhu also directed to maintain enhanced vigilance round-the-clock in districts Gurugram, Faridabad, Rewari, Panipat, Panchkula and Yamunanagar, which had larger number of women employees.
New Delhi: Ensuring speedy justice by fast track courts over the horrific Rohtak gang-rape incident, Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar on Monday said the culprits involved in the brutal crime will not be spared.

"Two of the culprits have been nabbed. The police is actively investigating the matter. Culprits involved in such ghastly acts won't be spared, will ensure speedy justice by fast track courts," Khatta told the media here.

On May 9th, a woman was brutally gang-raped and murdered, wherein later her mutilated body was found in an empty plot in Haryana's Rohtak.

The incident came to light when the victim's body was found in the city's IMT area.

The victim had allegedly refused a marriage proposal, following which the accused reached her home a week later with his friends.

A heated argument broke out which resulted in the woman slapping him.

In revenge, the accused along with his friends allegedly raped and murdered her.

The family of the victim said that on May 9, at least five to six youth abducted her from the gate of a private company.

After that the accused took her to a deserted place and gang-raped her.

The victim's mother said that the accused have been pressurizing the woman for marriage for the past one year.

The forensic reports suggested that the victim was mutilated with sharp-edged weapons.

Later, the accused tried to run her over to hide her identity.

"The victim was tortured and her body was mutilated after the gang rape. She was killed after being raped involving at least seven people.

Her skull was smashed in a way which indicates that she was run over by a vehicle in order to hide her identity," the forensic team has stated.

The victim was living with her mother and brother and used to work in a private medicine company.

The woman's parents had filed a missing complaint, based on which the police tracked her parents down.

The parents were called to Rohtak to identify her body.

The distraught parents have claimed that this ghastly attack was carried out by the girl's neighbour and have demanded capital punishment for the rapists.
Vienna: India and Pakistan on Monday presented their arguments at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Kulbushan Jadhav's case with New Delhi invoking the court's jurisdiction to see that the death sentence against him was annulled immediately.

Here is what Pakistan submitted before the court:

1/ Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a "spy" involved in terror activities.

2/ India's application on Jadhav must be dismissed on three counts - there is no agency, relief sought is manifestly unavailable and the jurisdiction is limited.

3/ Its application on Kulbhushan Jadhav is unnecessary and misconceived.

4/ India hasn't been able to prove that Jadhav is an Indian national or he is not a terrorist.

5/ India has not been able to give an explanation for Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name.

6/ Jadhav was given a fair trial and nothing can be further from truth.

7/ India's allegation that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran is far fetched.

8/ India was using the court as the "scene of political theatre" but "we will not respond in kind".

9/ There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistan's accusations on Jadhav.

10/ ICJ is not a criminal court of appeal nor does it exercise criminal jurisdiction.
Singapore: Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba today attended Singapore's first International Maritime Review held at the country's prime Changi Naval Base here.

Lanba attended the review along with navy ships INS Sahyadri and INS Kamorta.

A total of 46 warships from 28 countries are in Singapore for the review, an event organised by the Republic of Singapore Navy's (RSN) to celebrate its 50th years of establishment.

Admiral Lanba will also attend the International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (IMDEX) 2017 tomorrow.

His visit aims to consolidate existing Maritime Cooperation initiatives as well as explore new avenues between India and Singapore.

Defence cooperation between the two countries is robust and is primarily focused towards Maritime Cooperation.

India signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement with Singapore in 2003, which was renewed in 2015.

Indian Navy and Singapore Navy are partners in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), a Maritime Cooperation construct conceptualised and pioneered by Indian Navy in 2008.

The Indian and Singapore navies will conduct bilateral exercise "SIMBEX" off Singapore from 18 to May 24.

Both countries have been conducting "SIMBEX" since 1994.

Both navies also engage in Navy to Navy Staff Talks, which commenced in 2004.

The 12th Staff Talks were conducted in March 2017 and the 13th Staff Talks are scheduled to be held in 2018.

The Singapore Navy has participated in all the MILAN- series interactions organised at Port Blair by the Indian Navy.

Warships of both countries regularly visit each other's ports.

Lanba, who arrived in the country yesterday, held extensive talks with his Singaporean counterpart Lai Chung Han and explored ways to further step up maritime cooperation between the two countries.
New Delhi: The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) on Monday told the Supreme Court that the dispute was not just the issue of triple talaq but the prevalence of patriarchy among communities.

The board told a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar, which was hearing pleas challenging the constitutional validity of triple talaq, that all patriarchal societies discriminate.

Sibal told a bench, also comprising Justices Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, that there was a difference between personal law and customs and usage.

"All patriarchal societies are partial. In Hinduism, a father can will away his property to anyone, but not in the Muslim community. I can point out many such practices in the Hindu society. Is it better for a woman to apply for divorce and fight for 16 years and get nothing," Sibal said.

He said in some areas of Himachal Pradesh, polygamy was practiced but it has been protected since it is a custom and only society will decide when to change it.

The arguments of AIMPLB remained inconslusive and will continue tomorrow.

During the hearing, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said that AIMPLB should apologise for justifying triple talaq in its affidavit by saying that men have greater strength to control their emotions. PTI MNL ABA SJK RKS ARC

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said that all the three forms of divorce among the Muslim community ?- talaq-e-biddat, talaq hasan and talaq ahsan, were "unilateral" and "extra- judicial".

"Yes, we can bring law. There is no law for past 60 years. It has not been done. But the court should first strike down these practices which are not in confirmity with the Constitution," he said.

Rohatgi said that since the court is dealing with only one form of talaq, therefore he was restricting itself to one form only although he considered all forms as wrong and unconstitutional.

The attorney general said the issues of Muslim marriage and divorce were separated from religion in Shariat Act of 1937 itself and have been codified as personal law under Section 2 of the Act.

He said the apex court has to test them on the touch- stone of the fundamental rights of gender equality, justice, dignity, gender discrimination and human rights under the constitutional provisions, including Articles 14, 15, 21 and 51A.

"Muslim women must have equal rights to property, succession, marriage and it should be non-discriminatory among the women of same class and other communities," Rohatgi said.

Rohatgi said when half the population of a particular community is not empowered, no equal opportunity is given, they are devoid of gender equality, then it does not pass the test of constitutional morality.

He said even if triple talaq is considered as an essential part of religion and falls under Article 25, the practice still has to be constitutionally moral.

"Even if talaq is considered under Article 25, it has to be related to the fundamental rights and should abide by the principles of gender equality, non-discrimination and justice," the AG said, adding that all personal laws have to be in confirmatory with the Constitution.

To this, the bench insisted that the government has to first prove that this practice of triple talaq was not essential to Islam and only then can it delve further into other aspects.

Rohatgi pointed out that it was not the apex court's job to interpret a religion and said "You cannot go into essential principle because it is not an ecclesiastical court"

To buttress his argument that practices or customs were not an essential part of religion, he said that in the Hindu religion, women used to practice Sati till the law termed it as illegal and obsolete.

As far as Hindu laws are considered, various reformatory steps were taken but with regard to Muslim laws no such steps were taken, he said.
New Delhi: The Defence Acquisition Council on Monday discussed the much-awaited 'strategic partnership model' under which select private firms would manufacture fighter jets, helicopters and submarines in India in partnership with foreign companies.

Defence Ministry sources said the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by Defence Minister Arun Jaitley, made "forward movement" towards finalising the 'strategic partnership (SP) model', covering "substantial ground".

Under SP model, select Indian defence firms will be allowed to exclusively build various military platforms for a specified period of time in partnership with chosen foreign entities.

The sources termed the outcome of the deliberations "positive".

Last week, Jaitley had a meeting on the SP model with representatives of defence arms of leading groups including Larsen and Toubro, Ashok Leyland, Mahindra and Mahindra, Reliance Infra, Tata Group, Punj Lloyd, Adani Group and Bharat Forge Ltd.

Opinion is divided on whether to select only one private sector company for each segment identified for defence indigenisation or look for other options.

The Defence Ministry has been maintaining that it was working towards institutionalising a transparent, objective and functional mechanism to encourage broader participation of the private sector in defence manufacturing.

The DAC may again deliberate on some of the issues relating to the proposed SP model before it is taken up by the Cabinet Committee on Security.

At last week's meeting, some industry representatives had favoured a level playing field and expanding the industry base by allowing entry of new players. Some stressed on exercising caution and ensuring that the model does not block the flow of new technology to the sector.

It was learnt that some officials also raised concern about possible "judicial intervention and federal audit" in case of award of successive orders to one 'strategic partner'.

The proposed model envisages 'sequential award' of contracts for four selected segments, and some industry representatives felt such arrangements will lead to delays in implementation of mega projects.

The SP model was proposed by the Dhirendra Singh Committee in July, 2015. It had said for the 'Make in India' initiative to become wider in the defence sector, the government should adopt a strategic partnership model, whereby a private firm is chosen for the development of a specific identified platform.

Last year, the then Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had announced that the policy on SP model would be unveiled soon.
Suspended AAP leader Kapil Mishra said that whenever he would be discharged from the hospital, he will make a written complaint to the CBI and the CBDT under black money, hawala and money laundering cases against Arvind Kejriwal and the AAP.

By India Today Web Desk: To take forward his corruption charges against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party, suspended AAP leader Kapil Mishra on Monday said that he will approach the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT).

"Whenever I would be discharged from the hospital, I will make a written complaint to the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Central Board of Direct Taxes under black money, hawala and money laundering cases (against Kejriwal and the AAP)," Mishra tweeted.

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THE ALLEGATIONS

On Sunday, Mishra accused the party of lying to the Election Commission (EC) about donations and money laundering through shell companies, before he fainted midway through the presser and was hospitalised.

He called Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal corrupt and dared him to quit failing which he "would drag him by collar to Delhi's Tihar jail".

Addressing a press conference, Mishra alleged that the AAP had over Rs 45 crore in its bank account during the financial year of 2013-2014 whereas the party in its declaration to the EC had showed an income of around Rs 9 crore. He said the party concealed around Rs 36 crore from the party workers and the government.

Mishra told the media at his residence that AAP had received "crores of rupees" from "shell companies" run by people close to Kejriwal, mentioning in particular AAP legislators Shiv Charan Goel and Naresh Yadav. These shell companies, Mishra alleged, also had "ghost" directors who donated money to the party and converted "black money into white".

The AAP refuted Mishra's charges and said he was "parroting" the Bharatiya Janata Party. In another press conference, AAP MLAs Goel and Yadav denied links with the entities named by Mishra and said they would file a defamation suit against him.

SUNITA KEJRIWAL SLAMS KAPIL MISHRA

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's wife, Sunita Kejriwal slammed Kapil Mishra saying that he would face the consequences of the false allegations that he has made.

"Law of nature never errs, seeds of betrayal, false allegations sown, so shall he (Kapil Mishra) reap. Inevitable," she tweeted.

Mishra in his tweet about Sunita Kejriwal has said, "Sunita Kejriwal is a very loyal wife, she would not say anything against her husband. She has no idea what vicious plans are being made in her own house.

Sunita Kejriwal doesn't know the truth, she is worried about her husband's downfall."

The former minister has been on an indefinite hunger strike since May 10, at his official residence here, demanding that Kejriwal must reveal the source of funding of the foreign trips of five AAP leaders -- Sanjay Singh, Ashish Khetan, Raghav Chadhha, Satyendar Jain and Durgesh Pathak -- in the last two years.

Mishra was sacked on May 6 in a sudden move and later was also suspended from the party.

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Also Read:

Kapil Mishra faints after calling Arvind Kejriwal corrupt; AAP blames BJP, Congress demands probe

Kapil Mishra 'exposes' Arvind Kejriwal: All you need to know about the charges against Aam Aadmi Party

Kapil Mishra fires 'donation scam' salvo at Kejriwal, AAP deflects it towards BJP, Congress

Kapil Mishra continues fast, promises another AAP expose as cops reach his home in late-night drama

--- ENDS ---
New Delhi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Monday that Harish Salve, who fought India's case at the International Court of Justice against the death sentence given to Kulbhushan Jadhav by Pakistan, has charged Rs 1 as fees.

The EAM tweeted:

Not fair. #HarishSalve has charged us Rs.1/- as his fee for this case. https://t.co/Eyl3vQScrs  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) May 15, 2017

Her tweet was in response to a comment by one Sanjeev Goyal, who said that India could have got any good lawyer with much less fee than what Salve must have charged.

Salve was India's lead attorney at the ICJ hearing the case of Indian national Jadhav.

India and Pakistan on Monday clashed at (ICJ over the fate of alleged 'spy' Jadhav with New Delhi invoking the court's jurisdiction to see that the death sentence against him was annulled immediately.



But Pakistan rejected the plea on the ground that India had no right to invoke the jurisdiction of the UN's highest court because the Vienna Convention does not provide for matters relating to spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.



However, Islamabad suffered a jolt when it was not allowed by the court to play the video containing a purported confession by Jadhav, a former navy official, who India says was abducted from Iran and taken to Balochistan.



At the end of the day's proceedings ICJ President Ronny Abraham announced that the verdict in the matter would be given "as soon as possible" and the date delivered in a public sitting.



The Indian case was put up strongly by Salve who demanded that Pakistan should annul Jadhav's death sentence and see that he was not executed as his trial was held under "farcical" circumstances in violation of the Vienna Convention.



"I urge the ICJ to ensure that Jadhav is not executed, Pakistan reports to this court that the action (of not executing him) is taken and that no action is taken that might prejudice the rights of India in the matter of Jadhav," Salve said in his over 90-minute presentation.



The ICJ had last week "stayed" the execution on a petition by India, which approached the UN court after 46 years on an issue with Pakistan.



Jadhav was awarded the death sentence by a Pakistani military court last month, a year after he was arrested on espionage charges. India says Jadhav has been kidnapped and framed. Islamabad has rejected 16 Indian requests for consular access to Jadhav, who is held at an unknown prison in Pakistan.



The brunt of Salve's argument was that the entire matter of arrest, chargesheet and trial of Jadhav were all done in violation of the UN Charter and Vienna Convention in farcical circumstances and on concocted charges as the Indian national was not given legal assistance to defend himself, as per IANS.



Salve said the matter was "grave and urgent" as Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran on March 16, 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and confession was extracted in custody before a magistrate. He was incommunicado and the trial was also held incommunicado.



The lawyer urged the ICJ President to take note of the farcical nature of the circumstances of the military court.



Salve said the provisions of the Vienna Convention recognised that any prisoner has a right to be tried by an independent tribunal as established by law and he should be tried in his presence and defended by legal aid assigned to him. In Jadhav's case all the basic provisions of human rights were "thrown to the wind", he said.



The facts presented by India establish the violation of all principles of UN charter and Vienna Convention because of the nature of the trial which destroyed any credibility or sanctity of the army court's decision sentencing him to death, he said.



Salve cited three past similar cases in which the international court had intervened. These cases include Paraguay versus the US in which the court decided that the American government needed to take steps to give rights of access of a Paraguayan national.



In Germany versus the US, Salve said, the court held that execution of a German national was "an irreparable damage to justice". He also referred to a case between the US and Mexico in which lives of 54 Mexicans were at stake as they faced execution.



Pakistan mounted a strong defence of its case with Counsel Khawar Qureshi rejecting India's attempts to invoke ICJ's jurisdiction in the case, saying provisions of the Vienna Convention did not apply on spies, terrorists and those who indulge in espionage.



Rebutting India's case, he asserted that this forum is not a criminal court of appeal nor does it exercise criminal jurisdiction.



"India's plea for invoking provisions of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention is not relevant in this case. The Vienna Convention was adopted for better communication between friendly countries. But it cannot apply in this case of a spy set up by a state.



"It is clear from the Vienna Convention that the provision being sought under Article 36 by India cannot be entertained by this court," Qureshi said in his 45-minute reply to arguments put forth by Indian counsel Harish Salve earlier.



The lawyer claimed that India had on September 8, 1974 told the ICJ to exclude itself from its jurisdiction in disputes with Pakistan and from any interpretation and obligation of multi-lateral treaties.



He also noted that Pakistan had reservations over the jurisdiction of ICJ on matters it considered as impinging on its national security.



Qureshi also dismissed India's charge that Jadhav was kidnapped.



"No evidence was provided by India to back the charge that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran. We have a long border with India where millions of people reside. If we wanted, one of them could have been picked up. To say that we abducted Jadhav from Iran and brought him to Pakistan seems at best to be far fetched."



He said India had at no point made any comment on the Muslim name of Jadhav on the passport seized from him. "This requires explanation."



Qureshi said the issue of consular access to Jadhav was not considered as he was accused of spying and it was not considered to be applied on terrorists.



Overall, the relief India is seeking from this court is not available and the "provisional measures" sought by India cannot be initiated, Qureshi said.



He said parallels drawn by Salve of the precedents of cases relating to involving US and other countries, including Mexico and Germany, were not relevant and factually incorrect.



At the outset, Qureshi said India was invoking the jurisdiction of the court for "political theatre" and described as "bizzare" the description of Jadhav's trial as a kangaroo court.



Dismissing India's contention that it invoked the jurisdiction of the court because of the "imminent" possibility of execution of Jadhav, Qureshi said the court was bound to settle disputes between countries peacefully and not waste time on issues sought to be raised for political purpose.



In this regard, he cited the possibility of clemency which was mentioned by Pakistan Foreign Advisor Sartaj Aziz.



Qureshi also said India did not respond to communication from Pakistan in January this year seeking cooperation in the probe relating to Jadhav.

(With IANS inputs)
The Hague: India on Monday earnestly appealed to the international court to immediately suspend the death sentence awarded to alleged spy Kulbushan Jadhav in Pakistan.

As The Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearing Jadhav's case, India argued that human rights treated as "basics" all over had been thrown to the wind by Pakistan.

We want appropriate legal representation for Jadhav, India told the UN's main judicial body which has stayed his death sentence.

Putting up a spirited defence, lawyer Harish Salve, who led the Indian legal team at the ICJ, said that Jadhav had been framed on the basis of confessional statements extracted from him when he was in Pakistan's military custody.

India further underlined that "the situation is grave" and said there was fear that Jadhav may be executed even before the court decides the case.

Salve said the matter was "urgent and hence India approached this court" that took up the case "at such a short notice".

He told the court that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran in 2016, brought to Pakistan, presented as an alleged Indian spy and confession was extracted in a military custody.

"Pakistan did not inform India of the arrest," Salve said, pointing out that India had moved the ICJ seeking suspension of the sentence awarded to Jadhav by a military court following a "farcical trial".

The former Indian Navy officer was awarded the death sentence by a Pakistani military court last month, a year after he was arrested on espionage charges. India says Jadhav has been kidnapped and framed.

Islamabad has rejected 16 Indian requests for consular access to Jadhav, who is held at an unknown prison in Pakistan.

Salve said a communication from Pakistan dated May 12 didn't clarify what the charges against Jadhav were.

"Pakistan said Jadhav's sentence is based on credible evidence in espionage against Pakistan. India refuses these allegations. India has taken measures to ensure appropriate legal measures for Jadhav. It is not known whether Jadhav will seek clemency in the present circumstances."

He described Jadhav's trial process as "farcical" and stressed that Pakistan did not respond to Jadhav's mother's plea to see her son.

Salve cited three past similar cases in which the ICJ had intervened. These cases include Paraguay versus the US in which the court decided that the American government needed to take steps to give rights of access of a Paraguayan national.

In Germany vs the US, Salve said, the court held that execution of a German national was "an irreparable damage to justice".

Watch India's line of argument here:

#WATCH Arguments by India before International Court of Justice in Kulbhushan Jadhav case, in The Hague, Netherlands https://t.co/1d4En7XlJU  ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

Deepak Mittal, an Indian official, told the court in his opening remarks that there was a fear that Jadhav may be executed soon even before the decision of the UN court. "Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed."

Mittal told ICJ president Ronny Abraham, who presided over the proceedings, that India's repeated requests to Pakistan on consular access to Jadhav were denied.

"India learnt from press reports that the death sentence was awarded to Jadhav on the basis of an alleged confession. Pakistan has not provided the charge sheet, any documents on the case despite repeated requests.

"It is clear that Jadhav has been denied of his right to seek legal counsel. Jadhav's parents have applied for visa to travel to Pakistan which has fallen on deaf ears."

VD Sharma, a Joint Secretary in the External Affairs Ministry and co-agent, said Pakistan had failed to comply with all its legal obligations by denying consular access to Jadhav ever since he was arrested in March 2016.

Sharma also urged the court to restrain Pakistan from "giving effect to the sentence awarded by the military court" and to direct it to annul its decision.

The day-long hearing, which began on Monday morning, involves two sessions of an hour-and-a-half each to India and Pakistan to make their cases.

Pakistan's session will begin in the afternoon.

India had appealed against the death sentence on May 08, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by Pakistan. On May 09, ICJ gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province.

The ICJ was last a battleground for India and Pakistan nearly 18 years ago when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will on Monday begin hearing India's plea seeking an immediate suspension of the death penalty awarded to its national Kulbhushan Jadhav by a military court in Pakistan.

The hearing at the ICJ will begin around 1:30 pm Indian Standard Time (IST).

The hearings will be devoted to the request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by India, the ICJ had said in a release.

Pakistan had earlier said that it will make a decision within the next few days on Indias appeal before an international court to stay the execution of the Indian national accused of spying, even as New Delhi defended its move saying an innocent mans life was under threat.

Islamabads reaction came after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) stayed on Tuesday the execution of former Indian naval officer Jadhav, who was convicted of espionage and sabotage by a Pakistani military court on April 10.

The ICJs intervention is being seen by some as a reprieve for Jadhav. But efforts by India to secure the 46-year-old mans release will have to navigate increasingly tense ties with its arch rival.

Pakistan is reviewing the move by India and a decision in this regard will be issued accordingly, Sartaj Aziz, foreign affairs adviser to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said, adding a statement will be issued in the next few days.

He also said the Pakistani government will review the ICJs jurisdiction in the case. But the Pakistani Army appeared defiant.

Pakistani military spokesman Asif Ghafoor said it will respond at an appropriate level to any query by the ICJ on Jadhav. His comments came shortly after their army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa met Sharif to discuss the court order.

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif also accused India of using Jadhavs death sentence to divert attention from what he said was New Delhis state-sponsored terrorism in Pakistan.

Jadhav was allegedly arrested in Balochistan in March 2016. Pakistan accused Jadhav of spying for his countrys external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

India had warned that if Jadhav was hanged, it would be considered premeditated murder.

In New Delhi, the foreign ministry defended its decision to move the international court for the first time since 1971.

Kulbhushan Jadhav is in illegal detention in Pakistan and his life is under threat, external affairs ministry spokesperson Gopal Baglay said.

We made 16 requests for consular access to Jadhav but there was no response from Pakistan on the demand.

India believes the ICJ can look into Jadhavs case as the two countries are signatories to the optional protocol of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR). The protocol says any dispute arising out of the interpretation or application of VCCR shall lie within the jurisdiction of the ICJ.

Indian lawyers seemed divided over Indias decision.

I am not sure it is a wise move to go to the ICJ. Pakistan could cite precedence when India said the ICJ has no jurisdiction in a case in 1999 involving Pakistan, said Narendra Singh, the secretary general of the Indian Society of International Law.

New Delhi listed in 1974 subjects linked to India that the ICJ can adjudicate. India does not accept the ICJs jurisdiction on disputes with the government of any state which is or has been a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

In 1999, a Pakistani military plane was shot down in Indian airspace over the Rann of Kutch. When Pakistan approached the ICJ, India said the international court didnt have the jurisdiction to hear the case. The court accepted the argument.

Shashank Kumar, who previously worked with the ICJ said: As the bases for jurisdiction are separate, a comparison with what happened in the aerial incident case, in my view, does not really answer whether Pakistan may at present comply or not.

Senior lawyer Harish Salve will represent India when the ICJ hears the Jadhav case. India will seek directions to Pakistan to annul the execution order issued in violation of international law.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, said to be instrumental in moving the international court, tweeted that she spoke to the Jadhavs mother about the ICJ order.

With PTI inputs
Beijing: India will have a very small role to play if it decides to join the OBOR initiative in the future, China's state-run Global Times reported on Monday.

The commentary published on the concluding day of the two-day One Belt and Road (OBOR) summit here, described India as an "onlooker" and said New Delhi appeared more anxious than the actual players.

India would never succeed in stopping other neighbours from joining OBOR, or from seeking Chinese infrastructural assistance, the article said.

China had invited India to participate in six separate forums as part of a two-day OBOR summit being held in Beijing.

But India had decided to boycott it, saying Connectivity projects must be pursued in a manner that respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity".

"We are of the firm belief that connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognised international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality, MEA spokesperson Gopal Baglay said.

Baglay said, "We have been urging China to engage in a meaningful dialogue. We are awaiting a positive response from the Chinese side."

The two-day Belt and Road Forum is being attended by leaders from 29 countries, including Pakistan. India has boycotted the event due to sovereignty concerns over the $50 billion CPEC.

On the concluding day of the summit on Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that a total of 68 countries and international organizations signed the One Belt and One Road (OBOR) cooperation agreements with China.

Meanwhile, the Chinese foreign ministry dismissed India's concerns over the OBOR initiative, saying the CPEC project, which is a part of OBOR, will not affect Beijing's stand on Kashmir.

It said that over 100 countries and organisations were already involved in the venture.

"Regarding the issue of Kashmir which the Indian side is concerned about, we have been stressing that the issue was left over from history between India and Pakistan, and should be properly addressed by the two sides through consultation and negotiation," the Chinese Ministry said, reiterating its stand.

"The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is an initiative on economic cooperation. It is not directed at any third party, not relevant to disputes over territorial sovereignty and does not affect China's position on the Kashmir issue," PTI quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying.

(With agency inputs)
The Hague: India and Pakistan on Monday clashed at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Kulbhushan Jadhav's case with New Delhi invoking the court's jurisdiction to see that the death sentence against him was suspended immediately.

India made a forceful submission as the ICJ began hearing the case of the 46-year-old former Navy officer who was 'abducted' from Iran and taken to Balochistan and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities.

"Jadhav has not got the right to get proper legal assistance and the right to consular access. There is an immediate threat to him to be executed even before a decision is passed," joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs Deepak Mittal told the court in his opening remarks.

India at ICJ demands Pakistan annul Jadhav death sentence

Representing India, lead attorney Harish Salve said, "The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention."

Battling Pakistan in the UN's highest judicial body, India said the situation was grave and urgent, prompting it to approach the court "at such short notice".

Eighteen years after the two neighbours last faced off at the ICJ - when Islamabad sought its intervention over the shooting down of its naval aircraft - India took up the issue of consular rights to its national and accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".

"The execution of the death sentence cannot be done while this court is hearing the appeal. Else, it will be a violation of the Vienna Convention," Salve said.

Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, Salve said.

Also Read - India fears Jadhav could be executed before ICJ trial ends

"The graver the charges, the greater the need for continued adherence of the Vienna Convention. Jadhav has been in judicial custody without any communication with his family," he pointed out.

The rights of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are sacrosanct, Salve said, citing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) that recognises that no one can be arbitrarily deprived of their lives.

India had not been given the copy of the charges filed against Jadhav.

"The need for a wholesome compliance is greater when charges are serious. We want appropriate legal representation for Jadhav," he maintained.

Though Pakistan says Jadhav has the right to appeal, two-star generals will hear his mercy plea, Salve stressed, questioning the impartiality of the process.

Vienna Convention not for spies involved in terror: Pak to ICJ

On its part, Pakistan later today told ICJ that Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a "spy" involved in terror activities.

India's application on Jadhav was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed, Pakistan further told the UN's highest judicial body.

India had been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhav's passport which bears a Muslim name, Mohammed Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office said in his opening remarks in response to India's submissions earlier in the day.

Also Read - ICJ denies Pak request to play Kulbhushan Jadhav's 'confessional' video

"India has been unable or perhaps more accurately unwilling to provide an explanation for this passport which is the most obvious indication of covert and illegal activity," he said.

"We wish to make it absolutely clear that we remain committed to the path of peaceful resolution of all disputes. Whatever the provocation. Pakistan will not be cowed by terrorism, nor will it allow any attempt to malign or misrepresent its position or legal processes to go unchecked," Faisal said.

India has seen it fit to use the International Court of Justice as a stage for "political theatre" but "we will not respond in kind", Faisal told the ICJ which held day-long proceedings to decide the fate of the former Indian Navy officer.

"He will touch upon the reasons what the court should not otherwise exercise any jurisdiction or entertain any aspects of India's engagement of its jurisdiction. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic but perhaps consistent that India complains that it has not been given access to commander Jadhav who has confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan," Faisal said.

There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistan's accusations on Jadhav, Pakistan's lawyer Khawar Qureshi said.

He urged the court to dismiss India's application on three accounts - that there was "no urgency", the relief sought was "manifestly unavailable" and the jurisdiction under the Vienna Convention was not "as unchallenged" as India has suggested, as per PTI.

"It (jurisdiction of the court) is limited and indeed it is further limited at qualified rules supplemented by the 2008 agreement" on Consular access," Qureshi said.

On India invoking the Vienna Convention, Qureshi said, "The Vienna convention article 36 which adopted to set up standards of conduct particularly concerning communications and contact with nationals of the sending state which would contribute to the development of the friendly relations among nations... The observation we made immediately is this is unlikely to apply in the context of a spy, terrorist send by a state to engage in acts of terror."

"Indeed, with clear from the Vienna conventions itself that there are provisions beyond article 36 that need to be considered before coming to the court with the bold assertion that the Vienna is interrelated regime," he said.

However, Islamabad suffered a jolt when it was not allowed by the court to play the video containing a purported 'confession' by Jadhav.



At the end of the day's proceedings ICJ President Ronny Abraham announced that the verdict in the matter would be given "as soon as possible" and the date delivered in a public sitting.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) today is set to hear the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, who has been sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of espionage, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi on Monday expressed optimism saying that India has the upper hand in the matter.

"I think India has a very good case on violation of all international norms and treaties," Rohatgi told ANI.

He further reiterated that Pakistan`s trial of Jadhav had rejected all international laws as well as human rights, as he was tried in a military court without the presence of an attorney.

The ICJ on May 9 put a stay on the death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy.

The development came after India instituted proceedings against Pakistan, accusing the latter of "egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" in the matter of detention and trial of Jadhav, and sought a stay on his death sentence.

India earlier contended that it was not informed of Jadhav`s detention until long after his arrest and that Pakistan failed to inform the accused of his rights, an official release from the ICJ said.

India further said that, in violation of the Vienna Convention, the authorities of Pakistan were denying it its right of consular access to Jadhav, despite its repeated requests.

It`s also pointed out that India learned about the "death sentence against Jadhav from a press release."India submitted that it had information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy, and was then shown to have been arrested in Baluchistan" on March 3, 2016, and that the Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on March 25, 2016.

India also asked the ICJ to declare the decision illegal being violative of international law and treaty rights and restrain Pakistan from acting in violation of the Vienna Convention and international law by giving effect to the sentence or the conviction in any manner, and directing it to release the convicted Indian National forthwith, if Pakistan is unable to annul the decision.Pakistan had claimed that Jadhav was arrested from the Balochistan province last year.

A military court sentenced him to death, alleging he was involved in espionage and anti-national activities. Pakistan also claimed that he was "a serving officer in the Indian Navy.

"India out rightly denied the claims, saying Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was running a business, and adding he was a retired Navy officer.

Pakistan has turned down 16 requests from India for consular access to Jadhav.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) last month for his alleged involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan.
New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party senior leader Subramanian Swamy on Monday withdrew an application he had filed seeking summoning former Haryana Chief Minister and Congress leader BS Hooda and three other bureaucrats as witnesses in the National Herald case.

Swamy had earlier told the court that Hooda was questioned by the CBI in a case related to the Panchkula plot allotment matter and his deposition, in this case, would help the present case since both the matters were related.

Swamy, however, today told the Metropolitan Magistrate Lovleen that the present case was not related to the one being investigated by the CBI.

The court allowed his plea and has posted the matter for further hearing on July 1.

In an another development, Swamy today urged the Delhi High Court to issue summons to all 11 witnesses related to the National Herald case.

"Today I have been given permission to summon eight documents by the court which are partially from the Congress party and partially from the Associate Journal Pvt.

Limited. In addition, I also wanted to prove the authenticity of the documents. So, I asked for 11 witnesses to be summoned and the court said to make a consolidated list and file it and after vacation, we will hear you on July 1. In the hearing, the court will decide whether to send Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi for trail or not," Swamy said.

Recently, the Delhi High Court gave its nod to an Income Tax probe in the National Herald case.

Earlier, the Patiala House Court had allowed investigation of income tax of the Gandhis, which was then challenged at the Delhi High Court.

Swamy had filed an application in 2012, accusing Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul and others associated with the Congress of conspiring to cheat in the land deal.

In his complaint, Swamy had alleged that the Congress granted an interest-free loan of Rs. 90.25 crore to the AJL, owner of the National Herald newspaper, established by Jawaharlal Nehru, which was either not repaid or repaid in case, which was in violation of Section 269T of the Income Tax Act, 1961.

In August, the court issued notices to Sonia, Rahul and five others on Swamys application seeking presentation of certain documents from Associated Journals Pvt. Ltd (AJL) and Indian National Congress (INC) in connection with the National Herald case.
New Delhi: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday said he will seek the help of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's good offices in reaching a solution to the Palestinian issue which will help in the fight against terrorism in that part of the world.



Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel in July, Abbas said India should continue to play the important role that it has been playing to bring peace in the Middle East.



India has always reiterated its support for a political solution to the Palestinian issue



"We know very well that India has very good relations with Palestine and Israel," Abbas said while addressing the India Islamic Cultural Centre here.



"So India can play a very important role in bringing peace in Israel," he said.



"Tomorrow when I will be meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I will discuss with him and I will ask him to utilise the Indian capacity, Indian good offices to bring peace between the two countries."



Modi and Abbas are scheduled to hold bilateral discussions on Tuesday.



Abbas said that he had a very successful meeting with US President Donald Trump last month and has also met his German and Russian counterparts Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Vladimir Putin respectively and discussed the issue.



"What we are trying to is to implement the two-state solution (based) on the border of June 1967 - that is to establish a sovereign, independent state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital living in security and peace side by side with the state of Israel," he said.



He said that Palestine was ready to make peace and hoped for a response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.



"Now, it is clear to everyone that solution of the Palestine issue, ending the (Israeli) occupation will greatly help in countering terrorism in the region," the Palestinian President said.



"So, achieving justice is the basis for the success in fighting terrorism being practised by terrorist groups such as ISIS (or Islamic State) and other extremist groups in the region," he said.



He described the Arab Spring as a "catastrophe" that tore the entire social fabric of the region.



Stating that India held a prominent place in the world, he said New Delhi has to play a role in the Middle East peace process.



Leader of the Opposition in the Rajaya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, who was also present, recalled the words of Mahatma Gandhi's who said that Palestine was to the Arab just England was to the English people and France to the Frenach.



JD-U President Sharad Yadav said that Indians would always stand in support with the Palestinian people.



Manipur Governor Najma Heptullah fondly recalled her memories of late Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat.



Abbas arrived here on Sunday on a four-day visit to India. This is his fifth visit to India and the third state visit after his visits in 2008 and 2012.



He is being accompanied by a delegation comprising Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Abu Amr, Foreign Minister Riad Malki, Diplomatic Advisor Majdi Khaldi, Presidency Spokesperson Nabil Aburdeineh and Palestine's Chief Judge Mahmoud Habbash.



On Tuesday, apart from his talks with Modi, he will call on President Pranab Mukherjee at the Rashtrapati Bhavan



He will also meet Vice President Hamid Ansari and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.


Jaipur: With little over two months to go before his term ends, President Pranab Mukherjee has expressed concern over decline in time devoted to legislation in Parliament, saying privileges vested in elected representatives by the Constitution was being substantially wasted.



Delivering the first Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Memorial Lecture here, the President on Monday said that "India cannot continue to be a democratic role model to the world simply on the basis of the size of its electorate".



The President also presented the 1st Bhairon Singh Shekhawat Lifetime Achievement Honour in Public Service to Sikkim Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling.



Congratulating Chamling, who has been Chief Minister since 1994, Mukherjee said Sikkim was emerging as role model for Indian states.



The President, who delivered a lecture on "History of Parliamentary Democracy in India", called upon the elected representatives to uphold the high traditions established by eminent personalities during the freedom movement.



"If prominent legislators of pre-Independence days with limited powers could have done so much, how much more can be done by our MPs, MLAs and MLCs of today," he asked.



He expressed concern over the reduction in time devoted to legislation in Parliament, terming it "most unfortunate" and the increase in time lost due to interruptions.



"The rights enshrined in the Constitution, endorsed by Indian people from 1952 to 2017 by participating in 14 parliamentary elections, we are substantially wasting that privilege given to us, the members, and to my mind this is a pernicious state. You can't remain a role model to the world simply because of the size of your electorate unless you have quality in your deliberations, discussions."



Mukherjee said that job of legislators was one of "24x7" responsibility and they must, at all times, be responsive to problems and concerns of people.



He said the Parliament had tremendous power and no money could be spent from the ex-chequer, no tax imposed or new services created without the approval of Parliament and similar was the case with state assemblies.



"This huge power vested in the members of Lok Sabha, members of legislative assemblies of all 29 states by 800 million people...if we do not utilise that privilege and power, we are ourselves to blame," he said.



Mukherjee said three Ds -- debate, dissention, decision -- were always important in parliamentary functioning.



Mukherjee said parliament and assemblies were the primary instruments of good governance and socio-economic change.

He termed reduction in time devoted to legislation in Parliament as "most unfortunate"



He said the first Lok Sabha from 1952-57 had 677 sittings, in which 319 bills were passed, while the 14th Lok Sabha had 332 sittings and passed just 247 bills. The 15th Lok Sabha had 357 sittings and passed 181 bills, while the 16th Lok Sabha has had 197 sittings and passed only 111 bills (up to the 10th session).



He said 9.95 per cent of total time was lost due to interruptions in the 10th Lok Sabha and a shocking 41.6 per cent in the 15th Lok Sabha.



He described former Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat as "a man of masses" and recalled his meetings with him. Mukherjee said that as the Vice Chairman of Planning Commission in the 90s, he received valuable suggestions from Shekhawat, who was then the Chief Minister of Rajasthan.



He also referred to disbanding of Planning Commission and creation of Niti Aayog and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given a new dimension to planned development, synchronising it with "a totally liberated economy".



The President said over 25 years had passed since the liberalisation in 1991 and "all the major hindrances of liberalised economic policy have been removed" by making major changes, including investment in defence production.



The lecture, organised on Shekhawat's death anniversary, was attended by Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhra Raje, State Governor Kalyan Singh, Punjab Governor V.P. Singh Badnore and former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot.



All of them paid glowing tributes to Shekhawat, who served as country' Vice President from 2002 to 2007. Members of his family were also present.
A Jammu and Kashmir district administration has set up relief camps for civilians staying along the Line of Control. A reality check done by Mail Today revealed poor conditions at the centres.

More than 1,000 people who were evacuated and sent to relief centres in Naushera district complained of poor conditions and said they were not given food or drinking water (Photo: Manjeet Sehgal)

By Manjeet Sehgal: The four relief centres set up by the district administration in Naushera, J&K, for more than thousand people who were forced to flee their homes due to frequent shelling by Pakistan failed to provide much relief on Sunday.

When this correspondent visited the largest relief centre, which has been set up inside a school, people complained of the poor conditions and said they were not given food in the morning and were only offered breakfast after 2pm on Sunday.

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Apart from villagers who were forced to leave behind their crop ready for harvest, many of those housed in these shelters are students who said their studies would suffer. "Our studies have been hit hard. Whenever we are in the school, mortar shelling starts," said Suman, a class 8 student.

Another student, Monika, said that she along with many others was forced to spend a day without water and food on Saturday.

Satpal, a resident of Jhangar village, one of the 15 villages along the border that were evacuated, said that firing had started at 7.30 in the morning and continued till late afternoon. "We were stuck in a bunker for all this time without any drinking water," he said.

Deputy chief minister Nirmal Singh took stock of the situation and assured people that situation would improve soon.

"Pakistan is firing at our civilians from last two to three days. Three people have been killed and those affected people have been shifted to the safer places. The government is taking all preventive measures. Affected people are being accommodated in safe buildings with food, water and power," Singh said.

He, however, added that people should not expect the same comfort that they get in their homes. "I have visited the place and the administration has assured me that the inmates will be provided with all amenities," Singh said.

But his words failed to assure those stuck in these centres. Shivani Surya, a resident of Jhangar village, said they are forced to leave their homes every time they settle down. She said that the relief centre did not have water or adequate washrooms.

Locals also slammed the district administration for not assessing the ceasefire violation threat and reacting late. "We knew that heavy firing will take place on May 13. The Rajouri SDM was expected to reach our village but he failed. Had he visited, people may have been evacuated earlier," said Subhash, a resident.

Some residents even compared the damage to buildings to that of Syrian city Aleppo. "We used to see photos of Aleppo. We were gripped by the same fear for our lives when Pakistan started shelling. A few mortar shells also dropped near our bunker," Inderjeet Mahi , a local resident said.

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ALSO READ | Pakistan's ceasefire violations: Mass evacuation begins on border

ALSO READ | J-K: 2 killed as Pakistan violates ceasefire in Nowshera, Army patrol fired upon in Pulwama

ALSO WATCH | Jammu and Kashmir: Pakistan targets schools in Nowshera shelling

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New Delhi: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Monday joined the nation's political top brass in expressing grief over the demise of veteran Indian Information Service (IIS) officer I. Ramamohan Rao.

Gandhi took to twitter to praise the sincere contribution of the former PIO to the Government of India."A veteran of the Indian Information Service, Ramamohan Raoji rose to the pinnacle of his career& embodied the best values of his profession," tweeted Gandhi.

"A former PIO to GoI, he worked with four Prime Ministers including my father. My sincere condolences on his passing," he added.

Union Information and Broadcasting Minister M.Venkaiah Naidu also condoled the passing away of Mr. Rao, describing it a huge loss to Indian Information Service fraternity.

"Shocked to know about demise of Ramamohan Rao, Former PIO,PIB GoI. Big loss to Indian Information Service Fraternity," Naidu said in a tweet.

Frank Naronha, Principal Director General of the Press Information Bureau, also expressed grief on the demise of Mr. Rao and tweeted, "I.Rammohan Rao, former PIO #PIB passes away. He was a legend and an inspiration to so many of us. Rest in peace, sir."

Union Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore too took to the twitter to express gratitute to Rao. "Saddened by the demise of former PIO, PIB Sri Ram Mohan Rao," he tweeted.

The final rites of Rao, were performed at Lodhi Crematorium in Delhi on today afternoon. I. Ramamohan Rao, Editor-in-Chief, Asian News International (Print) passed away on 13 May 2017 after a brief illness.

A widely respected personality, he was the harbinger of the vision that has sustained the information spectrum of the country since independence.

All through his long and illustrious career with the Government of India, Mr. Rao had the distinction of being selected to contribute to setting up of many new organisations in the nascent Nation and handling others during sensitive periods. This was because of the faith that his superiors reposed upon him, a faith that he stood up to at all times.

Mr Rao embarked upon his career by joining the Press Information Bureau (PIB) in 1956. His early career was with the Defence Public Relations Organisation wherein he was totally involved in the Indo-China War 1962 and Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 and 1971.

He covered the most famous battles of the 1965 War in the Western front, and handled the delicate task of guiding the western press to the graveyard of Patton tanks, when they were all being taken in by the Pakistani propaganda.

During the 1971 War, he was with the Army Headquarters in Delhi, working closely with Field Marshal SHFJ Manekshaw -- who gave him the privilege of being the inly person who could smoke the cigarettes kept in Manekshaw`s office -- and facilitating an objective coverage of India`s glorious victory.

The photograph depicting the Indian paratroopers dropping at the Battle of Tangail was released by Mr Rao and it made it to the front pages of most global newspapers. He was latter questioned for releasing a photograph taken during a paratroopers' training exercise at Agra with an equivocal caption, but it did the trick when the surrendering Pakistani commander, Lt General Niazi referred to that picture as the one that broke his morale and will to fight.

He was also closely associated with the efforts of the Government to build the defence structure of the country. He served with the United Nations Emergency Force in the Gaza Strip where he did the country proud as its representative in the information domain. He rejected the offer from the United Nations to join as a permanent employee at New York, telling them his own country needed him much more.

As Director of Public Relations, Ministry of Defence, Mr. Rao was actively involved in path-breaking events like the 1982 Asiad, The Non-Aligned Summit in 1983 and the Commonwealth Heads of Government meet in Delhi.

During the challenging phase of insurgency in the North-East, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir it was his ideas of communication that ensured a dynamic, real time and correct flow of information. This played a crucial role in containing the challenges and set a benchmark for such communication which continues to date.

The concept of defence reporting in the country was scripted by him and has been continuing on the same lines ever since.

He served the Information Division of the Research and Analysis Wing at a time when the organisation was new and finding its roots. He also headed the News Service Division of the All India Radio during the turbulent years, which saw the Blue Star Operation and the assignation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The Government of India recognised his extraordinary skills and he was elevated in the hierarchy to the newly created Indian Information Service which he went on to head for seven years before his superannuation.

He served with all the Prime Ministers since independence and has the unique distinction of being Principal Information Officer and official spokesperson to four: Rajiv Gandhi, VP Singh, Chandrashekar and PV Narasimha Rao.

He was deeply involved in countering the proxy war promoted by Pakistan in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir and assisted in communication operations during the Kargil conflict.

The government was not ready to let go of Mr. Rao but he thought it prudent to make way for the younger generation in affairs of state and after the Kargil War, declined all the advisory offers that came his way.
Kannur/Thiruvananthapuram: Two CPI-M workers were arrested on Monday for their alleged roles in the May 12 killing of an RSS worker at Payyanur town, even as the Centre said it was 'keeping an eye' on the politically volatile north Kerala district of Kannur.

Rinesh (28) and K P Jyothish (26) were arrested from Kannur today.

"We have arrested two CPI(M) workers. We are still ascertaining as to how many persons were involved in the crime," Kannur Superintendent of Police Siva Vikram told PTI, adding that police was on the lookout for more persons.

Two persons who had helped the accused to flee were taken into custody yesterday and were still being questioned, the police said.

While accusing the state government of not having "the political will to fight out violence and killings," Union minister J P Nadda said the CPI(M)-led LDF government should take moral responsibility for such incidents.

"We condemn the attacks on BJP-RSS workers and the political party which has indulged in such activities," Nadda told reporters here earlier in the day.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, on the other hand, hit out at the BJP for demanding imposition of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA) in Kannur.

Some people have sought imposition of AFPSA in Kannur, he said, adding that "they would do well to remember that in Manipur, where it had been implemented, 1,528 fake encounters and killings had been reported."

The victims ranged from a 12-year-old child to a 72- year-old?woman, the chief minister added.

Kerala's democratic society, which stands for the human rights, cannot accept this, Vijayan said in a Facebook Post.

"How can a democratic party demand for such a law," he asked.

"The government is committed to take forward the peace efforts and ensure protection for life and property," he said adding that the state government would take an uncompromising stand against these type of incidents.

Earlier, in the assembly, Vijayan said a case would be registered against the BJP state president, if necessary, for allegedly "spreading false" reports related to the killing of the RSS worker in Kannur.

The RSS worker, Biju, an accused in the killing of a CPI(M) worker, was out on bail when he was attacked on May 12.

It was the first incident of political violence after peace talks were held between leaders of the CPI(M) and BJP- RSS in Kannur in January.

The BJP'S Kerala unit had submitted a?memorandum to Kerala Governor P Sathasivam, seeking action and to declare Kannur a disturbed area and to impose AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) there to maintain law and order.

BJP leader Sobha Surendran today continued her attack against the governor, saying he should demit office if he was scared to take action against the chief minister.

"Why isn't the governor visiting Kannur? Why can't he seek a report from the government?" she asked in New Delhi.
Bhopal: Three persons were killed and 46 others injured when a bus carrying people to Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh overturned in Dindori district early on Monday, the state police said.

The accident occurred near Ramnagar village when the bus driver lost control over the vehicle.

The victims were on their way to take part in the concluding function of `Namami Devi Narmade Sewa Yatra` which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is slated to attend later during the day.

Six of the injured are said to be critical.
Amarkantak (Madhya Pradesh): A day after a video surfaced where a man was being brutally beaten up by a group of cow vigilantes, Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Bhupendra Singh on Monday said that he has ordered an inquiry in the matter and will ensure justice is done in the case.

The MP Minister said that the guilty once caught, will be severally punished for their unwarranted deed.

"This is a serious incident. The moment I got to know about the incident I ordered an investigation in the matter. And once the investigation report comes, we will prosecute the guilty and se that justice is done," Singh said.

Cow vigilantes in Ujjain city of Madhya Pradesh brutally thrashed a man on the suspicion of him hurting a cow.

The incident took place on Saturday when a group of men claiming to be 'gau rakshaks' cornered a man and started beating him ruthlessly, accusing him of beating a cow.

The victim who sustained severe injuries after the incident was rushed to the nearby hospital.

The police took action after a video of the same incident went viral and registered a case against the miscreants.

Four people have been arrested while the others are on the run.
Bhopal/New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Monday pay a one-day visit to Madhya Pradesh to attend the concluding ceremony of the 'Namami Devi Narmada Sewa Yatra' in Anooppur district.

Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan will receive the PM at the Dumna airport in Jabalpur.

Modi will take a chopper ride from Jabalpur in the afternoon to reach Amarkantak to participate in the event, which will mark the end of the Madhya Pradesh government's pet project.

In the event, the PM will unveil a roadmap for steps to be taken for the conservation of the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh.

He will also take part in 'Narmada Pujan' and address a gathering, an official associated with the yatra said.

Elaborate security arrangements have been made for the Prime Minister's visit, he said.

The Prime Minister will return to Delhi from Jabalpur at around 5 pm.

The Narmada river originates at Amarkantak.

On Sunday, the PM had tweeted: I am delighted to join the programme to mark the conclusion of the Narmada Seva Yatra in Amarkantak, Madhya Pradesh, tomorrow afternoon.

"Narmada Seva Yatra is an excellent mass movement to protect the Narmada & conveys a larger message of saving the environment as well".

He said he will launch the 'Narmada Seva Mission' which will have a major impact on Madhya Pradesh`s ecology.

"The Prime Minister will release a roadmap for the conservation of Narmada, the lifeline of Madhya Pradesh, at Amarkantak," Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said yesterday.

"The roadmap has been prepared after wide-ranging consultations with various stakeholders, including environmentalists, river conservation experts and people directly associated with the Narmada," he said.

The Yatra had started from Amarkantak on December 11, 2016, and is concluding there after covering a distance of 3,344 km and passing through over 1,100 villages and towns.

A number of prominent personalties, including Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, BJP president Amit Shah, Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Uma Bharti, Anil Madhav Dave, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and well-known water conservationist Rajendra Singh, among others, took part in the yatra in its different stages.

Narmada flows 1,312 km before draining through the Gulf of Khambhat into the Arabian Sea.

Narmada, also known as Rewa, is one of only three major rivers in the country that flows from east to west. The other two are Tapti and Mahi.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: Self-proclaimed film critic Kamaal R Khan, who is known for his controversial tweets, on Sunday apologised to SS Rajamouli. Yes, you read that right. The 'Deshdrohi' actor also stated that he has accepted the people's verdict.

Here, the 42-year-old actor was talking about Rajamouli's latest release - Baahubali 2: The Conclusion  who he slammed left, right and centre a few days. Now, making a U-Turn, KRK admitted that his 'Baahubali 2' review was wrong.

"I m very sorry for my wrong review of #Baahubali2! I didn't like it but ppl like it n Janta Ki Awaaz means Nakkare Khuda. Sorry @ssrajamouli," he tweeted.

I m very sorry for my wrong review of #Baahubali2! I didn't like it but ppl like it n Janta Ki Awaaz means Nakkare Khuda. Sorry @ssrajamouli  KRK (@kamaalrkhan) May 14, 2017

Here's how social media users reacted to his apology:

@kamaalrkhan @ssrajamouli Ab rana ko bhi sorry bol de

Singing song mujh ko rana ji maaf karna galti maare se ho gayi  Ginni bajaj (@Coolgini11) May 14, 2017

@kamaalrkhan @ssrajamouli Jab janta ki choice ka pata hinahi he to review kyu dete ho  Shoaib shaikh (@ShoaibRoadie) May 14, 2017

On the cinema front, the movie has now minted way more than Rs 1000 crores worldwide.

'Baahubali' features Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty, Tamannaah Bhatia, Sathyaraj, Nasser and Ramya Krishnan in pivotal roles. The film which revolves around the battle between two warring brothers from a fictional ancient Indian kingdom, released in Telugu, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam on April 28.
New Delhi: In his almost three-decade-long career, he has established himself as one of the most dependable performers but Irrfan Khan says he is always trying to redefine the labels attached to him.

The 50-year-old actor says it does not matter to him whether he is called an actor or a star.

"If you are unable to innovate, then you are as good as dead. I'm here to redefine things and whatever I'll be called, I will redefine it," Irrfan Khan told PTI in an interview.

He says acting has always been a passion for him. This is why he has this constant need to look for something new.

"It is the need to constantly innovate oneself and it comes from the fact that it keeps you on your toes... It keeps you alive," says Irrfan Khan.

Starting from Mira Nair's "Salaam Bombay!" to "Inferno", the National Award-winning actor has build an impressive body of work in the Indian industry as well as in Hollywood.

But Irrfan Khan says he still struggles to conform to the norms as an artiste.

"... We are social beings, we always try to fit in. I'm still trying to fit in. As you grow up, you are conditioned to carry yourself in a certain way. You have demands from your own self.

"I was not cut out to be an actor. I was the last person who could become an actor. If I told people I wanted to be an actor, they would have killed me. I couldn't even share it," says Irrfan Khan.

He believes a person always has a choice either to mould one self according the social norms or stand out from the crowd.

"It depends on what you want. Sometimes you don't want to stand out. That's your calling. If you need to stand out, then you find the means to do so," he says.

Irrfan Khan is one of the most sought after Indian actors in Hollywood and he believes it is only because the West is "familiar with his work".

"I think they find something in me, I don't know. But I'm not shifting to Hollywood."

The actor, who will be next seen in "Hindi Medium", says he was busy shooting back-to-back films but their release is not in his hands. Irrfan Khan was last seen in 2016 film "Madaari".

"There is a time for every film. I am not such a big star who can plan my release. Sometimes, I have done films and they have released one after the other. I'll be completing four films this month. So, it's just the timing," he says about his year-long absence from Indian screens.

The actor, who will leave for Hollywood next month to start his next project "Puzzle", says it is a film he "was waiting for". The movie is being backed by the producers of "Little Miss Sunshine".

Meanwhile, "Hindi Medium", directed by Saket Chaudhary and also starring Pakistani actress Saba Qamar and Deepak Dobriyal, will release this Friday.
Pune: Marathi film producer Atul B Tapkir was found dead at a luxury hotel here on Sunday morning, police said. He was 35.

A post on Tapkir's Facebook page indicates he was disturbed over financial loss in filmmaking and a troubled family life.

Police had to break open the hotel room where they found Tapkir's body.

A case of accidental death (ADR) has been registered by the Deccan Gymkhana Police Station, and the body has been sent for an autopsy, a police official told IANS.

One of the last 'suicidal' messages posted on Tapkir's Facebook page on Saturday suggests he was depressed over the financial losses he suffered by producing Marathi film Dhol Taashe.

In the lengthy post, he claimed that while his father and sisters backed him, his wife Priyanka allegedly harassed him.

Tapkir said his wife threw him out of their home, and he was living out of the house since six months.

He was also upset as she alienated their children from him, apart from making allegations against him, defaming him in the neighbourhood and abusing him.

Tapkir's post -- written in Marathi -- mentioned that his wife got her "so-called" brothers to threaten and beat him up.

He shared how when some days ago, he called her and abused her, she abused him and his family in return and lodged a police complaint against them.

Tapkir has urged Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis that "the police must listen to a man's side of the story too when a woman lodges a complaint".

He said his last wish was that since his wife cannot look after their children, his father should raise them.

As proof of the harassment he faced, Tapkir said he has saved in a pen drive, the incident when his wife's brother hurled abuses at him.
New Delhi: Hindi film superstar Shah Rukh Khan, one of the world's 100 highest paid celebrities, says the core of his job as an actor remains to spread happiness and that the money, awards and fame that come along are "peripherals", which he is grateful about.

The actor, whose TED Talk in Vancouver went viral on social media with his witty one-liners, words of wisdom, and more, spoke to IANS in an email interview about his thoughts on stardom, how he can motivate others to follow their dreams, how he has so many dreams in his life that if he was to be left alone, he can just live in their company.

How does the life he is living today as Bollywood's King Khan compare to the dreams he had when he entered the industry?

Shah Rukh said: "It's extremely nice to hear the words King and Baadshah, heartthrob, loved, romantic hero, etc... All these things are really positive things. I'd rather be hearing these than some negative aspects that people might attach to my name. So, I'm extremely thankful and happy that this happened."

"Having said that, my core job is to try and entertain people. Like I always say, make them smile... Fulfil some unfulfilled desire or emotion in them that might exist. Give them a couple of hours of happiness. It has to be as simple as that. Everything else that comes is peripheral."

"Everything that gets attached to my acting in films... whether it's the money, the fame, the name, whether it's on a power list, whether it's an award... all of those are windfall games," Shah Rukh said.

"I'm very happy about them and grateful about them. But the core of my job is can I make people happy whenever I'm in touch with them? Through my cinema? Through just talking to them or meeting them. When you're a star, people feel happy just meeting you or seeing you pass in a car. So to me, the core is just that, nothing else."

Often, the 51-year-old star has said he sells dreams. But does the thought that there might come a time when he loses this ability, bother him?

"No. It doesn't bother me. I believe that anyone who has the capability, the ability, the desire to sell dreams, has to dream them first. So, I have lots of dreams. As a matter of fact, if I were to be left alone, I could just live in the company of my dreams."

"I don't really always need to get these dreams verified, quantified or substantiated," he said, stressing that he prefers to see the "optimistic side of life".

Shah Rukh, who has spent almost three decades in Indian showbiz, will be hosting TED Talks India: Nayi Soch, a global first Hindi TV talk show created in partnership with TED, the non-profit organisation devoted to 'ideas worth spreading'.

Asked if motivational talks by public figures can bring about a positive change among the country's youths, SRK said: "I think 'motivational talk' as a term itself is overrated. It's not about giving motivation to someone."

"I think if you can hold on to the interest of people through your experiences, then it's up to people to take away something of some worth which suits them. Not like the whole talk is going to become something that people are going to live by."

"Some aspects may touch some people, some may not touch people, some may not like it at all. But I think as long as you can make it personal, people everywhere in the world get attached to personal emotions because emotions are universal."

He also said: "For me to sit down and pen down my struggles and romanticise them, I think it's being ungrateful about the success I've got. But having said that, yes, I think it makes a lot of sense when you achieve something, when you come from no background, like I have... When you come from a different city and without anyone helping out... when things fall right, it just feels nicer."

"It also gives the message to people that if you can work hard, and if you have a bit of talent and you believe in yourself, that's more than enough to achieve your dreams. You need nothing else."
Mumbai: Megastar Rajinikanth addressed fans in Chennai Monday morning to thank them for their support and clear the air about his role in Indian politics.

Refuting rumours about entering the political field, Rajini, while addressing a large gathering clarified that he doesnt intend to join politics. He said that political parties often seek vote bank by using his name but he doesn't support anyone from the field of politics.

The 66-year-old star described his brief stint in politics two decades ago as a "political accident".



In 1996, during Tamil Nadu assembly election campaign, Rajinikanth denounced J. Jayalalithaa and her politics. His strong remarks caused her defeat.



"I did a mistake by supporting a political alliance 21 years ago. It was a political accident. Since then, politicians have misused my name on several occasions. But I have to clarify, I'm not joining any party," he added.

Thalaiva, who has an ocean of fan following, also silenced his critics who believe that he makes headlines just ahead of the release of his films to garner publicity. He said that he is fortunate to be blessed by the love of his fans and hence he feels no need to seek attention by creating controversies.

Adding that at this moment, he is an actor and will act in films. Tomorrow, if he is given another task, he will do it honestly. He also said that he would keep wrong people away from him.

Addressing the large gathering of his fans, Rajinikanth requested them to refrain from smoking and drinking.



"Take care of your family and children. Don't waste your life by smoking and drinking. Drinking and smoking not only affects your health but also your decision making ability. I have been affected enough so please take my advice seriously," he added.



Rajinikanth also confirmed he will commence shooting for his next yet-untitled Tamil project with director Pa. Ranjith from May 28 onwards.

The legendary actor also said that he stands by his decision to cancel his tour to Sri Lanka. He said that only after making a decision, one learns of the consequences. And if one foresees trouble, the best thing to do would be to avoid it.

(With IANS inputs)
Senior lawyer Harish Salve, who is arguing for India at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), gave three examples to push Kulbhushan Jadhav's case.

By India Today Web Desk: India cited three instances at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), at The Hague, to boost its own case seeking suspension of Kulbhushan Jadhav's death sentence.

Presenting its arguments against Pakistan for violating the Vienna convention and denying consular access to Jadhav, senior lawyer Harish Salve cited the examples of ICJ rulings in cases pertaining to Mexico, Nicaragua and Germany.

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We tell you what these three cases are and how the International Court of Justice ruled in these cases:

1) Mexico versus United States of America, commonly called the Avena case (March 2004)

In its judgment, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that the United States had breached its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The ICJ found that the United States was not allowing legal representation from Mexico to meet the latter's citizens, who were arrested and imprisoned for crimes in the United States.

Mexico had accused the United States of sentencing 54 Mexican nationals to death without allowing Mexico to exercise necessary legal options.

The ICJ had ruled that by "not notifying the appropriate Mexican consular post without delay of the detention of the 49 Mexican nationals", Mexico had been denied its right to "render assistance provided for by the Vienna Convention to the individuals concerned".

The United States was asked by the International Court of Justice to review and reconsider the convictions of Mexican nationals.

2) Nicaragua versus the United States of America (June 1986)

The International Court of Justice ruled in favour of Nicaragua which had accused the US of directing military and paramilitary actions against Nicaragua.

The ICJ ruled that United States of America "by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra (right-wing militant groups) forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua, has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another State".

The court also found that US had breached its international obligations by causing certain attacks in Nicaragua in 1983-1984.

3) Germany versus Italy or the Jurisdictional Immunities of the State case (February 2012)

Germany argued that Italy had failed to respect its jurisdictional immunity by allowing civil claims to be brought against it in Italian courts for Nazi-era war crimes.

Germany also accused Italy of breaching its jurisdictional immunity by declaring that the decisions of Greek civil courts against Germany can be enforced in Italy.

The ICJ found that Italy could not ignore German immunity and ruled that the decisions of Italian courts infringing the German immunity have to rendered void.

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(Source: Wikipedia, International Court of Justice)

ALSO READ:

How India argued against Pakistan for Kulbhushan Jadhav at International Court of Justice

Kulbhushan Jadhav and the league of extraordinary men: 5 'spies' you need to know about

Kulbhushan Jadhav death sentence: 10 things about executions in Pakistan

ALSO WATCH

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New Delhi: Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya on Monday said the board of retirement fund body EPFO will deliberate on raising investment limit in exchange traded funds (ETFs) to 15 per cent at its meeting later this month.

"The proposal to increase investment in ETFs to 15 percent from 10 percent in on the agenda of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) Central Board of Trustees meet scheduled on May 27," Dattatreya told reporters here.

"We will deliberate on the proposal and take a decision in this regard. The EPFO has investment Rs 17,000 crore so far in the ETFs and earned an encouraging returns of over 13 per cent," he said.

EPFO had started investing in ETFs from August 2015 by putting in 5 per cent of its investible deposits of around Rs 1 lakh crore. In 2016-17, the proportion of these investments was raised to 10 per cent. It is likely to be raised further to 15 per cent in the current fiscal.

The proposal was deferred at the CBT meet held on April 12, 2017 because some unions had sought an exit policy for liquidating investment in ETFs, securities and state loans to maximise returns before raising the proportion of equity linked investments.

On this issue, Dattatreya said: "Our investment in ETFs is for long term because there would be more returns. We don't want to take the risk (by selling ETF investment in short term). Long term means 10 years or 15 years. We have appointed CRISIL for these investment."

On the status of Payment of Gratuity Amendment Bill which seeks to double the tax free gratuity to Rs 20 lakh, he said: "There are one or two issues. After sorting out those, we would send Payment of Gratuity Amendment Bill for approval of the Union Cabinet."

Earlier, the minister also talked about building and construction workers welfare cess collected by the states, which is not being spend properly by them.

He said the Supreme Court has observed that some states have diverted these funds for other use like construction of schools, houses, road and recreation centres which are not in consonance with the norm prescribed by the Labour Ministry.

He also said that the apex court has recently asked the government auditor CAG to provide estimates of the cess collected and spent by the states.

The minister had earlier told the Rajya Sabha that As much as Rs 31,734 crore have been collected as construction workers' welfare cess by states and UTs up to December 31, 2016. Of this, he had informed the House, Rs 6,872.51 crore was spent.

The cess has been levied and is being collected at 1 per cent of the cost of construction as notified by the central government in the official gazette.

The Building and Other Construction Workers' Welfare Cess Act, 1996, provides for levy and collection of cess at such rate not exceeding 2 per cent, but not less than 1 per cent of the cost of construction as the central government may notify.

The cess is to be utilised for the welfare of building and other construction workers by the State Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Boards constituted under the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996.
Chandigarh: A woman intruder from Pakistan was shot dead by BSF troopers in the early hours of Monday in Punjab`s frontier district of Gurdaspur, a senior officer said.

Pakistan's border authorities later in the day refused to accept the body.

The woman, aged around 60, was shot dead near Bharial Border Out Post (BoP) around 3 a.m. when she refused to heed the warning to stop proceeding into the Indian territory, Border Security Force Deputy Inspector General R.S. Kataria said.

"BSF troops deployed at Bharial BoP in Gurdaspur sector observed suspicious movement of a Pakistan intruder who crossed the international boundary and entered the Indian territory.

"BSF troops challenged the intruder to stop, but she kept on moving towards the border security fence. Hence, BSF troops opened fire and the intruder succumbed to bullet injuries," the DIG said.

"The Pakistan Rangers were contacted to hand over the body, but they refused. The body was later handed over to Behrampur police station for the funeral," he added.

India and Pakistan share a 553-km international border in Punjab.
Bhilwara (Rajasthan): A man called Saddam Hussain Mansuri, who works as an UIDAI operator in Rajasthan, has been caught while tring to make an Aadhaar card in the name of terrorists Osama bin Laden.

Mansuri is now behind bars after he was arrested in Mandal in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district, ANI reported.

He reportedly works as an operator with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UDAI).

According to Mandal Deputy SP Chanchal Mishra, Mansuri was arrested after a complaint was lodged against him.

"The complaint said that a few days back Mansuri tried to enroll an Aadhar card on Osama bin Laden's name and filled Abbottabad, district Bhilwara as Laden's address.

He only uploaded a blurred picture of Laden, but did not provide other important and requisite details.

The glaring loophole came to notice of the UDAI, which directed the concerned officials to lodge a police complaint," said Mishra.

Station House Officer of Mandal Police Station Harish Sankhla said the accused was arrested based on the FIR against him and further investigation is on.
Lucknow: In yet another incident of shocking apathy of government officials towards the brave sons of 'Mother India', a sofa, carpet and an air conditioner put at the residence of slain BSF head constable, Prem Sagar, in view of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's visit was removed minutes after he left.

According to a report published in the Indian Express, the UP government officials, who had made several arrangements, which included installing an air conditioner, a sofa set, a carpet, curtains and table covers, were removed within minutes of CM Adityanath's departure from the slain BSF jawan's house.

The officials had made the arrangements in the honour of Yogi Adityanath, who had on Friday visited Prem Sagar's residence in the Tikampar village of UPs Deoria district to show his respect to the slain BSF jawan.

Around 1 pm on Friday, officials came and installed an AC in our drawing room, placed a sofa and spread out a carpet on the floor. The CM was in our house for about half-an-hour and soon after he left, they began dismantling the AC and took away everything else, Sagars son Ishwar Chandra was quoted as saying.

Interestingly, a day before CM's visit, dusty roads in the village were cleaned and drains which always used to remain open were covered.

Sagar, 45, was one of the two soldiers killed, and their bodies mutilated, in an attack by Pakistans Border Action Team on May 1.

During his visit, Yogi Adityanath had handed over a cheque of Rs 4 lakh and a certificate of a fixed deposit of Rs 2 lakh to Sagar's family members.

He also reportedly promised employment to Sagar's children after they complete their studies.

The Chief Minister also promised that a memorial and a girls inter college will be set up in the village in the memory of the slain trooper. He also promised a road to connect the village to the main road.

Ironically, when questioned about the shocking incident, the top Deoria district officials avoided a direct reply.
Lucknow: Expelled Bahujan Samaj Party leader Naseemuddin Siddiqui met Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Monday and requested that the Z security cover provided to him be continued.



In the 15-minute-long meeting, Siddiqui, who was thrown out of the BSP by Mayawati last week and subsequently released a series of audio tapes of his conversation with her, apprised Adityanath of the threat perception to his and his family's security and said that in view of his latest expose, it had grown manifold.



He also told Adityanath that he had been provided the security on the orders of the High Court and hence should be continued.



The Chief Minister, an official said, assured the former BSP leader, who is also a member of the upper house of the state assembly, that he will take a judicious stand on that matter.


Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh minister Shrikant Sharma on Monday attacked opposition parties for behaving in an "indecent" and "shameful" manner on the first day of the state assembly session, and attributed their actions to "frustration".

Opposition members had thrown paper balls at Governor Ram Naik during his address, with marshals trying to dodge them with files. The SP, BSP and Congress members had also created an uproar, drowning out his speech.

"The behaviour of the opposition parties is indecent and shameful. When the governor was addressing the MLAs and MLCs, there was continuous whistling. This is simply an insult to the people of UP. What is more unfortunate is the fact that the pack of those creating disturbance was led by a former UP chief minister," he said.

Slamming the opposition parties, he said: "Those who looted the state for the last 15 years and gave patronage to criminal elements are unable to digest the 50 days of good work done by this government.

"Had socialist ideologue Dr Ram Manohar Lohia been alive, he would had shed tears seeing the antics of the SP MLAs and MLCs," he said.

Sharma reiterated that the government will not bow before the actions of the rival parties.

"No matter what roadblock the opposition parties put up before us, we will not bow down to their pressure. All these actions of the opposition parties (SP, BSP and Congress) can be attributed to frustration, following their drubbing in the UP Assembly elections," he added.
Lucknow: The maiden session of the newly elected Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly began on a stormy note as the Opposition MLAs staged protest over deteriorating law and order situation in the state and disrupted Governor's joint address.

According to reports, opposition lawmakers from the Samajwadi Party and the BSP started shouting anti-government slogans and trooped into the Well of the House as Governor Ram Naik began his speech.

The customary address of Governor Ram Naik to the joint sitting of the two Houses of the state legislature was drowned in the uproar created by the opposition.

Slogan-shouting opposition members trooped into the Well of the House despite Speaker Hridaya Narain Dixit's appeal at an all-party meeting to ensure smooth proceedings.

The Governor was flanked by Dixit and Chairman of the Legislative Council Ramesh Yadav.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was present when the Governor read the address despite the bedlam.

Opposition members blew whistles and threw paper balls at the podium and the marshals tried to dodge them with files.

Pandemonium in Uttar Pradesh assembly over law and order situation in the state. pic.twitter.com/vHzuFIafRZ  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 15, 2017

The maiden session of Uttar Pradesh's 17th legislative assembly has been convened for passage of the UP GST bill amongst others.

The GST Bill has already been cleared by the Parliament and now requires nod of the states to notify rule and regulations by the respective state governments for its pan-India implementation from July this year.

In an endeavour to give a push to transparent working, the proceedings of the UP Assembly are being telecast live on Television, for the first time.

The decision was taken in a meeting between Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Assembly speaker Hriday Narayan Dexit.

"People also should directly see the activities of their elected representatives in house," said CM Yogi Adityanath.

The opposition lawmakers had earlier warned that they will corner the BJP government on the issues of law and order situation in the state.

However, the government too is arming itself with all the relevant data to hit back at the opposition, which has only 74 MLAs against the BJP and its allies' massive strength of 325 in the 403-member House.
Muzaffarnagar: A man, working in Saudi Arabia, has been booked by the police for allegedly sending objectionable messages to a woman, police said here today.

According to the FIR lodged by the police, Salman (30), who hails from the same district and is known to the woman, has been harassing her for a while by sending objectionable messages.

Police said they will be taking the case up with the higher authorities so as to seek passport cancellation of the accused.
Port Moresby: Seventeen prisoners have been shot dead after a mass breakout at a jail in Papua New Guinea, reports said Monday, with 57 still on the run.



Inmates from the Buimo jail in the Pacific nation`s second largest city Lae made a dash for freedom after breaking out of their compound on Friday, with prison warders opening fire.



The PNG Post-Courier and The National newspapers both cited local police as confirming 17 were killed, three were caught and 57 were still at large.



"These are undesirable people and will be a threat to the community," Lae police metropolitan commander Chief Superintendent Anthony Wagambie Jr said of the escapees, warning the public to be vigilant.



"The majority of those who escaped were arrested for serious crimes and were in custody awaiting trial.



"A good number were arrested by police last year for mainly armed robberies, car thefts, break and enter and stealing."



It is the same prison where police shot dead 12 inmates during a jailbreak last year.



Crime and lawlessness in PNG, a sprawling nation where many still live traditional and subsistence lives in remote areas, is rampant.



Wagambie urged family members and associates of the escapees not to harbour them.



"I am warning them that they will be caught. They must do what is good for them and surrender," he said.
India had approached the ICJ on May 8 with its plea to stay Kulbhushan Jadhav's execution till it hears the matter and reaches a conclusion. WATCH LIVE

By India Today Web Desk: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will hold public hearings in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case today. India and Pakistan will present their cases to the ICJ over the contentious Kulbhushan Jadhav issue. WATCH LIVE

The ICJ had on May 9 stayed the death sentence to the alleged Indian spy.

The ICJ, the United Nations' principal judicial organ, will hold a public hearing at the Great Hall of Justice housed in the Peace Palace at The Hague (the Netherlands), where India and Pakistan will be asked to present their case over the contentious Kulbhushan Jadhav issue. Senior lawyer Harish Salve is representing India at the ICJ.

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A Pakistani military court had sentenced Jadhav to death last month for alleged espionage and subversive activities. Jadhav had been arrested on March 3 last year.

ICJ HEARING SCHEDULE:

Monday 15 May, 2017

10 am-11.30 am: Oral observations of India - 1:30 PM IST

3 pm-4.30 pm: Oral observations of Pakistan - 6:30 PM IST

INDIA ACCUSES PAKISTAN OF "EGREGIOUS VIOLATIONS"

India approached the ICJ on May 8 with its plea to stay Jadhav's execution till it hears the matter and reaches a conclusion. India had accused Pakistan of "egregious violations" of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR), to which both India and Pakistan are signatories.

India earlier contended that it was not informed of Jadhav's detention until long after his arrest and that Pakistan failed to inform the accused of his rights, an official release from the ICJ said.

India also said that Pakistan was denying it the consular access to Jadhav, despite its repeated requests 16 times till now.

India submitted to the ICJ that it had information that Jadhav was "kidnapped from Iran, where he was carrying on business after retiring from the Indian Navy, and was then shown to have been arrested in Balochistan" on March 3, 2016, and that the Indian authorities were notified of that arrest on March 25, 2016.

India urged the ICJ to declare the decision of Pakistan illegal and being violative of international law and treaty rights.

JADHAV ACCUSED OF ESPIONAGE

Earlier, Pakistan had claimed that Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was "a serving officer in the Indian Navy" was arrested from the Balochistan province last year for being involved in "anti-Pakistan and espionage" activities after which a military court sentenced him to death.

India has so far denied the allegations of Pakistan against Jadhav.

PAKISTAN'S EXPECTED RESPONSE AT THE ICJ

1. Pakistan will reject the case, filed by India with the ICJ, referring to a declaration submitted during March 2017, restricting ICJ to question Pakistan over cases, related to national interest. The rejection will be done through a letter delivered as response to the ICJ hearing on Kulbashan Jadhav's conviction.

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2. Pakistan will send ahead a team, formulated after closed door meetings of government officials with Attorney General of Pakistan to ICJ today. The team will defend the case maintaining that the verdict given against Jadhav, done under military act and law of evidence. Pakistan will also present the video confessional statement of Jadhav, in which he confesses to his crimes of working towards actions, aimed at destabilising Pakistan.

3. Pakistan will maintain that no consular access can be given to Jadhav as per the law in Pakistan. Pakistan will also give reference to the Indian position on the Indian administered Kashmir, which Pakistan maintains, is a clear violation of human rights. Pakistan will refer to recent incidents of casualties and pellet-firing incidents, that emerged after Burhan Wani's death, and call on the ICJ and the UN to take a position against India on that.

4. Pakistan will also emphasise and highlight incidents of cross-border firing at the Line of Control (LoC), the Indus-Water Treaty issue, the suspicion of India's involvement in terror financing, with reference to the video statement of Ehsan Ullah Ehsan, TTP spokesperson, who surrendered to Pakistan Army recently.

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5. Pakistan will also highlight concerns over growing India's negative influence in Afghanistan, which Pakistan says is aimed at damaging Pakistan.

Also read: Who is Kulbhushan Jadhav, the Indian sentenced to death in Pakistan?

Also read: Kulbhushan Jadhav death sentence: Pakistan to overrule International Court of Justice's order

WATCH | Kulbhushan Jadhav case: International Court of Justice to hold public hearing in Hague today

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Palermo: An Italian coastguard vessel docked in Sicily's western port city of Trapani on Monday with 512 migrants and the bodies of a further seven on board.

The migrants and the corpses were picked up in the Mediterranean at the weekend, the coastguard said.

A further 14 migrants were rescued from a small fishing boat off Sardinia on Monday after setting sail from Algeria overnight, they said.

The migrants were due to receive medical treatment at a migrant reception centre in Assemini, according to the coastguard.

More than 45,000 people have reached Italy by boat from North Africa this year, a more than 40 percent increase on the same period of 2016, says the International Organisation for Migration, while over 1,200 migrants have died attempting the perilous sea crossing, according to IOM

Most of the migrants arriving in Italy are now from sub-Saharan Africa or from Bangladesh.
Brussels: British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on Monday downplayed differences with EU partners over the bloc`s military ambitions, saying London supported their efforts to bolster defence cooperation.

Reports on Friday put Brexit-bound Britain in the dock for blocking the launch of an EU military headquarters because it opposed any suggestion the unit should have an active operational role.

EU diplomatic sources were quoted as saying the British government was anxious not be wrong-footed on the issue ahead of a June 8 general election dominated by Brexit.

But Johnson said the differences had been overdone and that the problem was about finding the right language, not the principle.

"We understand the vital importance of European countries working together to strengthen our defences," he said as he arrived for an EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels.

"If they want to come together... with other arrangements, then we don`t want to stand in their way. We just (need to) work on the language to make sure that we get it totally right," he said.

In March, all 28 EU member states approved plans for what is known as a Military Planning Conduct and Capability (MPCC) facility in Brussels which would initially coordinate three of the bloc`s overseas training operations.

These "non-executive military missions" in Mali, the Central African Republic and Somalia do not involve the use of force.

Diplomatic sources say French and German demands that the subsequent legal text refer to this unit as an "Operational Headquarters" were rebuffed by Britain.

According to a draft text of the conclusions seen by AFP, foreign ministers will agree Monday that the EU "looks forward to the effective establishment, as a short-term objective, of the MPCC".

The MPCC will assume "responsibilities at the strategic level for the operational planning and conduct of the EU`s non-executive military missions".

If agreed, this text will go for approval to EU defence ministers who are meeting on Thursday.

EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini, who chairs Monday`s meeting, has pushed hard for the EU to take on an increased military role after President Donald Trump cast doubt on the US security commitment to Europe.

Brexit will deprive the bloc of both a nuclear-armed power which wields a UN Security Council veto and a member state which has consistently opposed EU defence integration as a risk to NATO.

Mogherini, top officials and member states led by France and Germany believe that against this backdrop, the European Union must now do much more on defence.
Oberhausen: Asserting that the USD 51.5 billionChina-Pakistan Economic Corridor will have a huge impact on the Baloch people, German lawyer and human right activist Claudia Waeldich said the people of Balochistan already have no access to the Gwadar port as has been to China for 40 years.

"The demography of the region will change as China will bring its own workers to work in Balochistan. The Baloch will be expelled from their villages and homes," Waeldich warned.

She alleged that the Pakistan Army has already began its operation to achieve there aim of expelling the Baloch people.

Waeldich said that only local security officials will find work and the rest of the population will be excluded contrary to the promise of creating new jobs for the Baloch."

The CPEC will incorporate 2000kilometer transport link in Kashgar in north west of China to Gwadar Port in Balochistan on the Arabian Sea near border to Iran. The geo-economy of China would change the geo-strategy from Asia to Europe in the Silk Routes to be built and pact by the new Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) which was established for this purpose to finance all projects of the CPEC," she said.

Waeldich warned that China is spreading its political and economic influence in the region through specific conditions of the CPEC, which have Pakistan`s support.

"China signed with the Punjab regime to secure influence over the resources along the CPEC with the help of Special Security Division (SSD) which is responsible for the security of China in CPEC regardless of the interest of the Baloch and other deprived regions in Pakistan," she said.

There are nine special economic zones planned. These planned enclaves are Special Economic Zones for which energy and water supply will have to be supplied from Baloch resources and it will not be open to Baloch investors in their own countries. Taxes will not be paid by Chinese in Balochistan," she added.

Waeldich further said that Balochistan still exists as a state and also cited that Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah had acknowledged the independence of Balochistan as it is shown in a document. So, consistency of this document can't be guaranteed.

"We are appealing to end this one sided illegal contract and to set up a new one to the benefit of Baloch and other deprived regions of Pakistan," she said.
Beijing: China and Vietnam will manage and properly control their maritime disputes, avoiding actions to complicate or widen them, so as to maintain peace in the South China Sea, the two nations said in a joint communique China released on Monday.



Vietnam is the Southeast Asian country most openly at odds with China over the waterway since the Philippines pulled back from confrontation under President Rodrigo Duterte.



After what China said were "positive" talks on the South China Sea last week between President Xi Jinping and Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, the joint statement stressed the need to control differences.



Both countries agreed to "manage and properly control maritime disputes, not take any actions to complicate the situation or expand the dispute, and maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea", it added.



The document, released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said both had a "candid and deep" exchange of views on maritime issues, and agreed to use an existing border talks mechanism to look for a lasting resolution.



China claims 90 percent of the potentially energy-rich South China Sea. Besides Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan lay claim to parts of the route, through which about $5 trillion of trade passes each year.



Last year, the tension between Beijing and Hanoi rose after Taiwan and US officials said China had placed surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island, part of the Paracels archipelago it controls.



Vietnam called China`s actions a serious infringement of its sovereignty over the Paracels.



In 2014, the tension between the two communist countries peaked more dramatically when China moved an oil rig into disputed waters and protests broke out across Vietnam.



Relations have gradually improved since, with exchanges of high-level visits, though the regional military buildup continues, including China`s construction of airstrips on man-made islands in the busy waterway.



Quang arrived in Beijing last week for a state visit and to attend a two-day conference ending Monday on an ambitious scheme proposed by Xi to build a new Silk Road connecting China to Asia, Europe and beyond, through massive infrastructure investment.
Washington: President Donald Trump is trying to determine how keeping his promise to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem could affect his hopes of brokering a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, his secretary of state said on Sunday.

Since taking office in January, Trump has shown signs of shelving his campaign pledge to move the embassy from Tel Aviv, while vowing to do what is necessary to clinch a Middle East peace agreement.

"The president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told NBC`s "Meet the Press." He spoke just days before Trump starts a Middle East trip that includes meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal and indivisible capital and wants all foreign countries to base their embassies there. The relocation is strongly opposed by many U.S. allies as the Palestinians also claim the city as their capital.

Tillerson said Trump`s decision would depend greatly on how it is seen by governments in the region, including "whether Israel views it as being helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction."

His comments drew a quick response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Israel`s position has been stated many times before to the American administration and the world," Netanyahu`s office said in a statement.

"Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem will not harm the peace process, it will do the opposite. It will advance it by righting a historical wrong and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."
Paris: Emmanuel Macron is beginning on Monday his first day as French President, with picking a Prime Minister and later travelling to Germany to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel, the media reported.

The Prime Minister's appointment is crucial for Macron, who needs to do well in next month's parliamentary elections to push through his planned economic reforms, the BBC reported.

The 39-year-old former investment banker and economy minister was inaugurated on Sunday as the 25th President of France and also the youngest in the nation's history in a ceremony at the Elysee Palace.

He promised to convince people that "the power of France is not declining -- that we are on the brink of a great renaissance".

Macron's party Le Republique en Marche has unveiled more than 400 candidates for June's elections.

Many have never held elected office before, reports the BBC.

Macron was sworn-in as President after his landslide victory over far-right National Front leader Marine le Pen, with 66 per cent of the vote in the run-off poll held on May 7.

He had never contested an election before and only formed his centrist movement a year ago.

His visit to Germany is expected to be cordial as Macron has strong pro-EU views, officials said.

He has said he wants to reform the eurozone, giving it a common budget and its own finance minister, but he will need German backing.
Gaza City: A military court in Gaza on Monday held the first hearing of three men accused of assassinating a Hamas military leader, naming the chief suspect for the first time.

Hamas has accused Palestinian "collaborators" of working with Israel to commit the murder.

"In Gaza today, the first hearings were held for three (men) accused of killing Mazen Faqha," Assistant Military Attorney General Fadl al-Jadili said in a statement carried by a local news agency.

He named Ashraf Abu Leila as the chief suspect in shooting dead Faqha, a senior Hamas official killed near his home on March 24.

Two other accused men faced a separate session, with Jadili saying they had been tasked by the Israeli security service with tracking Faqha's movements in the period prior to his killing.

Abu Leila was arrested about two weeks after the assassination, a security source said.

The source added Abu Leila had allegedly been a member of Hamas's military wing, Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, for a number of years before being expelled in 2008.

An image allegedly showing Abu Leila's identity card was shared on social media, according to which he was born in 1979 in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

The well-planned assassination in the middle of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip shocked the Islamist movement.

Hamas immediately blamed its arch-enemy Israel, with which it has fought three wars since 2008, and implemented strict border restrictions on those seeking to leave the Palestinian enclave.

The arrest was announced by Hamas's leader Ismail Haniya last Thursday, but he did not release the name of the suspect.

Faqha had been in charge of forming cells for Hamas's military wing in the occupied West Bank.

He had spent years in an Israeli jail before being released as part of a 2011 prisoner exchange deal.
Rome: Italian mafia have infiltrated one of Europe`s largest reception centres for migrants, creaming off state funds that were earmarked for the care of new arrivals, prosecutors said on Monday.

Police arrested 68 people in early morning raids in the southern toe of Italy, including a priest and the head of a Roman Catholic association that runs the Sant`Anna Cara immigrant centre in the town of Isola Capo Rizzuto.

Amongst the accusations levelled against those detained were involvement in a mafia organisation, extortion, misappropriation of state funds and fraud, said a statement from police in the southern city of Catanzaro.

There was no immediate response from those arrested.

The head of parliament`s anti-mafia commission hailed the operation. "The Cara of Isola Capo Rizzuto had become a money printing operation for organised crime thanks to the complicity of those who ran the centre," Rosy Bindi said.

"This operation shows the ability of the mafia to take advantage of the weaknesses and fragility of our times with its predatory and parasitic approach," she added.

Police said many of those arrested belonged to the Arena clan of the `Ndrangheta mafia -- Italy`s most powerful organised crime group and one of Europe`s biggest cocaine importers.

The police statement said the Arena clan was suspected of winning contracts to provide catering for migrants both in the Isola Capo Rizzuto centre and on the southern island of Lampedusa, which is on the front line of the migrant crisis.

More than half a million migrants have reached Italy since 2014, mostly by boat from neighbouring Libya. The government has set up reception centres across the country to take care of the new arrivals.

The Isola Capo Rizzuto centre has room for more than 1,200 people, making it one of the largest in the country. The state gives it some 16 million euros ($17.5 million) a year to house and feed the migrants.

($1 = 0.9129 euros)
Habbaniyah: Militants killed two police Monday in Haditha in a rare attack inside a town west of Baghdad that tribesmen and security forces successfully defended against repeated jihadist assaults, officials said.

When the Islamic State group seized swathes of territory in Anbar and elsewhere in Iraq, Haditha was one of the largest Sunni Arab population centres in the country not to fall to the jihadists.

Khalid Salman, the head of the Haditha council, said three militants infiltrated the town and clashed with security forces and tribesmen, killing two police.

The attackers were later surrounded in a house and killed, Salman said.

A police first lieutenant gave the same death toll but said the two police were killed when one of the attackers blew himself up.

The officer put the total number of militants involved at four, and said the remainder were killed by security forces.

IS seized large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, but Iraqi forces backed by US-led air strikes have since regained significant ground from the jihadists.

Iraqi forces recaptured the Anbari cities of Ramadi and Fallujah from IS, and are now nearly seven months into a massive operation to retake Mosul in the country`s north.

But the fall of Mosul will not mean the complete defeat of IS in Iraq: the jihadist group still holds territory west of the city as well as in Anbar, where it is carrying out deadly attacks targeting security forces.
Seoul/Washington: North Korea said on Monday it had successfully conducted a newly developed mid-to-long range missile test on Sunday, supervised by leader Kim Jong Un and aimed at verifying the capability to carry a "large scale heavy nuclear warhead."

Kim accused the United States of "browbeating" countries that "have no nukes" and warned Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland is in the North`s "sighting range for strike," the North`s official KCNA news agency reported.

The North fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday in a launch that Washington called a message to South Korea, days after its new president took office pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.

The missile was launched at the highest angle so as not to affect the security of neighbouring countries and flew 787 kilometres (490 miles) reaching an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers (1,312 miles), KCNA said.

Experts said the altitude reached by the missile tested on Sunday meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it travelled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000 km (2,500 miles), experts said.

"The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead," KCNA said.

"If the U.S. awkwardly attempts to provoke the DPRK, it will not escape from the biggest disaster in the history, Kim said, strongly warning the U.S. should not to disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in the DPRK`s sighting range for strike and that it has all powerful means for retaliatory strike," KCNA said.

DPRK is short for North Korea`s formal name, the Democratic People`s Republic of Korea.

North Korea is believed to be developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching the mainland United States.

The U.S. military`s Pacific Command said the type of missile that was fired was "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile".

The United Nations Security Council is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss North Korea`s latest missile launch, diplomats said on Sunday, which was requested by the United States and allies South Korea and Japan.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the launch a message by Pyongyang to South Korea after the election of President Moon Jae-in, who took office on Wednesday.

"You first have to get into Kim Jong Un`s head -- which is, he`s in a state of paranoia, he`s incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him," Haley told ABC`s "This Week" program, referring to North Korea`s leader.

The report on the missile`s flight was largely consistent with South Korean and Japanese assessments on Sunday that it flew 700 km (435 miles)and reached an altitude of more than 2,000 km (1,243 miles), which is further and higher than an intermediate-range missile tested in February from the same region, northwest of Pyongyang.

"North Korea`s latest successful missile test represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile," Washington-based monitoring project, 38 North, said in an analysis issued on Sunday.

"It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the US base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)," it said.
LSR - These three letters beautifully summarise three crucial years of life. When I joined, I remember being filled with scepticism and uncertainty, wondering if I would be able to fit in. The experience was consistent with what I thought - LSR challenges you with fierce competition, and awes you with the brilliant minds who have travelled here from across the country. It is a place where you first crave and then end up striving for your own personal identity. It intimidates and demolishes students' assumptions that they are 'something'; every other person in this space seems far better, in their unique ways.

LSR slowly takes you in, giving you the space to find your own rhythm, and then challenges your notions. It teaches you to embrace differences, to acknowledge the culture of dissent, to question, discuss and deliberate. An encouraging set of professors, batchmates and the myriad opportunities and exposure that the various societies of LSR offer - I think that's the magic that powers us us in the congregation of thoughts, intellectual discourse and creative stimulation. Rightly described as 'Leadership with Social Responsibility', LSR gives its student body a sense of power, and to each student as well, empowering us to make a difference. Along with 31 societies, there are also student initiatives like Basta, the Because You Matter campaign and the Peer Support Programme which aim to make small yet significant changes.

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A slow unconscious process of evolution becomes evident by the end of the second semester, and then one comes to terms with the reality of carving out one's uniqueness. It's a surreal feeling-from juggling attendance criteria, extra-curricular activities, class schedules, recurring internals and assignments, all the way to experiencing one's own evolution. LSR is about the survival of the fittest; it is a roller coaster ride, but in the end, one cannot even begin to imagine how much the memories of these three years come to mean.

LSR shatters each student's confidence and then rebuilds it to the extent that we all become ready to face the world and any challenges that come our way. Summarising my time at LSR, I would say that I haven't ever been so self-deprecating; but at the same time, today, I couldn't be more elated that I belong to this space, that LSR is and will always remain an inseparable part of me.

Forever in love with the space that makes me believe in, question and challenge myself, this is the beautiful feeling they call the magic of LSR.

Photo: Yasir Iqbal

--- ENDS ---
Seoul: North Korea`s apparently successful launch of a mid-to-long range missile indicated a significant advance in its drive for an intercontinental ballistic missile, monitors said on Monday, a worrying sign for the Korean peninsula and the United States.

The isolated North boasted on Monday that the launch the previous day, supervised by leader Kim Jong Un, was aimed at verifying the capability to carry a "large scale heavy nuclear warhead".

Kim accused the United States of "browbeating" countries that "have no nukes" and warned Washington not to misjudge the reality that its mainland is in the North`s "sighting range for strike", the North`s official KCNA news agency reported.

However, the US military`s Pacific Command said on Sunday the type of missile that was fired was "not consistent" with an ICBM and South Korea`s military played down the North`s claim of technical progress on atmospheric re-entry.

"We believe the possibility of that is low," said Roh Jae-cheon, a spokesman for South Korea`s Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The missile landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday in a launch that Washington called a message to South Korea, days after its new president took office pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.

Moon responded on Monday by sending special envoys to the United States, China, Germany, Japan and Russia to explain his new government`s plans and policy towards the defiant North.

North Korea has been working to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the United States, a flight of some 8,000 km (4,800 miles), presenting US President Donald Trump with perhaps his most pressing security issue.

Trump said last month major conflict with North Korea was possible but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome. He has also vowed to prevent North Korea from being able to hit the United States with a nuclear missile, a capability experts say Pyongyang could have some time after 2020.

The latest missile launch suggested the North had taken a step in that direction, analysts said.

The new ballistic missile, named Hwasong-12, was fired at the highest possible angle to avoid affecting neighbouring countries` security and flew 787 km (489 miles) after reaching an altitude of 2,111 km (1,242 miles), KCNA said.

Those details were largely consistent with South Korean and Japanese assessments and indicated the missile flew higher and further than an intermediate-range missile test-fired from the same area in North Korea`s northwest in February.



North Korea is banned under United Nations resolutions from engaging in nuclear and missile development, but has conducted its fifth nuclear test and a string of missile launches since the start of last year.

The UN Security Council is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss the North`s latest missile launch, diplomats said, at the request of the United States, South Korea and Japan.

Experts said Sunday`s launch would have had a range of at least 4,000 km (2,500 miles) if fired at a standard trajectory.

That "represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile", Washington-based monitoring project 38 North said in an analysis.

"It appears to have not only demonstrated an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that might enable them to reliably strike the US base at Guam, but more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)," it said.

KCNA also claimed that the test launch verified "guidance and stabilization systems" and the reliability of a new engine, as well as the warhead homing feature that allowed it to survive "under the worst re-entry situation" and detonate accurately.

Kim Dong-yub, a professor at Kyungnam University`s Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, said that, if true, that would mark a quicker-than-expected advancement in the North`s ICBM programme.

He said the missile`s trajectory indicated the North was clearly testing the re-entry technology under flight environments that would be consistent for an ICBM.

The North has successfully launched long-range rockets twice to put objects into space, although many experts believed it was some years away from mastering the re-entry technology needed to perfect an ICBM.

North Korea`s official Rodong Sinmun devoted half of its six-page edition on Monday to coverage of the missile test, including vivid photographs of the launch and a jubilant Kim Jong Un celebrating with military officers.

The photographs showed a long nose-coned projectile similar to missiles put on display in an April 15 military parade marking the birth anniversary of state founder Kim Il Sung.

The nose cone resembles that of the KN-08 ICBM the North is believed to be developing. Joshua Pollack of the US-based Nonproliferation Review said the lofted trajectory of the launch would test re-entry by putting the missile through extra stress.

"This is an advanced missile, if their claims are true," he said.

North Korea has accused the United States of a hostile policy to remove its regime and says its nuclear weapons and missiles are a "sacred sword" to protect itself.

"If the US awkwardly attempts to provoke the DPRK, it will not escape from the biggest disaster in ... history," KCNA quoted Kim as saying, referring to the North`s formal name of the Democratic People`s Republic of Korea.
Seoul: North Korea said Monday it had successfully tested a new type of rocket in its latest missile launch, as analysts said it showed an unprecedented range that brought US bases in the Pacific within reach.



Sunday`s launch was of a "new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket" named the Hwasong-12, the official Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) said.



Leader Kim Jong-Un personally oversaw the test, it said, and "hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing".



The isolated North is under multiple sets of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, which have triggered global alarm.



The missile was launched on an unusually high trajectory, with KCNA saying it flew to an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometres and travelled 787 kilometres before coming down in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).



That suggests a range of 4,500 kilometres (2,800 miles) if flown for maximum distance, analysts said.



It "represents a level of performance never before seen from a North Korean missile", aerospace engineering specialist John Schilling wrote on the respected 38 North website.



It appeared to demonstrate an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) that could "reliably strike the US base at Guam" in the Pacific, he said, and "more importantly, may represent a substantial advance to developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)".The North says it needs atomic weapons to defend itself against the threat of invasion and has carried out two atomic tests and dozens of missile launches since the beginning of last year.



Its goal is to develop a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States -- something President Donald Trump has vowed "won`t happen".



Tensions between the two reached a peak in recent weeks, with Washington saying military action was an option under consideration and Pyongyang issuing threats of its own, sending fears of conflict spiralling.



Trump later appeared to hold open the door to negotiations, saying he would be "honoured" to meet Kim and called him a "smart cookie".



Last week the South elected a new president, Moon Jae-In, who advocates reconciliation with Pyongyang and said at his inauguration that he was willing "in the right circumstances" to visit the North to ease tensions.



But he slammed the latest missile test as a "reckless provocation" after holding an emergency meeting with national security advisers.



Dialogue would be possible "only if the North changes its attitude", he said.In April the North put dozens of missiles on show at a giant military parade through the streets of Pyongyang, including one that appeared to be the type of device launched on Sunday.



The test "proved to the full all the technical specifications of the rocket" which was "capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead", KCNA said.





There is no evidence yet that Pyongyang has mastered miniaturisation sufficiently to fit a nuclear weapon into a missile nose cone, or the re-entry technology needed to ensure it survives returning into Earth`s atmosphere.



But it described another launch earlier this year as a drill for an attack on US bases in Japan -- which has long been within its range -- and David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists said the Hwasong-12 missile "has considerably longer range than its current missiles".



Schilling said the ability to hit Guam was not a game-changer, but that the new missile could be a step along the way.



"What would change the strategic balance is an ICBM capable of reaching the US mainland," he said.



"This is not that missile but it might be a testbed, demonstrating technologies and systems to be used in future ICBMs. It may be closer to an operational ICBM than had been previously estimated."



KCNA cited Kim as saying that the US strategy of what it called "militarily browbeating only weak countries and nations which have no nukes" would never work on the North.



"If the US dares opt for a military provocation against the DPRK, we are ready to counter it," it said.The United States called for tougher sanctions against the North, with the White House saying it "has been a flagrant menace for far too long".



The missile came down "so close to Russian soil... the president cannot imagine that Russia is pleased", it added in a statement.



Russia`s Defence Ministry later said the missile landed about 500 kilometres from its territory and posed no threat.



Washington and Tokyo called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, which was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.



China, Pyongyang`s sole major ally and main trading partner, which has been under growing US pressure to help rein in its wayward neighbour, urged restraint.



"All relevant parties should exercise restraint and refrain from further aggravating tensions in the region," said Beijing`s Foreign Ministry.
Harare: A pastor in Zimbabwe was devoured by a group of hungry crocodiles when he tried to replicate the Biblical story of Jesus Christ walking on water.

The incident took place when Jonathan Mthethwa of the Saint of the Last Days Church tried to demonstrate the Biblical story in a Crocodile-infested river in the presence of his congregants.

Mthethwa, who hails from White River Mpumalanga area, died on Saturday.

His church members saw him devoured by three crocodiles, the dailypost.ng reported.

The pastor taught us about faith on Sunday last week.

He promised he would demonstrate his faith to us today, but he, unfortunately, ended up drowning and getting eaten by 3 large crocodiles in front of us.

We still dont understand how this happened because he fasted and prayed the whole week, the report quoted a church member as saying,

When he was 30 meters inside the river, he tried to ascend to the water surface but the reptiles appeared from nowhere and started feasting on him.

They finished him in a couple of minutes.

All that was left of him when they finished eating him is a pair of sandals and his underwear floating above the water, the church member added.
Balochistan: China's One Belt, One Road initiative, of which the USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a premier and pilot project, is being slammed by World Baloch Women`s Forum president Naela Quadri Baloch.

Notably, India on Sunday skipped China's Belt and Road forum to oppose the CPEC. However, Pakistan and China vowed to conclude the contentious economic route.

"Why the world leaders are deciding about Balochistan in the name of development?," asked Baloch Kurd liberation activist Naela Quadri Baloch.

Naela Baloch accused the Pakistani Army of carrying out brutal activities in Balochistan.

She said thousands of women are kept in rape cells where they are confined and subjected to brutal sexual assault.

She maintained that her struggle for liberation is not limited to women but extended to all quarters of Balochistan.

"The Baloch lawyers, doctors, and engineers are being kidnapped by the Pakistani Army," she said.

Stating that Pakistan is committing this genocide of the Baloch people with the full support of China as a form of "ethnic cleansing", Naela added: "The International Human Rights is silent despite the atrocities and the level of genocide going on in Balochistan by the Pakistan Army and the Pakistani establishment.

Accusing the Pakistan Army of having the licence to "kill, rape and torture Baloch people and to take out their organs to sell them", Naela has demanded that the United Nations - which has "turned blind and has closed its ears and mouth" - to wake up and listen what is going on in Balochistan.

"So, the Baloch nation is going to be finished from the face of the Earth and the UN is silent and the international community is silent. It`s a very-very worrisome situation for us," she added.

(With ANI inputs)
Amman: More than 2,000 rebels and their family members have left the devastated district of Qaboun on the edge of the Syrian capital Damascus after more than two months of aerial strikes and artillery shelling, state media said on Sunday.



The rebels had agreed overnight to a secret evacuation deal after being cornered in a small pocket of Qaboun, which lies on the northeastern edge of Damascus. The area has been largely reduced to rubble after being struck by hundreds of aerial strikes and missiles over a period of about 80 days.



The Syrian Army had resumed its intensive bombardment of the district on Wednesday after a one-day ultimatum it gave the rebels mainly drawn from the area to surrender and agree to evacuate to rebel-held areas in northern Syria.



"The regime has threatened to destroy what is left of Qaboun and will not accept anything but a military solution," Abdullah al Qabouni from the local council of the district told Reuters.



Hundreds of rebels and their families were evacuated this week from the adjacent Barzeh district after rebels there decided to lay down their arms and leave to rebel-held Idlib province.



Syrian state media said 2,289 people had left the district to rebel-held Idlib province on Sunday, half of whom were fighters. Rebels put the total figure at more than 1,500 people.



At least three people were killed when a shooting took place at a bus among a convoy of more than 30 buses ferrying the evacuees northwards out of Damascus, a rebel source said.



Most of the residents of the once-bustling area, which had sheltered thousands of displaced people from other parts of Syria in the course of the conflict, fled in the last two months as the bombing escalated.

REBELS UNDER PRESSURE



The loss of Qaboun following Barzeh is another blow to rebels as they battle to keep a foothold in the capital and face government troops who are supported by Russian air power and Iranian-backed militias.



Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has promoted the use of evacuation deals, along with what his government calls "reconciliation" accords, for rebel-held areas that surrender to the government as a way of reducing bloodshed.



But the United Nations has criticised both the use of siege tactics which precede such deals and the evacuations themselves as amounting to forcible displacement.



The Sunni Muslim rebels accuse the government of seeking to evict Sunni inhabitants in these areas in demographic changes they say would eventually pave the way for Iranian-backed Shi`ites who back Assad`s rule to take over their homes, a claim the authorities deny.



Army advances were made possible after tunnels between Qaboun and Barzeh were cut and the army isolated the areas from the rest of the main rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta.



The tightening of the siege in Qaboun and Barzeh, where tens of thousands of people lived, forced the hands of rebels to eventually agree to deals worked out elsewhere that force them to pull back to northern Syria.



"They besieged us and even medicines for children or any supplies were no longer left ... and people died of hunger," said Ahmad Khatib, who was among those who left on Friday.



Rebels say bloody internecine infighting this month has also weakened their resolve. Fighters in Qaboun and Barzeh said they were not sent reinforcements from powerful rebel groups in the Eastern Ghouta district.



The densely populated rural Eastern Ghouta district of farms and towns has been besieged since 2013. It remains the only major rebel bastion near Damascus and the fall of Qaboun and Barzeh have removed a main line of defence that protected it, rebels say.
Columbia: The Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in a military prison in order to destroy the remains of thousands of murdered prisoners, the United States alleged Monday.

Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, gave reporters satellite pictures apparently showing snow melting on the roof of the facility.

"Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium," he said, referring to a military jail north of Damascus.

"Although the regime`s many atrocities are well documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place in Saydnaya."

Jones said Washington`s information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the US "intelligence community" and that as many as 50 people per day are thought to be hanged at Saydnaya.

He did not give an official estimate for the total number killed, but cited an Amnesty International report that between 5,000 and 11,000 had died between 2011 and 2015 in the prison.

President Bashar al-Assad`s Syrian regime, he alleged, had detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people over the same period.

The latest satellite photograph presented by Jones dated to January 2015, more than two years ago, and it was not immediately clear why the United States waited to present its evidence.
Washington: The United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Islamic State militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to US interests in the volatile Middle East.

The Turks are fiercely opposed to the US plans, seeing the Kurdish fighters as terrorists. And when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visits the White House this week, the most he and President Donald Trump may be able to do is agree to disagree, and move on.

"The Turks see this as a crisis in the relationship," said Jonathan Schanzer at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The challenge is hardly new. Long before Trump took office, US presidents have grappled with the fragility of partnering with Turkey's government and the Kurds to carry out a Middle East agenda.

Past administrations have sought a delicate balance. Too exuberant in its support for the Kurds, and the US risks pushing ally Turkey toward US geopolitical rivals like Russia or emboldening the Kurds to try to create an independent state a scenario that would destabilize multiple countries in the region.

Too little cooperation with the Kurds risks squandering a battlefield ally with proven effectiveness against extremist threats and who has staunchly supported Washington. Trump has made his priorities clear.

His administration is arming Syrian Kurdish fighters as part of an effort to recapture the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State group's self-declared capital.

Coupled with the US-backed fight in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Raqqa is seen as a key step toward liberating the remaining territory the militants hold.

Turkey has been pressuring the US to drop support for the Kurdish militants in Syria for years and doesn't want them spearheading the Raqqa effort.

Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish group, known as the YPG, a terrorist group because of its ties to the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party inside Turkey. The United States, the European Union and Turkey all agree the YPG is a terrorist organisation.

The Turks fear any weapons the US provides the Syrian Kurds could well end up with their ethnic brethren in Turkey, who've fought violently as part of a separatist insurgency for more than three decades.

As a nod to Turkey's concerns, the Pentagon has promised tight monitoring of all weapons and greater intelligence sharing to help the Turks better watch over their frontiers.

Kurds are an ethnic group predominantly concentrated along the borders of four countries Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

But a face-to-face confrontation on the matter between Trump and Erdogan seems inevitable. Erdogan and other top Turkish officials have pressed for the US to reverse its strategy, however low the prospects of Trump changing his mind.

As a result, experts see Erdogan using the meeting to confront Trump on a host of other Turkish grievances. Those include extraditing the Pennsylvania-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blames for fomenting a failed coup last summer, and dropping US charges against Reza Zarrab, a Turkish businessman accused of money-laundering and violating US sanctions in Iran.

"I see this trip as a new milestone in Turkey-US relations," Erdogan said, as he prepared to fly to Washington. The US, too, has a wish list for Turkey. Washington is concerned by rising anti-Americanism in Turkey that Erdogan's government has tolerated since the July coup attempt. The US also has pressed unsuccessfully for the release of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor, and other detained US citizens.

Trump also has much at stake. His willingness to partner with authoritarian rulers and overlook their shortcomings on democracy and human rights have alarmed US lawmakers of both parties. Trump's premise has been that he is focusing on deal-making. That puts added pressure on him to get results.

Trump has gone out of his way to foster a good relationship with Erdogan. After a national referendum last month that strengthened Erdogan's presidential powers, European leaders and rights advocates criticized Turkey for moving closer toward autocratic rule. Trump congratulated Erdogan. Now, the American leader may try to cash in.
United Nations: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday condemned North Korea over its launch of a ballistic missile and called on Pyongyang to return to denuclearization.

"This action is in violation of Security Council resolutions and a threat to peace and security in the region," said Guterres in a statement by his spokesman.
Geneva: Syria peace talks in Geneva this week should prosper from a tighter format and a recent deal to reduce the violence, U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura said on Monday, playing down dismissive comments by President Bashar al-Assad.

Previous rounds of talks have produced agreement that the warring sides will discuss a four-part agenda, but no progress has yet been made on any topic.

Under pressure from international backers, the two sides have agreed to discuss a new constitution, reformed governance, new elections and the fight against terrorism, but they differ sharply over what those agenda items mean.

Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, is keen on discussing "terrorism", a term he uses broadly to describe all adversaries. Opposition negotiators have demanded Assad`s removal, something his backers think is fanciful in the face of his recent military advances in the civil war, now in its seventh year.

Last week Assad told Belarusian TV channel ONT that the Geneva talks were "merely a meeting for the media" and there had been "nothing substantial in all the Geneva meetings".

De Mistura countered that Assad`s negotiator Bashar al-Ja`afari had arrived in Geneva with an 18-strong negotiating delegation "empowered for serious discussions". He denied the U.N. was being used as a diplomatic smokescreen for more war.

"If being a mediator and trying to find common points (means) `being used`, I would accept that. The alternative is no discussion, no hope, no political horizon, just waiting for facts on the ground to take place," de Mistura told reporters.

"Facts on the ground" - U.N. jargon meaning "war" - will not produce a political solution to the intractable conflict which all sides had committed, he said. He said the United States was increasingly engaged and interested in the process, and he hinted at high-level diplomacy going on behind the scenes.

"Everything is connected. There are big important meetings taking place, that will be taking place. There are discussions taking place in capitals. They do have an impact on what we discuss. But I am not going to elaborate now."

The Geneva round of talks comes on the heels of a deal by Russia, Turkey and Iran to arrange and monitor "de-escalation zones" in Syria to ease the fighting.

But he cautioned that no reduction of violence could last without a political horizon to aim at. "That is exactly what we are pushing for".

Previous rounds in Geneva have proceeded at funereal pace, punctuated by what critics have called grandstanding media appearances by rival negotiators.

This round will be shorter and more business-like, starting on Tuesday and ending by Saturday, and with less room for rhetoric, de Mistura said.

"Even the rooms will be smaller, the type of meetings will be a little bit more interactive and proactive and more frequent, we will also choose some subjects to be focused on in order to get more movement."
Ankara: Angered by a U.S. decision to arm Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria, Turkey`s President Tayyip Erdogan heads to Washington this week for talks with Donald Trump seeking either to change the president`s mind or to "sort things out ourselves".

Trump`s approval of plans to supply the YPG as it advances towards the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, just days before his first meeting with Erdogan, has cast a shadow over Tuesday`s planned talks between the two NATO allies.

Ankara, a crucial partner in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, considers the YPG an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency in Turkey`s mainly Kurdish southeast for three decades and is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and United States.

Washington sees the YPG as distinct from the PKK and as a valuable partner in the fight against Islamic State.

"If we are strategic allies we must take decisions as an alliance. If the alliance is to be overshadowed we`ll have to sort things out for ourselves," Erdogan told reporters on Sunday, according to the pro-government Sabah newspaper.

Erdogan was speaking during a visit to China, ahead of his trip to Washington for his first meeting with Trump.

Turkey had hoped that Trump`s inauguration would mark a new chapter in ties with Washington after long-running tensions with the Obama administration over Syria policy and Ankara`s demands for the extradition of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Erdogan blames Gulen supporters for a failed coup attempt last July and has conducted a large-scale crackdown on them, drawing criticism from Washington. Gulen, who has denied involvement in the coup, remains in the United States.

Erdogan welcomed Trump`s election victory last November and said he hoped it would lead to "beneficial steps" in the Middle East. When Erdogan narrowly won sweeping new powers in an April referendum, Trump rang to congratulate him, unlike European politicians who expressed reservations about the vote.

DYNAMITE

But hopes for rapprochement took a hit last week. The decision to arm the YPG was "tantamount to placing dynamite under Turkey-USA relations", a senior Turkish official said.

"Just as it was being said that relations (which were) seriously harmed during the Obama period are being repaired, Turkey moving apart from one of its biggest allies would be an extremely bad sign," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

Erdogan portrays U.S. support for the Kurdish militia - instead of Syrian Arab rebels - as a leftover policy from the Obama administration, which he said had wrongly accused Turkey of doing too little in the fight against Islamic State.

"It is a slander of the Obama administration. Unfortunately now they have left the Syria and Iraq problem in Trump`s lap," Erdogan said in China.

Erdogan will tell Trump that backing a Kurdish force to retake Arab territory held by Islamic State will sow future crises, and that other forces in the region including Kurdish Iraqi leaders also oppose the YPG, the Turkish official said.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said after talks in London last week with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis that Trump`s meeting with Erdogan would be an opportunity to "correct the mistake" of support for the YPG.

"Now we will conduct the final talks," Erdogan said. "After that we will make our final decision."

The United States sees few alternatives to supporting the YPG, which forms a major part of the Syrian Democratic Forces advancing on Raqqa, if it is to achieve the goal of crushing Islamic State in Syria.

Erdogan did not spell out what actions Turkey might take if Washington does press ahead with its plans.

Officials have suggested it could step up air strikes on PKK bases in northern Iraq, or YPG targets in Syria. It could also impose limits on the use of its Incirlik air base as a launchpad for the air campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

But that would hamper operations against jihadis who also menace Turkey and have claimed responsibility for attacks including the bombing of Istanbul airport in June 2016.

"Naturally (Turkey) would have to consider the aftermath of closing the Incirlik base to (U.S.) use," said Soli Ozel, a lecturer at Turkey`s Kadir Has university.

"It will not be very easy to put relations back on track," Ozel said. "I think ultimately a formula will be found. I think neither side wants to cut relations."
In the first week at the NLSIU, one of my seniors told me, "NLS is a big pie. What piece of the pie you get depends on what you make out of the pie." This remark has stayed with me. While NLS has its daily regimen of classes with strict attendance rules, it also provides students the freedom to pursue interests outside classroom. It is what you do after 1.30 pm that defines NLS for you. Student committees and administration work very hard to facilitate and encourage co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.

While we may passionately debate the contours of a legal provision in classes in the morning, we get to decide what we want to do with the rest of the day-one may spend time in the library, cheer for a team at a sporting event, attend a talk, prepare for a competition, read, sleep or just go to enjoy in the town. At night, you will find hostels and canteens bustling, with conversations on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the death penalty. Of course, you will also find a daily dose of campus gossip at one of these places!

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One might think that at a top law school with such great opportunities, the competition would be cut-throat. While the students are competitive, the competition is mostly constructive and positive. Everyone works hard to excel, but that is generally not at the expense of others. Students are ready to share their notes and material, discuss ideas, explain concepts, share resources and knowledge. I remember, in an exam for which we had an exceptionally large syllabus, my batchmates collaborated and made notes for different readings. It made the course easier for all of us. You will find the cooperative spirit moving beyond exams- students often form 'firms' and research together for internal moot court competitions.

The moment you enter NLSIU, you are assigned several mentors-for the library, for projects, etc. There is also a student-run 'parent system', in which the person with the same roll number from a senior batch is your 'law-school parent'. One may find other seniors through various associations-there are annual state lunches where the incoming students get to meet the seniors from their respective states.

When I joined, I was told that NLSIU was all about corporate jobs. The last five years have proved this is not the case. While almost everyone in my batch managed to secure employment in India or abroad, there so many brilliant, passionate and inspiring folks who have chosen interesting career paths-public policy, startups, arts and academia.

Personally, NLSIU has been a great immersive experience. I will soon graduate with the realisation that the past half-decade has been a transformative experience - not only in terms of what I know, but also in the ideas I believe in, and most importantly, the way I think!

Aradhya Sethia is a fifth year BA, LLB (Hons) student.

--- ENDS ---
Beijing: Russian President Vladimir Putin played the piano while waiting for Chinese leader Xi Jinping for bilateral talks in Beijing on Sunday.

Putin, while waiting for Xi at the official residence on Sunday, spotted the shiny black grand piano and played two Russian songs, "Moscow Windows" and "The City on the Free Neva River" -- the unofficial anthems of Moscow and St Petersburg, Sputnik news agency reported.

Putin spoke earlier on Sunday at a summit on China`s new Silk Road plan. He later arrived at state Diaoyutai residence for talks with Xi and other leaders.

The 64-year-old former KGB spy has demonstrated his skills on the piano in the past although he has mostly cultivated a macho image. That included riding a horse in Siberia, piloting firefighting planes and diving in submersible into the depths of Lake Baikal and the Black Sea off Crimea coast.

The annual Vladimir Putin calendar has showcased the President`s many passions, featuring him as an equestrian, a pilot, a shirtless fisherman and a cat lover.

(With Agency inputs)
Beijing: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Moscow was opposed to any new countries acquiring nuclear weapons, but that the world should talk to North Korea rather than threaten it.

Putin, speaking in Beijing, said nuclear tests of the type that Pyongyang had been carrying out in recent weeks were unacceptable, but that a peaceful solution to rising tensions on the Korean peninsula was needed.

"I want to confirm that we are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear powers, including with the Korean Peninsula and North Korea," said Putin, who said any such move would be "harmful and dangerous".

"But at the same time, we understand that what we have observed in the world recently, and specifically flagrant violations of international law and incursions into the territory of foreign states, changes in regime, lead to such kinds of arms races."

Putin did not specify what countries he had in mind, but he has in the past repeatedly criticised the United States for military operations in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and accused it of trying to oust legitimate governments.

"In this connection, we need to act in a joined-up way, (and) strengthen the system of international guarantees with the help of international law and with the help of the U.N. Charter," said Putin.

"We need to return to dialogue with North Korea and stop scaring it and find ways to resolve these problems peacefully."

The Russian leader said he thought such an approach was possible because of what he called "the positive experience" of holding talks with Pyongyang in the past.

"If you recall, there was a time when North Korea announced it was suspending this kind of (nuclear) programme, but unfortunately certain participants in the negotiations process did not have enough patience. I think we need to return to this."

Putin said he was briefed by his defence minister after North Korea`s latest missile test.

"This missile launch presented no threat to us, but it of course escalates this conflict and there is nothing good about that."

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday that a ballistic missile fired by North Korea had crashed into the Sea of Japan around 500 kilometres (310.69 miles) off the Russian coast.
YEREVAN, MAY 14, ARMENPRESS. As of 15:00, Police received 14 reports regarding the process of the City Council election.

The Police HQ told ARMENPRESS one report was received from a citizen, 5 from police officers, 1 from media outlet, and 7 from representatives of political parties.

The reports are being verified.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. North Korean leader Kim Jong -un ordered his missile scientists and experts to get ready for new tests.

Kim Jong -un made the announcement after a successful missile test on May 14, which flew 787 km.

It is necessary to create more precise and diverse nuclear devices and strike means, as well as prepare for new tests, which will continue as long as the United States and its vassals dont make the correct choice, the North Korean leader said as quoted by the countrys state media.

Kim Jong-un emphasized that Pyongyang is ready to give a response if the US dares to make a military provocation against the democratic republic.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Serzh Sarsgyan on May 15 signed a decree to conduct the 2017 summer draft and demobilization, press service of the Presidents Office told Armenpress.

The decree reads:

Based on article 11 of the Military Service and article 6 of the Alternative Service Laws I hereby decide:

Conduct mandatory military service and alternative service summer drafting in May-July of 2017 of those male citizens who will be 18 years of age until June 30 of 2017, as well as those citizens whose temporary deferment right expires until June 30 of 2017. Ensure organization and implementation of alternative service. Demobilize in May-July 2017 conscript who passed obligatory military and alternative service. Discharge alternative labor servicemen who passed their service in the prescribed period. To the Government of Armenia: Within two weeks from this document coming to force, to adopt relevant decision of ensuring implementation of this decree. This decree comes into force the day following its official publication".










YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Kursat Yilmaz, a top mobster of a Turkish organized crime syndicate who is serving a 66 year prison term, testified on Hrant Dinks murder.

The mafia boss said Gulenists had urged him to murder Dink.

In his testominy, the mobster particularly said that Corporal Ahmet S. had requested him in Ankara to organize a meeting between him and Gulenist Imam Ismayil E.

Ismayil spoke about Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in a hotel owned by the Gulenist community. The Gulenist Imam wanted me to be communitys mafia. Speaking on Dink, he said: He is trying to create an Armenian lobby. He is putting the country in a difficult situation, we must kill him, the mobster testified.

He also added that the same man wanted him to kill communist and Alevi activists, but he refused.

After the failed military coup in Turkey, authorities are attempting to accuse Fetullah Gulen and the Gulen movement in murdering Hrant Dink.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. A group of Turkish intellectuals called on eliminating the several-month-long state of emergency in the country, Cumhuriyet reported.

The intellectuals said they are concerned over the existing tense situation in the country, the language of hatred, violations of laws, restriction on freedom to exercise rights, lack of safety of life and property.

We say no to one persons regime, injustice and illegality, pressure exerted on any opposition figure and threats, wrongful, unlawful and arbitrary dismissals of hundreds of thousands public workers, political figures, academicians, media and judicial system representatives, they said in a statement.

They once again stated that they dont recognize the results of April 16 constitutional referendum. The Turkish intellectuals announced that it is necessary to quickly eliminate the state of emergency which led to legal violations in order to again live in secure conditions.

Turkey declared state of emergency on July 20, after the July 16 military coup attempt of 2016. On April 18 the Turkish parliament approved the decision to extend the state of emergency for another 3 months.




YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. The Central Electoral Commission (CEC) of Armenia will make the final summary of the Yerevan City Council election results on the 7th day following the voting, reports Armenpress.

CEC Chairman Tigran Mukuchyan told reporters that they will make a calculation of allocation of seats after summarizing the final results of the election.

There is deadline for the final summary of election results. This deadline is set for submitting complaint-letters, for examining the notes in the registration book and making respective decisions. When the final protocol of results is formed, we will carry out respective distribution of mandates, Mukuchyan said.

He clarified that the 65 mandates of the Yerevan City Council will be distributed in accordance wit the votes received by political forces participated in the election.

Mukuchyan informed that on May 14 the CEC and the regional electoral commissions didnt receive complaint-letters. Deadlines are set for submitting applications. You know that they can be re-count applications, applications to declare invalid the voting results, as well as there can be usual complaint-letters. As of now no such applications have been received, however, in case of receiving them the Electoral Code sets a timeframe during which all applications must be examined, the CEC Chairman said.

The applications can be submitted to the regional electoral commissions on May 15, starting from 12:00 to 18:00 and on May 16, from 09:00 to 11:00. Longer timeframe is set for submitting applications on voting instead of other person: in this case the term is more than one day.
At the closing ceremony of the Narmada Sewa Yatra in Madhya Pradesh's Amarkantak, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said we're forced to ponder what we did to have to work towards saving the Narmada river.

By Rahul Noronha: Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said that while the Narmada river saved us for thousands of years, we're now forced to ponder what we did to have to work towards saving her.

PM Modi's comments came at the closing ceremony of the Narmada Sewa Yatra at Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh.

The Narmada Sewa Yatra, which began on December 11, 2016, ended today in the town.

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The yatra has been dubbed as both a river conservation drive and a mass contact programme by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan ahead of the 2018 assembly polls in the state.

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

PM Modi said public participation is very important in a democracy.

"Madhya Pradesh has shown the way in public participation. Twenty two cities in the list of 100 cleanest cities in the country are from the state. This feat has been achieved through public participation. Similarly, the Narmada Sewa Yatra is another example of public participation," he said.

He added that a document prepared for the rejuvenation of the river is the perfect document for the purpose, and should be distributed to all states, so that they can emulate it.

The PM also said that since he was born in Gujarat, he knows the importance of 'every drop of water' of the Narmada.

He said the river had an important role to play in ensuring 20 per cent agriculture growth for Madhya Pradesh.

In a message to the Opposition in Madhya Pradesh - which has been calling the Narmada Sewa Yatra a drain on the exchequer - PM Modi said it was unfortunate that whenever a movement gets associated with politicians, it is criticized.

"In any other place, a movement that has been on for 150 days would have all the television channels covering it," he said.

'PUBLIC-DRIVEN PLATFORM'

Earlier, CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced that 6 crore saplings would be planted on the banks of the Narmada on July 2.

Madhya Pradesh would gradually move away from thermal power, promote organic farming in a big way, and would establish a course on river rejuvenation in universities, he added.

He said the Narmada Sewa Mission - formed to take forward the plans formulated during the yatra - would be a public-driven platform which would work towards making the river the cleanest river in the world.

Union Minister for Rural Development Narendra Singh Tomar and MoS Health Faggan Singh were also present on the occasion.

ALSO READ:

New committees in UP, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand to boost PM Modi's clean Ganga project

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Uttar Pradesh can learn how to conserve its rivers from MP: Yogi Adityanath

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar to NGT: No damage done to Yamuna; when lies are exposed, it is shocking

--- ENDS ---
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenias Embassy in Austria on May 12 participated in the Day of Armenian Studies; scientific conference in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Salzburg, press service of the Armenian MFA told Armenpress.

The conference was organized by the Christian East Study Center of the University led by Chair of the Department of Armenian Studies Jasmine Dum-Tragut and in partnership with the Armenian Embassy.

The conference was dedicated to the 25th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Austria. On behalf of the Universitys rector, Vice Rector Fatima Ferreira Briza delivered a welcoming speech. Thereafter, the representative of the Armenian Embassy conveyed to the participants the message by Ambassador Arman Kirakosyan where he expressed gratitude to the university leadership for the special attention shown to Armenian studies, as well as for hosting this scientific meeting.

Scientists, researchers from the universities of Austria and a number of European countries, the US, Australia, as well as lecturers of YSU Faculty of Oriental Studies presented reports during the conference.

On behalf of the Armenian Embassy a reception was organized for the participants of the conference.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. All three political forces running for office in the May 14 election will receive mandates in the Yerevan City Council.

The Republican Party of Armenia, which received 240,036 votes, will have 46 mandates.

The opposition bloc Yelk, which received 71,731 votes, will receive 14 mandates, while Yerkir Tsirani party will get 5 mandates with 26,109 votes.

The calculation has been carried out as prescribed under the Electoral Code.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. By the assistance of Armenias Embassy in Iran, a photo-chronological exhibition entitled Newly independent state of centuries old Armenia was held in Tehrans Ararat cultural union on May 11-13 dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Armenias Independence, press service of Armenias Foreign Ministry told Armenpress.

During the exhibition key cultural, scientific, political, public, economic and other events happened in Armenia in 1988-2016 were presented.

More than 160 photos at documentary and fiction format were presented.

Consul of Armenias Embassy in Iran Grigor Hakobyan, Chairman of the Iran-Armenia Joint Chamber of Commerce Levon Aharonyan and exhibition organizer Pavel Sargsyan delivered remarks at the event.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. By the initiative of the Association of Armenian modern painters, Present painting exhibition was opened in the UN Office in Armenia on the occasion of the International Day of Families, reports Armenpress.

The works of Armenian young modern painters were presented at the exhibition.

The works of 18 painters are presented: each of them presented several paintings. As this is our first exhibition, all members of the Association are taking part. Majority of paintings are dedicated to the family and the current concerns of the painters, exhibition organizer, painter Sergey Isaverdyan said.

He said the Association of Armenian modern painters is newly established. It aims at presenting the works of modern painters to the wide circles of the public.

It is already 15 years I am engaged in professional painting, I am inspired by the positive events happening in life. I attach great importance to this exhibition because the family is the most important idea which has weakened in our days since many values are violated, painter Vahe Apoyan said.

Painter Mariam Mughdusyan stated that in future exhibitions will be held in other places as well. We plan to jointly present the works of painters sharing the same ideas, views at various exhibitions. The goal is to get acquainted with each others works and activity, she said.

Some paintings are being sold. The exhibition will be open until May 30.

In 1993 the UN General Assembly called on the members states to celebrate May 15 as the International Day of Families every year. Currently the International Day of Families is celebrated in Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Tajikistan, Belarus, Ukraine and several other countries. On February 9, 2011, Armenias Parliament adopted the law on making an amendment in the Law on Holidays and Memorials Days of the Republic of Armenia, by which May 15 was declared as Family Day.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian delegation to Beijings May 14 Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation comprised Suren Karayan, minister of economic development and investments, and his deputy Hovhannes Azizyan.

Minister Karayan participated in the plenary session and the panel discussions on Promoting unrestricted trade and Promoting financial integration.

The minister held meetings and discussions with several of his counterparts of various countries.

During the conference Karayan also met with executives of different national corporations, and discussed the prospects of investing in Armenia.

Leaders of 29 countries, representatives of governments of 130 countries, 70 international organizations and other corporations participate in the conference.
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Travel + Leisure, an American online travel magazine, named Singapore Airlines the worlds best airline.

Singapore Airlines received the Best Awards prize from the magazine.

Travel + Leisure conducted a wide survey among its readers to assess convenience, customer service and pricing of various international airlines.

The top ten, according to Travel + Leisure, is comprised the following way :
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. The Turkish government again banned the German Bundestag Defense Committee members to visit the German soldiers stationed in Incirlik air base, Deutsche Welle reports citing DPA news agency.

The German Foreign Ministry told Committee Chairman Wolfgang Hellmich that the Turkish government announced on May 10 the rejection of the request to visit the German soldiers in Incirlik air base.

According to dpa information, one reason given for the denial of access was Germany's granting asylum to a number of Turkish officers who faced persecution following the failed coup in Turkey on July 15 last year.

The visit must have been held on May 16. Hellmich and the Committee members must have been informed about the fight against Islamic State terrorist group and the working conditions of the German soldiers in Incirlik.
DOHA, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenia and the State of Qatar reached an agreement to take steps aimed at contributing to bilateral trade turnover growth, Minister of Economic Development and Investments Suren Karayan said after the meeting with Qatar's Minister of Economy and Commerce Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, Armenpress correspondent reports.

Minister Karayan departed for Qatar in the delegation led by President Serzh Sargsyan.

The major aim of the meeting with Qatars Economy Minister was to reach agreements on further cooperation formats: we reached those agreements. We have presented Armenias investment environments attractiveness, a number of concrete investment programs which they can carry out at the first stage. I invited my colleague to visit Armenia, Suren Karayan said.

According to the Minister, the Armenian side proposed to make investments in promising fields, such as in agriculture, urban development, road construction and tourism. It is possible new investment programs, new ideas will emerge during the discussions. In particular, we have talked about the possible investment in the high technologies field. Preliminary agreements were reached on holding a bilateral economic forum, the Armenian Minister said.

Minister Karayan said both sides accept that currently the bilateral trade turnover volumes are at a very low level, and there is a desire to sharply increase them. We have agreed with my colleague to stay in constant contact, we will try to take steps within the frames of public-private sector cooperation aimed at increasing the trade turnover, Karayan said.

Armenia and Qatar established diplomatic relations on November 5, 1997. In 2016 the trade turnover between the two countries comprised 468.3 thousand USD (45.2% growth). The export amounted to 14.7 thousand USD (increase 3.5 times). In January-March, 2017 the trade turnover comprised 38.3 thousand USD (increase 4.1 times).
YEREVAN, MAY 15, ARMENPRESS. The Azerbaijani side undertook another provocative measure on May 15, at about 16:30, in the eastern direction of the border with Artsakh, firing guided missile at a military facility of the Defense Army, as a result of which one military unit has been partially damaged, Armenpress reports MoD Armenia spokesperson Artsrun Hovhannisyan posted on his Facebook page.

The Defense Army suffered no human losses as a result of the provocation by the Azerbaijani armed forces. We announce that the provocation by the Azerbaijani armed forces will not remain without retaliation, while the entire responsibility of the consequences will be on the shoulders of the military-political leadership of Azerbaijan, he wrote.
LONDONLovehoneys Trade Sales Executive, Jade Bawa, has just returned from a successful trip to Australia. Jade visited customers and retailers and represented Lovehoney at Adultex, one of the largest gatherings of adult industry manufacturers and retailers in the southern hemisphere.

Held by Calvista, Australias largest adult wholesale distributor in Australia, the three-day tradeshow took place April 26-28 and showcased the latest products and innovations in sexual pleasure and wellness products.

Lovehoney showcased the Motorhead - The Official Pleasure Collection, Motley Crue - The Official Pleasure Collection, Fifty Shades Darker - The Official Pleasure Collection and tokidoki x Lovehoney Pleasure Collection ranges and Sqweel. Supporting eye-catching POS was also on display to show the customers the fantastic marketing support that Lovehoney offers. This included a brand new striking Fifty Shades Darker acrylic display shelf and tokidoki x Lovehoney slat wall graphics.

Visitors to the stand were particularly taken by the tokidoki x Lovehoney Pleasure Collection, notably the effervescent tokidoki x Lovehoney bullets and striking POS, Lovehoney reported. Customers were rocked by the Motorhead vibrators, with many fans of the band coming to check out the line-up, the company added.

Jade remarked, We are so pleased with the outcome of the show, the turnout was fantastic and it was great to chat to existing and potential customers. The response to tokidoki x Lovehoney was phenomenal, people loved the vibrancy of the products!

Calvistas General Manager Roger Sheldon-Collins added, It was great to see so many retailers interested in all the wonderful brands that Lovehoney stock, especially tokidoki and Lovehoneys Official Pleasure Collection, as both these brands stood out to not only customers but us too!

For more information contact [email protected] or Lovehoneys Trade team at [email protected].
Major Nitin Gogoi who raised a huge controversy after tying a civilian to an Army jeep has been given a clean cheat by a court of inquiry convened over the issue.

The Army had tied a civilian on their jeep to escape stone-pelting during by-polls in Srinagar

By Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu: The court of inquiry (CoI) convened by the Army in Jammu Kashmir has given a clean chit to a Major who tied a civilian to an Army jeep's bonnet.

Following furore, the Army had convened a CoI on April 15, two days after an FIR was filed by J&K Police into the incident, allegedly involving a Major from 53 Rashtriya Rifles.

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No action has been recommended against the Major. A source said, "Court martial is out of the question. Not even disciplinary action was recommended against the officer."

Sources say the five-vehicle convoy led by the Major had soldiers, 12 poll officials, nine ITBP men and two policemen. The major had reportedly come up with the idea to escape stone-pelting mobs during the by-election to Srinagar. Separatists and militant groups had asked youths to disrupt the elections.

BRASS BELIEVES HE SAVED LIVES

Highly placed sources say that the inquiry has given a clean chit to the major in question - Nitin Gogoi. A source told MAIL TODAY that contrary to the hue and cry generated by the clipping on social media, senior army officers had appreciated the presence of mind of the officer to avoid casualties or injuries.

The source said, "He was congratulated for his acumen and presence of mind that saved many lives."

Senior Army officers are reportedly of the view that it was 'one-off incident that was blown out of proportion'. Another source said, "In the Army, attaining the objective is more important. The means used by the officer could have been different, but the objective was perfectly met."

Sources said the officer is of an ACC background. The Army Cadet College wing trains soldiers from the regular Army, Navy and Air Force for commission as officers in the Indian Army.

The officer has risen from the ranks, and is said to have close to a decade experience. The April 9 incident, which occurred in Budgam, involved troops from 53 Rashtriya Rifles who tied up one Farooq Ahmad Dar on their jeep's bonnet as a 'human shield'.

'NOT A STONE-PELTER'

Though Army sources said Dar was a stone-pelter, the latter said he was returning home after casting his vote when jawans picked him up.

The jeep, the video showed, was the leading vehicle of a convoy. Omar Abdullah tweeted the visuals demanding a CoI.

Sources said the CoI was headed by an officer of the rank of Colonel. The CoI was a fact-finding mission where the Army had also called Dar to record his statement.

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Dar, who claimed that he had gone out to vote, had told before the media that he received internal injuries. He claimed he was not a stone-pelter. However, after he was tied to the jeep, the convoy was able to pass safely.

ALSO READ | Kashmir: Army orders probe against major for tying man to jeep as human shield

ALSO WATCH | I'm not even a stone-pelter, says Kashmiri man tied to jeep

--- ENDS ---
Wong Wong Bakery Limited has been fined more than 14,000 after council health inspectors uncovered a host of food safety violations.

On 4 May, Wong Wong Bakery Limited, owners of Wong Wong Cafe and Bakery, Gorton, was fined 12,000 and ordered to pay costs of 2,388.18 at Manchester Magistrates Court, for six separate food safety offences.

On 17 March 2016, officers from Manchester City Councils environmental health team visited the Wong Wong Cafe and Bakery, Gorton, to carry out a routine food safety inspection. The inspection revealed serious issues, such as evidence of mice activity, as well as greasy and dirty conditions.

Mouse faeces were found in the serving and kitchen areas, under shelving and around the wok-range - as well as in the washing-up area and under a chest freezer.

Several holes were observed at the premises that could allow access for vermin.

Surfaces of the walls, floors, canopy, wok range, shelving, chopping boards, duck ovens, and fridges were also all found to be greasy and dirty.

The cloths and sponges in use were also unsanitary and needed replacing. A large quantity of raw duck had been left on a draining board next to the sink  creating a risk of cross-contamination to the clean bowls and other food containers stored underneath.

Following the inspection, the company agreed to close the business voluntarily until the infestation was under control and the cleaning standards and food safety practices were improved.

The cafe and bakery did not reopen until 23 March 2016, when environmental health officers were satisfied the pest infestation was under control and improved food safety practices and procedures were in place.

Councillor Nigel Murphy, Manchester City Council executive member for neighbourhoods, said in a statement: All food businesses need to understand the responsibility they have to their customers, who rightly expect all cafes and restaurants to maintain the highest standards.

The complete disregard for hygiene displayed by this company is frankly unacceptable, which is illustrated by the severity of the fine. This case should serve as a warning - our inspectors are out there and will not hesitate in taking action to protect the public.
The Democrat leadership has made constant, profound and incredible pronouncements that one's supportive vote for Republicans is tantamount to surrendering Democracy forever. Understanding their sincere thinking in their extreme position: How will you still vote on this election day?

Democrat; because the continuance of this Democracy from the existential threat of extreme Republicans is paramount.

Republican; the process of having a choice is the democratic method within what so called "Democracy" does exists.
Kathy Manos Penn

I'm fond of saying,and I'll add,That's why my collection has grown by leaps and bounds over the past month and is sure to do so again at the next Library Sale.I started at the Lemonade Days Festival Book Store where my book was for sale in Georgia in April. Since I manned the booth for two days, I "had" to buy a book. Next, I sat with the Friends of the Library at another festival last weekend. Again, I couldn't just sell my book; I "had" to buy a few of theirs. Now, I'm anticipating roaming through the larger selection of books at an upcoming Library sale.Mysteries are my favorites, especially those set in England. For quite some time, I've been stuck in the post-WWI era, though I also enjoy modern times. When I find a mystery series I like, I try to read them in order. The library can't carry every book in every series, so I'm always on the hunt to fill the gaps.If you're a mystery fan, you'll want to check out my list of favorites:Her Maisie Dobbs series starts in post-WWI England, with flashbacks to Maisie's early life before the war. I strongly recommend you read these in order, as the character development is critical to enjoying these mysteries.This series also begins in post-WWI England, and the main character is Inspector Rutledge of Scotland Yard. I stumbled across one of these books at a Library Salewhere else?and, I've been hooked ever since. I've got the 19th in the series on reserve at the library.Her Chief Inspector Woodend series is set in the 1950s and 60s England. I started with #16 in this series of twenty, and I've been searching for the earlier tales ever since. I've worked my way up to #12 with a combination of library books and Amazon used books.I moved back across the pond for this series set in the Canadian province of Quebec. Just across the border with New York lies the quaint town of Three Pines, filled with characters you'll come to love. It's important to start at the beginning here too, with "Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery," or you'll miss out on the character development over the course of these twelve books.Moving back to the USA, a friend recommended the Gregor DeMarkian series set in Philadelphia. DeMarkian is called the "Armenian-American Poirot." I found the first in this 29 book series at the library and have now made it to #8.Sheriff Le Brun, who lives in Brunswick, GA, is the protagonist. I read a WSJ review of "The St. Simons Island Club," the fourth in the series, and went in search of the first one, "The Jekyll Island Club." These mysteries, set in the early 1900s, include real-life characters like J.P Morgan and Joseph Pulitzer.If my list has introduced you to a few new authors, maybe you'll search for them in your area. Here's to happy hunting
You may have read in the past few days that the North Carolina Senate has approved its version of a state budget to go into effect on July 1. Depending on your source for the information, however, your perception of the Senate's work might differ markedly from that of other North Carolinians.Did state senators just limit spending to the bare essentials so they could approve a billion-dollar tax cut? Or did they just boost spending substantially on teacher pay raises and other state priorities? The answers to both questions depend on which of two fiscal years we are referencing.In odd-numbered years, state leaders enact a biennial budget - that is, a revenue and spending plan for the next two fiscal years. Therefore, the budget approved by senators this month covers the 2017-18 fiscal year that begins July 1 as well as the 2018-19 fiscal year that begins the following July 1.Coming up with a two-year budget doesn't mean state leaders place the budget on autopilot and return to it two years later. In even-numbered years, they come to Raleigh for a shorter legislative session during which they "adjust" that two-year budget to reflect the first year's actual revenues and expenditures. Unless there is a recession, that typically means revenues will come in higher than expected and spending will come up lower than expected. The governor and lawmakers then make plans for the resulting difference - both the budget surplus for the current year and the higher-than-projected revenue for the second year of the biennium.In effect, then, state leaders enact a budget every year. That's why I always urge North Carolinians to pay closer attention to the first year of a biennial budget than to the second-year budget, because the latter is never implemented the way it looks on paper.For the 2017-18 fiscal year, legislative staff projects that North Carolina will collect a little over $23 billion in tax and fee revenue for the General Fund (the part of the budget that doesn't include federal funds, highway funds, and other special or dedicated revenue streams). That's about a billion-dollar increase in General Fund revenue over the 2016-17 fiscal year. For the following year, 2018-19, the projection is for another billion dollars or so in new General Fund revenues.A useful way to think about the budget the North Carolina Senate came up with is that of the roughly one billion dollars in new revenue projected for the coming year, the state would allocate 54 percent of it to General Fund spending (to fund enrollment growth, pay increases, new programs, and other items). It would allocate 31 percent of the new revenue to the Senate's tax-cut package, the primary elements of which would reduce personal and corporate tax rates and expand the standard deduction to exempt more North Carolinians' income from tax. The remaining revenue will be stowed away in savings in one form or another, a prudent practice that state lawmakers have been following for several years.What happens in the second year? Well, if the Senate's budget plan were implemented as written, the proportions would flip around. More than 70 percent of the new revenue in 2018-19 would be allocated to the tax-relief package, budgeted at $710 million. General Fund expenditures would still grow, but at a more modest pace.When lawmakers of both parties talk about a "billion-dollar tax cut," in other words, they are combining the revenue impact over two years. But even on paper, that's only about half the expected growth in revenue, and represents just two percent of the $46 billion the plan allocates to General Fund expenditures over those two years.More importantly, revenue and expenditures will likely be higher in the second year of the budget biennium - unless the economy dips into recession. If that happens, we'll be grateful for the large savings reserves that lawmakers and former Gov. Pat McCrory have built up.In short, don't overreact to the Senate's budget. Let's see how the House responds.
Rust is a language for confident, productive systems programming. It aims to make systems programming accessible to a wider audience, and to raise the ambitions of dyed-in-the-wool systems hackers.

It's been two years since Rust 1.0 was released. Happy second birthday, Rust!

Rustaceans at RustFest Berlin, September 2016. Picture by Fiona Castineira

Over these two years, we have demonstrated stability without stagnation, maintaining backwards compatibility with version 1.0 while also making many improvements. Conveniently, Rust's birthday is a bit under halfway through 2017, which makes this a great time to reflect not only on the progress in the last year but also on the progress of our 2017 Roadmap goals.

After reading this post, if you'd like to give us your feedback on how we're doing and where Rust should focus next, please fill out our 2017 State of Rust survey.

But first, let's do the numbers!

Rust in numbers

A lot has happened since Rust's first birthday:

10,800 commits by 663 contributors (438 of them new this year) added to the core repository;

56 RFCs merged;

9 minor releases and 2 patch releases shipped;

4,405 new crates published;

284 standard library stabilizations;

10 languages rust-lang.org has been translated into;

48 new companies running Rust in production;

4 new teams (Docs, Style, Infrastructure, and the Unsafe Guidelines strike team);

24 occasions of adding people to teams, 6 retirings of people from teams;

3 babies born to people on the Rust teams;

2 years of stability delivered.

On an average week this year, the Rust community merged 1 RFC and published 83 new crates. Rust topped the "most loved language" for the second year in a row in the StackOverflow survey. Also new this year is thanks.rust-lang.org, a site where you can browse contributors by release.

Rust in production

In addition to the 48 new Rust friends, we now have a Rust jobs website! More and more companies are choosing Rust to solve problems involving performance, scaling, and safety. Let's check in on a few of them.

Dropbox is using Rust in multiple high-impact projects to manage exabytes of data on the back end, where correctness and efficiency is critical. Rust code is also currently shipping in the desktop client on Windows running on hundreds of millions of machines. Jamie Turner recently spoke at the SF Rust Meetup about the details on how Rust helps Dropbox use less RAM and get more throughput with less CPU.

Mozilla, Rust's main sponsor, has accelerated their use of Rust in production. Not only did Servo start shipping nightly builds, Firefox 48 marked the first Firefox release that included Rust code as part of the Oxidation project. Project Quantum, announced in October 2016, is an effort to incrementally adopt proven parts of Servo into Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko. Check out this blog series that's just getting started for a detailed look at Project Quantum.

GNOME, a free and open source desktop environment for Linux, went from experimenting with Rust in librsvg in October 2016 to a hackfest in March to work on the interoperability between GNOME and Rust to enable more GNOME components to be written in Rust. The hackfest participants made good progress, be sure to check out the reports at the bottom of the hackfest page for all the details. We're all excited about the possibilities of Rust and GNOME working together.

This year, npm started using Rust in production to serve JavaScript packages. The Rust pieces eliminate performance bottlenecks in their platform that serves around 350 million packages a day. Ashley Williams recently gave a talk at RustFest in Ukraine about npm's experience with Rust in production; check out the video.

This is just a sampling of the success stories accumulating around Rust. If you're using Rust in production, we want to hear yours too!

Rust in community

Speaking of conferences, We've had four Rust conferences in the last year:

And we have at least three conferences coming up!

That's not even including the 103 meetups worldwide about Rust. Will you be the one to run the fourth conference or start the 104th meetup? Contact the community team for help and support!

Rust in 2017

The 2017 Roadmap goals have been great for focusing community efforts towards the most pressing issues facing Rust today. Of course we'd love for every aspect of Rust to improve all the time, but we don't have an infinite number of contributors with an infinite amount of time available yet!

Let's check in on some of the initiatives in each of the goals in the roadmap. The linked tracking issues give even more detail than the summaries here.

The second edition of The Rust Programming Language Book is one chapter shy of having its initial content complete. There's lots more editing to be done to get the book ready for publication in October, though. The print version is currently available for preorder from No Starch, and the online version of the second edition has boarded the beta train and will be an option in the documentation shipped with Rust 1.18.0. Steve and I have gotten feedback that the ownership chapter especially is much improved and has helped people understand ownership related concepts better!

The Language Ergonomics Initiative is another part of the lower learning curve goal that has a number of improvements in its pipeline. The language team is eager to mentor people (another goal!) who are interested in getting involved with moving these ergonomic improvement ideas forward by writing RFCs and working with the community to flesh out the details of how these improvements would work. Comment on the tracking issue if you'd like to jump in.

Also check out:

Waiting on the compiler is the biggest roadblock preventing the Rust development workflow from being described as "pleasant". So far, a lot of work has been done behind the scenes to make future improvements possible. Those improvements are starting to come to fruition, but rest assured that this initiative is far from being considered complete.

One of the major prerequisites to improvements was adding MIR (Mid-level Intermediate Representation) to the compiler pipeline. This year, MIR became a default part of the compilation process.

Because of MIR, we're now able to work on adding incremental recompilation. Nightly builds currently offer "beta" support for it, permitting the compiler to skip over code generation for code that hasn't changed. We are in the midst of refactoring the compiler to support finer-grained incremental computation, allowing us to skip type-checking and other parts of compilation as well. This refactoring should also offer better support for the IDE work (see next section), since it enables the compiler to do things like compile a single function in isolation. We expect to see the next stage of incremental compilation becoming available over the next few months. If you're interested in getting involved, please check out the roadmap issue #4, which is updated periodically to reflect the current status, as well as places where help is needed.

The February post on the "beta" support showed that recompiling in release mode will often be five times as fast with incremental compilation! This graph shows the improvements in compilation time when making changes to various parts of the regex crate and rebuilding in release mode:

Try out incremental compilation on nightly Rust with CARGO_INCREMENTAL=1 cargo <command> !

Thanks to Niko Matsakis for this incremental compilation summary!

We've also made some progress on the time it takes to do a full compilation. On average, compile times have improved by 5-10% in the last year, but some worst-case behavior has been fixed that results in >95% improvements in certain programs. Some very promising improvements are on the way for later this year; check out perf.rust-lang.org for monitoring Rust's performance day-to-day.

As part of our IDE initiative, we created the Rust Language Server project. Its goal is to create a single tool that makes it easy for any editor or IDE to have the full power of the Rust compiler for error checking, code navigation, and refactoring by using the standard language server protocol created by Microsoft and Eclipse.

While still early in its life, today the RLS is available from rustup for nightly users. It provides type information on hover, error messages as you type, and different kinds of code navigation. It even provides refactoring and formatting as unstable features! It works with projects as large as Cargo. We're excited to watch the RLS continue to grow and hope to see it make its way to stable Rust later this year.

Thanks to Jonathan Turner for this RLS summary!

The recent post on the Libz Blitz details the Library Team's initiative to increase the quality of crates for common tasks; that post is excellent so I won't repeat it here. I will note that many of the issues that the Libs Team is going to create will be great starter issues. For the blitz to be the best it can be, the Libs Team is going to need help from the community-- that means YOU! :) They're willing to mentor people interested in contributing.

In order to make awesome crates easier to find for particular purposes, crates.io now has categories for crate authors to better indicate the use case of their crate. Crates can also now have CI badges, and more improvements to crates.io's interface are coming that will help you choose the crates that fit your needs.

One of the major events in Rust's ecosystem in the last year was the introduction of a zero-cost futures library, and a framework, Tokio, for doing asynchronous I/O on top of it. These libraries are a boon for doing high-scale, high-reliability server programming, productively. Futures have been used with great success in C++, Scala, and of course JavaScript (under the guise of promises), and we're reaping similar benefits in Rust. However, the Rust library takes a new implementation approach that makes futures allocation-free. And Tokio builds on that to provide a futures-enabled event loop, and lots of tools for quickly implementing new protocols. A simple HTTP server using Tokio is among the fastest measured in the TechEmpower server benchmarks.

Speaking of protocols, Rust's full-blown HTTP story is solidifying, with Hyper's master branch currently providing full Tokio support (and official release imminent). Work on HTTP/2 is well under way. And the web framework ecosystem is growing too. For example, Rocket came out this year: it's a framework that marries the ergonomics and flexibility of a scripting framework with the performance and reliability of Rust. Together with supporting libraries like the Diesel ORM, this ecosystem is showing how Rust can provide slick, ergonomic developer experiences without sacrificing an ounce of performance or reliability.

Over the rest of this year, we expect all of the above libraries to significantly mature; for a middleware ecosystem to sprout up; for the selection of supported protocols and services to grow; and, quite possibly, to tie all this all together with an async / await notation that works natively with Rust's futures.

Thanks to Aaron Turon for this server-side summary!

Cargo, Rust's native package manager and build system, is often cited as one of people's favorite aspects of Rust. But of course, the world runs on many build systems, and when you want to bring a chunk of the Rust ecosystem into a large organization that has its own existing build system, smooth integration is paramount.

This initiative is mostly in the ideas stage; we've done a lot of work with stakeholders to understand the challenges in build system integration today, and we think we have a good overall vision for how to solve them. There's lots of great discussion on the tracking issue that has resulted in a few Cargo issues like these:

There are a lot of details yet to be worked out; keep an eye out for more improvement in this area soon.

The "all levels" part of the roadmap item is important to us: it's about onboarding first-time contributors as well as adding folks all the way up at the core team level (like me, hi!)

For people just getting started with Rust, we held RustBridge events before RustFest Berlin and Rust Belt Rust. There's another coming up, planned for the day before RustConf in Portland!

The Mozilla Rust folks are going to have Outreachy and GSoC interns this summer working on a variety of projects.

We've also had success involving contributors when there are low-committment, high impact tasks to be done. One of those efforts was improving the format of error messages-- check out the 82 participants on this issue! The Libz Blitz mentioned in a previous section is set up specifically to be another source of mentoring opportunities.

In January, the Language Team introduced shepherds, which is partly about mentoring a set of folks around the Language Team. The shepherds have been quite helpful in keeping RFC discussions moving forward!

We've also been working to grow both the number and size of subteams, to create more opportunities for people to step into leadership roles.

There's also less formal ways that we've been helping people get involved with various initiatives. I've worked with many people at many places in their Rust journey: helping out with the conferences, giving their first conference talks, providing feedback on the book, working on crates, contributing to Rust itself, and joining teams! While it's hard to quantify scenarios like these, everywhere I turn, I see Rustaceans helping other Rustaceans and I'm grateful this is part of our culture.

Rust in the future

At two years old, Rust is finding its way into all corners of programming, from web development, to embedded systems, and even your desktop. The libraries and the infrastructure are maturing, we're paving the on-ramp, and we're supporting each other. I'm optimistic about the direction Rust is taking!

Happy birthday, Rust! Here's to many more! 
The Kansas photographer tricked many women to act in his fake 'adult' films and promised them a hefty amount of money.

By India Today Web Desk: A US man from Kansas has pleaded guilty for duping dozens of women into having sex with him on camera.

The 34-year-old Mario Antoine, pretended to be an adult star and tricked women to have sexual intercourse with him naming the sessions as 'rehearsals'.

Antoine created a series of fake identities online to lure aspiring adult actresses. He used to fake identities of talent managers, photographers etc. to contact women who were interested in doing adult films. Antoine also threatened women when they tried exposing his activities by blackmailing them.

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Mario Antoine was also a photographer by profession at one point, and had previous convictions for fraud. He used to take advance payments from clients and constantly failed to show up on the events.

FYI || Also read: Watch: Here is what a hospice nurse, who sees people die everyday, has to say about life

Antoine will be sentenced to 10 years in prison under the terms of the deal he agreed, the U.S attorney's office said. He also will be required to pay compensation to his victims. The formal sentencing of the case is set for September 13, 2017.

FYI || Also read: Australia: 'Deeply distressing' footage shows mentally ill woman suffering before death due to hospital's negligence

Also watch: Colombian Shops Display Breastfeeding Mannequins to Tackle Stigma

--- ENDS ---
By Ayesha Rascoe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers on Sunday called on President Donald Trump to turn over any tapes of conversations with fired FBI chief James Comey, potentially setting up a showdown with the White House as Democrats considered a boycott of the vote on Comey's replacement. In a highly unusual move, Trump last week appeared to suggest on Twitter that he might have tapes of conversations with Comey and warned the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation against talking to the media. Trump and a White House spokesman declined to confirm or deny whether such tapes exist. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the White House must "clear the air" about whether there are any taped conversations. "You can't be cute about tapes. If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over," Graham told NBC's "Meet the Press" program. Trump sparked a political firestorm when he abruptly fired Comey last week. The FBI has been investigating alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. election and possible ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign. Democrats have accused Trump of attempting to thwart the FBI's probe and have called for some type of independent inquiry into the matter. Trump has said he removed Comey because he was not doing a good job and that Comey had lost the support of FBI employees. Trump tweeted on Friday that "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!" If there are recordings, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah told the "Fox News Sunday" program it was "inevitable" that they would be subpoenaed and the White House would have to release them. Lee, who was on Trump's list of potential replacements for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, also said recording conversations in the White House is "not necessarily the best idea." 'SIGH OF RELIEF' Trump's threat about tapes has intensified calls from Democrats for an independent probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump must immediately provide Congress with any tapes and warned that destroying existing tapes would violate the law. Schumer also said Senate Democrats are weighing whether to refuse to vote on a new FBI director until a special prosecutor is named to investigate Trump's potential ties to Russia. Russia has denied the claims and the White House says there was no collusion. "To have that special prosecutor, people would breathe a sigh of relief because then there would be a real independent person overlooking the FBI director," Schumer told CNN's "State of the Union" program. Trump, who has sought better relations with Russia, has continued to question whether it was behind the hacking of email accounts belonging to Democrats involved in Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. But Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told NBC's "Meet the Press" program there is no question that "the Russians were playing around in our electoral processes." He defended Trump's decision to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office last week. "It's in the interest of the American people, it's in the interest of Russia and the rest of the world that we do something to see if we cannot improve the relationship between the two greatest nuclear powers in the world," Tillerson said. The Justice Department began interviewing candidates for the FBI director job on Saturday. Some people under consideration include acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, New York Appeals Court Judge Michael Garcia and former Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher, according to a White House official. Meanwhile, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday found that 29 percent of Americans approve of Trump's decision to fire Comey, while 38 percent disapprove. If a Senate vote on a new FBI director breaks down along party lines, Democrats would not have the votes to block a nominee because Republicans hold a majority in the chamber. "The key is getting some of our Republican colleagues to join us," Schumer said. Republican leaders in the Senate have rebuffed calls for a special prosecutor, saying it would interfere with ongoing congressional probes. Graham said there may come a time when a special prosecutor is needed but not now. "Right now, it is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. So you don't need a special prosecutor," Graham said on "Meet the Press." (Additional reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Caren Bohan and Jeffrey Benkoe)
Policy Analysis

U.S. Colleges Face Potential Loss of $250 Million from Drop in International Enrollments

The "Trump effect" could smack American colleges and universities to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars in tuition and fees if international student enrollment drops by only 5 percent. That's the conclusion of researcher Rahul Choudaha, who leads DrEducation, a U.S.-based firm that monitors international student trends. Choudaha said the president's "anti-immigrant rhetoric" is "colliding with the economic challenges in the 'source' countries to create a perfect storm for international student enrollment."

Of course, the travel ban imposed by Trump affects six Muslim-majority countries, which in the near past have sent about 20,000 students, "highly skewed to Iran and most at the doctoral level," said Choudaha.

But the "trickle-down effect on other Muslim-majority countries" is still an unknown, he added, as is the impact on travel from other countries. "The decline for the 2017-2018 academic year will hit the institutions hardest that have benefited from the rising tide of enrollments particularly from China, India and Saudi Arabia," he said.

China leads by count, he said; a third of the entire number of international students consists of Chinese students. For example, as of March 2017, 133,616 people from China were pursuing bachelor's degrees; 110,070 sought master's degrees; and 49,060 were working on doctorates at U.S. institutions in 2017. The number of students from India who sought bachelor's degrees at that time was 19,484, and those going after master's degrees totaled 164,727. Saudi Arabia had a total of 57,498 people studying in the United States, most at the bachelor's level.

The researcher calculated that if student enrollment dropped by a "conservative" 5 percent, schools were in line to lose an estimated $250 million. That's based on new enrollment at the bachelor and master's level of 200,000 students paying an average of $24,930 for tuition and fees. Even a 2 percent drop would equate to a loss of $100 million.

Choudaha warned that over the next couple of years, institutions would be wise to "prepare for an environment of hyper-competition and turbulence for recruiting international students." Some, he added, would "hurt more than the others." The first in line to see declining enrollments are those schools "not perceived to be high-ranked or ... in unpopular destinations."

"Given the immigration barriers, they may also have to find new ways of reaching international students through technology and cross-border modes of delivering education," he recommended. In addition, he advised institutions "to find more effective ways of meeting career and employability expectations of international students in either host or home countries."
At the beginning of this month, Sean Williams the long-time owner of Primer Mundo Cigars was named the new Cohiba brand ambassador for General Cigar Company. This past weekend, Williams stopped by the Smooth Draws Radio Show to discuss his new role.

According to Williams, this was a role where General Cigar reached out to him. Earlier this year, he was contacted by Rick Rodriguez, the blender and brand ambassador for Generals CAO brand. At the time General Cigar had just finished its 2017 planning meetings and were making plans for some of its legacy brands  by which Cohiba was one of them. The idea was floated to Martin about coming on-board as Cohibas Brand Ambassador. Some follow-up conversations ensued and this led to Williams coming on board.

Williams told Smooth Draws Radio, When the industrys premier cigar company calls you and says they are interested in you working with arguably one of the most iconic names in the history of cigars, how do you not do that?

In his role Williams will split his time between spending time with consumers at retail events and working on product development for the Cohiba brand. Cohiba isnt done, commented Williams.

Williams has a busy couple of weeks. Next week, he will be heading to General Cigar Headquarters in Richmond, Virgnia. After Memorial Day he will head to the General Cigar Dominicana factory in the Dominican Republic.

In between Richmond and the Dominican Republic, Williams will begin to hit the event circuit. On May 19th, he will do his first event as Cohiba Brand Ambassador at R&R Cigars in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He then heads to New York to do some events at Club Macanudo.

You can catch the show below. Williams interview starts at the 51:08 mark or you can just click right here.

e.
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New York, May 15, 2017Kazakh authorities should swiftly and thoroughly investigate yesterdays stabbing of journalist and press freedom defender Ramazan Yesergepov and should bring all those responsible to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Yesergepov, who spent three years in prison for his work as an editor and who now runs the press freedom group Journalists in Trouble, was stabbed on an overnight train bound for the capital Astana.

Yesergepov had scarcely begun the journey of roughly 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) north from Almaty to Astana to discuss threats to media freedom with foreign diplomats when he was stabbed in the abdomen, local and international media reported. He was taken to a hospital in Shu, the nearest city, where doctors performed an emergency surgery and listed him in stable condition, media reported.

We call for a thorough investigation into the stabbing of Ramazan Yesergepov, including whether the attack was meant to obstruct his work as a defender of press freedom, CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. Yesergepov has suffered retaliation for his journalism before. Kazakhstan should show it is a country built on rule of law, a country where citizens, including journalists and their defenders, cannot be harmed with impunity.

Speaking to the Kazakh-language service of the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty after the surgery, Yesergepov said he believed the attack was directly related to his work. Two men, one with a knife and one with what appeared to be a gun, approached him on the train and asked his name before the man with a knife stabbed him, he told RFE/RL. He told the broadcaster he had been scheduled to meet with officials from the Lithuanian and German embassies in Astana to discuss his past imprisonment and the case of Zhanbolat Mamay, the editor of the independent newspaper Sayasi kalam/Tribuna, who has been jailed since February on suspicion of illegally receiving money from an exiled opposition leader.

The Almaty-based press freedom group Adil Soz reported today that the local police launched an investigation into the attack.

A court in 2009 jailed Yesergepov, then the editor of the now-defunct independent weekly Alma-Ata Info, for three years on charges of collecting information that contains state secrets in reprisal for his publishing internal memos of the KNB, Kazakhstans national security service, CPJ reported at the time.

CPJ advocated for his release and in 2010 unsuccessfully attempted to visit the journalist in prison. Yesergepov was released in 2012 after serving his full sentence. He has since petitioned for financial damages and for his criminal record to be expunged, in accordance with the March 2016 recommendations of the U.N. Human Rights Committee, according to media reports.
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Iran has a history of cracking down on the independent press ahead of elections, with authorities arresting journalists and forcing reformist outlets to shut down. As Iranians prepare to vote in presidential and city council elections on May 19, authorities have turned their attention to Telegram, arresting several channel administrators for the app.

With mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter blocked for most users in the country, Telegram has become a popular way for Iranians to share news. A tech expert and a journalist with whom CPJ spoke said that Telegram played a critical role in the 2016 parliamentary Iranian electionin which dozens of moderate and reformist leaning candidates were elected to the Majles (Irans parliament)by allowing users to circumvent censorship. A video of former president Mohammad Khatami, for instance, in which he encouraged people to vote for reformist candidates, was widely shared on Telegram. Iranian media are banned from showing Khatami and YouTube is blocked, leaving Telegram as one of the few ways for supporters to share Khatamis message inside Iran.

A Telegram channel administrator, who goes by the name Vahid Online, told CPJ, Telegram was the deciding factor in Irans last election and I believe it will play a very important role in the upcoming presidential election.

The app is popular in Iran, where it has 40 million active users, according to Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov. Digital safety experts however, have criticized Telegram for security vulnerabilities such as its use of a proprietary encryption protocol whose safety cryptographers are unable to assessunlike standard protocols, which are well-tested. It is also possible to use unencrypted chats by accident and Telegram phone-number-based authentication system makes it easy for governments to take over accounts and access previous messages, experts have warned. Telegram told CPJ last year it rejects claims that its system is vulnerable. [CPJ recommends using Signal or WhatsApp for secure, encrypted messaging.]

Iranian authorities have also tried to regulate Telegram. In December, the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, a body that set policies on internet content, announced that Telegram channels with more than 5,000 followers must register with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. According to the semi-official Mehr News, more than 2,000 channels are registered.

Amir Rashidi, an internet security researcher at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told CPJ the groups research suggests the administrators were arrested because Iranian authorities had access to their identities through the registry and because they had a close connection to Hassan Rouhanis administration. A report by the New York-based human rights advocacy organization said that the registration scheme was probably implemented to help identify reformist voices.

Local news outlets reported that channels affected by the arrests include Reform News, with more than 111,000 followers, and Assembly of Reformists, with 94,000 followers, and that content on some channels was deleted after the arrests. CPJ was unable to determine if authorities ordered the channels to delete the content. Authorities have not publicly given a reason for the arrests, but Ali Motahari, a member of parliament, told the semi-official ISNA news agency, about 12 administrators of reformist or pro-government Telegram channels have been arrested by an intelligence body. CPJ was unable to determine the status of their cases.

CPJs review in recent months of the channels targeted found they mostly contained news, information, and analysis about Irans presidential election, and often were supportive of reformists.

Rashidi told CPJ, Telegram had a huge impact in Irans last parliamentary election. Reformist activists had very limited access to major media outlets and the state radio and TV, so they used Telegram to send and spread their messages. Rashidi said that he thinks Telegram helped mobilize millions of people who voted for candidates featured on what was known as the List of Hope. By using tools provided by the app (such as groups, bots and channels) Iranian voters were able to find names of the candidates based on the city they lived, said Rashidi.

Rashidi added that he believes the arrest of Telegram administrators is an attempt by authorities to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

Telegram has not publicly commented on the arrests of channel moderators, but the company has been critical of moves by Iran to block users from making calls through Telegram, saying in an April 17 statement that Irans action suggests that this move is targeting Telegram specifically.

Iranian authorities have also targeted journalists ahead of the elections. CPJ has documented in recent weeks how Iranian authorities arrested journalists Ehsan Mazandarani, Hengameh Shahidi and Morad Saghafi, and sentenced Issa Saharkhiz to one year in prison one day after he was released from jail on a separate charge. The country also blocks access to millions of websites, including news and social networking sites.

Telegram has helped Iranians to expose some of the censorship. Last month, an apparent attempt by the state-run News 1 channel to censor a live news broadcast was widely circulated on Telegram. A clip shows a news anchor about to announce that Hamid Baghaei, an ally of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is running for the presidency. Before the anchor says Baghaeis name, the camera cuts to the news room, where a second anchor says the station is experiencing technical difficulties. When the news feed returns to the first anchor, she can be heard asking the control room, You dont want me to mention Baghaeis name? before realizing she is live on air and finishing her report without mentioning the candidate.

Baghaei and Ahmadinejad were both found unqualified to run by Iran conservative Guardian Council, which must approve all candidates that run for presidency.

The arrest of Telegram administrators has been criticized by Rouhani. The president, who has been vocal about his efforts to keep Telegram open, said last month that Irans Minister of Intelligence informed him that those arrested had not committed any crime, ISNA reported. Mahmoud Sadeghi, an Iranian MP, also tweeted that he is investigating the arrests. Sadeghi posted a message by a constituent who said her husband was arrested by six agents and is accused of acting against national security. The message, which did not identify the woman or her husband, said that agents showed them a form with a Revolutionary Guards logo on it.

Five reformist-leaning Iranian MPs also sent an open letter to the Minister of Intelligence about the arrests.
Iran Human Rights (MAY 13 2017): A prisoner identified as Koroush Langroudi was reportedly hanged at Bandar Abbas Central Prison on murder charges.





According to close sources, the execution was carried out on Tuesday May 9 and the prisoner was 36 years old at the time of his death.





Iranian official sources, including the Judiciary and the media, have not announced this execution.





Recently in Bandar Abbas Central Prison, the death sentences of eleven prisoners with drug related charges were commuted to life in prison.





However, there are still about nine prisoners in this prison who are in danger of execution for drug related charges.





Iran Human Rights (MAY 13 2017): A prisoner identified as Davoud Fateminasb was reportedly hanged at Tabriz Central Prison on murder charges.





According to a report by the Kurdistan Human Rights Network, the execution was carried out on Tuesday May 9 and the prisoner had been arrested three years ago on murder charges.





The prisoner was reportedly sent for execution two months ago, but his death penalty sentence was suspended last minute.





Iranian official sources, including the Judiciary and the media, have not announced this execution.





Iran Human Rights (MAY 10 2017): On the morning of Monday May 8, two prisoners were reportedly hanged at Mashhad Central Prison.





According to the Iranian state-run news agency Rokna, one of the prisoners, who was not identified by name, was 35 years old, while the other prisoner, who was identified by the initials M.M., was 27 years old.





Iran Human Rights (MAY 6 2017): On Thursday May 4, a prisoner was reportedly hanged at Mashhad Prison on murder charges.





The execution was announced by the Iranian state-run news agency Rokna, but the name of the prisoner was not mentioned in the report.





According to Rokna, the prisoner had committed a murder crime five years ago at the age of 25.

 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com



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Source: Iran Human Rights , May 15, 2017
Wang Ching-yu





While prosecutors at the Shilin District Prosecutors Office had sought the death penalty for 34-year-old Wang Ching-yu, the judges ruled that since Wang had been found to be suffering from schizophrenia, he could not be executed, citing international human rights conventions.





However, the man's insanity defense did not save him from life imprisonment with the court determining that he he had been "cognitively normal" at the time of the attack. The decision can still be appealed.





Last year in court, Wang had said that he had believed himself to be a Chinese emperor from Sichuan and thought that by killing the little girl he would be granted concubines to carry on his ancestral line.

During his trial, he got down on his knees to ask forgiveness from the victim's mother.





The horrific attack occurred last March on a Monday morning in Taipei's Neihu District.





Wang approached the 4-year-old girl nicknamed " Little Light Bulb " from behind with a cleaver while she was riding her mini-scooter in the street just a few feet away from her mother and grandfather.





Before they could stop him, Wang severed the little girl's head on the street in broad daylight.





Little Light Bulb's killing shocked Taiwan and reignited debate on the island over capital punishment with many calling for Wang's execution.





At a press conference, the girl's mother, Claire Wang, stepped forward to call on groups not to use her daughter's death to advance their own agendas, arguing that she didn't believe that any kind of regulation like the death penalty could stop these kind of random attacks from occurring.





Instead, she said that she hoped they could be eliminated through better family and school education.





The mother was not in court to hear the verdict against her daughter's killer.





Little Light Bulb's family has also not issued a statement about the decision.

 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com



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Among all the chants that parents repeatedly whisper to Indian students, 'media studies' is rarely one of them. 'Engineering', 'law' and the infamous 'medicine' don't leave much room for other considerations. So when students do pick media studies, it is almost always a quiet rebellion against the norm, fuelled by a fierce hope of changing the world. That is what I remember most of the batch of aspiring media professionals I met on my first day at the Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication (SCMC), in Pune.

At Symbiosis, there were days I remember fondly, when lecturers spoke passionately; other days were difficult, when the reality of the profession would hit home. On yet other days, the thrill of creating something would make up for all the scepticism. What I don't remember is a day on which nothing happened-there were no quiet days. Twelve subjects a semester, five internships overall and assignments that stretched the boundaries of what I considered possible consumed all my energy. I have felt emotionally exhausted after projects. I have run around the heart of Pune city shooting a news piece for an assignment. I have witnessed my batchmates breaking down when we had open discussions on patriarchy. I once spent two weeks reading United Nations resolutions for a history assignment. I have made documentaries with my journalism batchmates, created advertisements from scratch with my advertising batchmates and witnessed my public relations batchmates manage an event based on what they had learned. As for my own fellow film and television batchmates, we shared our struggles until our graduate films were completed.

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Photo: Danesh Jassawala

Photo: Danesh Jassawala

I also don't remember a lot of vacation days. At the conclusion of each semester came an internship. I have taught English to underprivileged children while volunteering at Teach for India, worked with children with special needs at a school in Dubai and identified and proposed solutions for environmental issues at WWF-India. I interned with a two-year-old start-up called Paper Planes in Mumbai, picking up media skills in the process, and also worked with international brands like McDonald's and Kiri at advertising giant Leo Burnett. These wide-ranging experiences were thanks to the opportunities available at Symbiosis, and the education that allowed me to do justice to them.

The memories of the many treks I took with my batchmates to the forts peppering Pune's geography, the much-loved interactive sessions at Panchgani (an SCMC special), the detention hours spent at the library, the behind-the-scenes of our college festivals-these (and more) are memories that will stay with me for life. My batchmates are the sample group upon whom I project the real world. While this may be a skewed and naive proposition, their vigour, ambition and passion are my assurance that there is hope. That quiet rebellion against stereotype make SCMC students a refined cohort. This is a legacy here, too. I remember the first seeds of inspirations sown by our seniors to help us be better students, a gesture we have attempted to emulate with our juniors.

SCMC offers students a chance to make decisions every single day. Much of life here is about weighing choices, grabbing opportunities and making something of them. In that sense, it is a reflection of what the media industry is in dire need of today-independence and the courage to take up challenges.

Amal Shiyas is studying for a Bachelor of Media Studies (Film and Television), Batch of 2017.

--- ENDS ---
Can you think of a grand American plan to build something momentous, similar to the interstate highway system or the NASA moonshot?

Dont think too hard, because there is no such plan at the moment.

There is in China, however.

China just concluded a two-day showcase of its Belt & Road Initiative, a huge plan to improve the physical and digital infrastructure between China and its trading partners, or build new infrastructure if there isnt any. Representatives of more than 100 countries, including 28 heads of state, showed up to demonstrate their enthusiasm for participating in the worlds biggest construction project.

China excels at spectacle, and the Belt & Road Forum was as much PR stunt as anything. But the vast scale of the plan and the national ambition behind it dwarfs anything leaders are contemplating in Washington, or European capitals. If you compare this to what the United States is doingtrying to rescue the steel and aluminum sectors and open a few markets for its goodswere pretty small potatoes, says Scott Kennedy, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. China is more organized and theyre planning more strategically than the United States.

Cranes at the site of a new airport terminal near Beijing. Source: Reuters

Chinas plan is to strengthen its overland trade routes through central Asia to Europe, and its maritime trade routes to other Asian nations, Africa, and the rest of the world via the Suez Canal. China pledges to invest in other countries willing to improve their roads, railways, ports, pipelines and communications in ways that improve trade with China. While spending is hard to track, China has probably spent around $50 billion so far, with the tally possibly exceeding $1 trillion eventually, if Beijing keeps its word and partner countries chip in.

Source: Council on Foreign Relations

Western analysts view the Belt & Road Initiative, or BRI, as Chinas way of building soft powerthe ability to influence other nations without force or coercion. If even moderately successful, BRI could speed the flow of goods to and from China, and increase the volume of trade. As other countries become more dependent on Chinese trade, Chinas influence will grow at institutions such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, along with, perhaps, its ability to get its way in various territorial disputes.

Story continues

Theres political motivation for Chinese President Xi Jinping to promote the plan. Xi is burnishing his credentials as a global leader ahead of a big gathering of the Chinese Communist Party this fall, at which a number of senior party leaders will be determined. To consolidate power, Xi wants a string of visible wins demonstrating his high standing among the worlds potentates. Thats why Xi stood out at this years World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, defending globalization while western leaders fretted about waves of populism roiling their nations. Xis chummy visit with President Donald Trump in March was another tableau depicting his easy way with world heavies.

Theres a lot that could go wrong with the BRI. Some analysts suspects its a scheme for China to unload excess inventories of building materials such as cement, steel and aluminum, which pile up in part because state-subsidized Chinese manufacturers produce more than justified by market demand. If projects meant to be profitable and generate a return on investment go bust instead, it could add to whats already an excessive amount of bad debt in China. Plus, construction projects in nations with weak or corrupt governments, like those in central Asia, are often plagued by theft and mismanagement. China is just as capable of funding bridges to nowhere as the US Congress.

But China will likely reap some rewards from the BRI, at a time when President Trump is reeling America in with his America first policies, threats of protectionism and hostile remarks toward neighbors such as Mexico. Even if China only achieves 10% of what it plans, its a big deal, Kennedy says. The US has no similar initiatives and is highly chaotic and disorganized.

Trump does plan to launch his own infrastructure program, with up to $1 trillion in private and government funding for new projects. But that is in line behind contentious legislation on repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, and might never materialize. And some analysts worry that Trumps entire agenda could be jeopardized by his recent firing of FBI Director James Comey, the investigation into his ties with Russia, and other controversies.

Trumps biggest construction priority is his border wall with Mexico, which still lacks funding and is unpopular with voters. If Trump does get his wall someday, it could generate a few thousand temporary jobs and a bit of increased demand for steel and concrete. But its not the kind of project that will boost trade or add permanently to economic growth. The Chinese seemed to recognize the limits of walls a long time ago.

Confidential tip line: rickjnewman@yahoo.com

Read more:

Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.
Crude oil prices surged over 3% to their highest level in two weeks after the worlds two biggest producers agreed in principle to extend a deal on output restraint through March of next year.

The Energy Ministers of Saudi Arabia and Russia said that they had reached an understanding that it is necessary to keep surplus crude off the market until March 31, 2018, in order to stabilize a world oil market that is still oversupplied.

The statement, made on the sidelines of an economic summit in China, is an admission that the efforts of the worlds biggest exporters to balance the world oil market by holding back 1.8 million barrels a day of crude have failed to end the current glut as quickly as they hoped. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which produces around a third of the worlds oil, and a group of non-OPEC countries led by Russia, had agreed in November to keep the cuts in place through June.

News of the deal six months ago had provided an immediate boost to prices, but the strategy contained the seeds of the plans own downfall, because higher prices encouraged producers in the U.S., which isnt party to the deal, to raise their output and invest in new production. U.S. output has risen more than 10% since the middle of last year, and data released on Friday by oil services firm Baker Hughes showed that the number of active rigs across the country rose for the 17th week in a row.

Benchmark futures prices for U.S. crude rose 3.2% on the news to trade at $49.41 a barrel by 0800 Eastern Time, while shares in big shale oil and gas companies such as and Whiting Petroleum were also higher. The market reaction reflected how far the commitment went beyond market expectations: the consensus view over the weekend was that the output deal would be extended through the end of the year, while some market participants were also concerned that Saudi Arabia and Russia, the two biggest exporters, would abandon restraint completely rather than lose any more global market share to American producers.

Read: All Drill, No Pump: Oil Producers Are Leaving Thousands of U.S. Wells Unfinished

The declaration carried on the Russian Energy Ministrys website said that the existing deal had had a significant positive influence on the market, noting that global inventories of crude had fallen faster than their historical averages in the last five months. But that glosses over the fact that inventories in advanced economies are still higher this year than they have ever been in May, and only slowly returning to their historical range.

The ministers said that while they start from the assumption of rolling over the current deal, they also hoped that a wider circle of countries outside the current group will see the benefit of this cooperation in bringing stability to oil markets, and will join the effort.

The declaration has no binding force. It will need to be confirmed at a meeting of OPEC ministers on May 25th in Vienna. However, with the worlds two biggest producers now on board, an extension now seems a near certainty.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to include more market reaction.

See original article on Fortune.com

More from Fortune.com
Rex Tillerson

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was asked on Sunday why he didn't bring up the issue of Kremlin interference in the 2016 election when he met with Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov earlier in the week.

"Can you get on a better footing with [Russia] if you don't address this issue of the Russian interference?" NBC's Chuck Todd asked Tillerson during an interview on "Meet the Press." "I mean, your counterpart, the Russian foreign minister, Mr. Lavrov, said that you guys didn't even talk about this issue of Russian interference in our election because, as he put it, President Trump himself says it's fake news, so it's not an issue. Why haven't you brought it up with them?" Todd asked.

"Well, Chuck, I think we have such a broad range of important issues that have to be addressed in the US-Russia relationship," Tillerson replied. "Obviously, the interference in the election is one of those. I think it's been well-documented, it's pretty well understood  the nature of that interference here and elsewhere."

He added: "You know, these are not new tactics on the part of the Russian government, directed not only at us but at others. But again, I think we have to look at this relationship in its broadest contours, and there are many, many important areas which require attention if we are to bring it back to a relationship that we believe is necessary for the security of the US."

Todd pushed back on Tillerson's assertion.

"Mr. Secretary, though, this is fundamental. They interfered with our democracy. I just don't understand how this is not a top issue for you to deal with, with them, in order to essentially start with a clean slate," Todd said. "Can't start with a clean slate until, maybe, they either own up to what they did, or we punish them in a way that they're not going to do this again."

Story continues

sergey lavrov rex tillerson

Tillerson replied: "Well, Chuck, I think it's important to understand we're not trying to start with a clean slate ... We're starting with the slate we have, and all the problems that are on that slate. We don't dismiss any of them, we don't give anyone a free pass on any of them. They're part of the entire nature of the discussion we're having with the Russians. And yes, there are a large number of issues that we have to get around to addressing in order to put this relationship back together, if that is indeed possible."

Todd later pressed Tillerson on whether he definitively believed that Russia had interfered in the US election.

"Is it clear in your mind that it is a fact the Russians interfered in our election?" Todd asked, noting that US intelligence reports concluded, and top officials have repeatedly confirmed, that Russia had played a hand in the 2016 election.

"I have seen the intelligence reports, Chuck," Tillerson said. "And yes, I don't think there's any question that the Russians were playing around in our electoral processes. Again, those intelligence reports also have indicated that it's inconclusive as to what, if any, effect it had."

donald trump kislyak

Todd also mentioned the fact that the White House did not disclose that Lavrov and Russia's ambassador Sergey Kislyak  who is widely believed to be a Russian spy  were allowed in the Oval Office.

News of the meeting broke when Russian state media posted photos of the meeting online, while American media were barred from entering the room.

When Todd asked Tillerson why the White House didn't disclose that Kislyak was also in the meeting, Tillerson said he didn't know and that question should be posed to the White House.

Tillerson added that although Kislyak had been involved in his meeting with Lavrov, he didn't recall whether he had been notified that Kislyak would also be joining Lavrov and Trump in the Oval Office.

'Our institutions are under assault'

The topic of Russia has dogged Trump since his victory and into the first few months of his presidency. There are currently three investigations, conducted by the House, Senate, and FBI, that are focusing on the nature of Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Trump's associates, in particular, are being investigated over their suspected collusion with Russia to hand Trump the presidency.

The Trump-Russia controversy was thrust into the spotlight again this past week, when Trump made the bombshell decision to fire FBI director James Comey  the man overseeing the investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. Comey's firing prompted speculation over whether Trump removed him because he was angry about the Russia probe.

James Comey

Initially, the White House said that the Russia investigation had nothing to do with Trump's decision and that he'd acted solely on the recommendations of deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and attorney general Jeff Sessions.

Later, however, Trump said he had been mulling over firing Comey for a while, and that Rosenstein's memo sealed the deal. The next day, Trump again shifted his stance, saying that he had already decided to fire Comey by the time he got Rosenstein's memo.

Comey has made no public statements since his abrupt removal, but Trump has lashed out at him amid the media firestorm following his decision. He also suggested that he may have recordings of his conversations with Comey.

"James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!" Trump tweeted on Friday.

A source close to Comey told NBC News that Comey "hopes there are tapes. That would be perfect."

Comey declined an invitation to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door session, and a close associate told The New York Times that Comey was willing to testify  but only in public.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said in a Sunday morning interview that US intelligence agencies were "under assault," including from the president himself.

"I think in many ways our institutions are under assault both externally  and that's the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system  and I think as well our institutions are under assault internally," Clapper told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union." "The founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances. I feel as though that is under assault and is eroding."

NOW WATCH: Yale history professor: Heres why it's useful to compare Trump's actions to Hitler's





More From Business Insider


May 12 (Reuters) - Speculators' net bullish bets on U.S. 10-year Treasury note futures rose earlier this week to their highest levels since early 2008, while they turned bearish on federal funds futures for the first time since late 2015, according to Commodity Futures Trading Commission data released on Friday.

The amount of speculators' bullish, or long, positions in 10-year Treasury futures exceeded bearish, or short, positions by 229,119 contracts on May 9, according to the CFTC's latest Commitments of Traders data.

This was their highest amount of net longs in 10-year T-note futures since the 236,037 contracts on Jan. 1, 2008.

A week earlier, speculators held 179,870 net long positions in 10-year T-note futures.

Below is a table of the speculative positions in Treasury futures on the Chicago Board of Trade and in Eurodollar futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the latest week: U.S. 2-year T-notes (Contracts of $200,000) May 9, 2017 Prior week week Long 213,252 254,962 Short 204,172 247,340 Net 9,080 7,622 U.S. 5-year T-notes (Contracts of $100,000) May 9, 2017 Prior week week Long 480,150 565,373 Short 626,578 666,714 Net -146,428 -101,341 U.S. 10-year T-notes (Contracts of $100,000) May 9, 2017 Prior week week Long 861,792 830,446 Short 632,673 650,576 Net 229,119 179,870 U.S. T-bonds (Contracts of $100,000) May 9, 2017 Prior week week Long 127,772 114,262 Short 122,594 105,078 Net 5,178 9,184 U.S. Ultra T-bonds (Contracts of $100,000) May 9, 2017 Prior week week Long 32,672 30,870 Short 140,336 119,632 Net -107,664 -88,762 Eurodollar (Contracts of $1,000,000) May 9, 2017 Prior week week Long 519,707 542,113 Short 3,684,027 3,616,879 Net -3,164,320 -3,074,766 Fed funds May 9, 2017 Prior week week Long 248,238 162,034 Short 222,504 199,420 Net 25,734 -37,386 (Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Tom Brown)
The New York City Health Department is not pleased with the celebrities who posted pictures of themselves smoking during the Met Gala this year.

By India Today Web Desk: Just like every year, this year's edition of the Met Gala was high on fashion and plenty of drama. But there's one more thing Met Gala 2017 will be remembered for--celebrities cooking up a smoke storm in the Met Museum washrooms.

Names like Dakota Johnson, Bella Hadid, Marc Jacobs among many other broke an important rule that prohibits indoor smoking anywhere in New York City. According to a report by the New York Daily News, the Met Museum was issued a notice by NYC's health commissioner, Dr Mary Bassett.

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Also Read: 5 nakedest outfits from Met Gala 2017

Also Read: Deepika Padukone's Met Gala dress was one of the most Googled in the world

Smoking in the girls room #metgala @chardefrancesco @courtneylove @space_witch666 A post shared by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on May 1, 2017 at 6:31pm PDT

The alleged letter calls out those celebrities who smoked and subsequently posted pictures of themselves on social media. Apart from glamorising smoking, the celebrities are also being criticised for flouting the rule that disallows indoor-smoking.

"We were dismayed to read reports that some celebrities chose smoking as their fashion accessory and flagrantly violated New York City's smoking laws," Dr Mary Bassett reportedly wrote in the letter.

This photo is like taken at a college party except for the fancy dresses #metgala pic.twitter.com/wwiRCjre6x- elif (@victuuris95) May 2, 2017

While Dr Bassett's words are also believed to hint towards the New York Health Department keeping a close check on next year's Met Gala, the museum reportedly denies receiving any such document.

--- ENDS ---
These are certainly tense times for security officials in Central Asia.

Barely halfway through this spring, the violence in northern Afghanistan, in provinces just across the border from Central Asia, has already reached levels not seen since the late 1990s.

The April 21 attack on a military base in Balkh Province, just across the border from Uzbekistan, left more than 130 Afghan soldiers dead, and the Taliban have besieged Kunduz city, the capital of Kunduz Province, which borders Tajikistan, for the third time in less than two years.

There are also the battles in the Zebak district of Badakhshan Province, which also borders Tajikistan. The Ghormach district in Faryab Province, adjacent to Turkmenistan, has been solidly under militant control for weeks and in other areas of Faryab, and Jowzjan Province to the east, control of villages passes back-and-forth between government forces and militants.

Officials in the Central Asian capitals north of the Afghan border are surely weighing their options at the moment, including who they might call upon for aid if some element of instability currently present inside Afghanistan makes its way over the northern border.

That was the topic of the latest Majlis, or panel discussion, RFE/RL arranged that looked at parties the Central Asians could be expected to call upon should some problem from Afghanistan destabilize their own governments.

Moderating the discussion was RFE/RL Media Relations Manager Muhammad Tahir. From the RFE/RL studio, Dr. Stephan Blank, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, joined the discussion. From Britain, our old friend Dr. David Lewis, senior lecturer in politics at Exeter University, took part.

Blank noted, "Everybody in Central Asian establishments is always concerned that whatever happens in Afghanistan will not be confined to Afghanistan."

That has generally been the view of Central Asian governments for the last 25 years.

The most immediate fear in Central Asia, as the panel made clear, is not the Taliban. The Taliban have never been able to exert control over all of Afghanistan, even in the late 1990s, so the group has never been in a position to consider expansion beyond Afghanistan's borders.

Even now, when the Taliban are resurgent, the militants are a very long way off from conquering Afghanistan.

Lewis said, "Even if the Taliban itself has not been particularly interested in spreading into Central Asia, it's acted as an umbrella, sort of like a protector for groups, which may well have security designs on Central Asia."

Lewis said for Central Asian governments "the bigger problem [in Afghanistan] is ... this array of other groups that may be in conflict with the Taliban or at least have different goals from the Taliban, particularly various offshoots of groups that somehow are linked to forms of Islamic State [militant group]."

Citizens of Central Asia are present in many of the militant groups currently active in northern Afghanistan.

Fighting along or near the Tajik border has been in the news a lot recently. Tajikistan is unique among the three Central Asian states that border Afghanistan (Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan being the other two). Tajikistan has clear agreements for receiving outside military help to defend the country.

Tajikistan is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), along with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia.

As the security situation in northern Afghanistan has deteriorated over the last three years, the CSTO has offered numerous pledges of rapid military support to the Tajik government if problems from Afghanistan spill across the border.

But Blank said, "There are real question marks about the actual readiness of the CSTO as a military alliance."

He pointed out, "Formally speaking there's the Collective Security Treaty Organization, in practice that really means the Russian Army."

And Blank added that Russia is "already involved in three wars, in the North Caucasus, Ukraine, and Syria, the economy is very constrained, military spending has had to be cut, and the last thing they need is a fourth protracted war."

Blank suggested that was one of the reasons Moscow had entered into talks with the Taliban because "Russia has decided that ISIS is the greater threat," and the most likely to destabilize the situation in Central Asia.

Russia has the 201st Division stationed in Tajikistan. Russia commands the CSTO base at Kant, Kyrgyzstan, also.

But Lewis explained, "Tajikistan's been very cautious about its military relationship with Russia," and "there's a lot of sensitivity in the region about Russian involvement in Central Asia, and that's certainly the case for Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan."

Uzbekistan is no longer a CSTO member. The first time Uzbekistan withdrew from the CSTO was in 1999, shortly after Tashkent invoked the CSTO mutual-defense treaty when the Taliban arrived at the Uzbek border (Uzbekistan rejoined the CSTO in 2006 but pulled out in 2012). At that time Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka said he would not send even one soldier to defend Central Asia.

Uzbekistan is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), along with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Russia, and China, but Blank said, "The Shanghai Cooperation Organization cannot be relied on, it has never...developed the capability to function as a hard security organization."

Lewis suggested there was another option that would probably be particularly unpalatable to the Kremlin. "I think from a Russian perspective, the kind of nightmare scenario is that if Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan come under pressure they turn not to Russia for help but to other countries, maybe even to the West," Lewis said.

There is another issue here and that is the definition of an internal versus external security threat.

It was noted in the Majlis that when inter-ethnic violence erupted in southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010, the CSTO did not intervene, deeming that an internal problem.

But Lewis said, "It seems to me the real problem is if you get some internal dissention or state collapse in Central Asia." And Blank noted that in Tajikistan's case, "I'm not altogether certain the Tajik government is strong enough to fight off an internal challenge."

Should Central Asian militants currently located in northern Afghanistan be able cross into Central Asia and wage a terrorist campaign how would the CSTO, SCO, or others view that situation?

The Majlis looked at these topics and also other issues, such as foreign influence in Afghanistan's conflict. You can listen to the full discussion here:

Listen to or download the Majlis podcast above or subscribe to the Majlis on iTunes.
English Latvian

Riga, 2017-05-10 11:17 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Correction: Audited consolidated financials for year 2016 added.

Key indicators for the financial year:

Turnover grew by 61% and reached EUR 946th;

Share capital increased to EUR 500th;

Successful entry in Estonian market with 63 clients by the end of the year;

Further bond issues made in 2016 and 2017 for the total volume of EUR 1,725th.

On operating results

Year 2016 for Capitalia group (further Capitalia) has been growth focused period. We have entered Estonian market, as well as significantly increased our capacity in loan evaluation and servicing. In 2016 Capitalias revenues increased to EUR 946th  a growth of 61% over the previous year. Company reported small losses of EUR 11 thousands. The net financial results were foreseen and are result of establishing operations in Estonia as well as investing in building up company for growth in the future (new employee hires, marketing developments and IT investments). As part of building up the company we also boosted the balance sheet by increasing the share capital to EUR 500,000 as well as organizing a new closed bond issue for the total amount of EUR 500,000. This allowed us to boost the balance sheet to EUR 4m, growing 52% compared to the total assets in 2015.

On new markets

From 2016 Capitalia can start calling itself a truly pan-Baltic company with operations and employees in all the three countries. At the end of the year our office in Estonia employed 2 loan managers that already serviced 63 active clients in this country. Our loan book in Estonia is still significantly smaller than in Latvia and Lithuania, hence our focus in 2017 will be on expansion in this geography with a target to double our client number during the year. Capitalia does not expect to enter any new markets during 2017, focusing instead our full attention to the growth in the Baltic States.

On future plans

In 2017 our focus will be to ensure proftiability with the target net margin of 10%. With regards to new product development, we are planning to launch our own crowd-funding platform in the first half of year 2017. The platform will be aimed for businesses that want to attract mezzanine loan financing in the amount from EUR 100,000 to EUR 1,000,000. We feel that there is a large gap in this investment range that is not fully addressed nor by local private investors, nor banks or venture capital/private equity funds. Capitalia will co-invest in each of the projects offered through the platform as well as will manage the crowd-financed loans on behalf of the pool of investors.

On Capitalia

Capitalia is the largest non-bank lender to small and medium enterprises in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. To date Capitalia has financed working capital and investment needs of more than 1000 companies investing over EUR 20 million in growth of these businesses.
English Lithuanian

Elektrenai, Lithuania, 2017-05-15 15:00 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba, AB, legal entity code 302648707, the registered office address is Elektrines st. 21, Elektrenai (hereinafter  the Company). Overall number of ordinary registered shares is 635 083 615, ISIN code  LT0000128571.

The Company announces the unaudited financial results for the first three month period ended 31 March 2017.

The Companys sales revenue of the January-March period of 2017 are EUR 31.79 million and are 5 percent smaller than the revenue of the January-March period of 2016 (EUR 33.46 million).

of the January-March period of 2017 are EUR 31.79 million and are 5 percent smaller than the revenue of the January-March period of 2016 (EUR 33.46 million). The Companys profit of the January-March period of 2017, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ( EBITDA ) reaches EUR 14.50 million and is 52 percent bigger than the profit of January-March period of 2016 (EUR 9.56 million).

) reaches EUR 14.50 million and is 52 percent bigger than the profit of January-March period of 2016 (EUR 9.56 million). The Companys net profit of the January-March period of 2017 reaches EUR 3.97 million and is 72 percent smaller than the net profit of January-March period of 2016 (EUR 13.96 million).



The main reason for the loss of sales revenue is a huge decrease of electricity production in Elektrenai Complex, which produced only 6 GWh of electricity during the first three months of 2017. The electricity production units in Elektrenai were not generating electricity due to fairly smaller prices of electricity in exchange, which were smaller than the prices at the beginning of 2016. As a result, the combined cycle gas turbine unit in Elektrenai Complex could not operate competitively, hence, it was activated only once. Last year in the same period it was activated nine times and produced nearly nine times more electricity (34 GWh).

The generation of Kruonis pumped storage power plant produced was by third smaller during the January-March period of 2017 compared to the same period of 2016 (104 GWh and 153 GWh respectively).

One of the major reasons for the increase in EBITDA earnings is the flood, which made the Kaunas Algirdas Brazauskas Hydroelectric Power Plant generate a greater amount of energy. During the January-March period of 2017 this power plant produced 132 GWh of electricity, i. e. 12 percent more than in the same period in 2016 (118 GWh). Overall, the power plants of the Company produced 242 GWh of electricity during the January-March period of 2017  21 percent less than during the same period in 2016 (305 GWh).

The increase in EBITDA is also stimulated by the fact that in 2017 Companys revenue from regulated activities was not reduced due to the regulation of commercial production and inspection of the Companys activity in 2010-2012. As a result of the decisions of The National Commission for Energy Control and Prices, financial reports of the Company in 2016 January-March did not acknowledge a part of regulated activity income and this had a negative impact of EUR 5.8 million on the EBITDA indicator of the Company.

The change in the Companys net profit (compared to the results of January-March period of 2017 and January-March period of 2016) emerged due to the effect of one-off factors  the selling result of the business part, which was calculated in early 2016 (EUR 19,5 million). If the sale of the part of the business was excluded, the Company would be experiencing an increase in net profit.

The changing market conditions imply that our power plants face a greater rivalry. We take this challenge seriously, therefore, we effectively manage our costs. In addition, we support the availability of operating facilities in order to be able to start producing electricity in time and contribute to a proper supply of electricity to customers and to the stabilization of electricity prices on the market. We are also actively implementing the Companys strategy which is aimed at making our employees dedicate their competency and time to delivering new services  in March we provided the first maintenance services to external customers,  chairwoman of the Companys board and CEO of the Company Egle Ciuzaite points out the most important activity issues for 2017.
CLEVELAND, May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SPR Therapeutics (SPR) has been awarded a $6M four-year contract from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to further advance its SPRINT Peripheral Nerve Stimulation (PNS) System for non-opioid relief of acute and chronic pain. This contract complements a previously awarded DoD grant, bringing the total to nearly $9M awarded from the DoD to advance the research and commercialization of SPRs pain relief therapy.



Our Service members deserve the best and most innovative medical treatment, said Maria Bennett, SPR Therapeutics Founder, President and CEO. Building upon substantial safety and efficacy data from prior trials, this project will further establish that our SPRINT PNS System relieves pain in severely injured military Service members and Veterans and helps them to reduce or eliminate use of addictive opioids, improves their quality of life, and accelerates their rehabilitation. We are very fortunate to partner with the DoD to advance this meaningful and beneficial therapy.

The DoD funded research, which is supported by the U.S. Army under Contract No. W81XWH-17-C-0019, specifically targets individuals with combat or trauma-related amputations who suffer from moderate to severe neuropathic pain, which the DoD says is a major health problem among Service members and Veterans. According to the Amputee Coalition of America more than 85 percent of individuals who have had an amputation suffer from residual or phantom limb pain.

Many of our Service members and Veterans experience excruciating, debilitating postamputation pain, said Col (RET) Steven P. Cohen, MD, Director of Pain Research at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. There is a clear military benefit to developing effective and innovative pain relief therapies and to providing treatment beyond conventional painkillers. All available analgesics have undesirable side effects, the most significant of which are related to opioids. The SPRINT PNS therapy could have a tremendous impact on how we help our Military Personnel return to the active and fulfilling lives they deserve.

The SPR-patented SPRINT PNS technology includes a threadlike lead and a small, wearable stimulator. The lead is placed percutaneously, or through the skin, and connects to the wearable stimulator, which activates peripheral nerves to achieve pain relief.

SPRINT was specifically designed for use in the periphery to preferentially activate target nerve fibers, delivering sustained, significant pain relief without opioids, permanent implants or tissue destruction. The System was developed to address a wide spectrum of chronic and post-surgical pain conditions affecting millions worldwide.

SPRINT is concurrently being evaluated in other advanced clinical trials including its use in the treatment of chronic low back pain and acute post-surgical pain, such as pain following total knee replacement, areas in which there are significant potential applications in military, Veteran and civilian populations. To learn more about SPRINT, visit www.sprtherapeutics.com.

About SPR Therapeutics

SPR Therapeutics, LLC (www.sprtherapeutics.com) is a private company headquartered in Cleveland. The company is commercializing its SPRINT technology, which provides opioid-free, peripheral nerve stimulation for the relief of chronic and acute pain.




BROOMFIELD, Colo., May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Colorado Therapeutics LLC, a commercial-stage medical device company with a proprietary technology platform for the production of innovative cross-linked tissue products, announced that John Lorbiecki has been appointed to the newly created position of chief operating officer effective March 21, 2017. Mr. Lorbiecki brings broad leadership experience from a career at Medtronic in finance, business development and commercial operations to Colorado Therapeutics.

Johns experience in the areas of marketing, regulatory, reimbursement and financial accounting will be a significant benefit to Colorado Therapeutics as we prepare to launch our first FDA cleared commercial product, XIS+, stated Joseph B. Horn, Colorado Therapeutics president and CEO. His experience with surgical biologics products is particularly applicable to our product line, which has shown utility in the repair of hernia and other soft tissue applications. We welcome John to our team and look forward to capitalizing on his experience with our impending product launch as well as our open Series A financing.

From my experience, I believe that the team at Colorado Therapeutics has developed a truly unique biologic tissue product. The characteristics of XI-S+ will provide surgeons with a blend of strength, flexibility, and biocompatibility that is not currently available on the market in either synthetic or biologic products, Mr. Lorbiecki added. Ive spent my career at a large, established medical device company. The opportunity to join a nimble, innovative organization at this stage of commercial growth was one I could not pass by.

During his 25-year career at Medtronic, Mr. Lorbiecki held several positions of increasing responsibility, most recently as Senior Finance Director of Strategic Scientific Operations where he was responsible for developing long-term and annual operating goals, providing business support to clinical, regulatory, reimbursement, and other strategic scientific operations in the company. Prior to that role, Mr. Lorbiecki held two divisional CFO roles, managed financial integration of multiple acquisitions, and provided analytical and strategic insight on high-value business development opportunities. During his term, he dedicated six years to managing the development of pricing strategy and tactics for the Cardiac Surgery division, including national accounts. He earned a MBA from the University of Chicago and a BA in economics from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

About Colorado Therapeutics

Colorado Therapeutics is a commercial-stage company developing strong, durable and biocompatible tissue from xenogenic sources using a proprietary cross-linked tissue processing technology. Resulting tissue products demonstrate superior benefits compared to currently available biologic or synthetic products. XI-S+, Colorado Therapeutics first commercial product, received U.S. FDA 510(k) clearance in 2016 for implantation to reinforce soft tissue where weakness exists and for the surgical repair of damaged or ruptured soft tissue membranes. Colorado Therapeutics products target the $2.25 billion U.S. soft tissue reinforcement and regeneration markets, and may have utility in a broad range of applications. Colorado Therapeutics corporate headquarters and pre-commercialization facilities are located in Broomfield, Colorado. For more information on Colorado Therapeutics technology and career opportunities, please visit the Colorado Therapeutics website at www.co-therapeutics.com.
English Latvian

Olaine, 2017-05-15 16:12 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

April 2017, consolidated sales Sales, thsnd. EUR Changes to April 2016 Share in total sales Russia 4 690 58% 42% Latvia 2 428 12% 22% Ukraine 1 209 -6% 11% The Netherlands 735 6642% 7% Belarus 491 -27% 4% Kazakhstan 255 159% 2% Turkmenistan 183 6% 2% Italy 160 -43% 1% Lithuania 132 49% 1% Poland 129 143% 1% Other 863 -16% 8% Total 11 275 28% 100%

Sales of pharmacies of SIA Latvijas aptieka during April 2017 were 1.66 million euros, which represents an increase by 5% compared to Aprils 2016. Sales of SIA Silvanols in Aprils 2017 were 0.48 million euros, which is an increase by 23% compared to the same period of last year. Suring Aprils 2017, SIA Silvanols sold its products to six European countries and with help of AS Olainfarm also to Azerbaijan, Russia, Belarus and Armenia. Sales of SIA Tonus Elast in Aprils 2017 were 0.65 million euros, and the company sold its products to 16 countries in three continents.

According to preliminary numbers, consolidated sales of AS Olainfarm in four months of 2017 was 38.28 million euros, which represents an increase by 9% compared to the same period of 2016. The biggest sales increase during this period was achieved in The Netherlands, where sales grew by 427%, while sales to Germany increased by 151%. The biggest sales reduction took place in Ukraine, where sales shrunk by 49%. The major sales markets of the group in four months of 2017 were Russia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and The Netherlands.

4 months of 2017, consolidated sales Sales, thsnd. EUR Changes to 4 months of 2016 Share in total sales Russia 12 366 33% 32% Latvia 9 920 13% 26% Belarus 3 693 0% 10% Ukraine 3 209 -49% 8% The Netherlands 2 492 427% 7% Kazakhstan 704 5% 2% Italy 702 32% 2% Lithuania 530 18% 1% Germany 497 151% 1% Turkmenistan 462 -29% 1% Other 3 709 -8% 10% Total 38 284 9% 100%

Sales of pharmacies of SIA Latvijas aptieka in four months of 2017 were 6.8 million euros, which represents an increase by 3% compared to the same period of 2016. Sales of SIA Silvanols in four months of 2017 were 2.1 million euros, which is an increase by 31% compared to the same period of 2016, when Silvanols sales were 1.6 million euros. Products of SIA Silvanols in four months of 2017 were sold to nine European countries and with the help of AS Olainfarm also to Lithuania, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus and Armenia. Sales of SIA Tonus Elast in four months reached 2.5 million euros and this company sold its products to 30 countries in 4 continents.

According to unconsolidated preliminary results, sales of AS Olainfarm in April 2017 were 9.38 million euros, which represents an increase by 22% compared to April 2016. The biggest sales increase was achieved in The Netherlands, where sales grew by 6642%. Sales to Lithuania grew by 49%, while sales to Russia increased by 44%. The biggest sales reduction took place in Italy where sales shrunk by 43%. In April 2017, the company also made significant shipments to Germany. The biggest sales markets during this period were Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, The Netherlands and Belarus. Products of AS Olainfarm were sold to 29 countries in five continents.

April 2017, unconsolidated sales Sale, thsnd. EUR Changes to April 2016 Share in total sales Russia 4 288 44% 46% Ukraine 1 209 -6% 13% Latvia 1 198 7% 13% The Netherlands 735 6642% 8% Belarus 491 -27% 5% Kazakhstan 217 121% 2% Turkmenistan 183 6% 2% Italy 161 -43% 2% Lithuania 107 49% 1% Germany 102 NA 1% Other 686 -31% 7% Total 9 377 22% 100%

According to unconsolidated preliminary results, sales of AS Olainfarm in four months of 2017 were 30.72 million euros, which represents an increase by 1% compared to the same period of 2016. The biggest sales increase has been achieved in The Netherlands, where sales have increased by 415%, while sales to Germany increased by 106%. The biggest sales reduction during this period took place in Ukraine, where sales shrunk by 50%. The major sales markets of AS Olainfarm in four months were Russia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and The Netherlands. In total during this four months period AS Olainfarm sold its products to 38 countries in five continents.

4 months of 2017, unconsolidated sales Sales, thsnd. EUR Changes to four months of 2016 Share in total sales Russia 11 203 21% 36% Latvia 4 929 6% 16% Belarus 3 642 -1% 12% Ukraine 3 117 -50% 10% The Netherlands 2 492 415% 8% Italy 668 26% 2% Germany 492 148% 2% Kazakhstan 464 -30% 2% Turkmenistan 462 -29% 2% Lithuania 434 13% 1% Other 2 820 -23% 9% Total 30 723 1% 100%

According to preliminary estimates, unconsolidated sales of AS Olainfarm in 2017 might reach 96 million euros, while consolidated sales might reach 127 million euros. According to the preliminary sales numbers published here, during four months of 2017, the company has already made 32% of its unconsolidated sales estimate and 30% of its annual consolidated sales estimate.

JSC Olainfarm is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in Latvia with more than 40 years of experience in production of medication and chemical and pharmaceutical products. A basic principle of company's operations is to produce reliable and effective top quality products for Latvia and the rest of the world. Products made by the Group are being exported to more than 35 countries of the world, including the Baltics, Russia, other CIS, Europe, Asia, North America and Australia.
Macon, GA, May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DotCom Marketing, one of Georgias most promising promotional marketing firms, shattered records in the first quarter taking over an unprecedented and progressive piece of Georgia real estate.

Headquartered in Macon, Georgia, DotCom Marketings vast reach stretches from Savannah, through Macon, Albany and Valdosta, covering nearly the entire central Georgia region.

The now vast and thriving firm began to flourish in February this year as the executive team realigned their annual goals.

Director of Operations, Alex Inman explains, We had an incredible amount of success in Macon. We were the top-performing firm in the South several times in the first two months of the year. Our consistency in Macon got the wheels spinning for our executive team. How were we going to prove that we could be profitable on a larger scale?

Alex says the team moved quickly, rolling out extensive road trip initiatives to drive team focus on a broader scale.

We had associates on road trips to Albany, Savannah and surrounding cities on a weekly basis, says Alex. Our team began producing record numbers, tripling previous production seen in the areas. We earned the trust of our clients nearly over night and ran with the opportunity.

Because of the unprecedented success derived from DotCom Marketings initiatives, the company now manages 23 locations across the central Georgia region.

The territory expansion is far from the only business aspect flourishing for Alex and the Dotcom team, however.

DotCom Marketing recently announced plans to expand twice before June. What this means for the associates of the company, is the possibility for promotion. With each expansion initiative, comes the opportunity for one or more of the DotCom Marketing associates to step into an Assistant Director or Director role.

Furthering the line of opportunity and coinciding with the companys recently released plans, Alex and the executive team for DotCom opened their doors for new, entry level associates.

We are currently seeking individuals who can bring a fresh and exciting perspective to our marketing force, says Alex. We are willing to provide an extensive paid-training initiative if we can find the right individuals.

For more information about the career opportunities offered by DotCom Marketing or for more about the company culture, visit www.DotComMarketingInc.com
Police said the disc jockey, who is originally from Jaipur and is wanted in a case there, was involved in honey trapping and blackmailing.

By Shivendra Srivastava: A woman DJ who was allegedly part a high-profile sex racket was arrested in Mumbai today.

Police said the disc jockey, who is originally from Jaipur and is wanted in a case there, was involved in honey trapping and blackmailing.

Last year, special operations group of Rajasthan Police had busted a racket in which a group of accused extorted over Rs 15 crore from few men by filming them in sexual acts.

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They were blackmailed with threats to lodge rape cases against them.

The accused girl, aged 21 years, is wanted in the case since December last year.

The case was registered on the complaint of a Jaipur-based doctor.

As per the complaint, the woman had convinced him to take her to Pushkar where they stayed at a resort. He was filmed and was asked to pay Rs 1 crore as extortion money.

When the doctor failed to pay, a case of rape was registered and the doctor was also sent to jail.

Also read:

Sex traffickers using social media to prey on victims

BJP MP honey trap: Woman refutes allegations, says he sexually exploited her

--- ENDS ---
devarshi9283 wrote:

Hi Friends.....



I am Devarshi, Male, 28 years, Electrical Engineer from Lucknow, India



My profile;



X---UP Board ---72%

XII----UP Board---- 72%

then a gap of 3 yrs...

B.Tech(Electrical & Electronics)----UP Technical University----66% (CGPA 6.6 on a scale of 10)

average extra crculars at School and College level.







then 2 years of experience as a Lecturer and a Trainee Engineer in an Electronics company....nothing much significant...was preparing for PSUs and CAT...

July 2009---Selected in Power Grid Corporation of India Limited through All India Test...

CTC 11.5 LPA at that time...

Currently working in PGCIL as an Engineer in Executive cadre with a CTC of 12.5 LPA ( Approx 20000$ per annum....Inhand salary 1000$ per Month...)

work exp in PGCIL ----40 months



Managing the operation of High voltage AC transmission System at 765/400 kV as well as 400/220 kV Sub-stations as Shift in-charge.

Managing an Operation and Maintenance Team looking after the Power System Elements such as Power Transformers, Shunt Reactors, Circuit Breakers, Instrument Transformers.

Managing a Testing and Commissioning Team performing on site testing of various power system elements and protection schemes.

Managing a team looking after the functions of Fixed Series Compensator to increase the Power Transmission Capacity of a High Voltage Transmission Line.



Also Attended few certificate Programs such as in Technical Consulting, BSI standards etc.



Have started preparing for GMAT...will be taking it in early 2013.

Just took GMAT prep practice test 1....score came out to be 710.

I will be targeting 750.



Just wanted to ask u Guys...considering my avg Acads and gaps during study...and a low GPA at Grad level, which international MBA prgms i can look forward too....also...shall a higher GMAT score compensate for an average Acadmc performance....whether there are any good MBA progms that overlook avg GPA if i fare well in my essays and interviews....Any suggestion will be highly regarded..

Looking at your profile, I will suggest you must aim for a high GMAT score. Along with the score strenthen your essay with some extra curicular activities.
have had / has hadWe typically use have as a main verb with an object to talk about common actions. There are lots of things that we have in English, meaning that we enjoy or experience them. For instance, we can:have breakfast/lunch/dinner/supper/a bite to eat/a light mealhave a hot or cold drink/a glass of wine/a cup of coffee/some mineral waterhave a shower/a bath/a wash and shavehave a rest/a snooze/a siesta/a good sleep/a bad dreamhave a walk/a swim/a good time/a nice evening/a day off/a holiday/a good journey/a good triphave a word with someone/a chat/a conversation/a quarrel/an argumenthave a headache/a sore throat/hay fever/a bad back/a bad coldhave a (good) job/some work to do/money/an opportunity/a chanceWe use the present perfect tense when we want to connect the present with the (recent) past in some way and this will appear as has had or have had in full forms or as 's had or 've had in contracted forms:Have they had their breakfast yet? ~ They've had a glass of orange juice, but they haven't had anything to eat yet.He was in a foul mood when he got back, but now that he's had a shower and a snooze, he's calmed down a bit.Have you had a nice evening, Barbara? ~ I've had a rotten evening. I had an argument with Tom and I've had enough for one day.Have you always had hay fever? ~ I've had it every summer since I was 13.Thus, your example sentence, Sazd, I've had a headache since early morning, is quite correct.had hadHad had is the past perfect form of have when it is used as a main verb to describe our experiences and actions. We use the past perfect when we are talking about the past and want to refer back to an earlier past time, Madiini. In these examples, note the use of before, after, already and by the time as a trigger for the past perfect. Note also that the contracted form of had had is 'd had.She'd had a lot to drink and wasn't capable of walking home by herself.After he'd had a good night's sleep, he felt much better.She sacked him before he had had a chance to explain his behaviour.By the time he was twenty he'd already had four different jobs.I'd already had a word with Joan about re-locating to Manchester and now she's had time to think about it, she quite likes the idea.Note that past perfect forms are a feature of if-clauses in the third type of conditional sentence when we are explaining past actions or regretting past inaction. Thus, had had is likely to appear in this construction:If I hadn't had a good education, I would never have got this job.If she had had children later in life, she would have been a better mother.If I'd had another ten minutes, I would've finished the examination paper.Had they had any savings they didn't need, they would've re-paid their son's student loan.Source : http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learn ... v343.shtml
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may meet US President Donald Trump in person for the very first time next week at the US, Arab and Islamist Summit in Saudi Arabia, a Dawn News report says.

By Santosh Chaubey: According to a Dawn News report, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may meet US President Donald Trump next week during the US, Arab and Islamist Summit in Saudi Arabia.

Quoting sources from the Pakistan Foreign Office, the report said the related modalities are still being worked out.

If the meeting happens, it will be the first face-to-face encounter between Sharif and Trump, who had a telephone conversation on November 30, 2016.

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The US-Arab-Islamic summit is scheduled to be held on May 20-21 in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh.

The Saudi-led Islamic alliance was formed to fight terrorism.

It will be Donald Trump's first major interaction with major Muslim leaders of the world.

PHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN TRUMP AND SHARIF

Trump is known to have a tough stand on Pakistan, even if Pakistan chose to highlight the November 30 phone conversation between him and Sharif.

The exchange was widely mocked, with the global media using terms like "Trumpiest Phone Call" to describe it because of Pakistan's eagerness to play it up.

In the past, Trump has said Pakistan is not the US' friend, and asked when it will apologize for providing safe sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden.

Apart from the November 30 phone call, he hasn't endorsed or publicly contradicted his past views about Pakistan.

US STAND ON PAKISTAN

Pakistan released the readout of Sharif-Trump phone conversation, reflecting a bonhomie between the two leaders:

"President Trump said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me any time even before 20th January that is before I assume my office."

But no one except Pakistan took it seriously.

In fact, the stand of the Trump administration on Pakistan appears to be rather different.

On May 11, in its 'Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community' report, the US government blamed Pakistan for deteriorating India-Pakistan ties and batted for India's growing intolerance of Pakistan's state-sponsored terrorism.

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In April, US National Security Advisor General HR McMaster, who was in Pakistan, bluntly told the nation to stop using terror as state policy.

And during his campaign, Donald Trump promised to get Pakistan to free Dr. Shakil Afridi, who was instrumental in finding Osama Bin Laden, an act for which he has been languishing in jail.

With the sixth anniversary of Bin Laden's killing falling on May 2 and with Trump now in the White House, the US President may put pressure on Sharif to free Afridi.

And he can intervene if he wants to. In a tweet in March 2016, Trump had claimed that he "alone could solve the problem" after a terrorist attack targeting Christian women and children left 67 dead in Pakistan.

ALSO READ | Don't politicise CPEC, says Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif

ALSO READ | Imran Khan's party to sue Nawaz Sharif after book reveals Pak PM took money from Osama for Kashmir jihad

ALSO WATCH | Panama Papers case: Pakistan Supreme Court orders Nawaz Sharif to appear before probe team

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A Global Times article slammed "nervous" India's response to One Belt, One Road, saying New Delhi cannot stop its neighbours from participating in China's initiative. The article was only published online, suggesting it was aimed primarily at Indian online readers.

By Ananth Krishnan: Online commentary in a hardline Chinese media outlet on Monday slammed "nervous" India's response to China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative and said New Delhi couldn't dissuade its neighbours from joining the plan.

"It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbours' debt burden, the neighbours appear willing to take on more," said the article by Global Times reporter Wang Jiamei that was published on the hardline tabloid's English-language website, but not carried in the print newspaper or in the more widely-read Chinese edition, suggesting the piece was aimed primarily at Indian online readers - and perhaps aimed simply to irk them.

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"Given the active responses from countries along the route, there is no way for India to impede its neighbouring countries from cooperating with China in infrastructure development," it said.

The commentary hit out at India's statement on Saturday that highlighted India's sovereignty concerns regarding the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as well as the "debt burden" of countries in unsound connectivity initiatives.

"India was openly sceptical of China's Belt and Road Forum hours ahead of the opening of the event, mainly due to concerns over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key project of the B&R, and whether it might influence the disputed Kashmir region," the commentary said.

"It is strange that the onlooker is more anxious than the players. While India cares about its neighbours' debt burden, the neighbours appear willing to take on more."

It pointed to deals signed by China and Pakistan on Saturday for airport, port and highway projects and said Pakistan's repayments would peak at $5 billion by 2022 and would be offset by transit fees. Nepal also is in talks over a cross-border rail.

"China has formally invited India to join the B&R. If India doesn't want to take a part on the stage, then it should just be a good member of the audience. The role is still available if India changes its mind, but it may only be a small role if it is left too late," the article said.

"China would never force any country to participate in the B&R if it was too skeptical and nervous to do so. It is regrettable but not a problem that India still maintains its strong opposition to the B&R, even though China has repeatedly said its position on the Kashmir dispute would not change because of the CPEC," the article added.

ALSO READ | China formalises CPEC as One Belt One Road 'flagship' while Xi says will 'respect sovereignty'

ALSO READ | Beijing's One Belt, One Road Summit will embarrass India, says Chinese media

ALSO WATCH | Oppo row: China asks firms to respect Indian laws

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The missile, launched at a steep angle on Sunday, reached an altitude of 2,000km (1,242 miles) and travelled about 700km, landing in the sea west of Japan. North Korea said on Monday it was a test of the abilities of a newly developed ballistic rocket, according to the BBC.

South Koreas military said it could not yet verify the Norths claims.

But it said the Norths missiles did appear to be able to leave and re-enter the atmosphere, which is crucial to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the Yonhap news agency reported.

Repeated missile tests by the North this year  not all of them successful but all a breach of UN sanctions  have sparked international alarm and raised tensions with the US.

The US and Japan have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

North Koreas KCNA state news agency said on Monday that the test of a newly developed mid/long-range strategic ballistic rocket, Hwasong-12 had gone to plan.

The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead, it said.

North Korea is known to be developing both nuclear weapons  it has conducted five nuclear tests  and the missiles capable of delivering those weapons to their target. Both are in defiance of UN sanctions.

But it remains unclear whether it has the ability to make the weapons small enough to be mounted on a rocket, and it has never tested a long-range ICBM which could reach, for example, the US.

ICBMs are considered to have a range of about 6,000km, but analysts believe the missile tested on Sunday would have travelled about 4,000km if it had been fired at a standard trajectory rather than upwards.

The KCNA report said that, as ever, the test had been overseen by the Norths Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

It said he had told the scientists and technicians involved not to be complacent but to build further nuclear weapons and methods of delivery until the US made the right choice.

The White House has mooted talks with North Korea under the right conditions, which would include a halt in missile tests.

But in a statement on Sunday, it said Pyongyang had been a flagrant menace for far too long and that this latest provocation should serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions.

The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said on Sunday that until Mr Kim meets the US conditions, were not sitting down with him.

South Koreas newly elected President Moon Jae-in, who is seeking deeper engagement with the North, said it was a reckless provocation while China, North Koreas only real ally, is urging restraint.
Cambodias Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has ordered workers to stop all illegal destruction of forests and timber trafficking activities.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) says the government order was dated May 8 and publicly released the following day. It said the ministry has taken note of the existence of forest and land-clearing, as well as the seizure of forest land for private ownership.

RFA said the order appears to be in reaction to a report from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). The London-based group released the report on April 8.

The group described a major tree-clearing operation and timber export business in Cambodia. It said corrupt Cambodian government officials and Vietnamese companies started the business last year in the northeastern province of Ratanakiri.

The EIA report accuses corrupt officials and members of Vietnams armed forces of removing large numbers of illegally cut trees from Cambodia. It noted their removal violates Cambodias ban on timber exports to Vietnam. The Cambodian government has banned such exports for over 30 years.

The report is called Repeat Offender: Vietnams Persistent Trade in Illegal Timber. It estimates that over 300,000 cubic meters of hardwood logs have been taken from Cambodias national parks and shipped to Vietnam.

Much of the wood is valuable Siamese rosewood, which is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Any wood listed as vulnerable is one step away from being endangered.

The EIA says timber smugglers are paying bribes to border agents in both countries. In return, the agents permit shipment of the trees to Vietnam.

The report said more than $13 million in unlawful payments have been made to Cambodian officials since last November.

Ouch Leng is an investigative reporter and activist. He has reported on illegal logging operations and corruption in Cambodias Prey Lang Forest. He won the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize for his reporting.

He said it is a good thing for the Cambodian government to be concerned about illegal timber trade. But he does not think the government will be able to stop it.

Thats because the people who are involved in the illegal logging business are members of the government or the armed forces, he said.

Seng Sok Heng is another critic of the Cambodian government. He said he thinks some law enforcement agents will continue accepting money and permit the smuggling to continue.

He's said, Its too little, too late now. Such action should have been taken much earlier.

Im Jonathan Evans.

Radio Free Asia and the Associated Press reported on this story. Dan Friedell adapted the story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

What do you think about the illegal logging? We want to know. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

smuggle  v. something valuable (such as money) that is given in order to get someone to do something

bribe  n. something valuable (such as money) that is given in order to get someone to do something

offend  v. to cause (a person or group) to feel hurt, angry, or upset by something said or done

persist  v. to continue to do something or to try to do something even though it is difficult or other people want you to stop

timber  n. trees that are grown in order to produce wood

vulnerable  adj. open to attack, harm, or damage

log  v. to cut down trees in an area for wood
Dwraka-based parents of a 19-year-old girl who was gangraped and murdered in 2012 are still waiting for justice with the Supreme Court yet to confirm the death sentence of the rapists.

By Harish V Nair: What is the criterion for fast-tracking a case? Only those which involve public outrage, mass fight for justice and media trial?

The question is being raised by Dwarka-based parents of a 19-year-old girl who was gangraped and murdered, perhaps more brutally, around 10 months before the Nirbhaya incident and is awaiting justice for the past five years and three months.

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The debate triggers ten days after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of four convicts in the high-profile Nirbhaya rape and gangrape case which passed through the entire judicial hierarchy - trial court, high court and apex court - within a span of just four years.

In the pertinent case, accused Rahul, Ravi and Vinod were sentenced to death by a Delhi trial court after two years of trial on February 13, 2014. This was after the victim's father, 55-year-old Kunwar Singh Negi sat on a fast at the Jantar Mantar seeking justice for her.

Acting fast, the Delhi High Court upheld the sentence within just six months - on August 25, 2014.

SC YET TO CONFIRM SENTENCE

But the Supreme Court is yet to confirm the sentence and the matter has been pending before it for the past two years and two months without a single hearing.

The only movement in the case which happened in the SC was the court allowing the victim's father to become a party in the case on December 9, 2015.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The victim was returning after work from Cybercity in Gurugram on February 9, 2012 with three of her colleagues who lived in the same neighbourhood in Qutub Vihar, in Dwarka.

The girls were dropped off by a bus around 8.30 pm and had to walk through a maze of poorly lit lanes to reach their homes.

Three men in a car accosted the women and started passing lurid comments. They suddenly pulled the victim inside the car and sped away.

She was kept in captivity and 'We want the three rapist monsters to hang at the earliest' gangraped for three days and later brutally killed.

They burnt her body with cigarette butts, mutilated her eyes and face with screwdrivers, poured acid over it and also inserted a broken beer bottle in her private parts, and finally left her to bleed to death. The body was found four days later in a field in Rewari, Haryana.

WANT THEM HANGED AT THE EARLIEST: FATHER

"Mera yahi praarthana hein ki teeno darindon ko jald se jald phansi dena chahiye (My only prayer is that all three monsters should be hanged at the earliest)," said Kunwar Singh Negi, 55-year-old father of the victim who works as a security guard in a private school.

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"We are clueless about the criteria adopted by courts to fast track cases. This incident in fact, took place 11 months before the Nirbhaya incident. Just because there was no public outrage or media campaign her family cannot be denied speedy justice," Yogita Bhayana, social activist involved in the case.

The view is echoed by Charu Wali Khanna, the advocate of victim's family. "Justice should be speedy for all victims. Not merely for the family of the victims whose case has been highlighted by the media," she adds.

Terming the crime 'brutal and diabolic', the High Court had observed: "We cannot ignore that in a rarest of rare case where the crime and the criminal test are satisfied, sentence of death can be inflicted for a violent rape followed by murder and especially when the accused have acted as predators, have snatched a member of the society from the society to commit the crime.

"Having committed the crime the predators have defiled the body of the victim. It is not that they acted upon a sudden impulse. They were predators moving on the streets and were looking for a prey...this is not a common rape followed by murder. It is a whimsical and bizarre crime, conceits of which kind are not common in the annals of crime," the HC added.

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ALSO READ | Rohtak's Nirbhaya: Girl gangraped, brutalised, murdered and body mutilated

ALSO READ | Nirbhaya gangrape verdict: What the Supreme Court observed while upholding death sentence

ALSO WATCH | Nirbhaya gangrape case: This is what happened inside the Supreme Court today

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(HealthDay)Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) is associated with increased risk for cholesteatoma, according to a study published online May 11 in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.

Chin-Lung Kuo, M.D., Ph.D., from the National Yang-Ming University in Taipei, Taiwan, and colleagues used data from a nationwide, population-based claims database to examine the risk of cholesteatoma in patients with CRS. Data were included for 12,670 patients with newly diagnosed CRS and a comparison cohort of 63,350 matched individuals without CRS. Patients were followed for eight years for cholesteatoma.

The researchers found that 209 patients developed cholesteatoma during the eight-year follow-up: 66 from the CRS cohort and 143 from the comparison cohort. Per 1,000 person-years, the incidence of cholesteatoma was 0.65 and 0.28 among those with and without CRS, respectively; the absolute difference in the incidence density was 0.37 per 1,000 person-years. Patients with CRS had a significantly increased risk of cholesteatoma within eight years compared to those without CRS (hazard ratio, 1.69), after adjustment for potential confounders. The eight-year cholesteatoma-free survival rate was significantly lower for patients with versus those without CRS. The absolute difference in the eight-year cholesteatoma-free survival rate between the groups was 0.0029.

"The purpose of the study was to draw attention to the possibility of development of cholesteatoma among patients with CRS," the authors write. "Because that possibility exists, clinicians should keep this association in mind as well as the importance of a thorough head and neck examination."

Copyright  2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Childhood Obesity is a bimonthly peer-reviewed journal, published in print and online, and the journal of record for all aspects of communication on the broad spectrum of issues and strategies related to weight management and obesity prevention in children and adolescents. Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

How many hours a day young children (1-3 years) sleep does not appear to affect their cardiometabolic risk (CMR) at ages 3-8, based on an assessment of factors including blood pressure and cholesterol and blood glucose levels. Most unexpectedly, less sleep was associated with increased levels of high density lipoprotein (HDL), the "good" form of cholesterol, as reported in a new study published in Childhood Obesity.

The article entitled "Longitudinal Analysis of Sleep Duration and Cardiometabolic Risk in Young Children," was coauthored by Lesley Plumptre, PhD, Catherin Birken, MD, and colleagues from The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto School of Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Toronto, and St. Michaels Hospital, Toronto, Canada, on behalf of the TARGet Kids! Collaboration.

The researchers collected sleep duration data for children 12-36 months of age. At a follow-up visit at age 36-96 months they determined a CMR score for each child by totaling the child's age, standardized waist circumference score, systolic blood pressure, triglyceride measurement, blood glucose level, and the inverse HDL. The authors suggest that a relationship between sleep duration early in life and CMR could appear at a later age. Sleep quality could also have a greater effect on CMR than sleep duration.

"Recently, sleep duration has emerged as an influence on cardiometabolic risk factors and obesity in childhood and among adults using mostly cross-sectional analyses. It is not clear when this relationship starts," says Childhood Obesity Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX. "Plumptre and colleagues conducted the first such analysis using a longitudinal design testing the relationship between sleep in early childhood (12 to 36 months) with a cardiometabolic risk score later in childhood (36 to 96 months), and found no such relationship. This important finding indicates that the relationship between sleep and cardiometabolic risk emerges later in childhood."

More information: Lesley Plumptre et al, Longitudinal Analysis of Sleep Duration and Cardiometabolic Risk in Young Children, Childhood Obesity (2017). Journal information: Childhood Obesity Lesley Plumptre et al, Longitudinal Analysis of Sleep Duration and Cardiometabolic Risk in Young Children,(2017). DOI: 10.1089/chi.2016.0279
(HealthDay)Men troubled by the embarrassment of premature ejaculation might soon have an easy way to avoid it, new research suggests.

Special "wipes" embedded with a mild anestheticbenzocaine appear to help reduce premature ejaculation, a small new study has found.

According to the American Urological Association (AUA), premature ejaculation is the most common form of male sexual dysfunction, affecting about one in three men aged 18 to 59.

Currently, drug treatments for premature ejaculation in the United States are limited to creams or sprays, the AUA said.

"Premature ejaculation means ejaculation in less than 2 minutes after penetration," explained one urologist, Dr. David Samadi. He's chief of urology at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

While benzocaine and other anesthetics have been used before to treat the condition, their use in a bedside wipe is new, he said.

The new studyfunded by the wipes' maker, Veru Healthcareincluded 21 men with premature ejaculation who were in monogamous heterosexual relationships.

Fifteen used the wipes, which contain 4 percent benzocaine, while six others received a placebo wipe with no anesthetic.

After two months, the men in the treatment group showed significant improvement in premature ejaculation compared to those in the placebo group, said a team led by Dr. Ridwan Shabsigh, who specializes in men's sexual health in New York City.

The study was presented May 13 at a meeting of the American Urological Association. Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

"This study is encouraging in demonstrating a new and innovative way to reduce the symptoms of premature ejaculation," AUA spokesman Dr. Tobias Kohler said in a meeting news release.

"Premature ejaculation can cause a variety of issues related to negative feelings and emotions that can lead to problems with sexual relationships. This data shows topical 4 percent benzocaine wipes is a promising therapy to treat the most common form of sexual dysfunction among men," he said.

Kohler is associate professor and residency program director at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

But Samadi brought up one potential downside: benzocaine's effect on the man's sex partner.

"The study has not mentioned a common problem of using topical anesthetics, which is absence of an orgasm in the female partner," Samadi said. "Topical anesthetics can be absorbed through the vaginal wall and reduce the partner sensation if a condom is not used."

Dr. Harris Nagler is a urologist at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y. He reviewed the study and agreed that the wipes are a "novel technique for application of topical anesthetic to decrease penile sensitivity and premature ejaculation."

But he added that the study was small and was also too vague about a number of factors, such as a "lack of consistency of measurement of time to ejaculation."

And Nagler said topical anesthetics won't help every man battling premature ejaculation.

That's because the treatment has "also resulted in erectile dysfunction in some men due to penile numbness, and vaginal insensitivityaffecting partner satisfaction," Nagler said.

"However, it is reasonable to assume that there would be men who would benefit by this novel approach," he said.

More information: Harris M. Nagler, M.D., urologist, Northwell Health's Arthur Smith Institute of Urology at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park, N.Y.; David Samadi, M.D., chairman of urology, chief of robotic surgery, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City; American Urological Association, news release, May 13, 2017 Harris M. Nagler, M.D., urologist, Northwell Health's Arthur Smith Institute of Urology at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park, N.Y.; David Samadi, M.D., chairman of urology, chief of robotic surgery, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City; American Urological Association, news release, May 13, 2017 The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more on premature ejaculation.

Copyright  2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Credit: Susan Buck Ms/Public Domain

Older adults often receive drugs of questionable benefit during their last months of life, according to the first study conducted on the burden of end-of-life medications across an entire population. The authors advocate for clinical guidelines to support physicians when they face the decision to continue or discontinue medications near the end of life. Their findings are published in The American Journal of Medicine.

The simultaneous use of multiple medications has become commonplace among older adults. In high-income countries, it has previously been estimated that 25% to 40% of people aged 65 years or older are prescribed at least five medications. This practice is known as "polypharmacy," and can lead to drug-drug interactions and serious adverse effects.

In the context of end-of-life care, polypharmacy also raises important ethical questions about the potential futility of treatments close to death.

"People with life-limiting illness often receive medications whose benefit is unlikely to be achieved within their remaining lifespan," writes lead author Lucas Morin, of the Aging Research Center at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. "However, previous studies have been conducted in selected samples of individuals. Future research and clinical guidelines need to be informed by findings that are generalizable beyond a specific illness or care setting."

The authors identified over half a million adults over 65 years of age who died in Sweden between 2007 and 2013, and reconstructed their drug prescription history for each of the last 12 months of life through the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register. The characteristics of study participants at time of death were assessed through record linkage with the National Patient Register, the Social Services Register, and the Swedish Education Register. Of note, over-the-counter drugs were not taken into account in this investigation.

The study resulted in two main findings:

First, the burden of medications increases as death approaches. The proportion of older adults exposed to at least ten different prescription drugs rose from 30% to 47% over the course of the last year before death. Older adults who died from cancer had the largest increase in the number of drugs. Individuals living in institutions were found to receive a greater number of medications than those living in the community, but the number of drugs increased more slowly for those living in an institution.

Second, the researchers found that polypharmacy near the end of life is fueled not only by drugs prescribed for the purpose of symptom management (e.g. analgesics), but also by the frequent continuation of long-term preventive treatments and disease-targeted drugs. For instance, during their last month of life, a large proportion of older adults used platelet antiaggregants (45%), beta-blockers (41%), ACE inhibitors (21%), vasodilators (17%), statins (16%), calcium channel blockers (15%), or potassium-sparing agents (12%).

"The clinical benefit of drugs aiming at preventing cardiovascular diseases during the final month of life is at the very least questionable. Physicians should consider discontinuing drugs that may be effective and otherwise appropriate, but whose potential harms outweigh the benefits that patients can reasonably expect before death occurs." However, the authors noted that "the process of de-prescribing requires timely dialogue between the patient, family, and physician, and close monitoring of symptoms. It is also essential that patients and their relatives receive clear information about their options in terms of palliative care in order to counter the feeling of abandonment that they may experience when treatments are withdrawn."

The authors call for the development of clinical guidelines to support physicians in their effort to reduce potentially futile drug treatments near the end of life.

More information: Lucas Morin et al, Choosing Wisely? Measuring the Burden of Medications in Older Adults near the End of Life: Nationwide, Longitudinal Cohort Study, The American Journal of Medicine (2017). Journal information: American Journal of Medicine Lucas Morin et al, Choosing Wisely? Measuring the Burden of Medications in Older Adults near the End of Life: Nationwide, Longitudinal Cohort Study,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2017.02.028
Research led by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute found that almost two-thirds (65%) of parents of adolescents agreed with policies to ban indoor tanning for youth under age 18. About one-quarter of parents had no opinion (23%), and only 12% disagreed. Support for an indoor tanning ban was high across racial/ethnic groups and geographic regions of the U.S. The study appears online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Researchers from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Georgetown University and the University of Minnesota surveyed 1,244 parents of children, ages 11-17, about age-based restrictions on indoor tanning. They found that parental support for bans was highest among parents who perceived the harms of indoor tanning for adolescents.

Indoor tanning is associated with an increased risk of skin cancer, including melanoma, and is especially harmful for those who begin use early in life. Accumulating evidence of indoor tanning harms has prompted public health leaders, including the World Health Organization and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to categorize UV radiation as a carcinogen and prioritize the goal of reducing adolescents' use. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a 10% excise tax on indoor tanning. And, in 2015, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a rule, currently under consideration, to ban indoor tanning for those under 18.

However, ongoing consideration of ACA reform in Congress may reverse existing national policies, including an excise tax on indoor tanning.

"Our study demonstrates parents' broad support of age-based restrictions on indoor tanning for adolescents, particularly when they've been informed of the health risks," said lead author Melissa B. Gilkey, PhD of Harvard Medical School's Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. "This study provides valuable information on parents' attitudes toward the public health risks of indoor tanning that should inform public officials re-examining policies concerning the industry."

More information: Melissa B. Gilkey et al. Parental Support for Age-based Indoor Tanning Restrictions, American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2017). Journal information: American Journal of Preventive Medicine Melissa B. Gilkey et al. Parental Support for Age-based Indoor Tanning Restrictions,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2017.03.011

Provided by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
The 2- and 3-D structure of lysergic acid diethylamide, aka LSD, synthesized by Alfred Hofmann in 1938 while investigating the argot fungus. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Nearly 50 years ago, psychiatrists lost access to one of the most promising tools they'd found to study consciousness and treat a range of refractory psychological conditions: psychedelic drugs. Psychedelics were banned in the United States in 1970 and by the United Nations the next year, classified as Schedule I drugs with a "high potential for abuse" and "no currently accepted medical use." Many scientists blame Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who became one of the most prominent psychedelic proselytizers of the sixties, for fueling both the drug's popularity and the media frenzy that inevitably triggered a legal backlash.

These restrictions have severely impeded research into novel therapies to treat brain disorders. As British psychiatrist David Nutt argued in PLOS Biology a few years ago, "Most researchers do not have the time, money, or energy to work through the regulatory jungle." And with no federal support for this work, scientists must rely on private organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and the Beckley Foundation, which funds Nutt's group at the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London. Both organizations are dedicated to breaking the bureaucratic logjam.

Last month, Nutt joined hundreds of other clinicians and researchers who've received private funding to pursue psychedelic medicine and research at the third MAPS-sponsored Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland, California.

Scientists and clinicians presented evidence from ongoing research suggesting that psychedelics, used in a controlled psychotherapy setting, have the potential to alleviate conditions that don't respond to conventional drugs and therapy, including depression, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction. Some are harnessing psychedelics to study the neural basis of consciousness, using advanced imaging techniques to map changes in brain activity and chemistry to altered perception, moods and perspective.

Much of the recent work with psychedelics picks up where early psychiatric pioneers left off, in many cases confirming what researchers hypothesized but lacked the tools to test.

Early evidence of positive results

Clinicians started experimenting with LSD in the late 1940s, soon after Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized the drug while studying the ergot fungus as a potential medicine, accidentally dosed himself. Hofmann reported an "extraordinary disturbance" marked by "an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors."

The potential of this mind-altering drug was not lost on Hofmann, and psychiatrists soon began experimenting with psychedelics to treat addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression and anxiety. Some used LSD to model the delusions and psychosis seen in schizophrenia, while others explored its "mind loosening" effects to help patients work through repressed thoughts and feelings. Experimental psychiatrist Joel Elkes took LSD with a small group of volunteers in 1952, the first to do so in England. He noted in a retrospective commentary that observations from these experiments led him to propose that the drug selectively inhibited the organization of sensory information through a serotonin-mediated receptor.

Elkes was "remarkably prescient," Nutt says, "because that's what we have shown."

Historians of psychedelic science say that by the mid-1960s researchers had published over 1,000 clinical studies involving over 40,000 patients, reporting few side effects, though many of the studies would not meet contemporary research standards. Even so, Leary's promotion of LSD as a panacea for the unenlightened masses, many scientists say, led regulators to slam the door on research that held great promise for unlocking the mysteries of the mind.

Despite a "lack of accepted safety" designation that goes along with a Schedule I classification, most studies have found no evidence that psychedelics produce serious adverse effects when used under controlled conditions. That may hold for recreational use as well, according to a 2012 PLOS ONE study, which found no indication of psychological problems in healthy people who used LSD, psilocybin, peyote or mescaline. Another PLOS ONE study came to the same conclusion about ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea brewed from bark and leaves traditionally used as part of ritual healing ceremonies in the Amazon Basin.The research doesn't claim that adverse events can't happen. But they are likely rare and in some cases may be related to pre-existing conditions.

Placebos, probes and treatments

Early studies of psychedelics typically failed to use controls, raising an obvious question: how do you design a placebo-controlled trial when the active drug under study produces profound changes in perception and cognition?

It helps to work with people who've never experienced the drug before so they don't know what to expect, says Fernanda Palhano-Fontes, a PhD student working in Draulio Barros de Araujo's lab at the Brain Institute at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. In a recent study to test ayahuasca's potential to alleviate treatment-resistant depression, she and her colleagues used a placebo brew designed to mimic the potent tea's color and nasty taste, and even its capacity to cause nausea.

Participants were randomly assigned to receive a placebo or a single dose of ayahuasca and, as often happens in depression trials, both groups improved somewhat the next day. But by the end of the week, people in the ayahuasca group showed much greater gains than the placebo group. The study, which involved just 35 patients, hasn't been published yet.

To better understand how ayahuasca affects mood and perception, Palhano-Fontes and Araujo have been studying its effects on the brain in healthy people, using fMRI. They reported in a 2015 PLOS ONE paper [6] that ayahuasca caused reduced activity in what's known as the default mode network, a "connector hub" of brain regions that tends to be more active when people are resting or daydreaming. It's been associated with sense of self, and emotional and cognitive processing. Studies have associated increased activity in this network with schizophrenia, depression, social phobia and several other psychiatric conditions. This increased activity has also been linked to intense rumination and obsessive thoughts. One theory holds that by suppressing the default mode network, psychedelics may help release the brakes on severely constrained thinking, opening the door to more effective psychotherapy.

For David Nutt, psychedelics hold a unique capacity to probe the neurobiology of mental states, and to reprogram circuits to recover from psychological distress. "These drugs can change your attitude to life," Nutt says. In a study of psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression, he found that patients became less pessimistic. "My outlook has changed significantly," one patient said. "I'm more aware now that it's pointless to get wrapped up in endless negativity."

Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist who conducted clinical trials with LSD before it was illegal, once said, "Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy."

But that promise won't be realized until regulators change the restrictions on psychedelics and recognize their potential as a medicine. Hofmann immediately recognized that psychedelics release constraints on consciousness to offer a glimpse into a world we otherwise can't perceive. Now scientists have the tools to figure out how psychedelics do that by interrogating the underlying brain mechanisms in a reproducible, scientifically valid wayif only we let them.

More information: Jonathan D. Moreno. Acid Brothers: Henry Beecher, Timothy Leary, and the psychedelic of the century, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (2016). Jonathan D. Moreno. Acid Brothers: Henry Beecher, Timothy Leary, and the psychedelic of the century,(2016). DOI: 10.1353/pbm.2016.0019 David Nutt. Illegal Drugs Laws: Clearing a 50-Year-Old Obstacle to Research, PLOS Biology (2015). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002047 Teri S. Krebs et al. Psychedelics and Mental Health: A Population Study, PLoS ONE (2013). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0063972 Jose Carlos Bouso et al. Personality, Psychopathology, Life Attitudes and Neuropsychological Performance among Ritual Users of Ayahuasca: A Longitudinal Study, PLoS ONE (2012). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0042421 Rapid antidepressant effects of the psychedelic ayahuasca in treatment-resistant depression: a randomised placebo-controlled trial (2017) bioRxiv 103531; doi: doi.org/10.1101/103531 Fernanda Palhano-Fontes et al. The Psychedelic State Induced by Ayahuasca Modulates the Activity and Connectivity of the Default Mode Network, PLOS ONE (2015). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118143 Journal information: PLoS ONE , PLoS Biology

Provided by PLOS Blogs

This story is republished courtesy of PLOS Blogs: blogs.plos.org.
(HealthDay)Male shift workers listen up: Two new studies link sleep disorders common in these men to urinary problems and erectile dysfunction.

And a third report links the repercussions of shift work to lower-quality semen, which could make it harder for men to father children.

The research doesn't prove that shift work and its accompanying sleep issues cause these problems. However, "men who work shifts, particularly night shifts, should be aware they may be at risk for many health issues, and should be sure to seek care from a physician to help prevent and treat these conditions," said Dr. Alex Pastuszak, co-author of the three studies.

Pastuszak is an assistant professor with the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

For the studies, researchers sought to better understand the role of "shift work," which requires workers to be on the job outside of traditional daytime hours.

"We know that shift work can disrupt circadian rhythms and disrupt normal hormonal function," Pastuszak said. "Shift work can also put people at risk for shift-work sleep disorder, which causes insomnia or excessive sleepiness and a reduction of total sleep time due to a work schedule."

In one of the three studies, researchers examined 75 infertile men who were shift workers, 96 other infertile men and 27 fertile men who'd recently fathered children.

"We found that in men who are seen for infertility, those who work night shifts have significantly lower sperm counts than those who do not," Pastuszak said. "We think that too much or too little sleep alters circadian rhythms and thus changes hormone levels and the expression of genes that are important for producing sperm."

The other studies examined responses from almost 2,500 men who went to a men's clinic and answered questionnaires about urinary issues.

"We found that men with shift-work sleep disorder had worse urinary issues, worse erectile function, and worse symptoms of low testosterone as well as lower testosterone levels," Pastuszak said.

The urinary issues included problems such as frequent urination, urgent urination, urinary hesitation and nighttime urination. "They're most often caused by either bladder dysfunction or prostate enlargement," Pastuszak said.

As for other potential explanations for the urinary problems, "we also asked the men about their use of tobacco and alcohol, symptoms of depression, exercise and other medical conditions they had," he said. "We found that shift work most significantly impacted urinary symptoms, sperm counts and low testosterone symptoms."

Sleep specialist Dr. Dennis Auckley, an associate professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, cautioned that the new research should be considered preliminary.

It's difficult to study the effects of shift work since it can vary widely with different schedules of hours and days off, Auckley said, and another study found no connection between shift work and measurements of semen quality.

If shift workers do have urological problems, Auckley added, "there's a long list of causes for these problems that should be evaluated before one could attribute their symptoms to shift work."

What can shift workers do to protect themselves?

According to Pastuszak, "these men can take the following steps to improve sleep quality: Go to bed at regular times; sleep in a dark room; avoid alcohol and caffeine prior to going to bed; and limit use of computers, tablets, phones, televisions and other bright artificial lighting for at least 30 minutes before going to bed."

The studies were presented May 13 at the American Urological Association's annual meeting, in Boston. Research presented at meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information: Alex Pastuszak, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, Center for Reproductive Medicine, department of urology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston; Dennis Auckley, M.D., director, Center for Sleep Medicine, division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, MetroHealth Medical Center, associate professor, medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland; May 13, 2017, presentation, American Urological Association annual meeting, Boston Alex Pastuszak, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, Center for Reproductive Medicine, department of urology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston; Dennis Auckley, M.D., director, Center for Sleep Medicine, division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, MetroHealth Medical Center, associate professor, medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland; May 13, 2017, presentation, American Urological Association annual meeting, Boston For details about what to expect during a male urologic visit, try Northwell Health.

Copyright  2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Neural maps in the visual cortex of many mammalian species become more complex with increasing neuron number. The dots in the graph symbolize single nerve cells, the colours denote different characteristics. In brains with higher numbers of cells neurons with similar characteristics are grouped together. Credit: FIAS/ H. Cuntz

The human brain consists of a highly complex network of approximately 85 billion nerve cells, which continually exchange information with each other. In order for this complex network to function efficiently, it is important that the distances between neurons encoding similar properties remain relatively short. In the human visual system and in that of many mammals, the neurons that respond to objects with similar orientation are indeed located near each other. Interestingly, such an ordered structure cannot be found in rodents. Researchers from the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research and the Ernst-Strungmann Institute for Neuroscience have studied why such differences between these animal species exist using two different computer models. Unexpectedly, the researchers found that the existence of this ordered structure is not only determined by the connectivity in the circuit, but also by the total number of neurons.

Distinct regions of our brain are responsible for different tasks, such as vision, language, and memory. Within these regions, the nerve cells  or neurons - that respond to similar features are also located near each other, forming so-called neural maps. These neurons are strongly interconnected, which enables them to communicate with each other. If similar cells are in close proximity to each other, the paths connecting them are shorter and our brain works more quickly and efficiently. A prominent example of such neural maps is the arrangement of nerve cells with similar orientation preferences. These nerve cells are located in the brain's visual cortex, and they recognize the orientation of individual objects in our field of vision (vertical, horizontal, diagonal, etc.). The colored visualization of these orientation preferences results in pinwheel-like patterns on the surface of the brain. Interestingly enough, these "pinwheels" exist in many types of mammals, but not in rodents, which instead possess an unstructured neural map.

Neuroscientists have long speculated whether the rodents' neural circuitry differs from that of other mammals. The Frankfurt research group, led by Hermann Cuntz, has now demonstrated with two radically different models that the structure of neural maps is determined by the number of nerve cells in addition to the underlying neural connectivity. This result is a simple explanation for the observed differences in the neural maps. Rodents, such as mice or rats have a significantly lower number of neurons due to their body size and their relatively lower density of nerve cells compared to other types of mammals.

More neurons, more structure

Indeed, the models show that with an increasing number of neurons, the neural map transitions from unstructured to structured. In addition to a rapid transition from an unstructured to a structured neural map, there is also a gradual increase in the quality of the structure with an increasing number of neurons. Therefore, ferrets or tree shrews display less structure in the neural map of the visual cortex than closely-related species with more neurons in their visual system. "The apparent difference in the neural map of rodents' visual systems could be caused by the lower number of nerve cells in the examined species  therefore, there is not necessarily any difference in the underlying neural circuitry," the lead author Marvin Weigand explains. Therefore, the "pinwheels" could exist in the largest species of rodents, the capybaras native to South America.

In order to reveal the dependence of the neural maps' structural quality on the interconnectivity  in other words, the number of relevant connections per neuron  the research group adopted two models from different scientific disciplines for its own purposes. The first model was based mainly on multidimensional scaling. In this numerical method, objects are sorted spatially according to their similarity  in this case, the similarity of the circuitry of the nerve cells. The second model was a modification of the so-called XY model. This model, which originally came from statistical physics, was also used by David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz for examining topological phases of matter, for which they were awarded last year's Nobel Prize in Physics. Incidentally, the predictions derived from the models apply to all possible neural maps and could possibly lead to a better understanding of the relationship between the number of neurons and the quantity of encoded attributes in the brain.

More information: Marvin Weigand et al. Universal transition from unstructured to structured neural maps, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Marvin Weigand et al. Universal transition from unstructured to structured neural maps,(2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1616163114
It's just one step. Flushing the bladder with a common chemotherapy drug after a cancerous tumor is surgically removed reduces the chances of that cancer returning. Canadian and European clinical trials have proven this true and now a major U.S. study has done the same.

Dr. Edward Messing, an investigator with SWOG, the international clinical trials network funded by the National Cancer Institute, has found that an immediate infusion of the common chemotherapy agent gemcitabine after the removal of a bladder cancer tumor will significantly reduce the risk of cancer recurrence. The Winfield W. Scott Professor and Chairman of Urology at the University of Rochester, Messing will present results of this Phase III, blinded clinical trial during a May 15 oral presentation at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) held May 12-16 in Boston.

"This one extra step, using a drug that's fairly inexpensive, has impressive results," Messing said. "Urologists in Europe and Canada have been doing this procedure for more than 20 years with other chemotherapy drugs, with the research to prove it. Even the AUA recommends it. Now that we've got results from an American study, using a readily available drug that is very well-tolerated, maybe American urologists will start using gemcitabine this way. I certainly hope this finally changes our standard of care."

Messing is former president of the Society of Urologic Oncology and, in 2013, was awarded the prestigious Presidential Citation from the AUA for his work as a bladder cancer researcher and educator. Messing led a SWOG team that conducted the trial, S0337, which enrolled 406 eligible patients with non-muscle invading bladder cancer. Bladder cancer is the sixth most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, and the third most common among men. The low grade, non-muscle invasive form of the disease is common, making up about half of all newly diagnosed cases. Treatment includes a procedure called transurethral resection for bladder tumor, or TURBT, which involves a surgeon removing cancerous tissue from the bladder.

In the Messing study, patients were randomized into two groups. One group, after TURBT, received a single 3.5-ounce instillation of gemcitabine, which was administered directly after surgery and allowed to sit in the bladder for one hour. The drug kills cancer cells, and is often used to treat advanced bladder cancer in combination with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. The other group of patients, after TURBT, received an infusion of saline only. Both groups were followed for four years. Results were strong and clear: There was a significant 34 percent reduction in risk of recurrence for patients receiving the gemcitabine infusion. While more of those patients experienced moderate post-surgical pain, investigators found, they experienced no other additional side effects, such as bleeding, compared with the patients who received a saline infusion alone.

"The big deal here is that cancer recurrence is common for people diagnosed with this less aggressive form of bladder cancer," Messing said. "I know some patients who undergo four TURBT procedures a year. If we can cut down on these recurrences, we will save a lot of people a lot of pain, money, and time lost to recovery."

Provided by SWOG
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

New diagnoses for two types of skin cancer increased in recent years, according to a Mayo Clinic-led team of researchers.

Their paper, published today in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, uses medical records from the Rochester Epidemiology Project to compare diagnoses of basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinomaboth nonmelanoma skin cancersbetween 2000 and 2010 to diagnoses in prior years. The Rochester Epidemiology project is a medical records linkage system and research collaborative in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Age, sex lead to different diagnoses

The researchers report that, between 2000 and 2010, squamous cell carcinoma (also called cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma) diagnoses increased 263 percent, and basal cell carcinomas increased 145 percent. They compared the 2000-2010 period to two other segments of time: 1976-1984 and 1985-1992.

Women 30-49 experienced the greatest increase in basal cell carcinoma diagnoses; whereas, women 40-59 and 70-79 experienced the greatest increase in squamous cell carcinomas.

Men had an increase in squamous cell carcinomas between the first and second time period studied (1976-1984 and 1985-1992), but experienced a slight decline in the 2000-2010 period. However, for basal cell carcinomas, men over 29 showed similar increases in diagnoses in the 2000-2010 period then the two earlier periods.

Tanning: Beautifying or death-defying?

"We know that the sun and some artificial sunlight sources give off skin-damaging ultraviolet, or UV, rays," says Christian Baum, M.D., a Mayo Clinic dermatologist and the study's senior author. "This skin damage accumulates over time and can often lead to skin cancer."

"Despite the fact that sunscreens and cautionary information have been widely available for more than 50 years, we saw the emergence of tanning beds in the 1980s, and tanning - indoors or out - was a common activity for many years."

Although Dr. Baum notes that tanning has slowed, tanning beds still exist, and beaches will never be empty. But what people should remember is that the damage accumulates, he says, and "eventually those blistering sunburns of your youth and hot, reddened skin, and peeling shoulders of your adulthood can add up to one or more skin cancers."

The authors also reported that shifts in exposure to UV light may be the reason for a location shift in where the cancer tumors are found. In the earlier time periods, both basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas were diagnosed more often on the head and neck. But, in the most recent time period, the records showed that basal cell tumors on the torso increased, as did squamous cell carcinomas on the arms and legs.

Dr. Baum says that the risk of cancer should provide the ultimate argument for using sunscreen - every day, year-round on all exposed skin.

"Use sunscreen," says Dr. Baum. "This includes on your left arm for those who do a lot of driving. UV rays can penetrate car windows and exposed skineven when the sun isn't shining. UV rays bounce around under the clouds, off the snow, buildings, and more, causing damageeven on gray days.

More on the data

Using the Rochester Epidemiology Project medical records linkage system, the research team was able to identify nearly all of the Olmsted County, Minnesota, adult residents who received an initial diagnosis of the most common nonmelanoma skin cancersbasal or squamous cell carcinoma (or both), during the 2000-2010 period and the comparison years.

"There is no tumor registry for these types of cancer," says Dr. Baum, "So it is difficult to have accurate estimates of the national or worldwide impact of these cancers. However, because the Rochester Epidemiology Project contains health care information for virtually all residents of Olmsted County since 1966, it provides a good proxy for information on many global population health concerns."

More information: John G. Muzic et al. Incidence and Trends of Basal Cell Carcinoma and Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma, Mayo Clinic Proceedings (2017). Journal information: Mayo Clinic Proceedings John G. Muzic et al. Incidence and Trends of Basal Cell Carcinoma and Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.mayocp.2017.02.015
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has ruled himself out from the race for prime minister's chair in 2019. Opposition parties consider Nitish as a formidable leader who could challenge Narendra Modi in the next general elections.

By Sujeet Jha: The opposition parties are yet to decide on a Bihar-like grand alliance to deny the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Narendra Modi a second consecutive term and one of the prime 'would be' contenders for the PM's chair has already backed out.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has ruled himself out of the PM race in 2019. Speaking to reporters on the sideline of an event in Patna, Nitish said he has no interest in taking the top post.

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"I am not a fool...not in race for 2019 PM post. I was elected as party (JD-U) president as Sharadji (Yadav) couldn't continue on the post. But this was seen as my aspiration for a national role...which is wrong," he said.

"I thank people for considering me capable enough for it but let me make it clear once again I am not in the race," Nitish said.

ENDORSES SECOND TERM FOR PRANAB

Nitish Kumar also backed a second term for President Pranab Mukherjee. "It will be great if President Pranab Mukherjee is given a second term. I will support the move, but the final decision has to be taken by the Centre," he said.

President Pranab's term ends in July.

ON ALLEGATIONS OF SCAM ON LALU PRASAD'S FAMILY

When asked about recent allegations of scam linked to RJD chief Lalu Prasad's family, Nitish said both Lalu and his party have already responded to charges by BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi.

Nitish also sought to divert the issue, saying matters concerning company laws come under the Centre's purview. "There is an attempt to divert people's attention towards such issues. This is happening in a well planned manner," the Bihar chief minister said.

ON EVM CONTROVERSY

Nitish Kumar also rejected claims by parties like the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Mayawati's BSP that the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) could be tampered with to favour a particular party.

"I believe there is no issue with EVM but if questions are being raised...it would be good if they are answered comprehensively," he said.

WATCH: Dump Lalu, we'll support you: Sushil Modi's offer to Nitish

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--- ENDS ---
Credit: Shutterstock

More Indigenous children are going to hospital in NSW with serious burns than non-Indigenous children and they are less likely to be treated in a hospital in a paediatric burns unit, despite needing more intensive treatment and a longer stay.

A study led by the UNSW Centre for Big Data Research in Health and supported by researchers at The George Institute for Global Health investigated the differences in burn injuries in children, examining the cause of the injury, its location on the body, the total body surface affected (% TBSA), burn depth and length of hospital stay.

The proportion of Indigenous children with burns who presented with injuries affecting more than 10% TBSA was greater and the hospital stay was usually almost three days longer than non-Indigenous children.

A smaller proportion of Indigenous children with burns were treated in a hospital with a paediatric tertiary burns unit, fitting with previous studies that have shown Indigenous Australians experience inequities in access to medical services.

The first author on the paper published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, Holger Moller, says the higher proportion of Indigenous children presenting with burns affecting more than 10% TBSA is of particular concern.

"Burns can be among the most devastating of child injuries and can result in long-term physical and psychological impairment thus affecting the child's development and future life," he said.

"We could not assess the longer term outcomes of burn injury in this study and to date little is known about the long term outcomes, the post-discharge care, and the impact of care on functional outcomes in Aboriginal children."

Scalds were the leading cause of burn injury to both Indigenous (47%) and non-Indigenous children (62%). There was a higher proportion of flame burns in Indigenous children, which may be partially explained by the higher number of Indigenous children living in rural and remote areas where there are more outdoor fires.

The study involved population-based cohort analysis of linked hospital and mortality data for 20002014, with 35,749 Indigenous and 1,088,938 non-Indigenous children aged under 13 years as participants.

The study was done with researchers from Neuroscience Research Australia, Australian National University, The George Institute for Global Health, Flinders University and the University of Wollongong.

Study author, Professor Rebecca Ivers, director of the Injury Division at The George Institute, is currently exploring the care of Aboriginal children with burns through a cohort study in Queensland, NSW, South Australia and the Northern Territory.

The study is following children for at least two years post-burn in order to understand the impact and cost of burns. A roundtable is being planned for 2018 to develop a new model of care. The study utilises Indigenous research methodologies and three Aboriginal PhD students are working on the study.

"The study builds on previous understanding about burns in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children but rather than just measuring inequality, will result in a new transformative model of care that meets the needs of patients and caregivers," Professor Ivers said.

More information: Holger Moller et al. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian children hospitalised for burn injuries: a population data linkage study, The Medical Journal of Australia (2017). Journal information: Medical Journal of Australia Holger Moller et al. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian children hospitalised for burn injuries: a population data linkage study,(2017). DOI: 10.5694/mja16.00213
Mastercard has joined forces with Verifone and Global Payments to make consumer checkouts faster, thanks to the companys M/Chip Fast technology.

M/Chip Fast prioritises the parts of a transaction critical to security to speed up checkout times.

Verifone will build the M/Chip Fast technology into its point-of-sales products deployed in the US.

These products are used by most of the top retailers and will help drive greater adoption of faster EMV technology.

EMV is a technical standard for smart payment cards and payment terminals, and ATMs that can accept it.

Global Payments will make the EMV technology available to merchants in the fast food, grocery, transit, and other retail environments.

Now read: OneBit debit card allows you to pay with Bitcoin and Ether
Vodacom has announced a plan to acquire a stake in Kenyas Safaricom, held by Vodafone.

Vodacom will fund the R34.6-billion acquisition of a 34.94% stake in Safaricom by issuing 226.8 million new ordinary shares.

The transaction is set to enhance Vodacom as a leading African mobile communication company, with operations in South Africa, Lesotho, Tanzania, the DRC, Mozambique, and now Kenya.

Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said they are also interested in acquiring Vodafone Ghana, should the price be right.

While the Safaricom transaction will strengthen Vodacoms operations and diversify its revenue, it is a curious transaction  as Vodacom will buy the shares from its biggest shareholder, Vodafone.

Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said in April that they want to consolidate their sub-Saharan operations into a single entity as part of its single, coordinated Africa strategy.

Colao told Business Day that the Vodafone group was looking at improving the cohesion of different operations.

While this may explain the transaction, market speculation suggests the consolidation may be linked to Vodafone plans to offload several of its African operations.

It will be easier for Vodafone to offload its sub-Saharan operations into a single entity  Vodacom  than to sell these operations individually.

Vodacom and Vodafone were asked for comment regarding the potential consolidation plans, but the companies did not respond by the time of publication.

Update  Vodafone Comment

A Vodafone spokesperson has denied speculation that the company is looking to offload its African operations.

We are not looking to offload our African operations. Africa is one of our core operating regions, said Vodafone.
Huawei recently announced a new premium warranty which comes with its new flagship Android smartphones, the Huawei P10 and P10 Plus.

Called Huawei Diamond Service, the warranty includes two free screen damage repairs over the 24 months of a cellphone contract.

It also includes free collection and a dedicated VIP call centre.

While it is certainly an attractive smartphone warranty for South Africans, Huawei Diamond Service is technically a downgrade.

Huawei Select vs Samsung ADH Premium

Previously, Huaweis flagship smartphones included Huawei Select, a warranty which featured free repairs for liquid damage along with the screen damage repairs.

This is not the first time weve seen premium warranties on smartphones covering less with the launch of a new flagship device.

Samsung offered a similar warranty called ADH Premium on the Galaxy S4, Note 3, and Galaxy S5.

However, from the Galaxy Note 4 onward, it reduced the scope of its ADH warranty to the first 12 months and only covered a single accidental screen damage repair.

With the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8, ADH has been canned, and only devices already on the plan will continue to benefit from it. Samsungs new smartphones now come with Samsung Mobile Care.

Samsung Mobile Care vs iCare Plus

Samsung Mobile Care is effectively an insurance product which covers your phones screen against accidental damage.

At R1,299 once-off for two years of cover, it is priced similarly to Apples iCare Plus service.

However, Samsung Mobile Care offers two screen damage repairs over the period of cover, while iCare Plus only offers one.

Samsung also offers the Care service for a monthly fee of R69.99.

The plan also requires a service fee of R1,000 for a repair when you take your phone in.

It took four years for Samsung ADH to completely collapse in South Africa and be replaced by the new service.

Huawei Select would have been entering its third year with the P10 and P10 Plus, and one cant help but wonder whether the downgrade to Huawei Diamond Service is the beginning of a trend we saw with Samsungs premium warranty.
Poland and Slovakia will increase defense spending

Audi presents new crossovers Q8 e-tron

Benny Gantz: Israel has an opportunity to strike Iran's nuclear facilities

Samvel Babayan: Russia will withdraw peacekeepers from Nagorno-Karabakh

Hungarian government sets price ceiling on eggs and potatoes

Benny Gantz: Israel does not have the production capacity to supply Ukraine with air defense systems

Germany must adopt energy-saving measures in face of skyrocketing inflation

Beglaryan: Azerbaijan continues and will continue its policy of genocide and hatred against the Armenian people

Kiev believes it is too early to talk about withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson

Raisi: Relations between Tehran and Moscow have a bright future

Taliban virtue representative kills minor for refusing to marry

Meeting held at Ministry of Defense

Kaljurand: A fair peace agreement, that will guarantee the rights and security of the Nagorno-Karabakh people, is needed

ATMs closed at night in Germany because of increasing number of break-ins

Moldova to request 450 million from EU amid fears of stopping Russian gas supplies

Kazakhstan plans to make knowledge of Kazakh obligatory for obtaining citizenship

Vladimir Putin to visit Armenia

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Macron: France ends its military mission in Africa

Military forces of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey take part in Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline protection exercise

Shoigu orders withdrawal of troops across Dnieper River

Swedish parliament will vote to change constitution for NATO membership on November 16

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'Armenia' bloc: Authorities going to peace at any cost legitimize change of power

Dollar falls, euro rises in Armenia

FT: Taiwan plans to establish drone production, allocated $1.6 billion

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Tesla recalls 40,000 electric cars because of problems with power steering

Sky News: Russia handed over Javelin, NLAW and Stinger missiles to Iran in exchange for drones

Russia has record number of Armenia migrants outflow

Stoltenberg says NATO summit will be held in Vilnius on July 11-12, 2023

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Europe fills its gas storage facilities almost 100% before cold season

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By Press Trust of India: New Delhi, May 15 (PTI) Home Minister Rajnath Singh today described India as one of the most disaster-prone nations, saying more than 50 per cent population of the country lives in areas that are vulnerable to calamities.

Singh said the National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction has been set up by the government to finalise a national strategy to deal with all kinds of disasters in coordination with state governments and other stakeholders.

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"India is one of the most disaster-prone nations in the world. More than 50 per cent population in the country lives in areas which are prone to earthquakes, floods, cyclones, droughts and tsunami," he said while inaugurating a meeting organised by the National Disaster Management Authority.

The meeting was attended by ministers from state governments, officials of the state disaster management authorities, top civil and police officials dealing with various disasters and representatives of non-government organisations.

Singh said the national platform was set up so that it can work effectively for disaster risk mitigation along with various stakeholders.

The home minister said India has learnt lessons from the 1999 super cyclone in Odisha where 10,000 people had lost their lives, the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat and the 2004 tsunami and brought a paradigm change in its approach towards disaster risk mitigation.

"We have been working in a planned manner for disaster risk mitigation that include adopting the Disaster Management Act in 2005, disaster management policy in 2009, raising national disaster response force besides others," he said.

Singh highlighted the governments efforts in setting up the early warning system for disasters, cyclone shelters, saline embankments, disaster response force in central and state levels, community preparedness and capacity building.

The home minister said India has become the first country to prepare a livestock disaster management plan for the safety of livestock during a disaster.

Singh also said India has taken a number of steps for enhancing cooperation with South Asian countries in disaster risk mitigation besides improving ties with BRICS, BIMSTEC and East Asian nations.

He also asked the participants to prepare a special action plan for vulnerable communities.

In his address, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said India could not afford to ignore preparing for disasters as it was one of the most disaster-prone nations.

"We are bound to face disasters, not only natural but man-made too. If we can prepare for the disasters properly, we can have a safe and secured society," he said.

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Rijiju also said India has been taking the lead role in the entire efforts of disaster risk mitigation, especially in South Asia.

In the meeting, the NDMA released the main features of the national database for emergency management. They are disaster dashboard, incident reporting, data visualisation, decision support tools, interaction tools, resource management, India disaster resource network database, mobile apps and data inventory. PTI ACB AAR

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Speaker of the Armenian National Assembly (NA) Hermine Naghdalyan, who is also the PACE Vice President the head of the Armenian delegation to PACE, on Monday attended the session of the PACE Monitoring Committee Sub-committee on Frozen Conflicts held in Helsinki, Finland.

The session agenda related to the 2017 Working Plan and methods, including, among other conflicts, the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, conducting of a fact-finding mission there, etc.

Naghdalyan told the committee members that it is inappropriate to refer to the Nagorno-Karabakh issue during this fragile period, since this can have a negative impact on the mediation process, resulting in unprecedented developments.

Such a method of work of the sub-committee is inefficient and fraught with negative consequences, she said, recalling those present Point 7 of the PACE Charter on the activity of the Sub-committee on Frozen Conflicts, under which the sub-committee can carry out actions specifically pertaining to a conflict only when it has received the agreement of the member-states.

As a result of the discussion, the Armenian delegation managed to make certain changes in the agenda. The committee thus decided to return to the agreement reached earlier, that is, the sub-committee should, guided by the stipulated terms of reference and in accordance with the prescribed working procedure, discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh issue in late 2017, after prior agreement with co-rapporteurs.

The session of the PACE Monitoring Committee session also took place on Monday. During it, Vice President of the Monitoring Committee Naghdalyan chaired the discussion of issues related to Estonia and Ireland.
By Press Trust of India: on vaccination

New Delhi, May 15 (PTI) Ignorance and fear of adverse effects are among the main reasons why parents dont get their children vaccinated under the governments immunisation programme.

A monitoring exercise from April 2016 to January 2017, which covered over one lakh children below the age of two years who missed out on vaccination, revealed that one-third of them could not get vaccinated because their parents did not consider it important.

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"In some cases parents were not aware of the place where the vaccination was being carried out while in some instances they were busy with some other work.

"Also, when a child is born, parents are given an immunisation card to keep track of the vaccines. In some cases, they claimed to have lost or misplaced the cards," said Dr Pradeep Haldar, Deputy Commissioner (immunisation) in the Ministry of Health.

Haldar said some even perceive vaccination as interference by the government into what they believe should be a personal choice, indicating that they do not understand its value.

Another one-third did not receive vaccination as their families feared adverse effects like fever, irritability, soreness and swelling at the injection point.

"All these side effects are minor and subside within a couple of days," the official said.

As per the report, 14 per cent of the children missed out as they were not in their village the day the exercise was carried out while in the case of another five per cent, the parents simply refused to get their child vaccinated.

Ten per cent were not vaccinated due to a gap in the programme, which means the session was not carried out on the scheduled date due to non-availability of vaccines or human resources.

"We estimate that around 30 per cent children miss the benefits of full immunisation every year. That means an estimated 89 lakh children across the country either get only a few vaccines or no vaccines at all.

"One out of every three children in India does not receive all vaccines that are available under the routine immunisation," Haldar said.

Annually, about 12 lakh children die before they attain the age of five.

Despite several interventions to strengthen routine immunisation since 1978, estimates show that in 2014, only 65 per cent of the children received all vaccines, available free of cost under the universal immunisation programme, during their first years of life.

The government launched Mission Indradhanush in December 2014, which aims to cover all those children by 2020 who are either unvaccinated, or are partially vaccinated against eleven vaccine-preventable diseases which include diphtheria, tuberculosis, tetanus, polio, measles and hepatitis B.

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During the first three phases, 28.7 lakh immunisation sessions were held in which more than 2.1 crore children were reached out to and 55 lakh of them were fully immunised. PTI PLB BSA

--- ENDS ---
President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who is on an official visit to Qatar, on Monday met with the representatives of the Armenian community of the state.

The Armenian President delivered a welcome speech. Noting that he is happy to have an opportunity to meet with the newly-formed, small but strong Armenian community representatives, Sargsyan welcomed the fact that living and creating in Qatar, the Armenian community contributes to the development of that country, trying to maintain the Armenian identity and spirit. In this respect, President Sargsyan attached importance to the role of the one-day Mesropian college.

According to him, in such conditions the existence and prosperity of the Armenian communities gains a new value in the Gulf Arab countries. Sargsyan expressed conviction that that there is an unrealized potential in the Armenian-Qatari bilateral relations, and it is thus necessary to exert efforts with the support of the local Armenian community in order to give new content to them.

In his speech, the President also referred to the process of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement, briefing the participants on the stance and the currently existing concerns of the Armenian side. Today I openly state that valuing the cost of peace, we will never be afraid to become a single fist and being the master of the just demand of the Artsakh Armenians, as we did a quarter century ago and last April, Sargsyan stressed.

Furthermore, he touched on the international recognition process of the Armenian Genocide, as well as the events taking place in Armenia.

I am sure that you are all following the events taking place in Armenia, getting excited about each of our achievement and getting upset over our failures. And today, I think, you are all proud of the fact that the reforms carried out in our country for a long time yielded their long-awaited results. Here I, of course, mean the recent parliamentary election, which received the positive assessment of all the international institutions. But this is not a full stop, nothing of a kind. As I have repeatedly stated, this is a new beginning, which is more obliging. We will set ourselves to implementing reforms in our country with new enthusiasm, relying on your potential, knowledge and talent in this process, since we pursue the same goalto have a powerful and stable Armenia. As in all the stages of history, unity currently remains the guarantee for the longevity and development of the Armenian people.

Therefore, lets put all our efforts, power and enthusiasm, capacities and talent into the development and strengthening of the Armenian state, not only remaining Armenian and bringing up the coming generation as Armenians, not only by carrying out pro-Armenian activity devoted to our nation, but also through initiating economic projects and implementing daily programs, even if they are small.

Let us together level the path of the eternity of the Armenian people, President Sargsyan said.
Cast R Way: Experience a cruising adventure to a hidden gem in Phuket.

Dedicated to Making Business Travel Business Unusual, Renaissance Hotels Will Host 160 Events in 35 Countries That Spotlight Local & Unusual Businesses in Celebration of its Sixth Annual Global Day of Discovery.

WHO: Renaissance Phuket Resort & Spa in collaboration with Andaman Passion

WHAT: Renaissance Hotels, the global lifestyle brand known for bringing its Business Unusual mantra to todays travelers, will host its sixth annual Global Day of Discovery on May 17 at 160 hotels around the world. Created to encourage business travelers to experience 5 to 9 with as much vigor as they approach their 9 to 5, Global Day of Discovery will host unexpected hotel events and neighborhood experiences that bring an unusual taste of the local scene to life in more than 35 countries around the world.

Renaissance Phuket Resort & Spa will celebrate Global Day of Discovery with a half day boat tour featuring cocktails and live music from local band.

WHEN: Wednesday, May 17, 2017 (3 pm)

WHERE: Renaissance Phuket Resort & Spa 555, Moo 3, Mai Khao, Talang Phuket, 83110 Tel. +66-76-363-999

SOCIAL MEDIA: Join the conversation with #renhotels and #businessunusual across all channels. Follow us on Twitter @renhotels.

Like us on Instagram www.instagram/RenHotels.

Follow us on YouTube www.youtube.com/RenHotels.

Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/RenHotels.

CONTACT: Peachanan Juanpanich E: peachanan.j@renaissancehotels.com M: +66918755675
Celebrated wine expert conducts two days of blind tastings to identify the best of the best pinks in two price categories.

Following the successful inauguration of the Best Rose for Thailand contest in 2016, leading luxury resort THE NAI HARN once again partnered with international wine expert James Suckling this year to sniff out the pinnacle of the pinks.

In the second edition of the Kingdoms only wine competition to focus on premier Rose, Mr Suckling conducted a series of blind tastings on 11,12 May scoring each wine from am extensive entry list of varied wines put forward by a strong line-up of leading wine suppliers to Thailand.

After the intensive tasting sessions, and with help form his son and protege Jack Suckling, James selected 12 wines for this years awards. The winning wines were announced during a glamorous awards party on 12 May at The Nai Harns al fresco Reflections lounge, where guests were invited to sample all the roses in the competition accompanied by tasty bites served from live cooking station and framed by the stunning backdrop of Phukets picture perfect Nai Harn bay.

A total of 80 rose wines entered this years contest, including labels from France, Italy, Chile, Spain, and Australia, as well as some top homegrown Thai vintage. The submitted roses were separated into two categories based on wholesale price  those below THB 800 (USD 23), and those above. Based on these categories, James Suckling selected the the Top 10 Roses for Thailand judging the wines or their quality and value for money. Friends the list, he also selected his Best Affordable Rose, and the Best Rose in Show.

The overall Best Rose award went to Chateau dEsclans Cotes de Provence Garrus Rose 2014, imported to Thailand through BB&B, which James scored an impressive 96 points. In the Best Value Rose category, the winner was Chateau Routas Coteaux Varois en Provence Rose 2016, imported by Italasia, which was given 93 points and also claimed the number one spot in the Top 10 Roses for Thailand list based on quality and price.

During the presentation ceremony, Mr. Suckling noted that Thailand produced roses made a strong impression led by the GranMonte Syrah Asoke Valley Sakuna Rose 2016 which made came eighth overall.

We are delighted to return to THE NAI HARN to judge the excellent wines entered for this unique contest. Although the roses from Provence are still the best in the world, its impressive indeed to find a Thai produced wine in the Top 10 once again this year, an achievement thats thoroughly deserved, Mr. Suckling said. Roses are best enjoyed in warm climates with light, flavourful cuisine and Phuket offers both of these essential ingredients in abundance, he added.

Following the competition, the Top 10 rose wines will be featured as part of the exclusive Cellar by JamesSuckling.com at THE NAI HARN, a curated selection of wines available exclusively at Reflections, Cosmo and Rock Salt restaurant.

THE NAI HARN was also the first resort on Phuket to offer Frose (Frozen Rose), an iced wine cocktail inspired by summer vacation trends to the south of Europe. The resorts unique Frose is made with Italian rose wine (Terre Di Talamo Toscana PIANO PIANO Rosato 2015, rated 91/100 by James Suckling), and features fresh strawberries, vodka and grenadine.

Rose wines are a perfect complement to Phukets tropical climate and we are honoured to have the opportunity to partner with the worlds foremost wine expert to highlight the best pinks in the market, also to ensure our guests enjoy the finest wining and dining while staying with us, said Frank Grassmann, General Manager of THE NAI HARN. Our partnership with James Suckling underlines our commitment to offer the very best international cuisine and drinks, not only in Phuket, but also in Thailand, added Mr Grassmann.

Best Rose for Thailand 2017 by James Suckling & THE NAI HARN Phuket

1. Chateau Routas Coteaux Varois en Provence Rose 2016 (Best Value Rose )

Italasia. Points: 93.

2. Mastroberardino Irpinia Lacrimarosa Rosato 2016

Italasia. Points: 92

3. Chateau dEsclans Cotes de Provence Garrus Rose 2014 (Best )

BB&B. Points: 96

4. Marques de Caceres Rioja Rose 2014

IWS. Points: 91

5. Domaine Houchart Cotes de Provence Rose 2015

Wine & Taste  Gfour, Points: 91

6. Gerard Bertrand Pays dOc Gris Blanc Rose 2015

BB&B. Points: 91

7. Chateau Cavalier Cotes de Provence Cuvee Marafiance Rose 2016

Siam Winery. Points: 91

8. GranMonte Syrah Asoke Valley Sakuna Rose 2016

Wine & Taste  Gfour. Points: 91

9. Les Maitres Vignerons de la Presquile de Saint-Tropez Cotes de Provence Cep dOr Rose 2015. Wine Connection. Points: 91

10. Roubine Cotes de Provence La Vie En Rose 2016

Wine & Taste  Gfour. Points: 91
An octopus using a nut shell and clam shell as shelter. Credit: Nick Hobgood/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Humans set themselves apart from other animals in a number of ways, including our ability to make tools. When the anthropologist Jane Goodall discovered that wild chimpanzees frequently make and use tools, her advisor Louis Leakey famously quipped that "now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans".

Numerous other species have joined chimpanzees in knocking humans off their pedestal. Boxer crabs use stinging anemones as defensive weapons. American alligators place sticks on top of their snouts to catch egrets during their nesting season, when sticks become a valuable resource. Parrots frequently use a variety of objects to scratch themselves. A jay and a crow have once been observed to use sticks as weapons to jab at each other. Elephant bulls sometimes throw young elephants at fences to create a passage.

The list goes on, and continues to grow with new research. For example, we recently discovered that New Caledonian crows use tools to transport objects and that greater vasa parrots use pebbles to grind calcium powder from seashells for ingestion.

Despite the large variation in which species use tools and how, this behaviour still has special significance. New reports of tool use in animals often feature words such as "intelligent", "smart" or "clever". But is this really the case or is it time to abandon tool use as a measure of intelligence?

Termites build extraordinary structures that perfectly fit their needs. Their mounds have chambers that suit specific functions, connecting tunnels that allow large crowds to pass in both directions, and air flow that keeps the nest cool during the day and warm during the night. Designing such structures out of simple materials proves difficult even for human architects, yet it appears effortless for the tiny-brained termite. This is because building behaviour in termites is genetically encoded and often follows a fixed set of rules.

Chimpanzees sophisticated tool use.

The same line of reasoning can apply to tool use. Simple rules and processes can lead to complex behaviours. Egyptian vultures can't break ostrich eggs with their beaks, so they throw stones at the eggs to crack them. Young birds are not picky in what tools they use  they also try small stones, soft wood and even dung. They quickly learn what works and what doesn't, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the animal understands the physical properties of objects simply because it can successfully use them as tools.

Humans don't always reason about their tool use either. Or have you often thought about how a ballpoint pen actually works?

Flexibility is key

Finding a single measure of intelligence for species as different as fish and elephants is extremely difficult. But one place to start is by looking at how flexibly animals can solve problems or, in other words, if they can learn more general rules and use these to solve new problems. For example, if an animal usually uses a stone to crack open a nut but there are no stones around, will they choose another heavy, hard object to crack open the nut? This would suggest a more abstract understanding about the type of object needed.

In the case of the Egyptian vulture and many other species, tool use occurs in one very specific context and is relatively inflexible. On the other hand, some species use a range of different tools to solve different problems. Chimpanzees, for example, have a broad toolkit: they use stones to crack nuts, leaf stems to fish for termites, stick tools to probe for honey and leaves to soak up water for drinking.

Rooks are good problem solvers despite not normally using tools. Credit: John Haslam/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Similarly, New Caledonian crows make and use several different tools from different materials to probe for insects, and also use tools to explore new and potentially threatening objects.

This type of flexible tool use may allow individuals to innovate new and creative solutions to difficult problems. But even so, tool-using species aren't necessarily better at solving problems than species that don't use tools.

Not surprisingly, New Caledonian crows excel in experiments that require them to use tools. What is surprising, however, is the performance of their close relatives that are not natural tool users. For example, researchers have shown that rooks, which do not habitually use tools in the wild, can select tools of an appropriate size and even bend a piece of wire into a hook to retrieve food in experiments when there's a reward at stake  their problem-solving skills help them work out how to use tools. In the same way, tool-using finches and apes are not necessarily better at problem-solving tasks, whether they involve tools or not, than species of finches and apes which do not typically use tools in the wild.

In addition to using problem-solving tasks, scientists can also compare species by calculating innovation rates, or how often members of different species adapt to new challenges. For example, blue tits invented a creative way to get food by pecking open the caps of milk bottles left on porches  a behaviour which spread quickly across the population.

With continued research on animal behaviour, scientists are constantly forced to reconsider what makes humans unique. Animals continue to surprise us, leading one researcher to ask: are we even smart enough to know how smart animals are?

Humans are clearly not the only animals to use tools for a wide variety of purposes. And while tool use may not always reflect the spark of a bright mind, it still provides a fascinating glimpse into how different species interact with their environments. Case in point: wild chimpanzees use leafy sponges to obtain fermenting sap from palms. Tools to tipple  another sign of intelligence?

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The pilot came out from the cockpit mid-flight and proposed to his ladylove at 35,000 feet above the ground.

By India Today Web Desk: True love has no boundaries, we all know it.

Well, in this particular scenario, there were no boundaries quite literally and sky was the only limit.

A pilot of Volaris Airlines proposed to his girlfriend mid-air who was working as a cabin crew during the flight. In the video, the pilot comes to the cabin and makes an announcement calling her out infront of the passengers.

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Also read: 21-year-old girl becomes India's youngest pilot, plans to fly Russia's MIG-29

He then proposed his ladylove making an official announcent during the flight.

Also read: Pakistan International Airlines pilot asks crew to leave cockpit, invites Chinese passenger instead

Here's the heart-warming video of the couple:

--- ENDS ---
An artist's rendering of an X-ray pulsar. Credit: NASA

European astronomers have found that an X-ray pulsar designated AX J1910.7+0917 has the slowest spin period among other objects in this class. The research team, led by Lara Sidoli of the National Institute for Astrophysics and Space Physics (INAF) in Milan, Italy, presented the new findings in a paper published May 4 on arXiv.org.

X-ray pulsars (also known as accretion-powered pulsars) are sources displaying strict periodic variations in X-ray intensity, consisting of a magnetized neutron star in orbit with a normal stellar companion. In these binary systems, the X-ray emission is powered by the release of gravitational potential energy as material is accreted from a massive companion. X-ray pulsars are among the most luminous objects in the X-ray sky.

AX J1910.7+0917 was detected by Japan's Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA) in 2001 as part of the ASCA Galactic Plane Survey (AGPS). It was initially classified as a relatively faint and poorly known X-ray source. Due to the fact that this source lies at a projected distance of about 12 from the supernova remnant W49, it was the target of many observations. Pulsations from this source were discovered in 2011 during observations conducted with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Recently, Sidoli's team has thoroughly analyzed the available data provided by the observations of AX J1910.7+0917 with ASCA, Chandra and ESA's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton) spacecraft. The study revealed more details about this high mass X-ray pulsar.

"Pulsations from the high mass X-ray binary AX J1910.7+0917 were discovered during Chandra observations performed in 2011 (Israel et al. 2016). We report here more details on this discovery and discuss the source nature," the researchers wrote in the paper.

The scientists found that the spin period of the X-ray signal is 36,200 seconds, with a pulsed fraction of 63 percent. Such a long period makes it the slowest X-ray pulsar known so far.

"This discovery makes AX J1910.7+0917 the pulsar with the slowest spin period," the paper reads.

The researchers assigned this long periodicity to the rotation of the pulsar's neutron star. They assume that a very long neutron star spin period can be explained within a quasi-spherical settling accretion model, that applies to low luminosity, wind-fed, X-ray pulsars.

"A quasi-spherical settling accretion model (Shakura et al. 2012) is able to explain this superslow pulsation, even adopting a typical neutron star surface magnetic field of about 1012," the authors wrote.

However, this hypothesis cannot be confirmed until other source parameters like orbital period and the velocity of the wind outflowing from the massive donor, are measured. Moreover, the team calls for future sensitive spectroscopy observations above 10 keV, which will be needed in order to detect cyclotron resonant scattering features and obtain a direct measurement of the neutron star's magnetic field.

More information: AX J1910.7+0917: the slowest X-ray pulsar, arXiv:1705.01791 [astro-ph.HE] arxiv.org/abs/1705.01791

 2017 Phys.org
The 'Wannacry' ransomware attack

Questions are swirling over who is responsible for the security flaws exploited by hackers in the world's biggest ransomware attack to date, which crippled thousands of businesses and public organizations around the world. Here are some answers:

Who bears the blame?

Because hackers exploited a security hole in some Windows versions discovered by the National Security Agency, Microsoft says the intelligence agency bears some responsibility.

"This attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem," Microsoft president and general counsel Brad Smith said in a weekend blog post.

Steven Weber, faculty director at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, said "the fault is pretty distributedthere are plenty of people to blame."

Weber said the NSA's primary mission is intelligence: "If I were sitting at the NSA I would push that argument right back to Microsoft," he argued. "They would say, 'It's our job to stockpile those weapons and use them against our adversaries.'"

Other factors were the large number of old, outdated software programs in use and often ineffective security systems.

Cornell University computer scientist Stephen Wicker blamed "profound ethical lapses" both on the part of the US government and the computing public.

The flaws "were known to the NSA and CIA, but were kept secret by those organizations to be exploited for their own data collection purposes," Wicker said.

But he added that a large number of businesses and other users failed to install a patch issued by Microsoft in March, and also share the blame for spreading the malware.

President Donald Trump's homeland security advisor Tom Bossert dismissed the idea that the US is to blame.

"This was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data," Bossert told reporters.

"This was a vulnerability exploit as one part of a much larger tool that was put together by the culpable parties and not by the US government."

How did hackers get this tool?

Microsoft effectively confirmed analysts' diagnosis that the ransomware known as "WannaCry" was designed to exploit NSA software that was leaked earlier this year by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers.

President Vladimir Putin has said Russiawhich has been accused of cyber meddling in several countrieshad nothing to do with the massive cyberattack, and criticized the US intelligence community for creating the original software.

But Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer for IBM Resilient Systems, has suggested that a state-sponsored actor, most likely Russia, was probably responsible for the initial hack of the NSA.

"Whoever got this information years before and is leaking it now has to be capable of hacking the NSA and/or the CIA, and willing to publish it all," Schneier said in a recent blog post.

"The list of countries who fit both criteria is small: Russia, China, and... and... and I'm out of ideas."

James Lewis, a cybersecurity specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he believes the exposure of the flaw likely "leads back to Moscow"but that the hackers who designed the malware are probably not Russian.

"One of the rules in Russia is that Russian criminals are not allowed to hack Russian targets," Lewis said. "This does not fit the pattern of Russian-sponsored activity."

"The cybercrime market is really innovative," he added, "and they are quick to take advantage of vulnerabilities."

What about computer security at large?

The attacks came a day after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for improved cybersecurity in the federal government and better cooperation with the private sector.

But few see this or any single initiative as a silver bullet.

Weber said the attacks show the risks of an overreliance on computerized systems that are not fully secure.

"We have built an increasingly digital society on a very insecure foundation and we are starting to see the consequences of that," he said.

Weber warned there is no single entity capable of fixing this problem in the near future, since security depends on so many factors.

"If you want to look for an upside, it would be this would be a wakeup call," to improve computer security, he said.

At the same time, Weber noted that the attack could prompt more people to shun digital technology and turn back to analog systems that can't be hacked.

Weber said there are already some signs that the public is losing confidence in the digital world as a result of security problems.

"For Silicon Valley and technology companies, their future depends on these underlying systems working," he said.

 2017 AFP
Researchers at Bielefeld have confirmed that blue tits, particularly when young, can recognize their kin through smell and modify their behaviour accordingly. Credit: Bielefeld University/Oliver Kruger

Nestling blue tits can discriminate between the smell of other nestlings and adapt their begging behaviour accordingly. This is the outcome of the latest study by Dr. Barbara Caspers and Dr. Peter Korsten from Bielefeld University to be published today on the 12th of May in the journal Functional Ecology. The behavioural biologist Caspers is currently studying odour discrimination in various animals.

In this subproject, Dr. Barbara Caspers and Dr. Peter Korsten from Bielefeld University and Marta Rossi from the University of Sussex in Brighton (Great Britain) examined the begging behaviour of seven-day-old blue tit nestlings from a population near the Dutch city of Groningen. 'Blue tit nestlings beg to obtain food from their parents and may have to compete with as many as 10 peers in the nest that are not all necessarily full siblings,' explains Dr. Peter Korsten. In earlier studies of other songbirds, it was found that this competition intensifies when nestlings are competing with non-kin. In such cases, nestlings beg even more intensively for food.

In the present study, the research team presented nestlings of blue tits with two different smells: familiar smells of siblings from their own nest, and unfamiliar smells of unrelated nestlings from another nest. In both experimental situations, the biologists then measured how much the nestlings begged. Results showed that blue tit nestlings beg longer and more intensely after being exposed to the smell of the unfamiliar nestlings compared to the familiar smell of their own nest mates. 'Up to now, we did not know how songbird nestlings were able to discriminate between the smell of close kin and less-related individuals when competing for food from their parents. Our study shows that they may well smell this difference,' says Caspers.

Science had long assumed that birds cannot smell at all. Behavioural researchers together with Dr. Barbara Caspers at Bielefeld University, have already been able to disprove this in earlier studies on zebra finches.

Dr. Peter Korsten is studying mate choice and family life particularly in blue tits. Credit: Sander van der Werf

More information: Marta Rossi et al. Begging blue tit nestlings discriminate between the odour of familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics, Functional Ecology (2017). DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12886 Journal information: Functional Ecology
The Information Age has drastically changed the landscape of one of humanity's most creative processes, idea generation or ideation. The emergence of crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, has enabled a greater, more diverse audience to contribute to the creative process from the comfort of their own homes.

"However, the very nature of crowdsourcing means that ideators can be overwhelmed by the number of ideas generated, rather than inspired by them," says Victor Girotto, a PhD candidate at the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. "There are several issues that need to be considered in systems that operate at this scale, such as the organization of the ideas, as well as the subsequent convergence on the best ones," adds Erin Walker, an assistant professor at the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University.

In an effort to enhance idea generation within the crowd context, Girotto and Walker partnered with Winslow Burleson, an associate professor at NYU's Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Together, the trio sought to determine what effect peripheral taskssuch as rating and combining others' ideas had on ideation performance.

"Embedding peripheral micro-tasks within the ideation process may enable such systems to move from passive to active forms of inspiration and support, resulting in a stronger ideation session," said Burleson.

Through a series of four experiments on Mechanical Turk, the group tested their hypothesis, utilizing an online module of their own design. Each experiment had a control, an exposure group, and multiple task groups. In every study, where each group was given the same problem for which they were to contribute ideas. The control group only received the problem prompt. Members of the exposure group were given access to an inspiration panel, where they could prompt the system to display others' ideas. Task groups were given access to the inspiration panel, however, subjects were required perform microtasks on the inspirations: rating, comparing, or combining others' ideas.

"To determine what, if any, impact these microtasks had on ideation we measured the number of ideas generated by each user as well as the breadth and depth of their ideas," said Girotto. Breadth is a measure of the number of concepts an ideator explored, whereas depth is the number of ideas within an ideator's most explored concept. Furthermore, the researchers measured the number of inspirations each user requested, as well as inspiration influencea user's average similarity between an idea and the most similar of its preceding inspirations.

"Through our trials we found the performance of the microtask groups to be as good or better than the exposure groups in terms of the breadth of the ideas they generated," said Burleson. However, the team found these effects to depend on two factors: time of ideation and productivity of the ideator. For time of ideation, they found greater effects on the second half of the ideation session, when ideators are more likely to be running out of ideas, and thus may receive greater benefits from inspirations. As for their productivity, it makes sense that those who generated more ideas would also be more affected by the different inspiration types, as they may be more willing and capable to use them effectively.

"Our research provides some support and guidance in explicitly embedding microtasks into ideation, which will not only be aiding ideators in their idea generation, but will also be generating information useful for converging on the best ideas." said Girotto. The full findings of this research are detailed in "The Effect of Peripheral Micro-tasks on Crowd Ideation."
Scanning electron micrograph of the bladder of Utricularia gibba, the humped bladderwort plant (color added). The plant is a voracious carnivore, with its tiny, 1-millimeter-long bladders leveraging vacuum pressure to suck in tiny prey at great speed. Credit: Enrique Ibarra-Laclette, Claudia Anahi Perez-Torres and Paulina Lozano-Sotomayor.

The carnivorous humped bladderwort plant is a sophisticated predator. Living in swamps and ponds, it uses vacuum pressure to suck prey into tiny traps at breathtaking speeds of under a millisecond.

A new genomic analysis shows just how valuable this carnivorous lifestyle has been to the plant throughout its evolutionary history.Over millions of years, the species, Utricularia gibba, repeatedly retained and enhanced genetic material associated with its carnivorous naturedespite tremendous evolutionary pressure to delete DNA, the research finds.

The biological treasures that were nurtured include genes that facilitate the trapping of prey, the digestion of proteins, and the transport of small bits of protein (derived from the bladderwort's victims) from one cell to another.

"What's exciting is that we didn't go in and cherry pick these genes," says Victor Albert, PhD, professor of biological sciences in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences. "We used bioinformatics to identify genes that were preserved and enriched in the species, and when we did that, these genes related to a carnivorous lifestyle were the ones that stood out. They were screaming out at us, telling us to look at them."

"Through careful analysis, we were able to uncover the genetic signatures of a carnivorous plant," says Stephan C. Schuster, PhD, professor of biological sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The findings will be published on May 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Albert and Schuster co-led the study along with Luis Herrera-Estrella of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) in Mexico. Other researchers came from San Diego State University, El Instituto de Ecologia in Mexico, the University of Ottawa in Canada and the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in China.

The genetic underpinnings of a predatorial plant

Albert, Schuster, Herrera-Estrella and colleagues first reported sequencing the bladderwort genome in 2013, an achievement described in the journal Nature.

Light micrograph of the bladder of Utricularia gibba, the humped bladderwort plant (color added). Credit: Enrique Ibarra-Laclette and Claudia Anahi Perez-Torres.

However, with new tools available in the field of genomics, the researchers joined forces again to create an even better version of the bladderwort genome for the 2016 study.

The sequencing technique they chose was a single-molecule method developed by Pacific Biosciences (PacBio). Like other technologies, this one reads different sections of DNA in the genome, and then specialized software combines overlapping chunks to form bigger and bigger chains. But the PacBio method enabled the scientists to build a better genome by generating individual strings of bladderwort DNA more than 40 times longer than before.

This new high-quality sequence allowed researchers to scrutinize the bladderwort genome in new ways.

They were able, for instance, to identify important strings of gene copies known as tandem repeats. These are fragments of genetic material that were accidentally duplicated next to each other, sometimes more than once. Such repeated genes are often lost over time as a species evolves, so the ones that are retained are candidates for having leant their hosts an evolutionary advantage.

That's especially true of the bladderwort, Albert and colleagues say. They note that the plant has a tiny, gene-rich genome, an indication that the species has had a history of rampant DNA deletion.

Tandem repeats in the bladderwort genome included genes responsible for the creation of papain proteases"proteins that chew up other proteins," as Albert puts itas well as genes that promote peptide transport, in which chopped-up proteins (parts of victims) are shuttled from one bladderwort cell to another. Both groups of genes are highly active in the plant's vacuum traps, hinting at a role in the digestion of prey.

Tandem repeats also included genes tied to traits such as the acidity of the traps and the elasticity of their cell wallsqualities that may facilitate the plant's effectiveness as a predator.

"The trap of Utricularia is only two cells thick, and the way it does its trapping is it creates a whole lot of negative pressure inside the trap to suck in the prey once triggered," Hererra-Estrella says. "The cell walls are under a lot of tension. So it's no shock at all that there seem to be some interesting clusters of tandem duplicates that deal with the cell wall dynamism."
In this May 13, 2017 file photo, a screenshot of the warning screen from a purported ransomware attack, as captured by a computer user in Taiwan, is seen on laptop in Beijing. Global cyber chaos is spreading Monday, May 14, as companies boot up computers at work following the weekend's worldwide "ransomware" cyberattack. The extortion scheme has created chaos in 150 countries and could wreak even greater havoc as more malicious variations appear. The initial attack, known as "WannaCry," paralyzed computers running Britain's hospital network, Germany's national railway and scores of other companies and government agencies around the world. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

The "ransomware" cyberattack that has hit companies and governments around the world ebbed in intensity on Monday, though experts warned that new versions of the virus could emerge.

Thousands more infections were reported Monday, largely in Asia, which had been closed for business when the malware first struck Friday. The cases were more contained, however, than the systemic outbreak that last week paralyzed computers running factories, banks, government agencies and transport systems around the world.

Many of the 200,000 victims in more than 150 countries were still struggling to recover from the first attack of the so-called "WannaCry" virus.

Carmaker Renault said one of its French plants, which employs 3,500 people, wasn't reopening Monday as a "preventative step."

Britain's National Health Service said about a fifth of NHS truststhe regional bodies that run hospitals and clinicswere hit by the attack on Friday, leading to thousands of canceled appointments and operations. Seven of the 47 affected trusts were still having IT problems Monday.

As cybersecurity firms worked around the clock to monitor the situation and install a software patch, new variants of the rapidly replicating malware were discovered Sunday. One did not include the so-called kill switch that allowed researchers to interrupt the malware's spread Friday by diverting it to a dead end on the internet.

A patient takes a nap on her wheelchair as she waits with others at the registration desk at Dharmais Cancer Hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia, Monday, May 15, 2017 as the hospital's information system is in trouble by cyberattack. Global cyber chaos was spreading Monday as companies booted up computers at work following the weekend's worldwide "ransomware" cyberattack. The extortion scheme created chaos in 150 countries and could wreak even greater havoc as more malicious variations appear. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

Ryan Kalember, senior vice president at Proofpoint Inc., which helped stop its spread, said the version without a kill switch could spread. It was benign because it contained a flaw that prevented it from taking over computers and demanding ransom to unlock files but other more malicious ones will likely pop up.

"We haven't fully dodged this bullet at all until we're patched against the vulnerability itself," Kalember said.

Lynne Owens, director-general of Britain's National Crime Agency, said there was no indication of a second surge of the cyberattack, "But that doesn't mean there won't be one."

Tim Stevens, a lecturer in global security at King's College London, said the incident should be a wakeup call to both the public and private sectors to incorporate security into computer systems from the ground up, rather than as an afterthought.

"This thing cannot be brushed under the carpet," he said. "It is so visible and so global. There is going to have to be change at levels where change can be made."

On Monday, Chinese state media said 29,372 institutions there had been infected along with hundreds of thousands of devices.

Patients wait at the registration desks at Dharmais Cancer Hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia, Monday, May 15, 2017. Global cyber chaos was spreading Monday as companies booted up computers at work following the weekend's worldwide "ransomware" cyberattack. The extortion scheme created chaos in 150 countries and could wreak even greater havoc as more malicious variations appear. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

Universities and other educational institutions in the country were among the hardest hit, possibly because schools tend to have old computers and be slow to update operating systems and security.

On social media, students complained about not being able to access their work, and people in various cities said they hadn't been able to take their driving tests because some local traffic police systems were down.

Railway stations, mail delivery, gas stations, hospitals, office buildings, shopping malls and government services also were reportedly affected.

In Japan, 2,000 computers at 600 locations were reported to have been affected. Companies including Hitachi and Nissan Motor Co. reported problems but said they had not seriously affected their operations. In Indonesia, the malware locked patient files on computers in two hospitals in the capital, Jakarta, causing delays.

In Britain, the government denied allegations that lax cybersecurity in the financially stretched, state-funded health service had helped the attack spread.

Prime Minister Theresa May said "warnings were given to hospital trusts" about the Microsoft vulnerability exploited by the attackers.

People walk in front of the headquarters building of Hitachi Ltd., center, in Tokyo, Monday, May 15, 2017. The global "ransomware" cyberattack hit computers at 600 locations in Japan, but appeared to cause no major problems as Japanese started their workday Monday even as the attack caused chaos elsewhere. Hitachi spokeswoman said emails were slow or not getting delivered, and files could not be opened. The company believes the problems are related to the ransomware attack, although no ransom appears to have been demanded so far. They were installing software to fix the problems. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

NHS Digital, which oversees U.K. hospital cybersecurity, said it sent alerts about the problemand a patch to fix itto health service staff and IT professionals last month.

Experts urged organizations and companies to immediately update older Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows XP, with a patch released by Microsoft Corp. to limit vulnerability to a more powerful version of the malwareor to future versions that can't be stopped.

The attack held users hostage by freezing their computers, popping up a red screen with the words, "Oops, your files have been encrypted!" and demanding money through online bitcoin payment$300 at first, rising to $600 before it destroys files hours later.

Microsoft distributed a patch two months ago that protected computers from such an attack, but in many organizations it was likely lost among the blizzard of updates and patches that large corporations and governments strain to manage.

The president of Microsoft laid some of the blame at the feet of the U.S. government. Brad Smith criticized U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency, for "stockpiling" software code that can be used by hackers. Cybersecurity experts say the unknown hackers who launched the attacks used a vulnerability that was exposed in NSA documents leaked online.

Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, said "criminals" were responsible, not the U.S. government. Bossert said the U.S. hasn't ruled out involvement by a foreign government, but that the recent ransom demands suggest a criminal network.

In this May 11, 2017 file photo, the emblem of a Nissan car is seen at its showroom in Tokyo. Japan has fallen victim of a global "ransomware" cyberattack that has created chaos in 150 countries. Nissan Motor Co. confirmed Monday, May 15, 2017, some units had been targeted, but there was no major impact on its business. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

Bossert told ABC's "Good Morning America" that the attack is something that "for right now, we've got under control" in the United States.

So far, not many people have paid the ransom demanded by the malware, Europol spokesman Jan Op Gen Oorth told The Associated Press.

Eiichi Moriya, a cybersecurity expert and professor at Meiji University, warned that paying the ransom would not guarantee a fix.

"You are dealing with a criminal," he said. "It's like after a robber enters your home. You can change the locks but what has happened cannot be undone."

 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Insects and disease are killing an unprecedented number of Southern California's urban trees, but each day on his way to work, Los Angeles County plant pathologist Jerrold Turney sees opportunity amid the biological nightmare.

On the drive between his home in South Pasadena and his laboratory in South Gate, he takes stock of the survivors, the trees that offer some hope to the region.

"There's dead and dying liquidambars, oleanders and olives almost everywhere you look," he said, backing his car out of the driveway.

"Sycamores and plums? Forget it." He snapped his fingers. "They go like that.

"But there are winners out there too," he said. "Ginkgoes, Southern magnolias, pink trumpets, pepper and pines are hanging in there. I would even recommend replanting with pecans, if you've got room for those huge trees."

Amid the devastation, the race has begun to develop new lists of stronger, less vulnerable trees.

It's a first step in trying to reconstruct the treescape of Los Angeles and surrounding communities, which is withering under a deadly confluence of invasive pests, prolonged drought and climate change.

An estimated 27 million trees are at risk of infestation in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, including parts of the desert. That's roughly 38 percent of the 71 million trees in the 4,244-square-mile urban region with a population of about 20 million people.

The polyphagous shot hole borer and its cousin, the Kuroshio shot hole borer, are known to transmit a fatal fungal disease in 64 species of trees across Southern California, including willows, avocados, palo verdes, sycamores and Japanese maples.

The goldspotted oak borer has killed tens of thousands of drought-stressed oak trees from San Diego County to Los Angeles County. The aphid-size Asian citrus psyllid is transferring an incurable bacterial disease as it feasts on citrus leaves. Oleander leaf scorch is an incurable bacterial disease spread by the glassy-winged sharpshooter, a flying insect. The South American palm weevil threatens palms throughout the region.

So far, state and local government agencies have been slow to react with plans to address the devastation, which stands to significantly change the way Southern California looks, feels and smells and the way Southern Californians live.

Part of the problem is a lack of knowledge about how many trees have been attacked and how likely it is that some species will rebound.

Methods to reduce the threat posed by the onslaught of pests, many of them new arrivals with poorly understood life cycles, are the focus of debates among research scientists, arborists and urban planners.

The Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services, which is responsible for trees in the city's public right-of-ways, relies on a tree inventory compiled in 1996. It stopped planting trees in 2008 because of budget cuts, and it limits its services to removal of dead, dying or hazardous trees.

Yet without an accurate inventory, it is all but impossible for the agency to devise a plan to protect its trees from invasive, fast-spreading insects, according to a report conducted in 2015.

In San Diego County, officials contend green leaves on the sprouts of 144,000 willows in Tijuana River Valley Regional Park attacked by shot hole borer beetles last year show they are growing back at a fast pace.

Akif Eskalen, a plant pathologist at the University of California, Riverside, however, says that when those sprouts grow larger than 1 inch in diameter, the beetles will bore into them too.

Such disagreements, he said, can complicate efforts to obtain funding and approvals for research needed to develop a response to the devastating insect attacks.

The cost of removing and replacing the 27 million trees at risk of infestation by the most destructive threat, polyphagous shot hole borers, would exceed $36 billion if all were to die, according to a study by Greg McPherson, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service.

Cities and counties spending heavily on removing troubled trees within their jurisdictions are prohibited from assisting private property owners, who must pay commercial operators an average of $1,000 per large tree to clear the deadwood.

Meanwhile, the race is on to develop new lists of trees that are less susceptible to invasive pests, prolonged drought and climate change.

The look of Southern California's green canopies has changed several times over the past two centuries. Untold numbers of native oaks and sycamores fell in the 1800s to ranchers eager to expand grazing land. In the 1950s and '60s, developers turned their noses up at those species, landscaping their subdivisions instead with huge numbers of nonnative trees, including palms, crape myrtles, olives and liquidambars, also known as American sweet gum.

This time around, planners hope to learn from the region's mistakes.

"We need to start dressing up our communities with trees suited for the future climate we are transitioning into," said Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Climate Resolve.

Sycamores, purple leaf plum, liquidambars and olive trees already have fallen off the list of trees recommended by City Plants, a city of Los Angeles agency that provides free trees to residents and plants street trees. Instead, it has increased plantings of black acacia, African sumac and Brisbane box trees, among other hardy species.

Turney, the plant pathologist, has made a habit of taking deliberately circuitous routes to work in the interest of making informal spot checks of the damage.

Some of the hardest hit areas include the city of Pasadena, home of the Rose Parade and winner of this year's "Tree City USA" honor by the National Arbor Day Foundation; Alhambra; Arcadia; Claremont; and South Pasadena, Turney said.

"I understand the concern in peoples' voices when they ask: 'How can I save my trees? What can I replace them with?'" Turney said.

Less than a mile from his home, Turney brought his car to an abrupt stop along a broad street median in Alhambra dominated by rows of ficus microcarpa more than 50 feet tall. "Let's go for a walk," he said.

Moments later, he was striding beneath the boughs of the trees that had lost most of their leaves from a fungal disease that had coated their branches with a sooty residue.

"Just a few years ago, this was one of the prettiest streets in California," he said. "Now, it's going to cost Alhambra a chunk of money to rip out all these trees. And once they're gone, nearby residents can expect to see their monthly electricity bills rise by 20 percent because it will be harder to keep their houses cool in summer without the shade."

In Alhambra's nearby historic and tidy Emery Park Hills neighborhood, Maria Luz, 66, like many of her neighbors, opted to save some money by paying a commercial arborist to trim, rather than remove, three 20-foot-tall liquidambars stricken with what she described as "a plague."

"The arborist said if we only trim, we could keep them around awhile longer," Luz said in Spanish. "Otherwise, it would have cost us $300 to remove each tree, plus more money to grind up the stumps."

A few miles away, in Pasadena, self-employed recycler Ernesto Cousin, 57, was methodically emptying the water remaining in plastic bottles he'd plucked out of local trash bins onto the base of a ficus tree.

"Looks like it could use some help," he said.

"I remember when all these trees were so thick and full of life you couldn't see the sky above them," he said. "Now, they don't look so good, and most people around here blame it on the drought. But it's not that. Something else is wrong.

"I'm going to help them in any way I can," he said, "until there's not one leaf left on their branches."

2017 Los Angeles Times

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Radar images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission show the sudden advance of the Negribreen glacier in Norway in early 2017. Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (201617), processed by T. Strozzi (Gamma)

Rapid acceleration of an Arctic glacier over the past year has been detected by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites.

Sitting on Norway's Spitsbergen island in the Svalbard archipelago, the Negribreen glacier has recently seen a surge in ice surface speed, increasing from 1 m to 13 m a day over the winter.

When a glacier 'surges' a large amount of ice flows to the end in an unusually short time. While the causes are not completely understood, they are believed to be linked to changes in the amount of heat or water in the lowest layers of the glaciers.

The last time Negribreen experienced a surge like this was in the 1930s, as documented in aerial photographs. At that time, it advanced almost 12 km into the fjord in one year along a 15 km-wide section of the front. Since then the front of the glacier had been steadily retreating, with large icebergs breaking off.

This latest jump in speed began in July 2016 and has been climbing ever since  even over the cold winter months.

Monitoring glaciers in areas prone to bad weather and long periods of darkness  like the Arctic  was difficult before the advent of satellites. Radar satellites can 'see' through clouds and in the dark, and Sentinel-1 offers frequent and systematic coverage of the Arctic.

Radar images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission were used to create these two ice speed maps of the Negribreen glacier in Norway. In October 2015, only the front of the glacier was moving by more than 300 m a year. By late 2016, the entire glacier was advancing at this accelerated rate. Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (201617), processed by T. Strozzi

A team of scientists working under ESA's Climate Change Initiative in the Glaciers_cci project are using satellite radar and optical coverage to map glaciers at different times and determine their changes in extent, elevation and speed.

"Sentinel-1 provides us with a near-realtime overview of glacier flow across the Arctic, remarkably augmenting our capacity to capture the evolution of glacier surges," said Tazio Strozzi from Swiss company Gamma Remote Sensing and scientist on Glaciers_cci.

"This new information can be used to refine numerical models of glacier surging to help predict the temporal evolution of the contribution of Arctic glaciers to sea-level rise."

Sentinel-1 is a two-satellite mission for Europe's environment monitoring programme, Copernicus.

The surface speed of the Negribreen glacier in Norway suddenly increased starting in July 2016. Background image from Sentinel-2, captured in April 2017. Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (201417), processed by T. Strozzi
Photograph of the chip used in the experiment to couple a microwave cavity to a micrometer-size drum (the sharp purple pencil tip is placed as a scale). Inset shows a scanning electron micrograph of the drum. The top membrane of the drum is suspended only 50nm (1/2000th of the diameter of hair) above a metal plate. This is then used to manipulate and amplify microwaves in the quantum regime. Credit: N. R. Bernier and L. D. Toth (EPFL).

In a recent experiment at EPFL, a microwave resonator, a circuit that supports electric signals oscillating at a resonance frequency, is coupled to the vibrations of a metallic micro-drum. By actively cooling the mechanical motion close to the lowest energy allowed by quantum mechanics, the micro-drum can be turned into a quantum reservoir - an environment that can shape the states of the microwaves. The findings are published as an advanced publication in Nature Physics.

Laszlo Daniel Toth, Nathan Bernier, and Dr Alexey Feofanov led the research effort in Tobias Kippenberg's Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements at EPFL, with support from Dr Andreas Nunnenkamp, a theorist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Microwaves are electromagnetic waves, just like visible light, but with a frequency that is four orders of magnitude smaller. Microwaves form the backbone of several everyday technologies, from microwave ovens and cellular phones to satellite communication, and have recently gained further importance in manipulating quantum information in superconducting circuitsone of the most promising candidates to realize future quantum computers.

The micro-drum, only 30 microns in diameter, 100 nanometers thick and fabricated in the Center of MicroNanotechnology (CMi) at EPFL, constitutes the top plate of a capacitor in a superconducting microwave resonator. The drum's position modulates the resonator's resonance frequency and, conversely, a voltage across the capacitor exerts a force on the micro-drum. Through this bidirectional interaction, energy can be exchanged between mechanical vibrations and the microwave oscillations in the superconducting circuit.

In the experiment, the micro-drum is first cooled close to its lowest energy quantum level by a suitably tuned microwave tone. Every microwave photon (a quantum of light) carries away the energy of a phonon (a quantum of mechanical motion) such that the mechanical energy is reduced. This cooling process increases the dissipation and turns the micro-drum into a dissipative reservoir for the microwave resonator.

By tuning the interactions between the cavity and the cooled micro-drum, which is now an environment for the microwaves, the cavity can be turned into a microwave amplifier. The most interesting aspect of this amplification process is the added noise, that is, how much random, unwanted fluctuations are added to the amplified signal.

Albeit counter-intuitive, quantum mechanics dictates that this added noise cannot be suppressed completely, even in principle. The amplifier realized in the EPFL experiment operates very close to this limit, therefore it is as "quiet" as it can be. Interestingly, in a different regime, the micro-drum turns the microwave resonator into a maser (or microwave laser).

"There has been a lot of research focus on bringing mechanical oscillators into the quantum regime in the past few years." says Dr. Alexey Feofanov, postdoctoral researcher on the project. "However, our experiment is one of the first which actually shows and harnesses their capabilities for future quantum technologies."

Looking ahead, this experiment enables novel phenomena in cavity optomechanical systems like noiseless microwave routing or microwave entanglement. Generally, it proves that mechanical oscillators can be a useful resource in the rapidly growing field of quantum science and engineering.

Future activities on the emerging research possibilities created by this work will be supported by two recently started EC Horizon 2020 projects: Hybrid Optomechanical Technologies (HOT) and Optomechanical Technologies (OMT), both coordinated at EPFL.

More information: A dissipative quantum reservoir for microwave light using a mechanical oscillator, Nature Physics (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nphys4121 Journal information: Nature Physics
Researchers led by Professor T Venky Venkatesan (first row, centre), Director of NUSNNI, uncovered extraordinary properties of semiconductor material strontium niobate. Credit: National University of Singapore

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) recently uncovered novel properties of strontium niobate, which is a unique semiconductor material that displays both metallic type conduction and photocatalytic activity. The two studies, which were conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, herald exciting opportunities for the creation of novel devices with unprecedented functionalities as well as unique applications of a new family of photocatalytic materials.

Dr Wan Dongyang, a researcher from the NUS Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Institute (NUSNNI) who was involved in both research, said, "The key to these successful studies was the ability of the NUSNNI team to produce high-quality crystalline films of these materials that were then studied by a variety of measurements to provide scientific clues on how such materials perform under varying conditions."

New family of plasmons uncovered in unconventional metal

In the first study, the researchers, who were led by Assistant Professor Andrivo Rusydi, and Director of NUSNNI Professor T Venky Venkatesan, had found that while strontium niobate is highly metallic in nature due to a very large population of electrons in the material, which is typical of most metals, it is still transparent at most photon energies, which is an exceptional property that is unlike most metals. Utilising spectroscopic techniques, the research team discovered that this unique property arose from an intrinsic plasmonic absorption.

Dr Teguh Citra Asmara, the first author of the paper and also a postdoctoral researcher at NUSNNI, said, "From our studies, we found that this material is a semiconductor with a large bandgap of four electron volts. Based on our understanding of semiconductors and this material's strong metallic behaviour, we did not expect this material to absorb any visible photons, so the results we found are indeed surprising."

"Plasmons are resonant oscillations of a collection of electrons and typically occur in a metallic solid. Under the right conditions, photons can cause these plasmons to be excited in a solid and in this process the solid absorbs the photon energy. Before our team figured this out, this material was thought to consist of a smaller bandgap, of the order of two electron volts, and a secondary band above of comparable energy," explained Prof Venkatesan.

In addition, the research team discovered a new family of plasmons which occurs at multiple frequencies. This new family of plasmons is observed even when strontium niobate is not a conventional metal.

Asst Prof Rusydi said, "This novel discovery opens new research directions and paths for plasmonics research, and enables us to look into previously untapped insulating and strongly-correlated materials. We are also currently studying the possible applications of this new type of plasmons."

This project was originally initiated by Dr Zhao Yongliang as a part of his PhD thesis, and Dr Wan Dongyang followed up on it as part of his doctoral thesis. Both of them carried out the project under the supervision of Prof Venkatesan. The novel findings were reported in prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications on 12 May 2017.

'Water splitters' to reduce carbon footprint

In the second study, NUS researchers examined how strontium niobate catalyses water. The team, supervised by Prof Venkatesan, found that when strontium niobate is in contact with water under solar irradiation, the semiconductor material could spilt water into its constituents of oxygen and hydrogen. This study, which was also conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Nanyang Technological University, was first published online in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications on 19 April 2017.

Prof Venkatesan explained, "While this material converts water into hydrogen under solar irradiation, the mechanism behind this process was previously misinterpreted as being due to the high speed or mobility of the electrons in the material. Our group clearly showed that it was not the case. The measured electron mobility was significantly low, but the effect was enhanced by the resonant absorption of the solar photons by the intrinsic plasmons present in this material."

The results strongly suggest a novel approach to designing catalysts for various applications, and the work could lead to new techniques of harvesting hydrogen  a sustainable fuel - from water, hence contribute towards reducing carbon footprint.

"At NUSNNI, we have a group that has found a family of materials, aside from strontium niobate, that work equally well as plasmonic water splitters. Moving forward, we are working towards finding the right combination of photo-catalytic process for producing useful chemicals," added Prof Venkatesan.

More information: D. Y. Wan et al. Electron transport and visible light absorption in a plasmonic photocatalyst based on strontium niobate, Nature Communications (2017). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15070 Journal information: Nature Communications
Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh today. The pilgrim town has an interesting but jinxed story attached to it.

By India Today Web Desk: Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the famous pilgrim town of Amarkantak in Anuppur in Madhya Pradesh today. The place is famous as the origin place of three rivers including Narmada.

While Amarkantak has several mythological stories attached to it, the place is considered jinxed as leaders who have visited the pilgrim town have lost their chair in the past.THE JINXED STORY OF AMARKANTAK

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1. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Amarkantak in 1982. Gandhi was assassinated two years after her visit to this town in 1984.

2. Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Sundarlal Patwa toured Amarkantak just before the Babri mosque demolition in December, 1992. He had step down soon after.

3. Arjun Singh, who served a Madhya Pradesh CM from 1980 to 1985, paid a visit to Amarkantak. The visit proved costly for him as he lost his chair.

4. Uma Bharti, who currently is a minister in the Narendra Modi cabinet, visited Amarkantak as the CM of Madhya Pardesh in 2004. She had to make way for Babulal Gaur a few days after the visit to this town.

5. Former Vice-President Bhairon Singh Sekhawat also had to lose his position after his visit to Amarkantak. Sekhawat was on the top post from 2002 to 2007.

Almost all the leaders who visited the Amarkantak through helicopter faced the same fate. Leaders have now been avoiding air travel to the town and instead prefer travelling by road. However, PM Narendra Modi took a chopper from Jabalpur to reach Amarkantak today.

#WATCH PM Narendra Modi offered prayers at Narmada Udgam Sthal Mandir in Amarkantak, MP pic.twitter.com/rub4zoBBMj- ANI (@ANI_news) May 15, 2017

AMARKANTAK NOT THE ONLY JINXED TOWN

Famous as Uttar Pradesh's tech city, Noida has proved unlucky for leaders visiting the city just ahead of Assembly elections.

Noida jinx, as per political circles, has in the past caught up with several chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, including Veer Bahadur Singh, Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Kalyan Singh and Mayawati, who lost their chairs soon after visiting the city

The jinx started in 1988 when former Chief Minister Vir Bahadur Singh lost power within days of visiting Noida that year.

Later in 1997, Mayawati lost power after visiting Noida.

Earlier, in 1989, N D Tiwari and 10 years later, in 1999, Kalyan Singh suffered the same fate.

In 1995, Mulayam was out of power within months of his Noida visit.

The last one was Mayawati, who lost power in 2012 Assembly elections after she flew down to Noida in October 2011 to inaugurate the Dalit Prerna Sthal.

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Akhilesh Yadav too avoided visit to Noida when he was the chief minster.

ALSO READ:

PM Narendra Modi to unveil Narmada conservation roadmap in Madhya Pradesh's Amarkantak today

Jinxed Noida waits for Akhilesh Yadav to break 30-year taboo: Will the young CM succeed?

--- ENDS ---
The pigments can look very different when viewed with terahertz eyes. Credit: Shutterstock/Garry0305

When we look at a painting, how do we know it's a genuine piece of art?

Everything we see with the unaided eye in a painting  from the Australian outback images of Albert Namatjira or Russell Drysdale, to the vibrant works of Pro Hart  is thanks to the mix of colours that form part of the visible spectrum.

But if we look at the painting in a different way, at a part of the spectrum that is invisible to our eyes, then we can see something very different.

As our recently published research shows, it could even help us detect art fraud.

A matter of frequency

The electromagnetic spectrum ranges from very high-frequency gamma rays down to the extremely low-frequency radiation of just a few hertz. Hertz is the unit of measurement for frequency.

The frequency of colours in the visible spectrum range from blue, at about 800 terahertz (THz), through to red at about 400THz (1 THz = 1012 or 1,000,000,000,000 hertz).

If we drop to frequencies below the visible spectrum we find the near-infrared at about 300THz and then the mid-infrared at about 30THz.

Then comes the far-infrared and at last we meet the frequencies around 1THz.

Continuing even further brings us to microwaves and radio waves where frequencies range from the gigahertz down to kilohertz. Thus the terahertz part of the electromagnetic spectrum lies between the radio and the visible parts  in other words, between electronics and photonics.

Things can look very different when viewed with "eyes" that can see in the terahertz range. Some things that are transparent to visible light, such as water, are opaque to terahertz light.

Conversely, some things that visible light won't penetrate, such as black plastic, readily transmit terahertz radiation.

Intriguingly, two objects that have the same colour when viewed by the unassisted eye may transmit terahertz radiation differently. So their terahertz signal can be used to tell them apart.

Pigments and colour

This points to the potential use of terahertz radiation in differentiating paints and pigments. Terahertz spectroscopy can distinguish different pigments with similar colours.

We recently used terahertz spectroscopy to distinguish between three related pigments. All come from a family of chemical compounds called quinacridones. These are used widely in producing stable, reproducible pigments that range in colour from red to violet.

Measurements at the University of Wollongong provided the experimental data in the range of 1THz to 10THz. Numerical modelling at Syracuse University (New York) reproduced the experimental data, and gave physical insight into the origin of the features observed.

The combined experimental and theoretical work, published last month in the Journal of Physical Chemistry, unequivocally demonstrates that terahertz spectroscopy is able to distinguish three different quinacridones.

This brings us to the subject of art authentication  or more importantly, detecting cases of art fraud.

Art fraud

Museums, galleries and collectors are typically very protective of their art collections, but terahertz spectroscopy is well suited to examining their works.

While terahertz spectrometers are often located in laboratories, there are also portable models.

The terahertz (1012) region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Credit: The Conversation, CC BY-ND

Unlike an analysis that requires removing and consuming some material (by reacting it with chemicals, or burning it), there is no contact made with the material, and thus no harm done to the artwork.

The terahertz radiation simply shines on the painting, and the transmitted radiation is measured. The low energy and low density of terahertz radiation means that the painting is not damaged in any way.

This all makes it suitable for examining art in a way that does not damage it and can be performed where it is located  in a gallery, or home, or almost anywhere.

From theory to practice

So how can terahertz spectroscopy assist in detecting art fraud in practice?

Here's an example. Let's say terahertz spectroscopy picks up a quinacridone pigment in a painting. Quinacridone is an artificial material that was first synthesised in 1935, so the painting must date from 1935 or later.

Any claim that the painting is a work by Leonardo da Vinci (who died in 1519), Vincent van Gogh (died 1890) or Claude Monet (died 1926) could therefore be dismissed. Any claim the the work was by an artist who worked after 1935 could not be so easily disproved on this basis.

Of course, other physical methods than terahertz spectroscopy may be applied to analyse paintings. One direct way to analyse art work is by sophisticated, quantitative measurements of the visible spectrum.

Artworks may also be interrogated by other species of light that lie above the blue end visible spectrum. Here the ultraviolet (uv) photons are higher in energy than visible photons. That means they can put energy into a material that is re-radiated as visible photons.

This is the phenomenon of fluorescence, and uv-fluorescence is an established tool in art conservation.

Moving further above the ultraviolet, X-rays may be used to examine works of art. For example, X-ray fluorescence at the Australian Synchrotron has been used to find hidden layers in works by Degas and Streeton.

A genuine fake?

There are many aspects to authenticating an artwork, the physical examination being but one of them.

Nonetheless, technical analysis of the materials used  the paints, the canvas, the frames  plays a fundamental role, and that is where terahertz spectroscopy contributes.

But other approaches also play a role. For example, documentation such as records of sales may provide key evidence, as may the more subtle appraisal of style by art historians.

The perceptions of people who assess and buy art is itself an important factor. The word of the artist might be thought to be definitive, but even this has been overruled by expert opinion, as in the case of Lucian Freud.

Finally, the legal dimension is critical, as has been reported recently in the quashing of the art fraud convictions of Peter Gant and Mohamed Siddique. These related to the paintings Blue Lavender Bay, Orange Lavender Bay, and Through the Window. At issue was whether the paintings were the work of Brett Whiteley.

Other uses

Of course, art fraud is just one application of terahertz spectroscopy. There are many more.

Able to penetrate paper and cardboard, terahertz radiation can be used to look inside envelopes for contraband, or inside packaged food for contamination.

Terahertz methods have been used to assess burns and to monitor the hydration of plants.

As better terahertz sources, detectors and components are developed, the range of applications will further expand.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Inventory needs to be managed and managed well, or you are going to get in recurring trouble, and lose your credibility and hard-earned conversions, whether 

Read more
Congress president Sonia Gandhi and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee are meeting tomorrow. The meeting is likely to decide if the Opposition parties are going to field a common candidate in the Presidential election.

By Supriya Bhardwaj: Ever since West Bengal Mamata Banarjee has landed in New Delhi, the political circles are abuzz as to who could be Opposition's candidate for Presidential election .

Mamata Banerjee is all set to meet Congress President Sonia Gandhi tomorrow evening at latter's residence.

The meeting is significant in the view of Presidential election as Trinamool Congress of Mamata Banerjee and Sonia Gandhi-headed Congress sit on the opposite benches in West Bengal Assembly.

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SONIA-MAMATA MEET

Sonia Gandhi has already met who's who from Opposition camp in what has been viewed as an attempt to field a united front as a challenge to the Narendra Modi government in Presidential election.

Mamata Banerjee, on her part, too has met several Opposition leaders in connection with Presidential poll.

"All eyes will be on 10 Janpath on Tuesday when these two leaders will meet. Apart from discussing Presidential candidate, the two heads of their respective parties - Congress and TMC - are likely to discuss strategy to handle Central government during upcoming Monsoon Session," said a senior Congress party leader.

PRESIDENT PRANAB MUKHERJEE AS CANDIDATE

While Mamata Banerjee was heading to Lutyen's Delhi, the Chief Minister from her neighbouring state, Nitish Kumar recommended the name of the outgoing President Pranab Mukherjee as next Presidential candidate.

Mamata Banerjee may not have any objection if Pranab Mukherjee is named as a Presidential candidate by the Opposition camp. Mamata had played key role before Pranab Mukherjee was fielded as UPA candidate in the 2012-Presidential election.

However, the Congress seems to be circumspect at this point of time. Congress spokesperson Shobha Oza spelt out party's stand during official press conference saying, "There is a united Opposition front as far as Presidential candidate issue is concerned. We hope that through consensus a name will come up and that individual will be acceptable to all the Opposition parties."

"Nitishji has given a proposal. It is Nitishji's recommendation and it is the leaders from the Opposition camp who will deliberate on this name too," Shobha Oza said.

GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI

While Bihar CM Nitish Kumar has proposed President Pranab Mukherjee's name for second term, the other name that is doing the round includes Mahatma Gandhi's grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

Those in the know of things in Opposition camp claim that many leaders including Sonia Gandhi, Sitaram Yechury of CPI-M and Sharad Yadav of JD-U have spoken to former diplomat Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who served as West Bengal governor for five years between 2004 and 2009.

Former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, JD-U leader Sharad Yadav and NCP chief Sharad Pawar's names are also doing rounds.

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WHO WILL BLINK FIRST?

While the hustle-bustle of the Opposition camp for the Presidential election is there to see for everyone, the ruling coalition has not said a word on its potential candidate as a successor of Pranab Mukherjee.

As the BJP-led NDA is maintaining stoic silence on the matter, the Opposition parties seem to have decided that they will adopt a wait-and-watch policy as far as announcement of Presidential candidate is concerned.

"First let the ruling establishment open their cards. If BJP gets non-controversial candidate then some Oposition parties might support him/her," said a senior Congress leader.

ALSO READ |

Presidential poll: How a joint Opposition candidate may trump Modi-Shah combination

Why BJP may surprise again with its pick for President of India's post

25 years after Babri demolition: Will Modi choose Advani as President?

ALSO WATCH | Mamata Banerjee to meet Sonia Gandhi, common Presidential candidate on the agenda

--- ENDS ---
Seventeen prisoners have been shot dead after a mass breakout at a jail in Papua New Guinea, police said on Monday, with 57 still on the run. Inmates from the Buimo jail in the Pacific nation's second largest city of Lae made a dash for freedom after breaking out of their compound on Friday, with prison warders opening fire. The Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary said in a statement 17 were killed, three were caught and 57 were still at large. "These are undesirable people and will be a threat to the community, Lae police metropolitan commander Chief Superintendent Anthony Wagambie Jr said of the escapees, warning the public to be vigilant. "The majority of those who escaped were arrested for serious crimes and were in custody awaiting trial. "A good number were arrested by police last year for mainly armed robberies, car thefts, break and enter and stealing." Police shot dead 12 inmates during a jailbreak at the same prison last year. In 2015 more than 50 prisoners escaped from the same facility. Jails in PNG are often overcrowded and conditions are poor. Wagambie said locals in Lae should brace for a spate of crime. "We experienced an upsurge of criminal activities when Buimo jail reported a mass breakout last year," he said, urging family members and associates of the escapees not to harbour them. "I am warning them that they will be caught. They must do what is good for them and surrender. Crime and lawlessness is rampant in PNG, a sprawling nation where many still live traditional and subsistence lives in remote areas.
The Bahamas voted in a new leader Wednesday, with Hubert Minnis, who campaigned on a platform of change, beating scandal-tainted incumbent Perry Christie in general elections on the island archipelago. "My fellow Bahamians, the people have spoken," Minnis, a doctor, said in a victory rally before thousands of supporters. "We have been given a mandate for change." Christie, leader of Progressive Liberal Party, conceded defeat in a statement in which he said he had made a congratulatory telephone call to Minnis wishing the leader of the Free National Movement success. "I understand as perhaps few others the challenges that await Dr Minnis, and I wish him only success on behalf of our nation. He has my full support for a smooth transition," he said. Christie, who was finishing his second non-consecutive term as prime minister, was dogged by scandals and double-digit unemployment. The long-delayed opening of a $4.2 billion mega-resort called Baha Mar, and last month's spectacular failure of the Fyre music festival -- which stranded partygoers who paid as much as $100,000 to attend -- were factors in the vote. Minnis campaigned on a platform of change, seeking to implement term limits on the prime minister and promote "Bahamian ownership in the economy," according to his website. "I support the FNM 100 percent, because I feel Christie was not doing a good job in the five years we gave him," Nassau resident Jmeail Dames said of the prime minister's current term. Dr Minnis has endured trial after trial and came out victorious. He has a task ahead of him," said FMN supporter Travis Edgecombe, 28. "But I do believe that this new administration will provide new and innovative plans to create opportunities for Bahamians. - Middle finger - Christie, 73, prompted condemnation earlier this year when he denied corruption accusations by raising his middle finger to reporters. His education minister, Jerome Fitzgerald, is also embroiled in controversy over a shady multimillion-dollar business allegedly seeking contracts from the Baha Mar resort, which is controlled by Chinese investors. Under construction for almost a decade with Chinese financing and construction workers, Baha Mar was taken over by a Chinese conglomerate in 2016 after its original developer tried to file for bankruptcy in the United States. The archipelago, which gained independence from Britain in 1973, heavily depends on tourism and foreign investment in resorts and other attractions. More than 180,000 people are registered to cast their ballots for the 39 seats in the House of Assembly. Voting took place without incident, however, a polling station on the main island New Providence opened late following concerns about ballots, and some of those waiting left without voting. International observers the Caribbean Community, the Commonwealth of Nations, the Organization of American States and the United States were invited to monitor the election. Official results were not complete as of late Wednesday, but early returns showed that Minnis easily won his seat and that his FNM party would hold the majority. Minnis will be sworn in on Thursday.
A North Korean diplomat said Monday the election victory by left-leaning South Korean President Moon Jae-In reflected the people's "longing" for change. The comments by ambassador to Beijing Ji Jae-Ryong were the first official response by the North to Moon's triumph last week, except for a four-paragraph dispatch by the official Korean Central News Agency two days after the vote. Moon -- who favours engagement with Pyongyang to curb its nuclear ambitions -- won overwhelmingly after his conservative predecessor Park Geun-Hye was ousted over a massive corruption scandal. "The South Korean people are longing for new politics, new society and new life and the election was a reflection of this popular sentiment," Ji told reporters in Beijing. Park, who advocated a hard line with the North, was arrested in March and is in jail awaiting trial on multiple charges. "Anyone who pursues selfish interests by following a foreign power and keeping their distance from their compatriots cannot avoid the stern judgement of the people," Ji said. It was important for Seoul's leadership to "faithfully abide" by previous North-South agreements, he added, Moon was part of the South's last liberal government nearly a decade ago, which pursued a "Sunshine policy" of reconciliation and dialogue with the North. He is widely expected to shift away from Park's approach, and declared at his swearing-in that he would go to Pyongyang "in the right circumstances". But its latest missile launch came only four days into Moon's tenure and he slammed it as a "reckless provocation", saying dialogue would be possible "only if Pyongyang changes its behaviour".
Philippine lawmakers on Monday rejected an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte that accused him of a crime against humanity over the deaths of thousands of people killed in his war on drugs. The complaint alleged Duterte had adopted a state policy of extrajudicial killings that led to more than 8,000 deaths in his first eight months as president, and was involved in mass murder as well as widespread corruption in his previous stint as a mayor of a southern city. The congressional justice committee quickly dismissed the complaint in its first day of hearings on the issue, overwhelmingly voting that it was "insufficient in substance". "The complaint filed was frivolous. How can you proceed if the complaint has no basis," committee chairman Reynaldo Umali, who is a member of Duterte's ruling party, told reporters afterwards. The committee vote effectively ends the impeachment case, which even Duterte's opponents conceded had little chance of prospering with the president enjoying a commanding majority in the lower house of congress. A plenary of the lower house still needs to endorse the committee's decision, although political observers and lawmakers said there was zero chance of Monday's vote being overturned. "We have nowhere to go (but) we will find a way to get justice," opposition lawmaker Gary Alejano, who filed the impeachment case, told reporters. Duterte, 72, won presidential elections last year after promising to launch an unprecedented crackdown on crime in which tens of thousands of people would die. Police have reported killing about 2,700 people since Duterte took office at the end of June and immediately launched his war on drugs. Unknown assailants have killed more than 1,800 others, while about 5,700 other violent deaths are under investigation, according to police data. Duterte has called for addicts to be slaughtered and repeatedly promised to pardon police if they are found guilty of murder while prosecuting his drug war. But Duterte also insists that he is not breaking any laws with his rhetoric, and that police are only allowed to kill in self-defence. He has said he does not encourage or endorse extrajudicial killings. The United Nations, the European Union and the US government have criticised the drug war, while rights groups have warned Duterte may be orchestrating a crime against humanity. However surveys show Duterte remains a popular president at home and that many Filipinos support the drug war, believing tough tactics are needed to tackle crime. Duterte has also won some support internationally, including from China. - 'Trumped-up charges' - Duterte's spokesman Ernesto Abella welcomed Monday's rejection of the impeachment complaint. "We maintained that it was from rehashed, trumped-up charges aimed at undermining the duly constituted government," Abella said. Monday's vote showed that Duterte still enjoyed the overwhelming backing of lawmakers, according to Gladstone Cuarteros, a political analyst at Manila's De La Salle University. "They are sending the message that from the first instance they will dismiss it and they are showing the president has large support. 'We are the super-majority,'," Cuarteros told AFP. A Filipino lawyer last month filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Duterte of mass murder in relation to the drug war. However many observers saw that complaint as premature, arguing all legal remedies had yet to be exhausted in the Philippines, which is an ICC requirement. The ICC has not given any indication as to whether it will pursue that complaint. Alejano said Monday he was also considering filing a case with the ICC. Cuarteros said Alejano's failed impeachment effort could have been part of a strategy to pave the way for an ICC probe. "He wants to show people that (Philippine) institutions are compromised because of strong support for Duterte and by extension perhaps external institutions, international organisations can step in," Cuarteros said.
Venezuelans living abroad are collecting box loads of items -- including safety helmets, gas masks and first-aid kits -- to support the crowds marching in their homeland against the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro. Increasingly violent near-daily protests that began April 1 have left a toll of 38 dead, and hundreds wounded and under arrest. In Miami, often referred to as the "capital of Latin America" and a city with a large Venezuelan community, meet-ups where donations are collected are increasingly common. The gatherings are advertised among community members on Whatsapp, Instagram or Twitter, and identified with Venezuelan flags and signs like "Solidarity" or "SOS Venezuela." Lists of preferred items are also posted online. "I did what I could to buy everything that was on the list and contribute my grain of sand to support these people who are fighting for my country," said Michelle Lewin, a 31 year-old fitness model who lives in Miami. Lewin dropped two large bags of supplies on a table at a Colombian restaurant where donations were being accepted. Half of the 225,000 Venezuelans living in the United States reside in Florida, mostly in the greater Miami area. - Goggles and gloves - Most donations are geared towards protecting demonstrators from tear gas, pepper spray and other crowd-dispersal gases used by Venezuelan riot police. Police also use high-pressure blasts of water from water cannons to break up the crowds. Hooded protesters, sometimes carrying home-made shields, respond by throwing rocks, fuel bombs and bottles filled with paint or excrement. Liquid antacids -- the kind sold at corner pharmacies -- are good to treat gas-caused skin burns. For eye protection, swim goggles and over-the-counter eye drops are popular. Also in demand are walkie-talkies, hydrogen peroxide to clean superficial wounds, neck braces, antibiotic cream, and leather gloves for protesters to pick up and hurl hot gas canisters back at the cops. - Destination: Green Cross - Jose Colina is a Venezuelan former army lieutenant who heads a group called the Organization of Persecuted Venezuelans Living in Exile (VEPPEX). He told AFP that he hopes to collect 100 boxes of donations over the weekend. Last week he said he collected 1.4 tonnes of supplies. The items are sent to the Green Cross, a group of first responders from the Universidad Central de Venezuela that rush in to aid wounded protesters. "This is a way of doing something, to show that we may be far away but we are not absent," Colina said. He described the support from Venezuelans and sympathetic Latin Americans in Florida immigrants as "exceptional." Recently the Green Cross volunteers were blasted as a "paramilitary group" on a state-run VTV television show in Venezuela. - Anonymity rules - Medical supplies, almost all imported, are especially hard to find in cash-starved Venezuela, where the oil-dependent economy is in a free fall. "We're trying to help the heroes that are fighting for the freedom of our country," said Gloria Mora, who heads a group of Venezuelans living in Miami and is also gathering supplies. Much of the donation work is done anonymously. Organizers are often wary of interviews, fearing retaliation on relatives and friends still in Venezuela. Anonymity is especially common online. There are several anonymous sites at Amazon.com asking for medicine for Venezuelans. Organizers list what they want, and anyone can make the purchase. The whole transaction, including the final destination of the items, is anonymous. Another anonymous group, "Helmets against Bombs," accepts donations to buy hard-hat safety helmets -- the kind used at construction sites -- and cans of red, yellow and blue paint. At the crowd funding site Go Fund Me organizers collected nearly $23,000 in nine days. The group's Instagram account then showed pictures of long tables where the helmets were being painted with the colors of the Venezuelan flag. Absent from the pictures: faces. Others collect money at Venmo, a mobile payment app. Again, all anonymous.
Our mate Daryl Dominguez recently got in touch to share this video part from Thai ripper Petch Napat. To quote the email, This kid Petch Napat is setting a new bar for Thai skateboarding. It would be really appreciated over here if you guys could share it and throw a bit of light on whats going on in the skate scene of Thailand.

So, without further ado, heres Petch Napats new section, filmed and edited by Olarn Posuwan who works for Vans Thailand, as recommended by Daryl Dominguez. Pay attention to some of these spots as well  incredible!
Take a look at the following 20 inexpensive yet effective employee recognition ideas for your small business.

Recognizing the hard work and achievements of employees has proven to be an effective, long-term motivator. It helps maintain morale within the workplace and boost productivity.

The challenge many small businesses face is finding ways to recognize stellar employee work without going over budget. Thats why these ideas have been selected with small businesses in mind. They do not cost much, for the most part. But in the eyes of team members they can seem like big rewards.

Employee Recognition Ideas

Promote in the News

If a member of staff has done something incredible and achieved something that needs shouting about, contact the local press. See if the story could be published in a local newspaper. The achievement doesnt necessarily have to be related to work. It could be a great fundraising effort or personal sporting achievement.

Give a Paid Day Off

Who is going to turn down an extra paid day off? Not many, we think! Offering the best performing employee a free day off is an effective incentive to help reward outstanding work.

Hand Out Lottery Tickets

They dont cost much but they could equate to millions of dollars. Rewarding a high achieving employee with a lottery ticket for the next 12 lotteries would be a great way to say thank you. Though be warned, if they win the jackpot you could risk losing them!

Create a Company Scrapbook

Create a company scrapbook which, each month, dedicates a page to the Employee of the Month. It is a creative way to recognize and celebrate achievement in the workforce.

Ask Peers to Nominate

Instead of relying on management to pick an Employee of the Month, get fellow team members involved.

Ask them to monitor the performance and nominate the colleague they think has performed the best in a given week or month. This will ensure greater involvement and interaction with your recognition program among employees.

Establish a Kudos Column

Publicize employee hard work and achievement. How? By setting up a kudos column in the company newsletter, on the business blog or in social media.

The glory column will mean the member of staffs hard work will be put on the public pedestal it deserves.

Throw a Pizza Party

Celebrate staff and team achievements by ordering some pizzas. Pick the best pizza place in town. Dont forget to add beverages, a crispy salad and cookies for dessert.

Throwing a pizza party in the office is a fun recognition and perfect to reward the entire team. Kept as a rare treat, the calories will be worth it.

Give Out Gas Cards

Reward an outstanding employees efforts by paying for their travel commuting expenses for a whole month.

A public transportation pass is another alternative, if associates take a bus or subway. You can even give a weeks worth or Uber or Lyft rides.

Name a Beer After Someone

For beer-loving employees who have achieved well at work, approach a local microbrewery and ask them to put a label on a beer with the stellar employees name on it. This is bound to go down well.

Offer Casual Friday Exclusive

If a member of staff or a whole team has met its targets and carried out some great work, celebrate! Announce a business casual day, where employees can wear business casual attire. Friday is a typical day for this type of team recognition.

But what if business casual is the standard attire in your company? Then offer a dress down day where employees can get even more casual. The can turn up to work in anything from flip flops to tracksuits.

Write a Simple Thank You Note

Sometimes a simple thank you is one of the best employee reward programs in a small business. For employees who have been going that extra mile and showing dedication, innovation and great team spirit  meet them in kind. Go that extra step and show your appreciation and gratitude.

Rather than just sending your thanks on an email, go a little bit further. Send a note to their home address. They wont be expecting it. And it will make them smile.

Give a Special Gift

Presenting a well-performing team member with a special gift is a memorable way to show your appreciation. From a bottle of wine to a pencil porcupine, there are plenty of great gift ideas that would leave your stellar employee beaming with pride.

Play Their Favorite Song

One personal and memorable way to thank an employee for exceptional work is to play their favorite song. Have it playing in the office when they show up to work in the morning. This is guaranteed to put a smile on their face!

Give a Round of Applause

One of the most inexpensive yet powerful staff recognition ideas is literally  applause. Greet your star employees with a rapturous round of applause when they walk into the office in the morning.

Its a super simple way to show gratitude for hard work and to say thank you. It will surprise them. And it will evoke positive feelings immediately.

Offer Flex Time

Research shows that offering flexible working conditions can make staff happier and more productive. Reward hard working members of staff by giving them the opportunity to work flexible hours.

Consider the prospect of working from home, too. It doesnt need to be every day, but just Fridays perhaps. Or Wednesdays.

When approved sparingly, work-from-home privileges become a special associate recognition.

Send a Video Thank You

Make a video thanking a member of staff for their hard work and effort and post the video on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram.

Try to get as many co-workers and even customers featured in the video. For example, include the company owner, managing director, line managers and fellow colleagues. This will maximize the poignancy of the video.

Hire a Special Dedicated Assistant

Show your appreciation to employees who demonstrate innovation and creativity. How? Hire some temporary help for those employees.

For instance, you could bring in a personal assistant for a temporary period of a week. The assistant could help high achieving workers with administrative duties such as data entry, office organization, and answering telephone calls.

Give Away the Best Parking Spot

Give up your reserved parking space for a week. Let your best-performing employee take your spot.

Or simply pick the best parking spot available and designate it for the employee of the week or employee of the month. Having the privilege of parking in the prime company parking space is one incentive employees are likely to battle it out for!

Create a Wall of Fame

Dedicate a section of the office to being a wall of fame. Each month or even week, crown the employee who has outperformed his or her colleagues with the wall of fame title. Place a photo of this employee on the wall, accompanied by a message of gratitude.

Give Them a Promotion

Of course, theres nothing quite as effective in recognizing, appreciating and rewarding great work as offering a promotion. Ensuring there are career progression opportunities for members of staff is a key way to attract and retain talent in your workforce. Knowing a promotion could be in the pipeline is an effective way to keep staff on their toes!

In summary, pick one or a few of these employee recognition ideas. Youll soon become known as the employer that offers cool employee recognition programs. Simple recognitions are a low cost and creative way to build a loyal team and become known as an employer of choice in your area.

Does your small business recognize great team and high achievers? How do you show your appreciation and gratitude to employees that deserve recognition and thanks?
Every business owner knows that the odds are stacked against them when starting out; more than 50 percent of startups fail in their first four years.

When businesses do end up failing, the entrepreneur behind them is equally destroyed; that is, unless they were busy building their personal brand as well.

The Importance of Self-Branding

SMB owners must understand that personal branding far exceeds the desire to accumulate more wealth and actually translates into a multitude of benefits that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

Personal branding can help entrepreneurs become authorities in their field, separate from what their company offers. By becoming a public figure, business owners can develop new and fortuitous relationships and connections, recapture momentum if a business does fail, or even create entirely new businesses much faster.

People like Bill Gates and Tony Hsieh have created powerful personal brands that revolve around their personalities and values rather than their infamous corporate enterprises; this is part of what gives these men staying-power in the public eye.

As an entrepreneur, your best bet at establishing long-term career success is to shape and promote your own personal brand in tandem with your businesss identity.

If you are aching to become an authority in your niche, a thought leader, or otherwise notable individual, here five methods for bringing this dream to life.

Self-Branding Tips

Find Branding Master Mentors

One of the best ways to successfully achieve anything is by looking to those who have already achieved success; absorb their knowledge, learn their secrets, and apply it to your strategy.

One of the biggest misconceptions about mentors, however, is that these need to be people you have face-to-face interactions with and personally know.

While this certainly is ideal, mentors and mentor-mentee relationships come in many shapes and sizes. These people can be personal associates, but they can also be digital influencers, keynote speakers, or authors of books that you have reaped rewards from.

In a Huffington Post interview with Tai Lopez, one of todays most prolific and sought-out investors, entrepreneurs, and digital business influencers, he candidly proclaims that his fervent book-reading is what allowed him to tap some of the worlds greatest minds and gain mentorship, knowledge, and direction. These valuable tools allowed him to attain his massive success and build a robust personal brand.

The key is finding mentors who have successfully built strong personal brands and who resonate deeply with you; this will allow you to really internalize much of their teachings.

Find Your Social Niche

Its undeniable that social media is one of the most essential aspects of business and branding today  personal or otherwise.

Most entrepreneurs, however, rush into establishing a website, figuring out logos and branding elements, and making their mark as a thought leader.

Urgency is not your best friend when establishing your brand. Be intention, and focus on things like:

Which social media platforms best suits your style and interests

Where your audience lives in the social-sphere

After you have accomplished these objectives, start cranking out valuable content that will help your audience and provide obvious value. If you are a cook, start posting images of dishes on Instagram with the recipe as the description. If you are aiming to be an influencer in the realm of psychology, start catering to your audience with Facebook Live. Want to make how-to carpentry videos? Then YouTube is where you need to be.

After you start building your audience through valuable and pragmatic information, then you can start creating the actual elements of your brand. But finding your voice and your audience is the most powerful first step.

Create a Personal Website

Now its time for your digital zip code. Websites are a necessity for anyone who is cultivating their personal brand. Without a website, the internet controls your brand reputation as there is no central source of info when someone Googles your name. Without a definitive destination, bad press might be the first search result; this will surely turn off most would-be visitors.

Dont rely on social media to be your home; thats leased real estate. You dont own your image there, you are only borrowing that space to spread the word. Your website is your domain, literally; dont do this process without creating a rock solid web presence.

Whenever possible, create a website with a URL that is consistent with your full name (firstandlastname.com) so that when people search for you, it will be the first result.

See Also: Beef Up Customer Experience with These 4 Tips

On your site, be sure to include professional photos of yourself, a bio framing yourself as an industry expert, links to your personal brands social channels, and a link back to your company website.

Additionally, if you have any external articles or blogs youve written, link to these as well. You should have more content on your site than just some external links, but well get to that in a moment.

Since youre just starting out, you dont need to hire a development firm to build some A-1 destination; start by using a service like Wiseintro or Squarespace as they are quick, easy, affordable, and look amazing.

Provide Value through Content

In addition to the content you have been cranking out on social media, you are going to need to provide your website visitors with an abundance of valuable information as well.

This means that you need to implement a blog or vlog section to your site where you can build a portfolio of thought-leadership-type pieces that provides your audience with unique and pragmatic knowledge and tools. Be sure to share these materials across your social properties as well to drive additional traffic and engagement.

Additionally, to help give your audience something more substantial to chew on, implement a piece of specialized content like an eBook, premium checklist, or similar download. These can be given out for free in exchange for an email address. This way you can begin to build an email database of interested prospects for the next phase.

Remember, the ultimate goal of your site is to reinforce your personal brand while providing visitors with unparalleled value through content and other offerings.

Launch Your Product

To ensure that your personal brand does not just become an affiliate portal, develop your own products or services to sell to your audience.

The biggest thing that this will provide to your brand is credibility and credence; not money (though that is a nice perk).

For most personal brands, the best offerings to sell are knowledge. This could be books, speaking events, in-person or online courses, and similar ways of transmitting in-depth information.

As you begin to cultivate and refine your personal brand through content, recognition, and the natural evolutionary process, you will begin to develop new and exciting opportunities that unchain you from relying on the sole success of your company. Through this route, you can become a success in your own right, and find an entirely new career path that can lead to much more profitable and stimulating pursuits.
'Ravishing' is an understatement for Priyanka Chopra's look at the Miami premiere of her debut Hollywood film, Baywatch.

By India Today Web Desk: Priyanka Chopra has turned into quite the charmer, especially since she touched international borders, and gradually conquered the hearts of millions all over the world.

What Priyanka Chopra does even better, however, is make us go weak in the knees with the kind of looks she keeps pulling off like a boss. We were still reeling from her girl-boss looks from when she was in India recently, promoting Baywatch, and PeeCee decided to throw this look from the Miami premiere of Baywatch at us.

Picture courtesy: Instagram/priyankaxobsessed

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Just for the record, when a picture has Zac Efron and Dwayne The Rock Johnson, and you still decide to ogle at Priyanka instead, that's really saying something!

Priyanka wore this midnight-blue sequinned gown with a plunging neckline for the premiere of her debut Hollywood film. The way the dress wrapped her curves so perfectly was commendable, as was that thigh-slit she casually flaunted.

Picture courtesy: Instagram/priyankachopra

What's more, PeeCee decided to tie her hair in a simple pony, with mid-parting, and chose not to wear any baubles in the ears. And that's exactly what made the look classy. Had she paired even the tiniest of earring with that sequinned dress, it was sure to go a bit OTT (over the top). Trust PeeCee to keep things classy, always!

Picture courtesy: Instagram/ishusamar_live

Our only question is, how do you manage to pull off every public appearance with such ease, Priyanka?

--- ENDS ---
The typical angel investor has a portfolio of just seven companies, the American Angel Survey, an effort to gather information from nearly 1700 accredited investor angels, reveals. The 75th percentile is just 15 investments, and the maximum portfolio is only 106 investments.

The small portfolios of typical angel investors surprise me because numerous studies of angel investing show portfolios that size are too small to ensure that the investor will generate an acceptable financial return at minimal risk. For instance, Monte Carlo simulations of angel investment return data indicate that investors need to build a portfolio of more than 50 investments to have a greater than 90 percent probability of a two times return on investment. In this weeks column, I will try to explain why angel investors build small portfolios.

Why Angels Have Small Portfolios

Making Money Isnt Their Goal

Eric Ver Ploeg, a former venture capitalist, who now puts together startup investment syndicates on Angellist says, Most angel investors are investing for non-pecuniary reasons, so they rationally dont care about optimal portfolio sizing, he says.

Dave Lambert, a partner at Right Side Capital Management, a pre-seed stage investor, concurs. Most have some other utility factor that is more important to them, whether they are aware of it or not, he says. Some specifically want smaller, concentrated portfolios because they enjoy working closely with the entrepreneurs. Some specifically just want to invest locally so that they can give back to their community, he continues.

If investors are not trying to maximize their financial returns, then there is no reason for them to have large portfolios. Growing a portfolio is a way to remove risk, while generating a return. Lambert says, If you consider that most angels dont invest in a manner that maximizes their expected return, its not that surprising that even a smaller percentage operate in a manner that optimizes their risk/adjusted return.

They Dont Understand Statistics

Morris Wheeler, an investor with Drummond Road Capital says, most angels dont understand the concept of standard deviation. They think that if they put more money into fewer investments that they will have an opportunity to make more money. I cant tell you many times I have heard people say, if I only put $10,000 into an investment I will get so diluted over time that my investment will be worth nothing. They simply dont understand the difference between percentage dilution and value dilution.

Another experienced angel says, They are unaware of the Law of Large Numbers.

They Havent Got the Time

Wheeler offers a third reason for small angel portfolios: limited time. He says, most angels invest as a hobby. They dont have the pipeline to make that many investments [and] cant do the due diligence  [or] monitor that many investments.

Venture capitalist Tim Schigel says, People who enjoy working with startups  cannot possibly keep up with over 50 companies. They may actually enjoy getting their hands dirty with fewer companies.

Marianne Hudson of the Angel Capital Association explains, Most education Ive seen has also recommended building your portfolio over time, say one to three companies per year. Many  angels  are in the early stages of building their portfolios.

Time affects angel portfolio size in another way as well. Because time is limited, some angels find it better to focus on selecting the right start-ups rather than on finding more of them to invest in. As Ver Ploeg says, For an angel it is rational not to increase their portfolio size if doing so means spending less time evaluating and rejecting companies.

Angels Overestimate Their Ability to Pick Winners

Former public equities hedge fund manager turned early stage fund manager, Larry Bernstein says, Angel investing is just the most natural thing ever to bias otherwise smart people into overvaluing their own opinions on predicting the future. Many angels think they dont need a large portfolio because they know which new companies will succeed and which will not.

They Get Scared By Their Losses

An experienced angel offers another aspect of the psychology of angel investing  the horror of experiencing losses. He says, Lemons ripen faster than plums: Id guess that every serious angel I know recorded several losses prior to reaping their first positive exit. Many angels see the money they have lost on bad deals and decide not to make further angel investments.
Anti-Racism, USA  May 15, 2017  Mostafa Henaway

We are people! We are not illegal!  Kiwi Ilafonte

This past May 1st, across the United States and here in Quebec, the spirit of May Day was alive and well. Immigrant workers have given International Workers Day a new breath of fresh air since the historic mobilizations of a day without an immigrant in the United States in 2006. This year in the U.S., broad coalitions of migrant communities and trade unions took to the streets in solidarity with immigrant workers to resist Donald Trumps racist and xenophobic policies. In Montreal the Immigrant Workers Centre, community organizations, and trade unions marched in solidarity with precarious immigrant workers and the Fight for $15 campaign. The struggles of immigrant workers for migrant justice, against racism and broad workplace struggles that impact heavily immigrant workers for decent work and wages are critical for any renewal of working class politics in North America and beyond.

The world is still reeling as Donald Trump is turning his anti-immigrant rhetoric into reality, with a second attempt at implementing the ban

on immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, pushing forward the expansion of the wall between Mexico and the United States, and increased deportations. Migration has become one of the most profound issues of our time, shaping contemporary politics in the advanced capitalist states in Europe and North America. Not only in the United States, but in the first two months of 2017, 1,134 migrants crossed from the U.S. into Canada in harsh conditions in order to claim refugee status as a result of the crackdown on migrants in the USA. It is critical for the Left to put forward a clear position of solidarity with migrants and open borders at this juncture, not only in order to pose a challenge to the far rights xenophobic agenda but also for building a working class movement for more radical social transformation.

Analyzing Migration

Across the advanced capitalist states, a few sections of the broad left have currently taken positions on migration based on a game of catch-up to the right. These policies have unfortunately begun to have a significant impact on how the Left is analyzing the question of migration, as well more broadly for how it relates to the questions of class and to whom we should begin to re-orient our discourse in this current moment of disorientation.

Some sections of the Left seek to rebuild a lost connection to the rust belt working class, in particular states in the U.S., and de-industrialized regions in Canada, abandoned by the Left, thus rebuilding the weakening power of trade unions. As a result, the strategy of this section of the Left has been to present a more tame position of regulated migration, in order to reorient their demands toward such sections of the working class. Similarly, elements of the trade union movement seek a tightening of the labour market through restricting migration rather than organizing migrants and immigrant workers, due to their own inability to adapt their organizing strategies and forms to the current historical juncture. This only reinforces a false vision that pits migrants and immigrants against a narrow vision of the working class.

Such a view of the working class distorts our perception of how work has transformed, and of who is performing that work. To simply speak of a national working class is impossible; we need to think of the class in a true internationalist and local way, understanding the role migration plays. It is precisely at this moment that we need to be organizing more with immigrant and migrant workers, not simply to rebuild the labour movement, but more profoundly to create working class politics that can lead to radical transformation. To engage in organizing that can bring about solidarity in local communities to defend their neighbors; coworkers who face exploitation and deportation as a manner to frame how work has shifted. Why is there such profound migration, and how can they challenge their employers and racist policies by finding the local commonalities.

Interventions and Migrations

The massive wave of migration over recent years has its roots in the dispossession of people by the devastating impacts caused by global capitalism, and U.S. imperialism, which have their roots here in the Global North. A testament to this is the recent ban of migrants from seven states that the U.S. has actively attempted to destabilize, force regime change, or has occupied directly. Canadas role as an imperialist state has also fueled the destabilization of the Middle East, has contributed immensely to the creation of 60 million refugees by 2015  mainly displaced in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia. The U.S. is also pursuing the same strategy to shut the borders to Latin America, in particular to those devastated by NAFTA and displaced from their lands as a result of U.S. intervention in Central America.

A similar pattern has taken root with the role of Canadian capital in Central America. In Guatemala, for example, entire communities have been displaced violently from their lands and livelihoods with destructive mining projects on their territory. This displacement has fueled labour migration by over 5,000 Guatemalans in the agricultural program in Canada as a mechanism of development for rural indigenous communities in Guatemala who were originally displaced by Canadian capital. As journalist Juan Gonzalez describes

Latino migration to the U.S., you cannot understand the enormous Latino presence in the United States

unless you understand Americas role in Latin America, and in fact that the Latino presence in the country is the harvest of the empire.

Those that have become en masse displaced by U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism will have no refuge from its carnage. From the dangerous journey to El Norte to the death boats on the Mediterranean, migration has become the last desperate scream of humanity searching for a better future, making our solidarity and the opening of borders a must for the global working class.

Global migration has reached historic proportions, reaching 244 million people in 2015, according to the United Nations. The massive wave of migration by 2015 was a signal in terms of both the desperation of a global working class and the increasing inequalities produced by the expansion of global capital, as those whose collective wealth and resources have continued to be drained, accumulated and concentrated. A recent study has shown that from 1980 up to the present, the developing world has lost $16.3-trillion in capital flight to the Global North. Developing countries have paid $4.2-trillion in interest payments on international debt. This has resulted in those populations without state social services, decent work, as a result of structural adjustment, and the integration into global capitalism. The integration of the developing world into U.S.-led global capitalism did not lead to a trickle-down effect of wealth and prosperity on a global level, but has in reverse led to a profound trickle-up effect  and concentration of capital in particular states and regions across the globe. As capital becomes more mobile and seeks competitive advantage, this has had a great impact on local populations.

As capital flight generates unemployment and forces workers to migrate to seek work, at the same time generates the needs for workers in other regions. One of the largest flow of migration globally has been internal migration in China from rural regions into industrial hubs. Asia has also now become the second largest destination of migrants globally outside of Europe. As production chains become more global as a result of the compression of time to be able to move goods across the globe, has resulted in the need for greater low wage disposable workers in other regions. Shifting the nature of migration globally, already coupled with historical imbalances as a result of imperialism and uneven development maintaining particular migration corridors. The crisis of 2007/08 in the core countries resulted in push factors of new corridors such as African migration toward Brazil, and Asia. Thus as the power of capital globally strengthens and becomes more mobile it makes migration one of the major forms that workers have individually to cope with such capital flight, and uneven development under capitalism.

Is Global Migration Necessary for Global Capitalism?

One faulty assumption is that capitalists and conservative politicians are outright anti-migration. Trump had actually declared that his aim was to transform the U.S. immigration system into one modeled on Canadas immigration system, which is based on meeting the needs of capital and ensures that those who come through regulated means remain temporary, vulnerable and deportable at any given moment. Global elites, and states in the Global North have in fact been immensely supportive of global migration that suits the needs of capital. Migration has not only provided mass pools of cheap exploitable labour across the globe but has also shored up entire economies in the Global South. In essence it has become the last escape valve that has prolonged the crisis in the Global South, through large financial flows from migrants in the form of remittances. Labour migration is the largest percentage of migration globally. According to the ILO, there are an estimated 150 million migrant workers in 2015 worldwide. The overwhelming majority of labour migration takes place in the form of migrant worker programs, either under trade agreements, through the International Organization of Migration, or Guest Worker programs. These migration regimes allow for mass, temporary migration that suits the need of capital rather than workers.

States have increasingly opted for such models, based on temporary labour migration where workers are tied to a single employer without the freedom of movement. This can be seen as a globalization of the Kafala system. The Kafala system is a sponsor-based system of migration where the employer sponsors the migrant worker for the visa. This creates in essence a privatized form of migration where the employer has the power over the migrant to determine if they are allowed to remain in the host country. The kafala system is associated with temporary migrant workers in the Gulf Cooperation Countries, forcing workers into situations with single employer visas, without fundamental worker rights, and with deportation being the consequence of challenging their work conditions. This model is not simply a phenomenon in the Gulf, but has been expanded as a model of regulated migration globally.

Canada has become an example of this system for other states to replicate  migration has become regulated and stratified in two forms: one for wealthier migrants, and skilled workers, who have access to citizenship and permanent residence under the point system; and the other form, extreme exploitation without the ability to become permanent residents under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada. The program has brought over 300,000 workers on temporary work visas without the right of permanent residency, tied to a single employer and thus constrained in their capacity to defend their basic rights for fear of facing deportation. This form of stratified migration is now upheld by the World Bank as an effective model to ensure continuing flow of remittances from the Global North to the South, while guaranteeing a supply of cheap labour that can be quickly accessed and disposed of. Ensuring that workers remain temporary in the countries to which they migrate ensures that they remit more to their countries of origin. This has become a central aspect of capitalist development in the Global South.

The failure of neoliberal policies (free trade, privatization, and freedom of movement for capital) in the Global South has led to a new discourse by the World Bank  promoting ideas of sustainable development aid; not eliminating debt and allowing countries to pursue sovereign forms of economic development, but repackaging neoliberal policies through aid. To no ones surprise, the mantra of sustainable development also became an epic failure.

The World Bank has since promoted what it sees as the only safety valve left to governments and capitalists in some zones of the Global South to release mounting pressure over unemployment, low value and low-paid work in global supply chains, and lack of state services as a result of economic restructuring  exporting, not commodities, but populations!

Multi-lateral coordination between the UN, the EU, and the IMF through the Forum of Global Migration and Development, the World Bank has moved to promote and expand regulated migration as a mechanism for development, further locking certain zones in the Global South into exploitative neoliberal capitalism. By 2015, the remittances of migrants to developing countries had reached an estimated $601-billion. Without such remittances back to the Global South countries permitting them to purchase commodities from the Global North, they would not meet their international debt obligations, and peoples ability to survive would be in peril. Further, remittances and migration become the only means left for Global South populations to secure services, such as health and education, that were previously provided for publically but have now become privatized. Entire economies (such as that of the Philippines and Egypt) are now built around providing export labour.

The Philippines, considered one of the great hopefuls of American-led globalization, although moving labour intensive industries to the Philippines has not improved conditions of poverty for workers there. This led to an increase of its labour export policy, which has led to sending 20 per cent of its workforce abroad. The Philippines has become dependent on remittances which account for 10 per cent of its GDP. Other states such as Egypt have pursued similar strategies, to shore up their economies. Egyptian migrants fill the fisheries of Greece, the agricultural sector in Cyprus, and construction in the Arab world. Egypt too was considered a darling of the World Bank with growth rates at 5 to 6 per cent during the early 2000s. Remittances from Egyptian migrants alone were equivalent to the revenue of the Suez canal, or 5 per cent of the GDP. Not only are the immediate remittances crucial for foreign currency reserves, but also for replacing state services such as welfare, and education, as those in poverty rely on remittances of family members who are sent as workers abroad.

Remittances have become an increasingly important lifeline for developing countries. According to the World Bank, developing countries need to leverage remittances in order to gain access to international capital markets due to the counter cyclical nature of remittance flows. This has been the particular strategy proposed by World Bank economist Dilip Ratha. According to Ratha, [r]emittances can improve a countrys creditworthiness and thereby enhance its access to international capital markets. Hard currency remittances, properly accounted, can significantly improve country risk rating. This has only reinforced countries in the Global South to pursue labour export programs in order to have steady access to capital markets. This only benefits corporations in the Global North and South, instead of eliminating international debt, countries in the Global South can seek new loans to continue to pay their unjust debt obligations to international lenders. Labour migration has become a win-win for global capitalism  it has allowed countries in the Global South a mechanism to continue to integrate into global markets, avoid crisis, and maintain imports, but at the same time giving countries in the Global North unprecedented amounts of cheap exploitable labour.

Migration and Class in the Global North

Immigrants and migrant workers have been at the fault lines of global capitalism  they are at the heart of the global economy as expressed with such clarity by journalist Michael Grabell around migrant workers in the U.S. and the rise of the logistics industry. The people here are not day labourers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of Americas largest companies  Walmart, Macys, Nike, Frito-Lay They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Beyond this, immigrant workers are concentrated in industries that cannot be off shored, such as: agriculture, food-processing, services, and logistics, where these workers face the same conditions as they would in the Global South. As conditions facing all workers become more precarious, immigrant and migrant workers become increasingly vulnerable facing lower-wages, precarious conditions, as temporary agency workers, as day labourers, and as a result of being undocumented and without having trade union representation. Despite this, they have organized against the odds, self-organizing against unjust laws, and employers. Organizing not only to defend their own labour rights, but for the working class as a whole.

In the United States immigrant workers brought back to life a militant tradition to May Day as witnessed by the historic mass mobilizations, in 2006 on the day without an immigrant where a million people mobilized in the streets of Los Angeles and mobilizations across the United States. In France the sans papier actions in the Paris region in 2008 under the banner we work here, we live here, we stay here migrant workers organized wild cat strikes, and occupations of restaurants to demand regularization. In Canada immigrants have been central to broad based working class movements such as the fight for $15 in Canada.

Migrant and immigrant workers have been forming new models of worker organizations along class lines, which has opened up the possibilities of going beyond business unionism. From the creation of hundreds of workers centres across the U.S. and in Canada, despite the contradictions and limits, migrant and immigrant workers continue to self-organize. Immigrants have formed their own unions on industrial lines, such as the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, taxi workers have organized in Toronto to build new types of organization, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain which has organized migrant workers who are cleaners in London, and large networks such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in the USA. These examples of worker self-organization and a renewed labour movement by immigrant workers have been central to giving hope for a renewal of working-class politics.

The industrial action by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance to refuse to go to JFK airport on the eve of the implementation of Trumps first immigration ban  was the very first political industrial action by workers against Trump and his policies.

The industrial action by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance to refuse to go to JFK airport on the eve of the implementation of Trumps first immigration ban despite the action being limited was the very first political industrial action by workers against Trump and his policies. This is the kind of struggle and organization that will rebuild the Left and where we need to concentrate our forces, if we truly want to move from protest to power. But that means a Left that takes a serious effort to relate to such struggles.

Under Trump, as capital becomes more mobile and more power is given to finance through deregulation, and borders become increasingly tightened  the call for open borders is not simply a humanitarian demand or one that may seem simply an impossible one, it is very much a necessary one in our moment, and at its heart a working-class demand. That is if our conception of working class is a truly international one, and we aim to root our struggles with all of those who are dispossessed by global capital from their land, and their livelihoods. Where we can be the most effective now is not to call for regulated migration but to actually call for open borders, and to be vigorous in our support for migrant workers in their organizing, not just against employers but their struggles for immigration status, and freedom of movement. As a Left, we also need to find the commonalities in terms of their struggles with those having their livelihoods displaced, whether it be in the rust belts in the U.S., or those having their livelihoods displaced in Mexico, the Philippines, or Syria. They all have had their livelihoods and dignity displaced by the same common enemy  global capitalism and imperialism. This is where we can build the common struggle against the tensions, and build working-class struggles based on solidarity and internationalism. We must, as the Left, call for freedom of movement for people, not for capital. 

Mostafa Henaway is a long time organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, and was a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), and the Toronto Coalition of Concerned Taxi Drivers.
When ex-minister and ex-judicial official Stefan Harabin claimed someone tried to kill him, a newspaper created an experiment to verify his accusations.

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One year after the alleged assassination attempt aimed at former justice minister and former head of the Supreme Court and the Judicial Council, Stefan Harabin, bare wires are still hanging over the desk meant for the accused in the disciplinary panels trial room of the Supreme Court. Since the alleged attack, nobody has bothered to install a new lamp.

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Beginning in 2017, the National Criminal Agency started dealing with the case, investigating it as an attempt at premeditated murder. The lamp cover fell on the spot where Harabin had sat shortly before, during a break in the disciplinary proceeding against him. He immediately reported the incident as a murder attempt. Apart from other claims, he also accused Interior Minister Robert Kalinak of the Smer party: Did Kalinak have a motive to eliminate me in a sophisticated way, thanks to a pre-arranged accident? Harabin asked the General Prosecutor Jaromir Ciznar to days later in a letter criticising the General Prosecutors Office for not starting a criminal prosecution.

The glass lamp cover which fell weighs less than one third of a kilogram.

Experiment

Police have not commented on the case, as it in the course of investigation. Harabin revealed, however, that the investigation ordered expert evidence recently.

Investigators will have to investigate if it is even possible to kill a person with a lamp cover, spokesman of Police Presidium Martin Waldl told Sme. In such cases, a so-called investigation experiment is usually done. In artificially arranged conditions, experts check whether the event could have taken place in the way claimed by the injured person. Also, new facts important for criminal prosecution are inquired into.

The Sme daily tried to simulate this investigation experiment  which will be done, with all probability, also by an expert addressed by the investigator. In their test, the newspaper tried to determine how serious an injury could be caused by the cover if it fell on somebodys head from two-and-a-half meters.

When studying possible head injury and damage, first the force with which a lamp cover would hit the top of the head must be calculated. Data and theoretical calculation suggest that the fall of the lamp cover would not suffice to seriously injure anyones head.

Peter Markos of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of the Comenius University points, however, to many other factors that could impact the result. If the lamp has a sharp tip in the bottom part, it could break the head, he opined for the daily.

Moreover, the material on which the lamp falls has its influence on the result, too. But even if the experiment was made with a board instead of a solid floor, the force would not be sufficient, by far, to seriously damage the skull. However, scratches and minor skin wounds caused by shards could not be avoided.

Apart from a skull fracture, another threat in such an accident is a concussion. The time of impact was very short  three thousandths of a second - which is a factor in considering potential harm, too. A short impulse is less critical than a longer one.

Exploring intentions

Another thing necessary to be proven during the investigation is whether it was possible to commit this accident as a crime in practice: i.e. whether the cover can be fastened so that it get loose in a certain moment and fall off the lamp. "I can imagine that the cover falls by itself; some glasses do not fit quite tightly to the lamp itself, and after some time, one or more of the clamps can unscrew, Marek Letko of the Mopntaze Svietidiel company pointed out.

Theoretically, it is possible to fasten the cover so that it falls after some time. Letko says that some lamps have metal bases  and if the bulb is too strong, the metal expands and in a certain point, the lamp cover can get loose.

However, the chance that someone could set the glass cover deliberately in a way to make it fall in a pre-arranged moment is very improbable, according to the expert on installing lights.
The opposition pointed out that the completion date for the highway has changed a number of times.

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Transport Minister Arpad Ersek (appointed by the coalition partner, Most-Hid party) said the highway between Bratislava and Kosice could by finished by 2025, or 2026, on the public RTVS political programme Sobotne Dialogy (Saturday Dialogues) on May 13.

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Opposition MP Eduard Heger (OLaNO-NOVA), who also appeared on the show, reminded Ersek that while a 2020 deadline for completing the highway is included in the Government Manifesto, a deadline of 2023 was mentioned recently.

Ten landowners are blocking the construction of the Bratislava ring-road, minister responded. "Theres a need to say that weve already bought up 99.5 percent of all plots of land that should form part of the R7 expressway and D4 highway," Ersek pointed out. "As many as 11,000 contracts have already been signed. However, there are ten people with whom were unable to agree, as their demands are unacceptable for us with regard to contracts that have already been signed. For example, most people received 40 per square metre, while the aforementioned ten owners want 120 per square metre," the minister said. He also defended the need for legislative changes concerning land expropriation for highway construction that are currently discussed within a fast-track legislative procedure in parliament.

Heger claimed that the state is paying too much for the land, as it is buying land as construction plots when arable land is mainly involved. He noted that the land should have been bought up by the end of 2015, anyway.

Unnecessary chaos alleged

"Chaos is emerging from the Transport Ministry, reminding me of the turmoil with energy bills that Slovakia experienced in January," stressed the opposition MP, adding that the ministry should take responsibility for the chaos.

The land that is being purchased for the Bratislava bypass is made up of construction plots, as the authorities are issuing construction permits for it, Ersek maintains, adding that he is unable to guarantee that the governments amendment to the law on one-off extraordinary measures for preparing some highway sections would not contradict the Constitution.

Nevertheless, the ministry tasked lawyers who participated in creating the amendment with preparing a document that would eventually be acceptable for the Constitutional Court and would not violate peoples ownership rights.

A lack of money for large investments, mainly those in the road and rail networks after EU funds are exhausted, is the reason why changes are required in the way that the debt brake is set, transport minister stated.

On the other hand, Heger argued that money must be sought where it can be found. He recommended that Ersek reduce preparatory work on other highway sections in Slovakia, which would bring savings of around 1.5 billion. Let's limit construction to important sections for which the money will be released, Heger added.
After an extreme thunderstorm and hailstorm hit a huge part of eastern Slovakia in May 2015, a new one hit the city of Presov recently.

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Two years ago, on May 6, 2015, a storm caused enormous damage not just in Presov but also in the Poprad valley, Levoca, Kosice, part of the Upper Zemplin region and area close to Trebisov, the Korzar Presov regional newspaper wrote on May 15.

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This time, the supercell appeared on May 12 and damaged mostly the metropolis area of the Saris region  i.e. Presov city  and its close vicinity.

This time, it arrived from the Levoca Hills under whose foot it had formed, according to the Slovak Hydro-meteorological Institute (SHMU); and from there, it continued to the east and south-east.

"Close to Sabinov, it already showed several features typical for a supercell, meteorologist Miroslav Singer of SHMU told Korzar. It typically brings intense precipitation, large hail, and strong gusty wind. Supercells are marked by considerable deviations in motion compared to other storms, the expert said, adding that supercells are not frequent in Slovakia, and this one was deviating southwards, later hitting Presov  where it brought strong rainfall (13 mm in 10 minutes, or 35.5 mm in 2 hours) and huge hail (with a diameter of cca up to 3 cm).

Some areas were flooded, while the road to Surdok was completely washed away. Hail  connected with supercells  mostly damaged vegetation.

video //www.sme.sk/vp/35673/

A supercell differs from other storms also by its deep, persistently rotating updraft; thus, it has a mesocyclone, although the rotation may not be visible when looking at the cloud itself.

The persistently rotating updraft enables its longevity, which can be several hours, without being a part of a bigger complex of storms.

The establishing and appearance of such a storm cannot be predicted, Miroslav Singer pointed out for Korzar, adding that thus, it is very difficult to predict where exactly it will strike. This was true also for the previous supercell which hit the east of Slovakia two years ago.
Slovak Ambassador to Greece, Peter Michalko, should become the European union ambassador to Moldova, the Politico website informed in mid-May.

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High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, Federica Mogherini, nominated 43 new ambassadors to EU representations worldwide.

The appointments, which now require the approval of national governments, involve the rotation of top diplomats in nearly one-third of the EUs 139 delegations around the world. The appointments are concentrated in Latin America and Africa, and include five G20 countries: Russia, Canada, Mexico, Australia and Argentina.

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The appointees are a mix of current EU diplomats, national diplomats and EU high-flyers from other policy areas. Fourteen of the 43 nominees are women, and 14 are existing EU ambassadors, Politico wrote.

Michalko has been the Slovak ambassador in Greece since 2013, the SITA newswire wrote. Between 2008 and 2009, he was the advisor of a special EU envoy for Moldova. At the Slovak Embassy in Athens, he was deputy of the head of office from 2002 to 2006. Then, he was deputy of the political advisor of the commander-in-chief of KFOR until 2007. At the Slovak Foreign Ministry, he was head of the department of countries of south-eastern Europe and between 2011 and 2012, he was head of the political section.
Economy Minister Peter Ziga attends major meeting on the project in Beijing.

A 'Golden Bridge of Silk Road' structure outside the National Convention Center, the venue which held the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in Beijing. (Source: AP/TASR)

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Ambitious investments in transport and trade projects and modern maritime and land infrastructure to connect Asia, Europe and Africa, imitating the ancient Silk Road, have been discussed in Beijing at a meeting of senior officials from more than 100 countries, with 30 presidents and prime ministers. Slovakia is represented by Slovak Economy Minister Peter Ziga.

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The meeting was opened by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who announced an investment of $124 billion in the project called One Belt, One Road, which involves major reconstruction and modernisation efforts in transport infrastructure, including railways, transhipment points and ports.

The project has been backed by senior figures such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Czech President Milos Zeman and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Slovakia has had a long-term interest in this major investment plan, mainly in terms of investments in rail transport, including transhipment points and other Chinese investment activities.

Its a historic opportunity, viewed as the project of the century, said Ziga as cited by the TASR. Everything indicates that the Chinese side and other important states such as Russia have a strong interest in launching a new Silk Road. Even though the details still havent been released, it seems that the question is actually only whether the project will take place with us or without us.

Talks with the Chinese on the issue should continue soon, in line with a concept for developing Slovak-Chinese relations approved by the Slovak Cabinet last month.

Planned extension of the broad-gauge rail line

A plan to extend the broad-gauge rail line from eastern Slovakia to Vienna, to enable the smoother transport of goods from China via Russia and the Ukraine has been on the table in Slovakia for several years but so far even a feasibility study for the project, estimated at 6 billion, has not been completed.

Certainly it is possible to build one logistics centre near Kosice where the existing broad-gauge rail line from Russia now ends, Ziga told the public broadcaster RTVS on May 14. And of course, we also have a memorandum of cooperation between four countries in which we talk about extending the broad-gauge rail line maybe even to Austria.

Read also:

Read also: The saga of broad-gauge rail line continues Read more

Peter Balaz from the University of Economics in Bratislava is sceptical about extending the broad-gauge rail line pointing to problems that such a project might encounter in Slovakia, TASR reported. He gives, as an example, the building of the ring road around Bratislava by a consortium of companies led by the Spanish firm, Cintra. The project is late as the state has failed to purchase all the land under the future D4 highway and the R7 dual carriageway and hand it over to the consortium.

Balaz estimated that the extension of the broad-gauge rail line would thus last several years. The question also is whether the Chinese would actually be interested in it, as their southern arm of the railway line from China will end in Budapest.

Why should they spend billions of euros on such a project? asks Balaz, adding that Slovakia has not tried hard enough to win the Chinese interest.
The first written mentions of butchers in the territory of Slovakia date back to the 13th century.

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However, this does not mean that meat had not been processed here earlier. Before butchers appeared, meat was processed in family households, and this self-sufficiency remained for a long time, especially in the countryside. In towns and cities, butchery was established quite quickly as a distinctive profession.

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During the 15th century, butchers started to also deal with livestock, which elevated them to the more well-off classes of craftsmen. The craft was profitable and butchers' guilds mushroomed; initially mostly in mining towns full of miners who were always hungry.

The promised land for stock traders used to be the region of Spis. In 1770, for example, there were only 21 stock traders in Bratislava, but there were 27 of them in Kezmarok, and in Levoca 30.

The butchers in Spisske Podhradie were famous as masters of smoking meat. Their Spisske parky / Zips Frankfurters, well-known even todays, were sought-after in the whole of Great Hungary and were also exported to other European countries.

What did a traditional butchery workshop look like? Usually, it was composed of three rooms: in the first, animals were slaughtered and the meat processed, in the second, it was smoked, and in the third it was sold. In smaller towns and villages, there were also pigsties built adjacent to the workshop, where fattened pigs awaited their end.

In this photo from the 1920s, we see a butcher from the Small Carpathian town of Modra at work. Behind the meat chunks hung on the hook, owners of the late pig pose proudly. They were surely warmed also by the wine which was drunk abundantly during pig slaughterings, as well as by the idea that their larder would be filled with tasty meat for months to come.
The affair has led to increased tensions.

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If anybody claims that letters addressed to members of parliament have been read, he is nothing but a liar, said Bela Bugar, Deputy Speaker of Parliament and leader of the ruling coalition party Most-Hid during a discussion programme, V politike (In Politics) on the TA3 news channel on May 14.

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If we wanted to read any letters, methods are available to us that would mean that you wouldnt even realise that the letters had been opened, so lets not be silly, said Bugar, ruling out that anything like this has actually happened.

Bugar said that the criticism concerning the opening of letters for MPs results from the fact that the opposition is making life hell for the coalition, as it promised to do.

Very bad tensions are being created here, as if everything that the governing coalition is doing was bad, he said.

Read also:

Read also: Speaker of Parliament denies letter opening accusations Read more

The deputy speaker of parliament declined to predict whether the issue of opposition MP Igor Matovics (OLaNO-NOVA) mandate will be discussed in parliament in June.

The question is whether we will raise the issue at all, we will see, said Bugar. Nevertheless, I do not think that it makes any sense to deal with Mr Matovic.

Bugar is of the opinion that Matovic is paying for his own style of politics, with the hatred that he has spread returning to him now like a boomerang. He does not find Matovics decision to stop attending parliamentary sessions after receiving death threats from an unknown man to be a solution to the situation.

It is not a solution to weaken the opposition by not going to work, said Bugar.
Only a few companies were infected by the dangerous ramsonware in Slovakia.

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On Monday May 15, the Nitra Faculty Hospital was still dealing with the aftermath of a massive malware attack from Friday afternoon. Only around half of its computers were in working order on Monday morning, while the rest were being checked and gradually brought back into operation, hospital spokesperson Tatiana Timkova told the TASR newswire on the same day.

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However, the computer blackout has not jeopardised the treatment of patients, stressed Timkova. Nonetheless, patients had to be prepared for somewhat longer waiting times due to the complications with the computers.

No sensitive data was leaked during the attack.

"Some damage has been caused, however, so we're considering filing a criminal complaint against an unknown perpetrator," said Timkova as cited by TASR. "We're consulting with a lawyer about this option at the moment."

The screens of the computers at the Nitra Faculty Hospital suddenly turned red shortly after noon on Friday, May 12.

"An order was released immediately to shut down all computers and the situation was tackled right away," said Timkova. "The malware was identified and is still being removed."

Only a few in Slovakia

In Slovakia only a few companies were infected by the ransomware Wannacry, informed Zuzana Hosalova, spokesperson of the security software company Eset. She stressed that companies are not obliged to report such cases but as of May 2018 companies in the EU member countries will be obliged to report each leakage of any personal data, including those caused by malware.

The malware that hit computers in dozens of countries worldwide on May 12 is a later version of the ransomware that occured in February 2017.

An infection usually gets into companies through the financial, personnel or marketing departments, as their workers are used to getting e-mails from unknown addresses. After infection, the ransomware encodes the content of the device and asks for a ransom, stated Hosalova.

The ransom of 300 dollars is relatively low," said Hosalova, adding that paying the ransom does not always mean getting the code to unlock the data. If the device was already encoded it is hard to get the data back."

The security experts search for mistakes in the code to get the decoding key, summed up Hosalova, adding that the decryptolocker to Wannacry is not available world-wide.

The Wannacry malware especially infects computers that use the Windows XP operational system that is no longer supported by Microsoft. Some companies and organisations are still using Windows XP for financial reasons or because it is too complicated and sometimes almost technically impossible to change to another one.

Microsoft released updates for supported versions of its operational system to protect it against this threat in March.
A Pakistani intruder was shot dead by 120 battalion BSF at Bharial post near pillar number 02 around 4:30 am.

By India Today Web Desk: An infiltration bid was foiled by the Border Security Force (BSF) in Gurdaspur, Punjab today morning.

A Pakistani intruder was shot dead by the 120 battalion BSF at Bharial post near pillar number 02 around 4:30 am.

The intruder has been identified as a 60-year-old woman and the incident was confirmed by BSF in an official statement.

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The infiltration bid comes amidst the regular ceasefire violations by Pakistan along the LoC.

Earlier on Saturday, Jammu Police confirmed that they had arrested five persons and busted a LeT module, following the May 7 attack on a police station on Tanta Doda district.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will be holding public hearings today on the case of death sentence given by Pakistan to the alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav.

According to reports, Pakistani intelligence agency - Inter-State Intelligence (ISI) is trying to infiltrate boys of 10 to 15 years age group in the guise of inadvertent crossers for collecting specific information related to security forces before infiltration by hardcore terrorists.

Indian security forces are maintaining severe caution in keeping a check on the cross border infiltrations, especially after the Krishna Ghatti incident, where two Indian soldiers were mutilated by Pakistan Army.

Also Read:

Major who tied Kashmiri civilian to jeep given clean chit, Army brass believes he saved lives

Pakistan's ceasefire violations: Mass evacuation begins on border

Jammu and Kashmir: 2 LeT terrorists, involved in attack on Army camp in Kupwara on April 26, killed in Handwara

--- ENDS ---
For Hamor it was the last peak out of 14 eight-thousanders in the region.

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Slovak climbers Peter Hamor, 52, and Michal Sabovcik, 30, successfully climbed the eight-thousander Dhaulagiri (8,161 metres) in the Himalayas on May 15. Sabovcik himself reported their achievement on social networks. The climbers already returned to the base camp.

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With this climb, Hamor completed the Crown of the Himalayas, the list of all 14 eight-thousanders in the region. For Sabovcik, it was his first. Hamor had planned to climbed Dhaulagiri in 2009 but that attempt failed and Hamor's co-climber died during the ascent.

On Sunday May 14, Hamor and Sabovcik reached the height of 7,250 metres where they overnighted. The next day they continued onwards and reached the peak. Their steps could be watched online via GPS.

Hamors project, called Himalayaadventure XXVII started on March 10 flying from Bratislava to Kathmandu in Nepal. The climbers reached basecamp at a height of 4,500 metres on April 13, however the climb was complicated by the weather and at the C2 camp they lost one tent. The project will last until June 2, when the climbers will return to Slovakia.

Peter Hamor from Poprad conquered his first eight-thousander in 1998 when he climbed Mount Everest (8,848 metres). Over the following years he reached the peaks of another thirteen eight-thousanders.

Dhaulagiri was climbed for the first time in 1960 by the members of a Swiss-Austrian expedition. Later in 1988 Slovak Zoltan Demjan with two Kazakhs reached the peak.
Michael, the 20-year-old student of Harward university has been for almost 40 countries, but what he saw in Armenia, has impressed him a lot. The Chinese student has learned about Armenia from his 80-year-old Grandfather, who has studied in Russia in 1950s. But the decision to come and see Armenia he made after meeting his Armenian friend at the University.

I later discovered my university had an internship program to work in Armenia for 2 months at the Central Bank of Armenia, and I went because it looked amazing from the photos and articles I found online. I felt that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I decided to go!- Michael tells NEWS.am STYLE.

The young traveller has shared his Armenian impressions by posting videos through the internet. He understands that people surrounding him know little about Armenia, that's why he desided to reveal Armenia through his videos. Michael is very impressed by our history and the fact that Armenian people try their bests to mentain their culture.

I am very fortunate to have been able to travel to over 40 countries. I decided to show Armenia in my videos because it was different from anything else Ive ever experienced. I feel that most people in my community have never seen Armenia, so I wanted to share my great experiences with friends and family back home,-he says adding. Similar to China, Armenia has thousands years of history. From my perspective, Armenia has held onto its ancient culture and history very well, which isnt always the case for many other countries. The people I met in Armenia understand their shared culture and history, and preserve the historic relics around the country.

Michael is especially touched by the hospitability of Armenian people. I had great first impressions about Armenia because of the kindness of the people. Many of them had never seen a Chinese person like myself, but they were very welcoming in trying to help me have a great stay in the country. That was my favorite part about Armenia. I also enjoyed eating Armenian barbecue.

However, is there anything that Michael disliked about Armenia? Here what he answers. One thing particularly noticeable about Armenia is the number of cigarette smokers. Cigarette smoking can be damaging to ones health and has negative effects on surrounding people. I am currently working on bringing more electronic cigarettes into the country, which should improve the health of current smokers.

By Shushan Shatikyan, Syune Arakelyan

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The incident came to light on Friday, after the minor's mother taking notice of her deteriorating condition took her to a hospital, where doctors confirmed her pregnancy and the sexual assault.

By India Today Web Desk: Just days after Haryana's Rohtak district made news for a harrowing rape and murder case of a 23-year-old girl, news of a 10-year-old impregnated by her step-father has shocked one and all .

According to an NDTV report, the minor is five months pregnant after being allegedly raped by her step-father, who is also her paternal uncle.

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The incident came to light on Friday, after her mother taking notice of her deteriorating condition took her to a hospital, where doctors confirmed her pregnancy and the sexual assault.

Doctors at the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) confirmed the pregnancy and said that the victim is in a serious condition.

The minor's step-father has been arrested after her mother filed a police complaint.

The 10-year-old narrated the series of incidents and said her step-father threatened her with dire consequences, if she told anyone.

The doctors will decide today whether to abort her foetus, as termination of pregnancy is not allowed after 20 weeks since it is not considered safe.

ROHTAK HORROR REDUX

A young girl was abducted in Rohtak, taken to a secluded place and allegedly gangraped by seven persons. Her mutilated body was found on May 11.

Police were stunned to see the state of the body. The victim had been brutally raped and body bore several injury marks.

Sharp-edged objects had been inserted into the private parts of the victim. Her head had been smashed. A vehicle had been run over her.

The perpetrators of the crime tried to disfigure her to hide the identity of the victim. The forensic team that conducted the investigation said that the victim was gang raped .

Also read: Rohtak's Nirbhaya: Girl gangraped, brutalised, murdered and body mutilated

Also read: Rohtak gangrape and murder: Post-mortem finds victim's food pipe missing, Rs 10.5 lakh assistance to kin

--- ENDS ---
John McAfee

Johnny Depp has made a living out of playing bizarre fictional characters: Edward Scissorhands, Captain Jack Sparrow, the Mad Hatter. What separates his next enigmatic role from all the others, however, is that its completely real.

Depp will play cybersecurity magnate John McAfee in an upcoming dark comedy, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The film, called King of the Jungle, will be based on a 2012 Wired story that chronicled McAfees rise as the creator of the antivirus software that still bears his name to his startling descent into paranoia in the rainforest of Belize.

After losing much of his fortune in the 2008 financial crisis, McAfee moved to Belize, where he built a private compound near a set of Mayan ruins and started a mysterious antibiotics research laboratory. He eventually fled the country after police wanted to question him about the murder of his neighbor.

He was caught in Guatemala and, after claiming to have faked several heart attacks in order to avoid being taken back to Belize, McAfee was deported to the United States, where he remains today.

The Wired story by reporter Joshua Davis is packed with wild, cinematic anecdotes, like when Belizes Gang Suppression Unit raided McAfees jungle compound, or how McAfee thinks he may still be on a psychedelic drug trip he began in 1969. Or, most terrifying of all, how he insisted on a game of Russian roulette with Davis during one of their interviews.

While living in Belize, McAfee, who kept various teenaged girlfriends, set up his own private militia to investigate Carmelita, a nearby village he believed was rampant with drug traffickers (a claim thats never been corroborated). He grew increasingly paranoid that the Belizean government and pharmaceutical competitors were watching him. When the countrys Gang Suppression Unit raided his property on suspicion he was operating a meth lab, they found no such lab, but they did find an arsenal of weapons. They also couldnt identify what was in the hundreds of bottles of chemicals found throughout the compound.

Story continues

A few months later, now staying at an island villa he owned, McAfee became a person of interest in the murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull, another American expatriate. When police arrived, McAfee buried himself in his yard to avoid detection. Belizean prime minister Dean Barrow called the former software tycoon bonkers, and asked that he turn himself in for questioning. McAfee was never charged for the murder.

While his story is certainly filled with darkly comic moments, the filmand Depps performancehave a difficult task ahead striking the right balance between farce and tragedy. King of the Jungle will be directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the director-writer team behind Crazy, Stupid, Love and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

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Reuters

PARIS (Reuters) -TotalEnergies announced plans on Tuesday to reward its French clients who reduce their electricity consumption, following government pressure to do more to help consumers tackle rising inflation and higher household bills. The French oil major, which is also a player in the retail energy market on its home turf, said it would award a bonus to those who manage to lower their consumption by at least 5% this winter compared to one year before. France, along with many other European countries, is trying to find ways to cut down on general energy consumption, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
By Aidan Lewis and Steve Scherer TRIPOLI/AQUARIUS RESCUE SHIP (Reuters) - Italy gave the Libyan coast guard four repaired patrol boats on Monday to beef up Libya's efforts to stop people smuggling, but the support worries humanitarian groups operating rescue ships near the Libyan coast. Italy and the European Union promised in February to spend millions of euros to help the Tripoli government upgrade its coast guard fleet, and some 90 crew have been trained by the EU. "These are capable officials and sailors who from this point on can contribute to a double operation: the first is the control of Libyan waters, which is highly important for the stability of this country," Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said as he presented the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli with the vessels. "The second is to contribute with other European countries and Italy to the security of the central Mediterranean, with a capacity to intervene against human traffickers and with preventative action against terrorism." Another six repaired patrol boats will be delivered "in the coming weeks", Minniti said. But Libyan officials say they need far more equipment than the vessels being delivered by Italy, none of which is new. Smugglers in Libya have packed hundreds of thousands of migrants attempting to reach Europe onto unsafe boats over the past four years, and thousands have died trying to make the crossing. And humanitarian groups say that at sea, Libyan coast guards have put the rescue crews and migrants at risk in several incidents. The groups are concerned not only for their own safety but for that of migrants trapped in Libya. Private aid vessels normally cruise in international waters about 20 miles off the coast of a country where militias and smuggling networks wield more power than the authorities. Rescued migrants are brought to Italy because Libya is not considered a safe harbour. But increased capacity by the Libyan coast guard means more refugees and migrants will be returned to the lawless state. Even centres nominally controlled by government authorities hold migrants captive in inhumane conditions. Elsewhere they are often extorted, abused, murdered and even bought and sold. At sea, Libyan coast guards can become a threat to rescue crews and put migrants at risk, the humanitarian groups say. The latest such incident occurred last week. A Libyan coast guard cutter sped across the bow of the Sea Watch 2 rescue ship, which had spotted a migrant boat and was on its way to assist. The Libyans instead picked up almost 500 migrants and returned them to Libya. On board the Aquarius, a rescue ship now patrolling off the coast of Libya, the crew performs drills in case of an emergency lock down. If the coast guard or an unknown boat approaches without making radio contact, an alarm sounds. The crew scurries to a secure room, which is sealed shut after a roll call. It is not only the armed coast guard that concerns the rescue boats, but also additional suffering for migrants. Those returned last week were sent to a detention centre in Tripoli. "These are human warehouses completely filled with people ... like sardines in a tin," said Annemarie Loof of Doctors without Borders, which operates the Aquarius rescue ship along with SOS Mediterranee. Loof visited Libyan detention centres last month. "This is now celebrated as a success in Europe. The Libyan coast guard was trained and look, they're doing their job," she told Reuters aboard the Aquarius. "But these 500 people are still in Libya. They still want to escape Libya. They're just going to come back on a different boat, on a different day." (Story refiles to clarify attribution in second and third paragraphs.) (Editing by Larry King)
MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines has been forced to turn to China and Russia for arms supplies because of conditions imposed by its long-time ally and former colonial ruler the United States, Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Monday. The United States has provided its defence treaty ally with most of its major hardware, like ships, fighters, helicopters and small arms, but the Philippines was now looking to China and Russia for drones, planes, fast boats and rifles to fight Maoist-led rebels and Islamist militants behind an unrelenting spree of piracy and kidnapping, he said. Lorenzana said acquiring weapons and equipment from the United States had become difficult because the process was slow and there were conditions tied to sales. "That's why we are discouraged from getting from them because of these conditions," Lorenzana told reporters in Beijing. "We need airplanes, we need drones, we need fast boats," he said. "We need them in the south so that we can deter kidnappings and bring about development." Weapons procurements could also be complicated by bipartisan attempts by some U.S. lawmakers to ban the transfer of arms to the Philippines that could be used in a war on drugs that has killed thousands of Filipinos, and has been condemned by Western governments. At the sidelines of a Belt and Road summit in Beijing, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday met several Chinese state-owned corporations, including a defence contractor blacklisted by Washington for selling to Iran items that were banned under U.S. laws. Duterte, who is working hard to strengthen ties with China, has admitted he has a grudge against the United States and complained at what he says is useless U.S. "hand-me-down" merchandise. Lorenzana confirmed China's Poly Group Corporation and Poly Technologies were among companies which called on the firebrand leader, and the defence ministry would send a technical team to look at the Chinese equipment. China has offered to donate $14 million worth of military hardware to the Philippines, plus a soft loan for $500 million in Chinese arms. He said the Philippines had only planned to use China's money if the military's five-year 100 billion peso (1.55 billion pounds) budget for modernisation was insufficient. He is due to sign a defence agreement with his Russian counterpart next week for possible purchases of weapons and drones. The Philippines is also acquiring drones from Israel. (Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Martin Petty and Nick Macfie)
With less than a week to go until Iranians vote for their next president, incumbent Hassan Rouhani has been working hard on the campaign trail as he seeks a second term, rallying supporters to oppose his hardline opponents.

On Sunday, Rouhani touched down in the western Lorestan province before addressing thousand of supporters, many of them clad in purple, at the university in Khorramabad.

This footage was shared by one of Rouhanis supporters. He said crowds were shouting slogans demanding the release of reformist politicians Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who have been held under house arrest since 2011. Both stood in the 2009 election that triggered mass protests over allegations of vote-rigging.

Iranians will cast their ballots on May 19, with a second round of voting to take place two weeks later if none of the candidates secure an absolute majority. Credit: Twitter/@sasanalem via Storyful
Russian President Vladimir Putin played the piano on Sunday at Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping's residence while waiting to meet him.

By AP: Russian President Vladimir Putin, known for his passion for the outdoors, showed off his softer side during a visit to China when he sat down to play the piano on Sunday.

Putin is in Beijing on a state visit to discuss a $1 trillion infrastructure plan that strives to revive the ancient Silk Road.

After speaking at the summit in the morning, Putin headed to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at his residence.

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Putin is habitually late for meetings, but this time he was the one who was made to wait, Russian news agencies said.

WHEN PUTIN PLAYED SOME TUNES

So, Putin played some songs on Xi's piano.

Russian state television showed excerpts of at least two tunes he played - "Moscow Windows" and "City on the Free Neva" - both Soviet classics.

Putin has demonstrated his music talents before. In 2010, he took the stage at a charity concert with a jazz band to play and sing "Blueberry Hills."

But in recent years, Putin - occupied with the annexation of Crimea, the crisis in eastern Ukraine and Russia's role in Syria - preferred to demonstrate his virile side in Kremlin-distributed pictures of him hunting and fishing.

Also read: 'Nervous' India can't stop neigbours backing OBOR: Chinese media

Also read: Russia, Turkey agree to support safe-zones in war-torn Syria

--- ENDS ---
By Benjamin Weir SYDNEY (Reuters) - Prison officers in Papua New Guinea shot and killed 17 inmates involved in a mass prison break, local media reported on Monday, sparking calls for an investigation into overcrowded jails in the South Pacific nation where Australia detains asylum seekers. Fifty escapees were still on the run from the Buimo prison in the city of Lae on Papua New Guinea's north coast, police said on their official Facebook page, warning the public that an increase in car jackings and armed robberies was likely. "These are dangerous individuals," Lae Metropolitan Police Command said. "Police anticipate an increase in serious crimes in the city." Local media reported than more than 70 prisoners attempted to escape from the Buimo prison, nearly 320 km (200 miles) north of the capital Port Moresby, on Friday. The Post Courier and The National newspapers reported that 17 prisoners were shot dead, three captured, and 57 were still at large. It was the third mass breakout from Buimo in three years. International human rights groups have repeatedly called for an inquiry into PNG jails, citing concerns about overcrowding, limited access to medical treatment and delays in court proceedings. "Unfortunately these incidents, tragic as they are, happen all too frequently in Papua New Guinea as there is poor accountability with police and security officers," Kate Schuetze, Amnesty International's Pacific Researcher, told Reuters by telephone. In February last year, 11 prisoners were killed in an attempted breakout at Buimo after 30 prisoners attacked guards. Fifty-five men escaped from the prison in a breakout in 2015 and two years earlier one detainee was shot dead when 44 fled the same facility in another mass escape. Australia maintains an asylum-seeker detention centre on PNG's Manus Island, in accordance with its policy of not allowing people who attempt to reach Australia by boat to settle in the country. The Manus camp, one of two South Pacific island asylum seeker detention centres funded by Australia, has been criticised by human right groups and the United Nations for cramp conditions, inadequate medical facilities and violence. The PNG Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the camp was illegal and should close, forcing Australia to confirm it would shut down the camp by the end of 2017. Australia struck a deal with former U.S. President Barack Obama to take some detainees who were deemed refugees, an agreement criticised by President Donald Trump as a "dumb deal" when he took office earlier this year. (Reporting by Benjamin Weir; Editing by Jane Wardell and Michael Perry)
The University of North Georgias (UNG) Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree is designed to serve students who are currently employed in a public-service organization or are contemplating a new career in public and human services. Effective fall 2017, the program will be fully online to accommodate the growing number of working professionals seeking to advance their careers.

Graduates with an MPA work in a variety of professional fields, including public policy, public affairs, public health administration, or criminal justice administration.

"I was honored to be the second graduate to complete the MPA program in 1996, and it prepared me for the monumental task of running Lumpkin County as the sole county commissioner for four years," state Sen. Steve Gooch said. "The academic benefits of the MPA program at UNG better prepared me for the difficult task that was required to be a public official through courses such as public budgeting, organizational behavior and ethics in public service. It provided the academic foundation to further my career in public service in my leadership role in the state senate. The MPA program will benefit all levels of government by developing a stronger, more qualified work force."

Since its inception in 1995, the MPA program has prepared students for administration in public and private partnership work, such as between state governments and non-profits. With the switch to an online format, the program will be able to support a greater number of students as well as students who work full-time and cannot attend traditional classes on campus. Also, the virtual classrooms provide a means for students across the nation and globe to participate, lending a more diverse perspective to class discussions and projects.

"We are very excited about the opportunity to reach so many more students in this new format," said Dr. Dlynn Williams, head of UNG's Department of Political Science & International Affairs. "This will greatly increase the number of graduates we can produce; we've already seen proof of online success with our Master of Arts in International Affairs program. We really want to reach throughout the north Georgia region and into north metro Atlanta and create a cohort that can answer public administration demands in these areas."

Heather Bryan, who earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from UNG in 2013, is currently in the MPA program while working as a teaching assistant, and anticipates graduating in spring 2018. Though she has enjoyed the face-to-face format thus far, she is looking forward to the transition to online.

"Going online will open the program up to a much larger demographic, and I expect this will offer a greater potential for horizon-broadening student interactions," Bryan said. "Working with people from different walks of life is critical to public administration, and I think this aspect of the program will grow by leaps and bounds. This will only be helped by student collaboration, which tends to be more common in online formats."

UNG now offers 15 fully online programs: one doctorate - pending approval by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on College, four master's degrees, one bachelor's degree, three associate programs, three teaching certificate endorsements, and three certificate programs.

Among the fully online programs is the newly approved Doctor of Education degree with a major in higher education leadership and practice, the second doctoral program available at the university.
Watch out Texas, here comes New Mexico.

Albuquerque-based Tractor Brewing is expanding operations into El Paso. Because of laws concerning brewery expansion across state lines, the move will involve sales only, not a new location, said Skye Devore, co-owner of Tractor Brewing.

(Co-owner) David (Hargis) and I spent a lot of time in Texas as kids, so it seemed like a natural step for us, said Devore.

There were other, more business-minded reasons as well.

Skye points out that Texas, at least the El Paso market, has a mentality and style that Tractor excels at. She said Texas often prefers the lighter beers, unlike Colorado which likes darker or more bitter beers.

Another difference between Colorado and Texas, said Devore, is that Colorado already has a booming microbrew scene. El Paso has like four (microbrews) as opposed to like 20 here in Albuquerque.

Tractor will initially be offering Milk Mustachio Stout, Farmers Tan Red Ale, New Mexico Lager, Almanac India Pale Ale and Hay Maker Honey Wheat to the El Paso area. It will also offer two of its cider flavors, Delicious Red Hard Apple Cider and Berry Cider.

Distribution will be handled by L&F Distributors, which already handles Tractors distribution in southeast New Mexico.

Rollout for the new market is expected to be the first week of June.

In keeping with the axiom that everything is bigger in Texas, Tractor will also begin moving from a 12-ounce can to a 16-ounce can starting later this month.

The new cans allow us to be much more agile. Devore said.

Tractor was able to find a company that offers small-quantity orders of the larger can, so instead of just doing a few beers, we can include seasonals. It just made sense, Devore said.

Tractor Brewing currently has two Albuquerque locations at 118 Tulane SE and 1800 4th NW, but last week announced it had signed a lease for a third location at Central and Tramway. An opening date for that location will be announced soon, according to Devore.

Pueblo mugs

More mugs are coming! More mugs are coming!

The popular pueblo-style Starbucks mugs offered by the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center will be out in an entirely new series later this year. These Series Two mugs will feature new artists and new designs.

For Series Two, were selecting (artists) by going on our database, looking at images and feeling who could best represent (us) and what properties do they have, said Ira Wilson, lead buyer for the IPCC gift shop, Shumakolowa Native Arts.

Wilson said the new series is already being designed.

Last year, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center shook the Starbucks designer mug collector world with the introduction of five cups featuring the work of five prominent local Native American artists. In April, the IPCC introduced a line of glossy ceramic mugs with the same patterns.

Since December of 2016, the IPCC has sold more than 8,000 plastic Starbucks cups bringing in nearly $200,000. It has sold 400 of the ceramic mugs, bringing in over $10,000.

The first series sold out quickly and required the IPCC to create a waiting list for purchase.

Hopefully there will be a line out the door again like last time, said Wilson.

For Wilson and the IPCC, these are more than just coffee cups. At the New Mexico True Travel Tank event last week, Wilson spoke about efforts to connect with Native American young people.

The goal is to appeal to those young people through something generational and new. Since the IPCC owns and operates the Starbucks across from the Cultural Center, it seemed like a natural fit to Wilson.

We are always trying to teach our young kids about our culture  Kids are coming in and purchasing these cups. And they are (saying) this is amazing. What is this water bird about? What are these patterns? And we can teach them. And they get that education. Now, we are again perpetuating our traditions and our culture. Its cool, Wilson said.

The original prototypes, which were made with traditional Native American methods, are displayed at the Starbucks across from the IPCC. Copies of the mugs and cups are only available online and at Shumakolowa Native Arts located inside the center. The mugs and cups both cost $25.00.

For more information or to order the cups, visit www.indianpueblo.org/visit/shopping/.

Smiths introduces Clicklist

Smiths is adapting to the changing consumer environment by introducing Clicklist, an online ordering service that allows for same-day curbside pickup.

The introduction of ClickList to the New Mexico market illustrates the evolution of customers embracing technology to enhance their shopping experiences, states a Smiths news release.

Smiths Clicklist, which was announced last year, will offer 40,000 items to customers through an online order form. The program comes with a $4.95 service charge that Smiths will waive for a customers first three orders.

The kickoff of the program was announced Wednesday at the 4700 Tramway NE location and is now offered at three locations  6125 4th NW and 4700 Tramway NE in Albuquerque, and 1000 Rio Rancho SE in Rio Rancho.

We are certain this online shopping service will offer busy families, seniors, people with disabilities and other shoppers an easier and more convenient way to grocery shop, said Marsha Gilford, Smiths vice president of public affairs.

Smiths parent company, Krogers, launched the service in 2015 and Smiths has already brought it to Nevada and Utah.

To use Clicklist, visit www.smithsfoodanddrug.com/ClickList.

In other news 

 QBriks, a new Albuquerque-based convenience store, will be opening in East Downtown and will offer local items like Rebel Donuts and ChocolateDude alongside staples like Coke and Doritos.

The new store could open as early as today, according to founder Brian Gage. It will be located at 300 Broadway NE. A second location is planned for 2018, according to the company website.

 Five Guys Burgers, the popular national eatery is set to open a new location at the Northeast corner of the Coronado Center parking lot, according to the company website. Five Guys currently has two Albuquerque locations and one in Rio Rancho.

 Bobs Burgers, a local burger joint, will open a new location at 1945 Juan Tabo NE, the former Christees Restaurant. This will be Bobs Burgers 11th location in Albuquerque.

 Buffett King on Academy and San Mateo has reopened after a long closure for renovations.

 Allen Sigmon Group and Sundram Builders have broken ground on the Heritage Farms and Interpretive Trail project at NMSU.

The project will include a 125-room Courtyard by Marriott and several retail pads. Retailers have not yet signed leases, according to David Miles, a representative for Allen Sigmon, but there has been talk of including a winery and microbrewery.

Completion is roughly set for the end of 2018.
The New Mexico School for the Blind and Visually Impaired looks for innovative curricula and partnerships to help its students, families and employees succeed.

During a recent visit to the Albuquerque campus, employees described a work environment where the mission is awesome; a warm, kind atmosphere focused on student progress; an opportunity to change lives for the better; and colleagues ready and willing to guide and teach me.

For these reasons and many others, the school, with facilities in Alamogordo and Albuquerque, is ranked the No. 1 Top Workplace in the midsize category for 2017.

We are very clear about who we are at the outset, said Linda Lyle, school superintendent of the hiring and recruitment process. Not only is she looking for top instructors, therapists and nursing staff, but a passion for serving the clients ages preschool to high school. The majority of the students have complete blindness, while a small number have impaired vision. Some also have developmental delays.

We are looking for people of like minds, said Lyle. We want them to see the potential, she added, summing up the key goal that drives the team of 240 employees, some of whom are also blind or visually impaired. Employees serve about 800 students through the residential-oriented Alamogordo campus, the preschool and kindergarten in Albuquerque and outreach programs.

Many staff members get their first exposure to the school doing internships, externships or clinical practices.

Seeing potential encompasses a larger team  parents, other helping agencies and the New Mexico Legislature, which created the school in 1903.

In Albuquerque, the smiles begin at the front desk where Miss Tiffany, also known as Tiffany Munera, said the children, ages 3 to 6, light up her day when they arrive each morning. They make their way to classrooms, the playground, or the popular Miss Tiffanys work station by using canes, walkers or wheelchairs.

The building, at 801 Stephen Moody SE, has unique design features. Ceilings and walls provide tactile, acoustic and visual cues.

Innovation is embedded into what we do, said Lyle, talking about a pilot program that is teaching prison inmates Braille and will lead to them transcribing textbooks for the students. The inmates have been training for more than a year. Lyle said the recidivism rate at similar programs elsewhere in the U.S. is 2 percent.

Lyle, who is retiring in June after 22 years at the helm, said her leaving is bittersweet. But shes confident the next generation of leaders will bring their own good ideas and practices to the school.

What Ive enjoyed most has been finding a community of learners that share my passion for students, vision impairment, helping these kids learn and believing after all these years that we have made a difference and changed some lives for the better because of our work together, Lyle said.

We celebrate miracles every day, said Lyle of a workplace that focuses on seeing the possibilities and not disabilities.
Santa Ana Star Casino has graced the list of New Mexicos Top Workplaces for five consecutive years, this year earning the No. 1 spot among the top five large companies for 2017.

Its an honor that casino management and staff now strive for as a team every year, said Human Resources Director James Stevens.

Its helped unify us, Stevens said. Its become our goal to stay strong and keep trying for the No. 1 spot year after year.

Employees say its that team mentality that makes Santa Ana such a great place to work, a place where everyone feels support and respect no matter their position or the department they work in.

Its refreshing that we are supported by upper management and our ideas are heard, one employee said. We are appreciated. We treat each other with respect and that starts from the top.

Many said being a part of Santa Ana feels like having a second family.

When you find yourself in a difficult situation, there are other people who will support you and help you succeed using their experiences, said another employee. With all of us working toward a common goal, it makes you feel like anything is possible.

The casinos executive leadership sees those values as part of its operational paradigm, one that emphasizes the contributions of every team member and that casts each persons role as important and necessary, according to a statement from the casino.

Thats hard to do in a large corporation like Santa Ana, which employs 606 people full time. Apart from the gambling venue  which includes 1,400 slot machines, 26 table games, and video poker  the casino also offers three restaurants, Starlight Bowling and a performance center.

It offers a full slate of benefits, including medical, vision, dental, life and accidental life insurance, plus a 401(k) profit-sharing plan for both full- and part-time workers. All team members also get a free meal for each full shift, access to a fitness program that pays a $10 incentive per month for participants, eight paid holidays and two weeks of paid time off for maternity leave.

The casinos central mission is to help Santa Ana Pueblo, with hiring preference given to tribal members to provide more employment opportunities in an environment sensitive to their cultural needs. Santa Ana members get paid administrative leave for events and observances, helping to encourage and preserve tribal culture.

I am helping make a difference for the Santa Ana Pueblo and my family, said one employee.

I am part of a bigger vision for the growth and betterment of the pueblo, said another.

Camaraderie is built into the hiring process, with care, courtesy, attitude, respect and enthusiasm emphasized as core values, Stevenson said. And management and staff celebrate those values with many team member appreciation events and get-togethers throughout the year.

We focus on friendly personalities as a good cultural fit, Stevens said. Our people make all the difference.
So, first the good news: More companies than ever have made our Top Workplaces list.

Now, the better news: We didnt change anything, they did. Forty-five companies out of 75 surveyed had scores high enough to make that list. Thats five more than last year, even though participation was about the same.

This years list includes 17 new companies, but much of the list looks pretty familiar. Nine businesses and organizations have made the list all five years that weve worked with WorkplaceDynamics to find the best workplaces in New Mexico: Childrens Choice Child Care Services Inc.; Edward Jones; FootPrints Home Care Inc.; Indian Pueblo Cultural Center/Indian Pueblos Marketing Inc.; Mark Pardo SalonSpa; Nusenda Credit Union; Santa Ana Star Casino; Souder, Miller & Associates; and T-Mobile US. And another five  The Range; Car Crafters; Nor-Lea General Hospital; ERA Sellers & Buyers Real Estate; and Bradbury Stamm Construction Inc.  have appeared four years.

Maintaining that kind of consistency isnt necessarily easy, but Santa Ana Human Resources Director James Stevens says its worth the effort.

Its helped unify us, he told Journal staff writer Kevin Robinson-Avila. Its become our goal to stay strong and keep trying for the No. 1 spot year after year.

The 75 organizations that agreed to participate in the survey process this year employ 30,996 people in New Mexico. Of those employees who received questionnaires, 16,313 responded, either on paper or online.

A variety of factors make up a healthy workplace, which WorkplaceDynamics CEO Doug Claffey explains in a column later in this section. You can also read about what goes into a top workplace from employees and managers at this years top companies.

Finally, Top Workplaces is more than a popularity contest. WorkplaceDynamics employs a strict methodology to ensure the results have meaning. That, too, is explained in this years coverage.

The front of this weeks Business Outlook is devoted to celebrating these organizations success. Youll find most of our regular Outlook features in the pages following the Top Workplaces coverage.
Governing by referendum might be good politics, but its bad policy. Its just not a good idea to circumvent the elected body that voters have entrusted to represent them.

Sadly, that issue has for now been relegated to the category of academic debate in Albuquerque, where it is way too easy to get an initiative on the ballot. So attention now turns to the mechanics of how this works in the context of a city election.

In that regard, state District Judge Alan Malott and now the state Court of Appeals have made important rulings that mean voters will have the opportunity to read the proposed ordinance they are voting on, and if they can get through it, gain a feel for its scope and potential far-reaching impact.

The benign-sounding Healthy Workforce Ordinance is set to appear on the Oct. 10 city election ballot, barring a successful attempt by several business groups to knock it off on the argument it is unconstitutional logrolling that combines two separate issues into one for purposes of voting. Opponents also argue the referendum isnt allowed under state home-rule provisions that govern Albuquerque.

While paid sick leave is a reasonable policy discussion to have  and the City Council would be an appropriate venue to vet proposals, weigh unintended consequences and draft legally sound legislation  the proposed ordinance is seven pages chock-full of unreasonable requirements ranging from coverage of temporary workers to onerous record-keeping requirements. It would eviscerate existing PTO policies now in effect at many companies, and, incredibly, it would enact a presumption of retaliation for any employment action that followed an employees use of sick time.

The ordinance would apply to full-time, part-time and temporary workers at any business with a physical presence in Albuquerque, could force some small businesses to simply close up shop and provide others with a reason to employ as few people as possible.

Finally, it would preclude any future City Council from reducing any of the benefits. Need to clean up the mess? It has to go back to the voters.

Is it any wonder supporters prefer that a sanitized summary go on the ballot rather than all seven pages of micromanaging and meddling?

Malott had ruled earlier the City Charter required the full ordinance to be published on the ballot. Several activist groups including Healthy Workforce ABQ and the OLE Education Fund asked the Court of Appeals to overrule Malott and instead allow a summary. The Court of Appeals declined and also refused a request to forward the question to the state Supreme Court.

If Albuquerque is going to run on referendum, voters at least deserve a fighting chance at knowing whats fueling those decisions. These court decisions allow that to happen.

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.
The proposed charter amendment to mandate about 375 more sworn officers for the Albuquerque Police Department is on life support after a City Council committee earlier this month voted to forward it to the full council with a recommendation that it not be approved.

Voting for the do not pass recommendation were Councilors Trudy Jones, Pat Davis and Brad Winter. Councilor Don Harris, one of the amendments sponsors, was the lone dissenting vote.

Harris said he plans to reintroduce some form of the proposed charter amendment as an ordinance, saying he thinks its important for the city to commit to fully staffing APD.

The original proposal, introduced by Harris and Councilor Ken Sanchez, would have required the city to have 25 sworn police officers for every 11,500 residents, in effect mandating a police force of about 1,215 officers. That would put Albuquerque in line with cities like Denver and Nashville, Tenn.

As of late last month, APD had 839 officers. The department is budgeted for 1,000 officers, but the city has had difficulty filling the vacant positions.

The proposed charter amendment has failed to gain traction since it was unveiled two weeks ago. Among the concerns raised have been that the staffing model proposed is arbitrary and that policy decisions such as staffing levels at APD shouldnt be included in a city charter.

At the Finance and Government Operations Committee meeting May 8, Harris tried to substitute the charter amendment to merely require that the city make fully staffing APD its priority every year. But Harris motion died for lack of a second.

Jones said that while the proposed substitute was much, much better than what had been proposed originally, she did not feel it belonged in the charter because it does nothing in reality.

Its a suggestion that the first priority shall be to fully staff the Albuquerque Police Department, she said. I believe that thats a priority every year in our budget. We just havent been able to reach (the desired staffing levels).

Davis agreed, saying that the council for the past two years has fully funded the initiative to build up APDs ranks.

Harris said that since the Legislature hasnt adopted return-to-work legislation, which would allow retired officers to return to work while still collecting their pensions, the city should look at options, such as significantly boosting what it pays its officers to attract police from other agencies.

He also argued that if a mandate to fully staff the police department were in the city charter, the city would stop doing things like tying up gross receipts tax operating revenue on capital projects.

For three years, weve been at 800-plus (officers), and the Department of Justice says 1,000 is a passing grade, Harris said. I dont think were passing. I think we have to treat this as an urgent situation.  Im really just disappointed that members of this council do not want to give the public an opportunity to weigh in.

At least six of the citys nine councilors need to vote for a charter amendment to get it on the ballot.
WASHINGTON  It was implausible that FBI Director James Comey was fired in May 2017 for actions committed in July 2016  the rationale contained in the memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

It was implausible that Comey was fired by Donald Trump for having been too tough on Hillary Clinton, as when, at that July news conference, he publicly recited her various email misdeeds despite recommending against prosecution.

It was implausible that Trump fired Comey for, among other things, reopening the Clinton investigation 11 days before the election, something that at the time Trump praised as a sign of Comeys guts that had brought back his reputation.

It was implausible that Trump, a man notorious for being swayed by close and loyal personal advisers, fired Comey on the recommendation of a sub-Cabinet official whom Trump hardly knew and whod been on the job all of two weeks.

It was implausible that Trump found Rosensteins arguments so urgently persuasive that he acted immediately  so precipitously, in fact, that Comey learned of his own firing from TVs that happened to be playing behind him.

These implausibilities were obvious within seconds of Comeys firing and the administrations immediate attempt to pin it all on the Rosenstein memo. That was pure spin. So why in reality did Trump fire Comey?

Admittedly, Comey had to go. The cliche is that if youve infuriated both sides, it means you must be doing something right. Sometimes, however, it means you must be doing everything wrong.

Over the last year, Comey has been repeatedly wrong. Not, in my view, out of malice or partisanship  although his self-righteousness about his own probity does occasionally grate. He was in an unprecedented situation with unpalatable choices. Never in American presidential history had a major party nominated a candidate under official FBI investigation  turns out the Trump campaign was under investigation as well. Which makes the normal injunction that FBI directors not interfere in elections facile and impossible to follow. Any course of action  disclosure or silence, commission or omission  carried unavoidable electoral consequences.

Comey had to make up the rules as he went along. He did. That was not his downfall. His downfall was making up contradictory, illogical rules, such as the July 5 non-indictment indictment of Clinton.

A series of these and Comey became anathema to both Democrats and Republicans. Clinton blamed her loss on two people. One of them was Comey.

And theres the puzzle. There was ample bipartisan sentiment for letting Comey go. And there was ample time from Election Day on to do so. A simple talk, a gold watch, a friendly farewell, a Comey resignation to allow the new president to pick the new director. No fanfare, no rancor.

True, this became more difficult after March 20 when Comey revealed that the FBI was investigating the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. Difficult but not impossible. For example, just last week Comey had committed an egregious factual error about the Huma Abedin emails that the FBI had to abjectly walk back in a written memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Here was an opportunity for a graceful exit: Comey regrets the mistake and notes that some of the difficult decisions he had previously made necessarily cost him the confidence of various parties. Time for a clean slate. Add the usual boilerplate about not wanting to be a distraction at such a crucial time. Awkward perhaps, but still dignified and amicable.

Instead we got this  a political ax murder, brutal even by Washington standards. Or even Roman standards. Where was the vein-opening knife and the warm bath? No final meeting, no letter of resignation, no presidential thanks, no cordial parting. Instead, a blindsided Comey ends up in a live-streamed O.J. Bronco ride, bolting from Los Angeles to be flown, defrocked, back to Washington.

Why? Trump had become increasingly agitated with the Russia-election investigation and Comeys very public part in it. If Trump thought this would kill the inquiry and the story, or perhaps even just derail it somewhat, hes made the blunder of the decade. Whacking Comey has brought more critical attention to the Russia story than anything imaginable. It wont stop the FBI investigation. And the confirmation hearings for a successor will become a nationally televised forum for collusion allegations, which until now have remained a scandal in search of a crime.

So why did he do it? Now we know: The king asked whether no one would rid him of this troublesome priest and got so impatient he did it himself.
By Press Trust of India: Ranchi, May 15 (PTI) Union Chemicals and Fertilisers Minister Ananth Kumar today said Jharkhand governments Sakhi Mandal scheme is a role model for the country.

He said the states Yojana Banao Abhiayan, digging of ponds and strengthening of panchayat secretariat will also prove to be mile stones in its development.

Saying that other states should follow such schemes, Kumar said Jharkhand is the first state where the Central Institute of Plastics Engineering and Technology (CIPET) is being inaugurated, according to an official release.

advertisement

The session will start in the next two months and 1,500 students will get vocational training, he said.

Kumar said this has been possible due to the Chief Ministers efforts as he wants to make Jharkhand the capital of plastic engineering and technology.

On the request of the state government, three more CIPETs in Deoghar, Jamshedpur and Palamau will be opened, he said.

The Union Minister said the Centre has approved Rs 6,000 crore for revival of the Sindri fertiliser factory in Jharkhand and one lakh metric tonne urea will be produced there.

Under the Jan Aushadhi Pariyojana (generic medicine), Jharkhand will have 100 such centres, he said.

Kumar said the importance of plastic has grown and 10 lakh people are required in this sector, but only two lakh skilled people are there.

Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das said it is an important day for the state as the unemployed youth will get skilled and become self-sustenance.

There is a shortage of skilled workers in the country, which has only 10 per cent skilled hands compared to South Korea (96 per cent), Japan (80 per cent), Germany (75 per cent) and England (86 per cent), the release said.

Stating that 80 industrial units are working in the plastic sector, Das said the CIPET trained students can assist in those units as well as in other sectors.

A plastic park is being built on 169 acres of land at Devipur in Deoghar, Das said. PTI PVR DKB

--- ENDS ---
Sandia National Laboratories student intern Julian A. Vigil and researcher Timothy N. Lambert have earned a 2017 American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Inorganic Chemistry Award for Undergraduate Research.

Vigils research career began as a junior in high school when he participated in an eight-week student-intern research program with Lambert. During that Sandia program, called STAR (Science, Technology and Research), Vigil quickly learned to perform rotating-disk electrode studies. His results were significant enough to make him a co-author of a technical paper with Lambert and a university researcher.

Vigil has repaid Sandia not only by mentoring newer students, but also by contributing to and then leading the development of a number of promising nanoscale inorganic electrocatalysts for oxygen electrochemistry or water splitting. In addition to serving as models to understand the process of catalysis in systems of interest, Vigils materials also have demonstrated excellent electrocatalytic activity and stability, and hence could provide a more cost-effective solution than the precious metals that are the current commercial standards.

Vigil not only synthesized materials, evaluated their electrocatalytic performance and performed background literature searches, he eventually  while still an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico  wrote the main draft of five of his seven peer-reviewed publications in Electroanalysis, Journal of Physical Chemistry C, Chemical Communications, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, RSC Advances, Journal of Materials Chemistry A, and Journal of Physical Chemistry C. Vigil was first author on three of the papers. Two more manuscripts, all with Lambert, are in preparation. The paper from his high school years has been cited at least 33 times; his undergraduate work has received 61 additional citations.

Meanwhile, Lambert has mentored Vigil to become a productive independent researcher in the laboratory and has educated him on professional aspects of science. These include how to present at national meetings, the importance of aiding in peer review, maintaining proper laboratory Environment Safety and Health documentation, keeping chemical inventories and more.

Vigil was designated a 2016 Barry Goldwater Scholar based on the strength of his academic talents applied to the comprehensive educational research program developed by Lambert.

The tailoring of our program to fit Julians part-time schedule is helping him to succeed and develop as a scientist, Lambert said.

The joint ACS award was presented earlier last month at the organizations national meeting in San Francisco. As part of his award, Vigil gave a talk during the Inorganic Division-sponsored Frontiers in Undergraduate Research symposium. Vigils talk is titled Advances in Manganese- and Cobalt-based Nanostructures for Oxygen/Hydrogen Electrocatalysis.

Vigil also has received a Churchill Scholarship, named in honor of the late British prime minister. Each year, the program chooses 14 students to study at the University of Cambridge in England for a one-year masters degree program.

Vigil received a financial stipend and a plaque; Lambert received a plaque for permanent display at Sandia.
Consider this a public service announcement.

Yes, another one.

Because you need it.

In story after story, column after column, the Journal has explained how to obtain a Real ID-compliant drivers license or ID card without causing yourself  and the rest of us waiting behind you  real pain.

But if my recent visits to the New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division are any indication, not enough of you have been paying attention.

So let me nag you again, because I care. And because youre making it rough for the rest of us.

First, lets recap. The Real ID Act, passed by Congress in 2005, standardizes what is required in every state to obtain a drivers license or ID card to protect us against terrorism, though many argue it does nothing but inflict more terror into our already unpleasant pilgrimages to the MVD.

Thats because under the Real ID Act we are required to present a specific set of documents  four in all  to prove who we are and where we come from.

Call it exasperating existentialism.

New Mexico has been issuing Real ID drivers licenses and cards since Nov. 14 and is among 25 states in compliance with the federal act; 21 states have asked for extensions and four states are not yet in the compliance ballpark. Such IDs are necessary if you plan to fly on a commercial airline or enter a federal facility or nuclear power plant, as one does.

(If you dont expect to do any of those things, or you are an undocumented immigrant, you might consider obtaining a driving authorization card, which requires fewer forms of identification.)

But seven months after its rollout, many New Mexicans havent a clue what Real ID requires, judging from the chatter, confusion and complaints apparent at MVD offices these days.

Ive spent some time there lately, and Ive heard it all  the shock and surprise, the indignation and anger, the groans from those who came informed and prepared but have to languish in line anyway behind those who need a crash course on what they should have brought with them.

Waiting has always been the way of things at most MVD offices. But thanks to the crush caused by Real ID, even private enterprises such as MVD Express and MVDNow  where you spend more money for spending less time waiting  have longer waits of late.

I can only imagine that working behind an MVD counter these days is something akin to slowly pulling out each fingernail after each fingernail is scraped across a chalkboard.

So bless those kind clerks who patiently counsel clients on why a landline phone bill is acceptable as proof of residency but a cellphone bill is not  never mind that more than half of all U.S. households rely only on cellphone service.

Bless them for showing compassion for the women with birth certificates or Social Security cards bearing names different than their married or divorced names.

Bless them for listening endlessly to the young customers cuss out the system because they have no mortgage, checking account or credit cards.

Last Saturday, I listened as one smiling clerk calmly worked with a young man who brought in a stack of papers, slapped them on the counter and asked her to go through them to pick what she wanted so he could get his drivers license.

Twenty minutes later, she had whittled down his pile of documents, almost none of which was useful (handy tip: Dave and Busters Power Cards are not acceptable) and came up with a plan of what he should bring in.

She never stopped smiling.

All her efforts were for naught. As it turns out, the mans drivers license had previously been revoked over a drunken driving arrest, and he had yet to install an ignition interlock device in his car as required.

He also did not have a car.

So one last time, people: Know before you go, so the going goes faster  for everybody.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
SEATTLE  Federal judges on Monday peppered a lawyer for President Donald Trump with questions about whether the administrations travel ban discriminates against Muslims and zeroed in on the presidents campaign statements, the second time in a week the rhetoric has faced judicial scrutiny.

Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, defending the travel ban, told the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the executive order should be reinstated because it falls well within the presidents authority.

No one has ever attempted to set aside a law that is neutral on its face and neutral in its operation on the basis of largely campaign trail comments made by a private citizen running for office, he said.

Further, Wall said the president had backed off the comments he made during the campaign, clarifying that what he was talking about was Islamic terrorist groups and the countries that sponsor or shelter them.

Neal Katyal, who represented Hawaii, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, expressed disbelief at that argument and said Trump had repeatedly spoken of a Muslim ban during the presidential campaign and after.

This is a repeated pattern of the president, Katyal said.

The 9th Circuit panel was hearing arguments over Hawaiis lawsuit challenging the travel ban, which would suspend the nations refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The judges will decide whether to uphold a Hawaii judges decision in March that blocked the ban.

Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judges decision putting the ban on ice. They also questioned whether they could consider Trumps campaign statements, with one judge asking if there was anything other than willful blindness that would prevent them from doing so.

Dozens of advocates for refugees and immigrants rallied outside the federal courthouse in Seattle, some carrying No Ban, No Wall signs.

Walls insistence that the travel ban should be upheld because it is neutral, without reference to Islam, drew pointed questions from Judge Richard Paez. An executive order issued by President Franklin Roosevelt that led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II similarly was couched as a necessity for national security and made no reference to residents of Japanese heritage, Paez noted.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that executive order in a challenge brought by California resident Fred Korematsu. The ruling is now widely considered regrettable.

Would the Korematsu executive order pass muster under your test today? Paez grilled Wall.

No, Judge Paez, he answered

Why not? Facially legitimate  thats all you say! Paez said. You emphasize facially legitimate.'

I want to be very clear about this, Wall said solemnly. This case is not Korematsu, and if it were I wouldnt be standing here and the United States would not be defending it.

Wall went on to argue that unlike the Korematsu case, Trumps executive order probably wouldnt be questioned but for the statements he made as a candidate.

Paez also questioned Katyal about Trumps statements, calling them profound. But the judge wondered whether Trump is forever forbidden from adopting an executive order along the lines of his travel ban.

Katyal said no, and suggested the president could begin by repudiating his earlier statements or by working with Congress.

If you rule for him, you defer to the president in a way that history teaches us is very dangerous, Katyal said.

Mondays arguments marked the second time Trumps efforts to restrict immigration from certain Muslim-majority nations have reached the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.

After Trump issued his initial travel ban on a Friday in late January, bringing chaos and protests to airports around the country, a Seattle judge blocked its enforcement nationwide  a decision that was unanimously upheld by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel.

The president then rewrote his executive order, rather than appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in March, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu blocked the new version from taking effect, citing what he called significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus in Trumps campaign statements.

Again, in this court, the President claims a nearly limitless power to make immigration policy that is all but immune from judicial review, Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin wrote to the 9th Circuit. Again, he must be checked.

At his daily briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer expressed confidence that the executive order will be upheld by the appeals court.

The executive order is fully lawful and will be upheld. We fully believe that, Spicer said.

The travel ban cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court, but that would likely be cemented if the 4th and 9th Circuits reach differing conclusions about its legality. Because of how the courts chose to proceed, a full slate of 13 judges heard the 4th Circuit arguments last week, while just three, all appointees of President Bill Clinton, will consider the case in Seattle.

With the possibility for myriad concurring or dissenting opinions, it could take the 4th Circuit longer to rule, noted Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond law school in Virginia.

__

Associated Press reporter Martha Bellisle contributed to this report.
LAS CRUCES  Dona Ana Community College on Monday said it plans to close a satellite campus in Hatch next month due to stagnant enrollment and budget constraints.

The recession and resulting market declines have negatively impacted overall DACC enrollment and utilization of the Hatch Learning Center, said DACC President Renay Scott in a statement.

The Hatch campus taught three in-house courses per semester and served 42 regular students and 16 English as a Second Language students in the recent spring semester.

New Mexico has 31 colleges and universities for a population of about 2 million. Many of those institutions have branch campuses, as well as branches of the branches  twig campuses called learning centers. In addition to its Hatch center, DACC operates learning centers in Sunland Park, Anthony and Chaparral.

Questions have been raised about whether such campuses are competing or cooperating with other regional public institutions of higher education.

In a news release, DACC said it tried to find ways to make the Hatch campus successful: A faculty member who is also a Hatch resident was tasked in 2014 with boosting enrollment in the small farming community north of Las Cruces. The efforts didnt work, DACC said.

The Hatch learning center didnt generate the resources to sustain itself.

That reality and state funding cuts this past year led to the decision, DACC said.

Faced with shrinking state revenue, legislators voted to reduce funding to higher education in a special session last fall. In the recent legislative session, a stalemate over a $6.1 billion budget package approved by legislators and rejected by Gov. Susana Martinez prompted the governor to veto all higher education funding  a move she said was meant to bring lawmakers back to the negotiating table.

Martinez has said higher education funding will be reinstated in a special session.

According to DACCs website, the 6,764-square-foot Hatch campus houses a computer lab, a light manufacturing lab, a computer classroom and office space. It is adjacent to Hatch Valley High School and offers dual-credit courses to HVHS students.

DACC, which is part of the New Mexico State University system, said it will use the universitys real estate arm to sell or close the building.
JERUSALEM  A diplomatic spat on Monday erupted between U.S. and Israeli officials, just days before a planned visit by President Donald Trump, after an American representative questioned Israels claim to one of the holiest sites in Judaism.

Israel angrily demanded an explanation from the White House, casting a cloud over the highly anticipated visit by the new president, which is being greeted with a mixture of excitement and nervousness by Israeli officials.

The spat reportedly erupted during preparations for Trumps visit, during which he is planning a stop at the Western Wall in Jerusalems Old City.

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

The Western Wall is revered as the holiest site where Jews can pray, and according to Channel 2 TV, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked to join Trump. The report said the Americans rebuffed the request, with one official telling the Israelis the site is not your territory. It said the comment prompted shouting from the Israeli preparatory team.

Israel captured the Old City, along with the rest of east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. It considers the entire city to be its eternal capital and next week is set to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of what it calls the unification of Jerusalem.

However, the international community does not recognize Israels annexation of east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians seek as the capital of a future independent state. The Old City is also home to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

The rival claims to east Jerusalem lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and often boil over into violence.

An official in Netanyahus office said the U.S. comment was received with astonishment and that Israel had asked the White House for an explanation.

We are convinced that this remark is in contradiction to the policy of President Trump, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Israeli officials appear to be growing increasingly nervous over Trumps visit, when he is expected to make an attempt at relaunching long-stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.

On the campaign trail, Trump voiced solidly pro-Israel positions. His campaign platform made no mention of an independent Palestinian state. He showed little concern about Israeli settlement construction on occupied lands claimed by the Palestinians, expressed support for recognizing Jerusalem as Israels capital and vowed to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

He also surrounded himself with a core of advisers with strong ties to the West Bank settlement movement, including his ambassador, David Friedman.

Friedman, a fundraiser for settlement causes and vocal critic of liberal Jewish groups, has backtracked from some of his controversial positions.

On Monday, Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, arrived in Israel to take up his new post and traveled straight to the Western Wall to pray. In an apparent coincidence, Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith, was visiting at the same time and briefly spoke to Friedman. Aerosmith is set to perform in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

We wanted to come straight to the holiest place in the entire Jewish world, the Kotel HaMaaravi, the Western Wall, straight from the airport, Friedman told reporters. I prayed for the president, I wished him success especially on his upcoming trip.

But since taking office, Trump has called for restraint in settlement construction and signaled he is no hurry to move the embassy. Earlier this month, he held a warm meeting with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, at the White House.

Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, a senior member of Netanyahus coalition government, voiced concern Monday that there has been a kind of change in the spirit of Trumps statements since he was elected.

Bennett said he was not sure why Trump has changed his rhetoric.

Bennett said he welcomed Trumps arrival next week, but said Israel also has to stick to its positions. He said Israel must oppose attempts to establish a Palestinian state and insist on Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem forever.
WASHINGTON  North Koreas launch of a longer-range missile shows advances in its technological capabilities and offers the sternest test yet of President Donald Trumps strategy to work with China to combat the threat.

Will China fully enforce global sanctions on North Korea and back tough new penalties? If not, will Trump accept the growing calls from Congress to start targeting Chinese companies that help Pyongyang access international markets, even if that puts U.S.-China ties under new strain?

The U.N. Security Council is set to discuss North Koreas latest provocation Tuesday. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley raised the possibility of a new set of global economic restrictions for the North, including on oil imports. France and Britain on Monday both publicly supported tougher sanctions.

China is feeling increasingly alienated from its wayward North Korean ally and Sundays headline-grabbing missile launch wont have helped matters. It came as Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted 30 world leaders for talks on trade and infrastructure. The test also immediately closed the space for maneuvering for U.S.-allied South Koreas new president, who favors engaging North Korea.

But Trump and Xi may have the most at stake. Beijing is wary of piling on economic pressure that could cause North Koreas collapse, and it wasnt clear Monday if it would support new sanctions. Opposing the Norths test, Chinas Foreign Ministry called on all sides to exercise restraint.

China is the linchpin of Trumps strategy for halting North Koreas pursuit of a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the U.S. mainland. Trump has feted Xi in hope of securing more pressure on the North, which counts on China for up to 90 percent of its trade.

We are calling on all those folks in the region, particularly China and Russia, to do everything they can in terms of sanctions to help resolve this situation and bring stability to the peninsula, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Monday.

Trump also has flexed U.S. military muscle, though with little apparent effect in deterring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un from his rapid tempo of weapons tests. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which was ordered to the region last month, is still in the Sea of Japan, where the missile landed Sunday.

U.S. defense officials said it landed about 60 miles from the Russian coast. Russias Defense Ministry put it several hundred kilometers away from the east coast city of Vladivostok.

More significant, however, was that it flew higher and for longer than previous missiles.

U.S. experts said Sundays launch was likely a mobile, two-stage, liquid-fueled missile that North Korea displayed in a huge April 15 military parade. It could have a range of 4,500 kilometers (about 2,800 miles), putting the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam easily within range. But the system might be adapted to provide it, in time, with an intercontinental ballistic missile that could strike the United States.

At the U.N., Francois Delattre, Frances ambassador, said Security Council members are preparing to impose new sanctions and strengthen enforcement of existing ones. British ambassador Matthew Rycroft backed the effort.

North Korea is already subject to six resolutions aimed at restricting revenue and technology applicable to its nuclear and missile programs. Theyve failed to stop the Norths progress, which includes five nuclear test explosions since 2006.

If a new resolution is pursued, haggling between Washington and Moscow could take weeks, with Russia following Chinas lead. Alternatively, the council could choose instead to issue a condemnatory statement. The last set of sanctions, imposed in March, capped Chinas imports of North Korean coal, a key cash earner for North Korea. A possible next step would be to restrict Chinese exports of oil to the North.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is studying possible sanctions against international companies that help the North evade restrictions  a step strongly supported in Congress. Primary targets would be banks and companies inside China, posing a dilemma for the Trump administration. Going forward with the secondary sanctions would anger Beijing, which views dialogue as the answer to the nuclear issue.

Such sanctions are blunt and unpredictable, Adam Szubin, a former top Treasury official for terrorism and financial crimes, told a Senate hearing last week. China wont be strong-armed into acting against its own interests, he said.

___

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
GSK Consumer Healthcare Ltd. announced the appointment of Vikram Bahl as the Area Marketing Lead for Nutrition & Digestive Health for ISC. Vikram will be based in Gurugram and report into Manoj Kumar, Managing Director, GSK Consumer Healthcare Ltd. He succeeds Prashant Pandey who moves to Bangladesh as General Manager  MyBaN (Myanmar, Bangladesh & Nepal).

Vikram joins GSK from Kellogg where he was the Global Innovation Lead for wholesome and savoury snacks, based out of their headquarters in the US.

Announcing the changes, Manoj Kumar, Managing Director, GSK Consumer Healthcare Ltd., said We are pleased to welcome Vikram on board. He brings with him over 23 years of rich experience and in-depth knowledge working across various FMCG companies globally and India. With such extensive experience in driving businesses and building brands, I am confident that Vikram will help us in taking the Nutrition & Digestive Health category to greater heights.

I also take this opportunity to thank Prashant for his immense contribution to the ISC business where he has made significant contributions to the Nutrition & Digestive Health category in various capacities since 2008. Kumar added.

On his appointment, Vikram Bahl said, I am absolutely thrilled to be back in India with GSK - a company that has many iconic science based brands that are a part of our everyday lives and also being a part of the growth trajectory of the subcontinent. I am looking forward to working with the team to accelerate growth by keeping current consumers engaged while driving more recruitment to the categories with innovative insights based marketing leveraging both traditional and new age media.

Vikram brings with him over 23 years of experience in leading companies like Gillette, P&G and Kellogg working across a wide range of roles and geographies.

He holds a Mathematics degree from St. Stephens college and MBA from IIM Bangalore.
In a strategic move to reinforce its aggressive retail expansion strategy, Mattel Toys, the worlds largest toy-maker has partnered with FirstCry.com, Indias No #1 Baby & kids store. The partnership with FirstCry will help Fisher-Price to better reach and engage with millennial parents and strengthen its market position as the No. 1 choice for infant and toddler toys and baby development.

Toys from Fisher-Price are designed to aid in the overall growth and development of the child, and aim to provide the Best Possible Start to babies. The e-commerce partnership is in line with Mattels strategy to enhance accessibility of Mattels products and provide greater value for money to consumers. Mattel is also focusing on exclusive brand stores on firstcry platform, thus enhancing its e-commerce presence. In celebration of celebrate Mothers Day, Fisher-Price will be the prime sponsors on FirstCry offering exclusive deals on their range of products.

During a meeting with FirstCry, Ishmeet Singh, Country Manager- India, Mattel Inc. said, We are a creations company and strongly believe in the wonder of childhood. Our goal is to provide the best experience to children across the country. Strengthening our e-commerce presence to empower parents with the best options is one step in our larger plan to grow the market in India. We are happy to partner with an organization like FirstCry that is like-minded in their efforts to enable affordability and ease to millennial moms to provide the best care for their babies

Commenting on the association Mr. Supam Maheshwari, Founder, CEO FirstCry.com said We are delighted to partner with Fisher-Price for Mothers Day celebration. This association is a step towards providing Indian parents with the complete range of toys which aid towards growth and child development. Fisher-Price and FirstCry are two of the most loved brands amongst parents and we aim to continue to bring joy to parents with such initiatives.

The Fisher-Price range on FirstCry includes a wide range of toys for new-born babies and toddlers as well as building blocks from the Mega Bloks range and toys from the line of Thomas and Friends; baby gear like portable cots, strollers, feeding bottles and other developmental products like convertible gyms and learning tablets. The Barbie stores boast of a robust line of dolls, playsets, doll houses, apparel and other licensed merchandise. The Hot Wheels stores will showcase the wide range of die-cast cars and track sets, as well as other merchandise.

Mattel Toys has focused its efforts around the core philosophy of Play with purpose  where each toy developed by the global leader has an intrinsic benefit linked to it. The vision for Mattel toys will continue to evolve and grow as a brand that is a trusted partner for a parent and an integral aspect of every childhood.
All Google Pixel XL buyers will receive a free official case for the device while stocks last, as revealed by the listing of the device on the Google Store. Its unusual to come across deals for the Pixel XL so if youve been thinking of purchasing the device, this may be a good time. The current deal applies to purchases made on the Google Store in the United States and the United Kingdom.

If you want to take advantage of the free case deal, simply head to the Google Store source below and youll see a message saying Buy Pixel XL, get a Pixel XL Case by Google on us. Select the Pixel XL color and storage option of your choice and simply add either the clear Pixel XL case or silicone case in a choice of grey, blue, green, peach, and coral color options. Those cases are priced at $30/25 or $35/29 respectively and this amount will then be discounted so youll receive the case completely free of charge. Its worth noting that the deal only applies to the Google clear case or silicone case and not to the LifeProof FRE, Otterbox Defender, or any of the Live Cases available for purchase from the Google Store. The deal began yesterday and Googles terms and conditions state that the offer will end on June 18 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time, or sooner if the supplies dont last.

The Google Pixel XL is the larger sibling of the Google Pixel, both of which were announced last year. The Pixel XL was released running Android 7.1 Nougat and has a premium-looking metal and glass build. Its specs include a 5.5-inch display panel with QHD resolution (2560 x 1440), Qualcomms Snapdragon 821 system-on-chip (SoC), and 4GB of RAM, as well as between 32GB and 64GB of non-expandable internal storage. Theres a 12.3-megapixel rear camera with a dual-LED flash on the back of the device, while its front hosts an 8-megapixel selfie shooter, and all of that hardware is powered by a 3,450mAh battery. The Mountain View-based tech giant is expected to announce the successors to its original Pixel lineup later this year.
The school girls decided to sit on a hunger strike after the local authorities refused to help them.

By India Today Web Desk: It is said that Justice is truth in action.

But for the 80 girls in a Haryana village, when justice wasn't served, they decided to take the matter in their own hands.

Around 80 girls of Gothera Tappa Dahena village in Rewari's Khol block stopped going to school when the village administration refused to fulfill their demand of upgrading the village high school to senior secondary school.

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The demand was raised because the young girls of the school used to travel 3 kilometers every day to Kanwali to study and faced harassment from local boys on a daily basis.

The girls took the matter to the village sarpanch who tried helping them but failed. The young brigade then decided to take the matter in their hands and sat on a hunger strike to protest against the local authorities.

"They face problem related to conveyance and street harassment. They have to walk 3 km to go to school. Men wearing helmets on their bikes molest them regularly and get away as their identities remain concealed," village sarpanch Suresh Chauhan told HT .

While the authorities deny receiving any harassment complaints from the students, the district education officer, Dharamvir Balodia said, the girls were being misled by the sarpanch and their parents.

"There are certain norms that need to be fulfilled before a school is upgraded. The high school in their village has around 150 students that is too less," the DEO said.

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Motorola Mobility officially announced the Moto C and Moto C Plus, its latest pair of entry-level Android smartphones aimed at consumers who prioritize value and battery life when choosing a new handset. The Lenovo-owned phone maker claims that its latest product lineup fulfills all basic functions of a smartphone while simultaneously being affordable and available in a broad range of color options. The Moto C and Moto C Plus will be offered in Pearl White, Starry Black, Metallic Cherry, and Fine Gold as of this spring and will officially launch in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, Motorola said, without providing an exact release date for either device.

The Moto C is powered by the MediaTek MT6580m system-on-chip (SoC), a 32-bit piece of silicon with four cores clocked at 1.3GHz and the Mali 400 GPU. The phone ships with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage expandable by up to 32GB via a microSD card slot, features a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front one, and is fueled by a 2,350mAh removable battery. Finally, the device is equipped with a 5-inch FWGA (854 x 480) display panel and runs a relatively clean version of Android 7.0 Nougat. The Moto C will be offered in 3G and 4G-enabled variants, with the former only being available in Pearl White and Starry Black. The base model will be priced at 89 ($97), while the more expensive variant will set customers back 99 ($108).

The Moto C Plus features a 5-inch HD (1270 x 720) screen and boasts the 64-bit MediaTek MT6737 SoC with four 1.3GHz cores and the Mali T720 GPU. The device will be available in variants with 1GB and 2GB of RAM, both of which will sport 16GB of storage space and a microSD card slot that will support up to 32GB of additional memory. The 8-megapixel rear camera of the phone is accompanied by a standard LED flash and its front houses a 2-megapixel shooter. All of that hardware is powered by a 4,000mAh battery thats removable, Motorola revealed, adding that the handset also ships with Android 7.0 Nougat. The British unit of the Lenovo-owned company confirmed that the Moto C will be retailed by O2, Carphone, and Tesco, starting at 89.99, while the Moto C Plus will be sold at Argos for 109.99. Both devices will also be available for purchase from Motorolas website, though its currently unclear whether either will debut in the United States.
Samsung has created a limited Pirates of The Caribbean Galaxy S8, and it looks as though the phone comes complete with a specially designed box that includes the phone itself, the standard Galaxy S8 packaging that you would get if you bought the regular model, and a couple of extras like the wireless charging dock and a themed Pirates of The Caribbean clip on case that is NFC-enabled and provides some smart features when placed on the phone. According to the details the case will connect to the Galaxy S8 through NFC and apply a special Pirates of The Caribbean theme to the phone, and on the backside of the case is harboring a special design with a giant skull in the middle, a skull and crossbones in the top right corner, and the Pirates of The Caribbean logo at the bottom.

The release of this special edition model of Samsungs most recent flagship is said to be in celebration of the upcoming film release as part of a partnership with Disney, and will help promote the launch of Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which is the latest Pirates film in the popular franchise.

Rumors point to a possible June launch in China, and the cost of this special edition model is supposed to be about 300 Yuan more than the standard model, likely due to the special outer box and included extra accessories that come inside of it. While this is pegged for a launch in China, there is no word on if Samsung will launch this version of the flagship smartphone in the U.S. or other western countries, but if they dont chances are that you will see some of them go up for sale on third-party sites. This also isnt the first time that Samsung has partnered with a brand to release a special edition of their flagship device. Last year, they released a special edition Batman version of the Galaxy S7 Edge in partnership with Warner Bros., and the year before they launched a special edition Iron Man version of the Galaxy S6. For the aspiring pirate who dreams of sailing the high seas with a new smartphone in hand, this may be the device to pick up.
Western Digital filed for arbitration with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) with the goal of stopping Toshiba from selling its chipmaking division that also contains assets of a joint venture that the two companies have been running for years. While the Irvine, California-based data storage firm isnt inherently opposed to the notion of its partner selling its chip-manufacturing operations, the company is displeased abut recent developments and wants to stop the Tokyo, Japan-based tech giant from going through with the transaction without its consent, as well as force the company to exclude their joint venture from Toshiba Memory, a recently established unit that was formed specifically for the purpose of being sold. The U.S. firm previously bid for Toshibas chipmaking arm but its offer was reportedly not close to those made by other interested parties.

As Western Digital believes that Toshiba is violating the terms of their joint venture agreement by putting shared assets into Toshiba Memory and faced with a lack of alternatives, the company opted to file for arbitration, its Chief Executive Officer Steve Milligan said on Monday. In a news conference held after Western Digitals filing with the ICC, Toshiba CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa stated that recent developments wont delay the firms sale plans that will continue on Friday after the second bidding round on Toshiba Memory is completed. The Japanese tech giants top executive also dismissed Western Digitals filing as having no basis, implying that the companys partner wont be able to stop the transaction.

Toshiba has been trying to sell its chipmaking unit for several months now as the firm faces major financial issues caused by the bankruptcy of its U.S. nuclear division Westinghouse Electric. The sale of Toshiba Memory may inject up to $18 billion into Toshiba, though some of the companys investors previously criticized the decision as being short-sighted due to the fact that the assets its trying to sell are its best-performing ones. Its currently unclear whether Western Digital has a realistic chance of delaying the transaction but an update on the situation is expected to follow in the coming months once ICC processes the arbitration filing.
Less than half a year after the Dentons merger with Gadens , a large group of partners who went to the global law firm are reportedly ready to up and leave.The Australian Financial Review says that a group of 10 to 12 partners are preparing to leave Dentons Sydney office, according to an unnamed source. The partners are apparently not happy with Dentons our way or the highway approach.The global giant denies that a large group of partners is leaving, with a spokesperson categorically saying that the rumours are not true.Dentons and Gadens completed their merger in December, splitting the Australian firm. The legacy firms Sydney, Perth, and Papua New Guinea offices integrated into the worlds largest law firm by lawyer headcount. The Adelaide and Brisbane offices retained their brand and agreed to an association with Dentons, while the Melbourne office remained as a standalone business.The exodus is not without precedent in the Australian legal space. Just last September, 10 Herbert Smith Freehills partners left the firm en masse and moved to Wall Street giant White & Case. The move resulted in a lawsuit, which has just recently been settled.The AFR said that the Dentons partners could head back to Gadens. However, the historically rough relations between the Sydney and Melbourne offices of the legacy firm could mean the partners are more likely to choose the Brisbane office, if they do indeed return to their old firm.
Ailing law firm Slater and Gordon plans to file a 600m ($1.05bn) claim against the Watchstone Group for the failed acquisition of the Quindell professional services division.The firms British subsidiary, Slater & Gordon (UK), will file a claim against Watchstone, the renamed entity following the purchase, in the High Court of England and Wales over the coming weeks, it said in an announcement to the ASX The law firm bought the business in 2015, only to post more than $1bn in loss in fiscal 2016 after writing off most of the acquired businesss value.Watchstone has confirmed that it has been notified by Slater and Gordon of pending fraudulent misrepresentation claims. The ASX-listed firm intends to issue proceedings by the end of this month, it said. Slater and Gordon said it would not have purchased Quindells professional services division without the claimed misrepresentation.The move comes after Watchstone said in its most recent financial report that it is exploring divesting all its remaining business units. Last month, the company revealed a net loss of 69.1m for fiscal 2016, a massive drop from its 274.9m profit after tax the previous year.Slater and Gordon said that the value of the claim exceeds Watchstones net assets and money in escrow by several hundred million pounds. It declined to comment further except to say that the claim will be pursued vigorously.In March, Westpac, National Australia Bank, Barclays, and Royal Bank of Scotland on-sold their Slater and Gordon holdings at a massive loss . The firm was recently thrown a lifeline after successfully arranging for a new three-year $40m lending facility
Slater & Gordon to launch AU$1bn lawsuit

Slater & Gordon is to sue the company formerly named Quindell over its acquisition of its professional services business.



The ASX-listed law firm is seeking around AU$1bn (600m) claiming that without fraudulent representations that its says were made by Quindell (now called Watchstone Group plc) the acquisition would not have gone ahead.



Watchstone informed the London Stock Exchange that it had been notified of Slater & Gordons intention.



The statement references an opinion given by an independent barrister in November 2016 which dismissed a misrepresentation claim in respect of the warranty escrow process, as it had less than a 50 per cent chance of success.



Watchstone says it denies any misrepresentation in the strongest terms and remains satisfied that neither the warranty claim nor a misrepresentation claim have merit and will defend such claims robustly if proceedings are brought.



It is seeking evidence from Slater & Gordon which it says has so far not been disclosed.



Brand protection tech partner for Bird & Bird

Bird & Bird has announced a strategic alliance with technology firm INCOPRO to boost its suite of counterfeit goods and copyright content protection tools for clients.



Bird & Birds team of expert IP lawyers will offer the tech firms platform as an additional service to clients across a range of industries affected by online counterfeiting including luxury, fashion, cosmetics, technology and pharmaceutical.



The IP infringement landscape has fundamentally changed in recent years. Identifying and removing counterfeit goods and copyrighted content is now a challenge dispersed globally on the internet. said Phil Sherrell, Partner, Bird & Bird.



He added that the new partnership will help clients take more decisive and impactful action.



Nixon Peabody CWL bolsters Hong Kong practice

Nixon Peabody CWL in Hong Kong has announced the hire of two new consultants.



Rollin Chan joins from Deutsche Bank (China) Ltd where he was head of legal. His practice includes both corporate transactions and arbitrations. He is based in Hong Kong.



Meanwhile, London-based David Tang is a legal advisor who is called upon by the Chinese embassy in the city to represent Chinese companies operating in the UK.
Christ University, a name synonymous with quality and excellence in education, provides students with the best of education to prepare them for the real world. As the world looks for multifaceted people, the university sculpts students into such individuals, encouraging them to test their limits, experience new things, build confidence and producing skilled persons.

Photo: Niloptal Baruah

The science department, which was the first to be started in the university, inspires students to experiment and experience to this day. The faculty engages students in research, and helps find apt solutions to challenges. Every educator is well-versed in the subject that he or she teaches, and keeps abreast of new inventions, discoveries and lab equipment. Apart from well-equipped laboratories for science practicals, there are two libraries at the disposal of the students.

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Christ University is known to host several fests, competitions and field visits that fill the students with a desire to learn. The levels of a student's understanding are tested through engaging competitions as well as inter- and intra-collegiate fests, national workshops and seminars where professors from reputed institutions like the IISc deliver lectures.

That's not all. In our leisure time, plates of momo chaat sit side by side with Malabari parottas while fruit bowls and biryanis share space with brownies. All of us gather around and waste no time digging into the various dishes while passing them around.

As I look around, the campus is bubbling with activity. The law school students are rushing to get their moot memorials printed while the hotel management students are busy whipping up culinary delights and serving students at the numerous food stalls near the island. Alongside, the peer education team is holding a meeting to discuss how it can help and mentor classmates and give mental health the priority it deserves. Students of theatre, meanwhile, are pinning the poster of yet another play on the main board.

As I climb the steps leading up to the first block, I hear various bands rehearsing for the Blossoms fest. Among the most popular events in the university, the judges always have a hard time picking a winner from the immense pool of talent. A lot of our students are actors and professional artists outside the campus and have been making the university proud elsewhere in the country and abroad. Of course, there are numerous other ways students are encouraged to give back to society.

There is no dearth of opportunity the university provides for us to become whoever we choose to be. So it is that you will find a BBA student singing next to a law student in the coveted university choir. Fests like Darpan, Blossoms, In-Bloom, Juristar foster a healthy competitive spirit among students while helping them develop a positive attitude towards victory and defeat. It is this that makes Christites easily cross the threshold to Ivy League institutes.

In events such as Gratitude Week, the student council felicitates every single member of the staff, from the security guards, who tirelessly protect our campus day and night to the housekeeping members, who keep the campus spotlessly clean as well as the administrative staff, who ensure the college functions smoothly, and the faculty, who give us lessons within and beyond the classroom.

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It is said that each student who walks into the campus leaves behind a piece of him and takes along a part of the university along with him in the world. I still don't know how to sum up my life here, but I couldn't agree more as I finally accept that this time when I head back to my family at the end of the semester, I don't know if I'm going home or leaving one.

The author is a student at the Department of Life Sciences, Christ University.

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First 911 or latest? Both NA and manual A post shared by Michael Danner (@porsche1988959) on Apr 21, 2017 at 2:34pm PDT

A post shared by Michael Danner (@porsche1988959) on Feb 7, 2017 at 7:47am PST

The hue, which came to the brand back in the days of the 356, is mixed with yellow, which is used for the main stripes of the Neunelfer, as well as for the "Porsche" badging on the doors. As for the stripes on the side of the Neunelfer, these come in black. Don't expect the last color to be used for the wheels, which are here in silver trim.As for the cabin of this clutch special, this is covered in Tarpan Brown leather, while featuring silver contrast stitching. For those of you keeping track, this is chassis #661 of 991.According to Instagram-provided details, which reportedly come from the owner of the rear-engined delight, this 911 was supposed to be dressed in Oslo Blue. Nevertheless, at the time when the man placed his 911 R order, the said hue hadn't been approved for the 991 - by the way, things have changed meanwhile.Whether presented in the sun or caressed by the shade, this hue makes the retro aura of the 911 R stand out, delivering a memorable visual experience.And if images of the Porsche 911 R make you lust for that example you could never grab, we'll remind you that Porsche is expected to work on a new six-speed manual special.We spied the 2018 Porsche 911 Sport Classic last month - note that the model hasn't been officially confirmed, with out expectations being built on a wingless 991.2 GT3 prototype However, given the fact that the last Sport Classic, namely the 997-based model, only came to the world as a 250-unit uber-special. And this might just mean that those who will be able to adorn their garages with such a Neunelfer have already discussed the matter with their dealer.
The kit is familiar and so is the car, but we never thought the two would ever be combined. In fact, Liberty Walk has only ever made one other kit for a small car, and that's the R56 MINI Cooper S.But that was then, and this is now. Honda's little S660 is the sportiest car ever to comply with kei car rules . No, not kit cars; kei cars. All their measurements have to be small, especially the overall length, and the engine cannot be any bigger than a 0.66-liter. And even with a turbo, the output is limited to 64 PS.That's about a tenth of a Camaro engine. But in Japan, it's perfectly alright to slam your Prius to the ground and install titanium exhausts. So the LW S600 should fit right in.The transformation includes the trademark fender flares, which are made up of multiple pieces. The ones at the back are much wider, giving the Honda sportscar a Murcielago-like appearance . Of course, they also installed brand new bumpers, and they completely change the look of the car. But the side sills are magical too.The tuners opted for a ducktail trunk spoiler and some black alloy wheels wrapped in Falcon tires. But we feel a little disappointed with the exhaust. Some other company is going to have the privilege of upgrading that component.The complete package called SSX-660R can be ordered in Japan for 475,000 yen or just under $4,200 at today's exchange rate. Airrex air suspension is an additional 580,000 yen ($5,100). Kato Wataru 's company talks about a second version of the kit that comes with a large wing and diffuser, but pictures aren't available at the moment.Update: We've added some new pics, which is no big deal... unless you like the car. Do you?
The countrys Ministry of Transport has imposed a compulsory vehicle recall after verifying the information that it received from a 55-year-old employee of Hyundai.The mentioned recall was the countrys first mandatory action of this type, as Hyundai and Kia reportedly refused to perform a voluntary service campaign, Euro News remarks.Apparently, Mr. Kim Gwang-ho had been with the automaker for 25 years, and he raised his concerns with defects that affect a dozen models offered by the two brands.He informed the authorities about 32 faults last year, but the company had filed a lawsuit against the man once the word of the situation had reached the press. The autoamaker wil have to recall some of its cars for eight of those defects, while nine others will be fixed on demand, without any additional charge.The legal action was dropped at a later date, and Hyundai then hired Mr. Gwang-ho to his former job, along with paying him the compensation for the time during which he was suspended from the firm. He told the media that his conscience would not allow him to let people drive in vehicles that he knew were faulty or potentially defective.While all 12 models were not named, the Hyundai i30 was among the cars with potential problems. The representatives of Kia and Hyundai have confirmed that they will conduct a recall in South Korea , and underlined their commitment to the safety of their consumers.We must note that Hyundai and Kia have told the media that no injuries or accidents have been reported as being linked to the possible defects of some of its vehicles. Several items and parts had faults, which leads us to believe that an honest mistake happened at one point in several departments, for various parts.Unlike Volkswagens Dieselgate, nobody at Hyundai or Kia deliberately affected the cars they sold to cut back on costs. If they did, the situation could prove to become a scandal that may have ramifications in other countries.
And the most recent 918-infused Ring track day took place over the weekend, with Saturday's session seeing a British-registered example of the Zuffenhausen halo car playing in Nordschleife traffic.Alas, the 887 hp machine didn't seem to cross paths with any machine that could've put up a fight, so its driver kept passing others cars effortlessly throughout the session.We can only imagine what would've happened is a Ring Wolf would've come across this Porscha. So far, we've seen such animals going as quick as 7:25 (Bridge to Gantry, not the full track), so, given the heavy traffic seen here, we could've ended up with one hell of a battle.The supercar spotted who captured the gas-electric Porscha on camera also took the time to have a little chat with the driver, dropping an interesting detail: "This one has done over 23,000km in 1.5 years and is on the track almost every weekend! Great to see one being used properly, kudos to the owner!"Speaking of the 918 Spyder stretching its legs on the infamous German track, we'll remind you that, last month, Porsche itself brought the hypercar back to the Nordschleife. The Ring rumor mill talked about the German automaker willing to bring the production car back home, but we expected the test to be related to tire aspects.In fact, we've brought along a second piece of footage, one that shows what happens when the 918 is manhandled by a Porsche driver who doesn't have to deal with traffic.Zooming in on the pace difference between the two Nordschleife adventures below should keep one entertained for the day.
The latest entry comes from Lyft , which has signed a partnership with Waymo. The second company is already testing self-driving cars on public roads, and they operate with technology developed by Google. In a way, the company with the mustache logo came later than Uber in this field of driverless ride-hailing, but it may have a shot at supremacy due to Googles technology.Apparently, the deal between Waymo and Lyft was signed for some time, but the company insiders who had revealed it under cover of anonymity could not reveal details about it until both parties were ready to make it official.Eventually, both companies told representatives of the New York Times that they had signed a partnership regarding self-driving cars. The deal will involve multiple pilot projects that will attempt to bring this technology into the mainstream.Lyft already has a ride-hailing app with plenty of users on hand, and Waymo has the technology, but needed a customer base willing to try new things.An ongoing partnership with General Motors (an investor in Lyft) has led to a deal that will involve self-driving Chevrolet Bolt models in the next few years At this point, it is unclear if Waymo will use the GM cars or its existing fleet of Chrysler Pacifica Hybrids under its partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. The latter is not an exclusive deal, and the autonomous car business is already discussing with other potential partners.It is fair to note that Waymo is already experimenting with an autonomous car program in some parts of Phoenix, Arizona.The partnership would bring Googles driverless cars to new riders, who may not have been in the area served in the limited-access deal that Waymo rolled out in the state.Eventually, driverless cars will probably be able to replace all human drivers of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, but the conclusion leaves us with a few questions.First of all, we are curious what will taxi drivers have against the robots that will operate the driverless ride-hailing cars, which would have lower costs than using humans who need to eat, sleep, and earn money for their efforts.Secondly, what will happen to the humans who drive people with either Uber or Lyft once the apps switch to driverless cars? At this point, nobody knows if robots will bring an end to cab drivers, the ride-hailing part of the sharing economy, or to none of the above.
As might be expected, pilots are reporting seeing a lot more drones these days but the lather that sightings seem to create might be overblown, according to an analysis by the Academy of Model Aeronautics. AMA looked closely at each of the 1,270 sightings reported by pilots of manned aircraft in data released by the FAA in February that showed that 44 of those encounters could be described as close calls. Thats about 3.4 percent and the same as the results of similar analyses done by AMA in 2015 and 2016. Back in the 70s and 80s, everything pilots saw was a UFO. Now everything they see is a drone, AMA President Richard Hanson told Popular Science. Drones are the new UFOs.

Hanson told PopSci its possible pilots have now lumped everything they see in the air, from dry cleaning bags to kites and weather balloons, as drones. Theyre also reporting perfectly legal drone operations. Some of the reports included sightings of drones being flown at well below the 400-foot ceiling. Despite all the hype, the notes that come with new drones about rules and drone registration and numerous programs promoting safe operation of the aircraft, Hanson told PopSci he thinks theres more education to be done. The vast number of sightings that are people operating inappropriately is because they just dont know any better, they didnt know they werent supposed to do what they were doing, he said. There are a few individuals who are irresponsible but you find that in any community of people.
The next generation of airliners use a lot less fuel and are whisper quiet but squeezing all that efficiency out is challenging and its causing some headaches for airframers and their engine suppliers. Bombardier and Airbus have been having issues with the Pratt & Whitney PurePower geared turbofan that theyve hung their sales on and Boeing briefly suspended the flight test program for its 737 Max because of turbine disc issues with the Leap 1B turbines made by Safran, a joint venture between GE and CFM. Boeing hadnt noticed anything wrong but grounded its test aircraft after Safran warned it of potential issues. The 20 test and pre-delivery aircraft were inspected and returned to service late last week, and first delivery is planned for May 22 to Indonesian carrier Lion Mentari Airlines.

Meanwhile, the issues with P&Ws engines do appear to be design-related but are being addressed and arent hurting sales of the CSeries airliner, according to Bombardier. CEO Alain Bellemare told analysts on a first-quarter earnings call theres a bearing that needs upgrading and a combustor lining needs beefing up. But Bellemare said the engine has been reliable inservice and dispatch rates are exceeding the expectations of the two carriers flying the new twinjet. Airbus uses the same basic engine on its A320Neo but some of the suppliers and contractors in the program are different.
A panel of judges will review the deal struck between the FAA and the city of Santa Monica that will close the airport by 2028 and severely curtail operations in the meantime. A U.S. District Court of Appeals rejected the National Business Aviation Associations bid for an injunction against implementing the deal but it did agree the legal underpinning of the agreement needs further study. A separate merits panel of judges will take a detailed look at the arrangement, which was agreed to by the city and FAA in January. NBAA President Ed Bolen said the decision makes clear that the court holds steadfast on the need for a thorough and fair hearing about this unprecedented situation, according to a story in the Santa Monica Lookout.

NBAA alleges that in making the deal with the city, the FAA failed to follow established procedures when issuing the settlement order, including consideration of its detrimental effects to operators and businesses at the airport, and to the National Airspace System. Although the airport will remain open for 11 more years, the deal gives the city the right to shorten the runway from 5,000 feet to 3,500 feet, which is too short for many business aircraft. It also allows the city to take over all services at the airport after the runway is shortened. The deal ended decades of costly legal sparring between Santa Monica and the FAA but the bulldozers will be held at bay at least until the merits panel completes its review. Its not clear how long that might take.
What started out two weeks ago as, if not a trial balloon, perhaps a rumor, may be about to happen. Several news outlets have reported that the U.S. wants to expand a policy to ban any electronic device larger than a cellphone from airline cabins on flights to the U.S. originating in Europe.

Recall that this very ban was put into place in March, but it was limited to about 50 flights a day from 10 cities, mostly in the Middle East. The wider ban would apply to European cities as well, although no details of its implementation date have been announced. The Department of Homeland Security said the new ban isnt in response to a specific threat, but to a believed new capability among terrorist organizations.

Rather than trot out the predictable snide remark about security theatre, I will instead ask a more sincere question: What is the threat matrix here? How significant is this threat? Banning laptops is a fairly big deal because so many business travelers returning from Europe use the plodding nine or 10-hour flight into headwinds to catch up on work they missed during their trips. I know because I am one of them and I will be traveling in Europe next month.

Theres a tradeoff, of course. How much additional safety is achieved byinconveniencingbusiness travelers and concentrating all those LiPo batteries in the cargo holds of 400 airliners a day? Under current guidelines for domestic flights, you can be fined for checking baggage with batteries, which is why when I board an airliner, my roll-aboard is stuffed full of all the camera batteries Im not supposed to check, plus a laptop, a cellphone and an iPad.

The thinking for this policy is sound. You can at least access LiPo batteries in your carry-on and they are less likely to get manhandled to the point of shorting the internals, a leading cause of lithium ion battery fires. To be sure, these have occurred in airline cabins, but they have proved manageable. Surrounded by other flammables and despite baggage compartment fire suppression systems, Im less sanguine about batteries I cant see cooking off in checked baggage.

DHS argues that even laptops or devices with explosives concealed inside are less threatening than they would be in a cabin because it takes more explosive energy to breech a baggage container and cause significant enough damage to bring down an airplane. Also, says the agency, checked baggage is more rigorously checked than are carry-on bags. Pardon me, but I dont have much confidence in that claim.

If I had my druthers, Id take my chances with whatever is in the cabin, thanks. On the plus side, this is a policy that ought to stimulate the sales of paper books and magazines and since Im in the business of the latter, perhaps I shouldnt complain.
Saudi Arabia and Russia jointly said they favor extending the production-limiting deal between OPEC and some other big producers through the first quarter of 2018.

Why it matters: The comments by the world's largest producers signals what could happen when OPEC meets May 25 to weigh the future of the six-month production agreement that began in January.

"I think there is general consensus that this is the right approach and the right thing to do," said Saudi Energy minister Khalid Al-Falih at a Beijing appearance, according to several accounts.

The big bounce: Oil prices rose in trading on Monday after the announcement. Via CNBC, both West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude gained over 3 percent Monday morning.

What they're saying: "I think OPEC and Russia recognize that in order to get the market back on their side they will need 'shock and awe' tactics where they need to go above and beyond a simple extension of the deal," Virendra Chauhan, an analyst at Energy Aspects, told Reuters.

In a joint statement, the two countries' oil ministers said they want to ensure "market stability, predictability and sustainable development" and pledged to agreed to do "whatever it takes" to stabilize the market and reduce commercial inventories to their five-year average level.

To be sure:

Output growth by U.S. shale producers even amid modest prices is a check on OPEC's influence. In a research note late Sunday night, Goldman Sachs noted that the U.S. rig count climbed for another week to reach a level that's 125% higher than it was a year ago.
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Monday inspected the progress of the NGT-mandated clean-up work at Bengaluru's Bellandur Lake, which has been in the news for catching fire multiple times in the past.

By Nolan Pinto: With just a few days to go for the state government to submit its compliance report to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on the works completed and on-going at the Bellandur Lake, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has ordered his officials to speed up the process of cleaning the highly polluted lake.

Bellandur is the same lake that has caught fire multiple times in the past, forcing the NGT to take notice. The environmental court ordered the Karnataka government to clean up the polluted lake and also shut down industries near the lake.

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Speaking to India Today after inspecting the Bellandur Lake on Monday morning that he has 'instructed the officials to further expedite the work.'

The chief minister was present to inaugurate a 60 MLD sewage treatment plant in the Koramangala Challaghatta valley that will help reduce the amount of raw sewage that enters the Bellandur and Varthur lakes on a daily basis.

Responding to citizens' allegations that clean up work on the Bellandur Lake is proceeding at an extremely slow rate, MLA NA Haris, a member of the legislature panel on lake encroachment, said the state government working on a war-footing to comply with the directions of the NGT. Since the lake is spread across almost 900 acres, it will take time to complete all the work, Haris added.

'The Supreme Court needs to see here that the state government is all out to do the work,' he told India Today.

But, he believes his government cannot solely be held responsible for the issue and that CM Siddaramaiah is doing more than what others in the past have done.

'One cannot blame the government and CM who is working to solve the problem,' he said, adding, 'The problem is because others did not do anything for the past 25 years,' and things cannot change overnight.

ALSO READ | Bengaluru: Part of Bellandur Lake catches fire yet again

ALSO READ | Bengaluru: State government not able to meet NGT's deadline to clean Bellandur Lake

ALSO WATCH | Bengaluru: Choked in toxic fume, Bellandur lake catches fire

--- ENDS ---
Sean Spicer said "there's frankly no need for a special prosecutor," during his briefing Monday, noting that the Congressional and Senate committees, as well as the resources cited by acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, are enough. "The process is running completely as it should," he said. Other takeaways:

Firing Comey as a selfless act: "The actions that he took, he knew could be detrimental to himself but none of those things mattered because the president had to do the right thing for the American people."

"The actions that he took, he knew could be detrimental to himself but none of those things mattered because the president had to do the right thing for the American people." On Trump taping WH conversations: MSNBC's Hallie Jackson pressed Spicer repeatedly, but he'd only say that "the president has made his position clear."

MSNBC's Hallie Jackson pressed Spicer repeatedly, but he'd only say that "the president has made his position clear." Global ransomware attack: Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert said as of now, no U.S. federal systems have been affected. Bossert also insisted the attack "was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data."
15 May 2017 11:11 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Armenian media and public organizations have been ringing the alarm bell, as the country faces catastrophic population decline due to the large-scale migration.

Thousands of people leave the country every year for various reasons: unemployment, corruption, impossibility to withstand the countrys government, etc. This, in turn, leads to the reduction in the number of school-age children in Armenia, but the countrys authorities seem not to care about this problem.

During the government session on May 11, Prime Minister of Armenia Karen Karapetyan instructed the Education and Science Minister to submit proposals on optimization of urban schools, given the optimal workload of teachers, Armenian media reported.

This wording is surprising because the current workload of Armenian teachers is not high  the number of students in schools has declined so much that in many schools of Armenia the number of teachers becomes equal to the number of students.

Many teachers barely survive as they do not have enough work  their workload should be increased but it is impossible as Armenia is suffering from lack of young generation.

While addressing the government session, Premier Karapetyan optimistically spoke about the bright future of the Armenian educational system, but the reality is disturbing  even the official statistics are terrifying.

The data of the National Statistical Service of Armenia show that about 35,000 schoolchildren left Armenia over the past six years. As a result, many classes and sometimes school are becoming empty in the country.

The number of first-graders in Armenia has sharply reduced due to emigration and falling birth rate. In some villages, there are schools where only seniors remained  after their graduation Armenia will get another batch of empty schools.

---

Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 17:42 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

For most Armenians life abroad offers a higher material standard of living and more opportunities. It is no less true that the poverty, corruption and ongoing demographic implosion of Armenia can be crushing, and that daily life there for a great many people is equal to survival.

But people in Armenia suffer not only from economic hardships, but also social injustice and impunity for officials. Armenian soldiers are the one who suffer from this more than others. This also applies to those Armenian soldiers, who serve in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh.

In addition to terrible conditions in the Armenian army units, the soldiers constantly die there in non-combat conditions and the real causes of the deaths are not being investigated.

Many families of the killed soldiers still unaware of the real reasons behind the deaths. Some of them have already given up, while others continue to fight for justice.

Every week the Armenian media reports about new deaths of soldiers in Karabakh allegedly because of the psychic weakness or illness.

Recently, the Armenian side reported that the 18-year-old soldier Karen Avetisyan died while serving in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. His death was immediately labeled as a suicide  Avetisyan allegedly shot himself. However, the soldiers parents got outraged after they heard this version of their sons death.

First of all, he was waiting 26th of April, his mother was supposed to visit him and they would spend one day together in Karabakh, Hraparak newspaper quoted Avetisyans relatives. He was very happy and very excited about this, therefore he could hardly be suicidal.

Secondly, the bullet entered his head from the lower part of the right ear and exited through the temple. A suicidal person would not have shot himself that way.

Finally, the preliminary investigation has yet to be completed, but the parents have already been told [by officials] that [Karen] has committed suicide. All of this was enough to convince the family that Karen was in fact killed, Hraparak writes.

At Karens funeral, the paper continues, his uncle attacked one of the officers who had come from his military unit and had the imprudence to say: Karen was going to the toilet If he had gone half an hour later, he would have survived.

The uncle and everyone else were surprised at the officers words. So could it be that Karen Avetisyan did not commit suicide, as reported? Hraparak asks.

Also, the Armenian population cannot understand why the alleged "voluntary" serving in Karabakh[the occupied land of Azerbaijan] applies only to the children of the poor families and representatives of national minorities in Armenia.

Thus, time goes by but Armenia continues to occupy Azerbaijani lands, sends there young boys from poor Armenian families and then, after these soldiers get killed in the army units, the Armenian authorities come up with another fake reason to their deaths. As a result, hundreds of Armenian families lose their sons, and the Armenian government does nothing to prevent these deaths.

---

Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 11:58 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, which is an important part of the Silk Road, will be commissioned within few months, said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The President announced about this at an opening ceremony of the forum "One Belt, One Road" in Beijing on May 14.

I believe that the initiative of the new Silk Road will go down in history. I think that everyone will benefit from such a model of cooperation, and Turkey is ready to render universal support to this undertaking, the President said.

He went on to say that this transport project will contribute to the development of the infrastructure and technical capabilities of the countries that have joined the "One Belt, One Road" initiative, and promote the development of land, sea and air communications development programs.

The new Silk Road project, which involves over 60 countries with a population of 4.5 billion people, runs through an area of 40 million km2.The initiative is based on bilateral and regional cooperation between countries based on mutually beneficial relations, which is another important distinctive feature of the project, Erdogan added.

Turkey, which is located at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, is one of the leading countries participating in the Silk Road and the corridor of the Silk Road will connect Europe with Central Asia through Turkish Anatolia and will be brought to China.

The Central Corridor of the Silk Road passes through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we want to cooperate with China and other countries that are on this route, the President noted.

The President reminded that the Edirne-Kars high-speed railway is being developed jointly with Chinese companies.

The BTK railway is a corridor that will connect Azerbaijan, Georgian and Turkish railways. It is being constructed on the basis of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey intergovernmental agreement. The key objective of the project is to improve economic relations between the three countries and gaining foreign direct investment by connecting Europe and Asia.

The project implementation began in 2007 and construction began in 2008.

The line is intended to transport one million passengers and 6.5 million tons of freight at the first stage. This capacity will then reach 3 million passengers and 17 million tons of cargo.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 15:19 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Some commercial banks in Azerbaijan have stopped cashing from plastic cards designed for entrepreneurs.

Report informed that such a step has been taken upon recommendation of the Financial Market Supervisory Body (FMSB).

The FMSB representative called all banks and orally advised to suspend cashing from business cards. This comes out of execution of the law "On non-cash transactions, the report reads.

Recently limitations have been set for cashing out from accounts of entrepreneurs in accordance with new rules. In other words, individuals - entrepreneurs will be able to cash out funds only after paying the relevant taxes.



This rule applies only to accounts of individuals engaged in entrepreneurial activities, and does not apply to other current accounts and deposits of individuals.

The law On non-cash transactions was approved on December 2016. Under the law, trade facilities and public catering registered as VAT payers and whose annual turnover exceeds 200,000 manats ($118,000) can conduct cash settlements for up to 30,000 manats ($17,786) per month, while other taxpayers up to 15,000 manats ($8,893) per month.

In case of violation of the law requirements, the individuals will be fined with financial sanctions amounting to 10 percent of the operations. If the violation is committed for the second time, the penalty will be 20 percent, for the third time and more - 40 percent.

The law limits the ability of entrepreneurs to cash out money in banks. Banks or postal operators will withhold a simplified tax of 1 percent of the amount for withdrawing cash from bank accounts of legal entities and private entrepreneurs. These restrictions apply only to legal entities and individuals engaged in entrepreneurial activities.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 13:20 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

Baku Expo Center will host Caspian Motor Show international exhibition of cars, spare parts, equipment and accessories presented by the manufacturers and their local distributors on June 28-30.

International Trade Fairs Group founder Agahasan Murtadci and director general Nizami Gozalov announced about this at a press conference, Trend reported.

Caspian Motor Show will be held with support of Azerbaijan Export and Investments Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO), National Confederation of Entrepreneurs (Employers) of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijani 'Silk Road' Public Union for Promotion of Development of Entrepreneurship, Gozalov told journalists.

All famous car manufacturers and their distributors have been invited to the exhibition which will cover an area of 8,000 square meters.

The goal of this exhibition is to demonstrate modern technologies, new developments in the motor vehicle sphere, said Murtadciyev. We stand for ensuring environmental cleanliness and safety of passengers. Therefore, during the exhibition, we want to demonstrate the technologies which will allow us to achieve this.

Nizami Gozalov, for his part, noted that this exhibition will help attract foreign investors who are interested in Azerbaijans car market. He added that the development of car manufacturing will ensure the flow of investments to the country.

Such exhibitions not only open up economic prospects, but also pave way to flow of investments to the country, said Gozalov. In this regard, we are glad to invite representatives of the ministries of economy, transport, communication and high technologies, as well as organizations engaged in this sphere, experts and others to our exhibition.

We hope that the atmosphere in the exhibition, communication between the participants and guests of this event will help improve the economy, strengthen the production sector, attract investments, to work out new projects and create new jobs, added Murtadciyev.

The founder of ITF Group also noted that in order to exchange views and experience, it is planned in parallel to hold a business forum with participation of foreign firms which will become familiar with car manufacturing in Azerbaijan, as well as experts, specialists and researchers in this sphere.

ITF Group, which has held over 200 various exhibitions and business forums over 25 years, will organize Caspian Industry Expo international industry exhibition on September 13-15 and Halal Product Expo international exhibition on December 13-15, 2017.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 16:04 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

The International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) has launched the process of voluntary restructuring of its obligations.

The process of restructuring the currency obligations of the IBA will not affect its IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia subsidiary banks. The bank told Trend that both subsidiaries do not have foreign obligations.

IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia comply with all regulatory requirements of the central banks of the countries where they operate, the bank said. The financial indices of IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia exceed all requirements of the central banks of both countries."

The IBA added that IBA-Moscow and IBA-Georgia successfully fulfill their obligations to customers.

In July 2015, President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on the measures for rehabilitation related to the preparations for privatizing the state-owned shares of the International Bank of Azerbaijan JSC.

The shortcomings in the management, investment and loan policy of the IBA, as well as financing of less efficient, risky investment projects worsened the Bank's financial state, caused increase in the share of distressed assets and reduced its liquidity.

The restructuring plan contemplates a restructuring process to be effected through an exchange of IBAs senior and junior foreign currency obligations for direct sovereign obligations of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Pending the implementation of the planned restructuring process, and to ensure equal treatment of all affected creditors, IBA has suspended payments of principal and interest with respect to all obligations to be included in the operation (other than interest under trade finance facilities).

The process will lead to a meeting of all creditors affected by the restructuring plan. If approved by two-thirds of the affected creditors by value the plan will be accepted and become binding on all of them.

The IBA has been operating since 1992 and is one of the country's two state banks. The IBA-Moscow was established in 2002, the IBA-Georgia-in 2006.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 10:49 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

The first-ever Street Food Festival will be held in Baku on May 19-21.

More than 20 local cafes and restaurants in the ancient part of Baku - the Old City will offer unique recipes of street food.

Aylin Seidova, one of the organizers of the event, said that the festival, which is celebrated around the world, will be held in Azerbaijan for the first time.

An indescribable feeling of fresh food and explosion of flavors - right in the Old City, all this awaits you on May 19-21 from 11 am to 11 PM. Those who are looking for new receipts and improve his/her cooking skills are invited to workshops on cooking, she said, adding that the festival will be accompanied by tracks of the most famous DJs of the city.

Farhad Pashayev, in turn, said that the festival aims to develop food culture in Baku.

The first ever Street Food Festival is a kind of test, successful holding of which will lead us to our main goal. We want Baku Street Food Festival to become a kind of springboard for new and intriguing concepts in our city. The event is the ideal platform for a certain test on the perception of new ideas at our local market. Next year we will try to attract guests and culinary concepts, not only from the local market, but also from neighboring countries such as Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic States, he said.

Lala Hasanova spoke about the main challenges for event organizers.

With the support of the Administration of the State Historical-Architectural Reserve Icherisheher, our small but ambitious team began to transform the familiar and favorite area near the "Gosha Gala Gates" into a small paradise for food lovers. We wanted to show the importance of the cult of food in our beloved city, said Gasanova.

Aysel Huseynova, for her part, said that the Festival will give all cooks the chance to learn something new: to create unique recipes, meet masters of this realm and look into the kitchen of famous chefs and famous restaurateurs.

Media partners of the event are Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az, Azernews.az

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 11:32 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijan's National Art Museum has hosted presentation of a new art project.

"ART Rising" project is aimed at promoting the Azerbaijani artists, as well as ensure copyright protection and legal support, Trend Life reported.

New online platform for ideas and art works was presented as part of the event.

The exhibition featured the works of 20 young and 11 eminent painters, 7 handicraft masters and 5 sculptors, including Samir Kachaev - talented young sculptor, a graduate of the Azerbaijan State Academy of Arts, who died in fierce battles in April 2016.

Media partners of the event are Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az, Azernews.az

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 15:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

The Indian Embassy in Baku will hold an event in the State Musical Theatre named after Rashid Behbudov to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Azerbaijan and India.

The Embassy invites everyone to enjoy colorful and enchanting Indian Dance and Song Show on May 15. The show will start at 19:00.

India has close and friendly relations with Azerbaijan and was among the first countries to recognize Azerbaijan and establish diplomatic ties.

Last year the trade and economic exchanges between India and Azerbaijan progressed from strength to strength, increasing by 63 percent in 2016 as compared to 2015.

India has recently facilitated the visa application procedures for Azerbaijan.

From now on, Azerbaijani nationals would be able to get online e-Visa for visits to India for recreation, sightseeing, casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business.



Earlier in December 2016, Azerbaijan revealed the list of countries, whose citizens will be able to visit the Land of Fire fast and without tedious procedures. India became one of the 81 countries who is able to take advantage of ASAN Visa system, which will make life of many foreigners easier.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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IMD has issued a warning for heavy rainfall at isolated places over Andaman and Nicobar Islands from May 14 and May 16.

By Ashish Pandey: In a huge respite from the blistering heat, the southwest monsoon has arrived six days in advance in the Andaman sea and Nicobar islands. Usually, the southwest monsoon arrives in Andaman and Nicobar Islands by May 20 and in Kerala by June 1, after which it covers the entire country.

An India Meteorological Department (IMD) release said, "In view of the strengthening and deepening of south-westerly winds, persistent cloudiness and rainfall, southwest monsoon has advanced into some parts of southeast Bay of Bengal, Nicobar Islands, entire south Andaman Sea and parts of north Andaman Sea on May 14 2017. Conditions are favorable for further advancement of southwest monsoon into some parts of southwest Bay of Bengal, some more parts of southeast Bay of Bengal, remaining parts of Andaman Sea, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and some parts of east central Bay of Bengal during the next 72 hours."

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The weather department has also issued a warning for heavy rainfall at isolated places over Andaman and Nicobar Islands between May 14 and May 16.

"Strong wind speed reaching 30-40 kmph gusting to 50 kmph is very likely to prevail over Nicobar Islands and adjoining Sea areas during May 14 and May 16 and over Andaman Islands and adjoining sea areas during May 15 to May 17," said the release.

SEA CONDITION

Sea condition will be moderate to rough over south Andaman Sea and adjoining southeast Bay of Bengal from May 14 and May 15 and over north Andaman Sea and adjoining southeast and east-central Bay of Bengal from May 15 to 17.

Fishermen are advised not to venture into the sea along and off Nicobar Islands from May 14 to May 15 and along and off Andaman Islands from May 15 to May 17.

WEATHER WARNING FOR NEXT 4 DAYS

MAY 15 (Day 1):

Thunderstorm accompanied with squall very likely at isolated places over Jammu-Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim and interior Tamil Nadu.

Thunderstorm accompanied with gusty winds very likely at isolated places over Bihar, Gangetic West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, interior Karnataka, Goa and Kerala.

Heat wave conditions likely to prevail at isolated places over north Madhya Pradesh, Vidarbha and Odisha.

Heavy to very heavy rainfall very likely at isolated places over Andaman and Nicobar Islands, sub-Himalayan West Bengal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and interior Tamil Nadu.

MAY 16 (Day 2):

Thunderstorm accompanied with squall and hail very likely at isolated places over Jammu-Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Thunderstorm accompanied with squall very likely at isolated places over Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and thunderstorm accompanied with gusty winds very likely over isolated places in Gangetic West Bengal.

Heat wave conditions very likely at isolated places in Chhattisgarh.

Heavy to very heavy rainfall likely at isolated places over Assam and Meghalaya and heavy rainfall at isolated places in Andaman-Nicobar, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura

May 17 (Day 3):

Thunderstorm accompanied with squall and hail very likely at isolated places over Jammu-Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

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Thunderstorm accompanied with squall very likely at isolated places over Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand and Gangetic West Bengal.

Heavy rains at isolated places over Andaman-Nicobar, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.

May 18 (Day 4):

Thunderstorm accompanied with squall very likely at isolated places over Bihar, Jharkhand and Gangetic West Bengal.

Heavy rain very likely at isolated places over Andaman-Nicobar, Assam and Meghalaya.

ALSO READ:

Delhi government aims to get rid of mosquitoes ahead of monsoon

Southwest monsoon will be 'normal' this year, forecasts IMD

--- ENDS ---
15 May 2017 14:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

Electro music lovers are invited to fierce DJ battle on June 3.

The event will be held in Richmond Club & Resort, Weagency and GuennolaMusic with support of Azerbaijan Youth Union (AYU).

If you want to party, support your favorite DJs and enjoy a great day in nature  welcome to the Richmond Club & Resort, located in one of the most picturesque corners of Azerbaijan, in the Pirkuli, 22 km from the town of Shamakhi. Here at 1,400 metres above sea level, eight of the best DJs-finalists will rock the silence of the forest, giving you an unforgettable experience.

Baku`s best DJs, including DJ Twist, DJ ED, DJ RaSL will judge the participants of the battle. Only 8 contestants will reach the final. The show will be hosted by MC Remo Neal.

Winner of the first place will get a prize in the amount of 1000 manats ($ 591), while the winners of the second and third places 500 manats ($ 296 ) and 300 manats ($ 177) ), respectively.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1885948558323080/

Media partners of the event are Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az, Azernews.az

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 15:30 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

A documentary Objective Baku  Hitler's War on Oil has been screened at Gaumont Cinema in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The documentary was produced by Arzu Aliyeva in partnership with the Heydar Aliyev Foundation.

Representatives of the diplomatic corps accredited in Argentina, government officials, MPs, teachers and students of higher education institutions, media representatives and members of the general public attended the event, Azertac reported.

Azerbaijani ambassador to Argentine Rashad Aslanov, in his speech, highlighted Azerbaijan's tremendous contributions to the Victory over Nazism.

Ambassador Aslanov said that the plot of the documentary reveals the role of the Azerbaijani people in defeating Nazism and the strategic importance of the Azerbaijani oil during the war.

The film provides a totally new approach to the history of World War II, i.e. through the prism of oil.

With over 200 hours of video materials, photographs and other documents scrutinized, documentary took 14 months of substantial research in Azerbaijan, Germany, the US, the UK, France and Russia,

The video material features some unique video snapshots of the WW2 battles never shown to this day in a totally new format of restored color film.

So far, the film was broadcasted at the National Geographic channel in 26 countries.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 12:17 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Moscow is very active in the resolution of the Karabakh conflict not only as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, but also as one of the powers responsible for the maintenance of peace and stability in the Eurasian area, especially in the area of its geopolitical interests, head of the expert-analytical network PolitRUS Vitaly Arkov told Trend on May 13.

The expert noted that Moscow rightly believes that a solution can be found only through a peaceful and direct dialogue between Baku and Yerevan.

Moscow strongly promotes dialogue between the parties by regularly acting as the initiator and organizer of negotiations at various levels, including those at the level of foreign ministers and leaders of the states, said Arkov.

Russia along with the U.S. and France is a co-chair country of the OSCE Minsk Group established to broker a peace to the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

After the April 2016 escalation in Nagorno-Karabakh, Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting with Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents in St. Petersburg.

On April 28, 2017, Russia again brought the sides together. This time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers. They discussed the prospects for the progress of the negotiation process on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement.

Arkov noted that the Karabakh issue is perhaps the most intractable one not only in the Post-Soviet area, but also in Europe in general.

Yerevan, although hardly, painfully and with the help of Moscow, has realized that the state will not be able to fully develop and peacefully coexist with neighbors without taking any steps to return the occupied territories to the control of Baku, said the expert, adding that there is a plan of the interim settlement developed in Moscow and agreed with Baku and Yerevan.

Arkov also accused the West of inaction, saying that their words differ from their actions.

The expert added that the formation of preconditions for the emergence of new conflict zones is one of the strategies of Washington to maintain control over Eurasia, which is the key continent for world domination.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Armenia still controls fifth part of Azerbaijan's territory and rejects implementing four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts.

---

Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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15 May 2017 12:50 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

The trial, which began on the basis of an appeal by the Russian Justice Ministry in connection with the liquidation of the state registration of All-Russian Azerbaijani Congress, aroused deep concern among the Azerbaijani community living in Russia, compatriots living abroad, as well as the entire Azerbaijani public.

The court session is scheduled for May 15.The All-Russian Azerbaijani Congress allegedly violated the legislation of the Russian Federation.

Experts say that this step aims at harming relations between Azerbaijan and Russia.

Professor of the Academy of Public Administration under the President of Azerbaijan, Doctor of Political Sciences Elchin Ahmedov considers that the attempt to liquidate the Congress is the result of joint activity of anti-Azerbaijani forces and the Armenian lobby.

It is aimed at harming relations between the two countries, he added.

Ahmedov noted that until now the All-Russian Azerbaijani Congress did not do anything that would contradict the laws or the national interests of Russia. "On the contrary, this structure has always been actively involved in the socio-political and cultural life of Russia, and all this should be taken into account," he said.

MP Elman Nasirov views this action as a shadow over the dynamically developing strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and Russia.

"Relations between the two countries are developing in many ways: Azerbaijan and Russia have the same positions on fundamental issues, Azerbaijan has never joined the sanctions imposed by some countries, in particular the United States, on Russia, even though, for these reasons, these countries exerted pressure on Azerbaijan," he said.

All-Russian Azerbaijani Congress has always contributed to the development of Azerbaijani-Russian relations, helped to develop relations between peoples, institutions of civil society of both states, according to Nasirov.

We cannot allow the intentions of anti-Azerbaijani circles and pro-Armenian forces to be realized. We believe that the Russian government will intervene in this matter and anti-Azerbaijani circles will not achieve their goals," he said.

Unfortunately, certain forces in Russia, looking for insignificant flaws in the organizational activities of the All-Russian Azerbaijani Congress, do not stop trying to create conditions for the liquidation of this large Russian social organization.

Earlier, Azerbaijans Russian community, which unites more than 120,000 Russian citizens of Azerbaijan, expressed serious concern over the long-standing situation surrounding the Russian public organization All-Russian Azerbaijan Congress.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 13:32 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

The aggregate value (weighted average volume) of investment portfolio of Azerbaijans oil fund SOFAZ for 2017 is forecast at 51.24 billion manats ($30 billion).

This is reflected in the decree of Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev on the approval of main directions of the use of SOFAZ funds and investment policy for 2017.



The forecast for 2016 was at the level of 51.3 billion manats ($30.1 billion), for 2015- 28.2 billion manats ($16.6 billion), for 2014  27 billion manats ($16 billion), for 2013  25.2 billion manats ($15 billion) and for 2012  23 billion manats ($13.5 billion).

The main areas of SOFAZ spending in 2017 will be: financing of some measures related to accommodation and improvement of social and living conditions for refugees and IDPs; transfers to the 2017-state budget; transfers to the Central Bank of Azerbaijan to ensure financial stability; financing of reconstruction of the Samur-Absheron irrigation system; financing of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project; financing of the state program on education of Azerbaijani youth in foreign countries in 2007-2015; financing of Azerbaijans share in the Southern Gas Corridor projects.

Under the presidential decree, the currency structure of SOFAZs investment portfolio is as follows: up to 50 percent invested in assets denominated in US dollars, 35 percent - in Euros, 5 percent - in British pounds, and 10 percent - in other currencies.

The Funds investment portfolio can consist of four sub-portfolios: a portfolio of debt instruments and money market instruments  60 percent of total portfolio value, a portfolio of shares  25 percent, a portfolio of real estate  10 percent, and a portfolio of gold  5 percent.

SOFAZ was established under the Presidential Decree, dated December 29, 1999, "On Establishment of the State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan".

The main purpose of the establishment of the Fund was to preserve and multiply the income derived from oil, create an excellent economic base, taking into account social needs, the requirements of economic progress and development of the country. Besides, the challenge ahead is to protect the country's economy from possible negative influences caused by the growth of foreign exchange earnings and avoidance of damage to financial discipline.

The total volume of SOFAZ investment portfolio amounted to $33.2 billion as of April 1, 2017, or 99.98 percent of total assets.

In the first quarter of 2017, 12.9 percent of the investment portfolio of SOFAZ was invested in shares, while last year this figure was 12.2 percent. Some 88 percent of the investment portfolio was invested in financial instruments for a period of up to five years, and 21.1 percent of are invested in real estate, stocks and gold.

Currently, about 3.6 percent of the investment portfolio is invested in gold, 4.6 percent  in real estate, 12.9 percent  in shares.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 14:34 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

Azerbaijan and China have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the oil and gas processing and petrochemical complex (GPC) project of SOCAR.

SOCAR GPC Company reported that the document was signed during the high-level international forum held as part of the One Belt  One Road strategy in Beijing.

The MoU was signed by President of Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR Rovnag Abdullayev, Chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) Wang Yilin and head of the China Development Bank Hu Huaibang.

This agreement will regulate the services to be rendered by China Huanqiu Contracting and Engineering Corporation (HQC), subsidiary of CNPC and Technip Italy for the preliminary detailed design work as part of the SOCAR GPC project.

HQC and Technip Italy companies will start rendering services in accordance with this agreement from May 15, 2017.

The engineering and civil engineering work is provided by HQC, which has extensive experience in the field of design, procurement and construction of projects, with the support of Azerbaijani companies on the basis of projects prepared by the world's leading licensors.

The GPC project envisages construction of gas processing and petrochemical complex 15 km away from Baku by the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR. The capacity of the complex will be around 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year.

The complex will include a gasoline-powered ethylene pyrolysis plant with a capacity of 610,000 tons, a propylene plant with a capacity of 130,000 tons and a polyethylene plant with a capacity of 600,000 tons, Buten-1 and Hexen-1 facilities, a general plant and a heat energy center.

The cost of the project is around $4 billion.

SOCAR GPC Project is the beginning of a new era in development of Azerbaijans petrochemical industry. With implementation of this project Azerbaijan will become a global player in the petrochemical industry.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
15 May 2017 10:17 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Turkish fighter jets pounded the outlawed PKK terror targets in northern Iraq killing 10 terrorists, Turkish General Staff said Sunday.

The military statement said the counter-terrorism air raid hit terror targets in Zap and Sinat-Haftanin regions.

Four shelters and three weapon establishments were also destroyed in the airstrikes, the statement read.

The air force has been conducting regular airstrikes on PKK facilities in both northern Iraq and Turkey since July 2015, when the terror group resumed its decades-old armed campaign.

PKK, a designated terrorist organization to Turkey, EU and the U.S., have been engaged in decade-long insurgency in southern Turkey bordering Iraq.

---

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By Press Trust of India: Dehradun, May 14 (PTI) BJP leader Subramanian Swamy today said he hoped that construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya would begin next year, while advocating the removal of Article 370, which grants special autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir.

On sidelines of an event here, Swamy said he would talk various groups on June 7 in Ayodhya.

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Stating that the Supreme Court would complete hearing on the petition in the case by September-October, he added, "This is a matter of faith. The temple should be constructed where Lord Rama took birth. The mosque could come up on the other side of the Saryu river."

The Rajya Sabha MP said he has argued in his petition in the apex court that as per Article 25 of the Constitution, he should be allowed to offer prayer at the Ram temple.

However, he added that it was not possible to pray there due to the restrictions imposed.

Talking about J-K, he stressed that Article 370 should be removed. He recalled when the legislation was implemented, it was mentioned that it has to be a temporary measure.

"It is not a tough call to remove Article 370 (in J-K). Even Parliaments approval is not required for this," he claimed. PTI DPT KIS KIS

--- ENDS ---
By Press Trust of India: Bengaluru, May 15 (PTI) Observing that India and France have a lot in common, French Ambassador to India Alexandre Ziegler today said new President Emmanuel Macron will herald a "new bilateraldynamics" between the two countries.

"We share a lot of common values with India, there is lot of opportunity for development of our bilateral relations," Ziegler told reporters here.

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He said "..there will a new dynamics, a new bilateral dynamics with the new president coming to the office and the new government coming to office..."

Ziegler was speaking to reporters after inaugurating the first Atout France (Frances tourism promotion agency) tourism kiosk in India and the newly relocated France Visa Facilitation Service (VFS) centre here.

Stating within India, Bengaluru will be one of the hubs for the French president in terms of investment and presence of French community, Ziegler said: "Yes we have a lot to do, and we will do a lot."

He said France has become the most preferred outbound destination for Indians as in 2015 alone five lakh Indian travellers visited France, registering a 45 per centincrease of Indian tourists to France compared to the previous year.

Though the figures for 2016 were still not available, it will be "quite impressive" looking at the numbers of visa issued, he said,adding Bengaluru is one of the fastest growing places forvisa applications to France with more than 30,000 applications made last year alone. PTI KSU RA BN RAX

--- ENDS ---
The majority of our work is directly with homeowners, and we are the Auckland specialists in Cedar house maintenance. We understand the need to take time to explain the options and work out the most effective way to care for the maintenance or restoration of the Cedar on their homes.

We dont outsource our work. Using our own team ensures that the work is carried out in a way that is comfortable for the home owner and meets our high standards.






Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi informed the Supreme Court about the Narendra Modi government's intent when asked what are the remedies for a Muslim man to come out of a marriage if such practices are struck down.

Supreme Court said it will deal with triple talaq for now.

By Anusha Soni: The Centre today said that if the Supreme Court strikes down triple talaq, it will bring in a law to regulate Muslim marriages and divorces.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi informed the Supreme Court about the Narendra Modi government's intent when asked what are the remedies for a Muslim man to come out of a marriage if such practices are struck down.

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At this, the Attorney General told a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar that "If the practice of instant divorce (triple talaq) is struck down by the court, then Centre will bring a law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community."

Mukul Rohatgi told the Constitution bench that triple talaq violates Muslim women's right to equality within the community, and also within the country.

All forms of talaq are bad since they are unilateral in nature, the Attorney General said adding that Muslim women are not given equal status within the community in matters pertaining to divorce.

Muslim women in India have not been given rights that women in other countries have been given, said Mukul Rohatgi.

WILL DEAL WITH TRIPLE TALAQ FOR NOW

Earlier, the Supreme Court said that due to paucity of time it will only deal with triple talaq while keeping the issues of polygamy and nikah halala pending.

"It may not be possible to deal with all the three issues in the limited time we have. We will keep them pending for future," a five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar said.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said the Supreme Court must also test the validity of polygamy and nikah halala separately.

ALL THREE ISSUES MUST BE HEARD, SAYS CENTRE

The Centre insisted that all the three issues--triple talaq, polygamy, nikah halala--must be heard as the plea before the Supreme Court raises all the three questions.

"The scope of referring had all the three issues that was divorce, nikah halala, polygamy. All these three issues are before this court by virtue of the reference order of the two- judge bench," Mukul Rohatgi said.

"At a time when theocratic countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan are moving towards reform, we being a secular country are still debating," Mukul Rohatgi told the Supreme Court

WILL BE DEALT IN FUTURE, SAYS COURT

Rohatgi asked the bench, also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, to make it clear that the issues of polygamy and nikah halala are still open and would be dealt by other bench in future.

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At this, the Supreme Court said it will keep the issues of polygamy and nikah halala open for debate at a later point in time. "It will be dealt in future," the bench clarified.

The Constitution bench is hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the practice of triple talaq among Muslims.

(Inputs from PTI)

ALSO READ:

Triple talaq undesirable, worst form of dissolution of marriage among Muslims: Supreme Court

Triple talaq: How it affects lives of India's 90 million Muslim women

Before triple talaq case, a look at how India's judiciary dealt with personal laws vs the fundamental rights

WATCH | Will hear only triple talaq now; nikah halala and polygamy later: Supreme Court tells Centre

--- ENDS ---
Archaeologists discover ancient churches near the Sea of Galilee

Archeologists digging the ancient city of Hippos-Sussita near the Sea of Galilee have unearthed a cluster of churches that may have existed in the late fifth or early sixth century. The expedition has found six to seven places of worship so far, indicating a mutual tolerance among Christian sects during that time.

Hippos-Sussita was one of the region's 10 cities (along with Damascus) in the eastern part of the Roman empire, encompassing sections of what today are Israel, Jordan and Syria. Christians in those times held various interpretations of their faith, but they opted to build their churches as closely as possible.

It seemed that the coexistence of multiple churches in a single place was the norm during those days. Some of the churches may have been built at different times. They could have also been made to accommodate different theological perspectives. It could also be all of the above.

Hippos had been occupied for thousands of years, but somehow, the place was abandoned along with its churches. This could be attributed to a massive loss of faith or population, or it could also be caused by some of the sects ceasing to exist, explained Prof. Mark Schuler, co-director of the excavation of the Northeast Insula Project.

Christians in the fifth century debated about Christ's divinity. The monophysite theory taught that Jesus and God the Father are one. But the bishops of Hippos in the sixth century advocated the Chalcedonian perspective which taught that Jesus, the Son, is separate from the Father but is divine nonetheless.

The professor from Concordia University explained that the during the time, the monophysite belief was strong in Palestine, but this changed in around year 516 when the apostle John, who was then the patriarch of Jerusalem, embraced the Chalcedonian Christianity.

The belief was carried on by John's successor, Peter during the second Synod in 538. Present in that Synod was the bishop of Hippos, which meant that the ancient city generally adhered to the Chalcedonian tradition. But apart from Christians, there were some Jews who thrived in the area.
Donald Trump's Liberty University speech was a masterclass in winning the religious right

Donald Trump's speech at the evangelical Liberty University was nothing short of extraordinary.

In parts genuinely inspirational. In parts outright bizarre.

For one thing he said 'Jerry'  in reference to the college's president Jerry Falwell Jnr  18 times in 30 minutes and at one point seven times in six sentences.

This was more than Trump's typical disjointed and rambling style of speaking. This was a very deliberate ploy as part of a theme that permeated his commencement speech to graduates from the Virginia university  'us and them'.

Some evangelicals love a victim mentality. They love being outsiders. And Trump played on those heartstrings to perfection.

'Did we take risks? Did we dare to defy expectations? Did we challenge accepted wisdom and take on established systems?' he said, asking the 18,000 gathered to reflect on what their lives would look like, before adding: 'I think I did.'

With repeated references to 'entrenched interests', 'failed power structures', 'broken systems' and 'failed' government, he urged the students to relish criticism.

'Demand the best from yourself and be totally unafraid to challenge entrenched interests and failed power structures. Does that sound familiar by the way?,' he said in another reference to his own outsider credentials.

'The more people tell you it's not possible, that it can't be done, the more you should be absolutely determined to prove them wrong. Treat the word "impossible" as nothing more than motivation.

'Relish the opportunity to be an outsider. Embrace that label  being an outsider is fine, embrace the label  because it's the outsiders who change the world and who make a real and lasting difference. The more that a broken system tells you that you're wrong, the more certain you should be that you must keep pushing ahead, you must keep pushing forward.'

It is clear that Trump himself relishes his image as an outsider. By reinforcing its depiction as as a strength, he underpins his own image among white evangelicals as their president  an almost messianic figure sent to preach the gospel of guns and savage healthcare to the heathens of the political elite.

He was introduced as 'the President who bombs the Middle East' and Liberty hailed its messiah with a standing ovation.

But as well as preaching on the qualities of being an outsider, Trump went further to shore up his support among evangelicals, who he clearly sees as being critical to his presidency.

In a convenient re-writing of America's secular orgins, Trump fulfilled the Republican evangelical ideal of seeing America as founded on Christian ideals  a new Jerusalem.

'America has always been the land of dreams because America is a nation of true believers,' he told the packed stadium.

'When the pilgrims landed at Plymouth they prayed. When the founders wrote the Declaration of Independence, they invoked our creator four times, because in America we don't worship government ,we worship God,' he added in a soundbite from paradise for Jerry Falwell Jnr.

'That is why our elected officials put their hands on the Bible and say, "So help me God," as they take the oath of office. It is why our currency proudly declares, "In God we trust," and it's why we proudly proclaim that we are one nation under God every time we say the pledge of allegiance.

'The story of America is the story of an adventure that began with deep faith, big dreams and humble beginnings. That is also the story of Liberty University.'

If you are a politically conservative evangelical, it really doesn't get any better than this.

Except it does, if you come from Liberty University.

'Liberty University is a place where they really have true champions and you have a simple creed that you live by: to be, really, champions for Christ. Whether you're called to be a missionary overseas, to shepherd a church or to be a leader in your community, you are living witness of the gospel message of faith, hope and love. And I must tell you I am so proud as your President to have helped you along over the past short period of time,' he said.

'America is better when people put their faith into action. As long as I am your president, no one is ever going to stop you from practising your faith or from preaching what's in your heart,' he vowed to swooning cheers.

This was a masterclass in winning the religious right.

With his religious liberty order, his Supreme Court choice of Judge Neil Gorsuch, his attempt to implement a Muslim ban and his vows to curtail LGBT freedoms, Trump has the evangelical vote locked down. And judging by his reception at Liberty, he's secured the support of another generation of true believers.
Drugged child soldiers involved in attacks by Christian militias on Muslims in Central African Republic

Christian militias killed as many as 30 civilians over the weekend in escalating violence on the Central African Republic border with Congo.

Many of those fighting are believed to be child soldiers who have been drugged.

Dozens of surviving civilians have fled into sanctuary inside a mosque in Bangassou, a town on the border, according to United Nations staff on the ground.

The Chrisitian militias are targeting Muslims in the violence, which has also seen attacks on the United Nations base and follows the departure of Ugandan and French peace-keeping troops.

At least six UN peacekeepers have been killed.

According to the local leader of the Red Cross, Pastor Antoine Mbao Bogo, the fighting has continued the point where the Red Cross and other aid organisations are unable to go in to help the wounded and retrieve the dead.

Herve Verhoosel, spokesman for the UN mission, told Reuters: 'The situation is extremely deplorable and we are doing everything to rapidly retake control of Bangassou.'

A disarmament programme put in place by the government has failed to halt the rising violence.

Prime minister Simplice Sarandji condemned the attacks.

The latest sectarian violence began four years ago after Muslim troops seized control of the former French colony.

Additional reporting by Reuters
General Election 2017: Here are the Christian Labour candidates

Rarely in the build-up to a General Election in the UK has there been more talk of tactical voting.

Whether it's progressive alliances on the left or UKIP endorsing Brexit-backing Conservative candidates, die-hard members of all parties are backing others in a bid to either block or ensure the UK's exit from the European Union.

Whatever view you take, there is a very stark choice between a hard-left Labour and a hard-Brexit in the Tories.

Inevitably this will leave many politically homeless and some Christians may be tempted to abandon their traditional party and vote for people who share their faith.

Here is a list of Christian candidates who are standing for Labour in the General Election 2017, with thanks to Christians on the Left.

Christian Today has contacted the Conservative Christian Fellowship and the Liberal Democrat Christian Forum for a similar list.

NEW CANDIDATES

Sara Hyde  Bromley and Chislehurst

Marsha de Cordova - Battersea

Sam Rushworth - Tatton

Gillian Troughton - Cumberland

Chris Ostrowski - Watford

Graeme Currie - North Shropshire

Emma Hardy - Hull West

Doug Swanney - North Hertfordshire

David Stokes  Bournemouth West

Mandy Garford - Gravesham

Lee Rhodes - West Dorset

Graham Giles - Havant

David Mellen - Rushciffe

Darren Paffey  Romsey and Southampton North

David Drew - Stroud

Tim Young - Colchester

Ruth Jones - Monmouth

Dan Greef - South Cambridge

Catherine Atkinson - Erewash

Sally Gathern - Ashford

PREVIOUS MPs

Jonathan Reynolds  Stalybridge and Hyde

Ben Bradshaw  Exeter

Lyn Brown - West Ham

Chris Bryant  Rhondda

Dawn Butler - Brent Central

Liam Byrne - Hodge Hill

Neil Coyle  Bermondsey and Old Southwark

Mary Creagh  Wakefield

Stella Creasy - Walthamstow

Jon Cruddas  Dagenham and Rainham

Alex Cunningham - Stockton North

Wayne David  Caerphilly

Stephen Doughty  Cardiff South

Rob Flello  Stoke on Trent South

Barry Gardiner  Brent North

Helen Goodman  Bishop Auckland

Andrew Gwynne  Denton and Reddish

Sharon Hodgson  Washington and Sunderland

Susan Elan Jones - Clwyd south

David Lammy - Tottenham

Gordon Marsden  Blackpool South

Rachael Maskell - York Central

Conor McGinn - St Helens North

Catherine McKinnell  Newcastle North

Bridget Philipson  Sunderland Central

Steve Pound - Ealing North

Barry Sheerman  Huddersfield

Gavin Shuker  Luton South

Cat Smith  Lancaster and Fleetwood

Stephen Timms  East Ham

John Woodcock  Barrow and Furness
Jesmond church defends consecrating renegade bishop: We're not causing a split

A conservative church is defending a move to consecrate its senior minister as a rogue bishop in the face of sharp criticism from fellow evangelicals.

Jesmond Parish Church insists it is not causing a split in the Church of England after Rev Jonathan Pryke was consecrated a 'bishop in the Church of God' without permission from the archbishops.

In a question and answer sheet handed out to its congregation on Sunday, the church's leaders warn conservative ministers are being 'filtered out' in the current CofE system.

'The aim is not to create a new denomination,' parishioners were told according to the Thinking Anglicans blog.

'This is one small but necessary step on behalf of faithful Church of England ministers and congregations nationwide in our mission to the nation.

'This is not a step of "leaving the Church of England". It is the theologically liberal bishops and clergy that have "left the Church of England" doctrinally.

'This is a step to preserve the Church of England's heritage and mission which we have received.'

The Q&A goes on to say without new conservative bishops to ordain new conservative clergy and plant new churches, it would mean 'biblically faithful ministers finding it increasingly difficult to be ordained and deployed by the current system, as people are "filtered out" according to their views on homosexual practice and the ordination of women.'

It goes on to refer to 'the confused Church of today' with bishops denying traditional teachings like the Virgin Birth and male headship and says: 'We need new style English bishops here "on the ground" to plan for and enable the urgent spread of the gospel nationwide  especially through church planting.'

It adds church growth requires 'the ordination and deployment of new ministers who are biblically faithful  which the current system, sadly, can hinder.

'And we hope that some of those ministers will move into existing Church of England posts as well as new church plants, to contribute to the recovery of the gospel and to further the ministry of men and women for church growth.'

The Church of England is investigating the incident after Pryke was consecrated by the presiding bishop of a breakaway Anglican faction in South Africa.

A spokeswoman for John Sentamu told Christian Today: 'The Archbishop of York has been informed by the Bishop of Newcastle that a minister who holds her licence in that diocese has been made bishop in a ceremony held under the auspices of an overseas Church.

'All clergy of the Church of England are bound by Canon Law, which forms part of the law of the land.

'Whilst the facts of the matter are being investigated it is not possible to say how what has happened relates to Canon Law so it would not be appropriate at this point to offer further comment.'

The provocative move has been criticised by fellow evangelicals including Ian Paul, of the blog site Psephizo, who told the BBC the time for a split was not yet.

'The Church of England's belief is described in its liturgy,' he said.

'So the red line for anyone of orthodox persuasion is when liturgy is changed.'

Christian Today contacted the Diocese of Newcastle but a spokeswoman would not confirm whether the Bishop had spoken to Jesmond's leadership.

Senior Anglican leaders in the Archbishop's Council are meeting this week in Lambeth Palace where the issue is likely to be raised.
Jesus said the disciples would do 'greater works' than he did. He didn't mention walking on water

It turns out that the tragic news that a Zimbabwe pastor was eaten alive by crocodiles in front of his congregation is a classic example of fake news.

Many people were taken in by the story, and this is perhaps because it had an element of plausibility to it.

And that is because it would not have been the first time Christians have been killed attempting to imitate Christ's miraculous deeds. Some have died from extreme fasting, while others have been bitten by deadly snakes in their attempt to live out the Jesus' alleged promise: 'They will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all' (Mark 16:18).

For those wondering if they're faithless for not handling pythons, there's a good explanation for the Mark 16 passage  many scholars believe it to be inauthentic, at least not part of Mark's original Gospel.

But if there's one verse that really captures the radical Christian enthusiasm of this kind, it's Jesus' words to his disciples in John 14:12-14: 'Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.'

Jesus, who performed lots of miracles in his ministry, told his followers that they would do 'greater works' than he. For some, this is a commission to exceed the powers that even Jesus displayed. It's a call to be bigger and better in ministering the miraculous.

But what did Jesus really mean? These are words that have puzzled readers for millennia. As we've seen, the stakes of interpretation are high. Either some are gravely misunderstanding Jesus, or others are ignoring one of his greatest promises.

Some interpreters say the emphasis is not in quality but in extent: Jesus' followers wouldn't exceed his power  walking on water, raising the dead etc  but they would exceed his reach. Reaching out beyond Israel and 'to the ends of the earth', and over 2,000 years of global Church history, Jesus' followers would certainly reach wider than he did in his short ministry.

Another popular interpretation sees the 'greater work' as witness to Jesus' gospel, only fully unveiled after his death, resurrection and ascension. John Piper suggests that since the function of Jesus' works is to witness to him, so the disciples will now have the greater power to witness to Christ, in fuller knowledge of his ministry.

The witness need not be miraculous (it may simply be love and good deeds that glorify God), but it still points to the Father. The 'greater things' come because never before have the disciples been able to share a Spirit-filled message of complete forgiveness for all.

As Piper suggests: 'What's new and greater is that never before in the history of the world had anyone ever been forgiven by faith in the already crucified, already risen, already reigning, already indwelling Christ.'

That reading actually makes good sense in the context of the story of Scripture. But what of the truly miraculous? There clearly is a miraculous ministry in the early Church, seen through the Spirit-filled disciples in the book of Acts.

Paul too refers to the gift of working miracles, but calls it one gift among many that not all will have. As he asks in 1 Corinthians 12:29-30: 'Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues?'

Since Jesus' promise is addressed to all believers ('whoever believes in me') but miraculous gifts are not promised to all by Paul, there's reason to conclude that Jesus' words aren't exclusively about working wonders.

None of this is to say that Jesus didn't want his followers do work miracles of healing or other intervention through the Holy Spirit, but it's also not a blank cheque for blind and life-threatening faith.

The tragedy of people who died through taking this promise literally is that 'faith', in Scriptural terms, is meant to stir life and hope, but here it has only brought death and despair. Ironically, these ill-fated demonstrations of faith may well have crushed the faith of many.

A wise pastor of mine once said: 'You can't trust God for things he hasn't promised'. It's dangerous and foolish to test God in that way.

There are some ambiguous verses in Scripture, but a brief look at Church tradition, the lived experience of believers  and a healthy dose of reason  offers wise direction for understanding them.

The disciples faced death as a cost of radical witness, which is different. The New Testament talks much about faith as a profound gift in a dark world  it doesn't tell people they're invincible.

No church seriously invested in studying the Bible could think that Jesus called his followers to be daredevil stunt artists. The call is radical servanthood, a ministry for others which may involve the miraculous, or the more mundane. It's a life that takes deep trust (faith), but doesn't live to drastically prove its commitment to others.

Lastly, we live in a broken world where humans are fragile and death is real. Only a fool bets against such powers to make a point.

In a fallen world, promises offer hope, and faith offers life. But in a fallen world, it matters what you trust. Faith in fake promises can only spell despair  just as trust in what turns out to be fake news only brings embarrassment. We can all learn lessons from these episodes  both when they happen, and when they turn out not to have happened at all.

You can follow @JosephHartropp on Twitter
Louisiana Baptists forgive Russell Moore for 'breach of fellowship' after he apologises

Prominent Southern Baptist Russell Moore has won the backing of Baptists in Louisiana after apologising for divisions caused by his criticisms of President Donald Trump, Baptist Press reports.

The Louisiana Baptist Convention executive board looked at 'issues of concern' around Moore, who heads the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Louisiana has commended Moore for 'confessing his failings' has also urged him to 'listen carefully and respectfully to Southern Baptists even as we listen to him.'

Russell Moore has been at the centre of controversy over allegedly being disrespectful of evangelical supporters of Donald Trump.

Moore told Baptist Press: 'I've had a great time talking with Louisiana Baptist leadership about the ways the Gospel intersects with our cultural moment. As I told their leaders recently, too, I look forward as always to partnering with Louisiana Baptists for the sake of the Great Commission and the cause of Christ.'

Two months ago, Moore publicly apologised 'for failing to distinguish' in some instances between Trump supporters who appeared to compromise core Christian principles and those who did not.

It was this apology that convinced the Louisiana Baptists to commend Moore for 'confessing his failings' that led to a 'serious breach of fellowship' among Southern Baptists.
Muslims in CAR 'slaughter 26 Christians in door-to-door village attack'

Muslim militants killed 26 civilians in a predominantly Christian village in the Central African Republic (CAR) after going door-to-door seeking out Christians to slaughter, Morning Star News reported.

In what was reportedly the worst violence in the country for months, rebels from the former Seleka group  an alliance of rebel militia factions that overthrew the CAR government in March 2013  attacked the village of Ndomete, about 220 miles north of the capital city of Bangui on Friday.

Hostility between Seleka, officially disbanded in 2013, and Christian "anti-Balaka" militias  who emerged after the 2013 coup - has increased in the past year, but government and UN officials said the attack targeted civilians.

One Christian leader from the area cast doubt on the country's ability to bring order, telling Morning Star News: "If the government is not going to beef up the security, then we are going to defend ourselves. We shall not keep quiet as our brothers are dying."

Fighting between Muslims and Christians worsened in 2013, when Seleka deposed the then-President Francois Bozize and installed Michel Djotodia, a Muslim. Djotodia announced the disbanding of Seleka in September 2013, but rebels have since rampaged throughout the country, killing Christians and political enemies. Christian militia groups have formed in response.

Human Rights Watch has documented executions, rape and looting by ex-Seleka fighters. In May 2014, rebels killed 11 people in a grenade and shooting attack at the Church of Fatima in Bangui.

In February, the former prime minister Faustin-Archange Touadera was elected president, bringing hope that political and religious conflict would subside. But rebel and militia fighters are still active throughout the country outside the capital.
The students were on their way to IP College in Narela for their second semester exam when the accident occurred.

By Press Trust of India: Two college students died and five others were injured after their car fell off from the Punjabi Bagh flyover in west Delhi this morning, the police said.

The car had seven occupants who were on their way to appear for an exam. While two persons died, others are undergoing treatment at a city hospital.

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The victims are first-year students of Delhi Institute of Professional Studies. They were on their way to IP College in Narela for their second semester exam when the accident occurred, a senior police officer said.

The deceased have been identified as Sanchit and Ritu. Those injured were Pranav, Garima, Rishab, Rajat and Raja, the police said.

The students, who were all in their teens, had assembled at Rajat's house in east Punjabi Bagh and were going to their exam centre, they added. Rajat was driving the vehicle and it is suspected that he might be speeding.

The police are waiting to record the statements of those injured in the accident to ascertain the sequence of events. The injured are still unconscious, they added.

Also read: Tamil Nadu: Family of six dies in a road accident

Also read: Delhi: Man kills woman for argument with bar dancer girlfriend, arrested

--- ENDS ---
Pastor Killed And Church Destroyed In Revenge Attack In Central African Republic

A Christian pastor has been killed and two churches destroyed in brutal revenge attacks by Muslim rebels in the Central African Republic.

Pastor Jean-Paul Sankagui of the Eglise du Christ en Centrafrique was attacked and stabbed to death by supporters of Muslim rebel militia in the CAR's capital Bangui, World Watch Monitor reports.

The attack came after a military operation was launched by CAR military and UN peacekeepers to capture and interrogate local militia leader Youssouf Sy, whose name has also been reported as Youssouf Malinga. The operation failed and he and one of his officers were killed in the incident.

'During the operation, Sy  also known as Big Man  and his men opened fire on the security forces and killed two passers-by, a man and a woman,' a UN spokesman said, according to CBN News.

'The security forces responded, killing Youssouf and one of his men. Three Central African security forces troops were also injured,' he added.

In retaliation Sy's allies surrounded Sankagui's church. An eyewitness said that Sankagui had urged those present at the church to flee the church to escape the violence.

Sankagui was then attacked and stabbed to death, a family member said. His church was set on fire and destroyed.

Two other churches in the area were set on fire, and a local school was destroyed. The UN reported that at least three people were killed and 26 injured in the violence.

UN spokesman Vladimir Monteiro lamented the violence, saying: 'It is unfortunate that the civilian population were the victims of these criminals' indiscriminate fire.'
Politicians on trial: Why we need more from this election than slogans and abuse

'I want to start a debate about...'

It's become a familiar refrain from politicians and public figures over recent decades. We have problems facing the state of our economy, public services, deficit, security, infrastructure, communities, etc, etc, etc. Solutions are not straightforward but it's clear that we can't carry on as we are. We need to think creatively about fresh alternatives, and to negotiate deep-felt differences in the process. So we need a serious debate about...

Not a word of this is a lie. We do face challenges as a nation. Solutions are not simple. People have different opinions about what we should do. We live in a democracy. And so we should  must  have a debate about what we do.

That it precisely what elections, supremely general elections, are supposed to be: the moments, regular if not necessarily frequent, when the nation pauses momentarily, draws breath, looks around and asks what kind of country we want to be and how should we get there. Ask any Briton  indeed, any Westerner  what she thinks is important and admirable about their national politics and 'democracy' and 'free speech' are likely to be up there with 'rule of law' and maybe 'human rights'. A general election is the national moment of democratic speech par excellence. It is only natural for us to be enthusiastic about another one.

We're not, of course. Brenda from Bristol was speaking for many when she said incredulously, 'You're joking? Not another one! Oh for God's sake. Honestly, I can't stand this. There's too much politics going on at the moment.' Even those who like the business of politics (we have a few in the Theos office) sighed a little at the prospect.

Now, the obvious reason for this is that we have had quite a few 'national' elections of late. The 2017 general election follows hot on the heels of the 2016 EU referendum which followed the 2015 general election which followed the 2014 Scottish independence referendum which...it's enough to sate the hardest political junky.

Yet, this wasn't just over-familiarity. After all, if each and every one of those elections had been paragons of democratic speech and deliberation  real, meaningful, helpful national debate  then we should, in theory, itch at the prospect of another.

The reason we don't is because they aren't. Indeed, if the three or so weeks of semi-official campaigning so far are anything to go by, the election has been an exercise in saying as little as possible, as frequently as possible, or as colourfully as possible.

Strategists at Tory Central Office have clearly been reading Alastair Campbell's handbook in their determination to have the prime minister repeat the phrases 'strong and stable' and 'coalition of chaos' as many times as it's possible within grammatically recognisable sentences. It's a kind of a game of Just a Minute that's gone slightly wrong: 'speak for a minute without hesitation and deviation but with as much repetition as possible'.

This is usually just wearying but can abruptly rise to supreme comic effect, such as when Mrs May was asked on BBC Radio Derby whether she knew what a 'mugwump' (more of which below) was, and she replied 'What I recognise is that what we need in this country is strong and stable leadership.' This isn't debate and it isn't democratic. But it is funny.

The PM may not have known what a 'mugwump' was but Boris Johnson presumably did, as he called Jeremy Corbyn one or, more precisely a 'mutton-headed old mugwump'. The word has various possible origins and meanings but it would be an exaggeration to say that any of them was overwhelmingly positive. Whichever iteration Johnson intended, the intention was clearly one of mockery and abuse.

Not to be outdone, Labour's Deputy Leader Tom Watson shot back that Boris Johnson was 'a caggie-handed, cheese-headed fopdoodle with a talent for slummocking about'. Most of us will be no clearer on precisely what this means than they are on mugwumps, but the effect is apparent, even if the meaning isn't. The exchange sounds as if James Joyce's Finnegans Wake has leaked from the page onto the campaign trail; like that novel the effect is entrancing in short paragraphs but bewildering and exhausting over a prolonged period.

For his part, the Labour leader has eschewed such name-calling and, while honing in on a few slogans  'Theresa May is strong against the weak, weak against the strong'  has avoided mantras and slurs. Nevertheless, lest this seem an unduly partisan article at this sensitive time, it is worth noting that it was (New) Labour the developed the media tactics  'simplify and repeat ad nauseam'  and then deployed them to such effect under Tony Blair. I once heard Alastair Campbell give a public talk about his party's election strategy and it made the one presently adopted by the Tory Party seem positively broad and discursive by comparison.

This is point at which author (and reader?) stands back and complains heartily about mendacious spin doctors and their puppet politicians, who seem determined to treat their electorates as if they are educationally sub-normal. But consider this: even after Theresa May's endless parroting of 'strong and stable' for a fortnight, a YouGov poll suggested that only 15 per cent of the population recognised it. Jeremy Corbyn's comparable slogan 'For the many not the few' was recognised by two per cent. Alistair Campbell, when explaining his tactic, said that he forced cabinet ministers to repeat endlessly the same crafted slogan interview-in-interview-out for an entire campaign because if they did, there was just a chance that a majority of people might remember it by the end. He was clearly right.

This is the heart of the matter. We get the democracies we deserve. If we, as a people, are disengaged with the democratic process, cynical about the people who govern us, disinterested in their plans for our common life, the tone and content of public speech and debate will simply grow emptier and shallower, which will, in turn, give us all the more reason to be disengaged, cynical and disinterested. By contrast, an informed and engaged public is less likely to allow their leaders to get away with mere sloganeering and abuse.

We should be realistic here. No-one is expecting electorate to read manifestos, never the most gripping from of literature to curl up with on the sofa. But political speech is made constructive less by the politicians who speak it than by the audience who hears it. We owe it to ourselves to listen carefully.

Nick Spencer is acting director at Theos, the religion and society think tank.
Pope Francis doubts authenticity of continuing visions of Virgin Mary in Medjugorje

In the wake of canonising two children whose visions of the Virgin Mary in Fatima in Portugal a century ago transfixed the world, Pope Francis has cast doubt on the veracity of visions that continue to this day in Bosnia.

More than 30 million Catholics have visited Medjugorje since six children began reporting regular visions of the Virgin Mary in 1981.

'These presumed apparitions don't have a lot of value. This I say as a personal opinion,' Pope Francis told journalists on the plane as he returned to Rome from Fatima.

The visions in Medjugorje have transformed the fortunes of the town. Some of the children, all now adults, claim the Madonna still appears to them.

The claims were so controversial that Pope Benedict set up a commission to examine them. The report has never been published but Pope Francis said that it made clear the Church's 'doubts' about the continuing apparitions.

Pope Francis said the claims are still being looked into in remarks reported in full by Catholic News Agency.

The Pope said: 'I prefer the Madonna as mother, our mother, and not a Madonna who is the head of a telegraph office, who every day sends a message at such-and-such an hour. This is not the Mother of Jesus.

'Who thinks that the Madonna says, "Come tomorrow at this time, and at such time I will deliver a message to that visionary?"

He conceded that pilgrims to Medjugorje experience a spiritual renewal, 'encounter God, change their lives' and also said he believed the original apparitions in the early 1980s are more likely to be authentic than the continuing ones.

Referring to the Portuguese visionaries, Pope Francis said: 'Fatima certainly has a message of peace. It's brought to humanity by three great communicators that were less than 13 years old, which is interesting. Yes, I came as a pilgrim. The canonisation was something that wasn't planned from the beginning, because the process of the miracles was in progress but the all of a sudden the reports were all positive, and it was done  that's how the story was told - for me it was a very great joy. What can the world expect? Peace. And what am I talking about from now on with whomever? Peace.'
Report on freedom of religion shows horrific persecution of Christians worldwide

A horrific catalogue of human rights abuses of Christians and other believers is listed in the latest freedom of religion or belief report from the European Union.

The report calls on the EU to "use political and financial power to end persecution of religious minorities worldwide."

It finds "significant restrictions" exist on religion worldwide, including the near extinction of Christians in Syria and Iraq.

The two MEPs who chair the group, Peter van Dalen and Dennis de Jong, particularly highlighted the suffering of Christians and other minorities at the hands of Islamic State.

The report finds global restrictions in 53 countries to freedom of religion or belief.

Van Dalen said: "Our beliefs are at the core of our human dignity  tragically, however, today not everyone enjoys the freedom to hold and manifest their beliefs. We have witnessed the near extinction of Christians in Iraq and Syria; a 150 per cent rise in violent faith-related incidents in Inida since 2014; and in Pakistan the injustice of Asia Bibi's death sentence for blasphemy continues. In this report we outline practical recommendations for how the EU can act to help find solutions to cases like these. Freedoms of religion or belief must be higher on the EU's agenda."

De Jong said: "Regrettably, we observe that the EU, in its external actions, continuously compromises its human rights agenda in favour of a more economic and geopolitical agenda. We have witnessed a concerning lack of expertise and knowledge on the EU Guidelines  especially in EU delegations. I am particularly disappointed that no reporting was undertaken for the focal countries that appeared in our report last year, and urge the EEAS to rectify this for focal countries this year."

Countries of particular concern included the Central African Republic, with a population of 5.3 million of which 80 per cent are Christian, and where 36,000 Muslim civilians remain trapped in areas besieged by anti-Balaka Militia.

The predominantly Muslim Ex-Seleka forces are also continually attacking the Christian civilian population, and between January and April 2015 killed 1,269 Christians.

Nigeria, with a population of 180 million, with 90 per cent Muslims Christian, has Sharia courts in 12 northern states and there have been cases where non-Muslims have been forcefully brought before sharia courts and suffered punishments such as caning, amputation and death by stoning for blasphemy and other offences.

In addition, the Fulani Militia, categorised the fourth most deadly terror group in the world, have killed more than al-Shabaab and Boko Haram. More than 4,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria because of faith-related reasons in 2016 and 198 churches were attacked, damaged or destroyed between November 2014 and October 2015.

In Somalia, with a population of more than 10.4 million, nearly all Muslim, the violent Islamist group and Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabaab imposes its dogma "by harassing, maiming, or killing people who are suspected of converting from Islam or who are failing to uphold the principles of Islam," the report says. Since 1993, there has been policy of religious cleansing and the group has declared it "wants Somalia free of any Christians."

In Iraq, where most of the 32.6 million population is Muslim, Christians are forced to convert to Islam, pay the Jizya tax or otherwise face execution. The 2,000-year-old Christian community in Iraq is facing extinction, the report says, and estimates suggest that Christians in Iraq have fallen from 1.2 million in the 1990s to 500,000 in 2013, to 260,000 in 2015.

In Saudi Arabia, where the 27.3 million population is almost entirely Muslim, the report says government restrictions constitute "the most severe violations of the freedom of religion or belief in the world." Apostasy, blasphemy, "sorcery" and peaceful dissent are punishable by death.

In Iran, where Muslims make up 99 per cent of the population, the Baha'i Faith is considered a "political sect" and Baha'is are deemed apostates by the government and denied civil rights. Members of the Baha'i community are banned from higher education, denied the right to establish and maintain religious institutions and excluded from the social pension system.

The Christian community also faces "systematic persecution and prosecution" by the Iranian regime and as of February 2015, about 90 Christians languish in prison, are detained, or await trial because of their religious beliefs and activities. There has also been a "significant increase" in the number of physical assaults and beatings of Christians in prison.

In Sudan, where 96 per cent of the 35.5 million population is Muslim, blasphemy carries a six-month prison sentence, flogging or a fine. Proselytism is not illegal but conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death. Since 2011, more than 170 people have been arrested for attempting to convert Muslims. In June 2015, Sudanese authorities arrested Fardos Al Toum and nine other women at a church because they wore jeans and long shirts, deemed as an indecent, the report says. Al-Toum was sentenced to 20 lashes and a fine.

In Syria, mostly Muslim, there has been "brutal ethnic and religious cleansing" by Islamic State of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities.

Massacres carried out by the Islamic state against religious minorities  sometimes involving entire towns  have been called "genocide" by several international bodies, including the European Parliament. One of the worst atrocities in 2015 was in Palmyra, where around 400 people were slaughtered, many of them women and children. In Aleppo just 60,000 Christian individuals remain, down from 400,000.

The organisation ADF International did the legal analyses of countries including Nigeria, Nepal, Bahrain, Algeria, Sudan, Marocco, Iraq, Tajikistan, India, Nepal. Drawing from their research for the universal periodic reviews for the United Nations on countries worldwide, its lawyers have this year added several new countries to the report.

"We cannot accept that people today are being killed, tortured, or oppressed, simply because of their religious convictions or beliefs," Sophia Kuby, director of EU advocacy for ADF International told Christian Today after the report was presented to the European Parliament.

"The annual Report on Freedom of Religion or Belief is an important instrument to promote religious freedom both inside and outside the EU. It will effectively help us to address religious persecution throughout the world and ensure that the European Union uses its political and financial power to safeguard the fundamental rights of religious minorities in all countries."
The Jesmond crisis: My shocking suggestion for the Bishop of Newcastle

The bishop of Newcastle finds herself in a bit of a pickle right now.

For suddenly  out of the blue  she finds herself with an unexpected extra bishop on her patch.

The consecration of Jesmond Parish Church curate Jonathan Pryke as a bishop has been widely reported. He was elevated to his new role by bishops from the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church in South Africa, and the move followed unhappiness within the church at Jesmond about the direction of the Church of England.

But this all presents a bit of a conundrum for the Bishop of Newcastle, Christine Hardman. For what, if anything, should she do about this unexpected episcopal presence? Or would it, indeed, be better not to do anything?

As various commentators have pointed out, she seems to face a 'lose-lose' choice between two options. On the one hand, if she decides she will take action against Bishop Pryke, she runs the risk of getting involved in costly and time-consuming litigation. It would appear from the various legal opinions flying around she cannot be confident of winning. And media coverage of such a fight is likely to damage Church, gospel and her own reputation.

Moreover, she will confirm many conservatives in their view that the Church of England is far more concerned with upholding denominational structures than maintaining doctrinal truths. Anglican divisions will intensify.

On the other hand, if Christine Hardman decides not to take action, it could be argued she is undermining her own authority and effectively giving up on the idea of the Church of England's parish and diocesan system. And if she does nothing, it will be said, what is to stop Jonathan Pryke merely being the first of a whole stream of alternative bishops?

For what it's worth, I do not think there is a big queue of parishes and clergy lining up to come under the wings of Bishop Pryke right now. Most Anglican evangelicals  even if theologically sympathetic  seem to have been perplexed by what has happened, its timing, and the lack of communication surrounding it. The majority are not looking to jump ship, at least for the time being.

So what should Bishop Hardman do? Well, there is another option in addition to either 'doing something' (going down the route of litigation) or 'doing nothing'.

And that is the way of grace. Grace is unmerited kindness, favour and blessing. Grace is at the heart of the gospel  for it is how God deals with us. Grace is the truth that 'while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,' (Romans 5:8). Grace is shocking, for it is never merited, never earned, never deserved. It is a gift  which we can accept or reject.

For the Bishop of Newcastle, the 'grace option' in her current situation might involve her deciding to say to Jonathan Pryke something like this: 'I do not like what you have done and I do not agree with it. But I want, nonetheless, to offer you the right hand of Christian fellowship. I want to say that if your ministry is from God then may it be blessed. I want to meet with you and pray with you.'

She could even go on to add something along the lines of these famous New Testament words: 'The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.'

From a purely pragmatic point of view it would be unexpected. In terms of church politics it would demonstrate magnanimity. And from a theological point of view it would be a wonderful manifestation of grace in action.

Grace is a profoundly Christian concept. It inverts secular concepts of power, authority and merit. It shows power in weakness and wisdom in apparent foolishness. Grace cuts through the twisted boundaries of legalism and liberty.

I have never met Jonathan Pryke. But from all I have read he is wholeheartedly committed to the beliefs and doctrines of the Church of England as they have generally been held. For Christine Hardman to launch a legal crackdown against such a man would merely inflame denominational tensions. Then again, to do nothing might just look odd.

But to take the radical, transformative option of grace? Well, that might actually make a watching, cynical world sit up and think, 'Perhaps, just perhaps, there is something we should take note of here.' Because grace, truly, is amazing.

David Baker is a former daily newspaper journalist now working as an Anglican minister in Sussex, England. Find him on Twitter @Baker_David_A
'Tragedy Of Our Times': UK Government Urged To Protect World's 250,000 Child Soliders

The charity World Vision has urged the UK government to make protection for the world's 250,000 child soldiers a priority.

Yesterday marked Red Hand Day, also known as the International Day against the Use of Child Soldiers. According to UN reports, 59 armed groups and armies from at least 14 countries recruit, kill, injure, rape or abduct children, with an estimated 250,000 children currently active in global conflicts.

Positively, the UK Mission to the UN in New York projected that over 115,000 children have been freed from armed groups since 2000.

Erica Hall, Senior Policy Adviser at World Vision UK, praised the UK government's recognition of the problem, but said that more needed to be done.

'Now we want to hear how they will support these efforts  with their political weight, funding and military expertise,' she said.

'To demonstrate its commitment we expect the UK Government delegation in Paris later this month to be led by Boris Johnson. We hope for a public announcement outlining the concrete plans they will make to support vulnerable children affected by war, with a focus on preventing the recruitment of child soldiers.

'Without political will and coordination across Whitehall and the various corridors of power across the world, thousands of child soldiers, some as young as seven, will continue to be abused, tortured, raped and die in armed conflicts around the world.'

Star of HBO's Game of Thrones Jerome Flynn recently went to visit World Vision's work in combating child exploitation in Myanmar.

Flynn said: 'This week I've been in Myanmar (with World Vision UK) meeting former child soldiers; boys who have been exploited and forced to kill. But these are just a few of the thousands of children around the world who are pressed into serving in armed groups. It is a heart-breaking tragedy of our times.'

World Vision shared the story of Malaika (name changed), a former child soldier in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Malaika lost her mother while she was young, and at age 7 was kidnapped by Mai-Mai rebels. She was 'married' to a rebel who violated and abused her, making her his slave. Other young men would abuse her too.

'At that time I did not know at all what sex was. I was only a child,' Malaika said. 'It hurts so much and was so humiliating. I tried not to feel anything in order to survive.'

Francis was one of tens of thousands of children in the DRC to be targeted as a child soldier. He was recruited at age 13, and by the time he was 14 he had killed four children and one adult. He was able to escape a few months later.

World Vision supports the protection and rehabilitation of child soldiers and slaves like Francis and Malaika in the DRC, the Central African Republic and Myanmar.
Vote your Christian values, urge bishops in election letter

The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have written a letter to their dioceses nationwide, stressing Christian values as they urge participation in Britain's forthcoming general election.

The letter from the Archbishops of Westminster, Cardiff, Southwark, Birmingham and Liverpool makes no party recommendations  leaving the June 8 vote to personal conscience  but encourages value-driven participation at a critical time for the country, as it prepares to leave the European Union.

The letter quoted the teaching of Pope Francis in his Evangelii Gaudium, in which the pontiff wrote:'An authentic faith...always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better than we found it.

'We love this magnificent planet on which God has put us, and we love the human family which dwells here, with all its tragedies and struggles, its hopes and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. The earth is our common home and all of us are brothers and sisters.'

Drawing on Francis' words, the bishops emphasised the importance of challenging the world's injustices and the need to embody mercy to a humanity in need.

The letter emphasised the common humanity of those made in the image of God. It added: 'We cannot be indifferent to the struggles and disasters of people who live far away from us, and must strive to assist and protect them. We cannot be indifferent to the environmental impact of how we live and organise our creation of wealth and well-being.'

The letter implored voters to consider how their local candidates stood on issues such as family and the protection of the vulnerable, the welfare of the world's poorest, the need for prison reform, and the human implications of EU negotiations.

Other issues it highlighted include the welcome of refugees, protecting religious minorities, standing up for Catholic schools and advocating against modern day slavery.

The letter said: 'To a great extent the outcome of this election will determine the approach taken on how this (leaving the European Union) is achieved, the priorities we pursue and the values we wish to treasure as our own in the UK and as partners with countries around the world. It will determine how we can heal divisions in our society, care for the vulnerable, how our public services are run and whether we can remain a united kingdom.'

The letter concluded with the prayer: 'Lord grant us wisdom to act always with integrity, seeking the protection and flourishing of all, and building a society based on justice and peace.'

The full letter can be read here.
The 60th annual New York City Puerto Rican Day parade steps off June 17 under a cloud of its own creationthe designation of Marxist bomber Oscar Lopez Rivera as the events first National Freedom Hero. The honorific is a rhetorical fantasyto which nation, exactly, is he a hero?but when it comes to politicized parades, facts take a backseat.

Rivera was convicted of seditious conspiracylegalese for terrorismin 1981. Sentenced to 55 years in federal prison, his term was extended by 15 years for plotting to use explosives in an escape attemptonly to be commuted by President Obama in January. Rivera will walk free this week; his presence at the parade is expected to be part of a national victory lap.

Rivera is an improbable role model. He was a founding member of the Puerto Rican separatist Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, which fancied itself a guerilla army but never numbered more than a handful of membersleftists who acted out their homicidal pipe-dreams on the sneak. Still, the FALN was dangerous: it committed at least 130 bombings between 1974 and 1983, mostly in New York City and Chicago. Its dynamite killed four and wounded 43 at Fraunces Tavern in 1975, a month after the maiming of four NYPD officers in bombings at One Police Plaza. (One of the wounded officers was a rookie patrolman of Puerto Rican descent, which raises this question: What do the departments 8,700 officers of Hispanic heritageone-quarter of the forcethink about Riveras newly awarded hero status?)

Ethnic parades steeped in toxic politics have been a New York City fixture since just about forever. But these expressions have rarely won the unqualified support of responsible New Yorkers, particularly those holding significant elective office. Not so this time. City council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, herself of Puerto Rican descent and as hard-left a pol as is likely to be found in mainstream New York politics, has long been a Rivera acolyte: Im really proud [that he] is returning to us, she said. It is really great to stand in solidarity with him.

Mayor Bill de Blasio was also delighted by Riveras release, declaring that, after all, he wasnt such a bad fellow: I think he first of all was not personally involved in violence. (This is preposterous. The mayor ought to look up the surviving Fraunces victims and the cops maimed by FALN and ask what they think.) De Blasios political views dont veer far from Mark-Viveritos (he did, after all, honeymoon in Havana), and likely not from Riverasminus the bombs. And it is precisely the bombs that warrant an expression of mayoral disapproval of the honor given Rivera.

Contrast this sorry spectacle with the way prominent New Yorkers approached the 1983 St. Patricks Day parade, also rendered poisonous by its tolerance for terrorism. The parallels arent exact, but theyre close enough: organizers had named as grand marshal one Michael Flannery, a longtime advocate for the largely Catholic Provisional Irish Republican Army and before that a member of the original IRA. By 1983, an American citizen, Flannery had become an organizer of the Irish Northern Aid Committeelong suspected of funding gun-running to Ulsterand had himself been accused, though acquitted, of conspiring to smuggle arms to the PIRA.

The 1983 parade came at a difficult time for Northern Ireland: PIRA bombings sparked counterterrorism by Protestant-backed paramilitary organizations, street violence was heavy, and the British Army had effectively occupied the province. Ten PIRA members had recently starved themselves at Belfasts Maze prison. The hunger strikes, in particular, energized Irish-Americans. Thus, Flannerys designation as grand marshal of the parade enjoyed significant support.

But among the best-known Irish-American elected officials, whether in New York or elsewhere, the attitude was very different. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Governor Hugh Carey of New York, along with Senator Edward Kennedy and House Speaker Tip ONeill of Massachusettsknown in Northern Ireland, and not always favorably, as the Four Horsemen of Irish Americawould not truck with terrorism. Moynihan and Carey, joined by Terence Cardinal Cooke, refused to participate in the parade. The message was clear: terrorism, and support for terrorism, had no acceptable place in American life.

Truth be told, there never was much backing for PIRA violence in New York, never mind the rhetoricjust as, today, theres little support for Puerto Rican nationalism and the hard-left politics of Rivera, Mark-Viverito, and de Blasio. That doesnt make the refusal of Moynihan, Carey, and Cooke to excuse political violence any less admirableor Mark-Viveritos and de Blasios embrace of it any less deplorable.

Bob McManus is a City Journal contributing editor. Email: bmcmanus@city-journal.org.

Photo by Stephen Chernin/GettyImages
Cancer Research UK has raised 90,000 for its appeal to help rebuild its Manchester Institute following a large fire last month.

Over 60,600 has been raised through a JustGiving page from over 1,300 supporters for the fire which caused significant damage to the Cancer Research UK institute in Manchesters Christie Hospital last month. The remaining amount has come from a combination of web donations, text-to-donate and cheques.

Over 100 firefighters and 16 fire engines attended the scene after the fire broke out on Wednesday 26 April. Firefighters finally left the scene on Saturday 29 April.

Ed Aspel, executive director of fundraising and marketing at Cancer research UK, said: Were so grateful to everyone who has supported and donated to Cancer Research UK after the fire in our labs at the Manchester Institute. The appeal has now reached 90,000."

He added that CRUK does not yet know the cause of the fire or the extent of the damage.

Civil Society Media is hosting its annual Charity Property Conference on 4 July 2017 which includes a session on dealing with disaster. For more information, and to book, click here.
The email on October 14, 2016, from a New York Times reporter, asked Wendy Walsh to call when she had a chance. Walsh was used to getting emails like these. As she walked to her car in the faculty parking lot at California State University, she called Emily Steel, who told Walsh she was investigating sexual harassment at Fox News.

Walsh thought that Steel wanted to interview her as an expert on the psychological impact of sexual harassment. A former journalist with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Walsh is a psychology professor with a radio show and three books. She is a frequent commentator, having appeared regularly on CNN and The OReilly Factor.

It was this latter credential that Steel wanted to talk about. What exactly was Walshs experience working with Bill OReilly? Did he ever treat her inappropriately?

Steel had no idea whether OReilly had sexually harassed Walsh.

ICYMI: Journalists, heres what to do when things start to get genuinely bad

Since the start of their investigation in August 2016, Steel and reporting partner Michael Schmidt had uncovered five OReilly sexual harassment settlements totalling $13 million. They had contacted dozens of women, but those who had experienced OReillys sexual harassment refused to speak to them on the record, or at all. They had been silenced, either legallydue to confidentiality agreements in their settlementsor figuratively, out of fear of retaliation. Others were afraid of losing their jobs or reputations.

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Yet to tell this story as the reporters hoped, they would need a person who could tell her own narrative.

Perhaps, Steel wondered, OReillys abuse hadnt been limited to Fox News staff. Maybe it extended to women who had been guests on his show, and could speak more freely. She searched IMDb for a record of all the women who had appeared as guests over the years. She watched footage of Walsh on The OReilly Factor, and saw that she had appeared often throughout 2013, and then disappeared. She wanted to know why. It turns out no other reporter had asked Walsh about OReilly.

Steels hunch and cold call ultimately would hold the key to toppling the king of cable news. But the reporters work gaining trust was just beginning.

Reporter and source spoke off-the-record at first. Walsh recalled the night in 2013 when she and OReilly met for dinner at his request. She was a frequent guest on his show, but over dinner, he offered her a lucrative position as a Fox News contributor. After dinner, he invited Walsh to his hotel suite, a proposition she refused. OReilly withdrew his contributor offer. Several months later, OReillys executive producer personally told Walsh that she would no longer appear on his show.

Walsh concluded by telling Steel, I wasnt an employee, but if I was, I would have sued him.

Really? Why? Steel asked, as Walsh recalls. Even job applicants can sue for sexual harassment. He basically dangled a $200,000 a year job in front of you and then took it away.

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Walsh was stunned. She had no idea that what OReilly did to her was sexual harassment.

I did what many women have learned to do, Walsh tells CJR. Minimize, acquiesce, and manipulate around the land mines.

Still, she insisted on staying off the record. Steel followed up with Walsh for weeks, trying to change her mind. This was one of the hardest parts of the eight-month investigation, Steel says.

Wed spend a lot of time thinking who is this person, what is their background, what can we say, what can we do to make them talk to us, Steel says. Theres no incentive for a lot of these people to talk.

Steel called five times in October, Walsh recalls. Shed call and say things like, I know youre still off the record, but I was wondering if youve remembered any other details?

Steel was friendly, says Walsh, and would listen to her radio show, discussing it during their calls.

Then one day, says Walsh, She tells me, You have to go on the record. We need a face. I said no, I dont need this nonsense.

On their next call, Steel told Walsh that she wanted to visit her in LA.

I told her I had a Pilates class, Walsh recalls. Next thing shes flying to LA. She gets a hotel right across from my Pilates studio, shows up next to my Pilates mat, and asks me to get coffee afterwards.

This was in November, a few weeks after their first phone call. Over breakfast after Pilates, Steel made her case. I told her that she doesnt have a confidentiality agreement, and could have a powerful voice since she could talk on the record.

Walsh was torn. Her friends, she says, told her she shouldnt speak out. They said its not worth it, you dont need all this negative publicity, Walsh tells me. I wont lie to you. I was absolutely terrified.

But Steels instincts were right.

She looked me straight in the eye and said, These other women are silenced, gagged, and bound, Walsh recalls Steel saying, referring to the women with confidentiality agreements. Youre the only one who can actually tell your story, Steel told her.

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After breakfast, Walsh gave her blessing. Hers was the only on-the-record account from an accuser in a Times expose that led more than 50 advertisers to abandon OReillys show, ultimately resulting in his ouster from Fox. The aftermath is still piling up, with the exit of former Fox News co-president Bill Shine and the potential breakdown of takeover negotiations between 21st Century Fox and the British broadcaster Sky.

Steels reporting not only resulted in OReillys firing, but exposed a pervasive culture of misogyny and sexual harassment enabled by Fox executives. It also empowered other women to come forward.

Walsh says her story would have remained untold, if it hadnt been for Emily Steel.

Walsh and Steel spoke to CJR about how the story came together, and how they felt about its ripple effects.

The investigation began in the aftermath of the Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal. Times editors assigned her and Schmidt to look at what happened in the case of Andrea Mackris, a former OReilly Factor producer whose 2004 case went public with lurid details of her former bosss sexual harassment. Their goal at the time, Steel says, was simply to see what happened to Mackris, how Fox dealt with the situation, and what it could mean for the network. Over the course of their reporting, they came across other women who had accused OReilly of sexual harassment. So they investigated those cases and eventually realized how widespread the pattern had been.

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Walsh still cant believe the impact of her story. For years, her friends, agents, and coworkers told her, this is to be expected when youre a beautiful woman working in television, or this is what men do, and that if she spoke out, shed be blacklisted in the industry.

When she saw that advertisers were abandoning OReilly, Walsh says, I just welled up in tears and was like, wow, real change is happening. I never really realized how little of a voice women had until I was given a voice.

The woman who gave her that voice had been threatened by OReilly before. In February 2015, Steel was covering a different scandal, when OReilly was accused of lying about his reporting on the Falklands War. I am coming after you with everything I have, he told her when she called him for comment. You can take it as a threat.

Over the course of their investigation, Steel and Schmidt interviewed more than five dozen people and tried to talk to dozens more. The fact that just one woman was willing to go on the record underscores the fear these women faced, and the odds that were stacked against Steel and Schmidt in telling the story.

She was putting puzzle pieces together, and the one thing she was missing was a source who would talk, Walsh says of Steel. She just started turning over stones, emailing women at Fox, going into old shows and YouTube and looking for a certain type. She sees me and thinks, Oh, shes there, and now shes not there.

RELATED: Fox News journalists: Dont stay silent amid Bill OReilly controversy

Walsh told me that she never would have spoken out if Steel hadnt urged her to. She recently nominated Steel for the National Journalism Impact Award. She said she deserves a Pulitzer.

Steel is grateful, but insists that she didnt do this alone, noting her reporting partner was there every step of the way.

While the details of the five sexual harassment settlements were important pieces of the story, two of them were already public, and its doubtful the Times would have published without a human being to build the story around, a woman willing to speak openly.

While Steel downplays her role in toppling OReilly, two women at the heart of the storyWalsh and Lisa Bloom, the attorney representing her and other OReilly accusersinsist Steel was crucial.

Steels hunch and cold call ultimately would hold the key to toppling the king of cable news. But the reporters work gaining trust was just the beginning.

Walsh and Bloom just returned from London, where they met with the British regulators who will decide the fate of Rupert Murdochs deal to acquire Sky. Walsh seemed encouraged by her meetings in London. Most encouraging, she says, was a call from former Labour party leader Ed Miliband, thanking her for her bravery.

She thinks someone else deserves the gratitude.

Absolutely none of this would be happening without Emily Steel, Walsh insists, comparing Steel to Erin Brockovich. She is the beginning of this, and is continuing to follow it along. She is literally shaking up major business deals in the UK, and making government regulators do a major investigation. None if this would have happened if Emily hadnt exposed the code of secrecy and hadnt convinced me to speak.

Steel, 33, who worked at the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal before joining the Times in 2014, recoils from the idea of being a journalistic hero.

The purpose of doing this reporting wasnt to win awards, or to bring OReilly down, but to follow the facts and report a fair and accurate story, she tells CJR. It was about holding a person in power accountable and giving a voice to the people who had been silenced. There was a reason OReilly had paid millions of dollars to these women. To keep them from going public.

During the eight months she spent on this investigation, Steel only covered two other stories in her beat. We were so lucky that we had the support of our editors, that we had the time and the resources and the ability to keep digging and digging.

Steel is still digging. Shes received dozens of messages from women across the country with stories of sexual harassment, and not only in the news industry. At a time when the president is a man who has been accused of sexual harassment and who boasted about harassing women, several readers have told Steel that these kinds of stories are more important than ever.

Sexual harassment is illegal, Steel says. Its against the law. And women deserve to be treated with respect in the workplace.

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Yardena Schwartz is a freelance journalist and Emmy-nominated producer based in Tel Aviv. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, CBS News, NBC News, and MSNBC. Previously, Yardena was a producer at NBC News in New York.
The BJP's recent wins in UP, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand could prove beneficial for Modi's clean Ganga project with all three states instituting State Ganga Rejuvenation, Protection and Management Committees.

Impending State Ganga Rejuvenation, Protection and Management Committees in three out of five main stem states, UP, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand, have been notified for fast implementation of the project (File photo)

By Shashank Shekhar: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship project, the Namami Gange programme, could benefit from the change in political equations in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where BJP recorded a massive win in recent state elections.

This is clear from the formation of long impending State Ganga Rejuvenation, Protection and Management Committees in three out of five Ganga main stem states - Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand (all BJP-ruled) - after recent Assembly elections.

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A senior Water ministry official said these committees were to be constituted immediately after NMCG was elevated to the status of an authority, but because of non-BJP government in all five Ganga basin main-stem states (except Jharkhand) the process was delayed owning to political differences. While UP was ruled by Samajwadi Party, there was a Congress government in Uttarakhand.

"Within days of the new government's take over in UP and Uttarakhand, State Ganga Committees in three states were notified for swift implementation of Namami Gange programme," the senior water ministry official said, adding, "These committees are still to be constituted in West Bengal and Bihar. It is being delayed as the governments there, especially in West Bengal, are not sending their recommendations and nominations for State Ganga Committees."

COMMITTEES VITAL

According to the officials, along with the state committees, district committees will be formed that will be setup in all the districts where the river flows. The main objective of these committees will be to streamline the work and fund along with execution on ground.

"Formation of these committees is vital as it will speed up the work at the local level. They will draw plan and channelise funds for each projects. Along with it they will supervise and monitor work at the grassroot level," said a senior officer.

The officer added that the state and district committees will also communicate with local bodies in speeding up execution of work.

With the formation of these committees in three states, the clean Ganga project is expected to pick up pace.

"Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand are the two most crucial states as far as cleaning Ganga is concerned, as the river traverses more than 1000 kilometers in Uttar Pradesh and close to 500 kilometers in Uttarakhand.

"Besides, the pollution-free upper Himalayan reaches are very important for smooth flow of the river," said a senior police officer.

He added, "Uttar Pradesh government has already started sending positive signals, with UP CM Yogi Adityanath in favour of shifting tanneries in Kanpur, which are the major source of pollution.

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"Giving an overview of Namami Gange's progress, senior ministry officer said, "63 sewerage management projects are under implementation in the five states with another 12 to be launched in the states.

28 riverfront development projects and 33 entry-level projects for construction, modernisation and renovation of 182 Ghats and 118 crematoria have been initiated.

"Cleaning of river surface for collection of floating solid waste from the surface of the ghats and river and its disposal are afoot and pushed into service at 11 locations," the officer said.

He added, "Real Time Effluent Monitoring Stations (EMS) has been installed in 572 out of 760 Grossly Polluting Industries (GPIs)."

Reports also say the Namami Gange programme is being directly watched by the PMO, which has taken strict note of delay in implementation of projects and are in fact monitoring the programme for better results.

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--- ENDS ---
Lets return to journalisms roots, where every story is tied to a community Illustration by Sara Wong

It was not all that long ago that the robust heart of American journalism could be found in local newsrooms across the countrynewspaper newsrooms, mostly, whose work was then amplified and expanded on by local radio and television.

Just as Americans viscerally grasped Tip ONeills statement that all politics was local, journalists recognized that our most important work was local.

Oh sure, many of us aspired to postings internationally or in Washington. But even then the great stars knew where they came from and where the great stories came from, too. After all, the defining story of my formative years as a journalist was regularly described as a local police story. Regularly and proudly. That story led to the unseating of a president.

We were, in that way, really quite different from journalism in many other developed countries, just as our federal system, with powers reserved for the states and for the people in their local communities, was different from the politics of those countries.

But while our country, providentially, has preserved that division of power through considerable disruption in our political culture, our journalism lost its focus on local. We tend to talk about this as if we were passive victims of a great disruption that decimated the business models that had made local coverage an enormous profit center. But it was more than that. And we need to face that reality if we have any hope of bringing local back to the heart of American journalism, for our own sake and the countrys.

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In the course of dealing with the business disruption, we began to lose sight of the journalistic mission. The cool kids were no longer the ones breaking news at city hall or driving a local investigative unit. Instead, they were honing their entrepreneurial spirit, figuring out how to create new models for journalism. Clearly, this was badly needed. The problem was that in the first 20 years of digital media those new models pulled us away from local journalism, sowing the seeds for our present civic crisis.

It wasnt exactly on purpose, but we talked about eyeballs and scale as a new holy grail. One very well-known media executive actually said the words to me, Build it and they will come. (We did, by the way, and they did come. But their value in supporting our journalism was much less than that executive or any of us had hoped.)

Innovation reigned. We created powerful new forms of journalism and engaged large new followings. But virtually all of the investment and invention was at the national level.

Now the country is beginning to grasp the service and value of local journalism that has been sucked from our civic culture.

The result of this new journalistic culture has been a significant reduction in resources focused on the basic work of covering communities. Bird-dogging your local government didnt scale. Local news disinvestment has been the decades dominant theme in the industry, wrote media analyst Ken Doctor.

The shift in Washington coverage illustrates the larger pattern. During the years that local newsrooms have been significantly reduced, the number of journalists in Washington has increased. But their focus has changed. Most are working for new, digitally based organizations serving niche audiences that follow the work of Washington as it affects their business interests. Nothing wrong with that kind of journalism. Its the way the profession started centuries ago among trading companies in Europe.

But while all that innovation and building was going on, the number of reporters sending back news to local communities from Washington has been cut in half. Is it any wonder people feel disconnected from the work of the federal government? Our actions helped disconnect them.

One personal note here*. I didnt just live through all this. I was present and involved every step of the way. So if you hear a criticism, its self-criticism every bit as much as a critique of our profession.

But the critique is not the point. The moment has arrived to turn this around. To reverse the disinvestment. To restore local journalism to its central place in our news culture.

Journalists have known for years about the jobs lost. Now the country is beginning to grasp the service and value of local journalism that has been sucked from our civic culture.

The great crisis for American journalism and democratic society shouldnt be thought about at the platform levelnewspapers versus online or television versus streaming, social media versus traditional, wrote Tom Rosenstiel, the author and media critic. It should be understood at the civic and geographic level. The crisis is local.

You can feel the tide starting to turn. After a generation of focusing on media business at national or even global scale, new ideas are being offered for local.

Heres Gordon Crovitz, explaining why he was merging his Denver hyperlocal site with Jim Bradys sites in Pennsylvania: We expect to create a company with a value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. . . . It will take scale to create profitable local publishing, which we are now further along in creating than any other local news venture.

In other words, the local vacuum has become a business opportunity. Thats promising.

At the same time, public radio stations have added hundreds of journalists to their staffs in recent years and have been rewarded with large increases in audience. The board of directors of NPR, which in the early days of digital was sometimes criticized as slow to support innovation, recently instructed the NPR leadership to work with member stations to develop a much closer integration, rooted in the power of stations to engage with their local audiences through radio and digital and serve their news and information needs.

Public radio and digital media startups no doubt define their goals differently, but they are responding to the same unmet needs. The future of local news will look different from the past, which is good. We all know the old model had its flaws. The dominance of one provider tended to make it harder for different voices to be heard.

The best newspapers covered poorer neighborhoods and communities of color because it was part of their job, regardless of whether their advertisers wanted to reach those communities or not. But the pattern was, to say the least, uneven.

In the new model, its unlikely any one organization will be as dominant. But that doesnt mean there cant be just as muchif not morerobust journalism. Its the kind of journalism that holds local officials to account, that connects residents, and that provides a platform for crucial dialogue around local issues.

One obvious change is the increased importance of non-commercial media. Anyone who cares about local news wishes success to Crovitz and Brady, and to our colleagues at Gannett who are trying to build a network of local newspapers supported in part by their ability to scale for national advertising. (Read our profile of Gannett on page 64.) But clearly public and nonprofit media are going to play a bigger part in the future of local news than in its past. You can imagine a new world that throws together a commercial player like the local newspaper and several local nonprofits that get distribution help from the local public radio station. You can already see different versions of these alliances developing in places like St. Louis, Miami, Philadelphia, and Detroit.

In a way, news organizations arent competing with each other anymore. They all face the same challenge, which is finding the resources to cover communities fully and to connect with them effectively in a world of distractions and powerful platform companies.

A word about those platform companies. The rise of the giant tech companies was part of what destabilized local news. Trying to satisfy the new dynamic created by Google and Facebook is part of how we got here. My belief that this is a moment of opportunity is partly based on their expressed recognition that they have a civic responsibility, too.

A strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community, Mark Zuckerberg said in an open letter recently posted on Facebook. Giving people a voice is not enough without having people dedicated to uncovering new information and analyzing it. There is more we must do to support the news industry to make sure this vital social function is sustainablefrom growing local news, to developing formats best suited to mobile devices, to improving the range of business models news organizations rely on.

Given the powerful role Facebook has played in disrupting the news industry, many of us will be watching closely to see how the company translates these words into actions. The best of the great local newspaper publishers supported journalism that often didnt make them a dime, including investigative stories that antagonized advertisers and political coverage that angered mayors and governors (I still remember Mario Cuomos angry calls to my bosses).

RELATED: 10 podcasts to help you keep up with the news cycle

Is Facebook prepared to act that way, too? To support local news organizations even at the price of revenue for Facebook? Zuckerberg, in his manifesto, does a good job chronicling the decline of community institutions, echoing concerns raised 17 years ago in Bowling Alone, Robert Putnams transformative work on how weve lost touch with one another and the price of that separation.

The stakes could not be higher. Local communities are where society can begin to tackle our most serious civic challenges and to rebuild a belief in government, trust in journalism, and trust in one another.

In a country of 325 million people, its difficult on a national scale to overcome polarization and fragmentation, especially when some of our elected leaders are playing on this mistrust for their own ends (and in fairness, when business incentives push many media organizations to pander to those divisions for their own ends, too).

But local relationships are, or at least can be, different, more nuanced and complex. It is easier to find common ground with someone who lives nearby. Locally based news organizations are well positioned to be part of rebuilding that trust. This will be good for us as journalists, and good for communities, too.

We sometimes make it sound as if were only interested in this because so many journalists lost their jobs. Thats been a scary experience. But now is the moment to do what we couldnt or didnt do 20 years ago.

Lets be clear that we have a mission and that we see local journalism at the very core of it.

*Michael Oreskes is on the Board of Overseers of CJR.

TRENDING: Eleven newsletters to subscribe to if you work in media

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Michael Oreskes is the former head of NPR News. He was national political correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, among other posts, and is co-author of The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again.
When President Donald Trump meets tomorrow with Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he will complete the press freedom violators trifecta. Trump has already met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, whose country holds 25 journalists behind bars, and President Xi Jinping of China, where 38 journalists are imprisoned. Turkey holds at least 81 journalists in jail, according to data compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. These three countries are the worlds leading jailers of journalists and together account for more than half of all journalists imprisoned around the world.

We dont know what President Trump has said behind closed doors in his previous meetings, but we do know that he has praised both Xi, whom Trump hosted at Mar-a-Lago, and Sisi, who he claimed is doing a fantastic job. Along with the ceaselessly hostile rhetoric toward the US mediathe rants about fake news, failing news organizations, and journalists as enemies of the American peopleTrumps embrace of the worlds leading press freedom violators is serving to normalize media repression. The damage to the global press freedom movement is hard to overstate.

To understand why this is, one must dig into the data. Since 1992, CPJ has compiled an annual list of journalists in prison around the world. The 259 journalists in prison at the end of last year represent the highest number ever recorded. What is even more disturbing is that repression is concentrated in a handful of nominally democratic countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Ethiopia.

The Trump administration is delivering a different message on the global stage: Journalists are contemptible, and governments that crack down on the media face no consequences in terms of their relationship with the US.

Pressuring these governments to release imprisoned journalists depends on isolating them and depriving them of the ability to call themselves democracies. Simply put, democratic leaders, no matter how large their margin of victory at the ballot box, do not put critical journalists in jail. Doing so undermines accountability and deprives citizens of any meaningful opportunity to participate in the political process. That is why on World Press Freedom Daymarked each year on May 3UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for an end to all crackdowns against journalists, noting that a free press advances peace and justice for all.

ICYMI: The lesson news managers can learn from Comeys firing



Attempts by countries like Turkey and Egypt to justify their media repression by claiming they are cracking down on terrorism and operating within democratic norms must be aggressively countered. Both countries are strategically important to the United States, and so under former President Barack Obama the message in support of press freedom was delivered inconsistently. For example, at the height of the a last major Turkey media crackdown in 2012, then US Ambassador Frank Ricciardone was quite outspoken, as well Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But President Obama himself did not speak out.

In China, which does not claim to be guided by democratic principles, the dynamic is different. The countrys leadership believes media must serve the interests of the Communist Party, but precisely what those interests are has varied depending on who is in power. President Hu Jintao regularly called on the media to expose corruption at the local level, believing this would lead to more efficient government. President Xi, meanwhile, has reversed course, demanding more conventional loyalty. Still, China is bound by international law, including Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of expression to all. While the US may not be able to exert much influence over China directly, it is still important to stand up for those principles.

Sign up for CJR 's daily email

The Trump administration, however, is delivering a different message on the global stage. It is this: Journalists are contemptible, and governments that crack down on the media face no consequences in terms of their relationship with the US. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all but institutionalized this position when he noted in a May 3 speech to all state department employees that an America First agenda means deemphasizing human rights. Thats terrible news not only for the Turkish journalists languishing in jail but for all those around the world seeking to report independently in places where the government claims the power to determine the truth.

RELATED: 11 images that show how the Trump administration is failing at photography

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.
NewsItem class is missing a definition of the link JSON entry.









"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

- Homer







Richard MacCutchan wrote: shouldn't it be trying to deserialise int a News class, rather than NewsItem?

Indeed. As I posted below.





"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

- Homer







Farhad Eft wrote: JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<NewsItem>>(json);

Farhad Eft wrote: new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer().Deserialize<List<News>>(json);

The JSON you've posted is neither a List<NewsItem> nor a List<News> ; it is simply a single News object.

C# string json = File.ReadAllText( " data3.json" ); News allNews = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<News>(json); foreach (NewsItem item in allNews.data) { foreach ( string title in item.title) { Console.WriteLine(title); } foreach ( string body in item.body) { Console.WriteLine(body); } Console.WriteLine(); }





"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

- Homer









Thank you!



Assuming I've defined a hierarchy of #whatever that allows nesting an arbitrary number of levels : then, I delete a reference to a top-level #whatever instance which contains #n levels deep of #n other #whatever instances:



Can I assume that the #whatever instance now-without-a-reference, and all its sub-levels of references/instances, will be garbage collected ?



Or, is it on me to recursively remove child references ? Of course, it is on me to handle references in the code to sub-elements that are "outside" the parent/ancestor inheritance chain.



Is there a specific 'Dispose technique that can be used here ?



Note: I've deliberately phrased the hypothetical here in an abstract way, to avoid talking about what a specific Control, like the WinForms TreeView, might implement internally.



thanks, Bill

 When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.  Blaise Pascal







1. an object is dead and collectable as soon as you no longer have a reachable reference to it (reachables are inside other obects that are reachable, stacks, static variables, ...). When a number of objects have internal references to each other but no outside references are alive, then all of those objects are dead/collectable.



2. exactly when they get garbage collected is more complex, it depends on the size, the generation number, when your GC runs, etc. However one normally should not care about this, that is the GC's job.



3. when your objects have a Dispose() method (necessary when they may hold pointers to unmanaged system resources), then for each of them the Dispose() method will be called eventually by the GC. In this case it is advisable to call their Dispose() explicitly so the system resources get released ASAP.

Note: providing a Dispose() method will somewhat postpone the GC freeing their memory, so providing a Dispose() on huge objects is a bad idea!



4. when your Application terminates neither of those mechanisms will work for you; instead Windows itself will reclaim all memory and all system resources your program was using (unless...), so you can't safely implement wanted side effects in your Dispose() method as your program might terminate before Dispose() gets called by the GC!





Hope this helps and is sufficiently clear and accurate.





Luc Pattyn [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum



modified 15-May-17 5:43am.







cheers, Bill

 When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.  Blaise Pascal







It seems you have mixed finalizers and IDisposable.Dispose() in your reply.



The garbage collector will never call Dispose. It will call the finalizer if one is present.





This space for rent







I doubt it. I scratch my head often, but the right kind of doubt does not come.







cheers, Bill

 When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.  Blaise Pascal





Especially this.

Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...

AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!



CLR via C#[^].



That book turned me around about automatic garbage collection. At least half a dozen times I said to myself something like "Hey, that's smart! I would never have thought of that if I were to manage the heap myself!" I used to be sceptical about automatic GC - now I am sceptical to those who claim they can do better themselves. It is like an optimizing compiler vs. assembly code: The optimizer will discover a lot of tricks that the assembler coder wont.



The only problem remaining now is that you believe that you have removed the last reference to that 1 Gbyte data structure, and you are waiting for ages for it to go away, forgetting that you still have a reference to it in some static struct holding, say, user preferences. (Maybe you needed that reference e.g. during initialization, but never after that.) This is similar to, say, forgetting to close files.



(There was a similar situation in old style Unix file systems, where anyone with read access to a file could create another link to it, preventing it from being deleted: When the creator/owner removed his last link, he lost control over it; your 'secret' link might be the only access path to the file, keeping it alive, keeping disk space from being released. But the owner is still the same, so he will have to pay for the disk storage! - I think remedies for handling this was introduced many years ago, but in the first years of Unix, it was a real problem.)



Write recursive function, that counts ones in the mass. For example... The first parameter was given to facilitate recursion





HomeWork is not set to test your skills at begging other people to do your work, it is set to make you think and to help your teacher to check your understanding of the courses you have taken and also the problems you have at applying them.

Any failure of you will help your teacher spot your weaknesses and set remedial actions.

So, give it a try, reread your lessons and start working. If you are stuck on a specific problem, show your code and explain this exact problem, we might help.



As programmer, your job is to create algorithms that solve specific problems and you can't rely on someone else to eternally do it for you, so there is a time where you will have to learn how to. And the sooner, the better.

When you just ask for the solution, it is like trying to learn to drive a car by having someone else training.

Creating an algorithm is basically finding the maths and make necessary adaptation to fit your actual problem.



The idea of "development" is as the word suggests: "The systematic use of scientific and technical knowledge to meet specific objectives or requirements." BusinessDictionary.com[^]

That's not the same thing as "have a quick google and give up if I can't find exactly the right code".

Patrice



Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Albert Einstein



how to get the tracing information in a c# function call using zipkin . please try to give reply as soon as possible if you know .it is very important for me

i am unable to get anything .i tried combining several codes together .but it ' s not working .please try to make some video on this topic that is how to connect a c# program with zipkin







Why not ask on the Zipkin chat channel? openzipkin/zipkin - Gitter

=========================================================

I'm an optoholic - my glass is always half full of vodka.

=========================================================



this[^].

This space for rent





"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".

 Blaise Pascal


05/12/2017

Consumers struggling to pay back student loans have been left in the lurch lately, as the U.S. Education Department and Fannie Mae, among others, roll back protection measures from the Obama Era.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and lawmakers in the state are trying to compensate by passing legislation at the state level. The Illinois Senate this week passed Senate Bill 1351, which would create a Student Loan Bill of Rights to protect borrowers from abuse.

The bill addresses widespread abuses and failures in the student loan industry that were revealed by Madigans investigation and lawsuit against one of the countrys largest student loan servicing companies, Navient.

The measure, drafted by Madigans office and Sen. Daniel Biss, passed the Senate by a vote of 34 to 15 with one member voting present, and will now be considered in the House, where it will be sponsored by Rep. Will Guzzardi.

This bill is critically important now that the U.S. Department of Education has abandoned student loan borrowers by revoking reforms to prevent the abuses uncovered in my investigation, Madigan said. These commonsense measures will improve the financial futures of student loan borrowers, their families and our economy.

"Misleading and self-serving practices"

The U.S. Department of Educations decision to roll back protections for student loan borrowers is extremely disappointing, particularly when investigations into the industry  such as those conducted by Attorney General Madigan  have revealed misleading and self-serving practices, Sen. Biss said. I encourage my colleagues in the House to support these commonsense reforms.

Over the past decade, student loan debt has doubled to become the largest form of unsecured consumer debt in the country, with more than 40 million borrowers owing over $1.4 trillion. Nearly 70 percent of graduates leave college with an average debt burden of $30,000, and one-in-four borrowers are behind on their payments or in default.

Students who attended for-profit colleges are particularly hard hit, making up the vast majority of borrowers in default. While federal income-based repayment options are available, the U.S. Treasury has reported that only 20 percent of eligible borrowers are enrolled in these options, which can lower payments based on income to as low as $0 a month.

Madigan said Illinois borrowers frequently experience problems with their student loan servicers. Specifically, borrowers in Illinois have complained to her office that their loan servicers failed to inform them of affordable repayment options, follow borrower payment instructions and answer questions consistently.

Senate Bill 1351 would create a Student Loan Bill of Rights to protect student loan borrowers by prohibiting student loan servicers from misleading borrowers and requiring that they:

Properly process payments;

Require specialists to provide and explain to struggling borrowers all of their repayment options, starting with income-driven plans; and

Inform borrowers who may be eligible to have their loans forgiven due to a disability or a problem with the school they attended.

The bill would also create a Student Loan Ombudsman in the Attorney Generals office and require student loan servicers to obtain a license to operate in Illinois.

Learn more in the ConsumerAffairs Student Loan Buyers Guide.
A remembrance service was recently held onboard the Golden Princess on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea, according to a press release.

Guests and crew alike paused for the service to remember those who died in the battle.

The battle raged from May 4-8 in 1942 and was the first clash to halt the advance of Japanese forces.

"Golden Princess' current itinerary to Papua New Guinea and South Pacific destinations placed the ship off the far north coast of Queensland between Australia, PNG and the Solomon Islands on the 75th anniversary of the climactic day of the Battle of the Coral Sea," said Princess Cruises Vice President Australia and New Zealand Stuart Allison.The ships HMAS Australia and HMAS Hobart, were part of the joint US and Australian naval force during the battle.

"The Battle of the Coral Sea was a pivotal moment in history and paved the way for the alliance between Australia and the United States, which endures to this day. For our Australian and American guests, the remembrance service was an opportunity to pay tribute to those who made the supreme sacrifice at a time of great peril for Australia," Allison said.

"But it is also comforting for our guests in knowing that with the passage of time the protagonists in the battle are now firm friends and international allies."

In 1942, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin made a historic statement to the Parliament.

"A great naval battle is proceeding in the southwest Pacific area," Curtin told Parliament. "Nobody can tell what the result of the engagement may be. If it should go advantageously, we shall have cause for great gratitude and our position will then be a little clearer. But if we should not have the advantages from this battle for which we hope, all that confronts is a sterner ordeal, a greater and graver responsibility."

War veterans and currently serving members of the armed forces played a central role during the remembrance service.

"It was a privilege for Golden Princess to be in vicinity of the Battle of the Coral Sea for the 75th anniversary and an honor to pay tribute to brave sailors and airmen who secured our freedom," Allison said.
The 133,500-ton Carnival Horizon is well on its way to a 2018 spring debut and is currently under construction at the Fincantieri shipyard in Marghera, Italy.

The Carnival Horizon is scheduled to make its maiden voyage April 2, 2018, with a 13-day Mediterranean cruise from Barcelona  the first of four round-trip departures from this port. Carnival Horizon will reposition to the U.S. with a 14-day trans-Atlantic crossing from Barcelona to New York May 9-23, 2018, according to a statement from Carnival.





Following its summer schedule of four-day Bermuda and eight-day Caribbean departures from Manhattan, Carnival Horizon will shift to Miami and kick off a year-round schedule of six- and eight-day Caribbean cruises beginning Sept. 22, 2018. Carnival Horizon will also offer a special two-day cruise to Nassau from Miami Sept. 20-22, 2018.
More than 215 credit union professionals, representing 65 credit unions, will gather in San Diego Wednesday for the 6th annual Corelation User Conference. Attendance at the event, which includes 80% of Corelation credit unions and sales and technical consultants from 50 leading credit union vendors, represents more than 40% growth from last year. Those numbers indicate that Corelation has emerged as the leader among new credit union data processors that have appeared in recent years.

The conference kicks off with a keynote address from bestselling author and Top 5 leadership speaker Jackie Freiberg. Then for the next two days, influential credit union executives, seasoned Corelation professionals, and other community leaders will present sessions designed to fuel innovation and collaboration. To ensure that all attendees enjoy valuable, relevant content, sessions are divided into four tracks: technical, operational, executive and new client.

We have clients coming from all across the country and each one is definitely unique, said Corelation President Theresa Benavidez. However, they do share a couple of traits. Theyre all innovation leaders in credit union technology and they all love to share ideas with other institutions.

According to Benavidez, the Corelation conference offers an unparalleled opportunity for credit unions to gain important technological insight, meet with leading industry vendors, and network with a diverse and dedicated group of peers.

In addition to existing Corelation clients, the company has invited representatives from more than a dozen credit unions that are currently undergoing core data processing vendor searches.

In all honesty, our conference is a great sales tool, Benavidez said. Once people see the excitement that our technology generates among our clients, its hard for a prospect to choose anyone else.

Credit union executives interested in attending the 2018 event can visit the Corelation website at www.corelationinc.com or simply send an email to info@corelationinc.com.
As House members return to Washington this week, NAFCU staff will be on Capitol Hill to represent credit union interests and keep tabs on hearings dealing with financial institutions and policy.

NAFCU staff will hear testimony from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin during a Senate Banking Committee hearing Thursday on domestic and international policy. The associations lobbyists will be focusing on any developments potentially impacting credit unions.

The committee will also meet on Tuesday at 10 a.m. to consider Trump administration nominees to the Treasury and Commerce Departments. Witnesses will include nominees for assistant Treasury secretary and under secretary for the Treasurys Office of Terrorism and Financial Crimes.

On Wednesday, the House Small Business Committee will hold a hearing to review the Small Business Administrations 7(a) loan program and evaluate its success in helping creditworthy small businesses obtain capital. Witnesses will include the director of the SBAs Office of Credit Risk Management and the associate administrator of the agencys Office of Capital Access.
By Press Trust of India: From Lalit K Jha

Washington, May 14 (PTI) A former US spymaster today accused Donald Trump of assaulting American institutions, saying the US presidents decision to fire FBI Director James Comey was "very disturbing" to the employees of the bureau.

James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, told CNN that Comeys sacking has led to concern in the bureau tasked with proving alleged Russian meddling in the November presidential election that brought Trump to the White House.

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"I spoke to one (of the FBI employees) last night at a dinner who was quite upset about it. And I think that reflects the feeling, the widespread feeling, in the FBI," he said.

"I will just say that the developments of the past week are very bothersome, very disturbing to me," Clapper said.

Last week, Trump fired Comey, who was leading an investigation into the alleged Russian interference.

Comeys sudden removal from the post set off a political firestorm in Washington, fuelling fears that Trump was trying to stifle the bureaus probe into alleged Russian meddling.

"People had issues with Director Comeys - some of his decisions. Thats fine. People took issue with decisions I made. Thats part of the deal. But, I think, as far as his stature as a leader and his integrity, people are very upset about the way he was treated," Clapper said.

"Im pretty familiar with the bureau and its people. Its a national treasure. Its very disturbing to me that the negative morale impact this event has had," he said.

He also said the "assault" on American institutions was not limited to Trump. He said the alleged Russian meddling in the US election system also compromised the institutions.

"In many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally - and the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system. And, I think, as well our institutions are under assault internally," Clapper said.

Asked if by "internally" he meant Trump, Clapper said: "Exactly".

"Internally, it is coming from the US President Donald Trump himself, and externally from the countries like Russia through interference in the election system," he said.

"The founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances. And I feel as though thats under assault and is eroding," Clapper said. PTI LKJ ABH

--- ENDS ---
Talking Points

- First-quarter Greek GDP data showed an improvement but the economy still contracted again.

- The Euro was unmoved by the figures, with Greece no longer a major market worry.

- Check out the DailyFX Economic Calendar and see what live coverage of key event risk impacting FX markets is scheduled for the week on the DailyFX Webinar Calendar.

Greeces economy contracted again in the first quarter of 2017 but by less than in the previous quarter, according to the latest official flash data. The figures showed a fall of 0.1% quarter/quarter, better than the previous 1.2% contraction. Year/year the economy shrank by 0.5%, also better than the previous 1.1%.

However, Greece has ceased to be a major concern for the financial markets and the Euro was unruffled by the news, continuing its Monday climb higher that is taking it ever closer to the key 1.10 level.

Chart: EUR/USD Five-Minute Timeframe (May 15 Intraday)

Chart by IG

On Sunday, the Greek government cut its GDP growth forecast for the current year to just 1.8% from its previous estimate of 2.7%, well below the European Commissions 2.1% economic growth estimate published in February.

The revision was included in the governments economic plans for 2017-21 presented to parliament at the weekend, which included a tighter budget including new austerity measures. These are designed to meet the demands of Greeces creditors that are still negotiating with the country to agree on a bailout that will provide debt relief for the nation.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pledged that his government will not implement new austerity measures without debt reduction in exchange.

Tsipras met Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, on the sidelines of a meeting in Beijing today and, according to the IMF, exchanged views on next steps and the importance of controlled implementation of agreed reforms and support from Greeces partners, including appropriate debt-relief measures.

--- Written by Martin Essex, Analyst and Editor

To contact Martin, email him at martin.essex@ig.com

Follow Martin on Twitter @MartinSEssex

If youre looking for trading ideas in the Euro and other currencies, check out our Trading Guides; theyre free and updated for the second quarter of 2017

If youre looking for ideas more short-term in nature, check out the IG Client Sentiment Data
The Opposition members created ruckus in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly today on the first day of the session. Governor Ram Naik's address drowned in the din.

By India Today Web Desk: It was pandemonium in Uttar Pradesh Assembly over law and order situation in the state on the first day of the session today.

The Opposition members created ruckus in the Assembly and threw paper balls thrown at podium while marshals tried to dodge them with files.

The customary address of Governor Ram Naik to the joint sitting of the two Houses of the state legislature was drowned in the uproar created by the opposition.

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Slogan-shouting opposition members trooped into the Well despite Speaker Hridaya Narain Dixit's appeal at an all-party meeting to ensure smooth proceedings.

#WATCH: Opposition creates ruckus on first day of assembly session over law and order,blow whistles & throw paper balls at Governor Ram Naik pic.twitter.com/UQuq5dyJK2- ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 15, 2017

The governor was flanked by Dixit and Chairman of the Legislative Council Ramesh Yadav. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was present when the Governor read the address despite the bedlam.

The address is a note prepared by the government highlighting its achievements and future plans.

Incidentally, it was for the first time that the proceedings of Uttar Pradesh Assembly were telecast live by Doordarshan.

After the BJP came to power in the state, a decision was taken to telecast live the proceedings of the House so that people could benefit.

"Sara Uttar Pradesh dekh raha hai aap ko (the entire Uttar Pradesh is watching you)," a visibly annoyed Governor told the shouting members, who kept throwing papers at the podium and creating din.

Noisy start of UP Assembly .Papers being thrown at Ram Naik on law and order issues @UPGovt pic.twitter.com/gNARzOK1Ot- Anil (@Interceptors) May 15, 2017

The Opposition SP and BSP have decided to take on the Yogi Adityanath government on the law and order front.

(With PTI inputs)

ALSO READ |

Fireworks likely in new UP Assemblys first session starting

WATCH | Uttar Pradesh Assembly session: Opposition creates ruckus, hurls paper balls during Governor's address

--- ENDS ---
By Press Trust of India: (Attn Eds: Updating with fresh inputs and quotes)

The Hague, May 15 (PTI) Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a "spy" involved in terror activities, Pakistan today told the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is hearing Indias plea on the death sentence given to its national Kulbhushan Jadhav.

Indias application on Jadhav, who was arrested in March last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities, was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed, Pakistan told the UNs highest judicial body.

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India had been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhavs passport which bears a Muslim name, Mohammed Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office said in his opening remarks in response to Indias submissions earlier in the day.

India was using the court as the "scene of political theatre" but "we will not respond in kind", Faisal told the ICJ which held daylong proceedings to decide the fate of the former Indian Navy officer.

There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistans accusations on Jadhav, Pakistans lawyer Khawar Qureshi said.

Expressing the fear that Jadhav, 46, might be executed before the hearing was over, India accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".

Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, Indias lead attorney Harish Salve said.

The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhavs execution. While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of Indias external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), took less than an hour.

India wants the ICJ to annul Jadhavs death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

Jadhav, the latest flashpoint in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province. PTI ASK CPS MIN

--- ENDS ---
By Press Trust of India: (Attn Eds: Updating with fresh inputs and quotes)

The Hague, May 15 (PTI) Vienna Convention provisions on consular access were not intended for a "spy" involved in terror activities, Pakistan today told the International Court of Justice while accusing India of using the world body as a stage for "political theatre" in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case.

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Indias application on Jadhav, who was arrested in March last year and sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and subversive activities, was "unnecessary and misconceived" and must be dismissed, Pakistan told the UNs highest judicial body.

India had been unable to provide an explanation for Jadhavs passport which bears a Muslim name, Mohammed Faisal of the Pakistan Foreign Office said in his opening remarks in response to Indias submissions earlier in the day.

"India has been unable or perhaps more accurately unwilling to provide an explanation for this passport which is the most obvious indication of covert and illegal activity," he said.

"We wish to make it absolutely clear that we remain committed to the path of peaceful resolution of all disputes. Whatever the provocation. Pakistan will not be cowed by terrorism, nor will it allow any attempt to malign or misrepresent its position or legal processes to go unchecked," Faisal said.

India has seen it fit to use the International Court of Justice as a stage for "political theatre" but "we will not respond in kind", Faisal told the ICJ which held day-long proceedings to decide the fate of the former Indian Navy officer.

"He will touch upon the reasons what the court should not otherwise exercise any jurisdiction or entertain any aspects of Indias engagement of its jurisdiction. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic but perhaps consistent that India complains that it has not been given access to commander Jadhav who has confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan," Faisal said.

There has been deafening silence and no response from India on Pakistans accusations on Jadhav, Pakistans lawyer Khawar Qureshi said.

He urged the court to dismiss Indias application on three accounts - that there was "no urgency", the relief sought was "manifestly unavailable" and the jurisdiction under the Vienna Convention was not "as unchallenged" as India has suggested.

"It (jurisdiction of the court) is limited and indeed it is further limited at qualified rules supplemented by the 2008 agreement" on Consular access," Qureshi said.

On India invoking the Vienna Convention, Qureshi said, "The Vienna convention article 36 which adopted to set up standards of conduct particularly concerning communications and contact with nationals of the sending state which would contribute to the development of the friendly relations among nations...the observation we made immediately is this is unlikely to apply in the context of a spy, terrorist send by a state to engage in acts of terror."

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"Indeed, with clear from the Vienna conventions itself that there are provisions beyond article 36 that need to be considered before coming to the court with the bold assertion that the Vienna is interrelated regime," Qureshi said.

Expressing fear that Jadhav, 46, might be executed before the hearing was over, India accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna convention and conducting a "farcical trial" without a "shred of evidence".

Pakistan had denied India its 16 requests for consular access, Indias lead attorney Harish Salve said.

The urgent hearing comes after the ICJ last week stayed Jadhavs execution. While India presented its argument over 90 minutes, Pakistan, which claims that Jadhav is an agent of Indias external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), took less than an hour.

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India wants the ICJ to annul Jadhavs death sentence and for Pakistan to ensure that no action is taken that may prejudice the rights of India or of Jadhav.

Jadhav, the latest flash point in the tensions between Pakistan and India, was sentenced last month. On May 8, India moved the ICJ against the death penalty, alleging violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On May 9, the highest court in the UN gave Jadhav a lease of life.

India, in its appeal to the ICJ, had asserted that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he was involved in business activities after retiring from the Indian Navy. However, it denies that he has any connection with the government.

Pakistan claims to have arrested Jadhav from its restive Balochistan province. PTI ASK CPS MIN PYK MRJ MRJ

--- ENDS ---
Vodacom is obtaining a 34.94% stake in Kenyas Safaricom from its parent firm Vodafone Group.

The ZAR35 billion ($2.6 billion) acquisition will shore up Vodacoms East African footprint as well as allowing Vodafone Group to streamline its African holdings. If the deal receives regulatory approval, Vodafone will retain a 5% stake in Safaricom, with the remaining 35% held by the Kenyan government.

A statement from Vodacom described Safaricom as a prized asset on the African continent, particularly with regard to its m-Pesa mobile money platform, which has over 19 million users. Vodacom noted that taking on these customers will make it a formidable player in financial services on the continent with 32 million financial services subscribers.

Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said that the deal would allow the operator, which is 65% owned by Vodafone, to diversify our revenue growth and profitability. He noted that acquiring a strategic stake in Safaricom will provide our shareholders with access to a high growth, high margin, high cash generation business operating in a high growth market. In addition to producing mutually beneficial opportunities for growth, it will create further incremental value through close cooperation between the two businesses, particularly in driving m-Pesa adoption across our operations.

Based on Safaricoms share prices at the close of trading of the Nairobi Securities Exchange on Friday, Vodacom will be availed of a 5.9% discount through the deal, which Joosub noted was attractive for access to an additional 28 million customers.

Safaricom leads the Kenyan mobile market with over 26 million connections. Its biggest rival, Airtel Kenya, trails it with over 6 million connections. In March, a report by Analysys Mason suggested that Safaricom should be forced to separate its mobile unit from M-Pesa, but Kenyas Communications Authority did not act on the advice.
Flooring designer, manufacturer and distributor Victoria announced the non-board appointment of Jan Debrouwere as the group's director of business development for hard flooring on Monday, with immediate effect, reporting directly to the group's CEO Philippe Hamers.

The AIM-traded company said Debrouwere was bringing 28 years of expertise in manufacturing, selling and marketing of all kinds of hard flooring with him - a product group which the board said represented significant growth potential for Victoria.

It described Debrouwere as a focused entrepreneur, with a passion for product development, design and innovation.

His appointment was said to be an important step as the group was seeking to secure customers, suppliers and acquisitions to gain market share in the growing hard flooring market.

For the last four years, Debrouwere headed the successful turnaround of Beaulieu International Group's worldwide hard flooring business - a multi-product, multi-national division with a turnover of 500m, overseeing multiple production sites and sales teams in Russia, USA and Europe.

In that role, he initiated and oversaw multi-million euro greenfield start-ups to produce LVT and sheet vinyl both in Europe and the US.

Debrouwere was also pivotal to the acquisition and successful integration of one of Russia's largest flooring distributors into BIG, the Victoria board explained.

Prior to that role, he held senior management positions at IVC - part of Mohawk Industries, Domo - acquired by Balta Group in 2010, and Tarkett.

Victoria is very determined to grow its existing successful hard flooring business, which we believe represents a significant opportunity for us, said chairman Geoff Wilding.

With almost three decades of flooring experience in Europe, we are delighted to have secured such a senior and experienced individual as Jan to run our hard flooring division.

As a very driven entrepreneur who is extremely well-known in the industry, Jan will be a fabulous asset to us as we materially develop our hard flooring business across the UK and Europe.
Analysts at Macquarie sounded a positive note on Gemfields's stock despite what it said was the short-term issue of lower grade production.

On 12 May, the precious gems miner lowered its 2017 production guidance from between 30.0m to 35.0m carats to a range of 20.0m to 25.0m, due to lower than expected mining grades at its Kagem and Montepuez operations.

However, at both mines, and especially so at Montepuez, the outfit had "significant" scope to shift production from lower to higher grade zones, the broker said.

"So total output in carats is not so much a concern to us relative to carat quality and consistent product mix."

As for the decision to withdraw from purchasing the Coscuez emerald mine in Colombia, while a minor loss it would allow Gemfields to refocus on other highly prospective exploration assets in Ethiopia and elsewhere.

The company's significant inventory of rough and polished stones, in excess of $100.0m, also meant it had a strong financial cushion, which in turn reassured Macquarie about its ability to refinance if necessary.

"Gemfields remains a highly differentiated, global leader in the gemstones industry. Over 2017, operational setbacks have hampered the shares but we remain confident in the three-year growth plan to nearly double production of rubies and emeralds. The shares remain attractively priced at ~0.5x NAV, and we maintain an Outperform rating."

Investec upgraded funeral provider Dignity to 'buy' from 'hold' following the company's first-quarter update, in which it reported a 15% jump in revenue as deaths rose 7%.

The brokerage said Dignity has made a "strong" start to the year. "Whilst Q1 16 presents a weak comparator, a situation which we expect to unwind over the year, the results are more impressive when viewed relative to Q1 15 (the strongest quarter in ten years)," it said.

It added that with acquisition activity remaining high, strong growth in pre-arranged funerals and robust average prices, Dignity is well placed to meet expectations.

Investec said that with the death rate assumed to revert to a more normal level over the course of full-year 2017, it expects 2% revenue growth on a 2% decline in deaths with an EBIT margin of 33%.



Consensus is too conservative on Ibstock, analysts at Barclays said, reiterating their 'overweight' recommendation on the shares with an improved target price of 285.0p.

To make their case, analysts Pierre Rousseau and Nabil Ahmed pointed to strong new build activity and a better than initially expected price/cost differential in Britain.

"Beyond the superior industry features (tight supply-demand balance, industry discipline and unprecedented public support), Ibstock has very promising development projects which should all address attractive market opportunities and enhance profitability," they added.

On the basis of the above, they raised their 2017 to 2019 estimates for the company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation.
Analysts at Macquarie sounded a positive note on Gemfields's stock despite what it said was the short-term issue of lower grade production.

On 12 May, the precious gems miner lowered its 2017 production guidance from between 30.0m to 35.0m carats to a range of 20.0m to 25.0m, due to lower than expected mining grades at its Kagem and Montepuez operations.

However, at both mines, and especially so at Montepuez, the outfit had "significant" scope to shift production from lower to higher grade zones, the broker said.

"So total output in carats is not so much a concern to us relative to carat quality and consistent product mix."

As for the decision to withdraw from purchasing the Coscuez emerald mine in Colombia, while a minor loss it would allow Gemfields to refocus on other highly prospective exploration assets in Ethiopia and elsewhere, according to the broker.

The company's significant inventory of rough and polished stones, in excess of $100.0m, also meant it had a strong financial cushion, which in turn reassured Macquarie about its ability to refinance if necessary.

"Gemfields remains a highly differentiated, global leader in the gemstones industry. Over 2017, operational setbacks have hampered the shares but we remain confident in the three-year growth plan to nearly double production of rubies and emeralds. The shares remain attractively priced at ~0.5x NAV, and we maintain an Outperform rating."

Nonetheless, the analysts also lowered their target price from 90.0p to 80.0p.

Among the potential share price catalysts Macquarie cited an emerald auction between 15 and 18 May, together with the mixed quality ruby auction in June.
The global cyber virus attack on private and public sector computer systems is a wakeup call for governments to deal with the way such threats are countered, a senior Microsoft executive said.

The software giant's chief legal officer Brad Smith said the ransomware attack that had crippled operations from Britain's National Health Service to courier heavweight Federal Express was the equivalent of the US military having a Tomahawk missile stolen.

The ransomware, called 'WannaCry' has hit more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries since Friday, Europol says. The perpetrators demand money in return for unlocking encrypted data.

Internet security firm Kaspersky said the largest number of attacks occurred in Russia, but Ukraine, India, and Taiwan have also been hit.

"In just the first day of the attack, we found WannaCry in 74 countries," said Kaspersky's Alex Perekalin.

Microsoft's Smith said the latest attack provides "yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem".

This is an emerging pattern in 2017. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the (US) National Security Agency has affected customers around the world.

Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage. An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.

Smith said the attack represented an unintended but disconcerting link between the two most serious forms of cybersecurity threats in the world today  nation-state action and organized criminal action.

The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call. They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world, he said.
By Press Trust of India: New Delhi, May 15 (PTI) The VO Chidambaranar Port, one of the top 12 major ports in the country, and Tamil Nadu entity TANGEDCO today inked a pact to augment the capacities of two coal jetties at the port four-fold to 24 million tonnes for Rs 800 crore.

The pact will upgrade two coal jetties at VO Chidambaranar Port - Jetty I and II -- from 6.25 MTPA (million tonne per annum) to 24 MTPA.

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"The VOCP Trust signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation Limited (TANGEDCO) for the upgradation of Coal Jetty I and II," Ministry of Shipping said in a statement.

Shipping and Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari and Minister for Electricity, Prohibition and Excise, Government of Tamil Nadu, P Thangamani were present on the occasion.

Gadkari said that the project would benefit both TANGEDCO and the VOCPT.

"It would make coal handling by the jetties much more voluminous and efficient, and thus bring down logistics costs. This would also allow for cheaper production of electricity, which would be very beneficial for industrial growth," he said.

With the upgradation of coal jetties, TANGEDCO will be able to handle additional volumes of coal cargo for the upcoming new power plants in Uppur and Kadaladi in Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu.

In addition, there will be quicker turnaround of vehicles with the deployment of high tech handling equipment like two ship unloaders, each with a minimum 2,000 TPH capacity and a high capacity conveyor system of 4,000 TPH.

This enhancement of handling capacity and upgradation of infrastructure will result in reduction of logistics costs, the statement said.

"TANGEDCO will therefore, be able to utilise the services of the port in a more cost-effective way. With the power generation from TANGEDCOs Tuticorin plants being linked to the National Grid, this would enable availability of additional power at reduced costs, which, in turn, can fuel industrial growth and employment generation," it said.

The project is the outcome of Ministry of Shippings Project Unnati, under which a study, Unlocking National Ports Potential was done to improve the handling capacity of CJ-I & II.

"The estimated cost for upgrading CJ-I & II is about Rs 800 crore," the statement said.

As per the MoU, initially Coal Jetty-I will be upgraded in about 24 months by constructing a new coal jetty while the second jettly will be upgraded thereafter. PTI NAM JM MVV

--- ENDS ---
European regulators have launched a formal investigation into Aspen Pharmacare over concerns that the South Africa company has been engaged in 'price gouging' over several of its life-saving cancer medicines.

The European Commission will investigate whether Aspen, South Africa's largest drug company and until last year a close partner of British drug group GlaxoSmithKline, has abused a dominant market position in breach of EU antitrust rules, imposing "very significant and unjustified price increases of up to several hundred percent, so-called 'price gouging'".

Aspen, having bought the rights to five life-saving cancer drugs from GSK in 2009, planned to hike up the price of some treatments by as much as 4,000% and even examined the possibility of destroying supplies of the life-saving drugs in order to drive the massive price rises, according a report in The Times.

The company's determination to ramp up prices discovered in a cache of documents that were passed to the newspaper after a row erupted in 2014 between Aspen, which runs its European business from an office in Dublin, and Spain's health service before then spreading to Italy.

With little or no competition for these drugs, Aspen ramped up the price of these drugs around Europe, according to the Times' research, with the price of busulfan, used by leukaemia patients, rose from 5.20 to 65.22 a pack in England and Wales during 2013, while chlorambucil rose from 8.36 to 40.51.

Having also now been passed these documents, the EU said it "has information that, for example, to impose such price increases, Aspen has threatened to withdraw the medicines in question in some Member States and has actually done so in certain cases".

On Monday, EC competition chief Margrethe Vestager acknowledged that companies should be rewarded for developing drugs that save or prolong lives, to ensure that they keep making them into the future.

"But when the price of a drug suddenly goes up by several hundred percent, this is something the Commission may look at," she said.

"More specifically, in this case we will be assessing whether Aspen is breaking EU competition rules by charging excessive prices for a number of medicines."

The EC investigation will examine Aspen's pricing practices for niche medicines containing the active pharmaceutical ingredients chlorambucil, melphalan, mercaptopurine, tioguanine and busulfan, which Aspen bought after their patent protection had expired and has sold under various brand names and in different combinations for treating cancer, such as hematologic tumours.

GSK sold the drugs as part of the 'Cosmos' portfolio in 2009, the same year it built up a 19% stake.

Last September Glaxo sold its last stake in Aspen, which in 2015 year had represented 12.4% of the South African company and was worth north of 10bn.
Markets in Asia were mostly higher on Monday, after a weekend in which trade protectionism was on the agenda as finance chiefs from the worlds seven largest economies gathered for a G7 meeting in Italy.

Geopolitical tensions were also at the fore, after yet another missile launch from North Korea.

Japans Nikkei 225 was 0.07% lower at 19,869.85, as the yen weakened against the greenback.

It was last off 0.08% at JPY 113.47 per $1.

Ailing technology firm Toshiba posted its results, booking an unaudited JPY 950bn net loss for the financial year.

Its stock still managed a rise of 3.44% by the time markets closed in Tokyo.

On the mainland, the Shanghai Composite was 0.22% firmer at 3,090.23, while the smaller, technology-heavy Shenzhen Composite was 0.38% higher at 1,827.02.

Industrial production data for April for China missed forecasts, rising 6.5% instead of the expected 7.1%, down from the 7.6% expansion sees in March.

Fixed asset investment data was also released on Monday, with that reading growing 8.9% in the first four months of the year - falling short of the 9.1% Reuters-pooled estimate.

Retail sales managed to do better than expected, increasing 10.7% year-on-year in April, ahead of the 10.6% forecast but still short of the 10.9% booked in March.

South Koreas Kospi finished up 0.2% at 2,290.65, while the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong finished up 0.86% at 25,371.59.

Finance ministers and central bankers discussed the risks of a more protectionist United States at the G7 finance meeting in Italy over the weekend, following a similar theme to the G20 meeting in March, in which leaders failed to jointly endorse the concept of free trade.

Locally, tensions were fuelled by the launch of another missile from the belligerent Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea on the peninsulas north.

It reportedly landed in the sea near Russia without too much incident.

Finally, markets were dealing with the fallout of the WannaCry global cyberattack, which began spreading among unsecure, largely Windows XP machines on Friday, wreaking havoc for the UKs National Health Service among other organisations.

During the Asian session on Monday, traders seemed to largely brush off the risks of the cyberattack, perhaps reassured it was only infecting older, less secure systems thus far.

Oil prices were up strongly during the session, after reports that energy ministers from Russia and Saudi Arabia had reached agreement that production cuts needed to be extended until March 2018.

Brent crude was last up 2.42% at $52.10 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate added 2.49% to $49.06.

In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 was up 0.03% to close at 5,838.40, with BHP Billiton shares adding 0.29% after it prepared to take the wraps off plans to extract more value from its shale assets.

The major miner had been under pressure from activist shareholder Elliott Management to restructure recently, and on Monday also confirmed plans to rebrand and drop the Billiton from its name.

One of the largest newspaper publishers in Australia and New Zealand, Fairfax Media, was offered AUD 2.76bn by TPG Capital Management for the entire firm.

An earlier, surprise bid from TPG this month was only for the companys bigger newspapers and internet properties.

The publishers shared rocketed after the announcement, finishing up 6.54% in Sydney.

Across the Tasman Sea, the S&P/NZX 50 was down 0.3% at 7,429.94, with a drought of domestic news seeing exposed stocks dictate the benchmark.

Dairy products and baby food exporter A2 Milk was among the big losers, off 2.5%, as the disappointing Chinese data had an impact on companies exposed to the pseudo-capitalist economy.

Both of the down under dollars were strongly ahead on the greenback, with the Aussie last ahead 0.69% at AUD 1.3443 and the Kiwi advancing 0.65% to NZD 1.4477 per $1.
Buying pressure from the previous week is carrying through into Monday's session following news of a strong showing for Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU in elections in the country's most populous state at the weekend.

As of 0832 BST the benchmark Stoxx 600 was up by 0.05% to 396.49 and just above its year-to-date highs, alongside a rise of 0.27% for the Dax to 12,804.47 and gains of 0.38% for the FTSE Mibtel to 21,662.43.

Euro/dollar was advancing 0.05% at 1.0939.

Merkel's CDU came away with 33% of the ballots - 6.7 points more than in the prior elections - versus 31.2% for the centre-left SPD in Sunday's vote in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

"After a horrible 2016 in which a tide of political anger led to the UK's Brexit vote and swept Donald Trump to power in the US, the newsflow so far this year has been rather different. Anti-European populism seems to have peaked in the Eurozone," said Holger Schmieding at Berenberg.

The results of the vote pointed to a possibly even wider margin of victory for the CDU in September's parliamentary elections, he said.

On a related note, analysts at Deutsche Bank revised up their projections for euro area GDP growth in 2017 and 2018 from 1.3% and 1.5% to 1.8% and 1.6%, respectively.

"The euro area has absorbed high political uncertainty better than we expected, with GDP growth averaging almost 2% annualised in the last two quarters. With France having chosen Macron over Le Pen, the window has opened for us to update our forecasts," economists at Deutsche Bank said.

Acting as a backdrop, front month Brent crude futures were up by 1.85% to $51.80 per barrel on the ICE amid reports that Saudi Arabia and Russia had agreed to do "whatever it takes" to put a floor under prices.

On the conomic calendar for Monday, Greek and Portuguese first quarter gross domestic product figures were scheduled for release at 0900 BST, with a speech later in the day from European Central Bank chief economist Peter Praet likely to attract attention.

The agenda in the US was rather sparse too, with the Federal Reserve bank of New York's manufacturing gauge set for release at 1330 BST, followed by the NAHB's survey of homebuilder confidence at 1500 BST.

France's Bollore announced first-quarter revenue rose by 7.2% on the year.

Analysts at Barclays downgraded Telefonica to 'underweight' while their peers at Deutsche Bank bumped up their target on AstraZeneca from 5,350p to 5,700p.

Oil major Total was also in the news after signing a deal to search for oil and gas offshore Mauritania.

German power group RWE posted core earnings which were slightly ahead of forecasts.
Electra Private Equity and its investment manager Epiris announced on Monday that its portfolio company AXIO Group has agreed the sale of intellectual property and technology services provider TechInsights to Oakley Capital .

The FTSE 250 company said the sale, which was expected to complete within a fortnight, was the seventh and final major realisation from AXIO's portfolio.

Based on Monday morning exchange rates, Electra Private Equity would receive proceeds from AXIO of 26m.

The sale would increase the total cash proceeds received by Electra from its investment in AXIO to 455m, equivalent to 5.0x original cost, with an internal rate of return of 76%.

We are delighted to have agreed the final sale from the AXIO group of companies which will conclude what has been an outstanding investment for our investors, delivering an unlevered return of 5x cost and an IRR of 76%, said Epiris partner Alex Cooper-Evans.

The AXIO investment is a terrific example of the Epiris strategy at work.

We bought a complex group of assets before transforming them with a programme of strategic and operational focus as well as investment in organic and M&A-led growth.

Cooper-Evans said that created a portfolio of high-performance growth businesses which had proven to be extremely attractive to trade and financial buyers alike.

Henry Elkington, CEO of AXIO Group, said the company was delighted to have brought the investment to a successful conclusion.

I speak for the whole management team in saying that this outcome would not have been possible without Epiris, whose vision and support have been invaluable, Elkington added.

Based in Ottawa, Canada, Electra described TechInsights as the global leader in intellectual property consulting, patent brokerage and technical reverse engineering.

It said TechInsights helped patent owners maximize the value of their patents through portfolio assessment, advising on strategic options, licensing and litigation support.

In 2016 the business was combined with Chipworks, which Electra said was the leader in the intellectual property and technology services market, creating the clear global leader in advanced technology intelligence and technology founded patent advisory services.
Simpson will succeed Matthew Lester, who informed the board of his intention to step down following the 2017 annual general meeting. He will report to chief executive officer Moya Greene and will take up the new post at the conclusion of the AGM in July.

Simpson joined the company in 2009 and was appointed director of group finance in July 2105. Prior to this, he was deputy chief operations officer and has been a member of the Chief Executive's Committee since 2014. He has also held senior operational and finance positions within Royal Mail's core UK business.

Before joining the company, he held senior roles in the automotive industry in both finance and strategy, based in the UK and internationally.

Greene said: "He brings a very detailed knowledge of our business to this key role, which he has developed over eight years working both at the group level and in our core UK operations. This will prove invaluable as he works with me to transform Royal Mail. Over the past three years, he has been instrumental in driving performance particularly in the core business. His combination of financial and operational experience makes him an excellent addition to the board."

At 1240 BST, the shares were down 0.4% to 428.40p.
In combination with the standard test of clotting time, new laboratory testing method opens the door to personalized resuscitation for trauma patients

CHICAGO (May 15, 2017): By combining a conventional laboratory measurement of blood clotting time (known as the International Normalized Ratio or INR) with a new test of blood clot strength, based upon thrombelastography (TEG), researchers at the University of Colorado's Department of Surgery, Denver, are able to quickly and efficiently assess the overall ability of blood to clot and identify trauma patients who were most in need of a massive blood transfusion. The investigators believe that in the not too distant future these tests, when used in combination, will be able to personalize trauma care, help surgeons save lives, and make better use of scarce blood bank resources. The ability of the tests to predict the need for massive transfusion was described in an "article in press" published on the Journal of the American College of Surgeons website in advance of print publication.

More than 80 percent of deaths in the operating room and 50 percent of deaths in the first 24 hours after injury are due to massive blood loss and impaired coagulation. While only 3 percent of civilian trauma patients receive a massive transfusion in the first day of treatment after trauma, these patients account for 70 percent of all blood transfused in a trauma center.1

"When someone is massively bleeding, you need to give certain blood products early, and the blood bank has to mobilize blood products that are resource scarce, such as platelets, which have only a five-day shelf life. You want to quickly identify patients who will require a large quantity of blood products to save lives and mobilize the blood bank only when you need it," according to lead study author, Hunter B. Moore, MD.

However, clinical scoring systems for predicting the need for massive transfusion are problematic. Some rely on vital signs, such as blood pressure and heart rate, which are subjective and highly variable; others require multiple diagnostic imaging and laboratory tests.2

Dr. Moore and his colleagues at the University of Colorado's Department of Surgery developed a new test to predict which patients would require massive transfusion. This test modifies a currently available test of blood clot strength, thrombelastography (TEG), by adding tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) to a patient's blood sample. Thrombelastography is a point-of-care assay of coagulation that measures the viscoelastic properties of whole blood and determines the ability of blood to clot. Tissue plasminogen activator is a protein involved in the breakdown of blood clots.

"When patients go into hemorrhagic shock, they activate the blood's fibrinolysis or clot degradation system at the local or organ level so organs continue to be perfused with blood. At the systemic level, there are backup inhibitors--platelets and proteins--that prevent clot degradation from affecting the whole body. Activators of fibrinolysis include tissue plasminogen activator. As patients progress toward hemorrhagic shock, clot degradation intensifies, and their tPA levels increase. We can unmask this process in the early stages by giving extra tPA to blood samples and forecast if the patient is at high risk of progression to hyperfibrinolysis," Dr. Moore said.

Dr. Moore and associates studied more than 300 patients who were treated for trauma between 2014 and 2016. Seventeen percent of the patients required a massive transfusion, and one third of deaths were due to uncontrolled hemorrhage. The investigators assessed how effectively each clinical score could determine the need for massive transfusion, and compared their effectiveness to their new developed test.

The analysis showed that this tPA-challenged TEG assay was highly sensitive and specific and took only a few minutes to provide results--up to 30 minutes faster than existing tests. Moreover, when the tPA-challenged TEG assay, was used in combination with the INR, it improved the predictive value of identifying patients who needed transfusion by roughly 40 percent. Additionally, the two-test combination identified 97 percent of patients who did not require blood products, thereby preventing unnecessary transfusions. The researchers therefore propose that trauma teams use the INR as a screening test to determine if someone is at risk for bleeding and then follow up with tPA-challenged TEG to ensure that this result is accurate.

The tPA-challenged TEG assays currently require trained technicians to conduct the testing. However, newly available fully automated TEG instruments will streamline this process, according to Dr. Moore.

"The fully automated assays will have a standardized methodology for obtaining samples and may be used as a point-of-care test by prehospital providers to screen for the risk of massive transfusion before patients enter the trauma center. These assays will help us move one step closer to the time when the trauma team can tailor or personalize resuscitation to each patient," Dr. Moore said.

###

In addition to Dr. Moore, other study authors include Ernest E. Moore, MD, FACS; Michael P. Chapman, MD; Benjamin R. Huebner, MD; Peter M. Einersen, MD; Solimon Oushy, BA; Christopher C. Silliman, MD, PhD; Anirban Banerjee, PhD; and Angela Sauaia, MD, PhD.

Citation: Viscoelastic Tissue Plasminogen Activator Challenge Predicts Massive Transfusion in 15 Minutes. Journal of American College of Surgeons. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2017.02.018.

This study was supported in part by National Institute of General Medical Sciences grants T32-GM008315 and P50-GM49222; National Heart Lung and Blood Institute grant UM 1HL120877; and Department of Defense Contract Number USAMRAA, W81XWH-12-2-0028. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, or the Department of Defense.

Disclaimer: Drs. H. Moore, E. Moore, and Chapman have shared intellectual property with Haemonetics. There is no direct financial relationship. Haemonetics provided reagents and devices to run viscoelastic assays, but has no involvement with data analysis, interpretation, or any contribution to this manuscript.

1 American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Program: ACS TQIP Massive Transfusion in Trauma Guidelines. Available at https://www.facs.org/~/media/files/quality%20programs/trauma/tqip/massive%20transfusion%20in%20trauma%20guildelines.ashx. Accessed May 11, 2017. 2 Brockamp T et al. Predicting on-goin hemorrhage and transfusion requirement after severe trauma: a validation of six scoring systems and algorithm on the TraumaRegister DGU. Critical Care. 2012; 16(4):R129.

About the American College of Surgeons

The American College of Surgeons is a scientific and educational organization of surgeons that was founded in 1913 to raise the standards of surgical practice and improve the quality of care for surgical patients. The College is dedicated to the ethical and competent practice of surgery. Its achievements have significantly influenced the course of scientific surgery in America and have established it as an important advocate for all surgical patients. The College has more than 80,000 members and is the largest organization of surgeons in the world. For more information, visit http://www.facs.org.
May 15, 2017 Chicago...For the first time, a variant in UBQLN4 gene has been associated with Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - a progressive disease resulting in the loss of nerve cells that control muscle movement, which eventually leads to paralysis and death. The study published in the journal eLife also describes how this gene variant disrupts a cellular process that drives motor neuron development. This new insight opens the door to potential treatment targets for ALS.

"We know that many genes are involved in ALS and a major goal in the field is to identify as many of these genes as we can so we can uncover targets for treatment at the cellular level," says lead author Brittany Edens from Stanley Manne Children's Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. "We found that UBQLN4 gene variant interferes with a pathway involved in breaking down a certain protein called beta catenin, and the resulting accumulation of this protein leads to defects in the motor neuron structure. These defects likely make motor neurons vulnerable to progressive degeneration seen in ALS."

The study is part of an ongoing National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded collaboration between the lab of Yongchao Ma, PhD, at Manne Research Institute and the lab of Teepu Siddique, MD, and Han-Xiang Deng, MD, PhD, at Les Turner ALS Research and Patient Center at Northwestern Medicine. The Siddique and Deng lab found the UBQLN4 gene variant associated with ALS, while the Ma lab discovered the underlying disease mechanism.

The earlier discovery of mutations in UBQLN2 gene, which causes ALS and ALS/dementia in children and adults, in the Siddique lab led to the screening of the UBQLN family of genes in a large cohort of patients with familial ALS, resulting in the identification of the UBQLN4 mutation.

Using a zebrafish model, researchers were able to reverse the defects caused by the UBQLN4 gene variant by inhibiting the beta catenin signaling pathway with the drug quercetin. These findings suggest that this pathway could be targeted for treatment. More research will be needed before a similar drug could be shown to work in people with ALS.

"At this stage, it is unclear how many people with ALS have the UBQLN4 gene variant, and this will be important to determine," says Ma, the senior author on the study who is Ann Marie and Francis Klocke, MD Research Scholar at the Manne Research Institute and Assistant Professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "Another important next step will be to assess whether the disease mechanism we describe is common to other forms of ALS."

It is estimated that ALS occurs in 20,000 Americans at any given time, with over 6,000 new cases diagnosed each year, according to the ALS Association.

"Another intriguing aspect of our study is the molecular link we have established between ALS and spinal muscular atrophy or SMA, which is a pediatric motor neuron disease," says Edens. "We see a similarity in the increase of beta catenin, which causes defective motor neuron development. So even though the genes that cause ALS and SMA are different, they might share a common pathway that affects motor neuron structure and function."

###

Research in the Ma lab is funded by the NIH, The Hartwell Foundation, and Cure SMA. Siddique's research on ALS is funded by the NIH, Les Turner ALS Research and Patient Center at Northwestern Medicine, and the Foglia Family Foundation.

Research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago is conducted through the Stanley Manne Children's Research Institute. The Manne Research Institute is focused on improving child health, transforming pediatric medicine and ensuring healthier futures through the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Lurie Children's is ranked as one of the nation's top children's hospitals in the U.S.News & World Report. It is the pediatric training ground for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Last year, the hospital served more than 198,000 children from 50 states and 51 countries.
(Boston) -- This year's Carol Nachman Prize for Rheumatology was awarded to David T. Felson, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University's Schools of Medicine and Public Health (BUSM, BUSPH). The Prize is the most prestigious international award for research in rheumatology -- the study of arthritis and other disorders of the joints, muscles and ligaments. Since 1972, the award recognizes outstanding research and innovation achievements, aimed at promoting clinical, therapeutic and experimental research in the field.

Felson's research interests include understanding how to prevent and treat osteoarthritis (OA) -- also known as degenerative joint disease or "wear and tear" arthritis. He is studying whether treatments for rheumatic diseases are effective and particularly in osteoarthritis, identifying risk factors for disease, testing treatments and characterizing MRI features of normal knees and knees with pain. He also studies outcome measurement (tests that objectively determine a patients' baseline function at the beginning of treatment) in rheumatic disease and has focused in this work on rheumatoid arthritis trials.

Felson led a series of major studies to identify prevalence, impact and risk factors for knee osteoarthritis (OA). In the Framingham Osteoarthritis Study, his group first documented that obesity increased the risk of OA and that weight loss could lessen that risk. The first to introduce magnetic resonance imaging in large scale studies, his group discovered that meniscal tears and other structural pathology were present in most middle-age and older persons regardless of knee pain. He inaugurated the study of structural correlates of joint pain, identifying for the first time that in OA, synovitis and bone marrow lesions cause pain and these structural findings have now emerged as targets of treatment. Recent work from his group suggests that chronic alterations in the nervous system that enhance pain sensitivity affect most patients with OA pain.

Working with the FDA and rheumatology organizations, he also led the effort to standardize clinical trial outcome measurement in rheumatoid arthritis, creating the first core set of outcomes and coming up with the American College of Rheumatology definition of improvement (ACR20). This outcome standardization made it possible for the first time to gauge the relative efficacy of new drugs such as TNF inhibitors.

###

The recipient of numerous awards, Felson was the first non-basic scientist recipient of the Kunkel Young Investigator Award from the American College of Rheumatology, and from this same organization, he received its inaugural Clinical Research Award. Felson graduated from Harvard College and received his MD from Johns Hopkins University. After a residency in internal medicine at Case Western Reserve, he trained in rheumatology at Boston University where he also received his MPH in epidemiology. He joined the BU faculty in 1984, became a professor in 1994 and was appointed Chair of Clinical Epidemiology in 2001. He is the Director of Training and Education for the Boston University Clinical Translational Science Institute and the Director of Clinical Epidemiology at Boston Medical Center.
A team of researchers from Cleveland Clinic, Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente Northwest, and other clinical sites have demonstrated that a new blood test known as IsoPSA detects prostate cancer more precisely than current tests in two crucial measures - distinguishing cancer from benign conditions, and identifying patients with high-risk disease.

By identifying molecular changes in the prostate specific antigen (PSA) protein, the findings, published online last month by European Urology, suggest that once validated, use of IsoPSA may substantially reduce the need for biopsy, and may thus lower the likelihood of overdetection and overtreatment of nonlethal prostate cancer.

The research team, led by Cleveland Clinic's Eric Klein, M.D., conducted a multicenter prospective study of 261 men scheduled for prostate biopsy at five academic and community centers in the U.S. enrolled between August 2015 and December 2016.

"Despite criticism, PSA has transformed the landscape of early detection, screening, and management of prostate cancer in the last few decades," said Dr. Klein, chair of Cleveland Clinic's Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute. "Unfortunately, PSA is tissue-specific but not cancer-specific, leading to overdiagnosis and overtreatment of biologically insignificant cancers, which is widely recognized as a key limitation in its clinical utility."

The study directly compared the clinical performance of a new test based on PSA, called IsoPSA, to PSA itself with patients already scheduled for prostate biopsy. IsoPSA proved significantly superior to PSA in two key indications: discriminating between prostate cancer and benign conditions; and identifying patients with high-grade disease. The former indication is potentially useful for using IsoPSA for screening by primary care physicians, while the second is helpful for urologists in identifying patients who would benefit from curative intent therapy and other applications.

The results show that if validated and adopted clinically, IsoPSA could significantly reduce the rate of unnecessary biopsies by almost 50 percent. "The methodology used in the IsoPSA assay represents a significant departure from conventional ways to define biomarkers in blood, and may be applicable to improving other cancer biomarkers," said Dr. Klein.

"Due to its inherent simplicity, requiring only a blood draw and presenting information to the physician in familiar context using a single number - just like PSA itself - we are quite hopeful in IsoPSA's future utility after further validation studies," said Mark Stovsky, M.D., co-author and staff member, Cleveland Clinic Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute.

###

The IsoPSA test was developed by Cleveland Diagnostics, a company co-founded by Cleveland Clinic, in which it has financial interest. Dr. Klein has no personal financial interest in the company. Dr. Stovsky has a leadership position (Chief Medical Officer) and investment interest in Cleveland Diagnostics, Inc. About Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. U.S. News & World Report consistently names Cleveland Clinic as one of the nation's best hospitals in its annual "America's Best Hospitals" survey. Among Cleveland Clinic's 51,000 employees are more than 3,500 full-time salaried physicians and researchers and 14,000 nurses, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic's health system includes a 165-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 10 regional hospitals, more than 150 northern Ohio outpatient locations - including 18 full-service family health centers and three health and wellness centers - and locations in Weston, Fla.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2016, there were 7.1 million outpatient visits, 161,674 hospital admissions and 207,610 surgical cases throughout Cleveland Clinic's health system. Patients came for treatment from every state and 185 countries. Visit us at clevelandclinic.org. Follow us at twitter.com/ClevelandClinic. News and resources available at newsroom.clevelandclinic.org.
By Press Trust of India: New Delhi, May 15 (PTI) A new law to regulate marriage and divorce among the Muslim community would be brought, if all forms of divorce including triple talaq are struck down, the government today told the Supreme Court.

The Centre, which also sought that the issues of polygamy and nikah halala should not be excluded from the ongoing deliberations, got an assurance from the apex court that these aspects were open and would be dealt with later.

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The government termed all the three forms of divorce among the Muslim community ?- talaq-e-biddat, talaq hasan and talaq ahsan, as "unilateral" and "extra-judicial".

The apex court bench said the government has to first pass the test of "essentiality" and prove that triple talaq is not an essential part of Islam, as this will amount to "tinkering" with religion.

A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar said "we are not only the guardian of the Constitution but also the guardian of minority rights" and will have to see if triple talaq formed a fundamental part of religion and pass the test of "essentiality" under Article 25.

The bench, also comprising Justices Kurian Joseph, R F Nariman, U U Lalit and Abdul Nazeer, asked if the court struck down all forms of talaq, then what options would a Muslim man be left with to come out of a marriage.

"The government will not leave the people high and dry once the instant form of divorce (triple talaq) or all forms of talaq are struck down. We will come out with a law to regulate the marriage and divorce among Muslim community," the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Centre, said.

He said the issues of Muslim marriage and divorce were separated from religion in Shariat Act of 1937 itself and have been codified as personal law under Section 2 of the Act.

The apex court has to test them on the touch-stone of the fundamental rights of gender equality, justice, dignity, gender discrimination and human rights under constitutional provisions, including Articles 14, 15, 21 and 51A.

"All personal laws must be in confirmity with the Constitution. Rights of marriage, divorce, property and succession has to be treated in the same class and has to be in conformity with the Constitution," Rohatgi said.

The Attorney General also said what kind of religious practices are essential to a particular religion or faith was difficult to define for the court. But once such practices of marriage and divorce are separated from religion, there cannot be any immunity under Article 25 (freedom to practice any religion).

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He said if the practice of talaq was out of Article 25, then it has to be constitutionally moral, which means it has to be secular and non-discriminatory.

"One half of a community in the country has to suffer inequality from their male counterpart. What may be permissible for society may not be constitutionally moral," he said.

To this, the bench observed if the government wanted social welfare and reforms, why cant it bring laws to correct the wrong.

"Yes, we can bring law. There is no law for past 60 years. It has not been done. But the court should first strike down these practices which are not in confirmity with the Constitution," he said.

Rohatgi said when half the population of a particular community is not empowered, no equal opportunity is given, they are devoid of gender equality, then it does not pass the test of constitutional morality.

He said even if triple talaq is considered as an essential part of religion and falls under Article 25, the practice still has to be constitutionally moral.

"Even if talaq is considered under Article 25, it has to be related to the fundamental rights and should abide by the principles of gender equality, non-discrimination and justice," the AG said. (More) PTI MNL ABA SJK RKS ARC

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Bottom Line:

Lung cancer tumors were prevented in mice by a novel small molecule that directly activates a tumor suppressor protein.

Journal in Which the Study was Published:

The Journal of Clinical Investigation

Author:

Goutham Narla, MD, PhD, Pardee-Gerstacker Professor in Cancer Research, Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and member of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Background:

Cells are constantly turning proteins on and off via molecular switches--phosphate molecules--that have become common drug targets. Said Dr. Narla, "All the drugs we currently have to treat our cancer patients target what we call kinases, which attach phosphate molecules to proteins. But equally important to this are the enzymes that take the phosphate off."

One enzyme--PP2A--can "turn off" tumor proteins by removing phosphate molecules attached to them. But according to Dr. Narla, "This tumor suppressor is turned off in pretty much every major cancer. Its inactivation is essential for a normal cell to become a cancer cell."

Narla and his team decided to take an unconventional approach to cancer drug development by seeking molecules that directly target PP2A, in an effort to reactivate its tumor suppressor properties.

How the Study Was Conducted:

Forty-five researchers, including eight students from the Young Scientist Foundation and Mark R. Chance, PhD, Vice Dean for Research at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, collaborated to screen a series of drug-like molecules for their ability to reactivate PP2A in lung cancer cells and prevent lung cancer tumors in mice. The prototype drug molecules were created from FDA-approved medications by Michael Ohlmeyer, PhD, Associate Professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Results:

The team found one particular prototype drug can attach to a subunit of the PP2A protein, effectively activating the enzyme. As Narla explained, the study is the first to use a small molecule to directly activate an enzyme that removes phosphate molecules. "There are indirect ways that have been shown to get at these kinds of enzymes, but this is the first example of a direct activation of one. Our drug actually binds to and turns on PP2A."

The prototype drug also prevented lung cancer cells from proliferating in laboratory models, including mouse models. Mice injected with the drug had fewer lung cancer tumors and did not experience weight loss or behavioral abnormalities associated with other cancer medications. In the mouse models, the drug was comparably effective to currently available combination therapies used to slow lung cancer progression.

To confirm exactly where the drug attaches to PP2A, the researchers also developed lung cancer cells with specific mutations at the putative drug binding site. Mice with tumors created from the mutated cancer cells did not benefit from the prototype drug, as the drug could not attach to and reactivate PP2A. The results confirmed that the prototype drug attaches to PP2A at two specific amino acids within a subunit of the enzyme, information that could help inform other drug developers.

Author Comment:

"This is the first example ever of a cancer drug that directly binds to and activates an enzyme that removes phosphate molecules. Therefore our findings could have broad applicability to the treatment of a large number of human cancers, including lung cancer as we demonstrated in this paper," Narla said.

"There are some 2,000 plus papers on the role of PP2A in cancer. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, brain cancer, childhood cancers, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer, every major cancer involves the inactivation of this protein," Narla noted. "Molecules that allow us to turn it back on, like the one in our study, have the potential to work in a broad range of cancer patients."

"We are continuing to test our drug in a large series of animal models. If things continue to go well, we hope to start clinical trials next year with this drug. Our initial clinical trials would be quite broad, and would include a number of diverse cancer patients, including patients with lung cancer." Narla said.

"The Young Scientists supported by the Young Scientist Foundation, http://www.ysf.org, were integral to these discoveries," Narla added. "I think their contributions highlight, in an increasingly competitive funding environment, the importance of STEM and the benefit of engaging youth early on in biomedical research."

Limitations:

The study included pre-clinical cell and animal models that may not necessarily translate to human lung cancer. Mice were implanted with lung cancer tumors, rather than developing them on their own, and treated with the drug for only four weeks. Long-term effects of the prototype drug remain unknown.

###

Funding & Disclosures:

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), University Hospitals through the Harrington Discovery Institute, and Dual Therapeutics. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai on behalf of the authors GN, MO, NSD, DBK have filed patents covering composition of matter on the small molecules used in the study for the treatment of human cancer and other diseases. Dual Therapeutics LLC has licensed this intellectual property for the clinical and commercial development of this series of small molecule PP2A activators. The authors GN, MO, YI, NSD, DBK have an ownership interest in Dual Therapeutics LLC. GN and MO are consultants for Dual Therapeutics LLC.

For more information about Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, please visit: http://case.edu/medicine.
Simulations run at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of a unique collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an industry consortium could help U.S. paper manufacturers significantly reduce production costs and increase energy efficiencies.

The project is one of the seedlings for the DOE's HPC for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) initiative, a multi-lab effort to use high performance computing to address complex challenges in U.S. manufacturing. Through HPC4Mfg, Berkeley Lab and LLNL are partnering with the Agenda 2020 Technology Alliance, a group of paper manufacturing companies that has a roadmap to reduce their energy use by 20 percent by 2020.

The papermaking industry ranks third among the country's largest energy users, behind only petroleum refining and chemical production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. To address this issue, the LLNL and Berkeley Lab researchers are using advanced supercomputer modeling techniques to identify ways that paper manufacturers could reduce energy and water consumption during the papermaking process. The first phase of the project targeted "wet pressing"--an energy-intensive process in which water is removed by mechanical pressure from the wood pulp into press felts that help absorb water from the system like a sponge before it is sent through a drying process.

"The major purpose is to leverage our advanced simulation capabilities, high performance computing resources and industry paper press data to help develop integrated models to accurately simulate the water papering process," said Yue Hao, an LLNL scientist and a co-principal investigator on the project. "If we can increase the paper dryness after pressing and before the drying (stage), that would provide the opportunity for the paper industry to save energy."

If manufacturers could increase the paper's dryness by 10-15 percent, he added, it would save paper manufacturers up to 20 percent of the energy used in the drying stage--up to 80 trillion BTUs (thermal energy units) per year--and as much as $400 million for the industry annually. Multi-scale, Multi-physics Modeling

For the HPC4Mfg project, the researchers used a computer simulation framework, developed at LLNL, that integrates mechanical deformation and two-phase flow models, and a full-scale microscale flow model, developed at Berkeley Lab, to model the complex pore structures in the press felts.

Berkeley Lab's contribution centered around a flow and transport solver in complex geometries developed by David Trebotich, a computational scientist in the Computational Research Division at Berkeley Lab and co-PI on the project. This solver is based on the Chombo software libraries developed in the lab's Applied Numerical Algorithms Group and is the basis for other application codes including Chombo-Crunch, a subsurface flow and reactive transport code that has been used to study reactive transport processes associated with carbon sequestration and fracture evolution. This suite of simulation tools has been known to run at scale on supercomputers at Berkeley Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

"I used the flow and transport solvers in Chombo-Crunch to model flow in paper press felt, which is used in the drying process," Trebotich explained. "The team at LLNL has an approach that can capture the larger scale pressing or deformation as well as the flow in bulk terms. However, not all of the intricacies of the felt and the paper are captured by this model, just the bulk properties of the flow and deformation. My job was to improve their modeling at the continuum scale by providing them with an upscaled permeability-to-porosity ratio from pore scale simulation data. "

Trebotich ran a series of production runs on NERSC's Edison system and was successful in providing his LLNL colleagues with numbers from these microscale simulations at compressed and uncompressed pressures, which improved their model, he added.

"This was true 'HPC for manufacturing,'" Trebotich said, noting that the team recently released its final report on the first phase of the pilot project. "We used 50,000-60,000 cores at NERSC to do these simulations. It's one thing to take a research code and tune it for a specific application, but it's another thing to make it effective for industry purposes. Through this project we have been able to help engineering-scale models be more accurate by informing better parameterizations from micro-scale data."

Going forward, to create a more accurate and reliable computational model and develop a better understanding of these complex phenomena, the researchers say they need to acquire more complete data from the industry, such as paper material properties, high-resolution micro-CT images of paper and experimental data derived from scientifically controlled dewatering tests.

"The scientific challenge is that we need to develop a fundamental understanding of how water flows and migrates," Hao said. "All the physical phenomena involved make this problem a tough one because the dewatering process isn't fully understood due to lack of sufficient data."

###

This study was conducted with funding from the DOE's Advanced Manufacturing Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

This article utilized materials provided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Computing Sciences organization provides the computing and networking resources and expertise critical to advancing the Department of Energy's research missions: developing new energy sources, improving energy efficiency, developing new materials and increasing our understanding of ourselves, our world and our universe.

ESnet, the Energy Sciences Network, provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections that link scientists at 40 DOE research sites to each other and to experimental facilities and supercomputing centers around the country. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) powers the discoveries of 6,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities, including those at Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division (CRD). CRD conducts research and development in mathematical modeling and simulation, algorithm design, data storage, management and analysis, computer system architecture and high-performance software implementation. NERSC and ESnet are DOE Office of Science User Facilities.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the DOE's Office of Science.

DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
The latest edition of the Prospective Insights in ICT R&D (PREDICT) report, by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), is now available. It provides the most complete and extensive analysis available of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industries including their expenditure on research and development (R&D) in Europe and beyond, spanning from 1995 to the most recent year for which official statistics are available. The 20-years perspective over 40 countries offered by the report shows how the ICT sector has tripled in value added in the last 20 years, and the leading role of ICT services which represent 73.1% of the total value added of the ICT sector globally.

The PREDICT report, shedding light on R&D in the sector, contributes to the recently published Europe's Digital Progress Report. It focuses on 40 advanced and emerging countries - the EU28 plus Norway, Russia and Switzerland, as well as Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States of America.

The ICT sector in EU was employing 5.7 million people in 2014

A comparatively high R&D intensity and productivity level were distinctive features of the ICT sector common to almost all the analysed countries, which qualify the sector as strategic for productivity growth. The EU ranked third in terms of value added in 2014, challenged by the spectacular progression of China which reached the second position behind US after overtaking the EU, Japan and South Korea. ICT services were playing the most important role. The ICT sector in EU was employing 5.7 million people in 2014 (considering the "operational" definition of the ICT sector, a definition allowing comparability with non-EU countries). Public funding of ICT R&D was keeping a slow but positive pace.

The ICT sector received a high share of the total R&D business expenditure at global level in 2014

In 2014 almost a quarter of total business expenditure in R&D (BERD) originated in the ICT sector at global level (16 % in the EU). R&D intensity, i.e. the ratio of BERD to total value added in the EU was at 5.3 %, similar to China's (5.2 %), but much behind South Korea (21.1 %), the US (12.3 %) and Japan (11.0 %).

In absolute terms, when converting national currencies into Purchasing Power Standards (PPS) euro to net for the effect of differences in price levels across countries and of movements in exchange rates, the United States was the leader in business expenditure in research and development, spending  84 bn in 2014, followed by China ( 33 bn) and the EU (more than  29 bn). Together with South Korea ( 23 bn) and Japan ( 21 bn), these five geographical areas represented 89% of ICT BERD in the 40 countries in the study.

The ICT sector globally tripled in size between 1995-2014

The ICT sector of the 40 economies has tripled in value added in the last two decades (1995-2014). Since 1995, when neither Google, Facebook nor Wikipedia existed, and MP3s, DVDs and USBs were new, the US ICT sector doubled, the EU's multiplied by 2.3. Asian countries led by China, India and Taiwan, however, experienced an even bigger growth. In 2014 the US had the largest ICT sector closely followed by China, while the EU ranked third with a size of  546.2 bn. The weight of the ICT sector in the total EU economy reaches 3.9%, behind China and India (4.7%), the US (5.3%) and Japan (5.4%) while in Taiwan it reached 15.9 % in 2014.

ICT services are driving the ICT sector

The ICT services subsector, which includes computer and related activities and telecoms, is the leading subsector representing 73.1 % of the total value added of the ICT sector globally, while the manufacturing sub-sector constitutes the remaining 26.9 %. Manufacturing is significant in terms of value added for Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan. In the EU, ICT services represent more than 90 % of total ICT value added in 2014 while ICT manufacturing industries amount to about 9 % of total ICT value added.

The weight of the ICT manufacturing sub-sector is higher in BERD than in value added. Hence, the BERD intensity of the ICT manufacturing is relatively high (at 21.8 %), with that of the 'manufacture of communication equipment' being the highest (30.1 %), versus 3.6 % for the ICT services sub-sector. However, over the medium-term period, in the EU we witnessed a structural decline in BERD in the ICT manufacturing sector (falling by 17 % from 2006 to 2014), whereas the ICT services sector saw a structural increase (BERD rising by 49 % over the same period), and in particular in the ICT services sector comprising computers and related activities, whose BERD grew by 80 % between 2006 and 2014.

ICT Employment growing in all countries and ICT productivity in EU ahead of China

Employment in the ICT sector grew in all 40 countries, except Russia, between 1995 and 2014. Employment in the EU ICT sector was 5.7 million in 2014, 1.4 times higher than in 1995. The overall growth in ICT sector employment was interrupted by slight declines during two short periods, between 2001-2003 and 2008-2010.

Within the sector, employment in ICT services grew for all countries except Russia, but employment in ICT manufacturing decreased in the majority of countries, and most markedly in Norway and Canada (by around 45 %), Japan, Australia and the EU (around 30 %). Only India, China, Brazil and Taiwan experienced a growth in ICT manufacturing employment.

In Europe, the intense growth rates of productivity in the ICT sectors throughout the period from 1995 to 2014 led it to exceed by far the levels of the total economy, even if the productivity of the EU ICT sector (defined as the ratio between value added and employment) remains markedly behind that of the US. The productivity of EU ICT sector is anyway ahead of that of Japan, and China, the latter resembling in this respect the patterns of emerging economies.

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Publicly funded ICT R&D

ICT R&D public funding reached an estimated  6.3 bn in 2015, representing 6.7 % of EU total government budget allocations for R&D (GBARD), a figure which remained stable over the medium-term period. In this respect the EU lags behind both the US (8.3 %) and Japan (10.2 %) No data on ICT R&D public funding are available for other countries.

Background

The 2017 edition of the PREDICT Key Facts Report and Dataset is based on the latest data available from official sources, such as the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) among others. The data and analyses available here are mostly based on data from National Accounts and R&D statistics. For the first time, to allow broader analysis of trends and comparisons, the report provides data from 1995 to 2014, the most recent year for which official statistics are available (2015 for GBARD).

PREDICT is a joint project of the JRC and the European Commission's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CNECT). Since 2013, data collection and analysis has been carried out jointly by the JRC and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research. The JRC has been producing statistics and analyses on ICT industries and their R&D activities in Europe and beyond since 2006.

Methodological note

In the 2017 PREDICT Key Facts Report and Dataset, the ICT sector is defined according to the 'comprehensive definition' provided by the OECD in 2007 on the basis of the NACE nomenclature Rev.2 (2008). To allow comparability with non-EU countries not offering sufficiently disaggregated data, the study also uses a reduced 'operational definition' of the ICT sector. Figures in this note refer to the operational definition. National currencies have been converted into euro Purchasing Power Standards (PPS), an accounting unit based on current euros, to net for the effect of differences in price levels across countries and of movements in exchange rates.
In a recent experiment at EPFL, a microwave resonator, a circuit that supports electric signals oscillating at a resonance frequency, is coupled to the vibrations of a metallic micro-drum. By actively cooling the mechanical motion close to the lowest energy allowed by quantum mechanics, the micro-drum can be turned into a quantum reservoir - an environment that can shape the states of the microwaves. The findings are published as an advanced publication in Nature Physics.

Laszlo Daniel Toth, Nathan Bernier, and Dr Alexey Feofanov led the research effort in Tobias Kippenberg's Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements at EPFL, with support from Dr Andreas Nunnenkamp, a theorist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Microwaves are electromagnetic waves, just like visible light, but with a frequency that is four orders of magnitude smaller. Microwaves form the backbone of several everyday technologies, from microwave ovens and cellular phones to satellite communication, and have recently gained further importance in manipulating quantum information in superconducting circuits -- one of the most promising candidates to realize future quantum computers.

The micro-drum, only 30 microns in diameter, 100 nanometers thick and fabricated in the Center of MicroNanotechnology (CMi) at EPFL, constitutes the top plate of a capacitor in a superconducting microwave resonator. The drum's position modulates the resonator's resonance frequency and, conversely, a voltage across the capacitor exerts a force on the micro-drum. Through this bidirectional interaction, energy can be exchanged between mechanical vibrations and the microwave oscillations in the superconducting circuit.

In the experiment, the micro-drum is first cooled close to its lowest energy quantum level by a suitably tuned microwave tone. Every microwave photon (a quantum of light) carries away the energy of a phonon (a quantum of mechanical motion) such that the mechanical energy is reduced. This cooling process increases the dissipation and turns the micro-drum into a dissipative reservoir for the microwave resonator.

By tuning the interactions between the cavity and the cooled micro-drum, which is now an environment for the microwaves, the cavity can be turned into a microwave amplifier. The most interesting aspect of this amplification process is the added noise, that is, how much random, unwanted fluctuations are added to the amplified signal.

Albeit counter-intuitive, quantum mechanics dictates that this added noise cannot be suppressed completely, even in principle. The amplifier realized in the EPFL experiment operates very close to this limit, therefore it is as "quiet" as it can be. Interestingly, in a different regime, the micro-drum turns the microwave resonator into a maser (or microwave laser).

"There has been a lot of research focus on bringing mechanical oscillators into the quantum regime in the past few years." says Dr. Alexey Feofanov, postdoctoral researcher on the project. "However, our experiment is one of the first which actually shows and harnesses their capabilities for future quantum technologies."

Looking ahead, this experiment enables novel phenomena in cavity optomechanical systems like noiseless microwave routing or microwave entanglement. Generally, it proves that mechanical oscillators can be a useful resource in the rapidly growing field of quantum science and engineering.

Future activities on the emerging research possibilities created by this work will be supported by two recently started EC Horizon 2020 projects: Hybrid Optomechanical Technologies (HOT) and Optomechanical Technologies (OMT), both coordinated at EPFL.

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The project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, NCCR QSIT, and the European Union iQUOEMS. L. D. Toth was supported by the European Union's Marie Curie International Training Network cQOM. A. Nunnenkamp holds a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society and also acknowledges support from the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability.

Reference

L. D. Toth, N. R. Bernier, A. Nunnenkamp, A. K. Feofanov, T. J. Kippenberg. A dissipative quantum reservoir for microwave light using a mechanical oscillator. Nature Physics 15 May 2017. DOI: 10.1038/nphys4121
Boston, MA - Research led by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute found that almost two-thirds (65%) of parents of adolescents agreed with policies to ban indoor tanning for youth under age 18. About one-quarter of parents had no opinion (23%), and only 12% disagreed. Support for an indoor tanning ban was high across racial/ethnic groups and geographic regions of the U.S. The study appears online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Researchers from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Georgetown University and the University of Minnesota surveyed 1,244 parents of children, ages 11-17, about age-based restrictions on indoor tanning. They found that parental support for bans was highest among parents who perceived the harms of indoor tanning for adolescents.

Indoor tanning is associated with an increased risk of skin cancer, including melanoma, and is especially harmful for those who begin use early in life. Accumulating evidence of indoor tanning harms has prompted public health leaders, including the World Health Organization and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to categorize UV radiation as a carcinogen and prioritize the goal of reducing adolescents' use. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a 10% excise tax on indoor tanning. And, in 2015, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a rule, currently under consideration, to ban indoor tanning for those under 18.

However, ongoing consideration of ACA reform in Congress may reverse existing national policies, including an excise tax on indoor tanning.

"Our study demonstrates parents' broad support of age-based restrictions on indoor tanning for adolescents, particularly when they've been informed of the health risks," said lead author Melissa B. Gilkey, PhD of Harvard Medical School's Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. "This study provides valuable information on parents' attitudes toward the public health risks of indoor tanning that should inform public officials re-examining policies concerning the industry."

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About Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute's Department of Population Medicine

The Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute's Department of Population Medicine is a unique collaboration between Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Harvard Medical School. Created in 1993, it is the only appointing medical school department in the United States based in a health plan. The Institute focuses on improving health care delivery and population health through innovative research and teaching.
New Rochelle, NY, May 15, 2017--How many hours a day young children (1-3 years) sleep does not appear to affect their cardiometabolic risk (CMR) at ages 3-8, based on an assessment of factors including blood pressure and cholesterol and blood glucose levels. Most unexpectedly, less sleep was associated with increased levels of high density lipoprotein (HDL), the "good" form of cholesterol, as reported in a new study published in Childhood Obesity, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Childhood Obesity website until June 15, 2017.

The article entitled "Longitudinal Analysis of Sleep Duration and Cardiometabolic Risk in Young Children," was coauthored by Lesley Plumptre, PhD, Catherin Birken, MD, and colleagues from The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto School of Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Toronto, and St. Michaels Hospital, Toronto, Canada, on behalf of the TARGet Kids! Collaboration.

The researchers collected sleep duration data for children 12-36 months of age. At a follow-up visit at age 36-96 months they determined a CMR score for each child by totaling the child's age, standardized waist circumference score, systolic blood pressure, triglyceride measurement, blood glucose level, and the inverse HDL. The authors suggest that a relationship between sleep duration early in life and CMR could appear at a later age. Sleep quality could also have a greater effect on CMR than sleep duration.

"Recently, sleep duration has emerged as an influence on cardiometabolic risk factors and obesity in childhood and among adults using mostly cross-sectional analyses. It is not clear when this relationship starts," says Childhood Obesity Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX. "Plumptre and colleagues conducted the first such analysis using a longitudinal design testing the relationship between sleep in early childhood (12 to 36 months) with a cardiometabolic risk score later in childhood (36 to 96 months), and found no such relationship. This important finding indicates that the relationship between sleep and cardiometabolic risk emerges later in childhood."

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About the Journal

Childhood Obesity is a bimonthly peer-reviewed journal, published in print and online, and the journal of record for all aspects of communication on the broad spectrum of issues and strategies related to weight management and obesity prevention in children and adolescents. Led by Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, and Editor Elsie M. Taveras, MD, MPH, Massachusetts General Hospital for Children & Harvard Medical School, the Journal provides authoritative coverage of new weight management initiatives, early intervention strategies, nutrition, clinical studies, comorbid conditions, health disparities and cultural sensitivity issues, community and public health measures, and more. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Childhood Obesity website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative medical and biomedical peer-reviewed journals, including Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, Population Health Management, Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (DTT), and Journal of Women's Health. Its biotechnology trade magazine, GEN (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, newsmagazines, and books is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.
New Rochelle, NY, May 15, 2017- Novel therapeutic approaches and advances in the treatment of uveitis, a sight-threatening inflammation of the eye caused by infection or an autoimmune response, are presented in a special issue of Journal of Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The series of articles on uveitis are part of a Special Festschrift issue dedicated to Dr. Robert "Bob" Nussenblatt, a leader in ocular immunology, which is available free on the Journal of Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics website until June 7, 2017.

Guest Editors Chi-Chao Chan, MD, H. Nida Sen, MD, Laboratory of Immunology, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and Khalid F. Tabbara, MD, The Eye Center and The Eye Foundation for Research in Ophthalmology, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, have organized an outstanding group of authors from leading institutions worldwide to contribute original research articles and share their insights and perspectives on this rapidly evolving therapeutic area.

In the article entitled "Cyclosporine: A Historical Perspective on Its Role in the Treatment of Noninfectious Uveitis," Wendy Smith, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, examines the many years of comprehensive basic, animal, and clinical research that contributed to the development and refinement of successful therapeutic protocols using cyclosporine to treat autoimmune uveitis.

Joelle Antoun, Lia Judice Relvas, and coauthors from Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, present a study that explored the effects of "Topical Ganciclovir in Cytomegalovirus Anterior Uveitis ." In this article, the researchers report the results of using topical ganciclovir 0.15% gel to treat patients with inflammation of the middle layer of the eye caused by cytomegalovirus infection, demonstrating the ability to preserve vision over time and prevent recurrences, though with glaucoma as a frequent and severe complication.

In "Regulatory T Cell Therapy for Uveitis: A New Promising Challenge," Arnaud Foussat, Bahram Bodaghi and coauthors from Txcell (Sophia-Antipolis), UPMC University of Paris, and Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, Paris, France, describe the advances being made in developing a new, cell therapy-based, personalized medicine approach for treating autoimmune uveitis. This novel strategy makes use of immune cells called regulatory T lymphocytes, or Treg cells, to induce immune tolerance and regulate immune responses that may mistakenly target the body's own cells.

"This special issue brings together an amazing collection of reviews and original articles on uveitis to commemorate the brilliant career and scientific contributions of Bob Nussenblatt," says Editor-in-Chief W. Daniel Stamer, PhD, Joseph A. C. Wadsworth Professor of Ophthalmology and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC.

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About the Journal

Journal of Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics is an authoritative peer-reviewed journal published ten times a year online with open access options and in print. It is the only multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal providing basic and clinical research that focuses on biopharmaceuticals that have the potential to prevent, treat, and/or diagnose ocular diseases and disorders. The Journal delivers the latest discoveries in the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of biopharmaceuticals for the treatment of ophthalmic disorders. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Journal of Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics website. Journal of Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics is the official journal of the Association for Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies and Population Health Management. Its biotechnology trade magazine, GEN (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- New diagnoses for two types of skin cancer increased in recent years, according to a Mayo Clinic-led team of researchers.

Their paper, published today in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, uses medical records from the Rochester Epidemiology Project to compare diagnoses of basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma -- both nonmelanoma skin cancers -- between 2000 and 2010 to diagnoses in prior years. The Rochester Epidemiology project is a medical records linkage system and research collaborative in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Age, sex lead to different diagnoses

The researchers report that, between 2000 and 2010, squamous cell carcinoma (also called cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma) diagnoses increased 263 percent, and basal cell carcinomas increased 145 percent. They compared the 2000-2010 period to two other segments of time: 1976-1984 and 1985-1992.

Women 30-49 experienced the greatest increase in basal cell carcinoma diagnoses; whereas, women 40-59 and 70-79 experienced the greatest increase in squamous cell carcinomas.

Men had an increase in squamous cell carcinomas between the first and second time period studied (1976-1984 and 1985-1992), but experienced a slight decline in the 2000-2010 period. However, for basal cell carcinomas, men over 29 showed similar increases in diagnoses in the 2000-2010 period then the two earlier periods.

Tanning: Beautifying or death-defying?

"We know that the sun and some artificial sunlight sources give off skin-damaging ultraviolet, or UV, rays," says Christian Baum, M.D., a Mayo Clinic dermatologist and the study's senior author. "This skin damage accumulates over time and can often lead to skin cancer."

"Despite the fact that sunscreens and cautionary information have been widely available for more than 50 years, we saw the emergence of tanning beds in the 1980s, and tanning - indoors or out - was a common activity for many years."

Although Dr. Baum notes that tanning has slowed, tanning beds still exist, and beaches will never be empty. But what people should remember is that the damage accumulates, he says, and "eventually those blistering sunburns of your youth and hot, reddened skin, and peeling shoulders of your adulthood can add up to one or more skin cancers."

The authors also reported that shifts in exposure to UV light may be the reason for a location shift in where the cancer tumors are found. In the earlier time periods, both basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas were diagnosed more often on the head and neck. But, in the most recent time period, the records showed that basal cell tumors on the torso increased, as did squamous cell carcinomas on the arms and legs.

Dr. Baum says that the risk of cancer should provide the ultimate argument for using sunscreen - every day, year-round on all exposed skin.

"Use sunscreen," says Dr. Baum. "This includes on your left arm for those who do a lot of driving. UV rays can penetrate car windows and exposed skin -- even when the sun isn't shining. UV rays bounce around under the clouds, off the snow, buildings, and more, causing damage -- even on gray days.

More on the data

Using the Rochester Epidemiology Project medical records linkage system, the research team was able to identify nearly all of the Olmsted County, Minnesota, adult residents who received an initial diagnosis of the most common nonmelanoma skin cancers -- basal or squamous cell carcinoma (or both), during the 2000-2010 period and the comparison years.

"There is no tumor registry for these types of cancer," says Dr. Baum, "So it is difficult to have accurate estimates of the national or worldwide impact of these cancers. However, because the Rochester Epidemiology Project contains health care information for virtually all residents of Olmsted County since 1966, it provides a good proxy for information on many global population health concerns."

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About the Rochester Epidemiology Project

The Rochester Epidemiology Project is a collaboration of clinics, hospitals, and other medical and dental care facilities in southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Founded by Mayo Clinic and Olmsted Medical Center in 1966 in Olmsted County, Minnesota, the collaboration now stretches across 27 counties and includes Olmsted County Public Health Services as its first public health member. This collaboration and sharing of medical information makes this area of Minnesota and Wisconsin one of the few places where true population-based research can be accomplished. For more information about the Rochester Epidemiology Project, view its new historic timeline or rochesterproject.org.

About Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to clinical practice, education and research, providing expert, whole-person care to everyone who needs healing. For more information, visit mayoclinic.org/about-mayo-clinic or newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org.
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Faced with a serious disease, patients want to know the answer to a difficult question: "How long will I live?"

A new Mayo Clinic study in today's JAMA Neurology has some answers for patients with Parkinson's disease, Lewy body dementia, multiple system atrophy with parkinsonism and Parkinson's disease dementia.

The population-based study found that patients with these diseases died about two years earlier than the general population. The highest risk of death was seen among patients with multiple system atrophy with parkinsonism at six years earlier. This high-risk group was followed by patients with Lewy body dementia, four years earlier; Parkinson disease dementia, 3 years earlier; and Parkinson disease, one year earlier.

"As doctors, we want to be able to counsel our patients appropriately when they ask, 'What will happen to me?'" says Rodolfo Savica, M.D., Ph.D., lead author and a neurologist at Mayo Clinic. "Understanding long-term outcomes can help clinicians better inform patients and their caregivers about what to expect."

The study used data from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, a collaboration of medical facilities in Minnesota and Wisconsin involving community members who have agreed to share their medical records for research. The researchers reviewed data from 1991 through 2010. They compared 461 patients with these diseases to 452 patients in the general population -- all in Olmsted County, Minnesota. Sixty percent of each group was men.

Patients who had synucleinopathies -- diseases in which the brain accumulates abnormal amounts of the alpha-synuclein protein -- included 309 with Parkinson's disease, 81 with Lewy body dementia, 55 with Parkinson's disease dementia, and 16 with multiple system atrophy with parkinsonism. Parkinsonism was defined as having at least two of four signs: resting tremor, slowed movement, rigidity, and impaired reflexes to maintain posture and balance.

Of the 461 patients with synucleinopathies, 316 or 68.6 percent died during follow-up. Of the 452 general population participants, 220 or 48.7 percent died during follow-up.

Cause of death also was compared. Among patients with synucleinopathies, neurodegenerative disease was the most frequent cause of death at 31.5 percent. Cardiovascular disease was the second most common cause of death at 15.7 percent. For the general population, cardiovascular disease was the most common cause of death at 25.5 percent.

"This helps understanding on how these diseases work," Dr. Savica says, noting that the paper is among the first comprehensive studies of the survival and cause of death of people with synucleinopathies, compared with the general population.

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Study co-authors are Brandon Grossardt, M.S.; James Bower, M.D.; Eric Ahlskog, M.D., Ph.D.; Bradley Boeve, M.D.; Jonathan Graff-Radford, M.D., Walter Rocca, M.D.; and Michelle Mielke, Ph.D., all of Mayo Clinic.

The study was supported by an award from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (grant AG 034676) and the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. The authors noted study limitations and conflict of interest disclosures.

About Mayo Clinic Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to clinical practice, education and research, providing expert, whole-person care to everyone who needs healing. For more information, visit mayoclinic.org/about-mayo-clinic or newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/
EAST LANSING, Mich. - Some people travel to northern California for wine. However, Maren Friesen, Michigan State University plant biologist, treks to the Golden State for clover.

The lessons of plant diversity and competition learned from a clover patch, which are featured in a special issue of the Journal of Ecology, can potentially unlock secrets on plant interactions around the globe.

"There's something quite special in how clover assemble such diverse communities. They compete, yet they have many traits in common due to shared ancestry," Friesen said. "Native Californian Trifolium represents a special system for understanding competitive interactions among close relatives. We'd like to understand their processes of diversity before they're all gone."

These special patches of clover are located on a handful of hills in Northern California. Friesen's patch was in the Bodega Marine Lab reserve, run by the University of California, Davis, which harbors a diverse community of clovers.

Friesen has been working with Sharon Strauss at UC Davis since 2014 to unlock the secret to their sociability. Friesen admits that the experiment began as a bit of a genome-wide "fishing trip." The team, whose lead author was Alan Bowsher, MSU postdoctoral researcher, collected samples from Trifolium fucatum growing with different competitors and sifted through thousands of genes -- 26,000 of them, to be precise.

The trip, though, yielded a trophy catch. A single gene, UDP-glucose flavonoid 3-O-glucosyltransferase, made the expedition worthwhile. And just like all trophy fish, the catch was documented with a photo -- actually a graph.

"It's a very intriguing 'fish,' part of a very important signaling pathway," Friesen said. "It's also a flavonoid, which is involved in many plant interactions, including those involved with nitrogen fixing bacteria. The gene's levels rise when the plants compete with other species of plants and decrease when surrounded by members of the same plants."

It plays a key role in the relationship plants form with bacteria that fix nitrogen, grabbing the critical element from the air and soil and accumulating it in root nodules -- essentially, fertilizing themselves. If scientists could identify the genes and mechanisms involved in this process, they could potentially find ways to reduce the amounts of manmade fertilizer used to grow crops.

"Past studies have focused on individual plants, but few have focused on plant competition and studying the entirety of all the genes being expressed, the transcriptomic response, during these interactions," Friesen said. "Yet scientists and farmers are aware of these interactions; that's reflected in knowing that it's beneficial to rotate crops, in determining the distance between rows of plants and the proximity of growing crops near other plants."

This, however, was one of the first studies to tackle the transcriptomic response during specific plant interactions. It's akin to listening to plants, but doing so on the genetic level. The team listened and noted the pathways being used, observed plants' body language in terms to how they reacted with their friends versus with competitors.

Another novel result involved the correlation of the genes. What made the "big fish" gene standout so prominently is that all of the other genes responding to different types of competitors stayed grouped together. The team initially thought the genes would be scattered everywhere. Basically, though, they reacted the same way.

"In a sense, we saw this gene respond differently to the neighbor's identity: increased expression during competition with a different species and lower expression when among the same species," Friesen said. "Competition is operating in a comparable way. The increased expression also correlated with increased growth, although it's much too early to begin to find out why."

An additional finding involved two competing plants. Each has a preferred level of iron in the soil in which they live. However, one plant turned on its iron transport genes solely because it sensed its competitor was nearby.

"It's like it's saying, 'If you're here, you must be in better soil, and I must be in a low-iron area,'" Friesen said. "There must be something cool over there."

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Prateek Shetty, MSU master's student of plant biology, also contributed to this study. Scientists from the University of California-Davis also were a part of the research team. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Michigan State University has been working to advance the common good in uncommon ways for more than 150 years. One of the top research universities in the world, MSU focuses its vast resources on creating solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges, while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

For MSU news on the Web, go to MSUToday. Follow MSU News on Twitter at twitter.com/MSUnews.
Metformin, the most widely used drug to treat type 2 diabetes, could potentially be used to treat symptoms of Fragile X syndrome, an inherited form of intellectual disability and a cause of some forms of autism.

A new study led by researchers at McGill University, the University of Edinburgh and Universite de Montreal has found that metformin improves social, behavioural and morphological defects in Fragile X mice.

Fragile X syndrome is a genetic disease caused by defects in the Fragile X Mental Retardation 1 gene (FMR1), which triggers excess production of protein in the brain, as well as dysregulated connections between neurons and changes in behaviour. The condition leads to impairments in speech and language, behaviour and social interaction. It affects about 1 in 5,000 boys and 1 in 6,000 girls and is often co-diagnosed with autism, anxiety disorders and seizures.

Fragile X mice - animals that display symptoms associated with the disease such as increased grooming and decreased socialization - showed normal brain connections and behavioural patterns after 10 days of injection with metformin.

Nahum Sonenberg, James McGill Professor at McGill's Biochemistry Department and co-senior author of the new study published in Nature Medicine, said the findings offer hope for patients with Fragile X syndrome. "This is some of the most exciting research work in my career, as it offers great promise in treating a pernicious genetic disease for which there is no cure," he said.

Christos Gkogkas, Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Patrick Wild Centre explained that "metformin has been extensively used as a therapy for type 2 diabetes for more than 30 years, and its safety and tolerability are well documented."

"This makes the drug an ideal candidate for fast-tracked clinical trials and, if all goes well, a readily available drug for the treatment of Fragile X syndrome," added Jean-Claude Lacaille, Canada Research Chair in Cellular and Molecular Neurophysiology and professor in the Department of Neurosciences at Universite de Montreal and a major collaborator on the study.

'Wonder drug' In the past few years, metformin has generated extensive interest for its potential in treating numerous health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, neurological diseases and aging.

"Basically, it's something like a wonder drug," Sonenberg said.

The study suggests that metformin might also be used to treat other autism spectrum disorders, said Ilse Gantois, a research associate in Sonenberg's lab at McGill.

"We mostly looked at the autistic form of behaviour in the Fragile X mouse model," explained Gantois, who is co-lead author with McGill researchers Arkady Khoutorsky and Jelena Popic. "We want to start testing other mouse models to see if the drug could also have benefits for other types of autism."

The study also established that metformin restores some of the molecular pathways disrupted in the absence of the FMR1. The next step will be to understand the drug's exact role in these pathways.

"It is a simple story in terms of the description of the corrections allowed by the drug," Sonenberg said. "What is more complicated is the molecular mechanism, how exactly it works. We need to study, in the lab, what molecules metformin interacts with and what cellular functions are affected."

Moreover, the drug could be tweaked "to be more efficient than metformin" and repurposed, for example, for other disorders, he added.

Media contacts: Justin Dupuis Jeff Heinrich Media Relations International press attache McGill University Universite de Montreal Tel.: 514-398-6751 Tel: 514-343-7593 justin.dupuis@mcgill.ca jeff.heinrich@umontreal.ca

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One million miles from Earth, a NASA camera is capturing unexpected flashes of light reflecting off our planet. The homeward-facing instrument on NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, launched in 2015, caught hundreds of these flashes over the span of a year. As keen observers from outside NASA wrote in, questioning the source of these lights, scientists deciphered the tiny cause to the big reflections: high-altitude, horizontally oriented ice crystals.

NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument aboard DSCOVR is taking almost-hourly images of the sunlit planet from its spot between Earth and the sun. Alexander Marshak, DSCOVR deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, first noticed light flashes occasionally appearing over oceans as he looked through that day's EPIC images.

Investigating the flashes, Marshak and his colleagues found that similar reflections from our pale blue dot caught the attention of astronomer Carl Sagan in 1993. Sagan was looking at images taken by the Galileo spacecraft, which launched in 1989 to study Jupiter and its moons. During one if its gravitational-assist swings around Earth, Galileo turned its instruments on this planet and collected data. Sagan and his colleagues used that to test a key question: Whether spacecraft could detect signatures of life from afar.

"Large expanses of blue ocean and apparent coastlines are present, and close examination of the images shows a region of [mirror-like] reflection in ocean but not on land," they wrote of the glints.

Flashes of light reflected off oceans - like those referenced by Sagan - could have a simple explanation, Marshak said: Sunlight hits a smooth part of an ocean or lake, and reflects directly back to the sensor, like taking a flash-picture in a mirror.

But when the scientists took another took a look at the Galileo images, they saw something Sagan and his colleagues apparently missed -- bright flashes of light over land as well. And those flashes appeared in the EPIC images as well. As the contact listed on the website that posts all EPIC images, Marshak started getting emails from people curious about what the flashes were.

"We found quite a few very bright flashes over land as well," he said. "When I first saw it I thought maybe there was some water there, or a lake the sun reflects off of. But the glint is pretty big, so it wasn't that."

Instead, he and his colleagues Tamas Varnai of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Alexander Kostinski of Michigan Technological University, thought of water elsewhere in the Earth system: ice particles high in the atmosphere. The scientists conducted a series of experiments, detailed in a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, to confirm the cause of the distant flashes.

First, the researchers cataloged all of the prospective sunlight glints over land in images from the EPIC camera. The flashes show up in three distinct colors because the camera takes the red, green and blue images several minutes apart. In all, the scientists found 866 bursts between DSCOVR's launch in June 2015 and August 2016.

The scientists reasoned that if these 866 flashes were caused by reflected sunlight, they would be limited to certain spots on the globe - spots where the angle between the sun and Earth is the same as the angle between the spacecraft and Earth, allowing for the spacecraft to pick up the reflected light. When they plotted the locations of the glints with where those angles would match, given Earth's tilt and the spacecraft's location, the two matched.

This helped confirm that it wasn't something like lightning causing the flashes, Marshak said: "Lightning doesn't care about the sun and EPIC's location." The researchers also plotted angles to determine that the light was reflecting off of ice particles floating in the air nearly horizontally.

Another feature of the EPIC data helped confirm that the flashes were from a high altitude, not simply water on the ground. Two channels on the instrument are designed to measure the height of clouds, and when the scientists went to the data they found high cirrus clouds, 3 to 5 miles (5 to 8 kilometers) where the glints were located.

"The source of the flashes is definitely not on the ground. It's definitely ice, and most likely solar reflection off of horizontally oriented particles," Marshak said.

Detecting glints like this from much farther away than in this case could be used by other spacecraft to study exoplanets, he said. As an Earth scientist, however, Marshak is now investigating how common these horizontal ice particles are, and whether they're common enough to have a measureable impact on how much sunlight passes through the atmosphere. If so, it's a feature that could be incorporated into computer models of how much heat is reaching and leaving Earth.

The DSCOVR mission is a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, with the primary objective to maintain the nation's real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities, which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of space weather alerts and forecasts from NOAA.

###

For an archive of daily EPIC images, visit: https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov

For more information about DSCOVR, visit: https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/dscovr-deep-space-climate-observatory
The Information Age has drastically changed the landscape of one of humanity's most creative processes, idea generation or ideation. The emergence of crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, has enabled a greater, more diverse audience to contribute to the creative process from the comfort of their own homes.

"However, the very nature of crowdsourcing means that ideators can be overwhelmed by the number of ideas generated, rather than inspired by them," says Victor Girotto, a PhD candidate at the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. "There are several issues that need to be considered in systems that operate at this scale, such as the organization of the ideas, as well as the subsequent convergence on the best ones," adds Erin Walker, an assistant professor at the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University.

In an effort to enhance idea generation within the crowd context, Girotto and Walker partnered with Winslow Burleson, an associate professor at NYU's Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Together, the trio sought to determine what effect peripheral tasks--such as rating and combining others' ideas had on ideation performance.

"Embedding peripheral micro-tasks within the ideation process may enable such systems to move from passive to active forms of inspiration and support, resulting in a stronger ideation session," said Burleson.

Through a series of four experiments on Mechanical Turk, the group tested their hypothesis, utilizing an online module of their own design. Each experiment had a control, an exposure group, and multiple task groups. In every study, where each group was given the same problem for which they were to contribute ideas. The control group only received the problem prompt. Members of the exposure group were given access to an inspiration panel, where they could prompt the system to display others' ideas. Task groups were given access to the inspiration panel, however, subjects were required perform microtasks on the inspirations: rating, comparing, or combining others' ideas.

"To determine what, if any, impact these microtasks had on ideation we measured the number of ideas generated by each user as well as the breadth and depth of their ideas," said Girotto. Breadth is a measure of the number of concepts an ideator explored, whereas depth is the number of ideas within an ideator's most explored concept. Furthermore, the researchers measured the number of inspirations each user requested, as well as inspiration influence--a user's average similarity between an idea and the most similar of its preceding inspirations.

"Through our trials we found the performance of the microtask groups to be as good or better than the exposure groups in terms of the breadth of the ideas they generated," said Burleson. However, the team found these effects to depend on two factors: time of ideation and productivity of the ideator. For time of ideation, they found greater effects on the second half of the ideation session, when ideators are more likely to be running out of ideas, and thus may receive greater benefits from inspirations. As for their productivity, it makes sense that those who generated more ideas would also be more affected by the different inspiration types, as they may be more willing and capable to use them effectively.

"Our research provides some support and guidance in explicitly embedding microtasks into ideation, which will not only be aiding ideators in their idea generation, but will also be generating information useful for converging on the best ideas." said Girotto. The full findings of this research are detailed in "The Effect of Peripheral Micro-tasks on Crowd Ideation."

###

Researcher Affiliations: Victor Girotto1,Erin Walker1, Winslow Burleson2.

1. Arizona State University Tempe, AZ, USA

2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank all of the Mechanical Turk workers who participated in the studies. This research was funded by the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil, Brasilia - DF 70040-020, Brazil.

About the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing

NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing is a global leader in nursing education, research, and practice. It offers a Bachelor of Science with a major in Nursing, a Master of Science and Post-Master's Certificate Programs, a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree and a Doctor of Philosophy in nursing research and theory development.

About the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

The Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University include nearly 19,000 students and more than 300 faculty members who conduct nearly $100 million in research, spanning a broad range of engineering, construction and technology fields. Across the six schools contained within the Fulton Schools, 24 undergraduate and 32 graduate programs are offered on ASU's Tempe and Polytechnic campuses and online. The schools' educational programs emphasize problem solving, entrepreneurship, multidisciplinary interactions, social context and connections. Arizona State University includes more than 80,000 students and 1,600 tenured or tenure-track faculty on multiple campuses in metropolitan Phoenix as well as online.
The same technology that adds fizz to soda can now be used to remove particles from dirty water. Researchers at Princeton University have found a technique for using carbon dioxide in a low-cost water treatment system that eliminates the need for costly and complex filters.

The system injects CO2 gas into a stream of water as a method of filtering out particles. The gas, which mixes with the water in a system of channels, temporarily changes the water's chemistry. The chemical changes cause the contaminating particles to move to one side of the channel depending on their electrical charge. By taking advantage of this migration, the researchers are able to split the water stream and filter out suspended particles.

"You could potentially use this to clean water from a pond or river that has bacteria and dirt particles," said Sangwoo Shin, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Shin, the lead author of a paper describing the process, performed the research as a post-doctoral researcher in the laboratory of Howard Stone, the Donald R. Dixon '69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton.

In a paper published May 2 in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they built a laboratory-scale filter that removed particles three orders of magnitude (1,000-fold) more efficiently than conventional microfiltration systems. The system is low energy, with bottled carbon dioxide as the only moving part (besides the pump responsible for the flow), and has no physical filter or membrane that can clog or require replacement.

Carbon dioxide alters water's chemistry by making it slightly more acidic: the tart taste of carbonic acid is familiar in most sodas, and its absence is a reason for flat soda's unpleasant flavor. In chemical terms, the acidity means that when CO2 dissolves in water it creates charged particles called ions. One of those ions, a positively charged hydrogen atom, moves very quickly through the water solution. Another, a negatively charged bicarbonate molecule, moves more slowly. The ions' movement through the water creates a subtle electric field; this field draws particles in the water -- which have either negative or positive charges of their own -- toward one side of the water stream.

Because most contaminants have some amount of surface charge, the electric field is an effective way to strain them from water. The researchers' device takes advantage of this electric sorting by drawing the contaminants to one side of the flow and then splitting the water into two channels. One path carries water containing the contaminating particles and the other holds clean water. Because the system does not have a membrane or a mechanical filter, clogging is not a problem.

To maintain the electric field, the researchers needed to keep the ions moving through the water channels. They accomplished this by making the channel walls out of material that is permeable to carbon dioxide, in this case silicone rubber (polydimethylsiloxane). Pressurized carbon dioxide diffuses through one wall of the channel and permeates out the other side. Shin said if the channel is enclosed, designers could capture the carbon dioxide gas for later use. When finished, the dissolved CO2 can be easily removed by exposing the water to the air so that the water contains only normal levels of carbon dioxide; it is not carbonated.

The researchers thought of the technique while examining the motion of colloidal particles in a salt gradient -- a term for the interface between bodies of salt and fresh water. In a salt gradient, the difference in chemistry of the two solutions causes pressure on particles. Shin said the researchers were observing the motion of charged particles in the salt water when they realized the phenomenon could be useful as a filter.

Salt -- sodium chloride -- would not be useful for water purification because the salt would remain in the water after filtration. So the researchers thought to substitute carbon dioxide because it is cheap, not harmful for humans to ingest and as easy to remove from water as opening a can of soda.

The researchers said using a soluble gas as a method of controlling particles in a solution could lead to other industrial or scientific applications beyond water filtration. "The principles being explored in this research we hope will also be impactful in other research areas," Stone said.

Shin said the CO2 system could be particularly useful in the developing world because it does not require the installation and replacement of filters. The idea may be useful for portable systems. It is also relatively low cost, only requiring a canned source of carbon dioxide to use.

"It is definitely able to scale up to a hundred liters per hour, which meets a practical household standard," Shin said.

Another use would be as a supplement to a desalinization plant. Many types of desalinization use membranes to strain out salt molecules, but biological particles including viruses and bacteria are able to pass through the membranes. Shin said the carbon dioxide system could strain out the particles before or after the water passes through the desalinization membrane, reducing the need to treat the water with chemicals such as chlorine.

Shin is now working on methods to scale the system for possible use in water treatment plants to supply larger communities. He said the basic science works, but further engineering is needed to create a large-scale carbon dioxide filter.

"In Hawaii, we have a fresh water problem," he said. "We hope to scale up the device to help solve it."

###

Besides Shin and Stone, the researchers include Orest Shardt, who worked on the project as a co-lead author while at Princeton and is now a lecturer at the University of Limerick in Ireland; and Patrick Warren of Unilever. Support for the project was provided in part by Unilever Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Princeton Environmental Institute.
HOUSTON -- (May 15, 2017) -- By precisely measuring the entropy of a cerium copper gold alloy with baffling electronic properties cooled to nearly absolute zero, physicists in Germany and the United States have gleaned new evidence about the possible causes of high-temperature superconductivity and similar phenomena.

"This demonstration provides a foundation to better understand how novel behaviors like high-temperature superconductivity are brought about when certain kinds of materials are cooled to a quantum critical point," said Rice University physicist Qimiao Si, co-author of a new study about the research in this week's Nature Physics.

The experimental research was led by Hilbert von Lohneysen of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. Lohneysen's team, including study lead author Kai Grube, spent a year conducting dozens of experiments on a compound made of cerium copper and gold. By studying the effect of stress, or pressure applied in specific directions, and by making the materials very cold, the team subtly changed the spacing between the atoms in the crystalline metallic compounds and thus altered their electronic properties.

The cerium copper gold alloys are "heavy fermions," one of several of types of quantum materials that exhibit exotic electronic properties when very cold. The best-known of these are high-temperature superconductors, so named for their ability to conduct electrical current with zero resistance at temperatures well above those of traditional superconductors. Heavy fermions exhibit a different oddity: Their electrons appear to be effectively hundreds of times more massive than normal and, equally unusual, the effective electron mass seems to vary strongly as temperature changes.

These odd behaviors defy traditional physical theories. They also occur at very cold temperatures and come about when the materials are tuned to a "quantum phase transition" -- a change from one state to another, like ice melting. In 2001, Si and colleagues offered a new theory: At the quantum critical point, electrons fluctuate between two entirely different quantum states, so much so that their effective mass becomes infinitely large. The theory predicted certain tell-tale signs as the quantum critical point is approached, and Si has worked with experimental physicists for the past 16 years to amass evidence to support the theory.

"Liquid water and ice are two of the classical states in which H2O can exist," said Si, director of the Rice Center for Quantum Materials. "Ice is a very ordered phase because the H2O molecules are neatly arranged in a crystal lattice. Water is less ordered compared with ice, but flowing water molecules still have underlying order. The critical point is where things are fluctuating between these two types of order. It's the point where H2O molecules sort of want to go to the pattern according to ice and sort of want to go to the pattern according to water.

"It's very similar in a quantum phase transition," he said. "Even though this transition is driven by quantum mechanics, it is still a critical point where there's maximum fluctuation between two ordered states. In this case, the fluctuations are related to the ordering of the 'spins' of electrons in the material."

Spin is an inherent property -- like eye color -- and every electron's spin is classified as being either "up" or "down." In magnets, like iron, spins are aligned in the same direction. But many materials exhibit the opposite behavior: Their spins alternate in a repeating up, down, up, down pattern that physicists refer to as "antiferromagnetic."

Hundreds of experiments on heavy fermions, high-temperature superconductors and other quantum materials have found that magnetic order differs on either side of a quantum critical point. Typically, experiments find antiferromagnetic order in one range of chemical composition, and a new state of order on the other side of the critical point.

"A reasonable picture is that you can have an antiferromagnetic order of spins, where the spins are quite ordered, and you can have another state in which the spins are less ordered," said Si, Rice's Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy. "The critical point is where fluctuations between these two states are at their maximum."

The cerium copper gold compound has become a prototype heavy fermion material for quantum criticality, largely due to the work of von Lohneysen's group.

"In 2000, we did inelastic neutron scattering experiments in the quantum critical cerium copper gold system," said von Lohneysen. "We found a spatial-temporal profile so unusual that it could not be understood in terms of the standard theory of metal."

Si said that study was one of the important factors that stimulated him and his co-authors to offer their 2001 theory, which helped explain von Lohneysen's puzzling results. In subsequent studies, Si and colleagues also predicted that entropy -- a classical thermodynamic property -- would increase as quantum fluctuations increased near a quantum critical point. The well-documented properties of cerium copper gold provided a unique opportunity to test the theory, Si said.

In cerium copper-six, substituting small amounts of gold for copper allows researchers to slightly increase the spacing between atoms. In the critical composition, the alloys undergo an antiferromagnetic quantum phase transition. By studying this composition and measuring the entropy numerous times under varying conditions of stress, the Karlsruhe team was able to create a 3-D map that showed how entropy at very low yet finite temperature steadily increased as the system approached the quantum critical point.

No direct measure of entropy exists, but the ratio of entropy changes to stress is directly proportional to another ratio that can be measured: the amount the sample expands or contracts due to changes in temperature. To enable the measurements at the extraordinarily low temperatures required, the Karlsruhe team developed a method for accurately measuring length changes of less than one tenth of a trillionth of a meter -- approximately one-thousandth the radius of a single atom.

"We measured the entropy as a function of stress applied along all the different principal directions," said Grube, a senior researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. "We made a detailed map of the entropy landscape in the multidimensional parameter space and verified that the quantum critical point sits on top of the entropy mountain."

Von Lohneysen said the thermodynamic measurements also provide new insights into the quantum fluctuations near the critical point.

"Surprisingly, this methodology allows us to reconstruct the underlying spatial profile of quantum critical fluctuations in this quantum critical material," he said. "This is the first time that this kind of methodology has been applied."

Si said it came as a surprise that this could be done using nothing more than entropy measurements.

"It is quite remarkable that the entropy landscape can connect so well with the detailed profile of the quantum critical fluctuations determined from microscopic experiments such as inelastic neutron scattering, all the more so when both end up providing direct evidence to support the theory," he said.

More generally, the demonstration of the pronounced entropy enhancement at a quantum critical point in a multidimensional parameter space raises new insights into the way electron-electron interactions give rise to high-temperature superconductivity, Si said.

"One way to relieve the accumulated entropy of a quantum critical point is for the electrons in the system to reorganize themselves into novel phases," he said. "Among the possible phases that ensue is unconventional superconductivity, in which the electrons pair up and form a coherent macroscopic quantum state."

###

Additional co-authors include Sebastian Zaum of Karlsruhe and Oliver Stockert of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany. The research was supported by the German Science Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, the Army Research Office, the Welch Foundation and the Rice Center for Quantum Materials.

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

http://news.rice.edu/files/2017/05/0511_ENTROPY-dilatometer1-lg-1skczml.jpg

CAPTION: Physicists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology used this capacitive dilatometer to measure the thermal expansion in cerium copper gold alloys cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero with a precision of one tenth of a trillionth of a meter, or approximately one-thousandth the radius of single atom. The precise thermal expansion measurements allowed the researchers to map out the stress dependence of entropy in materials as they were cooled to the point of a quantum phase transition. (Image courtesy of K. Grube/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/0929_RCQM-Si1-lg.jpg

CAPTION: Qimiao Si (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

The DOI of the Nature Physics paper is: 10.1038/nphys4113

A copy of the paper is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys4113

More information about RCQM is available at: http://rcqm.rice.edu/

Related research from Rice:

Copper stripes help iron pnictide lock-in insulating state -- Dec. 19, 2016

http://news.rice.edu/2016/12/19/copper-stripes-help-iron-pnictide-lock-in-insulating-state/

Physicists probe magnetic fluctuations in heavy fermion -- June 29, 2016

http://news.rice.edu/2016/09/29/physicists-probe-magnetic-fluctuations-in-heavy-fermion/

Evidence mounts for quantum criticality theory -- Jan. 30, 2015

http://news.rice.edu/2015/01/30/evidence-mounts-for-quantum-criticality-theory/

Rice physicist emerges as leader in quantum materials research -- Aug. 20, 2014

http://news.rice.edu/2014/08/20/rice-physicist-emerges-as-leader-in-quantum-materials-research/

Study finds physical link to strange electronic behavior -- July 31, 2014

http://news.rice.edu/2014/07/31/study-finds-physical-link-to-strange-electronic-behavior-2/

Moore quantum materials: Recipe for serendipity -- Aug. 12, 2014

http://news.rice.edu/2014/08/12/moore-quantum-materials-recipe-for-serendipity/

Quantum criticality observed in new class of materials -- June 4, 2014

http://news.rice.edu/2014/06/04/quantum-criticality-observed-in-new-class-of-materials/

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,879 undergraduates and 2,861 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for happiest students and for lots of race/class interaction by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.
PORTLAND, OR - It's just one step. Flushing the bladder with a common chemotherapy drug after a cancerous tumor is surgically removed reduces the chances of that cancer returning. Canadian and European clinical trials have proven this true and now a major U.S. study has done the same.

Dr. Edward Messing, an investigator with SWOG, the international clinical trials network funded by the National Cancer Institute, has found that an immediate infusion of the common chemotherapy agent gemcitabine after the removal of a bladder cancer tumor will significantly reduce the risk of cancer recurrence. The Winfield W. Scott Professor and Chairman of Urology at the University of Rochester, Messing will present results of this Phase III, blinded clinical trial during a May 15 oral presentation at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) held May 12-16 in Boston.

"This one extra step, using a drug that's fairly inexpensive, has impressive results," Messing said. "Urologists in Europe and Canada have been doing this procedure for more than 20 years with other chemotherapy drugs, with the research to prove it. Even the AUA recommends it. Now that we've got results from an American study, using a readily available drug that is very well-tolerated, maybe American urologists will start using gemcitabine this way. I certainly hope this finally changes our standard of care."

Messing is former president of the Society of Urologic Oncology and, in 2013, was awarded the prestigious Presidential Citation from the AUA for his work as a bladder cancer researcher and educator. Messing led a SWOG team that conducted the trial, S0337, which enrolled 406 eligible patients with non-muscle invading bladder cancer. Bladder cancer is the sixth most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, and the third most common among men. The low grade, non-muscle invasive form of the disease is common, making up about half of all newly diagnosed cases. Treatment includes a procedure called transurethral resection for bladder tumor, or TURBT, which involves a surgeon removing cancerous tissue from the bladder.

In the Messing study, patients were randomized into two groups. One group, after TURBT, received a single 3.5-ounce instillation of gemcitabine, which was administered directly after surgery and allowed to sit in the bladder for one hour. The drug kills cancer cells, and is often used to treat advanced bladder cancer in combination with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. The other group of patients, after TURBT, received an infusion of saline only. Both groups were followed for four years. Results were strong and clear: There was a significant 34 percent reduction in risk of recurrence for patients receiving the gemcitabine infusion. While more of those patients experienced moderate post-surgical pain, investigators found, they experienced no other additional side effects, such as bleeding, compared with the patients who received a saline infusion alone.

"The big deal here is that cancer recurrence is common for people diagnosed with this less aggressive form of bladder cancer," Messing said. "I know some patients who undergo four TURBT procedures a year. If we can cut down on these recurrences, we will save a lot of people a lot of pain, money, and time lost to recovery."

###

Messing said after his AUA presentation, he will submit his findings to a peer-reviewed journal for publication. Messing's SWOG study team includes: Cathy Tangen, DrPH, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Deepak Sahasrabudhe, MD, of University of Rochester; Theresa Koppie of Oregon Health & Science University; David Wood Jr., MD, of Beaumont Health; Philip Mack, PhD, of UC Davis Cancer Center; Robert Svatek, MD, of UT Health San Antonio; Christopher Evans, MD, UC Davis Cancer Center; Khaled Hafez, MD, of University of Michigan; Daniel Culkin, MD, of University of Oklahoma; Timothy Brand, MD, of Madigan Army Medical Center; Lawrence Karsh, MD, of The Urology Center of Colorado; Jeffrey Holzbeierlein, MD, of University of Kansas Cancer Center; Shandra Wilson, MD, of University of Colorado; Guanming Wu, PhD, of Oregon Health & Science University; Melissa Plets, MS, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Seth Lerner, MD, Baylor College of Medicine; Nicholas Vogelzang, MD, Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada; and Ian Thompson, Jr., MD, of CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Medical Center.

Research reported in this presentation was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers CA180888 and CA180819. Eli Lilly and Company also supported the work. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or Eli Lilly and Company.

SWOG has nearly 12,000 members in 47 states and six foreign countries who design and conduct cancer clinical trials. Founded in 1956, SWOG's 1,300 treatment and prevention trials have led to the approval of 14 cancer drugs, changed the standard of cancer care more than 100 times, and saved more than 2 million years of human life. SWOG is funded by the National Cancer Institute and is a proud member of the NCI's National Clinical Trials Network and the NCI Community Oncology Research Program. Learn more at swog.org.
CHAPEL HILL - University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have identified a strategy that doubled screening rates for colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States, among patient groups who historically have had lower rates.

The researchers report in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine that providing one-on-one support and customized tools for decision-making increased screening rates for patients at two community health centers in North Carolina and New Mexico. They were able to boost screening rates to 68 percent, which was 40 percentage points higher than the group who did not receive the intervention.

"We know colon cancer screening is effective, but we also know we're losing opportunities to prevent deaths from colon cancer because screening rates aren't as high as they should be. This is particularly true in vulnerable patient populations," said the study's lead author, Daniel S. Reuland, MD, MPH, a UNC Lineberger member and professor in the UNC School of Medicine. "We've shown that if we structure care such that we catch patients right when they are seeing their doctor, systematically provide them with clear and compelling information about screening and what their choices are, and then give them personal support they need to get screening test they prefer, we can substantially improve rates."

Screening has been proven to be effective in reducing colorectal cancer deaths in the United States, and regular screening is recommended for people between 50 and 75 years. But researchers report screening rates are low in some groups, particularly for people who are low-income, on Medicaid, have limited English proficiency, and some minority groups.

"While colorectal cancer screening rates have improved nationally, low-income, and some minority populations tend to be screened at lower rates than the national average," said Alison Brenner, PhD, MPH, associate program director of the Decision Support Lab at UNC's Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. "Further, Latino populations typically have the lowest screening rates."

In their new study, the researchers tested a strategy to improve screening rates for 265 patients at community health clinics in North Carolina and New Mexico. The majority of patients were Latino, low income, on Medicaid or lacking insurance.

Before their appointments, study participants watched an "decision aid" video in English or in Spanish about their colon cancer screening options, which included colonoscopy as well as a home test that allows patients to mail in a sample of their stool. The participants met one-on-one with a patient navigator who followed up about their plans for a colonoscopy appointment or home test.

Overall, 68 percent of study participants who watched the video and met with a patient navigator were screened for colorectal cancer within 6 months, compared to 27 percent of patients who did not receive the intervention.

"This study gives us one model for effective health interventions in vulnerable populations," said Michael Pignone, MD, MPH, chair of internal medicine at Dell Medical School and a former UNC Lineberger researcher. "Providing patients with personal follow-up and customized tools for making decisions about their health are two beneficial tactics."

The researchers said giving study participants a choice in the type of test they received helped to boost screening uptake. And using the evideo helped them have an informed discussion and share the decision with their physician, who might not otherwise have elicited the patients' preference regarding screening tests.

"Colonoscopy is just one of several screening tests recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force," Brenner said. "Studies have shown that offering only colonoscopy results in lower adherence to screening than offering a choice, and our study appears to confirm that."

They also concluded that combining the video with patient meetings with a navigator also contributed to the intervention's success. Navigators helped to make sure patients received a stool test kit if they wanted it, did not lose or forget to complete mailed test, to access financial assistance programs, and to schedule a colonoscopy.

"We think that these two interventions are working synergistically, they were delivered systematically by non-physician members of the care team, and the system was set up so that it should work even if the doctor doesn't have time to address this particular issue during the visit," Reuland said. "That's part of the 'secret sauce.'"

Their systematic, team-based approach also helped improve rates, he said.

"Doctors sometimes have 12 to 15 minutes to address multiple important health issues and concerns, and colon cancer screening can fall off the list because it's not urgent, and sometimes people don't want to deal with it," Reuland said. "But really putting a system in place that says everyone who is due for screening should get clear and consistent decision support, and navigation help if they need it, increases screening rates."

Reuland added that the findings have policy implications because community health centers often don't have the resources they need to do this systematically. "Resources need to be allocated to do what needs to be done to deliver high-value, evidence-based care like colon cancer screening," he said. "We are seeing that if we design and resource primary care appropriately, we can deliver evidence-based care, and improve the value of care we deliver to individual patients and to society."

###

In addition to Reuland, Brenner, and Pignone, other authors included: Richard Hoffman, MD, MPH; Andrew McWilliams, MD, MPH; Robert Rhyne, MD; Christina Getrich, PhD; Hazel Tapp, PhD; Mark A. Weaver, PhD; Danelle Callan, MA; Laura Cubillos, MPH; and Brisa Urquieta de Hernandez.

The study was primarily supported by the American Cancer Society. Additional funding was provided by the University of New Mexico Clinical and Translational Science Center, the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute at the University of North Carolina, and UNC Lineberger. Individual researchers were supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality's National Research Service Award, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The body mass index calculations that physicians have been relying on for decades may not be accurate for assessing body fat in adolescents between the ages of 8 and 17.

A new study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics shows that tri-ponderal mass index estimates body fat more accurately than the traditional BMI in adolescents.

These new findings are timely as diagnosing, treating and tracking the prevalence of children and adolescents with obesity is a high public health priority. Moreover, many school districts are sending home report cards labeling adolescents as overweight -- a practice that has been controversial because children and adolescents tend to be more vulnerable to weight bias and fat shaming than adults.

"Treating obesity in adolescents requires an accurate diagnosis first," said lead scientist Courtney Peterson, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Health Professions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "We found that TMI is both more accurate and easier to use than BMI percentiles. These new findings have the power to potentially change the way we diagnose obesity in children and adolescents ages 8 to 17."

BMI is the standard used worldwide to screen for obesity in both children and adults, despite prior evidence that it does not work as well in adolescents. To test BMI accuracy in adolescents, researchers compared body composition data from 2,285 Caucasian individuals ages 8 to 29 who participated in the 1999-2004 U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Their findings challenge the accuracy of BMI (weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) in adolescents and show that TMI (weight divided by height cubed) estimates body fat more accurately than BMI in those 8 to 17 years old.

"BMI is a pretty good tool for determining whether adults are overweight or obese," Peterson said. "But we've always kind of known that it doesn't work as well in children."

Using three different calculations -- stability with age, accuracy in estimating percent body fat and accuracy in classifying adolescents as overweight versus normal weight -- researchers compared BMI to several different obesity indices. They found that TMI is the best overall body fat index to use in Caucasian adolescents between the ages of 8 and 17.

The researchers found that TMI better estimates body fat percentage, especially in male adolescents for whom the investigators found BMI to be particularly inaccurate. Their analysis also showed TMI to be a better index for diagnosing overweight adolescents than the current BMI percentiles. Using BMI percentiles, researchers noted that adolescents are incorrectly diagnosed as overweight 19.4 percent of the time, versus an only 8.4 percent incorrect overweight diagnosis rate for TMI. The data showed this is especially true for lean adolescents, a significant fraction of whom are incorrectly being diagnosed as overweight.

The researchers also used mathematical strategies to show how the relationship between body weight and height is much more complex in children and adolescents than it is in adults, particularly when adolescents are rapidly growing. The authors explained that for decades this complexity made it challenging to figure out the optimal body fat index for adolescents.

Steven Heymsfield, M.D., one of the team's physician scientists at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center, added that, to make BMI work in children, complicated BMI percentiles called "Z scores" were developed to diagnose overweight status and obesity based on BMI levels specific to a child's age and gender. But the researchers found that using percentiles does not solve BMI's accuracy problems.

Peterson mentioned that percentiles are problematic because they change over time and can become outdated. However, she emphasizes that, even if BMI percentiles were updated to be as accurate as TMI for diagnosing adolescents as lean versus overweight, TMI still inherently estimates levels of body fat in adolescents more accurately than BMI does, while also eliminating the need for complicated percentiles.

"These findings are important," Peterson said. "Many school districts send home report cards labeling adolescents as overweight, and children and adolescents tend to be more vulnerable to weight bias and fat shaming than adults."

Obesity increases the risk of several chronic diseases in adults, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Children who are overweight are at an even higher risk than adults, and nearly one in six children in the United States is overweight. Several national and global initiatives are underway to screen and diagnose children who are overweight as a first step in curbing the obesity epidemic and the chronic diseases that follow.

Investigators agree that further research is needed to assess the effectiveness of TMI in broader audiences, including wider age ranges and ethnicities.

"We look forward to collaborating with other existing national and global health organizations to analyze additional data for diagnosing weight status among children and adolescents," Peterson said. "Ultimately, we hope this research lays the foundation for improving the health of adolescents, and we think that down the road TMI will likely replace BMI for children and adolescents."

###

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Montclair State University, the United States Military Academy, The Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Verona University Medical School collaborated on this research and publication.
Chapel Hill, NC - A special issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases focuses solely on HIV eradication. Edited by a renowned HIV investigator from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the edition explains the scientific thinking behind the cure strategies being pursued at the National Institutes of Health-funded Martin Delaney Collaboratory sites around the United States.

"For this supplemental issue, we invited clinicians and scientists who represent the newly funded and restructured Martin Delaney Collaboratories to discuss developments, challenges and priorities in each of seven key areas of HIV cure research," said David Margolis, M.D., editor of the special edition and a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at UNC.

Margolis is the principal investigator the Collaboratory of AIDS Researchers for Eradication (CARE), which is one of the six sites. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, first funded three Martin Delaney Collaboratory sites, including CARE, for a five-year period in 2011. The program was the first major funding initiative to focus on eradication of HIV from the body and was named in honor of internationally recognized HIV activist Martin Delaney.

In 2016, the NIH announced the second round of five-year grant recipients. Margolis and his CARE colleagues were among six sites funded. In the special edition, Margolis and UNC collaborator Nancie Archin, Ph.D., discuss the challenges in developing latency reversing agents (LRAs), a critical tool needed to awaken dormant virus in the body.

"Finding a cure for HIV is not a trivial endeavor. As many mechanisms control HIV latency, it might be necessary to design LRAs with activity against multiple targets," said Archin, an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at UNC. "Furthermore, these LRAs would need to be effective against all persistent virus, including tissue reservoirs."

UNC researcher J. Victor Garcia, Ph.D., and postdoctoral fellow Christopher Nixon, Ph.D., join colleagues from Emory University in writing an article about the two leading pre-clinical models under study in HIV cure research. Other contributors to this cure edition of JID include investigators from the University of Washington, the University of California at San Francisco, Duke University, the Wistar Institute and NIAID.

###

The mission of UNC's Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases is to harness the full resources of the University and its partners to solve global health problems, reduce the burden of disease, and cultivate the next generation of global health leaders. Learn more at http://www.globalhealth.unc.edu.
Frisky female fruit flies become more aggressive towards each other after sex.

Female fruit flies start headbutting each other after mating, becoming significantly more aggressive and intolerant Oxford University research has revealed.

Levels of aggression soar after sex, when a variety of proteins, which flow freely in semen, stimulate dramatic behavioural and physiological changes in females. Other changes include increased ovulation, rejecting male advances and loss of interest in sex. Increased post coital levels of aggression may have wider in direct implications on female competition.

Studies in many species have shown an association between increased levels of aggression in females, egg laying and reproduction. Protecting and providing for offspring is often identified as the main motivation for this behaviour. The factors at play in the reproductive process, that trigger such dramatic behavioural changes, have until now, been less clearly understood.

A team of researchers led by Dr Eleanor Bath and Dr Stuart Wigby of the Oxford University Department of Zoology, examined hundreds of fruit flies, assessing the impact of mating on female fruit fly behaviour, and to what degree it alters their levels of aggression. Fruit flies are also known as Drosophila melanogaster, a species of fly that is approximately one-eighth of an inch in length, with red eyes. Fruit flies are known for being drawn to ripe or rotten foods like fruits and vegetables.

The research newly published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, proposed that aggression was potentially stimulated by two factors; either indirectly as a result of costly egg-production, or directly by coming into contact with the components contained in the male's ejaculate. The findings show that after mating, female fruit flies become evidently more aggressive towards each other when fighting over food, often head-butting and swatting at each other. Specifically, pairs of mated females fought significantly more than virgin pairs. Pairs with at least one newly mated female were also found to be more aggressive towards each other than pairs with two virgin females.

Females are also know to experience a number of other dramatic changes after mating, including increasing their levels of egg production, increasing their feeding rates, and altering their sleeping patterns. Previous research has drawn links between these behavioural changes and proteins found in the seminal fluid, such as the sex-peptide, which is carried in the seminal fluid and binds to sperm. The team were able to determine that females needed to receive sperm to increase their aggression after mating, and sex-peptide was also involved in elevating female aggression.

Copulation may also affect the social tolerance of females in general. Immediately after mating female fruit flies are known to be significantly less receptive to re-mating. Females were found to be equally aggressive towards one another, regardless of whether or not they were able to produce eggs, showing that reproduction was not a contributing factor in their obvious change of temperament.

Dr Stuart Wigby, Research Fellow at Oxford University, said: 'A lot is known about male fruit fly behaviour and what affects their levels of aggression, but very little has been published about competition among females. Even taken on its own, our study is useful. If these behavioural changes occur in fruit flies, it is highly likely that they are happening in other insects.'

Now that the relationship between mating and aggression in females is better understood, the team intend to conduct further analysis into the effects of the behavioural change, pinpointing the exact time that their intolerance intensifies, and how long the effects of the sex-peptide last. New research will also work to determine whether the effects carry positive or negative benefits to males and females, who the behavioural change benefits and if it is linked to spousal or offspring protection? Dr Eleanor Bath said: 'Knowing whether female aggression benefits females in the wild could help us to understand fruit fly population dynamics. Potentially having more aggressive females might result in females doing less well in the wild, meaning that we could potentially use female aggression as a behavioural tool to control pest insect populations.'

Dr Stuart Wigby added: 'A lot of insect control programmes involve releasing sterile males into the wild. When these males mate with wild females, the females fail to produce viable offspring. It could be that mating with these sterile males also affects female aggression levels. Further research will help us to understand exactly how such affects could help or harm populations, and therefore whether or not they can have a wider use.'

###

Notes to editors

Embargoed until Monday 15 May at 1600pm (GMT) / 1100am US Eastern time

The full paper entitled 'Sperm and sex peptide stimulate aggression in female Drosophila, by Eleanor Bath1* , Samuel Bowden1, Carla Peters1, Anjali Reddy1, Joseph A. Tobias1, 2, Evan Easton-Calabria3, Nathalie Seddon1, Stephen F. Goodwin4 and Stuart Wigby1 features in Nature Ecology & Evolution

Supporting images and video are available from the below link:

https://wetransfer.com/downloads/96ab4583fe9911b8e7635c870ce2758120170512102208/059db67daec1755dfb123a4c85f354a020170512102208/d871b3

Credit details:

Two flies mating - Amy Hong

Fruit fly face (close-up) - Amy Hong

Back view of two flies mating - Amy Hong

Image of females in the contest arena (with the paint and yeast patch highlighted) and video footage - Eleanor Bath

For interviews or supporting images please contact: Lanisha Butterfield, Media Relations Manager on 01865 280531 or lanisha.butterfield@admin.ox.ac.uk

The Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division (MPLS) is one of four academic divisions at the University of Oxford, representing the non-medical sciences. Oxford is one of the world's leading universities for science, and MPLS is at the forefront of scientific research across a wide range of disciplines. Research in the mathematical, physical and life sciences at Oxford was rated the best in the UK in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment. MPLS received 133m in research income in 2014/15.
A newly developed printable elastic conductor retains high conductivity even when stretched to as much as five times its original length, says a Japanese team of scientists. The new material, produced in paste-like ink form, can be printed in various patterns on textiles and rubber surfaces as stretchable wiring for wearable devices incorporating sensors, as well as give human skin-like functions to robot exteriors.

The development of wearable devices such as those monitoring a person's health or physical performance, like heart rate or muscle activity, is currently underway with some products already on the market. Moreover, with the advent of robots in areas such as health care and retail, in addition to manufacturing, future applications for sensitive elastic conductive material that can withstand high strain from stretching are likely to increase at a fever pitch.

"We saw the growing demand for wearable devices and robots," says Professor Takao Someya at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering, who supervised the current study. "We felt it was very important to create printable elastic conductors to help meet the need and realize the development of the products," he adds.

To achieve a high degree of stretchability and conductivity, the researchers mixed four components to create their elastic conductor. They found that their conductive paste consisting of micrometer-sized silver (Ag) flakes, fluorine rubber, fluorine surfactant--commonly known as a substance that reduces surface tension in liquid--and organic solvent to dissolve the fluorine rubber markedly outperformed the elastic conductor they had previously developed in 2015.

Without stretching, printed traces of the new conductor recorded 4,972 siemens per centimeter (S/cm), high conductivity using the common measure for assessing electrical conductance. When stretched by 200 percent, or to three times its original length, conductivity measured 1,070 S/cm, which is nearly six times the value of the previous conductor (192 S/cm). Even when stretched by 400 percent, or to five times its original length, the new conductor retained high conductivity of 935 S/cm, the highest level recorded for this amount of stretching.

Magnification by a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) showed that the high performance of the conductor was due to the self-formation of silver (Ag) nanoparticles--one-thousandth the size of the Ag flakes and dispersed uniformly between the flakes in the fluorine rubber--after the conductive composite paste was printed and heated. "We did not expect the formation of Ag nanoparticles," comments Someya on their surprising discovery.

Furthermore, the scientists found that by adjusting variables like the molecular weight of the fluorine rubber, they could control the distribution and population of nanoparticles, while the presence of surfactant and heating accelerated their formation and influenced their size.

To demonstrate the feasibility of the conductors, the scientists fabricated fully printed stretchable pressure and temperature sensors--that can sense weak force and measure heat close to body and room temperatures--wired with the printable elastic conductors on textiles. The sensors, which can be installed easily by laminating onto surfaces by hot pressing with heat and pressure, took precise measurements even when stretched by 250 percent. This is enough to accommodate high-stress flexible areas such as elbows and knees on conformable, form-fitting sportswear or joints on robotic arms often designed to surpass human capabilities and thus undergo higher strain.

The new material, which is durable and suitable for high-capacity printing methods like stencil or screen printing that can cover large surface areas, points to easy installation, and its properties of forming Ag nanoparticles (which are a fraction of the cost of Ag flakes) when printed provide an economical alternative for realizing a wide range of applications for wearables, robotics and deformable electronic devices. The team is now exploring substitutes for Ag flakes to further reduce costs, while they are also looking at other polymers, like nonfluorine rubbers, and various combinations of materials and processes to fabricate elastic conductors with similar high performance.

###

Journal article:

Naoji Matsuhisa, Daishi Inoue, Peter Zalar, Hanbit Jin, Yorishige Matsuba, Akira Itoh, Tomoyuki Yokota, Daisuke Hashizume, and Takao Someya, Printable Elastic Conductors by in situ Formation of Silver Nanoparticles from Silver Flakes, Nature Materials (2017).

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat4904

DOI: 10.1038/nmat4904

Collaborating institutions:

Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)

Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), RIKEN

Thin-Film Device Laboratory, RIKEN

Link:

Research contact:

Professor Takao Someya

Someya Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems (EEIS), Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo

7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656 JAPAN

Tel: +81-3-5841-6756

Fax: +81-3-5841-6709

Email: someya@ee.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Press officer contact:

Yayoi Miyagawa

Public Relations Office, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo

7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656 JAPAN

Tel: +81-3-5841-1790

Fax: +81-3-5841-0529

Email: kouhou@pr.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Funding:

This result is an accomplishment of the Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology (ERATO) research funding program.

Project Name: Someya Bio-Harmonized Electronics Project

Project Director: Takao Someya, Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo

Project Period: August 2011 - March 2017

Project Objective: The aim of the project is to realize brand new electronic devices that seamlessly merge biological tissues and electronics together, by making the best use of the unique features of soft and bio-harmonized organic materials, and to subsequently open up new bio-harmonized electronics markets that are closed to conventional electronics relying on inorganic rigid materials represented by silicon.

About the University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo is Japan's leading university and one of the world's top research universities. The vast research output of some 6,000 researchers is published in the world's top journals across the arts and sciences. Our vibrant student body of around 15,000 undergraduate and 15,000 graduate students includes over 2,000 international students. Find out more at http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ or follow us on Twitter at @UTokyo_News_en.
Helping patients understand colonoscopy alternatives and make a colorectal cancer screening choice based on their own values -- combined with one-on-one support -- dramatically increases screening completion among patients with historically lower screening rates, a new study finds. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine, researchers from the University of North Carolina (UNC) Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center report a 40 percent increase in screening rates for patients at two community health centers in North Carolina and New Mexico using a decision aid and support from a trained navigator.

Michael Pignone, M.D., a former researcher at UNC and chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, co-authored the study.

"This study gives us one model for effective health interventions in vulnerable populations," said Pignone. "There's no doubt that colon cancer screening is beneficial when implemented in the right age group. The question is, how far are care providers willing to go to bring those benefits to people with barriers to screening?"

Regular screening for colorectal cancer is recommended for people between 50 and 75 years of age. But research shows rates are low in some groups, particularly for people who are low-income, on Medicaid, have limited English proficiency and some minority groups. The majority of the 265 patients in the UNC study fit the profile of those with typically lower screening rates.

"We've shown that if we structure care such that we catch patients right when they are seeing their doctor, systematically provide them with clear and compelling information about screening and what their choices are, and then give them personal support they need to get the screening test they prefer, we can substantially improve rates," said the study's lead author, Dan Reuland, M.D., MPH, a UNC Lineberger member and professor in the UNC School of Medicine.

Before their appointments, patients watched a decision-aid video in English or in Spanish (per primary language) about their colon cancer screening options, which include colonoscopy or a home test that allows patients to mail in a sample of their stool. Then, patients met one-on-one with a navigator who followed up about their plans for a colonoscopy appointment or home tests.

Overall, 68 percent of patients who watched the video and met with a patient navigator were screened for colorectal cancer within six months, compared with 27 percent of patients who did not receive the intervention.

"Colonoscopy is just one of several screening tests recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force," said Alison Brenner, PhD, MPH, associate program director of the Decision Support Lab at UNC's Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. "Studies have shown that offering colonoscopy only results in lower adherence to screening than offering a choice, and our study appears to confirm that."

The video aid helped patients make an informed discussion with their physician about screening and share in decision-making. Due to time constraints of appointments, physicians aren't always able to elicit patients' preferences regarding screening tests, but this intervention facilitated the conversation.

Combining the decision aid with support from a trained navigator also contributed to the success, researchers concluded. Navigators helped to make sure patients received a stool test kit if they wanted it, completed the test, accessed financial assistance programs, and scheduled a colonoscopy if needed.

Shared decision-making is a key component of patient-centered health care, one that Dell Medical School is embedding into its curriculum, clinical care and community outreach efforts, Pignone said. He plans to adapt the principles from the UNC study to initiatives in Travis County to measurably improve health in the community.

One barrier to replicating the intervention model is the cost to community health centers for navigator salaries. Follow-up studies are planned to analyze the cost-effectiveness of the method so that it could be improved and implemented in a value-based health care framework.

###

In addition to Reuland, Brenner and Pignone, study authors include: Richard Hoffman, M.D., MPH; Andrew McWilliams, M.D., MPH; Robert Rhyne, M.D.; Christina Getrich, Ph.D.; Hazel Tapp, Ph.D.; Mark A. Weaver, Ph.D.; Danelle Callan, M.A.; Laura Cubillos, MPH; and Brisa Urquieta de Hernandez.

The study was primarily supported by the American Cancer Society. Additional funding was provided by the University of New Mexico Clinical and Translational Science Center, the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute at the University of North Carolina, and UNC Lineberger. Individual researchers were supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's National Research Service Award, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
A diverse group of the world's leading experts in marine conservation is calling for a Hippocratic Oath for ocean conservation ? not unlike the pledge physicians take to uphold specific ethical standards when practicing medicine.

A code of conduct for marine conservation would help prevent human rights violations that might occur during conservation and promote fair, socially responsible decision-making when planning and carrying out actions to protect the ocean. The recommendations were published May 15 in the journal Marine Policy.

"The benefit of developing a code of conduct is that we are taking past mistakes and learning from them," said lead author Nathan Bennett, a researcher at the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University. "We are trying to suggest a way forward and ultimately to increase the success of conservation."

An international group of academics and practitioners from universities, government agencies and nonprofit organizations convened at the International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Conservation Congress ? the world's largest recurring conservation event ? in Honolulu last year to discuss the need for a marine code of conduct and put together a framework for what such a document would include. This discussion, along with a review of existing conservation policies, is summarized in the new paper.

"Bringing together this broad group of experts is really the first step in a longer process," Bennett explained. "What we are calling for here is for the development and application of a code of conduct by the entire marine conservation community. This will require some of the key players in marine conservation to step up and support this initiative."

A number of human rights violations have occurred as byproducts of conservation activities in various parts of the world. In Tanzania, for example, coastal indigenous people have been forced off their land in the government's attempt to protect the area. In South Africa, areas that were designated for marine protection without consulting local communities are cited as examples of "ocean grabbing" ? policies or actions that take away resources and rights of small-scale fishing communities.

Part of the problem, the authors say, is that marine conservation is relatively new and it is ramping up quickly to meet global targets to protect 10 percent of the oceans by 2020. Mistakes or negligence can happen under tight deadlines. Additionally, oceans have several unique qualities that make it difficult to navigate conservation work: property rights are not as clearly defined in the sea as on land; jurisdictions are hard to define and rules are hard to enforce; and there are stark differences in opinion over whether to further exploit the ocean's natural resources or protect them.

It is perhaps the world's newest "Wild West" scenario.

"The oceans are a busy place these days, with everyone trying to stake their claim with different end goals in mind," Bennett said. "Dealing with issues around how decisions are made, who is involved and being clear about the rationales for decisions ? and putting that information on the table in a transparent way ? are some fundamental challenges to making marine conservation happen in a good way."

The paper's authors lay out a number of social justice, accountability and decision-making principles that could be used for a marine conservation code of conduct. These include topics such as indigenous rights, food and livelihood security, inclusivity and transparency. They also list draft objectives for further development, and they cite examples of good and bad outcomes from conservation activities.

In British Columbia, for example, the marine planning process has been inclusive of all affected parties. In Hawaii, a marine national monument integrates native culture while protecting the ecosystem's health and diversity. Lessons learned from these positive examples, and others, can also be used to guide development of an international code of conduct, Bennett said.

The authors plan to discuss their recommendations at several upcoming international ocean meetings, including the United Nations Ocean Conference in June, the International Marine Protected Areas Congress in September and the Our Ocean conference in October. They hope other scientists, policymakers and funders will weigh in on what should be included in such a document, then get to work on drafting a code of conduct.

They expect the final document will be used as a tool to educate and guide the actions of the next generation of conservation practitioners and advocates and, when necessary, as a means to hold groups accountable for their actions.

"The practice of marine conservation always involves trade-offs. This analysis makes it clear that society's most vulnerable cannot be expected to carry the main burdens of conservation," said co-lead author Patrick Christie, a UW professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs and the Jackson School of International Studies. "Without taking into careful consideration the principles of this analysis, conservation will likely fail in the long term and have unintended negative impacts on society and environments."

###

The paper's other co-lead authors are Lydia Teh and Yoshitaka Ota of the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program at the University of British Columbia. J. Zachary Koehn is another UW co-author. The full list of authors is available in the paper.

This work was funded by the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Bennett was funded by the Banting and Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellowship programs.

The paper is an output of the OceanCanada Partnership, the Too Big to Ignore Global Partnership for Small-Scale Fisheries Research and the Community Conservation Research Network.

For more information, contact Nathan Bennett at Nathan.bennett@ubc.ca or 360-820-0181.
A Welsh farming union has called on all retailers to show their commitment to Welsh lamb to help farmers who are under a 'cloud of uncertainty'.

With Brexit looming and the UK in the middle of a General Election campaign, sheep farmers from across Wales will be gathering at the NSA Welsh Sheep 2017 event in Talybont-on-Usk, Powys under what the NFU Cymru says is a 'cloud of uncertainty'.

As new season lambs come onto the market and in a bid to provide welcome assurances for Welsh farmers, NFU Cymru has asked retailers to back Welsh lamb by adhering to the unions eight point action plan.

The union is asking retailers to provide a 'clear and transparent' commitment to sourcing Welsh lamb, specifically stating when Welsh lamb will be readily available.

They have asked retailers to ensure that labelling is clear on the origin of lamb and clearly highlighting the PGI status of Welsh lamb, and that there is dedicated shelf space for both Welsh and UK lamb to differentiate between the two.

'Stability and confidence'

Adequate supplies of Welsh lamb available over key religious festivals and a commitment not to product mix or co-mingle lamb products either on shelf or in the packet, the union stated.

The union wants retailers to actively engage with producers to build 'stability and confidence' between producer and retailer.

Retailers are being urged to work together to understand each others needs with the aim of delivering Welsh lamb to the consumer for 12 months of the year whilst ensuring an increasing proportion of produce matches the retailers desired specification.

Finally, NFU Cymru wants a plan to develop new products to entice more consumers to buy Welsh lamb and to secure greater utilisation of the whole lamb carcass within the UK retail sector. Retailers are being asked to work with meat promotion bodies to market and promote Welsh and UK Lamb, in store and via relevant media channels.

'Continued support'

NFU Cymru Livestock Chairman Wyn Evans said said the union will have regular meetings with retailers over the coming weeks to press them to confirm their commitments to sourcing Welsh.

Mr Evans said: What is most important of all is the continued support of the public in ensuring that when they go to supermarkets, smaller retailers, butchers and restaurants they make a point of asking for great tasting PGI Welsh Lamb.

Retailers say they are driven by their customers, well, in a recent survey 71% of those given a choice would opt for local produce.

Producers have a key part to play in producing the right product at the right time but given the right signals, incentives and commitment this can be done. Good communication throughout the supply chain is key to achieving this.

Mr Evans added: A number of retailers over the past 12 months have made positive commitments towards Welsh lamb. We applaud this and hope this commitment can be built upon. We encourage more retailers to follow suit soon.

One of NFU Cymrus 10 key policy asks for the 2017 General Election is Consumers consistently tell us that they want to buy Welsh and British produce. Clear and unambiguous country of origin labelling is required so that consumers can make informed choices.

Meat promoters are already looking at an 'exceptionally busy month' of promoting premium British produce around the world in a major export push.
A Cornish farmer has a plan to release two beavers in an attempt to tackle flooding and improve water quality.

Farmer Chris Jones, whose land lies upstream of Ladock, a village that has been hit by severe flooding, plans to release two beavers into a fenced enclosure along a small stream.

Experts in dealing with flood risk at the University of Exeter have studied the land, and believe by building dams the beavers will naturally slow the flow of water that could otherwise flood areas downstream.

The researchers will monitor the impact of the beavers on flooding and the quality of water being released, drawing on expertise gained from monitoring the release of Eurasian beavers at a site in Devon.

The fenced project hopes to show that beavers can help create new wildlife habitat, make streams cleaner and crucially, help to reduce flooding.

But to bring the beavers back the Cornwall Wildlife Trust needs to raise at least 15,000 over the next six weeks, which they hope to do through a Crowdfunder campaign.

The beavers will be re-introduced to a specially-fenced five acre area at Woodland Valley Farm, upstream of Ladock village, just outside of Truro.

Chris Jones, the farmer at Woodland Valley Farm where the beavers will be released, said: Weve done a lot of work getting the site ready for the first task of installing the beaver-proof fence.

This will then be rigorously tested by beaver conservation experts to make sure they will be safe in their new home. I am hoping the beavers will transform the site by digging new ponds and water channels, making it much better for wetland wildlife.
Farmers are joining forces with the University of East Anglia (UEA) to combat poor water quality in the region.

Farmers will be using adapted land management techniques to help battle the declining water quality in the River Wensum.

UEA's Kevin Hiscock, Professor of Environmental Sciences will demonstrate how mitigation measures can limit the amount of nutrients and pesticides that end up in the river.

Mr Hiscock said: Working with farmers, the Wensum Demonstration Test Catchment Project provides an opportunity to test and assess the effectiveness of a variety of land management measures to reduce this contaminant runoff whilst maintaining farm profitability, which is of vital importance to the agricultural community.

The Wensum is recognised as one of the most important chalk river habitats in the UK, with over 100 plant species and a rich invertebrate fauna.

Endangered species that require conservation include Desmoulins Whorl Snail and the White-Clawed Crayfish, as well as vegetation such as Water Crowfoot and Starwort.

The UEA will be displaying a 3D model that demonstrates how agricultural activity can be adjusted to reduce loss of nutrients into the water course.

Alongside this, a water analysis laboratory and a display of the root systems of some of the cover crop plants that have been used as part of the project, to prevent nutrient losses.

Nitrate-based fertilisers

As well as presenting a problem for ecological systems, nitrate-based fertilisers can have other effects, explained the UEA.

It is important to detect the levels of nitrate to protect the quality of drinking water, Mr Hiscock said.

Alongside this, nitrogen applications in agriculture play a significant role in climate change. The action of soil microbes triggers the production and release of nitrous oxide.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) estimates that nitrous oxide accounts for 55% of all UK agricultural sector greenhouse gas emissions. The main cause of nitrous oxide emissions is the application of synthetic fertiliser and livestock manure to arable soils.

According to DEFRA, 90% of nitrous oxide emissions are from three sources: direct emissions from soils (42%), indirect emissions from soils via surface water and groundwater (33%) and emissions from pasture and paddock manures (15%).

The research has proven to be of value to Poul Hoveson at Salle Farms Co. He said: Our work with UEA on the DTC Project, has helped us to improve our understanding of nutrient movements in the soil.

This has enabled us to have an integrated cultivation technique which optimises nutrient uptake as well as preventing leaching into streams. We have seen an improvement in soil structure which lowers our energy input and this has led to an improvement in our yields.
Farmers across the UK are reporting an increase in ravens killing new-born lambs, with the problem reportedly getting worse.

The alarming rise in such attacks are not unheard of, as ravens have a tendency to be opportunistic feeders - but experts are still baffled at the increased attacks.

Ravens are classed as a protected species, so there is little farmers can do to fend off such attacks.

Some are so concerned that they are demanding the right to shoot ravens without need for a special government licence.

Farmers say they feel it is necessary to protect livestock and thus their income.

'Smart, but very aggressive'

Phil Stocker, of the National Sheep Association, told the Daily Mail: "The problem is growing. We are getting reports from all over the country. Ravens are smart and intelligent but very aggressive."

The birds, a protected species under UK law, live in the wild in the Scottish Highlands and uplands of Britain, the Lake District, Wales, Dartmoor, Exmoor and the South-West.

Last year, a petition was launched to have the Raven added to the general license  a move that would allow landowners to control (by lethal means) ravens in the same manner as other corvid species.

A farmer having a problem must apply to Natural England (NE), the Government's wildlife advisers, for a licence to kill the birds.

From 2014 to 2016, five licences were issued, with three given to the same farm.
Police are investigating a second theft of sheep, this time 21 sheep stolen, in the Sperrin mountains, Northern Ireland.

Twenty-one black faced horned Hoggets have been stolen from common grazing land near Moneyneena, Draperstown in the Sperrin mountains.

The stolen sheep are well marked with read heads and rumps, and are branded.

Earlier this week, police appealed for information relating to the theft of 19 sheep from grazing land on Slieve Gallion.

The Sperrin mountains is one of the largest upland areas on the island of Ireland. The region has a population of some 150,000 and is a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Sheep rustling is becoming an increasing problem across the UK, farmers have said.

On 5 May, sheep rustlers stole more than 50 sheep in a raid on a north-east farm in Scotland.

In March, Police appealed for information after the theft of between 25 and 30 sheep from a field in North Yorkshire.

And in February, sheep rustlers stole almost 100 sheep, worth just under 13,000 in a farm near Falkirk, Scotland.

If you have can provide police with information about the thefts, contact them on non emergency 101.
Scottish farmers are being told to be more alert to the opportunities of investing in deer farming as a suitable enterprise to complement stock farming.

Malcolm Taylor, a leading agriculture expert at Bell Ingram, said with growing consumer demand for venison and upland grass farms facing an uncertain future with falling subsidies, Brexit and independence uncertainties, exploring the option of deer farming makes perfect sense.

Scotland currently imports nearly 1,000 tonnes of venison to meet demand while only two per cent of the 3,500 tonnes produced at home is from farmed stock.

Rewarding

Mr Taylor said low start-up costs and a good return on stock make deer farming a potentially rewarding prospective investment.

He said: The consumption of venison meat rose from sales of 43 million in 2009 to sales of game meat (mainly venison) in the region of 95m in 2014  a number which has continued to grow and has been valued at 106m in 2016.

There is a wealth of experience to tap into from those that are farming deer for profit.

Whats more, several lending institutions are happy to consider lending to establish deer farming  a sure sign of the positive outlook for the sector.

'The economics are attractive'

Until recently the lack of abattoir facilities was regularly cited as one of the barriers to the growth of deer farming, but the establishment of a new purpose-built facility in Fife could now open the market.

Mr Taylor added: The economics are attractive - the average cost of a breeding hind is 300 - 500 and a stag will cost anything between 500 and 2,000.

Typically, farms run 30 to 50 hinds with one stag. In theory, deer farming looks to be a suitable enterprise to complement stock farming.

My hope  and encouragement  is that more farmers and landowners will rise to the challenge of investing in more home-produced venison.

British game meat has been pinpointed as one of the worlds top 50 consumer growth markets thanks to the success of venison as an alternative to mainstream red meats.
Summary

Company Announcement Date: May 11, 2017 FDA Publish Date: February 08, 2018 Product Type: Food & Beverages

Produce Reason for Announcement: Recall Reason Description Listeria Company Name: The Horton Fruit Co., Inc. Brand Name: Brand Name(s) Peak; Harris Teeter Farmer's Market Product Description: Product Description Spinach

Company Announcement

The Horton Fruit Co., Inc. (Horton) of Louisville, KY is voluntarily recalling select bags and containers of fresh spinach because it has the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. The company was alerted to the potential of contamination by their supplier partners, and conducting a subsequent internal investigation. Listeria monocytogenes is an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems. Although healthy individuals may suffer only short-term symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea, Listeria infection can cause miscarriages and stillbirths among pregnant women.

There have been no reports of illness related to the recalled product and no other products produced by Horton are implicated.

The products were distributed in North Carolina, Illinois, Kentucky and West Virginia and distributed through retail stores, wholesale and foodservice distributors. Specific information on how to identify the product is summarized below:

10oz. Bag PEAK brand Fresh Curly Leaf spinach

Best If Used By 05/11/17

UPC 0-78951-50002-3 10oz. Bag HARRIS TEETER FARMERS MARKET brand Ready-To-Eat Leaf spinach

Best If Used By 05/11/17

UPC 0-72036-88023-9 2.5 lb. Bag PEAK brand fresh spinach

Orange sticker dated 05/13/17

Case label pack date of 05/01/17



We are treating this incident very seriously because we want to ensure that our customers are provided with only the safest, most wholesome, and high-quality products available, said Michael Wise, President. The company has ceased distribution of the affected product as Horton continues their investigation as to what caused the problem. This recall is being undertaken with the knowledge of the FDA.

Consumers who have purchased any of these products are urged to return it to the place of purchase for a full refund. Consumers with questions may contact the company at 502-969-1371, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.  4 p.m. EDT.

Company Contact Information Consumers: 502-969-1371 Media: Michael Wise 502-969-1371
Branding Evolution for InnQuest Includes Launch of New Website

InnQuest Software, a premier hospitality technology company, unveiled the evolution of its branding and new website today.

The branding changes include a new logo design and the introduction of a blue and gray color palette, which is featured on the website, as well as the companys latest communications.

InnQuest Software, which has served hoteliers with property management solution for over 20 years, recently made major investments with the aim of becoming the global leader in hospitality technology. The brand refresh captures this commitment to innovation.

Our new corporate branding and redesigned website reflect both the evolution of our company, as well as the vision for our future, said Michael Assi, President and CEO. Our new website reinforces to our clients and partners that our technology solutions will delight their guests.

With a vision of becoming the preferred one-stop solution provider for hoteliers technology needs, InnQuest recently added new solutions and services to its hospitality portfolio. These services appear on the relaunched website alongside a new client portal, and a blog highlighting the latest hospitality insights.

InnQuests growth over the last two decades is attributed to delivering powerful solutions with superior service, said Assi. The new offerings, blog, and client portal are a testament to the service-driven company that we are today.

InnQuest has more major announcements coming soon. To access the companys new website and stay up to date on the latest news and insights, visit http://www.innquest.com.

About InnQuest Software:

InnQuest Software is a leading technology provider for the hospitality industry. Since 1994, the company has combined hotelier experience with innovative technology to deliver all-in-one solution that empowers hotels to attract guests, drive customer loyalty, and increase profits.

More than 5,500 properties across 100 countries trust InnQuest, with over 440,000 rooms managed daily through the companys flagship property management software, roomMaster.

InnQuest delivers scalable solutions with the belief that everyone deserves a great guest experience, whether theyre staying at a small B&B, a thousand-room resort, or anywhere in between. InnQuest is headquartered in the United States with offices in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Contact Information

InnQuest Software

Kent Howard

813-288-4900

press@innquest.com

www.innquest.com
Heavlin Management Company welcomes Matt Herod as the new General Manager at Salmon Falls Resort, an extraordinary full-service waterfront resort in Ketchikan Alaska. Herod is responsible for daily resort operations ranging from fiscal responsibilities to ensuring exceptional guest experience. Located in an area with breathtaking views and known as the epicenter for saltwater Salmon and Halibut fishing, Salmon Falls Resorts first class facility includes 51 guest rooms and a full marina with 10 24 Skagit Orca boats and 19 skiffs.

A 10-year veteran of the Alaskan seasonal hotel industry, Herod ventured from his home state of Arizona to explore the backcountry of Denali National Park. During that first summer he fell in love with the picturesque landscape and the freedom often felt while visiting such a vast and beautiful land. Herod was born and raised in Prescott, Arizona and is excited to be working for an Arizona-based company.

Matt is a consummate believer that great results are achieved by the efforts of great individuals, said Darlene Heavlin, executive vice president of operations for Heavlin Management Company. His knowledge and experience in hospitality as well as the Alaskan seasonal market will be an invaluable asset in connecting with our guests and delivering a once in a lifetime experience. She added, He is highly skilled in recruiting, training, cultivating and retaining top talent. Matt will help lead our culture of excellence at Salmon Falls to result in happy and motivated employees who will work diligently to exceed corporate and guest expectations.

Additionally, Heavlin also announced the recent appointment of Michael Briggs as Director of Sales. Briggs is charged with increasing bookings sales to the world-renowned resort in addition to forging relationships with individuals and corporations to aid them in their Alaskan excursion travel needs.

Briggs is a native of central California before moving to Los Angeles to try his hand in the music business. Later, while acting as the Promotions Director for a cluster of radio stations in his hometown of Bakersfield, Michael met his wife and the two of them embarked on an adventure together, moving to Ketchikan in 2010. Prior to joining Salmon Falls, he held positions in the Alaskan Sport Fishing Industry and Local CVB.

Owned by Caliber - The Wealth Development Company, Salmon Falls Resort is one of the only full-service waterfront resort properties on Revillagigedo Island. It is located and easily accessed by a beautiful 14 miles drive directly from the airport. The property is an option for cruise line guests for charter fishing, sightseeing tours or lunch in the restaurant with 360-degree views of the bay. The property is continuing to add enhancements for an amazing property experience including the addition of guest suites, new technology, kayak rentals and more.

Salmon Falls Resort is located at 16707 N. Tongass Hwy, Ketchikan, Alaska. For more information and reservations, visit www.salmonfallsresort.com or call (907) 225-2752.

About Heavlin Management Company

Heavlin Management Company, LLC (HMC) is an award winning, privately held hospitality management company with over 40 years of leadership and operational experience in repositioning underperforming hotels and distressed assets. In partnership with hotel owners, developers, investor and lenders, HMC offers results-driven improvement plans that yield cost reductions and rate growth while maintaining top quality standards. Founded by Frank Heavlin, HMC is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and has an impressive portfolio in Arizona and Alaska operating brands as Choice, Crowne Plaza, Hampton Inn & Suites, Hilton and Holiday Inn & Suites. The company currently manages 7 hotels with 1,206 guest rooms. HMC was listed as Hotel Managements 2016 Top Third-Party Management Company. For more information, visit hmchospitality.com.

Media Contact

Ruth Seigel, RS Marketing & Assoc. for HMC

rsmarketingandpr@gmail.com

(602) 320-4182
Two Moxy Hotels Announced for Japan

Moxy Hotels continues its global expansion with the announcement of two new properties in Japan. Moxy Tokyo Kinshicho and Moxy Osaka Honmachi are both set to open in late 2017, further expanding the brand's presence in Asia Pacific with the opening of the region's first Moxy in Bandung, Indonesia slated for Q3 2017.

"The next generation of travelers craves adventure, and until now affordable hotel options lacked personality and verve," said Mike Fulkerson, vice president, brand and marketing, Marriott International Asia Pacific. "We are excited to introduce Asia to the Moxy brand, which offers a vibrant and fun hotel experience at a great price."

Moxy Tokyo Kinshicho, a modern hotel with an industrial chic design, will open in the heart of historic Kinshicho in Tokyo. A short walk from Kinshicho Station, one of Tokyo's busiest train stations, guests will be able to easily navigate their way to some of the capital's major tourist attractions such as Asakusa, Tokyo Sky Tree and Tokyo Disneyland, as well as Haneda and Narita airports. Owned by Goldman Sachs and managed by Tokyo-based commercial real estate developer Pacifica Capital K.K., the hotel is a conversion from a stand-alone office building, and will feature 205 bedrooms.

"Moxy is for the curious and adventurous, and we're confident this brand will be a welcome addition to Japan's lodging offering," said Seth Sulkin President & CEO of Pacifica Capital K.K. "As Japan's tourism and hospitality industry continues to develop and grow, Moxy is the ideal boutique hotel for the region. Like Japan, Moxy is a fun and spirited brand that offers guest something different with each stay."

Centrally located in Japan is Moxy Osaka Honmachi, which promises an unexpected design with 155 high-tech, cozy bedrooms. A short distance to Honmachi Station, one of the most prominent stations in Osaka, the action  whether shopping around the Namba district, or indulging in the Shinsaibashi food and nightlife district  is all just a hop away. Owned by Goldman Sachs and managed by EGW Asset Management Inc., Moxy Osaka will also be an edgy conversion from a stand-alone office building.

"I love the Moxy concept and we are elated by this partnership with Marriott International," said Yuichi Ohata, Managing Director of EGW Asset Management Inc. "The Moxy Hotels brand is defined by its attitude, giving its guests permission to play. With design and style seriously considered and playfully executed, this innovative property in Osaka will provide Next Gen travelers with everything they want from a hotel stay."

Moxy Hotels first launched with the opening of the Moxy Milan in September 2014, and currently operates nine additional hotels in New Orleans, Tempe, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna, and the UK. Today's Next Gen traveler spends more time in public spaces, so Moxy's NOW communal areas are designed to be the center of activity. The livings rooms are crafted for the socially extroverted, energetic consumer, with highly social spaces including a high-energy lounge, 24/7 self-service grab-and-go food and drinks, ample plug-ins for personal devices, furiously fast and free Wi-Fi. Moxy will also be equipped with a library and plug-in zones that invite a quiet read or a brief web browse. Smartly designed bedrooms offer keyless entry, internet TV and motion-sensor lighting. Photo booth elevators encourage and enable guests to snap fun selfies with locally inspired props.

Moxy Hotels has more than 70 signed deals worldwide in the pipeline, in destinations including Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Oslo, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle.
6 awesome employee handbooks

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Weve talked in the past about how an amazing welcome kit can magically transform a new hire into a loyal employee. Now that your creative juices are flowing, its time to talk about another crucial part of the onboarding process: the employee handbook. Employee handbooks are versatile little documents. They can do everything from waxing poetic on a companys mission and values to answering frequently asked questions about the group benefits plan. More generally, though, a handbook tells employees what is expected of them and what they can expect of the company. Ready for a little inspiration? Heres a look at six awesome employee handbooks. Austin Fraser The IT and engineering recruitment company commissioned London design studio Felt Branding to overhaul its brand identity, and that included creating this pint-sized employee handbook, a.k.a. the Little book of house rules. The language is pleasantly casual and concise (section titles include If youre unhappy, and If your...

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AlphaStaff Introduces Vice President of Benefits

Posted by Press Releases on Monday, 05-15-2017 7:17 am

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AlphaStaff, a leading HR outsourcing firm, has hired Dorothy Miraglia King to further develop the master benefits program within the organization.FORT LAUDERDALE, FL (PRWEB) MAY 11, 2017AlphaStaff, a leading HR outsourcing firm, has hired Dorothy Miraglia King, who will join its leadership team as Vice President of Benefits.In her role, Ms. King will be overseeing the strategic product development for the master benefits program within the organization, which includes managing AlphaStaff's strategic relationships with insurance carriers and other vendor partners. Ms. King will also be working with AlphaStaff's General Counsel to provide compliance and guidance over matters related to the delivery of employee benefit plans. Having over twenty-five years of employee benefits administration and human resource experience, Ms. King brings great expertise into AlphaStaff's benefits strategy and operations team."We are very excited to have Dorothy return to AlphaStaff," said AlphaSt...

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Governor Charlie Baker and Tad Mitchell of WellRight Announced as Keynote Speakers for the Worksite Wellness Council of Massachusetts (WWCMA) 6th Annual Conference

Posted by Press Releases on Monday, 05-15-2017 7:16 am

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The Worksite Wellness Council of Massachusetts (WWCMA) announces Charlie Baker, Governor of Massachusetts, and Tad Mitchell, President and CEO of Wellright as their Keynote Speakers for the 6th Annual WWCMA Conference to be held on September, 19, 2017 at Gillette Stadium.BOSTON, MA (PRWEB) MAY 11, 2017The Worksite Wellness Council of Massachusetts (WWCMA) announces Charlie Baker, Governor of Massachusetts, and Tad Mitchell, President and CEO of Wellright as their Keynote Speakers for the 6th Annual WWCMA Conference to be held on September, 19, 2017 at Gillette Stadium.Governor Charlie Baker was inaugurated as the 72nd Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on January 8th, 2015, after several decades of service in both state government and the private sector. Since taking office, Governor Baker has been making Massachusetts a great place to live, work and raise a family while delivering a customer-service oriented state government that is as hard working as the people of the Co...

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Home Instead Senior Care Featured on Forbes 2017 Best Employers List

Posted by Press Releases on Monday, 05-15-2017 7:14 am

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Forbes third annual Americas Best Employers list has named Home Instead Senior Care one of its best employers for 2017. Ranking 78 on the list, Home Instead is the only home care company to be included in magazines annual index of the nations top employers.OMAHA, NEB. (PRWEB) MAY 12, 2017Forbes third annual Americas Best Employers list has named Home Instead Senior Care one of its best employers for 2017. Home Instead ranks 78 on the list, which was generated using anonymous feedback from employees at the nations top employers.Companies on the Best Employers list range across 25 different industry sectors from government services to retail to healthcare. While the 2017 list featured a variety of healthcare companies, Home Instead is the only provider of home care services for seniors.We are delighted to be recognized as one of the nations best employers, said Jeff Huber, president and CEO of Home Instead, Inc. For more than twenty years, our goal has been to provide e...

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Todays workplace is anywhere. CIOs and CISOs and their teams need a secure mobile workforce, including enterprise mobile security solutions that enable flexible delivery of apps, content and resources across devices. Whether supporting bring-your-own-device (BYOD), choose-your-own-device (CYOD) or a corporate-liable environment, they need strategic options for mobile security threats and prevention, such as risk insights and behavioral analysis, security policy and containerization of mission-critical resources.

In our modern world, organizations must centrally manage endpoints and security while keeping their IT experts efficient, create frictionless experiences for their users, reduce cyberthreats and keep a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
Page Content



Montreal, 15 May 2017  In the near future, an overhead drone delivery or even a flying taxi may enter your daily life. To make these services safe and efficient, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) announced today that it will begin establishing low-altitude traffic management guidance for domestic unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and that industry, academia and other innovators will have a chance to further explore these issues later this year, when ICAO convenes its Drone Enable Symposium in September at its Headquarters in Montreal, Canada.



Today were seeing many new proposals and innovations emerging in terms of both unmanned aircraft and operations at lower altitudes, commented ICAO Air Navigation Bureau Director, Mr. Stephen Creamer. ICAO recognizes that its the natural agency to be gathering together the best and brightest from government and industry to define how these craft can be safely integrated into 21st century airspace, and in a way that optimizes their benefits globally for the wide range of public and private sector operators now exploring their potential.



Because of their size and operational profiles, unmanned aircraft and prototypes generally do not fit the definitions for normal aircraft operations established under the Convention on International Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention). To address that fact, and better accommodate the speed being seen in UAS innovations today, ICAO will be employing a more responsive Request for Information process focused on specific problem statements relating to low-altitude UAS operations.



Our 191 Member States asked us to begin looking into this at our 39th triennial Assembly last October, and these new activities are ICAOs response to that call, confirmed the President of the ICAO Council, Dr. Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu. Multiple States and regional groups have proposed creating something along the lines of a UAS airspace management tool for lower altitudes, along with registration and identification solutions and related initiatives. Our work through this RFI process will help to make sure that all related solutions set out are safe, secure, sustainable, and most importantly globally aligned.



ICAOs over-riding goal is to better define the issues involved, whether technical, operational or legal, and also to ensure safety continues to remain the driving priority. The agency understands that the sooner this framework is agreed upon globally, the sooner industry will be able to launch their UAS businesses with suitable levels of investment confidence.



Experts, companies and others wanting to contribute to the applicable ICAO Requests for Information will find information on its Drone Enable website, at icao.int/DroneEnable.





Resources for Editors



About ICAO

A specialized agency of the United Nations, ICAO was created in 1944 to promote the safe and orderly development of international civil aviation throughout the world. It sets standards and regulations necessary for aviation safety, security, efficiency, capacity and environmental protection, amongst many other priorities. The Organization serves as the forum for cooperation in all fields of civil aviation among its 191 Member States.



ICAO's UAS initiatives

ICAO's DRONE ENABLE Symposium



Contacts



Anthony Philbin

Chief, Communications

aphilbin@icao.int

+1 (514) 954-8220

+1 (438) 402-8886 (mobile)

Twitter: @ICAO



William Raillant-Clark

Communications Officer

wraillantclark@icao.int

+1 514-954-6705

+1 514 409-0705

Twitter: @wraillantclark
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
The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and the Mohegan Tribe are seeing some support from the Trump administration as they seek a new casino in Connecticut.

Although the tribes are pursuing the casino outside of the framework of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act , they insist the project won't upset their existing revenue-sharing arrangements with the state. During the Obama administration, the Department of the Interior issued an advisory letter saying that it wont.

The Trump administration is now standing by the letter. While it's not a final decision of any sort, it helps address questions that have been raised by Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), non-Indian competitors and others.

"We confirm that the current administration supports the views in the technical letter," Jim Cason, the "acting" deputy secretary of the Interior, told the tribes on Friday, The Hartford Courant reported.
We address all the expressions of the libertarian movement, particularly those of this continent, not only to draw their attention to the situation we are living in Venezuela since April 2017, but by what we understand as urgency for the international anarchism expresses more emphatically on these dramatic circumstances, with positions and actions consistent with what has been the preaching and practice of the anti-hierarchic (actual word used here is Acrata.^N.delT.) ideal in its historical walk.

It is deplorable that, while on the one hand the Chavista government -today headed by Maduro- together with its sounding boards from the outside and, on the other, the opponents from the right and the social-democracy, are in disgusting campaigns for selling to world opinion their equally biased visions and charged with interests of power, many anarchist voices outside of Venezuela have maintained a mutism that is in some way tacit acceptance of what one or other of the hungry contenders for state power want to impose as "truth." We know that sympathetic voices do not have the access to most media, as it sits ready at the order of statists, and that comrades face complex realities where there are issues and problems that, due to their proximity, demand their immediate concerns, but we understand that this difficulty should not be an obstacle so that, in some modest way, attention, interest and solidarity are expressed both for what happens in Venezuela and for what the anarchism in this region divulges.In a rundown of what local anarchism says today, the present juncture shows the fascist nature of the Chavez regime -and its sequence with Maduro-, reactionary militarist governments that we have denounced forever in El Libertario. It has been a regime linked to crime, drug trafficking, looting, corruption, imprisonment of opponents, torture, disappearances, apart from the disastrous economic, social, cultural and ethical management. Chavez managed to impact with his messianic and charismatic leadership, financed by the rise of the price of oil, however after his death and with the end of the bonanza, the so-called Bolivarian process deflated, being supported by weak bases. This "revolution" followed the historical rentist tradition initiated at the beginning of the 20th century with the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez, continued by the militarist Marcos Perez Jimenez, and did not cease in the later representative democratic scheme.There are those at the international level (Noam Chomsky, the best example), that rectified their initial support for Venezuelan authoritarianism and today they denounce it in a clear way. However, we note with great concern the silence of many anarchists of this and other continents about the events in Venezuela. It says an adage: "the one who is silent grants", which is perfectly fulfilled when people are starved and criminally repressed and who should protest for it say little or nothing. We call on those who embrace the libertarian banners to pronounce, if they have not, on our tragedy. For indifference, there is no justification if one has an anti-hierarchic (actual word used here is Acrata.^N.delT.) vision of the world. The opposite is to cover up the government farce, forgetting what the anarchists of all time have said about the degradation of authoritarian socialism in power. Perhaps in the past the "progressive" mirage of chavismo might have deceived even some libertarian people, but being consistent with our ideal it is impossible today to continue to hold that belief.We are in the presence of an agonizing, delegitimized and repressive government that seeks to perpetuate itself in power, repudiated by the vast majority of the population, who murder through their repressive and paramilitary forces, which also promote looting. A corrupt government that blackmails with boxes of food, sold at black market dollar price, that participates in all kinds of capitalist business negotiations, a government of bolibourgeois (a portmanteau of the Bolivarian and bourgeois words.^N.delT.) and militarists enriched by the oil rent and ecocide mining. A government that kills with starvation and murders, while applying a brutal economic adjustment agreed with the transnational capitalism, to which punctually pays a criminal external debt.It is time to dismantle the pseudo-informative maneuvers of those who pretend to use it at an international level for those who control, and those who aspire to control, the Venezuelan State, and in this we hope to count on the active support of individualities and libertarian groups in both Latin America and the rest of the world. Any sign of anarchist solidarity will be welcomed by the Venezuelan anti-hierarchic movement (actual word used here is Acrata.^N. del T.), certainly small and moving among many difficulties, but at the present juncture will be grateful to know that we somehow have the support of people from the rest of the globe, either by reproducing and spreading the information disseminated by the anarchists of Venezuela, generating opinions and reflections that dismantle the visions in this issue that try to be imposed by authoritarians from the right and left, and -which would be much better- promoting or supporting action initiatives in your respective countries that denounce the circumstances of hunger and repression that are now present in Venezuela. Now more than ever it is necessary your presence and voice in all the possible scenarios where the tragedy in which the Venezuelan people is submerged gets denounced.El Libertarios final note: More comprehensive and detailed analyzes and information on what is happening in Venezuela, on the blog of El Libertario. In particular, we recommend these posts which briefly outline our vision and position regarding the recent and current Venezuelan conjuncture (all in Spanish.^N.delT.):- Buenos Aires: Radio interview with El Libertario http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/01/buenos-aires-interview-radial-el.html - Cartography of chavomadurista failure: A tour of the current map of Venezuela http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/02/cartografia-del-fracaso-chavomadurista.html - Crisis in the critical thinking, or jumping off a sinking ship http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/02/crisis-en-el-pensamiento-critico-o.html - Outcome of the Venezuelan crisis http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/04/desenlace-de-la-crisis-venezolana.html - Declaration of El Libertario: Surpassing the political parties to face the crisis and build a new Venezuela http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/04/declaracion-de-el-libertario-sobrepasar.html - Venezuela Today: The dictatorial errors http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/04/venezuela-hoy-los-errores-dictatoriales.html - A slogan of 2014 to resume today: IMMEDIATE DISSOLUTION OF THE GUARDIA NACIONAL BOLIVARIANA http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/04/una-consigna-de-2014-retomar-disolucion.html - The constituent fraud http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/05/The-fraud-constituent.html Original post in Spanish on their blog: https://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2017/05/llamado-desde-venezuela-ls-anarquistas.html [Nota de El Libertario: Muchas gracias a l@s compas de Insurrection News por esta traduccion al ingles. El original de la misma esta en https://raddit.me/f/anarchism/281 .]
The Jiyan Foundation, Supporting Survivors of ISIS Terror in Iraq by Iraq Solidarity News (Al-Thawra)

The Jiyan Foundation strives for a society where the dignity of the human person is protected, where adults and children enjoy the right to life and liberty, and where citizens are free from torture and terror.



Millions of women, men, and children in Iraq live under a reign of tyranny imposed by the so-called Islamic State, the terrorist group also known as ISIS.



Those who oppose its inhuman ideology of hate face torture and public execution.



Women and girls are abducted and raped; children are enslaved and forced to join the terrorists' assault.



In addition, Iraq witnesses the obliteration of its ancient spiritual and cultural heritage. Holy sites and temples have been reduced to ashes.



Members of religious minorities are threatened with extinction. Three million Muslims, Yazidis, Christians, and Shabak were forced to flee their homes.



Half of them found refuge in the Kurdish provinces of the country. They live in overcrowded camps or makeshift shelters and struggle to make ends meet.



Many suffer from physical and mental trauma and are haunted by the images of what they were forced to see.



The team of the Jiyan Foundation works hard to provide physical and psychological care for survivors of ISIS atrocities.



At our rehabilitation centers, 100 medical doctors, psychologists and trauma therapists offer treatment and a place to heal.



Women and girls who have escaped from ISIS captivity and sexual enslavement find a new perspective in Iraq's first and only psychosomatic trauma clinic for women.



Our mobile teams reach out to survivors in refugee camps, where medical aid is limited, and psychological trauma care almost non-existent.



In 2015, we admitted more than 700 women, children and men, displaced by ISIS, into our long-term rehabilitation program.



Besides physical and psychological care, the Jiyan Foundation provides much required emergency aid to individuals and families who lost everything.



Our staff also helps prevent future extremism by strengthening local communities through education campaigns and civil society programs.
California African American Heritage at Sutter's Fort State Historic Park by Khubaka, Michael Harris

Imagine the impact on society of people of African Ancestry were part of the daily Sutter's Fort, State Historical Park Tourist and Educational experience. People of African Ancestry provided financial venture capital, agriculture products, cooking, barrel making, personal military escort, fur trapping, scouting and much, much more... today it is hidden deep with the California State Archives and California State Library awaiting statutory authority to share an authentic legacy.

Sacramento, California ~ Essential contributions by people of African Ancestry remains an open secret, hidden from an everyday experience at Sutters Fort State Historic Park and throughout many of the California State Parks along the American River Parkway.



The late Honorable Mervyn M. Dymally, served as US Congressman, California Lt. Governor, and two separate occasions in the California Legislature. In 2004 he authored AB 59, stating, there is a great amount of institutional and historical evidence of contributions of African-Americans to the history and culture of the state and in many instances these facts have been distorted or revised. Therefore there is a need to preserve the contributions of various institutions, events, and individual.



The proposed measure, AB 59 (Dymally) 2003-2004, passed overwhelmingly in both the Assembly and Senate only to suffer a humiliating defiant veto message by Governor Schwarzenegger.



Today, AB 783 (Weber)2017-2018, authored by Dr. Shirley Weber, reintroduces similar legislation that continues to labor within a strange amendment process seeking a first committee hearing. One bright day, we will showcase the need and share profound examples of the significant contributions made by people of African Ancestry throughout the Great State of California.



Historically, the vast diversity and recognition of African presence both in scientific documentation and oral traditions predates California European conquest in 1535. Early Spanish, British, Russian, French and Mexican pioneers share primary source documentation of the presence and significant contribution by people of African Ancestry in Pre-American California. During the Mexican-American War, 1846-1848, the conquest of Alta California hastened by the California Gold Rush, help create the 31st state of the Union.



People of African ancestry held leading and supporting roles in both Mexico and United States, at Sutters Fort 1840-1850, a powerful and profound example of our unique journey toward freedom along the American River Parkway and throughout the State of California.



Community stakeholders and sponsors are ready to support establishing the legal statutory authorization creating an autonomous California African American Heritage Commission; thereby officially qualifying and quantifying the salient contributions by people of African ancestry, as originally envisioned by Honorable Mervyn Dymally, from the back side of Mt. Shasta to the Salton Sea.



Global educators and community stakeholders offer a 21st century examination of early Black Pioneers in Gold Rush California that continue to uncover and expand recognition of the contributions made by people of African ancestry at Sutters Fort and throughout the American River Parkway.



Together, we must remove the distortion and share authentic history in the California Gold Rush Era, 1840-1875. Recently, California State Parks official have reorganized archival period documents at Sutters Fort, catalogued for future generations to study, appreciate and share with the world.



Many public and private institutions often share scholarship, resources and relational database information thereby providing consistent, careful and concerned scholastic opportunity toward discovery and dissemination, one day it will happen with our California African American Heritage.



Why not actualize equity and inclusion as part of the daily presence at Sutters Fort State Historic Park and throughout the American River Parkway? Imagine the possibilities valuing and sharing the essential contributions by people of African Ancestry with all visitors and educators.



Old Sacramento State Historic Park, Sutters State Historic Parks, Negro Bar State Historic Park and Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, and other points of interest along the American River Parkway, the Ole Historic Coloma Trail, will one day showcase for the world to experience African American Heritage from Old Sacramento Embarcadero, Sutters Fort, Rancho Rio De Los Americanos, Historic Folsom, arriving at the site that sparked, The World Rushing In during the California Gold Rush, beginning January 1848.



It is long past time, to dust off the old source documents and collaborate with our California Archives and California State Library utilizing Legislative direction, working hand in hand with the California African American Heritage Commission; researching, documenting, preserving and sharing the authentic contributions by people of African ancestry throughout California and beyond.



Starting with Sutters Fort State Historical Park, a formal collaborative partnership with leading public and private institutions of higher learning offers new exciting job creation and career opportunities in a plethora of opportunities embracing cultural tourism and historical preservation.



Both conservative and progressive political leaders at the International, Federal, State and Local level are poised to embrace an expanding notion of celebrating our diversity, it is time to reconsider and act upon finally including our authentic and unique California African American Heritage, beginning with the Our Journey Toward Freedom in the California Gold Rush Era (1840-1875)



Submitted by

Michael Harris, Executive Secretary

California African American Heritage Commission




Update: 8:30pm: The cyclist who died in a road collision in Co Cork earlier today has been named as Donal OBrien.

Donal, 46, was a resident of Ovens and an avid fan of motorsports.

Mr OBrien was company director of Donal OBriens cars ltd.

He was married and had one daughter.

Update: 5.11pm The road where a cyclist was killed earlier today has reopened.

CORK: The N40 South Ring Rd westbound has reopened at J2 Curraheen following an earlier fatal collision. https://t.co/C56x2eWL7G  AA Ireland (@aaroadwatch) May 14, 2017

Earlier: A cyclist has been killed after a road collision in Co. Cork.

The collision is reported to have happened on the Ballincollig bypass near Cork city at 12.25pm.

A man in his 40s was pronounced dead at the scene after a collision between his bicycle and a car vehicle. The driver of the car was uninjured.

He is the eighth cyclist to be killed on Irelands roads this year. A woman was killed last Wednesday when the bike she was riding was involved in a collision with a tractor on the Killarney bypass in Co. Kerry.

Picture of the scene, taken by Larry Cummins.

The road has been closed and diversions are in place while Gardai carry out a forensic investigation.

Investigating Gardai are appealing for witnesses. Anyone with information has been asked to contact Gurranabraher Garda Station 021-4946200, the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
Burma More Than 200 Civilians Flee Villages Amid Rising Tensions in Northern Shan State

Ethnic Shan IDPs at a camp in Namtu Township, northern Shan State. / Lawi Weng / The Irrawaddy

RANGOON  More than 200 internally displaced persons (IDPs) including ethnic Shan and Palaung (Taang) civilians have arrived in Namtu Township, northern Shan State, since last week, pressuring the towns dwindling IDP camp food supplies, according to community leaders.

The new civilians fled Sai Kaung, Paung Ngu, Nat Myit Choung and Har Lin villages, said IDP camp leaders, after heightening tensions flared between the Burma Army, the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), and the Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA).

U Aung San Myint, a community leader of Namtu who helps settle and feed IDPs, said about 260 people have arrived since May 11; 30 Palaung and the rest Shan.

There has been no fighting yet, he said from Shwe Pyi Thar, a Buddhist monastery near Namtu where the Shan IDPs are staying. But they are worried that there will be fighting soon, so they fled their villages.

We managed to provide them with food that was donated to us. They have enough for only a few days.

Myanmar Relief and Resettlement Department members gave each new IDP two longyis, a towel, a mosquito net, soap, and 2,500 kyats today, added U Aung San Myint.

More than 500 IDPs including Shan, Palaung, Kachin, and Lisu, stay in separate camps in Namtu, according to Sai Ba Nyan, the volunteer vice chairman of the IDP camps. He said they could only provide the towns IDPs with rice and cooking oil.

We gave the new IDPs food that was donated. We even asked for help from authorities and civil society groups, he said.

Many of the IDPs fled their villages over the past few years, he added, and some look outside the camps for work, as they do not have enough food. Camp leaders said many IDPs rely on local donations for food.

The Burma Army, the RCSS, the TNLA, and the Shan State Progress Party (SSPP) are based in Namtu. Fighting often breaks out in the surrounding areas.

The Burma Army and the RCSS have reportedly stopped fighting, as the RCSS signed the nationwide ceasefire agreement. Most of the fighting occurs between the Burma Army and the TNLA, or the RCSS and the TNLA.
Burma All Ethnic Armed Groups Will Be Invited to Union Peace Conference

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at the first 21st Century Panglong Conference. / Reuters

NAYPYIDAW  The Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee (UPDJC) decided at a meeting in Naypyidaw on Friday to invite all ethnic armed groups to the second Union Peace Conference.

We will invite all groups, including NCA [nationwide ceasefire agreement] non-signatories and blocs such as the Northern Alliance as special guests. Despite their status, if groups sign a deed of commitment with the government in the run-up, they will be allowed to participate in discussions at the conference, said U Zaw Htay, director-general of the State Counselors Office.

Although NCA non-signatories will be allowed to attend the peace conference, decision-making power will be still be vested in the UPDJC. It remains unclear if special guest status is equivalent to observer status, with groups being left on the sidelines if they choose not to sign the deed of commitment.

The peace conference will convene on May 24 and around 700 delegates from respective stakeholder groups will attend under the framework for political dialogue, according to the UPDJC.

We dont allow foreign observers and we limit the number of local observers, he added.

The UPDJC meeting discussed six topics related to the political sector to be negotiated during this round of the conference: sovereignty, the practice of sovereignty, equality, self-determination, federal Union principles, and a multi-party democratic system.

The meeting reached an agreement on 21 political points, 10 economic points, four social issue points, and six points regarding land, resources and the environment, according to U Zaw Htay.

All are federal principles. Weve never had such agreements in our country before. All of the participants agreed that divisions and states should have their own constitutions for self-determination. The upcoming conference will be a milestone in the history of Myanmar, said U Zaw Htay.

While the right to draft individual constitutions is a breakthrough in the right for self-determination, the groups agreed that the 2008 military-drafted Constitution would still take precedence.

It is necessary to amend the 2008 Constitution to adopt constitutions for states that ensure equality, said Kachin ethnic leader Dr. Tu Ja, who attended the UPDJC meeting.

If the Union Peace Conference agrees to adopt federalism, the [2008] Constitution must be changed and the Union Parliament must approve a new federal Constitution, he added.

The coming Union Peace Conference will hold group-based and sector-based discussions and make decisions through voting, according to U Zaw Htay.

Agreements made at each conference will be signed and become parts of a Union Accord. After all of the discussions are over, the complete and final Union Accord will emerge, he said.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.
Burma Five Bodies Found in Buthidaung

A clock tower in the center of Buthidaung town. / Ministry of Information / Facebook

RANGOON  Border police unearthed five bodies in Tin May village tract of Buthidaung Township, Arakan State on Saturday afternoon.

The five men were allegedly killed in an accident with an improvised explosive device near Thae Ne village on May 3, police official Ko Kyaw Kyaw of nearby Kyi Kan Pyin border post told The Irrawaddy on Monday.

The bodies were discovered after police launched an investigation in the area on May 5 and found materials that could be used in manufacturing explosives, the police officer said.

One body was found on May 7 with the help of local residents and village administrators, he said.

According to the police officer, local villagers testified to border police that two of the deceased were Pakistanis providing militant training in the area.

Police did not obtain any official identification to verify the mens nationalities.

A resident of Buthidaung Township who works at a government school told The Irrawaddy over the phone on Monday that local sources had reported that the deceased were all from the village and surrounding area, and were not foreigners.

Authorities transferred the bodies to Buthidaung general hospital for medical examination on Sunday.

A State Counselors Office statement on Monday stated that five bodies had been found and police were investigating.
Burma Heavy Wind Kills Two and Injures Six in Sagaing

Heavy wind damaged dozens of houses in Sagaing Division. / Sagaing Regional Information Page / Facebook

MANDALAY  Heavy wind killed two people, injured six, and destroyed dozens of homes in Kani Township, Sagaing Division, as strong winds hit the region for the second time this month.

A woman in her 50s and her 20-year-old son died when their home collapsed as the winds hit Quarter No. 3.

Quarter No. 3 suffered the most damage. Almost all of the homes in the quarter were destroyed, said U Tun Tun Naing, a Sagaing divisional lawmaker from Kani Township.

Six other people were injured and are currently hospitalized at Kani General Hospital, while some 100 homes, and government and office buildings, were destroyed.

The lawmaker said the town needs aid to rebuild, as this is the second incident this month.

Some of the homes were just renovated when the wind struck again. Without aid, reconstruction will be difficult, he said.

Heavy winds on May 6 destroyed some 600 homes in the region.

Sagaing Division Chief Minister U Myint Naing visited the area on Monday and said the divisional government was planning to give financial support to the families who suffered fatalities, injuries and loss of property.

Strong winds and heavy rains, signs of the upcoming monsoon season, hit upper Burma on Sunday, primarily in Sagaing and Mandalay.

Meteorologist U Tun Lwin forecasted that from Monday, monsoons would bring greetings of heavy wind, rain, hail and thunder to many regions of the country.
Burma KBZ Employee Arrested for Forging Banknotes

Money-forging equipment seized by police at the suspects guesthouse. / Hintharnee / The Irrawaddy

RANGOON and MOULMEIN  A junior clerk from a branch of Burmas largest private bank, KBZ, in Karen States Hpa-An Township was arrested for possession of forged bank notes in Thaton Township of Mon State on Friday, according to Thaton Township police.

Police arrested the 22-year-old junior clerk Chit Ko Ko Lin in a guesthouse in Thaton and discovered a bag with 48 forged bank notes as well as templates and printing machines. He remains in police custody.

The senior managing director of KBZ U Nyo Myint confirmed that the staff member, who very recently joined the Hpa-an branch, had been arrested.

He claimed that as the incident happened outside of office hours and in a neighboring township, KBZ had no responsibility or connection to the issue.

He acknowledged that police opened the case against Chit Ko Ko Lin under Articles 105 and 106 of the Central Bank of Myanmar Lawenacted during former president Thein Seins administration.

The company would not file a separate lawsuit as Chit Ko Ko Lin had already been expelled for misconduct, he added.

Article 105 states that those using counterfeit currency can be imprisoned for a maximum of three years, or a fine, or both. Article 106 issues a punishment of between 10 and 20 years in prison for issuing counterfeit currency.

U Nyo Myint said it was the first such arrest of staff in decades.

He was a little concerned that the case would damage KBZs reputation and reiterated that the crime could not have been committed at the bank as they use counterfeit currency detecting machines.

There is certainly no reason this should damage our image, he said, adding, I would like to encourage our customers to absolutely believe us and move forward as normal.
Burma NCA Signatories Team Urges Govt to Allow for Dialogue

Members of the Peace Process Steering Team (PPST) meet in Chiang Mai, Thailand, over the weekend to discuss the governments implementation of the national ceasefire agreement. / The Irrawaddy

CHIANG MAI, Thailand  A team providing leadership in the peace talks for eight signatories of the nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA) has urged the government to let two of its members hold national level dialogue before the second round of the 21st Century Panglong peace conference.

The Peace Process Steering Team (PPST), led by the Karen National Union (KNU) chairman Saw Mutu Say Poe, met in Chiang Mai, Thailand, over the weekend to discuss the prevention of the Arakan Liberation Party (ALP) and the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) from conducting ethnic-based national-level political dialogues.

The dialogue collects public opinion on issues such as political rights, land disputes, and the environment, which will be shared by representatives at the Panglong conferencealso known as the Union Peace Conference (UPC)to begin on May 24.

The dialoguesbased on region, ethnicity and themeare a mandatory step in the process laid out by the NCA. The government, however, has not allowed the ALP to hold public consultations, citing the instability due to ongoing conflict in Arakan State.

The Burma Armys reluctance to allow the RCSS to gather the public in the Shan State capital Taunggyi has delayed the groups attempt for ethnic-based dialogue.

ALP vice chairman Khaing Soe Naing Aung said the PPST would send a letter to State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma Army commander-in-chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing asking for permission to allow his group to conduct national dialogue at a suitable place.

The ALP is ready to conduct our dialogue, and we think it would just take a day to do so, he told The Irrawaddy on Sunday.

The ALP has formed a committee comprising its members, the Arakan National Party, and civil society members for the dialogue, said Khaing Soe Naing Aung, adding that they just need the governments permission to proceed.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said Rakhine is a sensitive place to conduct national level dialogue at the moment, he said. But we have other places that are not very sensitive, like Yangon, [southern Arakan townships] Thandwe or Kyaukphyu, which are not in northern Rakhine State. Our request has been repeatedly rejected.

The State Counselor turned down the ALPs request on April 24 to hold ethnic-based national level dialogue.

The situation in Arakan State has remained volatile since the Burma Army began clearance operations after militants attacked border police outposts there on Oct. 9; a Rohingya group calling itself Harakah al-Yaqin claimed responsibility for the attacks.

During the operations by security forces that followed, hundreds of Rohingya Muslims were reportedly killed and about 75,000 fled to Bangladesh, according to the United Nations.

U Khaing Soe Naing Aung said participants of the ethnic-based national-level dialogue would be of Rakhine ethnicity and its sub-tribes, and there would be no representatives from the Rohingya community, a majority in northern Arakan but a minority in the state as a whole.

On Friday, the Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee (UPDJC), led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, discussed recommendations collected at government-led events and from public consultations at national-level dialogues of the KNU, the Pa-O National Liberation Organization (PNLO), the Chin National Front (CNF), and the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF).

The recommendations, categorized as political, economic, social, security, and land and environment, will be negotiated at the Union Peace Conference and, once they are agreed upon, signed as Union accords.

The RCSS has stated concerns that the views of people who live in its territory will not be heard at the Union Peace Conference.

We do not want that to become an obstacle for the peace process, so we shared our concerns with the PPST and requested some time for us to find a way to overcome it, said Sai Laeng, a leading member of the RCSSs peace implementation committee.

Both the ALP and RCSS have stated that they will not skip the upcoming Union Peace Conference, regardless of whether they can hold national level dialogues before the conference.

Sai Laeng said the RCSS would consult with the Committee for Shan State Unity this week to find a way to reflect the Shan State peoples wishes in the peace process.
Here are some recent highlights from around the IP blogosphere:





The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts filed a suit against photographer Lynn Goldsmith; the suit asks the Southern District of New York Court (SDNY) to declare that the Andy Warhol Prince Series did not infringe on Defendants copyright, that the portraits in the series are transformative works protected by fair use, and that Defendants claim is barred by the equitable doctrine of laches. The case is The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Lynn Goldsmith and Lynn Goldsmith, Ltd. Marie-Andree Weiss considers the claim and the Fair Use Factors. Marie-Andree Weiss considers the claim and the Fair Use Factors.

Are my stripes distinctive?

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) found that the European Union Trade Mark three-striped marks", owned by the German sportswear manufacturer Adidas AG, did not enable consumers to identify clothing items as originating from a particular producer. Adidas AG also failed with its claim that the three-striped mark had acquired distinctiveness through use based despite the 12,000 pages of evidence. Class 46 Blog discusses some of the observations made by the EUIPO concerning the consumer's perception of the Contested Mark.

JIPLPs latest Current Intelligence covers the case of Lacostes registration of a Crocodile trade mark for goods in classes 11, 20 and 21 which was rejected by the Turkish Court of Cassation. In this matter, the court provided detailed criteria to assess the scope of protection of a well-known trade mark in relation to goods and services different from those for which the trade mark is registered.

Over on the SPC blog, Catherine discusses Mr Justice Arnolds decision (

, [2017] EWHC 987 (Pat)) relating to the validity of Searles supplementary protection certificate (SPC) to darunavir in light of Article 3(a) of the SPC Regulation.

The Canadian Parliamentary Budget Officer released a

last week providing its estimate on the economic impact of the Canada - EU Trade Agreement. Michael Geist gives a summary and over view of the report.

EP Law updates us on a recent case in the Supreme Court of the Netherlands - Sun Pharmaceutical Industries (Europe) B.V. v. Novartis AG

. The matter involved a claim for use of zoledronic acid in the preparation of a medicament for the treatment of osteoporosis, owned by Novartis. However, Sun Pharmaceutical markets a zoledronic acid product with a carve-out for osteoporosis, but had entered a tender for the insurance company VGZ which did not distinguish between indications for the product. Novartis instituted proceedings for indirect infringement and the Court of Appeal held that, other than the first instance preliminary relief judge, and other than the English High Court and Court of Appeal, the patent was entitled to its priority claim.




Burma Refugees Asked To Visit Repatriation Center For Interviews

A UNHCR invitation letter shown by an invitee in Mae La Oon camp, Thailand. / Saw Yan Naing / The Irrawaddy

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has invited refugees to discuss a voluntary repatriation plan in Mae La Oon camp, one of nine refugee camps in Thailand along the Thai-Burma border.

According to sources in the camp, the UNHCR invited refugees who expressed interest in returning to Burma to visit the volunteer repatriation center (VRC) office, which would facilitate return arrangements for the refugees.

However, The Irrawaddy reporter also found some people who were invited for interviews despite not wanting to return.

A refugee housewife, Ger Tha Moe (nickname) told The Irrawaddy in Mae La Oon camp: I dont want to return home and I didnt contact them [VRC]. I dont know why they asked me to come in for an interview.

The invitation letter read: the following persons are kindly requested to be at the place mentioned here below in the camp for the interview. Please take your UN Households registration with you.

Ger Tha Moe was requested at the VRC office on Tuesday.

I will go and ask them [the UNHCR] if they can ask the Burma Army to withdraw its troops from my village. I want to know why they asked us to go home, added Ger Tha Moe.

Ger Tha Moe and her family have lived in several refugee camps in Thailand for more than two decades since fleeing northern Karen State, which is a Karen National Unions Brigade 5 controlled area.

Although the Burma Army and the KNU signed a ceasefire agreement, there are still Burma Army troops near many villages and some civilians do not feel safe returning home at this point.

We dare not go home because there are Burma Army troops and landmines near our village. If theyll withdraw their troops, well go home right away on our own, said Ger Tha Moe.

She had previously applied for resettlement in the United States but her application is pending as she was told her husband did not qualify for the resettlement program because he did not live in a camp. Ger Tha Moe said he does live in a camp and has a UN registration card.

Vivian Tan, the spokesperson for the UNHCR in Asia, told The Irrawaddy in an email that she was not aware of this particular case and would have to look into it further.

Refugees who are interested in voluntary repatriation can approach us at the VRC for more information, she said, adding, If it was a misunderstanding, we will need to check with colleagues on the ground.

Sources in Mae La Oon refugee camp also told The Irrawaddy that several woman and families had been requested to visit the VRC office in the past month, many of whom were not interested in returning and had not contacted the VRC.

There are VRC offices in all nine refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. They discuss safety and support for those who want to be repatriated.

As the peace process is underway and financial support has been declining along the border, the Thai and Burmese governments, as well as international non-governmental organizations, have been preparing for refugee repatriation in recent years.

There are more than 90,000 refugees living in the nine camps along the border.

Last month, international agencies and INGOs including The Border Consortium (TBC) also reduced a stipend given to about 10,000 community workers in the camps due to declining funding.

CORRECTION: While the invitation letters have caused some confusion within the refugee community, the UNHCR has looked into the case in question and told The Irrawaddy that in this instance, the letter was a request to come to the VRC for resettlement counseling.
Burma USDP Refuses to Make Recommendations to Arakan State Advisory Commission

USDP chairman U Than Htay, Arakan State Advisory Committee member Ghassan Salame, and other commission members at a meeting. / U Than Htay / Facebook

RANGOON Burmas main opposition and former ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) refused to make recommendations to the Arakan State Advisory Commission in a meeting on Sunday.

Members of the Kofi Annan-led Arakan State Advisory Commission met with USDP chairman U Than Htay and the partys central executive committee members on Sunday. They previously met with the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) partys central executive committee members in Rangoon on Friday to discuss their upcoming final report.

The commission explained what they had done and asked for comments on their interim report [launched in March] and recommendations for their final report, Dr. Nanda Hla Myint, a USDP spokesperson who was in the meeting, told The Irrawaddy.

The commission will submit a final report to the government in August.

Since its formation, we have announced that we dont recognize the commission. So, as a party, we refused to comment, Nanda Hla Myint said.

The USDP objected to the formation of the commission, stating that the government was allowing foreign interference in internal affairs.

State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi founded the commission in August last year as an impartial body to recommend lasting solutions to complex and delicate issues in Arakan State. It is composed of six locals and three international experts, and is chaired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Though we didnt make any recommendations, our chairman and partys CEC members  who have served as Union foreign, border and immigration affairs ministers and handled Arakan State issues in the past  shared their personal experience on the issues, said Nanda Hla Myint.

USDP chairman U Than Htay said the partys objection to the commission still holds. He also said the citizenship verification process in Arakan State has been delayed as changing race and ethnicity classifications has been prioritized over gaining citizenship  referring to the Rohingya Muslims, who have long been stateless and kept in apartheid-like conditions in Burma, which does not recognize them as citizens but instead as interlopers from Bangladesh.

The Irrawaddy was unable to reach commission members for comment at the time of publication.

CORRECTION: This article was edited to correct erroneous information that the commission had met with Burma Army commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing.
Biology Major Awarded Prestigious Research Fellowship

Brooke Koebele 19

May 15, 2017

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. Brooke Koebele 19 has been awarded a prestigious American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Undergraduate Research Fellowship to determine variations between related members of bacteriophages, or viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria.

A native of Wheeler, Ill., Koebeles award includes a $4,000 stipend for 10 weeks of full-time employment in research and $2,000 for travel to attend and present her research at the ASM Microbe Meeting next summer in Atlanta. Richard Alvey, visiting assistant professor of biology at Illinois Wesleyan, will mentor and advise Koebeles work.

A biology major, Koebeles project is entitled Determination of Host Range Variation between Highly Related Members of a Novel Cluster of Rhodobacter capsulatus Bachteriophages. The enormous number and diversity of bacteriophages (or phages) means they play an important role in nearly every ecosystem, yet scientists dont know much about they evolved or how different phage populations are related to each other. Illinois Wesleyan students isolate bacteriophages from local soil, extract DNA from the phages, then sequence and analyze the phage genomes within their biology undergraduate programs as part of SEA-PHAGES (Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science), which is jointly administered by the University of Pittsburgh and the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science Education division.

Koebele said her study involves two different phages previously discovered by IWU students  Oceanus and Dormio.

These two viruses are almost identical in their DNA sequence, but Dormio has 14 genes that Oceanus does not have, Koebele explained. Dormio is able to infect a different host, or different type of bacteria, that Oceanus cannot. We believe that one or more of the 14 genes present in Dormios genome is the reason for this difference. This summer Koebele will utilize several different biological techniques, such as in-host homologous recombination, polymerase chain reaction, and cloning, to determine which of Dormios 14 genes is the reason for the variation in host range.

At Illinois Wesleyan Koebele is a teaching assistant for the SEA-PHAGES lab and for microbiology courses, a general chemistry tutor, and a lifeguard at the Shirk Center. She is a member of Titan Catholic spiritual student organization and the intramural volleyball team.

The ASM Undergraduate Research Fellowship is aimed at highly competitive students who wish to pursue graduate careers in microbiology. After graduation from Illinois Wesleyan, Koebele plans a career as a physician. She is on the M.D./Ph.D. track in hopes of broadening her understanding of the microbial disease process, host-pathogen interactions, and the mechanisms of immunity. An ideal career path is one where I can help others through controlling infectious disease, she said. This fellowship will give me the platform I need to begin my research career.
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By Ali R. Abootalebi | (Informed Comment) |  

President Trump recently told the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas, that Ive always heard that perhaps the toughest deal to make is the deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians,Lets see if we can prove them wrong, insisting that We will get it done. This is while, vice president Mike Pence said some days prior that President Trump was still giving serious consideration to moving the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Interestingly enough, the administrations front men in negotiations between Palestinians and the Israelis are none other than Jared Kushner, presidents son-in-law, and David Friedman, a lawyer with long history of ties with Israel; both men having strong ideological and business ties with Israel. Then, Armin Rosen in an article in Foreign Policy argues that President Trumps front man negotiator in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Jason Greenblatt, is perfectly unqualified and that might be exactly why he pulls off a peace deal. This is because he is not part of the Washington establishment and entrenched interests. Although there is merit in this observation, reasons behind the failure of a Palestinian-Arab-Israeli peace agreement is a great deal more complex. No, Mr. President, it is harder than you think.

Whether deliberately stated to gain political score or naively believing a quick-fix is within reach, this is purely a simplification of the situation and closer to a fantasy. Beyond such declarations remains the hard reality of the state of the conflict and what has prevented its resolution throughout decades: the imbalance in power of the opposing negotiating sides. First, Arab governments have been too inept and corrupt to effectively negotiate on behalf of their own peoples and in the interest of the Palestinians. Second, successive Israeli governments have had the upper hand in power parameters and in negotiations, with the intention to dictate the terms of a Palestinian surrender while neutralizing Arab States security threats. Finally, the United States has been far from a neutral third party mediator, using its hard and soft power in the service of a peace settlement or a conflict resolution and not reaching for a true positive peace.

It is well known that the mother of all conflicts is the Arab (Palestinian)-Israeli conflict that has engaged major actors in global politics. After decades of conflict and repeated wars since 1948, the end result for the Arab States has been military defeat and loss of territories and national pride. Years of negotiations and attempts at safeguarding peace has resulted in a cold peace between Israel and some Arab StatesEgypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994and a long arduous negotiation process resulting in the 1993 Declaration of Principles and Palestinian self-rule in parts of the occupied territories. That process, as imperfect as it was, finally saw its demise after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and the rise of political right in Israel in the ensuing years. The failure of Camp David II in 2000 effectively declared the demise of the Oslo Process.

Today, the PNA is in charge of merely 18% of the West Bank, where it can exercise respectable but not complete sovereign control in the designated Area A. Areas B (22%) and Area C (60%) are outside PNAs sovereign control, where Israel has the ultimate say in matters of security and all that falls within its security parameters, including, communication, transportation, and all matters of governance in general. The Palestinian people remain divided between those living in the West Bank under the PNA rules and those living under Hamas control in the Gaza Strip. Israeli settlements have expanded in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where settlers population now exceeds over one-half a million. Gaza is a vast prison camp surrounded by Israeli and Egyptian soldiers, and at the mercy of political events happening outside its borders. Syrias Golan Heights and its precious water resources also remain under Israeli control.

Wider regional and global events have overshadowed and marginalized the plight of the Palestinian people. These events include, but not limited to: the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks on America, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), Israeli invasion of Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008; 2014), the rise of Hamas in Gaza (2006), Arab Spring (2011present), U.S. and NATO intervention and regime change in Libya (2011), political change in Egypt and the 2015 military Coup detat with silent U.S. approval, Saudi Arabian intervention in Bahrain (2011) and Yemen (2015), and the ongoing, devastating war in Syria since 2011.

The latest blow to the Arab States and the Palestinian leadership and people is the destruction of Iraqi and Syrian states and infrastructure and the threat of Daesh and instability to Lebanese and Jordanian national cohesion, as well as the Palestinian refugees. The Arab world, for the most part, remains divided and uncertain over domestic and regional security threats, only to show frivolous unity in the Arab League meetings. The rise of Iranian power is the Arab States latest excuse to deflect their endemic problems in governance by inflaming a Sunni-Shia divide and the fabrication of a security threat to their respective states.

The security threat to many Arab governments emanates from within these countries. Many Arab regimes have for decades neglected their own population and have ruled with impunity, pillaging national treasures in the service of the elite and the privileged. Gilbert Achcar explaining Arab states political economies, argues that the peculiar modality of the capitalist mode of production dominant in the Arab region is a mix of patrimonialism, nepotism, and crony capitalism; and pillaging of public property, swollen bureaucracy, and generalized corruption. All of this occurs against a background of great sociopolitical instability and impotence or even nonexistence of law.

The central threat to Arab regimes existence is due to the archaic nature of Arab states governance, where people are treated as subjects and not as citizens. The Arab Spring movement in 2011 was a manifestation of Arab peoples frustration with governance that unfortunately has since produced more hardship instead of liberation. Arab populace for long has been kept marginalized. The Iranian threat to Arab regimes is not due to its military might and/or threat of an invasion. In spite of all its shortcomings, majority of Iranians today consider themselves as participatory citizens in Irans political economy, and not as mere voiceless subjects of the ruling elites.

The Palestinian leadership for its part has failed to either chart its struggle separate from the Arab States or maintain a degree of independence free from the Arab regimes control. So, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and later the PNA, have remained dependent on the Arab regimes largesse and political whims and power play. The history of the conflict testifies in many occasions when Palestinians have been victimized by the Arab regimes armies and their cronies. Yasser Arafat endlessly struggled to keep Palestinian national aspirations for statehood alive while facing Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese military and militia onslaughts and resisting Israeli war machine, control, and occupation.

The end of the cold war pushed a desperate Palestinian leadership into a process of negotiation that was paved from the beginning with unsurmountable obstacles, destined to failure. The Oslo process only neutralized the Jordanian threat and left the Palestinian leadership at the mercy of the Israeli protagonists and their American supporters. The failure of the Camp David II (2000) showed the total weakness and dependence of the Palestinian leadership on their Arab patrons and the United States who in the end blamed Yasser Arafat for its failure. Abandoned by the Arab States, Yasser Arafat could not betray the Palestinian peoples trust and agree to the terms of the agreement: to effectively forsake the dream of statehood and control over East Jerusalem and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. The rise of Hamas and the split in leadership since 2006 has eroded the Palestinian position. President Mahmoud Abbas term ended in 2009 and he has ruled since without a mandate from its peoplethe irony of Arab leaders political legitimacy. There is also no united front in support of the Palestinian people in the Arab League. Unsurprisingly, Iran, and not Israel, the threat of the Daesh, sectarian violence, chaos of war and refugees, and extra-regional invasion and intervention is named the undeclared enemy of the Arab regimes!

Israel in the past seventy years has been transformed from a small state with a population of less than one million to a regional hegemon with the fifteenth powerful military in the world, nuclear weapons, an advanced economy, and a democratic political system, imperfect as it is. The cold peace with Egypt and Jordan still is holding and the flux of over one million Russian Jews in the 1990s brought more economic vigor, as well as challenges, to its political economy. Israel with a population of just over seven million had a GDP of $312 billion and ranked 34th in the world in 2016. Israeli democracy has many faults, including the ambiguity over its secular and religious divide and its overall treatment of its twenty percent non-Jewish citizens. Yet, Israeli citizens participation in politics and civil society is highly valued.

Israeli politics have shifted to the right since the demise of the Oslo Process and the years of increased violence in the 2000-05 period, coinciding with Americas declared war on global terrorism in 2001. The Obama years of presidency will be remembered as a disappointment to many Israeli pundits. Obama met with Prime Minister Netanyahu 17 times, approved in 2016 a sizeable $38 billion aid for the decade ahead, and yet could not convince Israeli leadership to stop its settlement activities in the occupied territories, effectively killing any prospects for meaningful negotiations.

The unbiased and keen observer notices that the United States has not been completely an honest broker throughout the years of the conflict. The U.S. pursued a four-tiered policy of anti-communism, stability, free flow of cheap oil, and ensuring Israeli security throughout the cold war. Such umbrella policy goals often meant U.S. support for authoritarian Arab regimes and in Iran, large cache of arms transfer, political, and covert and overt military intervention. The U.S. policy in the region since 1990 has continued the tradition of strong support for Israel and the defense of authoritarian but friendly Arab regimes, significant arms transfer, and a declared war on terrorism that has effectively brought chaos and destruction to much of the region.

The United States policy preferences have helped perpetuate a dominant Israeli position in its relations with the Arab states and the unresolved Palestinian dilemma. The U.S. continues to overlook Israeli stockpile of nuclear weapons, its illegal occupation of Arab lands and settlement activities, and its repeated violation of its Arab neighbors national sovereignty through military incursions. This has been occurring in defiance of international law and in violation of the United States declared core valueshuman rights, democracy, and the rule of law.

What has remained constant in U.S. Middle East policy since 1945 is inattention paid to the legitimate will of the Arab populace for popular participation and democracy, and national development and pride! Therefore, Arab peoples frustration with authoritarian rule, corruption, military defeat on the battlefield (1967; 1973; 1991; 2003; 2011), and low level of socioeconomic development in human capital, technological penetration, and innovation instigated the Arab Spring revolt in 2011.

Today, the U.S. policy in the Middle East is viewed as unpopular, biased and even hostile to the welfare of the people in the region. The U.S. remains extremely unpopular in the Arab world, despite millions spent on efforts at public diplomacy during the G W Bush and Obama administrations. A 2016 survey on Arab public opinion of the United States policy in 12 Arab countries, that included face to face interviews with 18,310 respondents, finds that that sixty-three percent of respondents believed the United States to be the greatest threat to stability in the Arab region, beating out Iran, Russia, and China, while falling short behind Israel. Over a quarter of respondents believed the United States policy towards Palestine, Syria, and Iraq to be either negative or very negative while almost a quarter believed the same of the U.S.s policy towards Yemen and Libya.

The resolution of the Arab (Palestinian)Israeli conflict is intimately related to the political and socioeconomic realities in Arab countries, Israel, and the U.S. view and policy practices in the region. Arab politics and international politics matter. The optimism expressed by President Trump and Armin Rosen is thus unwarranted. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is not primed for a newcomers fresh thinking, and U.S. involvement in the conflict has not been spearheaded by a quarter century of careful, deliberative, and well-intentioned professional U.S. diplomacy.

In the absence of a viable two-state solution to the conflict, while also resolving the Syrian and Lebanese concerns over their territorial disputes, a one-state solution may be, by default, emerging. Palestinians, like others in Arab countries, yearn for political expression and the right to have a say in determining their lives. The millennial Arab generation deserves a better future. Despite their differences and grievances, many Israeli Arab citizens still view the Israeli state with a high degree of legitimacy to rule. A surprisingly two-thirds of Israels Arab citizens are pleased with the situation of the state in Israel. Their rating of its achievements (except in defense issues) is even higher than that of the Jews. A very large majority (86%) of the Jews and a small majority (51%) of the Arabs are proud of being Israelis. This is perhaps because, in spite it all, what matters most in governance is that people everywhere wish to be free from severe socioeconomic hardship and/or political conditions that humiliate them on daily basis.

Ali R. Abootalebi is Professor of Middle Eastern and Global Politics in the Department of Political Science, UWEC. He is the author of Islam and democracy: State-Society Relations in Developing Countries, 1980-1994 (Garland, 2000), and, coauthored with Stephen Hill, Introduction to World Politics: Prospects and Challenges for the United States (Kendall Hunt, 2013) and more than fifty articles on Iran, Arab Politics, Civil Society and Democracy and U.S. foreign policy.

-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

CGTN: Trump peace effort
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TeleSur |  

Authorities warned that the cholera outbreak could lead to an unprecedented disaster if not managed immediately.

Officials in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, controlled by the armed Houthi movement, declared a state of emergency on Sunday amid an outbreak of cholera that has killed 115 people from late April to May and left thousands infected.

Calling to avert an unprecedented disaster, Yemens Health Ministry has urged several humanitarian organizations and aid donors to help deal with the epidemic. Yemens health care system has severely deteriorated due to the ongoing civil war that has also displaced millions, the state news agency, Saba, told Reuters.

Yemen is reeling from the conflict between Houthi rebels, aligned with Iran, and a Western-backed, Saudi-led coalition. More than 10,000 people have been killed, mostly by almost-daily air strikes, since the fighting began.

According to the United Nations, only a few medical facilities are still functioning and two-thirds of the population are without access to safe drinking water. Yemen authorities first reported the outbreak in October 2016 and since then the outbreaks of cholera are becoming more frequent. According to World Health Organization Sanaa has been worst hit by the outbreaks, followed by the surrounding province of Amanat al-Semah. Cases in other major cities including Hodeidah, Taiz, and Aden have also been reported.

According to WHO, the medicines and medical supplies, including cholera kits, oral rehydration solutions, and intravenous fluids as well as medical furniture and equipment have been distributed at the diarrhea treatment centers. Ten new treatment centers are being established in affected areas.

Dr. Nevio Zagaria, WHO representative in Yemen, said in a statement, We are very concerned with the re-emergence of cholera across several areas of Yemen in the past couple of weeks. Efforts must be scaled-up now to contain the outbreak and avoid a dramatic increase in cases of the diarrhoeal disease.

So far, the diarrheal disease has killed 115 people since late April, according to WHO, and 2,752 people have had suspected cases. WHO estimates nearly 7.6 million people live in areas at high risk of cholera transmission.

WHO is in full emergency mode to contain the recent upsurge of suspected cholera cases, Zagaria added. Containing the spread of the outbreak is a high priority for WHO and we are coordinating efforts with all parties and with our health, water, and sanitation partners to scale up an integrated and effective response to the cholera epidemic.

According to the U.N., nearly 17 million of Yemens 26 million people lack sufficient food and at least three million malnourished children are in grave peril.

Via TeleSur



Related video added by Juan Cole:

CGNT: Cholera outbreak kills at least 115 in war-torn Yemen
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By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) |  

The closest I ever got to Mosul, Iraqs second largest city, was 1,720.7 miles away  or so the Internet assures me. Although Ive had a lifelong interest in history, I know next to nothing about Mosuls, nor do I have more than a glancing sense of what it looks like, or more accurately what it looked like when all its buildings, including those in its Old City, were still standing. It has  or at least in better times had  a population of at least 1.8 million, not one of whom have I ever met and significant numbers of whom are now either dead, wounded, uprooted, or in desperate straits.

Consider what I never learned about Mosul my loss, a sign of my ignorance. Yet, in recent months, little as I know about the place, its been on my mind  in part because whats now happening to that city will be the worlds loss as well as mine.

In mid-October 2016, the U.S.-backed Iraqi army first launched an offensive to retake Mosul from the militants of the Islamic State. Relatively small numbers of ISIS fighters had captured it in mid-2014 when the previous version of the Iraqi military (into which the U.S. had poured more than $25 billion) collapsed ignominiously and fled, abandoning weaponry and even uniforms along the way. It was in Mosuls Great Mosque that the existence of the Islamic State was first triumphantly proclaimed by its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi.

On the initial day of the offensive to recapture the city, the Pentagon was already congratulating the Iraqi military for being ahead of schedule in a campaign that was expected to take weeks or even months. Little did its planners  who had been announcing its prospective start for nearly a year  know. A week later, everything was still proceeding according to our plan, claimed then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. By the end of January 2017, after 100 days of fierce fighting, the eastern part of that city, divided by the Tigris River, was more or less back in government hands and it had, according to New York Times reporters on the scene, been spared the wholesale destruction inflicted on other Iraqi cities like Ramadi and Fallujah, even though those residents who hadnt fled were reportedly scratching out a primitive existence, deprived of electricity, running water and other essential city services.

And that was the good news. More than 100 days later, Iraqi troops continue to edge their way through embattled western Mosul, with parts of it, including the treacherous warren of streets in its Old City, still in the hands of ISIS militants amid continuing bitter building-to-building fighting. The Iraqi government and its generals still insist, however, that everything will be over in mere weeks. An estimated thousand or so ISIS defenders (of the original 4,000-8,000 reportedly entrenched in the city) are still holding out and will assumedly fight to the death. U.S. air power has repeatedly been called in big time, with civilian deaths soaring, and hundreds of thousands of its increasingly desperate and hungry inhabitants still living in battle-scarred Mosul as Islamic State fighters employ countless bomb-laden suicide vehicles and even small drones.

After seven months of unending battle in that single city, perhaps it shouldnt be surprising that Mosul has receded from the news here, even as civilian casualties grow, at least half a million Iraqis have been displaced, and the Iraqi military has suffered grievous losses.

Though theres been remarkably little writing about it, heres what now seems obvious: when the fighting is finally over and the Islamic State defeated, the losses will be so much more widespread than that. Despite initial claims that the Iraqi military (and the U.S. Air Force) were taking great care to avoid as much destruction as possible in an urban landscape filled with civilians, the rules of engagement have since changed and its clear that, in the end, significant swathes of Iraqs second largest city will be left in ruins. In this, it will resemble so many other cities and towns in Iraq and Syria, from Fallujah to Ramadi, Homs to Aleppo.

The Disappearance of Mosul

At a moment when Donald Trump makes headlines daily with almost any random thing he says, the fate of Mosul doesnt even qualify as a major news story. What happens in that city, however, will be no minor thing. It will matter on this increasingly small planet of ours.

Whats to come is also, unfortunately, reasonably predictable. Eight, nine, or more months after this offensive was launched, the grim Islamic State in Mosul will undoubtedly be destroyed, but so will much of the city in a region that continues to be  to invent a word  rubblized.

When Mosul is officially retaken, if not ahead of schedule, then at least according to plan, the proud announcements of victory in the war against ISIS will make headlines. Soon after, however, Mosul will once again disappear from our American world and worries. Yet that will undoubtedly only be the beginning of the story in a world in crisis. Fourteen years have passed since the U.S. invaded Iraq and punched a hole in the oil heartlands of the Middle East. In the wake of that invasion, states have been crumbling or simply imploding and terror movements growing and spreading, while wars, ethnic slaughter, and all manner of atrocities have engulfed an ever-widening region. Millions of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, and others have been uprooted, sent into exile in their own countries, or fled across borders to become refugees. In Mosul alone, untold numbers of people whose fathers, mothers, grandparents, children, friends, and relatives were slaughtered in the Iraqi Armys offensive or simply murdered by ISIS will be left homeless, often without possessions, jobs, or communities in the midst of once familiar places that have been transformed into rubble.

Mosul now lacks an airport, a railroad station, and a university  all destroyed in the recent fighting. Initial estimates suggest that its rebuilding will cost billions of dollars over many years. And its just one of many cities in such a state. The question is: Where exactly will the money to rebuild come from? After all, the price of oil is at present below $50 a barrel, the Iraqi and Syrian governments lack resources of every sort, and who can imagine a new Marshall Plan for the region coming from Donald Trumps America or, for that matter, anywhere else?

In other words, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Libyans, the Afghans, and others are likely, in the end, to find themselves alone in the ruins of their worlds with remarkably little recourse. With that in mind and given the record of those last 14 years, how exactly do you imagine that things will turn out for the inhabitants of Mosul, or Ramadi, or Fallujah, or cities yet to be destroyed? What new movements, ethnic struggles, and terror outfits will emerge from such a nightmare?

To put it another way, if you think that such a disaster will remain the possession of the Iraqis (Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans, and Afghans), then you havent been paying much attention to the history of the twenty-first century. You evidently havent noticed that Donald J. Trump won the last presidential election in the United States, in part by playing on fears of a deluge of refugees from the Middle East and of Islamic terrorism; that the British voted to leave the European Union in part based on similar fears; and that across Europe pressures over refugees and terror attacks have helped to alter the political landscape.

Where Is Globalization Now That We Need It?

To frame things slightly differently, let me ask another question entirely: In these last years, havent you wondered what ever happened to globalization and the endless media attention that was once paid to it? Not so very long ago we were being assured that this planet was binding itself into a remarkably tight knot of interconnectedness that was going to amaze us all. As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times put it in 1996, we were seeing the integration of free markets, nation-states, and information technologies to a degree never before witnessed, in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and countries to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever. All of this was to be fed and led by the United States, the last superpower standing, and as a result, the global playing field would miraculously be leveled on a planet becoming a mosaic of Pizza Huts, iMacs, and Lexuses.

Who of a certain age doesnt remember those years after the Soviet Union imploded when we all suddenly found ourselves in a single superpower world? It was a moment when, thanks to vaunted technological advances, it seemed blindingly clear to the cognoscenti that this was going to be a single-everything planet. We were all about to be absorbed into a single market for goods, capital, and commercial services from which, despite the worries of naysayers, almost everyone stood to gain. In a world not of multiple superpowers but of multiple supermarkets, we were likely to become both more democratic and more capitalistic by the year as an interlocking set of transnational corporate players, nations, and peoples, unified by a singularly interwoven set of communication systems (representing nothing short of an information revolution), triumphed, while poverty, that eternal plague of humanity, stood to lose out big time. Everything would be connected on what was, for the first time, to be a single, flattened planet.

It wont surprise you, Im sure, to be told that thats not exactly the planet were now on. Instead, whatever processes were at work, the result has been record numbers of billionaires, record levels of inequality, and refugees in numbers not seen since much of the world was in a state of collapse after World War II.

Still, dont you ever wonder where, conceptually speaking, globalization is now that we need it? I mean, did it really turn out that we werent living together on a single shrinking planet? Were the globalists of that moment inhabiting another planet entirely in another solar system? Or could it be that globalization is still the ruling paradigm here, but that whats globalizing isnt (or isnt just) Pizza Huts, iMacs, and Lexuses, but pressure points for the fracturing of our world?

The globalization of misery doesnt have the cachet of the globalization of plenty. It doesnt make for the same uplifting reading, nor does skyrocketing global economic inequality seem quite as thrilling as a leveling playing field (unless, of course, you happen to be a billionaire). And thanks significantly to the military efforts of the last superpower standing, the disintegration of significant regions of the planet doesnt quite add up to what the globalists had in mind for the twenty-first century. Failed states, spreading terror movements, all too many Mosuls, and the conditions for so much more of the same werent what globalization was supposed to be all about.

Perhaps, however, its time to begin reminding ourselves that were still on a globalizing planet, even if one experiencing pressures of an unexpected sort, including from the disastrous never-ending American war on terror. Its so much more convenient, of course, to throw the idea of globalization overboard and imagine that Mosul is thousands of miles away in a universe that bears next to no relation to our own.

What It Really Means to Be on a Flattening Planet

Its true that in France last week extremist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was defeated by a young, little known former investment banker and government minister, Emmanuel Macron, and the European Union preserved. As with an earlier election in Holland in which a similar right-wing candidate lost, this is being presented as potentially the high-water mark of whats now commonly called populism in Europe (or the Brexit-style fragmentation of that continent). But Id take such reassurances with a grain of salt, given the pressures likely to come. After all, in both Holland and France, two extreme nationalist parties garnered record votes based on anti-Islamic, anti-refugee sentiment and will, after the coming parliamentary elections in France, both be represented, again in record numbers, in their legislatures.

The rise of such populism  think of it as the authoritarian fragmentation of the planet  is already a global trend. So just imagine the situation four or potentially even eight years from now after Donald Trumps generals, already in the saddle, do their damnedest in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Theres no reason to believe that, under their direction, the smashing of key regions of the planet wont continue. Theres no reason to doubt that, in an expanding world of Mosuls  the Syrian capital of the Islamic State, Raqqa, is undoubtedly the next city in line for such treatment  victories wont produce a planet of greater ethnic savagery, religious extremism, military destruction, and chaos. This, in turn, ensures a further spread of terror groups and an even more staggering uprooting of peoples. (Its worth noting, for instance, that since the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Special Operations forces, al-Qaeda has grown, not shrunk, gaining yet more traction across the Greater Middle East.) So far, Americas permanent war on terror has helped produce a planet of fear, refugees on an almost unimaginable scale, and ever more terror. What else would you imagine could arise from the rubble of so many Mosuls?

If you dont think that this is an ever-more connected planet still being flattened (even if in quite a different way than expected), and that sooner or later the destruction of Mosul will reverberate in our world, too, then you dont get our world. Its obvious, for instance, that future Mosuls will only produce more refugees, and you already know where thats led, from Brexit to Donald Trump. Destroy enough Mosuls and, even in the heartland of the planets sole superpower, the fears of those who already feel theyve been left in a ditch will only rise (and be fed further by demagogues ready to use that global flow of refugees for their own purposes).

Given the transformations of recent years, just think what it will mean to uproot ever vaster populations, to set the homeless, the desperate, the angry, the hurt, and the vengeful  millions of adults and children whose lives have been devastated or destroyed  in motion. Imagine, for instance, what those pressures will mean when it comes to Europe and its future politics.

Think about whats to come on this small planet of ours  and thats without even mentioning the force that has yet to fully reveal itself in all its fragmenting and globalizing and leveling power. We now call it, mildly enough, climate change or global warming. Just wait until, in the decades to come, rising sea levels and extreme weather events put human beings in motion in startling ways (particularly given that the planets sole superpower is now run by men in violent denial of the very existence of such a force or the human sources of its power).

You want a shrinking planet? You want terror? You want globalization? Think about that. And do you wonder why, these days, I have Mosul on my mind?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dowers The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffers dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardts Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt

Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just one day left in our offer of a signed, personalized copy of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dowers highly praised new Dispatch Book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two, in return for a contribution of $100 ($125 if you live outside the United States). It will be taken off our donation page Monday afternoon, so check it out now. The good news is that the book itself will be available for years to come. As a gesture to this site, however, think about getting your hands on a copy of a great and disturbing book in the near future either at Amazon by clicking here (and so giving us a few extra cents at no extra cost to you) or by visiting the website of publisher Haymarket Books where its available at a significant discount by clicking here. Tom]

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TORONTO, May 15, 2017 /CNW/ - Avesoro Resources Inc. ("Avesoro" or the "Company"), the TSX and AIM listed West African gold producer, is pleased to provide a short update on its corporate strategy. Further to the Company's stated strategy to become a premier mid-tier African gold producer, the Company announces that it is currently considering a range of growth opportunities, including the potential acquisition of the Youga Gold Mine and Balogo deposit in Burkina Faso (the "Assets"). These Assets are currently owned by the Company's majority shareholder Avesoro Holdings Limited ("Avesoro Holdings").

Independent technical reports are currently being prepared on the Assets by CSA Global to provide a guide as to their valuation in any potential future transaction.

Shareholders should note that there can be no certainty that a transaction will be proposed by the Board, nor as to the terms or the timescale of any such transaction. Any future transaction, if proposed between the Company and its majority shareholder would be a related party transaction and as such would therefore require minority shareholder and regulatory approvals. The Company will, if appropriate, make a further announcement in due course.

Publication of presentation

Further information on the Assets can be found in a presentation titled "Q1 2017 Results Presentation" which is now available to view on the Company's website, www.avesoro.com.

About Avesoro Resources Inc.

The Company's assets include the New Liberty Gold Mine in Liberia (the "New Liberty Gold Mine," "New Liberty" or the "mine") which has an estimated proven and probable mineral reserve of 8.5 Mt with 924,000 ounces of gold grading 3.4 g/t and an estimated measured and indicated mineral resource of 9,796 Kt with 1,143,000 ounces of gold grading 3.63 g/t and an estimated inferred mineral resource of 5,730 Kt with 593,000 ounces of gold grading 3.2 g/t. A Definitive Feasibility Study ("DFS") has been completed, the first gold pour has taken place and commercial production has been declared. The foregoing mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates and additional information in connection therewith are set out in the Company's technical report dated March 25, 2015 and entitled "New Liberty Gold Project, Bea Mountain Mining Licence Southern Block, Liberia, West Africa, Definitive Project Plan.

The New Liberty Gold Mine is located within the Southern Block of the 100% owned Bea Mountain mining licence. This licence covers 478 km and has a 25 year, renewable, mineral development agreement. The Bea Mountain mining license also hosts additional gold projects of Ndablama, Gondoja, Weaju and Leopard Rock which are the focus of exploration programs during 2016. Ndablama has an indicated mineral resource of 386,000 ounces of gold grading 1.6 g/t and inferred mineral resource of 515,000 ounces of gold grading 1.7 g/t and Weaju has an inferred mineral resource of 178,000 ounces of gold grading 2.1 g/t. The Yambesei (473 km2), Archaen West (56 km2), Mabong (36.6 km2) and Mafa West (15.6 km2) licences will also be subject to preliminary reconnaissance geological work. The foregoing mineral resource estimates and additional information in connection therewith are set out in the Company's technical report dated December 1, 2014 and entitled "Ndablama and Weaju Gold Projects, Bea Mountain Mining Licence, Northern Block, Technical Report on Mineral Resources" ("Ndablama and Weaju Technical Report 2014").

The Company also has a gold exploration permit in Cameroon.

Qualified Persons

The Company's Qualified Person is Mark J. Pryor, who holds a BSc (Hons) in Geology & Mineralogy from Aberdeen University, United Kingdom and is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, a Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists and a registered Professional Natural Scientist (Pr.Sci.Nat) of the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions. Mark Pryor is an independent technical consultant with over 25 years of extensive global experience in exploration, mining and mine development and is a "Qualified Person" as defined in National Instrument 43 -101 "Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects" of the Canadian Securities Administrators and has reviewed and approves this press release.
Vancouver, B.C. (FSCwire) - ALX Uranium Corp. (ALX or the Company) (TSXV: AL; FSE: 6LLN; OTC: ALXEF) is pleased to announce the appointment of David Miller as a director of the Company. Mr. Miller is a businessman, professional economic geologist, and an elected member of the Wyoming Legislature. Mr. Miller served as the Chief Executive Officer of Strathmore Minerals Corp. prior to its merger with Energy Fuels in 2013. David's primary professional focus has been on mineral exploration, development and mining, and his career has spanned over 40 years with a chain of companies that started with Utah International in the United States, which evolved into AREVA, the French nuclear power conglomerate. In addition, he has consulted for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Commission) in Austria and China.

We are very pleased that David Miller has joined the Board of Directors of ALX, said Warren Stanyer, Chairman of ALX. David brings a wealth of experience to ALX in both geology and business and we look forward to his contribution to the growth of the Company.

Mr. Miller is a recognized expert in the nuclear and energy field and has been featured in recent years in the New York Times, BBC, CNBC, CNN, Business News Network, Wall Street Journal, Globe and Mail, and Barron's. He is also author of "Investing in the Great Uranium Bull Market". David is an eight-term member of the Wyoming Legislature and currently serves as Majority Floor Leader of the Wyoming House of Representatives. David graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in Geology. He is a Registered Professional Geologist in Wyoming, a Registered Member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration and is a Fellow in the Society of Economic Geologists. Mr. Miller's professional career has taken him worldwide, working with companies in Japan and South Korea, evaluating projects from Laos to Mongolia, Bolivia to Alaska, and in Canada. His expertise in commodities includes fissionable materials, precious and base metals, fossil fuels and lithium.

ALX also announces that its Board of Directors has approved the allocation of 400,000 incentive stock options to a director of the Company. The options are exercisable at $0.10 per share for a period of five years from issuance, and are subject to the following vesting provisions  one third (1/3) of the options will vest immediately, one third (1/3) in six months and one third (1/3) one year from the allocation date.

About ALX

ALX's mandate is to provide shareholders with multiple opportunities for discovery and value creation by building and optimizing a portfolio of prospective uranium exploration properties through staking, joint ventures, acquisitions and divestitures. The Company executes well-designed exploration programs using the latest technologies and has interests in approximately 140,000 hectares in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin. ALX is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada and its common shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "AL", on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol 6LLN and in the United States OTC under the symbol ALXEF. Technical reports are available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) for several of the Companys active properties.

For more information about the Company, please visit the ALX corporate website at www.alxuranium.com
Toronto, Ontario (FSCwire) - Tsodilo Resources Limited ("Tsodilo" or the "Company") (TSX-Venture Exchange: (TSD)) is pleased to provide an update on its wholly owned BK16 kimberlite project.

BK16

The BK16 kimberlite project is located within the Orapa Kimberlite Field ("OKF") in Botswana. The diamond mines in Botswana have produced an average of 27 million carats annually in the last 10 years and Botswana is the worlds largest producer of diamonds by value. In 2016, the OKF area produced 8.85 million carats. Of the 83 known kimberlite bodies in the OKF, nine have been or are currently being mined. These are AK1 (Orapa, Debswana), AK6 (Karowe, Lucara Diamond Corporation), BK1, BK9, BK12 and BK15 (Damtshaa, Debswana), DK1 and DK2 (Letlhakane, Debswana) and BK11 (Firestone Diamonds). The Karowe mine has produced such notable diamonds as the 1,109 carat `Lesedi La Rona` and the 813 carat `Constellation`. The diamondiferous BK16 kimberlite pipe is approximately 6 hectares in size at surface, and is known to contain rare and valuable Type IIa diamonds (see, Tsodilo press release dated May 31, 2016).

Pilot Hole Drill Program

The Pilot Hole Drill Program commenced in February 2017. The pilot hole pattern was designed to achieve an approximate 50 meter grid hole spacing for the Phase 1 Large Diameter Drilling (LDD) sampling. One pilot hole is drilled immediately next to every planned LDD hole. The primary objectives of the pilot holes are to improve on and upgrade the knowledge of the internal geology of the kimberlite and optimize the kimberlite intersected by the Large Diameter Drill (LDD) program. Geotechnical studies of the cores will allow for the selection of the appropriate LDD drill bits based on rock hardness and the pilot hole cores will also provide a reference once the diamond recovery results have been obtained from the LDD program. Fourteen (14) holes totaling approximately 3,100 meters are planned with eleven (11) being completed to date. The remaining 3 holes are expected to be completed by months end.

The pilot hole drilling as well as the earlier delineation drilling was conducted utilizing the Companys Atlas Copco CT14 diamond core drill rigs. All bits used were of a Wuxi-Tsodilo design and contained only synthetic industrial diamond.

All pilot and delineation core holes were logged in the field in detail according to a standard operating procedure, describing each kimberlitic unit, measuring contacts between various units as well as kimberlite/country rock contacts and brief descriptions of country rock. Magnetic susceptibility measurements were taken every 20 centimeters and the country rock dilution content was logged using the line point count method along the entire kimberlite intersection.

Core recovery and depth data were recorded as per standard operating procedure. Core recovered from the pilot hole drilling is stored at the Companys Letlhakane exploration camp. The core has been labelled, photographed and the information captured in the Companys database.

Density (specific gravity) measurements were done on the delineation core samples by taking a 20 to 30 centimeter length of core every 2 meters. The core was then coated in a thin film of varnish and the density was established using the Archimedes method of weighing in air and in water. Additional samples for density measurements will be taken from the pilot hole cores where the delineation drilling had not sufficient coverage.

LDD Program

The layout of the initial 14 LDD holes was designed to provide grade estimates for the main kimberlite phases as well as an initial grade distribution throughout the kimberlite. The relatively large bulk sample will also provide an initial diamond value. Z Star Mineral Resource Consultants (Cape Town, South Africa) were consulted to optimize these objectives. The diameter of the LDD holes will be 24-inch and the planned 14 holes (approximately 3,100 meters) will provide just under 2,000 tonnes of kimberlite for processing. The design calls for sampling to a 350 meter depth within the main two volcaniclastic kimberlite phases (VK2 and VK3) as well a sampling minor amounts of the central VKxxx zone which is a restricted upper zone that highly diluted with basalt xenoliths.

The LDD samples are to be collected over 12 meter intervals, corresponding to hypothetical mining benches. The samples will be collected in cubic meter polypropylene bulk bags, with varying numbers of bags making up one sample. The bags will be attached to the drill site shaker and receive a feed of +1.00 millimeter material directly from the shaker. The Phase 1 LDD holes will be logged by caliper and caliper data will be used to estimate the volume drilled for grade calculations. Representative chip samples will be taken during LDD program every meter, these samples will then be screened on site and used to control the quality of the drill product.

The Company has entered into a drill contract with De Wet Drilling (Pty) Limited of Gaborone, Botswana to drill the LDD holes. De Wet Drilling (Pty) Limited Botswana (DWD) has been in operation since 1948 focusing on the drilling of deep, large diameter boreholes. This specialization is made possible through custom designed and built drill rigs that are able to withstand the extreme conditions the mining sector faces in Southern Africa. DWD has extensive LDD experience working on projects for Debswana, De Beers, Petra Diamonds and Firestone Diamonds amongst others. DWD conducted the Phase 1 & 2 LDD on AK6, (Karowe mine, Lucara Diamond Corporation).

About Tsodilo Resources Limited: Tsodilo Resources Limited is an international diamond and metals exploration company engaged in the search for economic diamond and metal deposits at its Bosoto (Pty) Limited ("Bosoto") and Gcwihaba Resources (Pty) Limited ("Gcwihaba") projects in Botswana and its Idada 361 (Pty) Limited ("Idada") project in Barberton, South Africa. The Company has a 100% stake in Bosoto (Pty) Ltd. which holds the BK16 kimberlite project in the Orapa Kimberlite Field in Botswana. The Company has a 100% stake in its Gcwihaba project area consisting of twenty-one (21) metal (base, precious, platinum group, and rare earth) prospecting licenses located in the North-West district of Botswana. Additionally, Tsodilo has a 70% stake in Idada Trading 361 (Pty) Limited which holds the gold and silver exploration license in the Barberton area of South Africa. Tsodilo manages the exploration of the Gcwihaba, Bosoto and Idada projects. Overall supervision of the Company's exploration program is the responsibility of Dr. Mike de Wit, President and COO of the Company and a "qualified person" as such term is defined in National Instrument 43-101.

The Company has offices in Toronto, Canada and Gaborone and Maun, Botswana. Please visit the Company's website, www.TsodiloResources.com, for additional information and background on our projects.
Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCwire) - ALIX RESOURCES CORP. (Alix or the Company) (AIX-TSX:V) (37NFRANKFURT) is pleased to report it has begun exploration at its 100%-held White Basin lithium property in Nevada. The White Basin property includes 25 unpatented mineral claims comprising 500 acres and is located roughly 75 kilometers northeast of Las Vegas. Sampling on the property has returned values as high as 3,762ppm Li from six composite samples of the Horse Spring Formation. The Horse Spring Formation is Oligocene-Miocene in age and includes clay-rich, altered volcanic units with historic reports of elevated lithium (Brenner-Tourtelot and Glanzman, 1978, Energy 3, 255-262). Sampling by the Company has confirmed elevated lithium with results provided in the table below.

Sample Number UTM Easting/Northing* Description Lithium, ppm** S#2:LV 721505/4026514, 721486/4026659, 721515/4026804,721698/4026819, 721775/4026607 Five sampling sites of calcareous playa lake units of Horse Spring Fm., collected by digging 30cm into the formation surface, then homogenized before assay. 3,762 S#1.LV 717621/4026824, 717551/4027292, 717725/4027010, 717608/4027443, 717889/4027073, 717989/4027010, 718130/4026836 Seven sampling sites of calcareous playa lake units of Horse Spring Formation, collected 30cm into the formation surface, then homogenized before assay. 2,093 S#3-LV 721322/4026892 to721267/4027094 Sampling sites of calcareous playa lake units of Horse Spring Formation, collected 30cm into the formation surface, then homogenized before assay. 1,549 LV#8 721689/4026618 Calcareous Horse Spring Fm., from an outcrop ledge. 878 LVJH#1 721505/4026467 Calcareous Horse Spring Fm., collected from a drainage exposure. 838 LVJH#2 721613/4026625 Calcareous Horse Spring Fm., collected from a drainage exposure. 310

*UTM Zone 11S. **Lithium assays were obtained by arc spectrometry at Reed Laboratories (Carlsbad, CA) from 100mg aliquots. Standards and blanks were not included with the samples.

Alix President Michael England states, We are very pleased that preliminary sampling of the White Basin property is demonstrating economic lithium potential. These results are some of the highest grades in Nevada. Based on these positive results our field crew continues to systematically sample the property, with additional results expected in the coming weeks.

The Company is also pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Tom E. McCandless as Technical Advisor to Alix. Dr. McCandless has over 35 years of mineral exploration experience including eight years in lithium exploration. He is president of MCC Geoscience Inc. and also holds the position of Adjunct Professor in Geochemistry at the University of Arizona and University of Alberta.

The technical contents of this release were approved by Dr. Tom E. McCandless, P.Geo., Technical Advisor to Alix and a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. The property has not been the subject of a National Instrument 43-101 report and Dr. McCandless has not verified the technical data disclosed in this release.

About Alix Resources

Alix Resources is a project generator in the junior mining exploration business focused on seeking and acquiring world class lithium projects globally. Alix continues to evaluate suitable prospects that fit the mandate of the Company.
Don't even say the b-word ...

What will happen to IP rights in a post-Brexit world? This is a question that has been daunting IP professionals for a few months now ... and to which no firm response has been provided yet.





The IPKat is delighted to host the musings of former guest Kat Darren Meale (recently promoted to partner at Simmons&Simmons) on this matter.





Here's what Darren writes:





" This one is about the UK leaving the EU. Having had enough of this millenniums most reckless political decision, this occasional IPKat contributor cannot bring himself to say Br*x*it without an asterisk or two to cool his ire. In any event, have you thought about the implications for trade marks and designs, as well as the businesses that use them and the practitioners who make their living from them? Allow me to give you some food for thought (or perhaps a snack  this is by no means a comprehensive guide to the many issues).





Trade marks





In all likelihood, on 29 March 2019 (B-Day), well over a million EU trade mark registrations will cease to apply in the UK. This may be the largest removal of intellectual property rights in history. Here are nine things you should know.





1. Although we are in entirely new territory, there is a widespread confidence amongst the UK IP profession that the UK government and the UKIPO will create a dedicated process by which owners of EUTMs can secure continued protection for their marks in the UK. Two models appear the most likely. The first option is for all EUTMs to be automatically granted separate protection as UKTMs carrying the same benefits as their parent EUTMs (including filing and registration dates). CITMA calls this the Montenegro Model. The second is for owners to have the option to elect for this separate protection, most likely by filing a request at the UKIPO and paying a fee. CITMA calls this the Tuvalu model. CITMA has more on the options here . Something will need to be done about International Registrations designating the EU too.





2. Be careful calling the above process conversion, which is an option already available by which an EUTM can be given up and turned into applications for national marks in EU Member States. Perhaps division would better serve  EUTMs previously covering 28 countries should be (one way or another) divided into an EUTM covering 27 and a UKTM covering 1.





3. The bad news is that we do not expect to find out exactly what option will be chosen and how it will be executed until fairly late in the process. Civil service time within the UK government is in short supply at present, and that will only get worse as B-Day approaches. For that reason we do not expect to see a public consultation issued by the UK government. These commonly precede major, and not so major, changes in IP law in the UK (such as the new copyright exceptions introduced in 2014) and provide the IP community an opportunity to kick the tyres of proposal and point out all the flaws. Any flaws in the plan this time will have to be sorted out after the event.





4. EUTMs are subject to use requirements five years after they register. It would make sense that use in the UK prior to B-Day would count as use in the EU so far as proof of use is concerned, but not after it (but the former may be a question for the EUIPO and Court of Justice of the EU). Going forward, however, businesses which only really operate in the UK will not be able safely to maintain EUTMs beyond their initial five year registration period (after which the use requirement kicks in).





5. When an EUTM is filed, there is no need for the applicant to intend ever to use the mark for the goods and services claimed. In the UK, applicants must sign a declaration of intention to use. What of divided marks? Will owners have to declare they did intend to use in the UK, that they have used or that they will soon?





... wishing a happy B-day ... 6. There is a raft of impacts on brand enforcement. A UKTM will no longer be able to block the registration of an EUTM. Unregistered rights protected by passing-off in the UK will no longer be able to block an EUTM either. On the flipside, clearing a brand in the UK may get easier because there could be many fewer earlier rights to worry about (subject to how the division process works). Goods on the market in the EU may not be exhausted, making it easier for brand owners to keep parallel imports out of the UK.





7. Some of the biggest headaches are likely to involve EUTMs and EUTM applications pending before the EUIPO where opposition or cancellation procedures (which can take years at the EU level) are ongoing. If you are three years into litigation relying on passing-off and/or a UKTM, will your challenge suddenly fail? If an EUTM under challenge is divided to the UK, will you have to start proceedings afresh before the UKIPO? Will a UK High Court infringement action based on an EUTM need to be struck out? What will happen to pan-EU injunctions already in force, especially those ordered by a UK court? Well also see the death of the celebrated EUIPO/Alicante Torpedo.





8. UK IP professionals will be worried about their rights to represent before EU institutions, including the EUIPO and the EU General Court. EU IP professionals may have the same concerns about working in the UK. Trade mark attorneys look to be in a worse position than solicitors at present (for those unfamiliar with the UK system, these professions are quite distinct), because (as I understand it) re-qualifying to practice in a remaining EU Member State (which may be required) is harder for attorneys than solicitors (hello Law Society of Ireland!). There is also a place of business requirement, which is unlikely to trouble those of us working in practices which span Europe, but which will disadvantage UK-only firms. On the plus side, EU businesses are likely to need UK IP lawyers to help them with all of their new divisional UKTMs.





9. What do brand owners need to do now? Opinion is divided: file new UKTMs now? Wait for the division process? Pack it all in and emigrate to the moon? Talk to your colleagues, advisors or talk to me, as the answer most likely depends on your business, portfolio and your plans.





Designs





The story is very similar for the more than 700,000 Registered Community Designs (RCDs). Again CITMA has produced some very helpful material on the possible options, which closely mirror those for EUTMs. See here and here





There will be both similar and different complications with RCDs, some of which no one may even have thought of yet.





Unregistered design rights will be impacted heavily. Unregistered Community Design right, which is very similar in protection to RCDs but is available without registration and lasts for three years, will no longer cover the UK. The UK still has its own UK unregistered design right, but it is quite different and does not protect, for example, surface decoration. The fashion industry is thought to be the biggest loser here, but we may see a new or updated UK designs law in due course to plug the gap (although Im not confident wed get it before B-Day). Unregistered Community Design right will continue to apply in the remainder of the EU, of course, but there are issues around disclosure of designs which are first disclosed to the public in the UK (at London Fashion Week for example).





... thinking about B-day

And theres more





Exhaustion of rights has been mentioned above in the context of TMs but there will be a more general impact across IP. There are some lesser known IP rights which will be impacted  plant variety rights for example. Protected geographical indications (PGIs) and protected designations of origin (PDOs) may no longer be honoured in the UK (Parma ham from Paisley anyone? Champagne from Chatham?). You might need a new plan, too, if you operate from a .eu domain name. Copyright, as if it isnt complicated enough, will also probably throw up some surprises, but at least we may be given a respite from reading any more Court of Justice decisions on communication to the public




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - May 15, 2017) - Goldstrike Resources Ltd. (TSX VENTURE:GSR)(OTC:APRAF)(FRANKFURT:KCG1) is pleased to announce that it is mobilizing to the Plateau Property in central Yukon with its new strategic partner, a Canadian subsidiary of Newmont Mining Corporation (NYSE:NEM) (News Release March 6, 2017), to execute the most extensive exploration campaign ever carried out on the property.

Goldstrike and Newmont will execute an extensive program utilising many of Newmont's proprietary exploration tools that have a proven record of success. Airborne and ground geophysical surveys, geochemistry, geological mapping, detailed sampling and extensive diamond drilling are all aimed at discovering additional zones of gold mineralization while better defining known zones of high grade gold mineralization. Goldstrike has allocated 100% of the proceeds from the recent C$6,200,000 equity investment by Newmont to its exploration program at Plateau.

The Plateau Property represents an entirely new and undeveloped district scale gold mineralized system in Canada's Yukon, 130 kilometres southeast of Mayo. Through its brief history, starting in 2011 with the initial discovery by the Goldstrike team, the Plateau Property has year over year revealed an ever-expanding gold mineralized system that has reached 50 kilometres in length and remains open for expansion in all directions. Based on new information and guidance by Newmont, the company has recently expanded the claim block from approximately 350 square kilometres to 2,733 claims encompassing some 571 square kilometres. Goldstrike's Yukon land holdings, including those in the White Gold District, now total 4,704 claims covering over 1,000 square kilometres.

Prospecting and mapping crews have consistently discovered high grade gold mineralization in quartz veins, stockworks and breccias at Plateau that often carry visible gold. The team discovered multiple new gold mineralized zones in the final days of the 2016 field season: most notably Bonanza, Goldbar, Bullion and Big Bang. The "Big Bang" is made up of numerous quartz veins and breccias occurring across a 3 kilometre by 2 kilometre area. Fifty reconnaissance rock grab samples taken from the Big Bang zone over an 8 day period returned assays ranging from below detection level to 21.2 grams per tonne (gpt) gold by screen fire metallics assay, including 14 samples that returned over 1 gram per tonne gold. Two initial channel samples from the Big Bang zone returned 2.17 gpt gold over 1 metre and 3.46 gpt gold over 0.5 metre (News Release, October 3, 2016).

Drilling to date has confirmed the depth potential of previously discovered zones, with one 2016 drill hole in the Goldstack Zone returning 6.05 gpt gold over 45.5 metres, including 12.5 gpt gold over 20.65 metres, including 21.13 gpt gold over 12.25 metres, including 34.35 gpt (1 ounce per ton) gold over 6.75 metres (News Release September 6, 2016). The Goldstack zone remains open for expansion in all directions.

"This will prove to be a defining season for the Plateau Property," said James Moors, P.Geo., Chief Geologist for Goldstrike. "Our recent partnership with Newmont allows us to advance to the next stage of development by committing the resources and technical expertise necessary to further focus our efforts and understand the nature of the extensive new gold system. We are in the enviable position of having an entire suite of high grade gold mineralized showings that merit detailed follow-up sampling, mapping and drilling, and we also have vast areas of very prospective unexplored ground with strong potential to host new gold bearing zones. Year after year our exploration has continued to expand the known extent of this new district scale gold system and produce exciting results."

Commencing in early June, a multi-faceted 2017 program will focus on outlining the full extent of numerous newly identified gold mineralized showings with the tools best suited to successfully advance them in preparation for diamond drilling.

Intensive geological mapping and sampling over 60 kilometres2 will increase the resolution of information and allow crews to vector into key areas with the strongest potential for additional discoveries. Proprietary Newmont geochemistry surveys, ground geophysics and detailed geological mapping along the interpreted trend of showings will help define the extent of mineralization both on surface and at depth. Property scale geophysics and detailed surface modelling will refine understanding of the geology and structural framework that control the high-grade gold mineralized zones across the district and identify key areas having strong potential to host additional gold mineralization. Trenching and channel sampling of multiple discovery areas will further define the geologic controls on mineralization at each location in preparation for drilling. The most extensive diamond drilling program to date will focus on those targets that provide the most compelling results.

Bill Chornobay, Goldstrike's COO commented: "Newmont's accomplished team of technical personnel and their full suite of proprietary exploration tools have achieved great success on both Greenfield and brownfield projects worldwide. When combined with Goldstrike's history of discovery on the Plateau Property, this year's work program has an unprecedented capacity to fully realize the potential of this new gold district."

LUCKY STRIKE PROJECT - WHITE GOLD DISTRICT

Goldstrike has completed the expansion of its holdings of key ground in the White Gold camp from 780 claims to 1,970 claims covering approximately 430 square kilometres over four properties. All four properties, Lucky Strike, BRC, Kings Ransom and Goldsource, are 100% owned by Goldstrike with no underlying property payments or royalties.

The Lucky Strike Property will see the largest exploration campaign in its history as recent geology, geochemistry and trench sample results all show strong similarities to those reported at the nearby Kinross Golden Saddle and Gold Corp Coffee Creek deposits. An advanced exploration permit is in progress to facilitate intensive diamond drilling of several surface discoveries as well as extensive trenching across the five gold in soil anomalies identified along a 10 kilometre long structural corridor at Lucky Strike. The recently discovered Monte Carlo zone, an anomaly measuring 1,400 by 350 metres and open for expansion in all directions, is one of the largest known undrilled gold in soil anomalies in the White Gold District. Trenching of this anomaly in 2016 produced bedrock samples assaying 0.42 gpt gold over 154 metres, including 0.76 gpt gold over 78 metres, including 3 gpt gold over 8 metres (Sept. 26, 2016 news release). All trenches on Monte Carlo to date contain gold mineralization. The bedrock gold mineralization is planned to be drilled during the upcoming drill program.

The other four large gold in soil anomalies along trend at Lucky Strike are: the Belmont Zone, measuring 1500 by 800 metres, the Samson Zone, measuring 600 by 300 metres, the Boss Zone, measuring 1,000 by 1,000 metres, and the Maverick Zone, measuring 150 by 200 metres. These anomalies all remain open for extension along trend with further trenching and sampling (Sept. 26, 2016 news release).

James Moors, P.Geo., Chief Geologist, commented: "As with the program at our Plateau Property, this season's program at Lucky Strike will investigate a full suite of targets: exposed strong bedrock gold mineralization and Induced Polarisation anomalies ready to be drilled; a 10 kilometre corridor of anomalous gold mineralized zones that can be quickly advanced to the drill-ready stage; and large areas of prospective untested ground that offer further excellent potential for additional discoveries."

James Moors, P. Geo., Chief Geologist, is a qualified person, as defined by National Instrument 43-101, for Goldstrike's Yukon exploration projects and supervised the preparation of, and has reviewed and approved, the technical information in this release. All drill intersections and assay values included in this release have been reported in previous Goldstrike news releases.

ABOUT GOLDSTRIKE

Goldstrike is a well-funded exploration company with a focus on two projects in Yukon. It recently entered into a strategic alliance with a Canadian subsidiary of Newmont Mining Corporation to carry out a comprehensive, multi-year exploration program on its Plateau property, and with additional funding from Newmont and a Yukon YMEP grant added to proceeds from prior financings and the exercise of warrants, Goldstrike has the funding required to carry out a comprehensive 2017 program on its Lucky Strike property and its two newly staked properties in the White Gold District. The Fraser Institute currently ranks Yukon as the No. 1 jurisdiction in the world for mineral potential.

The Plateau property covers 571 square kilometres (5,700 hectares) in the Mayo Mining District, and contains a district scale gold-mineralized system known as the Yellow Giant Trend. It is 100% owned by Goldstrike subject to a 3% NSR, of which one-third (1%) may be purchased for C$1,500,000 until March 22, 2020.

The Lucky Strike property is located in the White Gold District, 30 kilometres northwest of Goldcorp's Coffee Creek gold deposit and 10 to 15 kilometres east of Kinross' Golden Saddle gold deposit. Goldstrike owns a 100% interest in the Lucky Strike, BRC, Kings Ransom and Goldsource properties free and clear of all encumbrances, including royalties.

Goldstrike is committed to transparency and the promotion of health, safety, environmental and community interests, which are integral to the conduct of its business. The Company supports the rights of workers and the communities in which it operates. It respects the traditional rights and culture of the First Nations and their concern for the environment and preservation of their cultural heritage. The Company is committed to building relationships based on honesty, openness, mutual trust and involvement, and to working with local communities to develop relationships that focus on creating value for everyone. WORKING TOGETHER, WE SUCCEED.

To see additional information and maps of the Plateau Property and the New White Gold District assets the Kings Ransom and Goldsource properties go to www.goldstrikeresources.com.
PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA--(Marketwired - May 14, 2017) - Perseus Mining Limited ("Perseus") (ASX:PRU) (TSX:PRU) wishes to announce significant results from exploration drilling at the Papara prospect, located approximately 20 kilometres north-northwest of the Sissingue Gold Mine ("Sissingue") on Perseus's mining permit in northern Cote d'Ivoire. (Refer to Figure 1.) Development of Sissingue is on target for first gold to be poured in the March 2018 quarter when it will become Perseus's second operating gold mine. The associated JORC Table 1 is included in the release available for download from www.perseusmining.com and www.asx.com.au.

HIGHLIGHTS

Significant initial reverse circulation ("RC") and diamond drilling results returned to date included:

Hole PADD019 (799,600E; 1,172,611N) - 11.18m at 4.36g/t Au from 135.82m, including 1m at 24.7g/t Au.

Hole PADD017 (799,598; 1,172,495) - 46m at 1.11g/t Au from 109m, including 14m at 2.37g/t Au from 141m (incl 1m at 13.3g/t Au).

Hole PRC171 (799,540E; 1,172,500N) - 15m at 1.66g/t Au from 30m.

Hole PRC181 (799,793E; 1,1729,72N) - 10m at 1.07g/t Au from 30m.

Hole PADD010 (799,598E; 1,172,553N) - 20.1m at 1.02 g/t Au from 20.9m and 20m at 1.23 g/t Au from 66m.

Hole PARD012 (799,525E; 1,172,480N) - 3m at 3g/t Au from 45m; 12.7m at 1.84 g/t Au from 60.3m including 1m at 9.32 g/t Au; and 35m at 1 g/t Au from 76m.

Hole PRC184 (799,363E; 1,173,222N) - 2m at 4.5g/t Au from 10m.

Hole PADD015 (799,627E; 1,172,522N) - 1m at 10.81 g/t Au from 62m.

Perseus's Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Mr Jeff Quartermaine said: "The drilling results at Papara point to the potential for a significant additional inventory of mineable, mineralised material being discovered within trucking distance of Sissingue, the construction of which is currently 53% complete with first gold due to be poured in early 2018. Assay results from several holes in the current drilling programme are still pending and follow-up drilling is planned once all results are received and fully assessed.

The results from this next phase of drilling, if positive, could lead to an upgrade of the current Life of Mine Plan for Sissingue that currently generates an attractive after tax internal rate of return (IRR) of close to 30% at a gold price of US$1,200 per ounce by processing ore for five years."

1. Drill Results

Recent RC and diamond drilling at the Papara prospect on the Sissingue mining permit in Cote d'Ivoire has returned significant results from primary mineralisation intersected in several holes. Hole PADD019 returned 11.18m at 4.36g/t Au from 135.82m, including 1m at 24.7g/t Au. Hole PADD017, 80m to the southeast, returned 14m at 2.37g/t Au from 141m (including 1m at 13.3g/t Au) within a broader intersection of 46m at 1.11g/t Au from 109m. On the intervening section, PADD010 returned 20.1m at 1.02 g/t Au from 20.9m and 20m at 1.23 g/t Au from 66m, whilst PRC171 on the same section returned 15m at 1.66g/t Au from 30m. PARD012 on the latter section returned three mineralised intervals, 3m at 3g/t Au from 45m, 12.7m at 1.84 g/t Au from 60.3m and 35m at 1.00 g/t Au from 76m. Locations for all drill holes from the current program are provided in Table 1, with details of all results  0.3g/t Au provided in Table 2.

2. Interpretation

The results reported above are from the first major drilling campaign undertaken at Papara since reconnaissance rotary air blast ("RAB") and RC drilling was performed between 2008 and 2012 returning scattered gold intersections. The latest drilling appears to define a new zone of mineralisation hosted by metasediments along the southern margin of a diorite intrusion (Figure 2 and Figures 3 to 5). The mineralisation consists of quartz veins and sericite-carbonate altered metasediments with associated pyrite and sparse arsenopyrite.

The diorite underlies a zone of intensive artisanal workings extending over an area approximately 1.2 kilometres by 450m. The artisanal workings largely exploit mottled zone mineralisation at the base of the laterite duricrust, with some workings extending deeper into higher-grade primary quartz vein mineralisation. The drilling and some of the deeper artisanal workings indicate the presence of narrow granodiorite dykes that appear to have a close spatial association with gold mineralisation.

Results are pending from diamond holes PADD023, 024 and 025 on the south-eastern side of the zone. These holes also display strong alteration, veining and pyrite-arsenopyrite mineralisation. Based on results to date and the visual mineralisation in the pending holes, it appears that the zone is currently open to the east, west and at depth.

Perseus is currently awaiting receipt of all outstanding results prior to planning further drilling. This drilling will likely focus on investigating the contact of the diorite body to the east and north-west as well as investigating areas where intensive deep artisanal mining indicates potentially significant bedrock mineralisation.

3. Further Exploration Opportunities

More broadly within the Papara area, Perseus is conducting auger drilling over widespread gold-in-soil anomalism associated with extensive artisanal mining within an 8 kilometre by 6 kilometre area. As at Papara, many of the artisanal sites exploit concentrations of gold in the mottled-zone at the base of the duricrust, and therefore likely represent dispersion from primary bedrock sources. Historical RAB and shallow RC drilling of the highest tenor soil anomalies failed to provide categorical indications of significant underlying bedrock mineralisation. However, the soil anomalies in many cases do not coincide with known artisanal workings, and it is now suspected the anomalies may be offset from their bedrock sources. Auger drilling is required to more closely define the source of the surface anomalism, and particularly the extent and source of the mottled zone mineralisation being exploited artisanally.

Elsewhere on the Sissingue licence, Perseus has commenced a 1,150m RC pre-collared, diamond drilling program at the Katara prospect, located approximately 25 kilometres south of Sissingue (Figure 1). Historical RAB and RC drilling following-up gold-in-soil anomalies intersected significant bedrock mineralisation at this site. Subsequent reviews of these results in light of structural information gained from post-drilling artisanal mining, indicates the original drilling was not optimally oriented to intersect the mineralised structures, and the current program has been designed to rectify this deficiency.

Figure 1: Sissingue Project regional geology and gold occurrences





Figure 2: Papara drill hole locations





Figure 3: Cross-section - Papara Line 3-40m





Figure 4: Cross-section - Papara Line 3+00m





Figure 4: Cross-section - Papara Line 3+40m





Table 1: Locations of All Holes Covered by this Announcement



Table 2: All assays results  0.3g/t



Competent Person Statement

The information in this report and the attachments that relates to drilling results is based on, and fairly represents, information and supporting documentation prepared by Dr Douglas Jones, a Competent Person who is a Chartered Professional Geologist. Dr Jones is the Group General Manager Exploration of the Company. Dr Jones has sufficient experience, which is relevant to the style of mineralisation and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity being undertaken, to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the 2012 Edition of the 'Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves'") and to qualify as a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). Dr Jones consents to the inclusion in this report of the matters based on his information in the form and context in which it appears. All production targets for Sissingue referred to in this report are underpinned by estimated Ore Reserves which have been prepared by competent persons in accordance with the requirements of the JORC Code. The information in this report that relates to Mineral Resources for Sissingue was first reported by the Company in compliance with the JORC Code 2012 and NI43-101 in a market announcement released on 15 December 2016. The information in this report that relates to Mineral Resources for Bele was first reported by the Company in compliance with the JORC Code 2012 and NI43-101 in a market announcement released on 20 February 2017. The information in this report that relates to Ore Reserves for the Sissingue and Bele was first reported by the Company in compliance with the JORC Code 2012 and NI43-101 in a market announcement released on 31 March 2017. The Company confirms that all material assumptions underpinning those estimates and the production targets, or the forecast financial information derived therefrom, in those market releases continue to apply and have not materially changed. The Company further confirms that material assumptions underpinning the estimates of Ore Reserves described in "Technical Report - Sissingue Gold Project, Cote d'Ivoire" dated 29 May 2011 continue to apply.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - May 15, 2017) - Salazar Resources Limited (TSX VENTURE:SRL)(FRANKFURT:CCG) ("Salazar" or the "Company") is pleased to report results from the additional six holes (1,888 meters) of the phase V diamond drill program in progress on the Company's 100-per-cent owned (21,500 ha) Curipamba volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) project in Ecuador. These holes represent new exploratory drilling and were not included in the latest El Domo resource estimate which was released on January 16th, 2015.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Hole CURI-224  16.60 metres (15.60m true) averaging 3.66 g/t gold, 117.40 g/t silver, 4.88% copper, 5.36% zinc, Including: 6.35 metres (5.97m true) averaging 7.72 g/t gold, 180.05 g/t silver, 2.28% copper, 8.24% zinc, and 6.50 metres (6.11m true) averaging 1.32 g/t gold, 99.22 g/t silver, 8.89% copper, 4.48% zinc

PROGRAM RESULTS

The Company has now drilled 5,251.05 meters as part of the Phase V drilling program which encompassed 40 holes (10,000 meters) designed to further expand the El Domo volcanogenic massive sulphide ("VMS") deposit and explore its margins, as well as to test geophysical anomalies and surface showings (Figure 1). The latest six holes (1,888 metres) (Table 1) were drilled as part of this program. It is anticipated that the drill program will be completed by the third quarter of this year.

CURI-224 intersected 16.60 meters (15.60 meters true width) of massive and semi-massive chalcopyrite-sphalerite-pyrite grading 3.66 g/t gold, 117.40 g/t silver, 4.88% copper, 5.36% zinc beneath an andesite sill that occurs in the vicinity of the hole (Figure1). The intersection in CURI-224 is located approximately 120 meters east of the intersection in CURI-173 (2.74 meters averaging 0.677 g/t gold, 6.5 g/t silver, 0.39% copper and 0.37% zinc) and 75 meters south from CURI-198 (7.40 meters averaging 2.498 g/t gold, 74.61 g/t silver, 3.45% copper and 5.07% zinc; see News Release of August 27, 2012). The mineralization in CURI-187, CURI-198 and CURI-224 is currently interpreted to be part of a separate zone of mineralization. The intercept in CURI-224 is gold-rich; the top of the mineralization grades 7.72 g/t gold over 6.35m (225.40 - 231.75m). Further drilling is planned to test this area.

Fredy Salazar, President and CEO, commented: "We are thrilled with the recent results from hole CURI-224 located in the north east of the El Domo resource. The mineralization encountered is thicker and of better grade to the last hole drilled in this area: CURI-198. This new intersection indicates significant potential for finding thicker mineralization in the north-east area of El Domo resource which will increase the size and quality of the resource. So far we are very satisfied with the results to date from this Phase V drilling program and will continue working to expand the resource."

The latest six holes (1,888 metres) (Table 1) were drilled as part of the planned 40-hole (10,000 meters) drill program that is designed to further expand the El Domo volcanogenic massive sulphide ("VMS") deposit and explore its margins, as well as to test geophysical anomalies and surface showings (Figure 1). It is anticipated that the drill program will be complete by the third quarter of this year.

Holes CURI-219 and CURI-221 were drilled west of the El Domo deposit to further test the area of the CURI-213 (which intersected two zones of mineralization: 4.14 meters (true width) averaging 1.01 g/t gold, 16.78 g/t silver, 0.67% copper, 0.95% lead and 4.77% zinc, and 29.37 metres (true width) averaging 0.5 g/t gold, 77.93 g/t silver, 0.17% copper, 0.17% copper and 0.89% zinc (See News Release of March 23, 2017). CURI-219 and CURI- 221 were collared approximately 350 metres west of El Domo deposit and 50 meters north and south from the CURI-213 respectively. No significant mineralization was encountered and no further drilling is planned in this area.

Hole CURI-220 was drilled vertically from the same collar as the CURI-218 (See News Release of March 23, 2017). CURI-220 did not encounter significant mineralization, however, the horizontal separation between CURI-220 and the mineralization in CURI-218 is estimated to be approximately 138 metres. The eastern limit of the mineralization intersected in CURI-218 remains to be established. As well, the mineralization in CURI-218 remains open to the north and south.

Hole CURI-222, drilled steeply due east from the same platform as CURI-224, intersected 2.66 meters averaging 0.13 g/t gold, 5.56 g/t silver, 0.31% copper and 1.15% zinc.

Holes CURI-223 was drilled vertically 50 meters north from the historic hole CURI-155 which cut two mineralized zones with gold and silver values and anomalous zinc and copper values (see News Release of January 26, 2012). CURI-223 encountered similar lithology to that in CURI-155 with one interval grading 3.61 meters of 0.77 g/t gold, 37.54 g/t silver, 0.15% copper and 1.68% zinc.

TABLE 1

Hole ID East North Elev (m) Azimuth Dip Depth (m) CURI-219 694567.2 9855144.9 829.73 90 -65 317.70 CURI-220 695565.2 9855188.9 1097.34 270 -90 401.50 CURI-221 694532.4 9855052.2 861.18 90 -75 290.75 CURI-222 695488.6 9855540.9 1027.06 90 -87 302.70 CURI-223 695743.3 9855201.3 1083.91 0 -90 311.70 CURI-224 695488.6 9855540.9 1027.06 260 -70 263.70

PSAD_1956_UTM_Zone_17S

Figure 1, El Domo Deposit - Pierce Point Map





TABLE 2

SIGNIFICANT INTERSECTIONS

Hole ID From

(m) To

(m) Width

(m) Au

(g/t) Ag

(g/t) Cu

(%) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) CURI-219 No significant mineralization encountered in this hole, located 50m north from CURI-213 CURI-220 No significant mineralization encountered in this hole, located 138m east from CURI-218 CURI-221 218.75 221.95 3.2 - - 0.16 - 1.46 234.35 235.95 1.6 0.14 10.3 0.11 0.88 1.26 CURI-222 224.28 226.94 2.15 0.13 5.56 0.31 0.11 1.15 CURI-223 220.9 224.51 3.61 0.77 37.54 0.15 0.7 1.68 CURI-224 225.4 242 16.6 3.66 117.4 4.88 0.44 5.36 including 225.4 231.75 6.35 7.72 180.05 2.28 1.13 8.24 including 234.05 240.55 6.5 1.32 99.22 8.89 0.01 4.48

Widths presented in Table 2 are downhole core lengths. Where possible, true width estimates are noted in the text. A rigorous chain-of-custody and quality assurance/quality control program that included the insertion of certified standard control samples and blanks, and re-analysis of samples with high levels(overlimit) of gold, copper and zinc, was applied to the NQ-diameter, rock-sawn half-core samples. All samples were analyzed by Inspectorate Services Peru S.A.C. (Bureau Veritas), a certified ISO 17025 and ISO 9001:2000 laboratory.

As part of the program's sample quality assurance, twin samples were taken on the CURI-224. The samples were part of a Brecciated Dacite and gave the following results:

Sample # Top Bottom Au

(g/t) Ag

(g/t) Cu

(ppm) Pb

(ppm) Zn

(ppm) 170422 242.00 243.45 0.219 7.90 2186 31 2199 170423 242.00 243.45 0.232 7.80 1371 31 1758

The scientific and technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Kieran Downes, Ph.D., P.Geo. a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.

Salazar Resources Limited

Salazar Resources Ltd. is a publicly-listed (TSX VENTURE:SRL) mineral resource company engaged in the exploration and development of new highly prospective areas in Ecuador. Led by a senior Ecuadorian management team and most notably by its namesake Fredy Salazar, this team has been instrumental in other major discoveries throughout Ecuador, including Aurelian's Fruta Del Norte discovery, IAMGold's Quimsacocha Deposit, Mozo Deposit, Ex Newmont's Cangrejos Project and International Minerals Rio Blanco and Gaby Deposit. Being an Ecuadorian based company gives the Company a strategic advantage enabling the Company to complete exploration at a rapid pace. With an excellent property portfolio (4 projects - 36,269 hectares), good geopolitical positioning and a number of strategic corporate and financial partnerships, Salazar has positioned itself to be a strategic player in Ecuador.
CALGARY, ALBERTA--(Marketwired - May 15, 2017) - BACANORA MINERALS LTD. ("Bacanora" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:BCN)(AIM:BCN), the Canadian and London listed lithium exploration and development company focused on building an international lithium group, is pleased to announce changes to the Board, as well as provide an update on its flagship Sonora Project ("Sonora") in Mexico where a Feasibility Study ("FS") for a 35,000 tonnes per annum lithium carbonate operation is now on course for completion in late 2017. The Company has also recently commenced a FS for the Zinnwald Project ("Zinnwald") located near Dresden, Germany. In addition the Company is pleased to announce the appointment of two new Non-executive directors and Canaccord Genuity Limited as its sole broker with immediate effect.

Changes to Board of Directors

The Company announces the appointment of Dr Andres Antonius, who is based in Mexico City, and Mr. Junichi Tomono, head of the Speciality Metals and Alloys department of leading Japan-based global trading company Hanwa Co., LTD. ("Hanwa"), as Non-executive Directors of the Company. Such appointments have been approved by the Board of Bacanora and will take full effect upon completion of standard regulatory reviews, which are underway.

The two appointments replace Mr. James Leahy, who has stepped down from the Board to pursue other business interests, and Mr. Kiran Morzaria who resigned from his position as Non-executive Director of the Company earlier this year (see announcement of 26 January 2017 for further details). Mr. Tomono's appointment to the Board follows the signing of a strategic partnership and offtake agreement for Sonora which has seen Hanwa acquire an initial 10% interest in Bacanora following a private placement (see announcement of 2 May 2017 for further details).

Dr. Andres Constantin Antonius Gonzalez (aged 47) is a Mexican national who has held positions in the Government of Mexico as well as in the private sector and academia. Dr. Antonius previously served as Undersecretary for Energy Policy and prior to that was a staff member at the Agriculture Secretariat. Dr. Antonius also held the role of coordinator for strategy of then President Elect Pena Nieto's transition team in 2012. Dr. Antonius is currently CEO of Plan B, a provider of strategic advice to a range of clients. Prior to founding Plan B, he was the President of the Consulting Services Group at Kroll, a world leader in risk management, business intelligence, and investigations. Dr. Antonius has also held the position of Director of Strategic Planning at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico ("ITAM") and has taught economic theory, game theory, and crisis management at both the ITAM and the Universidad Iberoamericana. He received a B.A., Masters and PhD degree in Economics from Harvard University. As part of his package, Dr. Antonius will be granted 500,000 options to acquire new ordinary shares in the Company at an exercise price of 86.5 pence. Such options vest as to 1/3 on the date of grant and an additional 1/3 on each of the first and second anniversaries of the date of grant and are exercisable for a period of three (3) years. All of these options (and the common shares issuable upon exercise) will be subject to applicable securities law hold periods.

Junichi Tomono (aged 43) has over 22 years' experience with Hanwa, during which time he has worked in the Metals, Chemicals, Alloys, Scrap metals and Mining divisions. Mr. Tomono has a special focus on the battery chemicals sector including lithium. As head of the Speciality Metals and Alloys department and as a Director of three of Hanwa's subsidiaries, Mr. Tomono has played a key role in Hanwa adopting a more global focus in response to the rapid growth in the lithium battery sector.

Project Updates

Sonora, Mexico

FS activities continue on the Sonora Project, which is one of the world's larger lithium resources. Metallurgical test work continues at the SGS laboratories in Perth and Ausenco Limited is currently completing the flow sheet design and mass balance to finalise operating and capital cost estimates. IMC Mining Consultants in Tucson has commenced mine planning and equipment selection for the open pit mining operation. Within Sonora, local infrastructure, energy and natural gas supplies and consumable chemicals for the project continue to be a focus as a result of the previously reported increases in costs for natural gas and chemical reagents. The FS report will also include an updated Mineral Resource Estimate ("MRE") and geological model by SRK Consulting (UK) Limited based on the infill drilling programme which was completed in Q3 2016.

The pricing environment for lithium carbonate has strengthened to close to US$12,000/t from an average of around US$6,000/t in 2015 (source: http://trugroup.com/lithium-market-conference.shtml). The pricing of lithium carbonate shipments to China and Japan remained strong in January 2017, with reported sales by major producers in the region of $12,000/t and spot sales in Japan and China around $15,000/t (source: (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4040100-lithium-miner-news-month-january-2017). With this in mind, the Company will update the pricing assumptions in its FS and expects to announce the updated long term pricing forecast for lithium carbonate for the FS prior to the FS being released.

Reflecting its commitment to working with Bacanora to deliver a 35,000 tonne per annum lithium carbonate operation which can supply the fast-growing Asian battery market, cornerstone investor Hanwa continues to facilitate discussions with regards to securing long-term project debt funding to contribute to the construction capex.

Zinnwald, Germany

The Company has commenced the FS at the Zinnwald Lithium Project in Germany, in which it has a 50% interest. Zinnwald benefits from its proximity to Dresden, a major centre of the German chemical industry. The ability to source downstream chemicals and skilled professional labour is considered a significant advantage in Bacanora's strategy to develop a downstream, high value lithium product suite. In addition, close proximity to the rapidly growing German automotive and renewable industries provide a very significant potential local market for Zinnwald lithium products.

Baconora's 50% partner in Zinnwald, SolarWorld AG ("SolarWorld"), recently announced its intention to file for bankruptcy protection in Germany due to ongoing pricing pressures in its core solar markets. Under the terms of the agreement signed with SolarWorld in February 2017, Bacanora acquired a 50% interest in, and joint operational control of Zinnwald in exchange for a cash consideration of EUR5 million and an undertaking to spend EUR5 million towards the cost of completing the FS. The agreement also included an option for Bacanora to acquire the outstanding 50% held by SolarWorld within a 24 month period for EUR30 million. The Company is confident that the SolarWorld insolvency process will have no material impact on the Company's interest, nor its agreement with SolarWorld.

As part of the FS, bulk ore sampling work will be carried out during the summer to provide samples for metallurgical testwork for inclusion in the flowsheet. Additionally, an infill drilling programme is planned for late 2017 to upgrade the existing resource model in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. The drilling will test for a number of potential by-products including tin, tungsten and SOP. The 2014 resource estimate was reported in accordance with the Pan European Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Reserves, and is outlined below:

Resource

Category Tonnes*

(000) Li Grade

(ppm) Contained LCE

** (Tonnes) Measured 10,283 3,661 200,277 Indicated 16,287 3,594 311,408 Inferred 9,867 3,705 194,484

* Li cut-off 2,500pm and >2 metres vertical thickness. ** LCE is the industry standard terminology for, and is equivalent to, Li2CO3. 1 ppm Li metal is equivalent to 5.32 ppm LCE / Li2CO3. Use of LCE is to provide data comparable with industry reports and assumes complete conversion of lithium in clays with no recovery or process losses.

Bacanora CEO Peter Secker said, "We are delighted to welcome both Dr. Antonius and Mr. Tomono to our Board and Canaccord Genuity to our advisory team. The addition of individuals with the experience and expertise they have comes at an exciting time for Bacanora, specifically with the FS for Sonora nearing completion and the FS for Zinnwald commencing. These activities are focused on our objectives of transforming Bacanora into a major supplier to the fast-growing Lithium markets in Asia and Germany.

"We expect the Sonora FS to confirm the project's status as a high-quality asset capable of supplying Asian markets with battery grade lithium carbonate for many years to come, and at the same time generating excellent returns for our shareholders. Similarly, we believe Zinnwald can become a significant hard rock lithium asset with the potential to serve the fast growing German e-vehicle sector. The planned upgrading of the historic resource to internationally recognised reporting standards is a first step in demonstrating Zinnwald's excellent potential. I look forward to providing further updates."

Mark Hohnen, Chairman of Bacanora commented, "On behalf of the Board I would very much like to thank James Leahy for the invaluable contribution he has made to Bacanora's development both as a Non-executive director of the Company as well as interim Chairman of the Board following the untimely passing of Colin Orr-Ewing last year. The Board wishes James all the very best for the future with his other business interests."

Set out below are details of Dr. Antonius' current directorships and those that he has held within the last five years.

Current Directorships Past Directorships (past 5 years) Plan B Asesoria y Estrategia, SC Grupo Financiero Interacciones, S.A. de C.V. Corporacion Geo, S.A.B de C.V.

There is no further information on Dr Antonius, which is required to be disclosed under Schedule Two, paragraph (g) of the AIM Rules for Companies.

Set out below are details of Mr Tomono's current directorships and those that he has held within the last five years.

Current Directorships Past Directorships (past 5 years) Showa Metals Co., Ltd Nikko Metals Co., Ltd Hanwa Metals Co., Ltd

There is no further information on Mr. Tomono, which is required to be disclosed under Schedule Two, paragraph (g) of the AIM Rules for Companies.

ABOUT BACANORA:

Bacanora is a Canadian and London listed lithium exploration and development company (TSX VENTURE:BCN)(AIM:BCN). The Company is exploring for, and developing a pipeline of international lithium projects, with a primary focus on the Sonora Lithium Project. The Company's operations are based in Hermosillo in northern Mexico. The Company is led by a team with lithium expertise and proven mine development, construction and operations experience.

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 National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101")) of 4.5 million tonnes (LCE1) and 2.7 million tonnes Inferred.2 A Pre-Feasibility Study completed in Q1 20163 established Probable Mineral Reserve (in accordance with NI 43-101) of 2.1 million tonnes LCE and demonstrated the economics associated with becoming a 35,000 tpa lithium carbonate and 50,000 tpa SOP producer in Mexico.

In addition to the Sonora Lithium Project, the Company also has a 50% interest in the Zinnwald Lithium Project in southern Saxony, Germany. The Zinnwald Lithium Project is located in a granite hosted Sn/W/Li belt that has been mined historically for tin, tungsten and lithium at different times over the past 300 years. The strategic location of the Zinnwald Lithium Project allows immediate access to the German automotive and downstream lithium chemical industries.

1 LCE = lithium carbonate (Li 2 CO 3 ) equivalent; determined by multiplying Li value in percent by 5.324 to get an equivalent Li 2 CO 3 value in per cent. Use of LCE is to provide data comparable with industry reports and assumes complete conversion of lithium in clays with no recovery or process losses.

2 See Amended Mineral Resource Estimate for the Sonora Lithium Project, Mexico, April 2016. The lead author of the amended report is Mr. Martin Pittuck (MSc., C.Eng., FGS, MIMMM) of SRK Consulting (UK) Limited ('SRK'). A copy of this report is available under Bacanora's corporate profile at www.sedar.com.

3 See Technical Report on the Pre-Feasibility Study for the Sonora Lithium Project, Mexico, 15 April 2016. The authors of the PFS are Ausenco Limited, SRK and Independent Mining Consultants Inc. A copy of this report is available under Bacanora's corporate profile at www.sedar.com.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - May 15, 2017) - Northern Empire Resources Corp. (TSX VENTURE:NM) (the "Company" or "Northern Empire") announces that the Company intends to complete a brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") of subscription receipts at a price of C$0.25 per subscription receipt to raise gross proceeds of up to C$20,000,000. The Private Placement is being conducted by a syndicate of agents led by Cormark Securities Inc. ("Cormark") and will include GMP Securities L.P., Haywood Securities Inc., and PI Financial Corp.

The proceeds of the Private Placement will be used in part by the Company to acquire the Sterling Property from Imperial Metals Corp. ("Imperial"). As previously announced in the Company's February 15 and April 3, 2017 news releases, total cash compensation payable to Imperial for the acquisition is US$10,100,000 of which US$1,500,000 has been paid.

Proceeds of the Private Placement will be placed in escrow pending completion of the Sterling Gold Project acquisition. Each subscription receipt will entitle the holder thereof to receive, without any further action and without payment of additional consideration, one common share of the Company upon the occurrence of certain conditions. As soon as practicable following the closing of the Private Placement, the Company will use its commercially reasonable best efforts to obtain a receipt for a (final) short-form prospectus qualifying the common shares underlying the subscription receipts from the applicable principal regulator. In the event the Company does not receive a receipt for the final prospectus within 60 days of the closing of the Private Placement, each subscription receipt will entitle the holder thereof to receive 1.1 common shares in lieu of one common share.

Prior to completing the acquisition of the Sterling Property, the Company anticipates completing a consolidation of its outstanding common shares on a 3(old) for 1(new) basis. The Private Placement is subject to TSXV approval and is expected to close on or before May 30, 2017.

Sterling Property Highlights

High Grade Gold in Nevada. Northern Empire filed an NI 43-101 compliant resource estimate on the Sterling Property on May 2, 2017. Total inferred resources on the Sterling Property were estimated at 709,000 oz Au (In Place) with an average grade of 2.23 g/t Au. Included in this estimate is the Sterling Deposit where a pit constrained resource of 231,000 oz Au (In Place) in 1,958,000 tonnes with an average grade of 3.67 g/t Au was determined. Further information on the Sterling Project Resources, please refer to the Company's news releases dated April 3 and May 2, 2017, and the and the Technical Report titled "Sterling Property, Nye County, Nevada, USA: A Property Under Option to Purchase by Northern Empire" that was posted May 2 on SEDAR.

Northern Empire filed an NI 43-101 compliant resource estimate on the Sterling Property on May 2, 2017. Total inferred resources on the Sterling Property were estimated at 709,000 oz Au (In Place) with an average grade of 2.23 g/t Au. Included in this estimate is the Sterling Deposit where a pit constrained resource of 231,000 oz Au (In Place) in 1,958,000 tonnes with an average grade of 3.67 g/t Au was determined. Further information on the Sterling Project Resources, please refer to the Company's news releases dated April 3 and May 2, 2017, and the and the Technical Report titled "Sterling Property, Nye County, Nevada, USA: A Property Under Option to Purchase by Northern Empire" that was posted May 2 on SEDAR. Permitted to begin operations. The Bureau of Land Management has issued a Finding of No Significant Impact ("FONSI") and approved the next phase of mining at Sterling. This permit was issued on May 12, 2016 and has an indefinite term. Northern Empire will immediately undertake a resource estimate, on all deposits on the properties;

The Bureau of Land Management has issued a Finding of No Significant Impact ("FONSI") and approved the next phase of mining at Sterling. This permit was issued on May 12, 2016 and has an indefinite term. Northern Empire will immediately undertake a resource estimate, on all deposits on the properties; Location. The Sterling Property is located approximately 100 miles NW of Las Vegas on the eastern flank of the Bare Mountains. The property is accessed via highway I-95 and gravel roads;

The Sterling Property is located approximately 100 miles NW of Las Vegas on the eastern flank of the Bare Mountains. The property is accessed via highway I-95 and gravel roads; Significant Engineering Completed by Imperial Metals. To achieve the FONSI, Imperial Metals created designs for the new pits and heap leach facilities that Northern Empire will be able to use as a basis for developement going forward;

To achieve the FONSI, Imperial Metals created designs for the new pits and heap leach facilities that Northern Empire will be able to use as a basis for developement going forward; Significant infrastructure in place. Imperial Metals ceased underground mining in 2015. Processing facilities, mine offices and generators are on site and are currently being used to rinse heaps from prior operations.

About Northern Empire

Northern Empire is an aggressive, Vancouver based, gold explorer working to take advantage of the current improving market conditions by assembling a value driven portfolio of properties.

Qualified Persons

The 2017 resource estimate was prepared by Norwest Corporation in accordance with requirements of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101). Technical work, analysis and findings were completed by Derek Loveday, P.Geo., Allan Turner, P.Geol., and Sean Ennis, P.Eng. Each person is an independent "Qualified Person" as defined by NI 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the information in this news release.

Michael G. Allen, P. Geo., President of Northern Empire, and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101, has reviewed the technical information contained in this news release. He is the non-independent qualified person for this new release and has verified the data.
By Rachel Lee



A South Korean delegation headed by Rep. Park Byeong-seug of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) arrived in Beijing, Saturday, to attend a two-day international summit, which began Sunday.



The delegation is attending the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which attracted 29 delegates from various countries including North Korea.



The visit is seen an opportunity to mend frayed ties between Seoul and Beijing over the deployment of a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea. China is opposed to the THAAD battery, installed to deter the North's missile threats.



Park, a former deputy National Assembly speaker, said he expected to meet high-ranking Chinese government officials Monday.



"China puts a high value on our visit," Park said.



Beijing had reportedly considered ruling out Seoul as a participant in protest against the THAAD installation. But it extended the invitation in light of the inauguration of South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is poles apart from his predecessor Park Geun-hye who pushed for the deployment.



Political observers believe Beijing expects the new leader could reconsider the previous government's decision.



Earlier in a phone conversation, Moon told Chinese President Xi Jinping he would send envoys to discuss THAAD and North Korea's nuclear program.



Park said he carried no special message from the president, but would deliver a greeting



"The main purpose of this visit was to attend the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, and when we get to meet Chinese government officials, we will talk about issues naturally such as the situation on the Korean peninsula," Park said.



"If the Chinese side brings up the THAAD issue, we will also discuss that."



Park stressed that the visit should be a starting point for bilateral relations to improve.



Pyongyang's state media reported that the North's delegation led by Minister of External Economic Relations Kim Yong Jae left for China, Saturday.



Regarding the North's participation, Park said: "We did not contact each other before the forum, but since we are going to be at the conference all day long, we could naturally start talking."



Asked what he wanted to discuss with Kim, Park said there could be several points of discussion as a step to establishing bilateral relations.



President Moon Jae-in plans to send special envoys to major countries surrounding South Korea in an apparent move to make up for months of stalled diplomatic relations. There will also be phone conversations with the heads of countries, including the U.S., China and Japan.



Moon appointed former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan as special envoy to China. Lee was also the special envoy to China under the former Roh Moo-hyun government.



Moon took office May 10, after an unusual presidential election caused by the removal from office of former President Park Geun-hye over corruption allegations.








By Casey Lartigue Jr.





I am occasionally blindsided when race comes up during discussions about my activities related to North Korean refugees. A South Korean colleague says she has observed three main reactions: Koreans highlight that a Harvard graduate is helping refugees; North Korean refugees praise my work; American reporters and intellectuals bring up race.



After I spoke at a conference in the USA a few years ago, one of the professors who had been singing my praises informed me that some at the conference were asking: "Why is a black man doing so much to help North Koreans?" In a podcast discussion last year, a Korean-American host (now a good friend) asked how my race is related to my work.



I was recently interviewed on the TBS eFM radio show "Koreascape." Host Kurt Achin is a seasoned reporter who will directly ask you in a serious voice about stupid gossip he has heard, then wait to hear your response. Transitioning without a transition from the specifics of helping North Korean refugees, Achin asked: "Casey, you're African-American. Is that relevant? Do you bring any of that forward?"



I have been through this kind of discussion and didn't want to waste live radio time on it. To make his case, he mentioned that I occasionally quote Civil Rights leaders in my columns. I explained: "When I was 12 years old, I read all three of Frederick Douglass' books. I am still moved by his words and his actions."



I'm focused on freedom of choice, respecting the individual, and locomotion, not race. When I was the keynote speaker at the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association (FDMHA) conference in 2003 and later a member of the FDMHA Board of Trustees for more than a decade, I was honored because of Douglass' ideas and actions, not his race.



I have heard chatter that some conspiracy theorists and bean-counters in the journalistic and expat chattering class in Korea have been accusing me of trying to lead a movement against North Korea like I am a modern-day Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King Jr. I've considered launching NorthKoreanRefugeeRevolution.com on a Friday night to set off simultaneous heart attacks as the chit-chatters are having drinks at the Press Club.



Those frogs in the well at Press Club networking nights see race, but Douglass stood for universal human rights, abolishing slavery, protecting women's suffrage, and open immigration. As Americans sought to restrict Chinese immigration to the USA, Douglass argued as early as 1869 for universal locomotion as part of human rights that all have (the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act passed anyway).



After that TBS eFM interview, I dug up the beautiful plaque FDMHA honored me with years ago. I have positioned it on the wall in my office in Seoul to fall, with the push of a button, on the heads of chit-chatting expats and reporters visiting me.



I'm not saying race is a forbidden subject, it is what it is. I can't help but notice that no matter what work I do, even helping North Korean refugees, some American reporters, intellectuals, and critics see race. I have had Koreans mention race, but that has been related to English teaching. Otherwise, about North Korean refugees, Koreans emphasize my Harvard connection then run through the usual boring checklist of questions about my favorite Korean food and personal life.



With so many seeing race, I am wondering: Am I the only blind one? I have no expertise about race other than being born to parents who are listed as "Negroid" on my birth certificate issued by the state of Texas. Two years ago, I rejected an offer by an American film director who wanted to feature me in a documentary. He wanted to highlight me as a black man who came to Korea to work in solidarity with North Korean refugees. That's not how it happened and I'm not sure how race would be the focus.



I suppose there is some irony that North Koreans, called the "Cleanest Race" by one American scholar on North Korea, have not connected race to my activities. I am humbled by the love showered on me by North Korean refugees. They bring me and my South Korean co-director personalized gifts and praise us as "angels" even when we aren't present. They talk about what we are doing, how we can expand to help more refugees, not about race.

I was recently connected with a Korean book publisher who wants to inform the Korean public about me. She has mentioned several possible angles, but race is not one of them. Our mutual contact may not have broken that particular bit of news to the publisher yet. I certainly won't be asking any of the gossiping reporters to propose book titles; I suspect they would start with the title of this column.



Casey Lartigue Jr. is the co-founder of the Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center (TNKR) in Seoul. He can be reached at CJL@post.harvard.edu.
The distinctive dog device

Reputation

Zuma the dog (probably)

c/o DineinWithZuma.com

Use of a sign

Use in the course of trade

Making a link in the mind of the average consumer

the use of the words "dine in" - "one does not normally refer to dogs dining"; the defendants' dog food product names such as "slow braised pork" and "chicken and lentils" were more commonly associated with human food; and the dog on every page of the website is smartly dressed in a bow tie (see picture above).

Tarnishment

"I would not call my restaurant Zuma because I think it is literally dog food and dog food is not pleasant. Sometimes it smells, sometimes it is just unpleasant and people many times associate dog food with bad food. So Zuma could serve bad food, dog food. I would never call a restaurant Pedigree because Pedigree is, I think, a well-known animal pet food... and I know people would associate that food for the animals with my food served in my restaurant."

It was Game Over for the

Zuma's Revenge argument

Dilution

Without due cause

with application in a case in which there was no prior use of the sign ... the court must consider whether in all the circumstances there is objective justification of the use of the sign complained of, notwithstanding that the court has found detriment to the distinctive character or the repute of the trade mark."





The suggestion that the defendants "had due cause to use the signs complained of because she created a dog food business using the signs" did not convince the judge.





The own name defence





Maier v ASOS [2015]EWCA Civ 220, the key question is "whether the use that Asos has made of the sign ASOS has been in accordance with honest practices in industrial or commercial matters." In other words, it is a question of fairness. Although the own name defence is available for both individuals and companies for disputes involving UK marks, it is no longer available for EU marks. As Kitchin LJ said in[2015]EWCA Civ 220, the key question is "whether the use that Asos has made of the sign ASOS has been in accordance with honest practices in industrial or commercial matters." In other words, it is a question of fairness.





The judge confirmed that the own name defence cannot be relied upon if you name your business after a dog. As Simon Malynicz noted "the dog is not a party to the proceedings, nor is it a natural person or company". However, the corporate defendant, Zuma's Choice Pet Products Limited was able to rely on the name defence as "a company name will not, of itself, infringe the Marks or any of them."





Joint tortfeasance

the defendant must have assisted in the commission of the act by the primary tortfeasor; the assistance must have been pursuant to a common design between the defendant and primary tortfeasor; and the act must constitute a tort against the Claimant.

Groundless threats
by Sara Guaglione , May 15, 2017

Nylon Media has acquired fashion and beauty conference business Simply Stylist to connect consumers with its roster of influencers and celebrities. The move provides opportunities for brands to support the events, as well as attract engaged followers.

Simply Stylist, founded in 2012 by Sarah Boyd, will continue to operate as Simply and work closely with Nylon and Socialyte, the publishers influencer casting agency with about 2,000 influencers on its platform. It will build and extend its talent roster, conference and brand activation businesses and video content.

Jamie Elden, president of Nylon and chairman of Socialyte, stated the acquisition adds a layer to the business, which will enable us to connect and engage at a much deeper level with our consumers, brands and leading talent in the industry.

Simply Stylist manages a roster of celebrity talent as bloggers. Its conferences span across the U.S. and Dubai. Boyd will continue leading the business and report to Elden.

advertisement advertisement

Elden told Publishers Daily Simply Stylist and Socialyte will work together to amplify and promote events, as well as increase scale.

Beauty brands were saying how great we were doing with content, social, print, digital ,but asked how can we look at getting more of a one-to-one connection with consumers, he said.

Thats where Simply comes in because they throw large conferences, with a panel, where consumers can come and learn how to use different beauty products, how to build their own social profile, and provide opportunities for brands who want more one-to-one connections. If that can scale, thats a win-win, Elden said.

The acquisition makes it seamless for agencies and brands to tap into these opportunities, he noted.

Simply Stylist conferences are very stripped down and encourage Q & A sessions to let consumers talk to influencers and get to know how they got there, their journey, Elden said.

He suggested one idea to expand the business is to launch a shopping mall tour with smaller expos across the top 30 shopping malls in the U.S., where consumers can interact with fashion and beauty stylists.

All such events would be supported by Nylon content. For example, video of conferences would be distributed on Nylons social platforms. Elden said a benchmark for these events is TED Talks.

They have a very simple format but it works  not only if you are there, but when you watch it you are there as well. Its a very real, authentic experience and a great one-to-one connection. People will share it because it is valuable, he said.

Elden hopes the conference business will bring social conversation and discussion. As a media company, you have your consumers who read your content, you have brands that want to be around it, and you hope people like it, share it, and comment upon it.

Elden said just a few years ago, Nylon was buying some print, some digital and a bit of social, but now it is focused on growing into a media company with a range of businesses  from the content studio it launched last year to its new TV and video programming production studio, in partnership with talent and literary agency United Talent Agency (UTA).

With the addition of Simply, Nylon claims it now reaches 45 million uniques and more than 140 million on social platforms.

Nylon Media recently revived its men's fashion title Nylon Guys. It will appear as a supplement to Nylon magazines March, June/July and September issues and in 2018 will roll out as a standalone, bimonthly publication.
by Larissa Faw , May 15, 2017

Atlantis, Paradise Island in the Bahamas and its agency enso are revealing the island resort's new "Come to Life" initiative, which refreshes its brand purpose and positioning.

The effort includes a new storytelling platform for the "voices of Bahamas artists, musicians, employees and locals, designed to reach and resonate with travelers worldwide. Atlantis is the second-largest employer in the Bahamas after the government.

A 60-second film showcases the voices message  it featuring local artists, musicians and designers. A voiceover proclaims "a brighter sun lies within ourselves" before ending with the tagline, Come to Life.



This makeover is being led by Atlantis' president and managing director Howard C Karawan who has recently returned to the company after 10 years. His return sparked a reunion with enso's Kirk Souder, who heKarawan originally partnered with when they first developed the upscale destination's inaugural campaign 20 years ago.

advertisement advertisement

Souder went on to cofound enso. Now, the two are teaming up to create a shared marketing vision for Atlantis intended to resonate with a new generation of travelers.

"It was clear to me the world was different, the customer had evolved and the market had changed," says Karawan. "Atlantis had to evolve toward purpose and mission  Offering our guests the spirit and culture of the Bahamian people and an immersive connection with the ocean is the core of our product and needed to be the foundation of our social impact and communications.
by Wayne Friedman , May 15, 2017

During Mondays upfront presentation, NBCUniversals Linda Yaccarino made a strong case for advertisers continuing to buy lots of TV commercials, in light of competing digital media concerns.



Yaccarino, chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships for NBCU, relayed a story that a media agency CEO told her recently. She would have the easiest job this year in the upfront advertising selling season because of digital medias brand safety issues.

Googles YouTube and Facebook have recently been troubled by concerns that some ads could run next to risky content.

With NBCUniversal, you never have to worry about your ad showing up next to something objectionable, said Yaccarino. But lets be honest  promising brand safety is a really low bar  and some companies cant even do that.

advertisement advertisement

Yaccarino went on to cite a recent study NBC did with Accenture showing that overall premium TV content delivers four times as much brand awareness as paid social media and 11 times more than short-form video.

Even then, NBCU isnt shying away from digital  especially mobile. Yaccarino claimed that NBCUniversal is the only company that can reach every single smartphone in the country. As part of this, NBCUniversal, last November, struck a big deal with Apple News, in which NBCU sells advertising in what it calls trusted advertising opportunities with mobile publishers.

TVs declining viewership, by current Nielsen measures, has been a major concern for big TV marketers.

Yaccarino has been a big critic of Nielsens proposed plan for its Total Content Ratings (TCR), a metric that includes all traditional TV -- live, linear and delayed TV viewing, as well as digital media airings of TV episodes, up to 35 days after its initial airing.

Given this, Yaccarino says NBCU has its own plan for measurement  going beyond traditional age and gender metrics.

At NBC, we just could wait any long so we built the capabilities ourselves, she says. This year, we are guaranteeing up to $1 billion of inventory, based on real business outcomes  your business outcomes.

She added: We are teaming up with our good friends at Fox and Moat using Moat video scores to measure all viewing  live, linear and digital. That way, all of us can compare different video environments with just one metric.

Even though competing digital media platforms have grown due to key ROI business metrics, TV can now compete on the same level: Today with TV, you get the best of both worlds  the data you crave plus the premium content everybody loves.

TV still has a leg up; digital media algorithms cant do it all, she says. If algorithms were in control at the TV networks, says Yaccarino, NBC networks hit This Is Us or USA Networks Mr. Robot would never have made it on air.

If you want to reach real humans, you need the human touch.
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.
* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati received the 2022 Adepi Award

* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati listed as one of the World Intellectual Property Review's "Influential Women in IP" of 2020.

* PermaKat Eleonora Rosati listed as one of the Managing Intellectual Property magazine's "Fifty Most Influential People" of 2018.

* IPKat founder and Blogmeister Emeritus Jeremy Phillips listed as one of the Managing Intellectual Property magazine's "Fifty Most Influential People" of 2005, 2011, 2013, and 2014.

* Recommended by the European Patent Office as reading material for candidates for the European Qualifying Examinations, 2013.

* Listed as "Top Legal Blog" in The Times Online, March 2011.

2010 ABA Journal 100. * One of the only two non-US blogs listed in the Blawg100.

* Court Reporter Top Copyright Blog award winner, November 2010.

* Number 1 in the 2010 Top Copyright Blog list compiled by the Copyright Litigation Blog, July 2010.

* Selected by the United States Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials related to Legal Blawgs as of 2010.

* Top Patent Blog poll 2009: 3rd out of 50 in the "Favourite Patent Blog" poll and 2nd out of 50 in the "Most-read" poll.

Blog of the Year, 20 August 2008. * ComputerWeekly IT Law and Governance, 20 August 2008.
Chrome ore prices drop by 34.6% in China

Chinese domestic spot ferro-chrome prices drop 20%

Ore buyers walk away from some inbound cargoes

Alloy prices slide in Japan and Europe

Alloy prices hold in South Korea and USA

Metal Bulletins UG2 chrome ore index, cif China, dropped to $151 per tonne, down 34.6% from May 5.



Metal Bulletins price quotation for Turkish lumpy chrome ore, cfr China dropped 30% week-on-week to $240-250 per tonne.

Market sources reported that some chrome ore buyers in China have started to walk away from cargoes they bought at higher prices in recent weeks, due to the subsequent drop in value.

Metal Bulletin assessed Chinese contract ferro-chrome prices at 6,900-7,100 yuan per tonne, in line with May tender prices released by two major mills.

Metal Bulletins price quotation for domestic spot ferro-chrome also dropped to 6,900-7,100 yuan per tonne, in warehouse China, down 20% compared with the previous week.

The new contract and spot ferro-chrome price ranges are equivalent to about 77-80 cents per lb.

Most market participants said they anticipated further price drops on both ore and alloy, citing high raw material inventories and poor demand from the stainless steel sector.

It will be hard to say UG2 prices have touched the floor before inventories wind down. And the downward ferro-chrome trend will be also weighing on chrome ore prices, a major ore trader told Metal Bulletin.

A gap persists between Chinese domestic ferro-chrome prices and imported ferro-chrome prices, leading to a stand-off between international ferro-chrome suppliers and their customers in China.

While ferro-chrome suppliers outside China have said in recent weeks that they are under less pressure to cut their Chinese than Chinese domestic mills are, import prices are edging lower.

Metal Bulletins charge chrome index, cif Shanghai dropped 1 cent to $1.11 per lb.

One side will give up; I think sooner or later the seller will concede to Chinese mills tender prices as this is an obviously falling market, one international ferro-chrome supplier predicted.

Elsewhere in Asia, ferro-chrome prices were also under downward pressure in Japan, while trading remained thin in South Korea.

Metal Bulletins price quotation for spot high-carbon ferro-chrome, cif Japan dropped 3 cents at each end of its trading range on Thursday May 11, settling at $1.1-1.17 per lb.



Prices for high-carbon ferro-chrome, cif South Korea held at $1.1-1.15 per lb on Thursday.

Europe braces for lower prices, USA spooked

In Europe, prices edged lower as market participants braced for further weakness in response to the sharp falls in China.

High-carbon ferro-chrome prices fell 2 cents at the high end to $1.30-1.42 per lb on a delivered basis.

Im holding off buying in the spot ferro-chrome market and see what the impact will be from the markets in China, a consumer in Europe told Metal Bulletin.

Spot enquiries have been for small volumes as most consumers remained covered on long-term contracts, according to a supplier source who added that the ferro-chrome market is better balanced in Europe than in China.

The main consumers are covered for the time being and the transactions are rather limited to small lots, the source told Metal Bulletin.

Irrespective of expected downward price movements in China, supply and demand remain balanced in Europe, the source added.

In the USA, spot prices for high-carbon ferro-chrome held at $1.42-1.49 per lb in warehouse Pittsburgh on May 11, according to Metal Bulletin sister publication AMMs latest assessment.

The US market has been spooked by weakness in China and spot activity has been limited to small, sporadic transactions.

Its definitely a little scary what is happening overseas, and we have seen a slowing of enquiries this week, a supplier source in the USA told AMM.

But others said they believe recent uncertainty will limit scope for downside as it has been discouraging imports, keeping supply tight.

Everyone is still reluctant to bring material in and that is still creating significant tightness, a second market source told Metal Bulletin.

The latest developments in the Chinese chrome ore and Chinese ferro-chrome markets will exacerbate that effect, sources added.

Traders have not been willing to stick their necks out and now those fears are only going to be further entrenched, the first supplier source explained.

Despite, the uncertainty, US suppliers were keen to point out that theirs is the market where stainless steel demand remains robust.

We see prices staying where they are for a while because demand is still great, and no one is long, a third supplier source told AMM.

We are expecting most mills to come back in even longer contracts for the second half and third quarter, the source said.
The following companies are subsidiares of Becton, Dickinson and: Accuri Cytometers, Accuri Cytometers Inc., Alverix Inc, Alverix Inc., Atto Bioscience Inc, BD Holding S. de R.L. de C.V., BD Infection Prevention BV, BD Kiestra BV, BD Kiestra Total Lab Automation, BD Rapid Diagnostic (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., BD San Luis Potosi S.A. de C.V., BD Switzerland Sarl, BD Ventures LLC, BD West Africa Limited, BDX INO LLC, Bard (Thailand) Limited, Bard ASDI Inc., Bard Access Systems Inc., Bard Acquisition Sub Inc., Bard Australia Pty. Limited, Bard Benelux N.V., Bard Brachytherapy Inc., Bard Brasil Industria e Comercio de Produtos Para a Saude Ltda., Bard Canada Inc., Bard Chile S.p.A., Bard Czech Republic s.r.o., Bard Devices Inc., Bard Dublin ITC Limited, Bard EMEA Finance Center Sp.z o.o., Bard European Distribution Center N.V., Bard Finance B.V. & Co. KG., Bard Financial Services Ltd., Bard Finland OY, Bard France S.A.S., Bard Global Holdings I LLC, Bard Global Holdings II LLC, Bard Global Holdings III LLC, Bard Healthcare Inc., Bard Healthcare Science (Shanghai) Limited, Bard Hellas S.A., Bard Holding SAS, Bard Holdings Limited, Bard Holdings Netherlands B.V., Bard Hong Kong Limited, Bard IP Holdings Inc., Bard India Healthcare Pvt. Ltd., Bard International Holdings B.V., Bard International Inc., Bard Istanbul Healthcare Limited Company, Bard Korea Ltd., Bard Limited, Bard MRL Acquisition Corp., Bard Malaysia Healthcare Sdn. Bhd., Bard Medica SA, Bard Medical Devices (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Bard Medical R&D (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Bard Medical SA (Proprietary) Limited, Bard Mexico Realty S. de R.L. de C.V., Bard Norden AB, Bard Norway AS, Bard Pacific Health Care Company Ltd., Bard Peripheral Vascular Inc., Bard Poland Sp. z.o.o., Bard Productos Plasticos e Medicos Ltda., Bard Reynosa S.A. de C.V., Bard S.r.l., Bard Sdn. 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Bhd, Becton Dickinson GmbH, Becton Dickinson Guatemala S.A., Becton Dickinson Hellas S.A., Becton Dickinson Holdings Limited, Becton Dickinson Holdings Ltd., Becton Dickinson Holdings Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson Hungary Kft., Becton Dickinson India Private Limited, Becton Dickinson Industrias Cirurgicas Ltda., Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy AB, Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy Holdings UK Limited, Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy Systems Inc., Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy Systems Inc. S.A. de C.V., Becton Dickinson Infusion Therapy UK, Becton Dickinson Insulin Syringe Ltd., Becton Dickinson International Holdings II Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson International Holdings III Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson International Holdings Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson Israel Ltd., Becton Dickinson Italia S.p.A., Becton Dickinson Ithalat Ihracat Limited Sirketi, Becton Dickinson Korea Holding Inc., Becton Dickinson Korea Ltd., Becton Dickinson Ltd., Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Finance S.a.r.L., Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Global Holdings Sarl, Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Holdings II S.a.r.L, Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Holdings III S.a.r.L, Becton Dickinson Luxembourg Holdings V S.a.r.L., Becton Dickinson Malaysia Inc., Becton Dickinson Management GmbH & Co. KG, Becton Dickinson Matrex Holdings Inc., Becton Dickinson Medical (S) Pte Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Devices (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Devices (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Products Pte. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Medical Technology (Jiangsu) Co. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Netherlands Global Holdings II C.V., Becton Dickinson Netherlands Holdings B.V., Becton Dickinson Netherlands Holdings II B.V., Becton Dickinson Norway AS, Becton Dickinson O.Y., Becton Dickinson Overseas Services Ltd., Becton Dickinson Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd., Becton Dickinson Penel Limited, Becton Dickinson Philippines Inc., Becton Dickinson Polska Sp.z.o.o., Becton Dickinson Portugal Unipessoal Lda., Becton Dickinson Pty. Ltd., Becton Dickinson Research Centre Ireland Limited, Becton Dickinson Rowa Germany GmbH, Becton Dickinson Rowa Italy Srl, Becton Dickinson S.A., Becton Dickinson Sample Collection GmbH, Becton Dickinson Scot Financing L.L.P., Becton Dickinson Scot Financing L.P., Becton Dickinson Sdn. Bhd., Becton Dickinson Slovakia s.r.o., Becton Dickinson Sweden AB, Becton Dickinson Sweden Holdings AB, Becton Dickinson Switzerland Global Holdings SarL, Becton Dickinson Technology Campus India, Becton Dickinson U.K. Limited, Becton Dickinson UK Financing I Limited, Becton Dickinson UK Financing II Limited, Becton Dickinson Venezuela C.A., Becton Dickinson Venture LLC, Becton Dickinson Verwaltungs GmbH, Becton Dickinson Vostok LLC, Becton Dickinson Worldwide Investments Sa.r.L., Becton Dickinson Zambia Limited, Becton Dickinson and Company Ltd., Becton Dickinson de Colombia Ltda., Becton Dickinson de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Becton Dickinson del Uruguay S.A., Bee IT Solutions, Benex Ltd., Biometric Imaging, Bridger Biomed Inc., C. R. Bard (Portugal) - Produtos e Artigos Medicos e Farmaceuticos, C. R. Bard Do Brasil Productos Medicos Ltda., C. R. Bard GmbH, C. R. Bard Inc., C. R. Bard Netherlands Sales B.V., C.R. Bard Inc, CME America LLC, CME Ltd., CME Medical (UK) Limited, CME UK (Holdings) Limited, CRISI Medical Systems, CRISI Medical Systems Inc., Caesarea Medical Electronics, Cardal II LLC, Care Fusion Development Private Limited, CareFusion (Barbados) SrL, CareFusion (Shanghai) Commercial and Trading Co. Limited, CareFusion 213 LLC, CareFusion 2200 Inc., CareFusion 2201 Inc., CareFusion 302 LLC, CareFusion 303 Inc., CareFusion Asia (HK) Limited, CareFusion Corporation, CareFusion Corporation., CareFusion D.R. 203 Ltd., CareFusion France 309 S.A.S., CareFusion Israel 330 Ltd., CareFusion Italy 312 S.p.A., CareFusion Manufacturing LLC, CareFusion Mexico 215 S.A. de C.V., CareFusion Netherlands 328 B.V., CareFusion Netherlands 503 B.V., CareFusion Netherlands 504 B.V., CareFusion Netherlands Financing 283 C.V., CareFusion Resources LLC, CareFusion S.A. 319 (Proprietary) Limited, CareFusion Solutions LLC, CareFusion U.K. 244 Limited, CareFusion U.K. 305 Limited, CareFusion U.K. 306 Limited, Carmel Pharma AB, Carmel Pharma Inc, Cato Software Solutions, Cell Analysis Systems Inc, Cellular Research, Cellular Research Inc., Clearstream Technologies Group Limited, Clearstream Technologies Limited, Clontech Laboratories Inc, Corporativo BD de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Critical Device Corporation, Cubex, Cytognos, Cytopeia Inc, DLD (Bermuda) Ltd., DVL Acquisition Sub Inc., Davol Inc., Davol International Limited, Davol Surgical Innovations S.A. de C.V., Difco Laboratories Incorporated, Distribuidora BD Mexico S.A. de C.V., Dutch American Manufacturers (D.A.M.) B.V., Dymax Corporation, Embo Medical Limited, Enturia de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Enturican Inc., FJ International Inc., FlowCardia Inc., FlowCardia LLC, FlowJo LLC, Franklin Lakes Enterprises L.L.C., GSL Solutions, Gamer Lasertechnik GmbH, GenCell Biosystems, GenCell Biosystems Ltd., GeneOhm Sciences Canada ULC, GeneOhm Sciences Inc, Gentest Corporation, Gesco International Inc., Gesco International LLC, Glentech Inc, HandyLab Inc, HandyLab Inc., IBD Holdings LLC, Iontophoretics Corporation, JoHome LLC, Kabushiki Kaisha Medicon (Medicon Inc.), Liberator Health and Education Services Inc., Liberator Health and Wellness Inc., Liberator Medical Holdings Inc., Liberator Medical Supply Inc., Limited Liability Company Bard Rus, Loma Vista Medical Inc., Loma Vista Medical LLC, Luther Medical Products Inc, Lutonix Inc., Med-Design Corporation, Med-Design Investment Holdings Inc., Med-Safe Systems Inc, Med-Safe Systems Inc., MedChem Products Inc., Medafor Inc., Medegen LLC, Medinservice.com Inc., Medivance Inc., NAT Diagnostics Inc., NAT Diagnostics Inc., NOW Medical Distribution Inc., NOW Medical Distribution LLC, Navarre Biomedical LLC, Navarre Biomedical Ltd., Neomend Inc., Nippon Becton Dickinson Company Ltd., Omega Biosystems Incorporated, P.R.C. (Isialys) Societe a responsabilitie limitee, PT Becton Dickinson Indonesia, PharMingen, PharMingen., Plasso Technology Ltd, PreAnalytiX GmbH, Pristine Access Technologies Inc., ProSeed Inc., Procesos para Esterilizacion S.A. de C.V., Productos Bard de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Productos Para el Cuidado de la Salud S.A. de C.V., Puls Medical Devices AS LC, PureWick Corporation, Roberts Laboratories Inc., Rochester Medical Corporation, Rochester Medical Ltd., Saf-T-Med Inc, Safety Syringes Inc., Scanwell Health Inc., Sendal S.L.U., SenoRx Inc., SenoRx LLC, Shield Healthcare Centers Inc., Sirigen Group Limited, Sirigen II Limited, Sirigen Inc., Sistemas Medicos ALARIS S.A. de C.V., Specialized Cooperative Corporation, Specialized Health Products Inc., Specialized Health Products International Inc., Specialized Health Products International LLC, Staged Diabetes Management LLC, Straub Medical AG, Straub Medical AG, Surgical Site Solutions Inc., TVA Medical Inc, TVA Medical Inc., Tepha Inc, Tepha Inc., Tissuemed Ltd., Tri-County Medical & Ostomy Supplies Inc., TriPath Imaging Inc., Tru-Fit Marketing Corporation, Vas-Cath Incorporated, Vascular Pathways Inc., Velano Vascular, Velano Vascular Inc., Venclose Inc., Venetec International Inc., Venetec International LLC, Visitec, Y-Med Inc., Y-Med LLC, and ZebraSci Inc..

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Those who had been concerned about the nature of the former administrations appeasement policies now see signs that point to the new administration having a very different approach.

In fact, shortly after the new administration took office, Iran began a series of test launches of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. By doing this, they risk violating a United Nations Security Council resolution calling upon the country to avoid provocative gestures following the 2015 Nuclear Deal.

The Trump White House was quick to respond, and immediately put Tehran on notice, according to Giulio Terzi, former Italian Foreign Minister, writing for Newsweek on May 15.

They also targeted a number of other issues related to the Irans role in the broader Middle East, including its use of terrorist proxies.

United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, spoke to those concerns in her address last month, during an open debate on the Middle East. She called on the Security Council to put significant focus on Irans regional conduct and sponsorship of terror.

Several officials in the Trump administration have spoken out with similar criticisms and advocacy. Their beliefs, so different to the previous administrations, who believed that the Nuclear Deal would bring about economic relief for Iran, and thus a more peaceful Tehran, show that Americas new foreign policy leaders have had no qualms about pointing out that Iran is the worlds leading state sponsor of terrorism and a source of instability in the local region.

The issues of terrorism and regional involvement have contributed to President Trumps conclusion that Tehran is violating the spirit of the nuclear agreement.

Additionally, the leading Iranian opposition group, the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), have recently reported that its operatives inside the country uncovered ongoing nuclear research at the institutions which were formerly tasked with weaponization programs. The US administration has stated that it is reviewing this new information carefully.

Revelations such as these should be a source of concern for anyone who is worried about the instability of the Middle East, as well as the safety of Western interests and assets. Those Western businesses and policymakers who have been eager to do business in the Iranian market, after sanctions were lifted via the nuclear agreement, should also be concerned with this new information.
The following companies are subsidiares of General Dynamics: 42SIX LLC, ARMA Global Corporation, Advanced Technical Products, Aeromil (Australia) Pty Ltd, Aeromil Aircraft Engineering Pty Ltd, Aeromil Aviation Services Pty Ltd, Aeromil IT Services Pty Ltd, Aeromil Marine Pty Ltd, Aeromil Pacific Pty Ltd, American Overseas Marine Company LLC, Anteon International Corporation, Applied Physical Sciences, Applied Physical Sciences Corp., Ascend Intelligence, Australian Avionics Pty Ltd, Autonomic Resources LLC, Avion Logistics Limited, Avjet Corporation, AxleTech International, Axsys, BATH IRON WORKS CORPORATION, BP-HP Pte Limited, Bath Iron Works, Bath Iron Works Australia Corporation, Bath Iron Works Canada LLC, Bluefin Robotics Corporation, Blueprint Technologies Inc., Braintree I Maritime Corp., Braintree II Maritime Corp., Braintree III Maritime Corp., Braintree IV Maritime Corp., Braintree V Maritime Corp., Buccaneer Computer Systems & Service Inc., CSC Computer Sciences Venezuela S.A., CSRA, CSRA (Costa Rica) S.A., CSRA (Guyana) Inc., CSRA (Middle East) LLC, CSRA Argentina S.R.L., CSRA BH d.o.o., CSRA Bahamas Limited, CSRA Bahrain S.P.C., CSRA Belgium SPRL, CSRA Bolivia S.R.L., CSRA Brazil Servicos de Tecnologia Ltda., CSRA Canada Inc., CSRA Caribbean Inc., CSRA Chile SpA, CSRA Colombia SAS, CSRA Commerce 2010 LLC, CSRA Consular Services Holding Company LLC, CSRA Consular Services Inc., CSRA France SARL, CSRA Guatemala Solutions Sociedad Anonima, CSRA Honduras Sociedad Anonima, CSRA Inc., CSRA Information Systems LLC, CSRA Information Technology Spain SL, CSRA Ireland Limited, CSRA Italy S.R.L, CSRA Kosovo L.L.C., CSRA LATAM LLC, CSRA LLC, CSRA Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., CSRA Netherlands B.V., CSRA Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CSRA Panama Inc., CSRA Peru S.R.L., CSRA Senegal SARL, CSRA South Africa (Pty) Ltd, CSRA State and Local Solutions LLC, CSRA Systems & Solutions LLC, CSRA Trinidad & Tobago Limited, CSRA Turkey Bilisim Teknolojileri Limited Sirketi, CSRA Uruguay S.R.L, CSRA Visa Services Israel Ltd., CSRAIT - Information Services Portugal Unipessoal LDA, Centauri Solutions LLC, Command System, Computing Devices International, Concord I Maritime Corporation, Concord II Maritime Corporation, Concord III Maritime Corporation, Concord IV Maritime Corporation, Concord V Maritime Corporation, Convair Aircraft Corporation, Convair Corporation, Creative Technology, Customer Services Ecuador CSRA S.A., Devcor, Diamond Fortress Technologies, DynPort Vaccine Company LLC, EB Groton Engineering Inc., EBV Explosives Environmental, ELCS-CZ s.r.o., Eagle Enterprise Inc., Earl Industries - Ship Repair and Coatings Division, Ebv Explosives Environmental Company, Electric Boat - Australia LLC, Electric Boat - UK LLC, Electric Boat Canada LLC, Electric Boat Corporation, Electric Boat France LLC, Electrocom Inc., Engineering Technology, Expro Finance Inc., FBD Fahrzeug und Bremsendienst GmbH, FC Business Systems, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Force Protection, Force Protection Europe Limited, Force Protection Inc., ForeSight Technology Services LLC, Freeman United Coal Mining Company LLC, GD Brazil Holdings LLC, GD European Land Systems - Steyr GmbH, GD European Land Systems Holding GmbH, GDOTS Services Corporation, GM GDLS Defense Group L.L.C., GPS Source Inc., GTE Government Systems, GWA-Datatrac FAST LLC, Galaxy Aerospace Company, Gayston Corporation - Defense Operations, General Dynamics - OTS (Global) Inc., General Dynamics AIS Australia Pty Ltd, General Dynamics Canadian Finance Inc., General Dynamics Canadian Holdings Inc., General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services LLC, General Dynamics European Finance Limited, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Austria GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Bridge Systems GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Czech s.r.o., General Dynamics European Land Systems - Denmark ApS, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Deutschland GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - FWW GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Mowag GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems Romania S.R.L., General Dynamics European Land Systems S.L., General Dynamics Global Force LLC, General Dynamics Global Holdings Limited, General Dynamics Global Imaging Technologies Inc., General Dynamics Government Satellite Services LLC, General Dynamics Government Systems Corporation, General Dynamics Government Systems Overseas Corporation, General Dynamics Information Technology Canada Limited, General Dynamics Information Technology Inc., General Dynamics Information Technology Limited, General Dynamics Installation Services LLC, General Dynamics International Corporation, General Dynamics Itronix LLC, General Dynamics Land Systems - Australia Pty. Ltd., General Dynamics Land Systems - Canada Corporation, General Dynamics Land Systems - Canada Services Inc., General Dynamics Land Systems - Canadian Services Limited, General Dynamics Land Systems - Force Protection Inc., General Dynamics Land Systems Customer Service & Support Company, General Dynamics Land Systems Inc., General Dynamics Limited, General Dynamics Marine Systems Inc., General Dynamics Mission Systems Inc., General Dynamics Mission Systems International Limited, General Dynamics Mission Systems Overseas Company LLC, General Dynamics Motion Control LLC, General Dynamics OTS (Aerospace) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (California) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (DRI) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (Niceville) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (Pennsylvania) Inc., General Dynamics One Source LLC, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems - Canada Inc., General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems - Canada Valleyfield Inc., General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems - Simunition Operations Inc., General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems Inc., General Dynamics Overseas Systems and Services Corporation, General Dynamics Properties Inc., General Dynamics Robotic Systems Inc., General Dynamics SATCOM Technologies Inc., General Dynamics Satcom Technologies Asia Private Limited, General Dynamics Satellite Communication Services LLC, General Dynamics Saudi Holdings S.L., General Dynamics Shared Resources LLC, General Dynamics Support Services Company, General Dynamics Swiss Financial Management Limited, General Dynamics United Kingdom Limited, General Dynamics Worldwide Holdings Inc., General Dynamics-OTS Inc., General Motors Defense, Gulfstream 100 Holdings LLC, Gulfstream Aerospace, Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (CA), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (DE), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (GA), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (OK), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation of Texas, Gulfstream Aerospace Hong Kong Limited, Gulfstream Aerospace LLC, Gulfstream Aerospace LP, Gulfstream Aerospace Ltd., Gulfstream Aerospace Services Corporation, Gulfstream Aerospace Sociedad de Responssabilidad Limitada de CapitalVariable (S. de R.L. de C.V.), Gulfstream Do Brasil Servicos De Suporte E Manutencao A Aeronaves Ltda., Gulfstream International Corporation, Gulfstream Leasing LLC, Gulfstream Product Support Corporation, Gulfstream Services Corporation, Gulfstream Tennessee Corporation, Gulfstream-California Inc., Hawker Pacific (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Hawker Pacific Aircraft Management Pte Ltd, Hawker Pacific Airservices Limited, Hawker Pacific Airservices Pvt Ltd, Hawker Pacific Asia Holdings Pte Ltd, Hawker Pacific Asia Pte Ltd, Hawker Pacific Australia Pty Ltd, Hawker Pacific Aviation Services Pty Ltd, Hawker Pacific NZ Limited, Hawker Pacific Pty Ltd, IPWireless, IPWireless PTE. Limited, Information Services Consulting Limited, Interiores Aereos S.A. de C.V., International Manufacturing Technologies Inc., Itronix, Janteq Australia PTY Limited, Janteq Corp., Jet Aviation, Jet Aviation (Asia Pacific) Pte. Ltd., Jet Aviation (Bermuda) Ltd., Jet Aviation (Hong Kong) Ltd., Jet Aviation (Malaysia) SDN BHD, Jet Aviation 125 Services LLC, Jet Aviation AG, Jet Aviation Brazil Holdings Inc., Jet Aviation Business Jets (Hong Kong) Limited, Jet Aviation Business Jets AG, Jet Aviation Business Jets FZCO, Jet Aviation California LLC, Jet Aviation Dulles LLC, Jet Aviation Flight Services Inc., Jet Aviation France SAS, Jet Aviation Holding GmbH, Jet Aviation Holdings USA Inc., Jet Aviation Houston Inc., Jet Aviation International Inc., Jet Aviation Malaga SA, Jet Aviation Management AG, Jet Aviation Netherlands B.V., Jet Aviation Savannah Holding LLC, Jet Aviation Services GmbH, Jet Aviation St. Louis Inc., Jet Aviation Teterboro LP, Jet Aviation Texas Inc., Jet Aviation of America Inc., Jet Aviation/Palm Beach Inc., Jet Professionals LLC, Kylmar, Longreach Energy LLC, MAYA Viz, Maricom Systems Incorporated, Material Service Resources Company LLC, Matthews Land Company, Mediaware International, Mediaware International Pty Ltd, Metro Machine, Metro Machine co, Midwest Properties Sales LLC, NASSCO, NASSCO Holdings Incorporated, NES Associates LLC, National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, Network Connectivity Solutions Corp., Newberry Holdings LLC, OOO Jet Aviation Vnukovo, Open Kernel Labs, Page Europa Srl, Patriot I Shipping Corp., Patriot II Shipping Corp., Patriot IV Shipping Corp., Plane 79 LLC, Praxis Engineering Technologies LLC, PrimeX Technologies, Prodelin India Private Limited, Proyectos Prohumane Mexico S.A. de C.V., Quincy Maritime Corporation III, Raven Acquisitions LLC, SENTECH INC., SRA International Inc., Saco Defense, Santa Barbara Sistemas S.A., Savannah Air Center LLC, Signal Solutions LLC, Southern Illinois Recovery Inc., Spectrum Astro, St. Marks Powder Inc., Stabilo Pty Ltd, Steyr-Daimler-Puch Spezialfahrzeug AG & Co KG, Sydney Jet Charter Pty Ltd, Tadpole Computer, Tecnologias Internacionales de Manufactura S.A. de C.V., Tenacity Solutions Incorporated, The Depth of Ideas for General Trading LLC, TriPoint Global Communications, Vangent, Vangent Servicios de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Veridian, Vertex Antennentechnik GmbH, ViPS, Vulnerability Research Labs LLC, and Weco LLC.

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In the article that followed on May 12, 2017, students who study Persian language and Iranian culture at the university level said they worried over what the benefit of this presence is for their society, and to what end they can profit from studying this culture.

Meissa Diop said, We have been studying Persian language since our high school diploma. And we are still waiting for a lot, me, as the president of the students collective, and a student in this department, I have always tried to expose the multiple ways we can create greater ties between Iran and Senegal, because they, the Iranians, adore Senegal, but unfortunately, we dont know very much about their culture, aside from what we learn in school.

In Senegals capital Dakar, there are numerous foreign cultural and educative structures meant to function as bridges from one culture to another, and are similar format to those set up by Iran. These initiatives were put in place to encourage a partnership and cultural exchange between the two countries. But future generations of managers and policy makers, like Meissa Diop, find that most doors for collaboration are closed, in the case of Iran.

President Cherif Mballo of the Superior Counsel of Ahlul Bayt(as) Shiites of Senegal says the problem is in the objectives, and perhaps even the budget of Iran. Unfortunately the chair Hassane doesnt have a budget and hes not competent. The students there told you that hes not competent, and to make matters worse the Iranians dont put a lot of emphasis on that part of their relationship. Thats why when they [the students] go to the embassy the doors are closed to them, same with the cultural center. But I know that the mentality is generally like that. They [the embassy] asked a lot for financing but they were unable to have those means. I know that until presently Senegal was looking to close the chair because its not at all what they wanted to do.

Mballo continued, mentioning the chair and ambassador Hassan Alibashi Bakhshi, The chair was created in 2005-2006 to have better cultural relations in Senegal. Its normal for a country that wants their language and their culture to have more cultural and historical visibility and appreciation, to come to other countries to share for a large distribution in other countries.

The cultural attache to Iran in Senegal, and president of the Cultural Center of Dakar, Dr. Hassan Esmati, said in an interview with a local newspaper, Le Soleil, For 15 years, University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar hosts a Persian language and literature department. A number of students are learning Persian language and more than ten university students are currently in Iran for their doctorates or masters degrees.

However, the students are wondering what, if any, opportunities are open to them after they conclude their studies. Meissa Diop said, I dream to go to Iran, especially to set up economic opportunities between the two countries. And as a student, there is no one better placed than me to do it. But my difficulty is really just opportunity. Trying to gain friends and gain support from actors in Iran is hard. I am calling on Iran to help us out, and when I say help I mean come to Senegal, see what we, as students, have to offer, we are studying your culture. Note what we need, assist us financially, provide scholarship opportunities to go there to study and learn and work.

If both parties showed an interest, a sort of cultural change would be simple to construct, according to student leaders. Meissa Diop explained, I follow the cultural center of Irans activities in France. They support engagement and culture exchange. Why cant they do that here? They say they do, or want to, but it just doesnt exist. It would be simple for them to say, we are hosting a film, come watch it with us, or host a translation challenge

Meanwhile, Senegalese students fear that their time spent learning a language and culture will result in unemployment. Irans embassy and Cultural center did not comment on the report.
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.
Rogers Corporation designs, develops, manufactures, and sells engineered materials and components worldwide. It operates through Advanced Electronics Solutions (AES), Elastomeric Material Solutions (EMS), and Other segments. The AES segment offers circuit materials, ceramic substrate materials, busbars, and cooling solutions for applications in electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EV/HEV), wireless infrastructure, automotive, telematics and thermal solutions, aerospace and defense, mass transit, clean energy, connected devices, and wired infrastructure markets. This segment sells its products under the curamik, ROLINX, RO4000, RO3000, RT/duroid, CLTE Series, TMM, AD Series, DiClad, CuClad Series, Kappa, COOLSPAN, TC Series, 92ML, IsoClad, MAGTREX, XTremeSpeed RO1200, IM Series, 2929 Bondply, 3001 Bondply Film, and SpeedWave names. The EMS segment provides engineered material solutions, including polyurethane and silicone materials used in cushioning, gasketing, sealing, and vibration management applications; customized silicones used in flex heater and semiconductor thermal applications; and polytetrafluoroethylene and ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene materials used in wire and cable protection, electrical insulation, conduction and shielding, hose and belt protection, vibration management, cushioning, gasketing and sealing, and venting applications. This segment sells its products under the PORON, BISCO, DeWAL, ARLON, eSORBA, Griswold, XRD, Silicone Engineering, and R/bak names. The Other segment provides elastomer components; and elastomer floats for level sensing in fuel tanks, motors, and storage tanks for applications in the general industrial and automotive markets under the ENDUR and NITROPHYL names. Rogers Corporation was founded in 1832 and is headquartered in Chandler, Arizona.
Snap Inc. is a social media company operating globally. The company was founded in September 2011 by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy. Originally known as Snapchat, the company changed its name to Snap in order to represent its offerings better as it grew over the years. The companys headquarters are in Santa Monica, California and it is a very tightly held company. The original founders, Evan Speigel and Bobby Murphy own a combined 45% of non-dilutable shares with ownership transferable to the other upon death. The two remain active in the company today serving on the board and acting as CEO (Speigel) and CTO (Murphy).

The company was formerly known as Snapchat, Inc. and changed its name to Snap Inc. in September 2016. Snap Inc. was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. Over the years it has been courted by most of the big tech companies including Facebook and Google but has always opted to remain a standalone company. The business went public in 2017 and raised $30 billion on its opening day which is about 10 times the expected amount.

Today, Snap operates as a camera company internationally. The companys main revenue streams are Snapchat, a mobile app for cameras and communications, and Spectacles, a wearable augmented reality device. Snapchat is a camera app that allows users to take pictures and tell stories, the platform also permits ad sales which is an integral part of the revenue and earnings. The companys mission? To empower people to express themselves in todays digital world.

Spectacles is a hardware device that can connect with Snapchat to deliver pictures and video from a point-of-view perspective. The company has since made three upgrades to the original version and has a Next Generation model available too. The Next Generation of Spectacles are not intended for sale but will be made available to creators who wish to push the boundaries of video and digital communications.

In October 2022 the company reported it had more than 347milion daily active users with more than 250 million engaging with AR each day. The platform had more than 250,000 Lens creators (Lenses are AR experiences) with more than 2.5 million lenses created. There were more than 6 billion lens plays each day and more than 75% of 13-34-year-olds in 20 countries were users.
The following companies are subsidiares of Harsco: 21st Century Environmental Management of NV LLC, 21st Century Environmental Management of RI LLC, AERC Acquisition Corporation, AES Asset Acquisition Corporation, Accelerated Remediation Kinetics LLC, Advanced Remediation & Disposal Technologies of Delaware LLC, Allied Environmental Group LLC, Allworth LLC, Altek, Altek Europe Holdings Ltd., Altek Europe Limited, Altek LLC, Altek Melting Solutions Limited, AluServ Middle East W.L.L., Alusalt Limited, Assessment & Remedial Design Technologies Inc, Ballagio S.a.r.l., Burlington Environmental LLC, CEHI Acquisition LLC, CEI Holding LLC, Calrissian Holdings LLC, Carteret Asphalt Corporation, Chemical Pollution Control of Florida LLC, Chemical Pollution Control of New York LLC, Chemical Reclamation Services LLC, Clean Earth Dredging Technologies LLC, Clean Earth Environmental Services Inc., Clean Earth Environmental Services Inc., Clean Earth Environmental Solutions Inc., Clean Earth Holdings LLC, Clean Earth Inc., Clean Earth LLC, Clean Earth Mobile Services LLC, Clean Earth Specialty Waste Solutions Inc., Clean Earth of Carteret LLC, Clean Earth of Georgia LLC, Clean Earth of Greater Washington LLC, Clean Earth of Maryland LLC, Clean Earth of Michigan LLC, Clean Earth of New Castle LLC, Clean Earth of North Jersey Inc., Clean Earth of Philadelphia LLC, Clean Earth of Puerto Rico LLC, Clean Earth of Southeast Pennsylvania LLC, Clean Earth of Southern Florida LLC, Clean Earth of West Virginia LLC, Clean Earth of Williamsport LLC, Clean Rock Properties Ltd, Czech Slag- Nova Hut s.r.o., ESOL TOPCO LLC, Environmental Soil Management Inc, Environmental Soil Management of New York LLC, Environmental Solutions (ESOL) Business, Excell Africa Holdings Ltd., Excell Americas Holdings Ltd S.a.r.L., Faber Prest Limited, Gardner Road Oil LLC, GasServ (Netherlands) VII B.V., General Environmental Management of Rancho Cordova LLC, HLWKH 517 Limited, Harsco (Australia) Pty. Limited, Harsco (Beijing) Fertiliser Co. Ltd, Harsco (Gibraltar) Holding Limited, Harsco (Mexico) Holdings B.V., Harsco (Peru) Holdings B.V., Harsco (Tangshan) Metallurgical Materials Technology Co. Ltd, Harsco (Tangshan) Metallurgical Materials Technology Co. Ltd. - GuYe Branch, Harsco (Tangshan) Metallurgical Materials Technology Co. Ltd. - Leting Branch, Harsco (Tangshan) Renewable Resources Development Co. Ltd, Harsco (U.K.) Limited, Harsco (UK) Group Ltd, Harsco (York Place) Limited, Harsco APAC Rail Machinery (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Harsco Americas Investments S.a.r.l., Harsco Belgium SRL, Harsco Brazil Investments SRL, Harsco Canada Corporation Societe Harsco Canada, Harsco Canada General Partner Limited, Harsco Canada Limited Partnership, Harsco Chile Investments SRL, Harsco China Holding Company Limited, Harsco Defense Holding LLC, Harsco Environmental S.R.L., Harsco Europa B.V., Harsco Fairways Partnership, Harsco Finance B.V., Harsco Financial Holdings Inc., Harsco France S.A.S., Harsco Holdings Inc., Harsco India Metals Private Limited, Harsco India Private Ltd., Harsco India Services Private Ltd., Harsco Industrial Grating China Holding Co. Ltd., Harsco Infrastructure B.V., Harsco Infrastructure CZ s.r.o, Harsco Infrastructure Construction Services B.V., Harsco Infrastructure Group Ltd., Harsco Infrastructure Holdings Inc., Harsco Infrastructure Hong Kong Ltd, Harsco Infrastructure Industrial Services B.V., Harsco Infrastructure Services Ltd., Harsco Infrastructure South Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Harsco International Finance S.a.r.l., Harsco Investment Ltd., Harsco Investments Europe B.V., Harsco Leatherhead Limited, Harsco Luxembourg S.a.r.l, Harsco Metals (Ningbo) Pty. Ltd., Harsco Metals (Thailand) Company Ltd., Harsco Metals 373 Ltd, Harsco Metals 385 Ltd, Harsco Metals Argentina S.A., Harsco Metals Australia Holding Investment Co. Pty. Ltd., Harsco Metals Australia Pty. Ltd., Harsco Metals Belgium S.A., Harsco Metals CTS Prestacao de Servicos Tecnicos e Aluguer de Equipamentos LDA Unipessoal, Harsco Metals CZ s.r.o, Harsco Metals Chile S.A., Harsco Metals D.O.O. Smederevo, Harsco Metals Egypt L.L.C., Harsco Metals Emirates Partnership, Harsco Metals Germany GmbH, Harsco Metals Gesmafesa S.A., Harsco Metals Group Limited, Harsco Metals Guatemala S.A., Harsco Metals Holding LLC, Harsco Metals Holdings Limited, Harsco Metals Holland B.V., Harsco Metals Ilanga Pty. Ltd., Harsco Metals Intermetal LLC, Harsco Metals Investment LLC, Harsco Metals Limitada, Harsco Metals Luxembourg S.A., Harsco Metals Luxequip S.A., Harsco Metals Lycrete S.A., Harsco Metals Middle East FZE, Harsco Metals Norway A.S., Harsco Metals Oostelijk Staal International B.V., Harsco Metals Operations LLC, Harsco Metals Peru S.A., Harsco Metals Polska SP Z.O.O., Harsco Metals RSA Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Harsco Metals Reclamet S.A., Harsco Metals SRH Mill Services (Pty.) Ltd., Harsco Metals SRI LLC, Harsco Metals Saudi Arabia Ltd., Harsco Metals Slovensko s.r.o., Harsco Metals South Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Harsco Metals SteelServ (Pty.) Ltd., Harsco Metals Sweden A.B., Harsco Metals Transport B.V., Harsco Metals Turkey Celik Limited Sirkety, Harsco Metals VB LLC, Harsco Metals Zhejiang Co. Ltd., Harsco Metals and Minerals France S.A.S., Harsco Metals de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Harsco Metro Rail LLC, Harsco Mexico Holdings S.A. de C.V., Harsco Minerais Limitada, Harsco Minerali d.o.o., Harsco Minerals Arabia LLC (FZC), Harsco Minerals Deutschland GmbH, Harsco Minerals Europe B.V., Harsco Minerals Technologies LLC, Harsco Minnesota Finance Inc., Harsco Minnesota LLC, Harsco Mole Valley Limited, Harsco Nederland Slag B.V., Harsco Nova Scotia Holding Corporation, Harsco Rail Emirates Maatschap/Societe de Droit Commun, Harsco Rail Europe GmbH, Harsco Rail LLC, Harsco Rail Limited, Harsco Rail Ltda, Harsco Rail Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Harsco Rail Pty. Ltd., Harsco Rail Switzerland GMBH, Harsco Steel Mill Trading Arabia LLC, Harsco Sun Demiryolu Ekipmanlari Uretim Ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Harsco Switzerland Holding GmbH, Harsco Technologies LLC, Harsco Technology China Co. Ltd., Harsco Track Machines and Services Private Limited, Heckett Bahna Co. For Industrial Operations S.A.E., Heckett Comercio de Rejeitos Industriais Importacao e Exportacao Ltda, Heckett MultiServ (FS) Pty Ltd, Heckett MultiServ Bahna S.A.E., Heckett MultiServ China B.V., Heckett MultiServ Far East B.V., Heckett Multiserv MV & MS CA, Hunnebeck Group GmbH, Iductelec Limited, Ilserv S.R.L., Luntz Acquisition (Delaware) LLC, MKC Acquisition Corporation, Mastclimbers Ltd, Metal Reclamation SPV (Pty.) Ltd., Minerval Metallurgic Additives B.V., MultiServ (Sweden) AB, MultiServ Finance B.V., MultiServ International B.V., MultiServ Limited, MultiServ Logistics Limited, MultiServ Oy, MultiServ Technologies (South Africa) Pty Ltd, Nortal Limited, Northland Environmental LLC, Nortru LLC, PSC Environmental Services LLC, PSC Recovery Systems LLC, Phillip Reclamation Services Houston LLC, Protran Technology LLC, Real Property Acquisition LLC, Republic Environmental Recycling (New Jersey) LLC, Republic Environmental Systems (PA) LLC, Republic Environmental Systems (Transportation Group) LLC, Rho-Chem LLC, SGB Holdings Limited, SGB Investments Ltd., SGB Scafform Limited, Shanxi TISCO-Harsco Technology Co. Ltd., Short Brothers (Plant) Ltd., Slag Processing Company Egypt (SLAR) S.A.E., Slag Reductie (Pacific) B.V., Slag Reductie Nederland B.V., Solvent Recovery LLC, Tosyali Harsco Geri Kazanim Teknolojileri Anonim Sirketi, and United Retek of Connecticut LLC.

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The following companies are subsidiares of UnitedHealth Group: 1070715 B.C. Unlimited Liability Company, 1st Avenue Pharmacy Inc., 310 Canyon Medical LLC, 4C MSO LLC, 4C Medical Group PLC, 5995 Minnetonka LLC, ABCO International Holdings LLC, ACN Group IPA of New York Inc., ACN Group of California Inc., AHN Accountable Care Organization LLC, AHN Central Services LLC, AHN Target Holdings LLC, AMIL International S.a.r.l., APS  Assistencia Personalizada a Saude Ltda., ASC Holdings of New Jersey LLC, ASC Network LLC, ASC Operators-East Bay LLC, ASC Operators-San Francisco LLC, ASC Operators-San Luis Obispo LLC, ASC Operators-Santa Rosa LLC, ASC Operators-South Bay LLC, ASV-HOPCo-SCA Cornerstone LLC, ASV-HOPCo-SCA Florida LLC, AbleTo Behavioral Health Services P.C., AbleTo Inc., Accurate Rx Pharmacy Consulting LLC, Administradora Clinica La Colina S.A.S., Administradora Country S.A.S., Administradora Medica Centromed S.A., Advanced Surgery Center of Clifton LLC, Advanced Surgical Center LLC, Advanced Surgical Hospital LLC, Advocate Condell Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Advocate Southwest Ambulatory Surgery Center L.L.C., Advocate-SCA Partners LLC, Aliansalud Entidad Promotora de Salud S.A., All Savers Insurance Company, All Savers Life Insurance Company of California, Alliance Surgical Center LLC, Allina Health Heart and Vascular Surgery Center LLC, Allina Health Surgery Center-Brooklyn Park LLC, Aloha Surgical Center LLC, Ambient Healthcare Inc., Ambient Holdings Inc., AmeriChoice, AmeriChoice Corporation, AmeriChoice of New Jersey Inc., American Health Network of Indiana Care Organization LLC, American Health Network of Indiana II LLC, American Health Network of Indiana LLC, American Health Network of Kentucky LLC, American Health Network of Ohio Care Organization LLC, American Health Network of Ohio II LLC, American Health Network of Ohio LLC, American Physicians Inc., Amico Saude Ltda., Amil, Amil Assistencia Medica Internacional S.A., Angiografia e Hemodinamica Madre Theodora Ltda., Anne Arundel-SCA Holdings LLC, Anne Arundel-SCA Surgicenter LLC, Antelope Valley Surgery Center L.P., Analisis Clinicos ML S.A.C., Apothecary Holdings Inc., AppleCare Medical Management LLC, Aquitania Chilean Holding SpA, Arcadia JV Holdings LLC, Arcadia Outpatient Surgery Center L.P., ArchWell Health LLC, ArchWell Health MSO LLC, ArchWell Health Professional Services Holding Co., ArchWell Health Professional Services of Alabama LLC, ArchWell Health Professional Services of North Carolina P.C., ArchWell Health Professional Services of Oklahoma LLC, Archwell Health Professional Services of Arizona LLC, Archwell Health Professional Services of Nebraska LLC, Arise Physician Group, Arizona Physicians IPA Inc., Arlington Surgery Center LLC, Aspectus Inc., Associacao Lusiadas Knowledge Center  Health Education and Research, Audax Health Solutions LLC, Aurora Hospitalist P.C., Austin Center for Outpatient Surgery L.P., Avella Specialty Pharmacy, Aventura Medical Tower Surgery Center LLC, Avery Parent Holdings Inc., Aveta Inc., AxelaCare Intermediate Holdings LLC, AxelaCare LLC, B.R.A.S.S. Partnership in Commendam, BOSC Holdings LLC, BSC Holdings LLC, Ball Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Banmedica Colombia S.A.S., Banmedica Internacional SpA, Banmedica S.A., Barranca Surgery Center LLC, Beach Surgical Holdings II LLC, Beach Surgical Holdings III LLC, Beach Surgical Holdings LLC, Beaver Medical Group P.C., Bedford Physicians Risk Retention Group Inc., Behavioral Healthcare Options Inc., Beltway Surgery Centers L.L.C., Benefit Administration for the Self Employed L.L.C., Benefitter Insurance Solutions Inc., Bergan Mercy Surgery Center LLC, Bergen-Passaic Cataract Laser and Surgery Center LLC, Bessler MD PLLC, Bind Benefits Inc., Bind LH Holdings Inc., Bind Re Inc., Birmingham Outpatient Surgery Center Ltd., Birmingham Outpatient Surgical Center LLC, Bloomfield ASC LLC, Blue Ridge Day Surgery Center L.P., Blue Ridge GP LLC, Blue Ridge Properties LLC, Boca Raton Outpatient Surgery & Laser Center LTD., Bordeaux Barbados Holdings I SRL, Bordeaux Barbados Holdings II SRL, Bordeaux Barbados Holdings III S.r.l., Bordeaux Holding SpA, Bordeaux International Holdings Inc., Bordeaux UK Holdings I Limited, Bordeaux UK Holdings II Limited, Bordeaux UK Holdings III Limited, Bosque Medical Center Ltda., Brandon Ambulatory Surgery Center LC, BriovaRx Infusion Services 102 LLC, BriovaRx of Florida Inc., BriovaRx of Maine Inc., BriovaRx of Massachusetts LLC, CCEC Anesthesia Management LLC, CDC Holdings Colombia S.A.S., CLISA  Clinica de Santo Antonio S.A., CMO  Centro Medico de Oftalmologia S/S Ltda., CMS  Central de Manipulacao e Servicos Farmaceuticos Ltda., COI  Clinicas Oncologicas Integradas S.A., Cabin Enterprises LLC, Cabin Holdings LLC, California Medical Group Insurance Company Risk Retention Group, Camp Hill Ambulatory Centers, Camp Hill-SCA Centers LLC, Capital City Medical Group L.L.C., Cardinal Holding Company LLC, Care Improvement Plus Group Management LLC, Care Improvement Plus South Central Insurance Company, Care Improvement Plus Wisconsin Insurance Company, Care Improvement Plus of Texas Insurance Company, Care Logistics LLC, CareMount Dental Member LLC, CareMount Health Solutions ACO LLC, CareMount Health Solutions Employer LLC, CareMount Health Solutions LLC, CareMount Holding LLC, CareMount Medical Foundation Inc., CareMount Value Partners IPA LLC, Carr PLLC, Casa de Saude Santa Therezinha Ltda., Castle Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Castle Rock SurgiCenter LLC, Catalyst360 LLC, Catamaran 2 Unlimited Company, Catamaran Finance Ireland Unlimited Company, Catamaran S.a.r.l., Cedar Park JV Partners LLC, Cedar Park Surgery Center LLC, Cemed Care  Empresa de Atendimento Clinico Geral Ltda., Center for Quality Improvement LLC, Center for Restorative Surgery at Maple Grove LLC, Center for Surgery of North Coast L.P., Central Indiana Care Organization LLC, Central Ohio Care Organization LLC, CentriHealth Corporation, CentrifyHealth LLC, Centro Medico Hospitalar Pitangueiras Ltda., Centro Odontologico Americano S.A.C., Centro de Entrenamiento Capacitacion en Reanimacion y Prevencion Limitada, Centro de Servicios Compartidos Banmedica SpA, Centromed Quilpue S.A., Centros Medicos y Dentales Multimed Ltda., Centura-SCA Holdings LLC, Centurion Casualty Company, Channel Islands Surgicenter L.P., Channel Islands Surgicenter Properties LLC, Charleston Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Charleston Surgery Properties LLC, Charlotte Surgery Center LLC, Charlotte Surgery Properties LTD., Charlotte-SC LLC, Chatham Orthopaedic ASC LLC, Childrens Surgery Center LLC, Citrus Regional Surgery Center L.P., Claims Management Systems Inc., Cleburne Surgical Center LLC, Clinical Partners of Colorado Springs LLC, Clinton Partners LLC, Clinica Alameda SpA, Clinica Bio Bio SpA, Clinica Ciudad del Mar S.A., Clinica Davila y Servicios Medicos S.p.A., Clinica Iquique S.A., Clinica Medico Cirurgica de Santa Tecla S.A., Clinica Portoazul S.A., Clinica San Felipe S.A., Clinica Santa Maria S.p.A., Clinica Sanchez Ferrer S.A., Clinica Vespucio S.A., Clinica del Country S.A.S., Coachella Valley Physicians of PrimeCare Inc., Coalition for Advanced Pharmacy Services Inc., Cobranzas Banmedica SpA, Cogent Healthcare IPA of New York Inc., Cogent Healthcare Inc., Cogent Healthcare Management of New York Inc., Cogent Healthcare of Arizona P.C., Cogent Healthcare of California Prof. Corp., Cogent Healthcare of Georgia P.C., Cogent Healthcare of Illinois LLC, Cogent Healthcare of Iowa P.C., Cogent Healthcare of Jackson MS LLC, Cogent Healthcare of Jacksonville LLC, Cogent Healthcare of Mississippi Inc., Cogent Healthcare of Missouri Inc., Cogent Healthcare of Montana P.C., Cogent Healthcare of New Jersey P.C., Cogent Healthcare of North Carolina P.C., Cogent Healthcare of Oregon P.C., Cogent Healthcare of Pennsylvania Inc., Cogent Healthcare of Pensacola L.L.C., Cogent Healthcare of Tennessee P.C., Cogent Healthcare of Virginia Inc., Cogent Healthcare of Washington P.C., Cogent Medical Care P.C., Cogent Patient Safety Organization Inc., Cogent/Endion Medical Care of New York P.C., Collaborative Care Holdings LLC, Collaborative Care Services Inc., Collaborative Realty LLC, Colmedica Medicina Prepagada S.A., Colonial Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Colorado Innovative Physician Solutions Inc., Colorado Springs Surgery Center Ltd., Comfort Care Transportation LLC, Comprehensive Hospital Physicians of Florida Inc., ConnectYourCare Inc., ConnectYourCare LLC, Connecticut Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Connecticut Surgery Properties LLC, Connecticut Surgical Center LLC, Consorcio Regenero S.A., Constructora Inmobiliaria Magapoq S.A., Consumer Wellness Solutions Inc., Continuum Physicians Group Inc., Continuum Physicians Group of Washington PLLC, Cornell Surgicenter LLC, Cornerstone Surgery Center LLC, Cornerstone Surgicare LLC, Corpus Christi Endoscopy Center L.L.P., Country Scan Ltda., Critical Care Physician of New York P.C., Critical Care Physicians of Illinois LLC, Critical Care Physicians of New Jersey PC, Critical Care Physicians of Pennsylvania P.C., Cross Timbers Surgery Center LLC, Cypress Care Inc., DBP Services of New York IPA Inc., DSP Flint Real Estate LLC, DSP-Building C LLC, DTC Surgery Center LLC, DWIC of Tampa Bay Inc., Dallas Inpatient Specialist PLLC, Danbury Surgical Center L.P., Day-Op Surgery Consulting Company LLC, Definity Health, Dental Benefit Providers Inc., Dental Benefit Providers of California Inc., Dental Benefit Providers of Illinois Inc., Denton Endoscopy Surgery Center LLC, Denton Surgery Center LLC, Derry Surgical Center LLC, Diagnostico Ecotomografico Centromed Ltda., Diasnostico por Imagenes Centromed Ltda., Digestive Disease Center L.P., Dilab Medicina Nuclear Ltda., Diplomat Blocker LLC, Diplomat Corporate Properties LLC, Diplomat Pharmacy, Diplomat Pharmacy Inc., Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy Great Lakes Distribution Center LLC, Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy of Chicago LLC, Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy of Ft. Lauderdale LLC, Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy of Los Angeles County LLC, Distance Learning Network Inc., Divisadero Holdings LLC, DocASAP Inc., DocASAP India Technologies Private Limited, DocASAP US LLC, Doctor + S.A.C., Dry Creek Surgery Center LLC, Dublin Surgery Center LLC, Duluth Surgical Suites LLC, Durable Medical Equipment Inc., E Street Endoscopy LLC, EM Orange Tree LLC, EP Campus I LLC, EPIC Health Plan, EPIC Management Services LLC, East Bay Endoscopy Center L.P., East Brunswick Surgery Center LLC, Echo Locum Tenens Inc., Electronic Network Systems Inc., Elual Participacoes S.A., Emerald Coast Surgery Center L.P., Emisar Pharma Services LLC, Emmaus Holdings LLC, Emmaus Surgical Center LLC, Empire Physician Management Company LLC, Empremedica S. A., Endion Hospitalist North P.C., Endion Hospitalist of Western New York P.C., Endion Medical Healthcare P.C., Endion Medical Services P.C., Endoscopy Center Affiliates Inc., Enterprise Life Insurance Company, Equian, Equian LLC, Equian Parent Corp., Esho  Empresa de Servicos Hospitalares S.A., Everett MSO Inc., Excelsior Insurance Brokerage Inc., Executive Health Resources Inc., Executive Surgery Center L.L.C., Eye Clinic Oftalmologia Clinico Cirurgica e Diagnostico Ltda., Eye Specialists Surgery Centers LLC, FMG Holdings LLC, Family Health Care Services, Family Home Hospice Inc., Ferrell Physician Services P.C., Fideicomiso Clinica Barranquilla Portoazul FA-517, First Coast Orthopedic Center LLC, First Family Insurance LLC, Florence Surgery Center L.P., For Health Inc., For Health of Arizona Inc., Fort Sutter Medical Building a California Limited Partnership, Fort Worth Endoscopy Centers LLC, Fortified Provider Network Inc., Foundation Surgery Affiliate General of Huntingdon Valley LLC, Foundation Surgery Affiliate of Huntingdon Valley L.P., Franklin Surgical Center LLC, Freedom Life Insurance Company of America, Freeway Surgicenter of Houston LLC, Frontier Medex Tanzania Limited, FrontierMEDEX Inc., FrontierMEDEX Kenya Limited, FrontierMEDEX US Inc., Fundacion Banmedica, GLBESC LLC, GRANTS PASS SURGERY CENTER LLC, Gadsden Surgery Center LLC, Gainesville Surgery Center L.P., Gainesville Surgery Properties LLC, Genoa, Genoa Healthcare Inc., Genoa QoL Wholesale LLC, Genoa Technology Canada Inc., Genoa Technology Inc., Genoa Telepsychiatry Inc., Genoa of Arkansas LLC, Gladiolus Surgery Center L.L.C., Glenwood Surgical Center L.P., Glenwood-SC Inc., Global One Ventures LLC, Golden Gate Endoscopy Center LLC, Golden Outlook Inc., Golden Rule Financial Corporation, Golden Rule Insurance Company, Golden Triangle Surgicenter L.P., Grandview Surgery Center LTD., Greater New Haven ASC LLC, Greensboro Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Greenville Surgery Center LLC, Greenway Surgical Suites LLC, Grossmont Surgery Center L.P., Grove Place Surgery Center L.L.C., H&W Indemnity SPC Ltd., H.I. Investments Holding Company LLC, HCP ACO California LLC, HCentive Technology India Private Limited, HFHS-SCA Holdings LLC, HMG Holding Corporation, HMG Holdings LLC, HMP of Baltimore  USH P.C., Harken Health Insurance Company, Harrison Endo Surgical Center LLC, Hawthorn Place Outpatient Surgery Center L.P., Hays JV Partners LLC, Hays Surgery Center LLC, Health Care-ONE Insurance Agency Inc., Health Inventures Employment Solutions LLC, Health Inventures LLC, Health Plan of Nevada Inc., HealthCare Partners ASC-LB LLC, HealthCare Partners Affiliates Medical Group, HealthCare Partners Management Services California LLC, HealthCare Partners RE LLC, HealthEast Surgery Center-Maplewood LLC, HealthFirst IPA Inc., HealthMarkets Group Inc., HealthMarkets Inc., HealthMarkets Insurance Agency Inc., HealthMarkets LLC, HealthMarkets Services Inc., HealthSCOPE Holdings Inc., HealthScope Benefits Inc., Healthcare Solutions Inc., Healthplex America LLC, Healthplex Dental Services Inc., Healthplex I.P.A. Inc., Healthplex Inc., Healthplex Insurance Company, Healthplex of CT Inc., Healthplex of DC Inc., Healthplex of MD Inc., Healthplex of ME Inc., Healthplex of NC Inc., Healthplex of NJ Inc., Healthplex of TX Inc., Heartland Heart and Vascular LLC, Help Seguros de Vida S.A., Help Service S.A., Help SpA, Hemonefro  Hemodialise e Nefrologia Ltda, Highlands Ranch Healthcare LLC, Home Medical S.A., Honodav SpA, Hospice Inspiris Holdings Inc., Hospitais Associados de Pernambuco Ltda., Hospital Alvorada Taguatinga Ltda., Hospital Ana Costa S.A., Hospital Santa Helena S.A., Hospital de Clinicas de Jacarepagua Ltda., Hospitalist Medicine Physician of Broome County PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physician of New York - Binghamton P.C., Hospitalist Medicine Physician of New York - Buffalo P.C., Hospitalist Medicine Physician of New York - Newburgh P.C., Hospitalist Medicine Physician of New York - Nyack P.C., Hospitalist Medicine Physician of New York - Patchogue P.C., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Alabama  TCG Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Alabama  TCS Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Alaska  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Alaska  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona - Goodyear Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona - Nogales Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona - Phoenix II Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona - Phoenix Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona - Sierra Vista Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona - Tucson II Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona - Tucson Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona  TCG Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arizona  TCS Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arkansas  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Arkansas  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Buncombe County PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Apple Valley PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Bakersfield PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Camarillo PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Crescent City PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Fairfield PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Fremont PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Grass Valley PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Jackson PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Oceanside PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Oxnard PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Salinas PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - San Bernardino II PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - San Bernardino PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - San Leandro PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Sonoma PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Stockton II PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Stockton PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Thousand Oaks PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California - Vacaville PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of California  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Colorado - Brighton PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Colorado - Denver PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Colorado  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Colorado  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Connecticut - Manchester LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Connecticut - Rockville LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Connecticut - Wallingford LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Connecticut LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Connecticut  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Connecticut  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of DC PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of DC  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of DC  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Delaware  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Delaware  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Florida - Ft. Lauderdale LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Florida - Jacksonville II LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Florida - Jacksonville LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Florida - Palm Coast LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Florida  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Florida  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Fredericksburg LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Georgia - Atlanta PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Georgia - East Point PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Georgia - Lavonia PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Georgia - Savannah PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Georgia  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Georgia  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Hawaii - Kealakekua Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Hawaii  TCG Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Hawaii  TCS Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Idaho - Nampa PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Idaho  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Idaho  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Illinois - Downers Grove LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Illinois - Elmhurst LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Illinois - Rockford LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Illinois - Winfield LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Illinois  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Illinois  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Indiana - Clinton LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Indiana - Mishawaka LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Indiana - Terre Haute LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Indiana LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Indiana  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Indiana  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Iowa - Cedar Rapids PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Iowa - Mason City PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Iowa PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Iowa  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Iowa  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Kansas - Topeka LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Kansas - Wichita II LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Kansas - Wichita LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Kansas  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Kansas  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Louisiana - Alexandria Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Louisiana - Bossier City Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Louisiana - Lake Charles Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Louisiana - Shreveport Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Louisiana  TCG Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Louisiana  TCS Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maine - Bangor PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maine - Lewiston PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maine  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maine  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland - Cheverly PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland - Cumberland PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland - Frederick PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland - Laurel PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland - Rockville PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland P.C., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Maryland  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Brockton PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Dorchester PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Framingham PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Holyoke PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Natick PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Norwood PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Springfield PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Stoughton PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Taunton PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts - Worcester PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Massachusetts  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Alpena PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Dowagiac PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Escanaba PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Grand Blanc PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Grayling PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Kalamazoo PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Plainwell PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Port Huron PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Saginaw PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan - Tawas City PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Michigan  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Minnesota  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Minnesota  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Mississippi LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Mississippi  TCG Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Mississippi  TCS Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Missouri - Bridgeton Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Missouri - Richmond Heights Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Missouri  TCG Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Missouri  TCS Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Montana - Billings PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Montana - Butte PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Montana - Miles City PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Montana - Missoula PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Montana  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Montana  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Multiple Practice Sites LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nebraska  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nebraska  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nevada - Henderson Bessler PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nevada - Henderson II Bessler PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nevada - Las Vegas Bessler PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nevada - Las Vegas II Bessler PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nevada  TCG Bessler PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Nevada  TCS Bessler PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Hampshire  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Hampshire  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Jersey - Hackensack PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Jersey - Paterson PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Jersey - TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Jersey  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Mexico - Clovis LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Mexico - Rio Rancho LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Mexico - TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New Mexico - TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of New York PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina - Burlington PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina - Clyde PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina - Elizabeth City PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina - Jacksonville PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina - New Bern PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina - Rocky Mount PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Carolina  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Dakota  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of North Dakota  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Akron Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Batavia Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Canton Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Cincinnati II Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Cincinnati III Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Cincinnati Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Circleville Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Columbus II Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Columbus Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Dover Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - East Liverpool Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Fairfield Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Martins Ferry Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Westerville Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio - Youngstown Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio  TCG Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Ohio  TCS Professional Corporation, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Oklahoma - Oklahoma City LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Oklahoma  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Oklahoma  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Oregon - Portland PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Oregon  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Oregon  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Pennsylvania P.C., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Pennsylvania  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Pennsylvania  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Rhode Island  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Rhode Island  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Richland County Ltd., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of San Luis Obispo County Inc., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of South Carolina - Aiken LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of South Carolina - Rock Hill LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of South Carolina  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of South Carolina  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of South Dakota  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of South Dakota  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Tennessee  Columbia PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Tennessee  Franklin PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Tennessee  TCG PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Tennessee  TCS PC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Amarillo PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Atlanta PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Austin II PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Austin PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Bryan PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Burnet PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Corpus Christi II PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Corpus Christi PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Cypress PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Dallas PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - El Paso II PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - El Paso III PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - El Paso PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Fort Worth II PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Fort Worth PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Fredericksburg PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Houston PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Humble PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Kerrville PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Kyle PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Livingston PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Lubbock PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Lufkin PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Mount Pleasant PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Plainview PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Rockwall PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Round Rock PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Antonio II PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Antonio III PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Antonio IV PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Antonio PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Antonio V PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Antonio VI PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Antonio VII PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - San Marcos PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Texarkana PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas - Tyler PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Texas  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Utah  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Utah  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Vermont  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Vermont  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Alexandria LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Front Royal II LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Front Royal LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Mechanicsville LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Midlothian LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Richmond II LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Richmond LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia - Winchester LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Virginia  TCS LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Arlington PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Auburn PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Bellingham PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Bremerton PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Burien PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Coupeville PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Enumclaw PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Federal Way PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Gig Harbor PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Lakewood PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Mount Vernon PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Puyallup PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Tacoma II PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Tacoma III PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Tacoma PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington - Vancouver PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington County LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Washington  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of West Virginia PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of West Virginia  Martinsburg PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of West Virginia  South Charleston PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of West Virginia  TCG PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of West Virginia  TCS PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of West Virginia  Wheeling PLLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Wisconsin Ltd., Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Wyoming - Casper LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Wyoming  TCG LLC, Hospitalist Medicine Physicians of Wyoming  TCS LLC, Hospitalists Management Group LLC, Humedica, Humedica Inc., Hygeia Corporation, Hygeia Corporation Ontario, IEC Holdings LLC, IHD Holdings LLC, INOV8 Surgical at Memorial City LLC, INSPIRIS of Texas Physician Group, Illinois Independent Care Network LLC, Imagen Technologies Inc., Impel Consulting Experts L.L.C., Impel Management Services L.L.C., InTouch Pharmacy LLC, Indiana Care Organization LLC, Indiana Endoscopy Centers LLC, Inland Surgery Center L.P., Inmobiliaria Apoquindo 3001 S.A., Inmobiliaria Apoquindo 3600 Ltda., Inmobiliaria Apoquindo S.A., Inmobiliaria Clinica Santa Maria S.A., Inmobiliaria Vinamed Ltda., Inmobiliaria e Inversiones Alameda S.A., Inpatient Services P.C., Inpatient Specialists of California P.C., Inspiris, Inspiris Inc., Instituto Radium de Cammpinas Ltda, Inter-Hospital Physicians Association Inc., International Healthcare Services Inc., Inversiones Clinicas Santa Maria SpA, Ironman Holdco Inc., Ironman Intermediate Holdco LLC, Isapre Banmedica S.A., JPM Healthcare LLC, Johnston Surgicare L.P., Joliet Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Jordan Ridge Family Medicine LLC, Joyable Inc., Kansal Inc. A Professional Corporation, Knox Diagnostic Imaging Center LLC, Kokomo Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, LDI Holding Company LLC, LDI Management Services LLC, LGH-A/Golf ASTC L.L.C., LHC Group, La Esperanza del Peru S.A., Laboratorio ROE S.A., Laboratorios Medicos Amed Quilpue S.A., Landmark Group Holdings LLC, Landmark Health Holdings LLC, Landmark Health LLC, Landmark Health NY IPA LLC, Landmark Health NY PO LLC, Landmark Health Technologies Private Limited, Landmark Health of California LLC, Landmark Health of Massachusetts LLC, Landmark Health of North Carolina LLC, Landmark Health of Oregon LLC, Landmark Health of Pennsylvania LLC, Landmark Health of Washington LLC, Landmark India LLC, Landmark Intermediate Holdings LLC, Landmark MSO LLC, Landmark Medical of Idaho PC, Landmark Medical of Massachusetts PLLC, Landmark Medical of Tennessee PC, Landmark Primary Care LLC, Laser Acquisition Holdings III LLC, Leehar Distributors LLC, Lemhi Ventures Fund I LP, Lemhi Ventures Fund II LP, Level2 Medical Services P.C. Alaska, Lexington Surgery Center Ltd., Liberty Anesthesia Services LLC, LifePrint Health Inc., LifeWell. Ltd. Co., Lifeprint Accountable Care Organization LLC, Limestone Medical Center LLC, Litomedica S.A., Logan Surgical Suites LLC, Lotten-Eyes Oftalmologia Clinica e Cirurgica Ltda., Louisville S.C. Ltd., Louisville-SC Properties Inc., Loyola Ambulatory Surgery Center at Oakbrook Inc., Loyola Ambulatory Surgery Center at Oakbrook L.P., Lusiadas - Parcerias Cascais S.A., Lusiadas A.C.E., Lusiadas Algarve S.A., Lusiadas S.A., Lusiadas SGPS S.A., Lutheran Campus ASC LLC, MAMSI Life and Health Insurance Company, MCNA Health Care Holdings LLC, MCNA Insurance Company, MCNA Systems Corp., MD Ops Inc., MD-Individual Practice Association Inc., ME AHS UC LLC, MGH/SCA LLC, MHC Real Estate Holdings LLC, MIAMI SURGERY CENTER LLC, MSLA Management LLC, Main Line Spine Surgery Center LLC, Managed Care of North America Inc., Managed Physical Network Inc., Mansfield Endoscopy Center LLC, March Holdings Inc., March Vision Care IPA Inc., March Vision Care Inc., March Vision Care of Texas Inc., Marin Health Ventures LLC, Marin Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Marin Surgery Holdings Inc., Marlin Holding Company LLC, Maryland Ambulatory Centers LLC, Maryland-SCA Centers LLC, Massachusetts Assurance Company Ltd. PIC, Massachusetts Avenue Surgery Center LLC, McKenzie Surgery Center L.P., MedExpress Primary Care West Virginia Inc., MedExpress Urgent Care Alabama LLC, MedExpress Urgent Care Inc. - Ohio, MedExpress Urgent Care Maine Inc., MedExpress Urgent Care New Hampshire Inc., MedExpress Urgent Care of Boynton Beach LLC, MedSynergies, MedSynergies LLC, Medical Clinic of North Texas PLLC, Medical Hilfe S.A., Medical Support Los Angeles Inc., Medical Surgical Centers of America Inc., Medical Transportation Services LLC, Melbourne Surgery Center LLC, Memorial City Holdings LLC, Memorial City Partners LLC, Memorial Houston Surgery Center LLC, MemorialCare Surgical Center at Orange Coast LLC, MemorialCare Surgical Center at Saddleback LLC, Mesquite Liberty LLC, Metro I Stone Management Ltd., Mid Atlantic Medical Services, Mid-West National Life Insurance Company of Tennessee, Midlands Orthopaedics Surgery Center LLC, Midwest Center for Day Surgery LLC, Mile High SurgiCenter LLC, Mississippi Medical Plaza L.C., Mobile Medical Services of New Jersey PC, Mobile-SC LTD., Modality Accountable Care Organisation Limited, Moen M.D. P.C., Mohawk Surgery Center LLC, Monarch Management Services Inc., Montgomery Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Monument Health LLC, Moore Orthopaedic Clinic Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Morris County Surgical Center LLC, Mt. Pleasant Surgery Center L.P., Multiangio Ltda., Murrells Inlet ASC LLC, Muskogee Surgical Investors LLC, Mustang Razorback Holdings Inc., My Wellness Solutions LLC, NAMM Holdings Inc., NPN IPA Washington PLLC, NSC Channel Islands LLC, NSC Greensboro LLC, NSC Greensboro West LLC, NSC Lancaster LLC, NSC Seattle Inc., NSC Upland LLC, Naperville Surgical Centre LLC, National Foundation Life Insurance Company, National Pacific Dental Inc., National Surgery Centers LLC, Navigator Health Inc., Nebraska Spine Hospital LLC, Neighborhood Health Partnership Inc., Netwerkes LLC, Nevada Pacific Dental, New Orleans Regional Physician Hospital Organization L.L.C., New West Physicians Inc., New York Proton Management LLC, Newton Holdings LLC, Niagara Hospitalist P.C., Nomad Buyer Inc., North American Medical Management California Inc., North Coast Surgery Center Ltd. a California Limited Partnership, North Dallas Surgical Center LLC, North Kitsap Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, North Puget Sound Oncology Equipment Leasing Company LLC, Northern Nevada Health Network Inc., Northern Rockies Surgery Center L.P., Northern Rockies Surgicenter Inc., Northern Utah Surgery Center LLC, Northwest Hills JV Partners LLC, Northwest Medical Group Alliance LLC, Northwest Spine and Laser Surgery Center LLC, Northwest Surgicare LLC, Northwest Surgicare Ltd. an Illinois Limited Partnership, OC Cardiology Practice Partners LLC, OCC MSO LLC, OSB  Tecnologia e Servicos de Suporte Lda., Omesa SpA, OmniClaim LLC, Oncocare S.A.C., One World Surgery, Ophthalmology Surgery Center of Dallas LLC, Optimum Choice Inc., Optum Bank Inc., Optum Biometrics Inc., Optum Care Inc., Optum Care Networks Inc., Optum Care Services Company, Optum Care of New York Management Inc., Optum Clinics Holdings Inc., Optum Clinics Intermediate Holdings Inc., Optum Compounding Services LLC, Optum Digital Health Holdings LLC, Optum Direct To Consumer Inc., Optum Financial Inc., Optum Frontier Therapies Holdings LLC, Optum Frontier Therapies II LLC, Optum Frontier Therapies LLC, Optum Genomics Inc., Optum Global Solutions Colombia S.A.S., Optum Global Solutions India Private Limited, Optum Global Solutions International B.V., Optum Global Solutions Philippines Inc., Optum Government Solutions Inc., Optum Growth Partners Holdings Inc., Optum Growth Partners LLC, Optum Health & Technology Holdings US Inc., Optum Health & Technology Hong Kong Limited, Optum Health & Technology India Private Limited, Optum Health & Technology Servicos do Brasil Ltda., Optum Health & Technology Singapore Pte. Ltd., Optum Health & Technology US LLC, Optum Health Plan of California, Optum Health Services Canada Ltd., Optum Health Solutions Australia Pty Ltd, Optum Health Solutions UK Limited, Optum Health and Technology FZ-LLC, Optum Healthcare of Illinois Inc., Optum Hospice Pharmacy Services LLC, Optum Inc., Optum Infusion Services 100 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 101 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 103 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 200 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 201 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 202 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 203 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 204 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 205 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 206 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 207 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 208 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 209 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 301 LP, Optum Infusion Services 302 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 305 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 308 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 401 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 402 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 403 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 404 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 500 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 501 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 550 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 551 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 553 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 554 Inc., Optum Insurance of Ohio Inc., Optum Labs Inc., Optum Labs LLC, Optum Life Sciences Canada Inc., Optum Management Consulting Shanghai Co. Ltd., Optum Networks of New Jersey Inc., Optum Operations Ireland Unlimited Company, Optum Oregon MSO LLC, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Pennsylvania Inc., Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Texas Inc., Optum Perks LLC, Optum Pharma Services Holdings Inc., Optum Pharmacy 601 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 700 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 701 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 702 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 704 Inc., Optum Pharmacy 705 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 706 Inc., Optum Pharmacy 707 Inc., Optum Pharmacy 800 Inc., Optum Pharmacy 803 Inc., Optum Pharmacy 805 Inc., Optum Pharmacy 806 Inc., Optum Public Sector Solutions Inc., Optum Rocket LLC, Optum SCA CS JV Holdings LLC, Optum Senior Services LLC, Optum Services Inc., Optum Services Ireland Limited, Optum Services Puerto Rico LLC, Optum Solutions UK Holdings Limited, Optum Technology LLC, Optum UK Solutions Group Limited, Optum Venture Global Partners II LP, Optum Venture Global Partners LP, Optum Venture Partners II LP, Optum Venture Partners III LP, Optum Venture Partners LP, Optum Washington Network LLC, Optum Women's and Children's Health LLC, Optum of New York Inc., Optum360 LLC, Optum360 Services Inc., Optum360 Solutions LLC, OptumCare ACO New Mexico LLC, OptumCare ACO West LLC, OptumCare Clinical Trials LLC, OptumCare Colorado ASC LLC, OptumCare Colorado LLC, OptumCare Colorado Springs LLC, OptumCare Endoscopy Center New Mexico LLC, OptumCare Florida CI LLC, OptumCare Florida LLC, OptumCare Holdings Colorado LLC, OptumCare Holdings LLC, OptumCare Management LLC, OptumCare New Mexico LLC, OptumCare New York IPA Inc., OptumCare Portland LLC, OptumCare South Florida LLC, OptumCare Specialty Practices LLC, OptumHealth Care Solutions LLC, OptumHealth Holdings LLC, OptumHealth International B.V., OptumInsight Holdings LLC, OptumInsight Inc., OptumInsight India Private Limited, OptumInsight Life Sciences Inc., OptumRx Administrative Services LLC, OptumRx Discount Card Services LLC, OptumRx Group Holdings Inc., OptumRx Health Solutions LLC, OptumRx Holdings I LLC, OptumRx Holdings LLC, OptumRx Home Delivery of Ohio LLC, OptumRx IPA III Inc., OptumRx Inc., OptumRx NY IPA Inc., OptumRx PBM of Illinois Inc., OptumRx PBM of Maryland LLC, OptumRx PBM of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumRx PBM of Wisconsin LLC, OptumRx PD of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumRx Pharmacy Inc., OptumRx Pharmacy of Nevada Inc., OptumRx of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumServe Technology Services Inc., Oregon Healthcare Resources LLC, Oregon Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Orlando Center for Outpatient Surgery L.P., OrthoNet Holdings Inc., OrthoNet LLC, OrthoNet New York IPA Inc., OrthoNet West Inc., OrthoNet of the South Inc., OrthoWest MSO LLC, Orthology Inc., Orthopedic Center of Palm Beach County LLC, Orthopedic Surgery Center of Palm Beach County LLC, Orthopro Management LLC, Ovations Inc., Owensboro Ambulatory Surgical Facility Ltd., Oxford Benefit Management Inc., Oxford Health Insurance Inc., Oxford Health Plans CT Inc., Oxford Health Plans LLC, Oxford Health Plans NJ Inc., Oxford Health Plans NY Inc., P2P Link LLC, PCCCV Inc., PHC Subsidiary Holdings LLC, PHYSICIANS DAY SURGERY CENTER LLC, PMI Acquisition LLC, PMSI Holdings LLC, PMSI Settlement Solutions LLC, POMCO Inc., POMCO Network Inc., PPH Holdings LLC, PPH Management Company L.L.C., PPH-Columbia Inc., PPH-Gardendale Inc., PS Center LLC, PacifiCare Health Systems, PacifiCare Life Assurance Company, PacifiCare Life and Health Insurance Company, PacifiCare of Arizona Inc., PacifiCare of Colorado Inc., Pacific Cardiovascular Associates Medical Group Inc., Pacific Casualty Company Inc., Pacifico S.A. Entidad Prestadora de Salud, Panama City Surgery Center LLC, Park Hill Surgery Center LLC, Parkway Surgery Center LLC, Patient Care Associates L.L.C., PatientsLikeMe, Patrimonio Autonomo Nueva Clinica, Payment Resolution Services LLC, Peninsula Eye Surgery Center LLC, Penzo Enterprises LLC, Peoples Health, Peoples Health Inc., Perham Physical Therapy LTD, Perimeter Center for Outpatient Surgery L.P., Pharmaceutical Technologies LLC, Physician Alliance of the Rockies LLC, Physicians Health Choice of Texas LLC, Physicians Health Plan of Maryland Inc., Physicians' Surgery Center of Downey LLC, Pinnacle III LLC, Plano de Saude Ana Costa Ltda., Plus One Health Management Puerto Rico Inc., Plus One Holdings Inc., Pocono Ambulatory Surgery Center Limited, Polar II Fundo de Investimento em Participacoes Multiestrategia, Polo Holdco LLC, Pomerado Outpatient Surgical Center Inc., Pomerado Outpatient Surgical Center L.P., Post-Acute Care Center for Research LLC, Practice Partners in Healthcare LLC, Preferred Care Network Inc., Preferred Care Network of Florida Inc., Preferred Care Partners Holding Corp., Preferred Care Partners Inc., Preferred Care Partners Medical Group Inc., PreferredOne, PreferredOne Administrative Services Inc., PreferredOne Insurance Company, Premier Choice ACO Inc., Premier Surgery Center of Louisville L.P., Premiere Medical Resources LLC, Presidio Surgery Center LLC, Prime Health Inc., PrimeCare Medical Network Inc., PrimeCare of Citrus Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Corona Inc., PrimeCare of Hemet Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Inland Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Moreno Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Redlands Inc., PrimeCare of Riverside Inc., PrimeCare of San Bernardino Inc., PrimeCare of Sun City Inc., PrimeCare of Temecula Inc., PrimeDoc St. Francis P.C., PrimeDoc of Richmond P.C., ProHEALTH Care Associates L.L.P., ProHEALTH Care Associates of New Jersey LLP, ProHEALTH Medical Management LLC, ProHealth Physicians ACO LLC, ProHealth Physicians Inc., ProHealth Proton Center Management LLC, ProHealth/CareMount Dental Management LLC, Procura Management Inc., Professional Coverage Services PLLC, Progressive Enterprises Holdings Inc., Progressive Medical LLC, Promotora Country S.A., Pronounced Health Solutions Inc., Prosemedic S.A.C., Prospero Benefits Management LLC, Prospero Care Management LLC, Prospero Management Services LLC, Providence & SCA Development LLC, Providence & SCA Off-Campus Holdings LLC, Providence & SCA On-Campus Holdings LLC, Providence & SCA Outreach Markets Holdings LLC, Pulse Platform LLC, QoL Acquisition Holdings Corp., R Cubed Inc., RABessler M.D. P.C., ROC Surgery LLC, ROCS Holdings LLC, RX Ricardo Campos Ltda., Rally Health Inc., ReMedics LLC, Real Appeal Inc., Redding Surgery Center LLC, Redlands Ambulatory Surgery Center, Redlands-SCA Surgery Centers Inc., Reliant MSO LLC, Reliant Medical Group Inc., Reliant Medical Group The Endoscopy Center LLC, Research Surgical Center LLC, Resonancia Magnetica de Colombia Ltda., Resonancia Magnetica del Country S.A., RightCare Solutions Inc., River Valley ASC LLC, Riverside Corporate Wellness LLC, Riverside Electronic Healthcare Resources Inc., Riverside Medical Management LLC, Riverside Surgical Center of Meadowlands LLC, Riverside Surgical Center of Newark LLC, Robert A. Bessler MD PLLC, Rockville Eye Surgery Center LLC, Rocky Mountain Health Maintenance Organization Incorporated, Rush Oak Brook Surgery Center LLC, SC Affiliates LLC, SCA AHN JV Holdings LLC, SCA Alaska Surgery Center inc., SCA Athens LLC, SCA Austin Holdings LLC, SCA Austin Medical Center Holdings LLC, SCA Aventura Holdings LLC, SCA BOSC Holdings LLC, SCA Bloomfield Holdings LLC, SCA Cedar Park Holdings LLC, SCA Clifton LLC, SCA Colorado Springs Holdings LLC, SCA Community Service Foundation, SCA Cottonwood Holdings LLC, SCA Danbury Surgical Center LLC, SCA Denver Holdings LLC, SCA Development LLC, SCA Duluth Holdings LLC, SCA Duncanville Holdings LLC, SCA Duncanville MSO LLC, SCA ESSC Holdings LLC, SCA Englewood Holdings LLC, SCA Global One Holdings LLC, SCA Greenway Holdings LLC, SCA Grove Creek Holdings LLC, SCA Guilford Holdings LLC, SCA Hays Holdings LLC, SCA Health Value Enterprise LLC, SCA Heartland Holdings LLC, SCA High Point Holdings LLC, SCA HoldCo Inc., SCA Holding Company Inc., SCA Holdings Inc., SCA IEC Holdings LLC, SCA Indiana Holdings LLC, SCA Lutheran Holdings LLC, SCA Maple Grove Holdings LLC, SCA Mohawk Holdings LLC, SCA Murrells Inlet LLC, SCA Northern Utah Holdings LLC, SCA Northwest Holdings LLC, SCA Outside New Jersey LLC, SCA Pacific Holdings Inc., SCA Pacific Surgery Holdings LLC, SCA Palisades Holdings LLC, SCA Pennsylvania Holdings LLC, SCA Pinnacle Holdings LLC, SCA Premier Surgery Center of Louisville LLC, SCA Providence Holdings LLC, SCA ROCS Holdings LLC, SCA Rockledge JV LLC, SCA Rush Oak Brook Holdings LLC, SCA SSSC Holdings LLC, SCA Sage Medical LLC, SCA Sage Medical MSO LLC, SCA San Diego Holdings LLC, SCA Skyway Holdings LLC, SCA South Ogden Holdings LLC, SCA Southwestern PA LLC, SCA Specialists of Florida LLC, SCA Specialty Holdings of Connecticut LLC, SCA Stonegate Holdings LLC, SCA Surgery Holdings LLC, SCA Surgicare of Laguna Hills LLC, SCA Teammate Support Network, SCA West Health Holdings LLC, SCA Westgreen Holdings LLC, SCA Woodbury Holdings LLC, SCA eCode Solutions Private Limited, SCA of Clarksville Inc., SCA-Albuquerque Surgery Properties Inc., SCA-Alliance LLC, SCA-Anne Arundel LLC, SCA-Applecare Partners LLC, SCA-Bethesda LLC, SCA-Blue Ridge LLC, SCA-Bonita Springs LLC, SCA-Brandon LLC, SCA-Castle Rock LLC, SCA-Central Florida LLC, SCA-Charleston LLC, SCA-Chatham LLC, SCA-Chevy Chase LLC, SCA-Citrus Inc., SCA-Colonial Partners LLC, SCA-Colorado Springs LLC, SCA-Connecticut Partners LLC, SCA-DRY CREEK LLC, SCA-Davenport LLC, SCA-Denver LLC, SCA-Denver Physicians Holdings LLC, SCA-Derry LLC, SCA-Doral LLC, SCA-Downey LLC, SCA-Dublin LLC, SCA-Encinitas Inc., SCA-Eugene Inc., SCA-First Coast LLC, SCA-Florence LLC, SCA-Fort Collins Inc., SCA-Fort Walton Inc., SCA-Franklin LLC, SCA-Frederick LLC, SCA-Freeway Holdings LLC, SCA-Ft. Myers LLC, SCA-GRANTS PASS LLC, SCA-Gainesville LLC, SCA-Gladiolus LLC, SCA-Glenwood Holdings LLC, SCA-Grove Place LLC, SCA-Hagerstown LLC, SCA-Hamden LLC, SCA-Hilton Head LLC, SCA-Honolulu LLC, SCA-Houston Executive LLC, SCA-IT Holdings LLC, SCA-Illinois LLC, SCA-JPM Holdings LLC, SCA-Kissing Camels Holdings LLC, SCA-MC VBP Inc., SCA-Main Street LLC, SCA-Marina del Rey LLC, SCA-Mecklenburg Development Corp., SCA-Memorial City LLC, SCA-Memorial LLC, SCA-Merritt LLC, SCA-Midlands LLC, SCA-Midway Management LLC, SCA-Mobile LLC, SCA-Mokena LLC, SCA-Morris Avenue LLC, SCA-Morris County LLC, SCA-Mt. Pleasant LLC, SCA-Naperville LLC, SCA-Naples LLC, SCA-New Jersey LLC, SCA-Newport Beach LLC, SCA-Northeast Georgia Health LLC, SCA-PORTLAND LLC, SCA-Palm Beach LLC, SCA-Palm Beach MSO Holdings LLC, SCA-Panama City Holdings LLC, SCA-Paoli LLC, SCA-Phoenix LLC, SCA-Pocono LLC, SCA-Practice Partners Holdings LLC, SCA-River Valley LLC, SCA-Riverside LLC, SCA-Riverside Partners LLC, SCA-Rockville LLC, SCA-Sacred Heart Holdings LLC, SCA-San Diego Inc., SCA-San Luis Obispo LLC, SCA-Sand Lake LLC, SCA-Santa Rosa Inc., SCA-Somerset LLC, SCA-South Jersey LLC, SCA-Sparta LLC, SCA-Spartanburg Holdings LLC, SCA-St. Louis Holdings LLC, SCA-St. Louis LLC, SCA-St. Lucie LLC, SCA-SurgiCare LLC, SCA-Swiftpath LLC, SCA-VERTA LLC, SCA-VLR Holdings Company LLC, SCA-Wake Forest LLC, SCA-Western Connecticut LLC, SCA-Westover Hills LLC, SCA-Winchester LLC, SCA-Winter Park Inc., SCA-Woodlands Holdings LLC, SCAI Holdings LLC, SCLHS-SCA Holdings LLC, SCP Specialty Infusion LLC, SHC Atlanta LLC, SHC Austin Inc., SHC Hawthorn Inc., SHC Melbourne Inc., SJ East Campus ASC LLC, SRPS LLC, SSSC Holdings LLC, SVHS-SCA Florida JV LLC, Sacred Heart ASC LLC, Saden S.A., Sage Medical Prof. LLC, Salem JV Holdings LLC, Salem Surgery Center LLC, Salveo Specialty Pharmacy Inc., San Diego Endoscopy Center, San Diego Sports and Minimally Invasive Surgery Center LLC, San Francisco Endoscopy Center LLC, San Luis Obispo Surgery Center a California Limited Partnership, Sand Lake SurgiCenter LLC, Santa Barbara Endoscopy Center LLC, Santa Cruz Endoscopy Center LLC, Santa Helena Assistencia Medica S.A., Santa Rosa Surgery Center L.P., Santos Administracao e Participacoes S.A., Sanvello Health Holdings LLC, Sanvello Health Inc., Sanvello Health Limited, Scanner Centromed S.A., Seashore Surgical Institute L.L.C., Seisa Servicos Integrados de Saude Ltda., Senate Street Surgery Center LLC, Senior Benefits L.L.C., Serquinox Holdings LLC, Servicios Integrados de Salud Ltda., Servicios Medicos Amed Quilpue S.A., Servicios Medicos Bio Bio Ltda., Servicios Medicos Ciudad del Mar Ltda., Servicios Medicos Santa Maria Ltda., Servicios Medicos Vespucio Ltda., Servicios de Entrenamiento en Competencias Clinicas Ltda., Serviclinica Inmobiliaria S.A., Serviclinica S.A. Ex Los Leones La Calera, Servisalud Inmobiliaria S.A., Servisalud S.A. Ex Los Carrera Quilpue, Shark Holdings P.C., Sierra Dental Plan Inc., Sierra Health Services Inc, Sierra Health Services Inc., Sierra Health and Life Insurance Company Inc., Sierra Health-Care Options Inc., Sierra Home Medical Products Inc., Sierra Nevada Administrators Inc., Sistema de Administracion Hospitalaria S.A.C., Small Business Insurance Advisors Inc., Sobam  Centro Medico Hospitalar S.A., Sociedad de Inversiones Santa Maria SpA, Solstice Administration Services Inc., Solstice Administrators Inc., Solstice Administrators of Alabama Inc., Solstice Administrators of Arizona Inc., Solstice Administrators of Missouri Inc., Solstice Administrators of North Carolina Inc., Solstice Administrators of Texas Inc., Solstice Benefit Services Inc., Solstice Benefits Inc., Solstice Health Insurance Company, Solstice Healthplans Inc., Solstice Healthplans of Arizona Inc., Solstice Healthplans of Colorado Inc., Solstice Healthplans of New Jersey Inc., Solstice Healthplans of Ohio Inc., Solstice Healthplans of Tennessee Inc., Solstice Healthplans of Texas Inc., Solstice of Illinois Inc., Solstice of Minnesota Inc., Solstice of New York Inc., Solutran LLC, Somerset Outpatient Surgery L.L.C., Sound Inpatient Physicians Inc., Sound Inpatient Physicians Medical Group Inc., Sound Inpatient Physicians of Ohio LLC, Sound Inpatient Physicians of Texas I Inc., Sound Inpatient Physicians  Michigan PLLC, Sound Intensivists of Nevada RBessler M.D. PLLC, Sound Kenwood Hospitalists of Cincinnati Inc., Sound Kenwood Hospitalists of Cincinnati LLC, Sound Physicians Advisory Services Inc., Sound Physicians Alaska Hospitalist Group LLC, Sound Physicians Anesthesiology of Texas PLLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Arizona Inc., Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Georgia P.C., Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Illinois LLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Kansas LLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Kentucky PLLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Louisiana Inc., Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Michigan PLLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Nevada Bessler PLLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of South Carolina LLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Southern California P.C., Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Texas PLLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of Washington PLLC, Sound Physicians Emergency Medicine of West Virginia PLLC, Sound Physicians Holdings LLC, Sound Physicians Intensivists of Arizona Inc., Sound Physicians Intensivists of Georgia PC, Sound Physicians Intensivists of South Carolina LLC, Sound Physicians Intensivists of Virginia LLC, Sound Physicians Intensivists of Washington PLLC, Sound Physicians Palliative Care of Maryland P.C., Sound Physicians Telemedicine Inc., Sound Physicians of Florida IV LLC, Sound Physicians of Georgia III P.C., Sound Physicians of Hawaii Inc., Sound Physicians of Idaho PLLC, Sound Physicians of Illinois LLC, Sound Physicians of Indiana LLC, Sound Physicians of Iowa PLLC, Sound Physicians of Kankakee Illinois LLC, Sound Physicians of Massachusetts II P.C., Sound Physicians of Massachusetts Inc., Sound Physicians of New Jersey LLC, Sound Physicians of New York PLLC, Sound Physicians of North Carolina PLLC, Sound Physicians of South Carolina LLC, Sound Physicians of Wyoming LLC, South Arlington Surgical Providers LLC, South County Surgical Center LLC, South Sound Inpatient Physicians PLLC, Southern California Medical Practice Concepts LLC, Southland Hospitalists P.C., Southwest Medical Associates Inc., Southwest Michigan Health Network Inc., Southwest Surgery Center LLC, Southwest Surgical Center LLC, Space Coast Surgical Center Ltd., Spartanburg Surgery Center LLC, Specialists in Urology Surgery Center LLC, Specialized Pharmaceuticals Inc., Specialty Benefits LLC, Specialty Billing Solutions LLC, Specialty Surgical Center LLC, Spectera Inc., Spectera of New York IPA Inc., Sports and Spinal Physical Therapy Inc., St. Cloud Outpatient Surgery Ltd. a Minnesota Limited Partnership, St. Cloud Surgical Center LLC, St. Louis Cardiovascular Institute LLC, St. Louis Specialty Surgical Center LLC, Stonegate JV Partners LLC, Stonegate Surgery Center L.P., Summer Street ASC LLC, SunSurgery LLC, Surgery Center Holding LLC, Surgery Center at Cherry Creek LLC, Surgery Center at Cottonwood LLC, Surgery Center at Grove Creek LLC, Surgery Center at Kissing Camels LLC, Surgery Center at South Ogden LLC, Surgery Center at St. Vincent LLC, Surgery Center of Boca Raton Inc., Surgery Center of Colorado Springs LLC, Surgery Center of Des Moines LLC, Surgery Center of Easton LLC, Surgery Center of Ellicott City Inc., Surgery Center of Fairfield County LLC, Surgery Center of Fort Collins LLC, Surgery Center of Lexington LLC, Surgery Center of Louisville LLC, Surgery Center of Maui LLC, Surgery Center of Mt. 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Vesuvius plc provides engineering services and solutions principally to steel and foundry industries worldwide. It operates in two divisions, Steel and Foundry. The company offers foundry consumables and equipment, including binders, coatings, feeding systems, filtration and gating systems, melt shop refractories, metallurgical and pouring control systems, die dressings and coatings, melt treatment products, crucibles, and ceramics for the iron, steel, and nonferrous foundries. It also provides nonferrous metals, such as primary and secondary aluminum, copper, and other metals and alloys; cement and lime solutions, iron ore pelletizing and calcination products, and grains and powders; and process heaters, FCC units, hydrogen reformers, boilers, coke calciners, and thermal oxidizers, as well as sulphur, ethylene, and ammonia plants. In addition, the company offers solutions for power generation and incineration; glass products comprising artistic, display, float, hollow, and optical glass; glass tempering, and reheat and forming products; and solutions for solar multicrystal silicon ingots, thin film and cell processing, and feedstock. Further, it provides solutions for blast furnace stack repair; taphole clay, iron and slang runner, sampler and temperature, tilting runner, and torpedo ladle solutions; iron ladle solutions; lining, taphole system, bath agitation and tuyere system, electric arc furnace and BOF maintenance, and metallurgical sensor solutions; and ladle, ladle to tundish, and tundish solutions, as well as tundish to mold solutions for conventional slab, thin and slim slab, beam blank, flow control valve bloom or billet, and calibrated nozzle billet casters. Additionally, the company offers ingot casting solutions; and reheat furnace, steel hot forming, galvanized steel, and electrical and stainless-steel solutions. Vesuvius plc was founded in 1916 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.
Ghanaian Super Model Anita Ofori is launching a new campaign Attitudinal Change to help sensitize and hopefully correct some attitudes inculcated in Ghanaians that is not helping us progress but rather retrogress as a nation.

Anita Ofori, a product of the University of Ghana, Legon, is a runway and photo model who has featured in many big fashion events in Africa, Asia and Europe. She has also featured in some international commercials.

She represented Ghana in the Miss Model of the World pageant held in china- Asia, where she raised the flag of Ghana.

She also represented Ghana at the UN (United Nations)  Geneva in an international womens day conference.

Talking about her new project Attitudinal Change, Anita Ofori told (BLOGGER NAME) in an exclusive interview, that the campaign is very necessary because there are some behaviours and attitudes Ghanaians must do away with in order to achieve the better Ghana we are all crying and praying for.

She mentioned lackadaisical attitudes, low commitment towards work, laziness, absenteeism, bribery and corruption to be the common attitudes among the Ghanaian workers which ought to be addressed. She also said that these problems exist in the various sectors of the economy from the government to the common lay man.

Authorities giving permit to people to build at inappropriate locations, fuel stations situated in crowded areas among others.

According to her, although there has been a lot of talk on the subject by prominent persons even from the incumbent Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo- Addo, no results have been recorded as of yet, rather the ominous and frequent call on government to change Ghana seems to be the order of the day and this runs through every sector and almost every problem. If there is filth in a particular area, we call on the government, choked gutters we call on the government, every problem the average Ghanaian will call on the government to address.

She believes the average Ghanaian shares a dual responsibility with the government in ensuring Ghana develops and becomes a better country.

Anita ofori feels that there should be strict enforcement of law in the country to help stop this problem. Ghanians must be made to trust in our legal system.

It has become a heavy burden on Anita Oforis heart to see changes in Ghanaians so as to move the economy forward for everyones betterment. Patriotism is what we need for a better Ghana.

As part of the campaign, Anita Ofori and her team will storm school campus to educate and enlighten students in the junior high, senior high schools and at the tertiary levels. They will also work relentlessly, using all forms of media to see some level of change among Ghanians.

Profile of Anita Ofori

A young and an energetic entrepreneur with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from the University of Ghana, Legon. First runner up in the Exquisite Face of the Universe pageant and second runner up in Face of Legon city campus pageant.

SHE represented Ghana at the Miss Model of the World pageant in China where I had the opportunity to showcase the rich culture of Ghana and learn about the beautiful cultures from around the world.

The government and civil society are needed to offer solutions. We need to offer solutions by Ghana for Ghana and in Ghana, Anita Ofori said to Daily View Gh Dan Kwasi Prince.
15.05.2017 LISTEN

Bisa Kdei has once again received another honor, and this time, as the brand ambassador for FOCOS Foundation.

The hospital (FOCOS) which is specialized in complex spine and joint replacement surgeries had their charity event inside Movenpick on Saturday 13th May 2017.

At the event, multiple award winning musician Bisa Kdei was publicly announced the brand ambassador for the Foundation Of Orthopedics And Complex Spine (FOCOS).

Present at the charity were top personalities which include the former president of the Republic of Ghana, HE John Agyekum Kuffour, current trade minister. Alan Kyeremanteng, to mention but few.

President and Founder of FOCOS, Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei with his team awarded and congratulated Bisa Kdei for his music successes.

Bisa Kdei later entertained everyone at the charity event by performing to them some of his hit songs. He made everyone had their happiest night.
JoyNews anchor and editor Dzifa Bampoh and seven other prestigious women have been honoured for their commitment and dedication in key sectors of Ghanas social fabric.

At the second edition of the Glitz Women of Year Honours, they were celebrated as the mavericks, the enduring souls, the tenacious sisters, the standard bearers in Ghana.

Mrs Bampoh was honoured for her excellence in the media at the well-attended event at the Banquet Hall, State House on Saturday night.

Other personalities who were honoured at the event included; movie producer and director, Shirley Frimpong Manso for her excellence in the arts and musician Wiyaala as young and gifted honouree.

Others were the CEO of Manet, Theresa Oppong Beeko and Professor Afua Hesse who were honoured for their excellence in business and health respectively.

Joyce Ababio's contribution to fashion and Eugenia Tachie-Menson's feat as an activist was also recognised.

The Member of Parliament for Kwabre East, Francisca Oteng-Mensah also received the Trailblazer Honour.

In her acceptance, Mrs Bampoh speech said, It's been 20 years of media work. If anyone had told me this is where I would be I wouldnt have believed it. I started off pre-university in GBC.

"For the first eight years there, I was learning the craft and trying to do my best. I wanted to do more, more than I felt I couldnt do in GBC and so I ended up at Joy FM.

Being with Joy FM, she noted, was a challenge, I must admit, because its the brightest and the best when you talk about journalism and I remain truly grateful

Prior to the awards, Claudia Lumor, Chief Executive Officer of Glitz Africa, organizers of the honours, had explained in an interview with JoyNews MzGee that she was optimistic the stories of the honourees will affect the younger generation.

She explained that she is very passionate about the stories successful Ghanaian women have to share.

It is very personal to me because I mentor a lot of young people and when I go to schools to talk to them, they are quick to mentione Oprah as their mentor.

"I asking myself, 'what are we missing here? Is it that we are not telling the stories of our own Oprahs'? Because I knew we have them here [Ghana] as well, she explained.

The event was attended by several personalities including former First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings; former Deputy for Tourism, Creative Arts and Culture, Dzifa Gomashie; and veteran actress, Akorfa Edjeani-Asiedu.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Ernest Dela Aglanu (Twitter: @delaXdela / Instagram: citizendela)
14.05.2017 LISTEN

I see socialism as the most divine ideology which demands strong convictions to practice. Since the 19th century, the hard-left brand of socialism has advocated radical societal reforms that would redistribute power and wealth along more equitable lines. Some pastors and Imans have become conduits used by the capitalists in their wealth accumulation agenda which contradicts the basic tenets of their religions. Socialism was propounded based on Christian and Islamic values.

Those who advocated for reforms ( socialists) were aligned with Christian movements in the early 20th century. Their demand for regulations mandating workplace safety, minimum wages,pension schemes, social insurance, universal healthcare and other welfare policies which are generally funded by relatively high taxes were inline with policies and positions expressed by the Christian and Islamic movements across the world. Islamic socialism,for example,centers on Zakat,the requirement that holy Muslims give sway a portion of their accumulated wealth.

We have no version of socialism that preaches poverty. Socialism or socialists can be pro or anti market but the ultimate goal of practioners is the abolition of social classes.Most capitalists governments and parties have adopted many of the socialist policies including social security, public education and arguably universal suffrage.

People confuse themselves with the Communist Manifesto when discussing socialism.One fact people may not know is that socialism predates the Communist Manifesto.Before Marx and Engels propounded the theory,great minds like Henri de Saint Simon,Robert Owen,Pierre Joseph Proudhon etc had written thesis about socialism and Pierre for instance described " property as theft".

In the 20th century,socialism emerged as the most influential secular movement worldwide and the Soviet Union at a point led the ideology's crusade. African leaders or states adopted the ideology and it became the guiding document and ideology for most of the liberation forces. After independence most African leaders adopted the ideology but branded it to suit their homegrown philosophies.

Nyerere adopted the Fabian socialist ideas to support his rural development agenda, Kaunda,Jomo Kenyatta and others went same direction. Nkrumah who was the most powerful force and the most influential personality when it comes to the practice of socialism in Africa, also created his brand of socialism to suit his "One Africa and believe in your African personality" agenda.We have nothing like appearing poor or dwelling comfortably in poverty in the socialist manifesto.

Communism advances the idea of workers taking control of the means of production,government fades away,as workers build a classless society to establish an economy based on common ownership. The ultimate target of the communists is production and consumption reaching an equilibrium.I don't think this represents wishing for poverty to bath you.The NDC a centre - left party whuch is a fusion of aspects of pro capitalist and pro socialist ideas a common ideological philosophy being practiced by most leftist elements across the globe.

Africans per our original traditional system are socialist inclined. We farm together, harvest the products together, supported each other,uncles paid for education of their sisters who were financially weak,fathers extended their support to their families, aunties picked wards of their family members and catered for them, we ate from the same bowl,fathers married ten wives but their children and wives lived together, ate together, farmed together etc.These were the original values and doctrine, our biblical and old Islamic father practiced.

Westernisation and capitalism have come to bury all these wonderful values creating unnecessary competition in our communities and at the governmental level leading to corruption,suspicion, hate and all the ills in our society. You cannot convince me that you are a socialist when you place all your hopes on your political organisation as your source of progress and survival, it is sinful to pose a socialist when you struggling to build ten houses, ten companies at the expense of the struggling masses, you cannot tell me you are a socialist when you preach tribalism and survive on tribal permutations and you cannot convince me you are a socialist when you succumb to wicked policies of a regime for fear of victimization and persecution.

Socialism unlike capitalism is another form of religion or religious faith, Christ preached about it,the case of Annais and Sapphira fresh in our minds,Christ visit to the temple to challenge the establishment there to guide us and Prophet Muhammed's stance against the "cheats" is another clearest example.

Socialist inclined parties who abandoned the system for neo- liberal agenda are all going back to their old philosophy example is the ANC.China has not abandoned its communist ideology rather, it has fused it with aspects of pro liberal policies.In Vietnam though the authority of state remains unchallenged,private ownership of farms,factories etc is being encouraged.

Nkrumah was never against private businesses.Contrary to lies his opponents peddle around, Nkrumah is the only President in the annuals of our post independence political history who consciously fashioned out a programme to create powerful Ghanaian business magnates to support his developmental agenda.He sent some of them to Nigeria India etc to learn trade and others to Yugoslavia,Hungary, US,Russia etc to learn their technology to support our industries.

Welfarism is building schools in the deprived areas,hospitals for the rural poor who have been denied such facilities for decades,implement prudent tax system which would roll in the business class who make huge capital,who exploit the poor and take advantage of facilities provided by the state such as ports,water,electricity,roads,security etc.
15.05.2017 LISTEN

As history can take me back our grandparents wore our beautiful traditional clothes, the beautiful colors of Northern fugu, shining brightness of the Asante kente, adorable Volta kente that made us first class citizens as time pass on to our time we are gradually accepting the second class citizen, why at all should we complain about racism and superiority of the white men, na who cause amm.

Ghana economy and Ghanaians are the second highest uses of used clothes (broni wawo) meaning the dead Whitman clothes, this, in my opinion, consider Ghanaians as second class citizens, is time we acknowledge ourselves as first class citizens but not second class.

We import BRONI WAWO from abroad to Ghana for Ghanaians to buy and wear them, according to 2013 figures from the United Nation Comtrade Database; Ghana spent 65 million dollars on importation of used clothes from Uk alone.

That is not even the issue of the amount of money involve but the issue is why are we killing our talented tailor's skills and destroying our culture of clothing? In Ghana every nook and cranny you will find dressmaking shops with beautiful young ladies in their uniform learning how to sew Africa dress or Kaba they learn it for many years hoping to graduate and get their own shop and start their own business this is massive employment for the youth, SELF EMPLOYMENT.

But with the importation of BRONI WAWO the youth in dressmaking end up as skilled jobless because people will not give them materials/textiles for them to sew, they will rather go in for the BRONI WAWO. Thou some give excuses that, tailors like saying go and come that is to say delay tack tics but the truth is that there is BRONI WAWO in the market.

The BRONI WAWU is collapsing our textiles factories, making our youth unemployed, putting us before the world as second class people, we are likely to get skin diseases by using broni wawo and using our country as dumping place of rubbish.

I, therefore, ask my fellow Ghanaians to restore our dignity as first class citizen by not patronising broni wawo

I call on government and policy makers to ban the importation of used clothes (broni wawo) into Ghana just like the government did on used refrigerators.

The main challenges for banning broni wawo is the loss of jobs to those who are into the business, I suggest government make a policy to integrate them into textile production or fabric business where they will supply textile and other materials in the market for tailors to buy as well as individuals. Those who are into broni wawo wholesale business can, therefore, collaborate with dressmakers were they will buy the textiles and materials for the tailors to sew for them and they will, therefore, get their designed clothes from the tailors into the market for both retail customers and final consumers to patronise. By so doing, we will be promoting our culture, restore our dignity and create businesses as well as export our production across West Africa countries.

I am therefore appealing to all the boggas outside Ghana to also make a pledge to stop the importation of used clothes and rather go into textile business.

I ask Ghanaians to stand up against this broni wawo importation just as we did to illegal mining (glamsay) meaning gather and sell, in Ghana.

I SALUTE OUR PRESIDENT FOR TAKING THE LEAD

I SALUTE KOFE ARKO FOR HIS PASSION FOR AFRICA WEAR

The Whiteman will not allow used clothes from Africa to their land not talking about using them by their children, but why should we allow it into Ghana are we so poor that we can afford new clothes?

I stand for youth empowerment my role to advocate for youth empowerment

Once we lose our culture we lose our soul

Africa Ghanaians arise to uphold our culture

Abongo promoting Africa wear abroad

President of Ghana in his beautiful Africa wear

Africa lady wearing kente
A Non-Governmental Organization(NGO) , operating in northern Ghana and known as Meta Foundation, has been commended for complementing the effort of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to undertake activities to mark this years Child Health Promotion Week(CHPW) in the Upper East Region.

The CHPW instituted by the GHS in 2004 aimed at scaling up a number of priority interventions to reverse the morbidity and mortality trends in the country is marked in the second week of May every year, aimed at creating the awareness and intensifying efforts to increase knowledge, improve health coverage for children especially those who would not usually be covered under the normal routine outreach services.

The NGO apart from contributing financial resources for monitoring and supervision of nurses carrying the health activities in the health facilities in the region , also took part in the monitoring and supervision activity, built the capacity of eighty- four volunteers to conduct home visits to promote exclusive breastfeeding , encouraged mothers and women in labour to go for antenatal and post-natal services at the various health facilities, encouraged parents to register their new born babies with the Department of Birth and Death as well organized health talks using the community radio.

Mr Rexford King James Adjei, the Regional Health Promotion Officer of the GHS, made the commendation during joint monitoring visits by some of the Senior Staff of the Regional Health Directorate of the GHS and some staff of the NGO to some health facilities in the Builsa North and the Nabdam Districts in the Region.

The Regional Health Promotion Officer who expressed happiness about the high turnout for the five day event , commended the NGO for its contribution towards the event , and appealed to other development partners and Corporate bodies to support the GHS in delivering quality health care to women and children so as to help Ghana fast-track the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

He stated that Community members need much information on health to enable them to access health care services affectively, but mentioned that one of the major challenges facing the Regional and District Health Directorates was inadequate funding undertake Social Mobilization and community activities to empower the communities with health information.

Among some of the health facilities the team visited included the Sadema District Health Hospital , the Chuchuliga Sub District Health facility, Achanyire Goayie CHPs Compound where majority of mothers with children under the five years were seen accessing essential services including immunization against childhood diseases , vitamin A supplementation , weighing of children, giving bed nets to children aged below 18 months, conducting of free birth registration for babies under 1 year, receiving advice on exclusive breast feeding and complimentary feeding through demonstrations.

Mr Aboziah Ernest , the District Health Promotion Officer in charge of the Builsa North , attributed the success story of this years event to the high level of the awareness creation embarked by the NGO in many of the communities through sensitization and community radio.

Unlike before, it was very difficult getting people to register their newborn babies with the Department of Birth and Registry , but now many parents are now patronizing the services. This will provide reliable and accurate data for proper planning and programme implementation. We are also happy that the NGO through community durbars is engaging with the communities to stop negative cultural practices such as early marriages and open defecation which have health implication  , he stated

The Programme Manager of the Foundation, Mr David Amozebega, said Health, Sanitation and Agriculture were among the core mandate of his outfit and indicated the NGO in collaboration with the GHS, the Birth and Death Registry, the traditional authorities, opinion leaders and assembly members with support from UNICEF- Ghana was implementing a - one- year project dubbed: Sustaining Human Progress and Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience, in 80 communities in the Builsa North and the Nabdam Districts of the Region , aimed at the promotion of skill delivery at health facilities, exclusive breastfeeding promoting of birth registration, ending child and forced marriages, increase in school enrolment among others.

This years theme: Healthy Child, Start Right, Do It Right for Total Growth and Development is aimed at improving access and efficiency in service delivery, quality of care and increase coverage of children under the ages of five.
17.05.2017 LISTEN

Dear James Caraway:

Thank you for the email you sent to me after you read, I suppose, only one of my many articles published in this column of mine on the Modern Ghana internet site. I must say you very much amazed me and brought sadness to my innermost being by what you said in your letter. But then, I am not surprised by your utterances, since you introduced yourself as an evangelist!

For, I know that most people plying your kind of trade would address me in similar manner or even worse than you did in your letterarrogating upon yourselves a sole right and duty to humanity in order to pompously try to reprimand, castigate, apprehend, judge, condemn and insult my person, without even knowing who I am and how I stand before the Most High One, Yahuwah Elohiymand thus the reason why I make this letter addressed to you open to all, so your fellows may also be properly educated and cautioned! All this notwithstanding, I take your name-calling of me as a work hazard that people like me must endure in working for Yahuwah Elohiym.

You wrote, in your letter to me, thus: I have never been to Africa, but I have seen the crusades that Reinhard Bonnke has led on the Continent and I see his fruit. I ran across your web site and this nonsense: Let me preface this by saying, I dont know you personally, but I know your fruit. . . . I am a Christian Evangelist with Victory Outreach International, here in San Antonio, Texas. As I began to read some of your rhetoric, it struck me as odd, that someone who is obviously educated . . . would spend their time sitting in front of a computer promoting fear, doubt and unbelief.

Dear Evangelist Caraway, do you realize that you contradict yourself by these words of yours I quote here? For, if you can admit that I am someone who is obviously educated, why do you say that what I put out in my writing is nonsense without caring a hoot about the solid evidence I provide concerning the issues I raise in my particular article you read??

You see, you hurt yourself very badly by not listening to this obviously educated person, who may be the first (and I pray should not be the last) you would ever hear accusing your favorite apostle, St. Paul, of plagiarizing Greek philosophers in letters he wrote to Christians of his day, and by extension to Christians today, with the sole aim of turning them into ignorant zealots of deception such as you, my dear evangelist Caraway, have become!!

You see, I meant very serious business when I accused your St. Paul of plagiarizing Greek philosophers in letters he wrote to Christians of his day while lying to these same Christians (and subsequently to you and your ilk today) that he spoke to them in words he was given by Yahuwah Elohiym to be spoken to them!

And even though I gave you irrefutable evidence in my article you readtitled, Apostle Paul Caught Plagiarizing Greek Philosophers in His Epistles of the New Testament (of link https://www.modernghana.com/news/769023/apostle-paul-caught-plagiarizing-greek-philosophers-in-his-e.html) about how St. Paul lied in his claims to having received a word from Yahuwah Elohiym, you still would not think over my accusation made against him, but simply dismiss all I say as nonsense? Like seriously?? Or you are simply too immature to take spiritual issues seriously or tolerate contrary opinion??

How sad to read your words that Paul never plagiarized anything! For, I meant for you to know Paul plagiarized human beings and that the people Paul plagiarized were not holy people according to the reckoning of the scriptures, but were worshippers of Greek deities whose lifestyles, speech and beliefs were based on and dictated by Greek mythology, literature, science and religion!! Your assertion that Paul never plagiarized anything, even in the face of the evidence I provided, left me bewildered and wondering about your level of education and your ability to reason or adduce conclusions logically!

Then, you went further on to say: I dont know if you are a Christian, but that matters little. What you need is a proper rebuke and stern correction. I am not judging you, but by the Spirit of the Living God this idiocy needs to stop.

I am sad you expose yourself to open ridicule and shame the entire Earth, and that you draw all the people you claim you are leading in your Victory Outreach International (VOI) to also be smeared with this shame and ridicule of yours, for exposing yourself as their leader and not even being cut for a job of leading sinners to the salvation of Yahuwah Elohiymfor, you deceive yourself by professing to be doing the work of salvation in your self-acclaimed role and status as evangelist by such unholy garbage talk you direct at my person!

You shock me too much by this filth you spew out of your mouth! Does holiness mean anything to you at all?? Are you able to praise Yahuwah Elohiym with such a foul mouth as you have that seems only fit and capable of spewing from it trash??

Let me say to you that I live by and walk in the Towrah; if you know what Towrah means! So then, I can only be judged by the Towrah; and since your life is one of an evangelistan unholy Greek-based calling or job which is bereft of Towrah wisdom, with what wisdom do you think to judge my teachings?? You see, you are simply incapable of judging me because you are deficient of Towrah-light in your spirit and you also lack Towrah-wisdom, and so, you are right in saying to me that I am not judging you, for you cant even try to do so of me!!

And for you to think yourself qualified and capable of giving me a proper rebuke and stern correction, you must be kidding yourself or as we say in Ghanaian parlance be tickling yourself so you may laugh your heart out! Are you not being funny in thinking you can correct me, when I am not a member of your organization (VOI) and when your own uninspiring leadership of it means nothing to me? You really must be joking!!

It is therefore no wonder that you do not even know the true and genuine name of the Creator! You refer to Him as God when since 1999 the world was made to become aware of the error in calling Him so, and therefore, no serious seeker or teacher of the salvation of the Creator addresses Him as God!! Are you so backward that you do not know this, and are thus become irrelevant and unworthy in any mission to get mankind to the salvation of the Most High One?? Do you and your type not call an idol a god, and yet are you not bothered one bit in calling the Most High One also as God??

Can you teach me what distinction you have between GOD God and god?? If you are able to give me any such distinction, it will be a demonstration of the kind of superior education you may have over mine. For me, I go the way of simple high school logic to know that whether written as GOD, God or god they have one and the same sound! Who then do you expect to respond when the sound GOD/God/god is made? My dear evangelist, let it be it known to you that a word is primarily a sound that is meant to be properly uttered to have the appropriate and desirable effect! Can you get that??

If in your mind you think to ascribe GOD or God as being the name of the Creator, and then conversely think to also ascribe god as the name of the ruler of darkness (cf. Second Corinthians 4:4), do you not demonstrate yourself as being a simpleton just as any of the many simpletons who dabbled with the Ivrit (Hebrew??) word of Elohiym by translating it during mans historical and ancient past were??

The English Bible you use must be deemed useless if, for all you must know in this twenty-first century, it still teaches you that the name of the Most High One is God; for, it is not!! You see, even todays publishers of your popular King James Version Bible have had to retract some wrong information that was provided in their Old (1611) and New (1982) versions (or are they rather perversions) by expunging the words God, Jesus, Christ and Christians that are found in these versions from their latest version titled The Restored Name King James Version Bible (RNKJVB, 1999) and have replaced them with Elohim, Yahushua, Messiah and Messianics, respectively!!

And so, this latest version of the KJV Bible (RNKJVB) cannot be deemed as a teaching (revelation??) about God, Christ, Jesus and for Christians as the previous KJV was thought to do and is deemed to have done till a time not long ago!! And so, this whole gamut on Christianity, which incidentally is a word that is never even once mentioned as an article of faith in any Bible ever published, must now be lost on all mankind according to the RNKJVB of 1999, and so all men must seriously work to delete the word Christianity from their memory.

And for all, who some time ago were happy addressing themselves as Christians, they must now let all people know that they now call themselves, messianics, rather than as Christians according to the dictates of the RNKJVB!!

What an uphill task that people like you, evangelist Caraway, must have to work to overcome in order to remove all the cloudiness brought by Christianity into their spirits, in order to allow the true light and truth of the Towrah of the Most High One to come into their psyche as must become of any people who seek His true salvation.

Now, with all this cloudiness over your spiritual eyes, Oh evangelist Caraway, how could you with all the spiritual blindness you obviously portray, be able to say anything else other than the boorish words you say thus:

QuoteYou are in error. Galatians 6: 1-3 Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted. . . . For, if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.

You . . . are self-deceived. Stop being an instrument of Satan . . . Get on your knees and ask Jesus to forgive you and then ask him to reveal the truth of Gods word . . . Paul never plagiarized anything! Your writings are not good works, they are fruitless. . . Revelation 12:10 depicts what happens when you go against God, and do not repent. . . . REPENT! REPENT! REPENT! And be saved. Romans 10:9-10 That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved For with the heart one believes into righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

Please say this Prayer: Lord Jesus, I know I am a sinner. Please forgive me. I believe you are the Son of God. I believe that you died for my sins on the Cross of Calvary. I believe that you rose from the dead, after being in the grave for three days. I accept you now as My Personal Lord and Savior. Amen.End of quote.

In all of this long talk above, you again give up yourself as being a very unwise person who is also blind to truth since you do not live by the value and substance of what scripture you quote for me! For, when you say you must in a spirit of gentleness show me the way of truth, you display an obvious lack of gentleness in your spirit but only a demonstration of arrogance and an annoying crude pomposity; and thus portray yourself as the hypocrite you really are! I am just sad for you!

You go further to say to yourself, and very truly too, that if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. If you are wise, one little bit, you will see this is all true of your person because while you have only one finger of your hand pointing at me, thinking this verse is for me, you have all four remaining fingers of your hand pointing right back at your good self in confirmation that this verse was meant for your education and correction; it is only sad that you do not have the humility to see yourself being corrected. Do you not see a big log in your eye blinding you to the truth of Yahuwah Elohiym?? How then are you able to see a speck of dust in my eye to take it out for me?? Pathetic evangelist!!

You may say all the nasty things you like about my person but none of the mud you sling at me will stick; and in fact, I pardon you for all the evil things you utter against my person! However, you must ask for the forgiveness of my merciful Av (Father) in Shamayim (Heaven) for your own good!! You need to REPENT of your empty pride and ask for forgiveness from Yahuwah Elohiym! He may hear you!!

I really wonder why all you evangelists I have heard about or known are so infatuated about Romans 10:9-10 and the fake prayer you fabricate (commonly known as the "Sinner's Prayer") and invite me to say in repetition after you in the quote above, as all you know to be the way and means into the salvation of Yahuwah Elohiym??

It is sad to note that it is your wrong belief in these verses of Romans and in the reciting of the Sinners Prayer by any people who are taught and led by itinerant and television evangelists, Reinhard Bonnke your own idol being one of them, to do so which is claimed to magically transform and catapult or haul sinners at their open air crusades all over Earth, into the salvation of the Most High One!! And sadly, this manner of catapulting into a so-called salvation is what you, my dear evangelist Caraway suggest to me to be saved by!! What ignorance and an insult to my understanding of the scriptures!!

I suggest you ask yourself if you know of any one person as revealed in the scriptures who gained entry into the salvation of the Most High One by such a weird faith and methodology! And if you cannot find one person according to the scriptures who was saved according to your methodology based on Romans 10:9-10 and the reciting of this stereotyped prayer (after you), why do you think you are yourself saved and can brazenly refer your wrong methodology to me to be saved by it??

I suggest you read my book of title Beware of This False Doctrine: Of Reciting the Sinners Prayer for Salvation published in your USA and earn yourself some education on how anyone may be saved, if the narratives of the New Testament are anything to go by, and in order to deliver yourself from spiritual ignorance.

In my book, you will gain a lot of wisdom to forever discern between remission and forgiveness of sin and how that it is only in and by remission (and not forgiveness) of sin that anyone enters the salvation of Yahuwah Elohiymcf. Acts 2:38-39, KJVand how that Shimon Kefa on his first assignment to lead people into the salvation of the Most High One never taught forgiveness as you do and urge people to believe in, but rather, remission of sin to bring anyones salvation about!

Now, let me tell you a few things about your apostle Paul that will shock you! In his claim to being a son of Avraham and of the tribe of Binyamin even though begotten of a Roman mother, Paul lied big time just as I proved to you in my article under reference; for, no child begotten of a heathen or strange woman to a son of Yisroel, is by right also one who belongs to the tribe of his father or nation (Yisroel)!

Therefore, for Paul to lay claim to not just being a Hebrew but a Hebrew of Hebrewscf. Second Corinthians 11:22 and Philippians 3:5I can only say he lied and was only successful in deceiving people who are ignorant about the Towrah instruction on any illegitimate child begotten of a strange woman to a son of Yisroel! It is sad this lie and deception of St. Paul has stuck with Christians to this day; with many Christians, like you evangelist Caraway, even worshipping the life of this liar!!

Again, when Paul claimed to belong to the sect of Perushim (Pharisees), he obviously lied; for, no grouping of such ultra-zealous Towrah-believers as the Perushim claimed they were, would permit a man who was of illegitimate birth in Yisroel into their membership for fellowship!

Also, because of the fact that Yahuwah Elohiym has never called and sent anyone who was not of good standing, holiness wise, in Yisroel, Pauls claims about meeting with Yahushua whilst he was about to enter Damascus with the evil intent to kill holy people, together with his stain of illegitimacy to being a son of and in Yisroel, MUST be false! And this falsehood is become obvious by the record of Acts 26:14-15, where Paul lied that, while the voice that spoke to him did so in Ivrit (Hebrew??), the owner of the voice in the same breath gave him (Paul) his name as JESUS (an English name)!!

Paul in his youthful days was schooled under Greek philosophers in their schools where he could enroll without resistance! I am very certain Paul never had any admission into any yeshiva (bible school??) in Yisroel to be under the tutelage of one GamaliEl, a Towrah teacher, as he claimed since he could never meet the Towrah requirement of being a true and legitimate son of Yisroel in order to be qualified for enrollment!

Greek philosophers who tutored Paul in a school called Asklepius located in Agae, Greece, were themselves tutored under Pythagorean philosophers. Now, be it made known that Pythagoras was himself tutored by Plato; and hence, Pauls great infatuation with the philosophies of Plato!

Dear evangelist Caraway, as you MUST know, the basis of freemasonry is Pythagorean! So then, it is not strange that Paul was, by his allusion to being a masterbuilder in First Corinthians 3:10 (KJV), revealing his spiritual roots of Greek origin and his affiliation to freemasonry!

The abiding spirit(s) of Greek mythology, religion, philosophy, literature and culture in apostle Paul were later to so vividly manifest in him as to have the Greek deity Mercurius manifest in him and thus was deemed by Greeks who witnessed this manifestation of deity in Paul as being worthy of worship and the offering of animal sacrificescf. Acts 14:11-12, KJV!

My dear evangelist Caraway, in all of the foregoing, I still would urge you to read my article under reference just one more time in order to understand and appreciate why I write these articles, at all, and under whose mandate and unction I do so!

And when you do find out, please leave me alone to do my work for my Av in Shamayim, since you have neither part nor lot in this task laid upon my shoulders! Shalawam!!

cc: James Caraway

PS: Should readers of this letter and any of my articles published in this column have serious questions or suggestions, they may contact me via e-mail by clicking on Contact on the Home Page of my website, http://sbprabooks.com/BongleBapuohyele You may also want to purchase a copy of my bookBeware of This False Doctrine: Of Reciting the Sinners' Prayer for Salvationvia the same web address so, together, we walk the narrow way to the presence of Elohiym. Shalawam!
It is exactly one year that an Abuja-based business woman, Charity Aiyedgbon was declared missing by her Facebook friends. Charity, popularly known as Chacha, is said to have gone missing since the 9th of May, 2016 and family, friends and Security Agencies said to be working to unravel the mystery behind her sudden disappearance.

Speculations on the possible whereabouts of the 44-year-old mother of four, also known as Deepdeal Chacha Dehammer were rife.

First, a Lagos-based lawyer, Emeka Ugwuonye said he had overwhelming evidence that the missing Charity was dead, accusing her erstwhile husband, David Aiyedogbon of having a hand in her disappearance; an allegation he posted on his Facebook group, The Due Process Advocates.

Reacting to Ugwuonyes allegation, former husband of the missing woman, Mr. David Aiyedogbon washed his hands over the disappearance of the lady and wrote his accuser, through his lawyers, demanding an apology, failure which he would seek legal redress.

The letter titled: Defamation of the character of David Aiyedogbon; demand for apology, signed by his lawyer, Obiora Illo esq (Ogbulafor Chambers) and made available to newsmen, expressly states: It is our instruction to demand an unqualified apology from you to our client through our chambers for the defamatory publications you have made of and concerning our client.

Also, addressing newsmen in Abuja, Mr. Aiyedogbon urged the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris to investigate the allegation against him, describing it as cruel, criminal and untrue, stressing that his estranged wife Charity left their matrimonial home on the 28th of May, 2014, noting that since then, he had neither heard from her, nor had any dealings with her.

While the controversy lasted, a Civil Society Organisation, Coalition against Crime (CAC) called on Nigerias Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris to arrest Lagos-based lawyer, Ugwuonye to explain his role in the disappearance of Charity Aiyedogbon.

National Coordinator of the group, Harrison Pepple, made the call while addressing newsmen in Abuja, arguing that Mr. Ugwuonye had some questions to answer.

In a Petition to the Inspector General of Police, the group quoted Mr. Ugwuonye as saying: Charity Aiyedogbon is said to have been missing since the 11th of May, 2016 and one Emeka Ugwuonye claims he has evidence that the woman is dead and was murdered. He also posted a photograph of a dead person, part of whose body was dismembered. How can Police be looking for a missing person and someone says he has a clue and he has not been invited or arrested.?

Following the intervention by the Civil Society Organisation, the Police eventually arrested Mr. Ugwuonye and later released him on bail, after questioning, while investigations continued.

Several developments aided Police investigations. First, those believed to be close to Chacha are quoted as saying that she went missing on the 9th of May, 2016, but her lawyer, Barrister Nsikak Udoh, handling a suit filed at the Federal High Court, Lokoja on 29th April, 2016 against 29 respondents, including her biological children and former husband, claimed she (Chacha) came to his house on the 18th of May, 2016 (eight days after her purported disappearance) and one of his staff accompanied her to Federal High Court, to sign and depose to an affidavit in support of the ex-parte motion filed along with the case. How could someone who was declared missing on the 9th of May reappear on the 18th and then disappear again?

Today, it has been established that Chachas signature was forged; as the lawyer, Barrister Nsikak Udo has recanted. He says he did not see Chacha, as earlier claimed. He confessed to the Police that he forged Charitys signature in an affidavit he filed in court. Apparently, Charity was not behind the filing of the suit, but her lawyer, Barrister Nsikak Udoh. He therefore lied on oath. Both himself and the Commissioner for oaths in the Federal High Court Abuja jurisdiction risk being prosecuted by the Police for forgery and perjury.

Another puzzle is that a corpse, said to have been dismembered beyond identification was allegedly seen in Abuja on the 12th of May and Mr. Ugwuonye claimed it was Chachas body. Till date, who has identified the corpse as that of Chacha? Impeccable sources say a DNA test conducted on the body revealed otherwise. Children of the missing woman have also chorused on several platforms that their mother was NOT dead. They have also stated that the displayed corpse is not that of their mother. The missing woman also has siblings and parents who have been going about their normal businesses and have neither said their sister was missing, dead, nor joined in the search for her.

The missing Chacha has a case of forgery that is yet to be concluded. A suit instituted in a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT High Court 8) on the 14th of March, 2016, with suit number CV/1231/16, between Messrs Chibuzor Ogugua and Chigozie Eme (plaintiffs) and Mrs. Charity Aiyedogbon (defendant), made eight prayers to the Court. The last prayer reads: an order of the Honourable Court directing the defendant to pay the plaintiffs the sum of 200,000,000.00 (Two Hundred Million Naira) as damages for the losses suffered on the ground of the unauthorized and fabricated Valuation Report by the defendant.Could she have disappeared to frustrate the Suit or evade justice?

In the last one year, a lot has happened. The law enforcement agencies and private investigators have worked very hard to unravel the mystery behind the disappearance of Mrs. Charity Aiyedogbon, aka Chacha Dehammer. Cases have been instituted and some already decided.

Some friends of Chacha, believed to have earlier raised the alarm recanted. They are said to be at war with Emeka Ugwuonye, who said he was briefed by same Chachas friends on the matter. They engaged in war of words on Facebook. One of them, Pamela Nwansoh allegedly confronted Mr. Ugwuonye in a Police premises in Abuja over an obvious sense of disenchantment with his activities, alleging extortion of members of the public (in the name of looking for Chacha) using his Facebook Group, the Due Process Advocates (DPA). Ugwuonye had, via a post on the group, solicited financial contributions for his trip to Abuja to respond to Police invitation to explain himself over the case of the missing Chacha.

One of the ladies said to be involved in the search for Chacha, Viola Ifeyinwa Okolie, on the 14th of July, 2016, also made a worrisome post on her Facebook wall, expressing disenchantment with Mr. Ugwuonyes antics.

Also in a post on The Due Process Advocates on the 17th of July, 2016, Ugwuonye attacked Viola Okolie, making spurious allegations. The post was titled: How the search for Chacha took strange turns and her friends turn out not to be friends after all. The drama continued.

But, how did Emeka Ugwuonye get involved in this matter? Was he really in America when the incident happened, as he claimed? Available records suggest otherwise.

Barrister Ugwuonye claimed to have been in the United States of America as at the time of Chachas disappearance and only came into Nigeria in June, 2016, after being briefed to handle the matter, but his call log betrayed him, showing that he was in Abuja on the 10th, 11th and 12th of May, 2016; same time Chacha is said to have got missing. Information from private investigators and telecommunication service providers revealed that he made calls around Jabi area of Abuja, up till midnight same 10th and 11th and departed Abuja on the 12th of May, 2016. When confronted by the Police in Abuja with evidence of his movement, he owned up.

Three key suspects earlier arrested by the Police in connection with Chachas disappearance were said to have been released at his instance. He claimed at the FCT Police Hqrs that they were his clients; but when brought face to face with Mr. Ugwuonye, they denied all his claims, saying they neither briefed him nor identified any corpse to him as that of Chacha.

As at today, Police sources reveal that Mr. Ugwuonye has not provided any evidence to substantiate his claims. The only person he claims showed and identified the corpse as that of missing Chacha (Jo) denied him.

Today, Chachas car has been recovered. Two of her handsets have also been recovered. Is it a coincidence that he (Ugwuonye) has been questioned more than thrice by the Police in Chachas case?

The first puzzle is solved, with the admission by one of Chachas lawyers, Barrister Nsikak Udo that Chachas signature was forged. He admitted that he lied on oath and his fate shall be determined by the laws of the land soon.

Second, Chachas last Facebook post before she went missing shows that she sat on the passengers seat of her car. That was the last she posted on Facebook, using that particular User ID- Deepdealdehammer. The question of who drove the car may have also been addressed.

Her car has been recovered, following a tip-off by one of the suspects that were in Police custody, IK Ezeugo. IK never opened up until Police arrested one of Jekwus friends, who now gave the lead, indicating that he (IK) personally drove the vehicle to the place where it was parked. His (Iks) younger brother, identified as Paul Chukwujekwu Ezeugo (still at large) is believed to have been in custody of the vehicle. He (Chukwujekwu) is also believed to have driven the missing woman on that last trip. The car was found in Enugu State by the Police, in the residence of one Uche, with its Plate Number and particulars already changed.

Again, Chachas two handsets have been recovered. One of them, a Nokia handset, is said to have been found with Chukwujekwus biological mother, Mrs. Ezeugo. The second handset (a Samsung phone) was recovered from one Augustine, who claimed that one Odinaka, Chukwujekwus friend and phone repairer sold it to him for Twenty Five Thousand Naira. The proceeds, according to Odinaka, were handed over to Chukwujekwu. Just like the vehicle, the both handsets were found in Enugu. Chukwujekwu is still at large.

Why is it that almost all the persons arrested/suspected so far in connection with Chachas case are from Enugu State? Precisely, six suspects so far arrested in the case are from Enugu State. Emeka Ugwuonye is from Enugu and Chachas car and handsets were found in Enugu. Chachas maternal home is Enugu. In fact, Paul Chukwujekwu Ezeugo and the missing Chachas mother are both from Oba-Nsukka, in Enugu State.

Mr. Ugwuonyes relationship with one of the prime suspects, Chukwujekwu Ezeugo is suspicious and his call log points in the same direction. He is also suspected to have aided his escape, as, according to Police sources, the day he (Jekwu) was to be arrested, Ugwuonye personally called the Police, promising to produce him, only to revert 24hours later, telling the Police that he had escaped.

Understanding how bad the matter was getting, Ugwuonye at a point, announced his withdrawal from Chachas case, a move Police sources described as diversionary, since he is already a suspect in the case.

David Aiyedogbon fights back

Following his refusal to apologize, ex-husband of the missing woman, Mr. David Aiyedogbon dragged Lagos- based Lawyer, Emeka Ugwuonye to the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) over what he described as unprofessional publications against his person.

A letter dated 22nd August, 2016, captioned: Petition against Emeka Ugwuonye for Unprofessional Publications and False Allegations, addressed to the General Secretary of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), urged the professional body to investigate the matter and invoke appropriate disciplinary actions against the lawyer. Till date, Mr. Ugwuonye has not responded to a query issued him by the NBA, following Aiyedogbons petition.

Also, for falsely accusing him of, having a hand in the sudden disappearance of his estranged wife, Charity Aiyedogbon, Mr. Aiyedogbon instituted a defamation of character suit of Ten Billion Naira (N10b) against Lagos Lawyer, Emeka Ephraim Ugwuonye.

The Suit, with number CV/2750/16, between David Aiyedogbon (Plaintiff) and Emeka Ugwuonye (Defendant) on defamation of character, before Justice Peter Kekemeke of Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court 14, Apo Abuja; also prays that the defendant be ordered to pay the cost of the suit.

The Plaintiff is also seeking an order of perpetual injunction restraining the Defendant, his Agents, Privies, Associates or whosoever called from making further defamatory publications against him and his family members. The matter is adjourned to Thursday, 18th May, 2017.

Sources also reveal that Mr. Aiyedogbons lawyer, Tony Ogbulafor may have also filed a personal suit against Mr. Ugwuonye for wrongly accusing him of giving a bribe (in an envelope) to a Police man to detain him.

Police sources also reveal that, while some persons have already been charged to Court (awaiting trial) for their roles in the disappearance of Charity Aiyedogbon, others that have questions to answer will also be charged soon, to explain their roles in the controversy.

Meanwhile, the suit purportedly filed by Chacha at the Federal High Court, Lokoja, wherein Barrister Nsikak Udoh represented her has been decided in favour of David Aiyedogbon.

One year after, Chachas case is getting more interesting. We await the explanation of those in possession of Chachas car and handsets on their roles, accomplices and her whereabouts.

While we wait patiently for the unfolding drama, the Police must realise that Nigerians and indeed the world are watching. They must address Nigerians now on the extent of their investigation.

Again, Police must expedite actions in charging suspects to court. Waiting endlessly on the matter does not help the course of justice.

One is still at a loss as to why the prime suspect in the matter, Jekwu is yet to be declared wanted; and why Charity Aiyedogbon has not been declared missing. The Police must clear the air now.

As the whereabouts of Charity Aiyedogbon remain unknown, I join millions of Nigerians to demand that Emeka Ugwuonye provides his overwhelming evidence regarding what happened to Chacha or get prosecuted for false information and criminal conspiracy.

Destiny Ugorji
An Accra district court has struck out the suit brought against construction firm, Engineers & Planners and its chief executive, Ibrahim Mahama, over non-payment of Social Security contributions of its staff.

The action follows the withdrawal of the case by lawyers of Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT).

SSNIT had hauled Mr. Mahama, a brother of former President John Dramani Mahama and three other directors of the company to court over GH1 million unpaid SSNIT contributions of staff of the company.

Others

The other directors are Kwadwo Aboagye-Attah, Director; Sulemana Ahmed Amidu, Director Executive and Sidney Audrey Steyn, Managing Director.

Mr. Mahama came recently under investigation by the Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO) for reportedly issuing 44 dud cheques to the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), making the country lose over GH10 million in revenue.

He has however, reportedly paid the full amount of GH12.5 million to the state.

Charges

In the latest case, it was the contention of the prosecutor, Leena Adomah Boakye, that the accused persons, between the periods of February to July 2015, June to August 2016 and October 2016, failed to pay to the Trust the Social Security contribution to the tune of GH668,754.75.

The four were facing an additional charge of failure to pay penalty of GH387,709.31 on the said contributions.

At the hearing of the case on Saturday, Mr. Ibrahim Mahama, who appeared in court with his usual entourage, including Alhaji Bature, editor of the Alhaji Newspaper as well as his lawyers, denied the charges.

Arguments

Nancy Amartefio, lawyer for the business mogul, said his client had paid the money in excess of GH2 million.

She stated that Mr. Mahama paid the amount before the first court date on April, 29, adding that she did not know why SSNIT was still continuing with the case.

Leena told the court that the accused person paid the debt after the writ of summons was served on them on April 13, 2017.

The prosecutor was emphatic that she also had instructions from her superiors to discontinue the prosecution of the matter.

This compelled the judge, Efua G. Sackey, to strike out the case as withdrawn.

Journalists Prevented

Meanwhile, journalists covering the case were prevented from taking notes in the court, although it's a practice which is allowed even at the Supreme Court.

A policeman at the beginning of the hearing walked to the reporters in the court ordering them to stop writing  an action which created a scene, drawing the attention of the judge to the controversy.

Having enquired from the over-zealous policeman, the judge surprisingly gave her blessing to the action.

The helpless journalists had no other option than to listen with rapt attention and later confer with one another in order to reconcile their notes.

Facts

As required by the National Pensions Act, 2008, Act 766, the employer is expected to pay Social Security on behalf of the employees at the end of every month.

Inspections conducted by officers of the Trust into the pay books of the accused person's establishment revealed that between the said period the unpaid Social Security contributions of GH668,754.75 attracted a penalty of GH387,709, bringing the total indebtedness of the accused persons to GH1,056,709.31.

By Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson

[email protected]
Standard Chartered Bank (Stanchart) has pledged its commitment to support government's development agenda.

This pledge was made when the newly appointed chief executive officer (CEO) of the bank, Mansa Nettey, and management paid a courtesy call on President Akufo-Addo at the Flagstaff House last Friday.

The management team was led by outgoing chief executive, Kweku Bedu-Addo.

Mr. Bedu-Addo informed the president about the end of his tenure as chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank Ghana Limited and introduced his successor to him (president).

When given the opportunity, Ms Mansa Nettey highlighted many projects and initiatives the bank continues to undertake to support national development.

She mentioned the bank's commitment to support the private sector, indicating, The private sector is an area we are looking to grow; we are looking at supporting them and we've carved out a very special unit mainly because of the importance of the SMEs.

As the first female to head the bank in its 120 years' history, the incoming CEO said she was particularly honoured for her appointment whiles commending President Akufo-Addo's decision to appoint women to fill key positions in his administration.

Mr Bedu-Addo, who was the first Ghanaian chief executive to head the bank said, I am excited to be handing over to another Ghanaian who also is the first woman to head the bank in its 120-year history in the country. It is a rare honour. With her extensive business experience and depth of client relationships, I am confident that the bank will continue to consistently deliver value to shareholders.

President Akufo-Addo congratulated Ms Mansa Nettey and wished her well.

He expressed confidence in her ability to lead the bank.

Whiles acknowledging the fact that banks were going through challenging times with increased regulation and scrutiny from regulators, he expressed confidence in Mansa's ability to lead the bank to greater heights.

At the meeting were Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and Deputy Chief of Staff, Francis Asenso Boakye.

The team from Stanchart included Henry Baye, Head of Retail Banking, Ghana and West Africa; Xorse Godzi, Head of Corporate and Institutional Banking; Kwabena Boateng, Head, Commercial Banking; Asiedua Addae, Head, Corporate Affairs & Brand and Marketing and Sam Peprah, Business Planning Manager to the CEO.

By Charles Takyi-Boadu, Presidential Correspondent
Renowned British-Ghanaian architect, David Adjaye, has been awarded with a Knighthood for his service to architecture.

The investiture ceremony was performed by Prince William.

David Adjaye said, I am truly honoured and humbled to receive a knighthood by Her Majesty the Queen for my contribution to architecture. I see this not as a personal celebration, but as a celebration of the vast potential  and responsibility  for architecture to effect positive social change that we as architects have to bring something positive to the world. I am proud to continue to work in service of this mission as a global cultural ambassador for the UK.

David Adjaye was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents. In 1996, he set up his first office, where his ingenious use of materials and his sculptural ability established him as an architect with an artist's sensibility and vision.

He reformed his studio as Adjaye Associates in 2000 and immediately won several prestigious commissions all around the world

Adjaye Associates now has offices in London and New York, with projects throughout the world. These include the Aishti Foundation shopping and cultural complex in Beirut (2015), the Alara concept store in Lagos (2014), and a new headquarters building for the International Finance Corporation in Dakar.

In September 2016, the architect celebrated his 50th birthday and completed the largest project in his career to date  the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History & Culture on Washington DC's National Mall.

David Adjaye has taught at the Royal College of Art, where he had previously studied, and at the Architectural Association School in London, and has held distinguished professorships at the universities of Pennsylvania, Yale and Princeton. He is currently the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard.

Credit: Ameyaw Debrah.


Reverend Sylvanus K. Tettey, the Principal of E.P College of Education (AMECO) in the Volta Region has been suspended for three months for allowing the schools bus to be used in carting fire wood.

Disciplinary action was taken against him by officials of the Ghana Education Service (GES) after images of the newly donated 60-seater was seen carting firewood.

According information gathered from the disciplinary body of the GES, the embattled Principal is supposed to be without salary within the period of his suspension.

Last week, images of the the Eicher Bus with registration number GV 158-16 carting firewood saw the Education Minister Dr Mathew Opoku-Premepeh seething in anger and demand that full-scale investigations be conducted into the incident.

Authorities of the school explained that they had to use the bus for the purpose of carting the wood because there had no truck for that purpose.

The explanation was described as flimsy by officials of the GES who observed that it was not enough ground for them to engage in such practice especially when the vehicle is not meant for that purpose.
First Lady Rebecca Akufo-Addo has paid glowing tribute to mothers across the country.

On International Mothers' Day which fell yesterday, she released a message saluting all mothers and mother figures for their roles.

First was her admission of the fact that motherhood is a tough job and that mothers never rest because a mother would move heaven and earth for her child.

She emphasised that mothers shape our lives, nurture our talents and inspire us to achieve greater heights, for which reason she said, Every mother deserves to have this special day.

As a mother, I am mindful of the struggles mothers go through, as we work tirelessly to instill discipline, protect and create opportunities for a better life for our children, she stated.

She, thus, used the opportunity to urge all mothers to keep up the good work even in the face of challenges, knowing that in due course we would all enjoy the fruit of our labour.

I also urge everyone to appreciate all the mothers in our lives because they are simply phenomenal, she said, insisting that whether this woman is your mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, foster or adoptive mother, please remember to say thank you today. These women deserve your appreciation.

The first lady used the occasion to remind all Ghanaians of the needless deaths of mothers and children at the Komfo Anokye Hospital, insisting that no woman should die giving life to another and no mother should lose a child she has carried for nine months.

Rebecca Akufo-Addo, therefore, urged Ghanaians to let us all resolve to contribute to 'save a child save a mother project' by contributing in cash or in kind to the special fund to build a new unit for the Komfo Anokye maternity block.

She has since made a passionate appeal for people to make donations or cheques into the 'save a child save a mother' account at Access Bank.

By Charles Takyi-Boadu
Kwaku Kyei Ofori

15.05.2017 LISTEN

The communications team of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the United States (US) has sent warm wishes to its Director of Communications, Paul Kwaku Kyei Ofori, on his appointment as Deputy Director General of the National Information Technology Agency (NITA).

The Kwaku Kyei Ofori Ofori holds an MA in Technology Management from Georgetown University, Washington DC and a BA in Networking Technology, with a minor in Business Administration from the Central Connecticut State University, New Britin in Connecticut.

Until his appointment, Kwaku Kyei Ofori was the Director of Communications NPP-USA, the representative of 'Let My Vote Count Alliance representative' (LMVCA) in the US, a member of the NPP side of transition team of 2016, technology entrepreneur, philanthropist, a consultant, founder/ CEO of O & O Technologies and OforiBowTies.

He is widely considered among his peers to be one of the most innovative young professionals of today.

At O&O Technologies, he and his team utilised advanced analytics in the resolution of business issues, whilst driving revenue growth through the development and delivery of tailored innovative support services.

Kwaku Kyei Ofori is also the founder of OforiBowTies, a handcrafted wooden bowtie line which has partnered with Barnes & Noble College to carry the wooden bow ties in major university books stores across the USA.

In addition to his leadership roles at his companies, Kwaku Kyei Ofori worked as a consultant at Accenture Federal Services, a global management consulting firm.

Aside this experience, Kwaku Kyei Ofori also worked as a technology server engineer at United Technologies and Aetna Life Insurance Corporation respectively, both Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Connecticut.

He also led a team of technical consultants at Vaskro International Corporation in New York and worked as part of a team of network administrators at his alma mater.

He is a regular speaker at career counselling workshops, capacity building and information sharing sessions to better equip the youth.

In a mentoring capacity, Kwaku Kyei Ofori provides advice and expertise to low-income earning sole proprietor businesses with basic technology needs.

By Charles Takyi-Boadu


The Western Regional Organiser of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and his deputy, have been suspended from the party for allegedly pocketing proceeds from the sale of party paraphernalia.

Japheth Baidoo and Thomas Asienau, according to a suspension letter cited by Adomonline.com is based on Chapter 8 of Article 46 Clause 1 of the partys constitution.

Thomas Asienau confirmed on Adom FMs Morning Show, Dwaso Nsem Monday that he was suspended for allegedly diverting items of the party including paraphernalia which was meant to be sold to party members in the region.

These items, he said included flags of the NDC which was said to be costing a whooping amount of 3.5 billion old cedis.

According to the letter communicating his suspension, he has sold the party flags and pocketed the amount.

I heard of my suspension and that of the regional organizer in the media, they are accusing us of diverting party items, selling party paraphernalia worth 3.5 billion and pocketing the amount, he said.

This accusation, he said shocked him and the organizer as they have never engaged in any such act.

Can the whole of Ghana import a flag worth 3.5 billion cedisI have been a regional deputy organize for three terms and there are times when I use my own resources to manufacture flags for the party., he said.

The Deputy Regional Organiser who insist he would still be contesting the position at the next delegates conference of the NDC said he has taken the matter to court.

We have taken the matter to court in Takoradiwe are even looking for the party executives to serve them the suit, hopefully we will serve them today, he said.
Johannesburg (AFP) - South Africa's highest court weighed Monday whether lawmakers can cast secret ballots in a no-confidence vote in President Jacob Zuma, who faces growing criticism within the ruling ANC.

Several hundred protesters marched to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg in the latest demonstrations against Zuma, who has been implicated in a series of corruption scandals.

Opposition parties have lobbied for a secret ballot and called for African National Congress (ANC) lawmakers to "vote with their conscience".

The ANC holds a large majority in parliament and Zuma has survived similar votes in the past, which have not been secret.

"ANC members of parliament will have to choose between what is best for themselves and what is best for South Africa," Mmusi Maimane, leader of the main opposition Democratic Alliance party, told protesters.

"They did not swear (their oath of office) to be faithful to Jacob Zuma, or to the ANC... They promised to be faithful to South Africa."

The case united DA protesters with marchers from the radical leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, with the court forecast to give its ruling later in the day.

"If parliament fails to remove Zuma, then the people in the 2019 election will make sure that the ANC is voted out," said EFF supporter Daniel Mninele, who travelled from Pretoria to rally outside the court.

The scheduled no-confidence debate has been postponed by parliamentary Speaker Baleka Mbete, who has said she has no powers to agree to a secret ballot.

Zuma's sacking of respected finance minister Pravin Gordhan in March fuelled public anger over years of government corruption scandals, record unemployment and slowing economic growth.

Legal battles

The president has recently faced unprecedented criticism from senior ANC figures, including from Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Zuma, who came to office in 2009, is due to step down as head of the ANC in December, and as national president ahead of the 2019 general election.

He is seen as favouring his ex-wife, former African Union chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to succeed him -- rather than Ramaphosa.

"Zuma's time is up," 22-year-old marcher Tsido Molefe told AFP. "We are going to march until he leaves, and today we are here to support the court case," she said.

On Monday morning, the Constitutional Court heard legal arguments in favour of the secret ballot.

The court last year found Zuma guilty of violating the constitution after he refused to repay taxpayers' money used to refurbish his private rural house.

Zuma has been accused of being in the sway of the wealthy Gupta business family, allegedly granting them influence over government appointments, contracts and state-owned businesses.

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.

The dismissal of Gordhan saw the Fitch ratings agency as well as Standard and Poor's cut South Africa's sovereign credit rating to junk status due to fears of political instability and growing corruption.

The ANC -- which Nelson Mandela led to power in the 1994 post-apartheid elections -- has lost popularity in recent years, taking just 55 percent of the vote in last year's local elections, its worst ever result.

Zuma retains widespread support from ANC members in some rural areas and has been able to rely on lawmakers to survive previous votes of no confidence.
Djerba (Tunisia) (AFP) - Tunisia plans to seek UNESCO World Heritage status for the island of Djerba, site of Africa's oldest synagogue and an annual Jewish pilgrimage, its culture minister said on Sunday.

Speaking on the last day of the pilgrimage to the Ghriba synagogue, Mohamed Zine El-Abidine said the island was important for its "cultural and religious uniqueness".

He said the application to add Djerba to the World Heritage List would highlight the rich religious heritage of the island, which is home to centuries-old mosques, churches and synagogues.

He did not give a specific time frame for the application.

A French Jewish woman carries a carton of eggs with her family's wishes written on them at the Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba on May 14, 2017

The cultural agency of the United Nations already lists eight sites in the North African country, including the old cities of Tunis and Sousse and the city of Carthage, once the capital of the Mediterranean-wide Phoenician empire.

Some 3,000 pilgrims attended this year's Jewish pilgrimage to the island, which ended Sunday under tight security following a string of jihadist attacks in Tunisia.

"There has been a real increase compared to the past two years," Tourism Minister Selma Elloumi said.

"It is an important sign for the start of the tourist season," she added.

The number of pilgrims visiting the synagogue has fallen sharply since a suicide bombing claimed by Al-Qaeda struck Ghriba just before the 2002 pilgrimage, killing 21 people.

Before then the event attracted as many as 8,000 pilgrims a year.

Believed to have been founded in 586 BC by Jews fleeing the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the Ghriba synagogue has long been a destination for pilgrims, especially for Jews of Tunisian descent.

Around 1,500 Jews live in Tunisia today, down from an estimated 100,000 before the country won independence from France in 1956.

Many of today's pilgrims came from Europe, the United States and Israel.

Prime Minister Youssef Chahed was in Ghriba on Sunday to deliver what he called "a double message".

"Firstly... Tunisia is a country several thousand years old, with a deep-rooted history of openness to all religions," he told AFP.

Secondly, he said, "security has come back to Tunisia".

French tourists horseback riding on the southern Tunisian resort island of Djerba, on May 13, 2017

Rocked by instability since the fall in 2011 of longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia was hit by a series of jihadist attacks in 2015 and 2016 that left dozens dead, including 59 tourists.

The country's key tourism sector, devastated by the attacks, has since registered a rise in visitor numbers.

According to Elloumi, there has been a 34 percent rise in tourist arrivals from Europe over the past year.
15.05.2017 LISTEN

The Ghana Revenue Authority organized its Ghana National Single Window (GNSW) Conference in Accra 9 and 10 May. In the opening session of the first day of the Conference, attended by over 500 participants, Mr. Alan Kyeremanten, Minister of Trade and Industry mentioned that Trade Facilitation is a cornerstone of the Government's agenda.

He lauded the inclusion of the Single Window (SW) in the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) and said it would help simplify trade processes and enhance the cooperation between Customs and other Border Agencies.

In a speech read out on his behalf Mr. Ofori-Atta, Minister for Finance urged the trading community to fully embrace the new transparency and compliance level developed through the introduction of the GNSW. Other keynote speakers were SG Kituyi of UNCTAD, Deputy DG Agah of WTO, Executive Chairman Banda of ICC Ghana, Customs Commissioner Crenstil and CEO ms. Mintah of Westblue Consulting. They all highlighted the importance of the GNSW programme in the context of implementing TFA.

During this day in panel sessions speakers focused on the strategic and technical aspects of GNSW Progress and its Achievements to date, GNSW in the Context of the WTO TFA and the Trade Development aspects of GNSW. On behalf of WCO Deputy Director Luc de Blieck highlighted WCOs tools and instruments to support a succesfull implementation of SW and of TFA in general.

Further contributions in the panel sessions were delivered by, among others, Ghana Customs, Ghana National Trade Facilitation Committee, Rwanda Revenue Authority, WTO, Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, Ghana Export Promotion Authority, Ghana Union of Traders Association and Ghana Investment Promotion.

All speakers concentrated on aspects of the TFA implementation in general and the SW requirements in particular. Among the aspects highlighted were the further development of the digital environment GNSW requires, the strengthening of Coordinated Border Management and Stakeholder Engagement.

The second day was a Key Stakeholder Workshop where the private sector was offered the opportunity to share with governement officials their experiences with and expectations for GNSW. This workshop was attended by over 100 business representatives.
Veteran journalist Abdul Kweku Baako says Gender minister Otiko Djaba 'may not survive' a ministerial reshuffle after she was 'severely reprimanded' by her party for misconduct.

While he insisted this is not a prediction, the Editor-In-Chief of the New Crusading Guide suggested the controversial politician is courting a sacking following an ugly public spat.

"I wouldn't be suprised if there is any reshuffle, Otiko's head may be axed...because I thought what she did was too embarassing" he said on Multi TV/ Joy FM news anaysis show Newsfile Saturday.

Otiko Djaba threw jabs at the NPP Northern regional chairman Bugri Naabu after he threw her out of region for organising an NPP meeting without his knowledge.

The two grabbed media headlines since Saturday until the NPP National Council stepped in to stamp some order in the party.

At a National Council meeting late last Wednesday night, the party said the two apart from a reprimand, having been asked to submit written apologies. Otiko, 55 years, and Bugri Naabu, in his 60's have also been bonded to be of good behaviour, the party says.

They have both apologised.

Kweku Baako believes the sanctions were soft. He observed that the kit-glove treatment suggests 'it is obvious, the president is giving her another chance'.

Former NDC MP George Loh whose party has called for Otiko Djaba's dismissal said ' I feel ashamed that she represents me as Gender, Children and Social Protection minister.

He said when the Minority raised questions about Otiko Djaba's temperament, pro-NPP elements praised her as being assertive.

George Loh wondered why the party should feel embarrassed by Otiko Djaba's 'assertive behaviour, he screamed political hypocrisy.

Watch video discussion on Otiko-Bugri public spat



Story by Ghana|myjoyonline.com|[email protected]
The President Nana Akufo Addo is expected in the Volta region later today on an official assignment.

The residents are excited about the visit and cannot wait to discuss with the president a number of key developmental issues they would the current administration to address.

Ahead of the visit, some residents in Ho have been speaking to Joy news about their expectations from the president. Notable amongst the issues raised is the setting up of factories in the region under the one district, one factory industrialisation policy which was key in the president's campaign in the 2016 elections.

Some also wants the road networks in the region to improved so that goods and foodstuffs can be transported easily, especially from the hinterlands.

We are expecting the president to fulfill his promises on the building of factories, [construction] of road networks so that foodstuffs from the villages can be brought to the big markets in the region  a resident said.

Some other residents also expressed worry over lack of potable water in some districts making it difficult for the people in those areas to cope with life.

According to them , some towns and villages share water with animals whilst others have to walk long distances just to look for water.

They also want the president to tell the people of the Volta region the projects started so far and those they have had to continue from the previous government.

We want the president to solve the water issues in some of the districts and also tell us the projects started by the government so far . We dont want more promises from the president  a resident told Joy news

The president is expected to join the staff and students of the Mafi Kumasi secondary technical school for their speech and price giving day.

He is also expected to pay a visit to the Volta regional Hospital, the Ho technical University and the University of Allied Sciences.

The president is also expected to have cocktail with heads of department/Regsec and the media and later Sunday he would worship with the Global Evangelical church, Fiave and round it up with a rally in Ho.

The President , Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo will use the opportunity to preach peace and security of the region and the country at large and also assure the people of the region of government's commitment to continue projects started by the previous g government in the region and other parts of the country.
President Nana Akufo-Addo in accordance with Article 144 (1) of the 1992 Constitution has in consultation with the Council of State, nominated Supreme Court judge Justice Sophia Akuffo as the next Chief Justice.

At a short ceremony Friday, he lauded her over two decades' legal career with the Supreme Court which he described as "extraordinary"

She takes over from c urrent Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Wood who is leaving office in June, after 10 years' service as the head of the third arm of government, the Judiciary.

"Her career has been extraordinary, and I pay warm tribute to her distinguished service to our nation, and wish her a well-earned retirement, even though her public service will not be over as her place on the Council of State awaits her," he said in appreciation of her service to the state.

President Akufo-Addo said he has no doubt that Justice Akuffo will be a worthy successor to Chief Justice Wood and uphold jealously, the independence of the Judiciary.

He said Justice Akuffo whom he has known for well over 40 years has impressed him "considerably with her hard work, capacity for detailed research, independence of mind and spirit, honesty and integrity, deep-seated respect for the rule of law, and her abiding belief in the sovereignty of Almighty God."

"I expect discipline, fairness, integrity and the continuing modernisation of judicial activities to be the hallmarks of her tenure as Chief Justice if she is so endorsed by the constitutional bodies."

Read the full speech below:

In three and a half weeks time, on 8th June this year to be precise, a remarkable chapter in Ghanas legal and judicial history will come to a close. On that day, Her Lordship the Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Wood, will step down from an office into retirement. The twelfth occupant of that office in independent Ghana, she is the first female to head the Judiciary, and its longest-serving leader, who will have been in office for three days short of ten years. Her career has been extraordinary, and I pay warm tribute to her distinguished service to our nation, and wish her a well-earned retirement, even though her public service will not be over as her place on the Council of State awaits her.

In order to ensure a smooth succession to the office and preserve the integrity of the judicial branch of government, I have decided to initiate the constitutional processes for the appointment of her successor, so as to preclude any undue vacuum in the office. I have, thus, today, sought, by letter, consultation with the Council of State, in accordance with Article 144 (1) of the Constitution of the Republic, in order to nominate for the approval of Parliament the appointment of Justice Sophia Akuffo, a Justice of the Supreme Court and a senior member of the Court, as the new Chief Justice of the Republic. If the constitutional processes conclude in a satisfactory manner, and I have every expectation that they will, she will be the thirteenth person to hold that important office of State.

I have known Justice Sophia Akuffo well, for over 40 years. Indeed, she was my first junior in practice, as barristers call their work. She impressed me considerably with her hard work, her capacity for detailed research, her independence of mind and spirit, her honesty and integrity, her deep-seated respect for the rule of law, and her abiding belief in the sovereignty of Almighty God. I believe these are the qualities which sustained her brilliant career as a lawyer that propelled her to the notice of the 1st President of the 4th Republic, His Excellency Jerry John Rawlings, who appointed her to the Supreme Court on November 30, 1995, some 22 years ago.

She has been one of the leading lights of the Court since her appointment, and her contribution to the Courts work and the growth of our nations jurisprudence has been extensive. She has enriched her judicial experience by serving with credit on continental judicial bodies such as the African Court on Human and Peoples Rights, where she ended up as President of the Court.

I have no doubt that Justice Akuffo will be a worthy successor to Chief Justice Wood and uphold jealously the independence of the Judiciary. I expect discipline, fairness, integrity and the continuing modernisation of judicial activities to be the hallmarks of her tenure as Chief Justice if she is so endorsed by the constitutional bodies. It is important for the development of our nation that we have a Judiciary that commands the respect of the nation by the quality of its justice delivery, as well as by the comportment of its judges.

We are all witnesses to the stormy winds that have buffeted the Judiciary in recent years and to the efforts Chief Justice Wood has been making to restore public confidence in the institution. I expect Justice Akuffo to continue and intensify that work. The Judiciary has the onerous responsibility of being the bulwark of the defence of the liberties and the rights of our people. It can only discharge that responsibility effectively if it has the unalloyed respect of the people.

We are determined to build a new Ghanaian civilisation, where the rule of law is not a slogan, but an operating principle for the development of our State, where the separation of powers is real and meaningful, where the liberties and rights of our people are fully protected, and where law and order provide a firm basis for our social and economic development, so that the dreams of prosperity that animated the great patriots, who are the founders of our nation, can find expression in our generation.

I will be a genuine and trusted partner of the Judiciary so that, together, the Executive and Judiciary can co-operate in a spirit of mutual respect to attain this goal for the benefit and welfare of our people. I am confident that, in Justice Sophia Akuffo, I will find a worthy collaborator in this noble endeavour. I commend her to the constitutional bodies, the Council of State and Parliament, for appointment as Chief Justice of Ghana.

Thank you. May God bless our homeland Ghana and make her great and strong.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Abubakar Ibrahim
[May 15, 2017] The Djibouti Data Center (DDC) and Hurricane Electric Expand Internet Connectivity and Enhance End User Experience in Africa

Hurricane Electric has strengthened its global network with new regional network connectivity in Africa by establishing a new point of presence (PoP) at the Djibouti Data Center (DDC), bolstering its ongoing commitment to the economic development of the region through the provision of improved IP connectivity and global network access. By joining the DDC ecosystem - including the Djibouti Internet Exchange (DjIX) - Hurricane Electric (News - Alert) is leveraging new capabilities to provide higher performance and low latency Internet connectivity across many of the world's fastest growing emerging markets. With the launch of the company's latest PoP in Djibouti, Hurricane Electric is further expanding access in east Africa to the company's IPv4 and IPv6 network through 100GE (100 Gigabit Ethernet), 10GE (10 Gigabit Ethernet) and GigE (1 Gigabit Ethernet) ports. "We are very excited about having Hurricane Electric join the DDC community, which is now a leading regional hub providing advanced services in Africa to our partners," said Anthony Voscarides, Chief Executive Officer of the DDC. "The DDC and DjIX ecosystem is well placed in east Africa to attract major Internet service providers and positions the hosting DDC ecosystem as a major Internet hub in Africa for the 'good of the Internet' and the rapidly growing Internet communities across all of Africa."



"We are delighted to partner with the DDC, which will further extend our global network reach into east Africa's growing telecommunications market," said, Mike Leber, President of Hurricane Electric. "Companies hosted at the DDC, can now utilize Hurricane Electric's extensive IPv4 and IPv6 network and as a result, will be able to experience increased throughput, reduced latency and improved reliability. Additionally, companies at the DjIX will gain additional peering capacity" In 2016, the DDC implemented the neutral, open, and independent Djibouti Internet Exchange (DjIX), which gives global and regional telcos, mobile network operators, ISPs, content, and CDN network service providers greater control over their Internet traffic flow to better serve the populations in east Africa. The DjIX leverages the core DDC ecosystem and its unique access to 11 international and regional fiber cable systems to provide a high speed, reliable and resilient IP exchange facility.

About the Djibouti Data Center (DDC) and the DjIX The Djibouti Data Center (DDC) is the first and only Tier 3 (News - Alert) carrier-neutral data center ecosystem in east Africa with direct access to all major international and regional fiber optic systems connecting Europe, the Middle East, and Asia markets with Africa - including upcoming AAE1 and SMW5. The DDC also operates the Djibouti Internet Exchange (DjIX), a neutral and independent IXP in Africa. The DjIX offers high speed, reliable, and resilient service. Both the DDC and DjIX are catalysts in east Africa that enable new applications and services that help to drive economic development and social well being in the region. Learn more about the DDC and the DjIX, please visit www.djiboutidatacenter.com About Hurricane Electric Fremont, California-based Hurricane Electric operates its own global IPv4 and IPv6 network and is considered the largest IPv6 backbone in the world as measured by number of networks connected. Within its global network, Hurricane Electric is connected to 155 major exchange points and exchanges traffic directly with more than 6,000 different networks. Employing a resilient fibre-optic topology, Hurricane Electric has no less than four redundant paths crossing North America, three separate paths between the U.S. and Europe, and rings in Europe and Asia. In addition to its vast global network, Hurricane Electric owns and operates two data centers in Fremont, California, including Fremont 2, its newest 208,000 square foot facility. Hurricane Electric offers IPv4 and IPv6 transit solutions over the same connection at speeds including 10 Gbps and 100 GbpsEthernet. For more information on Hurricane Electric, please visit http://he.net. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170515005525/en/

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Geneva (AFP) - The United Nations said Monday that $1.4 billion (1.3 billion euros) was needed this year alone to help the nearly two million people who have fled war and famine in South Sudan.

"The suffering of the South Sudanese people is just unimaginable," World Food Programme chief David Beasley said in a statement, adding that many are "close to the abyss".

South Sudan, the world's youngest nation, descended into civil war in December 2013, just two years after it split from the north.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed since then, with 1.8 million forced to flee the country, including about one million children, to seek refuge in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

Another two million have been displaced inside the country, but they are not covered by Monday's appeal.

The country has declared famine in some areas and has warned that a million people are on the brink of starvation.

WFP and the UN refugee agency launched a revised appeal, saying the $1.2 billion originally requested would not be enough.

Donors distracted

The UN said people were now fleeing South Sudan at a rate that far exceeded already pessimistic estimates.

"The number of people fleeing to Sudan in March surpassed the expected figure for the entire year," it said, with about 375,000 South Sudanese refugees now in the country.

Ethiopia is hosting the same number, while the situation in Uganda is even more dire, with nearly 900,000 refugees from South Sudan there.

Kenya counts about 97,000 South Sudanese refugees, DR Congo has 76,000 and the Central African Republic 2,200.

Aid agencies are struggling to secure the funds they need to help the refugees, making it difficult to provide food, water, shelter and health services.

"Our funding situation forced us to cut food rations for many refugees in Uganda," Beasley said, a situation he called "unacceptable".

"These are families like yours and mine, our brothers and sisters, and the world must help them now -- not later," he said.

Beasley, a long-standing member of the US Republican party who previously served as governor of South Carolina, was named WFP chief in March.

He said a major problem in raising money for emergencies like South Sudan was that donor nations were distracted by domestic politics.

"Everybody is talking about Trump, Trump Trump or Brexit, Brexit, Brexit... and people aren't receiving the normal information they receive on international crises...

"We've got to break through all of the smoke" and attract more attention to people on the brink, he told reporters in Geneva, urging donors to "step up their game even more".
Ho, May 15, GNA - Togbe Afede XIV, Agbogbomefia of Asogli and President of the National House of Chiefs says President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's commitment to the development agenda of the country was giving hope to the citizenry.

'Your commitment to stop galamsey, One District, One Factory policy, tour of the sub-region, planting for food and jobs and free Senior High education are exciting. We are happy these things are happening so early, giving us hope for the future. We have hope in you for the coming years,' he stated.

Togbe Afede made the statement when he hosted President Akufo-Addo in his house in Ho during the President's visit to the Region.

He urged the President Akufo-Addo to maintain the momentum and not to relent in the fight against galamsey because those involved were in the minority.

Togbe Afede commended the President for working towards the 24-hour opening of the Lome-Aflao border, saying, it would enhance economic activities between the Ghana and Togo and especially the Volta Region.

He said the Volta Region was ready to take advantage of government's One District, One Factory policy and stated the readiness of traditional rulers in the Region to support the initiative.

Togbe Afede reminded the President of government's promise to upgrade the Volta Regional Hospital into a teaching hospital, work on the Eastern Corridor road and a stadium for Ho.

President Akufo-Addo expressed gratitude to Togbe Afede for his interest in the development agenda of the country and the preparedness to support government initiatives.

He said government remained committed to developing all parts of the country and assured that all promises would be fulfilled.

President Akufo-Addo said the fight against galamsey was a fight for the future and that the 24-hour opening of the Lome-Aflao border was not 'a promise in the sky, it will be a reality soon.'

GNA

By A.B. Kafui Kanyi, GNA
Dormaa-Ahenkro(B/A), May 15, GNA - Mr Iddrissa Quattara, the Dormaa Central Municipal Chief Executive, on Monday commended Assembly members, party faithful, clergy, chief Imam and chiefs for the support given him for his endorsement as the new Municipal Chief Executive of the area.

He said the support was a "demonstration of the trust and confidence the good people of Dormaa and the Assembly in particular had reposed in him".

"This gesture is enough motivation to commit me, honorable members and all other stakeholders to the course of lifting out Municipality to another level in its development agenda. I am indeed humbled", he said.

Mr Quattara was delivering his victory speech after an election supervised by the Electoral Commission had been conducted.

He was overwhelmingly endorsed by the members after all 44 members had voted for him to receive two-thirds majority of the votes cast needed to confirm his nomination.

Mr Quattara said his overwhelming confirmation had signaled to the world that the Dormaa people were peace loving, as the area had consistently and historically approved and never rejected the President's nominee for the position of a District or Municipal Chief Executive.

He promised to eliminate all forms of discrimination against vulnerable groups "treating everyone equitably to ensure that development is inclusive".

The MCE entreated members to eschew unnecessary partisanship and forged together as a team to accomplish development agenda as a Municipality.

GNA

By Robert Tachie Menson, GNA
15.05.2017 LISTEN

Friends of the Press, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Konkomba Youth for NDC's attention has been drawn to the Nana/Bawumia government's indebtedness of Senior High School Feeding Grant arrears to the continuing students of the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions of Ghana for three terms.

While schools in the southern part of the country resumed on Thursday 4th May 2017 with teaching and learning ongoing, their counterparts in the Northern regions are languishing at home with despair due to the ineptitude of the NPP government. This avoidable situation is not just unfortunate but a bad testament of misapplication of public funds and gross incompetence of the Nana/Bawumia government. A situation carefully rehearsed and crafted to keep our young brothers and sisters at home.

Ladies and Gentlemen, a government touting itself with accolades of having the best pair of hands to drive Ghanaians to paradise should not be found in this quagmire of irresponsibility and total neglect for the fate of our young ones in school. With each passing day, the students are deprived of their constitutional rights with impunity whiles the government looks on without a clue of resolution.

Ladies and Gentlemen, our records show that the current government only attempted to defray two of the four terms arrears without recourse to the current 2016/2017 term tranches that will rally the students in school. This attempt is inconsistent with the NPP's 2016 campaign promises on feeding grants phenomenon in the erstwhile H.E John Dramani Mahama's administration and therefore amounts to failure on the part of Nana/Bawumia administration. The former President was highly chastised by our northern brothers and sisters in the NPP but sadly enough, they have reduced the scheme to ridicule with no reverence today.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in as much as recounting errors of the pass may not solve the problem of today, the citizens and for that matter our students must not be sacrificed on the table of political propaganda of the New Patriotic Party government.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the press, this failure and loss of focus by the NPP government raises eyebrows as to how effective the Nana/Bawumia administration will implement their flagship Free Senior High School program if they simply cannot pay the feeding grants of four out of the ten regions in Ghana. This is an issue of great concern since the said program shall include the feeding of both boarding and day students across the country.

Friends of the Press, the most intriguing and more worrying aspect of it is the failure of the NPP government to define a road map stating clearly and categorically a sustainable source of funding for this flagship free SHS program yet to be implemented.

As youth, we wish to remind the Nana/Bawumia administration that Governance is a serious business and therefore those who aspire to occupy such high seat must do so with all the sincerity, tact and finesse it deserves.

We again call on the NPP government to swiftly settle the remaining arrears to enable our brothers and sisters gain the needed concentration for their studies.

Lastly Ladies and Gentlemen we entreat the NPP government to equally define a more pragmatic and sustainable source of funding for the Free SHS program lest the policy is reduced to a recipe of academic disaster.

Thank you.

Long Live KKB Youth for NDC!!

Long Live Ghana!!

Mumuni Believer Likpalmor (President)

Tel: 0501062925

Njolonah Linus (Secretary)

Tel:0209883023

Tafu Joshua(PRO)

Tel: 0202746068
Libreville (AFP) - Ugandan troops deployed in eastern Central African Republic to fight Ugandan rebels have sexually abused local women and girls, Human Rights Watch reported Monday.

"Ugandan soldiers ... have sexually exploited at least 13 women and (three) girls since 2015, including at least one rape, and threatened some victims to remain silent," the rights watchdog said in its report.

HRW workers interviewed all 16 earlier this year in the southeastern town of Obo, which has since 2009 served as a base for Ugandan forces in an African Union Regional Task Force set up to destroy the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

One 15-year-old, given the name "Marie" to protect her identity, gave birth six months ago after being raped by a Ugandan soldier in fields near Obo airstrip, HRW said.

"Fifteen of the women and girls interviewed said they became pregnant, but in each case, the soldier who fathered the child left the country and has not provided any support," the report stated.

US special forces were fighting alongside the Ugandan troops until last month when a planned withdrawal began.

"Ugandan and African Union authorities should conduct proper investigations, punish those responsible, and make sure that the women and girls who were sexually abused or exploited get the services they need," said Lewis Mudge, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The report said more cases of sexual violence had been documented by the United Nations, whose investigators spoke to Obo women afraid to give details, and the BBC, whose report included a 12-year-old girl who gave birth.

The defence ministry in Kampala did not respond to the allegations, according to HRW.

The US command did not acknowledge the charges against Ugandan soldiers, Mudge said in an email. "They say the Ugandans are not engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse."

Ugandan soldiers may join the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSCA operating in CAR but HRW said the allegations of sexual abuse should be investigated first.

Some MINUSCA soldiers and French troops who were deployed in the strife-torn country between 2013 and 2016 have also been accused of exploiting women and children.

However, a Paris prosecutor in March called for the case against soldiers accused of raping children to be dropped.
15.05.2017 LISTEN

Being an activist has been necessitated by some telephone calls from friends across the globe, early this year, expressing support and urging caution for my personal safety because of the cowardly, malicious and libelous attacks against my establishing reputation and integrity as a student activist and non-partisan of the Republic of Ghana.

Actually, I pledge to speak about truth, peace and justice, and I wish to walk the talk of it. I will continue to let the "beauty of what I love be what I do.

Mr. Amadu Osumanu, Nazir Zuberu and Ahmed Lawal Pilato, I was so happy about your proficient, capability, fighting justice for students interest and advices you guys always give me when I am going wrong. As I always say, "my family are those who advices and straighten my path. As a matter of fact, there is no doubt that you are part of my family. Allah bless you all.

As Edwin Louis Cole said; "Attitudes determines the altitudes of life" and that make the caption of the article for the moment.

According to Business dictionary, Attitudes is defined as; A predisposition or a tendency to respond positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person, or situation. Attitude influences an individual's choice of action, and responses to challenges, incentives, and rewards (together called stimuli).

Way back in Senior High School, my Geography teacher Mr. Godfred Armah defines Altitude as the height of an object or point in relation to sea level or ground level.

He further explained to us as the angular elevation of a celestial object above the horizon. So how can our mentality as citizens determines the highest level of civilisation as a developing nation, intellect as a learned citizens and patriotic as a democratic government?

We cannot deceive ourselves when we voice to people that we love them when corruption is our hallmark, hypocrisy is our slogan, jealousy and discrimination is our daily test.

Citizens as we are should bare our nation to heart as EDWARD LYTTON said; "a good heart is better than all the heads in a world ".

Not just saying sake but our attitudes toward our fellow citizens, should rather convince each and everyone that we love our mother land.

WOODROW WILSON said " The sum of whole matter is this, that our civilisation cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually". Spiritually here, I believe is something that coordinates we all as citizens of this nation, working towards a common goal; making our homeland great and strong without any ill mind or jealousy

What perception do you have toward public service? We cannot reach the altitude of stable economy, from consumption to production economy, etc. when all citizens engage at the public sectors. Some ought to work privately and this is what we are seeing in Ghana now. But in fact attitudes some workers exhibit at this sectors are not developing Ghana at all, when self-discipline fail to exist and corruption being the order of the day. If corruption is healed, the true change we need can prevail.

Justice Yaw Apau defines corruption in his opinion as an antithesis of accountability. We behave as if we see it but appear not to see it because; indirectly, we seem to approve of it and indulge in it unknowingly. It appears to have assumed the posture of a norm. Where there is proper accountability, corruption finds it difficult to make a headway".

I agreed 100% to his lordship for this taught. Corruption is also at its peak in Ghana now. It has filled every tinny space in the country. We are talking about the effects, accusing one another, failing to be responsible for our little actions and deeds that all leads to this increase in corruption. We only see those in high offices as corrupt. Yet, we have forgotten the fact that, we sometimes add catalyst to our requests and applications without even a demand from these our leaders and those we tag as corrupt.

I always say, bribery and corruption is a double edged sword. So to every corrupt person, there is someone who bribes. Accusing one another will not curb corruption, but rather finding a practical antidote to it, which I believe begins from the simplest unit of our society.

On 7th December, 2016. Ghanaian acted for change and it is a change we are expecting to eradicate a state of perplexity.

As H.E. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo said during the inauguration day; "The change we have voted for has to start with each individual. I ask you to be responsible citizens, I ask you to be citizens, not spectators: citizens not subjects. It is time to define what being a Ghanaian ought to mean. Being a Ghanaian must mean you sign up to a definable code of conduct".

I wish to assure all Ghanaians who are still unequivocally and resolutely committed to the idea of Freedom, Justice, Probity and Accountability: enshrined in the preamble of the 1992 constitution that we should remain steadfast to those principles, ideals and commitments as citizens of freedom and Justice and peace be our focus.

Lets all remember the heroic men and women who laid down their lives in diverse ways that this country must live and serve the cause of the majority of the ordinary people whose sweat has consistently been exploited by the elite and elitist politicians in the name of service to the people.

The motive of all winners take all should be annulling in this current regime led by H.E. AKUFO ADDO. This issue has been rife after the inauguration, where party foot soldiers invade into some public offices to take the helm. "This foolishness must stop" as THE THIRDEYE states always in some of his pieces.

The idea of having a political party card before one can be employ should end this time. Our constitution permits all citizens to join any political party of his or her choice but it has become ill-will nowadays, that many especially youths seek for a political party in power membership card where they are not truly members with the intension to use that petite means to be employ.

H.E. NANA ADDO DANQUAH AKUFFO ADDO said after his victory at the end of the poll, "a president of Ghana is a president of every single Ghanaian, without discrimination, malice or ill will". Accordingly, we expect him to serve all Ghanaian without prejudice.

Lets all work intelligently, have our nation in blood as OTTO VON BISMARCK said "The great question of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood".

This is our motherland, our home, we must build it ourselves, being selfless not selfish, being objective and not subjective, having in mind, the beautiful plans of predecessors.

Lets keep up working to achieve our dreams, and our dreams can come true if we all have the courage to pursue them.

God bless our mother Ghana. Forward ever backwards never.

THE WRITER IS A STUDENT ACTIVIST.

GOODNUFF APPIAH LARBI

Email: [email protected]
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has left Ghana on Monday, May 15, 2017, to begin the second phase of his official working visits to the countries of the ECOWAS region.

Akufo-Addo's first stop is Senegal and will proceed to Guinea May 17 before heading to Cape Verde from May 19 to 21.

The visits will afford President Akufo-Addo the opportunity to introduce himself, as the new Ghanaian leader, formally to the governments and peoples of our neighbouring countries, explore and deepen our bilateral relations with them, and reiterate Ghana's full commitment to the ECOWAS project, a statement from the presidency said.

He will be accompanied by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway, and officials of the Presidency and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

President Akufo-Addo will return to Ghana from the second phase of his tour on Sunday, 21st May, 2017.

Vice President, Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, will act in his stead.

-Starrfmonline


Recent comments by the Northern Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, Daniel Bugri did not only disgrace his Party and put himself in a funny state, but has embolden the family of Gregory Afoko to press for his immediate release from prison.

The young man, Gregory Afoko, younger brother of suspended National Chairman of NPP, Paul Afoko was accused of killing the late Adams Mahama, former Upper East Regional Chairman of the NPP and for almost two years has been on remand.

The family of Gregory Afoko including his Paul Afoko have since the begining of the case insisted that, their brother was not responsible for the death of the late Adams Mahama and called on the Police to work extra to get the true killers of the late Party Chairman.

The family at a press conference at Sandema in the Builsa North district of the UpperEast Region on May 15, announced that Gregory Afoko was not the killer of the late Party Chairman, but the real killers of the late Adams Manama are walking around freely, enjoying the goodies that the NPPs victory has come with.

The family through a spokesperson, Robert Atong Asekabta, mentioned NPP Northerne Regional Chairman, Daniel Bugri Naabu, the Minister for Gender and Social Protection, Hon. Otiko Afisa Djaba, the Upper East Regional Minister, Rockson Bukari and the National Nasara Coordinator, Kamal-deen Abdallah as people who know about the killing of the late Adams Mahama, considering the recent comments by Mr. Naabu and past comments of the Nasara Coordinator after the death of late Adams Mahama.

The family has called on the Police invite these persons to assist in the investigation into who killed the late Mahama and if possible be arrested just as their brother Gregory Afoko was arrested and being trialed based on allegation.

So, just as Gregory Afoko was arrested on the allegation of someone, it is our humble plea to the Ghana Police Service that, Madam Otiko Djaba, Mr. Rockson Bukari and Bugri Naabu himself be arrested or invited by the Police to assist them in finding who actually killed Adams Mahama and for what purpose. The law must be seen to be applied equally to all manner of persons including Bugri, Bukari and Otiko.

We, again, want to state unequivocally that, the quest to find the true killers of the late Adams Mahama must be the concern of all peace-loving Ghanaians irrespective of their status in society.

According Gregory Afokos family, the investigation into the death of the late Party Chairman has not been the best, especially when they decided to hold Afoko and insisted that he killed the late Adams Mahama, despite his continuous denial and the Police inability to prove his involvement in the killing.

The Police have not widened the net of their investigations enough. For instance, some hours after the night Adams Mahama sadly passed on, the current National Nasara Co-ordinator of the NPP, one Kamal Deen Abdulai, was heard in the media saying that, he had called to inform the late Adams to take issues of his personal security seriously and that he should be prayerful.

They want him (Kamal-deen Abdallah) too to be invited and interrogated thoroughly to get to the bottom of the matter and the real killers arrested and punished.

We are interested in seeing our Gregory Afoko walk out of prison custody as a free man. We also believe that, the family of the late Adams Mahama want to see his true killers, so we should all join forces to help the security agencies find the true killers.

 We wish to appeal to Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), the Ghana Bar Association (GBA), the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the Ghana Chapter of Amnesty International as well as foreign missions in Ghana to add their voices to our call on the Police and government to have these three individuals arrested or invited to assist in finding the true killers of the late Adams Mahama.

FROM: EBO BRUCE-QUANSAH, Sandema
Violence in Kasai was sparked by the killing of tribal chief Kamwina Nsapu. By Laurence SAUBADU (AFP)

15.05.2017 LISTEN

Kinshasa (AFP) - Spiralling violence in DR Congo's central Kasai region has killed 390 tribal militia fighters and 124 government troops since the end of March, the army said Monday.

"DRC's armed forces have been waging operations to back up the police since end March in Kasai," the army's (FARDC) Brigadier General Leon-Richard Kasonga told a news conference.

The death toll from the fighting has amounted to 390 militia fighters, 39 FARDC troops and 85 police officers, according to Kasonga.

Violence in Kasai was sparked by the killing of tribal chief Kamwina Nsapu last August and has killed hundreds of people and displaced 1.27 million more.

The UN has accused the Kamwina Nsapu rebels of recruiting child soldiers while also criticising the country's government of using excessive force against the insurgents.

"Our troops respect international humanitarian law and human rights... we have acted professionally," said Kasonga on Monday, although he did not provide a civilian death toll.

In March, UN experts Michael Sharp, an American, and Zaida Catalan, a dual Swedish-Chilean national were abducted and shot dead while investigating reports of more than 40 mass graves in the region.

The UN security council last week called on Kinshasa to cooperate with the investigation on the deaths of the UN workers and step up efforts to implement a New Year's Eve agreement aimed at paving the way to elections.
A member of the legal team of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has written to the Attorney-General, Gloria Akuffo demanding information on governments $2.25 billion local bond issued last month.

Victor Adawudu in a four-page letter to the AG said his request was necessitated by the issues that have been raised by sections of Ghanaians following the issuing of the domestic bond.

He said he was exercising his right in Article 21(F) of the 1992 Constitution which states that, All persons shall have the right to information, subject to such qualifications and laws as are necessary in a democratic society.

A section of NDC MPs on Parliament's Appointments Committee

"...the Constitution of Ghana is predicated on the tripod of transparency, probity and accountability, and as a citizen of Ghana, I am concerned about the apparent opaqueness of the processes towards the issuance of the bonds," the letter read.

Related Article: BoG officials clear Finance Minister in controversial $2.25 bn bond issue

The private legal practitioner is requesting a litany of information:

(a) Please provide the date and the exact time all the Bond Transactions were opened or announced to investors to participate;

(b) How was each of the transactions communicated to investors?

(c) Before the official communication to investors of the opening of the Bonds did the Ministry or any of its officials directly or indirectly discuss any aspects of the Bonds with any of the investors?

(d) The date and time the Bond Transactions closed;

(e) The date and time the summary of issuance was made known to investors and the public.

(f) Please confirm the coupon prices for all the Bonds issued;

(g) Whether or not there was any roadshow towards the issuance of the Bonds;

(h) If yes, where did ti take place, and what was the duration of the roadshow.

Related Article: NDC MPs want Parliamentary probe into govt's 15-year bond

The NDC Minority has consistently raised questions about government's issuance of the $2.25 billion domestic bond, claiming the process was not transparent.

Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta

The Minority on April 3, 2017, called for a Parliamentary probe into the local bond issue, insisting it was shrouded in secrecy to the extent that Ghanaian investors were denied the opportunity to participate in the deal.

The NDC MPs said the bond was manipulated by Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta to favour one of the bond investors, Franklyn Templeton.

Related Article: $2.25 bond was open; not 'cooked' for anyone - Finance Ministry

The Finance Minister in a press statement said nothing untoward happened in the issuance of the bond, saying notice was served to both local and international financial markets on March 30. This, Mr Ofori-Atta said was done through email and same was published on the Ministry and Bank of Ghana's websites.

But speaking to Evans Mensah on Joy FM's Top Story Monday, Mr Adawudu said he is seeking the answers because the Minister's statement did not answer the core questions that continue to bother both local and foreign investors.

"When the press statement was released, there were conflicting accounts and to get the right information I am requesting for the data so that we will get the right answers," he said.

Mr Adawudu is asking "Whether there was Parliamentary Approval for the issuance of all the Bonds? If so, when?" and "Whether or not there was Cabinet Approval for the issuance of the Bonds. If so, when?"

NDC's Ashanti Regional Youth Organiser, Yaw Brogya Gyamfi

Meanwhile, Joy News has learnt the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) has written to the Finance Minister in reaction to a petition by the NDC's Ashanti Regional Youth Organiser, Yaw Brogya Gyamfi over the matter.

CHRAJ in the said letter has given Mr Ofori-Atta a 10-day period to forward his response to the Commission.

Mr Gyamfi told Joy News his checks at the Ministry reveal the Minister has responded to the letter. He said he is ready to testify if summoned by CHRAJ.

"There are more emerging issues...I have got a lot of information especially about the man [Franklyn Templeton] involved," he said.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Austin Brakopowers | Instagram: @Realbrakopowers
[May 15, 2017] WTIA and Seattle CityClub Jointly Present FullConTech

SEATTLE, May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), the state's unifying voice for the tech community, is hosting its FullConTech  conference and workshop in partnership with Seattle CityClub. Now in its third year, FullConTech connects community leaders across business, education, and government sectors under this year's theme of Civic Collaboration on Monday, May 22 at Seattle City Hall. FullConTech inspires citizens to get involved and combine each other's skills to solve problems and create new, more effective action plans. This begins with a deeper understanding of the city's civic challenges to discover better ways to make real progress on opportunities. At this year's event, the Seattle CityClub will unveil its Seattle Civic Health Index, which compiles research on the Pacific Northwest region and analyzes how it compares to other top tech hubs. The research outlines the overall civic health of Seattle after taking a closer look into the strengths and weaknesses, changes over time and dmographic disparities.



"The city of Seattle is rich in talent and expertise. It is essential we leverage these strengths to create a better community for all who live and work here," said Michael Schutzler, CEO of WTIA. "Our collaboration workshop is a powerful experience. With open minds well informed by facts, we can help each other solve problems in ways we never thought possible." "Seattle CityClub's Civic Health Index provides context for our region's civic strengths and needs and by partnering with the WTIA, we are able to leverage the connections, skills, and means for the tech sector to work on civic issues successfully," said Diane Douglas, executive director of Seattle CityClub.

The half-day conference will consist of TED-style Flash Talks with executives from Zillow and Graduate Tacoma, panel discussions, breakout sessions and networking opportunities. The keynote will be given by Nigel Jacob, Co-founder of the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. Attendees will also participate in a series of interactive discussions working to address some of the issue areas outlined in the Civic Health Index. WTIA FullConTech Conference Date: Monday, May 22, 2017

Time: 7:30am  1:30pm

 Location: Seattle City Hall, 601 5th Ave (Cherry St and 5th) Seattle, WA 98104

City Hall, 601 5th Ave (Cherry St and 5th) Seattle, WA 98104 Follow the Conference on Twitter: #FullConTech For more information, visit: http://www.washingtontechnology.org/fullcontech/. To register to attend and be a part of the civic collaboration, visit: http://www.washingtontechnology.org/fullcontech/register/. About Seattle CityClub

Seattle CityClub is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization improving the civic health of the Puget Sound region by informing residents, engaging community leaders and providing programs that bridge politics, professions, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. About the WTIA

The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) is a non-profit trade group. The primary mission of the WTIA is helping Washington residents gain access to high-wage tech-industry jobs. The WTIA acts as an independent, unifying voice to motivate industry, education and government peers to collaborate effectively and also uses group-buying power to help tech companies grow profitably. The WTIA group includes the 501c6 WTIA Member Trade Association, the 501c3 WTIA Workforce Institute, the 501c9 WTIA Voluntary Employees' Beneficiaries Association, and the for-profit company WTIA HR Benefits, Inc. Apprenti is a program operated by the WTIA Workforce Institute. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wtia-and-seattle-cityclub-jointly-present-fullcontech-300457335.html SOURCE Washington Technology Industry Association

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Accra, May 15, GNA - Ghana is to host the fourth Annual Conference of the African Federation of Institutes of Internal Auditors (AFIIA), the regional body of the Global Institute of Internal Auditors in Africa, to deliberate on risk management and corporate governance.

The four-day conference being held in collaboration with The Institute of Internal Auditors Ghana (IIA-Ghana) will commence on Tuesday May 16, 2017 with the 2017 Board, Chief Executive Officers & CAE Governance Workshop on the theme: 'Enhancing Governance Effectiveness with Insightful Internal Audit.'

The workshop is designed for internationally acclaimed corporate governance professionals, to afford them an opportunity to share ideas with participants on corporate governance effectiveness, strategies for enhancing oversight responsibility and bridging the gap of understanding between internal auditors, the Board and Management.

The workshop is also meant to further equip the Board, Chief Executive Officers and Audit Committee members to perform their oversight responsibilities effectively.

Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the African Leaders Academy, Mr Parity Twinomujuni, the Chairman AFIIA, said the conference would be used to boost capacity of professionals on risk management processes, control processes, and governance processes to help the organisations to achieve their goals.

'One of the major things is to build the capacity and we are building the capacity of the leaders of the Institute, board and Chief Executive Officers as well as the capacity of the individual internal auditors,' he said.

Mr Twinomujuni said in doing so the conference tried to bring concepts and models that were globally recognised and things that had been done elsewhere to the attention of the internal auditors and how they could be adapted to deal with governance problems.

Besides, the sharing of rich experiences among practitioners, it would also help to change the landscape of governance.

He said challenges confronting the internal auditors include resource wastage, corruption, and the experiences of the internal auditors themselves having the confidence to say no to some practices and be able to report them.

Mr Richard Chambers, President and CEO IIA Global, said the conference would look at what it takes to be a successful internal auditor in the 21st century and focusing on risk in business operations, technology, among others which organisations face.

He said the Global Institute was working to provide members worldwide resources that would allow them to identify where risks were for fraud and corruption, so that they could be reported to the appropriate authorities.

The main conference, which comes off from 17-19 May, 2017 would be opened by the Speaker of Parliament Professor Aaron Mike Ocquaye on the theme:

'Insight to Foresight: The New Imperative for Internal Audit and Governance.'

AFIIA, among others, seeks to create opportunities for networking, sharing of knowledge and expertise among affiliate institutes and members, and to also create relationships with stakeholders and other bodies to improve governance.

Over 500 delegates are attending this year's conference.

GNA
Bolgatanga, May 15, GNA - Two persons have been confirmed dead, while seven others who are in critical condition are receiving treatment at the Bolgatanga Regional Hospital in the Upper East Region, following a chieftaincy dispute on Saturday night.

Sources at the Bolgatanga Regional Hospital said the seven, who are in critical condition, are responding to treatment.

It is not clear exactly what might have caused the clash but reports say confusion broke out during a funeral where representatives of the two royal families were present.

The resultant violent clashes also led to two houses being set on fire.

The sporadic gun shots; machete wielding young men prowling around; and the pelting of stones frightened residence of the Atulbabisi suburb who had to abandon their homes to seek refuge with friends and relatives at other suburbs of Bolgatanga.

It took the Ghana National Fire Service several hours to quench the fire engulfing the two houses, but several properties including motor bikes belonging to both factions were destroyed.

When the Ghana News Agency contacted Superintendent, Samuel Punobyin, the Bolgatanga Municipal Police Commander, he said so far no arrest has been made but the command has intensified its investigations to ascertain the cause of the clash.

The chieftaincy dispute which is still pending in court is between the two royal families of Bolgatanga- Naba Raymond Alafia Abilba II, who was enskinned by the traditional chief makers; and Naba Joseph Abeka Nonge-Buuri, enskinned by the Nayiri, Paramount Chief of the Manpurugu traditional area.

Meanwhile, calm has returned to the area as there is heavy military and police patrols in the area.

GNA

By Samuel Akapule, GNA
BouakA (Ivory Coast) (AFP) - Heavy gunfire rang out Monday in Ivory Coast's two biggest cities as a four-day mutiny by disgruntled soldiers spread nationwide but the government claimed a deal to end the crisis had been reached.

Banks, offices and department stores closed in the heart of the economic capital, Abidjan, as shots were fired in San Pedro, the second biggest port in the world's top cocoa-producing nation.

Border posts closed, snarling road traffic to Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, while the west African nation's second biggest city, Bouake, was under the control of mutinous soldiers.

The mutiny is the latest in a series of armed protests since January, with troops angered by a wages dispute, leaving them to demand President Alassane Ouattara's government pay up.

"This is not a coup. We want our bonuses. The president signed a paper saying he agreed with our bonuses. When he pays up, we'll go home," said a spokesman for troops at Bouake barracks, the centre of the latest protest.

"We'll fight to the end. We won't lay down arms," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity from the city where the protest movement began earlier this year.

"8,500 of us brought Ouattara to power, we don't want him to leave but he's got to keep his word. It's that simple," he added as a group of soldiers, some wearing masks, let off shots.

'Return to your barracks'

However Defence Minister Alain-Richard Donwahi late Monday said "an agreement has been found" with the mutineers, though he did not give any details.

"We consequently call upon all soldiers to clear the entry points into cities and return to their barracks," he said on national television.

Soldiers of the Republican Guard stand in the street going to the Akouedo's military camp, in Abidjan, on May 15, 2017

Heavily-armed rebel troops controlled exits and entrances to Bouake, where residents appeared to be largely staying indoors.

Ouattara took office in 2011 after months of deadly election violence in which more than 8,000 rebels supported him against troops backing ex-head-of-state Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to concede defeat at the ballot box.

Many of the rebels subsequently joined the regular army, which currently numbers some 22,000 troops.

Early on Monday, heavy gunfire was heard at two military camps in Akouedo in the east of Abidjan, which together form the country's largest military barracks, a resident living nearby said.

Shots were also heard from Gallieni camp in the city centre.

Sustained gunfire rang out in Bouake, where one person died on Sunday from bullet wounds.

The situation was also tense in Man in the west and Bondoukou and Daloa in the centre of the country, where sporadic shooting could be heard.

The African Development Bank advised its employees in Abidjan to stay at home, warning that the security situation remained unclear.

Falling cocoa prices

Under a deal negotiated with the government in January following the initial protest, the ex-rebels were to be paid bonuses of 12 million CFA francs (18,000 euros) each.

They were given a partial payment of five million francs with the remainder to be paid starting this month, according to sources among the protesting soldiers.

But the government has struggled to pay the promised money.

Bouake served as the rebel headquarters following a failed coup in 2002 which split Ivory Coast in half and led to years of unrest.

The former star French colony has since been slowly regaining its credentials as a West African powerhouse and a haven of peace and prosperity.

But falling cocoa prices have hobbled the government's finances.

The current round of trouble began late Thursday when a soldier presented as a spokesman for the former rebels said they wished to apologise to Ouattara for the January mutiny and were renouncing their demand for huge payouts.

But the 'apology', which was delivered in a televised ceremony, was viewed with scepticism by many of the mutinous soldiers.

Last year, the government unveiled a plan to modernise the military, part of which would involve the departure of several thousand men, particularly ex-rebels, who will not be replaced.
When someone is under pressure, they tend to make foolish mistakes. This applies to businesses and governments, too.

In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina ripped through multiple US states, the US government made some costly errors.

Below, Mark Ford outlines what those errors were, and how you can avoid them in your own business dealings.

What Hurricane Katrina Can Teach You About Giving Vendors Your Business

By Mark Ford

Over a decade ago, after Hurricane Katrina, the US government  under pressure to respond quickly  awarded two enormous contracts for temporary housing to two giant businesses: Fluor Corp. and Bechtel National, Inc.

Both projects proved hugely costly and ineffective.

In retrospect, its easy to see that the people affected would have been better off if the government had taken a bit more time. Responding as it did, the government violated two very basic rules of business:

Dont award a contract without at least one other competitive bid. Dont agree to cost-plus pricing (whereby the selling price is determined by adding a specific dollar amount mark-up to a products unit cost).

One can understand why a novice would make the first mistake. You are eager to get the business going and dont want to delay progress by reviewing bids. You know the company  either by reputation or from prior experience  so you assume you can trust it to do a good job at a fair price. So you opt, in effect, for one-stop shopping.

Ive done it. And Ive seen colleagues and employees do it. And not just once, but over and over again.

Theres a reason it recurs so frequently; buying right is tough and time-consuming. One is always tempted to make the faster, easier decision.

But we should resist the urge. Keep in mind: A vendor that knows its getting the contract, however well intentioned, will naturally take less time in studying the project before bidding on it.

That lack of early analysis leads not only to sloppier pricing, but also less creative approaches to solving problems.

And cost-plus pricing means that mistakes will be paid for by the customer (in the case above, the US government) and not the vendor. Again, that means less attention is paid to the process.

If you or someone who works for you makes this mistake, understand it. But dont allow it to continue or it surely will.

Make it a protocol to get competitive bids for all significant new work and double-check pricing on all long-term relationships. And dont ever agree to cost-plus.

*****

Thanks, Mark. This story goes to show how anyone  even a well-oiled machine like the US government  can violate basic rules of business if theyre under pressure.

Take heed!

Regards,

Michelle Hammond,

Director, Wealth Builders Club Australia

Editors Note: Mark has spent more than three decades dispensing wisdom like thisand now hes compiled it into the most comprehensive wealth-building program in existence

Its called the Wealth Builders Club. It includes everything from extra income blueprints (which have the potential to generate thousands of dollars per month) to investment strategies outside the stock market, plus several of Marks bestselling books. Click here to learn more.

From the Port Phillip Publishing Library

Special Report: Vern Gowdies Crash Protection Portfolio: Vern has written a new book I believe everyone with money in the stock market should read ASAP. This week, we are mailing hard copies to any eligible reader who requests one. All you need is a valid Australian postal address.

As Vern demonstrates in the book, Australia may be staring down a market crash that could wipe out all the paper wealth created since the GFC. When this market does explode, Vern believes investors are going to see decades of gains blown away in a very short space of time.

If you cannot afford to see your wealth shrink by possibly two-thirds in value, you need to prepare for that potential snap NOW.

To claim your copy, click here.

Money Morning: Why These Traders Are In An Enviable Position

Money Morning: Could Cryptocurrencies be the Ultimate Tax Haven?
Jamestown, CA  Among the Mother Lodes brimming reservoirs Lake Tulloch sits ready for recreaters as news buzzes of more public access in the wings.

While the primary public access point remains on the south shore, the reservoirs owners, the Tri-Dam Project, are signaling plans to provide north shore access from OByrnes Ferry Road near the Lake Tulloch bridge.

We are working on developing a public access point at that site, explains Tri-Dam spokesperson and license compliance coordinator Susan Larson.

Possible Concept Plan Submission In July

Catching Clarke Broadcasting up on the progress of the Tri-Dam partners efforts, she confides, We have already done consultation with [Tuolumne and Calaveras] counties and other required state and federal agencies and now will probably sometime in July be making a formal application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and working on obtaining all the approvals that we need from FERC to move forward.

Sharing what the public may want to know about the recreation season ahead, Larson effuses, There is plenty of water in Tullochthe public should feel very comfortable accessing the reservoir at the South Shore Campground and Marina and know that the Tri-Dam Project is actively working to develop a public-use day-access area on the north shore. That property is a great spot for people to put a kayak or a canoe in the water near the bridge and five-miles-per-hour zone, where they will immediately be upriver.

Locals may recall that the parcel was formerly owned by the late Merle Holman, who operated a small marina there. His heirs eventually sold the property to Tri-Dam after he previously entered into but then subsequently pulled the purchase agreement with them out of escrow.

FERC Approval Stamp Required

Tri-Dams concept plan offers two options (which may be viewed within the slideshow link in the image box). In our application we will explain how we believe it will provide public access to the reservoir and [FERC} will go through their process, Larson says.

With regard to timing she adds, We will move forward as rapidly as we can. But until we get through the federal approval process, it is hard to anticipate exactly when the project will be able to get underway, although the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors issued a letter of support.

Continuing, she states, The anticipation is that the site will include a parking area, picnic area and a restroomprobably a fishing pier and car-top boat launching spot for canoes and kayaks. Parking and land use, as she points out, are long-time issues in that area, as people continue to illegally park near the bridge.

Ongoing Public Access Issues

Too, she says, Along the rocks on both sides of the bridge are privately owned properties and people are not supposed to walk on the bridge. Larson dubs what looks to be a trail access on the Tuolumne County side of the bridge a fake public trailhead because the land there is not public. So those using it are technically trespassing.

There is a difference between true public access, that being an access point to the reservoir that is truly owned or operated by a public entityand that would [solely, at this point] be the Lake Tulloch South Shore Campground and Marina, Larson states. The land there, actually owned by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, is on a long-term lease to Tuolumne County, which has a concessionaires agreement with operator John Stivers.

Larson maintains that the South Shore Marina, whose address is 14448 Tulloch Road, Jamestown, will remain the primary access area. The ramp there was built with public funds from the California Department of Boating and Waterways and later expanded to provide six launching lanes. There is no fee to launch although the operator is allowed to charge a nominal parking fee.

Tight Quarters At Lake Tulloch Place

Seekers of north shore access for at least the time being must continue to do so through private means, such as the limited access provided for boat launches at Drifters Marina, located at 6603 Lake Tulloch Place, which is not only adjacent to but shares the same cul-de-sac as entrances to the Calypso Bay and Conner Estates subdivisions. According to its website, last years first-come, first-serve charge to use the one-lane launch ramp was $30 with harbor fees costing extra.

Interestingly enough, Tri-Dam holds ownership of the vacant, 2.7 acre parcel located adjacent to Drifters, having acquired it after learning about its availability through FERC in the interim when it seemed that it would not be possible to lock down the sales agreement for the OByrnes site.

Over the course of time the property, which includes a narrow easement controlled by Calaveras County for decades, has been used by marina patrons and other members of the public as a de facto trailer parking area. Since the property remains unimproved, and located on a steep grade, it presents safety issues. Larson recounts that Tri-Dam had at one point installed a gate. However, in recent weeks it was removed at the request of county officials who wanted the public to be able to access the easement.

Moving Forward Plans

Although Larson says that Tri-Dam had earlier prepared a concept public day-access plan for its Calypso property it decided to proceed with those to develop the OByrnes property due to its proximity to a main road and former use as a marina area.

Asked if the Tri-Dam board might be open to a future possibility of working with the county on developing the other parcel Larson says, if the county is interested, it would certainly be a discussion-worthy topic.

For details on public access from the south shore, click here. For more on north shore access, click here.
President Donald Trump View Photos

President Trump was Mondays KVML Newsmaker of the Day. Here are his words:

My fellow Americans,

Confidence in the American economy has reached levels not seen in many, many years. Unemployment fell to its lowest level in nearly ten years last month, and we created 211,000 new jobs.

Our economic progress is especially good news for the millions of young Americans who, at this time of the year, are putting on a cap and gown and receiving a diploma, certificate, or commission. So important, and we are so proud of them.

This weekend, I am delighted to be participating first hand in the excitement by joining the students and faculty at Liberty University to celebrate the success of their graduates. I was invited to make the commencement address at West Point, but I will be away at the G7  and I look forward to that  and will be at West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy.

Come to think about it, a few days later, I will actually travel to New London, Connecticut, to speak to the graduating cadets of the United States Coast Guard Academy about their new roles serving our country. So well be with them very shortly.

To young Americans at both schools, I will be bringing a message of hope and optimism about our nations bright future. That is a message that I want to extend to all young Americans today, especially those who are graduating this year and entering the labor force.

We are also celebrating all of the Americans who learn the skills and trades that generations of workers have used to build, shape, and supply this nation. The people who construct, repair, and create with their own two hands are the people who make this nation run. And lots of those people voted for me. Thats also why, in my Administration, I am so deeply committed to technical and vocational education.

I want you to know that my administration is working every single day to create new opportunities and to reverse years of stagnant growth, falling wages, and disappearing jobs. We are ending the sellout of American workersand lifting the burdens on American industry, manufacturing, and businesses.

We are rolling back the job-killing regulations that make it harder for companies to grow and hire in America. At the same time, we are unleashing American energy development to create thousands of new jobs on our soil and just off our shores.

On trade, we have also taken historic action to protect American industry and bring back the kinds of high-paying jobs that can support a middle class family  and in fact, most families.

As a vote of confidence in these policies, business optimism is soaring and employment is rising. These are great signs for Americas future  the future that our new graduates will play with such a critical role in shaping our world and our country.

I want every young citizen  regardless of education or geography  to be able to live out their American Dreams.

So to all of Americas graduates, congratulations. And to all of Americas youth: we are here to help create the jobs and future you deserve.

The brightest days are ahead of you. And I just look forward to seeing you at the Coast Guard Academy, and at Liberty University.

Thank you. God Bless You. And God Bless America.
Sacramento, CA  Governor Jerry Brown has sent a letter to President Donald Trump requesting that the environmental review for the high speed rail project be expedited.

The letter specifically asks President Trump to transfer final approval of many environmental reviews to the states rail authority. The Associated Press reports that the federal environmental review process is behind schedule on the $64-billion project and it faces an uncertain financial future.

The request comes as the Governor and the President have recently been at odds on a variety of issues, ranging from immigration to climate change. The Governors revised May budget proposal includes an additional $6-million to the California Attorney Generals Office related to anticipate litigation involving actions of the federal government.
Naval officers are one of the most respected people in any a country. Navy jobs also attract a very respectable salary. So, it is not surprising that many young Nigerians want to join the Nigerian Navy. So, if you are one of those looking forward to a Navy career, these are the basic things you need to know about the Nigerian Navy recruitment, ranks and the Navy pay scale.

The Nigerian Navy is one of three branches of the Nigerian Armed Forces. It is one of the largest Navies in Africa. It is made up of thousands of servicemen and women including the Coast Guards. The Nigerian Navy has a ranking system different from Nigerian Army or Nigerian Air Force. Also, the Nigerian Navy officer salary is based on a different scale from other branches of the Nigeria Armed Forces.

The Nigerian Navy Ranks

For the Nigerian Navy recruitment, induction into the navy is divided into two groups: the non-commissioned and commissioned officers. Non-commissioned officers are enlisted members of the Nigerian Navy. To become a non-commission officer you dont need to have a higher or university degree. They are only involved in the coordination and physical aspect of military strategies. Commissioned officers are more involved in decision-making and leadership in the Nigeria Navy. For them, entry requirements include a higher or university degree.

Note that commissioned officers hold higher ranks, are more respected and earn more than non-commissioned officers. Furthermore, all non-commissioned officers are subjected to the command of commissioned officers.

Ranks for Non-commissioned Navy officer

From the highest-ranking officer to the lowest.

- Warrant Chief Petty Officer;

- Chief Petty Officer;

- Petty Officer;

- Leading Rating;

- Able Rating;

- Ordinary Rating;

- Trainee.

Ranks for Commissioned Navy officer

From the highest-ranking officer to the lowest.

- Admiral of the Fleet;

- Admiral;

- Vice-Admiral;

- Commodore;

- Captain;

- Commander;

- Lieutenant Commander;

- Lieutenant;

- Sub-Lieutenant;

- Acting Sub-Lieutenant;

- Mid-Shipman.

How much does the Navy pay?

A Nigerian Navy officer salary is based on his/her rank. The information below does not contain the Navy pay scale of all ranking officers in the Nigerian Navy. We were only able to get information on the salaries of the high-ranking commissioned officers.

Annual salary of high-ranking commissioned officers

- Admiral in the Nigerian Navy  16,303,140;

- Rear-Admiral earns 12,038,945;

- Rear-Admiral earns 12,038,945

- Commodore earns 7,385,856;

- Captain earns 3,715,859;

- Commander earns 3,380,086.

Dreaming about the white decorated uniform of the Navy officer, high social position, and respectable salary? Join the Nigerian Navy and build a perfect career.

Watch how the Nigerian Navy rescues hijacked ship.

Source: Legit.ng
[May 15, 2017] Diverse Computing, Inc. Announces New Project with the Oregon State Police for the Development and Operation of Their New Law Enforcement Data System

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., May 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Diverse Computing, Inc. (DCI), a national leader in criminal justice software and FBI-compliance solutions, was awarded a contract by the Oregon State Police (OSP) for the development, implementation, and operation of the new Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS) 20/20. LEDS 20/20 is designed to provide criminal justice professionals such as law enforcement agencies, courts, and correctional institutions with information about individuals with whom they have contact or interest. For example, LEDS 20/20 will inform a police officer that a violator has a criminal history or is wanted on a warrant for his/her arrest. In addition, the system will support authorized non-criminal justice agencies with access to critical information that they use for making determinations in situations such as employment and interaction with vulnerable populations. LEDS 20/20 will replace OSP's legacy criminal justice system, CRIMEvue. OSP Program Manager for the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division, Mathew Oeder, said of the partnership, "Since 1931, the Oregon State Police has been committed to our mission of protecting people, property, and natural resources with a diverse and dedicated workforce. Throughout our history, this mission has driven us to leverage and develop new and available technology to improve public safety. We are eager to work side by side with Diverse Computing to implement the new LEDS 20/20 system and to leverage a state-of-the-art approach of sharing information throughout the criminal justice and non-criminal justice communities. The outcome we anticipate is an increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of law enforcement officers, criminal justice professionals, and non-criminal justice professionals, which will result in improved safety for the officers, citizens, and visitors of the state of Oregon." When complete, LEDS 20/20 will utilize DCI's flagship product, a next generation message switch called eAgent FUSE, at the core of the solution. In addition, DCI will be implementing their eAgent Computerized Criminal History (CCH) and eAgent Hot Files which will be customized and configured to meet the State of Oregon's specific business requirements. Users of the LEDS 20/20 system will be able to take advantage of DCI's state-of-the-art user interface called eAgent 2.0 to access state and federal systems and databases. In addition, DCI will design custom user interfaces for other LEDS 20/20 components such as the Computerized Criminal History (CCH), Firearms Instant Check, and Applicant Background Check.



eAgent 2.0 is a browser-based, zero-footprint National Crime Information System (NCIC) access solution that will run on any device including mobile data computers, desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones. The "zero-footprint" design means the program runs in a browser and does not require installation on the device. Once implemented, Oregon's criminal justice, law enforcement, and non-criminal justice communities will see a vast improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of information sharing while fulfilling their mission of protecting the public. Diverse Computing looks forward to working with the State of Oregon on this matter.

DCI Business Consultant, Jamie Blakley, emphasized, "DCI is excited to come alongside the Oregon State Police, and to become a stakeholder in their public safety mission. We appreciate the opportunity to share our state-of-the-art eAgent software suite with one of the nation's premier law enforcement agencies. OSP's dedication to their mission as illustrated by leveraging technology to empower criminal justice professionals serves as a model for others. DCI is committed to the ongoing relationship with OSP and to implementing a solution that will securely deliver critical decision-making information to law enforcement, criminal justice, and non-criminal justice agencies." Diverse Computing, Inc. is a specialty software and consulting company that develops NCIC/Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) end-user access and message switch applications for federal, state, and local criminal justice agencies. Through its CJIS Audit and Compliance Experts Division (CJIS ACE), DCI provides criminal justice agencies and vendors with a full suite of "all things CJIS" consulting services. More than 1600 agencies throughout the country utilize the DCI software to perform their duties every single day. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/diverse-computing-inc-announces-new-project-with-the-oregon-state-police-for-the-development-and-operation-of-their-new-law-enforcement-data-system-300457669.html SOURCE Diverse Computing, Inc.

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- Garba Shehu, the senior special adviser to President Buhari, says the president is alive

- According to him, the rumour is plain lies spread by vested interests to create panic

- He insisted that nothing unpleasant has happened to the President and there is no cause for apprehension

The Senior Special Adviser to President Buhari on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, has reacted to the news making the rounds that the president is in serious life threatening situation.

The Presidential aide said this in series of tweets, yesterday, May 14.

READ ALSO: Osama Bin Laden's son threatens US over father's death

According to him, the rumour is plain lies spread by vested interests to create panic.

Garba Shehu says that nothing unpleasant has happened to President Buhari and there is no cause for apprehension

Rumours making the rounds are that the president is in life support as a result of the deterioration of his heath and another even more disturbing is another one that claims the president may even have died.

However, Shehu debunked the rumours, insisting that the president is well and alive.

Baseless rumors are trending again that an unpleasant thing has happened to our beloved President, Muhammadu Buhari.

If you have received this information on WhatsApp or Facebook, disregard it because it is plain lies spread by vested interests to create panic.

READ ALSO: Buharis top aide in trouble as plot to stop Osinbajo from acting revealed

Nothing unpleasant has happened to the President. No cause for apprehension. Thanks for the many calls.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng brings you a full text of the rumour making the rounds that prompted the media aides reaction:

Nigerias President Muhammadu Buhari Finally goes Home; Body to be Flown back to Abuja Tomorrow

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has been confirmed dead in London where he was receiving medical treatment.

President Buhari flew to London from Abuja last Sunday for follow-up medical consultations with his doctors where he unfortunately died. He had been to London twice since last year for the same medical reason.

Speculation has been rife that his health had deteriorated badly, but he attended last Friday prayers to douse such grave insinuations.

His special adviser on media and publicity, Femi Adesina, disclosed in Abuja that President Buhari had planned to leave Sunday afternoon, but decided to tarry a bit, due to the arrival of 82 Chibok schoolgirls in Abuja earlier in the day.

According to Adesina, the length of the presidents stay in London was to be determined by the doctors, saying that the government will continue to function normally under Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.

President Buhari has transmitted letters about the trip to the Senate and the House of Representatives, in compliance with Section 145 (1) of the 1999 Constitution, he added.

Then Nigerian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom told reporters plans are underway to transport the body of the late President back to Abuja where final funeral rites will be held.

"President Buhari had travelled to London in January for a similar check-up and returned to Nigeria in March.

Before that, in June 2016, the president also travelled to London to seek treatment for an ear infection.

President Buhari had earlier hosted the 82 rescued Chibok schoolgirls to a light reception shortly before the arrival of Osinbajo, Bukola and Dogara.

The President, at the reception, described the rescue of the girls as a pleasant second anniversary gift to Nigerians.

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo is expected to be sworn into office as the substantive President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Government is yet to issue an official statement on the Presidents demise. He was 74 years.

Meanwhile, in this Legit.ng video, watch Nigerians react to the president's return to London.

Watch the video:

Source: Legit.ng
- The general overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, urges Nigerians not to lose hope in God

- Pastor Adeboye calls on Nigerians to maintain a peaceful disposition towards one another, no matter the situation they find themselves

Pastor Enoch Adeboye has urged Christians in the country not to lose hope but to believe that there is no problem impossible for God to solve.

READ ALSO: Buhari is alive in London - Presidency debunks death rumour

The general overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (Worldwide) gave the admonition on Sunday, May 14, in Jos, at the RCCG inter-denominational service held at Kassa in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of Plateau State, where he rounded up the RCCG 2017 Northern Ministers and Workers Conference, with the theme, The Almighty.

According to the Punch, the cleric also urged Nigerians to maintain a peaceful disposition towards one another, no matter the situation they find themselves, saying it was only through such acts that their prayers would be answered.

Adeboyes message was taken from the Book of Genesis 17:1-10.

Pastor Adeboye urged Christians to believe that there is no problem impossible for God to solve.

He said: "Know that there is a God who is the Almighty; hide nothing from Him no matter the situation but put your trust in Him and the Almighty will be available to you. Though you have no one to help, the Almighty will help, remember that He knows all.

Meanwhile, some Northern clerics have urged Nigerians to expect great abundance under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari.

READ ALSO: Buharis top aide in trouble as plot to stop Osinbajo from acting revealed

The religious leaders under the aegis of the Northern Interfaith and Religious Organization for Peace urged Nigerians not to be deterred by President Buhari's health condition.

The group's national coordinator Bishop Musa Fomson while speaking during a special prayer session in Abuja on Saturday, May 13, assured that the president will bounce back and continue "the job he has started in Nigeria."

Fomson said there were revelations to the anointed religious leaders during the meeting that Nigerian will be great

In the video below, legendary Nigerian actor, Fadeyi Oloro, has told Legit.ng that there are possibilities that he will soon become a pastor.

Source: Legit.ng
- Ex-governor Ibrahim Shekarau has referred to Governor Fayose as a living legend

- Shekarau said the governor's political achievement is worthy of emulation

Ibrahim Shekarau, the former governor of Kano state has said Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti state is a living legend worthy of being emulated by other political leaders.

The Chief Press Secretary to Fayose, Idowu Adelusi, said Shekarau made this statement during a visit to Ado-Ekiti.

Shekarau who also lauded the governor's political achievements, said he was overwhelmed by the relationship between Fayose and the people of Ekiti state, Daily Post reports.

He urged Nigerian leaders to emulate Fayose in their dealings with the masses and their needs.

Shekarau urged other political leaders to emulate Fayose.

READ ALSO: Court officials refused to provide documents to release IPOB members because of N10,000 bribe -Nnamdi Kanu's lawyer

He said: I am not surprised by the great performance of Governor Ayodele Fayose in Ekiti State.

We were governors at the same time in 2003, though we were in different political parties, he did wonderfully well then too.

I am impressed by the projects being executed by the governor despite the recession in the country and the small statutory allocations coming to the state."

The deputy governor of Gombe state, Charles Yau Ilya, who also visited Ekiti state said he was happy at the projects and that what he saw on ground confirmed that the Ekiti governor was a true and real friend of the common man.

READ ALSO: Osama Bin Laden's son threatens US over father's death

He said: This is my first visit to Ekiti state and I have heard a lot about Governor Ayodele Fayose.

I am really happy that the governor is a living legend, whose love for the people of the state is duly reciprocated by the people who are showing their love for him too.

Meanwhile, Fayose has suspended four top government officials over allegation of misuse of public utilities, saying that such act has become a drain of public resources.

The governor therefore ordered the immediate suspension of four government officials and the setting up of a panel to look into their activities and the way they manage government utilities in their care.

Watch Legit.ng video of Nigerians saying who they prefer to rule Nigeria between Fayose and Buhari in 2019:

Source: Legit.ng
- A renowned security expert, Dr Ekhomu Ona, has expressed serious concern over Boko Haram's recent threats

- The Islamist group had threatened to bomb the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja

- Dr Ona said the threat is real and should be taken seriously

A renowned security expert, Dr Ekhomu Ona, has expressed serious concern over the recent threats by Boko Haram.

The Islamist group had threatened to bomb Nigeria's capital, Abuja in a new video clip released by Abubakar Shekau, the sect's leader.

While the Nigerian Army has dismissed the two video clips as mere propaganda, Dr Ona argued that the swapped commander now has a better inside knowledge to plot a good attack.

Boko Haram threatened to bomb Abuja in a recent video by its leader, Abubakar Shekau

Returning commanders of Boko Haram to the battlefield is not a great idea. However, we have no choice in this case because we have to secure release of our girls. And I praise President Muhammadu Buhari for that. But then, we really have to take it as a credible threat.

It is a credible threat because we have active terrorist cells that are all over the country. We have them in the Kogi axis; we have them in the outline districts of Abuja. As someone who just returned to the field, he has better inside knowledge now to carry out the threat. Prison is the prime radicalization ground for many extremists. That is where they meet and share ideas, Dr Ona told Daily Sun.

READ ALSO: Aggrieved soldiers allegedly write open letter to Buhari, threaten to resort to lawlessness if their demand is not met

He further noted that freed Boko Haram members were the forerunners of major attacks in the recent past.

His words: Prison gives them opportunity to be together and to plot good attacks. Besides, there is a lot of radicalism in those cells which have not been well infiltrated by our intelligence agencies.

Some Boko Haram commanders were freed in exchange for the Chibok girls released recently

He advised the federal government to focus on effective control of explosives which Boko Haram relied upon in its terrorist activities.

He said: There is a poor control of explosive ordinance in the country. Today, explosive ordinance is available everywhere for people who do blasting and quarrying, for farmers who need fertilizer.

There must be a focus on controlling explosive in the country. Another thing is that what is bugging them has not been resolved in the society.

These people are saying that there is a lot of corruption in Nigerian society, there is injustice. You are a liar if you say we dont have corruption and moral depravity in our society today. They believe it is only under Sharia that these can be resolved, which is wrong.

Boko Haram attacks has left in their wake destruction, loss of lives and properties

READ ALSO: Osama Bin Laden's son threatens US over father's death

Meanwhile, unknown gunmen suspected to be Fulani herdsmen attacked a community mosque in Etogi community, Gbara ward of Mokwa local government, Niger state.

Legit.ng learnt that the attack occurred in the early hours of Sunday, May 14, while the villagers were observing their early morning prayers.

21 people including the Imam of the village were said to have been killed in the attack.

Watch this Legit.ng video below of victims of Boko Haram attacks.

Source: Legit.ng
- The presidency has promised to give the 2017 budget the urgency it merits

- They promised by signing it into law immediately it is transmitted to it.

- It assured that Acting President Yemi Osinbajo would not hesitate to perform the all-important ritual

The presidency has promised that the 2017 budget will be signed immediately by Acting President Yemi Osinbajo when it gets to them.

According to a report by Vanguard, the presidency assured that it would not hesitate to perform the all-important ritual.

The presidency however stated that the Clerk of the National Assembly was yet to transmit the document, even as it says it is anxiously waiting for it to arrive at Aso Rock.

Acting President Yemi Osinbajo has the full powers constitutionally to assent to the bill

The National Assembly passed the Appropriation Bill into law on Thursday, May 11 after much delay that held up the document for five months.

READ ALSO: Senate investigate banks over $62b alleged fraud

Details of the budget showed that N434.4 billion was appropriated for statutory transfers to the National Judicial Council (N100 billion); Niger Delta Development Commission (N64.02 billion); Universal Basic Education (N95.2 billion); National Assembly (N125 billion); Public Complaints Commission (N4 billion); INEC (N45 billion); and National Human Rights Commission (N1.2 billion).

Legit.ng gathered that a top presidency source assured Nigerians of speedy presidential assent to the bill especially as the life of the 2016 budget had elapsed early last week.

The budget has not been officially transmitted to us yetso until it is transmitted formally by the Clerk of the National Assembly we should not be discussing signing.

But the presidency is keenly awaiting the budget and we have assurances that it is on its way. We shall act with urgency and promptly when we get it, the source said.

Legit.ng had reported on Tuesday, May 9 that the Senate had received the 2017 budget report after much delay.

President Buhari and Acting President Osinbajo has worked seamlessly despite the president's illness

READ ALSO: Buharis top aide in trouble as plot to stop Osinbajo from acting revealed

The 2017 appropriation report was laid before the upper house of legislature by chairman of the senate committee on appropriations Senator Goje during plenary on Tuesday.

The budget had been expected to be passed last week, before Friday, May 5, when the 2016 budget officially expired but was stepped down by the upper house of legislature.

Watch this Legit.ng TV video of Nigerians sharing their opinion on whether the Senate should be scrapped or not.

Source: Legit.ng
- Boko Haram terrorists stormed villages in Borno in search of food

- 11 farmers were reported dead after the attack

- The village attacked was closed to Alau Dam which was reportedly heavily guarded

- For more reports on Boko Haram, please visit: https://www.legit.ng/tag/boko-haram.html

Eleven farmers have been killed in Amarwa village in Konduga LGA, after Boko Haram insurgents reportedly stormed the village in search of food.

Legit.ng learnt that the village, which was about 16 kilometers away from Maiduguri metropolis was very close to Alau Dam which was heavily guarded but no help came from there during the attack.

According to a report by Nigerian Tribune, an eyewitness, who preferred to be anonymous said: "They killed eleven of our people Saturday afternoon in Amarwa village in Konduga LGA 16 kilometers away from Maiduguri metropolis.

READ ALSO: Former Nigerian Air Chief facing corruption charges, 19 others Nigeria has had (photos)

Nine Boko Haram insurgents drove into our village on motorcycles to unleash their wickedness. But by the time they finished their show of strength 11 of our farmers working in their farms were killed. We have informed bereaved families including Ali Umaru that lost a brother in-law.

Those killed were said to have gone to clear their farms in preparatory for this years farming season with the assurance from political authorities that they can really farm big time this year since the first rain has already fallen.

According to the villagers the insurgents are still visible around Kajiri village of Konduga LGA which is about two kilometers from the location of the alleged murders and eighteen kilometers from Maiduguri.

The villagers believed the insurgents might have become more emboldened by the recent exchange of their commanders for Chibok girls by the Nigerian government.

READ ALSO: Pope Francis appoints a Nigerian as apostolic nuncio to Ireland

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Army has reacted to two new videos released by Boko Haram insurgents on Friday, May 12.

In a statement by its spokesman Brigadier-General Sani Usman Kukasheka, the army said the videos were full of empty threats and that Nigerians should ignore them.

Usman confirmed that the Boko Haram commander that issued the threat was just recently swapped in return for the Chibok girls and noted that as a result cannot make violent threats.

Watch Legit.ng video of survivors of Boko Haram talking about the horrors inflicted by the terrorists:

Source: Legit.ng
Public comments on the FCCs anti-net neutrality proceeding have exploded over the past week following an incisive pro-net neutrality rant from John Oliver on Sunday. The proceeding, which had accumulated about 39,000 public comments as of Saturday 5/7 at 8PM (prior to Olivers segment), has now seen more than 1.1 million comments as of Friday 5/12 at 8PM (just five days later):

Comments accumulated rapidly over the course of the week, peaking at a rate of over 44,000 comments per hour on Thursday:

On this chart, the gap between Olivers segment concluding and the influx of comments is presumably due to site downtime that the FCC reported on Monday morning. The FCC claims that this downtime was driven by a malicious DDoS attack. However, the timing of the downtime relative to Olivers segment casts some doubt on this claim; as many have pointed out, an influx of requests & comments from Olivers audience could easily be mistaken for a DDoS attack. Two senators and one pro-net neutrality group has called on the FCC to release logs supporting the claim that they were DDoSed.

The chart also shows evidence of other periods of intermittent downtime throughout the week, as reported by pro-net neutrality group Fight for the Future.

Not long after Olivers segment aired, reports began to surface that FCC commenting had become a target of bots and spammers. What was the impact of these efforts? After some light text cleaning, here are the top 10 most common free text filings:

Rank Statement Count % of Total 1 the unprecedented regulatory power the obama administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation 440,049 38.8% 2 i support strong net neutrality backed by title 2 oversight of isps 26,324 2.3% 3 i specifically support strong net neutrality backed by title 2 oversight of isps 16,014 1.4% 4 i was outraged by the obama wheeler fccs decision to reclassify the internet as a regulated public utility 13,748 1.2% 5 preserve net neutrality and title 2 12,285 1.1% 6 i am in support of strong net neutrality backed by title 2 oversight of isps 5,369 0.5% 7 as an internet user im asking the fcc to protect the net neutrality protections currently in place 5,309 0.5% 8 i support net neutrality backed by title 2 oversite of internet service providers 5,182 0.5% 9 please preserve net neutrality and title 2 5,051 0.4% 10 [No Text] 3,801 0.3%

Many of the top comments are variants of Olivers recommended comment supporting net neutrality backed by Title II oversight. This demonstrates that Oliver was likely an inspiration for many filings.

However, most striking is that the top-submitted comment (the unprecedented regulatory power) has been filed over 440,000 times, including over 270,000 times on Thursday 5/11 alone:

We cant say for sure whether these submissions were due to a bot (see below); however, various reports suggest that there are reasons to believe that at least some share of them were. In particular, although the repeated (hereafter: spam) submissions include real names and addresses, a number of individuals whose names appear have denied submitting the comments.

Earlier this week, The Verge reported that the names and email addresses used in the fraudulent filings may have been pulled from a data breach of River City Media (RCM).

To further investigate this hypothesis, I randomly sampled 1000 filings that used the repeated text and queried the HaveIBeenPwned API to retrieve a list of known data breaches that the associated emails were involved in. I found that ~76% of emails associated with the repeated comment had been involved in at least one data breach, and ~66% were part of the RCM breach specifically:

This lends some support to the claim that many of the repeated comments are fraudulent. However, a few caveats are worth keeping in mind. First, the RCM breach is extremely large (1.4 billion records), and so the majority of any random list of emails might show up in the breach. Second, just because an email shows up on the RCM list doesnt mean that the associated filing is bogus, given that we know that a conservative group called Center for Individual Freedom provided a form to its supporters that included the same spam text.

After Removing the Anti-NN Spam, Filings Overwhelmingly Support Net Neutrality

Supposing that the anti-net neutrality spam is all fraudulent, do most filings support or oppose net neutrality? To find out, I took a random sample of 200 comments from the pool of filings (excluding the repeated anti-NN comments) and hand-tagged the comments as Supports net neutrality, Opposes net neutrality or Other. The results show that the remaining comments overwhelming support net neutrality:

As noted above, we dont know for sure whether the spam comments are (exclusively) fraudulent; however, even if the spam comments were all legitimate, this analysis suggests that filings would still be in favor of net neutrality by roughly a 59-40 margin overall. We also dont know the extent or impact of possible botting / spamming on the pro-NN side, which could shift the balance of opinion as well.

The FCC Should Reconsider its Position on Net Neutrality

The FCC has now entered a Sunshine period for docket 17-108, during which it will not consider new comments. Given the magnitude of filings (~695,000 if you exclude the anti-NN spam) and the balance of opinion expressed (97% in favor of net neutrality or 59% if you include the spam), this analysis suggests that the FCC should reconsider its position on net neutrality during this period of reflection.

Edits

EDIT: Did not expect this to blow up as much as it has! With that, wanted to highlight some important caveats to keep in mind when reading this post: (i) in this post I use the term spam to connote an identical bit of text that was repeatedly filed many times; importantly, we dont know exactly what share of these spam comments are legitimate, though we do know that some are fabricated; (ii) there is some evidence of botting/spamming on the pro-NN side as well (though likely not to the same degree), which is not addressed in this post, and could shift conclusions. If anyone is interested to futher address these caveats, please let me know and I am happy to collaborate or share data.

EDIT 2: For more analysis on this topic (including important points not addressed here), I highly recommend you check out this analysis from Chris Sinchok, as well as this analysis from Nathaniel Fruchter

EDIT 3: New analysis from the Daily Caller suggests that substantial pro-NN botting may have occurred as well (a point not addressed here). Please take a look!

Appendix
Will you have a better life if you lived in Ghana instead of Nigeria? Many Nigerians will argue that their home country is far better. Yet there are facts that prove otherwise.

The World Factbook is a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency with almanac-style information about the countries of the world.

Comparing Ghana to Nigeria, the CIA World Factbook has revealed the following advantages of living in Ghana:

1. You will live longer

Accra is a must visit place for anyone touring Ghana

According to the Factbook, the life expectancy at birth in Ghana is 65.75 while in Nigeria it is 52.62.

This entry contains the average number of years to be lived by a group of people born in the same year, if mortality at each age remains constant in the future.

The entry shows that you will live 13.13 years longer in Ghana.

2. You will have more job opportunities

Ghana has an unemployment rate of 11.00% while Nigeria has 23.90%. This entry contains the percent of the labor force that is without jobs.

This means that in Ghana you are 53.97% less likely to be unemployed.

READ ALSO: 29 Nigerians arrested for internet fraud in Ghana

3. You are less likely to die as a child

The number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in Ghana is 38.52 while in Nigeria it is 74.09.

This rate is often used as an indicator of the level of health in a country and it shows that if you live in Ghana, you are 48.01% less likely to die in infancy.

4. You will make more money

The GDP per capita in Ghana is $3,500 while in Nigeria it is $2,800. This entry shows GDP on a purchasing power parity basis divided by population as of 1 July for the same year.

So, if you lived in Ghana, you would make 25% more money.

5. You are less likely to have HIV/AIDS

The percentage of adults living with HIV/AIDS in Ghana is 1.40% while in Nigeria it is 3.10%. 11,600 people in Ghana and 239,700 people in Nigeria die from AIDS each year.

This means that you are less susceptible if you live in Ghana by 54.84%.

6. You are less likely to be murdered

1.70 in every 100,000 people are murdered annually in Ghana compared to 10.30 in Nigeria

This includes the victims of an unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person. Data is originally sourced from either criminal justice or public health systems.

This means that you are 83.5% less likely to be murdered in Ghana.

READ ALSO: Nigerian businessman nabbed in Ghana trying to smuggle Indian hemp

7. You will pay less for healthcare

If you lived in Ghana you would spend 11.98% less money on health care.

Per capita public and private health expenditures combined in Ghana are $83.00 USD while Nigeria spends $94.30 USD

While, Ghana might be better, Nigerians have suffered Xenophobia in South Africa recently. Watch this Legit.ng video of a protest against it:

Source: Legit.ng
- The Federal Government has assured Nigerians that everything was being done to ensure that the abducted Chibok School girls would soon be free

- The Federal Government would also ensure that the girls were freed from the terrorist group

- For more reports on Boko Haram, please visit: https://www.legit.ng/tag/boko-haram.html

The Federal Government on Monday assured Nigerians that everything was being done to ensure that other Chibok School girls abducted by the Boko Haram terrorists regain their freedom.

The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amb. Sola Enikanolaiye, disclosed this in his address to the UN Security Councils open debate on Women and peace and security: Sexual violence in conflict in New York.

Enikanolaiye explained that after their freedom, the Federal Government would also ensure that the girls were freed from the ideological grips of the terrorist group.

READ ALSO: Presidency 2019: Peter Obi pays special visit to Obasanjo at Otta farm

The 82 recent Chibok girls released with President Buhari

We seize this opportunity to assure you that following the recent release of 82 of the abducted Chibok school girls, government has intensified its efforts at securing the release of the abducted girls and the remaining ones, including freeing them from the ideological grips of Boko Haram terrorists.

Having regained their freedom, it is equally important that they regain their self-esteem and be assisted to return to their families and back to their schools.

Furthermore, emergency teams of psycho-social counsellors and health professionals have been dispatched to the north east to assist with the profiling of victims for appropriate therapies, he said.

According to him, Nigeria has carefully and favourably considered joining the existing 108 countries to sign up to the Paris Principle and Commitment on the protection of children in armed conflicts.

The Permanent Secretary pointed out Nigerias active participation at the international Ministerial Conference marking the 101h Anniversary of the Paris process held in February.

It is our conviction that this step will help to strengthen Nigerias commitment to global frameworks in further preventing the recruitment and use of girl-children as child or female bombers by Boko Haram.

According to him, Nigeria recommit to ensuring that women and girls enjoy full rights and that those who have perpetrated sexual violence are dealt with in accordance with our national laws and international obligations.

Other remedies of legal and social nature taken so far by the Federal Government include diligent prosecution of 203 detained Boko Haram terrorists in competent courts of law.

As well as the reintegration, reorientation and rehabilitation programmes designed to meet the peculiarities of each victim of sexual violence.

To achieve an enduring result in the search for workable solutions to the challenges of sexual violence in conflict, he said priority must be accorded to addressing the enabling environment and underlying root-causes of conflicts.

This he noted includes, poverty, hunger, human rights abuses, injustice, unemployment, corruption, lack of inclusiveness and impunity.

The envoy also stressed that perpetrators must be held accountable, but the capacity of State to do so with the prevalence of weak structures and institutions needs to be addressed.

Mr President, this open debate bears great relevance to the terrorist activities of Boko Haram in the North East region of Nigeria, which have led to huge displacement of about two million people and conflict related violence against women and girls that have been widely condemned.

Nigeria has always acted concertedly to ensure accountability for sexual violence, we have also collaborated with the UN and other international partners to improve service delivery and enhance protection measures both in communities and areas where women and girls seek refuge.

These efforts by the Government of Nigeria are in the context of the great strides made by our military in degrading Boko Haram, he said.

In spite of the daunting challenges, Nigeria has always been in the vanguard of promoting the involvement of women in conflict resolution, as well as in the promotion of peace and security.

He pointed out that just last week, Nigeria launched the revised National Action Plan for the Implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and Related Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security.

READ ALSO: Be warned! Senate sends strong message to Kachikwu over PIB

We have also taken measures to enhance the security of women and girls in the camps for the Internally Displaced Persons to reduce their vulnerability and promote their safe return to their homes and reintegration into the society.

As part of efforts to counter violent extremism, Nigeria is taking steps to de-radicalise convicted terrorists through the development of a range of expert psychologies and counsellors.

Watch Legit.ng video of survivors of Boko Haram talking about the horrors inflicted by the terrorists:

Source: Legit.ng
Moon Express is one of only two teams in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition with a verified launch contract for its 2017 lunar mission. In October 2015, Moon Express announced that it had signed the worlds first multi-mission launch contract with Rocket Lab USA for 3 lunar missions between 2017 and 2020.

Moon Express sees the moon as critical for humanity to become a multi-world species, and that our sister world, the Moon, is an eighth continent holding vast resources than can help us enrich and secure our future.

MoonEx had been planning to place the International Lunar Observatory (ILO) on the Moon as early as 2018. The plan calls for placement of both a 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) radio telescope as well as an optical telescope at the South Pole of the Moon.

Rick Tumlinson, chairman of Deep Space Industries, plans to land its first prospector on an asteroid by 2020.

Deep Space Industries will use small scouts to explore and study prospective targets. A larger robot will land on high value asteroids to mine and process material. It will use solar power to evaporate and capture water from the sample.

Water, we believe, is relatively easy to harvest from asteroid materials, said Tumlinson.

By 2025 they could be producing serious quantities of resources.

Deep Space Industries and the University of Tennessee were awarded NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program funding for developing technology to slow spacecraft carrying asteroid resources as they return to Earths orbit.

The purpose of asteroid mining is to collect fuel and building materials harvested from near Earth asteroids and provide them to commercial and government missions. One major challenge to making asteroid mining a reality is slowing down the returning mining spacecraft as they approach Earth. Returning from distant destinations, these spacecraft will be traveling at high speeds, so slowing them down enough to slip into orbit is quite difficult.

Current braking methods call for the returning asteroid mining spacecraft to expend a great deal of propellant to slow itself down enough to achieve low Earth orbit insertion. However, propellant is heavy and valuable, so if another way of slowing the spacecraft could be devised, it would significantly help the economics of asteroid mining missions.

The NASA grant will research the manufacturing of an aerobrake system from the asteroids regolith (soil) collected from mining operations. The idea is that the fully laden asteroid mining spacecraft will use the collected material to manufacture a braking system during its journey back to Earths orbit. The aerobrake system would act as a large heat shield that would allow the spacecraft to pass through Earths atmosphere, creating enough drag to slow down the payload without using propellant.

Using aerobrakes instead of propellant will expand by 30 to 100 times the number of asteroids where water and other supplies can be affordably delivered to markets in Earth orbit, said Dr. John S. Lewis, chief scientist at DSI. In the near future, explains Lewis, asteroid resources will support space stations, expeditions to the Moon and Mars, and the transfer of payloads from low orbit to geosynchronous orbit by space-based tugs refueled with asteroid propellant.

Planetary Resources is also focused on water.

You can concentrate that solar energy and heat up the surface of the asteroid and literally bake off the water in the same way youd bake a clay pot, says CEO Chris Lewicki.

Both Lewicki and Tumlinson want to supply building materials in space, which could allow for the construction of super-massive floating structures that would be ungainly to launch from Earth.

This was the old L5 colonization vision.

National Space Society has updated analysis of the enormous growth potential of orbital space colonization and near earth settlement. If the single largest asteroid (Ceres) were to be used to build orbital space settlements, the total living area created would be well over a hundred times the land area of the Earth. This is because Ceres is a solid, three dimensional object but orbital space settlements are basically hollow with only air on the inside. Thus, Ceres alone can provide the building materials for uncrowded homes for hundreds of billions of people, at least.
Weekly US oil production is back to 9.3 million barrels per day and is nearing the 9.6 million barrel peak in mid-2015.

OPEC raised its outlook for U.S. production growth by 285,000 barrels a day to 820,000 a day in 2017. The number of drilling rigs operating in the country has more than doubled since May, data from Baker Hughes Inc. shows, as shale explorers emerge from a two-year rout buoyed by the initial price gains after OPEC announced its plan.

OPEC members are still sticking with their pledge to reduce output, the report showed. Production from all 13 members slipped by 18,200 barrels a day to 31.73 million last month, with Saudi Arabia continuing to pump below its official target.

As crude oil production in the Permian Basin of western Texas and eastern New Mexico has increased, pipeline infrastructure has also increased to deliver this crude oil to demand centers on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

One indicator of a potential shortfall in available takeaway capacity in the Permian is a negative spread between the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil at Midland, Texas, and the price of WTI at Cushing, Oklahoma.

Going forward, the Midland versus Cushing discount, which recently widened to more than $1 per barrel (b), is unlikely to be either as large or as persistent as it was following the rapid increase in Permian production from 2010 to 2014. At points in both late 2012 and mid-2014, WTI-Midland was priced at least $15/b lower than WTI-Cushing. Pipeline capacity expansions and other market changes are now underway to deliver more Permian crude oil to demand centers.

Pipeline infrastructure in the Permian is now better equipped to handle new production than it was in 2014. Several pipelines that came online to accommodate rising Permian production in recent years, such as Magellans BridgeTex pipeline, Sunoco Logistics Permian Express pipeline, and Plains All Americans Cactus pipeline, are undergoing expansions that are set to come online later this year, adding approximately 340,000 b/d of capacity.

In addition to expansions of existing pipelines, Enterprise Product Partners is building a new Midland-to-Houston pipeline with a capacity of 450,000 b/d, expected to come online later this year. Other pipeline expansions are planned for gathering systems and intra-Permian pipeline infrastructure to bring increasing volumes of oil to the larger pipeline origin points like Midland. After 2017, several more new pipelines and expansions are planned, or are in the planning stages, that could carry any additional increases in Permian production.

The Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico is the new star of the U.S. shale oil revolution. Land prices in the Permian have skyrocketed, drilling activity has tripled since last year and production there is poised to soar despite cheap oil prices.

The First Texas oil boom was from 1900 to 1940. Texas oil production previously peaked at about 3.4 million barrels per day in 1972 and then 3.6 million barrels per day in 2015.

Some are predicting the Permian could eventually surpass the colossal Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia as the worlds biggest oilfield.

The key is that the unique geology of the Permian allows frackers to hit multiple layers of oil as they drill into the ground. Thats what sets the Permian apart from other major oilfields, making it lucrative to drill there even at todays sub-$50 prices.

Oil explorers have paid as much as $60,000 an acre in the Permian Basin, according to Wood Mackenzie. Thats a stunning 50 times higher than the price four years ago.

Land in the Permian is now fetching 10 times what oil explorers will pay for the Bakken, the North Dakota shale formation that used to be the face of the American shale oil boom.

Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) CEO Scott Sheffield is even more optimistic, arguing that the Permian could eventually exceed the 5 million barrels per day pumped each day from Saudi Arabias Ghawar field, the biggest in the world.

The Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas Permian Basin province contains an estimated mean of 20 billion barrels of oil, 16 trillion cubic feet of associated natural gas, and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey. This estimate is for continuous (unconventional) oil, and consists of undiscovered, technically recoverable resources.

According to Scott Sheffield, Executive Chairman and CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, the Permian will end up being bigger than the Ghawar field, with more than 75 billion barrels in the Spraberry and Wolfcamp plays alone, 40 billion barrels in the Delaware, and more in new zones being discovered, like the Wolfcamp C. Sheffield thinks the totals will exceed 160 billion barrels.

Permian production at 2.3 million barrels per day is 840 million barrels per year. Doubling production to 4.6 million barrels per day or 1.7 billion barrels per year could be maintained for nearly 100 years.

A Permian producing at 5-7 million barrels per day would mean overall Texas production could reach 6 to 9 million barrels per day. Texas by itself would almost have as much oil production as Russia or Saudi Arabia.
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Its an incredible collection. I wouldve been prepared to pay the full amount anyway.  Shoshana Maasland, visiting from New Zealand, is shown with her husband, Tom, and their children, Alex, left, and Jacob.

The Met is counting on the enthusiasm of tourists like the Maaslands  and the assumption that art exhibitions arent free  as the museum pursues its controversial proposal to start charging a mandatory fee to visitors from outside New York State. The Met formally asked city officials this month to approve such a fee; no dollar amount has been specified yet, but Mayor Bill de Blasio endorsed the general concept by saying he was a big fan of Russian oligarchs paying more to get into the Met.

The Maaslands and most other foreign visitors arent oligarchs, of course, and the current proposal would also charge people from Montclair, N.J.; Stamford, Conn.; and other nearby towns who do not consider themselves tourists. Some supporters of the Met are concerned that the proposed fee could alienate visitors, whose dollars are critical to the citys economy, and the Met also risks criticism, because it is seeking the fee revenue in part to deal with a $15 million budget deficit.

Visitors to the Met have previously sued over its voluntary admission fee, and their lawyers recently decried the proposed mandatory fee, saying some people wouldnt be able to afford it.

In conversations with tourists and visitors at the Met last week, there was some ambivalence about a mandatory fee for only non-New Yorkers, given that they were already spending a lot of money to visit. But there was also considerable openness to the idea that the Mets high quality justified some sort of admission payment.
VENICE  The Venice Biennale, still the worlds most distinguished exhibition of international contemporary art, opened to the public on Saturday, after a prosecco-drenched professional preview that has grown larger and less professional than ever. Not just curators, dealers and critics, but also oversize crowds of collectors and the regulars of Europes partying class swarmed the lagoon last week to see the 57th edition of the Biennale  and to make merry until long after the last scheduled vaporetto.

The Biennale comprises a central exhibition, organized this year by Christine Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Center in Paris; and 85 national pavilions, which feature solo or thematic presentations. Prizes are awarded to the best pavilion  this year its Germany, which hosts a harrowing performance work by the young artist Anne Imhof  and to participants in the main show. The whole thing adds up to a kind of art-world Olympics. And museum exhibitions, pop-up shows, public sculptures and the occasional guerrilla performance make Venice the epicenter of contemporary art this spring.

My colleague Holland Cotter will publish a review of the Biennale shortly. But first, here are a few highlights from the first week, inside and outside the exhibition grounds.

Turkish Twilight

Ms. Macels exhibition takes a more optimistic and unrestricted view of todays cultural production than the highly polemical edition of 2015. But several national pavilions took a darker, if still more metaphorical, view of world affairs.
ALBANY  In late February 2016, the Republican leader of the New York State Senate, John J. Flanagan, sent a letter to the chambers secretary outlining a series of stipends to various members  de facto bonuses totaling hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

In that letter, Mr. Flanagan said the stipend for the chairman of the Health Committee should be paid to Senator David J. Valesky, an upstate member of the Independent Democratic Conference, an eight-member breakaway group whose alliance with the Republicans has kept that party in power in the Senate.

There was just one catch: Mr. Valesky was not the chairman of the Health Committee.

Instead, he was the vice chairman; the actual chairman of that committee, Senator Kemp Hannon, a Republican from Long Island, was awarded a richer bonus for a different Senate leadership position, and by law, lawmakers can receive only one such stipend, commonly known as a lulu.

Two weeks after Mr. Flanagans letter, Mr. Valesky was identified as chairman of senate health committee in documents sent to the state comptroller by the Senate payroll staff, a designation that was false, and Mr. Valesky was later paid the $15,000 stipend. On Saturday, a Senate lawyer said those documents were simply accounting papers.
To the Editor:

Re Hillary Clintons Absolution, by Frank Bruni (column, May 7):

Ever since Hillary Clinton came onto the national political scene, pundits and columnists have been asking variations of the question Frank Bruni poses: Why cant we see more of the real Hillary? If only she would be more authentic, less guarded and less calculating  wouldnt that be great? Like the time in 2001, when, according to Mr. Bruni, at the end of a long day, she mirthfully ordered a glass of merlot. That must have been really something!

Fact is, many of us who are most enraged by Donald Trumps presidency would prefer it if Hillary Clinton, along with Bill, would go away. The Clintons have been running the Democratic Party like a fief for 25 years. Hillary should not even have run for president in 2016. She was ethically compromised from the get-go. Shes not good at retail politics, shes a chronic, shameless dissembler and her campaign was grossly incompetent.

And yet Mr. Bruni hopes that in her next memoir, Hillary will finally write more revealingly about herself, showcasing her emotions and candor. But that is not her style  it never has been  and, besides, the time for that has passed.

JOHN MCMILLIAN, ATLANTA

To the Editor:

Please, if there is a merciful God, please release us from the seemingly unending fixation with Hillary Clinton. I get that she was the hope of many women who genuinely and passionately wanted to see a woman as president. But to ruminate about how Hillary would have won if only the Russians, WikiLeaks and James Comey did not do her in  well, I have had enough of this.
To the Editor:

Amy Sullivans discussion of the so-called Johnson Amendment (Clerical Speech Isnt Persecuted, Op-Ed, May 5) reinforces my conviction that clergy have no right to endorse a political candidate from the pulpit.

In my 60 years of preaching, teaching and writing, I never once endorsed or opposed a candidate and never used my pulpit for political purposes. I did speak out on moral issues like civil rights (I participated in the March on Washington in August 1963), and early on I opposed the Vietnam War (at some risk to my post).

But I felt that it would have been wrong to turn my pulpit into a political forum. The glory of our country is its separation of church and state. Heaven help us if we betray that legacy.

(RABBI) GILBERT S. ROSENTHAL WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.

To the Editor:

President Trump has signed an executive order allowing clergy to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. Does that mean that clergy can now say what they really think of him?
To the Editor:

Re Confederate Monuments Fall, and Tempers Flare (front page, May 8):

The Confederate obelisk that was removed last month in New Orleans was erected to commemorate a violent white uprising against racial integration during Reconstruction and originally bore a plaque declaring that the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.

In 1993, the plaque was covered up. Now the monument itself is gone, along with any lasting reminder of the many ways that racism defined power and privilege in post-Reconstruction Louisiana.

I understand the impulse to remove Confederate monuments, which embody some of the most repulsive aspects of the American past. But if we hide them away in a museum, it becomes easier to evade their implications. Let the statues to white supremacy stand, alongside monuments to the brave Americans who challenged it. Anything less lets all of us off the hook.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN

PHILADELPHIA

The writer is a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.
The companies have left hints as to what the partnership could entail. Lyft, for instance, has long said it wants to match its network of passengers and drivers with partners in the transportation industry. Last year, it struck a deal with General Motors, a major Lyft investor, to help with that goal. Under that agreement, the companies plan to test autonomous Chevrolet Bolt vehicles using Lyfts network with the general public in the next few years.

What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? Whats their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source. Learn more about our process.

Waymo has pursued its own partnerships. It is working with Fiat Chrysler on a fleet of minivans and is in talks with Honda about a possible deal that would put Waymo technology in Honda test vehicles. Waymo also recently introduced a pilot program in Phoenix in which consumers can apply to hail self-driving Chrysler minivans and Lexuses for free rides around the city. The company has said it hopes to find new ways through such partnerships to bring its self-driving technology to the general public after nearly a decade of development.

The seeds of the partnership between Waymo and Lyft were planted in discussions last summer, the two people familiar with the deal said. The talks involved Logan Green and John Zimmer, the founders and leaders of Lyft, and John Krafcik, the chief executive of Waymo. The idea of a deal evolved as the executives visited each others campuses in the ensuing months.

The partnership indicates that Waymo believes its self-driving-car technology has moved past the research stage and is ready to be applied commercially. Alphabet, Googles parent company, spun Waymo out of Googles X project lab in December after more than eight years of research. The vehicles have been tested on closed tracks and open roads in Arizona, California, Texas and Washington, where state law allows the testing of autonomous vehicles. Waymo has said the vehicles have logged more than three million miles of real-world testing.
TOKYO  When Toshiba, the struggling Japanese conglomerate, decided to sell off part of its coveted microchip business this year, the American digital storage company Western Digital Corporation looked to be in an ideal position to scoop it up.

Western Digital, a part-owner of a Toshiba semiconductor factory in Japan, is as close to Toshibas chip operations as an outsider can be. It is said to have made an offer for the microchip business  whose total value has been estimated at close to $20 billion  although it declined to comment on whether it had done so.

But now the companies partnership has become a source of contention, leading to legal threats and complicating the sale of the chip unit.

The dispute centers on whether Toshiba can sell the semiconductor business without Western Digitals consent, and it is compounding a run of problems for Toshiba, which is grappling with huge losses in its nuclear power division and badly needs the sale to succeed.
BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Utah  Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the interior, stepped into the desert last week at the edge of the 1.3-million-acre red-rock expanse that is roiling the West.

Mr. Zinke had billed his visit as a listening tour, and a woman trailed with a camera phone, needling him to support her side. Be nice, he said, swinging around and shaking a finger at her in the view of those in the crowd, many in cowboy hats. Be nice!

Nice has been difficult recently in this patch of America, where President Trumps decision to reconsider one of the countrys newest national monuments has thrust southeast Utah back to the front line in the battle over how much control Washington should have over Western lands.

President Barack Obama established the Bears Ears National Monument in the final days of his presidency, using the Antiquities Act, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, to place special protections on a vast swath of winding canyons and shifting sands imbued with at least 10,000 years of human history. In terms of protection, national monuments are generally considered one step below national parks.
Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, oversees an office whose clerical and regulatory work costs the states taxpayers barely $5.5 million a year. But he has parlayed that modest post into a national platform for tough restrictions on voting rights and immigration, becoming both a celebrated voice within the Republican Party and a regular target of lawsuits by civil rights advocates.

Now, as vice chairman of the new Advisory Commission on Election Integrity announced by the White House on Thursday (Vice President Mike Pence is the titular chairman), Mr. Kobach has a far bigger soapbox for his views on voter fraud  which Republicans, including President Trump, call a cancer on democracy. Others say it is a pretense for discouraging the poor, minorities and other typically Democratic-leaning voters from casting ballots.

Academic studies regularly show  and most state election officials agree  that fraud is rare, and that the kind of fraud Republicans seek to address with voter ID laws is minuscule.

Mr. Kobach promised an impartial inquiry into election vulnerabilities during an interview on Friday, saying the commission would go where the facts take us. But in Kansas, the facts appear at best mixed, and critics say he is one of the most partisan and polarizing figures imaginable to preside over a fair inquiry on voter fraud.
Most Americans, it seems safe to say, derived a healthy measure of satisfaction from the news in 2011 that a team of Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden. The cheers faded soon enough, however, for one group: public health professionals. Thats because killing the archterrorist had the unintended consequence of undermining their campaign to finally wipe polio off the face of the earth.

This offering from Retro Report recalls how the damage was acute for a while in Pakistan, where Bin Laden had holed up in the northern town of Abbottabad. To confirm his presence there, American intelligence agents took advantage of an anti-hepatitis program being run by a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi. As part of this collaboration, Dr. Afridi collected DNA samples in Abbottabad and tried, without luck, to do so at the compound where Bin Laden was hiding. The Americans satisfied themselves through other means that they had the right target.

But they also inadvertently delivered a serious blow to the anti-polio drive in Pakistan, which some imams had already denounced as a plot to sterilize Muslims. With suspicions about their true intentions running high, vaccinators suffered. Eventually, the extreme distrust receded, but the damage had been done. It underlined the frustrations often endured by public health specialists in their attempts to conquer certain infectious diseases once and for all. Just when they seem within reach of the goal line, events have a way of stopping them short.

Retro Report, a series of video documentaries exploring major news stories of the past and their lasting repercussions, examines this issue through the prism of one of humankinds greatest achievements: the eradication of smallpox four decades ago. That awe-inspiring triumph has long begged to be duplicated. Yet it stands alone. Smallpox remains the only infectious disease to have been globally extinguished.
SEOUL, South Korea  North Korea said on Monday that the missile it launched a day earlier was a new ballistic missile that can carry a large, heavy nuclear warhead, warning that the United States military bases in the Pacific were within its range.

North Korea launched what American officials called an intermediate-range ballistic missile on Sunday from the northwestern town of Kusong. The missile, believed to have a longer range than any other North Korean missile tested so far, landed in the sea between the North and Japan, sparking angry comments from President Trump, as well as from President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan.

The Norths official Korean Central News Agency said on Monday that the new ground-to-ground missile, Hwasong-12, hit the targeted open water 489 miles away after soaring to an altitude of 1,312 miles. The missile was launched at a deliberately high angle so it would not fall too close to a neighboring country, the news agency said.

The flight data announced by the North roughly matched that released by Japanese and South Korean officials hours after the launch.
ROME  Less than two weeks before a potentially tense and diplomatically delicate meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, President Trump has apparently settled on nominating Callista Gingrich, the wife of Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, as the United States ambassador to the Holy See, according to two people close to the president.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, and the announcement is pending approval from the Office of Government Ethics, according to CNN, which first reported the news on Sunday.

But on Monday, Vincent Salamone, a spokesman for the Office of Government Ethics, which checks for potential conflicts of interest and compliance with financial disclosure rules, said the office completed its work and cleared her report on April 7.

That would mean that either another agency in the vetting process had not signed off on Ms. Gingrichs nomination or that the White House itself did not yet want to make the nomination public.
LONDON  Bank robbers wear masks and escape in vans with stolen license plates. Kidnappers compose ransom letters from newsprint to elude handwriting experts. Burglars target houses with the upstairs window ajar.

Cybercriminals do much the same.

They hide behind software that obscures their identity and leads investigators to look in countries far from their actual hide-outs. They kidnap data and hold it hostage. And they target the most vulnerable companies and people whose information is poorly protected.

Cybercrimes, like the global ransomware attack that began Friday and has affected hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries, are in a way an updated version of ancient criminal methods.

And in the global search for the criminals that continued Sunday, investigators are following much the same process that detectives in the physical world have used for decades: secure the crime scene, collect forensic evidence and try to trace the clues back to the perpetrator.
Chuck Davis, a dancer and choreographer widely regarded as Americas foremost master of African dance, died on Sunday at his home in Durham, N.C. He was 80.

His death was announced by the African American Dance Ensemble, which he founded in Durham in the early 1980s and directed until 2015. No cause was given.

Mr. Davis, who often said that he considered dance an agent of social change, performed, choreographed, taught and otherwise evangelized for the dances of Africa and the African diaspora for more than a half-century.

He was known both for his re-creations of traditional dances from throughout the African world and for his contemporary choreographed pieces that fused African traditions with modern dance.
When the curtain went down on Alexei Ratmanskys dense, complicated new work for New York City Ballet last weekend, the end of a long Sunday matinee, my friend and I turned to each other, not sure what to think.

What was with the gang rape scene? I said.

My friend shook his head, as unenthused as I was.

We both had been struck by it: a scene in which the ballerina Megan Fairchild (in a role originated by Sterling Hyltin), at the center of a group of five men, was aggressively thrown around against her characters will  a scene that happened, and then was over, not explicitly addressed again. At one point, the petite and strong Ms. Fairchild, trapped, was catapulted into the air, flailing violently (and rather impressively) while airborne.

When her aggressors dispersed, she slapped her partner, Daniel Ulbricht, and he fell to the floor. Some people in the audience laughed. We didnt. The retaliation, if thats what it was, didnt match the gravity of the assault.

In other words, we had seen a portrayal of a woman being physically violated, with essentially no consequences, no resolution, no critique of the mens actions or of their unresolved nature. Sound familiar? Moreover, it was never less than beautiful to look at: controlled, virtuosic, glamorous.
Sendaks reluctance to sentimentalize childhood and his melancholy awareness of the precariousness of life that haunts so many of his books were rooted in his boyhood bouts with illness (diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever), which often left him confined to bed, and his fraught relationship with his abrupt, rejecting mother and the rest of his cuckoo family.

His siblings, he said, protected him. His brother, Jack, read him stories, and the pair spent hours drawing, copying comic strip characters and making their own little books. Fantasy, Sendak would remain convinced, is the best means children have for taming wild things, that is, all the emotions that are an ordinary part of childrens lives  fear, anger, hate and frustration  and that children can perceive only as ungovernable and dangerous forces.

Image Jonathan Cott Credit... Rachel Papo

Sendak was haunted throughout his life by the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Though Sendak was only 3 at the time, the boys abduction and death came to signify all the perils that could befall a child, and Outside Over There would become an exorcism of that memory. In the book, a baby girl is snatched by goblins while her sister, Ida, is distracted for a moment. As in so many of Sendaks books, the parents play a marginal role  Idas father is away at sea and her mother seems oddly absent, almost narcotized. It is Ida who must use her golden wonder horn to subdue the goblins and bring her sister home, safe and sound.

Cott recounts how it took Sendak more than a hundred agonizing drafts to get the book right, and while Cott relies heavily on secondary sources here, he provides an illuminating window into the creative process  and the countless inspirations, influences, ideas and serendipitous encounters that fed into the creation of this work of art: In this case, Mozarts opera The Magic Flute, the movie The Wizard of Oz, a Grimm fairy tale, nativity paintings, old photographs of the Lindbergh baby and the Dionne quintuplets, and color schemes borrowed from William Blake and Eric Rohmer.

Cotts close reading of Outside Over There  given a big assist here from Kushner (himself the author of a book on Sendak) and the art historian Jane Doonan  leaves us with a lucid understanding of how Sendaks words and drawings came together to create an immensely layered story, at once a dark fairy tale, a heroic quest narrative and an elaborate homage to the many artists Sendak loved.

Its a tale that also shares a narrative structure with many of Sendaks best-known books. As in Wild Things and Night Kitchen, a child embarks on a night-time journey, has a strange, dreamlike adventure, and returns safely home in the end. And as in Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life  a captivating tale about a restless Sealyham terrier named Jennie (just like the authors beloved pet), who leaves home in search of Experience, and becomes a star with the World Mother Goose Theater  that odyssey turns into a quest for self-knowledge and self-mastery. By the end of Outside, Ida has become a strong warrior girl, charged by her absent father with watching over her sister and mother, and at home, now, in the world.

As usual, Sendak said it best: Children surviving childhood, he observed in an interview, is my obsessive theme and my lifes concern.
 Few Iranians are optimistic that Fridays presidential election will turn around a dysfunctional economy. Stop saying, Death to America, make amends with the world and foreign investors and jobs will come, a honey and saffron trader said.

 More trouble for Volkswagen: Prosecutors in Germany are investigating payments to a labor union leader on the companys supervisory board.

 Valeriya Gontareva closed half of Ukraines private banks as governor of the central bank. She discussed her plans after stepping down: Never be a bureaucrat again.

 Google is transforming U.S. public education with low-cost laptops and free apps. But schools may be giving it more than they are getting.

 You may not want to hear it right now: Buying individual stocks can be hazardous to your financial health.

 Heres a snapshot of global markets.
1. President Trump gave highly classified information on ISIS to Russia in an Oval Office meeting last week, breaking a deal with an ally, officials said.

He leaves Friday on his first overseas trip as president. The first stop is Saudi Arabia.

Syria is likely to be at the top of the agenda in his discussions. Also Monday, the State Department released new satellite images from Syria that officials said show a crematory used to hide mass executions at a government prison.
Police stations and local security offices reported problems on social media, while university students reported being locked out of final thesis papers. Electronic payment systems at gas stations run by the state oil giant PetroChina were cut off for much of the weekend. Over all, according to the official state television broadcaster, about 40,000 institutions were hit. Separately, the Chinese security company Qihoo 360 reported that computers at more than 29,000 organizations had been infected.

At China Telecom, one of the countrys three main state-run telecommunications providers, a similar scramble occurred over the weekend, according to an employee who was not authorized to speak on the matter. When a company-provided software patch did not work, the employee was told to use one from Qihoo 360, which supports pirated and out-of-date versions of Windows, the person said. A spokesman for China Telecom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, the main internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, quoted an unidentified person in charge of internet security saying that the ransomware was still spreading but the speed of transmission had slowed. It said that regulators overseeing banks, schools, the police and other groups had given orders to stop the risk and that it had instructed users on how to avoid exposure.

Using copied software and other media has become embedded in Chinas computing culture, said Thomas Parenty, founder of Archefact Group, which advises companies on cybersecurity. Some people are under the impression that using pirated goods in China is legal, while others are simply not used to paying for software, he said.

Mr. Parenty cited an instance when he was working at the Beijing office of an American client. It turned out every single one of their computers, all the software, was bootlegged, he said.

The twin problems of malware and the unwillingness to pay for software are so ingrained that they have led to an alternative type of security company in China. Qihoo 360 built its business by offering free security programs; it makes money from advertising.
Mr. Poehlings allegations, if true, could help explain why insurers are staying in the Medicare Advantage program even as they pull out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges in some states: Medicare Advantage offers a way to get extra money from the federal government.

When a whistle-blower succeeds in recovering money for the government, the False Claims Act calls for him or her to receive a percentage. Many whistle-blower cases fail to reach that point, but when the Justice Department joins a case, in general, the odds of a recovery go up.

Already the Justice Department has declined to intervene in some smaller whistle-blower cases with similar allegations. But in March, it did say it would join a whistle-blower suit filed by James Swoben, a former data manager of SCAN Health Plan, accusing UnitedHealth and several other companies of cheating Medicare Advantage by looking improperly for ways to raise peoples risk scores.

In 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated a lower courts decision to throw out Mr. Swobens case. After reviewing the allegations, Judge Raymond C. Fisher wrote, We do not see how a Medicare Advantage contractor who has engaged in such conduct can in good faith certify that the diagnosis codes it reports to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are accurate, complete and truthful.

That ruling did not decide Mr. Swobens case, but merely sent it back to a district court to be adjudicated. His case and Mr. Poehlings case are both now being handled by the United States District Court in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, UnitedHealth has sued the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, seeking to vacate a 2014 rule that requires insurers to make sure the diagnoses they report to the government are borne out by what is in peoples charts, and imposing penalties for overstatements. UnitedHealth argues that this rule unlawfully departs from the programs statutory mandates requiring actuarial equivalence with the traditional Medicare program.

That case could provide further clarity on the program rules, Mr. Burns of UnitedHealth said. He added that the government seemed to be trying to delay so that the two whistle-blower lawsuits could go first.
Since being pulled back from the brink in the 2008 financial crisis, American International Group has shrunk significantly. And activist investors have further pushed to split the insurer.

The companys new chief executive, however, pledged on Monday to focus on growth.

Let me be clear, I am here to grow A.I.G., the executive, Brian Duperreault, said at the companys consumer insurance investor day on Monday.

I recognize the value of the companys multiline structure, he said. I didnt come here to break the company up. I came here to grow it.

His appointment is a homecoming. Mr. Duperreault, 70, worked 21 years at A.I.G. before leaving in 1994. He was a lieutenant to Maurice R. Greenberg, who built the New York-based company into a global colossus before resigning as chief executive amid accounting investigations in 2005.
Lyft and Waymo  two of Ubers biggest rivals  have decided to work together.

Waymo, the self-driving car unit that operates under Googles parent company, and the ride-hailing service Lyft have signed a deal to work on autonomous vehicle technology through pilot projects and product development efforts, according to two people familiar with the agreement.

The companies began talking about a partnership last summer, the two people said. The talks involved Logan Green and John Zimmer, the founders and leaders of Lyft, and John Krafcik, the chief executive of Waymo.

Waymo and Lyft confirmed the deal but didnt say what types of products they were aiming to bring to market or when the public would see what they were working on.

The partnership indicates that Waymo believes its self-driving car technology is ready to be applied commercially. For Lyft, the deal is a way to enter the autonomous driving industry.
With oil markets flagging, the worlds two biggest oil exporters agreed on Monday to extend production cuts for several months, sending the price of crude soaring.

Major oil-producing nations have struggled of late to bolster prices, as inventories piled up and crimped the potential for demand. Prices dipped below $44 a barrel this month, their lowest level in more than a year.

Countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia  which are heavily dependent on energy sales to fund national budgets and government services  are trying to manage the markets by promising to reduce production. The move on Monday pushed oil prices up by nearly 3.8 percent, to almost $50 a barrel, the highest level in about three weeks.

The strength in oil prices sent American stocks to new highs. With energy shares surging, the Standard & Poors 500 index surpassed its record, closing just above 2,400 points.
The new bag tags are embedded with RFID chips (for radio-frequency identification), which means the location of bags is tracked and electronically crosschecked against a database to make sure that they are in the right place at the right time. Airline and airport management say this increases security, since each bag is linked to a ticketed passenger. It also speeds up the discovery of a bag in the wrong place so the process of reconnecting a bag to its owner can begin sooner.

RFID, from a customer experience point of view, has brought transparency to the customer, Mr. Joyce, of Delta Air Lines, said.

Weve invested about $50 million in deploying this tech across our organization, he said. That investment includes integrating this data into the Delta mobile app. If youre traveling and you check a bag, you get a push notification when your bag is loaded, Mr. Joyce said.

Representatives from American, United and Southwest also said they were building similar systems with advanced bag-tracking capabilities.

At most airports in the United States, the airlines have operational control of their terminals, so it is incumbent on them to add new technology. But Mr. Drummond said airports also had a stake in making sure their airlines were doing their job. If an airport had a lot of mishandled bags and passengers see that, that reputation will precede that airport, he said. So the incentive there is with the airport as well.

That is one of the reasons the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates a portion of Newark Liberty International Airports Terminal B, has spent $2.3 million installing a more sophisticated, RFID-based tracking system. As terminal operator, we have a responsibility to ensure a certain level of service in that terminal, said Diane Papaianni, the airports general manager.

That kind of tracking is going to become more the norm. By June of next year, the International Air Transport Association has stipulated that all airlines must maintain an accurate inventory of passenger baggage by tracking when each piece of checked luggage moves on, off or between planes.
The hosts of MSNBCs Morning Joe said on Monday that the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway complained extensively about President Trump in private conversations with them before he was elected.

Mika Brzezinski said during Mondays broadcast that she heard Ms. Conway denounce the candidate in private after promoting him on television.

She would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say Blech, I need to take a shower, because she disliked her candidate so much, Ms. Brzezinski said of Ms. Conway.
Lincoln Community Foundation was named Corporate Marketer of the Year at the Lincoln chapter of the American Marketing Association's Annual Prism Awards banquet on Thursday, May 4. In addition to this top honor, Pam Hunzeker, former VP for marketing at Lincoln Community Foundation, was inducted into AMA's Hall of Fame.

Each year, members of Lincoln AMA vote to recognize a marketing luminary through their distinguished Hall of Fame award. Pam Hunzeker's nomination highlighted her career which started in banking, flourished while serving in several positions, including president, at Bailey Lauerman, and ended when she retired from Lincoln Community Foundation in March. Hunzeker was also a founding member of the Lincoln AMA and a past recipient of their Individual Marketer of the Year award.

"The Lincoln Community Foundation moved to a new level when Pam began to lead our branding while she was still with Bailey Lauerman," said President, Barbara Bartle. "Pam helped us to create and promote a brand that Lincoln trusts to help donors connect with community needs."

The Foundation's work was also honored as local marketing firm, KidGlov, received eight Prism Awards and two merit awards for promotion related to Give to Lincoln Day and Prosper Lincoln, the shared community agenda focusing on early childhood, employment skills and innovation and entrepreneurship. The Lincoln Community Foundation, established in 1955, strives to continually enrich the Lincoln community by promoting and achieving philanthropic support. The Foundation has distributed more than $90 million in grants to local nonprofit organizations that have improved our community and the lives of our residents.
The Campbell Apartment, a soaring, old-fashioned cocktail bar tucked away in an ornate corner of Grand Central Terminal, closed in July to the dismay of many commuters. It will reopen to the public on Wednesday  in triplicate.

The main room  once the lordly private office of the railroad executive and millionaire John Williams Campbell, complete with Florentine decor, a coffered ceiling and a fireplace  will be reborn simply as the Campbell Bar. A second, smaller bar area just outside the entrance, bookended by two palm trees, will be called the Campbell Palm Court. And a former taxi stand just outside will be fitted with a third bar, the Campbell Terrace. Announcing the presence of all three, collectively titled the Campbell, will be a large awning on Vanderbilt Avenue.

The bars days as a hard-to-find, slightly mysterious hideaway appear to be over.

We want people to know about it, said Scott Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Group, which runs several bars and restaurants in New York City. We dont want it to be that secret place. We want it to be more inclusive. There are so many people who commute through here every day who didnt know about it.
NORTH BEND, Wash.  Finding an authentic recipe for Twin Peaks cherry pie is about as easy as figuring out who killed Laura Palmer.

They serve a version here at Twedes Cafe, the restaurant about 30 miles east of Seattle that played a backdrop as the Double R Diner in David Lynchs quirky 1990s television series. Visitors still come from around the world to linger over slices of the bracingly sweet, viscous red double-crust pie and cups of the damn fine coffee at the U-shaped counter.

A short drive away, there is another pie, heavily seasoned with cinnamon, at the Salish Lodge & Spa overlooking Snoqualmie Falls, the waterfall in the series opening credits.
Of course, in my head, theres always a fashion show going on  its weird, maybe? he said, laughing. But when we decided that Japan was the destination, I said I know where I want to be.

The show followed previous cruise shows held at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro and at the John Lautner Bob and Dolores Hope estate in Palm Springs, Calif., which, together, Mr. Ghesquiere called a trilogy. Vuitton is a travelers label, founded on trunks, so a bit of architectural tourism makes sense. But it does not hurt to surprise a jaded fashion crowd with wild experiences, either. I think its more exciting to do a cruise collection in that context, Mr. Ghesquiere said, where you bring people to see your clothes and your fashion, of course, but also to be able to share another feeling, of architecture and nature.

The setting was decided before the collection was designed, so Mr. Ghesquiere had a chance to indulge his longtime love of Japan and tailor the clothes and bags to the scene, drawing from both classical references (obi belts, Kabuki masks) and contemporary ones, including the girl-gang bikers of the Japanese Stray Cat Rock films of the 1970s. (They are turf-war epics and heist capers with fabulous titles like Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss and Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo.) He worked with Kansai Yamamoto, the Japanese designer best known for creating some of David Bowies most otherworldly stage clothes, whose patches and illustrations of peeping eyes decorated handbags and clutches and even found their way onto some of the clothes.

Far from it being a case of the tail wagging the dog, the collection looked great, even removed from its Japanese element and shrunken to smartphone-size. Mr. Ghesquieres modern-day stray cats had patchwork jackets sassed up with leopard print, but also great tailored pieces, like cocooning, almost corseted-looking blazers. (Most women will probably want to wear them with pants, but fashion shows are not meant to be purely prescriptive.) It was a playful evolution of Mr. Ghesquieres fall collection, with its dolled-up wardrobe staples and propositions for day-to-day dressing (albeit at great expense). Less playful, but quite lovely, were a series of lace evening dresses, the most beautiful in black, embroidered with gold leaves. It was inspired, apparently, by Noh theater costumes. It could make a convert out of any actress or high-rolling customer, Japanophile or not. If you dont Noh, now you Noh.
The tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, now threatens the developing brains of children in Cambodia  but not for reasons that were ever expected.

Cambodia has long struggled with iodine deficiency. The element is crucial to early brain growth: When pregnant women and their infants have low levels, the children can permanently lose 10 to 15 I.Q. points. Iodine deficiency is considered the worlds leading preventable cause of mental impairment.

But there is a cheap, easy remedy: iodized salt. As salt is cleaned and packaged, potassium iodate may be sprayed on it, normally at a cost of only a dollar or two per ton.

That means, nutrition experts say, that the I.Q. of entire nations can be raised 10 points for just a nickel per child per year.
BEIJING  The tip came in the form of an advertisement posted in the elevator of a Beijing apartment building.

New Jersey Central Tower, it said above a rendering of a gleaming housing complex. Government supports, star family builds.

The star family referred to relatives of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of and senior adviser to President Trump. The ad gave the details of a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Beijing where investors would learn how they could obtain permanent residence in the United States by investing $500,000 in a project called Kushner1.

On Saturday, May 6, I showed up at a ballroom in the Ritz-Carlton, doing my best to blend in with a crowd of Chinese investors.
Article: Cyberattacks Impact Could Worsen in Second Wave of Ransomware

Before Reading

What do you know about the cyberattacks that occurred on Friday? What companies have been affected? What is ransomware?

Questions for Comprehension and Analysis

1. How might the effects of last Fridays global cyberattacks be magnified on Monday? Why?

2. How many computers in how many countries have been hit, according to Rob Wainwright, the executive director of Europol?

3. What role has the British researcher who uses the Twitter name MalwareTech played in the aftermath of the cyberattacks? How old is MalwareTech?
STROUDSBURG, Pa.  Four men initially charged with murder in the hazing death of a Baruch College freshman pleaded guilty to reduced charges on Monday. The four were involved in a fraternity initiation in which the authorities said the 18-year-old student who died, Chun Hsien Deng, fell unconscious and the other fraternity members delayed seeking medical aid.

The students had traveled in the winter of 2013 to the Poconos from New York City for a weekend retreat where potential members went through a hazing to join Pi Delta Psi, an Asian-American fraternity. Mr. Deng was one of the pledges, and the authorities said he was knocked out after he was blindfolded, forced to wear a backpack weighted with sand and pummeled by other fraternity members as he tried to cross a frozen yard.

Almost two years later, Monroe County prosecutors announced that 37 people had been charged in connection with his death, many facing counts such as assault and hindering apprehension. Five of them, as well as the national fraternity itself, were charged with third-degree murder, which does not involve premeditation or a specific intent to kill.

Four of the men who had been charged with murder  Kenny Kwan, 28; Charles Lai, 26; Raymond Lam, 23; and Sheldon Wong, 24  appeared in court here on Monday, where they pleaded guilty to reduced charges of voluntary manslaughter and hindering apprehension after reaching an agreement with prosecutors.
To the Editor:

I was very sad to read The Next Standing Rock?, by Terry Tempest Williams (Sunday Review, May 7), about how Bears Ears National Monument in Utah could very well become another Standing Rock in both desecration and resistance given President Trumps order directing an Interior Department review of national monuments.

The red rock formations, vistas and five national parks of Utah are tributes to awe.

Oil and gas companies chasing the almighty buck are, with no foresight, making the beauty of this country up for grabs. I live near the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail, which are being threatened by Dominion Virginia Powers Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

No place of sanctuary is free from greedy corporate scarring and obliteration. We in central Virginia are fighting this rape of our land with allies across the United States. Our natural treasures are all becoming Standing Rock.

SUSAN B. LAZERSON, FABER, VA.
To the Editor:

Re Oval Office Etiquette: A G.O.P. Guide (editorial, May 14):

I wept when I read your list of inappropriate actions taken by President Trump. Its not that I wasnt aware of all of them before. But seeing them together paints a picture of a democracy in deep trouble, and of Congressional Republicans who have given up all pretense of working for anyone but themselves. They only care about getting their agenda passed before the 2018 election, no matter how it might hurt their constituents.

And to do this, they are turning a blind eye to an incompetent, corrupt and mentally unstable president. Its all about keeping their jobs. They demonstrate a complete lack of moral fiber. They should be ashamed.

And then there are the Trump supporters. I can understand their being angry at a government establishment that apparently does nothing to help them. But dont they see that Mr. Trump does nothing to help them, or the country or our dignity on the world stage? Dont they see that he cares only about himself, his glory and using his position to further enrich himself? What horrible thing does he have to do for them to see who he is?

It is all very disheartening. Who is going to save us?

ELLEN SUSSMAN, BROOKLYN

To the Editor:

Your editorial cites 34 examples of inappropriate behavior by our president. I think the issue in most peoples minds is whether the president is competent to perform his duties. Contrary to popular belief, his competency is a judicial and political question, not a psychiatric one. Congress needs to step up to the plate, as it did in 1974 when Republican leaders met with President Richard Nixon to let him know they would vote to impeach and convict him of the crimes of Watergate if he did not resign.
In fact, the P.C.F. constituted a powerful counter-society, one that stood apart from the rest of French political and social life without ever being completely cut off from it. The partys base was principally composed of workers, but also of small farmers, teachers and prestigious intellectuals, like Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso and Louis Althusser, to name just a few. Having elevated Marxist doctrine to infallible dogma, the P.C.F. derived strength from its ability to arouse passions  that is, to generate feelings of a quasi-religious nature that in turn led to mass mobilizations.

The passion for the Soviets was a prime example. The P.C.F. considered the Soviet Union as the fatherland of the revolution and the achievement of utopia, an earthly paradise that was to be defended at all costs. At different times, the Soviet Union was extolled as an example of a rationally organized economy, as a social model for workers, as a force for universal peace, as a determined adversary against fascism  and after 1945 as a rampart against American imperialism. The cult of Stalin reached its height during the Cold War. The fundamentally pro-Soviet P.C.F. nevertheless criticized Moscow for its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, during the heyday of Eurocommunism in the 1970s, even for its domestic policies. But the party never truly broke with the Soviets. Communist sympathizers werent all ardent followers of the Soviet Union, but they did show empathy with it, mostly because of the role it played during World War II and for its anti-Americanism  a sentiment widespread in France.

Starting in the mid-1930s and then during and after the Resistance, the P.C.F. endeavored to be at once the herald of internationalism, organized around the absolute primacy of Soviet interests, and the champion of national independence, defined in the partys terms. It was therefore at pains to reconcile a double allegiance to the Soviet Union and to France, though the former always won out over the latter. The Communists wanted to incarnate France, and beginning in the 1940s they tried in vain to deny De Gaulle a monopoly on the representation of the nation. For the P.C.F., France was a revolutionary nation, built on the tradition of 1789. In the 1970s, the P.C.F. claimed to have created socialism in French colors.

This glorification of the nation lies at the origin of the partys opposition to European integration. Moreover, the P.C.F. saw itself not only as the protector of the working class, but also as the voice of all the ordinary people who opposed capitalism. The party oscillated permanently between a kind of workerism that exalted the worker as the repository of all virtues and a propensity for populism when it tried to address other demographic groups. Ever since the 1970s, the workers world has been disappearing under the effects of economic modernization, and the P.C.F. has lost the greater part of its base without being capable of appealing to others.
BERKELEY, Calif.  The latest widespread ransomware attack, which has locked up computers in nearly 150 countries, has rightfully captured the worlds attention. But the focus shouldnt be on the scale of the attack and the immediate harm it is causing, or even on the source of the software code that enabled it (a previous attack against the National Security Agency). Whats most important is that British doctors have reverted to pen and paper in the wake of the attacks. Theyve given up on insecure digital technologies in favor of secure but inconvenient analog ones.

This back to analog moment isnt just a knee-jerk, stopgap reaction to a short-term problem. Its a rational response to our increasingly insecure internet, and we are going to see more of it ahead.

As part of our research, in 2015 we developed a scenario for the not-so-distant future called the New Normal, in which consumers baseline belief has flipped from the internet is basically safe unless I do something stupid to the internet is fundamentally insecure, a dangerous neighborhood in which my safety is always at risk. The impetus for the flipping in that scenario was a flurry of larger, ever more visible hacking attacks  of personal email accounts (Colin Powell and John Podesta) and corporate data (Yahoo and Sony), not to mention bank account information. Last weeks ransomware attack may start to tip a significant proportion of internet users over the edge.

The surprise is not that the frequency of such attacks is accelerating; its that it took so long. There are at least three reasons for this acceleration. First, the internet has a fundamentally insecure infrastructure that was initially made for interoperability among a small number of trusted parties, but is now being used by billions who do not know and should not trust one another.
To the Editor:

In Denied Parole, a Former Radical Reflects on Symbolism and Redemption (About New York, May 4), about my mother, Judith Clark, who has been in prison for 35 years for her role as a getaway driver in the fatal 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored car, Jim Dwyer quotes the Parole Boards statement that my mother is a symbol of violent and terroristic crime.

But parole decisions that refuse to take rehabilitation into account are their own kind of violence and create their own kind of terror. I am someone, my mother says, who once believed in violence and now believes in respecting human life.

New Yorks Parole Board members, who consistently refuse to release people they acknowledge are rehabilitated and low-risk, show no such respect for human life.

My mother says in the column that people in prison want to believe that what we do wrong matters, and that what we do right matters. What the Parole Board does matters, too  to people inside and their loved ones outside, and it should matter to everyone concerned about this countrys epidemic of excessive and inhumane incarceration.
If there was an opening act in President Trumps quest to exploit his office for personal gain, it was the rapid turn in fortunes experienced by the Trump International Hotel in Washingtons Old Post Office after he won the presidency.

For that to happen, Mr. Trump needed the General Services Administration, the governments property manager, to find he was not violating a clause in his lease. No elected official of the government of the United States, it says, shall be admitted to any share or part of this lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.

At its September opening, the hotel was a loser tied to a pariah in a deep-blue city. Its restaurant sat nearly empty; its rooms were hawked at steep discounts. After the election, everything changed. Foreign governments, corporate titans and lobbyists thronged the place: Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Kuwait moved parties from other venues to the hotel.

As the president-elect spun cash, Denise Turner Roth, the agency chief, saw nothing wrong. G.S.A. does not have a position that the lease provision requires the President-elect to divest of his financial interests, an agency spokesperson said. No determination regarding the Old Post Office can be completed until the full circumstances surrounding the President-elects business arrangements have been finalized and he has assumed office.
If you want to know what such voter intimidation looks like, take a look at Pences home state of Indiana, where state police in October 2016 raided the offices of a group working to register African-American and low-income voters, Ari Berman, author of the book Give Us the Ballot, writes in The Nation. In Kansas, Kobach has been the driving force within the G.O.P. behind policies that erect new barriers to the ballot box and the most fervent evangelist of unproven voter-fraud claims.

Jamelle Bouie of Slate has more on the obstacles that Kobach has tried to put between low-income voters and the ballot box.

An important caveat here: We still dont know whether voter suppression changed the outcome in any state in the 2016 presidential election, despite some recent claims from the political left. In a smart piece in Slate, Josh Voorhees walks through the evidence. He ends up skeptical. But as he points out, disenfranchising American citizens is shameful regardless of its short-term consequences.

Berman makes an even broader point: Were at a very dangerous moment for democracy right now, when the core institutions of our democratic system have repeatedly been attacked by the president of the United States. He adds, Saving American democracy is the most urgent fight of the Trump era.

Bouie writes: As Donald Trump begins his attack on voting, the Democratic Party should make voting rights its rallying cry, a first-order priority for any Democrat that wins office. More than a potential advantage for the party, its simply the right thing to do, a statement of belief in a democracy that, at this stage, needs all the help it can get.
In the name of being safe, students with traditional religious values or conservative political views now feel decidedly unsafe about expressing their views on campus.

And in the name of being safe, we are gravely jeopardizing the central task of any serious liberal education, which is not  or not merely  the transmission of knowledge.

It is, rather, the cultivation of a certain kind of spirit: a passion for inquiry; an insistence on asking hard questions and challenging received wisdom; a reveling in argument; a productive tension between self-confidence and self-doubt; a robust faith in the ultimate attainability of truth; and a humble acceptance that our understanding of the truth will almost always be something less than complete.

This is what education is, or ought to be, about. This is how we educate young men and women toward the moral and political responsibilities of democratic self-rule. This is how we lay the conditions for scientific and social progress. This is how we lay sturdy foundations for a truly civil society. Thomas Jefferson said it best in his first Inaugural Address: Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Let me repeat that, so that you may commit the words to memory: Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. When you cant speak freely, sooner or later it becomes difficult to think clearly. God did not give you a mouth in order to keep it shut. And the Constitution does not include a Bill of Rights so that we may refrain from exercising our rights.

This should be a standard for every free society  and for every great college and university.

From everything I have read about Hampden-Sydney, this is the education you have received here. I hope you use it well. But I need to level with you: Youll be facing an uphill battle.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of your peers are also celebrating their commencements, receiving their diplomas, starting out in the world. But not all of their educations have been liberal in the truest sense of the word.
Three years ago, the West African Ebola epidemic set off a worldwide panic and the biggest global-health security crisis in years. Then Zika struck and the reality of those transmittable disease threats was brought even closer to home in the United States, with more than 5,000 cases reported and America still on high alert. Yet today, an even greater potential threat to the world is sweeping across Brazil.

The disease, yellow fever, is a deadly virus that spreads as rapidly as Zika, with symptoms that can be as horrific as Ebola. It is transmitted by certain species of mosquito, including the same Aedes aegypti that carries Zika. Up to 15 percent of those bitten become severely ill, with symptoms that include black vomit and bleeding from the nose, mouth and eyes. For up to half of those who develop severe symptoms, yellow fever ends in a painful death.

Until about a century ago, the disease regularly caused urban epidemics in the United States, including one in Philadelphia that killed 10 percent of the population in 1793, forcing President George Washington and others in his administration to flee what was then the nations capital.

Now, with Brazil facing an unusually large outbreak of yellow fever  there are 715 confirmed cases, more than 820 suspected cases and 240 confirmed deaths  another global health crisis looms. So far, the outbreaks have largely been confined to sparsely populated jungle areas. There is serious concern, however, that if the virus starts spreading in a major city, health authorities will be ill equipped to contain it. Rio de Janeiro, for one, is aggressively vaccinating its citizens in hopes of inoculating 12 million by the end of the year.
RICHMOND, Va.  The United States is beginning to realize that it suffers from deferred maintenance of its own history. Here in Virginia, the city of Charlottesville is preparing to remove and sell its statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. New Orleans is already removing its Confederate statues and monuments honoring post-Civil War white supremacists.

Perhaps the most emblematic complex of structures honoring those who fought for the Confederacy is here in Richmond, its former capital. In the decades following the night they drove old Dixie down the citys business and housing was rebuilt step by step.

The early 20th century saw a broad row of grand patrician homes going up on Monument Avenue. The avenue is punctuated by equestrian statues of Confederate heroes  Lee, Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson  and a semicircular shrine with an outsize column glorifying the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, the seceding states and the deceptive doctrine of sovereign states deployed to defend slavery. They were erected 35 to 50 years after the war. Records show that they were meant to legitimize and dignify the white supremacist regime that had taken hold in Virginia.

The debate around these monuments  Should they be destroyed, maintained or removed elsewhere?  has been heated and, I believe, misguided. We should be asking other questions instead: Are these statues really monuments by our present standards? Or are they rather memorials? Are we misled by the avenues name? Do we need to rename the avenue itself as we attempt to remedy our deferred maintenance of history?
When people behave as if they have something to hide, it is often because they do. For me, this is a basic law of human behavior.

Thats why President Trumps baffling, outrageous, unfathomable and just plain bizarre behavior last week strengthened my already strong suspicions that there is something that Trump knows about the investigations into his campaigns contacts with Russia that he doesnt want us to know.

That is the only way that I can make sense of what happened: These are either the machinations of concealment, expressions of a burgeoning insanity, or both.

The details of the most recent episode in the Trump madness are now well known and yet every new detail that helps add texture to the story also renders it more horrifyingly egregious.
Princeton, N.J.  In Agatha Christies Murder on the Orient Express, the detective Hercule Poirot proposes an improbable theory to explain an improbable murder: Maybe they all did it. Twelve riders each stabbed the victim once, making it impossible to know who struck the fatal blow.

Poirots solution offers some insight into a debate among journalists and Democratic strategists: Was Donald Trumps surprise victory due to his voters racism or their economic anxiety? The right answer might be that it was both.

A similar question of whodunit inspired my research on the history of postwar white flight. White movement to the suburbs coincided with a period of substantial black migration out of the rural South: From 1940 to 1970, four million blacks settled in industrial cities in the North and West. As they moved in, the fraction of white metropolitan households living in the typical Northern or Western central city fell from two-thirds to one-third.

Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to the white exodus as a triumph of racist social engineering, and he is not wrong. Many white households moved to suburban towns precisely because black households were effectively excluded from them by real estate agents and mortgage brokers. But thats not the whole story. Even in cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul that had few black migrants, the suburbs were a magnet for newly prosperous families after World War II seeking larger houses and more open space.
Still, it was during this period that Milosz produced one of his most famous widely read works, the 1953 book The Captive Mind. In it he examined why so many intellectuals and artists of the time succumbed to, or pretended to believe in, communism. A successful ideology, he wrote, is comforting, an all-encompassing tool to salve our deepest fears and orient our lives. The book brought him international fame, although as a poet he felt uneasy about being pigeonholed as an analyst of Soviet politics.

Perhaps a decade ago, it would have been easy to pass off The Captive Mind as a relic of the totalitarian 20th century: However, the last decade has demonstrated how the mechanisms of mind control Milosz exposed continue to be deployed throughout the globe.

Some people, for example, feel certain that their failures or the collective failures of the state are caused by enemies one can easily pinpoint. They embrace ideologies that demonize liberals, communists, capitalists, Jews and, more fashionably in recent times, migrants and Muslims.

The importance of Miloszs analysis is that it applies to much more than communism and fascism, or even political ideology. Toward the end of his life the British historian Tony Judt was reading The Captive Mind with his students and pointing out that there are many different ideologies to which we passively yield and lies we choose to believe in: that wealth will make us happy, that thanks to the latest iPad we will find sense in our existence, that Facebook will bring us closer to others and that, because of all this, we will avoid pain and disappointment.

Many of the political and social transmutations that appalled Milosz  the fears and hatreds  have been revived. In Native Realm he tells of his journey through France in the 1930s and how, walking together with his friends across a bridge joining Switzerland and France, he encountered a sign saying, Gypsies, Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians are forbidden entry. Change the ethnicities, and one could easily find a similar message along other borders today, and not just in Europe.

It could be said that the history of humanity is defined and dictated by two opposing processes: building bridges and raising walls. A bridge brings us closer to others, allows us to get to know them; it is a beginning of or an extension to a road. A wall separates, closes. And although it appears to provide security, it also generates a defensive mentality, the conviction that everything on the other side represents a threat, as the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski points out.
The Legislature on Monday approved a resolution opposing any federal action to rescind protections for so-called DACA youths that now allow them to legally remain in the United States.

But the expression of support for the young people who were brought to the United States as children when their parents entered the country illegally was delivered in a lukewarm manner, as 17 senators declined to vote.

The resolution, authored by Sen. Tony Vargas of Omaha, was adopted by a 24-1 margin, with Sen. John Murante of Gretna casting the single opposition tally.

"In my view, DACA represented an unconstitutional use of executive authority (and) I cannot support former President Obama's unconstitutional executive action," Murante said following the vote.

Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive action in 2012 granted those Latino youths legal presence to remain in the United States.

More than 3,000 young immigrants live in Nebraska under that protection.

Vargas said the resolution reaffirms the Legislature's past record of support for DACA youths and informs "a new president who has spoken about changing DACA" that the Nebraska Legislature stands with them.

"This is an opportunity for our state to allow him to hear our voices," Vargas said.

On three separate occasions in the past, the Legislature has voted to grant DACA youths resident tuition rates at Nebraska colleges and universities and the right to acquire Nebraska driver's licenses and to earn professional and commercial licenses to work in the state. All were adopted over gubernatorial vetoes.

This was the first expression by members of the current Legislature.

Sen. Bob Krist of Omaha told his colleagues that "these young adults who have grown up in our schools and contributed to our communities deserve your support."

Sen. Laura Ebke of Crete also spoke in support of the resolution, noting that these young Latinos have "the same dreams as any other kid."

Vargas, the only Latino member of the Legislature, said Latino families are "feeling fears" now as President Donald Trump's rhetoric and actions have "changed how this country handles immigrants."

No one spoke in opposition to the resolution.
On todays episode:

 The firing of James Comey has raised questions of a White House cover-up and drawn comparisons to Nixons midnight massacre. But is there a version of this story that says it amounts to little? Were joined by Jeremy W. Peters, who has been covering the reaction in the conservative news media.

 Laurie Goodstein, the religion correspondent for The New York Times, discusses an overlooked executive order that would seem to blur the line between church and state. And we talk with two pastors, Gus Booth and Jamie Washam, about the case for and against politics from the pulpit.

Background reading:

 More on the outrage among Trump supporters over criticism of Mr. Comeys dismissal. More clearly than other recent Trump-induced uproars, the reaction to the Comey firing illustrated how many conservatives now justify their defense of the president as part of a fight against a rising tide of overreaction and manufactured hysteria by the left, Mr. Peters writes.

 An explanation of the executive order that Mr. Trump signed this month, the centerpiece of which is a pledge to allow clergy members and houses of worship to endorse political candidates from the pulpit.
MONTREAL  The driving instructor wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and not just because of the heat. His student  a grown woman, squinting over the dashboard  was ramming the curb in an effort to parallel park.

We reached an agreement, right then and there: He let me pass the test, and I promised never to drive, Brenda Milner said, smiling to herself at the decades-old memory. You see, my spatial skills arent so good. Thats primarily a right-brain function.

Dr. Milner, a professor of psychology in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, is best known for discovering the seat of memory in the brain, the foundational finding of cognitive neuroscience. But she also has a knack for picking up on subtle quirks of human behavior and linking them to brain function  in the same way she had her own, during the driving test.

At 98, Dr. Milner is not letting up in a nearly 70-year career to clarify the function of many brain regions  frontal lobes, and temporal; vision centers and tactile; the left hemisphere and the right  usually by painstakingly testing people with brain lesions, often from surgery. Her prominence long ago transcended gender, and she is impatient with those who expect her to be a social activist. Its science first with Dr. Milner, say close colleagues, in her lab and her life.
Other conservatives in Congress took aim at climate researchers well before the 2016 election. Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee, last year subpoenaed federal climate scientists whose work supporting the evidence of a warming planet shows what he has called a suspect climate agenda.

Actions by the Trump administration have been met with anger, lawsuits and friend-of-the-court briefs. A group of former Obama administration lawyers has filed lawsuits seeking information about charges of bullying of civil servants and scientists who work on climate issues.

David M. Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former top prosecutor of environmental crimes at the Justice Department, has taken part in several such efforts, including briefs filed before Mr. Trump took office. He said the work was important both as an attempt to preserve environmental progress and as a message to his students.

In November, many of his students expressed dismay over the election results and their concern that everything they came to law school for no longer mattered, Professor Uhlmann said. My message to them was, Everything you came to law school for matters more than ever before.

Other lawyers are stepping up to protect dozens of climate scientists who have been targeted by private conservative groups demanding their personal emails and other documents. The groups, which dispute the powerful evidence underlying climate change science, use the tactic to unearth embarrassing and inartful language in private correspondence and then publicize it.

Those filing the document requests say they are trying to ferret out politicized, sloppy science and fraud. David Schnare, an official at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, said, The legislatures give the citizens a right to know, and for good reasons  and there are good reasons for citizens to find out whats going on. Mr. Schnare, who was a longtime E.P.A. employee, briefly served in the Trump administrations transition team at the agency; the group receives funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Entering the designer Jed Krascellas West Village apartment is a bit like walking through the looking glass, or into the Wardrobe. A guest, arriving on a rainy April afternoon, might be offered Turkish delight (From friends in Athens, Krascella says) or delicate candied Violet petals (a drop from the south of France.) Curios fill the walls and shelves: Theres the Florentine tabernacle, dragged back from Tuscany, and Saint Valentines tooth, nestled in a reliquary that Krascella found in Sicily. Iranian pomegranates, dried and hand-painted, sit alongside a selection of scarabs from Luxor, Egypt. I travel a lot, he says. Can you tell?

Stacked neatly on the seat of a chair is Krascellas latest  and perhaps most eclectic  collection: a line of sweaters from his eponymous label, Jed, which launched last year. This was made in Scotland, he says, holding up a striped cashmere turtleneck in a rainbow of soft hues (More colors than any sane person would put in a sweater, in a manufacturing sense.) Scottish cashmere is the best, he adds. Theres something about the water there. An oversize merino silk college sweater was made in China, where theyre adept at certain detail work (Look at the precision!), while a thick camel-hair cardigan with a broad collar and flounced cuffs is done in Italy.

Like everything in Krascellas cabinet of curiosities, the sweaters defy easy categorization  some are playful and eccentric, others sharply tailored and classic. A chunky pullover, busy with squares of color (he calls it the Paul Klee), sits next to a delicate Japanese silk V-neck; bold, Bauhaus-inspired graphics mingle with intricate, more feminine-seeming crochet work. For the designer, this maximalist approach resists the overly polished and hands-off aesthetic of other brands. What unifies the line is an interest in pushing expectations of what a sweater can or should be.

Krascella, who began his career as a designer at Perry Ellis, insists that sweaters are in his blood. When you mention the word cashmere to my 90-year-old mother, she stops everything, he says. As an undergraduate at Parsons, Krascella included a sweater  usually hand-knit by his mother  in every project. Its a family passion.
A cyberattack has hit at least 200,000 computers in 150 countries since Friday. More will be known about the extent of the incident as workers who might have missed it on Friday trickle into the office on Monday. But where there have not been major outbreaks might be most telling, at least about who takes computer security seriously.

The attack, to be specific, was a nasty form of ransomware, which hackers use to lock people out of their computers and demand payment. The malicious code relied on the victims opening a zip file emailed to them. From there, the program used a flaw in Microsoft operating system software to proliferate. Microsoft released a patch for that vulnerability in March, but as has been made clear, plenty of people, companies and government agencies around the world have not been keeping their software up to date.
A decade-old form of malicious software known as ransomware has been making headlines after cybercriminals hijacked hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide.

Ransomware, which is often transmitted by email or web pop-ups, involves locking up peoples data and threatening to destroy it if a ransom is not paid. The global cyberattack has affected 200,000 Windows computers in more than 150 countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Britain.

The cybercriminals have generally targeted hospitals, academic institutions, blue-chip companies and businesses like movie theater chains. The attacks highlight the challenges that organizations face with consistently applying security safeguards on a large scale.

Not only individuals, but even governments and big companies with so much to lose fail to secure their systems and train their employees about necessary security practices, said Marty P. Kamden, a marketing executive for the private network service provider NordVPN. Cautious online behavior would probably have prevented the malware from infecting the network in the first place.
For 18 days last month, a team of computer security experts found themselves engaged in a digital version of hand-to-hand combat with a group of hackers determined to break into the network of a military contractor.

Every time the hackers, believed to be Iranian, gained a toehold in one server, the defenders shut down their access. A few days later, the hackers would come in through another digital door, and again the defenders would block them.

While dueling with the hackers, the security experts said they encountered something that they had never seen before when dealing with an Iranian cyberattack: a Russian connection.

Specifically, they found that the Iranians were using a tool set developed by a known Russian hacker-for-hire and sold in underground Russian forums. The tool had popped up in connection with an attack in Ukraine in 2015, when Russian hackers successfully shut down parts of Ukraines power grid.
Shiny new signs posted last week in northern Nevada signal that the state is joining a trend toward higher speed limits for rural highways  motorists can now hit 80 miles per hour on a 130-mile stretch of Interstate 80.

Nevada has long been known as a state that allows people to do things they cant do anywhere else in the country, but dont expect any winking boasts that what happens between Fernley and Winnemucca stays between Fernley and Winnemucca. A handful of other states already had a limit of 80 m.p.h. or more, and there are places in the world where you can legally go even faster.

Things really are bigger in Texas. And Germany.

A section of State Highway 130 in Texas, a toll road between Austin and San Antonio, has an 85 m.p.h. speed limit, the highest in the United States  a fact that drew a lot of attention when the blacktop opened to traffic in 2012. It did not, however, draw a lot of drivers, and the company that won the concession to operate the highway filed for bankruptcy last year.

Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming raised the limits on certain roads to 80 m.p.h. in recent years  in part out of a recognition that a lot of people were driving that fast already. Mississippi has a theoretical 80 m.p.h. limit; it applies only to toll roads, and the state has no toll roads.
Barron Trump, the presidents fifth and youngest child, will attend St. Andrews Episcopal, a preparatory school in Potomac, Md., in the fall, affirming the first familys plans to reunite in Washington after living apart since President Trump took office.

Barron, 11, and his mother, Melania Trump, the first lady, have been living in Trump Tower in Manhattan so he could finish the academic year at his Upper West Side private school. Mrs. Trump has expressed reservations about bringing Barron closer to the Washington spotlight, although Mr. Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg News this month that his wife and youngest son still planned to join him in Washington.

Mrs. Trump confirmed the decision.

We are very excited for our son to attend St. Andrews Episcopal School, she said in a statement. It is known for its diverse community and commitment to academic excellence. The mission of St. Andrews is to know and inspire each child in an inclusive community dedicated to exceptional teaching, learning and service, all of which appealed to our family.

The choice of St. Andrews in suburban Montgomery County is a break from tradition for first families school-age children. Many presidential families, including the Obamas, the Clintons, the Nixons and the Roosevelts, sent their children to the prestigious Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school in Washington. Jimmy Carter sent his daughter, Amy, to public school in the city.
Mr. Gillum, by contrast, has offered himself as a candidate of the left. A firebrand on the stump, he has called insistently for a rollback of Republican education policies and for aggressive action against climate change. Since House Republicans passed a bill that would gut the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Gillum has made protecting health care regulations on the state level a centerpiece of his message.

Theres muscle memory thats been built up over a long time about what the candidate has to look like, sound like, where they have to come from, he said. In our case, in Florida, it hasnt worked.

That sense of frustration among black Democrats parallels, in some respects, the exasperation Democrats in general have voiced after the 2016 election.

If certain black candidates like Mr. Gillum and Ms. Abrams are urging an untested path, they may find primary voters more receptive to the idea after the failure of conventional Democratic strategies against Mr. Trump. Mr. Gillum and Ms. Abrams have already attracted significant interest from national liberal donors: Mr. Gillums first fund-raising report showed contributions from members of the Soros family, and several donors supportive of Ms. Abrams are expected to create a multimillion-dollar committee to advocate her election, according to people briefed on their plans.

The determination to compete in 2018 may run deeper in the black community, where the sense of political exclusion is even more acute. With the end of the Obama administration, there are few black Democrats in senior positions of power: just two black Democrats in the Senate and no black governors of either party. A third black senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, is a Republican.

There is limited optimism among African-American Democrats that national party leaders will work aggressively to change that. Several of the most promising black candidates or would-be candidates  including Mr. Gillum, Ms. Abrams and Mr. Jealous  are likely to face contested primaries against well-known, well-funded white opponents. And the battle for control of the House and Senate is likely to be fought largely in rural states with few minority voters, and in suburban congressional districts where right-of-center whites often cast the decisive votes.

Symone D. Sanders, a spokeswoman for Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential campaign, said she was concerned that national Democrats might reflexively favor white candidates in close races, rather than trusting black candidates to win over swing voters.
Members of the Nebraska Legislature signaled support Monday for protecting refugees regardless of their ethnicity or religious background.

The move came in the form of a formal resolution (LR27), sponsored by Lincoln Sen. Kate Bolz, that recognized the rich cultural history of the United States, the plight of refugees around the world and the efforts of local nonprofit organizations to assist them.

Lawmakers voted 21-7 to adopt the resolution during one of the final days of the 2017 legislative session.

Fourteen senators who were present chose to not vote.

In describing her resolution Monday on the legislative floor, Bolz mentioned University of Nebraska-Lincoln student Hana Muslic and UNL graduate Shams Al-Badry  two refugees who were among the people who testified in support of her resolution during a hearing in March.

"Nebraska is stronger with all of them," Bolz said.
WASHINGTON  No one knew it at the time, but Al Qaedas ability to strike in the West was severely damaged when a skinny onetime altar boy who grew up on Long Island stumbled into a Pakistani checkpoint in 2008, attacked a police officer and was detained.

Within days, F.B.I. agents had flown to Pakistan and were grilling the young man, Bryant Neal Vinas. He told them that he had consulted for Qaeda leadership on spectacular plans to blow up the Long Island Rail Road. Osama bin Laden wanted to turn him into a recruiting poster.

Mr. Vinas kept talking to the F.B.I. agents, and to federal prosecutors back in New York. He talked for the next eight years, taking part in 100 interviews, reviewing 1,000 photographs and assisting in more than 30 law enforcement investigations. Mr. Vinas, who had once volunteered to become a suicide bomber, turned on Al Qaeda with devastating effect.

The extraordinary assistance from Mr. Vinas, now 34, created a dilemma for the federal judge deciding his fate last week. The judge had to decide how to punish a criminal who had demonstrated such a capacity for evil but who had also helped deliver a crushing blow to the terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
WASHINGTON  The Trump administration said on Monday it would vastly expand the so-called global gag rule that withholds American aid from health organizations worldwide that provide or even discuss abortion in family planning. The new policy could disrupt hundreds of clinics in Africa and around the world that fight AIDS and malaria.

It affects about $8.8 billion in global health funding, up from about $600 million during the administration of President George W. Bush.

The rules, issued by the State Department, mean that any foreign nongovernmental group that wants American money for any of its health activities  from AIDS treatment to malaria prevention to safe childbirth practices  must promise not to promote abortion as a method of family planning. Already, American taxpayer dollars cannot be used for abortion services abroad.

They are a follow-up to an executive order President Trump signed in January, which froze funding to nongovernmental organizations if they offer abortion counseling or advocate the right to seek abortion. In April, the administration also froze funding to the United Nations agency that promotes family planning efforts.
WASHINGTON  President Trump boasted about highly classified intelligence in a meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador last week, providing details that could expose the source of the information and the manner in which it was collected, a current and a former American government official said Monday.

The intelligence disclosed by Mr. Trump in a meeting with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, was about an Islamic State plot, according to the officials. A Middle Eastern ally that closely guards its own secrets provided the information, which was considered so sensitive that American officials did not share it widely within the United States government or pass it on to other allies.

Mr. Trumps disclosure does not appear to have been illegal  the president has the power to declassify almost anything. But sharing the information without the express permission of the ally who provided it was a major breach of espionage etiquette, and could jeopardize a crucial intelligence-sharing relationship.

In fact, the ally has repeatedly warned American officials that it would cut off access to such sensitive information if it were shared too widely, the former official said. In this case, the fear is that Russia will be able to determine exactly how the information was collected and could disrupt the allys espionage efforts.
WASHINGTON  Three months after the federal appeals court in California blocked President Trumps first travel ban, a three-judge panel of the same court heard arguments on Monday in a challenge to Mr. Trumps revised ban, this one limiting travel from six predominantly Muslim countries.

Mr. Trump views the appeals court  the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit  as a hostile forum, frequently criticizing it on Twitter. But the judges hearing Mondays arguments asked probing questions of both sides and may not be ready to endorse the sweeping reasoning of a federal judge in Hawaii who blocked major parts of the revised order.

The appeals court judges, all appointed by President Bill Clinton, barely tipped their hands, but they did say they recognized that the dispute before them was momentous. The argument was held in Seattle and broadcast live on C-Span.

This court is very well aware of the importance of this case, Judge Ronald M. Gould said at the outset.
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Monday refused to revive a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.

The courts decision not to hear an appeal in the case effectively overturned one of the most far-reaching attempts by Republicans to counter what they contended, without evidence, was widespread voter fraud in North Carolina. The law rejected the forms of identification used disproportionately by blacks, including IDs issued to government employees, students and people receiving public assistance.

Democrats and civil rights groups, wary of the Supreme Court now that it has regained a conservative majority with the appointment of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, welcomed the announcement that it would not hear the case.

An ugly chapter in voter suppression is finally closing, said Dale Ho, director of the A.C.L.U.s Voting Rights Project.
That means the Supreme Court is very likely to weigh in on the fate of political gerrymandering, probably during the courts next term, which starts in October.

There are two basic ways to inject partisan politics into drawing legislative maps: packing and cracking. Both result in what Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, a law professor at the University of Chicago and a lawyer for the plaintiffs, calls wasted votes.

Packing a lot of Democrats into a single district, for instance, wastes every Democratic vote beyond the bare majority needed to elect a Democratic candidate. Cracking Democratic voters across districts in which Republicans have small majorities wastes all of the Democratic votes when the Republican candidate wins.

In an influential article, Professor Stephanopoulos and his colleague Eric McGhee applied a little math to this observation. The difference between the two parties wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast, yields an efficiency gap, they wrote. In a world of perfect nonpartisanship, there would be no gap.

The gap in Wisconsin was 13.3 percent in 2012 and 9.6 percent in 2014.

The Wisconsin voters who sued to challenge the Assembly map argued that gaps over 7 percent violate the Constitution. That number was meant to capture the likelihood that the gap would endure over a 10-year election cycle, but critics say it is arbitrary.

Adopting it, they say, would transform American elections. A 2015 report from Simon Jackman, then a political scientist at Stanford and an expert witness for the plaintiffs, found that a third of all redistricting plans in 41 states over a 43-year period failed the 7 percent standard. Elections in 2012 and 2014 in Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming featured efficiency gaps of more than 10 percent, Professor Jackman found.
LILONGWE, Malawi  A contingent of Ugandan and American military officials  and a handful of journalists  will board a plane on Tuesday in the Ugandan city of Entebbe for an approximately two-and-a-half-hour flight.

Destination: the remote town of Obo, in the southeastern part of Central African Republic, where they will take part in a ceremony organized by Uganda to mark the end of the mission to capture or kill Joseph Kony, the notorious leader of the Lords Resistance Army, or L.R.A.

Mr. Kony was, of course, never captured or killed.

The United States spent almost $800 million on the effort since 2011, when President Barack Obama deployed Special Operations forces to the region to provide advisory support, intelligence and logistical assistance to African Union soldiers fighting the Lords Resistance Army. Officials from the countries involved say they have significantly degraded the L.R.A., diminishing it to around 100 people today from a fighting force of 3,000. Now, they say, its time to go home.

Still, when Ugandan officials informed their American counterparts that they wanted to have a ceremony to celebrate the end of the mission, some Defense Department officials at the Pentagon, mindful of mission accomplished ceremonies that can come back to bite celebrants, were wary. But the Ugandans were insistent, defense officials said, and the Americans offered up Brig. Gen. Kenneth H. Moore, the deputy commanding general of United States Army Africa, along with the American ambassador to the Central African Republic, Jeffrey Hawkins, to carry the flag.
On Sunday, union representatives for a Renault auto plant in France received text messages from the management: Tell the workers to stay home the next day. The company was still dealing with the fallout from a global hack that hit thousands of businesses and the factory would be shut.

Since the hack was first detected on Friday, the companys technicians have been racing to assess the damage. They have cleaned and rebooted systems that control robots on Renaults factory floors, trying to make sure their systems were back to normal.

As universities, hospitals and businesses around the world continue to take stock from a global hack that has locked up at least 200,000 machines since last week, they are going through much the same process. Many are also trying to determine if they have lost any data or if their systems are safe. Some are trying to figure out whether they should pay the ransom, or whether they have backups that will allow them to avoid giving in.

On Saturday morning, technicians inspecting computers at Renaults Sandouville operation in northern France found a demand in French for a $300 Bitcoin ransom with a threat to erase data. The carmaker decided not to pay.
NEW DELHI  A 10-year-old girl who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather, and who is now at least 20 weeks pregnant, may be forced to give birth because of Indias restrictive abortion law.

In a case that has become a glaring example of both impunity for rapists and a lack of womens reproductive rights in India, a court must decide whether the pregnant girl is entitled to an abortion.

A medical board in the northern Indian state of Haryana said on Monday that the girls life had not been endangered by the pregnancy, a necessary condition under the law for most abortions conducted after 20 weeks. India enacted that law in part to discourage the widespread termination of female fetuses in a part of the world where boys are preferred.

In making its determination, the medical board said a court would have to determine whether the girls case meets the legal threshold of exceptional circumstances that justify an abortion.
I was promised everything under the sun, Mr. Kalia said, referring to what Indian officials had told him. But the picture became clear. They will summon the Pakistani high commissioner and give him a protest note. What importance will they give to that protest note? They have accepted it, they tear it, and they throw it out.

Last year, The Hindu, a daily newspaper, printed internal government documents about a 2011 Indian Army raid called Operation Ginger, which was prompted by a Pakistani attack that had killed six Indian soldiers. Two of the dead were beheaded. The response came a month later: an ambush that left at least eight Pakistanis dead, three of them beheaded, according to documents cited by the newspaper.

The newspaper characterized the soldiers heads as trophies.

Beheading carries extraordinary emotional power for troops and has for many centuries, said Gen. Ved Prakash Malik, who was chief of the Indian Army during the Kargil conflict, a monthslong war the two countries fought along the Line of Control in 1999.

You know, from the old wars, beheading is being considered, for the victors, a kind of a big thing they had done, and for the loser, a big insult that they have suffered, he said.

Both the Pakistani and Indian Armies also were imprinted by the British military tradition, which puts a massive emphasis on unit loyalty, said Myra MacDonald, a journalist and author of Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War. According to the Indian Army, more than 4,500 Indian soldiers have been killed or injured along the Line of Control since 2001.

If you see a couple of your mates killed, you certainly would be in a blind rage to avenge them, she said. This is what happens when men fight wars. On one hand, you know where the limits are, and on the other hand, you get this ground-level rage when you see the man next to you killed.
MANILA  Lawmakers in the Philippines on Monday threw out an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte that accused him of orchestrating the mass murder of thousands of people in his crackdown on drug use.

The Justice Committee of the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Duterte backers, reviewed the complaint and declared it insufficient.

The majority leader, Rudy Farinas, said that Congressman Gary Alejano, who initiated the complaint, had no personal knowledge of the allegations, which he said were taken largely from news reports of the killings.

Mr. Alejano said the action to stop the complaint showed the governments unwillingness to act. Since Mr. Duterte became president in June, more than 4,000 people have been killed by the police in antidrug operations or by vigilantes in drug-related cases, according to police statistics.
BERLIN  Nearly six months after Austria averted a swing to the right by rejecting an extremist candidate for president, the country appeared poised to clear a path for the far-right Freedom Party to enter into power as the current government teetered on the verge of collapse.

Austrians were not scheduled to elect a new Parliament until September 2018, but after months of bickering, the leaders of the two parties in the current governing coalition met with the president on Monday to seek a date for an election.

The move is expected to open the door for the Freedom Party to enter into government for the second time since it was formed by former Nazis in the 1950s, given its current popularity ahead of either traditional party in opinion polls.

Such a turn would signal that the populist movements and extremist parties in Europe are certainly not dead yet, even after being turned back by voters this year in the Netherlands and France, as well as in Austria last year.
THE HAGUE  Twelve people who were conceived with sperm from a Dutch fertility center have filed a lawsuit asserting that its longtime director is their biological father, and that over several decades, he swapped donors sperm with his own.

The 12 people, and 10 mothers who suspect that their children were conceived using the clinic directors sperm, filed a lawsuit on Friday asking a court in Rotterdam to give them access to the DNA of the clinic director, Dr. Jan Karbaat, who died last month at 89.

Im hoping that the judge will allow us to extract the DNA so we can use it to find out if we are his children, one plaintiff, Moniek Wassenaar, 36, said in an interview. The 12 people are 8 to 36 years old. Some of the 10 mothers in the suit conceived children who are still minors.

From 1980 to 2009, Dr. Karbaat ran a sperm bank in the rear of his stately yellow brick house in the Bijdorp section of Barendrecht, near Rotterdam. He became well known in the field of assisted reproduction. About 10,000 children are estimated to have been conceived at the clinic.
BERLIN  The new French president and the veteran German chancellor used their first engagement on Monday to declare their determination to salvage European unity now that France has beaten back the immediate risk from radical populism, which threatened to undo the European Union itself.

As has become tradition for a new leader in either France or Germany, the first trip abroad is to the others country, and Chancellor Angela Merkel continued in the regal spirit of Emmanuel Macrons inauguration as French president on Sunday, greeting her visitor with full military honors.

Hundreds of onlookers, some waving European flags, cheered at the brief ceremony.

The pomp reflected a rare moment of hope for a European Union that has in recent years faced a relentless succession of troubles  the euro and debt crisis, a migration and border crisis, terrorist attacks, the British vote to bail on the bloc  that has left it staring at the prospect of disintegration.

The election of Mr. Macron now offers the bloc, but Ms. Merkel in particular, a chance to hit reset and for its core partners to press ahead with overhauls to save the decades-old project of economic and political comity that has preserved peace and prosperity on the Continent.
LONDON  An 81-year-old former Marxist urban guerrilla who became a far-right extremist and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for Holocaust denial was arrested in Hungary on Monday after illegally leaving Germany, officials said.

The German news media reported that the extremist, Horst Mahler, had announced he was seeking asylum in Hungary, where the rightist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has repeatedly provoked the European Union with crackdowns on the press, political opponents, refugees, judges and academic institutions.

Ken Heidenreich, a spokesman for the prosecutors office in Munich, said in a telephone interview that his office had been informed that Mr. Mahler had been arrested in Hungary.
PRAGUE  Milos Zeman, the president of the Czech Republic since 2013, is no stranger to controversy. He once suggested that vegetarians and teetotalers should be put to death  and then added that he was referring to Hitler, who abstained from alcohol and meat. He has referred to news reporters as manure and hyenas. He has called Islam a religion of death.

Mr. Zemans latest incendiary remark came on Sunday. In Beijing for an international conference to discuss Beijings $1 trillion One Belt, One Road plan to shake up the global economic order, Mr. Zeman was chatting with Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, when he appeared to suddenly suggest that journalists be killed.

And here are other journalists? Mr. Zeman asked in Russian, as the two presidents walked to a news conference. There are too many journalists.

The audio was fuzzy, but Mr. Zeman was clearly heard talking of a need to liquidate the journalists.
LONDON  Since emerging as prime minister from the political wreckage of last years vote to quit the European Union, Theresa May has told Britains voters little about what she believes, aside from stressing her desire for a clean break from the bloc.

But with an election looming, Mrs. May is promoting some strikingly centrist social and economic policies, reaching out across the political divide to traditional supporters of the opposition Labour Party, many of whose incomes were squeezed after the financial crash.

On Monday Mrs. May promised that, if elected, her Conservative Party would extend protections for workers in the gig economy, increase minimum pay levels and ensure a years unpaid leave for those who care for a sick relative.

My plan will deliver a fairer deal for all workers, by extending rights and protections, said Mrs. May, using language more normally associated with the Labour Party. She also promised to force employers to publish data on racial pay disparities and to accept some form of employee representation on company boards.
TEHRAN  One of the leading hard-line candidates for Irans presidency withdrew from the race on Monday, in a move aimed at consolidating the conservative vote ahead of Fridays election.

The candidate, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the mayor of Tehran, threw his support behind Ebrahim Raisi, a former top official of the judiciary, who is seen as the main threat to the moderate incumbent, President Hassan Rouhani.

Recent polls have put the combined support for the two conservative candidates at just over 50 percent, with Mr. Rouhani at around 42 percent. That is not to say, however, that all of Mr. Qalibafs supporters will automatically vote for Mr. Raisi.

In suspending his campaign, the third unsuccessful run he has made at the presidency, Mr. Qalibaf released a statement calling the Rouhani camp of moderates and reformists pseudorevolutionaries who are consuming the roots of the revolution like termites.
WASHINGTON  The United States accused the Syrian government on Monday of using a crematory to hide mass murders at a prison where thousands are believed to have been summarily executed in the nations civil war.

The assertion, based on newly declassified satellite photographs of the prison, significantly expanded the accusations the United States has leveled at President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, with some officials appearing to draw a parallel to Nazi Germany.

The attempt to cover up mass murders in the Assad crematorium is reminiscent of the 20th centurys worst offenses against humanity, said Nikki R. Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr. Assads forces and their allies have been widely accused by human rights groups and others of killing thousands of prisoners and burying their bodies in mass graves during the course of the war, now in its seventh year.
GENEVA  As President Trump prepares for his first overseas trip this week, his decision to make Saudi Arabia his first stop is prompting urgent appeals from humanitarian agencies to assist in the crisis in neighboring Yemen, which is careening toward a catastrophe.

Seven million people in Yemen are facing starvation and 17 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian relief after two years of fighting between a Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels.

Adding to Yemens misery, health officials in the capital, Sana, declared an emergency on Sunday over an outbreak of cholera. The disease has killed more than 100 people in the country in little more than two weeks and has swamped hospitals that are critically short of medicines.

Its very, very timely that the United States apply all the pressure it can with regard to all parties involved, including Saudi Arabia, David Beasley, the newly installed head of the United Nations food relief agency, told reporters in Geneva on Monday.
CHICAGO -- In March, two illegal immigrant teens were accused of attacking and raping a 14-year-old girl in a Maryland high school bathroom stall. The girl had reported the boys to the police, claiming that they'd held her down as she cried and tried to break free, and repeatedly told them to stop and as they took turns assaulting her.

The incident was used by the Trump administration to illustrate the narrative of the south-of-the-border rapist and murderer that Donald Trump has been pushing since announcing his run for president.

It turns out that the prosecutors in the case had to drop the sexual assault charges because text messages underscored the defendants' claim that the sex had been consensual, and school surveillance video footage backed up their claim that the school-grounds tryst had been pre-arranged.

Unfortunately, sexual behavior goes on in high schools -- and, now, increasingly, in middle schools -- all the time. These days, sexting, videotaping sexual encounters and engaging in sexual contact in taboo settings are just part of the landscape when it comes to young people who have high-powered, web-connected cameras in their hands 24/7.

The real issue in the Maryland case was the legal status of the perpetrators.

So, now that the two teens have been cleared of rape and sexual offense charges, it's time to reinforce the fact that not all -- not even most -- illegal immigrants are criminals who are here to harm U.S. citizens.

Entering the U.S. without permission -- or entering on a visa and then overstaying it -- is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

In an analysis of data that included both individual self-reports of crime and official records, researchers from the University of Massachusetts and the University of Texas at Dallas reiterated the low crime rates among immigrants and found "no evidence that foreign-born, first-generation immigrants underreport their arrest history. In fact, when evidence of divergence exists, it is in the direction of immigrants overreporting arrests."

Research going back nearly a century affirms that the foreign-born are involved in crime at significantly lower rates than their U.S.-born peers.

The reason this is not better understood is that we can't directly compare the number of crimes committed by the foreign-born to those committed by the U.S.-born.

"When the FBI releases data on crime, they don't release the proportion of arrests that are committed by the undocumented -- their numbers come from 15,000-odd police departments who don't have the field for immigration status as part of their data collection," said Alex Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Dallas and co-author of the new study. "So we don't know how many are undocumented, and we also don't know how many are living here. We have back-of-the-envelope estimates of about 11 million, but we don't know for sure."

Piquero told me that there are political aspects implicit in how data is collected. For instance, up until 2013, the FBI did not sort out Hispanics -- they were lumped in to the white or black categories.

And, in terms of municipalities collecting immigration-status data, Piquero said, "I'm not a member of any immigrant advocacy organizations, but it's easy to see how they might see it as a double-edged sword. Yes, you might want to capture information on legal status to demonstrate that the undocumented aren't a problem, but then that might open them up to being detained and deported."

So we must nibble at the edges of the data we do have to gain a better understanding of who commits crime. According to the most recent Department of Justice report on federal arrest statistics, in 2014 non-U.S. citizens made up 41.8 percent of defendants charged in U.S. District Court and 37 percent of those were in the country without legal authorization.

We're talking about 23,783 unlawfully present defendants out of a total U.S. foreign-born population of 42 million, in 2014. That's a rate of 0.057 percent of all foreign-born immigrants charged in federal court, and about a third of those cases were immigration-related.

Surely, all crime is far too much crime. And all reasonable people want law and order to prevail. But our country will not get less violent or more safe if we collectively choose to pretend that our crime problem would go away if only we could get rid of all the illegal immigrants.
I once heard a story about a guy who wanted to write a book. But he was too overwhelmed by the enormity of the process, so for a decade, he didnt do it. One day, he decided to create a 5,000-word monthly magazine and offer a two-year subscription to everyone he knew. A bunch of people signed up, and all of a sudden, he had to do it. At the end of two years, he had 120,000 words to work with to create this book.

Theres another guy I know who for 10-plus years made a commitment to sit down every day and write something. Thats exactly the opposite of waiting for inspiration to strike. Every day. Nobodys creative every day for 10 years! Now this guy didnt start out as a creative, but I dont think anyone would bat an eye if you called him that today. In fact, you may have heard of him. His name is Seth Godin. Check out his blog and decide for yourself.

Of course, I can relate. Im no Seth Godin, but every week for seven years now, Ive had a deadline to produce this column and draw something. I have never seen myself as an artist or an illustrator. But for about 400 weeks, Ive created a sketch to go in The New York Times. So, I engaged in the process, and, as Mr. Close puts it, I went to work.

All my best work happens this way. Not through luck of the draw but through persistence and dedication. And Im not saying luck has nothing to do with it. In fact, I love luck! Im just saying its important to put yourself in the position to get lucky. Dont wait around for creativity to come to you on accident. Be creative on purpose.
Where is North Korea? Here are guesses from 1,746 adults: (Read in Korean.)

Where is North Korea? Each represents a respondents guess.

Just 36 percent got it right. Here are the countries they selected:

RUSSIA KAZAKHSTAN MONGOLIA North Korea TURKMENISTAN KYRGYZSTAN JAPAN IRAN AFGHANISTAN SOUTH KOREA CHINA PAKISTAN NEPAL OMAN INDIA BANGLADESH Pacific Ocean MYANMAR VIETNAM LAOS PHILIPPINES THAILAND CAMBODIA MALAYSIA Indian Ocean PAPUA NEW GUINEA INDONESIA AUSTRALIA RUSSIA KAZAKHSTAN MONGOLIA North Korea TURKMENISTAN JAPAN IRAN AFGHANISTAN SOUTH KOREA CHINA PAKISTAN NEPAL Pacific Ocean INDIA BANGLADESH OMAN MYANMAR VIETNAM LAOS PHILIPPINES THAILAND CAMBODIA MALAYSIA PAPUA NEW GUINEA Indian Ocean INDONESIA AUSTRALIA MONGOLIA North Korea IRAN CHINA SOUTH KOREA PAKISTAN INDIA PHILIPPINES MALAYSIA INDONESIA AUSTRALIA

When asked in April which policies the United States should pursue regarding North Korea, Americans diverged on their views depending in part on whether they knew where it was.

An experiment led by Kyle Dropp of Morning Consult from April 27-29, conducted at the request of The New York Times, shows that respondents who could correctly identify North Korea tended to view diplomatic and nonmilitary strategies more favorably than those who could not. These strategies included imposing further economic sanctions, increasing pressure on China to influence North Korea and conducting cyberattacks against military targets in North Korea.

They also viewed direct military engagement  in particular, sending ground troops  much less favorably than those who failed to locate North Korea.

The largest difference between the groups was the simplest: Those who could find North Korea were much more likely to disagree with the proposition that the United States should do nothing about North Korea.

Net support for ... Among those who could find North Korea Among those who could not Large differences are shown in bold. Net support is a measure showing the percent of respondents who supported a policy minus the percent who said they did not support it.

What drives these differences? Simple partisanship is one possibility. On average, Republicans  and Republican men in particular  were more likely to correctly locate North Korea than Democratic men. And Republicans were more likely to be in favor of almost all the diplomatic solutions posed by the researchers. (Women tended to find North Korea at similar rates, regardless of party.)

Geographic knowledge itself may contribute to an increased appreciation of the complexity of geopolitical events. This finding is consistent with  though not identical to  a similar experiment Mr. Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff conducted in 2014. They asked Americans to identify Ukraine on a map and asked them whether they supported military intervention. The farther a respondents guess was from Ukraine, the researchers found, the more likely he or she was to favor military intervention.

Which groups were most successful

Share correctly identifying North Korea on an unlabeled map of Asia: By gender By party By education By age Do you know someone of Korean ancestry? Have you ever visited another country? All adults 36% Men Women 45% 27 Democrats Independents Republicans 31% 39 37 Less than coll. Bachelors deg. Post-grad deg. 31% 46 53 Age 18 to 29 30 to 44 45 to 54 55 to 64 65 and up 37% 35 25 35 48 Yes No 55% 34 Yes No 43% 26 Share correctly identifying North Korea on an unlabeled map of Asia: By gender By party By education By age Do you know someone of Korean ancestry? Have you ever visited another country? All adults 36% Men Women 45% 27 Democrats Independents Republicans 31% 39 37 Less than coll. Bachelors deg. Post-grad deg. 31% 46 53 Age 18 to 29 30 to 44 45 to 54 55 to 64 65 and up 37% 35 25 35 48 Yes No 55% 34 Yes No 43% 26

Education was a major factor in participants ability to find North Korea. Those with postgraduate degrees had among the most success; the only ones who did better were people who said they knew someone of Korean ancestry. Those who had visited or been to a foreign country were also much more likely to find North Korea than those who had not.

After the highly educated, the next most successful group was older people: Nearly half of respondents 65 and older found North Korea. The Korean War, which ended in 1953, may be in the memory of todays older seniors.

Americans geography skills remain poor

Americans inability to identify countries and places is not new. A Roper survey in 2006 found that, in the midst of the Iraq war, six in 10 young adults could not locate Iraq on a map of the Middle East; about 75 percent could not identify Iran or Israel; and only half could identify New York state.

But how important is this, really?

In Why Geography Matters, Harm de Blij wrote that geography is a superb antidote to isolationism and provincialism, and argued that the American public is the geographically most illiterate society of consequence on the planet, at a time when United States power can affect countries and peoples around the world.

This spatial illiteracy, geographers say, can leave citizens without a framework to think about foreign policy questions more substantively. The paucity of geographical knowledge means there is no check on misleading public representations about international matters, said Alec Murphy, a professor of geography at the University of Oregon.

While Americans could be better at geography, they cannot be expected to follow every twist and turn of foreign policy. People dont invest in policy information, but thats rational, said Elizabeth Saunders, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies foreign policy and international relations. Instead of exhaustively researching foreign policy options for a host of nations, Americans are rationally ignorant, effectively outsourcing their foreign policy views to elites and the news media.

At the moment, Americans views on North Korea are remarkably consistent, regardless of their other political views. A YouGov survey showed North Korea atop a list of 144 countries described as an enemy; a Gallup study from about the same time showed North Korea as Americans least favorite country.

Americans relatively low interest in North Korea is not returned in kind. North Koreans are obsessed with the United States, wrote Barbara Demick, the former Beijing bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, in an interview with the New Yorker.
A state regulator's part-time job with a telecommunications consulting firm doesn't violate his oath of office, the Nebraska Attorney General's Office has determined.

However, the same legal opinion left the door open for the Nebraska Public Service Commission to terminate Jeff Pursley as its executive director if it nonetheless finds the arrangement inappropriate.

Pursley and Commission Chairman Tim Schram of Gretna weren't immediately available for comment Monday afternoon. A PSC spokeswoman said the agency was still reviewing the opinion.

The commission regulates phone companies and other common carriers in Nebraska. It requested the opinion in March in response to questions about Pursley's private work with the national telecommunications consulting firm Parrish, Blessing & Associates.

Pursley is a former director with Parrish, Blessing and has continued helping its clients with federal telephone compliance filings since becoming head of the PSC in July 2015.

His oath of office forbids him from holding direct or indirect interest in any entity regulated by the Public Service Commission.

The Attorney General's Office found Pursley's side job does not violate his oath because he doesn't work directly with any clients, such as Windstream, that are also regulated by the PSC, and his compensation isn't based on the firm's work with regulated clients, according to an opinion signed by Chief Deputy Attorney General David Bydalek.

That aligns with a separate, informal opinion earlier this year from staff at the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, who found Pursley's private work doesn't pose a conflict of interest under state law.

Yet Bydalek dismissed the idea that Pursley's employment contract with the PSC protects him from being fired.

The contract is invalid, because the PSC lacked authority to make the deal in the first place, Bydalek wrote.

Director-level appointees in state government are generally at-will employees, and Nebraska is an at-will state. There are some specific exceptions in state law  but not for the Public Service Commission.

State Sen. Jim Smith of Papillion, who has been critical of Pursley's arrangement, said the next step is for Pursley to quit his consulting job.

"Just because he didn't technically violate his oath doesn't mean it doesn't look bad," Smith said.
Gov. Pete Ricketts has red-lined a total of $56.5 million in spending from several state budget bills.

Ricketts' line-item vetoes, announced Monday, included taking an additional $5.7 million over two years from the University of Nebraska. And he took Medicaid provider rate funding back 3 percent, cutting about $33.75 million.

"It's everybody being a part of the solution," he said.

His vetoes would prevent any increase in the gas tax and would maintain a 3 percent minimum reserve for the $8.9 billion state budget, rather than allowing it to go down to 2.5 percent, as it would have without the vetoes.

He said the budget sent to him by the Legislature was balanced with gimmicks.

Appropriations Chairman John Stinner said the budget the committee recommended was as far as it wanted to go with cuts to spending. Going to a 2.5 percent reserve, rather than 3 percent, was to help make the budget work, he said.

The spending increase in the 2017-19 budget sent to the governor was 1.1 percent. With vetoes, Ricketts reduced that increase to 0.6 percent.

Ricketts pointed to the states continued decline in tax revenues in recent months. The vetoes will help guard against any future downturns in tax collections, he said.

The states revenue picture continues to worsen, and we must take responsible steps to tighten our belts, Ricketts said. "These are thoughtful and measured reductions, and I urge the Legislature to sustain these vetoes.

The vetoes would ensure the gas tax would not increase by two-tenths of a cent, he said.

He reduced the highway construction appropriation for the Department of Roads by less than did the Legislature, which transferred $15 million each year from the Roads Operations Cash Fund to the general fund. Ricketts' veto would transfer $7.5 million each year, as had been proposed by an amendment introduced by Sen. Curt Friesen of Henderson that failed during the budget debate.

The governors vetoes would reduce various state agency appropriations by a half of a percent, including NU. Some programs and agencies are excluded, he said, including those already reduced by 3 percent or more. If the cut was $1,000 or less, it was also excluded.

The budget, after line-item vetoes, protects the property tax credit relief fund, Corrections reform, public safety and state aid to K-12 schools, Ricketts said.

Omaha Sen. Burke Harr said he was disappointed that Ricketts' vetoes adversely and disproportionately affect one segment of the population.

The proposed cuts to Medicaid will drain resources from a program that helps one in eight Nebraskans get the health care they need and continues an enormously troubling pattern of pulling funding out of Medicaid to serve other interests, said Nebraska Appleseed Executive Director Rebecca Gould.

Gould said that over and over again, the poorest Nebraskans are the ones hurt by cuts to the state budget.

"Once again, Governor Ricketts has chosen to make steep cuts that endanger the health and safety of our most-vulnerable Nebraskans, Gould said. Four of the largest cuts in the Governors vetoes hit low-income Nebraskans and children."

She urged the Legislature to override those vetoes.

On Friday, Ricketts vetoed $11.06 million of general funds from a capital construction bill (LB330) meant to pay for a portion of the replacement of the state Capitol heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system.

He said the veto did not cancel or delay the project. Necessary preparation work for phase one of the project, including land acquisition and installation of a geothermal well field, could continue, he said.

Stinner said the committee would meet Tuesday morning to go over the vetoes. Any potential veto overrides would be scheduled for Wednesday.

Once the committee comes out with its recommendation, any senator could make a motion to address any specific line-item veto, he said.

The governor's vetoes also include:

* $524,042 from state colleges

* $1 million from community colleges

* $1.4 million combined from Supreme Court operations, probation services, specialized court operations, juvenile justice

* $1.1 million from Department of Health and Human Services operations

* $33.75 million from provider rate funding, including: $2.4 million from behavioral health aid; $23.6 million from medical assistance; $1.3 million from child welfare aid; and $6.45 million from developmental disability aid.
As I was heading off to visit Russia, a friend told me of a friend who knew a Russian school teacher. I asked if I could visit the school, and I brought along a couple of American friends. Here's a video of what we saw there.







We met first with high-school-level students who gave us a tour of the school and then asked us all kinds of smart questions, all in perfect English. These kids were clearly very well educated and very eager to learn anything they could. We asked them questions as well. While a leading Russian journalist has told me that young people all want to enter into the careers that make the most money, none of these students told us they did. They said things like history, biology, higher mathematics, economics, and languages when we asked them what they wanted to study in college. Then we met with elementary-level students. They were even more eager to speak, and they asked us many more questions, ranging from "Do you have dogs?" to "Do you like Russian music?" The teachers told us that they have brought groups of students to the United States before and would love to again. If you know of a school, organization, or group of potential host families that would like to help them out, please let me know. If you know of anyone who pictures Russians on the basis of the information available in U.S. news reports, please send them this.
Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121

"Humans have spent 99 percent of our developmental time in the wild kingdom, which tutored us in what Rob Kall calls bottom-up values?small, local, interdependent, respectful, egalitarian and decentralized -- and which the world desperately needs in order to balance out some of the darker impulses of top-down values. His faith that bottom-up values represent a critical re-balancing act for humanity, if not an outright better mousetrap, is compelling and hard-won, and I offer him a high-five for his courageous inquiry into the deep wisdom inherent in our age-old intimacy with natural rhythms, native intelligences, and interconnectedness."



Gregg Levoy, author of Callings and Vital Signs
Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121

"Stressed? Oppressed? Isolated? Kall's Bottom-Up offers a lifeline for connecting with yourself, with others, and with your whole community or organization so that everyone thrives. He offers compelling science, stories, and insights from business, government, the arts, and more to make visible an unabashedly hopeful bottom-up revolution towards cooperation, compassion, and meaning. Join him."



Peggy Holman, author of Engagement Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity and coauthor of The Change Handbook
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Dmitri Babich has worked as a journalist in Russia since 1989, for newspapers, news agencies, radio, and television. He says that he used to always interview people, while lately people interview him.



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According to Babich, myths about Russian media, such as that one cannot criticize the president in Russia, can be dispelled simply by visiting Russian news websites and using Google Translator. More newspapers in Russia oppose Putin than support him, Babich says.

If Russian news is propaganda, Babich asks, why are people so afraid of it? Was anyone ever afraid of Brezhnev's propaganda? (One might reply that it wasn't available on the internet or television.) In Babich's view the threat of Russian news lies in its accuracy, not in its falsehood. In the 1930s, he says, French and British media, in good "objective" style, suggested that Hitler wasn't anything much to worry about. But the Soviet media had Hitler right. (On Stalin perhaps not so much.)



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Today, Babich suggests, people are making the same mistake that the British and French media made back then, failing to appropriately stand up to a dangerous ideology. What ideology? That of neoliberal militarism. Babich points to the swift response of NATO and the Washington establishment to any proposals from Donald Trump to ease up on hostility toward Russia.

Babich is not naive about Trump. While he says that Barack Obama was decidedly the worst U.S. president ever, he does not predict great things from Trump. Obama, Babich explains, had incompetence to match his militarism. He imposed sanctions on Russia that hurt the most pro-Western organizations. "He became a victim of his own propaganda."



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I asked Babich why I'd heard such positive comments on Trump from so many Russians. His answer: "Unrequited love for the U.S.," and "hope," and the thought that because Trump won he must be smarter than he seems. "People hate to wake up," Babich concluded.

Pressed on how people could possibly place hope in Trump, Babich said that because Russia has never been colonized (despite Sweden and Napoleon and Hitler trying), Russians are only now learning what Africans colonized by the West understood about the colonizers.



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Asked why Russia would make alliances with China and Iran, Babich replied that the U.S. and E.U. wouldn't have Russia, so it is taking its second choices.

Asked about Russian journalists who have been killed, Babich said that while more were killed in the time of Boris Yeltsin, he has two theories. One is that an opponent of Putin's is responsible. Babich named a politician who died around the time of the last killing. The other theory is that people enraged by the media are responsible. Babich said he couldn't take seriously the idea that Putin would himself be responsible for killing someone right next to the Kremlin.



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Asked about the approach of RT (Russia Today) television, Babich said that the approach of the news agency Ria Novosti of trying to imitate the New York Times gained no followers because people can already just read the New York Times. By opposing U.S. crimes and giving voice to alternative perspectives RT has found an audience. I think this interpretation is borne out by the CIA report earlier this year hyping the danger of RT. If the U.S. media were providing the news, Americans wouldn't look for news elsewhere.

Babich and I discussed these and other topics on the RT show "Crosstalk" on Sunday. The video should, sooner or later, be posted here.
Vladimir Posner, who spent his youth in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and who cohosted a show with Phil Donahue on U.S. television for years, met with a group of visitors to Moscow from the U.S. on Monday, offering his well-informed views on a range of media-related topics.



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Posner said that for years he worked on Soviet propaganda aimed at the United States. The first blow to his full belief in the rectitude of the USSR came, he said, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He eventually concluded that he was not telling the truth, that by telling only good things he was telling half the truth, which is a falsehood. He quit the job and he quit the Communist Party.

In the days of Gorbachev, Posner was permitted to travel, and moved back to the United States, where he co-hosted that program with Donahue until CNBC got a new president by the name of Roger Ailes. The new boss demanded the right to approve or reject topics or guests. "That's censorship," Posner told him. "I don't give a rat's ass what you call it," Ailes replied.

So, back to Moscow it was. Posner has hosted his current weekly television show in Russia for 8 years. He says he will never again work for a government or a party, and he'll sign a contract with a company only if it leaves him independent control.



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We had heard from other Russian journalists in the preceding days who had painted a very positive picture of Russian media, telling us that there is no censorship, and that more newspapers in Russia oppose Putin than support him. Posner has a bit stricter definition of censorship, I think, as well as a television perspective. "Anyone who told you there are no restrictions on Russian media was not telling you the truth," he said.

He said that Russia's state television channels (1, 2, and 4, and Red TV) serve the government and dominate the audience. "There are things you cannot say and people you cannot invite on," he said. "You cannot criticize Putin on those networks." On smaller, private networks you can, as well as in print and on radio. "The smaller your audience, the greater your freedom." Posner agreed that several newspapers oppose Putin, but denied that they are a majority, and dismissed their audience as no more than 1 million readers, albeit an elite readership. One of the main reasons that Putin has 80% support, Posner said, is state television. The party line in Russia and the company line in the U.S. amount to about the same thing, Posner said.

Asked later for the most common complaints with Putin, Posner didn't offer any. Instead, he tried to explain Putin's popularity; and the explanation may have been understood as functioning through television spin, but it also seemed factual. Posner said that people see Putin as having stood up to the 800-pound American gorilla, restoring pride to the disrespected federation of Russia. Russians were ready to be hugged when they got rid of communism. Instead they were given the rotten deals of the 1990s and now endure sanctions that have lowered incomes by 10% to 12% (while benefitting Russian agriculture) -- a state of affairs that Posner predicted would win absolutely no concessions out of Russia.



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Posner offered as an example of a dishonest company line Christiane Amanpour of CNN, who had never been to Crimea, reporting that people in Crimea voted to rejoin Russia only under the threat of Russian soldiers. "She was lying."

Posner suggested that David Remnick of the New Yorker is better informed yet seemingly writes something very different from what he must know. Posner said that the New Yorker's ownership by Conde Nast is typical of a trend away from independence in the U.S.

Asked about Russia Today (or RT, Russian TV for Americans) he dismissed it as propaganda showing only the good in Russia and only the bad in the United States. But for those of us who ignore RT reporting on Russia and appreciate its reporting on uncovered topics in the U.S., Posner seems right only up to a point when he states that no audience will ever turn to a foreign source over a domestic one. In fact, Posner immediately offered the counter-example of the popularity of the Voice of America, the BBC, and German broadcasting in the USSR.

Posner glides effortlessly from criticizing Russian media to criticizing U.S. media and back again. The U.S. media, he says, has demonized Russia since 1918 and has done so far more than Russian or Soviet media has ever done the same to the United States. In Posner's estimation, Putin is demonized in U.S. media in ways that even Stalin was never subjected to. He cited as an example a graphic depicting Putin's shadow as falling over a downed airplane in Ukraine. Putin asked to join the EU, for goodness sake, he asked to join NATO, and the U.S. turned him down, explained Posner.

Posner said that when he was a kid in the United States, Americans knew that it was the Soviet Union that won World War II, and loved Russia for it. Now, Americans have no idea. Russians, meanwhile, have come to identify Americans with their government's hostile policies to a degree not seen during the Cold War. Everyone used to like Americans and dress like Americans, etc.

Posner explains the Russian attitude as the product of Russian propaganda and of the absence of stories of Americans protesting Washington. (I gave Posner thousands of messages from Americans hoping to fill that gap.) Posner also blamed the failure of the U.S. to provide anything like a Marshall Plan in the 1990s, or to assist in the development of democracy, something Russia had never had. Asked whether the Marshall Plan in Germany and Japan had left Europe and Japan totally subordinate to the United States, and whether Russia would have suffered the same fate, Posner seemed inclined to believe that is not what would have happened.

In explaining Russia's lack of a democratic tradition, Posner said that Putin actually believes that the U.S. president can call up the New York Times and ask them to print a story, and they will. Well, label me a Russian autocrat, but we know of many cases of the White House feeding stories to the New York Times, and many of it suppressing stories at the New York Times. The drone kill list story of 2014 comes to mind as an example of the former (or, if you prefer, the aluminum tubes story of 2003), and the NSA mass-surveillance story of 2004 as an example of the latter.



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Hacked

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Reprinted from columbusfreepress.com by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

We have no evidence at this point that the Russians, or global hackers, hacked our electronic voting machines to put Donald Trump in the White House.

But we are 100% certain our electronic voting machines have been hacked by many many others, and could be in the future by virtually anybody with entry-level computing capabilities. As the New York Times and others have reported, cyberattacks have now become an integral part of the modern landscape. A tool stolen from the very National Security Agency meant to protect us has been used to perpetrate more than 75,000 recent hacks---and those are just the ones being reported.

The evidence that our electronics-based election system is particularly vulnerable to such attacks has long been well-established. It ranges from a wide range of public vote flipping demonstrations to a computing professor using a voting machine to play the University of Michigan fight song.

But, why would you need to hack the machines if you are one of the private, for-profit partisan corporations that secretly program the computerized voting machines and tabulators with secret proprietary software? The lack of transparency with our "black box voting" means that none of our elections are truly verifiable.

In 2016 some 80 percent of America's ballots were cast and/or counted on such machines and tabulators. Many touchscreen voting machines provide no usable paper trail and render vote counts that cannot be independently verified. Scanners of paper ballots can be rigged to render dishonest counts that go undetected if the ballots are never manually audited.

Though we have no evidence of Russian hacking on our electronic voting machines in 2016, there is no doubt that they or any other hacker with an interest in the outcome could have done so if they wanted to.

Or, the private companies could have simply programmed the results

So that leaves us with one inescapable conclusion: to protect the integrity of our future elections, our entire electoral system must convert to universal hand-counted paper ballots.

It has become an issue of national security.

The entire nation is now in an uproar over Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. We know he was investigating possible Russian involvement in our election. The Russians clearly wanted Trump to win.

During the campaign, Trump very publicly asked the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails. The Russians did, in fact, hack the Democratic National Committee, releasing documentation showing the DNC hierarchy worked actively against the nomination of Bernie Sanders.

We don't yet know what else the Russians actually did or did not do, if anything, to help shape our choice of presidents in 2016.

We know further that someone hacked into the recent French elections on behalf of Marine LePen.

In an electronic era, election theft has now become a matter of a few keystrokes.

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By Garrett Jennings







Many Americans think that the United States is the world's most exceptional democracy. Some believe that the U.S. Constitution is the most democratic legal document to ever exist, and others believe the Constitution to be sacred. They think that every American has the right to vote--the most basic and established pillar of a democracy--but they would be wrong on all three points, especially the last. The Constitution has no explicit mention of the right to vote for its citizens even though voting is the most widely recognized way for individual citizens to express their preferences (although it is not the only way). The lack of a right to vote in the United States solidifies its history of demonstrably weak democratic principles, which is largely why the highly regarded Economist magazine classifies the United States as a 'flawed democracy.' This is the reality in what Paul Ryan falsely claims is the world's oldest democracy, a country that has for its entire history deliberately and routinely denied the right to vote to millions of its citizens. Of course its necessary to acknowledge the most recent and widely successful efforts by many right-wing politicians to enact voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise the poor, minorities, and the elderly (sometimes an intersection of all three) as well as the Supreme Court's recent attack on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by striking down a critical component of the law which ensured states maintain fair voting practices. However, the struggle for the right to vote is not new and should not treated as one. On the very day the Constitution was signed, only rich white men, who owned property, were given the freedom to vote. Past (and present) elected leaders, loath to share their power, have always stood in the way of expanding the vote to We the People. The gains achieved to enfranchise communities of color and women came from years of diligent activism within social movements, commonly given short shrift in high school civics lessons. The people's gains are being lost--legislated away by a ruling elite in thrall to corporations and their owners. From the Jim Crow style laws of the late 1800's which used literacy tests, poll taxes, and other more sinister methods to bar African Americans from voting, to women's suffrage, which wasn't achieved until 1920--less than 100 years ago--the people's so-called right to vote has only been expanded upon demand by a vibrant social movement. In an effort to establish the right to vote as an indistinguishable feature of American democracy, FairVote, a non-profit committed to grassroots coalition building to create a more fair and accurate depiction of a real democracy, is behind a right to vote amendment in Congress, House Joint Resolution 25. The amendment states: "SECTION 1. Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides. SECTION 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation." This seemingly straightforward amendment might not seem necessary at first, considering the gains achieved so far, but there's nothing to prevent them from being taken away in the future, as the Supreme Court did in 2013. To stop the continued debate over voting laws by states that each have their own rules and policies, many of which deliberately disenfranchise certain groups, this must-pass amendment declares, once and for all, that every US citizen has the right to vote. Move to Amend supports FairVote and this amendment as part of a larger strategy to legalize democracy. Move To Amend is organizing to pass the We the People Amendment; our mission is to realize the dream of American democracy by building an authentic participatory democracy that serves the interests of all people over property and profits. Our broad grassroots coalition seeks to amend the Constitution to end corporate rule (fascism) by declaring that campaign contributions are not protected political speech and corporations are not people with human rights. The We the People Amendment overturns the Citizens United ruling and other Supreme Court decisions which have endowed upon corporations human rights found in the 1st, 4th, 5th and 14th amendments. The most egregious of these is the 1886 case which found that under the 14th Amendment, corporations had equal protection under the law. The 14th Amendment recognized the rights of freed male slaves, but was instead hijacked by corporations in an unprecedented power grab. What is more disturbing is that corporate rule can only thrive when We the People are kept divided, and racism has always been the tool of choice to achieve and maintain division among the classes. To allow the corporate ruling elite to legally use the 14th amendment for their selfish and destructive purposes is among the worst outcomes of any case in US history. It has led directly to the election of a corporation in the form of Donald Trump, and a cabinet full of billiionaire corporatists intent on redistributing the wealth of this nation into the pockets of the 1%. Building a vibrant and transformative democracy is a team activity which requires participation, debate, and solidarity building. All communities, especially those on the frontlines of struggle, must be represented as We the People come together to form a more perfect union, by assembling our demands and developing and implementing a strategy to build and take power. Small "d" democrats will gather in Minneapolis August 2 - 6 for the Democracy Convention, seven conferences on democratizing the Constitution, the environment, economy, media, education, open government, and global democracy--under one roof. Resisting Trump is a necessary evil; but it isn't enough to change the status quo. The best defense is a good offense, and building power to create real participatory democracy for the first time in our long history is the best defense against the ongoing assault on We the People. Join us in Minneapolis and start building real democracy in the US before the next election and the further erosion of the people's rights. Garrett Jennings is a Senior Intern with Move to Amend and a recent graduate from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he earned a degree in political science concentrating in public policy, with a minor in economics. Follow on Twitter: @GarrettJ8

(Article changed on May 15, 2017 at 13:20)


davidswanson.org

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Photo by Daily Progress.

While I've been in Russia trying to make friends, back home in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, a group of torch-bearing supporters of Robert E. Lee has held a rally generally understood as a proclamation of white supremacy. I've previously written at some length about this white identity group, their humanity, their legitimate grievances, and their support for Donald Trump.

They chanted: "You will not replace us!" possibly because the city of Charlottesville has decided to replace a statue of Robert E. Lee with something less racist.

They chanted: "Blood and soil!" I suppose to express their lengthy connection to the land (although their leader is no more from Virginia than Robert E. Lee is from Charlottesville), or -- less charitably -- just because of the flagrantly fascist sound of the slogan.

And they chanted: "Russia is our friend!"

If the relevance of that last one confuses you, I am very pleased to hear it.

To explain: In the United States many people identify as Democrats or Liberals, or Republicans or "Conservatives" on the other hand. What these identifications entail is infinitely manipulable by the corporate media and the powers that be in Washington, D.C. At the moment, one camp has come to mean:

Progressive,

Humanitarian,

Feminist,

Racially Inclusive,

Economically Fair,

Environmentalist,

Militarist,

And Hostile Toward Russia.

The other camp means:

Capitalist,

Regressive,

Sexist,

Racist,

Inhumane,

Destructive of the Environment,

Militarist,

And Friendly Toward Russia.

Both camps accept on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that Russia helped put Trump in the White House. Both camps are perfectly open to building up hostility toward a nuclear-armed government, but only one camp has been instructed to do so at this time for partisan reasons.

I mentioned this state of affairs to some Russians, and one replied: "But we never even had slavery, only serfdom." Regardless of how important that distinction is, this misses the point. There's no logical connection between liking Russia and wanting a city in 2017 to be dominated by confederate statues erected for racist campaigns in the 1920s. I'm not committing any fallacies by favoring some changes in Charlottesville's landscape and favoring U.S.-Russia personal and governmental friendships.

I toured Moscow's Gulag Museum today. I saw no crowd of gulag supporters proposing friendship with the United States. But such a display would hardly have been observable as such, since every single Russian I've ever met has proposed friendship with the United States -- including Russians with a wide range of opinions about the gulags.
There is no such thing as cyber security. The only choice is more security or less security, as the recent hack of the National Security Agency demonstrates.

Hackers stole from NSA a cyber weapon, which has been used in attacks (at time of writing) on 150 countries, shutting down elements of the British National Health Service, the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, automakers Renault and Nissan, Russia's Interior Ministry, Federal Express, the energy company PetroChina, and many more.

The news spin is to not blame NSA for its carelessness, but to blame Microsoft users for not updating their systems with a patch issued two months ago. But the important questions have not been asked: What was NSA doing with such malware and why did NSA not inform Microsoft of the malware?

Clearly, NSA intended to use the cyber weapon against some country or countries. Why else have it and keep it a secret from Microsoft?

Was it to be used to shut down Russian and Chinese systems prior to launching a nuclear first strike against the countries? Congress should be asking this question as it is certain that the Russian and Chinese governments are. As I previously reported, the Russian High Command has already concluded that Washington is preparing a nuclear first strike against Russia, and so has China.

It is extremely dangerous that two nuclear powers have this expectation. This danger has received no attention from Washington and its NATO vassals.

Microsoft president Brad Smith likened the theft of the NSA's cyber weapon to "the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen." In other words, with cyber weapons, as with nuclear weapons and short warning times, things can go wrong in a big way. http://www.bbc.com/news/ technology-39915440

What if the hackers had successfully attacked the Russian Ministry of Defense or radar warning systems, would the Russian High Command have concluded that the cyber attack was Washington's prelude to incoming ICBMs?

The fact that no one in Washington or any Western government has stepped forward to reassure the Russian government and demand the removal of the US missile bases surrounding Russia indicates a level of hubris or denial that is beyond comprehension.

In my May 12 posting I wrote: "The costs of the digital revolution exceed its benefits by many times. The digital revolution rivals nuclear weapons as the most catastrophic technology of our time." In response, Robert Henderson wrote to me from England that he had addressed the enormous costs of the digital revolution in 2010. Here is the link to his article, "Men and Machines: Which is Master Which is Slave?" https://livinginamadhouse. wordpress.com/2010/09/08/men- and-machines-which-is-master- which-is-slave/

Reading his article will raise your awareness. When you add up the vast financial costs, the depersonalization of human relationships, and the complete loss of individual privacy and security, the benefit of being connected is vastly outweighed by the costs.

Paper files are far more secure. Malware cannot be introduced into them. To steal a person's information required knowing the location of the information, breaking into the building, searching file cabinets for the information, and copying the information. To intercept a voice communication required a warrant to wiretap a specific telephone line.

People born into a world where the ease of communication comes at the price of the loss of autonomy never experience privacy. They are unaware that a foundation of liberty has been lost.

In our era of controlled print and TV media, the digital revolution serves for now as a check on the ruling elite's ability to control explanations. However, the same technology that currently permits alternative explanations can be used to prevent them. Indeed, efforts to discredit and to limit non-approved explanations are already underway.

The enemies of truth have a powerful weapon in the digital revolution and can use it to herd humanity into a tyrannical distopia. The digital revolution even has its own Memory Hole. Files stored electronically by older technology can no longer be accessed as they exist in an outdated electronic format that cannot be opened by current systems in use.

Humans are proving to be the most stupid of the life forms. They create weapons that cannot be used without destroying themselves. They create robots and free trade myths that take away their jobs. They create information technology that destroys their liberty.

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"A plan for ensuring best and fair practices for charter operators, including results that indicate positive impacts on the achievement gap, inclusion of all students, fair labor practices, and parent engagement practices. "

-Steve Zimmer, 11/13/12



(Image by stevezimmerforschoolboard.com/) Details DMCA

Michael Bloomberghave spent millions of dollars pushing to privatize our public schools with disastrous effectsfor school districts like the LAUSD. Much of this spending is not used to benefit students in any way, but to influence elections. This spending has swelled to the point where once again Los Angeles has broken the record for "the priciest school-board race in U.S. history."

Fueling much of this spending is a desire to eliminate the threat of any board member who dares to seek accountability for these privately run institutions. Two years ago the target was Bennett Kayser, who had a reputation for being a tough critic of the charters. In a campaign that included unproven allegations of racismand mocked his diagnosis with Parkinson's, they unseated the only LAUSD board member who was a guaranteed vote against unregulated charter expansion.

Steve Zimmerhas taken a more balanced approach towards the charter industry, but that has not stopped him from being attacked. While he admits to voting for more charter approvals than almost any other school board member in the county, he also attempted to make sure that charters are accountable to both the students and the taxpayer. This includes Zimmer's drawing attention to the fact that Granada Hills Charter High School is not serving a proportional number of students with special needs during their renewal hearing. In 2012, he introduced a resolution simply asking "charter operators to voluntarily delay requesting action on new charter applications until the Board has heard the Superintendent's recommendations and is able to set a timetable for the implementation of changes to better serve all children and families." After hearing speakers that included representatives from the California Charter School Association (CCSA) and Magnolia Science Academy 3, the board rejected this proposal. Kayser was the only other "yes" vote.

Instead of taking even minimal steps toward accountability, the CCSA and their allies have spent millions trying to replace Zimmer with Nick Melvoin. Ignoring the problems of charters cherry-picking their students, disrupting district schools, and using public funds for their own personal gain,Melvoin worships at Betsy DeVos' altar of imagined school-choice, even if it results in a system of separate and unequal education. In Melvoin's vision of education, even the most basic attempts at accountability are seen as an impediment to "market share" and are fought at all costs.

Any airline passenger can testify how well deregulation works for the consumer as companies rake in massive profits at the expense of comfort. The consumers in our education system are our students and they stand to lose more than legroom. Parents who send their children to charters deserve to know that the promises made about academic superiority are nothing more than marketing gimmicks. Students in public schools deserve to have a school board that represents their interests. None of this is possible if privatizers like Melvoin are allowed to take control of the LAUSD.

____________________________________________

Carl Petersen is a parent and special-education advocate and was a Green Party candidate in LAUSD's District 2 school board race.

He was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action and Dr.

Diane Ravitch called him a "

." His past blogs can be found at
Peru is considered one of the top 17 most mega-diverse countries in the world, yet few who visit travel beyond the Cusco and Machu Picchu area to see what this Andean wonderland really offers in terms of natural splendor. Besides the majestic beauty of the towering peaks of the second highest mountain range in the world, Peru is home to an extensive Pacific coastline lined with golden sand beaches and offshore islands as well as the pulsating vibrant depths of the mighty Amazon rainforest, which makes up nearly 60 percent of the country.

Leaving the beaten path behind, Peru offers nature lovers endless options for exploration in a wide variety of different awe-inspiring different ecosystems, from deserts to rainforest to ice-covered craggy peaks. In fact, Peru has the highest percentage of protected land in South America (more than 30 percent of total land area), making it quite possibly the best country on the continent for natural exploration. Because it would truly take a lifetime to see all of the raw natural beauty here, we have put together a list of the top jaw-dropping spots for avid outdoor adventurers just like you.

Often referred to as the poor mans Galapagostheyre incredibly cheap to visit and are home to unique and diverse species including Humboldt penguins and giant sea lion coloniesthe Islas Ballestas are part of the larger Paracas National Reserve. Besides the half-day boat trip out to the islands the reserve also holds red sand beaches to explore, ancient petroglyphs to discover and rocky cliffs that look out over the crashing surf. A perfect day is spent visiting the islands in the morning and then renting a bike in the town of Paracas and riding around the peninsular reserve the rest of the day.

Photo by Pedro Szekely/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

With cliffs that hover over 13,000 feet above the valley floor, Colca Canyon is one of the deepest canyons in the world and the natural marvel, located just outside the charming colonial city of Arequipa, is one of Perus top attractions. Besides the amazing views, natural hot springs and endless hiking opportunities, Colca Canyon is also the best place in the world to see the giant Andean condor up close as they often hover above the canyon rim and right in front of visitors faces as they scan the valley floor far below.

Photo by Paulo Tomaz/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

You would have to travel to the Himalayas to get peaks higher than those found in Perus Cordillera Blanco (White Mountains), and Huascaran National Park is home to the tallest of the tall, including Huascaran itself, the countrys highest, surpassing 22,000 feet. Located just outside of the city of Huaraz, known as the outdoor enthusiastss capital of Peru, this is the highest tropical mountain range in the world and an absolute mecca for hikers and those who simply want to gawk at impressive mountain scenery. Turquoise blue high alpine lakes are fed by more than 600 glaciers, all of them crisscrossed by trail networks where pumas, condor and a wide variety of birds are often sighted.

2px); width:calc(100% 2px);"> A post shared by Alberto Niquen (@tinkueditores) on May 5, 2017 at 9:01pm PDT

Photo by Alberto Niquen/Instagram

With a lone mountain rising out of the flat jungle like a scene right out of myth and legend, Sierra Divisor is Perus newest National Park and has not experienced a rush of tourism yet. Besides conical rainforest covered volcanoes that issue steaming hot spring rivers at their base and spectacular waterfalls, Sierra de Divisor park is also home to an incredible variety of Amazonian flora and fauna as well as many villages of the matriarchal Shipibo tribe, known across the country for their fine embroidery skills. The park is a days boat ride from the rainforest metropolis of Pucallpa and accessible from the quaint riverside village of Contamana, where tour agencies have recently set up shop.

Photo by Patty Ho/Flickr CC BY 2.0

A UNESCO World Heritage site that encompasses 1.5 million hectares, Manu includes several different pristine ecosystems as it rolls down from the cloud forest covered Andean foothills to the Amazon rainforest. Just hours from Cusco and the Sacred Valley straight down the mountain, Manu National Park is one of the most visited natural areas in the country and a must do for anyone who makes the trip to Machu Picchu but wants to see the Amazon jungle in all its natural glory as well.

Besides the famous brightly colored macaws and boisterous spider monkeys that make the park their home, visitors also often spot black caimans and even the elusive jaguar while visiting Manu. While independent exploration is possible along the parks edge where several indigenous communities are located, the inner depths of the park are off limits to all besides scientific researchers and a handful of licensed tour operators. These tours to Manu are easy to book in Cusco or in Puerto Maldonaldo, a pleasant jungle town near the park.

Main photo by unukorno/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Ocean Malandra writes the EarthRx column for Paste and divides his time between Northern California and South America.
FREMONT  About eight years ago, the Rev. Joel Schroeder was visiting with an area couple.

Immanuel Lutheran Church in Snyder had closed due to declining membership. The couple was concerned about the future of their church, too.

So Schroeder suggested they all pray for God to open avenues so this wouldn't happen. Schroeder took the concerns to the cluster, a group of clergy from area congregations in the Nebraska Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

In the meantime, an organization called Enhancing Rural Ministry for Aging Adults began in the area. Clergy, including Schroeder and the Rev. Nicki McIntyre, brought representatives from different congregations together to see what they could do to improve life for older area residents. Out of that came a food pantry and all sorts of health efforts and personal services for those who didn't have family around to help.

"We didn't realize it at the time, but that was God's answer in a real way for us to address the issue of small congregations in our area," Schroeder said.

Area residents realized that by working together, a parish with several worship centers could do more than what one center could do by itself.

And last Sunday, the Faith Ambassadors Lutheran Parish officially formed during a celebration service in Hooper.

Five area churches have combined to form one parish. Basically, these five centers have become a larger church, but each one retains its own individuality. They each have their own Sunday worship services and Sunday schools, youth and women's groups and property, but they can collaborate on projects and other ministries.

Members may go to any of the worship centers, including St. John's Lutheran Cuming County Line, St. John Ridgeley Lutheran and United Evangelical Lutheran, all of Scribner; St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran of Uehling and Redeemer Lutheran of Hooper.

During Sunday's event, two pastors, Schroeder and McIntyre, and parish minister associate student Vicar Bob Ball were installed as Faith Ambassador Lutheran Parish clergy. Council members were installed as well.

The five worship sites share the clergy, who collaborate to teach confirmation class students who usually meet at Redeemer. There are 27 students representing several area towns.

Schroeder noted something else.

"We have a goal in 2018 to have at least one youth from each worship center who will go to the ELCA National Youth Gathering in Houston," he said.

The rural ministry organization was the brainchild of Vance Valerio, who worked at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and was a dean of students at Midland University. It continued to expand.

Now congregations in Scribner, Hooper, Uehling and the surrounding area are part of the organization, which is not clergy-led.

"It's quickly obvious that laypeople are very capable of taking charge and they were being creative and it's just continuing," she said.

Initially, seven churches were involved in the parish collaboration. Two decided not to become part of the parish, but council representatives were elected from five of the other worship centers.

In 2015, the worship centers formed and voted on a covenant, detailing how they could work together structurally and functionally, focusing on where their work would be most productive.

The parish isn't a merger, but a collaborative effort for sharing the Gospel.

"We're one parish with five worship centers," Schroeder said.

The parish also has a new transformation ministry team with representatives from all the worship centers. The team is a subgroup of the council and its purpose is to present a mission plan for the parish.

In Uehling, evangelists are preparing to start a parish Kids for Christ group for those in kindergarten through sixth grade. Participants will study Scripture, play games and have food and fellowship.

Schroeder noted that the collaborative effort is a community endeavor.

"We are seeking to work in the public church," Schroeder said. "There's people all over who believe in God, who don't go to church and they seek to be spiritual with their families. They pray, but they're nor members of a church.

"So you come and ask them to help for a project like the food pantry and they're more than willing to help, but for some reason they choke when it comes to becoming a member of an organization," Schroeder continued. "So we're doing public Gospel work with people who respond and want to do it.

"And we welcome anybody who wants to help us accomplish something for God and help us dream up and shape what it could look like."

McIntyre said any congregation that would like to join is welcome to come and sit in and begin a conversation.

She noted that in August members of the Ridgely congregation plan to bake bread and visit the 20 to 30 families living on acreages within a 5-mile radius of that worship center.

"We don't know them personally, but we need to, as a worship center, be a better neighbor to our neighbors," McIntyre said. "The purpose is not to fill pews. The purpose is to finally do what Jesus said and be a good neighbor."

She said the Ridgely congregation also plans to provide a potluck meal for people in its neighborhood and the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Scribner plans to bake cookies which will be taken to new people who move to town.

A Stephen Ministry, where people are trained to provide additional help for pastoral care, has formed. Laypeople also are being trained to deliver Holy Communion to the homebound.

Future plans include having collaborative summer vacation Bible school activities.

"That's one of our dreams and goals," she said.
As the world continues to warm and the impending consequences of humanitys treatment of the planet come slowly into focus, there are still many people in the United States who wont acknowledge climate change is a human induced problem, that the effects of heating could be disastrous for humankind, or even simply that the phenomenon of global warming exists at all. Why are there so many people unsatisfied with this truth even though the unanimous and overwhelming evidence indicates we could be heading toward catastrophe?

As the imminent accretion of climate change looms, were beginning to understand the human effects on the climate as well as its relatively near consequences. Imperative solutions and resolve are not meeting the demand due to psychological, political, and economic entanglements.

According to an extensive study from the American Psychology Association (APA), people understand climate change as a long-term problem and have trouble connecting current events like a change in weather as related to the phenomenon. It is very difficult for people to be able to understand or care about the consequences our actions will have on future generations well never meet. In addition, climate change can been viewed as a natural occurrence because the earth goes through natural cycles of warming and cooling.

The study from the APA reports that 47% of the people surveyed in the United States consider climate change to be a very serious problem, and 28% consider it a somewhat serious problem. This statistic has the United States falling behind many industrialized countries such as Canada, France, Japan, China, Brazil, India, and Mexico. A similar Pew Research study reaches the same conclusion. The APA study suggests this is because the concern is directly related to political ideology in America and is ingrained in our bipartisan political system.

If the non-political, non-partisan issue of climate change is infecting politics in the United States, then why do the people who hold onto a particular political ideology insist on speaking and behaving as if climate change isnt a tangible and impending catastrophe when the overwhelming evidence indicates otherwise?

Clinical, cognitive, and social psychology have determined that risk perceptions are related to cause and effect, and theyre driven by associative processes at least as much, but probably more than, analytical processes. This is because associative processing was first developed evolutionarily and represents risks as feelings and emotions while analytic processing must be taught explicitly and works through rules and algorithms. The acknowledgement of risks and consequences of climate change are mostly based on analytical brain procedures, but these processes are still dependent on one another. When the associative and analytical systems are at odds, associative emotional processing takes precedent over the more complex analytical reasoning very often.

The interaction between the two cognitive systems results in a disparity between the associated risks concerning the long-term development of climate change, with analytic reasoning leading people to believe climate change is a serious concern, while the associative system fails to send the proper warning signals in the brain to those who do not, or cannot, experience the dangers of the changing planet. Effective risk detection relies on dread risks, which include catastrophic disasters like nuclear fallout and nerve gas accidents, and unknown risks, which are perceived dangers not yet tested by time.

There are two process that protect people from information that they dont want to believe or have to act on. One process is denial, says Lee Ross, psychologist and professor at Stanford University. Essentially saying that something theyve heard isnt true and [they] dont want to think about it or hear about it. That notion goes back at least to Freud. And the other notion is rationalization, in which we try and come up with reasons for justifying inaction or supporting the idea that the threatening information wont be so bad. These are classic defense mechanisms.

In order to engage in denial, Ross continues, we might engage in biased information processing or biased assimilation of information, which is when we take information wed like to hear at face value. And [with] information we dont want to believe, we find as many reasons as possible not to believe it. People who believe in climate change may also do the same thing. Its just that in this case the overwhelming evidence is that climate change is cause by human emitted Co2.

The American Psychology Association indicates that across the worldand for the United States specificallythe perceptions of climate change detection, which are dependent upon personal experience, result in very little cause for alarm or change in behavior. Even the fishermen and farmers who are directly affected by the change in weather patterns can have a difficult time detecting climate change risks because their daily and yearly experience with the climate may not be noticeably different enough to raise concerns for the worlds overall warming temperatures.

Despite the fact that ignoring climate change is clearly risking cataclysm, many associative processes in the brain cannot understand the connection between routine weather occurrences like tornadoes and hurricanes and their association with the overall shift of the climate.

Therefore, emotional mongering such as depicting climate change as a rapid occurrence will have a greater effect in triggering the warning responses in the brain. Long-term risks are viewed in the abstract while short-term risks heed appropriate responses.

The thing about climate change is that its a very different threat, Ross says. The threat is not so immediate; it is primarily about the future, and human beings are not particularly engineered to deal with threats 50 or 100 years off. Theyre not motivated enough to take actions that have long-term benefits. Most people give weight to the short term rather than the long term, which is called discounting.

In addition, the way information about climate change is communicated to the public from both the scientists themselves as well as the news media contribute to augmenting risk and, depending upon the example, can decrease hazard perception and response.

The evidence of climate change is very technical and hard to process, Ross goes on to say. Its not like evidence that your roof is leaking. It involves having to accept evidence that is highly statistical and scientific. Its about having to trust scientists, and lots of people have many reasons not to trust science; they might be religious. To address climate change properly it takes a lot of people.

In their book The Wisest One in the Room, Ross and Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell University, describe a study in which people who live in a particular neighborhood were more likely to conserve household energy when their usage was reported alongside that of their neighbors. Furthermore, the people who saved the most energy were actually more likely to use more power unless they were given the positive reinforcement of a smiling face next to their name as motivation to continue conserving energy.

This sample is indicative of other psychological research and suggests that the average American is willing to put in the work to conserve energy, and cut down on both the immediate and long term costs, if they are able to see their personal rate of usage, the effects of conserving, and the benefits it has for their overall communities. If people fail to see the positive effects of conserving in their own backyard, then they will be more vulnerable to manipulation, denial, and rationalization.

This is how the mindset of climate change dismissal is intimately involved with political organizations, corporations, and other powerful entities that shape public opinion by incessantly spreading denial and rationalization. Group affiliations, the APA study states, are likely to influence opinions and perceptions of risk concerning climate change.

Using human psychology, the political factor is still prevalent but a few questions remain. Do the people who are intimately involved with shaping the political ideology and skepticism regarding climate change truly believe their inability to foresee its risks? Or is it a political calculation? Furthermore, if it is a political calculation, how much does the control of constituents come from a grim philosophy of certain impending doom married to the idea that the ends of a lawyer, politician, or business person protecting themselves and their families against such a disaster justifies the means of corporations and others perpetuating their raging war on our clean air, water, and environment? Psychology suggests that the vast majority of people either are not aware of what they are doing, or justify it with rationalization and other defense mechanisms, but this does not describe everyone.

Intellectualization, Ross says, is a defense mechanism where you treat the information as if it is abstractnot personally relevant. You dont allow yourself to feel emotions that would accompany that information. We tend to deal with death that way.

Terror management theory suggests that people deny the significance of climate change because it is a reminder of their mortality and contributes to the confirmation of a belief system and validated self-esteem. Surely, the people who are supposed to lead, represent, and organize citizens are aware of this kind of agent to control, manufacture consent, and fabricate the false narratives that climate change doesnt exist, that it isnt a problem for humanity, or that this particular instance is a natural occurrence that no one can do anything about.

People readily accept information that they want to believe and reject information that they dont want to believe, Ross says. And it becomes very easy for that to be exploited.

The refusal to acknowledge climate change as a serious problem can be influenced by powerful people, by their greed, their desire for more power, as well as in an attempt to sustain both consumption and lifestyle rather than by pure ignorance. Even the ill-informed politician who truly believes climate change is a hoax refuses to engage in discourse because it is convenient for them to do so. Specifically, both the Trump administration and the broader Republican Party have interests in the same fossil fuel industry that pumps Co2 into the atmosphere, degrades the environment, and warms global temperatures.

All people that do something wrong are rationalizing, Ross says. They may say whatever we do will be futile anyway. People work hard to see themselves as coherent, rational, moral beings. He cites the economy, employment, and donating to charities with the money earned as ways a climate-denying profiteer such as the Koch brothers or EPA head Scott Pruitt would justify their actions. There are many stories to tell yourself that youre not a villain in engaging in climate denial even if you have come to recognize that it is happening.

Either the psychology of denial and rationalization are playing out in the people who actively pursue environmental harm for profit, or they are engaging in a behavior that can also be described by human psychology: the personality disorder known as sociopathy.

A sociopath is someone who cannot acknowledge the effects their actions have on other people, often fail to feel empathy for others, and instead commonly meet them with disregard. Not to be confused with psychopathy, sociopathy is often a tenuous description that can simply describe the inability to recognize the hardships of others.

Thats the explanation I go to when the other explanations have failed, Ross says. The people that engage in denial do lots of other things that arent sociopathic.

There are undoubtedly some climate change denying profiteers who interact with a grim philosophy that trying to saving the world is futile, and that they must do the best for themselves and their families as they stare into imminent destruction, and therefore continue denying climate changes existence for their own benefit, profit, and security. This, however, is difficult to study or confirm.

It is indeed a small portion of the climate change deniers, but if the people who are actively shaping the narrative of climate change by polluting the earth, allowing it to occur, and shaping public opinion with denial and rationalization do not share the same inability to analytically determine the risks of climate change and respond to themor if they are not entrenched in a pessimistic philosophy of defeatismthen they are actively engaged in the far more egregious position of pursuing the destruction of the natural world without regard for the planet we live on or the plants and animals who live here too.

Ryan Beitler is a journalist, fiction writer, traveler, musician, and blogger. He has written for Paste Magazine, Addiction Now, OC Weekly, and his travel blog Our Little Blue Rock. He can be reached at ryanrbeitler@gmail.com
Holidays.

Theyre supposed to be a time for us all to unplug and unwind.

In reality, this is almost never the case, because holidays are prime time to gather Instagram content.

Take pictures everywhere. Put a filter on them. If the ones you take a aesthetic enough, you might become an influencer and thus live every day as a holiday. This is the way we live now. What a time it is to be alive.

Anyway. The cast of Pitch Perfect 3 are a tight bunch, so tight in fact that theyve gone on a vacay to the resort city of Cabo San Lucas in Mexico to celebrate wrapping filming for the flick. Rebels there and so it Anna. Sadly, Adam Devine is nowhere to be seen, but you cant have everything.

If youre a fan of the film, go ahead and have a scroll through this visual diary:

Those friends that wait for you to dive into the selfie at the last second. ???? A post shared by Anna Kendrick (@annakendrick47) on May 13, 2017 at 1:52pm PDT

Its hard. A post shared by Anna Kendrick (@annakendrick47) on May 13, 2017 at 7:41pm PDT

A post shared by Rebel Wilson (@rebelwilson) on May 14, 2017 at 6:46pm PDT

A post shared by Rebel Wilson (@rebelwilson) on May 14, 2017 at 8:56am PDT

A post shared by Rebel Wilson (@rebelwilson) on May 12, 2017 at 10:41pm PDT

A post shared by Anna Camp (@therealannacamp) on May 14, 2017 at 9:21am PDT

A post shared by Anna Camp (@therealannacamp) on May 13, 2017 at 2:56pm PDT

A post shared by kelleyjakle (@kelleyjakle) on May 14, 2017 at 8:30pm PDT

A post shared by kelleyjakle (@kelleyjakle) on May 14, 2017 at 4:19pm PDT

A post shared by kelleyjakle (@kelleyjakle) on May 13, 2017 at 11:41am PDT

A post shared by Shelley Regner (@shelleyregner) on May 5, 2017 at 2:58pm PDT

I want to be on holidays now. Thanks a million, Bellas.

Photo: @annakendrick47 / Instagram.
The third round of the Enduro World Series in Madeira was one of the most intensely fought battles to date. Two days of racing over nine epic stages saw Greg Callaghan and Cecile Ravanel triumph, but that's only a small part of this race's story. Full highlights to follow shortly, but in the meantime here's one minute of race action to whet the appetite.
888Live Barcelona Opening Event Ends with Nine-Way ICM Deal

May 14, 2017 Christian Zetzsche Contributor

Another event has come to an end here at the 2017 888Live Poker Festival Barcelona!

Only 143 hopefuls out of a 720-entry strong field returned to the tables of Casino Barcelona on May 14 for Day 2 of the 200+20 Opening Event. The tournament crushed the initial guarantee to create a prize pool of 138,240 and the top 81 spots were to receive a return on their investment.

After an action-filled day, the last nine players gathered for the unofficial final table, took a group picture and looked into ICM numbers. Only 10 minutes later, they shook hands and called it a night.

Alejandro Vazquez Gomez walked away with the most money and the 888Live festival trophy. The Spaniard held the chip lead when the deal was cut. He received 11,775 for his efforts. Fernando Ortola Ferragud took second for just 40 less.

Joachim Lob as shortest stack with 12 big blinds received more than double of the regular ninth place prize and was just one of two non-Spanish players represented in the deal. That being said, Portugal's Andre Filipe Quelhas, who claimed 6,870, actually works here and calls Barcelona his second home.

Final Result 200+20 Opening Event

Place Winner Country Prize (EUR) 1 Alejandro Vazquez Gomez Spain 11,775* 2 Fernando Ortola Ferragud Spain 11,735* 3 Eduard Munoz Martin Spain 10,820* 4 Sergio Manuel Martinez Pascual Spain 9,950* 5 Juan Font Espina Spain 9,775* 6 Ivan Olivas Uliaque Spain 9,315* 7 Angel Callen Mozos Spain 7,495* 8 Andre Filipe Quelhas Portugal 6,870* 9 Joachim Lob Switzerland 6,700*

*reflects ICM deal of the last nine players

The start of Day 2 saw 20 players depart within the first level and the money bubble was soon reached. Among those to bust before the money were Guillem Cusco Bach, Max Rotko,Jon Ignacio Chipongian, Harcharan Dogra Dogra, Marco Della Tommasina, Josep Maria Galindo Lopez and Francois Evard.

In level 17, the bubble burst after Gregory Torrents lost a flip with ace-queen against the pocket sixes of Day 1a chip leader Sergio Alonso Camunas. The eliminations kept on coming quickly and Maria Lozano Valero, as well as Susana Bonastre Rodriguez, were sent to the rail in the first payout step.

Lauri Saaskilahti and Aleksei Istomin followed soon after. Kaido Koorits' four-bet jam with pocket jacks came at the worst possible time. Xavier Sola Vall held pocket aces and flopped a full house to send Koorits out in 45th place.

Thomas Hargreaves was one of two 888poker qualifiers that made it into the money, and the short-stacked Brit saw his hopes of a deeper run when his pocket queens got cracked by jack-ten suited. Fellow 888poker qualifier Suliko Kheladze reached the last three tables and had to settle for 26th place and 915.

Olga Mirasol was the first player to take home at least 1,000 and the last woman in the field lost back-to-back coin flips to run out of chips. The pace of eliminations barely slowed down, and soon after the last two tables were set.

Former big stacks Marcos Paton Bao, Xavier Sola Vall and Yannick Pernot all bowed out in quick succession, before Sergio Alonso Camunas and Fernando Campomar Concha became the last two casualties of the night. Alonso Camunas had lost most of his stack previously and then ran with ace-jack into the ace-king of Juan Font Espina not long after coming back from the dinner break as chip leader with 15 left.

Campomar Concha shoved with jack-deuce in a battle of the blinds and Ivan Olivas Uliaque looked him up out of the big blind with ace-six suited. An ace and a six appeared on the flop and it was all over on the turn to set up the unofficial final table. This ultimately resulted in the ICM deal with stack sizes ranging between 12 and 35 big blinds, and the nine finalists shook hands.

The 100+10 "The Breeze" Side Event saw four players bag up last night and return at noon local time. It was all over within less than 35 minutes, and Antonio Perez Vico Barba emerged victorious to take home the lion's share of the prize pool for 4,870 and 888Live Side Event trophy.

A deal was cut in the 45+5 High Noon Turbo Event, which attracted a field of 121 entries and prize pool of 5,228. Hector Germino Cabus Maseda (1,202) and Ivan Arcos Alba (1,186) took home the most money.

Last but not least, the 100+10 The Hurricane kicked off at 6 p.m. local time and another decent field of 190 entries emerged. At the time of writing, the money bubble was just reached with a minimum payout of 175 guaranteed. The winner can look forward to a payday of 4,400 and among those still in were Douglas Wheatland, Rafael Achermann and Harcharan Dogra Dogra.

The PokerNews live reporting team will provide updates from the festival at Casino Barcelona for the remainder of this week and the next two highlights are the 2,200 High Roller as of May 17 and the 1,100 Main Event with a guarantee of 500,000, which kicks off May 18.

Sharelines Alejandro Vazquez Gomez walked away with the most money and the trophy.
PC who repeatedly smuggled cigarettes and alcohol into UK dismissed

The Met officer was caught by border enforcement staff walking through the 'Nothing To Declare' channel at Luton Airport.

Best admitted to border control officers she had snuck through before with more than her allowances of cigarettes and alcohol

Date - 15th May 2017

By - John Toner - Police Oracle - 15th May 2017

0203 119 3303

or alternatively get in touch via the Do you have an interesting news story? Contact the newsdesk onor alternatively get in touch via the contact form

An officer caught trying to sneak large amounts of cigarettes and alcohol into the United Kingdom from Serbia has been dismissed. PC Susan Best, based at the Road and Transport Policing Command, arrived at Luton Airport on July 14, 2016,...
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 16:06:02

DANBURY, Conn., May 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Addivant(TM), a global leader in polymer additive technologies, today announced the launch of the NAUGARD FOAMPLUS LE solutions, a next generation liquid antioxidant for the polyurethane industry. Developed to meet the challenges faced in automotive applications, the NAUGARD FOAMPLUS LE portfolio comprises ultra-low emissive stabilization packages enabling the entire value chain to be compliant with the ever-stricter national legislations on vehicle indoor air quality (VIAQ). Addivant will make the announcement during the Chinaplas 2017 exhibition (Booth 9.3M01) May 16-19 in Guangzhou, PR of China.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d8aef4a9-0533-44c3-9ebd-4a1280812210

The NAUGARD FOAMPLUS LE series has been designed to be inherently more thermally stable to provide excellent scorch protection and polyol stability. Another important advantage is that the liquid antioxidants provide improved handling with a better viscosity profile than existing competitive materials. The new solutions are less volatile than the industry benchmarks at high foaming temperatures, resulting in more than a 90% reduction in VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) & FOG emissions.

"We are excited to launch our NAUGARD FOAMPLUS LE series this week during Chinaplas." said John Steitz, President and CEO of Addivant. "China is the largest automobile market in the world and it is quickly implementing some of the most stringent environmental and quality standards in the world." The new breakthrough series builds on Addivant's reputation for technology and quality, complementing a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for polyol producers and downstream foamers.

The NAUGARD FOAMPLUS LE series has been extensively researched and tested to be fully compliant with the VOC and FOG limits set by Germany's VDA 278 emission standard which is part of the delivery specifications of leading automobile companies such as Daimler, BMW, Porsche, and VW. Furthermore, the new solutions maintain or improve upon the other critical performance parameters required by polyol and polyurethane system houses and foam producers.

The new FOAMPLUS LE series is an easy drop-in replacement for existing stabilization packages, allowing customers to switch quickly without any investments or plant modifications. Addivant provides peace of mind to the global polyurethane industry by supporting customer's global standards with worldwide manufacturing and technical support capabilities.

The automotive industry is increasingly replacing traditional materials with polyurethanes to deliver greater comfort, meet higher fuel efficiency standards and provide greater safety and design flexibility. Addivant is well positioned to help the polyurethane industry meet these challenges with the broadest range of specialty solutions in the market.

Addivant is an independent portfolio company of SK Capital.

Addivant(TM) and NAUGARD are trademarks of Addivant.
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 09:01:02

Data-Driven Success Story Highlights Role of Adaptive Marketing

Alterian to Present with Thomas Cook at Data IQ Summit

Alterian

Jim McNulty, 508-481-2024

jmcnulty@alterian.com

Alterian will co-present with client Thomas Cook, a tourism world leader, at the DataIQ Summit on 24 May in London. The presentation will focus on Thomas Cooks partnership with data intelligence specialists GBG and Alterian and how that relationship has helped the travel group create world class marketing  with an 80% reduction in costs.

Building from development work by GBG, Alterian technology has helped Thomas Cook evolve into a sophisticated, data-driven marketer that delivers profitable results and high satisfaction with over 19 million customers a year around the world.

Ryan Cotton, head of CRM, analytics and insight at Thomas Cook, will present Evolution of the Data Driven Marketer, an in-depth look at Thomas Cooks marketing journey to deliver a continually more adaptive and relevant experience for all their customers.

Cotton will explain how Thomas Cook is currently using their customer behavioural data to better understand their customers, personalize communication to them, and automatically trigger communications. He will also discuss their future plan to become an Ultimate Adaptive Marketer.

Success benchmarks featured in the presentation include:

Innovative campaign management solutions

Migrated all capability in house for 80% reduction in costs

Major improvements in email ROI

Multi-channel personalised post booking experience

20 + automated / trigger based communications: feeds of behavioural data

Alterian technology has helped us build highly personalised, automated campaigns across our channels, boosting all of our key performance metrics, said Cotton. Not only has Thomas Cook increased its capabilities, it has significantly reduced agency costs.

Check out Alterians 8 Seconds eBook and find out how to create a success story for your business by capturing todays fast-moving customers attention with an Adaptive Customer Experience.

About DataIQ

Launched in 2011, DataIQ has been consistently ahead of the curve in its advocacy of data and analytics as drivers of value in business. The DataIQ Summit, to be held this year on 24 May at 200 Aldersgate in London, is an annual event that continues to be a source of learning, networking and inspiration for the data-driven community.

About Thomas Cook Group Plc.

Thomas Cook Group plc. is one of the worlds leading leisure travel groups with sales of 7.8 billion. Thomas Cook is supported by 22,000 employees and operates from 16 source markets. Thomas Cook Group plcs shares are listed on the London Stock Exchange (TCG).

About GBG

GBG is a global specialist in Identity Data Intelligence, helping organisations make decisions about the customers they serve. Headquartered in Chester (UK) and with 21 locations in 13 countries, GBG provides solutions to many of the worlds biggest organisations. The GBG team work collaboratively with clients to ensure they use the data their customers share with them to create personalised customer journeys for each individual and responding to every interaction in real time.

About Alterian

With over 19 years of experience, Alterian helps marketers around the world adapt to the unpredictable behavior of their customers so they can always send the right message no matter where and when an interaction occurs. Innovative brands use Alterians Chameleon Platform to create an adaptive customer experience that automatically adapts to the unpredictable behavior of their customers and naturally improves every single time a brand interaction occurs on any touchpoint.

Visit www.alterian.com to see how adaptive marketers are solving their unique challenges by always being one step ahead and maximizing every opportunity to increase the lifetime value of each customer, one relationship at a time.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201705150050

Alterian helps Thomas Cook boost results as an Adaptive Marketer - and reduce costs 80%!
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 10:44:02

Arabesques Anja Mikus Announced as Interim CEO of German Governments EUR 23.6 Billion Nuclear Phase-out Fund

For all media enquiries and interview requests:

Arabesque

Ciaran McCale

Ciaran.mccale@arabesque.com

0044 7956 175 100

Arabesque has announced that its CIO, Anja Mikus, has been seconded for six months to become the interim CEO and CIO of the German governments EUR 23.6 billion nuclear phase-out fund, subject to approval by EU authorities.

The German federal parliament approved a bill on 15th December 2016 to transfer liabilities for storing nuclear waste to the state, marking a significant step for Germanys journey towards clean energy.

Anja Mikus joined Arabesque in 2014, where she has overseen investment products and processes alongside leading the firms growth strategy. In a distinguished 25-year career with some of Europes largest asset managers, Mikus has achieved an exceptional and consistent track record resulting in numerous awards both individually, and for the funds and companies under her leadership. Most recently she served as the CIO for Union Investment with more than $250bn assets under management.

Speaking on todays announcement, Omar Selim, CEO of Arabesque, said: We are delighted for Anja Mikus in her secondment to lead the German governments nuclear phase-out fund, and it is a privilege for Arabesque to support in this way. We wish her every success as she embarks on what is an important project for Germanys transition to clean energy.

Ends

About Arabesque

Arabesque is a specialist ESG Quant fund manager that uses self-learning quantitative models and big data to assess the performance and sustainability of globally listed companies. Its investment technology processes over 100 billion data points to select an investment universe of equities, integrating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information with quantitative strategies.

Arabesque was launched in 2013 following a management buyout from Barclays Bank PLC, and was built in cooperation with professors from the universities of Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, Maastricht, and the German Fraunhofer Society, in support of the United Nations Global Compact.

Arabesque Asset Management Ltd is a limited liability company registered in England and Wales (no. 08636689) with its registered office at 68 Brook Street, London W1K 5DZ, authorized and regulated by the FCA (no. 610729) and registered as an investment adviser with the SEC (#801-107600). Arabesque (Deutschland) GmbH is a limited liability company organized under the laws of Germany, registered with the commercial register of the local court of Frankfurt am Main (HRB no. 97525), and having its seat and business address at Zeppelinallee 15, 60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201705150056
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 15:57:01

'Built for SAP HANA' solutions enable manufacturers to improve operational efficiency and lower costs

Paris, and SAPPHIRENOW Annual Conference, Orlando, 15th May, 2017

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, showcases its comprehensive suite of solutions and services 'Built for SAP HANA' which enable manufacturers to dramatically improve production uptime and efficiency, while lowering maintenance costs. Building on an established 32-year partnership with SAP, Atos presents its end-to-end expertise in SAP-driven solutions for a range of markets on booth #1245.

Global Leader in SAP

Leveraging a team of more than 12,000 experienced SAP experts and the experience gained in supporting more than 3 million SAP end-users in over 90 countries, Atos offers a comprehensive suite of purpose-built solutions for SAP HANA environments which creates differentiating business advantages securely and at scale, while providing access to a rich portfolio of Atos digital transformation services and solutions. Atos' position as an expert in delivering end-to-end SAP HANA solutions is reinforced by its ranking, earlier this year, by Gartner as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SAP Application Services, EMEA, based on its ability to execute and its completeness of vision.

Showcasing the Industry's Most Complete Portfolio of Solutions-'Built for SAP HANA'

Built for industry - Using MindSphere, the Siemens IoT operating system, the Atos solution allows for immediate IoT-enablement of plant equipment, capturing data via SAP HANA by Atos, allowing real-time data insight with Atos Codex for predictive maintenance, all of which is powered by Atos' bullion high-end Intel Xeon processor servers

Built for Scale - Atos' bullion(TM) server, the highest performing SAP HANA certified server in the industry, for improved performance, flexibility and scalability

Built for Smart - innovative high-quality mobile apps enabling smart customer services, such as live purchase options; based on Apple's iOS SDK leveraging the SAP Cloud Platform

Built for Business - an end-to-end portfolio of digital transformation solutions and services for SAP HANA customers covering consulting, migration, application management and operations.

Built for Security - a network of Security Operation Centers (SOC) and 4,500 security specialists worldwide



Insightful Expert Talks

Tuesday May 16 - 1.00pm , " bullion for SAP HANA - The most scalable SAP HANA platform powered by Intel Xeon E7 v4 processors " presented by Patrick van der Griendt, Global Director SAP HANA at Atos, at the Intel mini-theater booth #669

Wednesday May 17 - 1.30pm - " Delight Customers with a Virtual Showroom using SAP Cloud Platform and iOS " - SAP-led Interactive Session with Atos and furniture and interior fittings maker Fundermax.

Thursday May 18 - 11.30am - " bullion for SAP HANA at Siemens - The largest SAP HANA deployment worldwide " presented by Patrick van der Griendt, Global Director SAP HANA at Atos, at the Intel mini-theater booth #669

Thursday May 18 - 12.00pm - "Accelerate Your Roadmap to Smart Services by Converting to Real-time IoT" - Speaking Session with Jaime Konzelman, Senior Director, Sales & Client Services Atos and Ram Prabhakar, Senior Partner, Manufacturing, Retail & Transportation Industry Atos.

"We're delighted to be part of the conference and to showcase our end-to-end SAP-driven solutions, which enable millions of companies worldwide to successfully implement their digital transformation" said Michel-Alain Proch, Group Senior Executive Vice President and CEO North America. "Our extensive experience in mastering SAP products, together with our 32-year partnership with SAP makes us the end-to-end SAP provider and go-to partner for business transformation and innovation."

Atos is exhibiting at the SAPPHIRENOW Annual Conference in Orlando from the 16th-18th of May 2017 on booth #1245.

###

About Atos

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with approximately 100,000 employees in 72 countries and annual revenue of around  12 billion. The European number one in Big Data, Cybersecurity, High Performance Computing and Digital Workplace, The Group provides Cloud services, Infrastructure & Data Management, Business & Platform solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies, digital expertise and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across various business sectors: Defense, Financial Services, Health, Manufacturing, Media, Energy & Utilities, Public sector, Retail, Telecommunications and Transportation. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldgrid, Bull, Canopy, Unify and Worldline. Atos SE (Societas Europaea) is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index.

Press contact for U.S.:

Kim Marie Testa | Kim.testa@atos.net | +1 214 223 5343

Press contact outside of U.S.:

Laura Fau | laura.fau@atos.net | +33 6 73 64 04 18 | @laurajanefau





This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: ATOS via Globenewswire


ADVISOR TO WASHINGTON - Mitch Becker, a Lincoln financial advisor for the financial services firm Edward Jones, recently met with legislators in Washington, D.C., to seek retirement savings incentives for individual investors and business owners. This is the 32th year for this effort  making it one of the longest-running nationwide grassroots outreach efforts to Congress in existence. Becker was one of 52 financial advisors chosen from among the firms 15,000 who traveled to Washington, D.C., on behalf of individual investors. Becker is a member of the firms Grassroots Task Force, a group dedicated to voicing the investment concerns of individual investors to local, state and national lawmakers.
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 16:14:02

Bosnian Holidays Targets Third Highest Tourism Growth Market in the World

For more information please contact:

Bosnian Holidays

Ms. Nadja Vatric

Email: info@bosnianholidays.net

Telephone: +387 33 761 600

Web: www.bosnianholidays.net

Bosnian Holidays opened its doors for business as a travel company specialized in inbound destination management. The World Travel Organization (WTO) has stated that Bosnia Herzegovina has the third highest tourism growth rate in the world continuing up to the year 2020.

The Bosnian Holidays grand opening ceremony was held in the Sarajevo premises of the new company where top officials from Bosnia Herzegovina and senior investors were present.

Outbound Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) tourists are predicted to spend $100 billion by 2018 on international holidays.

Bosnian Holidays is the newest chapter in the exciting tourism industry that has witnessed double digit growth in visitors since the year 2000 of more than 10% annually. Such impressive growth motivates more quality tourist service providers to operate with an aim to introduce high quality services to the travel sector. One such innovative feature coming soon will be a tool that allows visitors to build their own holiday tours online via its website bosnianholidays.net

The new company specializes in destination management and aims to provide an unforgettable quality experience for holiday makers in Bosnia Herzegovina. The focus is on providing unique services and detailed tailor made packages, guides and events for modern international tourists.

Bosnia Herzegovina is a fascinating destination for tourists around the world. Untouched unbridled nature, abundant rivers and a lot of history in one place makes Bosnia Herzegovina among the most desired destinations worldwide. No wonder the famous travel site Lonely Planet named Sarajevo as one of the top ten cities even in 2010.

The new agency offers tourists packages covering interests such as: Health tourism, Adventure tours, food tasting trips, in addition to teenage tours , sport holidays, family outings and honeymoons. The customer strategy is to treat clients not simply as "tourists" but guests and friends.

Bosnian Holidays is very optimistic about the promotion of Bosnia Herzegovina and has a strategy to expand its services to cover more sectors of the travel tourism business through this project such as aviation and hotel ventures.

END.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201705150059
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 03:32:01

Leading property developer and real estate services company will implement cloud-based solutions to manage iconic residential and commercial assets

Deyaar Selects Yardi for Asset and Property Management

Yardi

Fadwa Hassan  Marketing Associate (Middle East)

Tel: +971.(0)4.4322679

Email: fadwa.hassan@yardi.com

Deyaar Development PJSC, one of the UAEs largest property development and real estate services companies, has selected Yardi Voyager 7S to perform lease and property management across its extensive project portfolio.

Alongside Voyager 7S, which streamlines property accounting, lease and property management, Deyaar has adopted Orion Business Intelligence. This powerful, fully mobile solution has more than 200 built-in key performance indicators and flexible reports and dashboards that help monitor and improve property and portfolio performance.

The UAE market has successfully emerged as a dynamic hub for global real estate, combining technology and state-of-the-art infrastructure to offer an international standard of living, said Hani Fansa, Chief Financial Officer of Deyaar Development.

Since Deyaar is fully committed to design smarter lifestyles through up-to-date leasing and property management services, we have adopted Yardi software to support the full range of our business services, help us enhance processes, and maximize customer satisfaction.

We are extremely pleased to announce that Deyaar Development has selected Yardi to support its operations in Dubai, said Neal Gemassmer, vice president of international for Yardi. Our solutions are used to manage assets in some of the most dynamic cities worldwide which serves to further demonstrate not only our multinational culture but our focus on continued innovation of real estate technology solutions.

About Deyaar

Deyaar Development PJSC is a leading real-estate developer and real-estate services company, headquartered in Dubai. Since its establishment in 2002, the company has registered exponential growth to become an industry leader in the region, with a share capital of AED5.78 billion. Deyaar is well-positioned to play a pivotal role in the development of the region's property landscape. The companys in-depth market intelligence, world-class services and unrivalled property management support for communities across diverse portfolios have firmly consolidated its pioneering status in the regions real estate landscape. For more information, visit deyaar.ae.

About Yardi

Yardi develops and supports industry-leading investment and property management software for all types and sizes of real estate companies. Established in 1984, Yardi is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., and serves clients worldwide from offices in Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America. For more information, visit: yardi.com/ae

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201705140050

.@DeyaarOfficial selects @Yardi #commercial #realestate platform to manage iconic assets in #UAE
Future Market Insights has announced the addition of the Hospital Capacity Management Solutions Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2017- 2027" report to their offering.

Hospital Capacity Management Solutions Market

PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 08:03:35

Press Information

Future Market Insights

616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,



Valley Cottage, NY 10989,



United States



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F: +1-845-579-5705



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email





Published by

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+1-347-918-3531

e-mail

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# 499 Words

616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: www.futuremarketinsights.comAbhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531

Adoption of hospital management capacity solutions will grow at 5.1% CAGR through 2027, according to a latest research by Future Market Insights (FMI). Increasing need for enhanced health safety will influence healthcare institutes to adopt IT/HCMS. Furthermore, emphasis on financial and clinical integration will push incorporation of robust IT infrastructures such as PLEXIS.Adoption of HCMS is also increasing as it enables users to access real-time location services. As healthcare institutes grapple with rising operating costs, HCMS is being looked upon as a next-gen solution that reduces medical and administrative errors. The market will also continue to be influenced by the broader industry-wide push to amalgamate IT with operations.Moreover, political dynamics have impacted the process of demand and supply through implementation of various healthcare related evolutions and reforms such as The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandates various regulations and requirements regarding storing, capturing and sharing data, which will bring fundamental transformation in various healthcare-related operations. In addition, enhanced technology such as wireless communication and easy internet accessibility, incorporated with various healthcare applications will create new opportunities and enable patients to access related information whenever they need it. Such factors are likely to contribute towards growth of the HCMS market.However, Future Market Insights identifies that security breaches and vulnerabilities associated with IT will continue to hinder its widespread adoption. Imposition of complicated regulations by governments for enhanced quality and services, along with lack of integration with regards to analytical solutions with platforms such as electronic health record (EHR) can also pose challenges to growth of the HCMS market.Request For Sample@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-eu-3520 By product type, real-time locating system will account for a majority revenue share of the market. This segment accounted for US$ 88.34 Mn in 2016, and is expected to register highest CAGR through 2027. Event-driven solutions segment is expected to exhibit second-highest CAGR of 5.2% over the following decade.Regional AnalysisU.K., with total revenues to the tune of US$ 50.78 Mn in 2016, is the largest market for hospital capacity management solutions in Europe. It will remain the largest, and the fastest-growing market in Europe, during the forecast period. The HCMS market in Germany is expected to surpass US$ 80 Mn by 2027.Vendor InsightsLeading players mainly focus on strategies such as expanding their global footprints through collaboration, conferences, product expansions, partnerships and strengthening distribution networks. Demand for applications and systems for new business requirements will intensify partnerships, mergers and acquisitions and consolidations among market players. Vendors are actively entering into partnerships and acquisitions to consolidate their position in the market. Moreover, majority of the stakeholders in healthcare are adopting cloud computing solutions to address security, scalability and availability issues.Send An Enquiry@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-eu-3520 Key players operating in the Europe HCMS market include Awarepoint Corporation, Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc., Cerner Corporation, McKesson Corporation, Epic Systems Corporation, TeleTracking Technologies, Inc., Central Logic, Sonitor Technologies, Inc., STANLEY Healthcare Solutions Limited and Care Logistics LLC.
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 11:45:24

Press Information

Future Market Insights

616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,



Valley Cottage, NY 10989,



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Published by

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# 551 Words

616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comPress: press@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: www.futuremarketinsights.comAbhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531

Future Market Insights (FMI) announced the release of a latest report titled, POU Water Purifiers Market: MENA Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2014 - 2020. FMI estimates that the Point of Use (POU) water purifier market in Middle East and North Africa is expected to reach US$ 471 Mn at a CAGR of 7.6% from 2014 to 2020.Residential water purification system includes point of use water purifiers (POU), point of entry (POE) water purifiers, portable water purifiers. Moreover, the demand for POU water purifiers is high among consumers in MENA region as compared to POE and portable water purifiers.In the POU water purifiers market, products with high purification capabilities such as combination of reverse osmosis (RO) and Ultraviolet (UV) technologies are more preferred. It has also been observed that a majority of the demand is coming from urban centres in GCC when compared to the entire MENA region.Request For Sample@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-ma-30 Market SegmentsThe POU water purifiers market is segmented on the basis of technology which includes RO, UV and media-based. RO technology based water purifiers segment is estimated to account for slightly over 40% of the total POU water purifiers market in MENA region in 2014. Media-based water purification, which is a conventional water purification technology has also witnessed technological advancements, and is estimated to display a CAGR of 9.3% during the forecast period, in terms of volume. The third technology, UV based water purifiers, is estimated to exhibit a sluggish growth rate during the forecast period due to its limitation in removing only organic contaminants from water. Additionally, UV-based water purifiers are also priced higher in comparison to media-based water purifiers and hence the product preference for UV based water purifiers is comparatively low.Region-wise, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey, Israel, Egypt and Algeria are the promising markets for POU water purifiers. In addition, a cumulative scenario has been highlighted for rest of MENA (includes smaller countries like Kuwait, Jordan etc.). Among the aforementioned regions, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is estimated to be the prominent market for POU water purifiers, followed by Turkey, due to its growing population and rapid urbanization, and increasing awareness for safe drinking water forecast period.In addition, penetration of bottled water is a challenge for the POU water purifiers market in Anatolia. As a result, Anatolia is estimated to demonstrate a sluggish growth rate in the near future. Furthermore, POU water purifiers market in UAE is anticipated to reach 149.2 thousand units by 2020, exhibiting a CAGR of 10% between 2014 and 2020.Send An Enquiry@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-ma-30 Drivers and RestraintsDeteriorating water quality, rising cost of bottled water, increasing population coupled with increasing per capita income are some of the prominent factors which will catalyse the point of use water purifiers in the region. Though the MENA market is attractive in terms of absolute dollar opportunity, low awareness about safe drinking water and product unavailability are major challenges for the MENA POU water purifier market.Competitive LandscapeKey players operating in the MENA water purifier market are LG, Eureka Forbes, Strauss Water, Panasonic, WaterLife and Coolplex. The report sheds light on their key growth strategies and recent developments. In addition, the report also discusses the value chain followed by multinational companies in MENA for POU water purifiers.
Years ago, I landed the job of a lifetime  leading a city/county agency that worked on the issues that impact women in the community. Already a 60s feminist, I reveled in the wisdom and foresight of a community that recognized that the plight for some women was not what it should be. I met and interacted with some awesomely amazing women and found my life greatly enriched by the experience.

As a long-standing practice, I kept a small book with me at all times in which to capture the ideas that popped into my brain. My volume of ideas contained visions for programs and events that would highlight and celebrate the female side of our community.

One of those ideas, dubbed, Silver-Haired Sisters, would celebrate those women in our lives who not only had far more knowledge and experience than most of us, but who freely and gladly shared that perspective with those of us who were younger, greener and less familiar with the world. While I didnt have a grand scheme for a program or event, the Silver-Haired Sisters theme spoke to my heart. It evolved unexpectedly and in a rare and treasured way.

An influential group of women were interested in the Womens Commission and one of those took a special interest in the issues of aging and older women. Ina May was a longtime, respected member of a now-defunct national group called the Older Womens League  OWL for short. She spent hours not only volunteering for OWL on a local and national level, but also teaching me about the issues that impacted them. I listened and I learned. At conferences, she introduced me to others who helped broaden my knowledge and understanding.

Somewhere along the way, Ina May became not only my mentor, but also very good friend and surrogate mother (who lived several states away). We went to meetings close and afar together, we had lunch and discussed local and national politics. We took a road trip to Colorado together in my spiffy, new, screaming-yellow turbo-charged VW Bug.

When my ailing mother couldnt make it to an award ceremony to celebrate with me, Ina May proudly stood in to share the moment. We drove around the countryside when the leaves were beginning to turn in autumn; in spring, we inhaled the sunshine and watched the countryside bloom.

When Ina Mays beloved Alan died, I was there at his funeral to offer support, love and hugs. When my beloved Michael died, Ina May took me into her home for awhile as I took a road trip around the country, trying to lose my sorrow. She helped hug away the hurt.

This month, Ina May turns 90 years old. While I cannot be there to help celebrate her rather significant milestone, I can tell you that she is a wonder and a true treasure.

For years, I dyed my hair to hide the gray that was beginning to appear. When I decided to let it all grow out, I was surprised to find that it was all  every strand of it  silver. I had, unknowingly, become one of the Silver-Haired Sisters.

And now, I have a legacy to fill.

Bonnie Allmon Coffey cherishes her Lincoln surrogate mom, Ina May Rouse, and regrets that she is unable to attend her 90th birthday. Ina May taught Bonnie how to cherish and appreciate life and to remember her Silver-Haired Sisters, who are amazingly fun folks. Happy Birthday, Ina May!
Future Market Insights has announced the addition of the Medical Carts Market: North America Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2017- 2027" report to their offering.

Medical Carts Market

PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 08:21:23

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# 500 Words

616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: www.futuremarketinsights.comAbhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531

The need for streamlining workflow has necessitated the integration of information technology (IT) solutions in healthcare settings. Medical carts manufactured by companies are presently serving the essential purpose of aiding nursing operations in medical facilities. The robust healthcare infrastructure in the US will demand the adoption of advanced medical carts that not only dispense medical instruments & supplies, but also have integrated IT systems. In the years to come, the demand for medical carts in North America will witness steadfast inclination towards IT-integrated medical carts.According to Future Market Insights North Americas medical carts market is expected to reach US$ 600 Mn value by 2017-end, and will expand at 11.2% CAGR through 2027 to bring in US$ 1,720.8 Mn in revenues. Rising focus on point-of-care diagnosis & treatment has led to an increase in the use of mobile computer medical carts. Computer medical carts are used to record and update a patients electronic health records (EHR). Increased adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) is also observed to be an instrumental factor for growth of North Americas medical carts market. The report, titled Medical Carts Market  North America Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2017-2027, also projects that manufacturers of medical carts are extending the product line by introducing medical carts with added features. Omnicell, Inc., Herman Miller, Inc., The Harloff Company, Capsa Solutions LLC, Medline Industries, Inc., Armstrong Medical Industries, Inc., AFC Industries, Waterloo Healthcare, TouchPoint Medical, and Ergotron, Inc. are recognised as leading manufacturers of medical carts in North America.Request For Sample@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-na-3608 Constructive Prospects for Future of North Americas Medical Carts MarketA lucrative opportunity for such prominent medical device manufacturers towards consolidating their presence in the medical carts market in North America is changing their product line in accordance with shift in technology. Mechanical medical carts are being gradually replaced by new and enhanced technologies such as powered medical devices with battery systems, locking drawers (with negative tilt to facilitate efficient stocking of medication), and automated medicine dispensing systems.In addition to this, increased focus on acquisitions and collaboration among companies have helped them expand their clinical carts product portfolio and cater to the demand for efficient healthcare systems. This has boosted the need for more effective and advanced medical equipment, devices and procedures. Emerging players must keep in mind that acquisitions over the years have resulted in strengthening the positions of current market leaders.Key Highlights of the Report follow,In 2017 and beyond, computer medical carts will remain in great demand, procuring close to 40% of the markets overall revenues towards the end of 2027North Americas medical carts market is poised to witness dominance of metal as base material, revenues from which will reflect a CAGR of 12.1%Non-powered medical carts will also be top-sellers in the market, while revenues from sales of powered medical carts are anticipated to showcase 12.6% CAGRHospitals will be the largest end-users of medical carts in North AmericaSend An Enquiry@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-na-3608
Critical Care Information Systems Market

PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 08:50:53

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# 780 Words

616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: www.futuremarketinsights.comAbhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531

Critical care information systems are used to help manage the large amount of data generated in an intensive care unit every day. Obtaining, synchronizing, assimilating, and evaluating patient data is very difficult because of incompatibilities among monitoring equipment, the absence of standard data formatting and proprietary limitations from industry. The intensive care units are a specialized section of a hospital containing the equipment, medical and nursing staff, monitoring and life support devices necessary to provide continuous care to patients that are severely ill and medically unstable. Information and communication technology has the potential to address many problems encountered in ICU care and managing large amounts of patient and research data and reducing medical errors.Critical Care Information Systems Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe extensive use of physiological monitoring and organ support systems in critical care ensures that these areas are already technologically rich environments. This leads to a higher likelihood of acceptance of new information technology and ease in its implementation that reduces the inherent risk of information technology projects. However, clinical record keeping has been more challenging, particularly the requirement for electronic storage of a medico-legal record. Decision support ranges in its extent and requires further development. Successful integration with other hospital systems is highly desirable but may be made more difficult by the lack of rigorous technical standards in healthcare computing. The critical care information system is fundamental to the quality improvement, research and business reporting functions. The huge amount of data, the lack of common minimal and extensive data sets, and the technical challenges of software development, all combine to make this a resource expensive venture requiring on site customization. Purchasing and implementing a critical care information system is costly in human and material resources.Request For Report Sample@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3649 Critical Care Information Systems Market: SegmentationOn the basis of component the critical care information systems market can be segmented intoHardwareSoftwareServicesOn the basis of deployment the critical care information systems market can be segmented intoOn-PremiseCloud-BasedOn the basis of end-user the critical care information systems market can be segmented into,HospitalsoLevel 2 ICUsoLevel 3 ICUsClinicsNursing HomesOthersThe critical care information system providers offer specialized programs to the end-users assisting in management of health plans by offering solutions to increasing costs of complexities in various treatments.Critical Care Information Systems Market: OverviewThe critical care information system has been implemented in 201 adult and pediatric Level 3 and Level 2 critical care units. The system provides an important medium for monitoring and managing the province's critical care resources more effectively, as well as highlighting opportunities for implementing quality improvement initiatives at individual hospitals and across the LHINs. Additionally, critical care information system supports the ventilator associated pneumonia and central line infection data collection under the ministry's patient safety initiative. The data captured in critical information system is also used to develop quarterly reports to inform health care system improvements.Critical Care Information Systems Market: Region-wise OutlookGeographically, the market is segmented into North America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. North America is the largest market for critical care information systems owing to extensive technological advancements in this region. Countries such as the U.S. and Canada have been successful in implementing eHealth and mHealth in their healthcare system, which as a result will boost the market growth. Also presence of developed healthcare and IT infrastructure, promising government initiatives in executing critical care information system in the current healthcare infrastructure and constantly improving reimbursement scenario is further propelling the market growth. Followed by North America is Europe market in the critical care information system owing to enhanced digitization of the healthcare processes and implementation of telehealth in this region. Asia Pacific include the acceptance and demand for high end medical. Countries like China, Japan and India are developing countries and hence fuel the market growth for critical care information system. Countries in Latin America like as Brazil and Mexico are the regions that have significant potential for growth due to evolving medical structure in the critical care information systems.Visit For TOC@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3649 Critical Care Information Systems Market: Key PlayersSome of the major market players include Affiliated Computer Services Inc., All Scripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc., Cerner Corporation, CompuGroup Medical, Computer Sciences Corporation, iSOFT Group Limited, Picis Clinical Solutions, Inc., Optum, Inc., McKesson Corporation and Siemens Healthcare. The companies in this market are adopting various strategies like agreements, expansions, and product deployment to increase their share and create a strong position in the critical care information system market.
Surgical Lasers Market

PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 08:49:37

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# 665 Words

616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: www.futuremarketinsights.comAbhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531

The term laser is an acronym for the light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation," and a laser is a light beam emitted from a device through a method of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic waves. Surgical lasers use a beam to treat blood vessels that are bleeding or to remove diseased tissues. Laser beams are focused on the cell to heat them until they burst to treat tissues or shrink tumors. There are a number of different kinds of laser beams. Each one of them has a different color and use. The color of the light beam is related to the color of the tissue that is being treated and type of surgery that is being performed. Lasers can be used in almost every surgical procedure. In fact, general surgeons use various laser wavelengths and laser delivery systems to cut, vaporize, and remove tissue.Surgical Lasers Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe growth of the global surgical lasers market is driven by technological advancements of surgical lasers, increasing prevalence of targeted diseases, prevalence of chronic diseases, and high prevalence of ophthalmic disorders. In addition, increasing demand for minimally invasive surgeries is also one of the major factor responsible for the growth of surgical lasers market. High procedural costs and limited medical reimbursements are factors restraining the growth of surgical lasers market. Safety concerns associated with the use of surgical lasers is also one of the key challenging factors.Request For Report Sample@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3646 Surgical Lasers Market: SegmentationThe global surgical lasers markethas been segmented on the basis of the laser type, procedure type, application, end user and region.On the basis of laser type global surgical lasers market is segmented into:Carbon dioxide (CO2) laserArgon laserDiode LasersNeodymium: Yttrium-Aluminum-Garnet (Nd:YAG) LaserOther LasersOn the basis of procedure type global surgical lasers market is segmented into:Open surgeryPercutaneous surgeryLaparoscopic surgeryOn the basis of application global surgical lasers market is segmented into:OphthalmologyDermatologyGynecologyCardiologyOncologyDentistryUrologyOther ApplicationsOn the basis of end user global surgical lasers market is segmented into:HospitalsClinicsOthersSurgical Lasers Market: OverviewGlobal surgical lasers market is expected to witness significant growth due to factors such as technological advancements and increasing demand for less invasive surgeries. The carbon dioxide (CO2) based lasers are anticipated to be fastest growing segment in the surgical lasers market owing to the availability of advanced CO2 surgical lasers. The laparoscopic surgery segment is expected to lead the surgical lasers market. The growth of this segment can be owning to the growing awareness among patient, procedural benefits of this surgery and demand for minimally invasive procedures. The urology segment is projected to be fastest growing. The growth of this segment can be attributed to the increasing prevalence of urological disorders such as renal cancer, kidney stones and prostate enlargement.Surgical Lasers Market: Region Wise OutlookGeographically, surgical lasers market is segmented into seven regions, North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, Middle East and Africa. North America is the most attractive surgical lasers market. Increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, use of innovative surgical methods by the healthcare professionals, significant medical reimbursement policies and the large number of cosmetic laser equipment manufacturers are the major driving factors for the growth of surgical lasers market in this region. Followed by which is Europe. However, Asia-Pacific market is expected to be fastest growing surgical lasers market. Factors such as the presence of a large patient population for target diseases, increasing geriatric population and rising awareness among healthcare professionals regarding the benefits of surgical lasers are driving the growth of surgical lasers market.Visit For TOC@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3646 Surgical Lasers Market: Key Market ParticipantsSome of the market participants in the global surgical lasers market are Lumenis, Cynosure, Inc., Boston Scientific Corporation, Spectranetics Corporation, Biolitec AG, and BISON MEDICAL Co. Ltd.
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 08:02:01

RF IDeas to Showcase Manufacturing Authentication Solutions at Automation University

RF IDeas Inc.

Arlene King

Marketing Manager

Ph: (866) 439-4884 Ext: 480

E: Marketing@RFIDeas.com

RF IDeas Inc., a leading innovator and manufacturer of employee badge readers for in-building applications such as computer access, identification, time and attendance will demonstrate its leading authentication solutions at Automation University Classic 2017. Automation University, hosted by Rockwell Automation, gathers leading engineers, business managers, consultants and system integrators at a two-day event designed to promote industry best-practices and discuss emerging challenges.

Together with in-region distribution partner, Plankomat SA, RF IDeas will demonstrate a series of access control and authentication solutions designed for the manufacturing industry. As a long-standing member of the Rockwell Automation Encompass PartnerNetworkTM [..], RF IDeas recently has expanded to the EMEA Encompass program. RF IDeas will showcase its pcProx product line for Rockwell Automation as well as its Rockwell PanelViewTM demo showing access control with the pcProx Plus badge reader.

"As a company deeply rooted in innovation, we're thrilled to be included as an exhibitor at this forward-looking Rockwell event," said Ian Bayly, Sales Director for EMEA. "RF IDeas' attendance demonstrates our continued dedication to expanding our international presence and we look forward to sharing best-practices and innovative ideas with industry thought leaders at this year's Automation University."

Automation University Classic will be held May 17-18 at the Emperors Palace-Centre Court in Kempton Park, South Africa. RF IDeas will host an information table at the event. For more information about RF IDeas' manufacturing and authentication solutions, visit https://www.rfideas.com/solutions/industries/manuf.

About RF IDeas

RF IDeas, Inc. is a leader in the employee badge and card reader space for healthcare, manufacturing, government and enterprise. Partnering with leading technology companies, RF IDeas readers enable innovative solutions for single sign-on, secure printing, attendance tracking and other applications that require authentication. RF IDeas is a subsidiary of Roper Technologies. For more information about RF IDeas solutions, visit the Knowledge Center at https://www.rfideas.com/knowledge-center.

RF IDeas and pcProx are registered trademarks of RF IDeas, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks and product or service names are property of their respective owners.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201705140050
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 09:58:01

This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: Songa Offshore SE via Globenewswire









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Please find attached Notice of Annual General Meeting in Songa Offshore SE to be held 7 June 2017.15 May 2017Limassol, CyprusThis information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.
PR-Inside.com: 2017-05-15 19:17:02

Starr Companies Hires Danielle Wilson as Head of Management Liability and Robert McTaggart as Head of Professional Indemnity

Starr Companies

Paula Negro, 212-884-0561

Director of Content, Communications and Media Relations

paula.negro@starrcompanies.com

Starr Companies today announced that Danielle Wilson as head of management liability and Robert McTaggart as head of professional indemnity have joined the company. Danielle and Rob will be located in our London, England office, serving the European marketplace.

These individuals bring a wealth of knowledge and experience and will report to Liz Ilott, chief underwriting officer financial lines, who joined in August last year to spearhead our expansion plans, stated Colin Buchanan, head of casualty.

Danielle has ten years of insurance experience specializing in financial lines for private and commercial companies. She earned her Bachelors Degree in International Studies from Open University and will be earning her Masters Degree in Corporate Finance from the University of Liverpool.

Rob has nine years of experience as a line of business manager in professional indemnity. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Geography from the University of Southampton.

About Starr Companies

Starr Companies (Starr) is the worldwide marketing name for the operating insurance and travel assistance companies and subsidiaries of Starr International Company, Inc. and for the investment business of C.V. Starr & Co., Inc. and its subsidiaries. Starr is a leading insurance and investment organization with a presence on five continents; through its operating insurance companies, Starr provides property, casualty, and accident & health insurance products as well as a range of specialty coverages including aviation, marine, energy and excess casualty insurance. Starrs insurance company subsidiaries domiciled in the U.S., Bermuda, Hong Kong and Singapore each have an A.M. Best rating of A (Excellent). Starrs Lloyds syndicate has a Standard & Poors rating of A+ (Strong). Starrs insurance company subsidiary domiciled in China has an A.M. Best rating of A- (Excellent).

For more information visit us at www.starrcompanies.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201705150061

Starr Companies UK office welcomes Danielle Wilson and Robert McTaggart